LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22823, 23 September 1939, Page 16

LITERARY GOSSIP

Obituary note by “W.R.8,” [William Rose Benet] in the “Saturday Review of Literature”: Harry Leon Wilson (1867-1989)' They say that Harry Leon Wilson wrote his novel “The Spenders” because he wanted to get out of New York, -which he thought the ugliest city in the world. “The Spenders” fot him a summer in Colorado,: (The incident in it of the miner and ‘the Washington Cream Pie has always stuck in this commentator’s mind as one of the richest things in American fiction.) Everyone forgets that Wilson lived in New York for 10 years in the nineties, editing “Puck,” first while Henry Cuyler Bunner was alive, and then after Bunner’s death. He liked better living in Paris Ipter on, when he and Booth Tarkington and Julian Street would meet at the D6me in the afternoon. Jt was south of Paris that he and “Tark" turned out their play, “The - Man From Home,” which ran six years after its start in Chicago in 191”. It is, however, for Ma Pettengill, Bunker Bean, Buggies of Bed Gap, and Merton of the Movies that Harry Leon Wilson will long be remembered. Those characterisations put him into the front rank of American humorists who can write real novels. The dramatisation of “Merton of the Movies.” with Glenn Hunter; and the picturisation of “Buggies of Bed. Gap.” with Charles Laughton, will also keep Wilson’s name green with a less literary generation. He hailed from nunois, was a Stenographer to several biographers when he was a youngster —and that took him into the Sierras: lived in mining camps, and then began, writing jokes and funny pieces. He ended as the true interpreter of the humorous side of an America now as dead as the get-rich-quick ambitions of the people in “The Spenders." But historians will have to go to Wilson, along with other novelists of the period, to know how it was. Wilsont was a wit and -a traveller, and finally settled down at Carmel. California, He liked the West. He wrote robust, sardonic comedy. His is a sure place among the best American •humorists—friends of the common man.

The Joseph Conrad Memorial Library at the Seamen’s Institute, 25 South street, New York, recently marked its fifth birthday. More than 100,000 seamen have used the library in five years, and Miss Anne Conrow, the librarian,"is looking for funds to add a periodical room.

Mr E. Phillips Onpenheim, lute# viewed by Pamela Frankau, said n* could not make out why everybody; l ' thinks he lives at Monte Carlo. Ac*-** tually, he lives nearly all the year., in extreme quiet and ’ seclusion <M. the mountain road above Canntt|* He never touches a pen or a tyjagv writer, but dictates every word. o|'m, his books. His publishers have^| asked him for his autobiography But when he looks back he sees qo definite shape, only a tangle of sions, loves, hates, and beliefs which' is he now remembers as.though they- j :, were those of another man who told him about them. ■ fif; Meantime, the “New - Yorker” hastps been gloating and giggling over thbifti enterprise of a young woman while acting as Oppenheim’s secre- ’j 1 tary, defrauded him of a sum .of money. This practised upOh“|P the man who has created, planned 3 for, and outwitted a long line ofipi master crooks and schemers! , Closing words of a homily adtfsii dressed by Stephen Leacock writers of detective stories: Don’t be afraid to bang the at the end; better lay the. story, jfil l ypu can, in a jurisdiction where hang them, because, to us, the the electric' chair sounds too fortable. But hanging is old and spectable. and if you like you can uca% such a • phrase as “went to the ! lows,” or “went to the scaffold” —tfaa|w||; as simple as Old Mother Hubbard; 'Bnft I mean we want him hanged; don him fall into the sea oufof his aerjtegplane. It’s ,not good - enough. Hpd?r him tight by the pants till you him to the gallows. And dentlflj. ■ your criminal get ill in prison, or gßf|| so badly wounded, or so heavily soned that he never gets tried. nJSK-. cause he is “summoned before tig. Higher Court.”— Honestly, you c«l» get a higher criminal court than tag| State Court Of Appeal. There ol ril stop there. Other readers Bpiff have suggestions, . 4^ The Columbia University - ‘ has been conducting a poll 0* fggfc, gestions for a series of stamps to honour American Thirty-eight authors bad iwg tioned and, in July, Emerson. and Whitman were in the lead- - The librarian of the Public Library reports that fiction additions include two Dorothy L. Sayers’s “The Pay,” and G,- B. Shaw's “Genres a satire on the League of with Herr Battler as one m chief characters. Other volWMp. are G. L. Steer’s “Judgment tm Ofgp man Africa,” a study of SouthAfrica, the Cameroons, Tanganyika; John Moms s ' with Lepchas,” an study of this declining Him«aSSsu tribe, and “The Trial of ard Hauptmann,” edited B. Whipple. Fiction includes John ■ volume of short stories, "HJJSSJSsir Heaven,” D. E. Stevenson’s "Opjfe. Money,” J. Davis’s first novel, Are Angels in Madrid”—the In* Sr the painter, Goya—and Alfred’tjg, Williams’s “Barny and Sally-