WRITER’S FIRST DUTY

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 14

WRITER’S FIRST DUTY

MAKING HIMSELF INTELLIGIBLE

“I may be wrong,” said General John Beith (lan Hay) in a speech at the Sir Walter Scott Club, “but I have always held that the first duty of a writer is to make himself intelligible to his readers. But there is a school today which appears to regard intelligibility as an obsolete literary affection.” He went on:

The stuff they set down gives you the impression at first sight that something has gone wrong at the printer’s. Long jumped sentences without any stops in them—sometimes without any verbs in them. Sometimes a series of unrelated interjections. The idea, I know, is to produce on paper the process of human thought; because when we think we do not

think in consecutive sentences, but in a series of spasmodic flashes, so to speak. But the real trouble with that sort of writing is that it is too easy. Anybody can do it in a fashion; and it is difficult for the uninitiated to say whether it is good or bad of its kind; and since people always show the most profound respect towards what they do not understand, in nine cases out of ten this ultramodernistic school gets away with it.

Dr Thomas Mann has just been elected an honorary corresponding member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His membership was proposed by Van Wyck Brooks in a letter in which he said:—

He is defending the basic ideas of our civilization perhaps more powerfully than any other writer. Moreover, he has paid us a very great compliment in coming to live in this country.

Dickens is still a firm favourite with children, though even “Oliver Twist” must give precedence to the “William” and “Biggies” books, according to a census at Bethnal Green public libraries (London). Children of varying ages from eight to 14 were invited to give the name of the book they liked best of all the books they had ever read, and 800 responded. In his report, issued recently. the Borough Librarian, Mr George F. Vale, discloses that “the incorrigible William, that type and spokesman of boyhood the world over, like Abou Ben Adhem, leads all the rest.”