Word: reader
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...little above mediocrity. There is a ghost story by Somerset Maugham, for instance, in which the author describes an uncanny scene in the most matter of fact terms, no doubt believing this the certain means of investing the supernatural with reality. The story cannot help reminding the reader of "The Phantom Rickshaw", an unfortunate recollection, for Mr. Maugham has been matter of fact and nothing more...
...both a personality and an education. This has marked him with a shyness which is now less a matter of reality than a survival of what, I imagine, was an earlier manner. He was associated with a publishing house at an early age, and is now literary adviser and reader to Chatto & Windus in London. Many of his novels have been written under the most trying circumstances, when he was lonely, pressed for time or ill. Yet he has preserved through all this an extraordinarily sweet attitude toward life...
Books, we are credibly informed, have souls. So, in all probability, have houses, towns, vegetables, hair nets, tin cans. In the case of books, however, the situation becomes more acute. The soul of a book tends rather to force itself upon the reader. One is led to wonder what other qualities noble or ignoble the unassuming volumes on our shelves share with the existing lords of creation. Have books feelings, sensibilities, all those little emotional refinements which make of life so deli cate an adventure? No one wants to hurt a book's feelings. Are they sensitive? Have they their...
...sense, taciturn. A quite simple gesture may suffice to bring forth a perfect volume of verbosity from the most unassuming. But they are at a disadvantage. A book is quite incapable of button holing you. At any moment it may be reduced to completely submissive silence by the reader's merely turn ing away his head. But does all this reticence imply a Spartan fortitude, hiding intolerable pain...
...Swinnerton has been well coached. His account of the origin of the "Young Visiters" coincides in all important respects with that of its distinguished, though whimsical, sponsor. According to his own statement, Mr. Swinnerton received the manuscript from a friend of Daisy Ashford's while he was a reader in a London publishing house. He showed it to friends and then, after much difficulty, persuaded Sir J. M. Barrie to write a preface for it. To lend artistic verisimilitude to this unconvincing narrative, he adds fascinating details of Miss Ashford's subsequent career, and even fells how she spent...