THE OBSERVER

London, England

27 May 1962

(page 29)

Mr. Stork and Mr. Log.

The Glittering Pastures. By Rupert Croft-Cooke. (Putnam. 21s.)

Fanfrolico and After. By Jack Lindsay. (Bodley Head. 30s.)

When Rupert Croft-Cooke left school just after the Great War, he wanted to “be a writer”; but his notions of what this entailed were facile where they were not merely vague, and he just drifted along, teaching in a series of abominable (and brilliantly described) prep. Schools and waiting, so to speak, for the Muses to issue further instructions.

The muses kept silence. So Mr. Croft-Cooke went to see Kipling, who was off-hand on the subject of passionate friendships between schoolboys (“Watch young bullocks in a field”); he got to know Victor B. Neuburg, Aleister Crowley’s chum who had a taste for doggerel verses of mild impropriety; he even formed an attachment to Lord Alfred Douglas, who was very considerate of his old mother. But none of this seemed to be getting him anywhere, when one day, almost by accident, he was appointed to an English school in Buenos Aires; under the impression that this was in Ceylon, he sailed away over the ocean and was quite pleased to find himself in Latin America instead.

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