European Visits For Literary Detection

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31128, 3 August 1966, Page 14

European Visits For Literary Detection

HAMILTON, August 2.

Two members of the staff of the University of Waikato will leave soon on exploratory visits to Europe in the cause of “literary detection.” Mr P. F. Wells, senior tutor and acting head of the French department, will go to Belgium, Monaco and France in quest of information on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Mr Paul Day, reader in English, will visit Strasburg I and Greece, where he will do

research into the adventures' of John Mulgan during the Second World War. Mr Wells said yesterday, that Apollinaire, a PolishItalian who died in 1918, had always been a man of mystery. “It still is not certain who his father was, and it is sometimes claimed that he was descended from Napoleon,” said Mr Wells. “Some of his most famous poems are mysteries and just what some of the references mean is the literary detective work I will be undertaking.” This will involve tramping through forests in Belgium, climbing cliffs In Monaco and interviewing the few surviving friends of the poet in Paris, as well as photographing manuscripts and comparing notes with colleagues in five countries. Mr Wells will be accompanied by his wife and two sons in a camping car on their 1500-mile trail. They ’ will leave Auckland on August 11 -for seven months.

Mr Day will leave Hamilton this week and will deliver a paper to the 10th international; conference on modern language and literature, held at I Strasburg. After the confer-1 ence he will be visiting! lecturer for two terms in the! faculty of drama at the University of Bristol. He will meet members of the former Greek resistance who will take Mr Day to the Pindus Mountains where John Mulgan worked with them during the war. Mr Day is writing a biography of Mulgan, a New Zealand novelist and author of “Man Alone.” Mr Day will also spend a month in the United States I studying faculties of drama at 'American universities.