“WHY WRITE A NOVEL?”

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 312, 30 November 1933, Page 11

“WHY WRITE A NOVEL?”

MR HUGH WALPOLE ON THE ARTIST IN FICTION. Mr Hugh Walpole, who spoke at the Oxford Luncheon Club recently on “Why write a novel?” asked why it was that the number of people who were writing novels was increasing year by vca.r, even though the chances of success were comparatively small. He 'said that three of every six novels were scarcely reviewed; they had no place in the booksellers’ shops; and they were hardly recognised by the libraries. What extraordinary reason was there that more and more people were writing them ? He believed the novel was different from all other writing arts, in that it was something that could be quite good without being altogether literature. Arnold Bennett, one of the wisest and most practical men he had known, said that the very best novels were always half amateur, and that the novel was something that revealed the writer more than anything else, not excepting autobiography.

He supposed, Mr Walpole said, that the original impulse of the novelist was the sense that lie must give himself, something, by means of which he might liberate himself. Certain phases of the novel had to-day become altogether different from what they were 25 years ago, when his first book was published. Then it was still possible for a novelist without losing reputation to write a novel of the sword-and-pistol type—a novel full of action, in which the characters were too busy to say much except “Ho!” and “Hal” The whole necessity of the novelist in the last 10 vears, at least, had begun to be something quite different. He must now be an artist and his novel must be something beautiful in form and must deal with something the writer knew to be true. Because the novelist must now write of things ho knew to be true and because his experience was necessarily limited, there had come about the elaboration of small incidents such as the taking of aspirin and so on.