The Making of a Novelist.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14918, 17 March 1914, Page 6

The Making of a Novelist.

Morlev Roberts as a boy was bookish. His father owned many books, and loved thorn—so tho novelist tells the "Strand." in a chapter of personal reminiscence. "I read almost all that he possessed before 1 was twelve." In other ways father and son failed to agree. Before ho was nineteen, Morley Roberts had bade the usual hero's farewell to home discipline, and made off a,s a steerage passenger to Australia. On an old iron ship called tho "Hyderabad," ho worked' like one of the crew, and made friends with a yarn-spinning mate, a Malay serang (who made good copy afterwards), and a stcerago sooietv composed of "more - failures, entertaining blackguards, and pleasing ruffians than 1 had up to that timo met in ono place." Landing in Australia, ho became first a labourer in railway goods sheds; but soon, hankering for the wild, he gained his colonial experience in handling 6heer> in tho bush, acting as boundary rider\ or mender of fences, sometimes being eaten U'> by mosquitoes, but generally finding "the bush enchanting, and its rudest conditions romance." Then tho lovo of books revived, and drew tho wanderer home to write in London. This was a briej experiment, ended by ill-health, and escape this time to Texa... Convalescence was rapid under tho tonic of day labqur in the "Western States. "On the water-works of St. Paul, Minnesota. I worked in icy cold water in quicksand, and, one day, having worked for twelve hours I worked over-time all night. The next day I worked again, and half the next night." In Oregon, ho learned the truth of tho Western saying, "A man cannot live on wind pudding and mountain scenery." This was equivalent to living "on the round holes in dottgh nuts"— a Barmecide feast which met Morley Roberts in two cities of the Pacific Slope, where he arrived "a homeless outcast, with all I owned under my hat." During the American yearsh* camped with Indians, and mado comrades of tramps and hoboes. Ho worked with railway men and sawmillers, with men of the prairio farms, and with lumberers in pine-woods. His friends were men of a dozen different nations and languages. "I had been friends with men whose language I did not know, and who did not know mine, but still had found them men.", If Australia was his school for novelists, America was the university in which he graduated, if not with honour, yet with some credit. "So I came back tc my old world and set to work writing books, endeavouring to put things down." It is a curious little history, this, of exploration through life for the purpose of fiction. Yet there is good hope, too, for the stay-at-home, if he learns to "put things down." One man takes the world for bis pillow, and afterwards can tell the world exciting tales. Another lives through absolutely unadventurous years, and writes a "Joseph Vance" and an "Alice-for-Short." So variously a novelist may b8 "made."