REVIEW
Response to review - D Johnson
                                                                        L de Kock
   Reviewers are at liberty to say what they see fit about other people's books,
and writers should stay out of arguments with them. However, reviewers should
not enjoy the right to commit basic errors in a style which is slovenly as to the
matter of facts. Further, reviewers should not be allowed to commit the indecency
of wilful misquotation for the pleasure of making their conclusions just so.
   David Johnson does all of this in a review of my book, Civilising Barbarians
(Transformation 31, 1996), in a piece of writing which is astonishing in its
slovenliness. Coming from a scholar with a reasonable reputation, these lapses
are all the more remarkable.
   In his first sentence Johnson identifies me as the person who, with Martin
Trump, edited a book in 1996 called The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in
English, 1990-1995. Martin Trump died in 1994, more than a year before The
Heart in Exile was even conceived. My co-editor is in fact Ian Tromp.
   Johnson then identifies me as the editor of ajournal he calls "Scrutiny 2". Again
this is an error, but it suits his purpose of drawing a parallel between my journal
and the one edited by FR Leavis in the early part of this century, Scrutiny. The
journal I edit is called scrutiny2: issues in english studies in southern africa. The
"2" in our title is affixed to the word "scrutiny", and the shortened title, scrutiny2,
has always been presented either in capital letters entirely, or in lower case
entirely. It has never been represented by us as "Scrutiny 2". Perhaps this is too
subtle for Johnson. An editorial announcing the journal's inaugural issue in 1996
explicitly drew attention to the ironic distancing between Leavis's Scrutiny and
scrutiny2, but perhaps it is too much to expect that Johnson would have read the
editorial.
   The worst lapse of academic decency, however, comes at the end of the review,
 where Johnson knowingly misquotes my words. Johnson quotes one of my
phrases from an essay in the Southern African Review of Books, and then, after
 an ellipsis, quotes a succeeding phrase which actually appears seven phrases
 before the first phrase he quotes. If he wanted to paraphrase my sense, that would
 be a different matter, but Johnson places the jumble he makes out of my words
 in quotation marks as if I had written the words in this manner myself. The
 rearrangement means that the complexity of my original (long) sentence is
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 REVIEW                                                                    KOCK
 traduced to dogmatic assertion. Again, subtlety or complexity do not seem to sit
 well with the reviewer in the instance, who, in his eagerness to score a point or
 two, will go so far as to misquote his subject.
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