In a wry little poem, "The Fairies," D. J. Enright neatly sums up his response to the foreign countries in which he has worked: …

         and the closet door swings eagerly open
      And out falls a skeleton with a frightful crash.

Enright's inaugural lecture at the University of Singapore, on which this poem presumably comments, aroused governmental hostility by criticizing the banning of jukeboxes. Such a skeleton appears to an outsider comparatively small; it is his poems about Japan that display to the full his talent for dropping bricks, for X-raying through the public "face" of a country to the bones beneath.

The "humanism," the concern for individuals rather than governments, that conditions this response first made its appearance in Academic Year, a novel based on Enright's experience as a lecturer at the University of Alexandria…. Enright reiterates this problem in his preface to Poets of the 1950's, and...