THE word " genius " is so provocative and imprecise—the
claim is so large and in its application so susceptible to the vagaries of a personal opinion—that it seems rather a pity that the term has been used as a feconunendation on the dust-cover of this posthumous collection of James Farrar's writings. This is not to deny that the letters, stories and poems of the gallant and charming young airman, who was killed in action in 1944 at the age of twenty, show a most unusual talent. They were well worth bringing together ; and Mr. Henry Williamson deserves the thanks of anyone interested - in good writing for the sympathetic understanding with which he has handled them. But much would have depended on Farrar's development during the next ten years of his life. As it is, there is little among these fragments—necessarily tentative and immature —that posterity is likely to remember, though it is to be hoped that those who compile verse anthologies will not forget James Farrar. Neither should they forget James Blyth, who died in an accident in 1942, aged seventeen, and whose poems were published by the Favil Press. Reading this book, one might say of Farrar, as of Blyth, in the words of Charles Sorley: . . . you bright promise, withered long and sped Is touched ; stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet And blossoms and is you, When you are dead."
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