New Zealand Criticism

[A good critic is even rarer than a good writer, according to James K. Baxter in an address to the P.E.N. Writers’ Conference in Wellington early this month.] ‘The first thing a critic needs is humility towards the work he is examining, even if it is a child’s first poem,’ said Mr Baxter. ‘He must be without envy. He must have no axe to grind. That is not easy. Many critics are themselves retired poets or failed novelists and this fact may unconsciously influence

their approach to new work.’

Mr Baxter said that a writer – as a writer – didn’t need critical standards. They were a nuisance, standing between him and the truth he served, the life he re-created on the page. A writer did not have to decide whether his work was good; he was inside the work, trying to make it good. When he stopped writing, he became a critic of his own work. But not till then. Mr Baxter referred to the ‘appallingly sterile background’ and ‘the brick wall that surrounds any person who tries to come alive and start feeling and thinking and writing in this country’.

‘To me I’m afraid it [this country] looks like a plush coffin, cut out of heart rimu, with handles taken off the nearest beer pump,’ he said. ‘I do believe it is vitally necessary for a writer’s mental health and the health of the work done that he or she (whatever dreadful characters they may be themselves) should keep on criticising the society in which he or she is obliged to exist.

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Not criticism as the Marxist or religious propagandist imagines it. A writer serves truth alone. Some of you may remember that Chaplin film where a civic statue is being unveiled by the Mayor or someone. The big dust-cover is hoisted off the statue, and there is Charlie, curled up asleep in its lap. He slides down the knee of the statue, gets up, straightens his cuffs, swings his walking stick, and life has begun again, thank God. The speeches and the statue are shown up as dead words and dead concrete. The man behind the mask, the terrible, loveable fool, the everlasting hobo, has arrived. That is what I mean by the criticism of society. Charlie criticises everything by continuing to be himself.

‘I want to emphasise the fact that critical standards cannot be abstract. A writer criticises life. His or her critical standards are implicit in the work done. A literary critic criticises the work. A man may become both a writer and a professional critic. It is a dangerous amalgam. I have at times produced criticism myself, with a strong sense of danger in putting on the pinstripe uniform instead of my own true, well-ripped boozer’s overcoat. God help me, I mightn’t be able to unbutton it again.

‘A critic has to serve in a different way the same truth that the writer is serving. Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that one has to be homosexual to criticise the works of André Gide. I mean only that Gide would yield up nothing (or very little) to a critic who regarded homosexuality as a habit of temperament that no friend of his could conceivably possess. There are more kinds of people than one might suppose. It is a great asset to a critic to be basically as unshockable as a mature priest or a trained psychiatrist.

‘I remember Mr Allen Curnow, for whose opinion I have the deepest respect (though I do not always agree with him) saying or writing once: “Our poets must set their sights higher”. That, of course, is one part of criticism: to see New Zealand writing in the context of world writing. The double standard is dangerous and useless. It breeds inferiority and robs our writers of courage. I am disturbed not by the ham-handedness of those who are learning the trade, but by the lack of significant content, of growth, of development, of an extension of insights, in the work of our older writers, among whom I will soon reluctantly take my place. Let us not reach out for the pruning-shears when the apple tree is bearing little or no fruit.’

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