SMUDGED PORTRAIT
LOOKED forward to the first talk in the Imaginary Persons series (1YC). The straight-out creation of "odd bods" seemed a pretty good idea; what a fine opportunity for tart commentaries on human nature, and for satirising New Zealand mores. But the talk on Hugh Cornerham Montmorency by Pauline Quinlan Stafford (I wasn’t sure, at first, from the names, which was the speaker and which the subject) fell far short of expectations. This pompous, self-satis-fied, reactionary London stockbroker presented to us was compounded of chief character-clichés of second-rate fictiona highly improbable person, rather like one of those bogies the New Statesman scares timid young radicals with. He was neither wildly fantastic enough to be funny, nor close enough to ordinary experience to provide a meaningful commentary on a type. Even if Mr. Montmorency were based on an original, he should have been made to seem real, and not just a collection of scraps torn from rather ingenuous books. One touch of originality might have brought him to life, but I waited in vain to hear it, Perhaps it is too much to expect subtlety in such a programme; all the same, the heavy-handed jocosity and the synthetic comments of this first sample set the series off to a limping start.
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19550304.2.19.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 10
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213SMUDGED PORTRAIT New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 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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