Your Little Magazine Won't Last

ONE tossed an article into its readers' laps last month which turned out to have a lighted fuse. The editors are no less than overjoyed at the response to A. X.'s description of how very negative our prognosis is. The deluge of mail is almost evenly divided between suggestions that the writer be congratulated or crucified. Following are a pro and a con which were particularly lucid.

Con

Dear Sir:

If you say anything with enough heat and emphasis, the unthinking will believe you. So A. X.'s diatribe in your July issue will impress some people. But it is largely nonsense.

He tries to show that your fiction must exclude every topic but homosexuality. You cannot publish a story of a girl warning about a broken dam because the author could not logically drag sex into it. But that is exactly what any professional writer would do! If the girl merely passes the word about the dam, that is simply an anecdote. To turn it into a story, the author must make her a Lesbian, a whore, crippled by polio, rejected by the football captain, or any of a thousand other things. All fiction is a counterpoint of unrelated ideas. If you don't introduce something irrelevant, you have no story. Even in fiction of the Chekov type, where nothing actually happens, there is an implied conflict of unrelated ideas. Con't page three

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Pro

Gentlemen:

A round of ringing applause for Mr. A.X. ("Your Little Magazine Won't Last") He seems to know the facts of life. What perturbs me is to find the editors of ONE falling all over themselves to prove his case for him.

Hard on the heels of Mr. A.X.'s pungent words about romantic clap-trap comes as malodorous a specimen of it as ONE could hope to unearth from a dank file of True Homosexual Confessions. Mr. A.X. must have thought he was writing satire when he outlined the formula for the type of story he fears. For "towering happiness" he has: "Paul sniffed Dave's hair and shuddered with delight." Mr. Freeman, creator of that bit of unconscious satire "But They'll Outgrow It", matches him with the same currently fashionable male names and throws in the color angle and a barn besides: "Dave . . . remembered the fragrance of the newly-cut alfalfa and the scent of Paul's hair which mingled to a heady Con't page four

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