THE ART OF LIVING

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 50, 27 August 1938, Page 26

THE ART OF LIVING

BALANCED OUTLOOK

A reader can be depressed by learned books written on social problems, sex, education, etc. They are profound and abstruse but they seem to get one nowhere: they are out of focus with the difficulties of everyday living. As regards sex, annoyance is often felt at the tendency to exploit it or to isolate it quasi-scientifically from the plexus of human relationships upon which it reacts and by which it is influenced. Dr. Elizabeth Bryson, in "Learning to Live" (published by A. H. and A. W. Reed), has written neither a ponderous nor an abstruse but an exceptionally wise book. Her every page illuminates the whole subject. At one and the same time she deepens the meaning of living and gives clear guidance towards its higher and wider possibilities. Such a work has permanent values very different from the ginger-hot-in-the-mouth treatises not uncommon. Dealing mainly with love, sex, and marriage from a woman's point of view she displays a firm grasp and clear insight. Hers is the first book of its kind which the writer working in the educational field would assert ought to be in the hands Of every adolescent, at least of every girl adolescent. It is amazing that in such short compass any writer should both state and elucidate the whole problem. The style is hard to describe. If it is poetic, it is also direct and informative, that of a mind which viewing the heights is firmly rooted in the homeliest verities. Nor because the writer considers motherhood a lofty mission does she avoid the pitfalls of sex. She writes with a respect for truth not a regard for convention. "Learning to Live" is a book that could be read, understood, and apprecij ated by thousands of adolescents, and such is the blended tact and candour of the writer that they would not feel that they were being preached at or that another was being added to the unlovely list of modern phobias, the phobia of sex nastiness. In books handling social subjects, science and good sense somewhat rarely go hand in hand. Add to these poetic power that suffuses what is said and touches it to higher issues and you have a work at once "simple, sensuous, and passionate," a work whose words come as near to being flesh and spirit as the limitations of mere language will allow. Miss Eileen Duggan has received word that Macmillans have bought the American rights of her collection of poems from Allen and Unwin.