PARTISAN REVIEW
29
of psychological methods: "The astonishing thing is that these people
have no written language...." And no one thinks him absurd.
Where, on the occasion of a centenary of Shelley, in the same
week and in three different literary periodicals, three young men, of
identical education, from our identical universities, can write critical
pieces about Shelley, damning him with the faintest possible praise,
and in identically the same tone, as if they were doing Shelley a great
favor to mention him at all - and no one seems to think that such a
thing can indicate that there is something seriously wrong with our
literary system.
Finally . .. this novel continues to be, for its author, a most
instructive experience. For instance, ten years after I wrote it, I can
get, in one week, three letters about it, from three intelligent, well–
informed, concerned people, who have taken the trouble to sit down
and write to me. One might be in Johannesburg, one in San Fran–
cisco, one in Budapest. And here I sit, in London, reading them, at
the same time, or one after another - as always, grateful to the
writers, and delighted that what I've written can stimulate, illum–
inate - or even annoy. But one letter is entirely about the sex war,
about man's inhumanity to woman, and woman's inhumanity to
man, and the writer has produced pages and pages all about nothing
else, for she - but not always a she - can't see anything else in the
book.
The second is about politics, probably from an old Red like
myself, and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never
mentions any other theme.
These two letters used to be, when the book was as it were young,
the most common.
The third letter, once rare but now catching up on the others,
is written by a man or a woman who can see nothing in it but the
theme of mental illness.
But it is the same book.
And naturally these incidents bring up again questions of what
people see when they read a book, and why one person sees one
pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to
have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen so very
differently by its readers.
