LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20280, 4 July 1931, Page 13

LITERARY GOSSIP.

The phrase "hot from the press" is not unknown to compilers of purple patches, but a husband (says an exchange) who was mentioned in one of our police courts the other day is evidently no believer in that form of warmth. His aggrieved wife complained to the Magistrate that one of her duties was to warm the morning paper for him before he would condescend to read it in bed. There is a well-estab-lished adjective of the North known as "nesh," which denotes the state of ono who betrays a somewhat effeminate fear of catching cold —and this husband seems to have the quality of neshness developed to a positively astounding degree. If he needs his inorning paper airing before he will touch it, how many hot-water bottles and warm-ing-pans must bo required in order to assuro him that his actual sheets and blankets are chill-proof! ... It seems a pity that wo were not told the name of his morning paper, for it would be a sad thing if all the hot air thrown off in some of them was not enough to establish confidence in this delicate valetudinarian. One could understand, perhaps, this sensitive soul demanding that the chill should be taken of his "Times" before he opened it—but surely our Press lords have lived in vain if there is not more heat than light in their own unaided issues? In spite of all the crusades and all the vendettas do these, too, have a damping effect! Perish so painful and preposterous a thought—the man must' be reading the wrong papers!

TJic business man in Arnold Bennett is brought out by the literary editor of the London "Daily Express." Bennett, in writing articles, counted his words and exacted their market value iu shillings, and there seems to have been nothing thrown in for good measure. Also the exact complexion of his words was to be maintained as he gave it to them. Thus: ■ Once I upset him a little by printing 1 * word in the heading of one of his articles in italics. "If you ever ask me to write for you again," he wrote, "I do moat Rolemnly exhort you not to diversify _ the types. I tliink that a properly written article should, and does, make its own emphases. The trouble, in my opinion, is that , bo few article writers have ever suspected that an article ought to have a shape, a curve, that it ought to bo constructed.' His price for newspaper contributions was high ei-cugh to raise most eyebrows even in tliia era of spectacular rewards for author- v «bip—two shillings' a word to the "Daily Express," because of his old and eloso association with this newspaper, half & crown a word to other*. If be wrote, say, J fifty words over the agreed number he would insist on his fifty extra fibrins. If y<JB demurred, he would salvage the surplus,words, I imagine to use' at- some other, time. It was all part of the technique of living and moving, and having his being which he bad worked out for himself very early in his career. Bead "The Truth About an Author," ■ that moat 'diverting of modem literary autobiographies. It was one of his gayest aqd best books.

The German critic, Julius Bab, in his volume on "The Theatre in the light of Sociology," expresses the opinion that the chief reason why historical fiction usually fails so completely to reproduce the atmosphere of past ages, especially of times which are very remote, is that few writers realise that only recently did a man become an individual. For centuries he was only one of a herd, a more or less incomplete and indistinguishable part of a social group, go that when an author undertakes to give an individual of centuries ago the mental attitudes and initiatives of a modern man, he is distorting the picture out of all verisimilitude. '

. Lecturing on Chaucer, Mr John Masefield said frankly, "Much in him does not interest me. I think that some of Chaucer belongs to his time and that much of that time is dead, extinct, and never to-Be made alive again. What was v alive in it, lives through him." Nevertheless, "In his strength Chaucer was ■ 13io first of our three great poets, the ■ creator of a model and of a system. No - other English poet, except Milton, added so much to tfee armoury of t;he art; no other, except Shakespeare, has been so true, gentle, wise, and merry in his statement of what is significant in life."