Notes toward the Destitution of Culture

Absolute honesty is, I suppose, the great obligation which a pseudonym puts upon one who elects to use such a device. After all, to assume a fake name and then come on as a fake would be rococo extravagance. If I wanted to be a fake, I could do that under my other (and, I used to think, real) name.

With astringent candor, then, I address myself first to the question of how I come to be doing a piece such as this for a magazine such as this. You don’t see Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann writing for Kenyon Review—or PR, or Yale, either. Why should they? But here I am, author of what my publisher calls the “B. M.” novel of the season (he means “Big Money”—I hope), fooling around for what is not, after all, the top dollar in the quality lit. biz. “How”—certain perceptive analysts of the rhetoric of motives are likely to ask—”come?”