BOOK COLLECTING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23669, 29 November 1938, Page 10

BOOK COLLECTING

VIEWS OF SIR HUGH WALPOLE lAN HAY ON NOVEL WRITING SPEAKERS AT THE BOOK FAIR (From Our Own Correspondent) (By Air Mail) LONDON. Nov. 7. Sir Hugh Walpole gave the first of the series of talks at the Sunday Times National Book Fair. His subject was "Book Collecting." Two of the best modern writers to collect in first editions, at "incredibly cheap" prices, he said, were W. B. Yeats, " the greatest poet alive to-day," and Hillaire Belloc, of whom he was never tired of saying that he was one of the finest living writers, whether in poetry, fantasy, the detective novel, satire, history, or travel. Recalling the first book he ever bought, when he was about eight, Sir Hugh said: "I went into a bookshop, assisted by my old governess, and say a little book which smelled strongly of manure. It was one of Stead's Penny Classics. I bought the top one, and as soon as I was an my bedroom I began to read the trny print. I finished the book, feeling pale and yellow, in the early morning. The title of it was 'The Talismatv BUYING AT CHRISTIE'S

"I once accompanied the late Gerald du Maurier to a sale at Christie's. ' What do you have to do to get these books?' I asked. 'You have to nod,' he said. So I began to nod. Then the hammer came down, ana I knew the book was mine, as I had been the last to nod. But du Maurier told me: ' You fool; 1 was bidding for it for you. If I bad only known I might have got it for about 2d.' " Referring to the fascination of going from book to manuscript collecting Sir Hugh said: . "In 1917 I went to a sale and found there 21 volumes of all the letters written to Sir Walter Saott and bound by him. Among them were letters from Goethe, Byron. Wordsworth, and all the other great poets of the day." The happiest moments in his life were, first, when his first novel was accepted, and. secondly, when he heard the sound of the hamiiner at the auction of the Scott letters and heard the man say. "Mr Walpole." HAY'S 39-YEAR-OLD NOVEL

Another speaker was lan Hay (Major-general John Hay Beith), the new Director of PubJic Relations at the War Office. He wondered how many of his audience had hidden in some corner the manuscript of a novel s a play, or a volume of verse, written by themselves, usually in secret. "Long ago, when I was a student at Cambridge, I wrote a novel," Majorgeneral Beith continued. "I have it still. Sometimes in the dead of night I wake up suddenly, and creep downstairs to where it is hidden, to reassure myself that no one has found it and read it! It has been lying there for about 39 years. "Probably the most useful book I ever wrote, and certainly the most accurate, was a small maoual upon the tactical handling of machine guns in battle, which I wrote rather more than 22 years ago at the W.ar Office. In fact. I was brought home from the trenches specially to write it, as a trained writer who had also had over a year's experience of machine-gun warfare, and was, therefore, a rare and valuable object for those days. "I.received no fee for writing it: they did not even put my name to it; and it was obsolete in abotrt six weeks; but it was all mine white it lasted. It was not romantic, it was not impassioned, it was not even funny; bit* it did achieve that artistic truth which we are all supposed to be groping for." QUALITIES OF AU'EHOR Discussing the qualities needed by an author to make people want to rear him, Major-general Beith said:— "These qualities appear to me to be fourfold. The first, of course, must be creative power—power of invention. Ideas do not come of themselves; they are engendered by contact with some outside agency—perhaps an incident in your own daily life, or a scene witnessed in the street, or a chance paragraoh in a newspaper. "The man who can seize pn one of these ideas, however, small, and develop it and embroider it and work it into something readable and believable is of the stuff of which story-tellers are made.

"The second quality, I thiink, must be ability to tell your story. In other words, to be easy to read. The whole art of writing dialogue is to write highly artificial dialogue in such a way as to make it sound entirely natural—and that takes some doing. "The third quality, I think, must be power of characterisation, the power to make your figures live. "The fourth quality, and the most important of all, is ability to criticise vour own work when completed—criticise it as if it had been written by somebody else, and if it does not ring true, to amend it, to rewrite it, and if need be to destroy it ruthlessly.

" Rudyard Kipling once told me thai he systematically destroved about onethird of everything he wrote I remember wondering at the time how much of his best work might have gone to its grave by that route. And that is why I say that this power of self-criticism is the most important of the four qualities that I have •mentioned."