CRISIS IN THE BOOK TRADE

Naturally there is crisis in novel writing and in short stories. Novel writers are too stupid to perceive external reality but have not yet heard of the monetary system.

The whole of contemporary fiction is still boggit in false dilemmas. The heroisms and romanticism of the Saturday Evening Post epoch as are as out of date as the knights of the Morte d'Artur.

Henry James was vaguely aware that something was going on" down town", something mysterious which he at any rate didn't understand, but on which the whole of the social jincrackery was perched, and which couldn't be monkeyed with without endangering the whole set of his values.

The illiterate are howling for "maxxian fiction" for Proletaria, stories, wildly and mildly unconscious that Dickens, Flaubert and D Isoreli were all busy being Karl Marx's contemporaries and writing his novels and stories.

The writers who haven't yet perceived the bearing of economic thought, and of the history