LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 114, 10 November 1934, Page 24

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS I

Uncle Eemus ,and ,Brer Babbit will be the central figures in a memorial in Piedmont Park, Georgia, to Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Jtemus stories. . Mr. Shane Leslie, who has been visiting the United States, says that it is difficult to approach Washington with--out being mistaken for a professor called in to advise the President. In the opinion of Laurence Binyon, wo are too apt to assume that sincerity is .easy to achieve in literature. It is rare and difficult, and one sometimes wonders whether it is not the last of the arts. Erie Button, the translator of "Sergeant Grischa" and "Little Man What Now!" has just completed the translation of Hans Tallada's new novel, "Who Once Eats Out of the Tinbowl." Putnam' is going to press with the book immediately. "Seven Gothic Tales," by "Isak Dine sen," is announced by Messrs. Putnam. The name is a pseudonym for a Danish baroness who has lod an adventurous life of travel, including some years of sharing native tribal life in Kenya. She writes in English. Her talcs are fantasies. The "Yorkshire Post" complains that sound criticism of the Bronte works has become obscured by an enthusiasm for a cult. ,/Many people seem to feel that if they ( can exaggerate the gloom in which the Brontes lived they will have the better enjoyment in reading the novels. , ( Miss Sheila Kaye Smith's new novel, announced by Messrs. Cassell, is called "•The Gallybird." Though it is not a sequel to_"The End of the.. House,, of Alard," several characters first mentioned in that book reappear. It is a novel about the dying iron industry of Sussex. In the opinion of Malcolm Muggeridge, satirists are seldom good novel ists. Life is -so full of illusion!, of hopes, and convictions, and*he lomancicising of appetites into ideals that you have to be within it to convey an authentic impression of what it is like, whereas a satirist can only be a satirist by standing outside it.t, Vernon Fane is struck by the fact that, while few Continental writers live and work outside fheir own countries —except for those Germans who are now in enforced' exile—many English and American authors do\so. As most of them settle by the shores of the Mediterranean or in Italy, it is suggested that the* inducement is probably the climate. Visitors from Melbourne formed part of a large attendance at the pilgrimage on October 14 to the Gordon Memorial. Cottage in the Botanic Gardens, Ballarat. ,The president of the Gordon memorial committee of Melbourne (Mr. C. B. Long) said that in 1867 Gordon took'oVer Craig's livery stable in Ballarat, and made his home in a six-roomed house beside Lake Wendouree. Mr. Long believed that there was ono poem that was especially associated' with (> Ballarat 7. ; That was ♦'Doubtful Dreams," one/ of Gordon's finest poems. N Apparently it was unusual two hundred years ago for women to take gardening seriously. "Miss Eleanour Sinclair Bohde tells in"Gardens of Delight" (Medici Society) that a horticultural success of the Duchess of Beaufort in 1714 made such a stir that it was writ ten that she had "a Soul above ifer Title and Sense beyond what is com-imon-in her Sex/ . It -.-was,* added that f'Whenltheiifaiir -iand jDelicalfoj^i/fjar-; !den;wit*^Bg'BonvethingsW^theJSuperr, uatwajj-: something, Jso^ ■trin'ingii|tniuseiii(ents|<)f {Ladies .that.;it' is apt to flll'the.Minds ■.. of the, Virtu-; ou^with'-?Admiration;'^-:,i;C::'- : .... 1" 1