OFF TO CALIFORNIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 12

OFF TO CALIFORNIA

New Zealand Proved Too Cold for Fiector Bolitho

y, COUPLE of days before he left New Zealand for San Francisco last week Hector Bolitho, who has been visiting his mother in Autkland for six weeks, recorded five talks at 1YA for later broadcast from the National Stations..To &ive listeners an introduction to this New Zealander who has been called the friend and biographer of royalty, we esked our Auckland representative to interview him. T is twelve years since Hector Bolitho last visited New Zealand, twenty-five since he first left it on the proceeds of his successful lecture-tour through North and South Islands with films illustrating the Prince of Wales’ tour here in 1920. On the telephone he sounded a little reluctant-he explained later that he had been so often misquoted that he now shunned all interviews-but agreed to call at the office. Two-thirty, he said, and at two-thirty sharp I heard him in the corridor asking for The Listener in a brisk voice with strong consonants and vowels that have quite forgotten their New Zealand foundations. He came in beating his hands together in grey suede gloves. * "By Jove!" he said. "this cold will kill me. Or don’t you find it cold? Well, at least it’s warm in here." There followed a purely domestic argument on systems of ventilation and in the end he claimed that he would rather die by suffocation than by freezing. He sat at the other end of ‘my desk in front of a hillock of blocks and stereos, which he examined with interest, picking them up carefully, by the edges, replacing them in qa neat stack. I watched his tidy hands, small and rounded; hands that would be at homé with a typewriter for machine, a pencil for implement. "You should let me file your blocks for you," he said, "I am good ‘at that kind of thing. I have a tidy mind." I beliegd him, with his long heavy black overcoat, his black and white scarf, his spectacles with the thickest and blackest horn rims I had ever seen; I had a

picture of his tidy mind at work, methodically turning out page after page of neat typescript, book after book of tidy biography .. . I asked him if he was still keeping up his output of a book a year as he had done the first few years after he left New Zealand. ; "Well, it’s rather more," he said. "I’ve put out 30 books in 25 years. Of course, a few of them are letters and so on I’ve edited." "But otherwise mostly biography and travel, not novels?" "Yes, three early novels. That’s rather interesting; I’ve just re-written all three. They’re really not bad at all. That was my war job. I set myself to do a job of re-writing and re-casting every night-say two or three hundred words a day. It kept my hand in and I found it a pleasant relaxation." Still a New Zealander Mr. Bolitho was in the intelligence section of the R.A.F. throughout the war; his job was all lined up for him earlier and he reported for duty less than: two hours after the declaration and served until last August. He had to have special permission to wear New Zealand shoulder flashes upon which he insisted because, as he says, he is proud of being a New Zealander. "You know I am still a New Zealander and very proud of it," he said. "I really love New Zealand. As a matter of fact I returned this time with real delight." He paused to consider. "In fact, I can say that I had a 50 per cent intention to stay here. If I found I could work here and live in reasonable comfort in congenial surroundings I thought I’d stay. But I can’t work here." He spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders. "What do you think? If I go to a hotel there’s no heating in the rooms. I can’t build a house, can I? No, of course I can’tthanks to this Russian experiment you have here. I’m cold and I can’t get a thing done, so I’m off to California to give lectures and broadcasts." "Are the lectures political?" "Oh, lord no! They’re quite personal. Personal history, I suppose. Much the

same as I’m giving here in Aucklandmy 30 exciting years, you know. But I don't mind lecturing in America-it’s this Auckland lecture that has me worried. I tell you, I’m really terrified! Think of it: standing up there and lecturing in my own home-town! I don’t know how I shall ever do it." He was pattly joking-but only partly. -"The Worst Judgment" I reminded Mr. Bolitho that the last time he was here, in 1934, he had expressed himself shocked at what he described as two menaces in Auckland, the passion for gossip and the bitterness against Germany. I asked him what he thought about these things now. "I’m ‘delighted to see them both flourishing," he said at cnce. "Delighted. I never was so mistaken in my life as I was about Germany. It was the worst judgment I ever made. It’s part of one’s atrogance to be generous to a vanquished people and I was young and arrogant and I thought I knew Germany. I was wrong. But look at the world to. day! It’s incredibly hard to make a judgment of any sort. Wouldn’t it be delightful to live in Switzerland, never to have to make a judgment about anything but what to eat for breakfast, eh?" Mr. Bolitho moved from the difficulties of the world to the special difficulties in. Auckland-the gas situation, the housing situation, the domestic help situation. He is full of praise and sympathy for the New Zealand elderly housewives who have no help in their daily drudgery-‘"and yet they do it all and work like slaves and then go out looking well-dressed and well-groomed and quite smart." He is disgusted with the bad manners of our young people: "The young people and the people in shops and restaurants and on trams are tude and unmannerly and, well, just not nice. Nobody’s nice any more. It doesn’t pay to be nice." Before he left Mr. Bolitho said he would very much like to pay a tribute to the memory of a young New Zealander, John Mulgan, with whom he collaborated in writing a book once. , "It is a loss of a person of real importance and promise," he said. "He had so many qualities you were seldom meeting one person. He had a good mind but he wasn’t a prig; he was a person of fine feeling without sentimentality and he was greatly liked by people in Oxford. He was a good talker and he had the peculiarly New Zealand characteristic that he did a job when he set out to do it. He had what I might call manners of the mind."

J.