Many authors are embarrassed about letting their random journalistic writings be gathered into a book, though the embarrassment is much mitigated by the need for money. What is written for ephemeral reading finds an appropriate style, the deadline dictating flatness or hysteria, with no time for the mot juste (and who the hell cares, anyway!) or (you can always change your mind next week) the considered opinion. A book is, on the other hand, an awful undertaking: it takes a long time to come out, it costs dear, it ought to be a product of essential conviction, not just a cast-off wardrobe. Hence, however venally qualified, the embarrassment.

Asked whether her journalism interferes with her serious writing, Brigid Brophy replies that her journalism is serious writing. She was never one for embarrassment. So here [in "Don't Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews"], bold as brass, are articles on the subjects which Miss Brophy feels—even with the approach of a deadline—deeply about. They are best defined as Brophyesque subjects, which is the best possible tribute to her integrity and consistency. This means that they are for Brophyesque readers. I am, for the most part, temperamentally unfitted to be one of those. (p. 4)

There is something endearing about the consistency of Miss Brophy's tastes and convictions: setting out to surprise, she never surprises—at least, not if we start with the premise of her ying chu-i (or yinnism). Naturally, she is vegetarian (meat is yang food), an advocate of polyandry, a lover of the rococo, and an adorer of Mozart. Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" (a yang book) has a reference to "filthy Mozart," twice mentioned in these essays by Miss Brophy, and that seems to be the irritant which impels her to a very cruel attack on one of the funniest books of the last 20 years. But humor, especially of the British Jerome K. Jerome variety, is yang; wit—which is more of a weapon—is the proper yin stuff.

Which writers must she, conditioned prenatally as she is, prefer to what other writers? Colette and Françoise Sagan to Simone de Beauvoir; Genet to Sartre—isn't the core of "Nausea" a revulsion at the sight of that chestnut tree, indecently and excessively flourishing, all yin? She does well and right by John Horne Burns, a fine and neglected novelist cut off early, but she despises Henry Miller so much that she shakes herself off balance….

There's a great measure of unashamed self-regard in these essays (reviews rather, reviews she's kept and not, like most of us, regarded as expendable along with the checks that were paid for them). Consistent in her attacks she permits herself a haughty helping of inconsistency in her ideas. The woman who is all for natural foods and the rights of animals has no great love of nature, preferring the elegance and rationality of an idealized Augustan metropolis. The woman who is passionate for angelic writing (like, God help us, that of Hortense Calisher) defiantly thrusts at us the silly Cockneyism of her title, which is the final injunction of an essay on Mozart. She is clever, but she is not very likable. One of these days the yang—which normally suppresses the innate qualities of the gentleman—is going to bite back. (p. 5)