THE PUKKA SAHIBS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 793, 1 October 1954, Page 6

THE PUKKA SAHIBS

HATEVER Continentals and others have said about the Englishman at one time and another, England and the English way of life remain extraordinarily attractive to many ‘whose admiration can hardly be taken for granted. Arthur Koestler, for instance, in his recently published The Invisible Writing, admits that the English don’t like his books-in fact, their sales in England are _ proportionately lower than in any other country, including Iceland. Yet it’s in England that Mr. Koestler has finally settled, "for I realise that the reasons why the English find my books unlikeable are to be found in precisely that lotus-eating disPosition ‘which, attracts me to them." And noting "their supreme gift of looking at reality through a soothing filter," "their contempt for systems and ideologies," and. their dislike "of. anything didactic. and discursive in art, of any form of literary sermonising,’ he concludes: "On the whole, I find life in the doghouse quite cosy." "Critical. but comfortable" might sum up the feelings of this European middleclass intellectual, and after all even the Englishman can be pretty self-critical. An English Member of Parliament, R. H. S. Crossman, spoke of "English muddle-through in politics" in discussing Koestler’s book, and another Eng-

more, he says, we might fing that sometimes admired courage was no more than what Dr, Johnson once called "stark insensibility’-and we might find that sometimes apparent insensibility was true courage, Dr. Johnson, as those who have read him won't need to be told, isn’t quotable only on the subject of courage-he could be pretty pungent, for example, on the Englishman’s sport. But against his remark that "a fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other," David Moody, in the feature on sport, is able to quote another authority (guess who?) on "the most honest, ingenious, quiet and harmless art of angling" to this effect: "I know it worthy the knowledge and practise of a wise man." On other sports also Mr. Moody has sorted out some equally felicitols readings. Later in the series he contributes a programme on the Englishman’s sentimentality. "No one," says R. T. Robertson, in the feature which he has written on integrity, "has heard Wordsworth cry: ‘Integrity, thou should’st be living at this hoyr,’ but that’s what he meant." Searching for illustrations for this programme, Mr. Robertson found there were few obvious or prolonged references to integrity in the whole of English literature, but all the same in "a wide sweep through all sorts of English writing from the 16th to the 19th Centuries"

he found examples of integrity even though it might not be called by that name. Mr. Robertson also contributes a second programme, on the Englishman’s insularity. "To die,’ it was often said in late Victorian and Edwardian times, "will be an awfully big adventure.’ Those were the times when the Stiff Upper Lip had its apotheosis, and in a programme on this phenomenon Sarah Campion says that one of its few powers is to reduce great things to little matters and to give mean things undue importance. Introducing some amusing illustrations, she says: "In the Boer War, and in the endless skirmishes with the Lesser Breeds Without the Law which preceded and followed that undignified shindy, the Stiff Upper Lip was all over the place,

rigid and futile as the stockades the Sahibs erected for their defences against loose- lipped savages during the Indian Mutiny." Two programmes by Joan Stevens complete the series. The first of thésethe sixth in the series-is about the Englishman's attitude to Freedom. Finally she illustrates his view of the arts-which has something in it of the suspicion of George II that painting and poetry "never did anyone any good." Aspects of an Englishman will start from 4YC at 9.58 p.m. on Wednesday, October 6, and from 2YC at 8.13 pm. on Thursday, October 7, repeating from 2YA the following Tuesday. It will start from 1YC in the last week of this month, and from 3YC in the first week of November.