Quick Review

The Goldfish by Robert Lynd

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Here's another of that last, charming generation of literary gentlemen and "light" essayists who earned their livings primarily from a kind of writing that all but disappeared after the Second World War.  These were not frivolous writers; most if not all were also serious reporters, critics, committeemen, and like Lynd, as likely to take a hand in politics as in literature.  That said, the essential enticement to these old books now, for me at least, is in the simplicity of their conceits, the commonalities of both language and reference taken for granted, and the leisurely, often almost pointless pace at which things are taken.  Witness, for instance, the title essay here which is made of nothing much more than one very slight memory of an Irish old rag-and-bone-man, with a very clever idea of how to attract custom to his cart: bowls with goldfish in them.  In exchange for dad's old coat or one of mother's old skirts, any boy or girl in the neighbourhood, just that day, may take home one of those magical wee pets.  And so the cry for old clothes is raised, sacrifices made up one side of the street and down the other, that the babies might have a goldfish.  There's nothing mean in the whole enterprise, at least as described by Lynd.  Even dad, home from hard work to discover his favourite trousers sacrificed, is gentled down when he sees it was "for the kiddies."  Nice.

It is nice, that. In fact, all the book is nice.  Even more than "charm," nice is a word that fell into such disrepute at roughly the middle of the last century or shortly thereafter as to be now rare, at least when used without irony, if that's even possible anymore.  Maybe it's not.  Maybe words like "nice" and "charm" are still too weighted with the dust of generations of respectability, i.e. racial privilege, class, colonialism and sexual repression, to ever quite come back.  Still, we would seem to have put enough distance between us and great-grandma's antimacasssared parlour to find at least the best of those times and this style quaint, amusing in a mild way, even good, rather than indicative of  lingering conservatism.

Lynd is really an excellent personal essayist, so I don't mean to reduce him to the antique.  He's so good indeed, I feel sure that had he been born a few decades ealier or not lived quite so long, he would be widely read and anthologized still.  Because he lived into the new days of Flann O'Brien and the like, Lynd lived long enough to be seen to be old fashioned and he's never quite recovered, sure,  even since he had the good turn to die, poor man.

Now that radio, of all things, has made stars out of not a few comic writers and personal essayists here and abroad, I'm thinking this might be just the moment for some enterprising soul to reissue some essays by Robert Lynd, perhaps with an introduction by one of those Public Radio stars. Publishers if any, please take note.  Meanwhile, any who can could do much worse than to find some charming little book like this one to read of a quiet evening.  Nice, that.



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