FIRST THINGS FIRST By Frank Tilsley
The present decade, the " ideological thirties," becomes increasingly manifesto-minded. The impulse to " state where one stands " philosophically, religiously and, above all, politically, seems to be one of the chief spurs to literary com- position. Many novelists and most journalists have done it ; some do it again and again, year after year, as they grow up. No doubt it helps to clear confused minds. Mr. Tilsley stands—" both feet firmly on the ground," the publisher assures us—for conventional agnostic socialism. His points have all been made before ; everyone has at one time or another considered them and formed his own judgements. It is scarcely worth while examining them in detail in a review. The manner of the book (Michael Joseph, Jos. 6d.) is blustering and self-assertive. The author is a young Manchester man of proletarian origin, who, after trying numerous ill-paid trades, has discovered what is far too widely known, that writing is anybody's money. He has adopted the now common literary form of autobiographical credo and well illustrates his own point of the superiority of expensive education ; he might easily have emerged from a rich man's schooling just as ill-informed as he is today, but at least he would be less cocksure and obtrusively egotistical. It is encouraging to traditionalists to find that while polite letters are being more and more monopolised by the mutual-admiration society of the extreme Left, old-fashioned ranting radicalism has survived the commercial decline of Lancashire.
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