Wes Lawrence

Barry's Girls Corner Author

John Braine, the Yorkshire author of Room at the Top and other novels, arrived in Cleveland Tuesday to find the lobby of his hotel well-populated with Goldwater followers. A group of teen-age girls, mistaking him for a member of the senator's party, asked him if he had a sign for them to carry.

no, I

"I told them didn't," Braine said yesterday as he related the incident for a Town Hall audience. "They asked me if I weren't for Goldwater, and I told them, no I wasn't. Then they asked me if I were for Johnson. RememJOHN BRAINE bering the awful reputation of American teen-agers, and considering that the female is more deadly than the male, I said no, I wasn't, that I was neutral. 'I'm English,' I told them.

"SO ONE OF THE GIRLS immediately shouted “Ringo for president,' and they went marching off, chanting ‘Ringo for president.' I'm afraid I may have complicated your election."

Braine revealed, after his Town Hall talk, that his next novel, The Jealous God, the first since Life at the Top was published in 1962, will be released in England next month and, he hoped, in America next spring.

The 42-year-old former librarian, whose Room at the Top was an international best-seller in 1957 and was made into a popular movie, was asked by a member of his feminine audience whether one should take a course in writing to learn to write.

“IF YOU HAVE THAT MUCH money to spare," he said, "I suggest that you spend it on a new hat. I have never known any writer who took a course in writing. You already know how to write. What you have to learn is how much time you must spend every day at writing. Then you sit down and you write. Of course, you can't write without having done a great amount of reading. You should read authors of the past and contemporary authors, I should say on a ratio of about two to one."

Braine's own writing is done, he said, in a flat he maintains about six miles from where he lives with his wife and two children.

DENYING THAT THERE WAS any such thing as a school of "angry young writers" in England, Braine said that what happened about 1953 was a general change in the type of British novel. Before that time, he said, beginning after World War I, a British novel was supposed to have London or its environs as its locale, a middle class hero, and a plot in which the hero got the worst of two worlds. Now, he said, the hero can be a working man, he need not get the worst. of it, and since Room at the Top the locale has moved to the north of England.

The worst fault of American fiction, in Braine's opinion, is its bad taste. And he expressed disapproval of homosexual novels, not for moral reasons, but because in his opinion only a normal heterosexual man has the tenderness, and only such a woman has sufficient masculinity. to write accurately about normal people.