POET AND SOLDIER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 544, 25 November 1949, Page 14

POET AND SOLDIER

IN THE GREEN TREE, by Alun Lewis; Allen & Unwin. English price, 8/6. LUN LEWIS lived as a scholar, poet and journalist in England and in Wales. He died at 28 as a soldier in Burma. Three books were left behind him-two of poetry, Raider’s Dawn, and Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, and one of short stories, The Last Inspection. Now comes In the Green Tree, a posthumous collection of letters and stories. In a way I found the letters more interesting than the stories. The latter, with the exception of "Ward O 3 (b)" and "The Orange Grove," are all fairly familiar in theme and treatment. They are the "slices of life" that contemporary writing sets such store by, and of their kind they are very good. The letters are more intimate and more interesting. The usual trend of thought is (continued on next page) s

(continued from previous page) always to search for what lies behind the facade. We try to reach the man behind the phrase, or character or idea. Quite often we get a glimpse, a flash, but we are never certain just where the poet or the storyteller ends and where the individual begins. Although Alun Lewis’s poems and stories hint at someone of more than average thought and sensitivity, it is from his letters that we are able to get a rounded portrait. He hoped that his creative writing would be "an expression of all the conflict, all the faith and hope and despair and love that is humanity." There is nothing really new in this. It is the creed of most creative artists, but Lewis’s manner of achievement has made him one of the best of contemporary writers. There is a lack of pretentiousness which so often becomes the limitation of his associates; there is a disregard for showmanship; there is no seeking after the tortured phrase, the obscured message. Everything is straightforward without being too simple, truthful without being naive. His is a bul‘anced mind, devoid of illusion but devoid also of cynicism. He is as ready as most to abhor injust&e, to despise sham, and he sees humanity through his own particular vision, accepting the pain as well as the wonder. "Acceptance" is, I think, the operative word. Take, for instance, his description of a troopship: the "sweating hold," the piano accordion, the tiered bunks, the men "like maggots, playing houseyhousey . . . . Hammocks, beer bottles, oranges, bare legs, sweat and smell and foetid breath." A lesser man, a more egotistical poet, would have ‘railed against these circumstances; but he accepts them and surmounts them in his own way. He is at all times the participator as well as the observer, and as such keeps his sanity. He has been generally assessed as a poet, but A. L. Rowse and Walter Allen have both put forward. the suggestion that he might have veered more and more towards prose if he had lived, and although speculation along these lines is really more than useless, I am inclined, for what it is worth, to add my vote to theirs. I remember thinking when I first read The Last Inspection that here was a writer with all the attributes of sympathy, insight and integrity that are needed for "good" authorship. Lewis's death is yet another of those numberless and fatuous tragedies of war. He himself said after the publication of ‘Raider’s Dawn that as a writer he had just gone back to school. If this is so, then we have missed a lot. Yet he also speaks a

little later on of the sudden maturing, under the influences of love and war, of his work from the winter of 1939 to the following autumn. So it might be that the gods who overlook the destinies of poet turned soldier decreed this sudden, perhaps too sudden, flowering, and that

Alun Lewis attained some zenith before he died. His was a rare spirit-tolerant, wise, honest and often inspired.

Isobel

Andrews