ABSTRACT
I have read Point Counter Point with a heart sinking through my bootsoles and a rising admiration. I do think you've shown the truth, perhaps the last truth, about you and your generation, with really fine courage. It seems to me it would take ten times the courage to write P. Counter P. than it took to write Lady C.: and if the public knew what it was read ing, it would throw a hundred stones at you, to one at me. I do think that art has to reveal the palpitating moment or the state of man as it is. And I think you do that, terribly. But what a moment! and what a state! if you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape, in their various degrees-and you state plainly that it is so-caro,1 however are we going to live through the days? Preparing still another murder, suicide, and rape? But it becomes of a phantasmal boredom and pro duces ultimately inertia, inertia, inertia and final atrophy of the feelings. Till, I suppose, comes a final super-war, and murder, suicide, rape sweeps away the vast bulk of mankind. It is as you say-intellectual appreciation does not amount to so much, it's what you thrill to. And
if murder, suicide, rape is what you thrill to, and nothing else, then it's your destiny-you can't change it mentally. You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it. Still for all that it's a perverse courage which makes the man accept the slow suicide of inertia and sterility: the perverseness of a perverse child. . . . I can't stand murder, suicide, rape-especially rape: and especially being raped. Why do men only thrill to a woman who'll rape them and S on their face? All I want to do to your Lucy is smack her across the mouth, your Rampion is the most boring character in the book-a gas-bag. Your attempt at intellectual sympathy!—It's all rather disgusting, and I feel like a badger that has its hole on Wimbledon Common and trying not to be caught. Well, caro, I feel like saying good-bye to you-but one will have to go on saying good-bye for years.
