LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19854, 15 February 1930, Page 13

LITERARY GOSSIP.

A letter to the Editor of "Everyman":

Your reviewer of my book, "Goodbye to All That," refers to a mythical Mrs Graves, my wife. Such a person does not exist. I mads it very plain in the book that Nancy Nicholson, whom I married, never took my name, as she was legally entitled not to do, and it is therefore false courtesy on your reviewer's behalf to award it to her. It is more than that, it is insolent.

It is in the same spirit that your reviewer suggests that I am one of those young men who come to dinner-parties in sweaters. It is true that I often wear a sweater, but I lieg him not to do me the false courtesy of awnrding me dinner-parties. Please ask him to note both these points. Spain. ROBERT GRAVES.

At the Publishers' Association's annual dinner in the historic Stationers' Hall, recently, the response to the toast of "Literature" was made by Mr George Stuart Gordon, late Professor of English Literature at Oxford and now president of Magdalen College. He had accepted the invitation to the dinner, he said, with that alacrity which poor authors in all ages had accepted when invited to sit at the tables of their patrons. He recalled a remark by Adam Smith, that most gentlemanly of political economists, that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices." Mr Gordon believed, however, that, for the moment at least, the hearts of his hosts were innocent of such thoughts. He did not know much about publishers, except in the capacity of a defaulting author; but he had often experienced the singular dissimilai'ity of the author's and the publisher's position. An engagement between author and publisher was like an engagement between a sailing ship and a steamship to sail the same course: The author was unable to move till the wind blew, whereas the publisher was ready at all times. The old reproach that publishers were a mercenary race was now almost played out. If the publisher got more of the money, at any rate the author got most of the fun. As to the ptesent condition of literature, Mr Gordon found that, in all the most important departments of ■writing outside belles-let' 1 -. I '' the books now writteh were better books than those of the period before the war. He connected that fact with the financial stringency of war time —the difficulty about paper and the rest —which forced authors to write more briefly and therefore better. There seemed to him a higher standard of technique, however, than of inspiration. "We are all waiting," continued Mr Gordon, for the great poet. Perhaps every age has always waited for him, and failed to recognise him, when he was there all the time. The poets of our own time are now tuning up their instruments, and that, as we know, makes very queer noises."

From Thomas Mann's lately published "Three Essays" :

Beautiful is resolution. But the r ® a 'l* fruitful, the productive, and lience the artistic principle is that which wo call reserve, the intellectual sphere we love it as irony, that irony which glances at both sides, wnu is in no great haste to come to decisions.