MR SARGESON'S BOOK

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21886, 12 September 1936, Page 17

MR SARGESON'S BOOK

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS. Sir,—Mr Frank Sargeson’s book “Conversation With My Uncle and Sketches” was reviewed in your columns last week in one catalogue sentence without a verb arid one long one with several verbs and a potently condescending sting in the tail. The stories were called “10 superficial dabs at' New Zealand life as imagined by the author and bespattered with the Australian idiom.” I do not wish to spend time discussing the idiom or grammar of this sentence or its companion, but I do wish to protest against so flippant and summary a dismissal of the book. If a reviewer dislikes a book or the style in which it is written, let him say so; but let him not hint with smart, bright 'phrases at such damning faults as borrowed idiom and second-hand experience. And if he claims that such faults are to be found let him convince his public by giving examples. In this case he will prove only that Mr Sargeson has written some brief original sketches about certain phases of New Zealand life as he has seen it lived. In the other sentence the reviewer has cunningly pointed out the author’s apparent indebtedness to Hemingway and has then gone further to mention “the impression irresistibly conveyed that Frank Sargeson is the only inhabitant at New Zealand gifted with intense sensibility and the Lord help the other one and a half millions.” This sounds lamentably like the rwbisa of literary jealousy. But the real Ming comes in the predicate of this remarkable sentence: “these are entertaining and often agreeably written trifles.”

This letter is written in protaat, not against the reviewer's dislike of Mr Sargeson’s work, but against Ms method of dismissing it with - mOd scorn and flippant condescension. Any work that is creative deserves better than this.—Yours, etc, J'.E.S.