Scottsboro Boy "
Sta,—Two points in Professor Brogan's review of Scottsboro Boy call for comment. " Who wrote this? " he asks. " We have no means of knowing whether Mr. Patterson or Mr. Conrad wrote it, whether Mr. Conrad was merely an editor for a semi-illiterate narrator or whether he ' ghosted' it." The answer is that Conrad wrote the story for a man insufficiently literate to write it himself. I should have.thought this was sufficiently obvious from the fact that Conrad wrote the foreword, and says in it: " Every fact, every episode, all the information in Scottsboro Boy was provided by Haywood Patterson. It is the story he lived, what he saw, experienced and described." I cannot find that any other reviewer has been in any doubt about the position.
The other point is graver. On the jacket I describe Patterson's treat- ment as " one of the world's greatest crimes against humanity." Pro- fessor Brogan considers the description " hysterical." " A crime, but in the modern world, ' one of the greatest '? " he asks. Yes, one of the greatest, despite Hitler and Hiroshima and Karaganda and Belsen and Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Professor Brogan, 1 suspect, is a victim of the arithmetical fallacy. I commend to him the words with which another review opens: " A million suffering men can feel no more than one man. Human experience, in spite of the excesses of collectivisms, remains measurable only in terms of the individual. Our dulled sensi- tivities, sympathies and imagination today are towards suffering, cruelty and inhumanity in general: the things in themselves."
If it is hysterical to describe the unspeakable torment inflicted on this man (quite deliberately and year after year) as " one of the world's greatest crimes against humanity," then a little more " hysteria "—as well as a little more " ientimentality," that other grossly misused word—is just what the deadened conscience of 1950 requires.—Yours, &c.,
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W.C.2. VICTOR GOLLANCZ.
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