COMING ROUND THE BEND...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 713, 13 March 1953, Page 13

COMING ROUND THE BEND...

with

Denis

Glover

ANY people whose company I like because I think they are good Dickens characters prove, on closer acquaintance, to be something out of an unwritten Dostoevski. 4XCUSE my prejudice. When anyone tells me he doesn’t like Dickens I can’t see the point of talking to him about books, or life, or anything. VER the whole Victorian scene, the great laughing, weeping madman Dickens, telling us all about everyone else, never .about ourselves, never about himself. "THE trouble with some of us is. that \" we want happiness readymade. 4 SILENCE is golden, but speech is \ Long John Silver. ~OME conversation reminds me of the noise I made as a small boy dragging a stick rapidly along a corrugated iron fence. That used to give me pleasure. SOMEWHERE there is a synthesis of the apparent irreconcilables, land and water; of the snow-capped Kaikouras and the white-topped waves; of the foam-edged sea and the equally flexible shifting, stretching sands. I don’t mean merely a comparison in terms of imagery (which is the best one can do), but a real synthesis and sameness which

perhaps only the crab knows, instinctively understanding as it scuttles under a rock when the tide recedes. OW that the festivities are behind us, it may be pertinent to remark that good whisky needs no tartan, OW we organise ourselves into behaving as others wish us to behave, and how we dislike them when we find. them actually organising us. F we must put our real selves away in a cubbyhole it’s a good thing to keep the lock well-oiled, and not lose the key. O pursue aesthetic and _ spiritual things involves a major campaign in agony. To pursue material things, constant worry. The artist is concerned to live fully, the purveyor of pies to prove that he deserves as big a funeral as the rest. T’S not a thought for the demon driver, but the beauty of coming round the bend is that you never know what’s ahead of you. F there had never been a Shakespeare it would have been necessary to invent a George Bernard Shaw.