FACTUAL AND CREATIVE WRITING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 651, 21 December 1951, Page 5

FACTUAL AND CREATIVE WRITING

Sir,-This letter should really be sent to whomever compéred Book Shop (2YA, November 30). I enjoyed the Christmas edition, Part One. M. K. Joseph’s selection of current prose literature-I hope I am not biased by his choice of my novel among those for mention-I thought outstandingly good. A. D. Priestley handled other prose with more care than most of it deserved. But I particularly enjoyed the irony of the commentator’s footnote. It is a peculiarity of some New Zealanders who have moved into reviewing, "literary criticism," etc., to prefer the ostensibly factual to the creative, to exclaim over golfers’ memoirs and books with titles such as Penguin Rearing in the Cocos Islands (factual stuff, you know-stat-istics enclosed) and My Aunt Matilda’s Love Life in Turkestan, I don’t know at what point in this century the compére of Book Shop began to watch novelists earn their temporary fame only to fade into oblivion. I think, however, that I could name three or four novelists active in any decade of the 20th Century whose works will survive long after writers of "adventure, games and travel" have lost their ephemeral nrarket, Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that Joyce Carey’s Mister Johnson has greater possibilities of enduring than Pauline Betz’s (have I the name correctly?) tennis reminiscences, ae My apologies. I have become serious. And I agreed to regard the compére’s footnote, in which he expressed his preference for books about tennis, golf and all that, as an ironical gesture directed at the uninitiated or illiterate. My congratulations to him.

GUTHRIE

WILSON

(Palmerston North).