LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 98, 22 October 1938, Page 27

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

The county of Robin Hood is the latest chosen for inclusion in Mr. Arthur ' Mee's "King's England" series. Nottinghamshire surveys all its towns and about 200 of its villages. Russia has suffered loss by the death of M. Alexander Kuprin in Leningrad at the age of 68. He was the author of many popular novels and as a short story writer he was ranked next to Chekhov. The visitor called at the village library. "May I have the Letters of Charles Lamb?" he inquired. "Yours in the wrong building, Mr.' Lamb," said the new clerk pleasantly. "The Post Office is just across the street." Robert Lynd suggests that the popularity of the long novel is partly due to the fact" that most people borrow their fiction from the libraries instead of buying it, and it seems scarcely worth while borrowing a short book like "The Cardinal's Snuff Box," which can be almost finished in the bus before one has got home. A search is proceeding in the United States for John Bunyan's silver tankard- The tankard, of solid silver and weighing over 220z avoirdupois, has engraved on the front in interlaced capitals, "The Pilgrim's Progress." On the bottom, in script, is engraved "The Gift of Nathaniel Ponder to Elizabeth, Wife of John Bunyan, of Bedford," besides the date of "1671." The tankard was traced through many vicissitudes.to a Chicago collector, and was last reported in Chicago in 1884, at the jewellery store of Giles Brothers. Hilaire Belloc, writing on the profession of an author, finds —from wide experience, "I am now on the point of entering my sixty-ninth year. My experience" (of authorship) "covers the last five years of the nineteenth century and the first 38 years of the twentieth: 43 years of work"—that the work a writer has to do is the hardest a man can undertake. "I have done many things in my time, from ploughing to earning my passage on a tramp steamer, but nothing which compares with creative writing for taking it out of a man. This is a universal experience, and a universal danger to the writing man; it leads to excess, exhaustion, and depression." The diaries of Gouverneur Morris, United States Minister to France during the Reign of Terror, hitherto unpublished except for meagre extracts in Jared Sparks's 1832 edition of Morris's letters and the incomplete selection which appeared under the editorship of Anne Carey Morris in 1888, will be printed in full as "A Diary of the French Revolution," edited by Beatrix Davenport, Morris's greats grandaughter. The diaries cover a period of four, years, 1789-93, and tell the story of the Revolution from the standpoint of one who was on intimate terms with the leading personages of the time. There is every reason why we should take Dr. Julian Huxley's advice and cut the word rhinoceros down to "rhino," and hippopotamus to "hippo,'' says a London writer. Science, sticking to Greek roots, has always inclined to the sesquipedalian, and the names of native animals, short and expressive, axe in painful contrast to the titles one reads in the zoo—itself a triumphant curtailment of five syllables. The same thing has happened in hundreds of cases which we don't resent because our memories are short—-"cab" for cabriolet, "mob" for mobile vulgus, "wig" for periwig; and today "bus" has a better right to its place in the dictionary than "omnibus." A London gossip writer says that having won fame and fortune with her vast—and first—novel, "Gone With the Wind," Miss Margaret Mitchell is stated to have said that she is not going to write any more books. "But," he adds, "there have been so many stories about Miss Mitchell that lam wary of this one. Since the book appeared, about two years ago, she has ; had to deny all sorts of j rumours—that she was going blind, [that she wrote the book while in a, plaster cast after a motor accident, and so on. She has also had a good deal of trouble with people impersonating her, and giving lectures in her name. The trouble is that she so hates the limelight that she seldom leaves her home and husband at Atalanta. Georgia, U.S.A."

It is to be hoped that the suggestions put forward that a memorial should be ejected to C. J. Dennis in the form of a collected edition of his works, will be acted upon, says the "Australasian." Dennis at his best —arid his best comes surprisingly often, which is to say that his general standard, considering the amount of his output, was surprisingly high—is equal to any modern poets in English, and the simplicity of his work should not blind us to that fact. As a vibrating instrument, recording human passions and Nature's song, his tone was pure and of high quality. His craftsmanship was undoubted. As a man, Dennis was, in his fight against ill health, which never quenched his spirit nor embittered his song, another R. L. Stevenson, another Henley. As a fellow-Australian we should be proud of him, and the scheme for the production of his collected works should not be permitted to languish.