RECAPTURED CHILDHOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 730, 10 July 1953, Page 12

RECAPTURED CHILDHOOD

THE WEEPING AND THE LAUGHTER, by J. Maclaren-Ross; Hart-Davis. English price, 12/6. THE WEEPING AND THE LAUGHTER is the first book in an autobiographical trilogy, by J. MaclarenRoss, dealing with his early childhood,

His earliest memories are common to my generation: Zeppelins,. comics, Charlie Chaplin, Punch and Judy. For me there is particular poignancy in a shared background: first London, and then France. But the poignancy would fall flat if the writing lacked power and subtlety to evoke rather than just recall. Autobiography is so easy that almost every writer attempts it, but so difficult that very few achieve a universal statement. I believe Maclaren-Ross does succeed, both artistically and historically By selection of incidents which seemed important to the child he was, and recording them through the eyes of the man he is, he avoids the common errors of childhood biography: on the one hand sophistication or smugness, on the other banality. Childhood incident is normally banal to the sophisticated adult, so that attempts to record it in childish fashion are usually unreadable. But it is equally true that what seemed important to the child is the essence of the child’s biography, no matter how much more important other incidents may appear on mature reflection (if, indeed, mature reflection can discount anything that made a deep impression when the psyche was most malleable). Memory and _ insight. as Katherine Mansfield showed us, are important; but they are not enough. To show the child to the man, the writer must be more than historian and psy-, chologist. He must be an artist. Maclaren-Ross is like Katherine Mansfield in this respect, and for some of the same reasons. Sensitive, intelligent, intuitive, and devoted to his craft he comes to autobiography in his full maturity. Concerned primarily with his childhood vision, he is too concerned with language to write childishly and too honest for adult affectation. The result is a book that rings true, not only because its, incidents are true, but because the "writing is superb. It is no accident "that we are back in the great tradition of English prose: a flexible precision-instrument, which has _ outmoded the flat understatement just as it has outlasted an ornate romanticism. I now know Maclaren-Ross’s_ childhood almost as well as my own, and I know my own better for it. That is my measure of the book’s success.

Anton

Vogt