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

CON'l'EN'l'S

Notes 311 Three Poems, Michae!Jackson 312 A Boy's Will, Janet Frame 314 The Root of the Matter, Miroslav Holub, translated by !an Milner 324 Beginnings, Maurice Duggan 331 Take Care to Leave the Brush-Marks!, Alan Roddick 339 The Visit, Michael Gifkins 341 Two Poems, Norman Bilbrough 345 Nobby Clark, Alistair Campbell 346 An Imaginary Conversation, Frank Sargeson 349 On a Five-fold Screen, Ruth Dallas 357 Beginnings, Colin McCahon 360 Two Poems, James K. Baxter 365 Fairburn, C. K. Stead 367

COMMENTARIES: Australian Letter, Judith Wright 382 Drama in Auckland, MacD. P.Jackson 385

REVIEWS: Sings Harry, Robert N ola 392 Pig Island Letters, Lawrence Jones 393 The Needle's Eye, For the Rest of Our Lives, A.J. Gurr 396 William Pember Reeves, W. H. Oliver 399 Meanjin, Preoccupations, Australian Literature, Terry Sturm 403 Correspondence, Peter Platt, John Miller, Jean Ann Anderson 411 Windows for a Chapel, Colin McCahon Cover design, Anthony Stones

VOLUME TWENTY NUMBER FOUR DECEMBER 1966 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund.

LANDFALL is printed and published by The Caxton Press at 119 Victoria Street, Christchurch. The annual subscription is 30s. net post free, and should be sent to the above address. All contributions used will be paid for. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor at the above address; they cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped and addressed envelope. :1\(Etes

EARLY SPRING brought shows by two painters, Doris Lusk and Margot Philips, whose persistent exploration of their own way of seeing and rendering gives their work a strength and authenticity beyond fash- ion; it is individuality such as theirs that will in time give not only painting but all the arts in New Zealand a distinct character. Dunedin Art Gallery presented in August a retrospective show of seventy-three works by Doris Lusk, chosen by the artist from some thirty years of painting. The show gave a very moving record of a painter's struggle to find and state, through her involvement with the landscape chiefly, her own painterly identity, which is nearly always an artist's hardest, life-long work. There seem to be no theo- retical preoccupations, either aesthetic or philosophical, behind Miss Lusk's painting, no unifying impulse except the responsive senses and mind, which sometimes she can harness together and sometimes not. After several remarkably sure and satisfying early oils, both landscape and figure, her work shows repeated uncertainty in aim and method; until in her water-colours of the sixties, especially those done at Onekaka this year, she struck a fine maturity of ease and subtle richness. A few oils of this year have something of the same quality, which marks her movement away from rather literal state- ment towards an airier, larger, more open apprehension of the mys- terious, atmospheric beauty of the country. Her approach and devel- opment, although very personal, in a general way are not untypical among painters and writers; she is almost a representative artist. Margot Philips cannot be called typical, and she works rather differently. She began painting only some fifteen years ago, in middle life, yet even her early paintings are quite sure in aim and method. Her first one-man show, at the New Vision Gallery, Auckland, in September, contained eight earlier works and twenty-four more recent ones, all landscapes in oil. In most of them, people, houses, settlements, appear only in the distance if at all, often on the horizon on top of a hill or ridge. She paints scenes distilled in the mind from real landscapes closely observed and deeply pondered; the intense greens of the W aikato, the wide, open airiness of small lakes in the hills under big skies, the dizzying pale sand and rock of the Negev Desert which she visited recently. In her best work, as in Doris Lusk's, any influences have been absorbed out of recognition; each artist is doing what is entirely her own and now our own; work of the loving imagination, truthfully of this time, of this place.

311 MICHAEL JACKSON Execution

WHERE thousands of tiered cheering faces threw their fears away and a blue flag broke, crossed by red and bearing a gold star, another Independence was handed over like an unwanted child six years ago on this very square.

But today in another throng, pressing leaves and shadows on the sunlit square white monuments surround, where I took coffee so many evenings, chatted with friends, bought peanuts from orphan vendors, or scorned the fat landlords of Europe buying cheap artefacts among the G.I.'s smell of soap, and brazen accents ... there, they are hanging four men.

I cannot imagine if cheers will go up as I heard they did in other dark ages. I have never seen the fear, as it is called, of men found guilty of God knows what purpose, sentenced to be hanged accused before not justice but their own damned history which once was ours, and then, inheriting it like a suicide in the family, mine for one year.

An elegy to myself is all I have put down, turned to the wall of radio announcements and dirt in a square where gibbets summarize the dawn, and tiered stands for dignitaries wait the first tin blare of the band's anthem.

I too found independence there, I thought, but now my independence is these men's act. I have overthrown no government, I have taken insults, 312 risked nothing, given only my dreams a decent burial, and come back home to little else except the bitten hours after bad news, and time in which all done to prove our worth is trapped and hung on history's gate, warning us away from this green plot upon a blackened ground.

:J(gt Only Strings

THE guitarist's melancholy touches not only strings but continents. Couched in the dark west wing a bird soon flees resounding passages. Heartsick a bat flies heavenward; My eye encircles all but blue. I hear the desperate sentiment of misplaced love beside a wall. Impossible accompaniment has overcome the notes we had in us to play. Sadness begins with ends upon a threshold somewhere near Equador. Somewhere too when your guitar begins the bird becomes what I cannot say.

The 'R.!;d 1\gad

THE red road led to nowhere I could go Nowhere was a village I would never know: For days I drove companionless along it The forest had no horizon I wore a mask of red dirt The wheel steered me My body ached At night I lay awake in terror at the night: 313 People everywhere Saw to me with the same indifference They shared their food I passed through country Only on a map And came back along the same road Nothing in particular fulfilled: The red road led to nowhere I could go Nowhere was a village I would never know.

JANET FRAME u113oy's Will

ALL THE WILD summer holidays Peter was angry. The rain came down heavily almost every day but it was not the rain that angered, it was people-family, visitors, neighbours who moved judging, complaining in their subtropical sweat and steam with their damp skin clinging to the new plastic-covered chairs in the sitting room and their voices tired and their eyes puzzled when they looked at him, as if they did not understand; and then he grew puzzled too for he did not know what they were trying to understand. He wanted to be left alone. His fourteen years belonged to him like trophies. He sensed that this, his fifteenth year, would be so much prized by himself and others that he would need to fight to preserve it for himself. Everyone had suddenly become intensely interested, seeming to want to share him and explore him. In the first week of the holidays when in answer to his mother's question, Where have you been?, he said, -Nowhere, his aunt Lily who had come to stay began to chant with an inexplic- able triumph in her thick country throat, 'Where have you been? -Nowhere. -What did you do? -Nothing.' -It's begun, Cara, she said softly. She was standing by the telephone pressing her hand gently upon the cradle, circling her index finger on the black polished curves. 314 -It's begun, Cara. Her hand quivered as she spoke. What did she mean by her chant? 'Nowhere, nothing, no-one?' Why did everyone know so much about him? About his future too, what he would become, where he would live, how he would feel in his most secret self? His aunt had said, -In a few years, Cara, he'll want to break away. You can see the signs already. His mother replied, -As I've told you, Lily, it's a scientific career for him. With his I.Q. His I.Q. was high. He'd heard them say it was so high it couldn't be marked. His mother had said in tones of awe as if she had been describing an elusive beast instead of his intelligence that it was so high it had 'gone off the page', while Aunt Lily had replied in a sour dry voice, -These tests are not as reliable as they were once thought to be. Then his aunt Lily sighed as if she wanted something that would never be given to her and though he possessed skates, a transistor, a half-share with his brother Paul in a dinghy and there were few things he wanted desperately, he identified the feeling Aunt Lily had and he felt sorry for her with her hairy chin and her footballer's legs. When she came to stay everyone always told her,-You're one of the family, Lil, you're one of the family, but it was said so often that nobody seemed to believe it any more and she was really not one of the family, she laughed too loudly and her clothes were funny and she was just a woman living by herself in a room, in Wellington: in a room, not even in a house. It was when she came to stay that Peter's mother talked about him and Paul and their young sister Emily, describing what they had said or done, how from the very first he'd shown signs of exceptional intelligence, how he'd skipped classes at school, had learned to play the piano and was now on to Chopin Waltzes and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. When Aunt Lily arrived Peter had to play all his music to her. -Play the Beethoven, his mother said, closing her eyes and humm- ing, De-De-De, De-De-De, De-De-De .... -Now the Minute Waltz again, Peter. (He does this well because it ties in with his mathematics.) Peter felt his fingers moving stifHy. He'd been shirking his practice. His aunt murmured in her sour dry voice, -He's good technically but he thumps. He heard his mother's quick intake of breath and her protective, -He hasn't always thumped. He hasn't been practising. You should have heard him- 315 and his aunt's cold reply, -Anyone really interested in music practises all the time. His mother sighed then. -There are so many demands made on him, with his intelligence .... He played his pieces, too, when a family friend arrived by plane from America, and though the friend had been flying all night and his eyes were dark with wanting to sleep he sat on one of the new plastic-covered chairs listening to the messy blurr of notes made bv Peter's unpractised fingers. The expression masked on his face he said calmly, -That's all right. Peter saw his mother frown, searching the remark for the comfort- ing word 'brilliant'. Not finding it, she looked lonely and Peter, turning and seeing her face and knowing what she wanted, felt miserable. He finished in a hurried swallow of notes banging the final chords down like a window sash and taking the kid's toy, an American police car, the visitor had given him he escaped through the kitchen and downstairs to the garage where, his misery giving way to anger, he leapt up and down on the lid of an applebox until it snapped beneath him, sharply, satisfyingly. Auckland this summer was a factory of storms. Lightning, thunder, rain swept from West to East, Tasman to Pacific, rolling big smoke- white clouds like a bushfire in the sky with tongues of lightning darting and stabbing and the thunder exploding and more rain like sheets of aluminium falling. Peter dealt with each storm by record- ing it, calculating, experimenting. He collected and measured the rain in his rain-gauge, he read his barometer, his maximum and minimum thermometer, and then after such close disciplined read- ing he spent hours reading the sky, in agreeable free translation. His teacher had written on his School Report, 'What has happened to Peter's reading? Must read more.' Peter had not explained that he suddenly found clouds more interesting than words. Clouds, light, heat, sound. On their Christmas trip round the East Coast in the family car he carried his barometer like a book on his lap, reading it. -He'll be a meteorologist, his mother said, almost destroying his new passion with the weight of her tomorrow. He made a sundial too and set it on one of the fenceposts but there had been so much rain and so little sun that its applebox surface was sodden. Only once or twice at the beginning of the holidays he had been able to read the time by the shadow but now, when the holi- days were nearly over, that time seemed so long ago, a time when he had not been angry, when his anger did not seize him so com- pletely that he threw things or slapped his young sister, prompting his mother's cry, 316 -Peter, stop bullying. Remember your fourteen to her eleven. Be your age. His brother Paul, two years older, had a job for the holidays and would let no-one forget that he earned five pounds a week and was grown up. He was studying photography, too, and spent his spare time shut in the downstairs bathroom with a sheet of cardboard over the window and the slit under the door sealed with newspaper, developing and enlarging films. With his savings and his earnings he'd bought himself an enlarger, all the James Bond paperbacks, two books of science fiction, a bottle of Cedar Wood pre-electric shave lotion, and he'd had his trousers tapered. One Saturday early in the holidays he'd gone with Peter for a train-ride to Swanson where they sat in the Domain sheltering under the macrocarpa trees, licking icecreams, jelly-tipped on sticks, and reading comics bought at the railway bookstall. It rained, they came home early, and on the way home Paul made it clear that he hadn't gone out with Peter for the day that he'd taken Peter, and as they loitered up the drive, preparing answers to embarrassing questions they might be asked, Paul said,-I'll never go anywhere with you again. You act like a kid. Now, in the weekends, Paul went to the pictures with a girlfriend and Peter saw little of him except when they watched television. There had been a fuss about that too. His aunt Lily nearly died when she saw the new television set. She had cried out as if she were in danger. -What about the children? For their sake .... Peter's mother flushed. - Ted and I made the decision. It's easy for you as you've no children- Aunt Lily nodded meekly. -I just hoped, she said quietly,-that it wouldn't draw the children too much. Draw? Once when he had a boil on his neck his mother had put a poultice on it, as she said, to 'draw' it. She had burned the poultice in the oildrum at the back of the section. Certainly they watched television at first. They enjoyed the easy programmes, those with the laughs, and escaped when the serious news appeared showing jungle warfare, poverty, disease, famine. But that, too, had been at the beginning of the holidays before Peter began to get angry. Now he seldom watched except for the pro- gramme starring the cowboy who gambled. Peter knew all the poker terms. -I'll raise you, he'd say coolly to an imaginary opponent. He'd seen a programme, too, about the chances of a fly settling on a certain lump of sugar and he'd worked out the probability and 317 had even snared Paul's interest in this, though what was the use when all their windows and doors had insect screens and flies never landed on the sugar? It was just before he began to make his kite that he heard his mother saying to Aunt Lily, -Do you notice how impatient he's getting? His intelligence will be no use if he has no patience. Paul is the one who perseveres. Paul will go far. -You mean he's the plodding type? Peter saw his mother's shocked face as she absorbed all that plodding implied. Oh no, her children were bright, quick, surely they would never plod. -I think persevere is the word. Peter will find life hard if he has no patience. He's grown so quick-tempered! Peter pulled a face to himself. Who did they think they were to try to live his life for him? -This interest in the weather. It could be permanent. I rang up the Department.- He heard his aunt's manuka-stick voice, -The experts now say .... He did not wait to hear what the experts now said. He escaped from the top of the stairs down to the garage and ten minutes later Emily came upstairs crying. -Peter thumped me! Peter sat on an upturned applebox in the garage. He could imagine his mother's exclamation, -Thumped you! And her tender admonition afterwards, -Peter, you must be kind to your little sister. Boys must be gentle with girls. How could he explain that the thumping had been Emily's fault? They'd all watched a programme on television the night before where there was an old woman, so old and tired that she had to be moved from her little house to be put among the old people, and the film showed her arriving with the few belongings she'd been allowed to bring with her, and one was a photograph of herself as a you!!g girl, and just when she was deciding where to hang it in her new bedroom, a big nurse in a white fly-a-way hat had rushed into the room, admired the photograph, said the woman had not grown a day older, then she'd seized the photograph and the old woman stood looking unhappy and lonely with her arms dangling and her hands empty. But that had been last night on television. Now, this morning, Emily had taken an open page of Peter's Boy's Book of Outdoor Hobbies and drawn a picture of the old woman clinging to 318 her treasure while the nurse tried to take it from her. Peter had no quarrel with Emily's drawing. The programme had frightened him, too, for old age was part of tomorrow and tomorrow was like one of those tools that clamped down and screwed tight, permanently fixing everything beneath it. But Emily had drawn the picture where she shouldn't have, over the diagram of the kite that Peter planned to make, and surely a thump was small punishment for such a crime? The Boy's Book of Outdoor Hobbies was one of the few consolations Peter had during the holidays. He had worked carefully through it, making the sundial, the wind gauge, other interesting items not connected with the weather. He had skipped the chapter on Photo- graphy and Radio for these were Paul's interests and it was better, at this stage, to know nothing about them than to try to compete with Paul's accurate detailed knowledge. With an elder brother in the family it was a case of the younger taking the leftovers or perishing in the comparisons that would follow. -When Paul takes photographs he- -Paul knows how to fix the tv when it breaks down- Peter had decided, therefore, as his next project, to make a box kite. He rubbed angrily at the pencilled lines of the old woman and the photograph and the wicked nurse. Emily ought to have known better. The figures quite covered his diagram and measurements. And even if he managed to decipher them and make his kite would the weather be clear for kite-flying? Rain steamed in the sky, the leaves of the big subtropical flowers grew glossy, their stems grew tall, the bush on the hills had a milky green appearance as if rain and milk had fallen together from the sky. Peter found paste, bamboo sticks, string, a roll of blue and white crepe paper left over from someone's attempt at fancy dress, and forgetting about Emily and the old woman and thumping and the weather and his future he began to make his kite. Just then he heard his mother and aunt coming downstairs. -In this gap between showers I'll show you the passion fruit grow- ing by Emily's playhouse. His mother looked into the garage. -What are you doing, Peter? Oh, making a kite. She turned apologetically to Aunt Lily. -I suppose it's a childish thing for him to make. For all his intelli- gence he's young for his age. -All normal boys like kites, Aunt Lily said smoothly. They crossed the lawn to the playhouse where Emily with the innocent gaze of one who has been thumped and avenged peeped out at them. 319 -Aren't they big? It will be ages before they ripen. I've always wanted to grow passion fruit. -I love passion fruit. They were coming back across the lawn. Peter's mother seized the opportunity to scold him for his treatment of Emily. -We can't have these rages, Peter. He heard her saying with sadness in her voice as they climbed the stairs, -Though he has always played the piano best when he's been angry. I'm sorry he's giving it up. Ted's sorry too. I don't know what's come over the boy these holidays. There was a drop in his school- work, too, at the end of last year. The teacher remarked on it. He doesn't seem to have the patience. -You have to have patience, Aunt Lily said, snapping shut the insect-screen door. It took Peter several hours to make his kite. He knew he was perhaps the only boy in the street making a kite; he knew also that as soon as it was launched everyone would be flying kites and no doubt some would break the rules, flying theirs in forbidden places like the street where entanglement in the wires would cause electro- cution and death. Peter had been warned. There was not much his mother and his father and his teachers had not warned him about. When he thought of his kite as an instrument of death he began to breathe quickly and his hands grew cold and he could not believe that anything so beautiful could help to destroy. It was a box kite blue and white as light as a bird's wing on bamboo-stick bones. None of the other boys in the street would make a box kite; theirs would be the usual kind, flat, a skeleton cross of sticks fleshed with brown paper or plastic with a sharp nose and tail and though it would fly the flight would be a plunging swooping movement as if it were not at home in the sky and longed to descend to earth whereas the box kite, Peter knew, would float and drift without panic or restlessness, like a cloud. To Peter, the clouds that passed overhead during all the wild stormy rainy holidays had been unlike any others he had known; or perhaps his feeling for them had changed. In a mysterious way they seemed to contain promises of a wall or window opening beyond into the light. Sometimes in the evening the sun setting in secret appeared to grow so full of light that it could not contain itself and burst through, suddenly, thrust- ing like a shaft through the big soft clouds down, down into the earth. Watching, Peter knew a feeling of strength, of himself powered by light, of a discovery that he could not understand or control. He felt after closely reading, translating the sky day after day night after night (the 'holiday reading' Under The Greenwood Tree, 320 Great Expectations, lay unopened on his bookshelf) that the clouds in their lightness would offer no resistance when the time came for the moment, his moment, to burst through. Without being able to articulate his dream he thought that the moment might come when he flew his blue and white box kite. When that evening he drew aside the curtains in the sitting room he could not suppress his joy when he saw the clear bright sky. -Ooh Mum, it'll be fine tomorrow. Isn't the sky lovely? he called. He frowned when he heard her comment. -Come and look at the sky everyone. Peter says come and look at the sky. And her loudly whispered aside to his father. -It's the poet in him, Ted. Peter's discovered the wonders of Nature. Peter felt the rage growing in him. It was his sky, h£s sky, his light, his clouds. He had impulsively let others intrude to claim them. Before the whole family could surge about the drawn curtain he swung it back across the window. -It's gone now, he said sullenly. -Will you fly your new kite tomorrow? his mother asked, and turning to his father said proudly, -Peter made such a beautiful kite today. Not the ordinary sort of kite, either. And then turning to Aunt Lily, -He's clever with his hands as well. Peter decided then that he would not make an event of the flight. If the next day were fine he would sneak out, launch the kite, fly it to his satisfaction, then come home without any of the family knowing what had happened. At the back of the house there was a play- ground as big as two paddocks where the Catholic children played games and where during the holidays the grass had grown as tall as wheat and had browned without sun as everyone's skin, too, had turned brown in the humid sunless weather. Day by day the rain lashed the grass and the strong winds rippled it and the cloud-shapes twisted across it in plaited shadows. It was an ideal place to fly a kite. Peter dreamed of it as he lay in bed. He would run through the grass with his kite flying behind and above him. He would not feel any more the irritating rage and impatience that kept overwhelming him for there would be nothing to rage over, then, flying his kite, with his face looking up at the clouds and the sky that swung like a vast ship's deck under the surge of the sky's waves. He could almost feel that he might be standing in the sky, sailing through it, steering his path on a voyage of discovery. The day was fine, the sky clear except for cottontails of cloud and rather more wind than Peter had hoped for. He did not hurry to 321 get up. He sneaked a plate of W eetbix from the kitchen to his bed- room, ate most of it, then lay waiting for Paul and his father to go to work and for Emily to go about her recent domestic craze of making clothes for her teenage doll. Then, when Peter was sure the coast was clear he made ready his kite but his plans for secrecy were destroyed when he met his mother by the kitchen door. She was standing, waiting, while the washing eddied in its white machine. Did all mothers know how to destroy in such subtle ways? Surely she too had not been thinking all night of whether today would be fine for kite-flying? Surely mothers had other things to think of besides their children and their abilities, their intelligence, and what the future held for them in such proud frightening store? -A nice day to fly your kite, Peter. He grunted. Then, remembering his manners, he said, -I think I'll try it in the Catholic playground. -Good! his mother said, seeming to think, but not saying, that once he had flown his kite he might go on to activities more suited to his intelligence. Her eyes as she looked at him were heavy as if his future lay inside them like a dark stone. He climbed through the fence and ran into the playground. The kite obeyed at a touch, stumbled in a jaggling way, at first, over the long grass until it caught and was caught by the passing wind when it began to float like a feather then to turn and swim lightly like a fish in buoyant air, while Peter ran, his feet and legs soaked in the long wet grass, the grass-seeds like clusters of shot stinging his knees; feeling the kitestring as if, tied to himself, it were a part of his own body. He knew a pleasurable feeling at once of lightness and of anchorage, as if his fastrunning legs were tangled for ever in the twisted stems of grass while another part of himself were floating lightly up near the shredded white clouds; then suddenly he found himself out of breath, with running and flying, and he was sobbing with his eyes full of stinging tears, and he stopped running and stood still while the kite jerked and laboured above him, no longer flying with freedom and grace. He felt the tears falling down his face. He was aghast at his weeping but he could not stop it, and all the while he clung fast to the kitestring feeling the weight like that of a restless wing upon his arm. It was then that a stronger gust of wind came buffeting, gashing the fragile blue and white crepe paper body, and as the kite drifted down the blue and white paper trailed behind it like shreds of skin. It fell a few yards from where Peter was standing. For a moment he stood still. Then slowly he wound the string and calmly picked up the broken kite. He felt no rage at its breaking. He carried it over the playground, through the gap in the back fence and was crossing the lawn when his mother, hanging 322 out the washing, saw him and cried out, her face full of sympathy, -Oh Peter, your lovely kite! What happened to it? Peter's voice was calm. -The wind was too strong. -What a shame! His mother spoke into the white flapping sheets. He knew that when she went upstairs she would say to Aunt Lily who would be reading her share of the morning paper, -Peter's kite is broken, his lovely kite! Perhaps she might also say, -More tantrums, I suppose. That boy. For all his intelligence, that boy .... That boy. He was that boy. He was intelligent. He had been in the Silver class at Intermediate and his brother, for all his photography and repairing of radios, had been in the Bronze, and his sister-well, sisters were not the same. That boy. Immune, he went to the garage. He understood now what the television preachers meant when they insisted the skies had opened. He believed them. He saw his mother with a stone in her eyes and a bone in her throat. Stone and bone were his future and she could never remove them nor perhaps would he want her to. He did not want her to grow old, to go to an institution and have her treasure snatched from her. He felt suddenly protective towards her. He looked at her standing passively on the lawn while the flying sheets and _!:owels slapped at her face and he felt a surge inside him as if he still anchored the blue and white kite and the kite itself flew on towards the hidden sun. -Now keep your temper, Peter. Just because your kite's broken don't go throwing things around or interfering with Emily's play- house! Shrugging his shoulders as he'd seen his father do, Peter laid the kite gently on the garage floor. Then taking the remaining whole pieces of crepe paper he began patiently to renew and repair the broken body.

323 MIROSLAV HOLUB Translated by !an Milner The 7?..Eot of the :Matter I FAUST or anyone clumsy enough to be wise, anyone who bends the nail at the first stroke, anyone who forgets to buy his ticket or show his pass right at the start of the journey, anyone who can be done out of an ounce of his half-pound of butter, in short F aust takes a walk (before Easter) beyond the town, stepping into puddles he would have rather avoided, strolls against the stream of passers-by, tags on to a crowd which is cheering, more or less, because the weather's either cloudy or set fair and after all There are times when you simply have to be gay strolls and shares their mood, finally Some mistakes are now mistakes others are still virtues walks around like a grandfather dock out of its case and forgetting to chime, Nothing has happened but we always saw it coming walks around like a run-down battery on a movable pavement, listens to the voices from above, 324 Birds of prey do not sing listens to the voices from below, Are you looking for the meaning of life? And have you laid in your garlic? he takes the grey road past the cement works, he takes the red road past the slaughter-house, he takes the blue road past the lake, he takes the banned road past the council offices, he takes the green road past the playground yelling mindless bodies rolling on the ground- youth is no argument. Age even less walks and thinks but rather just walks Thinking is natural only when there is nothing else to do.

II And at last (naturally) he meets a black poodle running around in smaller and smaller circles like an ominous spider spinning its vast web. -Look, now we shall see the poodle's true kernel, the root of the matter, says Faust and hurries off home. And the poodle circles like a carrier raven, For keeping one's balance wings are best · like a cat, like a mouse, like a black-burning bush, There is poetry in everything. That is the biggest argument against poetry like the ardent hump of the horizon The hump and other survivals of the past 325 and at the same moment the kindly stoniness of the milestone, Infallibility and other maladies of adolescence like the Marathon runner and yet like himself (But the root of the matter is not in the matter itself) like the demon that denies, The more negative the type the more often it says yes like a fallen angel, Fall and you shall not be shaken like the forefinger of the nether darkness. But the root of the matter is not in the matter itself Faust hurries home, the circles are growing smaller like the noose tightening round the neck of a mystery. And when Faust sees his house before him and gropes for his always missing bunch of keys, ready to make the sign of the cross, Is the cross more human than a straight line? or the sign of the straight line, From criticism of the straight line we get the dash or the sign of the heart, How many organs are called heart? the sign of the heart on the palm, Heart, yes, but where do we have the palm? As he's entering his house and the poodle's crossing the street eager as a stone about to become a star, suddenly like a knife that falls half-blade into the ground a bus slips through and 326 the poodle's run over and dies. Faust has the cold shivers, pushed out of history by a grain of sand, by a hundredweight of stupidity. m The root of the matter is not in the matter itself Grandma used to say a man who makes no mistakes makes nothing but some sort of termite always lurks in the kneading-trough of every holy eve

Faust lifts the poodle up and the blood, like a chasuble put on over the head, runs down at his feet

Keys chanced upon he goes and opens the house and corridor and study and the evening confronting the cosmos.

And he sets down the poodle on his opened book and the letters drink the blood with gullets unassuaged for centuries, and the pages suck it in through the skin of their unconsciousness and it is like a clown's red cap on the flat skull of literature, like a set of illuminated initials after the letter Z. Howl! You won't have any trouble with your spelling. IV Faust, not making light, since pain itself gives out the reflected light of death, 327 stands there, nonplussed, and says:

Dog and nothing but a dog, who might have been the allegory of creation and are no more than the very meaning of death, who might have been the annunciator of another and are no more than crunched bones,

dog and nothing but a dog, black, white or other, empty-handed messenger, because there is no mystery except the thread which from our hands leads round the far side of things, round the collar of the landscape and up the sleeve of a star. The root of the matter is not in the matter itself dog and nothing but a dog, with your eyes gazing into the sweet shell of terror, stay, you are so fair. Verwe£le doch, du bist so schon And Faust feels he loves the dog with a love whose essence is hopelessness just as hopelessness has its essence in love, knows what he should do but cannot, not having a bandage nor a veterinary's licence nor the right to redress the acts of omnibuses The root of the matter is not in the matter itself and often not in our hands Faust merely knows. In the distance a siren wails and bells die on the air, it is long after Easter, W agner comes in to ask after his health, 328 The good man will live so that on Judgment Day he can discourse on the virtues of naphthalene the dog is stretched out and his pupils span the horizon and the pages of the book beneath him quiver like white whispering lips.

And Faust knows that he will not speak of it, and if so only by a comma, only by a word in a big new book. It is really something like a coat of grey fur over the soul, like the uniform the unknown soldier wears inside him.

And so he goes and starts a painting, or a gay little song, or a big new book. Nothing has happened but we always saw it coming. All in all India ink is the blood's first sister and song is just as final as life and death and equally without allegory, without transcendence and without fuss.

81-firoslav Holub MIROSLAV HOLUB is probably the most distinctive voice among the middle generation of Czech poets today. Born in Plzen in 1923, he took his M.D. at the Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. He is a research worker in the Immunology Department of the Microbiological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, at present seconded for two years to the Public Health Research Institute of New York City. He has published seven volumes of poetry: Denni sluzba (Day Duty), 1958, Achilles a zelva (Achilles and the Tortoise), 1960, Slabikar (Primer), 1961, Jdi a otevri dvere (Go and Open the Door), 1961, Zcela nesoustavna zoologie (Unsyste- matic Zoology), 1963, Kam tece krev (Where the Blood Flows), 329 1963, Tak zvane srdce (The So-called Heart), 1963. A further volume of selected poems 1958-63, Anamneza (Anamnesis) was pub- lished in 1964. Dr Holub has visited England more than once and in 1962 spent some months in the United States as visiting scientist and lecturer, recording his impressions with shrewd and witty irony in a prose reportage, Andel na koleckach (Angel on Wheels). Holub has on occasions indicated his own approach as poet. In an article written in 1963 about certain poems of William Carlos Williams he commented: 'The poetic conception is not based upon any newly created circumstances but upon the choice between actually existing circumstances, on a choice made possible by the range of one's information.' The heart of his aesthetic lies in the conclusion drawn: 'The foundation of such poetry is therefore no longer the traditionally lyrical nor the magically illogical, but the energy, ten- sion and illumination contained within the fact itself.' There are affinities here with Williams's 'no ideas but in things'. But no deriva- tives. Holub's poetic vision is very different, though he may have learnt something in his earlier poems, worked out in his own way for his own purposes, from Williams (and Jacques Prevert) in the patterning of free verse, especially the use of the staccato one- or two-syllable line. Holub's early poems, brief, compact, firmly textured 'statements', may have confirmed his sometimes expressed view that poet and scientist have much in common. Later volumes show a variety of theme, mood and treatment that can't be pinned to a formula. The concern with 'the fact' remains. But the awareness of 'the energy, tension and illumination' within the fact is expressed with a freer, more complex imagination and, at times, a lively fantasy. The out- look behind the poetry is a toughly knit, unsentimental humanism. The poetic intelligence is well aware of the world of the absurd, of the cruel, of nuclear madness. But the poems celebrate the range and the staying-power of the human mind and the affections. Or they expose with terse, often bitter irony the interferences or distortions that unimaginative authority and custom impose, in any society, on the natural growth of the creative personality. 'The Root of the Matter', a recent poem which has not appeared in any of his published volumes, stands somewhat apart, both in structure and length, from the characteristic short pieces, sharply focussed on an incident or built up around a single image. Its mood of inquiry is more sustained, tone more reflective. Yet the familiar ironic intelligence is plainly present in the italicized lines of the 'choric voice'.

330 Note A number of Miroslav Holub's poems have appeared in Ian Milner's translation in the Times Literary Supplement and The Observer, New Zealand Monthly Review and Overland. Acknowledgement is made to Penguin Books for the right to print the translation of 'The Root of the Matter', which is included in their volume of Holub's selected poems to be published early next year.

:Beginnings

9. MAURICE DUGGAN

IT WILL NOT be possible to separate one strand from the skein. There were books, but no seminal book. And the colour of everything is variously determined by one's life and one's obsessions, preoccupa- tions and simple interests-a compound sum.

Beginnings ... lying on my stomach, in an unused room, in a city that was not and is not a city, in a soft flooding of light through ancient, wooden venetian blinds, having discovered fathoms down under the forgotten accumulations of the bow-fronted china-cabinet -pink coral, bone china, Beleek ware, a crucifix containing a splinter of the Holy Cross (Cairo)-a book by Jules V erne. Only the title remains with me. And a sense of mystery and solitude, and of curious light filtered through bars of green. In a house where remote relatives, aged and ill, lived remotely in huge rooms, permitting me this sanctuary and cups of tea and tram fares, on my free Sunday from Catholic boarding-school. Free be- tween the brackets of morning Mass and evening Benediction, whose tediums and inconsequence disturbed but whose umbers and golds sometimes entranced. I was thirteen: I left school that year.

Beginnings ... under the mask. An acute infection requiring amputa- tion of the leg. So the lofted ball fell towards me through the afternoon light and 331 I ran and gathered it in and punted across, and ran and ran. There seemed no end to the running.

And the nurse said, 'Drink this', and I stopped running and tried to think of something else. Maybe, when I felt better, I'd read a book. Why not? I could read, couldn't I? In the flooding of light. At seventeen.

It cost sixty pounds and weighed fifteen pounds and it was alto- gether a curious machine-this wholly extraneous leg. And crippling above all to my vanity. But after two years on crutches what wouldn't you do to have your hands free? So I hobbled down to wharves and trains to farewell those others going to a war. 'You'd never get far on that', they said. Land, sea or air? But I'd time on my hands and whole libraries through my head, or so it seemed, and I'd better make some fist of dealing with what was, after all, no great tragedy. Up the hill to night-school, across the slope to the public library, feeling like a fool, standing by the empty seats in the tram, because I couldn't master the mechanics of the knee-bend-until I learned the insouciance of the platform-rider, cigarette for excuse. My beginnings as a heavy smoker. 'Move along, please.' Not me.

And the nurse said, 'Drink this', and I tried to think of something else. That he who runs may read. But happily I was losing my self- pity-you can't keep that for long in the public wards of hospitals- though the intense social embarrassment never abated. And it took a long time before the messages stopped coming in from the outpost; and my dreams were entirely physical, so that by day I led one sort of life and at night went haring up mountains, charging across fields. Until the running stopped.

Beginnings ... the lampshade the colour of egg-yolk and the branch of an old pepper tree scraping along the wall of the house, and the first story an evanescence called 'Smoke'. I was nineteen and the story covered nineteen pages of foolscap; and we looked at each other in profound suspicion. This was going to be more complicated than the knee-mechanism, or anything else, and I wouldn't even be walking here, yet a while. Supposing it were more than a goofy optimism.

And now I was taking the tram to Brooking's second-hand book- shop, as junior assistant out the back-under Literature. 332 'Do you have, by any remote chance, a copy of the Memoirs de Brantdme?' And I was writing morning and night, to the insatiable maw of the incinerator, and myself.

Beginnings ... the floodwaters were bringing down cattle and trees and a foamy rubble. The men were trying to lassoo the beasts as they checked against the bridge before going under. The rain had stopped. The river water was yellow from the mining battery in the gorge where gold was extracted by a cyanide process. A girl, with thighs, rode up bareback on a piebald horse. The nooses fell short: the cattle bellowed: the rubble piled up. And I, of course, was in the thick of it. It was a story called 'Flood'; it was reportage; it came back from The New Zealand Listener with a handwritten note: 'Not this time, but you interest us. Try us again.' The initials, I later learned, were those of the editor, Oliver Duff. It was a voice from outer space, in 1943, when I was twenty-one. (I have not met Mr Duff and this was our only contact.) Note. All my female characters at that time were pieces of anatomy. They had breasts, or thighs, though I rarely mentioned both. Either one feature was prominent, or another. As women they had no character: I wouldn't allow it. I conjured them up, carnal figments, and symptoms of what was troubling me; and mildly lusted. I was living at this time with two of my sisters in a roomy old house in Mount Eden, and I hated going out. Anyone I'd ever known, or so it seemed, was making or preparing for the journey to a war. I received a white feather through the post and another, quite openly given, as I stood on the tram-platform smoking my cigarette. Then I was 'manpowered' into essential industry, stamping out metal chassis for radio transceivers for American troops in the Pacific. It was a heavy, tough job; but I felt I was proving some- thing. The firm's contract was negotiated on a cost-plus-ten-percent basis, with a piece-rate bonus for the men on the presses and an extra bonus for setting up your own power-press from the templates. My pockets were filled with coins and duty-free Bourbon and black- market Camels. I began to be offered free drinks, as walking wounded or returned serviceman, and there was a sense of constraint on both sides when I refused. 'No offence. I suppose you'd have gone if you could. Have a drink anyway.'

333 Beginnings ... in the Auckland Public Library. I was borrowing A Man and His Wife. I was reading, now, every piece of New Zealand writing I could get my hands on. Then, not now. 'That's Mr Sargeson, over there.' Haversack, tweed jacket, knitted tie-a living writer, in disguise. I retreated. But wrote, a year or two later, and was invited to a meal in a small bach. (I had a haircut and dressed as for a wedding or funeral and took a taxi from the ferry terminal and stood under the porch roof where tobacco leaves were drying and green peppers were strung. I was sweating a little.) The meal was excellent. The writing on the wall read: Out of mind out of sight. I didn't understand it. I hadn't read Bishop Berkeley; but I'm not sure this was the meaning. Outside, on the corner of the bach near the path, the words read: No visitors in morning, please. Mourning? I understood. From then on I began to meet other writers, at Frank Sargeson's bach or at the home of Greville T exidor and her husband. This was the North Shore where I had spent the first eleven or twelve years of my life; in ignorance of this sort of possibility. And it was here that I met my wife. I tried to keep, amidst this enlivening strangeness, my ears open and my mouth shut, listening to the diverse appraisals of the world which seemed to include New Zealand, and began to listen, first as an affectation and then with a genuine interest, to Beethoven, Bach and Bessie Smith; but couldn't stomach the wine, then. These were my beginnings as a magpie: I made a curious nest out of the bright pieces. In 1945, and it is strange to look back, my first publication, in Anvil, a little magazine that ran to only two issues. And in the same year publication in Speaking for Ourselves which Frank Sargeson edited, and Bob Lowry printed, for the Caxton Press. I knew much encouragement in these years but held stolidly to my inflated style, a sedulous apecraft, and sweated through Auck- land summers, now working part-time in the radio factory. I wound wire onto radiator bars and packed transformers, tapping in the plates with a neat hammer; and in the afternoons, with a view to the harbour, I wrote-in a flat on Takapuna beach. And the nurse said, 'Drink this', and as in boarding-school dormi- tory, as always, the white beds an enfilade of tombstones as regular as teeth, among which visitors were alien; it was so private and precise a world whose small rituals had all the power of an absolute ordination, which one as absolutely accepted.

334 Beginnings ... newly married and enrolling for Greek (quick change to a 'soft option' after four or five months), English, History, Philo-- sophy. And next year for English and History. Among the nubile women, now with character, and the boys fresh from school, and a benchful of returned warriors with prouder scars and major thirsts. In 1947 I wrote for Kiwi; in 1948, with notable presumption, I edited it. Bob Lowry was typographer and printer, and Rex Fair- burn wrote most of the introduction-over my name and a plateful of fried potato and egg. I enjoyed it, at the expense of Anglo--Saxon; and many writers contributed; but how harshly time may have aged it I don't care to ask. At this time, too, I wrote 'Six Place Names and a Girl'. It was perhaps less a story than a prose celebration of a topography and a time that, in rediscovery and re-creation, moved me strongly enough to force me away from what had become a habit of rhetoric. If it was to be strong, it had to be simple; the language must be a focus- ing glass and not, as had up to now been the case, a sort of bejewelled and empty casket. I learned to murder my darlings; and have mostly benefited, in my writing, by continuing the painful slaughter, ever since. Though bits of bombast do get by, of course, to my shame. The title 'Six Place Names and a Girl' was supplied by Frank Sargeson: I thought it, and still think it, a good one. And Landfall published it. (Fortunately, when I came to collect together the stories for lmmanuel's Land, I excluded the eight or nine pieces of juvenilia which had been published earlier. If these were necessary beginnings I cannot see that they deserve more, today, than their deep obscurity in discontinued publications.)

And the nurse said, 'Drink this', and time clicked round, and the priest said, 'But all your family are Catholic', and I said, 'And I am not, Father'. I had never, and have never, known the need of it; but parents can force and I ceased the pretence only when I left home, at fifteen. On the census paper I write: None. But I am humanist, and anti-cleric.

Beginnings . . . a voyage, a sort of automatic pilgrimage, and in three years in London I wrote most of the stories in lmmanuel's Land (the epigraph I treasured for the irony it gathered in this context: the book from which it came I can only deplore), living, happily enough, on extremely short commons in a crumbling house off Haverstock Hill, visiting friends in Cambridge and Oxford and crossing the channel whenever this was possible. Some of this I 335 tried to set down in a short travel journal, 'Voyage'. Is one's psyche simply the expressive instrument of one's secret desires, wishes made in darkness below the level of consciousness, a repository of half-thoughts and unconscious gestures to be flooded at moments with uneasy illumination? (This flooding: I have spoken of it before. A drenching of all senses in a quality of light.) Proust saw all illness as the result of a psychic depression. Does the psyche never invent rude health, then? Is all disease a disease of the will? Yes. In Spain I brightly and voluminously coughed. And the doctor said, 'No essmoking', and the practicante, the man the Spaniards called 'the picador', rode up the hill on his bicycle with his lance of streptomycin ('Mush bettaire?') and beyond the small window three men transformed a dead olive tree into a meticulous stack of neat cords of wood. I owe the doctor a debt, Doctor Severa of Palma de Mallorca, because the cost of the antibiotic was enormous and he did not charge us. The big box of fine cigars sent from London was more gesture than recompense. And a debt to Arthur and Rosemary Sewell who were hospitable and kind in Barcelona as I huddled, not entirely dismayed, waiting for a plane in cold weather. This part of 'Voyage' I could not expand: I dislike being near the sick. And at Greenlane, at a rather later date, the doctor shook hands and said, 'Report back once a year'. It was, I think, 1957: I was thirty-five. And through Cornwall Park as I elatedly walked it was spring, bright oaks, dark olives, yes, by the stone wall and the prefab Scouts' Den, with silver under their leaves, and I had the feeling of having passed a barrier as I crossed the cattle stops-that were for sheep. I had read myself almost blind: I had written a little; and I was abroad again.

About this time I finally abandoned the writing of a novel which I had tentatively named Along the Poisoned River-the same river as 'Flood'. I turned away from this novel because I saw it as eating up what Maugham has called the 'imaginative capital' at one great gulp. There was too much in it; and too little. I ceased to be subject, in that sense, from then on. And if I did not lose my interest in breasts and thighs I found a much larger one in the consideration of character not my own. Henry James has it, thus, in The Lesson of Balzac: How do we know given persons, for any purpose of demon- stration, unless we know their situation for themselves, unless we see it from their point of vision, that is, from their point of 336 pressing consciousness or sensation?-without our allowing for which there is no appreciation. I began, as a way of making a little money until I was fit enough for the market place, to write for School Publications. I began with Falter Tom and the Water Boy because this was a story I had been telling the children of friends, and my own son, over the years. Later it was published in Great Britain and in America and if the financial return from it was not great it at least bettered by far anything I have earned from writing for adults; but then the cases, as I recog- nize, are different. One would not agree to tailor one's writing in the manner required (wrongly?) for children. After that my best writing year was 1960, as Burns Fellow at Otago University. The conditions were wonderful; and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit in a room and write. It was a good climate for working. I wrote 'Blues for Miss Laverty', 'Riley's Handbook', a short novel which I am at present revising, and the first draft of 'Along Rideout Road that Summer'. I also wrote much verse of a rather undistinguished kind. And wished the year would never end. Ah, explication of the lacework, indeed.

Beginnings ... 'I'm no bloody immigrant, boyo: I paid for my own freighting.' (Don't come down the ladder, they've taken it away.) As a first generation New Zealander this was a large part of the environment in which I grew up; the sad Irish bravura; the drear Irish Catholicism; the Irish syndrome-booze, melancholy and guilt; the pointless, loud pride-for what had they to be proud of, each man a Joseph in his coat of bright verbs? ; the intolerance; the low superstition; the peculiarly Irish deceit. (What in God's name would it be like to be a Scot?) Books were rare in the house and the small shelf was a static collection: no one to my memory bought books. Pen and paper had to be stalked. Each man spoke from his private text, so that I longed to speak to a non-Catholic, an Irishman without the mad maggot, which in his better moments my father consented to be, protestant and puzzled. 'You can have the lovely priest-ridden land and its lights and loomings, proud mists', was what I understood him to say. And Joyce? And Synge? And Wilde? And Shaw? Bloody word- mongers and traitors, the lot. Parnell? Casement? (That patriotic bugger.) And Yeats? Who? And de Valera. Only four generations back, there he sits, disowned, my dark ancestor, stitching a boot in the doorway of a sod hut, hating the 337 stranger, spitting upon Ireland, this damned land, aching in every bone from the rotten damp, a sullen, moody, violent man feared by his family, too fierce for friendliness, his life packed down like black explosive powder in a hole.

Beginnings ... I have raised often enough with myself the question of whether, given other conditions, without that first illness I would have turned to writing. I do not know. Certainly there was no moment when I ever, consciously, wanted to be a writer. Perhaps the years of omnivorous, even feverish, reading urged a direction; but not every such reader turns writer. Two years at University un- doubtedly did a great deal to discipline and direct the raw didact: my marks did not shame me, and I looked far more critic- ally at what I wrote. My friendship with Frank Sargeson and Greville Texidor, especially in those early years, opened doors and expanded vistas. But looking now from the centre of the fabric (my father was a draper) there seems no point at which warp and weft do not continuously interrupt each other. If I have placed too much emphasis on the merely physical aspects it is because I see this as inseparable, if I am to speak at all, from the larger question. If one sort of life becomes, in some aspects, imposs- ible then another must be devised. (In fact many of the difficulties in that sense have disappeared with the passing of time.) I see it as an aspect of beginnings, as I hope I have shown: though something other than illness might have brought that light to a similar focus. And I am not, after all, an invalid-yet. I think it was Harold Nicolson who said of his reading of the Loeb classics: 'I read the English but mark the Greek.' I recognize myself in that, wishing for larger talents. But so much every writer knows. I earn my living in the market place, as an advertising copywriter: the crying of wares is, at the least, an ancient trade. It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all. Six or eight hours a day so as not to die of starvation. And then-there is profit in all things for anyone really in search of it. But I confess that this (from Cam us) doesn't make me feel en- tirely comfortable.

I look in vain for big books, the decent output. I work too slowly, and too irregularly. (There is no substitute for will.) The output has been small, and I must take what confidence I can from what seem to me small successful things. And still there remains, at least, a 338 sense of mystery, when I do not abuse it with whisky and rant (Joyce's 'flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Maryle- bone'). And sometimes the light invades through green bars and there, inexplicably, beginnings lie; if I will be diffident before the page; if I will wait and in whatever unease allow the flooding of the senses, allow the daemon to enter; and set to work.

ALAN RODDICK Take Care to Leave the Erush-:Jifarf<[ I

ALL EASTER, hammering from twenty feet up, it sounds. Up where last winter empty air was, hammering, while saws keen as leaves fall, and show behind their scaffolding car-shed or sunporch, third bedroom or fourth. Not only leaves fall, though: after bearing all of thirty years' southerlies the nectarine is down, we are discovered to the curious stare of a wall-eyed bedroom-annexe. I pick at the stump for dry- rot, finding none; it must be the sheer weight of its crop has engineered our tree's downfall. A fine season for stone-fruit, fine for building. As I count the growth rings back toward their seedling centre a history of this house and its garden's fallen open : there, that good midsummer when we were married, here again the polio year, 339 three months off school, you said. How odd to find that winter I was four, this wood remembers a bad year for its Antipodean progeny. -A Professor Urey found a fossil mollusc that by the composition of its shell reports the precise temperature on its Jurassic birthday, at sea over Scotland.-So we too record our settlement in this valley, with coats of paint, in plaster- board-walled bedrooms tacked on as families grown, bank balances blown up, or southerlies with rain, permit us to. Our hammering fills the air. Who will, a million years on, label this one a good season for Homo sapiens in the Hutt Valley? Painting the back porch (wall-board over tongue-and-groove), before the final coat goes on I print PIAT DULUX in off-white. There's one to puzzle any conceivable palaeosociologist! -and let's not wish him luck, when he tries to read the full gloss.

340

MICHAEL GIFKINS The Visit

'MuMMY there's a man.' The high-chair seemed to inspire Barnaby to vague prediction and irresponsible announcement; unable to think of a suitably inconsequential reply she ignored him and con- tinued to make the bed. But there was indeed a man who now stood in the bedroom doorway and seemed cheerfully expectant of greet- ing. Although she knew and had known several expectant and smiling young men she did not remember one quite so tall, and never had she seen one dressed like this, here, at this time of the year. But he put down his rolled sleeping bag and advancing to shake her hand claimed kinship, which was at least respectable. And over coffee in the main room he spoke of great-aunts and grandparents with such vehemence and evident knowledge that Barnaby was silenced and she, fascinated, let her coffee grow cool, marvelling that their common heritage of rich and uninspired merchants could provoke such agitated discourse. His whole body jerked the words out, running them on to each other, jam-packed into incredibly contorted clauses, brutalized in a series of staccato vignettes of pompous men with side whiskers and stiff, calmly purposeful women. Barnaby, dribble running down his chin, listened wide-eyed to this strange source of sound, striving to discover mean- ing in a delivery so much at variance with her own sparse utter- ances or Austin's carefully modulated statements. She had needed neither to provoke nor encourage the telling of this history, so the silence following its close emb:o.rrassed both of them. But Barnaby demanded to be released, and his examination of the long pipe that the young man was now filling with a dark and treacly tobacco led to a discussion of his tie, which had worried her from the start. She was reasonably sure that it was an unusual tie, and since Barnaby was investigating it with sticky care she felt prompted to mention it. It was made, she learnt, from a large piece of leather which at wholesale price was not really an extravagance, though of course it was hard to sew on the machine, and if you didn't reduce the tension you would in all probability snap the needle. Black, it was agreed, was not really the best colour consider- ing the nature of the material, but you had to take what you could get. And it was a shame to waste any of the suede so he had made it as wide as he could, and although some people might feel six 341 inches to be too broad, he could always use it as a scarf. Perhaps he should have made a belt as well, since string was quite useless and as she could see he'd had trouble with breakages. He really needed new jeans, too, because these were now much shorter than he liked and he'd split them climbing the hill to the house. These preliminaries over it seemed to her natural to start talking about the coast. When she had first met Austin, she remembered, he had invited her to tell him about the bush, and the rocks, and the sea, and as she had spoken, at first shyly and then with a grow- ing excitement, of the birds which banked and dived beyond the first line of surf and the scrub which clutched the cliff tops, reluctant to retreat in the face of the sea wind to the hills behind, it was as if the images in her mind were reaching him unharmed, delicate in their totality. So she spoke of the unusual rains, and the slips, told the young man how whole cliff faces were altered over night, how the streams were now impossible to cross, how the bush smelt old in the brief intervals of sunlight. He watched her attentively, looking down only to relight his pipe. As was inevitable the longer she spoke the more foolish she felt, the more vulnerable she became. Austin had known, carefully, to let her down; with a smile and a few sentences to catch the fine threads, guard them until the proper time. She rose, quickly. He would of course stay for dinner, stay the night. Austin would be back at any minute and then they could eat. There was, she was afraid, nothing special for this day, because Austin wished it to be like any other. But she had an extra potato in the oven, could easily set another place. At the mention of food the young man was again moved to speech. 'I have,' he said, 'some cheese.' With considerable difficulty he un- knotted the strings of flax encircling his sleeoing bag. He seized the bottom and in one vigorous flip had unrolled it and was shaking its contents on to her floor. Barnaby, officiously, began to catalogue the assortment of articles which now lay in an untidy heap, liberally coated with sand. The apple could be explained, as could the parka and the two fat sticks of charcoal. The one sandal was too obviously incongruous to invite comment. And the mystery of the large news- paper parcel, which Barnaby deemed worthy of detailed investigation and which the visitor found worth while to rescue, was obviously, could only be, the cheese. And unwrapped, with reverence, on the living room floor, it proved indeed to be a magnificent piece of cheese: creamy textured, 342 crumbling, marbled with fine light green veins. Breaking off a con- siderable corner, the young man took a thoughtful bite, to reassure himself no doubt that no organic mischief had occurred since his last appraisal. Satisfied, he offered her the remainder of the bitten piece, stretching forth his hand slowly, with ceremony. Taken by surprise, still a spectator, she refused. Sensing his chance Barnaby clamoured for his share. This child, she knew, could with frighten- ing nonchalance dispose of a bottle of beer or an entire length of salami and then not touch the main meal of his day. She declined on his behalf. And in the confusion of cries of dismay and avowals that a small piece would not hurt him he was conveyed, struggling, back to his high chair where he commenced to sulk with determina- tion. The visitor, uneasy perhaps in the knowledge that his posses- sions had precipitated the strife, made muttered excuses and left the room. She went over to the tree and, careful not to dislodge one of the bright glass balls or disturb the criss-crossed strings of tinsel, carried it across to the high-chair, just out of reach, but sufficiently close to be amusing. Austin, of course, was right about the tree. But she was glad she had argued, glad that she had insisted on dressing it up this year. Barnaby had been almost delirious with excitement as she had scattered the snow-flakes of cotton-wool, hung the bells and stars from the thin branches. She took the tray of coffee things out to the kitchen. The young man, sleeves rolled up, was struggling on the back doorstep. The torn end of a large pine bough, beaded with sap, waved dangerously from side to side. He strove to force it into the house, hindered by the lesser branches which jutted randomly from it, heavy with dark green needles. She gazed in alarm as the struggle grew more violent, as twigs snapped and crackled, as, with a final desperate heave, the bearer and his branch crashed triumphantly on to the kitchen floor. He commenced to drag it into the living room, encouraged by Barnaby who beat with loud approval on the tray of his chair. An ashtray, dislodged from the mantelpiece, shattered on the floor. Barnaby screamed with delight, screamed louder as the base of the branch, out of control, smashed through one of the smaller windows. The young man endeavoured fiercely to set the branch upright next to her decorated tree. She moved to a chair, sat down, put her face in her hands, began to cry. Barnaby started to howl in sympathy. Despairingly, the visitor shouted at them both to keep quiet. The effort of trying to prop the branch upright in the corner proved too great. Again it crashed to the floor. In the silence which followed, he wiped his hands on his shirt, 343 walked to the centre of the room, squatted down on the floor. She looked up. With a piece of charcoal, face set in concentration, he was sketching quickly and boldly on the lid of a cardboard box. After perhaps half a minute he stood up, leaving the charcoal and lid on the floor. Stuffing his belongings into the bag, he announced that it would be better if he went. He stepped deliberately over the branch, walked slowly out through the kitchen. She heard the back door click quietly shut. It was her face he had drawn, and it was, she supposed, a good likeness. But he had drawn her with her hair up, and had got the ears all wrong, had made them much smaller than they really were. She pulled her hair back and crossed to the mirror, then went over to the window which looked out on the bay. With his sleeping bag in one hand and a bottle, which she pre- sumed to be her cooking wine, in the other, he was moving cautiously down the path to the base of the cliff. The sky was black and she could see that rain was not far off. The path, she knew, was slippery, and he would need to be careful. He reappeared on the beach. The tide was high and he was forced to walk close in beneath the cliffs, skirting the clumsy heaps of clay and rubble that squatted rudely on the glistening sand. She could see Austin, sack over his shoulder, walking towards him from the other end of the beach. Spume from the breaking waves, caught by the wind, was whipping across the beach and up, in particles like fantastic birds, up the face of the cliff and over the top to die on the sharp leaves of the twisted manuka. They had seen each other, and were walking faster. She saw, with surprise, how much alike they looked, and as they came tog-ether could be distinguished only by the shape of their burdens. They had stopped, two tall figures, were shaking hands, were sitting down on the wet sand, in the wind, in the spray. The sleeping bag was emptied, she could see the parcel, and the bottle, placed between them, could see them eating, and drinking, and waving their hands at each other, could imagine them shouting to make themselves heard above the wind. Then she saw them leap to their feet and rush madly into the water, floundering out to their knees, to their thighs, clutching the cheese and the bottle. The cliff under which they had been sitting slid slowly, and from where she watched, soundlessly, down on to the beach, settling heavily on the sack, on the sleeping bag, on where they had been sitting. They stood awkwardly in the surf, staggered as the squat little waves chopped past them, leant against each other like drunken men while the undertow sucked the sand from beneath their feet. 344 A bigger wave crashed in towards the cliffs. She could see one knocked off balance, an arm and a bottle in the tunnel of foam, the other unsteadily dragging him upright. She watched as they moved diagonally towards the beach, as they took off their sodden clothes; saw them begin to walk slowly back to the path, one clasp- ing the bottle by the waist, the other, with both hands, bearing the unwrapped cheese before him. Turning, she moved quickly into the kitchen, took another knife and fork from the drawer. Yes they would be having dinner soon. She rolled one of the potatoes from the oven and passing it from hand to hand went back to the window. The potato was hot and heavy. She held it in her jumper, chopping it with the side of her hand to soften it and release the steam. It was almost dark. Rain had started to gust in across the bay. She could see them moving carefully up the clay path. Austin would be wondering why there was no light in the living room. She fumbled for the matches, broke the first, and was momentarily blinded as the second flared to life. She raised the glass, turned up the wick. There was no reason why she should not start the lamp.

NORMAN BILBROUGH Seascape

BEHIND the headland's stoop the shag opens its black wings on black rock. Black royal head: white water swarming at its feet. Death had softened the eye of the thin wet rat at our door. The rain quickened its departure: I threw it over the driftwood, stumbling on a lame gull-beach's bleak Jew-its neck shredded. Wetness stank. Hands groped as I plunged indoors, and found the gull's eye on my love, fur's wetness in her face, the sun's foetus in her mouth. 345 To a Past Friend

You have your brass bedstead, your tomb of books, a belly-full of clean linen, and the sun pouring through cut, coloured glass. The rocking chair commands your heart: fire is schooled on the bricks. Plants are cultured in your house. Your second child announces succession. A large, locked belly makes your wife uglier. That she should straddle the pillow with wanting thighs is a threat that will not shake your mouth's piety. Love cannot exist beyond the word. Lust provokes you to boot the cat into the wind: it waits in your eyes ... daily they violate your daughter.

ALISTAIR CAMPBELL :J(Jbby Clark 1 A FEW rusted iron sheets are all that remain of your small tin shack that was burned to the ground by anonymous boys, while you lay on your back in an Old People's Home, out of the reach of the foam and the shrapnel spray- out of the way. 2 The trees with twisted boughs and tattered leaves are in flight from the beach. 346 They straggle up the cliff face to the top, like cripples still within reach of some terror hunting them down until they drop. 3 What terror hunted you down, Nobby Clark? What did you hear, as you sweltered with fear in the head-shrinking dark of your smoke-filled shack? What did you see? Did you see at your door the tattooed face of a long-dead chief with a mind like a slaughter-house floor? 4 The white bones of driftwood glow in a tangled heap high on the jagged beach where you often stood, your hand raised to your eyes to ward off the glare from the sea- or was it the wreckage in the bay and blood drifting away? 5 The cries of the wounded and dying- do they trouble you still where, they say, you are lying in Karori Hill? No sound is ever lost, Nobby Clark. At night, when the moon is full, each rock and stone gives out, like a thin wavering mist, a despairing shout or groan that chills to the bone. 6 And yet, even here, where the salt-heavy air 347 oppresses the mind, there must have been days that were kind, nights that were blest, when the whole beach shimmered with praise and you were able to rest. 7 Why did you choose a place guarded by brutal rocks, avoided by birds, exposed to the punishing knocks of the wind and spray- a place so bare? What did you hope to find that you could not find elsewhere? Did you at last find grace before you went out of your mind and men came, with confusing words, and led you away?

8 But perhaps it was otherwise, Nobby Clark, and my wild imaginings mere surmise. You may be more aptly numbered among gentle tentative things, unencumbered except by the wish to be left alone- a lizard whose nature demands survival in stone, or a creek that winds and spills down water-worn steps through a narrow cleft in the hills, its passage sometimes checked by clumps of watercress, until, above the beach, it reaches a carpet of grass where its murmur slowly subsides with a gentle alas! Pukerua Bay

348 FRANK SARGESON An Imaginary Conversation W illiam Y ate and Samuel Butler

BUTLER. Mr Y ate? YATE. As it pleases you, Mr Butler. May I remind you of my years as a clerk in Holy Orders? BUTLER. I intended no discourtesy. To me you are a clergyman- without any suggestion of reproach or satire. May that not be thought perhaps a little singular?-! mean in relation to what I write. YATE. Now you comfort me. When there are grave matters to dis- turb me I am grateful for words that put me at my ease. BUTLER. Ah, words! Yes indeed, words. If I am not wholly mistaken it is mainly words which are to be reckoned at the root of our mutual fortunes. Or perhaps I had better say, misfortunes. YATE. I am not sure about your meaning, Mr Butler. We have our individual roots in our common humanity-and these roots are no doubt closely related to our fortunes and misfortunes. But what is there of fortune worth considering except in relation to Almighty God? Our only misfortune is to miss the re-union with our maker which he so ardently desires. BUTLER. I can respect your faith. That's to say, insofar as it may relate to what is behind the Church of England-or perhaps better say, behind the Christian religion. Remember Mr Y ate, that same Force (I am not prepared to say Almighty God. I yearn for definitions which I cannot supply, and have never been satisfac- torily supplied with-and certainly not by our illustrious Mr Darwin)-that same Force, I say, is also behind every religion. But let it pass-in relation to these large matters your fortunes and my own must of necessity appear infinitesimally restricted. I say only that these same fortunes have touched us in our humanity- touched us sufficiently indeed to fill our humanity's entire horizon. It is these mutual fortunes that engage my attention. I endeavour to handle them with words, and it is my belief that they are them- selves rooted in words. YATE. You embarrass me by your hints, Mr Butler. BUTLER. You will agree that it was our common fortune as young men to sail out to the Antipodes. YATE. Ah! 349 BUTLER. Or misfortune. YATE. I don't know that in my book about New Zealand I spoke of misfortune. There is much among my recollections of that country for which I am grateful. BUTLER. In a book which I begin to write but perhaps will not finish, and do not expect to publish, leastways not in my lifetime-in this book I remark upon the human unhappiness which might be avoided if people would speak honestly to each other without reserve, if- YATE. Pardon my interrupting, but I infer from your drift that you are aware of scandal concerning me. Very well. All that was a long time ago. May I ask if you have sought out an opportunity for troubling an old man? If so, Mr Butler, say so frankly- without reserve. And I will call in my beloved sister-to leave you in no doubt that our interview is terminated. BUTLER. What is the worth of frank speaking unless it is mutual? It is not much likely that scandal which touches myself has reached you. I will repair that omission. That is to say, if you will permit me. YATE. As you must be awa.re, I am padre of our mariners' church here in Dover. A moment ago I referred to matters that disturb me-my reference was to the ravages of sin here among my con- gregation. Sin and its suffering, Mr Butler. You will readily understand that I am accustomed to frank speech-it is my habit to encourage it. But I do not see that I am in any relation to your- self which would make me happy to dispense with all reserve. BUTLER. There are times when all of us must envy the confessional of the Roman church. Daily life is no doubt made to appear simpler by the habit of that ritual and unquestioning submission to church authority. The troubled spirit may be soothed. But the price of this comfort is that we must be content with what I would call an approximation. I think there are signs that the Church recognizes this principle of approximation. For the unquestioning Christian the creed may be clear and final-but there were those church fathers who spoke of the creed as the symbol. That's to say, perhaps, as the approximation-a thing faute de mieux. If- YATE. I again interrupt. I am not receiving you to hear your con- fession, Mr Butler. BUTLER. Not in the church sense. YATE. Unless I choose-not in any sense. BUTLER. I have mentioned a book I write but do not finish-Mr Y ate, in this book I try to depict myself truly without reserve. I did not come here to discuss with you books I have finished-my Erewhon, 350 for example. But I would say that in my published writings I present .myself to the world as a man for whom the intellectual life is dominant. To you, Mr Yate, I say that what I try to reveal in my unfinished book is a man stripped ... solitary, naked, shrinking ... the animula vagula of the emperor-poet. It is in the character of that man I have approached you today-a man who perhaps is little known to anyone except myself .... YATE. You were saying, Mr Butler? BUTLER. If one does not submit to church authority, there is so far as I know only one recourse available to the man who seeks to sanctify his private and personal life. I mean as a substitute for what the church claims to provide .... YATE. Well? BUTLER. We may privately invoke charity-! should hope with humility. You will agree that to say agape is probably an improve- ment .... It may well be that I am invoking your charity, Mr Yate. YATE. But invoke? That word has to me a portentous sound. Had you not better say you appeal to my charity? And do you as well appeal to my pride? Your humility may be the occasion for my pride, Mr Butler. I see danger there. And your aim is that I might assist you consecrate your private and personal life? That is a very tall order. Again I warn you, Mr Butler-the church claims to be supra-personal, supra-human. You appeal to me personally-your appeal is to someone who is wholly unworthy. BUTLER. Oh yes, yes. Pardon my impatience-if we stick to the human facts- YATE. Facts seen under the form of eternity may cease to be human and become divine. BUTLER. For the purposes of what I have to say I agree. Consider. It is as one who as a young man sailed out to the Antipodes to encounter his fate that I invoke your charity .... YATE. Was your ... fate, as you put it-was your fate so severe? BUTLER. In its incidentals, yes. To love is to suffer. It was for me written that I should voyage half way round the world ... for money, it is true. But it was also to find my heart ravished by the discovery of love. . .. In your book, Mr Y ate, you wrote of the anguish of joy, the pain of pleasure .... YATE. If the love you found embraced the charity we spoke about, then I do not see your reason for the invocation which we also spoke about. BUTLER. What I found was joy. I cannot deny that it was also suffering.... It was written that you too would meet your fate in 351 those distant parts-and suffer the agony of love destroyed in public scandal. YATE. Mr- BUTLER. I am bold, perhaps not to be forgiven. But I do not apologise -nor for my endeavours to invoke your charity. It is a compliment I pay you. Who in these matters can truly understand unless his heart has known that rape? Can you appreciate that without the profoundest feelings of sympathy, coupled with humility, I could not have dared approach you? YATE. Mr- BUTLER. Although I am for quite some years returned from New Zealand, the love I found there still survives. Incredibly more-it is much increased. With the corollary that suffering has increased a thousandfold. Perhaps I might dare to say that the severity of your own suffering is not now beyond my experience. There, sir, you have the core of my approach to you-the reason why I beg for your charity. Mutual suffering may find a way to mutual relief. YATE. Very well, Mr Butler. But I warn you-charity that falters in the face of sin is charity that has failed. BUTLER. That word! One of those at the root of our misfortunes as I have mentioned. Do you recollect that the wise Frenchman has said that most of the occasions for our troubles in this world are grammatical? Sin! The word ties us to our century, our age, our island and our continent. Well! And what is sin? YATE. From you, Mr Butler, that is a question which requires no answer. BUTLER. But consider the Greeks of the days of our scholarship, Mr Y ate-of whom it has been said that they were unable to dis- tinguish the word from the thing. The word you say is sin. That word can be distinguished. It was the redemption of joy that I felt-a flood in my heart and throughout my being. Must I say sin? YATE. Must I remind you of your texts? Adultery is the guilt of the man who looks upon a woman- BUTLER. It was no woman- YATE. That is neither here nor there. What you speak of was rooted in the lust of your loins. Its direction was its own sufficient warn- ing-that no consecration could be granted you. BUTLER. I am not to be held to account for its direction. What is of the constitution is no sin. YATE. Not in its leaning-so long as leaning may be distinguished from the prompting of active desire. BUTLER. You are too fine. If I were a consecrated clergyman the 352 be-all and end-all of the Evangel I would preach would be the forgiveness of sins. But in any event, all was redeemed in charity- which I had then no need to invoke. Charity was already there. Do you suppose I conceived of my friend as an object for my pleasure regardless of every concern for his dignity and well- being? No, Mr Yate. I have mentioned since my return from New Zealand an increase-and there has been much increase of charity from which my love can never be wholly disentangled. YATE. But you also mentioned a thousandfold increase in suffering. BUTLER. There you have my reason for seeking your charity .... What is the worst suffering we may be obliged to endure?-that which may be compared with what your God must endure, Mr Yate. YATE. I am not sure that what you say is not blasphemy. BUTLER. It is written that God offers us love. If the offer is thrown back in his face-then it is beyond our understanding not to suppose that we cause God to suffer. YATE. The love God offers is charity-which is not readily offended. BUTLER. My analogy holds-neither is the charity which moves me. I have mentioned the common human love with which it is mingled. It is because I seek the balm of a charity from which common love has not been wholly purged that I have sought you out, Mr Y ate. Because of the tincture of mortality mingled with the charity you are already affording me, you may be assured it will not be thrown back in your face. . . . YATE. Was the love you discovered in New Zealand for a native?-a Maori? BUTLER. A European. He is about my own age-quick lively hand- some confident carefree. All that besides much else-indeed, all that I am not.... Among the New Zealand settlers there were scandalous tongues to- Y ATE. And your love is not thrown back in your face?-it is answered? BUTLER. It was. It is not now. YATE. And your charity? BUTLER. That is ... accepted. I have evidence in the most concrete sense. Money is ... accepted. YATE. Am I to understand that you are blackmailed? BUTLER. Not in the legal sense .... You have already quoted the Apostle, Mr Y ate-charity is not readily offended. YATE. Your friend is not a worthy man? I am not concerned with that word. What is relevant is his 353 worth to me, which is beyond calculation. Perhaps I should say beyond words .... YATE. This is strange matter-it revives in me what an old man might have wished to be done with .... Mr Butler, it surprises me to speak. BUTLER. Speech that eases you, Mr Y ate, may for me-no, I repeat myself. Y ATE. You recall to me my College days, and a young man I first observed and then cared for. He became a great sorrow to me when I understood how greatly he was distressed by the prompt- ings of what to him was his own natural self. It was only by the discipline of my prayers and fasting that I had imposed a truce upon my own longings .... You see, Mr Butler, you have won from me my trust .... But this young man-he had discovered, as no doubt many still do, that in towns of any size there are always those who will cater for our lusts. It would seem often in fear trembling and shame-at least that is what I inferred from my friend's behaviour. He was in company reluctant to meet any direct glance, and his own glances were the very spit of those described by Dante-you will remember he speaks of the looks which men exchange of an evening under a new moon, looks which call to mind an old tailor sharpening his vision at the eye of his needle .... His very walk became a silent gliding motion, curiously effacing. It was as though he had become already like the souls of the Inferno-the ghost of what he had formerly been. I cannot describe how much I felt his distress-on account of which I was prompted to offer him my charity along with my excuses for inquiring about his problem. And it was his excuse that he was engaged upon a search-a quest. He was obsessed by the belief that around one of the many street corners which he was impelled to turn-and turn and turn again, until it seemed that for him there was nothing upon earth except turning corners -I say he was obsessed by the illusory conviction that his search would end in the sublime happiness of his discovering another Platonic half. It was here I had the reason for his being unwilling to bother with me. There was so little time he could spare for anyone-when around the next corner was to be found the joy which he might miss if he was in any other way occupied-the joy which would be his when he achieved his completion.... BUTLER. Yes? YATE. I should tell you, Mr Butler, that he was a talented classical scholar. And one bright morning when the world seemed not an unpleasant place in which to be ... he was taken from the river. 354 Excuse and forgive me.... Very well, or rather perhaps, very ill. It was to myself the gravest warning, Mr Butler-and perhaps the more especially since it was not a great time afterwards that I found myself among the natives of the south seas, dedicated to the work of a Christian missionary. I was much too among the Europeans of Port Jackson-but my heart was fixed where the work was that I loved best, among the warm-hearted people of the Bay of Islands and tropical Tonga.... I will be frank-perhaps I am responding to what you called your invocation. Or perhaps, Mr Butler, it is more simply that your dark colouring of feature recalls vividly to me many a Polynesian for whom I conceived the most lively affection .... BUTLER. I have read your book, Mr Y ate. YATE. Then you will know that I printed letters from a great number of my Maori friends-know too that if the language they wrote is to be credited my affection for them was tenderly reciprocated .... You would meet the native people in your part of New Zealand, Mr Butler? BUTLER. In Canterbury they were scarce, almost not to be found-at least not by me. YATE. You cannot conceive the readiness of their traits of affection ... the tears of farewell, the smothering kisses ... a New Zealand- er's love is all outside, in his eyes and his mouth .... It is not to be wondered at, at least not by you, Mr Butler ... I was indiscreet. There are times for every one of us, it is something known to us all, when there is no answer to what we must endure in this world ... there is no answer, no remedy-except the comfort, the protection we may find in a pair of enclosing arms. You will understand my special circumstances, the sleeping arrangements of those people are not as ours .... Indiscretion became my dis- grace in a rage of scandal which you leave me in no doubt was echoed to you during your visit to those distant parts. BUTLER. There were those who commended you. It was quoted to me that you were the victim of a conspiracy black as hell. YATE. From you, now, in what we may agree to call this moment of truth, a moment which has so unexpectedly become mine in my old age, or should I more properly say yours-and-mine?-from you Mr Butler I will hold nothing back. You argued that the word sin ties us to our own times and country, to the continent of Europe and its civilization. You touched me-for it was part of my difficulty as a Christian missionary that I did not always dis- cern a sense of sin where it seemed I might without fail expect to findl it. It would sometimes surprise me that among these native 355 friends I found nothing to remind me of the shame which had afllicted the young colleague of whom I spoke. And zealous Christian though I was, devoted to my work of conversion, the matter appeared important enough to require some investigation. As a worker in the mission field I was commissioned to bear the Gospel message, and when I discovered that many natives were possessed of qualities which seemed to distinguish them admir- ably from some Christians it had greatly distressed me to be familiar with-well, it was evident that I must make some inquiry into their own religious beliefs and practices. And to restrict myself to the matter in question, I discovered what struck me as immeasurably disturbing-for these people conceived of deities that inhabited the surrounding country, and resembled in their tastes the deities of ancient Greece. It may surprise you to learn, Mr Butler, that an affection for native Ganymedes was attributed to a native Zeus who was believed to be established upon the summit of a local Olympus .... Believe me, Mr Butler, there has been nothing in my life which has more sorely tempted me than these tentative explorations into native belief. It was perhaps for my soul's good that I became a target for scandal despite the un- speakable anguish I was obliged to endure. If it had not been in God's purpose to halt me, what licence might I not have been tempted into permitting myself?-as preparation for my own eternal destruction I do not doubt .... BUTLER. I am grateful to you, Mr Y ate. I understand, and I am moved. But for me any solution which depended upon Christian approval would not have satisfied. It would have entailed a life- time's suffocation not to conceive of my freedom in a moral area where I might exercise my right to choose. Strong feelings may no doubt interfere with one's detachment in endeavouring to choose freely-but that may be remedied by a constant reference to the charity which I judge to be a constant need in all human relations. I am not aware that I am diminished in my stature as a man by my choice. Licence is not to me a temptation, nor am I convinced that a reason for what I suffer is to be found in the guilt which the tribal rules of the community I belong to demand that I feel. To you it may appear sacrilege, Mr Yate, but for me there are times of such happiness I can infer myself to be in a state of grace. . .. The contrary is also true-I confess that I suffer. But I suspect that suffering is the price exacted from any one of us who endeavours to establish harmonious relations with another human being. I resent my suffering, Mr Y ate, because I am reluctant to believe that to suffer is to be enriched-my 356 observations have often led me to an opposite conclusion. But today I am soothed-grateful that you have opened to me your heart.... YATE. If I am not mistaken I hear the sound of my sister's teacups . . . . We must talk of other things, Mr Butler. May I recommend to you the thought that it is perhaps by God's grace that we have today reached across the gulf which separates us? I shall hope always that you may come to rely for your support upon the Christian faith. I am not your judge, Mr Butler-and I do agree with you in what you had to say about the forgiveness of sins.

On a Five-fold Screen

RUTH DALLAS South and :J(_orth of the City

To the south the land holds colours of the sea, Paua-shell blue, green, translucent silver; Its voice seems velvet, the rich tones of a 'cello. North the country is somnolent, a drowsy tiger, Ochre gleams from its flanks, ginger, wheat-gold; Clouds float in ribbons, satin-smooth. I have heard its music from a violin. South I go to view the autumn trees, Poplars incandescent against blue hills, Willows spangled thinly beside water; North for the wandering scent of clover, And Persephone's fields of outlaw flowers. North or south, there are days When to stay in the city is to seem Inanimate as a bolt, a nut or a screw. The land calls me, as to others the sea calls. From the country I return stored Like a jar with a distillation Of field and peaceful sky. 357 Still Life

THE APPLEs whirl in their own roundness. The plate trembles a little to contain them. Beyond the window, frozen in a cube, Three jugs wait rooted at the bus-stop, The man with the twisted mouth, a teapot woman, And the boy in a bullseye cap, Plucked from the dominion of the kitchen clock, Time's passengers rejected.

PotjPoem

WHEN the haystack needle is found, the greasy pig caught, Words show themselves more sharp and slippery, Leading one a fine dance across country, Riderless broncoes: who will be master? A line is more malleable, Allowing itself to be bent or broken, welded. It can be made to hop like a flea, Prance, sing, Copy the balancing movements of a bird's wing, Or lumber progressively in a sluggish wagon train. This in spite of words quarrelling, fence-jumping, shouldering each other out of place. Years may pass before a poem wears like a slant hat the easy appearance Of having been slapped together casually in a spare moment When the poet had nothing better to do.

If it's upsetting, as finding overturned stone images in a mat of jungle, 358 If it stands idly As an unselfconscious Japanese pot, slightly askew, almost insolent, so much the better.

Better stili (though it spring Fresh as an overnight toadstool) To reveal the aplomb of always having been; Like mosaics, centuries buried, cleared of sand, or an alpine pass discovered.

Fruit Country

FRoM the mortar of desert The sun pounds From dust of the dead Rise Sweet fruits, Strawberry raspberry buffed cherry Apple, pear. From trees stark, Limbs amputated, Or with angry clenched fists, Beseeching or turning away, Springs the flushed peach blossom; From powdered ice-locked stone Resurrection of the honeyed apricot.

THE music ceasing Is the sun going down.

Nothing now Shuts out the night Whose hugeness and emptiness Rush in With a neighbourly Yoo-hooing wind sound. 359 The orange of the earth turns Smooth as a ball-bearing In the oily vat of space. I am fastened to the earth. Travelling. Where?

:Beginnings

10. COLIN McCAHON

MY GRANDFATHER William Ferrier was both a photographer and a landscape painter in water colour. We grew up with his paintings on the walls, and at holiday times visiting my Grandmother's house at Timaru (I don't think I ever met my Grandfather) we lived in rooms hung floor to ceiling with water colours and prints. Once, suffering from mumps, I think it was, I spent a time confined to bed in what had been my Grandfather's dark room: red glass in the window, and paints and brushes, a palette, in shallow drawers. I don't remember doing any painting at this time myself, I was prob- ably intimidated by the obvious professionalism of the environment. Possibly the mumps and dark redness of the room were together too discouraging. This little room was seldom, if ever, used. The occurrence of mumps in a crowded holiday household made segregation impera- tive and so it was that having met the 'finished' work both in Timaru and in Dunedin I now met the sacred materials of 'art'. All children apparently draw and paint, I drew and I painted, so did my brother and my sister. Some painting I was pleased with and with some I was not. I recall a drawing of kingcups, flowers I only knew of through a book illustration. I was pleased with this drawing and later with others, an illustration of W ordsworth's 'Daffodils', a few Venetian scenes with black posts to tie gondolas to, and many South Sea Islands with feathery palms. (Later, I became interested in banana leaves-this through watching Russell Clark drawing them for some job-and later I too could do them most expertly.) I also produced an excellent likeness of Joan Craw- 360 ford with one large and staring eye and a loop of smooth hair falling alluringly over the other. Some years after this, at the Dunedin Art School, I produced a horrible version of this image, first in clay and then cast in plaster of Paris. Once when I was quite young-we were still living on Highgate and hadn't yet shifted to Prestwick Street-! had a few days of splendour. Two new shops had been built next door, one was Mrs McDonald's Fruit Shop and Dairy, the other was taken by a hair- dresser and tobacconist. Mrs McDonald had her window full of fruit and other practical items. The hairdresser had his window painted with HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST. Painted in gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold, with shadows, and a feeling of being projected right through the glass and across the pavement. I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting. The grace of the lettering as it arched across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on its dull red field but leaping free from its own black shadow pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation. Following this, I did a lot of signwriting. Our house was in white roughcast but the doors to the various backyard 'offices' were of wood and offered surfaces well suited to poster painting. (I suppose my present glad acceptance of pop art is in some way related to this experience.) Some time, I don't quite know when, out for a Sunday visit with the family, I discovered Cubism. This world was one I felt I already knew and was at home in. And so I was, as by this time the Cubists' discoveries had become a part of our environment. Lampshades, curtains, linoleums, decorations in cast plaster: both the interiors and exteriors of homes and commercial buildings were influenced inevit- ably by this new magic. But to see it all as it was in the beginning, that was a revelation. It was a dull, uninteresting afternoon. We were looking through copies of the Illustrated London News. The Cubists were being exhibited in London, were news, and so were illustrated. I at once became a Cubist, a staunch supporter and sympathiser, one who could read the Cubists in their own language and not only in the watere,d-down translations provided by architects, designers and advertising agencies. I was amazed when others could not share this bright new vision of reality. I began to investigate Cubism, too enthusiastically joining the band of translators myself. (In 1953 in Melbourne I was privileged to meet and all too briefly 361 work under Mary Cockburn-Mercer, an associate and friend of the great Cubist masters. Mary, herself a Cubist, perhaps out of date in the context of the Melbourne modernism of 1953, was above all a painter of great integrity. Her simplicity in her art and living pointed to her having learnt well the artist's most difficult lesson, to accept disillusionment and to work within one's own limits. In 1957 I saw works by all the great Cubist masters. I mention these two later events to underline the first.) We were a gallery-going family and went to all the exhibitions. At this time the big artistic event of the Dunedin year was the large Otago Art Society exhibition held in the Early Settlers' Hall. When you are young and in love with paint and with painting even inferior paintings .become proper food. Later, increasing dis- crimination robs the experience of its first joy: a critical eye is neces- sary for the painter but this very eye, seeing that there are blemishes in the beloved, destroys pure joy. The Dunedin Art Gallery offered a Russell Flint, a female nude with swirling draperies called 'The Banner Dance'; a large still-life with excessive detail, but fascinating; a huge, dark shipwreck; a Laura Knight; and others. It had a very special smell and a more sacred feeling than the Art Society could ever achieve. Was this because the Art Society was 'us' and this was 'them' ?-from Over- seas, or Old? or was it just a difference in disinfectants used by the respective caretakers? perhaps the Art Gallery cleaners used a brand also used in the city's Presbyterian churches. None of this worried me at the time. The Gallery smell then heralded nothing but pleas- ure. There was one painting in the Gallery I loved above all else, Prances Hodgkins's 'Summer'. It sang from the wall, warm and beautiful, beautiful faces beaming from summer blossoms. It was strong and kind and lovely. When we shifted to Oamaru (it was when I was in Standard 4 at school), I took that picture with me in my mind and painted myself my own version. This painting I loved too, not for itself but for the more accessible remembrance of the other it made possible. Oamaru was a fine place to be. There were school plays, Saturday mornings on the harbour dredge, rafts on the lagoon. I remember also a parachutist whose parachute failed to open and the white cross erected against the low North Otago hills where he fell. I have often used both the cross and these hills in later paintings. On trips to the W aitaki dam site we passed this landscape. At this same time I had a good art teacher. She seemed old, perhaps she wasn't, had faded red hair and was encouraging. I don't 362 know her name but she taught me for one grateful year at W aitaki Junior High School. We then returned to Dunedin and all too soon to the most un±orgettable horror of my youth, that school for the unseeing, Otago Boys' High. After a long and dismal struggle with my father I left high school with the little knowledge that I had gained and a profound loathing for several of the masters and for their utter failure, as far as I was concerned, to communicate any- thing as important as HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST and 'Summer'. I do recall with pleasure 0. G. Cox asking in a history test who had painted the portrait of Henry VIII reproduced in our history text book-Holbein-and only I gained that mark. The class considered the question unfair, Cox defended its validity, the painter's name was under the picture. It was near the beginning of the second term in the fifth form year that I left high school and enrolled at the Dunedin School of Art. The School of Art was a department of the Technical College but had a building of its own. The director was Mr Gordon Tovey, the staff, those who had contact with me, were Douglas Charlton Edgar, R. N. Field and Gordon Tovey, later Dick Seelye. The student population was largely female. Technical School pupils came over for various classes but of the full-time students only two were boys when I started. There were some nice girls at the School, some I never got to know. They were the ones doing mysterious things in upstairs rooms, embroidery and design; I did painting and sculpture and posters downstairs, life drawing upstairs (with a model in a bathing suit), and anatomy. One of the painting girls always signed her paintings with her name and S.A. (Senior Art), we were a real elite compared to the Tech. kids. But this elite was also divided into its own hierarchy. The older (and more advanced) pupils drifted around being very superior and aloof. There was a 'No Smoking' ban in the School but these superior ladies were apparently allowed to smoke and smoke would come billowing from under their cloakroom door and be quite overlooked by the staff. The ban was absolute for the boys. I did winter terms at the School and worked in Nelson in the summer-tobacco and apples, and got to know that landscape. Later on I married one of the superior girls (first met and seen through a barrier of tobacco smoke and Brahms on a portable gramophone). And later still learned to make use of the Nelson landscape in my own work. Otago has a calmness, a coldness, almost a classic geological order. It is, perhaps, an Egyptian landscape, a land of calm orderly granite. Driving one day with the family over hills from Brighton or Taieri 363 Mouth to the Taieri Plain, I first became aware of my own particu- lar God, perhaps an Egyptian God, but standing far from the sun of Egypt in the Otago cold. Big hills stood in front of the little hills, which rose up distantly across the plain from the flat land: there was a landscape of splendour, and order and peace. (The Crucifixion hadn't yet come: perhaps this landscape was of the time before Jesus. I saw an angel in this land. Angels can herald begin- ings.) I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet to its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not even really yet invented. My work has largely been to com- municate this vision and to invent the way to see it. This vision or discovery was reinforced by the remembrance of paintings seen in my recent past, paintings of Nelson landscape by Toss Woollaston. At this time I had not yet met Toss. I had seen the paintings in a small shop on Broadway, Dunedin, watched over by the painter and by various other people whom I did not then know. But there were the paintings, wonderful and magnificent interpretations of a New clean, bright with New Zealand light, and full of rur. I was at High School and couldn't afford to buy but could look and absorb and be impressed. I met the artist himself some years later; I saw the actual Nelson landscape and better understood the discipline imposed by the painter on his subject. I still admire W oollaston's painting, I still remember the revelations of that first exhibition. It is only now I realize the great good fortune that surrounded my youth. I must admit to awful bitterness and to a hatred of 'them'; this still exists. But my beginnings were fortunate indeed, surrounded by no dealers, few exhibitions, very few where I was at all welcome, no pressure to 'Be with it' or to 'Go Go'. I lived in a certain peace. Actually, no fashions existed at all (and from the Dunedin School of Art at that time, and now, no Diploma of Fine Arts was given). Nothing more came from the School but a love of painting and a tentative technique; the painter's life for me was exemplified by the life and work of R. N. Field.

364 Each panel 68 x 24 ins South window, detail

CouN McCAHON. Windows in the Convent Chapel of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions, Auckland. Painted glass. 1966. East

West window (by Colin Me ndow

thon and Richard Killeen)

JAMES K. BAXTER To my Father in Spring

FATHER, the fishermen go down to the rocks at twilight when earth in the undertow

of silence is drowning, yet they tread the bladdered weedbeds as if death and life were but the variation of tides- while you in your garden shift carefully the broken sods to prop the daffodils left after spring hail. You carry a kerosene tin of soft

bread and mutton bones to the jumping hens that lay their eggs under the bushes slily-

not always firm on your legs at eighty-four. Well, father, in a world of bombs and drugs you charm me still-no other man is quite like you! That smile like a low sun on water tells of a cross to come-Shall I eavesdrop when Job cries out to the Rock of Israel? No; but mourn the fishing net hung up to dry, and walk with you the short track to the gate

where crocuses lift the earth.

365 :Jlfother and Son

1 BLOWFLIEs dive-bomb the sitting-room Table, this dry spring morning,

In my mother's house. As I did in my 'teens, I listen again to the Roman-lettered clock

Chiming beside the statue of Gandhi Striding towards God without any shadow

Along the mantelpiece. Time is a spokeless wheel. Fantails have built a nest on the warm house wall

Among the passion vines. The male one lurks. The female spreads her fan. Out in the rock garden

White-headed my mother weeds red polyanthus, Anemone, andean crocus,

And the gold and pearl trumpets called angels' tears. Mother, I can't ever wholly belong

In your world. What if the dancing fantail Should hatch tomorrow a dragon's egg?

Mother, in all our truces of the heart I hear the pearl-white angels musically weeping.

2 There's more to it. Those wood-framed photographs Also beside the clock, contain your doubtful angels,

My brother with his hair diagonally brushed Over his forehead, with a hot dark eye,

And myself, the baby blondish drowsing child So very slow to move away from the womb!

Saddled and ridden to Iceland and back by the night-hag He learnt early that prayers don't work, or work 366 After the need has gone. Mother, your son Had gained a pass degree in Demonology Before he was twelve-how else can you make a poet?- Yet we're at one in the Catholic Church. I go out to meet you. Someone is burning weeds Next door. The mother fantail flutters Chirping with white eyebrows and white throat On a branch of lawsoniana, and the darting Father bird comes close when I whisper to him With a susurrus of the tongue.

C. K. STEAD Fairburn

IT IS Goon that A. R. D. Fairburn's Collected Poemr should look like a book of poems and not like a text. But the order in which Fair- burn's separate volumes are presented here seems to me arbitrary. There is nothing on the contents pages to indicate dates of publica- tion, and the printing types used on these pages do not make sufficient distinction between titles of volumes and titles of sub-sections of volumes. The Rakehelly Man is listed as a title but not as a poem. There is nowhere an alphabetical list of poems or of first lines. A reader finding an interest in Fairburn awakened by this book would have to go outside it for elementary information. Mr Glover has got the poems into print; his foreword is brief and gritty; but as an editor he might have been more helpful to the uninitiated. * * * * In Dunedin recently I found myself arguing (in accord with Dr E. H. McCormick's complaint in Landfall 77 about academic critics of New Zealand writing) that our universities were producing weed- killers instead of fertilizers. Now, as if to test my sincerity, I am 1Collected Poems. A. R. D. Fairburn. Pegasus. 22s. 6d. 367 confronted with Fairburn's collected poems, and with the doubts, irritations and dislikes they arouse in me. Writing after the death of T. S. Eliot, Alien T ate mourned that 'high civility' had 'almost disappeared from the republic of letters'. 'Its disappearance', he went on, 'means the reduction of the republic to a raw democracy of competition and aggression, or of "vanity and impudence".' I believe I understand the complaint, and even in some degree share its feeling. But did Tate reflect that it might have been written by Sir Henry Newbolt or Sir Edward Marsh (or equally by Senator Yeats) after reading some ofT. S. Eliot's early reviews? Will it occur to those who echo it here that it might have been written by Alan Mulgan confronting Fairburn and his younger con- temporaries in the 1930's? Fairburn's reputation in New Zealand is considerable. He is more widely admired, I think, than any other of our poets. His work is read in schools. It is accessible, enjoyable, and the demands it puts on readers are not severe. The 'civility' which hedges it round is peculiarly Kiwi. Dr Alien Curnow, Mr R. A. K. Mason, Mr Antony Alpers, Mr Harold Innes, as well as Mr Glover himself-each in his different style has reminded us that Fairburn was swimmer, golfer, rugby player, yachtsman, that he had opinions and spoke out, that he was six-foot-three and good company in a pub-'a big man' (in Mr Mason's description), 'big in every way, in mind and body and spirit'. The literary reputation this image in part protects has not been questioned. It is not going to be snuffed out by an article. The poems are all here, in print; Fairburn has finished writing them; it is time to look at them at least without being required to keep in mind that their author (like anyone else) was capable of spending his energies profitably on other-than-literary pursuits. What is the function of 'criticism'-and especially when the critic's responses prove to be largely negative? I cannot conceive of its function as that of 'maintaining literary standards', or, as Eliot once proposed, 'correcting taste'. 'Standards' are supported by concrete blocks, and 'taste' is largely a matter of decorative convention, social or literary. I am not sure what 'literary standards' are if they can be abstracted from feelings and taught in public institutions. 'Literature' is a e<;mfronting of personalities, occurring somewhere between the cold, immovable words on the page and the living eye which per- ceives them; and perhaps criticism is rightly only a form of biography, not of the poet's life, nor of the critic's, but of the life generated in successive confrontations. It is no science. It proceeds from feelings before rational analysis has anything on which to work, returns to 368 feelings for its final sanction, and though it may be 'better' or 'worse' it can never be 'right' or 'wrong'. I do not, anyway, want to measure poems against any formal con- ception of what is a 'good' poem, but to measure a kind of life against those human qualities experience has taught me to respect. * * * * 'New Zealanders', Alien Curnow writes in his Penguin anthology, do not trouble themselves much about the historical divide which separates their latest three or four decades from their first seven or eight .... Yet this divide is the most significant fact to be regarded in any realistic retrospect upon the country's literature, upon the qualities of mind and imagination it has nourished. I would like to think it is 'common sense' that makes me doubt this 'fact'. It is comfortable to draw a line and place oneself and one's contemporaries on the right side of it. 'History' is then, not a mere record, but a Principle whose blessing, long withheld, has lighted on us. But if to believe in ourselves we have to belittle our forbears as a class, pretending they were all victims of delusions, we are not merely committing what seems to me an impiety, but inviting a future in which successive generations will draw the line again, nearer to themselves. What does this 'historical divide' signify if Katherine Mansfield, for example, stands on the far side of it, and Fairburn on the near? Either nothing; or that she had more to contend with and he less, which magnifies both her achievements and his failures. If there are, as Mr Curnow believes, particular 'New Zealand' anxieties (about, for example, the precise relation between our actual and our literary experience) then they are anxieties we all share and will go on sharing. The writers we value will be those who surmount them and make use of them. If Fairburn was the poet Mr Curnow believes he was, he needs the historical no more than the personal myth to make this plain. If he was not such a poet, neither myth will protect him for long. * * * * Can one talk about verse simply as verse-meaning the movement, the run of the lines, singly and together, the syntax and grammar, the conjunctions of vowels and consonants, but excluding reference and meaning almost entirely? If so, it is doubtful whether Fairburn ever surpassed the quality of the best verse in He Shall Not Rise, the 1930 volume which dismisses itself in its last poem ('Rhyme of the Dead Self'). The talent on display is aesthetic. The talent for living which in mature poetry gets worked into, becomes indistinguishable from, 369 the other, is hardly yet present. But there are signs of its growth: even the sardonic Fairburn is now and then dimly revealed. The aesthetic talent is what a poet is born with-like a talent for logic, or mathematics. It must be there or there is nothing to discuss; but it cannot alone (one might argue that Auden's inherited facility is greater than Yeats's) determine the stature of the poet. Fairburn's command in this first book is not merely of verse forms, but of a line that lengthens or shortens, rhymes or fails to rhyme, echoes, falters, runs on, with a perfect sense of how to keep itself attuned to a music without becoming merely predictable. It delights us, as the movement of water does, by echoing some knowledge within us of Chance and Choice, causation and indeterminacy. The deficiencies of the poems are plain. Little of the man's life is in them. They lack his strength, his energy, the range of his passions, his intellect. Their referential (as distinct from their plastic) sub- stance is literary. One must penetrate the conventional language if one is to discover any sense of actual experience behind them. It is probably more the lack of energy than the faded language that Fair- burn rejected. At every stage in his career he resorted to that langu- age (what W ordsworth called, in a withering phrase, 'the family language of poets'). In embryo the whole of Fairburn is in this book. It seems to promise a great deal. * * * * In the second published volume, Dominion, a violence of the will is offered as a substitute for the manifest weaknesses of the first. It is as if we had moved from one aspect of the poetry of the 1890's to the other, from Dowson to Kipling (a Kipling of the Left), only to be reminded that both, the weakness and the violence, proceed from the same uncertainty. 'Dominion' is an ambitious national epic in which there is some confusion about whether the 'nation' resides in the people or the place. The poem surveys our history in broad in- accurate sweeps. It offers two largely unrelated visions of the present -one particular, rural, and idyllic; the other general, urban and un- pleasant. And it concludes with a vision of the future in which We shall arise at morning, and clothe ourselves, and walk in green fields. And we shall have dominion over the earth and the forms of matter. This is, it seems, what awaits us on the far side of that rending struggle apocalypticallyI abstractlyI absurdly described in the final section of the poem, where a notion of dialectical Progress (Hegelian, 370 not Marxist, Fairburn once assured me) is set forth in verse whose energy is breathtakingly 'trumped up'. To the social and historical arguments of the poem M. H. Holcroft has patiently put the unavoidable objections: ... it implies a strictly limited conception of humanity. There is the suggestion of a Calvinistic morality applied to the social background: the sheep are separated from the wolves, but there is no room for intermediate breeds, and no awareness of the immense haphazardness, the pathos of good intentions gone astray, the selfishness and the goodness, and the blind conflict ... which seem to me to be nearer the confused reality of human experience .... It is true that New Zealanders struggle under a burden of debt and that the brave new world of the south is shadowed by the narrow doors of Threadneedle Street; but it is also true that most of the debt has been shouldered with an easy optimism by politicians who imagined themselves to be free agents setting up the foundations of prosperity. There was no compact with financial oligarchs, no evil compounding with the sons of Mammon, no conscious spinning of a web that later generations could name The System. To visualize the deliberate exploitation of posterity, is to overlook the nature of history .... (The Deepening Stream) Mr Holcroft also writes of 'a spontaneous lyrical impulse' in the poem, and of 'the efficacy of Mr Fairburn's lyric gifts, asserting itself against the thickening influence of the ideology'. He is right that what value the poem has exists in these lyric passages; but it is diffi- cult to remove them from the flavour of the poem as a whole; and even if this can be done, objections remain. We are confronted once again with that faded 'literary' language, the old high tremulous emotive talk Fairburn all his life went on producing and running away from. 0 lovely time! when bliss was taken as the bee takes nectar from the flower. This is the language of He Shall Not Rise, but it is now mounted in a pulpit bearing a great moral weight on its narrow shoulders. Fairest earth, fount of life, giver of bodies, deep well of our delight, breath of desire, let us come to you barefoot, as befits love, as the boy to the trembling girl, as the child to the mother.... 371 'Dominion' is full of violence, a violence, it is always assumed, which stemmed solely from the Depression. I suspect however that it had as much to do with literary as with social problems, and that it was something the poet was in part directing blindly against him- self. He was in revolt against the pallid personality discovered in his early poems, a personality he could not accept as his own. Simultane- ous with this discomfort, intensifying it, must have come Fairburn's full realization of the 'modern' movement in poetry, and the feeling that he was hopelessly 'out of date'. Only a New Zealander could have responded so precipitately to an alteration in Greenwich Mean Time. 'Dominion' is thus doubly ambitious-in design and in style- conceived as a sort of New Zealand 'Waste Land', and executed in a manner intended to reveal, among other things, a vigorous, tough- minded, modern poet. The maturing of a poet's personality will demand, and help to create, an alteration in his style. A style chosen because it has impressed him rather than because it relates precisely to his own needs, will not make him a better poet. In a large part of 'Dominion' Fairburn is running ahead of himself; the 'lily-white lad' of 'Rhyme of the Dead Self' is still publicly strangling himself instead of getting on with the slow painful business of growing up. The language of the early lyrics, for all their virtues, is a self- enclosed literary language, lacking in precise reference. A great deal of 'Dominion', in freeing itself from that 'poetic' language, fails to achieve poetry because it fabricates the 'reality' it pretends to reveal and denounce. The army of the unliving, the cells of the cancer: small sleek men rubbing their hands in vestibules, re-lighting cigar-butts, changing their religions; dabblers in expertise, licensed to experiment on the vile body of the State; promoters of companies; efficiency experts (unearned excrement of older lands, oranges sucked dry), scourges of a kindly and credulous race; economists, masters of dead language; sorners, bureausites, titled upstarts ... and those who embrace their misery in small closed rooms, sucking carious teeth, sniffing the odour of themselves, gentlemen's relish: 'You must not confiscate our sufferings, they are private poetry.' 372 Fairburn in these sections of the poem ostentatiously cast aside 'private poetry'; what he offered in its place was public rant. * * * * With the aid of Miss Olive Johnson's excellent bibliography a dozen of the poems published in Poems 1929-41 can be certainly identified as having been written after He Shall Not Rise and before 'Dominion'. Of these, 'Winter Night' is a Georgian lyric, with all the cosiness of its convention. The candles gutter and burn out, and warm and snug we take our ease .... 'Empty House' is an experiment in freer form, introducing details like 'a plug for the vacuum cleaner' which suggest the influence of the 'Pylon' poets. 'Landscape with Figures', 'Street Scene' and 'Deserted Farmyard' are satires of an English scene, none of them notable poems. 'The County', by contrast ('a mordant bucolic', as Mr Glover describes it), has been worked at and is pointed and witty. Few of these poems mark any distinct advance over those of He Shall Not Rise. But there are two poems belonging to this period- 'The Sea', and 'Disquisition on Death'-which stand alone. Fairburn seems to have been content with neither. He never published 'The Sea' in a collection; and he calls 'Disquisition on Death' 'an un- finished poem', and dates it 1929, as if to insist that it is not to be considered with his mature poetry. Both poems are in some degree obviously derivative, but what Fairburn has taken in each case he has made his own. They seem to me superior to anything else he wrote at that time; and of all his work the 'Disquisition' is, I think, the poem I read with most pleasure. Why was he dissatisfied with them when their shortcomings, to say the least, are no greater than those of the poems he chose to represent him? A possible explana- tion is that they were written in some degree spontaneously, and fell outside the cate,!wries of his poetic intentions at that time. It is more likely a poet will recognize whatever faults such poems have than that he will see the inadequacies of his own formulated strategy; and indeed, they may be judged wanting precisely by their failure to accord with poems which, however inadequate, are as he meant them to be. Yet if his intentions are in some way mistaken or mis- guided, the poem which causes discomfort may be the very one proceeding most naturally from himself, out of his full sensibility. 'Disquisition on Death' has philosophical pretensions; and some of its language has no reference, hardly even an existence, outside 373 of literature. Yet everything in it is gathered up in an exhilarating forward momentum that is the poem itself. It is this body-death they fear indeed, this scavenger of flesh and all living substance, this is the very fountainhead of fear. How should so beautiful a thing as death be a stench in the nostrils, be clothed in such bitter finality? For death is but the digestive organ of God, by its prime metabolism giving fresh form and shape to the immortal spirit; so that the leaf, the fruit, bowel and gut of swine, the beggar's scabs, the flesh of emperors, the lips of Guinivere and the blood of Christ, dissolved and scattered, have worn a million shapes. The poem contains statements as lofty and pretentious as Fairburn wrote anywhere ('But where is the tower that shall outlast all time/ ... 0 it is builded in the heart of man')-yet it does not depend on them. They are not the pillars of a structure. The 'thought' is only another manifestation of energy, and the poem is 'unfinished'-which I suspect means that the impulse governing it was strong enough to resist Fairburn's efforts to pull it all together into an orderly con- clusion. Instead, it ends with a high-pitched but convincing account of a love affair, in which the tone of voice is maintained unfalter- ingly, and all Fairburn's skills have free play . . . . the setting sun and the far golden hills like mice embalmed in honey .... There's no knowing how it happened, or how by the mere merging of body and perishable dust grace should have bloomed in us .... It is unfashionable to talk of 'beauty', but that is what Fairburn achieves in the final section of this poem, and in a measure rare in our poetry. * * * * Poems 1929-41, and the same collection published with additions in 1952 under the title Strange Rendezvous, seem to me to lack coherence, unity of purpose. Perhaps they seemed so to Fairburn. He prefaced the 1952 collection with, and derived its title from, five lines of Wordsworth's (which Mr Glover omits without explanation from the present volume) : Strange rendezvous! My mind was at that time A parti-coloured show of grave and gay, 374 Solid and light, short-sighted and profound; Of inconsiderate habits and sedate, Consorting in one mansion unreproved .... The effect is of a poet's notebook rather than of a finished collec- tion. There is no one governing personality, conviction or purpose, only a succession of attempts at 'poetry', and little development even of means. Fairburn is striking out in all directions and never quite finding himself. Even the best of these poems lack density or depth. There is the impression everywhere of surfaces, a dimension lacking, an inability to see, and consequently to say, more than one thing at a time, so that everything, despite the command of verse forms and the poetic dressing, is in the nature of prose. Fairburn's struggle is not with an intractable reality which has been seen and which resists arrest, but rather with the feeling that the observed reality ought to be more 'poetic', grander, more high-toned than it is. In poetry, as perhaps in life, Fairburn was constantly in search of the big experi- ence, the explosive moment. Failing to find it, he alternately fabri- cated, scolded, or threw away the whole problem for a quick laugh. There should be the shapes of leaves and flowers printed on the rock, and a blackening of the walls from the flame on your mouth.... There should have been, perhaps, but there were not. Is it too much to say that his disappointment, like his expectation, was naive? In a few short lyrics in the 1952 collection ('The Estuary', 'Sea Wind and Setting Sun') and in the grave pastoral couplets of 'Wild Love', Fairburn achieved something like the completeness his early work might have led one to expect. So, like a leaf quitting a tree, I go, and by your leave take leave of what we may never again not ever again in this dispensation hope, or dare, to achieve. * * * * As he grew older Fairburn resorted more and more to the writing of comic verse. I say 'resorted' because, though his comic verse is always diverting and sometimes very funny indeed, his earlier work testifies everywhere to a literary ambition which was hardly to be fulfilled in trifles. If Fairburn could not satisfy himself he could at least satisfy his friends and his public. He had a lively sense of humour and was an agile rhymer. But it is a mark of the fragmenta- tion of his personality that the solemn, high-toned poet and the 375 funny man are so totally segregated in the poetry. In a few of the earlier poems one can see the whole personality merged in some- thing that is serious without loss of a sense of the absurd, or comic without being weightless. Lying in the sun beside the sea the sky the huge hard bulging bum of a metal kettledrum, the sea hot parchment tightly stretched for the sticks ... I am neither sea nor rock but living flesh I can swim but not as a fish swims I have fear and the knowledge of opposites. ('The Sea') Kant's dead, the gods be praised. That old man ruled me five years or more, wagging the finger of reproof under my nose, bloodless, lifeless, sexless he ruled me, he and his system, a two-and-elevenpenny clock with an alarm like the conscience of Calvin. He's dead, and I no more eat German haggis. The Sphinx smiles, say some, I say she sneers. ('Disquisition on Death') These are varieties of 'wit', something richer and more complicated in its effect than Fairburn's characteristic humour. In his later work the solemn prophet and the clown, each of them half a man, part company almost entirely. Both are present in 'The Voyage', hut they take turns to speak. Reading the 'serious' poems in Strange Rendezvous I find myself wondering again and again how the author of the comic verse could have been so totally excluded that Fairburn could write, for example (in 'Epithalamium'), 'Strip quickly darling', and 'leap on the bed', without any consciousness of the potential absurdity of the visual image they evoke. We are required to enter these poems as one is supposed to enter a church, appropriately dressed, and in the right frame of mind (Fairburn's own when he wrote them). To bring our whole personality is to commit a sacrilege against Poetry. In 'Song for a Woman' F airburn writes, His vision of my loins, I know, blooms like a rose as thrust on thrust he loves me, till his brow is wet, and splits my womb and spills his lust. 376 Inevitably one prefers the comic variant of this unreal 'vision': He plucked her in the portico, and not content with that the ruffian rumble-dumbled her upon the back-door mat. ('The Rakehelly Man') Much of Fairburn's comic verse seems, in fact, an unconscious parody of his own poems, as if the part of his personality excluded in the serious writing were protesting against that exclusion. Several years ago in a long review of Alien Curnow's poetry I extracted from the Introduction to Mr Curnow's Penguin anthology, and applied to his own work, the principle that there must be a 'reality prior to the poem' if there is to be a poem at all. That prin- ciple seems to me as sound now as it did then-so long as it is understood that the kind of 'reality' can never be prescribed, and that it may as often direct our vision inward as to some outwardly experienced form. I was saying, or understanding Mr Curnow to say, that though a poet may derive from other poets his modes of dealing with experience, he must nevertheless deal with actual experi- ences, and not with fabricated ones. ('I hear the sleet upon the thatch' is fabricated.) This is a general statement of a proper relationship between the poet and his world; and though it may seem simple or obvious, any- one who has tried to write poetry will recognize the problems it points to. But the particular application of any truism will always cause disagreement; and looking again at Mr Curnow's Introduction I find him arguing that James K. Baxter lacks the sense of that reality, while Fairburn is in full possession of it. Every poet will lack it from time to time, and his writing will suffer accordingly. But if one poet is to be used in this way as the measure of another, it seems to me precisely a confidence about the reality of his subjects (one might as accurately say his 'feelings') that gives Mr Baxter's work, through all its variations, the doggedly personal voice, the resoluteness of tone, that Fairburn's lacks. * * * * Fairburn was troubled in his later years by what he regarded as a prevailing 'aestheticism'. For this, he partly blamed Keats : In spite of his greatness it is difficult to resist the thought that in Keats was the seed-possibly the ground-of corruption; and that Wordsworth was really the more substantial poet. (Landfall 20, December 1951.) 377 He was troubled by the obscurity of much of the poetry being written, and by its lack of 'philosophical' substance; he saw the London publishing world as a fairy encampment; and he half con- ceived of himself as a modern New Zealand Wordsworth, somewhat isolated in maintaining the true function of the poet. Good poetry might have emerged from all this had Fairburn possessed the con- fidence to maintain it. But he was (or seemed to be) constantly tempted, troubled, irritated and diverted from his own concerns by the poetry that was fashionable. He was perhaps always over-con- scious of an external literary world, a world of fashion and success, and not conscious enough of that inner necessity which ought to govern each new step a poet takes; and he was so fluent, simply as a writer of verse, that it must have been more difficult for him than for most poets to be sure when he was writing poetry and when he was not. Fairburn's claim to be taken seriously as a 'philosophical' poet must rest on the two long poems written in the late 1940's. 'The Voyage' is described in his own Notes as a poem about faith, and works. In particular, it is about what Keats called 'Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. It is odd that Fairburn should have located a source, or a parallel, for this poem's 'philosophy' in the very poet in whom 'the seed- possibly the ground' of aesthetic 'corruption' lay. But Keats meant, surely, that a poet's most valuable perceptions were discovered in the 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts'. Fairburn makes of that idea a pro- gramme, in the course of which he evades rather than experiences the motions of uncertainty. He stands, like a swimming instructor, on the brink of life rather than in it, urging us on. No one could doubt his faith in the value of swimming; it is only that, preaching it, he has no time for the practice. In the allegory of the poem Life is represented as a voyage to death, an unknowable destination. The captain is asked where the ship is going, but he cannot answer. (He bears a close relation to the poet. He weaves on a hand-loom in his cabin; and the poet addresses us through him.) He can only affirm the voyage itself. 'Who are we' he asks, 'to know the complete, the illimitable pattern?' We must get on with our work, take pleasure in it, and ask no questions. 'It is a sentiment', Denis Glover once observed, 'that would move tears of banality in a Hitler a Holland or a constellation of Commissars' (Landfall 27, September 1953). 378 The 'faith' the poem requires of us is faith in the voyage, not in anything beyond it, not in a destination-and this could constitute a perfectly respectable point of view (though hardly a striking one) if Fairburn, rising to a romantic crescendo in the last lines, had not tossed it overboard: the dolphins gliding and breaking at our bows will lead us on, and the wind filling our sails gather us into glory. Is it mere pedantry to ask, of a poem that has presumed to instruct us, what this 'glory' means; and to point out that if it means any- tht'ng, it contradicts the whole of the preceding argument? The weight of the poem's didactic argument is further called in doubt by the alterations of tone, and more, by the elaboration of the idea. The idea, as such, is very simple. It is, after all, capable of state- ment in the Notes. If the length of the poem were truly governed by the idea it might well be brief. But the metaphor of the voyage is extended, and for what other reason than to produce 'poetry'-more and more of it? The philosophical pretension is, in fact, only an excuse for the aesthetic exercise. 'The Voyage' is not so much a single poem as a small collection- some comic verse, some fine lyric passages, and a prophetic utterance -contained loosely within the one structural metaphor. 'To a Friend in the Wilderness' might seem to possess a more genuine unity. Fair- burn's evocation in this poem of the rural pursuits he delighted in is as fine as anything of that kind he wrote-though its force, too, is diminished because it seems to lack a natural length, internally governed, and to stop only for want of breath. But again the poem asks to be considered as an argument, and again the argument ends on the brink where life (and poetry) might be expected to begin. How seriously is one to take a poet who asks himself, or pretends to ask, and at length, whether he should depart from human society and teach his children 'stone-age crafts, usingjsuch simple gear as might be stored in a cave,jor stowed in an ark'? That he decides against the idea is hardly the point. I simply question what made him think such an elementary decision might make dramatic sub- stance for poetry. A formidable intellectual lady once told me that 'To a Friend in the Wilderness' was 'the finest statement of the humanist position by a New Zealander'. Another, to whom I quoted the remark, said 'That, of course, is cant'. It is; and it is all the poem's pretensions deserve. To locate life's deficiencies outside oneself, and yet live with them solemnly out of a sense of moral responsibility, is at once to negate life and to take too much upon oneself. There is no evidence 379 in this poem that Fairburn has imagined his way into the lives of those he calls (unconsciously echoing the comic opening of 'The Voyage') 'my people', and to whom he dedicates himself. They exist only as a loosely assorted collection of grotesques. The gesture in their direction is only a gesture; and for all the evidence the poem offers, the reason for renouncing the ideal life described in it might as well be that it did not exist, or that the cave lacked hot water, as that the poet felt any genuine obligation. The poem's merits are wholly descriptive; but even the actual world described is breath- lessly translated into an ideal, a Platonic, one: on that shore despair withers in the sun, in the salt air, love goes gloveless, faith is naked, the eye stares at the skeleton fact, the doomed lips smile at truth revealed, cry welcome to the flux, the fire, the fury, the dance of substance on the needle-point of mind.... It is sleight of hand which asks us to credit with a high sense of social responsibility the decision not to live in an ideal world. No man is offered the choice. Meeting the poem as an argument one can only reply that girl and boy, busy matron, sad-faced successful man, prim saint and puzzled sinner, grim loser and bad winner, pimp and peeping Tom, snotty-nosed cherub, anonymous letter writer, sleek parasite and host, master and slave, owl-eye, chew-cud, wolf-jaw, ferret-face .... these-if they exist at all-would not be helped by a poet's renuncia- tion on their behalf; but that he would be helped a good deal by seeing them as human beings. * * * * F airburn is sometimes represented as a man of many accomplish- ments, of which poetry was merely one-a man relatively indifferent to literary success. I don't believe this is true of him. Under all his self-protective changes of colour he remained an ambitious poet, anxious to get on. His Collected Poems is full of that anxiety. One hears a good deal about his bewildering variety. It is, rather, varieties of bewilderment. The personality that comes out of these pages, even on its funniest pages, is fragmented, frantic and disappointed. He tries too much and too hard, and lacks certainty about all he does. The word 'immature' creeps up on me again and again, and I 380 censure my own impertinence only to replace it with 'precocious'. Even the poems written in middle age seem precocious; and I find myself inclined to speak of the things I like not as 'poems' but as 'performances'. A talent is constantly on display, but where are the poems? They are there of course. But to measure them against the uses to which such energy might have been put, against their own apparent ambitions, is to find them wanting, and by a test they seem to invite. I know Eliot meant it, and was right, when he said 'the poetry does not matter'. It was something Wordsworth, too, might have taught Fairburn, had Fairburn looked more than longingly and from a distance into his work. The human personality transmuted mto poetry, or transmitted through it, is what matters-its magni- tude, its strength, its capacity to suffer and affirm the common range of experience, and to lose itself there. I have in mind some lines by James K. Baxter. Come now; Poems are trash, the flesh I love will die Desire is baffiement, But one may say that father Noah kept Watch while the wild beasts slept. F airburn knew 'the flesh I love will die'. He proved, but hardly abstracted into a consistent understanding, that 'desire is baffiement'. But did he ever guess at the truth that, if poems are not trash, at least 'the poetry does not matter'? It is only within that understand- ing that poems which matter are written. To live one's life accord- ing to an ideal notion of what is appropriate to a 'Poet' is to live a dream, and to deprive oneself of the substance out of which poems are made. Am I saying-what might seem at first glance the reverse of the truth-that Fairburn gave poetry precedence over the quality of life, and as a punishment was defeated by both? The punishment seems outrageous.

381 Commentaries

JUDITH WRIGHT Australian Letter

ONE of the most indignant books to appear here lately is called The Great Extermination, and bitterly sub-titled 'A Guide to Anglo- Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste'. It deals, as you might guess, with what we Anglo-Australians are doing to our landscape and wildlife; and it has caused a small-but so far only a small- commotion among the people at whom it is directed. It is not easy to convince us that in Australia itself there is anything really worth respect, and even harder to prevent us from laying it waste. Yet the book has annoyed a few people. We are getting accustomed to having certain strictures made upon us; nowadays we even smirk a little when we are told that we are mindless, casual, self-satisfied and materialistic, and that our prosperity is more a matter of good luck than good management. We are not quite so pleased to be called wasteful; to call us greedy and wicked seems to us to be going too far. But this time we can scarcely say that the man who shakes his fist at us through this book is just a bloody journalist. He is that fiercely Australian, republican, windmill-tilting character, Professor 'Jock' Marshall, author of several books and noted here and overseas as zoologist and comparative physiologist; and the amiable whiskers he is wearing in the photograph on the back jacket conceal a most formidable chin. The situation the book deals with is becoming uncomfortably obvious now in all the 'new' countries-New Zealand, no doubt, not excepted. It is the rapidly worsening status of the original plant and animal species of the continent, and the general uglification-a Carroll-word that can't be escaped-that goes with it. Some of this is of course inseparable from our settling into the country, but as Marshall makes clear, far more of it is due to wanton ignorance, cruelty, unchecked economic exploitation, and a curious kind of attitude to the place itself which can only be called hostility. Of all new countries, perhaps Australia has aroused most distaste in her new settlers. Her climate, trees, animals and even soils were wholly unfamiliar; she refused to yield easily, and her beauties were 382 too subtle for the English eye. We brought here an inner landscape, so to speak, which differed at every point from what we found. Perhaps it has been a kind of self-protective psychological compensa- tion that has made us burn, shoot, chop down and destroy whatever we could. We replace it, if at all, with something nearer to the heart's desire-a conifer or an elm; a geranium or a rabbit-warren. Over the past years, however, a certain conscience has been aroused where the most obvious exploitations are concerned; we have a National Parks movement, there is some protective legisla- tion (seldom up-to-date and seldom policed with any enthusiasm). But once again our schizophrenic arrangements leave each State the control of its own affairs, and some States are painfully backward, while there is no Federal control or advisory system to centralize what is a continental-not a State-problem. Professor Marshall naturally finds his main area of concern in what has happened to the unlucky wearers of fur or feathers since the first settler shot the first wallaby. He brings in other scientists to plead other cases-those of reptiles, plants, forests, marine and freshwater animals-and at least as damning a story could have been told by soil scientists and water-conservationists, if there had been space. The book's total conclusion is that we have been living off the country by waste and exploitation, and that a reckoning is on the way. It is on the sheep-farmer that Marshall lays most of the blame for Australia's devastated ecosystems and endangered species. In the interests of the flocks, forests have been laid waste, well-adapted plant communities altered past retrieval, soils bared, watersheds eroded, the larger animals shot and poisoned out of existence and the smaller ones robbed of habitat. Now the farmer faces continuing deterioration of soils and pasture, and increasing weed-invasion; rabbits and grasshoppers flourish in the absence of their natural predators, feral cats and foxes replace the smaller mammals and reptiles which once kept insect plagues at bay. (Leach, the ornithologist, once saw a flock of 240,000 ibis breeding on a Riverina plain. Those shot were found to contain in their crops an average of 2,000 very young grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are an increasing hazard to farmers in many districts now; they have to be attacked by aerial poison-spraying, and in this highly expensive process the few remaining predators are also killed.) Our unremitting attack on Australia's most characteristic large animal, the kangaroo, still goes on, with industries such as pet-food factories and kangaroo-skin coats and souvenirs for tourists keeping the slaughter at high pitch. Modern methods (jeep and night spot- 383 light shooting) and the long drought years increase the danger of extermination, and while money rolls in it is not at all likely that Governments will act. But it is gradually being realized that the slaughter may be economically unsound. The Red kangaroo, the shooters' chief target, has recently been the subject of research and it is now known that a full-sized kangaroo eats no more than a sheep (not four times as much, as graziers allege), does not under normal conditions eat the pastures preferred by sheep, but those coarser plants which would otherwise increase in the pa§ture, and has a protein conversion rate which is far and away better than that of any hoofed animal. It may well be the best investment a protein- hungry world could ask of us, to allow the Red kangaroo to re- establish itself on the marginal western lands which we are rapidly turning into semi-desert by overstocking them with sheep. But we are evidently bent on exterminating it, and are probably far too conservatively minded to start kangaroo-farming at this stage. Our treatment of our forests has certainly been economically disastrous. We have never been rich in these, and our forestry policy -such as it has been-is condemned wholeheartedly by the writers of the relevant chapters in Marshall's book. The almost total destruc- tion of the Red Cedar was complete by the beginning of this century. Great forests, rich in cabinet-woods, were cleared and burned out of hand in an orgy of waste, and farms established instead. These farms, in such areas as the Dorrigo and Richmond and the North Queensland tablelands, are now problem dairying country, much of it heavily eroded and a threat to the flood-plains below in wet seasons. The shaded and protected volcanic soils once robbed of forest humus, were too poor to stand exposure and heavy grazing. Other plant-communities have suffered just as much. 'Man is the most destructive of all animals', laments the botanist Turner in his melancholy survey of the decline of Australian plant associations. And when the plants go, or their associations alter, there is not much chance for their dependent warm-blooded animals and insects. But in any case, the Australian is convinced that all indigenous animals are a threat to the existence of the sacred sheep and cow, or to his crops and chickens. Birds of prey and reptiles are among the unluckiest of our species. Though eagles and hawks are excellent rabbit-predators, the few that are left are fast being shot out for their occasional taking of a lamb or chicken; and few Australians can tell a venomous snake from a non-venomous, or for that matter a lizard from either; while crocodiles and marine turtles are econom- ically valuable species with little or no protection or sympathy. The use of pesticides, poisons and hormone sprays is almost uncontrolled 384 (except in Victoria, where some legislation is now being enacted); there are almost no land-planning authorities with the slightest regard for the values of Australian landscapes, or even for erosion- control; and the land-developer has already ruined much of the Australian coastline, with the aid of rutile sand-mining companies. The tale of destruction is unfortunately increasing, with not much sign of a change of attitude. We do have the beginnings of an Aus- tralian Conservation Foundation which will concern itself with the urgent question of more national parks and wildlife reserves, and with public education in such matters. So far, however, it is starved of money and looks like staying so; and its function will be wholly advisory. One or two politicians, at State and Federal levels, are beginning to take an interest in the unpopular cause of conservation of wildlife; a rural University runs valuable public seminars; there are energetic private societies, one of which runs a popular Australia- wide magazine; and there are men, like Alan Moorehead and Jock Marshall, who speak out. But I have not seen The Great Extermina- tion listed among Books in Demand as yet. On the whole, Australia's tragedy is probably that she was settled by the English. No other race could have brought so sentimentally opposite a picture with them of what landscape should be. And even now, to most of us, a pink plastic gladdie is a far lovelier sight than a waratah.

M A c D. P. J A C K S 0 N Vrama in Auckland July 1965-July 1966

THE ABOVE DATEs are approximate, but during the roughly twelve- month period which this survey covers some seventy-five drama productions have been publicized and reviewed in the local papers. Only ten of these were by visiting groups. At least fifteen Auckland drama groups have presented two or more plays during the period; among the better-known and most competent are the W.E.A. Drama Club, Central Theatre, Community Players, Grafton Theatre, and the University Drama Society-now the University Theatre Com- pany; other particularly active groups are the Howick Little Theatre, the Mairangi Players, the Remuera Players, the Titirangi Drama 385 Group, and the Onehunga Repertory Players. Nearly thirty of the plays presented were works of some consequence, or at least with some pretensions, by contemporary playwrights; a similar number could be categorized as light entertainment-of the Treasure Island or Witness for the Prosecution variety; and a dozen were well-estab- lished classics of the theatre by such dramatists as Shakespeare, Euri- pides, Chekhov, Sheridan, and Ibsen. The categories tend to overlap, of course, and some productions fall only into a miscellaneous group. The proportion of light-weight comedies and thrillers is perhaps unnecessarily high, when television and the cinema provide vast quantities of such entertainment, but it is satisfactory to note the wide range of serious contemporary plays offered. The absence of any Elizabethan or Jacobean plays by dramatists other than Shake- speare is notable; it is a pity that many of the finest plays written in English are seldom, if ever, performed in this country. Very few New Zealand plays were staged. In the junior section of the British Drama League Festival of one-act plays, Westlake Girls' High School performed Bruce Mason's The Pohutukawa Tree. Three short plays by the New Zealanders John Barningham, David Andrews, and Kenneth McKenney, though dropped from the Auckland Festival official programme at the last moment, were per- formed by Community Players, McKenney's, The Escape of Harry Springer, with considerable success. The Community Players' Play- wrights' Workshop gives new play-scripts by local writers a trial run, followed by an assessment from some invited 'authority' and a general discussion. The evening I went an obviously impossible piece was staged and the comments were fatuous. I saw thirty of the seventy-five productions. In general I avoided those that occasioned reviews beginning in the following vein: 'This is a comedy-drama on the eternal problem of the mother-in-law. And what a brass-throated harridan Emma Hornett is!' But some of the more pretentious offerings were painful enough. The Univer- sity presented Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, which has been taken seriously as an early example (1894) of avant-garde theatre; but the average Goon Show has more important 'philosophical implications' (the programme notes told us about these) and is infinitely more enter- taining. The production (which, said Roger Harris in the Auckland Star, 'would make the first undress rehearsal of an undergraduate review seem like classic Greek theatre') may not have done the play justice, of course, and the difficulties of translation may partially account for the monstrous inanity of the dialogue. A dismal failure of a similar kind was the W.E.A. production of Ping Pang, 'a new type of play by Arthur Adamov, translated from the French by 386 Derek Prouse'. This wearisome theatre-of-the-absurd anti-drama, 'new' only in the degree of its banality, got the sort of acting it deserved. A much more intelligent rendering of a much more intelligent theatre-of-the-absurd play was Tom Finlayson's University produc- tion of Ionesco's Victims of Duty, a bizarre mixture of surrealist- ic fantasy, psycho-analysis, and (surprisingly) didacticism, which brought together three of the most accomplished actors in Auckland (Alexander Guyan, Michael Noonan, and Robert Leek) and two competent actresses (Jill Retter and Nicky Boyes). It was as vivid and inconsequent as a dream-and as soon forgotten, I find. The University productions were mostly of some interest. There were few weaknesses in the group's version of the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Diirrenmatt's Ramulus the Great, most imaginatively pro- duced by a visitor from Oxford, Daphne Levens. Romulus, disgusted with the corruption and cruelty of Rome, intentionally precipitates its fall by attending not to his Empire but to his chickens. Donald Hampton responded with admirable subtlety and flexibility to the enormous demands of the title role. His encounter at the end of the play with Michael Noonan, cast as the invading Teutonic leader Odoacer, another chicken-fancier to whom the excesses of war are distasteful, was one of the most satisfying scenes played on an Auckland stage this year. Arne Nannestaadt's settings conveyed the right decadent atmosphere. University's open-air production of The Tempest, on a large three- level site, was a near-success. Cheryl Sotheran was a perfect Miranda, matched with an embarrassingly wooden Ferdinand. John Betts gave the best performance of Caliban I have seen, arousing due com- passion as well as repugnance; Neil Smith (Stephano) and Stewart Ross (Trinculo) formed an exceptionally talented comic duo; and Brian McKay as Gonzalo seemed 'an honest old counsellor' indeed. Paul Day was physically effective as Prospero and spoke his lines with obvious feeling for the verse, but he appeared nervous and stumbled over some of them on the night I saw the production. The spirits, nymphs, and reapers provided a galumphing floor-show. Decidedly successful was School for Scandal, with the same pro- ducer, John Dixon. The actors were, in the words of the New Zealand Herald reviewer, 'exquisitely gowned and wigged, complete with bustles, frills and taffetas, cocky gestures and the airs and graces of the period', while 'colour schemes for the sets exactly set the mood'. Robert Leek was an endearingly disgruntled Sir Peter Teazle, to whom Helen Smith as his wife was a delightful foil; and 387 Nicholas Tarling effortlessly underwent his various metamorphoses as Sir Oliver Surface. The Community Players' revival of Beaumarchais' mannered com- edy The Marriage of Figaro, or His Lordship as they called it to avoid confusion with the operatic version, was similarly remark- able for the charm, grace, and authenticity of the costumes (Dart Douglas) and sets ( Christopher Black well), enhanced by imagina- tive lighting. The producer, Murray Alford, had prepared a lively translation, and cuts made in the text were sensible. I thought that the production captured the essential spirit of the play, and that while several of the actors were weak, the peculiar talents of Barry Dorking as Figaro, Kevin Wilson as the affected music master Bazile, and Diana Carter as Rosine achieved full realization in the parts which these actors were assigned. Urged by Roger Harris that one 'must not miss' the 'magnificent, sizzling' Howick Little Theatre production of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, I made the journey, prepared to see Alma Woods playing the taxing role of the passionate Sicilian Serafina 'with the dynamic power of an active volcano', prepared to see her 'frightening outbursts . . . contrasted with moments of a quietly simmering intensity'. I found her good in the comic parts, but her range of voice and gesture was limited, so that such phenomena as the Fright- ening Outbursts were not always convincing. Opposite her, Sam Winer was well suited to the role of the truck-driver Alvaro. He was the only actor in the large cast to speak the Italian phrases with assurance and adopt a plausible Italian accent and manner. The set, designed by Hugh Phillips, was striking, conforming well to the author's conception as indicated in his detailed production notes. Very few Auckland actors can sustain an assumed accent. Chris Cathcart overcame the problem in his W.E.A. production of Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet by choosing his cast from actors either Irish or of Irish descent. Con Melody, the central figure in the play, is a former Irish officer, now a pub-owner in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, where his image of himself as gentleman and hero is gradually dimmed by reality. Con O'Leary, in an extraordinarily sympathetic portrayal, brought Melody to life in all his complexity. Another American drama, Burning Bright, adapted from the 'play novelette' by John Steinbeck, was produced by Randell Wackrow for Central Theatre in the intimate atmosphere of the Barry Lett art gallery, with seating for no more than about forty people, arranged in a semi-circle around a small playing area. The sets consisted of background sketches on screens, and properties were kept to a mini- mum. The acting was thus all-important. Fortunately, the production 388 had two very good actors in Rhys Jones and Elspeth Harbutt, and the other two actors required by the play were suitably enough cast to be adequate. All three of the American plays I have mentioned seemed to me to suffer from patches of grossly written dialogue-'poetry' it often gets called. In each play some of the speeches degenerate into senti- mentality, spuriously toughened up by the incongruous use of collo- quialisms. The trouble with modern naturalistic plays is that when the dramatist wants to make a Serious Statement or express Power- ful Feelings he too often forgets that the only convincing medium he has is the natural idiom of the characters he has created, and writes purple passages rendered embarrassing by the everyday-life atmosphere of the play as a whole. Max Frisch's Andorra, in trans- lation at any rate, was not free from this fault. In the Community Players' production the main roles of Andri and Barblin proved too demanding for the young actors playing them; but Clyde Scott, Harold Kissen, and Peter Carroll gave excellent performances. The Tiger by Murray Schisgal is one modern American play in which the dialogue is brilliant. A radically non-conformist bachelor and a respectable housewife are thrown into a violent conflict which is neatly resolved. A Central Theatre production starring (and this, for once, is the right word) A verill Crook and Sam Winer, got off to a breath-taking start and did not flag for a moment. The producer was once more Randell W ackrow, who seems to specialize in pro- ducing plays with few actors in an informal setting. His Central Theatre production in 1964 of Pinter's The Caretaker (with Jim Coates, Alistair Meldrum, and Gordon Styles) was superb. The translation used for the W.E.A. production of The Cherry Orchard was inadequate in the ways referred to by Margaret Walker in her admirable notes on 'Translating Chekhov' in the June 1957 Landfall: it was often stilted and it blurred distinctions between characters and their relationships to one another. This meant that the stated aim of producer Lorenz von Sommaruga, to vindicate Chekhov's insistence that the play was a comedy, even in places a farce, was doomed from the start, though the cast was a strong one, with Chris Cathcart, Tom Rutter, and Ted McAllister outstanding among the men as Gayev ('cannon off the cush'), the eighty-seven- year-old Peers, and Simeonov-Pishchik the landowner, respectively; while J acqui Porteous played V aria, 'a nun, a silly girl ... a serious and religious girl ... a cry-baby by nature ... a very charming girl' (as Chekhov himself variously described her), with beautiful restraint and, at the right moments, real power. Ironically, Henry James's masterfully constructed novel Washing- 389 ton Square, modified for the stage as The Heiress by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, is more essentially dramatic, with its credibly worked-out conflicts between and within all the main characters, than almost any modern play. Errice Montague's Grafton production was eminently satisfying. Jocelyn Robinson was good in the title- role; among her ablest supporters were Ronald Montague, Hazel Cole, Les Hunt, and Lois Paynter. The 1966 Auckland Festival was notable for the visit of the Athens Drama Company, who presented in modern Greek lphigenia in Aulis by Euripides and Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Captions were projected onto screens in the wings. These were brief and hard to see, but a knowledge of Greek proved no more necessary to an appreciative response than a knowledge of Italian is essential to the enjoyment of a Verdi opera. The beautifully stylized gestures, the variety of tone in the actors' voices, and above all the expressive movement and vocal music of the chorus, constituted a rich and complex dramatic language which could be understood by every- body acquainted with the plot. The point is not that the words them- selves are unimportant, but that because the actors so fully under- stood the meaning of their lines (understood with their senses as well as their minds) they were able to convey to the audience more of the poetry of Euripides' play than is apt to survive in an English versiOn. John Betts produced The Trojan Women (by Euripides) for the University, also as part of the Festival. As Jack Tresidder remarked in the Star, the acting-styles and the tone of the translation veered from matter-of-factness to melodrama: 'At one end of the scale Ronald Smith (the herald) is dispensing the horrific edicts of the Greek army in a "let's be sensible about this chaps" voice while at the other Margaret Blay (Hecuba) is bewailing Troy's fall in an interminable broken sob.' The unconvincing simulation of unrelieved agony rapidly becomes comic; certainly this production failed to attain tragedy. Cheryl Sotheran, as Andromache, allowed the pathos of her situation to speak for itself. Other Auckland Festival plays were Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, in a mediocre Grafton production (the choice of such a play provided the main element of mystery), and Anouilh's The Rehearsal produced by Jean Ingram for the Titirangi Drama Group. The New Zealand Theatre Centre's version of Oh What a Lovely War was also presented at the Festival. I endorse the general acclaim accorded The Comedy of Errors, which was in no way inferior to the original Stratford-on-A von pro- duction as I remember it. Another much-praised visiting production, 390 the Harold Lang Voyage Theatre Company's Macbeth in Camera- in which a young academic festival-organizer clashes with some actors over the rehearsal of Macbeth-simply irritated me because what no doubt started as an impromptu private debate, as Mr Lang claimed, became hopelessly artificial when re-enacted before an audience, and because the academic was too great an idiot and one could anticipate by several minutes the actors' heavy-handed argu- ments against him. I should like at least to mention that Pinter's The Birthday Party was reasonably well performed by the W estlake Adult Drama Group; that The Knack was produced by Community Players, H edda Gabler by the Titirangi group; and that part of the York Mystery Cycle was presented in St Mary's Cathedral by Theatre Guild under John Thomson's direction. Mention should also be made of the satirical review Current Offence: for three months a talented team (Alexander Guyan, Michael Noonan, Moon McCowan, Philip Thwaites, and Lindsey Bog le) presented three nights a week at the Wynyard Tavern a changing repertoire of lively topical skits; Francis Kuipers played the guitar and sang. I hope that these sketchy remarks about a selection of recent productions have suggested the diversity and diffusion of activity in Auckland drama. Not more than half-a-dozen of the local produc- tions I saw reached the standard which Downstage in Wellington now habitually achieves (though the actual building which the Downstage actors use is no more impressive than any one of the motley collection of makeshift acting-places used by Auckland ama- teurs). The obvious and hackneyed conclusion is that Auckland's considerable acting talent is diffused among far too many groups, though admittedly there is regular interchange. We have several versatile actors and actresses, and a great many more who can give an excellent account of themselves in the right role. We have several imaginative designers of sets (CoJin McCahon is one) and of cos- tumes, many efficient technicians, and one or two competent and conscientious producers. But sufficient talent seldom converges upon any one production. In the past the annual amalgamation of the Grafton and University groups in a Shakespeare production has often yielded satisfying results. Current efforts to form professional theatre in Auckland (under Arts Council patronage, of course) will presumably lead to more fruitful use of our resources. So far we have only a 'board' with six members, or there may be twelve by now. Discussion seems to have centred on proposals for the building itself-something tangible. The question of what policy our board should pursue would offer material for another article altogether. 391 siNGs HARRY. For tenor voice and piano. Poems by Denis Glover, Music by Douglas Lilburn. Otago University Press. 7s. 6d. DouGLAS LILBURN's song cycle Sings Harry was written in 1954 and has been available for the last four years on record. Now Otago University Press has given us the music. New Zealand composers have partly discovered, partly created their own small listening public, but they have yet to discover performers of their work, apart from the well-known few devotees of modern music who have worked strenuously to bring the present-day music of Europe to New Zealand as well as giving the New Zealand composer the odd chance to hear his work. The student of music has had to wait since 1954 to have the text of Sings Harry in front of him and he will have to search long and hard to find even a little other work by New Zealand composers in print. Otago University Press and other pub- lishers would be doing an essential service if they were to publish even a representative selection of works written in New Zealand in the last fifteen years; the list would not be unimpressive in quality. Mr Lilburn's compositional thought is presented in essential out- line in this song cycle: there are no unnecessary notes but there is no sparseness either. Each piece is built up from some simple harmonic or melodic idea which is clearly stated and remains undeveloped and unembellished. For example, the first piece is constructed out of an E minor chord; the quiet ripple of these chords, separated by figures containing out-of-key accidentals, produces a guitar-like effect under- neath the almost modal quality of the melodic line. In the third piece Harry reflects upon and regrets having left the land. The music is a softly rising theme which appears first in the piano right hand, then left, then in the vocal line. A simple idea but effective. For the most part the vocal line in all six pieces moves smoothly and remains closely within a small compass; it is eminently singable musiC. New Zealand has very few ballads and folk-songs but in the Sings Harry cycle Douglas Lilburn has created something like what one would have expected this kind of music to be. The moods, feel- ings and thoughts of Harry, the persona of the poems, are revealed in the images of a particular landscape in which he has lived and the people he has known; the music is also of that landscape and those people. A listening public always lags behind the composer and Douglas 392 Lilburn's case is no exception. Those who have heard his electronic settings of poems by other poets feel that the same musical quality of the Sings Harry cycle is present and even more evident in the newer medium. The musical delineation of the verse transcends the tech- nique and medium used, whether piano sounds or electronic sounds. Robert Nola

PIG ISLAND LETTERS. James K. Baxter. Oxford University Press. 18s. THE TITLE sequence, thirteen verse letters to Maurice Shadbolt, de- fines the themes of the volume, both the public and satirical and the personal and lyrical. The other poems-some personal statements, some dramatic monologues-deal with the same themes, although often less directly. The public themes concern New Zealand society, the repression and the lack of love caused by 'the Calvinist ethos which underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot-work is good; sex is evil; do what you're told and you'll be all right; don't dig too deep into yourself' ('Beginnings', Landfall 75). Letter 2 of the title sequence successfully presents these themes in a picture of a farm family. The mother, work-oriented, frightened of sex, love's 'walk- ing parody', is central: That brisk gaunt woman in the kitchen Feeding the coal range, sullen To all strangers, lest one should be Her antique horn-red Satan. Her husband, 'much baffled', occupies himself with pub and work, while her daughter prepares herself at training college to be a more modern loveless woman. The son moodily goes his own way with his dog and traps, but he has seen a vision of retribution for the denial of love and instinct, 'An angel with a sword' waiting to 'split the house like a rotten totara log'. The denial of love is further presented in three dramatic monologues. In 'Thoughts of a Remuera Housewife', a frustrated, tranquillizer-addicted woman, stuck with a husband she does not love, mourns the emigration of her lover. In 'Henley Pub', a travelling salesman caught between fleshly desire and religious guilt wishes for his own death. In 'A Takapuna Busi- ness Man Considers his Son's Death in Korea', a father ponders the mistakes he made with his rebellious son. Each poem builds a con- crete, individualized character and situation, but each also points to the malady of New Zealand society (note the use of place names), and, beyond that, to a more universal ill, implied by the use of 393 the archetypal images of Pluto-Orpheus-Eurydice, Samson-Delilah, David-Absalom-Joab. Other poems in the title sequence make rather vague gestures towards relating inner ills to outer institutions: A skinny wench in jeans with a kea's eye: The rack on which our modern martyrs die .... Holyoake yammering from a kauri stump- God save us all! I need a stomach pump. (Letter 4) For me it is the weirs that mention The love that we destroy By long evasion, politics and art, And speech that is a kind of contraception. (Letter 7) Letter 8 approaches social failure from another angle. It begins movingly with the image of the poet's father tortured for his con- scientious objection in World War I: His black and swollen thumbs Explained the brotherhood of man. But the stanza on the gap between his father's hopes and the welfare- state actuality is weak, a confusing multiplicity of images failing to compensate for a lack of concrete substance: And we have seen our strong Antaeus die In the glass castle of the bureaucracies Robbing our bread of salt. Shall Marx and Christ Share beds this side of Jordan? Thus the general conclusion is rather hollow, not adequately sup- ported by concrete particulars: Political action in its source is pure, Human, direct, but in its civil function Becomes the jail it laboured to destroy. 'To a Print of Queen Victoria' traces social failure further back, to the Victorian past: Incubus and excellent woman, we inherit the bone acre of your cages and laws. More effective is 'Great-Uncles and Great-Aunts', with its striking image of repression: 394 the lack ate inwardly like fire in piled-up couchgrass too green for it, billowing smoke. Several poems link these public themes with the personal themes. Those on the poet's adolescence relate him to his society, for he sees himself as having defined his own identity by opposition to it, choosing to make his life 'flow like a river into the gulf of Bohemia' ('Beginnings'). He recounts finding liberation in drink: And when I made a mother of the keg The town split open like an owl's egg, Breaking the ladders down; In sex: In the bed of a girl with long plaits I found the point of entry, The place where father Adam died (Letter 3); in nature: Again and again I came And was healed of the daftness, the demon in the head And the black knot in the thighs, by a silence that Accepted all. ('The Hollow Place') The present 'poet as family man' acknowledges his debt to the self created in youth, the 'Convict self, incorrigible, scarred/With what the bottle and the sex games taught', for he 'gets all his meat from the skull-faced twin ... Struggling to speak through the gags of a poem' (Letter 9). But much that made that self is now lost or modified with the decline of that youthful 'hunger [that] caught/ Each of us, and left us burnt' (Letter 6). Several poems, acknowledg- ing this 'menopause of the mind', elegize what is lost and explore what is left. Letter 11, one of the best, records the father's sense of having lost forever the childhood world of his son: And no one may enter the tree house That hides the bones of a child in the forest of a man. 'Waipatiki Beach' records the loss of the intense youthful response to nature. 'The Beach House' contrasts the more tranquil, assured love of maturity with the wild hunger of youth, while 'Near Kapiti' building a similar contrast, asks 'Can/A temperate love atone/For what it shuts out?', and ends more negatively: 'Too much/Com- promise; the hour's edge is blunted'. Letter 13 and 'Easter Testa- ment' point towards a possible religious affirmation gained in matur- ity, but neither, to me, communicates a fully-realized experience. 395 Though unified by these common themes, the poems differ greatly in impact. Many are marred by clotted and obsessive imagery- sexual, scatological, Biblical, and mythical; by a forced and overly portentous tone; by inexact language; by private allusions; or, in such poems as Letters 3, 4, and 9, by a loose structure. Such a poem as 'Ballad of One Tree Hill', an elegy for Bob Lowry, fails, for me, because of these flaws (contrast it with Kevin Ireland's simple, under- stated, moving 'Threnody' in Landfall 75). But in the best poems- such as Letters 2 and 11, 'Tomcat' (with its wry suggestion of self- symbolism), or 'The Beach House'-the images and the deceptively casual half-rhymes work, the tone is sustained, and a concrete, coherent, telling experience is communicated. These poems bear out the prophecy of Letter 1: In the Otago storms Carrying spray to salt the landward farms The wind is a drunkard. Whoever can listen Long enough will write again. Lawrence Jones

THE NEEDLE's EYE. Errol Brathwaite. Collins. 22s. FOR THE REST OF ouR LIVES. Dan Davin. Michaelfoseph and Paul. 25s. THE sECOND NOVEL in Errol Brathwaite's Maori Wars trilogy is set in the W aikato during the full-scale war operations of 1863. This shift in the war setting from the first novel, The Flying Fish, which used the beginnings of the war in Taranaki in 1861, is reflected by a similar shift of scale amongst the issues with which the books con- front us. The first novel offered an attenuated version of what might be called the classical pathos of civil war, where neighbours and friends have to fight each other. It begins with a pre-war idyll of Pakeha and Maori farmer working in partnership, and ends with the two partners brought face to face in battle, at the war's point of no return. The conclusion is left in the pathos, with the Maori murdered, not by his partner, and the partner subsequently killed by his own death-wish and an anonymous enemy. The Needle's Eye has a different and larger purpose. The civil war situation is lifted from the individual to the community level and represented not simply as a matter for pathos but in terms of the particular problems it sets for the military and religious authori- ties of a community in such a situation. The plot steadily ravels itself into a political dilemma where the niceties of both the military and religious codes of morality can be shown to their greatest in- effectiveness. The scale is larger, less personal, and the niceties are 396 clearer than in the first novel. But again, the conclusion, if it is one, is simply the pathos, the pity that things worked out the way they did. The dilemma which is the drawn-out crisis isn't so much re- solved as dissolved. This is one objection to the book; one reads one's way into the meticulous tangle of the moral and political dilemma, only to find in the end the author cutting through the Gordian knot of his own making. It apparently results from the perennial difficulty of this type of historical fiction, trying to run the historical tortoise in harness with the fictional hare. Historical fiction has usually been cold-shouldered by both its parents, whether it uses its historical settings for fictional purposes or merely plants the occasional flower of fiction along the straight and narrow of history. On the one hand history is inflexible and on the other fiction isn't history. An author can stick to his historical realism and sacrifice most of the possibili- ties of fiction, or limit his historical scope in order to expand his fictional purposes. The more ambitiously he works at the one the less chance he has of getting far with the other. Mr Brathwaite's approach to his historical material is on the whole responsible, though perhaps a little too romantically according to Cowan. The only fictional insertion large enough to clash with the historical setting is Williams' Horse, the dragoon company to which the main fictional characters and events belong and which is credited with evolving the close fighting tactics actually initiated by V on Tempsky's Forest Rangers. If one grants him this, one must also allow him his reconstructions of General Cameron's staff conferences and of the historical personalities at them. A historical novelist is most open to question over his reading of historical personalities, of course, and one might concoct a different view of Cameron's personality from Mr Brathwaite's in the light of his conduct for instance over the W eraroa affair before his resignation in 1865. But this is a subordin- ate consideration if the fiction takes precedence as in this case it does. If one accepts its historical accuracy it makes an entertaining though pedestrian narrative (brown forms are always flitting through the Brathwaite scrub), as any war history will. But the story refin- ing as it does on the historical material centres on the fictitious Williams' Horse and therefore necessarily makes history not much more than background colouring. The interest and entertainment depend on the moral dilemma in the book's crisis, which is a matter of fiction. And as fiction it is unsatisfying because it isn't resolved. It isn't resolved because the historical facts wouldn't allow it. So the fictional hare started by the moral purpose in the end loses to the historical tortoise. 397 Dan Davin's For the Rest of our Lives was his second novel, originally published in 1947. Like The Needle's Eye it is a war book, though of a very different kind. Its setting is the New Zealand Division in the North African desert in 1941-2. Lawrence Baigent, reviewing it in Landfall when it first appeared, concluded that since it had no plot it must be about the three main characters; and that since none of the three had any individuality it must have been written simply out of the determination to write a novel. This is looking at it in Brathwaite terms. It hasn't a plot because it follows the war through the desert, and it hasn't characters so much as figments of an ideal. The three main characters in particular and the Division in general are celebrated in the book as a joint perfec- tion of manhood and efficiency. The title (which like the characters is entirely solemn and bears no relation to any living mattress adver- tisement) refers to the durability of this ideal. A very different book from Brave Company, it does a similar kind of job in a more cere- bral way. Mr Davin himself offered a perspective on it in a later novel about New Zealand ex-servicemen in post-war London, where he wrote of one of them that the war 'belonged to him and his friends. Superficially it was mainly a joke for them, a playground of reminiscence; privately, it was an idealized past, heroic, sacred, a kind of Westminster Abbey, where the best was buried, the best of yourself, and those of your friends who by being dead could no longer be seen quite as they had really been. It wasn't the sort of thing you could talk about except with those who had been there and knew the language.' The war we are given for the rest of our lives is a publicly idealized past where the best is acclaimed not buried, and where the war is talked about as a heroic reality. It is unmistakably written as one-man history, personal rather than private and not so much a record of events as of what they signified to the author. This dependency on a private history limits its value- at least for such readers as Mr Baigent and this reviewer who were not there. For the outsider it's less of a revelation and more of an assertion of its own values of manhood and military efficiency. An assertion of this kind doesn't even have as fiction the virtues of Mr Brathwaite's moral crisis. What is outstanding in the book is its style, a baroque stucco worthy of Palladio himself which puts a noble face on the whole construction. It's certainly the main, and to this reviewer the sole justification for republishing it. A. J. Gurr

398 WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES: NEW ZEALAND FABIAN. Keith Sinclair. Claren- don Press. 42s. PRoFEssoR SINCLAIR has written a brilliant book. It is, in spite of a lack of personal papers, an intimate book, persistently concerned with an individual's story: with Reeves as a young man working sheep, as a cricketer and a clubman, as a fledgling journalist and poli- tician, as a public figure with a great capacity for work and a danger- ously sharp tongue, as an elder statesman looking back upon his earlier excitements from the calm repose of London. The issues of the time are all there (frequently more clearly expounded than in any available text book) but the requirements of biography control the shape and the movement of the book. This is history as a work of art. Possibly it is the more brilliant because the intimate docu- ments do not survive, for the gaps do not remain empty but are filled by an imagination which is both adventurous and controlled. The chief characteristic of the book as a piece of writing is energy. Professor Sinclair has always written well, but here he writes with a control which enables him to forgo the usual norms, to use short abrupt sentences and half-sentences, to exclaim, expostulate, de- nounce, to express his contempt and his approval, to enter the lists against contemporary detractors, to go inside Reeves and to stand apart from him as the occasion requires, to deal out epigrams and elegies, to slip in punch-lines with a deftness which a dramatist could well envy. Consider the following passage, bearing in mind what the Herald still ,means to radically-inclined Aucklanders. In Australia 'a reporter thought he looked "atrabilious and despondent. He has nothing sanguine about him. He looks as if he thought very badly of human nature in general, and as if the majority of his fellow-creatures were 'undesirable immigrants'." With gleeful malice the Herald, in Auckland, republished this description, a parting shot at New Zealand's rejected son, the first great European New Zea- lander.' One may dissent from the judgment, and still admire the literary skill with which it is made. The effects, throughout the book, are plotted with the skill of a novelist and a poet; I do not know of any New Zealand book, other than such a volume of verse as A Small Room with Large Windows or such a novel as After Anzac Day, which has made me so happily aware of the presence of a constantly organizing, contriving and constructing literary intellect. This book is quite as much the achievement of Sinclair the poet as of Sinclair the historian; I would go further and say that it is a finer fruit of his poetic i,magination than any of his collections of verse. The book has, constantly, contemporary overtones and implicit 399 references; sometimes they are obtrusive and graceless. 'In common with perhaps a majority of his countrymen, Atkinson thought the "backbone of this colony is in the country" (he did not ask where was its head).' It is perhaps excusable to detect here the over-reaction of the mid-twentieth century Aucklander, the insecurely urbanized intellectual, making rather heavy work of a self-imposed mission to convey the culture of cities to his country cousins. The Herald's farewell to Reeves comes at the very end of the group of chapters (5 to 15, nearly two hundred pages) which span the years 1887 to 1896 and are the core of the book. The prelude and the epilogue-Reeves before he entered politics and Reeves in the busy but anti-climactic retirement which went on to 1932-are well done but distinctly subordinate. In one sense this is a pity, for one aspect of the later years, Reeves as historiographer, is worth a deeper and more detailed treatment than Professor Sinclair gives it. No one is better equipped than he to discuss this theme and I should have thought that Reeves the historian has had as much impact upon the New Zealand mind as Reeves the legislator upon New Zealand society. This comparative neglect is the penalty paid for the literary shape of the book; the third act must be a denouement, and a new climax would destroy its shape. It is, essentially, the long second act which contains the portrait- in-action of the left-wing hero. Reeves moves, initially, from an advocacy of Canterbury railway construction to identification with the demands of the province's underprivileged; from progress as development to progress as social struggle. A personal animus against the province's well-bred, well-educated and well-to-do, gives bite and venom to the crusade of a privileged man against privilege. He is welcomed in trade unionist and radical circles and execrated by the respectable. He finds this to his taste; he can make stinging speeches and write trenchant editorials. Perhaps his zest is heightened by the chance this alignment gives him to attack those who had succeeded in the kind of ventures in which his father had failed. Elected. in 1887, he spends a couple of years sorting out his national as distinct from his regional alignment, becomes a foundation mem- ber of Ballance's Liberal opposition, and a cabinet minister in Ballance's Liberal government. The cause of the underprivileged becomes, after 1890, a legislative crusade which, by 1894, succeeds against the forces of darkness, the squatters and their henchmen in the House of Representatives, the antediluvian conservatives of the Legislative Council, the aristocratic conservatives in Government House. No crusade without infidels, and they are both abundant and impotent. The Liberals, Reeves among them (Reeves, perhaps, lead- 400 ing them) make over the country and establish the rights of the underprivileged. But this is tragedy, not comedy, and Reeves is a tragic hero. He wishes to take the cause of labour further than his colleagues will tolerate. Ballance dies, Stout is frustrated, Seddon reigns, Ward legislates. Reeves moves into isolation, at odds with Seddon-Ward pragmatism and with Stout-Taylor prohibitionism. He becomes a lone crusader; Seddon he finds offensive, Ward unscrupulous, Liberal policy, a return to borrowing and development, unsympathetic. Per- haps Professor Sinclair recalled that it can be argued on behalf of candidates for canonization at Rome that they met with hostility and even persecution from those at whose hands they had a right to expect friendship and encouragement. Reeves's measures are opposed from within the party, barely survive, are emasculated or get nowhere. Attacked by Seddon, reviled by newspapers relieved to find Seddon a 'safe' man even if a coarse one, jeered at by the Herald, he leaves for the Agent-Generalship, London, the acclaim of cultivated progressives, the directorship of a bank, the L.S.E. But the greatness has gone. The man and the moment have met, and parted. The story is a moving one, and movingly told. I cannot quarrel with its details, for clearly the author knows more about the lives of the dramatis personae than I do. I can, though, quarrel with the stage-set and with the overall interpretation. I am more than doubt- ful about the way in which Professor Sinclair appears to relate Reeves's ideas and achievements to the social structure of late nine- teenth century New Zealand, and to the limitations this structure imposes upon the effectiveness of anyone's ideas and the conse- quences of anyone's achievements. A biography is not the place in which to look for an analysis of social structure and of social change. But, by the same token, neither is it a place in which to use vocabulary which presupposes, or at least appears to presuppose for any indication given to the contrary, a social structure dominated by class separateness and social change effected by the class struggle. Two questions beg to be answered: first, was New Zealand like this? and second, if Reeves thought it was, and actually it was not, how does this contribute to a nemesis which thus becomes more pathetic than tragic? Professor Sinclair uses a class-conflict terminology considerably and without qualification, especially to describe Reeves's alignment with social forces in Canterbury in the late 1880s. The same terrnin- ology, again without qualification, is used to indicate the nature of the 1890 election. The terminology is used in an emotive rather than a scientific manner: and, again, there are revealed the snares that 401 await the historian who is too consciously a literary artist. For this terminology unless carefully qualified has a general signification which derives from a body of social theory designed, chiefly by Marx, to explain the conflicts of industrialized societies with a fairly rigid pattern of social stratification, and a great gap between the privileged and the deprived. It is, in its general acceptance, con- nected with the conflicts in which capitalism emerged and is chal- lenged. But what if New Zealand social history has been little marked by conflict, industrialization, rigid social stratification and characterized by only a small distance between top and bottom? What if this social history has rather been marked by mobility be- tween the social strata, and by tensions only within an overall accept- ance of a capitalist economy, and hardly at all by tensions arising from a determination to abolish that economy? In my opinion New Zealand social history is to be so described, and the Liberals are to be considered chiefly as promoters of social mobility and removers of social tension. Professor Sinclair, later in the book, indicates the multi-sectional rather than the class basis of the Liberal party. But as well, he argues fairly strenuously for an interpretation of Reeves's social thought which makes it of a class- conflict kind. But if this is so (which, again, I would doubt) then how is Reeves the foremost Liberal? If indeed Reeves believed that class-conflict was basic, and that such devices as arbitration were only temporary palliatives, then he becomes something of an aberra- tion in the Liberal party, and (if my view of our social history is right) an unreliable observer of New Zealand society. I doubt very much, on the evidence that Professor Sinclair puts forward, if Reeves in fact took his anti-capitalism and his class-conflict rhetoric as seri- ously as his biographer does. I suspect that the biographer has been confused by his quest for a left-wing hero. But, depending on whether Professor Sinclair is right or not in this, either of two conclusions seems hard to avoid. If Reeves held firmly to class-con- flict views, then his fall from influence was inevitable as soon as his intentions and Liberal intentions ceased to overlap. If, on the other hand, he was a social engineer and not a social revolutionary, then his fall was occasioned by some personal lack, some inadequacy of character, some absence of a political talent. Either way the hero ends up as rather less than heroic. He becomes either irrelevant or impotent. W. H. Oliver

402 MEANJIN QUARTERLY. Edited by C. B. Christesen. No. 100, 1965. University of Melbourne. PREOCCUPATIONS IN AUSTRALIAN POETRY. Judith Wright. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 52s. 6d. AN INTRODUCTION To AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE. Edited by C. D. Nara- simhaiah. Brisbane: The Jacaranda Press. 30s. AT THE END of 1940 two hundred and fifty copies of a bi-monthly magazine appeared in Australia, containing eight pages of poems and taking its name from the aboriginal word for Brisbane, where it was published. By 1945 Meanjin had become a quarterly of eighty pages with a circulation of four thousand, and had shifted to Mel- bourne. Now, after twenty-five years and over a hundred issues, it is probably the most widely read of Australian literary magazines outside the country. Much of the credit for Meanjin's success must be owed to the energy and dedication of its editor; the difficulties which it had to overcome at the beginning are only hinted at in Mr Christesen's review of the first ten years (1951/1): during those years his personal financial loss exceeded £2,500; in the last five of them no less than twenty-five similar literary and semi-literary periodicals had gone out of existence. What were Meanjin's aims, what kind of need has it filled, what is its future? Most readers would probably agree that it is a broadly 'liberal' magazine: left of centre on political issues, and, in the arts, uncommitted to any specific programme either of creative practice or of critical method. Editorial policy has always striven to be non-political, non- partisan, uncommitted and unconfined to any one programme of art or thought, because concerned with all possible pro- grammes. . . . The ideal at any rate remains a disinterested criticism that is interested in all pertinent ideas, flexible because of its inflexible sincerity, as a matter of principle unattached to any one principle. We usually look for a rather more specific definition of policy than this; yet the apparent concern to disclaim any specific programme ('Hang directions!' was the reply to an early sniping attack from The Bulletin) itself marked a significant 'direction' in Australia's literary development. The Bulletin in the 1880s, Vision in the 1920s, and the Jindyworobaks and Angry Penguins later on, had all assumed, in a greater or lesser degree, that 'culture' was something which could be produced by writing about it. They tended to falsify the cultural patterns which they saw, or wanted to see, in Australian 403 life by the mere act of supposing that a declaration of intent was an achieved fact. It is difficult to say whether Meanjin's avoidance of a specific pro- gramme actually influenced Australia's subsequent literary develop- ment or whether it simply reflected a development which had already begun, the movement away from national self-consciousness which marked emerging poets like Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. But in either case it provided a forum for discussion on other than sectarian lines and a medium of publication for a wide range of creative writers; and it thus helped to establish the climate for a more searching analysis of Australian culture. Almost every writer of importance in Australia over the last twenty-five years is represented substantially in Meanjin, yet no one writer or group is associated particularly with it (except perhaps V ance and Nettie Palmer in its early years, and the critic A. A. Phillips). Nor has it been exclusively preoccupied with 'Arts and Letters in Australia': overseas contributors include Ezra Pound, Sartre, Arthur Miller, Koestler, O'Casey and Frank Kermode. It has published poems by, among other New Zealand poets, Curnow, Baxter, and Smithyman; an early article by Curnow (1943/4) contains some of the ideas which later formed the Introduction to the Caxton Book of New Zealand Verse; and there is also an article (1954/3) on Ursula Bethell's poetry. In a sense the very representativeness which Meanjin has aimed at and achieved over the years has been gained at the expense of a distinctive identity-the kind of distinctiveness, springing from a specific programme, which marked Scrutiny, or Fugitive, or even the Angry Penguins. Meanjin's kind of liberalism exists less in the abstract than in particular instances: attempting to gain recognition of Australian literature as a respectable subject for historical research and critical appraisal in the universities; speaking out, as it did in the mid-fifties, against manifestations of McCarthyism in Australia; or pleading for a reassessment of attitudes towards Asia. Perhaps, also, part of its original raison d'etre was lost by the actual success of its campaign to liberate Australian literature in the universities. It is possible, however, to see Meanjin's future role in the context of a different kind of alienation from that which provided its main impetus up to the mid-fifties: the alienation arising out of the in- creasing specialization of literary studies in Australia. Meanjin is uniquely fitted-by reason of its non-academic background, the range of its interests, and its insistence 'that literature and society cannot be divorced one from the other'-to provide a point of contact between the literary specialist and other-historical, sociolog- 404 ical, political-specialists, and to act as a bridge between the neces-- sarily narrow interest of academic research and the general interest of a much wider reading public. Judith Wright's collection of essays, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, marks the emergence of a distinct and important critical voice in Australia. The introductory chapter, 'Australia's Double Aspect' is an extension of a short article, 'The Upside-down Hut', published in Australz'an Letters (1961); the chapter on Charles Har- pur contains some material from her essay on his work in the 'Australian Writers and their Work' series; and the chapter on John Shaw Neilson is largely the same as that which appeared in Quad- rant Ill, 4 (reprinted in the O.U.P. symposium of essays, Australian Literary Criticism, edited by Grahame Johnston). The remaining twelve chapters appear to have been written specifically for publica- tion in the present book. Miss Wright's analysis of the problems faced by poets in Australia will be familiar to New Zealanders from Alien Curnow's similarly based analysis of New Zealand poetry. The 'double aspect' of her introductory chapter is a 'reality of exile' and a 'reality of newness and freedom': The two strains of feeling (for the conservative, the sense of exile, and for the radical, the sense of liberty, of a new chance) have, at least until very recently, been recognizable in all that was written here. What is different here is the political dimension which Miss Wright's analysis suggests. Australian nationalism was radical in its origins and aims; in New Zealand, on the other hand, the sense of exile was quite as strong as the sense of newness in those writers- Glover, Fairburn and Curnow-who can most easily be seen as radicals in the thirties. In New Zealand, perhaps simply because its literature developed much later, comparatively, than in Australia, but perhaps also because its historical origins placed it in a more ambiguous relation to England, the sense of alienation from Eng- land and from the English literary tradition, and the impulse towards national identity, became a source of tension within indi- vidual writers. In Australia, on the other hand, this tension had existed from the beginning as a class phenomenon, as two quite separate responses: the concept of Australia as a land of liberty offering a 'new chance' grew from emancipated-convict sentiment and later on from outback and working class solidarity, whereas exile was something which only the self-constituted aristocracy might be permitted to feel. It was not until much later, with poets like FitzGerald and Hope and Miss W right herself, that the two 405 John Summers Book Shop 1 19 MANCHESTER STREET CHRISTCHURCH TELEPHONE 77-051

1st Dec. 1966 Dear Joe, Christmas again practically! So commercialised, thank God: Started with those 3 wogs with the frankincense, myrrh and what not, and nobody can stop it. Anyway let's put it on a higher plane with Skelton's HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY (170/·), full of ye old mappes-200 half tone plates and 20 in colour, in fact just the thing for the shearers' coffee table being 11" x 8'' x 2". As for Raphael Gully, I prescribe ODILON REDON ( 145/-), a little thinner, 90 half tone plates and 21 in colour accompanied by a sensitive and careful appraisal of this painter's work, and his oblique relationship to the work of the Impressionist period. I think it's just the berries, but if you want to drop a hint, there's a reasonably flash copy of FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS (55/6). For the dinkum Kiwi out Barnego Flat way the Begg brothers DUSKY BAY (55 f-): in the steps of Captain Cook, handsome, well documented and illustrated; is ideal for the rocking horse adventurer. Have I mentioned Haslucks REMEMBERED WITH AFFECTION ( 31J6) Lady Broome's (nee Barker) letters to Guy with a short life; tops in discreet scholarship and distinguished format, complete with little drawings and ancient photo of the old girl. Could safely be sent on appro. Of course THE FIGHTING MAN (30/-) life and times ofT. E. Taylor by Nellie E. H. Macleod, isn't down for the final count yet. In case I don't see you before, Merry Xmas to all at Barnego Flat. As ever,

406 responses can be said to have presented themselves consciously as aspects of a personal dilemma. One of Miss Wright's special insights is her recognition that the various movements for 'internationaliza- tion of culture' in Australia over the last forty years and the self- conscious concern of much contemporary academic criticism to hit out at notions of Australianity, are themselves continuing manifesta- tions of the 'reality of exile': we should be honest enough to recognize that it was and re- mains real enough to influence our feeling still in many ways. This general argument gives unity to Miss Wright's analysis of individual writers. The chapter on Vision ('the Australian Renais- sance that never happened'), and those on FitzGerald and McAuley are particularly good. The quality which distinguishes Miss Wright's criticism from much of the academic criticism at present being written in Australia is its historical sense, the sense of a poet's exist- ence within a particular historical and social environment. It enables her to avoid an excessively formalist criticism, and to be aware of an overall continuity embracing poets as widely different from each other and as radically opposed to contemporary ideas of 'modernity' as John Shaw Neilson and Harpur. Our ignorance of him [Harpur] is our loss. Poetry is not just a matter of what is being written here and now; it is a living and interconnected body that draws its nourishment from the past as much as the present. We cannot ignore our poetic roots, if we are to write poetry that is fully aware of its surrounding influences. One interesting example of her awareness of 'surrounding influences' is her comparison of Harpur's relation to W ordsworth with Henry Kendall's relation to Tennyson and Swinburne. Harpur, unlike Kendall, rejected Tennyson: He is an old world 'towney'-a dresser of parterres, and a peeper into parks. I am a man of the woods and mountains-a wielder of the axe, and mainly conversant with aboriginal nature. Miss Wright argues that Harpur's acceptance of the Wordsworthian philosophy 'made him the first poet able to accept and delight in the strange new landscape of Australia', whereas 'the poetic mid-Victor- ianism of Tennyson and Swinburne was probably the most unsuit- able influence for Australian poets that could be imagined'. We often tend to assume that the tradition which is 'overseas' or 'elsewhere' or 'larger' is something fixed and static against which Australian or New Zealand literature can be defined. Is it not poss- ible, however, that critical notions of what the 'larger' tradition is 407 Charles 'Brasch

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408 may be determined by the same historical circumstances which pre- dispose us to see 'differences', or 'similarities', or 'influences' in our own? If we say, for example, that Wordsworth was an important influence on some New Zealand writers, perhaps we are not so much 'comparing' those New Zealand writers with a point of view that is somehow fixed in W ordsworth's position in the 'larger' tradi- tion, as 'recreating' W ordsworth through our own experience as New Zealanders and as readers of New Zealand poetry. The diffi- culty must be faced if critics are to avoid caricaturing English liter- ary history. One example might be the tendency to compare nine- teenth century Australian and New Zealand poetic attitudes with a Victorianism seen only in terms of gentility, sentimentality and 'false' diction. Nietzsche is ubiquitous in Miss Wright's book as one such point of reference, but his presence is never adequately defined. Sometimes she seems to see him as a dominating influence on indi- vidual Australian writers, a claim which can be made, surely, for only a few. At other times she seems to be claiming for him the distinction of being the founder and ultimate spokesman of the 'modern sensibility'. Miss Wright is really using him as a 'metaphor', but she fails to establish its aptness. An Introduction to Australian Literature, edited by C. D. Nara- simhaiah and intended as an introduction of Australian literature to an Indian audience, is a disappointing book, despite the presence of Miss Wright's essay, 'Australia's Double Aspect', and contribu- tions by many of Australia's leading poets and critics. The mere fact of writing for a non-Australian audience seems to have induced some temporary suspension of the sensibility, a closing of the ranks in the interest of national solidarity. The result, for the most part, is a series of potted histories-the same facts, the same repetitions of the same passages from Marcus Clarke and (who could impress more?) D. H. Lawrence-almost as if the enterprise were deliber- ately designed to dissuade the Commonwealth-minded Indian stud- ent from reading further. The most interesting contribution is the editor's personal account of his reactions to Australia and its litera- ture. As for the rest, the Penguin Literature of Australia has it all, and much more that is more to the point, and says it better and more cheaply. Terry Sturm

409 POETRY * Australia A journal devoted to contemporary verse

Edited by Grace Perry Published six times a year by South Head Press, 350 Lyons Road, Fivedock, N.S. W.

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Te Ao Hou THE MAORI MAGAZINE

Te Ao Hou is a quarterly magazine concerned with everything Maori. It publishes a great deal of new material on traditional Maori art, literature and music, also short stories, verse and articles on the swiftly-changing modem Maori world. There are many illustrations. It is written mostly in English, and Maori text is always translated. Subscriptions: N.Z. rates: one year 7s. 6d., three years 20s. Australia: one year $1.35, three years $3.15. U.S.A.: one year $1.50, three years $3.50. Canada: one year $1.65, three years $3.75. Other countries: the equivalent of English rates. Send to: The Editor, Te Ao Hou, P.O. Box 2390, Wellington.

410 Correspondence

To THE EDITOR Sm: Since Wellington long ago drained the outlying parts of New Zealand of her finest instrumentalists and created a pool which Pro- fessor Page for some years has been drawing upon at his pleasure, it ill becomes him to reproach Dunedin for backwardness in attempting such ambitious programmes of contemporary music as he finds poss- ible (Landfall 79). We are conscious of the need to proselytize on behalf of new music, but are loath to do this in performances of inferior standard, and the prospects of providing regular programmes of palatable variety are only now coming into view here, as our re- sources develop. In any case, is not the insinuation of this music into ordinary concert programmes a more natural and convincing method of making the beginning of which Boulez speaks than the forming of a special society with its suggestion of clique and cult? Such a beginning has been made: it's true that our more ambitious works so far (the Stravinsky Cantata, Maxwell Davies' 0 Magnum Mysterium, Tremain's Obmittamus Studia) seem middle-of-the-road beside Wellington's later programmes; at least they were performed before our average audience for University Concerts (about two hun- dred), and created an enthusiasm which justified a repetition of two of them in later concerts. Surely this is the way towards the wider audience Professor Page himself would like to see? P. Platt Dunedin

Sm: In his review of Dr Harold Miller's Race Conflict in New Zealand Professor Keith Sinclair rebukes the author for having failed to pay homage to 'some recent books' on the same subject. I am not sure that this is a very serious offence, but if it is, Dr Miller could cite as a precedent Professor Sinclair's own The Origins of the Maori Wars which neglected even to mention Dr Miller's earlier contributions in the field, although Professor Sinclair now briefly acknowledges that Dr Miller 'pioneered the modern study of race relations in New Zealand, 1815-1865'. Having thus intruded his own high sense of academic decorum, Professor Sinclair assails the work of a rival historian as 'smooth', 'very superficial', 'familiar to us' and falling 'between the stools of pedantry and popularity'. Admittedly, he concedes that Dr Miller 'always writes well' (hence perhaps his popularity) and 'tells a story 411 1"--:E..A.::N" J::J:::N" Q,U ..A.R.TER.L"Y Editor C. B. CHRISTESEN

'Meanjin Quarterly created a path along which it was possible for other magazines to follow. Its reputation is still, deservedly, almost greater than the sum total of the others. Not only has it provided a platform-in its early days almost the only one-for local talent; it has also consistently sought contributions from distinguished overseas writers. By opening such a window on the world its stimulus to Australian intellectual life has been incalculable.' THE GUARDIAN, Manchester.

Subscription £2.10.0 a year (posted).

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$ $ THE INDO-ASIAN CULTURE $ Illustrated Enalish Q!Jarterljr journal $

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*$ Subscription Rates (Post Free): *$ $ Annual Per copy $ $ In India Rs. 6/- Rs. If so $ $ In other countries Ios, 2s. 6d. $ $ $ 412 with charity and with feeling' (two essentials of the historical imagin- ation), but Professor Sinclair leaves us with the general impression that Dr Miller's book 'does not advance' the enquiry into the origins of the Maori Wars, and that the author 'does not probe or grapple with the problems of his topic'. Now all of this could, just conceivably, be fair. It is, however, significant, I think, that Professor Sinclair makes no attempt-none whatsoever-to describe Dr Miller's general approach to the subject or to challenge his interpretation of any major issue. He confronts us, not with a sustained argument, but with a series of carping assertions. At no stage does he admit that Dr Miller's book, matured over a period of thirty years, contains a single valuable insight. Instead we are left in little doubt that the very existence of the book is offensive to the reviewer. One day, I expect, a detached historian will assess the various accounts of the Maori wars and place them in the perspective of a continuing tradition of scholarship. In the meantime the interested student may care to examine the contributions of Dr Miller and Professor Sinclair in the order of their publication between 1940 and 1966. If he does, he may be surprised to discover how far Dr Miller opened up a whole field of enquiry and pointed to subse- quent lines of research. In his review Professor Sinclair describes Dr Miller's book-the culmination and fruit of a careful investigation which he com- menced in the nineteen-thirties-as 'a useful, popular summary of events', containing 'little that is new'. In fact, however, the book contains a good deal which is new-new facts, new scrutiny of motives, new interpretation. One contrast in particular stands out. Whereas Professor Sinclair in his The Origins of the Maori Wars tended to play down the element of personal responsibility and even to argue that 'the few leaders' could not be said 'in any meaningful sense' to be responsible for the outbreak of war, Dr Miller has now uncovered the inner movements of a definite pakeha conspiracy, which he has been on the tracks of for thirty years. Race Conflict £n New Zealand does, in fact, contain a large number of exciting disclosures. Had Professor Sinclair drawn attention to even a few of these I would not have been stirred to write this protest. John M£ller

SIR: In his generous review of Dennis McEldowney's Donald Ander- son: A Memoir, Mr Finlayson states that the book was apparently published without the assistance of the New Zealand Literary Fund. 413 A REED SELECTION

Belles Lettres THE HILLS OF HOME, by Professor E. M. Blaiklock, with twenty-five drawings by David More. 56 pages. 19s 6d. Literature THE NEW ZEALAND NOVEL, by Professor Joan Stevens. Third edition, includes novels published up to 1965. 160 pages. 15s. Race Relations MAORI AND PAKEHA, by Professor John Harre. 160 pages, about 30s. THE WORLD OF THE MAORI, by Erik Schwim- mer, with line drawings by Roger Hart. 160 pages, 21s. Poetry THE LUTHIER, by Ruth Gilbert. 56 pages. 10s 6d .

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414 While it is true that the acknowledgment was inadvertently omitt- ed from the book, we did in fact receive a grant towards publication from the Fund. We would like to take this opportunity of acknow- ledging the Fund's help. Jean Ann Anderson Editor, Blackwood & Janet Paul Ltd

:J.f..§w Contributors Robert Nola. Born Auckland 1940 of Jugoslav father and Portuguese-Scottish mother. Graduate in Mathematics and Philosophy of and teacher of Philo- sophy at Auckland University. Foundation member and past president of Auckland Society for Contemporary Music. At present doing research in Philosophy at the Australian National University. Judith Wright. Australian poet, critic, and literary maid-of-all-work. Born 1915 near Armidale, N.S.W. Has published six books of verse; another, The Other Half, is now in the press. Also in prose: The Generations of Men (family biography); Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (criticism); several critical monographs, a book of short stories now in the press, and four books for children. Her poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian and Yugoslavian, and is represented in many anthologies.

An index to Landfall volumes XVI to XX will be sent out with the issue for March 1967.

415 THE OBSERVER OF THE 19TH CENTURY Selected by MARION MILIBAND Introduced by ASA BRIGGS History written at the time is the most compelling kind of all. This is a genuine self-portrait of the 19th Century created for, by and of the people who lived through it. It is a picture seen through the eyes of a great newspaper, The Observer. Starting in 1791, the year in which The Observer was founded, this selection ends in 1901. Thus it takes in 110 years from the French Revolution to the funeral of Queen Victoria and the great themes of the age are illustrated and developed through the mouths and pens of those illustrious writers of the times. 368 pages. Line drawings. 37/- N.Z.

New Zealand Office: 5 Milford Road, I Longmans Auckland, N .2.

416