Literary Views And Reviews

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24750, 15 December 1945, Page 5

Literary Views And Reviews

“LEO ” KM Sri tsstvx win lo aphlC . al -f ries goes on - Leo ™ fig A re .‘? 14 now only as he nrtriff 5 ln . ]VIr Agate s memory. Musician "S' o^ u - sentlc-heart, Pavia died a few buted’ thp°fnn L 9 ndon - Mr Agate contriouted the following note to -The Times”; “Leo,” as he was generally called, was immensely proud of having studied, under Leschetizky, and even rnore proud of that notice which a famous musical critic gave him when he appeared as a juvenile prodigy at the St. James’s Hall some 60 years ago. “He went at the Waldstein sonata like a young avalanche, fortissimo sempre crescendo e prestissimo sempre accelerando, keeping his feet cleverly over the straightforward bits. staggering gamely through the syncopated passages, going head-over-heels up and down Ihe flights of octaves, and finishing, flushed but unbeaten, after a recordbreaking necjc-or-nothing ‘reading’ that would have made Rubinstein gasp and Mme. Schumann faint.” The boy was destined to be a failure in a wider field than piano-playing, but also to prove in his own person—to the everlasting credit of the law of compensation—that the lady in the Henry James story was not talking entire nonsense when she reflected that "There was something a failure was, a failure in the market, that a success somehow wasn’t”

Leo Pavia had a measure of genius, f|bd all of it strictly unmarketable. He was a walking literary as well as musical reference library, and knew most of whatever there is to be known about 'Restoration comedy. Johnson Jane Austen. Dickens, Thackeray, Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen. He could duote Richardson! He translated Wilde’s plays into German, w’rote a great deal of music that was half Johann and half Richard Strauss, and was for many years a player of professional bridge in which he combined maximum skill with fantastically poor cards. ■ No man ever enjoyed bad luck more! • He was schizophrenic long before the thing became fashionable, half of. him being entirely rational, the other half living in a world in which it was taken for granted that nigs have wings and cows jump over the moon. His piano-playing was marked by an exquisite cantabile. but he could not pick up one object without knocking over two others He was a combination of Lamb’s friend George Dyer. Tchehov’s Ephikhodof. and half a dozen characters in “Alice in Wonderland.” He was a superb talker who never listened, or, listening, got w'hatever was said the wrong way round. He had the best sense of pure fun. plus the finest wit. of any man I have been privileged to know, with a gift for making conversational gaffes both natural and cultivated Vulgarity of mind died in his presence. His death creates a void which .his friends will not attempt to fill. THESE MEN SPOKE TO THE ATOMIC AGE The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, nojr to restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and to work without injury to himself or others No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and" bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. -BARUCH SPINOZA. “Writings on Political Philosophy” (1670). I know no safe deposi'ory of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves: and if. we think them not .enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome direction, the-remedy is not to take it from. them,, but to inform .their discretion by education. —THOMAS JEFFERSON, Letter (1820). Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union —FEDOR DOSTOEVSKI, "The Grand Inquisitor” (1881).

N.Z. AT WAR KIWI SAGA SEQUEL Mr Martyn Uren’s “Kiwi Saga" is continued in his Diamond Trails of Italy (Collins. Auckland. 229 pp.), in which accounts of the New Zealand Division’s Italian campaigning are diversified by descriptions of countryside and city and excursions into ancient history. Past and present smoothly join where once Caesar crossed the Rubicon towards Rome, and here the Maoris crossed the other way. Mr Uren’s book makes good reading. NURSING SISTER Miss Joyce Macdonald’s Away from Home (Presbyterian Bookroom, Christchurch. 163 pp.) records three years a nursing sister’s service in the Middle East, It is a modestly told story, m which the hardships and str *} m °f duty are kept out of sight, and the cheerfulness, patience, and courage of sick and wounded men. the comradeship of the medical, and cor P s > an d the humours and thrills of off-duty hours are in clear view and happily described. CRIMINA L THE MASTER Georges Simenon. master of the tale of crime and detection* has now Proved so far from the beaten track that he does not trouble to explain the death which introduces in The Shadow Falls (Routledge. 382 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.) an inevitable process to other deaths by violence; and he ironically gives to policeman and judge an utterly insignificant part in the drama. Money and character; that is the theme, worked out to a crisis, in which the opposition between self-interest and love can be resolved only by two shots. THE PRIG Mr A. E. Martin’s Sinners Never Die (N.S.W. Bookstall Co. Pty. Ltd. 279 PPJ ' s the narrative of a calculating, cold-hearted, unscrupulous prig whose part in mysterious events in a backblocks Australian town is prevented .rom having ruinous consequences partly by sheer good luck, partly by the intervention of kinder and wiser persons than he. Mr Martin ties up an excellent, tight plot and looses it with a few quick tugs at the very end, and writes with attractive vivacity and humour. NEVER LIKE THIS It is impossible to say a good word for Maria Marches On (Rich and Co ] PP I Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.), except that there is a little fun to be picked by the way, as when Mr John Slate puts his characters through incredible antics of speech and deed. No headmistress was ever like this Miss Maria Black, who beats the Yard man to the solution of a murder mystery in her own school; which she leaves during a day’s absence in charge of the head prefect; and no American angel of the underworld ever wobbled in idiom from ‘T’m just achin’ to mash some guy’s kisser” to “I rather thought you’d confront him jwith it.” CHILDREN TINKERED RHYMES It seems that the author of Happy Endings (The Book Depot, Melbourne.), F. Oswald Burnett, was advised by his (or her?) children to give a more fortunate turn to the many nursery rhymes which, like “Jack and Jill,” end in disaster. The result may also be illustrated from “Jack and Jill”: Up there ran a little man. Whose legs went faster and faster: He got there and cut their hair And mended them with plaster. Coloured pictures by Dorothy Dibdin accompany both grim original and comforting supplement. AND THAT’S HOW Paul’s Book Arcade, Hamilton, issues Margaret Dunningham’s Three Brown Bears and the Manpower Man, illustrated by Anne McCahon, a pleasant story in which Bruno and Juno and Jonathan, manpowered to Wellington, solved the housing problem for themselves . . . "And that’s how all the people in Wellington found somewhere to live,” ROYAL FOUR-YEAR-OLD About 30 photographs of Prince William of Gloucester (Angus and Robertson, Ltd. 39 pp.) are collected in this volume by Lisa Sheridan, the photographs being from the Studio Lisa. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester figure in some of them. They are all very good examples of the art of the camera, very'well reproduced.