LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23000, 20 April 1940, Page 14

LITERARY GOSSIP

In a letter to her American publishers, Storm Jameson describes how she wrote her new novel, “Europe to Let: The Memoirs of an Obscure Man.” She writes: I began it in August, 1938. I wrote it backwards, so that “The Children Must Fear” was the first section I wrote. I had just come from Budapest, and I worked on this section through the awful crisis that ended in Munich, but I had other things to do during this time and didn't finish it until November 1. I began “The Hour of Prague” on November 14, but put it aside because I wanted some more information and the only person who could give it to me was in Paris. So I ■wrote “The Captain’s Wife” while I was waiting for him to. come back to England, and also to give my feelings about Munich time to settle down. 1 didn’t get at “The Hour of Prague” again until July of last year, and before I finished it we were in the middle of a much worse crisis. I went on writing at it in the intervals of going up to London for news and for P.E.N. business (we were going to hold our international annual conference in Stockholm early in September and had to decide what to do). I knew on August 24 that there was no hope of avoiding war—the source of my information was absolutely beyond doubting, but still I hoped for a miracle, as one does at such times. As much to keep quiet as anything, I went on writing at “The Hour of Prague” all through these days and some of the nights. I finished it a few days after we began the war. Then on October 2 I began the Rhineland section and finished on the 16th, and began the Vienna section and finished that on November 2. All this time, too, I was busy with the troubles of our exiled writers, who had their tribunals to face (to know whether they were to be interned or made “friendly aliens”), and this took a lot of time, so often I had to write at night, a thing I hate doing. I find it awfully hard to write now. My mind works all right and all sorts of ideas walk about in it—but it is, all the same, very difficult to write with one eye on the clock and one ear always listening.

One of the oldest and most widely known bookshops in London is Bain’s, near Charing Cross. A member of the Bain family has just written “A Bookseller Looks Back, which carries personal memory and tradition through a century and a quarter. Bain’s was founded in 1816; Sir Robert Peel was a regu-

lar customer, and Disraeli, Rosebery, and Asquith followed his good ex- . ample. “This isn’t a toyshop, mother,” remarked a disappointed daughter of Lord Rosebery, when her mother took her there. “It’s your father’s toyshop, my dear,” replied Lady Rosebery, Lord Birkenhead liked “large and showy y o1 .' umes” and was not very discriminating in his choice. Sir Hugh Walpole, who writes an introduction, recalls that he has seen Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, and T. E. Lawrence at Bain’s shelves and counters, and he comments that to see an author buy a book by some other author is a great and glorious sight! An odd customer was a book collector named J. Lettsom Elliott, whose greatest ambition was to become the only survivor of the original members of the Athenaeum Club. Morning by morning he would scan the obituary-notices in “The Times,” and, observing the name of another of his contemporaries, he would mutter: “They’re dropping off, they’re dropping off.” Re finally achieved his heart’s desire before he dropped off himself in 1893 at the age of 94. Mr Allan Nevins has nearly completed a biography of John D. Rockefeller. Mr Nevins, who has twice received the Pulitzer award for biography, has had access to all the * private papers in the possession of various members of the Rockefeller

family as well as to documents of the various institutions with which Mr Rockefeller was concerned. The volumes are said to be as much a history of the era in which Rockefeller lived as they are a biography of the man.

Non-fiction accessions at the Canterbury Public Library, reports the librarian, are Hansjurgen Koehler’s “Inside the Gestapo,” which gives a comprehensive account of the general organisation of the whole of the German secret police; Frank Owen’s “The Three Dictators,” which presents the life stories of Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, showing the differences and likenesses of character; and Leonard Blake’s “The Last Year of the War,” in which the author bases his predictions on astrological observations. Two books supplementary to each other are Margaret Shea Gilbert’s “Biography of the Unborn,” the story of physical development during the nine months before birth, and C. Anderson and M. M. Aldrich’s “Babies are Human Beings,” which traces tne mental growth and development of children. Fiction additions at e H. A Vachell’s “The Great Chameleon,” the story of Richard B. Sheridan, and Pearl Buck’s Chinese novel “Other Gods.”