UNDERGRAD MIXUP
BALLET HOO. By Nicholas Bentley. Michael Joseph. E must be eternally grateful to ‘Nicholas Bentley for introducing the works of Damon Runyon to an English publisher." Otherwise, such are the curious conventions of high finance and the book publishing world, we in New Zealand would probably never have met Mr. Runyon’s guys and dolls, and our lives would have been so much the more limited. But Mr. Bentley is not himself a creator, except possibly in his drawings. His style, his ideas, and his sense of form have an undergraduate imprecision which would be welcomed in the chaotic welter of a Capping Mag, but do not make a happy impression in a book to themselves. Ballet Hoo is a mixture of knockabout humour, gangling satire, and straight information and criticism. The mixture does not mix. Serge Pantz, Michael Youpushoff and Irina Fallova could be charming characters, but, separated only by para-' graphs from living people like Fokine, Baranova, or Margot Fonteyn, they do not convince or amuse. This is-a pity, because some of the drawings do both. If Mr. Bentley could write with the
same precision as he draws, he could claim equality with Thurber, but he seems content to remain an undergraduate, and there is no place for him at
High Table.
G. leF.
Y.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490325.2.23.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 11
Word count
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218UNDERGRAD MIXUP New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 11
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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