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The Moral Climate of Sargeson' S Stories* && A New Zealand Qyarter!J VOLUME NINE •955 Reprinted with the permission of The Caxton Press JOHNSON REPRINT CORPORATION JOHNSON REPRINT COMPANY LTD. 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Berkeley Square House, London, W. 1 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund. Corrigendum: Landfall 34, p. I2o, line I I, should read: -It's not me, Harry said. I was wondering about Miss Mackin- 6c; 1·4-'4- First reprinting, 1968, Johnson Reprint Corporation Printed in the United States of America LANDFALL A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press CONTENTS Notes 3 In the Fields of my Father's Youth, W. H. Oliver 4 Two Poems, Colin Newbury 7 Winter Beach, Charles Doyle IO Two Poems, Hubert Witheford u Inheritance, Kendrick Smithyman 12 The Sleeping Beauty, Keith Sinclair 13 The Colonel's Daughter, Frank Sargeson 17 The Moral Climate of Sargeson's Stories, H. Winston Rhodes 25 Comics in New Zealand, Margaret Dalziel 41 Commentaries : THE ELECTIONS, R. G. Durrant 70 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND DIVORCE, D. H. Monro 76 SOME NEW ZEALAND COMPOSERS, Frederick Page 83 Reviews: WORKS OF FRANCES HODGKINS IN NEW ZEALAND, A. R. D. Fairburn 86 JOURNEY TO NEW CHINA, C. P. FitzGerald 90 Correspondence, Howard K. Kippenberger, Bill Pearson, Guthrie Wilson, A. R. D. Fairburn 93 Maori Heads by Dennis Knight Turner Illustrations from Comics VOLUME NINE NUMBER ONE MARCH I 9 55 Notes I AMONG the first tasks of the trust to be set up under the Historic Places Bill will be to save, or persuade the Anglican Church to save, St Paul's-the pro-Cathedral-in Wellington. St Paul's is one of the finest wooden churches in New Zealand, and one of the country's few architectural treasures of any size. It combines a charm and dignity rare in our churches with considerable interest as a building, intrinsically and historically. St Paul's was built just on ninety years ago, and has long been part of Wellington's life and the country's history; in a special sense it belongs not only to the Anglican Church, but to the nation. If any one church in New Zealand can be called representative and national in the way St Paul's and Westminster Abbey are in Eng- land, it is St Paul's, Wellington. The proposal to pull it down, or to remove half of it to form part of a new Anglican cathedral, can only be called barbarous. To do either would be, for an historically-minded church like the Church of England, to pull up part of its own roots, which are also the nation's roots. Although St Paul's is not large, it has always been large enough for its parishioners. It is only for the greatest official occasions that it is too small. But, as a writer in Design Review pointed out a year ago, in arguing (unanswerably, as it seems) that it ought ta be preserved intact, no building is ever large enough for those. II IN a remarkable lecture given last year at Canterbury College and lately published, one of the most thoughtful of our historians has made explicit a revolution which has been taking place quietly in New Zealand for some twenty years now. The revolution, as J. C. Beaglehole sees it, is the change in this country's intellectual status from colony to province, from the entire dependence of the colony to the relative autonomy, modest but real, of the province, which has a life and mind and tradition of its own, which is a new and 3 growing entity, a seed-bed. The medium of this intellectual revolu- tion is the scholar, who is not only, as he was for Emerson, ' man thinking', but is also 'the creative artist in whatever medium'. Dr Beaglehole reflects on the relationship of capital and pro- vinces, on expatriates, on the nature of tradition; he sketches a significant chapter of autobiography, which it will be his duty as a historian to fill out some day; he gives a notable account of Joe Heenan and his fathering of the centennial publications, which marked the second stage in this revolution. The lecture is in itself proof that such a revolution has occurred; it could not have been conceived twenty years ago. Dr Beaglehole describes Emerson's celebrated address on 'The American Scholar' (from which he takes his title) as America's intellectual Declaration of Independence. It is as a comparable declaration that his own lecture1 may be read in New Zealand. 1 The New Zealand Scholar. J. C. Beaglehole. Christchurch, Canterbury University College. W. H. OL IVER In the Fields of my Father} s Youth I IN THE fields of my father's youth, now bountiful and green, I walked and stared, half-recollecting each new but anticipated emblem of a past once legendary, now more remote than legend, remembering all he had told for the delight of children: folk-habits, succession of seasons and lives, the dim procession of my ancestors walking through centuries this treadmill lane. Its trench between stone bramble-plaited hedges wound where the contour made a passage easy, past fertile hills where he had worked all seasons, the last of the peasant line who broke this earth. Mill and manor, farm house, cottages, 4 kept up an easy, sociable conversation: a discourse of rank and degree, proud and humble linked by its cautious line in a common life. I celebrated every moderate hope that lay embedded in the lane's hard clay feeling myself made radical once more : and celebrated, too, the manor house, crown of the country, elegant, discreet as well-worn riches, sweet as piety. II How many hopes were trenched in the secretive lane? I populated every crossroad with a host of suicides impaled on hate: passionate, modest, impossible hopes, denied in life and death the four unwinding roads which led, whichever way, to difference. When it was moonlight, how many bones jangled together at Black Cross and White Cross as an army of lost liberators gaped for flesh? How great a multitude of dreams? Not his, at the end. They leapt across an era and a world and pitched full-flighted, ready to flower, on an empty island, travelled the dust and gravel of a new highroad linking, not age to age, but moderate hope to hope. Solitude, dream, their pinched and starving hopes, his and my ancestors', he brought to breed in the raw clay and timber of a settlement new and elsewhere; not anywhere the manor's grace could mock their stuntedness. Ill His dream is fulfilled in an acre of fertile ground; took body in a house, a family; in leisure, fruit and flowers, company : 5 work winning ease, children bringing home children for grandparents, warmth for autumn. The dream is fulfilled in an empty island town, a street of stucco shops and iron verandahs perched on the site of a violated forest; a temporary borough pitiable beneath the winter snow range meditating flood and disaster in the final spring- not yet. Clay gapes in cuttings and the soil runs down each winter river; land is dying; yet there will be life in it enough for him, enough for the dream to flourish and express a permanent hope lodged in impermanence, given, in one brief life, a chance to live apart from that perpetual English rite: one taken chance, then newness, all things strange. Till that time fall from the mountain and the sky I think the innumerable peasantry within his hand and eye, the ground bass of that theme particular skill and courage elaborate, are strong and sappy in his acre garden and, I expect, are happy as never on earth moving in his disguise among strawberry frames, directing the growth of flowers round a house. They are prodigal there who died in paucity and, having raised a county's fodder and crops, delight themselves in more luxuriant harvests. And I think they talk through the words of poetry he writes to me here in England, telling me of the growth and profit and joy of his fruitful acre as once in passion and in oratory they stood on platform, soapbox, with the jobless, full of the argument of state, rebelliously talking down privilege, arguing equal rights. That dream flower faded, cynically abused; the song of equality became a bribe offered abroad by immoral political apes while good men reeled in the wake of procureurs. There is only the garden full of surprising fruit. 6 IV The lane led away to the by-pass, to the rail, to the university town, this desk, these words. Can I who live by his flight relinquish either the peasant's dream or the eloquent manor house? Both were his first and every birthday gift. All those who sleep in tears till their time break will reach, if I do not, the breaking point where loyalties depart and go their ways separate, hostile, taking up their arms to meet in battle on the disputed field of England's and our own heart's heritage. That will be time for treasons and for faith. COLIN NEWBURY Two Poems THE CITY OF ACESTA They enrolled the women for the city and disembarked Those who wished to be colonists-persons With little love of great reputation. AENEID V I MYSELF was a youth, Lusty and unlearned but for some husbandry From my father, and the deep lines a Greek gave me Before I cut him down. And much they taught me-those uncouth Syllables etched in my own blood: Easily the idiom of pain can drown The noblest elocution of the good, And set the brave whimpering.
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