Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writings by Frank Sargeson

Author:Frank Sargeson [Sargeson, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405557
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Landfall, March 1964 (v.18, no.1), pp.44-54. ‘Shakespeare and the Kiwi’ was one of four essays published in that issue of Landfall to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

]21[

HENRY LAWSON: Some Notes after Re-reading

From Lawson’s own account of his childhood it seems clear that he suffered a precocious sense of interior desolation. There were reasons—poverty, disagreements and disputes between parents, besides the boy’s own peculiarities of temperament. (‘My aunts said it was a pity I hadn’t been born a girl.’) But an inquiry into the nature of Lawson’s great literary achievement could be better served by emphasizing the permanence of this sense, than by any probing for its whys and wherefores. In a letter to a friend serving in the 1914–18 war, Lawson, then in his later forties, said:

I’ll tell you this, Benno, old chap, and you can tell the nurse if you like, married or single, ‘happy’ home or not—there’s such a thing as home-home-sickness [the italics are Lawson’s] as well as the foreign kind; and when the hero welcome—or prodigal son welcome; it doesn’t matter which—is over, you’ll feel in your bowels that awful, sinking world-emptiness which is infinitely worse than any home-sickness abroad, because it is born of the hoary father of all disillusions, and is, or will seem to be, the End—the Limit. It’s a mighty reaction of course—the same as on the first night in a Promised Land…. I’ve felt that kind of home-sickness for the last place I came from, or for anywhere….

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.