Rebecca West's 1920's

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 654, 18 January 1952, Page 10

Rebecca West's 1920's

ener said not long ago: "Of broadcasters who write their own script, the average, I think, write better than they speak, and I cannot at the moment think of a broadcaster who speaks better than he writes." I thought, a few weeks before Christmas as I listened to a BBC programme from 2YC, that I had found someone who spoke as well as she wrote -Rebecca West on her particular decade, the 1920’s, in the decade by decade review of the half century, But at the end of that most enthralling programme I learned that the chief voice had been the enviable gift of Margaret Rawlings; so the honours were divided between writer and actress, slightly in Miss West’s favour-it would have been a poor voice indeed that could have robbed that script of its life and vigorous enthusiasm. But Miss West -was lucky in having a reader who obviously had her heart in the matter. Miss West announced honestly that she was 27 when that amazing and tackety decade began, and now, twenty years later, she looks back and writes of ‘it with the same kind of zest and warmth and wholeheartedness with which she must have enjoyed, it as she lived it. It might not be going too far to say that her story of the decade sounded like the story of a woman who was in:love with those years, or at least in hove with the life of those years. Perhaps that is the secret of a superlative broadcast-that the broadcaster should have something nearer love than enthusiasm in his subject. Yes, there was more than zest and. enthusiasm in that broadcast: there was a whole ten years of life, with sidelights, insights, asides, flippancies-a little much, I thought, of the treasure-hunt flippancies and the extravagant, recklessly expensive party flippancies-and a few of the other things that make up ten years of life, ten years of a certain kind of life. Not, of course, ten years of everybody’s life, but ten years of the life of Miss West and her writing friends and her artist friends and thousands and thousands of big-city post-war young men and young women eager to enjoy those mirage years of peace. "This was the broadcast of the year for me. I hope 1952 will bring more from the same team. . CRITIC in the English List-

J.E.

B.