The Living Novel [antikvár]

EXPERIENCE suggests that a writer is wise to avoid reading many novels when he is writing one himself; and Mr. Somerset Maugham, an efficient guide to the hygiene of authorship, has even laid it down that a novelist ought to have few books in his house at any time. I have never desired, indeed could never afford perfect health; and at the beginning of the war I was sitting half inside other people's novels and half inside a növel of my own. The war put a stop to that. Without leisure or freedom to write what I wanted, I could at least read what I wanted, and I turnéd to those most remarkable men and women: the great novelists of the past, those who are called the standard novelists, We were and are living through a revolution, and revolutions stir us to a totál reconsideration of the past: a reconsideration of the növel might teli me where my own half-finished növel was wrong; it would certainly teli me, if I regarded each classic as it came along as a new just-published book, what a good növel ought to be. I set out therefore on a number of short journeys of rediscovery, too idle and specific in my enquiry to call myself a critic, but rather like the ordinary reader who has somé priváté axe to grind. Somé of the notes I made appeared from week to week in the columns of the New Statesman and Nation and now, occasionally lengthened, are collected in this volume. To the literary editor of that paper, Mr. Raymond Mortimer, I owe a great debt for encouraging and advising me in projects which, I must confess, often scared me. For, except to the bookish, many of what are called the .. vn