Typescript poetry and prose.

Bookseller Notes

Percy Nash was a major figure in British cinema of the silent era. He had earlier, as a reminiscence included in these papers describes, worked in the theatre under Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Some of the work here refers to, indeed one section of poems is dedicated to, the Green Room Club. He is not otherwise known as a poet, and whilst the verse here has some interest both on account of his eminence in that other cultural sphere, and for its having been written, from a civilian perspective, during the Second World War it is hard to imagine it having been written for a purpose higher than exercising his sense of humour and various grudges.Some of the sections have titles 'Flashbacks: Of Verse and Adverse'; 'Flotsam and Jetsum [sic]' indicative of a lightness of tone. That tone is still present even where the subject matter is more serious, such as in the various poems dealing with the Second World War; the jingoistic strain there is not unexpected, and often strays further than modern sensibilities would allow in instances becoming outright unpleasant, such as in the prose diatribe 'Our Responsibility', where Nash proposes the obliteration of the German people and their language as the only way 'this fair World will live in Permanent Peace [...] our Duty to the Almighty'; the same sentiment is taken up in poetic form in 'A Warning'. Similarly reprehensible is 'What a Christian Would like to Know', a haranguing litany of questions that is thoroughly anti-Semitic in a manner certainly expressive of contemporary attitudes but no less distasteful for that fact.Nash here writes in, as he puts it at the opening of a recollection of a vision on the hills of Rome during his film-making career, the 'autumn of life', and there is much else that would fall into the more palatable category of curmudgeonliness associated with that age: in 'An Open Letter to Dance Band Proprietors' addressed to the editor of the Radio Times, Nash suggests road drills, dustbins, screws scraped on slate as improvements to the instrumentation and the use of people 'straining to Vomit' in order to enhance the vocals; the poem 'Doctor B.B.C.' closes with a similar dig at 'swing music' and 'crooners'. His early career in the theatre is recounted in an 8pp. memoir of his work under Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree; his present distaste with the theatre-experience stated in a 3pp. letter from 'a Playgoer' signed by him at foot.