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 revolution 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

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. 7 For the arm was salt-sore And the heart cracked with scanning a world Bare, a sky burnished as a bronze shield; And the memory of the fallen city Grew sour as the ashes of her war. But you were my sum of surgeon, Captain, seer, through whom deity Set the course and visible numen Signed on my will to wandering.

For seven years, restless At the oar, you held us, till we forgot the feel Of earth, and the household gods had rotted in the keel; For seven years the erratic Ploughshare cut a fruitless Furrow. And faithful to bond, We never questioned your vision-ecstatic Mirage rainbowed in the spindrift-second Troy fay and fleeting.

No, Lord Aeneas, It was not merely the hardship, nor the crazed women Firing the fleet to frustrate the purpose of heaven, Moved us to seek the shore. But the soul mutinied at the groaning windlass Dropping and weighing our tomorrow Among barren reefs and tidal bore On promises only. For a while we sorrow; But no Dido stands lamenting.

I had no heart for Fame, For the blood of friends, exacted by the greed Of gods for the right to remake our kingdom. Seed, I can weigh in the hand; reckon seasons By the moon; am strong to carry the lame In my flock; and dare to ·believe that this Is why my mother bore her son : To marry the brown earth and kiss A good wife into bearing.

Our destiny ends here; Our world is wide as a man can plough in a day, 8 And our fame will be to have buried our fame with our clay. Adventurer, goddess-born, Never to Acesta where a ripening field is the measure Of enterprise, and sacrifice is made Only in kind before an altar at dawn. Foul was the wind for Italy with dead, And the seabirds wheeling, keening.

STROLLING PLAYER HE came on a tepid August evening To the corner of my street and played. Business lounged comfortably in doorways, And Time, in shirtsleeves, lolled smoking at the balustrade.

With half a smile at indifference, he conjured Tunes from his box and bow, Frail and faded as old valentines : Sentimental posies of twenty years ago,

That fell apart in his stiff fingers Littering the street with scent And musty petals; till business turned Indoors; Time shrugged and suddenly went

To set the beacons on the Eiffel Tower Probing the invading night, And loosed a troop of helter-skelter Swallows to chevy the straggler rays of sunlight.

Yes, Play To Us Gypsy, for the Moon Is indeed High Above : Her mood is not for memory, but the summer Moment of the impatient young. Speak to us of Love,

But lightly as yet. Every lover Soon enough grows Familiar with her lament: and we Are still the restless beacon, impulsive as the swallows. 9 CHARLES DOYLE Winter Beach

CLOTHED darker for the empty season, the wet sands Seem like that moment at the mountain's foot When the first flood subsided. The time has turned This tract of Man's dimension inside out.

There lingers here, long after the lighterman Has capped his crackling beacons and the boards Have clicked into place to screen from the prying season Perennial knick-knacks, their keepers' jealous hoards,

There lingers here an innumerable ghost. Somewhere, the photostat of an avid mind Will tell again the tale, enlarged as processed, A Summer's adventure focussed in one week-end;

The bright white boarding-house set in geraniums' scarlet; The delicate brown-eyed lady and the bald Boozer she met and married, and how they sat The season out her tongue and his glass withheld.

Any Summer, at the hotel bar on stormy days In nautical jargon any of a handful of tars Could be heard tell, in a voice swollen as the seas, Of that year the pleasure-boat sank with no survivors,

-But that year was exceptional, of course. What filled the foreground was the faded women Sagged unrelaxed in deckchairs, done with chores For a while, but recounting chores again and again;

And the arrested gestures of countless children Building each a separate world upon the sand, Building each a replica of their most bewildering, Enchanted minds. The supple and subtle hand

IO Hollows runnels into harbours, shapes the quays For strange ships, frigates, triremes, coracles. Now the empty husk of a crab, still stretched crabwise, Has no more notion of these miracles.

There lingers here all this but faintly now In the headlong Winter when the hurled waves hammer With curling fists the promenade's cold plateau, Flinging against the rocks that every Summer

Capture clear, peaceful pools with gentle fingers. The sea throws on the sand old, twisted wood Sapped in the marrow, a prey to Nature's anger, Among the broken shells and the other dead

Come uncertainly to rest. The breakers crack With malice again and yet again, at the drab Front-line of beach, raiding, marauding the rock, Hissing like a blowtorch at a cracksman's crib.

Omnivorous, the tide swallows, the wind tears Tears of spray from the impact. Nothing is spared The rage, the tantrum, the recriminations, the roar Of the mad-wild winter weather whipping a bleeding world.

HUBERT WITHEFORD Two Poems

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD Yes, I am one of those who will go back. Nor is it some allegiance that attracts But the same weakness, need for life, that drove The Polynesians out when subtleties and stone Trembled and fell as, lit by monstrous stars, Lemuria drowned. Two straggling, cryptic isles at last they found. A long forgetting then.

II The tall clock of the heavens points again To leave the tulip stairway and the dome (Wrought shadowings from the glare of Chaos' wings). I know I am of those whose way returns To the unconsummated tryst with space and dissonance Without uplift of heart but by the heavy weight Of chance or the most obscure pull of fate.

London November 1953

THE CACTUSES

IT IS the orange flower on dark flushed stem Or the small spines to guard the so sleek flesh Amid dry sand and stone That waken an almost malicious love For the mild cunning of the old creation. Unblurred by virtue or by sin's delusion, Out of the inert debris of disaster It rose among the thinning atmosphere. We cannot emulate. But as across the aeons Our later sense accosts these presences A sting of freshness runs from skull to heel And on the palate sparkling waters fleet.

KENDRICK SMITHYMAN Inheritance

TREE, paddock, river: plan landscape for a child who shall inherit all, and grow, to be a man - but when does manhood's wild ordinance of downfall 12 first rack him? What the mild pronouncing, deciding year? Five, seven, twenty-one? How high against the wall standing knows love and fear measure him, then undone? Plan paddock, river and tree. The witless agents scan their amicable sky but mark fair weather there where lark and bright gull ply. His shadow dulls a stone outcrop below the track. A harkaway runs the ridge, his ewes drift out and clear morning covers the flat, pattering feet in the dust .. What morning will he hear first, running at his back (his heeler, his black bitch) his silent, sedulous pair: his love, his lovely fear?

KEITH SINCLAIR The Sleeping Beauty

ON AN ill-starred divan, in a room Of roses, in a palace that scrapes the sky, In linen and silk she lies, my lady. All round her weaves a ringing wall of fire.

Trapped in a hedge of filigree She cannot preen or sing, but nestles Like a stone dove on a branch That never sheds a leaf, 13 In that unseasoned garden, Where every worm and weed, each shrub Can neither grow nor rot, but dwells In its perfection like a dream.

Only a stream that pearls along An opal lawn reminds of time : It tolls of tired nights and wrinkled dawn And like a lady's hair it winds From breath to lust to birth to grave. * Her eyes are berries green that grow Bloodshot with sleeping. In an appetite Of time I'll shake her bush and dine On the first fruit, cherry ripe, that falls. All winter long I walk about her sleep And stir her pulse. I am a light That comes from Venus in the sign of the fish; I am the dream she could not leave undreamed.

An age before my green nativity We pledged our souls in a house of love; Engaged by the gods when the archer struck, When his meteored bolt went blind, when the night Was blue; when a great fish followed the moon, Wallowed in the mirror of the stars and swam All seven days around the tropic zone Where men turned black, our horoscopes Were cast, our dream, our deed divined.

We swore our unencountered legs Would dance in tune to unheard steps, To hold our absent hands, to kiss Unkissed and share the feel of not To feel until the sea cast up Our shoal of love, until my palm Was written in a present tense, Until that lost conjunction of our loves.

14* Though many clamber, heavy-lunged, And fall, one longer-limbed is meant To mount her high Afghanistan To break with a shout the spell of silent Centuries that lies on her lids.

Though she is older than known time, Born before the world began, A kiss will kindle youth's first yes. Then, like a maiden with her blouse undone, She'll blush and no and bless and nod And bosom both her lover and herself Quite out of innocence. He'll rock On her breath, tilt on her sigh, And trawl a swelling sea of sense Till his hold is bulged with beauty And husbanding his profitable cargo, In a wake of wantons, in a school of paradise, Go down on an amorous tide To ports of sailored nights. * She sleeps a sleep of willows (Waters at ebb, leaf in the eddy) And one dream all her dreaming - Street in the dark, man in ·the shade, Sword in his hand will cut through briars Sharp as pain, as thick as fear. How as she sleeps her dream becomes my deed * Up climbed that page of life, desire's Knight, above the pine, beyond The green crevasse, world's window-pane, Past the plumes that the birds of the wind Had shed. There on the verge of the sky Where the spectrum of the globe Had arched from grass, past snow, to black, Black rock, those battlements of bronze, 15 That ring of fire, as smooth as ice Planed by the noon, that nightless keep: What paupered prince would storm its gate To loot its lauded treasury? * Fanning his frozen soul with the torch Of his sword he dared a burning acre, Flushed the first hot thicket. A black mare galloped from the smoke With her foal of fire, flicking his mane Of cinders, frisking his iron heels And rode him down in a golden gutter. A kite curled from the sulphur sky, The shadow of sin and fledged with flame, To pluck his hair. He cut her wing From wing and two birds spun away. A lambent cord, a vine that grew From green, untasted grapes was hung From that fence of fear. He scaled its notes Up a screaming octave, down a dying gamut, And fell into all edens, angels, Holy, hosannas in a queen's garden. * And so I came fish-eyed from Eras, Chaos' child, to the war-god's daughter; Followed my life-line (by the mounts of Sin And fair Astarte, through a maze Of persimmon, past lemon lanterns, Across the lawn) like a silken stream Where it rose from a fount of love and fell From the tallest window of my towering dream And climbed a rope of sleeping hair. * In a moment I bend my serpent lips; In the opening of an eye, in a parting mouth, 16 Property ofVernon Brown lit in. x 9 in. TOHUNGA Coloured Ink I950

Dennis Knight Turner WOMAN'S HEAD Pencil I9SO 11 in. x 7} in. TOHUNGA Pencil 1950 ...... ______..,_

WOMAN'S HEAD Ink 1950 In the forming of a word, in the sound of love, She will peep from her coffined quilt At my eternity of beating blood.

In a moment I will repay her price, Play customer to night, cock's crow To sleep, midwife to death, and pluck Her from the womb of timelessness, From a world where time is not, where time Is a shower pendant in the air.

Beauty, I must unsheet your foetal dream. Sleeper, awake! I bring love's breakfast in.

FRANK SARGESON The Colonel's Daughter

WHEN I went in to dinner the manager of the little tourist hotel left the table where he sat with his family, to come over and introduce me to the old lady whose table I was to share. Miss Smith. A moment later she surprised me by saying that she remembered me perfectly. You were a Waikato boy, she said, and then she named the town. Yes, I said, but I don't remember you. I'm sorry. But surely, she said, surely you remember my orchard! I exclaimed. It must have been forty years ago that I had helped Miss Kate Smith to beat out a fire in her orchard one scorching hot summer's day. She had been burning a heap of prunings in draughty weather, and the fire had spread. There was fortunately no wind, and very little dry grass underneath the trees to burn; but upon my looking through the bars of the gate as I passed, I had been called in to help. When we had poured a bucket of water on the last smouldering patch, Miss Smith remarked that fire was a very good servant, but a very poor master. She also asked me my name, and left off calling me Boy; and after a few I7 days I received through the post a bright silk handkerchief, wrap- ped round with a card which thanked me for my kind help. I was staring, trying to reconcile a stiff-backed, white-haired, rather prim-looking old lady, with the woman who might have been any age at all to a child of ten, who had worn gardening gloves, and a wide-and-stiff-brimmed straw hat tied on with a veil, and who had vigorously whirled an empty sugar-bag to whack at the flames. Of course you remember, she said. Yes, I replied, but I can't remember I ever saw you again from that day to this. Ah ha, she said, nobody saw me very much. Not in that town. No, she went on, I don't live there now, I got sick of it at last. I live in a flat in the city, but I come here regularly for six weeks in the off-season. I like it quiet. Was:a't it quiet in the old town? I questioned. It was and it wasn't. Tell me, she said after a pause, did your mother object to the handkerchief I sent you? Not that I can remember, I said. Though I seem to remember she wasn't exactly pleased. I'm sure she wasn't pleased. We were interrupted while we decided about our soup and what was to follow, and then she asked : Did your mother ever tell you anything about me? Nothing that I can remember. What else did you hear about me? I thought for a moment, and said I could remember nothing except what everybody seemed to take for granted. You mean, she said, that I was an aging spinster with plenty of money, an eccentric woman who lived alone in a large house and never went out. Well, I said, perhaps. Something like that if you must put it that way. She seemed a little disappointed, and I added: You see, I got out of the town before I reached my twenties, and I never went back. I don't blame you, she said. It was a very proper little town. No place for anybody with spirit. Still, she went on, I had spirit when I was a girl-at least I thought I had. I do think I might have been talked about, she said in tones that suggested complaint. r8 Tell me, did you never hear any scandal about me at all? Really and truly? I shook my head. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. Of course, she went on, your family was as proper as any, but I have always understood that scandal is the main topic of conversation among people of that kind. Or should I say gossip? I decided to take it good-humouredly. Perhaps, I said. Probably. But of course not in front of the children. Your mother's sister now, a Miss Bertha Topp, a maiden lady- as the dubious saying is. She reclaimed a friend of mine, a Daisy Willoughby, she turned Daisy's feet away from the primrose path. My aunt Bertha, I said, lived with my aunt Daisy, yes, but I think we children all understood that aunt Daisy was not our real aunt. She was a Mrs Clouty, and we played with her dark- eyed little girl, although she was some years older than I was. Exactly, she said. But how did Daisy Willoughby come to be Daisy Clouty?-tell me that. Well, I began, and then I said, No, it's too obvious. Marriage. Of course. You never knew Clem Clouty? I tried to remember. Certainly I had never known him, and yet there was a thread of memory, his voice on the phone perhaps, and a message I was to remember to give. I could connect him with whispers and winks and disapproving looks and-that was it, he drank! But I said: Didn't he play the piano? Anybody can play the piano, she said severely. I mean anybody could in those days. I played myself. Probably you did too. Do you know, she said with immense conviction and seriousness, apart from Pachmann, I never heard anyone play with a finer feeling for the instrument than Clem Clouty? I felt myself impelled to demonstrate that I was knowledgeable in these matters, and said : You mean he played Chopin? Ah, she said, and her eyes opened wider, you know! I once heard Pachmann, I said. In London. Where did you hear him? In Germany. It must be going on for half a century ago. It was before my father died-I expect it would be when you were a very small boy. My father was a gentleman, he was Colonel Smith, retired from the Imperial Army. Our name is really hyphenated, I9 my father was Porterhouse-Smith. He took me on a tour, to mend my morals if you please. Dear oh dear! I pretended to be a little shocked. Were they as bad as all that? I was carrying on with Clem Clouty. I see, I said. I expect you mean after he was married to my aunt Daisy. Ah, but how did he come to marry her? I'll tell you, it was those proper people. She paused, and I said, Yes, do tell me. After all, we were about to enter upon the cabinet pudding stage, and my slight feeling of irritation had mellowed with the food, and the not unworthy bottle of dry wine Miss Smith had insisted on my sharing. Daisy Willoughby and I were inseparable, she said. Of course, she really belonged among the proper people, and I didn't. My father was never in trade or anything of that kind, he had money and property, and he drank his bottle a day-and I don't mean cheap brandy. He went to Church only once a year, at Easter, and to the Church of England of course. But I admired Daisy for her spirit. It was more difficult for her, after all as my father's only daughter, indeed his only child, he rather expected me to be high- spirited. He himself had had the spirit to charge the enemy-but I always forget whether it was the Crimea or China. I think it was those Taipings. But you know in a town like that a girl with high spirits could come a cropper-and Daisy did. You see, except for the dances there wasn't a great deal to be high-spirited about. Daisy wasn't supposed to go, but she defied her parents or else she deceived them-I'm not sure now exactly which. Clem Clouty worked in some mercantile establishment, I forget what it was, but he played the piano for our dances, and a few violins and some woodwinds and brass were raked up as well when we held our big balls. Clem used to come to the house to practise on our grand piano, and when my father's rheumatics didn't make him too irritable we used to have some really lovely parties. I mean for a town like that in those days. I envy you, I interrupted. I can remember only the Bible class socials. Once we were allowed a moonlight picnic on the river, but the paddle-steamer nearly capsized when it broke down and ran on a sandbank. All our bottles of soft drink were broken. The dear old days! she exclaimed. It is wicked to deceive ourselves about them. And others too. But don't imagine I am 20 deceiving you about Daisy-and myself. This is quite an occasion, and I am deceiving nobody. Shall we take our coffee on the verandah? she interrupted herself to say, and she looked at her watch. The moon will be up quite soon and I like to see it-but from behind glass at this time of the year. Perhaps if it was a new moon I should feel a little super- stitious, but of course it is not. There was nobody on the verandah, so we turned off the lights to wait for the moon, and while we sat and smoked in easy chairs, her voice in the dark sounded astonishingly fluent. What she had to say seemed quite released from all considerations of reserve or constraint. Yes, she said, Daisy Willoughby-have you seen her lately by the way? I said I hadn't seen my aunt Daisy for thirty years. Well, she said, she's quite gone to pieces now-she's nothing but an old bag, though I expect I sound horribly vulgar. Perhaps it was a mistake to turn the lights off, but leave them as they are. And I must sound as though I am ending my story when I am only in the middle. You see, Daisy was as keen about Clem Clouty as I was, at least I am sure she would have claimed to be if we had ever discussed the matter, which we never did. Probably she would have attempted to depreciate my own feelings by claiming to be even keener. I must admit that it was a shock to me when she owned up to being in a certain condition-as the curious saying is. The fact was not shocking in itself, not to an Army gentleman's daughter, but I could not refrain from calling her a little devil for my own personal reasons. However, I laughed it off. I proposed a trip to Sydney for both of us until it was all over, and I even undertook to pay every expense from money which I hoped to get from my father. I was even prepared to persuade him, if he should be reluctant, by declaring myself to be the guilty one. But all my plans on Daisy's behalf came to nothing. The poor girl's mind turned constantly on the dreadful fact that she was a fallen woman, and she could not forgive herself for straying from her proper environment among the proper people. I didn't mind so much her throwing me over, but I thought her reasons for doing so were most uncomplimentary. Her dearest friend in those circles was Bertha Topp, your proper aunt in two senses of the word. Miss Topp was a girl a good ten years older than Daisy, and on account of her displeasing appearance (I do hope you won't mind 21 my speaking frankly)-but on account of that she had never, I am sure, had to take any serious steps in defence of her personal virtue. But she was perfectly prepared to go into action on behalf of Daisy when she heard her confession. She planned and led a campaign against Clem Clouty, whom I have never to this day forgiven for capitulating. The poor boy was persuaded and bullied by Miss Topp until he agreed to go to the altar, or whatever it is they have in those Nonconformist places-! believe it sometimes resembles a card table. But no doubt any piece of furniture will serve as a site, once a human sacrifice has been agreed upon. I remember I had my twentieth birthday on the day of the wedding, and it was deplorable weakness on my part, which I still don't forgive myself, to spend the whole of it face down on my bed while I drenched the pillow with my tears. She appeared to meditate for a moment or two, and I did not interrupt her. It is curious, she said, but I don't remember that I ever saw the wedding photographs. I expect there was a careful arrangement of Daisy's bouquet-! believe photographers who do that sort of work are always tactful and understanding. I remember, she went on, that for quite two years afterwards, I was, at least once a week, galled to hear some fresh piece of news about the happy married life of Clem and Daisy Clouty. I knew it couldn't last, but that didn't help me. Daisy's father and mother had bought the couple a house, right next door to their own. It was so that Clem might be constantly protected against backsliding. But they refused to buy him a decent piano, because that instrument was associated with his life of wickedness, from which Daisy had providentially rescued him. Yes, it is curious the way the minds of some people work. Daisy had been transformed by her marriage into an angel of providence. Can you believe it? -she was said to have risked soiling herself with pitch, in order to fetch up Clem from the depths of the pit. I of course was the woman who had done the most to drag him down there, and Daisy avoided me when we met in the street. It was expecting much too much to expect her to rescue me. Again she was silent for a moment while she finished her coffee, and then she remarked that the moon seemed not to be on time. But never mind, she said, when it's the moon one can be sure it won't miss an appointment, even though it may turn up late. 22 But where was I? she went on. Oh yes, about the piano. Well, in all the town I was the only person, the only person mind you, who was fully alive to Clem's talent for playing. Also, my father's grand (it had been my mother's poor dear, before she was thrown from our four-wheeler when the horses bolted-but that was when I was a baby, and fortunately I wasn't in the carriage)-my father's grand was the only instrument of its kind in the town, and I should think almost the only one in the Waikato. It broke my heart to be cut in the street by Clem as well as Daisy, but there was a difference. I knew it, and I knew that he knew it too. The poor dear boy, so handsome and unusual with his long dark hair and his really beautiful whiskers, I think the style was known as the King Edward-the poor boy did not cut me because he believed me to be a brand that was unreclaimed, and still burning. Indeed no. He was purely and simply ashamed of himself for neglecting his great talent. And how right he was! I was never much of a church-goer myself, but I was by no means unfamiliar with Scrip- ture, and I did know about the awful punishment that was visited on the man who wasted his talents. I would lie awake at nights thinking what I could do to save poor Clem, who was not even permitted to tinkle away at the piano for our dances, and at last I hit upon a plan. It cost my father a lot of money, but it worked brilliantly. A Continental pianist (if I told you his name you wouldn't believe me)-this famous man was visiting the country on a concert tour. He wasn't booked to play in the town, but he had to pass through on his way, and he consented to play privately on my father's grand, naturally for a very substantial fee. Of course I included Clem among the very few people I invited, and I didn't invite Daisy. I don't forget the agonies I suffered, wondering whether he would turn up-and yet I knew he would, and he did. Alas, my poor father, he never knew I paid that famous man a fee nearly double the amount he had agreed to fork out. I had to sell half my mother's jewellery to get the money. I was sure that such a fabulous payment would induce the man to listen to Clem for five minutes after the guests had gone-I was even sure that he would feel obliged to say a few kind words. I was not mistaken, and dear Clem was transported into the seventh heaven. Even my conscience was perfectly at ease, because I was convinced that besides being kind, the words were absolutely true. Her silence was prolonged, and I seemed to startle her with my, Well? Well, that is the end of my story. Or very nearly. You might almost say that Clem abandoned his marriage with Daisy, to engage in a liaison with our piano. He was never out of the house, and indeed it was impossible for him to be when he was never off the piano stool. As for the rest, it is just sordidness. Miss Topp violated the sanctity of our home by forcing her way in on behalf of Daisy. And there was such a rumpus, my father, who never really noticed anything, except perhaps when his rheumatics weren't troubling him too badly, which was very seldom-my father, I say, could scarcely continue to be unaware that Clem was actually living in the house. We had a frightful row and I was threatened with the European tour, but in the meantime I managed to put it off. Clem, even though he had given up work, had to appear in the streets sometimes, and he was persistently waylaid and molested by Daisy and Miss Topp, not to mention the in-laws. They even attempted to thrust his daughter into his arms in public. And when he eventually gave in and returned to Daisy, he revenged himself by taking to drink. So far as I know, he told nobody about his plans when he decided to leave Daisy, and leave the town. He just disappeared. And after six months, when nothing had been heard of him, I agreed with my father about our European tour. It turned out to be quite wonderful. If I had never gone, I should never have heard Pachmann. But, she said after a moment, I am getting quite worried about the moon. And aunt Daisy's husband? I asked. Was he never heard of again? Clem? Oh dear no, not at all-though it wasn't for many years, indeed it was only quite recently. Whatever do you mean? I asked. He is a man in a very big way. He imports crockery, or perhaps it is hardware-! fancy it is something to do with cooking. I have a friend in the city who knows the family. There are two girls, and they both married very well. Professional men, I fancy. Their father sent them to the very best of schools, but do you know?- I was told he put his foot down, and absolutely forbade them to learn the piano. He would never allow any sort of musical instrument in the house. It is rather strange, isn't it ?-I believe Daisy's parents lost all their money, bad investments or something of that kind. I have been told that your aunt Bertha left a will in her favour, but it was very little, and with the cost of living what it is, 24 poor Daisy half-starves on the pension. They say that her daughter treats her abominably. Oh, but do look! she exclaimed. The moon at last. How very, very, beautiful. You must be silent, and I will promise to be. We must forget all about this sordidness-I can't think what could have come over me. Do you know? she said in a whisper-I can't explain why, but it always gives me the curious fancy that I am listening to Chopin.

H. WINSTON RHODES The Moral Climate of Sargeson' s Stories*

THE writer of short stories is often regarded as a mere picker-up of unconsidered trifles, as an observer of those fragments of human experience which are not required by the novelist. He is an artist without a recognized medium, engaged in a constant struggle with form, and unable to assume that the limits of his intention will be immediately apparent to his readers. What he produces may be akin to poetry in its evocation of a mood, a scene, or a pattern of sense impressions. Its effect may depend on the well knit action or the pointed dialogue, on the unfolding of human character, or on the angle and intensity of the author's vision. It may be an abbreviated novel or an expanded fable, an intricate parable, or a fleeting glimpse of reality. Its chameleon-like qualities and what Elizabeth Bowen calls its 'poetic tautness and clarity ' provide less tractable material for the academic critic concerned with the analysis of plot and character portrayal, than the longer prose narrative; but those who are fascinated by the way in which shape, verbal expression, and technical skill can emphasize and give subtlety to an underlying morality may find ample scope for their explorations. *Written for an unpublished symposium on Frank Sargeson's work edited by Helen Shaw. As in other forms of literature, 'value' in the short story is not merely an aesthetic concept. It does not arise solely from an ability to make words express the intention of the author, but from .the mental and emotional significance of his work. It is directly connected with the moral climate in which his creative endeavour has its being and finds its meaning. Conrad has pointed out that 'Every subject in the region of the intellect and emotion must have a morality of its own if it is treated at all sensitively, and even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence'. This observation suggests what is indeed true, that the morality emerges from a work far more often than it is deliberately inserted in a work. It is part of the climate of opinion in which the author lives both as a human being and as an artist. It may not be what he re- gards as his own morality, especially if he places any value on the intensity of his observati<;m, but at least it is the morality of that aspect of life which his individual bias compels him to explore. In our own age there have been many writers who have tried to withdraw from a slowly disintegrating Western society in order to watch and describe it, and, with judgment suspended, to taste the flavour of its decay; but even these give themselves (and their morality) away in about every third sentence. They cannot fail to reveal attitudes towards fundamental moral questions by the very consistency with which they choose similar moral situations, and represent similar human relationships. Their commen- tary is supplied by the process of selection and the organization of material. In the midst of diversity there is a sameness, and the sameness provides a key to the morality. New Zealand criticism has been chiefly concerned with the vain and unrewarding attempt to discover signs of national characteristics and the influence of local environment in our literature, rather than with the search for meaning and the examination of the moral climate which may be related more to West- ern man than to the accident of locality. It has fastened its attention on problems connected with the mental and geographical isolation of New Zealanders, on the literary consequences of the struggle to break in a new country, and the implications of a high level of material prosperity; but it has less frequently occupied itself with the way in which the loss of social meaning and 26 religious faith in Western society has produced a climate of opinion that has been having profound effects on writers whether they live in London or New York, in Dublin or in Auckland. And yet it is this moral climate which is of primary importance in the writing of Frank Sargeson. It is this rather than the treatment of local character, scene, or idiom that provides a solid core of meaning to his work and gives it cohesion. It is this that determines his angle of approach to the life around him, that dictates much of the form in which his stories are cast, and the strict economy he has cultivated in the use of words. Plot and personality, background and dialogue are important only in so far as they contribute to his theme, to his whole meaning, to the figure in the carpet-the morality which is implicit in his work. His craftsmanship is not an end in itself, but a means. Consciously or unconsciously he has organized his material and selected fragments of human experience in order to form a pattern, the outlines of which begin to emerge immediately his stories are examined together and attention paid to the 'value' judgments implied in them. The world of Sargeson's stories is one inhabited by casual work- ers and rouseabouts, by station hands and street loungers, by the misfits, the dispirited and the lonely. Because of their mental attitudes and habits they are isolated from the smug conventionalities of the garden suburb. They are separated from social groups and organized communities by their anarchic behaviour, by their inability to accept the recognized prescriptions for achieving respectability and a comfortable bank balance. Mr Williams in 'A Man of Good Will' felt 'it was wrong of people to shut themselves away from the sun and fresh air by working in a draper's shop; except that you went home at night it was just as though you'd been put in gaol. As for people who worked inside cages behind the counters of banks, or sat all day going up and down lifts - well you might as well live in a cage in a zoo.' Like the hero of 'That Summer' Sargeson's characters are frequently men with 'itchy feet', and Freddy Coleman in 'An Affair of the Heart' ex- presses the thought that is in the minds of other wanderers when he says: 'It's always seemed a bit comic to me to see people stay in one place all their lives and work at one job. I like meeting different people and tackling all sorts of jobs, and if I've saved up a few pounds it's always come natural to me to throw up my job and travel about a bit. It gets you nowhere, as people say, and 27 it's a sore point with my mother and father who've just about ceased to own me. But there are lots of compensations.' It is uncle Bob, the shiftless carpenter, whose refusal to settle down and become a respectable married man gives him a prominent place in the feverish dreams of the properly brought-up and thoroughly repressed Henry in When the Wind Blows\ for the victims of routine and orderly living are either to be pitied or detested, but never admired. The subtleties of human relationships in a sophisticated society with its aesthetic teas and cultured prattling have no place in Sargeson's stories. 'I've only got a sort of polite interest in Jack's missus and those friends of hers' the narrator of 'The Hole That Jack Dug' comments, 'They're always talking about books and writers, but never any I know anything about.' His characters are uninterested in such matters not only because the cultivated social life of a Jamesian novel is not well developed in New Zealand, but also because their creator is bent on exploring that primitive moral code which is all that remains after the veneer of respectability and conventional behaviour has been stripped off. They live outside the domestic circle, outside the social group, either of which, by its traditional cus- toms, its established laws and regulations, may provide for its members a temporary substitute for life's meaning. In Sargeson's writing, however, it is a substitute destructive to those natural instincts, those primitive feelings and ideas which are the residue left to us by chaos. Both women and men, Mrs Crawley and Miss Briggs as well as the grandmother in 'Toothache', the toughs and the unsuccessful on farm and racecourse and waterfront, in the bar-room and dingy lodging-house, are separated from human society because there is no human society capable of giving meaning to their lives. Their loneliness has nothing to do with the physical isolation of the back country or with the geographical isolation of New Zealand. It is a loneliness that is bred in the soul when both social meaning and religious meaning have been lost, a loneliness which has become increasingly the theme of Western writers who, by withdrawing themselves from the chaos to observe, have become part of the chaos observed. The displaced person was a figure well known in the literature of the twentieth century long before he became an all too familiar figure in Europe. 1 The first part of the novel, I Saw in My Dream, originally published separately. 28 The pattern that weaves its way through Sargeson's stories is one of the pathos of isolation. It is something more profound than the misery of solitary confinement which may lead to despair; something that is not merely the result of a frustrated life made empty by lost opportunities. Both Miss Briggs and Beggs, the filing clerk, are the unhappy victims of a pitiless social system; but they live in a solitude that is mental and spiritual even more than it is physical. On a different social level and in a different social environment it is the same isolation that led Virginia Woolf to ponder on the darkness at the core of the human personality and the darkness of a civilization in which men and women have 'dis- persed', unsustained by any robust faith that their lives are part of a social organism or that their actions contribute to the whole meaning of life. It is the same isolation that led Ernest Heming- way to describe man as a fighting, lusting animal, only vaguely aware that the exercise of his primitive instincts could not provide any permanent satisfaction or offer more than a temporary relief from the gnawing pain of an existence without hope or meaning. In 'An Attempt at an Explanation' a small boy and his mother sit on a park seat in the sun, hungry and alone; but when the boy begins to cry it is not because he is hungry-' I don't know that I can explain it even now, but I know I wasn't crying just because of myself personally. I think it was because for the first time in my life I understood how different sorts of things are all connected up together. I thought of the way my silkworms ate the mulberry leaves that I gave them, and the way the lice had crouched down and held on tight to my hand when I tried to shake them off. And there, right in front of me, the birds were looking for food, and the worms that themselves wanted something to eat were being eaten by the blackbirds. And there came into my heart a pity for all living things that were hungry and needed food.' Then Sargeson continues: 'If I'd been older perhaps I would have made a picture for myself of the earth as just a speck of dirt drifting in space, with human creatures crawling over it and crouching down and holding on tight just as the lice had done on the back of my hand.' There is little else that they can do in Sargeson's world but crawl over it, and crouch down, and hold on tight. They are hungry for comradeship, for human love, for the wordless sympathy that may soothe the dull ache of a loneliness they do not understand, and shelter them from the cold winds of indifference. 29 Memory turns the leaves of Sargeson's stories, and the dominant theme is revealed again and again in phrase and episode. The fat old granma in 'Toothache' holding the small boy in her arms and all night staring hard at the dark, Miss Briggs who never smiled but every weekday plodded along carrying two suitcases, Mrs Crawley waiting every night in the bus shed for a son who never came, the old man in 'Cowpats' who asked if he could warm his hands in a bucket of hot water, Bandy and Myrtle sitting on the garden seat, Beggs hurrying up and down stairs with endless files, and Nick the Dalmatian-they are all lost, pathetic figures, hungry for affection, crouching down and holding tight. Where they live and where they go are unimportant except in relation to Sargeson's ability to describe a local scene. What is important is the world in which they live; and the reader is soon made aware that however the sun may shine, whatever the degree of physical satisfaction that can be obtained from the mere fact of existence, it is a world of poverty and hunger, cruelty and oppression, loneliness and death. Neither traditional religious belief nor any coherent political philosophy gives meaning to the lives of his forgotten men and women, his voluntary or involun- tary outcasts from society. In 'The Making of a New Zealander' Nick is a communist only because everything is wrong: ' But what is the good of that? I am born too soon, eh? What do you think?' And if Nick is unable to derive strength from a social faith, Henry Griffiths is enfeebled and almost destroyed by the narrow religious orthodoxy of his home. There are too many 'dead men walking about in hard knockers' like 'My Uncle', men who cannot suppose, who are unimaginative, or, like the elder Mr Griffiths, stamp their feet and don't want to hear any excuses. It is a world in which the 'Good Samaritan' has become an ana- chronism, and Jones can do the right thing only by doing the wrong thing, and the boy who never wanted to be a good boy is condemned because he has an attack of righteousness 'just like father and mother'. Sex is either Lawrence's 'dirty little secret' as it is in When the Wind Blows or a casual encounter after the flicks. Social and religious convention have bred cruelty and sadism, the twisted and the sullen life. Miserable or happy, victims or outcasts, not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, 30 without faith to sustain them, and only a primitive instinct for survival and affection to guide them, they live their lives, failing even to give complete utterance to what is truest in themselves. 'Town's no good' complains the hero of 'That Summer', 'a man doesn't have any say; he just gets pushed about.' 'No matter what sort of life you have,' observes the narrator of 'Last Adventure', 'there's always the catch at the end of it.' And yet chaotic as it is, the world that emerges from, rather than is described in, Sargeson's stories has vivid patches of sunlight in the midst of the surrounding gloom. When the worst has been said, when the cruelty, the lust, the poverty, the sordidness have been acknowledged, when conventional social behaviour has been seen for what it is, when religious hypocrisy has been unmasked, and the accumulation of rags and tatters and false finery has been stripped from the moral life of man, there is still a residue. That residue, that irreducible minimum, without which man would cease to be man and become one of the lower animals, can be detected and revealed more readily, Sar- geson seems to suggest, among the failures, the rejects, the forgotten men and women, among the toughs and the wanderers and those who cannot conform. Isolated from civilized society though they may be, unaccustomed to the exchange of ideas and unable to do more than hint at the emotional life within them, unanchored by any creed or accepted code of conduct, they yet retain something that under happier circumstances might be the beginning of a rich and satisfying existence. They have their moments of beauty; they have a ' natural ' understanding and appreciation of the possibilities of life even in the chaos they inhabit. They live through their senses and their human associations. There is more than an occasional glimpse of the pride of achievement, the peacefulness of solitude, the happiness of physical well- being, and the satisfaction derived from common human pleasures. Although their appetites are those of adults, few of them outgrow the instinctive behaviour of children; and they look back to their childhood on the farms and beaches of New Zealand, wistfully recalling the time when life was less complicated and more innocent. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that some of the most moving descriptions of human loneliness in Sargeson's stories are given through the minds and emotions of children. It was a child who dimly perceived the hunger and instinct for 3I survival which showed the relationship between the silkworms . and the lice and the worms and the blackbirds and himself. It was a little boy singing out 'Tod!' by the garden fence and quarrelling intermittently with his sister, who dimly felt that 'everything would be just all right if only Tod would come on over'. Remembering his boyhood, another character reflects : 'Children are rather like hens. They know things that men and women don't know, but when they grow up they forget them.' And in each of the three stories 'Boy' . and 'Granma' and 'Cowpats' it is a child who responds so instinctively and naturally to the affection that banishes loneliness or to the pathos of loneliness without affection. Like the children, the adults act by instinct rather than by reason; they follow the promptings of the heart. From beneath their rough exteriors, through the midst of their halting words, there often emerges that is truer and more fundamental than can be found in the polished phrases of the charm- ing and the intelligent. Bill in 'That Summer' spends a lot of time with little Fanny around the money tree, and satisfies his hunger for human companionship by chumming up with all kinds of dubious acquaintances. He is as innocent and as amoral as a child, continually seeking for a response to his need for devot- ing himself to someone. It is Freddy Coleman, fresh from his glimpse of the devouring love of the half-crazed Mrs Crawley, who says: 'I never understood until last Christmas, when I was walking northwards to a job on a fruit-farm, how anything in the world that was such a terrible thing, could at the same time be so beautiful'. The climax of 'The Old Man's Story' comes with the description of what the small boy saw in the moonlight : 'Bandy and Myrtle were sitting on the seat. Bandy was in his working clothes but Myrtle seemed to be in her nightgown, at any rate the boy could tell she had bare feet. And they were sitting there without saying a word, the old man said, sitting a little apart but holding each other's hands. Every now and then the girl would turn her face to Bandy and he'd lean over to kiss her; or Bandy would turn his face and she'd lean over to kiss him. That was all there was to see, the old man said. Nothing more than that. It amounted to this, that bad old Bandy had got the girl, this young Myrtle, with her silly curls, out on the seat with him, and there was nothing doing except those kisses. And the whole time the boy stood there watching he never heard 32 them say a thing.' And the listener to the old man's story observes: ' I felt there was something in the story that he wanted to make me see. Something that had a touch of beauty perhaps, though he never used the word beauty. And I felt it was mainly connected with the part about Bandy and Myrtle sitting on the garden seat, because when he'd told me that part the old man seemed to think his story was finished.' 2 The beauty referred to in these two passages is nothing so stereotyped as the love of a man for a maid. In one it is the terrible self-sacrificing love of a bent and withered old woman for her spoilt, scapegrace son who never returns. In the other it is the pathetic adoration of a wiry, middle-aged farm-hand for a plain-faced girl of thirteen or fourteen. The moral climate in which these and other characters live is one from which nearly everything has been taken away except the sense of isolation and the need for fellowship, the instinctive urge to find some object for affection. As in 'A Man and His Wife' it may be a dog or a canary; it may be a child or a cobber; it is never a wife. It is because Sargeson finds the material for most of his stories among the forgotten men and women, because he is concerned with the problems of hunger and love in a setting of human isolation, that he avoids the happier sides of domesticity. The satisfying human companionship and sexual relationship that can exist between a man and a woman is evidently not a theme which interests him. 'Poor mother . . . Poor father' thinks Henry Griffiths as he recalls their lives together and apart; and he echoes the words of the boy who never wanted to be a good boy : ' I was always real sorry for mother and father. They didn't seem to have any pleasure in life. Father never went out after he'd come home from work. He just sat and read the paper. His stomach was bad too, and made noises, and he kept on saying, Pardon. It used to get on my nerves, I used to watch him and mother when I was supposed to be doing my homework. Some- times the look on mother's face gave me the idea that inside she wasn't properly happy and was wanting pleasure just the same as I was.' Sargeson rarely gives a more satisfactory picture of domestic life than this; he turns instead to the maladjustments and even the perversions of the sexual instinct; and he turns to

2 In the revised edition of A Man and His Wife, published by the Pro- gressive Publishing Society (Wellington, 1944), and in That Summer, published by John Lehmann (London, 1946), the sentence 'Something ... beauty', is omitted from this passage. 33 them because they seem to provide a fitting accompaniment to his main theme. In When the Wind Blows his treatment of family life helps to reveal rather than it blurs the outlines of the ' figure in the carpet '. He finds in the smug respectability, the narrow religious beliefs, and the protective care of the domestic circle an artificial hothouse atmosphere in which unhealthy seeds of sexual mal- adjustment can germinate. Henry Griffiths passes from babyhood through adolescence to early manhood gathering vague impressions of cruelty and violence, obscenity and lust, of the secrets of physical life and the mysteries of conception and birth. Filled with a sense of guilt, tormented by his ignorance, he finds a refuge in the studious achievement of respectability and the unctuous platitudes of an orthodox creed; but he cannot resist the continual assaults made by life on his ignorance, and at every crisis seeks to return to the blissful and protective comfort of the womb. Henry's loneliness is far more terrifying than the loneliness of the social outcasts, because it is thrust upon him by the conventions of society. His expanding consciousness is dark- ened by fears and inhibitions which isolate him from normal human companionship. If When the Wind Blows reveals the loneliness of man in terms of an abnormal sexual attitude and the destructive influence of an abnormal family life, ' That Summer ' presents a predominantly male world in terms of homosexuality and mateship. There were hints in such stories as 'A Pair of Socks' and 'I've Lost My Pal' to prepare Sargeson's readers for this preoccupation with an exclus- ively masculine situation, but in That Summer' there would seem to be the deliberate intention of exploring both a normal and an abnormal hunger for companionship, each of which exists among such undomesticated wanderers and outcasts as Sargeson chooses to describe. It is noticeable that although the dramatic significance of ' That Summer ' depends on the homosexual theme, its human significance depends on the relationship between Bill and Terry, a relationship which, on Bill's side at any rate, is the expression of an urgent need to find an outlet for his affection. His casual sex experiences fail to satisfy his vague longing for human intimacy, and it is only in the idea of mateship that he can discover anything to give stability or meaning to his life. ' A man wants a mate that won't let him down', he affirms; and again: 'Terry was the sort of joker who'd go solid with a cobber.' 34 Nor is it without significance that immediately after the death of Terry, Bill should ask a taxi driver ' if he knew of any decent sheilas '. This compelling but inarticulate desire for close companionship with a cobber is a theme which occurs again and again in the shorter stories. ' That Summer ' is extraordinary not only because the homosexual episodes help to stress Bill's normality, but also because in the scene beside Terry's deathbed the terror of loneliness gives place to a selfless and pathetic devotion which is all the more impressive because it is only implied: Terry, I'd say. What is it, boy? he'd say. Nothing, I'd say. And then I'd say, Terry. And instead of answering he'd just have a sort of faint grin on his face. Terry, I'd say. But I never could get any further than just saying Terry. I wanted to say something, but I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't say it. Terry, I'd say. And he'd sort of grin. And sometimes I'd take his hand and hold it tight, and he'd let it stay in my hand, and there'd be the faint grin on his face. Terry, I'd say. I'm all right, boy, he'd say. Thus it is that in Sargeson's stories there arises a conception of male companionship that has certain resemblances to the ideal of mateship in early Australian writers like Tom Collins. This is something that may be regarded as a natural development during the pioneering period of a young country, but in Sargeson it has little to do with the masculine isolation of a pioneering life and a great deal to do with his rejection of a normal sex relationship as an adequate basis for the pattern that he is drawn to observe. The perversions and maladjustments which he frequently describes are, as it were, merely an attempt to stress his main theme from a particular point of view. David Williams, the eccentric tomato grower of ' A Man of Good Will ', lifts a personal relationship to a social level in the following reflection : 'Well, well, he said, the world was all wrong, men couldn't be 35 brothers to each other when they spent so much time worrying over the prices they were going to pay or get.' The brotherhood of man is the hazy but positive ideal that is present in the minds of some of Sargeson's characters. It is referred to by implication in the 'Conversation with My Uncle' : ' Once I asked him, suppose he went to a picnic and there was only one banana each, would he try to get two bananas for himself, or three or more? He said he never went to picnics. Now you might think my uncle was trying to be funny. He wasn't. He can't suppose. So I said, say anyone went to a picnic they wouldn't try to monopolize the bananas, would they? Not if they were decent? He said, no, of course not. Then I asked him, what about the social picnic? Social picnic? He repeated the words. He didn't understand and I had to leave it at that. He was so puzzled I felt sorry for him.' The ideal of human brotherhood gives point to the theme of ' The Good Samaritan ' and also to that of 'The Making of a New Zealander', but most of the characters in the other stories are too inarticulate to give expression to an abstract ideal and too anti-social to concern themselves with any social objective. Their conception of mateship is presented in personal terms. It is concrete and real. It is the human embodiment of their unconscious search for a free, equal relationship with their fellows, and has little to do with religion or politics, but much to do with an instinctive urge to crouch down and hold on tight. Human companionship can make this more tolerable. Their loneliness can become more endurable, and a temporary meaning and significance can thus be given to their casual experiences. 'That's one thing the slump did,' Ted's friend in 'A Man and His Wife ' observes, ' it put a certain sort of comradeship into life that you don't find now.' Sargeson's version of the doctrine of brotherly love is closely linked to his variations on the theme of the Noble Savage. His preoccupation with . the inarticulate toughs and loungers whose instinctive goodness and sensitivity are barely concealed by their inability to think, suggests that he has not entirely escaped the influence of the modern cult of the primitive. In their very different ways D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster have been strongly attracted to the unspoilt child of nature. Hemingway's bull- fighters and rough-house boys as well as Steinbeck's irresponsible outcasts are not unrepresentative examples of ' nature's gentlemen '. ' It is a great temptation to intellectual persons ', wrote 36 Robert Liddell, referring to the earlier novels of Forster, ' to fall in love with the Noble Savage, and to exalt him and his passions over people of their own sort, and their thoughts and feelings. If this is carried too far, and the Savage is exalted beyond his due, intuition and instinct are made of more account than the intellect -it is a bad form of the trahison des clercs.' The re-emergence of the Noble Savage in literature gives little cause for· surprise, but his appearance in New Zealand short stories as a casual worker and a voluntary outcast from society, instead of a valiant and magnanimous Maori, is an interesting departure from what had threatened to become a traditional literary device. It is improbable that anyone, much less Sargeson himself, was conscious that a change had occurred; but it is apparent today that the overdose of sentimentality which had been injected into the Maori character had destroyed its usefulness for a New Zealand writer who was largely concerned with problems of social morality. By the reflective comment at the end of 'White Man's Burden': 'Gosh, there's a great day coming for Abyssinia when civilization gets properly going there ', Sar- geson showed that he had no intention of sentimentalizing about the Maoris. Nevertheless he was attracted to the doctrine of the Noble Savage in the shape of the casual worker, not necessarily because he was influenced by English or American writers, but because he was sensitive to the moral climate of a sophisticated and urban civilization which has emphasized the importance of efficiency and standardization at the expense of human spontaneity and freedom. ' That Summer ' contains the most complete and detailed portrait of this rude barbarian with the heart of gold. BiU, the farm-labourer and kitchen-hand is able to work and able to loaf. He is a wanderer with 'itchy feet' and no fixed abode or domestic ties. As far as can be gathered he has no religion, no politics, and no morals; only a kind heart, and, beneath his rough exterior, an incurably sentimental disp9sition. He is a friendly soul who picks up acquaintances in lodging house and public bar, in tram and restaurant and on the street corner, always expecting to find 'the joker who'd go solid with a cobber '. His passing intimacies with girls count for nothing in comparison with his desire for a male companion who might fill the emptiness of his solitude by his mere presence, and become an object for his affectionate care. His meeting with Terry constitutes a crisis in his life as 37 intense as any meeting of boy with girl. Bill is a boozer and a sneak thief when necessary. He can exercise sufficient ingenuity in order to obtain small sums of money, when these are required for the rent and food of himself and his mate; but his generosity and his innocence are such that others less soft-hearted than himself can with little difficulty relieve him of his earnings. There is no guile in him except when he needs money for his own or Terry's necessities. He is full of tolerance and sympathetic understanding; but his intellectual level is not much above that of a boy of twelve. Bill is, indeed, the Noble Savage, the repository of those moral values which in Sargeson's writing are set up against the respectability, the hardness, and the callousness of people like 'My Uncle' or Mr Griffiths in When the Wind Blows; but Bill is merely a more finished portrait of which the Kens and Freds and Jacks and Teds were suggestive sketches. Uncle Bob in When the Wind Blows had never settled down and become a respectable married man like his brother. He had a ' hard-case old face, badly in need of a shave, but good-tempered looking, and always on the point of breaking into a grin.' ' I never had no brains ' he confessed, but he was a carpenter who liked his drink and his laugh and his freedom. He had been a good footballer in his youth. He was tolerant and kind-hearted, unwill- ing that the adolescent religious fervour of his repressed nephew Henry should be held up to scorn: ' I don't hold with religion myself, but I don't say anything against it. Not having the brains, like.' On Sunday morning while the elder Griffiths are at church he plays a wild and hilarious game of tennis with the two boys. ' The ball would bounce on the roof of the house, or land in the rambler roses and bring down a shower of petals, and getting it again uncle Bob would shake down more petals all over himself, so they'd be in his hair, or sticking to the hair on his chest.' And for a few minutes, Henry nearly forgot the everlasting ' No ' that from babyhood he had said to life. During Henry's nervous breakdown uncle Bob returns in his uneasy dreams as a symbol of the freedom and spontaneity and uninhibited attitude to life which his morbid fears and unhealthy dependence had denied to him-' uncle Bob was hidden in the roses, but the grin on his face with petals stuck on all over it looked out, and a hand came out from lower down holding a glass of beer with the froth running over. And you held on to mother's hand and hid behind her skirt so that uncle Bob couldn't 38 see you. Nothing could hurt you when you could run to mother or father. But uncle Bob was sitting in the back seat with Cherry on his knee, and he had Cherry's little red hat on instead of her, and the motor car was going down into the. hole, and uncle Bob had his two arms round Cherry and the two of them were laughing and bouncing up and down, and you were saying isn't he naughty mother?' It is at least curious that this Noble Savage, the carpenter who ' never had no brains ' should remark to Henry: 'I had a mate once. We had to drive out to a job in the country, and he said (But mind you Henry, just a joke, like) he said we were two simple carpenters following in the master's footsteps -only in a motor car.' It is also not without significance that Henry does not have the good fortune to meet with anyone pos- sessing a normally happy and open disposition who is able to understand his problems and help him to overcome his difficulties. It is once more the Noble Savage who becomes a symbol of a healthy attitude to life and a humble representative of a striving towards human perfection. It is the presence of so many of nature's gentlemen in the stories of Sargeson that probably accounts for the impression he has made on a considerable number of readers. Many of them have felt uneasily that the Bills and Bobs and Freds and Jacks and Teds are by no means typical or even individual New Zea- land figures, that neither their characteristics, nor their behaviour, nor their idiom can be as closely associated with the New Zea- land scene as some of his admirers affirm. They feel, however vaguely, that their creator is observing life around him from an angle that is not common to most of his readers; and they are quite right. Like most artists, Sargeson has concentrated his attention on the pattern which his individual qualities and experiences have moved him to describe, and has been encouraged by what he has seen to impose this pattern still further on life. His art is deceptive in that it might lead his readers to think that he is engaged in reporting the lives of representative New Zealanders in a series of vivid snapshots of character and episode, but, again like any artist, he is concerned with a private vision that touches external reality only at a number of points. As has been suggested, this private vision is related far more closely to what has been called the moral climate of the twentieth century than to typical New Zealand attitudes. It is the personal response of a creative writer to the social morality of an age of disintegration. 39 Sargeson is not primarily interested in a dramatic situation because of its dramatic possibilities, but because it may be used to reveal the primitive moral code that is associated with instinctive behaviour. This is prooably one of the reasons why he is readily attracted to episodes connected with the experiences of children as well as to those connected with the behaviour of child- like men who cannot conform to the conventions of orderly and sophisticated living. In his stories, ' natural ' goodness and 'natural' evil are always being opposed to the conventional goodness and evil of an unnatural society where cruelty, rapaciousness and lust receive official sanction. Sargeson explores his limited portion of life with the mind of a moralist and the technique of an objective recorder. The superficial toughness of his style and theme emphasizes rather than it conceals his preoccupation with the hungry hearts of lonely people who are desperately seeking the values which could give meaning to their lives. These values are described only in terms of the instinctive behaviour of child-like people who cannot become accustomed to a civilization in which social habits conflict with the promptings of the heart and who, therefore, refuse to adjust themselves to abnormality. Sargeson has not succeeded in avoiding all the dangers that dance attendance on the heretic. It is scarcely just to complain of sins of omission; and yet it is true to say that because of his angle of vision he has failed to clear himself from the charge levelled by Robert Liddell against those who tend to advocate a return to nature, and proclaim the virtues of the Noble Savage. If he is not guilty of expressing an open contempt for the things of the intellect, his emphasis on a primitive morality is such that few readers would be able to derive from his stories even a moderate faith in the power of human beings to change the conditions under which men live or to make any substantial progress towards the ideal of the brotherhood of man. His characters do little but crouch down and hold on tight. Their solitude is relieved only by the presence of others in a like predicament. They are the displaced persons whose fate it is to remain for ever rootless, but tormented by vague desires that can never be satisfied. And yet no one should succumb to the temptation of demanding a coherent philosophy of life from a novelist or a short story writer, much less a solution for the ills of society. In the preface to Tess of the D'Urbevilles Thomas Hardy insisted that the con- 40 templative parts of that novel were ' oftener charged with impressions than with convictions ', and elsewhere he has referred to the ' series of seemings ' which his critics had mistaken for a philosophy. In Sargeson's writing -the series of seemings arrange themselves into a moral pattern which gives significance to his work and also grounds for a criticism which cannot be confined to aesthetics.

MARGARET DALZIEL Comics in New Zealand

'The mischievous trash that circulates by thousands and tens of thousands of copies among the humbler classes' (Athenaeum, I January 1848). ' Some of the objectionable, suggestive and trashy literature ... now on sale throughout New Zealand' (The Dominion, 21 August 1954, reporting a debate in the House of Representatives).

' He strongly deprecated the vicious character of much of our cheap literature' (Athenaeum, 26 August 1854, reporting a speech by Cardinal Wiseman). ' The best-selling novel which is often openly indecent ... this evil emphasis on sex and general indecency . . . the indecent literature now flooding the country' (Evening Star, 4 September 1954, reporting a discussion at the Hawke's Bay session of the District Synod of the Methodist Church).

' The ruin of many girls is commenced by reading the low trashy wishy-washy cheap publications that the news-shops are now gorged with, and by devouring the hastily-written, immoral, stereotyped tales about the sensualities of the upper classes, the lust of the aristocracy, and the affection that men about town- noble lords, illustrious dukes, and even princes of the blood-are in the habit of imbibing for maidens of low degree " whose face is their fortune".' (H. May hew, London Labour and the London Poor, extra volume, 1861, p.25o) 4I ' The girls under detention in a certain institution (the greater number of them had had a good deal of sexual experience) decided that various publications were more harmful than films because the images conveyed by the printed matter were more personal to them and more lasting' (Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, 1954, p.r8).

FEw activities are more soothing to our self-esteem than the criticism of other people's judgment. When, as in attacks on certain kinds of books, pictures and films, the critic can combine the consciousness of both aesthetic and moral superiority, the temptation to condemn is one that few of us can resist. A good example of this has been the recent outcry about 'juvenile immorality' in New Zealand, and the closely connected talk about ' objectionable literature'. While much that has been said on these topics may be just, most of it fails to produce satisfactory evidence for the conclusions reached. The attacks on children's literature, with which this article is concerned, tend to be vigorous and vague. Even where it seems possible (as in statements made by the special committee on moral delinquency of children and adolescents) that the critics have some first-hand acquaintance with what they are attacking, their judgement is superficial. In so far as it is a literary preference, based on a distaste for indifferent stories, badly told and badly illustrated, it is very sound. But as moral judgment, it depends on a simple and rather doubtful belief in the direct influence of literature on conduct, a belief which is notoriously not proven. And it makes no attempt to analyse the indirect effects of such literature, which are probably more important. It is not really well informed about the actual contents of comics, and it is highly emotional. Emotionalism and inconsistency have been typical of attacks on popular literature ever since its existence began to be recognized by responsible people, over a hundred years ago. What should be an aut;b.oritative recent work on the subject is vitiated by these qualities. Having stated with commendable honesty that 'we are forced to admit that we know almost nothing about 42 what affects the child ',1 and that 'it is a disquieting fact that the reactions of the young public are almost entirely unknown ',2 the writer yet makes hysterical statements about the bad effects of comics. The roar of rocket-aircraft, the yells of the demigod hero, the fire of cosmic rays and the more or less deliberate sadism practised by detective supermen exacerbate and warp, by dint of repetition, young minds that are already saturated with the yiolence of life as it is in fact lived today.3 (The muddle of half-realized and inconsistent metaphors is typical of such attacks.) Elsewhere he writes of 'the disastrous reactions provoked in children by the superman ',4 and says that children, as a result of reading spy stories in comic form, are kept in ' an atmosphere of nationalist ferment which is particularly disquieting' .5 If this is the attitude of an authority, it is natural enough to find it among well meaning people who have no special knowledge of the subject. This article is therefore written in the hope of throwing a little light on the subject, of substituting a few facts for a mass of vague opinion and prejudice. It will give an account of comics on sale in New Zealand, of some of the assumptions and moral attitudes they embody, of children's taste in comics, their possible influence on the reader, and ways in which better reading may be substituted for them. There will be no attempt to give them serious consideration on aesthetic grounds, because they are simply not worth it.

II The word ' comic ' is now commonly used to describe stories which make no attempt at comedy, as well as those that do, and refers only to a certain narrative technique. It will be used here to describe the cheap weekly or monthly periodicals in which all or most of the stories are told by illustrations-what the trade is now beginning to call ' cartoon books '. The dialogue is superimposed on the illustrations, printed in block capitals set in balloon-like outlines above the characters' heads. Con- necting narrative is often printed beneath or between the pictures.

1 P. Bauchard, The Child Audience, Unesco, Paris, 1952, p.l3. 2 Ibid., p.62. a Ibid., p.37. 4 Ibid., p.67. 5 Ibid., p.45. 43 One or more numbers of over one hundred different comics have been studied, and many more examined briefly. This number is unimpressive compared with the three hundred and eighty- six comic books recently mentioned by the president of the Nebraska Federation of Women's Clubs as being evaluated by trained reviewers. But the assumption that there is a great sameness about any type of cheap popular fiction is well tested, and even in the comics read there was an almost intolerable uniformity. The number of different comics on sale in New Zealand is about two hundred. About three quarters of them are printed in Australia from American flongs, nearly a quarter are printed in England, a few of these also being of American origin, and there are a very few, again printed from American flongs, produced in New Zealand. While a certain number of titles are well established, and have been appearing for a long time, the general policy of publishers is to change titles rapidly and so exploit the taste for novelty in this kind of literature. No circulation figures are available, but it is agreed that sales of comics have increased enormously since the war. They may be classified as follows : comics dealing with romantic love, with war, crime, detection, and adventure (including the new mythology of science fiction and the superman), animal cartoon books, retold classics and straight humour.6 People closely connected with the trade consider that animal cartoons have much the highest sale in New Zealand; next in order of popularity are Westerns and classic comics, then comics of the Superman type and love comics. Comics dealing with crime and detection, science fiction and genuine ' funnies ' have the lowest sale. The demand for different types of comics varies with locality; westerns are more popular in the country, crime stories and science fiction in the towns. Love comics are bought by adolescents and by young married women. Long established 6 In all the shops-at least fifty-in Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin which I visited in the search for comics, no ' horror ' comics were found. The quality of some of these is indicated by the following passage quoted from an English horror comic, and reported in the Evening Star, 23 Sep- tember 1954: 'We aim to publish this putrid periodical every three months. Each agonizing issue will contain horrifying hours of revolting reading for you slime observants. Turn down the light if you dare and start reading the tops of terror!' The absence of this kind of thing is largely responsible for the different view of comics taken by responsible observers in England and the United States from the view that js justifiable in New Zealand. 44 English comics for small children, like Rainbow and Chicks' Own, have a steady if smallish sale (as do some of the English comics for bigger children), but this seems to depend at least partly on the influence of parents. When children reach an age to buy comics for themselves, they are more likely to choose American ones. While most of the better (and smaller) bookshops in New Zealand sell no comics at all, our biggest and best known bookshops have the largest and most varied stock of comics that I have seen. In addition, there are innumerable news agencies and small bookstalls which display a more or less comprehensive range of titles. Some sell only the long-established English comics, while others have a wide selection of American-style comics of all types. Almost every suburban shopping centre has at least one shop where children can buy comics of one kind or another.

III To turn now to the stories themselves, they will be discussed under three main headings: those that deal with romantic love, those that describe war, crime and adventure, and the genuine 'funnies'.

Comics dealing with romantic love Many comics contain only love stories. Typical titles are Darling Love, First Romance, Intimate Confessions, Love Experiences, Love Problems, Love Secrets, Real Love, Revealing Confessions, Teen-Age Romances, Teenage Love, and Young Brides. The words ' love ' or ' romance ' occur in most of the titles. The covers bear coloured illustrations, sometimes the reproduction of a photograph of a couple of film stars, more often a scene connected with one of the stories inside. This may show two of the characters embracing, but often a number of characters are depicted at some moment of crisis. The colours are crude, the captions startling, and the general effect enough to stimulate the reader's curiosity. Most of these comics contain three or four complete love stories. They are usually, though not always told from the viewpoint of the heroine, using the popular ' confession ' technique. Though printed in Australia (as are most comics on sale here), 45 they are all of American ongm. Only occasionally is an effort made to disguise this, as by talking of pounds instead of dollars. The setting of the stories is present day America. This is interesting, since, traditionally, cheap romantic literature includes a high proportion of stories set in the past or in foreign countries. Perhaps the readers' knowledge of history and geography is assumed to be inadequate even to the very limited demands made on it by such stories, and the process of identification with the characters has to be made as easy as possible. Or perhaps the implication is that there is no imaginable setting for the good life except modern America. In many stories, the action takes place in holiday camps, pleasure cruises, ranches, or mountain resorts; and when the events take place in an ordinary town, the characters often find their recreation in riding, boating, playing golf, even flying. In addition, much time is spent by the' characters in dining out, dancing, and visiting night-clubs, cinemas and theatres. The plots deal with conflict and crisis in the relationship between boy and girl (or very occasionally husband and wife), and fall into two classes. There are those in which the events arise solely from the characters of the people concerned. The heroine is unreasonably jealous, she becomes infatuated with a worthless charmer and forgets the object of her girlhood affections, she falls in love with somebody else's fiance, she is guilty of some deceit in order to attract the man she loves, and so on. The crisis comes when she realizes her mistake or wrong-doing, and in almost every case the story ends happily. The second class consists of those which try to deal with problems of more general importance. The commonest of these are the conflict between love and career, between love and parental ambition or domination, between the desire to have a good time and the necessity to save or make other sacrifices for the sake of marriage, between the attractions of city life and the more substantial virtues of the country or small town, between the heroine's desire to be glamorous and sophisticated and the hero's taste for a 'fresh natural American girl'. Here too the heroine is the centre of the story, and nearly always her adherence to ' a phony set of values ' causes the conflict which the story resolves. Stories of this slightly more complex kind are most frequent in comics stamped 'Conforms to the A.G.P. teenage code of approved reading'. 'A.G.P.' seems to stand for 46 Amalgamated General Publishers, but whether this is an Aus- tralian or an American sign of approval is not clear. The characters are uncomplicated and stereotyped. They fall into three classes, the good and wise, the fundamentally good but misguided, and the bad and foolish. Those in the first class are not changed by the events, those in the second learn wisdom, those in the third drop out of the story, baffled, unsuccessful and unhappy. The bad characters are never wise or clever enough to do permanent harm to anyone but themselves. The illustrations are in black and white, and of varying degrees of badness. They make no attempt at giving individuality to the characters. All the heroes and heroines conform to the stereotype established by films and fashion papers, while the depiction of older people or eccentrics is miserably poor. The heroes are invariably tall, square-jawed and square-shouldered, with slim hips and athletic figures. The heroines are shorter, with impossibly slender waists and hideously uplifted bosoms. In nearly every story the heroine appears at some stage in either a two-piece bathing suit or a strapless evening dress. In every story there is at least one scene in which the hero and heroine are shown locked in an embrace; usually there are several. There are rather fewer such illustrations in the comics stamped with the A.G.P. seal; but generally speaking the illustrations give little indication of whether the comic is an ' approved ' one. The first comment to be made about these comics is that in the narrow sense of the word they are inflexibly ' moral '. The sex relationship is completely monogamous, and there is no hint that there exists such a thing as intercourse outside marriage. The heroine is .usually a single girl, occasionally a widow, never a divorcee. The hero is always single. It is assumed that love implies a single-hearted devotion to the beloved, and leads to a marriage in which that devotion continues. Many of the stories end with the word ' forever '. In the few stories about married people, quarrels end in reconciliation, never in divorce. Secondly, 'dating ', frequently every night, is taken for granted as normal. For a girl, lack of dates is plain tragedy. Several stories read suggested that to 'go steady' without a preliminary period during which a girl goes out with many different boys is a great mistake. This sort of social life begins early, and one noticeable thing is the frequency with which boys and girls fall 47 in love and plan to marry while still in ' school '. This often means some kind of ' college ', but the youth of the characters is stressed (as for example in an astonishing tale called 'No Wedding Ring for Me', which begins, 'The knell of each passing year impressed the dread fact more deeply on my heart . . . the fact that although I was already out of my teens there was No Wedding Ring for Me!'7 Dating, whether serious or not, almost invariably includes kisses and embraces. The text of the stories, like the varies in the extent to which it dwells on these. The difference between those that do and those that do not carry the A.G.P. seal is pretty marked. The latter tend to describe the heroine's sensations at much greater length. He stopped my protest with a kiss ... a kiss that sent stabs of sheer ecstasy darting through my body! I trembled with delight and yielded to the firm pressure of his lips! This was love-real and strong . . . Then I was in the house, my body trembling, my pulses pounding, a roaring symphony of aroused emotions! 8 In all these comics, the heroine's reaction to being kissed by the hero is a reliable indication of the true state of her feelings. ' His ... his kiss doesn't thrill me at all ... the way Ned's did! Oh, what a blind fool I've been . . . and now it may be too late!'9 It is true that she may respond to the wrong man's kisses, but she will always be thrilled by those of the right man. Her sensations indicate the genuineness of her love and the suitability of the kisser as a husband. The third convention is the unchallenged assumption that marriage is the object of a woman's life. After a vague period of general dating, the heroine will meet a man who is ' different '. Their first encounter usually ends in his asking her out to dinner, and before the evening is up the heroine will probably be in love. Love at first sight (or second or third at most) occurs in about half the stories read. (' Don't let them kid you about love at first 10 sight ... It does happen! It had happened to me! ' ) As a rule marriage follows with great rapidity, for 7 First Love, Romance Library No. 37. Punctuation, including italics and dots, as in original. 8 Love Illustrated, No. 42. 9 Darling Romance, No. 33. 10 Popular Romance, No. lOA. the universe of every girl's life revolves around the sunny dream of love, romance, and a happy marriage! .Without romance a woman's existence is hollow . . . without love it is empty ... without a happy marriage it is barren.U Fourthly, a high proportion of the characters are not shown against a family background, but are living in some kind of apartment or dormitory. Where other members of a family appear as important characters in a story, it is almost always as a source of trouble; the possessive mother who gets blinding headaches when her daughter's wedding plans are discussed, the ambitious father who insists that his daughter devote herself wholly to becoming a tennis star, and gets a heart attack every time a lover threatens, the small son of the young widow, whose hopes of remarriage are thwarted by his attitude to her suitors, and above all, the jelaous and treacherous sister who has 'designs on the heroine's lover. (Female friendship tends to follow the same pattern.) When the family enters the tale only as a background to the heroine's social life, it is sometimes normally prosperous, united and affectionate; but often it is very poor, and the heroine is determined to cut free and at all costs to escape her mother's fate. Fifthly, though the heroine is almost invariably either at school or at work, there is only the briefest reference to any education she may be getting, or to her work. School exists as the background for an endless series of dates, which can leave little time or energy for anything else. Work provides the opportunity for marrying the boss (many American businesses and offices seem to be controlled by handsome young men). Or else it receives some attention because the theme of the story is the conflict between love and career. This problem is always solved in the same way. A story called 'Love is an Art' begins: More than one girl has been faced with the problem of love versus a career . . . and found only one answer! But I thought I was different . . . that I could become a successful commercial artist . . . and love could wait! But romance draws its own lines and paints its own pictures . . . and I was to find, that above all else, love is an artP2

11 Romance Story, No. 20. 12 Darling Romance, No. 33. 49 Sixthly, not only are the stories moral in the narrow sense, but they take a lofty attitude in general. It is true that religion is referred to only occasionally and in the vaguest way (in moments of distress the heroines sometimes pray, though just how and to what kind of deity is not indicated). But the stories have clear ethical standards. They attack male lust, female jealousy, folly and deceit, love of money, snobbery, the person whose love of ' meaningless glitter ' contrasts unfavourably with the attitude of another who is ' a real person with an honest set of values '. Simple pleasures and the simple life (golfing, boating, etc.) are the best. 'Suddenly I realized that all my so-called civilized values had been worthless . . . that the only things that really counted were true loyalty, courage, devotion, sincerity! '13 There is much talk of 'values ', and it is very desirable to be ' mature ', a word of vague commendation that is much used. Above all, directly and indirectly these stories stress the importance of romantic love, which matters more than anything else in the world. 'Where there's love that's all that counts'; 'There was a blaze of glory around us as we kissed and I knew at last that life was for . . . LOVE !14

Comics dealing with war, crime and detection, and adventure These are of two types, American comics, which usually contain perhaps three stories all of the same kind, and often with the same hero, and English comics, which include different kinds of stories in each number. Stories about the war seem to be rare in English comics. American comics like Battle and Soldier deal chiefly with the experiences of soldiers and airmen in Korea. They claim to be true, and often open with such sentences as: ' Special permission has been granted this magazine to bring you these special cases from the files of G2, Army Intelligence Dept., Washington, D.C.' 15 The stories are told from the viewpoint of non-commissioned soldiers or junior officers, and tend to deal with the adventures of small groups or individuals entrusted with missions which give scope to individual bravery and enterprise. The virtues of the American soldier are courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice. (' Private

13 Love Secrets, No. 11. 14 New Romances, No. 13A. 15 Kent B/ake of the Secret Service, No. 3. 50 HEH,HEHI I SEE YOU'RE HUNGRY FOR HORROR AGAIN. WELL, REST ASSURED. YOUR A PPErtT£ WILL BE SATISf'IED. IN FACT, WHEN YOU'RE THROUGH WITH THIS PUTRID PERIODICAL, YOU WILL HAVE LOST YOUR APPETITE ENTIRELY. SO DON'T JUST STAND THERE I)R00l/N8. COAl£ IN.' WELCOME ONCE MORE TO THE CRYPT Of' TERROR. THIS IS YOUR HOST IN HOWLS, YOUR NAUSEATING NARRATOR, THE CRYPT· KEEPER, READY TO CHILL YOUR SPINE AHD CUR!JlE YOUR BLOOD WITH THESPINE·TINSL!NG TAlE Of' TERROR fdnfP)

Tales from the Crypt (No. 1) first class Bill Muldoon understood the meaning of pride and guts 16 . . . He couldn't understand the meaning of retreat.' ) The enemy (the ' reds ') are cowardly and treacherous, and are often depicted in the traditional form of the wily oriental with long mous- tache and stately speech. So a ' red ' leader, attacked with his party, says, ' My life is most valuable to the cause! Stay and fight, whilst I flee!' When captured, he uses his apparently unarmed condition to stop a chivalrous American from attacking him, then draws a knife and himself makes an attackY The actors in these stories are almost all men. When the glamorous spy or female war correspondent is introduced, it is partly for humorous purposes. The illustrations are crude, and the appearance of the American soldiers unpleasing. They are square-jawed, hard-faced, unshaven he-men. Naturally, the pictures show a great deal of violence. Guns are fired, bombs dropped, men are killed, all sorts of objects, including bodies, are shown flying about; there are flames, swirl- ing and zig-zag lines, and attempts at onomatopoeic description by such barbarous coinages as ' krakarak ', ' whram ', ' pring-g ', ' k-pow ', and ' baroom '. But there is no lingering over the wounds, torture and death that occur in the stories, and the text makes little ,of them. They are not even realistically drawn. The most interesting thing about these comics is their open propaganda for the American way of life. One expects the vague idealism shown by a character who says, ' I joined up with the infantry at the height of my career [as a baseball player] because I didn't like those guys with them crack-pot ideas pushing around some little guys! '18 But there is a much more explicit message. It is seen very clearly in a story about a prisoner of war camp in Korea. The six Chinese ordered to teach communism to the Americans meet unbroken resistance, and in the end are themselves converted by statements like the following : You reds are living like rats in a trap ! Let me tell you how Americans live under a free economic system . . . Every third American has a car, a radio, a house, the best food, a television set, electricity, a good job, and what's more ... 19 Here inspiration apparently fails the speaker, and he breaks off.

16 Fight Comics, No. 31. 17 Soldier, No. 16. 18 Battle, No. 8. 19 Kent Blake of the Secret Service, No. 3. 52 But he has said enough. The story ends with the words of one of the converts : ' We saw that your way of life was best! A life of truth and freedom. We want to go over to your side'; and with the comment: 'Communism is a living lie that will one" day die . . . as those back there have died! Communism has no weapon against truth . . . and freedom! ' Stories of crime and detection, mostly American, but some English, are very numerous. Differing greatly in length and com- plexity, they deal almost entirely with crimes committed for the sake of money. Sexual frustration or jealousy, drink and insanity as causes of crime are never mentioned, and in spy stories there is no suggestion that the foreign agent is motivated by anything but ambition or greed. Crimes frequently described are the swindling of insurance companies, smuggling, robbery and burglary. The criminals are often organized in big gangs, and the discovery of the boss is difficult. Treachery within a gang or between associates is common, the criminals are depicted as uniformly unattractive in appearance, disloyal and often stupid, the crime is never successful, and the slogan ' Crime never pays ' is found repeatedly. Details of criminal activity are seldom such as would be of any use to youngsters plotting their own villainy, if only because plenty of money and the co-operation of a well organized gang is nearly always needed for even temporary success. And there is not much evidence that the criminals get any enjoyment in the interval between crime and capture. The illustrations come down on the side of the angels as heavily as the text, in that the detective is depicted as conventionally attractive in appearance, the criminal almost always as ugly, sinister and degraded. This seems far more important than the fact that many crime stories are told from the criminal's viewpoint (using something like the ' confession ' technique found in love comics), and that sometimes police or detectives have a small part in the story. Fredric Wertham, the American expert on comics, in trying to prove that they cause juvenile delinquency, attributes this effect to the predominance of the criminal in the story. But many crime stories in comics on sale in New Zealand are told from the viewpoint of the police or private detective, and anyway the physical unattractiveness and inferiority of the criminals is consistent. Hence there is no encouragement to the reader to identify himself with them. 53 There are many pictures of fighting and shooting, at which the hero excels, and considerable emphasis on the appeal to force. But, as in comics about war, there is no lingering over details, no realistic depiction of fear or pain. And the appeal to certain positive if vague moral standards which justify the forcible repression of crime is there too. Spy stories in American comics emphasize the goodness of the American way of life, while others uphold the ideal of 'decency'. So one character, having described her sufferings through the apparently criminal activities of her fiance, ends the story thus: ' I do not regret all that has happened to Cal and me! For I have made my small contribution to decency-as you too may be called upon to do, some day! 20 Stories of adventure (often describing the frustration of law- breakers like cattle rustlers, smugglers, Red Indians, or pirates) are perhaps the commonest of all in comics, whether English or American; and many of them are very readable. Good examples are found in comics stamped on the cover ' Approved comic- for sale in New Zealand ' (these are printed from American plates in Wellington). They often follow traditional lines. The object of the action is to discover buried treasure, to free captives, rescue and restore the oppressed. The enemy are hostile natives, wicked Indian princes, pirate chiefs; there are innumerable feats of courage performed by the heroes, hairbreadth escapes from fire, drowning, underground caves, storms and floods, dramatic rescues and sudden changes of fortune. Cowboys and Indians are apparently still popular, and a prominent place is often given to the hero's horse. The characters are mostly male, but when a female appears it is usually as a comrade rather than as the object of romantic love. There is of course some violence, but it is in the tradition of 'another redskin bit the dust'.21 The pictures of fighting and killing are mostly undetailed and unrealistic. The moral tone is summed up when the newly appointed sheriff of a western town, thanked for capturing a couple of criminals, replies, 'I only did what was right'.22 English comics contain good adventure stories. The part of the villain is often omitted, and the theme is escape from some natural danger through the exercise of skill and resourcefulness. zo Brenda, No. 28. 21 'And four warriors fell, wounded, to the dust', from a story of cowboys and Indians, Sun, 24 July 1954. 22 Buster Crab be, No. 2. 54 do not refer to OI'IY IJvii'IQ pcr1on.

TOP: Battle (No. 2). MIDDLE LEFT: Beloved (no number). CENTRE: Darling Romance (No. 38). MIDDLE RIGHT: Teen-Age Love (No. 30). BOTTOM: G-Man (No. 21) Co-operation between human characters and between humans and animals is often described, and these are the qualities held up for admiration. Finally, to consider some of the most interesting adventure comics, we come to Superman and the tribe of characters made in his image. Superman was well established as a comic character many years ago, and three separate publications (Super, Superboy and Superman) deal with his exploits. There are many similar comics, as for example, Fighting American, Marvelman, Young Marvelman, Plastic Man and the Phantom, and single stories of this type occur in comics which vary the kind of fiction they print. The heroes of these stories are beings of supernatural powers, which they use entirely for beneficent purposes. All of them wear a kind of fancy dress, consisting of close fitting tunic, tights, high boots and cloak; they all wear a sort of badge or monogram on their chests. All are incredibly broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, square-jawed and muscular. They usually have an everyday identity too, and go about as mild mannered nonentities. of no particular power or charm. Often such a hero is accompanied by a boy who takes part in his adventures-Batman is accompanied by Robin, Fighting American by Speed Boy. (These are astute devices on the part of the writers of these tales-the second also appears to Dr Wertham an example of an idealized homosexual pattern.) The metamorphosis from everyday to supernatural identity may be accompanied by a lot of pseudo- scientific mumbo-jumbo, as when the honest newsboy Mick Moran is transformed into Marvelman by the operation of atomic force. The element of science fiction is common. Many stories deal with inter-planetary travel and space warfare. Superman has X-ray vision. A visitant from another world-' the faraway super-scientific world of Xanadu '-comes to earth equipped with ' atomic transplanting mechanism', 'invisibility halo', and 'miniature hand-jet' .23 Plastic Man can hypnotize people. Superman can break through the 'space-time continuum' and take up his life at a point in the past. And so on. Their adventures are fundamentally very like those described in stories which have ordinary human beings as characters. They use their powers to foil criminals and spies. The stories are short and commonplace, often very unskilful-the extreme of unrealism is reached in one where Superman's task is to recover jewels

23 Super boy, No. 65. stolen during the making of a film, for which the film director, in his passion for 'realism', has insisted that real jewels be used, not imitations. Desperate devices are necessary to provide them with worthy opponents. One set of criminals in a Superman story have incredible destructive machines, and are provided with ' electronic homing pigeons ' by which they dispose of stolen jewels. The morality of these beings is strict. They are always on the side of law and order, and Superman always puts people before things. Thus in order to rescue people in distress he will let criminals escape with their loot. Batman and Robin are called ' the lawmen '. Fighting American is ' dedicated to the fight against all evil '. In many ways they observe a stricter moral code than the characters in the old fairy stories do. The comparison is serious, for all the scientific jargon only emphasizes the fact that here we have a new mythology, based on a new kind of magic, and one that seems to appeal to children more than the old machinery of seven-league boots, flying horses and carpets, magic herbs, rings, swords and helmets, cloaks of invisibility and all the rest. Both kinds of magic exist to confer power over space, time and the enemy. For several reasons, the assumptions and conventions of comics describing crime and adventure are less interesting than those of comics that deal with romantic love. Every girl (and boy?) who reads romantic stories expects to fall in love, if she does not believe that she is in love already. But as a rule even imaginative children recognize impossibilities. Stories of space ships and Red Indians, even, to the New Zealand boy, stories of war in Korea, deal with the impossible. Moreover, the problems confronting heroes of adventure stories are practical, not moral. They do not need to brood over the ethics of their actions, or to suffer pangs of conscience for wrong-doing. Their world is clearly divided between goodies and baddies, and the reader knows exactly where to align himself. But the heroine of the romance comic is torn by conflicting emotions, tortured by doubt, perplexed in her relationships, not with cattle rustlers and jewel thieves, but with her parents and friends and lover. The principles which guide her decisions and behaviour are comparatively complex, and closely related to life. She often does the wrong thing. There are however one or two points to be made about the assumptions underlying stories of action in comics. A common 57 charge against them is that they glorify violence. It is necessary to be clear about what this means. They do not glorify crime and criminals-on the contrary. But many of them do depict the forcible and usually violent suppression of crime, whether international (communism) or national. There is no room for reasonable argument as a weapon. Even physical strength and skill (the sort needed for enduring shipwreck or riding immense distances or escaping from underground caves) is less commonly shown by the heroes of these stories than the ability to shoot straight. For one thing, human physical powers are so miserable compared with those of Superman. Results tend to be obtained by short-cuts, usually violent, some magical. While it is true that children's books have always been full of violence and magic, there is no doubt that the illustrations of the modern comic, unskilled and unrealistic though they seem to the adult, must impress this aspect of the stories very forcibly on young readers. How forcibly is hard to say. But it is probable that most objections to comics on the score of violence are based on the illustrations. It is certain that adventure stories in English comics have a very different moral tone from most American stories of the same kind. The characters are often children, where in American stories they are always adults. A much larger place is given to positive virtues like family affection. There are serials like ' The Space Family Rollinson ' (Knockout) in which a whole family, parents and four children, are kidnapped from earth and carried off to ·distant planets by strange mechanical spacemen. Another example is 'The Fleet Family in the Island of Secrets' (Swift), a variation on the treasure island theme. A complete story about a working class family appears every week in T.V. Fun-' meet this happy lovable family, whose everyday adventures will bring tears of laughter to your eyes. They are quite ordinary folk, but they do some extraordinary things at times. They are the sort of family you find in every street-and they are fun!' Frequently a brother and sister, or a group of friends, are involved in an adventure together. There is much emphasis on helpful- ness and on the love of animals (horses and dogs that show remarkable intelligence, lambs to be rescued, and so on). There are school stories like 'Tales of St. Clements' (Knockout-this comic also contains a series about Billy Bunter) and 'Sandy Dean's Schooldays' (Lion), in which, while the business of educa- 58 tion is ignored, the characters are uninterested in 'dating', and instead pursue adventures familiar to readers of Gem and Magnet. They show the virtues of loyalty to school, fellow pupils, even teachers, a very adequate compensation for the snobbery to which George Orwell objected in such stories. Stories in English comics are more skilfully constructed, perhaps because many of them are serials, while others are consecutive stories with one or two ordinary illustrations, and they therefore have more space in which to develop. Stories told in the comic technique have a higher proportion of narrative to picture than American comics. The inference is that they are written for a more literate public. The illustrations are much better drawn. There is often an element of humour in the midst of the adventure. And even in stories of crime there is less violence and greater emphasis on skill, co-operation and resourcefulness, in contrast to brute strength. The nearest American approach to this sort of world is found in some of the animal cartoons, depicting the adventures of characters originally invented for the screen. The colour of these is bright and simple, very attractive to children, and the drawings in their own way are good. Some of the little animals really care for one another, and, as in the screen cartoons, the weaker side always wins in a fight. But, not surprisingly, it is stories of English origin that take for granted the virtues of family affection and the love of real animals.

Genuine comics ' Classic ' comics (potted versions of standard novels) are perhaps objectionable on literary and educational grounds, but they do not fit into the present discussion. The last kind of story to be considered here is the 'funny', the genuine comic. Some whole periodicals are devoted to humour, and there are often short funny stories in comics dealing mainly with romance and adventure. The characters and situations are (except in the case of cartoons) much closer to the reader's life than in any other type of comic, and the appeal to the imagination less. English comics are best adapted to the taste of young children. Their humour is of a simple kind, exploiting age old situations like slipping on banana skins, forgetting to put on trousers, confusing identical twins, practical jokes, the failure of bright 59 ideas, misunderstandings based on punning words, and so on. The adult who finds this hopelessly feeble need only live in the same house as a boy of eight or ten to realize that it is just what appeals to him. Painful though it may be, it is very harmless. The humour in American comics of this type is more suited to the adolescent reader. (This appeal to the adolescent rather than the child is common to most American comics.) The characters tend to be homely, awkward and spotty. The stories describe things like learning to smoke (with a boy as the hero), a boy's first shave, a girl's infatuation for a film star, boys and girls squabbling and playing tricks to show which sex is superior, awkward situations arising out of mistakes and misunderstanding, and the funny side of calf love. The attitude to sex is humorous but pure, and there is no concern with crime or serious wrong- doing. It is hard to think that this type of comic can be attacked by the moralist. There is not even the possibility of the objection made to books like the William series, by Richmal Crompton, that the naughty boy 'is made a hero. There is no mockery of serious subjects, no laughter at poverty, age or suffering. The world depicted is morally neutral, untouched by ordinary standards of conduct or ideals of behaviour. Though its inhabi- tants so closely resemble the children and adolescents who read about it, there is no pressure on the reader to identify himself with them. And it is this process of identification with a hero or heroine which surely determines the influence of literature on the young reader.

IV In the hope of testing children's own interest and preferences in comics, a questionnaire was sent to a number of intermediate schools in different parts of New Zealand. The questionnaire was designed to elicit facts rather than opinions. That is, children were not asked What they thought about comics, but simply whether they preferred them to books, what kind of comic they liked best, what single comic they would choose if given a year's subscription, how much they spent on comics each week, and whether they got ideas for games from the comics they read. An effort was made, by including questions about books, newspaper reading, and library membership, to mask the real purpose of the 6o investigation, and to get a candid answer. There are certain indications in the replies that this effort was reasonably successful. 1638 children answered the questionnaire, 623 from two intermediate schools in Auckland (271 from (1) and 352 from (2)), 400 from a school in Palmerston North, 287 from a school in Christ- church, and 328 from one in Dunedin. With a few exceptions, the children tested were twelve, thirteen or fourteen years old. In almost all cases the schools provided the I.Q. rating for each pupil. The children were asked to state their fathers' occupations. (a) The following table shows the answers, expressed in percentages, to the question, ' Do you prefer to read books or comics?'

TABLE I Preference between books and comics Unclassifiable Books Comics Both answer Auckland (1) 76 7 15 2 Auckland (2) 67 7 24.5 1.5 Christchurch 72 25 3 Dunedin 55 22 21 2 Palmerston N. 80 12 8 The variation in taste shown here is wide, and not quite easy to explain. To a certain extent it clearly depends on the area in which the school is situated. The Dunedin school, which shows the lowest preference for books, is in a working class district; the first of the two Auckland schools is in a ' better ' district than the second. But the Christchurch school tested was also in a very good residential area, yet a quarter of the children said they preferred comics to books. A partial explanation is probably that these children were particularly capable of dealing with the questionnaire. Few_ of them answered 'both' to this question, and none of them returned an answer from which no meaning could be extracted. Their power to analyse and describe their opinions was unusually developed. Therefore, when in other schools many children took refuge in 'both', these Christchurch children gave a more precise answer. But it remains a little strange that such a high proportion of them prefer comics to books. The preference for books was almost unanimous among children of high intelligence. It gradually decreased, till among the least intelligent groups sometimes more than half the children expressed a preference for comics. 61 (b) The next question was, 'If you read mostly comics, what kind do you like best-Wait Disney type, Space-ship, Super- man, stories of crime and detection, love comics or classic comics?' The following table shows the percentage of children 2 expressing a preference for each of these kinds of comic. '

TABLE II Preference for different types of comics No Wait Space Super- Crime & Love Classic pref. Disney ship man Detec- type tion Auckland (1} 52 30 0.4 2 5 1 14 Auckland (2) 30 50 3 3 7 6 19 Christchurch 59 32 1 1.5 1 2 16 Dunedin 25 45 4 10 2 16 27 Palmerston N. 48 33 1.5 2.5 3 2.5 15 Several very interesting things were shown by the answers to this question. First, a large number of children, varying between 25 and 59 per cent in different schools, refused to express a preference for any kind of comic. Their answers usually took the form of ' None ', ' I do not read comics ', ' I do not like comics', or even' I am not allowed to read comics', That is, their refusal did not indicate inability to make up their minds between competing and attractive possibilities. When a child was unable to do this, he or she gave the name of more than one kind of comic, or simply replied, ' All '. The conclusion seems to be that a large number of New Zealand children at least say that they do not read or care about comics. The proportion of such children in any one school is closely related to the kind of district in which the school is situated; and, within each school, children of professional men take up this attitude far more often than do children of working class parents. Secondly, in every case comics of the Wait Disney type were by far the most popular, with classic comics next in order of preference. This accords with the information about sales given by booksellers and distributors. So does the fact that, though there is not a great deal to choose among the other types, love comics

2' A good many children mentioned more than one kind of comic as preferred, and as there was no way of deciding between alternatives, all those mentioned were counted. Therefore the percentages in no case add up to 100. 62 are next in order of popularity. Generally speaking, these results suggest that the children were giving honest answers to this question. A third point is the great variation in the popularity of love comics in different centres. By far the highest vote in their favour was recorded in Dunedin, where there is no sign of any marked recent increase in ' juvenile immorality '. Have North Island children been terrorized into concealing their taste for this kind of comic? Another noticeable thing is the fact that comics dealing with crime and detection are far more popular in Auckland than anywhere else. This may indicate the more sophisticated taste of children in a larger city. Finally, the most reassuring thing about the answers to this question was the relative lack of interest in the Superman kind of comic. (The high figure for Dunedin should almost certainly be connected with the fact that Superman at present figures in a comic strip running in the Saturday night sports edition of the evening paper. This will make many more children familiar with the character than would otherwise be the case.) Observers in other countries have found the Superman the most disturbing and sinister character in comics. But New Zealand children apparently do not find his antics very attractive. Nor do they like the debased science-fiction which describes adventures in ' space '. (c) The next set of answers to be considered concerns the chif- dren's choice of a single comic (as opposed to a type of comic). The actual question asked was, ' If you like comics, and were offered a year's subscription to any ONE COMIC, which would you choose?' An exact title was sometimes given, but the children more often used the general descriptions given them in the question just discussed. The same descriptions therefore are used in the following table, which gives an analysis of the answers, expressed in percentages.

TABLE Ill

No Wait Space- Super- Crime & Love Classic English Oth· Choice Disney ship man Detec- Comics ers type tion Auckland (1) 42 23 0 1 3 0 9 19 3 Auckland (2) 25 42 2 1 2 3 9 11 5 Christchurch 40 30 1 1 2 0 11 13 2 Dunedin 19 31 1 2 4 7 18 12 6 Palmerston N. 32 36 1 1 2 2 12 8 6 63 Under the heading 'English comic' are included comics like Lion, Girl, Champion, Girl's Crystal, Film Fun and Rainbow. As was explained earlier, English comics do not confine themselves to one type of fiction, or to the adventures of one hero. A single number may include stories of terrestrial adventure and space travel, of school and family life, animal cartoons, re-told classics and humorous anecdotes. Therefore they do not fall into types in the way that American comics do, and this the children clearly recognized. They hardly ever in answering the second question gave the title of an English comic. Therefore the answers to this third question should give a more accurate indication of the children's preferences. Again, it should be noticed how many children refused to choose a comic at all. A percentage varying between I9 and 42 apparently would not accept a comic if it was offered to them. This percentage varies, as one would expect, with the kind of area in which the school is situated. Next, the Walt Disney type of comic was again the most popular, with classic comics and English comics always either second or third. Well behind in order of popularity were love comics and crime comics, with Superman and space stories taking the lowest place. New Zealand children of intermediate school age, if they con- fess to reading comics at all, say that they prefer those comics which adults regard as the least objectionable. How far children were honest in their replies is of course open to question. Certainly the stated order of preference agrees with the experience of booksellers and distributors. And the answers from the different centres agree pretty well. The same kind of consistency is shown in the answers to some of the other questions. For example, the percentage of children who say that they get ideas for games from comics varies only between 2 I (Auckland (I) and Christchurch) and 28 (Palmerston North). The games mentioned in all cases included a high proportion of ordinary outdoor and team games, indoor and party games, tricks, puzzles, and traditional children's games like cowboys and Indians. The percentage of children who say that they spend nothing on comics varies only between 65 (Auckland (I) and Christchurch) and 57 (Dunedin); while the amount spent weekly by those who do buy them varies only between IS. (Auckland (2) and Christchurch) and IS. 2 Yzd. (Palmerston North). These 64 figures show the sort of agreement one would expect in a relatively homogeneous society like that of New Zealand, and suggest that the children who supplied them were giving what they believed to be correct information. But a much more comprehensive investigation of the facts is needed. Children of other age groups, living in the country as well as in the towns, should be questioned; late adolescents and adults also.25 What can perhaps be concluded from these 1638 answers is that the New Zealand child of intermediate school age, if he reads comics at all, prefers as a rule those that are least likely to deprave him. What can certainly be concluded is that the answers provide no evidence at all of the need for government interference with the sale of comics in New Zealand. Where love comics are most read (in Dunedin), there has been no particular increase of 'juvenile immorality '. What a more thorough investigation would reveal of course remains to be seen.

V All this merely confirms what most thoughtful people believe, that evidence of the direct influence of literature on behaviour is very scanty and uncertain. Yet it is commonly accepted that what we read has some effect on what we are and how we behave. Every scheme of censorship, from Plato on, has drawn its justification from this belief, and it is held even by those most unlikely to favour censorship. 'Many people would never have been in love if they had not heard talk about it', said La Rochefoucauld, and 'talk' here can surely be extended to include literature. Love is to many, according to Lord Byron, 'a factitious state, an opium dream of too much youth and reading'. All of us have some experience of adapting our behaviour (and criticizing other people's) directly according to something we have read; and most thoughtful people suspect that their beliefs and expectations in life have been moulded by books to an almost frightening extent. Accepting this, therefore, let us consider very briefly what the influence of comics, especially those dealing with romantic love and violent action, is likely to be. 25 It is generally known that many adults read comics, and this is openly acknowledged-with what motives who shall say?-by at least one publisher. There has recently (February 1955) appeared in New Zealand the first number of a comic called The Saint, by Leslie Charteris. Written in large letters by the title are the words 'Adult picture stories'. In every other respect, The Saint is indistinguishable from the usual crime comic. 65 'Romance' comics stress above anything else the primary importance of sexual love. The characters, almost always in late adolescence, have no life apart from 'dating', 'petting', quarrelling and making it up with the beloved. It is possible that readers, particularly girls, and among them particularly the less intelligent, may be influenced by such literature to behaviour that in our culture is considered, to say the least of it, precocious. On the other hand, it must be emphasized that the stories never deal with actual unchastity, and that in them love always ends in marriage. In this, as in the love-making shown in the illustrations, comics are far more conventional than films. Indeed, while it is generally agreed that the illustrations increase the influence of comics, it seems obvious that the film will have at least equal power. It is hard for an adult to estimate the probable effect of the innumerable pictures of couples locked in passionate embrace which fill the pages of the love comics. Their artistic worthless- ness and their extremely unrealistic depiction of the human form must not blind us to the fact that they have a permanence which films lack, and that they show very clearly and repeatedly certain simple standards of human beauty and behaviour. Films, on the other hand, have the advantage of combining the illusion of complete realism with much greater glamour than surrounds the illustrations in comics. It will be at least as easy for the adolescent girl to identify herself with a film star as with the heroine of any of the romantic stories she reads in comics. But illicit sex relationships, common in films, are unknown in comics. When we consider the possible indirect influence of these comics much the same thing applies. It is very likely that they will lead the adolescent reader to form a false picture of the world, and to expect life to be very different from what it is. But of how much literature is this not true? And how much more the film is likely to do in this respect! 26 We are all full. of illusions in our youth. Not all of them come from books and films. Not all of them are disapproved by adults. The normal person shakes them off or is forced to slough them pretty soon. Respon- sible parents and teachers try to guide children towards reading which will encourage lofty illusions, or will show the truth. But to attempt to censor or ban literature on the grounds that

26 For an account of investigations into the influence of films on children, see H. J. Forman, Our Movie Made Children, New York, 1934. 66 it is likely to encourage false beliefs is clear folly. Our bookstalls might be cleared of comics, but our libraries also would be half emptied, and many films would never be shown. Desirable as in some ways this might be, it is hardly a practical possibility, and the attendant evils of such censorship cannot be overstressed. Much the same conclusions apply in the case of comics that describe violence. Literature that has traditionally been regarded as proper for children is full of crime, violence and sudden death. The same is true of films like westerns, which, if only because they usually lack love interest are thought to be suitable for children. Many authorities regret this emphasis on crime and violence, even to the extent of wanting to suppress such facts as that Peter Rabbit was a naughty rabbit, and that his father was caught and cooked in a pie. They may be right, but this example shows the total impossibility of removing this elemep.t from children's literature. It is true that the illustrations in comics probably deepen the impression made on the reader, and also that in most of them the violence takes place in a contemporary setting, as contrasted with the world of legend, history and fairy tale. But these objections apply still more powerfully to many . films, which in depicting violence leave the worst of our comics far behind in realism. A thorough attempt to eliminate all violence from films and literature is out of the question. As I have alrea

VI Yet most people agree that most comics are poor reading, and that children should be encouraged to grow out of them as soon as possible. Even though it is clear that the worst type of crime comic does not reach New Zealand, yet there is probably something in Wertham's contention that all comics blunt 'the finer feelings of conscience, of mercy, of sympathy for other people's sufferings and of respect for women as women and not merely as sex objects to be bandied around or as luxury prizes to be fought over.' 27 Perhaps also it is true that comics are 'such

27 Quoted from Seduction of the Innocent, by Frederic Wertham, in the New Yorker, May 1954. highly flavoured fare that they affect children's taste for the finer influences of education, for art, for literature and for the decent and constructive relationships between human beings and especially between the sexes.' 28 So it may be worth making some suggestions, by no means original, for leading children to better literature. For children need food for the imagination almost as much as food for the body, and if we do not want them to get it from comics, we must see that they get it in a better form. The simple, and fundamentally the only answer to bad books is just more good books. But nothing is as simple as that. As far as the present situation in New Zealand is concerned, certain difficulties have to be faced. There are not enough good books; and however many good books you have, a large number of children will not turn to them of their own accord. What is often lacking is skilled guidance from the class teacher, whose opportunities for influencing children's reading are so much greater than those of the public librarian. As far as the supply of books is concerned, there has since 1948 been a steady decline in the amount of money per child being spent on the school library service. The latest complete figures, for 1952, show that though the total amount of the grant has increased, in fact, because of the large increase of the number of children to be supplied, the amount spent for each child has gone down from almost six shillings in 1948 to less than four shillings in 1952; considering the increase in the price of books, the decrease is even greater than it appears. The number of books bought for the service showed an actual decrease in 1953-4. That is, as far as the government is concerned, children will have fewer good books now to combat the influence of bad ones than they had a few years ago, When, we are given to understand, good influences were less needed than they are at present. This is a point that should surely have been taken up by the Opposition when the matter of juvenile delinquency was being debated in Parliament recently. Public libraries give excellent service to children, but in many cases their grants also have not been increased for some years, with the result that their stock will gradually become less adequate to the demands made upon it. It is clear then that the first duty of people anxious to fight against the depraving influence of comics is to fight for the extension of our present 28 Ibid. 68 library services. This simple, practical and not very expensive measure was not mentioned in the report of the special committee on juvenile delinquency. The second necessity is much more skilled guidance by class teachers. Part of their job is the formation of good literary taste among their pupils. At present, class teachers seem too inclined to condemn comics out of hand, without taking positive steps to meet the needs that comics meet. Too often they fail to realize the necessity of replacing comics by literature which has a similar appeal for the child; and practically none of them seem to understand the possibility of getting their pupils to subject comics to some very rudimentary but useful critical scrutiny. In case the latter suggestion should be considered quite impractical, demanding more maturity than children of intermediate and early secondary school age possess, both English and American educational periodicals have from time to time published accounts by practising teachers of how they tackled the problem. For instance, a writer in the Times Educational Supplement of I I July I952 shows how the teacher of a Form II in a comprehensive school for girls in South London got the girls to consider questions such as the possible harm done by comics, their own preferences, the use and abuse of the classics as subjects for comic-strips, and the difference, if any, between 'good' comics and 'good literature'. It is clear from the written work quoted that the girls were not of particularly high intelligence, yet they were being encouraged to consider and express critical opinions that were independent and often shrewd. Two articles in The English journal, the official organ of the national council of teachers of English in America, show this process carried a step further. In one case, 29 the children were high school freshmen. They were asked to decide in class discussion what was the appeal of the comics they read. When they had analysed it under the following headings-the thrill of danger and adventure, story value, humour, and wish fulfilment-they were asked to suggest books which had the same appeal, but were of a better literary standard, and they were encouraged to get these books and read them. Some of the books suggested were third rate (the ]alna series, for

29 Fleda Cooper, 'The comics and their appeal to the youth of today', English Journal, xxxii, June 1943. 69 example), others were first rate (Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland). All of them were infinitely preferable to any comic. The very fact that the teacher was prepared to encourage the reading of the third rate must be emphasized. The same good sense is shown in the second article from the same periodical, where a teacher gives a list of 'sure-fire' substitutes for comics, to be suggested to children according to their tastes and ability."0 Too many teachers, in expressing disapproval of comics, tell children that they should be reading books that are far beyond their capacity. For certain children it is a real achievement to read a book of the level of the ]alna series, and the teacher who brings about this result has achieved a success. It is surely not too much to ask that student teachers in our Teachers' Colleges should be equipped to deal with this problem of leading their pupils from comics to better literature. They would themselves gain from the necessity of being alert and analytical in their approach even to comics. Instead of an occasional spate of vague, ill-informed and emotional attacks on 'objectionable literature', there would be a steady, well- informed, sensible pressure on children to realize that there are certain, even if very humble standards of literary taste to which every literate person should subscribe. 30 Earl J. Dias, Comic books, a challenge to the English teacher', English Journal, xxxv, February 1946.

COMMENT ARIES

R. G. DURRANT The Elections

IT WAS a quiet election, yet it was not without interest. We were not this time rallying to save the country from communist agitators. We had done that in 1951, and National speakers were quick to remind us of it, and to invite us to take pride in our past achievement; but although the implication was that we should consolidate our position by returning the speakers to office, it was 70 clear that the time of blood and sweat was past; there were no fresh laurels for us to win here. A month or two earlier it had looked as though we might be mobilized to prevent the wholesale corruption of our sons and daughters, but bipartisan agreement on measures to control the wicked booksellers had assured us that however we cast our votes, that particular problem was solved. The importance of the 1954 election lay not in the issues presented by the established parties, but in the appearance of a third party on a national scale. Social Credit alone offered high drama. Here was our chance to escape the tyranny of the bankers and live debt- free ever after. Social Credit's achievement in this election should not be underrated. It is interesting to compare it with that of the Demo- crats, who made their one brief appearance in 1935 before vanishing into oblivion. In 1935 the Democrats, with fifty-three candidates, gained 7.8% of the votes.1 In 1954 Social Credit, with eighty candidates, gained 11.3% of the votes.2 In 1935 there were also a .large number of independent candidates and others, who gained in the aggregate another 9.04% of the votes. But on the other hand the political position in 1935 was extremely fluid and there were plenty of uncommitted voters to be wooed. The National party had not yet any established following. It relied on those who had supported the United and Reform parties prior to the 1931 Coalition government, and it was only to be expected that many voters whose traditional loyalties had been broken should have been looking around for a new home. But in 1954 Social Credit had to face a situation in which two firmly established parties had held the field for nearly twenty years, and a belief had grown up that no third party had a chance. Without attempting a detailed analysis of the voting, it is worth noticing that, although the individual electorates in which Social Credit did best were Hobson and W anganui, their overall support was much greater in the South Island than in the North Island. This is strikingly shown by the fact that in the South Island four Social Credit candidates out of twenty-six lost their deposits, compared with forty-eight candidates out of fifty in the North Island.3 Presumably, if Social Credit contest the next election, they

I European votes only. Figures for the 1935 election are taken from an unpublished thesis by C. G. Rollo. 2 Preliminary figures. 3 European electorates only. will concentrate their effort on the areas where they did well this time. What did Social Credit have to offer to the electors? In the first place, they had an economic theory which, though fallacious, has an air, particularly when imperfectly understood, of being thoroughly scientific. Many who could not readily follow discussion about the validity of the A + B theorem, willingly accepted the suggestion that its critics were discredited ' orthodox ' economists. This type of reaction was very noticeable in correspondence to the Otaao Daily Times after that paper had published two articles critical of Social Credit by a University economist. Secondly, the Social Credit candidates had faith in themselves and their cause, and this conviction was infectious. There was a marked difference in atmosphere between Social Credit election meetings and those of the other parties. The former sounded a revivalist, evangelical note which this observer found unpleasant, but which certainly contrasted with the dullness of National and Labour meetings. At times this evangelism was more specifically religious in character, while in the case of at least one candidate a wide variety of emotional appeals was used. Patriotism, religion, pacifism and anti-semitism were all displayed, and all met with a response. To name these ingredients is to suggest a theoretical content which was not evident. Thirdly, religious conviction carried with it a belief in miracles, so that Social Credit were not impeded either by logic or commonsense from offering benefits on an extravagant scale. This meant they were well placed to outplay the other parties on the ground that they themselves had chosen, though it is possible that they overreached themselves here, and frightened away some voters who didn't share their own optimism as to what was financially possible. It is probable however that for many people all these factors were important, not so much in themselves, as by contrast with the negative policies of the major parties. Social Credit scored heavily because they were able to take advantage of a political vacuum. Many of those who were disgusted by the failure of the other parties to put forward positive policies and support them with conviction, voted for Social Credit in the recognition that here at least was a party which believed in itself and had a programme based on principles. That those principles were misguided escaped notice or seemed less important. It is not possible to estimate with any confidence how many Social Credit votes 72 were of this protest variety, but personal observation suggests that they may have been a considerable proportion of the total. From the beginning of the campaign it was clear that the major parties were going to be content to go through the motions of electioneering, and were not going to offer either clear alterna- tive programmes, or even intelligent discussion of the problems facing the country. If it was a quiet election, this was largely the wish of the parties. The Prime Minister announced the theme of his party's campaign in his first broadcast address. He invited the electors to look at what the Government had done and find it good, but he was uninformative about its intentions for the future. The broadcast by the Leader of the Opposition on the following night made it clear that the Labour party was going to make it a cost of living election. From then on it was largely a matter of one party alleging that the cost of living had skyrocketed and promising to keep it down, while the other argued that firstly, the cost of living had not risen as much as was claimed, secondly, if it had, something else called the standard of living had risen just as much, and thirdly, that the cost of living had risen under the Labour government too. Both parties made lavish use of statistics to support their contentions. It is a pity that the care and thought that went into the selection of figures to prove contrary theses was not expended in the formulation of positive policies. Most of this discussion was singularly futile. The average voter, rightly or wrongly, is more likely to trust his own subjective judgement than official or unofficial statistics as a measure of changes in the cost of living, and in any case he has certainly long since scouted the claims of politicians to be able to do anything about it. For the Labour party to attempt to gain power by promising to hold the rise in living costs was to trust to a broken weapon; after all, the country had elected a government in 1949 which promised to do just that. The Labour party tried to avoid vague generalities here, and offered a specific undertaking-food prices would not rise above the levels ruling on election day. Pressed for details, their speakers had little to say, and those who had raised sceptical eyebrows felt justified. What was lacking in all this discussion was any recognition of the economic and political setting in which New Zealanders seek to maintain and improve their living standards. Within a few weeks of the election, anxiety was being expressed about sterling funds, but this reminder that the economic state of the country was 73 not merely a function of the hopes and wishes of her politicians, was one which, in general, party candidates preferred not to draw attention to in their speeches. There were other topics too on which they preferred to keep silent. Foreign affairs received scant mention. This is not unusual in New Zealand elections; but, in a period in which it has been found necessary to reintroduce peacetime conscription, and to send troops to fight in Asia, it might have been expected that candidates who were offering to control the country for the next three years would have revealed some knowledge of and interest in recent events. Just prior to the election the Government had taken part in the conference held at Manila to set up a South East Asian Treaty Organization. This was a step which admittedly could lead to ultimate involvement in war, and some informed discussion of it could reasonably have been looked for. This was not forth- coming. The extent of candidates' knowledge might not have been fairly shown by the reaction, one of clear bewilderment, of one Labour candidate to a question about this treaty, but the electors were given little evidence that other candidates were better informed. One exception to the silence on foreign affairs was the announcement by the Labour party that if returned they would recognize the government of China and support its admis- sion to the United Nations. Here was a clear divergence between the parties on a matter regarded by many competent observers as of the first importance for world peace, but as far as the New Zealand election campaign was concerned, it might have been the merest of trivialities. Instead of the illuminating debate which should have followed from this difference in policy, there was silence from the Government. It would of course be naive to suppose that the New Zealand electors were gasping for information and discussion on these topics. Most probably cared little. But it seems to me that these are matters where party leaders should be prepared to lead and inform public opinion. In foreign affairs we in New Zealand are far too ready to accept as right whatever is done by the powers that be, more especially if it coincides with what the cable news encourages us to believe. It would be undesirable enough if we were simply ' leaving it to the experts ', but many of those who frame and ratify government policies are anything but expert. Certainly men and women who have the confidence to offer themselves as governors of the country ought to take the trouble to become well-informed at 74 least about the more important aspects of the country's internal administration and external relations. In too many cases confidence would be better called impudence. One matter which was repeatedly mentioned by one party and almost ignored by the other was the ha:p.dling of the I95I waterfront strike and the legislation which accompanied it. Government candidates referred to these events in tones of pride, and as evidence of their fitness to govern. Labour candidates in general kept silent. There may have been little point in going over the ground of the strike itself, but the legislation is still on the statute book, and some of it is of a kind which the Labour party of an earlier day would have fought tooth and nail. Is the present Labour leadership happy about this legislation? We were not told, but it appears that the Labour party, having sat on the fence in I95I, is still there. Something has been said about the lack of knowledge and general competence displayed by many candidates. Some of the blame for this must be laid at the door of the party organizers. It was noticeable for instance that some candidates were unable to cope with shrewd questioning by Social Credit supporters. They just didn't know the answers. Intelligent party organization would have anticipated many of these questions, and supplied candidates with the necessary information. It is of interest that the writer of the articles mentioned earlier was approached by representatives of both the traditional parties seeking the use of the articles in their election material. An examination of the voting figures suggests that Social Credit votes came in the main from those who had voted National in I95L It is not possible however to determine how far this was the case without some measure of the extent of the swing towards Labour, which is completely obscured by the Social Credit votes. Where accuracy is not possible I may be forgiven for enquiring as to what follows on certain rather improbable assumptions. Both major parties claimed that they lost votes to the third party, Mr Nash even blaming them for his failure to become Prime Minister. Suppose we give Mr Nash the benefit of as much doubt as possible, and arbitrarily give Labour two-thirds of all Social Credit votes. This would have given Labour forty-two seats. It seems clear that on any reasonable assumptions about voting distribution Labour could not achieve anything but the barest of majorities in the present political situation. The support for the 75 two main parties is almost equal in the country, a state of affairs which perhaps reflects the diminishing difference between outlooks and policies. Those who voted for Social Credit this time will probably determine the result in 1957, but a prophecy three years ahead would be rash. Those who see the swing of the pendulum in the fluctuations of party support will get encouragement or the reverse, as the case may be, from the reflection that this form of crystal-gazing promises Labour a small majority.

D. H. M 0 N RO Juvenile Delinquency and Divorce

THE events in the Hutt Valley which caused such a stir last year gave many New Zealanders a fresh opportunity to push their favourite barrows. Opponents of comics, the new education, the welfare state, working mothers, supporters of community centres, corporal punishment, sex instruction, God, were all apparently certain that they knew exactly what had happened and what must be done about it. Their representations presumably made a large part of the 'four volumes of .evidence' and the 'large file of submissions' referred to in this report/ but not published with it. It was the task of the Committee, one supposes, to examine all these suggestions patiently, judicially and without prejudice, considering only how far each of them could be supported by evidence or argument. There is little in this report to suggest that the Committee set to work in that spirit; indeed, if it had, it could hardly have reported so soon. One suspects that what the Committee actually did was to jump enthusiastically into those barrows which its members already favoured. Those suggestions which did not happen to appeal are treated with admirable detachment: Several witnesses have claimed that the philosophy underlying the New Zealand education system is a predisposing cause of sexual delinquency, but in the absence of direct evidence, 1 Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents. Wellington, Government Printer. 76 which is obviously difficult to obtain, such claims can only be an expression of personal opinion. But lack of ' direct evidence ' (whatever that would be) does not prevent the Committee from holding forth in this strain: Education, medical and hospital treatment, industrial insurance, sickness and age benefits, and other things are all provided by the State, when the need arises, without direct charge upon the individual. The virtues of thrift and self-denial have been disappearing. Incentive does not have the place in our economy which it used to have. The tendency has been to turn to the State for the supply of all material needs. By encouraging parents to rely upon the State their sense of responsibility for the upbringing of their children has been diminished. It does not seem to occur to the Committee that this, too, ' can only be an expression of personal opinion '. When it comes to the censorship proposals, the Committee admits frankly that it does not know whether films, books and radio programmes actually do corrupt the young or not. Yet here, apparently, the lack of evidence does not worry it: To what degree these things are directly causative no one can say. Their influence is imponderable. But whatever their influence, the Committee is firmly of the opinion that practical measures to control what is offensive to many would be an indication of a renewed concern for the moral welfare of young people. The reader hardly needs the Committee's own readiness to jump to conclusions to infer from this paragraph that the Com- mittee is more concerned to save the face of the authorities than to help the young. Yet I am not sure that this would be quite fair. What the paragraph does show without doubt is a complete lack of appreciation of the case against censorship : if anything is 'offensive to many', it is felt, it might as well be banned. Consequently the report speaks approvingly of the recent Victorian legislation which widens the definition of 'obscenity', without apparently recalling that similar legislation in the past has made both Australia and New Zealand the laughing-stock of more civilized countries, without indeed e_ven noticing that the Vic- torian Act (and a similar more recent one in New South Wales) has caused much controversy in Australia. It is not irrelevant to mention here that the federal executive of the Australian Labour 77 Party has recently denounced the organization in Victoria for allowing itself to be dominated by Catholic Action groups, and that similar charges have been made in New South Wales. Both states have Labour governments. Some of the opinions expressed in the report seem reasonable enough and some of the recommendations are probably sensible. But what one misses, and what one is surely entitled to expect in a report of this kind, is a rigorous application of the accepted techniques for sifting evidence and evaluating arguments. When the report does refer to evidence, it is too often of this kind: 'The Committee has evidence that a large group of delinquents detained in an institution attributed their situation to the failure of their parents to be firm with them in early life.' Such statements are, of course, practically valueless unless cor- roborated: the inmates of such institutions naturally fall back on stock excuses of this kind, either because they think this is what they are expected to say, or because they are trying to find excuses for themselves, or simply because they want to parry an embarrassing question. And, in any case, how many of us are competent to assess the effect of our upbringing on our characters and behaviour? The Committee credits delinquents with quite exceptional powers of self-knowledge. When it comes to religion, the Committee really lets itself go: the critical spirit is completely abandoned. ' The acceptance of the Christian position cannot fail to promote good conduct in all fields including the relationship between the sexes . . . It is clear that, other things being equal, a home with a real religious atmosphere is a good safeguard against immorality, and a sound background for moral teaching, particularly for the development of knowledge about sex . . . The Nelson system of religious teaching in schools should be encouraged and developed.' These statements are regarded, apparently, as self-evident truths, which do not need to be supported by argument. Only once does the Committee allow itself to entertain a doubt; and this is quickly dismissed: It may be a matter of argument that morality is dependent on religion, but the structure of western society and our codes of behaviour have, in fact, been based upon the Christian faith. If this faith is not generally accepted, the standard of conduct associated with it must deteriorate. 78 It does not seem to occur to the Committee that this argument cuts both ways. Imagine a community which had been taught that it is wrong to steal, or to torture tom-cats, only because the moon is made of green cheese. Scepticism about the moon might well lead to property losses and feline suffering. No doubt there would be a campaign to 're-affirm our spiritual heritage'; no doubt many citizens would shake their heads sadly over the decline of the old, simple faith. But wouldn't it be better, in the long run, to bring morality down from the moon and try to find a rational basis for it? The Committee, however, does not believe in a rational basis for morality. The basic assumption behind this report is that morality consists in adhering blindly to a code of behaviour with which children must be indoctrinated as early as possible. Two consequences follow from this assumption. First, anyone who questions the code can be met only with shocked and righteous horror: Perhaps the most startling feature is the changed mental attitude of many young people towards this evil . . . Some assert a right to do what is regarded by religion, law and convention as wrongful. It was reported that some of the girls were either unconcerned or unashamed, and even proud, of what they had done. Some of the boys were insolent when questioned and maintained this attitude. Secondly, since all departures from the code are alike sinful, there is no essential difference between sexual experimentation and theft or even murder : If, as the Committee believes, immoral behaviour should be regarded as a phase or facet of juvenile delinquency, the same influences which tend to incite other anti-social behaviour are in operation here. ['Immoral' here means 'sexually irregular' : in itself a revealing usage.] It seems unlikely that any intelligent adolescent will be convinced by this attitude. He (or she) will point out that theft and murder are wrong at whatever age they are committed: they do not suddenly become, once a certain age is reached (and perhaps an appropriate ceremony performed) not only innocent but (according to countless novels, songs and films) the highest consummation of human bliss. It may also occur to the adolescent that theft and murder are condemned because they inflict suffering on others. The sexual experiments of adolescents, on the other 79 hand, at least where there is no bullying or coercion of any kind, can be condemned only on the grounds of the harmful effects on the adolescents themselves in later life. (This is apart, of course, from the immediate risk of conception, with which the Committee is curiously little concerned.) What the report should do then is to investigate these effects with an open mind and with careful attention to such evidence as is available from the Kinsey reports and other sources. But there is no attempt to do this. At most there are oblique and somewhat question-begging references: 'That group [the older adolescents] may have practical experience of the mechanics of sex; what they require is a more wholesome outlook on the intimate relations of man and woman.' Or (even more vaguely): 'An irregular sex relationship may be psychologically disadvantageous.' There is not the least elabora- tion of either of these statements. This report is chiefly of anthropological interest. It gives a very revealing picture of the basic assumptions and prejudices of a (presumably representative) group of well-meaning and conscien- tious New Zealanders in responsible public positions. It does not even begin to be a serious investigation of either the moral problems or the practical social problems involved.

Mr Nixon's pamphlet,2 by contrast, has most of the virtues the report lacks. He is concerned, not to pontificate about divorce in New Zealand, but to find out what he can about it by examin- ing the facts. All his conclusions are supported, not only by a full statement of the evidence on which he bases them, but also by a careful examination of any argument which might be brought against them. His own prejudices are kept so completely in the background that when he mentions, in an aside, that he happens to approve of the Catholic attitude to divorce, the reader gets· a distinct shock. In short, Mr Nixon's approach is adult where the Committee's is adolescent. Moreover, Mr Nixon's investigation reveals the dangers of taking the current catch-cries for granted. It would not, I think, be unfair to claim that in the public imagination the typical divorcee features as a godless, high-

2 Divorce in New Zealand. A preliminary survey. A. J. Nixon. Auckland University College Bulletin no. 46, Sociology Series no. 1. 4s. Bo living, city dweller about as far removed as could be from the simple piety of the illiterate poor. We shall see how far this picture is confirmed. It turns out that the statistics confirm it only in one particular: rather more divorcees live in the city than in the country. Divorces are more common among the poor than among the rich, or relatively rich. More accurately, they are commoner among groups whose social status is low: seamen, watersiders, taxi-drivers, barmen. Remembering also that divorces are less frequent in smaller communities, one is tempted to conclude that it is the desire to be respectable that holds New Zealand marriages together. But this would be a guess, and one that Mr Nixon does not favour. He thinks it more likely that a satisfying job increases the chances of a happy marriage in the first place, and, in making husband and wife more contented, makes them also more tolerant. But perhaps he shows less than his usual caution in using this theory to explain the higher proportion of divorces in the cities : ' New Zealand farmers, as a class, are financially well-endowed, and their life appears a healthy and satisfying one.' New Zealand farmers vary so greatly in their living conditions, their incomes and their temperaments that this kind of generalization has little value. Further analysis is needed here. The ' typical divorcee ' is not, it seems, ' godless '. The religious and moral indoctrination on which the Committee relies so strongly would seem to be largely ineffective. Divorces are more frequent among both Anglicans and Roman Catholics than among Presbyterians and Methodists, who, Mr Nixon points out, ' are characterized neither by a firm rule nor by a long tradition against divorce'. It is true that Mr Nixon's figures include many whose religious beliefs are merely nominal, but there should be enough genuine adherents to make some difference to the statistics. The most puzzling fact Mr Nixon unearths is the difference between the divorce rate in the two islands. There are fewer divorces in the South Island. This is not simply because more South Islanders live in the country, or in small towns: ' when centres of the same size in the different islands are compared the frequency of divorce in the northern centres is seen to be roughly twice as great.' Mr Nixon's own explanation is that the difference began in the days when social conditions in the North Island were less settled than in the South, and continued, after the two islands 8! had become alike in most other respects, by the sheer force of the example already established. He supports this by pointing to what happened (in New Zealand as a whole) after each of the two wars: war-time conditions naturally produced an increase in divorce, but, after these conditions had passed, the divorce rate continued to increase more rapidly than before the war. He also thinks that the force of example may help to explain the higher divorce rate among those of low social status. (Here, however, his argument is not as clear as it might be, since it depends in part on the cryptic statement, nowhere explained, that ' proceed- ings for summary separation are the prerogative of the lower social classes '.) Mr Nixon realizes that there is room for doubt about what he calls 'the validity of example as an explanatory concept'. One depends upon imitation to explain, say, why spotted neckties lose favour to striped ones. Here, the new has not any native superiority to the old. But one does not say that imitation is the force responsible for the ousting of candles by electric lamps . . . In both the above cases . . . example has a role. But in the first case it provides a real part of the motivation, while in the second it serves merely as publicity for the new solution. The influence of example has clearly been critical in divorce, but which function has example principally served? . . . If the function of example is merely that of advertising the facilities, newspaper reports might serve as well as personal acquaintance with divorced persons. And they appear not to do this, for the critical factor has been the distribution of divorced persons. But here Mr Nixon has, I think, overlooked the influence of respectability. It is one thing to read newspaper reports of divorces in distant places, especially since details are given, as a rule, only when they are scandalous; it is quite another to learn that one's friends and neighbours ('my own sort') have been divorced. There is always, one imagines, too much strain and un- pleasantness about divorce to give example much force as a motive. There may be good reason, then, for answering ' no ' to some of Mr Nixon's final questions: 'Is one ... to dismiss divorce as a mere bad habit, or something like it, which is got by mixing in the wrong company? And is one to add . . . that it is principally a lower-class habit? And with a hint, moreover, that it is 82 a lower-class activity because it is an inferior act?' But his skill in analysing and interpreting statistics, and his care to present all the evidence, means that any doubts one may have about his own conclusions do not in the least affect the value of his researches. It is a pity, however, since Mr Nixon is critical of some of the assumptions of American· sociologists, that he has sometimes allowed their style to infect his. It would seem that there is a high negative correlation between skill in handling statistics and in using the English language. But it must be admitted that the Committee, which has obviously not been exposed to such influences, is, in its own way, rather worse. At least Mr Nixon does not write: 'If right-thinking parents took a firm stand in this matter a sound lead would be given to the community as a whole.'

FREDERICK PAGE Some New Zealand Composers

OvER the last months of 1954, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service ran a series of programmes of music by New Zealand composers. In all, some fifteen programmes were given and close on thirty names appeared. It would seem that Lilburn or no Lilburn, the islands are full of noises. The plan of the series, hatched I take it in Waring Taylor Street, must have been to include everybody in the country who was putting notes on music-paper; there were some omissions; only living composers were admitted and composers studying abroad, like EdWin Carr and R. Tremayne, were ruled out: I would have thought, after someone had had the good idea of having a series of New Zealand composers to hear for their own sake, and to hear how our best work stands in comparison with the programmes of contemporary Dutch and Scandinavian music that have been coming over the air, that the next move would have been to allot programmes to those composers who are Writing to some purpose. More than part of a programme to Mr Lilburn, who is still the most considerable figure in the country, one or two to the best of Alfred Hill's quartets, one to composers 83 such as the late Robert Fuchs and Dr Galway, one to Edwin Carr who got such an excellent notice in the London Times for his Symphony for Strings, another to R. Tremayne who has had his work played at an International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Salzburg, one certainly to Dorothea Franchi, on the strength of her viola concerto, a work of fine impulse, a final one to the few good short works that I shall mention later by younger men. I believe that eight to ten programmes could have been put together that would have been worth listening to. Admittedly this would have meant to the N.Z.B.S. time, trouble and expense. Waring Taylor Street has different ideas of how to run a series of programmes, which is simply to invite everyone you've heard of to join and give every joker a chance. No one must say ' This is good music, this is bad '. For myself, I find the music of Richard Dixon, Vernon Griffiths, Claude Haydon, Ernest Jenner, John Longmire, H. C. Luscombe, Tracy Moresby, commonplace, at times blatantly so. They write in a language that was dead in 1912; their compositions are uninspired, unoriginal and uninterest- ing in craftsmanship. One feels they would find quite satisfying the music of Balfour Gardiner, Eric Thiman and John Ireland. I missed the programme of Dr Galway's music; he too writes in what I think is a played-out idiom, but from what I have heard of his music on other occasions, one has respect for the decency of his writing and for the fact that he shows some compulsion to write. Another group, which at a guess is comprised of young university-trained composers, shows that they are waiting to step into the shoes of their elders. These are Ronald Dellow, Nigel East- gate, John Ritchie, Berenice Rodewald, David Sell and Barry Trussell. These have studied their counterpoint and fugue (not much in evidence), added parts to a given soprano, continued instrumental openings for twenty bars. Again they write in a dead language; the cliches come thickly, the texture of their work has a curious sameness. One poor soul, having embarked on an instrumental movement found it hard to stop. There is not the slightest suggestion that they are living in a half-century that has produced, among others, Stravinsky and Copland, Webern and Bartok, Fricker and Berkeley, Tippett and Busoni. I am not asking that these young New Zealand composers should write pseudo-Stravinsky, pastiche Copland, but that they should consider the tools they are using. I personally do not over- 84 enjoy the music of Howells, Finzi and Rubbra, but at least these three men know what they are doing, know the value of common chords, how notes can be made to ring, even though they do not, for me, handle them in the inspired manner of a Vaughan- Williams. One wonders whether the young poets that emerge from our university English departments write as tritely as this second group of composers. Are they ignorant too of the way Robert Graves, William Empson, Dylan Thomas, use language? Odd men out are Terence Vaughan and Owen Jensen; I found Mr Vaughan's 'Dialectic' for pianoforte trio lifeless, not surprisingly so, as the medium is outworn. Mr Jensen is unlucky in that in the mid-nineteen-twenties there were no Government bursaries to ship him off to Paris to become a disciple of Les Six. As a jester, imitating their quirks, he can be as tiresome as they; as a serious, and sentimental composer, he makes one listen. Two composers, Ashley Heenan and Thomas Gray, slipped in as adapters; not a good idea, surely, in a first survey. Mr Gray's original suite, Question and Answer, was Lyons Corner House stuff. Apart from Mr Lilburn, four figures· did emerge from the scene of New Zealand contemporary composition. Carrick Thompson showed some personality, of someone trying to get something through, despite an awkward technique; Leslie Thompson brought forward some competent string-writing in a 'nice' bit of Eng- lish pastiche; Robert Burch and David Farquhar, with a set of Bagatelles for piano and some songs respectively, wrote in a spare manner that I personally found refreshing; notes were not wasted and were placed with consideration; the influence of Frankel is strong and I felt that neither of these composers, on the evidence of these small bits submitted, has yet found himself. In general the instrumental playing was remarkably good. One felt that the composers were well served by the players, in some instances, brilliantly so. Some of the singing is better passed over. But it does mean something to perform music of one's own time, and of one's own country. How enviable the life of Ricardo Vines appears, with his performances of the works of Albeniz, Debussy and Ravel, as they came out in the first decade of this century. Composers are now writing for performers in this country music that they can make their own. For both it is an exciting moment. No one has yet taken the plunge into the twelve-note sea and swum off to study with Matyas Seiber or Luigi Dallapiccola. I ss have soft-pedalled mention of Mr Lilburn, who cares passionately about what kind of music is being written in New Zealand. It is high time the N.Z.B.S. gave us a review of his output, and I hope that r955 will give us a more considered series of programmes of New Zealand composers.

REVIEWS

WORKS OF FRANCES HODGKINS IN NEW ZEALAND. E. H. McCormick. Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland. 25s. (Published in the United Kingdom by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, London.)

THE paintings of Frances Hodgkins are not in themselves hard to understand and appreciate. Nevertheless her career raises a number of problems. In his introduction Mr McCormick approaches some of these, modestly refraining from an attempt to provide final answers. In the main he is concerned to give an accurate account of her development, as it manifests itself in her work, not in newspaper gossip. He sets out to show that there was throughout a certain logic, and that the notion of the 'inspired matron ' who suddenly 'went modern' is unsatisfactory. On this view we must look at her last period, when her most esteemed work was done, against the background of her earlier work; and this in turn can be related to the influences at work on her during her youth in New Zealand towards the end of the nineteenth century. (On this last question Mr McCormick would no doubt find some relevance in Berenson's remark that 'genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training'.) One of the chief difficulties encountered in discussing Frances Hodgkins-or, for that matter, any 'advanced' writer or painter -is that one tends to get involved in the art war. An outbreak occurs in, say, Christchurch, and one is called upon to fight for either the Aesthetes or the Philistines. As in military warfare, all questions of finer judgment are at once shelved or abandoned, and only certain crude issues relating to the politics of art are allowed to be important. Although I am far from being a pacifist in the war against the Philistines, I have been driven to wonder whether it is good strategy to allow something like the work of Frances Hodgkins to be used as a battleground. If one wants to fight the Philistine, far better to take the war on to the enemy's ground than to let it be fought out among one's own vineyards and wheatfields. He is vulnerable at so many points, if we really 86 want to make an effective attack on him. Mr McCormick is too wise and serious a critic to allow himself to be drawn into the thick of the art war. Yet in the circumstances he could not avoid it altogether-any more than one could write a book about wine in New Zealand without making some reference to prohibi- tionists. One thing this book should do is to reduce the amount of energy that is wasted on brawls between ' lovers of modern art ' and ' lovers of true art and beauty '. So long as it is necessary to go on arguing whether ' alcohol ' should be drunk, the development of a healthy taste in wine is difficult, and some distortion of judgment is likely. In discussing Frances Hodgkins the things of real moment are, first, her inner development as an artist, about which Mr McCor- mick is mostly concerned; and, beyond that, something of still greater importance-the relationship between her work and the general tradition of European art on the one hand, and on the other its particular modification in the concrete circumstances of life in this country. It was not Mr McCormick's purpose to investigate this latter question at all fully on the present occasion, but the publication of such an important book necessarily raises it. Looking at her later and mature work from the outside, I cannot see that her relationship to New Zealand is of prime importance. I would go so far as to say that in her last period she ceased to be a ' New Zealand artist ' at all. Like Katherine Mansfield, she abandoned the country of her birth, became closely involved with certain current trends that were strictly European, and achieved fruitfuiness. (I should like to pursue the thought that women,- by their very nature, are more capable than men of submitting themselves to influences, digesting them fairly quickly, and producing high-class work of a minor order-but lack of space prevents me.) I feel that the essential background of Frances Hodgkins's later work is the modern expressionist movement, manifesting itself in the European milieu in which she deliberately chose to immerse herself. (As Mr McCormick says on p.ro7, ' Only after she is established in Paris does she decide to remain permanently abroad, and from this time dates also the beginning of her career as a painter of considerable stature'.) Let us look for a moment at this background. In the welter of contemporary painting two main trends are discernible. One relates, fundamentally, to classical notions of form and objectivity. Touching on a few high points, a line may be traced from Renaissance Florence through Poussin, Cezanne, Cubism, and Mondrian. In our own day this appears to lead right out of painting, to the Bauhaus and the development of architec- ture and modern design-or rather, painting becomes a minor activity ancillary to the larger sphere. The other line is the expressionist one, deriving in the main from the Gothic ethos, and this accounts for the greater part of contemporary European 87 work. Painting here becomes a minor art of personal, usually lyrical, expression. (It might be argued that a parallel break-up of classical poetic drama into the film at one extreme, and minor lyric poetry on the other, has taken place.) It is to the expressionist movement that Frances Hodgkins strictly belongs. Its limitations are her limitations. I find some reason for thinking that her last period was not quite as natural and logical as Mr McCormick believes. For one thing, there is to me a hint of wilfulness about some of the paintings-as if she were tempted to ' show ' the Philistines, especially the New Zealand Philistines who had rejected her. (In spite of what Mr McCormick says, there was a good deal of the rebel in her.) Apart from that, I think evidence may be found in Howell's book that she began more or less consciously to paint for a market, the possibilities of which he revealed to her. She was, after all, as Mr McCormick points out in referring to an earlier period-New Zealand, c. 1904-' a professional artist who painted in order to live and who at this period felt compelled, as she herself confessed, to study the taste of her public '. Contrary to a widely-held view, a desire or need to please a particular public does not necessarily corrupt an artist. But it does impose a particular cast on the work done. If Frances Hodgkins in any conscious sense ' went expressionist ', she did it with her eyes open, and with a wealth of talent and experience behind her, and the results fully justified her on aesthetic grounds. Among present- day expressionist painters she must be granted a high and honour- able place. On a wide view this sort of art can, I think, properly be called 'decadent '-so long as one is trying to determine its place in the geography of art, not to abolish it. It is decadent in that it is the rather worked-out and over-refined end product of the development of an art that has in certain times and places been a great social art. If painting-as a specific art With high social significance, not merely a minor activity or a legitimate outlet for the ' self-expression ' of the amateur-regains its former status, it will be the result of striking back to some more vigorous period in its tradition, as Cezanne did, and re-introducing a viable strain. (This is why Cezanne-who contrived to be at once a great classical artist and an expressionist-remains the most important painter of the past century.) Contemporary expressionism tends to be like the race-horse or the show-dog: if it has any progeny, they will not be much different from itself, except perhaps for being a little more highly specialized, a little less robust. As things stand, we are already producing a class of art-fanciers, similar to dog-fanciers and ' horse-lovers '. Out of this situation emerges the most difficult of the problems relating to the work of Frances Hodgkins in its relationship to our own country. When an artist 'has gained recognition abroad' (magic phrase, potent for mischief!) we all tend to fall into a 88 Tourist and Publicity Department state of mind, and even the best of us find it difficult to keep our eye on the ball. Mr Mc- Cormick is for the most part admirably detached. It is only in the last few pages of his introduction that I find anything to cavil at. Of the Christchurch controversy he says: ' Viewed more calmly than was possible at the time or even now, this affair may appear not as a clash between wickedness (or folly) on one side and virtue on the other, but as an incident, perhaps a turning point, in the struggle of New Zealand art to free itself from the bondage of timid prejudice and sterile convention. From r95r, when Pleasure Garden was finally accepted and hung, a future historian may find it convenient to date New Zealand's emergence from colonial status in the arts.' I am not sure this sort of thing is really very helpful, except in the art war. It leaves the ill- informed too open to assume that all we need do to achieve salvation is to embrace current European modes. Salvation is not to be had so easily; and so well-organized is the publicity front of the dealer-cum-artist business in Europe, so persuasive is its influence, that already the work of some of our younger and more promising New Zealand painters gives the impression of being picked before it is ripe. And when, at the end, after making the useful suggestion that a complete retrospective exhibition of Frances Hodgkins's work should be shown in New Zealand, Mr McCormick says that 'Thus Frances Hodgkins might posthumously realise a scheme once proclaimed, only half in jest, for civilising her fellow-countrymen', we are left with the faint smell of cordite in our nostrils, rather than those odours of the vineyard and the cellar with which we need to have a so much closer and more discriminating acquintance. Appreciation of the real qualities to be found in the work of Frances Hodgkins-not the sort of appreciation one gives to a newly-discovered flavour of ice-cream, but one that is illuminated and qualified by an awareness of the relationship of her work to time, place and tradition-is more important than pride in having produced yet another esteemed export commodity. I should be doing Mr McCormick a cruel injustice if I were to suggest that he thinks, or writes, in such crude terms. What I am taking into consideration is the impact of Frances Hodgkins, as the ' local girl who made good', on the minds of New Zealanders. There is today a pulping-down of art styles to one single cosmopolitan standard of taste, and it is not to Frances Hodgkins's discredit to say that her work is of the kind that offers no strong resistance to this trend. What needs to be said, I think, is that apart from the tonic effect of good painting of any kind, there is not a great deal in her work that is likely to be of specific use to the New Zealand painter who wishes to deal with those problems in which she did not happen to be interested, or from which she deliberately withdrew: such as, for example, the development 89 of our landscape VISIOn, the absorption of Polynesian motifs, or the painting of genre subjects illustrating (and, one could wish, sometimes satirizing) our national life and character. If her work stood in the same relation to New Zealand as does, say, Ben Shahn's to the U.S.A., the story would be a different one. Anything further I could say on this theme has already been said with much more force and finesse than I could command. To save space I refrain from quoting, but strongly recommend to the reader's attention, the editorial paragraph that appears on p.249 of Landfall no. 32, beginning 'In older countries . . .' Apart from being of the highest relevance, it may help to take the raw edge off some of my own asseverations. There only remains to be said, what hardly needs saying, that Mr McCormick deserves our gratitude for writing and compiling this most useful and important book. Every page of it shows evidence of the labour of love performed with patient and thorough scholarship, temperate judgment, and fine perception. Its publication would, however, not have occurred so promptly but for the Auckland City Art Gallery and the Library Committee of the City Council. The enlightened policy of the civic authorities in allocating money for such purposes as this deserves high commendation. A. R. D. Fairburn

JOURNEY TO NEW CHINA. Margaret Garland. The Caxton Press. zrs. JOURNEYS, or Missions, to New China, have become popular and frequent since Mrs Garland wrote her book. Mr Attlee has con- ferred the sanctity and prestige of high politics upon the hitherto unclean act of contacting the Chinese Communists. Sir Hugh Casson has led the artists and the writers to Peking; and, in small print, it is now shyly revealed that these pioneers have been followed by a mission sponsored by the Federation of British Industries. The abuse and catcalls from the press which greeted Mr Attlee when his mission was announced were spared in the case of Sir Hugh Casson, and have been altogether muted when it came to the F.B.I. Slowly the ice is melting. Whether politicians, artists or business men, none of these later visitors have seriously questioned or upset the picture of the New China which was first drawn by the delegates to the much abused Peking Peace Conference, of which delegates Mrs Garland was one. From all sides comes the same picture, that of a nation reinvigorated, uplifted, serious and purposeful, sloughing off the vices of the past and much of the picturesque character of Old China too. This is the dominant impression of all recent visitors, and in the interpretation of other phenomena they only vary in small matters. An intelligent practical woman like Mrs Garland, 90 a keen observer, ·with a fresh mind as far as China was concerned, saw and reports some little things which seem out of character with the almost idyllic version of things Chinese which her informants sought to present. But these blemishes are small and few. Mrs Garland, like those who have followed her, is over- whelmingly favourable, and her sincere testimony is weighty and shrewd. It would be only fair, tlierefore, to examine the case from the aspect of the prosecuting counsel, and try to find out whether and in what way this picture may be distorted, unconsciously, by the skill of the Communist propaganda machine, or the unwariness of the visitor. The first, perhaps the most damaging criticism, must be that Mrs Garland, like many of the more recent visitors, did not know China. Some of what she sees as new is not new, and often she did not realize that some credit was due to older, 'pre-liberation' days. The Imperial Palace in Peking is not merely ' now ' a museum, it has been open to the public as a National Museum since the autumn of 1925. No one will deny that since the Com- munist regime came to power the service and running of the railways has been immensely improved. But anyone who can still remember the comparatively peaceful pre-war period in China between 1930 and 1937 must acknowledge, that if the service was not so good as it is now, it was then clean, comfortable and cheap. The Communists certainly restored and improved the railways, but they started from the very lowest point, after invasion and civil war lasting thirteen years had wholly wrecked what was once a reasonably efficient service. Mrs Garland, not alone in this, contrasts the cleanliness and order of Canton with the conditions in Hong Kong, thus reversing the old comparison to the disfavour of the British colony. It should however be remembered that the swollen population of Hong Kong did not come there as refugees during the late war- on the contrary then the population under Japanese occupation shrank to a bare 30o,ooo-but after the war, to escape from the confusion of civil war and the (wrongly perhaps) anticipated consequences of Communism. Now the Hong Kong government cannot send these people away for they have no entry permits to China, and so must remain. If criminal statistics in Hong Kong are high, it is partly because the criminals fled there as a more profitable hunting ground than Communist China. But these are minor points; the great question still remains; is the New China the totalitarian tyranny that the supporters of Chiang Kai-shek maintain, or the People's Paradise that some of the more ardent admirers of Mao Tse-tung proclaim; or is it something more human than either of these overdrawn caricatures, human in high endeavour, and human too, in partial failure to realize its aims? Those who knew the old China and also saw . the 9I beginning of the great changes introduced by the Communists will unhesitatingly reject the fanciful propaganda emanating from such partisans of Chiang Kai-shek as Senator Knowland. The restoration of Chiang and his Kuomintang with the consent of the Chinese people is no more likely than the restoration of the Romanoffs in Russia. Everyone who knew China and understood the crisis of the post-war years knows that the Communist regime has come to stay, and with the broad ·consent of the Chinese people. But when these facts are recognized, and given their true value, it does not mean that the great question is thereby resolved. If we do not accept the strange proposition that China is governed against its will by a tyranny, then are we to agree that Commun- ism has found the answer which other systems failed to find, and admit that for China at least, Communism is the true solution? This conclusion is repugnant to those who believe that the democratic system, with all its faults, is superior to any system of authoritarian rule. It will be argued that the Chinese Com- munists see their system as democracy. True, they do so regard it, but we interpret the term rather differently. We cannot agree that under a system of government in which no opposition party can be formed, nor opposition views expressed in the press, and where the voter is confronted with a single list to vote for, there is what we call democratic government. Nor can we easily accept a rule of law which means that offences against the state are punishable very much more severely than offences against the person. China therefore, has found the answer appropriate to Chinese conditions at the present day. They are not the solutions we would advocate for all places and at all times, but we must recognize that the choice before the Chinese was not between totalitarian efficiency and democratic liberty, but between efficient and corrupt authoritarian systems. The efficient system has remedied great evils, inspired the people with hope and purpose, unified the country, restored order, and rebuilt the prestige of China in the world at large. These are great satisfactions which the Chinese have received in return for poverty, civil war, invasion, and corruption. Their choice is not strange; if it is also true that liberty of thought for the highly educated has been restricted, that news is purveyed through strictly controlled channels, and that opposition or criticism of the regime is either impossible or unwise, these things are not new to China. For centuries the Imperial Government did, within the more limited range of its power, just what the Communist government seeks to do with all the aids which science and organization can bring. It controlled thought, forcing it into the Confucian mould, as now it is impelled to Marxian conclusions. There is one Party, one doctrine, one philosophy. Under the Empire there was one Sovereign, one doctrine, one philosophy. The Chinese have 92 always organized their world in that way, and they like and understand the certainty and the security which it brings. We . have chosen another path, which will lead us we do not know where. When we are quite sure ours is the right road, and not a blind alley, it will be time to denounce the Chinese way; meantime let us try to understand and to co-operate. C. P. FitzGerald

CORRESPONDENCE

To THE EDITOR SIR: Mrs Ross's acute criticism of the two volumes of Documents deserves an answer and obliges some admissions. We are keenly aware of the deficiencies she has pointed out, and of others. I am just not scholar enough to give the scholarly definition of my views and policy on the functions, limitations and editing of official documents, the absence of which Mrs Ross rightly regrets. The two prefaces are not brilliant essays. They seem to me to set out clearly enough the purpose and scope of these publications, but I admit that they claim a little too much. It was of course not necessary to publish this series, except in the sense that it is complementary to the campaign and political volumes which are slowly being completed. That is how it should have been described. The Preface said bluntly that there had been no censorship. Nor had there been any by Government. We had done a little ourselves, of trivial and personal matters, a very little. Certain topics were chosen and we published all the documents we could locate dealing with them. A great many topics and the messages concerning them and incidental matters, were omitted altogether, otherwise we would have had twenty volumes instead of two. It would have been better to say that these volumes contained all the located messages on selected topics, those we judged to be most interesting and important. The reader can be assured that our documentation on these topics is as complete as we could make it and that he is not in any way deceived. The messages between Weston and Wavell to which Mrs Ross refers did not seem to come within the limits of my attempt at a definition in the Preface. They dealt mainly with numbers to be embarked, and are given in Crete. We were trying to give the documents concerned with policy rather than with detail and I 93 am sorry that Mrs Ross thinks our claim that all important messages relevant to the different topics are included is in this case as inaccurate as it is absurd. I don't admit it. She certainly has detected some gaps in our documentation of the furlough scheme discussions. So had we. The missing cables and letters are not to be found. Perhaps because of the then current election campaign, or for whatever reason, they were not filed, or perhaps they were personal letters and no copies were kept. In any case we should have provided an editorial explanation in footnotes or a supplementary report, as suggested. The omission to do this was an oversight which we regret. At the time we thought it sufficient to give an outline of the scheme and the reasons for it, without tracking each furlough draft to its ultimate disposal. Paraphrasing was necessary and regrettable. All messages passed over the air can be intercepted and are intercepted by other Governments than those directly concerned. If later published without paraphrasing the cipher is compromised with possibly serious results. All similar messages quoted, for example, in Sir Winston Churchill's volumes are paraphrased, though no indication to that effect is given in his text. Very small alterations are sufficient, we made them with the greatest care, and are confident that in no case was the sense altered and hopeful that nowhere was there any ' corruption of the finer shades of meaning'. It would be very helpful to some people whom we are not anxious to help if there was ' any discernible indication where, and how often, such paraphrasing occurs '. We hope that when our series is completed these volumes will be found to fit in somewhere and usefully. Meantime we have ourselves found them useful, as have the British, Australian and South African Historical Sections, and a good many readers have found them informative and interesting. They are far from perfect, an equally searching analysis of any other series of documents would find nearly as many defects, but I do really think they were worth publication. Howard K. Kippenberger Editor-in-Chief New Zealand War Histories

SIR: Mr D. H. Monro, reviewing a collection of Australian short stories, says that sex, sadism, violence, and hatred between people and nations are 'not what is really wrong with the comics'. Instead, their fault is their 'use of ready-made phrases and ideas, the offering of cliches, stock situations and stock characters as a substitute for genuine observation and discernment' (Landfall 31). 94 Has Mr Monro seen any of these comics? An American soldier strangling a Chinese with a rope and saying, ' So sally, please!' A speeding car dragging two people by the legs,· and a comment that when their faces are erased the meat won't be identifiable. A jungle woman whipping slaves. A face ground in with hob- nailed boots. A (Russian) mother threatening to feed her children to starving lions. A girl about to be raped with a redhot poker. Nine girls who dislike their boss who stitch up his lips with a sewing-machine and leave him to be burnt alive. (' Heh! Heh! Heh! Well, a stitch in time saves nine.') A meat-packer who kills his boss by knocking him into a mincing machine. A girl who wins a Miss Corpse 1954 beauty competition and finds she must become a corpse. ('And so we leave Helen to the mercy of the undertakers as they cut and slash and drain her blood.') A woman who conceives an adulterous passion for a gorilla. (' I must go to him! I must!') Explosions, fire, violent death. ('Hickory Dickory Dock. His head rolled off the block.') Necrophilia and cannibalism. 'Blood and guts all over the street. And me without a spoon to eat.' Or any of the situations from the unillustrated equivalent of the comics, a Mickey Spillane thriller: breaking a man's arm already in plaster, cracking an unconscious man's fingers so that the bones can be heard to splinter, machine-gunning a man's arm off and watching the expression in his eyes, using a dumdum bullet and gloating that the hole will be so big you'd be able to put your head in without getting blood on your ears. Can these be called stock situations? It is easy to act the mandarin and sneer that the comics can't do us any harm: if the plebs are affected, who cares; they never were cultured anyway. But an intellectual who takes Mr Monro's position is abdicating. It is the trahison des clercs again. Not even to preserve the esoteric, sophisticated culture he admires, is Mr Monro willing to defend the most elementary bases of humanist culture. The' comics erode the most fundamental habits of humane, civilized living: love, tolerance, forgiveness, generosity, integrity, trust, loyalty and compassion are replaced by fear, hatred, selfish- ness, cruelty, cunning and deceit. ' Gee honey, with you and my gun I can get anything I want in this world.' And they erode them in the most vulnerable element of our society, our children. It is not inconceivable that we are raising a generation who will bring our civilization tumbling down about our heads, and exult in it; who will hate and fear things of the mind and spirit; a generation conditioned to be the tools of power politics. I speak from experience. Teaching in thirty-odd London council schools I noticed the continual emphasis, from boys of all school ages, five to sixteen, on violence and toughness, in their behaviour and in their drawings. Boys left to choose what they wanted to 95 draw, generally chose war scenes. One boy drew a vivid concen- tration camp containing a man hanging, another headless beneath an executioner's axe, an infernal machine, presumably a gas- chamber with a truckload of victims waiting for the treatment, a passive crowd standing underneath the surveillance of a machine-gun from a watchtower. In the middle, faintly drawn, was a detached bewildered child, not knowing where he was going : the boy himself, protesting at the cruelty of the adult world. He was more sensitive than many. It is up to us to give him a lead. Another one, after I objected to a war scene, drew a bald, spectacled head: he called it ' The Mad Scientist '. His third attempt was of a goblinish figure. I asked him what it was. ' A funny little earthman. I seen them in the pitchers.' I said there were no such things. 'Ah do you know?' he asked. This isn't, as some intellectuals think, a commendable demand for evidence; it is a rejection of the authority of tradition without which continuance of culture is impossible. That boy had three attitudes directly implanted by comics and films: interest in violence, fear of science, pagan superstition. In their hatred of intellectuals, the comics in fact threaten the cultural mandarins more viciously than any other force in society. As I have said elsewhere, la trahison des clercs is suicide. Some intellectuals might argue what that boy thinks isn't important. I think it is. He and thousands of others may be dragged into another war for which the comics are conditioning them; he and a thousand others may exult to demolish the people, the cities and culture of Europe and Asia. Civilization can hardly survive more than one generation of the comic-indoctrinated. Unpublished studies by Peter Mauger show that my experience was less dramatic than is typical in Britain. The evidence in Albert Kahn's The Game of Death and (I gather from reviews) F. Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, and Geo:ffrey Wagner's Parade of Pleasure, is that the position is worse in the United States, reinforced by television. Christopher Craig, the sixteen-year-old who couldn't read, was a voracious scanner of comics : his world of fantasy imposed itself on reality when he shot a policeman. Alan Poole was twenty when he shot a policeman and then himself three years ago in England : in his room there was a pile of comics and notes he had taken from them. These comics are on sale in England and in the United States where the matrices are made for many comics printed in England. I do not know, but I doubt if their like is sold in New Zealand or Australia. Yet they are a warning of what ours might become. And the local comics proclaim the idea that problems are best solved by force, fraud and magic. 96 If we ban the comics we are reducing the chances of war and preventing the further perversion of the world's children. I do not doubt that Mr Monro agrees that these things are of much deeper importance than 'genuine observation and discernment'. Bill Pearson

SIR: In the December number of Landfall Lawrence Baigent passed judgment on my latest novel, The Feared and the Fearless. What emerged most clearly was a rather frightening display of the peculiar obtuseness which makes so much of our pseudo-intellectual criticism not worthless merely, but even dangerous. Stripped to the bones, the burden of Mr Baigent's criticism becomes this: 'I don't like novels with the subject-matter Wilson has selected. I like novels about fishing or feminism or a host of other subjects but I don't like violence or madness.' In fifteen hundred words purporting to review a particular novel, Mr Baigent has confined himself to explaining why he can't bear the things he can't bear. My own choice of title for this novel was Cypress By Moonlight. Pressure from both publishers caused me, foolishly I think, to accept The Feared and the Fearless. The association suggested by the Cypress title might have made my intention so much more clear to the hasty reader-the portrayal of disintegration, given nightmare dimensions because it was seen with the distortion moonlight imposes, yet covered with a certain charitableness that moonlight also offers. None of this came through to Mr Baigent, but (Praise God!) it has come through to some other reviewers. Without malice, without ill will, with some appreciation of at least the physical effort demanded from him in composing such a lengthy review, of a novel he did not wish to read, I would suggest to Mr Baigent that to damn a book because it is not another kind of book is dangerously irresponsible criticism. Guthrie Wilson

SIR: From time to time little things happen that lend colour to the view that some of our fellow-countrymen are living mentally in a Freudian slum. A curious story has just come to my ears. It seems that a girls' class in one of our educational seminaries was introduced to contemporary New Zealand poetry. Among other work presented to them was a poem of mine called 'Modern Love'. Some of the girls are sufficiently interested to compile their own anthologies, and several of them copied out this poem. The warden of the women's hostel, becoming aware of this, 97 publicly condemned the girls concerned, and described them as being ' dirty-minded' and ' sexually preoccupied'. The poem in question is not of any great consequence, but I feel that the incident I describe probably has some clinical significance. If a satire on immorality can, at a high level in the pyramid of education, be mistaken for an expression of immorality, we are indeed in danger of losing our bearings. A. R. D. Fairburn

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED Mountains. W. H. Auden. Nativity. Roy Campbell. The Winnowing Dream. Waiter de la Mare. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. T. S. Eliot. Christmas Eve. C. Day Lewis. The Other Wing. Louis MacNeice. Prometheus. Edwin Muir. Sirmione Peninsula. Stephen Spender. Ariel Poems (New Series). Faber and Faber. 2s. each. The Sound of the Morning. John Caselberg. New Zealand Poets 7. The Pegasus Press. 3s. 6d. The Young Have Secrets. James Courage. Jonathan Cape. 12s. 6d. The Five Bright Shiners. Eric Lambert. Australasian Book Society. 12s. 6d. The Expatriate. A study of Prances Hodgkins and New Zealand. E. H. McCormick. New Zealand University Press. 30s. Irish Landscape. R. Lloyd Praeger. Irish Life and Culture. Calm 0 Lochlainn, Dublin : at the Sign of the Three Candles. 2s. The Headlands. Howard Sergeant. Putnam. 7s. 6d. The Australian. Yarns Ballads Legends and Traditions of the Australian People. Gathered together by Bill Wannan. Australasian Book Society. 18s. 6d. Communism and Democracy in Australia. Leicester Webb. Melbourne, F. W. Cheshire. 25s. American Writing Today. Special Number of The Times Literary Supple- ment, 17 September 1954. 6d. (By courtesy of the U.S. Information Service, Wellington.)

NEW CONTRIBUTORS C. P. FitzGerald, Professor of Far Eastern History, Australian National University, was born in London in 1902. From 1923 to 1939 he lived mostly in China, and was there again with the British Council 1946-50. His publications include Son of Heaven (Cambridge, 1933); and China, a Short Cultural History (1935), Tower of Five Glories (1940), and Revolution in China (1952. All from the Cresset Press). His book The Empress Wu is to appear shortly. Frederick Page. Born in Lyttelton 1905. Studied the piano with Ernest Empson and others; Mus.B. degree from Canterbury University College; studied at the Royal College of Music, London, with Vaughan-Williams. Head of the Department of Music, Victoria University College. Dennis Knight Turner. Born Wanganui 1924. No training. Painted portraits 1938-50. Is now learning to paint (mainly landscapes). 98