`POP' FICTION
SIR,—As apparently your only correspondent who reads women's magazines for no professional pur- pose and with great enjoyment, I would much like to comment on a few of the points raised in the letters you have published.
This business of a happy ending . . . I am de- lighted that the editors of my favourite magazines have rejected novels likely to cause me gloom. I, and apparently the editors, am in entire agreement with the eighteenth-century producers who added a final cheerful scene to King Lear, that otherwise singularly depressing play. My sister and I used to make it a habit to telephone London cinemas show- ing films we had not heard of and ask if there was a happy ending before we decided on our evening's entertainment. It was a precaution I often regretted being too morally cowardly to take before-an even- ing spent with young men who insisted on film pro- grammes including bombing, witch-burnings, guillo- tines and slow, foreign suicides. If I want to read about executions, suicides, the H-bomb or the colour bar, I can read about them factually; why should I repeat depression and unpleasantness in fiction? Fictional sex, ending, as your correspondents have pointed out it always does in the women's magazines, in marital twin beds, is surely one of the most pleasing and least depressing antidotes anyone can take to the day's news. My only difficulty is that personally after several hours with the women's magazines I begin to suffer from slight guilt feel- ings bringing on a headache.
A second point . . . one of your correspondents, leaping to protect women from the charges of moronism levelled at them, suggested we read women's magazines because of the educational ar- ticles in them. This, if I may say so, would be really moronic. No addict of women's magazines can have failed within a few weeks to have read all the beauty hints that the most inspired editress can possibly think up. All that remains is the soothing, hypnotic charm of the endlessly repeated affirmation that you, too, can be beautiful if only you give up crumpets and cream sauces. The cookery articles are only novel or interesting to amateurs or women who are unable to buy and read ordinary cookery books. I am a regular reader of women's cheap magazines, but I do not desire to buy the dresses they suggest as suitable for my life; nor to decorate my flat with the crvheted lace mats their home-making pages recommend. I buy my magazines for their fiction 'and their `human interest' articles; although in the interests of truth I should perhaps add that there is one factual article I find endlessly fascinating— the accounts of symptoms and .the possible diseases causing them in 'the Doctor's' columns. I find the same sort of fascination in the pages of the Lancet . . . but this is a more difficult magazine to buy casually yet often.—Yours faithfully,
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