EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22413, 28 May 1938, Page 18

EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY

New volumes in Everyman’s Library are “Stories, Essays, and Poems,” by Walter de la Mare; “The Georgian Literary Scene,” by Frank Swinnerton; and .a collection of “Hindu Scriptures,” edited by Nicol Macnicol. The de la Mare collection has been made by Mildred Bowman, with the author’s co-operation. There are 13 of the short stories, ■ including such miraculous as “Miss Duveen” and “Sambo and the Snow Mountains.” The poems, admirably chosen (but alas, what inevitable omissions!), are grouped under five headings, “Childhood and Age,” “Dream and Vision,” “Creatures,” “Dirge and Ghost,” “Here and Hereafter.” Last there come three prose pieces, “On a Book of Words.” a charming introduction to ' “The Cricket on the Hearth,” and the famous, magical essay, “On Desert Islands.” And first of all there is a long introduction, written for this collection, in which Mr. de la Mare explores in his soft, musing, delicate style the problems of authorship and readership. (This introduction, by the way, has 'also been separately issued, in q limited edition of 300

copies. Collectors of such pretty things will be put on their mettle by the further information that the issue seems not to have been a commercial one.)

Any complaint about this delightful book?— Only a thoroughly unreasonable one: that it could not include the introduction to “Come HitherJ” Mr Swinnerton’s survey of Georgian letters and men of letters, from Henry James to A, P. Herbert and T. S. Eliot, is an informal and unsystematic book. But the informality and the want of system are ■wisely judged self-liberations. Mr Swinnerton writes as critic or biographer or sketches a literary and personal portrait, not capriciously, but so as .to make the best use of material and experience which are essentially personal. This book is real. The aridity of researchers, treatise*writers,. thesis-arguers, and stubborn fulfillers of a cut-ahd-dried plan touches no sentence of Mr Swinnerton’s. ~

The collection of Hindu Scriptures, which has a foreword by Rabindranath Tagore, consists of hymns from the Rigveda. five Upanisnads, and the Bhagavadgita. The three volumes are nos. 940, 943, and 844 in Everyman. (J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 2/- net each.)

’Mr "Rea ’ ahd~Mr Whatmore and all connected with them vacated the theatre at the end of February, 1932, leaving me, by permission of the landlords, huddled in an overcoat in an empty theatre with ho heat, no staff, no typewriter, no nothing. The printers who had been gallantly printing my own circulars lent me a typewriter, and my present secretary volunteered to come' and hammer on it with blue-cold fingers, while she enveloped herself in a rug and a coat. / Another helper sat "beside me and addressed thousands of envelopes, and little paragraphs and stories ap-r peared in the papers about this attempt to save the Embassy, Michael Egan doing his stuff in and about Fleet Strieet, also huddled in an overcoat with pennies jingling in his pocket. ' , , My -beloved mother, then aged seventy-five, used mournfully to say to me: “If you had given the time, energy, and enthusiasm to accounts ancy that you are giving to the theatre, you would have been at the •top of the.tree by now.” And all I could answer was that I had not wanted to be top. of the accountancy .tree. That, no doubt, if I had given the same time', etc., to pork butchering, I would have been a most successful pork butcher; but I did not want to be, for at long last I was doing the job I really liked, and that to me seems to be the chief secret of human happiness. Frpm “Overture and Beginners,” by Ronald Adam. (Victor Gollancz Ltd. 320 pp. 10/6 neth The extract above catches Mr Adam at the forlorn-hope beginning of the remarkable theatrical enterprise sketched in this book. Under his management, the Embassy Theatre, at Swiss Cottage, had put on such good plays as “Precious Bane.” “Lady In Waiting.” “Marriage by Purchase,” “Delicate Question,” and “Britannia and Billingsgate”; but the lessees decided y to give up:—and Mr Adam decided (with £B7 in the bank!) to carry cn. There followed amusing and anxious vicissitudes, sudden threats, periods of elation and hope, dark sequels of depression; but triumph emerged—the triumph of the courage and judgment which could give the public “Miracle at Verdun,” “Professor Bernhardi,” “All God’s Chillun,” and “Judgment Day,” as well as “Ten Minute Alibi” and other clever pieces. Nearly 'BO productions were transferred to West End theatres during these five years. Mr Adam very rapidly reviews this exciting venture. Besides, he glances back at his earlier life and, in the second part of the book, he briskly sets out his ideas on the theatre. Among these are some incisive ones on; the want of “virility, vitality, sincerity, and force” in English acting and on the lessons to be learned from American and Continental acting.