Human Violence

Now I must try to sketch a few head notes for my final category of human violence, before suggesting a few tentative conclusions.

I begin again with our earliest indubitably first-rank literary artist. Katherine Mansfield. There is one vein she opened up, in a few early stories not widely published until after death, which is quite uncharacteristic of her later work. This is the deliberately tough genre-study of life-in-the-raw we meet in The Woman at the Store and Ole Underwood. No one who has read these stories can forget the idiot-child who maliciously betrays her mother's sordid crime, or the crazy old derelict who briefly assuages his own lonely anguish by Hinging the little cat down the sewer drain. Sooner or later someone was bound to take this kind of thing further.

The Woman at the Store is clearly the prototype for Jean Devanny's The Butcher Shop; and the little cat, victim of human frustration, is even more grotesquely martyred in Sargeson's Sale Day. when it is thrust by a disgruntled farmhand into the open range undery the frying chops And the difference between these two later treatments is, of course, the difference between back blocks melodrama pretty crudely handled, and the masterly use of violence as a deliberate effect of art the telling stroke that points up unbearable strain.

Violence in Frank Sargeson—and there is plenty of it, between the delayed charge of A Great Day' page 11 and the positively Jacobean piling up of corpses at the climax of 'The Hangover' is almost always the result of deprivation, of the warping of human instincts by the cramping environment of a joyless, repressive, still fundamentally puritan society. The Hangover is a particularly telling instance, because the spectacular homicidal outbreak that stains its final pages with gore comes from an apparently model youth who is the special pride of his hardworking respectable mother—and who has taken the precaution of wearing for the occasion a number of lightweight plastic raincoats, so that he can strip these off one by one as he proceeds to each encounter with his chain of victims. The symbolism here is almost too neat, the whole fiction perhaps too near a casebook study of the era that produced Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; but the point is made, in the novelist's own terms, with a stylised and sinister elegance.

Sargeson's art is his own. : I wish I had time to discuss it. Nor would it be difficult to cite examples from other writer's of the fifties and sixties—from the "three Maurices" Duggan and Gee and Shadbolt, from Sylvia Ashton-Wamer and Ian Cross and O.E. Middleton—of a similar, if generally less subtle, exploitation of the violent outbreak to point up or explode emotional and social tensions. Two sisters have been especially adroit in their handling of near-psychotic conditions: Fleur Adcock in her poetry, and Marilyn Duckworth in a series of brittle but closely-observed novels of human disorientation. Fleur Adcock has written some notable hate-poems, and has also been able to suggest, in verse-fables that mix the language of dream and fairytale, something of the nightmare encounters in which we all become involved, whether in domestic relationships or in such public disasters as the Vietnam War.

Can I, in any meaningful way, attempt a summing-up? The literary historian, I think, would by this time admit that we have something however patchy and unevenly developed—we can call New Zealand literature. It can show some significant achievements in poetry and the short story, with at least two novelists—Sargeson and Janet Frame of striking and abrasive quality. Drama—the most open form of all internationally, these days—remains pretty thin, though at least more New Zealand plays are being written and performed than ever before.

In general, our literature is modest in scope and intention, restrained in statement, low-keyed, avoiding extremes of passion or rhetoric. And this in a country with an early history of singular boldness and imaginative sweep, with a native tradition of fierce myth and bawdy humour that has remained untapped almost' to our own day. Perhaps at last we are beginning to tap it: we must be especially grateful for such a poet as Hone Tuwhare, who reaches for some of his rhythms and images into these deep ancestral wells.

In a setting of sea and hills that remains beautiful but harsh, we have evolved our own comfortable, materialistic, egalitarian society—that is also conformist, intolerant, and too often small minded. Does our literature exactly reflect us? Are we, as a people, meagre, strained, and lacking in generosity;

Out of Ireland have we come;
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start....

Yeats wrote of his own country. If the lines were modified to fit New Zealand, they might read:

Great rancour, little joy
Maimed us from the start.

That is why Frank Sargeson is, in a precise sense, our first truly national writer: because he has shown us to ourselves from within, shown us the narrowness of our own hearts.

May I take the parallel with Ireland just a little further, to make my last point? For in this parallel we may find,

I think, both a warning and a challenge.

Ireland at the turn of this century, in the bitter crisis of her struggle for national identity following the fall of Parnell, most needed two writers of a very special kind: Yeats and Synge. Yeats, who had first tuned his own exquisite instrument to sing nostalgically of the misty past, found new modes and a new compass when he faced the realities of his own time: he made himself into the great violent poet we all know, holding suspended in deathless verse the extremes of savage passion and formal, balanced control. Synge, a gentle, lonely, compassionate man, wrote violent humorous plays that flayed his own countrymen as mercilessly, and as surgically, as Apollo flayed the faun. Without the work of Yeats and Synge, would the splendid flowering of literature from this one small Atlantic island have been possible?

New Zealand's social crisis, in our time, came between the two world wars. We have no Yeats—though I have always felt that Mason, with better luck, might have become one. Yet the influence of Yeats, beyond that of any other modern poet, helped to inject energy and urgency into our own post-war poetry. If there are two New Zealand poets who have, since then, produced a substantial body of work that follows a similar trajectory to his, I would suggest they are Charles Brasch and James K. Baxter. In the later poetry of these writers of two generations—more surly in Brasch than in Baxter—there is a readiness to accept the full complexity of most of our modern dilemmas, and meet them in terse, colloquial, unstrained but arresting language. I am sure that the real stature of Brasch as poet is insufficiently recognised: Baxter is perhaps a little over-valued, especially by the young. But for his unreserved immersion in the destructive element, his passionate commitment to the cause of the derelicts and drop-outs of our too-complacent society, I have nothing but admiration.