NOW OR NEVER
JIM DANDY. Fat Man in a Famine. A play by William Saroyan. Faber and Faber, London. English price, 8/6. ‘THE blurb credits Saroyan with "eliciting the responses of laughter, pathos, and satisfaction." That seems a singularly flat and pedantic way of saying that he is concerned with the truth about life, and furthermore succeeds in stating it in a. fashion only occasionally marred by sentimentality. His characters "searched the enemy shore for the word in stone that would set us free + « every man from his own bastille and blockade. Lightning wrote in the pitch black sky-nor or never, now or never. Find the blessed word or be done." Some of them wanted it. Jim Dandy "knew the truth and was looking for something better." Some of them knew they needed it and were humble enough to be ready to accept it. One, Fishkin, a cynic who had known nothing but "sickly self-analysis and fidgeting despair," did all he could to obstruct the search, yet by his very obstruction he drove himself to such a pitch of tension and unhappiness that he too was ready to accept the word when he was shown it. None of them could obstruct or run away indefinitely, because the Good was in them all and there was nowhere to fun where the Good was not. One of them said: "I am imprisoned in His worship, which rids me of all vanity." Finding the word was not enough, nor was talking about it. Talking doesn’t let the poet out of gaol and poetry intolife. Before life revealed its inexhaustible. plenty they had to eat its whole bread? participate, act on their belief in life. Then they found the miracle complete; bread in plenty for their need, wine from water, material abundance and spiritual peace. / This is a good play. .
G. leF.
Y.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490401.2.22.5
Bibliographic details
New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 12
Word Count
309NOW OR NEVER New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 12
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