Lost Leisure

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 258, 29 July 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

Lost Leisure

“Different people have different ideas as to what literature does cheer them up,” says Mr. Neville Chamberlain. “To me it does not consist in stories with a happy ending. What I feel I really want is something that takes me out from my daily life and away into a world as remote from reality. “I think it is this same eager desire to get away from the real present that leads many people to devote themselves to crime stories. I am always swallowing one myself as a sort of literary cocktail, but it is as easy to become an addict to detective stories as to opium and to crossword puzzles. I prefer, therefore, to treat them as an occasional excess. “One of the things I have a bone to pick with the dictators about is that they leave me so little time for I reading. For days together they have been making speeches. Often I cannot read for 20 minutes without a visitor coming in and saying, ‘He has done it again.’ So you can see how difficult it is for me to get the reading I should like. “In those odd moments that come to me I find relief in one of those many’excellent works on fishing, which probably most of you would not class as literature, but which take me back to the river that I cannot visit in person and recall many thrilling moments that I should like to repeat. “Always I cherish at the back of my mind the idea -that some day I shall have leisure to tackle those serious works in many volumes which at present remain unread upon my shelves. I conclude by saying to you that even a busy man like myself, engrossed in the affairs of public life, does find recreation in reading.”