Probing Too Sedulous

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 22

Probing Too Sedulous

OW fortunate for the illustrious dead that their great talents were not subjected to the kind of teasing scrutiny that radio and television now perform! Consider this: "Now, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, you are perhaps the most famous composer of the Western world. But it seems to me that in your opera The Magic Flute, you created a barrier between yourself and your admirers by your licit references to the masonic movement. Could you, perhaps, enlighten us on what was in your mind?" I hope that W. A. Mozart would have told his interlocutor what to do with his question. But it was in just such a coy, but to me, impertinent manner, that Walter Allen approached Graham Greene in the last of the We Write Novels series on the Catholicism of his novel, The End of the Affair. Greene was polite, but urbane and evasive. I wrote last week rather strongly against this series. Now that it is over, I will say more strongly that I think the whole series was a mistake, and that Walter Allen should not have been allowed to muck about with the talents of his betters. I don’t suggest that any harm will accrue to the novelists as a result of the probings of their talents; which are too firmly grounded for that; I do think it impertinent, to ask artists to explain themselves in literal terms on the nature of their work, which is, as it should always be, secret and obscure, By their works, ye shall

know them.

B.E.G.

M.