LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22319, 5 February 1938, Page 18

LITERARY GOSSIP

♦ Sir James Crichton Brown, in hjg recent work, “From the Doctor’* Notebook,” quotes Carlyle’s lines; So here hath been dawning Another blue day. Think, wilt thou let it. Slip useless away"? Out of eternity This new day is bon.; Into eternity At night will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did: So soon it for ever From all eyes is hid. So here hath been dawm.-.g Another blue day, Think, will thou let it Slip useless away? “Carlyle's hymn." he says, "has not found its way into any popular hymnal, and is little known, but it is impressive and not inappropriate in these days of everlasting golf and football, and other time-absorbing ‘recreations’ as they are called.”

“The author is the Cinderella of the book world,” said Mr Frank Swinnerton at the “Sunday Times’* book exhibition in London recently: Actually there are a great number of people concerned in the publication of every book which appears on the stalls. They include the typist, who first copies the manuscript, the publisher’s reader, the publisher, the printer and bookbinder, the publiriier'a salesman, the bookseller, the librarian, and, of course, the author. Between 15,000 and 16,000 books are published each year, and of the thousands of manuscripts w!. : ch are received annually by publishers, probablv only ono in a thousand is worth publishing. Authors sometimes have the reputation of being conceited, bat I have found that the only conceited ones are those whose books over a long period have had no sale. With success comes modesty.

The Literary Supplement of “The; Times” remarks that the latest supplementary volume of the Diction- ’ ary of National Biography, which covers the years 1922-1930. records the lives of an extraordinary mm- . her of the greatest men of the present age: There is a noble passage in Lucretius on the inevitability of death, parts of which may well come to mind as this new supplement to the “Dictionary of National B; is first taken up. Covering nine year?— IBS to 1930—it is probabfv the richest, as it is the most capacious, volume o( the Dictionary: for here are many of the greatest men of the recent age, men great in themselves or great because of the opportunities given them and the responsibilities thrust upon them during the years of the war. Think of the > statesmen —have nine years of mortality ever before produced such a harvest? There are four Prime Ministers —Rosebery, Balfour. Asquith, Bonar Law—to be closely associated with whom are Morley, Lansdowne, Milner, Curzon Walday Bryce, Birkenhead, Loreburn, Cav% ■ Finlay. Think of the soldiers—Haig. French, Horne, Rawlinson, Smith-Doe-rien. Wilson: and of the sailors—De Robeck, Evan-Thomas, Jackson, Scott. Sturdee.

On the shoulders of nearly all thtae men fell the heaviest burdens, mak- * ing some reputations and impairing others, but augmenting them all fir the purposes of biography. An astonishing list.

Captain Riesenberg has beea commissioned by Macmillans (New York) to write a history of the American merchant marine, IMO- - As was mentioned here in * paragraph last Saturday, he ha* already spent two years in gather** ing his materials. Mr E. V. Lucas, speaking at a literary gathering in Edinburgh, told the following story about Dean Inge; Stories of or about Mr A. P. Herbert are numerous, but there is a recent one that you may not have heard. Once, on a public occasion, when proposing the health of Dean Inge, he described that divine as “a pillar of the Church and two columns in the ‘Evening Standard.’ ” The Dean, dispensing for a moment with his alleged gloom, was delighted, itnd added this anecdote to his repertory; for, although too deaf to hear what soup his neighbour is consuming, he is an after-dinner speaker much in request. i Not so long ago he wound up one of these addresses by relating this epigrammatic description of himself—“a pillar of the Church and two columns of the ‘Evening Standard' ” —and was overjoyed by the warmth of its reception. “I have often told that story,” he said to the chairman, at his side, as he sat down, “but it never went so well as this evening.” ‘‘That." the replied, "may be because it was also told by the previous speaker.” The opening address at the annual national exhibition of books in London was delivered by Mr Winston Churchill, who probably startled and vexed many distinguished politicians by attacking the politically tendentious “book clubs’’ of one sort or another to which they have lent their names and support. Mr Churchill described this new departure in publishing as "the deliberate publication of books of a unifonn political tendency to an organised mass of readers.” He did not care, he said, whether it was the left or .the right side of politics to which this process was directed. To feed a particular kind of leaf to a particular tribe of injurious caterpillars, incapable of taking any other nourishment, and taking their colour as well as their food fro® the foliage on which they crawled, was entirely contrary to the spirit oi literature. Nothing could be worse than to breed in a single countfy races of men and women incapable of understanding one another. Emil Ludwig’s study of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which “a been serialised in America, is to expanded for publication in boo* form this year.