ODDS AND ENDS

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

ODDS AND ENDS

According to Dr W. R. Inge, the writing of Utopias is a masculine weakness. Women never write them. Dorothy L. Sayers notes that the art of detective story writing has flourished in the English-speaking countries only.

In the opinion of Harold Nicolson, Lord David Cecil is the best of all modern biographers. He is a scholar, and therefore accurate; he is fastidious, and he thus prefers being intelligent to being clever; he is selfassured, and has therefore no desire either to pity or to deride the illustrious dead.

Notes and Queries expresses its “firm conviction” that poetry is sickening of a plethora of critical theories, and suggests that the best thing that could happen to it would be to have all literary criticism held* up for the next twenty years.

To describe himself with any success, says “John o’ London,” * a man must see himself both subjectively and objectively, both as the hand and the handiwork; he must find a way to lift himself by his boot-straps. That is why most autobiographies tell us more about other people than they do about then- writers.

In Sir Hugh Walpole’s opinion, although it is now 20 years after the Armistice, not a single great novel has appeared whose theme is the World War. He regards Ewart’s “Way of Revelation,” Frankau’s "Peter Jackson,” Brett Young’s “Crescent Moon, A. P. Herbert’s “Secret Battle” and Ford Madox Ford’s fine trilogy as the best of the English ones.

Commenting on Professoi' G. T. Buswell’s devices to increase one’s speed in reading, The Yorkshire Post thinks more people would gain from a professor who would teach them how to read slowly and well. A fast reader tends to fall into a passively receptive mood, whereas slow reading, which permits of reflection, while it covers less ground, leaves a much richer deposit in the mind afterward.

Richard Church believes it is not mere old fogeydom that makes him say that today the memory of the public is shorter and its intellectual appetite more jaded than in the days of Queen Victoria. For then, once an author had arrived, he remained in the favour of the public for the rest of a writing life. Now he lives precariously from book to book, and risks much if he courts that favdur over a single book into a sequel.

The psychology of a best-selling novelist, according to John Mair, must be as unambiguously simple as Suetonius’s studies of the Twelve Caesars.

The title of James Joyce’s new book, long known as “Work in Progress,” will be “Finnegan’s Wake.” It will be published simultaneously in England and America on May 1. The first edition, limited to 250 signed copies, will be produced in England and will carry both English and American imprints on all copies.

Outright and money down, £500; a four weeks’ tour of the United States of America, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and Florida, or a four weeks’ tour in Europe; an annual income of £5OO a year for four years—that is the prize which two publishers —Hodder and Stoughton, in London, and J. B. Lippincott, in Philadelphia—are offering to a new novelist for a first novel in the great Romantic Tradition and for three subsequent novels. ,

The monthly scientific magazine Discovery remarks that the colloquial American style, so pleasing when presented by Damon Runyon, is rather unsuited to biography, especialy scientific biography, and it is with some disappointment that one meets it iql such books as Dr Paul de Kruif’s.

Discriminating critics on both sides of the Atlantic, says The Times Literary Supplement, have saluted Robert Nathan in high terms, yet neither at home nor abroad has he received the wider recognition which seems his due. This, it adds, is the world’s loss more than Mr Nathan’s. His achievement is too finished to succumb to oblivion, and meanwhile it may be that his talent and his philosophy flourish best in quiet corners.

It is generally known that A. J. Cronin had to pass through a period of hardship at the outset of his career. How severe was his struggle for a livelihood at that time is now disclosed in an interview given by his wife to The Daily Mail. She tells us that she made her husband’s acquaintance when they were medical students together in Glasgow. On their marriage they went to a village in South Wales, where they occupied two rooms in a miner’s cottage. One was the surgery, and they lived in the other, sharing the use of the kitchen with the miner’s wife. After a time Dr Cronin obtained an appointment as a member of a government commission to report on conditions in mines. With the savings from his official salary he bought a medical practice in London, but at the end of three years his health broke down through overwork. He went to bed on a milk diet on a farm in Scotland, and there he wrote “Hatter’s Castle.”

Many regrets have been expressed at the decease of The Criterion. It was founded 16 years ago by T. S. Eliot, who continued to edit it during the whole of its brief life. Its circulation has always been small—for how many people can afford to pay 7/6 on a quarterly review?—but its influence on contemporary letters has by no means been negligible.

Upton Sinclair has received, in a letter, an uncommonly high tribute from Professor Einstein:

Dear Upton Sinclair—lt is an evil time, a going to ruin of everything which is dear and precious to the finer men. One receives all the more thankfully everything which .can still rejoice the heart. Truly, anything of that sort comes rarely. So much greater was the joy which I felt in the reading of your wonderful book, “Our Lady.” Through the pressure of my work I come only rarely to

bury myself in a literary work with untroubled enjoyment. The impression is to be compared only with the greater works of Anatole France.

The writer of “Literary Gossip” in The Pall Mall Gazette of 50 years ago said: “The largest sum ever given to a woman for any single story has just been offered and accepted in America. The authoress is Mrs Hodgson Burnett, and the sum is said to be £3750. I am told, by the way, that the extraordinary success of ‘Robert Elsmere’ will bring in a very large sum to its authoress, and that she has already received correspondingly large offers for her next novel. But Mrs Humphrey Ward’s ‘figure’ is still, I imagine, not more than half Mrs Hodgson Burnett’s.”

Linguistic notes from The New Yorker. . . It reports that the “sodajerkers” at the New York Fair (“The World of Tomorrow”) are to be styled “fountaineers.” It reports also that Californian olives are sorted into five sizes: the largest is the Super-Supreme - Colossal, the next Super-Colossal, and so, by way of Colossal and Jumbo, to the smallest size, which is Giant.