The Great Mervyn Blake

THE large room rented by the Australian Society of Creative Writers for its bi-monthlymeetings was comfortably filled on the afternoon of 7th November. The Society was fairly strong and quite influential, for many of its members had arrived in the local world of belles-lettres and its president was the well-known Mervyn Blake, novelist and critic.

He was the chief speaker this afternoon, and he spoke with the assurance of the successful. His speech began shortly after tea, which was served at half past three, and it finished at four minutes to five, being followed by polite hand-clapping. At five o’clock he left the building in company with Miss Nancy Chesterfield, the socialeditress of theRecorder.

Blake’s age was somewhere in the early fifties. He was large but not fat, florid of face but not flaccid of muscle, and his over-long hair still matched the colour of his dark-brown eyes. He carried his years exceptionally well, for Prosperity riding on one shoulder and Success on the other kept those shoulders well back.

“Glad you were able to make the grade this afternoon,” he said when he and Nancy Chesterfield were walking along Collins Street to the Hotel Australia. “Do we pick up your case at your office?”

“Yes, please, Mervyn. I left it with the commissionaire so there’ll be no need to go up for it. My compliments on your speech. But-”

“But what?”

“I wonder. Do you think if the modern novelist turned out his wares similar in length and scope and digression to, say, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray, that they would be acceptable to modern publishers?”

“No, most certainly not. Modern publishers have to and do pander to the demands of the modern and now comparatively educated herd. Old time publishers took pride in their part of the production of fine literature. Nowadays they demand sensationalism slickly put across, for their shareholders must be given their pound of flesh. Anyway, it’s a heck of a dry argument, and at the moment I’m sick of telling the would-be great how to write novels. And I am sick of literary people-which is one reason why I had Janet to ask you out for the night.”