Early flight
Sir: 'It is certainly a quotation all right', Colin Welch says in condemning the phrase 'the necessary killing' which he attributes to a `blood-chilling poem' by Auden (Books, 8 June). It certainly isn't a correct quotation. The line as originally printed in 1937 was 'the conscious accept- ance of guilt in the necessary murder'. Within a couple of years the phrase was changed to 'the fact of murder'. The poem of course was 'Spain', and if Colin Welch's blood was chilled by reading it one can say only that it cools very easily. For a full measure of error Welch mentions 'the poet's craven wartime flight to America'. Auden left England in January 1939, sever- al months before the outbreak of war.
Julian Symons
Groton House, 330 Dover Road, Walmer, Kent
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