The review below gave rise to the following letter to the Editor of the TLS in this week's (January 29) issue:

Sir, – Charles Morgan’s review in January 1936 of the Auden/Isherwood play The Dog Beneath the Skin, to which Ollie Brock alludes in his own review of Morgan’s dramatic criticism (January 24), was masterly and just; but it drew a riposte. A manuscript note by Louis MacNeice reading “Charles Morgan – cottage at Tottenham Court Rd” indicates that the author of The Fountain was the target of the lines about a men’s lavatory used for quick sexual scrabbling in “Auden and MacNeice: Their last will and testament” (which the two poets began to write in December 1936 and published in Letters from Iceland): “We wish the cottage at Piccadilly Circus kept / For a certain novelist, to write thereon / The spiritual cries at which he’s so adept”.

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
Le Meygris, 07200 Ailhon, France.


N.B.: Those who would like to see the review concerned will find it above, on the "Works" page, directly after the essay on 'Serenity'.