BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 22454, 26 September 1936, Page 23

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

VERSES BY BURKE'S PASS Nature, earth’s angel, man’s antagonist, The stern antagonist from whom he wrests his bread, Long heretofore with vast magnificence Did carve this scene, prepare the arena, spread Bronze tussocked terraces before precipitous Great purple alps, loose glacier-shed Fierce-laughing streams in circuitous riverbed, Lo, man to the assault! In part victorious, His pretty trophies sets he up to amend The natural scene. The corn-stacks aureate. Wearing their weights like amulets, the autumn blend Of orange-spattered poplars, with the various Gilt , willows are his signet. Now, vainglorious, He calls the expanse a home and awful Nature, friend. The austere angel smiles on man’s predicament, Foregoes awhile advantage, and abates his blows : t Soft mein assumes of kin,dly ministrant; As on this ending day in genial radiance glo ~s The whole amphitheatre, stark antinomy Of wild and won annulled; and, newcompanioned foes, Beneath the hostile heights homestead and farm repose. Homestead P Nay, halting-place, .-.ccbmmodation Achieved . . . Did not that sombre regimented band Of firs, those gravestones, publish man’s condition ? For night, parental night, shall soon with gentle hand Suspend her folding arras, resume domination; Nature, to rest dismissed by a most high command, ; ; i - Shortly roll up this planetary decora- , tion, Man having passed darkly onwards to an unknown land. ■- . . . lV v-nVs —From * Time and Place.’ " MY JRUE LOVE IS A VALIANT MAN ” I must bear my head upraised lest it should bend to sorrow; I must hold my face against the everlasting stars; Fate that’holds the bitter cup will proffer wine some morrow; Beyond the blackness of the night . wait golden avatars. I must stride with knightly mien lest faltering steps should blunder; " Behind the mask of gallant mirth who but the gods may see? Proudly must I hold my heart lest it be torn asunder; • “My true love is a valiant man,” my dead love said to me. —Kendall Banning, New York. HOW TO WRITE DETECTIVE STORIES _ The popular writer of detective fiction, Mr Freeman Wills Crofts, in an interview in the summer issue of W. H. Smith and Son’s literary journal, 1 The Book Window,’ was asked:— “ How does one embark _ on a detective story? Do you begin with the characters or the plot?” ” The plot always,” replied Mr one episode or one aspect of the crime —a way of killing or the problem* of disposing of a corpse in given circumv stances, or sometimes a good climax add closing scene. From this point the book begins to grow in all directions, like a skeleton clothing itself with flesh and skin. One asks oneself questions. Why did it come about? The motive? The locality? Then, in answer to these questions more and more people begin to appear, and their circumstances must be fitted into the s.ory. It becomes more complicated, and now the problem is to simplify these parts and to make them into a whole. “ At this point I make a very free synopsis, arranging 'the material in chapters, though I am quite prepared to find that these will not bo the actual chapters that I shall write in the end. I draw elaborate plans of the house and garden, and maps of the district. By this time lam familiar with the whole story, and the,actual writing can begin. But these preliminaries take fully one-quarter of the time I spend on a book.” “ Are you generally on the side of the criminal or the detective?” “ The detective. The discovery of the mystery is the real subject of all detective stories, so one must be with the man who is going to solve it.” “ Are vou interested in crimes in real life?” “ Not often. In them you get the horror and ghastliness of the crime itself, while a detective story is all on the solving of a problem. And in real life the criminal is mostly an obvious kind of fellow, lacking the skill to tie up a tangle which is worth while to unravel. _ No book detectives would waste their time over, a commonplace newspaper murder.” “ Yet you must keep close to real life.” F “ Not so much on the criminal as on the detective side. There are certain books which help towards that. • Gross on ‘ Criminal Investigation,’ for instance. That’s the Bible of detective story .writers. And then there are books on medical jurisprudence. Very valuable, too,”

A LITERARY CORNER

NEW BOOKS NEW ZEALAND VERSE The poems in a little volume, ‘ Time and Place,’ by a writer who is unknown to us and is only indicated as the author of ‘ From a Garden in the Antipodes,’ are not for hasty reading. They take their inspiration from the four • seasons and a few places—‘ The Old Harbour’ (is it AkaroaP), Burke’s Pass, North Canterbury. They are for slow enjoyment, that savours each fastidious word and rthe irregular, but always satisfying, long metres, constantly recalling, and yet not echoing, the ‘ Testament of Beauty ’ of Robert Bridges, the poet with whom this writer seems to have most in common. Each stanza, in the longer poems, makes a picture, and the poems make pictures also, usually delicate, occasionally bold, suffused always with imagination. There is thought also; man’s destiny' is read in all the changes of Nature. These are poems, one feels sure, that will mean more, and convey fuller images of beauty, the more they are read and made part of the mind. It is startling that they should be by an unknown New Zealand author. Published by the Caxton Press, Christchurch. ‘ * ART IN AUSTRALIA' The international art exhibition held in Sydney supplies its chief black-and-white illustrations to the latest number of ‘ Art in Australia,’ and they are rich alike in interest and variety. Eleonore Lange gives a detailed review of the exhibition. Melbourne has also had a striking picture display in the last few weeks, that devoted to works of the late Sir William Orpen, and this also provides a precious quota, Basil Burdett discussing the characteristics and influences which helped to shape the artist. The illustrations in colour include a particularly vivid ‘ Portrait of a Lady,’ painted in London about 1835 by an unknown hand; ‘ Dry Creek ’ and ‘ Haystack and Cows,’ by Eliott Gruner; ‘Spanish Landscape,’ by George Bell; and ‘ Banksias,’ by Arnold Shore. There are articles on Gruner’s recent work, and Bell and Shore. Mr William Moore has his usual interesting budget of notes from Home and abroad, and Lionel Lindsay writes on ‘ Modern Prints and Drawings.’ This last article, it should be said, is based oh’ another exhibition, that organised by the Empire Art Loan Collections Society, at present being shown_ in Australian art galleries. The architectural section runs to 30 pages, all illustrated. Published by John Fairfax and Sons Ltd., Sydney. . ‘ FREEDOM; THE WISDOM OF THE NOW'. ‘ Freedom: The Wisdom of the Now,’ was written by K. C. Anderson, a young man of great promise, who died at Wellington last year from injuries received in a lift accident. This book, which reveals the author’s philosophy of life, was edited by Messrs C. W. Morrison and B. Anderson. Spiritual development and understanding is his theme, and the lines on which his mind travelled were similar in some respects to those of R. W. Trine, the author of ‘ln Tune with the Infinite,’ and of Krishnamurti and other Eastern philosophers. In a foreword Mr C. W. Morrison says that Keith Anderson was convinced that the present world problem is an individual problem, andi he sought to understand himgelf. “In inviting experiences of every possible nature, in suffering, and in successfully understanding the significance and value of it, did he discover that potential power in himself which condensed into his short span a wealth of wisdom.” The author’s definition of wisdom is the unfoldment of experience in mind. Understanding is the unfoldment of experience in both mind! and heart, and knowledge is the knowing of experience. Though he may not accept the author’s conclusions, the seeker after spiritual truths will find much to interest him in this hook, and will regret that such a promising life was so short. _ln one of the author’s poems in this book he expresses his philosophy in this way: Be of good cheer, The way is clear. Life does not ask or give; Life says; Just be and live— Therein lies the secret, No sorrow, no regret, Just Love, and Life, and Love. The publishers are E. S. Cliff and Co. Limited, Hastings. ROMANCE When love is true it is hard to forget. Such is the case of Peta Marley, who has been out East for the first time. Auburn Lyell, who was despised by many, played a double part, leading Peta on with the thought that she, and only she, mattered to him, while all the time he was having affaire with other women. Peta, returning to England, was building castles in the air and looking to a happy future. On board is a distinguished doctor, who has contracted a mysterious tropical malady, and he fell deeply in love with Peta. Having some nursing experience, she noticed the doctor’s plight and quickly assisted. At Port Said he is taken ashore with very little hope of living. Ho asked Peta to go with him. On his death-bed he pleads with Peta to marry him. She does, believing that as he has such a very short time to live she would almost immediately be free. Then complications arise, for the doctor survives. How this romantic story ends is told by Denise Robins in ‘ Those Who Love.’ It is exciting, thrilling, and fully upholds the slogan “ Robins for romance.” Our copy was sent by Whitcombe and Tombs, and the publishers nro Ivor, Nicholson, and Watson Ltd.

SIR WALTER BESANT THE DEBT OF THE MODERN NOVELIST It is quite possible that Sir Walter Besant’s novels are numbered among those which have ceased to be read to any extent worth speaking of (writes a correspondent of the London ‘Times ’). Many of them were the best-sellers of their time; but though the centenary of his birth falls to-day, we have heard of no centenary edition of them. Why? Like most novels of to-day that are hailed as joining the “ front rank,” they are not works of genius. None of the characters presented in them—not even Dick Mortiboy or Gilead P. Beck or Armorel of Lyonesse, or the brothers Humphrey and Cornelius Jagenal —are immortals who can be referred to in casual conversation with- any certainty that the reference will be understood. But they did stand for something definite. They did reflect—more faithfully, perhaps, than some romances which made more noise in the world—the manners and tone of the period in which they were published. They were full of the joy of life; and though no one of them ever struck a note which could cause the blush of shame to mantle on the cheek of innocence, and they were, in that sense, on the side of the angels, they were also on th side of the rebels against those Victorian conventions which made a virtue of dullness and a fetish of the business of keeping people in their place._ Dickens wks Besant’s model, in so far as he had one; and, allowance made for what was genius in one and talent in the other, there is more than a modicum of truth in the view of Besant’s contemporaries that Dickens wrote as Besant might have written if he had spent his youth in a blacking factory, and that Besant wrote as Dickens might have written if he had been at Cambridge. As a social reformer, Besant had the advantage of beginning where Dickens left off, and was able to make Dickens’s battlefields the starting point for fresh campaigns in the conquest of a merrier England. His first novel introduced a sympathetic character whose principal proposal for the amelioration of the world was that the Church Catechism should be pitched into the fire. The first novel which he wrote without Rice’s collaboration foreshadowed many of the diversions which now brighten the lives of the working classes in great cities. In another—- ‘ Katherine Regina ’ —he pleaded for more frivolity and more male com.panionship in the hostels inhabited by the young women who earned their living as clerks, governesses, and typists. And he was sufficiently a literary artist to preach without seeming to preach, and sufficiently a man of action and energy to work hard for the realisation of his ideals. _ Two important institutions are associated with his name. He founded the Incorporated Society of Authors ; because he had observed that the majority of authors, not being men of business, were at a disadvantage in their dealings with publishers, and that some publishers, not drawing the clear line which they should have drawn between good business and sharp practice, were prone to take advantage of innocence. In ‘ All Sorts and Conditions of Men ’ he sketched the . programme of that People’s Palace which was to do so much to give the East End of London a cheerful interest in the arts. For the Society of Authors he did most of the spadework himself, instead of delegating it to subordinates; and he gradually extended the scope of his society for the protection of men and women of letters not only against those who tried to exploit them in the home market, but also against Continental and American pirates and those of our own politicians who, now and again, diverted a portion of the Civil List Pension Fund into channels in which its founders had not intended it to flow. Besant’s belief, expressed in the modest speech which he delivered at a banquet given in his honour, that his knight hood was the reward of these practical services rather than of his merits as a writer of fiction was probably well founded. Other novelists among his contemporaries, as he himself would have been quick to admit, excelled him as artists; but he was the first of them to devise a practical plan for the protection of their literary property. These fine services should be remembered on the occasion of his centenary. NOTES The writing table on which Macaulay wrote his ‘ History of England ’ is one of the treasures of Wallington House, Northumberland, which Sir Charles Trevelyan is to bequeath to the National Trust.. Professor Herbert Somerton Foxwell, who has died at Cambridge, devoted much of his life to the collection of_ the most important private library in Europe of books on social and political economy. It is now owned by the University of London.

CHANGING RUSSIAN LIFE The changing conditions of life in a Russian city during the troubled years of 1919-20 are interestingly depicted in the story told by Flisaveta Fen, whose book, ‘ Rising Tide,’ has been published by MacMillan and Co. Ltd. This novel reveals the picture of the experiences of a bourgeois family living in a city alternately under the rule of Red and White troops, and discloses the discomforts that had to bo borne in a time of social upheaval. Discourtesies and unpleasant associates are forced into the lives of the members of the central family, some of whom bear their lot in an openly cheerful manner, while others grudgingly withhold their complaints in the interest of self-preservation. The story is entertainingly told, and enough Retailed asides arc introduced to preserve it from becoming a mere chronicle of plain facts. Our copy is from the publishers.

Signor Luigi Pirandello, the distinguished Italian playwright, is engaged on his autobiography. A musical setting of ‘Hark! Hark! the Lark,’ which from its age may have been the one known to Shakespeare, has just turned up in a Manchester public library. Mr Gabriel Wells, the American collector, has been invited by a London publisher to write a volume of reminiscences. Mr Wells is a familiar figure in salerooms on both sides of the Atlantic. A large portion of Hughenden Park, once the home of Disraeli, is likely to be bought by the Town Council of High Wycombe. Bulwer Lytton said of the house that it was “ bosomed high in tufted trees,” and the description still applies. ‘ Naulahka,’ the house at Brattleboro’ (Vermont) in which Mr and Mrs Kipling lived from 1892 until 1896, is now open to the public every afternoon upon payment of a small fee. Brattleboro’ is Mrs Kipling’s native city, and two of the children were born there. It was there, too, that the Jungle Books were written. General Archibald Wavell, who is writing the official biography of the late Lord Allenby, has many interests besides soldiering. He is an enthusiastic golfer and skier, and a keen rider to hounds. He _ served under Lord Allenby in Palestine, and is the author of ‘ The Palestine Campaigns.’ At present he is commanding the Second Division- at Aldershot. Two aged descendants of Flora Macdonald who died recently at Helensburgh, Scotland, bore the name of Miller. This, as ‘ Observator ’ points out in the London ‘ Observer,’ is a departuro from the family tradition. Flora Macdonald was herself a peculiarly obstinate Macdonald. She was born a Macdonald (on both sides), her step-father was a Macdonald, and she married a Macdonald. Two interesting documents recently offered for sale'in London are paragraphs in British history. The first is one of the last messages to be sent from Khartum by General Gordon. It was written on a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp, and was carried through the Mahdi’s lines concealed in the quill which was stuck in an Arab camel rider’s hat. The other is a certificate of capable seamanship and good conduct written for Lieutenant Horatio Nelson by his commander, Captain Locker, in 1778. Mr Oliver Baldwin, who has received wide publicity for his statement that Kipling’s anti-German 1 The Story ot Mary Postgate ’ is “ the wickedest story ever written,” was the famous author’s second cousin (writes the London Diarist of the ‘ Evening Standard ’). The relationship arose in this way. Kipling’s father was a designer of in the “Five Towns’’district. His best friend there was Rev. F W. Macdonald, a Wesleyan Methodist minister. Mr Macdonald had five beautiful daughters. Agnes _ married Sir Edward Poynter, Georgiann. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and Louisa a young engineer called Alfred Baldwin, who afterwards became a millionaire and the father of Mr Stanley Baldwin. Alice married Kipling’s father. They plighted their troth by Rudvard Lake, in the “Five Towns” district. Their son was christened Rudyard. Kipling's literary talent was perhaps inherited from his aunt, Mr Stanley Baldwin’s mother, who wrote several novels, a book of fairy tales called ‘ Pedlar’s Dreams,’ and a series of ghost stories. READING BOOKS TWSGE “ I have to admit that I seldom, very seldom, read a book twice. “ It may be a book which 1 admire greatly. The author has brought to it the thought and toil of years. He may have opened up to me new ranges of vision. I read him. I say to myself, ‘ That is a book to, be kept on the shelves near at hand.’ I mean to read that book again. But do 1? Most probably not. , , “ There are many reasons for this, and there are some consequences. Hie first and chief reason for this change in habit is that books come out so rapidly and there is always, and rightly, a strong appeal to the reader in the list of new books. The increased “speed at which books are produced tends to make the reader put away the book read and try to keep pace with the swift stream. “It is the general confession of such as prepare books for us that books have to-day a shorter life. Good books, even best-sellers, have, as a rule, a lesser term of life than they used to have. “ But may not this be due in part to the fact that in the conditions of this modern life we demand that accelerated supply? We want new books because we do not really want to read books twice. Upon us has fallen the spell of the cinema and the radio; we live in the age of speed. We travel faster; we eat faster; we read faster. And we do not tarry by the way. “ But as reasonable beings, do we not have to report losses as well as gains P “ What should we have known of Hamlet or King Lear if we had read these plays once and put them aside? Or for a matter of that, what should we have known of the book of Job or of Isaiah if we had read them as they came from a circulating library on Monday, and we had to return them on Wednesday? By the following Monday if you were asked what you remembered of these books you might answer that they left upon you a sense as of a glorious light, but what they revealed you could not precisely say. “ We should agree that for the understanding of such books there is need for many readings. But why should we re-read some of the books which come our way ? Why indeed ? Why read some of them at all ? “ You remember the ‘ Ballade of a Book Reviewer,’ written some j’ears ago by Mr Chesterton: “ ‘ I have not read a rotten page Of “ Sex Hate,” or “ The Social Test,” And here comes “ Husks ” and “ Heritage ”... 0 Moses, gives us a.l a rest! “ ‘Ethics of Empire!’ . . . I protest 1 will not even cut the strings, I’ll read “ Jack Redskin on the Quest,” And feed my brain with better things.’ “ Have you ever fled from some books of the day hack to ‘ Jack Redskin on the Quest ’ P “ But when the good book comes — there is no lack of good books—we shall not get the virtue of it by reading it once. To say that we can is to exalt ourselves above the writer and to boast that what took him years to prepare, takes us only an hour to understand. “ Yours ready to turn over an old hU,”—-“ Quintus Quiz,” in the • Christian Century.’