SIRS – In your recent editorial you stated emphatically that: ‘It has become widely recognised that it is the responsibility of every generation to dictate the tastes by which their art should be accepted and judged.’ – a sentence I struggled with and whose clarity is, I feel, verging on the opaque. After much squinting, I allowed that you might be pointing at the necessary critical urge to regularly set a fixed point from which work can be assessed; the urge to judge what is good, promising, bad, unmentionable in the literature of the time, then to hold up new works against these water-marks to see how they measure up. I hope that this is your meaning because, well, yes, absolutely. And yes too, to your condemnation of those ham-fisted literary journalists who attempt to post new writers into the established pigeon holes of literary tradition. I am glad that you aim to avoid this lazy and unhelpful ‘clumsy clustering.’
But then your approach becomes less clear. I simply don’t understand why you go on to endorse ‘any approach that makes the routes between the past and the now more navigable.’ Why, having dismissed the forced yoking together of past and present writers as a crass attempt to make the world a more tidy place, do you then go on to approve a ‘calm, sensible and measured’ approach to linking past and present?
Why must past and present be linked? I thought that this is what you had just revoked?– One is reminded of those neat little amazon.com boxes allying past and present purchases (‘If you liked this, Lizzie Smith, then you might also like..’)
Then, even more confusingly, you go back to stating your original point that: ‘any publication devoted to the development and the promotion of new writers and writing must develop a readership whose attentions are drawn to those standards of taste informing the work they’re being asked to read.’
Well which is it? Do you wish to link past and present? Or to put new yard sticks in the ground? You do not go on to say. Instead you seem to leave the whole proposal: directing the next chapter of your editorial to the analysis of different schools of critic, a dismantling of current generic literary trends.
Taste and chronology are not the same thing. (Nor is taste the same as quality, although I suppose it could be used, if so defined from the outset, to imply a judgement of quality.) Taste must always come first, then, if it is good taste, chronology will naturally follow. You seem to know this, so why don't you say it?
You rebuke the categorising critics, the snarky sensationalists, the verbose academics and the sound-biters: are you sure that in your haste to avoid all such pigeon-holing, to not condemn or condone absolutely, that you haven’t left yourself without a niche altogether?
faithfully yours,
F.L. DEMPSEY.
Shropshire

(F.L. Dempsey identifies some worrying flaws in our argument. That said we are happy to be nicheless and, despite these remarks, continue to seek and publish work which we find it worth our while disagreeing with.)

SIRS – In response to the vacillations of Smith’s protagonist – ‘Who is it in King Lear? Which bastard son? Henry? Harry? Conceived out of wedlock. The more handsome son. Henry? Harry?’ (Translation by the Author, vol. I, no. 1, p.76) – the answer is Edmund. Whilst Edgar is Gloucester’s true son.
As to the more handsome son: well it is frankly a hard one to call – the text says nothing directly. The only reference to appearance I can find is during one of Edmund’s soliloquys when he asks: ‘Why bastard? wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest madam’s issue’ (I.2). But surely this suggests equal good looks rather than superior ones – perhaps Smith’s character sees Edmund as a modest sort?
Henry and Harry are no relation, although King Henry does muse ‘in envy’ (in Henry IV, Part 1) that ‘my Lord Northumberland should be the father to so blest a son’ and wishes:
That it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine. (I.I)
However, this is mere whimsy. There is no real suggestion in the play that either Hotspur or Hal is illegitimate. As to handsome? It is again tricky: Shakespeare is oddly brief on physical appearances, although not adverse to the odd joke about fat people. After defeating Harry Hotspur in battle, Hal does make reference to his opponent’s ‘mangled face’ but I do not think we can take this as indicative of his looks on a general basis. Does Smith’s protagonist use the word ‘handsome’ in the old fashioned sense such as ‘evincing a becoming generosity or nobleness of character’ perhaps? In this case I would discount the bastard, Edmund, but leave the other three as strong contenders.
I do hope this helps.
Yours Faithfully,
KATE KNOWLTON.
Leeds, England

SIRS – I greatly enjoyed Aaron Robertson's piece on ‘The Illusion of Neutrality.’ Mr Robertson examines with admirable precision the banal pretentiousness of the modern ‘space’: rooms that refuse to allow a work of art to stand on its own, insisting instead on labouring meaning through context. He uncovers, in fact, what many of us should have realised years ago: that despite its fashionable aspirations the White Cube is, in reality, a little square.
I beg to remain,
yours faithfully,
JONATHON NAIPOL
Greater Manchester