AMUSINGLY CRUEL

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23269, 11 February 1939, Page 4 (Supplement)

AMUSINGLY CRUEL

Of "With Malice Towards Some." by Margaret Halsey, a London critic says: This book writes itself so easily and devasitatingly that most of us, after reading it, will go about wearing our coats inside out, trying to see ourselves as this amusingly cruel American writer sees us.

Mrs. Halsey came fresh from the haunts oi: culture with her professorial husband, and from the remoteness of some village near Exeter tells the world her candid opinion of tho English. We laugh—who could help it?—as she tries to get a nodding acquaintance with the inside niceties of our social life. Obviously she is damped a little by the weather "in this dim aquarium of a country," but even we, acclimatised, have to admit to an iota of truth in her criticism of English food. There is the matter of soup, tasting as "if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand"; our two, and only, alternating savouries, and our lack of variety jn vegetables. "Is it," she says, ''some complicated form of Puritan spitefulncssr 1 " She finds our clothes hideous, our conversation of a "boneless quality." and our manners (in some instances) sadly lacking. There is an account of a publisher's cocktail party which reaches surely the high water mark of incivility. Hut, while admitting to being amused fluid to indulging in an inordinate number of irrepressible chuckles, we would' but bog Mrs. Halsey to "try, try, try again." There lire other little English villages, and even —so it is rumoured —publishers with maimers. Possibly her next book, although hound to be entertaining, may get a little nearer the truth of tho matter!

"With Malice Towards Some," by Margaret Halscy. (Hamish Hamilton.)