LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 36, 11 August 1934, Page 24

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Tho main defect of modern poetry, according to the "Scotsman," is that it attracts too few readers.

. Miss Kate Mary Bruce, author of "Snow Storm," is a daughter of Mr. Justieo Maugham and a« niece of Mr. Somerset Maugham. Her great-grand-father was Mark Lemon, first editor of "Punch." *

The detective novel has bocomo such an important organised industry, says Mr. Howard Spring, that we are being hypnotised into believing that there's something in it that simply isn 't there. Most of it is nonsense.

Forty-one times round the Horn during forty-four year's of life at sea is the record of Captain James Barker, the famous master of sailing ships. Ho has; set down his experiences in the "Log, of a Lime-juicer," which is to be published shortly.

Hcrr Hitler is suing tho publishers of ail unabridged and unauthorised French translation of his book, '' Mem Karnpf." Permission to publish anything but an abridged edition had been refused, but the French publishers claim the right to know the- original contents of a book of such^- international importance.

Miss Margaret Gilruth, a young woman who worked on a Norwegian tramp ship as " deckhand-steward-cook-ac-countant," has written an entertaining account of her remarkable voyage. Besides going aground on several occasions, there was plenty of other excitement, with such events as the steeringgear,breaking down and a couple of en ginccrs being certified insane.

Mr. P. S. Oliver, who died recently at tho age of seventy, was the author of "Ordeal by Battle," a book which*provoked niuch discussion in 1915. He supported Lord Roberts's scheme for national service. Two volumes on Robert Walpolo, called "The Endless Adventure" appeared in 1930 and 1931;. and a third was nearing completion, at;the time of the author's death.

Russia's R.S.F.S.R., tho State. Publishing House, which will shortly celebrate its .fifteenth anniversary, has published during its existence 2,376,000,000 of the 5,000,000,000 publications which haye been issued in the Soviet Union. Its.. publishing activities cover 104,221 different titles. This is twice as much as,the total book production in the thirty years in Tsarist Russia,

Nothing is so surprising to the ordinary man as tho want of foresight possessed by those in whose . hands are tho destinies of the stage; and never can he be more surprised than when, rovclling in the excitement and suspense of Anthony Armstrong's "Ten Minute' Alibi," he reflects that this was the, play that manager after manager rejected, remarks a writer in a London paper. The play has been running for- many months and has now been turned into a novel with tho same title.

1 „ In the opinion of Mr. Gerald Gould, writing in- the London "Observer," no one should read—to say nothing of writing—a big book without pausing to ask:' "What's tho big idea?" Some •novels, he remarks, are long because tho thing they have to say is genuinely vast and various;.some because the authors are too idle to prevent tho irrclevancies of their minds from slopping over on to their pages; some' becauso tho necessity for detail is honestly felt by the writer, even when he cannot consistently sustain tho reader's belief in that necessity. . MrA Gould holds that few books are rctflly big enough to bo long, and he believes that a new technique will soon havo to establish itself. Wo shall moro and more demand vapidity, economy, concentration.

According to the excavator of ancient .Ur (writes tho "Sunday ; Times"), the debt of literature to the business man is greater than tho world has yet realised, for to him it owes the art. of writing. "Memory was good enough for the poet," said Mr. .Woolley (we can think of some modern poetry where memory produces a positive pain), •'but the business man of'Ur, with his foreign correspondents on tho Mediterranean coast, and perhaps in India, had noed of (accuracy." Hence those tablets and these typewriters. Instead of crying, "Curse on that man who business first designed," wo like to think of that brisk Chaldean catching tho morning camel to tho city, dictating letters which doubtless murdered the Sumerian tongue, and forging with every hieroglyphic tho chains of our modern civilisation.

Dreams as an aid to authorship havo been considered by Mr. Alfred Tresidder Sheppard in his book on "Historical Fiction." "An idea or tho broad outlines of a plot may come at any moment and iv any place," ho writes; "even from a dream, as Stevenson and (Horace) Walpolo found —though dreamland is perhaps tho most unsatisfactory country from which the novelist can draw his inspiration. Too often there is disillusion on full awakening, as Jobb (not famous as a novelist) found onco when suffering from typhoid fever; ho dreamed a dream which seemed, to'make the plan of a most amazing and admirable novel, only to find it resolve itself into sheer nonsense in daylight. Lytton dreamed, or said that he dreamed, verse—but it was nonsense verse. 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' though tho best dreanvstory over written suffers from its origin; there is at least a grain of truth in Watts-Dun ton's criticism that had it not been for the influenco upon him of the healthiest of all writers except Chaucer—Sir Walter Scott—Stevenson might havo been in tho ranks of tho pompous problemmongers of fiction and the stage, who do their best to make life hideous."