LITERARY GOSSIP

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

LITERARY GOSSIP

The International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture recently organised in London, for the Spanish Medical Aid movement, an auction of books and MSS., at which Humbert Wolfe. Elizabeth Bowen, and Canon Sheppard took the rostrum. Humbert Wolfe particularly drew some good prices, but his auctioneering style was not orthodox. He got much fun out ot the minute, illegible, seemingly almost illiterate handwriting of other authors, and Miss Bowen took up the same game. Admitting incidentally that her own writing was terrible, she recommended a manuscript of Mr Gerald Bullett as being “just illegible enough to be intriguing,” and a Vera Brittain novel (in type and corrected) as “giving an interesting insight into the mental processes of Miss Brittain's typist.” She recommended a first edition “Pendennis” as “a fine old library book in good condition and with a good smell.” This unusual auctioneering of unusual books had gained nearly £l5O before the sale was over. Many eminent authors, Mr H. G. Wells and Mr W. De La Mare among them, had assisted the good cause, and many others were there to make it a success.

Sir Richard Paget’s suggestion to the Parents’ National Education Union that “book-reading should begin at 12 years old” would have seemed strange doctrine, says the “Miscellany” columnist of the “Manchester Guardian,” to any age but this, which is pretty well used to seeing older ideas firmly and boldly left standing on their presumably foolish heads. In the past if a chiW showed any aptitude for scholarship, and the family resources permitted that aptitude to be followed, book-reading began just as soon as it could be acquired. The classical instance in the last century was John Stuart Mill, who was learning Greek at the age of three and between the ages of eight and 13 had acquired an acquaintance with books which ranged from the whole of Herodotus to Gibbon and 30 volumes of the “Annual Register.”

A book that has recently appeared in the United States, entitled “Why Was Lincoln Murdered?” puts some startling questions. Why was Lincoln’s request for special protection at the theatre denied? Why was the President’s bodyguard, guilty of the grossest negligence, never punished. Why did all commercial telegraph lines out of Washington go out of order immediately after Lincoln was shot? Why was Booth not brought back alive, and who was responsible for hampering his pursuit? The volume is the work of an unknown writer, Otto Eisensch iml, but is issued by a reputable Boston publishing firm and seems to be taken seriously. In one New York weekly, for instance, it is reviewed at length by the Illinois State librarian, who is evidently staggered by its revelations. The reviewer hesitates to accept the author’s implied solution, but declares that the facts of his argument cannot be ignored. Mr Eisenschiml’s suggestion appears to be that the “Radical” Republicans of the North saw their hopes of treating the South as a conquered province threatened by Lincoln’s conciliatory policy, so that only his removal could prevent their disappointment.

When asked to comment on the opinion of some critics that his war poems were more significant than his later volumes of verse, Mr Siegfried Sassoon remarked that his war poetry was written by a young man as a challenge to what he believed to be a suppression of the truth about the war. In his later writings he has tried to achieve more technical and emotional control, and the development in his poetry during the last 15 years has coincided, he hopes, with his development as a human being. He cannot expect to write for intolerant, contemporaneous youth, and will be content if he can satisfy those who, like himself, have safely arrived at middle age.

Christopher Motley, who has the luck of his genius in such things, recently chanced to be rereading Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets," and in the one on Milton, with the noise of the Supreme Court squabble in his ears, he found “a faintly hodiernal echo." He read that Milton’s brother Christopher became a judge but “retired before any disreputable compliances became necessary.”

It was recently reported from Budapest that the Emperor of Abyssinia—the former one, in Italian reckoning—was planning to buy an estate with historic and literary associations, in Kekko, County Nograd. The estate, which is now in Czechoslovakian territory, belonged to Baron Balint Balassa, the first famous Hungarian lyric poet, who lived in the sixteenth century, and whose legendary figure has excited the imagination of many poets and authors since then.

In “Only the Other Day,” the latest of Mr E. V. Lucas’s long list of books of essays, there is a graceful sketch of Oliver Herford, who died in 1935, removing from the world a great gift of laughter. So Mr Lucas remembers him:

To me Oliver remained the little impish creature, with his eyeglass and his white hair and his sober clothing, who moved unmeaningly about, mysteriously subsisted, made the most excellent jokes, loved the past, and found a peculiar delight in discerning folly in the present and shooting it as it flew.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” once banned in Palestine, is now reported to be a best seller among the Arabs, who appreciate Nazi Germany’s hostility to the Jews.

The big three in demand this week include Hector Bolitho's "Edward the Eighth.” Laurence Housman’s autobiography, “The Unexpected _ Years, and Captain Doorly’s entertaining nai - rative, “In the Wake,” reports the librarian of the Canterbury Public Library. Other favourites are J. C. Squire’s autobiography, "The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” and Dean Inge* “A Rustic Moralist.” Several novels are attracting attention, among them being Richard Aldington’s “Very Heaven," James Hilton’s “We Are Not Alone." and W. Somerset Maugham’s "Theatre." But people are also reading Gertrude Atherton’s “Golden Peacock" and Naomi Jacob’s “Fade Out" i