LA:J\(JJFA LL ' 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.