Broken vow with Levin

Press, 29 July 1989, Page 22

Broken vow with Levin

AU Things Considered. By Bernard Levin. Cape, 1989. 291 pp. index. $44.95. (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) Whenever a new selection of Bernard Levin’s journalism comes into my hands I vow to be restrained in my reading, to ration myself to one or two articles a day so the pleasure will be prolonged and I will appreciate each column to the full. And every time my vow is promptly broken. I start slowly with the introduction, the old addiction grips me, and a few hours later I find with dismay that I have raced through the whole book and must now wait another two years for the next. “All Things Considered” is the fifth volume that Levin has culled from his journalism. (He has also written travel books, but although they have their own delights they do not really compare with his polemics.) There is no other living journalist who writes with such wit, such passion, and such knowledge and devotees of his craft will not be disappointed with his latest offering. Here again is the wide variety of subjects which can spark his interest and his fluency — from boomerangs to orchestras, from stamps to pornography — and here again too is the sense of being in the presence of a lively, erudite, cultured intelligence which can focus a brilliant light on both the genius and the foibles of mankind. Levin agrees (as who would not?) that there is much to cause disquiet in the present age. "And it is inevitable that one who, like me, chronicles our life and times, will tend to use more of the disquieting material which lies so copiously at hand than the more reassuring variety.” But he also reaffirms that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and his descriptions of the ultimate solace of artistic experience (which he finds in Brendel playing Schubert and in Hogan’s creation of Crocodile Dundee)

provide excitement and comfort for a discerning reader. “The greatest long sentence writer in the world,” commented a colleague to whom I showed this book. That is true, but Levin is much more and he proves it again here, though I reluctantly admit to a faint unease as I finish “All Things Considered.” The inclusion of his interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury could be questioned — it is a boring and predictable plateau in the exciting landscape. Then, too, it seems that some of Levin’s opinions have hardened unduly, that his ridicule sometimes verges on the cruel, that he relies a little too heavily on his own cliches. No, no this is heresy and in the main the articles in “All Things Considered” are worthy of the writer Philip' Toynbee described as “the journalist par excellence: the purest living example of the English species.”