&& A New Zealand Qyarter-!J VOLUME FOURTEEN 1g6o 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. &9/49, First reprinting, 1968, Johnson Reprint Corporation Printed in the United States of America 'THE DQJl.fi.,jtilii:.!J&!Nl Landfall A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press CONTENTS Notes 3 Poets of the Sixties: Peter Bland, Cordon Challis, Owen Leeming, C. K. Stead 9 An End and a Beginning, Alexander Guyan 29 Writers in New Zealand: a Questionnaire 36 Commentaries : NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT-ANOTHER VIEW, A. R. Entwis]e 71 THE REPORT ON THE UNIVERSITIES, T. E. Carter 77 THE WIDE OPEN CAGE, fames Bertram 81 GREEK PLAYS IN DUNEDIN, G. R. Manton 84 Reviews: THE NEW ZEALANDERS and THE STONE, R. A. Cop/and 87 A GUN IN MY HAND, ETC., lan Cross 90 COAST TO COAST and WEST COAST STORIES, Ruth Dallas 93 POEMS OF DISCOVERY and HEROES AND CLERKS, M.· K. Joseph 95 THE BEST OF WHIM-WHAM, Robert Chapman 98 NEW ZEALAND POETRY YEARBOOK, Basil DowJing !02 PORTRAIT OF A MODERN MIXED ECONOMY, Conrad BJyth 104 Correspondence, John Miller, f. G. A. Pocock, 0. E. Middleton w6 Landfall's Portrait Gallery (II) VOLUME FOURTEEN NUMBER ONE MARCH 1960 Notes THE beginning of this new decade seems a good moment to pause and reflect on the country's life during the fifteen years since the last war. Landfall has therefore invited a number of persons with widely differing backgrounds and interests to set down their views of what has been significant in the life of that period. Some of those invited are New Zealanders by birth, most of them travelled New Zealanders, some have been settled here long enough to know the country well while retaining the detachment of persons brought up in other societies. Some will be writing mainly about fields of which they have special knowledge, others will write somewhat more generally, although not attempting any formal, historical objectivity. The series, inevitably limited in scope, is a series of personal surveys. It will begin in the next number. None of the contributors to the series will be concerned mainly with literature. But a glance at the present state of literature in New Zealand will not be out of place. For some thirty years now (but scarcely longer) not a year has passed without the appearance of work by good writers who were neither amateurs nor journal- ists; the number of such writers has increased and the body of work grown steadily; the foundations of a New Zealand literature to come have been laid down. But the outlook is not quite as simple and rosy as this may suggest. How do writers manage to write, and what response do their books find, at a time and in a society in which books and writers are apparently so little regarded? The nineteenth-century respect for them, which has survived or been revived in Russia, has gone in English-speaking societies. Writers have become private individuals again; they are no longer seers and preachers, oracles to whom the hungry multitudes listen; indeed in New Zealand they are rather less than other men, and solid citizens shy in embarrassment at the mere mention of the word, as if touched on the raw. Figures as eminent as Forster, Russell, Eliot, Trevelyan, and their like in other countries, are eclipsed in general esteem by a host of rivals such as never challenged their nineteenth-century peers. That may not matter. But their work does not penetrate society as it would have done in the past. It cannot command attention, it must persuade silently, competing with other per- 3 suaders whose more immediate appeal gives them a decided if short-lived advantage. Where the educated public provides a large market this is serious enough; in New Zealand it sets very heavy odds against books and against that enquiring concern with human affairs which fosters and is fostered by literature. What can the writer do, what should he hope for, in this situation? What does he do, in fact? Can we expect to see literature flourish here under such conditions? In an attempt to explore the situation, Landfa!J asked a number of writers to answer questions about it and to give their views. Questions and answers will be found in the following pages. TwELVE years ago, in December 1948, Landfall printed a substantial group of poems by six young poets (none of them had published a collection of work at that time) who were to be among the best- known writers of the fifties. In this issue, it prints a selection of recent work by four young poets who are likely to figure promin- ently among writers of the sixties. YEAR after year, the country gives up to the mountains in sacrifice a precious few of its finer spirits. This summer a heavy toll claimed, at the height of their powers, two most able and experienced climbers well known far beyond the mountains and greatly admired. M. J. P. Glasgow was editor of The New Zealand Alpine journal, and T. H. Scott, first head of the Department of Psycho- logy in the University of Auckland, had been closely associated with Landfall almost from the start and later with the Alpine journal too. Tried climbing friends, they were killed together near the summit of Mt Cook on I February. T. H. Scott took a large part in the shaping of Landfall's character in its early years; it owes a great deal to his ardent support, to the breadth of his outlook, his generous imaginative sympathies, his cool informed judgment. He wrote several memorable papers for it, enquiries, diverse in subject, with a common theme running through them: what it means to be a New Zealander. They are landmarks in the growth of the country's consciousness of itself. In his own field of experimental psychology he did some remarkable work, especially on the effects of per- ceptual isolation. Fittingly for a New Zealander and climber, he also explored the subject of isolation in other contexts. His inter- est in all the main fields of scientific endeavour was accompanied by an acute feeling for literature, painting and music, shown in his writings. He was thus led to a wide-ranging view of the nature 4 of man and the world he lives in, and to that humane passion for knowledge, the just society and the good life which our time so much needs. He had one of the most gifted, fertile minds of his generation. IN THE thirties, radical opmwn was strong, active and sanguine enough to create its own organ of opinion, the political and liter- ary journal Tomorrow. Starting in 1934, Tomorrow came out, first weekly and then fortnightly, with only one break, until suppressed by the Labour Government in 1940. Its editor, Kennaway Bender- son, who died in Christchurch in January, aged eighty, enlisted many able contributors who continued to write for it without payment; most New Zealand writers of the time appeared in its hospitable pages. To bring out an independent fortnightly regularly in this country was then (as it would be now) a heroic effort. Kennaway Henderson edited Tomorrow single-handed, as a labour of love, unpaid; he gathered his contributors, kept them up to the mark, wrote for the journal himself, and illustrated it with his cartoons. A collect- ion of these last was published shortly before his death. Tomorrow provided an invaluable centre for political and liter- ary aspirations. It was the most important journal of opinion which had yet appeared in New Zealand. Television THE government's decision to introduce a television system which is not to be handed over to commercial interests but to be publicly owned and controlled gives ground for hope. But the government has rejected the proposal that television should be administered by a public corporation responsible to parliament; instead, it is to come under the direct control and supervision of the government and to be 'associated' with the Broadcasting Service. This means that, being politically controlled, TV will be forbidden to deal with controversial issues-with what is really news because it excites immediate interest and argument, such as the Maoris and All Blacks issue, and so is likely to be as tame and lifeless and out of this world as broadcasting too often is. Much may happen, however, before a full service comes into operation. Copyright THE Report of the Copyright Committee, 1959, recommends 5 several changes in the law of copyright which, if enacted, would be very damaging to the interests of every New Zealand writer. It proposes that the present term of copyright, the life of the author and fifty years after his death, should be reduced to fifty-six years from the date of publication of the work or the life of the author, whichever is longer. Other proposals would reduce the control which an author now has over the reproduction and performance of his work. There is no space to go into detail here, but together these proposals form a serious attack on what has been for many years in most civilized countries, New Zealand included, the traditional protection given to authors of artistic, literary and musical works. Copyright is not a matter which writers in this country have had to bother about in the past; but the position which had been won in England and transferred to New Zealand must now be asserted and maintained here.