THE AGE FOR AUTHORSHIP

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 44, 20 August 1938, Page 26

THE AGE FOR AUTHORSHIP

- Some wise, .remarks about'the profession of letters and the difficulties arid dangers that beset it were made by the Duke bf Kent and other speakers at the anniversary dinner in London of the Royal Literary Fund. One of the most interesting, because it emphasised a point of view not very often expressed, was... Mr. Desmond McCarthy's assertion that,"unlike, what happens in other professions, an author's life is apt to become harder as; he grows older. . Mr. McCarthy's point was that as authors grow older "they lost the power of adapting themselves to a change of atmosphere and lost the faculty of findirig subjects or ways of handling them which were not too new.to b£ understood and yet fresh enough not to be stale." And yet. the older author has advantages i which might seem largely to compensate for this. He has, or-should have, a rij)e experience on which to draw, a full mastery of his own technique, and a name,that has had time to become known, if with these things he cannot compete against the "newer" style" "arid ' themes of young novelists who sometimes have much less of importance •to say,. the fact is not altogether, to the credit of the reading public.