SCHOOLBOY IN FICTION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20378, 9 April 1928, Page 3

SCHOOLBOY IN FICTION.

IMPOSSIBLE SCHOOL NOVELS. DR ALINGTON’S VIEWS. (From Ora Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 17. Dr Alington, headmaster of Eton, spoke on the public school novel at a dinner ot the Authors’ Club. “ The public school .novel is really an impossibility.”,he said. “I do not mean to suggest tnat a great many have not been written and that they cannot be read with pleasure, and that once or twice there may not have been masterpieces, but i do suggest that the public school novel is really an impossibility. Now, if you give me credit for coherent thought, jou will suppose I mean that a novel must mean a love story. I do not mean that. Obviously you cannot have that in n school story, though in some school books you do have ladies who move about in the background in a more or lose dignified manner. In 'The Bending of thewig there. is a delightful lady who invited boys frequently to tea. but tea with the housemaster’s wife, delightful though she may be, is not romantic. You cannot get a love story out of that. I do not regard masters’ wives as subjects foi romance.” . , , Many school novels had hanging over them the disaster of a sequel, and the reader was threatened with being toh: what happened to the boy at the uiiiy versify when everybody knew the same things would happen to him at the university that happened to him at the school DULL UNIFORMITY. The truth of this was proved by Kip ling, who never tried to write a school novel, though he had written school stones of great brilliance. The fact remained that the plots of school novels were hardly ever coherent, and rarely complete At schools the same thing was said day in, day out, and on half-holidays, too, so that there was a background of uniformity of which it was hardly possible to exaggerate the dullness alter all the possible episodes and changes had been rung. ‘ We all know the hero who distin guiahes himself at his first match, and finally distinguishes himself at his lasl match, with occasionally a little slump in between. If he takes all the wickets in his first year, he is certain to do something great at Lord’s.— (Laughter.) The details that you can put in are so commonplace that it is difficult to provide any background.” Good fiction ought really to be unlike life. That was what they wanted fiction to be. He did not like the idea of many modern novelists that fiction should be made like life. “If I want fiction, J want something different from what I am living. If that is right, the public school novel is bound to fail. If you read public school novels you are thinking of your own school days, and you can judge it as being a good or bad novel according to your own experience.” BOYS’ TALK. “Of course,” Dr Alington admitted, “if you produce boya talking aa they really talk, nobody could possibly stand it. — (Laughter.) It is perfectly certain that the ordinary conversation of boys—although I have a great admiration for boys—is, aa has been said, mainly concerned with small, concrete facts.” The novel had to deal _ with clear types, and these were exceptional. What emerged from boys at school was the average type, and the “ average ” boy was the last person one wanted to write a novel about. Speaking of Kipling, Dr Alington described him as really the only great writer who had dealt with boys as they were; he had done it far better than anybody else, and he had shown more understanding of the schoolmaster than anybody else he knew. The Rev. the Hon. Edward Lyttelton, a former headmaster of Eton, continuing the discussion, said he was inclined to think that any apparent change between the modern schoolboy and his predecessor of a generation ago was superficial. Boy? at school, as a rule, were a most exact reproduction of the state of society at the time Schoolmasters often deplored that the boys at school were the sons of their fathers. They had manifold disadvantages.—(Laughter.)