Love Of Business And Love Of Books

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 471, 28 September 1928, Page 14

Love Of Business And Love Of Books

l From one of Mr Hugh Wat pole’s Lon,don letters to "The Sew York Times." The extract below comes after a first paragraph in which Mr Walpole has referred to the qtllet publicity season .f QUIET seasons of this kind are admirable moments for futile discussions, and Lord Birkenhead started one the other day when he asserted roundly that men writers were vastly superior to women. Than this there can be surely no more foolish debate, and yet the silliness of it has not prevented a great many people engaging in hot discussion. I seem to remember that 20 years ago there was a good deal of dominance by women of •he literary circles in London: Violet Hunt gave delightful garden parties under her trees on Campden Hill; there were the most fascinating luncheons at old Rhoda Broughton’s; Mrs K. Clifford gave soirdes and Miss May Sinclair very solemn dinners at her club. As an eager and excited young man I went to all these functions and enjoyed them thoroughly,

but the literary “shop” of the day was extremely exciting to me, and women are infinitely better at giving a sublime air of importance to literary "shop” than are men. I don’t go to literary gatherings in London any “more, but I imagine that they no longer exist here as once they did. For one thing, there is not, I suppose, the timp; for another, novelists and poets to-day live almost without exception out of London. Arnold Bennett apparently does most of his work In London, and, it seems, all of It before breakfast. And, then, I fancy that the whole quality of literary talk in London has deteriorated; nobody seems to have any time any more, and everything wear a commercial air. The love of business and the love of letters are being further and further divorced: a great deal of splendid work has been done, especially in the production of beautiful new editions of old books; but authors, it seems to me, are being less and less encouraged to build up their reputations with solid patience; everybody is being urged to be quick and sensational. When yesterday I told a man of business in the world of letters that I was at work on a novel that would, I hoped, occupy me for some two years, he was horrified that I should allow a year to go by without publication of something under my name. He quoted E. M. Forster as an example of the danger of allowing long intervals between books, and I, on my side, instanced him as an example of exactly the opposite. Forster’s reputation was, I said, so splendidly high simply because he didn’t write save when he must. “But look at the money he hasn’t made,” my companion remarked, and then couldn’t see that lasting success is never made out of snap aensajjonal performances.

The truth of the matter is that here, as well as in America, the rewards of a commercially successful book are now so startling as to be a temptation to almost everybody. ’’The Constant Nymph” has been a dangerous example; after its immense book success it has been a tremendously fortunate play, a very popular film and now it has found in its cheap sixpenny book form millions of new readers. More and more publishers and agents are quite naturally looking for Constant Nymphs, and more and more authors are trying to write them; but the whole point about “The Constant Nymph” was that it was written, as were “The Bridge of San Luis Key” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” without any thought of -popular success at all. This is a platitude—that no book is worth anything at all unless, while in the writing, it exists for the author as something created without any thought of its public life. It is just that premature intrusion of publicity that is the danger and certain publishers and agents are doing definite harm to contemporary literature by their eagerness to make popular successes out of an art that is nothing if it is not jealously guarded.

I was at a dinner the other night snd four or five authors were present. One of them was a novelist who had immense commercial success but has lost in the course of it critical appreciation; another was a poet of an exquisite talent who has never had any commercial success at all and probably never will have. I admire him so greatly that as we sat there he was to myself by far the most enviable man in the room. He was very silent during most of the evening, but toward the end of it, after there had been much talk of prices and publics, he said: “I wonder whether you realise that it is becoming more and more difficult every day for a poet in England to be published at all. There are .at this moment to my positive knowledge half-a-dozen books of poetry going the rounds of the English publishers that would, if they appeared, give credit to any literature. Even three years ago they would have found publishers: now on every side one is fold that there is nobody left in England who buys hooks of contemporary poetry. It is hell to-day to be a poet.” He spoke with so much bitterness that i couldn't help saying: “It is odd for you to say that, because you are the one man in the room whom all the evening I have been envying.” He answered: “My last book sold 200 copies in England: I am going back to selling 3Botor-cars in the city.” __