CANDID AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20420, 23 November 1929, Page 10 (Supplement)

CANDID AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

DRUNKARD'S PHILOSOPHY.

" Say when, old man," tho familiar greeting, supplies the key to tho enigmatic titlo of the most candid autobiography of J. L. Polo, perhaps best described as a progressive drunkard. To that demand when put by tho last comrade, Death, the author holds it to be tho inalienable right of every man to answer as ho pleases. For himself, after a life which included a public school education, fair attainments, both in brain and brawn, successful authorship in styles as diverse a3 suggested by the titles " Susan's Repentanco" and " Goals in Hell," a career of useful secretarial war service, and a period of insanity, ho said his final " when" at'ler an overdose of methylated spirits, in a private home for inebriates before reaching the ago of fifty.

Sordid as tho bare facts seem thus coldly stated, tho book is curiously and cumulatively interesting both as a study in transitional social life—Victorian and Noo-Georgian —and also because tho reader is alternately repelled and attracted by the character of tho writer himself.

As the author's literary executive, Mr. Peter Grimstono C.B.—all these names are obviously pseudonymous—puts it: " Ho was a mixture of devil and genius with a good deal of the brute beast and sheer weakness thrown in." But ho was a bittor rebol against what ho calls the ' Shamorality' of tho Victorian era and one cannot help feeling that his cynical brutality was unconsciously exaggerated by his hatred of smug hypocrisy. Possibly ho was right too, in attributing to a taint of insanity in his blood the perversity with which ho went out of his way to alienate good friends. But the number of these friends and tho loyalty with which they sought to protect liiin against his own failings argues something good in the man himself." Tho quotation of a single passage will convey something, both of tho writer's wayward personality and of his literary charm. As head boy of his school ho had tho right to sleep out on a flat roof next his room. " I used to think, in thoso very far-off days," ho says, "as I lay out on a hot summer night. . .

that tho argent moon would go sailing for ever in its serene purple sea and I likewise be watching it for ever. Tho stars, spangled so numerously, like celandines in black earth, would always be thero; those intcrminablo nightingales always shouting, tho farm dogs speaking intermittently to ono another across the silences. No one would ever grow old; certainly not I. . . It all seemed eternal, while still tho sap ran lively in my veins, which held no chalk then: neither did my pipes and runnels hold other destructive tilings. - I think perhaps I would not go back to that enchantment now, even if I could. For now I know enchantment ends and wo go abruptly either into the dark or into a cold light that will make us shiver as it tells us we are bone-naked. All is but toys." " "When " by J. L. Polo (Chapman and Hall).