BOOKS AND BOOKMEN A LITERARY CORNER

Evening Star, Issue 22526, 19 December 1936, Page 23

BOOKS AND BOO KMEN A LITERARY CORNER

VERSES •THE COCKNEY OF THE NORTH' [W. B. Yeats.] I will arise and go now, and go to ■, Inverness, And a small villa rent there, ot lath and plaster built; _ Nine bedrooms will I nave there, and I’ll don my native dress, . And walk about in a d loud kilt; (And I will have some sport there, when grouse come driven slow, Driven from purple hilltops to where the loaders quail; [While midges , bite their ankles, and shots are flying low. And'the air is full of the grey-hen’s \ tail. i wiir arise and go now, for ever, day and night, I hear the taxis bleating and the motor buses roar, And, over tarred macadam and pavements parched and white I’ve walked till my feet are sore! For it’s oh, to be in Scotland! now that August’s nearly there, Where the capercailzie warble on the mountain’s rugged brow, There’s pleasure and contentment, there’s sport and bracing air, In Scotland —now I, ( , —Captain Harry Graham. THE FOUNTAIN OF GOODWILL Our battles through the year Seem empty strife, until At Christmasticle .We pause beside ■ The Fountain of Goodwill. Beside her crystal spring lays his load of care; Then every man His past vyill scan, To find the harshness there. Each little orphan thought Bereaved by words unkind, Or sheer neglect, This retrospect Will bring back to his mind. He’ll reconcile these wrongs, And bearing no one ill, [ All care confound In revels round The Fountain of Goodwill. Alex. M'Dowell, Dunedin. A NONSENSE WRITER CEASES English papers report the death, at the age of 61; of Captain Harry Graham, whose parodies and light verse, including musical comedy lyrics, * added to the gaiety of his generation. ’ He served in the Coldstream Guards in the South African War and Great War, and at one time was private secretary to Lord Rosebery. He was a genial and witty conversationalist. “ His particular nonsense (states a writer in ‘ The Times ’) is not exuber- ; ant, and it does not go at a gallop. It is very plain and austere. It is not even demurebecause demureness invites a laugh;; and this form of wit defies it. The-poet takes the utmost pains to make it clear that he is not being funny. He is talking plain sense in the plainest words. Mr Belloc has something of the same method, especially in Ins ‘ Cautionary Tales.’ . . . ■ As in prose, Harry Graham is equally matter-of-fact, but much more deadly. Lady Biffin is a nice little study in the double-edged; but she cannot hold a candle to that safety razor blade of irony, the account of the younger Captain Blood-Busterfield (surely it was lie who, playing golf ‘ the _ day that the Germans landed,’ complained that ‘ the thought of England’s shame almost put him off his game ’). Portraits of this kind,: however, are not nonsense; they are far from t, being the most serious of. Harry Graham’s essays in satire. It is when lie pushes through satire that he comes out on the other side into a kingdom of nonsense all his own. Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes; Now, although the room grows chilly, I haven’t the heart to poke poor .Billy. Hie title of that is ‘ Tender-hearted-ness,’ and by a very slender thread we ane still tied to Graham’s satire; there is still an implied standard or right fueling. We are not to be hampered by it for long. ‘ Calculating Clara ’ will free us. O’er the rugged mountain’s brow Clara threw the twins she nursed, And remarked, ‘ I wonder now Which will reach the bottom first?’ But it remains for. Aunt Eliza to draw us forth into the full freedom of that enchanted world where there ; are .no values nor standards of conduct or ’feeling, and where the plainest sense is the completest nonsense. In the drinking well Which the plumber built her. Aunt Eliza fell . . , ... We must buy a filter. Of course they must. Edward Lear would have agreed, but he is Graham’s only possible companion in a world , which would have seemed too irresponsible to either Lewis Carroll or Gilbert.” Sir Godfrey Collins, who died last month, _ was the first publisher to enter a British Cabinet. Until he became Secretary of State for Scotland in 1932 ho was actively associated with the management of William Collins, Sons, and Co., London and Glasgow. Publisher* are rarely politicians (says ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly ’). One exception—and only one—comes to mind: Walter Page, the American diplomat, whd was ft partner in the publishing firm of JDoubleday, Page, and Co. Our own W. H. Smith attained Cabinet rank, hut be was a newsagent and distributor. not» putyiaimr.

EXPERIMENT IN “ BASIC ENGLISH " MR SHAW LEADS THE WAY November witnessed the publication of what a personage has called “ this queer Shaw experiment ” (says Eric Partridge, in the ‘ Observer ’). This book, ‘ Arms and the Man.’ by Bernard Shaw, in Basic English, is the 'greatest triumph of Basic English—may long be that greatest triumph. Mr Shaw is the world’s most sensible crank; he has lived to see many of his crankinesses become '“the accepted thing ” ; it is even possible that he will yet see Basic English become popular. Obviously he, like the. eighteenth century essayists, is a comparatively easy writer to transcribe: into Basic; one would like to see such philosophers as Berkeley or Bradley or Whitehead in Basic. Of perhaps one wouldn’t! A single speech or even several consecutive speeches of ‘ Arms and the Man ’ may read passably well in Basic, but a scene in Basic reads very oddly, very inadequately., SHORT-CIRCUITED ENGLISH, Perhaps, however, that _ comment is “ not cricket ” ; for Basic is not meant for British readers, although a knowledge of this short-circuited English should benefit not only the more woolly and verbose of our writers and orators, but also those others who prefer polysyllabic sonorities to monosyllabic utilities. But how many of us have heard of Basic English (this term, by the way, has _ already been shortened to “Basic”)? Very few. The present writer recently mentioned it- to an alert’ teacher of English.’ '“Never heard of it,” he replied. _ Admittedly he teaches in a school in England; nevertheless, he is typical. “ Basic ” is anagrammatic for British - American - Scientific - International - Commercial; but, to quote a leading article from ‘ The Times ’ of June 12, 1935, “those initials happen to make up a very suitable word, for this English is clearly Basic also in the sense of being fundamental, or essential, in the architectural or chemical use. . . . Basic English is not a new form of English.” One cannot better clarify than by quoting from a special correspondent’s article in the same journal of the day before: “It is possible to have a working selection of ‘ right ’ words ” Swift’s theory of good writing was “ the right words in the right places ” —“ which will do almost everything which is needed. And it is possible, further, to have a group of rules with the help of which right words may be put in the right places.” A list of 850 words and the complementary set of rules have been drawn up by Mr C. K. Ogden, of the Orthological Institute, 10 King’s Parade, Cambridge, England. It is permissible to remark that both “ onthological ” and “ institute ” adorn the Basic vocabulary by their absence ; more important, however, is it to note that the institute is the primary source of information on its aims, methods, publications, and that Messrs Thomas Nelson are its publishers. ONLY EIGHTEEN VERBS. Basic English, in short, is “a system for saying things simply and clearly, and at the same getting free from the unnecessarily, complex rules of the old ‘ Grammar.’ ” It is significant that of the 850 words only 18 are verbs, whereas 600 are _ nouns, and as many as 150 are adjectives; it looks as if the grossly overworked “ get ” may die of exhaustion. But many verbs can be formed _ from the nouns; so can many agential nouns (those in -er or -or). _ The past tense and the present participle are the subject of a rule. The number of adverbs included in the 850 Basic words is surprisingly high ; the formation of further adverbs by the addition of “ ly ” to Basic adjectives constitutes another of the few rules. The rules, indeed, are wholly admirable. The Basic Movement began—so far as the public is concerned—with the publication, _by Messrs Routledge, of ‘ The . Meaning of Meaning,’ in 1923 ; this is the Bible of Basic. From 1923 Mr Ogden and bis colleagues (of whom Mr I. A. Richards is perhaps the most considerable) worked on the structure of the Basic system. In 1928 the Basic vocabulary of 850 words was printed; in 1928-29 it was tested; in 1930 came ‘ Basic English,’ the textbook of the system ; and by the end of 1934 30 books had been printed in Basic. NOT A SUBSTITUTE. Basic is designed to be “ the tional language of the future?” Possibly it will. Already it has a hold on China and Japan and other distant lands; it makes progress on the Continent. This is as it should be. Prosit Basic! But the promoters of Basic would do well to'rest content with a “ Volapuckish ” Basic, for they will render Basic a grave ’ disservice if they propose its use abroad as a substitute for English ; render it ludicrous if they propose its use—except as a corrective or as a deterrent—anywhere in England. Basic is clear; it certainly is not beautiful, nor is it often subtle, nor is it, except very rarely, delicate. It has tremendous utility and no afflatus; a mind, but not a soul; thousands of worshippers, several idols, no God. Basic is not on the side of the angels, hut on that of foreigners. It represents a significant stage in the mechanisation of the world. Let Basic remain a very valuable servant, for only heaven could save English if Basic became its master. Absit Ogden! Last week I mentioned the fact that Mr T. F. Powys had decided to write no more (says a contributor to ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly’). Now I learn that his son, Mr Francis Laurence Powys, has written a first novel called ‘ Midnight Thunder.’ He is 27 and works in a London book shop. Another distinguished author’s son who has just written a first novel is Mr Lewis Masefield, the Poet Laureate's only son. The heroine of the hook, it seems, is a Dame of the British Empire, who has a private fleet and dresses like an admiral 1

NEW BOOKS THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE Memoir on the fossils of the late pre-Cambrian (Newer Proterozoic), from the Adelaide series, South Australia, by Sir T. W. Edgeworth David, K.8.E., C.M.G., D. 5.0., M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., and R. J. Tillyard, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S., F.R.S.N.Z. (Angus and llobertson, Sydney; price, 7s 6d). This is the record of the .last of the investigations of the late Sir T. W. E. David, the most renowned of Australian geologists, working in association with Dr Tillyard, formerly the Australian Commonwealth entomologist, and earlier chief biologist of the Cawthron Institute/ Nelson, one of the world’s authorities' on insect life and its evolution. The earliest of known rocks containing abundant fossil remains are those of Cambrian age, dating back to five hhndred million years ago. Though so ancient, these fossils comprise an astonishingly varied assemblage of organisms, the most complex being the trilobites, a group of forms like water beetles, usually about an inch in length, but so.metimse much larger. The theory of evolution would lead one to expect that such complex forms of life must have had a long ancestry. Yet the rocks that are older than the Cambrian have been searched persistently in many parts of the world without yielding very credible evidence of such ancestral forms. The deduction usually drawn is that the Cambrian organisms in the earlier part of their evolutionary history had not acquired the habit of forming hard parts, capable of preservation in the sedimentary rocks, such as the shelsl of molluscs or of crayfishes at the present time. The oldest fossils are thus not the remains of the earliest - forms of life, but only of the earliest habitually to possess hard ' parts, and the discover} of remains of their occasionally hardshelled ancestors is not impossible. The immensely thick, little-altered sedimentary rocks lying beneath formations near Adelaide had been repeatedly and unsuccessfully searched for fossils by Sir Edgeworth David and others during the past 30 years. A few years ago he there discovered the speciments described in the memoir under, review, as well as others which seemed to him to indicate the existence of yet other forms of primitive life. The form described in detail was, in the view of the authors, a very primitive arthropod, belonging to the great group of jointed-limb animals which includes the scorpions and insects. Reason is adduced from a study of the radio-active minerals in associated formations for concluding that the age of the specimens described must be less than 970 million years, though considerably greater than that of the Cambrian rocks. Yet even they cannot be considered as the oldest of their class, for, in the view of the authors, they were descended from earlier forms from which also the great sea scorpions (Eurypterids) of. Palaeozoic times, and the modern arthropods were in turn descended. The eventful history of the period during which these very ancient organisms are believed to have existed, and the steps by which the authors became convinced of their organic nature, and put together the series of imperfectly preserved fragments to obtain the restoration of a complete animal (some 6in long), are vividly described. Some provisional conclusions are also advanced concerning the presence and nature of other animal remains associated therewith, so far as has been inferred from the study of the material collected and examined during the preparation of this striking and thought-provoking work. A BOOK FOR BOYS Boys who like a good adventure yarn will find something which will hold their attention and stir their imagination in ‘ The Secret Island,’ a new book by John F. C. Westerman, who has written numerous stories suitable for boys. The story in this case is one of modern piracy, a new 25,000-ten liner on her maiden voyage, with a full complement of tourists, being captured by a destroyer and taken to the secret island. There the passengers are given the option of joining the pirates, who aim at founding a new nation, or of becoming slaves in the quarriers and plantations on the island. The thrilling adventures are told in the author’s best style, and the escape of three young officers of the ship will be followed with eagerness by young readers. The young fellows cleverly get away, and are rescued by a passing ship, which advises the naval authorities. Then follows an exciting raid by a naval squadron and by seaplanes, the pirates being captured and their victims rescued. The puhlishesr are Messrs Ward, Lock, and Company Limited, London and Melbourne. * WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT 1 _ * Women Are Different ’ is a particularly well written and well balanced novel by Elizabeth Margetson, who provides an interesting and thoughtful story. Its main theme is the problem of a woman remaining in a job after her marriage. Bonney Cornell, a woman reporter on the ‘ Daily Comet,’ beats a male rival, Michael Lawless, to a story. Despite his anger she falls deeply in love with him. Their marriage, so passionately romantic and promising so well at the beginning, is a continual round of misunderstandings, and it is only with the greatest difficulty that a happy ending is possible. This story should make a particularly strong appeal to women who hold the view that their sex is the equal of the male in all respects, and the author shows much psychological insight into the problem. Our heroine, who is altogether a delightful character, was emphatic at the outset that she could combine her work at the office with her married duties, but in the end she changes her mind and finds a happiness she never before thought possible. The publishers are Messrs Ward, Lock, and Company Limited, London and Melbourne.

‘ THE FLYAWAY HIGHWAY * ‘ The Flyaway Highway,’ by Norman Lindsay (Angus and Robertson), is a quaint and delightful book. It is supposed to be a children’s book, and so it is; but it belongs to the small number of these publications that appeal to the adult mind as well. It is an account of the adventures of two vbungsters who meet a strange fellow '(“this bloke ”) calling himself Sylvan■der Dan. He shows them the Flyaway Highway, and they set off along it. What happens to them is told in a witty way. The author takes the two children and Sylvander Dan whisking away from chapter to chapter, telling the tale in such a manner that it can be read either straight off or episode by episode. The highest improbabilities, set down in the author’s own engaging style, will seem as real to the child mind as they seem deliciously fantastic to grown-ups. ‘ The Flyaway Highway ’ is profusely illustrated. The drawings are by Mr Lindsay himself, and, as might be expected, show masterly craftsmanship. • THE SECRET DANGER ’ In recent years mystery fiction has enjoyed an extraordinarily wide vogue, and the literary market has been Hooded with stories of which crime—principally that of murder—is the dominant note. One of the most recent of these is Norman Berrow s ‘ Secret Dancer.’ The whole action in this highly engaging work takes place in one evening in a theatre where a musical comedy is being given its premiere, and from the moment a heavy lantern falls from the fly and nearly kills one of the principals the reader’s interest quickens. Then the producer’s attractive secretary is found murdered in a dressing room. There is no love lost among the principals and stage staff, and any one of six has enough motive for the crime, but it seems clear that the glamorous star of the evening has perpetrated- the murder. Then she herself is murdered on the stage in full view of the audience. Sitting there is Detective-inspector Courtenay, and this smooth and personable policeman steps in and takes charge. Mr Berrow has worked out a series of ingenious and engaging mysteries in this novel, and the fact that he commands the reader’s undivided attention until the climax is the best tribute to his success. ‘ The Secret Dancer ’ is decidedly above the average, both in story and in literary merit. Our copy is from Messrs Ward, Lock, and Company. I * PICK O' THE BUNCH V Lewis Cox is extremely popular as a writer of romances, and 1 Pick o’ the Bunch ’ will certainly enhance his reputation among those who prefer lighter fiction. It is the love story of Geraldine, a beautiful young typist who attracts, the interest of a rich man well known for his “generosity” to pretty girls. But there is also a steady-going young engineer in love with her, and when she loses her position he misconstrues the situation. There is .not a great deal that is new in the theme, but Mr Cox invests it with a fresh appeal by virtue of his charming style. His denouement is skilfully effected, and his characters are finely and distinctively drawn. Our copy is from Messrs Hutchinson and Company; PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM Mr E. Phillips Oppenheim is an entertaining novelist. He keeps well along the lines that he has made so popular, and he varies the incidents in his stories with great ingenuity. When the reader opens his books he knows in imagination that he will be in the company of members of the nobility and others in the social swim, and that', also in imagination, he will dine on the choicest foods and drink rare vintages. Mr Oppenheim is first of all a teller of mystery stories, and his facility in this way is illustrated in his latest book, ‘ Judy of Gunter’s Buildings.’ In most of the mystery tales as the final chapters are reached the solution becomes obvious, but Mr Oppenheim conceals the denouement in this case in a most ingenious way. The reader wonders how the author is going to take his leading characters out of the morass in which they seem to be plunged, but he manages it most successfully. The publishers of this excellent novel are Hodder and Stoughton. NOTES The desk at which Oliver Goldsmith wrote ‘ The Vicar of Wakefield ’ has been left to the South Kensington Museum. Miss L. A. B. Heney, author of ‘ The Shadow Tree,’ is the daughter of Mr T. W. Heney, editor of the Sydney ‘ Morning Herald.’ Her grandfather, Henry Gullet, for many years edited the ‘ Australasian.’ Following on the death of Mr R. B. Cunninghame Graham, it was felt that he should be remembered by some tangible memorial. Through the courtesy of the Scottish Memorial Trust a site for a suitable memorial has been selected on the field of Castlehill on the outskirts of Dumbarton—the field is reputed to be the site of the last home of King Robert the Bruce. A committee to further this aim has been appointed under very representative patrons.

In a recent English newspaper competition to discover tho most disliked characters in fiction, Dickens characters predominated in the choice of readers, Uriah Keep, Pecksniff, Squeers, the Murdstones, and Quilp leading. Jane Austen and Thackeray each provided several entries, and the moderns included Soames Forsyte, Elmer Gantry, John Brodie (from ‘ Hatter’s Castle’), Lady B. (from ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady ’), Burlap (from ‘Point Counter Point’), and Anthony Bevan and Mary Emberlcy (from ‘Eyeless in Gaza’).

Parents looking for Christmas presents in book form most likely to please their offspring may be interested in the results of a symposium recently contributed to by English librarians. The results suggest that the modern child insists on absolute reality and fidelity to the world he sees about him. Books of adventure must ring true and be accurate in detail. Tales of action, featuring aeroplanes and other modern contrivances, have displaced fairy stories, and, while there is a decline in the popularity of the school story, an amazing increase is reported in tho demand for animal stories, especially stories of horses. But beware of attempting to foist on the knowing youngster a pseudo-Alice or pseudoChristopher Robin. Such rash attempts invariably utterly fail.