Class of 1914

No TIME LIKE THE PRESENT--Storm Jameson--Knopj ($2.50).

Margaret Storm Jameson belongs to a hard-hit generation (she calls it "the Class of 1914") and she comes from hard-bitten Yorkshire. The combination, as readers of her novels will recognize, is not one that makes for softness or cares about charm. Good if somewhat angrily honest, her stories are apt to be bitter to palates accustomed to a sugaring of the pill. In No Time Like the Present, half autobiography and half indictment of a civilization that returns to war like a dog to its vomit, there is less sugaring than ever, more anger than usual, and the same hard honesty as always.

Born & bred in the old seaport town of Whitby (where she still lives) she had an outdoor childhood, is sorry for those who do not. "Our only eternity is at the beginning of our lives and who if he could choose would choose to spend it in streets?" She won a scholarship to Leeds University, where "with one exception, all the young men who were my friends . . . were killed within the next three years." At Leeds she worked erratically but well, took a First and won a research scholarship at University College in London. There she shared a study with three young men, impoverished, enthusiastic students like herself; they worked, ate, argued apparently on terms of masculine equality. When, one day, Authoress Jameson had an article accepted by the New Age she was in the seventh heaven. "That paper was the Bible of our generation. We would rather go hungry than not buy it. We quoted it. argued with it, and formed ourselves on it. I suppose that Mr. A. R. Orage had a sharper influence on the young men of our day than any other man. . . . You got Orage as it might be religion--usually for life."

Then came the War. Authoress Jameson has never gotten over it. Her brother was killed, most of her friends. "In 1932, what lying, gaping mouth will say that it was worth while to kill my brother in his nineteenth year? You may say that the world's account is balanced by the item that we have with us still a number of elderly patriots, politicians, army contractors, women who obscenely presented white feathers. You will forgive me if, as courteously as is possible in the circumstances, I say that a field latrine is more use to humanity than these leavings." In answer to the upholders of the late War she quotes Ezra Pound's verse:

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilisation.

She comments on peace pacts and disarmament conferences: "As though you could take out an injunction against a bayonet in your stomach or make a neat point against chaos."

Authoress Jameson is not one who enjoys writing. Says she: "I would rather not write at all than write as I do, to live. . . . I am not what you call a born writer, and I should have been much happier as an engineer. . . . Each book now represents so many months of hard bitter effort and no moments of satisfaction." But she despises writers (especially popular ones) who have no social conscience or are deliberately sentimental: "Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act."

Married, Authoress Jameson is not raising her only son to be a soldier.

Other books: Three Kingdoms, That Was Yesterday, The Lonely Ship, The Voyage Home, A Richer Dust.

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