LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21376, 19 January 1935, Page 21

LITERARY GOSSIP.

I Some extracts from a speech by, [ the Archbishop of Canterbury at ; the jubilee dinner of the Incorporjated Society of Authors, Playj wrights, and Composers, in London: I have little time to read books, and, | what is worse, I do not what j to read. Once I thought I would reau ! best sellers, but I am sorry to say I j generally regretted having bough: I them. I found my fingers moving n>I wards the shelves where my honoured j Walter Scott lies secure. | As for poetry, I find that poetry I appears to be a sort of puzzle garre of queer words and uncouth rhythms. I History is turned into romances. Fcr i the most part great men like Prime ! Ministers seem to be rather afraid to wait until great men write their biographies. They now write the.r own. It is not all of them who ca;. write with the straightforwardness and sincerity of Lord Snowden. o who can, with the detachment » - Mr Wells, weave their lives into •< system of philosophy. These marvellous biographies seem for the most part to be competitions in indiscretion. The publishers' advertisement'! drive me to the conclusion that never in the history of English, Scottish, and Irish literature has the.;; been an epoch comparable in brilliance with our own. It is not mereiy their rights of law but rather their modesty in which authors have to be | protected from their publishers. | There is one class of books that r.o longer adds to the great outflow—sermons. Nobody seems to read sermon* if they come from divines. They prefer sermons by Sir James Jeans. Mr Well.-, or Mr Shaw. | J The question whether authors are ! appropriately honoured by putting j up statues to them has been raised I by the proposal to mark the Charles ! Lamb centenary by putting up. not I a statue but a bronze tablet with a bronze bust portrait in the middle of it and beneath it a shelter and seats. The site will be no open place. where the traffic would go surging past a memorial of one of the shyest of men, but a quiet little garden. hidden behind Newgate street—part of the "cloister" which shared with that other "cloister." the Temple. the boyhood of the "child Elia." In the opinion of "The Times" such a memorial will be "the very thing." and the same editorial recognises the force of the objection that i authors, of all people, least need public memorials because they have provided their own in their writingsWhat true honour, it asks, do Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton gain by having their statues stuck lon a fountain in Park Lane ? And I has not the colossal statue of Byron i hard by already begun to look j rather ridiculously out of proportion I to his merit ?

Mr J. B. Priestley tells an "Observer" interviewer that, after so much novel writing, he finds it interesting to get into direct contact with his public by means of theatre. You can go on writing successful novels all your life and never really find out what people are thinking. But in the theatre, and to some extent in the films, you get some kind of measurable reaction. His object nowadays is to have three techniques—those of the novel, the play and the film—at his fingers' endsf, so that when he gets an idea for a story he may be able to choose the appropriate form to express it. Mr Erie Stanley Gardner, author of a lengthening series of notably good detective stories, owes his start in the legal field to being haled before the Deputy District Attorney of Butte County, in California, tor putting on an unlicensed prizefight. He became so interested in the law office that he started in to study lavthere, paying the Deputy District Attorney for the use of his books by doing janitor work. Gardner was admitted to the bar at 21 and w;is a successful lawyer at 25. Sir John Simon recently addressed the medical students at Westminster Hospital on "Culture and Specialisation" and disclosed Vimself as one of the long line of English statesmen who have consoled and refreshed themselves, after political battle, among the ancient classics. But Sir John uses a crib—even though oi the most admired order : If you have a taste for serious reading, whatever it is—the classics, poetry, history—a great deal is to be done by keeping it up, even though u be by little every week. My own hn<?. modest as it is, is to read the classics. When I say "the classics I mean the Loeb Classics; that is to say, the book., which have the Latin or the Greek on one side and a very good Engh translation on the other !