NOVELISTS' PATH

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 13

NOVELISTS' PATH

ALEC WAUGH'S WARNING A warning to novelists to beware of an inferiority complex which might make their books unreadable in a few years' time was given by Mr. Alec Waugh at the "Sunday Times" Book Exhibition in London, says the "Daily Telegraph." Scores of people, unable to get into the lectura hall, heard the talk through loud speakers. Mr. Waugh pointed out that the storyteller of Homer's day, and the troubadours, were in direct touch with their audience. "But the modern novelist is not in touch with his public at all. and has no means of judging the precise effect of his story. It is like talking through a microphone to an unseen audience. "This seems to be affecting the whole scope and tendency of the modern novel Unable to judge whether or not he has solved the problem he has set himself, the novelist is forced to rely very much, too much, on Press criticism. "Now the criticism a book receives is addressed not to the author but to his audience. So the author depends on articles on the trend of modern fiction which he finds in the weeklies and quarterlies. "The modern novelist is met all the time by theories about writing, and for this reason he has begun to take himself either over-serio usly or overmodestly and so to develop a kind of inferiority complex. He has been told that the novel is an art form and that just to tell a story is not enough. "I believe that any book wholly concerned with a sociological or political problem, though it may fulfil an important function at the time of its publication, will lose its interest when the citadel that is being stormed has been won. The same thing will happen to books that depend for their success on a technical trick." Mr. Ralph Straus, who presided, advised prospective novelists to imitate Mr. Waugh by breaking away from the accustomed background of their lives. Many first books were autobiographical, and their writers faded out because they could not find a background for their powers.