BOOKS AND BOOKMEN A LITERARY CORNER

Evening Star, Issue 22637, 1 May 1937, Page 24

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN A LITERARY CORNER

VERSES MARY STUART My brother Jamie lost me all, Fell cleverly to make me fall, - And with a sure reluctant hand Reft my life and took my hand. It was jealousy of the womb That let me in and shut him out; Honesty, kingship, all shut out, While I enjoyed the royal room. My father was his, but not my mother, We were, yet were not, sister, brother; To reach my mother he had to strike Me down and leap that deadly dyke. Over the wall I watched him move At ease through all the guarded grove, Then hack and hack and hack it down Until that ruin was his own. i—Edwin Muir,-in the ‘ Spectator.’ TINSEL LACE ON A WAXEN DOLL Dance, little lady in tinsel lace, - Step to the tune that the piper plays, Pose with your studied and lithesome grace, . Dance, little lady, and take your praise. Dreams that are brightest will fade at dawn, Fade and will turn to the greyest ash; , Love will depart with a smothered vawn, Castles will tumble and life will crash. Know, little lady, we all must pay, Nothing is left to the will of chance; Play, if you will, till the end of day, Toll is demanded of all who dance. So . . -. Dance, little lady in tinsel lace, Step to the tune that the pipef plays, Pose with your studied and lithesome grace, Dance, little .lady, and take your praise. —By Margaret Copeland and James Northe, California. i BOOK COLLECTOR’S TEMPTATION The hunt for the rara avis in literature holds for the devotee to the chase “ more thrills to the minute than trapping wild animals in a jungle,” according to Dr A. W. S. Rosenbaph, the American bibliophile and collector. And in ms ‘ A Book Hunter’s Holiday, he describes the feelings of an enthusiast when he sights his quarry. On one occasion he passed through a Connecticut village, where lived a certain Mr Brown, wno had asked him to call when passing that way. Dr Rosenbach did so, ana Mr Brown being away for an hour the visitor was left to browse around the library. Now for the story; Suddenly I stopped. Across the library, upon a shelf of a, few loosely placed, slanting volumes, something attracted my eye. I could see no title—nothing. But I knew—l knew what that book was, although I myself had not placed it there. It was the first edition of Thomas _ Hellier—the first single volume dealing with wholesale murder in Colonial America. And I had searched over 18 years here and abroad for this little work! I put my hand to my face. It was damp with perspiration, excitement—and a peculiar sense ox fear. Then, as though invisible accusing eyes were upon me, ,1 walked casually, but cautiously to the shelves. First I carelessly picked up a volume to the left of it, and another to the right. And then, with my heart pounding, I removed this remarkable hit of Americana. Now like a miser I ran my, fingers over the precious leaves and drank in the title page.” Needless to say, Dr Rosenbach withstood the dreadful temptation which this volume offered. Equally needless to say, the book eventually found its way into his own library, for your true collector, when once on the trail, will never let go.

At almost 1 any price the desired volumeis cheap. Dr Rosenbach proved this fact to himself when he paid £5,000 for a first edition of ‘ Alice in Wonderland.* And he proved' it again when, at Sotheby’s, on April 3, 1928, he paid £15,400 for tie manuscript of ‘ Alice.’ Then it was, too, that he proved himself a boofelover indeed, for, in response to the expressed hope that the manuscript would remain in the land of its birth he offered it to England for the price he paid for it —and what that offer must have cost so ardent a collector! But it journeyed across the Atlantic, after all.

Sir John Squire thinks that many people will be surprised to find how wide wag the extent of Kipling’s reading. In this connection he adds a reminiscence of his own of a luncheon party, at which Kipling’s conversation ranged over all literature, and revealed an intimate knowledge of such out-of-the-way subjects as the minor eighteenth century poets and the poetry of Landor.

Lovers of Australian literature (says the ‘ Australasian ’) will be glad to know that an effort is being made by the A. G. Stephens Memorial Committee to publish a memorial volume containing selections from the work of him who was adjudged by J. F. Archibald to be “ the best judge of literary values in Australia.” Australia owes Stephens much. To him is due our knowledge of the best or first works of Ogilvie, Furphy, Davis, O’Dowd, Quin, Brady, Church, Adams, Hebbelthwaite, Phil May, Hopkins, and other Australian writers and artists. And he rescued Shaw Neilson’s poetry from oblivion, bringing out the first volume of Neilson’s work in 1919,

NEW BOOKS NEW ZEALAND VERSE MR ALLEN CURNOW’S ‘ ENEMIES.’ Mr'Allen Curnow is one of the most modern of New Zealand’s young poets. In an introduction to his second small volume, ‘ Enemies,’ he explains his theories. He has excluded, he tells us, pieces written merely, or chiefly, in satisfaction of the desire to emulate some admired poet. Such. work seems to him to be too common in New-Zea-land. In that he. is probably right. There is one sort of imitation, however, which he advises. He has tried to show the possibility of a technical development pari passu with that or English poetry. Whatever may be said or written about a national literature for New Zealand, England remains at the very least the ‘ technical research laboratory,’ where th'e finest and most advanced work is done with that subtle, material, the English language. Jhc argument seems to be that New Zealand winters must imitate,, while they try to carry further, the metrical experiments of their English contemporaries. However natural such search for examples may be, many must doubt if it amounts to a necessity. The New Zealand poet, after all. has precisely the same heritage as his coevals overseas. The entire body of English literature, all that has been done best in the past, belongs equally to both. No disadvantage is suffered here by isolation. We see no reason why, if it is a prune end to be sought, the New Zealand poet should not develop for himself new ingenuities of rhythm or of assonance, ot line division, or of capital lettering, as naturally as Mr Ezra Pound (now probably out-of date), or a certain Mr Bunting, who writes:

They say Etna belches as ranch poison as Duisberg’s pudenda a littering sow helpless in the railroad ditch Gear and gear.

The main weakness of New Zealand poets is not that they are metrically deficient but that they have so little to say,'a defect that will be at once apparent in comparing typical New Zealand and English verse anthologies. A rather desperate effort is being made, not only by colonial but also by younger English verse writers who suffer from it, to overcome that disability. Mr Curuow writes: “ The only hope is in poetry written on a genuine impulse to l present in expressive form the material which naturally suggests itself—suggests itself, that is, uninfluenced by any notion of what is or is not fit subject matter for poetry. I have tried to avoid a preconceived idea of what poets in New Zealand should write about.” In other words, all things may bo lawful subjects for poetry. There is this much of truth in that doctrine, that a great deal of loss and mischief can always be done by_msisting on too narrow definitions. On the other hand, there are some types of subject, tried at intervals all through the ages, from which poetry worth remembering has never yet been extracted. The real subject of six lines by Mr Curnow which give their name to his volume is one of them, and he has not succeeded better than his predecessors. On the other hand, metrical experiments made by Mr Curnow in this volume, such as the rhyming of accented with very much unaccented end words, do'not strike us as in auy way revolutionary or other, than legitimate efforts at variety, whether at-tractive-in their effect, or not. - Certainly Mr Curnow is a poet when he writes: Old and crooked Asia Is an evil glance in the north, and his simplest, most conventional writing moves us more than poems in which he is most symbolic and elaborate, with least _ perceptible meaning. When he can write: Your face between my hands, And your eyes open to me. It is as if I stood Beside a great sea; For nothing is so still Or of such lovely pride Or of such deep 'motion, as The flesh I stand beside, he has no need to worrv over-much about new techniques. Published by the Caxton Press. * RETURN TO MALAYA 1 Mr Bruce Lockhart is a _ ready writer. He has the gift of making interesting everything that comes from his pen. In his ‘ Memoirs of a British Agent 5 and ‘ Retreat from Glory J he had a wealth of material to work on. It might have been supposed that a book about a visit to Malaya would give no great opportunities, and yet, this third contribution of his is as long, and in many respects as entertaining and informative as the others. Those people who have read his previous books will remember that as a very young man he spent several years on. a plantation in Malaya. When opportunity arose lately he made up his mind to revisit the country and_ see how the conditions now prevailing compared with his youthful impressions. Mr Lockhart has the advantage of being interested in everything that comes before him. As a consequence he is discursive, and his adventures and experiences begin from the day he determined _ to make the trip. He is a man who is remembered by his friends, and on the way out he met old _ acquaintances who provided opportunities for seeing the conditions now prevailing. His description of Singapore will be_ read with close attention, for this is one of the important strategic points of the Far East, and is of vital importance to the Empire. His comments on this' great port, with his personal experiences make entertaining reading. Though unusually frank about _ himself, Mr Lockhart is discretion itself in mattors of public moment, being guided, no doubt, in this way by his training in diplomacy. Without exaggeration, the author conveys to the reader something of the glamour and mystery of

the East and the influences that sway its millions of people and affect their lives. Mr Lockhart is nothing.if not adventurous. He travelled by air liner and tramp steamer among the islands of the East,, and he. describes the magical tropic scenes in a most convincing way. The very names of the places spell enchantment —Sourabaya, Celebes, Macassar, Bali, and many others in the Malay Archipelago. Their history and present conditions are graphically described. It is a region of particular interest, because of proximity, to Australians and New Zealanders, so that fact, added to Mr Lockhart’s literary abilities, is bound to create a keen demand for the book. The author returned to Malaya after an absence of 25 years. Notwithstanding all that he went through in the war and post-war years life for him has not lost its zest. That is* one reason whv his latest book is so interesting. ‘ Return to Malaya- ’ is from the publishing house -of Putnam. ORIGINAL SLEUTH Methods of fictitious sleuths in solving complicated problems are varied, but for sheer originality of process, Nootka, an Eskimo, as imagined by M. B. Gaunt in ‘ The leases of Death,’ is without equal. Nootka departs from the systems of other investigators, who. by diverse ways, examine facts to lead them to a guilty person, and first decides by a novel method on the identity of the perpetrator of the crimes, then takes the facts into account in order to determine the motive. From the moment a wealthy gold mining prospector gathers together an ill-assorted bunch of other claim-stakers, one is interested in whatever might eventuate. What does develop, is.both exciting and entertaining, and it is not long or ‘; the services of an officer of the Royal Canadian North-west Mounted Iplice are required. With the ■ ‘ mountie comes his deputy, Nootka, who eventually solves the mystery ■ that puzzles everyone else. He works on the Pythagorean principle of people and animals, and contributes a startlingly new figure to fiction’s detective agents. A copy of ‘ The Leases of Death has been received from Messrs Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. MR ELLIOT ON SCOTTISH AUTHORS Mr Elliot, Secretary of. State for Scotland, speaking- at a Foyles luncheon at Grosvenor House, gave thanks that Scottish writers of to-day were getting away from “ that sometimes rather mawkish Scottish literature. “Wo suffer terribly from a hangover from the kailyard school,” Mr Elliot said. “We have got to get away from that at all costs.” He attributed the kailyard literature to an inferiority complex—to the awful feeling' that came over Scotland when she looked round, towards the end of the industrial revolution, and saw what sort of a mess she had made of her own country. It would need a greqt deal of humour, satire, and cynicism before she recovered her own soul again, but he thought she was on the way to doing so. There was fortunately a good deal of toughness about their modern Scottish authors, good examples of whom were Mr Eric Linklater and Mr A. G. MacDonell. Except Mme Jolanda Foldes, who discussed the genesis of her novel, ‘ The Street of the Fishing Cat,’ all the speakers were. Scots. Lady Tweeddale took the chair. Mr Linklater offered advice, not at all seriously, to young authors on the branch of letters they should cultivate. Mr MacDonell, on the subject of the English, explained how with infinite guile they had made the Scots believe that they ran the Empire, the Scots meanwhile being unaware that the English ran Scotland. • . General Sir lan Hamilton, talking of Mary Queen of Scots, said that the House of Commons the previous night had been debating a question of Royalties in the abstract. “ Scottish literature will never treat its Royalties in the abstract,” he observed.