EARLY STRUGGLES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XX, Issue 2062, 3 January 1925, Page 6

EARLY STRUGGLES.

THE CASE OF ZANE GREY. Zane Grey, the American novelist, who is as popular in Australia and New Zealand as in his native land, is said to he corning to New Zealand to fish. He has a lovely home at Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California. He is an instance of a man determined to succeed as a novelist, but at the outset he experienced most tlishearl - enlng' circumstances. With a strong belief in his own possibilities, Mr Grey gave up his previous occupation, and removed to the country where for five years he worked faithfully on fiction, only to receive rebuffs from all the publishers to whom he submitted his work. In this period only one story, '“Betty Zane,” a little tale of one of his ancestors, appeared in print and he published that at his own expense. It was “Betty Zane,” however, that encouraged Colonel C. J. Jones, a famous Western character, widely known as Buffalo Jones, to take him into Buckskin Forest, on the north vim of the Grand Canyon, for the purpose of gathering material for “The Last of the Plainsmen,” a book that told of the experiences of the man who represented a type of pioneer American that has almost disappeared. Mr Grey tells with what confidence he offered the manuscript to Harper and Brothers, and he describes his visit to their offices, where he met Mr Ripley Hitchcock, who for many years decided the fate of authors:—

“Soon I was ushered into the presence of Mr Hitchcock. He handed me my manuscript with a few words of regret; and he concluded, ‘I don’t see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction. 5 I was stunned. I could not speak a word. Taking the manuscript, I went out. A terrible commotion laboured in my breast. When T reached the wide staircase my eyes began to grow dim, my mouth went dry, and my body became cold as ice.

“When I reached the corner of Pearl Street. I leaned against a tall iron post. There my sight failed me entirely. I clutched the post with one arm and the manuscript with the other. That was the most exceedingly bitter moment of mv life.

Suddenly, something marvellous happened to rue, in my mind, to my eyesight, to my breast. That moment should logically have been the end of my literary aspirations. From every point of view | seemed lost. But someone inside me cried out: ‘He does not know! They are all wrong!’” Back in his country home, where lie was always sure of the sustaining faith of his young wife, Mr Grey began his first romance of the West. Through a cold winter of extreme sell'-denial he worked on it and when he made his next visit to Harper and Brothers he took with him “The Heritage of the Desert,” which was gladly accepted. Since then Mr Grey has attained extraordinary success.

Mr J. H. G. Chappie’s book, “The Divine Need of the Rebel,” receives a notice in the literary supplement of “The Times.” The writer of the paragraph lets Mr Chappie off with the advice that he should read more and think more. “He is a trenchant exponent of views revolutionary in both religion and politics (says “The Times”), and he indicts with vigour both the throne and the altar—the future hope of humanity lying, in his view, in the abolition of both. New Zealand cannot, he cries, become, under Imperialism, ‘a land where the miseries of the dead past shall be impossible.’ ‘lt. can as a free republic, but not otherwise.’ He hates militarism, capitalism, and what he calls ‘gobbling -Imperialism;’ and bis view of eugenics (derived, he tells us, from ‘eu,’ well born, and ‘ge»os,‘ race) is summed up in his chapter heading ‘Cradles or Cannons?’ Russia he seems to think, has shown us that ‘God’s in His Heaven,’ and ‘there is a moral power in the universe, or this Divinity is in the mass, in (lie mind of mankind.’ But despite his enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks, he is not himself a materialist, and he firmly believes in future life. The book is immature. Mr Chappie needs more thought and reading. Among other things, the latter might save him from such statements as that the word ‘Bible’ comes ‘from the Creek word biblios,' which, by the way is plural, and means books, or that ‘the word evil had a D put before it and became Devil.’ ”