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' Zealam 'terly 'Y' and v.,,,.,,,,,,.,.,,," by 1 'On ,,'re CON'I'EN'TS Notes 3 City and Suburban, Frank Sargeson 4 Poems of the Mid-Sixties, K. 0. Arvidson, Peter Bland, Basil Dowling, Denis Glover, Paul Henderson, Kevin Ireland, Louis Johnson, Owen Leeming, Raymond Ward, Hubert Witheford, Mark Young 10 Artist, Michael Gifkins 33 Poems from the Panjabi, Amrita Pritam 36 Beginnings, Janet Frame 40 A Reading of Denis Glover, Alan Roddick 48

COMMENTARIES; Indian Letter, Mahendra Kulasrestha 58 Greer Twiss, Paul Beadle 63 After the Wedding, Kirsty Northcote-Bade 65

REVIEWS: A Walk on the Beach, Dennis McEldowney 67 The Cunninghams, Children of the Poor, K. 0. Arvidson 69 Bread and a Pension, MacD. P. Jackson 74 Wild Honey, J. E. P. T homson 83 Ambulando, R. L. P. Jackson 86 Byron the Poet, !an Jack 89 Studies of a Small Democracy, W. J. Gardner 91 Correspondence, W. K. Mcllroy, Lawrence Jones, Atihana Johns 95 Sculpture by Greer T wiss Cover design by V ere Dudgeon

VOLUME NINETEEN NUMBER ONE MARCH 1965 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund.

LANDFALL is printed and published by The Caxton Press at 119 Victoria Street, Christchurch. The annual subscription is 20s. net post free, and should be sent to the above address. All contributions used will be paid for. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor at the above address; they cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped and addressed envelope. Notes

PoETs themselves pass judgment on what they say by their way of saying it. To be gifted enough, first, and then to care enough-these are what count. No mere originality, so-called, no brilliance, clever- ness, facility, will interest readers for long if the essentials are want- ing. And the first is conditional on the second: you cannot convey your message or vision or passion if you haven't language fit to do so. Dante's vision is the language that reveals it; Shakespeare's men and women are the language that creates them. If the vision and the conception come first, they are no more than private fantasies until language communicates and makes them real. T. S. Eliot's use of English is so finely felt and judged, so penetrating, that it seems to give the language a new subtlety and timbre. To read his poetry is to be made more responsive to and critical of the language of other poets, especially contemporary ones; to be less ready to accept faded, inexact language, even though it seems to bear acceptable sentiments or to promise novelties of theme or treatment. He has shown once and for all (one would have thought: but every generation has to learn again) that subject, language and style are indivisible; that a poet's work is new and therefore living only when his language is fresh (and this is the one real novelty or originality), otherwise it says nothing, literally, because it fails to communicate. Detach subject or message from its language and what you have is a translation, and translation of poetry, never quite credible, has always to be taken largely on trust. Yet in his prose as in his poetry Eliot had one new thing to say which needed saying at the time and will remain, and not only because his poems embody and demonstrate it. For him, literature is rooted in history and is history, while all history, which includes the events and actions and thoughts of our daily lives, is contributory to literature. A work of literature, to be read justly, has to be placed in its setting of ideas and movements, in the stream of human his- tory; only then will it yield its full meaning. The same is true of our lives. That is what makes 'The Waste Land' and 'Sweeney Agonistes' and 'Four Quartets' so actual and poignant. The boredom and the horror and the glory-to Eliot they are simultaneous and interpenetrating. The crowd flowing over London Bridge, the de- mobbing of Lil's husband, and what happened at Richmond on the floor of a narrow canoe: these and their like are common themes of poetry and fiction, but most often they have been written about 3 separately, in detachment; they had never before been set so dram- atically in the fuller context that, by showing individuals as both victims and agents, and events as new but also timeless, could reveal boredom and horror and glory in their depth and power, as the very stuff of human life everywhere, always.

FRANK SARGESON City and Suburban

To ME, it more or less fixes the time I belong to if I say there was always a war in progress when I was a schoolboy. To be more exact, though-the Armageddon I refer to was the second one this cen- tury. I remember particularly a teacher who plugged a line about my lucky generation. Last time there had been some mistake about the war to end war. But now, let there be no mistake about it! There was a good time coming for all young people-golden opportunities, glittering prizes later on; more to the point, generous bursaries for all students with ambition. But in those days my ambition was an opportunity denied me by the school leaving age. My elder brother, a little too young for any of the services, was establishing himself in a milkround which could have been profitably extended if I had joined in as a junior partner. I was told that in the meantime I must remain a schoolboy. It was suggested that for compensation I might usefully dig for victory in the vegetable garden. Whenever there is any kind of petty crisis in my life that milk- round will return into my mind as something I regret having missed out on. Let's face it, I'm average. I have my university qualifications, I am by profession an accountant, that's to say a partner in a public accountancy business. I am the end product of what may happen if you raise the school leaving age. Instead of neglecting the opportuni- ties provided (drawing my bursary for beer money), I worked hard and I still do. I'm a married man with two youngsters a home of my own and of course the car. Nothing alters the fact that you have only to strip away the higher education to find me average. If you like, the new average-the latter-day common man, the runner among the ruck in the urban rat race. In secret I yearn for something less complicated, let's say a milkround and an unworried living in a 4 small country town. For commrttmg m:ysd£ to paper I .hav;e the good excuse that I am at present enduring another of my crises. But first I must say that it was only gradually during my years of exposure to the higher education that I discovered its two-sided character. It takes you on a stroll through civilization's flower garden (and I'm not being ironical-I am ready at any time to applaud the man who decides there's nothing in life to compare with reading, say, history); and on the other hand it leads you to believe you are being singled out, made to feel important, assisted to get on and make a career-earn good money. So the question eventually comes up whether you can have it both ways; whether, having been shown around the garden you don't visit there any more, or whether (I am aware that I am changing the metaphor), you endeavour to arrange an uneasy marriage between what is of perennial appeal, and what has its day to day uses in keeping the wolf a long way from the door-in my own personal case one party to the marriage a business career, and the other, well, history. (That study does in fact happen to be my special cup of tea; but with my enthusiasm only moder- ately abated I could mention others, and will even go so far as to specify theology. Granted free choice of a career I might well have preferred to all others that of a learned clergyman-and the advan- tage of an efficient curate to attend to parish duties would have clinched the matter beyond all question.) Now I have aimed at establishing myself as a man who can appreciate that some very attractive flowers grow on what used to be a kind of dung heap, sometimes called by fanciful names (such as Leviathan); but which is nowadays more aptly described as a combined junk and gadget heap, praised-and-damned as the welfare state-or sometimes just praised as the affluent society. What are the advantages I derive from that appreciation? Has the higher educa- tion sold me an outsize pup or not? Answers to these questions wouldn't be just for me-as an accountant I would say that to reckon accurately the number involved could be a pretty sizable job of com- puting, one requiring to be served by the latest model electronic machine if the population explosion and all such kindred phenomena are to be taken into account. I expect my use of the marriage metaphor is significant. After all, everything we endure in this world is rooted in the married state- ! mean it's the reason we are here unless we happen to be literal bastards. And I will say at once that I have no petty complaints about my wife. Since I began with women I have never been able to do without having one around. Pam is nicely put together, and I am confident about wearing qualities which should ensure that she remains for many years easy on the eyes. Also, being one hundred 5 per cent woman, I can never see her landed in my own sort of jam- I mean to say I sometimes foresee the day when my life will be largely composed of an attempt to deal with long hours of bore- dom occupying the empty space between the morning and afternoon newspapers. That sort of horror will never be Pam's cup of tea, and even if it was she would never recognize it as such. There's a phrase (if I remember it was plugged by Spinoza), sub specie aeternitatis. To my certain knowledge Pam will never be plagued by the itch to relate her experience to any principle-! mean anything that might tend to upset her certainty about what is important in life and what isn't. But it's time I came to the point-after all, I have mentioned a CriSIS. It would be on a day like this (by far the best of our summer holi- day), that our youngsters should come up the beach at low tide, and bring with them the finger they had found in one of their favourite rock pools. 'Mummy, look!' That was our boy, Happy. The pair of them had been disagreeing over who was to carry their find, which was cupped by Glad in her two hands. To me, it was as though I had never seen a finger so astonishingly large despite the wrinkles. The nail was intact and all had been washed white and clean. As an object com- posed of alabaster or translucent wax it could have been attractive- but there was no mistaking what it was. As usual Pam was quicker than I was, and her technique within its own limitations couldn't be faulted. While she whipped out a handkerchief she agreed with the young 'uns that they had found something very precious (Why! of all things! a new kind of shell- a finger-shell! Well!), and at the same time quite desperately fragile. Mummy would keep it for them. And now please would they go and find Mummy another of those pretty red and green stones-but wait a minute .... And as the handkerchief-draped horror went into the picnic bag, out came the transparent packet of chocolate biscuits. In the meantime I had been trying very hard to rid myself of the impression that what our children had found was somebody's severed phallus; and I recovered my speech only to say a thing which to Pam would be irritating and silly, and which in the circumstances she was quite right to ignore. 'For God's sake, Pam,' I said, 'why ever in the name of heaven and earth did you insist they be called Happy and Glad?' The children had obligingly trotted off as suggested, and now Pam remarked that we must stroll casually about the rock pool area, just to be satisfied about any more human remains. And after that I must take the car to the nearest phone box and ring the police. We 6 must hand over our gruesome relic and free ourselves of all responsi- bility. But there you are-my wife had used two words which belong to the stock in trade of one branch of the higher education. And in any case, once our children were beyond hearing I had groaned aloud. 'Pam,' I said, 'so long as we are at large in human society responsi- bility is our fate. No,' I added, 'our doom!' My wife's sharp look at me was familiar-also her decision. 'All right,' she said, 'I'll go. Jellyfish.' She said too that I might try to make my conversation a shade more coherent-that sort of thing could be the sign of a mental breakdown. I haven't mentioned that I met Pam during the time of our joint exposure to the higher education. She had begun with the fine arts, but changed to social studies-hence perhaps her flair (very evident during the time of our first encounters), for reconciling general theory and particular instance. Born myself to fumble any practical job in hand when it is unfamiliar, I was quick to admire and be grateful. 'While I'm gone,' she went on, 'I will trust you to be responsible for our children.' I was not in the mood for arguing. When the children showed signs of disquiet over the sound of the car I shouted that Daddy would be with them soon, and to dispose of the jellyfish allegation I joined them by way of a circuitous route past the rock pool. There were no human remains so far as I could observe-as I told myself of course there wouldn't be. Despite what actually turns up, it's always the bits and pieces I expect to come in my direction. When we were through with the police sergeant and his offsider, who turned up after the youngsters were in bed (being Pam, Pam had arranged for our children to be 'spared'), we had a row-the kind of rumpus which I foresee will be an annual event guaranteed to coincide with our annual holiday. And although there was no mistaking what grim finger had reached for the push button on this occasion, that is not to say any couple wanting a thorough-going occasion will ever lack a watertight excuse. Nevertheless, common stuff-I mean when the pair of us could be in no doubt what we were up to, yet found ourselves compulsively impelled to demon- strate how damnably ordinary we are. Pam is my own age exactly- which means she has come on right to the top of her form according to Kinsey. As for me, well, according to the same authority senility of that kind begins in males after sixteen. Not that I'm not the man to meet his marriage account as often as the wife likes to send in her bill-it's just that I am not always bright enough to conceal my surprise that pay-time has come round again so soon. (I owe to my 7 historical reading the discovery that according to Roman law a hus- band might discharge or withhold payment of the debt according to inclination. An Athenian husband on the contrary was by Solon's law required to make three payments a month. It was the Jewish people however, who had rules for special cases: a daily settlement of the debt was required from an idle but vigorous young husband, but twice a week from an ordinary citizen sufficed; once a week from a peasant, once in thirty days from a camel-driver, and once in six months from a seaman. But a student or doctor might resist all demands; and no wife who was in receipt of a weekly sustenance could sue for a divorce. I believe too that among the Jewish people polygamy would divide, without multiplying, the duties of the hus- band-and polygamy regulated in that way is something of which I could thoroughly approve. After a.ll, it is not unreasonable for any man to wish for a number of wives sufficient to ensure there re- mains always one on duty.) From my general reading I have gathered that back at the beginn- ing of the century a wife would sometimes rebel against a husband to whom she was, according to her own view, 'just a plaything'. But from my experience I would think that modern times have tended to reverse that situation. Also, I will admit to irritating my wife by my failure to adopt what she considers the right attitude to our annual holiday-for her an extension of the child's experience of a beach holiday; that is to say golden days of sun sand and sea, in more exact words a daily round of fun and games but with the lid taken right off. And no regrets, and no guilty conscience. And of course she's right in the pattern-you have only to check up on the statistics for spring births ('plum duff babies' is I believe the descrip- tion bestowed by the nursing-home sisterhood). But perhaps I can put the matter on a somewhat more refined level, if I say that for Pam our annual holiday is what the whole of life could be if we never aged (I mean beyond our maturity), and could always reckon on a large credit account at the Bank with never a moment's worry about its maintenance. There is something very pro-American about my wife, but money and consumer-goods are not what I mean. What you buy with money is the happiness which you never for a moment doubt is what you deserve, and may expect without any argument to the contrary. If you are disap- pointed in your expectations, then some two-legged scapegoat must be sought for immediately and made to take the blame. Tonight, before my wife slammed the bedroom door (leaving me to write this kind of last will and testament), I hitched back at her with the declaration that a more accurate view of our situation on this planet was held by the Greeks, for whom life was damned awful apart 8 from a few happy moments for which they were no doubt pro- foundly- grateful. And apart from her retort ('Ancient Greeks! I'd give the whole damn lot for one decent American any day'), she remarked that she hoped I had considered the status of women and practices such as the exposure of infants-and that wasn't to mention slavery and what went on at stag parties. What did I think I knew about the ancient Greeks anyhow? Ha ha! Now I expect I might have tried to patch matters up by making some kind of jest-perhaps by referring her to Kinsey, and Nature's cruel jest in throwing us into each other's arms at identical ages, when it would have been more satisfactory if her thirty years had been complemented by a mere sixteen years on my part (and ha ha to you). And no matter how vehement my wife's verbal reactions might have been, she would nonetheless have understood. But for me, to say any such thing would be merely to conceal the truth. To catch the interest of the parlour psychiatrist in her, encouraged by her social studies, I might perhaps have said that I could not rid myself of my first impression that it was some poor devil's severed member our youngsters had come up the beach to present us with. But what in the name of all that's sub specie aeternitatis would she have made of me if I had confessed the simple shocking truth- that even from her and my closest friends I conceal the melancholy which is induced in me by the afternoon slope of the summer sun? And that sex, Kinsey, and what have you are all the easiest kind of stuff to take compared to that horror? Well, that's it. If these pages ever have a reader I would expect them either to ring a bell, or not to. It occurs to me that what our kids found on the beach might well represent somebody's drastic attempt at a solution (and it would make me very very angry to be reminded that what was found was a finger). Each man to his taste and his solution-and Pam by the sound of things behind the bed- room door has reached the limits of her patience. For that matter, so have I.

9 Poems of the Mid-Sixties

K. 0. A R V I D S 0 N The Flame- Tree

I CHRISTENDoM's least visionary, I Can none the less, in an inward sound Of Orpheus on an Anglo-Saxon harp discern The syllables of love so overlaid That faces rhyme at me, their eyes and lips With Easter set, and set on a single throne, Smiling at once their range and consummation.

II Consider the tragic dreamer, his one fault Issuing in the night, as darkness cracks The grain apart of nightmare, dreamer as foe, With changeable faces, all of them raising up Their voices that sound of drowning To condemn him, One by one. His torment is comprehensible; pallor, The stench in his room of fear, His impotent, baffling hands that stir The dark but to break it, foaming, about his throat- These are admitted. And so he dreams Not one but the nights of all his whole life out In accusation, and seeking for release, From nights and accusors, One by one.

Ill And consider the compost heap Your loves become. Are not their lips more tremulous Than leaves, and bright as petals? 10 Are they not flowering trees in their season, And after, A cry for husbanding? For delving? For allowing the lineal Accent to bespeak itself Perpetually, in many tongues, but One by one?

IV You might at one time, when you were young perhaps, Have imagined that by holding out your hand You could seize the moon. Reconstructing the attempt, you might recall How, silent at first, and single, the moon, A voiding your hand that moved like a cloud across it, Prickled at length on the dryness of your eyes, And split to a raffish galaxy, rapid and menacing, Invading you at last through the holes of your head; Acrid, intemperate brilliance Racketing With a scream of engines. And in dense quiet then, the solitary moon Watched As the veins were flooded in your hand.

What gazing now can turn us into gods, Lightning at our command?

V I have aligned myself with desire On the rock of reflection, and through the blood-washed Window between the curling trees have seen My variously beloved and my beloved One: one breath Disposing the whirlwind, One hand gathering harvests in, the other Rendering to the turning wheel repose. She is beautiful, my beloved, of all names one name, Voice of all voices; And I am the reeds to her, the strings, Whole clutch of the harmony of her, 11 That when to the desert Thursday's house gives way, I shall moan of her till the moving stars embrace, And the hourglass of my mind Lies level upon the horizontal sand.

VI Late shopping night; the week's end Winding its myriads in, expectantly. Everywhere exploration, queues of it Surging up alleyways, up stairs, And fretful on escalators shuffiing Heavens of trade away. I have bought myself a set of transparencies For finding out the colour of the sun, When it rises. I doubt if they'll entertain me though Much more than a day.

VII Our pauses predict eclipse, the night, the day One soft and copper disc; and storm Towards morning lights the wind whereon I play. Only the clock sets rancorously the norm On axles. Stars and faces move away.

Your images on the water bend downstream, U nclasping hands. Your muttering in the mouths Of rivers is not my theme. Your summoning was against your going out, And a calling home.

Briefly, before the falling rain Dilutes the blood, in my beloved's hair The flame-tree blossoms once, and stains With time the sea that curdles in my eyes. I see you drink her in, and disappear.

VIII My arms reached out for a moment And there were the live and the dead, as wheat To an instant's fullness grown 12 For me to phrase; and in my breath Strove centuries, beauty, strove above all Desire; which gave my voice Not Christ in his proud emerging, Eurydice neither, Nor Beatrice shining alone in her window-pane, But a whirlwind. I am the flail of my desire. And devouring the days and nights of my regret, Salt-eyed, in blindness, I shall cast about For a word I sang once, unrecallably. My hands shall break the hours apart like bread; For sight belongs To a chance division, fractional calm between The sounds of feet that rise about me, pause For no time, and then Nameless, Move away.

PETER BLAND

Landfall with Cannibals, Goats, and Mirrors

WAKING, wet with light, I'm swimming Bodiless in the bedroom mirror. Who's calling? Land's in sight! Child cries Of 'look ... look ... mother's growing whiskers.' The day looms over me. What a sandpilel I crawl towards it through infant fingers.

It's all there, crammed in the open window, The breathless filling out of an old idea: Hills round as mushrooms in the white of my eye And the small waves squabbling like knives. I've sailed the night. Clung to rotting timbers. Beached in the mirror kids kick me alive. 13 No. I don't want to be beaten. Won't nobody Hop hop to school like a sun-drenched clown? Whose face is a clean sheet? But no-one's playing Ring round the bed-post.... It's flesh in earnest. I'm dragged off to school past goats with yellow eyes And hung up to dry before a blind black mirror.

The Bay

THrs summer we've had two beached whales (More dead than rocks). We wrote them off As bits of night left over, midnight Ocean offal, or pieces of black Horizon to be booted .... Light Is mineral hard; no mirages; my arm Clangs on your bikinied thigh.

Then how to live? As objects? Waking Out of what depths? (A glass of red wine Behind tight midnight doors; outside, Those two dead hills ... no ... caves.) It's day! The light lets nothing come between us. We lie like fallen monoliths. The bay Is vacant now ... there's only a brown man With slabs of silver on his back, and sticks Of eels that buckle like thin black drains.

14 BASIL DOWLING Walking Home by Moonlight

As 1 walked home tonight Up the sullen road, The moon was on my right Just beyond the wood. With her round beaming face And glow-worm light She kept my easy pace Or with me stood; Then on she moved with grace Through oaks and firs. Walking with her I walked With friends of hers Of whom she might have talked- Poets, astronomers And lovers, too, And I might have listened long Or made a song As poets and lovers do; Or she might have told Of how she visited here In the age of gold Nightly for moon-desire Of a shepherd boy, The beautiful and shy Endymion. But before I could catch her ear To quiz her joy She had sailed up into the sky; And, to tell the truth, I wasn't so much concerned With beauty and youth As to learn what she had learned From looking on At the whole tragi-comedy Of ages gone.

15 Soho Scene

IN THE bitter cold, under the street lamps' glare, A preacher stands. The raw wind ruffies his hair And whistles round him as he calls out loud Strange biblical words to the unheeding crowd Who stroll along, their overcoats up to their ears, And the motors rush, hooting or changing gears. Nobody seems to care For the preaching man with his urgent, passionate air: One perhaps, here and there, Stops for a while and gives him a quizzical stare; But the rest, old and young, Go on their way as though his were a foreign tongue.

Ten paces off, on the other side of the street, Two harlots come and go, as if on sentry beat, Sauntering with a kind of opulent ease, And silent but for the jingle of their keys.

Cries the high-pitched voice, 'All you that are passing by, You were born in sin, and in sin will surely die .... 0 come, and be delivered from Hell's curse.'

The harlots look at each other as if to say 'Thus he is, and thus we, for better or worse. Some seek in us deliverance from hell, And we do our best for those who treat us well.'

A man comes up, and discusses what's to pay; And the wind whirls the preaching voice away.

16 DENIS GLOVER The Sick 1\qse (Blake)

'THE ROSE, the worm, the storm, dark love' The Commentator now asks what?

Sickly my rose, wriggles the old worm, And dark, dark is love sunrise or storm Augmented. (Let the Commentator not Fall into suburban spinach leaves to rot.)

His leaves are unimportant, his beliefs Are half-explained half-truths.

But here's your three-in-one, The god-man-woman toil Drilling for oil mirthfully And down to earth.

Press then your plastic nose To the synthetic rose. Stay indoor for the storm. In dark, dark love A blonde may keep you warm.

PAUL HENDERSON Beside the Water

WHEN it is nearly dark the last light Glows from such refulgent surfaces As walls of the old shed, and boats lifting gently.

It is as though lamps are placed in them; As though they are rooms which have become translucent, So softly the light is gathered there. 17 On this calm night there are no birds about; They gather to fish on a ruffied evening, Their snowflake hovering flight as disturbed as the water.

Perhaps below the surface fish are conscious too Of this quiet time; of water, sky and hill Muted and absorbing the sound we make.

Movement down there will be tranquil; fish and weed Flow gently; sometimes are held at rest By awareness of calm above, and of whatever

Orders their shadowy world, the dark hills too, This dreaming harbour where the last light Is gathered into our hands like lamps, or flowers.

KEVIN IRELAND Deposition

I cannot give you words which turned as succulent as flesh upon the nib:

thin men write gaunt poems and each word sticks out like a rib.

18 Postcard with Pictures

I thought even a brief parting would be like a fall from light

that I would feel a sense of blind loss a drop of all bright hopes

now I find there is no abstract fall and loss has perfect sight

in fact I miss your small but actual world of scented sheets and coloured soaps

A Modern Seduction

CLOSE your ears to the telephone you know what it has to say shut your eyes to the papers there is bad news every day

block your nose to the city it stinks of mildew and oil keep your tongue from its spices their sickly taste will spoil

19 benumb to the touch of others they paw for title and gold let us lie down in the darkness and clinch against the cold

A Summer Storm

WIND is crushed between the rubbing crying trees

is shaken out like scurf in dry and scratchy leaves

mind is milled between her shattering limbs

it flakes in stinging gusts of seed it scatters like a storm-burst leaf

20 LOUIS JOHNSON A Sense of Style

MY FATHER never found a sense of style to match the urgings of his inner needs. And so his fourth decade was eaten up with grasping possibilities and hobbies that lacked the satisfactions he most craved. These were soon dropped when emptiness again leered from his handiwork. One winter he laboriously copied faces from advertisements in movie magazines, and then with coloured pencils, hour by hour, gave them the tints that his imagination, and Hollywood, conceived. Our kitchen wore his output for a year until an age of cooking smells and defecating flies yellowed the paper, fouled his pure design, consigning craft and art to the rubbish bin.

Another year, with hoarded silver paper he designed ships, in India ink, on glass filling between the lines with twisted glitter, achieving a fine flatness on the black backgrounds he chose to set the colours off. One yet remains, hung on the kitchen wall, kept by my mother out of sentiment, and also, no doubt, that it's something like the object it set out to represent.

Representation seemed to foul him most. Truth to the subject he could take as sign of craftsmanship he did not quite possess, so most desired. But, beyond that, he did not sense a more original need worked in his blood to irritate his sons with private visions he would not afford, having come through a world that stank of war, of makeshift fences, compromised defences, 21 depression, concrete need. And so his itch to make could not avoid the practical and recognizeable elements of the day, demanding most the daylight world's approval.

Next in his chain of interests came the small world of the model ships: in time, a fleet of stately Spanish galleons foundered upon the isthmus of the mantelpiece. The crowsfeet grew between his eyes that strained to bore minute holes through sliced knitting-needles as pulleys for the rigging: always something got out of scale. He gave it up, began saving cigar and balsa boxes for his fretwork craze, and then, sensing that times were better, that he lacked training towards the whole, aesthetic man, went to nightclasses and learned bookbinding.

In later years he did little with his hands: fashioned sometimes a crow from a cow's horn, or owls from pinecones; but his heart was not in it; nor was his pride, his care, the same. All wore those flaws that point the amateur. And he was clearly troubled that my brother, who took to painting, paid such small concern to actual likenesses and yet could gain something of personal vision, private strength, from going his defiant road to style and shrugging-off complaints to 'make it real'. And God alone knows what he thought of those early poems of mine in which I mapped lacked lusts and then filled in the blanks not with sweets wrappings, but the facts of life.

Not that I feel superior to that man who tried so hard in his mistaken way to glorify his kitchen corner in a grim, despondent world. I'm grateful for what restlessness and discontent he gave me and my brother, that we turned about and looked inside to see what made us tick, 22 realizing that an outer copy of what passes for reality's but a fact needing no celebration-a mere disguise if one's to find some meaning in the act.

And in his name I dedicate again myself to the resistance of the times- and the demands of those who do not know a trombone from a contretemps-and blow my own horn loudly in the artless world that, in an empty country, gave to him as only standard the foiled chocolate box, appearances and guilt against the self; for dreams, imported films; for aspiration the bitter thought that anything one made must look as real as money, pay its way even to stand upon a kitchen shelf. I, and my brother, wanted more than that: we asked that we be given living space for more of the man than he conceived existed, though feeling some of its neglected force: and may the effort to assess his size give me the right to speak.

OWEN LEEMING Vespers

THERE IS a bell behind the evening's bluishness Whose harmonics are tingling like hot little nerves, As the lulled instant inwardly concretes itself, A shaky dam to hold back the massing future, Guarding over this Saturday, a moderate Easterly, And no more strontium than usual, sport For the sporting, melancholy, I think, As this hour so often is, and yet laughs Anticipatory, a swinging time ahead. 23 Like a compass the country seems to yaw In an ocean of possibility, North Cape Making an unsure arc, so that all parts Take on a queasy loosening of status quo. But who if any has heard the bell's true note, The fundamental deep concussion of bronze? I, I suspect all, have caught its overtones Trembling outside the evening sky. Why Does this cool-stirring world feel as if fire Is waiting around it, when we know there is space, Only space, immoderately cold? It is the hour Of cold-meat meals, of the closing of bars, Of showers and talcum, of a couple of births, A couple of deaths ... the ink spreads through the sky, The moment for spasm has gone. Quite gently now, What is to come drains into what has been, The tremorous needle homes on North, and not a soul Has been disturbed. Only a cur's ear, mean, Alert, instinctual, would prick to catch a faint, Continuing hum still shimmering from unearthly spires.

Venus is Setting

NIGHT drops as each bar voids. Out of office men empty words And hilly suburbs are waiting For the men. 'I am a man. My beery breath is warranty.' Cabbage in saucepans boils Where the other sex are. A green, A laundered vegetable breath Steams mothering in apathy's kitchen. Black spikes on violet space Frame a Maori sundown. 24 'I'm home.' The children of the man Lie star-shaped on the carpet, Flickered on by Rin Tin Tin. 'Well, say hello to your Dad.' Infanticide. V en us comes out. She says he forgot the flowers. A white tail in the swamp Flicks, flicks As the sky darkens to the Southern stars, Argo Navis, the Centaur cradling the Cross, The panoply of galaxies, Well out of England's sight. 'I am their Dad. I like cabbage.' She smoulders in her private death But merely stacks the dishes. Electra sighs above, warning light Winking red, a fine arrival. Still the swamp-hens flick and scratch. Somewhere an avalanche: She polishes tomorrow's shoes Till she sees her ovaries in them.

'I must give a good impression To the big chief from Australia.' The children of the man Troop off to bed. V en us is setting, Sits with him. In starlight, the volcano peaceably smokes, The Thermal Region belly-rumbles, Showing kinship With what glimmers out there. 'I wish I'd shot a deer. Or just a rabbit.' She toasts him cheese, Fills the hottie, Five years to menopause.

'Time for my leak on the hedge.' The man goes out and meets the stars- Acrux, Achernar, Canopus, Spikes of the cabbage tree, 25 The sea-surge round his island, Difference, Such difference, Polynesian island with volcano, His sex, Leaks on the hedge.

RAYMOND WARD Solo for Clarinet

I AM always meeting him. In his rags or in his extra special clothes, he lands on both feet from out of nowhere. Like new. A springy disconcerting number with a slouch hat skimming one ear like a spun lariat, or a tray load tilting on a waiter's palm; alternatively, rubbed right forward astonishing his nose. Definitely not the man-in-the-street. Not Everyman. Nothing like that. Himself: as water is inclined to be liquid and fire flame; and with as little interest in the habit of name. Snakily on his toes he confronts me, his hat like a rubber ball bobbing on a seal's nose; while he cranes his neck to see me in the round with a stare like Picasso's. Ants I can't shake off, his eyes stalk round my chin, file through my shirt, my trousers, bite my skin till I am itching all over. 26 Immediately I begin to wriggle pivoting, he slithers off- as a gorilla might in clothes- and I slump like a ransacked house with broken windows.

(jodsand Men

MosT men seem to think that we have seen the last of the gods, that crashed from a mythic heaven to a rational earth they lie between their splintered axle-rods, discredited but long forgiven; that all the temples built for them by our hazy ancestors in a fit of monumental folly and the sea of blood they spilt to satisfy them were a curse irrational as it was unholy; that all the poetry and song they invoked them with was a fashion conceived in primordial ignorance of what is right and wrong and that between truth and passion they could not see the difference; more and more they seem to think that stage of infancy long past its gruesome rituals obsolete the god of gods himself extinct and man ripe for divinity at last with few enigmas left to read.

Yet men still hold the same relentless arguments with nature and with their own deceptive kind; 27 powers for which they cannot find a name with all their proud nomenclature still tread the labyrinth of the mind; the thoughts which have perplexed philosophers and the devout for centuries may create no wonder in them now but how this contemptuous man of theirs originated, or what his fate is in the universe, they cannot show.

Meanwhile the expanding scope of time lies in the imagination's range, as in a flash the dream of history where past events with present chime where forms, not what they stand for, change and stubborn fact is ringed with mystery.

The Living

THIS couple, like two asphalt flowers rooted securely in the sidewalk, he with a dangling fist of messages, she mowing slowly with a pram, defined in silhouette against the glare grow silently yet never move. Some thread of his tobacco clouds will always twist between the poles, her knuckles need some hint of gold.

Before and after an explosion such a stillness dominates all things.

28 Settler and Stranger

THROUGH the dark lens of our detachment, we proceed to peer. Beyond the murmuring lips and eyes flickering with animation, beyond the brief society of sounds they form with so much amiability, beyond the heads and shoulders only, framed like icons in the shimmering windows, we stare into the night.

Across the harbour from their eminence a constellation of interiors like our own glitters impersonally. We too would like to feel that we are known, but with as little curiosity. Hospitable though we at first appear to strangers, in them we soon lose interest and stare into the night,

to where, against a clear and moonless sky, the unfinished profile of the mountain turns benignly from its own reflection. What may, to some men once, have been a god commanding sacrifice commands no more. The myth extinct as a volcano, it remembers chaos bubbling from the void and stares into the night.

Out there the world, we know, is ill at ease. As one can no longer be an island, our role in these has yet to be defined and, in our pantheon, the role of strangers: which is to be impermanent, within the most exclusive circles most alone, to be, for us, a shade too near the bone. We stare into the night.

29 Sales

HE would not be found in the neon lake but walking on it. De profundis and fathoms deep in Sin City her head is raised : He is shining somewhere beyond that shop verandah, His bearded face like Alec's without a hat on but much younger and more polite. Pinned like a heart upon the sleeve her guarantee: like bulging eyeballs, CHRIST IS RISEN, billed in stupendous capitals across the cover. ... Visible, though not to my astronomy, this dope anoints her,-there's her oily smile. Whatever music at that minute thrills her ears, it is not celestial: teenage demons He would not be seen alive or dead with stand about the loudspeaker, swathed in thought, hearing the disc right through I liked one track of, and almost bought.

HUBERT WITHEFORD Compulsion

HABIT: and of earth ... weight. Was it to endure that The elements came together in this life, Is 'fail' what it is about? To be as a slave Is that what He acted out? Not as I play it-for laughs And lachrymae rerum. But as if By taking it clear, and it seemed quite Simply downwards, He arose Tall pole of our cross. 30 The Displacement

How CAN I look at my unhappiness As it puts its hand over the side Of the crumbling old well And hooks itself up? I know without opening my eyes It is ugly, It is mine.

It is really not unhappiness at all, Who is to tell what it is? It is something pressing up towards the light; I call it ugly but feel only it is obscene, A native, perhaps beautiful, of the vasty deep.

MARK YOUNG Tattoo Artist

WE BOTH have our windows that we work behind, and in each window is the reflection of the other. Apart from this we are strangers, although we both have beards and I especially have spent hours just sitting at my window watching him work in the small shop that is decorated with tattoo designs- the false hearts and misshapen eagles of his self -called artistry.

He is not precise, makes no allowances for shape of limb or curve of muscle as he roughly shaves the chosen spot and then applies the transfer that the needle is to follow. 31 It is the ritual that is important, though- the group of friends, the naked arm grinning white in the halflight of the shop, the flow of blood.

The completion of the stigma is the dreamt-of moment: when the newly-tattooed youth can go out from the small shop, bearing proudly his illustrated manhood.

Your Fallen Orpheus

for Ross RJ'tchie

THE SHADOW of the despairing man seems longer than a mile. He is your fallen Orpheus, stripped of his lute and more naked than the women in the foreground.

Movement of the wind is memory of movement amongst the macrocarpa trees that now no longer bow before the beauty of his music. The presence of the trees embarrasses. Each is the memory of a song that shame has made him swallow.

The other people in the painting- the men in evening dress, the women undressed for another kind of evening-do not concern themselves with anything behind. Untouched by memories or shame, they spend their time participating in an empty orgy that echoes out the hunger of the age. 32 This moment, in the gallery, I stand in what must almost be the same position as you stood in your studio to cast the last glance that completes the painting. The summit of the background hill has since lost sight of you; and now it is my time to turn, and leave the ground your fallen Orpheus walks upon.

MICHAEL GIFKINS Artist

TwENTY-SEVEN MINUTES, that's all it would take. In twenty-seven minutes he would be out with the seats shining and the stain- less steel scoured clean. But already he could see them starting to queue aggressively on the concrete path outside the doorway. They clutched their sponge-bags and striped towels as if afraid that their neighbour might try to grab them; the ones with electric razors ap- peared smoothly conscious of some vague superiority. About half were wearing shorts, singlets and roman sandals. The rest were still in their pyjamas. You could tell the ones that hadn't been long in the camp. They looked white and worried. He kicked open the first door. The jet from the hose splashed up off the concrete, soaking his boots and socks. He moved quickly down the row of cubicles, praying briefly at the door of each that it wouldn't be in too much of a mess. The hose was good for this sort of work; but if you got a really dirty one you had to use the stiff broom. Once he had even had to go back and get a shovel. Thank God they weren't too bad today. As he turned off the water he glanced again at the waiting crowd. Some were becoming impatient. He could see them muttering to- gether and pointing at their watches. Damn them. At eleven in the morning you'd think that even holiday-makers would have made time to clean themselves up. The hot water hissing on to the disin- fectant in the bucket sent choking vapour billowing up into his 33 face. It made his eyes run, but at least it was better than the other smell. He used twice as much as it said on the tin, and even that was not enough on very warm days. Without disinfectant, he thought, it would be hell. He was on the last pan when he caught a glimpse of a little kid slipping into the cubicle at the other end. Perhaps the boy was not old enough to read his sign. He called out. The child hitched up his pants and ran snivelling out the door. It was hard on the little ones, he thought, and then slammed the bucket down with a crash. How many stopped to think how bloody hard it was for him? He would have to hurry. The shower-boxes were good; he had only to shake the rubber mats and pull the hair out of the plug holes. The walls would be due for a scrub soon, but he didn't have the time today. And there were too many waiting outside. He wished they would go away. Someone had emptied the used razor-blade tin all over the floor underneath the wash basins. The blades slithered over the wet con- crete as he tried to get his nails under them to flick them up. He could see blood starting to ooze from one of his fingers as he got the last blade into the tin and hung the tin up on its nail. For a moment he was scared. Norman had let a bug get into a similar cut and had come out in sores all over. That was the worst of this job. You couldn't even smoke for fear of forgetting and touching your cigarette. He looked at his watch. Only ten minutes to go. He liked watching the crystals of caustic as he emptied them from his tin on to the bench. The water lying in pools on the stainless steel changed them from a white definite solid to a crumbling col- ourless mass. But he could not watch for long. He took his rag and began rubbing vigorously at the twenty-four hour accumulation of soap and body-fat. It never ceased to amaze him how it dissolved away under his strokes and left the steel gleaming and fresh. He would have to write one of those 'I like your product' notes to the manufacturers. They might even print it in the newspapers. And it didn't burn your hands much, either. On the label it advised you to wear gloves, but how could you get into the corners of basins with gloves on? It would take too long; he couldn't afford the time. It was hard luck for him that the skin on his fingers went brown, then black, and sloughed off. Perhaps that's why they were paying him so well. But he didn't really like doing the long bench all that much, because when he got level with the big mirror over the taps he would see himself working and that always gave him a shock. Today he noticed that he had got a dark stain all over the shoulder of his shirt and cursed himself for being careless. He saw himself 34 swear in the mirror and it was like watching another person; a damp, worried-looking man who was rubbing purposefully with a huge straggly wet rag at a shiny bench. This was the moment he hated, because now and only now was he forced to look at himself as those outside must be looking at him. He felt sick. He would never do this again. He would say he was leaving. The rag caught in a plug-chain and he jerked it free. A splash of caustic flew up into his eye, and suddenly he was afraid. His hand went to his face and then he remembered how his hands must be crawling with bugs. So he turned on one of the taps full blast and stuck his head underneath the cool water. It would probably be right if he could sluice it out of his eye. It wasn't as if it had been in there for long. Norman had said to use olive oil but he didn't have any olive oil. Water would have to do. What must they be thinking out there? What must they be thinking? 'Why can't my kid have a piss?' He tried to ignore the voice and concentrate on the water flooding over his face. It was streaming down his neck, too, and his shirt was soaked through. 'I said why can't he have a piss?' The tone was more menacing now and the sudden darkness told him that the crowd were pressing forward, blocking the doorway so as to watch the outcome. Reluctantly, he looked up. It was the man who had come in the night before with the big Rover towing the six-berth caravan. He had a red face and a hairy chest and the snivelling child was hanging on to his belt. 'He wants to piss.' The standard explanation ... of how it took only half an hour a day to clean up their mess from the day before and besides, they wanted their amenities clean, didn't they, and anyway, there were toilets at the other end of the camp, and he had to have it empty for a clear run ... went over their heads. The child was holding himself now and had started to whimper. He saw himself in the big mirror as he pleaded his cause and realized that they couldn't be expected to listen to him, looking as he did, soaked through and with his hair hanging damp over his forehead. He turned his back on the crowded doorway. Immediately the father pushed past him and ushered his son into the first cubicle. Inspired by his example the rest poured in, some hesitant and slightly guilty-looking, the majority appearing to assert defiantly some inalienable right of mankind. That the seats had not been wiped dry of disinfectant appeared to be of little importance. He left twelve packets of paper on the bench to fill the dispensers that to their dismay they would soon 35 realize to be empty. He picked up his rag and his broom, his bucket and his tin and squelched out of the building. He paused at the en- trance as the bright sun and the warm, fresh air struck him; paused and looked out over the rocks, over the reef where the long channel surge frothed forward and back. His eye did not appear to be hurting. Steam rose up from his damp shirt and he could feel the flannel beginning to itch his skin as it dried out. He could hear water being slopped over the floor he had just swept clean. Someone was jerking on the chain of a cistern that had jammed. Screams of delight came from two kids who had got hold of his hose and were soaking walls and paper. But these things, at this moment, did not unduly worry him. He knew that this time tomorrow, for just under half an hour, he would be in there again and his would be the task of putting things to rights.

AMRITA PRITAM Poems from the Pan;abi

Translated by Amrita Pritam and Charles Brasch

A Limping Shadow

A LONG line of trees.

As if stones had hurt their bare feet As if they had twisted their ankles As if their knee-caps were broken As if their shoulders ached As if every branch limped as it grew.

Each new soft branch Is fastened to a dry stick As if its wrists were sprained As if its elbows had been fractured, Steel wires are wound round the branch As if to tie back its waving hair. 36 Soft are the leaves of trees Soft the flowers of the womb; When the gardener is very cunning The tree is full of knots; As a branch grows step by step, Step by step its shadow limps.

Let us bend low Let us fold our bodies up small And sit in the thin shadow of a tree, And when a small flower comes To crown the tree's head We shall weep for the flower. rou Vo Not Come

SPRING is waking and stretching its arms, Flowers weave their silk threads For the festival of colours. You do not come.

Afternoons grow long; Red has touched the grapes, Sickles are kissing the wheat. You do not come.

Clouds are gathering, Earth opens its hands to drink The bounty of the sky. You do not come.

Trees murmur enchantment, Airs from the woodland wander With lips full of honey. You do not come.

Seasons wear their beauty, Night sets on its brow A diadem of moon. You do not come. 37 Again the stars tell me That in my body's house A candle of beauty still burns. You do not come. All the sun's rays vow That light still wakes From the death sleep of night. You do not come. v1 Lump of Clay

A handful of man And a handful of woman Kneaded together- Two hands To form the body And mould the face. Only a milky smell Comes from it, This lump of clay, And a small sound, nothing more, It has not yet learned The play of language. It wears the first birth-hue, It has not yet put on The hundred shades of the world, Its soft feet Are still pure Of the dust of the world. From the common ocean It has scooped up no handfuls Of Mine and Thine, Its thoughts still go free Of the ties of relationship. This will not last: The clay must be baked in the ovens Of religion and morality. 38 Baked, it will bear the marks That many have set upon it, Each of its feelings overlaid By the repeated curse of convention.

It will have to suffer Parents, race, country, Learn to favour its own people And despise others.

A soft lump of clay It will have to learn The secret of the hardness of stone.

Knowing the secret of stone Like big stones And becoming one of the big stones itself Sooner or later it must break somebody's head.

vft :Midnight

YouR memory knocks at my door.

These are not words of song But drops of sweat on love's brow.

These are not words of song, They are tears that choke my pen.

These are not words of song: Wounded silence weeps.

I have paid love every debt And every debt is to pay- Why do they never grow less?

Your memory comes with the rest Bidding life sign this night The blank cheque of death.

Your memory knocks at my door. 39 Note. Amrita Pritam was born of a Sikh family in Gujranwala, Panjab, in 1919, daughter of a well-known man of letters; until partition she lived in Lahore and now lives in Delhi. Her first book of poems was published in 1935; she has published fifteen collections in all, the latest in 1964. In 1956 she received the Sahitya Akaderni Award, the highest in India, for the collection entitled Sunehre (Messages); she is the only woman to have received it. Since 1948 she has also published ten novels and five books of stories. Nearly all these have been translated from Panjabi into most other Indian languages, some of her stories have been translated into Russian and English, and her novel The Skeleton into English. A few of her poems too have been translated into English and Russian. In Panjabi poetry the line consists not of so many stresses but of so many long and short syllables. Until recently, rhyme was always used and stanzas were regular. Amrita Pritam has experimented in free verse without rhyme, but this was a passing phase; now she always writes in regular stanza form, using rhyme. Her work is famous for the beauty of its language, and this is lost in translation. It is often close to folk poetry, and reflects the romantic nature of Panjabi life and the Panjabi temperament. For Panjabis, it is as usual to sing poems, even long ones, as to recite them; many of her poems are sung by peasants at work in the fields, are recited publicly, and quoted in everyday talk and in public speeches and writings.

Beginnings

2. JANET FRAME

ARE THERE 'pockets' of poetry in the world as there are 'pockets' of depression and wealth, areas breeding poetry like a rare plant which the nation eats to satisfy an extra appetite, enjoying the pleasant taste without thinking too much of the dangers of the 'insane root'? I was born into a family, local and national 'pocket' of poetry. In my family words were revered as instruments of magic. My father's mother whose cross on her marriage certificate had been witnessed as 'Mary Paterson, her mark' used all the forces of her Scottish superstition to try to cope with the sudden family literacy, the eleven children who were born and going to school in the new land, and learning to read and write words. In a recent visit to my old home 40 to sort family papers and letters I've seen the legacy of my grand- mother's superstition in the way my father carefully hoarded grocery lists, greetings cards, notes, receipts, certificates, licences, telegrams, pages of financial plotting rich with££££ signs, Art Union and Tatts tickets: the debris of a revolution of literacy, millions of words whose power to destroy, to revive, transform, had been so respected and feared that the words had been kept prisoners, almost as if my family expected the telegrams of many years past to present them- selves again at the front door, provoking renewed shock-joy, grief. As my mother's family had been literate for many generations and she had not suffered this devastating avalanche of words, her meth- ods of controlling them were less disorganized. Even her great grand- mother had found a solution to the problem of the power of words by shaping them as poems into notebooks. Writing poems became a family habit, though some of the succeeding generations chose to make little books of household remedies rather than poems. My mother united the two: she wrote poems as remedies for her own ills and those of her family, her friends and her country. A dreamer, who never gave up her romantic notion that great writers compose masterpieces on backs of envelopes, receipts, old letters, she left each day a trail of poem-spattered fragments in the hope, perhaps, that the gods woyld favour her for meeting the first condition of literary greatness.· So my father sat at one end of the table writing his time-sheets, recording pack and trim, draining tanks and tend- ers, tablet exchanges; my mother sat at the other end writing her poems to submit for publication, while my sisters and I sat on the long kauri form or the bin near the fire writing our poems to send to the newspapers: We were proud to have our work printed, and read over the air. When I began to share my interest in poetry with a Canadian penfriend who sent me half a dollar, a maple-leaf which became brittle and crumbled, and a book of verse by the Young Co- operators Club, full of evocative references to prairies, trappers, snow; spruce, tamrac, quaking muskeg beds-then my chosen world -North America-was complete. Much has been written of the English background to the life of a New Zealander; little has been said of the North American influence. Though my mother and father had been born in New Zealand (indeed, my step-great-grand- mother was a full-blooded Maori) and drew their themes for bed- time stories from life around she Port Chalmers Wharf and 'down the Sounds' in Marlborough,· my Scottish grandmother convinced me, by her tales of life in America, and by her knowledge and sing- ing of negro spirituals, that my ancestral home was North America. I do not know where my grandmother learned her tales and songs; I believed that she had come from America, that she had been a 41 slave there, for she was big, with frizzy hair and dark skin, and sometimes when she sang about the cotton fields she would cry as if she were remembering her years as a slave. As a child then, I dreamed more often of prairies than of pad- docks, of coyotes than wallabies, and in winter when the bitter wind blew from the T okorahis (or were they the Rockies?) I had to struggle through deep snowdrifts down town to buy-The Otago Daily Times . ... 1 I made my first story on the banks of the Mataura river after a meal of trout and billy tea. 'Once upon a time there was a bird. One day a hawk came out of the sky and ate the bird. The next day a big bogie came out from behind the hill and ate up the hawk for eating up the The story's not unusual, told by a child of three. As I still write stories I'm entitled to study this and judge it the best I've written. When my Scottish grandmother came to one of the most memorable moments of her life she had no words to waste in writing. When I was small, and the hawks so often came swooping out of the sky to kill the birds and the bogies so often lived behind the hills, and I thought I'd make up a story to put hawk, bird, bogie into their proper hierarchy, then I had few words to waste. Getting them, using them were as simple as being the hawk which swooped out of the sky. I keep that story in mind as an example of a time in my life when I did not waste words, when I had fewer words to choose from, yet I was still unable to perform the miracle of keeping my listeners 'from play' and (as equivalent of the 'chimney-corner') from the paddling pool-clear water on a bed of white stones- near the river. I remember that I called on the authority of my mother-Mum, they're wriggling, stop them from wriggling while I tell a story. How much more difficult it is now, to choose words that bind with their spell, and to realize that once the words are chosen and written, there's no one to appeal to, to help recall the wandering attention! One is quite alone, one must decide alone. Recently, for the first time in seven years, I travelled in a New Zea- land train which stopped suddenly in a country wilderness, not, it seemed, for the accepted reasons-to get water, to let the north express or a goods train pass; there was no reason that I could think of, and the code forbade me to ask, for I was of the country, wasn't I, and should have known? When I write, and my words go astray, with unexplained stops and 'wrigglings' of concentration in those who read, I think to myself-I'm of the country-the country of words-I should have known. The Second War came. Books were printed on thin yGllow paper with smudges and specks on it; such thin paper that it seemed 42 unable to bear the weight or shape of the words; and where could words be contained if paper could no longer house them? I felt as if the floor and walls of the world were being torn apart; there seemed to be nowhere anymore, no hope, once governments had decreed the rationing of paper and books. The books in my life had once been few. On the shelves in the kitchen at home there were none of the books which my mother was able to remember and recite from: Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Dickens, and the American poets. My mother had come from a home where there were many books to one where were few; in a way, her marriage was a migration; she retained passages of prose and poetry and recited them as if they were vivid memories of a homeland she would never see again. Our bookshelf had Grimm's Fairy Tales with its dark small print enhancing the terror of many of the tales, and with occasional pages stiffened and curled as if they had been exposed to the weather, as they had been, for Grimm's Fairy Tales and Ernest Dowson's Poems, and George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind had been found in the town rubbish dump. The other family books were twelve volumes of Oscar Wilde (which my father bought at an auction in Wyndham, in a 'lot' which included Oscar Wilde, a yellow and black chiming clock, a pair of hedge shears, and a bagpipe record, The Wee Macgregor), Christendom Astray, my mother's Christadelphian manual, the Bible, God's Book (a luridly illustrated account of the creation and the prophets and the Latter Days), the doctor's Book, an equally luridly illustrated account of the human body in sickness; a collection of school books and prizes, and one 'foreigner' which I never read: it was pale blue with white stripes down the cover and spine, and its title was To Pay the Price. When I was Dux of the primary school I was given a medal and a library subscription for the following year. The whole family shared in the wonders of the books I brought home, and when the subscription had finished we agreed that no matter how hard it was to make ends meet at home, we could not give up the pleasures of reading. My mother (excited at the thought of communicating with the characters and poems of her past) begged, 'Bring home Charles Dickens, bring home Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mark Twain (that is, kiddies, Samuel Clemens).' My mother would never dream of giving a writer anything but his or her full Christian and surname. I duti- fully 'brought home' the favourites including 'a William book' for my brother who was ill, and 'something about the sea' for my father. The library tradition was begun. As my ambition from the time 1 was eight was to be a poet, and I was now at High School, 43 in preparation for my future profession I read chiefly poetry and books about poetry and poets. Along a lonely wall of the town library (I felt it belonged to me, for no one seemed to choose books from there) I found the Complete Works of the Poets, all the Vic- torian Novelists, German Philosophers (I could never be a poet without having studied Kant), the translated works of Georges Sand (I descended from my poetic pedestal to cherish a secret passion for Count Albert in Consuelo ). I was almost in despair because I could never find Chapman's Homer to 'look into', nor Holinshed's his- tories to read the original stories of Macbeth and King Lear. In our later years at High School my sisters and I, becoming more ambitious, set to work on our novels, with the titles carefully chosen: There is Sweet Music, Go Shepherd, and The Vision of the Dust, which I had chosen because I was currently anti-shepherd, anti-sweet music, seeking the poetry in 'the heart of the unobvious' by writing about such topics as cellophane paper, factories, slums, ugliness. There were tragic happenings in our family?Sometimes when it seemed to us that our family was doomed, we would console ourselves by remembering the Brontes and drawing between them and us a grandiose dramatic parallel which could not harm, though it might have amused, them, but which may have harmed us into believing that we three girls held, by right, 'silk purses' of words. With a background of poverty, drunkenness, attempted murder and near-madness, it was inevitable that we should feel close to the Brontes, once we had read their books and knew the story of their lives. My younger sister (who later died when she was twenty) was assigned the role of Emily; I, more practical and less outwardly 'passionate' became Charlotte, while my youngest sister, shy, over- shadowed in many ways by our 'glory', became Anne. 1 Then, when my own private world became more demanding and I no longer cared to confide in 'Emily' or 'Anne' I spent my spare time writing my diary addressed to the ruler of my Land of Ardenue. I lived increasingly in this imaginary world whose charac- ters were drawn from objects and people I met in my daily life, with occasional intrusion of characters from fiction-from Dostoyev- sky, Daudet, Hardy. My home task of milking the two cows enabled me to spend hours on the hills around Oamaru talking to and ex- changing opinions with my characters while I persuaded the cows (which I milked in the paddocks) to 'let down' their milk. Or I made poems in my head and wrote them when I came home. The channels of poetry were strengthened and deepened. Those needs and longings which, during childhood, had been stacked in a tremendous slow-moving mass, like a picturesque glacier seen in the mountains of the high country, had begun to thaw, in the 44 spring of adolescence. One always remembers vividly those chilling crashing immense movements of the spirit as the long-frozen ideas found their life and course and merged one with the other in their flow to the sea. ,/People began asking, What are you going to do with your life? I'll be a teacher, I said, writing in my diary the same evening, I'm going to be a poet. I left home to attend Training College and University in Dunedin. I looked for the poets. Where were the poets? I spent my free time in the North Dunedin Cemetery, sitting on the tombstones, dream- ing, or walking along St Clair beach, by the lupins and the sandhills. One day I wrote a story, sent it to the Listener, and to my surprise it was published, with illustrations. I was very proud of my story. Though it was published only under my initials, someone traced it to me and added to my self-esteem by remarking,-The Listener's hard to get into. Secretly, I was more proud of the illustration by Russell Clark than I was of the story, for the scene depicted a dark- haired attractive schoolgirl in the kitchen of a typical New Zealand home, such a contrast to the home I'd been describing, my own, which had never been 'typical', which had none of the furniture and ornaments portrayed by the artist. The schoolgirl in the smart gym frock was a flattering picture of myself. If I had been able to draw I would have made a 'true' picture, far from the pleasantly romantic etching. /As it was becoming impossible for me to reconcile 'this' and 'that' world, I decided to choose 'that' world, and one day when the Inspector was visiting my class at school I said,-Excuse me, and walked from the room and the school, from 'this' world to 'that' world where I have stayed, and where I live now. At first, it seemed a lonely disastrous choice. I tried to kill myself, and was sent to hospital for six weeks, and when I came out I found a living-in job as a housemaid in a boarding-house for workmen and old ladies, and in the evenings, in my small room which was still used as the linen cupboard though it now held my bed and chest of drawers squeezed in somehow beneath the shelves piled with linen, I sat on my bed with my newly acquired secondhand typewriter, an aged Barlock whose keys performed a roundabout dance before they reached the paper, and typed slowly, with one finger, for I had never used a typewriter before, most of my Lagoon stories. Then, after another family tragedy, I went to live in Christchurch where I worked at a 'racing' hotel and continued writing the stories/ which I gave, as they were written, to a friend who had tried to make 'this' world more endurable for me. Though I tried to be a good waitress, my fear of everyone-the fierce black-clad head wait- 45 ress, the proprietor, his wife, the guests, a fear intensified in some way by the nightmare of the long long Christchurch streets, became more than I could bear alone, and I was again sent to hospital. For eight of the next ten years I was in hospital, and when once again I was discharged 'on probation' I was truly an inhabitant of 'that' world. Once again, optimistically I found a living-in job as a waitress in a Dunedin hotel where I saved enough wages to replace the old Barlock with a more modern secondhand Remington on which I typed stories and poems to send to the Listener. (I had pleasant memories of the publication of my first story.) Yet the pat- tern of fear began to reassert itself (I developed a terror of calling out the meal-orders to the sharp-tongued second cook-and how could I be a waitress if I could not give orders without bursting into tears?) and I returned to hospital for a short time. When I was dis- charged I knew (though I was repeatedly urged to 'adapt' 'mix' 'conform') that unless I devoted my time wholly to making designs from my dreams, whether or not those designs were approved or admired, I should spend the remainder of my life in hospital-or per- haps, as had been planned for me while I was a patient, there would be a leucotomy and the dreams of those who cared for me would be realized: I would 'mix' 'conform', become 'a useful member of the community'. I went to stay in Auckland where I met Frank Sarge- son and accepted his invitation to live in the army hut in his garden. He arranged, through an understanding doctor, that I should receive a Social Security Benefit, for a time. I wrote Owls Do Cry. Then, because the doctor could not continue indefinitely to supply certifi- cates, I was forced once again to venture into 'this' world, and spent a nightmare two weeks cleaning rooms at a huge hotel in Auck- land, until I was sacked for my slowness-the housekeeper had found me, at four-thirty in the afternoon, still struggling to finish my allotted 'floor' when the other housemaids had been gone three and a half hours! At the suggestion of Frank Sargeson I applied for a Literary Fund grant to travel overseas. I knew, and others knew, that leaving the country was my last hope to avoid life-long confinement in hos- pital, for the doctor who had supplied the certificates was already per- suading himself into the way of thinking which I had met so often: nothing could be done for me, I would be 'better off' in hospital. I lived in London, Ibiza, Andorra, and returned to London where I sought help at the Maudsley Hospital, and when the doctor had studied my history and difficulties, I was astonished and grateful to hear him refute all previous commandments.-Why mix, why conform? I think you need to write to survive. First write the story of your years in hospital, then keep on writing. You've no money, 46 no income? We will arrange a National Assistance grant. There will be the usual personal difficulties, depressions; but we will try to make them more endurable. During the four years that followed I wrote Faces in the Water, The Edge of the Alphabet, two volumes of stories, and Scented Gardens for the Blind, a novel-length autobiographical essay To- wards Another Summer and other works. The circumstances quoted by Virginia Wool£ as being against writing have not changed. 'Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.' (The reference of the first has extended: people will play radios, televisions; traffic will change gear, jets will fly overhead.) One is lucky to get any writing done, particularly as there is a fifth circumstance which may be equally unfavourable: human beings will procrastinate, make ex- cuses for beginning. A writer gets into the state of the condemned prisoner who, knowing that execution is inevitable, employs every device he can think of to prolong the walk to the scaffold; until words, like wardens, seize him at last. Here the similarity ends between the writer and the unhappy prisoner: the writer is punished after execution is carried out, and as it is he who pronounces his own sentence, so it is he who performs execution and punishment. Though I began writing when I was a child and have never really stopped writing, I think I really began when my need to write was understood by distant members of the same profession which had previously condemned my needs as 'unhealthy', when I had enough money not to invite the fourth circumstance (waiting neighbour at any time) by trying to involve myself with waitressing; in short, when I had 'freedom' to write. Freedom to write is a very narrow freedom among the many personal imprisonments suffered by those who want to write, yet it is the master key, and if a writer has determination enough to turn the key (heedless of the desires and warnings of those who don't understand or who fear (rightly) the consequences of this outrageous daylight robbery of the imagina- tion) then he may be able to put his dreamed works into words. It is for the critics and psychologists to remind and explain the sad truth that the urge to write is not correlated with literary talent. Though my personal and family life has seen many disasters, I've been lucky in the small, sometimes more influential circumstances of my life-meetings, partings. At least I've been lucky enough to have the services of a locksmith. The story of How I Began writing could be condensed into two lines: A Hawk Came out of the Sky. and l Knew a man who knew a man who knew a locksmith. 47 ALAN RODDICK A ofVenis (jlover

1 A READING of Denis Glover's selected poems suggests that he has felt three aspects of the poet's role in society to be of especial importance: as commentator, celebrant, and craftsman. Although the third of these might initially be thought subordinate to the other two, his conviction of the importance of poetry as a craft, and his carefully simple style, make technical skill perhaps more fundamental to Mr Glover's poetry than to many other writers'. Enter Without Knocking contains the 'Sings Harry' and 'Ara- wata Bill' sequences, along with a number of poems, well-known from anthologies, on which Mr Glover's reputation as a serious poet must rest for a majority of his public at least; it also offers a selection of less familiar pieces from Thirteen Poems (1939), Recent Poems (1941), The Wind and the Sand (1945), and other volumes. This selection may be thought to be unduly generous, but it does allow us a broader view of the part his poetic convictions have played in his writing. I Mr Glover's concern with poetry of social criticism was not just one of the effects of Auden's influence on him during the thirties; nor were the beliefs which his poetry expressed of the naive justice-for- the-oppressed-workers variety. On the contrary, what emerges most clearly from all his verse, recent and early, is his conviction of the intrinsic value of human activity. It was this which led him to cele- brate the 'unremembered legion of labourers' in 'The Road Build- ers'; to lament the strikes which thwarted a man's capacity to work, in '"Scab-loaded"'; and to celebrate the ingenuity of an Arawata Bill, and the skill of a Mick Stimson who could tell 'by the marks Of them tears it was sharks', simply by looking at a damaged net. In fact if influences are to be sought, it may well be that of Y eats which has proved more positive and lasting than Auden's. The idea Y eats expressed in 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' finds an echo in Mr Glover's verse: Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, And all he did done perfectly As though he had but that one trade alone.

1Denis Glover, Enter Without Knocking. Pegasus. 17s. 6d. 48 Other points of congruence with Yeats may be seen, say, in his belief that the poet has a social value, and that his relationship to his society is important, which underlie his adoption of a persona, Harry; and in his idea of the value of what might be called 'exem- plary action', seen best in 'Arawata Bill', but also in a recent poem such as 'The Sportsmen', for instance. Like Yeats's poetry, Mr Glover's contains a kind of aristocracy of exemplary figures. Auden of course shared some of these views with both Yeats and Glover-as his 'How beautiful it is,jthat eye-on-the-object look' suggests-but his influence on Denis Glover was most obviously stylistic, rather than thematic. It might be argued that at the time he was first writing, Auden was simply accepted as the most con- venient model, although the impulse to make that kind of poetty was already present in Mr Glover's mind, reinforced perhaps by his reading in Yeats. Such apparently uncritical acceptance of a number of the most obvious features of Auden's style, and his lack of assimi- lation of them, did his poetry little good. His natural romanticism diverted him, at worst, into the extravagance of 'Letter to Country Friends': We in the city live as best we can, Fettered by fears of by-laws and police, and at best into uncertainty of tone, while his sense of humour (perhaps fortunately) scuttled some others of the poems from this period. It might be suspected at first that the lines just quoted are meant to be ironical-the bathos of 'by-laws' affording the clue-but the rest of the poem fails to support this reading: though country life is seen romantically, the fact that it is at least taken relatively seriously implies that his view of city life must be taken the same way-if that is possible. 'Letter to Country Friends' leaves us with no clear impression of the times in which it was written; where it does succeed, as in these lines, And your fields that lie towards one another, Mountains being near it is through Mr Glover's sense of place, of the setting of the poem, instead. 'The Magpies', on the other hand, from the same volume, does convince, largely because it communicates some awareness of the social and historical context in which the action is set. In fact it is the clarity of the historical setting which persuades us that it is also firmly placed in New Zealand, though we are given few explicit clues to this. As 'The Magpies' demonstrates, social criticism was not beyond 49 Mr Glover's powers at this period; another example might be found in 'In Fascist Countries', which has one line at least containing a brilliant distillation of, and judgement on, the political system: In words dated like medals the junta speaks. This imagery, however, like that of the lines last quoted from 'Letter to Country Friends', appears to have grown out of Mr Glover's sensi- tivity to words themselves, rather than from any necessity the poem as a whole might have generated. To take another example, the close of 'Sunday Morning': later on air falls under the heavy yoke of bells. Our reading here turns on the two senses of yoke, metaphorical and technical (the yoke that supports a pair of bells), and then reaches back to the newly-modified meanings of falls/falls under; but the kernel of the image has no necessary connection with the rest of the poem. Though it need not actually have been written in this way, the primary impression the poem leaves is of existing around that image, to which the rest of the poem remains somehow secondary. We find this relative prominence of single images in much of Mr Glover's poetry. They have something of the appearance of 'notes' which the writer may have made on 'experience' (using the word in a very general sense), though it is of course immaterial whether these 'notes' were made on the spot or in retrospect. Some of his earlier poems do look to have been written around such notes, but in 'Leaving for Overseas', for example, and 'Wartime Bar', the notes actually constitute the poem, being set down in seemingly casual order, and simply allowed to cluster about the poem's central theme. They are not, however, set down carelessly or without artistry: this skilful inversion of the colloquial word-order in a line from 'Leaving for Overseas' gives evidence of that: At night Before the stars' silver tremendous stare They button up a coat or turn to cards. With the creation of Harry, Denis Glover seems to have found a way to make effective use of these and other elements already dif- fusely present in his poetry, including the laconic manner ( appropri- ate to The Casual Man), and the deceptively-lightweight lyric which often reveals a subtly precise use of words. Along with this we see affectionate description of his country and a rather less romantic view of its people (a comparison of 'Leaving for Overseas' with 'Returning from Overseas' will suggest the extent of the change in outlook the intervening years effected). 50 Harry's background and character are sketched in various songs. Grown up in a farming family about the turn of the century ('I remember'), he has left the farm ('Once the Days'), worked casually as a musterer, was perhaps also a serviceman ('Thistledown'), and now middle-aged, may perhaps live in the city ('Songs' II and Ill, and 'The Park'). It is possible too that we might infer the extent of his education from his reference to Milton in 'The Park', or the oblique allusion in 'Fool's Song'-'For a dog likes his biscuit And a man his buttered scone'-to an eighteenth-century slang term. Once presented as something of the type of a New Zealander Harry has also established his qualifications to criticize his country- most clearly in 'Themes', but also in 'Thistledown', 'The Casual Man', and the second of his 'Songs', in which he sings of the child, once 'wide with vision', who grows up to own fences barbed Like the words of a quarrel; And the sea never disturbed Him fat as a barrel. The last line has incidentally been taken to refer to Harry himself 'fat as a barrel'; Allen Curnow, for instance, in his introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, sees James K. Baxter's 'Harry Fat' as 'borrowed ... from one of Glover's "Harry" poems, in which this New Zealand Everyman, having lost the illuminations of youth, has grown fat and property-conscious' (p.63). This ignores not only the differences between Harry and Harry Fat, but the actual statement of the Glover poem, where Harry laments the fact that the boy, 'pupil to the horizon's eye', can grow into the man with 'the indifferent, the accustomed eye Nothing can elate'. He himself, as a poet, can still see both the 'Pacific's sheer Mountainous anger' and 'lake waves breaking short': plainly, Harry in the wind- break still retains vision enough for him to make these songs. For the most important point about Harry is that he is a poet: one created by Mr Glover able to speak about his country, and able to speak to it; and also, significantly, with qualifications to persuade it to listen to him-as one poet at least who is 'more than summer shadow-play'. For the first time a New Zealand writer has created an 'ideal poet', just as Yeats created, in the Fisherman, an ideal audience, both actually attempting to adjust the relationship between the poet and his public. By making use of the persona he was in no way trying to evade his audience, or assuming a 'disguise' so as to 'say what you liked without feeling that you had to face the music', as Alistair Campbell suggested in Comment 21. It is on the contrary a clear assertion of 51 the importance of the poet, his subject-matter, and his public, and of the relationship between all three-the elements of the 'triangle' of C. K. Stead's analogy (The New Poetic, p.ll). This is only what we might have expected, after all, from a poet deeply committed to his society; and far from achieving any escape from his responsibility towards us, the poet is surely the more involved with his audience as a result. II In his creation of Harry, Mr Glover has demonstrated the second of the poet's roles mentioned at the start of this article, that of celebrant; here his subject is the Poet himself. Harry is made the possessor of qualities which are as much essential to society as to its individual members-for example, the ability to recognize both the good and the bad, and to assign each its proper place and import- ance in our world: What shall we sing? sings Harry. Sing all things sweet or harsh upon These islands . . . Sings Harry. In these lines from 'Themes' Mr Glover perhaps most nearly approaches a direct statement of the value of possessing such quali- ties. Generally this is conveyed by implication only-which is in itself important, implying in its turn that they must be embodied in one's life and actions, actually practised and not merely preached. This technique may be seen again in the second of Harry's 'Songs', for example, where his vision of the surrounding oceans as wild boars attacking the land is contrasted with what the dull, complacent man 'fat as a barrel', knows, who Soon is content to watch the traffic Or lake waves breaking short. Here watch, overshadowed by 'content to .. .', carries an implicit comparison with the more active see or look, for instance, and with the 'vision' of the fourth stanza of the poem. Similarly, the mech- anical nature of 'traffic' and the artificiality of the 'lake waves' are set against At one flank old Tasman, the boar, Slashes and tears, And the other Pacific's sheer Mountainous anger devours .... The very rhythm and sound of these lines, with their naturally vigor- 52 ous movement, invites comparison with the flat, staccato fall of 'lake waves breaking short'; again, the contrast is between qualities of vision and expression, and again a 'criticism of life' is implied by the poetry. Earlier poems in Enter Without Knocking celebrate physical work and skill as such, as in these lines from 'All of These' (1939) : Consider, praise, remember all of these. Their easy partnership of hand and eye divides them not; life they identify with effortless use of tools, lovely, articulate, striking clear purpose into the inanimate. The workers here are simply identified with the activity itself, as they are in 'The Road Builders'; but it is a defect in these poems that their characters-the 'unremembered legion of labourers'-are essentially anonymous, and so cannot readily be made actual and immediate. It may have been Mr Glover's awareness of this diffi- culty that attracted him to the idea of writing a film commentary, 'The Coaster', in which his own experience of seafaring, together with the visual contribution of the camera, might have provided some solution to the problem; this however was not attained until 'Arawata Bill', in which the character of the prospector (himself a credible creation) is inseparable from his obsession with his quest. A further achievement of this later sequence is its realization of a New Zealand landscape-again a form of celebration-and its identification of the landscape too with Arawata Bill. Although the mountains are hostile to him, and must be fought and made to deliver up the gold they conceal, they are also inevitably his home: there he may be able to live off the land, but must, like his horse, still be 'wise in the ways of the river'. Two lines from 'Letter to Country Friends', already noted, con- tain one of Denis Glover's earliest descriptions of the landscape in animistic terms, anticipating by ten years his treatment of it in 'Arawata Bill': And your fields that lie towards one another, Mountains being near. If we were to try to reconstruct the genesis of this image, we might guess that the poet's attention was originally caught by the way in which fields on the sides of a valley do literally lie 'towards one another'; and that then, with this idea clearly in mind, he seized on an imaginatively logical reason for this-that they are huddled to- gether for protection, 'mountains being near'. (Incidentally, his use 53 of fields here may betray one of the English influences on the poem: the later Glover might prefer paddocks.) In 'The Scene', the opening poem of the 'Arawata Bill' sequence, he also endows the elements of his mountain country with their own life: Rock, air and water meet Where crags debate The dividing cloud. Meet and dividing we might have expected, but debate (perhaps suggested by meeting and division-as in a parliament?) is the intellectually right word that transforms the whole picture. This animism is not over-emphasized, it is implied by a careful choice of words, as in 'The River Crossing': The river was announcing An ominous crossing With the boulders knocking. Mr Glover has thus avoided the defect of the 1939 poems in two ways: by directly sketching the prospector's personality, and by imputing one to the mountains as well. It is clear that Bill may be yet another Man Alone; but he is not exactly an Outsider, as Kendrick Smithyman has implied in an essay in Mate. For the Out- sider is essentially a misfit, whereas Bill is at home in his country- in fact his life might well be seen as representing a measure of unity and accord, rather than alienation. Granted, Bill would scarcely fit into Suburbia (as do how many of us, in any case?), but there can be no doubt that he has made his place in the society he has chosen. Read in this way, the sequence suggests the idea of accord at several points-from the opening 'Mountains nuzzle mountains' through 'The River Crossing' and 'Living off the Land', for example-an accord won only through his having lived Over forty years of my life In a kingdom where wind is wife ('His Horse'). We have seen how Glover/Harry in the earlier sequence was closely involved with the society whose faults and virtues most con- cerned him, and Arawata Bill may represent the poet again, in a different guise-that of the prospector, whose gold may stand for the good which his faith tells him lies hidden in the heart of his society. Bill himself ('Soliloquies' III) is unsure whether he is driven to this search as a penance 'For a sin I never knew' (the Fall?), or drawn instead by some vision of a Holy Grail; but Mr Glover's final comment on his character suggests that his search, 54 and the life it led him to make among the mountains, had their own value apart from any more tangible reward: You should have been told Only in you was the gold: Mountains and rivers paid you no fee, Mountain melting to the river, River to the sea. ('The End') Both the symbolism of this sequence, and his selection of its principal character, suggest that Mr Glover's view of his world, and of his place as a poet in it, had changed since 'Sings Harry'. There are signs in 'Arawata Bill' that the reality of New Zealand society had come to seem harsher than it had done before, and that as a result, the poet as Bill had taken up a position farther from his audience than he had as Harry. As evidence of this, first, society, represented by mountains and rivers, is not only inimical to civilized life, but essentially permanent as well, resistant to change other than by its own processes of dis- solution and decay: 'Mountain melting to the river, River to the sea'. Secondly, the gold Bill seeks can only be glimpsed; from the beginn- ing he seems fated not to find it. This is not only dramatically effective, it is also in keeping with a romantic view of the old pros- pectors he represents. For (thirdly) Bill's scope as a symbolic figure is limited by the particularity of his own identity. We know him first as a kind of re-creation of the original Arawata Bill, and through him of all the early prospectors and explorers in the Southern Alps; and then, secondarily only, as it were, in his symbolic roles as man of action, or poet, or visionary, say. In short, Bill is not the completely created character Harry was; he enters the sequence with a life of his own, and it is precisely the extent of that life which limits the Poet's par- ticipation in his character. m Denis Glover's technical skill has always been devoted to seeking complete clarity in his verse. His best poems show signs of having been worked and polished at least as much as those of more 'difficult' poets, this end requiring its own artifice; but where a Curnow or a Smithyman may seem to accept some degree of complexity for the sake of the artefact, and make correspondingly greater demands on the reader, Mr Glover requires at least a minimal clarity, if not always simplicity, and offers this to his audience. His concern with the craftsmanship of poetry is directly related 55 to his view of the poet's importance as critic and celebrant. This relationship is exemplified by the verse of his 'invented' poet, Harry: just as earlier pieces celebrated engineers and labourers who were skilled at their trades, so Harry's singing celebrates the poet who is good at his job. This does not mean of course that the real skill behind the verse is not Mr Glover's, or that 'Sings Harry' is uni- formly good poetry; but the idea is there, and indeed furnishes one of the complex of motives for Mr Glover's recourse to the persona. 'No definition can ever cover the whole field of anything, but I now prefer to think of poetry as a crystallisation of experience.' (Denis Glover, in notes on poetry, in his Bedside Book, p.90.) He is luckily well-equipped to achieve this, as he has always had, and has extended and perfected, an ability to express sensory experience through vivid metaphor and imagery. We have already noticed one or two such metaphors-'the heavy yoke of bells', for instance-and from later poems we might select these: Wind tumbles from the sail. ... ('Off Banks Peninsula')

The obsequious foam Crawls flattering to the ship And then goes crawling home .... ('The Coaster', 'North About') A more subtle example of his skill with words may be found in 'On the Headland', the last of Harry's songs. Wrapped in the sea's wet shroud The land is a dream, is a cloud. The mist and the sun Have made it their own, Sang Harry, And hand on hips Watched the departing ships. Until the last line the reader may find himself uncertain of his own viewpoint, relative to the speaker: it is only the significance of 'the departing ships' makes it clear that we are being persuaded to remain here on the headland, with Harry. Complex imagery is uncommon, and rarer still is the kind of con- ceit found in 'Song' II of 'Sings Harry': From the cliff-top a boy ... pupil to the horizon's eye Grew wide with vision .... 56 This is almost the only example of such a conceit, but Mr Glover shows that he can handle it with assurance by its resolution in the succeeding stanza ('But grew to own fences barbed... .') as the climax of the poem. Occasionally his metaphor is less happily chosen, as in the opening line of 'Arawata Bill': 'Mountains nuzzle mountains'-where nuzzle seems scarcely appropriate even to animistically conceived moun- tains, and a word like jostle might have been more exact; and pre- cision is surely what is most wanted in such an important place in the sequence. A similar query can be made about 'Rivers swell and twist Like a torturer's fist' in the same poem. It is hard to visualize a fist doing anything useful in the way of torture if it 'swells and twists'; nor can the image of a fist be readily reconciled with that of 'river'. Was the poet perhaps really thinking of the veins on a fist instead? Again, in 'A Prayer', one might have wished for a better word than 'arid' in the second line, when 'brazen' has already made the point in the first. (These objections might seem trivial; but with a poet who was less habitually precise, they would not be worth raising at all: Mr Glover's is a different case.) His feeling for the interactwn between sound and sense in a line is generally extremely acute, however. In these lines from 'The Flowers of the Sea', in 'Sings Harry', for example, Once my strength was an avalanche Now it follows the fold of the hill the placing of the strong and weak stresses makes the movement of the first line echo its sense, while a kind of counterpoint is provided by the regular rhythms of the second (this has been beautifully caught by Douglas Lilburn in his setting of the poem). And from 'Arawata Bill': Wicked country, but there might be Gold in it for all that, Under the shoulder of a boulder Or in the darkened gully ... where the third of these lines is slowed up by the internal rhyme, at the same time quietly maintaining its connection with gold in the previous line-while incidentally one's mental picture of the boulder seems to loom larger and darker, thanks again to the repetition. Mr Glover's craftsmanship does not, however, work merely through the selection of words or the organization of a stanza or a complete poem, but in his very choice of subject and character which will embody and exemplify his concern with the poet's place 57 in his society-and we must note too that it is specifically our own society which most occupies his attention. For no 'international' tone of voice could express his beliefs as well: the accent in these poems is consciously, and conscientiously, New Zealand. 'Reality' has always been 'local and special' for him; and Enter Without Knocking, for all its imperfections, does show us beyond any doubt what such consistency of aim can achieve.

Commentaries

MAHENDRA KULASRESTHA Indian Letter

IN THE passing away of Mr Nehru India has lost something-shall we call it her soul?-at least that of the era he has endeavoured to bring about and dominated by his towering personality, modern ideas and will to rebuild the nation-which will never be recovered. Mr Shastri, Lal Bahadur, as his successor, has yet to make his mark, and though he has shown some excellent common sense in deciding certain matters, he has not been able to get his policies and ideas executed. Price increase in essential and other commodities during the year has been great and almost everyone in the whole country is finding it difficult to make ends meet. Many regions are living in near-famine conditions. The Shastri Government has passed suitable laws, even ordinances, to meet the situation, but does not act upon them. Mr Gulzari Lal Nanda, the Home Minister, who was the Acting Prime Minister after Nehru's death and before Shastri's election, is, on the contrary, a man of initiative, action and enthusiasm. He set about fighting against corruption in a remarkably effective way, almost immediately after the establishment of the new government, but soon his hands were crippled by the violent criticism of the vested interests in the Congress party and elsewhere and the apathy of Prime Minister Shastri. His Sadachar Samiti (Committee to Root Out Corruption) started working with a real bang, though modestly in a tent in the compound of the Home Minister's residence, to which the commonest man had an easy approach, and punishing the 58 guilty in case after case, but it is now ending in the dullest whimper. It is a pity that the worthy Home Minister has even been ridiculed for his attempts, but the Prime Minister has not come to his aid. Then there is foreign policy. Under Shastri, and his Foreign Minister, Sardar Swaran Singh, it seems to have acquired a modest and unobtrusive tone. It is no. more the foreign policy of a leading nation, as was more than evident at the second Bandung-type con- ference of non-aligned nations held at Cairo. It was attended by Prime Minister Shastri himself. A foreign diplomat, commenting on his performance at the conference, said, 'He looked like a boy arriving newly at the school'. Sardar Swaran Singh's more recent performance at the United Nations was equally unimpressive. The leadership of the group seems to have passed to Egypt and Indo- nesia. Our foreign policy has thus lost its vigour and also style, which was the particular hallmark of Mr Nehru and his assistants. It has also lost some of its power, the outer reasons for which are the explosion of the atom bomb by China and Khrushchev's down- fall in the U.S.S.R. A nation-wide debate has started on the implications of the demand for an independent nuclear deterrent. To many it seems to be a question of to be or not to be. But there is no doubt that a great deal hangs in the balance and the problem covers questions pertaining to our prestige, our power as a nation, our influence on other nations and the emerging nations of the world in particular, even our national independence and survival. A thoughtless move, a wrong gesture, will completely ruin our future. The threat seems to be considerable in view of the fact that, contrary to all earlier speculations, which discounted the Chinese adventure as a 'poor man's bomb', it has turned out to be a device of far greater atomic capability and danger. The American experts have given the opinion that 'China's use of enriched uranium and their use of the implosion method to trigger the atomic explosion indicates a broad-based and more efficient industrial management capacity.' It has also been estimated that China can produce one atom bomb every month. She thus emerges as the only atomic power in the East, and a pretty powerful one at that, which is a frightening prospect indeed. She can be a great danger to non-Communist nations in these parts, and to enemy nations like India in particular. Moral considerations apart, the main obstacle to the production of atom bombs and their accessories in India is their high manufac- turing cost. It has been estimated that India would have to sacrifice one to two five-year plans to become an effective nuclear power. The question of cost should be thrashed out in detail. But no, the national character, though unconsciously, decides national questions, 59 and Non-Violence is India's life-blood. How can it let us dare to produce a killer like the atom bomb, even for prestige's sake? It appears that even if the bombs can be made for $100 a piece, the nation will not think about it. The Government and the Congress party have clearly expressed themselves against it, even Mr Rajago- palachari, leader of the Swatantra Party, who is otherwise known for his vigorous and unbiased judgment, has opposed it. Only a few rightist groups who pose to be militaristic in their attitudes, like the Jan Sangh supported by the volunteer organization R.S.S., which boasts a lot but does nothing, have favoured the production of the atom bomb. The Socialist Party is still considering the matter. And independent opinion can be nothing but mild. In Hindi literature, the movement concerning the New Short Story has come to stay. One of its senior, though quite young leaders, Ramesh Bakshi, has been appointed editor of the foremost literary monthly, Gyanodaya (The Rise of Knowledge), presumably on the basis of his work, which has shown great promise. Another leader, Kamaleshwar, has become editor of N ai Kahaniyan (New Short Stories), the prominent short story monthly, and still another, Mohan Rakesh, was appointed editor of the equally well-known short story monthly, Sarika (The Song-bird), which, though, he left due to certain reasons. So the invasion is complete. The Gyanodaya and Nai Kahaniyan have been bringing out valuable special numbers to depict the philosophy, or rather the mood, of the New Short Story and to publish the work of those who claim to be 'New'; a large number of them have sprung up during the past two years. It appears from the short stories, which they have been publishing in Hindi translation, that the movement is spreading fast in other languages, too, and mainly in Bengali, Marathi, Gujerati and Mala- yalam. As in poetry, the 'New' in short story tries to express the uncer- tainty, absurdity and contingency of human life and particular human situations. In India the situation is still more depressing, almost desperate in a large number of individual cases, due mainly to the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions. I am tempted to give an example, though of a poet, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, who died recently in most despairing circumstances. Though he didn't write much, he was considered a senior poet, one of the first and finest in the line of the Experimentalists and the New, and wielded great influence over the New poets of his State. Life was a great struggle for him, he found it hard to feed himself and his family. A sensitive intellectual, who finds it nearly impossible to meet the basic demands of life-a life given to him without his asking for it-, can only be in the worst metaphysical dilemma. 60 Which he remained in till he became seriously ill and died prema- turely; it seemed his brain was paralysed. Naturally, therefore, the quality of his verse was Kafkaite; what else could it be? The impact of his death on Hindi writing has been great, he is being regarded as the symbol of the prevailing situation. Now after his death, his works are being published in book form for the first time. But, unfortunately, most of our writers do not try to be genuine by dealing with their own particular problems and situations. They, instead, follow and copy the situations available in English fiction and other foreign work, which, therefore, leads them nowhere. The 'modern sensibility', which is the talk of the day and is understood to be the guiding spirit behind all new writing and art work, could certainly be given an Asian or Indian shape and approach, the shape conditioned by the life and the problems of the under-developed countries. In India, it could, or should, first of all contain our desire and need of changing the rigid caste-and-creed-ridden social struc- ture, of critically examining all our existing values and cultural mores, and, above all, of doing something to eradicate or at least control this overwhelming poverty. In Sartre's terminology, this could be the 'engagement' of the present-day Indian writer and also his way to 'authentic existence'. That is a reason why the New Short Story movement is not getting down to the level of the novel where the canvas is many times wider; the writer is at present able to deal with piece situations only, and that too not so impressively. It is a pity that though a lot is being written, very few remarkable short stories are coming to the fore. A Hindi weekly, Dharmayug, has for over a year been publish- ing the best short stories of all these writers, chosen by themselves, which are now being assessed as a whole. The result, in unbiased opinion, is not satisfactory. Also, some of the work does not fit the label of the 'New'; it is included just for company's sake. Moreover, the Newness is extremely mild and of an utterly unprovoking variety, which, though, suits our cultural attitudes. And here lies our weakness; we are too tied to our past, we have no courage to vigor- ously explore and express the New, to build the New. As a reaction to it, another movement, known as the Sachetan (Activist), has recently started in Hindi Short Story. It proposes to change the situation by encouraging purposeful and spirited writing, and it appears that something most striking would follow the de- clarations. The group, under the leadership of Maheep Singh, has just now produced its first collection, or selection, of twenty short stories and a few articles discussing their philosophy. Some of the stories are good, no doubt, but none of them seems to convey the special message of their movement, which is not clear even in their 61 discursive articles. It has been suspected that all the traditional writ- ers, who have not been included in the more fashionable New group, have pitched their tent separately in this form. Their so-called 'philo- sophical' bases are naive. They want to ignore the widely accepted absurdity of the human situation and the fear and despair resulting from it, which is not possible. In fact they don't seem to understand and appreciate the helplessness of the situation (though they ought to have done, the more so as many of them are ex-Marxists), which has persistently given a different bent to modern writing, in an attempt to discover better ways of living, based on a new explanation of life and the world. Can anybody change the realities by giving a different, though seemingly useful, slogan? But the 'Hungry Generation' of Bengali poets, of which I made a brief mention in my last letter, and who have meanwhile become very popular in Calcutta and elsewhere, seem to be better and more suitable manifestations of the situation. Hunger as their base for a movement seems to be very right, though they are more inclined to express their deep sense of frustration only at the moment. So they are violent, verging on the ridiculous, and vulgar. They say that sex can be the only pleasure available to hungry men. Can anyone deny it? They don't mind being arrested and sent to jail. In short, they have created a furore in the literature and life of Bengal, and that too by poetry only, the most neglected and fast declining branch of writing. Many say they are after publicity. Yes, may be, but obviously not for their own selves, as many of them don't even write in their own names: Haradhon Dhara writes as 'Debi Roy', which is the name of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Detective Branch, and so forth. They prepared several thousands of masks and posted them to politicians and other eminent persons in the whole country, with the request that the latter 'take off their symbolic masks and use these real ones which were being sent to them free'. One of them sent a shoe-box to a prominent magazine 'for favour of review', another submitted a blank sheet of paper for publication as a short story. Now let us have a look at their manifestos. They are equally queer but do indicate something. For example, on religion, they say: 'Relig- ion is a huge c .. t [sic] from which emerges once for all the raving sickness of suicide leading to the divino-satanic self-nailing of my ME. ... Religion is I with I, I from I, I by I, I less I and I as I.' On short story they say: 'It has nothing to do with the communication of facts. It should only and only, burn down the spinal chord of an individual alife, with an emotive valency that ran through the blood of Christ on Calvary.' They compare art with orgasm, which is quite 62 original and suitable, though I would like to suggest a slight change: I will add the word 'sustained' to 'orgasm'. Naturally, all the Bengali newspapers and periodicals have started scolding them, and teaching them gentlemanly behaviour. Time has also taken note of them. A leading Bengali daily, Jugantar, has de- voted editorial after editorial to chide them for their naughty ways. Let us see what fate awaits them. 20 January 1965

PAUL BEADLE Cjreer Twiss

IN LANDFALL for June 1964 the editor points to three significant post- war moments of crystallization or precipitation in poetry and paint- ing. 1945. A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-1945, edited by Alien Curnow: 'a few seemingly unrelated poets, working each in isola- tion, had amassed between them a small body of work to which, for the first time, the name New Zealand poetry could be applied.' 1955. John Weeks's retrospective exhibition: 'So far as one can tell from present knowledge, no other painter before 1955 had worked in New Zealand for so long to such good effect.' 1963. 'The W oollas- ton-McCahon retrospective ... covered some twenty-five years of work by two painters who started in the thirties and who still stand at the centre of New Zealand painting.' Any such moment in sculpture here must await the outcome of equally long, unbroken and fruitful working. That the moment has been late is true. That this is due to the public's common image of sculpture as a grandiose and ponderous civic ornament, a civic responsibility, and to the fact that the sculptor everywhere with his peculiar and demanding skills is a minority within a minority, is patent. But there are scattered signs which give one hope for such a moment. The brightest of these was the 1964 exhibition of cire perdu bronzes, mainly of athletes, by Greer Twiss from his own foundry. It may even earn, in retrospect, elevation to 'moment' with the others. It was doubtless a crystallization or precipitation or refine- ment of Greer Twiss. Mr Twiss's main subject-the runners-is at once universal, olym- pic and strongly national, eminently human and admirably enjoy- 63 able. They more than any other sportsmen in New Zealand are everywhere and inescapable. They break their records to thunderous applause in their temples but they practise their religion in the city and suburban streets, as much a part of the Auckland scene as pohutukawa and gull. Mr Twiss has captured the spirit and power of the runners in delicately, sensitively and emotionally modelled single figures and groups. Even the vacated numbered singlets stand- ing erect express the threshold between sprint and relaxation. All are vitalized by the chromatic and textural contrasts in the metal and the fleeting yet unmistakable sweet smell of sweat and the rasp of respiration. The mind's eye sees the same urgent vitality should he pour his metal into moulds of hefty, leaping Maori girl basketball players in their buttock-length tunics and translucent black stock- ings, or of trotting horses, or yachties stacking out in a twenty-five- knot wind. What is it that this particular exhibition refined? Look- ing back over a little less than a decade one sees the fabric of Greer Twiss's life woven of man in action and his portrayal of him. An outstanding scholar of human movement. No cold anatomist but a hot and spirited composer and conductor of sculptural works and first-class executant in wax and metal. Amongst all this one must mention Mr Twiss's marionette theatre with its scores of players. The link is obvious-the conventions and restrictions of the anatomy of the marionette lie alongside those of the cire perdu process. The work of the theatre beside that of the foundry. The metamorphoses run interestingly counter to each other. The sleeping marionette comes to the nature of life the master wills. The vision of the run- ners' violent sprint modelled in wax is fixed infinitely awake in the cooling bronze. From earlier formalizations of child and adult acrobatics, from some severely planar abstracts untextured by the detail of action and from the discovery of the physical properties and possibilities of wax has grown an art form hitherto unknown to this country. Sculpture here has many more inherent and related problems than in Europe, the United Kingdom or America. There it is not necessary for a sculptor to have mastery of many of the technical processes involved because he can employ skilled and competent craftsmen to under- take the purely mechanical aspects of construction and production. Not held up by having to 'do it yourself' (highly commendable in pioneers) the sculptor abroad can devote more time to creation and have a consequently higher rate of artistic development. That Greer Twiss has learnt much in coming to grips with the technical pro- cess one does not deny. The Queen Elizabeth the Second Arts Council has seen fit to send this gentle man of wit, courage and immense potential to other parts of the world where bronze casting 64 Mr R. E. Kennedy 1 0} ins high Hurdler. Bronze, 1964.

SCULPTURE BY GREER TWISS Auckland City Art Gallery 14 x 24 ins Group of Athletes. Bronze, 1964.

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0 .<: .:t Mr Hamish Keith 12 ins high Athlete. Bronze, 1964. has been done for centuries. What he will bring back to New Zea- land, to its students, teachers and other artists will profoundly affect its sculpture.

KIRSTY NOR THCOTE-BADE After the Wedding

NoLA MILLAR produced Campbell Caldwell's After the Wedding for Unity Theatre in November, and the play's lively entertainment was received with enthusiasm. lp Mr Caldwell's earlier play (Flowers Bloom in Summer) the dramatic situations arose from clashes of principle over problems of education; here the theme is marriage. The new play may then be of more concern to us than the first, in so far as emotions roused in personal relationships touch us more immediately than those evoked by abstract ideas. Moreover, Mr Caldwell's dramatis personae offer parts to be enjoyed by actors and audience alike. During the action, set in the living-room of Joe Currie's rehab. farm, somewhere near Feilding, we discover more and more about the state of Joe and Sylvy Currie's marriage. The process is precipi- tated by their daughter's wedding, and aided by the presence of those brought together for it: Joe's matriarchal mother; his friend, Fred, visiting for the first time since the war; the happy-go-lucky trouble-evading neighbours, Betty and Ron Buckle; the young, cruelly-handled Myra, and her husband Charlie Kerr; Myra's baby; her mother, once an educated woman; the Curries' cheerful young Dutch farm-hand, whose capabilities underline Joe's inadequacies; the Padre who nicely gate-crashes the party. For the audience, the experience was largely a matter of local identifications: Betty Buckle is just like that woman we met at the Barkers' last week, Charlie Kerr could be the twin brother of the man next door-probably is. Or literary parallels: Fred is a true Horatio, Joe and Sylvy's inability to communicate was a primary source of action in Othello. Believing as we must for the present that the production is the play, After the Wedding comes off as fine entertainment, not as first- rate drama. It fails to assure us of its seriousness of purpose; the audience is unwilling to accord it any necessary depth of response. Paradoxically, the reasons for this failure are precisely that liveliness and warmth in characterization and the humour of the 'little' situa- 65 tions which go towards making the play in the first place good drama. It is a tragedy on home ground, but the vein is comic. This complexity of tone, coupled with a situation which carries the seeds of a tragic development, has all the potential for compelling drama; yet the play beguiles where it should compel, detaches (and relaxes) its audience where it should involve them most. Perhaps one reason for this is in the writing. Mr Caldwell is best (and this best is excel- lent) when using vivid colloquial language which incidentally ex- ploits a fine bawdy wit. The punch of the lines diminishes in a direct ratio to their high moral content. Is this the old story of vice being always more interesting than virtue? Not entirely; it is not only the Padre who bores (and structurally speaking the drop in tempo with his entry is a sound comic device) but also Sylvy, on whom most of the weight of the tragedy depends. Sylvy's character is the questioning one: where did things go wrong? Played by an accomplished actress (Dorothy McKegg), in this she is sympathetic enough; yet she embarrasses both by over-sentimentality, as in her speech on the sanctity of the marriage-bond ('till death do us part' is left unlightened by some rather stolid dialogue) and by the unneces- sary gaucheness of the end of Act II, a mime sequence where she tries, more desperately than pathetically, to elicit an emotional re- sponse from her fifteen-years despised and now drunken husband. Our sympathies are with him; but should they be? The fact that a baby is on stage for much of the action is also symptomatic of the quality of the relationship between the players on stage and the watchers in the hall. Anxieties of play-life and real-life became mixed; the baby drinking its milk distracted from the seri- ous problems presented. One may have to attend to such exigencies in real life; but surely it is an exclusiveness here which is needed to lead to the truth of drama. The naturalistic atmosphere necessary for this play's success was created by an illusion of freedom in the actors' movements. The memorable incidents were frequently those, peripheral to the main theme, which became anything but negligible in the cameo-truth of their portrayal. Some fine acting must of course have helped in this; we would go again for the delight of seeing old Mrs Currie (Pat Evison) feeding the baby, patting its back to get the wind up ('Isn't she a good girl?') or good ol' Betty Buckle (Nola W ebb) at the party in bouncing high spirits, facing Fred's mock bayonet charge to illustrate his story. Individual members of the audience, participat- ing in the liveliness of the stage-party, were more inclined to say 'that's it; that's what we're like' than to revalue their own relation- ships. However, the play's social vitality will be for many its own justification. 66 Reviews

A WALK ON THE BEACH. 0. E. Middleton. Michaelfoseph. 21s.

h's GOOD to see the accolade of overseas publication (if it is an acco- lade) given to a writer as unassuming as 0. E. Middleton. A Walk on the Beach is to some extent a recapitulation. Of the nine stories in it one appeared in the Handcraft Press collection of 1953, and three in The Stone, published by the Pilgrim Press in 1959. Another is printed in Landfall Country. This is reasonable enough: few people would have read all the stories previously published, and in any case they bear re-reading quite as well as the new ones bear their first reading. In his conception of a story, his range of characters and his social attitudes 0. E. Middleton belongs to a tradition which was fashion- able twenty years ago and is not now. Which is not to say that he has stayed still while others have moved on. Fashions in literature are nonsense anyway. Mr Middleton is by nature a conservative writer (which is not to imply a judgment of quality) who can express himself best within the limits of an established tradition. Therefore he writes realistic, undramatic accounts of people who are outside middle-class society, conveying a radical social viewpoint and a simple ethical morality. Whether this view of life is adequate philosophically is a question beside the point, the real question being whether it is adequate to Mr Middleton as a writer. The short answer is that it is difficult to imagine him writing in any other way. It is also clearly his own conscious choice: he has withheld from this book attempts he has made in the past to be more dramatic, and has restrained himself in some of the stories he has printed. The longest story in A Walk on the Beach has a whole series of episodes each of which might have led to a conventional crisis; but none of them is allowed to do anything of the sort. The strengths of this story, 'Not for a Seagull', are of quite a different nature. It is narrated by a Maori boy who migrates to Auckland, reminiscent in this of Maori Girl but possibly written earlier than Mr Billiard's novel, if the writing was contemporaneous with the setting (the boy is re- jected for His Majesty's Navy, encounters trams in Auckland, and jives but does not rock or twist). It is episodic and apparently art- less, but redeemed from being over-sociological by the typically Middleton warmth of feeling, and also (although it takes a while to grasp this) by some considerable but unobtrusive symbolism. The title refers to the boy's job as a non-union labourer on the wharves. 'In any case, the wharf couldn't last for ever. Not for a seagull.' But 67 it also recalls, and I presume intentionally, Wiremu Kingi's refusal to sell the W aitara land 'lest we resemble the sea-birds which perch upon a rock: when the tide flows the rock is covered by the sea, and the birds take flight, for they have no resting place.' Mr Middleton's character is named Sonny King, and though he is alive and unde- feated he has no resting place. This is further symbolized by his shuttling between the vivid Polynesian girl, Anne-Marie, with whom he makes love behind a blind on a verandah, and his tentative, more intellectual affection for a Pakeha nurse. None of this is declared, and the people, the town, the sights and sounds and smells, exist of their own right and not as symbols. The flaw is an occasional strain in the over-obvious avoidance of stereotypes of the Maori, and too little avoidance of stereotypes of the Pakeha. It would be easy to overlook how distinctive Mr Middleton's char- acters are within the tradition. Most of them are young, but only a few are children. They are seldom mentally abnormal or emotionally disturbed, they are spontaneous and unembittered (however bitterly they may express themselves about the bosses), they are lyrically heterosexual, and they are seldom alone. Even when as a group his characters are outside society (unemployed seamen in 'The Doss- House and the Duchess', American prisoners in 'The Collector') most of them belong within the group. Typically his characters are working men who discover that 'it takes times of trouble to tell you who your friends are .... And nine times out of ten, you find they're your own workmates.' Certainly, they are not articulate. Twice the verbal response to a tragedy (to the death of a favourite dog, and of a first baby) is to call it 'a bit of bad luck'. But of course the emotional response is quite different, and Mr Middleton is not at all inhibited emotionally. One of his favourite adjectives is 'sweet', which sometimes only just avoids being cloying and sometimes does not avoid it at all. For Mr Middleton emotions like judgments are straightforward. An uncomplicated view of life and an uncluttered style are never in any literate man natural: depending on how real they are to the writer they are either achieved or contrived. This is the point of 'A Day by Itself', in which the narrator who 'once ... thought that to live in the city and be near the Library, or the University, were the most desirable things in the world' goes eel-fishing and meets two young Maoris who have come to the scene on their motor-bike. 'We followed a cattle track through scrub and gorse for about half a mile. Somehow, I felt responsible for that gorse. There it was grow- ing strongly among the manuka and looking much too sharp and green and successful in competition with the older things. 68 'I mentioned to the others that I thought it a pity the gorse had got such a hold up here, but they didn't seem to be worried. '"The old flame-thrower soon fix that," said the older Maori.' Mr Middleton's view of life is achieved. It is a pity that in his first story it should seem contrived. 'A Walk on the Beach' furnishes a good title for his book, a perfect metaphor for all his work, and a splendid jacket; but it is too much a propaganda piece on the need for New Zealanders to turn towards Asia. A child named Zelda is reflecting on the Japanese, after seeing fishing boats from the shore and picking up a marvellous glass float. This is fine: the reflections are less fine. 'Grandma Stewart had a Japanese sewing machine. She said people could say what they liked, but it was every bit as good as the American and British ones-and much cheaper. And Uncle Tom, who had a farm further down the coast, had one of those tiny radios you could carry in your pocket.' To any child today 'transistor' is one of the commonest nouns in the language. It would take a really sophisticated one to think instead of a description. This simplicity is contrived. But the following story, 'The Doss-House and the Duchess', is all of a piece and shows Mr Middleton, very delicately and without violating his ascetic vows, developing into a stylist. The prose is very slightly heightened and tautened; there is wit and an irony which has seldom appeared since 'A Day by Itself', the story reprinted from the 1953 collection. Mr Middleton has places to go yet. Dennis McEldowney

THE CUNNINGHAMS. David Ballantyne. Robert Hale and Whitcombe & Tombs. 15s. cHILDREN OF THE POOR. John A. Lee. London: New Zealand Books. Paperback. 4s. THE$E two reprinted novels have a certain amount in common. Both are connected with the nineteen-thirties-Mr Ballantyne's is set in that decade, Mr Lee's was first printed in 1932. Both are broadly speaking sociological. Both deal with a boy growing up in a New Zealand city. And both, to an indeterminable extent, are autobiographical. When The Cunninghams was first published, Landfall carried a detailed and very sound review of it by Robert Chapman (June 1949). The review concluded,' ... as a contribution to New Zealand literature, it is a lesser work containing much truth but an untrans- formed truth, accuracy at the expense of art.' It seems to me that, after a lapse of fifteen years, a reappraisal should not only stress 69 further the limitations of this novel's art, but should question its accuracy as well. The kind of accuracy Mr Ballantyne intends is clearly that of social realism, a representation truthful enough to be of relevance to New Zealand at large. Certainly the novel is most commonly held to embody just that, and most commonly with more approval than I would allow. Sarah Campion, for example, review- ing M. H. Holcroft's Islands of Innocence in the Auckland Star recently, writes, 'It is good to see Ballantyne's The Cunninghams recognised for what it is: the best picture in depth of this country's urban, almost slum, life.' Best is a relative word, of course; and I agree with Robert Chapman that this novel represents the end-point of a genre rather than a new means of exploration. For me, it is a question whether Mr Ballantyne's accuracy is in fact that of objective analysis, or rather that of giving voice to an attitude. There is a dif- ference; and the difference rests on the double-barrelled assumption that people, necessarily an imperfect order of being, are more than usually limited in these parts, and uniquely; and that literature's primary mandate is to analyse their deficiencies. No matter what one might think of its first element, the assumption is pernicious in toto because it fosters a literature, simply, of deficiency. Doubts, fears, failures, social suffocation-these are real enough things, but they become the writer's material in the narrowest of ways; and in a novel, that is a weakness. It is a weakness that Mr Lee transcends: Mr Ballantyne is overtaken by it. In outline The Cunninghams is simple, and potentially strong. Gilbert Cunningham, invalided through the freezing-chamber's ag- gravation of a war wound, lives in waning hopes of a pension and growing doubts of his wife Helen's fidelity. Half way through the book, a presumably violent scene with her on this subject induces a lung haemorrhage: hospitalized, he later dies, and the book ends with his funeral. Against the background of his decline, Helen's responsibilities as mother of five children are but a transient deter- rent from promiscuity; and a warehouse manager gives place to a radio mechanic. And yet she is not a calculating woman. Indeed, she is unique in this novel in demanding a sympathy that its other char- acters fail to inspire. This is true in particular in the short chapter revealing her desolation on the death of her husband. With an irony that wrenches pity from the reader almost in spite of himself, the chapter ends with the wayward Helen crying out, -Oh, Gil, my darling Gil, why did you leave me? She wept into the moonlight that shone through the window and spread over her bed. The simplicity of that, its absence of strain, is unfortunately not often to be discovered in this novel. 70 Among the vicissitudes of his parents, as out of touch with them as they are with one another, moves the oldest son, also called Gil- bert. With him, the story weakens. Whether or not he is Mr Ballan- tyne's reconstruction of himself, as I suppose he is, he is a dismal character, in his largest aspect a stock character, in all aspects swamped by an over-played triviality. He oils his bike so the rain won't dissolve it (materialism) and so it will look good (aestheti- cism); he shrinks painfully in the book's more prurient moments (puberty with residual puritanism); he writes good essays at school (artist as young man) ; and he feels inferior in every situation that threatens to engulf him, as all situations do (sensitivity). All three desire something better than their lot. None achieves it. It is not clear whether their dissatisfaction is a cause or an effect of their desire; neither is it clear whether it is a cause or an effect of the impoverished human relationships the book sets forth. At all events, these things are central to the book; and it is exactly in this central aspect that Mr Ballantyne seems to me to fail, both in accuracy and art. He fails because he tries to perform the functions of both analy- sis and universalization by means of a single instrument-style. And while the right style might have worked out, Mr Ballantyne's style is the wrong one for either task. Since his style is that of his characters, or at any rate the one that such characters are thought to use, and since he employs the same style in the monologues that provide breaks from the conversations, it is impossible that his novel should provide any insights but those dimly perceived by the characters themselves. And it doesn't. The trivial events, the unclear issues, the moral fuzziness, the unvisual- ized scenes, above all the unalleviated monotony of the book, all these are functions of Mr Ballantyne's style. I'm well aware how easily it might be objected that these conform exactly to his inten- tion, that his style is a mirror as well as a social scalpel. But even assuming that his characters are as dull as they seem, it doesn't require dull writing to prove it. In relation to its length, a novel demands breadth. When the style is cramped, when the style doesn't even ring true, what are we to make of its revelations? There are further implications. Continual use of the second person impersonal ('you had hoped he would grow into the sort of boy you could talk to man-to-man with'), over-use of youthful expletives (gosh, bonzer possy), and a habit of using commas instead of periods to indicate flow of thought, which they don't, combine to give a rather School Cert vacation-essay effect. Even the characters rail at one another if big words are used. And all this is not only wearying in itself, it bears no relation to any real speech of my experience, common or uncommon: as naturalism, it is false. It is a literary style. 71 Frank Sargeson is behind it, I suppose, but Sargeson's understanding enables him to use it judiciously. It might be as well to mention here that Mr Ballantyne could only have been about twenty-three when he wrote The Cunm'nghams. But there is a larger issue yet. Superficially, because the novel is written in the third-person or dramatic form, and because Mr Ballantyne nowhere steps blatantly in to give personal opinions as such, one might be tempted to credit him with at least a fine detachment. But there is a real problem here: is his detachment an example of artistry, in fact, or is it a means of creating distance between himself and the object of his writing, a means of disinvolvement? The latter, I judge, purely because I don't believe a novelist can write unpalatably about some- thing he is genuinely concerned with. Perhaps I misjudge. Perhaps Mr Ballantyne is guilty of no more than an error of tact. Either way, his novel represents the rabble less than it does an attitude that assumes that's what they are. The new paperback edition of John A. Lee's Children of the Poor is somewhat marred by errors. But the novel survives the misprints as well as it has survived both its own weaknesses and a critical tendency to devalue it. In a note on an earlier reprint, Denis Glover wrote (Landfall, June 1951) that it'... may well leave a later genera- tion incredulous or unmoved. . . . The book is likely to become a period piece in our literature; but among sociological writing it will always have a place.' It may well be that Children of the Poor had, in its inception, a modest sociological bias. It came out first in the depth of the depression, and can certainly be read as a tract to the effect that poverty is not shameful, that it has compensations, and that anyone with a modicum of spirit can override his condition and be a man for all that; whence, perhaps, what I understand to be its widespread popularity at that time. But its actual relevance to the depression period seems rather slight. Sometimes Mr Lee can be seen speaking directly to the poor, as when he suggests for example that the Salvation Army is a better giver of bread than other religi- ous bodies, because it gives it to be eaten, and not to shanghai new recruits. Sometimes he speaks even more directly. But such intrus- ions are relatively uncommon. There is a greater sociological rele- vance perhaps to the period and place of Mr Lee's own youth, whicfi is where the novel is set, Dunedin at the turn of the century. But its references to the self-interest of the rich, to the blindness of the Holy Willies, to charity that guarantees its own preservation by keeping the poor in poverty-these are all of the most general kind. If the novel has any sociological value, it lies not in the economic and social analyses which it does not perform, but in its emotional recreation 72 of a condition we don't hear much of any more. And as one of a later generation, I find the book both moving and convincing. And yet it's not what Mr Lee says about poverty that gets me. To see this book as being about poverty is to confuse an ostensible inten- tion with an actual achievement. Written in the person of Albany Porcello, a pariah of no fixed parentage but a charwoman mother, its method is autobiographical, its form picaresque, and its story a series of consecutive anecdotes that range from the lyrical through the melodramatic to the tragic. Between these anecdotes, but rarely within them, stand the weakest sections of the book, those pages in which Porcello stops living and philosophizes on poverty. They are not good pages; they are devitalized through repetition in particular; and yet the book survives them-firstly because they only distract for a page or two at a time, and secondly because, stylistically, the shadow of Mr Lee's power is discernible even there. The source of this power is a cast of mind that sees both sides of every issue, and generates a productive tension between them in the act of doing so. At its narrowest, this results in a taste for antithesis, for epigram and paradox. In the anecdotes, it results in dramatic blendings-as of tenderness with brutality, when young Albany salvages a litter of new-born rabbits, only to have them placed on fence-posts by an uncle and used for rifle practice; or of sympathy with sadism, when a minister pleads for him in court, gains him a light sentence, and then takes him home to thrash him naked round the parlour before making sexual advances to him. The principle pervades the book, and is the source of its unity in defiance of all weaknesses. At its broadest, developing as the story advances, it becomes a knowledge of good and evil that quite transcends the standards of prescriptive right and wrong, a knowledge in which virtue and vice are rendered meaningless terms by the emergence of a supra-moral charity. It is this which enables the novel ultimately to transcend the fatalism engendered otherwise by its antitheses-the impossible marriage of an instinctive sensibility with a necessary pragmatism, the self- perpetuation of poverty in a family whose oldest son's efforts to find employment are wrecked in advance by its daughter's reputation as a prostitute, the bitterness of personal endeavour in the face of economic determinism. Notwithstanding its faults, its repetitions, its occasional gaucheness even, Children of the Poor is a triumphantly human novel. Its triumph is a stylistic one, and it is so precisely because its style is not a glass for looking through, but a function of Mr Lee's personal vision itself, informing the novel in its every aspect. I doubt if we can afford to hold a book like this as merely a period piece. K. 0. Arvidson 73 BREAD AND A PENSION. Louis Johnson. Pegasus. 15s. IN REPLY to a mysterious suggestion by an Australian broadcaster that Louis Johnson, though not so good a poet as R. A. K. Mason, was 'the most original poet you've got', Anton V ogt (as the dust- jacket reminds us) 'said that when his best lOO poems are sorted out from a stack of several thousand, he may prove the best as well as the most prolific.' Mr V ogt isn't, I think, the only critic to assume that Mr Johnson's notoriously copious industry must have produced many poems of considerable value, if only the formidable task of detaching them from the mass were made. But Bread and a Pension affects me not only as being predominantly bad but as containing no single poem so unmistakably good as the earlier 'Magpie and Pines', for example. I want to emphasize at the outset that other reviewers have admired Bread and a Pension and that my inability to do so may be a fault in me rather than a fault in the poetry. Criticism is, I take it, an attempt at a special kind of conversation, a co-operative under- taking, a collective attempt to discover the real nature of the works under consideration. A critical judgement cannot, of course, be 'absolute', but so long as a critic, in trying to make plain his re- sponses, keeps pointing to particular things in the poems (let us say) themselves he stands a chance of modifying the initial opinions of his fellow readers by showing them something about the poems which they hadn't properly seen before. Literary criticism is the means by which the articulate reader endeavours to make his own reading capacities available to other readers. Naturally some critics have more to offer than others, but the critic who can contribute nothing of relevance to this collaborative reading is rare. It is commonplace that Mr Johnson has 'explored new themes' in New Zealand writing, has been concerned to 'map suburbia', has interested himself primarily in 'immediacies of the domestic situa- tion'. The more relevant question of how adequately these 'themes' are embodied in the words Mr Johnson uses is less frequently dis- cussed. When I ask myself why so much in this volume fails to make me feel anything at all except a vague dissatisfaction I seem to find a reason in the prevalence of slack journalistic phrases and virtually meaningless expressions-a fault in the poems which sug- gests that their creator was fundamentally uninterested in them. The adjective 'journalistic' may easily become too facile a term of reproach; a sentence from a recent Auckland Star will show what I mean by it. Under the heading 'Kennedy's Impact on History Pro- found' the Star quoted the Sunday Times: 'Mr Kennedy set forces in motion which, if Moscow finds the right response, may pro- 74 foundly influence the paths of history.' This is typical newspaper prose. What I find most interesting about it is the deadness of the metaphors. An 'impact' (unlike an 'impression') can only be spoken of as 'profound' if the actual phenomenon is not visualized at all. 'Forces' set things in motion; they cannot themselves be set in motion (unless they are armies, but the writer gives no evidence of having anything as concrete as military forces in mind). Nor would the journalist have claimed that these forces (what would be 'the right response' to a moving force?) might 'profoundly influence the paths of history' if he had been seeking a genuine image in which to convey genuine thought. The show of metaphor merely obscures the banality of the sentence, which might less pretentiously be written: 'Kennedy did things which may have important effects'. In a hackneyed phrase such as 'the paths of history' there is no vital and illuminating relationship between the two terms of the pretended metaphor-the paths are not real paths. It seems to me that the poetic use of language necessarily works in the other direc- tion, giving words maximum substance, strengthening their depend- ence upon things and actions, using all their resources to the full. The examination at some length of a few characteristic passages from Bread and a Pension will perhaps show up the volume's affini- ties with newspaper prose. In 'The Madwoman in the House' Mr Johnson writes: each distortion brings us close to that dark deep and melancholy gulf that opens over insecurity. A gulf or abyss is, of course, a commonplace image for despair, fear, and similar emotions, but the almost dead metaphor could be given vitality by verse which revived its physical content, which presented a real gulf to the reader's imagination. Hopkins, for instance, does this in the well-known lines: 0 the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. The novel diction and the urgent, expressive rhythm and texture combine to bring the cliffs, and thus the distress for which they stand, alive to the reader's senses. Mr Johnson, on the other hand, murders his metaphor by prefixing it with the trite (and unpunctu- ated) adjectives 'dark deep and melancholy'. His gulf 'opens over insecurity'. I am not sure how a gulf could do this; an attempt to imagine 'insecurity' as a river running along the bottom of a ravine would be irrelevant to this sort of writing. Clearly the lines are 75 simply an ineffective way of saying something like 'each distortion makes us more insecure'. Insecurity and melancholy are present merely as words-nothing in the verse gives the words substance. Similarly, when Mr Johnson asks 'How to rebuild a kingdom where the heart/Is a closet of utter dark?' (p. 20) I do not experi- ence the alleged emotional darkness any more than I am convinced of the agony of the cocktail-party acquaintance who says that some experience was 'sheer hell'. Mr Johnson's disillusion and despair invariably has this glibness and is expressed in second-hand images: This is the bed you've made-so here you lie, Thunders the oracle in the midnight mind Conjuring shapes of failure and despair Out of the mouthing dark. If children try Their talents at it and succeed, be blind. Joy is no cause that you should tear your hair. (p. 39) 'Considerations of the Gyres' begins: If Y eats was right, we've 45 years left Before this worn-out, overworked machine Grinds to a standstill and the dark recurs; But can it be so simple, dear-our deft Hands lapsed because a sage has seen Visions of wheels among his autumn fires? Who can be persuaded to view the world as a 'worn-out, over- worked machine' by such unfelt journalese? What precision has the word 'lapsed' with reference to hands? Isn't 'among his autumn fires' a vague poeticism for 'in his old age'? And Mr Johnson's reference in another poem to 'the coldjThat clutches the heart' (p. 65) leaves me unperturbed. It merely serves to remind me that 'cold' and 'clutch' have been juxtaposed by Mr Mason in a line which leaves no doubt of the reality of the poet's horror: I no hint of asphodel amaranth ambrosia moly paradise nor heaven holy after these long pangs have found but the cold clutch of the ground. 'Fresco of Boys and Beach' is a characteristic piece. (The title is curious. A fresco is a painting done quickly on a wall while the plaster is still wet. The poem presents a sort of moving picture. Perhaps Mr Johnson meant to imply that his poem was created in a hurry.) 76 Noisy boys in the dry Arabian sun dripping their shadows over rock and sand invade the self-willed silence of the ear this melting morning. A wear and tear of surf and shouting leaves my hand inert. I sit and watch them run

Louder than gulls among breakers; slicker than fish and water-scaled, high bounding insteps flash; fine haired and ripened thighs have disappeared under another ton of sea. The sky disapproves with a parental flicker.

It is not negative but more of envy. These profligates with so much to expend, so little real to achieve, while one with so many plans droops in the sun a rootless cactus, nothing to his hand accomplished, drained of energy. Unless the poet is in Arabia, the adjective 'Arabian' must indicate that the weather is hot and dry, but Mr Johnson has to apply the specific epithet 'dry' to the sun too. Though the word 'dripping' vaguely suggests that the boys are wet (the suggestion is superfluous, because the point is made explicitly later on), it seems inappropriate to describe human shadows. How can a boy drip his shadow any- where? How, in other words, can he let it fall in drops? 'Pouring' or 'spilling' would make better sense, though either would still be indifferent as poetry. The noisy boys 'invade the self-willed silence of the ear'. In other words he has been trying not to hear things but can't help hearing the boys. 'This melting morning' is pure cliche ('Whew, it's hot. I'm melting.'). The next sentence, with its advertising phrase 'wear and tear', is less precise than good prose: I suppose it means that the sounds distract the poet from writing. 'Water-scaled' would be an apt adjective to describe the bodies of the covered with drops of water, but the lines actually say that the 'insteps' of the boys are water-scaled. 'Ripened thighs' is cliche- poetic. I can find no satisfactory meaning in the sentence, 'The sky f disapproves with a parental flicker'. The adjective 'parental' implies that the sky is thought of as a parent to the boys; but parents do not express disapproval by flickering; nor is swimming a pastime of which many parents disapprove. Perhaps a cloud covers the sun for a while, but such a phenomenon could scarcely be described as 77 a flicker. I suspect that 'flicker' was the only available rhyme for 'slicker'. In the next stanza we learn that it is not disapproval which the sky is expressing after all, but envy. 'It is not negative but more of envy.' Surely poetry should be at least as precise as prose. A sentence so loosely linked to the previous one and so vague in itself would be intolerable in a School Certificate essay paper. And after all we need not have been told about the sky, because it is the poet who is envious. The last five lines seem simply petulant when put beside a product of genuine feeling; again Hopkins provides the contrast: See, banks and brakes Now, leaved how thickllaced they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build-but not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, 0 thou lord of life, send my roots rain. Mr Johnson's 'drained of energy' is again the language of trivial conversation. Like many of his cliches, it turns up later in the volume: 'And all that should have been is quite drained out' (p. 58). The mass of verbiage in 'Nor'wester in the Playground' boils down to the statement: 'On windy days children become restless; they prefer calm.' The poem offers nothing more than this, though it pretends to. Teachers will tell you, children in the wind Are crazy as trees-willows whipped to a gale Of seething green-their sharpened voices twined With scudding clouds, brittle as gulls. The phrase 'willows whipped to a galejOf seething green' might have come from a short-story in a pulp-magazine. 'Seething' is a reach-me-down word which Mr Johnson uses again with equal lack of point-'a seething wilderness of progeny' (p. 63); whatever a wilderness does it doesn't 'seethe', if the word is to retain any but the vaguest of meanings, least of all with 'progeny'. The same magazine story might well contain 'scudding clouds'. Voices, 'sharpened' or otherwise, can only be 'twined/With scudding clouds' in writing of the slackest kind. 'Brittle as gulls' ought, if one could trust syntax, to refer to 'clouds', but since the expression 'a brittle voice' is a familiar cliche the phrase probably is meant to qualify the 'voices'. But why should 'gulls' be called 'brittle'? Perhaps an apostrophe has been omitted (by either the poet or his printer), and the phrase applies the cliche 'brittle' to the voices of gulls, as well as to those of children. The poem continues: 78 Or like leaves burning their force out in the hot Assailing air, they hop skip leap Forever homeless puppets far out over the not Still playground trying to keep

Up with the shadows or beat the next gust To a powder of dust .... Another simile is dragged in. Presumably the syntax is characteristic- ally imprecise and Mr Johnson means that the hot air is burning the force out of the leaves. One can only accurately speak of the air 'assailing' the leaves and burning the 'force' (sap, energy, life?) out of them if they are still on trees, but children who hop, skip, and leap far out over the playground are more like dead leaves blown along the ground. The children are next described as 'Forever home- less puppets'-'puppets' because the wind makes them jump more than usual and men make puppets jump; 'forever homeless' simply because they are playing 'far out' over the playground, which must mean a fair distance from the school. There is no reason why the children should be called 'homeless'; and even if they were supposed to be refugees they could hardly be homeless 'forever'. Nor is 'home- less' a particularly apt epithet for 'puppets', though admittedly a Punch and Judy show travels from fair to fair. To write of 'the not/ Still playground' is an extraordinarily clumsy way of getting a rhyme with 'hot'. Surely the ground at least is still. If the expression just implies that the playground is 'a seething mass' of children it is redundant. The children, we are told, are 'puppets ... trying to keep/Up with the shadows' (the shadows of the clouds, I assume). But Mr Johnson doesn't mean what he says. Since puppets don't try to keep up with shadows, we must take it that they have already been forgotten and that only the children are referred to. The children (puppets) also try to 'beat the next gust/To a powder of dust'-an activity in which I cannot imagine even the most restless of children indulging. If 'beat' means 'race', I can understand how children could try to race the wind; but how could they try to race it to 'a powder of dust'? 'Beat' in this context must mean 'pound', but what child would try to pound the wind to powder? A poet with something to say would surely be more careful than Mr Johnson about such verbal details. In the next stanza he writes that children do not like The wind which stings the blood and maddens Them to imitate the functions of a kite. 'Stings the blood' is another literary cliche. The next line appears to 79 be an unconscious reminiscence of Henry V: 'then imitate the action of the tiger', especially since Shakespeare mentions 'the blood' in the next line. It can hardly be accidental that in reading Bread and a Pension I am so often reminded of better work by other poets. Even a reviewer who thinks highly of the volume (Barry Mitcalfe in the Listener) notes the echoes of Eliot, MacNeice, and Cummings. Mr Johnson does not give second-hand phrases and rhythms a new and independent vitality; he uses them to concoct pseudo-poetry which looks like the real thing but lacks substance. 'Any Old Iron' begins: I have nailed up the sheet of iron on the backyard fence that has swung in the wind all night with rasp and groan shattering sleep, entering every dream by force and metal weight. An early poem by Allen Curnow, 'Wild Iron', which he has re- printed in both his anthologies, evokes the noise of clanging iron by its expressive rhythms and subtly organized sounds. The responsive reader is made to share the experience which the poem embodies. Mr Johnson uses lifeless diction in lines which are rhythmically dead; they evoke nothing. His poem continues with this sort of writing: 'the day /sours around disturbance in the dark' (what can imagination or intellect make of a statement such as that?), 'micro- phones that have no heart' (a microphone that did 'have a heart' would be worth telling us about), 'desire will crumble', 'an air bereft/of meaning and identity'. When Mr Johnson attempts a novel image the result usually seems far-fetched. One poem, for instance, tells of a man ('there was a touch of distance about him'-he was like the man in the Woman's Own story in this respect) who hid his fear under many conquests, birds in the hand meaning more than hopes in the hush of himself. He saw God as a deodorant on a completely immaculate shelf. (p. 23). This is the slick but unconvincing imagery of the 'Towards More Picturesque Speech' page in the Reader's Digest. One could cite several examples. In 'At the Barber's', as in so many of the poems in this volume, Mr Johnson is feeling sorry for himself: I shall walk out like Samson, shorn of strength, At midday to the Delilah afternoon Spread like a whore the whole dishevelled desk-length Taking my turn upon the grinding-stone. 80 The Samson and Delilah analogy not only seems contrived but, in conjunction with the heavily charged 'whore', inflates a trivial experi- ence to ridiculous proportions. Why should the poet feel that having a hair-cut will deprive him of his strength? Delilah betrayed the secret that her lover's strength was in his hair; I can see no way in which the 'afternoon' could be comparable. But, having personified the afternoon as Delilah, the poet also likens it to a whore lying along the top of an untidy desk. Confronted with the afternoon in this extraordinary posture, Mr Johnson merely takes his turn 'upon the grinding-stone'. That last line is, of course, simply another bit of flat conversation ('Oh well, back to the grindstone.'). Incidentally, Mr Johnson's haphazard punctuation might tempt one to take 'I' as the subject of 'Spread', as well as of the other participle, 'Taking'; a comma is needed after 'desk-length'. Mr Johnson moves from a de- scription of what is not to be heard in the barber's shop ('a mous- tachioed quartet/Leaning their harmonies to each other's wind'- the second line is a pointless circumlocution for 'harmonizing') to a description of what is to be heard: the weather report ('The radio unreels the weather's net') and race results. Then the mechanical hair-trimmer, which the barber somehow contrives to 'hide behind', is referred to metaphorically as a 'cat that eats up hair', though none of the trimmers that I have seen cutting hair eat it up-they just bite it off. Next comes a confused allusion to a remark by Christ: Mr Johnson seems to be saying that he (Johnson) counts his hairs as they fall (though they don't if the machine really eats them up) so that he will be saved in preference to sparrows. And then follows the unexpected generalization, unsupported by anything that has preceded it, 'Always the strong must suffer, and the pale/Mechanical Delilahs take their toll'. The poet is having his hair cut, and the clippers don't even 'nip an ear', he admits, but he is prompted to reflect that the strong must always suffer! What is a 'pale/Mechan- ical Delilah'? I can envisage only a sort of clockwork female Philis- tine doll, painted white. The poem goes on: Perhaps the barber has. hair's breadth escapes And dreams of iron adventure after toil, Or merely drinks his beer with other chaps. In other words, perhaps the barber has exciting adventures and per- haps not. The word-play in 'hair's breadth escapes' serves no serious function; 'iron adventure' hasn't even a bad pun to lessen its trite- ness. The poem ends: We sit and suffer while the will is done Fashioning tidiness at the crux of the skull: 81 I walk out, lighter, in the enslaving sun, But, when I stretch my arms, cause no towers fall. All this no doubt has, in the words of another poem (p. 34), 'Some- thing to do with Life' ('the sweetest spring at which awareness drinks', Mr Johnson explains: what other springs are there, I won- der?), but a poet should make some effort to show what the 'some- thing' is. In the first stanza of 'Down to the City Airport' the imagery is so confused as to render the lines meaningless : I spring upon my city from the sky As a gull descends or as the wry Impersonal airman with his clutch of bombs May swoop to loose his bowels and watch Death flower and gorge on crumbs; The evil that, within, each one will hatch. The poet is evidently landing in an aeroplane. 'Spring' (to leap suddenly) suggests the wrong kind of movement and contradicts the image of a gull descending. Why the airman should be 'wry' is not clear; the word appears to have been chosen purely for its use- fulness as a rhyme. The associations of 'clutch' (the word is used of a set of eggs) sort oddly with the idea in 'loose his bowels', and surely the loosening would be of the plane's, not the airman's, bowels. The verb 'flower' remains cliche here (it is another of Mr Johnson's stand-bys-'No blessing flowered', he writes on page 20), because the potentialities of the metaphor are killed by the immedi- ate transition to a contradictory one: the airman may watch death 'gorge on crumbs' (what do the crumbs represent?). The last line has the most tenuous of syntactical links with the others. I suppose it is an object of the verb 'watch'. 'Each one' must mean each bomb: each bomb will hatch evil within itself. 'Hatch' has arisen out of 'clutch', but an egg doesn't hatch anything within itself-a bird hatches an egg. There are some moderately good pieces in the volume. I find 'The Spy's Report', 'The World and the Individual', and 'Procrastinator' more competent than most. 'Song in the Hutt V alley' is pleasantly unpretentious. Mr Johnson's daughter has produced a bit of poetry for him in the first half of 'Vision'. And while Section IV of the volume is mostly very heavy-handed, 'Overheard in a Gallery', though slight, is neatly turned. 'This Week in Nursery Land' comes near to being a very good poem, but even here makeshift expressions such as 'noise appalling' enfeeble the verse. I have compared various unsatisfactory passages in Bread and a 82 Pension with the genuine poetry of other poets, but Mr Johnson's own 'Magpie and Pines', readily accessible in the Penguin anthology, serves as sufficient contrast to his recent work. To read aloud first that poem and then any one of the pieces in Bread and a Pension is to become aware of a difference in kind. So, at any rate, it seems to me. Perhaps some critic who thinks otherwise can show me from a detailed analysis of actual texts that my reading of the volume is inadequate. MacD. P.Jackson

WILD HONEY. Alistair Campbell. Oxford. 18s.

IN AN EARLIER age of printing, Wild Honey might have forgone its attractive title for a more prosaic description, perhaps Mine Eyes Dazzle: THE FOURTH EDITION: Newly Revised and Greatly Augmented by the Author. But the touch of pride in that insensitive description would be well merited. Few poets these days can emulate Mr Campbell's four editions of a single collection of verse in less than fifteen years. The revisions to earlier work are numerous but in the main insig- nificant-a word here and a comma there, rolled before the critics like the golden apples before Atalanta. But I am going to stop for two of these apples because they bear upon the poet's new work. Every poem is now given a proper title, and in a few cases the linea- tion is altered. Mr Campbell's earlier poems are well known for their immediate evocation of strong but ill-defined moods, most commonly moods of deep melancholy or spiritual barrenness, which are described indirectly through such landscapes as a cold shingly beach, desolate misty pines or bare wind-swept tussock, scenes whose parts take on through repetition the force of symbols for emotional states of mind. This much was most successfully done. But the reader was rarely allowed to comprehend the human situation which could alone give rise to such moods and which alone could define them with tolerable certainty. The new titles indicate a greater concern to be explicit. The poem which was originally called 'The mist in the pines' relied for its mood of unhappiness on such phrases as the 'mournful cries' of the gulls, 'the wooded mist-dark hills', 'the storm-wrecked garden' and the 'bitter crying of the sea'. It is now entitled 'The Quarrel', and in place of a stanza describing the rain-sodden forest has Since nothing stays, what certainty But in our love for one another? 83 Why then must we make our days Bitter with recrimination? This enables one to appreciate more precisely the effect of the stormy landscape in human terms, though one wonders if the wild mysteri- out gloom of the original version is not let down by the expla'nation. Certainly, though, there are poems, especially those that refer to a woman drowned in the sea, which would be less distractingly mys- terious if the poet had handled them as openly and directly as he did the poems of the 'Elegy'. The changes in lineation are of less importance. In three poems the text has been rearranged so that the lines are shorter and more irregular, suggesting a concern for the way in which the poems should be phrased in the reading. I cannot see that this improves them at all, but it does point to the abandoning of formal patterns in line and stanza as found in 'Sanctuary of Spirits' and to a reliance on the rhetorical patterns of declaimed speech which are particularly well handled in this new work. Wild Honey is in fact so augmented as to be more than just a fourth edition of Mine Eyes Dazzle. Half the verse in it is new. A few poems, especially in phrases like Some sea-torn promontory where the wind Lifts the white spray .... recall the poet's earlier manner, but their content is more substantial. Even in such a personal one as 'Lament', which contains some movingly plangent lines, there is a sense of completion where earlier poems on a similar theme sometimes seem to be only fragments. More direct communication of rational thought rather than purely of emotion is also found in 'Blonde Girl' and 'Bitter Harvest'. Yet one of the weaknesses of this poetry is that the two qualities are so easily separable. Except in the very best poems, and elsewhere in the occasional line, they lie side by side in an uneasy balance. Directness of expression is carried to an extreme in the four 'Per- sonal Sonnets'. In these, the details of family deaths and bereave- ments are stated with such simplicity and in such nakedness that one is embarrassed as if intruding in a room of mourning; and criticism is disarmed. But most important is the sequence called 'Sanctuary of Spirits: a pattern of voices', of which a most elegant edition was printed privately at the W ai-te-ata Press in Wellington in 1963. The work comprises nine poems to be spoken by some of those who suffered in the course of Te Rauparaha's infamous career. It has little dram- atic reality or continuity, and despite the explanatory notes demands 84 a more than common knowledge of Maori history for full under- standing; but it is described as 'a pattern of voices' and the sugges- tion of spoken language is powerful and convincing. The words are set in short and unequal lines which represent not so much lines of verse as the breath groups of rhetorical speech. The patterns of rhetorical speech and of verse are, however, different, and that such short lines are unnecessary and even a hindrance in verse is shown at the end of 'Kapiti' where the opening lines of a sonnet by Milton are imitated thus: Howl, depleted tribes, for your dishonoured manhood whose bones lie scattered on the shores of Kapiti! But the devices of rhetoric are generally well used: ... the maddened Rangihaeata roasts alive his suppliant kinsman Rangimairehau ... Enough! It is done. and Can a baby wield a taiaha? Or a hag give suck to the fighting-man? These lines seem to capture the spirit of Maori speech, though few readers will feel competent to judge. I can point with certainty to only one or two examples. The metaphor, for instance, in 'Te Rauparaha is a godjand Kapiti is his backbone' is exactly that used by Maoris who told early travellers that Tongariro was the backbone of the great T aupo chiefs. And certain words borrow their connotations from Maori rather than from English usage. When for example the Old Man says, 'I died like a slave' and 'Te Rua- oneone, 'I am a slave who was a chief', the word slave should have a much more derogatory and degrading sense than it has for those who have been taught to believe all men born equal. In any case, it is the effect rather than the accuracy that counts, and the passages for Maori speakers have a direct assurance and sense of importance. The last section, spoken by the poet, with its colloquial reflection and melodramatic exclamation, cannot match them. 'Sanctuary of Spirits' is an important addition to Mr Campbell's repertoire; the remaining new work will add little to his already great popularity. J. E. P. Thomson 85 AMBULANDO. Charles Brasch. The Caxton Press. 15s. IN THIS LATEST book Mr Brasch's poetic method remains, in many respects, essentially the same as in his last, The Estate, though it has become in some poems more strikingly personal. The rhythms and structures are still rather loose or quietly tense, unanimated, re- flective, in accordance with the poet's quiet, elegiac tone, his contem- plative attitude, his vague uneasiness and the nature of his themes. 'Hawk Over Bowen Peak' is perhaps closest in its method to the characteristic mode of the short poems in The Estate. Thinking, feel- ing, and the apt presentation of a clearly visualized landscape are, in these poems, inextricably interrelated: the 'thought' grows out of and finds its image in the landscape. So, in this poem, the hawk is at once clearly visualized and an object of philosophical significance. It is a poem which has as its implicit theme the contrast which lies behind most of the best poetry in The Estate, the perennial theme of poetry: the tension between the 'ideal' and the 'real', the relation between 'heaven' and 'earth'. The poet follows the hawk as it escapes from time-bound, fleshly existence, from limitations and transience. He waits for him to soar on, take fire, vanish Upward, ascended, received on high. There is a moment of indecision, of rhythmical hesitation as the hawk remains stationary, poised in a visual and philosophical limbo. And then the call of earth asserts itself once more, the rhythm falls away, and the hawk returns to a world whose duality the poet realistically recognizes. Mr Brasch's best poetry is almost always organized, rhythmically: one rarely feels that the line divisions are arbitrary or that the rhythm is so 'free' as to be non-existent. But the rhythmical structures always seem simply to have happened, to have grown slowly from the process of reflection itself: one never gets the impression of con- scious 'construction'. Often there are unobtrusive half-rhymes or in- ternal rhymes, consonance, or even a kind of syntactical rhyme in which statements are knit together by being grammatically or rhyth- mically parallel or antithetical rather than rhyming with each other: No word, except in the bone In the resurrection bone. Action is bred there And praise opened And repentance fulfilled there. 86 There is the battlefield There the seat of judgement. If I praise in words, do not listen Nor if I call in words. Take no account of words .... Mr Brasch's frequent reliance on half-rhyme is in character: the tentativeness of the rhyme is part of a general tentativeness, an ab- sence of strong or confident accents. And the inevitable rise and fall of the rhythm suggests the balance of mind which the poet is striving to achieve and faithfully reflects the duality of experience which lies at the centre of the poetry. We are presented with a mind in the pro- cess of pondering experience. In 'Badger's Mount' the flux which is the theme of the poem is enacted in the looseness of the structure and the syntax, the absence of punctuation and the predominance of present participles: Bridging then now and hereafter U nforgotten rising and setting Over wood downland ocean Tropic and temperate Bear and Cross October and October Leafing unleafing Sifting Mr Brasch does not always manage to avoid the dangers of the mode he works in. His characteristic rhythms invite us to ponder seriously every phrase in his poems: so that any cliche or banality that there is is likely to be obvious. In 'Seventeen April' we have: This was your day All your years long, eighty-eight times together. The meditative rhythm here seems to claim too much for the phrase 'eighty-eight times together'-the seriousness is inclined to be in excess of its subject matter. This seems, too, to be the case in 'A Manila Folder'. In the two longer sequences 'Bred in the Bone' and 'In Your Presence' the method of the long poem in The Estate is developed. In 'Bred in the Bone' especially there is a movement towards a more generalized scenery, a more elemental and universalized landscape. It is a very interesting experiment and in the main, I think, a success- ful one. Its complexity lies not in the manner of utterance (a kind of ironic 'complexity' which is becoming sterile through fashionable abuse) but rather in the range of its theme. It operates on several 87 levels; the 'I' of the poem is a triple exile: he is the Wandering Jew, the isolated New Zealander, and modern man estranged from his God (though what summary makes cliche of is in fact a distinctive and moving synthesis). The language and the rhythms recall the Old Testament prophets and one remembers Mr Brasch's modern mystery play, The Quest. The resemblance suggests one possible origin for his measured cadences: the rhythmical rise and fall, the antithetical or parallel statements commented on earlier are similar to Hebrew parallelism. And like that of the Old Testament Mr Brasch's poetry is pre-eminently a poetry of statement-a statement which becomes more than mere assertion through its beautiful and precise rhythmical organization and the resonance of the words which the rhythm makes emphatic. C. K. Stead, in his review in an earlier Landfall of The Estate, rightly sees the method as similar to that of Eliot. One would imagine that he is the most difficult of poets to be 'similar to' without slavishly imitating. And if one were con- fronted with, say, these two passages in isolation from their contexts one might legitimately have doubts: That love as evergreen mover Is our always and our never, Creator, destroyer, preserver. I neither believe nor disbelieve, I expect the rising moon And the dissolution of empires; A tree in which the winds nest, Knowing and knowing nothing. Mr Brasch contrives to persuade us, however, that he has made the method his own. It is perhaps not fortuitous, then, that the preoccu- pations which produced this kind of poetry are in both cases religi- ous (though the collocation of Mr Brasch with Eliot does more than justice to the former). One remains, however, uneasy about the conclusion of 'Bred in the Bone'. The 'resurrection bone' seems too abstract and ill-defined a positive, and the poetry does not carry the conviction which we are invited by the statement to give it. One has similar doubts about the song cycle 'In Your Presence'. Parts of it are very moving and the structure seems admirably suited to Mr Brasch's manner but doubts as to the nature of the 'you' of the poem constantly preclude com- plete assent. And though the rigorous asceticism of the poet's con- templation is no doubt a condition of the success the poem does achieve, I find myself asking at times for a less insistent contempla- tiveness, even, perhaps, for a concentration on external objects as 88 mere 'things in themselves' quite apart from their religious and metaphysical significance. The difficulty in reading 'Ben Rudd' is to decide whether the poet engages our sympathy for the W ordsworthian solitary at the expense of not doing justice to the town. In the third section Mr Brasch cleverly organizes colloquial speech into poetry, preventing it from sounding commonplace without the rhymes seeming obtrusive; the town retains its dignity. But in the ninth section reported speech remains inert and characterless and the town is on the point of becoming a caricature. Yet the poem ends with the active sympathy of the townspeople for the dying man and the necessary balance is perhaps restored just in time. The last poem in this volume ostensibly represents a new direction in Mr Brasch's poetry, a tendency towards a late Yeatsian bitterness. But in the third verse there is a tension between assertion and rhyth- mical and syntactical organization, between matter and manner. The first five lines create as a positive stoicism what, as the last two indicate, they are meant to be questioning the existence of. And the poem ends with a typically tentative assertion: Liking and disliking, Unloving and wanting love, Nearer to, farther from My cross-grained fellow-mortals, On my level days I cry mercy And on my lofty days give thanks For the bewildering rough party. It remains to say that the production of this book is admirably suited to the nature and quality of the poetry it contains. R. L. P. Jackson

BYRON THE POET. M. K. Joseph. Gollancz and Paul. 47s. 6d. TEN YEARS AGo there was not a single first-rate critical study of Byron. W. J. Calvert's book, Byron: Romantic Paradox, came near- est; but most of the multitude of books about Byron were concerned with the man and his life, and the one thing that seemed in danger of neglect was the poetry that he wrote. Criticism had usually to be ferreted out from books of essays and the pages of periodicals. Now three studies have remedied this state of affairs. The first and fullest is the work of a Frenchman: Robert Escarpit's Lord Byron: un temperament litteraire, which appeared in two volumes in 1955 and 1957, gives an intelligent account of the man and his writings and 89 explores some of the less-frequented byways of his poetry. Andrew Rutherford's Byron: A Critical Study, is the work of a Scot: it is above all sensible and economical: its limitations are a certain lack of sparkle and a marked absence of any deep interest in Byron as a man. Now a New Zealander, Professor Michael Joseph, has produc- ed a book which is in many ways the most satisfactory study of the three. The first thing that struck me about Professor Joseph's book was the way in which it is planned. We all know the type of writer or lecturer on Chaucer who begins with a minute account of the early poems and their relation to the second-rate French poetry of the time-struggles on to Troilus and Criseyde-and then apologises at the end for having no time to discuss The Canterbury Tales, which are dismissed (as likely as not) with the quotation from Dryden about 'God's plenty'. Professor Joseph clearly determined to avoid that danger, and we find that Don Juan is firmly at the centre of his book, the subject of some two hundred pages. The other poems get one hundred and fifty pages or so, which include a shrewd and sensitive account of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This seems to me quite right, and I approve of the strategy by which the early poems -which can make for a rather tedious beginning-are tucked away at the end of Part I, with the satires in heroic couplets. Little is lost by this slight to chronology, while much is gained in impetus and directness of attack. Escarpit (by contrast) devotes one hundred pages to 'le mode lyrique' in Byron and greatly weakens the effect of his criticism of Don Juan by dispersing it among the various sections of his book. The great difficulty, in writing a critique of Byron's poetry, is to devise a way of bringing biography in without allowing it to usurp too much space. To exclude it almost completely, as I had to do in Englz'sh Literature 1815-1832, cannot be very satisfactory; yet once it is allowed in it does tend to steal the show. In this matter Professor Joseph succeeds admirably. His interest in psychology gives depth to his comments on Byron as a man, yet we are always reassuringly aware that the man with whom he is concerned is above all a major poet. Professor Joseph is himself a writer of satire and epigram, and his criticism of Don Juan is the work of a man who understands the origin of satire in the generous indignation of a wounded and sensi- tive mind. Here and elsewhere he is lavish with quotations, both from the poems and from the letters and journals, though he spares us the aridities of so much that is now proudly labelled 'practical criticism'. He has done plenty of 'close reading', I do not doubt; but 90 he has kept the immediate results where they belong, in his note- books or in the margins of his working copies. He gives us his findings, and the reasons behind them. His book is learned and closely-reasoned; but it is also witty and agreeable to read. Of course there can be no finality about a study of this kind. A better edition of Byron's letters will one day throw further light on his life, while his poetry will turn a different face to another age. But meanwhile Professor Joseph has done as much as anyone to help us to under- stand the man who struggled with Childe Harold and succeeded so brilliantly in Don Juan. The only cause for regret is the fact that his publishers did not give more care to the production of so important a book. !an Jack

STUDIES oF A SMALL DEMOCRACY: Essays in Honour of Willis Airey. Edited by Robert Chapman and Keith Sinclair. Paul's Book Arcade for the University of Auckland. 27s. 6d.

I HAVE a vivid recollection of Willis Airey at New Plymouth in 1960. The occasion was on one level a teachers' conference, but on another it turned itself into a reunion between Professor Airey and his old students. The warm, easy relationship between an outstanding group of teachers and their former tutor seemed to me to set the highest seal on his academic career. In their introduction to these essays, the editors outline the effect of war and depression on Airey's independ- ent, sensitive mind. A major contribution to New Zealand studies would be Airey's own account of the clash between left-wing con- science and right-wing complacency in those years. Since the later 1940s, a group of Auckland historians has taken the lead in New Zealand studies. The initial source of their inspira- tion was Professor Airey's personal integrity and social idealism. It is interesting to reflect that the protest of Airey and his friends has broadened out into the Auckland radical tradition, for some time now the orthodox approach to our past. Yet it is inevitable that fresh research, undertaken with time and resources not available to him, should produce new interpretations. These supersede some of his own in 'Condliffe and Airey', and also some of the earlier conclu- sions of the authors themselves. The collective title of these essays is perhaps misleading. This is not a reconsideration of Siegfried's views, still less an examination of the effect of New Zealand's small size on its democratic institutions. These are simply essays on aspects of New Zealand history with no connecting theme. However, by subject and approach they show 91 their common background in the Auckland radical tradition, while at the same time making significant modifications of it. R. C. J. Stone unconsciously supplies some of the notes for a theme in his study of the trade unions: ' ... if in the process, idealism seemed to have gone, reality appeared correspondingly nearer at hand.' He con- cludes: ' ... [they] seemed at last to have come to terms with New Zealand.' It would, of course, be ridiculous to suggest that idealism and reality, the passion for a cause and the passion for truth, can not mix in good historical writing. However, it is worth while making the point that these Studies are all the more acceptable for being less angled and more obedient to the complexity of our past than some previous Auckland historical writing. In his discussion of the period 1853-1858, the late David Herron shows a very proper caution in handling his weighty evidence. He is concerned in part to show what politics were not about. 'Provin- cialism' and 'centralism', the two commonest coins in political cur- rency, were either counterfeit or dishonoured at will. Yet they passed into respectable historical circulation. Herron suggests, I think rightly, that the realities of politics were the struggle for office, and local pressures. Until historians accept the small scale of New Zea- land's institutions, they will continue to look for patterns larger than life. Herron's account still needs to be supplemented (as he was aware) by thorough analysis of division lists and exhaustive bio- graphical studies. In other words, we still have not answered fully the Namier questions: Why did men go into politics? What gov- erned their actions as politicians? Keith Sinclair's study of Atkinson's 'scarecrow ministry' is complementary to Herron's essay in that it seeks to isolate the crucial moments in the break-up of the old order that went back to the 1850s. Professor Sinclair demonstrates his Eormidable skill in sinking test-bores in the right places. His evidence is not extensive, but clearly much of it leads to conclusions of first- rate importance. It does not matter that these contradict some of his own earlier views. However, it does matter that he has not taken account of the work of W. R. Armstrong, and that he insists on re- taining such terms as 'continuous ministry' and 'Conservatives' in the face of his new evidence. His general account of the 1880s does not carry us forward a great deal, and he might have made more of the 1888 tariff if he had treated 'free trade' and 'protection' with Herron's scepticism towards catch-cries. It seems to me that the aim of the new taxation was more important than its incidence. Atkinson demonstrated that the colony would tax itself to pay British money- lenders their interest. This paved the way for the last great loan of 1888, and possibly even forWard's renewed borrowing of 1895. Of the other three essays largely or entirely on the pre-Liberal 92 period, those of M. P. K. Sorrenson and D. A. Hamer whet the appetite for full-scale published studies on the King Movement and on Sir Robert Stout. Mr Sorrenson might have shown more clearly the place of the King party among Maori organizations. He does not discuss the alleged compact of 1885, which was examined in 1953 by A. H. McLintock. Mr Hamer ends his valuable essay with a rather unconvincing tailpiece on New Zealand as a 'utopia', in the mind of Stout, in the dreams of British emigrants, and in Liberal philosophy. Here is another cliche which is a positive hindrance to understanding our history. It seems ungrateful to carp at H. J. Hanham's account of New Zealand promoters and British investors, 1860-1895. This is a pioneer expedition into an important field, and a welcome change from the political studies which dominate New Zealand historical research. From British records of New Zealand loan companies registered in the United Kingdom, he shows the highly speculative nature of their activities, and the meagre nature of their returns compared with similar Australian groups. Mr Han- ham demolishes another devil-figure of New Zealand history, the absentee British investor gorged with antipodean gains. Perhaps the most lucrative return on his colonial estates was the political capital made out of them by local party orators. Mr Hanham provides an entertaining contrast between the wise husbandman of absentee estates, W. S. Davidson, and the unjust steward of colonial specula- tors, Thomas Russell. The latter nevertheless emerges as a leading founder of New Zealand's 'main financial institutions'. We can now hardly cavil at Reeves's encomium on Russell's associate, Vogel: ' ... almost all that he did or tried to do was wise.' It is not clear whether Mr Hanham's list of companies is complete. Perhaps an economic historian, more familiar with the whole colonial scene, will deal with this and other questions which await full-scale system- atic studies. What New Zealand studies lost by the departure of R. T. Shannon is shown in his brilliant study of the fall of Reeves, in which he answers a number of puzzling questions. There will be plenty of readers whose imagination will be stirred by his opening purple passage on the familiar theme of Reeves the 'radical ideologue' and 'intellectual' in politics. To me, it is the least useful part of his essay, and seems to indicate a rather sketchy knowledge of Reeves's pre- 1891 career. Reeves rose to ministerial rank, not as reader of the Fabian Essays or as the author of the Lyttelton Times articles on socialism, but as party journalist, electoral organizer, and opposition debater-common enough roads to office, but he was uncommonly swift and successful in them. He was less at ease on the treasury benches, wincing under the kind of blows he had dealt earlier, and 93 preferring the ministerial office. Mr Shannon's essay is on Reeves the politician; it needs to be complemented by a study of Reeves the man-sensitive, fastidious and plagued by doubts. In the other study of the Liberal period, Frank Rogers argues that both Siegfried and Condliffe have underestimated the influence of overseas ideas and examples on New Zealand politicians of the period 1890-1912. On the range of these ideas and on the extent of their impact, Mr Rogers makes a valuable advance, but on the depth of their penetration there is still room for other opinions. He shows, for example, that Rolleston was not the pragmatist, contemptuous of theory, that he professed to be. On the other hand, he does not penetrate far enough into the mind of the key man, McKenzie. Later land reformers, such as G. W. Russell, T. E. Taylor, and George Laurenson, are not dis- cussed. The twentieth century is represented by three essays. In the first of them, B. D. Graham examines the 'Country Party Idea', 1901-1935. His knowledge of Australian politics enables him to make useful comparisons, but the range of his New Zealand material could be wider. Additional light on the limited success of rural separatism in politics would be thrown by a study of the following: A. W. Rutherford's abortive 'country party' of 1903, David Jones's Farmers' Political Protection Federation of 1911, and W. J. Poison's vigorous campaign for an independent Farmers' Union in the 1920s. Captain Rushworth, the party's leader, and his Bay of Islands electorate de- serve fuller study than they get here. Mr Graham has read too much into his W aikato Argus references in claiming that Massey and other opposition members were contemplating a 'farmers' faction' in 1901-2. However, the general outlines of his study are sound. R. C. J. Stone's essay on the unions and the arbitration system, 1900-1937, is the best available short survey of the subject. He makes plain the limitations of militancy within the unions, and the limitations of the unions within New Zealand society. Unlike most writers on this subject, he is not led astray by the polemics of either capital or labour. The long-standing preoccupation with left-wing movements has obscured the continued existence of the Trades and Labour Councils. Perhaps some labour historian will not find it beneath his dignity to make an overdue study of them. There was a time when Auckland honours students would ask one another, 'Are you doing a Chapman or a Shannon?'-that is, an exhaustive survey of voting patterns in individual electorates, or a broad study of party struggles in parliament and at general elections. Both approaches seem necessary for a full understanding of New Zealand politics. In his study of Labour's electoral fortunes, 1928- 1960, R. M. Chapman asserts his faith in the 'closer measurements' 94 of 'contemporary psephology' to 'reduce and define what historians of politics must explain'. He is asking new questions and turning up new answers in New Zealand history, and the value of his work can not be properly tested until there are others working at the same depth as he is. In the meantime, the originality and power of his work can be gratefully acknowledged, and a general practitioner can only query his clinical findings on very broad grounds. Is the floating voter, so often pronounced dead by Professor Chapman, really killed by studies at the electorate level? Is his sevenfold divis- ion of the New Zealand electorates the basic political anatomy of this country? Is his 'norm' of 'equal movement' in these seven sections broadly enough based to be regarded as a physiological law of our body politic? Can his diagnosis of 'deep social change' be reconciled with his belief in a fixed political skeleton? The value of these essays has been amply demonstrated in univer- sity teaching, and there will soon be a call for a revised second edi- tion. W. J. Gardner

Correspondence

T 0 THE EDITOR SIR: I read with the greatest interest Dr Oliver's commentary on the issues raised in Mr J. A. Lee's book Simple on a Soap-Box and I agree that the book remains 'a first-rate piece of entertainment'. It is also highly relevant matter in the history of the New Zealand Labour Party and I would like to add my small testimony in the case. During all those early years of Labour power I was an active mem- ber of the party and also secretary of an L.R.C. The general picture of the struggle as given by Lee, the accounts of actual events and conversations match very closely the accounts of the same events as I heard them from another member of the Labour caucus during those years. It seems that politicians who intend to remain in power and dom- inate policy must always be a little shady in their dealings with their fellow-politicians, and I believe that the picture drawn by Lee of this side of Labour politics (1935-40) is sound. The issue that Lee misses (and also, it appears, Dr Oliver) is that there was a substantial minor- ity of members in the Labour caucus who were genuinely Left-wing 95 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S WORDS Hailed by all ten critics in Le Bulletin du Livre as one of the great books of the year. 22s BABEL IN LONDON John Haycraft An account of his difficulties and eventual triumph in establishing a language school for foreign students by the author of best-selling Babel in Spain. 2 6s EUROPE Kai Curry-Lindahl One of the most beautiful hooks on natural history ever published. Lavishly illustrated in colour and black and white. £5 1 Os 3d

And Two Best-sellers: NORMAN BIRKETT H. Montgomery Hyde Now in its Fifth Impression 43s THE ITALIANS Luigi Barzini Now in its Fourth Impression 31s HAMISH HAMILTON

96 or socialist in their views, who wanted to travel towards defined poli- tical goals, but who were unfortunately no match for the seasoned politicians in the party. This minority did not have a determined and experienced leadership (so necessary if a political group is going to count in the long run). But the flamboyant Lee was most vocal in heading the challenge to the policies of the leaders. The leaders saw the dangers and decided to crush the dissident minority. They probably realized that they could fragment the Left, the first step being to get rid of Lee round whom it tended to group. Perhaps the most pitiful story (yet to be told) is how easy it was to smash the remnants of the group, especially with the help of the developing war situation. In the party branches the worst effect was, as Dr Oliver notes, that Lee, not himself a socialist, became identified with the Left and large numbers flocked to his banner many of them later to become completely disillusioned with politics as a means of achieving defined ends, and others to become money reformers. At the same time the party hierarchy firmly crushed any left-ward thinking. Radical Labour has never recovered from this smashing defeat. It is unfortunate to have to describe these events in generalities. To do anything else would involve other people. There are still several men living who could 'tell all' and it is to be hoped that some or all of them will put history before everything else and do so, lest the fragment of the picture as seen through the Lee eyeglass becomes the mly piece we are to see. As a postscript I may add that the history of the development of the Social Security scheme (of which all politicians are now proud) would throw very interesting light on the timid approach of Savage, Nash and Fraser to any radical ideas. W. K. Mcllroy

SIR: As a long-time Faulkner reader, I found R. A. Ranald's essay on Faulkner's South most stimulating. The approach through myth seems to me to reveal some of the central aspects of Faulkner's work. However, the essay does contain a factual error that needs correc- tion. In his concluding discussion of Part IV of The Bear, Professor Ranald has Isaac McCaslin reading the Ode on a Grecian Urn to his 'unlettered uncle' and then making a statement about truth. Actually, it is Isaac's older cousin (one of his spiritual 'fathers'), McCaslin Edmonds, who reads the poem to the boy, Isaac, after Isaac has refused an opportunity to shoot the bear. The scene is reported as remembered by Isaac when, seven years later, he is discussing with his cousin his decision to renounce his patrimony of 'tainted' land. (In the shorter version of The Bear, which appeared in The Satur- 97 John Summers Bookshop 119 MANCHESTER STREET CHRISTCHURCH TELEPHONE 77-051

1st March, 1965.

Dear Josephus,

I have felt for some time that "foe" hardly befits the exalted calibre of your mind, and norv that you ask about Aristotle I am confirmed in this. Yes, we do have ARISTOTLE'S WORKS in 12 vols at £12/10/-, O.U.P. imprint, 1950 edition translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross. Nerv this set rvould cost about £23 now, and ours is in excellent order. Yes Nellie Macleod's THE FIGHTING MAN (T. E. Taylor of Ch'ch) is now published at 30/-.-Well that's what you get if you can't get the ear of the State Lit. Fund. And yes, rve have a variety of back numbers of LANDFALL and will note you for issues that we've got no stocks of (mostly 5/- each still). Yes, rve have a copy of Masson's ITALIAN GARDENS almost as new for 65j- (new 98/-), and a DOBELL at 80/- and also a NOLAN at 65j-all Thames and Hudson books. And the only way I can console myself for all these 'yes's' is to remember Nietzsche. Yeah, yeah, yeah or have I got it rvrong again, Cheery Johannes

98 day Evening Post of May 9, 1942, it is Isaac's father who reads the poem to him (if the unnamed boy of the story is meant to be Isaac).) The assignment of the speeches to the correct characters is crucial in this instance, for the scene becomes deeply ironic if we see that Isaac, arguing with his cousin over the guilt that slavery and segre- gation have brought the South, is remembering his cousin's own speech on the previous occasion and is using it to oppose his present defence of racism. After reading the poem to the young Isaac, Edmonds had made a statement about truth that is central in Faulkner's work: 'Truth is one. It doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart-honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love. . . . Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes truth, as far as we know truth.' These words had had an effect on the young Isaac, for 'He could still hear them, intact in this twilight as in that one seven years ago, no louder still because they did not need to be because they would endure.' The irony is that McCaslin Edmonds, an educated and sen- sitive man who represents the best of the Old South, is incapable of living by his professed values when they run against the South's racial mores. Isaac, in defying him, is attempting to live by his values. This scene, in which he renounces the family property on his twenty- first birthday, announces his coming of age. He has learned from Lion, the dog, and Old Ben, the bear; he has learned from Sam Fathers, the Indian guide; he has learned from Edmonds, General Compson, Major De Spain-voices of the Old South. Now he is ready to move beyond his teachers into his own maturity. This scene becomes even more ironic if it is viewed from the perspective of Delta Autumn, the story which follows it in Go Down Moses, when the mulatto girl who has been deserted by Edmonds's grandson tells the now aging Isaac that honour and code are not enough, that he has learned much in his movement away from Southern orthodoxy, but not enough: '"Old man," she said, "have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?" ' Thus the scene to which Professor Ranald refers is central to an understanding of the story and of the character of Isaac as it develops throughout the book. Edmonds's speech provides a standard by which he is judged and found wanting; ultimately, it provides a standard by which even Isaac is found wanting, for although he does achieve courage, honour, pride, and a sense of justice, even he is found lacking in pity and love. Lawrence Jones 99 BOWEN'S COURT by ELIZABETH BOWEN

A new edition of this remarkable book in which Elizabeth Bowen tells of the tangled, tragic history of Ireland through which for three centuries is woven the chronicle of her own family. In this new edition she has added some final pages which tell the last chapter of the story of Bowen's Court which lay in the rolling limestone country of County Cork between the Blackwater and Ballyhoura Mountains. These are the lands which the Bowens called home. N.Z. retail price 431-

Published by LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. LIMITED London & Auckland

A memorable collection of nearly thirty years' work pre- enter sented more or less chronologic- ally by one of New Zealand's most quoted poets. His style is idiomatic, tough and individual. without An absolute clarity is the mark of his best lyrics, written with deceptive economy. This book contains his well-known sequen- lino eking ces Sings Harry and Arawata Bill together with his earlier books and later poems. by 164 pages 17s 6d

Denis Glover PUBLISHED BY PEGASUS

lOO SIR: Dr John Harre's suggested behavioural research may be needed in the study of the race problem of what he probably prefers to call social situations but he has little to offer for an already predictable situation (South Africa's ban on coloured sportsmen). In place of Dr King's call for equality now and Chief Luthuli's Christian cry for social justice all he can offer is a weak watery gradualism. No one prefers government interference in sport but this is preferable to the meek surrendering of a rational principle for political expedi- ency. There is nothing militant about telling South Africa that for rational reasons we cannot comply with an irrational policy and since the issue is one of the contradicting principles of two nations then the government must tell her. Sport after all is not everything. In this modern world there are other lines of communication open to us except perhaps with such people as Mr Mandela and Chief Luthuli. No doubt the motives of some participants in public pro- tests against apartheid are suspect but this is not true of all partici- pants. In a country strongly conformist, it requires courage to pro- test at all. Secondly those who really care about racial equality find that public protest is a means of drawing attention to and expressing this belief. Incidentally the underdog Bantu is no longer permitted the luxury of public protests since he already knows the behavioural pattern of his master. Dr suggested that in order to keep open the lines of com- munication we must encourage every interchange of persons that is possible. Since the interchange of Maori and Bantu (equal partners in this situation) is not possible, there will be an interchange only of white people who already have much in common. Add to this the fact that Dr V erwoerd does not exactly welcome those with liberal views, it is even possible that the interchange may benefit apartheid if the views of Mr Tom Pearce and Mr Lydiard are any indication. There is little comparison between the white South African and Maori wish to retain racial identity. We do not rule this country with its white majority. Can Dr imagine South African whites accepting a political representation similar to ours? Maori- tanga is the result of our own wishes and its destiny is in our own hands. Compare this with the fact that 'Bantutanga' is mainly a white creation aimed at maintaining racial, economic and political supremacy for whites. Surely it is not necessary to have separate public toilets in order to maintain racial identity. The final answer probably is that we must all stop thinking in racial terms and I think this could best be done by intermarriage. In the meantime we should not be influenced too much by Dr Verwoerd's hallucinations about his descendants having dark skins, epicanthic eye folds and numerous toes and feelers. Atihana Johns 101 HONE TUWHARE No Ordinary Sun The reprint of this outstanding collection of poems is now available 'Hone Tuwhare's love and hate poems ... and his poems of specific time and place ... will not be easily, if ever, for- gotten. New Zealand Listener. 10s. 6d. SAMUEL BUTLER A First Year in Canterbury Settlement Edited by A. C. Brassington and P. B. Maling A fine new edition of an important book long out of print. 'Butler makes an exciting new impact on current readers and, indeed, emerges as a first-rate historian. Christchurch Star. lSs. 6d. From all booksellers BLACKWOOD AND JANET PAUL Publishers AUCKLAND AND HAMILTON t ,Some 1965 Titles Ruth Allan: NELSON, A HIS- Trevor Hatherton, ed: ANT- TORY OF EARLY SETTLE- ARCTICA £5 Ss. Od. MENT 45s. John Houston: MAORI LIFE Graham Billing: FORBUSH IN OLD TARANAKI 45s. AND THE PENGUINS 16s. J. D. McDonald: THE NEW Prof. E. M. Blaiklock: TEN ZEALANDERS IN COLOUR POUNDS AN ACRE 30s. about 14s. 6d. Major-Gen. W. G. Stevens: R. M. Burdon: THE NEW FREYBERG: THE MAN DOMINION 50s. lSs. 6d. Peter Graham: PETER Dr R. F. Watters: LAND AND GRAHAM: MOUNTAIN SOCIETY IN NEW ZEA- GUIDE 42s. LAND 45s . .A.. :a:. & .A.. JR.EE:D Wellington Auckland Sydney

102 New Contributors

Paul Beadle. Born Hungerford, England, 1917, educated Perse School, Cam- bridge Art School, Central School of Arts and Crafts. Came to the Antipodes with the Royal Navy and stayed to work. Head, Newcastle Art School, 1952-7; Principal, South Australian School of Art, 1958-60; Professor of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, since 1961. Has exhibited sculpture, and won medals, in many countries, and his work is represented in galleries in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Michael Gifkins. Born in Wellington in 1945 of English parents. Educated at Westlake Boys' High School and Auckland University, where he is at present completing a B.A./LL.B. degree. !an Jack is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a University Lec- turer in English. He is the author of Augustan Satire, and of English Litera- ture, 1815-1832, in the Oxford History of English Literature. In 1964 he visited New Zealand as De Carle Lecturer in the University of Otago. Kirsty Northcote-Bade. Born in Upper Hutt 1942 and has lived in the district since. Graduated at Victoria University in 1963; now a junior member of the English Department staff; is going to Britain this year on a post-graduate scholarship. Has contributed to student journals and to Comment. Mark Young. Born in Hokitika 1941. At Victoria University was president of the Literary Society and edited Experiment in 1960. Joined the staff of the Japanese Embassy in 1961 and 111.arried the painter and poet Merlene Young. Edited Argot in 1964 and then moved to Auckland. Has published poems in most New Zealand literary journals and in the Sydney Bulletin.

103 $ * * • $ * • Now Two Shops * $ $ * 378 GREAT KING STREET, DUNEDIN *$ : 39 THE SQUARE, PALMERSTON NORTH : * Both carrying good stocks of New Zealand and * other literature (orders f-Or Landfall welcomed).

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