Gossip

Southland Times, Issue 22999, 19 September 1936, Page 13

Gossip

C. Day Lewis names Virginia Woolf, Constance Holme, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen and Margiad Evans as the women writers of to-day whose originality is beyond question.

H. G. Wells denies a report that he is planning an “Encyclopedia of Modern Thought.” He admits that he has had a few conversations with friends on the subject, but say that nothing has been decided.. If the suggested work materializes, it will be on the lines of Diderot’s famous enterprise.

Rudyard Kipling is to be commemorated by a library at the Imperial Service College, Windsor, the successor to the United Services College, where he was educated.

America’s Pulitzer literary prizes have a remarkable pulling effect very gratifying to the authors of books successful in winning one. The 1935 fiction award was made to “Honey in the Hom,” a first novel by the American author Harold L. Davis. The announcement was made over the wireless at 10.30 in the evening. When Harpers, the publishers of the book, opened their doors the following morning the staff found themselves submerged under orders for close on 5000 copies in the first half-hour. By 9 o’clock that same morning a new edition of 10,000 copies was on the press.

Commenting on a report on library reading from Toronto (Canada), “John o’ London’s Weekly” asks can it be that the modem boy is less adventurous than his forebears? An analysis of Canadian children’s reading shows that books on exploration come at the bottom of the list, along with books on art. The types of books most in demand among Canada’s young idea are (1) picture books, (2) fairy tales, (3) natural history, (4) history, (5) poetry, (6) famous lives, <7) geography and description. But all these follow far behind the great class—fiction.

Mr George Bernard Shaw and his wife (who was bom in Cork) were recently admitted to Irish citizenship. This was discovered by inquiry at the Irish Free State Office in London. Under the Irish Treaty the Free State Government was empowered to have a Nationality Act for the registration of its citizens, and it passed an Act by which persons bom in Ireland or of Irish parentage could register their Irish nationality in Great Britain or abroad by declaration at the Irish Free State offices. The term for registration expired some months ago, but the representatives outside Ireland had powers to extend the period in particular cases. Mr and Mrs Shaw seem to have come under that head. The registration as Irish citizens does not forfeit their status as British citizens or affect it in any way.

The following extract is taken from an article on travel books by Dr Malcolm Burr in a recent number of the “Bookseller”: “The real writer of travel books writes because he cannot help himself. He is bursting with what he has seen; he is craving to tell his fellow-men, to share his adventures with them. He is enthusiastic upon his subject, and that means that he knows what he is writing about. He may not be a stylist; perhaps he is not a master of English prose, but that may not prevent him from turning out a great work, or even a classic, for knowledge and sincerity combined are irresistible. And the greatest of these is sincerity.”

Republication of Mark Rutherford’s books, “The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford,” “The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane” and others, has drawn attention to works that enjoyed considerable popularity before the war. The Times Literary Supplement, in review of these reprints, makes the following critical assessment of their author: “No one will claim for Hale

White (Mark Rutherford) a commanding position in literature. But there will always be some who will be drawn to him by the silver-point of his style, and a genius not very fertile or energetic, but steady, penetrating, fine, at rest in a world of which it found threefourths unintelligible and the remainder only just tolerable, in a kind of Calvanistic Quietism of its own devising.”

There need be no fears on the part of Heinemann’s about the commercial success of J. B. Priestley’s new novel “They Walk in the City.” More than 45,000 copies of the book were sold before the day of publication.

A wish that, more poets should be supplied to the world was expressed by Mr Stanley Baldwin in a recent address to the Empire Universities Conference. He said: Great poets are scarce—scarcer, perhaps, than scientific men. I always feel that one of the tragedies of the world is the way in which the devil is using the discoveries of the chemist, and of those men who invented the internal combustion engine, for the destruction of mankind. No poet has done that. I do not think many of them did much harm in their lives, but they left us incalculable benefits for this world, and if the universities can conspire to produce more poets, more power to their elbow!

A reviewer of John Buchan’s latest novel, “The Island of Sheep,” wrote: “If we sometimes feel that John Buchan brings gifts of too high an order to the adornment of stories of mere plot and counter-plot, it is his own generosity that prompts the criticsm. He is so evidently very much more than a yamspinner; and yet as a yam-spinner so complete a master.”

According to Basil de Selincourt, a great deal of confusion is to be traced to the mistaken belief that American and English poetry, being written in the same language, are the same thing. England and America share, with their language, a great many ideals but they do not reach their ideals by the same ladder, nor are they standing on the same rung.

Wilfrid Gibson suggests to novelists that it is time, and more than time, that they spared their readers the tedium of accounts of so-called Bohemian parties. Artists in their off moments are rarely exhilarating people, and a drunken painter is every bit as much of a bore as a drunken stock broker.

Compton Mackenzie is now hard at work upon a four-volume saga, entitled “The Four Winds of Love,” which he expects to be his greatest achievement. Its subject will be the lives and loves of some young people who pass from adolescence into maturity during the present century, and it will indicate how the events of the last 35 years have affected the author’s own mind.

E. V. Lucas regrets the neglect into which Andrew Lang has fallen. It seems to him “shocking” that no life has been written of this “exquisitely capable and various man of letters.”

Basil de Selincourt recalls that in the good old days one of the pleasures of reading criticism of poetry was the quotations, but now, he says, it is all the other way round. The only chance of believing in the moderns is to hear their praises and forget their works. To ask for bread and get a stone is nothing to it. It is like asking for a glass of cold water and getting a handful of hot dust. E. R. Punshon doubts whether the proverb that a good beginning is half the battle applies to detective novels. A good beginning certainly puts the reader in a receptive mood and lures him on, but it is also apt to lead him to expect an end more brilliant still. If that expectation is disappointed, he is tempted to forget his earlier delight and remember only his later disappointment in a conclusion that in another mood would have amply satisfied him.

the age of 19 Redfern expressed his passionate disapproval of the food and conditions given the seamen and lower ratings in the navy, was put under arrest by his commander, court-martial-led, sentenced to death, enjoyed the commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, and was, after some years in Dartmoor, transported at his own request to Botany Bay. Pure chance allows him to be of medical service to Sara Wills, daughter of a prominent citizen of Sydney, so that he comes under the eye of authority which needs a surgeon in the penal colony of Norfolk Island. There he is sent. His fine work so wins the admiration of the officials that a complete pardon is approved and thus Redfern becomes an “Emancipist” (June 19, 1803). Returning to Sydney, Redfern, by sheer force of skill and personality, becomes a dominant figure in the young community, a close friend of Macquarie and his household and a staunch supporter of the Governor’s humane attitude towards all emancipists. In this, both men are vigorously opposed and thwarted by a clique of bitter, conservative antagonists, but win through. Redfern leads the way in scientific farming, helps establish the Bank of New South Wales (beating up the Editor of the Sydney paper in the street, during the process of the negotiations), becomes frankly essential in the medical life of the people, and, of course, gathers Sara Wills into his arms in the last act.

The four scenes of the first act arg., all on shipboard, and very well done, the curtain falling on the reading of the life-sentence on the quarter-deck. Apart from “some unseen cataclysm may destroy the fabric of our ideals,” a very worthy speech put into the mouth of one of the characters, there are no stilted lines. Act two has three scenes, one in Dartmoor prison, one in Sydney, one on Norfolk Island. Here is a mixture of weakness and strength. The parting of Redfern from his mother may be tragic—to me it is uncontrolled sentimentality and unreal to a degree. On the other hand scenes two and three are compact and forceful. The six scenes of act three are all in Sydney. The act is too long and unbalances the play, while Macquarie’s dialogue is, in too many places, more platform utterance than the easy language of an educated man who knows his own quiet mind. The authors, curiously enough, are decidedly not at home with the comedy of the educated, intelligent people of their play, and scene one grows tedious in the extreme. Stage or film will deal harshly with act three, which lacks cohesion, dragging in historical data by the heels, as well as creating artificial situations so that some incident may be recalled or some historical fact clumsily grafted on to the stem of the piece. Greater artistry could have taken greater historical liberties and been perfectly justified. The minor characters, particularly the rougher ones in the act, are deftly handled. This play has gusto and pageantry, a dash of melodrama and much good characterization. It gets its virility from many little and big conflicts of men, minds and ideals. As it is published it is unnlayable. But a discerning producer, with a judicious pruning knife would soon see to that! One day, New Zealand will claim parentage of some such drama as this.