FLECKER AND SOME OTHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 12

FLECKER AND SOME OTHERS

LIFE INTERESTS. By Douglas Goldring. Macdonald. English price, 12/6. "HE tone of Douglas Goldring’s Life Interests ig set most clearly by'-his reminiscence of James Elroy Flecker and his essay on The Gentleman Tradition in England. The book consists of 18 lively discourses on somewhat timefaded subjects by an author whose interests are principally literary. Flecker, fine fleur of the English public school and university system, of the, witty irresponsible undergraduate life in pre-1914 England, is recalled with a sense of loss. Goldring, a contemporary and friend of Flecker, feels that the young men of the period with their mauve silk shirts and gloom carefully cultivated in their verse possessed a spontaneity, "a generosity of heart and mind" lacking in those who succeeded them-the sons of the hard-faced men who profited from the first world war. Shortly before September 3, 1939, the British Council subsidised a Greek professor to write a book on The Gentleman Tradition in England, for, no doubt, the edification of the professor’s countrymen. The title conveys something of the sentiments of the British Council, at least, at that time and provides Goldring with the subject of an essay. Amusing and enlightening incidents are related in a long piece on D, H. Laws rence, whom Goldring also knew. Lawrence, for instance, hadn’t any qualms about tapping, a rich relative, an uncle who owned a stocking factory, for the odd tenner. And the attitude of the day towards Lawrence, ranging from worship as a latter-day Christ to vilification as a pornographer, is brought back vividly.

J.R.

C.