THE PERSONAL VIEW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 13

THE PERSONAL VIEW

IN TIME OF TROUBLE, by Claud Cockburn; Rupert Hart-Davis, English price 21/-. SWEET AND SOUR, by John O'Hara; Cresset Press, English price 12/6. READERS of English journals such as The New Statesman won’t need to be told who Claud Cockburn is. Part. biography, part history, his articles recall the recent past as entertainingly as anything of the kind that is being written, | and they have the authority, too, that. only a man who sat in a ringside seat could give them. In Time of Trouble is Mr Cockburn’s autobiography and once (continued on next page) |

BOOKS

(continued trom previous page) you’re past the chapters about his youth (not tedious-but one has read this sort of thing so often before) it’s quite brilliantly entertaining. Mr Cockburn was in post-Versailles Berlin, in New York during the stock market collapse, in Prague during the Munich crisis, and so on. He worked for The Times and for the Daily Worker, and he started The Week, which must have been one of the most influential cyclostyled sheets ever issued. About all of this and much else he writes in the liveliest, most perceptive, most revealing way. Mr O’Hara’s book is entertaining too, but though his pieces first appeared in a newspaper column they will not, I think, have such a wide appeal as. Mr Cockburn’s. Often slight and, as he admits, generally frivolous, they are hardly what I expected from such a serious writer of fiction. Mostly they will interest people not too solemnly interested in writers and

writing. I enjoyed them, and I salute the courage of Mr O’Hara who wrote most of them in the months after his wife’s death: Commenting on this he explains: "T want the young to realise that. writing is, among other things, an act... If you are a pro, you keep going." on caer

F.A.

J.