A POET IN LOVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 499, 14 January 1949, Page 11

A POET IN LOVE

MOUNT IDA. By Monk Gibbon. Jonathon Cape, London. AUTOBIOGRAPHY is one of the most difficult literary forms, and it is never more. difficult than when a writer decides that he must tell his readers about what would be known in Hollywood as his "love-life." If he tells everything, he makes himself seem rather a terrible fellow, although he may be no worse than his neighbour, who prefers to be reticent; and if he tells only part of the truth he is likely to select the evidence which supports his conception of himself as an interesting and colourful person. Or if he wants to be candid in an artistic way he may exaggerate small matters until the reader is able to believe that a modest flirtation was really

a desperate affair which would have to be compared with nothing less than Dante’s infatuation for Beatrice. | Monk Gibbon is careful to indicate the mild nature of his interest in the three young women who are examined exhaustively in Mount Ida. He explains that he was still chaste when he martied, so that readers who wonder what can be the outcome of his earnest pursuit of beauty have no need to suspect that the ultimate truth has been withheld. And indeed, at the end of a long book it is easy enough to believe that the author’s satisfactions have . been strictly aesthetic. He meets his first young woman at a school for boys. The second is encountered in Rome, and the third in an Austrian resort devoted to winter sports. All three are beautiful, and the pleasure the young man feels in their company is provided mainly by the sensation of being a little, but not very much, in love with them. He is really in love with beauty, and although in one case he goes so far as to exchange kisses, he retains his self- | control; and it- seems likely that this restraint is not imposed upon him simply by the fact that he intends to marry someone else. His interest is in feeling the attraction grow upon him, and perhaps in watching it grow upon the girl (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (Cont'd)

(continued from previous page) who at the moment is receiving his attentions. It becomes a subject for speculation, for much literary allusion; and because the experiences occur mainly while he is travelling in Italy and Austria they supply emotional overtones to a narrative which links states of mind to changes of scene. Mr. Gibbon is a poet; and his prose, in spite of numerous clichés, allows him to avoid some of the dangers in the method he has used. But in trying to express what he saw and felt during his three discoveries of beauty he makes the mistake of imagining that everything is relevant. Details are the elements which when brought skilfully together, create the total effect of a situation. It does not help us, however, to understand himself or the girls, if he tells us that they spent an hour or two guessing the authorship of passages in an anthology, Nor can we be deeply interested in knowing how he filled an idle hour while separated from his beloved. The constant attentions to detail means that he is building up the atmosphere of crises which never occur. He gives an impression that something really important is about to happen, and it usually turns out to be another tea party which has no interest for the reader and no consequences in the story. "On page 478 the feeling remains that Mr. Gibbon has examined too closely, and too carefully, affairs of the heart which ate very thin indeed compared with the love story of many a little -man who lives unobtrusively in the

suburbs.

M. H.

Holcroft