A "NOVEL" HOLIDAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 208, 3 September 1927, Page 36

A "NOVEL" HOLIDAY.

GUEBEUA AND GIBBS CROSS

SWORDS.

GERTRUDE STEIN'S HICCUPS,

(From Our Own Correspondent.*

LONDON, July 26, 1927. I wonder how many made the mistake a young New Zealander made when she saw the announcement of a debate, "Why Not a Novel Holiday," to be discussed by Miss Rebecca West and Mr. Philip Guedella, Lord Oxford in the chair? She read it as a new kind of travel, and interested in the protagonists rather than the debate, for all she cared thev might all talk about the Mountains of the Moon, and thinking thev would be worth hearing, she went. It was quite different from her anticipations in more ways than one, for neither Miss West nor Lord Oxford were able to come. But Miss Irene nobly coming to the rescue for a good cause—London Hospital Fund—left her country home at Marlow, where she is resting prior to her tour in Australia and New Zealand and took the chair while Sir' Philip Gibbs took up the cudgels with Mr. Guedella. So all was well, and disappointment tempered. For it was a jolly debate about novels. Miss Vanbrugh was a charming and most businesslike chairman, commendably brief, and allowed, as was proper, the debaters all the limelight with the wittily judicial remark that she would as became a chairman keep "The Middle of the Road" as did the novelist. Sir Philip Gibbs.

Mr. Guedella tried to persuade us that he was taking his subject seriously, a holiday from fiction, by taking as his test the figures for output of novels in 1926, but his touch was of a lightness that the habitual handlers of figures might well enw.

There was what he called the "apalling figure" of 2964 novels published in comparison with 12,700 bocks of all other kinds—"only 89 cookery books," said Mr. Guedella in horror. He pleaded for a stoppage for the sake of the novelist, who, he thought, should take a lesson from the bricklayer and enjoy the advantages of restricted output. If the stream of English fiction ceases to flow so freely —"this Mississippi flood of fiction"—there will be a better chance of masterpiece appearing. He made merry at the expense of that modern of moderns, Miss Gertrude Stein, whose effusions Bound like the conversation of a moron, of whom he said that she "elevates hiccups into a prose style," and of Mr. James Joyce, who, he said, "mistakes the main stream of English letters for the overflow of the gasworks."

Sir Philip Gibbs was more serious, but on the whole rose gallantly to the flippant level of his opponent. "When he disclaimed making any appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. Addressing us as brother and sister novelists, he claimed our sympathy, since everybody writes them. He pleaded pathetically that "if we were to give up writin" novels the streets would be strewn with our corpses." How was the novelist to escape insomnia if he had not one of his own novels by the bedside—would he be driven to one of Mr. Guedella's histories? He went on to argue for the superior truth of fiction over history. Where should we find the truth about the warT Not in the official histories, but in books like Mr. Wells' "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" of Mr. Montague's "Disenchantment." We depended, indeed, for our knowledge of past time upon the histories, but upo-n fV facts in the histories as interpreted and vitalised by the novelist. "History is the raw material with which the imagination of the novelist builds his castle."