Geese and Swans

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 124, 7 November 1941, Page 5

Geese and Swans

HOSE who are interested in modern writers and the younger and more enterprising authors of the present time, whether in England or on the Continent and elsewhere, should read John Lehmann’s recent account in the Pelican series. It is called New Writing in Europe and attempts to tell the story of the development of the younger writers during the last ten or fifteen years. Lehmann is inclined to turn some of the common variety of modern geese into super-modern swans, and the critical reader who has read the books which he deals with may at times be amazed, that it is evidently so easy to miss the world’s masterpiece even when it is staring one in the face. None the less, New Writing in Europe is an interesting survey not only of the Auden, Spender Day, Lewis group of writers, but also of the work af novelists like Graham Greene, George Orwell, Willy Goldman, B. L., Coombes, and others. Inevitably Lehmann’s account becomes not only literary history but social history as well, The new poets, with their concern for ‘the sickness of society, their images- drawn from the world of psychology and social struggle, have striven also to bring poetry more in relation to the lives of men and women. The new drama connected with the Group theatre and the Unity theatre and working-class Socialist experiments was symptomatic of the times. The development of numbers of new writers drawn from working class has been significant in a time of depressions and wars. -(Book Review of " New Writing in Europe," by John Lehmann. H. Winston Rhodes, 3YA, October 14.)