Henry Bosco’s Art

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 4

Henry Bosco’s Art

Henry Bosco. Poet Novelist. By R. T. Sussex. University of Canterbury. 184 pp. Index.

Henry Bosco is that uncommon phenomenon among novelists today, a poet and a visionary: one for whom, in John Cowper Powys’s phrase, there is “a borderland of the miraculous round everything that exists.” The harsh, dry landscape of Provence is for him, as Shoreham was for the painter Samuel Palmer, and the Lakes were for Wordsworth. a stepping-stone to the unseen. The earth is

full of presences, some evil, which can take possession of a man, some good, like those mellow old Provencal farmhouses which are conceived as living things, in intimate contact with earth and air. Not surprisingly, in a writer drawing inspiration from a land where a diversity of cultures have mingled, there are both pagan and Christian influences in his work. Demeter and Pan may still be invoked in the form of powerful and ‘ dangerous earth-forces: while in remote corners of the hills may be found the flawed innocence of a Provencal Eden. Bosco’s novels are as remote from the preoccupations of Satre and the mainstream of French fiction as “Wuthering Heights” is from the novels of Dickens and Thackeray; and, although he achieved a measure of fame in 1945, when his novel “Le Mas Theotime” won the Theophraste Renaudot Prize, Bosco has not always received the critical appreciation be deserved. Happily, this is not the case with Professor Sussex’s study, which is both sympathetic and penetrating. His enthusiasm for Bosco’s art shows on every page; yet he has also a sharp eye for those pitfails into which a Romantic novelist can easily fall. His method of approach iis to disregard biographical details in favour of a chronological assessment of the novels, poems and children’s books, in the course of which Ihe covers the main aspects lof Bosco’s art. Professor Sussex’s book provides an ; excellent introduction to a I novelist of genius whose work. ] inexcusably, still awaits * translation.