Review of Here's Lower by Lennie Lower, ill. Patrick Cook, with a memoir by Cyril Pearl, selected by Tom Thompson

Abstract

For a writer whose reputation rests on a single book, and who has been ignored in all the histories of Australian literature, Lennie Lower shows notable pertinacity. Here's Luck, first published in 1930, was reprinted eleven times before his death in 1947 and has remained in print for most of the time since. And though the selections of his tall tales and jeux d'esprit that were published in his own lifetime met with no comparable success, two further selections have appeared posthumously: The Best of Lennie Lower, presented by Cyril Pearl and WEP (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1963), and the present selection by Tom Thompson. Most of the pieces in these and the earlier selections were originally printed in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Guardian, Smith's Weekly, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Women's Weekly. They took their inspiration, such as it was, from chance personal experiences, from news items (real or imaginary), from topics of the day, or from any social phenomenon, quirk of human nature, or oddity of the English language that happened to tickle Lower's sense of humour. Those in Tom Thompson's selection range from little gems of verbal humour and witty social observation—worthy of the author of Here's Luck—to mere agglomerations of lame puns and leaden flights of fancy.