NO DESPAIR

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23536, 14 January 1942, Page 8

NO DESPAIR

CURRENT BOOKS

♦ Second Wind. By Carl Zuckmayer., George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd.' 240 pp. (10/6 net.) iThe writer of these reminiscences, apparently casual yet closely bound in significance, is a distinguished German playwright. He served in the war of 1914-18 left Germany for Austria, when the Nazis came to power, and was lucky to escape their clutches when they invaded his new home. A revolution may always be horrible, but the horror can be borne, overcome, conquered, if it is a revolution of the human spirit, or if what caused the overturn was a spirit or derived ffbm the spirit But here what was unloosed WBs only the mob, a blind passion for destruction and its hatred was directed agiinst everything which nature or human will had ennobled. It was a witches’ Sabbath for the mob, and the death of all human dignity. But as Dorothy Thompson acutely says in her introduction, there is “no despair in this book,” though Zuckmayer has seen the overwhelming of sanity and beauty by the beast; has fought, as a youth, through the shambles of war to crushing defeat; has shared the sick hysteria of post-war Germany and sadly seen its healthier strivings destroyed or absorbed and perverted bv Hitlerism. What has sustained Zuckmayer in this passage through European chaos is clear enough in the personal side of his narrative: humour —this is a remarkably light-hearted book—vigorous intellectual independence, and the idealism both of a dreamer and of a simple lover of earth. CNOSSUS AND FRANCE The Heathen Are Wrong. By Eugene Bagger. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 319 pp. (12/6 net.) Mr Bpgger and his wife lived for three years in France. They saw Armageddon coming; they saw the collapse . . . But Mr Bagger’s account of the fall of France is not another series of inside revelations . . , “what Daladier said, or Gamelin did not do.” He had been reading, in France and for years before that, about Cnossus, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the last days of the Roman Empire. Paris was Cnossus: France, “part of that great twentieth-century Western civilisation which is our own equivalent of the Minoan culture and that of its greater hinterland in Egypt and Asia.” Mr Bagger’s fine book unfolds, in. what he calls an "impersonal biography,” the process by which he reached the outlook of a Catholic philosopher over the decline and fall of civilisations—over the drift of this one, paralysed by “the neglect or surrender ... of that use of Right Reason which instructs the will of man to choose the good in preference to evil, the helpful in preference to the harmful, that which pleases God in preference to that which promotes the designs of the Devil.” The West is inexorably doomed, and self-doomed, in Mr. Bagger’s view, unless it turns and appeals to the grace of God, with the will to preserve Christian values by paying the price, to establish Christian justice, Christian mercy on Christian doctrine and Christian discipline. There is a steady light in this book, sternly cast; but upon many recollec- . tions, of place, person, and time, it falls with soft and serene beauty, AT A GLANCE . Poetry Martyn Skinner’s Letters to Malays (Putnam. 63 pp. 5/- net), written. to a friend at Ipon, are turned with insight as well as wit to the problems i. of freedom, power, purpose, and right i, that perplex man and nation in. a \ cracking world. The grim conundrum, which we must explore, Includes the woes of peace as well as war. In thousand varied forms our troubles fall: Bombs, ailments, earthquakes, Life employs them all; And if a Hitler lacks wherewith to smite Uses a microbe, or mosquito bite. , v But Mr Skinned thrusts a little de£&e*?’ than Pope, sometimes. . The Melbourne University Pressissues, with an introduction by Nettie Palmer, The Poems of Lesbia Harford (3/6). The poet, who deserves .$» title, died 15 years ago, aged 30. 5W ; ; had a simplicity of expression at nfit deceptive, seeming superficial, which it is not. It is no superficiality that is uttered in the sharp couplets of the love-poem: ’ Oh, make no woman of me, you who can, Or I will make a husband of a ipan. Poems by N. F. H. Macleod and L. C. Lesley House, both of Christchurch, are printed together in a Caxton Press booklet, In the Dark Hour. Social Welfare In The Community Chest (Allen and Unwin. 63 pp. 2/- net) Mr J, P. Brander gives an account of the wellestablished American system under which the wtork and finance of welfare organisations are jointly planned. Mr Brander believes, and indeed shows, that it is efficient, develops wide public interest and support, reduces overlap and competition of effort, and reconciles “central guidance” with the freedom of member societies. Tales of Childhood Short stories by F. Alexa Stevens are collected in Children First (Harry H. Tombs Ltd. 86 pp.). The children who people them, as Dr. C, E. Beeby says in a foreword, “march out of the confines of her neatly turned plots and pluck pur sleeves with the insistence of living beings." ’They’ are not sentimentally idealised; as delightfully well appears in the contest between Timmie, the wilful, and Miss Jarvis, the wise. Some of the illustrations reproduce children’s drawings.