Portrait of the Artist as a New Zealander

It can be dangerous for a writer to pass judgment on the state of literature in his own country. What after all, can he know about it? The true state of New Zealand literature exists, undiscoverable at this very moment (or so one hopes), in poems, stories, novels, plays, still shapeless as an unmade bed, in the semi-conscious minds of housewives, school-teachers, farmers, asylum patients and quarrelsome undergraduates.

The worst danger of a judge, however, is not assassination. Recently I saw the photograph of the so-called ‘vegetable caterpillar’, discovered under moss on the slopes of Mount Egmont. This caterpillar had been the unwilling host of a parasitic fungus. The spores of the fungus developed within it, enlarging its size and turning it to a kind of wood – then, when the caterpillar host was quite dead, a triumphant vegetable trident emerged from its mouth to wave above the forest floor.

It seemed to me an instructive natural parable. The vegetable caterpillar is myself or any New Zealand writer, slowly becoming a public figure, consumed by the spores of kudos, developing the reviewer’s shamble, the critic’s stoop, and accepting finally a permanent job at a university.

Works of art and works of criticism are, I feel, different in method and origin. The American poet, Allen Tate, suggests that ‘a man of letters must recreate for his age the image of man’. Such a labour is deeply private, unpredictable – and while criticism may codify the results, it has little to do with the process of gestation.

Then there is the matter of honours. I was pleasantly surprised three years ago, when the Oxford University Press accepted for publication a book of my poems, In Fires of No Return. It is not easy for a New Zealand writer to get work published in England. I think New Zealand poets must seem a little off-key, even exotic, to English readers. The signposts are different over there.

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The Oxford University Press produced an attractive volume. But were the poems, many of them hammered out originally in obscurity and solitude, any better or worse for being well-printed and well-bound? The point at which growth occurs is in the writing or re-writing of a work, not in the publication of a book.

This book received the Jessie Mackay Poetry Award for 1958. I feel that the ghost of Jessie Mackay might be a trifle bewildered by the content of the poems. She pinned a sprig of heather to my father’s coat when she met him, a tribute (I think) to his Highland ancestry and Socialist sympathies. But I am not sure that she would have liked my verse. She herself wrote mainly of an ideal Scotland: at least her verse was deeply coloured by such an idea. Whereas I, belonging to a later generation, have written of those aspects of New Zealand which are visible to me – the Otago landscape and seascape, the mangrove swamps of the North, and an age of conflict when all ideals are shaken and muddied like sheets in a strong wind. At any rate, the Jessie Mackay Award was supplemented by £25 from the State Literary Fund. I received altogether £50, a welcome gift for a man with a family.

It was another surprise to me when a recent play of mine, The Wide Open Cage, was on the whole well received by Wellington audiences. I have a genuine horror of success. Neither God nor the Muses visit a man who has bandaged his wounds and settled down to fulfil the expectations of his relatives, his audiences, his bosses and his religious advisers. When someone likes what I have written, it seems to me probable that they have misunderstood it.

The play in question contained a fair amount of vulgar vernacular speech and the characters discussed their feelings very frankly. It may be that the talents of a Unity Theatre cast and the excellent production of Richard Campion stimulated the audience, or conceivably, the human image which I had endeavoured to recreate, the holy and terrible face of one’s neighbour in a suburban boardinghouse, stirred their minds and imaginations.

But some humour present in the work was very likely helpful. I am often depressed by the humourless approach of my fellow-countrymen to writing and the criticism of writing. In quite a primitive sense, it is the job of a writer to entertain. He may or may not instruct, as he chooses. Vitality rather than politeness seems to me the most essential virtue of a work of literature. The living caterpillar is always less polite than his vegetable brother.

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