BOOKMAN

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22111, 5 June 1937, Page 17

BOOKMAN

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LITERARY MAN Swinnerton. An Autobiography. By Frank Swinnerton. Hutchinson. 415 pp. (10/6 net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Mr Swinnerton has taken fortune’s buffets and rewards with equal thanks. Most of the buffets of circumstance were taken in youth when they were softened by the unity of his mother, his brother, and himself, by their sense of fun, by hard work, and by determination. Material rewards have, during the last 20 years, been taken gracefully and used wisely, and emotional buffets during the last years have been borne without a whimper. Mr Swinnerton makes himself out a man of sense rather than of feeling, and it seems at times that he is too deliberately kind and tolerant. He must disapprove of or dislike some of his contemporaries, but this adverse feeling is scarcely hinted. About himself he is more outspoken. He had, he says, as a child, a horrible “ingratiating, jovial complacency” which produced a smiling response, but this characteristic was displaced in the man by a quiet resolution that never yielded to fear or favour. His conquest of J. M. Dent, miserably great man, proves that. He is tolerant of young writers who scheme to get on, for he knows the part played in the creation of literary fame by social reputation. His own chief handicap is that as a young man he felt deeply, and has never quite ceased to feel, the evil and shaming effects of poverty. , „ Mr Swinnerton entered literature as a boy in the service of J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. He served publishers for more than 20 years, his industry, judgment, and initiative _ carrying him, with his partner, Whitworth, to the successful management of Chatto and Windus. The romance of commerce is nowhere so'romantic as in the publishing business; and the history of the enterprise of Swinnerton and Whitworth is delightful. Great men, strange writers, good books, publishers, agents, novelists, and poets, old and young, passed through their offices, and most left a good story there. Mr Swinnerton loves life and writes about it with enjoyment. His little biographies are splendid. The best is of Festmg Jones. Arnold Bennett, his best friend, is presented very differently from the Bennett created by the Journals. Mr Swinnerton records Bennett’s abundant generosity, a generosity which left him at death not well off and which more than writes off the harping on returns and word values that Bennett emphasised so often in the Journals. He speaks of Bennett’s charming recklessness of statement. Bennett was always “honest, wise, and readable, with fine taste and great experience. Wells is always caught in his active humours, alert and vigorous, but never, by any chance, working. Another excellent little portrait is of Martin Seeker.

Mr Swinnerton, like many another good man, is an admirer of Jane Austen and quotes as. discreetly as she wrote. A good deal more space might have been given to Mr Swinnerton’s own literary career. His success appears to have surprised him; but in boyhood the irresistible pen had been taken up and it was only a matter of opportunity and time before he wrote books. He has had great successes, the greatest with “Nocturne.” His full and varied life has been set down without malice and •with much pleasure to reader and writer. It will be remembered as recording most adequately the modern history of books and writers from within.