The Third Goes Slumming

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 481, 10 September 1948, Page 12

The Third Goes Slumming

NCE a week the BBC Pacific Service does its best for us with a feature from the Third Programme. So far we have escaped what some wit foretoldan hour of meditation with T. S. Eliot ~-for the more tender slices of culture, such as V. S, Pritchett reading his. short story "The Fly in the Ointment." This is a study of decay; the decay of an acquisitive man, symbolising, if you like, the decay of the myth which equated material acquisitiveness. with morality. The key of the story is in the sentence ".... all big-faced men have two faces." There was the large, rosy, innocent outer face of this old man, but ". . the big face smiled‘ and overflowed the small face" which was "like a fox looking out of a hole of clay." The outer face of the old man wambled indecisively; he was obsessed by a fly in the room, he was maudlin about the people who had sympathised with him in his bankruptcy, he worried about his son's approaching baldness, he made vague, hopeless plans for his retirement, a cottage in the country perhaps. But when the son, appalled and embarrassed, offered money, which he said he would raise somehow, the little acquisitive fox face, summoned by the familiar word, peered out from the old man’s head. What money? How much? How was it going to be raised? Father was back at his job. The acquisitive way of life, although decaying too, was stronger than the man who had tried to live a its : myth, ‘i