A Novel for Broadcasting

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 649, 7 December 1951, Page 17

A Novel for Broadcasting

LINDNESS is always a tragedy. The slow misting out of light and shade, colour, distance and proximity must, for anybody, be like losing half the world. For a painter, though, it must be almost like the loss of life itself. Wyndham. Lewis was a considerable artist» and critic. He began to go blind noticeably about December, 1950. By May of this year he could make out only lights and shadows and moving objects. Painting, and, of course, criticism, became impossible, Fortunately, though, Lewis is writer as well as an artist, and blindness seems to have intensified his abilities; and particularly his sense of humour. He uses a dictaphone now, instead of a pen, and finds it rio more of a hardship than anything else concerned with his blindness. Twenty-three years ago Wyndham Lewis began The Childermass, the first of what‘was to be a trilogy of novels.

2 The first novel was finished, but the second and third parts were never written. The Childermass is a serious piece of social criticism. It is thought, by some people, to be Lewis’s most brilliantly imaginative work. The story is set "outside Heaven." Two ex-Public schoolboys, the principal characters, are being put through a stiff entrance examination by the Bailiff, and Lewis makes full use of his ability to write subtle and penetrating satire. Some time ago the BBC asked Wyndham Lewis to adapt The Childermass for broadcasting in the Third Programme. He did so with the help of D. G. Bridson, one of the BBC’s feature producers, and a poet of some distinction, who visited New Zealand in 1948. The broadcast was a success, and as a result of it, the BBC took the unusual step of commissioning Lewis to write part two of the trilogy. Commissioned novels, these days, #efe fairly rare. This one will probably be yniaue, for the BBC proposes to

broadcast it, together | with part one, before its. actual publication as a book. More than that, the novel will not be heatfd on the air in its. origirial form. It will be. specially adapted by Lewis and Bridson. This | is because the BBC feels that only when The Childermass is . finished as Lewis __ originally planned it. will the best of it be obtainable for broadcasting. It’s a distinctly new step, not only in broadcasting, but also in the business of writing a novel. We've had fadio plays, both in verse and prose, talks, histories and documentaries, all influenced by the medium through which they were | transmitted. It would be interesting to speculate -on what influence that medium might have on the novel, a, Ricks,