HIGHBROW NOVELS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 14, 9 October 1937, Page 15

HIGHBROW NOVELS

Are They True to Life?

The theory that people who read "the clever novels producqd by highbrows" are really studying life was critxcised by Lord Elton in a rocent broadcast. " To his way of thinking, these clever novels are usually much further removed from^ life than tho wilflest romauce of the handsome hero whp t'ells flve fully-armed . gangsters wjth his bare flsts, or the blue-eyed oflice girl who marries tbe disguised prince of Buritania. "We smile." said Lprd Elton, "at what appear to us to be the stilted and unnatural conventione in the Victorian novels our grandparents read- The blushing An'gelina, th© whiskered Edwin seem to us mere figures of pastebpard. But the f&shionabie novels of tq-day seem to me, 1 must confesa, to be full of conventione every bit as onreal, . . . To begin with, there is the obvious fact that an uverwhelming majority of the people you encountor, if* you read highbrow novels, are . persons of either very Iqoso or very perverted morais, or both; whereas nine-tenths of the. people one meets in everyd&y life are sober, decent folk*. That is an old conveation, Just as odd as the couvention of manly Edwin and blushing Angelina, Just as odd and not so ploasant. And then there is the habit of writing at full leagth in the plainest Of plnin English of matters which twenty-five years ago were only mentxoned in Latin in the footnotes to works on medical jurisprudence. That

convention is surely just as odd as the conventioa of Edwin and Angelina, and Oot half as agreeable." - War novels also provide a convention which Lord Elton criticised— 'the belie# that war is much worse fer the young than for the old, " You must have come acress the ultra-patriotic father who paeke his son off into the Army, 'If only I was your age, my boy,' : He revels in his Vicarious sacriflce, while the son heavy-heartedly dons his khaki, bitterly reflectlng that hisx elders made the war while he, on the thresbold of life, is called upon to fight it." Looking back on his own experieuce, Lord Elton remembered that, when he joined the Army it was with a pleasant stir of excitement, and a faint sense of being a hero: "I hadn't the faintest coneeption then of the gnawing antieties which must. be felt by the parents of a son on active service. Now, with a son of my ,own, I can imagine them ^nly too clearly. The late War was uncomfortable at times for me, but, ae I realise now, nothing like so uncomfortable as it must have been for my parents," But the highbrow novelist cannot see this; in his works it is always the other way round, and it is only the young who suffer. , " Y es, ' ' Lord Elton added, "I think that to read 'clever' novels is usually in its own way every bit as much au escape from life as to read the thriller or the love romance."