Booker brouhaha
Sir: Auberon Waugh describes Berger's book as 'ineffably fatuous.' Berger's ensuing interview in Line-up was even better. Through a haze ' of incoherent balbutience (more er-er-ers to the minute than the dimmest popstruck teenager) there emerged the Olympian affirmation that no literary writing could be of any account today unless Marxistinspired, a special permit of entry into the Pantheon, however, being allotted to that well-known hero of the toiling masses, Samuel Beckett. A little later on, in his sweet oldfashioned way, he was on about ' imperialism,' whereupon of course his interviewer, had he been equal to his assignment, wbuld have interjected: 'I take it then, Mr Berger, yours is an anti-Russian brand of Marxism?'
As regards such . , awards in general one can but agree with Mr Waugh when he stresses the harm done by people with ' advanced ' ideas both to art and literature themselves and to the material well-being of genuine practitioners. If this is what Connolly and his crew do to the novel when their aim is well-meaning what might they not be capable of if they deliberately set out to do it harm?
G. Reichardt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole
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