MR. SACHEVERELL SITWELL, who writes a preface to it, suggests
that The Pavement and the Sky is a book of a new kind. Though Mr. Clarkson is a new writer his book is not that. There is a name, if an awkward one, for the category into which it falls—and that is " reportage." He describes city life (and no noun is allowed out without a couple of adjectives), the saloon bar, the doss-house, the Zoo on a hot afternoon, the crowds round a coffee-stall or at Easter Mass in a small Catholic church, the birth of a welcome child in a temporary house on a bomb site, the contents of a prostitute's handbag, As You Like It in Regent's Park. Mr. Clarkson not only sees with a good retentive eye, but writes with a charm, innocence and tolerance that make the book appealing. He will, the reader will hope, never lose these agreeable qualities ; but may perhaps become convinced that nouns,. though very important, are not the sort of V.I.P.s who always have to have a couple of guards tagging after them, and that the way to bring colour into a sentence, without cluttering it up, is to choose the right noun and then to see what can be done with the verbs. However, poets (Mr. Clarkson writes verse) who rummage through all the words in the language to make their own fine mosaics, often suppose that prose can be- a last-minute travel-bag into which can be shovelled everything that might come in
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