SELF-PREOCCUPATION

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 72, 17 December 1938, Page 2 (Supplement)

SELF-PREOCCUPATION

A Woman’s Introspective Autobiography

“We Have Been Glad,” by Doris N Dalglish (London: Macmillan).

Here is autobiography of a peculiarly introspective nature. The writer began life in England as the only child of Scottish parents, who, particularly the mother, persisted in regarding themselves as exiles, and lived rather in the remembered life of the little coastal town from which they came than in the daily round of the strange new existence in London. Miss Dalglish says:—

The vision of the lone shelling exercised a shadowy domination over my ehildhod, as it does over the whole of my country, and to use (hose handy suggestions which our poets provide, I was indirectly encoutto regard tile world rut tier as a place where one sorrowed for a land of lost content than as a vale of soul-making. Lack ot friendship for my parents meant laek of companionship for me. Some only children have it. made up to them with cousins, hut. seventeen cousins, several of them considerably senior to me, and all living m Glasgow, could not mend matters.

•Miss Dalglish describes herself us “one of a generation whose burden is unique,” the generation which faced the daily tragedy of the war news bulletin at an age when they should have been discovering the “glad” new country of youth. Her story cannot, be regarded' as in any way “typical,” and makes very different reading from that which might, have been written by many of her contemporaries. She writes well, but the appeal of “We Have Been Glad” rests on her ability to rouse in the reader sufficient interest in and sympathy for a character so fintroverted and preoccupied with self as to carry him (or her) towards the end when “nerve storms in private, bad temper in public, a growing inertia (except, I will dare to say, where literature was concerned), and a general attitude of being, as one older friend put it, ’so young in her antagonisms,’ persisted so long that some would have said that nothing but psycho-therapy could help.” If the author ever forgot herself in the problems of others, one hears noth* ing of it in the book. Her friendships seem to have been of the romantic, adoring variety, with little of the ‘‘give and take” of equality. Her attitude toward the adult state of life she her self aptly describes as “mawkish.” Efforts to take part in the general life of the country as teacher or Government servant failed to rouse her enthusiasm, and she has returned to literature, her first and most abiding delight. Communism plays a large part in her life, and after years of feeling a religious “outcast,” she has now found her “spiritual home” in Quakerism. Appropriately, on the occasions when Miss Dalglish forgets her own woes and writes impersonally, the reader finds interest and enjoyment, and relief from walking with the spiritless, self-castigating # creature she represents herself as being.