ODDS AND ENDS

Southland Times, Issue 23444, 26 February 1938, Page 14

ODDS AND ENDS

According to The Times Literary Supplement there is a strong family resemblance between the volumes of memoirs published during the past few years by several well-known American journalists who have “covered” Europe in the war and post-war period. There is the same amazing professional competence, the same general friendliness to all sorts and conditions of men which is part of the essential equipment of the international journalist, the same breathless sense of excitement and movement, the same fund of “inside” stories about famous events. But they add to the gaiety of nations rather than to the store of historical knowledge. The technique is cinematographic and pays little heed to sequence and chronology; and there is an irrestible temptation to heighten colours and to report conjecture as fact.

Captain Felix Riesenberg has been commissioned by Macmillans (New York) to write a history of the Ameri-

can merchant marine, 1900-1940. He has already spent two years in gathering his materials.

To decide whether a writer of fiction possesses the true novelist’s gift it is

often a good plan, E. R. Punshon suggests, to consider whether the minor characters in his book —those to whose creation he has probably given comparatively little thought stand out in the narrative in their own right as living personalities. Sir James Crichton Brown, in his recent work, “From the .Doctor s Notebook,” quotes Carlyle’s lines: So here hath bedn dawning Another blue day, Think, wilt thou let it, Slip useless away? Out of eternity This new day is born; Into eternity At night will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did; So soon it for ever From all eyes is hid. So here hath been dawning Another blue day, Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away? “Carlyle’s hymn,” he says, “has not found its way into any popular hymnal, and is little known, but it is impressive and not inappropriate in these days of everlasting golf and football, and other time-absorbing ‘recreations’ as they are called.” “The author is the Cinderella of the book world,” said Mr Frank Swinnerton at The Sunday Times book exhibition in London recently: Actually there are a great number of people concerned in the publication of every book which appears on the stalls. They include the typist, who first copies the manuscript, the publisher’s reader, the publisher, the printer and bookbinder, the publisher’s salesman, the bookseller, the librarian, and, of course, the author. Between 15,000 and 16,000 books are published each year, and of the thousands of manuscripts which are received annually by publishers, probably only one in a thousand is worth publishing. Authors sometimes have the reputation of being conceited, but I have found that the only conceited ones are those whose books over a long period have had no sale. With success comes modesty.