Gift for life and living

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 10

Gift for life and living

Never Look Back. By Cecil Lewis. Hutchinson. 208 pp. N.Z. price $6.65. “You have a gift for life and living,” the painter Charles Ricketts told Cecil Lewis when he was 22. Lewis, now a locquacious 76, clearly exploited that gift for he has had an astonishingly varied life — as a First World War flying ace, flying instructor in China, a foundation member of the 8.8. C., film writer (he won an Oscar for his script of Shawls “Pygmalion”), beachcomber, journalist, failed dropout, United Nations official and television executive. ■ In “Never Look Back** — an illconsidered title for a book of reminiscences — he has reworked much of the ground covered in his previous books and threatens to

become, initially, one of those most obnoxious of four-letter words, a b—. Coyly boastful and boastfully coy on occasions, he can unblushingly produce phrases that leave the reader wincing. “The women who flocked to my bed,” he says at one point, “failed to console me.” Ah well, perhaps they, the whole flock, were consoled. But woven into these adventures is a recurring theme. As a spotter pilot over the trenches of France he was deeply moved by the horror and futility of war and much of his aduit life has been a quest for a philosophy of life that might create a saner world and provide a deeper understanding of man’s reality. He became, as he puts it, “hooked” on the ideas of Georgi Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and in a . state of spiritual inebriation embarked

on the establishment of a commune in the Transvaal, a disastrous venture in which he lost nearly all his worldly possessions. , The experience did not shatter his ‘ faith. Indeed, it enabled him to stand back and examine himself and his ideas; _ and the last chapter of the book is a sane and sensible exposition of his beliefs. His conclusion, free of dogma and jargon, is that nothing much can change in the human condition until man himself changes. There is nothing very profound or original about that finding, but Lewis does suggest at least one way of bringing about the change: the establishment of schools that foster a longing for another quality of life — schools, that is, for saints. The problem here though — and Lewis does not attempt to solve it — is who would teach the teachers?