I Wore My Linen Trousers. By Basil Collier. (Dent. I5S.)
FOR your literary exhibitionist, the light-weight travel-book offers
perhaps the greatest scope. Arch self-revelation is so easily larded with a knowing slice of guide-book snobbery, and the possibilities of padding are pretty well unlimited. Mr. Collier has taken full toll of his opportunity. Now skittish, now cocky, he intertwines intolerably trivial meanderings in Provence with long undigested chunks of post-Baedeker local higtory. No glimmer of wit relieves the trite recital of uninteresting facts. (" The ants and wood-lice which crossed my path were twice the size of those in England.") The reader's sympathies are reserved for two friends whom the author met in a hotel. (" They greeted me politely, even with friendliness, but I thought witnout much warmth.") Aix provides a potted biography of Cezanne, meal after meal calls forth exclamations on the cheapness of French food, a page is devoted to deciding whether a female friend can board the Avignon 'bus wearing an abbreviated " play-suit."
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