Remembrance of Things Past
\V HEN I was fifteen, one of the chores at my school was the swallowing whole of one classic per term. The hames of dignified authors were put into a hat, atid we drew one each. Once I drew Joseph Conrad, and I found myself faced with Almayer’s Folly. I can see that book now: its brown paper cover to thwart greasy fingers, and the horrid close print before which my eyes swam. I found the book unbearably "dry," as we used to say, and I have never since read a single word by the great Polish writer. And then last week, I heard Bertrand Russell's beautifully moving recollection of Conrad in the series Portraits from Memory. Russell's voice has the dry elegance of an old scholar, and is the perfect instrument for hig exquisitely turned and polished prose. Conrad lived in this talk so profoundly, with his firm, though never (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) wholly satisfying integrity, his loneliness and estrangement, that I am now resolved to repair at once my ravaged education by reading him again. "I hope," said Russell at the close of his talk, "I have made him shine for others as he shone for me." That I should so want to read him now is the best tribute I could pay to Russell’s delicate evocation of the spirit of a man he so greatly revered.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19550225.2.20.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 10
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238Remembrance of Things Past New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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