IT'S FUN KEEPING AN ANTHOLOGY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 30

IT'S FUN KEEPING AN ANTHOLOGY

(Written for "The Listener" by

N. P.

WEBBER

GOT the idea of keeping an anthology when I was at High School-it started then with a scrappy exercise-book, but now it has grown until four notebooks are filled. Then there was another that I lost somewhere in the Western Desert between Alamein and Tripoli. Keeping an anthology has given a new interest to reading. So often one reads a book that delights with sudden rays of humour, arresting facts or statements, unforgettable then, but three weeks later forgotten except for the general idea. Start collecting these extracts that interest or amuse you and the few minutes taken in writing them out will never be regretted. Months and years later, rereading them will give endless pleasure: most items chuckled over then will give just as much amusement as now, though other extracts may leave you uninterested and give surprise that they were once ‘considered diverting or of importance. I am no highbrow, and, like Samuel Butler, cannot claim any great interest or enthusiasm for poetry. Most of my extracts are prose-at first just humour which appealed to me, but now I am adding more and more serious items, At one time I kept a notebook with me when I was reading and I jotted down any pieces I liked there and then, but now I just mark the page (by turning up the corner, I regret to say) and then, when the book is finished, I turn back and write out anything which still appeals. Perhaps only one extract is taken from four or five books. I think it is better, however, to lift a little rather than too much. Together with this anthology, I keep a list of the books I have read-the name, the author and a few comments. If I have enjoyed the book I put the author on my reading list. If I read in a book that interests me, teferences or quotations from other books and authors, I make a note of them, too. Using this system I waste no time when I go to the library in idly looking around, and seldom read a book which bores me. Hunting with Samuel Butler Samuel Butler’s books are a happy hunting ground for an anthologist, in fact they are so full of choice extracts that the only practical thing to do is to have all his books in your library and read and re-read them. His Notebooks are delightful. Here are just a few extracts -*"Silence is not always tact, and it is tact that is golden, not silence." ... "God is love-I dare say. But what a mischievous devil. Love is." Or perhaps, if you are tired of pictures and the radio and playing cards, you might like to amuse yourself writing a story round one of his suggested topics, such as "The Complete Drunkard-he would not give his money to sober people, he said they would only eat it, and send their children to school with it." There are possibilities also in "The Battle of

the Prigs. and Blackguards." A really delightful extract is one of Butler’s rare pieces of verse called "The Two Deans," a discussion between the senior and junior Deans on Butler’s apparent virtues when he was studying for the Church. It begins JUNIOR DEAN: Brother, I am much pleased with Samuel Butler. I have observed him mightily of late, Methinks that in his melancholy walk And air subdued when e’er he meeteth me Lurks something more than in most other men. * After a long paean of praise, it ends on quite a different note, however, as

"Enter Butler suddenly, without a coat or anything on his head, rushing through the cloisters, bearing a cup, a bottle of cider, four lemons, two nutmegs, half a pound of sugar and a nutmeg-grater. Curtain falls on the confusion of Butler and the horror-stricken dismay of the two Deans." Quotations from Mansfield There are a lot of quotations you will want from Katherine Mansfield. Like Butler’s Notebooks her Journal is so delightful that there is only one satisfactory thing to do-put it in your library to read and read again: I love her equivalent of the nigger in the woodpile or the snake in the grass... . "the snail under the leaf." How do you liké this? "Mid-day strikes on various bells-some velvety soft; some languid, some regretful, and one impatient-a youthful bell, ringing high and quick above the rest. He thought joyfully, that’s the bell for me... ." Eric Linklater has a great appeal and I think I have read all his published books to date. I have lots of quotations. Linklater has a racy colourful style that is always amusing. Surely you couldn’t pass "He disappeared from the room like a cat going over Niagara," without reading it again. Or his soliloquy on "Yes"... "But ‘Yes’ that wasteful syllable, that running tap of a word will carry those who utter it as if on a pleasant stream, through rich and various country. It is a bridge that leaps over stagnation, a sky-sail to catch wind in the doldrums. It is a passport to adventure, birdlime for experience, a knife for the great oyster of the world and

— the pearls or poison that lie within. Yes is the lover’s word for peril. and for bliss. ‘No’ the misers’ and the word the barren womb has said." Every tourist who has heard a guide’s old hoary story will appreciate "All the tourists showed some appreciation of the joke. Some, simply pleased, honestly chuckled. Some nodded as if to say ‘How true.’ And others just displayed the sophisticated tooth of social mirth." Balzac and Mark Twain I like Honoré de Balzac. I still chuckle . hen I re-read extracts from his Droll tories, such as "He coughed like an old cow that had found feathers in her hay" or his view of the essential of war-"In great battles he endeavoured to give blows without receiving them, which is, and always will be, the only problem to solve in war." To give without receiving has been of great concern to every soldier I know. What soldier who has _ travelled through Italy will not agree with Mark Twain’s summing up in The Innocents Abroad, written eighty years ago-"As far as I can see, Italy for 1,500 years has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices and starving her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in one ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jewelled frippery in one of her 100° cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show 100-and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth." From authors I like, I have filled. many pages, but there are jottings from scores of others. I like the style of André Maurois, probably the most English of the French authors. He describes Marshal Lyautey in his youth as "being consumed by the demons of boredom and ambition" which sums up the restless soldier and statesman to perfection, Writing of convention, in Call No Man Happy, he says, "The acceptance of convention gives rise to a reign of order, and under the shelter of these conven-

tions, liberty flourishes." Somerset Maugham is always concise and. penetrating as, for example, when speaking of beauty and perfection, "The most beautiful things in the world finished by boring me... perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved." And don’t you like Damon Runyan’s description of a cat — "A cat blacker than a yard up the chimney." "The Morrignors" I had a friend who woke up in the middle of the night with this amazing rhyme running through his brain: Along the corridors, the morrignors Ran iftly, cliftly by. He got out of bed and wrote it down, and in the morning there it was in black and white. He tried, but-was never able to complete it. I gave it to a friend, who gave it to a friend on a visiting ship, and I don’t think that Lewis Carroll would have been ashamed of the final effort: Along the corridors, the morrignors Ran iftly, cliftly by, And canted as they planted The borders of the spry. The dickory ate hickory And Mulligog cabossed: What a plonking and a tonking Of noodles as they crossed. I’m sorry I cannot tell anyone what it all means. Just Words And then I have often copied down just words. Don’t you like "the brosy odour of porridge . . . . the sonsiest of the milkmaids .... algid weather... . the fatality of a coronach ... . bossy corbels ... . a casselty creature?" Don’t you think "a _ bottle-shouldered man" is descriptive. What of Walter Winchell’s new words? . .. a chicagorilla (a tough from Chicago), this-and-that way, infanticipating, or a "debutramp?" Yes, you will have lots of fun keeping an anthology. You will find that reading has a new interest and is more enjoyable. You will enjoy writing out your extracts and enjoy them even more when you read them months and years later.