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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21090, 16 July 1938, Page 12

Mr Malcolm Muggeridge, who gives his new book the lengthy title of * In a Valley of This Restless Mind,” has spent most of his working career in journalism. He was born 35 years ago, and educated at Cambridge. On leaving he taught in a missionary college in India, and then moved to Cairo University. His first journalistic job was on the "Manchester Guardian,” whose Moscow correspondent he became. After a period in Geneva he returned to India as assistant editor of the “Calcutta Statesman.” He was also on a London evening paper for a time. He was in the news himself about four years ago. He wrote a novel called “Picture Palace.” which dealt with a provincial newspaper, and was withdrawn because the "Manchester Guardian" threatened legal proceedings. The term "literary fare” is an old and hard-worked hack, but Mr Horace Annesley Vachell gives it a new value by making a comparison of novelists to cooks. Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding served up the roast beef of Old England. Some of our younger

English storytellers he sees as confec- j tioners, specialising in light pastry. Such writers as Francis Brett Young and Sheila Kaye-Smith deal with local dishes. Too often, Mr Vachell complains, a young cook-writer, lacking the experience of the accomplished chef, attempts a seven-course dinner when a light luncheon would be better served. Thrillers Mr Vachell dismisses as for the most part warmed-up fleshpots, the formula, or recipe, being cxasperatingly the same, and the scent of death being upon them, but the truth not in them. To meet an ever-recurring demand, a new but cheaper, edition of “The Story of a New Zealand River,” by Jane Mander, has been published. The setting of this fine novel is a river flowing into Kaipara Harbour, a district lying between the better-known Bay of Islands and the northern environments of Auckland. At the time the novel opens this was almost a noman’s land, a land of the “lost” men who dug up gum and hid in the bush. Into this isolation came a pioneer timber merchant with his English wife and her daughter. The story develops with the introduction of nearby English settlers and with the varied nature of the men who worked about the bush in those days. Drama is implicit in the story from the beginning. The book develops character against this isolated scene, and it is a fine novel of human relations. “All this foolishness about my writing being mystic or impressionistic is so stupid,” says Miss Gertrude Stein. • Just a lot of rot. I write as pure, straight, grammatical English as anyone, more accurate grammatically than most. Every word I write has the same passionate exactness of meaning that it is supposed to have. Everything I write means exactly what it says.” The American author. Mr Sherwood Anderson, once said: “She may be, just may be, the greatest word-slinger of our generation.” I am not quite sure whether this was intended to be complimentary; anyway, one can judge for oneself by reading her latest book, “Everybody's Autobiography.” Although she has lived for many years in Paris, Miss Stein regards herself as the "most utterly Americanised” person in the world. Her Montparnasse flat is a favourite meeting place for literary Americans in Paris.