THE REAL-AND THE IMAGINARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 233, 10 December 1943, Page 10

THE REAL-AND THE IMAGINARY

Books And Desert Islands HE discussion on books and music for desert islands reminds me of two jokes about the Mayflower. One was a picture of her hung all round her spars and rigging like a Christmas Tree, with the furni--ture and effects of the Pilgrim Fathers--a reference to the number of relics that appear to have been brought over in the ship. The other was the remark that, judging by the number of Mayflower ancestors and their possessions claimed by descendants, the ship must have been about the size of the Lusitania. One may imagine a person ‘setting out on a world cruise these days with the remote possibility in his mind of being marooned. "Let me see," as he packs‘"What shall I need if I have to console myself in a remote part of the Pacific? Shakespeare and the Bible, War: and Peace, 4 set of Dickens, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the poems of T. S. Eliot, Auden and Spender, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Joyce’s Ulysses, and an omnibus W. W. Jacobs. Yes, I think I could get along with that lot. Of course to an intellectual it is a meagre choice, but one must be prepared to rough it. As to music, there will be my gramophone (or I might see about a small piano), and a couple of hundred records of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Sibelius and Gershwin." "All passengers on deck, please! Dress yourselves and put on your lifebelts. Luggage? You'll be lucky if you carry away your toothbrushes. Books? This is a shipwreck!’ We may leave to the imagination what the officers in charge of the boats and rafts would say about editions of So-and-So, gramophones and albums of recordings. x e+" * F gramophones and records were landed on a small island-say, about the size of Ward Island in Port Nichol-son-the situation might develop in-. triguingly. One man might have nothing but comic songs, another nothing but ballads of the Stephen Adams-F. E. Weatherly type, and a third nothing written before 1920. It would be like that Highland gathering. "Were ye no at Angus ‘Macdonald’s last nicht? There was seven pipers in one room, an’ a’ playing different chunes-ye’d ha’ thocht ye was in Heaven!" * * % | HAPPENED once to meet a man who had taken one book to a desert island. It was a real desert island, and extremely unpleasant. He was a German chimney-sweep with two main hobbiesHomer in translation and good china, which he had collected in his wanderings. I got to know him because he asked me where he could buy Pope’s translation of Homer (evidently to replace copies worn out or lost). He had inquired in a bookshop of one New Zealand city, and been offered Omar. He told me this story. He had been a sailor in sail. One voyage they set out from a Chilean nitrate port for Europe round the Horn. The ship struck one of (continued on next page) _

(continued from previous page) the long chain of desolate islands that stretch down the Chilean coast, and was lost. Some of the crew got ashore. My acquaintance grabbed the ship’s cat and his copy of Homer and stuck*them inside his shirt. I don’t know. what happened to the cat, but Homer saved a nasty situation. The island was cold and miserable. It rained nearly all the time, and it took the castaways a week to make a fire by friction. For the weeks they were there, until they were picked up by a Chilean Government steamer (as the Hinemoa used to rescue castaways on our southern islands), they had absolutely nothing to eat but mussels. Tempers frayed and rows started.. The German sailor had the bright idea of reading Homer to the party. This he did every day, and the peace was kept. It saved their lives, he said, No, if you do contemplate really being marooned, put one book aside, and not a big one at that. It would be difficult to swim ashore with an omnibus volume in your shirt. And cultivate your memory. On a voyage from England to Ireland, Macaulay amused himself by repeating from memory the whole of Paradise Lost.

A.

M.