AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This is a book of singular charm by a British poet who is not too well known in this country. Muir spent the first fourteen years of his life in the Orkney Islands, and the descriptions of his childhood and youth on a number of remote, sea-girdled farms have a pure enchantment. Later when his family lost their money, many dreary and deathladen years were spent in Glasgow, before the first World War, Muir earning his own living and acquiring a difficult education in literature since he could not afford a formal education. His marriage in his late twenties to a woman he loved and reverenced throughout his life, his period in London where he made numerous literary friends, his travels on the continent, and the final episodes of his work for the British Council in Prague just before it was taken over by the Communists and for them later in Italy form the external pattern of this memoir. But, modest and gentle as it is, this is chiefly an ""internal"" biography. Essentially Muir is a mystic, with the mystic belief in a ""way"", a ""growth"", a meaning to life. This element constitutes the interest of his book, though it is never didactic nor eccentric. Chiefly within the framework of the Christian fable Muir seems to arrive at some faint indication of a pattern... His sincerity, his humanity, and for those who know his poetry- his deep mystic symbolism, will give this book its appeal to a special group.