THE MEMOIRS OF L. A. G. STRONG

By R. W. Millar
GREEN MEMORY, by L. A. G. Strong Methuen, 30s.). THIS book is the well-known novelist's account of his early years, his school-days and his Oxford friendships.
It is, to some extent, a "period piece" of a kind which has been rather elbowed out by more sensational experiences, and since the writer died suddenly three years ago he was not able to edit the book which would have benefited by some pruning.
Joys in Ireland
LEONARD STRONG was of Irish extraction and very proud of it. Some of the most delightful pages in the book describe his childhood visits to his grandmother's home in Ireland, which was. he points out, still in the midVictorian period in 1910.
His parents, on what was even then a very modest income, gave him a good conventional education, the merits and de-merits of which he assesses. He won an open scholarship to Oxford, rather attenuated in the years of the 191418 war, but the number of people, some famous and some now forgotten, with whom he had contacts is a tribute to his personality, and while many of these undergraduate encounters were fugitive. his friendship with Yeats, then living at Oxford, lasted for twenty years.
Great figures
A lot of now-faded literary figures flit in and out of the scene, some of them with éclat, like George Moore, who must have inspired more scurrilous anecdotesj than any other writer of the I period. For Yeats and l€ Strong always retained his devotion.
Leonard Strong was strongly attracted to the theatre, had once wished to be a comedian and took lessons in singing.
He was an excellent judge of acting, and his accounts of the Benson companies and the Abbey Theatre personalities are much more than merely nostalgic. But it was inevitable that after a period of schoolmastering, he should turn to writing, fortified by a typical piece of advice from Reginald McKenna, whose son was a pupil of his.
TJohn McCormack HE book ends in 1924 with his marriage.
Just before the end there is a sketch of John McCormack making his first re-appearance in England after he had renounced British nationality during the war. Such vignettes, acutely observed and simply described, are the strength of this book, as they were of his novels. a tribute to the "green memory" continually nourished by a gift for friendship and a generous response to the world.