The weeklies
Sir: It is curious to be reading letters about the New Statesman in The Spectator. But here goes, with another letter, though one which wasn't rejected by the New Statesman. Some things — not all of them identical — are now horribly wrong with both papers. Both, as Richard West says of the NS, need "better reading matter" (you need less hysterical High Toryism — your boring gale could abate; and less platitudinous and world-superior Worsthornism). The good reading matter for which I read The Spectator is Auberon Waugh's which is so often regrettable in the best way. The poorer reading matter in all the weeklies is always retrospective, is always mediocre comment on what is over and what is certain to have been commented upon everywhere else — in the Times, the Guardian, the Sundays I recognise few more drab weekly expanses, more profitably skipped, than the art surveys which finish off every New Statesman and every Listener. These are calculable runovers or comprehensive and convenient editorial rag-bags; they do not discover, promote, or celebrate. They follow, like sheep in line.
You may remember the New Republic in its great period, a long, long time ago. It was stimulating, even for us faraway, on politics and on society; it was exploratory and celebratory; it advanced with authoritative recognition what was new and genuine in the arts; it knew which author, which poet, which painter, was the real thing, the real, if yet unrecognised king of the cats, or of his companionage. Devoid of a formula, it dealt in politics, in books, in the arts, with shrewdly selected actuality. It chose the right contributors, it distinguished between butter and the marge which is now so smeared across our weeklies. So the New Republic had the intellectual power denied to all of you.
Editors and literary editors of weeklies might ask themselves how many things they are publishing which will seem less than trivial, or more than journalism, in twenty years' time.
Geoffrey Grigson Broad Town Farmhouse, Broad Town, Swindon, Wiltshire
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