"THE SHADOW OF A WAR"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 452, 20 February 1948, Page 5

"THE SHADOW OF A WAR"

Sir,-Even before I had read the book I felt that O.D.’s review of Mr. James Bertram’s The Shadow of a War had a curious and unpleasant perversity, and carried its own condemnation. For, having deprecated looking for faults and making a needless song about them, O.D. proceeds to spend a quarter of his space on two points that he admits are trivial -the quotations at the heads of the chapters and the fact that 21 out of 50 chapters begin with a remark by someone. He then tries to give them weight by linking them with a more substantial criticism which he claims is related to them, though many may doubt the connection.

But here again O.D. leaves one a little puzzled. Why, when he admits that "every book has faults to every reviewer," should he be so concerned that he cannot "admire this book without qualification" and is "held back from complete surrender?" Why should he ask any more when he can say that he has "read no book that brings the long-term problems of the East so clearly into the day," that Mr. Bertram has "so many wise, searching, and now and again crushing things to say that it is not easy to remember as we read that it is neither history nor politics he is offering us, but just the recapture of a large number of remembered hours of a man living for six years under the shadow of a war, four of them in rigorous and perilous captivity?"

Perhaps in this tribute lies the curious burden of O.D.’s complaint. He wants, it seems, to keep his history and his politics separate from "a large number of remembered hours’’-in other words, from concrete experience. Which, surely, takes any validity from history and politics. He’ applies the same measure to. art. "Art is selection" but "life is usually such a jumble of things"; and, apparently, never the twain shall meet. Does this not make of all art a kind of deceit and kill even the lowlier forms of writing? Nothing is left but dead, meticulous, uncommentated chronicling, which is in fact more deceitful than art because it pretends to an objectivity and

completeness of record that is humanly impossible. On such a basis would anything be left for a reviewer but to reproduce without comment the whole text of the book he reviews? Instead of being grateful to Mr.. Bertram for "using his typewriter as a skilful photographer uses his camera," for something equivalent to Wordsworth’s "emotion recollected in tranquillity," O.D. turns this into an accusation that Mr. Bertram "has too many of the answers at his finger-tips and too much skill with the light"’--though he does not support his charge by a single example. Yet O.D. cuts across this by praising Mr. Bertram for his reflection and in-terpretation-for "having the answers"in the case of the fall of Hong Kong {though at first reading his comment here might be taken as criticism) and the contrast between the Ming Tombs and the Nikko shrines. "His reflections on Nikko yield the best writing in the book and the most fundamental thinking." Reflection and interpretatitonselection of what is felt to be: significant -are after all permissible? No, apparently not when applied to the author’s own day to day experience. For this

writer, capable of "so many wise, searching, and crushing things" and such fundamental thinking, who is too intelligent to over-write and too sensible for mockmodesty, is accused of writing a book "too cunningly contrived to be true." "It would," says O.D., "be impertinent to say that these days did not pass as he presents them to the author himself." Yet O.D. has already said that he felt "much of it did not happen precisely as we get it in these 350 brilliant pages." We readers who weren’t there of course should know! It seems as if O.D. would like to know everything that happened in those six years without anyone telling him. O.D. fails to make a case for either his praise or blame. Could he not come clean and choose between openly Accusing the author of "cunning contrivance" -lack of integrity, in other words-and merely stating an honest but respectful disagreement with his general view of things? I do not wonder that he has misgivings about being offensive or ungrateful. As it stands the review reads rather like a disingenuous "smear." Even the statement that Mr. Bertram "must have written this book at the rate of two or three chapters a week-an astonishing performance both in quantity and quality" sounds as much like an insulting apology as a tribute,

All of which could have been written without the book itself being opened, and without any knowledge of the author. Having now read the book I would not necessarily agree that this is the most illuminating book I have read on the problems of the East. I might question the soundness of the philosophising on Nikko. But I feel a certain indignation on behalf of the author and all writers .of integrity at the reviewer's insinuation of unfaithfulness to experience, My own feeling is of extraordinary restraint and triumphant humanity. The capacity of a man who is no hard-cased adventurer, but selects Shakespeare, Goethe, and a verse anthology in a hurried move into first-hand experience of war, to endure four years as a misused coolie of militarist Japan and still write such a book is something before which we should feel humble and thankful for this renewed pledge of the quality in man.

WILLIS

AIREY

(Auckland).