FROM . . . Bookstall and Study.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18641, 19 December 1928, Page 4

FROM . . . Bookstall and Study.

Mr G. K. Chesterton and Mr Hubert Foss, the young composer, are said to be collaborating in an operatic version of Mr Chesterton’s “The Flying Inn.

Emil Ludwig's “Life of Abraham Lincoln,” upon -which he has been engaged for a long time, will be published earlv in 1929. A biography of Anthony Comstock is to appear shortl> r . It was Mr Cornstock -who succeeded in getting Mrs Warren’s Profession” banned in the United States, and about whom Mr Shaw wrote his preface on “ComstockXXX “Ephesian’s” jiovel about Dickens, “This Side Idolatry,” has been banned by the City Council of Portsmouth, where the novelist/^was^born. Edmund Blunden. the poet and biographer of Leigh Hunt, has. written a book on the War, part of which is m prose and parkin verse^ Mr Rudyard Kipling has obtained an injunction and £IOO damages against a publishing society which had attributed to him in error a’ poem appearing in its magazine. The society consented to judgment on these terms. A little more than £IOOO has been collected in England for the Thomas Hardy memorial, and the projected obelisk at Rainbarrow will shortly arise. But the response to the appeal is disappointing, and the project for a Hardy Librarv has to be abandoned. x Michael Aden and his wife narrowly escaped serious injury recently when their car overturned on the way from their villa at Cannes to Paris. Mr Arlen, an Armenian by birth, whose real name is Dikran Konyoumdjiau, was made famous before he was thirty by his novel “The Green Hat.” Mr Stoddart King’s new . book of verse, “Listen to the Mocking Bird," has just been published. Mr King is the author of the famous war song. “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” He and the composer, Alonzo Elliott, both at the lime students at Yale, were together one afternoon, when, improvising at the piano, Mr Elliott composed the “Long, Long Trail” air, and Mr King wrote the refrain an hour later while attending a lecture on English poets of the nineteenth century. The song was published in London about a vear later, and almost immediately war was declared. Mr King is convinced that “if anybody writes a good war song, a war will be provided.” Mr George Barr M’Cutcheon, the American author, who died recently and whose “Graustark” books had a great vogue some years ago, was a collector of first-edition Victorian novels. He obtained first and rare editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, and Kipling. and had one of the finest Kipling collections in existence. Recently he sold this library at auction, and booklovers from America, England, and the Continent were bidders.

First edition collectors, as well as : connoisseurs of the short story, will do . well to look out for a series of beauti- , fully-produced little volumes to be published in editions limited to 500 copies. They are to be called “The Woburn Books,” and each will contain a short story by a well-known writer of to-day. The first eight will include “The Man Who Missed the Bus.” by Stella Benson; "Rawdon's Roof,” by D. 11. Lawrence; “Portrait of the Misses II arlowe,” by Martin Armstrong, and “The Apple Disdained,” by R. H. Mottram; and other authors represented will be Sheila Kaye-Smith, T. F. Powys, G. K. Chesterton, and David Garnett. Writing on the subject of Christmas presents. Mr E. V. Lucas says:—Giving is usually simpler-—-so much simpler, indeed, that there is almost no comparison between the two actions. Giving can be so easy as to be almost automatic, whereas receiving can make demands on every nerve. Givers, particularly careless ones—and most givers think too little —can survive to a age and never have to practise any of the facial contortions and the tactful verbal insincerities which recipients of their generosity must be continually | calling to their aid. As it is—wholly

because giving is so simple: an affair of a shop assistant’s advice, or the writing of a cheque—as it is, most elephants are white.

In olden days the peacock was in great demand at the festive board, particularly the Christmas feast. Sometimes it was made into a pie. at one end of which the head appeared above the crust in all its plumage, with the beak richly gilt; at the other end the tail was displayed. Massinger, in his “City Madam,” gives some idea of the extravagance with which this, as well as other dishes, were' prepared: “Men may talk of country Christmasses, Their thirty pound butter’d eggs, their pies of carps’ tongues; Their pheasants drench'd with ambergris: The carcases of three fat wethers bruised for gravy' to make sauce for a single peacock.” THE CHRISTMAS DINNER. Lo, now is come our joyful’st feast; Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is drest, And every post with holly. Now all our neighbours’ chimneys smoke, And Christmas blocks are burning; Their ovens they with baked meats choke, And all their spits are turning. Without the door let sorrow lie, And if, for cold, it hap to die, We’ll bury’t in a Christmas pie, And evermore be merry. George Wither (1588-1667). A prize of £IOOO, as an advance on account of royalties is being offered jointly' by Jonathan Cape and Harpers, the publishers, for a new novel in English to be written by anyone of British nationality. It must be be'tween 60,000 and 120,000 words in length, and the manuscript must be* delivered to Mr Cape at 30, Bedford Square, W.C.I. before next August. The judges will be Sheila Kaye-Smith. Frank Swinnerton, and Hugh Walpole, their decision will be announced next October, and the book will appear in the spring of 1930. For a work of outstanding merit, not necessarily the first-prize winner. Harpers promise an additional award of 4000 dollars as a further advance on account of American royalties. Mr Hilaire Belloc confesses in “Ilow the Reformation Happened” that he dislikes modern novels. lie can read voyages to the planets, and he is fond of Atlantis; but the novel of to-day he does not read: I cannot do it, because there has been put into my mind either by my Creator or by some little Daemon a sort of catch which jabs up and stops me reading after the first two or three lines*. Indeed, when I do read a book (alas for me!) it is nearly always because 1 open it at random in the middle and find something that strikes me. But the beginning always knocks me out. When I read a beginning like this: “It was already dark and she was waiting,” my mind gives way and I go back to some of the more simple problems of arithmetic or to a crossword puzzle. When I read. “John Henderson had for fourteen years sat upon his stool in the bank," I stop at once like a little ship striking the bar as it tries to get into harbour. A shock runs through me, and I see that it is all up. x » :-j George Bernard Shaw has been robbed. A forged cheque for £SOO has been honoured by his bank. Even then, he pursued his policy of astounding everybody, and astonished his bank manager by refusing to prosecute. lie decided that if he set the machinery of the law in motion, he would not get the money back, and while it would not do him any good, it would do the criminal a great deal of harm. But it occurred to him that this was a fine opportunity to state his opinions on the prison system. Criminals, according to him, were of two classes, first, the ordinary type-amenable to treatjment, and second, the wild beast type, v incurable. The former, he h'aid, wurfe

invariably transformed into the latter by our prison system, and these “wild men,” of whom the man who threw his wife under the dray is a specimen, Shaw said, should be got rid of in a lethal chamber. “When a tiger preyed upon a village, we didn’t argue about the morality of taking life; we shot it,” was his sage conclusion.

Lowell Brentano, vice-president of the New York publishing house, has been offering a little gentle criticism of the English attitude towards American books, says a writer in “John o’ Lnodon’s Weekly.” “On the whole,” he is reported to have said, “I do not think that you English people are so sympathetically disposed towards our writers as we are to yours. There is a little prejudice against us. An English publisher handling an American book would want to Anglicise it—remove the Americanisms. We do not wish to do that. We like your English books to be 100 per cent English.” Is “prejudice” quite the right word? Can it be said that we are prejudiced against Sinclair Lewis, Hergesheimer, Mencken, Cabel, or Dreiser? As for the rest, I think Mr Brentano answered his own case when he added, “American publishers and public bodies believe that the best books of all are those which come from England. Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy and Bennett are some of twenty or thirty English authors whose books have an immense sale in America.” But perhaps I am merely showing my English prejudice in making this second quotation!

“Crime—The Autobiography of a by Eddie Guerin, describes some fearful punishments the author received in different prisons in the United States. At the Ohio Penitentiary he fell foul of the authorities for defying a warder. He was punished with the “sting,” a torture which he vividly describes. One day a man was killed by it, and henceforth its use was discontinued:

“They took me over to the solitary cell, stripped me stark naked, put me into a bath with two inches of water in it, handcuffed me behind my back, and tied a bandage over my eyes. I hadn’t the faintest idea what was going to happen to me. I half expected a flogging. I knew, of course, that preparations to some end were going on around me, but I certainly had no inkling of what they were until I suddenly felt a terrible sting which made me jump up in the bath about three feet. Once, twice, thrice the dreadful pain shot through me. My yells must have been heard in the street outside. They took the bandage off my eves when I saw what they had been doing to me—giving me electric shocks. I came to know it afterwards as the ‘sting,’ and no doubt it was the forerunner of the electrocution which is now the method of execution in different parts of America.”

LITERARY CENSORSHIP. Writing on the much-debated question in England of the merits and demerits of literary censorship, the -‘ Irish Statesman ” says:— “ The best way to combat what is evil is to create wha,t is good. Bad literature will be but liltle read if there is ample provision of good literature. Mere negation leads to nothing good. Emptiness of mind will fly to that which is denied it. Our legislators, if they are wise, will make as little fuss over evil literature as they can. “ Censor by all means obscene literature, but do not create by political means associations of people whose legal function is to be virtuous above their fellows, and to show this by rummaging about until they can discover obscene passages in books and give publicity to them. . - - We grow nobly like what we love, and ignobly like what we hate. The soul has laws just as unalterable as the laws of nature.” Writing on the same subject in the “ New York Herald Tribune,” Mr Hugh Walpole says:— “ We have the name, whether rightly or wrongly, of being the greatest hypocrites in the world, and an incident like the battle over Miss Radclvffe Hall’s “ The Well of Loneliness ” seems to prove the charge. Miss Hall treated her subject, that of abnormal love among women, with the greatest decency and discretion. At first everyone gave her his blessing. The ‘ Times ’ Literary Supplement said in fatherly way that it was a courageous book, a little dull in places and entirely lacking in humour, and Arnold Bennett said in his fatherly way that Mr Ellis’s name held such magic for him that he would read anything if Mr Ellis ad vised him to do so. Other papers followed in the same direction, and it seemed for a while that there was to, be no fuss at all.”

Then “ The Sunday Express ” comes out with an article that shrieked to heaven. Did the good British putAic know that a book was in their innocent midst which was the most corrupting work published in English since the last English translation of Petronius? The editor of “ The Express ” declared that he would rather give his little ones a bottle of prussic acid than _ this dreadful work; a stand must be made among all decent people to see that this vile subject was forever made impossible in English letters. lie called on the Home Secretary to step forward and destroy this canker that was eating away the heart of English life. The result of this was. of course, to inform two million English householders, who had hitherto not heard of the book, that here was something that they must instantly read. The outcome was that the publishers withdrew the book from circulation. At once it became obvious that something very much more serious than tfie fate of this particular book was involved. and it was remarkable that practically every paper of authority in the kingdom protested against the action of “ The Express,” not at all defending the particular book, but pointing out that we were in danger of a censorship of a particularly noxious kind, namely, that any paper in need of a sensation to send up its circulation had only to scream about the naughty morals of a book and the deed was done. New Zealand readers are also victims of this farcical literary censorship. particularly in public libraries. In many of the smaller towns there is a committee appointed, of most unsuitable persons frequently, who take upon themselves the duty of selecting the “ right ” literature for the reading public, with, very often, disastrous results. Notwithstanding the fact that these books have been supplied to the libraries by reputable booksellers —and New Zealanders are remarkably well-served by their booksellers —and are openly sold in their shops without fear of prosecution by the authorities, these well-meaning but incompetent literary censors arbitrarily deny the reading public who support the. libraries the right of selecting their own literature. It is a thousand pities that they do not consult the cuty librarians whose wide experience gives them a much broader outlook and who, after all, are specialists in this work.