Novelist's umbrage
Sir, — My first response to Mr Tony Palmer's comments on my novel The Send-off (one can hardly call it a review, since .in sixty-eight lines he never mentions what the book is about) was to have my seconds call on him: Remingtons at twenty paces. My second response was to ignore it. After all, the book received a good notice in the Guardian the previous day (publication day): one cancelled the other, and no doybt there would be other interpretations. My third was this letter. Mr Palmer complains that the book is short. It is. It is the shortest of my published novels, here and in the States. In all charity, perhaps it should be called a novella. But the content dictated the form. It couldn't be otherwise. May I explain further? I am concerned with the death of soliders. The too-easily forgotten death of soldiers. I wrote about the dilemma of a suburban family who, about to go on holiday to Spain, discover a dead soldier in the house. They don't want to miss the holiday, so in various comic , tragic ways they try to dispose of the body. The dilemma is resolved in the end, by the only human way. But it is not the end Now, I don't like spelling it out to the fiction reviewer of a distinguished journal but what I wanted in this book was a sparse, tight form: not a word wasted. If Mr Palmer would read my other novels (all of conventional length) he will find plenty of ' poetic ' description a la Conrad: The Send-off did not demand it. (The title, by the way, of which Mr Palmer makes much, is taken from the poem by Wilfred Owen.)
To emphasise the casual way we accept the daily ration of dead in Ireland and the rest of the world, I used the comic approach in the novel. Mr Palmer, in castigating me for the words 'the family soundo ' fails to mention, or perhaps to realise, that the words. come in the thoughts of Mrs Jardine when thinking of the family asleep. It's a common working-class South-ofEngland expression. It's maybe not up to Conrad's standards, but 1 was writing about a suburban family, not Lord Jim.
The book is a plea for human concern. If I failed to make that clear, either I have failed or Mr Palmer is not perceptive enough to see it. If the former, I am sorry. If the latter, I wince for Mr Palmer's future victims.
Two final points: Mr Palmer mentions that a more fastidious publisher would have reduced the book to fifty pages. May I say that you cannot get a more fastidious publisher than Chatto and Windus. From the original receipt of the typescript I have been consulted on every detail of the book's production: type, layout, jacket design, etc. I have at least twelve letters on the subject. They have done me proud: and I salute them.
. May I. at last, tell Mr Palmer that my next novel is 225 pages long; that in future I hope to write a novel called The Pheasant Shoot that he will have to spend some time over; and also that once he has made his name wearing the cloak of The Spectator's former fiction reviewer, I wish him well at the 'Evening Standard, when Mr Waugh moves on to the Sun.
Christopher Leach Far Yew Tree House, Over Tabley, Knutsford, Cheshire
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