LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22355, 19 March 1938, Page 20

LITERARY GOSSIP

A minor addition to Boswelliana is Professor Frederick Pottle’s “Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay.” A letter of Boswell’s, dated 1794, mentioning various disbursements including a “gratuity to Mary Broad,” started Mr Pottle on the adventure in literary detecting which makes up this essay. He has traced the connexion between Boswell and Mary Broad; and he tells here the story of the girl who was transported to Australia for robbery, married another convict named William Bryant, escaped with him and seven others in an open boat, and sailed from Botany Bay 3000 miles to Timor —the island on which Captain Bligh and his loyal boat’s crew had landed two years previously. Mary Broad was brought back to England and imprisoned with other survivors of the escape at Newgate. Boswell moved to their defence in 1792, exerted himself for Mary’s release, helped to find work for her, and paid her an annual “gratuity.” The little book has been printed in the United States in a high-priced, limited edition.

A reviewer quotes from Charles Graves’s “Other People’s Money” such “intimate statistics” or inferences about earning and spending as the following:

Before the War a house-master at some expensive schools might make a fortune, whereas to-day the point has almost been reached yrhere “you want to have a private income to be a housemaster just as much as if you were in the Brigade of Guards.” A boxer’s training becomes more scientific and more expensive every day; it costs Walter Neusel between £7O and £BO a week for two months to prepare for his fight at Harringay. Ice hockey, the fastest of games, is also the most productive of hard knocks; four players in our National Ice Hockey League have been blinded in one eye and are still playing. The most profitable sport to its organisers is greyhound racing. The weekly cost of the cabarets at London hotels and restaurants ranges from £6O to £I4OO. The demand for £2OOO a year flats in London is greater than the supply. You can arrange a comingout dance for 400 guests, and do 71 well, for about £450. In a prosperous season that means a gross outlay of something like £250,000 to launch 280 debutantes. The salmon which makes the highest price at Billingsgate come frbm Lismore Castle.

Mr Ivor Brown, who has been visiting the United States, has belatedly discovered the eminent success-expert. Dale Carnegie:

The familiar notion that young Americans are innocently eager to “make good” and believe that success can be learned like syntax is confirmed by one of the year’s best sellers. This is a solemn treatise on How to Make Friends and Gain Influence. When I first saw its title I thought it must be a joke, concocted by Mr James Thurber or Mr Robert Benchley. But no, it is a perfectly serious work and sells by the myriad to young men and women who therefrom derive the art of being, acceptable and becoming rich —or think they do. The desire for profitable instruction is quenchless. Passing by a drug-store’s amazing book counter I found lumped together, “Who’s Who in Advertising, 1931,” “Titus Andronicus.” and “How to Succeed as a Detective.” Unimpressed by the first, and already acquainted with the. second, I bought the third. But I am not yet a “G”-man.

Four American painters who won fellowships in book illustration recently awarded by the Limited Editions Club have selected the classics of American literature which they will illustrate. Thomas Hart Benton has selected Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” John Steuart Curry has chosen James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novel, “The Prairie,” Reginald Marsh has selected Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” with the full approval of the author. Henry Varnum Poor, who is known for his New England landscapes, will illustrate Edith Wharton’s .“Ethan Frome.”

Note by “Pendennis,” in the “Observer,” on T. S. Eliot, the poet;

In spite of the sensational success of “Murder in a Cathedral,” Mr T. S. Eliot contrives to shun publicity almost as continuously as Sir James Barrie. Though thousands of people must have seen the play, it is doubtful whether 20 people outside the circle of his friends would recognise his photograph. Mr Eliot sprang into prominence with his poem, “The Waste Land.” [A dramatised version was recently broadcast by the 8.8.C.] He has with cool detachment, and not without a trace of sardonic amusement, observed the tumult that his work has aroused. His own attitude—and appearance—are those of classic calm. He is not inaccessible except in so far as he has little patience with trifles or triflers. It is possible that he retains in his general approach to life a shade of the Bostonian tradition, in which he was nurtured. He laid the United States of America aside when he took British nationality, but like Henry James before him, he could not (and did not seek to) disavow the debt which he owed to her.

The Swedish Royal Postal Department, at the instigation of the Swedenborg Library in Stockholm, commemorated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Emanuel Swedenborg, on January 29, by issuing 50,000,000 of 10-ore stamps and 1,000,000 of one krona stamps bearing the portrait of Swedenborg and the years “1688-1938.”

Carl Crow, author of “400 Million Customers” and “I Speak for the Chinese,” has written a biography of Confucius, “Master Rung.’’ Mr Crow’s European agents report that “400 Million Customers” is a bestseller in Germany.

The February issue of “Cornhill,” in which Mrs Thornton Cook continues . her story of the Carlyles’ courtship, is notable, for an amusing article on Edward Lear, the “master of„nonsense,” and a pleasant one on canoeing in Florida, by Major R. Raven-Hart. The name of Hinkson has long been connected with Ireland in literature; and Pamela Hinkson’s sketch, “Old Michael and his Family,” charmingly reaffirms the connexion.—John Murray: Is 6d.

The librarian of the Canterbury Public Library reports, among recent accessions of special interest, “Northwest Passage,” by Kenneth Roberts, the historical novel which has swept to astonishing success on both sides of the Atlantic; Gerald Bullett’s charming story, “The Bending Sickle”; and Ethel Boileau’s new novel “Ballade in G Minor,” a sequel to her popular book “Turnip Tops.” In the non-fiction section, W. Somerset Maugham’s autobiography, “The Summing Up,” and Carl Crow’s “I Speak for the Chinese,” Bruce Lockhart’s early memories, “My Scottish Youth,” and Hector Bolitho’s “George VI” are notable new books. _