THE MODERN NOVELIST

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26521, 8 September 1951, Page 2

THE MODERN NOVELIST

TALK BY MR ERIC LINKLATER

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE OF LITERATURE DISCUSSED

“The Press” Special Service

AUCKLAND. September 7. “In times like these, when we are perhaps a little too much inclined to take a serious view of things, it is important to remember that literature began as entertainment and that the first literary persons earned their living by pleasing said Mr Eric Linklater, the noted British author and lecturer, last night. “Nowadays the writers most talked about have departed from that end” Mr Linklater was discussing the contemporary novel before an audience of about 500 in the Auckland University College hall. Contemporary writers were taking themselves seriously and, perhaps, not taking their readers quite as seriously as some readers would like. The readers’ attitude to literature had changed from the old days of storytelling and for that compulsory education must be blamed. Compulsory education had created a feeling of resentment toward the masters of literature. "Many of us suffered physically for our failure to appreciate ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” Mr Linklater continued “Compulsory education has taken an awful lot of pleasure out of life." Looking directly at the chairman, Mr K. J. Maidment, principal of the college, he added amid laughter: “There are people now, sir, who have acquired a vested interest in it.” One had to admit with a certain slight unease that the novelist to-day was a person of some importance in the world whether he was good or bad. The bad novel had an importance which should not be underestimated, for it might tell a good deal about the popular mind. The historians of the next century would find much to interest them in the bad novelist of our time. They would find a lot of sentimentality—one of the weaknesses of civilisation, like the common cold. Interest in Sex The historian would find a pervading and slightly tiresome interest in the sexual activity of human beings. which was, of course, a reaction against the extremely good manners and unnatural reticence of the Victorian age. He would certainly Observe that this interest was more pronounced in the United States, where Puritanism was a more recent memory than in England and where women enjoyed a romantic sympathy merely because there were not enough of them to go round. The historian would also observe a perverse and regrettable interest in physical cruelty. Discussing the good and positive trends of modern fiction, Mr Linklater said that life presented a whole series of problems and the novelist tolerably serious in his vocation tried to deal in some fashion with those problems. Forty years ago the literary scene in England was dominated by authors who believed human nature could be reformed and society made perfect. No English novelist to-day was a public figure to the degree of Wells and Chesterton. That aid not mean they were unworthy of confidence or respect, but that they were looking fbr a new sort of seriousness. The problems of the individual held the attention of contemporary writers far more than the political and social problems that exercised the minds of Galsworthy and Wells. The novel to-day was exploratory rather than assured. Of the young writers to-day, it could be said they wrote seriously and well within their chosen framework,, but what they had to say often had little relation to life as it was lived and did not compel much belief in what thev said. There was an appreciable division between those novelists who continued to write in tfie main tradition of the English novel and those who found inspiration in a more consciously intellectual analysis of life.