A LITERARY PAGEANT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20560, 10 May 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

A LITERARY PAGEANT.

CELEBRITIES AT HOME.

Mr. Ashley Gibson, who is perhaps best known to tho general reading public as (.ho editor of the Outward Bound Library —lho travel series published by Dent and written by people who have actually made their homes in tho countries described—has struck out'in a new line in "Postscript to Adventure," which is, in the words of the publishers, a pageant of im prcssions. Tho author in his younger days oscillated between the sophisticated joys of Fleet Street and Chelsea, and a more primitive, if no less precarious, oxistcnce in Central Africa. Later ho was caught up in the war machino and his descriptions of life as an infantry officer on tho Sommo and in Nyasaland are fresh and forcible. Foi those,' however, who are surfeited with war literature, no matter how good, tho chief charm of tho book will lie in tho thumbnail sketches of literary and artistic celebrities in Edwardian days when tho author was a young and struggling journalist. In tho days beforo Wells had written Tono-Bungay or Arnold Bennett " Tho Old Wives' Tale," when thero was no Conrad cult and Galsworthy's star was hardly abovo tho horizon, Heincmann suddenly came out with " a tremendously long novel by a tremendously old gentleman with spectacles and wliiLo whiskers who had been last heard of ... as a fabricator of rather nice pots." "Joseph Vanco " .became a best-seller and William do Morgan, tho unsuccessful potter, turned " in tho latter end " into a popular novelist. Yet " Joseph " had knocked in vain at tho doors of Hodder and Stoughton, who must afterwards havo bitterly bewailed their failuro to spot a literary winner. So Mr. Gibson clop-clopped down to Chelsea in a hansom to interview the mild old gentleman who " said thero wasn't anything much "to bo u-ritten about himself so far as ho could see, but didn't I rather like this pot?" Next time this lucky interviewer found himself in a " square, solid, emphatically upper middle sort of house. Any Forsyte might. havo signed its leaso with complacence." Not only did lie meet Galsworthy, but ho tripped over tho Galsworthy spaniel, " a little picco of copy, as it were, in tho concrete." But most enjoyable of all were tho visits to tho thatched cottago of IT. do Vero Stacpoole, " tho first and foremost exponent of lagoonery in twentieth-century fiction. His Celtic energy manifested itself in spasms. Not ovory day, but most days, ho would wrap round him his workman's overall, a Donegal shooting jacket of hoary pedigree, arm himself with an ounce of tobacco . . . retire to a garret. . . and emerge some hours later waving gleefully about half a ream of author's quarto covered with his spidery scrawl—it might bo 'lagoonery.' or ' gossoonery ' or detective stuff."

At one stage of his varied career Mr. Gibson was on the staff of T.P.'s Weekly, and there is a bright little story of Mr. T. P. O'Connor himself and tho office typewriter. Ho couldn't type " but he invariably handled the machine, notwithstanding. There was just one man on earth who could decipher the result, and that was his secretary, Walker . . . The sheets snowed steadily on to the floor ...

To glance at any of those pages was to marvel anew at 'the .super-human skill "of Walker. Half the letters transposed and no spaces whatever between words. They looked like .the gibberish the linotype operator impatiently taps off when he lias made one bloomer and wants a new lino."

" PostScript to Adventure " is the kind of book ono can dip into again and again and always come out with a prizo in the shape 0/ a cheery bit of gtfssip or a good story. " Postscript io Adventure," by Aahloy Gibson. (Dont).