Chapter XXI
THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING YOUNG MAN, STEPHEN MCKENNA
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In a sense, all of Stephen McKenna’s writing has been a confession. More than any other novelist now actively at work, this young man bases fiction on biographical and autobiographical material; and when he sits down deliberately to write reminiscences, such as While I Remember, the result is merely that, in addition to confessing himself, he confesses others.
He has probably had more opportunity of knowing the social and political life of London from the inside than most novelists of his time. In While I Remember he gives his recollections, while his memory is still fresh enough to be vivid, of a generation that closed, for literary if not for political purposes, with the Peace Conference. There is a power of wit and mordant humour and a sufficiency of descriptive power and insight into human character in all his work.
STEPHEN McKENNA