BOOKS AND MEMORIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23044, 21 November 1936, Page 4

BOOKS AND MEMORIES

A NOVEL AUTOBIOGRAPHY "Private Opinion; A Commonplace Book." By Alan Pryce-Jones. London; Cobden-Sanderson. 6s net. When Mr Alan Pryce-Jones arrived in Vienna some months ago and commenced to unpack his luggage, vagrant thoughts entered his mind as he rearranged his books on the shelves; each volume had some association, sometimes directly bearing on the book itself, and again having only an indirect connection. These random thoughts he has recalled and collected together in “Private Opinion,” which is really an interesting novelty between a volume of essays and an autobiography. It is at once highly informal and peculiarly personal. The author’s books are a very catholic collection and, as he takes each book as a “jumping-off place” and is liable to jump off in any eccentric direction, the variety of subjects on which he discourses is bewildering. The danger of complacence, to which such a method is very open, has been successfully avoided, but there is through the book an undercurrent, an unconscious egotism, which is quite delightful. Most readers will find some enjoyment in this book, but no one will derive so much pleasure from it as the author himself. Some of the volumes have for the author intimate associations with his childhood in a very respectable and slightly old-fashioned quarter of London 30 years ago, and descriptions of fragmentary recollections of those vanished days, and the fuller memories of adolescent joys and sorrows, with the gradual blossoming in public school and university life, are peculiarly evocative of that more leisurely period and of one’s own youth. Other books —known and unknown, quaint, classical or merely popular—prompt him to recall later days of travel, and excellent impressions of Spain, Uganda, Slovakia, South America and Morocco are scattered with a casualness which is almost irritating. Only once is an impression allowed to develop Into what could be called a travel sketch, and this is so brilliantly, done that one regrets all the more the opportunities that have not been fully availed of. So well is conveyed the tedium of the passengers on a tourist liner at a British Columbian port that one seems to be sharing the experience. In other sections, the public school system, as exemplified at Eton, is defended in a manner which will not be popular with the majority of its supporters. * “If we were permanently unfitted for earning our living,” he writes, “it might.be argued that only a negligible minority of Etonions have to rely entirely on their own resources. There is always somebody in the background. And as a prelude to taking to county activities, or estate management, or gentle stock-brokering, or diplomacy, or drink, or governing the country, the big public schools seem to do very well.” Similarly is pacifism discussed:— “If reason offers no excuse for taking part in a war, it offers none for staying out. Were the value of human life a constant value the excuse would be ready to hand. But so small is the probable public importance of each life lost—however regrettable the loss of a few sonneteers, fast bowlers, and colonial Governors-to-be—that the possible sanctity of that life can hardly be counted among the practical deterrents to a form of murder which is nothing if not matter-of-fact." Occasionally Mr Pryce-Jones mounts a hobby horse and sallies forth pleasantly in defence of a minor eighteenth century poet or of a little-known German author, or more purposefully tilts at the failings of some modern authors. Because of the goodness of these excursions into literature, travel, and autobiography, the book should become a cherished possession among collectors of such objets de vertu. D, G. B.