LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 123, 27 May 1933, Page 19

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Mr. Budyard Kipling, who has been on the Eivicra, announces that he has nearly finished a uew book.

"Lady Chatterley's Lover," D. H. Lawrence's novel which was banned in England aud the United States, is to be filmed by a French company.

Count Leopold Bcrchtold, tho Austrian Foreign Minister in 1914,_ had written his memoirs, which are said to contain the first authentic account of the real beginning of the war.

Mr. Silas K. Hooking is engaged on a new book—at tho age of cigiity-threo. Ho has already written over fifty. He is still said to play bowls every <laT — except Sundays—and to have an occasional gamy of golf.

■The "Daily Mail" (London) prize of £50 for the best answer to the question, "Who are our future literary giants?" has been won by the writer of an essay which places Francis Brett Young first.

Queen Marie of Rumania, has announced that she will publish her novel, "Crowned Queens," despite the objection of her son, King Carol,-who asserts that the book is based ou his private life.

Some 1,200,000 persons visit the library of tho British Museum every year. The highest price which the British Museum authorities have ever paid for a book is £1500,

"Punch." reprints from a New Zealand newspaper this paragraph, to which, it gives the heading "Another Shocker":—"Tho recently published reminiscences, of .Lady —— deal with many' famous people in politics, art, and literature she has met in the course . .of her long life.' Her ladyship 's rocollections run into 2.v01t5."

Mr. Somerset Maugham thinks that the danger for a young writer today is that he may succeed too easily and too early. He then, finds himself a member- of a small and select community of successful authors. Soon ho loses contact with life as it is lived outside the society of literary men, and tbcin he wonders why he has written himself out.

Twenty-one years after their heroic death* with' Captain Scott in the Autaetio separate memoirs arc announced both of Captain Oates and Dr. Wilson. The first, by Commander ■■ fL. ■ C." Bernacchi, the physicist of the expedition, is coining from Thornton Butterworth this month. -The -second book is by G. Scavor, entitled "Edward Wilson of the Antarctic: Naturalist,. Artist, Friend," and will be ready a few weeks later. It will be published by John Murray.

It is a curious' reflection, says Allan Monkhouso in the "Manchester Guardian;"' that; the growth of pacifism coincides with an increase of brutality in literature: ."I do not think there is much doubt about this, and perhaps the cause is the discovery that life is more brutal than it had pretended ■to be. There is much that is dreadful and something that is pitiless in modern novels. One does not wish for a literature in which the spirit of Jaue Austen is the limit to the ferocious, but it does seem queer that tho desire for peace and that for blood should bo manifested together."

Balzac's famous house in Fassy (Paris) appearß again in the news. For many years it has been maintained as a museum by the Society of the Friends of Honore de Balzac, and the keepers have always shown the curious visitors the secret stairway by which the unsystcmatie novelist was said to have escaped the frequent visits of his creditors. Now the visitors' fees have fallen off, taxes arc overdue, the keepers unpaid, creditors threaten—and the trustees of the society meet only to find the secret stairway of no use at all to them.