MATHEMATICIAN TURNED AUTHOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 20

MATHEMATICIAN TURNED AUTHOR

HE paradoxes of authorship have seldom been shown more clearly than in the case of Nevil Shute, the British novelist who visited New Zealand this month to attend the Booksellers’ Conference at Wairakei. Mr. Shute, whose 16 novels have sold around three million copies, stopped for a day in Wellington on his way back to Australia, where he now lives, and talked tothe Press about himself and his work. He is a person you wouldn’t notice in a crowd, with a mild, pink face and an abashed manner. Yet after he had been talking for a while he revealed himself to be a man of charm and intelligence, and possessing a large number of original and interesting ideas. He was asked whether he didn’t miss the literary life of London since he had emigrated to Australia.

"As a matter of fact, I’ve never lived in London," he said, "I’ve never mixed with the literary crowd and don’t -know any of them. I’ve always preferred to live out of London. All my fftiends are engineers and serving officers. I never read novels. Most of my reading is in the field of current affairs and technical . matters. I began life as a mathematician, you know, and I regard myself as basically an engineer who writes for fun." Nevil Shute’s real mame is Nevil Shute Norway, and it is under this head that he is listed in Who’s Who, followed by the letters B.A. Oxon; F.R.Ae.S. The entry notes that he was born in 1899 and attended Balliol College at Oxford, served in the war as a private in the Suffolk Regiment, and began his aeronautical career as a stress and performance calculator for the de Havilland

Aircraft Co. Ltd., from 1922 to 1924. The following year he became Chief Calculator for the Airship Guarantee Company, and worked on construction of the Rigid Airship R.100. He became their Deputy Chief Engineer, and in 1930 twice flew the Atlantic in the R.100 as a representative of the con-

structors. He then became Managing Director of the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club, and in 1931 founded his own construction company, Airspeed Limited, who are best known in this. country for their advanced twin-engined trainer the Airspeed Oxford. He was Joint Managing Director of Airspeed Limited for eight years, but in 1938 he "retired from industry and took up writing as a main pursuit." This second career was interrupted by the war. He was commissioned in the R.N.V.R. in 1940, became a LieutenantCommander in 1941, and retired in 1945. A few years after the war ended he left England and took up residence in Australia® with "his -wife-~and two daughters. Before coming .out.. to.,this part of the world he went to the United States on a lecture tour which. he regarded in the nature of a "Tegan naissance. to see if he would like" to settle there. Buf he decided to reriain within the’ Commonwealth, and igapw very happy in Australia. oye" The mystery of ‘why a man who: had made such a successful career in aero+ nautics should decide at the age of 39 to give it all-up to write fiction is one that Mr. Shute may attempt to explain in’ his autobiographical volume,- Slide Rule, which is shortly to be published: But part of the explanation at least was given by him when he met the Press in Wellington. He said that he began writing in 1920, so that for eighteen years he must have been living a kind of double life, designing aeroplanes and airships by day and writing short stories and novels at night. His first published novel was Marazan, which came out. in 1926, It was-two years before he published anotner, and the fiext two were published at. intervals of four and six years respectively. He had written only four novels when he retired from indus(continued on next page)

(continued trom previous page) try in 1938, but since then his rate of production has increased considerably. .The relationship between writing fiction and designing aircraft is an unusual but not impossible one, since both involve the creative processes and both require a high power of imaginative construction. It seems possible that as Mr. Shute moved further from the designing board and more into administration and directorship he may have felt that his creative and imaginative abilities were being frustrated, and so decided to break away towards what he still regards as a "hobby." At any rate, he is still very proud of his engineering background, and jealous of his feats as a designer. He is careful to point out that "the R.100 died peacefully of old

age," and did not crash like the R.101, which "was designed by another company." He likes to remember, too, that Airspeed Limited designed the first | machine to have a retractable undercarriage, the Airspeed Courier, and that the Airspeed Envoy was at one time assigned to the King’s Flight "for use by His Majesty." Mr. Shute is a royalist, and in his. novel In the Wet he proposed that the Queen should live in each country of the Commonwealth for part of the year. Each of his novels, he says, starts from an idea of this sort, usually related to current affairs. He is always provocative; his mind is lively and his manner is very pleasant, which may help to explain why his books invariably become best-sellers.