The Letters of Annabel Lee

Radio Record, Volume I, Issue 15, 28 October 1927, Page 6

The Letters of Annabel Lee

My Dear ElisabethBy invitation of the Minister of Publicity I lately saw a private screening of a film of exclusively New Zealand scenery. The scenes screened were typical, admirably chosen, and beautifully photographed. Our towns are well enough in their way; but the lakes and mountains of these little islands are of miraculous beauty. We suw the aloof splendour of the glaciers of the Southern Alps; Rotorua, uncannily bubbling and boiling, with its fascinating 2xcursions, courteous Maori guides, and lure for the tourist from overseas; the Milford track in all its fairy-like beauty; Stewart Island, that "isle set in a silver sea,’ romantic, remote, with its rare beauty of bush and sea and sky. This picture, when shown abroad, should create a vivid interest in our little country. It certainly is calculated to bring @ wistful nostalgia tu those wno, New Zealcnd born, will look at it in a foreign land. Some lines of a New Zealand poetess, whose verses I have just read and of whose work I hope to tell you anon, scem applicable here"Where English flowers are growing wild, And English song-birds you are hearing, Remember how our clematis Shines in a white splash. on the greenThe tree-ferns in the cool damp bushThe long grass in the burnt-out ingThe bell-birds calling each to each Across the gully in between." It is pleasant to realise that people respond to a good cause, and, to use a good old gag, their hearts are in the right place. This was exemplified in the large audience that turned up at a benefit concert spontaneously given to Madame Gitta Alpars by our local musicians. It was a good programme. Mr Bernard Page emerged from his aloofness to play, very beautifully, a Nocturne and Scherzo on the Town Hall organ; Mr. Harison Cook was dramatic and popular; and Madame Alpars herself, arch and gay and tragic by turn, captivated the quite large crowd who had come to wish her good luck in the name f camaraderie. For the rest, amongst much that was good and some not quite so good, Mrs. Wilfrid Andrews’s contralto was beautiful in "Not Understood," and also in an encore a a eee

popular Scottish ballad concerning Angus who came home from the war, Mrs. Andrews’s clear enunciation and attractive deportinent-to use that delightful Victorian word and attribute-lent an added charm. Richard, above all things a reader of books, som. frivolous, some obscure beyond belief, tells me of a remarkable novel he has come upon. Written by a’. author of the fearsome name of Lion Feuchtwanger, and translated very convincingly by Willa and Edwin Muir, "Jew Suss" created a remarkable sensation in London, when ‘t appeared in 1926, and has now reached its thirteenth edition, a few advance copies having just reached this Dominion, Arnold Bennett, surely a judge of whai’s what in literature, writes of it with unmeasured adimiration-" ‘Jew Suss’ is a splendid story, but it is also a complete picture of a complex social organism from top to bottom. It entertains, it enthrals, and simultaneously it teaches." 4ilso thut unemotional ‘ournal, the "New S atesman," gives unstinted praise, saying this novel has no counterpart, being written as though tt were sheer his« tory, with a precision of fact and phrase which Gibbon at his most ironic rarely ‘ excelled. A high eulogy, isn’t it, of this story of a young Jew of the eighteenth century, who set out to "cut himself an -normous slice of that cake, the world,’ and ended, as many another might do but for the grace of God, on the gallows; being buried with a small heap of earth from the land of Zion and *he words, "Vain and deceittful and fleeting as wind is the world." Not a cheery conclusion, but curiously as applicabble here in New Zealand at this stage of the world’s development as in that far-off century in the Duchy of Wurtemberg. Richard, besides being a bibliomaniac, is fussy about pronounciation, so was greatly bucked recently to find coinciding with his own the judgment of that august assembly of experts, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Advisory Committee on sboken English (no less!) which has published of the pronounciation to be adopted by broadcasters of certain doubtful words. Quite an imposing array of names is to be found in this little list of judges of English as she is to be spoken. The Poet Lau-« reate, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Sir J. ForbesRoberston, and others of equal note, pass judgment cn the fitting emphasis of cer- > i a oR OR ee SC te lo ee

tain words in what is, alas, sometimes a slipshod vocabulary, and I commend the little list they have compiled to those, who, on "the air’ and off, are doubtful of certain words that flutter on the borderland of correct and incorrect. I notice that in the word calibre, about which I have heard many a heated discussion, they give pride of place to the second syllable. It is good to realise that a standard of quite obvious educational value will be set to all and sundry through the pleasant and simple channel of broadcasting. The private view of the Etching Exhibition, now on at the Art Gallery in Whitmore Street, was a quite delightful little function; a gleam and a glint, so to speak, in the drab and work-a-day world, and a fascinating record of artistic achievement reaching down through the centuries. Upon the walls hung marvellous and valuable é¢xamples of the work of Rembrandt, Rubens, Whistler, Brangwyn. Our little country was represented in the work of Mr. Linley Richardson, and Australia by pictures of the brilliant Lindsay brothers, Norman and Lionel, the former with some of his unmistakable nudes, wonderfully clever ‘in drawing and design, but with a characteristic smear of lewdness. I hear that ~at an Australian exhibition his work was refused, so he held a show of | his own next door, with the result that everyone deserted conventional art and rushed kis wonderful drawings! Amongst the noticeably small crowd of visitors at the local show of etchings was a well-known woman ariist, whose grey hair and graceful presence seem to "go" with those clever pictures of hers. Isn't it odd how personality Sometimes matches performance, particularly with the passing of the years that take and give so much? The younger school of achievement was represented by a girl whose water-colour work is well known; the picturesque and gifted wife of the member for Otaki was u-aring a beautiful colourful wrap, and a versatile actor, producer, and painter was there with his bride studying the pictures with absorbed interest. An unusual and enjoyable collection, and as I set my face homewards in the teeth of a wind of Wellington's worst, I smiled to think of the genius that may be imprisoned on a few inches of paper, and sighed to realise that even one of those inches was beyond my ken-Your ANNABEL LEE, ~ ae"~)hlULhe) CUI oe --- ee