LORDS OF CREATION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20448, 30 June 1928, Page 8

LORDS OF CREATION.

MR W. B. MAXWELL ON LITERATURE. XOT A LITERARY XATIOX. (I aoM Our Own Correspondent.) LOXDOX, May 16. The well-known novelist, Mr W. B. Maxwell, was one of the speakers at the Royal Acadamey banquet, and replied to the toast of “Literature.” He maintained that we were not yet a literary nation. We did not love literature as the Americans, we did not encourage it as the French, we did not believe in its supreme power as the Germans, we did not take it to our hearts and homes as the Scandanavians. We talked about books a great deal more than we read them. Nevertheless, we were always progressing in the right direction, and there were many hopeful signs. There never was a time when authors showed more energy or when they- were better paid. A really successful book, what they termed in the trade “ a boom book ” or a “ stunt book,” would provide its author with quite a modest fortune—a solid nest-egg—in spite of the adverse pickings of income tax and super tax.— (Laughter.) These successes, no matter by whom gained, tended to make the writer’s task something of a lottery. They won the prize or lost it. It was hit or miss all the time. And he feared that, as the Prime Minister told them the other day, some really very fine work often passed quite unrecognised. At the committee of the Royal Literary Fund, over which Lord Crawford and Balcarres presided so admirably, they sometimes had most painful and pitiful revelations of the failure to secure a competence by men of the highest merit and brightest talent. The precariousness of their calling was certainly a drawback, but on the other hand, did not dangers and difficulties make the spice of life? They had many compensations. He dared not touch on the artistic side of authorship, of its immense joys, its solace to their restless blood, its comfort to their very' soul. But from the practical point of view one might say, what had been said so often, that authors were fortunate in requiring so little external aid to set thtir business going. The painter required a large studio with a northern light. A doctor must rent a good-looking house in a. likely neighbourhood and put up a brass plate before he could begin. Authors only wanted pens, ink, ana paper. Their registered office was wherever they happened to be at the moment; their telephone exchange was the world.— (Cheers.) Given a quiet room, they were happy—with a fire in winter if possible and a sunblind in summer—and, as their pens scraped along, they were absolutely lord* of creation.