THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 649, 7 December 1951, Page 32

THINGS TO COME

WO characteristics, one inherited and the other caused by a fever at boyhood, combined to make Sir Walter Scott a portent in English literature. From his ancestry, reaching back to Scott of Harden, famous in Border warfare, came the call of adventure in his

Diood, and the lameness left by that childhood illness prevented him from answering it by fighting in the Napoleonic wars. So literature had to compensate for the action that he craved. He became one of the great storytellers and chief of the Roman-

tic School. His novels were eagerly awaited by the public and he proved that authorship could be exceedingly profitable. He became a queer mixture of a feudal baron and a businessman. But the depression of 1826 found him liable for a huge sum of money because of the failure of a publishing firm. The rest of his life was gallantly devoted to paying off the debt. Lord David Cecil will talk about Scott in a BBC procramme, English Novelists, to be broadcast by 2YC at 7.45 p.m. on Monday, December 10. Distant Fields F you’re one of the great army who do a daily job of work and quite often feel you’d rather not, you’ve »probably at some time looked forward happily to your retirement. W. H. Graham, who was once a public servant, had looked ahead in that way ever since he was a fairly young cadet. He wanted to tell his boss what he thought of him and to begin a life of leisure, "including such joys of lying in bed in the morning and on my back in the afternoon." The big day came, and Mr. Graham found that it hadn’t turned out at all as he’d expected. He has told how it did turn out in two talks, Thoughts from Retirement. The first of. these, which includes an account of life on "the farm" (just under an acre of land which he bought in the country) will be heard in Feminine Viewpoint from 1YA at 10.30 a.m. on Monday, December 10; and from 2YC at 10.0 p.m. on Wednesday, December 12. South Island Journey URING the last six months The Listener has published impressions of New Zealand towns gathered by Lawrence Constable in his travels. He described Last Light at Rongotea, went south by ferry steamer to Shadow Town to. show some aspects of a Lyttelton which many New Zealanders see from one angle only, flitted back to Manaia ("a sleepy, scattered farming community scarcely more significant today than it was 70 years ago"), and, in Earthquake Town, paid a visit to Murchison. More recently he was with the whitebait fishers of South Westland in Airlift from the Awarua. Mr. Constable has recorded for the NZBS six short talks in which he will describe small settlements

in the South Island. These talks will be heard ‘on Tuesdays in the 2YA Women’s Session, the first of them, about Pompolona and the Clinton Valley (on the Milford Track) at 11.0 a.m, on December 11. Others will deal with Cromwell, Lumsden, Omarama, places on the road to Mount Cook, and Milford Sound and its two portals. Merchant Navy "WV ERCHANT Navy blokes. I expect you’ve seen us, often enough, Big or little ships, going up or down the harbours and rivers, or lying alongside, where you see us looking down at you, and we see you looking up at us." Yes, we've all seen them, whether it’s in the daily stroll! along the wharves in the summer, if we live in a seaport town, or on less frequent visits from further afield. And no doubt we’ve all wondered just how these fellows live-whether it’s boring to have nothing much more than the sea around them for so much of the time, what they do in their spare time, what they think of life in port, what well, W. H. Green and J. Pye, of the S.S. Cumberland, thought it would be a good idea when they were on the New Zealand coast not long ago, to answer some of these questions. They’re used to answering questions, anyway, for the Cumberland has been adopted by the Blackminster Secondary Modern School in the heart of the fruit-growing district of Worcestershire, and the logs that men from the ship supply are often used as a basis for a geography, history or current affairs lesson at the school. What these two men of the Merchant Navy had to say in a talk they recorded for the NZBS listeners will hear in Merchant Navy, 1951, which 4YA will broadcast at 7.16 p.m. on Wednesday, December 12. Hearing Shearing IKE the new look that came into women’s fashions a little while ago, a new flavour is being infused into popular and semi-classical piano music by an Englishman named George Shearing. A year or so ago the Shearing Quintet toured from California to New York with the Negro singing star Billy Eckstine, playing 43 concerts to capacity houses and demonstrating a form of inter-racial co-operation of unusual significance. If he were any ordinarily built young man, blond and debonair, Shearing’s success might not be unexpected. But he has never seen the musical world he has. conquered. He is blind. Two years ago his quintet was unheard of. Today the Shearing company travels about the country in two station wagons, is equipped with the best of wardrobe and luggage, and is in such demand for single concerts and night club performances that a day’s rest is an oddity. Shearing calls his work "progressive music," which is simply "music that progresses, is more advanced harmonically, melodically and rhythmically." George Shearing the pianist will be heard from 3YA at 8.46 p.m. on Wednesday, December 12, in four numbers |

with the "progressive" titles of "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to a Bar," "Jump for Joy," "Scrub Me, Mamma, with a Boogie Beat," and "Delayed Action." Original Celt SINCE James Stephens died late last year at the age of sixty-eight, some listeners have heard (in his "warm, beautiful brogue," as Eileen Duggan describes it), readings from his best-known book, The Crock of Gold, recorded for the BBC. On Wednesday, December 12, at 8.26 p.m., Eileen Duggan will be heard from 3YC in an appreciation of the Irish poet and novelist. Miss Duggan sees Stephens as "happiest in revealing the original Celt, by means of fantasy, as a creature of magnificent extremes, fierce, loving, faithful, taunting by endearments, and forgiving flat out if the enemy showed justice." She is sure that he will have an honoured place whenever the Celtic Renaissance is reviewed. This talk will be followed, at 8.40 p.m., by the*first of Stephens’s own readings from The Crock of Gold, more | extracts from which will be at 10.0 p.m. on Thursday, December 13, and at the same time on Friday, December 14. One of these readings will also be heard in .Topics for Women from 4YA at 11.0 am. on Thursday, December ‘13. N.Z. Fiction "T HAVEN'T been easily satisfied that it’s sensible to talk about the New Zealand novel, as people talk about the English or the American novel," Black-| wood Paul told the Writers’ Conference in Christchurch last May. He suggested that our recent novels are specially concerned with the conflict between our equalitarian ideals and the realities and appearances of our actual society. How true is this of the works of Katherine Mansfield, Sargeson, Davin, John Mulgan, and Ballantyne? The answer Mr. Paul gave, and his picture of the possible prospect before New Zealand fiction will be heard in his talk, "The Novel in New Zealand," which 2YC will broadcast in Arts Review at 8.0 p.m, on Friday, December 14.