For my fiver, I got one of my favourites, that is to say a former library book adorned with all the traditional stickers, tickets and so on and so forth. From where I associate to the libraries of my youth with their huge wooden trays full to their alphabetic brims with cardboard tickets and ticket holders. Or was it two sets of trays, one organised by book and one organised by borrower, so that you knew both which lenders had a particular book and which books were had by a particular lender?
The second book, like the first, was an entertaining read about that curious transitional world - say between 1955 and 1965 - when people at a loose end in the old world went out to help start up the universities of the new world, a new world still quite touchy about its recently colonial past. Plus Germany and Japan, tricky for rather different reasons. With the person at a loose end in this case being a poet and the new world being Japan, Berlin, Thailand and (mostly) Singapore, with excursions to London, China and Australia. Thinking about it now, perhaps there is a lot of overlap with the people who wind up working as expatriates for international operations more generally. I associate to the not very attractive people who like to dress up as aid workers and who charge around the pretty but poverty stricken desert (or jungle) in conspicuous, top-of-the-range land cruisers.
I offer a few nuggets.
First, Enright was able to sample the modest delights of opium dens in Bangkok, just before they were made illegal. He makes it all sound rather like popping down to the local for a couple of pints after a busy day at work. Not terribly evil or terribly addictive. The trouble seemed to be more that an opium habit made people lazy, not terribly keen on grafting away to pay for the fancy life style of the often unsavoury characters who had made it to the top of the greasy pole.
Second, he writes of an occasion when it was being asked why there was any point in teaching English Literature to the peoples of the new world. It seems that some of the speakers were struggling and it was left to an Indian professor, V. K. Gokak, to explain that English literature was perhaps the richest literature in the world. Riches which were there for anyone who cared, learned or who was taught to look. Enright reproduces the explanation in the paper, a talk to a conference at Hong Kong about 'English as a university subject in the Western Pacific area', included as appendix 1.
Third and last, right at the every end, he quotes a short chunk from a memorial poem by Yeats for Louis MacNeice, to the effect that a poem has the great advantage that you either consume it or you don't. It does not do well as wallpaper or background music. It does not take well to being abridged, adapted or translated. You just have to take it as it is. Or not in my case, as I rarely read poetry (other than that of the Bard). I associate to the Gill point about cutting letters, noticed at the beginning of reference 3.
PS: Bing fails for once, and I have been quite unable to trace the memorial poem mentioned above, despite offering the first line 'After all, it's rather a privilege'. Maybe I will have better luck later in the day. More luck with V. K. Gokak who is to be found at reference 4.
Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/thank-you-tescos.html.
Reference 2: Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor - Enright, D.J. - 1969.
Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/gill.html.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayaka_Krishna_Gokak.
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