''Lethargic Worm"

"You Americans are literary snobs," said burly British Novelist John Boynton (Angel Pavement) Priestley, landing in Manhattan last week. "I am here to speak or lecture at a place called Buffalo, prominent for its bootleggers. Then I will speak at Toledo, a place full of crooks chased out of Chicago. Third, I will lecture at Urbana, Ill., a place I couldn't find on my $12 atlas. . . .

"I am going to write a novel about an American girl who will call everything either 'swell' or 'lousy.' I expect she'll be lousier than she is swell. You spoil your women. We spoil our men. They can stand it better. Women turn out best in adversity. It may be hard on their youth and beauty, but it's good for their character. . . . [Novelist Priestley has begotten one daughter.]

"I hear that all American bathrooms are full of 'alleviating compounds'. . . . The nearest I ever came to North America before was Central America. When I got there I turned in the direction of the United States and thumbed my nose."

Among U. S. women who read these comments was Novelist Fannie (Humoresque) Hurst. Said she:

"America once more awakens to the crack of a whip across her cheek by a foreign visitor, and this time, hopefully, the welt seems a little higher and redder than usual.

"Mr. Priestley's broadside, illogical and uninformed as it is, serves American snobbery jolly well right. Year after year we submit to the patronage of a procession of such visitors, turn the other cheek, and apparently yearn for a third, that we might also turn it. "If it takes whole lecture shiploads of Mr. Priestleys to make the long lethargic American worm turn, then I am for whole lecture shiploads of visiting patronizers seeking American patronage." Charles Dickens was among the first British novelists to profit from cracking America across the face;/- and, as Mr. Priestley said last week, "Dickens is still read in America." Miss Hurst, and many another U. S. citizen, pounced simultaneously on a Priestley error of fact. He had said that Americans buy but do not read books, cited as proof the fact that an English friend had found Sinclair Lewis novels in homes throughout the U. S. "uncut." As Americans know, all trade editions of Mr. Lewis' novels, and nearly all U. S. novels, are machine cut, defy detection as to whether they have been read.

Novelist Priestley, after reading Miss Hurst's critique, after consulting his friend Manhattan Critic Henry Seidel Canby, beat a retreat on the ground that he had been joking, stated: "I am one of those strange Englishmen who really have a sense of humor."

/-In American Notes (1842) Novelist Dickens noted the U. S. citizen's "dull, sullen persistence in press," coarse ridiculed usage," "that flayed comfortless America's custom, so "licentious very prevalent in [American] country towns of married persons living in hotels, having no fire side of their own." Of a party of Pennsylvania legislators who came to greet him, Dickens observed "Pretty nearly every man spat upon the carpet, as usual; and one blew his nose with his fingers--also on the carpet, which was a very neat one."

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