A letter to George Steiner
Dear George, I met you first in 1965. You had just given a lecture at the Royal Society of Literature’s premises. You were outspoken in declaring the merits of reticence. Ardent for cool, you insisted that, when writing about sex, the explicit, licensed by the verdict in the Lady Chatterley trial, was the enemy of art. Never mind Sir Robert Walpole’s ‘Let us talk bawdy, then all may join in’: obscenity was one thing, literature another. The naming of parts, in your view, belonged only in the kind of book which Jean-Jacques Rousseau held to be read with one hand.
