"THESE DARK GLASSES."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 539, 21 October 1949, Page 5

"THESE DARK GLASSES."

Sir,-"P.J.W.’s" review of These Dark Glasses gives a useful summary of Greville Texidor’s book. Following up the suggestion that it’s the work of a sick mind and at the same time deadly serious, I quote these lines from T. S. Eliot’s East Coker, published in 1940: Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse. , Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and* Adam’s curse, And that, to be restored, our.gickness must grow worse, I think this book shows indications that in rejecting previously cherished ideals and attitudes the author does not shut out the possible emergence of new ones. The words of Comrade Ruth Brown quoted by "P.J.W.": "TI do not wish to leave. There is no future. Suicide is meaningless" suggest conflict even within the despair, and the moment of turning towards the necessity, stressed in Eliot’s lines, to seek restora-tion-that is a future-through growing worse, TI don’t know the exact date when W. B. Yeats wrote his Second Coming, but I think it deals with the contemporary situation and supports the validity of her new attitude in the lines: ; The best lack all conviction, while the ' worst Are full of passionate intensity. It’s the passionate intensity of the closed ’ism that Ruth Brown rejects, and in refusing suicide at the same time she faces willy nilly the challenge to whatever lies beyond, In sticking to her "phoney" companions she _ virtually challenges them too.

E.P.

D.

(Mt. Maunganui).