WRITER'S FUNCTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 27, 1 February 1941, Page 19

WRITER'S FUNCTION

A:BlB.C DEBATE We have been hearing so much lately Ipf the special obligations of the .writer in"wartime that it is a relief to turn aside ■ and consider his function "'above ;the battle,"..so to speak, re-; imarks the London correspondent of the *'New York Times Book Review." The ■i8.8.C. has broadcast a discussion of ''The Writer and His Public" which would have been quite as appropriate before the-bombs began to fall. The three disputahtST—Desmond '■ Hawkins, Victor Sawdori; Pritchett, and Edwin Muir—are themselves novelists,, arid the lastrmentioned has gained a reputation as a poet also. Mr. Hawkins posed the question, "Is the relation; bes tween writer and reader merely, that x)f/buyer and seller?" and Mr. Pritchett .^started to answer:it. / He opened: by declaring that too much was made of the difference between the -writer 'and. his public.-* In reality, he" insisted,"the writer is the public. The difference is that he iknows how to express himself. Everyone needs an interpreter. That's where the writer comes in. All kinds of social forces, people with all their tragedies and comedies, simply made H. G. Wells," for instance. They came to hiitt begging to be heard. We are jiow approaching the point when the mass of.the people ask for more than reporting; they want. to know not what they are but what they are capable of. They need, an interpreter of what1 is hidden, half guessed, or secretly aspired to, as w^ll as of what appears. , ..- ■ : '■ Here there broke in the unmistakably Scottish accents of Edwin Muir, in whose opinion this theory gives the writer too-passive a role. What makes him different in his capacity to think what the public thinks and feel what the public feels in a way that sets them in a new relation. While admit- , ting that the public might decide the writer's subject for him, Mr. Muir would not.; agree that each generation imposed its own values on its writers. Every. good novelist of the" last forty years has been-critical of the public's values." ;:' ■ '']', '•'■•...•.:■ ' Desmond Hawkins : then raised •'an allied question. Has the writer to accept the language of his own day and especially that of the class he wants to write about? If he doesn't, replied Edwin Muir, there is a barrier between them. Some American writers w-Ernest Hemingway, for : exampleHave tried to get over the difficulty by writing .deliberately in the speech of the public. But the writer who doesi this limits himself arbitrarily, for the language of the public is of too narrow j a range. When the public tries to goj beyond its own language, it uses cliches thrown off by the newspapers and the films—an unreal and corrupt language, whose use falsifies both feeling and .thought. , ~. The discussion concluded by a reference to the effect of popular education in enlarging the writer's public. In the eighteenth century the writer didn't trouble^about the illiterate, for they couldn't read him, but addressed himself to a select few. Desmond Hawkins thought -there was no need tof the present-day writer to reconcile kfinself to a minority audience, and ipointed out that a great writer could often enlarge his audience enormously, as' Dickens did, by the humanity' of his work; v,^,':-- ■ -'\. ""•'■■■. '.'.'.' ''[