Gentleman in Switzerland
Sir: May I at this late date be permitted to comment on the controversy aroused by Antony Lambton's recent inauguration (Books, 7 September) of a new and idiosyncratic style of literary criticism, with which I have only recently caught up? The BBC's weekly house organ, the fortunately inimitable Listener, has since allowed a Mr Jones space to blow the cover hitherto granted me as `Mr F', alias Andrew Wil- son's Waldo Chatterway in his Gentlemen in England. CI thought of Chatterway, marvellous bore,' seemed to me incidental- ly an excellent and Quennellish-sounding feu-de-mots, words well worth any egg left on my face.) But fair's fair, and, as it happened, Mr Wilson, who had forewarned me that there was in the post a novel in which I would be quite wrong to think myself portrayed, had, I discovered on its arrival, inscribed it with a disarming dedicace to 'Dear Ali, who inspired some of the jokes in this book, and who begs me to stick to fiction. You will be shocked by the inaccuracies but it comes with my love and unwavering esteem.' Even in the absence of so cour- teous and affectionate a communication I should have found nothing in the novel to give offence to me or my friends, all of us being accustomed to today's background sounds of clashing solecisms and serial false notes in literature and journalism.
However, it seems unlikely that there will prove to be a school of Lambton as once of Leavis. Certainly my attempts, using its guidelines, to criticise Iris Mur- doch for her failure to make sufficiently clear in her latest novel which of the two brothers is Peter Levi and which Andrew Wilson, have had to be abandoned. Never- theless it was a great comfort to learn that, over the 'decades' of our acquaintanceship, I have not, in Lambton's eyes, appeared as `a common, pretentious and vulgar snob', for he must have spotted quite a few of these in the years he and his large family, casting a wide net, used so hospitably and generously to entertain, in, now that I come to recall it, St John's Wood.
Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
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