HIGHBROW NOVELS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4347, 11 January 1938, Page 2

HIGHBROW NOVELS

ARE THEY TRUE TO LIFE? The theory that people who read “ the clever novels produced by highbrows ” are really studying life was criticised by Lord Elton in a recent broadcast. To his way of thinking, these clever novels are usually much further removed from life than the wildest romance of the handsome hero who fells five fully-armed gangsters with his bare fists, or the blue-eyed office girl who marries the disguised prince of Ruritania. “We smile,” said Lord Elton, “at what appear to us to be the stilted and unnatural conventions in the Victorian novels our grandparents read. The blushing Angelina, the whiskered Edwin seem to us mere figures of pasteboard. But the fashionable novels of to-day seem to me, I must confess, to be full of conventions every bit as unreal. . . . To begin with, there is the obvious fact that an overwhelming majority of the people you encounter, if you read highbrow novels, are persons of either very loose or very perverted morals, or both; whereas nine-tenths of the people one meets in everyday life are sober, decent folk. That is an odd convention. Just as odd as the convention of manly Edwin and blushing Angelina. Just as odd and not so pleasant. And then there is the habit of writing at full length in the plainest of plain English of matters which 25 years ago were only mentioned in Latin in the footnotes to works on medical jurisprudence. That convention is surely just as odd as the convention of Edwin and Angelina, and not half as agreeable.” War novels also provide a convention which Lord Elton criticised—the belief that war is much worse for the young than for the old. “You must have come across the ultra-patriotic father who packs his son off into the army, ‘ If only 1 was your age, my boy.’ He revels in his vicarious sacrifice, while the son heavy-heartedly dons his khaki, bitterly reflecting that his elders made the war while he, on the threshold of life, is called upon to fight it.” Looking back on his own experience, Lord Elton remembered that when he joined the army it was with a pleasant stir of excitement, and a faint sense of being a hero: “I hadn’t the faintest conception then of the gnawing anxieties which must be felt by the parents of a son on active service. Now, with a son of my own, I can imagine them only too clearly. The late war was uncomfortable at times for me, but, as I realise now, nothing like so uncomfortable as it must have been for my parents.” But the _ highbrow novelist cannot see this; in his works it is always the other way round, and it is only the young who suffer. “ Yes,’ : Lord Elton added, I think that to read ‘ clever ’ novels is usually in its own way every bit as much an escape from life as to read the thriller or the love romance.”