DISORDERED THOUGHTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 291, 19 January 1945, Page 16

DISORDERED THOUGHTS

HERE’S TO LIFE. By Henry J: Hayward: Oswald-Séaly (N.Z.) Ltd. HIS is an autobiography-or perhaps it would be better to describe it in the words of Mr. Hayward’s own subtitle as "The Impressions, Confessions and Garnered Thoughts of a FreeMinded Showman." Since the author has himself put the emphasis there, a reviewer may bé excused for suggesting that showmanship, of a kind, is the book’s chief feature. Look at some of the chapter-héadings: "I Face Lifé," "I Meet a Siren," "The Stage Kept Calling,? "Love and Sex agnetisin," "Dates with Death and Disaster," "The Rise of the All-Conquéering Cinema," "A ‘Madcap’ Prima Donna," "Sciénce Points the Way." And that is not half (continued from previous page)

(continued from previous page) of them." Mr. Hayward can certainly offer you. variety, though you may wonder exactly what he is offering you when you come across a chapter headed "Nature Calls and Consoles." One feels, indeed, that Mr. Hayward has been compiling film advertisements and theatre puffs for so long that it has become second nature to him. Somebody, I forget his name, once wrote a neat little satire in which all the .characters thought and spoke in the manner of the sub-titles on silent films, Mr. Hayward’s literary ‘style, liberally sprinkled with capital letters and outbursts of rhetoric, gives the same impression: an amusing impression until you become tired of it and begin to wish that he would not insist, for instance, on calling London "the mighty Metropolis," or keep on talking about Life as if it were an M-G-M super-production in technicolour. Still, that is Mr. Hayward’s outlook and. this is his autobiography. Nor does he see any reason to apologise for the almost incredible lack of arrangement of his’ "garnered thoughts." On the contrary, he defends it in his foreword by quoting (or misquoting) the Elizabethan poet who said, "There is more beauty in Disorder ‘than in Order." That, comments Mr. Hayward, is "my mental attitude," A reviewer cannot add much to thatbut he may perhaps make a suggestion. Whatever may be Mr. Hayward’s shortcomings as a writer, nobody else in the show business in New Zealand has such a wealth of memories about the. early days of entertainment in this part of the world, the history of which has" never been properly written. It would be a pity if that fund of knowledge and»personal experience were lost. If Mr. Hayward, now that he has attempted an autobiography, could be persuaded to let somebody else write his biography, the result might be a worthwhile book. Wal :