GROWTH OF A MIND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 714, 20 March 1953, Page 12

GROWTH OF A MIND

MY DEAR TIMOTHY, by Victor Gollancz; Gollancz. English price, 12/6. -|E. pictured himself as the model of a responsible libertarian, an angry youth with a hatred of compulsion and a detestation of anything that might fetter the human spirit. He was also a Juif moyen sensuel, with eyes, affections, passions and a sense of grace like the rest of us. In this autobiographical letter to his grandson Victor Gollancz is concerned less with literary chit-chat than with problems of religion and morality. A large part of the ‘ook deals with his conversion to socialism, which seems to parallel the development of his religious conscience, In a sense the book is a work of expiation, for the largest character in it, apart from the author himself, is his father, a self-righteous orthodox Jew, a Pharisee

with "no spirituality," a» political’ conservative with an immense respect for wealth who repels his son by his intolerance as much as he attracts him by the tie of blood. The author explains at length, what it is about his father’s religion that he abhors-the truth of any belief is destroyed by too great an emphasis on forms of worship; the formality becomes a substitute for the belief which withers and dies. On the outward sidé there are descriptions of Rome, Venice, Paris, New York, memories of Schnabel playing Beethoven and Verdi at Covent Garden, accounts of student, days at Oxford and a period of schoolteaching at Repton. But this is principally the story of a developing mind, and to body out his thought Gollancz quotes from writers like Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Ibsen, Margaret Mead and William James. Yet his thinking is essentially personal. The reasons for rejection of his early liberalism for socialism, for instance, or the description of his curious emotional relationship with his mother and the exhaustive passages about autoerotic experiences in childhood, form an honest if anguished analysis of the basis of his mental processes. It is indeed the frankness of the introspection, even if its confessional tone is often exhausting, that makes this a

Strangely naked self-portrait.

P.J.

W.