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not least because of the silent running argument I had with the author as I read. The dustjacket suggests that M r Buckley has been intentionally provocative. If that be so, then the tone of this review is the measure of his success.

S. E. LEE

SUMMING UP "THE DOLL"

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. By Ray Lawler. (Angus and Robertson, 1957. 15s.)

"The Doll" is now a byword with us. If we are not careful, we may find it has become one of our national institutions, like "The Bridge" and "The Yarra". What might prevent this is the appearance fairly soon of a number of plays of similar merit and type. And, fortunately, with the recent successful productions of The Shifting Heart by Richard Beynon and The Multi-Coloured Umbrella by Barbara Vernon (first and second prizewinners in the Sydney Journalists' Club competition) we have good reasons for supposing that "The Doll" is merely the brilliant forerunner of a local dramatic movement—a movement characterized by salty, pungent dialogue, exact observation of the racier sections of Australian society, and a humorous and compassionate attitude to the fortunes of ordinary people.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragi-comedy of the unwillingness of people to forgo their youthful pleasures and to face up squarely to the restrictions, defeats and humiliations of growing old. The theme is embodied in a vivid original story. For sixteen summers two canecutters—burly taciturn Roo and perky little Barney—have spent the "lay-off" season living it up big with two Melbourne barmaids. Sixteen souvenir dolls, the mementoes of sixteen gay summers, brighten the walls of a suburban home in Carlton. Olive, the most romantic of the characters, explains what the "lay-off" has meant to her:

It's different all right. Compared to all the marriages I know, what I got is—[she gropes for depth of expression] is five months of heaven every year. And it's the same for them. Seven months they spend up there killin' themselves in the cane season, and then they come down here to live a little. That's what the lay-off is. Not just playing around and spending a lot of money, but a time for livin'. You think I haven't sized that up against what other women have? I laugh at them every time they try to tell me. Even waiting for Roo to come back is more exciting than anything they've got. . . .

In the seventeenth summer, however, the idyll collapses. Nancy has gone off and got married, and her substitute, Pearl, is basically too respectable to enter into the spirit of the "lay-off". Roo—"the eagle flying down out of the sun"—is growing bald and paunchy; he is no longer a gang-leader in the canefields; he is broke and has to take a job in a paint factory. A n d Barney, once "the biggest Cassa in the north", now gets mostly knock-backs. One by one, Roo, Barney and Olive are brought to the humiliating realization that the "lay-off" is a thing of the past. And it is too late for them to find anything to take its place. W h e n Roo, in a stubborn attempt to salvage something from the wreck, proposes marriage to Olive, she turns on him in a fury:

OLIVE [almost whispering]. You're not going back?

ROO [tenderly]. Look, I know this is seventeen years too late, and what I'm offering is not much chop, but—I want to marry you, Ol.

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[There is a moment of frozen horror and then she pushes herself away from him, almost screaming with quivering intensity.

OLIVE. No!

ROO. Olive . . . OLIVE. You can't get out of it like that—I won't let you . . . ROO [appalled]. Olive, what the hell's wrong? OLIVE. You've got to go back. It's the only hope we've got . . . ROO. Stop that screamin', will yer . . . OLIVE. Y O U think I'll let it all end up in marriage—every day—a paint factory—you think I'll

marry you? ROO [grabbing her and shouting back]. What else can we do? You gone mad or something?

First you tell me I've made you low, and now look—you dunno what you want! OLIVE [breaking away, possessed]. I do—I want what I had before. [She rushes at him and

pummels his chest.] You give it back to me—give me back what you've taken . . . ROO [grabbing her wrists and holding them tight]. Olive, it's gone—can't you understand? Every

last little scrap of it—gone! [He throws her away from him, and she falls to the floor, grief-stricken, almost an animal in her sense of loss.

OLIVE. I won't let you—I'll kill you first!

What strikes one forcibly in reading as distinct from seeing the play—one is too caught up in the lives of the characters during an actual performance to make such critical reflections—is Ray Lawler's ability to wring a powerful poetic meaning from a thoroughly realistic mode of presentation. When, for example, Olive is explaining to Pearl why Bubba Ryan presents Roo and Barney with candy walking-sticks on their arrival each year, she prattles completely in character and situation, and yet her speech is an illuminating expression of her tawdry romanticism and of the funloving spirit of the "lay-off".

A playwright who chooses a realistic mode of presentation is confronted with the particular problem of having his characters explain themselves more fully than similar characters would be able to in the everyday world. Within an illusion of real life he has to suggest an extra dimension of understanding to a responsive audience. Like such modern American dramatists as William Inge and Arthur Miller, Ray Lawler solves the problem by a judicious use of symbols: the candy walking-sticks, Pearl's dresses (black when she is being respectable and colourful when she accepts the "lay-off" arrangement), the rockets on N e w Year's Eve, and of course, the Kewpie dolls. O n only one occasion does he introduce any self-conscious symbolism into the dialogue—Olive's image of Roo and Barney as "two eagles flyin' down out of the sun"—and then he takes pains to rationalize its apparent unnaturalness. Pearl explains that Olive spoke in this "funny" way on hearing "a newspaper fellow gassing" about the seasonal habits of birds.

A few critics have complained that the central situation of the play is too unusual to be profoundly convincing, that we are unable to enter sympathetically into the lives of the characters. This would seem to be an opinion formed in the study rather than the theatre. Taken in the abstract, the crucial opening scene of King Lear is improbable; yet Shakespeare makes it seem inevitable. Similarly Ray Lawler makes his characters so real that doubts about the practicability of the "lay­off" arrangement don't occur to us. What is more, the comedy and the pathos of "The Doll" are inherent in the incongruities and irregularities of the central situation. There is no rigging of crises (as there seems to be in The Shifting Heart) and no mere reliance on a quaint vocabulary for laughs. As with every well-

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conceived play, given the characters and the basic situation, all else seems to follow naturally.

Kenneth Tynan, the dramatic critic of the Observer, made the claim that the presentation of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in the London theatre was an epoch-making event because the play treats working people simply as people and not as humorous types. His comments, which were printed under the heading "People as People", are worth quoting at least in part:

Last Tuesday, against all augury, the lost cause was suddenly won. One of Her Majesty's subjects turned up with a play about working people who were neither "grim" nor "funny", neither sentimentalised nor patronised, neither used to point a social moral nor derided as quaint and improbable clowns. Instead, they were presented ... as human beings in their own right, exulting in universal pleasures and nagged by universal griefs. . . . The play that pulled off the feat is Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (New); and if Ray Lawler, its Australian author, is aware of the magnitude of his achievement, I shall be the most astonished critic in London; for I am sure revolution was not in his mind when he wrote it. He was merely born with something that most English playwrights acquire only after a struggle and express only with the utmost embarrassment—respect for ordinary people.

Most English critics were equally enthusiastic. John Barber, for instance, termed it "the play of the year" (Daily Express) and Milton Shulman described it as "a play of real people and real values, pulsing with real dramatic gusto" (Evening Standard). But Harold Hobson, the Sunday Times critic, although he did not deny that "the conception manifests creative ability of a high order", showed by the superciliousness of a number of his comments the kind of attitude Australian writers have come to expect from certain quarters in England. "For seven months of the year (that is, during the English summer)," he carefully explained, "these canecutters separate themselves from ordinary life and are devoted, heart, flesh and mind, to whatever it is that canecutters do. Then, during the English winter . . ." H e concludes his review by complaining that the characters' conversa­tion is "dull, flat and unrevealing".

There are at least one weakness (more easily detected in reading than in seeing the play) and a couple of difficulties that every producer will have to try to over­come. The third act is thin. It contains the most subtle climax in the course of the action and provides a final penetrating statement of Olive's romanticism, but the "lay-off" is over by the end of Act II and a whole third act is too much for a Q.E.D. As to the difficulties in the way of production, a brilliant actor will always be required for Roo, since his part is underwritten, and Pearl, a delightful comic character with more than a fair share of punch lines, will have to be played down or she will steal the show.

N o w that we can read the text of the play, we should be able more easily to distinguish its topical from its enduring qualities. Undoubtedly it has gained tremendously so far from the novelty of its characters and language. Roo, Barney, Olive and Pearl had never been on a stage before and, though salty dialogue is a feature of modern realistic drama, at least the vocabulary of "The Doll" is novel ("Keepin' nit for the S.P. bookies, eh—drummin' up trade for the sly grogs"). Many Australians who went along nervously to one of the early performances will remem­ber how relieved they were to discover that our national character was neither

parodied nor advertised. "The Doll" has contributed greatly to our self-awareness

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by its exact observation, its unforced use of local idiom, its avoidance of "Aussie" cliches, and its crystallization of typical Australian attitudes. The thrill of recog­nition for Australians, and the pleasure for overseas theatregoers of being taken among new people in a new country, may quickly wear off, but because Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is anything but provincial, because it treats a general theme humorously and affectingly, it is likely to give pleasure in the theatre for a long time to come.

It is silly, or even insulting, to say of a good play that it reads as well as it acts. None the less the text of "The Doll" is pleasurable reading, and Angus and Robertson are to be commended on publishing it at the reasonable price of fifteen shillings. However, since the edition is of some historical importance, it should have included a list of the cast of the original Elizabethan Theatre production.

P. K. ELKIN

LIGHT AND HEAVY READING

Serial Publication in England before 1750. By R. M. Wiles. (Cambridge University Press, 1957. Stg 30s.)

At first glance, Professor Wiles's scholarly history of the first English publica­tions of books by instalments would seem to have interest only for specialists in eighteenth-century literature, particularly as the artistic value of most of the works so published., as he freely admits, was slight indeed and some of them he has not read carefully himself. Closer examination reveals, however, that the story he has to tell throws light on the reading habits of our ancestors as well as on the history of publishing and of copyright law, and suggests some interesting comparisons and contrasts with the popular literary fare of today.

Professor Wiles takes as his epigraph a sentence from the Grub-Street Journal of 26th October 1732: "This Method of Weekly Publication allures Multitudes to peruse Books, into which they would otherwise never have looked"; and he shows how publishers found a new, still precarious but often profitable line of business in catering for the pockets of this new literary reading public, prepared to pay their three-halfpence or twopence a sheet (8 quarto pages e.g.) for an instalment of a book which they would never have bought as a whole for a greater number of shillings.

"The fact is," he writes, "that the piecemeal publishing of books was well established a hundred years before Dickens put pen to paper"; and in an appendix he is able to list "more than 300 new and reprinted works so issued before 1750". The practice of publishing by instalment was not widespread until 1732, but it is traced back into the seventeenth century. From the issuing of a number of separate works (particularly plays) as part of a series of similar format, it was no great step to the publishing of instalments of one work in newspapers; later the instalments became supplements to the newspapers and later still virtually replaced the papers, the news being printed on the blue covers of the instalments and the covers duly being removed by the purchaser when he had the parts bound into one volume.

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