MR. FLEMING BITES THE HAND THAT PATTED HIM ON THE
HEAD
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR, I am very sorry to have offended the generous American lady who is the donor of the " Prix Mrs. Will Gordon " by my article, " What I Mean to the French." (The title must indeed seem pretentious to anyone capable of taking the article seriously ; but here you, Sir, must take part of the blame, since you abbreviated—for reasons, I imagine, of space—my original title, which was, " With the Guards to Mexico, or What I Mean to the French." Flamboyant, I admit ; but less nakedly egotistic.) I am also sorry if I mis- spelt the essayist's name. I had only his signature to go on, and I ought to have checked it ; but, to tell the truth, this did not seem to me the sort of point that counted for very much with him.
Having expressed my regret on those two scores, may I explain briefly why I am impenitent in the face of Mrs.
Gordon's graver charges? She accuses me of sabotaging Anglo-French understanding and of treating with ill-mannered flippancy " a slight and somewhat incomplete essay by a young Frenchman who, working daily from 9 to 7 in an office, gets but a scant hour on Sunday to cultivate his interest in modem English literature."
You can't have your cake and eat it. If I had filched that " slight and somewhat incomplete essay " from under its industrious author's pillow, my article would have been un- pardonable. But I didn't. The fact that its author had won a prize for writing " Peter Fleming : Sa Place dans la Litterature Anglaise " was published in Paris and was reported if at least four serious journals over here. The donor of the prize sent me the essay, together with a list of those who (I suppose) awarded it. It is a distinguished list. The British Ambassador in Paris appears as honorary president. The 18 members of the Comite d'Honneur include the Minister of Finance, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Mr. Granville Barker, and Lady Austen Chamberlain. The " Membres du Jury " (which is 13 strong) include M. Andre Maurois, M. Paul Morand, and four other members of the Academie Francaise. As for the essay, which was—constitutionally, at any rate— acclaimed by this notable company, I should be the last to quarrel with the literary judgements expressed in it ; but I am bound in honesty to admit that almost all the statements of fact in it are wrong ; that they could all have been put right with the minimum of trouble ; and that, if the subject of the essay had (inconceivably) been set as a question in an examination, the essayist would have been lucky to get a Q—.
I do not myself believe (and Mrs. Gordon admits that my " inaccuracy is often questionable ") that the surest foundations of Anglo-French or any other international understanding are laid on a basis of easily avoidable inaccuracy, even in wholly trivial connexions ; nor (in my view) is the austerer and less opportunist ideal of literary excellence best approached by publicly rewarding productions which, however delightfully intentioned, are, to say the least, unworkmanlike.
Mrs. Will Gordon says that the essay won a prix d'encouragement. With due respect to a lady whose generous motives must command the gratitude of all writers, I shall not be sorry if my article has done something to decourager les autres.—Yours, &c., PETER FLEMING. yoyce Grove, Nettlebed, Oxon.
Previous page
