"SEX" ON THE WANE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 69, 22 March 1934, Page 17

"SEX" ON THE WANE.

AUTHORS SEEK TECHNIQUE. YORKSHIRE WOMAN'S VIEW (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23. <3 ex —the world's spiciest topic since Adam watched Eve nibble a rosycheeked apple in the original Garden of Eden—is on the toboggan. It i* reeling against the ropes, groggy and frayed by a barrage of cheap, sensational fiction —and love, realistically romantic love, is the victor. That was the dictum of Phyllis Bentley, a noted British novelist, authoress of the mucli-discussed 'A Modern Tragedy," when she visited San Francisco on * a naticn-wido lecture

tour. "The riot of raw, glittering sex novels that flooded the world's bookshelves after the war was simply a reaction to the squeamish reticence of the Victorian novel," she said. "The 1 world shook off its shackles of hypocritical shyness. Freud taught us to bo frank. But sex has been overdone hacked to death. "Of course, there is an element that gloats over cheap, sexy tripe, but it is dying in vogue, dying fast, and the trend is definitely towards more accurate and honest portrayals of human nature." IMiss Bentley, a small, grey-haired native of Yorkshire, and one of t.ic "tragic war generation of English girls/' said the modern novel is going back to the broader humanity of Defoe and Fielding. "The tide is turning toward finding more gusto and a more constructive attitude in life," she said. "We are on the verge of a great era—perhaps ' the great era —in literature. Writers are experimenting in technique to-day as they never did before, trying to find some vital philosophy of life and to enlarge the scope of the novel." j Miss Bentley's own book, "A Modern] Tragedy," has been bailed by leading critics, both here and abroad, as a revolutionary style in presenting her story. It approaches the technique of "Grand Hotel," with five distinct groups of characters interwoven in one central theme, but she had the idea long before "Grand Hotel" appeared, she said. The highly complex action in the story took her more than a year to plot out and six months to write. Despite lier belief that "sex" is on the wane in modern fiction, Miss Bentley is a champion of romantic love —"as long as it is real and not artificially simulated passion." In the future, she predicts, writers will turn more and more to "industrial novels, describing the lives and hopes and loves and tragedies of the multitudes rather than the tinsel careers of the wealthy few."