Sir: I am submitting to you my impressions of the course that PNR has been taking since I began reading it, a good many numbers ago. My first impressions of it were of an editorial intent of material-provision of a breadth of humane generousness in taste consistent with the maintaining of high but judiciously unex-treme standards of critical discretion. There seemed a healthy freedom from routine. If there was any tendentiousness in the discretion, it was of a 'nervous', hesitant sort, a care to distribute the favorable in notice-taking to the possible, a judicious avoidance of the appearance of special favorings. This might be described as a bias of self-protectiveness. But there seemed room for the development of serviceability as a scene for an eventual editorial decisiveness, commitment to a necessity of something better than merely the literarily unimpeachable, by judiciously unextreme standards.

I have come to feel PNR to be in the grip of an indecisiveness of a moral order resulting from the exercise of an editorial wisdom of circumspect liberality in place-giving for advocacy. Is it not plain that what has come to rate by discreet critical judgement as literarily unimpeachable is at best no better than the least easily disregardable of an ever-expanding supply of literary material, as 'original' and critical or critico-philosophical, each authorial unit an independent venture in private literary enterprise? With so much competing for rating as 'good', what is 'good' but that which makes forceful literary argument of its goodness, fits with effect of legitimacy into the general scheme of private literary enterprise? But could editorial decisiveness bring within editorial reach literary material that was better than what conformed to the criteria of goodness determined by the prevailing processes of literary production?

Only by belief in an intrinsic potentiality of language-employment of yielding words of good omen, good imparting of what minds have to share of good understanding, could there be transcending of the limits of the literary categorizations of 'good' which have become finally vague, indeterminate, from lost virtue, as with all other categorizations of 'good'.

Do I propose impossibilities? No, only a reversal of the conventionally assigned relationship of language and literature to each other, by which literature is the pattern of language. An editorial application, to submitted or solicited content of a literary kind or orientation, of standards of 'good' directly pertinent to it as of the substance of words, could throw a light upon texts under evaluation facilitating the reading of each as what, according to its words, is said in it: the patently delivered words would be judged, not the amalgam of play of authorial attitudes, verbally compounded into a something offerable as a product of literary performance. I can conceive of an effect, on authorial preparation for presenting something to an editorial seat exercising decision on the basis I have described, of a new kind of consciousness of the nature of the presentation as a linguistic performance. And of an effect on the presiding editorial consciousness of scrutinizing a presentation for distinctive apprehension of what is said in it. I can envisage a heightening, in the editorial and the authorial quarters of attention, of consciousness of what is communicated, in the present pieces of writing; the immediacy of the actual verbal conduct of the saying becomes conducive to an intensification of the sense of responsibility for what is authorially said and what is editorially committed to printed state.

Of course, as to the practicality of what I have sketched, there is no arguable case. Nothing comes into existence from merely being conceived of as a desideratum, as what ought to succeed the existent. The existent has precedence for so long, and so long. I mean no war-making upon what is, what is, the progressive has-been.
LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON
Wabasso, Florida

P.S. I am moved, finally, to point out that the structuralist interpretation of the nature of literary material is exactly antithetical to the said,as the crux of concern. Structuralist criticology reflects the actuality that the verbal substance of literary compositions, writers' productions, has been increasingly adulterated with implications, suggestions, secretions of private meaning, blanks of the verbally unexpressed for readers to 'understand', or fill in, as co-authors of the so-called text. Ordinary, conventional, literature-authorities-indeed, not a few among them in posts of academic authority as experts in traditional interpretations of literary material-have found themselves tempted to grant some validity to the structuralist device of shifting the solution of literary meaning from the writing to the reading occasion. This sort of compromise with structuralist theory spells a consciousness of how much absence of the verily said, the linguistically delivered, there has come to be in literary material-in the written. The benign nod towards general structuralist ideology of 'straight' critics confronted with the gappy meaning-substance peculiarly preponderant in modern literary writing is a gesture of conscience-relief. Less and less criticism in these times can be straight criticism; literature itself, in these times, is full of angles. There has come to be a problem distinct from the problem of literature-production: the problem, what to do about literature. L. (R.) J.

AGAINST THE FRENCH BIAS

Sir: In two recent numbers of PNR (22 and 25) pleas have been made by C. H. Sisson and Stephen Romer for a recovery of the closeness of relationship which used to exist between French and English literatures. More specifically, they have lamented the dearth of translations into English of contemporary French works. I gathered the impression from reading both pieces that the authors felt translators just weren't bothering, whether out of saturation or because other more easily accessible sources of stimulation were available (American literature) or perhaps from plain lack of curiosity about French literature itself. I would suggest the problem might be ascribed to the small amount of money such labour would bring in-but this is not the point I wish to make.

Perhaps it is not a problem at all. Perhaps the imaginative energies in French letters have shifted to criticism, sociology, anthropology, translations of which we regularly receive, mixed blessings though they may be. Apart from specialists in French culture, however, is there any reason why we should wait eagerly for works of contemporary French writers to be translated as soon as they come off the press? There is no reason why her literature should be supposed to be of such unceasingly high quality that we are bound to become uncivilized if deprived of it. In fact, we appear to have been treated in the past to much mediocre material from France while other interesting literatures have remained untranslated or unread. I refer not only to cultures with which Britain has few natural connections, such as Argentina's, but to some much closer, Spain's for example, or even those that share our language and traditions. How many people here have read the excellent James K. Baxter or even know which country he comes from?

To reflect a little further on the question of Spain. It is true that for many years during Franco's dictatorship Spanish literature had little to offer, though there were exiled figures producing work of the highest quality. Max Aub, to give just one example-intelligent, inventive and practically unknown here. Let us look back then to the period immediately before the Civil War. For twenty or thirty years Spanish literature had been extremely exciting and vigorous. Yet when we look at the number of translations from the Spanish in 1935 we discover that a paltry two books by Spanish authors were translated (and three by South Americans) while forty-nine books were translated from the French. I refer to works which could be classified as literature; the imbalance is even greater in the fields of history, science, etc.

Look now at the present. We know, at last, something of Latin American literature but contemporary Spanish literature remains largely untranslated and unheard of. And it is not that there is nothing to hear of. The list of stimulating novelists writing in Spain is long and getting longer. In a Madrid daily last year, F. Martinez Ruiz wrote: 'Presumably it will be necessary to mark this year, 1981, with a white stone, speaking in terms of publications.' (ABC, 25 October). The white stone is not a tombstone, either, but a landmark. Let any reader who doesn't have Spanish try to follow this up, to get hold of an English version of anything by Ramon Ayerra, Juan Benet, Francisco Umbral, Juan Garcia Hortelano or even the patriarchs Gonzalo Torrente Ballester or Miguel Delibes, let alone the newer writers such as Jaime Zulaika, Andres Sorel or Luciano Rincon. I can advise them not to bother. And the list does not end there. I merely wanted to point out that we should not presume that it is only French literature that we should turn to when looking outside Britain, that it might be time that we got away from this old affair with France and looked elsewhere.
DAVID CALLAHAN
London N 12

JUST A NOTE

Sir: Neil Powell in 'The Dream Decays' (PNR 24) quotes disapprovingly Jeff Nuttall's rather fatuous comment in Bomb Culture that what publishers mean when they say 'Too obscure for the general public' is-in fact- 'Too obscure for me, hampered as I am by a public-school, Oxbridge conditioning'. Later in the same article Powell himself writes of the Pooh episode at Warwick University that it 'may have had more to do with English education's notorious failure to prepare its charges for adult life . . '. I wonder if other readers of Powell's essay felt, as I did, that in the latter half of his argument he was changing ground and, in a rather ambivalent way, endorsing Nuttall's analysis-if one can call it that-without taking on board his polemic? I think Nuttall is wrong and that, in this, Powell too is wrong.
V. A. THOMAS
Loughborough