A New Zealand Q.Earter!J'

VOLGME SEVEN

1953

Reprinted with the permission of The Caxton Press

JOHNSON REPRINT CORPORATION JOHNSON REPRINT COMPANY LTD. 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Berkeley Square House, London, W. 1 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund.

First reprinting, 1968, Johnson Reprint Corporation Printed in the United States of America

b? /4-92. THE UllFiARY LANDFALL A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press

CONTENTS Notes 3 A Letter to Frank Sargeson 5 Absolute Error, Pat Wilson 6 The Free and the Strong, Lawrence Robinson 8 Two Poems, Louis Johnson 12 Brothers in Mourning, Gordon Dry/and 13 Two Poems, W. Hart-Smith 18 Presents, Dan Davin 19 The Return, J. R. Hervey 25 Fiction and the Social Pattern, Robert Chapman 26

Commentaries: THE GROUP SHOW, John Summers 59 THREE GUINEAS-LESS TAX, R. T. Robertson 62

Reviews: FIRES IN THE DISTANCE, Frank Gadd 69 JULIEN WARE, Bill Pearson 71 SONGS FOR A SUMMER, R. A. Cop/and 74 N.Z. POETRY YEARBOOK and 13 NEW ZEALAND POETS, Jonathan Bennett 76 T. S. ELIOT AND WALT WHITMAN, D. M. Anderson 78 A SECOND BOOK OF LEO BENSEMANN'S WORK, J. C. Beag/eho/e 80 AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE PACIFIC, H. D. Skinner 81 THE PLACE OF HOOKER IN THE IDSTORY OF THOUGHT, J. G. A. Pocock 84

Correspondence, G. Huntley, Ruth Reid, D'Arcy Cresswell 86

Paintings from the Group Show: Rita Angus, Olivia Spencer Bower, John Drawbridge, Juliet Peter

VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER ONE MARCH 195"3 NOTES

FRANK Sargeson's fiftieth birthday in March of this year is a more than purely personal occasion, as the letter of tribute to him in this issue from a number of younger writers of fiction indicates. No New Zealand writer before, no professional writer, artist as distinct from journalist, has reached fifty in the mature and full exercise of his powers in his own country. No artist: it has been said that a man may be born a poet (or novelist or painter) but has to make himself an artist. And there lies Frank Sargeson's achievement, a rare one at any time, and for us fruitful and precious to a degree it is impossible to ·estimate. There have been and are now talents enough and to spare in.New Zealand; what has been lacking is the will and the ability to use them for a single purpose, a purpose which must always be at once personal and beyond the personal and peculiarly diffi- cult to pursue. Talent alone is not enough, neither is genius alone; qualities of mind and spirit are demanded as well-intellect, understanding, charac- ter: the lives of Cezanne and of Yeats show clearly how much patience and devotion must be lavished on the raw material (of life, of art) before it can become the finished work. Other writers, pursuing their art single-mindedly, found New Zealand intolerable, inimical to the arts and to any freedom of life and spirit- as it was, as it is only now ceasing to be-and left it to live abroad. Frank Sargeson went abroad and returned to live as a writer, and a writer only, in New Zealand; which meant, at that time, to live as a virtual outcast from society. By his courage and his gifts he showed that it was possible to be a writer and contrive to live, somehow, in New Zealand, and all later writers are in his debt. Yet he was not quite alone. He was fortunate enough to find here an editor (and later a publisher) ready to print his work, and a small alert public eager to read it. He did not have to create unaided the standards of taste by which he would be judged; readers of English and American fic- tion (and New Zealanders have never been isolated from books and ideas) could appreciate his work without difficulty; his reputation began at home before he was known abroad. One quality above all in his work, in the view of life which it com- municates, marks him as a New Zealander, and that is its humanity, its concern for and trust in human beings, in what Croce calls 'that mute, inglorious host of good and honest men who are the underlying fabric which holds human society together'. This quality implies a religious attitude to life, which indeed underlies so much of our co-operative social activity as well as our social legislation, and the application of these abroad, as in Corso's work, in New Zealand's work on the United Nations, in Rewi Alley's in China. The attitude has in many cases been cut off from its origins and is ·usually expressed in secular form; New Zealanders are 3 not in any obvious sense a religious-minded people; but observers and critics who can recognize an attitude only when it bears a traditional label are likely to be misled in interpreting the outlook of many New Zealanders and the character of much New Zealand writing. Frank Sarge- son's work has dealt often with people wronged by society or warped by narrow conventions and creeds, those who are most in need of the concern which informs his picture of them. The tendency of his work has been to deepen our understanding and extend our sympathies, and so, we may hope, to strengthen one of the better traits of the (embryo) national character. Further, his work reminds us of the roots of New Zealand writing in English literature, and at the same time of its links with other colonial literatures, American, Australian, South African. All imaginative writers today draw, consciously or not, on a multitude of sources; it is the writer's sense of the tradition in which he is working which enables him to make good use of his sources, to give meaning to the present by relating it to the past out of which it has grown and to other presents which have grown from the same past. To work within a tradition and to add to that tradition, as Frank Sargeson is doing, is to reaffirm the continuity of human experience, the unity of man, and to point to the inexhaustible richness of the life that is open to men in New Zealand as elsewhere.

4 A LETTER TO FRANK SARGESON

DEAR Frank Sargeson, Your fiftieth birthday this month is an appropriate time, we feel, to pay tribute to you as a short story writer and a novelist. Your work has had, in the past twenty years, a liberating influence on the literature of this country. We may not all have read your early stories in Tomorrow. But we do know that it was your voice that said something true and original of life in New Zealand during those years. We remember the excitement aroused by the collections, Conversation with My Uncle and A Man and His Wife, and the stories and short novels that followed in Penguin New Writing and New Directions. It seemed very important that the significance of these New Zealand stories had been recognized by two of the most discriminating publications in England and the United States. You had broken down our isolation in the world ofletters still further. You proved that a New Zealander could publish work true to his own country and of a high degree of artistry, and that exile in the cultural centres of the old world was not essential to this end. One could be provincial, in the best sense, and of the world at the same time. We didn't imagine that what you said, or the way you said it, presented a complete picture of this country or described it in the only way possible. But you took a most important step. You turned over new ground with great care and revealed that our manners and behaviour formed just as good a basis for enduring literature as those of any other country. You have worked with patience and endurance at a task which has never provided as much as a living wage, a task which in our community has provoked suspicion and derision more often than sympathy or understanding. To your public example you have added personal advice and encouragement. Your generosity is well known. Your dedication is an example and an inspiration. As time has passed and we have read I Saw in My Dream, Up Onto the Roof and Down Again and I, For One, we have seen your highly individual vision deepen in its moral significance. It is not often that a writer can be said to have become a symbol in his own lifetime. It is this quality of your achievement that has prompted us to remember the present occasion. David Ballantyne Roderick Finlayson 0. E. Middleton John Reece Cole Janet Frame Bill Pearson lames Courage A. P. Gaskell He/en Shaw Dan Davin G. R. Gilbert Greville Texidor Erik de Mauny Bruce Mason Phillip Wilson Maurice Duggan 5 PAT WILSON ABSOLUTE ERROR

ABsoLUTE Error went down the street. His brow was sunny, his tie was neat, Yes, and his smile was sweet.

But there was one thing spoilt him all, Roused him up raw and rude as gall, Wayward and wild as a ball.

'I'll find it yet, this thing that eludes me,' · He was saying, 'whatever it is that deludes me And continually be-rudes me!

'I'll search, though it takes a thousand years, Though the sun goes black and the moon's in tears Sourer than prickly pears . . .

'Ugh!' and he shuddered there at the thought But still, like a ship whose keel is caught, Laboured to starboard and port.

Into the corners and into the nooks, Hither and thither his lightning looks Flung round like grapple-hooks.

His brow was sunny, his tie was neat, Yes, and his smile was sweet.

All through the day (I followed behind) He grappled everything he could find Into his roomy mind.

He grappled things in and he combed them through- Faces, places, and what-have-you- But none of them would do.

The thing that caused him all this ill He never found. Yet with obstinate will His strong legs carried him still, Going along at a steady clop. He took his meals at any old shop, Impatient at having to stop, 6 And at last he came to a place I knew- A little Park, where people go When they've nothing better to do.

He thought, 'Could this place hold some clue?' And paused at the gate and squinted through. He went in, and I went in too.

His brow was sunny, his tie was neat, Yes, and his smile was sweet.

What was he looking for in this Park? There children play, and grown-ups talk, And lovers lie till dark

While the old Park-keeper keeps their ease. But Absolute Error was none of these: This made him shiver and freeze (

He was not man, nor child at play, Nor lover in love in parks all day, Nor Keeper 'keeping' away,

But he saw their faults and these made his own Bounce up as wild as a It would carry you up to the moon!

As though he were up in the moon, he stood Amongst these people. 'Are they good?' He wondered, 'or are they bad?'

For Absolute Error sought perfect good, And until he found it, there he stood- Dull, and clumsy, and sad.

Well, he turned about the way he came. 'Things,' he said, 'are much the same.' And he caught a bus back home.

He had his supper and climbed into bed. All he'd seen bustled round in his head Until he wished he were dead.

I looked in the window, and there he lay. I stood in the door and he seemed to say, 'To-morrow' may be the day 7 'To find it at last. Then, it will set me At rest, and I'll live peacefully, And be as I ought to be . . . .'

I felt so sorry I made not a sound, But before I went I looked once round- Very softly my watch I wound-

Absolute Error was nearly asleep. His toes were curled, his thoughts were deep, Yes, and his clothes in a heap.

'I'll go on, though it's a thousand years,' He is dreaming, 'though the moon's in tears And the sun. . .. ' and at last, he snores.

LAWRENCE ROBINSON THE FREE AND THE STRONG

THE two seamen came ot.1 between the big iron of the wharf and began to walk up the main street of the town. One of them, a short, squarely built young man with fair hair, had the beginning of a beard on his face. He wore old dark blue trousers, wide at the bottoms, and a dark, pin-stripe coat. The taller one wore black trousers and a polo- sweater with broad green and grey stripes across it. There was a peaked hat on his head and he held his jacket slung over one shoulder. The two of them walked up the street together, not looking at any particular part of it. Overhead the sky was full of grey movement, and now, as they went into the pub, fine rain began drifting down again. Inside the bar, gas heaters glowed ruddily, the warmth from them spreading up about the drinkers and filling the place with the mustiness of drying overcoats. The barman, confined in his oblong island of glass- ware, was moving unhurriedly back and forth wiping the bar-top and refilling the foam-streaked handles. He wore a black apron made out of some shiny cloth and the sleeves of his plain grey shirt were rolled tightly up his arms, well above the elbows. Past middle-age, he had a sharp, narrow face with near colourless lips. Somewhere, high up among the bottles, a radio was playing softly, and occasionally the barman whistled in tune with it. Some men with flushed faces and dressed neatly in blue suits stood at the far side of the bar, talking, some of them looking at pink race-guides. They were all confident and merry, having been in the pub for some time. 8 As the street-door opened and the two seamen walked in, the barman and several of the customers glanced up, and then got on with whatever they were talking about. The barman moved forward, looking at the Norwegian. 'Yes gents. What's it to be?' The Australian with his jacket over his shoulder, moved his head slightly towards his companion. 'He don't know any English, Mac. We'll have two beers.' The barman reached down and filled two handles. He put them on the bar, glancing sideways at the Norwegian, wondering whether his mate went everywhere with him in order to interpret. He fetched the Aus- tralian's change. 'Which one are you off?' The Australian told him the name of the ship and the barman nodded. 'Must be quite a handicap for your cobber, not knowing any English.' 'Oh, he manages,' the Australian said. The Norwegian glanced enquiringly from one to the other. Casually, he tapped one of the handles, and made a motion towards the barman, though making no attempt to speak in his own tongue. He put the price of a drink on the bar-top. 'Well, go on,' the Australian said, 'have a drink.' The barman grinned. 'Don't mind,' he said. When he had drawn a small glass of beer for himself, the three of them drank together. The barman glanced back over his shoulder at the noisy crowd in blue suits. He then quietly filled the handles belonging to the seamen and turned his back on the money. He took a newspaper from somewhere under the bar and began looking over the racing notes. A cold tongue of air leaped in suddenly as someone came in by the street-door. A thickset, middle-aged man came up to the bar and his glance took in the laughing crowd on the far side and took in the two seamen drinking quietly. A couple of paces away from them, the new- comer ordered his beer. The Australian and the Norwegian were finishing their drinks. 'Perhaps the boys would like to have a drink with me,' the man said. He slid a shilling along the bar and edged himself down after it. The bar- man looked hard at the fellow, but said nothing, and fetched the beer. 'Thanks,' the Australian said. 'Not at all,' said the thickset man, 'Cheerio!' 'Good luck for both of us,' the Australian said, and they drank. Then: 'Your friend has some affliction?' 'No. No, he ain't got anything like that. He just don't know English.' The man was pleasantly interested. He smiled at the Norwegian, who nodded. Someone across the bar shouted 'Quiet!' and the barman turned the radio up so that they could all hear the race. The announcer's voice came sharply into the bar, rattling off the names of the horses as the race progressed. 'Desert Night,' a small, wrinkled man said suddenly. 'Dollar Princess.' 9 'Quiet! Listen, will y' !' The radio voice began to get quicker and higher and a man on the other side of the bar slapped his fist on his palm and kept saying 'Come on you blasted dray-horse ... Come on!' And then the radio voice reached an unintelligible climax, and the roar died away slowly; the voices in the bar came up again. They waited again for prices and then the barman turned the radio down. He took a notebook down off a shelf and made a pencil mark inside it. 'You were saying that your friend can't speak English,' the thickset man said. 'Yeah. He's from Norway. Everybody there is supposed to learn English, but he don't know any.' 'Well, now,' the man said. 'Well well .... ' He would have paid for the beers again, but the Norwegian's money was already on the bar. 'Fine people, the Scandinavians,' said the thickset man. 'Very fine races.' 'Uh-huh,' the Australian said. He was looking hard at the man. 'You ain't a colonial?' 'By adoption, my friend. What a grand little country this is.' 'Uh-huh.' 'You are both sailors?' the other asked. 'Seamen? Yeah.' 'Ah, yes. All the lads come into town, you know. I have a great many friends among the lads.' The Norwegian was listening with so much attention, that it seemed that he must actually be following the conversation. The stranger talked a lot. He had a smooth, liquid voice. A soft, rounded hand rested on the bar. Just then, the barman leaned over, offering a book of raffie-tickets. The seamen bought two each. The first prize was a 10 HP automobile. 'Hope your luck's good,' said the barman. 'If you're not in,' the Australian said, 'you can't win.' Idly he drew a diamond with his finger on the damp bar. The thickset man leaned towards them. 'Look boys; doing anything special? I know a quieter spot up town; you could get yourself a little game of crown if you want. What do you say we go?' 'No. Thanks all the same. We got to be aboard again soon.' 'Ah, now then, come along,' he insisted, 'you have everything to gain.' 'How's that?' 'The drinks will all be on me.' 'We'd pay our way,' the Australian said, 'but it's good enough in here for us.' 'Nonsense!' the stranger said, 'you boys should find some fun once in a while. Come on and meet my friends.' 'No, thanks. It doesn't matter. It's good here.' The man laughed. 10 'Imagine.· Months at sea and when you get shore-leave you only walk a couple of hundred yards!' The Australian just glanced at him, then away, slowly drawing another diamond on the bar-top. 'We got to go aboard shortly.' The thickset man smiled. 'What sort of company do you work for!' he said, shaking his head in mock bewilderment. 'We do O.K.' 'But refusing hospitality! Come, come now, really .... ' 'I told you,' said the Australian. 'We only got an hour off.' 'An hour! They wouldn't miss you for an extra hour. What can they do? What can they say? You boys take life too seriously.' 'Can't be done. Sorry, but it can't be done.' The barman was watching silently, wishing he could catch the Aus- tralian's glance, but the seaman was looking at the smiling man. 'Now, now, I'm certain that our young Norwegian friend would like to come.' He extended one soft, pudgy hand towards the Norwegian as he spoke. The Norwegian studied the face of the thickset man, his glance moving slowly down the extended arm to the fat hand near his elbow. Then with a sharp movement, the seaman seized the wrist and shoved hard and quick and sent the man staggering back along the length of the bar. The man's arm knocked his own glass tumbling; it struck a bracket on the brass footrail and chipped, the beer splashing white on the floor and across the seaman's shoes. The stranger recovered his balance, his mouth hanging slack and his pale eyes big with surprise and fear. The men at the opposite side of the bar fell watchfully, uncomfortably silent. The small, wrinkled man who had spoken during the horse-race became quite pale. He went out by the street door without finishing his beer. Nobody else moved. The face of the thickset man was like a wax mould and he swallowed once or twice quickly, his half-raised, limp hands shaking slightly. He began backing away with an odd, shuffiing move- ment; he put his fingers out until he could feel the door and turned and bolted out into the wet street. The Norwegian waited a moment, then straightened, relaxing. He finished his beer. Conversation started again, though much more subdued now than it had been before. There were many glances towards the seamen. The Australian was laughing and looking at the barman. 'You know, he don't know English, but he understands most of what counts, eh?' 'I'll say he does,' the barman said. The Norwegian had picked up the chipped glass from the floor and placed a ten-shilling note beside it on the bar. The barman grinned, shaking his head and shoving the money back. The seaman pushed it firmly across the bar. 'Take it,' the Australian said. 'Go on, take it.' 'Tell him it doesn't matter,' said the barman. 'Sorry, sport,' the Australian said. 'I don't know Norwegian.' 11 Shrugging, the barman took the note and turned to the cash register. He gave nine shillings change. The Norwegian put it in his pocket without looking at it. Both of them left the bar then, the Australian casually saluting the barman who was staring after them; when they had gone he was still looking at the thick glass winking as the street door swung freely back and forth. Outside, the two seamen were going down the cold street. The Aus- tralian had put his coat on. They walked back down the street in the misty rain towards the iron gates that opened onto the wharf.

LOUIS JOHNSON TWO POEMS

WOMAN THE desert of blighted years grinds in her blood its sand: time's drooping flesh hangs heavy, but yet her hands seek out the comfort and drug of useless tasks to attend. Where will she find the reward she said was waiting at the end? In the love of her children? They have departed-driven crazy into the world to escape from her prison of heaven; where God, the neurasthenic, sits sipping his cooling tea. They have come through the scorching wastes and not known ecstasy. And wear in their worst and awakening dreams the image of her bloodless, work-wearing face that a surge of courage endeavours to love: but repulse in the heart refuses to clip fealty's kiss to honour the bladdered stockings, or the sour, prickly lip. Do not remind them that gardens grew where the sands encroached. Gardens of leisure, lush as oases: shame has reproached them for not giving heed to her endless whine about duty that bullied love out of house and home and abolished beauty. He who had courted disaster in wooing the goddess, turned out at the door from the sweat-caked slattern and burned out his lights in the boozer. On his last, despairing morning, recalling Eden, he screamed that the rats were in and the walls were burning. She weeps scummy tears in the kitchen to transfixed tenants, wheezing her blessings-counts cash and kind-and recounts the names of the dispersed children to whom she will 'leave it all', and wonders, with numb self-pity, why none of them come to her call. 12 RENUNCIATION I HAVE sung you enough, you black ones, and would laugh for a while, be gay though I cannot walk again in the suns of the younger laughter; have the wind play nostalgic tunes in the adolescent hair. I am not very glad to be here, but glad to have come from there.

Love is decidedly not worth talking about, faith fails from anaemia. Any word is a walk through deceptive passages where confusions shout. To quest for a cause is to indulge mere talk and the causes fester and break and bleed each year. I am not very glad to be here, but glad to have come from there.

Which leaves me myself, and at last I have something to laugh at, enjoy the sensual ripple, the ripe ridiculous blast reflecting too well the world that the broken hopes of a boy built better empires-found his reward-a tear. I am not very glad to be here, but glad to be gone from there.

GORDON DRYLAND BROTHERS IN MOURNING

A DIALOGUE Two young men, both dressed in mourning. From the next room can be heard the soft sound of people being comforting to each other. All have just returned from a funeral. WILLIAM: You're quiet. How long does it take to get you back Into a state of mind where you can speak? Speak, Arthur, speak. Say something, even if it is crude, and damns that hypocrisy to hell. Silence. William glances back into the room off-stage, then continues: Our aunt is enjoying this. At funerals and weddings she excels, Becomes the ministering angel and the fount of wisdom. Whether in black or some soft pastel colour Such as becomes a matron at the ghoulish feast 13 Of rice and white flowers, She is a knowledgeable woman By dint of three husbands and a score of deaths. ARTHUR: Be quiet! What are you talking of her? She has been kind. I think she loved our mother. She was her younger sister. WILLIAM: And for precisely that reason loved our mother. ARTHUR: What? WILLIAM: Loved our mother. Graciously and kindly loved our mother. The love mixed in with gratitude and compassionate contempt Felt by the slightly younger, healthy and content For the sick, the lonely and the plain, Like our mother. ARTHUR: William, you're indecent. I won't listen. WILLIAM: No, Arthur, not yet. I have a duty to perform. ARTHUR: What duty? WILLIAM: A duty to myself. A duty to William. ARTHUR: What duty? WILLIAM: Now you frighten me away from it. I don't feel I should explain. It will come out if you've the wit to see it. ARTHUR: You're talking crazy. What's made you like this? WILLIAM: Why Arthur, did you love her so much My irreverence hurts you? ARTHUR: I'm sorry she's dead. I can't believe she's dead. WILLIAM: But then for you she was dead·a long time Before she died. Wasn't that so? ARTHUR: I didn't do that. WILLIAM: When you came in late and tiptoed into the room to say goodnight, When you woke her from what little sleep she got To tell her that you were her loving son And cared and showed concern by standing in the dark; When you came straight from life and laughter Into the stinking bedroom where she lay, To wish her goodnight and pleasant cancerous dreams, You sent wave after wave of noble love and pity Surging through the house. It lulled you to righteous sleep and drove me Into a frenzy of anger and sometimes, Arthur, hate! 14 ARTHUR: You make me ashamed. I tried to do more, I asked you often What I should do to help. You always were her favourite son, It seemed natural you should love her more And nurse her while she died. I felt inadequate, unwanted, and indeed I was, Unwanted. It seemed that all I needed show Was concern, not grief that she died while we watched. Grief was not necessary, she never asked it of me. I never knew her well enough to miss her while she died. Yet I think that I shall miss her now, Because I'm sorry. WILLIAM: All this is nonsense now, you know, We shout to each other across chasms months wide. We have even insufficient contempt for each other To make us companions in spite. I am-indifferent. I have passed understanding you Long ago. I no longer care. ARTHUR: This is not new, you never have. When I was five I felt my inferiority rise To confront me and make me clumsy with embarrassment. You were my mother's favourite son, Beside whose shining love my own starved instjncts Died like weeds, Shut out by the healthy achievement of your pride In that she loved you and not me. WILLIAM: Yes, she loved me. Had she not, I should be another person. To be known only as one who was good to his mother Is to be alone beyond trivial talk, And to feel the laughter of jackals Behind one's back. ARTHUR: I see now my sense of inferiority is matched by yours. Yet I grew out of mine. I can see its corpse lying across the lonely years When you surpassed me and tangled yourself in this. Mother's death has turned us out I see. We are now irreconcilable. If I looked at your face this minute I should see an expression for the first time, Too late for your acknowledgement to be needed. WILLIAM: Arthur, we are now come this far: We are no less brothers now than yesterday, When she died. But now our indifferent hearts have spoken 15 Only indifferently. If we go on and talk I warn you My tongue will tire of indifference And long for a greater activity Than the bored words of indifference allow. The very word 'indifference' is deadly. I have forced it into my every conscious thought. Now my brain seethes with words I should love to say. If we stop now we might even shake hands, But if we go on.... Let's go on, Arthur, let's go on! ARTHUR: I see now you are younger than I, Or mad! WILLIAM: Once I was older-such a pitiful bit Older than you. Just enough to let me fall into a trap Only the very young fall into. I felt pride very early, When I was bigger and stronger and handsomer than you; When she cared for me more, and showed it, Even to you. And she led me into despising you, She imprisoned me in a cage of responsibilities You pined for. Poor Arthur-no one is satisfied. You should have been happy in a minor agony So short-lived. I'd give you the juvenile arrogance of years For one of your women and one of your long soft drunks That kept you away nights. Mother never knew while she railed against you At the breakfast table; While she denounced your immoral living And spoke her profound contempt- She never knew how I writhed in envy! ARTHUR: Don't let's go on-it's deeper than I thought, And hurts more. WILLIAM: Too late to stop, Arthur my brother. We must exchange experiences. You can tell me erotic and sensuous tales Of long hot nights, For which I shall horrify you with my chilly narratives Of dark cold nights and loneliness. You'll love it, Arthur; It will acknowledge your virility And cure your complex of inferiority. I shall love it too, But for a different and less healthy reason! 16 ARTHUR: William, we-we should go back. Into the other room-with people. WILLIAM: Why, Arthur, afraid? ARTHUR: Yes, afraid. Of what you might want to tell me in a moment. WILLIAM: We'll go in just a moment. There's comfort in other people, don't you think? I hear our masculine cousin explaining away The qualms of conscience a death brings By telling the story of the suffering now passed. 'We must be grateful and not grieve' he said. Grateful? He would consider monstrous The enormous gratitude I feel. And grief? Any grief I ever felt Consumed itself, being for me And for what my long nights have cost me. ARTHUR: I thought you loved her! WILLIAM: Loved her? That I never did! I hated her so long ago I can't remember how it began. ARTHUR: And all your care-all these months, All the affection you displayed? WILLIAM: She was dying, Arthur. Every day she died a little bit more. Every time I emptied her pan I thought 'One time less!' Every time I made her bed and wiped her skinny arse I thought-'ONE TIME LESS!' ARTHUR: William, is this true? (a long pause) Then I loved her more? William, I loved her more! I forgave her-I escaped. You will never forgive-it is too late. Your gaoler has died but the keys are lost. And William-you are still in prison! WILLIAM: Don't crow-we are all in prison. Wait till the burden of your conscience Settles. ARTHUR: No. Not on me-I am free. You have released the last bond. William-you had only to put out your hand Once-once only- One small gesture would have been enough. You could have smiled at me William, Once, without malice; Or, William, cried. But you never did-I waited, I tried, but I was shut out. 17 William-William- See what you did for me? See what I escaped-see how you helped me? I was shut out ofprison!

W. HART-SMITH TWO POEMS

BURNING OFF DoN'T heed them. Those fires are tame burning over the hill. The tethered dogs lie with chain slack, sleeping. The smoke is invisible, it is something in the air makes all day's colours sombre, a fragrance, subtle, nameless. And you may have noticed the early stars are not of the purest water and do not twinkle. The grass, the grass is dry, the roof-metal shines like steel under a paring of moon. Like a procession of torchbearers going on some pilgrimage, the lines of flame on the hilltop. Leave the door open. Come inside. The night grows cold. Light the lamp.

MY BROTHER WILLIAM MY brother William with a two-horse team turned up this sour soil one morning. Man! there was half the inhabitants of Sodtown following. Like a flock of gulls, they were, after the plough, with the men laughing, and boys, and girls in long white dresses.

My brother William is dead now. His son ploughs elsewhere with a fine new tractor, bright scarlet red, it is. But the gulls seem less white now than once they were. Maybe it's because there are no girls now in their long white dresses, and black stockings. 18 My brother William said this field was the last place south the Maori tried to grow his kumara. Maybe it was some of that Irish laughter that was wanting, and girls in long white dresses, not the solemn face of a chanting tohunga.

My brother William with a bit of good Irish swearing once ploughed up this fairground, for that's what it is now, and a park; and the gulls coming after the litter remind me of the day when heathen steel first bit so cruel into sacred ground.

My brother William turned a crop strange indeed-some big rough stones that were gods guarding the cultivation, and knives and things, and adzes, all of stone; and most exciting of all, calling up the gayest shout from the furrows, some pieces of polished greenstone. Oh, man! a fine rich harvest we had that day of someone else's sowing.

DAN DAVIN PRESENTS

THE two boys were reading at the kitchen table. Mrs Connolly had set a place at the range end of it an hour before. Now there was nothing for her to do but wait and worry. From time to time she leaned her head to one side, though her hands kept shuttling the knitting-needles, and she listened. When no sound answered she would glance over at the boys and look down at the half-finished sock again, not sighing. They knew she had looked at them and knew why she hadn't sighed. When the heavy step and the clicking of the bicycle chain came round the corner of the house they all heard it at the same time. 'There he is at last,' she said. 'So he'll be able to take you into town after all. Now out of here with you and let him have his meal in peace.' Now that she wasn't worried any more her voice was sharp. They were afraid she was trying to get them out of the way to give her a chance 19 to go for him. If he was in a bad mood that would make him worse. If he was in a good mood it might put him off. 'You wouldn't like us to give you a hand washing up the dishes ?' Mick said. 'I know you and your tricks, Mr Long-ears. Run on into the sitting- room now, there's good boys. Your father and I want to have a talk.' But they did not quite close the door. 'What on earth's been keeping you, man?' they heard her say. 'You know you promised those kids you'd take them in to see the Christmas shops tonight and they've set their hearts on it. Where on earth have you been? Is anything wrong?' 'Wrong, Mary? It's the terror you are for worrying. Of course there's nothing wrong. Why should there be anything wrong?' That was like him, asking one question to answer another. And the voice sounded too cheerful. 'He's had a few in, all right,' Mick whispered. 'Shut up, Mick,' Ned said. There was talking again in the kitchen. 'Well, I only hope you haven't gone and spent that few bob in Joe Shields's pub.' She was poking the range fire to bring the kettle back to the boil and make fresh tea. You could tell from the noise what she thought. 'It's little enough the poor kids get at the best of times,' she went on. 'And you know how much money there's left in the house. Yet you're not content with filling them up with all sorts of talk about Christmas presents. No, you must go and spend most of what money there is down there in the town, buying drinks for strangers, I'll be bound, and forget- ting all about your own family. It doesn't look as if they'll get much of a Christmas.' 'Now never you fret, Mary. I'll take them all right. We'll manage, don't you worry. It's not my fault the damn strike is on and you wouldn't be having me a blackleg, would you, Christmas or no Christmas?' 'It's not a question of that. You know I'd never ask you to go against the union. But I would ask you to do without a few beers for the sake of the kids.' This was a facer. They were afraid he'd get wild. If he did they could say goodbye to Christmas Eve. 'That'd be asking more than you think sometimes, Mary,' he said, quite gently. 'When things are like this the days drag on a man. He thinks of what's best for his rnissus and his kids and the next thing he knows he's doing what's worst for them. It's the way things are.' They heard her sniff in the silence. They knew by the sound of it she would be wiping her eyes now on her flour-bag apron. His chair scraped and they heard him get up. He would be putting his arms round her. 'Smooging won't get you out of it,' she said. But her voice was different from the words. 'The poor kids,' she said, 'what do they know about strikes? All they know is that it's Christmas.' 20 They walked along towards the tram stop, one on each side of him. Mick had the sixpence for the tickets in his hand and it was sweating. Part of him was still back in the kitchen. The sixpence had come out of his mother's black purse, not his father's pocket. Did that mean any- thing? And the strike was in his mind, too. Till today it had been quite exciting, something to tell the other kids. Having the old man at home was better still. When he wasn't digging the garden he'd tell them stories about when he was a boy in Galway or show them how to make cradles to catch birds. Everything he made always worked and the very first time they tried it they caught a blackbird and two ring-eyes. And every day he thought of something new that they might never have known about if he hadn't been on strike. It was different today, though. He'd gone away straight after dinner and as the afternoon went on the fun just went out of things and they could tell from their mother's crotchetiness that she didn't like it and something was the matter. The way she kept looking at the clock at tea-time put it into their heads what she was worrying about and so they began to worry as well. The strike seemed to become quite a different kind of thing, not like a holiday at all. Still, here they were walking along Centre Street with him and the tram waiting at the top of it to take them into town and see the sights. And he didn't seem to be worrying, not a bit of it. 'Got that sixpence, Mick ?' he said when they stopped by the door of the tram. Ned had already climbed up the step and jumped in. 'You bet I have, Dad.' And he almost blurted out that he and Ned had two more sixpences, one each that they'd saved up. But that was still a secret. 'Good for you, then.' And he took Mick's arm with one hand and hoisted him right past the step into the tram. He was very strong. They got out at the main stop in front of Post Office Square. There were lines of trams there, all lit up inside, empty ones going off to get more people and full ones coming all the time. There were lights every- where in the streets and shops, Chinese lanterns and strips of coloured paper. What with the lights and the moon you could make people out right across the street as clear as day, even though people said that Dee Street and Tay Street were the widest streets in New Zealand. 'Come on,' their father said, and they crossed to the Majestic side, opposite the Post Office. Behind them sand crackers and bombs were going off in the square and you could hear kids squealing with laughter. 'Can we go and see, Dad?' said Ned. 'Not just yet, Ned. I want to go round to Esk Street for a minute and see a man.' The two boys looked at each other. The Shamrock was in Esk Street. Of course, Invercargill was a dry town now. Still, even they knew you were supposed to be able to get sly grog at the Shamrock. Once he was in there was no telling when he'd come out. Christmas Eve didn't look much just then. 21 But he put a hand on the shoulders of each of them and steered them through the crowds and Mick felt how kind he was and how mean it was to be so suspicious. 'Now just wait on this side for a bit and have a look at the shop- windows. I'll be out again in two shakes of a dead lamb's tail.' They watched him cross over and go in by the back way. Ginger Timms went by with his father and mother. He was blowing at a long paper snake thing that went in and out and made a crackly noise. They turned to the window behind them and he didn't see them. The shop was a Chinese laundryman's and the window was full of pink strings of crackers and roman candles. The centre piece was a big basket-bomb. 'I wish we could spend our sixpences on that,' Ned said. 'I'd like to buy the biggest basket-bomb there is and blow up Ginger Timms.' 'But he's. not a bad joker,' Mick said. 'I'd blow him up all the same.' Then they saw Ginger coming back. They crossed the road to the other footpath. It was darker because there was only the Shamrock and next to it the Rialto with its window full of second-hand furniture which nobody thought worth lighting up tonight.

'There he is,' Ned said. He was standing just outside the Shamrock gateway with his back to the footpath. They recognized him by the way he stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders squared back. He was talking to someone just inside. As they got closer they recognized the voice. It was Joe Shields. They'd often seen their father talking to him after eleven o'clock Mass on Sundays. 'I'm sorry, Ned,' Joe was saying, 'but that's the best I can do. You know I'm only too anxious to lend a hand if only for old times' sake. But all the boys are in the same boat and this is the time of the year when we all feel it. I'll tell you what, though. If you get a chance later on, come back and we'll have something together.' 'That's all right, Joe,' their father said. 'I know you would if you could. Thanks all the same.' The two boys were at the gate by now. Mick felt as if he'd dearly like to be somewhere else. Neither his father nor Joe Shields sounded quite natural, as if they wanted to get away from each other and at the same time didn't want to or didn't know how to. Then Joe noticed them. 'So these are the two young sprigs, eh, Ned. Fine-looking kids too, aren't you, eh? But you'll have to be pretty good if you want to be as good as your father, won't they, Ned ?' He patted their heads. Then he stuck his hand in his hip pocket. 'Here,' he said, 'here's something for you.' He grabbed Ned's hand and put something in it, then Mick's. Mick could tell by the feel it was sixpence. He would look later and make sure. 'Thank you very much, Mr Shields,' they said. 22 'Well, good night, Joe,' their father said. 'And many thanks. A Merry Christmas, too.' His voice sounded much warmer now.

After they had spent Joe's sixpences on some sand crackers and a bomb each and had had some fun throwing the crackers at people's feet in Post Office Square they all sat down on a wooden seat next to the City Library. They were going to keep the bombs to let off next day after the Christmas dinner. 'Well now,' their father said, when he got back from the Gentlemen's underground, 'what would you like to do next? Would you like to come and help me buy your Christmas presents?' They looked up at him with delight. Ever since the Shamrock they'd been convinced there weren't going to be. any presents and had been making the best of the lights and the crowds and the sand crackers. And that was why they'd hung on to their basket bombs, so as to have some- thing for tomorrow. Neither of them could say a word now. 'Come on,' he said, 'tell me what you want and we'll see what we can do. You first, Ned. What do you want for Christmas? Don't ask for a bike though. That'll have to wait for your lucky day.' That made Ned laugh. The cheapest bike you could get was six pounds sixteen and six with guarantee. While Ned was laughing Mick was knitting up his forehead. Would there be enough money for what he wanted? Better wait till Ned had said his and then if it wasn't too much and his father was still smiling he would be able to tell whether he should ask for something nice and cheap. Ned knew what he wanted. 'I'd like one of those fountain pens Pat Rodgers has. They're only four and six at Playfair's.' 'Only four and six?' his father said. 'And what about you, Mickt Mick couldn't tell from the way he said it whether four and six was an enormous lot or whether it wasn't. Perhaps he just ought to ask for a pencil. But perhaps his father had the money after all and half-a-crown would only be a fleabite. 'I'd like a printing-set,' he said. 'They only cost two and six.' And he looked down so as not to see how his father would feel if he didn't have enough money. 'Well,' said his father, 'We'll see what we can do.'

All the way to Playfair's their father seemed to be thinking of some- thing else. Once he stopped and talked with a man they didn't know and it looked as if he were asking the man for something. The man shrugged and threw his hands out sideways and said: 'Search me, Ned.' Their father shook his head in the queer, comical sort of way he had sometimes. 'Well, a Merry Christmas, anyway, Jimmy,' they heard him saying. He came back and joined them and they went on. People were pouring in and out of Playfair's with their arms full of parcels. Everyone seemed to have a kind of dazed grin on his face and to be in a hurry to squash through one way or the other. But when their 23 father went into a crowd there was always room somehow and it was easy if you kept close up behind him to follow along in the tunnel he made. 'Now where are those pens of yours, Ned ?'he said when they got inside. 'Over there at the stationery counter.' There were some real beauties, 'Swans' and 'Onoto the Pen' and 'Watermans' and kinds you'd never heard of with gold and silver all over them and places to get your name engraved. The four and sixpenny ones were in a big tray right at the front. Their father picked up a beautiful gold one as big as a barrel and showed it to the girl behind the counter. 'Is this a four and sixpenny one?' he said, smiling at her. The girl was very smart in a. tight black dress. She was wearing a real pearl necklace and she smelt of nice scent. But she must have been tired with so many people pestering her and not able to make up their minds what they wanted because she just looked at the pen and not at him and she said 'No,' a bit huffily. 'The tray at the front,' she added. He smiled more than ever and took one from the tray. 'I thought so,' he said. She looked at him then and began to smile back as she wrapped it up in a bit of fancy paper. 'Which one is it for?' she asked, quite nicely. 'The big one.' 'So he's the scholar?' 'Oh, they're both scholars,' he said. 'Not like their father.' 'Better to be nice than clever;' she said with a special smile. He held out a half-crown and a two-shilling piece and wished her a good Christmas. Mick was wonderfully relieved. His father really had had the money and he'd been wrong again. Now it would be all right with the printing set. And they'd get their mother a present, too, and it would be a real Christmas. The printing sets were on a shelf in the middle of the shop. There were all sorts of other things as well and people were pushing and shoving everywhere and asking how much this was and how much that was and there weren't enough girls to look after everybody and kids were blowing toy bugles and wanting to practise with wheelbarrows and tricycles and their mothers were trying to stop them. There was a terrible hullabaloo going on. Mick opened the box and showed his father how you fixed the rubber letters into the stamp and how you could print your name and everything. 'We'll make a printer out of you yet,' his father said, 'and you can print the South/and Times. Now close it up and we'll try and get out of this madhouse.' They started to move over to the counter. 'I'll tell you what, Ned,' their father said, 'you and Mick get out of the crush and wait for me outside. I won't be two ticks.' The two boys made for the door. But on the way they stopped to buy their mother the brooch they'd planned to get with their shilling. And 24 while Ned was paying Mick looked through a gap in the crowd to the other counter. His father wasn't there. But Mick saw him going towards the other door and at the same time putting the printing set in his pocket. They found him outside. When they explained what they'd been doing he said: 'That's good kids. And now I think we'd better get the next tram home.'

Their mother seemed even more pleased to see him than them. It was the first time they could remember seeing her kiss him in front of them. 'And what lovely presents,' she said. 'And a present for me, too. You shouldn't have been so extravagant, Ned. I didn't need anything.' 'You should know me better, Mary,' their father said. 'They saved up to buy you that.' Mick went to bed that night with the printing set on the chair beside him. 'I don't care if he did pinch it,' he said to himself finally, 'it was better than if he'd bought it, in a way.'

J. R. HERVEY THE RETURN

HER childhood could not believe in those mountains But growing up under them Her youth learned to kneel to their greatness. Finding, however, a love higher than mountains, She departed into an equable domesticity, Rude, nevertheless, with a dark rush of duties, And caught in cascading trivialities. But love kept a silence in her heart, And snow-bright memories rose Out of a scene distant as juvenility, A tranquillizing retrospect. And these stood guard until time In his more tender guise as deliverer Nudged her into the narrowness of age. Where hungering for a waft of the freedom in which she began And with past loyalties stirring like lilies, She returned to the former wilderness Where she had lost her childhood like a silver trinket, And to the mountains and their old redeeming friendship, Feeling so safe under mountains. 25 ROBERT CHAPMAN FICTION AND THE SOCIAL PATTERN

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF RECENT N.Z. WRITING!

I IT SEEMED to be quite widely held at the Writers' Conference in May of 1951 that criticism of the novel and short story in New Zealand is played out. There were not thought to be enough works to sustain examination more than once in, say, twenty years. We had E. H. McCormick's Letters and Art in New Zealand, published in 1940, and a chapter of seventeen pages in Creative Writing in New Zealand by J. C. Reid on fiction from the Great War to 1946. So on this reasoning the market is saturated, presumably, for the next fifteen years. Yet, quite apart from the need to explore the standpoint of sociological criticism, to which the present writer referred in a note in Landfall on the Writers' Conference, the attitude that any more criticism is uncalled for overlooks the quantity of considerable fiction produced since the works of E. H. McCormick and J. C. Reid. Any list of 'considerable' fiction is bound to be arbitrary; but it is necessary to give some consideration to what has been produced and when in order to see whither New Zealand fiction has travelled. Before E. H. McCormick wrote what is clearly still the outstanding critical conspectus of New Zealand writing Katherine Mansfield had produced all her work and Frank Sargeson his two collections of short stories, Conversation with My Uncle and A Man and His Wife. Thus the two major subjects for criticism yet to be raised here were at least open for discussion. McCormick deals also with four novels of Satchell, four of Jane Mander's, two of C. R. Alien's, four of Robin Hyde's, short stories by Alice Webb and B. E. Baughan, Children of the Poor by John A. Lee, and, last and best of these, John Mulgan's Man Alone which appeared in 1939. The first collection of Roderick Finlayson's short stories, Brown Man's Burden, had also been published, in 1938. Between 1940 and the appearance of J. C. Reid's survey (1946) three novels were brought out together with the same number of collections of short stories2. The four issues of New Zealand New Writing (1943-5) !This article, written in February 1952, is an extended version of an address delivered to the N.Z. University Students' Association Congress in January 1952. 2Between McCormick and Reid: Novels:- Collections of short stories:- Sargeson, That Summer (1943) Gilbert, Free to Laugh and Dance (1943) Sargeson, When the Wind Blows (1945) Finlayson, Sweet Beulah Land (1944) Davin, Cliffs of Fall (1945) Speaking for Ourselves (edit. Sargeson, 1945) 26 introduced among others, as short story writers, D. M. Anderson, David Ballantyne, John Cole, Maurice Duggan, A. P. Gaskell, W. H. Pearson, Helen Shaw and Greville Texidor, and printed Finlayson, Gilbert and Sargeson. Since 1946 there have been ten novels and three collections of short stories 3, as well as twenty issues of Landfall with an average of two short stories or short story length extracts from novels in each issue. Landfall has added or established new writers, including three who appear more than once there, Bruce Mason, P. J. Wilson and 0. E. Middleton, and thirteen who have contributed just once. Also, the ninth issue of Book, in 1947, was a short story number. Thus, possibly it is not too much to say that the bulk of considerable fiction produced here (leaving aside Katherine Mansfield) has been printed since 1946, and undoubtedly has been printed since 1940 when E. H. McCormick produced our most weighty criticism so far. This impression that we have enough extended criticism partly arises from the sheer bulk of recent occasional criticism over the radio, at the back of magazines and ia school journals; an occasional criticism which has room at times for the pregnant remark but which tends to repetition of what can be grasped and stated quickly. But a less obvious part of the explanation for the impression of a surfeit of criticism proper may be that in the search for good writing produced by New Zealanders about New Zealand the poets were the first to strike oil. E. H. McCormick regards Eileen Duggan's poetry as the close of one chapter with Ursula Bethell, J. C. Beaglehole and the Phoenix poets, Fairburn, Mason, Curnow and Glover, as the start of the next. This places the poetic strike at the beginning of the decade which closed with Mulgan's Man Alone (1939) and Sargeson's A Man and His Wife (1940). The relative gusher of prose came later-on the whole, nearly ten years later-the strength of the earlier poetic achievement perhaps acting to obscure the timing of the later development and, in particular, to obscure the fact that criticism came much nearer in time to the beginning of the developments in fiction than to those in poetry. Whether this did obscure the rapid and recent development of prose or not, some investigation of the sources of the phenomenon and of its significant features seems justified. It is fairly patent that we have to thank the depression for the original impetus. McCormick, who missed very little, said 'The "Great Depression" disorganized New Zealand's economy . . . ; it led to political changes more radical than those of the nineties; it effected a reorientation in 3Since Reid: Novels:- Collections of short stories:- Davin, For the Rest of our Lives (1947) Gaskell, The Big Game (1947) Courage, The Fifth Child (1948) Davin, The Gorse Blooms Pale (1947) Ballantyne, The Cunninghams (1948) Cole, It Was So Late (1949) Finlayson, Tidal Creek (1948) Sargeson, I Saw in my Dream (1949) Davin, Roads from Home (1949) de Mauny, The Huntsman in his Career (1949) Courage, Desire without Content (1950) G. Wilson, Brave Company (1951) Park, The Witch's Thorn (1951) 27 outlook of major importance to New Zealand's literature and not without some influence on its art ... it can be said with certainty that a continua- tion of the comfortable pre-depression conditions could not have led to the New Zealand of 1940 with its signs, few but positive, of adult nationhood.'4 The overturn in social conditions broke up the crust of complacency, allowing artists to see into what lay beneath. At the same time the disturbed conditions upset the pattern of normal lives and made some men, who might otherwise have taken a more usual course, into artists or apprentice artists forced to look below that broken crust. This process took time. Phoenix Miscellany:1 of September 1933, which was also the first collection of Allen Curnow's poems, has as first line 'Strange times have taken hold on me', but the 'strange times' were personal, the volume was concerned with the poet's relation to God. By 1939, in Curnow's Not In Narrow Seas, The Wind, which blew the emigrants to New Zealand and 'serves still to remind the patriot that the fight for liberty continues', reflects: The flag rides rattling at the hoist At prison and at madhouse door; I swell'd their sails and what's the end? The poor insane and the insane poor. s The Phoenix of the Auckland students of 1932 duly re-arose as Ronald Holloway's Unicorn Press of Auckland and the Caxton Press of Christ- church. Here, and particularly in the poetry of the second half of the thirties published by Denis Glover at the Caxton, the development pro- ceeded. Prose was largely taken up by direct political statement in the columns of Tomorrow from 1934 onwards. The Unicorn Press brought out the twenty-nine pages of Conversation with My Uncle in 1936 and Roderick Finlayson's Brown Jvfan's Burden in 1938. By 1940 Sargeson, Mulgan and Finlayson, with four appearances between them, stood alongside a variety of significant poetry. But the presses and the pre- cedents were established for the war period when a further major disturbance of the social pattern, coming at a time when the impulse of the depression was subsiding, carried the development on. Political prose, Tomorrow, and those interested in writing by the depres- sion and the sequent Labour Government supported the four 'progressive' book-shops. The book-shops brought forth the Progressive Publishing Society and the Progressive Publishing Society produced New Zealand New Writing, edited by Professor Ian Gordon. Here was an opportunity to publish for those whose routine of existence had been thoroughly disoriented and who saw New Zealand and New Zealanders in the services in the illuminating glare of the war years. The poets had put writing on the map and at considerable personal cost given writing a rough direction and some prestige. Reinforcing and possibly outweighing this was the example of Penguin New Writing which had been coming out since late in 1940. Here was a continuing model of the short story of record, a model slab-of-life form 4E. H. McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, pp.169-70. 5Allen Curnow, Not In Narrow Seas, Christchurch, 1939, poem 9. 28 into which could be put the slab-of-life experiences which, heightened by the vital-seeming quality of wartime, were felt so sharply by those shaken out of their civil rut. Moreover, the New Zealand short story writer Frank Sargeson, who had made the biggest stir and whose short novel That Summer was published in a sequence of three numbers of Penguin New Writing in 1943, used this same form either for presenting an exactly composed incident or for a clothes line of incident like That Summer itself. Those who took the opportunity and were printed first in New Zealand New Writing include, as the list earlier in this article shows, many who were to persevere until, in the second half of the forties, they produced novels, short story collections and provided the basis of Landfall fiction; in brief, wrote the material whose sources have been sought. Many, however, wrote once and wrote no more. Twenty-five made a single appearance in New Zealand New Writing or Speaking For Ourselves or Book Nine for the twelve who have continued on into Landfall or into books of their own. The major reason for this steady execution is obvious enough on reading the short stories. Briefly, it was not found possible to produce works of art without using art. The slab-of-life form was deceptive in its apparent simplicity. It appeared to be plotless and a mere matter of reportage and description. It was easy to miss at first the selection and arrangement of incident and detail which revealed, in those stories which were successful, an attitude to the matter handled. To lack such an attitude was to fail to invest the event or situation re- corded with a significance in relationship to anything outside the event or situation; it was to lack a standpoint to shape art from occurrence. Many were tempted by what seemed a new path in writing open to any who had been roused to walk by stirring events, but of the crowd few persisted until they had learned 'the trick of standing upright' there. The subtitle to one short story in New Zealand New Writing describes itself and many of its neighbours as 'Fragment of an autobiography which is extremely unlikely ever to be written'.6 Unlikely because the writing of even the first short story hinted ever more loudly at difficulties that previously had been unseen and now, for want of the aptitudes and techniques, must be largely ignored. Unlikely also because the finished products revealed their formlessness which arose from their authors' lack of the minimum of a consistent attitude to their experience on which to ring each coin of incident before deciding its place. The greatest want- the novice writers' want of a position in relation to their world which might have conferred a function and consequently some structure on their stories-was the widest spread and the most telling in its effects. Indeed, if the same matter is approached from the opposite end it is noticeable that the survivors had certain common characteristics. They remained loyal, on the whole, to what is very loosely called the realistic school, allied therefore to the major school presented in Penguin New Writing, and inclined, in retrospect and justification rather than in pre- paration, towards the American literary descendants of Dreiser and, 6New Zealand New Writing, No. 1, p.39. 29 remotely, of Mark Twain. To see with J. C. Reid 'the indebtedness of many of the prose contributors [to New Zealand New Writing] to Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, William Saroyan, Sherwood Anderson, Leslie Halward, James Hanley and even Gerald Kersh' 7 is to see alto- gether too much and yet too little: too much influence and too little of other factors bringing about a common technique and approach. One of the main difficulties, for example, which confines the approaches possible to those who write and set their fiction in New Zealand is the absence here of widely recognized psychological stereotypes. The squire, the parson, the cultured aristocrat, the Birmingham businessman, the clerk with white collar and umbrella, the spiv or the Cockney, just have not got established local equivalents. This has many effects. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to use the ordinary lending-library-romance technique of sketching in a few of the outlines of an attractive or villainous stereotype and allowing the reader to do the rest with his emotionally positive stock picture. Those who have had to do with the writing of New Zealand students of any age or have read the women's weeklies will have noticed how overseas stereotypes from English romances or Hollywood are borrowed at any cost to congruity in order to fill what is felt but not recognized as a gap. Stereotypes are not wholly wrong but rather the highest common factor of general observation in a stable pattern. Where the pattern has not been stable for long enough nor been sufficiently stratified and geo- graphically various to provide a variety of stereotypes, the consequence for the serious writer is that he cannot touch in any of his characters lightly or make them begin to live by showing one or two exactly observed departures from the expected norm. Each character must be handwrought; the author cannot take character roughcast from the mould and file to taste. So each author is driven to be his own sociologist, patiently observing the unrecognized majority pattern as well as the minor variations of which there will be all too few. For the New Zealand pattern is of a piece. Place New Zealand society behind the hierarchical time-cut fretwork of English society and its lower middle class would nearly cover all our variety with some allowance for the middle class (our upper few) and the exceptional, the man alone, the unfortunates who have fallen through the New Zealand pattern. Even the vivid colours of destitution in The Witch's Thorn do not hide the grey lower middle class ideas beneath. And if the fiction here sounds like a report it may be that the reader's mind selects out what there is in it of report because that report has not been made elsewhere and is needed. Again, where the fiction seems to derive from the realists of the American Middle West, in particular from Sherwood Anderson's Wines- burg, Ohio, it may be because the American writers were tackling the same kind of problem in very similar territory. The answers.given and the form of the answers would then be likely to look the same in both areas 7J. C. Reid, Creative Writing In New Zealand, Auckland, 1946, p.58. 30 if there had been no literary influence at all. And this also suggests an answer to the problem of why New Zealand writers are so remarkably alike in their technical methods and in their subject matter considering their numbers and considering that, apart from a very real regard for Sargeson's work and his precedents, there is so little contact between writers and hardly any of the basis of a literary school. As well as presenting the problem of exploring the pattern, this type of homogeneous society had no acknowledged place for authors, that is, it had ready no paradoxically-named 'declass6' division of the middle class. Also there is no separate class which is, as a matter of habit, an informed audience. Thus the difficulties imposed by smallness of popula- tion are increased. If the writer without a place was to be like other exceptions here he would drop through the scaffolding of the pattern into the basement of national life. In fact, so homogeneous and hence so insistently demanding was the pattern that in order to see it, in order to write about it, it was necessary to escape outside and often away from it. The first and truest escapees-those who exported themselves overseas- may not, as has often been said, have been escaping an exile here and going to values at their source, but instead have been escaping into an exile, an exile in England. For the new generation who are writing now, the depression or the war shook them outside the pattern and made a temporary place for them on the outside. It was no longer imperative to go to England and stay there, though many were removed and· returned by the war as appropriately as if it had been prescribed. The temporary place on the outside has been retained by working at other jobs and accepting the fact that writing here must be virtually unpaid, be for a small audience, and carry few perquisites of recognition and prestige. But there the writers are on the outside, like men clinging to the net which encloses a balloon, unable to live in the gas-filled interior, but in a fine though precarious position to see where the balloon is going and to tell from the whiffs of escaping gas how things are in the interior. And what do they report of the interior? What do they say of the course of the balloon? What is the attitude of the New Zealand writer to his society? To deal with these questions I do not propose to follow the writers into that technique which I have called elsewhere comment by indirec- tion, a technique indicated, if not imposed, by the nature of the artistic problem in this country. When my review of Sargeson's That Summer was written in 1947 (Landfall3) it seemed to me then, and reviewing and reading other New Zealand fiction has confirmed me in the impression, that the writer here must as a first step achieve the illusion of realism; must detect and present what would be taken for a photograph of reality by an audience which has neither an album nor so much as a snap. But it is, after all, a composed engraving which must pass for a photograph of reality, for the details cannot be included in their temporal proportions. Joyce's Ulysses could hardly hold one day of Bloom's Dublin. In making the necessary excisions a passive comment can then be inserted by leaving 31 out not only what would be fussy for the design but also what is not held to be significant in illustrating the writer's attitude. It is enough of comment, without a statement of the place in our community of illicit sexual information, to snap first Arnold and then Henry, in I Saw in My Dream, with an eye at the bathroom keyhole. The comment, then, is in the inclusions and the omissions. Art and imagination, too, lie not in fresh creation after the imaginative uncover- ing of reality, but lie in the selection from this reality. This is one of the reasons why the technique of presentation chosen is so often the participat- ing 'I' who tells his experience-and incidentally serves as a hero- without benefit of comment or chorus. The writer can select experiences for this 'I' who does not fully understand what affects him and tells us his view from an angle of vision the constriction of which is in itself informative but negatively so. For a New Zealand writer to choose the technique of omniscient narration from a platform outside the action would disperse the emotional force engendered by participation and constriction while letting the writer in for the whole task of drawing the social diagram. To make the participating 'I' the hero in the formal sense also fits the increasingly autobiographical tendency of the modern novel in most countries. This tendency is encouraged by the 'amateur' standing of serious writing here and, increasingly, elsewhere; for the amateur is tied by his job to a certain place and to certain people and will tend to write best about what he knows and about his own life in particular. The technique of the participating 'I' also draws on the homogeneity of ex- perience in New Zealand in solving the problem of drawing in the reader, who will have felt with the 'I', thus allowing identification with the hero to occur when there are otherwise few heroic stereotypes available. The very painstaking construction of character, which involves making a stereotype and then distinguishing a personality out of the stereotype, which is the writer's extra task here, is made to serve the further function of building the hero and the comment. To achieve his story, his hero, and his comment, the author may winnow his experience with intuitive taste like Sargeson, or, like Ballan- tyne, by a direct emotional blast out of a vividly remembered childhood. And it should be noted here that, far from feeling alien in New Zealand, writers of prose have gained much of their force from memories of a childhood identified with the community, which Helen Gardner has emphasized as being vital to creative writing. s The writer in New Zealand meets his childhood with adult rebellion, not with the knife of indiffer- ence. To cut away the past by indifference to it would constitute a real 8Helen Gardner, Mauriac: A Woman of the Pharisees in.The Penguin New Writing 31, p.101. See also 0. Von Nostitz, Georges Bernanos: His Life and Work in The Dublin Review No. 452, Second Quarter, 1951, p.75. 'Thus he [Bernanos] was able to say of his books that all the good things in them came from a very great distance, from "the deep sources of childhood" and that his vocation consisted precisely in striking the notes that he had once heard many years ago.' The same search in a more dissonant, flatter, less sonorous scene is apparent in Sargeson, in Ballantyne and in Bruce Mason, to name a few. 32 photograph Frank McGregor 19! ins x 23! ins

OL!VIA SPENCER BOWER

The Shed at 'Enys' (watercolour) photograph Frank McGregor 16 ins x 22! ins

JOHN DRAWBRIDGE

Woman (lithograph) photograph Frank McGregor 15t ins x ins

RITA ANGUS

Auckland Express (oil) photograph Frank A1cGregor 19l ins x 25 ins

JULJF:T PETER

State Forest (watercolour) alienation for the writer, for whom childhood is the period of fullest union with his community. However the writer goes about it, if he selects the right phenomena for his hero to experience in the action he will touch the nerve ends of life in this society. Were he to add analysis and explanation, to point out how he sees society and explain what cause and effect he illuminates by emphasizing this or that event, he would be writing sociology or histocy or both. But the critic is at liberty and it is his function to give an analysis of cause and effect and thus to tie up the phenomena selected by one or several authors. So the critic provides a background for the stories which he has to examine and makes it possible for the bold relief of the stories to be set against his sketch map of the society. What follows doee not pretend to have been arrived at with the help of the full apparatus of the academic sociologies. The surveys, the tests, the records where they exist, and the money are not available; the fifty or a hundred years of time and the dozens of men have not yet been expended 9. But the artist must work in the territory before the trigs are put up and he knows anyway that the inconstant magnetic variations of socidy will only allow the sociological surveys to come some points nearer the absolute than he.

11 This sketch, then, begins at the point where the outlook of New Zealanders was imported. For the New Zealand pattern, as should be obvious, was not a fresh growth but grew up from the trunk of the British social pattern. The visual analogy is of aY, one of the arms of which is our pattern, the trunk reaching up in time to early and mid-Victorian England. The continual reference to a 'young' country, 'adolescent' culture and the rest by our commentators can become an annoying semantic fallacy diverting them from the facts. For it is important to grasp that the pattern came ready-made from a given tradition and circumstance. It was as old as Great Britain when it arrived. It is also worth emphasizing that it took its central features from the type of immigrant who first came in considerable numbers. Without entering any controversy about the 'ultimate' importance to New Zealand's founding of the Wakefield gentleman-pioneer, it is fairly apparent that the three thousand one hundred men, women and children 'of the labour- ing class' sent by the New Zealand Company to Nelson would do more to determine the beliefs and outlook of their area than the 'eighty owners' 1 o who eventually arrived-however loudly money talked. And so it went on. The key years for the import of the pattern were those between 1861 and 1881. In 1853-after all the Wakefield-style 9Three valuable sociological reports are in, however. H.C.D. Somerset's Littledene, Wellington, 1938; Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole's Some Modern Maoris, Christchurch, 1946; and T. H. Scott's From Emigrant to Native in Landfall 4 and 6. lOW. B. Sutch, The Quest For Security In New Zealand, Penguin, 1942, p.21. 33 colonies were begun-the population was 28,000. In 1861 the European population was 99,000; in 1871, 256,000; in 1881, 490,000 and in 1901 it was 773,00011; which gives a rough ratio at those dates of 1 :4:10:20:31. The sudden and great surge was felt between 1861 and 1881, the depression thereafter tapering down the increase. The population multiplied five times in the sixties and seventies but rose by only a half in the eighties and nineties. Gold was discovered in Otago in 1861 and in Westland in 1865. The Maori Wars of the sixties necessitated soldier settlement in the North Island and food production wherever possible. Then, as the magnet of gold lost power from 1870 on, the V ogel public loans and assisted immigration took up the burden. However they came 'these builders of New Zealand were agricultural labourers, town craftsmen and domestic servants' 12 or, as Mrs Elsie Locke put it in entitling a pam- phlet to show 'Canterbury without Laurels', these archetypical builders were 'The Shepherd and the Scullery-Maid'.I3 The Britain of the working-class immigrants of the sixties and seventies was the Britain of the industrial revolution, in fact, of the nadir of that revolution, of its most cramping, bitter and hardest phases in which the immigrants' childhood was passed. And though the extreme lengths of laissez-faire had been shortened somewhat since the forties the great cities were still rapidly gathering in more lives to strain and begrime. The sudden overturn of expectations established in better circumstances, the narrowing hopes, the misery and disorientation spread evangelicalism in religion and produced Chartism in politics, and of the two the former is much the more important both in the British and the New Zealand social picture. 'Enthusiasm', Methodism, nonconformity, the puritan outlook and Calvinist rigours gave hope and direction in the social storm to the children from the deserted village. Indeed, if it was the middle class which carried this puritan and non- conformist outlook in the revolutions of the seventeenth century, in the revolution of the nineteenth millions of the expanding lower middle class and working class joined them. Halevy, the great historian of British society in the nineteenth century and of its religion, writes: 'the lower middle class which was everywhere nonconformist, pietist and puritan' 14 and 'during the nineteenth century Evangelical religion was the moral cement of English society. It was the influence of the evangelicals which ... placed over the proletariate a select body of workmen enamoured of virtue and capable of self-restraint. Evangelicalism was thus the con- servative force which restored in England the balance momentarily destroyed by the explosion of the revolutionary forces [of 1832 and earlier].' 15 G. D. H. Cole concurs. Of unionist developments he states that 'together with Radical dissenting ministers they [the Anglican Christian 11Population figures from chapter by W.M. Hamilton on 'The Farming Indus- tries' in New Zealand, edit. H. Belshaw, Berkeley, 1947, pp.l37-9. 12W. B. Sutch, op. cit., p.9. 13£. Locke, The Shepherd and the Scullery-Maid, Christchurch, 1950. 14£. Halevy, A History of the English People, Vol. Ill, London, 1927, p.200. 15Jbid, p.l66. 34 Socialists] were responsible for preventing that hostility between the organized working class and organized religion which became universal on the Continent.' 16 The wide spread of evangelicalism and its socially active, if ultimately quietening, effect, can also be seen in the fact that 'The promoters of the Factory Bill of 1833, Oastler, Sadler and Lord Ashley, were all three Evangelicals and all three Tories.' 17 Halevy sums up by saying: 'We shall witness Methodism bring under its influence, first the dissenting sects, then the establishment, finally secular opinion.' 1 s By the sixties and seventies, then, religious enthusiasm had become widespread, fully institutionalized and properly respectable. The preacher in the tin chapel of the slums· had succeeded for the lower classes to Wesley circuit-riding and preaching in the fields. In Scotland the 'Free Church', which had in its origins tended to attract 'Evangelical' 19 elements grew after the secession of 1843 into a denomination able to send with renewed Calvinist enthusiasm a strong if dour message with the crofter and the mill-operative to New Zealand. The Irish Catholics, too, though they would have no part of Methodism, were possessed of a poor man's Church with its priest living amongst and near to the peasantry who voluntarily supplied their priests' entire livelihood. The Irish of O'Connell's day had their revival in a mixed political and religious form and they insisted that no government money or English-organized help for the hierarchy should come between them and their priests.zo The message evangelicalism preached to the poor fitted the situation it answered. It emphasized grace and sin. The Hammonds have pointed out how Wilberforce and his active Anglicans at the end of the eighteenth century began 'a Society for the Reformation of Manners, which aimed at enforcing the observance of Sunday, forbidding any kind of social dissipation, and repressing freedom of speech and of thought wherever they refused to conform to the superstitions of the morose religion that was then in fashion.' 21 Wilberforce and his fellows coerced the English poor (though not the rich), but the poor ended by coercing themselves. The poor built on the foundations of Wesley and Wilberforce and on the advice of Hannah More. Another course-unfortunately available on the face of it only to the less rapidly and far less totally industrialized French-is indicated by the Hammonds when they write: 'The spirit of common gaiety, killed in England by Puritanism and by the destruction of the natural and easy-going relations of the village community, sur- vived in France through all the tribulations of poverty and famine,'22 In the face of the industrial revolution the doctrine of work was elaborated and the sins of the flesh extended to encompass all the pleasures 16G.D. H. Cole and R. Postgate, The Common People, 1746-1946, London, 1946, p.323. And compare also Graham Wallas's remarks in his Introduction to Halevy's Vol. I, London, 1924, pp. vi and vii. 17Ha1evy, op. cit., Vol. Ill, p.165. 18Halevy, op. cit., Vol. I, p.339. 19A.N. Prior, Disruption in LandfallS, p. 13, and for emphasis compare Halevy, op. cit., Vol. m, p.214. zocf. Halevy, op. cit., Vol. I, pp.408-ll and 418-23; Vol. m, Chapter m. 21J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, London, 1948, Vol. II, p.23. 22Jbid., p.24. 35 which might divert the energies from the arid struggle to survive and- that faint but driving hope-to escape up into the classes that did not face an end in Potter's Field. Sex and drink and ease-taking led to ter- restrial and eternal damnation both. In the overcrowded squalid condi- tions where much moral backsliding was accompanied by much grinding failure there was a high rate of emotional acceptance of the proposition which connected immorality and failure as cause and effect. The Old Testament virtues, product of a patriarchal tribal society, were burnt, to the accompaniment of much flickering of hellfire, into our immigrants by the acid emotions of life in slum and factory and unemployment. For those many who failed or resisted or were broken there was no alternative morality. Even Chartism and unionism, which offered more of an explana- tion than guilt and sin, were linked with the prevailing outlook rather than constituting an outright opposition to it. The outlook and the moral scheme were not lost in the cabins and holds of the emigrant ships coming to New Zealand. They travelled better in the habits and attitudes of the immigrants than the Churches could with their buildings, halls, schools, hospitals and vicarages. The Churches which had been associated with the elaboration of the puritan pattern tended increasingly over the decades to be left out. The denomina- tions might move in fresh directions, their theological emphases might alter, but they were no longer in sufficiently vital contact with enough New Zealanders to alter the design of the pattern. Somewhere about the turn of the century or possibly later (though the failure of the Church- sponsored attempt to introduce nation-wide Prohibition seems to indicate the first decade of the new century at the latest) the pattern can be con- sidered a thing in itself. It was by then unconsciously assumed and beyond the redirection of changing Churches which might have supervised and readjusted it in happier circumstances. The Churches, in fact, had not been essential to confirm the pattern as it was brought off the ships. For the puritan morality received a more obvious sanction. In the new land and with the new tasks it fitted, it worked. 'Work, deny yourself and you will be prosperous and saved' presided as a motto over the cracking of the spine of the bush. The sober, upright, industrious man who abhorred the flesh had opportunity to show his fibre as shepherd or gold miner or settler in the North Island backblocks. The shopkeeper and mechanic with slight capital could thriftily build on this clear field where at 'Home' they could not have begun. Out of nothing came something and the promise of success which should crown effort was realized and the Victorian proposition became an axiom. The institutions of patriarchy were there also, son learning from father by sharing in his tasks, the girl from the mother, their isolated life dominated by a male figure of command. In reality as in the model situations of injunction, fairy tale, Bible and manly talk the scene was set around the central figure of the father who directed and brought the family to a better future. Many, if not most, prospered only to a minor degree and some not at all, but the proportion of success was infinitely greater than in the lands they left and more than enough for the myth. 36 But this was not all that the new circumstances had to say in the matter. They were now to contradict their earlier confirmation of the puritan cultural pattern. The essence of the contradiction lay in the fact that conditions now grew easier, yet this had the effect of making hard work less efficacious since opportunities for the great majority were more and more restricted. Shopkeepers and tradesmen found that there was a low limit on expansion in a small country, patchily settled by a low density of population, and having no neighbouring territories. New Zealand became a land of the small shopkeeper, safe from overbearing competition, but confined to his modest competence. The great wool and wheat estates began to break up in the nineties, pressed by legislation and red ink. The advent of refrigeration and the separator drove the New Zealand farmer towards the small family-farm which allowed him, except by the occasional grace of the overseas market, the same kind of limited competence as his town counterpart obtained. In comparison with Europe New Zealand was a land of milk and honey, a lucky historical accident favoured by a temperate climate, by untapped soil, by a defence from the British Navy that was not paid for in heavy debt, and by a technology, developed elsewhere, which was ready to bring all to fruition at the right time. But the outlook, the morality that the immigrants had imported, had not been evolved for a land- relatively-of milk and honey; especially when the milk and honey were evenly distributed. Now, only the very exceptional and the very lucky man could go to the edge of settlement and break his way into greater rewards. Overall, it is probably true to say that the immigrants in thirty years had risen by a step in the English ladder and that, as a whole, New Zealanders had arrived securely at the economic equivalent of the English lower middle class. Their economic circumstances, moreover, while not allowing New Zealanders much more than lower middle class standards, were yet easy enough to free most of them from that nagging fear23 of dropping back into the lower class which underlay the lives of the immigrants' new equivalents in England. 24 23H. G. Wells both in his Autobiography and in his novel The History of Mr Pally shows the form and the power of this sapping fear. 24Cf. W. T. Doig, Rich and Poor in New Zealand, Christchurch, n.d. Mr Doig in his pamphlet makes some interesting points on the basis of 'the analysis of Social Security Declarations made by the Government Census and Statistics Department' in 1939 for the tax year 1937/38. Of 350,000 returns covered those of men over twenty numbered 323,822. 38% of these received under £208 a year, 55% received between £208 and £520, 5% between £520 and £1000, and 2% above £1000 (p. 6). The percentage of men in each occupation receiving more than £10 a week were: doctors, 72 %; employer-accountants, 57%; dentists, 50%; architects, 46%; managers, 44%; sheep-farmers, 30%; employers of labour, 28%; and dairy-farmers, 14%. Apart from the unemployed, the poorest section were farm-labourers, of whom 69% received under £3 a week in cash and 91% under £4 a week in cash. Of 50,273 wharf-workers, coal miners, quartz gold miners, fitters, motor mechanics, mechanics, construction and general labourers, and drivers, precisely 80 made over £10 a week, or 0.015% of them (figures based on pp. 8 and 9). The size and composition of the lowest income group, including as it must a 37 Conditions were easier in New Zealand, the competence was soon come to, but the ceiling on the ambitions of the majority made itself felt at the centre of things by limiting and changing the role played by the husband. No longer could he raise the family a visible, respectworthy notch by undeviating hard work and abstemious living. Once out of his time at a trade or plugging away at the mortgage on shop or farm he was almost as well off at twenty-five as at fifty. Regular opportunities for overtime were the exception in town, and, as rising land values took up the slack of good times, there was a limit to what the farmer could mort- gage himself into in settled districts. Mother now stepped into her own. The exact grade the family would occupy was fixed increasingly by mother's skill in spending to the greatest advantage a nearly fixed income. Mother 'managing' the household succeeded to father 'making a home'. An interesting parallel can be drawn here with an exa,mination by E. H. McCormick of the evolution in Katherine Mansfield's characters. 'Andreas Binzer, that caricature of the domineering, egotistical male, begins to take on human form, frail though not villainous, as Stanley Burnell; the wife and the grandmother are no longer depressed drudges, but the more plausible managers and diplomats of a middle-class home.' 2 s It is noteworthy also, that Mr McCormick suggests that Katherine Mansfield's earlier phase, when she saw family conflict as being between 'sensitive wife and domineering husband', is 'one that links Katherine Mansfield with the novelists of the nineties and may, in part, be derived from their pioneer or near-pioneer background.' 2 6 Katherine Mansfield reflected, then, a change of attitude some thirty years after the facts on which the attitudes were based had changed-a not uncommon lapse of time. Katherine Mansfield thus passed approvingly from the first version of the basic New Zealand sentimentality-that women are good and men high proportion of unemployed and farm-labourers-and therefore, possibly, of bachelors-is an interesting confirmation of the New Zealand writers' implicit view of the importance and character of this group. The 2% above £1000 a year make as minor a mark in the statistics as they do in our literature. There is a surprising percentage of those in what one might have assumed would constitute an upper middle class of professions and occupations falling at this time below £10 in weekly earnings. The tax year 1937/38 was neither a boom nor a depression year. It is perhaps too prosperous a year, but about the right period to furnish a background for the writing this article is concerned with. Professor H. Belshaw in Standards of Living, Wages and Prices, Wellington, 1941, provides (p. 19) figures for the 1938/39 tax year (a less typical year for our purposes). He gives the percentage of male income receivers over sixteen in various income groups which may be used as some sort of check. 16.4% received under £200; 58.3% received between £200 and £499; 15.0% received between £500 and £999; and 10.7% received £1000 or more. The brackets are not quite the same but it can be seen that the two upper groups are very considerably greater and the lowest group diminished by these figures, though inflationary changes would offset this to some extent. Despite the variation, generalizations about 'a modest competence' for 'the great majority' still appear to be justified. 25McCormick, op. cit., p.l37. 26Jbid. p.l36. 38 are brutes-a first version which rendered the male as an uncouth active brute, to the next version which pictures the male as an ineffective, insufficient, unhelpful brute who has to be humoured and is 'really rather like a child at times'. That Katherine Mansfield does so with consummate art and by exactly registering her early milieu does not absolve her from an involvement in the sentiment nor release her altogether from its confinement. 21 And agreement with the results of the changing role of the husband, and therefore of the male, did indeed prove to be a confining and distort- ing act. For though the circumstances which had originally confirmed the puritan pattern and morality were reversed, and the churches which had elaborated it were left on one side, the pattern itself did not depart, and that pattern was patriarchal at base and demanded of the male a role, an achievement, and a life which went clean contrary to the new facts. Father-increasingly a townsman 2 s-was a figure who departed for work in train or tram and returned at his children's bed-time. No longer did he teach the son by example in the bush or at the counter. The children went to school and the mother pointed to undone homework if much of the old participation was asked. Only in a depression and only on the farms did the family really return to that joint effort directed by father in his own sphere that had been a pioneering characteristic. Mother now had the children on her hands and in the home, which was her sphere, where she directed, and where her work and management, so central to the family's position, could be observed and absorbed by the children, girl and boy. The pattern enjoined work and promised reward and respect for it. Mother had learned and believed in the morality of work and her role, unlike father's, continued to demand and to reward it, as specified by the pattern. Here in New Zealand it was possible with the aid of machine- produced copies, scraping, and much effort to imitate in a bungalow elements of that High Victorian display of the upper middle class which the immigrant domestic may have seen and envied back in England. Certainly a 'neat and tidy' house with an overfurnished unused 'drawing room' became social essentials.29 Thrift and duty would 'do wonders', and, with the new vote that was contemporaneous with woman's new position it might even be possible by Prohibition to enforce abstinence on the husband and add to the family's funds while taming the remainder of his outbursts.

27 A reminiscence of the first version of this sentimentality can be noticed lingering on, in infectious spots, in James Courage's novel The Fifth Child. Something of a shift to the second version occurs in his Desire Without Content. Cf. a review by the present writer in Landfall 20. 28The majority of the population resided in the counties at the census of 1906. By the time of the census of 1911 the majority resided in the boroughs. See New Zealand Official Year-Book, 1918, p.88. 29E.A. Plishke in Design and Living, Wellington, 1947, comments on this type of display, particularly from pp. 34-7, but he does not mention the function that the accumulation of inefficient and labour-making objects of bad taste serves in constituting a visible record of work done and patterned attitudes upheld. 39 And under all these puritan virtues of work, thrift, abstinence of all kinds, and duty there slipped in a simple materialism combined with self-complacency. This complacency would only have been hypocritical had it been realized that only when the virtues were necessary expressions of a living faith and a genuinely religious attitude were they properly virtues, and that they were not virtues when pursued for themselves and the goods and social standing their practise purchased. That so many ministers of every denomination should not have noticed the substitution of the means for the end, but, instead, have encouraged this elementary materialism because of its formal virtuousness, is something of a tragedy. Instead of being re-examined, the pattern, the code and the morality were aided to carry on, as rigid as the law, like the hypertrophied superego as pictured by Freud and just as unconscious. Unconscious, too, was the father's adaptation to the change. Driven from the bridge, he occupied himself in the fo'c's'le 'with the boys'. The mechanics' institutes which dated from pioneering times were followed by the sports clubs, 3o the R.S.A.s, bowling clubs for the older men, Masonic Lodges, Rotary, Savage, and Creditmen's Clubs, and, of course, 'the pub'. In the scouts and the primary school team, through serious football and the races, on yachts or at the servicemen's smoke concert, men need never lack an equalitarian comradely substitute for singular, hierarchical, patriarchal family life. A. P. Gaskell's collection of short stories, The Big Game, ranks as our leading treatise on this aspect of New Zealand society. Whether he is dealing with a football player's tension within himself and with his team- mates during the week before a deciding game, or evoking the subtleties of concealed values in a morning's gossip among Home Guardsmen, Mr Gaskell never ceases to display the variety, importance, and vitality of links between men in this community. An amusing diagram of the sexually polarized society can be examined in the typical New Zealand dance hall; the men with the men in a clump at the door, the women with the women ranged, usually, along one side of the hall. And this extends in the upper income brackets even to separate entertaining and in homes at most levels to separate subjects of conver- sation and separate groupings of men and women at private parties. For the solitary man or the husband who must needs do his quid for his wife's energetic and pointed quo there always remains the garden. John Cole in his story 'A Touch of the Old Trouble' 31 manages this situa- tion precisely and brings out with insight and skill the implications of lonely frustration for the excluded father and unsatisfied husband. Out of Jack's huge burlesque excavation in the back garden Frank Sargeson makes a biting symbol for all the bitterness involved in his story 'The

30'To the stranger the most amazing feature of New Zealand sport is the com- pleteness of its organization. Every little town has its tribe of clubs.' Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, Introduction to New Zealand, Wellington, 1945, p.234. 3llncluded in his collection It Was So Late, Christchurch, 1949. 40 Hole That Jack Dug'. 3 z The hole is deep enough to bury half the house and its animosities and, by its very purposelessness, constitutes for Jack a vivid silent gesture against waste of effort and waste of spirit. The male institutions, as well as providing a substitute for a fuller family life, serve as a setting for the reassertion by men of their idea of themselves as men, as active, 'manly', commanding personalities, willing to take risks, displaying skill, courage and ability for valued recognition. The pattern has continued to insist on these attributes though the pattern's central institutions, the family and the job, no longer provide an arena for these attributes and an audience for them. Guthrie Wilson in his novel Brave Company has emphasized the supreme opportunity provided by war for this reassertion, and, as perhaps the most competent writer among the many New Zealand authors of war diaries who remain inside the pattern and share its values, Mr Wilson unconsciously demonstrates the function of war as a release from frustration and a reaffirmation of the New Zealand man's picture of himself in the face of social contradic- tions in civilian life. This reaffirmation takes the form, in Mr Wilson's novel, of an insistence on the value of war as a test. His hero, Private Peter 'Lawyer' Considine, remembers with approval in the heat of a charge 3 3 an aphorism which he later repeats almost exactly: 'But no. Two things are of the greatest moment to men-women and war. And the greater, because of its demands upon fortitude, because of its nightmare quality, is war' (p.265). 'Lawyer' thinks that war 'is not wholly vile' when it 'gives men like our commander and our corporal the opportunity to dominate us who are of a weaker mould in all that is inherently (perhaps primitively) manly'(p.51). 'Lawyer' also reflects that 'Men do not create heroes of their fellow men, but Hadfield is as near being a hero to me as any other man I have known. By that, I mean that he is a very good soldier.'(p. 247). And as 'Lawyer' feels less than his heroes so he, with Hadfield, feels more than the 'pail of water, civilian water' in which the returned servicemen will be 'but a drop of red blood' (p. 36). Similarly 'Lawyer' admires above his own learning the virtues of the playing field (p. 43) symbolically transferred in the figure of Major Cadman to the battlefield. 3 4 321ncluded in the collection Speaking For Ourselves, edit. Frank Sargeson, Auckland, 1945. 33G. Wilson, Brave Company, London, 1951, p.162. 34The present writer is not of the opinion that most New Zealand servicemen carry to the full the outlook of 'Lawyer'. But the very heavy sales of Brave Company, heavy for a New Zealand novel in New Zealand, show that the views are not felt to be basically untypical or offensive. Certainly, too, the literary merit of the descriptions of action is considerable. An unfortunate corollary of the assertion by 'Lawyer' of the 'manly' virtues is the depreciation of others. Moral courage is held to be composed of 'a thick skin ... a distended egotism and a platform speaker's love of an audience' (p.72). Admiration of Hadfield's 'invulnerable armour of ... fatalism, a dry, mocking acceptance of things' (p.265) and of the similar Cadman (pp.284 and 285) is accompanied by a hatred of those behind the lines with other tasks employing other qualities. This pro- duces a dangerously over-simplified view of history and politics. 'Chiefly I hate 41 It should be unnecessary to add that so much concentration in the pattern of living on the provision of a male environment from play- ground to bowling green makes for a fair degree of latent homosexuality. lt is not unnatural that this passes unrecognized by the mass of men except in the inverted form of much bar-room humour at the expense of 'queens' and a very strong aversion from certain physical traits imagined to be feminine. Many New Zealand authors indicate their perception of the unconscious signs of this strain in the national character both in novels and short stories. It has been treated fairly directly in P. J. Wilson's 'End of the River' 3 s and in Bill Pearson's 'Uncle 52'.36 A. P. Gaskell in the masterly story 'The Fire of Life' 3 7 sketches a skittish schoolteacher confronted with the possibility of marrying a solid manly woman. Dan Davin examines the reaction of New Zealanders another way, by introducing a homosexual character-an Englishman-in his novel of the New Zealand Division For the Rest of Our Lives. But it is Frank Sargeson who, in the novels That Summer and I Saw in My Dream, has followed, with the most subtle observation of nuance and gradation, the implications as far as they go, still more or less latent, but touching the surface in the lives of lonely and overstrained men like his backblocks farm labourer. This element of latent homosexuality, encouraged by too intensive and lifelong separation of the sexes, is to some extent attributable to the dis- orientation of the boy growing up in a home where formally, and by all the injunctions of the pattern, the man should command, but where, in observable fact, he does not. The boy cannot learn the role he is verbally instructed is his by the essential learning process of watching the father perform and fulfil that role. Insofar as it is the mother who directs and initiates, when the morality, the code, and the pattern proclaim her happy submission, it is the children who are confused. A confusion in learning the respective roles of male and female makes adjustment in marriage harder. When to that is added an institutional superstructure of the partially segregated type, and to that is superadded a conviction that abstinence from the pleasures of sex, or at least from most of them, is probably the better part of morality, then indeed are the difficul- ties of marriage, and hence of family life, greatly multiplied. I cannot call to mind one significant New Zealand novel where the European father is treated as the dominating figure in the home or where a fair degree of tension between parents is not recorded. Among the short stories only all self-important people who love the public platform, who rise by bombast, whose inadequacy to their responsibilities causes wars that they do not fight.' (pp.10 and 11). It is not without significance that when the minor Italian heroine says Mussolini was wrong because he failed, 'Lawyer' adds only the thought that the Italian men failed Mussolini (p.60). The dual view of women on pp. 1, 218, 64-9, 73, 101 and 206 strikingly reveals the many demands and the contradictory allocations of approval and disapproval which accompanies 'Lawyer's' other attitudes. 35Landfall16. 36Book Nine. 37Book Nine. 42 Gaskell's tale, 'The Pig and Whistle', 3 s of nineteenth century Little Akaloa is exceptional in this regard and then the date of the setting is some explanation. Whether partly in agreement with the values of the pattern, like Courage in his The Fifth Child, or not at all, like Dan Davin in his Cliffs of Fall, our fiction focusses, as between the parents, on the mother, and shows the children making what sense they can of the situation. That the children make too little sense of it is seen in their strong reaction to the situation as soon as reaction becomes possible-when they start to earn between fifteen and eighteen. This reaction takes the form of a rebellion, which seems, but only seems, to be a rebellion against the pattern. Actually, to strike out against parental authority, to loosen or cut most of the remaining threads of communication with the parents, to assert or experiment with other values and practises than those lauded in and associated with the home, this is the normal course over the ten years between seventeen and twenty-seven. A period of adolescent and post-adolescent Sturm und Drang seems to be an inherent part of cultural patterns deriving ultimately from the European complex; though not being a part, apparently, of all cultural patterns. 3 9 However general this period of adolescent strain may be it is still worth looking at the form it takes here and at the manner in which this planned detour helps to bring young New Zealanders with all the more force back onto the straight and narrow path for the remainder of their lives. This period of rebellion and experiment, as it seems to the participants, is perhaps the key period in the tightening of the pattern round the individual. Its forerunner, the period roughly between twelve and seven- teen, a period of doubt in the parents and discovery of adolescent identity, without, however, the possibility of taking action and of being more than a spectator, is the period which has provided Ballantyne in The Cunninghams, Finlayson in Tidal Creek, and Bruce Mason in 'Summer's End', 4o with a standpoint for their heroes. The key period itself is treated by Davin in Cliffs of Fall and Roads From Home, by Sargeson in sections of I Saw in My Dream, and by many in short stories. The break with the parents in New Zealand is aided and accentuated by the lack of communication between generations. Possibly the gap between parents and children arises from the methods of discipline employed, with father as the last physical resort, and with mother using a variety of emotional pressures which decline in effectiveness with use

3 8Included in The Big Game and Other Stories. 39Cf. Margaret Mead, The American Character, Penguin, 1944, pp. 85-7. Margaret Mead here suggests that adolescent tension is a necessary price paid for the valuable acquisition of conscience and its attendant private guilt. Ado- lescence is the difficult phase in which-though the parents themselves are rejected-the child's introjected image of the parent as good and punishing and rewarding becomes generalized into adult standards of good and right conduct imposed internally hnd not by public shame. For discussion of examples of adolescence in other cultures see also Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, New York, 1934; A. Kardiner, (edit.) The Psychological Frontiers of Society, New York, 1945; and Margaret Mead, Growing Up In New Guinea, New York, 1930. 40Landfal/9 and 10. 43 and with the increasing age of the children. With increasing age the child's emotional insight grows sufficiently to allow the child to under- stand and thus be less vulnerable to the psychological mechanisms of the pressures consciously employed by the mother. Again, the difficulty of accounting for, or more frequently of ignoring, the differences between enjoined fiction and observable fact about family relations imports confusion into parent-child communication. This confusion may play a considerable part in widening the gap. Had the parents not rebelled themselves and been drawn back to an adherence to those fictions by what they took to be 'the facts of life' they might not be so keen to protect children from rebellion or deviation by insisting on the fictions. Insisting on the fictions removes the need for the parents to dig into their own well-buried difficulties, regarded now as past failure and felt as present discontent. So to protect themselves, and, as they hope, their children, parents continue to insist on what will prevent examination and discussion. They confine themselves, usually, to worry and to one of the many variations on the theme summed up in the phrase 'you'lllearn.' 41 Dan Davin in Cliffs of Fall puts the problem in this soliloquy of Mark, his university student hero. 'As for confiding in her [the mother], what sort of intimate confidence could exist between one generation and the next? His mother was too garrulous to be trusted and too given to need- less worrying, even if he had had the slightest impulse to confide in her, which he had not. She could give him no advice which he would be likely to take. He was divided from his parents by education as well as by age, by difference in temperament as well as by the fact that they were now static in their outlook while his was still shifting and developing. What use would advice be, given from the standpoint of one set of values and standards of conduct, when, had he subscribed in the least to these values and standards, the situation would never have arisen? . . . His father had remained silent. Mark could tell by the noise of his shifting and stirring in the bed that he was embarrassed. He felt sure that as absolute a silence had prevailed hitherto between his mother and father on the subject of their children and sex as between parents and children.' 4 z 41Jt would be interesting to enquire how far the New Zealand emphasis on the merit of being older arises from a need to compensate for lack of other distinc- tions in a homogeneous and unstratified society, with, accordingly, too little monetary or other reward for the penalties of aging. Mr Coates was regarded as 'having youth on his side' at fifty (N.Z. Herald, Supplement, 8 Dec. 1928, p.5) and Labour Cabinets have been even older than those of Reform and National. Professor Lipson in The Politics of Equality, Chicago, 1948, (pp.466-8) remarks on the New Zealand Public Service demand for promotion by seniority with as many as possible of everyman getting two or three years at the headship before retirement. The multiplication of local bodies like Rabbit Boards may serve by multiplying local dignitaries. New Zealand had the huge total of 680 local bodies in 1942 (E. B. Dalmer and H. S. Southern, Counties at the Crossroads, Christchurch, 1948, p.13). The growing hagiography of pioneering probably over-emphasizes the work-virtue of those now old, at the same time, para- doxically, as the age benefits are allowed to stand at an unlivably low level. 42Dan Davin, Cliffs of Fall, London, 1945, p.13. 44 Mark launched his rebellion, in his first independence as a lodger, by absorbing the spread of other ideas provided by the university and by attacking through Bohemian party-going and some promiscuous experi- ment with sex 'the manners and morals their grandparents had brought with them from Scotland'. 4 3 For the non-university majority the weekly dance, party-going, and occasional sexual experiment are accompanied by less theory and hardly any chance that a theory may lead on to under- standing which might emancipate them from the compulsion of patterned action and reaction. The young man's image of an attractive companion is variously com- pounded. On one hand there is the element derived from the mother- image and the mother's advice revolving round the 'treat her as you would a sister' motif. On the other hand there is a combination of the inaccuracies of the shelter-shed, the daring and idealized reiterations of films and radio, and hope. This bifocal view of women is partially in- corporated in the stereotypes of the 'decent girl' and the 'good thing'. It is also partly met, as all such mixed demands must be met, by a mixed response on the part of the girl. 'Petting' at parties is some sort of com- promise, in one individual's action, between 'bad' and 'good' behaviour, between approved and disapproved courses of action. The girl, too, has contradictory demands. Earning for herself, with the background of home equipment provided and taken for granted, she has more money to spend with less responsibility than she will ever have again. Mother's doctrine of work and saving hardly fits the girl's circum- stances, containing, as it does, an unattractive picture of life. So mother's example falls temporarily into the discard. Along with the doctrine and the example there is a tendency to reject also the home picture of relations between women and men as unsatisfying, and, with regard to sex, pre- dominantly unpleasant. This picture mother passes on to daughter with much more emotional freedom than the mother would feel with her sons, though, as far as can be gathered, it is conveyed with no more explicit detail than the son receives. Mother's picture does not fit the exciting dance and party-going entanglements which are new, irrespon- sible, fleeting, and altogether different in background to the economic setting of the mother's frustrations. The excitement and the economic elbow-room combine in the girl's case to lend amplitude to the hope of a Prince Charming conveyed by film, magazine, and the corner lending-library novel. This hope is a natural romantic answer to the doctrine that 'a woman's work is never done'. The consequence, however, is that the eventual disappointment will be all the greater and be concerned with both budget and bed. For the girl does not lose her subconscious assumption that her mate should act his secondary role, as her father had done, while she adds now a demand that the mate bring economic ease and act in a commanding, sophisticated way which is unlikely under the circumstances of the pattern. 43See p.90. Mr Davin also remarks there 'The reactionaries were heartened and strengthened by a powerful nucleus of Scottish Presbyterians ... Peasant virtues ruled business. Business ruled the country and the towns.' 45 In fact the girl demands those very 'manly' attributes which the young man hopes to assert and which he has been taught (though family life contradicts them) he should possess. The demand and the hope coincide and produce a spurious conviction in the young couple that they have escaped being like mother and father. The young man can even act the economic Prince Charming until marriage forces him to face all his psychological debits and financial shortcomings at one time. 44 The period of rebellion containing, as it does, the maximum of strain and, for the individual, an assumption that he is on his own uncharted course, is, as it were, the shock-absorber of the whole system. Here, if anywhere, the pattern itself is most vulnerable and is subject to the greatest likelihood of change. Enough individuals striking out on their own detour from the usual detour may carve out a new route. It is certainly possible that the period of rebellion may henceforth start earlier. The developed U.S. film version of the romantic myth of Prince Charming had a foothold ready in our pattern. And the re-emphasis on the 'good provider' has a corollary in Prince Charming's younger brother, the well equipped and sophisticated youth, the successful 'dater' of the American high school. It is no very unlikely step to an extension of adolescent experiment back in the normal life-history to the early post-primary school years on the American model. To shift the emphasis unconsciously from the sexual aspect to the respect of competitive display of attractive boy by attractive girl and vice versa 4s fits the simple competitive materialism, if not the more limited financial resources, of New Zealand parents. A 'golden age' prior to an adult life of undeviating work beginning in the mid-twenties would be a considerable but not impossible change for the New Zealand pattern to undergo under the unremitting influence of the U.S. cultural pattern. Such a change-though the only foreseeable one-would hardly alter the basic tenets of life here, or meet the real, if implicit, criticism of artists and the thousands they speak for. Whether the route of the detour is permanently changed in this way or not, many fail to take the corners in this stretch of the life-history en- gendered by the pattern. It is here that, in the general strain of parentally unguided adjustment, some extra shock may prove too much for the individual as it does for the heroes of I Saw in My Dream and Cliffs ofFall. Then, as with Sargeson's story, one arrives at the point of departure for that New Zealand odd man out, the New Zealand bachelor, 46 the 44A recent advertisement in the January 1952 Here and Now is to this point. 'A message for young men. Now that your heart's set on marriage you'll be hard stretched to save that one thousand pounds by Easter. You definitely can't afford a car-and you can't ride a bicycle? Then read ... ' (p.31). The car, which completes the Prince Charming outfit, must be sacrificed just when it becomes really vital to ease the hard work of early marriage and parenthood. 45Qn the morphology of the American 'dating' system see Margaret Mead, Male and Female. 46Not all or most bachelors by any means. But as Mr Allan Nixon pointed out in the second of his 1951 radio talks on the family, the bachelor's social position, whether as cause or effect of bachelordom, is worse in most respects. Using the 46 social stray, the 'Man Alone'. The lessons of male companionship, the dominant mother, the emphases of latent homosexuality and family conflict, all join to produce for many an insuperable barrier to companion- ship with women and to marriage. The 1936 Census gave the percentage of those over sixteen who had 'never married' as, European male, 39%; European female, 33%; and 'married' as 56% and 56!-% respectively. Those legally separated, widowed, and divorced made up the remainder. 4 7 The number of married women of childbearing age (between fifteen and forty-five), expressed as a per- centage of all women in that age group, works out at 63.5% married for 1878, 52.1% for 1921, 50.4% for 1936, and 56.9% for 1945.48 So for all those above twenty considerably more than a third of the males are unmarried and about one-third of the females. A majority of unmarried adults naturally make a more or less usual adjustment, but for many the period ·of rebellion and single experiment is unconscionably pro- longed. 49 This provides those exceptions whose existence our writers of prose fiction have emphasized and we must return later to an examination of the artistic use made of those exceptions. The normal termination of the period of rebellion, however, is marriage. Marriage occurs in New Zealand at the average ages of thirty for men and twenty-six for women, 5o and, if first marriages alone are considered, at twenty-seven and a half for bachelors and twenty-four and a half for spinsters. 5 I Long engagements are fairly common, being connected, Government Statistician's Report on the 1936 Census as a basis it was shown that in 1936, among the men over 35, 1 in 24 of the married were unemployed but 1 in 10 of the single, and 1 in 6 of the married were employers of labour but only 1 in 13 of the single. Mr Nixon added: 'The bachelor, compared with the married man of the same age, suffers more sickness, is less often in steady employment, enjoys less than his share of the national income' and 'the prison population includes twice as many single men as married men . . . and the same division of the sheep from the goats is reflected in our hospital populations and in our mental hospital populations, too.' Mr Nixon warned his listeners against ignoring age-constitution of institutional populations as they affect these figures and against taking the position as being always the effect and never the cause of bachelordom or vice versa; but the figures do, as he said, illustrate something of a 'disordered condition'. It certainly bears out the relevance of much New Zealand writing. 47Quoted by E. Beaglehole, Some Modern Maoris, Christchurch, 1946, p.48. 48Based on figures at p.55 of the New Zealand Official Year-Book, 1950. On the basis of figures at p.79 of the New Zealand Official Year-Book, 1918, I have calculated the number of unmarried males over twenty expressed as a percentage of the total of all married males plus unmarried males over twenty. This is very nearly the percentage of unmarried men in the adult male population at the following census years: 1891, 46.3% unmarried. 1901, 43.9% unmarried. 1911, 46.6% unmarried. 1916 (a war year), 37.0% unmarried. 49Jt should be noted that, to judge from the statistics of the marriage rate, New Zealand is not unusual. Our marriage rate for 1948 was 9.9; that for Denmark, 9.4; Canada, 9.6; Australia, 9.7; Austria, 10.0; Israel. 10.8; and the U.S.A., 12.3. Vide N.Z.O. Y.B., 1950, p.lOl. 50This is two years later on the averages than the figure given by the British Registrar-General of 24 in 1945 and quoted in the British Medical Journal, 15 July 1950, p.l23. 51N.Z.O.Y.B., 1950, p.70. 47 particularly in the more comfortably-off brackets, with the girl's desire to keep up, not 'with the Joneses', but with her mother's style and standard of living. A certain amount of cohabitation by engaged couples seems to be almost expected by an unexpressed convention and produces, owing, as A. R. D. Fairburn remarked, to the loyalty of the young men who marry the mothers, a high proportion of seven-month babies. 5 z How high a proportion is uncertain, but such pre-marital experiment certainly carries no guarantee of a corresponding adjustment. Though intercourse between those engaged probably accounts for the greater proportion of pre-marital experience, because the partnership is likely to be more continuous and embody more trust, yet the opportunities even for this are not very numerous in a land without the roadhouse, the anonymous large hotel, the motel and the tourist cabin. Moreover, the lessons of such experience are bound to be confusing since it is never possible to eliminate either the extraneous excitement or the difficulties of situation. Most couples come to the honeymoon, symbolically regarded by New Zealanders as slightly ridiculous or humorous, and often occupied by an exhausting tour of the country, with years of romantic excitement behind them but without having solved in any way the fundamental difficulty inherent in the conflicting images of the roles of man and woman. They then have precious little time left to solve them before the first baby. In 1948 41% of first babies were born to marriages of under one year's duration, and 34% to marriages of under two but over one years' duration. So over three-quarters of all first babies are 'on the way' inside fifteen months of marriage. 5 3 The newly married man, about to become a father too all soon, and faced already with the difficulties of setting up a home, must suspend his efforts to reconcile the several model men he ought to be and suspend, also, the tasks of filling in the considerable omissions in his own knowledge of love-making and of adjusting his own bifocal view of women. The expectant mother feels ill-prepared for a baby without an elaborate layette. To receive seventeen matinee jackets is only too normal and, with mother's assistance, the gifts emphasize the work that remains to be done 'to be ready for the baby'. The pre-natal fears of the expectant mother are in no way diminished by the beliefs of the average New Zealand expectant grandmother. The clinics, such as those of the St Helens system, spend a great deal of time laying the most elementary spectres of ignorance. The slow headway made by the Grantly Dick Read method of natal care is some measure of the tension felt and expected, with all the attendant repercussions between man and wife. 52A.R.D. Fairburn, We New Zealanders, Wellington, n.d., p.35. Mr Fairburn undoubtedly expresses a common opinion among doctors and nurses but figures cannot be found in the Year Book. Illegitimate births total 4% of all births annually, on an average, though they rose to 6% in 1944, the year after the Americans were here in their greatest numbers and young New Zealand men were absent in their greatest numbers. 53N.Z.O.Y.B., 1950, p.61. 48 When the baby arrives the mother displays it to her circle of friends; and works. The 'Father of One' who wrote to the newspaper 54 complain- ing in none too stable terms that the baby had ousted him and that he was now 'a bill payer to a neurotic nurse' provoked a revealing outburst of patterned injunctions to accept the situation and make the best of it by working hard to help the mother, for 'after all, we the mothers have to go through the ordeal'. 55 'Mother of Two' thought husbands often to blame for 'devoting most of their leisure hours to the pursuit of selfish pleasures-golf, fishing, shooting, etc.'. 56 Some parent correspondents suspected that 'Father of One' was a 'spoilt boy' 57 who hankered after the attention he had received from his own mother, while most advocated more work about the home and sharing in the concentration on children. Everything from 'God's will' 5 s to 'maturity' 59 was invoked as laying down to 'Father of One' the duty of submergence in and acceptance of a situa- tion the basic outline of which was not denied. The new mother is tired. She is discovering that on the family's income, 'what with the baby and everything else', she must do a great deal. It is not true except in terms of the pattern that the baby needs to be displayed or have his elaborate rig-out or that the house needs carpets, or an oak bedroom suite, or a bow-fronted china cabinet. But such are the un- examined assumptions that now catch up with the young mother. Her own mother and her similarly placed and minded women friends, who are her psychological mainstays, do not disillusion her because they agree. The woman who placed a wall-to-wall carpet and a dining room suite in a tent at an Auckland motor-camp for the two years she had to live there was asserting, rather colourfully, the New Zealand scheme of the ele- mentary decencies. To achieve or 'make do' for these necessities which are not necessary personal relations are sacrificed to work in the name of 'facing facts' which are not facts. If the wife is tired and inclined more and more to feel that what mother told her is now shown to be true by experience she is also fearful. Contra- ception has just failed for the couple in the case of the first 'accident'. It does not need a Mass Observation Group to discover that the timing of the arrival of children is usually accidental or that married people are profoundly unsure of their knowledge of contraception. Marriage guidance workers and overseas visitors have expressed to the writer their surprise at how insufficient and difficult of access are the facilities of trained help in this matter compared with what is known and available both in England and America. Under what is felt to be the necessity of preventing another child ruining the prospect of making a 'decent home', the knowledge that illegal abortion may be the only recourse for another mistake in contra- 54N.Z. Herald, 22 March 1951. 55Jbid. 26 March 1951, 'Mother of Three'. 56Jbid. 27 March 1951. 51Jbid. 30 March 1951, 'Father of Three'. Cf. 26 March, 28 March, and 3 April. 5BJbid. 27 March 1951, 'Partner, Not Servant'. 59Jbid. 3 Apri11951, 'Understanding Mother'. 49 ception gives sordid substance to the wife's fears. Of those dying from sepsis following abortion during the years 1931-5 62% were married women. 6o The Department of Health advertises that 'the latest figures indicate that in New Zealand there are 4,600 unlawful abortions a year. For every 100 births there are 7 natural abortions (miscarriages) and 13 induced abortions.' 61 Fear and weariness do not make a good background for the delayed attempt to reconcile the already considerable distortion of relations between man and woman inherent in the pattern. The solution is all too frequently found in a severe limitation of intercourse summed up in a phrase that a woman medical practitioner described to the writer as characteristic of the consulting-room report: 'My husband is a good chap, he doesn't bother me much.' Another medical practitioner said that the greatest problem he found among young married women was the sudden onset of frigidity shortly after marriage. The domestic tragedy does not lie in this alone but also in the extension of the lack of adjusted relationships from one field of potential common interest to the next. This blighting process is aided by the earliest memories of both husband and wife as to the realities of married life and by the construction of social institutions which provide a refuge for the husband outside the home. The son, now married, follows the father's example out of the home because 'reality' has set in. 62 60E. Beaglehole, Mental Health in New Zealand, Wellington, 1950, p.96. 61Department of Health advertisement No. 4a in the series 'For a Healthier Nation'. Dr Keith Simpson in The Lancet, 8 January 1949, p.47, quotes figures for England and Wales from the Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion, 1939. These 'conservative' figures show between 44,000 and 60,000 'unlawfully induced' abortions a year; so that the New Zealand rate would appear to be about double the English rate, though doubtless the conservatism of the English figures and the low (on Dr Davis's calculation) proportion of all English abor- tions held to be unlawfully induced would account for much of the difference. Dr Albert Davis gives a clinical survey of 2,665 abortions in the British Medical Journal, 15 July 1950, pp.123-30. The average age of the patients was 29, but this is explained by the fact that abortion is much commoner among married women, and that the average age of marriage is fairly high'-24. 'In rural com- munities, and in the purlieus of wealthy districts, the proportion of single girls is higher.' One-seventh of Dr Davis's cases in a 'working-class suburb' were single, Roesle (1929) gave one-sixth as single, Mcllroy (1929) reported the married 'most frequent' but Richelt 'found that 65 % of his large series were unmarried'. Dr Davis points to the influence of 'convention' and it appears that abortion rates vary markedly according to class attitudes. Thus English analyses tend to confirm the analysis of New Zealand conditions presented here. 'Severe complications' were 14% of single cases and 6% of married cases, prob- ably because of 'the inexperience of these single girls, their isolation, and the desperate nature of their predicament'. If the single figures for severe complica- tions is also higher in New Zealand, for similar reasons, then the figures for deaths from sepsis following abortion would not yield the true proportion of single and married in the total number of abortions, but instead, would exag- gerate the proportion of the single. So a figure higher than 62% will probably represent the true proportion of all abortions here which are abortions of the married. 62Not only does the husband assert his picture of himself and find companion- ship in a male social environment outside the home, he may also find excitement 50 In truth the pattern has simply reasserted its main constituents. The conclusion that this was only to be expected since life is like that covers and explains the failure for the participants. The wife reasserts her idea of herself and of her value by imitating mother's pattern more closely, creating the husk of respectability and respect-worthy success around the kernel of marital defeat. 63 The woman who cannot conform, who continues with a romantic picture of escape, has occupied our fiction writers less. Possibly this is because most of our writers are men; possibly it is because women, having a more clearly defined consistent role which has an avenue of satisfaction in the children, attempt to escape their working destiny less often-anyway until it is too late to try, when the double reckoning of children leaving home and menopause arrives. This last situation fre- quently produces crisis and a 'nervous breakdown' as a conclusion to years of lonely striving. 6 4 It is the subject of a novel by James Courage, The Fifth Child, which shares in the New Zealand woman's formalized and sentimental picture there that he does not find with his wife. Skill and capacity for personal relation- ships are not pre-requisites for the 'thrill' of gambling and the excitement is joined to a hope that a 'lucky break' may propel the investor through his normal income's dreary ceiling. This applies also to many a wife. On horse racing alone in 1950 £25 million were bet through the totalizator. The Government kept 9.1% of this and the racing clubs 8.2% (N.Z.O. Y.B., 1950, p.495). This can be compared with the figure of £345 million for 'personal consumption' in 1949/50, representing 'consumption goods and services purchased by individuals and non-profit-making bodies' but not 'goods and services received free from Govern- ment social services' (N.Z.O. Y.B., 1950, p.1082). 63The success of the New Zealand marriage as a working partnership and the variety of diversion by attainment of material goods may be judged from the comparison which follows of U.S. figures of non-relief farm families (from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Year-book, 1940) with figures (from W. T. Doig's study A Survey of Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy Farmers, Wellington, 1940) on equivalent New Zealand possessions. The comparison is quoted by W. M. Hamilton in New Zealand, edit. H. Belshaw, Berkeley, 1947, p.158. The figures, which are percentages, relate to 1936. Facilities N.Z. U.S. U.S. (income $1000-$1249)(income $2500-$2999) Running water 94 16 43 H. and C. water in kitchen and 69 8 30 bathroom Electric light 80 19 44 Telephone 63 29 52 Car 78 71 80 Radio 82 54 81 Electric refrigerator 4 4 20 64'For twenty years she had been living, without knowing it, in despair. Despair may become an unconscious state of mind . . . Only the presence of the boy Andres had made it possible for her to live up to that resolution. He was right. She had made use of him: had lived on his life.' Fran<;ois Mauriac, The Dark Angels, London, 1951, pp.229 and 228. The effects of puritanism on family life have been dealt with by three French masters, Mauriac, Bernanos, and Gide. Cf. criticism cited earlier and the critical article on Gide's Et Nunc Manet in Te, suivi de Journal Intime by Peter Quennell in The New Statesman and Nation, 29 December 1951. There is no group in English or American writing which could teach so much to our writers on their chosen subject. 51 of herself. The conclusion confirms the pattern when the farmer husband is compelled to say: ' "I daresay the world's not going to end because I arrange to stay in my own bed in future" ' ... ' "Our youth, our day's over," he said after a minute. "Barbara and Ronald and the others, they're the generation now. Let them take this pa_ssing-on-of-life business as theirs. They can have it." He cleared his throat and drew in a long breath. "You and I will get along as we are. After all, there's a good deal left between us . . . " ' The wife concludes this passage on the homeopathic cure by adding ' "Come and sit down now, dear, and don't fidget." '6 s The women who break early, who insist on seeking an alternative fate, yield to the romantic promise they first met as young people. Its pathetic essence is expressed by Greville Texidor's character, a returned serviceman, in the story 'Anyone Home?' '"Everything's going to be different from now on. We're going to please ourselves. We're both young. We'll go away to Auckland or to a beach somewhere." '6 6 Almost the same expres- sions occur to Helen, the mother, in D. W. Ballantyne's The Cunninghams. 'Suddenly the idea came that perhaps she and Fred [her lover] could go to the city, start another life together, forget all the worries of Gladston.' (p. 133.) The tubercular and hysterical Queenie in Ruth Park's The Witch's Thorn thinks ' "I don't owe the old woman anything. I don't owe the kid anything! I'm going to Auckland and I'll get a job and I'll get well and then ... I'll have a lotta fun!"' (p.7). But if the pattern pinches in family life there is no escape outside it. Dan Davin's character Elsie in Roads From Home dies in a car crash, but not before thinking 'But they'd be after her now, the whole pack of them. They wouldn't let her get away with a thing like that. Her only hope was to clear out of the country altogether, if she didn't come home to him. She'd have to make Andy take her to Australia. A place like Woodlands, or Invercargill for that matter, doesn't forgive. But would Andy be prepared to take it on? Probably not. He'd rat on her sooner or later.' (p.231.) Economic opportunity and the pattern make no Prince Charmings among the lovers any more than among the husbands. Andy puts the dilemma to Elsie exactly. ' "Suppose we do go off together. What happens? Sooner or later you start wanting to settle down ... Only natural for you, I mean. But it isn't for me. And then you'd be wanting me to turn into something different. Well, suppose I did and, mind you, I'm not saying I would, where'd you be then? You'd be just where you were last week only a darned sight worse off. Because, believe me, if I did settle down I wouldn't be as good at it as that John of yours."' (p.223.) Elsie concludes that she must try, 'love or no love, to build a life for him [her husband] and for Michael [her son].' (P.225). The result of defeated aspiration in the regular pattern of marriage is not as stark as this. But the resultant underlying and powerful frustra- tion, loneliness, and lack of love67 is a reservoir for bitterness and hatred 65James Courage, The Fifth Child, London, 1948, pp.212 and 213. 66Included in Speaking For Ourselves. Quotation at p.94. 67There is an illuminating chapter which I have discovered runs parallel, but in 52 which provides the sour discordant ground-tone recorded in New Zealand fiction. Young people in their early thirties look back upon their period of revolt and see false and foolish adolescent hope. They feel that they were trying to 'kick against the pricks' and that facts have taught them better. Failure to succeed in bucking the system precedes quiescent assent on the part of young married people and breeds a conviction, shared by their parents in their day, that the children should be protected by being thoroughly engrained with those values that time has 'proven'. Failure for one generation's young people thus helps to ensure that they will create the conditions for the failure of the next. If New Zealand often seems a conservative arid country, and its politics, for one example, are frequently so, 6 s this relapse into convinced conform- ity, with its undercover motivation of unsatisfied bitterness, may be part of the explanation. It may also help to explain the short creative lives of many who hope to become writers, and, more generally, what sometimes appears to be a frequent failure of promising men in their twenties to make a contribution equal to their talents during the next twenty years of their lives. This convinced and self-protective conformity bears also on the whole question of the reception of New Zealand writing by New Zealanders. New Zealand writing is conspicuously plain and straightforward. The very few experimental writers in another vein than the realistic, such as those in the magazines Hilltop and Arachne, have obviously suffered from a lack of solid beams from which to spin their insubstantial webs. Without the establishment of a local Troll ope or a Dickens a local Firbank or Waugh cannot fly far. The number of experiments is, then, tiny and the bulk of New Zealand fiction has had nothing of the esoteric or cryptic about it. Yet it is ignored by the public or resisted quite as much as if it had been thrown down from the highest of ivory towers. The reason is obvious enough. The more clearly the writer produces the illusion of reality, the more exactly he probes for the nerve ends of life here, the less likely he is to be read as long as a great many of his potential public are trying to forget, to ignore, to cover their defeats. Against the intensity of the creative writer's exposure of what lies beneath broader terms, to the general thesis advanced here, on the relation between mental disease and New Zealand's 'organization of social and economic life', in Mental Health In New Zealand (Chapter XII) by Professor Emest Beaglehole. He adverts there to Karen Homey. The present writer found Dr Homey's general picture of the relation of lovelessness and lack of affection to neuroticism in, for example, The Neurotic Personality Of Our Time, London, 1936, and also Erich Fromm's The Fear Of Freedom, London, 1942, stimulating reading in expanding his thesis from reviews. The thesis could be linked, too, with the concept of anomy dealt with in a recent article (to be continued) in Political Science, Victoria University College, Wellington, Vol. 3, No. 2, by R. H. Brookes. 6SThe belief, beloved of schoolbooks and orators, that New Zealand is or was a laboratory of political experiment rests largely on the work accomplished in two brief periods of active legislation, roughly 1891-8 and 1935-8. Prior to each of these eruptions the New Zealand voter had first to experience depression, then an attempt to revamp conservatism by spending proposals (Vogel in 1884 and Ward in 1928), then a further period of negative conservatism, before the risk was run. 53 the crust of everyday is pitted the full conservative strength of the pattern. Where it is not ignored the clinical report of the writer on the state of his patient is answered by the charge that the writer is perverse and unhealthy in mind for having noticed anything amiss. 69 From making this charge it is but a step to laying a further charge- that to portray, however responsibly, the failures of society is in itself contributing to cause those failures. 7o The artist has probably been saved from becoming a scapegoat so far by the smallness of his audience. He may yet need, like Anatole France, to make 'the principal business of his life doing up dynamite in bonbon wrappers'. 71 The artist should certainly heed the discharge of frustration and bitterness on the heads of more numerous but equally isolated groups in the community which has, in the past, been spectacularly out of proportion to any 'crime' committed, even including the crime of difference. The excessive strength of public feeling about the laziness and good- for-nothing qualities of government white-collar workers in the twenties, the unemployed in the thirties, wharf-labourers in the forties and 'townies' widely in country areas, is partly a measure of the brackish pools of emotion, fed by the pattern, which must find an outlet. If the writers must risk this emotion being directed at them they can also take it as a confirmation that their underlying analysis does not lack in substance. If, in fact, this feeling of purposelessness, of frustration and bitterness arises in the way that has been suggested and implied by our writers then the family as it is in this pattern is serving as a centre of constrained conformity instead of willing cohesion, of discontent instead of content. Those who look to the integrated family as the basic institution of any successful variant of Western European culture-and it appears self- evidently to be so-have a duty to face the problem if our basic institution is not functioning properly. Cliches about the value of ideal family life do not meet the problem if family life is far from ideal and the question of how to improve it is raised. Rebellion against the failures of our pattern is too frequently dismissed, in advance, as rebellion against an idealized statement of how each institution ought to work. That is, the rebel is accused of rebelling against what he agrees with because he points out and rebels against the fact that institutions are working in a different direction and in a worse fashion. The continuing rebel is our rarest product, for the reasons outlined earlier, and his news from outside, presented as art, is worth intelligent consideration. Certainly the writers who continue to write continue to rebel. They concern themselves, moreover, with figures of rebellion, with men alone, with the occasional violent outbursts of individuals striking blindly against the symbols of authority, with the young coming to awareness 69There were some notable examples of this at the Writers' Conference held at Christchurch in 1951. 70Edmund Wilson in Classics and Commercials, London, 1951, first chapter entitled 'Archibald MacLeish and the Word', does a wonderful wrecking job on MacLeish's arguments laying just such a charge. 71Quoted by Edmund Wilson, op. cit., p.473. 54 and taking sides against their surroundings, with the lost or venturesome few against the many. Not only Man Alone but also de Mauny's The Huntsman in His Career and the none too successful Outlaw's Progress of R. M. Burdon were novels directly concerned with the theme of contor- ted solitary life exploding into nearly-meaningless, violent crime. The subsequent implacable hunt by monolithic authority contains something of a parable about the solid pressure of society upon the individual. Violence, homicidal or suicidal, in Davin's Cliffs of Fall and Roads From Home, in Ruth Park's Witch's Thorn and in Gaskell's 'All Part of the Game' 7 z is directly related to collapse under pressure from society which cannot be met. This pressure also underlies the distorted personality of the murderer in Frank Sargeson's most powerful short story 'A Great Day' 73 and of Henry in Gaskell's 'You Can't Go Three Days'. 74 The man alone appears again, farming by himself or as a farm-labourer, in Roderick Finlayson's Tidal Creek, in Sargeson's I Saw in My Dream and That Summer and short stories like Sargeson's 'Making of a New Zealander', 7s Gaskell's 'Holiday'76 and Phillip Wilson's 'A Change of Heart'. 77 This concern with the isolated individual, isolated in every sense, who may or may not explode into violent gestures under the distorting weight of a pattern he does not understand, is the writers' way of ex- amining the society they depict. The mismade character structure is not without pattern any more than the normal character structure. The forces which the social milling machine exerts to mould and trim its sound citizen coins out of the child's malleable alloy may be more accur- ately gauged from the bad bent pennies that result when the alloy fails under pressure. The writer cannot dismantle the whole milling machine but he can exhibit the bent pennies and help his society to draw its own conclusions about how sound coins as well as unsound coins are made, and at what cost. The depiction of the gestures of violence produced in the society also raises the question of the values from which the artist works and his answers to the question how far society works well or ill. It is plain that faced with the problem of acting by giving whole-hearted uncompromising approval to the attitudes of the pattern, the New Zealand writer stops short. When, like the boy of John Kelly's story 'For Ever and Ever', 78 artists must act alongside society, must shoot the hawk which attacks from the necessities of its nature, they, like the boy, do not participate fully. Bill Pearson's gripping story of the profound uneasiness of soldiers shooting the thief in their midst 79 clearly raises this question of participat- ing with society against the anti-social crime. So does Erik de Mauny's novel which ends with his hero, Villiers, a journalist become soldier, 12Landfall 13. 731ncluded in A Man and His Wife, Wellington, 1940. 741ncluded in The Big Game. 751ncluded in A Man and His Wife. 761ncluded in The Big Game. 77Landfall 19. 78Landfal/ 9. 79'Social Catharsis' in Landfall 4. 55 killing a character obviously based on Graham. 8o This crime remains for Villiers something of a criticism of society since society is shown to be directly involved in making the criminal capable of the crime. Villiers concludes thus on whether he should shoot to kill: 'If it should be the act of another, I should have to consent to it, because I should have no power over it. But by making it my own, I make the responsibility mine: and I do not consent.' 8 1 The writer takes the responsibility of his real share in what he feels are the best of the community values and in their name acts but does not consent by making a criticism of the discrepancies, the contradictions, and the shortcomings of the pattern of life by showing individuals caught up in it or distorted by it. To the simple materialism, shielded and con- firmed by the puritan moralities, the artist opposes the results of that attitude and demonstrates the insufficiency of it when confronted by crisis. The facts of death and failure and violence, as has been exemplified, are often juxtaposed. by New Zealand writers with the framework of the pattern grown insufficient to support the crises it produces. The young man whose mistress has just died of an abortion in Dan Davin's 'The Quiet One' is helpless. ' "So that's how it is," he said. "She's !dead." I didn't say anything. I just stood there, wishing I was anywhere else in the world. "If only I'd known," he said. "Christ, man, I'd have married her a hundred times, kid and all." He stopped. His mind must have been going over and over this ground for days. He gave a laugh suddenly, such a queer, savage sort of a laugh that I jumped. "If it'd been twins, even," he said.' 8 z At its quietest, in James Courage's intense and fine-drawn short story, 'After the Earthquake', the death of an old and invalid woman, and the daughter, Annie, who has nursed her, thereupon taking a lover, produces in the Blakiston family who visit Annie only an inquisitive comment from the Blakistons' son which is answered by a symbolic 'Shut up about it, that's all.' 83 The incapacity of the Blakistons to express real sympathy and the doubt raised as to their sensitivity to most aspects of the situation are movingly real, as are Annie's bemused reactions. A. P. Gaskell sums up the whole failure of the patterned attitude to deal with tragedy in his story of the girl enduring a beer and singsong party at which all know her fiance has just been killed overseas. 84 80Stanley Graham, a married West Coast farmer, aged 40 and with two children, had his cowshed condemned by the Health Department and was in financial difficulties. After threatening a neighbour, and later a policeman, he shot and killed four policemen who came to his home. During the subsequent search, involving hundreds, he left the edge of the bush to return to his home three times, the first time killing two young men guarding his home. He was killed on 20 October 1941, after a twelve day manhunt. 81The Huntsman in His Career, London, 1949, p.259. There is more than a hint of elementary existentialism in this soliloquy; but de Mauny's italics pick out the key sentence and the simpler truth. 82Landfall 11, p.239. 83Landfall 8, p.307. 84Jn New Zealand New Writing, No. 4. and included in The Big Game. 56 In the name of what selection of elements in the national scene do the writers point to deficiencies and condemn? When Mr J. C. Reid says of John Mulgan's hero in Man Alone that 'There is no room for things of the spirit in Johnson and his like, nor in the sort of society they would build' 8 s it would seem that Mr Reid has mistaken the writer's report of symptoms and his diagnosis for the writer's prescription. At even a first reading of Frank Sargeson's That Summer or John Mulgan's Man Alone one cannot but be struck by the writers' attitude of unjudging pity for their driven and socially damned characters. 8 6 That pity proceeds from the writers' sense of the deprivation of things of the spirit in their charac- ters' lives, if Mr Reid wishes it put in those terms, things of the spirit such as charity, humanity, and joy. The lack of these qualities or their distortion by the social pattern is what makes victims instead of whole people out of the subjects of the writers. In the search for these qualities a few writers have indicated a belief in 'natural man'. Roderick Finlayson in his pamphlet Our Life in This Land81 has adopted a belief, a la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the simple life of the soil. With this is linked Mr Finlayson's great admiration for the Maoris, which stands out in all his books. Frank Sargeson's equivocal end to I Saw in My Dream suggests a catastrophic finish to the persist- ence here of mismade civilization, and the character of Cedric, who walks out of his parents' shack and almost out of society after a boyhood of friendship with Maori children, is an erratic warning sporadically making an appearance throughout the story. Ruth Park makes her Maori character, Georgie Wi, into the best Catholic in the district, a successful patriarchal father, sole protector to the European waif-heroine, and a happy man. Professor Beaglehole adds some substance to the dream by pointing out that 'The Maori rate of psychosis is about one-third of that of the non-Maori population' 8 8 and he suggests the possibility that tribal support and security in the trials of 'the competitive aggressive world of the Pakeha' may help to account for the difference. 8 9 It is remarkable, in view of the public's attitude to the Maori outlook, that that outlook should have been held up at all in literature, or that stories including Maori characters should be disproportionately numer- ous. But this does not imply that most writers stand with an appropriately localized version of the noble savage. The superiority of the Maori in certain adjustments has been mainly used for contrast. With the excep- tion of Roderick Finlayson, the writers' true platform of values must be sought for elsewhere. Those values can be descried easily enough. They are the values of humanitarian liberalism, values which have always been present in New Zealand, though less often dominantly so than many critics of those 85Reid, op. cit., p.60. 86Cf. the present writer's review in Landfal/3, p. 221. 87R. Finlayson, Our Life In This Land, Auckland, 1940. 88E. Beaglehole, op. cit., p.28. This is the more notable since in other institu- tional populations Maoris are present in more than even proportion to popula- tion. 89Jbid. p.93. 57 values assert. The writers speak largely on the basis of those elements which do not stem mainly from the puritan tradition imported and in- congruously set down in a land fit for human ease and companionship. They would brick off the blind alleys of work to no purpose, that is, to no purpose save socially respectable accumulation. The stereotypes of men's and women's roles which no longer fit the facts they would like to see adjusted in the knowledge of a reality exposed to the light and air of public recognition and discussion. If the writers were professional sociologists or professionally con- cerned to see that the family-the central institution in the creation and enjoyment of our values-ran smoothly, then they might advise, without inconsistency, that personal crises which do occur should be met, not with fear and shame, but with greatly extended psychological services to supplement the physical welfare services existing. The social burdens of women are many: in a world of scarce bungalows there is no substitute for the assistance once provided by the three-generation unit; ever more rapidly changing circumstances to which the children must be educated also unfortunately diminish the aid which the elderly can provide; and this more complicated life must be lived without readily available help in family planning and guidance and allied matters, and without creches, kindergartens and home aides, which the mother often does not know to ask for even where they do exist. All these burdens could be lightened. There would be more than a possibility, the writers imply, that this much release from avoidable strain and distortion of all kinds would produce people capable of squarely confronting the unavoidable crises of life with a more Christian understanding of their implications. For our writers work in the light cast by liberal humanitarianism, which is as strongly embedded in Christianity and western values generally as the elements in our society that the writers attack by exposing their effects. If humanitarianism is, as is frequently said, not enough and demode, let philosophers, theologians and sociologists explore the ground and find in sizable, usable quantities, within our society, the ore of some- thing that can be cast into an alternative to our present and to the future which the writers imply might be achieved on the basis of that present. Meanwhile the attitude which the New Zealand writer takes to his society, and which informs his work, will continue to be based on the possibility here of a truly human ease and depth of living and on an attack on the distortions produced by an irrelevant puritanism of mis- placed demands and guilts. The artist must sound his trumpet of insight until the walls of Jericho-the pattern as it is-fall down.

58 COMMENTARIES

JOHN SUMMERS THE GROUP SHOW, 1952

CHru:sTCHURCH's annual Group Show exhibits the work of painters who, realizing that nature is simply the point of departure for the creation of a personal vision of the world, neither slavishly imitate her nor rely too closely upon the personal techniques of those who have preceded them. The achievements of the Group are, as a whole, modest, but the sheer maintenance of integrity in a hostile environment is worth corn- mending. The extent of this hostility may be gauged by the witticisms of even the freely-invited first-nighters who may say that the 'frames' are good, or suggest that the qualities of painting are so elusive that while one can churn out 'reams of phoney art criticism' one can presumably never write the just line. The existence of a personal vision does not, however, mean that it is everywhere triumphant. In particular in the 1952 Show the work of a guest artist, Mr C.O. Jansen, could hardly be described as distinguished. In these wide landscapes set in a low key the natural forms are bounded by facile flowing lines without any sensitive relationship to the rocks and hills which they define. This means that in the interests of a loose romantic- ism about our hills and mountains all true bulk, strength and reality has been lost, leaving only the stereotyped and the second-hand: a state not in any way compensated for in the dull harmonies achieved by using closely related colours. Mr W.A. Sutton is another artist who as often misses as he strikes a sympathetic chord, but for a different reason. Underneath the competent techniques of a 'Venus and Adonis' or a 'Peter Liley' etc. where lies Mr Sutton? In his 'Venus and Adonis' (despite the artist's joke about the Impressionists in another picture-a frame full of graveyard pebbles) he applied his colour like an uninspired Van Gogh. Mr Sutton lacks any consistent sense of direction although at times a sudden gust shakes him with an astonishing result. The vein of humour, his 'kick', is the safest bet in an artist of this calibre and perhaps explains why in his past work I have most liked that which, I have reason to believe, he takes with least seriousness. Picasso is often taken as an example to refute the assertion that a characteristic vision, or if you like, palette, separates the genuine artist from his uninspired contemporaries. It is forgotten that Picasso is an exception rather than the rule in art history, and that most of the modes of painting which he has adopted typify different periods of his life, not different moods in a single week. There is then a distinction to be made between the man who really experiences successive different ways of 59 thinking and feeling about the world and the one who picks his way through the styles of the last twenty years none of which can be truly said to be his own. In the Group Show itself, as I have suggested, there are painters who use a palette of their own: they are Dorothy Manning, Olivia Spencer Bower, Rita Angus, Doris Lusk, Colin McCahon, Leo Bensemann, and M.T. Woollaston. At times in their work the vision is dead but the per- sonal elements can always be discerned waiting to be fused together in an inspired moment. In their lyrical approach to landscape Dorothy Manning and Olivia Spencer Bower might be sisters, both having a delicate precision of wash. Miss Manning's work is quiet and the poetic way in which she projected herself into the depth and coolness of the sea in 'The Warm Cliffs' might easily be overlooked. Despite a light touch the hills in her painting retain their bulk. One has heard of 'dangerous curves' in a far different context but Miss Bower's 'Back Street, Queenstown' deserves this warning, the houses leaning too much to the Disneyan conception of the pretty, picturesque or hobgoblinish which is the enemy of the individual interpre- tation. 'At "Steepdown", Kaikoura' made the greatest impression on me in her work for this show, being an arrangement of hills at once vast and complex, leading the mind down from spur to spur through a crystal blue atmosphere and then out again to the distant mountains: essentially a painting in line and wash where each colour rings against its neighbour and each stroke marks a declivity or an ascent. The precision and craftsmanship which is so obvious in Rita Angus's work always gives pleasure, though for me this year 'Protea' gave greatest satisfaction. Its four outward flaring and half-opened blooms seen from different angles, so that you actually look over the cupped petals of one towards the centre, evoked a strong sense of that mysterious quickening which is life. The painting in its effect is the visual counterpart of Dylan Thomas's 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower'. 'Still Life' with its scattered fruits, pineapple and pumpkin on a blue background, suggests that Rita Angus is better when she can use the single, simple and unified pattern of a plant than when she arranges the elements of her painting for herself. Doris Lusk has a masculine grasp of landscape, being more concerned with the vast wide sweep than with details. In 'Plains from Port Hills' we look down through a row of pines into a valley which opens out on to the Canterbury plains. The pines across the front and the sides of the valley on either side bind together an otherwise unmanageably large theme, and as it is, interest does flag a little in the monotony of the far distance. There appeared to be no aesthetic justification for closing the folds of the gullies on the left hand side where they run into the main valley. 'Lyttelton', which looked like a pen and ink and wash painting, is a rapid improvised sketch characterized by sinewy vigour. It missed out only in the top right where cloud and hill did not emerge with any clarity from the maze of lines. 60 The religious vein which has been vigorously explored by Colin McCahon appears to be coming to an end. There is a noticeable feeling in 'There is Only One Direction' and 'Crucifixion' that the artist is copying himself in order to try and sustain the original inspiration. There is, however, a new interest in the human body-hitherto used mainly as a symbolical device-noticeable in the 'Crucifixion' and finding fuller ex- pression in the 'Nude', a tempera study of a woman drying herself with a towel. In the latter Mr McCahon has carefully built up his forms in a way that shows more craft than it gives pleasure. Of his landscapes the large triptych 'On Building Bridges' left me unmoved, chiefly because the background was not sufficiently alive. 'Landscape', on the other hand, saw Mr McCahon at his best. Here a magnificent stretch of plain is divided into paddocks, each of which is distinguished from the other after the manner of a painting by Paul Klee but without that almost niggling quality which prevents me from ranking the latter as any other than a great minor painter. Mr McCahon's drawings and sketches were nearly all charged with imaginative life. With a few strokes, washes or smudgy masses they all drew out those qualities of hilliness, storm, or quiet of evening, which they had set out to capture. The techniques employed will nevertheless have appeared crude to those who have paid too little attention to the sketches of well established painters. A direct contrast to this seizing the essence of a scene in a drawing was evident in Leo Bensemann's highly polished Frontispiece for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. The heavy-thewed, young, and well-fed mariner bore so little relation to the hollow men pacing below the deck that the macabre became comic. The title page, on the other hand, to the Love Poems where the drawing is half way between a picture and a printer's decoration possessed the right degree of impersonality and grace. In two pictures, one of a tree and the other of a carnation, done, if I remember rightly, in pen tinted with water-colour, an effect like very fine and delicate calligraphy was achieved. The right choice of colour density loosened what in some other of Mr Bensemann's work tends to become a set and rigid formula. The person who said in regard to M.T. Woollaston's work 'Thank heaven he has got rid of the Mapua mud at last' gave one of the main reasons why his paintings in this show gave so much pleasure. Despite a lack of solidity in the hills of 'Morning Light, Moana' this painting with its sure description of the feeling of richness and wonder which will overtake one seeing a new day begin is the fruit of a disciplined and authentic romanticism. Painted in Mr Woollaston's usual blues and purples running into browns-allowing for the refinement of his painting which has rid it of the 'mud'-it presents a most individual interpretation of the New Zealand landscape. 'Landscape with Tower, Greymouth' with its toppling incoherence reminded me that Greymouth is, after all, on the brink of the earthquake line which runs down the Pacific. This still leaves the work of two young guest artists untouched: John Drawbridge and Barry Miller, both of whom, rightly perhaps, seem more to be seeking than to have found themselves. Mr Drawbridge's 61 lithograph 'Woman' showed a sensitive handling of black, both in the volume and in line, though not quite striking the personal note. 'Self Portrait' where the flesh tones were translated into their expressionistic equivalents, eerie greens and yellows, though it has its antecedents in Munch and Rouault is not overshadowed by them. Sometimes ex- pressionistic art is content to grasp the bare symbol of an emotion, losing by this any strong sense of form. It is interesting therefore to note how solidly this head has been built up, out of colours which offer greater problems than true flesh tones. Mr Miller's anxiety to find and communicate a powerful emotion has turned his 'Death of a Youth' and 'Head of a Girl' into a species of the histrionic, where the stillness· of grief suddenly becomes a horrible fixity of expression. In the 'Death of a Youth' there is nevertheless an interest- ing effort to built up out of cylinders a pyramidal monument to grief, and if it had been left to these shapes to suggest the weight of tragedy, instead of to the tortured expressions, the feeling the painter aimed at might have been conveyed. The Group Show contained other paintings I have not felt sufficiently strongly about to comment on, and also displays of architecture, wood- work, pottery and modelling.

R. T. ROBERTSON THREE GUINEAS-LESS TAX

WRITERS AND RADIO

I SUPPOSE that nearly all practising writers in this country have spoken from the radio, and I am sure that most of them after a little experience must have been confused by the fact that they could get almost the same money for both an unrehearsed discussion and a painstaking script: in each case about three guineas, less tax. That is because the New Zealand Broad- casting Service is a medium of entertainment, principally music, and it pays all its 'performers' at the average rate of one guinea an hour, the basic rate for musicians and for radio actors and comperes. Unlike a true entertainment medium-the stage, for example-there is no possi- bility of star fees; although some of the best broadcasters are offered frequent and regular employment-again at this average rate, for which there are several reasons. The Broadcasting Service is part of the Public Service and pays its staff average wages with no reward for special abilities or special programmes; much the same applies to its performers. The Service is also a monopoly and only in the Commercial Division is it possible to leave the Service 62 and still be employed by it at rates that reflect the open market of Aus- tralian or American radio. The Service has also found that it can always get someone to do the job at the money it offers; this is a reflection on the unprofessional organization of writing in this country which, like amateur singing, is at a disadvantage in radio compared with the strongly organized and semi-professional union of musicians. The Talks Section of the Broadcasting Service has always had strong links with professional journalism and therefore has usually considered any piece of writing for radio as a 'job' of journalism for which there are recognized rates of pay generally based on the time that it can be assumed necessary to write the piece-an average rate of pay-plus a bonus for the merit of the idea or the standing of the writer. This bonus is easier to obtain in journalism than it is in radio for there is in the latter a fixed schedule of fees for both and music that must be applied as the Public Service salary scales are applied-regardless of merit. The only notable excep- tions to the scale are overseas visitors who sometimes ask and obtain several times the normal fees. (The assumption in regard to these visitors is that it costs them money to get here and to stay here.) The whole point of this average rate is that the Service has difficulty in deciding the value of an original piece of music or writing; it has no schedules of fees that can be applied for original work, it is sometimes slow to recognize real worth in a writer or composer, and it has no contact with its listeners and hence cannot find out whether a broadcast has been widely listened to and appreciated or not. The Service recognizes the problem and has tried to deal with it in special ways. With the introduction of the YC programmes in 1950 an extra fee or 'loading' was paid for YC talks on the assumption that these were better in quality than talks used on a YA programme. In January of last year this was abandoned chiefly because it was a cumbersome system but partly, I feel, because the Talks Officers at the YA stations varied considerably in their opinion of what was and what wasn't YC material. Instead the Service now recognizes what has always applied- that a good talk will be used more often than a poor one. Where previously the fee for a talk had been two guineas, and three guineas if broadcast more than once, under the new scale the fee was three guineas for a talk (of fifteen minutes duration or two thousand words as most talks are), four guineas for two broadcasts of that talk, five guineas for up to eight broadcasts and six guineas for 'unrestricted' broadcast. Even higher fees could be earned for certain talks; 'Lookout' speakers got eight guineas-or one guinea from each of the eight stations from which they broadcast simultaneously. The important principle of paying more each time a talk is used also applied to discussion groups, each member of which got another guinea if the discussion were re-broadcast. The Service also tried to encourage original writing by reducing from three guineas to one and a half the fee for merely arranging prose or poetry programmes of fifteen minutes or longer. This would have been acceptable had there been a compensating increase in the fees offered for creative literary work, but these were still left very vaguely defined. 63 With the introduction of the YC verse readings copyright for spoken material had to be settled for the first time in the Service's history; musical copyright is of course well organized and costs the Service not less than £15,000 a year. A copyright fee of ten shillings and sixpence per hundred lines or part thereof per broadcast (with a minimum of four broadcasts) was offered for the use of copyright verse and prose but it was found that some publishing houses overseas weren't sufficiently interested in the two guineas to answer the Service's correspondence. And American writers were so difficult to pay that they were generally left alone. At the end of last year the fees for spoken material were again increased but the same scale operates with the exception that anthologists, arrangers and editors of verse and prose programmes now get from four to seven guineas per programme. And the writer of verse or prose may now be asked more often to speak from the YC stations about literature or to read his own verse. Several new poetry programmes have given the poets a chance to read their own verse or have it read and several new books published have been read over the air (in part at least) by their authors, such as Dr A. H. McLintock and Mr A. H. Reed. This is a beginning and indicates that the Service is helping writers. But it could do much more, and it would if both listeners and writers were more aware of radio-its art and opportunities. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the possibilities in writing for radio, especially for the younger writer. I believe that radio needs the work of imaginative writers because listeners are becoming more critical of the spoken word. The age of amateurs in all branches of radio has passed and it is time it was finished with in spoken programmes, for unless talks are worth hearing television will wipe them from the air, leaving only the steady stream of music that makes up at present more than seventy per cent of the programmes. And I believe that writers should write for radio for three reasons; it offers ready money, it offers an immediate and large audience, and it is a medium with its own special forms and possibilities. I feel that the only basis on which a listener accepts as human and relevant the talk he hears from the box on the mantelpiece is that of honesty-sincerity of speech and conviction of thought. As in conversa- tion, what is said must be worth saying in that situation, although in radio it is chiefly the lack of any specific situation that makes radio an art. When we say that 'the microphone does not lie' we refer to much more than its scientifically accurate reproduction of the human voice. We mean that every shade of indecision and every false inflection or accent is immediately noticed either consciously in dislike of the speaker or unconsciously in antagonism to what is being said. The aid of the face and figure in conversation is lacking. This sincerity of speech or natural- ness is the technique of professional radio speakers, just as journalists have to try and sound convinced and convincing; we have all heard the speaker brought in front of the microphone for the first time and detected the embarrassment in his artificial voice even though he is speaking of what is perfectly well known to him. Announcers and radio actors must be people with voices that sound as if they believe in what they are saying 64 and each must acquire the art of hearing in a disembodied way, as a radio listener hears, his voice saying the words he is reading. A great deal of thought goes into writing advertisements, announce- ments and radio plays to make them sound straightforward and con- vincing, for there must also be in all radio speech the sense of an honest conviction of thought. It is this conviction which the imaginative writer shows in original work that is most important in radio, where slipshod thinking even in an announcement is immediately shown in the listener's failing to grasp whatever is intended. An example of this is the language in which news broadcasts are written. A few years ago the usual style and cliches of journalism were freely used, aiming for the same effects of surprise and importance that are still found in American news broad- casts. But news readers found great difficulty in conveying the meaning of many journalistic phrases and a simpler language and plainer style are now used, so that the facts are conveyed in a paragraph of radio news much more simply than in a newspaper paragraph. (This is, of course, partly influenced by radio commentating.) And, as in conversation, the thought of each sentence is unconsciously tested by the listener. Most imaginative writers have to be approached and invited to broadcast; I suggest that the writer take the initiative and ask the Service for the higher rates and the greater employment it is well able to afford him. Higher fees, first: fifty pounds would be a reasonable sum for a short story when you consider that the Service buys the complete broad- casting rights (in New Zealand only) and would be able to broadcast it up to fifty times (from twenty odd stations) in two years. For the writer, the Service would publicize his name and his story, and since it holds no publication rights, this might assist publication of a book of short stories. As for employment, it is surely the prerogative of writers to talk about books. At present the Service in both National and Commercial Divisions broadcasts about twelve separate book reviews from five to fifteen minutes in length each week. For these the Service pays about twenty guineas a week to reviewers, who are generally professional or amateur journalists. I find it interesting but a little sad that the best money in radio is to be earned by talking about books and it is symptomatic that the greatest increase in fees in the National Division has been for book reviews, after the Commercial Division began ZB Book Review. In general the Commercial Division has always paid higher fees than the National Division: it can find out by sales reaction whether the talk was worth the money or more; it generally employs professional writers who are prepared to haggle, and it also broadcasts less of the National kind of spoken programmes; when it does it broadcasts the programme from all its stations and makes the fullest use of it. An example of most of these points is the ZB Book Review. Most people in this country listen to that Review on Sunday evenings, perhaps because of the barren National programmes preceding its appearance at 9.30 p.m. The YC stations are often religiously devoted to opera and the spoken word from the YA's can't compete with 'Ray's A Laugh', 'We Beg to Differ' and 'Take It From Here'. The Review is also interesting 65 in itself-three speakers, none for more than four minutes at a stretch, and all smoothly presented by the Chairman. He received until recently five guineas per session, and the work involved is not to be compared with on a two thousand word script for a National talk which would probably earn three guineas. The result of this competition from the Commercial Division was that many of the usual reviewers refused to do a National review at two guineas for fifteen minutes when they could get three guineas for three minutes from the opposition. Consequently when the National book programme 'Bookshop' was begun in 1951 it offered fees of two to three guineas for five minutes and concentrated on finding new amateur writers to talk about books in general. I think it fair to say that as yet it hasn't the following of the ZB Book Review, but it has brought many new people to the microphone and it doesn't use regular reviewers, as ZB Book Review does. This competition has forced up the price of book reviews, but there is no competition for original writing, so that I feel 'it is up to the Service to act as a patron of writing in this country. A general obligation to patronage, particularly of singers and musicians, is recognized every year in the Annual Reports of the Broadcasting Service, under the heading 'Local Talent'. All singing teachers know that their pupils' only hope of making money from their talent is to sing on the radio and most of the reasonably efficient pupils do so; the teachers themselves are often the highest paid soloists the Service uses. But they also know that their fees are very small compared with those of the fifty-odd semi-professional musicians who play in the dance band and orchestra maintained by each Y A station. To take an extreme case, of the money available for local talent from one Y A station last year more than sixty per cent went to the orchestra and dance band which together fill only one hour of that station's one hundred and thirteen and a half hours of transmission a week. The music played by these orchestras is not very often home-grown and their performances are not recorded for use elsewhere. It is no wonder that local repertory players, who would like to do more reading and acting and earn more than the half dozen guineas a year that the lucky few get, are envious of the musicians. Many of the original talks broadcast each year are simply information about the writer's own subject and are usually given by a scientist, teacher or some other specialist. These talks are commissioned by the Talks Officers and the speakers are chosen either for their unrivalled knowledge of their subject or because they can talk about it in an interesting fashion. Any subject discussed in this way is then usually dropped from the spoken programmes until a decent interval has elapsed, when the process is repeated. Of the two hundred and seventy-one talks in seventy-three series offered for general use from Y A stations last year one hundred and nine were what I call 'informative', and nearly all were written by specialists. The rest of the talks I have put in two classes-personal talks, generally about the speaker's own life, and travel talks; there were one hundred of these personal talks and fifty-two travel talks. It is interesting that whereas women wrote only nine of the informative talks, they wrote 66 thirty-eight travel talks and fifty-eight personal talks. It is chiefly the establishment of the excellent YA Women's Sessions that has given women writers their opportunity and in general talks they .outnumber men by about nine to five. These orie hundred personal talks were not all the work of writers- not nearly all, for the Service holds the belief that there is at least one good radio talk in everyone and to that extent encourages nearly every- one to 'have a go'. The sheer interest of the experience in a talk is not now the criterion it was but it is still hard to turn down a good yarn that with a little tinkering will make good entertainment for the average listener. I feel that travel talks and informative talks have little place in radio, even though they are more popular in the programmes: in Novem- ber last two hundred and seventy-one talks were broadcast from National stations (according to Listener programmes); of these one hundred and forty-one were informative and only ninety-one were written by pro- fessional writers and journalists. Writers should, therefore, offer more imaginative writing to radio, but they will find that they must compete with the two kinds of writers of talks I have mentioned-the amateur and the expert. On a rough average of the talks figures for last year and for last Novem- ber it would seem that each talk is broadcast about ten times. This is much more often than the average of five or six years ago (and for the life of the recorded disc may be rather high for today). The chief reason for this increase in the number of broadcasts per talk is the increased hours of transmission for talks: in 1949 approximately one thousand hours of talks were broadcast, in 1952 probably over eight thousand hours, in a total for the whole Service of over one hundred thousand hours. The percentage of talks in the programmes has increased from 3.9 in 1949 to 6.41 in the year ended March, 1952. Most of the talks are written and delivered by people in this country, which is a much happier position than exists in either music or drama on the air. By far the greater part of the music broadcast is imported on disc; the only talks imported come from the BBC Transcription Service and give us speakers and subjects we would not hear locally. A large number of BBC feature programmes are imported: about seven BBC features are broadcast each day in National Programmes, eighteen each week from the YA and YZ stations alone. In November of last year of the BBC spoken features offered by these stations each week three were talks, six were discussions and nine were programmes-literary, historical and informative. Sixteen New Zealand programmes were broadcast in the same month by all National stations and they involved eleven writers, and over fifty speakers, about half of them professional. I would not like to miss some of the BBC feature programmes but I would like to see more New Zealand programmes especially those involving writers out- side the Service. Writers new to this form can begin by adapting a book; of the fifty-four programmes bought from overseas last year eleven were book adaptations. The writer should then learn how to write a good documentary programme. Apart from a few technical tricks all he needs 67 is a good sense of the material to hand and the imagination to make something creative of it. And he shouldn't let anyone in or out of the Service tell him it isn't 'radio' because no one but the individual listener can tell you that. It is best to try it out on the recording technicians; if, after they have heard so many productions, yours interests them, then it must have life in it. These two difficulties for the writer of spoken programmes-importa- tions and a technique-are even more important in radio drama, which I'm not fully qualified to discuss in detail. I realize there is a greater demand for radio plays than can be satisfied by either the playwrights or the producers of this country and many radio plays, especially serials, are imported on disc. Not counting the BBC plays and dramatic features, more than fifty plays (in about two thousand three hundred episodes) were imported by the National Division last year, mostly from Australia. Where possible plays are bought as scripts and produced in Wellington or Auckland (this year also in Dunedin and Christchurch). The yearly fig- ures of the Production Department are difficult to relate from year to year but over the last five financial years, 1948-52, two facts stand out: the num- ber of presentations of plays and short stories produced in New Zealand has more than doubled (in short stories it has trebled), although the per- centage of broadcast hours for plays has increased only 1.59 per cent. Allowing for the great increase in broadcast hours over the last five years this still means that plays and short stories recorded in New Zealand are being broadcast more often. On the other hand for the same period the number of scripts offered to the Service has declined by nearly half and the number purchased is now only a quarter of those bought in 1948. The proportion of short stories in these figures is very difficult to establish but I should say less than one-third of the scripts bought has been short stories and of all the scripts bought (seventy-six in the year ended March, 1952) less than one-sixth were written in this country. This is poor, but the fault does not lie entirely with the Service. Its standard of production is very high-higher than the BBC's in certain respects-but the quality of the plays and short stories is in general set by listeners (or what the Service thinks listeners will like) and many are pot-boilers or thrillers. If New Zealand writers are to enter this field of popular writing they must learn something of the technique necessary and desired; most of the New Zealand scripts submitted to the Service haven't the slightest idea of a radio play or radio story, both by now well established forms of writing. Writers must, therefore, do three things: they must acquire a radio technique, they must know the organization of the Service, and they must take the initiative in offering ideas and scripts to the Service. I am not going to talk about radio technique because it is a very vaguely defined accomplishment that only constant practice and complete familiarity can establish. There are very few people even in the Service who have any clear ideas on it at all. Nobody knows when a radio talk is successful nor what makes it so, although I hope that some of the experimental work of the BBC Listener Research and Birmingham University on the 68 subject will become available for study by writers here. Apart from a few devices I learnt only two things from working in radio: in common with all private art there is no 'specific situation' or performance-you know neither to whom your words are addressed nor in what circum- stances; the tendency has always been to make your words as general as possible, to make them a 'mass medium' like the films or journalism, affecting the lowest common intelligence, but I am sure that in the privacy of the sitting room we can count on a personal and not a general reaction. It was also customary a few years ago to mention each detail of each action in the correct order so that the listener missed nothing, but I think that a more imaginative and less pedestrian style of radio prose is now being written which makes fewer concessions to the unimaginative and achieves greater reaction with intelligent listeners. There are two important things to remember about the Service: one is that talks are organized by a separate department and that there are Talks Officers attached to each Y A station, through whom the first approach is best made. The other is that the Talks Department as a rule does not handle fiction, although it is well qualified to do so. Such writing is bought by the Productions Department which works from Wellington, and its standards are usually those of entertainment, an international business, whereas the Talks Department is more concerned with informa- tion and education especially by and of New Zealanders, though as I pointed out at the beginning of this article its standards of payment are based on entertainment. I have suggested that the writer must take the initiative in writing for radio and I repeat my reasons for that: radio offers ready money, it is an interesting art and it offers a large and immediate audience. The number of radio licences in New Zealand should this month reach half a million, the number of listeners must be well over a million and a half. With figures of this size it is unworthy of the Service to talk in terms of three guineas-less tax.

REVIEWS

FIRES IN THE DISTANCE. James Courage. Constable. 13s. 6d. THE same elements that made Mr Courage's Desire Without Content such an arresting work are again present in this succeeding novel. The sense of tragedy, perhaps, is not so intense but the drama of human relations against a similar background is rendered more compactly. A notable difference, however, is the influence of that background. In the earlier novel the scene is more elaborately portrayed yet is not nearly so 69 essential to the plot. That tragedy of the ineffectualness of a mother's love to stay the course of inevitable fate could have taken place anywhere. It is riot so with Fires in the Distance. The time (the year 1921), and the place (a sheep farm in Canterbury), are strong conditioning elements in the emotional set-up. Yet, strangely enough, despite the importance of the scene, the sense of locality and of what is incidental to that locality is nowhere conveyed with any iiiumination. This is due, in part, to the technique used. The plot is tidy and the action so confined in time and place that the novel might easily have been rendered in dramatic form. It is even possible that it was conceived as such, for the story opens awkwardly with the sentence, 'We begin as we shaH probably end, with Mrs Donovan'. This is simply another way of writing, Enter Mrs Donovan. The story which foiiows is rendered in all its essentials through conversa- tion. That story is briefly this. On a sheep farm in Canterbury in the year 1921 there live a Mr and Mrs Donovan, aged about 50, their daughter Katherine, aged 25, a son Leo aged 19, and a girl of about 10 years. Mrs Donovan is English by birth and education. Her husband is a second generation Irish colonial. Love between the two has long departed. The fascination of the young Irish colonial for the cultured English girl was of brief duration, and Mrs Donovan is now consciously an exile in brute surroundings. She takes refuge in neurotic iiinesses. The husband finds increasing consolation in drink. Katherine, the eldest child, is inclined to her father and helps him with the sheep but she is also her mother's daughter, and is caught be- tween an acceptance of local conditions and some unresolved aspirations. When the story opens she is half promised in marriage to a neighbouring farmer. Leo is very much his mother's son, both by heredity and example. Mr Courage's insistence on these things, by the way, is not merely a feminine interest in family resemblances; heredity, with him, is one of the agents of fate. Leo, it seems, has not had a very satisfactory hand-out. Imogen is a comparatively normal child and may be taken as representing an eventual acceptance of colonial life. Into this household, on a visit of several days, comes a young man who has been staying with his grandmother on a neighbouring estate. This young man is a farmer's son but by no means a typical one. He has just completed his local education and is shortly going to England to train as a doctor. He has written poetry of a sort. Upon his arrival the pace and intensity of the drama is greatly ac- celerated. Katherine, Leo and the mother immediately fail in love with him. He responds fuiiy only to Katherine. The situation is quite dramatic. Paul the visitor, with his better educa- tion, his poetry, and particularly his coming trip to England, represents for ail of them an escape. Their love for him is largely self-engendered, it had a prior existence, was created by circumstance and is overwhelming in the suddenness of its release. On the whole, Mr Courage's handling of the situation is quite con- vincing. The reader's reaction is to feel that the characters would not have acted quite as they did, but that in itself is an unconscious admission 70 of the reality of those characters and of the validity of the general situation. Mostly it is the minor things which irritate. The explanation of the rapidity of the emotional reactions given here is not sufficiently emphasized by the author. Consequently the emotions displayed are engendered and enlarged with apparently illogical suddenness. The young visitor scarcely has time to settle down before he is emotionally and almost physically raped. The background scenes are unimaginative and give no evocative sense of locality. The speech, though it delineates the characters well enough, does not stamp them as belonging to that locality. Only to Mr Donovan is given an occasional turn of speech that sufficiently suggests his origins. And it is Mr Donovan who is the least enlarged upon. It is the feminine mind which is portrayed best and those males who have a feminine streak, who are given the greater elaboration. Superficially, there is little to mark this as a New Zealand novel and one could dismiss it as being no contribution to a specifically local litera- ture. But that would not really be just. This novel has form and its content is definitely New Zealand, or at least colonial, in its character. The scene, however inadequately evoked, is the determining factor in the emotional reactions of the characters. It is, in a sense, responsible for the characters, and the fact that so many of them are slightly off-balance might not only serve to heighten the emotional responses, but also be an implied comment on the New Zealand situation. Frank Gadd

JULIEN WARE. Guthrie Wilson. Robert Hale. 10s. 6d.

AT FffiST it is refreshing to read a local novel free of attitudes common in our writers-there is no sentimentality, no posing, neither puritanism nor revolt against it; only a hard mind playing without pity or accusation on our society. But the author's unwillingness to question the assump- tions of his characters prevents the novel from rising above competent mediocrity. His assumptions are essentially those of Minhinnick, The Weekly News, L. K. Munro, The Auckland Herald and Observer and the society notes of The New Zealand Women's Mirror. Paganism and the social values of the stock and station agencies make a repulsive combination. Julien Ware is the son of a rabbiter on an estate on the flanks of a range in eastern Nelson. The Torrens, the section on which he lives, has been abandoned to the rabbits, and the owner John Cecillives fat on the green acres of the Sherbourne. Julien as a boy conceives a burning ambi- tion to own the Torrens and make it fertile. That is the theme, Julien's ambition and how it is modified as he matures; the ambitious individual will battling with society. It is a world from which most of us are excluded, a world of land- owners, wool-cheques and mortgages, snobbery and marriage for money, Plunket balls and Hunt Club balls-colonial 'County'. Land is not 71 fertility to the Cecils, it is profit, it is above all property, and the prestige and good living that go with it. To save the Sherbourne, Stella Cecil will sell her body, and her father will ask her to do it. Julien dreams of the Torrens made fertile. But property lures him too. The boy without property or prospects determines to fight his way into the owner class using their methods, adopting their customs. Underlining the theme is the incredible story of Bracegirdle the coalminer who forced his way, in Edwardian England, into a brilliant wealthy law practice, to whom the slump brings the Sherbourne and other estates. But Mr Wilson is not even true to his assumptions. He connives at Julien's ruthlessness, but he has to invoke a series of timely windfalls for Julien to achieve his ends-his father sends him unexpectedly to Nelson College where he learns the manners of gentlemen, he wins a scholarship only because his rival withdraws out of friendship, Bracegirdle offers him a partnership, Bracegirdle dies and leaves him his immense property, including the Cecils' land. The author has avoided the powerful satirical possibilities of his theme. By this time Julien is less single-minded. He has matured because 'infantry war, life's supreme teacher, the multiform Dr Arnold' has made a man of him. It was in Brave Company, this worship of war: only two things mattered, love and war, and the greater of these was war. The unsentimental Mr Wilson is getting close to the sentimentality of the R.S.A. reunion. There are soldiers who still hanker for the war years, though they cursed every minute of them. It is the only time when they lived in comradeship with a zest born of danger, when they were tough, cunning, death-daring animals. Now, pedalling in from the suburbs to hire out their minds and muscles, when can society offer them such fulness of living? Mr Wilson's voice has a familiar ring: Anzac Day, the R.S.A., Come on lad, it's your turn now .... Except that Mr Wilson is too honest to deal in the humbug of Anzac Day speeches; he values honesty so much that he seems to imply that Julien is excused by his complete honesty with himself. Self-deception is unforgivable. 'We like to be judged harshly,' says John Cecil. 'We're not weak, we aren't filled with tender feminine understanding of others.' Mr Wilson is impatient of Amyas Craig, ex-M.P., mayor, president of the Chamber of Commerce, editor of the local paper, tireless warmer of boardroom chairs, because he believes the humbug he talks. But the Cecils are made secure by the Craigs: it is the Craigs who concoct the daily doses of soporific for the landless two millions who never get a look-in in this novel. Julien's relations with women are handled fully and in more masculine fashion than by any New Zealander before Mr Wilson. There is his passion for Stella Cecil, his protective love for Beth Craig-one restless and destructive, the other too placid for him to believe in-eros and agape if you like, but more than that. For Stella he feels what he felt for her class-hatred, envy, coveting, so that when he marries her he wears her like a trophy, the spoilt arrogant little lady who used to turn up her nose from the back of her pony at the rabbit's blood on his pants. 72 Love to him is a disgusting emotion. He kills their child without even knowing that she is going to have it. How could he love Beth, good though she is? Her father lives off investments and his newspaper, but the Craigs own no land, they excite no envy in him. Even at the end, though he has promised Beth she shall be his second wife, he recognizes that he prefers Stella. What then is Mr Wilson's conclusion? That a man's will, however fierce, will be diverted by his mature sexual desires (wantings he calls them). That the will alters the world, and the world the will, to produce something different from what either intended. But it is not the end that interests Mr Wilson, only the effort. 'Whether one built or destroyed, it was only the striving that gave satisfaction.' Purpose doesn't matter, only activity. And Julien's dream of the Torrens never comes off; wells are bored, irrigation channels dug, and he dies in Italy. He has willed the land back to Stella, to the Cecils whom it never should have left. And although Stella will take the hint and make the Torrens green, she will never do it as he would have done it. Some future Julien Ware might attempt it. 'Let him plan from nothing also.' Only in the striving is the reward; but behind it all is a sneer, is Bracegirdle's slaty, cynical eye, tired after the effort of forcing himself up, knowing that at the heart of everything is nothing. His judgment on the human situation is 'tiny arrogant man, strutting under the rays of the sinking sun and imagining the long shadow he casts to be his stature'. All that courage, and a mortar can spatter it over Italian snows. Amyas Craig believed in his humbug, but (at heart) Mr Wilson doesn't believe in his. Is this the heart of it all? -of Minhinnick, the National Party platform, the Anzac Day speeches, the society notes of the Mirror ?-self-contempt under a sinking sun, the self-contempt of an insecure feudal class rapidly becoming demoralized, the self-contempt that justifies war, emergency regulations, the ditching of all this Christian kid-glove stuff? How much is the war responsible for Mr Wilson's stripped masculine style? There is nothing tender, sensuous or nervous in his style, none of the animation of each moment that we have learned to expect from Mr Sargeson and our short-story writers. The landscape might as easily be Australia or South Africa: in fact one English reviewer finished the book under the impression that it was Australian. The people are not distinctively New Zealand; there is no re-creation, even in the back- ground, of a life recognizably New Zealand. Mr Wilson eyes experience as he describes his women, as John Cecil might appraise land or horse- flesh. No irrelevant detail, only what is essential to the plot. It is an advantage in characterization. As in Brave Company the characters are effortlessly distinct, if undeveloped; no bother about mannerisms, no studious descriptions, yet you can recognize them as soon as they speak. Julien's father and Stella are most successful, Beth doesn't quite come alive, Bracegirdle is unconvincing. For Julien Mr Wilson relies on repeti- tion rather than development and he soon becomes a bore. This novel has a beginning, a middle, an end; it is satisfyingly told; the theme is engrossing; some of it is deeply moving. It is worth the 73 attention of everyone who follows novels by New Zealanders, because Mr Wilson can become increasingly important as a novelist. One is anxious to know if in his next novel he can widen his social range, ask himself more questions, humanize his outlook, and take time off to observe or share in the common life about him. Bill Pearson

soNGS FOR A SUMMER. Keith Sinclair. New Zealand Poets 5. The Pegasus Press. 3s. 6d.

IN KEITH Sinclair's Songs for a Summer there are nine short poems grouped under the 'Summer' heading and six others to complete the volume. Among the 'Summer' poems Mr Sinclair offers a series of essays in established ranging from the Elizabethan come-live-with-me through the metaphysical conceit to the fruity priapism which is today's version of the cavalier's pose. There is hardly a poem here which has muscle or bone enough to fill out the period costume, yet every one has sufficient verve to make it lifelike. As exercises these poems are admirable. For example 'The Wattle Tree' comes so nimbly into the poet's fingers that one wonders from what Arbour of Amorous Devices he could have filched it. Of the summer's gold I have my share: 0 I'll live here Until I'm old, In the wattle tree. Poem no. VIII is much the same, though here the artificiality is less acceptable because it is less airy. The speciousness of love's argument was unabashed in the old days, and so connived at. But when Mr Sinclair writes The water lily does not hide Her petals from the leering sun . . . More virtuous than her, I'll own, You're far less dignified he has obviously lost his panache along with his grammar and his lady. It is in the old metaphysical mode that Mr Sinclair's poetic strength begins to flag, only, one feels, because it is misapplied. A title like 'The Poet Encounters his Next Sonnet arriving at a Party' is auspicious enough, but the promise of passionate wit or even the extravagant trundling of a sophism is not fulfilled. The fantastic becomes merely the fanciful and the wit is less intellectual than verbal in most places. The strain is evident in the weary movement which the poem is obliged to adopt, jaunty though its expression may be. It is a case of misdirected energy, the musterer playing the cavalier. 74 In 'A Night Full of Nothing' as in many of these opening poems it is only Mr Sinclair's undoubted gift of the gab which redeems in any way a lost enterprise. The poem toils to an end in the dried swath of Dylan Thomas and Nelson Eddy. We larked it, we liked it, all play-timing on, It was dripping with moonshine from kiss to doomsday, One night full of nothing and then she was gone, 0 why did she linger and why did she stay? The first poem 'Salute to Summer' is marred only by a quite inap- propriate image in the first stanza. Then it gets down to the authentic summer singing which all this section might have been. The impact is immediate, the heat comes on and Mr Sinclair is master of a metaphysic that is his own. There is the direct sensuous thinking about real experience which Grierson speaks of as 'always apt to become metaphysical'. The th¥-d poem again strikes a genuine summer mood in which an adopted mythology becomes more than merely academic. The poet's 'intellectual sun' and the sun that 'shines only on the skin' are, at least momentarily, both in the ascendant. I lie within the red clay's aisles, Lizard not lazing nor embryo, Creator of islands and tides, The perfect carven Tangaloa, Indifferent, waiting to be born. One prays that next year Mr Sinclair will stay with the Auckland summer and be thankful he has the power 'to net her in an armful of languor'. She is hardly to be forced into farthingales, still less into the 'hot pants' of a 'ukulele lady'. The six poems beginning with 'For my Wife' are of another and generally higher order. In fact, Mr Sinclair hardly puts a foot wrong, and these poems like the two I admired in the first Poetry Yearbook are the real measure of his talent. They move with a disciplined ease rarely clambering after a factitious image or mere play-upon-words, the rhythms containing rather than being contained by the verse forms, and the sounds chosen with felicity. For example, when this stanza begins to get choked with consonants it falls pleasingly free again. Your loving life a living hymn, Unwritten, unforgettable bars, Not quite remembered, pulse within My absent arctic hours. Even the quip in 'Mother' ('with never a breast to call her own') comes off, as the earlier ones rarely do, because here the ruefulness, the amuse- ment and the run of the cliche are really pertinent, not fed into the script like a radio gag. Of these poems, 'For a Parting' is the least successful, possibly because it is overpitched. ('They are gone the centre of my hemisphere/Which flies apart like a flight of birds/Diluted in the shot-gun's burst.') The 75 word 'diluted' seems to betray the poem and its merits thereafter lie only in the parts. The last two, longer poems, 'Moors, Angels, Civil Wars' and 'Memorial to a Missionary' demonstrate, if this were in doubt, Mr Sinclair's control of a developing theme. The 'Memorial' appeared last year in Landfall. It is a worthy companion to a number of expository, disquisitional poems which have been written in this country. There is no reason why we should not have more like it. The requirements are an intimate know- ledge of and feeling for the subject and the period, and the poetic capacity to illuminate them in the imagination. Mr Sinclair has these requirements. R. A. Cop/and

NEW ZEALAND POETRY YEARBOOK 1952. Edited by Louis Johnson. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 10s. 6d. 13 NEW ZEALAND POETS. Edited by Robert Thompson. The Handcraft Press. 4s. 6d.

'REPUTATION is an idle and most false imposition', and it doesn't seem to be a guarantee of quality. The chief impression to be gained from the Poetry Yearbook is that too many poets of 'repute' are resting on their oars. Admirers of the work of Denis Glover and R. A. K. Mason will regret the appearance of their poems in the Yearbook: Mr Mason's 'Sonnet to MacArthur's Eyes' is something of a return to form, but compared with his earlier work it has a careless and occasional air, while two of Mr Glover's three poems were not worth publication at all. Basil Dowling's 'Dick Legg' tries and fails to exploit the simplicity of language which was so triumphantly successful in 'The Early Days', and A. R. D. Fair- burn's 'Down on my Luck' shows that Mr Fairburn is still working the nearly exhausted vein from which he got 'Walking on my Feet'. Since there are those who prefer the former, I had better explain that I regard it as an inferior copy of 'Walking on my Feet' because the first stanza is too weak to stand near-repetition at the end of the poem, and because of the synthetic nature of the third stanza. On the other hand, 'I haven't got a stiver,/The tractor's pinched my job' shows some of the old fire. Nor do the poems by Pat Wilson and Alistair Campbell add anything to the total of their achievements. There are some who have not let us down. In 'The Two Waters' M. K. Joseph's picture of the engineers' task in harnessing the power of the 'reservoir of limpid love' is but a pale reflection of the thought of the gunnery officer in Mr Joseph's earlier 'Drunken Gunners': 'wishing that love had ministers like these/To strike its distant enemy to the heart'- but the later piece is craftsmanlike, and it is still true that Mr Joseph has never published a bad poem. Mr Brasch's 'Seven-Year Simon' is in no way a disappointment. A simple treatment of childhood delight is here sustained by a rather loose (though in one place too jigging) metre and 76 by clear, vivid language. And though J. R. Hervey does not in the Year- book rise to the best he can do, these poems are typical of his second- level work: a worthy theme, some very striking images and lines ('Ruin, mad moonlight and a storm-cut sea'), but too many phrases that achieve nothing ('the earth is sour, guilty of thorn') .. Some of the 'younger' poets, too, have risen to the mark. In 'Farmyard', one of her best poems yet, Ruth Dallas gives a fresh view of the New Zealand scene: she sees the land as friendly, and stresses the age, not the youth, of our settlement. W. Hart-Smith's 'The Shepherd and the Hawk' is a good-humoured poem which exploits to the full Mr Hart-Smith's most successful technique: a terse colloquialism in the service of dramatic narrative. James K. Baxter is represented by four poems. His ballad is interesting, but the best of them is 'Night of April'. This is not extra- ordinary by Mr Baxter's standards, but the conclusion makes an effective climax to a moving reflection on the tension between precarious peace and encroaching chaos. Louis Johnson's 'Magpie and Pines' shows this poet at his best. Mr Johnson takes a sombre view of his subject, but the poem is informed with pity; and there is a fine precision and clarity in the handling of the magpie: as the informer, as the black-and-white symbol ('lovers whose white mating made magpie of the dark'), and to prepare the way for the raven's 'Nevermore'. In his 'Of Death by Water' Mr Smithyman's use of images, with layer upon layer of meaning, simply doesn't come clear. But he adds explanatory notes, and, though notes can't turn a bad poem into a good one, they do help in an understanding of a poet who is well worth the trouble. The comparative failure of some of the poets with 'reputation' is highlighted by the success of some who are without it. Henry Brennan's 'On Whangaparaoa' is a curious fantasy maintained by a richness of language which never slips into bathos; and it forms an interesting con- trast to Cherry Lockett's equally successful 'Spring Song'. Comparison of the latter with Miss Lockett's other poems in this book seems to indicate that she is at her best when the touch is light and the 'conceits' are consciously employed. Geoff. Fuller's 'Gunshot' is too diffuse, but most of it catches almost perfectly the feeling of one aspect of New Zealand bush landscape. And Robert Chapman's 'Leaving my Love', while a little enigmatic near the beginning ('triangle of time'?), emerges into a clear and coherent whole through a skilful fusion of 'wit' and 'poetry'. We must be grateful for nearly all the reprints in the Yearbook: poems by W. H. Oliver, J. R. Hervey and Charles Spear; Keith Sinclair's delight- ful 'A Night Full of Nothing' (though we already have it in book form); and two very impressive poems by Colin Newbury (from Gaudeamus where many would not have seen them). The reprint most difficult to understand is the third appearance of Anton Vogt's sestina, 'The Anni- versary'. Mr Vogt has written a few witty verses, and some which convey a certain depth of feeling, but he has given no indication of having the technical skill required by this most difficult form. Despite the fact that two of the repeated words ('were' and 'then') are fill-ins, the whole poem 77 appears wearily repetitive, probably because each of the other repeated words is used in a practically identical sense on each occurrence. It seems that the Yearbook as a whole would be improved by a policy of going out and getting the best work of the poets publishing in the literary journals, at the same time continuing the present policy of en- couraging interesting failures (like Mr Smithyman's) and good work by less prolific or less well-known poets such as the four mentioned above. And Mr Johnson is deserving of much better support than he seems to be getting from those who are in a position to convert the Yearbook; from an event, to the event of the poetic year. 13 New Zealand Poets reflects the generally low level of the poetry in Arena, in which most of the thirteen appear regularly. 0. E. Middleton, W. Hart-Smith (in 'The Devil') and Lily Trowern (in 'Drought') appear favourably, and there is some good Johnson and a magnificent Smithyman. This last is worth the money. Jonathan Bennett

T. S. ELIOT AND WALT WHITMAN. S. Musgrove. New Zealand University Press. 10s. 6d. 'IN READING Eliot's poetry', says Dr Musgrove in his stimulating booklet, 'one is aware, beyond the sometimes bewildering surface of literary association, of at least two deeper and more important strata. There is first the layer of direct philosophical and religious speculation, often carried on in terms of almost pure abstraction ... [and there is] the second layer-that of physical image and emotional evocation.' (p. 82) This second layer, with which Dr Musgrove is principally concerned, is characterized by the frequent repetition of a few images-'the curling smoke of evening, stairs and windows and doors, the hidden bird and the pool, the children's voices and the garden, the music and the thunder' (p. 11)-and Dr Musgrove's contention in this study is that these images are associated with Mr Eliot's American childhood and that certain of them in particular appear to derive from the poetry of Whitman. That Mr Eliot uses images which by dint of repetition tend to turn into symbols is hardly deniable, although Dr Musgrove's formulation-a 'tendency to re-create in literary form events and situations involving personal needs and memories' (p. 11)-does not seem very happy. It is equally certain, as is shown by one of the rare explicit references Mr Eliot has made to his childhood, that many of his childhood recollections do find their way into his poetry, especially into 'The Dry Salvages'. All this is not surprising, though, since the surface indications point to other origins, it deserves emphasis. But in deriving important symbols from Whitman, Dr Musgrove seems at first sight to be proceeding on the same principle as the medieval etymologist who maintained that a shady grove was called lucus 'from not shining' (a non lucendo). In the second section of his essay, however, he presents overwhelming evidence in favour of a close relation, and his major findings do not 78 seem likely to be upset. He observes more than coincidental resemblances between the 'Song of the Open Road' and certain 'journey' passages in the Four Quartets; between references to stairs in the 'Song of Myself' and in 'Ash Wednesday' (with a further echo in The Family Reunion); between 'The Mystic Trumpeter' and the 'poems of the Prufrock mood'; and between 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' and many widely scattered Eliot passages (The Waste Land II and V, 'The Hollow Men', each of the Quartets, 'Marina', and 'Journey of the Magi'). The last of these resemblances, in which practically every detail of the Whitman poem has been used somewhere by Mr Eliot, is particularly impressive; and it is backed up by a sentence of the latter's own Whitman speaks or the lilacs or the mocking-bird, his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext'. In themselves, whatever one may think of the theory Dr Musgrove builds upon them, these observa- tions are a valuable contribution to the understanding of Mr Eliot's somewhat oracular utterances. In certain other places I find his suggestions hard to see; I have noted p. 20 ('the muffled tones of mystic revelation') and p. 21 ('the apocalyptic intonation') as resemblances that seem doubtful. Again I fancy that Dr Musgrove errs in discovering in The Rock 'hatred' for urban civiliza- tion (p. 49) and in forcing the contrast between the Sweeney poems and 'Whitman's triumphant human affirmation' (p. 53). And there is a certain roughness in his handling of the theological contrast between the two poets, or rather between the he gives from J. A. Symonds (not a very reliable interpreter of Whitman, at least on one notorious occasion) and Mr Eliot's essay 'Religion and Literature' (p. 16). Is not Mr Eliot's point that good criticism demands· 'common agreement on ethical and theological matters', and Symonds's that this 'common agreement' need not be based on dogmatic religion, and would not Mr Eliot too admit that it could be based on dogmatic irreligion? A touch of prejudice on this issue seems to be apparent when Dr Musgrove sums up an entirely untheological contrast in the phrase 'the humanist against the theologian' (p. 80). Theologians do not necessarily despise crowds or fear water, whether it be taken simply as water or as a Jungian arche- type. The theory that Dr Musgrove is building up in these antitheses is, to put it baldly, that Whitman was one of the poets by whom Mr Eliot's mind was possessed in his youth (as he has told us it was possessed by Tennyson and the romantics) and whom he later rejected. 'The classical American pattern of the "rejection of the father" ' is mentioned (p. 82); but finally, of course, Dr Musgrove admits that 'to carry our enquiry beyond this point would require detailed biographical information about Eliot's American youth which is not at present available' (ib.). Without entering into what is questionable and hypothetical in his reconstruction, one may enter the reservation that Mr Eliot's symbols (like Dante's Beatrice) are possibly less important for what they originally were in the poet's experience than for what, by an individual (and therefore in some measure arbitrary) association, he has made them represent. The 79 further information Dr Musgrove would like might be illuminating; but one would be more certain if he offered any justification for his rather large assumption that Mr Eliot's nostalgic childhood recollections belong to 'that area . . . where the springs of poetry lie' (p. 77). An interesting and valuable appendix gives indications, fragmentary but revealing, of Mr Eliot's debt to Tennyson. It is to be hoped that Dr Musgrove or someone else will one day develop these hints. Technically the book is unworthy of a university press: the margins are uneven and the inking is poor. But the worst comes when the wretched reader attempts to use the page references, and discovers that the pagina- tion has been upset after the last proof-reading, so that every single reference in the book to its own page numbers is wrong. D. M. Anderson

A SECOND BOOK OF LEO BENSEMANN'S WORK. The Caxton Press. 42s.

HERE we have thirty-one pages of drawings, wood-engravings, calligraphy and type-specimens which throw light on an interesting and rather curious mind. There are two Mr Bensemanns mainly on view in this light, but there are other Bensemanns, or sub-Bensemanns, fitfully illuminated, lurking round the corner, or leaping suddenly into view and out again. There is first the portentously serious worker in line, immensely detailed, devoted to texture and to formal arrangement, most ingenious indeed in detail and texture, sometimes in formal arrangement composed into a rather wooden and even gauche balance. The spirit of Beardsley broods over the scene, but it is a most un-Beardsley scene, this region of Mr Bensemann's fancy-a mingling of mediaevalism and pseudo-Renaissance extravagance, the true creator and patron of which perhaps is the Bensemann-satyr of Plate II. At the other extreme is the draughtsman of the portraits, Plates XVII-XXII, reproduced in half-tone. Shall we call this the conventional, respectable Bensemann? It is at any rate an ex- tremely competent, sensitive and vigorous hand that is at work here, and one would be glad to see it employed on the portraits of a good many other New Zealanders. In between, affiliated somewhat .to the artist of black and white (e.g. Plate XXXI, in German script) is the calligrapher; and the best of Mr Bensemann's calligraphy demands unrestrained admiration. Would that this Bensemann could found a school in our country; for the man who can write the 'Donne' of Plate XXVIII is worth nine-tenths of the ornaments of our art-exhibitions, rolled up together, packaged, and labelled with the generic name 'artist'. This indeed is a Bensemann of both power and charm; who spills over so often into printing, matching fine type with as fine a script, or enlivening a title-page with the admirable Caxton Press monogram of Plate XXV. When we turn to the wood-engravings we get another modification of the line-draughtsman; these pages are technically interesting, for the engravings are almost as much wood-cuts, though here again we have 80 adventures in texture; but whereas we might have prophesied that in this medium Mr Bensemann would have devoted himself to an almost painful detail of white line, here we have a vigour of treatment, a violence that is almost crude. Where we have most rest, we have most satisfaction, as in the 'Strange Outlandish Fowl' of Plate V. To this particular reviewer, that last sentence sums up the total effect of Mr Bensemann's work. Can we divide him into romantic and classic, or dramatic and static, or uneasy and poised? Poise, an elastic balance, escape from a too obvious labour, seem necessary in a finally satisfying art or craft; and it is the Bensemann of the portrait drawings and of the calligraphy who is the most satisfying of all the congeries of Bensemanns. J. C. Beaglehole

AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE PACIFIC. THE THEORY BEHIND THE KON-TIKI EXPEDITION. Thor Heyerdahl. Allen and Unwin. 70s. THOR Heyerdahl is a Norwegian biologist whose early studies were in the field of marine zoology. Research took him to the Marquesas islands on the eastern borders of Polynesia, where, as was inevitable, his interests turned to anthropology. Looking into the steady-blowing easterlies and meditating on the ocean current flowing with equal steadiness from America, four thousand miles to eastward, he developed the theory that the Polynesians came into Polynesia from America, and that they were racially and culturally American. This theory had long ago been suggested but had never before been elaborated. A little thought had at once revealed formidable difficulties in accepting it; however, none of these difficulties had been investigated, since there appeared to be an initial over- whelming difficulty, rendering any further consideration unnecessary. The initial difficulty was this: the exploration and settlement of Polynesia could be carried out only by bold, skilful, and experienced navigators. On the west American shore such navigators were thought not to exist except on the island-studded coastline from Puget Sound to Alaska, and this area seemed too far north to be a possible point of origin. To European students the navigational skill of the balsa raft sailors of the South American coast was unknown. The startling resemblance between the stone-work of the ahu of Easter Island and the stone-work of the ancient pre-Inca fortress of Cuzco in Peru had long been recognized. The initial difficulty in admitting an actual relationship between the stone-work of Easter Island and that of continental America lay in the absence among anthropologists of any knowledge of maritime skill on the part of South American sailors, and the belief that the balsa rafts, sole sea-going craft on the west coast of South America, soon became waterlogged and had to be beached and dried out repeatedly on any lengthy voyage. First European to investigate the sailing powers of the balsa raft was Thor Heyerdahl, whose earlier book The Kon-Tiki Expedition records his demonstration of its seaworthiness. This book, one of the finest travel 81 stories in our literature, vividly records his long passage and the courage and the capabilities of his crew. Most admirable feature of all was the cheery comradeship that united them on Heyerdahl's balsa raft for more than a hundred days and carried them to victory through the surf of Raroia atoll, more than four thousand miles from their starting point. The most notable feature of Heyerdahl's literary style was vividness in narration, essential in a travel book, as also in the best journalism. This quality, linked with unflagging enthusiasm, is present in the book under review. Heyerdahl is indeed a distinguished journalist. But he is not an anthropologist. His more than eight hundred pages are devoted to elaborating the theory, conceived some seven years earlier, that was .the driving force behind the Kon-Tiki voyage. The voyage had proved that, within strict limits, the South American sailors were competent navigators, and that it was possible for a balsa raft to voyage from South America to Polynesia bearing the sweet potato and other American food plants in condition for planting in Polynesia. Heyerdahl exploits this considerable initial success by detailing the theory deriving from South America the bulk of the Polynesian population and the basic part of Polynesian culture. For this ethnic wave a date about 500 A.D. is suggested. Some seven centuries later he brings a second American invasion into Polynesia, this time from the Northwest Coast, sailing from the Hakai Channel (equated by Heyerdahl with Polynesian Hawaiki), pushed out by Bella Coola stock invading ancient Kwakiutl territory on the American mainland. This theoretical invasion sailed south-west from Hakai Channel, and conquered the Hawaiian group; it then passed on to conquer all the rest of Polynesia. To the immense task of documenting his theory Heyerdahl brought unflagging industry. Thus, at p.74 he says: 'The existence in Polynesia of various racial and cultural elements found to be characteristic also of the aborigines of prehistoric America has frequently been pointed out by previous observers.' In a supporting note ninety-five references are given. The bibliography includes the titles of about one thousand articles and books. But the impression of thoroughness given by these figures is fallacious. In reality the few years available to Heyerdahl for reading have not been enough. A certain number of what seem to the reviewer to be essential books and papers are unquoted in the text and absent from the biblio- graphy. But even more important than time to read the whole literature is soundness of judgment in evaluating the evidence used. Weakness of judgment in this fundamental matter is indicated by the fact that again and again writers are quoted whose material is second-hand. An interesting example is afforded by Heyerdahl's treatment of G. Phillips who in- vestigated the blood groups of two hundred Maoris in the Arawa area, and published his results at Baltimore in 1931. He treats Phillips's rehash of what some earlier writers had said about Maori history (p.l90) as though it were evidence of the same value as Phillips's own original investigations in blood grouping (p.88). Another aspect of the weakness in assessing evidence has an especial New Zealand interest. A large part 82 of the Maori traditional material that, in important sections, is funda- mental to Heyerdahl's argument is drawn from Whatahoro and Matoro- hanga, whose material is known to be historically worthless. In spite of these criticisms it is not argued that the book is unimportant. Its publication is an important event in the study of Polynesian history. It constitutes a challenge to the theory that has long monopolized atten- tion, namely that the most important part of Polynesian culture is derived from Indonesia. Its presentation of the botanical evidence shows clearly that the origin and distribution of Oceanic food plants should without delay be thoroughly investigated. Further, the book demonstrates that a broad knowledge of the ethnology and the archaeology of American regions bordering the Pacific is essential in the training of anyone who investigates the history of Oceania. The present reviewer is not competent to discuss the botanical problem, and the same reason forbids .treatment of Central and South American archaeology. In any case there is not space to examine more than a single aspect of Heyerdahl's argument. But I believe that the aspect here ex- amined is a fair sample of the whole book. So, if the criticisms advanced are valid they are valid criticisms of the whole book. An apology is due for introducing a section in which I myself am quoted. This section is examined solely because the weakness of Heyerdahl's equipment seems to me more compactly expressed in it than in any other section of the book. Patu is the Maori name for a spatulate weapon fourteen inches in average length, wielded in one hand, having the edges and in particular the distal striking end sharpened as keenly as its material permits. An essential feature of the weapon is that it is thin, flat, and sharp-edged. Its best-known variety is the greenstone mere. Its blow is a horizontal or uppish thrust

THE PLACE OF HOOKER IN THE IDSTORY OF THOUGHT. Peter Munz. Rout/edge and Kegan Paul. 18s. Tms book must be judged according to its title. Dr Munz is not giving us an intellectual biography of Richard Hooker; the history of thought is a different discipline, aimed less at tracing the intellectual resources at its subject's disposal and the development of his thought in relation to his world as he saw it, than at deciding his place in the often half- perceived evolution of ideas. It is a long-range study; its subject-matter is at once abstract and all too real; and there is no branch of historical study in which a sense of reality and a reasonable prose style must be fought for more unremittingly. Here Dr Munz has been notably success- ful. He seldom if ever slips into that world of dialectical fictions which 84 waits to ensnare the historian of thought, and his sentences are short and well-controlled. Whatever one may think of his conclusions, the events in the mind which he describes are of the sort which one can believe has occurred. His subject illustrates the dialectical unity of mediaeval with modern. Richard Hooker was an Elizabethan churchman combating the first strong manifestations of Puritanism; but the Puritans' theology was Augustinian-the institutions created by fallen man's reason were alto- gether condemned by the one true law which the illumined elect discovered in Scripture-and the means he took to counter them were no less rooted in the scholastic controversies of the thirteenth century. Dr Munz is perhaps a little antipathetic to a religion founded exclusively on the experience of conversion; but it seems that Hooker was right to see that the liberty and autonomy of the human intellect was under attack. He mobilized the whole force of Thomist Aristotelianism to show that what human reason had done since the birth of the Church had its place in the divine evolution of man and that the message of revelation came not to overthrow but to complete it. In justifying reason Hooker justified history; Burke is his analogue among post-mediaeval thinkers. Dr Munz does well to point out that Hooker was defending reason as the Middle Ages knew it against a subjective dogmatism, whereas Burke's enemy was Cartesian reason grown cocksure in the eighteenth century, and his counterweapon-or so at least Dr Munz thinks-an appeal to an ir- rational group-soul. But a deeper similarity exists; both were defending man's liberty to have a history, in prose whose splendour lifts it above ratiocination. Yeats wrote of 'Burke's great melody', and Hooker's Laws are the almost liturgical expression of Tudor political philosophy. But Dr Munz's concern is to set Hooker in the main stream that flowed from the mediaeval schools-he is at his best when pointing out how mediaeval thought fell as much by its strength (generating new ideas by a sort of overflow of energy) as by its weakness-and he does this by a series of essays that relate Hooker to Aquinas, Marsilius, Aris- totle and Plato. His main point is that Averroist, as well as Augustinian and Thomist thought must be taken into account in our view of Tudor philosophy. The Latin Averroists, it is believed, held that the truths revealed to man had no logical or other connection with the truths arrived at by reason, and Marsilius of Padua drew the political conclusion that the secular law, the expression of human reason, possessed complete sovereignty over the visible world of men, the divine law of the Church retaining only a private and nugatory authority in men's consciences. Dr Munz has no difficulty in showing that Marsilius was well known in England or that his doctrine corresponds to Tudor practice; for having declared herself an insular imperium, the necessarily secular entity 'Eng- land' assumed sovereignty over all her visible activities. Hooker's attempt to describe the English polity in the full beauty of Thomist philosophy therefore-Dr Munz thinks-broke down; he was compelled to import a measure of Marsilian thought and to come to terms with what was virtually secular ascendancy in English Church affairs. It further appears 85 that, having admitted that the Queen's prerogative governed in both church and state, he sought to render truth palatable by describing that prerogative in terms far more 'limiting' and 'constitutional' than the dynasty would ever suffer. Here Dr Munz reaches the central problem of Hooker's last unfinished books; and it is the more pity that his thesis seems over-intellectualized by the premise that these three views of man's relation to grace, the Augustinian, the Thomist and the Averroist, are fundamental, the only philosophies open to a Christian reflecting on his nature, and that 'all political philosophy is by its very nature existentialist philosophy par excellence' (p.S). Surely the Averroist view of the metaphysical world was a late sophistication of the schools, never simply arrived at by any Christian meditating on his nature; and surely Dr Munz would have done better to treat this extraordinary philosophy, whose influence he is tracing so interestingly, less existentially than historically? To indicate a last point of dissent from a most suggestive thesis: Hooker's defence of reason certainly involved an intense awareness of history-of a kind. But I cannot feel that the reasons Dr Munz gives on pp. 72-3 altogether justify him in crediting Whitgift and Hooker with 'a subtle understanding of the nature of historical development'; and in Appendix B and elsewhere he does not seem to have found more in Hooker than the view· that institutions which have been tried by the wisdom of many generations have a great claim to be left alone. But this was something of a commonplace in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century historical thought. The sense of history develops only through the attempt upon problems which compel the expansion of method. The effort, to which Dr Munz alludes, to prove Anglican institutions identical with those of the primitive Church was one of the chief of these. Among Hooker's successors were Ussher, Spelman and other giants of baroque scholarship, whose labours advanced historical thought in a way which his did not. J. G. A. Pocock

CORRESPONDENCE

To THE EDITOR Sm: In the last chapter of his article 'Fretful Sleepers' (Landfall, September 1952) Mr Pearson offers some suggestions which I find diffi- cult to reconcile with the artist's functions. I fail to see why a society should be made the scapegoat for the inadequacy of its literature and, in this particular case, why New Zealanders should be blamed because they fail to provide an ideal setting for the writer. If Mr Pearson spends too much time castigating his society he is likely to be wasting energy on a mistaken notion of the function of an imaginative writer, and one that may doom him to sterility. 86 I believe it is time to challenge this hankering after a community made according to the artist's ideal, and to enquire whether a society has ever been fully responsive to the artist's aspirations. I don't think that has ever been the case if the writer judged his society in terms of its laws, internal social conflicts, political and economic conditions and moral purposes. Seen under these terms every society has been decadent in the eyes of its novelists and poets, and for the artist to spend his time either criticizing or praising it in a general way, instead of focussing his atten- tion upon some of the persons who compose it, is to forfeit his vocation, since he will then be neither reliable as a social critic nor effective in the service of the muses. The artist must of course be aware of his society, of its virtues and its failings and of the pressures upon it; but the subject of literature is above all man, human beings. Man with all the characteristics of his day, so that the writer must make full use of the conventions, prejudices, hatreds and dreams which express him; but man, not society itself. And I am sure that for all its failings, the New Zealand scene could be a rewarding background for studies of individual New Zealanders. G. Huntley, Dunedin

SIR: As long as we have outspoken critics like Mr Pearson, we have no need to fear for our intellectual future. We are a young community and our faults are those of a pioneering people which hasn't had time to forget its fight with nature. The need to spend one's spare time on something useful-mending the chair, growing the lettuces or knitting the jumper-is a relic of a generation very near our own. Why pursue an art that exposes us when we can earn a useful commodity? is the question implicit in the work of the carpenter, the gardener and the knitter. One has only to have lived with the adage beloved of the pioneers 'the devil finds work for idle hands' and to feel the pressure of the price rise and the wages lag to have more sympathy with the home carpenter and his compatriots than Mr Pearson has. As well as being a young community we are a comparatively small one and in this lies the difficulty of the man who raises himself above the boys. When advancement comes to the aspiring workman in a large community, he frequently changes to a different shop, and, being amongst strangers avoids the social pressure to remain on a drinking level with associates turned subordinates. It is one of our troubles that there are not enough opportunities with strangers. Suspicion of the intellectual is probably a universal as well as a local trait and founded on the good sense that brains and character don't necessarily go hand in hand. Interwoven with this suspicion is the feeling on the part of the unscholarly taxpayer, of joint ownership of knowledge. Seeing that he has substantially contributed in hard cash to make scholar- ship possible the taxpayer is entitled, in his own mind, to guard against 87 any attempt on the scholar's part to assume total ownership; hence the defensive sneers. The useful hobby addict, the taxpayer, the intellectual-all of us- have not the perspective of the person writing from a distance. New Zealand's need for an art that exposes us will best be served by the writings of her sons in exile like Mr Pearson. Ruth Reid, Wellington

SIR: Two notices of my comedy, The Forest, in the New Zealand press have reached me so far, of which the first was an undergraduate effusion in The Listener of a quite inscrutable pretentiousness, and the second is a social and moral repudiation in your last number by Mr Keith Sinclair. It is not my habit to answer my critics, and if this last were a relevant criticism of my play I would have nothing to say. But since when are the opinions of characters in a play to be attributed to its author? Since Ibsen and Shaw and the theatre of propaganda, I suppose; and such authors, who had nothing but opinions and propaganda to offer the World, were delighted to be identified with their garrulous heroes and heroines, no doubt. But my play is poetry; or is offered as such, good or bad; and no objection to it is relevant which fails to treat of it as such. And as theatre it has, or ought to have, a structure, a shape, a form, a matter even more vital to criticism than the poetry. But Mr Sinclair has just nothing of weight to say of my play on either of these grounds. He is too busy exposing its author, through the mouths of its characters, as 'a fully- fledged Romantic who would flee from modern industrialism'. And even here, is he right? I have lived in the thick of it for thirty years. I have been a soldier, a sailor, a bus-conductor, an engine-room greaser, a radio announcer and broadcaster, an advertising hack, a London publisher's salesman, a cook on a threshing-mill, and so on. Perhaps on one occasion I might be said to have fled from the modern industrial World when I was a forester in the back-blocks of Auckland. But what I have never been is a recluse in a schoolroom or an artist in an ivory tower. Perhaps Mr Sinclair is nearer to one of these last than I. And if I have found the modern industrial World to be an irretrievable disaster for Mankind, I have not reached this conclusion from the scholastic sideline but from the thick of the scrum. He finds there is 'so little to grasp' in my play. There is certainly not that illusory straw of scientific progress at which our schoolmen and materialists are forever grasping in vain. But there is the poetry, the structure, the characterization. Let him grasp these, if he can, or else be silent. I challenge you, sir, to invite a review of my play from someone who loves poetry more than anything else in the World, if there be any such in New Zealand. No one else is competent to review my play. And Mr Sinclair is too cruel to Mr Curnow, whose play The Axe he speaks of as the predecessor of mine. He means the forerunner, perhaps. I wasn't aware that Mr Curnow's play was deceased, although the news doesn't surprise me. D'Arcy Cresswell, London 88 NEW CONTRIBUTORS Gordon Dry/and was born and lives in Auckland. He writes verse and stories. His second interest is music. Frank Gadd. Born in Staffordshire, England, came to N.Z. at the age of three. Spent his childhood in Auckland, and six formative adolescent years in country districts. Now living in Hamilton. Was a regular contributor to Tomorrow.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED Thomas Brunner. The Great Journey. The Pegasus Press. 2ls. Roger Duff. Pyramid Valley. Association of Friends of the Canterbury Museum. Second edition. 5s. 6d. Claude Evans. That Man Harlington. The Pegasus Press. John Pascoe. Land Uplifted High. Whitcombe and Tombs. 18s. 6d. Quakers Visit Russia. Edited by Kathleen Lonsdale. East-West Relations Group, Friends' Peace Committee. Friends House, Euston Road, London. 3s. 6d. Austro-Verse. Selected from The Austrovert. Melbourne. 2s. 6d. Ern Malley's Journal. Edited by Max Harris, John Reed and Barrie Reid. Cfo Post Office, Heidelberg, Victoria. Vol. I No. 1, November 1952. Quarterly. 16s. p.a. J. P. Angold. Collected Poems. Peter Russell. 8s. 6d. Sydney Goodsir Smith. So Late into the Night. Peter Russell. 8s. 6d.