POPULAR READING

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 151, 29 June 1938, Page 11

POPULAR READING

NEWSPAPERS AND BOOKS

THE FLIGHT FROM THE HIGHBROW

, The W.E.A. Class on Popular Literature last week began its session discussing the implications of the following extract from Michael Joseph's "Journalism for Profit": "The most practical methoa I know of how to make free lance journalism pay is to deliberately write what is known in Fleet Street as 'tosh'. ... By 'tosh' I mea~ the kind of innocuous twaddle •which a very large number of perfectly respectable newspapers and periodicals require for the immense lower-middle-class public opinion upon which they depend for their existence. . . . The next business is to get on the right side of the Great British Public. And keep your eyebrows well pinned down. It is quit? likely you may know it all and feel enormously sorry for the Great B.P. for not having enjoyed all your advantages. But the Great B.P. Is not always impressed. Very frequently it is bored stiff. Silly and presumptuous of it, but there it is. Amuse it and cheer it up. Chat to it. Bully it a little. Tickle its funny bone. Giggle with it. Confide in it. Give it, now and again, a good old cry. It loves that. But don'*, for your success's sake, come the superior highbrow over it." To follow such advice, it was agreed, -was to assist in lowering the general level of taste. Popular success of this kind was incompatible with writing with any profundity or sensitive awareness of the complexities and subtleties of human life.

The lecturer, Mr. W. J. Scott, sug- | gested, and the class agreed, that the middlemen who sell or lend books, the private lending libraries for example, are in the same position as the writers who set out to please the "Great 8.P." Some discussion took place on the effect the Book Clubs are having on taste, the general feeling being that it is quite impossible for any regular patron to get any true understanding of modern literature from the extremely limited range of books—mainly light ■fiction of recent vintage, light bio- ' graphy, and travel, with no adequate representation of standard modern works and, of course, rarely any , "classics"—provided by these Book Clubs. A question which was raised but which no one could answer was: How many members of these clubs still ' continue to make good use of the Pub,'lic Libraries and how many readers \vho join the Book Clubs without already being '.bscribers to the Public i Libraries find the reading provided by , the former inadequate and turn to the latter to fill the gaps? It was decided to make inquiries. From an examination of the illustraI tive material in the study book it was discovered that one of the prominent characteristics of the writers of books selected by the various Books of the Month Clubs, and of the readers for '.whom they are selected, is hostility for the "highbrow." Quotations were .made from Warwick Deeping, George A. Birmingham, and Ethel Mannin, to illustrate how marked this antagonism and contempt has become. This, for example, from Birmingham: "Detective ■novel writers have their own clientele, though they make no appeal to the young ladies who throng the,counters of Boots's libraries and but little to the sheep-like crowd who follow -the dictates of the highbrow literary ' critics." And this from Manmn: "The Book Guild—an organisation which would cater for the ordinal? intelligent reader, not for the highbrow—an organisation which would ! realise that a book can have a good story and a popular appeal and yet be good literature." "Notice," said Mr. Scott, elaborating the- point, 'that Mr. 'Birmingham's contempt for the highbrows leads him to imply—Which Is palpably absurd—that they are more sheep-like than those who hurry after the latest popular thriller, and that ,Miss. Mannin's conditions for book •society choices—a good story, a popular appeal, and still good literaturewould bear rather hardly on authors like Henry James, Hardy, Conrad, Laurence, etc., whose books are not popular in her sense, but are very good ■literature indeed. The effect of such societies is to set up "middlebrow or lower "middlebrow" standards of taste decidedly harmful .to the best literature, of today and of the past." This week the class will discuss the question of "Fiction and the' Currency of the National Life."