Letters: Letters, Aug. 21, 1939

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"On which occasion he will introduce a variety of Amusing Burlesques, Comical Delineations, Enlivening Funnyism, Gleesome Humors, Innoxious Jolities, Kindling Levities, Mirthful Novelties, Outjesting Palliatives, Queer Reminiscences, Satirical Truisms, Ubiquitous Voices, Wags, Xantippes, Yahoos, Zaneys, etc. etc.

"PERFORMANCE VARIED EACH EVENING."

ROBERT M. BOLTWOOD

Buffalo, N. Y.

Gad-Sir-the-Empire

Sirs:

False is Letterwriter-to-TIME Kimball's assertion that the government-controlled British Broadcasting Corp. is Red [TIME, July 17]. Correctly he charges that its newscasts are inaccurate, biased, anti-Axis.

B. B. C. English language news, intoned in bland Oxford accents, is insidious because smooth, therefore, to the unsophisticated, impartial. Consistently the B. B. C. represents the pseudo-democratic viewpoint of Britain's ruling caste, now belligerent because its habitually quiet but nevertheless arrogant assumption of omniscience in Europe and in Asia is effectively challenged by the Dictatorships.

Britain's Magna Charta gave the power and prerogatives to the barons, who have held them ever since—the backdoor of the peerage-cum-charmed political circle always being carefully left wide open to "commoners" who have the dough and can read without moving their lips, also, for safety's sake, to an occasional pale pink radical with an orthodox Imperial slant to his ideas. The country's masses, politically ignorant and acquiescent because they are continually mesmerized by a puppet press masquerading as democratic, have yet to realize that they are on the outside looking in. Apart from occasional darts to the Left, dragging a red herring, and aside from plenty of cockney and dialectal comedy, which is really a "front," the British Broadcasting Corp. is essentially Gad-Sir-the-Empire Tory, and uncompromisingly for all that the Empire does not mean to Britain's underprivileged millions.

ALFRED C. MOORE

London, England

Peculiar Parallelism

Sirs:

Of three literary men whose careers show a peculiar parallelism you have in recent months reported the marriage of one, the poem of another.

Eliot and Waugh joined the Catholic Church*. . . . But in so doing they committed themselves to nothing.

Huxley, on the other hand, finding an answer in a religion composed of all the best that's been thought and said, committed himself a couple of hundred pages worth in Ends and Means. . . .

Following its publication, Huxley edited a pacifist pamphlet, in great part a restatement of the book. But what else has he done, what is he doing now? Is he by any chance preparing a novel, foreshadowed in Eyeless in Gaza, of an unattached man? There is no such character in fiction, he claims. Or is he merely continuing with the practical work of the pacifist movement? Had he been very active during this period it seems probable that he would have gotten into enough trouble to make the news, and hence have appeared in your pages. Has he been suppressed? Or has he gone underground?

I appeal to you as the only likely source of this information. The local library has only an American Who's Who. I trust that you will feel the subject of sufficient general interest to publish at least a sentence in answer.