A year or two before he died, I went out from Wellington to the Hutt to see Walter Nash, the old lion of the Labour Party. He was living in one of the suburban houses that encircle the bed of the Hutt River in great meaningless symmetrical arcs. The reason I wanted to see him was because we (the postmen of Wellington; at that time I was a postman) had grown tired of being donkeys for the firms and carrying heavy wads of samples on our backs instead of the mail that people wanted to get. The last straw had been a mountain of green packets of soap powder piled in the corridors of the Post Office. The Post Office was going to get a good many thousand pounds for that deal with the firms; and the posties would get no extra money, no thanks, and the curses of the housewives for being late with the mail. So, for the first time in the history of New Zealand, the posties laid down their bags – or, more exactly, they were not allowed to pick up their bags unless they promised to carry the soap powder. The newspapers called it a strike; but the technical name for it was a lock-out.

Knowing that human stupidity is greatest at the highest levels of the Departmental pyramid, I feared that the Bosses would give our group the sack before we arrived at some working compromise – not because the Bosses were malicious men (there was no absolute evidence of that) but because they were, like most Bosses, paranoid men whose minds would be working by reflex. And I went out to see old Walter because I thought he might be able to put a little pressure on at the Government level; not much pressure, but just enough to hold the door open till we completed our negotiations.

I was not disappointed. Old Walter received me kindly. Several times before I had seen him at Government hooleys opening his mouth, as politicians have page 609 to do, and letting the words flow out automatically for ten or fifteen minutes. But I had not met him on a personal basis. In the little drawing-room in the Hutt house I began to notice his sharpness.

‘I can’t do much,’ he said. ‘Not now that I’ve ceased to be the Leader of the Opposition. But I can do a little. The strike’s a bad business. It would never have happened under a Labour Government.’

‘The trouble is, our union’s quite useless,’ I said. ‘We can’t get any backing from them. The bosses and the union are like two fingers on the same hand.’

‘You’ll have to get a face-saving device,’ he said. ‘Some kind of arrangement where both sides back down and nobody’s feelings are hurt too much. In politics the attitudes of people are the core of the matter. If you have a strike, feelings get stirred up, that’s the difficulty. There’s no need for strikes. These things can be settled round a table quite amicably.’

It struck me that Walter was a good man. It also struck me that the fine dust of political liberalism had settled on him and slowed him up. There are three kinds of unionism – political, militant and liberal. The political unionist is concerned to make a radical change in the social structure of his nation. In South-East Asia, because there is no Middle Left, the only effective unionists are political unionists. We are going over there these days to put them down with guns. In this country the political unionists are few and not very influential. The political unionists tend towards Marxism. But the militant unionists do not have much love for any kind of State. They are tribes fighting for themselves against the rule of the Bosses. The bosses recognise them as their natural antagonists and even learn an uneasy respect for them. We, the posties, were acting on instinct as militant unionists.

The liberal unionist is a bought man. He has entered the magic circle of the Bosses, where Property is the highest god of all. The Bosses see him as a frustrated Boss himself, a person who secretly despises the rank and file whom he represents, and who is casting round for a secure place in the business or Departmental pyramid. He is their kind of person; and it isn’t long before he and they are calling each other ‘Jack’. The roots of old Walter’s political career lay deep in the soil of militant and political unionism; but he had gradually transplanted himself into the liberal area. We had a good conversation together; but I knew we were not quite on the same wave-length.

Later I went to see a militant unionist, the secretary of one of the railway unions, a man who worked side by side on an ordinary job with the people whom he represented. He was like a guerrilla fighter: humorous, aggressive, subtle and sharp as a needle. He did not even have to be told what our situation was. He compared it immediately with another occasion on the West Coast when he had had to win a strike without official union backing. There was no dust on him. When we had worked out the sketch of a possible plan of mutual action, he began talking about his family.

‘Education’s what we need,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get a good education. I had to go out and work when I was fourteen. But my daughter’s getting a good education. She’s at the varsity now. That’s what I want to see. I want to see the children of the workers getting the same education as the children of the Bosses.’

I think he was mistaken. Though he himself did not genuflect before the god of Property (there was too much fire in him for that) his daughter would bow her head and marry a glorified clerk and raise children in the barren Utopian heaven of that faceless god. And she would be bored as her father was never bored; for she would have sold her intellectual freedom for a packet of cellophane-wrapped biscuits. That is the way we live in this country.

When I came back from India, with amoebic and bacillary dysentery turning my guts into a one-way traffic roundabout, I went up on deck on a cloudy morning to see the coastline of New Zealand. And when I saw the long white glittering and wholly uninhabited beaches from which there drifted a smoke of surf – then, after six months of dusty and closely inhabited cages of India, I felt a strong desire to weep with joy. Perhaps it was the weakness that goes with dysentery. I had been living on coffee and dry biscuits for quite a while. But I thought – ‘It is a country for angels. They must live here invisibly and rejoice in this non-human beauty. When I get to Lambton Quay I will kneel down and kiss the stones of the street. In this place there is no worry about property; no need to lock one’s doors at night. . . .’

I had of course forgotten my countrymen. Farmers and bureaucrats, they regard every inch of their country as a saleable commodity. If God has put mountains there, they will sell the sight of them to American tourists. If God has given them fertile land, they will fret because they cannot screw another ten cents out of each square yard of earth. Their religion consists almost wholly in a massive taboo on genital sexuality. And before they utter a word, their faces tell the visitor that they live in self-made misery, transmuting honey into gall, afraid that somebody will want to steal their faeces, and vastly more obsessed with material security than the Indians who have reason to be worried. The country into which I was coming was an enormous political and economic bargain basement. In India Sikhs who have no food in their stomachs fight and die because of a passionate concern for their religion and their culture, but here men who are internally loaded with chicken and mutton watch TV commercials advertising more chicken and mutton and develop ulcers because their sons have scratched the paint on their new cars. In Parliament the arguments circulate endlessly around one single topic: money. I had forgotten my countrymen. They are their own plague.

Poverty is a world problem, we are told by all those who give the matter any thought. And the natural corollary is – Let us do away with poverty; page 611 then we can construct a better future. But I see a difficulty. One has to grant that a perpetual grinding poverty deprives people of much of their freedom, disrupts families, and clouds the whole of life with anxiety. And destitution, the ugly cousin of poverty, murders many thousands daily. But if the removal of poverty were itself a cure for the worst of human ills, then we Kiwis would be the lightest-hearted people on earth. We are not light-hearted; and the reason we are not is because, the minute our needs are satisfied, we develop a crowd of wants to fill their place. All people need for a free and dignified life is food in their bellies, clothes on their backs, some shelter from the weather, a few friends, and an altar to worship at; and their families actually do not need much more than this, whatever they may think they want. Poverty of this order is a blessing, not a curse.

Many Asian people are suffering from poverty. I suggest that we are suffering from our lack of poverty. Let us imagine a Kiwi housewife sitting down and meditating after lunch. Her thoughts might run like this:

‘Ah, the blasted cat has been clawing at the furniture again. That chair’ll have to be re-covered . . . I wonder if Mike will pass his School Cert. If he doesn’t he’ll never get a good job. . . . The price of meat is going up. It cost me ten cents more for two pounds of beef steak this morning than it did a month ago. . . . If I got my hair dyed yellow, it would suit with that dress I saw at the Zombie Credit Shop. But if I get the hair dyed, I can’t get the dress for a fortnight; and if I get the dress, I can’t get the hair dyed. . . .’

She is stuck on the horns of an imaginary dilemma. Actually her habitual anxious expression has grained her face with a lack of comeliness which no hair-dyer or beauty specialist or dressmaker can do anything about; though they are more than happy to charge her for trying. Her grandmother had a family of eight (she has two) and lived in a house with an earth floor. The grandmother may have suffered from poverty. The grand-daughter is suffering from the lack of it. I take it that only God or a nuclear war will deliver her.

We of the West are at present engaged in exporting to Vietnam our two most prized commodities: guns and money. The guns bring death, often atrociously. The money may relieve a little poverty; it will also breed a good deal of graft. We are like lepers rubbing our stumps in the nostrils of our neighbours in the hope of infecting them with our own disease. Our kind of peace breeds war as a dead body breeds maggots; for it is the proliferation of endless and imaginary wants which is the chief characteristic of our national lives; and as we buy soap to make ourselves unnecessarily clean, so we buy guns to create a safety zone where no permanent safety is possible. Soap will not prevent our cadavers from stinking in the grave. Guns will not save us from the fear of our eventual and inevitable deaths. Only a different view of life and death could remove these phobias. How can we stop war? Only by choosing poverty, I think. Then we would not have enough guns or money to page 612 send them overseas. And we would have no reason to fear the material envy of others.

There is also the matter of higher education. When I see various hopeful people swarming like spermatozoa in the concrete vagina of the university, it does not make me feel particularly hopeful. I have the sense that anything that is going to happen is going to happen somewhere else. Undoubtedly mental possessions can be used, just like material possessions, to satisfy certain human needs. Doctors need to be trained. Farmers need to know how to deal with soil erosion. But the kind of mental possessions that are acquired at a university usually bear little relation to the needs of those who acquire them. Inside an outer shell of acquired knowledge, a solitary self is usually moping and groping and crying out inaudibly for deliverance. I do not think the human condition itself is bettered by education; that is, unless one extends the notion of education to include fighting, working, getting drunk, making love, flying kites and floating dud cheques. We normally learn best by our mistakes. And the education system seems designed to make sure that all the mistakes the young will make will be on paper. Of course it does not succeed in this objective, but leads them instead into the massive mistake of failing to make their own decisions.

Beyond our actual needs, the hunger for both material and mental possessions implies that security can be found in them. And this is not borne out by experience. If possessions could give security, then you and I would be secure people; but we do not need the help of a psychiatrist to know that we are not. Perhaps the desire for security is itself a blind alley.

One time in a hotel in the North Island, I found myself standing in the bedroom of an Australian gambler. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps he had invited me in to have a drink. He was a big plump fair baby-faced man. As he lay in bed subdued by a giant hangover, the housemaid came into the room and began telling him off. I think they must have been on intimate terms; for her abuse had the verve and penetrating power that usually belongs to mothers or wives. And I could see that he was resigned to it, as a man resigns himself to cold gritty weather. Perhaps it reassured him. The dry nagging voice may have seemed to him a necessary property of life, the voice of some female Moses pursuing him from the bassinette to the grave, and confirming a sexual guilt that had in it a theological element. At any rate, I was struck by his complete and uncomplaining solitude. He spent his life wandering in the desert of money, following the big gambling schools from Sydney to New Zealand to Honolulu and back again. This interior desert had no roots, no permanence, no green shade. I do not think he would have been able to imagine that anyone could have loved him, the inward man who was still half a child in any circumstances whatever. No doubt he had some bonds page 613 of friendship in the fluctuating tribe of gamblers. But the real inner self, the man under the lid, would find no signs in the world outside to explain why he existed. I think of him as the modern hero; a type of Western man, who has no place on the face of the globe that he can actually call home, no land to plough, no woman who will truly and simply accept his sexual nature, no fathers with whom he can lay down his bones. Yet he goes on living; and from that come his irreducible agony and his heroism. I thought at the time of the Australian painter’s picture of Ned Kelly in Spring. The man on horseback rides among flowers; and a faceless face looks through the black oblong iron mask and sees not flowers but a desert. He has his energy and his own dignity. He is not an anarchist but a nihilist. He has accepted the impossibility of creative love; and the anguish of that acceptance drives him forward like a projectile towards his death. The world of Property is a jail which he raids at intervals, not to stay inside it, but to satisfy his needs; the world of Poverty is closed to him, because the acceptance of Poverty requires a conscious knowledge of God. The modern hero provokes terror and admiration. But I had always hoped that man could be more than this.

Not long ago I read in the newspaper – ‘The tiny whitebaiting centre of Haast is scared that a major hepatitis outbreak will scare away its life-blood tourist trade. . . . Haast is a main staging point for tourist buses and cars passing over the New Haast Pass scenic highway to Otago. . . .’

This information alone raises several interesting possibilities. Perhaps God has had mercy on the town of Haast, alone among the towns of this nation. God has heard their cry for mercy and sent them hepatitis, so that the worse plague of tourism would be driven away. One has seen those somnolent Dads, window-hoisting Mums and baffled adolescents travelling the tar-sealed road of money and boredom and staring at mountains and rivers under the fixed delusion that they were planted there by the Tourist Bureau for their especial benefit, just like the hideous photographs behind glass in hotel lounges. They will not be coming to Haast any longer. What have the people of Haast done to deserve this miracle? Perhaps they crucified a martyr; or perhaps they sold all their goods and gave the money to CORSO. No wonder they are terrified. Once it has started flowing, the mercy of God is like a river. Today they have hepatitis. Tomorrow the men may recover their potency and the women their fertility. And the day after that they may begin to make up their own songs and sing them, and build a new church and set up statues there that they have carved with their own hands. I too am afraid for the town of Haast.

‘Come to the arms of Jesus,’ says the parson. ‘There you will find spiritual security. And that security is not incompatible with a prudent use of the world’s goods. Money is not one of the strange gods. Where would the page 614 Church be without money? Give a certain percentage of your income as alms to others and gifts to the Church, and God will reward you with a home in Heaven quite as secure as the well-ordered home you have constructed on earth. If you wake up at night and worry, say a short prayer and go to sleep again. God is the security of the Christian.’

‘My God is like a rough sea,’ says the Desert Father. ‘And my boat is a small one. He has led me out of riches into poverty, out of security into the abyss of His love. I do not know where to turn. I am alive, and yet I die; I die, and yet I am alive. There is no place in the world less secure than the place where the Cross is erected. But there is no other place in the world for me to go.’

I prefer the second voice to the first one; for I do not think that we were made for security.

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