SOURCE: Cruttwell, Patrick. “Fiction Chronicle.” Hudson Review 18, no. 3 (autumn 1965): 442-46.

In the following excerpt, Cruttwell regards Knights and Dragons as “witty.”

When I last wrote the “fiction chronicle” for this journal, I raised the war-cry of “Three cheers for the Puritans, and may they soon return to us!” One or two people, subsequently, asked if I really meant this absurd or shocking sentiment. At the time, it was not said with total seriousness; now, after another immersion in the ocean of contemporary fiction, I am not sure if I should not mean it very seriously indeed. It does seem to me that the liberation of literature—and of life also, of course—from the sexual taboos of the 19th century has entirely failed to produce the genuinely “liberating” effects which the pioneers looked for. The expectation, I suppose—one of the basic expectations of 20th-century liberalism—was that...