In One Ear

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 16

In One Ear

[7 is gratifying to find’ that the 1955 Reith Lectures, The Englishness of English Art, delivered by Nikolaus Pevsner, are neither dull to listen to nor as difficult as some have been. At the same time, this account of elements in English art which are distinctively English and reflect aspects of the English character, is sufficiently a product of original research to justify its inclusion in the series. These lectures really ought to be taken seriously, treated as lectures, with pencil poised above notebook. But they won't be, We'll let them float in one ear and merely hope it won’t all disappear out the other. Especially in New Zealand, where few people can visualise the details of English perpendicular architecture or the texture of Hogarth’s paint sufficiently to follow his finer points. Scholars using the radio seriously must inevitably waste most of their treatise on the desert air. Which is not to say I would ban this type of talk altogether, or even drastically alter it. For one thing, people are often attracted to a special study of some work they don’t fully comprehend, but wish to; for another, heaven forbid that every topic should be so’ popularised as to give all of us the impression that there is nothing in ‘the world beyond our immediate grasping. ; (continued on next page)

No Tears for the Years

| songs of our times help bring _ back the past, give to memory the gentle nudge it needs. . ." So. The only trouble is that I have listened to many of the Saturday night Songs of Our Times (not all of them-that would be just too dreadful) and have not yet had the slightest twinge of reminiscence or nostalgia. The fault may be mine. I’m not above listening to popular songs, but they’re not grappled in my memory with the times I’ve lived through. Yet Compton Mackenzie, with the help of songs of his time, can make me nostalgic for years I never knew. Alas, in spite of a sprinkling of felicitous phrases, James Walshe is no Compton Mackenzie, He doesn’t even sound as if he’s been there himself. He talks like an armchair traveller reading from a book. And not always reading very carefully -he has twice placed New Zealand general elections in years that never had any. As for the songs, their performance is so humdrum, so off-hand, that their banality is rendered too painfully obvious. If any of them ever had any spirit, let alone the spirit of the times, it has been thoroughly drained out.

R.D.

McE.