The sea coast of Bohemia
LETTERS
From Sir Denis Brogan. Peter Newmark, I. Dark, Thomas W. Gadd, William Phillips, R. B. Sutcliffe, A. C. Wilson, Angus Wright, P. II. Muir, Professor J. Isaacs, W. Michel.
Sir: I owe an apology to the SPECTATOR. to Mr William Buckley, and to his mother. Suffering from. post-Tripos trauma (the trauma suffered by examiners, not candidates), I missed Mr Buckley's letter (23 June); I also missed the carbon which he sent me. A colleague has just called my attention to the letter of rectification that Mr Buckley sent. I am more sorry. however. for having committed a crime of 'guilt by asso- ciation' against Mrs Buckley, for one knows only too well how a name can be attached to the more foolish fringe of a cause in which one in general believes.
The news of this film got out long before the film did and the Democrats got mileage out of it, as did the numerous dissident Republicans. That Senator Goldwater had more sense than to use this film is gratifying but not surprising. The whole campaign was so disorganised and so ill- disciplined that anything seemed possible. I have covered eight presidential campaigns (including the campaign of 1964) in detail, and it was the worst run of all—a view confirmed a few weeks later in a conversation with Mr Truman. whose authority on this matter is much greater than mine.
A more living question at the moment is why there is such an obsession not only with nudity but with the female breasts, and the female nipples, in the United States. Nudity is not a novelty. When I first came to the United States. some years before Mr Buckley was born, there was a great deal of nudity except in a few strong- holds of Irish puritanism like Boston. The present wave of alleged 'topless' shows in San Francisco and elsewhere would have seemed very timid and tepid compared with what was on display in the days of President Coolidge. The problem I put to myself and I cannot answer is whether the more astonishing phenomenon in America is the obsession with the female breasts as an object of worship or the most formidable example of the power of the Devil.
If the United States is now the homosexual capital of the world (which I tend to doubt). am assured, by very competent experts, that London is the nudist capital of the world and has dirtier shows than anywhere else in the so- called free world. It has been described as the Macao of the West. I can no more account for this than I can for the rise of the publicity now given to homosexuality (male) in the United States. The Yale Daily News today could never (as it did according to Harvard gossip) announce that 'Yale is, has been, and always will be a homo- sexual college.' The approaching arrival of Vassar in New Haven is an answer to Harvard's snide remarks.
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