Bright light of Eng. Lit.

Press, 24 August 1985, Page 20

Bright light of Eng. Lit.

Frederick Sinclaire: A Memoir. By H. Winston Rhodes. University of Canterbury, 1985. 126 pp. $l4. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley) If New Zealand writers owe a debt of gratitude to H. Winston Rhodes, they must also offer thanks to Professor Freddie Sinclaire, his friend, colleague and mentor, who is the subject of this engaging memoir. Sinclaire it was who so influenced the young Rhodes in the Melbourne of the early twenties that he gave up his medical studies and thereafter followed the literary life. He also followed Sinclaire to Canterbury University College, as it then was, and both set about demolishing an English syllabus cast almost in tablets of stone by the foundation professor, John Macmillan Brown. They succeeded. “Under Professor Sinclaire and H. Winston Rhodes I learnt for the first time what English literature was,” wrote Denis Glover in his autobiography. “Professor Sinclaire is probably the most remarkable of the professors under whom I tried to learn something.” Sinclaire did more than let light into

the English syllabus. He had a reputation as a formidable radical and he soon justified it in the somewhat stuffy social scene in Christchurch in the thirties. His essays appeared first in these pages and he later wrote for the radical journal “Tomorrow.” They were witty, wise, and waspish essays. They stung, not only the Establishment — if indeed

Christchurch then had one — but also the solemn dogmatists on the political Left. Sinclaire was clearly not a dangerous revolutionary, but, says Rhodes, he was never a passive footman in the halls of orthodoxy either. Much of the book is devoted to Sinclaire’s Melbourne years when, as head of the unorthodox Free Religious Fellowship, he attracted many of the radicals, writers, poets and free thinkers who influenced Australia’s cultural life in the twenties. It is a memoir only Winston Rhodes could have written and is a welcome addition to the accounts of people and ideas which have influenced our own social and intellectual development.