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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 776, 4 June 1954, Page 5

Sir,-May I support your reviewer in his estimate of The Confidential Clerk as a play to read? It is tedious, and in places trivial; the lesson it is intended to convey is carried by too flimsy a structure; and the infusion of poetry is about equal to the proportion of fluorine -Tequired in drinking water for our health. I am sure that had it been written by anyone but T. S. Eliot, it could never have been accepted for the theatre. This last opinion is expressed by ‘a critic in the American Saturday Review after seeing a stage production. He admires Eliot as a poet and a critic, but thinks little of this play, and his comment on Eliot’s disciples is diverting. "In him the double-domes have found a stately pleasure dome; in his poems and plays, a sacred river which runs through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. The more ‘swaddled with darknéss his meaning, the greater their delight.’ " I learn from this critic that a religious symbolism has been suggested: Act I is the Father; Act II the Son; and Act III the Holy Ghost. I wonder if Mr. Eliot has discovered this himself. There is an old story-whether authentic or not I don’t know-about Browning being asked by a reader what a certain passage meant, and replying that he had forgotten, but probably the secretary of the Browning Society could oblige. And there are the Punch verses on certain aspects of Shakespearian criticism: I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s ghost Sat for a civil service post. The English paper of the year Contained a question on "King Lear," Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t studied Bradley. This is rather rough on A. C. Bradley’s admirable work Shakespearean Tragedy, but the satirist is licensed. Perhaps if Mr. Eliot were examined on his own work, he would do equally badly, because he hadn’t read the New States-

man,

A.

M.

(Wellington).