I've only just remembered today that I am sitting on a vast hoard of newspaperly gems from
The Guardian and
Observer, including this small vote of confidence from none other than
Vita Sackville-West.
Ms. Sackville-West (you may remember) had a bit of a
run-in with the poetry committee of the Society of Authors in March, 1946, in the midst of trying to decide who would read at an upcoming poetry recital for the Queen. If she held any ill-will towards Reed she does not show it in her
review of A Map of Verona for
The Observer on May 5th ("Seething Brain," p. 3), little more than a week before the recital.
Indeed, she reports being 'much taken with the poem called "Lives," which seemed to express so admirably Mr. Reed's sense of the elusiveness as well as the continuity of life':
In addition to Reed's
A Map of Verona: Poems (Cape) and Durrell's
Cities Plains and People (Faber), Sackville-West also reviews (at length): Dylan Thomas's
Deaths and Entrances (Dent); Edwin Muir's
The Voyage and Other Poems (Faber);
Four Quartets Rehearsed by Raymond Preston (Sheed and Ward);
Pushkin's Poems, translated by Walter Morison (Allen and Unwin);
Modern Czech Poetry translated by Ewald Osers and J.K. Montgomery (Allen and Unwin); and Joseph Braddock's
Swanhild (Chaterson).
As for Vita and Henry, well... the poetry committee didn't pick
him, either.
This blurb appears in a publisher's advertisement in
The Spectator for February 18, 1949. It's lifted, according to the byline, from a book review Henry Reed wrote for
The Observer, on Gerard Hopkins' translation of
selections from Proust (London: Allan Wingate, 1948).
MARCEL PROUST
A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings
Chosen and Translated by Gerard Hopkins'We have the charming experience of meeting Proust outside the turmoil of creation, chatting, confiding, preparing... the same character, the same voice, that come through the translation of Scott-Moncrieff come through Mr. Hopkins's no less sensitive versions.' Henry Reed, Observer. 10s 6d net
Not only is this the first record I have of Reed reviewing this particular work, but it's actually the first clue I have to any Reed review appearing in
The Observer, at any time. Are there more? I bet there are more.
Tracking down a
Observer review is going to be difficult. I don't know the date (but we can easily surmise it was sometime in late 1948 or January 1949), and I can't find a library within easy reach that has the paper from the 1940s, either in print or on microfilm. I'll check
Book Review Digest, etc., and see if I can pinpoint it.
(And what do we have, here? In
The Guardian News & Media Archive catalog, is a record for a photograph of "Reed, Henry: Radio," in a file for "
Prints by Guardian/Observer photographers.")
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1540. Trewin. J.C., "Keeping It Up." Listener 52, no. 1342 (18 November 1954), 877. 879.
Trewin's review of Henry Reed's operatic parody, Emily Butter.
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