H. G. WELLS'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 104, 30 October 1933, Page 10

H. G. WELLS'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

THE REVOLT OF THE CLUMSY LOUT

BOOK BURNING ANO CENSORSHIP

(Written for "The Post" by Nolle M. Scanlan.) LONDON, September 22. Looking ]iko a very cheerful, rather mature ehcrub, H. G. Wells, smiled benignly upon the thousand people gathered for Ifoyle's luncheon at the Grosvenor to mark his ,67th birthday. A microphone carried his voice to the furthest gallery. He had promised to speak upon "Intolerance, " but he admitted that it was difficult after a good lunch, in an atmosphere so full of tolerance, to drag in that discordant note. "It is a unique experience for a writer to see before him a thousand of his readers at one time, and as I have written SO or 90 books, you represent a total sales of between 80,000 and 90,000 books," and ho chuckled. ."I would hate to think there was a book borrower here at all," he added. Book burning was the form of intolerance he began with. No book, he said, was ever killed by burning it. "Books have an extraordinary vitality, far exceeding any human being. Copies will persist and keep turning up." He recounted his only attempt to burn a book —it wouldn't burn. The cover shrivelled up and smelt abominably, but the pages smouldered and went out. It took hours, and then for weeks halfburnt pages blew about the countryside.

Book burning and censorship were futile attempts to suppress opinions. As he warmed to his subject, he launched a determined attack upon Hitler and his methods in Germany.

"Intolerance does not always stop at burning books," ho said. "At the present time in many countries .of tho world, there is an epidemic of intolerance which takes ugly and novel forms. It is all very well 'for a lucky and pampered writer of radical ideas like myself to discourse in vainly facetious manner about book burning, but it is quite a different matter in Russia, in Italy, in Germany; above all, in Germany. The Radical writer or honest' writer in Germany follows an adventurous and dangerous trade. Ho is hunted, manhandled, and lied about. He is struck at through his family. He will certainly be deprived of his property; he may be killed violently and disgustingly. These are facts that are beyond dispute; they are proved up to the hilt. The Jews may make most of the noise, but others are suffering equally in Germany. The German affair is not a pogrom. It is a rebellion of the Clumsy Lout against civilisation. It is the Clumsy Lout's revolt against thought, ngainst sanity, and against books. The Clumsy Lout is rampant everywhere with his idiotic salutes and his idiotic symbols, and contriving his imbecile cruelties.

"Arc we safe in England?" asked Mr. Wells. "Personally, I do not feel a bit safe for ten years ahead. Luiicheon parties for literary men may bocome lynching parties before my time is out. I may bs taken from hero to bo beaten up by Sir Oswald Mosley, or disciplined severely in a concentration camp b"y that true-born Briton, Gilbert Frankau. About one thing, however, I do feel safe —in the long run books will win. Sane judgment- will settle all the braying and bawling heroics of these insurgent Louts. : We shall have Hitler weighed accurately to his last yawp. We shall know the truth about Goering and Goebbels; about the murder of Matteotti, and the subtle issues between administrative incapacity and sabotage in Russia, or our children will. Men may suffer and men may die, but human thought embodied in science and literature goes marching on. Let us get back to enduring things—let us get back to our books."

Afterwards, Mr. Wells cut his birthday cake, with its childish white icing, and autographed copies of his books in the peace and security of London. While at tho same hour in Berlin, the floodlight poured down upon the five men facing their judges in the Beichstag fire trial, the first critical test of the revolution.

Professor Laski, who proposed tho toast of "Literature and Intelligence/ after Mr. Wells had subsided with his slice of birthday cake, was dry and academic, but Mr. A. G. Street, tho Wiltshire farmer who won sudden fame with "Farmer's Glory," a splendid record of life on the land in England under conditions old and new, compelled interest. A big man, a little shy yet of all this London literary nonsense, the countryside in its every; season and mood is the literature he loves and reads. Revering the country, and having been brought up under the old farming regime; he does not get maudlin about it. "You can't put back the clock," he said. "Agriculture and farming in England must progress on new lines; it can never go back to the old." He gave an amusing sketch of how he wrote his book. "When a man in a farming household thinks he would like to write a book, he goes off to a small room alone when the day's work is done. The rest of the family think: 'Well,he is in there, and he seems to like doing it, and if it pleases him, it doesn't harm anyone. Anyway, we know where he is ... he might be up to something worse." And that is how "Farmer's Glory" was written, a book that brought him fame in a night.