NOVELIST OF BOYHOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 12

NOVELIST OF BOYHOOD

FORREST REID, by _ Russell Burlingham; Faber and Faber. English price, 25/-. SORREST REID was a disciple of Henry James, though in his later novels he was able to shake off the influence of James’s style in favour of a greater simplicity of expression. He was one ‘of those literary figures who = highly regarded by a small circle of friends but largely unknown to the

public, and this biography and critical study, coming only five years after his death, is written in the affectionate tones of a personal admirer. The portTrait of the man reveals the type of sensibility that produced the novels. He was the perennial bachelor, living in his suburban cottage in the dingy city of Belfast, involved with his writing, his Greek studies, his stamp collection, his bridge and croquet friends, his youthful companions-a kind of literary old maid, not indeed unlike the great Anglo-American he had imitated and revered, The study of his novels, which are nearly all set in Ulster, and the, detailed analyses of books like Following Darkness and Uncle Stephen, emphasise that Reid was essentially the novelist of youth. His early psychological studies of the lonely and _ sensitive adolescent pre-date James Joyce’s, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In his preoccupation with his own boyhood he thought himself to be the victim of "some mysterious form of arrested development." But as an artist he matured to produce a delicate and subtle prose which traces every shade of the relationships between youth and age, and it is for this that he is likely

to be remembered.

P.J.

W.