`POP' FICTION
SIR,—Among the startling inaccuracies and puerilities of Victor Anant's article on women's magazine fic- tion (called by him, rather revoltingly, 'pop' fiction) I was pleased to recognise some gems of my own. We 'pop' writers like to be appreciated sometimes. But I'm sorry your contributor finds our stuff too mature for his taste. Mr. Anant is plainly a romantic young man, and romantic young men like to think of their women as wicked and witty; of human passion as a synonym only for the sex itch; of con- ventional behaviour as abject cowardice. Life, as I hope Mr. Anant will discover in time, is not like this; and it would be very dreary indeed if it were. Real women are not usually—thank God—the crazy mixed-up nymphomaniacs to whom your boy seems so far to have confined his acquaintance. Most real women share preoccupations which may make him sigh or smile, but to me they seem very sensible ones. They want to get married and have children. They want sexual satisfaction and to give it in return (this is why they are against promiscuity, which implies sexual dissatisfaction). They believe emotions should be generous and tender and not dictated by an arid intellectualism. And they want, in the stories they read, to find recognition of and respect for these womanly values.
Mr. Anant accuses us of trying to promote 'a single gimmick-geared pattern of love and marriage' (the lad really must learn to write better than that!). This is a fatuous charge. If there were any formula consciously used by writers in this field (and having written something like 200 of these stories in the last five years, I may fairly claim expert status on this), it would be the simple injunction (of course never explicit, since this must mean the story fails as a story): 'Be honest, courageous and generous, and never let yourself be deceived by phoney values.' Now Mr. Anant's values seem to me at least as cheap and silly as the Admass ones he attacks. He despises young love. He has no pity for loneliness. He does not admire integrity in women (nor, for that matter, in men, unless they are poor, colonial, American or European). He denies that women think important the problems of finding a husband, adjusting to marriage or coping with the emotional crises of marriage. He likes sexual promiscuity and has con- tempt for sexual virtue. And so on. "Top" fiction,' he says, 'cannot achieve greater innocence or solemnity.' This would seem a suitable epitaph for Mr. Anant the literary critic. He uses quotations from light comedies to bolster some por- tentous analysis. He cites half a dozen different styles, with equal seriousness, and concludes that all 'pop' fiction is the same. He takes lines from a story by an American and later points out that all these stories show distrust of Americans. He omits to mention anywhere the presence in these magazines, quite often, of writers accepted elsewhere as notable, for example Eric Linklater, H. E. Bates, Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald, Irwin Shaw, Stefan Zweig, William Saroyan, etc. Worst of all, he makes the fiat statement, utterly wrong, that we always 'wipe out any tragedy that remains unique and personal, . . . create a featureless face . . . of romance.' Of course, bad stuff often appears in women's magazines —just as it often appears in the Spectator; with such a vast output, it is impossible to maintain a high stand- ard all the time. But what the editors are constantly looking for, and what they do often succeed in find- ing, is the story which has precisely that 'unique and personal' quality denied us by Mr. Anant. As for being uniform and mealy-mouthed in our themes, the facts again disprove this. A random half-dozen of my own recent stories in this field covered such themes as the right choice of foster-parents for an illegitimate child, the wound to a child's innocence of her first encounter with adult infidelity, the terrible emotional damage done by the world to a displaced person, the experience of childbirth as seen by four different women, the malice of a frigid woman, a man's pity for his repressed wife. Nothing startling there, of course; but we do try to write truthfully, and I believe sometimes manage it. The editors like it when we do, believe it or not.
What I find most distasteful of all in articles of this sort is their underlying assumption that only the `literary' writers, the contributors to the Spectator and similar reviews, are on the right beam in this lowbrow age. This sort of thing makes me very sick. There is only one way to save the mass media of entertainment from being over-exploited by big business—and that is for writers and artists to stop shuddering and holding their noses, to invade these media and inject them with their own better values. Some of us are trying to do this; and already we have at least managed to produce, in a lot of maga- zine fiction, some truer, more mature values than those Mr. Anant seems to subscribe to.—Yours faithfully,
Chelsea, SW10
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