A New Zealand Q.Earter!J'

VOLUME

THIRTEEN

1959

Reprinted with the permission of The Caxto:n Press

JOHNSON l<.EPRINT 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.

g[N1 Landfall

A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press

CONTENTS

Notes 3 Bullocky's Song, Peter Cape 5 Earth Water Fire Air, John Caselberg 6 Four Poems, lain Lonie 29 An Orchard Year, Anthony Holcroft 31 A Nelson Boyhood, H. P. Kidson 37 To a Home-town Conscript Posted Overseas, Peter Bland 55 A Musician's Journal, Frederick Page 56 The Editing of Katherine Mansfield's Journal and Scrapbook, !an A. Cordon 62

Commentaries : ACROSS ANTARCTICA, Andrew Packard 70 OPERA IN WELLINGTON, 1958, David Farquhar 75 FILMS FOR NEW AUDIENCES, Catherine de la Roche 78 POSTSCRIPT ON PASTERNAK, Maurice Shadbolt 81

Reviews: IN FIRES OF NO RETURN, C. K. Stead 85 3 POETS, ]ames Bertram 90 EARLY VICTORIAN NEW ZEALAND, Michael TurnbulJ 92 THE NEW ZEALAND PEOPLE AT WAR, B. M. O'Dowd 95 THIS NEW ZEALAND, R. C. Lamb 98

Correspondence, S. W. Scott, F. A. ]ones 100 Some Recent Churches

VOLUME THIRTEEN NUMBER ONE MARCH 1959 Notes

THE National Historic Places Trust has issued a pamphlet stating the case for the preservation of St Paul's, Wellington.1 The Trust rightly takes the view that St Paul's is not simply an Anglican church, but a national monument. It is arguable that, after the Treaty House at Waitangi, it is the most important national monu- ment in the country. The case for preserving it appears unanswer- able; at least the reasons given by Archbishop Owen for destroying it, as quoted in the pamphlet, are no answer. Nor is apology needed for referring to the question again here. It is, quite literally, a test question. If a body like the Anglican Church is free to destroy St Paul's, to the impoverishment of the nation and in the face of responsible public protest, what building or other monument or place of beauty or interest anywhere can be considered safe for the future? The destruction of St Paul's would license the destruction of any beautiful object or historic site, by individuals or institutions or local bodies or government depart- ments, whether in the name of private property or public utility or economy or inscrutable reasons of state.

THE new Robert Burns Fellowship in the University of Otago (established by private benefaction to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth) is the kind of literary fellowship which has long been familiar in America, and to a lesser extent in England. It reminds us that part of a university's proper business is to act as nurse to the arts, or, more exactly, to the imagination as it expresses itself in the arts and sciences. Imagination may flourish anywhere. But it should flourish as a matter of course in the university, for it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows, materially and intellectually. Burns might have smiled at being commemorated in a university, and real as is the association of the Burns family with the found- ation of Otago, there is a certain irony in naming the fellowship after him. The element of the anarchic in most men of genius impels them at times, as it impelled Burns, to stand alone, apart 1 The Cathedral Church of St Paul, Wellington. The case for its preservation. Wellington: National Historic Places Trust, 90 The Terrace, C.l. 3 from all institutions, any conceivable order. Society has to recog- nize that anarchic spirit and give scope for the creative forces that work through it; and the university is one place where such forces should naturally find freedom to express themselves. Burns had no chance of going to a university; the mere prospect would have seemed to him a dizzy one. But it would have seemed at the same time less desirable in one respect than we today might suppose, less important, that is, from an educational point of view. For Burns's education, restricted although it was, gave him a far more thorough grounding in the English language than that which any child gets in even the best New Zealand school now, a grounding which no university can give him if he has not received it at school. No doubt Burns's education was old-fashioned, and the literary models held up to him were not all good ones. But his teacher John Murdoch gave him the mastery of English he needed if he was to become a great poet. Without that mastery, his genius would have been wasted. Burns Clubs all over the world, about a thousand of them, it is said, celebrated 25 January 1959 in their fashion. The DU:nedin Burns Club, which accounts itself sixty-ninth of these bodies, held two functions, a dinner the evening before at which the Leader of the Opposition spoke, and a Grand Scottish Concert the evening after at which the Prime Minister spoke. If one may judge from press reports, Mr Holyoake had no plums for his audience; and the Prime Minister's performance is best forgotten. Has any Burns Club in New Zealand ever invited a poet to share its convivialities and speak to it about the immortal works and their author? There are several good poets in this country whom Burns himself (if not the fancy Honest Robin of the Clubs' image) would have rejoiced to meet, and some of them are fine speakers and some have Scottish connexions and none of them would have been satisfied merely to spray his hearers with soft soap. Whatever the Burns Clubs may do to keep the poet's memory alive among people who do not normally read poetry, why can't they also try to honour him in other ways that would have been near his heart? Have they ever thought of helping in Burns's name a struggling poet of our own time? Or helping education, that best part of the Scottish inherit- ance? If they want a specific cause, more fellowships of the kind now established at Otago are needed, and travelling fellowships as well. Or they might sponsor at least one fully comprehensive Burns collection in a New Zealand library. The Dunedin Club has helped the Dunedin Public Library collection, but it remains patchy, like the other Burns collections in the country. 4 PETER CAPE Bullocky' s Song

T' AT ol' brindle bullick wit' t'e white wall eye (Maul and wedges and a totara tree) He'll lead t'is team til t'e day he die Maul and wedges and a totara tree.

Swing t'at maul and drive t'at dog (Maul and wedges and a totara tree) Chris' keep t'e tailers from a rollin' log. Maul and wedges and a totara tree.

Whitey an' Teufel is hardly broke (Maul and wedges and a totara tree) Can't pull taget'er in a double yoke. Maul and wedges and a totara tree.

Lancewood pole an' a nine-foot lash (Maul and wedges and a totara tree) Whip t'rough t'e air but never cut flesh. Maul and wedges and a totara tree.

Some men got stones set up for their names (Maul and wedges and a totara tree) But a good strainer post tells a bullicky's fame Maul and wedges and a totara tree.

Note: dog = dogspike.

5 JOHN CASELBERG Earth Water Fire Air

for Thor

I HE snorted. HE turned and opened his eyes.

2

Again the cold air came, salt, stinging, flooding in, brushing his muzzle and the delicate alae, entering the nostrils themselves and the warm moist chambers within and by touching the secret hairs halting their singing; with a new chemistry interrupting their in- cessant tremulous conversing; stabbing, and starting new songs echoing in and in to where they were recorded not as the dusts of loess and mosquito-laden air but as the scents-as his neck arched higher-of rain-washed grasses and resinous summer pines, spruces and larches; of damp beeches; of mountain junipers, pungent as lions; of the cedar whose scarred trunk his flanks pressed in the darkness, whose fallen needles cushioned now his and all of their hooves underfoot, whose branches in wide rays drooped over their heads and, higher, piled skyward, starward, where a bird woke where the wind moved. He tasted the mountains. Swiftly, before the breath swam down to his throat, he saw the snow-grass basins, circled above them under the rim of the peaks; and the forests, clinging around and falling below them, poured over the valley floors, ascending the tributaries and gullies, splashing the steep flanks and like a black sea lapping the mountains-the representatives here of the world- wide, world-encircling sea, of sea-growth, jungle, £orest, savannah, the original waking kingdom on which he and all of his stepping kind parasitized not just for shelter and food; the mothering king- dom, whose unseen, unintermitting breathing had made not just all food but all air-the air in the wind in the valley stirring now- and ever renewed it. His breath blew out again, freezing, pushing a pale cloud from his nostrils into the darkness. 6 3 He broke the grip of the frost from his eyelids as with head turned, lifted, he scanned the glacier peaks. His eyes probed slowly, swinging from the kaleidoscope of the sky, from the snow-pale promontories of his ancestors' features, past the murky basins, down the long hidden ridges, and down-river through the gloom of the valley to the light he had quitted when darkness fell; when he had crossed the swirling river, the moraines and forested river-flats, and ascended the cliff to this ledge where he sat now, cross-legged; where he had remained through the night, listening and watching, waiting for signs. Above the bear-bellowing of water ever falling in the mountains and of the river's rushing, he heard the thin tops of the spruces rustle. A fox, in the distance, barked. Earlier, in the first hours of the night, he had heard his relatives' calls tracer their movements: the owls sobbing, followed, later, by the floating of noiseless black shapes over his head; the heu, heu, downstream, of a red deer doe barking, with her thin neck elong- ated and upstretched, her violet eyes gleaming, her white flag rising for her flight as she warned that the she-wolf and her family on their accustomed trail were silently entering this valley part of their range; the pebble falling, avalanching other small stones from the scree-slopes high above him, dislodged by the wild chamois wraiths of the peaks moving out to their feeding. He had heard the note, close at hand, twice, thrice repeated, of the bear bird; whose accompaniment was repeated again as the ever-restless roaming giant paused nearby, circled, and approached following his man- tracks until the wet-wolf scent blew up at him and his finger-tips through the fur on the rock felt the thud thud, thud thud of the granite feet shuffling; until the bear's shadow appeared, in the starlight, under the rock, momentarily, swollen to a nocturnal vast- ness before it melted back into the gloom. And finally before the valley hushed in the midnight the sound of a willow snapping in the upper reaches of the tributary river told him the lords of the valley, proud, mighty, white-tusked as the mountains themselves, had come over the pass swinging their -great trunks walking quietly. The call which had startled him was not repeated. It had struck once, fiendishly, setting all the deer and the reindeer and the chamois and the horses on to their feet, stinging his scalp and rasping his backbone as he turned; as the precipices above the glacier echoed again the savage exultant scream of the male moun- tain lion still in his rutting. 7 It came then, as he watched, a far, far-off milky eye, hesitant, winking, detaching itself from the face of the snow, gazing at him. From beyond the faintest star this light of the harbinger of the Morning Star dropped into the chameleon valley; where, since its first outleaping, forest and ice like night and day had endlessly wrestled, thrusting to and fro, alternately triumphing. After linger- ing millennia of summer the first snows had crept into the moun- tains, coating the peaks, changing to ice, inexorably accumulating and spreading until outriders of ice slid from the parent glacier; until a thousand glaciers woke, advancing, snapping, uprooting old river gravels, savaging the rock of the valley floors and in paroxysms of whirlpool pressure gouging chasms and abrading the mountains' walls; until ice-towers toppled into the last of the trees and the forests fled, leaving scrub, stones, dust and wind the possessors of the land; until the tide had been checked, the pendulum halted, and the interminable retreat and refrondescence begun. Again and again the succession was repeated during the light's aeons-long journeying. Flicking now through the valley air, through the portals of his eyes being gathered in, the nebula's light struck home, at the fountainhead, against the brain of his eye, impinging on its out- thrust naked cells and firing a million cells to report of the image seen. He bent quickly. His forefinger and thumb closed on a burning stick. He stood up, held the flame close under his eyes, and signalled across the valley to the men.

4 They watched him, through the darkness, with soft wide eyes. The colts still trembled by the mares, while the mares stood, motion- less, under the branches. The manada waited. As his neck swung high again the leading mare stepped up, towards and past him. Her shoulder brushed his thigh, lightly, so that she felt the bark of his skin. His tail swung against her. She knew the knotted trunk of his thigh, the long wide croup, the short loins, straight back and deep ever-shaking chest; the powerful gaskins and hocks, the great hamstrings, the upright canons and small but terrible feet; the long forelegs, the high swinging muscular neck, the flaring nostrils and merciless teeth-and the eyes. She had heard him first, neighing, challenging her fathering stallion while she was yet virgin, the tempests of his cries ringing over the plain; and heard the ground drumming under his hooves. Then she had seen him, thrust over the grass ridge into the sky, standing immobile, carven of rock, his 8 eyes bursting. Without watching, while she fed, she had sensed his prancing approach until the two stallions met, the old and the young yellow stallion, upreared, on hind legs, trembling and snort- ing, their eyeballs like glaciers seamed already with blood, with ears flattened, lips snarled, striking, whirling, whistling, their fore- feet and teeth slashing the air, slashing flesh. She smelled his strength mixed with sweat and the blood in the saliva foaming still from his mouth when he returned from the pursuit, circled her, and she ran with him. At foaling he brought his manada to the sweetest grasses; and, twice a year, avoiding the swirling dust storms of summer and the winter's blizzards, he drove them from the steppe into the moun- tains. Tireless, vigilant, furious in times of danger and in the rut, he followed his own trails throughout their great range; guarding them night and day, resting or feeding; ever alert for the hunters of horses: cave-lions, wolves and men. At his signal the leading mare turned, going uphill, her full pointed belly swinging slowly. Milk wet her hind legs. The manada followed.

5 He heard their approach. Taking a firebrand and his spear, with his bundle tied at his waist and with his long knife in his belt, he descended the cliff. They walked quietly out of the darkness, out of the trees, towards where he stood in the clearing under the cliff. The old men came first, then the middle-aged, then the young. Silently they formed a half-circle round him. He stared at their weapons and clothes; at their javelin spears, throwing sticks, stone pouches and stone and ivory hunting knives; at their skin summer hunting parkas and trousers, with neither gloves nor boots-searching for the evil sign, the evil stitching. A grunt of approval rose in his throat but he made no sound. He examined their eyes then; whose forefathers had ringed this clearing for countless rites before them, facing his father or his father's father, their own shaman; whose ancestors since the peaks began had inhabited this valley, following the same customs and hunting similar animals with similar weapons. They, too, watched him. They saw his tangled beard and massive neck and shoulders, his broad dirt-sheathed feet, and the rippling of his rock-hard limbs under his clothes and the contorting of the whipcord of his hands when he moved. The flame flickered like 9 moonlight chased by hail clouds over his face. It lit the glacier that coursed out of his lichen-grey hair, gouged one flat-planed cheek and plunged into his forested beard; and it shone on the vast brow rising, wrinkled and aged like a precipice riven by the cataracts of a thousand storms; from under which, in their shadowed recesses, his eyes were as unwinking lions' guarding unfathomable mountain caves. Some were taller, several were equally strong; but when they saw his eyes, and the mark of the mountains, they looked aside- as they had ever since his return, when, still a young man, following his father's injunction after his long apprenticeship, attempting the journey from which his elder brother had never returned, he had gone out alone to wrestle with the spirits of the peaks' winter ice and storm. They saw his gaze withdraw from them then as he travelled either into the past or into the future of their lives or of the lives of the other animals they sought who were their kindred but who were not men. He stared out past them. . ..

The sun rode a cobalt sky and the snow gleamed, on the trees, on the mountainsides, on the peaks standing into the sky as he walked, first, under the larches; which were no longer emerald with spring, or dripping gold, but stood rigid, frozen, silver and white, , laced in a gossamer of crystals where each thin white twig festooned their boughs. With the snow powdering silently under his skin boots he moved past the trunks, crossing the pale blue tracks of the hares, watching, in that blue and white world, a wraith of irid- escence lift from the ground at his feet and begin flitting with him across the shining snow. Then the spirit of the snow, the great white owl, drifted over his head. He saw that the fur-matted feet of the white hares had trampled the ground under the blueberry bushes, which they had stripped of twigs and stems. Later he read how the owl had dropped, with her yellow eyes staring and her beak emerging from her facial feathers as she hovered, carefully, guarding the soft white under- pinions of her noiseless flying; as she struck, flurrying the snow, leaving this mess of fur and bones. Still climbing he entered under the sky-darkening pines. On the crest of the ridge he passed the bear-tree, the old spruce whose furrowed bark had been ravaged by the male bears in the autumn clawing their sign. The trees dwindled as he ascended. He passed reindeer tracks; and the holes where the reindeer had dug buried to their shoulders, 10 tearing the grey moss by its roots from under the snow. Emerging on to a naked snow slope, he was exposed to the full reflecting white glare of the sun. He ascended the slope and saw, upraised, the steep white ridges, couloirs, cols, peaks and further peaks of the great mountains unfolding, flowing and flooding up into a new white world far above him. He went on, breathing more quickly, crossing a wide snow basin. Agile and shy as the wind, the black specks of three chamois in the distance left off their digging for arven bushes and moved swiftly from the line of his approach. Under frozen limestone cliffs he reached the glacier, where, choosing his path carefully, he began travelling more slowly, jump.. ing the dark-blue crevasses, occasionally retracing his steps, con- stantly searching the foaming white river of ice for a route ahead. The crevasses grew wider, more frequent, and the ice piled in higher and higher blazing white and blue-and-white seracs. He had reached the ice-fall, the treacherous rapids of that ever furiously- flooded river. In the late afternoon he left the ice, climbed another long snow slope, and came on to the empty plateau where the wind itself like ice cut into his face. In his double suit of reindeer skins he was safe from freezing. The soft hair of the inner parka absorbed his sweat; while the outer hairs of his top-coat turned the daggers of both wet and cold. He stopped in a hollow at dusk, with his snow-knife carving a further depression. Afterwards he lay in the snow, holding in the palm of his fur glove the amulet of white marble, staring, up, as the sky darkened, at what were to become for him the amulet of the peaks. In the reflected light of the great alps far to the west, the peaks burned on like cedar embers after darkness fell. The air rang with the breathing of the mountains. The stars glittered. In the night snow demons pushed needles of grit into his eyes. Nearby he heard the roar and saw the trailing sparks of the sky spirits' boulders dropping, colliding and ricochetting down a rock chimney. At dawn the valley was sheathed in cloud. The peaks stared impassively at him. Ice-grey under the Morning Star, their faces were slowly lit, brightening like blossoms opening of primrose, mountain daphne, and budding fireweed; which wilted, flared again, and changed from ivory white to pitiless white after the sunrise. He traversed the plateau, seeking a snow-bridge over the berg- schrund ahead whose mouth gaped evilly under the long curving II ridge he must ascend. In spite of his parka's eyeguard of silky wolverine fur, his eyes were a torment to him. He found and crossed a snow-bridge. Thin fingers snaked suddenly past, circled, fled, snatched at and engulfed him. The mist tasted like cold wet smoke in his mouth. The smoke turned to steam, fermenting under the sun, enervating, soaking into him as he toiled on. When the cloud grew too thick he halted. Snow and cloud had merged. He waited, panting, in their single whiteness. Through a giant tear in the mist he saw silver-edged purple-dark anvil clouds riding the waves of the peaks, consuming the blue sky and rushing towards him. He went on. The wind moaned and whooped. Snow flakes danced through the world and dived back into the clouds. He was again enclosed, by snow now foaming in his face, mist- ing the antennae of his outstretched arms, boiling within his arms and swathing and whipping away from under him the mountain's snow which previously had shone under his feet. Enshrouded, his limbs moved, on and on and on, until the moun- tain returned and roared and leaped at and obliterated him as he fell. An unseen torrent rushed overhead. He looked at the ice. White and indigo walls lifted perpendicularly to a sapphire glare, He rolled on his face and tasted ice. He looked again at the rising blue veins of ice. He was incarcerated in ice. He lay on a lodged bone of ice gripped in the throat of the crevasse, in the rictus of the mountains, in the champing winter's maw. Above him the wind still shrieked. He tried to stand and again night fell. Then the implacable eye glared down, livid with rage as light- ning illumined the sky outside. Mauve fluorescence licked the ice- walls. The mountains were in full, deep-bellied, earth-shuddering death song. Their avalanche boomings ran howling from peak to peak; and were answered by the gurgitations of the abyss. In the lurid darkness he lifted himself from the ice, drew his stone knife and began to climb. He ascended to where the crevasse widened and he could no longer brace himself between its walls. There he wielded the knife. The eye and the shouting seas of its voices mocked him as he belaboured the adamantine ice. He chipped a finger-hold; then another finger-hold and a foot-hold; and mounted precariously. The imprecations were dinning his ears but he crept on, like a spider hanging, working his way up the interminable precipice. His body ached, and his fingers and toes were as if wrenched from him. The 12 incredulous eye widened, outraged, and hectically brightened. The thunder cracked louder and closer, attempting by its bellowing alone to dash him down. He paused where he hung. His arms were flexed over his head, grappling. He lifted his head. And at his confronting the naked visage above him the visage struck back, the whiplash melted his face, the thunderbolt exploded inside his locked arms. Waking a third time on the ice-floor he saw iridescence foaming in the sunlight at the lip of the crevasse. The ice seams shone like pathways of azure. An opal vapour spilled from the recesses. He felt his torn cheek, and raised his bursting head, his battered and crippled body. Slowly, painfully, he again mastered the ice-cliff; then dragged himself up the furrowed chimney where the lightning had struck. From the crevasse he emerged into a dazzling world. Lapis lazuli burned around him, peaks like necklacing moonstones and girls' breasts lay under his eyes, maidenhair shadowed the far-away valleys and a wisp of snow-crystals floated from the top-peak over his head. He looked into the sun. . . .

Now, before morning, in the firelight, they saw the mountains in his eyes as he bent, raised his spear, touched the blade to his lips, and extended the upright shaft towards them whom his actions had already enjoined to the hunt. One by one they approached, wrapped their fingers above his hand on the tightened their grip and pressed their mouths to the cold stone blade; which itself had come forth from the moun- tains; which had been fashioned by his ancestors and by frost, flame, water and stone; which through long centuries had frequently returned-had been hurled cleaving innumerable mountain hearts, arrowing home. A raven cried. Quickly he pricked the spear-point through the men's beards to their throats. The jowls of the old men quivered. He watched them turn, and file and fade back into the trees.

6

Flexed by their innumerable, interwoven, contracting and extend- ing ties, his ears twitched and turned. He heard the waters' falling, the rasping of twigs on his flanks as he pushed through the last of 13 the scrub, and the thud and clink of his hooves and of the other feet ahead. Shadows moved in front of the stars. Some of the mares were already feeding; others climbed the ridge slowly; others stood wait- ing, watching for him. In the starlight the mountains hung open like black-splashed flowers. But as his neck swung sideways, as he wheeled, the stripes of jagged rock and snow sprang close and crouched, panting, menacing, lions whose dry breath touched his face. The wind had changed. It came down-valley, brushing the spurs and eddying in the gullies, swinging through the pass which the previous night they had crossed. The leading mare stood on the crest of the ridge. Another gust came, redolent of the northern valley where they had wintered. Looking back he saw the eye of the Morning Star like a comet riding the peaks, pulsing fierily, transfixing the air, dropping its trail on the glacier sea and rekindling itself in his eyes ....

He stood apart, in the sunlight, blinking, watching the snow- smoke rising as a suddenly-dark pine branch shed its burden of snow; hearing a small white yellow-billed male snow bunting's ecstatic syllables rippling out from the song-stone above him, lifting over the valley, up through the trees and towards the peaks, herald- ing spring. Then he snorted and stamped, and galloping off through the trees circled the mares, assembling the manada. He turned them down- river, initiating their journey northward. Leaving their refuge they entered a narrow gorge, travelling at first under frozen waterfalls and battlements of rock and ice. Later in the morning their legs sank in soft snow, the white-ribbed over- hanging precipices retreated and the valley widened. In front of them the trees were dancing green flames, free of snow, glistening. The mares tossed their heads and raced whinnying forward. Yellow mud spurted under his hooves as he chased the dark-striped,. fawn and dun-coloured flood of horses, through rivulets and melting snow, across the river flats to the glade of withered brown sods from which trembling fresh grass sprang. Slewing to a halt he bent and cropped the stinging sweetness. After dark they went on, trotting steadily, past a frozen lake then under granite cliffs whose faces glared over them reflecting the moonrise. The trees grew smaller and the undergrowth denser as they left the limestone mountains. I4 In the night, before sending the manada crashing away through the trees, he reared and whirled and stood quivering, his forefeet planted, his senses straining towards the thud, the scream, the falling and the gurgling of a mare being struck down. At daylight peaks like icicles still hung in the sky, but the valley's walls had further receded. Dry meadows became more frequent. They passed herds of red deer, and groups of the great brown mammoth whose trails churned through the remaining snow. Climbing from a deep confluence they entered a wood of stunted larches, where squirrels were already chattering and whorls of split emeralds sparkled on all the pendant branches. Spidery grey-green lichen sprouted from the trunks and stippled blue and blue-and- white crocuses floated under their feet. A flock of goldfinches swept through the trees, whistling. He stopped. A trumpeting bellow rang across the valley. The finches alighted and the squirrels' noise ceased. From circling above the valley an eagle closed its great wings and dived in three head- long descents down to its eyrie. Two foals, dappled like flames darting to and fro in the sunlight, chased round an old log, tramp- ling the crocuses and flinging up strips of moss. They paused, looked up, and scampered off to their dams. The mares stood at attention, trembling, with ears pricked and eyes revolving uneasily. The wind dropped. The mountains shivered. Distending his nostrils he expelled his breath then neighing violently; then began with his voice and shoulders and teeth to harry them forward. All day he drove the manada along freshly-worn trails. Reindeer had come down from the snow-slopes and other horses descended the side-valley behind them. In the afternoon the sky had darkened. Blowing in from the western sea over the lowland forest and steppe, the spring wind was pushing its feelers southward into all the valleys. By dusk their migration had turned into a race. They did not stop during the night; when the valley was filled with the thudding of hooves, the clattering of stones and the break- ing of twigs and branches. He forced the mares on, away from the whimpering of the premature foals being abandoned in the dark- ness. Occasionally an over-exultant wolf bayed as it killed. Dawn broke sombrely, streaked with carmine. They crossed a valley-plain, where spots of rain stung their faces and tall snow- daisies rode under their chests like foam. He saw, ahead, the wall of grey curtains swinging, enshrouding the valley, advancing, sweeping closer and closer until it reared spattering and engulfed them. 15 They plodded into the rain. Giant whips lashed the mountains and the crags and precipices spouted foam. On the mountains' flanks, in the forests, above the beating of the rain, like a hundred herds of rhinoceros charging, the flood waters woke and burst into song tumultuously, deep-throatedly, trans- forming the valley into a boiling cauldron of sound. The storm swept on up-river but its noise remained, unabated, even swelling as they approached the bed of a formerly frozen creek; which at dawn had contained but a ribbon of ice; which soon would be brimming With rushing water bearing a chaos of broken ice and leaves, logs, mud and stones. Wheeling, snorting and biting he sent the manada into the creek. The water rose up to the knees, to the chests and over the backs of the frightened foals. The mares walked beside them. As he entered the torrent a mare in front of him stumbled, slipped in a hole, and was borne a dozen yards downstream before regaining her footing. Her bereft foal cried out, terror-stricken. With eyeballs dilated and nostrils blowing, its thin head strained feverishly towards the further bank. A block of ice struck its neck. Like a stick spinning in a whirlpool the foal's head gyrated and vanished. He strode forward, so that the small vibrating body with its furiously churning legs struck against him, the white eyes then the spluttering muzzle lifted from the brown foam, its hooves clacked on the stones and they pushed together steadily then more and more calmly through the swirling water until they went up out of the creek on to the dry ground beyond. They climbed to a tussock-covered terrace, where the manada stayed for the remainder of the day and throughout the night, rest- ing and feeding, waiting for the flooded streams to subside. At daylight they moved on, following the terrace into a second gorge. Soon sharp guano-stained bluffs stood on their left hand while eroded cliffs fell away into the river below. Their path descended. The mares in front paused. The tussock was replaced by green sedges and dark-brown rushes; lichen- shrouded boulders, dead trees and gnarled bushes stood out of gleaming black pools. As the press of horses in the narrow place mounted the mares advanced, splashing heavily, miring up to their knees, catching their feet in the roots of the bushes or jumping over logs and falling into the mud. A stench of rotting flesh hung over the swamp. Two harlequin ducks rose, flashing their black and white Wings, crying in consternation at this sudden assault of neighing, charging, floundering and even trapped, screaming horses. 16 When the last of the foals had been lost he broke slowly through the stricken concourse. With dripping heaving shoulders and haunches he came into the lead and paused, scanning the way. Blood trickled from a wound in his chest into the oily water. He turned then in under the cliffs and led the manada struggling on to more solid ground. After he emerged from the swamp he stamped and rolled in dry moss then stood panting, waiting for the mares. When they had assembled and fed he again sent them on. Beyond the gorge the mountains grew smaller. A last winter wind blew in their faces, sweeping up the valley from the prairies ahead, Whirling into the steppe from the limitless eastern tundras; striking into that continental peninsula from out of the kingdoms of blizzard and ice, from the white heart of the world. At sunset they cantered through tall seething orange-stained grasses to the edge of a still-frozen lake. Grass slopes stretched round its shores, interspersed with vivid green sedges and dark- green glossy dwarf birches and scallops of snow. But he drove them further, across rolling hills into the gathering night, through pale meadows and a scrub of quaking-poplar and willow. Before dawn they came with ears laid back and tails flying, pounding the earth, galloping out of the bushes into a bare space where the stars flamed not only in the air above and around them but even under their feet. Confronting them in silence the great ghostly river sped furiously on its course under a mantle of ice. He lashed the mares on. They put their hooves on the ice, and the phantoms of their reflections and the river-bed below and of the firmamental lights altogether mingling crouched and leaped. Once embarked on the ice they bounded high as if galloping over uneven ground, rushing on and on terrified toward the steppe. He sprang on to the ice and fled away as a mammoth swooped at him from below. A report rang out ahead, avalanche-clear. The breaking parting ice retracting its jaws would sever his legs, or widening would engulf and fling him away to be entombed in the cataracts under the ice. Water splashed his pasterns. Glancing up he saw, in the distance, the dark line of the farther shore, beyond which the steppe stretched endlessly north and east; where the sea rains reached so that new grass like waves strode over the plains; where a million shy vivid butterflies and flowers waking soon would open their eyes on the land; where the manada itself would 17 wander, feeding, fighting and multiplying among innumerable herds until the gales swinging again to the easterly quarter brought back the howling summer blizzards of loess. He swept on, slithering and jumping, following the other winged horses, somewhere passing the breach in the ice and bounding at last on to the bank where a foam-flecked fore-limb and buttock and long neck glistening showed the mares already moving apart through the wet grasses under the Morning Star....

He turned and the leading mare went on up the ridge. Instead of descending the long spurs into the valley he had brought them uphill again, out of the forests on to the alpine slopes. Now they climbed further; then sidled westward above limestone bluffs into the basin beyond. Here the knot of the manada unravelled. The colts raced away and the mares began grazing. Going up on to a promontory over- looking them all he stood alone, searching the dark glimmering air, sifting the wind for its scents and sounds. As he watched the brilliance of the Morning Star faded. Rock buttresses appeared like tusks hanging dimly above him. Against the sky the silhouettes of the mountain flanks sharpened.

7 Sharp leaves and hard green cones brushed his face as he left the clearing under the cliff and followed the men into the trees. He passed the young spruces, offspring of the giant whose brow swayed loftily overhead; whose basal branches sweeping down had struck in the earth, rooted and thrust up this grove of young stems. Turning aside he entered the dim tent under its branches, approached the old buttressed trunk and jabbing his spear carefully into the bark placed each nostril in turn then his splayed lips to the small wound; so that afterwards, striding away downhill, he tasted the tang of cut wood and the spruce's resinous sap stinging his mouth. The gloom of the valley had dispersed when he emerged on the moraine near the river. He went upstream, pushing through poplar scrub, following the narrow path which the men had taken. Coming out on to the river-bank he looked into a deep quiet pool. The water was darkly shadowed, smooth but turbid. Beyond the pool a large spruce lay prostrate, felled by storm, stretching from the net of its roots hung up in the air through tangled foliage and flattened smaller trees to the water's edge. A green branch dipping in the 18 water whirred as it beat like a bird's wing fluttering to and fro in the current. His gaze lifted above the trees to the pine-clad slopes rising out of the valley, where even now the daylight was filtering into the cave; where the crone who squatted by the blue and red birch embers threw a yellow-burning juniper branch on the fire, which suddenly blazed, chasing the shadows, illuminating the naked woman crouching suckling her babe, exposing the children humped still on the sleeping benches under the furs, the fur clothes hanging from the upright logs ranged round the walls, the skin buckets and baskets and the stone and ivory and wooden weapons and tools and the disarray of bones and the half-eaten reindeer carcase strewn over the floor; causing the women who were climbing the stone rampart at the entrance to turn as she laughed, poking the fire, hugging her empty stomach; startling the two who emerged into the frosty dawn, heard the crackle and the high-pitched laughter but went on, the younger hurrying towards the pale dried skins hanging high on the branches but the old woman limping, carrying spruce-root ropes, going for firewood, threading through the avenues of bones which sprouted everywhere under the trees. The large trout of the pool rippled the surface and disappeared. He retraced his steps. Going back down the valley he crossed a meadow frosted with daisies, dandelions, primulas and budding anemones. Further on the empty early-morning sky lay as if under his feet. He waded into a lake of blue cornflowers, which shone pale as ice in the dawn as they swished and clung to his knees. He entered a tongue of the forest, where the daylight glimmered now through the evergreen, ever-dark branches. Under white-holed birches a patch of red fireweed sombrely burned. Walking noiselessly on grey reindeer moss and on the softer brown carpeting larch needles, he reached a corner of the valley, descended the rocky terraces and approached the river again. The water frothed and sang. The blood hammered in his throat then as he dropped to his heels, examining the tracks of the hunters who had crossed the river during the night; of the greatest of all hunters, from whom his forefathers had learned but whom no man could emulate or capture; who fled from man, when trailed themselves leaping away up the ridges and crags and glissading down the scree-slopes out of the valley, retreating into the wildest part of their range; whose cunning and strength let them cut out a chosen deer or antelope or moose from its herd, stampede a herd to the appointed place of its death and, even, in the darkness break the circled bull musk-oxen's slashing rampart of horns to attack 19 their calves. He looked at the forest in the upper valley where the black-muzzled blue she-wolf and the three year-old bitches and the two young dogs were running now, silently, the javelins of their long bodies rippling slipping through the trees, with ears cocked, broad heads pointed and green eyes, red tongues and white fangs gleaming; slavering from the jaws which soon would sever the hamstrings, disembowel and tear out the throat of the old stag they were shadowing on and on up the valley until he tired or turned and fell. He walked through the cold grey glacier water, then climbed the banks of blue boulder clay and shingle and ochre-red breccia to the base of the cliff. From a pile of angular rocks wedged with rubble, water welled, poured and swirled away down to the river. The weathered white limestone cliff unrolled over him like a cloud. He retied the bundle, lashed his spear with sinews on to his back and began the ascent, climbing quickly, his bare hands and feet gripping easily on the rock following the accustomed route. High above the river he paused, jumped from one ledge to another and sidled to a crevice over which he leaned, letting his face sink lower and lower, peering in. Out of ice-sheathed cushions of moss the green stems of snow-flowers fountaining burst under his eyes in a shower of petalled white stars; which undid their scent on the air, more fragrant than girls or the sweet smell of the deer; which hung in the dark rock beaded with water-drops attracting, absorb- ing and rekindling from their butterfly-wing-bloom all the light of the morning sky on the snows and of the fled stars. Recrossing the ledge he continued his climb, not stopping again until, clambering up a last rock chimney, he pulled himself past an overhang on to the platform above and turned, standing upright, gazing out over the way he had come. A cold damp breath from behind him touched his neck and blew past his face. At the head of the valley, far above the climbing hunters, the peaks were dropping their veils. From their neve-slopes the ice swimming down dived into the coils of the white dragon below, which unwound through the valley, hugging its glacier bed, bury- ing its snout under vomited debris; from whose serac-studded jaws grey-green water spat gushing, milkily foaming, biting into the most recently deposited gravel terrace and cutting a new channel just as, millennia before, during the mountains' long slow uplift the first waters had run dissecting the mountains, prefiguring the peaks' shapes and the trench of the valley. Bound together by the tendrils of the river, yellow-green islands 20 floated below him on the dark forest sea; from which meadows the trees swept away in black waves, surging, ascending, pouring over ridges and massing in gullies, spouting up the steep valley walls on both sides past him dwarfing the cliff where he stood, flooding higher and higher over grey ribs of rock until the rock faces grow- ing too steep shot naked and grey to the further plateaus, and flinging at the last thin black pinnacles above the plateaus up under the summits' brows. Where the forest fell back spent, out of the last scraggy vegetation, the rock itself leapt on, erupted in gale and avalanche-torn bastions which reared into perennial ice or which cleaving the ice sharper than spears cut open the sky. Above the amphitheatre of the peaks the twilight arch of the morning brightened and swelled. He swung round and entered the cave.

8

Drifting, diving and swirling like a black leaf riding the breeze a raven played high over the valley as his lips parting the blades curled and his incisors clamped severing the cold moist grasses. He checked his energetic cropping, blew loudly, contentedly through his nostrils and shifting the weight of his hindquarters to the other rear leg threw his head quickly erect. The grass tasted sweet: as it had in the mouths of all horses since their pigmy ancestors had colonized the first multiplying parklands and savannahs. With his grooved tongue he pushed this hardest of all foods back into the mill of his jaws; whose complexity had mounted steadily during his age-old lineage, through its use by generations of horses more numerous than the stones of the moun- tain he trod, than the endless savage mountains themselves which ringed all the old world and new world plains where once his progenitors roamed. Still chewing, macerating the abrasive stems, he moved downhill. He walked slowly, frequently pausing, feeding and watching; leaving the promontory and following the manada across and up out of the basin. Reaching the brow of the ridge he turned, looking back. In the east, above the glacier, the mountains were trembling. Slivers of fire ran on their summits, licked up flashing and fled; then fountained as vast beams of gold which welled radiating through the vault of the sky, ebbed, and exploded again mingling moun- tains and sky in a molten glare. 2! He blinked, tossed his head, and swinging round trotted after the mares. From the ridge they dropped steeply into a long narrow gully; where previously a hanging glacier forging slowly had plucked out rocky cliffs on both sides of its course; where a stream now ran murmuring until it spilled waterfalling over a precipice into the valley below. They descended a snow-strewn tussock slope, sidled above the cliffs, traversed a shingle slide where their hooves clat- tered dislodging stones, and crossing a patch of snow gained the floor of the gully. The manada stopped at his warning. The mares stood alert, ready to flee; while he ran ahead, halted, sniffed the air, then galloped to and smelled a heap of old dung. For several minutes he tested the ground, looked up at the small caves in the face of the cliffs, gazed even at the broken ice-fall under the couloir where the gully and stream began, and exploring the skylines trotted to and fro and circled the mares. At last he allowed them forward. But as they walked down the bank he snorted and again broke them away from the stream. When he signalled a second time they ventured into the drinking hole. They all drank deeply. Some of the mares pawed the waters. A colt rolled on its back, splashing and kicking its thin legs in the air. He waded into midstream. With his ears still twitching and his eyes swivelling he bent his long neck, extended his head and dipped his muzzle into the water. Sucking in through his lips he swallowed large cool gurgling draughts. His ears flicked forward as he swal- lowed and lifted when he breathed. After drinking his fill he stood idly, lipping the surface, watching the pebbles dancing under the water and the big drops from his muzzle plopping into the pool. The sun rose, flooding the gully with warm yellow light, trans- muting the falling drops into stars and the water under his eyes into a silver meadow.

9 Grasping his spear he advanced into the chamber and crouched, blinking, accustoming his eyes to the gloom. Any bear-trace was obliterated by the strong bitter stench of the bats. Dripping water tinkled nearby, a colony of jays were twittering on the cliff-face outside, and a wolf's baying far up the valley rang magnified in the ear of the cave. 22 He undid the bundle. From the watertight bladder he extracted a fireboard, some dry brittle moss, torch of laminated juniper splinters, and the drill which he assembled and set spinning. His lips and jaws worked as he silently chanted, his beard shook, and the tendons of his massive neck pulsed in unison as he pushed the bow back and forth. Sweat soaked his lank hair and ran down the wrinkled hide of his cheeks. Spun by the bowstring wound on its ·shank the arrow burned cutting into the wood. When a curl of yellow smoke rose from the board he put down the drill, shook some smouldering ash on to the moss, and knelt blowing and fanning the ember until a small green flame sprang up in front of his mouth. He lit the torch, repacked the bundle, and after undressing placed his furs and spear under a long flat stone on a dry ledge high up the wall. The torch cast a yellow halo on the water-worn floor as he strode down the corridor, which curved away from the entrance behind him, sloped gradually uphill and grew narrower and narrower winding into the mountain. When his shoulders touched both walls he stopped, still panting. Footprints showed where generations of his forefathers had stood. He struck the wall with the haft of his knife, saw the spark fly and clapped his hand over the spot as if to catch the flame in the stone: in the cold glittering schist, which during its long history had witnessed other mountains crumbled and born, even two con- tinents mating and the systaltic earth herself breathing-as it had lain buried under mountain detritus on an ocean-bed sinking, sink- ing until the fresh-forming mountain root below shivered and the upheaval began, the telluric crust shrank, and of the two continents bounding the sea the southern hinterland woke, stirred, ponderously heaved and lurched inexorably forward; as the vice of the con- tinents closed; as the sedimentary layers arched and the fire crept into their fracturing roots, invaded their limestones, clays, con- glomerates and marls and migmatized the rock itself into schist; as the paroxysm mounting to frenzy the African hinterland charged, the foreland trembled, and the intervening trapped arches ejected out of the sea rose, buckled and toppled and uprooted by the onslaught shovelling northward smashed the crystalline shore into mountain wedges which they over-rode at the last piling on to the land in wave after wave of still-boiling alpine foothills, peaks, ranges, plateaus and chains. He hurried on. The walls receded, the roof soared and he entered a gloom-filled hall. He picked his way through the debris strewn on the floor then began climbing, carefully, over and past cyclopean boulders which in the unchanging calm, unexposed to the valley's rain, sun, frost or storm, were poised each upon each looming above him in serpentine ridges and menacing crags; which even the weight of his step might dislodge and start avalanching into tumuli of rubble. He jumped from boulder to boulder, descended, slid through cracks and climbed higher again ascending further until he reached a solid shelf high up the wall. There he heard the noise of water ahead and far below him gutturally roaring. The shelf led through a passage-way to a steep shaft, which he descended quickly, occasionally lowering himself by swinging from his arms and dropping to the ledges below. The noise of the torrent rang louder and louder in his ears. Reaching the base of the shaft he saw the stream swirl out of the darkness and dive disappearing into the rock-choked floor. He followed the banks of the stream, past hoary stalagmites, into a deep canyon and through another corridor to an inner chamber also crowded with pillars where he reached the motion- less waters of an underground lake. A rocky bridge arched into the vault of the chamber. Mounting and ascending the bridge he scanned the torch-lit lake, which stretched on all sides into cloistered grottoes and shadowy bays; which hung limpid underneath him carpeted with crystal sea-flowers and corals and bedecked, where their rock stems met the surface, with white water-lilies floating on pale- green water transparent as mountain air. The lake dropped away and a white ceiling appeared as he climbed higher. Where the bridge curved still closer to the roof he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees. The bridge led on, away from the lake-filled cavern, into a labyrinth of tunnels. He followed a winding tunnel until it closed in round him, becoming little more than a crack in the limestone, into which, lying full length, he wormed his way as if enacting a phylogeny far more ancient than that of the mountain or its constituent rock. Holding the torch his outstretched right hand cleared the way and pushed the bundle and his knife before him, while the left, with its forearm tucked under his belly, propelled him forward like a reptilean flipper. He slid through thick odourless mud, which clung to his beard, to the girdle of his shoulders, to his scraping trunk, buttocks and thighs and to his thrusting toes. At con- strictions in the rocky sheath where it seemed he must be im- 24 prisoned he rested, altered the flexion of his muscles and squirmed slowly through. His reptation ended abruptly as the crevice expanded into a low-roofed cavern, which echoed the gurglings of another stream. He stood up, wiped the mud from his body, and descending a slope overhung with stalactites more pointed than viper's teeth reached the water where it swirled from under the end wall of the cavern. Holding the torch over his head he looked into the green bowl of a pool; where flaxen and amber cave-pearls larger than plovers' eggs swung revolving lambent as beryls. He retied the bundle to his back, thrust his knife in his belt and extinguishing the torch stood suddenly blinded in the plunging dark. He left the torch on the floor and groped his way into the pool. The water like ice struck his feet and rose up his legs. The calcite pearls became flower-buds brushing his knees and his thighs. He took a deep breath and dived and swam vigorously forward and down. His outstretched finger-tips led him on like eyes, his hair streamed back in the swirl of the current and his beating legs drove him on, over the unseen boulders at the bottom of the pool, to the end wall of the cavern, to the orifice in the wall and into the narrow channel through which the water came rushing and swiftly on more desperately kicking through the cataract-filled trap in the rock until bursting into calm water beyond he broke to the surface and felt new air surge again in his lungs. He pulled himself out of the water and, still dripping, undid the bundle, kindled another flame and lit the large torch fixed in the floor; which revealed the surroundings where he stood in the penetralia of the mountain, in a towering nave. Dressing himself in a horse-hair scalp with lifted ears and hogged mane, a long thin tail and a dried stallion's sheath, he gazed at jewel-brilliant pillars and walls through a crystal forest. With manganese he marked a black dorsal stripe down his body and lines round his wrists and ankles; then, taking a piece of red ochre in one hand, he trod forward through the archway past where the torch burned. As he stole under the lion's claws incised on the roof the green, black and white lilies studded around him quivered and gleamed. He paused on the threshold of an inner shrine; where, ornamenting all the minutiae of the ceilings and walls, interlacing • mineral plumules frailer than snow-bunting down threw a myriad dazzlingly-white points of light back into his eyes; where from out of the white beach of the floor a black 25 and red stone stallion rose, stood, trembled in the white light and stared at him. Involuntarily his own foot lifted as he looked into the moons of the stallion's eyes.

IO Pealing shriek upon shriek stallion-blaring the cry burst rebound- ing in his ears as his head exploded aloft and whirling in a mist of white spray his eyes shot searching the shadows of the gully. He bellowed himself then and drove the manada galloping out of the stream; then dashing back through the water halted and wheeled as the cry resounded again, ringing round and round him as if leaping from out of the mountain from under his feet.

II His foot stopped moving. He stood poised on the balls of his feet. His lips parted and welling up through the organ-pipes of his throat the centaur neighing broke deafeningly echoing again and again through the subterranean vault.

I2 As the hunters remained hidden and the mockery of their challeng- ing cries mounted his limbs shook, seized in the convulsions of bewilderment, bravery, anger. Then the man-scent caught his nostrils, a dark line arched through the sky and he charged raking the air until the gold shaft landed and he smelled its smoke. His hooves ground through the dirt. He slid to a halt and stayed, staring at the flame, with out- stretched tail, twitching legs, erect mane, upflung neck, blowing dilated nostrils and his amazed eyes burning.

13 His lips closed, drew back, bared his incisors and quivered. The tail shook. One foot lifted from the rock floor, bent, advanced, retreated, swung slowly higher and slid forward casting a shadow into the chamber. Its toes found the floor, which they rapped like a hoof then gripped as he swayed, leaned his weight to and fro and edged from the archway. His forelimbs curved in front of his chest, his neck stretched higher flexibly vibrating sideways and 26 his ears flicked back. His eyes remained fixed on the statue and a tremor ran through his frame. Then his heels began drumming, to a slow but increasing tempo, and his lithe limbs began prancing bearing him circuitously forward ever nearer the frozen horse. A booming chant like the cataract behind him rang through the cavern. His eyes flashed, focussing hither and thither, near and far, around the crystal walls and into the depths of the mountain, peopling the white air with all the men, beasts and mountain spirits who answered his call. He dropped to the floor, sprang like a lion leaping at the stallion's throat, checked himself, hovered, and trailed his fingers against the cold stone flanks; which he began to explore, panting, huh huh huhing all the while, fingering the painted flesh inch by inch, feeling over the hock joints and the croup, under the thighs, moving forward with both hands above the withers and under the chest over the icy heart, reaching up to the tensed head and blowing on the moistened nostrils. Then he leapt backwards and out, fell crouching and straightening his own thighs whirled again neighing.

14 Another spear flashed through the air. He spun round, whistled violently, and racing back crossed the stream and ascended the bank in long buck-leaps following the manada, which fled now like a flock of birds to the head of the gully where the man-cries made him swing them across under the couloir and drive them galloping up the slope on the further side.

15 His dance grew wilder, tumultuous, his hands and forearms drooped like felled pines or jabbed upwards like insurmountable crags confronting the stallion's head. He towered suddenly dwarf- ing them all as ....

They reached a corner where the burning men appeared and a screaming mare spouting fire from her side falling under his eyes plunged under his hooves; where they all reared in confusion until he rammed the ribs of one mare with his crest, kicked another, ripped the ear of a third, raked one with his teeth, grabbed the haunch of another and squealing furiously forced them fleeing on down a rocky ledge which ran above the stream along the wall of the gully. He halted, swung round and, after glaring at the 27 fluted grey rock-faces, the bright shingle slides, the looming black and white mountain, the stream trickling in the sunlight; at all the lion-coloured grasses of the now man-mad gully ....

hope, fear, anguish, exultation flitted over his face, the muscles of his arms and legs rippled like torrents blown by gales, his frame rose and fell splashed with sweat and red ochre and his feet pounding their imprints in the rock the cavern itself sang his songs, his jubilates. He ....

swivelled in his tracks and chased the manada across a patch of snow, where compacted balls forming under their galloping hooves broke away crackling rolling over the crust; beyond which the bare ledge grew narrower, steeper, then flattened and began to descend. At each step the complex of his limbs' gristle and bone absorbing his thundering weight and his hindquarters' vast dis- charging musculature levering and lengthening and bone drum- ming faster and faster against the mountain's stone threw him bounding on, foaming, with mane and tail flying, through the blue crystal air after the yellow, dusky, brown and bleeding crippled colts and frothing mares whom he caught and passed, through whom he swept becoming himself an arrow, a river flooding, a shouting avalanche, spurting beyond them into the lead still leaping towards the creek's exit at the mouth of the gully and the tall white rock sentinels overlooking the half-frozen waterfall which diving down successive precipices fell drowned among the silent pines far below in a pond of icicles, ice-stones and ice-flowers where soon the husks of all of their bodies would lie, soaring more and more swiftly until shortening his forelegs' stride alighting on the limestone headland he saw the dark valley gape, the thin river ever winding and felt his hind hooves flung together far under his rising belly heave and h u r l e d

28 lAIN LONIE Four Poems

THE CHILDREN ACROSS THE ROAD

THE children across the road were undesirable. Their house lacked paint, the door leaned from its hinges Besides, the plumbing was inadequate

Which perhaps explained (though not excused) the foulness Of their knees or nails or noses. Under their matted hair

Their eyes flashed with austere beauty; the secrets They disclosed under the shrubbery startled The mimosa into sudden blossom and filled the air With loud, protesting, song.

FOR HELEN

SHE is young, young as the green grape Her breasts are hard, hard as the green grape Unyielding is her waist Yet should you taste Her love is bitter as the green grape.

A ripe grape bursting on your tongue Grape swallower, makes you and the day one In sweetness, and the savour past You are yourself at last And spread, vine wise, in the sun.

Taste her, bite her-she'll sting you Till you are soured to nothing But a green sigh curled Round her unbroken world Whose bitterness all tastes now bring. 29 A PASSION FOR TIDINESS

Now he has gone, in petulance or boredom, Leaving a shirt thrown across the bed, Studs on the dressing table, perhaps a coathanger-

Now you no longer hear him, blundering About the room at 3 a.m. or wake to feel him Humped oblivious at your back

You carefully tidy, I know, these reminiscences Into some convenient drawer, humming quietly And plan to redecorate a room;

While he elsewhere grows sentimental in the evening With glass in hand, and formulates your despair- Let him not pity you, or himself:

What fresh outrage of desertion can impinge On your serene mind, its knowledge of death, Its passion for tidiness ?

'PERHAPS IT IS ITS DEATH'

PERHAPS it is its death that fascinates, Or simulation of life, this vivid hair Streamed backward from your bird-like skull : desire From tip to root no cell communicates.

Flesh will answer flesh : the hand entreats The thigh assents, despite us. I despair Who lie and fumble for your will, and fear Your body's answer, which the will negates.

Safer to read the moral from your eyes Which tell how worthless giving and receiving And gaze elsewhere. So, lest your body feign

And I believe, I stroke your hair that lies Across my hand, insensate, undeceiving

And the aimless wind fumbles upon the pane. 30 ANTHONY HOLCROFT An Orchard Year

IN THE autumn, when the last apricot had been picked, and the last peach, the plundered orchard seemed slowly dying. As the sun moved northward, and the autumn winds roared like a river down the hills behind the farm, the wrinkling leaves rattled in their death-flutter and dropped down, leaving the odd forlorn apricot lodged in the swinging trees to tell of the vanished harvest. But Harry, my boss, was already stalking among the bare branches, examining with the tenderness of a lover, the buds of next year's crop. Perhaps, in his imagination, he saw the embryo flower and fruit cradled in its shell, saw it visibly growing and swelling-for him. 'You never saw such a crop!' boasted Harry. 'If we don't get a spring frost, we'll have four thousand cases next trip.' A hard winter gives a mild spring and a hot summer-that's how it goes, said Harry. And at first the winter was hard. Early in the morning, when I went out gloved and scarfed among the trees, the ground underfoot was iron, the frozen grass and skeleton leaves stiff-white. All around me the spidery tangle of branches was encrusted With drops of frozen dew, and powdery frost spikes which stuck out like thorns. And then, at long last, the sun, reach- ing the ragged edge of the high pine trees, would slide slowly into the marbled sky, making the frost twinkle like gold dust on the apricot trunks. But every day a snow-chilled wind blew down from the hills; and towards evening the air would ice over, the sky darken to the familiar frosty blue. Then the weather changed. Day after day I pruned the trees in warm, spring-like weather, the orchard bowing under a northwest wind. And it was still August when the first buds swelled. Here and there a white streak appeared in a slit in the bud's brown shell, and one morning the winter-bare branches were sprinkled with white flowers. Working week after week in the bare orchard, my eye grew watchful for each new movement in flower-bud and leaf, so that the first visible fulfilment of winter growth was, in a way, a fulfil- ment for me too. But Harry, stalking among the trees, shook his fist at the blossom. 'Too early!' he shouted. 'Far too bloody early! There'll 3I be a frost and they'll all be nipped-every bloody one.' I found Harry's temper pathetic. He was a strongly-built man, well over six feet, and walked about the farm with a brisk, pur- poseful stride, slightly swinging his broad shoulders. But he was diabetic, living, as he never tired of reminding me, on the border of life and death. The day I arrived, he alarmed me by taking out his tobacco pouch, and flourishing under my nose the piece of barley-sugar which I must force into his mouth if ever he took a seizure-something liable to happen, he said, at any time. Sometimes I wished it would. It was his belief that a man learns best by trial and error; and once I almost burst into tears while Harry, shaking with silent my first fumbling attempt to adjust a wire strainer. 'You gotta have brains to be a farmer', said Harry, who knew that I had vague ideas of going to University one day. 'Here, this is how it goes.' He took the meaningless pieces of metal from me, clamped them together in a flash, and then knocked them apart. 'It's all in the way you hold your mouth', said Harry. And again he was chuckling over my shoulder. In his own way he was kind, doing what he could to make me feel comfortable in my small cottage. He lent me a radio, and books which he thought would interest me, and which I hastily gutted in order to show him I'd read them; and on winter nights there was always a log fire in his sitting-room. Usually, though, I spent those long evenings in my cottage, listening to the radio, and ploughing through a few more stanzas of the sorrowful tale of Troilus and Criseyde, whose gentle, sensuous music had begun to fascinate me : But all so cold in love towardes thee Thy lady is as frost in winter mone, And thou for-done as snow in fire is sone. The words, softly said over, were an incantation, leading me away from the printed page into twilight fancies of my own, and from there into sleep. No wonder, then, that by the end of the winter I was still only half way through the book! Harry's wife, whom he always referred to as 'the missus', was much more pathetic than Harry. Small and frail, with white, sensitive hands, she looked as though she had strayed into the landscape by mistake. She seldom ventured very far from the sprawling stone farm-house. So tiny and delicate a thing would have been nipped by the first breath of frosLOnce she must have been very pretty, but now, though she was still in her early forties, her face was wrinkling, and her hair hung down anyhow 32 in greying wisps. Tense and nervous, she shrank from Harry's boisterous coarseness. Whenever their eyes met, his were laughing at her; and if she dared to voiCe an opinion, she was exposed to his merciless banter. Generally, when she spoke, she faltered, ending her sentence in a mumble. Not even the weather was a safe topic. 'This cold weather is a farce.' 'What's that Missus? Cold in your arse?' As a result, she seemed to be retreating into deafness. It had begun quite suddenly, she said, and though it was a haven from Harry, it was tragically dividing her from her one real source of pleasure. Music was her great enthusiasm, and it was a compen- sation to which she clung with determination, huddling herself over the radio until Harry switched to the wrestling in the Town Hall. Removed from all cultural and social contacts she was like a wraith, retreating further into her own isolation. Yet I felt sorry for Harry, too. Puzzling over their relationship, I came to the conclusion that the missus was paying for Harry's frustrated sensuality. If he had not been able to pummel her with words, I think he would have beaten her. Perhaps, after a wild youth, Harry had been attracted by her virgin purity as much as her good looks. But that was long ago. And now it seemed in- conceivable that she could even remotely satisfy the passion of a man like Harry. Sometimes I even imagined the missus as a sort of withered princess, sleeping every night behind a locked door on top of twenty mattresses. But in the Christmas holidays, when Jim, the engineering student, came to work on the orchard, he shattered what had grown to be a pleasant fantasy. The previous summer, he said, Harry had taken one of the fits he was always talking about; his skin went yellow, and he began to sweat. Thinking he was about to die, he roared out: 'Where's the missus? I'm not dead yet, God help me.' And pulling his wife into his bedroom, he slammed the door; and no more was seen of him for about half an hour, when he stalked out restored in mind and body. My imagination brooded over this story, filling in every detail behind the closed door. Yet in my own dreams, the woman I waited for was a shadowy image, a spirit remote and beautiful as the moon, who one day would descend upon the orchard as softly as dew upon a flower. And sometimes, lying alone in the grass on a warm Sunday afternoon, I could see her if I closed my eyes; for then every sound in the grass was her footstep, the wind her rustling dress. 33 Once I saw a tall girl walking down the hill through the sheep, her long hair blowing out in the wind. In the distance, her half- shadowed figure was a part of the landscape, a graceful shape like tree and hill and drifting cloud. Then she passed nearby, and I saw that it was only Molly Woodfield after all! Later on, in the summer, I told my fancies to Jim, who shook his head. 'Every man has his dream woman,' said Jim. 'You'll never find her in this world.' But somewhere, I knew, the other was waiting; and when I met her, I would know at once. When the orchard was in its last flowering, snow fell, followed by rain; and one night, as if in answer to the blossoms' challenge, came the first spring frost. At sunset, the wind dropped down. A deathly twilight calm brooded over the orchard. One by one the drifting wisps of pink cloud dissolved at the sky's frosty edge. And now, among the dark maze of orchards, gleamed lights like windows in the hill. The breathless air held a feeling of watchful- ness. Around midnight the murdering frost rose softly from the grasses, spiking the tender buds. I had gone to bed early, and had only just fallen asleep when at once-so it seemed-Harry's head was poking through the window. He sounded disturbingly wide-awake. 'Temperature's down to 28,' said Harry, 'I'm going to light up. You'd better pop over the road for some help.' I jumped up, dragged my clothes on over my pyjamas, and pulling a jersey over my head, rushed out like a scarecrow into the night. It was a long, lonely run over the paddocks, and in trying to make a short-cut in the murky half-light, I missed my way, wandering among the grass-grown craters of abandoned coal workings. Here and there were motionless white stone clods. Over one of them I tripped up, and immediately a folded flock of sheep rose and thumped down the hill. And from the four winds sheep dogs began to bark, straining on their chains, which in the still air rattled ominously. And then I saw a row of poplars and a white road beyond which lay the farm-house I was looking for. By this time I was wide awake, and it was the young neighbouring farm- boy who stumbled behind me through the paddocks, rubbing his eyes. Soon the orchard was full of fires as we ran among the oil pots with our flaming kerosene cans. Exhausted, I sat down at last on a log, and watched the crackling fires, which, in their symmetrical rows, resembled the fires of some army bivouacked there. Just as it was beginning to grow light, a solitary thrush song pierced the air. And as if at a signal, the sheep on the slope 34 above the gully got up and began to move in slow file over the hillside. I went down into the trees and threw the lids over the fire-pots, leaving the orchard cold and smoking a little in the grey light. Then I went to l;>ed. Three or four hours later, when I got up, the air was cold and sooty; the sun, if it shone at all, was obscured by black oily clouds drifting down from the orchards thirty miles to the north. Harry was already prowling about, assessing the damage. Here and there he stopped to slit open a tiny apricot with his finger nail. Some- times the tiny furry fruit, not yet emerged from the blossom, was brown in the centre. Later it would shrivel and drop out. Where there had been no pots the blossom was encased in a thin rind of ice. Harry did not even bother to examine these trees. 'We might get four hundred cases if we're lucky', was Harry's gloomy comment. But Harry always exaggerated. By early summer, apricots the size of acorns crowded the branches in green clusters. In spite of the frost, the crop would be heavy. Much, much too heavy, complained Harry. 'They'll all be piddling marbles-every bloody one. Come on you little buggers-grow!' All day I thinned the fruit, but never thoroughly enough; and the rain, which would have fattened them, didn't come, but a dry northerly wind instead. 'The season's all to hell', growled Harry, striding over the hard, cracked earth. But the rain came at last, and the fruit, in spite of Harry's moans, grew quietly golden and plump. In early January we began the first picking of Newcastles. At six in the morning, when I got out of bed, the sun was already warming the air. We worked in the orchard until morning smoko, by which time the sun had softened the fruit too much to handle. Then we packed in the shed till four, when we went out again into the apricots. About this time, Jim arrived; a tall, slim boy with freckles. Harry had long prepared me for Jim's visit. 'A great lad, Jim,' he once remarked. 'He's got his head screwed on right. Try to tell him there's a life after death. You and I've no more got an immortal soul than a bloody old cow.' But Jim shook his head over Harry. 'Between you and me,' said Jim, 'I wouldn't place Harry's I.Q. higher than I2o-he hasn't got the first clue about orchard management. I bet he could get twice the yield he does off this place. But he's too bloody stubborn 35 in his ways. He lacks humility,' said Jim, 'the biggest goddam thing on earth . . . .' I was awed by Jim's boundless self-confidence and worldly wisdom. No one, he said, had ever beaten him in an argument. Certainly I was no challenge to him. 'Every religion in the world', said Jim, as we sat on the steps of the cottage in the early evening, 'can be explained away in two words-wish-fulfilment. There's no more to it than that.' 'I've always thought', I said, 'that you can see something of God in all things, not just in human relationships, but in nature, too.' Jim smiled, and shook his head. 'Nature red in tooth and claw? It won't work. Anyway, religion ruins nature. Look at that Van Gogh sky now-' pointing to a few drifting cloud-whirls-'that's beautiful; but say it's filled with divine radiance or what have you, and all the light goes out of it. Religion kills the emotions by weighing them down with morals.' 'But I don't think of nature in terms of moral principles, Jim,' I said. 'Isn't it a mystery, rather?' Jim shook his head again. 'The big thing is to keep abreast of modern thought. Then you can't be caught out.' There seemed to be no answer to Jim's logic. When I was with him, I felt shamefaced about the things I believed in, as though stripped naked. But at the end of the hot, summer day, as I slowly drove the last load of fruit to the shed, I forgot about Jim and his arguments. A warm and serene lassitude filled my body like a gathered harvest of sunlight. I leaned forward on my arm to smell the sun on my skin. Then I let my knees guide the steering- wheel while I looked around me. In the twilight, round apricots glowed like small moons among the dusky leaves. Moths fluttered out of the dusty grass before the slow-pounding tractor-wheels; and a bird flew up, screeching, into the huge weeping willows hanging down the gully. The orchard, growing dark slowly, was a nest for every creature. Somewhere in a patch of warm grass, the hare, which the tractor often surprised out of his lair, lay still. Birds were in the trees, and over the trees lay the quiet sky. Afterwards, as I walked back slowly up the steep path from the packing shed, my mood began to change. There were rustlings in the leaves where the birds were. I fancied, too, that the trees, which all day had slept in the sun, were beginning to wake. The dry, motionless leaves seemed expectant for the cool dark. I wandered off the track through the trees, pressing the leaves in my hand, and feeling along the smooth branches. But I was adrift from the 36 orchard, and the life going on there. I returned to the cottage and sat down beside Jim on the step. Then, while the enchanted night waned, I listened to Jim reciting his romantic adventures, envying him the mistress he would be returning to in a week's time. The day he went, he drove the tractor and trailer in top gear over the Lucerne paddock, yelling at me over his shoulder: 'Don't forget to look me up when you come to town. I'll soon jack you up with a sheila!' Then he was gone. The leaves began to fall. Beauty, the cow, who had been eating rotten fruit, swelled in her belly like a balloon, bellowing for- lornly from dawn to dusk. I began ticking off the days to the end of the month. At last it was time to go. As I stood at the gate, the missus appeared at the edge of the pine trees. She waved and vanished. Now that I was already looking at the orchard from the outside, the falling leaves no longer seemed to reflect my loneliness. Rather they intensified a feeling of loss. All that was real and valuable seemed to be centred here; while all that was before me seemed uncertain. From the bus I looked back at the dwindling farm. The cycle was beginning again its unchanging course. Once more the harvest was in, the trees stripped. It was the signal for Harry to stalk again among the trees, examining with the tenderness of a lover, the buds of next year's crop. And now the autumn winds had unstrung the leaves, swirling them into whirlwinds; and the sun moved slowly towards winter.

H. P. KIDSON A Nelson Boyhood

MY PEOPLE emigrated to Nelson in r885. Because I was so young during their first years there my interpretation of their experiences may not be entirely correct, but all my memories fit in with my belief that emigration from a Black Country industrial city of that time to the Nelson of that time by a poor family of some potential talent was a most rewarding adventure. They were not in any way 'assisted', so they came in a sailing 37 ship, that being cheaper than by steamer. And they came to Nelson because a neighbouring family had gone there and reported favourably. There were seven children aged from one to twenty years. I, the eighth, was born in Nelson in 1887. The captain of the barque they sailed in continued to bring the vessel out for a number of years and usually had cargo for Nelson. He called me 'the Maori'. He was an entertaining sea-captain full of tales that you believed only when they were qualified with the phrase 'Honour bright!' On his last voyage he was saddened by some disagreement with the ship owners and, as we saw him no more, he remained a sad, romantic figure in my memory. My father was a blacksmith and had inherited from his father three forges at the pitheads in Staffordshire. His grandfather had farmed on the Clee Hills in Shropshire and had had waggons ply- ing between Shrewsbury and the Welsh towns. The family had lived in the region for many generations but there had been no distinguished forbears, though an uncle of my father's had some fame as a poacher, fighter and philanderer. When he defeated an opponent in a fight he put on his victim's shirt as well as his own. A barmaid, standing up on the bar of the tap-room, would help him by giving his opponent a vicious kick when he came near. For a wager he approached a notoriously vicious watch-dog, un- chained it and brought it into the tap-room in his arms. He had stripped stark naked and the dog had lost all spirit. Passing through a toll-gate on one occasion and not wanting to pay toll for man and beast he had proffered his penny with his donkey tucked under his arm. Magistrates had more than once threatened to send him 'over the Brook'. 'I knowed thy uncle Charlie' was the proud greeting my father would receive from the old men of the region. My father was an able man, a Methodist and a Liberal, taking part in local Liberal politics. (My eldest sister had sat on Glad- stone's knee at some local rally.) He was an intelligent smith, doing excellent work and charging too little for it. He had received more than the ordinary general working-class enlightenment through the 'mutual improvement' societies that were a feature of the Liberal and Methodist movements. He was ambitious for his children: that is of course why he escaped with them from the depressed Black Country of the eighties. My mother, the intelligent daughter of a Welsh miner, was particularly ambitious that they should excel in the arts. My eldest brother had gained certain art certificates that enabled him to take a position on the staff of Canterbury School of Art soon after his arrival in New Zealand. My elder sister had been 38 taught the violin and was able to give lessons straight away. The next two (brothers) were apprenticed to trades. They proved to be gifted musicians whose quality was soon brought out by an excel- lent teacher of singing in Nelson, Mrs Houlker. One returned to England before long, impressed one of the well-known teachers in London and got very good posts there, and was on the staff of King's College in the University of London. The three remaining, a girl and two boys (I arrived later) went to school in Nelson. Of the last four (including now myself) three gained Education Board Scholarships that enabled them to go to the local Colleges that were excellent by any standard. The other, not initially so studious, later got a university degree the hard way. The eldest of the four, and perhaps the ablest, was a girl. It was before the days when it was a natural thing for a woman to enter a profession and the spur that served to drive on the boys to study was lacking in her case. Two gained university scholarships and three proceeded to degrees. All three did well in their professions, one by his work in various countries becoming a recognized authority in meteor- ology. Strangely enough emigration had made them the first scholars of their line. How would they all have fared had they remained in England? I shall speak about the three youngest boys first. Had our parents not emigrated it is certain that they could not have given any of their children a secondary or university education. They might very probably have tried to get them white-collar jobs of some sort. As a young man I visited the hideous industrial town of Bilston, Wolverhampton, where I would have lived (had I been born, which is doubtful). I saw the house my parents had lived in, one of a long row, cheek by jowl with its neighbours, almost back to back with its counterpart in the long row of the next street. The thought that I might have had an etiolated existence there, as a clerk perhaps, made me even then almost frightened. Being a New Zealander I stalked out to the top of the Wrekin and gazed over the chequer-work of woods and fields of Shropshire to the Welsh Hills, and recovered my spirits. Had I been born in that depressing street I might never have thought of going to the top of the Wrekin. The life that was in store for the older ones too in New Zealand was dramatically different from the one they must have led in England. It was their good fortune to find in the Nelson settle- ment a number of cultured men and women who had been edu- cated in schools and universities in England, and were maintaining the tradition of the founders of the settlement who had established 39 the Nelson Institute with its library and museum and the Colleges for boys and for girls. The musical talent of my brothers and sisters brought them closely into contact with this group. So they not only became knowledgeable in many fields of music but interested in the books which the group discussed seriously. As was to be expected, books. like Trilby made a great appeal to them, but what has always surprised me is that my young ears were made familiar with the names of Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson and 0. W. Holmes and I remember wondering what on earth Sartor Resartus could be. I was fed from infancy on the tales of the Wagnerian operas and played up to it all successfully. My eldest brother too, now a successful artist, coming home on vacation, often with an Art School colleague, aroused their interest in painting and sculpture. All this aesthetic progress my parents watched with pride. My mother crammed her garden full of roses. This Nelson group had formed a Harmonic Society which per- formed mainly the great oratorios. My eldest sister became leader of the orchestra and my brother Harry was one of its chief soloists over a long span of years. They organized chamber music concerts too, occasionally with a string quartet, and I can remember per- formances of such things as In a Persian Garden by Lehmann that must have occurred very soon after their publication. There were a few very good voices and a few good pianists and string players and the choice of music was especially good. That love of the very best was perhaps the greatest virtue of these fine people. The bravest thing they did was to found what they modestly called a School of Music, with a small professional staff. There was in the city also an Operatic Society which performed such things as The Mikado and Les Cloches de Corneville, in which my brother Fred, who later returned to England, took leading tenor parts. The first Principal of the School of Music, Herr Balling, was brought out from Germany. He was a fine musician with a fine personality; he was far too good indeed· for the job. Several romantic suggestions were made to explain why he ever applied for it. He had fought a duel and killed his opponent-he had loved some nobleman's daughter and fled his wrath-und so wieder. When after a few years he returned to Europe he became the conductor of the Halle Orchestra and conducted at Bayreuth Festivals. My brothers and sisters sat at his feet. I can remember him playing through the Wagnerian scores on the piano of our home and making his enraptured group familiar with most of the operas. One of my brothers particularly, inspired by him and by the excellent teacher of singing I have mentioned, became a really 40 good interpreter of the German Iieder. He had married a fine pianist, a Nelson girl and one of the first members of the staff of the School of Music, who had been trained at the Leipzig Conservatorium. The family whistle was a Wagner motif. In the rather poor street where we lived we were justly dubbed 'music mad'. The dogs were apt to protest and I can remember one man, nearing home rather drunk and hearing the surge of that music coming from our house, to the delight of those of us who happened to be outside, telling us so in quite clear terms. We younger ones, before we went on our university way and in our vacations, picked up some crumbs from this rich table, but all my life I have envied the elder ones their exuberant, uninhibited participation in a feast they could hardly have expected to be summoned to in so remote a land. In one other direction their life was dramatically changed. Nelson was closely surrounded by wild mountainous country of great interest and beauty and my family, including my father and mother, became enthusiastic trampers and campers. We were soon quite good bushmen, with a knowledge of rivers, of leading spurs, of hunting. The weather in summer was settled for long periods and we three boys were allowed to camp for several days at a stretch, armed too with the sporting weapons of our elder brothers. In the dark Black Country cities of that time there would have been little or no opportunity for such exciting pursuits. Just as the family music-making might have been restricted to the repertoire of the chapel choir, an annual holiday at Llandudno or Blackpool might well have been the limit of their enterprise in this other direction. Like their devotion to music the love of tramping and climbing which the new land encouraged and developed in them made their lives full of interest. As I have said, we younger ones shared these pursuits, but with music it was more a passive participation. Our fairly exacting studies were the excuse, if not the reason, for a less active one; but it must be said that our elder brothers and sisters were such skilled musicians that we hesitated to spoil their good work. We, spurred on by the ambition that migrants so often have, proceeded to degrees and entered our professions. We gained much in the way of scholarship that our elders missed, entering great regions, in fact, that they were unable to explore. I know that they were excited by the opportunities we were getting and envied us our reaching up. Yet always I have felt that the education they had in the wide field of music was a far from second best one, and that my brother who sang so sensitively the great German lieder had achieved something of far greater value than anything I ever did. 4I I myself emerged into consciousness during the rather ecstatic period I have described. I was fairly bright and even precocious in some things and was put on exhibition in the usual manner. I can remember singing my childish numbers, playing a small violin and drawing and painting masterpieces. I had golden curls which were my mother's pride. Some of my first memories are of music and of sunsets viewed from the hilltop of Britannia Heights behind our home, whither I had been carried most of the way on the backs of my elders. The strong impressions these things made upon me were, I am sure, suggested by the genuine delight of my immigrant elder brothers and sisters. Soon with the two brothers who immediately preceded me, one by two years, the other by five, I roamed over the hills to The Sands (now Tahuna, then an unoccupied area), played games, bathed and cooked cockles. I listened to them reading aloud, in our tiny bedroom, the Boys' Own Paper and other books. We got through a lot of books altogether-the Deerfoot ones, and the tales of Kingston, Henty and those other fine story writers of the day. We even read aloud some of the Waverley Novels. This reading together, the walks over the hills and the elders singing and playing, are the things I remember always from those very early years. The books were good, the land was bright, the songs were from Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms. I did not go to school till I was nearly eight. I was the last of the family and there seems to have been a desire to keep me a kind of family pet. But I had learned to write and read, to take my share indeed, as soon as I could stumble through the pages, with the reading aloud I have spoken of. My first two years of schooling were spent in a small 'side school' which took boys and girls to Standard Two. My adventures there, I think, were much the usual ones. I shone in certain ways and felt some superiority over my fellows. I was 'clever', I could run fast, I was good at marbles. But I had my times of distress: for a short period I was bullied by a much bigger boy and suffered real terror. When we were both grown men I used to pass him in the street sometimes and find it hard not to stop and make him fight it out at last. For some days and nights I was in deadly fear of arrest and imprisonment for throwing stones on the roof of a house above which we passed on our way to school. The owner had come out and named me and told me he was informing the police! I had gone weeping wretchedly to school and told the solicitous teacher that I had fallen down a high bank. I had my one and only fight there, a bloodless affair in which the only enthusiastic ones were the 42 promoters and the onlookers. One day I played truant with another boy equally innocent of any evil intent. Nothing was said because I suppose my teachers did not imagine that I had any need to be guilty of such a thing. I had real friends there, one being a Maori boy who was living with a clergyman in the town. I cannot recall that he was any different from any really well brought up Euro- pean boy. He was able, proud, and sensitive-proud, but a little sad always, as one who was not among his people. That sadness was the only trace of the 'savage' in him. He was, I believe, a relative of Te Puoho and of Te Rauparaha. There was in my class a girl of my own age of obviously finer mould than the rest of us. She excelled in beauty and in talent and I fell in love with her, and she gently perceived my adoration. She left for other parts, but remained with me for many years, an undiminished presence, constantly recollected. I was soon promoted to the Central School where the boys were segregated from the third standard upwards. Here for the first year or two I trailed around after my brother who was two years ahead of me. We 'whipped behind' the vans on our way to and from school. This is an exciting pastime that the boy of the present day is denied. As we went along one of the main streets of the city we would watch for a horse 'express' going in our direction. We would chase it and haul ourselves up on to it. Traffic must have been very slow and gentle and the drivers usually ignored us in spite of our schoolmates who would cry 'Whip behind!' We swam in the river after school and crawled home weak with hunger. Here again I had easy success in my school work. When my brother left I became more independent again. During all this time I had been taken regularly to church (or chapel as my parents still called it). The family cohort tramped down the long St Vincent street in which our home was situated and through the main street of the town, meeting the other family cohorts making their way to other churches at the same time and the same spot each Sunday, my little legs taking enormous strides to keep in step with my elders. From as early as I can remember, church on Sunday morning and Sunday school in the afternoon was the accepted thing. As a whole the services were uninspired, though they were relieved for me by some good music in the voluntaries of the organist. For long years I attended Sunday school. Along With the other boys I had there a certain amount of fun. We had excruciating joy when the antics of some mis- chievous imp would succeed in making one of our teachers laugh 43 during prayers. She was a mountain of flesh, the building would shake with her smothered mirth, and some mighty wrath should have descended upon us. When we were in 'Dry Bones's' class it was the custom of some class wit to point to the words 'Dry Bones' carved deeply into the wall of the little room, with an innocent remark such as, 'Someone's carved something up here, Sir.' The invariable answer would be, 'The boy who did that is dead now! ' Strongly impressed on my mind were the words uttered by the Superintendent when praying for the souls of those who had been drowned in the tragic wreck of a ship called the Ohau : 'She went down with a surge and a guggle and that was all that was 'eard of the Ho'au!' I learned nothing, absolutely nothing, in those nine or ten years. To my subsequent regret I finished up with a complete ignorance of the Bible. I was un- interested and in the latter part of the period I was highly critical of the ill-equipped men and women who were trying to teach us. The calibre of the chapel ministers was, I have no doubt, much better than I in my teens gave them credit for, but they were in the main dull preachers (there was one exception: a most gifted orator who became famous for his advocacy of Prohibition) labouring their theology in a pompous way, and I was a pre- cocious intellectual snob. Our elder brothers and sisters had the interest of singing in the choir and remained 'adherents' longer, but we younger ones ceased to attend as soon as it was fair of us to our parents to do so; and they indeed were tolerant of our desire to escape. In due course I had sat for an Education Board Scholarship and gained one. A very small number were given each year for the primary schools of the district and by this precarious means I began my secondary education. I doubt whether I would have had it otherwise. I was still unruffled and unanxious, finding success in study easy, eager to absorb what the excellent teachers taught us, being awarded prizes and scholarships till adolescence dulled and slowed down this impetus and my studies became serious rather than light-hearted. Finally I gained a university scholarship and by this precarious means again got the university education that I certainly would not have had if my marks had been a little lower. I say 'precarious' advisedly because I had become too slow and deliberate for such highly competitive examinations. At Nelson College I had gained some idea of what greatness was in literature, had some mastery of the noble Latin tongue, some real capacity for deductive reasoning, and had felt the worth of the men who 44 taught us. I played games conscientiously but with not much skill and strangely enough had success as a cadet officer. I have said that adolescence dulled and blunted the bright enough spirit that had carried me along so far. One year I had, for example, won the reading prize after reading aloud in front of the whole school; the next year nothing would have induced me to do the same. My English compositions had come naturally enough, now they grew heavy as lead; and for the first time I became nervous if I had to read them in class. I suppose I was hit no more severely than most of my companions but the impact of sex with its sense of guilt certainly led me into a period of uneasy introversion which lasted several years. So much became a cause of dismay and even resentment. I hated the sight of my face; my physique was un- manly; my names, Christian and surname, were the last I would have chosen; the house I lived in was unlovely, the neighbourhood wretched. My snobbishness was extreme. I have pondered especially on this and I realize that there was enough to explain it. I was still really an immigrant, in some ways more so than my elders. I had shared their ecstasy in some of the rich experiences that had awaited them in the new land, but I had in exaggerated form some of their prejudices. Although born in the land I was still living only on the fringe of its new society. There was, too, something of a depressed class feeling in my parents. From the land, my father's father had come to the industrial city. My mother's father had been killed in a Welsh mine and she had gone to work when she was twelve. I heard tales of Welsh mine owners or their agents which were not pleasant. At primary school in Nelson I never went into the home of the boy who was my closest friend. I, his closest friend too, was not invited to the birthday parties he had. I knew quite well the reason: my mother was not on his mother's visiting list. For years I hardly ever entered a home other than that of my brother. My parents' chapel friends did not interest me much and the homes my elder brothers had entered through their music had no reason to be interested in us younger ones. All this was made worse by the departure of the brothers whose companion I had been and I brooded resentfully in my solitariness. My snobbishness endured for many years. I tried not to betray it to my parents : indeed I imposed deliberate acts of penance on myself, such as going in my College cap to the forge and working the bellows for my father and accompanying my mother, now to me so elderly, to meetings amongst people I was not interested in. The strong Calvinistic attitude which my parents had induced in us all did not make things lighter. The 45 family exuberance in music had never spilled over into dancing, smoking or cards. Along with this went the belief that money (there really was little of it) must never be used on things that were not necessary. This was the attitude that was transported from the rather desperate conditions of industrial England at the time of my parents' emigration. They willingly gave us anything we needed, but I remember that when I was given the chance of travelling as emergency with the first fifteen to play a school match I declined because I did not feel that it would be fair to use money in that way. My more urgent reason, perhaps, was the extreme shyness that had possessed me. I was afraid of not knowing how to behave in the home I would be billeted in. I had of course enjoyable days with my College companions and unfailing hours of music at my brother's home when I broke the surface of my despondency, and the beginning of my university days with its change of environ- ment saw it largely disappear. My adolescent imaginings took amusingly romantic forms. I often went to the top of the Britannia Heights behind our home to watch the sunset. When the sun went down behind the mountains across the bay and they grew dark and their snow turned coldly blue I would see the figure of a woman, dressed in Leighton Grecian robe, reclining on the bleakest of the snow fields. 'The Reward of Luxury' was the title of this sad image! I was deadly serious over it. Having read somewhere of Louis XIV casting aside his mistress, Louise de la Valliere, who then entered a nunnery, I carried her banner for a long period in my imaginary world. Had I been Louis XIV I would not have been guilty of the betrayal of one with such a lovely name. I was confronted quite recently with some verse I wrote about this time which described rapturously a beautiful damsel walking through the woods with the trees bowing to her and chanting, '0 Dea Certe!' My actual meetings with any of the other sex were almost nil. Returning home from school I used to pass across the end of a blind road in which, about a hundred yards away, was one cottage inhabited by a widower with one child, a girl of about fifteen years. My passing at a fairly regular time seems to have been among the very few events of her day and she was always standing on a little bridge over a ditch in front of the cottage. This went on for months. Now I could see that the girl had a really magnificent head of hair and this filled me with interest. One afternoon she was not there and my curiosity gave me courage to walk up the road past her house. I found her stand- ing in the doorway. She smiled at me, but alas! her teeth were blackened ruins. I passed on quickly with an instant and deep 46 understanding of everything I had read in prose and verse of the disillusionments that await mankind. A year or two after this, when reaching the hut which we had up the Maitai River, I looked down a steep bank to the stream below where to my surprise there were two girls. They were members of a party already at the hut who had been bathing their feet and were sitting by the shady stream, with their skirts well tucked up. Their long white legs seemed to my disturbed vision larger than the great trees around them. They were the same limbs that had flashed through the brakes of ancient woods before the eyes of mythical hunters. When I met them a few minutes later these two girls were still not ordinary mortals and they little knew that their luminous limbs would long remain for me urgent symbols of the change that had come upon me. It was only by some odd chance that we saw women's legs sixty years ago. At the university I slowly overcame my shyness and learned to associate with a few of the women students, and pleasant and charming they became. Always my memories seem mainly associated with the two things-music, and sunny days spent in tramping and camping. They are stronger indeed than memories of school, though my school friends become figures in the second of these things. I awoke to consciousness as a child to the sounds of music. There was some suggestion later that I should make it my profession, but the decision wisely went against it. I am sure that I would not have had the great application that that course would have demanded. I got away with things scholastically in a manner that would not have availed in music. I have spoken of the musical talent of my elder brothers and sisters. By the time I was fifteen they had dis- persed in marriage or departure to other places and our home became silent. But my brother Harry, the particularly sensitive baritone singer with his pianist wife, remained in Nelson and always at least once a week till we left for university and then too in vacations, we had an evening devoted to music. They never failed me, the last, and now the loneliest. My brother had built his home around a large music room with a fine piano and I became familiar there with many of the great German lieder and with much of the piano music of the great romantic composers. My sister-in-law sent us soaring into that lofty state of bliss to which the cadences of harmonic music can transport us. I would walk home with some tune in my head, the accompaniment perhaps of a Schubert song, would go to bed with it still singing and even hear it as I woke next morning. So later in life, coming from hearing, say, a Beethoven symphony and having important work 47 to do, I have had to summon up a great effort of will to exorcise from my rebellious senses a theme that would not be still. When other members of the family were there we sometimes sang to- gether. We younger ones could read music a little and could 'sing a part', but mainly we listened. Although when my brothers had gone I was solitary at home, I had my school companions. At the Sixth Form stage, when I was no longer so much younger than my class-mates, I formed many friendships. We were by then all serious scholars lasting out the course. One who by the quality of his brain and the vividness of his personality made the rest of us feel inferior mortals, another by far the most capable of us all in the administrative way, and others who had by then already shown their great worth, did not survive the First World War. We had as a group a respect and, I think, a real affection for one another. There was plenty of wit and good humour, no pettiness and no obscenity. There were two other scholarship day-boys along with me, Edwin Wilson and Arthur Sandel, who were like me of necessity very serious in their work, and we became intimate friends. E.W. as a boy and a man was one of the hardest workers I have known and one of the deadliest tacklers in Rugby. He became Professor of Modern Languages at Victoria College. A.S. had wonderful all-round promise but his health broke down in his second year at university. I encouraged these two to join with me, and with my brothers when they came home on vacation, on our excursions into the mountains. My delight in the sunny climate of Nelson was stimulated by the way my elders revelled in it. How different it was from the Black Country's almost constant pall of smoke. The mountains that flank the small plain in which Nelson lies deflect the storms that crash through the neighbouring Straits and send them swinging past, and there was sunny weather for long periods, with plenty of warning of any change. And there were splendid trees whose shade was deep and cool-calm sunny days and deep shade. When I had gained a little Latin I used to chant as I went along, 'Dies almus! Umbra grata!' making an incantation that seemed to fit those classic skies. The nearby mountains are high and deeply inter- sected, densely covered with mixed or beech forest up to the bush line, which is high in this region. The Maungatapu has indeed bush right to its summit four thousand feet up and a noble thing it is. On the east the highest mountain tops are about six thousand feet; the north western block is a little higher and has some perpetual snow; in the south and the Upper Buller region they are above seven 48 thousand. All this country, except for the low foot-hills, is too rough ever to be brought into use and is still in an almost primeval state. Into it the whole family would frequently go, not for day excursions only, but, taking tents, would camp up the river valleys or up on the flanks of the hills and we three youngest brothers, as I have said, were allowed to camp out by ourselves. Now my companions were sometimes those College class-mates E.W. and A.S. With them I tended to go longer distances to newer regions. I had not been away from Nelson and it was an adventure to set out by track and road down the Pelorus to Havelock or over the headwaters of the Rai valley to the Croisilles. That last tramp was a specially memorable one. From the saddle above the Croisilles I looked far over my first islanded sea. We relied on buying such stores as we needed from the Maoris there. For two or three days they gave us a hut to sleep in, made us eat with them in their communal dining room and in the end would not accept anything in payment. A boy of about twelve was a guide bubbling over with fun. A beautiful and charming girl about seventeen years old, who seemed to do all the cooking for the group, pressed food upon us with gracious hospitality. Though we suspected that her English was as good as ours, not one word of it would she speak to us; but she kept up a running commentary about us in Maori that made the others rock with laughter. When we went to thank her and to say goodbye she wiped her floury hands on her apron and with twinkly eyes said, 'Excuse my hands, won't you!' This was the year I saw my first lake. I had cycled up to Lake Rotoiti with two friends. The day was still but overcast, with high cloud. We topped a rise and there lay the water, completely silent, almost mauve in colour, with mountains and bush of grey and brown madder reflected stilly in it. I could have believed that it was some insubstantial vision. We camped in the one hut (where now there is a holiday settlement) and fed a starving half-grown kitten that we found there. In the evening we were eeling in a boat with the help of an acetylene lamp and were some twenty to thirty feet from the shore when we were astonished and moved to see that kitten take to the water and actually swim out to us. Most of our early tramping was done at the head of the Maitai Valley. One of my elder brothers, and a brother-in-law, and two others, had purchased a few acres of bush at the foot of the Maungatapu, and had built a cottage there. This was almost always available for our use and good use we made of it. From it we made day trips over the saddle to the Pelorus River (passing Murderers' Rock, the scene of the Maungatapu murders, and using in fact the 49 track that the murderers and gold-diggers used coming from the Wakamarina diggings), up the Dun Mountain, and the Maungatapu itself. Another tramp took us past a very extensive Maori quarry where there were perhaps two acres of chippings from the argillite rocks. We found anvils of granite transported from the Boulder Bank, a great many rough-hewn adzes and implements of varying shapes and sizes, and the flakes rang like glass under our feet. A few years later I took one of my sixth form contemporaries to see this quarry and he, later Dr H. D. Skinner the well-known anthropologist, wrote a monograph on it. Would that he and I could visit it again. My friend Bill Bennett, whom I shall speak of later, found another earlier quarry a few miles away overgrown with forest trees, but though I tried several times from the best directions he could give me, I failed to find it. This region too was the scene of most of our hunting and shooting. Here I learnt to take trout from a river in many ways, all of them illegal. One summer we became aware of a migration of mice moving eastwards in the area. We observed them several times in un- pleasant numbers seeking food in Bill's hut and one night when we were camped on the banks of the Pelorus many of them ran over us as we lay on the ground. Before bedding down we had watched them swimming over the river. There was enough light on the water to make visible their tiny wakes as they swam across the still pools. Occasionally we would see fish rise and take them. There were big trout and big eels in the river but they could not cope with the swarms that were moving across in that strange migration. As we grew older we joined our elder brothers and two or three other adults who had explored the mountains further away. With them we climbed all the mountains surrounding the Waimea Plain, including Rentoul, Starveall, Slatey Peak, Cordon's Knob and Mt Richmond on the east, Mt Robert and the No Catch'ems at Lake Rotoiti, and the group on the west, including Mt Arthur and its twin peaks, the Table Land, Mt Peel, Mt Cobb and Mt Domett deep into north-west Nelson. We usually made one winter trip, often to Cordon's Knob, to have a day in the snow. Most of these in- volved fairly long approaches on bicycles to their bases and easy but laborious climbs, generally between five and six thousand feet. To some, there were tracks leading in that had been cut for mining operations long abandoned. The climb up Mt Richmond, for example, began with a tramp along an old tram track leading up to the flank of the Dun Mountain. Climbing to the top of the Dun we plunged down some two thousand feet to the upper Pelorus 50 where we would camp the night. The next day we would toil up the eastern side of the valley to the summit which overlooked the Wairau Valley and the Cook Straits area. I can remember as a boy of sixteen toiling up the long grinding spur with my swag, cursing myself for being such a fool as to do this thing. But the reward was great. There was something exhilarating in thus climbing, then leaping down deep into this great primeval valley to rise again to a greater height on the other side, to look over an entirely different province, and across the Straits to the distant, but clearly visible North Island, toI me another country. Once we approached an old nanny goat feeding on a steep face above a big deep hole in the Pelorus and surprised her into falling into the water, whence we rescued her, unconscious and almost drowned, applied artificial respiration and put her on her feet again. On the tops above the bush-line I had found it possible to approach a feeding mob of goats without giving alarm. They had never seen man; they would be busy feeding, and, although the patriarch billy, keeping some sort of watch, might be staring straight at you but yet be unaware of danger, it was sometimes possible to grab one of them before the stampede began. This happened to me several times. Once when we had got on to the Richmond ridge and were moving along to the top I happened to be a few hundred yards ahead of the others. I came upon a mob of goats and thought I would try to be clever and have one caught by the time the others came up. I approached them from the side that placed them between me and the precipitous face of the ridge. They took alarm and to my astonishment disappeared over the face of the cliff. When I reached the edge I saw them moving quickly but in no panic down the rocky face, leaping from ledge to ledge, half-grown kids with them, landing with four feet propped together on the smallest of spaces, until they reached the slopes below. Now by any standards this was no mean precipice, several hundred feet of it, and when the rest of the party came up I had some difficulty in telling them what I had seen, because I felt that it would be expecting too much for them to believe it. Sometimes when we got to the top of Rentoul or Richmond we would find the W airau Valley and Cook Straits filled with cloud and with the sun low at our backs we would see the Spectre of the Bracken. We would camp the night in our sleeping bags in some snow-grass hollow overlooking the east. One morning I was awakened by my brother and found this sea of mist below us, but above it the sky was covered by a high layer of cirrus cloud. The rising sun had lit up this high cloud till it was crimson, and 5I this was reflected on to the lower sea which had become suffused with the same colour. Emerging from the dark crimson sea were Mt Fishtail, blue-black and cold, and like far distant islands, the Tararua peaks beyond the Straits. I was heavy with sleep as a boy can be, but I instantly realized that here was something of quite memorable splendour. I drank in deep, deliberate draughts of the scene for a few moments then dropped my head and fell into pro- found sleep again. One of the chief companions of my early boyhood had been Bill Bennett. His father was a Cornish miner who had been brought out to work in the copper mines in the Aniseed Valley. When the mines failed he was left in one of the houses to act as caretaker of the idle buildings and machinery. Here he lived for some years with his family of several daughters and two sons. They were the sole inhabitants of the upper part of the valley, getting their supplies by pack horse from Richmond. My people knew them through the young teacher of their 'household school' and they used our house as a refuge when they came to Nelson. We camped at 'The Copper Mine' at least once each summer, and after they had left, it was always an interesting region for our excursions. The bush streams had trout in them, there were deer and goats to hunt and we never tired of fossicking about the abandoned mines. Bill had been born there; he was tougher than anyone else I have known and hunting was his passion. I have seen him, a boy of nine years, actually crying with pain when he was following his dog who had found a pig and was chasing it down a steep bush slope. He always went bare-footed and that slope was covered with vicious jagged stones; but nothing could stop him when the chase was on. Even the caretaker was withdrawn from the abandoned mines and the family came to Nelson where the children went to school. I remember how we first took Bill over to The Sands. The tide was low and there was a fine stretch of flat sand awaiting us. When assured that it was possible and permissible he ran and ran on it in great excitement. He became our companion on very many of the camping excursions I have spoken of. Later he built a small hut near ours at the foot of the Maungatapu and also one over the saddle well down on the Pelorus side. Many times as a boy at College and later when on university vacation I went with him, sometimes in the dark in winter after Saturday afternoon football, for a day's hunting. He remained a very strong and tough tramper and a wonderful bushman and hunter. He was also one of the gentlest and kindest of companions. He knew every foot of the 52 track over to the Pelorus and in the dark would give us exact warning of everything that might cause a fall or injury. We would reach his hut perhaps at ten o'clock, have a grand supper, turn in on the bunks and start the hunt at the very first sign of light. He had dogs, one of them a particularly gallant one of mixed breed, who became well known for his prowess. We would move out into the bush up the mountain flanks relying on the dogs to pick up a scent. When they found the pigs they would immediately speak; the pigs would stampede downhill and the chase begin. We would follow them at our very best speed, Bill always ahead. The dogs' cry would change to a bailing note, perhaps two or three hundred feet below us. We would approach excitedly to see what kind of pig they had bailed; if the animal was not too dangerous Bill would go in and knife it; if it was too vicious a sow or too strong a boar he would shoot it. If we had brought with us, say, some university friend visiting Nelson on vacation, Bill and his dogs never failed us, but on one occasion he had to wait too long for one of these visitors to arrive to see the kill. His famous dog turned quickly to see what had happened and the boar, taking his opportunity like a flash, ripped him in the flank. Bill sewed up the great wound with flax, made a stretcher and carried the dog to his hut and left him there with plenty of food and water till he could be visited again the following week. He made a good recovery. Some years later he was killed by a boar and his master carried his body up to the top of the saddle and marked the grave with the dog's name. The cross stood there for many years and when Bill died, his friends saw that it was kept in order. I enjoyed pig-hunting long after I had stopped shooting anything else and Bill's great kindness combined with his great skill and fearlessness as a hunter made him a very dear and a very exciting companion. In my late teens I was able more and more to join in excursions with F. G. Gibbs, the headmaster of the Central School. My elder brothers had become friendly with him through the musical societies they belonged to and they found him an enthusiastic tramper. He was part owner of our Maitai 'whare'. For years, while at College and on university vacations, I joined their party, always having at least one major excursion a year. We explored the mountain regions I have mentioned, going further afield sometimes, as for example to the Fairie Queene in the Spensers, a high en- chanted land. Our chief joy was in the north-west Nelson area, covering Mt Arthur and the Table Land, Mt Peel, Mt Cobb and Mt Domett. This region had been glaciated, the Cobb being a long glacial valley, and there were many small deep lakes in the moun- 53 tain cirques, and always some snow to give it greater interest. F. G. Gibbs had a good knowledge of botany, and was indeed one of the most useful collectors for the well-known botanists of the time, and that part of the country was particularly rich in alpine flora. Certainly no deer had then reached it nor any goats or pigs, I think. We almost always saw blue duck in Flora Creek; there were, too, rock wrens above the bush-line, kiwis and kakapos in the bush, and wekas everywhere. Once I saw a saddle-back. There was a great area of limestone country and many caves with moa bones in plenty. F.G.G. was a scholar in the academic sense and also had . a tremendous fund of knowledge. My brothers and I owed him an enormous debt. He could satisfy, from his own knowledge, or from his fine library, all our enquiries and he stimulated our interest in all sorts of things. With it all he was a cheerful companion and one of the most unselfish of men. I have never known anyone watch so consistently over the safety and comfort of the weaker members of a party as he did. It was a great privilege indeed to spend so many and such memorable days with him. It is good to find that there are now tramping club huts in some of the mountain areas we explored and a ski-tow on Mt Robert. At the time I have been speaking of we were almost the only ones who climbed there for the pleasure of it. Gold prospectors and occasional hunters had preceded us and here and there farmers grazed cattle above the bush line. Except for the Cobb Valley, where a hydro-electric scheme is in operation, our haunts must still be much as we knew them, for the land is too mountainous ever to become inhabited. It was from our climbing that I got my greatest joy. Coming up out of the bush on to the high tops never failed to be exhilarating. The cicadas in the last stunted, gnarled, old-man-moss covered beeches, the bright glittering air as we emerged, the sight of deer moving so daintily and gracefully across a snow-grass face, the alpine meadows of celmisia, ranunculus, and ourisia, the patches of pure white snow, the sense of achievement on reaching the summit, the baring of our bodies to the sun and air after the long toil, the elation of seeing far, far below us the regions we had left, the sight of Mt Tapuaenuku in the Kaikouras standing up high to the south and Mt Egmont appearing in the evening light above the sea to the north-all these things made us feel especially favoured mortals. Favoured too because we experienced them with com- panions who had shared all the burden and toil cheerfully.

54 PETER BLAND To a Home-town Conscript Posted Overseas

JusT the right age to take an interest in the job We marched rebellious from our mother's parlours, Stuffed with our father's pride, and wild To be told they'd make us into fighting men. Remember when the train clocked in, the laughter Of the boys above the noise of arriving, the talk Of brown-limbed women waiting in foreign ports.

Who, as far as I know, are waiting still, unless You found them there-ready to drown your dreams Deep in their deep black hair. Did you learn To love and· kill with equal ease, lost In that flag-strung corner of the shrinking globe Where neither common bond nor grief dare meddle With that brief display of duty and its wake's despair?

And what of those we left there? Do their names, On brass plaques, strengthen the sacrificial myth Or fill out history in home-town museums? With us, they felt the long nights soak Like black-lead through their bones; alone, Would uncrease last week's mail, or tick away The calendar that should have brought them home.

55 FREDERICK PAGE A Musician's journal

Munich Music in Munich is the conservative business it is the world over. The opera offers Mozart, Wagner, Strauss, with one performance of a Handel opera, and all performances are sold out. Posters announce orchestral concerts for the coming season, Beethoven, Brahms, chamber-music programmes are not as enterprising as ours. Webern's six orchestral pieces will be played but so far as I could make out this was the only unusual work announced over a period of seven months. Contemporary music pours over the air, I am told, but not through my hotel bedroom radio, one knob of which gives dreary jolly German light music, the other the Voice of America which is hair-raisingly awful. But through the courtesy of an acquaintance I heard in one of the radio studios tapes of works by two contemporary Germans, Fortner and Hartmann. Fortner who is about fifty lives in Heidelberg, has a post at a church institution, and the work I heard was The Creation, a setting for baritone and orchestra of a poem by the Negro poet, James Weldon Johnson. The voice part was in speaking style, going up down, down up, so far as I could hear, inconsequentially; the words were beautifully placed, sung in English by Fischer- Dieskau, elaborately accompanied, but just as my attention was beginning to flag, the baritone broke into a series of Amens, and the music suddenly sprang into life. The composer employed the technique of iso-rhythm and with the intellectual effort required to sustain this his imagination took fire. Hartmann, a pupil of Max Reger and of Alban Berg, lives in Munich and is the most outstanding composer of symphonies in Germany. The two movements I was able to hear of the Third Symphony were serious but too full of Reger-ish, Hindemithian counterpoint to my taste; there is a brilliant virtuosic fugue, much to admire in the writing but the music never takes off. I should imagine that there is an immense amount of this earnest writing in Germany today, and the young will have none of it. At the opera I heard in the one evening two works by Strauss, the early opera Feuersnot, and the ballet ]osephslegend. My heart sank as the curtain went up on mediaeval Munich, quaint old 56 Opawa Baptist Church, Christchurch, 19 53 Designer: T. J. Taylor

Some Recent Churches St Therese of Lisieux, Invercargill, I 9 53 Architect: E. J. McCoy St Therese, Invercargill (Interior) St Martin's Presbyterian Church, Christchurch, I 9 n

Architect: Ernst Plishke of PusHKE & fnnH St Martin's Presbyterian Church (Interior) 00 er, 0'\ ro .... ;..-, '<:) r:: 0 ro u X u V < --, .,_," ....,"' UJ c...... r.: <..J p:) V .:.c: ...r:: ....<..J ...., -c: r:: ...r:: 0 ...., Cfl St John the Baptist, Alexandra (Interior) Opawa Baptist Church, Christchurch (Interior) houses, chuckling wives, jolly burghers, lads and lasses playing ring-a-ding-ding, and though Strauss, and for a moment, the scene- designer, were satirizing this world, the joke was tedious. There are soaring Straussian moments, particularly in a passage that must be played off-stage, with the young lovers making love all too audibly, the soprano all swooning sighs, the tenor punctuating these with vigorous shouts, the orchestra going for its life. It is all meant to be sophisticated and improper and more was to come in Josephs- legend. Strip-tease will have nothing on this, and the combination of voluptuous dancing, sumptuous decor, exquisite orchestral playing, from Rudolf Kempe, with Strauss trying hard to be lascivious, was tasteless and vulgar. Josephslegend is not an early work and I could not but compare the tinsel music given to Joseph with the music given to the sons of the morning in Vaughan Williams's Job. Tristan I went to dutifully, but except for the great moments, the prelude, the sailor's song and the G flat episode in Act II, the magic takes a long time to work. The only good music in Munich was a liturgical Mass by Lotti, the Italian contemporary of Bach, beautifully sung in the Michaelis-Kirche.

Darmstadt Since 1948 a summer school devoted to avant-garde music has taken place in Darmstadt. The town suffered saturation bombing in the war and an immense amount of energy must have been spent in these early years to get this school going at all. Now one hears that students are turned away. This year the school was held some six or seven miles out, in a teachers' training college, set in beech woods above the village of Jugendheim. Peaches ripen in the late summer sunshine; it is enchanting to walk up from the village through those Manet-like sunlit woods each morning. If I may alter the figure 1948 to 1950, to make it a round one, there is no doubt, at Darmstadt, that music started in 1950. Hindemith and Bartok are old hat, the nineteenth-century orchestra now slips into its historical place, with the seventeenth-century opera, the fifteenth- century Mass. Brahms is olde-worlde. Debussy is the hero, Webern is God, satellites, Stockhausen, Pousseur, Boulez, Nono, revolve. Boulez will come, will not come, Stockhausen and Pousseur get up on the platform, but do not make a platform. They expound their ideas, their beliefs, with modesty, they make no claims, they are not assertive, they simply say 'Look,' (or should it be 'Listen'), 'we have come through'. Their talks, their music, are listened to by some three hundred students in an 57 atmosphere that is lively and stimulating, and the excitement that runs through the place makes one wonder whether the Florentine Camerata had not something of this quality. Melody, harmony, rhythm, form, in the traditional sense, have gone overboard, and in electronic music, the performer disappears too. We are to sit in a hall with the sounds coming to us from all around, listening to the pure word, the pure tone. The processes that precede the pure word are complicated. Form of another kind (here Webern enters) returns with 'serial' music. The phrase 'serial music' was first used by Boulez in 1946 and, here comes a definition, is 'music built on the use of pre-selected rows for one or more parameters of tones'. The definition is Dr Stucken- schmidt's, the leading critic in Germany. By 'parameters' is meant the qualities inherent in a tone, its dynamic, its colour, its pitch. Not only are the twelve-note rows to be worked but each tone must follow the logic inherent in the parameters. There is much here to appeal to the French mind and to the German mind, and young men, barely out of their teens, have jumped into the system, boots and all. Darmstadt is generous to these youngsters, giving them performances, an audience, and the chance to hear what others are doing. Krenek and Blacher lecture on composition, John Cage is invited across from the U.S.A. to demonstrate his extra- ordinary ideas, Kolisch and Steuermann, who played the music of Schonberg, Berg and Webern as it was written, are here to keep us to the true tradition, Bruno Maderna prepares instrumental groups, in front of a class, for the evening performances, Dr Stuckenschmidt takes classes in music criticism. I take my hat off to Dr Steinecke who runs all this in the background and is hardly to be seen. Meantime young men play to Steuermann, Webern's Variations for Piano, op. 27, Schonberg's Suite, op. 25, Boulez's Second Piano Sonata, from memory. Steuermann is a wonderful man, with a lovely lyrical touch, a penetrating insight into music, and he plays most simply. He is a pupil of Busoni and Schonberg. The Parenin and the La Salle Quartets are here, instrumental groups from Paris, Milan, Cologne and Darmstadt; there is a prize of £2oo for him who plays best the first movement of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto. Three pianists, David Tudor, Alois and Anton Kontarsky are playing the piano in a way to suggest that that too was invented in 1950. Tudor plays in an unorthodox manner, the strings are to be hit, plucked, muted, harmonies coaxed from them. Like the brothers Kontarsky, he plays with the utmost clean attack and ring. One longs to hear how the slow movement of K.331 would 58 sound under their fingers. 'Do you play any traditional music?' Mr Tudor was asked. 'Why, of course,' he speaks very slowly, 'I play late Webern.' I give all these details to suggest the extraordinary variety, live- liness and vigour of this school. What is coming out of it all? The electronic music was disappointing. I see no reason why music should not come from a valve, as from a box strung With wires, and the disappearance of the performer, with memories of some piano-hashers, could be welcomed, and so, with good will, I tried to give this music a fair hearing. I tried to empty my head of traditional music, of notions of what might come, except to hope for a new world of poetry and imagination, but I couldn't have tried hard enough, for all that came through the loud speakers were sounds that had associations with the ridiculous world I was still in, back-room gurgles, Donald Duck squawks, space-ship noises, and so I have no other comment. A flautist playing a duet, or I suppose concerto with himself and other sounds from a tape- recorder was not as silly as it might read. But Bruno Maderna, Stockhausen, and Pousseur, like hermits, are pursuing their devot- ions to this cause in the new desert caves, the radio stations at Paris, Cologne, and, I hear, Tokyo (N.Z.B.S. please take note). In their serial music they write for piano, for small groups of varied instruments (as it were, the Brandenburgs, the Vivaldi concerti, come back again), and for small choirs. The music is formidably difficult and complicated, and at times they pile up the tones aggressively and violently as though to break the sound barrier. They seem to be making some gesture away ·from the horror and spiritual emptiness brought about by the Third Reich. Three of them, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, emerge from a mass of names, as bold, original, real composers. Unfortun- ately so far, I have heard only one or two pieces by each, but already they sort themselves out. Boulez with Le Solei! des Eaux, a setting of poems by Char, was fastidious and charming, Stockhausen with Kontrapunkt XI was logical and forceful, Nono with Cori di Didone was most moving. The sounds he evoked had a limpidity and beauty that made one realize that he is a Venetian. These men are in their early thirties, if that, and a young man from the backwoods of Sweden, Bo Nilsson, aged 21, also brought for- ward a good work. I must say that I found it remarkable to fly from New Zealand to Darmstadt and to find such invention, such originality, such poetry. I must add too that I find it mighty agree- able to sit in an audience that cheers and encores the works of Webern and that I have discovered that Schonberg in the Suite 59 op. 29 and the Serenade op. 24 is a witty and genial composer. It is now believable that he was an adept at ping-pang. An odd and disturbing figure, in case we were being snobbish about Webern, was John Cage. He, as it were, is a practitioner of Zen in music. Why do we not sit quietly in a room and play a few notes on the Japanese flute, the shakuhachi? What is all the racket about? Is the sound of Beethoven different from that of a cowbell? (Here, an angry German stamped out.) And so John Cage starts with a clean sheet of paper, finds the music all about him, from the mark on the wall, from the stars in their charts, and with the help of the Chinese Book of Changes he extracts, by chance, his notes, which he then takes to the piano and translates into sounds. One listens to the answer to the riddle 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' Silence is as meaningful as sound. Odd isolated sounds, and noises, are distilled from the piano. (In one long silence, the naughty French group had time to whistle the opening phrase of 'Colonel Bogy', now the rage in Europe.) Radios are switched on and off, rattles brought into play with a spare hand, whistles blown, alarm clocks set off, along with the disjunct sounds from pianos, and one feels that John Cage is trying to break down levels of thinking about music, to cleanse the porches of one's ears, to make one ask 'What is music?' Sometimes the shock technique works, sometimes not. Surely Mr Cage should have got himself born thirty years earlier and appeared with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists. He is a funny man, and one in an impress- ive list of American avant-garde composers, Charles Ives, Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varese. Myself I feel he is playing a dangerous game, with Zen Buddhism now so fashionable, but it is a charming game. I must add that I heard also a lot of very bad music at Darm- stadt and no doubt there is some snobbery and next year there will be a whole crop of imitation Stockhausens, but I found it thrilling and exhilarating to drop in by plane and come bang up against Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono. Nor have I mentioned an exquisite performance of Debussy's Ronde du Printemps at one of the orchestral concerts, given by an up-and-coming conductor Ernest Bour, and must add that by scooting up to Frankfurt one Sunday morning I heard a Lutheran congregation sing a Walther Chorale and, introducing myself to the organist, Helmut Walcha, had played to me 'Gottes Sohn, Herr Jesu Christ'. Venice Venice puts on a show; 'Tradition and Experiment' is to be the 6o theme and after some Gabrieli, which with the best will in the world, I found dull, W. H. Auden addresses us, 'The Pattern and the Way'. His sentences fall like dry biscuits, paragraphs are sub- divided and are hard to follow by ear, and, conscious that the Norddeutscher Rundfunk orchestra is waiting to play the Bartok concerto, and that there is a lot of speaking, he hurries rather. 'The pattern' is man's plight, and what are we to do to be saved, the usual guff, but somehow it is not guff, coming from this tough mind. He speaks with authority and one listens. 'The way', so far as I followed him, is to accept tradition, to accept William Empson's 'Homage to the British Museum'. Perhaps due to some acute listening in Darmstadt I heard, for the first time, weaknesses of structure in the Bartok concerto, weaknesses that are not apparent in the Music for Strings, Per- cussion and Celesta. There was a lovely concert of choral music by early Flemings and Venetians, the Hercules Mass of Josquin des Pres, and madrigals from Willaert to Monteverdi. The liquid siftings of Monteverdi simply ravished the ear; how is it that these com- posers in their final cadences can do to the ear what the sight of Venus in the evening sky can do to the eye? And what is it, after the bong-bang endings of the Viennese, that Stravinsky does in his cadences? I wish I knew. This choral concert was given in the Sala del Noviziato on the Isola di San Giorgio. A concert in the lovely Fenice Theatre brought Christian Ferras playing breath- takingly Berg's Violin Concerto; there was a deplorable concert of contemporary Italian music, with Luigi Nono's name conspicuously absent. Nono abhors plutocracy in music and, it is said, has had one performance of a work of his in Italy in his life. Stravinsky appeared in two concerts; the experts said that the first, with Oedipus Rex, and Sacre du Printemps, was not very good, that he is now showing his age, but I found it wonderful to hear the old man conduct his opera-oratorio with an austere touch, and the concert version of the ballet so that, apart from the rhythmic dances, it sounded quiet and strange. There is something hypnotic about the work with its evocation of April, the cruel month, the painful stirrings of the earth, the tumescent dances. The new work, Threni, is a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and is said to have been inspired by a study of Tallis's setting. The work is a fine one; it immediately strikes the note of lamentation, of tears, solo voices heard in twos, threes and fours go their way in recondite canons with the air becoming thin and dry. The chorus, sparingly used, interjects, the orchestra brings in fragmented comments, and this not easy work ends on a beautiful 6I closing page. One wonders why Stravinsky has not set something of Eliot's. There is a similar refusal in both to take an easy way. We also heard his version of Bach's Canonic Variations on 'Vom Himmel Hoch', a magnificent piece that we must get played in New Zealand, the Symphony for Wind Instruments, dedicated to the memory of Debussy, which opens in his fragmented manner, as though he is making abrupt movements with his limbs, and then gets going in his enchanting poised and balanced style. We also heard the In Memoriam Dylan Thomas; after the dirges from the trombones, the strings on their entry seemed to weep, and the tenor's singing of the first 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light' could surely have melted the heart of Charon. The audience, plutocratic, applauded tepidly and made for the doors.

IAN A. GORDON The Editing of Katherine Mansfield' s journal and Scrapbook

THE recent acquisition by the Government of New Zealand on behalf of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington of a group of Katherine Mansfield's notebooks and papers (sold at auction for the estate of the late John Middleton Murry) offers for the first time the opportunity of studying her writing at the workshop pre-public- ation stage. The Library has also acquired, as a separate transaction, the originals of the letters she sent to her husband. These, at the time of writing, are on exhibition in London; but the group of some fifty items secured at auction has arrived in the Library and has been carefully examined. An analytical catalogue is in pre- paration. Even the first cursory examination suggested that in these papers lay much of the material of the Journal. Closer examination has revealed that the Turnbull Library now possesses the complete original 'manuscript' of the Journal (published in 1927), the Scrap- book (published in 1939) and the 'definitive edition' of the Journal (published in 1954). Of the entire text of the fifty items, approxim- ately twenty-five per cent has never been published. The date of the earliest item is 1901, when the author was still at school; the date of the latest is 1922, a few weeks before her death. The material is of various types. Firstly there is a set of diaries- the ordinary printed kind one can buy at any stationer. These are for the years 1914, 1915, 1920, and 1922. They are surprisingly empty. The 1914 diary has entries mainly for March and April. The others are like everybody else's diary-they begin with good intentions (sometimes expressed) and fill up January day by day. By mid-February the enthusiasm has cooled. From March onwards the pages are generally blank. Next comes a group of about thirty notebooks. Some are dated by the author-usually with the precise date on which the note- book was started. Others are dated by Murry in a pencil note. The remainder can be dated fairly precisely from internal evidence. The contents of the notebooks are multifarious. There are drafts of stories and many dozens of brief conversations and scenes from stories-quite obviously Katherine Mansfield set down often on the spur of the moment short pieces of material that she was later to incorporate into a complete story. These pieces may come any- where in the completed story-there are many more 'middle' pieces than beginnings. There are notes from her reading, with or without her comments, quotations copied from Shakespeare, Hardy, Tolstoy and many other authors; calculations of her finances; lists of household expenses in astonishing detail (dinner at 12.15 francs; a lemon at 40 centimes); comments on the people she liked and disliked; comments (sometimes years later) on what she had written previously in a notebook; occasionally a dated 'diary' type entry on what she was doing or thinking at the moment. She often wrote her letters in her working notebook, tearing out the pages for posting. Occasionally she has decided not to send a letter, and it remains in the book. In general the notebooks represent 'workshop' material. They contain the stuff from which her stories were worked up; fragmentary material that was later to appear in lesser stories like 'The Wrong House' or major stories like 'The Doll's House' and 'The Garden Party'. The final group of material is even more miscellaneous; some 63 hundred single sheets of paper of various sizes and rulings with poems (several dozen), a draft of a chapter of her abortive novel Maata, an unpublished and unfinished play entitled Toots, many pages of schoolgirl poems and 'vignettes' and stories, further com- plete later stories (some in a fair copy ready for the printer), a meticulously kept book of household accounts for 1914-1916, and a solidly bound volume into which she pasted her Athenaeum reviews (which includes apparently all her unsigned short notices to the same journal). This heterogeneous mass is, in fact, the journal. It is also the Scrapbook. It is also the final 1954 expanded edition of the journal, which the title-page states is the 'definitive edition'. In the intro- duction to the original edition of 1927, the editor admitted that in addition to the 'Journal' there was 'material ... of various kinds'. But in all his editing he invariably referred to the Journal, the implication being that there was such an entity. I can find little trace of it in the extant documents. The journal is a brilliant piece of literary synthesis and editorial patchwork by Murry, based on pieces taken from some forty notebooks and diaries and a few hundred single scraps of paper. The existence of the four partially written-up diaries explains why the entries in the journal come so thickly in a few months of 1914, 1915, 1920, and 1922. Outside of these the editor made use of the occasional dated entries scat- tered through thirty notebooks. For the remainder he had recourse to the fragmentary story drafts in the notebooks and isolated para- graphs and even sentences which are everywhere-at the back of the diaries, throughout the notebooks, many on single sheets of writing paper and even on torn fragments of jotters and the pro- verbial backs of envelopes. These he assigned to what he considered were appropriate places in the journal. The combination of the remains of a writer of the calibre of Katherine Mansfield and an editor of the calibre of Murry produced what he was later- justifiably-to describe as a minor classic, which ran through many printings. It is hardly too much to claim that it is as much Murry's work as Katherine Mansfield's, though his only acknow- ledged part in the 1927 edition was the introduction and the 'minimum necessary words of explanation'. It is clear from the notes he made on the manuscripts that he returned to the material in 1938. 'Transcribe for Scrapbook' appears beside many passages that he had not previously used for the journal. Katherine Mansfield's writing for the printer was precise, legible, fully and delicately punctuated. But her notebooks are filled with pages of almost illegible scribbling-her normal writing 64 when she was composing rapidly. In the enforced leisure of an illness Murry tackled many of these difficult passages and did a superlative job in deciphering and transcribing. The result was the publication in 1939 of the Scrapbook. This has never had the appeal of the journal, although some of the writing is every bit as good. Readers in 1939 had other things on their minds; and the very title implied something unfinished. But the Scrapbook was quarried from precisely the same bundle of notebooks and papers as the journal had been a few years previously. Anything that was published in the one could with equal justification have been published in the other. In 1954 appeared the last and definitive edition of the journal. Murry, I think, found himself in something of a quandary. His own editorial work had led to the public acceptance of two books by his late wife, a journal and a Scrapbook. He was aware, as an examination of his own notes on the manuscripts makes clear, that there was indeed only one batch of material, from which both were derived. But he wished to publish a much fuller journal, firstly by printing those personal passages which he had (quite understandably and indeed quite properly) omitted from the 1927 edition, and secondly by printing as much as he wished of the original papers, irrespective of whether he had in the first instance called them 'Journal' or 'Scrapbook'. His explanation of his later editorial method is disingenuous : Other passages have been incorporated which, though actually published in the Scrapbook in 1939, really belong to the journal and would have been included in it, if they had been discovered in time. journal, 1954, preface p. ix. It is possible that in 1927 he had not 'discovered' all the material, in the restricted sense that certain of the notebooks he may not have wholly read-particularly the more illegible ones. But he had them all available. Moreover, a careful comparison of the originals with the printed texts reveals-to cite only one example -that this suggestion of a later 'discovery' of material cannot always be sustained. On pages 52-53 of the 1954 journal there are two passages, 'A Dream' and 'The Toothache Sunday' printed one after the other. 'A Dream' was first printed in the 1927 journal; 'The Toothache Sunday' was first printed in the Scrapbook. The reader who (preface in mind), compares the two editions of the journal is left with the presumption that this latter passage was not 'discovered in time' for the 1927 edition, and is therefore now put in its proper sequence in 1954. But both passages are derived 65 from the same Katherine Mansfield notebook, (and that in a singu- larly clear script), which was begun on March 6th 1914. There 'A Dream' (the title is editorial) occupies two pages, and the im- mediately following three pages are occupied by 'The Toothache Sunday'. To discover 'The Toothache Sunday' in time for the 1927 journal, one had only to turn over the page. Indeed, Murry certainly turned the page-he marked the passage 'omit'. Later in 1938 he marked it 'transcribe for Scrapbook'. A close examination of Murry's considerable annotations and mark- ings on the manuscripts leaves the careful reader with the certainty that he worked over all the papers very thoroughly for the 1927 edition. He marked with a 'tick' everything he wanted for the journal; what (for a variety of reasons) he did not want he marked with square brackets, with a zero sign, or with the word 'omit'. In 1938 he clearly did a further garnering from fields he had already harvested. The mild deception of his 1954 preface is, in one sense, un- important. Murry did not deceive himself. His annotations on the manuscripts (once his very simple code has been worked out) are scrupulous and indicate precisely what he did with his material. Sometimes they even indicate his reasons : one passage in which Katherine Mansfield attacks a woman friend of Murry's has never been printed-and Murry has added a brief explanation of his reasons for the omission at the foot of the page of the notebook. What, after all, was Murry producing when he published the first edition of the journal? Certainly not a biography of his dead wife, not even a narrative of their mutual relationships, though some- thing of that was added by way of 'minimum necessary words of explanation'. He was producing partly a memorial, partly an edited collection of fragments by the best short-story writer of her time. Its success as a piece of literature was its own justification. But in 1954 the situation was different. The successive studies by Sylvia Berkman (1951) and Antony Alpers (1953 in America, 1954 in London) had aroused considerable interest-and curiosity- about Katherine Mansfield's life. The publication by Murry in 1951 of her letters to him in their full text had supplanted a severely edited edition of 1928. The inclusion, in the full edition of the letters, of many passages in which the sick and terrified Katherine lashed out blindly-and often unfairly-at her husband leaves the reader convinced that Murry had courageously printed the entire letters, even when they seemed to do him discredit. This is certainly the implication of the 'definitive edition' which appears on the title page of the 1951 edition of the Letters. Then in 1954 came the 66 parallel 'definitive edition' of the Journal. The Preface claimed that it restored passages 'which for various reasons were suppressed in the original edition of 1927'. Scrapbook material was now in- corporated. Other material, which had appeared neither in the Scrapbook nor the earlier Journal, was added. The new Journal was almost twice as long as the earlier edition. Here, clearly, was not merely a new edition of a minor masterpiece but a solid piece of documentation for the life and writing of Katherine Mansfield. Is not that what is implied by the definitive edition of a writer's journal? Unfortunately, whatever the literary value of the Journal, the biographical value is severely limited by the editorial method. Certain passages are still omitted, sometimes for obviously personal reasons, sometimes through inadvertence. In spite of Murry's re- markable accuracy of transcription, a careful reader (admittedly with Murry's transcript before him; without it he'd be lost) can make corrections. Certain entries in Katherine Mansfield's diaries have been overlooked-usually short entries after a few blank pages. None of that is really important. What is important-and misleading to a biographer-is that many passages of apparently continuous writing are not really continuous at all. They have been assembled from different sources. Murry's instinct in joining them together may be right-he knew his wife better than anyone else could. But one can never depend on his text. One can never be sure when it is Katherine Mansfield speaking and when it is Murry blending and shuffling her material, and generally tidying her up. Sometimes he is manifestly mistaken. On pages 53-4 of the Journal he prints the passage already referred to, 'The Toothache Sunday' (Ida Baker has toothache and Katherine Mansfield is kind to her). Half-way down page 54 the final section is introduced by three dots . . . a favourite punctuation device of Katherine Mans- field's. In the manuscript the passage after the dots is separated by several pages from the previous passage, and has been grafted on by the editor. A reader with a sense of prose style can smell some- thing wrong. 'A Toothache Sunday' is a 'diary' entry, in which 'Katie' is Ida Baker's endearment for Katherine Mansfield. The tacked-on passage after the dots is a story : 'Katie' in this latter passage is the Cass-Katie-Kezia child of the Wellington stories. If it is to be linked to anything, it belongs to 'A Dream' (which is about a child called K.T.) on page 52. This mistaken fusion in turn misled Mr Alpers who describes the 'toothache' incident and then the 'reverie' that followed it, though his labels of description and reverie for the respective sections indicate that instinctively he 67 has sensed the difference between the tone of the two passages. But the biographer is here at the mercy of the editor. Something like half of the printed Journal material consists of passages which were in no sense a 'journal'. The editor has inter- polated them, often at precise dates, into the genuine journal material, even when his own annotations on the source manuscript indicate that he has doubts about its date. He regularly interpolates passages of poetry which Katherine copied out-sometimes on a single undateable sheet-and inserts them at 'appropriate' places. An outstanding example of this occurs on pages 191-8 of the Journal. This is a section of diary entries; the entries are approxim- ately the same length, because they were written in the limited space of a printed diary for 1920. On January 15 she is shown as writing in her journal a verse of Thomas Hardy. She quotes him again at the end of January. Neither quotation appears in the 1920 diary. The editor has transferred them from another manuscript, and as he was in England and Katherine in Ospedaletti on these dates, it is impossible to see how he can interpolate them so precisely. The patching together of material without indicating that it comes from separate sources sometimes produces a meaning that Katherine Mansfield certainly never intended. Two instances will suffice. On page 206 under August 8 1920 she records that this was the day on which her mother died. She then quotes Hardy's little elegy How she would have loved A party today! In the next line of the Journal she is shown as saying 'I hate this book. So awfully! ! ' What book? The reader can only assume it is the book that contains this pessimistic poem by Hardy. But the reference to her dead mother is in one notebook. 'I hate this book. So awfully! ! '· is written in another, and on a totally different theme. It was added to the top of the first page of a notebook begun in August 1920, in which she records a period in which she and Murry were at odds with each other. Some time later certainly -and perhaps as late as 1921 when she added other material to the book lamenting the temporary breakdown in their relation- ship-she added the regretful 'I hate this book' note. Murry's dating is at fault, but even more misleading is the blending of two entries that have nothing to do with each other. The result is a falsification of her character. She is given a pettish petulance (which she did not feel) and her real regrets over a more serious matter to 68 her-a misunderstanding with Murry-simply drop from sight. The second instance appears on page 54· She records, evidently in a mood of depression that she is sewing in a dispirited manner. 'In the middle of it' (her depression) she looks out of the window and sees a group of workmen eating their lunch. The passage concludes: 'I really have a faint idea that it might send one mad.' This portrait of a neurotic writer makes unpleasant reading. But in the original notebook this final sentence occurs several pages earlier than the rest of the passage. It stands in isolation at the head of an otherwise blank page-her regular indication of a 'story' idea which she would develop, if all went well, on the remainder of the sheet. Here a genuine 'journal' entry has been blended with 'story' material. If the relevant passage is read without the inter- polation, the writer appears depressed-and then diverted, a very different conclusion. The above are only samples of editorial method about which the general reader probably will not complain. I cannot see that detailed study of the source manuscripts and even publication of them is going to make much difference to the literary importance of the Journals. But any further critical or biographical work on Katherine Mansfield must be based on the original Notebooks and not on either of the present editions. The Journals present a com- plete and graceful persona of a writer, true in the essentials, but over-rarified. The Notebooks (were they ever published as they stand) would not be easy reading. They are scrappier, less tidy, full of false starts, loose ends, and material which is often apparently irrelevant for the job in hand. She may jot down the idea of a second story while she is engaged on a first. Real and fictional life get intermixed in her pages. She is capable of writing a factual diary entry and a story based on the experience simultaneously. The Katherine Mansfield of the Notebooks is a different creature from the Katherine Mansfield of the Journals. In the Notebooks she is not the intense writer of regular journal entries, but a per- haps truer and certainly more interesting figure, the writer in the workshop with her nose to the grindstone. Commentaries

ANDREW PACKARD Across Antarctica

LooKING back it now seems logical that the welcome received in Wellington by the crossing party of the Commonwealth Trans- Antarctic Expedition on their way home should also have been the occasion to welcome back the full New Zealand contingent that had prepared the way for the latter half of the Trans-Antarctic journey. Yet it is only in the last few years that the idea of New Zealand activity in the Antarctic has become accepted : that it has, may be in large part due to Sir Vivian Fuchs. Five years ago no smoke of Dr Fuchs's pipe dream had drifted this far, and New Zealand's administration of her own Ross Dependency was no more than nominal. Then our co-operation in the overland journey was sought along with that of other Cornmonwealth countries, and the Government in 1955 announced that it was prepared to contribute £5o,ooo to the venture. Three years later ten times that sum had been spent, and at present New Zealand finds herself indefinitely committed, as one of thirteen countries, to the explor- ation of a continent which still only a few thousand people have seen and about Which, a little while ago, it was true to say that in some respects we knew less than we do about the surface of the moon. In compiling The Crossing of Antarctica1 Sir Vivian Fuchs has performed a difficult task, for it is certainly an achievement to have finished the book in time to catch the tide. He has not satisfied everyone, and thank goodness he has not tried to. The advertisers and the press had set him the task of writing an account that had been 'sold' to the public as a best seller before it was written. But he has at no stage written anything less than an official account: something as factual as possible in the space available. If the public find this dull it is because they have had their palates spoiled by the popular press or are expecting something other than the main subject matter: a four-months mechanized journey in modern 1 The Crossing of Antarctica. Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Cassell. 30s. Antarctica. We are told the full story of how men first got across the Antarctic. The success of the expedition depended upon ade- quate preparation on both sides of the continent, and the account of the journey itself does not begin till more than two-thirds of the way through the book. It is the story of a party of specialists who purposely marooned themselves on one, quite unexplored, side of the world's greatest reservoir of ice in order to see if they could reach the other side by travelling across its surface without calling on unnecessary help from outside. The journey started at Shackle- ton in November 1957 and ended at Scott Base 2,158 miles away on the second day of March 1958. It was made with vehicles which gave mechanical trouble from the start and which had to be in- creasingly nursed towards the end in temperatures representing sixty degrees of frost by men whose average daily sleep was about six hours and who were fully engaged physically for the rest of their day. The progress of the ships through the ice fields, the setting up of the two bases in such different circumstances at either end of the route, and the nature of each crevasse problem and each mechanical breakdown, all are given their place. Time and again once the journey had started, we read such sentences as : 'two hours after starting the forward steering arm of "Haywire" had dropped, and, catching in the snow, had buckled back under the vehicle to be completely destroyed. The fitting of a new spare would take an hour or two.' Anyone who has had to set about mending a fault in his car on a windy winter's evening has some basis for envisaging what such a repair job on a sno-cat would be like even though it means transferring himself in imagination to an environment of -30°F with a 'sharp Wind blowing' on a plateau 8,ooo feet high where he and his party are the only people for hundreds of miles. There is plenty in these facts for the imagin- ation to work on without the cultivation of drama, tragedy, or shocks of some kind. It is true that Antarctic adventure is already part of our litera- ture, and the account of the Commonwealth expedition will in- evitably be compared unfavourably with those written in the train of Scott and Shackleton earlier in the century. And therefore it does seem necessary to explain why The Crossing of Antarctica has been written in the matter-of-fact way it has, and not more ostensibly as literary description of a 'feat of courage and endur- ance that will become a legend for succeeding generations'. One reason is that Hillary and Fuchs are the men they are. Fuchs is just as much dedicated to the fulfilment of his dream in writing the account, as he was in undertaking the journey itself, at which 71 time he saw no good reason for increasing his radio schedules to cater for a news-hungry world. The repeatedly stated objective of the journey was a seismic exploration of the ice depth. Admittedly it was big in conception-on a Commonwealth basis and routed through the South Pole-but it is by no means 'The Last Great Land Journey', nor indeed is it the last great seismic journey as the Russians are showing us at the time of writing. The only part of the expedition that was obviously done 'for the hell of it' was the New Zealand trip to the South Pole, undertaken because there was time. It made a colourful splash; it was a 'first', having its own hour; and the farm tractors are still there, turning on the axis of the earth. But because he recognizes that it served little 'objective' purpose, Hillary is quite right in confining the account of the extra 550 miles to the Pole to a mere page and a half. Another reason is made clear by the recently published book Arctic and Antarctic by Colin Bertram, which brings the subject of polar exploration right up to date. Indeed Professor Bertram's book stands as an admirably concise textbook of polar studies. He divides the history of Arctic and Antarctic venture into three main periods: the 'pioneer', the 'transitional', and the 'modern', and discusses the way the requirements of polar living-transport, food, organization and leadership-have been met in each of these periods. Anyone who knows the early literature and understands what it is that men have dedicated themselves to in going to the Antarctic, could well devote himself to Professor Bertram's short book in order to appreciate the changes-in attitude as much as material aids and knowledge acquired-from the pioneer days to the present. Clearly our Trans-Antarctic expedition falls well within the modern period: to think of it otherwise is to be out of touch with reality. No longer do men do many of the things for which we admire the pioneers, take the risks and suffer the hardships, because there is no need. I personally think the greatness of Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard who made the 'worst journey in the world' was a real greatness. They were pitted against the environ- ment, because anyone who tried to make himself one with that environment would be overcome by it. But a man who gets him- self into a situation where for weeks he has to try to sleep in a wet sleeping-bag which can not dry out because of the ice on the outside, or who uses a primus pricker to pierce his frostbitten fingers, or even who persists in going on in the teeth of extreme conditions although it was possible to turn back, would today be considered a bad member of a rottenly equipped expedition. There is something that offends in saying this, for it seems to belittle the 72 human spirit. But men have not changed: only their deeds in today's Antarctic setting do not provide such rich reading as those of the pioneer days. There is greatness, and romance too, in over- coming the extremes of environment, but the members of a modern expedition carry with them their own environment in which there is far less need for risks. A commentary upon the change was to be found outside the Cape Evans hut of Scott's tragically under- nourished last expedition in the form of an empty packet dropped by a 'tourist' of the modern period and labelled 'GLUCOSE-D- Garanteed contains no vitamins'. Another change that has affected the writing of The Crossing of Antarctica is in the role played by communication in the modern expedition. Radio contact with outside means that the progress of an expedition can be followed if not day by day, at least week by week. In the diaries of Scott and the pioneers we are brought near to the minds of men who knew that there would be no other record of their experiences. But the circumstances of the Common- wealth Trans-Antarctic expedition were broadcast the world over with varying emphasis on the different themes, with each day's outcome made common knowledge, sometimes before the very participants were aware of it. Not only did the photograph of Dr Fuchs at the South Pole reach the Times office the night after he arrived at the Pole, but copy about the arrival and much else was in the radio room at the Pole station five hours before the event it was supposed to describe. Why the Trans-Antarctic journey hit and held world headlines could no doubt be explained by a student of the modern press, but even the layman has some idea of the competition that must have arisen when as many as nine reporters, some of them the best their newspapers could send, were flown in to the South Pole station to give a running commentary on the expedition as it passed through. Much of what reached the newspapers was in- evitably irrelevant to the events and the men who took part in them. Those for whom The Crossing of Antarctica was written will doubtless appreciate that the effect produced outside by the exchange of opinions between the two leaders on the advisability of continuing beyond the Pole has to be seen against a background of press intrusion. Sir Vivian Fuchs has gone out of his way to be tolerant in giving the full text of the messages between Hillary and himself, in which the suggestion of the one, unfamiliar with sno-cats and anxious to get back to Scott Base after adding the South Pole to Everest, was not followed by the other with his dream half realized. 73 Finally, Dr Fuchs is wntmg as a scientist. And since the ex- pedition that he led was a scientific one, it makes nonsense to suggest that he should have taken a professional writer with him. I am not one who holds out excuses for scientific jargon, or main- tains that there are some subjects which can not be expressed in every-day terms, but I do think that descriptive writing has its own difficulties for the scientist, and moreover that there are some things which are more accurately described in specialist, rather than non-specialist, terms because each science does have its langu- age of specialized meanings which might loosely be referred to as jargon. The chief author here is not a natural writer-whatever a natural writer may be-but if he achieves an accurate descrip- tion by being more roundabout than most writers would think stylish then he has achieved his object even though the accuracy of the statement is greater than the general reader needs. When Fuchs writes, 'an apparently crevasse-free area', he is not dropping the first clue of an unsuspected problem ahead, he is literally con- cerned to cover the possibility that the area might have revealed some crevasses had the survey party taken a closer look. If it is a clue it is given to the person using The Crossing of Antarctica as a reference book because he may be working over the area; and to him it is also essential to know that the Skelton Depot is in 79°03'5, I62°I5'E and not just at the mouth of the Skelton Glacier. Occas- ionally this kind of writing leaves out the ordinary reader. It is almost meaningless to be told that the course was I25°M unless you have a knowledge of where the Magnetic Pole is and are pre- pared to do a little mental navigation, and I am still left in the dark as to what is a rammsonde (sometimes elevated to Ramm- sonde) except that it is something that can get stuck in the ice 'several metres down'. Though it would be possible to read The Crossing of Antarctica as if it were written by one author throughout, I found Hillary's five chapters on the whole easier reading. There was more going on at the Scott Base end-more men, and a far more interesting area to work in than at Shackleton-and since Hillary was given less space to tell it all, there was little danger of becoming dull. Instead of writing a moment-to-moment account not far removed from a log, he has been tidier than Fuchs was in his earlier chap- ters, and has followed each activity through to its conclusion even though it may be happening concurrently with another which is developed later in the chapter. Strangely enough, too, I have a better picture of what the scientists were doing at Scott Base than of the scientific work going on at Shackleton. But whereas the 74 purple passages of Hillary have been done before-'we covered the six miles back to Glacier Tongue in seventy glorious minutes'- there is a new majesty in Fuchs's description of the ice flowing out from the plateau: 'It seemed that here the ice sheet was already crumpled by its movement towards the mountains to the east, and, perhaps, by the underlying rock topography, gradually moulding its movement into the channels which carry the glaciers through the mountains' to the winter sea. The photographs in The Crossing of Antarctica-a large number in colour and a quarter of them taken from the air-show how far we have come, not only in the conception of an Antarctic expedition, but also in book production. It is still not a year since the end of the story recounted. Everything relevant to the success- ful outcome of an expedition is here described-it is not a descrip- tion of what it feels like to be part of it, nor an adventure story in the accepted sense. There will be other books about the crossing which will come nearer to these, and which will not have appen- dixes nor an excellent index. And when the singing and shouting is done those who took part will still be able to reflect to them- selves, and relive experiences which we can never learn vicariously. Every new adventure is new in the mind-the novelty is in the conception-the real adventure is in the mind of the scientist: the excitement is for the man on the end of the seismic recorder getting an echo for the first time from that particular part of Antarctica, away from the traffic.

DAVID FARQUHAR Opera in Wellington, 1958

THE MAIN event of Wellington's 1958 opera 'season' was the New Zealand Opera Company's October production of The Marriage of Figaro. There were, however, two precursors to this, both of which deserve mention. The first of these was Frank Poore's Auck- land company, which brought down its productions of La Traviata and La Boheme hot from their Auckland success. I shan't say much about these, partly because I saw only La Traviata, and partly because they have been reviewed previously in Landfall (September 1958). La Traviata got by largely on the excellence of Mary 75 O'Brien's performance as Violetta. Apart from her, the singing of the other soloists varied from good to adequate, but their acting was almost uniformly wooden. The production was rudimentary and the orchestral playing rough. The company is a young one, and I feel over-ambitious in attempting 'grand' opera so early in its life. Certainly Auckland has singers (many of them from the school of Sister Mary Leo) capable of sustaining the main roles in a Verdi or Puccini opera, but the days are surely past when an opera production can get by on good singing alone, even if it is the most important ingredient. 'Grand' opera is, I'm sure, unreal enough to the average New Zealand audience; it needs only the addition of a performance in Italian and a muddled production to make it almost incomprehensible. Mr Poore's initiative in import- ing Joan Cross to coach his singers last year must mean that he has higher standards in view for future productions. He would surely be more likely to achieve them by reducing the scale of his efforts and concentrating more on detail. Opera-Technique (an amateur Wellington company) chose Flo- tow's Martha for their major production in September last year. Martha has been revived with some success in England and Australia recently. It's definitely a period piece but not without charm, and well-suited to the capabilities of an amateur group of this sort. Better suited, in fact, than the more ambitious and much more interesting Fledermaus, which they did in 1957. Martha was well within their grasp, so the result was a production (by William Sheat) which had some polish, and was very prettily set and cos- tumed by Harry Baker. The company was lucky to get John Hopkins and a group from the National Orchestra in the pit, so that the orchestral playing had polish as well. And an opera as in- substantial as this certainly needs all the prettiness and polish it can get; a dull routine production would have been unbelievably dreary. Opera-Technique deserves credit for keeping our attention engaged pretty well throughout, in spite of many passages in which Flotow was merely nodding or (even worse) recapitulating 'The Last Rose of Summer'. So to October and The Marriaye of Fiyaro. A Mozart opera was something new for the New Zealand Opera Company which had previously concerned itself more or less exclusively with the music-dramas of Menotti. My anticipation was mixed with anxiety, as I thought of the precision and poise which Mozart demands. But the opening night soon dispelled my fears, and as the evening pro- gressed, my delight increased. Mozart is the perfect opera com- poser, and Fiyaro, with its emphasis on ensemble rather than 76 soloist, the perfect choice for a company such as this, which has good but no great voices. The Sadler's Wells is a similar company, and Figaro is one of the operas they do well. The production by Frank Ponton was essentially right, animated where it should be, and static and well-grouped in the ensembles. Inevitably, one has some quarrels with the production, but they are very minor ones, and many things were improved during the six-night run. Raymond Boyce's decor was light and gay, and some of his costumes very striking, particularly those of the Countess (Marie Robinson), who looked better than any Countess I've seen. Unfortunately, she had some curious faults of intonation, something which one might get away with in Verdi, but which Mozart shows up mercilessly. Nor did the striking quality of her voice blend perfectly with the other voices in ensemble. Apart from her the singing was all good and well-matched. Physically, Figaro (Geoffrey de Latour) was too large to iook as deft as he should, while Susanna (Beryl Dalley) was rather square and stolid, though she became more animated as the run progressed. The Count (Donald Munro) was too naive and like- able to give one the impression that his intrigues had any chance of success. These are all minor points, however, and the difficulties of finding a cast for Figaro that both looks and sounds well are severe enough even in a European opera house with ten times more choice available than here. Most of the essential things about this Figaro were right; the singing had some style and the words of Edward Dent's excellent translation (not mentioned in the pro- gramme) came across well, while the orchestra under John Hopkins was excellent. Altogether a very brave and praiseworthy effort, and well supported by Wellington audiences, who filled or near-filled the Opera House every night. In spite of these excellent houses, the New Zealand Opera Com- pany lost money, as it was bound to do on a venture of this kind. Surely it is time we had some organization in the nature of an Arts Council which would grant money to causes like this Com- pany before the event, instead of the backstairs arrangement which seems to operate at the minute, whereby the Department of Internal Affairs refunds them their losses after the event. Opera can never be expected to pay for itself, and unless a company of this sort has the foreknowledge of a regular subsidy, it can hardly be expected to plan future productions with any certainty of their coming off. Four operas in three months may not be exactly a 'season', but it shows that opera is increasingly in the air. I only hope that official recognition and help will, like some deus ex-machina, enable more operas to be brought safely to ground. 77 CATHERINE DE LA ROCHE Films for New Audiences

AT THE Brussels Universal Exhibition, 1958, one of the most sig- nificant events was the Presentation of the Best Films of All Time. Audiences of two thousand filled the Grand Auditorium to see the twelve pictures1 chosen by a jury of historians and to hear the judgements of a jury of film makers, which, as happens often now- adays at festivals, caused uproar and controversy. The whole mani- festation was new evidence that, while the cinema's mass audiences are dwindling, its discriminating public is growing. Indeed, hardly a month goes by without an authoritative comment being made on the importance of this discerning public. Recent spokesmen include Orson Welles, Paul Rotha and Lord Rank, whose distribution system is being revised for more flexible bookings and eighty of whose theatres in Britain are being set aside for specialized screenings. In the changing social conditions of this decade, people have tended to spend time and money on a larger variety of recreations, especially on television, and less on indiscriminate film-going than they did before. Adjusting itself to this situation, the film industry began by concentrating on the kinds of spectacle that are beyond the scope of TV and therefore in strongest competition against it. A large part of production has been reorganized for bigger shows on bigger screens. But television, which inherited a great deal from the senior medium, has also had a more positive effect on its recent development. Primarily a mass medium itself, television has its selective audiences, too. And some of the more serious, intimate TV plays, such as Marty, produced for them had so great a success that they were subsequently filmed and, directly or indirectly, led to a revival of similar subjects in cinema. Intimate films of this type are not, of course, anything new, still less their close-up technique, which, after all, is an essential element in cinematography. Brief Encounter, made in 1945, is an example from the days before television. It was directed by David Lean, who has always striven to use fully and extend the powers of his medium. In this picture, he told me, his idea was to put the experi-

1 Silent: U.S.A., Intolerance, Greed, The Gold Rush; U.S.S.R., Earth, Mother, Battleship Potemkin; Denmark, The Passion of loan of Arc; Germany, Dr Caligari, The Last Man. Sound: France, The Great Illusion; U.S.A., Citizen Kane; Italy, Bicycle Thieves. 78 ences of two people under a microscope, as it were, and present a study in close-up. But films like this were then comparatively rare and little imitated, whereas since about 1955 there has been a distinct and fairly influential if minor, cycle of them. In those adapted from television the style, so far, has been the writer's rather than the director's. This applies particularly to the films of Paddy Chayevsky's TV plays Marty, Wedding Breakfast and Bachelor Party, the first and third directed by Delbert Mann and the second by Richard Brooks. Chayevsky is interested above all in 'the marvellous world of the ordinary', which he usually locates among the lower middle class Roman Catholic commun- ities of his native New York. Marty is the love story of two lonely people, an Italian American butcher and a schoolmistress, brought together by their common shyness and lack of success with the opposite sex. Wedding Breakfast, a study of domestic relationships, shows how members of an Irish cabman's family reveal themselves under the minor stresses of preparation for his daughter's marriage. And in Bachelor Party a group of New York office workers, appar- ently well established in life, emerge in the course of a night on the town as troubled men who have by no means come to terms with it. Chayevsky's screenplays are concerned primarily with human emotions and behaviour, but they contain also a good deal of social observation and some criticism of modern society, more particu- larly of the emptiness and aimlessness for many of city life. His approach is sympathetic, sometimes affectionate and often sharply humorous. He has an extraordinary flair for trapping the revel- ation in a fleeting moment-Bachelor Party could be described as an essay on self-betrayal-and for finding the revealing phrase. Chayevsky is, in fact, one of America's best young writers of naturalistic dialogue, except for a lack of national character where immigrant idioms are involved. These are the essential elements which make up his style. And it is mostly his style-always an almost undefinable though recognizable quality-that distinguishes his screenplays from others of a comparable type originating in television. In Twelve Angry Men, as in most of Reginald Rose's TV plays, the emphasis is on matters of principle and current social issues as much as on the human situation. The protagonists here are jurymen, eleven of whom would, for different reasons, have con- victed an innocent man on circumstantial evidence, were it not for the sense of responsibility and tenacity of the twelfth. A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, another picture with TV origins, exemplifies the 79 exchange of influences between the two media. The story of a young American misfit, befriended at a difficult moment by a self- assured Negro, it has action sequences which resemble some of those in On The Waterfront and performances by John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier, as the heroes, in the 'Method' style of the Actors' Studio, reminiscent of James Dean's in Rebel Without A Cause- both films unconnected with television. The work of Ted Willis, the British screen and television writer and playwright, represents an even closer link between the media. His Woman In A Dressiny Gown, an intimate study of family relationships, and The Youny And The Guilty, about young lovers misunderstood by their parents, were adapted by him from his own teleplays. But Willis, known as 'the playwright of press cuttings', did not have to wait for TV to write in an intimate manner or on serious subjects for a discerning audience: the screenplay for The Blue Lamp, an Ealing film about the police, was written by him in 1948. It is hardly possible, in fact, to define exactly how much influence the two media have had on each other. But it is clear that besides their broad public both have a growing selective audience with fairly similar standards. Another change during recent years in the cinema's pattern of supply and demand is the tremendous increase in the exchange of films between nations. The economic reasons for this are not the most significant. With the progress in all forms of communication, our universe is shrinking. Cinema must to some extent embrace the international scene, simply to keep up with the times. The 'world outlook' is, after all, one of the most important and characteristic developments of our age. The foreign language films distributed nowadays may not be as select as they used to be-routine com- mercial productions with sub-titles are travelling extensively, too- but it is true to say that more of the world's masterpieces are seen by larger international audiences than ever before. Many are brought into prominence at festivals. Among those presented at this year's Wellington Festival, for instance, was a new picture from the U.S.S.R., Grigori Kozintsev's Don Quixote, which is sure to take its place in film history. This Russian version is very largely successful in capturing the spirit and style of the satire by Cervantes and has the great actor Nikolai Cherkasov giving one of his finest performances as the Don. Among those revived, several have already been recognized internationally as masterpieces. They included The Secret Game (France), directed by Rene Clement, a daring allegory in which the enormity of war is conveyed through the macabre games played innocently by a small war orphan; Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate Of Hell, inspired by 8o Japanese classica!ULt:•a•ure of feudal times, which combines superb acting in Kabuki style with unsurpassed beauty of pictorial com- position in colour; Arne Sucksdorff's The Great Adventure (Sweden), a poetic story of friendship between farm children and the animals inhabiting a forest; and Leopold Lindtberg's Four In A jeep (Switzer- land), a picture which, surveying life in Vienna under four-Power control, itself has an international theme. These and other foreign language pictures shown at the Well- ington Festival, together with some equally remarkable, if better known, ones from Britain and America, happen to come mostly from countries with long established cinemas. Since about the beginning of this decade, however, many of the best films have come also from countries with newly established cinemas, such as Greece and Poland, or those, like China and Brazil, where produc- tion has been revived. India, which has long had one of the world's largest film industries, did not produce many pictures of inter- national standard till 1955, when Satyajit Ray directed Pather Panchali, a charming and poetic family saga, followed later by its sequel The Undefeated. And most recently Sidney Furie, directing a young and gifted team, made the first noteworthy Canadian feature film, A Dangerous Age, which deals in a fresh and sensitive way with the subject of rebellious youth. Some of these pictures and others of comparable quality, though produced on small budgets, would probably never have been made, were it not for the faith their makers place in a sympathetic, if still relatively small, public.

MAURICE SHADBOLT Postscript on Pasternak

The air is heavy with the passing storm. Boris Pasternak

I oo NOT know-and certainly do not care-whether or not the award of the Nobel Prize to Boris Pasternak was motivated by politics: the simple fact is that, regardless of its motivation, it was an act of gross and unforgivable political stupidity. Until the award of the prize no real issue of Doctor Zhivago had been made within the Soviet Union: news of its publication abroad had been received 81 with remarkable quiet and calm: it is possible-indeed highly probable-that the novel, within a few years, would have been published inside Russia. That much, at least, could be inferred from the more or less conciliatory tone which Alexei Surkov, secretary of the Soviet Writers' Union, was forced to adopt when speaking of the novel at a largely attended public meeting held to greet Italian writers in Moscow during September. At the end of October, with the award of the prize to Pasternak, the literary bureacracy had suddenly to justify their clumsy banning of the book : the old Stalinist literary catch-cries were dragged out from the cellar: Pasternak was expelled from the Writers' Union, and thus alto- gether deprived of future publication in the Soviet Union. All this is bad enough in itself; but the tragedy strikes deeper. The award has, in fact, been a grave setback for those working quietly and bravely for progress within Soviet society. It has, for the time being, forced into defensive and protective silence-a silence as great as the shame they must feel at having to desert a colleague in the line of fire-those writers in the Soviet Union, whether Communist or non-Communist, who know better: and who have, in their own ways, been striving for freedom of express- ion in the arts. What were they to do? Had they spoken out for Pastemak they would doubtless have also suffered the fate of expulsion from the Writers' Union and loss of publication: indeed, it is probable that their suffering would have been greater than his: Pastemak can still receive royalties from his currently pub- lished work: his position as a public figure is some guarantee, at least, against his total disappearance from the Soviet scene. Others -like the ill-fated Pomerantsev (author of the too-premature article 'Sincerity in Literature') in 1955-are more easily lost to sight. Not only that: once expelled and hounded, they would virtually have been no more use to the cause in which they believe. And then, of course, they were not, as a group, in a position to accur- ately contradict the howls against Pasternak once the hunt was on: few of them, even now, are likely to have read Zhivago. So they were hardly in a position to argue against Surkov when he claimed that the novel was an attack on Soviet society; and the writing of it an act of treachery. Two claims which could have been dismissed by anyone who had read the novel. At a time when it is more than ever important to keep intact those fragile cultural bridges built between East and West in the past few years, few more provocative acts than this tactless award to Pasternak can be imagined. We, in the West, might feel that the award was not politically motivated; but what, exactly, were the 82 Russians supposed to think? Since its inception the award has only once before gone to a Russian: Ivan Bunin, an anti-Soviet exile. Gorki never received it; nor Sholokhov, who has written one of the great tragic novels of this century. And what about that novelist of vast imagination Leonid Leonov? And Ilya Ehrenburg, whose struggle for intellectual freedom has been so courageous, and whose influence for the good is felt over a far greater area of the world than, say, are the ideas of Albert Camus, who received the award last year? Any one of these notable figures could, and should, have been recognized. It was not too late, this year, to make amends; and in perhaps two or three years' time an award to Pasternak, in a less troubled period, might have been received without any com- motion at all in the Soviet Union. The threat to Pasternak's safety may be small at present, but it is nonetheless real. Some commentators have produced a convenient red herring by contrasting the award to Pasternak with the Nobel award made to Carl van Ossietzky under Nazi tyranny before the war. But what they neglect to add is that Ossietzky died after ill- treatment received as a direct result of the award. International recognition in· these circumstances is not worth the price. As it is, there are signs that the Soviet leadership has been con- siderably embarrassed by all the fuss : Pravda, for example, emascu- lated some of the more outrageous attacks on Pasternak's character. More than that : the same newspaper published, in full, two long statements by Pasternak in defence of himself. And these were not, in any sense, abject apologies : they were noble statements made with serenity in the teeth of the storm: he did not withdraw a single word of Zhivago, but merely expressed regret that the novel should have been used abroad as propaganda against his country. Nothing could illustrate, in more striking fashion, the difference between the Soviet Union of today and the Soviet Union of less than five years ago. At the time of writing the dust appears to have settled. Pasternak is still free to receive visitors; he is still in communication with the West. It is unlikely that a government which, while the Zhivago controversy raged, sent a nurse to remain night and day at Paster- nak's side for fear he might suicide, has any serious intention against his personal safety. Nevertheless, so long as doubt remains, those of us who would like to see a more liberal atmosphere inside the Soviet Union must be on our guard, and ready to protest, in full-throated fashion, should the need arise. But our argument, in the way that it falls on Russian ears anyway, has been weakened, first of all, by the 83 hypocritical use made of the novel in the West; and by the actions of the Nobel Prize committee. An ironic comment on the whole affair appears in the same issue of the New Yorker which carries Edmund Wilson's brilliant review of Zhivago. It is an advertisement, from a leading American publisher, for the historical novel Spartacus, by Howard Fast: it might be recalled that five or six years ago, when Fast was politic- ally suspect and gaoled by the Un-American Activities committee, the manuscript of this novel was rejected by every publisher of note in the United States .... It may be true that freedom is a relative thing; but it is also one and indivisible. And unless we understand that freedom for a Pasternak is also freedom for a Fast, whether in Krushchev's Russia, Eisenhower's America, Franco's Spain, Nasser's Egypt or Nehru's India, then the cause of liberal freedom which we protest is doomed and damned. One final point: I hope I have not given the impression that I am in any way defending the stupidity of those who first saw to the banning of Zhivago in the Soviet Union; or attempting to minimize the danger implicit in some of the more virulent attacks on Pasternak by a small, but still influential minority of Soviet citizens. These surely speak for themselves. I only suggest that the wrong has not been all on one side. Any study of the cold war written in years to come must surely include a chapter on the affaire Pasternak. The falsifications on both sides exceed belief. To take one example: in both East and West it has been repeatedly said and inferred that the manuscri_pt of Zhivago was somehow smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It was, in fact, sent out of the country under the auspices of Goslitizdat, the official Soviet State Publishing house, which in 1956 announced its intention of publishing the novel (later it changed its mind): it was Goslitizdat itself which sent the manuscript to Feltrinelli, the Italian publisher. After a reading of the novel it is both astonishing and encourag- ing to contemplate the fact that such a novel was almost published in the Soviet Union (in fact, some of the poems by Yuri Zhivago in the later section of the book were actually published in the magazine Znamia-extracted from 'a forthcoming novel'). It has been reasonably argued that tolerance is a late fruit of any society : and that if the novel had been published the Soviet Union would not have been the Soviet Union, and the year not 1956. If we con- sider the great turning-points in history (and Pasternak considers the Russian Revolution such a turning-point), we might discover 84 that it has always been a long while-certainly more than forty years-before any new society has been prepared to tolerate the unlacquered truth about itself. But this lesson of history need not, of course, necessarily quarrel with the fact that the novel should have been published in the Soviet Union. The Russians have still to learn the lesson that the society which can serve as a cradle for a genuine conflict of ideas proves not its weakness, but its strength. Again, in both East and West, the real meaning of Pasternak's novel has been twisted out of all recognition by publicists and critics who are, alternatively, pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet: it may indeed be years before Doctor Zhivago can be seen clearly, not as an event in the cold war, but as a work of literature. Few, apart from Edmund Wilson, have been prepared to see the novel as an indictment of both East and West: even fewer to recognize it as, in Wilson's words, 'one of the great events in man's literary and moral history'. Pasternak has written, as an act of faith, a novel out of a tormented country in a tormented century. In an age of human sickness he has spoken, with faith in the human spirit, for us all. London 24 December 1958

Reviews

IN FIRES OF NO RETURN. James K. Baxter. Oxford University Press. I2S. 6d. THE IRON BREADBOARD. James K. Baxter. The Mermaid Press. 5s. IF IT IS worth making a general distinction in the literature of this century between discursive poets, and poets who have attempted to achieve the poem as total Image, James K. Baxter belongs with the former group. Whatever else is left unsaid, one can include Alien Curnow without violence in a thought which takes in Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot: they are, all three, poets who mould the language in their own ways, make it work as it has not worked before. On the other hand one has come to think of Mr Baxter together with Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost (again kind, not stature, considered): poets who take the language as it is and who work with it at one level of meaning; but who can tell a story, ss describe an event, think coherently and convincingly, or combine all these activities, in a verse which is sparely and strongly con- structed. The verse letter is a form well suited to these skills, and In Fires of No Return (a selection from the whole range of Mr Baxter's work) opens appropriately with the well-known 'To My Father'. To praise the strong construction of this poem-the way, for example, a thought is unravelled through a demanding rhyme scheme and brought to its conclusion in a firm couplet-is not simply to praise technical competence. Your country childhood helped to make you strong, Ploughing at twelve. I only know the man. While I grew up more sheltered and too long In love with my disease; though illness can Impart by dint of pain a different kind Of toughness to the predatory mind. The qualities of the poet's mind at its best find their counterparts here in the syntactical toughness and lucidity of the verse. Similarly, when the technique is at fault it mirrors a personal fault, a false position. In the same poem sentimentality-of hero- worship, or perhaps of protesting too much-begins to soften edges in the sixth stanza : Almost you are at times a second self; Almost at times I feel your heart beating In my own breast as if there were no gulf To sever us. There is a personal unsureness here, and hence elaboration to fill out the stanza form. The lines come to grief among conventions: one cannot separate the 'breast' from the kind of poetry in which hearts are always beating. And in this confusion the simpler im- precision of 'sever' enters: a 'gulf' is the result of severing, not the instrument which severs. Mr Baxter's early poems were especially notable at their best for the ease with which they assimilated the essential features of New Zealand landscape and settlement; and in 'To My Father', typically, it is the externalization of feeling in terms of locality that saves the poem where its more directly personal motivations falter. In stanza 9, for example (after the preceding stanza's in- cantation of memories in which each line is prefaced untidily by 'You') the poem comes marvellously to life in two fine lines : These I remember, with the wind that blows Forever pure down from the tussock ranges. These are first, and most importantly, real ranges. a real wind. But the line is resonant within its own firm location: it carries echoes 86 of a source, of purity, of loss-feelings traditionally associated with childhood. This strength of self-expression achieved through the medium of landscape is most fully exemplified in the two poems which con- clude Section I of In Fires of No Return,: 'Poem in the Matukituki Valley', and 'The Fallen House'. The latter in particular moves with strength and certainty, from the economy of its first two lines- I took the clay track leading From Black Bridge to Duffy's farm to the final pitch of 0 Time, Time takes in a gin The quick of being! where a quite ordinary perception, supported by the full weight of the poem, attains momentarily the quality of revelation. In what might be called (to date) Mr Baxter's 'middle period' he seems to have concentrated on the writing of narrative verse; and on poems about single figures against a New Zealand background- in this collection, for example, 'Returned Soldier', 'Farmhand', 'Elegy for an Unknown Soldier', 'Mill Girl', 'The Hermit', 'Venetian Blinds' and 'The Homecoming'. These poems are more obviously technical exercises-that is, the writing is more deliberate, less urgent as a personal concern-than the poems written before or since; and one is led to speculate on a possible 'motive' in the writing. They may have been written in part as an attempt to objectify the poetry, to remove it from the difficulties in a poem like 'To My Father'; and in part as a conscious attempt to 'people the landscape'. About some of these single figure poems there is something arbitrary, inconsequential. 'Returned Soldier' is undis- tinguished; the 'Elegy' is a long and ordinary preliminary to a fine (early-Curnowesque) last stanza. And 'Farmhand' is plainly senti- mental. 'Mill Girl' and 'The Hermit' are poems of a finer quality. Here the arbitrariness is only in Mr Baxter's vision of the world-a world in which it is predictable that young girls will dream of 'a table at the Grand', but lose their virginity 'On wet park leaves, or on a mattress in a backjRoom at the party ... .' and where old hermits in shacks go down on sacking to pray, their hearts 'like wax in God's meridian blaze'. The problem set by poems of this kind is that their subjects tend to become morality figures, to assume an aura of archetype. Each in its own way is a generaliz- ation, an abstraction. They have their existence in an uncertain area which is neither fiction exactly, nor social comment. They attempt what perhaps can only adequately be done in prose. In Mr Baxter's case one feels that his single figures are distorted by an inclination to melodrama; that they are lit up, like a row 87 of coloured lights, with the charge of a particular emotion which belongs to the poet rather than to something he has observed in the world beyond himself. The failure is difficult to locate, but possibly the mill girl and the hermit are unconscious projections of an element of self-pity in Mr Baxter, disguised as general social realities. One is the virgin poetic mind, certain to be ravished by society; the other is the outcast poet, feeding on scraps but in tune with God. But in all the poems of this group-and especially 'The Home- coming'-there is again an evocation of locality, which is the more impressive because it enters only obliquely: She will cook his meals; complain of the south weather That wrings her joints. And he-rebels; and yields To the old covenant-calms the bleating Ewe in birth travail. The smell of saddle leather His sacrament; or the sale day drink; yet hears beyond sparse fields On reef and cave the sea's hexameter beating. This quality is present too in poems written in the ballad metres which Mr Baxter uses with such ease. Few poets have pinned down, casually, without obtrusive intention, so much of what the particular New Zealand scene feels like. And in poems like 'The Walk' and 'The Book of the Dead', life in this exact context is heightened by the presence of the unsatisfied ghosts of those who established it. Section III of this book shows the most recent developments in Mr Baxter's poetry. He has returned to the writing of poems more directly concerned with personal problems. Concretion is less fre- quently sought in terms of locality; and for this he has regrettably substituted an assortment of conventional literary trappings- pickings off the scrapheap of poetry. Too often it is a poetry (to select from 'To God the Son') of 'cries', 'blood' and 'dirt'; of the 'blind', 'weeping', 'deformed' and 'maimed'; of 'pride', 'danger', 'lust', 'poison', 'scorn', 'guilt', 'anger', 'love', 'loss', 'skulls', 'death', 'dreams', 'fury', 'flesh', 'pain', and 'agonies'. In such poems the language is diffuse and irresponsibly used; the pitch is hysterical; the self-posing is melodramatic. One can best illustrate the new verbose style in its failure by a single illustration. In 'Letter to the World' Mr Baxter builds the stage on which he is to act out an unpleasant piece of self-dramatiz- ation and asks his reader to accept it as an image of the world. The world is addressed as a woman. Too long (he tells her) he has ignored her face of 'blood', 'dirt' and 'tears'; and earlier he has written of this face as beautiful (given it 'the kiss of a kind mirror'). Now, bleeding 'from love's scar', he presents her with the facts about herself, his 'salt wife', whose Original Sin he appears to have engendered personally : 88 Salt wife, when you were pregnant with your death You asked me for the kiss of a kind mirror And newly married then, I knew no better. I praised you for the paint upon your scabs And left out evil from each loving letter. Now as the serpent stabs Of grief in my guts, among the wounds and swabs Of love's rough hospital to your proud flesh I come And the soul sweating in its iron lung. In stanza 3 the soul as T.B. patient is discarded in favour of the soul as a bird ('Hopping and moping in its bone cage') which must 'wet his beak with blood' so that it will understand evil. Despite the bird's moulting from 'lust and rage', the poet leaves it in favour of the world, his 'blood-bought bride' (who is also 'groaning in God's arms', and whose nails, for no very clear reason, are 'bright from the pounding abattoir'). Claiming thus to recognize her for what she is, he gives her the 'wordy ring' of the poem- With diamonds cut from my heart's stone, Tears for your agony fallen. Confusion of imagery proceeds from a confusion of mind and imagination; verbal imprecision from imprecision of obset:vation and thought. One does not object to the poem simply because the false counters of thought are tiresome, or the diction unfashion- able. The aesthetic objection is ultimately a moral one. The skin of feigned toughness provided by images designed to disgust fails to conceal the weakness within. The poet has offered a distorted image of the world and of his relation to it. He has acquired the mantle of the suffering prophet, second-hand. One cannot presume to prescribe the course Mr Baxter' s develop- .ment as a poet should take. But an attempt to define the areas in which his poetry has succeeded, and those in which it has failed, ought to be a legitimate activity of criticism. There are some successes in the new style, notably in the firm short lines of 'Homage to Lost Friends'. But one cannot avoid the feeling that he will not again be seen at his best until he regains some of the qualities of the finest poems in The Fallen House-spareness, direct- ness, and a firm consciousness of particular time and place. In Fires of No Return is a good selection only in the sense that it displays Mr Baxter's worst faults at least as clearly as it shows his strength. As a book which English readers will no doubt take as representative of the best that New Zealand poetry can produce it is unfortunate-but only seriously unfortunate if one believes that what English readers think of our poetry really matters. The Sunday Times, with typical carelessness about things at a distance, has already referred to Mr Baxter as 'a poet from Australia'; and 89 one comes to realize that so casual a glance as our literature receives in England is hardly a matter for concern. In The Iron Breadboard Mr Baxter illustrates his facility as a versifier by writing parodies, or pastiches, of the work of a number of New Zealand poets. Readers who know their poets well enough will find the pamphlet entertaining. One can only regret that Mr Baxter has demonstrated-by making one of his pastiches of Dylan Thomas the title poem of In Fires of No Return-that he does not yet know for certain when he is writing pastiche and when he is writing poetry. C. K. Stead

3 POETS. HABITUAL FEVERS, Peter Bland; THE WATCHERS, John Boyd; THE SENSUAL ANCHOR, Victor Q'Leary. Capricorn Press. IOS. IN WHAT is perhaps his most successful satirical piece, 'The All Black', Mr Victor O'Leary has the refrain: Men stand round in different places talking of the Trentham races. The lines could serve as signature for this first collection of verses by three young Wellington writers, who have little in common beyond their uneasy awareness of the urban setting they have lately shared. (Yet the Capricorn Press, unless it is promoting its own special cult of ugliness, is hardly entitled to ' take pride in present- ing' a volume which has considerably less appeal to the eye than a Trentham race-book; fortunately, the contents are rather better than the typography.) Mr O'Leary himself, the senior member by some years, can write deftly on small subjects, and achieves at times a pleasing dryness. I think he should avoid moral melodrama, which has many pit- falls. If-with such pieces as 'Alter Christus', 'Miracle', and 'The Modern Mariner'-he has now written out of his system an unlucky fondness for Baudelairean attitudes, he might go on to further topical satire in the more promising manner of 'Party' and 'Clockwork Love', where a smaller risk (such a rhyme as 'silence- violence') invites a more positive return. Mr John Boyd is more romantic, and more moved by the world around him. Two sombre visionary poems, 'The Watchers' and 'The Losers', convey with real imaginative power a deeply-felt response to the times we live in. The tension is not sustained; transferred to the local scene, Mr Boyd's rhetoric seems a little inflated, his mythology rather too accommodating. 'Teddy Boy', a sonnet which opens strongly with exact observation, ends with too easy a solution which has the effect of cliche. Yet there is· 90 something very attractive about lines which generate their own current, like these : One hour after sundown, and the brawling wind brings back the hook-winged angels of my dreams. I hear their dark epiphany in this room where Gothic spires of the inward-seeking mind have crumbled . . .. Can one hear an epiphany? Does it much matter? This is the sort of thing young men have always written when they first felt the intoxication of image-building, and began to have a notion of Words reaching towards their own expression. One may not be sure that Mr Boyd is as yet a poet, but knows he might become one; he is genuinely haunted by his angels, duffle-coated or hook-winged; his words are more than make-believe. Mr Peter Bland is a poet, I think, though his work is very unequal. 'Finality is what we lack' : despite many felicities (which have a habit of coming rather too pat in the last few lines, destroying the effect of spontaneity) there seems hardly a vigorous enough attack in most of his lyrics. Until we come to the verses to a friend in the English Midlands : There came the words like candy To our mouths, Eccleshall and Offley Where the houses cling to each lane like children to a carousel. Then children too, we took to wheels And sped by copse and cottage To the tumbling weir, deep as dreams In the festering spring. Hedge-side and hay-field Gargled our pedals as we swallowed past. And in his 'New Settler's Seasonal', steering confidently into waters already charted by Mr Charles Doyle, Mr Bland maps his own course with point and precision. His verse still carries many echoes, but they are tuned to his own accent- they do not obtrude, as Empson obtrudes in 'Reprisals' : no line is more easily or less profitably imitable than the Sheffield master's. Of Mr Bland one may say with some confidence that a genuine lyrical impulse, playing delightedly or critically over the surfaces of a newly-adopted country, has helped to present us to ourselves in fresh colours. It is interesting to find some variations on familiar New Zealand themes-in 'River Land', 'Sunday', 'Letter to John Boyd', we may be aware of the poetic presences of Mr Curnow, Mr Glover, Mr Baxter; but they need worry us no more than they do Mr Bland himself, who has great powers of assimilation and 9I considerable literary tact. At low tension, as in 'Sunday', his verse is remarkably effective; at higher tension, as in 'To a Suicide' and the Winter piece in his 'New Settler's Seasonal', he does not lose control, but retains a strong sense of tragic situation. If there is promise throughout this volume, in the best of Mr Bland's work there is very real achievement. We must welcome the appearance of a new poetic personality-tolerant, articulate, alert, amused, not incapable of passion-upon the New Zealand literary scene. ]ames Bertram

EARLY VICTORIAN NEW ZEALAND : A study of racial tension and social attitudes I839-1852. John Miller. Oxford. 30s. THE publication, within about a year of each other, of Dr Keith Sinclair's Origins of the Maori Wars and Dr John Miller's Early Victorian New Zealand has added much to our knowledge of the way the Treaty of Waitangi was applied and interpreted up to about 1870. During the same year, the possibility of celebrating the signing of the Treaty by means of a national holiday has been widely discussed. What such a holiday would celebrate is difficult to say. Dr Miller quotes Bishop Selwyn as saying, in 1847, that there had been 'more philanthropy written about New Zealand and less practised, than about any other country in the world.' Selwyn was probably thinking mainly about the conduct of the New Zealand Company and its settlers in Wellington, Nelson and New Plymouth, to which Dr Miller confines his enquiries. Dr Miller suggests that to an historian Selwyn's words seem exaggerated-but not much, surely, in view of the facts Dr Miller gives, and the high-flown sentiments of the Company and some of its colonists quoted or paraphrased in numerous books as a substitute for historical analysis. The history of race relations in New Zealand contains, as one would expect, a good measure of the unpleasant features of the history of European colonization in other parts of the world. New Zealand, as Selwyn pointed out, is remarkable for the amount of self-congratulation indulged in by Europeans-and also for the tenacity of the Maori people. The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi certainly gave an unusual twist to the history of race relations in New Zealand, but the colonization of the central districts by the New Zealand Company was begun in anticipation and carried out in defiance of the Treaty. While the Company's exploring expedit- ion, under command of Colonel William Wakefield, E. G. Wake- field's elder brother, was still on the high seas, the Company in London sold 'land-orders' representing sections of the land the Colonel was going to buy. This astonishing manner of carrying out the colonization of a distant and almost unknown country in- 92 habited by an intelligent and warlike native people caused endless complications. By unravelling these Dr Miller has made a notable contribution to our historical knowledge. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed about a month after the arrival of a party of New Zealand Company surveyors at Port Nicholson, confirmed the Maoris in the ownership of their lands. However, the principle ·on which European colonization proceeded, in the 184o's and later, was in the main that the settlers must have whatever land they wanted, even villages and cultivations, those spots vital to the Maoris which were specifically mentioned in the Treaty. The colonization carried out by the New Zealand Company in accordance with the theories of E. G. Wakefield, its most active director, went ahead on the principle that the settlers, and the numerous absentee speculators, had to have the land they had already paid for. The achievement of this end required two things. Firstly, the Company had to choose sites which contained the amount of land that had already been sold and survey it quickly and accurately, all of which the Company failed miserably to do. Secondly, the exploring expedition under Colonel William Wakefield had to extinguish the Maori title to the land. In this, on the whole, the Company succeeded. Not that Colonel Wake- field actually bought the land. Dr Miller shows in a full and pitiless analysis that Colonel Wakefield's negotiations were disingenuous, in fact farcical, and that the conduct of Edward Jerningham Wakefield, E. G. Wakefield's son and Colonel Wakefield's A.D.C., was if anything even more dubious. The Company's success in getting some of the land it wanted (and a good deal more that the settlers, as distinct from the absentees, needed) was an illustration of the saying that possession is nine points of the law. At Port Nicholson, the Maoris were driven out of the pas and presented in exchange with the native reserves which were in- cluded in E. G. Wakefield's scheme. Some of these reserves were situated on precipitous slopes incapable of cultivation. So much for the common assumption that the Maoris did well by being brought into the operation of the Wakefield system, but we should note in fairness to Wakefield and the Company that a number of the settlers fared no better and considered the colonization carried out by the Company 'a cruel system of swindling'. The simple technique of a show of force-armed survey parties, booming guns from ships in the harbour-worked well in Well- ington and New Plymouth. It led to the Wairau Massacre in Nelson, the 'Waitara' of the 184o's. Dr Miller gives us the first authoritative account of this controversial happening. The fact which stands out most clearly in his admirable analysis is the willingness of the Maoris to negotiate in contrast with the settlers' determination to use force to uphold British power and prestige, these being represented by the problematical 'rights' of the New 93 Zealand Company's settlers and the absentee owners of Company land-orders. The first Governors of New Zealand, Hobson and FitzRoy, acted on a very different conception of British prestige, a conception which involved honouring the promises made at Waitangi. To this end, the British Government had sent a special commissioner, William Spain, to enquire into all purchases of land made before the Treaty was signed. Spain's court made mincemeat of Colonel Wakefield's claim to have purchased the land round Port Nicholson, but the settlers had the nine points of the law on their side, and they followed up this advantage with a smear campaign (which has influenced most historians and entirely possessed some) against Spain, FitzRoy, the missionaries, in fact anyone who supported the Treaty of Waitangi. Dr Miller has rescued Spain, Robert FitzRoy and George Clarke junior (whom he calls one of the ablest advocates the Maoris ever had) from the libels of Edward Jerningham Wakefield and other New Zealand Company propagandists, just as an earlier generation of historians rescued Sir James Stephen and the Colonial Office from the sneers of Jerningham's father. The Wakefield family (with the exception of Arthur, who seems to have been free from the family tortuousness) receives some hard knocks from Dr Miller, and he makes some interesting revelations about the New Zealand Company. After a good deal of research into the ways in which the Company gulled men of property and labouring people into emigrating to New Zealand, I thought I was hardened to the Company's methods; but I hadn't believed that the Company would stoop so low as to misappropriate trust funds (giving part as loans to directors, including E. G. Wakefield) and suppress an honest legal judgment in favour of colonists to whom it had broken its promises, replacing that judgment With an opinion favourable to the Company prepared, in Dr Miller's words, by 'a dubious character who had not been permitted to practise in any court of law during the previous twenty-two years.' So far I have dealt mainly with Dr Miller's treatment of the racial question, and very good this is. Dr Miller is careful and judicious; he writes smoothly with often a nice turn of phrase, but at times the writing could· do with a bit more punch. He has an eye for the telling quotation and he blends his quotations with the text, by no means an easy thing to do. However, the book as a whole is not as satisfying as one would expect consider- ing the merit of individual chapters. More than most writers, Dr Miller realizes that the racial question is the question of early New Zealand history, and that part of the book which is related to the central theme of the Company's defiance of the Treaty of Waitangi has shape and unity. The chapters on the labourers' revolt, the beginnings of the pastoral industry, religion and education, polite 94 society, have too little connection with each other and are some- times inconclusive. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Dr Miller has made a point of not drawing on the researches of other historians, and this has forced him to take up an uncomfortable position somewhere between the short pamphlet which fills in gaps in our historical knowledge and the larger book which gives a rounded treatment of its subject. .V1ichae/ Turnbu/1

THE SEW ZEALAND PEOPLE AT WAR. Political and External Affairs. F. L. W. Wood. Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War, 1939-45. Wellington: War History Branch, Depart- ment of Internal Affairs. 25s.

THE FIRST thing to be said about Professor Wood's book is that it is a fine and most scholarly piece of historical writing which makes a particularly valuable contribution not only to the War History series, but also to historical study in general in a country as poorly off for solid monographs as it is well provided with short surveys. The style is on the whole plain. acc1,1rate and readable, and if the last quality is sometimes lost when the writer is most closely at grips with intractable material. this is balanced by sections in which, analysing a long development, the prose has great ease and grace. The New Zealand People at War takes emerging nationhood as its theme and concentrates primarily on external affairs; social and economic matters are lightly dealt with, surprisingly in view of the title; and even political affairs occupy a less central position than the subtitle would suggest. In emphasis and scope, then, as well as in method and arrangement, this volume offers an interesting comparison with the civil section of the Australian War History series. in which volumes completed and projected include two on political and social events, two on war economy and one on the role of science and technology. Professor Wood has set himself to examine political thinking and feeling in the Dominion only insofar as domestic issues in- fluenced the shape of New Zealand's war effort, and he adheres tc this consistently. Nevertheless. the detailed scrutiny of all the factors which might have affected this necessarily involves him in discussion of many important and more enduring themes in New Zealand politics. For example, the timing and the manner of tht introduction of conscription are made clear in the light of the nature of and reasons for Labour Party thinking on this matter through the whole period from the Party's origins. Similarly, the recurring question of participation in war-time government is bound to involve the basic distinctions in attitudes and principles between the two parties. and also such 95 matters as extra-parliamentary Labour Party organization and Peter Fraser's skill as a tactician in the management of his own party. The attempt at collaboration in the War Administration finally broke down when the National Party members withdrew in protest at the Government's handling of the Huntly strike, that is to say, over the issue of industrial unrest and the proper method of dealing with it, itself an issue long-standing and important as a source and expression of the divergence between the two parties. Tension over this particular matter was very much heightened by its wartime occurrence, when, as Professor \Vood says, the strikers in 1939-45 occupied much the same place for the press and the National Party as the war profiteer had for the Labour Party in 1914·18. As with the enduring issues, so with the permanently significan· figures of New Zealand politics-in such an episode as this, Frase and Nash, Coates and Holland are shown in a way which reVeab not only their war-time roles but also something of the quality of their characteristic contributions. When defining his field, Pro- fessor Wood defends the preoccupation of the book with political and external affairs rather than social and economic trends. His concern here is solely with the political implications and con- sequences of industrial unrest and its causes are left unexamined. Other domestic issues which belonged peculiarly to the war period are nevertheless examined in such a way as to show how the method of handling them related to habitual political and social assumptions-for example, Economic Stabilisation, the treatment of conscientious objectors and aliens, war-time censorship. But the greatest single theme of the book is its delineation of emerging nationhood, something obviously very difficult to achieve, requiring delicacy and exactness in a high degree. The attempt to be exact here has always to contend with the essential ambiguity and ambivalence of New Zealand's relation to Britain and the Commonwealth. Professor Wood's most notable success lies in the fact that he has managed to exhibit the growth in New Zealand's national self-consciousness in most detailed clarity without elimin- ating any of the due sense of ambiguity. The nature and development of the relation between Britain and New Zealand is set in perspective from the time of the First World War, and the stage reached by the beginning of the Second World War is stated with all the fullness and care required if the developments that follow are to be understood. The survey shows a long-standing willingness to differ from Great Britain when dif ferences in attitude or interest were apprehended. But the experi- ences of the war were to heighten the awareness of difference in. interest, and distinction in attitude and principles, to a point at which the relationship had become if not less strong and inevitable, certainly different in kind. The nature of the difference is perhaps 96 most readily suggested by the fact that whereas in the beginning Professor Wood can confine his examination of New Zealand's external affairs mainly to her dealings with Britain in the setting of the Commonwealth, by the end he has to be concerned with New Zealand on the world stage, preoccupied with the problems of a small state vis-a-vis the great powers. To the extent that New Zealand lost her sense of total reliance on Commonwealth protect- ion during the course of the war, she had become aware of the need to express the viewpoint and requirements of a small state with her own voice. During the war she had moved from the position of a normally acquiescent member of the Commonwealth, normally reluctant to have, let alone express, an opinion on foreign policy, to that of a small power rampant, as Professor Wood describes it. The impulse to more positive, independent action had been there since 1936 at least; the necessity for it had been sharply impressed by the events of the war; that the ram- pagings of the small power were observed with some respect by the war's end was due to the admirable war-time performance of her soldiers and to the capacity of her Prime Minister for tough, flexible, intelligent application of principle. The assumption of a greater measure of responsibility by New Zealand over her own affairs is pursued by Professor Wood with an attention both microscopic and roving, as required. It seems to have been promoted by two main factors : first, the determination to retain responsibility over the use of Dominion troops under British command, which inevitably led to greater insistence than previously on consultation over policy, as distinct from mere in- formation about it; and secondly, the dawning realization that the security of New Zealand in the Pacific did not occupy such a central position in the minds of British policy-makers and strate- gists as it did in that of New Zealanders. The first was chiefly in- fluential in the hammering out of a new relationship with Britain. The second taught the harder lesson, that as a Pacific state, New Zealand's destiny was not wholly contained within the Common- wealth but was bound up also with the major Pacific power, the United States. The tension involved in this realization is admirably revealed in the account of the intolerable problem of how best to dispose of New Zealand manpower, a very scarce commodity, inadequate in volume to fulfil British requirements in Europe and pursue the newly desired role in the Pacific simultaneously. As early as 1939 at the Pacific Defence Conference in Wellington, the New Zealand delegation learned that the idea that New Zealand might be vulnerable in the Pacific was not taken seriously by the British. Professor Wood quotes an arresting piece of dialogue in which to the New Zealanders' query how they should defend New Zealand, supposing that Singapore had fallen and the reinforc- ing fleet had been smashed, the British delegates responded, 'Take 97 to the Waitomo Caves'. New Zealand troops were sent to the Mediterranean on the understanding that in the event of trouble in the Pacific, British naval reinforcements would be sent there even at the expense of British interests in the Mediterranean. But after the fall of France, the New Zealand Government was in- formed that it would no longer be possible to honour this pledge. This communication and Fraser's reply to it mark the climax of New Zealand's emergence from dependence, as Fraser's activities at San Francisco mark its fruition. New Zealanders in general were slower to understand their situation and grasp its implications, and in fact it was not until after Pearl Harbour and the subsequent disasters that the 'shocking and unprecedented immediacy' of the war broke through what was described at the time as the 'apathy' and 'stupor' of New Zealanders in the face of affairs external to their shores. A few final points must be made at random, out of all those that merit attention. The chapter on New Zealand Trusteeship is outstanding in a fine book for the assured clarity and compre- hensiveness of its development, and for a felicitous and entertaining style which, though displayed elsewhere in the book at times, is not consistently present. It is also dexterously organized to lead into the analysis of New Zealand's participation in end-of-war councils on welfare and international organization, itself very well done. The development of machinery appropriate to New Zealand's new role, the Department of External Affairs and the various embassies, is traced. There is a great deal of material here on Peter Fraser, whose dominant stature is one of the major impressions one is left with. And indirectly, in the course of the book, there is a good deal of comment bearing on the character of New Zealand democracy, specially in its treatment of such ques- tions as censorship and of conscientious objectors, and such inci- dents as the refusal of a considerable proportion of furlough men to return to the war. The production of the book is of good quality, the illustrations and maps are appropriate and clear, and the index is admirably arranged for maximum usefulness. B. M. O'Dowd

THIS NEW ZEALAND. Third Edition. F. L. W. Wood. Paul's Book Arcade. 25s. AMONG the topics discussed in this comprehensive survey of New Zealand life are our system of government, our farming, our industry, our education system, the arts, and the Maori people. Our position in the British Commonwealth and our war economy (1939 to 1945)-subjects which Professor Wood has treated, each 98 in a separate book-are also dealt with in the present work. In attempting to account for so much in a small volume of two- hundred and seventy pages he has had perforce to keep to broad outlines and to generalize quite a lot. He writes as one who is anxious, not that the facts with which he is dealing should fit into a rigid pattern of thought, or lead to any hard and fast con- clusions, but that they should be weighed-if need be-one against another and receive as fair an appraisal as they warrant. This balanced quality in his writing is particularly noticeable in his chapter dealing with the Maori people. Here he notes the vitality of the race as reflected in its rapidly increasing birth rate. And, as noteworthy examples of Maori acculturation, he singles out the kind of community life established under the late Princess Te Puea's leadership at Ngaruawahia, the Panguru Community experiment in North Auckland, and the land development scheme initiated on the East Coast by the late Sir Apirana Ngata. His emphasis in this chapter is upon the renaissance that has been taking place in Maori life over the past few decades. But what of the facts that will not fit into this pattern of renaissance? The Maori infant mortality rate-nearly three times that of the European population; their death rate from tubercular diseases-five and a half times as great; their living conditions- sub-standard for at least one half of their people, the bulk of that half living in shacks or shelters, according to the latest annual report of the Department of Maori Affairs-what, it may be asked, has he to say of these stubbornly persisting features of the Maori situation? He is careful to note them. Nor has the urban drift of young Maoris in search of employment escaped his notice. And while he asserts (p.189) that in some areas 'employers' prejudice against Maori workers still lingers', he is no less mindful of the surmounting of social barriers apparent in Maori 'community adaptation to the conditions of twentieth century life'. The book contains, in one or two places, observations that are a little bald as they stand and that require amplifying in order to establish their point. Take, for example, the following remark on p.242: 'It was, no doubt, significant of New Zealand ways that during the war local news commentaries were suppressed in favour of rebroadcasts of B.B.C. bulletins and summaries issued by the Prime Minister's Department.'. Significant of New Zealand ways? It is not at all clear what is to be understood by this expression. Then to read on p.64 that 'beneath the English externals of Christ- church lies a characteristically New Zealand tension between farmers and townsmen' is to be left guessing at what is implied here; for nowhere else in the book is this tension referred to. Another statement that would bear expanding is that relating to the decision to launch the military campaign in Greece early in 1941. 'Though the adventure took place under British 99 writes Professor Wood, 'New Zealand was consulted.' What, in this case, did consultation amount to? (This question receives a careful airing in Professor Wood's recently published book entitled The New Zealand People at War: Political and External Affairs.) Some remarks concerning nineteenth-century British emigration to New Zealand need qualifying. For it is not altogether true to say that 'neither the very rich nor the very poor have ever come to New Zealand' (p.2o4), nor that 'the very poor have always been kept out by distance and expense' (p.69). There is evidence enough to dispute these contentions. Of British emigrants arriving in this country between the years 1840 and 1844, 'almost all brought a small portion of capital, but some were utterly destitute', said Edmund Halswell, who had seen them arrive in their hundreds, and was questioned on this point when giving evidence before a select committee of the House of Lords in April 1848. And then, in June 1863, the Canterbury Provincial Council voted £w,ooo to provide free passages to New Zealand to distressed operatives from cotton manufacturing districts in England. From Lancashire alone, over five hundred unemployed sailed shortly thereafter to Canter- bury. Not many years after this the Canterbury Provincial Council afforded free immigration to women domestics from England, some of whom were recruited from London refuges for the desti- tute. Until some closer study has been made of this subject, it will not bear too freely generalizing upon. In his final chapter Professor Wood sets down summary impress- ions of our country and people. He sees us as a home-loving, prac- tical people, and our society as an equalitarian one which from long tradition has come to look to the state to guard the security of 'the common man'. It is with this increasing reliance upon the state in mind that he remarks earlier (p.86): 'New Zealand is on the same track as the rest of Western civilization, and maybe a little further toward the triumph or disaster which lies at the end of the road.' R. C. Lamb

Correspondence

To THE EDITOR SIR: I have read Elsie Locke's article entitled 'Looking for Answers' (Landfall, December 1958) and must congratulate her on a very good piece of writing written with much feeling. Yet, after reading it twice I must say that Mrs Locke's state- lOO ment appears to be very ambiguous in important respects. Mrs Locke makes it plain that she passionately disapproves of Stalinist excesses such as the fake trials of the 193o's and of Stalinist and post-Stalinist policies in Eastern Europe. But it is by no means so clear where she stands on certain fundamental theories of so-called Marxism-Leninism which Stalin took over from Lenin. Elsie Locke condemns, and very justly so, the theory of demo- cratic centralism, the party of a single will. But she has no word to say in condemnation of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat which Lenin made the basis of his theory of revolution. Yet the party of democratic centralism has no meaning except within the framework of a society wholly dictatorial in character. Reading Mrs Locke's article very carefully I could not but gain the impression that she believed that Communism would be quite all right if it were brushed up a bit. To show that I am not being unfair to the writer, consider the following: 'These tendencies [i.e. bureaucratic distortions. S.W.S.] are not absolute .... The national liberation of Jugoslavia, the rebirth of China, the great post-war strikes in France, are examples of an impetus so profound as to thrust bureaucracy aside.' (P-353·) We are thus invited to believe that these are examples of 'true' undistorted Communism as distinct from what Mrs Locke terms the 'Stalinist form of Communism'. The examples are indeed un- fortunate. The French Communist Party is the most rigid and pro- Stalinist of all the West European Communist Parties. As far as the Party was concerned the strikes (1947-8) were undoubtedly motivated by a desire to please Moscow and injure the Marshall Plan. It would have been better had Elsie Locke claimed a modest share of Communist credit for the sweeping social security legis- lation passed in 1946 by the coalition government in which the Communists participated alongside the Socialists and the Catholic M.R.P. As for Jugoslavia I will only say that though it is somewhat less bad than Soviet Russia, the unfortunate Mr Djilas does not share Mrs Locke's views on the sweeping aside of bureaucracy. China is probably even more deeply bureaucratic than Russia. The Communist Party is monolithic, the State system totalitarian and Stalinism on more of a pedestal today than it is in Russia itself. Two years after Hungary Elsie Locke is 'looking for answers'. I hope she will never stop looking. I trust that I never shall stop looking either. But it would be fitting for ex-Communist leaders such as Mrs Locke and myself to admit that some answers, at least, were provided by those despised social democrats who were held in such lofty contempt in our 'scientific' minds. In our exalted humanism, our glow of idealism in the thirties, we did not confine our attacks to the 'reactionaries', but did our best to drag back 101 the one movement which did have some of the answers and actually carried out a good job of work. We may have been quite as noble as Elsie Locke suggests, but we were certainly a darned sight sillier than she even hints at. I don't know many of the answers. But at least I know that there are not two kinds of Communism-the Stalinist and some other kind. There is only one kind of twentieth century Com- munism (apart from inessential details) and that is the Communism of Lenin with its dictatorship of the proletariat and its monolithic party. The lesson of the years since the first world war is to eschew every kind of dictatorship whether it be in capitalist Europe, in colonial Asia or in 'Socialist' Russia, China or East Europe. It is the more necessary to point out ambiguities in the article because Mrs Locke's writing skill and her deserved reputation for integrity tend to obscure the implications of an attitude which, in my opinion, clings dangerously to the skirts of the pseudo-science of Leninism. S. W. Scott SIR: Writing about John Feeney's films in Landfall 47, Maurice Shadbolt mentions the lack of informed film criticism in New Zealand as one reason why Feeney's name is not better known. 'But to give Landfall its due,' he says, 'it was in these pages (in an article by P. J. Downey published in December, 1955) that John Feeney's name, as director of Legend of the Wanganui River, Kotuku, Pumicelands, and Hot Earth, first appeared.' May I put the record straight? On May 30, 1952-three and a half years before P. J. Downey's article appeared-The New Zealand Listener, in a review of Legend of the Wanganui River illustrated with a still from the film, named Feeney as its writer, director and editor. On January 9, 1953, The Listener again men- tioned Feeney, as director of Kotuku, in a full-page article, 'Filming the White Heron'. Introduced by a cover picture, this article in- cluded three shots, apparently from Kotuku. This film, incident- ally, was also reviewed in The Listener later the same year, and the still from it which appeared in Landfall with Mr Shadbolt's article was reproduced in The Listener in the middle of 1955 with an article on New Zealand films. F. A. ]ones

NEW CONTRIBUTORS Catherine de la Roche. London film critic, broadcaster, etc., now in Well- ington. Reader at Ealing and Denham Studios, 1934-9, Film Officer at the Ministry of Information 1943-5. Free-lance contributor to Penguin Film Review, Sight and Sound, The Times, Illustrated, Everybody's, Films and Filming, etc. Film correspondent for Picture Post 1950-3. Has broadcast for the B.B.C. and appeared on television. Member of the jury of historians for Presentation of the Best Films of All Time, Brussels, 1958. Author of monographs on Rene Clair and Vincente Minnelli. 102 lan A. Gordon. Born in Edinburgh, 1908. Professor of English at Victoria University, Wellington, since 1937. Chairman of the N.Z. Literary Fund Advisory Committee. Author of John Skelton, Poet Laureate, The Teaching of English, English Prose Technique, Katherine Mansfield, and other works. Anthony Ha/croft. Born in Christchurch 1932. Educated at Southland Boys' High School and Canterbury University. Has been school-teacher, gardener, farm-hand. At present managing an orchard near Christchurch and com- pleting a B.A. degree. H. P. Kidson. Born in Nelson 1887. Educated at Nelson College, Canter- bury College, the Sorbonne. First Principal Hutt Valley High School, Rector of Otago Boys' High School, President N.Z. Secondary Schools' Associ- ation .. Now living in retirement at Wanaka. R. C. Lamb. Born in Wellington 1910, educated at Victoria University and the University of Otago. Has followed three professions, the church, working in a Presbyterian charge in North Auckland for two years; teaching, at North Auckland Maori schools and at Wesley College, Paerata. Graduated from the N.Z. Library School in 1946. At the General Assembly Library till 1955, now at Public Library. B. M. O'Dowd. Born in Auckland 1923. Took an honours degree in history at Auckland University, was a secondary school teacher in Auckland, worked in the National Archives in Wellington, and was for three years a junior lecturer in the History Department at Auckland University. She is now Warden of Helen Connon Hall and part-time lecturer in the History Department at the University of Canterbury. Andrew Packard. Born at Sedbergh, Yorkshire, 1929. Educated at Gordons- toun and Pembroke College, Oxford, with a year in the Navy in between. Lecturer in Zoo)ogy, Auckland University, 1954-7. Biologist with the second summer party of the N.Z. Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1957-8. Relieving lecturer in charge, Marine Biological Station, Portobello, Dunedin, 1958. Now holding a Royal Society Research Associateship on the staff of the Zoological Station in Naples.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED A Speech by Rewi Alley delivered at the World Congress for Disarmament and International Co-operation, Stockholm, 1958. P. J. Alley, 70 Clyde Rd, Christchurch. Falter Tom and the Water Boy. Maurice Duggan. Faber & Faber and Paul's Book Arcade. !Os. 6d. Parents Largest Group of Unskilled Workers. Doris Meares Mirams. Obtain- able from N.Z. Parent and Child, G.P.O. Box 6385, Te Aro, Wellington. Verdict on New Zealand. Edited by Desmond Stone. Reed. 18s. 6d. The Queen's English. Arnold Wall. The Pegasus Press. 17s. 6d. Mate. Edited by David Walsh and Robin Dudding. No. 2. November 1958. Auckland: 23 Sentinel Rd, Herne Bay. 3s. This Earth of Ours. Part Two. G. A. Eiby. Post-Primary School Bulletin Vol. 11 No. 10. Wellington: School Publications Branch, Department of Education. Te Tiriti 0 Waitangi. Ruth Ross. A Primary School Bulletin. Wellington: School Publications Branch, Department of Education. 'Her Majesty Commands'. The story of the opening of Parliament. F. L. W. Wood. Post-Primary School Bulletin Vol. 12 No. 2. Wellington: School Publications Branch, Department of Education. 103 Mind and Matter. Erwin Schrodinger. Cambridge University Press. 13s. 6d. Plays in One Act. M. S. Armstrong. Edwards & Shaw. 12s. 6d. Chinese Women Speak. Dymphna Cusack. Angus & Robertson. 2Ss. West Coast Stories. A Western Australian Anthology. Edited by H. Drake- Brockman. Angus & Robertson. 20s. Politics in Eden-Monaro. D. W. Rawson and Susan M. Holtzinger. For the Australian National University: Heinemann. 22s. 6d. Black-feller, White-feller. Roland Robinson. Angus & Robertson. 1Ss. The Doors are Closing. Gyorgy Sebestyen. Sydney: lan Novak. 17s. 6d. (through Angus & Robertson). Four Plays. Douglas Stewart. Angus & Robertson. 30s. Early New Zealand. A Dependency of New South Wales, 1788-1841. E. J. Tapp. Melbourne University Press. 3Ss. Robina. E. V. Timms. Angus & Robertson. 17s. 6d. Though Poppies Grow. F. B. Vickers. Australasian Book Society. 17s. 6d. World Without Frontiers. Richard Weiss. Angus & Robertson. 2Ss. The Sunlit Plain. H. D. Williamson. Angus & Robertson. 18s. 9d. The Crescent and the Rising Sun. Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation 1942-194S. Harry J. Benda. The Hague: W. van Hoeve Ltd. 16.50 guiJders. The Hussite Movement in Bohemia. Josef Macek. Second, enlarged edition. Translated by Vilem Fried and Ian Milner. Prague: Orbis. 7.20 kcs. William Butler Yeats. A catalog of an exhibition from the P. S. O'Hegarty Collection in the University of Kansas Library. Lawrence: Kansas Uni- versity Library. Inland (incorporating Interim). Edited by John Rackham. Vol. 2 No. 2. Autumn 19S8. P.O. Box 68S, Salt Lake City, Utah. Quarterly. $2 a year, SOc. a copy. Sanity, Unheard Of. Hugh Woodworth. Victoria, B.C.: The Sumas Publish- ing Co. Ltd., S079 Lockehaven Drive. $3. The Singing Forest. Selected Poems. P. Brian Cox. Bharti Association Publications, Ghaziabad, U.P., India. Rs.l.SO. The Voice of Ahimsa. Vol. VIII No. S, May 19S8. The World Jain Mission, Aliganj (Etah), U.P., India. Monthly. !Os. a year. PENGUIN BOOKS : The English Novel. Waiter Alien. 4s. David Hume, A. H. Basson. 3s. 6d. Collected Verse. Hilaire Belloc. 2s. 6d. Poems and Letters of William Blake. Edited by J. Bronowski. 3s. 6d. The Penguin Book of French Verse. 2. Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Edited by Geoffrey Brereton. Ss. A Guide to Earth History. Richard Carrington. 4s. Gigi and The Cat. Colette. 2s. 6d. A House and its Head. Ivy Compton-Burnett. 2s. 6d. Going into the Past. Gordon J Copley. 3s. The Drunken Forest. Gerald Durrell. 2s. 6d. A Puffin Quartet of Poets. Eleanor Farjeon, James Reeves, E. V. Rieu, Ian Serraillier. 3s. From Dickens to Hardy. The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Edited by Boris Ford. Ss. Roman Literature. Michael Grant. 3s. 6d. The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. Edited by Ralph Gustafson. 3s. 6d. Disengage- ment in Europe. Michael Howard. 2s. 6d. The Gods of the Greeks. Car! Kerenyi. 4s. Going to the Opera. Lionel Salter. 3s. A Dictionary of Civil Engineering. John S. Scott. Ss. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. William Shakespeare. 2s. 6d. Human Groups. W. J. H. Sprott. 3s. 6d. The Earth Beneath Us. H. H. Swinnerton. Ss. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Maisie Ward. 3s. 6d. Selected Short Stories. H. G. Wells. 3s. 6d. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Angus Wilson, 3s. 6d.

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