Stray Leaves from Book World

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20669, 6 March 1937, Page 12 (Supplement)

Stray Leaves from Book World

INTERESTING NEWS ANU NOTES

Lord Dunsany is probably the only writer who breeds his own pens. He always uses quills, and they come from his estate in County Meath.

Pau! Kruger was recently given prominence on the screen, but biographers have long neglected him. Now Miss Marjorie Juta, herself a South African, makes amends with a full-length study, “The Pace of the Ox,” which has just been published.

Mr John Masefield is engaged on a new and ambitious work of fiction. It is a tale of the English countryside, and of the fortunes of a family, and it will occupy three volumes. The first deals with the 1870’s, when the head of the family becomes Involved in a quarrel with the authorities because he champions a poacher whose gang has caused the death of a keeper.

The latest additions to Duckworth’s “Great Lives” series—“ Queen Elizabeth" and “Mary Queen of Scots”—both continue the excellent traditions laid down by previous volumes. They are scholarly without being academic, popular without being cheapened, handy and, above all, extremely reasonable. They are both excellently written, and form valuable introductory studies to the lives and times of their subjects. (“The Shooting Man’s England,” by Patrick Chalmers, London. Seeley Service. “Mary Queen of Scots” and “Queen Elizabeth,” Great Lives. London. Duckworth.)

An author, who was a school teacher, although, with his sunburnt face and neat, white beard, he looked more like a sea captain, was Luigi Pirandello, the distinguished playwright. He was an obscure teacher in a girls’ school in Rome for 30 years until “Six Characters in Search of an Author” found him and brought him fame, leading him eventually to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Pirandello was a great smoker. He got through 120 cigarettes every day. And he was a great worker, writing—as did Julius Caesar —a lot while on the road. He worked in trains, in hotels, on ships, anywhere he happened to be when travelling the world attending his first nights. His death occured recently.

Some habits and peculiarities of various authors are disclosed by the literary souvenirs which were on show at the London “Sunday Times” Book Exhibition. From them we may learn, for Instance, that when Rabble Burns foregathered where “drouthie neibors nelbors meet,” he took snuff; that Robert Eyres Landor smoked cigars, but Charles Kingsley a pipe; that Charles Dickens wore a red velvet smoking cap, and Byron’s shirts were marked with his cipher nd coronet. Carlyle’s calling cards—it was possible to note from a sample—carried a facsimile signature and were themselves carried in tartan cases; Matthew Arnold hung his watch at night on a stand surmounted by a gilt bird; Trollope chewed the bone handle of his pen-hojder; and Kipling drew the outward and visible sign of his inspiration from a pewter inkstand. These are but small things. But they help us to draw portraits with the help of the mind’s eye.

In the last century there was generally considered nothing more pathetic than the lot of the governess. The governess in fiction and in fact was too often a lonely woman without much personality and generally the butt of fate. Of couruse there were times when the governess was both tyrant and tartar. The Oxford University Press have jusut published the letters and journals of a governess who lived and suffered at the beginning of the last century. “Miss Weeton” is a bbok as commonplace as it is quietly pathetic. It has been edited by Mr Edward Hall with care and sympathy. Miss Weeton was one of those unwanted young women left an orphan when she was twenty-one and sent into the World, lonely and Withoutu resources, when her younger brother married. She Was poor, she was shabby, she was not gifted, neither was She beaUtuiful. The only thing before her was to become a governess. She found employment in the household of a Liverpool merchant named Ghorley where she was snubbed by Mrs Chorley and then she went on to the Pedder family in the Lake District. Amongst these people she found no more happiness and no more consideration. Once she fell romantically in love, but it came to nothing. After years she married a Mr Stock, a thoroughly Unpleasant person and her life as wife and mother were no happier than it had been as governess. This might be described as a sour book. Experience soured Miss Weeton and her pen reflects her experience. The value of it all is that, like so many journals, we have a realistic picture of the life of the time as no novelist could reconstruct it. We learn from it that the proverbial reputation of the governess is not ill-founded and “Miss Weetch” may stand as a lesson to the world which may congratulate itself that some phases of the old times have almost passed.

General Sir lan Hamilton is hopeful that the Poet Laureate will not allow his literary endeavours, so far as the Near East campaigns in the Great War are concerned, to close with his book “Gallipoli.” He wishes that Masefield would write a poem about Suvla Bay, “which quite takes the shine out of the charge of the Light Brigade.”

Possessing as its central figure an old lady of nearly 80, “Great-Aunt Lavinia,” by Joseph C. Lincoln (Appleton, Century), is a story to be read and thoroughly enjoyed. Great-Aunt Lavinia is a vigorous personality, both physically and mentally, and her shrewd efforts to plan the life of her great-niece, Ethel Holt, are worthy of the success they attain. The book is brimful of incident, while the character portrayal is up to this prolific author’s usual standard.

There is, apparently, quite a lot of answers to the question: “What’s in a name?” so far as its application 'to book titles is concerned. Mr E. V. Rieu. late managing director of Messrs Methuen’s, the publishers, has often doubted whether too much importance is not attached *to a frequent cause of strife between author and publisher—the naming of books—but at the same time he asks some pertinent questions Which, in their issues, tend to lay his doubt. Would “1066 and All That” and “When We Were Very Young”—he asks—have sold quite as well as they did had they been called respectively, “A Diverting History of the English People" and “Verses in Reminiscence of Early Childhood.” Like Lewis Carroll’s “Carpenter”, we doubt it. And no doubt you will have fairly definite views on the subject yourselves.

There are signs at last of a concerted movement to protect authors from the risks to which they are exposed through the present unsatisfactory state of the law of literary libel (says Herbert W. Horwill). A powerful plea for drastic reform has been published in “The Times” over the signatures of thirty-four of the most distinguished living English Writers—novelists, poets, essayists and critics. They complain that the law is at present so heavily weighted against reputable authors that they have no effective defence against flimsy and malicious charges and claims. One of the principal grievances is as follows: A plaintiff alleges that the description in a book of some purely fictional character constitutes a libel on himself. To make out his case, he has only to procure a witness or two to swear that they “recognise” the character in question as himself, though actually the author may be unaware of this person’s existence. These witnesses may be ignorant, misinformed, malicious, or even parties to thinly disguised blackmail, but their evidence suffices to throw upon the author and publisher the whole cost of proving that the character cannot reasonably be identified with the plaintiff. The defendants stand to lose heavily whether they win or lose the actual case, and for this reason they tend to settle out of court, even at the last minute and after months of costly legal Inquiry and preparation.

The Poet Laureate is nominally a member of the King’s household, and his office is among those that fall under the administration of the Lord Chamberlain. He is commonly supposed to have fulfilled all the duties required of him when he had written odes or other suitable verses in celebration of events intimately associated with the Royal Family. John Masefield, however, appears to be taking a wider view of his functions and to be regarding himself as a representative not merely of the Court but of the nation. He has started on a tour of Scandinavia, which he will continue south through Germany, Belgium and France, for the definite purpose of spreading on the Continent of Europe a knowledge of English cultural ideas. There was founded last year a British council to promote in other countries a knowledge of the English language and of English art, music, science, educational institutions and other aspects of the national life. Its objects are thus avowedly propagandist, but this type of propaganda, as “The Times” justly claims, is “wholly unobjectionable.” It is on behalf of this council that the Poet Laureate is giing in his journey. He will concern himself mostly With English poetry, and his lectures will include readings from his own poemsx Mahy of his meetings Will be held In universities, so that the youth of the countries visited are likely to predominate in his audiences. Incidentally, Mr Masefield Will visit elementary schools in order to discover, for the ultimate benefit of English schools, the methods that are adopted in them to foster a love of poetry. “It is fitting,” remarks “The Times,” “that the poet of the British Court should be an ambassador of the British nation in a field where no international frontiers are closed.”