This does not mean he did not like Frontiers of War; he told Jack he liked it, he has never mentioned it to me. He is suggesting that it did so well because of what he would describe as ‘the capitalist publishing racket’. And of course I agree with him; except that the word capitalist can be supplanted by others, like communist, or women’s magazine, for instance. His tone is merely part of the game we play, the playing out of our roles. I am a ‘successful bourgeois writer’; he ‘the custodian of the purity of working-class values’. (Comrade Butte comes from an upper-middle-class English family, but this is of course irrelevant.) I suggest: ‘Perhaps we might discuss them separately?’ I put two packets of manuscript on the desk and push one towards him. He nods. It is called: ‘For Peace and Happiness’, and is written by a young worker. At least, that is how he is described by Comrade Butte. In fact, he is nearly forty, has been a Communist Party official these twenty years, was once a bricklayer. The writing is bad, the story lifeless, but what is frightening about this book is that it is totally inside the current myth. If that useful imaginary man from Mars (or for that matter, a man from Russia) should read this book he would get the impression that (a) the cities of Britain were locked in deep poverty, unemployment, brutality, a Dickensian squalor; and that (b) the workers of Britain were all communist or at least recognized the Communist Party as their natural leader. This novel touches reality at no point at all. (Jack described it as: ‘communist cloud-cuckoo spit’.) It is, however, a very accurate recreation of the self-deceptive myths of the Communist Party at this particular time; and I have read it in about fifty different shapes or guises during the last year. I say: ‘You know quite well this is a very bad book.’ A look of dry stubbornness comes over Comrade Butte’s long bony face. I remember that novel he wrote himself, twenty years ago, which was so fresh and good and marvel that this can be the same man. He now remarks: ‘It’s no masterpiece, I didn’t say it was, but it’s a good book, I think.’ This is the overture, so to speak, to what is expected to follow. I will challenge him, and he will argue. The end will be the same, because the decision has already been taken. The book will be published. People in the Party with any discrimination will be even more ashamed because of the steadily debasing values of the Party; the Daily Worker will praise it: ‘In spite of its faults, an honest novel of Party life’; the ‘bourgeois’ critics who notice it will be contemptuous. Everything will be as usual, in fact. But suddenly I lose interest. I say: ‘Very well, you’ll publish it. There’s no more to be said.’ There is a startled silence; and Comrade Jack and Butte even exchange glances. Comrade Butte lowers his eyes. He is annoyed.