ODDS AND ENDS

Southland Times, Issue 23840, 10 June 1939, Page 14

ODDS AND ENDS

The annual awards of the Pulitzer Prizes in Letters and Journalism for 1938 have just been announced by the trustees of the Columbia University. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has been awarded the 1000 dollar prize in fiction for her novel “The Yearling,” which topped the U.S. best-seller list of 1938. Carl van Doren’s biography, “Benjamin Franklin,” has won the biography prize, also of 1000 dollars. James Joyce, whose “Ulysses” created a greater sensation than any other post-War novel, has followed it with another book, of 628 large pages, “Finnegans Wake.” This is, probably, the obscurest book ever written by a man of genius, says the News Chronicle. Page after page of it will be found absolutely unintelligible, even by the intelligent reader. It is written, not in English, but in a fantastic semiEnglish language invented by Mr Joyce. Irving Tressler, who guyed the most famous work of a distinguished American philosopher under the title of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” goes on his way of bitter rejoicing. His latest crib-crab title is “With Malice Toward All,” for a book in which he surveys the follies and fads and eccentricities of the American people. The German police have banned the sale in Germany of two British and three United States publications. The British publications are: “The Shadow of the Swastika,” by Geoffrey T. Garratt, and “They Betrayed Czechoslovakia,” by G. J. George; the American are The Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, “Nazi Germany—lts Women and Family Life,” by C. Kirkpatrick, and the New York magazine Fame.

Authorities on Shakespeare, Milton and Jeeves will receive the degrees of Doctors of Letters together at Oxford on June 21. They are Sir Edmund Chambers, Sir Herbert Grierson and P. G. Wodehouse, the celebrated hum-

orous writer and creator of the infallible and impeccable butler, Jeeves. Mr Wodehouse said: “I am startled and almost alarmed. I do not know why I am getting it. I have never been to Oxford. Jeeves approves.”

Though his English publishers, carefully careless, did not say so, Kenneth Roberts’s “Rabble in Arms” is an earlier novel than “North-West Passage,” which wrote his name in big letters. A pleasant fuss has followed this disclosure. Says the London correspondent of The New York Times: Sir Hugh Walpole . . . declared that (the publishers) ought to have mentioned that it was an earlier book, in justice both to themselves and to the author. Many reviewers, on the other hand, were not aware of this and have dealt with it as though it represented the author’s latest effort. Thus Philip Page, in The Daily Mail, speaks of it as the “successor” to "North-West Passage." For the moment, the policy adopted by the London publisher has been rewarded, for The Bookseller reports that “Rabble in Arms" heads the month’s list of best-sellers as supplied by British booksellers. But will this policy pay in the long run? Some of the reviewers pronounce “Rabble in Arms” to be inferior to “North-West Passage," and it is at least likely that readers will generally be of the same opinion. If so, they will suppose that the quality of Mr Roberts’s work is falling off. instead of improving, and this will not help his reputation in this country.

| Is it not time for a revival of the essay, a form of literature in which the EngI lish have always been pre-eminent, asks I James Agate. Consider how much of I novel-writing is mere lumber. ConI sider those long descriptions of Sun- | rise over Derwentwater and Sunset over Wastwater, with which your novelist fills his pages whenever he is stuck for what to make his puppets do next. Consider how much of the actual writing is purely perfunctory. Always on condition that the essayist writes about something. The reading public has said goodbye, and rightly, to insipid effusion on such subjects as Goldfish, Hyacinths at Kew, the First RidingLesson. These are titles for Academy pictures, and as such do not engage the mind. . Christopher Morley’s “favourite thought” about W. B. Yeats: that the famous poem, “Innisfree,” as he said in his autobiography, was suggested to him by an artificial jet of water which he saw in a shop in Fleet street. Harold Nicholson confesses that in his reviewing he hedges between the two extremes of defending the eternal standards of literature and telling the public what it would like to read. The former task would lead him into one long pompous diatribe; the latter would be a degradation of the mind. So he addresses himself to the authors, telling them why he either likes or dislikes their work and trusting that the ordinary reader will derive some information therefrom.