Literary Guide

THE GEORGIAN SCENE--Frank Swinnerton--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Literary guides are not elected either by popular vote or by a session of their peers for theirs is usually a self-appointed task. But few better-qualified men could have been chosen to write a literary history of his contemporaries than Critic-Editor Frank Swinnerton. His middle-of-the-road guidebook to the Georgians (Henry James to T. S. Eliot) will be a useful Baedeker for literary sightseers; it does not pretend to be the last word in a never-ending critical argument.

Of nature-loving W. H. Hudson he says: "The only living creatures he hated were full-feeders, publishers, stoats, weasels, and ferrets." George Moore's "was not a generous mind, but though full of treacheries to friendship it was unwavering in strict loyalty to itself." Katherine Mansfield, "a charming, pathetic figure," had a talent that was "not . . . robust . . . and it was overweighted by an impulsive admiration for the tales of Tchehov." To his much-maligned friend Hugh Walpole he gives the Swinnertonian accolade of "professional novelist." Bertrand Russell's cold logic irritates Swinnerton who says: "The suggestion that a man may know everything and understand nothing would be meaningless to him." To D. H. Lawrence, "a sort of latter-day Carlyle rather than a latter-day Blake," he doffs his hat: "Let there be no mistake, however: in a hundred years he will probably still be on the literary map, while I, and those like me, will have sunk without trace from every record of the Georgian age."

But he is no worshipper of James Joyce. "To my mind he is a very able man, but not different in kind from other able men; only more brilliant and ruthless than they, and with a preference for what H. G. Wells has styled the cloacal. In that field he is a past-master." Aldous Huxley "is still baffled by the number of entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. . . . He has a greater capacity for wisdom than any encyclopaedia-stuffed man of this era; and may yet lead his generation, and the younger generation, into a state of grace out of which great things will come."

The Author, like many of his countrymen, is less pedantic than he looks but more than he pretends. A publisher's assistant since he was 18 (he was 19 years with Chatto & Windus), he retired to his Surrey cottage six years ago to give all his time to his own manuscripts. The late Enoch Arnold Bennett described Swinnerton: "He tells authors what they ought to do and ought not to do. He is marvelously and terribly particular and fussy about the format of the books issued by the firm. Questions as to fonts of type, width of margins, disposition of title-pages, tint and texture of bindings really do interest him. And misprints--especially when he has read the proofs himself--give him neuralgia and even worse afflictions. . . . Medium height, medium looks, medium clothes, somewhat reddish hair, and lively eyes. If I had seen him in a motorbus I should never have said, 'A remarkable chap.' "

Swinnerton has written more than a dozen books. Whenever he finishes one he eats a hot plum pudding, regardless of the season.

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