ROBERT

“HONOR SCOTS BARD

BURNS

McEwen to give address

at Burns N

' THE. PROUD ~ contribution

made by Scottish immigrants and-

Canadians of Scottish origin ‘to
British Columbia’s — democratic
heritage and militant labor tradi-
tion will be recalled by Tom Mc-
. Ewen, editor of the Pacific Trib-
_ une, when he addresses the Burns
Night supper to be held in Hast-
ings Auditérium (lower hall) on
Saturday, January 24. (Tickets at
$1.25 each, now on sale at the
_ Pacific Tribune office, Room 6,
426 Main Street and the People’s
Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West

ight affair

Pender Street, erroneously give
the date as Saturday, January
25.) :

In honoring Robert Burns, the
great Scottish bard whose immor-
tal Memory has become an in-
spiration to working people every-
where, the supper gathering will
also pay tribute to the Scottish
pioneers, from the miners of the
early Cariboo to “Ol’ Bill” Ben-
nett, the great labor journalist,
whose work has teft its indelible
imprint in B.C. tradition and his-
tory.

my subscription to
enclose
CHEQUE

BIRTHDAY
DANCE

YUGOSLAV HALL

767 KEEFER

SATURDAY
JANUARY 24
Sis 8:30 p.m.
\ Admission 50 cents
Proceeds to Champion
Financial Drive

CHAMPION for one year

QO

aoteceeee

A Send th SRS oa LARGE & SMALL HALLS
eae Vancouver 4, B.C, ws eee

GUIDE TO GOOD READING

Oxford Movement's beginnings |
in Britain in eighteen-thirties |

THE OXFORD Movement start-
ed in the eighteen-thirties, in Brit-
ain, when the first Reform Bill
had extended the franchise to the
bourgeoisie, and Chartism threat-
ened to seize it for the workers.

A group of Oxford dons (all
parsons then) thought that the
Church and aristocratic society
needeal defending against demo-
cracy and “those wretched Social-
ists.” Inequalities in rank, they
held, were facts in God’s Provid-
ence which it was folly to deny.

Led by John Henry Newman,
they wished to restore the pre-
Reformation position where priests
did men’s thinking for them. They
started a witch-hunt against ‘lib-
eral” theologians.

Their object, naively proclaim-
ed, was to save the ‘Church’s priv-
ileges and its vast property from
‘“Gnfidel” parliaments. But their
position’ contained fundamental
contradictions.

The Anglican Church had al-
ways walked a tight-rope between
the Catholicism it rejected in the
16th century and the rationalism
and democracy which it could
never fully accept. Newman tried
by equivocal arguments to remain

.in the Church of England while
attacking its historically progres-
Sive origins.

“Tt should. be sorry to trust
(Newman) with my*purse,” said a
fellow-parson after a public dis-
cussion. aan) ;

The logic of the movement ulti-

-mately drove many of the rank-
and-file and then (reluctantly)
Newman himself into the Roman
Catholic Church: the only secure
anti-democratic authority in the
19th century.

But ‘by the time Newman took
this plunge. Britain was emerg-
ing from the crisis of the ‘thirties
and’ forties, and capitalism * was
advancing to smug Victorian pros-
perity. Newman found himself
isolated in his alien creed.

* * *

TODAY A greater crisis is driv-
ing more intellectuals to seek ref-
uge in the Catholic Ghurch: and
Newman, the premature anti-ra-
tionalist, is being treated as a
serious and digniled intellectual
figure. In Newman’s Way (Long-
man) Sean O’Faolain reveals (not
entirely intentionally) the more
squalid side of Newman’s develop-
ment.

His father was a thrice-bankrupt
banker, with a bogus coat of arms,

who. ended: up keeping .a pub. |

Newman was horribly ashamed of
this, and even when he had become
a cardinal, still shuffled desperate-
ly to conceal the family “dis-
grace.”

: Contrast John’s scapegrace So-
cialist and tepublican brother
Charles, friend of G, J. Holyoake,
to whom O’Faolain does less than
Justice. Newman early broke with
Charles, though ‘subsidising him
sufficiently to prevent him becom-
ing a__—publie embarrassment
(Charles could never hold down a
Job.)

But in 1882, Newman, now a
cardinal, but a disappointed, frus-
trated old man, suddenly decided
to visit the poverty-stricken broth-
er whom he had disowned for so
long. Charles refused to see him,

preferring to die alone in his gar-
pels \
Perhaps Charles remembered
their father’s prophetic words:
“Well, John, I suppose I ought to
praise you for knowing how io
rise in the world! Go on... .

Always stand up for men in pow
er and in time you will get your
promotion!”? ‘
Charles got no promotion, but
he led 4 more useful and happier

life than the disillusioned car |

dinal.—C.H,
4

CRITIC VOICES PROTEST

Book Week change gives
edge to U.S.

ACCORDING TO William Ar-
thur Deacon, one of Canada’s
leading literary critics and book
editor of the Toronto Globe and
Mail, Canadian Book Week, which!
has become an_ institution for
three decades, is to be abandoned
this year.

In a recent column, Deacon
writes:

“Canadian Book Week, the old-
est activity of the Canadian Auth-
‘ors Association, is dead after 30
years of usefulness. It will be
replaced, March 14-21, 1953, by
the new celebration called Book
Week in Canada. The authors
have gone into partnership with
the publishers, booksellers and
librarians to manage the enter-
prise, which will no longer main-
tain its exclusively Canadian char-
acter. This sounds like the set-up
of the Toronto book fairs of 1936-
37 in which Canadian books play-
ed an important but decidedly
minor part. The aim is a national
affair for this year; and if any-
thing like the old book fairs are
to be staged in every ‘ity, the
cost will be prohibitive.

“The change of date talone will
compel the shift of emphasis from
Canadian to imported books. For
several reasons. Canadian -bcoks

»

are seldom published in the.
‘spring, overwhelmingly in the
fall. 3.1,

“The majority of. publishing:
houses in Toronto, if they publish
Canadian books at all, find them
a very small proportion of the
total number of titles they handle
yearly. If the bulk of the business
of the great majority of publish-
ers is the selling of imported
books, the logic of the equation,.
is plain.

“Some very unflattering state-
ments have been made in print
by the committee as to the in-
effectiveness of the old Canadian
Book Week. These must come
from persons with no personal
knowledge of the facts. I remem-
ber May Pashley Harris of Wind-
sor reporting in Vancouver in
1947 on the effort of the fall of
1946. As closely as I remember
the figures, 118 columns of news-
paper space had been devoted to
Canadian books; a total of 24
hours of radio time had been
given, while the speeches delivered
at meetings all over the country
would thhave occupied a week if
given from one platform with talks
proceeding 24 hours a day.”

Ae oka tat

IN VANCOUVER this week,
Merwyn Marks, manager of the
People’s Cooperative Bookstore,
which has sponsored an annual
book fair in the city for the past
Several years, pointed to the

‘growing public interest in books
by ‘Canadians and about Canada.

“Any move to diminish the im-
portance of Canadian books will
most certainly meet with public
resistance,” he commented. “An
increasing proportion of the book-
buying public is becoming aware
of the constricting effect witch-
hunting and war hysteria aré hav-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 16, 1953 — PAGE 8

publishers —

ing on U.S. publishers’ lists. More
and more people are rejecting the
glorification of! sex and war which
passes for literature in the U.S.
today. i }
“Canadian publishers have 2
real opportunity to meet the pub-
lic demand by putting out worth-
while reading.
to do it by promoting American
books.” ; ee

CURRENT FILMS
Spectacular |
but boring ©

THE MERMAID in Million Dol-
lar Mermaid is Esther Williams —
impersonating the real-life Aust-
ralian swimmer Annette Keller
man. Be

The story tells of her advance
from being a mere swimming
champion, with laughably naive
notions about her amateur status,
to genuine American success 43.
the star of a million dollar enter-
tainment in which her gyrations
in a vast water tank are supported
for good measure: by the great —
ballerina Pavlova (beautifully sug
gested ‘by Maria Tallchief) and
Sousa’s brass band. Ue

The emphasis here is on spec? —
tacle. Miss Williams is a highly
capable swimmer and diver and
she explores the limited entertain-
ment possibilities of these accomp-
lishments in a large tank, against
a background of colored smoke
and the miscellaneous ingenuities
of the New York stage.

At varions points in the story
she swims from Putney to Green=
wich in a fog, gets herself arrested

_ for indecency in Boston and falls

in love with the enterprising own"
er of Rin-Tin-Tin. .

Her boy friend sums her up 2S
shrewdly as anybody: “Wet you're —
teriffic. Dry, you’re a nice gitl
who should get married.”

Good enough, and recommended —
to those who don’t find water-tank —
spectacles as boring as I do.

* * *

THE PRODUCERS of The
Thief may have thought that the.
best way to publicise the unspeax-
able’ was cut out the dialogue. At —
any rate, there is no talking in this
otherwise routine piece of cold-_

, war propaganda.

As he goes through his motion
as a scientist who steals atomic
Secrets, escapes, relents, and gives
himself up to the FBI, Ray Mil-
land wears an agonised frown. __

It is not clear whether his evi-
dent distaste with life is brought
on by the effort of keeping his
mouth shut, the knowledge that he —
is caught in the toils of a worth-
less script, or a natural reluctance
to face the world since he became
vice-president of the Hollywo
Committee for Senator McCarthy:

Silence, in the circumstances, 19
his best bet. . :

\

They can’t hope |