LITERARY NOTES

Evening Star, Issue 26087, 29 April 1947, Page 7

LITERARY NOTES

Mr J, D. Beresford, a novelist of whom great . things were predicted when his trilogy, < Jacob Stahl,’ was published immediately before and during the First World War, died recently at Bath at the age of 73. He was a fine craftsman, who brought, in his first novels particularly,..no small degree of imaginative power to his studies of abnormal psychology, but though over a lengthy period he produced an average of rather more tlian\a book a year, not more than one or two of them achieved the impressiveness of the first. He was a cripple, and in' his earlier years an architect. Of Mr J. Li Garvin, the distinguished London journalist and editor of the ‘ Encyclopedia Britannica,’ who died recently, Sir Archibald Hurd, the well-known naval writer, records in ‘ The Times ’: “It may be a rash statement, but I would suggest that Garvin rivalled Dr -Johnson as .he has been represented by Boswell,” As a conversationalist, Garvin had the advantage over Johnson that he was of Irish descent. Mr Somerset Maugham, who has given a prize to encourage British writers to travel, set the example of so doing himself. His father was attached to the British Embassy in Paris, where he spent his boyhood. Later in life he journeyed in the East and elsewhere, - gaining the impressions which he used so admirably in ‘ The Gentleman In The Parlour,’ and other books of the . kind. His style has the directness and lucidness that are French qualities, and his reflections can have a foreign flavour notiso attractive to everybody. As to the general theory of the value of travel for authorship, much obviously can be said for it. Shakespeare, on the other hand, wrote for all countries without, so far as we know, going outside his own, and more writers than Hardy have won their fame from an intensive knowledge of a small locality. “ Plum ” Warner’s book, ‘ Lord’s, 1787-1945,’ should be in New Zealand almost immediately. No one is more competent to write that particular history, and, to quote the publishers, its “ reminiscences of the heroes who emote, and ran, and hurled at Lord’s on great days of the distant and recent past ” should be a joy to all lovers of cricket.

Romance being now out of fashion, the American novelist, Winston Churchill, does not stand nearly so high to-day in the views of the up-to-date critics as he did when his first novels

based upon national history, ‘ Richard Carvel ’ and 1 The Crisis,’ were written in the years following ihe Spanish-American war, or as he may do in 20 years’ time. A writer on ‘ American Literature, 1880-1930,’ in a book of 260 pages, could omit any mention of Churchill, finding more importance in a story that discusses the ethics of abortion, though it is not, as he points out, “about” abortion; “in the descriptive sense it is not ‘ about ’ anything.” The two novels named, however, and others that f|llowed them, still have thousands of readers. The first deals ivith the American Revolutionary War, with English as well as American historical characters, as nearly as possible in the manner of Thackeray’s vast ‘ Virginians,’ of which it might represent a sliver. The second treats of the civil war, and they are spirited and worth-while stories. It was from ‘ Richard Carvel ’ that a Dunedin headmistress, in the darkest days of the war, after Dunkirk, took the story of the American—or Scottish—privateer, Paul Jones, who, when his ship appeared to be shot to pieces by an English frigate of many more guns and lie was asked if lie- surrendered, replied: “Sir, I have not yet begun to fight.”