Shorter Notices
I Liked the Life I Lived. By Eveleigh Nash. (Murray. 9s.) MR. NASH was attracted towards publishing by reading at the age of sixteen a book about Scott's publisher called Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents ; it was a literary beginning to a not very literary career. Indeed, for a man who has dealt all his life with books, Mr. Nash seems curiously unresponsive to literary values, though these might have been a handicap to the publisher of The Sheik and the works of Charles Garvice. He was fond of publishing the memoirs of titled people, books with names like With the Prussians in Peace and War and Memories of the Months, and he must have kept a careful diary, for many of his reminiscences consist of the names of fellow-guests at dinner-parties or country-houses, names carefully remembered even when nothing else of note is recorded. " At his hospitable week-end parties I met mans interesting people, including the comely Lady Elspeth Campbell . . . Harry Betterton (now Lord Rushcliffe), whom I am alWays delighted to meet, Sir Mathew Wilson (Scatters;, Donough O'Brien and Sir Thomas Polson." There are a few good anecdotes and a delightful scene of quite unconscious humour when Mr. Nash, who had commissioned Henry James to write a novel (" before seeing a line of it " he adds), told the great novelist that he would prefer a novel in his early manner. (" I • was sadly disillusioned when the novel was delivered. It was The Wings of a Dove.") One likes, too, his comment on Lady Margaret Sackville, who " was even then writing poems which were published in good periodicals, and I am glad to see that some of these have been included in Anthologies, for this must be the high-water mark of a poet's ambition.".
Previous page
