A TRAVELLER RETURNS

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21512, 29 June 1935, Page 17

A TRAVELLER RETURNS

LAN DONNELLY'S NOTEBOOK The Joyous Pilgrimage. By lan Donnelly. J. M. Dent an j Sons Ltd 224 pp. (6s net.) Most of us dream of travelling; a very few realise more than the least ambitious of their dreams, and of the few one in a thousand, perhaps, sees the land he dreamed of clearly and, when he has left it, retains anything better than dying memories and travellers' tales that bore his friends Mr Donnelly shared the dream of visiting England with many young New Zealanders, and the realisation of it with fewer, but still many. He arrives back, and with him is a book to prove that he is the thousandth pilgrim. There must have been more coherence in his dreaming than in I most, for when he reached England 1 he knew what he wanted and set I out to find it with a determination that enabled him to resist the temptation of by-ways, however pleasant. He went a great distance; it is, indeed, remarkable that anyone in so short a time could have gone so far without making his progress a hustle, which he avoids. First, of course, he had to realise that he was in London; but he allowed admirai tion, wonder, and pinching himself I --just to make sure—to steal only a week of the year he had allotted himself to see the things and the people that England, and only England, could present to him. From the list of the things and people he chose, even without his revealing comment, the least gifted reader could come pretty near to reconstructing the author. He had more pleasure and excitement in meeting Laurence Binyon and Gordon Bottomley than in watching even the Derby crowd. It meant more to him to laugh with Chesterton than to hear his Majesty's Secretary of Slate for Dominion Affairs live up to promise by sprinkling a'tches round his Downing street office. He saw his poets in plenty and both he and his readers are better off because he has talked with Walter de la Mare, T. S. Eliot. Humbert Wolfe. Edmund Blunden. and the others. But he saw. too, W. W. Jacobs and J. L. Garvin "Evoe," and the men of the moment : r> Fleet street. Charles Morgan and "The Fountain" appear more than once, directly and indirectly. They offer a clue to the author; but it seems to be a misleading one. It must be admiration of technique, rather than of philosophy, or Mr ! Donnelly could surely not have j found the interest he did in the j activity of Westminster.

To speak kindly of James Maxtor) is fashionable; but Mr Donnelly's tribute to the lonely nrophet is sincere. In Mr Walter Elliot he found humour, and was surprised, though not peril arcs so deeoly as two present political pilgrims from New Zealand must be if they have made the same discovery. Sir Stafford Cripps "would persuade but not coerce" and is put out of consideration—perhaps too lightly—in a smooth parting sentence with an uppercut in it. There is no need to enumerate politicians and Mr Donnelly's impressions of them, impressions that Vrd humanity to the headlines or. ■he cable page. That they are there at all shows that the pilgrim did not wander into a library and forget the world outside, while his inferos' in Ronald Frankau, Grade Fields and Gordon Harker. after ihe others, makes him impossible to label.

In all these encounters Mr Donnelly represents the stay-at-homes faithfully, observing keenly and recording gracefully and wittily many of the things that cannot be learned from "Who's Who" or publishers' nufTs or conventional interviews though most of us want to know 'hem But there was much else for an observant man to learn from England and from the English whose names are never printed, and casual contacts taught Mr Donnelly much about the country. The inn with the sign "The Rose Refreshed" Uampstead Heath on August Bank Holiday: St. Paul's Churchyard m the evening; slum streets, bookshops, villages, soap-box politicians a New Zealand party round a keg of beer in a Bloomsbury boardinghouse—these are a few good memories, taken at random from the "-cores of "chapterette" headings. The chapterottes are part of the success of the book. Clamped into conventional form, with politician "ollowing politician and poets jostling one another for first place, it mirht have been formalised into dullness. But Mr Donnelly broke from the rules and arranged his conversations and observations in roughly chronological order; and if he was amused by some stray 'hought or isolated memory as he wrote, he gave it a little heading and put it m. In the middle, for variety, is one full-length chapter It is about cricket—he saw two tests —and the silly things done in its name. The arrangement, when one glances at the book, gives the imnression of disjointedress, but read-

ing dismisses this first thought. Somehow or other the chapterettes hang together, however incongruously consecutive headings may read, and it is much mort satisfactory to read the book straight through than to attempt to pick the eyes out of it. Perhaps the trick in this is 'he pace which gives the book form The opening, at sea, is expectant; in 'he next pages the reader hustles to keep up with the author, rushing excitedly about new London; then a steady gait is held, to the farewell l o all that and a leisurely statement of reasons for returning to New Zealand—reasons sound and wise unless, as the book suggests, the author underrates his chance _of making his own name and footing in London. The book cannot be left without mention of the introduction by Mr Howard Marshall, which shows that an Englishman can agree wit'h the praise New Zealand readers will warmly give.