JOURNALISTS v. CRITICS
SIR,—Even a gamekeeper nervously patrolling an iceberg (lit by low candlepower) in order to ward off the attack of a growling bulldozer—so Mr. Kenneth Alison appears to describe me in the colourful letter you published on August 15—can recognise a squeal of wounded amour-propre from the Dorset shore when he hears it. But I wonder why Mr. Allsop should be touched on the raw by being described as an 'ex-Beaverbrook journalist'? And why should he consider it a smear? All I wished to do, for the purposes of my argument (in the August number of The London Magazine), was to establish the fact that Mr. Brien and Mr. Allsop had shared a common training ground in journalism. Of course we are all journalists, from the moment a journal accepts a contribution from us; but the distinction I was trying to draw ought to have been perfectly clear to anyone who read my foreword in a less apoplectic state than Mr. Allsop : the dis- tinction between, shall we say, Mr. Allsop's approach to his responsibilities on the book page of the Daily Mail and that of his distinguished predecessor, Mr. Peter Quennell. Mr. Allsop seems to suffer from a number of strange hallucinations, the most extraordinary being that anyone who cares for good writing, as opposed to the kind of writing to be found in any chapter of The Angry Decade, wants to keep literature 'like a waxed flower under a bell.' My views on what is needed to keep literature a living, reality in Britain today certainly do not coincide with Mr. Allsop's (though they may overlap more than he thinks), but in order to right what he has turned topsy-turvy I should perhaps point out that what he describes. as 'providing guidance without lowering standards' in 'clarity and perspective' was precisely what 1 was advocating in the offending foreword. If Mr. Alison would give up his absurd mystique, imagining himself as Leader of the New Town Bull- dozers, threatening all my contributors with fearful liquidation, he might not find it necessary to make so much noise and might become the serious and intelligent populariser of culture he so plainly wants to he, But who are those unfortunate contributors, these 'nervous gamekeepers.' anyway? A large num- ber of the authors Mr. Allsop shows himself, in The Angry Decade, to he specially interested in— and even gives a pat on the head to—have appeared in the pages of The London Magazine, and some of theni in New Writing befbre that. Or is he referring to the contributor, of Mr. Allsop's own generation, who reviewed The Angry Decade in the same August number, soberly and at length, in a closely reasoned appraisal, even if it was more critical than appre- ciative? Not very nervous, as far as I could see.
The London Magazine 36 Soho Square, London, W I
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