WHERE ARE THE HUMORISTS?

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 272, 16 November 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHERE ARE THE HUMORISTS?

111 one of his weekly letters from London to the "New York-Herald-Tribune" Mr. Hugh Walpole contrasts Mr. J. B. Priestley's, "The Good Companion" with Mr. J. C. Powys' "Wolf Solent." Both are very long, but whereas one is in the cheerful tone of "Pickwick," the other is "dll darkness and dread." Mr. Walpole thinks Mr. Priestley's work more important at the moment. He says:— "Of Mr. Powys' gloom and despair we have had during the last ten years a considerable number of examples; of Mr. Priestley's humour, good-nature, common sense, in the Enflisli novel since the war, almost nothing. It is amusing to listen to the comments that this book has aroused. The plain man in England is obviously surprised that he should be offered once again a novel on a large scale that sets out to amuse rather than terrify him, and that this novel should be also good literature. , "The fact is that the English novelists have far, far too long been keeping the intelligent (but not too intelligent) reader at a distance. They have been either too clever or too abnormal or too melancholy or too scornful. They have been despising their readers and telling them that they ught to be ashamed of themselves. No one likes to be told that he is an idiot because he likes verbs to his nouns and sometimes /believes in matrimony. "At the same time it will.be a. terrible thing if Mr. Priestley's success leads all our younger novelists to be cheerful against their will. It is a sad fact that we have almost no natural humorists among our novelists at the moment. 'Elizabeth' and Miss Rose Macaulay are two grand examples among the ladies, and there is Mr. Denis Mackail, although he will persist in writing about nothing at all. Where are the others ?"