The Penguin New Wilting. No. 15. Edited by John Lehmann.
(Penguin Books. 9d.) Tits series is always worth buying, and it is perhaps captious to complain that some numbers too much resemble a family face with its recurrent, inescapable features. Surely all readers of contemporary literature have now had enough chance to digest Mr. Maclaren-Ross's reports on Army Life, which are entertaining but not infinitely repeatable. The saga of the dear old sturdy miner, who defies the wicked Town Council by keeping pigeons, also has a familiar sound. There is a good new Elegy by Spender, but the poem of George Barker's, reprinted here, is not equal to his moving and tragic best. The new material includes Robert Westerby's convincing story of a sailor's life and death, a hate-study of a suburban evacuee in the Highlands, by A. Gwynn-Browne, and " The Case of the Sleeping Man," good nonsense in the Fanfarlo vein. Spender's plea for " effecting a synthesis between the reality of the external and the internal human problems " is buttressed by shrewd contemporary examples—" the massed re- formist self-righteousness " of P.E.N. Club members. and the Pontius Pilates, anxious to wash away the taint of public life from Literature. The reprinted stories from India and China are very readable, and so is Mr. Acton's discussion of modern Chinese• fiction, of writings "that abound in pathos, but a pathos that has been frozen, that glitters with sharp icicles."
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