"Pope in the Antipodes" . . ..

Mr. Smithyman went on to outline two concepts of the Antipodes—the 17th century "classical misapprehension" of a "country so very pleasant, being always clothed in green", and the later idea, as expressed by John Callander, that "it is not worth the finding". Mr. Smithyman suggested that Pope "stood between the two modes of outlook: New Zealand ... as a fair prospect; and ... as a detestable barrenness". Pope could be taken as a kind of contemporary sensibility, and for him the Antipodes could be sensually delightful, or potentially severe, conducing to a noble simplicity. They might offer two styles of behaviour and possibly two manners of voicing that behaviour. (Here Mr. Smithyman read one of his own poems, which had some bearing on "the affairs of rhetoric and the plain man".)

Mr. Smithyman went on to point out that for Pope "there was little uncertainty as to what was apt language, the apt gesture. Would he have conceived that there could be any argument possible in the matter of rhetoric and writing which suited the plain man?" Here Mr. Smithyman gave Allen Tate's description of rhetoric—"the study and the use of the figurative language of experience as the discipline by means of which men govern their relations with one another in the light of truth". Pope was trained in the correct use of the arts of language, of a correct diction, but not an absolute diction.

"As a writer for and of his time . . . Pope was able to make prior assumptions that are commonly not able to be made today." Pope could assume a "cultivated audience with a literary field of reference". He could assume a kind of relationship with his audience that a modern writer, especially a contemporary New Zealand writer, could not. "In his equipment Pope was a 'professional speaking to professionals. His achievement lies in the perfection of . . . judgment—a sense of fitness so exquisite that it transcends all mere calculations'."

The essence of professional writing might be no more than 'judgment'. A sense of what was fitting was not in itself enough to guarantee the writer's professional sense. There must be related to it a concern for aesthetic worth. It must also be related to the sense of writing tactics which a man showed in his work—how far he might presume upon his audience, for example. The writer's sincerity, moral earnestness, were "not unimportant in this field", but "simply irrelevant".

Professionalism in writing should not be thought of in terms of a writer's income. There have been writers whose title to respect was not to be questioned, who did earn a comfortable living from writing. But "in the age of Majority Man they are likely to become rarer". Some remarks of Roy Fuller were quoted here: "I think there is little doubt that today the writer without private means is doomed to some sort of failure if he tries to make a living solely out of writing."

One solution to this problem was patronage, which did exist today in various forms, usually only in short-term projects. Roy Fuller "was out to show that even by providing congenial jobs . . . State kindliness, if not patronage, is dangerous for the profession of letters in their finest sense". It could result in "a proliferation of the well-paid and well-meaning purveyors of the second-rate".

Mr. Smithyman then "put forward a suggestion" as to what the professionalism of the writer was. "The professional writer ... is most likely to be characterised by his writing being committed ... but that commitment being part and parcel of his feeling of responsibility. ... But responsibility for what and to whom?"

"A writer's professionalism is urged . . . by his sense of responsibility. This is a compound of knowledge, judgment and a disciplined language that will serve him to report fully and to exceed reporting in re-creating, or even in creating, what can be taken to be his 'reality', in its actual state or in showing what is potential in it," said Mr. Smithyman. "His first anxiety is to preserve the integrity of his language; his second, to extend the potential of his language without sacrificing its fallible humanity, and this he may do only by exercising what he feels to be his 'discipline'."

This led on to the attitude to be taken to rhetoric and the plain man. "I am on the side of rhetoric, in its old fashioned meaning, rather than with the 'allegedly plain man'. Not that the rhetor's art and the plain man's art are absolutely opposed."

Recent research in Great Britain by Dr. W. D. Wall, for example, had shown that "40% to 50% of the adult population does not read books: . . . about 10% of adults do not even read newspapers". It could only be "a depressingly small minority that can be interested in and by the kind of writing that deserves to be thought of at the level of literature. I propose to accept now that literature is and has been a minority interest".

Plain man's writing could be identified with a simple and direct style, though this led to difficulties. "Writing for the plain man is largely a waste of time." Writing about him was another matter, and using the vernacular was quite another matter again. Writing in the vernacular had the advantage of using "direct" and "living" language, a disadvantage in that its colloquialisms daetd heavily. Success in using the vernacular was "the direct product of (the writer's) sensibility and selectiveness". Nor would his readers be "plain men", but those whose sympathies ranged across the wide field of literary manners.

"Poets are decidedly cagey about how they use the vernacular of their day," said Mr. Smithyman. "They seemed to recognise that a bit of vernacular was useful but that more than a bit was altogether too much. They tended to use attitudes of their contemporaries put into speech that looked like current language.

"To my mind a writer should first of all be concerned to be a rhetorician. . . . I cannot see that otherwise a writer can be fully responsible, unless he accepts that his concern is basically with language. ... He has to accept that his concern with language, the way he uses language and what he uses it for, are unnatural concerns or, if not unnatural, surely abnormal." If the distinction could be made, the amateur was involved with words, the professional with language.

But there was always a danger of "over-committed" language. "Fine writing at one pole, arch artlessness got up as social realism at the other. The professional writer moves between, valuing and evaluating what the tradition has left him; also evaluating his own day as far as he is able."

Returning to his sub-title, Poetry is how you find it, sometimes where, Mr. Smithyman read a poem by Marianne Moore, which, he said, illustrated professionalism in writing. "She is succinct, she is demanding, she is witty, she handles most admirably speech rhythms in a delicately formal pattern. She has a subject of common interest, a racehorse; she has something to say that is not commonly said on or of that subject." Mr. Smithyman emphasised that the sources of this poem were extremely varied. "The substance of what is potentially poetry can be found notoriously in all sorts of places."

Mr. Smithyman concluded by pointing out some of the differences which Pope would find if he were to come back to life. He would realise "that the 'how-and-where' of poetry has opened the field of reference most remarkably, while the relative number of readers, the quality of their ability and their social distinctiveness have either declined or blurred. He would find that readers are assumed to command a larger knowledge of material but to have a lessen appreciation of literary techniques". The modern reader also had to follow "those varieties of contemporary English which are the lingua franca of Australia, the different United States regions and culture levels, the New Zealand English. Those are some of the things which are the concern of the professionally-minded writers in this country today."