The Broadeners

Those who broadened the New Zealand verse tradition between the middle Forties and the present date are notable for the lack of any common programme or manifesto – a lack which may have done them no harm whatever. A loose and largely spurious political unity on the Marxian front had fallen to pieces by the Forties – that is, as a literary force to be reckoned with – and an apparent unity among the Innovators could only rest upon a common literary prestige, or, less plausibly, on certain common intuitions which they might be held to possess into the spiritual predicament of New Zealanders. In his Introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, first published in 1960, Allen Curnow writes in the following terms about R.A.K. Mason –

The ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’ (written before Mason’ twentieth year) has been taken for a simple one-level allegory and ‘this our race’ for the New Zealanders; the ‘far-pitched perilous hostile place’ is New Zealand. Mason has protested that this is not so. He was thinking of the human race and the planet Earth. He is willing to suppose, nevertheless, that here and elsewhere in his earlier lyrics, both the choice of theme and the intensity of feeling point to an under-level of allegory implicating the poet as New Zealander.

It is not hard to find the New Zealander; indeed, for Mason, there is no other man, so absolute is his sense of community . . . The condition of ‘shocked faith’ was the effect on a remarkable poet’s constitution of what he sensed in his society – its isolation, its scepticism, its misgiving that the whole enterprise of living together may be inconsequent or meaningless. I knowthat this area of New Zealand mind exists, and exerts its pressures on page 72 the more relaxed, good-natured, well-nourished surfaces of New Zealand living: we are uneasy underneath, and must expect a poetry which cuts so deeply to the sources of unease . . .

I suggest that Curnow manipulates his evidence to gain a desired result. In the face of an open (though later qualified) denial by Mason, he insists that a certain poem must be based on a predicament supposedly peculiar to New Zealanders and universal among them. He has cast Mason in the role of a New Zealand hierophant and sufferer for the tribe; and, willy nilly, Mason must accept it. I do not quarrel with Curnow’s intuition that we may, as a group, have to endure special spiritual privations; I quarrel only with an unscrupulous element in his criticism. A comment made by Kendrick Smithyman, in his recent published survey of New Zealand poetry, A Way of Saying, on Curnow’s relation to M.H. Holcroft, is also illuminating –

Over the years Curnow, as has been shown, has endorsed a sentence of Holcroft’s – ‘Their task, is to acclimatise the muse . . .’ which Curnow represents as describing and not prescribing what poets are to do. If it is a way of describing what poets are to do, simple or not, it is not a very good way of describing their ‘task’. Nor is it altogether irrelevant if we observe that a number of the poets failed to see that it was at all a description which applied to what they felt about their writing and their responsibilities. Rather than being descriptive, Holcroft’s language is prescriptive. In taking over Holcroft’s sentence, Curnow regrettably takes over the prescription attached to it . . .

In an article published in Salient, in the issue of 5 October 1964, W.S. Broughton has tried to shed further light on this obscure but real controversy –

The period since the second edition of the Caxton Book of New Zealand Verse has been notable for the rejection of what many younger poets believe to be legislating criticism from Curnow. In later years the target of the attack has been shifted from the preface to that book to the editorial technique of Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, and to ‘academic criticism’ in general . . .

In the critical debates of the last fifteen years, personalities as much as ideas have become involved, to the general detriment of intellectual standards, and it can be hoped that the rather artificial distinction that a number of poets and critics assume exist between regional-Universityacademicism and universal-bardic-Romanticism . . . will give way, not before time, to a situation where the serious lover of poetry can consider the history of his country’s literature without being involved in feuding . . .

I share Mr Broughton’s hope; and perhaps at the present day we are nearer the peaceful situation he wishes for than ever before; but I count it necessary to mention the chief facts of dispute, obscured (as he rightly points out) by irritable personal attitudes. In approaching the problem I have put before you page 73 first a comment by him and a comment by Smithyman, to give two different views from the sidelines as it were; but now, moving into the scrum itself, I will try to make clear the attitudes shared by myself, Louis Johnson, Alistair Campbell, Peter Bland, Richard Packer, who have had serious fault to find with Curnow’s criticism and editorial technique –

(a)	Some time at the beginning of the Sixties the proof sheets of Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse fell into my hands; and I was so shocked by the unrepresentative nature of this anthology that I wrote to Curnow and refused to let him include my work in it. Various other poets took the same action independently. I must make the point that Curnow’s selection from my own published verse was adequate, though it did favour his special regional interpretation. I had no private axe to grind. But the selection from the work of Johnson, Campbell, Bland, Witheford, Pat Wilson, and W.H. Oliver was wholly inadequate, and the work of Mary Stanley, Fleur Adcock, Richard Packer, Stuart Slater, Earle Spencer, Hone Tuwhare, John Weir, Barry Mitcalfe, Gordon Challis – one could extend the list almost indefinitely – had been neglected entirely. The omissions were massive enough to constitute a point of justice. One could say of course – ‘Why worry? Any anthologist will have his bias. Why should the Penguin anthology be representative?’ But given the implications of its title – A Book of New Zealand Verse – I doubt if Curnow had the right to be unrepresentative in his selection. The edition was intended to be a popular one, aimed at the paperback market, likely to be used in schools and read overseas. With the difficulties for publication that still exist to some extent in this country our local poets could reasonably expect that our most influential critic and anthologist would make a broader and less biased selection. No other anthology would reach as wide a public. In the event we lost the battle. The book was published as Curnow had selected it.
(b)	The mystique of the spiritual and social isolation of New Zealanders is too narrow to form a basis of critical theory. In Curnow’s case it seemed to have sprung into being from three areas of influence – a personal predisposition to think that way, wholly valid and legitimate in his own poetic practice, but invalid when extended to the interpretation of other writers; an unusually strong sense of the social differences between New Zealand and English life, generated perhaps by his youth in Canterbury, the area where English settlement sank its roots deepest and kept a spirit of colonialism the longest, but increased by subsequent experiences overseas, when Curnow encountered almost as a trauma the difference between New Zealand and English literary and social modes (again, this could have been a purely private matter, but became public because of its influence on his criticism and editorial selection); and finally, the early effect on his thought of the New Zealand mystique proposed by M.H. Holcroft. The existence of Curnow’s debt to Holcroft has been acknowledged by him in his Introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse, but never, I think, the extent of the debt. The first two page 74 books of Holcroft’s trilogy were certainly available to him in the early Forties when his mind began to move in critical channels. I am far from under-rating Holcroft’s significant contribution to our literature. His intuitions provided a broadly Jungian interpretation of New Zealand life and literature with at least the tentative assumption of the existence of a group mind, and the poets of the late Thirties and the Forties were indebted to him for the sense that the New Zealand landscape and seascape were a house waiting to be lived in. Brasch in particular wrote many fine poems whose content coincided with Holcroft’s intuition. But when Curnow provided a more sophisticated interpretation, without adding significantly to Holcroft’s original terms, he tended to kick away the ladder by which he had climbed up. It would be interesting to make a close study of the parallels between Curnow’s two Introductions and the intuitions contained in Holcroft’s trilogy. I doubt if one would find any important statements of a New Zealand mystique which were not already germinal somewhere in Holcroft’s work. The debt should have been acknowledged more fully. One can hardly accuse Holcroft of cutting other men’s cloth to fit his theories. In the early Forties the cloth did fit. But in his Introduction to the Penguin Book Curnow had to do a great deal of cutting, as I have indicated; and I think his critical and editorial butchery must have involved a degree of subconscious dishonesty. Could he honestly think, for example, that Louis Johnson had written only three poems worth including in the anthology, and these three with a regional New Zealand focus, when most of Johnson’s work has taken the form of dramatic fables unrelated to any distinctly New Zealand points of reference? I doubt it. Johnson and others had reason to be irate.
(c)	The phrase ‘academic criticism’ has often been used in a derogatory way by those poets and commentators who have opposed Curnow’s arguments. Smithyman suggests an opposite polarity of Romantic and academic writing to account for this – the poetry of what is said contrasting with poetry regarded as a way of saying – but I think, even if this polarity of method does exist, that he is barking up the wrong tree. Though some confusion may have occurred, the world ‘academic’ has been commonly used in a social, rarely in a literary sense. Thus ‘academic criticism’ has meant ‘criticism that issues from the universities’ – with the implication that Curnow and certain Landfall reviewers have regarded poems and books of poems as texts for linguistic analysis, have been limited in fact by a special university conditioning. One can see how the accusations might have arisen. Nearly all the Innovators began as university men, and many of them have stayed close to the campus; their work often sprang from the stimulus of university friendships, and had often the cosmopolitan intellectual tone which university life encourages. Unconsciously they might easily tend to favour work which sprang from the same sources. I think the accusation has some practical justification, though page 75 it is extremely hard to prove it.
(d)	The final factor which I can distinguish in this complex and important controversy is a purely psychological one; and it may be the strongest. The Innovators in their time were literary revolutionaries; but inevitably they have appeared in the light of father figures to the generation that succeeded them. However valid their intuitions and competent their methods, they were bound to be rejected as they had rejected the work of the Forerunners. Poetic methods and fashions don’t ever develop in a straight line; each generation tends to regard itself as born to be part of a unique revolution; and perhaps it is a tribute to the force and reality of Curnow’s mystique that the Broadeners have found it so vitally important to move out of his shadow. I remember an occasion in the early Fifties, when I had given a talk, at a Writers’ Conference in Christchurch; and I remember Curnow congratulating me in a local pub when the talk was over, with a paternal warmth that both pleased and troubled me. I felt like an ungrateful Elisha to whom Elijah was trying to donate his prophet’s cloak; I had to dodge the offering, even at the cost of ingratitude, because Curnow’s road and mine would always be different (in my case, could only remain real by being different); and the close parallel to the difficulties of a father-son relationship can hardly be ignored. These psychological factors are inevitable; and, as in families, they generally conceal an unexpected strength of real respect and affection. Many of the newer writers, myself included, may have felt too near to Curnow for them to feel safe when treading in his footprints. It was psychologically necessary for them to follow an entirely different track. I do not think we have failed to honour Curnow, nor Brasch, or any of the Innovators; we have ignored only their paternal directives and solicitude, and by so doing cleared a space to develop our own intuitions and our own literary idioms.

It is hardly usual for a critic (however much of a bush carpenter) who is also a poet to comment on his own poetic practice in the course of a critical survey. Yet I will break this unwritten rule and mention briefly one or two reasons why I have found myself by no clear choice belonging to the camp of the Broadeners. I began writing very early, and was out of my ’teens, with two published books to my credit or discredit, before I was influenced seriously by the work of the Innovators. Curnow, in a generous review of my second book, elected to discover there strong traces of the influence of R.A.K. Mason; but he had made an honest mistake – setting aside the possibility that New Zealanders communicate occultly by way of a group mind, the only contemporary influences I had encountered were communicated by the Faber Book of Modern Verse, by John Lehmann’s periodicals, and by various anthologies of English war poetry. I think most of the Broadeners were in the same box. They had found their own material and begun to develop their own idiom before they realised at any depth that some of the ground had already been covered by an earlier group of New Zealand poets. The page 76 publication of Curnow’s first anthology changed this; but it did not change what had already happened: a second beginning. Again, I have rarely felt that I belonged to a warm, nourishing mutually supporting group or clique of fellow-writers; a few sporadic friendships certainly helped me on my way; but I can distinguish nothing resembling the cohesive literary community that seems to have existed in New Zealand in the later Thirties. I think nearly all the Broadeners have been like this – solitary and idiosyncratic, turning more to English or American models. One could learn something from the Innovators, yes, and respect their achievement; but one had already served one’s term of solitary confinement before one noticed the existence of fellow-prisoners and fellow-rebels; and the exchanges that occurred afterwards were hardly formative. One shared only the same country and the same medium of words. Thus any prescriptive criticism was bound to seem peculiarly irrelevant. Already beginning to mature, we learnt something from one another, often something non-literary that might feed the roots of a poem; a smaller something from the Innovators, a way to sharpen style, an occasional new slant on the New Zealand society or landscape, not to be compared with what came to us from overseas; nothing to warrant a pupil-teacher relationship. We were perhaps aggressively democratic.

For many years Kendrick Smithyman followed his own track in Auckland, running all the risks of irrationality and obscurity, prolific and various, a doubtful portent, aware most of American models, doggedly individual. His compressed idiom affected no other New Zealand poet, except Louis Johnson and perhaps Mary Stanley: it jarred our conservatism, we did not imagine for ourselves the likelihood of poems like tightly packed sheep-pens. What we failed to recognise was a horizontal strength moving broadly and without bugles; as in this poem, ‘Incident at Matauri’ –

Shags or, they say, occasional a white
heron prints a waste of beach between tides.
Like catchcries fallen from that air bright
brown are surprising seaweeds. There’s no wharf
either way, miles; thread foam trails sand
below day broken on rough grazing, or a land
clipped by sheep. There no calls descend
through speculations down. Only the shell,
weed, tussock, cutty grass, scrub and run
of the wearing wind serpentines a minute
from what we meant by it, designing bay or bluff.
Space, largely, fills vision and prospect, and could
be bare except seas flow or those islands curl.

Look out then if you go that way by the east
page 77 holding your native sense to that nothing
complete in its now estates.
A morning took
two, thought them secure, by a small flurry,
(they left their cat sleeping out the fire)
with dawn a sail away from their fished channel.
Took two, with tackle ready, motor going.
Nothing rolled down the pebbles after them.
Space, suppose largely, was before them.

Print by print or at the lost step hemmed
a morning light surprised on those beaches
thread of foam and the motor’s distant rocking.
Rocking and distant the islands slept.

To the unaccustomed ear Smithyman’s style can be an obstacle – in particular his use of a telegraphese that frequently omits the definite article, inverts, compresses, and slides in a past participle where one would not expect it. His aim is fluidity and a cutting away of the dead wood of language. But language is hardly his chief preoccupation; there is a world to be probed, reflected, even interrogated with a strict enquiry whether it can provide man a foothold. At this point Smithyman may seem to labour a hairsbreadth away from Curnow’s and Brasch’s mystique of man solitary in an uninhabited land; but I would be more apt to suppose that he stops short of any commitment. His islands are not spelt out in invisible italics or capitals. He proposes most of all a civilised sway of thinking about primitive matters. In the poem here quoted, one is left in deliberate doubt as to what the incident may be – tragic, the death by drowning of two amateur fishermen; or tragic, the death of a married couple or unmarried lovers who had a liking for the water (in the early morning they left their cat by the fire, thus expecting to return); or mythical and fictional, a departure like that of the Argonauts, by which loss of safety becomes a gain in freedom – one is not supposed to identify the event with certainty. This can irritate the literal-minded; but it is Smithyman’s inveterate habit to leave the doors of his poems open on multiple possibilities. The uncertainties of human choice are framed in the exact décor of a living and particular seascape: the incident is uncertain, pointed only to provoke some animistic dread; but about Matauri we have no doubt at all, it is where we are accustomed to live.

Smithyman’s most obvious achievement stands in his poems of that rarest kind, the domestic romantic –

. . . I propose
a chaos. For should you go out
page 78 in the bitter livid street,
the young would be disgraced, bent
men be momently straight,
the huddled world raise a shout
for the face not seen since the day
when a wall and a city went down
and a Trojan suffered the clown
to stare on her pride . . .

Here the theme will carry the weight of traditional rhetoric; and Smithyman heaves a great shot from a sling against the scaffolding of custom and habit. Such rare moments of direct and passionate statement get more than half their force from the urbanity and reticence of his usual language. I think that Louis Johnson may have learnt first fluidity and later this urbanity from Smithyman; or else that they both learnt it from models admired in common – fluidity from Hart Crane perhaps, and urbanity from Allan Tate or Shapiro – the names don’t matter much, but the models would be mainly American ones. In this respect their formative development would differ entirely from that of the Innovators.

I am willing to grant that Johnson lacked in his earliest work a full control of a distinctive and highly charged idiom. (The same can be said, of course, of each single one of the Innovators.) The staccato bursts of imagery, the loosening of syntax, the compressed metaphor, could hardly please critics who had never shifted far from Victorian or Georgian norms. And one had to recognise that Johnson has been very prolific, building often a cluster of poems around some deeply felt theme, and letting the reader make his choice of the best ikon. Smithyman has written wisely in A Way of Saying about the way that Johnson encounters language and reality – ‘Johnson has had his own dark angel, fluent, expressive, persistent, persuasive, but generally minded towards their times, their occasions and their right diction . . . The range of subjects in Johnson’s poetry is wider than the manners he assumes to deal with them. . .’.

One felt that when various New Zealand critics ignored or attacked Johnson’s work (from the start, he has had the worst run of critical comment of any good poet in the country, and this has pushed him in turn negatively to irritable attacks on local academicism, and positively to his remarkable editorship of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, which has helped to nourish many new talents) – one felt that those critics were often genuinely baffled by a new mode of thought, feeling and language, one could almost say a new dimension of reality approached and recognised. One sees it in an early elegiac celebration of the death of Hart Crane, felt obscurely as the sacrificial death of the artist as hero –

The sea: white buildings, mazed in his dreams and brought
the fierce, ancestral face in flaming range.
Scorched by the harlot-voice that gave escape,
garrotted by the past and present; taught
by years of booze, disease and guilt – estranged
from beauty and the beast – there was no hope.

Deadened, forced face to face at last, he came
pale on that northbound ship, dreaming release
in the lion’s den: saw waters spin like peacocks’ eyes –
each vain with blame.
Within his hands, he gathered up his crime,
and leapt from the father onto the mother’s knees:
her merciful tears muffled his drowning cries.

What are the new elements in this poetry? I suggest – an unusual energy of language springing from an intuitive awareness of a last-ditch situation; a creative, personal and remarkably successful use of the basic Freudian images; a tendency to abstraction and generality in language, relieved by compressed metaphors, each containing some germinal intuition which, in another poet (Challis, for example) might have served as material for an entire poem. The richness of Johnson’s poetry undoubtedly scandalises his critics. Should they have been scandalised? I think not. After the mainly vertical dimension of reality which the Innovators had explored (Curnow writes somewhere about Glover: ‘You were the pine in the park, / The toughest, that we admired . . .’ indicating a perception of stature in terms of height; and the problems of vexed belief or unbelief all imply a vertical tension between man and God or no-God) some kind of horizontal corrective was needed, an exploration of man’s nature, therapeutic in emphasis, indicating the tensions of love versus no-love, or creativity versus barrenness. This was the dimension which the critics were not equipped to recognise; yet other writers were able to learn from Johnson – I recall a deep shock of recognition, like that of a man meeting his doppelganger, when I read those extraordinary lines—‘. . . he came / pale on that northbound ship, dreaming release / in the lion’s den. . .’. It was possible for me to associate them directly with the experience a New Zealander might have crossing on the ferry from the South Island to the North Island; and my own verse began to release itself into the horizontal dimension, as it has done from that time forward. What Curnow had seen in Mason many of another generation were able to see in Johnson: a catalyst, an explorer, a tactician who knew what needed to be defended. We had confidence not always in Johnson’s control of the verbal medium on which he loaded so much, but in his sense of new themes and a new direction. Confidence in his verbal control later became unqualified; as one can indicate by examining a late poem, ‘Age page 80 of Discovery’ –

How our conceptions crack; constructions fall.
The narrow world walked darkly and unknown
Will burst asunder, newly beautiful
For all our fear as favourite walls come down.

What is it shines upon the distant sea –
Mermaid or monster, some outrider of
Lost continents whose gold eternity
Renders a shambles of our world of love?

We had not looked because it might disturb;
Speak a strange language, or tear down the fear
Which clothed our safety. Someone took that word,
Gave a new meaning to the question: ‘Where?’

Suddenly all is broader: there’s more light.
But mind will split under the impact’s weight.
Give us more darkness to conceal our fright!
Man was not meant to move from his front gate.

What he will make of this will profit death
Who owns most shares in all discovery.
New-rising lands will bleach as that pale breath
Touches their frontiers from the aching sea.

But look! There’s gold: strange fruits and dreams:
Brown limbs and breasts wake in the conscience free
Of fear of sacrilege. Give wishes names –
All will come true! This is discovery!

Progress leaves prints across the beaten world.
Tracks, maps, cathedrals, and the ports of call
To ravage the instruction of the child
Quite like ourselves, bewildered by it all.

This is Johnson’s mature language, cool, controlled, urbane, with the powerful mannered drive of a Roman legion on the march. I notice the phrase – ‘Suddenly all is broader: there’s more light . . .’ which establishes in my mind as just the generic term of Broadeners, which I had doubted a little when I coined it. One may fairly contrast the poem with Curnow’s well-known ‘Discovery’ – ‘How shall I compare the discovery of islands? . . .’ page 81 Curnow spoke as a conscious New Zealander, trying to nut out the processes of tribal inheritance, looking strictly toward origin, obliquely applying to his thesis the theological doctrine of the Fall of Man; but Johnson, equally suspicious of the value of technological progress, speaks a genuine cosmopolitan language, influenced very likely by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in translation, and is concerned solely with the dilemma of modern man, whose discoveries include a new pact with the power of death. His argument is Promethean rather than Judaic. Technically he has developed his preferred form, the iambic pentameter employed in rigid quatrains, to a level of total competence where he can do what he likes inside the frame. The rhythmical vigour is maintained by the strong beat at the beginning of the line – repeated eighteen times in twenty-eight lines – and the frequent use of hiatus within the stanza. Half-rhymes (in one case assonantal rhyme) stand to full rhymes in the proportion of eight to six, giving a nice balance just this side of formality. There is a frequent use of consonantal clogging to slow up a line followed by a sharp driving line relatively free of consonants: this produces an alternate slowing and quickening of the pace of the poem which corresponds to the interior movements of thought and feeling. I mention these technical factors, not supposing that Johnson would work them out by algebra, mainly to knock on the head the widely held absurdity that he is a slack craftsman. One rarely finds so high a degree of polish among the Innovators.

To distinguish among the Broadeners is hardly easy – because of their highly individual idioms; because of regional differences; because one finds that they include more than one generation, with literary influences and antagonisms among them. The Chapman and Bennett anthology, published in 1956, and the Doyle anthology, published in 1965 though each provided an invaluable survey of News Zealand verse beyond the limits set by Curnow, did not provide introductory comment on the Broadeners in such a way as to show what they might have in common. Chapman saw no new departure or discovery in the work of poets writing after the middle Forties but simply an extension of the labours of the Innovators; and since Chapman had no axe to grind, one can conclude no such departure was clearly visible to him. Doyle, however, writing ten years later, has cautiously indicated some possible contrasts –

As well as differences between generations, regional loyalties have often impeded judgment of the work of various poets. Regional rivalry has been most persistent and extensive between Wellington and Auckland . . . When we look at the regional groupings . . . one interesting correspondence emerges: the common conflict of ideas between those who see the poet as a craftsman and those to whom he is a prophet corresponds to a surprising extent with the regional line-up . . .

There is a large grain of truth in Doyle’s distinctions – poets writing in Wellington have tended to make direct social comment a good deal more page 82 than Stead, Smithyman, Sinclair and Joseph have done; yet the contrast is not complete enough to establish a regional water-shed. I suggest a more complex grouping among the Broadeners.

In Wellington four poets – Campbell, Oliver, Wilson, Witheford – found stimulus in the Forties from each other’s writing, and from their association with the periodical Hilltop (later Arachne) to which Erik Schwimmer (who edited Arachne) contributed some first-rate criticism with a background knowledge of European models. Of this group Campbell’s was the strongest talent. In an essay in the first issue of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, Schwimmer, discussing the poems of Charles Spear, crystallised the notion of a shift from New Zealandism to the use of universal symbolism in local writing. Later Johnson, Schwimmer, Campbell and myself edited and published a number of issues of the periodical Numbers: in this departure Johnson was the leading spirit, and the main reason for launching and maintaining the periodical was our dissatisfaction with the limits of Landfall editing and reviewing. We had no dogmatic editorial programme; we paid our respects to the work of the Innovators, but considered our literary problems to be different from theirs – in particular a need to break some frost of rigidity and decorum which had settled on New Zealand letters. We had encouragement from Smithyman and Gloria Rawlinson in this venture. Later still, after Numbers had expired in the usual financial convulsions, Peter Bland and Richard Packer were loosely associated with Johnson and myself in discussion of literary problems; there were no doubt a few others on the sidelines; but I doubt if any of this indicated more than the usual mutual influence of poets living in the same place. We tended perhaps to value the use of social satire and a ribald element in poetry.

In Dunedin Colin Newbury and, later on, Ruth Dallas and Stuart Slater were getting some value from Brasch’s influence as a poetic model and as editor of Landfall – when Fleur Adcock lived in Dunedin she probably had a similar contact – though in these matters I am less knowledgeable, and may have missed some significant literary occasions. Most New Zealand poets of any standing have from time to time had verse published in Landfall; but I am trying to distinguish here a regional sphere of influence, and I suggest that it existed but was never considerable.

In Auckland Smithyman, Chapman, Stanley and Sinclair seemed to share common regional interests, and to have some common elements of style. It was only Stead, however, who was able to learn much from Curnow after Curnow shifted from Christchurch to a job at Auckland University. Joseph was from the start a lone wolf, developing a lucid style with affinities to the ballad. Doyle, who had lived for a while in Wellington, and is now in Auckland, shared the particular psychological and literary problems of the immigrant with Bland and several lesser writers: his way of coping with them was on the whole to identify himself with whatever group existed in Wellington. I cannot page 83 distinguish a clear line of development among Auckland poets by which they could be numbered especially among the academic camp, or by which they should be regarded as especially given to craftsmanship. Undoubtedly the university influence has made Curnow’s, Stead’s, Chapman’s, latterly Smithyman’s, and possibly Doyle’s critical comments a good deal more scholarly than they might otherwise have been. Scholars tend to multiply footnotes and accompany every statement with some cancelling reservation; and the eye may be fixed more on staff common-room opinion than on the fruitfulness of others. But these factors, while providing material for aggressive dispute, have had no noticeable effect on New Zealand writing, except negatively by way of a pettifogging element in Landfall reviews.

It may show a degree of subconscious anti-female bias among our critics and anthologists that Mary Stanley’s small, magnificent single volume, Starveling Year, has been all but neglected by them –

. . . I close
My books and know events
Are people, and all roads
Everywhere walk home
Women and men, to take
History under their roofs.
I see Icarus fall
Out of the sky, beside
My door, no beautiful,
Envy of angels, but feathered
For a bloody death.

Again and again she breaks through the surface mind to a level both spiritual and biological where the special perceptions of love, growth and death open to a woman can be opened also to the reader. The result is a poetry that moves slowly under heavy weights. She may have learnt from Smithyman, or he from her – there are close parallels in their idioms – but more than he, she explores a mode of feeling in which biology and geography are all but identical. The seasons are a process inside her persona; rocks and waves are an extension of her body – and this painful landscape is illuminated by harsh intellectual insight. With Johnson she shares an imagery more kinaesthetic than visual or auditory. She was the first woman poet in this country to write with real confidence from her own centre.

Gloria Rawlinson’s work has also unquestionably suffered from neglect. She had grown up in a milieu similar to that which helped and hindered Robin Hyde; and, through personal contact, she tended to take Robin Hyde as her artistic model and hero figure. Unfortunately Rawlinson had a precocious talent, which was fêted when still highly immature by the women’s page 84 groups. I doubt if there is anything in The Perfume Vendor, published in 1936, which could have survived: naturally enough, she followed the lead of those around her and produced her version of the mandarin mask. Then comes a prodigious gap in publication, between 1936 and 1955, when a small pamphlet, The Islands Where I Was Born, was published in a series from the Handcraft Press in Wellington. In that sequence the balance of austerity and richness, the depth of thought and feeling, is undoubtedly remarkable (Curnow wisely included the whole sequence in the Penguin anthology) – but a question needs to be asked – ‘Why the great gap?’ In correspondence with Rawlinson, I have found that, having climbed on the Georgian train, she found that that railway line ended in the bush or nowhere; and then, beginning tentatively to make her own break-through and develop a firmer style, encountered a massive wall of exclusion from New Zealand publication and from the cohesive and chiefly masculine group of the Innovators. Over the years this discouraged her to the point where she hardly cared to write. In the Fifties, Louis Johnson, however, published her in the Poetry Yearbook and helped her to renew her confidence; I believe that Hart Smith, an Australian poet who lived and published in New Zealand for a while, also helped her with personal encouragement. I may well have missed out some important factors; but I have the impression that Rawlinson is a poet who was nearly exterminated by neglect, and who was able to revivify her talent in the less bleak atmosphere provided by some of the Broadeners –

. . . Under the rosepink paper bell
Dancers punt a familiar theme
But as we move by twittering string
And moonhound baying of saxophone I
hear the light of the young night sing:

‘Where is your birdwheel? Where is your loveherb?
Where your fermented and smoking charm?’
My mother gave me the serial’s highlight –
A toffee apple in a garden suburb;
His father gave him a golden tip,
Newspaper, wallet and beer to sip,
But shall these answer the coldest harm
Which is the dulled wit’s fear of surprise?
O Venus in the western twilight
I wish your doves down to peck our eyes.

Rawlinson did not put overboard, any more than Robin Hyde, the neo-Georgian decorative quality; in her later verse it reappears as an element of fantasy or verbal wit enlivening an immediate dramatic theme. The break- page 85 through is not merely on a technical level, though it includes a radical surgery that cuts away the unnecessary image and a hardening of what had been in her a lax verse structure; it involves a hard-won battle on the human level to move from solipsism to a new existential freedom. In Of Clouds and Pebbles, her latest volume, published in 1963, this new freedom is everywhere apparent. Rawlinson may have seen her own development chiefly in technical terms – I remember a letter in which she mentions that, in trying to make a poem, she is struggling with an angel who is a black-belt judo expert – but here also there is some indication of a prolonged spiritual struggle; and I think it may be on the same ground that Mary Stanley had to fight, or any New Zealand woman poet – for freedom in the use of her own kind of symbolism; for the right to speak from a private centre not marked on any of the literary maps.

It is possible that the creative rhythms of women writers are in general different from that of men. I remember Fleur Adcock mentioning to me that she could only write very slowly and with difficulty, like a sculptor working in some hard material, and that her true themes came to her comparatively rarely. In her work a double revolt is apparent – the intellectual revolt of twentieth-century woman claiming a necessary equality (her favourite model has been Robert Graves, a writer who emphasises the need for an austere craftsmanship); and a deeper revolt, equally essential, against a still prevailing image of womanly meekness and decorum. This revolt is well exemplified in a negative love poem, ‘Instructions to Vampires’ –

I would not have you drain
With your sodden lips the flesh that has fed mine,
And leech his bubbling blood to a decline:
Not that pain;

Nor visit on his mind
That other dessication, where the wit
Shrivels: so to be humbled is not fit
For his kind.

But use acid or flame
Secretly, to brand or cauterize;
And on the soft globes of his mortal eyes
Etch my name.

Formally the structure of the poem is a rigid strait-jacket, compressing the theme to an absolute minimum statement. But what amazes is its content; not that one was ever unaware of the subconscious or semi-conscious negativism or aggression which lies on the dark side of every erotic relationship; but it is outside our tribal decorum for a woman to express it, in art, if not in speech. page 86 Adcock recognises (without liking it) the negative persona of the enchantress which a woman may assume in relation to a man; and in the grim fiction of the poem the unconscious content is perfectly projected. A quality of extreme intellectual honesty and boldness runs through that unique book, The Eye of the Hurricane; again, one knew that women, as much as men, employed faculties of intuition and sensation in their love relationships; but, at least in this country, they had always suppressed this level of knowledge in public communication. It is notable that Adcock, by ignoring the social decorum of the Women’s Trade Union, achieves her own aesthetic decorum at a much deeper level. I would count her book one of those most likely to survive into another century; and, symbolically, a model of pioneering courage by which other women writers may learn to renew a confidence that might otherwise fail. The sharp distinction I have made between the situation of the male and female poet might appear unwarranted; but I hold to it, because the pressures are different, and because the emotional and biological territory is also different, requiring a different standpoint, the finding of a different centre from which to speak; though speech itself is our common medium.

Consideration of Adcock’s verse brings to the surface the crux in the development of any poet – that the deepest themes are never arbitrarily chosen (moralists frequently and erroneously imagine otherwise) but, as it were, given to the writer as crystallisations from the flux of experience and that the choice of verse structure is not either an arbitrary matter, but something organic, a reflection in words of the unique balances among thought, feeling intuition and sensation which constitute lines of force in the writer’s interior universe. Thus if a critic, however gently, advises a developing poet to choose certain themes or employ certain structural devices, he is far more likely to frustrate than to help; he could at most suggest the reading of certain other poets whose work seems in tune with that of the developing craftsman. Idiom is more than a means to an end; in some degree it contains the poem as, by a note too remote analogy, the body contains the soul; and as body and soul can only be fatally separated, in a good poem idiom and content are indistinguishable. Thus, if I have stressed content more than idiom in my bush-carpentering criticism, this is to recognise that while a soul without a body is incomplete (the Blessed are supposed to feel a need, patiently endured, for the renewed exercise at the end of time of their lost bodily functions) a body without a soul is a mere cadaver; and if I object to academical word-counting, it is because it smells too much of the trade of the anatomist. The Georgians had real verbal talents, but lacked more than the shadows of a vivifying principle: it is the need for this, the soul of the poem drawn out of the flux of experience, which I have stressed and will continue to stress.

I notice among the Auckland poets a wide variety of idiom. M.K. Joseph, perhaps unfairly neglected, often uses the poem as a form of verbal play –

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In vacant intraterminal hush
Unheeded rings the telephone,
The cleaner with his wire brush
Castigates the grubby stone

From the empty lecture room
Where board and lectern idly brood
Still echoes distantly the boom
Of the expiring platitude . . .

Much of his verse has its own light-hearted charm; it is not designed to draw blood. I have felt that he may be too much tied to a rhetorical structure, to the poem seen as a thing, an artefact. In some of his later poems (notably ‘Mercury Bay Eclogue’) he achieves an elegiac force and an unaggressive irony which shows a real hidden strength. I suspect that his growth has been, and will be, gradual; and that like the vine, his fruit is being improved by the frosts.

Keith Sinclair began otherwise, with an exceptionally fluid idiom charged with natural warmth. His control has in the past been minimal, allowing a rapid coagulation of images and phrases; but lately he has been exploring successfully areas of social comment and satire –

Marriages were not made in unexplored
Rain forests, but in family-sized frames
Designed by soft-voiced child psychologists
As playrooms for the young . . .

Here his prevailing weakness of sentimentality has dropped away; also a good deal of the positive erotic element, the odour of the sand on a New Zealand beach on a hot day which gave the early poems their particular warmth. One has yet to see whether the shift from the lyrical to the satirical mode can be held by him (at times the new poems resemble intricately made glass paperweights with photographs embedded in them) – but if it can, he may move into a very tough maturity.

Thinking of C.K. Stead as Curnow’s strongest disciple, and influenced a trifle by polemical issues, I recently said in an omnibus article on the work of several dozen poets that Stead would benefit by a year’s stay in the King Country or a holiday on marihuana, to loosen up his linguistic reflexes. I don’t regret the slapstick comment; but I do see a serious tension in his work between solitary and intense experience and a commentator with a bag full of explosive metaphors and literary allusions. There are signs that the sufferer and the commentator are coming closer together, What was elegance is being hammered into a hard mature idiom. Stead is one to hone; his true themes page 88 are likely to come slowly; but his poems at their best have the force of the rock-drill breaking into hard ground. His technical powers have never been in question.

I see new growth also in the work of Charles Doyle, who has alternated between relatively unformed poems in which a flow of feeling predominates and a hard, hammered idiom which runs the risk of a total loss of feeling. For Doyle, I think it is still a matter of waiting to be possessed by his true themes, rather than trying to manufacture them from stray memories and the world which the newspapers present to us –

In those same fields tonight
frost will whiten the grass your feet trod
in pretended freedom. A hawk
will hang in the dusky sky, float
groundward, alight on a possum’s dead guts.

Come northward now. Ten months have limped
away. Tonight, I could count the stars
from among my trees or from my porch,
if there were any in the cloud-sodden sky . . .

I quote from Doyle’s poem ‘To George Wilder’. If it were only a poem of sympathy with a semi-heroic fugitive from social non-justice, it wouldn’t hold together; but Doyle has crystallised quietly and accurately many deep tensions between the individual and his social frame held in common by himself, an immigrant New Zealander with an itch to wander, by George Wilder and us. Wisely he offers no personal or social solution whatever. I think that his themes, when he finds them more completely, are likely to be nihilist: the boulder splitting slowly under many degrees of frost.

There are many poets who write best, for a time at least, without consciously striving for a formal structure; perhaps because of the need to get away from the residual influence of bad models. Doyle may be one of these. Another is Barry Mitcalfe, who has made some lively and highly welcome translations from the Maori – the scholars will complain that they are not accurate; but the scholars have said this of Pound’s translations from the Chinese, and Pound will survive the scholars – the problem for a poet is to build up a new poem on the English side of the fence which mirrors the thought and feeling of the original. In his own verse Mitcalfe has a good ear and a simple but organic use of metaphor –

Set like a cameo against the glass
dressed for an occasion that never comes,
except in the casual eye that sees
page 89 its own reflection in the window where all
time waits for the one who cannot return,
gone now from this grey-flannel street,
from this closed heart beating
in its kingdom of arteries.

Go, as if the clock
were put straight and your feet
kept the stair, up the well of night
into a sky prickling with stars
that wept once at the birth of the world,
and weeps now for its death.

Mitcalfe’s ‘Lady in Black’ succeeds by the use of a wholly unpretentious idiom. He has access in many of his poems to the rural world from which the university-trained poets are commonly cut off: the crude vigour of communities where the middleman, the grocer or the lawyer, does not exist or plays an unimportant role. I think he has been influenced both by Maori poetry and by those poets of Maori extraction who are now writing in English, with an idiom that owes something to the Maori – Hone Tuwhare and Rowley Habib are the best of them. Tuwhare’s work, like Mitcalfe’s is uneven, but he never produces a non-poem, a cage without a bird inside it; Habib inclines to a long dithyrambic structure which may have parallels with Maori chant. Both poets belong in a special way to the Broadeners: their work has given us some access to what seems a Maori dimension of thought and feeling, where the sense of a too recent habitation in this country is wholly absent, and nuances of a view more positive than our own towards sex, food, and natural phenomena enter the dry arena of the Western mind. Habib has a poem in which he eats a fish and experiences in imagination the ancestral journey from Hawaiki: his ancestors are participating in the feast. Tuwhare in a magnificent short poem called ‘Moon Girl’ tenderly considers the situation of a girl who has just entered puberty, her growing life and the dangers that lie about her: it embodies that superior unity of outlook in regard to sexual occasions by which Maori society, even in transition, can shame our own ferocity or aridity. Not that the poets in question lack the European intellectual lens; but they are using it in a different way, being surer of their material and closer to it. Erik Schwimmer’s creative editorship of Te Ao Hou, the Maori Affairs Department’s periodical, helped several writers on Maori themes to find their idiom.

Alistair Campbell, shifting away in some degree from his earlier Romantic mode, produced in Sanctuary of Spirits a dramatic meditation on the island of Kapiti, and the career of the Maori military genius, Te Rauparaha. He uses a loose free verse structure which owes much to recent translations from the Maori –

page 90

No use. No use at all.
I died at Kaparetehau
where ducks abound.
I died like a slave,
clinging to life
as a limpet clings to the rocks.
The enemy had swift canoes,
swifter than the crests of breakers.
Like hawks they swooped upon us,
wallowing overburdened,
a duck with a dragging wing . . .

The new idiom is frequently, though not consistently successful. In other poems Campbell has used rigid stanzaic structures. One notices that after a period of latency or sterility he is coping effectively with the problems that any writer must meet in middle life, after a vigorous, lush beginning – for him, the road leads generally inwards to a surgical examination of personal relationships. Those poets – Witheford, Pat Wilson and W.H. Oliver, who were associated with Campbell at his beginning, have tended to write less; Witheford and Wilson both went overseas, and have produced spasmodically, and Oliver may perhaps be hibernating. Oliver speaks elegiacally of his own poems, as stragglers over a border, cut down by withering blasts from harsh external circumstance and the interior moral censor. Yet the situation is always reversible.

Witheford had a view of the poet as hierophant, founded in part on the doctrines of Ouspensky; and it led him to a strongly ritualist interpretation of experience, verging on the esoteric, and in his verse, as in the later verse of Robert Graves, to statements that require in some degree that the reader should give the assent of a believer. Several powerful poems emerged from this cycle; but he lacked the kind of ability one finds so triumphantly in Yeats’s poems, to create what compels an imaginative assent to the emotional aspect of doctrines one may logically reject – reincarnation, I think, would be one of them.

In Pat Wilson’s verse what began as innocent eccentricity, the special language and attitudes of somebody explaining his dreams to friends, did not fully break through to a publicly suitable idiom – there are exceptions, in the case of objective sketches of places and events (‘The Anchorage’, ‘The Becalmed Yacht’, ‘The Tree’, ‘The Childhood Church’) – but what I imagine he would wish to stand as a work of maturity, ‘Staying at Ballisodare’, a poem about a difficult and disappointing visit to Yeats’s grave and tower in Ireland, comes out as a half-successful, though interesting, bit of autobiography, married by his tendency to approach every theme obliquely, and perhaps most in that one has the impression of a poet talking about the mythical power of poetry.

page 91

Oliver seemed likely to move the furthest – some of his poems written during residence in England have a broad power, limited only by a tendency to think in verse like a prose-writer – but, as I have noted, he may now be hibernating.

These three poets had in common a casual approach to technical problems and a welcome hint of the amateur who publishes the poem much as it happened to fall out on the page. Their need to write, however, may have been less vocational than they had supposed.

To continue writing in gritty, bleak, or bog-black psychological conditions; to keep alive in oneself a positive view of one’s own potential (not of one’s own performance, that hardly matters since it lies always in the past); to crack, if necessary, the armour of a useless intellectual conditioning; to choose one’s forms of employment with an eye to the survival of one’s gift – these apparently self-involved tactical manoeuvres are signs of the sense of a vocation. I sometimes think that poets who go on writing are haunted by a power more demonic than daemonic – their personal defects may serve them better than their virtues. At least, there is likely to be a sense of affliction, of an undesired compulsion, in the creative condition of humiliation also, considering one’s always inadequate equipment. I cannot blame those who are able to retreat from it. Sometimes retreat may be undesired; yet the poet, leaving youth behind, finds himself lacking a world-view coherent enough to understand and resist the three powers most apparent in the life of modern man: monotony, atrocity and anarchy. In youth poetry provides a hopeful dream, either of an erotic Eden, or of a fruitful Utopia, or of both; certainly to write, perhaps to appreciate poetry, one needs some area of imagined liberty and residual innocence, closely connected in practice with a positive view of the sexual impulse – but normally with ageing, as the physical powers decline, so does the sense of liberty and expectation. In the nature of things, imagined Edens or Utopias shipwreck on the actual. The themes of middle age are bound to include, if not, in this country, atrocity, at least the endemic monotony and anarchy with which our civilisation is permeated; and this necessitates, if the poet is to survive, a shift from the Romantic to a realist mode. The Innovators, deeply Romantic in their origins, have not made the shift easily. The Broadeners, encouraged by the realist quality of contemporary writing overseas, seem able to make it without trauma. Thus in Peter Bland’s ‘Lines on Leaving the Last Reservation’ –

I’m barely sane . . .
Three years of cramped
good living leaves me squat in spirit.

I’d like to think we’re getting out
in the nick of time
page 92 but
looking round
my sense of mild fatality comes through.

The spirit here has learnt a shrewd
backgarden whimsy . . .
crushed, it curls
still smirking in dog-kennel warmth:
such arse-sniffing could go on for years.

Thank God we’re off!
That Absolute
of public peace called Home
leaves me so insecure . . .
‘Man must grow roots’
is such a vegetable rule.
I dream
of hatchets gleaming at my neighbour’s
grim approach . . . his backhand chop
would fell me like a fencing post . . .

The key to the strength of this poetry lies in its aggression. Bland, a New Zealander immigrant from England, is not haunted much by pieties of land and habitation (he has his own pieties of family associated with his early life in England – he is able to see New Zealand society much as it is, an uninspiring offshoot from the tree of Western civilisation in which the sap has never been very green. His tone of satire is rarely shrill; he is helped in his aggression by a native sense of humour and a touch of the positive resignation of the underdog traditional in British folk comedy. His poems are based squarely on a recognition of the existence in himself and others of l’ homme sensual, or in Freud’s sense, l’ homme donné, the wisely incorrigible inner self which will be apt to survive any Deluge of water or fire; and whatever threatens this centre becomes a target of his aggression. Much anti-Puritan writing betrays the insecurity of the man always tormented by a subconscious Puritan heritage; but Bland’s anti-Puritanism is no more and no less than it claims to be – as when he observes the big-bellied settlers’ wives coming ashore from the boats at the moment of European settlement, more like characters in the first scene of a satyr play than monuments of ancestral gravity. Their fertility fascinates him. Since he, too, is an immigrant, they are his elder sisters, not his great-grandmothers. What a fresh breeze blew through our literature when his book, My Side of the Story, was published here! He owed much to Louis Johnson, who had pioneered in a grimmer way some of the same ground; but he is nobody’s disciple and his own master. I hope the bureaucracies do not page 93 murder him in their glass castle; or our theatre world drag him behind one of its many mirrors. He will need to carry at least the photograph of a kumara god in his wallet.

In Richard Packer’s work I see similar departures; though here the aggression is less strictly controlled. Prince of the Plague Country, published in 1964, contains, however, a number of ferocious balanced satires (‘No Way Out’, ‘Someone Special’, ‘Cause Enough’, ‘The Sad Assassin’) and a most effective long Jeremiad, ‘The Night after Wormwood’, in which Adam Kadmon and Everyman discuss the recent destruction of earth by fire. One other poem, ‘The Brandy Shortage’, seems to me to touch the high water mark of New Zealand verse in the last decade –

Tonight I am ferrying the straits
and your face is glowing under every
bubble on the beer I’m drinking,
a microcosm of you multiplying

from one nagging germ of love to
a wide aching beneath my heartshield,
the usual symptom of that silly
troubadour’s disease. It ought to be

suffered in some technicolour pavilion,
not in the cough-laden smokeroom
of this drunken steamer . . .

Packer goes on to identify himself as a neo-Catharist, enduring the pains of a troubadour’s devotion. He balances his statement at the end, most wisely, with realist vulgarity

. . . I’ve no guts for whisky, so hoping
for sleep tonight, my removed Sophia

perhaps now rinsing your divine panties,
I’m on D.B. lager, and taking you in
at every gulp, wonder what will win,
this, or your damned everywhere eyes.

The hard electric idiom belongs to Packer and perhaps may belong to a new generation among the Broadeners. It enables him to write what is, for us, a new kind of love poem, equally cynical and devotional. Earlier Packer was able to strengthen his defiances and broaden his technique by a sympathy with the work of Johnson; but one may notice with hope his equal awareness page 94 of that special phenomenon of our times, the newly emerging semi-tribal groups among the young.

It is only just to refer to other poets – the steady, quiet labour of Ruth Dallas, wholly unpretentious, influenced by translations from the Chinese, beginning with a private lyrical and elegiac style and achieving a more conversational public idiom in her recent book, The Turning Wheel; the firmly integrated pastoral idiom of John Weir, shot through by metaphysical insights, in his book The Sudden Sun; the brittle but effective fictions of Challis, which employ attitudes derived from psychiatry; one dense, dour, rocklike poem by Owen Leeming, ‘The Priests of Serrabonne’, in which the poet examines from an atheistic standpoint the Catholic conception of sacrifice and finds it wanting (no other work of Leeming’s is equal to this one in cohesiveness or intensity); the frequently effective lyrics of Victor O’Leary, a determinedly persistent Romantic; one or two remarkable poems by Hilaire Kirkland; the quartz-like structures of Paul Henderson, mirroring all too accurately a society riddled with monotony; the restrained, clear-cut sketches of F.M. McKay; the suburban commentaries of Boyd; the recently published books of Vincent O’Sullivan and Raymond Ward. If I seem to neglect these writers, it is only because their work was peripheral to the main line of my argument in this talk; or because I had already made strenuous comment on them elsewhere; or because I felt I had not fully entered the interior world of their poems; or because they seemed already to have had a fair run from the critics and the anthologists; or simply because I am speaking to a time-limit. No adverse comment on their work is implied or intended; nor is any survey of mine likely to be exhaustive. I would be glad to see critics more skilled than myself quarrelling with and departing from whatever I have suggested here – but preferably in a descriptive way, alluding to new works or works neglected. In the long run critics are middlemen who follow after literature as a dung-collecting householder may follow a horse with a spade. It is pointless for them to think that they help to create the works that they describe.

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