Clough and His Poetry, James Bertram 141

VOLUME SEVENTEEN

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.

First reprinting, 196S, Johnson Reprint Corporation Printed in the United States of America A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press CON'I'EN'I'S 107 Against T e Rauparaha, Alistair Camp bell 108 Outback, Kenneth McKenney 111 Watching you drift in shallow sleep, Alan Roddick 112 A Descendant of the Mountain, Albert W endt 113 To One Born on the Day of my Death, Charles Doyle 118 Three Poems, Raymond Ward 119 Towards a Zealand Drama, Erle Nelson 122 Reconstructions, Kevin Lawson 134 Five Poems, Peter Bland 137 Clough and his Poetry, James Bertram 141

COMMENTARIES: Canadian Letter, George W halley 155 Using Zealand House, f. M. Thomson 162 The Opera Season, John Steele 165 Joseph Banks: the Endeavour Journal, Colin Beer 168 Richmonds and Atkinsons, W. H. Oliver 177

REVIEWS:, Zealand Poetry Yearbook, Owen Leeming 187 The Edge of the Alphabet, Thomas Crawford 192 The Last Pioneer, R. A. Copland 195 Auckland Gallery Lectures, Wystan Curnow 196 Inheritors of a Dream, W. f. Gardner 199 Correspondence, Stella Jones, L. Cleveland, R. A. Copland, Don Holdaway, f. L. Ewing, R. H. Lockstone, R. McD. Chapman 201 Paintings by Don Binney, Bryan Dew, Garth Tapper, Dennis Turner

VOLUME SEVENTEEN NUMBER TWO JUNE 1963 Notes

LANDFALL has neither printed nor sought stories and poems by writers in other countries; not out of insularity, but on the ground that its limited space ought to be kept for the work of New Zealand writers, who had, and have, few means of publishing at home. It remains the chief task of a journal such as this to contribute to the creation of a substantial body of literature of our own. Landfall has always welcomed long stories and poems, which many journals are unable or unwilling to print. Some writers work best at middle length: to demand that they conform to the arbitrary conventions of publishing is to put the cart before the horse. Journals and publishers exist to serve literature, not vice versa. The form and character that literature may take in these islands are still hardly adum- brated; young writers and writers not yet born will show us more of what is 'our own'. These policies stand, and it seems worth restating them. In the two awards for prose which Landfall is offering this year to writers under twenty-five, length has necessarily been limited to a maxi- mum of five thousand words, but this is for the purposes of the awards only. Most literary-minded New Zealanders read English and Ameri- can journals (not to mention books) as a matter of course, so that we are in little danger of losing touch with developments in the main bodies of literature in English. We have few direct contacts with countries in which young literatures in English, comparable with our own, are springing up. It was to attempt to follow them that Landfall's series of annual Australian, Canadian, South African and Indian Letters were started, one in each quarter. The links they provide are slight, yet they carry interest in two directions, and a stimulus possibly far greater than might be expected. The Canadian Letter has been written hitherto from Vancouver, by Roy Daniells, whose informed, humane, engagingly personal commentaries on the Canadian scene aroused much sympathetic interest. It is now being written from the east, by George Whalley of Kingston. The Australian Letter too will come this year from another city: after Melbourne and Adelaide, Sydney. 107 ALISTAIR CAMPBELL Jgainst Te 1\q:uparaha

To Erik Schwimmer

Kei hea koutou kia toa-Be brave that you may live. Hongi Hika

THE records all agree you were a violent, a pitiless man, treacherous as an avalanche poised above a sleeping village. Small, hook-nosed as a Roman, haughty, with an eagle's glance, Caligula and Commodus were of your kin.

Kapiti floats before me, and the shadows round the island prickle like the hairs of my scalp. Shadows of war canoes splinter the bright sea. And I hear on the cliff below the low cry of a chief: 'Ka awe te mamae!- Alas ! the pain !'

Ironical to think your island pa once drenched with the blood of men and whales has since become a sanctuary for birds. Would this make sense to you, I wonder. That life is holy would seem a dubious proposition to you, old murderer, most laughable.

108 Pathetic ghost! Sometimes you hoot despairingly across the valley, and my small daughter sobs in her sleep, convinced an engine is pursuing her. Black as anthracite, issuing in steam out of the bowels of the hill, yours is a passable imitation, I'll allow. But where is the rage that terrorized the coast? The towering pride not to be withstood? Imperial violence! Imperial poppycock! I saw you slink away in the moonlight- a most solitary, attenuated ghost, reduced to scaring little girls! The worst that you can do is raise a storm and try to tear my roof off.

But why deceive myself? I know you as the subtlest tormentor, able to assume at will the features of the most intimate terrors.

Remember Tama who betrayed his friends, guests on his marae, to the murderous vengeance of Hakitara- Pehi and forty others, all great chiefs, impiously butchered in their sleep! How, spider-clever, you again escaped to spin a web and snare him! And how Te Hiko, Pehi's son, glared at him for fully half-an-hour, lifted Tama's upper lip with a forefinger, and tapped the wolfish teeth, crying wildly: 'These teeth ate my father!' T amaiharanui who strangled in the night 109 his beautiful daughter that she might not be a slave. But afterwards, plump goose for a widow's oven, plucked of his honour, what remained of Tama but a victim for a ritual vengeance?

T ama and Hiko too were of your kin, and vengeful Hakitara-violent men, crazed with a lust for blood! Who would have guessed that they were also dutiful sons, affectionate fathers? Or that, decorous on their maraes, they entertained their guests with courtly ease?

Scarer of children, drinker of small girls, your malicious eye stares down out of the midday sun, blasting the seed in the pod, choking the well with dust.

The se teeth ate my father- ate the heart of the bright day!

Insidious Enmity I I know you by these signs: the walls crack without cause, heads show pointed teeth, leer and fall away, the dog barks at nothing, whimpers and hides his head, and something wild darts into the night from under my window.

YOU-Te Rauparaha!

110 The wind rises, lifts the lid off my brain-

Madman, leave me alone! Pukerua Bay

KENNETH McKENNEY Outback

THE kangaroos hop like crackers Fireworking forward amongst dust. The cockatoos screech their unoiled Morning racket, mapping the sky.

These are glass mountains, broad As crystal, sandblasted into shape. The plain is unpolished flatware Not knowing the world is round.

Here, between suncrash and stone, Carved and soiled, rooted with Tar plant, spinifexed, coffin shaped A gouger's digging buries a prospect Of hope. Smothers the life vein. The silver pick has rusted. Green Stained the grave yawns quietly. Memories pile beneath the wheeling Cloud. Rust strewn man prints, Anonymous as rain, return to earth.

Clear, the stream caresses its bed Voluble between rocks, calm as Sleep. The plain is still. Proud The glass mountains shoulder the sky. 111 ALAN RODDICK Watching you drift in shallow sleep

WAS it the speed of your ascent set up such eddies, that hoist from deep darkness, so easily, those elements of nightmare which loll about you now? There, close beneath the gleaming undersurface of your day, what once was functional must turn grotesque, as bodies made to bear the green tonnage of shifting ocean, swell toward bursting in lighter water; and deep-sea-purple weeds, lately held fast below against the tug of tides known by no shore, dance uneasily in every trivial current. There even light, now alien, no longer simple, baffles with flaws of brilliance, quick confusions, as, overhead, sidling seas filter out all meaning, admitting only menace.

And there you lie, adrift in shallow sleep, beset by nightmare-but beyond rescue: for should I call to rouse you, or reach down hands to haul you up, then I too suffer the sea's interpretations, that turn innocent to sinister, and sink me in your nightmare; as now you rise from mine.

112 15.;} x 12 ins.

GARTH TAPPER. George. Oil, 1962

From CONTEMPORARY NEW ZEALAND PAINTING '62 AUCKLAND ART GALLERY 48 x 30 ins.

BRYAN DEw. The Key. Oil, 1962 48 x 36 ins.

DENNis TuRNER. Catcher and Ram. Oil, 1962 36 x 24 ins.

DoN BrNNEY. Pipiwharauroa, late summer. Oil, 1962 ALBERT WENDT A Descendant ofthe Mountain,

THE influenza epidemic squatted, like a speckled hen hatching her brood of death, over the district of Falefanua that lay spread- eagled beneath the impersonal mountain. The epidemic had crawled over the mountain range from the western side of the island after flying across the Pacific in a sailing ship, lodged in the throats of white sailors who spewed it out on reaching the shore. Now it was free under a sun that hung from the copper sky like a judge; a sun that cast a harsh spell of light over the mountain range, the village, the trees, the beach, and the sea. In the fale, sitting crosslegged like a statue, Mauga-high chief of the district-drank the wailing and chanting of the mourners as he stared at the body of his wife stretched out in the m!ddle of the pebble floor covered with fine mats. Flies swirled round the face of the dead woman. Mauga broke from the spell at the shrill sound of the song of a bird; then the pain was there again snaking its way from the core of his belly to fill his mouth, and brim over from his eyes. He looked out. A troupe of mourners-now a daily sight- trailed past on the road bearing a long bundle and heading surely for the graveyard. Soon they too would have to follow that road with the body of his wife. Mauga shuddered. First his eldest son-heir to his name-had died; then one of his daughters; now it was his wife. A fuia streaked past the £ale, and Mauga caught it in the corner of his eyes till the bird disappeared into the shelter of the trees. Mauga blinked, controlled the twitching of his body, and com- manded: 'Enough of this!' The wailing ceased immediately. 'She is dead. That is all. She is dead and gone to God!' He paused, com- pelled to stop and choke the swelling tongue of pain that had reached his clenched teeth, and was threatening to give the lie to all his outward show of strength. 'It is God's will,' he whis- pered. For a moment, in the stifling heat, he grew cold like a 113 knife blade, and he stood up and hurried out of the fale, stopping the funeral while everyone watched him disappear over the road into the trees. Hidden by the banana trees, he sat down muttering: 'It's God's will ..• it's God's will,' as if he was attempting to persuade himself that it was so. He had lost count of the days since the epidemic started, and the number of victims that it had claimed. Only the pain and fear of the inexplicable terror was real. . . . Stretching out his body under the trees like a discarded puppet, he deliberately opened his eyes to absorb the hurt of the blaring light. In his head there were no clear pictures, just an infuriating dark without any trace of the seeds of light. Like muscle round the bone, the dark had claimed him as it had claimed the rest of his people. . . . A spider, dangling from a banana leaf above him, edged down, down toward his eyes. He watched it steadily; then his hand shot up, closed round it, killed it. Some understanding flicked into his mind as he examined the dead spider on the palm of his hand. Yes, he was the destroyer. That was it. He had the power to destroy those things more helpless than he was, as God had the power to destroy him. Yes, God had willed the epidemic to punish him and his people. His eyes shut tightly as he listened to the faraway tolling of the church Iali. ,Another victim. God was angry, and His anger knew no bounds. This was the explanation which Mauga shared with his people. Mauga turned over and staggered to his feet. He sighed deeply. The funeral wailing seeped through the trees again at that moment, and iced him to the ground. The sound came whistling like sea-wind chopping, chopping the fingers of the trees. Wailing as terrifying as spears probing, probing the moulded clay of his skull. Caught in the sound of the chant and wooden drum, like the harmony of bone round the marrow, Mauga throbbed with fear as the wailing battled to snuff out the flicker of light in his mind. Chained, he watched the leaves dance, dance down to the quivering roots with the heat like wax round his body. As the tolling of the lali and the wailing ebbed away like a setting sun, Mauga shook his body, as if to expel the dark from himself into the air and the trees, and he gazed up, up at the sun crucified to the centre of the sky like a woman who had 114 sinned. There was no longer anywhere to hide. He turned and stumbled deeper and deeper into the web of trees. He stopped suddenly. The clearing-a green carpet of creepers and fern-skimmed away from his feet, and broke abruptly to his right where a spring bubbled like coconut milk from the earth to form a round, deep pool. He dragged his body to the pool, pushed it forward, and watched his mouth suck greedily at the water. He sighed and belched as the water stunned his belly. It was good .... For a long while he lay, like Narcissus, contem- plating his reflection in the water; and gradually he forgot the terrifying reality of the epidemic as memories of his youth bubbled up from the mudbank of his mind; memories as captivating and pure as the water under his face. Seeds of memory burst, and filled his head and heart, driving out the bitter dark. He sat up, pulled up his lavalava above his knees, and dangled his legs into the water. And slowly the coolness of the water tingled up from his legs and revived his whole body. A breeze tinkled through the trees and caressed his greying hair. A picture focussed in Mauga's head. He had seen her stepping from the trees: the girl Fanua who was to become his wife. Tall and slender she had emerged out of the womb of trees. He had remained, as he was now, staring into the water, pretending he had not seen her.... She filled his eyes like soothing ointment as she stopped, startled by the sight of the young man sitting by the pool, her pool. As she walked cautiously toward him, he continued to watch her out of the corner of his eyes. She shuddered and folded her arms protectively over her naked breasts. Without looking at him, she circled the pool and sat down on the other side. Casually she scooped up handfuls of water and drank them as though saying: 'This pool is mine!' His head came up, and he caught her staring blatantly, almost angrily at him. 'I only came to have a drink,' he heard himself apologize. She said nothing. And as if he wasn't there, she drew her lavalava high above her knees, exposing her soft thighs to the sunlight and his eyes as she stuck her legs into the water. He looked away politely. She didn't seem to care. She placed her arms behind her to support her weight, and she yawned and stretched her body, her breasts tautly challenging him. From narrowed eyes he drank the whole 115 of her beauty, suddenly becoming conscious of his heart thudding against his ribs. He looked away, ashamed, feeling annoyed, for somehow he believed that her actions were deliberate attempts to drive him away from the pool. He wasn't going to leave! 'Who do you think you are?' he called to her. She stared straight back at him. Immediately he felt a fool. He sprang up and moved to leave. She giggled. He paused. 'Don't go!' she called. 'I'll leave if you want me to.' He turned to face her, sensing that there was some trace of understanding between them: she was willing to share the pool with him. She smiled at him. And he noticed that she had pulled down her lavalava, and her arms were again crossed over her breasts. He sighed in relief, but he was disappointed that she no longer looked natural, free .... The sun was now over the trees, and the sunlight filtered through the leaves and branches to lie calmly on the surface of the water. The heat was lifting. The throbbing chorus of the crickets pulsated in their ears in unison with the beating of their hearts. 'I'm going to bathe. It'll be dark soon,' she called. She pulled off her lavalava. He blushed and turned his back even though he wanted so much to look at her. When he heard the splash as her body cut into the water, he turned round slowly. 'It's good,' she remarked, her body swallowed up to the neck by the water. Her hair, now wet and ,pinned to her head and neck by the weight of the dive, glistened like black lava. 'Why don't you come in?' she invited him. He started. He could almost hear her giggling. She twisted and dived for the bottom of the pool. When she was completely out of sight, he whipped off his lavalava and dived in. Once under, in the cool green water, he opened his eyes. She hovered straight in front of him, and while her head was out of the water, the golden nakedness of the rest of her body confronted him full in the face and injected desire into his bones. He stopped, and hurried to the surface to find her laughing as she blinded him with water. Their laughter mated and lost itself in the dense trees and the fading light. Three weeks later he took her for his wife as naturally as she had shown herself to him at the pool. A crackling in the trees broke the spell .... Now she was dead . Mauga sat up immediately. The delicate picture was gone, 116 shattered by the footsteps cracking over the brittle undergrowth toward him. He dashed his puffed face with water, and awaited the intruder. It was his son Timu who came into view with his head bowed. His feet marked a thin trail over the creepers till he stood above his father, staring down at the man's head. The boy, aged about eleven, placed his hand lightly on his father's head. Mauga's head turned slowly under the boy's hand till his eyes found his son's grinning face; then his arm circled the boy's waist and drew him to his face. This was his last son, the remaining heir to his title: Mauga, the Mountain, centuries old, as old as the history of the tribe; an institution now threatened with destruction by the wrath of God who seemed so far away-burning like an indifferent star outside his vision-yet so immediately terrifying. Bitterness and protest festered Mauga's heart as the picture of his dead wife erupted into his mind. 'God! God! God!' The boy heard his father's pitiful voice cut into his side. He had never seen his father like that before, helpless and human like most men. To him, his father had always been the Rock, the Mountain, unapproachable and high like the mountain behind the village; the mountain from which his family was descended. The boy gazed down at his father for a long time as though the next thing to do was to censure his father for behaving like a child and not in keeping with his high rank. When he became chief he would never act like this. Hadn't his father told him this? When he moved it was an attempt to leave, but his father's arm held him as securely as the history and mana of the title chained his father. So the boy stood, slowly melting under the fire of love which he felt for his father, till he was as pure as the water beside him, and he wrapped his arms like comforting shields round his father's head. The man was no longer the mountain, impersonal and far away. The man was truly his father who now needed his love as much as he had needed the love which his father had never given him. Mauga straightened suddenly and pushed his son away. Enough of that. He was Mauga. He bowed his head with his face turned away from the boy's eyes, ashamed for having shown so vulnerably that he was like other men. 'The funeral is over,' the boy informed the man. 'Mother's 117 funeral is over.' Mauga's face showed no emotion. This annoyed the boy, gradually turned his love to anger. He stepped forward, picked up a large rock with both hands, and hurled it into the pool; he turned, ran over the clearing, and disappeared into the trees. Mauga hugged himself as the rock shattered his reflection and pushed waves to the banks, and as the mud rose steadily from the bottom of the pool like dark sleep. Soon the pool was quivering mud. Mauga jumped to his feet and fled toward the trees, stumbling for home and the tolling lali. Over his shoulder he glanced back at the mountain range, centering his eyes on the highest peak that stood crowned by the last rays of the setting sun.

CHARLES DOYLE To One Born on the Day of my Death

I GAZING across the boyhood park You are the veins of the leaves. Cut grass Smells of you. Your bones are poetry.

II Manhood's sinews are logic. You will search through the green Innumerable grassblades, seeking

That flow in the veins, that scent Of grass. You will wonder, Watching the leaves grow; know they fall.

The grass at your feet will spring Upright again when you Have stepped aside. 118 RA YMOND WARD Ode to an Urban Day

THE urban day has got her blue straw hat on the one with the yellow rose in it and her grey eyes beneath it are cool and smiling.

Wherever the streets go and there are people her walk is leisurely: in the early morning she stands in the shade in the park at noon she will feed the pigeons in the evening she will wave good-bye to us- you understand, she is not working very hard today, she is there to look pretty.

In her dove-grey dress she is warm but not uncomfortable and she is not dusty: late last night she had a shower and another this morning; so her skin is fresh and her breath sweet.

From time to time she pauses- before shop windows and pools of rain to admire her reflection, then, smiling, strolls on. She is lovely today and she knows it: she will stand at bus stops and wait. Although the buses pull up 119 she remains where she is- she does not mind when people stare she does not think them indiscreet.

If one tries to take her photograph she laughs, for she is always changing and no camera has a nose.

She does not belong to us. We belong to her, no matter what mood she is in. But we must not ignore her- to remain is not enough.

Evening is the time, if any, for departure but today she does not wish to leave us nor does she wish to see us leave: she stands there in her faded blue straw hat looking for the rose-which must have come untied, as if to say, would someone be so kind ... ? then she begins to wander in and out of doorways from one street to the next ... but we have lost her now grey as the corner she is huddled into for the night, still sweet, her fragrance lingers in the pool of night rain where the rose has fallen ....

120 Intimacy

THE house nailed up and boarded in by a tall fence of rain; drab windows laced with steam and in the corners of the ceiling twilight of a stormy afternoon. No calls anticipated. Gone from the mantelpiece the clock: for once time will not tell, safely bound in the bottom drawer and gagged with a bedsock.

White Sax

NoT for you the furious negro's dedication to the cause of light. You merely play jazz, you do not live it, being day-born, white. Of that profoundly stifling aquarium in whose chill twilight he wavers like a ghost condemned to water you are ignorant. And fortunate, for you're at home in air. He's not. For so long silent, breathless almost, when he breaks surface upon the midnight, it's with a wail of exultation, fierce lament so much more poignant than professional it leaves the critic's yardstick nowhere ....

Excuse me, Paul. It was not quite my intent to sound like those too pure aficionados for whom jazz must be jazz if it protests. The squealed glissando, terse rhapsodic grunt and hollow bay ring harsh but true from those whom segregation sears for life and each reminder like high voltage splinters through. Whom wires illuminate. 121 For you that weeping rage was never meant: unwounded through the world of air and light your sax takes wing with a relaxed and flawless tone no speech can emulate.

ERLE NELSON Towards a New Zealand Vrama

THE movement to encourage the wntmg of New Zealand plays has not, so far, been conspicuously successful. There has been enough success to demonstrate that New Zealand has writers with talent, and the optimistic view is that playwrights will arise somehow, someday-and so on. In the meantime many earnest and devoted workers for the cause of an indigenous drama evolve various schemes such as playwriting competitions and the like. I have always thought it to be well understood since Aristotle that a play is a living action born in the perceptions of a playwright and finding its true expression on a theatre stage. None can say definitely what a play will be until it is either performed or found to be unperform- able; and it happens too often for comfort that playwriting competitions merely point the moral that the first shall be last. An indigenous drama could be greatly encouraged by enlightened and capable producers who are willing to form their own judgements independently of critical opinion overseas. I cannot accept the view that New Zealand theatre ought to be secondhand, offering us everyone else's reach-me-downs but nothing well tailored of our own. The tragedy of theatre in New Zealand is not that audiences decide which plays are to be performed. The plain fact of the matter is that producers and their production committeees have created the kind of audiences they deserve. If, in general, there is to be a change of heart, the locally written play must offer a 122 reasonable incentive for production committees to risk a change of heart. The locally written play cannot shoulder aside the exotics if it lacks stature and impact; for the New Zealand playwright is not only faced with the demands of the box office but an entrenched hostility in the amateur theatre movement as well, notwithstanding that movement's pious but nebulous intentions which cost it nothing. The first thing to understand is that a classless society is a myth, and that New Zealand's social security system is not a grand leveller which has legislated us into a humdrum, secure people un- touched by problems, fears and tragedies comparable to those experienced elsewhere. No government can legislate human nature, as the Russians have discovered; yet there is a notion in some quarters that material prosperity denies New Zealand playwrights a source of material virile and significant enough out of which to fashion an indigenous drama. To cap this local fatuousness, an English producer some four or five years ago echoed this notion, and painted the future of New Zealand playwrights in kindly but black tones. If there be any doubt that an emotional climate at a tea and bun level inspires playwriting as trite as social climbers' chit-chat, we have only to view the plethora of English one-acters played up and down this country. Much the same can be said of many English three-acters which, if they succeed at all, do so on reputation rather than merit. Strange, is it not, that England which has known its fair share of hardship should produce so many plays which could have been written by eunuchs? A drama has nothing in common with social security systems. The relevant point is what playwrights see, bearing in mind that it is the playwright's function to tell his audience what it knows but has not thought about, whereas the critic (and kindly visitor) merely tells his public what he has thought about but does not know. New Zealand's social security system has done little to abate alcoholism, even less to soothe the neurotic, and still less to cure the chronic no-hoper. Divorce is increasingly a marital expectation; drownings are a cause of national concern; industrial accidents are as common as 'She'll be jake'; and deaths on the roads are a national bad habit. Murder is still committed by a variety of methods both original and traditional; and lesser fields of crime, from cracking cribs to commercial advertising, are not lacking apprentices. Play- wrights have a healthy range of villains to choose from. All are here: 123 murderers, 'metho kings', grand embezzlers-even the wife-beater designed to mollify the obedient husband dragged into a women· ridden theatre by his loving spouse. The deserted wife with six children can scarcely be said not to want; moreover, her situation is a potential danger to society. Those who airily dismiss poverty from a social scene in which our clergy and welfare workers are overworked do not understand that poverty is relative. Our streets may be filled with pushbikes, but the child of the acute alcoholic sees what is common to others and denied to him. It is not necessary for a child to be hungry to experience poverty. The child who is the odd one out, nursing a misery he cannot share with others, suffers the most difficult poverty to cure. Poverty is something that does not exist unless we ourselves experience it; that is the tragedy of human nature. Men do not scream poverty aloud, nor do they parade their afflictions; the pauper and the cripple still have their dignity. Playwrights do not have to look far to see that which everyone knows but does not think about. Only if we are so trite and small that we can neither laugh nor suffer will there be no material (in terms of living) for a native drama. A drama which is true to its proper purpose does not live entirely for the moment, but is involved in tying together the loose ends of past, present and future. Oedipus and Launcelot Gobbo are still with us; and governments still rely on the absurdities of human nature. Whether men be heroic or clownish, Man himself is timeless. The past, the present and the future of New Zealanders was not, is not, nor will be exclusively Pakeha. New Zealand theatres are out of context with the reality that is New Zealand. Un- less a play is written by a New Zealander its essence of truth does not apply to New Zealanders. An exception is the great but rare play in which the comment applies to all humanity. Each country simply has its own truths, and New Zealand needs its truths to be expounded also. Life to us is the life which rubs against us; all else is fiction. The potentially largest audience is the one with the widest common experience. The fears which will stab that audience are our common fears, known but yet to be expressed. The poverty to arouse its pity is New Zealand's peculiar poverty which is brushed off by our want of thought. And the comedy, broad or delicate, with which to tickle an audience's belly, is to be found in our own self- 124 righteousness and misdirected good intentions-and of those there is no lack. Our particular fears and problems as a· nation, both now and in the foreseeable future, arise out of our relationships to each other as Maori and Pakeha. Malice is rare, and good intentions are legion. But there is little room for complacency, and most are aware of this, if but dimly. The old world of the Maori is dead, and the race is finding itself confronted with values alien to its true nature and difficult to understand. The Maori is no longer master in his own house. To add to the difficulties, Pakeha standards of value, such as they are, are rapidly changing. The Maori, accustomed to a single standard of conduct, is faced with numerous conflicting standards of Pakeha conduct. The result of hasty assumptions often leads to Maoris being considered to possess certain 'Maori' faults, whereas, in fact, the faults are strictly Pakeha in origin. The modern Maori is like a butterfly bursting out of its chrysalis. This is a critical stage of development, as difficult for Pakehas as for Maoris. Modern standards conflict with ancient traditions, and the well-intentioned Pakeha architect becomes exasperated because his Maori client takes offence at the suggestion of having a washing machine in his kitchen. In terms of Maoritanga the architect's suggestion is spiritually filthy. I do not see race relations as material which can lead only to the puerile proposition that Pakehas refuse to marry Maoris. The situation of the washing machine is only one of many that can provide the humour needed to sweeten our dour Pakeha souls with healthy laughter, little being as humorous as misplaced good intentions or earnestness made ridiculous. We tend to laugh with our tongues and because it is expected of us. The sly allusion and the preposterous situation which links us directly to the action on stage (indeed, involves us with the action because the action is us), these might restore our laugher to our bellies where it rightly belongs and help us to recover our basic sincerities. We need have no fear of intolerant audiences, since it is a lack of natural intolerance which has allowed amateur theatre in New Zealand to confuse itself with amateurishness for so long. An indigenous theatre is a theatre of the community which sup- ports it and is reflected on its stage. Unless the large image of New Zealanders, that is, Maoris and Pakehas as these form the national whole, are seen on stage, the essential link is missing to unite an 125 indigenous theatre with its community. Largeness of conception in theatre is strength; the small and the trite lack impact. An indigenous theatre firmly rooted in its own community can draw its strength from that community; the present weakness of theatre in New Zealand is that its drama is an alien one serving a community in which it has no roots. If an indigenous theatre is to become rooted and grow, plays must be written in clearly understandable terms, but without loss of self-respect. The commonness of human warmth and human feeling is not necessarily artistic poverty; and when theatre ceases to touch people, whether they be common or elevated, it loses its essential humilities and truths, becoming a stagey illusion impressing nobody.

II Jn wntmg plays about Pakehas New Zealand playwrights have no special difficulties peculiar to these islands. But plays about Maoris are likely to prove unduly difficult for playwrights who do not habitually rub shoulders with Maoris and are not familiar with Maori problems and aspirations. I envisage a truly New Zealand theatre developing a drama around Maoris under two separate conventions, namely Maori drama and Maori-Pakeha drama, two terms here coined for convenience. By the first term I mean a drama which reflects both the traditional and modern life of Maoris. By the second term I mean a drama of race relationships as these exist between Maoris and Pakehas. A Maori drama based on the marae and Maori ceremonial will require skilled handling. It is highly improbable that such a drama can be exploited beyond one act or a scene in a three-acter. But some attention should be paid to this aspect of a Maori drama, if only for the reason that the Maori is at his best on the marae. I protest strongly at stage portrayals of the Maori as no more than a depend- ant on sentimental Pakeha charity: this does not reflect the true situation. Movement on the marae is severely restricted, and conversation is limited to the menfolk, although nowadays some maraes have relaxed this limitation. Care is needed to indicate the area of New Zealand in which the marae is supposed to be located. The most 126 difficult problem is theatrical realism versus Maori sensltlvlty. Ceremonial without adulteration is not theatre. But how far can one go in eliminating the theatrically inessential without so castrating Maori ceremonial that Maoris flee disgustedly from the mutilation? Clearly one cannot have a recital of whakapapa (lineage) lasting for five minutes, nor can the ancient Maori virtue of speaking for hours at a stretch be allowed to go untrimmed. Nor can Maori characters behave as traditionally they ought to do so that speeches go unin- terrupted. The short answer is to study Maori ceremonial carefully. The full answer is to study Maori aberrations also, bearing in mind that the Maori, though a stickler for strict adherence to custom, is sufficiently elastic in his thinking to agree to variations of the norm on warrantable occasions. Thus whilst one would never allow a character to pass food over the head of an elder, a youth might well speak out of turn. Of course there would be correction and apology coupled with threats. The problem is to find acceptable dramatic caesuras; a difficult problem but not insurmountable. If one does not wish to write of my Whanganui friends in relatively modern times and allow the womenfolk a small say on the marae, I think even the conservative Arawas would permit their womenfolk to say something to each other, provided it was made plain that this was no female intrusion on the menfolk's preserves. Spineless mothers do not produce fierce sons, and more than one wahine has wordlessly made strong feelings plain. Acts or scenes based on Maori ceremonial ought to have a loose relationship to Greek drama in that characters represent themselves less than they represent areas of view or of life. No chief speaks entirely for himself; in a sense he is a trustee, though traditionally he has certain privileges enabling him to exercise his own initia- tive. What is often referred to as the Maori sense of drama is not only a sense of showmanship but is the larger sense of representing the wider and enveloping event within the individual compass of the characters. The chief who stands on a marae and speaks passionately against a Maori drift to the towns, speaks not for himself alone. His is a point of view held by many Maoris who prefer the taihoa attitude towards Pakehaism, and his statements represent a general Maori attitude against Maoris deserting their pas. Maori behaviour on the marae is not entirely static. A speaker does not stand still, but has certain areas within which he may 127 move as he pleases; he may employ all sorts of gestures up to the point where a speech is almost acted out in mime. Maori oratory is highly rhetorical, strongly active, vividly figurative. A chief does not die; instead, a tree falls in the forest of T ane. Maoris were also skilled performers in terms of their customs, it being a symptom of ill breeding to speak plainly and to the point on important occasions. In matters concerning utu (compensation or revenge) the Maori loved to bide his time, to weave a net of words, every so often making a sly allusion which everyone understood perfectly but which his opponent could not pin down, much to the glee of his supporters. The Maori orator revels in the roll of words off his tongue, savouring each phrase delicately like fine wine. Dramatic effect is an indispensable part of the performance, and the rhetoric makes ordinary prose language as gutless as whitebait. When settling his grievances on the marae the Maori usually makes a great fuss over some trifling matter ordinarily too petty for mention. Every finicky detail that will magnify his complaint is presented at great length. But if one listens with care some allusion is made to another matter quite unrelated to the complaint. The monument of terrific suffering-too much for ordinary mortal to bear-is slowly built up so that it stands as intricately devised as a piece of Maori carving. But the form of the complaint presents a well shaped case of grievance and it transpires, without being said, that as the plaintiff has not been able to catch his enemy out on the main issue, as a just and reasonable person he has exaggerated a side issue on which he has caught him out. So justice is done. Traditionally the Maori is highly dramatic. I sound a note of warning. The Maori is characteristically melodramatic; he is not a character in European melodrama. This distinction is not always understood. Chekhov's plays are not melodramas, but his characters can be explosively melodramatic on stage. Like the Russian, the Maori is passionate by nature, and passion must be released if men are to remain healthy in fact or in theatre. Violent emotion is not melodrama when it is the true expression of a given situation. The true form for Maori drama must be built on the demands of Maori behaviour; that is, its form must not be built on traditional European methods of dealing dramatically with emotional situations or situations arising out of motives. A particular situation can create different motives between Maori and Pakeha, and from 128 the motives so created further differing situations can develop: a European play would develop in one direction, a Maori play in another, yet each could initially develop from the same situation. I can best illustrate this by the hackneyed situation where a European youth refuses to marry a Maori girl he has got into pregnancy. To moralize about this in the hope of writing a successful tear-jerker is as dud as a forgery. Babies, legitimate or otherwise, are not blots on the family escutcheons of Maoris but welcome additions, there being nothing mean in the Maori soul. Maoris are not traditionally im- moral; the old Maori code simply differs from ours. Moreover, if the girl's parents shared a particular Maori view, they would be quite relieved that her husband had voluntarily divorced her. Not all Maoris are flattered by marriage with Pakehas, notwithstanding that the same Maoris shower affection on European children adopted by them. I do not fear that our playwrights will fail to find solutions to the difficulties in writing Maori plays and ceremonial plays. I fear not all but most of our critics and their stock of petty rules. It is clear that in many particulars Maori customs cannot conform to the chief specifications of the 'well made' play, namely characters with ants in their pants, this being euphemistically regarded as action. If action is the indispensable ingredient it is purported to be, I wonder why Murder In The Cathedral (largely without movement) should be regarded as a great play. And if British Drama League adjudica- tors are a yardstick, it is relevant to ask why The Purification (which has no movement) has won so many area and divisional finals at B.D.L. festivals. It needs to be said bluntly that New Zealand theatre would gain [fa distinction were drawn between mechanical techniques and artistic results; further, that the flurry and 'business', designed to con- ceal a lack of true action, needs to be seen for what it is-theatre's oldest confidence trick and the stock-in-trade of the hack producer. The true emphasis in drama is not physical gadding about stages, but the heightened moments of disccvery, the revealing of character, motive and emotion. A playwright's proper material is the animate inner persons of his characters, not stage plots of getting Murgatroyd Pentwhistle from point A to point B. I am not opposed to movement. Movement in its correct place and proportions is indispensable. What I oppose violently is the heresy that movement is 129 God in theatre. Such heresy leads inevitably to playwrights' carefully planned work being undone by producers who fail to move audiences by moving actors when they ought to be left to act- that is if they can act. Unless it becomes recognized more clearly that a playwright's job is to move his audience, whether a producer moves his actors or not, the ceremonial Maori play will be denied a fair hearing. The differences between Maori and European moral codes and motives are not obstacles to writing plays which are clearly understandable. The Maori does not suffer the European illness of emotional constipation. What a Maori feels comes to the surface sooner or later, and centuries of skill in haka and chant have given the Maori a traditional mode of expression. I have found in handling Maoris as actors that they are slow to accept conventional stage techniques, but they compensate for this by communicating an inner tension and vibration beyond the scope of most European actors. They tend to communicate a natural sympathy and sincerity which is all too lacking in the theatre as we know it. I venture the opinion that theatre audiences are instinctively more sensitive to emotion than producers are prepared to admit, and that the Maori is needed to help give our doldrum theatre a respected place in the community.

III A Maori-Pakeha drama is bound to deal with racial relationships, either directly by comment, or by implication through the conduct of characters. It matters little if a playwright sets out to avoid com- menting on racial relationships; as his Maori and Pakeha characters act and react on each other on stage they must inevitably, if the play is to have any truth, act and react in terms of racial relationships. Racial relationships in any country is a complex subject, and New Zealand is no exception. It is doubtful if anyone can lay down principles which can be applied without error to all communities in New Zealand. For instance, racial relationships in Gisborne are not identical with those in W anganui, and the playwright who falls into the error of portraying one or the other community as being 130 generally representative of New Zealand lays himself open to a charge of ignorance. In my opinion the key to racial relationships for theatrical purposes is not to be found in surface judgements based on direct ob- servation of what transpires, or seems to transpire, in any one community. Surface judgement is superficial; it tends to confuse cause with effect, and further, it ignores the fact that races do not always publicly reveal their sympathies or demonstrate their antipathies. From a theatrical standpoint surface judgement is dangerous because it fails to account for motive or it substitutes imaginary motives for real motives. Obviously, if motives in a play are stated wrongly, there is little that is not wrong. The true key to racial relationships is an understanding of psychological, economic and cultural differences, the conflict arising out of these differences and the attempts on both sides to resolve the conflict. The conflict is not always obvious. There is more the threat of conflict than any actual clash, an awkward uneasiness looming behind a situation, illumin- ated by occasional flashes of irreconcilable beliefs and attitudes. On the topic of racial relationships I think of Somerset Maugham's dislike of moralizers, and I side with him. Whilst there is much that is general about racial relationships there is little, if anything, which is absolutely certain. On the point of Europeans leasing Maori lands subject to the Maori Vested Lands Administration Act, Campbell Caldwell's Flowers Bloom In Summer is a good example of an author sensing or realizing this particular limitation. We are given the Pakeha view of a moral right to retain a right of lease in land which Pakehas have developed. We are also shown the Maori view that Maoris cannot be expected to stand out of their land for ever. Who is right? Mr Caldwell correctly refuses to pose as God. The aim of a Maori-Pakeha drama, surely, is not to give us ready-made solutions to actual or imaginary racial problems, but to bring us face to face with reality without intruding on our private right to form our own opinions as normally sensible people. A topic which can be applied generally to racial relationships is the Maori crime rate, there being, as far as I know, no significant difference between communities. Firstly, I must stress that the causes of the Maori crime rate have not been officially determined. New Zealand writing on this topic gives rise to a suspicion of a holier- than-thou attitude on the one hand, and a misplaced sentiment on 131 the other. If the causes of Maori crime are not known there can be no premises on which to base one or the other attitude. The Maori character, like the Pakeha's but not identically so, is not without subtlety and contradictions; and one can make no greater error than to assume too large a naivete in Maoris. If the Maori crime rate is to be written about charitably in the hope that a more general understanding of Maori problems will cast more light-and less heat-on Maori crime, it is necessary to probe into Maori motives. A race, once noted for its strict law-abiding in terms of its own customs, does not produce high crime statistics without reasons. Legal justice in New Zealand, although of a high order, is not perfect justice; it is merely a European concept transplanted to New Zealand and imposed on Maoris whether they agree with it or not. Without doubt the Maori mind admires our impartial courts, but whether the Maori mind regards our penal code with much -respect is open to question. In terms of Maori culture it seems to me that certain aspects of Pakeha law enforcement are grossly unjust. To the Maori mind imprisonment of the person is a serious immorality; it is one reason why Maoris have proved difficult to coax into hospitals. In my view, the imprisonment of Maoris for theft is not the proper sentence; and it may well be that such treatment, because of the general Maori resentment it arouses, merely provides an incentive for crimes of revenge against society by the wrong-doer, and breeds contempt for the law in Maoris generally. The legal maxim about justice not only being done, but being seen to be done, must appear as an inglorious farce in Maori eyes. To pro- tect society (in which one must also include Maoris) Pakeha law inflicts upon a Maori offender a crime larger than that originally committed, the crime inflicted upon the Maori being a crime against his person and not against his goods. Moreover, all New Zealand- ers do not stand equal before the law. In Maori eyes the income tax evader commits two offences; he tries to evade taxes legally due and owing, and he refuses as a member of society to play his part in supporting it. But the income tax evader is not insulted by being imprisoned. The villain of the piece is less likely to be Maori lawlessness than defective laws-one for the poor and one for the rich; one for the legal thief and one for the moral thief. Major income tax evaders, as distinct from persons who fail to pay their taxes, 132 are rarely Maoris, few Maoris earning sufficient income to attract large taxes. I suggest what is needed is less empty moralizing and more pressing for urgently needed reforms. Theatre has quite a respectable tradition in this respect, and in New Zealand could well do something to earn its keep. The few Maori-Pakeha plays so far staged or broadcast seem to be in danger of setting a wrong fashion in Maori dialogue. Maoris are usually portrayed as persons with thick accents lashed with wal- loping great doses of illiteracy. Maori accents cannot be denied; but it is not theatrically true to use the accents of farce in drama, or to assume that Maoridom on stages is to be distinguished by a convention better applied to village goofs. Many Maoris, whether of much formal education or not, speak English remarkably well, allowing for a Maori accent and speech in a second tongue. Such Maori speech is very rarely as undignified as it is made out to be; in fact, it compensates for its lack of formal construction by a dignity our Parliamentarians and local body politicians could emulate to their advantage. Certain Maori speech is probably the New Zealand dialect at its best, there being no cheap twangy sharpness and no lack of musical sensibility. Pakeha public speakers who speak well, or merely think they do, have amusing and uncertain standards. The standard of the good Maori speaker is certain and superior, and the listener who is not kiwi-deaf is not forced to wonder whether the speaker is of New Zealand birth with a pretentious overlay of acquired Englishness a la N.Z.B.C., or an Englishman with a partly developed New Zealand twang, or a New Zealander trying to be something he isn't. The conceited notion that Maoris are illiterates is analogous to a general prattling and moralizing about Christian virtues, notwithstanding that few seek grace within the Christian Church except from inside a coffin. Before we Pakehas cast the first stone we had better learn to say Upokongaro as the Maoris say it, rather than as Y ewpuckanarra (or worse still Yewpuck) as we now say it. In general, if Maoris spoke English as we do Maori, we could as well understand them as Martians. Less militancy and greater understanding would make Pakehas better writers and more humane persons. The amateur theatre movement in New Zealand is failing because it has failed in its main task-to create an urgency of purpose. I£ its 133 only urgency and purpose is to provide social events for the parading of fur coats, shirt fronts and mannerisms in foyers, to the accompani- ment of loud and gushing accents, it is culturally bankrupt. Our purpose as a race is not represented by social-climbing ambitions. Our first purpose is to understand ourselves, unflinchingly and without weak compromises. Theatre cannot accomplish that with Pakehas alone. A drama without a social conscience is merely a vast preten- siOn.

KEVIN LAWSON Reconstructions

For Nick Reid

Look stranger the sea is your voice caught in night's throat. 1 THE SEA drowns memory: gorged it heaves away to impossible silence the words one thought had value. Friends sculptured into distant pictures remain half-true, those one loved are almost brutal in their quick parting, others still remain, quietly absorbed into their own plastic stillness. Yet now and then a startled face appears to be destroyed by my own forgetting. All the half-true and those who had broken (silent now while their voices rage from past) become uncertain in the growing darkness the mind faces. I cry out and no one answers. Still I cry and still the darkness widens. 134 Clearly the position has never altered: older hints at redemption fade, one renounces all that could have value: word, thought, action lose their tough moment of existence when thrust beyond the instant point where I would fling them out. After, they remain a little outside, as bright cores in a brittle silence, reminding. Separate as hard lights of memory. Look the shadows cool on the high pass when the sun threshed the burning wind to dry fury. The stream I bathed in snow fed, pure cold in angry daylight cut the high pitch of silence, forced out the broken dream for the pure thought. This* too was past: this and each else born in the silence drove image and symbol from the dry vision of brain to some crueller point. Little things terrible for their violence remain: a moth eye globe-blind squashed beneath a casual fingertip, its scales dusting the whorls of finger flesh. Or in my hand a crushed flower, juice thick as blood staining the skin. Again my face flings back a mirror stare, sweat burnt to scars clear to the quick of overnight wounds. (Behind beyond the wall where I reflected stand is the mountain stream I bathed in, white cold.) And the empty chair in the darkened room, no longer signifies an absent guest, but there shouts out its own savage mould of existence. 135 Later the sea also takes an ominous ring in the sounding darkness. Voices emerge hard as death from the tumbled sound, and I strung in a high bed above a resonant beach, listen.

This too is past. Yet there is still the mystery when vision cracks the rigid silence of a raging eye and strangers pause, engrossed with silence and their own betrayal of mystery.

2 The sea, silent as the break of nerves lets out trembling fingers of weed from its brain; and the sea breeze moulds the waves to its own shape. Listen, in this search is another voice, one which laments all darkness long. Listen the anguish of words breaks before the simple energy of the moth transcribed in the hard encounter with fact, and fades mute to the stars.

3 The sea itself is conflict presenting through teeth of ripped rock its token of betrayal. Such as stone knowing stone only through conflict betrays the silence of its own existence.

Returning, as the stone to silence, it seems that the moth I crushed is caught by its death to resist; or, transcribed into image by the violence of its own tensile existence, still charts 136 the modes of its action. Thus the duality extends. All being marked by the movement between the modes, contraries forcing out a word working logic. I had not thought friendship contained its own hatred, or that the strength of strangers lay in the spiked words they voiced in hate or anger; or that the room caught by silence the long rhythm of waves, caught in the full sun, burns out the past by the cell it had become. Retreating seascape and mountain present a rigid loneliness, except that the sea runs hard upon words, drowning. So the strangers. They do not know the peace found in the sleep of women who love, only but only the peace of grief on grief caught from the throat of betrayal.

PETER BLAND Kumara God

THREE days and still the slow fogged rain Drifts inland-all along the valley Light melts to clusters of steamed-up panes. All's formlessness-a sharpened will Won't chip us free of it-it is A melting back, an elemental drift Beyond time or season .... And so I bring The little stone cramped kumara god In from the garden .... Take down the clock And set him there, upon the mantelpiece, To be my curled-in self, grown Old in embryo, slightly sardonic .... Feeling around me this slow retreat Of lives gone underground, of sleep turned solid. 137 Mother

(Died September 1950, Stone, Staffordshire)

LAsT night came crying out of the dark Your reborn image . . . . Mother, Mother, Stretched between two wars and drained By a crop of cancer, I thought I heard Your brass voice laughing with my drowned Sea brother. In my dream you nursed His salt-lungs back to manhood; when The guns exploded you blew back the waves From his wrecked mouth. Again, I named Your loud love to the factory hurt And council-house heart of England-breathing The warmth of your hennaed hair Above the smell of earth. Beside your grave I danced to your favourite tango and lowered Your sky-blue pyjamas from the steeple, While all about me sailors and factory girls Coupled beneath the trees, and crocuses Sprang from your buried death's black flower.

The Butlding

'I'n like to live in your lap,' said my daughter. 'And that' (my pocket) 'is a door.' She stepped up from the ground floor of my toes, and began the bony climb to where my backside spread big as a boardroom on the sofa. Curiously I was feeling about as bare as a public building after work-that time of being when light falls streaming 138 onto dust and detergents, when foreign women slop out hidden mops. Chest- high, she stopped, knocked twice, and entered ignoring the huge KEEP-OUT sign. (Not that she would lose her step in that blackened inner smoke-room.) It wasn't guilt made me want to push the stale jokes and doctored pin-ups out of her way, they just seemed dull-so unforgivably monotonous when faced by a true professional. 'Go away,' I said. And she took the lift back to the basement. She wasn't hurt just bored with one so full of doors. These days, public buildings are all the same.

House with Cat or Sun

(A drawing by Jo, aged 4)

AN idiot sun, cross-eyed, smiles down benevolence on a fist-full of windows crammed into a house .... A huge three-legged cat is trying to squeeze in through a floating door.

Or perhaps a malevolent cross-eyed cat is jumping onto the roof-top, while a huge, three-legged, idiot sun is floating out of the open door.

Or it could be a helicopter taking off that has nothing at all to do with either cat or sun-while a three-legged flower grows outside the only window in an idiot house crammed full of doors. 139 Poem at Oriental Bay

.... he has come to the very edge of the world; the void from which all things may grow. Carl Jung

A man-made beach, a human tip trucked each summer with city sand; (gulls like enamel, transistors, towels, patching the perved bay), here, we unpack our borrowed bones ... lying duly vacant among bikinied buttocks and bare hills.

Naked long enough, we might toughen to deep-sea relics (bone and sand gripping each other, grown together in fossil ecstasy), but have come anointing our limbs for light not burial; summer's flesh, we take the day in hand.

And light stuns the harbour . . . mirrors back the town's cool concrete vacancy (we are not 'rooted here, but squeezed into submission). Beneath the sun limbs flake like nameless monuments. At sea a nerveless blue burns hugely barren.

The heart congeals. Thin-skinned, the vision, shelled behind dark glasses, squints to traffic out below a slabbed horizon. (Bare as bach or board the air we rent as residence.) The tide's dead-end our noon-day bed and canned inheritance.

140 JAMES BERTRAM Clough and his Poetry

THE Clough centenary was noticed in Landfall, when the author of The Bothie was claimed as 'among the foremost of our ancestors in the spirit'. In the same issue (September 1961), Kenneth Allott's valuable article on 'Thomas Arnold the Younger' helped document that brief phase of nineteenth-century English discontent in which so many liberal intellectuals looked hopefully or wistfully towards the Antipodes. Tom Arnold came to New Zealand in 1848, prepared to take up his father's sections in Wellington; before long Domett, then Colonial Secretary, held out hopes of £8000 from Company funds to found a 'broad and liberal' college at Nelson. 'Almost my first thought, after Domett's proposal,' Tom wrote to his mother, 'was that if I got the appointment, perhaps that dear old Clough would come out and join in the work.'1 To Clough in Oxford- 'Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum', as Matthew Arnold addressed him just at this time-Tom sent off a burning, Shelleyan invitation:

A very great deal will have to be done before the thing is licked into shape: but when it is, do you not think, my dear Clough, that you could make up your mind to come out and join in a work which seems to promise so well, and which would require no unworthy compromise in order to embrace it? Fancy if Shairp and you and I were working together here, living in the light of a common faith, and united by the affection which we already bear one another,-do you not think we might make a glorious on- slaught on the great kingdom of Darkness, and do somewhat towards speeding the coming of that day, when Kingcraft and Priestcraft shall be among the things that were, and Love shall bind up the wounds of this bruised and suffering Humanity ?2 Three months later, with Governor Grey's support gained for the Nelson scheme, Tom Arnold wrote with even more enthusiasm:

Here, where we could work with a free activity, we might lay 141 the foundations deep and wide, of an institution, which like Iona in the middle ages, might one day spread the light of Religion and Letters over these barbarous colonies and throughout the great archipelago of the Pacific, where hitherto only the white man's avarice or lust or his imbecile Theology have penetrated. How many things would become possible, that now seem visionary, to two or three men animated by the same spirit, and working under favourable conditions! 3 Clough's response was prompt, and for him surprisingly positive; of course, he was fresh from writing The Bothie, in which he had just sent off his hero in the wake of Tom Arnold and the John Wickliffe: The thing is not quite impossible, my dear Tom. That is to say, I am not prepared to go out and settle in New Zealand, in any capacity, but I have a great fancy to go out for 3 years or so .... What sort of place is Nelson? I forget where it is. Would you take me for 3 years? You and Domett? You see I am just out of my old place, so that I am ready to look at every new place and likely enough to go to none.4 Where he went, as it fell out, was first to Italy (where he wrote Amours de Voyage) and then to the dismal new redbrick of Uni- versity Hall, London. Meantime, the Nelson College scheme had fallen through. That Antipodean mirage-the vision of an independent centre of liberal and humane studies, far from the smoke and stir of great cities-was to vanish almost as soon as Tom Arnold's youthful imagination had built it in air beneath the snows of Mount Arthur; to be recalled (with about as little practical consequence, it seems) by another scholarly expatriate in our own day.5 Tom Arnold went on to Tasmania; Clough, for his part, abandoned the Antipodes after his half-hearted, unsuccessful application for a university post in Sydney in 1851, and turned to North America instead.

II Clough has a particular interest for us, because in The Bothie he wrote the small Victorian epic of the moment of emigration by which this country, as we know it, was founded. He has other claims 142 to our attention. Graham Greene, in The Quiet American, neatly indicated one of Clough's 'contemporary' qualities when he made him the private reading of a tough-minded British correspondent in Saigon, watching the disintegration of French colonial rule: I drive through the streets and I care not a damn, The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money. 'That's a funny kind of poem,' Pyle said with a note of dis- approval. 'He was an adult poet in the nineteenth century. There weren't so many of them.' Clough in his time had been a disillusioned foreign correspondent of sorts; he had watched the birth of one Republic in 1848 in Paris, next year he watched French bayonets destroy another Republic in Rome. Almost, by anticipation, he had lived in the twentieth century, as a cancelled passage from Amours de Voyage suggests with rueful stoicism: anyway England France and the like may be things the Creator is sick of; the Planet Certainly still would revolve on its axis. What does it matter! Though fall England and France, Europe turn one Russia m Europe Men would live I suppose, the Earth would turn on its axis. Strangers would still visit Rome, and would stare and wonder as usual And the Pope be retained as Custode of Vatican marbles. other Victorian poet wrote like or thought quite iike that. Clough's irony was often pointedly topical; but it played around themes of continuing modern significance-as in the savagely ur- bane twist he gave to his rewriting of the sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive Officiously to keep alive. 143 Such a poet, on his centenary, deserved a thorough reassesssment; and for once he has been lucky enough to get it. Lady Chorley's book* is much the most comprehensive study of Clough's life and writings that has yet appeared. It is a brisk professional treatment which combines vigorous historical biography with close textual and literary analysis. Lady Chorley is fully at home with the economic and social background of her period. The two major achievements of Clough scholarship in recent years-the noble Oxford edition of the Poems of 1951, the two volumes of Cor- respondence edited by F. L. Mulhauser in 1957-are skilfully used; more enterprisingly, Lady Chorley packs in a great deal of reference to unpublished material. No one, it is clear, has wrestled more strenuously with the vast collections of Clough notebooks and papers now accessible in English libraries, mainly at Oxford. Psycho-analysis is invoked (discreetly, in a final chapter) to suggest a private interpretation of the written evidence. Clough himself, who might have been startled to find what twentieth-century biographers can add to the methods of Plutarch, would not I think have resented this method of inquiry: the author of Dipsychus would surely have been among the first to welcome Freud and Jung as liberators. Clough, like his own Adam in The Mystery of the Fall, was always addicted to self-analysis:

Though tortured in the crucible I lie, Myself my own experiment .... and was as fascinated by the complex workings of his own mind as some of his readers have since come to be. We remain justifiably curious about how that mind was formed. The trouble, of course, is the irritating (and surely by now irrelevant) question, 'Was Clough a failure?' It was natural enough that his friends should ask it in 1861, when the 'noble, striking-looking youth' Jowett had known at Balliol had .dwindled into a tired Third Examiner at the Education Office, who had just died obscurely at Florence. This early death in a foreign land came as the last tragic anti-climax in a wilfully broken career. Clough had outlived

*Arthur Hugh Clough: The Uncommitted Mind. Katharine Chorley. Claren- don Press, Oxford. 4Ss. 144 the brief lustre of his Rugby and Oxford years, and won no fresh laurels in the world and wave of men. Lady Chorley is well aware of the inadequacy of this nineteenth century view of Clough as 'one of the prospectuses who never became works'. The short answer is that he did, in the poetry he was so reluctant to publish after The Bothie in 1848, and Ambarvalia in 1849. What matters to us about Clough is not his failure to cut a more striking figure in the eyes of his contemporaries, but that he was able to write Amours de Voyage, Dipsychus, and a few shorter poems that can be read today with a keenness of response very different from the polite inattention we are likely to give to a great deal of more admired Victorian work. If the poetry still has power to move us, so has the life. The real problem of Clough for the biographer, as Lady Chorley outlines it in her first chapter, is to account for his apparently arrested development, both as man and poet, after the year 1851. Did he, in fact, give up the struggle, and write his own epitaph in 'Peschiera'? 'Tis better to have fought and lost, Than never to have fought at all.

Ill Clough's American childhood-until he was nearly ten he lived with his family at Charleston, South Carolina-has seemed variously significant to earlier biographers, who have used it favourably to account for his intense love of liberty, and blamed the clima:te for his early physical breakdown. Lady Chorley is more interested in the family pattern: the amiable, easy-going merchant father who was so often away on business, the dark-haired, 'strikingly handsome' mother who had such spartan ideas about God and duty. (It is a childhood pattern not unlike Leopardi's; even with the 'lym- phatic strain' on the maternal side of which Clough himself was so early conscious, one might have suspected that noia was lying in wait.) Transplantation back to England, where for eight years he became a boarder at Rugby, certainly meant for Clough an abrupt severance of all normal home life. The heavy load of moral responsibility he acquired as Dr Arnold's prize pupil and trusted praepostor is a familiar tale: Lady Chorley gives a freshly-documented out- 145 line of the Rugby years, with a sympathetic sketch of Dr Arnold; her quotations from such level-headed and relatively detached observers as Bagehot and Sir Francis Doyle are particularly useful in adjusting the focus here. She notes the 'puzzling character' of Thomas Burbidge, Clough's closest literary confidant from Rugby until the joint publication of their poems in Ambarvalia fifteen years later, but does not attempt to illustrate Burbidge's 'unspecified and slightly mysterious shortcomings'. This is a gap in the record, for Burbidge-'Wonderful Tom' at Rugby, the theatrical and outspoken versifier, the slightly raffish sensation-seeker whose company the younger Clough always found so dangerously congenial-is an important early influence. It seems clear that Clough was both attracted and repelled by Burbidge's daring, by his habit of self-exposure in verse, by his social uncon- ventionality. Burbidge took Orders after leaving Cambridge, but was immediately drawn, by taste or by temperament, to the Medi- terranean. He became English Chaplain at Palermo, acquired an Italian wife-'a very nice simple, lively and affectionate little body'- who seems to have been a woman of the people; the Italian background, and a strong undertone of democratic sympathies, are both very evident in Burbidge's contributions to Ambarvalia. It would be interesting to know if Burbidge's Sonnet XII in that volume, headed 'To-' was addressed to Clough:

0 fellow Soul! 0 brother more than brother! One stylistic link, at least, can be established: in Burbidge's 'Lilie. A Myth', in Ambarvalia, these lines occur: I was a coarse and vulgar man, I vile and vulgar things had done; And I, as Nature's instincts ran Was wont to let them run.

The self-conscious manner, the touch of bravado, show how uneasily the speaker (after all, the poet is now in Orders) is seeking to lift a corner of the Victorian curtain upon the back streets. We may recognize the same impulse behind the strange unpublished poem by Clough entitled 'Homo sum, nihil humani-', which is preserved (almost certainly by oversight, at least on Mrs Clough's part) only 146 in the cancelled proof sheets of the 1850 reissue of Clough's poems from Ambarvalia:6 She had a coarse and common grace As ever beggar showed, It was a coarse but living face, I kissed upon the road.

And why have aught to do with her, And what could be the good? I kissed her, 0 my questioner, Because I knew I could. The impulse is swiftly rejected, in a suitably high-minded manner: I kissed her, for her carnalness It could not come to me. and the girl (somewhat astonished, no doubt) is left with the kiss and a muttered blessing; the episode parallels the similar one more sentimentally treated in 'Farewell, my Highland lassie!' Clough was certainly right to suppress a bad poem; what is interesting, is that he should ever have gone to the trouble of having it specially set in print for the 1850 reissue (A). Clough's decision to reprint privately his own work from the joint volume of 1849 clearly marks the definite break with Bur- bidge. In the copy of the original1849 volume of Ambarvalia in the Houghton Library at Harvard there is an interesting note by Charles Eliot Norton: 'Clough was always reticent as to the circum- stances which led him to associate himself with Burbidge in the publication of their poems. I think he felt it had been a mistake.'7 And on the title-page of Norton's own copy of the 1850 reissue there is the further note: 'I fancy that Clough saw that his poems had another quality from those of his associate, and were not helped by doubtful companionship.'8 It seems likely from all this that Clough and Burbidge shared a long-standing interest in 'the question of sex' and its frank treatment in verse; that 'Homo sum, nihil humani-' was one of Clough's experiments in this direction; that he thought of adding it to his first private volume as a kind of last tribute to one of the old links with Burbidge; and finally cancelled the verses in proof both because they were not good enough, and 147 because he knew he had given the whole subject a much freer and more imaginative treatment in The Bot hie of 1848. On the Oxford years-from Clough's arrival as a Balliol Scholar in 1837, to his resignation of his Oriel fellowship in 1848-Lady Chorley adds a great deal of fresh and illuminating detail. Her out- line of the religious and social conflicts of the 1840's is admirable, and we must be especially grateful for a thorough documentation of Clough's own religious position at the end of this period. For the first time, full weight is given to the disruptive influence of W. G. Ward, Clough's tutor at Balliol. There are excellent supporting portraits of Clough's remarkable sister Anne (who was to become first Principal of Newnham, later to be followed in that position by the daughter Clough never saw) ; and of such close friends as Shairp and Walrond and Tom Arnold. One of Lady Chorley's dis- coveries is a mysterious love attachment-apparently involving a rejected proposal of marriage-late in 1846: she links this fairly convincingly with a number of the poems written in the following year, and with Thackeray's impression in 1848 that Clough had 'evidently been crossed in love'. This was alert detective work, for the clues were very cold indeed. It has long been supposed that there might have been some real-life basis for the situation to which Clough res- ponds with unusual feeling in several of his dramatic love poems- that of the young travelling scholar who falls abruptly in love with a simple country-girl, and must choose between withdrawal, marriage and emigration, or the moral consequences of seduction. This situation is lyrically treated in 'Farewell, my Highland lassie' and 'Les V aches'; in narrative verse it is explored in The Bothie, and in The Lawyer's Second Tale in Mari Magno. Lady Chorley's recon- structiqn of the 1846 episode supplies a real-life basis for the con- trasting situation of love sought 'in one's own station'-Philip's brief wooing of Lady Maria in The Bothie, and Claude's ineffectual tentative affair with Mary Trevellyn in Amours de Voyage. It is not so surprising that when Clough met Blanche Smith in 1850 he should have proved such a difficult starter. The four years 1848-51-years of decision for Europe and for the mind of the age-were the critical years for Clough and his poetry. All that was positive and sanguine in his Oxford experience, and in his own response to the challenge of a year of 'blessed revolutions', went into the firm narrative structure and rapid onward movement 148 of The Bothie. Next year, in Italy, a more sceptical ironic mood produced almost as rapidly Clough's major achievement in verse, Amours de Voyage; and the splendidly resonant 'Easter Day, I', which Lady Chorley herself regards as his masterpiece. In 1850, on a long vacation in Venice, he wrestled with the first draft of Dipsychus-that 'dialogue of the mind with itself' which is both the most private, and in plan the most ambitious, of his longer poems. Most of the scattered fragments of The Mystery of the Fall were already in his notebooks. Then: back to London, to uneasy engagement to Blanche Smith, the American adventure; finally, marriage and domesticity, self-sought drudgery for Florence Night- ingale, and a poetic silence of eight years until the narrative impulse returned, muted and chastened, to produce the flat, conventional moral tales of Mari Magna in the year of his last illness.

IV How much of this poetry matters to us today? The Bothie is a lively performance, of great historical interest, which keeps its youthful glow; but what Sir Harold Nicolson has called its 'rather embarrassing undergraduate high jinks' will not be to everyone's taste. It lacks the weight and balance of Goethe's Hermann und Doro- thea, though as a modern narrative poem in hexameters it seems to me technically much more accomplished. Dipsychus, that unfin- ished drama of introspection, must continue to suffer by the unfair comparison with Faust and Peer Gynt: it is a kind of private sketch of a major subject, attractive in detail, but never firmly pulled together: it remains, like Death's Jest Book, one of the most curious and stimulating of nineteenth-century notebook poems. Only Amours de Voyage (though we may regret that Clough never pol- ished it as he might have done, if the encouragement to publish had come earlier) is complete and self-sustaining as a work of art. It is surely one of the great secondary poems of English literature, as Mr Forster's are among our great secondary novels. For in the Amours Clough succeeded (where Arnold, Tennyson and Browning failed) in making poetry out of the very form and pressure of the times. He succeeded, perhaps, by the kind of judo trick that escapes more powerful wrestlers; but the trick was closely calculated. By thrusting an anti-romantic, over-intellectualized hero 149 into a potentially romantic and tragic situation, by setting his heart and head at private war against a background of one of the most picturesque yet futile episodes in the revolutionary crisis of Europe, Clough was able to establish minor tensions within the scheme of his poem that were the sensitive reflex of major ones outside it. The vibrations from this interplay of intellectual and emotional sympathies carry clearly across a century in which many of the major tensions have since broken in a series of rumbling wars and public disasters. 'My dearest Clough,' Matthew Arnold wrote from Thun in Sep- tember 1849, just after the Amours had taken shape, 'These are damned times-everything is against one.'9 And again, two years later, comes Arnold's cri de coeur: 'Only let us pray all the time- God keep us both from aridity! Arid-that is what the times are.'10 This is the private language of a man who was no weakling, who did not exaggerate. The romantic dream had faded, and the vulgar dream of progress the mid-nineteenth century tried to put in its place offered too gross a deception for disenchanted eyes. A long line of European poets-beginning perhaps with Leopardi, and running through Baudelaire and the French symbolists to Rilke, Eliot and Pasternak-was to establish with difficulty a new poetry of the Waste Land, a sad flowering out of public corruption and private despair. Arnold in certain moods (the moods he most distrusted) can be fitted into this line; Clough never. The siccum lumen of his mind is too constant, the ironical wit too ready at all times, for any of those moments of tragic vision that are the poet's antidote to despair. What Clough did achieve, in Amours de Voyage, was a precise correlative of that 'over-educated weakness of purpose in Western Europe' which was the legacy of the Napoleonic wars and the triumph of Legitimacy. Rome, of all European capitals, was the most appropriate setting for a modern variation on the theme of omnia lassant praeter intellegere. And Rome at this moment of foreign siege-the Eternal City become a pawn of international adventur- ers, yet throwing up a Mazzini, a Garibaldi, a Manara to prove again the indefeasible rights of the human spirit-this Rome was to prove an accurate prefiguring of what Petersburg and Warsaw, Madrid and Paris and Berlin, would ere long become in their turn. Some part of the spirit of the Napoleonic era that escaped the 150 labouring genius of Tolstoy, of Hugo and of Hardy, is preserved in the zestful irony of Stendhal-for Stendhal himself had been a part of it. And the lucky accident that set Clough within the walls of Rome in 1849 enabled him to catch something of the movement of history that 'books and a chamber' can never supply. Swinburne was very scornful of Clough's achievement: There was. a bad poet named Clough, Whom his friends found it useless to puff11 but the passionate rhetoric of Songs before Sunrise is dead enough today, while many touches in the Amours speak to us still. The whole poem is a model of the truth of what Katherine Mansfield was to write to her husband, in the first winter after a war called great: If you speak for your generation, speak, but don't say, 'I speak for my generation,' for the force is then gone from your cry. When you know you are a voice crying in the wilderness, cry, but don't say 'I am a voice crying in the wilderness.'12 Clough, in Amours de Voyage, was setting out to puncture something dangerously inflated: not heroism or political idealism or romantic love (for he had a limited and conditional faith in all these things); but the shallow optimism of an age which believed that the problems of Europe, and the problems of the human mind and heart, could somehow be solved without thought, without 'taking a good look at the worst.' The worst was here lightly patterned, in the guise of social comi-tragedy, but it contained a charge of truth sufficiently disturbing to upset Emerson, and many more complacent moralists of the mid-Victorian age. And the poem, with all its human frustrations, is not defeatist, as Arnold's Empedocles was defeatist. Claude-so unlike Clough in his egotism, his snobbishness, his intellectual self-sufficiency-is like Clough in his intelligence, his urbanity, his passion for the truth that hurts. If he were allowed to be pathetic he would col- lapse, and we might properly be disgusted with him. Because in the end he shrugs rather than wrings his hands at the fate of the Roman Republic, because he treats his loss of Mary Trevellyn (no less of a blow to his starved emotions, than the defeat of Mazzini had been to his political liberalism) with the wry fatalism of the 151 celibate scholar who has perhaps had a lucky escape, he just-only just-preserves his poise. And this, in its small donnish way, is the equivalent of the prodigious feat of a civilized man in keeping his sanity in the world of modern Europe. What suggests itself to Claude, in the Amours, is quite as important as what happens to him: this gives the poem a range far wider than the slight personal story might have promised. It was in the choice of such a hero that Clough's real originality was shown: he was anticipating the complex art of Henry James, in which fineness of perception and personal intuitions of good and evil reverberate far beyond the immediate circle of a few fictional characters. And Claude's instinct for survival, unlike Hyacinth Robinson's, is never in doubt. His inadequacy in many directions is made clear, but he is not utterly inadequate to himself; he is ineffectual, but he is not ignoble. And his final exit anticipates that of another English aris- tocrat-as upright, if more snobbish still-who 'left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the tor- tuous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.'13 The Bothie, we might say, was written for the world (and the New World, in Boston and Wellington, gave some of the first sal- utes); the Amours, for 'the happy few' who might appreciate it, and Matthew Arnold alas was not among them; Dipsychus, it would seem, for Clough alone. There is here a real breakdown of 'communication'-the conviction of an audience, if it had come sooner, might have helped. But Clough was a genuine poetic explorer: if he sometimes exaggerated the terrors of the factitious, he never de- ceived himself about the value of what he brought back from his longer verse expeditions. More clearly than any of his friends he saw both the originality, and the flaws in execution, of Amours de Voyage. With an insight that continues to astonish, he pointed- in the prose Epilogue to Dipsychus-not merely to the ambiguity at the heart of that poem, but to its limited achievement, and the reasons for the limitation. He was a modest man, always a little sur- prised to find himself taken seriously as a poet-once, indeed, he had hoped he might be that, 'but if never, no matter'. He had done his best; how good it was, in its own particular kind, an age sufficiently removed from his to appreciate complete private integrity and 152 an almost deliberate turning away from public success, can best appreciate.

V With infinite patience in the assembling of detail, enough (but not too much) charity, and a shrewd independent judgement of character, Lady Chorley completes her account of the last ten years. This, we may be confident, is pretty much how it all happened: Clough's painfully delayed engagement to Blanche Smith (oddly illurnined by some hitherto unpublished early letters), the straining of friendship with Matthew Arnold, the ignominious return from America; the six years of marriage that made Clough 'as happy as he was capable of being made'. The story holds much of human interest, but it has little to do with poetry except for Mari Magna at the end-and the poet of Mari Magna, though far from negligible, has little to do with the poet of Amours de Voyage. He had become, in Matthew Arnold's revealing phrase, 'ordinary and different from what he was'. He had submitted, as Dipsychus had submitted in the end, to his own age; and whatever compensations submission brought, his poetry was one of the casualties. Lady Chorley's offered explanation is psychological. She examines at length examples of poetic imagery involving water and darkness, and connects them with that subconscious desire to return to the womb which, in Freudian terms, seems to afflict so many of us. Her hypothesis of a suppressed Oedipus complex is supported by a cancelled variant of a line in an early sonnet about kissing his mother; and by an unpublished fragment of a later poem referring to the self-mutilation of Origen. Not every reader will share Lady Chor- ley's confidence in amateur psychoanalysis as a reliable literary tool, though she has worked hard to make out her case (the unpublished poem in the 1845 Notebook, 'The Ballad of Ladies W ell'/4 might have given her some additional evidence). However much of her analysis we may accept, Lady Chorley has certainly demonstrated the force of sexual imagery and symbolism, both conscious and uncon- scious, in Clough's poetry. Many of her other findings are valuable, and less controversial. Among these are the proof that the weaker sequel 'Easter Day II' followed closely upon 'Easter Day I'; the brilliant dating of Dipsy- 153 chus Continued, and the attribution of the mysterious 'Angel fragment' as a discarded opening to it (but the word 'way', at the end of the 7th line of this fragment on p. 266, should read 'wing') ; the eff- ective linking of many unpublished prose fragments in the notebooks to written poems. I have found only one other error of trans- cription: 'companionship', on p. 213, should read 'companionable- ness'.* Lady Chorley's work as biographer has been so thorough as to seem final, at least in matters of external fact and recorded detail. This becomes at once the standard life of Clough, and is likely to remain so for a good many years. Interpretation of the poems is another matter-though even those who differ in their judgements will be grateful for Lady Chorley's vigorous reading of certain key passages. Altogether, this is a most valuable and stimulating book, which should lead to a genuine revival of interest in Clough's poetry. For it provides the third of the indispensable aids to the student: poems, letters, life now lie all open to the view.

*There are several printer's slips, as on pp. 51, 55, 184, 229, 260, 272; but none is seriously misleading.

REFERENCE NOTES 1 Tom Arnold to Mrs Arnold, letter headed Wellington Terrace, June 16th, 1848. Turnbull Library MSS. 2Tom Arnold to Clough, letter from Wellington, June 26th, 1848. Clough papers, Bodleian MSS. 3 Tom Arnold to Clough, letter headed Porirua Road, Wellington, August 13th, 1848 (from continuation of Sept. 6th.). Bodleian MSS. 4 Correspondence of A.H.C., ed. F. L. Mulhauser, Vol. 1, Letter 188 (Clough to Tom Arnold, Oxford, Novr 6th [1848]). 5 See J. A. W. Bennett, 'Sketch-Plan for a College', Landfall XIV 274. 6Poems by A. H. Clough (called by Oxford editors Ambarvalia 1850 reissue (A)): sole copy in Bodl. MSS. eng. poet. e.88. The poem appears on pp. 62-64; Clough, after an earlier adjustment of the title, has drawn lines over three pages and written 'delete the whole poem'. 7Richd. C .Trench's copy of Ambarvalia, from the Library of Charles Eliot Norton, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard: note by C.E.N. 8Houghton Library copy of Ambarvalia 1850 reissue (B), from the Library of Charles Eliot Norton: C.E.N.'s pencil note on title page. 9 and 10 Letters of Matthew Arnold to A.H.C., ed. H. F. Lowry, Letters 32 and 42. 11 A. C. Swinburne, Studies in Prose and Poetry. 154 12Letters of Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, ed. J.M.M. Letter of December 5, 1919. 13 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady. 14Clough papers, 1845 Notebook, Bodleian MSS. Unprinted poem beginning 'The Stars that in the East were dim'. Acknowledgements are owed to the authorities of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, the Bodleian Library, and the Houghton Library, Har- vard University, for permission to quote unpublished material.

Commentaries

GEORGE WHALLEY Canadian Letter

KINGSTON, Ontario, is at the north-east end of Lake Ontario at the place where Lake Ontario becomes the St Lawrence River. For a short period Kingston was the capital of Canada. But the site was too close to the wicked Americans for safety and a new town (called Bytown, now Ottawa) was invented inland to become the capital. This accident of history has left us with a splendid courthouse, customs house, and town hall, and a number of beautiful stone houses and farmhouses, mostly Georgian in spirit, dispersed among the clutter of a Victorian town with its more recent split-level outer fringe. Population about 50,000. Queen's University, founded in 1841, has about 3500 students, the number now increasing rapidly. There are also a number of Army establishments-Royal Military College, National Defence College, Army Staff College, Area Headquarters, RCEME School, and School of Signals; there are sizable industrial plants for nylon and aluminum, and a large complex of federal penitentiaries, and one excellent grocer's shop. One side of the city lies along Lake Ontario. When you look south- westerly towards Oswego (invisible), the eye catches first an absurd little island that looks like the desert mirage of an oasis; actually a 155 cluster of elms growing out of a gravel bank; Snake Island, popu- lated with cormorants, said to be the farthest place from the sea for cormorants to nest; beyond that, nothing but the sky because the lake is wide. But to the eastward, the beginning of the river is half stopped by large islands which in the next fifty miles downstream break up into the coniferous and granitic Thousand Islands. It is about a month since we last had snow. The days are mostly cool still, and until the end of May a clear night will almost certainly be frosty. But it is possible for the unwary to get a vicious sunburn on a clear day, and the trees are now coming into leaf. Until a fort- night ago we would hear regularly, at dawn and in the first dark, the geese flying north. The urgent and tempestuous sound of their wings and feathers and their crack-brained calling often woke us in the morning, but sometimes we would see them in full day, looking delinquent and in a hurry. Perhaps they prefer to avoid the wide water. Year after year, spring and autumn, they fly across the town, bound southerly before the winter, and at this time of year heading north for James Bay and the Eastern Arctic. The flightline varies so little that when a few skeins of geese pass over the commercial part of the town east of our house, we wonder whether they have mis- taken their way a little, being such excellent navigators. Some days ago the flights thinned out, then there were no more. The end of the migration of geese brings a momentary autumnal regret to the spring. Last year I was in Wisconsin at this season and saw wild swans for the first time, also bound for the Arctic-birds even more graceful, strong, and mysterious than Yeats makes them, when you actually see a hundred or more of them approaching to land. We never see the swans here, perhaps because there are no shallow thaw-ponds of the kind they need for resting places. I am told that it is the young who lead the flights, not the old and experienced. These rhythmic passages are a twice-yearly delight and reminder and accusation: these birds are the last free people in the world. I find it difficult to imagine a country where the leaves do not all fall together in one season, and where there is no clearly marked rhythm of winter and summer, warm and cold. But New Zealand was brought closer than it looks in the atlases by a visit paid to us by Antony Alpers. As guest of the Canada Council, he made his headquarters at the University of British Columbia and made visits to eastern Canada to meet students and to talk about his work. It 156 is not for me to introduce Antony Alpers to New Zealanders. He spent a week at Queen's University and spoke to students and professors about the problems and accidents of literary biography, to students about Maori legends, and to biologists and all corners about dolphins. What interested students most about Mr Alpers, they said, was that he was obviously not a 'professor'. A distinction so subtle and positive is interesting, if unnerving, to those who care to look at themselves through the wrong end of a telescope. Students hear a good many lectures in the course of an academic year; some of the lecturers are well-informed, a few are eloquent, one or two have charm. The students were making their distinction against that background. They sensed at once that a writer was 'different'; that his values were more direct if less judicious than the academic, that his way of mind though firm is heuristic; simplicity, courage, gaiety were the words that recurred. The writer, they guessed, had actually more at stake; the danger affected his attitude and poise. I found myself wondering whether, by contrast, academics are much capable of unaffected merriment, and whether we show often enough an un- abashed enthusiasm for the material they are working with. Self- conscious Canadians are passing (-again, perhaps?) through a phase of high cultural seriousness at present; we try to turn everything to an instructive or improving purpose, and naturally the tone at times becomes hectoring and punitive. Students (though too polite to say this plainly) felt at once that Antony Alpers, without intend- ing to do so, accused the professors of superficiality and earnestness, simply by what he was and how he worked and the way he looked at his work. As a memento of his visit, Antony Alpers left me a copy of the Caxton Press Printing Types: A Second Specimen Book, 1948. Typo- graphy is a relatively new extension of the Canadian conscience. There is now a professional association in Toronto, some of the designers very accomplished and with sound European experience. The most aggressive and prolific, as in any art, are inclined to be coarse or slick. But one at least-Allan Fleming-is scholarly and fastidious; profoundly inventive, his work is always marked by the refined simplicity of intelligence. He recently made a simple two- letter monogram for the Canadian National Railways which- repeated now all over the country-has set many people, as an alter- 157 native to debased heraldry, doodling in sans serif. But there has not yet been issued in Canada, as far as I know, a specimen book so affectionate, witty, and literate as the Caxton Book; nor indeed have I seen its like anywhere else. The Canadian Letter I wrote to Landfall in 1960 had its begin- nings in Saskatoon. Saskatoon has since seen the first official establishment of a principle long axiomatic with you: that government has a responsibility to see that all people are insured at reasonable rates against medical disaster. The Saskatchewan government passed legislation providing for a government medical insurance scheme, to which all citizens of the province were to contribute, and which all doctors were to serve. The medical profession reacted in a way that is allowed by law only to a union-they went on strike. The Saskatchewan government kept their heads and stuck to their guns and the doctors went grumbling back to work after a time though they continue to repeat on all possible occasions that the government scheme is 'a failure'. The medical profession, as publicly represented by the officers of the medical association, has left the unfortunate impression that-as a group-they are wealthy, voracious, intransi- gent, and in political matters ill-informed and a little naive. The campaign to resist legislation has been in progress for some time, and must have been quite expensive: it makes standard use of slogans, half-truths, and incomplete comparisons; and relies much upon ambiguous and often irrelevant repetition of such phrases as 'government interference', 'the doctor-patient relationship', 'the sacred right of the patient to choose his own doctor'. It is difficult not to regard the doctors' campaign as irrational and retrogressive; certainly it is not disinterested and has some of the desperation of a last-ditch stand. A social historian would find, I think, that the doctors' defiance of government in Saskatchewan and its plans to extend their defiance elsewhere, has taken some of the bloom off the carefully cultivated Madison-Avenue-TV-serial 'image' of the doctor as beneficent, wise, generous, self-denying, omniscient. It will be interesting to see the redeployment of the same motives under slightly different slogans now that Ontario is introducing legislation to pro- tect its citizens against medical disaster. In a 'free' society, all causes must sail under the flag of 'freedom', otherwise you could too easily tell your enemies from your friends. An interesting conflict arose this year between the recently formed 158 'private' television ring called CTV and the national system called CBC, with the independent BBG (Board of Broadcast Governors) acting as uneasy umpire between them. In Canada the word 'private' means 'devoted to profit'; that is, a 'private' broadcaster is one primarily interested in selling advertising, or one who uses his broadcasting facilities primarily as a medium for advertising. The logic of advertising is primitive and arcane and tends not to coincide with cultural or social values. One of the red-letter days in the calen- dar of Canadian Secular Rituals is the final play-off in professional rugby football for the Gray Cup in December. To see the Gray Cup Game is an imperative that nobody is allowed to decline: the broadcasting rights are therefore matter for close commercial scrutiny. Traditionally the CBC, as a national system, has carried the Gray Cup Game as a national necessity. This year CTV managed to out- bid the CBC for the television rights of the Gray Cup Game. CTV, who have only limited network facilities at their command, assumed that since all Canadians must have Gray Cup coverage the CBC would have to carry the Gray Cup Game complete; in this way CTV would secure that all the advertising built into the programme would be carried for them on the CBC Transcanada network, and the 'private' principle of 'advertising before all' would be endorsed by the austere and detached national corporation. The CBC were not content to have so obvious a pistol held to their heads. In the course of tense negotiations, the BBG instructed the CBC that they would have to take the broadcast complete in whatever form CTV gave it to them. The CBC replied-properly, many thought-that they were under no obligation to accept advertising negotiated by CTV and that they would if necessary, pick up the broadcast with their own equipment and rebroadcast it without the advertising. In the end the game was broadcast in two versions, one by CTV with advertising interspersed, one by the CBC with only 'courtesy advertising'. It is not difficult to imagine which version most people watched. Part of the difficulty is that the CBC, originally deriving all its revenue in the same way as the BBC from government grants and licenses, was at one stage instructed to earn from advertising some of the cost of its operations. This was announced as a temporary measure, but like the temporary government measure of systemati- cally diluting all whisky and other spirits, it has become permanent through failure to rescind. The 'private' broadcasters never tire of 159 complaining of unfair competition from the CBC: that is, the CBC is accused of taking advertising revenue that might otherwise go by default to private broadcasters. The association of private broadcasters now announce that they intend to bite the hand that has so far somewhat lavishly fed them-the BEG; they will, they say, receive direction from nobody; nothing but absolute freedom is good enough for them. But much of this is sheer fantasy, acceptable only to a bemused or brain-washed public. As far as broadcasting is concerned, there is no competition between CBC and CTV: private broadcasters do virtually no serious programming, certainly nothing that can compare with even the run-of-the-mill CBC productions. CBC spends money on programming and private broadcasters do not. The CBC is one of the few national efforts that has reached and maintained a level of excellence: some hold that it is just about the only distinctive Canadian achievement in the past quarter-century. When the CBC was founded, it was intended to help establish and clarify 'the national identity'. When the CBC introduced full-scale television, at very short notice some five or six years ago, the object was to secure the integrity of the Canadian air, which- in the definition of successive Royal Commissions-belongs to the Canadian people and not to the advertising industry. Private broadcasters, whose concern is for revenue and therefore wish to obliterate all national distinction, complain that the CBC receives money from state sources, is 'paid for' by the Canadian people, and therefore should not 'compete' for revenue with the 'private' broadcasters who have to 'pay their own way'. This argument neglects the fact that the Canadian people also pay for 'private' broadcasting by having to pay, one way and another, every penny that is spent on advertising. Some recent analyses of the hidden cost of 'free enterprise' in this area suggest that we pay a very high price for a very questionable product; and certainly everybody is obliged to pay unwittingly and indiscriminately which is not true of payments from state sources. When private TV stations were first licensed they made pronouncements, even promises, about serious and responsible programming; but to fulfil such a promise would be not only expensive but contrary to the basic principles of 'private' broadcasting. Advertisers know that they inflict incurable wounds by giving continuous offence; by definition the 'private' programme should be a kind of mild narcotic, rather like the doped coffee the Gestapo used to feed to its victims 160 between beatings. Underneath the high talk about free enterprise, freedom of the press, what the people want, and the virtues of competition, the question arises whether a civilized society will allow indefinitely the cynical and irresponsible exploitation of media of communication. This is not a question of censorship but of privacy and the right of protection against malicious nuisance. One quick and easy way of finding out whether a broadcaster is serious about broadcasting is to tax the advertising. Another related question is whether we can afford indefinitely the rising costs of the vast para- sitic industries of advertising and packaging. But there are no signs that we are ready, as individuals or as a society, to face these questions just yet. In a lapidary's workshop the other day I saw a notice: LOOK ALIVE. YOU COULD BE REPLACED BY A BUTTON. Only a low-grade intelligence can be replaced by a button; no machine will replace a man who can do anything better than a machine. We are not in danger of being 'taken over' by machines; but we are in danger of losing our way. We still have to find out how to use machines so that we don't waste intelligence, time, patience, and intuition; and then we have to find out how to use ourselves. I think there is a growing but subterranean awareness of issues as radical as this. During the recent federal election campaign, one had the feeling that some of the old unexamined notions of the virtues of political parties and partisan politics were being questioned. At some political meetings-not least of all in Kingston (I am embarrassed to report) when the Prime Minister was the main speaker- students made such an uproar that the speaker could not be heard. These unorganized outbursts were deplorable, a breach of good man- . ners, a defiance of elementary democratic principle. Yet they were widespread and apparently spontaneous and may represent something other than callous disrespect for propriety. Did they represent a growing suspicion that we are outgrowing the era of snake-cure sellers and the cult of the irrational? Have we grown disenchanted with the traditional circus performances-the clown and dancing dogs, the fat lady and the games of chance? Can it be that we would, on the whole, prefer-if we could get it-government by intelligence, skill, compassion? Kingston, 12 May

161 J. M. T H 0 M S 0 N Using New Zealand House

ON A suNNY May afternoon, with an unaccustomed warmth in the air as London emerged from its long hibernation, the Queen opened New Zealand House. Traffic poured down Haymarket and around into Pall Mall while streams of cars bearing red NZH windshield emblems left their passengers at the heavy suspended marble canopy that dramatically marks the main entrance. The building was beflagged with the stylishness that marks every aspect of its design, from door-handles to paving stones, while the huge sheets of glass of this essentially glass-clad building seemed even more attractive when catching the light of the sun.' Inside, the guests sat on their hired gold-painted chairs, until with a surge and flurry of people in the street, a small island of space was created, the Queen's car arrived and the ceremony began. Old New Zealand House in the Strand, which was opened by the Queen's grandfather nearly fifty years ago, stands empty, stripped of its fit- tings, bereft of its name. Gone for ever, we hope, are the faded potted ferns that haunted its windows, gone too the boxes of butter and apples, the happy sportsmen and similar remnants of the pas- toral idyll. For the new building, despite the injuries inflicted by the planning authorities, who have now made themselves ludicrous in the public eye, is a tremendous success and has already given New Zealand a reputation for discrimination. In the original architect's design of 1954 the podium was lower backs in the roof. At a press conference shortly before the building was opened, Sir Robert Matthew, the principal architect, outlined the building's history. 'I took the view that this was a site above all for what was then a tall building,' he said. 'At that time it seemed a new departure and we had to go through a number of discussions and battles.' The London County Council, although not actively hostile, wanted it to conform to their current regula- tions and the Fine Arts Commission turned it down because it could be seen from the Palace and the Parks. After reducing the 162 height of the tower and altering all external features so that they conformed to an artistically valueless scale of measurements a modified design was accepted. In 1955 Sir Robert Matthew was taken to New Zealand and the project moved a stage forward, with the complete support of the New Zealand Government. 'In 1956 there was a strange concatenation of events,' said Sir Robert. 'A decision was taken on New Zealand House and on Suez almost in the same day.' The following year he transferred his work on New Zealand House from his comparatively small Edinburgh office to London, greatly enlarging his staff. Work began on the site and after an unusually long and troublesome history, the building was completed. 'This has been an exceptional job,' Sir Robert concluded. 'The client has been possibly one of the most enlightened clients I've ever had. They gave us an entirely free hand from beginning to end. They simply asked for a prestige building that would mean something to New Zealanders in London. We've been extremely fortunate.' Those who secured the site and those who commissioned the eminent architect, supporting him with such force, deserve New Zealand's gratitude. It is natural now to consider what use will be made of this building, particularly for the arts, and ask what image of New Zealand it will project, for, regrettably, detailed comment on its many distinctive features must for the time being be left aside.1 For too long the New Zealand image overseas has been lacking in definition, that of a seemingly small, diffident country inhabited by gentle people, whose kindliness was the only visible part of a seemingly untapped reserve of goodness. Static and conventional images based on scenery and primary products must be replaced by ones that reflect more accurately the kind of New Zealand that is emerging. A great responsibility rests on the arts, for it is through them that a nation communicates its essential character. New Zealand House should now become not only a diplomatic and trade centre but also a centre for the arts. It is to be hoped that a comprehensive scheme will be drawn up, with the full eo-opera-

1These features would include the works of art commissioned by the New Zealand Government in association with the architects-John Drawbridge's intensely felt mural painting, John Hutton's engraved glass windows and William Gordon's glass construction and ceramic form. Inia te Wiata's carved figure has yet to be completed. 163 tion of those responsible in New Zealand such as relevant Govern- ment Departments and the newly constituted Arts Council, and of New Zealand House in London. The possibilities are innumerable but will include invitations to visiting New Zealanders to lecture; exhibitions of painting, pottery, architecture and the other visual arts; historical exhibitions; literary exhibitions, all of which would be closely linked with relevant activities in New Zealand wherever possible. The highest standards of design exhibition must be used, for lettering and graphic design throughout the building is so good that anything less would appear grotesque. All publications and publicity associated with the building should be co-ordinated and well designed, even down to the postcards which should be on sale inside. The small cinema will no doubt show documentary films and the Reception Hall suggests concerts and recitals. Other countries already do much of this. The American Embassy has regular exhibitions, concerts, lectures and films, the French, German and Austrian Institutes arrange concerts, but so far the Commonwealth contribu- tion to the London scene has been comparatively feeble and dif- fused. Design standards in New Zealand House must show themselves superior in every way to the New Zealand exhibit in the recently opened Commonwealth Institute. Admittedly the exterior of that tent-like structure is unfortunate and the interior quite lacking in purposeful form, but some countries have not suc- cumbed. By comparison with the vitality of the Australian exhibit New Zealand has responded conventionally. There are poor murals, the familiar emphasis on sheep, butter and meat, the inevitable forest fronds, dusted no doubt, and a reasonable diorama of Auckland, but in general this is a dispiriting use of one of the best areas of exhibition space to be found in the building. A similarly unfortunate display recently took place in the Tourist window of the new New Zea- land House. Two weakly coloured landscape photographs sat primly in their paste-board frames. Next to them an animated figure of a Maori girl moved her pois and swayed her hips. This cheap mockery, with its coy caption, 'See you in New Zealand', must be the most tasteless form of publicity the Tourist Department has ever produced, yet for over two weeks it advertised New Zealand in one of London's busiest and most influential thoroughfares. It has now been succeeded by a display advertising B.O.A.C. 164 To initiate a programme such as that outlined above, to integrate all the activities and keep alive and responsive the link with New Zealand, will probably require the creation of a new position at New Zealand House, that of a cultural affairs officer, whose specialized knowledge of the arts would need to be equalled by an intimate knowledge of both New Zealand and London. Such a position has already been found invaluable by many other embassies overseas. Above all, the vision that has brought about New Zealand House must now be carried through to another sphere. This is an urgent task but one which might reinvigorate our development as a nation.

JOHN STEELE The Opera Season

WITH La Boheme and The Magic Flute, the New Zealand Opera Company this year mounted its most ambitious productions yet. Musically, both operas were presented (I saw them in Dunedin) with an aplomb, flair and professionalism which enabled the performers to paper over any cracks without making it too obvious to the audience that anything had gone amiss. (The same unfortunately cannot be said of the stage crew.) There were no outstanding individual voices, certainly none of international calibre, but most were more than adequate for their roles. The general impression was one of freshness, ease and convincing dramatic ensemble. Neil Warren-Smith's Sarastro and Grant Dickson's Orator were particularly noble performances. Peter Baillie's highly-praised Tam- ino seemed to me rather too much on a level. Mozart's music needs more attention to phrasing than this, and Mr Baillie has the right vocal equipment to supply it. He might have taken a few hints from the dramatic conviction with which Rosemary Rogatsy sang the part t;>f Pamina. Ronald Maconaghie as Papageno knew how to make the audience laugh, and used his voice intelligently, 165 but I was constantly disturbed by the anachronistic quality of his jokes and gestures. This was largely the fault of the translator (not acknowledged in the programme). It is fatally easy to raise a laugh by means that have nothing to do with the opera; the result is neither true humour nor Mozart, who himself complained of Schi- ' kaneder's over-clowning the part. The musical side of Boheme was just as efficient: pleasant, easy singing with no sense of strain. Ramon Opie's natural lyric tenor lent great charm to the feckless Rudolph and he was competently partnered by Maria di Gerlando as Mimi. Neither singer was well cast physically, but their singing went some way to atone for this. The younger singers, Paul Person (Schaunard) and Ian Morton ( Colline) were perhaps more dramatically convincing. The ensemble work, chorus and orchestra in both operas first-rate. I would never have believed that such a small orchestra- as few as three first violins-could make such a sweet sound, especially in the notoriously ungrateful acoustics of a theatre. Let the conductors keep a wary eye on the brass section, however; there was a chronic tendency to lag. I thought that this effect might have been because of my placing in the theatre, but a second visit to The Magic Flute dispelled the notion. Georg Tintner conducted Boheme without a score, a rare feat in this part of the world. He knows and loves the music so thoroughly that he carried absolute conviction during the performance. Any demurral as to the musical quality of Puccini's scores usually invites cries of 'snob!'; that for me is sufficient to confirm my suspicion of it. Good box-office, no doubt, though my head keeps filling with impossible visions of Otello, Peter Grimes and even Die Meister- sznger. James Robertson's conducting of The Magic Flute was sensitive and admirably calculated. (He capped this the evening following the season by directing a stunning performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.) The Overture, which ought to have sounded tinny with such a small orchestra, came through with grace and power, enhancing the expectations of the audience. Even the toffee- eaters were momentarily hushed. The productions were, as has been hinted, lavish. The Bay- reuth 'flying-saucer' has come to stay, even if only in a pigmy version. There was an awkward conflict in styles in Raymond 166 Boyce's expressionistic Rudolph's attic and the naturalism of the following scenes. The 'flying-saucer' was too small to serve as the total floor space, and the sides open to the roof-tops merely seemed comic when Mimi complained of the cold. The snow scene raised spontaneous applause, but I was sitting too close for it to look convincing. Stefan Haag's interpretation of The Magic Flute brings in larger issues which I can barely touch on here. First let it be said that the effects that we saw in Dunedin seem to have been only an approximation to Mr Haag's intentions. The appalling number of disasters that threaten when complex sets, a strange theatre and local lighting technicians are thrown together were mainly avoided, but often only too narrowly. Projected scenery is excellent ill principle, but the projector must be mounted on a firmer base. Wobbling temples are a nuisance. Moving clouds, too, should move steadily and not in short bursts. In opera of this quality, such effects are legitimate only in so far as they enhance the music and explain the action. Where they are poorly or obscurely managed, they merely distract. The final transformation scene had its potentially overwhelming effect ruined by haphazard lighting. A gradual fade-in might seem more natural and easier to manage here, since Mozart allows sufficient time in the score. Yet despite such crudities as these, the misplaced humorous 'business' with the three Genii, and the frequent gratuitous ignoring or contradicting of Mozart's stage directions, the moral implications and sensuous beauty of the opera came through powerfully. The scene of the two Armed Men-Mozart at his most awesome-was one of the most impressive that I have ever experienced in the theatre. Here Mozart teaches us that love without courage and steadfastness is not enough. To conclude, congratulations must go to the New Zealand Opera Company for their enterprising and able performances. Most of my criticisms are on comparatively minor points of detail. The important things are that a tradition is being established, that the Com- pany's work grows in stature, and that audiences here are coming to realize that opera, far from being 'an exotic and irrational entertainment', is perhaps the most powerful form of dramatic art. The enlightened policy of commercial firms in subsidizing these productions fills one with great hope for the future. 167 COLIN BEER Joseph Banks: the Endeavour Journal

HisTORY seldom obliges us by conforming to neat and tidy divi- sions of time and space; the end of a century does not necessarily mark the end of an epoch, social and cultural movements often seem to be more constructions of the mind than reflections of the facts. At the beginning of his excellent introductory essay to The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771 1 the editor, Dr J. C. Beaglehole, reminds us how inadequate have been the attempts to label the eighteenth century with a simple tag. This period was, he tells us, the age of many and conflicting things: nevertheless it presents itself to most of us as a distinct period with an individual character. We seldom have trouble identifying an eighteenth century product when we meet one and so we persist in trying to typify it in a few words. The temptation appears in acute form when we meet Sir Joseph Banks. Although Banks was an example of what Dr Beaglehole calls 'one of the queer English excursions into individu- ality', a man whose tastes and doings were in many ways extraordin- ary by the standards of his time and position in society, his life and works, his character and beliefs, have the most authentic eighteenth century stamp. So much so that, at the end of his essay, Dr Beagle- hole suggests that we might do worse than speak of the Age of Banks. The period of Banks's life was, as far as science was concerned, a breathing space between revolutions; Copernicus, Galileo, and New- ton were behind it, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were yet to come. Not that science stood still at this time; the mid-eighteenth century has been described as 'almost unexampled in the vigour and advancement of science' (Bentley Glass). But science had become respectable, even fashionable. Patronage was eager for new discov-

1Public Library of New South Wales and Angus & Robertson. Two volumes. £6. 6. 168 eries but only of the sort it was used to and found entertaining, the sort that could be offered to it as humble tribute and bring it greater glory. Its last wish was to encourage any challenge to accepted philosophy. Joseph Banks was peculiar in being both patron and scientist, but his activities as a scientist seem rarely to have chal- lenged his outlook as a patron. The natural world was worth taking pains over only as long as it continued to be diverting, only so long as it continued to present novelty for the entertainment of the scientist or his audience. Banks tells us himself, in a letter quoted by Dr Beaglehole in his introduction, that the voyage round the world was really to be a grand alternative to the conventional Grand Tour. This voyage was undertaken (1768-1771) when Banks was in his twenties. The ship was H.M.S. Endeavour under the command of James Cook, and the expedition was one of discovery and scientific researches sponsored by the Royal Society and His Majesty's Government. Joseph Banks was already an F.R.S. (not for any scientific achievement), he was very rich and had powerful friends at the Admiralty; his plan that he, together with the botanist Daniel Solander and six retainers, should join in the adventure, met with no opposition despite its irregularity. The purposes of this voyage were two: first to observe the passage of V en us across the face of the sun, in the hopes that data would be collected enabling a more accurate estimate of the distance of the earth from the sun; second to explore the southern Pacific in search of a great Southern Continent. Belief in a Southern Contin- ent was popular at that time. In addition to rumours of sightings, and the arguments of geographers, there was the Augustan taste for classical balance, which would have disapproved of the distribu- tion of land masses in the then known world. (If the argument had been put in the form of a syllogism it might have gone something like this: gentlemen of taste are superior beings; gentlemen of taste prefer balanced proportions; the Creator is a superior being, perhaps even superior to gentlemen of taste; ergo the Creator must prefer balanced proportions and so a topheavy world is unthinkable.) When the Endeavour rounded the southern point of New Zealand, so proving that it was not the edge of a continent but an island, Banks confessed in his journal that he accepted this blow to the continent theory with 'much regret', that he still firmly believed 169 in the existence of a Southern Continent, that he had 'a prepos- session in favour of the fact which [he found) it difficult to account for'. The Endeavour left Plymouth in August 1768, stopped at Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, and Tierra del Fuego, rounded the Horn and pro- ceeded to Tahiti where the astronomical observations were made. After a stay of three months the voyage continued south to New Zea- land, then across the T asman and, by stages, up the east coast of Australia until a passage was discovered between the northern tip of Queensland and New Guinea. The ship stopped for refitting at Batavia (now Jakarta) and during this interlude malaria and dysentery struck a large proportion of the company. From the East Indies the ship sailed the conventional route home via the Cape and St Helena to land at Deal on 12 July 1771. The journal kept by Banks is a day to day record of events supple- mented with extended summaries of information, impressions and conclusions about each place visited. Day to day entries are kept up consistently although many of the uneventful days at sea get only a line. The five days at Madeira are compressed into a single entry because they 'were spent so exactly in the same manner'; at Batavia many days received no note, probably because of the sickness. Also on the last stages of the voyage days passed without entry; no doubt excited anticipation of triumphant return discouraged any sustaining of interest or effort. The entries suggest that Banks's interests varied in the course of the voyage. While at sea he notices the marine animals, particularly jellyfish ('blubbers' he calls them), fishes, whales and birds, and we probably have a fairly complete record of what was captured or seen. On land, however, biologizing takes second place to observations of people and their artifacts. This is most true of the Tahiti section. The long summarizing account of the Society Islands is headed 'Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands'; it contains no treatment of the animals and plants except in connection with food, building, or some other respect in which they were of use to the 'Indians'. The accounts of other places make larger mention of plants and animals; interest was clearly determined for Banks by the extent to which the 'productions' were actually or potentially useful to man, or by the extent to which they differed from anything previously known. 170 Banks's descriptions of the events of the voyage are frequently exciting. His accounts of moments of danger convey a sense of urgent immediacy and many of his passages of hastily composed description have caught his enthusiasm for strange things. The journal communicates little of more complicated or less lively emotions. Banks was, perhaps, incapable of deep feeling, or at least of express- ing it. The arrival of the ship at Batavia, with the remarkable record of only one life lost, was an achievement that should have set the seal of complete triumph on the expedition; the really dangerous part of the voyage was accomplished, ahead was only the well- worked trade route home. The disastrous consequences of the stay at Batavia (about a third of the ship's company was lost through sickness) seems so unfair that one marvels at the matter-of-fact tone in which Banks records death after death as the ship sails towards the Cape. The incident at Poverty Bay which caused the deaths of four Maoris is recorded as 'the most disagreeable day my life has yet seen, black be the mark for it and heaven send that such may never return to embitter future reflection.' But the effect of this is quite destroyed by immediate continuation of the paragraph with a sentence about a piece of pumice retrieved from the bay and the possible existence of a volcano in the vicinity. However, Banks's expressed sentiments of regret at this incident are consistent with his attitudes about any situation involving the possible injury of innocent people; he is always humane and toler- ant of strange ways. He is horrified, if not a little morbidly fascinated, to discover cannibalism amongst the Maoris and argues that: 'As for the flesh of men, although they certainly do eat it I cannot in my own opinion debase human nature so much as to imagine that they relish as a dainty or even look upon it as a part of common food.' His account of the Dutch administration in the East Indies contains an implicit condemnation of oppressive and retard- ing practices, although this would no doubt come easily to an eighteenth century Englishman when the offender was a rival colonial power. One also suspects that underlying the liberal attitudes, the tact- fulness and ease of his relations with all sorts of people, was the tacit assumption of his superior nature; he could safely treat others as equals because birth in the class of riches and privilege had so securely elevated him above them. This suspicion is no more cer- 171 tainly confirmed than by the note he made when Cook opposed the idea of taking a young Tahitian nobleman back to England with them: ... I therefore have resolvd to take him. Thank heaven I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to; the amusement I shall have in his future conversation and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me. That he believed his position in the order of mortals to be part of a supremely benevolent, supremely rational, Creation is hinted at by some rather Panglossian remarks on the lot of the Australian Aborigines. As a record of scientific investigations, the journal is at its best in the sections dealing with people. Whenever opportunity was offered, for what we would now call descriptive anthropology, Banks's interest was stimulated and persistently maintained. Here we get the fullest, most consistent, and detailed descriptions and the enthusiasm· caught in the writing usually keeps these descriptions from becoming tedious. Occasionally one wonders at Banks's failure to press obvious questions. For instance human sacrifice was practised by the Tahitians of that time and Banks came across evidences of it, yet there is only passing reference to it in the journal. This is especially puzzling in view of the intense interest he took in the cannibalism of the Maoris. Usually Banks is satisfied simply to describe what he sees. When he does speculate he is often led astray by preconceived notions, or bases generalizations on too little evidence. In both Tahiti and New Zealand he assumed that society was organized on a feudal system and this led him to discover or postulate the existence of kings where there were none. The closest Banks comes, in the journal, to an accurate and important original induction is on the subject of language in the South Seas. He collected samples from all the places visited and, by comparing these with each other and with lists com- piled by earlier voyagers in the same part of the world, he realized that the several languages were related, probably by descent from a common parent tongue. This was a forward-looking discovery on 172 the part of Banks for which there was not a great abundance of models; Sir William Jones did not do the same thing for European languages until1786. As a biologist Banks is not so impressive. Sir Humphrey Davy, Banks's successor as president of the Royal Society, described him as 'a tolerable botanist, and generally acquainted with natural history'. The evidence of the journal suggests that this is a fair judgment. Dr Beaglehole points out that Banks's enthusiasm for science wavered as soon as it was called on to go through the drudgery re- quired to make a promising sketch into a finished piece of work. In his summing up of Australia, Banks explains a rather one-sided treatment of the botany by saying: 'I have been rather particular in mentioning those [plants] which we eat hoping that such a remembrance might be of use to some or other into whose hands these papers may fall.' But the brilliance and detail of a few of his descriptions of animals suggest that, in the main, his interest was not fully aroused in this direction. Also he rarely reports being moved by nature in the way that Gilbert White and, later, the romantic poets, so often were. A delightful exception is his description of waking one morning to the singing of bellbirds in Queen Charlotte Sound : ... the numbers of them were certainly very great who seemd to strain their throats with emulation perhaps; their voices were certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable to which maybe the distance was no small addition. The accepted reasons for doing natural history in the eighteenth century were at once practical and pious; increase of knowledge would give man greater control over nature and at the same time fill him with admiration for the rationality and goodness of the Creator. Banks seems rarely to have questioned the accepted reasons for things. It is clear that he hoped that his work would be of practical value. Although there is no indication in the journal that he was a very religious man, it is clear from the way in which he pursued his study of nature, and from his rare excursions into philosophizing on the subject, that he also saw his task as filling in the gaps in our catalogue of the creatures in Creation's plan. He and 173 Solander were searching only for variety and novelty. As soon as they had collected samples of all the varieties to be found in a place it was time to move on. Banks's curiosity rarely extended to such questions as why certain forms of organisms occur where they do, how they get their food, escape their enemies, or reproduce themselves. He admired 'the infinite care with which providence has multiplied his productions suiting them no doubt for the various climates for which they are designed', but this was an accepted belief that he made no attempt to illustrate by study or examples. This limiting of curiosity to the variety of forms and types to be found in nature was also encouraged by recent advances in system- atics. Solander was a student of Linnaeus and Banks's scientific training had likewise been along Linnaean lines. Linnaeus had done a great service to biology by bringing systematic order into it; his aim was to arrive at a 'natural' classification of organisms by means of the Aristotelian procedure of logical division, a method which was supposed to reveal the 'natures' or essences of things. This method implied that there are discrete classes of things in nature corresponding to a fixed number of essences. The task of the natural philosopher was to sort these out. The collections made on the voyage of the Endeavour were to provide added material for the more complete accomplishment of this task. But Banks had also read Buffon. Buffon was highly critical of the Linnaean system. He believed in a principle of continuity in nature according to which there is continuous gradation in the variations of forms, and hence no objective units apart from individual organisms (Histoire naturelle, I, 1749 ). This notion of continuity was one of the principles underlying the conception of the Great Chain of Being which was so widespread in the eighteenth century (see A. 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 1936 ). Buffon modified his position to admit the existence of species, in a later volume of the Histoire (1765) which came out in time for Banks to have read it before the voyage, but there remained a fundamental contradiction between the thought underlying the Chain of Beings and the rational basis of Linnaeus's system. We find these two ways of thinking running happily, side by side, through Banks's journal. Pen- guins are referred to as intermediate forms between birds and fish and hence 'truly what the French call Nuance'. There are several references to the Chain of Beings which indicate that Banks accept- 174 ed this theory of nature without question. The contradiction either did not occur to him or he did not think it worth bothering about, but in this he had the company of the majority of the biologists of his day. Banks was not a profound or original thinker. In spite of his unique opportunity, Banks is not remembered for any important original contributions to natural history. His contemporary stay-at-home, Gilbert White, achieved much more. Banks appears extremely light-weight when compared with successors like Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin or T. H. Huxley. When he and Darwin went on their voyages, they were both young men in their twenties, they were both wealthy, both good observers, and their voyages touched at some of the same places. The rest is contrast. Darwin's curiosity about nature is consistent, genuine and profound. In a letter from South America he wrote: I might collect a far greater number of specimens of invertebrate animals if I took up less time over each: but I have come to the conclusion, that two animals with their original colour and shape noted down, will be more valuable to a naturalist than six with only dates and place. Although he claimed to be working to 'true Baconian principles' he rarely reported a strange fact without speculating on the explanation. At the same time he remained dissatisfied with any generalization or theory that was not supported by as much fact as possible and he always argued with consistency and vigour. The Voyage of the Beagle can still be read as science and some of the ideas outlined in that work, notably the theories on coral reefs, have not been superseded. In many ways the contrast between these two men is typical of the differences between eighteenth century and nineteenth century biology (in this connection it is perhaps significant that the word 'scientist' was apparently not coined before 1840). Banks continued to dabble in natural history until the end of his life but his most important work was in the practical and public sphere; he concerned himself with the establishment of botanic gardens, and museums, the running of the Royal Society, the culti- vation of George the Third and 'Ladies of Pleasure', advising about transplanting bread-fruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, and about setring up a penal co1ony at Botany" Bay. He shone as an eighteenth century 'organization man'. Apart from the pages of his journal 175 that Hawkesworth used in compiling the account of the Endea- vour voyage, and a couple of slight papers on diseases in plants, nothing of Banks's scientific work was published in his lifetime. The shortcomings that one may find in Banks as a scientist should not detract from the important part he played in the voyage. His charm and compelling ease with people suited him to the role of public relations officer which he seems to have carried out with great success, particularly in Tahiti where the company relied on the natives for a large proportion of its food. Also he exercised an important influence on Cook by bringing a measure of educated polish to the equipment of that rather stiff and unlettered man of action. Cook's journal for the early part of the voyage has many sections cribbed straight from Banks (in his edition of Cook's Endeavour journal-Journals of Captain James Cook, Vol. I, Hakluyt Society-Dr Beaglehole has printed parallel passages from the two journals) and many others are modelled on Banks's style. As the voyage progressed Cook became more and more independent in his writing; he acquired facility of expression and learned something of the 'philosopher's' outlook on the world from his association with his scientific colleague, and we are to be grateful for this enrichment. Apart from a fragment from a journal kept by Moorhouse, the Endeavour's surgeon, and records of the short visits made by the Frenchmen Surville and Marion du Fresne, we have only the Endea- vour journals of Banks and Cook to tell us at first hand about New Zealand in the eighteenth century. For this reason alone the present authoritative edition of Banks's complete journal is welcome.2 The edition is admirably illustrated, mainly with reproductions of the drawings of Sydney Parkinson, Banks's draughtsman on the voyage. The editing is a model of thoroughness, scholarship and taste. In addition to the biographical essay there are a history of the original manuscript and its copies, five appendices including interpolations in the journal, alternative versions of accounts in the journal, correspondence about the voyage and about Banks's abortive plan to go on Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. There

2Portions of the journal have been previously published, including Professor W. P. Morrell's edition of the section on New Zealand-reviewed in Landfall, December 1959. 176 are a very comprehensive index and very full notes. Two points I would query: first, in Vol. II, p. 142, there is an unexplained contradiction between a note which says that Cook forbade his men to fell trees when ashore in New Guinea, and Banks's entry which implies that trees were not cut down because the men had no axes with them; second, the note on the bellbirds of Queen Charlotte Sound makes no comment on Banks's information that these birds were 'silent all day like our nightingales'-if this was an accurate report bellbirds have changed their behaviour since the eighteenth century. Dr Beaglehole is to be congratulated on his achievement. Had Joseph Banks possessed some of his thoroughness and scholarship he would have been a greater man.

W. H. OL IVER Richmonds and A tkinsons

TAKE a group of intelligent men and women, set them down in a colony, have them write to each other and to their friends frequently and at length, equip them with experiences which range from bush-clearing to the premiership, arrange that many of them shall live a long time-do all this, and you will have something like the papers of the Richmond-Atkinson family connection, recently edited by Dr Guy H. Scholefield.1 The two fat volumes that result-about 1400 pages of text-will, whatever else they may lack, not be without interest. The range of experience represented here is very considerable, and the intelligence brought to bear on that experience almost invariably acute. There may have been stupid members of the connection, but if so their letters are not here. Whether it is a matter of selling butter, timber or strawberries, or of investing in sheep, or of

1The Richmond-Atkinson Papers. Edited by Guy H. Scholefield. Two volumes. Wellington: Government Printer. £10. 10. 177 processing ironsands, or of editing a newspaper, or of setting up as a lawyer, or of a dozen other ways of earning a living, the appropriate Richmond or will have something relevant to say. Or it may be the problems of educating girls, or the need to talk a daughter out of romantic W ertherism, or the need to find a career for a young man; it may be Clough's poems, landscape painting, Darwinism, sacerdotalism, revivalism or Unitarianism; it may be the character of Grey, of Vogel, of Fox, of Stout, of Sed- don, of Hadfield, of Selwyn, of FitzGerald, or of each other- there will be some point in whatever is said. Or yet again, to come to what is after all the core of the multi- farious publication, it may be the hopes, ideas, frustrations, hatreds and hysterias of Taranaki settlers faced with (as they thought) treacherous enemies and irresolute authorities. This last theme domin- ates the larger first volume, and gives it at times the urgency aPd sweep of an immensely detailed novel; it is not without its place in the second volume when from time to time members of the clan turn their minds back to their chequered role in this chequered history of racial conflict. The two families settled at first in Taranaki, and though many of them left sooner or later, they remained involved with that luckless and frustrated province. Jane Maria Richmond, who married Arthur Atkinson, lived in New Plymouth under 'the shadow of the tomahawk' while her husband and his brother Harry served with the volunteers, thirsted for Maoris to kill, cursed the government and the British regulars. She was, if anything, more ferocious than they. Her brothers took to politics (so did her husband, but less notably): Christopher William, who married Emily Atkinson, as Minister for Native Affairs, Henry (a little later) as Superinten- dent of Taranaki, James Crowe as (in the 1860s) Minister of Native Affairs. William, a man who seemed born for responsibility and cau- tion, was the least bloodthirsty; Henry and J ames, with pen and tongue, cried out for war. The ordeal of T aranaki was a crucible in which they were all tested; whatever one may think of their judg- ments-whether they were fair to Grey, fair to the Maoris, or fair to themselves-the test showed them all to be vehement, tough- minded, self-reliant, adequate to the context of personal tribula- tion. Wise and forbearing they certainly were not, not even the cau- tious William who disagreed with his brothers chiefly over the pace 178 and the pretext of the anti-Maori policy rather than its direction and anticipated results. They had, after all, come as far as New Zealand to improve their lot, not to be frustrated by niggers (sic), officials, politicians, mis- sionaries and professional soldiers. They had not come because they faced acute hard times in England. They were, rather, opting out of the rat-race. William Richmond, as a London barrister, had built up a fair practice, but little of it was paying; James was a railway engineer facing a railway slump; Henry had the decision of a career in front of him; the Atkinson family construction business had declined, and Harry and Arthur would have to make their own way. New Zealand was not a necessity, but they hoped it would prove a highroad; they might have done reasonably well in the old world, but they hoped to do very well in the new. It was a pity, for such ambitions, that they picked their province so badly; no one had told them of Wiremu Kingi. They brought, of course, a good deal more than their worldly ambitions: their intelligence, their education, their courage, their adventurousness, their capacity for hard work, their good opinion of themselves, their unshakeable self-assurance. They were not, in E. H. McCormick's phrase, 'Happy Colonists', and having no non- sensical idealism about them (or certainly none that their writings here show) they were not too easily put off. They expected a good opportunity, not a utopia; if they were checked, they turned upon their adversaries with venom, and they tried their hand at something else. Their T aranaki land purchases, for instance, were long useless for farming; but William put money into a South Island sheep station, drew the stipend of a Minister of the Crown and then the salary of a judge. Government posts, for example in the Native Department, journalism, a haulage business, selling butter, cheese, meat and crops, politics, teaching school, selling paintings and prac- tising law-all these and much else helped to make ends meet. And further, it seems clear, though the detail is lacking, they each had a little capital and the income from it to fall back upon. They were resourceful, and though they were distinctly middle class, they were not simply gentleman colonists; their hands must have been frequently calloused and work-stained. Later in their lives some of them were charged on the hustings with being members of a 'ruling family', but these letters show how 179 little conservative they were. The Richmonds were Unitarians, and faithfully reflect the traditional radicalism of Dissent. William had been touched by Christian Socialism and F. D. Maurice before he left England (but not enough stuck to permit him to see any good in the Liberalism of the nineties-he reverted to a more typical Spencerian anti-state individualism). Jane Maria rejoiced when the women got the vote. The Atkinsons were more 'orthodox' in religion, but less so in politics: Harry was, according to his brother-in- law (William again) wrong in thinking that the state could do everything. The currents of nineteenth century perplexity flow freely in their writings: the implications of Darwin for the Book of Gen- esis, whether matter and energy are to be considered distinct, whether Divine Providence may be still believed in and if a rational religion is possible. They bred some notables too-a temperate advocate, a painter, a poet, a professor. They were open to ideas, they embraced novelty, they played a large part in affairs. Why then were they, by and large and especially in politics, so significantly ineffectual? The most eminent politicians were, of course, William Richmond and Harry Atkinson-and how little they were able to accomplish, either for good or ill, compared with Grey, McLean, Vogel, Reeves, Seddon. Richmond, in 1865, rejected Stafford's invitation to re-enter politics, with the reflection 'I do not feel myself to have ideas likely to influence the course of events, nor powers to give effect to my ideas, the times seem to me too strong for the men-at least too strong for me.' (ii 195). No doubt he was reflecting upon the native problem, with which he had himself grappled only a few years previously, but the words might stand as a political epitaph for the whole family group, with the possible and problematical exception of Harry Atkinson. For Richmond as Native Minister in the late fifties appears, in these papers, as an intelligent but rather less than decisive man, hemmed in by frustrations. He was caught between too many fires: a clueless Governor, Gore Browne; a slippery premier, Stafford; an incoherent House of Representatives; an ada- mant Maori will to resist; a stream of pressures towards a showdown from his T aranaki connection. He has been accused, by historians from Rusden to the present day, of edging Kingi on to the trap, and then springing it-all at the behest of his Taranaki relatives and friends, and also to line his own pocket. The papers here do not support the charge-whether they are full enough is another matter. 180 He, like his connection, was keen enough on a showdown, but he saw how difficult it would be to carry the whole colony, and especially to carry the Imperial Government. And, lawyer-like, he wanted to preserve at least the appearance of the decencies: 'Should anything happen,' he wrote in February 1858, when the land-seller Ihaia was taking refuge from his enemies, 'what the magistrates have to do in order to place the Government technically right is to bring the contumacy of the Natives up to the point of actual defiance of the Government, i.e. High Treason.' (i 353) But there is here nothing to connect him, in any conspiratorial way, with the Waitara offer, and its consequences. Dr Sinclair's pointing of the finger at Donald McLean remains the most likely account. Rich- mond was simply too bound up in formalities and too bewild- ered by difficulties to make a good conspirator-or, as his relations pointed out to him, to be a good agent for T aranaki ambitions. His judgeship, his reading, his lecturing and his philosophizing, were agreeable alternatives to a political complexity with which he knew he could not cope. The beginning of the 1870s sees the political eclipse of all the Richmonds and the Atkinsons, except the connection's supreme man of action, Harry Atkinson, that fierce militiaman and Defence Minister. He was the least reflective of the group, but idolized as their chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. (I could not be sure without a lot of arduous page turning, but I think the phrase was actually applied to him by one of the writers.) All except he were swept into political insignificance by the tide of Vogelite expansion, a colony-wide mood which they condemned without exception. Harry condemned it too-but if he was tough enough to last he was also flexible enough to change. He joins the despised Vogel in 1874. Perhaps 'despised' is a little strong, but only a little: the family was not antisemite, but they didn't actually care much for Jews. From then to 1890 he is prominent in politics, as premier, treasurer, opposition leader, and not entirely without effect. Certainly he did not give any decisive leadership in the Parihaka episode: the cruder Bryce called the tune. He wouldn't touch his old associate V ogel in the mid-eighties, no doubt on the once bitten principle. In his final ministry (1887-90) he became a protectionist, began to look at the colonial economy as a unit, but was too unwell to do much more. 1890 swept him, and his kind, finally away; political commen- 181 tary henceforth is confined to the antics of a second-generation pro- hibitionist, twitters of condescending alarm as rough tradesmen and unlettered party-men beat cultivated Richmonds and Atkinsons at the polls, expressions of after-the-deluge scorn from William Rich- mond as women get votes and arbitration is brought in (but J ane Maria rejoiced over the former), an occasional wisecrack at the expense of Seddon and Reeves. It all matters very little, for the country was clearly going a different way, a way which had left the Richmonds and the Atkinsons, for all practical purposes, high and dry. These men, then, even the most notable, were never the pace-set- ters; always they trailed after events and after more resolute men. There is a streak of irresolution in them all, in all except the indom- itable Jane Maria who could, had the enfranchisement of women occurred earlier, surely have outfaced even Seddon. They were close to being dabblers in politics: James Richmond had his painting, Henry his theories about the nature of matter and energy, and Harry Atkinson spent, for a leading politician, rather too much time and energy on his farm. Reeves, McKenzie, Ward, Ballance, Seddon, the new political generation, were simply more devoted politicians, quite apart from any other considerations. To concentrate thus upon politics gives an unbalanced impression of the compilation, but as it is very large (in another journal this article might be headed 'The Most Unreviewable Book I Have Ever Met') one can review only what one can remember. I am left, chiefly, with an impression of talented ineffectuality: Mat- thew Arnold's Shelley, perhaps, but we are not dealing with angels, and the void was hardly luminous. Other readers will remember other things. The feminist might look at Jane Maria, and she is, for that matter, the most forceful person in the whole book. Emigration was an adventure for her; the T aranaki troubles a trial to be faced; the Maoris an enemy to be beaten: New Zealand became a home and Europe was emphat- ically not a lost Eden to be grieved over. There is not a letter from her pen which does not sparkle with vitality. The art historian could look to James Richmond, the friend of Gully and no mean landscapist, a man who acclaimed the New Zealand light, but did not seem to have thought it might require any change in traditional painting techniques. He possessed, to the full, the resourcefulness of 182 the clan. Few people, of any age or place, could support themselves and educate their children while in Europe by selling paintings, and constructing railways in Algeria. And the literary historian could take careful note of their reading; many of the notable Victorians are there. He would find William Richmond reading Clough to the chairman of the W estland County Council. He would find Arthur Atkinson, one day in April 1860, taking great pleasure in the thought that the rumours of peace with the Maoris are sure to prove baseless, and the next day reading 'with very great satisfaction Mill's "Essay on Liberty".' Comments of any kind must be tentative, for the editor gives no guide to the relationship the published selection bears to the full collection. True, Dr Scholefield does aver that 'mere gossipy passages' have been left out, and also lets drop the fact that 'much more than one per cent' of the full collection is reproduced. That is very little to go on; as an editor Dr Scholefield is self-effacing to the point of culpability. The reader should at least be told, first, the principle of selection employed, and second, the scope of the compilation. That there is much of eminent interest left in the full collection is made clear by Dr Scholefield himself. He points out (ii 80) that Arthur Atkinson made a particular study of Pai Marire, he indicates descriptions of ceremonies and records of songs and incantations. But only a few, and rather sparse, descriptions of ceremonies follow, and no songs and incantations at all. Again there is a highly interesting correspondence between Frederick Weld and Wil- liam Richmond (ii 450 et seq.) about the history G. W. Rusden was writing while in government service in Tasmania where Weld was Governor. There is reference to four Weld letters, and only three appear; Weld, further, refers to copies of R us den's letters which he encloses, and these do not appear. Perhaps they did riot survive into the twentieth century; if so, the least of an editor's duties, when dealing with such interesting material, would be to say so. Rusden, after all, played a large part in fashioning that version of the W aitara-T aranaki story which assigns to William Richmond a sinister role. Dr Scholefield, though industrious, is not a faultless editor-there is probably no such person, and anyone who has himself transcribed MS documents will find the spirit of forgiveness in him. But some aspects of his editing may cause the reader alarm. When, 183 for instance, he deals with a journal jointly kept by William and Emily Richmond soon after their marriage, he gets the two writers thoroughly confused, so that (i 170) William appears to be complaining about his own sartorial irregularities, and (i 176) anxious that no one should smoke a pipe in 'my nice rooms'. An error like this can be detected from the printed material alone; the reader is left uneasily wondering what else a thorough acquaintance with the original documents would throw up. Nor is Dr Scholefield's use of dots and dashes beyond reproach. When William Richmond tells his wife a story about some fellow passengers to New Zealand who have been reduced to taking service with the Bowens, and are then embarrassed to have William a guest in the Bowens' house, they are discreetly indicated as 'Mr and Mrs A--' (i 321). When a government servant has an 'unfortunate relapse into a degrading vice' he is disguised as R-- (i 328). A luckless fellow court-martialled after being eight times drunk on duty is represented simply by a dash (i 692). Does it hurt anyone to know that the people in question are called Arthur, Ritchie, Inch? There is not a great number of such instances await- ing detection on the surface of the documents here printed, but one is left wondering what may be in omitted portions of letters, and letters which do not appear at all. Dr Scholefield may have considered it his duty to edit these papers in a way which could give offence to no man, living or dead. But if so, he should have told us. It should be added, too, that the volumes are, perhaps inevitably in view of their size, sprinkled (but not liberally) with those small errors which no editor can completely avoid-literals, probable errors in transcriptions, and the occasional number in the text without a footnote. The index, it must be said, is a triviality. It seems at least likely, further, that a more diligent hunt would have enabled the editor to identify a greater number of proper names-sometimes (and surely this should never happen) people are identified not upon their first appearance, but upon their second or third. Sometimes, too, there are documents for which one is wholly unprepared and which remain wholly inexplicable-often they seem to have an obscure connection with the business activities of some member of the families. As far as my limited checking enables me to form a conclusion, it suggests that Dr Scholefield is an accurate tran- 184 scriber, though not invariably a user of dots to indicate omissions, especially if these fall at the end of documents. Though my acquaintance with the documents is limited, it is sufficient to compel me to add a horrified note about the present condition of the originals. This condition amounts, in some cases, to their partial destruction. I can only make this clear by describing the present appearance of a few papers. Take one of the letters cited above, that concerned with the degrading vice. The original in the collection appears to be a carbon copy in a letter-book of William Richmond's letter to J. Flight, a New Plymouth Magistrate. The top of this document is ornamented with three pencil crosses, two in red, one in black; the word 'Auckland' in the date-line is crossed out in pencil, and the phrase 'C W R (Auck) to J Flight (NP)' inserted (in pencil) in its place; the number '152' is also inserted in red at the top. A pencil line to the left margin appears at the beginning of the second paragraph. A black cross and a tick are to be seen at the bottom, while the concluding matter-'! am dear sir' etc-is crossed out with two large pencil marks. The letter immediately following, which does not appear in the collection, is scored over with a diagonal pencil line through each page. One which occurs a little later, to H. B. Gresson, has the date line and the address crossed out, sundry individual letters written over in pencil, and the concluding sentence crossed out (this crossing out is not indicated by dots in the published version, i 390). In these, at least, the effect of vandalism has been diminished by the use of a pencil. Elsewhere ink is employed. Examples can be seen in a couple of letters from Flight to Richmond, of July and August 1860 (i 620, 624-5). In the first place they are pasted into a volume in a manner which obscures the words on the left-hand margin; in the second, words and passages have been crossed out in blue ink (the documents themselves are written in blue ink); in the third the usual embellishments in red pencil are there. Again, there is the letter about the court-martial, referred to above. This is in H. A. Atkinson's none too legible hand; it is in ink, and it is so written over in ink (letters which were scrawled in the original have been filled out) that parts of the original are, if my eyesight is any guide, obliterated beyond recognition. Now Dr Scholefield is not the first editor of the papers as a collection. But the insertions and deletions I have indicated all corres- 185 pond to the appearance of the letters in the two volumes under review. It is possible that Dr Scholefield followed the insertions and deletions of an earlier editor. All of them appear to be instructions to a transcribing assistant; this conclusion is borne out by two phrases inserted at the head of a long letter from Henry Sewell to C. W. Richmond of 30 August 1857: 'Don't copy this', 'Type from duplicate'. I spent only a couple of hours with these documents-but those hours were marked by mounting horror. The last volume I looked at contained early drafts of letters sent by C. W. Richmond. They were, as discarded drafts commonly are, characterized by words and passages scored out in ink. But by this time I was thoroughly unprepared to decide whether the deletions were those of the original writer, or of a subsequent editor. I thought, ruefully, of the impec- cably preserved documents I had used in the British Museum and the Public Record Office. Can one take consolation in the hope that professional standards have advanced sufficiently in New Zealand to make it impossible that such mutilation of documents will occur again? One reads these documents with enjoyment; one regrets that Dr Scholefield is not a better editor; one will, if one is a teacher, mark passages for subsequent use. And one will wonder what the whole enterprise is designed to effect, what audience is aimed at, what, beyond a reverential (but insufficiently reverential) gesture towards the past and a family, is the motive behind the undertaking. The research student will still go to the papers to encounter the frustrations Dr Scholefield has designed for him; the general reader will find the volumes a bit too heavy for armchair reading. No doubt those jackals, the dealers and collectors, will snap them up and wait for their ten guineas to turn into twenty. It is quite pleasant to have the collection on one's shelves, but one can think of half-a-dozen other volumes, in all occupying no greater number of pages, which one would prefer to have. One is the letters of Jane Maria Rich- mond; another is papers on the Maori Wars. And others are bio- graphies: of William Richmond, of James Richmond, of Harry Atkinson. And a folio of drawings and paintings by J ames and his daughter Dorothea Kate. And the result of the ruminations of a literary historian upon the reading of these people. In short, it would have been better if documents had been treated as documents-that 186 is as ore which historians can refine into history. And, most emphat- ically, one could wish that the documents had been handled with respect.

Reviews

NEW ZEALAND POETRY YEARBOOK. Vol. 10. 1961-2. Edited by Louis Johnson. The Pegasus Press. 10s. 6d. ALcocKj Adcock to Witheford. The a priori doubts raised by looking at Louis Johnson's decade of Poets' Directories are many and large. How could little Staaten Land possibly be so lush in bards? There are hardly thirty publishable poets per year in the Home Counties of England, let alone in the whole of France, Germany or Italy. Again, how could they write so much? It must be gruel of the wateriest sort. As for the editor, he must at best be a well-meaning gull. The N.Z. Listener reviewer quite obviously thought as much. I am not so sure. The quantity of art practitioners and their work, however inordinate, is an irrelevance. The literary historians of some passionless ocean-farming future may regard the local ,flowering as another Quattrocento, another Elizabethan Age. Nor, to judge by the ampleness of critical frames of acceptance, could one take the low overall quality of the poetry for granted. Between such local critics as Mr Curnow and Mr Smithyman, nearly all the Yearbook poets would be able to find a champion. Even between, say, Blackmur and Thwaite abroad, there are enough criteria to tickle all but our smallest fish. The editor? Well, he includes. And that is perhaps better than the idiosyncratic exclusion one finds in other equally expansively titled anthologies. The rubbish to be found in the Yearbooks is mostly arguable rubbish. If Louis Johnson excludes anything-leaving aside the casualties of bardic feuding-it is only bad free verse and what Mr Smithyman calls 'testaments of passion'. He certainly is kind to a fault. Some of the little pieces are ectoplasmically tenuous. In their own timid terms, though, they are often immaculate. It is not the 187 editor's culpability that their authors fail to put on weight. Nor that some of his contributors keep losing weight and finally disappear. If one has to argue about poetry, then it seems to me more instructive to argue over what is poor or mediocre rather than what is good. One has to define the effect of a merely competent poem in terms of what it does not do, and this is less likely to be subjective than an account of one's response to a good, or even a very bad, poem. Without partisanship, no one, I think, could accuse the Yearbooks of being monstrously unrepresentative of the poetry of their respective years. The only poets seriously under-represented are Charles Brasch, Ruth Dallas, and latterly, perhaps, C. K. Stead. If one knows this, I think it becomes possible to see the Yearbooks as a kind of mild fairground mirror of current New Zealand poetry. And, simply because of their inclusiveness, they provide a splendid text for critical dialectics. To me, the most obvious feature of this ten-year selection is its evenness. There are few eclats, hardly any pretentious flops. This in itself is a striking phenomenon and an open invitation to argument. However, it is not to be explained by the 'personalist, individual' trend which the editor detects, nor by Kendrick Smithy- man's more subtle discerning (in Mate) of a polarization between a romantic sincerity and an academic obliqueness. All English-speaking criticism has been obsessed with the dis- tinctions to be drawn between 'romantic' and 'classical'. Of course, this is a valid exercise and is a manner of describing the products of two kinds of human temperament. However, the 'romantic'j'classical' (add 'academic' and 'metaphysical') opposition is not, I believe, the most fundamental, nor the most fruitful, referential apparatus for discussing poetry on a world, a multi-lingual, basis. An Eng. Lit. alumnus has to read only a little into the poetic product of Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, or contemporary France to be at a complete loss for critical co-ordinates. I mention this because the attenuation of the usual influences and the hypertrophy of some unusual ones, added to a general cultural dislocation, have lent recent New Zealand poetry some of the characteristics of non-English poetic writing. It is the random, unintentional appearance of these characteristics that is largely responsible for the lack of hills and valleys which I notice so particularly in the Yearbooks, in Landfall itself, and in individual collections. The 'hills and valleys' pun may be significant in itself, of course. 188 The two great streams in all the major art forms are also those which are found in poetry. They constitute, I am sure, the proper opposition by which all poetry may be meaningfully discussed. While romantic and classical are the manifestations of distinct temperaments, the great division into associative and dissociative is derived from the actual modes of operation of the human consciousness itself. In art, one speaks of figurative and non- figurative. In music, one has Schoenberg and Stockhausen, development versus juxtaposition. In poetry, there is analogy and there is gnosis. Both 'romantic' and 'classical' poetry draw freely on both, so that in the English tradition the division is less clear. In America, perhaps, one could oppose, crudely, Robert Frost with John Berryman, or the later Robert Lowell with the earlier. The analogist draws on the mind's capacity for apprehend- ing reality in terms of a logically connected image or images. The gnostic, by contrast, uses the anterior, primitive mode of apprehension, in which the reality is the unverbalized centre of a cluster of psychic fragments. One might even say that the pre- eminence of English-language poetry in world literature comes from its characteristic blending of both modes. All the same, the finest exemplar of this blending was a Frenchman, a poet whose influence here is, unfortunately, negligible in comparison with the baneful Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Rilke, Burns, W allace Stevens complex which seems to rule the roost. I refer to Paul More commonly in the non-English-speaking parts of the world, one finds poetry more or less pure analogy, pure gnosis. Pas- ternak, Bonnefoy. Quasimodo, Neruda. Seferis, Reverdy. New Zealand poets, I suspect, have lost the firm anchorage in the temperament which is the willy-nilly blessing of the direct English poetic heritage. They seem unreceptive to the releasing effect which forerunners like Wilfred Owen and Edward Thoma9 have produced (not for the first time) in the latest generation of English poets. 'As the Team's Head-Brass', for instance, is a crucial antecedent for what is being written in England now. Our poets are roaming around, most of them, in the abyssal landscape of modes of apprehension. The result is a type of inflated patter, tragedian's patter, one might call it. The language and method of gnosis is frequently being used in intrinsically analogous poetry. The worst sufferer, ironically, has been Louis Johnson himself. Over and over again, his last lines jump across from the cultivated to the trackless areas of his mind in a completely arbitrary way. Another victim has been James K. Baxter, whose unhappy trading 189 with dishonoured gnostic currency the early and middle Yearbooks cruelly but unwittingly displayed. Robert Thompson, Angus Burton and Hubert Witheford are others who seem fuddled and lost between the two modes. I am not in any way advancing a covert argument for clarity in poetry. Far from it. The New Zealand poet whose stature is increasing to the measure of his originality is Kendrick Smithy- man. Through breadth of reading, he has earthed himself in the planet, not only the English Thirties and the American Forties but also the Roman Zeros and the Hauraki Gulf Sixties, like a saner, if less inspired, Ezra Pound. Nothing in the Yearbooks is more appalling on a grand scale than his verbal fretwork in 'Of Death by Water' (1952), a poem which seems to have its true source in the Note on the poem at the back of the book. The poem looks like a work-up of the Note, a sort of baroque exegesis with its heart and brains elsewhere. On the other hand, nothing is so critically impressive, taken all in all, as Robert Chapman's approach to Mr Smithyman's work in the 1955 issue. Certainly, nothing is so grand as his poems 'New Settlers' (1954), 'Incidental Music For The Dream' (1955), 'Cousin Emily And The Night Visitor' (1956), 'A Divination' (1957), 'Snapshots From The Pigbreeders' Gazette' (1960), and 'Morepork' and 'Tern' (1962). While Mr Smithyman has often written formula-poems derived largely from his reading of the Americans-John Crowe Ransom and W allace Stevens seem the main models-he is increasingly writing from the depths of a very powerful imagination, with his craft and scholarship content to serve the integrity of each separate poem. It is amazing, on a slightly more superficial level, how many New Zealanders can write poetry, and how few can write poems. I am sure this is partly related to the loss of bearings I have just described, but it equally indicates a certain lack of rigour in the literary climate here. What is happening is that these poets are verbalizing from a poetic flux in their minds, not from a poetic event. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of random poetic activity going on inside their heads, but only rarely is there an occasion, a sudden co-ordination of the sort that produces a sharply individuated poem. The result is a low tension piece of verse with generalized, under-coloured images and a slow-medium tempo. 'Andantino' is the word. Admittedly, the andantino poem is the staple fare of literary periodicals the world over and, in the typo- graphical isolation of a magazme page, such a poem's weak- 190 nesses are less obvious. It is also typical that the expressive content of one of these poetic 'seconds' should be an attenuated pessimism, since this is the state of mind which most rarely converts itself into choice, and most readily lends itself to an effortless expression in verse. Attenuated pessimism is probably as exact a description as any of the response of a tender, but essentially non-creative psyche to life in this country. All the same, there are poets here who write from the poetic event and not from what comes in between. It is notable that their language is harder, richer than the poetic Basic English of their colleagues. Their poems are free standing, varied in shape as well as in rhythmic dynamism. Their poems are, dare one say, moving. Who are they? Well, in addition to recent Smithyman, I would name Alistair Campbell, Marilyn Duckworth, Peter Bland and Gordon Challis. Poems by these writers usually have the formal and verbal stability which somehow is the index of a Good One. There may be tension, but it is tension in stasis. In other words, the verbalization has authority. One of the best features of the Yearbooks has been their ration of prose. It was good to read Erik Schwimmer respectfully implying a philosophy to four poets in the first issue. In the latest, it is also good to read Mr Baxter giving the parish cauldron a stir. Ideally, as he must know, the form of a poem is, in the Aristotelian sense, accidental to the substance. The type of substance he wants will, per se, be formally impeccable. He is tilting, I suspect, at the stanza-makers whose crustacean poems are all exterior intricacy and interior pulp. Still, while he was at his diverting paragraph on the formal debts of our poetic Establish- ment, I wish he could have included his own cribbings frotrl Burns and the Border balladeers. That 0, those refrains-which have marred so many poems by himself and his colleagues. In saying this, of course, I falsify his point, which was that these borrowed formal characteristics mattered nothing alongside the freshness and strength of what the named poets had to convey. Mr Baxter sees 'New Zealand verse afflicted with a disease of formalism'. I myself doubt whether preoccupation with form is at the root of the trouble. I agree with everybody that the fifties have seen a shift in direction in New Zealand poetry. I wonder if post-war communications are part of the explanation? The isolation, 'these castaway latitudes', man as intruder (not myths, by the way, but geographical and ethnological facts still), impose a certain poetic mode, a certain literalism which is internationally 191 unfashionable, or so the critical cliche goes. The world-minded, but actually isolated, younger poets here are impotent or unwilling to use the previous generation's material. Too cultivated to imitate Ginsberg and Corso, too 'modern' to write literal poems, too uncertain philosophically to make fiercely pronouncing poems, it is no wonder they have fallen back on lukewarm metaphysics. New Zealand is notoriously the country where no one ever says 'ouch!' out loud. I believe poets should say 'ouch' and force their readers to say it, along with 'ha ha', 'boo hoo', 'the bastards' and other archaisms of the same sort. Otherwise, as a recent issue of the English quarterly X pointed out, poetry degenerates into a Social Accomplishment. If it does, no doubt the Poetry Yearbooks will reflect the fact. It would be much better if Mr Johnson's open house could become a gathering place for the might which seems so nearly attainable by numbers of New Zealand poets. Instead of acting as a national status symbol, a Poetry Yearbook should really be a book which is too hot to handle. Owen Leeming

THE EDGE. OF THE ALPHABET. Janet Frame. The Pegasus Press. 17s. 6d.

IT IS hartf"for the novelist of the lost childhood, the madhouse or the concentration camp to write about the so-called 'real' contemporary world. Janet Frame tries to do it in the present work; the result is part failure, part success. Her failure is the inevitable consequence of pretending that the book is a manuscript 'found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death, and submitted to the publishers by Peter Heron, Hire-Purchase Salesman.' It is a nineteenth century, even an eighteenth century device. None the worse for that, you may well say- but then the personae of Scott and the Gothic Novelists weren't in the habit of addressing their characters directly, nor were they so closely identified with their creator. Another trait reminiscent of early novels is the frequency with which essayistic comments on Life (presumably Thora Pattern's comments) are scattered throughout the book. The novel about the writer composing a novel belongs to a more recent tradition than Sir Waiter's. In this convention it is necessary that the novelist-character should be at least as convincing as the people he invents and, perhaps, that one of the book's main concerns should be the nature of the creative process 192 itself. But we do not feel that Miss Pattern is in the least interesting or credible, and we don't learn much about how or why she writes, except that her motive is self-exploration; that the end of self- discovery is to arrive at the dead (why not at God? or at existence or essence? or at the contemplation of a universal dialectical process?); and that she belongs to a Chosen Race-the Unhappy Few who live 'at the edge of the alphabet'. Two of her characters-Toby Withers the epileptic from Owls Do Cry and Zoe the failed school- teacher-also live at the edge of the alphabet, and Thora persists in trying to communicate with them directly- I hear your thoughts, Zoe .... Day and night, Zoe, I have walked in the market among the crowds and the cries, Lovely Oranges, Lovely Oranges, while the night-papers exhort Crucify, Crucify. (p.SO). Who are the Lost Tribe, Toby? Why do they lie hidden in your mind, like beetles under a stone? ... They live, he says, behind a mountain approached through a secret pass. (p.l64) Thora's irritating questions and apostrophes destroy our faith in the reality of Toby, Zoe and even Pat Keenan, the pathetic 'ordinary man' who tries to decoy the introverts into his spider's web of normality. We just aren't able to believe in them after Zoe's Berkeleyan remark to Toby at the ship's fancy-dress party: It doesn't make you afraid, does it, that you are fiction, that you are not really aboard the Matua sailing to England, that you exist only in someone's mind, some poor writer who cannot do better than bring forth the conversation of musicians, poets, mice? (p.70) Janet Frame does not seem altogether aware that Thora Pattern's attitudes and pronouncements are tinged with arrogance and spiritual pride. The blurb describes the novel as 'wise, compassionate, and infinitely tender'-but the wisdom appears pretentious, and the compassion too often like condescension: a sad fall- ing off from Owls Do Cry. True, Chicks's diary in that novel is hardly motivated by generous sympathy; it is a masterpiece of savage irony that is more than a little unfair to the real Chicks's of this world because it fails to hint at the unrealized potentialities behind their petty suburbanite selfishness. Neverthe- less, that is a minor blemish compared with the beautiful portrayal of young Toby and Daphne, and the fine evocation of the Withers's childhood world. In The Edge of the Alphabet, however, Thora Pattern seems to have acquired some of the characteristics of an 193 introverted Chicks; there's a melancholy smugness that comes out in her glib scorn of 'pop' culture and common folk. Whether this is Miss Frame's intention or not, Thora cannot avoid dis- playing her sense that she is better than Pat and even Toby. Thora's greatest defect is a failure of tone, which could be demonstrated from almost every chapter. A small-scale example is provided by the placing of 'of course' in the following sentence: 'His early enthusiastic reading of love explained, of course, his facility in the translation of death: the alphabet, the grammar, are the same." (p.26) The implication is that such an idea is a truism to the Chosen Race; that you too, dear reader, are a member of a select band-though not ('of course') quite so select as Thora Pattern herself. And yet, in spite of everything, the book's virtues outweigh its flaws. Miss Frame, our most subjective writer, is perhaps also our best writer of documentaries. Faces in the Water is a better render- ing of mental hospitals than any social scientist could provide, and the present novel's handling of passenger life on a one class ship couldn't possibly be improved upon. When she keeps her eye on the object, she can do better than the realists. She is also a wonderful craftsman-mistress of pedal and keyboard, prin- cess of the arpeggios and cadenzas of prose; and she has a nice sense of humour (seen at its best in her treatment of Mr and Mrs Kala and son, the family who come on board at Panama), which is all too often spoiled by Thora's solemn and wistful intrusions. It is precisely because of her great gifts, because words and phrasing, prose-rhythm and image patterns mean so much to her, that she has fallen into the trap of making her book a rhetorical construct rather than a novel, where Janet Frame, Thora Pattern, the characters they create, even the entire human race become fused into a single whole-or, if you like, they all fall into the same slough: How I am haunted by death and the dead! And by the division of humanity into so many people when one birth, one mind, one death would be enough to end the tributary tears that flow in every acre of the earth in the stone obstructions of the heart that are called stars. What mathematical trick has divided the whole into the sum of so many people, only to set working in our hearts the process by which we continually strive to reduce the sum once more to its indivisible whole-until millions in one city become for us two or three people and finally one person. We pass our mother fifty times in a few seconds in the 194 street, and our father, and the only people we have ever really known; and if we love, everyone we meet is our lover. And what if the person who meets us for ever is ourselves? What if we meet ourselves on the edge of the alphabet and can make no sign, no speech? So it is the end of self-discovery. I have arrived at the dead. (p.223) What moving rhetoric! What beauty of cadence! And how arbitrary, really, since the reader feels that Thora's voyage of self-discovery isn't a genuine voyage. She does not convince us that her own death, or Zoe's for that matter, is inevitable; she merely tells us so in language so eloquent that few of her can equal it. Thomas Crawford

THE LAST PIONEER. David Ballantyne. Robert Hale and W hitcombe & Tombs. 12s. 6d.

FicTION is more than fidelity, and the privilege demanded by a reader is that of having the social facts refashioned within a critical and philosophical imagination. About David Ballantyne's new novel, The Last Pioneer, nobody could complain that it falls short on the side of fidelity. The setting is another small North Island town, Mahuta in fact being smaller than most, a mere vestige of civic unity. Here the local minds and personalities are dulled with beer and sun. The only strenuous activity is conducted by the borer-and there is no need to resist the pun. Mr Ballantyne accurately records the tedium of lives passed on compo, in the boozer, at the flicks and in kitchens with a sugar-bag of bottled beer under the table. Dullness settles on the reader like dust on a country hedge. The familiar problem of drama and fiction remains unanswered here-how to make the tedious stimulating. Into this corner of complacent decadence comes a Pommie, 'the last pioneer', a spruce and optimistic little man named Charlie Wyatt. He and his son Richard, a six-year-old product of his father's supra-Kiwi aspirations, reproduce in somewhat startling exactness the situation in Sorrel/ and Son. There is the same rather unhealthy closeness and pride between them and it is agreed that Richard is not to go to the local school or play with the Maoris. He is not in fact to play at all. Comics are out. On the bus his father offers him Volume Ten of an encyclopaedia. Charlie W yatt is going to make a noise and a name in Mahuta. 195 The novel reveals the indolent and sometimes spiteful opposition of the town to the newcomer. But it is rather the tedium that beats them all. Charlie's enthusiasm wilts with the sinking floorboards and the rusty roof-iron of the once proud dwelling he has taken over. His proposed marriage of convenience with a local widow fails through inanition and misunderstanding. Charlie packs up his bags and bravely hits the trail again. The local boys booze on in celebration of Mum's win at the races. The theme is an interesting and provocative one. Perhaps Mr Ballantyne has submerged it too scrupulously, voicing it only tentatively and late through the mouth of a local newspaper editor. It is, of course, the proper business of a novel to show rather than to state. But Mr Ballantyne wished to show a modern pioneer of decidedly reduced stature ('I wouldn't say he was a midget') and a populace that had lost both the respect for energy and the idea of self-improvement. With both parties to the conflict so feeble the conflict itself was bound to be feeble. The idea, in other words, is more vital than its exposition. Mr Ballantyne has been faithful to his material. His characters are no more varied and interesting than a town like Mahuta might in fact throw up. Their speech is true to life in its banality and general kindliness; dialogue forms a large proportion of the book's content. But it has long been apparent that a true record of New Zealand character and speech can only bring us half way to our fictional establishment. The regional novelist bestows more than he receives. One thinks of Carson McCullers in her New York apart- ment refusing to cross the Mason Dixon line for fear of contaminat- ing or even erasing her visionary South. R. A. Copland

THE INLAND EYE. E. H. McCormick. 3s. PERSPECTIVES. Ngaio Marsh. 2s. 6d. THE FAR-AWAY HILLS. M. T. Woollaston. 5s. Auckland Gallery Asso- ciates. IT rs still true to say that our art criticism remains, by and large, the hobby of versatile poets, journalists, historians and literary critics; in other words, of people whose training and practice is primarily to do with another thing. Good work has been done- A. R. D. Fairburn and R. N. O'Reilly come to mind-and yet we cannot afford to remain complacent at the real failure of such people to define adequately the achievement, modest though it is, of our 196 painters and sculptors. Awareness of this must temper the enthusiasm with which we welcome the sentiments of Mr Stacpoole who, in the Foreword to The Inland Eye, expresses the hope that these lectures sponsored by the Auckland Gallery Associates will provide 'many similarly valuable contributions to the understanding of our cultural development'. The first of these, delivered in 1957, is a rather eccentric piece. Mr McCormick, who was invited to speak on some topic which might 'contribute to art research in this country'-and who would be better qualified?-offered instead a 'Sketch in Visual Auto- biography'. Writing about oneself, even when it is only a matter of 'sketching', is a very different thing from writing about others and the things they have made. The art historian in his new role seems strangely ill at ease with the language, strangely, because we, his readers, are accustomed to the ease, which is that of the scholar's rapport with his subject and audience, to be found in his more substantial works. The man unsure as to the image of himself he wishes to project speaks with an uneasy voice. Mr McCormick likes to prick the bubble of inflated language- '! fled to the South of France-or, more accurately, I biked there.' (p.30), but more often than not it is allowed to burst of its own accord. ' ... a station on the main trunk line, the source z"n former times of nocturnal refreshments.' (p.7, my italics) 'On Christmas eve ... the revels and raucous singing of tipsy merry-makers.' (p.lO) 'Oh warm, erring humanity, infinitely varied, infinitely gullible, infinitely loveable! (Obviously the "refreshment" has gone to my head.)' (p.47) Obviously it has, but this reader is not so 'infinitely gullible' as to believe that Mr McCormick was still on the grog when he composed his lecture. Not only is this poor writing but it makes the reader uncomfortable because he guesses that more is being said than is meant. Insistent preciousness of style is matched by consistent superficiality of statement. Does the same uneasiness account for the omission of any reference to twentieth century New Zealand painting and for the inclusion of an extensive catalogue of popular tastes in bad prints as displayed upon the miserable walls of small-town drawing rooms? Does it account for the fact that the ephemeral detail constantly takes precedence over meaningful experience? In his field Mr McCormick is a professional among amateurs but perhaps he pines for a little 'kiwi' versatility. Miss Marsh, whose job it has been to know her audiences, has produced an address remarkable for its assurance and aplomb. She 197 sets herself a subject consistent with the aim of the series-{he attitudes of audience and artist and their relation to one another- and tackles it with exuberant confidence. 'They [the colonists] had no formula designed to cope with the violent colour, the uncom- promising clarity, the absence of composed foregrounds, in a word, the utter strangeness of this antipodean landscape where blue screamed blueness; where vegetation lay in great dots of dark wicked green .... Rivers boiled impersonally through indelicate wastes. It was not at all Victorian. (pp. 9-10) It is altogether unfortunate then, that Miss Marsh's remarks do not break new ground. What she has to say has been said before and often partakes of the commonplace. 'If we are to keep our sculptors and painters in New Zealand we must be prepared to think as intelligently as we can about what they are up to.' (p.l6) Miss Marsh's capabilities are numerous and I do not think it would be too unjust to suggest that such an address would have been better suited to the opening of an Auckland Festival exhibition than to this series of lectures. Mr W oollaston is a man of paint rather than a man of words. We are interested in his words as those of an important painter, especially when they are autobiographical. As it stands, the lecture forms a useful companion piece to R. N. O'Reilly's excellent critical article (Landfall, September 1948) on Mr W oollaston's earlier painting. If the language is often clumsy and forced it is the price we pay for its being there at all. The strain is most noticeable in passages of 'word-painting' where Mr Woollaston relies rather heavily on the mannered verbiage of bad romantic prose ('crested'; 'wild'; 'dark'; 'dense'; 'mysterious'; 'secretive'; 'secret', are favoured adjectives) in an attempt to realize in words the things realized in paint. The failure should not be stressed-we note the lack of continuity between Mr W oollaston's tastes in literature (primarily Shel- ley) and his tastes in painting (primarily Cezanne}-for the words are worn loosely and temporarily. This is the longest of the three lectures and ironically it is also the most substantial, because it is to be valued not only as a statement from a man making the tradition which this series is meant to review, but also because its author talks more sense about painting in New Zealand than the others, Drawing on his own experience as a painter, his comments, whether general or personal, are full of suggestion. His statement that 'It is sufficient that a New Zealand painter, 198 looking at the work of some world-master, should sometime find something there that will fertilize his own imagination and produce intense concentration on his own environment... .' (p.46) is sound and reminds us of his remarks on Cezanne as an influence on his own painting and the 'fifteen years of concentration on that landscape with none but occasional breaks'. (p. 39) It has the toughness of mind that makes for survival in a country without a visual tradition. Again, there are the observations on 'hilltops'. 'We soon acquired the habit of going to the top of the back-paddock hill. . . . Here we could ... see ... over a great deal of wild ridgy country . . . nearer now but even more inaccessible, dark, and mysterious.' (p.7) ' ... through the short darkness in the body of the hilL then the expanding new landscape through the other end . . . essaying this further region without the landscape's consent.' (p.l3) ' ... and many a time my reward was to find myself above the fog in a luminous, uninhabited world.' (p.S) 'In the bush I encountered a sense of deprivation of outlook .... ' (p.l9) 'I wanted to paint the landscape in a new way, with the sky in the centre and the hills all round the edge of the picture.' (p.35) These passages, when placed together, would seem to go to the heart of the painter's experience of the landscape; and notwithstanding the universal ritual significance of the mountain top, these passages regarded in the light of the work of McCahon, Van der Velden, and Mr Wool- laston himself, for example, seem to point to a specifically regional response to the land. W ystan Curnow

INHERITORS oF A DREAM. A pictorial history of New Zealand. Dick Scott. Auckland: Ronald Riddell. 45s. No more useful publication emerged from the centennial celebra- tions of 1940 than Making New Zealand. Those thirty 'Pictorial Surveys of a Century' still form the best illustrated introduction to our history. Their editors-McCormick, Pascoe, Hall, Duff, and Beaglehole-will never write anything as well thumbed as their joint effort in presenting 'the Dominion's history in a popular and easily assimilated form'. It is a pity that Mr Scott did not make more use of this work in planning his own, even though the latter is on a smaller scale and gives priority to illustrations over text. He could have digested with profit McCormick's straight- forward statement of aims and methods before embarking on his 199 introduction and choosing his title. The latter provides a dramatic link betweeri the fanciful maps of Terra australis incognita and the more prosaic material that follows. There is not much in this as an historical connection. The speculations of merchant adven- turers in search of El Dorado have no real relevance to New Zea- land's 'nation-building' (as Mr Scott describes it) except in the form of the deceptions of the New Zealand Company. The 'Respectable Poor' and not-so-poor were taken in and made the longest journey here, but we their descendants ought to be grateful, on balance, for the fraud, or, it may be termed, 'the dream'. The colonists' personal aims were of a different order: a little farm, a little business, rather better wages, rather more leisure; in a word, modest security. Obsessed by his maps, Mr Scott takes flight from these realities, borne on such words as 'romantic', 'mythical', 'fabulous', 'magic', and 'fantasy'. However, in the end, he comes down to earth offering us in more recognizable New Zealand understatement 'a casual record of nation-building'. This is a better subtitle than the one he uses, though Mr Scott does not define or develop what he means by 'nation'. The men of 1940 began with a prepared text and fitted the illustrations to it. If 'history' is to be the basic ingredient, this is the best method of making pictorial history. Indeed the task remains (as it was then) one for a team of the best experts available. This may sound grossly unfair to Mr Scott, but until Making New Zealand is revised or replaced in this way, there is ample room for an individual of imagination and industry, such as he clearly is, to compile a pictorial review of our past. He nowhere sets out his methods of selection and comment, but the latter is lively, interesting, and covers an impressively wide field. It is Reevesian in tone (e.g. Introduction; pp. 94 and 106). Not until Seddon do we get a photograph of a colonial politician (except Rolleston in a cartoon, with two misspelt Canterbury notables, p.97). Perhaps it is academic niggling to ask for more precision of date, name, and place. For example, full details of the matchless photograph of Seddon at Greytown (p. 114) are readily available, and Sir James Carrell (centre) deserves a better historical fate than 'Liberal nabob'. Given the nature of the work, it stands or falls primarily on its selection of illustrations. Mr Scott has dug deeply into library and museum collections, and has tried to avoid the familiar and the hackneyed. With limited time and money, he has succeeded admirably in his difficult task. He would have found untapped resources (and a valuable corrective) in illustrated weeklies such as the Canterbury 200 Times and Weekly Press. The heart of the book is the work of Frederick Tyree who worked with his brother William in Nelson in the 1870s and 1880s. Technically, Tyree is magnificent, but not all his photographs given here can stand up to a searching test of historical value. Further, the balance of the book is weakened by too much material from one of the smaller provinces. The least satisfactory part of Mr Scott's volume is the last section, which descends (perhaps inevitably) to something like illustrated journalism. Treading too close on the heels of history, Mr Scott has taken, like the Whangarei glass factory (p. 159), a bad knock. To end on a less critical note-the lay-out is of a high order, and the whole production is a credit to the publisher, Ronald Riddell. W. f. Gardner

Correspondence

SIR: I may be slightly at odds with Bruce Mason on some minor points in his article, 'Towards a Professional Theatre', Landfall 65, but I want to support him strongly in his main theme, expressed I take it in the two paragraphs of which the first begins 'Our leading novelists now write in a mature and confident manner on themes thrown up from our brief occupation of "these islands in the Pacific sun" and their work is reviewed and read respectfully .... But the chain of communication, from writer to reader, is a relatively simple one and the framework exists to carry it: writer-publisher-printer-bookseller-reader.' Years of experience of the existing situation in this country make it apparent to the serious writer of full-length plays that the comparable framework Mr Mason suggests for the playwright-'theatre-playwright-director- designer-electricians-stage-managers-actors-audience' -is an absolutely necessary condition for the writing of New Zealand plays of good quality. The most embarrassing question that can be asked of a playwright here is, 'How many plays have you written and had produced?' by an interviewer, or a member of the public completely unaware of what is involved in the answer-that only by a com- bination of ability, good luck and an amount of perseverance above that needed for success in any other artistic field is it possible 201 for a playwright to have even one three-act play produced in New Zealand in one lifetime-and that for a return that scarcely pays for the paper and the typing of scripts. As I am still writing plays despite the triumph of experience over hope, I may believe I have the perseverance; but nothing I have been able to do in the past has been of any continuing benefit to myself or to other playwrights; the framework that was precariously there for a while has collapsed; and we must suffer under the assumption that we are one-play writers, knowing that we have written others which will never be seen and receive the public judgment we need, while New Zealand has the unbalance of a strong amateur theatre but no professional one. For a first play, or a one-act one, we may be willing to accept the indifferent casting and production which can kill a play, but we can't suffer these stillbirths indefinitely. To prove this point, I some months ago dropped one more script into the amateur groups' bottomless well of indifference, while at the same time a friend submitted a prose MS to a publisher. For her, an almost immediate telephone appointment, leading to a businesslike and dignified discussion; for me, the rest was silence. The worth of either work is not the point, nor is criticism of amateur groups, which do excellent work as amateurs, valid; the point is that which Mr Mason makes-the lamentable lack of any framework to carry the playwright's work to the public. He says, of opera and music here, 'once the framework existed for their composition, the work was duly composed'. Admitted that in any country there are never more than a few good dramatists; thousands of plays are written that aren't up to production standard, and I should be the last to wish to see standards lowered. But there are bound to be, as time goes on and our population grows and matures, some few who can become, not only 'prime movers in the theatrical scene' but prime movers also in the national scene; and it is a tragic thing that, while all other branches of literature and the other arts are on the move here, this one still waits in the wings the cue to come on stage. How many enthusiastic sponsors of overseas plays pause to ask where those plays would be if those 'prime movers', Shaw, Miller, Priestley, Osborne and the others had had no incentive but a six- night season grudgingly granted them after months or years of waiting? Would they have had even a second play to their credit, let alone a dozen or more? Competitions are not the answer. We enter them, in desperation for any goal; they are one man's verdict (and, in passing, why, when it is well-known that women make up 202 the bulk of theatre audiences, does it never seem to occur to anyone to appoint a woman judge?) and we need and want the public verdict. Is it too much to hope for strong support for Mr Mason when he asks for civic repertory theatres, fully professional, on the lines of English repertory in the larger cities? I would like to suggest one play a month; at least one a year, and perhaps two, to be New Zealand plays. The acting talent is certainly here in Auckland; but a competent producer determined to seek out local work and put into it all the resources readily available for work from that glamorous region, 'overseas', is wanting. With even this skeleton framework, I am as certain as Mr Mason is that the plays would be written, and that in time our country would be the richer for them. Stella Jones

SIR: The impressive thing about Rob Wentholt's article, 'A Choice of W odds' in the December 1962 issue of Landfall was the reference to an important aspect of New Zealand life-the belief that personal relationships are what count most and what make life worth living, as well as the 'matter of course unquestioning comradeship' that he encountered. Culture and Environment (F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson) defines the organic community as one in which men are living in an integral relationship to the environment and to each other. To what extent is the New Zealand insistence on close personal relationships a continuation into modern industrial life of this ideal? Is it merely a sentimental echo of the 19th century idea of mateship -a dying tradition in a corrupt sport and booze culture-is it just a basis for a 'private selective network of thoroughly satisfying personal relations' and nothing more, or is it part of a fortunate balance of potentialities which enables some New Zealanders to find some kind of satisfactory commitment to their work, their fellows and the environment? Mr W entholt seems to have sensed the organic quality present in the 'human warmth' and 'unquestioning comradeship', but para- doxically, as he moved towards the 'social identification' he needed, he seems to have lost the sense of 'living reality' in the environment and the ability to see that the strength of the integral relationship with one another in New Zealand helps to make the environment less formidable-something lived in and shared by each as one of 203 many rather than endured in baffled isolation 'like a horse tied to a treadmill with no promise of release until old age'. But perhaps his inability to comprehend the New Zealand landscape as anything but frigid and dead, stems from a failure of consciousness, a lack of direct experience of the sense of place and the feeling of physical accord. To get that one has to live in the scene. Perhaps his Routeburn experience with the deer cullers was an opportunity that he should have followed up in order to find out more about the responses of the 'beautiful woman', and more about people in the rural environment. As for the town, he seems to have realized that there is a luxurious choice of individual freedom of action 'for those who do want it' and that the motor car is the means for pursuing this, though he, himself, preferred a 'take it or leave it' attitude towards nature and was satisfied with 'a dark city flat in a crowded urban area'. It seems to me that whatever the cultural shortcomings of the New Zealand town, it allows direct connection with the rural landscape as well as frequent personal contact with the people living in it. Those who have motor cars are particularly able to obtain a wider grasp of the total environment than might otherwise be expected in an industrial society. So why should the ever-present natural landscape depress or intimidate? Might it not suggest that there is a variety of modes of existence potentially available to the urban dweller, even if he personally can only acquaint himself with them briefly in his leisure time. Might not the very prominence of the landscape in our towns promote the feeling of identity and wholeness with the larger environment that seems to be a natural complement to the sense of community. Perhaps, after all, the feeling of quick fellowship is the lasting colonial heritage that makes New Zealand no cold, oppressive structure, but a dwelling with many rooms, offering possibilities both for individual awareness and for the organic life of a kind scarcely possible in Europe. Is it time for a revaluation of this vital gift? L. Cleveland

SIR: My review of The Big Season has made Mr Baxter angry. He makes his own case lucidly enough to expose all those simplicities and inconsistencies which I assailed in the novel. If I have been angry it was because a writer of Mr Gee's powers should have been so seduced. Mr Baxter objects to my applying general moral standards to the particularities of the novel: 'I don't think he (Mr Gee) is 204 suggesting that all burglars are good men etc.' Then he himself produces a ballooning generalization which I should never dream of blowing up: 'It was the respectable family-centred German citizen who allowed the Nazi crime of genocide etc.' This inflation is a device familiar to the least of rhetoricians: a man who would be cruel to a burglar would massacre a race. I am suspected of choosing a closed mind and losing the capacity for experience. Yet Mr Baxter is content to close his mind around an artless belief like the one quoted above. Twenty-five years separate me from the same belief and if I hadn't been 'learning from experience' I presume I should still hold it. But having chosen 'psychological life' I have been unable to remain innocent. I cannot read the story of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe as though it were the annals of a village. I have some notion of the complexity of power in a great state and of the vast contemporary dilemma implied in the phrase 'the ethics of power'. Thus when the Roman Catholic Church makes its pleas against the charge of Rolf Hochhuth that it 'shut its eyes' to Nazi atrocities, I am prepared to understand its case. Is Mr Baxter? To Mr Baxter this burglar is an 'honest, sensitive, humane person', 'a good man', whose 'burgling is an obsession' and the community's judgment of him is 'erroneous'. The police are wicked to be rough with him. These opinions derive from Mr Baxter's own humaneness. Perhaps he did not hear the burglar swear- ing to find the man who had informed on him and 'beat him to a jelly.' (p. 172) Or the burglar's accomplice: 'His description of what he'd do to the fellow if he caught him was graphic, to say the least.' (p. 167) Or the burglar's friend: 'You'll be meeting some of Bill's friends. They're tough boys, Junior ... I hope you're not too fond of the shape of your face. And you better hope that's where they stop. There's more than one body at the bottom of the W aitemata with a few yards of lead pipe wrapped round its legs.' (p. 188) They sound like Nazis to me. I find it in my heart to forgive the townsfolk for their errors of judgment. Mr Baxter blames the trampled citizen while I should blame the jack-booted adherents of a wicked theory. He pities the rapist where I should pity the ravished child. These at least are our em- phases. There is no hope that we should see eye to eye; because while I stand still Mr Baxter goes round and round. He blames the respectable German citizen for tolerating a set of criminals. He blames the respectable New Zealand citizen for not tolerating a set of criminals. 205 Mr Baxter asks whether I know that the family predicament of a young man who has taken up with burglars is 'precisely' that of 'any New Zealand artist who tries to develop a view of life based on his own experience rather than the social norms'. I did not know this. But if I had Mr Gee's gift I should love to use it. I suppose the idea would be to show how much more difficult it is for the artist and his parents. For burglary is much better hushed up, not being subsidized by the state (i.e. the citizens), not receiving bursaries, university fellowships, public presentation, the dutiful attention of schoolchildren and reviews in the national quarterlies. I think the theme of The Big Season could have been success- fully managed. It might have presented with compassionate irony the integrity of a young man whose limited experience provided him with no alternative to small-town smugness except the company of feckless outcasts, a treatment implying the existence of more rewarding alternatives (say in the Nabokov manner). Or it might have convincingly established the positive goodness of the outsiders beside the positive malevolence of the insiders (say in the manner of Riders in the Chariot). But this is what I said before. There is something I should add to all this, by way of anticipation. The sentimental are obliged to be heated by their own inconsistencies and will hotly conclude that a man who condemns violence will therefore condone it. They will perhaps expect to see my name on the petitions to introduce flogging, the sterilization of sex criminals and the summary hanging of murderers, and may wonder why they look in vain. R. A. Copland

SIR: Many a teacher could vouch for the relevance of Alien Curnow's insight to the intricacies of teaching young children. In Mr Stead's fine article that relevance has been sharpened and clarified by explicit exposition. Some of the central problems of education, over which hot and confused words are often wasted, find an explication here which bears a clear authority seldom found in educational writing. One fundamental misconception which entraps Mr Lockstone in his article 'The Neglect of the Mind' becomes quite plain when placed alongside these insights: he ignores the relationship between language and the reality that language is about, and fails to realize that the quality of this relationship determines the quality of the mind. For instance, he says of the new Social Studies handbooks for primary schools: And it appears that books are no substitute for a mysterious thing 206 called 'direct experience'; what this is may be gathered from the fact that it is important that small children should have 'smelt a pig', or that, by the 'living method', children are supposed to learn something of a foreign community by 'adopting the names, the greeting, some of the clothes, some of the habits, of the people they are studying'. Perhaps Mr Lockstone's incomprehension is merely posed, but whatever its status, the implications are disturbingly clear when we consider Mr Stead's exposition in Chapter VI of his article. He says: To come honestly to grips with experience here and now ... is to submit oneself to the most rigorous of all disciplines; it is not to negate the constructive intelligence, but to subordinate it to the recognition of 'things as they are', in all their complexity, and thus to insist that our poetry should be a truthful report upon experience .... words are not autonomous; they are imperfect indi- cators and we must use them humbly. Mr Lockstone would have us believe that there is something improper about an education which concerns itself with the 'reality prior to the poem', with what the syllabus calls 'direct experience'. The central problem of elementary school teaching, however, is to 'introduce the landscape to the language'-to make the language of children a 'truthful report on experience'. It is not easy to meet the demands that this makes on education, for it implies that there must always be a genuine experience-a prior reality. It is far easier to take the language as the reality, teaching it whether or not the children understand its relationship to anything real. Results can then be evaluated in terms of the language alone, as if the possession of the formal skill or verbal fact guaranteed the ability to grasp its relevance to any real situation. · The experiences of young children do not pretend to the sophis- tication of educated insights and are peculiarly open to ridicule when falsely compared with them. Mr Lockstone is quick to see this. (Further instances may be found on page 52.) However, l think Mr Curnow has shown us why it is important for a child to have smelt a pig before he calls somebody one. There is no surer way of cutting a child off from his past than to cut him off from his present-for the past is 'with experience here and now'. To deny the right of language 'to stand for a present and total reality larger than ourselves' is to threaten all forms of knowledge. We can agree with Mr Lockstone's demand for intellectual ends in education, for an inheritance, but we would 207 disagree in what constitutes those ends at the elementary school level-in Mr Stead's words, 'the mind that reaches after such wholeness must concern itself with minute particulars'. Don Holdaway

Sm: Mr Lockstone may seem to speak in an authoritative voice when he criticizes social studies in the primary schools. His stric- tures and predictions are those of a man supremely confident of what he knows and certain that what he knows is right. ('Accuracy goes completely by the board.. .' 'History in the primary school does not even begin to look like a serious study .. .' 'Academically this syllabus is a disaster. .. ') Unfortunately for Mr Lockstone, it is plain from his article that he has not read the syllabus. It is true he refers to and quotes from a syllabus, but it is the 1948 syllabus which was superseded in 1961 by a revised syllabus arrived at after a lengthy trial in the schools. It was for this later syllabus that the four bulletins of suggestions for teachers which Mr Lockstone attacks were written. This fatal omission makes nonsense of his eloquence in praise of accuracy in scholarship and the result is that readers of Landfall are completely misinformed. In the further interests of accuracy it would have been well for Mr Lockstone to have stated that much of the material in the bulletins was contributed by teachers who were reporting on their experience with the syllabus in its trial stages. He makes teachers' descriptions of their experiences in devising ways of dealing with the topics of the syllabus sound like Departmental dictates on method. This is misrepresentation. Perhaps one should not be critical of all Mr Lockstone's contribu- tion to the general debate about social studies. Where in footnotes he acknowledges some of the sources of his information he has managed to get his page references right. J. L. Ewing Department of Education

Sm: The Suggestion books in Social Studies appear with the Educa- tion Department's imprimatur. Nowhere is it made clear what parts, if any, are the mere ruminations of classroom experimenters. And the stock cry of 'misrepresentation' comes ill from one whose sole defence of these publications is to maintain that all the parts I have quoted happen to be invalid; I should be more interested 208 to learn that the extremely dubious aims of this subject-which are stated more than once, and with as much clarity as the Sugges- tion books ever achieve-are also among the invalid bits. But I admit that I find it heartening to know that these little books are not 'Departmental dictates on method'. Superseded or not, the syllabus from which I quoted was still in use when I wrote the article; and it is a poor excuse for teaching nonsense for thirteen years merely to say 'nous avons change tout cela'-especially when one has not changed it. For I read the revised syllabus, of course; and I found in it so little essential difference that I did not scruple to quote the earlier version-a version which, incidentally, was represented for thirteen years in Teachers' Colleges as the law and the prophets. Obliged as I am to Mr Ewing for checking my references, I think that he would have been better occupied in either defending or disowning the aims on which I focused my attack. Nor, with due regret, can I avoid stating my considered opinion that the cheap sneer of Mr Ewing's last paragraph is quite unworthy of one holding a highly responsible position in education. R. H. Lockstone

SIR: Respecting Dr Stead's capacltles as a poet and scholar as I do, I am astonished and dismayed by the misconstruction he has found need to place on one sentence of mine, reversed in its meaning and wrenched from its context in the Introduction to the Oxford Anthology. R. McD. Chapman

New Contributors

Colin Beer. Born Waipukurau 1933; Dannevirke High School; studied science at Otago University (research on reproductive behaviour of crabs); to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and took a D.Phil. (research on reproductive behaviour of gulls). Then on a post-doctoral fellowship to Rutgers University, U.S. (research on reproductive behaviour of doves). Returned to a lectureship in Zoology at Otago University in 1962. Married and has a son. Kenneth McKenney. Born Suva 1929. Educated Fiji, Australia, New Zea- land, B.Sc. in Geology, Auckland University College, 1951. Has worked 209 in Fiji and Australia as a geologist, in Sydney as a copywriter and TV producer for an advertising agency, in Auckland started a suburban newspaper and later worked as a boilerman on the Harbour Bridge, now working there with radio and TV for an advertising agency. Erle Nelson. Born in Napier 1919. Of English and Scandinavian descent, hence some experience of living with two languages, two minds, two inner feelings in matters others take for granted, and a natural sympathy, therefore, for the Maori predicament. Bomber pilot over Europe in last war, P.O.W. for two years. Production of first one-act play based on P.O.W. experiences won N.Z. play section of B.D.L. Jubilee festival in 1957; three other one-acters produced in B.D.L. festivals, the last written for an all-Maori cast. Founded small Maori drama group in Wanganui for which will be writing his first three-acter. Employed in Department of Maori Affairs. Albert Wendt. Born in Samoa 1939. Came to New Zealand end of 1952, went to school in New Plymouth, then to Ardmore Teachers' College for two years. Now completing an M.A. at Victoria University. Has contributed to several student magazines.

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