WORLD IN CRISIS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21467, 15 April 1933, Page 7 (Supplement)

WORLD IN CRISIS

CRITICS AND NOVELISTS " The fact that to-day everybody writes means that nobody lias any real vocation for writing," says Mr. James Agate, in the Daily Express. " With the exception of Mr. Huxley, and possibly one other, there is 110 young man or woman at work to-day who is a writer in the sense in which Laughton is an actor or Kreisler a fiddler. Since nobody has a good story to tell, one mediocre tale is as good as another. I attribute the continued sale of these groceries to the weak-mindedness of tlio reader who persists in throwing good time after bad. But perhaps it requires as much courage to stop reading as it does to stop writing!" " To me," says Mr. Roger Pippetfc, in tho Daily Mail, " the most startling aspect of the most startling year of literature has been tho novelists' utter indifference to a world in crisis. Wo have seen more of tho great slump in a single reel of a second-rate American film than we have glimpsed in five thousand tales. . . . What a chanco for a writer! A powerful people beset by a bewildering sequence of events and conflicting forces: Britain —the real Britain in which we live and move and have our being. Well, we had to wait a decade for the war novels. But perhaps some courageous author will seize tho obvious opportunity in 1933."