ABSTRACT
The taxi-cab-driver test can be applied, in the absence of a taxi-cab driver-though not so effectively-by merely opening any book of 'fiction', at the first page, and seeing what you find. I will now give a hasty demonstration of that method, selecting, for the purpose, two of the only 'fiction' books I have within easy reach. Here displayed intact upon the next page, is first-page No. 1. [Cites as 'Specimen A' the first page of Point Counter Point]
That is the first page of the most important work of 'fiction' of a very famous author, published in 1928, and regarded as one of the landmarks in English literature of the last decade. There is no occasion
to name the author, as it is only my purpose here to show you my taxicab-driver test in operation, and to indicate what results may be expected. This single tell-tale page appears to me to be terribly decisive: for no book opening upon this tone of vulgar complicity with the dreariest of suburban library-readers could, from my point of view, change its skin, in the course of its six hundred long pages, and become anything but a dull and vulgar book.
