BRIGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26200, 10 July 1946, Page 2

BRIGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A SATIRIST’S RECOLLECTIONS

Tlie Wolf at the Door. By Michael Barsley. Michael Joseph. Illustrated. 10s 6d.

Michael Barsley has several satirical works to his credit, but The Wolf at the Door is a venture into autobiography. It is broadly rather particularly personal, however, and he still finds plenty of scope for his sharp wit. The unusual title represents the device by which Mr Barsley preserves the necessary detachment from his subject. The wolf of the title is the proverbial wolf which is said to haunt the doors of budding artists and authors with particular zeal. Mr Barsley appears to be on terms of intimacy with this animal, which makes its appearance at various intervals throughout the book whenever the author’s sentimentalising self is tending to deception. It is an ingenious and effective idea, and the book owes much of its humour to it. The story is lightly written, but it is not merely a funny book. Comments such as the following show this: “Just as (Hugh) Walpole can be the novelist of youth’s last illusion, so Housman is the poet of youth’s first disillusion.’’ There is also more than humour in a phrase such as “The house was full of cats and goldfish.” Mr Barsley has a good sense of period and, in spite of the watchful eye of the woif, his descriptions of Liverpool at the beginning of the century and of Oxford in the 'twenties have a certain nostalgic quality about them. Of the latter period he writes: “The Noel Coward phase must have been m full, shrill cry at the time, with the Evelyn Waugh period in its first shrieks.”

Particularly interesting is the chapter, “ The Clock on the Wall,” in which the author describes wartime experiences in Broadcasting House and particularly those parts of it concerned with the production of the War Report. As the publishers claim, this is “an autobiography with a difference.” A.L.F.