IMPRESARIO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 13

IMPRESARIO

THE WHISPERING GALLERY, by John Lehmann; Longmans, English price 21/-. IEW ZEALANDERS have a special interest in the English literary movement of the 1930s, of which John Lehmann was in one sense the centre as editor of New Writing in its various forms, for in Christchurch alone, says Mr. Lehmann-in the circle of young writers who found "a generous and enthusiastic patron" in Denis Glover of the Caxton Press-was there any comparable upsurge in the English-speaking world outside Britain. In this first volume of his autobiography he gives several pages to the Caxton group. For all who were touched by the quickening impulses of that time and went on reading New Writing as a

Penguin through the war years, the second half of this book will be especially interesting. Some of it has been said before, as the author acknowledges, but I suspect that his New Writing in Europe, long out of print, is now little known anyway. The earlier chapters, recreating a now familiar childhood in a comfortable, cultured English family, will be less interesting to many who may nevertheless sympathise with Mr. Lehmann’s wish to "possess his past." There will be sympathy for him, too, in the unresolved dilemma of his life-‘Was I to be the impresario of other people’s creative work, or a creative writer myself?"and gratitude that at the time when an impresario was needed he wanted to do

the job.

F.A.

J.