NIGHTS OUT IN THE THIRTIES
SIR,—In the course of cutting ti. transcription. r"r which I take full responsibility, certain qualify' words slipped from my simplchearted gloss on Mr. Rayner Heppenstall's Four Absentees. I regret soh slips, in principle. How material or how trivial thcl are, in context, may be judged by comparing l'Or paraphrases and quotations with the original Pa'. sages. Reprehensibly I misattributed to Mr. Horn: stall 'a yell' where he writes merely of 'complaining. Or again, the reiterated 'dear boy' should proper! read 'dear old boy.' (Connoisseurs of such varinv, will find the famous description of Murry in yr: another version on p; 277 of the current Twentleo, C'entury: 'the best hated literary man in Iht country Since I have retained no diaries or files to ch" by, I readily concede Mr. Heppenstall his two Itun.1: bered points. As 'to (1), certainly I first met Blair at the offices of the New English Weekly. which he wrote frequently: and certainly he found', irksome to write about anything non-politically. the Orwell of those days remains for me a figun dim and shadowy as Dylan's. still, is vivid and ele3,' So, as to (2), I'm relieved to learn that the minah?.ii presence lurking in the haze of that incident, Will Mr. Hcppenstall also recalls, was not Orwell. It `1 it seems, a pugilist, who later died in Spain. misscd, perhaps, a well-merited clout with the sh" ing stick. On matters of opinion, such as your second e'lir respondent raises about Murry, I am not dispos.":1 to argue here. These figures are all as controve0:1; today as they ever were when alive.- Yours fail fully,
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