Listening While I Work (33)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 260, 16 June 1944, Page 20

Listening While I Work (33)

By

Materfamilias

ROM America and from the BBC we ‘have a constant stream of "features" based on war topics. Some of them are _ conscious propaganda and some merely exploit interesting war stories. At a guess I would say that the BBC feature Eternity in an Hour belongs to the former and the American War Correspondent to the latter class. And yet of the two heard one after another in one evening’s listening there was in my mind no doubt as to which was the more moving and artistic production. But perhaps it is not fair to compare two features so dissimilar. War Correspondent is a series giving stories of and from the War Correspondents. This war certainly has put the correspondents in hot spots. They have burnt on desert sands, they have been bombed and torpedoed, they have frozen in northern winters, and they have suffered more casualties than correspondents expect to suffer because the war has caught them up too quickly. Because they are men used to telling stories and telling them in words and ways that a public likes, they have undoubtedly a lot of good yarns. These are the bones round which the programme is built and, up to a point, this is a good way of dramatising a good war story. Many of the names are familiar too. Only a week or so after 2ZB gave the story of war correspondent Larry Allen there was a note in the news that he had escaped from his prison camp. That helped to make him and his story more real. But the great fault in the episodes in this series is the fault common to most American programmes-exaggeration of circumstances which makes a true story sound like a fairy tale. Take the story of the escape of the last batch of war correspondents from Singapore. The crowding of boats, the attack by Japanese planes, the sinking of the ship, the wreck on the island-these all pass, except that somehow the excited shouts ‘of the ship’s company don’t sound real to me. But as if that were not enough to make an exciting story, tigers were introduced. Were they terrifying? Not to me. The just added a Boys’ Own Annual touch that made the rest seem more unreal than it was. * * * IN the other hand, Eternity in an Hour has the restraint that makes even an unlikely tale move you to tears or anger. There was nothing particularly new in the story, just another tale of sabotage and espionage in occupied Holland. But it wasn’t just a thriller. You lived through the moments in the cafe when the saboteur and the nurse talked of the world they might have lived in, the expedition into the.country under the flat Dutch sky, the peace and security that they have missed and which they feel they will never live to know, the world they are dying for so that the next generation may live in peace and freedom. The girl gets away, but she is the only one to reach the inn and give the sign and countersign at the rendezvous. There is no slick and happy ending, no (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) rounding up of conclusions and morals. Very poignant and very good propaganda. % % % ALTOGETHER the BBC has been doing us well lately. Tommy Handley’s Half Hour is good fun, full of laughs and surprisingly full of puns. It is a good many years since a noted authority on Shakespeare spoke disparagingly about the Elizabethan fondness for such a paltry form of humour. Evidently puns are back and they come slickly from Tommy Handley. The whole half-hour is bright and quicker than we normally expect English programmes to be, and it is very full of unexpected laughs. I hope there will be many more. * * * [Tt always strikes me as an interesting situation when novelists and poets read their own works. It would seem reasonable to expect that an author could put over just what he wants to say, and that his familiarity with his work would add so much charm and clarity to his reading. I haven’t heard many poets reading their own poems, but I remember the endless monotony of Masefield’s reading and my disappointment at finding that Walter De la Mare robbed his own verse of much of its magic. J. R. Hervey did well by comparison when he read some of his poems from 3YA the other Monday evening, but I still feel that poets are not the. best people to read their own poetry. Perhaps it is that they are too familiar with their own words, Perhaps it is a certain shyness, a reluctance to sell their own wares, perhaps a tendency, which I noticed especially with Mr. Hervey, to stress the metre of the lines sometimes at the expense of meaning. Reading poetry to a large audience is, of course, a highly-skilled job whoever does it. The actor tends to elocute, to over-emphasise sound at the expense of meaning. The ordinary man is liable to fumble and hesitate in a way which does not matter much with prose but which can be almost as fatal to a poem as to a song. But there must be many listeners who would find such a programme once a week or so quite as stimulating as a recital of songs. I hope that we may hear more poems by New Zealand poets.

WING to her temporary absence from New Zealand, Aunt Daisy's page does not appear this week, and may not appear for the next few issues.