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I do not advocate that we should all put on sackcloth and ashes. But I think it reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth and that every poet should be a prophet according to his lights. In our time there has been a dangerous split between the moral and aesthetic factors in art – on one side doctrinaire expression, on the other side so-called pure art. The position of the Romantic poet inclines to that of the pure artist. His social aim, if expressed, is that every City should become a Wilderness. The aim of the doctrinaire artist, Christian or Communist, is that every Wilderness should be contained in the Just City. My sympathy is with the former, as I consider conformity a great deal more dangerous than non-conformity. But while Romantics refuse to speak in terms of any relationship but the sexual one, we must take our lead from the doctrinaire philosophers.
The typical dilemma of the modern poet is one of divided aims. A man who is working as a schoolteacher, a tradesman, or a Government official in a society which he knows to be unjust, cannot dare to think clearly on moral issues; for the society is part of his physical and even psychological security. If he breaks with the society and departs into the Wilderness in customary Romantic style, then he loses brotherhood with all but similar outcasts. What Justice demands is something more difficult – that he should remain as a cell of good living in a corrupt society and in this situation by writing and example attempt to change it. He will thus and only thus escape the isolation of the Romantic.
Haere mai! Welcome to Volume One of James K. Baxter: Complete Prose. The first aim of the set of volumes is to present the prose in chronological order of composition. The second aim is to keep Baxter’s writing in full view of the reader. To achieve this it has been decided to provide a plain reading page unencumbered by editorial notes and to consign all critical apparatus to Volume Four, namely,
Each item in the text is followed by the number given to it in the Contents list. The same number is used to identify its note and reference. The notes can be consulted by keeping Volume Four open alongside the volume you are reading. The Introduction is mainly biographical but it also gives a discursive overview of Baxter’s development as a prose writer. Those who wish to consult the Index or to undertake a systematic reading of the prose by beginning with the Introduction should turn to Volume Four.
Volume One contains the prose Baxter wrote between 1943 and 1948, while living in Dunedin and then Christchurch, as well as the prose he wrote in Wellington between 1949 and 1965. The fourth item, ‘[The Divorce of Poetry]’, introduces his opinions on the craft and practice of poetry. The earliest analysis of his personal concerns is ‘Thoughts Concerning a Career’ (No. 10). His criticism of the Church in No. 14 prefigures later criticism. The next item, ‘Poetry in New Zealand’ prefigures many of his talks and essays. ‘To Wake the Nations Underground’ is the earliest of several autobiographical vignettes.
In 1949 after Baxter married and began living in Wellington he was influenced by other young poets such as Louis Johnson and Alistair Campbell,
N.Z. Listener he found a hospitable venue for his poetry and critical writing and in the School Publications unit of the Department of Education he found a patient employer.
In Wellington he wrote short stories, plays and a novel, and produced his first book of literary criticism, The Fire and the Anvil. He asked ‘Is there a Colour Bar in New Zealand?’ and became a Catholic. He offered New Zealand readers the thoughts he assembled during a visit to India in 1958- 59 and composed a condemnatory essay ‘The Kiwi and Mr Curnow’. He also wrote a political diatribe ‘Mr Shand and the Rain of Fire’. These items introduced the literary vehicles and themes which he continued to use and develop later.
A description
The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted with screams human and inhuman through the hill-gullies. He slept on his camp-bed in a dream of narrow tunnels suffocating; under the blanket-layers of sleep, herculean, he tried to move a finger. With a sense of strain he woke. Lay staring in content at the canvas roof through which flooded diffuse light.
He sat up and the stretcher creaked: his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor. This was wild earth, he thought, we have tamed it within walls. He pulled off his pyjamas; on with bathing- trunks. He was sixteen.
Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside; but the birds chattered and flew in the fir-plantation; On the thread of a bird’s voice is the pendulous earth hung. The mountain-shadow lay still half-way from their bases to the camping-ground. The sky was one-coloured except that it was darker to the west and bright above the near mountains. There are mountains upon mountains, they are gashed by sword-strokes of the rising sun, they are awake at early dawn before I walk stiffly with bare feet to bathe before sunrise; and grasses are wet to the skin, stones and thorns knock at the gates of flesh, but I am the animal unsad and blood-aware.
As he climbed over the fence on the path to the lake he felt cold, wished he had gone to sleep again. His eyes were stiff still, one eye saw blurred. He crossed a water-course with willows and fell of cutty-grass and felt through the trees the first chill of the lake-wind. He crossed his arms on his chest and hunched his shoulders for protection from the wind.
Remembering sleep he thought. Tent-bedded I lie safe in body and cloak of memory, but behind my musing eyes, beyond walls of bone, is reality not of me, where the sea in dark hills cupped whose waves are death or longing. . . slap rotted wood in multitudinous strife and quiet. He came out on the shingle-banks of the lake-shore, picking his way between thorn-bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky had
It is air and water in the vast lands of silten rivers, thought he: swollen and swift from the lake, home of the abyss-monsters yet calm in surface save to the blades of glinting wind.
1942? (1)
From the top of the hill two kites were flying. They moved out, curvetting in the wind, over the belt of trees at the bottom of the slope, over the town itself, then on almost to the curved yellow sea-beach.
A small boy, perhaps ten years old, stood in an upper street and watched them. To an onlooker they might have seemed frames of wood and paper, but he knew better – for hadn’t he held the cord of one an hour before? Once he had seen a picture of a kite – this time an ugly bird of prey. But these had an entirely different life. The kite was like a snail’s eye on an elongated stalk, vibrating in the air, a link with another existence where there was only wind and sunlight.
He thought none of this clearly for there were no words to say clearly what was in his mind. Surely he could get one of these miraculous things that rose twisting in their will to be free and gave power and sureness to whoever held them. The big boy had only let him hold it for a moment, but he had known himself changed, felt the wind blowing in him.
Slowly he trudged back through the suburbs past unsold allotments, houses with paint-smears on empty windows. A tumble-down shed and junk- yard lay at the edge of the lived-in part, with a notice above the gate – ‘Old Iron and Bottles bought here’. Then at the corner of his own street a shop in whose window hung a huge kite of yellow paper. Below it – ‘MONSTER Kites for sale. 2/3.’
Tears came in his eyes for he knew he couldn’t buy it. Suddenly he thought of the bottle-man. There were a pile of old bottles in the wash-house. He could sell these and buy the kite.
He ran quickly along the street and in the gate. Soon he came out carrying a sack which jangled each step he took. At the bottle-merchant’s it was strange to see the heap of bottles dissolve into a single silver coin. (‘Half-a’crown and no more,’ said the man, middle-aged in a dusty black coat. ‘Some of them bottles were chipped.’)
The kite was taller than he was, and tapped on the ground as he carried it. Into the garden he went and hid it behind a trunk in the shed. No-one would guess he had it; tomorrow it would fly from the summit on the hill out over
His mother called him from the house. ‘John! Where are you? Come in at once!’ His father, a thick-set red-faced man, was coming in the gate. He went into the house.
. . . That night he dreamed that he was flying the kite from the top of a high cliff. The wind grew stronger and stronger till he was lifted off his feet and carried out above a shining sea. Strangely, he had no fear. Suddenly the kite became a great grey bird swooping towards him. He tried desperately to escape but was falling entangled in the cord while the monstrous bird grew nearer. Then a cord broke . . . and he woke to hear the rain beating on the roof.
Next morning, however, was fine and windy weather. As he sat at breakfast a van stopped at the gate, and the driver, a man in a dusty black coat, walked up to the front door. His mother rose, went out, and after a few words came back. ‘It’s the bottle-man,’ she said. ‘Have we got anything to sell him?’
‘I’ve a heap of old bottles out the back,’ said his father. ‘Just a minute and I’ll see about it.’ He left the room.
His face was hot. He saw the bottle-man pass the window out to the van. He waited. His father came back into the room – carrying the kite. ‘Every damn bottle’s gone! And how did this get here? Do you know about it, John?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he said slowly.
‘Oh, you don’t? And where did this kite come from?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘And you haven’t touched the bottles?’ ‘No.’
‘So the man’s a liar is he? – and so am I!’
The father’s face grew more red with anger. A little vein stood out on his temple. He put the kite over his knee and broke it. Twice.
‘You’d thieve my bottles to buy yourself a kite. Come here, and I’ll show you.’
He reached out for the belt that hung by the mantle-piece. The kite would not fly now.
1942? (2)
February 23rd1952:
Monday – In the morning investigated the Jones case. Found that I had better not undertake it, as it seems extremely difficult. In the afternoon visited my old school, recalling many unpleasant memories.
January 5th1953: Just had a visit from John Lassiter, prosecuting counsel, offering me ₤35 if I withhold the necessary evidence on the Jones Case which is being heard. Am considering the matter. I think I shall ask more.
April 15th1953: Elected King’s Counsel, on account of good character etc. Not so much money in it, but good steady work now, though I cannot undertake shady deals.
May 27th1953: Met some old friends in court – in for forgery. Was able to have them acquitted by an understanding with the jury. Very astonishing how many previous acquaintances I see in dock.
June 7th1953: Have brought off a good deal in business – the cost of the property was ₤1050, my fees were ₤75. ‘Truly a knowledge of the Law is a marvellous thing.’
1943? (3)
The divorce of poetry from the popular imagination arises in part from a diminution of vigour in expression, mainly from the habits of our civilisation. Great poetry must die – die to all save the poet, the critic, and the man born out of his time.
Its knell was rung when the phrase succeeded the word, when sentimentality succeeded in verse wit and philosophy. The sentimentality has gone, but with it has gone the last shreds of a popular appreciation of strong and complex thought.
We accept the merits of our greatest poets by hearsay; most readers, if it were written by a modern poet, would turn revolted from Milton’s ‘blind mouths,’ but recognise Milton and dare not criticise.
The greatest modern poet, W.B. Yeats, has unconsciously recognised a modern trend. Our eyes slide over a page; not words but phrases we read; the sound is unheard. Thus concentration of meaning evaporates. Yeats is the master of the phrase, and so for us there is magic in him.
The heyday of poetry lived when a word was still miraculous, when use and misuse had not dulled it to a smooth grey pebble. What force now has ‘light thickens’? The association is curded milk, I think. It is not understanding of meaning, we lack, though as interest dwindles that loss approaches; it is appreciation of concentration, of a transcendental meaning – in a word, of poetry.
1943 (4)
The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted with screams human and inhuman through the hill-gullies. He slept on his camp-bed in a frightening dream; under the blanket-layers of sleep, Herculean he tried to move a finger. With a sense of strain he woke. Lay staring in content at the canvas roof through which flooded diffuse light.
He sat up and the stretcher creaked: his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor. This was wild earth, he thought, we have tamed it within walls. He pulled off his pyjamas; on with bathing- trunks. He was sixteen.
Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside, but the birds chattered and flew in the fir-plantation; On the thread of a bird’s voice is the pendulous earth hung. The mountain-shadow lay still half-way from their bases to the camping-ground. The sky was one-coloured except that it was darker to the west and bright above the neat mountains. There are mountains upon mountains, they are gashed by sword-strokes of the rising sun, they are awake at early dawn before I walk stiffly with bare feet to bathe before sunrise; and grasses are wet to the skin, stones and thorns knock at the gates of flesh, but I am the animal unsad and blood-aware.
As he climbed over the fence on the path to the lake he felt cold, wished he had gone to sleep again. His eyes were stiff still, one eye saw blurred. He crossed a water-course with willows and cutty-grass and felt through the trees the first chill of the lake-wind. He crossed his arms on his chest and hunched his shoulders to offer less area to the wind.
Remembering sleep he thought. Tent-bedded I lie safe in body and cloak of memory but behind my musing eyes, beyond walls of bone, is reality not of me, where the sea in dark hills cupped whose waves are death or longing
. . . slap rotted wood in multitudinous strife and quiet. He came out on the shingle-banks of the lake-shore, picking his way between thorn-bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky had grown very bright; shaking bladed tracks of sunlight were reflected on the water. The lake was about three miles wide: he stood at the lower end of it and looked as far as he could see over its length, twelve miles perhaps in all but hidden by the feet and heavy shoulders of the mountains.
It is air and water in the vast lands of silten rivers, thought he: swollen and swift from the lake, home of the abyss-monsters yet calm in surface save to the blades of glinting wind.
He walked into the small waves at the edge of the lake, down over shelves of sand and shingle; then came out again and walked along the shore to a skeleton jetty where shingle had been scooped out to a depth of about twenty feet and the water showed faintly blue and very deep. He climbed the bank at the top of the beach and ran out on the jetty. The grey boards splintered and worn with gravel were solid under his feet. It seemed much more than ten feet down to the water. He hesitated; sat on the low bevelled parapet and hung his legs over; felt for leverage; then stood up, held his nose, and jumped.
The shock as always enveloped him, cutting off all thought, as if shock were an element like water. He doubled up with eyes shut and rose slowly till his back broke surface some way out from the jetty. He swam back and held on to the slippery beams of its scaffolding, slippery with fine weed, washed
Slowly he swam back to the shore: throwing his face under water rippling to see the hollow bottom (shallow at all points save that of direct vision) slope out to the deeper lake. As he swam he remembered the rabbit.
By the dry shingle-plain; he walked over dead rivers whose bones, with dried weed often, crunched under his sandals. His father shot the rabbit, behind the cemetery.
It shrieks, it is agony, the sound cuts my eyes. I run and it crawls to its burrow . . . child, you have slept in quiet earth and played in grasses, who are we to kill you? I run, balancing over the pipe-line across the gully, the pipe that feeds the sluices, rusty and the tar blisters from it. I run and hold the rabbit. It head droops and wobbles at the rabbit-punch; like corn rain- flattened its white belly-fur and brown side draggled where blood drips. Blood drips from its mouth but the eyes are brown and deeply sad. I hit with a stone on the neck, for it might still be alive. I walk back over the grass-floor through the plantation and the rabbit hangs heavy. Then the skinned rabbit skinned under the willows, bruised blue, speckled on the bare flesh with the rock. Guts thrown on the ground. Rain comes in the night hill-hidden while spiders drop from the tent-roof.
Purification, he thought, and swam out again. Further he swam, diving continually and bringing up weeds to examine. The weeds grew tougher as depth increased, and at last over twenty feet deep he came to a belt of mussel- shells. He carried them in with him, weeds and mussel-shells, all kinds. Cramp seized him as his feet touched bottom; disregarding it, swam in fast in panic, feeling that something malevolent had touched him. He dropped what he had brought in, thinking; I have brought them to the warmth of sun and man from their loneliness. He walked out stumbling and dizzy.
The willow-trees stood, roots in shingle: the light-green willow-trees in shingle planted and laved by the lake, of gnarled and broken bark but O leaves delicate and light-green. Yet are then the maledictory fists of bitterness clenched toward heaven that darkens, as time flows out from the land, as the sun dies.
. . . He walked limpingly up the shore dripping. The cramp eased as he stepped on the grass again. He had cut his ankle on a stone at the edge of the lake; he arched his instep to avoid walking on it. If I had been drowned, he thought, they would not have known: pity of his parents, not self-pity. As he
Growing hungry, he hurried over the grass running quickly on the side of his cut foot, grass sticking to the unhealed gash. Why worry over a rabbit? He thought. Thousands are killed every day in the world. I’ll see if I can shoot one tonight. It only hinders to feel with what you hurt.
A lorry had come into the camping-ground and was unloading packing- cases. The tents had lost their solid white sameness, had become shells and houses: a woman washed her hair under a tent-flap . . . a man crossed over the long grass carrying torn branches of broom . . . smoke rose in hieroglyphs above a frying-pan on a fireplace made of blackened rocks.
He rounded the tent and undid the flap. His father was dressing and his mother sat up in bed. ‘Been for a bathe?’ said his father.
‘Yes, in the lake.’
‘What was it like? – his mother. ‘A bit cold.’
The smell of frying bacon came in the door. The sun had risen. Dew evaporated on the furry leaves of the blue flannel-flowers. Gulls flew overhead; their feathers glistening, their cries calm music.
1944 (5)
The fish shop was crowded at five o’clock. I would have to wait, I knew. But it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t in a hurry.
I never was nowadays. I was quite content to stand calmly in the queue listening to the wireless which was playing loudly, so loudly that it could even drown the babble of voices and the shrill laugh of two girls joking with the chinaman behind the counter. He was a funny little man with a face round and flat like the moon, and he kept time with the music. He seemed unreal somehow with his flat moonlike face. Then the music, the voices, the smell of the fish and chips, all lost their reality. It was very odd. And when I went out into the street again it, too, had become unreal. It hadn’t been like that before. But it was now. It was as if I was in a dream. It was cold, too, and the air was very still. The long lines of the street lights seemed to stretch for miles and miles in a glittering fantastic chain. Nearly all the people had gone. How strangely my footsteps echoed in the stillness. Then a tram clanged past and the noise of it lingered behind, poised in the silence that there had been. The shops were empty now; empty and dark. It was like a dream walking along under their verandahs in the dark and I walked on and on and on. All I could hear were my own footsteps. All I could see was myself reflected dimly in the darkened shop windows. And the silence and the darkness increased and clung closer round me. It was all me, and yet it wasn’t me. I didn’t understand it, but
1944 (6)
The truck came down the side road at about sixty. The driver was drunk and happy; a minute after he hit the curb he was sober and cursing his luck.
. . . He stepped off from the gutter. There were three moments, three phases perhaps. In the first he was thinking of Judy and a few others: into his mohammedan heaven broke the roar, then the impact of the truck; he jumped back almost in time, but slipped on the snow-slush.
Then the third, slow and heavy; the darkness coiled round him eddying; he was a continent and there was night over it; from cape and inlet the tide fell away; life in him could not sustain unaided the weight of mountain and canyon, withdrew, till it flickered only on the screen behind the eyelids. He could see it there, like a candle at the bottom of a well; knew that it could go out. It dared and died.
Immense darkness was a cloak around him; set like a desk-mask on his cheeks. It has been like this before, it has been like this before, he knew; it will be like this again.
In place of the light a mist grew, white and choking. Through it came a face, unknown and serious, lined, framed in linen.
‘Both legs amputated,’ said a voice, low and remote. ‘Poor b—, I thought he was gone just then.’
1944 (7)
The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden (Phoenix Library). This is not a new edition, but the only complete collection of the poems of Owen which seems now accessible. When one has read Owen only in anthologies his complete works come as a mild shock; one has come to regard him as a poet of strange but mature talent (or genius, as one’s judgments waver), and suddenly . . . . It is as if one had read only Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and last sonnet, then were obliged to assimilate him in all his floridity. Owen admired Keats; and the influence of Keats, though not so baneful as that of Swinburne for a new-born poet, could not be wholly beneficial. But the war weaned him from dreams and gave him wormwood for suck. Thus happens it that the two greatest war poems, possibly the greatest of a modern age, have bitterness for theme: Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. The first is doom and revolt, the heaviness
The element of despair, hell, dantean, which stirs here to subside again, comes to clear fruition in Owen’s less volcanic but more coherent masterpiece:
He is the true prophet, true because he saw the world in crystal of doom:
Will any deny this the name of true prophecy?
It would seem that a sense of doom must enter into all great poetry. Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ – doom and the revolt of the romantic; Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ – doom and the revolt of sensitivity; Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love . . .’ – doom and the revolt of the lover. But in ‘Strange Meeting’ the revolt is subdued. Had he lived, it were anti-climax; he was a war poet; his works culminate in one poem; when he had laid bare the core of bitterness, he could do little else but die.
For his other poems. One may compare his sonnet ‘The End’, with Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Dead’, written earlier. Brooke’s may please, but after reading Owen’s one can say little; his power has expanded beyond the relevance of criticism. Much may be said about the debatable ill-effect on Owen of Sassoon’s satirical verse-dialogue; one might quote from ‘Asleep’, ‘Spring Offensive’, or ‘Futility’ to show evidence of his genius. It is needless; none can challenge it; for their cup of criticism falls back shattered from the infrangible forehead. Owen may complete the chapter with a synthesis of his thought:
1944 (8)
I sat and watched him come down the sand path between the lupins, a towel over his shoulders. From the high rocks you could see the whole beach like a toy shop come alive – sunbathing couples, solitary baskers, kids burrowing in their trenches. The sun which had caused it all looked down nonchalant; the sea which abets rose and fell like a giant breathing; the giant of fatal spray, the inverted mountain taller than mountains of land, with more of infinite variety than snow and ice possess; the land-mountain the Ego, curdling of magma; the sea eternity itself, neither life nor death, but to us land-born for ever death. . . .
He was thick-set, fleshy. A butcher – butchers, they say, grow fat by eating the raw scraps of steak left on the chopping board. Fifty perhaps, or fifty-five. Nothing picked him out from the others except an air of vitality; and the blood vessels dark in his cheeks. A burly man, a ‘buirdly chiel’ Burns would have said.
He walked down to the sea; the sun went behind a cloud. The sea was lead now, the weeds heavy.
He swam out, throwing his head under now and then, wiry-haired. Out of the bay, he struck the current. Soon he was floundering; soon he drifted under water, showing only when the high swells caught him.
They brought him in hanging on their shoulders like a sack; so much lime, so much phosphorus . . . a trace of copper, I believe. The red had gone from his face; there was a tracery on the calves of his legs. They worked on him for an hour. He was obviously dead.
And the gulls came over, and the sun came out. And the sea stayed. The bathers, too.
1944 (9)
I do not wish to lose my religion. In nature, in the mere sight of the natural world, in looking over wide distances, I find a self-delighting peace. Similarly in the physical achievement and physical pride of work. This is the primary source of my poetry, and all that I know of a God I know from natural things. The shape and colour, the life of Nature, is the very stuff of poetry. And my knowledge of God is fundamental for my well-being.
At varsity my mind is blurred and cramped. I am sensitive to the attitudes of those around me, and unconsciously absorb those attitudes: and at varsity
One may say: all cultural activity is lost in manual labour. I have no liking for the absorption of undigested slabs of learning, I know now that later in life I will write prose and good prose. This will not be aesthetic prose, but rather realist. That is I will describe the life of people, ignorant so-called, but men and women nevertheless.
One may say: the chance of a ‘good job’ will be lost. I do not value monetary success: I value my own happiness. It is necessary to eat to live: so one must work. If one should marry, one must support a family. If I should marry, I would wish to be a balanced individual, not an ‘intellectual’. I think I could support my family, in any case.
Briefly: if I am to be a writer, a good writer in the Tolstoyan sense as I know I can be, a ‘career’ is not my way to it. It is impossible for me to lose my culture; for that is fundamental. But I do not wish to be an intellectual, though I know comprehensively what it is to be one; I wish to be a sensitive and balanced adult. Daddy is this: and I have much of his nature in me. Mother has much of this; but women are rarely intellectuals, and she though cultured and intelligent is not one.
It is not the job I do, it is what I am that matters. I do not much fear death, poverty, or persecution such as that of the COs. I do greatly fear any loss of integrity in myself. Intellectuality demands a false bottom to the mind, a loss of emotional intuition. In this mechanist age one can accept, escape, or revolt. The cynical intellectual, such as the earlier Huxley, accepts; the romantic intellectual, such as I would be, escapes from reality to aestheticism; the realist writer, such as I would wish to be must revolt from contemporary modes and grow up on his own. Because of the reserves of strength which heredity and environment have given me, I can do this.
1945 (10)
( Prose-Poem)
When the wound has grown shallow, her face almost forgotten; the sight of a turning face on the street brings the sparking jolt, the old tremulous warmth. But the mind changes, the compass-needle no less true moves with its wandering magnetic north; the brain changes, coarsened by drugs or sharpened by muscular content; the body changes from adolescent gaucheness to animal pride, the blood heavy, the flesh-clad skeleton.
He who rides in the rain on a sodden hillside will feel the rough community riveting man and beast; will find memory and expectation branches of the same tree. From the plough-handles assurance jolts: our fathers, feeling the
. . . the sea iron-dust fog; sharp white breakers leap out like signal-flashes. Where the slant light crosses from day’s ruin, feathery grass is lit, and dark- green gorse expectant of what annunciation. Though no visible rain, the bow hangs over, a broken covenant. For green boughs have lied to us: the deluge of fear and iron is perpetual.
1945 (11)
The poems in this book are roughly in chronological order. The four divisions, however, are intended to represent specific emotional trends running, parallel in time, rather than consecutive phases of thought.
The poems of the first section were mainly built on themes of a myth character, being thus comparable to essays or narrative prose. Technically, they may be regarded as the matrix of a style more coherent and nearer to prose.
In the second section the longer poems develop by elaboration on themes rather as in music. In the third and fourth sections the idiom simplifies to prose directness.
The introduction of classical allusions occurs for symbolic purposes, the allusions containing for me in each case a powerful private significance.
It may seem strange that verse assumedly modern should be rhetorical or bear any resemblance to that of the Romantic era. I believe (as do both Spender and the later Auden) that the root of poetry must always lie in personal emotion, and that rhetorical gestures may be a truthful and natural mode of expression for this emotion. Dynamos and skyscrapers are no more essential to ‘modern’ poetry than were ruffs and wars with Catholic Spain essential to Elizabethan poetry. They may nevertheless quite naturally acquire an objective or subjective significance in the mind of any poet, and thus recur as an integral part of his poem. Birds, flowers, air, earth etc. must remain the staple and permanent poetic images because of their never-diminishing evocative intensity. If Spender uses the word ‘ocean’, this does not mean that he is necessarily imitating the nautical Masefield or the romantic Byron; it means simply that he is writing – and, being Spender, is probably writing, powerful and original poetry.
In a word, the modern poet is not a species distinct, and may be taught by Burns as readily as by Eliot. The weight of interpretation of environment, however, becomes a personal burden of death of the Atlas of traditional pose. Hence the moderns are apt to use their intellect where the stage-gestures of
J.K.B.
1945 (12)
Intro.
A fair amount of quoting. My own views. No authority on N.Z. literature. Poetry of last century. Quote Curnow.
Until 1920 poetry ‘the reflection of a reflection’. Imitation of Georgians, themselves imitators of Romantics.
McCormick in Letters and Art in N.Z. demands social content and criticism. Industrialism makes for shallow lives. Wars. Sargeson.
Quote Basil Dowling. J.K.B.
University mainly promotes sciences, not criticising Science as such. But aims of Art different from those of business world. Not ivory tower either. We remember the Elizabethans as poets and dramatists rather than as successful merchants.
Quote Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence. Blake and the Industrial Revolution. Human values must be emphasised.
Art a full-time profession. Now the playthings of amateurs. Difficulty of finding freedom from irritation. N.B. Rita Cook.
Will quote only from what I consider most to the point.
A.R.D. Fairburn. Job in 1ZB Auckland. Quote from letter:
For Christ’s sweet sake never let yourself get a lift on the band-waggon of Official Art, however comfortable the upholstery. I fully expect the Golden Age in New Zealand to be issued in with the appointment of a Director of Poetry (branch of one of the existing Government Departments – probably Fisheries or Mental Hospitals.) But I shall be working with a long-handled shovel on the remotest road I can find. I got a shock the other day when I looked at a collection of Russian paintings published recently. Most of them looked like extremely competent illustrations to the
Illustrated London News. Once the artist becomes an Official he’s done for.
Romantic tradition. Quote ‘Diogenes’.
Dominion as different trend. Best long poem yet in N.Z. Analysis of growth of industrialism. Quote.
Humorist. Satirical poem, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.
Love poems best yet written here, will stand with best English. Quote ‘A Farewell’.
R.A.K. Mason a contrast. Elegiac. Now running a leftist newspaper. NotNo New Thing, a collection published in 1934, Mason wrote –
Some of these poems were intended to appear in a vast medley of prose and poetry, a sort of Odyssey expressing the whole history of New Zealand. This I designed long ago and did much work on. I may possibly yet resume it, but youth having smouldered in senseless drudgery I can scarcely expect age to supply the necessary fire.
Strong sense of tradition. Quote ‘Song of Allegiance’.
‘Be Swift O Sun’ – a very beautiful love poem. His problems are private ones rather than social.
Charles Brasch. Editor of Landfall. Private income. Mystical. Dream may be more real than waking life. Effective symbols.
Quote first poem. Earth as a friend. Mention Holcroft. ‘The Iconoclasts’. Earth as an enemy.
Allen Curnow. On Christchurch Press. Feels the strain of being a reporter. It destroys his sense of reality.
Quote ‘House and Land’. Other poems difficult to read aloud. Time myth. More than any other a N.Z. poet.
Denis Glover. Caxton Press. Most lucid and attractive writer. Likes his work but not much time for writing verse. Caxton printing.
Quote ‘Holiday Piece’ for natural use of N.Z. names. ‘The Magpies’ for satire. ‘Sings Harry’. An elegiac quality. Very fresh and vivid.
J.K.B. Quote ‘Blow, wind of fruitfulness’. ‘Elegy for my Father’s Father’.
Art is the spearhead of individualism. Against the current. Landfall, good sign. European influences with refugees.
1946 (13)
In those times when the Church had grown rich in the goods of the world. . . it happened that three men died on the same day, and were called before the House of God. The first was a rich mineowner. The second a Bishop, and the third a Socialist, his body stained with long imprisonment and his throat hoarse with preaching revolt. They waited for God to take the Judge’s seat; but instead He came and stood before them, dressed as He has been on earth in the ragged coat of a fisherman. The Bishop was the first to speak.
‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I have [led?] Your Church and fulfilled faithfully my office
But the Lord was silent and, turning, looked toward the mineowner who justified himself, saying, ‘I have been a devout man, keeping the Sabbath, providing for my wife and children, and as far as I was able I have been fair in business, and just to those who worked where once I thanked You for the property You gave me. . . . Receive, therefore, me also.’
The Lord then turned to the Socialist who seemed to tremble: ‘I did not believe You existed,’ he said. ‘But I have been the champion of the oppressed, when they seem trampled underfoot. The Church has closed its eyes to the suffering of the world and the rich men have denied their followers bread and clothing, housing them in wretched slums. I tried to lead the workers in revolt, promising them that they would [not] be wanting of these things they made. I see that You too are dressed as a worker. You are of our kind and should accept me.’
Christ said to the Bishop. ‘Teaching worldliness, you yourself have been worldly, preaching temperance, you have been intemperate; you have set prudence above charity, and taught Me but not acted Me.’
And to the mineowner: ‘You have been proud and complacent, covetous.’ To the Socialist: ‘I was poor. There was great oppression in Palestine: extortion, police, poverty. Yet I did not lead the Jews against their oppressors. You have led them from the faith in search of a vanity. . . . Men are born and die sinful: I will judge them, not you. You have given them envy, despair, unbelief. Yet the oppressors are to be blessed for driving you to it. “Love one another,” is a bitter necessity.’
1946 (14)
In the Elizabethan era statesmen and parsons were poets also; not all of them poets, it is true, but no one would then have been in the least surprised if a Prime Minister should produce a mediocre ode, or soldiers sing a passable ballad. Perhaps Tradition has damned us. Shakespeare was modern in his own day; we are often parasitic growths on the works of Shakespeare. Anyhow, a serious poet seems now a queer bird, one tolerated for his readiness to sing at intellectual dinner-parties. And so poetry is regarded as a delicate academic flower, to be shielded from the harsh winds of the world and criticism alike; or else is churned out to fill gaps in magazines. Painters or musicians, though regarded as inessential luxuries, may be granted a social status somewhere between head clerk and school inspector, but the man who puts down POET on the census form can only raise a good laugh or a shake of the head.
Yet despite their vague taint of disrepute, poets still flourish in England
Poets in New Zealand will find the same problems of technique that all poets have found elsewhere; and as elsewhere, their material must in the last analysis be found latent in their own emotional reactions to persons, conventions and natural objects. But there is one drain on the integrity of the New Zealand poet which remains peculiarly his own – he is torn between two worlds.
Our forefathers were transplanted Englishmen or Scots, who brought along with their rocking-chairs and agricultural implements, some knowledge of the literary standards of their own period. These were as much their own as the aforesaid utensils. We, however, look to an England we have never known as centre of our mainly synthetic ‘culture’; while our real lives are rooted in these islands, and flower day by day. We are waiting to be born yet will not leave the womb. Especially do our universities turn Home-ward. An intellectual snob may find this thin air bracing, but a poet or an artist must choose here and now whether he is a transplanted Englishman or a New Zealander. If the first is his choice, why stay? If the second, then he must accept as his own and explore with a free mind our shifting and amorphous modes of living.
When that first hereditary wound is healed, one can find here in New Zealand all the drama needed for a thousand novels, plays, or poems. For the world is here, not somewhere over the horizon. The West Coast bushmen fell heavy timber; miners hack out coal, are buried under falls, strike for safer conditions; the deserts and oases of the night life of the town are there for any man to walk in; the shepherd rides alone over ranges, cashes his cheque, and spends a week in the D.T.’s; the middle-class home keeps up appearances, men and girls grow up in their private worlds, the young couples make love in the sandhills beside the beating sea; the old woman remembers what no one else can. All the world is here, waiting for us to heal our own blindness. A free mind and heart, that is the impossible request.
The successful poet will be anarchic in his thinking and feeling. For to understand his world he must understand himself, and an authority fully understood is an authority lost. But this is the land of Authorities: Government, Church, Monopoly, Democracy, Every-Decent-Man. So he is likely to seem a rebel.
Burns was a rebel, his rebellion undermined by his own unresolved guilt. As Chesterton says of Browning – he changed his convictions but not his prejudices. Nevertheless, with what freedom he did attain he discovered the world’s great songs.
All technical influences, modern and traditional, should be acceptable toKowhai Gold have subsisted too long on gruel to be able to change their diet. Invective would indeed be out of place, for they exist where many exist, in that attenuated limbo between Home and here. This much I will remark – that the best New Zealand poems need not differ in any essential from the best poems of England or America; that if pohutukawa trees and rata find a way into their glossary, this will be an incidental occurrence and not an evidence of childish and self-conscious posturing.
For the poet, childhood memories are a sure and inexhaustible reservoir. I myself grow lyrical at the smell of petrol, recalling camping trips among the lakes. South Island mountains and tussock land became then part of my own flesh and blood:
It sounds rather forced, yet it is emotionally a fact. Many New Zealanders are similarly immersed. The vastness and inhuman quality of our inland plateaus and those wastes of water that surround us, like a house that will never be lived in, are likely to make our best landscape-poems death-poems. Thus Glover’s
is no mere prose statement or flowery conceit, but emotion communicable in no other words. For words are interwoven in the very fabric of our minds and they can be made to bear thus a burden beyond their factual meaning.
Lyrics will be found to fall roughly into two categories – love-poems and death-poems. A New Zealander will show in the first kind his own insecurity, since he must shield the candle-flame of his emotion against the enmity of the very elements. They will be the more direct, as Fairburn’s ‘O flame and shadow of remembered time’, but the second class will be the more numerous. For we are more often out of love than in; and when that current, by which Nature supplies free to the grey globe of the mind her light and colour, is diminished, one falls back on that stratum of primal melancholy which underlies all deep emotion. Perhaps the hundred ages of impotence before death and pain to which primitive man was exposed, are a hereditary source of this surrender and resignation. We may count on hearing often in New Zealand poetry the ring of the old ballad –
In comparison with lyricism, metaphysical poetry seems harsh, reminding one of Art, the handmaid of Religion. But in fact a lyric can be subtle only by implication; both lyric and metaphysical poem must be at hand for the poet who has grown emotionally mature. Thus, though Byron in his simplicity is stronger than Donne in his complexity, no grown man can escape Donne’s ‘Else a great Prince in prison lies.’
Allen Curnow has written some excellent metaphysical poems. One notices in him a sure word-control, essential to this kind of writing. And if one desires a clear-cut and unbiased view of New Zealand poetry, one will find it in the introductory essay to his recent anthology. He has experimented with the creation of a myth from the peculiarities of our sensitivity to the passing of time. We are time-conscious because every year must bear us out of the fantasy-world of English seasons or Scots traditions, further into our here and now. So his creation is necessarily incomplete – I think his Biblical allusions bear richer fruit.
We cannot afford to be bound to the past; the price is too great, that of parasitic atrophy. For no one can teach us to live, men were no wiser then than now. The poet’s right is that of every man and woman: to stay alive. He may find himself at times the only man out of grave-clothes. Fears shape our lives, religious, economic, social. We call them Duties, and then wonder why the bog is so sticky. In a world of free men the fisherman or ploughman might compose his own poems, and think little of it. But in a world of go- getters, bosses and employees, authorities and obedience, ideals and sin, only the man civilised to the point of simple spontaneity is likely to write poems unselfconsciously. The man without a master is the good citizen – for what man is fit to be a master? He will also be the good poet.
1946 (15)
Dream series of about 20 dreams occurring one after the other within about an hour. Dreamt after being drunk about 2 days, the aftermath of being drunk leaving me in a mentally indigestible position, as if lost in a desert or being frozen to death. Notes written down immediately after waking, 3 to 4 a.m.
Unusual factors: – The dreams occurred like a chain-reaction, one leading on to another, moving towards a primitive layer of thought and feeling. That I retained the faculty while asleep to interpret them; indeed, a dream would be presented again and again until I had solved it, then a different kind of dream
All the dreams seem to be unusually vivid and important. I am as it were taking heaven by storm. . . .
1946 (16)
Brown felt curiously alive that Monday morning. It was a day out of the box he reflected as he stood waiting for his tram at the foot of the path in the cliff. Everything in the world seemed to be stirring and shining and singing. The wind purred against his cheek; warmth pulsed out of the rocky face behind him. He pressed his hands flat against the cliff and wondered why he had never experienced before the deep peculiar satisfaction there is in the feel of warm rock beneath your palms. Ice-plants drooled from the terraces above, their brilliant satiny flowers ironed out quite flat already in the early sun. A bird was singing somewhere, a long high, sweet trill that rose and fell, rose and fell. He listened attentively. Why didn’t he know what bird that was? He
A man came along the cliff path, whistling, hands in pockets. He was a stranger to Brown, who studied him at first with casual suburban curiosity, and then realised with a queer shock of delight that he had never seen anything more beautiful than this man’s brow and hair. The line where the dark hair grew from the pale forehead was perfect, he reflected; and wondered a little how he knew. He would like to paint that man’s head – good lord, how many years was it since he had thought of painting? He became aware that the stranger had turned and was regarding him in a hostile fashion, looking right through him with blank cold eyes. Naturally people didn’t like to be stared at. Brown transferred his gaze to the hills, wishing he knew how to explain that he had stared for the simple pleasure of looking at something beautiful, giving to dark hair springing away from a fine brow the same detached admiration he was giving now to the hills. Their lines were perfect too, he thought; strong, shapely, splendid, not one of them badly put together. Their warm bronze summits seemed to melt the sky they pressed against so ardently, giving a liquid quality to its blueness. On their slopes were dark smudges of pines, and occasional English trees that looked too tenderly green in their new summer leafage, defenceless somehow amid the bold colours and contours of these surging hills. Bluegums were perfectly at home; adaptable, like all true Australians. Brown noted their smoky swinging foliage, the casual grace of their long limbs, and again he yearned for a brush and an easel. What had become of those boyish doubts of his, he wondered. As a youngster he had been intensely fond of painting. He had meant to keep on studying art – well, why hadn’t he? He didn’t know. Perhaps he’d been too busy always? No, hardly. What did he do with his week-ends anyhow? He lounged around the pubs with his cobbers, drinking the odd beer and discussing tremendous questions of philosophy. He took his wife to the pictures Saturday nights. He lay in bed till noon on Sundays . . . he felt aghast at the thought of how much of his time, of his life, had dribbled away inanely.
Next week-end I’ll get out on the hills and paint, he thought. I must get some brushes today and oil colours. He laughed suddenly at the thought of his wife’s surprise when he arrived home with artists’ paraphernalia. Of course she wouldn’t understand. But he paused on that thought and considered. She might understand very well. He thought of the garden into which she put all her spare time and energy. Would she work with such passionate concentration if she were not impelled by an urge to create beauty? It was the best garden on the hill. Brown was proud of it without ever having thought of it as a creation of his wife’s. A picture came glowing into his mind now, warm wet banks of colour glowing and throbbing like music. There was the deep organ-roll of purple, red that called clear like trumpets, tinkling merriment of yellow, frail lovely fluting of brown. Brown felt an absurd desire to rush back
But the tram was due. In fact, it was overdue. Other regulars had arrived and were looking at their watches. He knew them all by sight. There was the greasy, amiable bloke whose collars, for some reason, always looked whiter but less clean than other people’s. He stood there smiling soft, offensive, trying not to seem middle-aged. Brown had always loathed him; but this morning he felt unaccountable pity instead of contempt. He observed that the fellow had good hands. He probably hadn’t been bad-looking at all, years ago, before something in life, or in himself, had defeated him. He never looked at you now without an easy greasy smile; but in his youth he had been passionately serious, thought Brown. And added soberly: it could happen to me. His glance travelled over the others. There was Miss Smith, lean, fierce, unlovely, standing apart as she always did, at what she apparently considered a judicious distance from the men. She never spoke to anyone. Always she carried a book which she read absorbedly going in and out on the tram. Brown and his friends were in the habit of making jokes about her, she was such an obvious and typical old maid. Pretty poor jokes, both in taste and wit, he felt now watching her standing there gaunt and grim with her mouth shut tight on her loneliness. He felt bewildered by the sympathy that ached in him. What had got into him this morning? Why should he be feeling sorry for sour old Smith, for the odious fat blighter with the too-friendly smile, and for every one of the bunch of human beings waiting there at the tram-stop on this glorious day?
The tram came trundling up the straight at last and they all got aboard. Jones and Robinson were sitting together as usual, and Brown dropped into the seat behind them. He knew them both well. The three of them usually chewed over some local topic as they travelled in and out of town, but this morning these two were so deep in conversation that they didn’t even notice Brown enter the tram. He was glad. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to sit quietly and look at things he had been seeing all his life but had never really noticed before. He looked at the backs of their necks. Jones’s neck was brown and muscular: Robinson’s was fresh and pink like a little boy’s, with a few odd, rather endearing freckles. Brown’s eyes roved round the tram. There was the Williams youngster, slick and pretty and neat like a girl on a magazine cover, her hair hanging smooth at her shoulders, her lipstick the approved shade for brunettes with fair complexion, her eyes flickering over the men in search of admiration. And there beside her was poor old Smith, deep in her book already. Hell, thought Brown, she must have read all the books there are. He looked at the title on this one. It was unknown to him and so was the author – but then it was years since he’d found time to read a book. He was surprised again by an almost panic-stricken sense of time wasted, time frittered away. I must join the Library again, he resolved.
They were passing the sea now. The smell of salt invaded the tram, harsh
Suddenly he wanted to talk to someone. He wanted to give expression to this new awareness. He bent forward. What were Jones and Robinson nattering about so earnestly, anyhow? He caught his own name and listened reluctantly but avidly, the way one does. ‘Poor old Brown,’ said Robinson. ‘It doesn’t seem possible, somehow. I still can’t understand how he didn’t see the car. He wasn’t full – we’d only had a couple –’.
Memories clawed at Brown out of a hollow place in his mind. Something sudden, something terrifying: what was it? Let’s see now. Saturday morning he had a beer or two with Robbie. They came out of the pub together and stood talking a moment before they separated. He remembered looking back over his shoulder with some parting remark as he stepped off the kerb. What was there after that? A jar, a white flash of pain. Then blackness . . . numbness . . . but that wasn’t real. That was something he had dreamed – wasn’t it?
‘What time’s the funeral?’ Jones asked.
‘Two-thirty. I’ll get time off to go to it of course; the boss will understand –’.
Brown leaned forward, and gripped Robinson’s shoulder with a terrible urgency.
‘Robbie,’ he pleaded, ‘my God. Robbie, it isn’t true is it? I wasn’t killed, was I?’
Robinson didn’t reply. He didn’t even look round. He took no notice at all, but went on talking quietly to Jones.
Brown shrank back into his seat. He felt himself withering to nothing in a gulf of icy loneliness that told him it was true. He was dead; and they were going to bury him that afternoon.
1945 (17)
When a group that has done as much as any other in the country to develop dramatic taste announces its intention to perform a play by one of New Zealand’s most important living poets, it is an event of interest to anyone following the labour pains of a home-grown culture.
The play is Curnow’s The Axe; the producers, fully fledged after Ngaio Marsh’s tutelage and last year’s experience of six one-acters and the Congreve comedy, no less than the Canterbury University College’s Drama Society.
The Axe is important, if only because of the few N.Z. plays, this is the first to be staged. Again, its author is a Christchurch man, and wrote it especially for the Little Theatre, which will receive it for a full-dress airing.
The play is a two-act tragedy in verse. Its subject is an unsuccessful revolt by the pagan Ngativara tribe against the Christian king of Mangaia in the Cook Islands in 1824. It was from a course of lectures by Dr Peter Buck that Curnow first got his idea; patient research amplified his knowledge of the event. The theme is the disappearance of an old culture, the emergence of a new. Thus it is plain that the interpretation can communicate modern meanings. It reflects Curnow’s preoccupation with islands and the sea:
The setting of the play and the technical innovations have set problems for the staging of the play. The Cook Island casting alone calls for expert make- up. The setting of the actors against the background of the sea dispenses with the usual stage-properties; the open-air colour is achieved by playing against a cyclorama. For the chorus two platforms project from the stage onto the floor, effecting an intimate contact between audience and players, an effect that only in a Little Theatre a playwright can put faith in. The device of the chorus commenting on the play and intensifying its emotional meaning is a resurrection that students of classical and modern drama alike will watch with great interest.
The performance of The Axe will be preceded by a series of mime exercises
The dates are not finalised, but those interested are advised to keep a night free about April 20. There will be three performances. Freshers are reminded that friends are welcome.
1945 (18)
When I was going to school there was one thing I couldn’t stand – the men who used to stand up in the assembly hall and spout about how school was the best time of your life. By Christ, I’d say, that’s one thing I’ll never do. Not in a thousand years. But now I’m coming to think different.
Perhaps you didn’t have the benefit of a secondary school education. Well, you didn’t miss much. English, French, Latin, History, Science, Mathematics. And none of it any use to you if you wanted to be a doctor or a radio-mechanic. At university you learn more in three months than in three years at school. Still, it keeps them out of mischief. And sport’s a good thing for a growing boy. It keeps his mind off unhealthy things like girls and what he was made for.
My school was on some land reclaimed from the harbour, with wide green playing-fields around that were very soggy when it rained. Four years I got off the bus in the morning and walked across them to the school. It looked new and hygienic with the sun flashing on the window panes. I’d sit on a bench till the doors opened and do the homework I should have done the night before.
I didn’t have many cobbers because I never joined in much with sports. In summer I’d tell the tennis master I was taking cricket and the cricket master I was taking tennis, and go off in the afternoon to swim in the town baths. I thought I had them fooled, but maybe they didn’t think it worthwhile chasing me up. And I didn’t do cadet drill either, partly because my people didn’t think it right and partly because I couldn’t be bothered anyway. Still, by the time I’d been there a year or two I was counted all right and a bit of a dag. And I made friends with one or two that were a bit like myself.
English was the only subject I really liked, and I could always get top marks for essays if I liked to try. It wasn’t bad either playing about in the lab, though I never had my science notes written up. Most of the other subjects gave me a sick feeling. They said Geometry and Latin were good for mental training. The parsons and school-teachers can always find an excuse for making you do what you don’t like doing. Anyway, most of it went off me like water off a duck’s back.
But there are some things that still stick in my mind. Not dates or verbs, but moods and smells and colours. For instance, there was Singing. We’d sit for an hour in the hall on benches. And we’d sing the same songs over
Then there was Friday morning with the sound of the bugles, and myself chipping grass around the edges of flower-beds. Or playing chess in the classroom after school. Or reading Carlyle for the first time, up in the library. My last year at school I began to like it a good deal. There were always the masters saying, I don’t expect fourth-form behaviour from sixth-form boys, but even they were human at times. There was no one to bully you any longer and a lot of the time you could do what you liked. In a way I was sorry to leave.
I’ve been round a couple of times to see the school. It looks pathetic, a small, rather meaningless world putting up barricades of Honour and football scores against the outside life. And not long ago I met some of my old school teachers in the pub. They just looked rather tired and nervy men. I had a yarn with them, but we hadn’t much to talk about except what had happened to certain old boys. It was a bit embarrassing to them and to me, as if there were rusty wheels that couldn’t start moving again.
1948 (19)
Now, as the wind strides with snow and rain from the antarctic desert, let the heart tick out her hours, presenting a blank front to the opaque sky.
And this ruined palace leased for so long to the inestimable Dead, this house of stone in the great marshland of unquiet sleep, overgrown with yellow swamp-flowers and lit by night with the blue flare of ignis fatuus – one need cry no longer for the hand of Christ on the rusted lock or His blazing breast on the empty hearthstone.
For a guest has entered, making from the stagnant vault a pleasant living- room.
Not this time a crony and jail companion, with whom one could lament a lost fortune, drinking a wine grown over-mellow and observing the acid stains of weather upon the ceiling. But a stranger, a mere girl, bearing it is true that brand on the forehead (no lotion can wholly disguise it) which marks us all; yet one of the youngest of the children of darkness, in her face the glimmer of some incredible other dawn, terrible and clear as a stirring of light to the blind from birth.
Though always behind the customary gestures, pain must be, like the shooting numbness of blood returning in a cramped limb, one can nevertheless extract even from this discomfort a salty flavour. For one is not alone; and hence no longer at the mercy of those unwanted visitors who call by night.
Burying one’s face in her golden hair, or caressing her childish breasts and responsive thighs, one is Antaeus, comforted by the soothing voice of Nature whose maternal arms still embrace those children whom she cannot save.
So – clouded eyes, reddening lips, taut breasts, confining knees, la belle chose itself, lose the discontinuity of the anatomist’s trade for a fluid significance, a common symbolic origin in that inexhaustible spring conveniently typified by – deepsea treasure, the cave of the forty thieves, oases in the desert, or the dark side of the moon – in a word, Woman.
Her shame is evidence that even she, of all creatures most equipped to hide from Heaven’s impassable scrutiny, has not escaped the common blight, the taste of corruption in every food.
But in her continued presence one can find at least some excuse for refurnishing the house.
Kitchen and bedroom first: linoleum and flowered wall-paper; an electric stove and heater; some linen to replace the grimy blankets. As for the other rooms, the most derelict can be boarded up.
That peculiar stone table in the upper room surmounted by two bars of wood set at right-angles, could well be brought down and used as a chopping- block. It is hard to throw away the most useless remnants (nails, bits of bone, wood from old thorn bushes) as one always has a feeling they will come in useful later on.
Since we have set up house together, things have made a permanent change for the better. The place looks much more cheery. All ghosts and odours have been abolished by a liberal use of Dettol. Admittedly the nights are getting longer and the rain more persistent. But we have laid in a good store of tinned food and enough firewood to last us till the Spring – which seems a long time in coming, a phenomenon easily explainable in terms of the activity of sunspots or the inaccuracy of calendars.
1948 (20)
In course of conversations we have come to know each other well enough to put up with those little idiosyncrasies that irritate. After all, the company of the most crashing bore is preferable to being alone. And as we have discussed the decay of our mutual estate as fully as we can without giving away any fact that could possibly be used against us, it is time for us to turn to a topic more congenial for all of us.
This hollow and aching truth, this sole surviving pillow of a lost civilisation, this ruined chapel which we are accustomed to call a Self, has had its moment of illumination. For a quarter of an hour, or five minutes, or final seconds even, we believed we had a fraction; and the rigid . . . of tragedy which now covers a vertiginous void, split to reveal a natural smile. This we remember as Joy, though on that momentous occasion we felt no wish to dissect the living tissue. What we hold in our hands is a broken mosaic. These come as splinters with which Kay was accustomed to amuse himself in the hall of the Snow Queen. They spelt then that Word . . . [Unfinished].
1948 (21)
These gulls hang always over the city, as symbols of an undivided being.
I have turned from the morning doorways of bars to watch them, the taste in my mouth of rum or vomit. I have seen them poised there as I come away from my girl, the smell of her still in my nostrils and filled with the power of knowledge and despair.
They are not pure, for all their whiteness. Only the dead are pure. I have seen them beside the wharves, gabbling over bread and garbage, their necks like serpents, their eyes stony and glittering.
But they alone are free. Balancing on the great wind, they enter as strangers this labyrinth of stone. Perhaps they are the unborn, the children of genesis, nursed still on the face of landless ocean, and free.
Because they cannot imagine death.
1948 (22)
Let the clock toll in its boarded tower.
I too have known the City of Man and the anarchic Tree of Knowledge – where the great Tyrant is thrown down from his rock of clouds and the lion waves roar on the beaches.
And I may yet live to see Queen Venus cross the Dead Sea in a witch’s sieve. But I am now in the crypt of the City of God: green stalactites hang from
My shadow crouches behind me; from his eyes run blood and brackish water; outside the world-end wind that smells of sailor’s tar.
Today is leper’s day when the dead beg for coins. I have no money to give but I can lick their sores.
But here comes my love naked on her wooden horse, with honey smeared on her hands and thighs. What if she sprout dog’s hair under the black sun of Persia? In her forest face lies buried my lost name.
Listen to the thunder of grass under paving stones. To every prostitute her virginity is miraculously restored. Take off your canvas mask, my friend, and let the worms go free.
The Ice Age is inaugurated by the opening of a new torture chamber. Here we go down the manhole to the sewer pit of tomorrow.
1948 (23)
Once I had no body. Alone in a desolate palace I admired the various tapestries showing stag-hunts, lovers intertwined, and crucifixions; or I looked out of my tower window waiting for Prince Charming. Sometimes I would cry softly, watching my face in a mirror.
In my great innocence I imagined myself a sinner; would fall asleep to the sound of mourning winds and waken with a terrible lassitude.
Then came the time when the mosaics broke. Lions burst into the chapel; stone steps leading down appeared in a meadow, under autumn leaves. I walked through to a foul crypt – so on to the world of men.
Since that time I have enjoyed many adventures. I have murdered, borne false witness, and slept in adulterous beds. Nor am I ashamed. Nature, the old whore, is my dearest confidant. She laughs when I spit in the eyes of authority and rewards me with liquor, ardent girls fresh from baths – and the energy to awake refreshed. She refuses me nothing. If I wish it I can find poems hidden under my pillow, banknotes in the tracks of cattle, elixirs in empty glasses.
Why do I value then so greatly the one thing it is not in her power to give? That blinding shaft which makes the whole world seem butterfly dust, my desires mediocre, my ambitions trivial, my rebellion a mere stupidity. It is pure pain, the soul for which I would sell my body.
1948 (24)
You accuse me then of weakness? Guilty: Lies, sloth and drunkenness. But behind lies I am mining always truth; in the midst of sloth I build stone by stone my church; from drunkenness I wring a terrible sobriety.
What was I looking for? The power to take or reject. The pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. The marriage of body and soul that makes all pleasure acceptable, all pain surgical.
What did I do? I cast off learning and ambition; fought my way through the swamps of the Nile, the deserts where stones fester, and the arid fogs of Antarctica.
You say: Commonsense. But under your flower garden one finds the snakepit. Once I walked among flowers. Now I lie in the snakepit, venom fuming through my veins – among those others whom you have cast out.
Good or bad you are still children, frightened of the dark. My childishness is my acceptance of your tribunal.
What did I find? Whirlwinds, lost towns and angry houses. Finally the rich odour of childhood, melting ice, companionship of beasts. The Woman who stood in tears at all my crossroads.
What then have I to offer? – The freedom to choose. A new language: not flowers, but wounds. The conversion of your private devil.
Shall I forget these for the old lying convention.
1948 (25)
Accidie, my mother, when shall I be born?
A thousand times I have lain down in your black swamp, desireless; not death, but the mud of a perpetual shame. Whole days I have wandered in your autumnal city, blinded by arid fogs, menaced by that dome of riveted steel on which sunrise and sunset are painted.
I – who love more than anything else the swarthy strength of miners, the brown faces and vivid speech of foreign seamen, the blazing noonday that melts down asphalt – action.
I am condemned to be dumb; or else the intolerable polar night that splinters ornate windows, volcanic explosion from the water of a moon mountain.
Yet I am at heart bourgeois, admiring flowers and cats and sentimental poems. Can this be reconciled?
Though I have died many times, I am not yet born. Accidie, your festering body is dearer to me thou that of any woman. Desire irritates; beauty wounds, clarity would destroy me.
Who shall administer justice? That purple abscess, the judge on the bench? What surgeon has clean hands? This is morality: You are free to do as you please.
Saints or jailors, do not lay hands on me. I have never accepted your laws. I know my own kind by their fresh faces, easy manners and despised of authority. You say: Ambition. I say: Bread.
1948 (26)
Oh the soft voices, the gardens, the days ordered to no purpose, they have strangled me. I cannot live in a kennel. Observe the round collar I wear, like a parson’s, symbol of good manners, a serf ’s nevertheless. Yet I am a good dog. I’ll do my tricks when the crowd gathers.
Women above all! They batten on us and lecture us while our throats are being cut. (Perhaps the weakness is ours: every sailor dreams of the home he ran away from.) Ethics they know well; religion they have never understood. What can they guess of the wisdom of anarchy?
Look at this pure bride, her ready giggle and her stupid mouth sucked in. By her ignorance she makes her husband ashamed of himself. A little sheepish, she believes deep down that she’s in the right.
They reserve their perpetual hatred for those who can do without them. ‘There’s something about him not quite . . .’ – Or – ‘When you’re older you’ll know better.’
And the dear mothers! Their life is one long sacrifice. They laugh it off – ‘Oh, I just did what I can.’ Fascinated, their sons protect them; age only makes the attachment more spiritual.
We cannot drown the bitches. But at least we can make it clear that we see through them. They’ll soon come to heel whining.
Oh the houses, the nice suburban houses . . .
1948 (27)
Close down the party; take away the coloured masks. Your enemies, your acquaintances, even those most dear to you whom you profess to love but have always shrunk from with a tenderness more destructive than hate – bundle them out of doors; shut off the radio; pull down the blinds; lie back and listen, alone as you have been from the start.
That murmuring out of the abyss – what is it? Those cries and clanging wings, growing more terrible as silence deepens. They come, the Furies: sad eyes and knotted brows, crowned with grey snakes that drop their slime on the furniture you chose so carefully thinking that its clear lines and bright colour, or the Van Gogh print above the mantelpiece, would serve as a rowan branch to keep them at bay. Arch-enemies of man. Yet looking at vulture wings and gorgon heads with the calm of a long despair, one must grant them their status of goddess; for they come of a noble house, more ancient than ours. Though they have at times assumed the role of subordinates (priestesses of disaster, Eumenides in the Greek chorus) this was a subterfuge, polite in an age of many gods. To us who own no master but the diseased will, they reveal themselves naked and triumphant, our supreme arbiters.
Fate carries scales, to preserve the form of justice. But these have claimed the right to avenge a crime never committed, a crime more hideous than any massacre of innocents, the crime for which we have no defence since we recognise even in our stammering self-justification an avowal of guilt – the crime of being born.
Their cry is an echo of that first cry of horror which rose at the breaking of the virgin sleep of Mother All. Our immortal companions, they are those forms to whom the child stretches his hands with his first inarticulate croaking, and the last mourners visible to his dying eyes. Especially they haunt the bed of love, with its mirage of Freedom beyond the last horizon – Fear, Guilt and Pain, the guardians of an imagined Eden never known in the act but anticipated in dreams. Yet those dreams are surely the dreams of the damned, since they express a perpetual lack rather than an expected fulfilment. They flower in an everwidening circle of desolation, as the dunes of the Sahara march over an oasis; the body is destroyed by the mind’s sanity.
. . . But the night’s still young. Turn on the music and let the lights go up, bring back the boys and their girl-friends. It is important to maintain a good atmosphere – the jokes mild in mixed company, growing a little broader as time steers on. There are two dozen of beer by the chest-of-drawers; remember to save a bottle for the morning. Jack will be looking for a fight soon; Tony will go into the next room with Kath. We must keep out all gate-crashers.
1948 (28)
Much has been written and will be written about the ‘New Zealand writer’. The theme has become rather stale. For apart from the influence of certain geographical accidents of high mountains, wide plains, big rivers, small towns, island climate, sparse population, a writer in New Zealand must do exactly the same as he would have to do in Prague or New York – digest the world he sees and feels, comment on its life and manners, and fight always to preserve his one jewel and magic lamp of artistic integrity. Only synthetic writing can be said to belong to a school; for creation must precede classification. The difference between influence digested and influence undigested is the difference between Frank Sargeson’s first-rate and second-rate pieces. Where he assumes the role of a hard-bitten realist his stories usually have the air of a bad joke; where he looks for maximum honesty and intensity, they can be strong and moving. An example of Sargeson’s best is the long short story ‘That Summer’, where savage pity and irony remain fully articulate under the pruning-shears. The story of a consumptive barman would in the hands of most writers have become either sentimental or comic (consider Saroyan). But Sargeson for once allows his characters a tenderness which rings all the clearer for its reticence.
In his novel When the Wind Blows, however, Sargeson applies the technique which he has developed in his short stories and fails to bring it off. Comparing it with the novels of Graham Greene, one can see what is lacking. Greene builds a clear and obvious scaffolding for every novel, which contains the theme as a bucket contains water. Sargeson’s theme is like water spilt on the ground. Nevertheless this novel contains some of his most lucid and sensitive writing, and though it is not a successful novel it has the raw material for one. He has succeeded in avoiding most of the time his besetting vice of fake toughness. A continuation of this novel may soon appear in print.
It is in keeping with the style of his work that the man himself should be something of a cipher. He has requested that this profile should concern itself with his writings rather than his personal activities. That he has part of a law degree; that he has visited England and the Continent; that he now lives in a shack on the North Shore – these are the kind of biographical details that seem to tell us something and in fact tell us nothing. One can gather from internal evidence in his work that he felt keenly the bite of the Depression. His most convincing characters are nomads in a desert of perpetual insecurity, living on the bare fringes of society. It is to his credit that he has become neither a doctrinaire leftist nor a hawker or soothing ointment. It is easy to dismiss his Toms and Harrys as overdrawn. But those who have worked with industrial labourers will recognise the faithful mirroring of a most barren and disorientated existence built around the shallow contacts of bars and race- meetings. Though there is fake in Sargeson, this is not fake, and we would do well to remember it. And though one may quarrel with the large place which sexual perversion plays in his work, this theme becomes in his hands a sharp weapon against the hypocrisy of conventional churchianity. When society refuses to recognise its own image, then writers turn to satire, till the very grotesqueness of their presentation forces attention.
Some of the happiest of Sargeson’s stories are concerned with farm life and country childhood. There is always the sting in the tail; but stories like ‘Last Adventure’ or those concerned with Dalmatian settlers have at times a smooth rich quality which comes unexpectedly after the sourer city sketches. The strange passive mood of much New Zealand landscape is captured more effectively than by any other writer; a country made for plants and birds rather than for mammals.
Though more than one opinion can be held about Sargeson’s style there is no doubt that his use of New Zealand idiom is brilliant and often startlingly effective. The range is narrow, and there is an inevitable loss in depth in the more introspective passages. But we do not reject a painter because he chooses to paint with three colours rather than fifteen, even if these are somewhat neutral in tone. Others will see and record a different New Zealand. There is enough general validity in Sargeson’s work for it to stand. His methods are by
1948 (29)
At dawn he stirred on his camp stretcher, and pressed up through blanketing layers of sleep to lie staring in contentment at the near canvas roof. In the half- dark he could hear the rustle of scrub and the waves breaking on a shelving beach below. The air was still chilly, and he lay without moving, ready to sleep again.
Yesterday near sunset they had come over a ridge in the old Ford truck and seen the lake spread suddenly below them. ‘That’s Ohau’, his father had said. ‘We’ll camp down there by the creek.’ And he had pointed to a clump of manuka scrub that grew close to the water’s edge about a mile from the rapid outlet. His mother, half-asleep, had lifted her head and smiled. ‘You’ll be glad to get a rest from the wheel, won’t you, Jack,’ she said. The boy, cramped between them on the narrow seat, shifted his legs and looked down at the lake. An oval of darkening silver caught in a fold of the arid ranges, two thousand feet in depth, fed by snow water from the distant glaciers, it seemed to him indescribably pure and remote, a place made for rest.
They came slowly down to the lakeshore, the truck straddling tussocks and small boulders, for the road had dwindled to wheel-ruts in shingle. They jolted over a ford, water splashing as high as the bonnet of the truck. From time to time the boy climbed out to open gates and close them again when the truck had gone through. When they finally came to a stop beside a scrub clearing he helped his father to unload the stores and cut props for a tent and fireplace. He was a little afraid of that lean-faced saturnine man – a farmer born and bred whom two wars had left powerless to take pleasure in natural growth and the small triumphs of farming. Yet he looked for his approval, driving the props deep into the stony ground, to stand firm against his testing. Before he went to bed that night, he walked out shivering to the edge of the lake and brushed his teeth there, spitting on the smooth stones and listening to the quiet sound of water. His senses seemed sharpened by the
Waking now, he could hear his parents deeper in the tent – his mother’s steady breathing and an occasional snore from his father. A small green caterpillar fell cautiously from the roof, suspended on its invisible thread. From the scrub outside he could smell the exhalation of damp grass and flowering manuka. As he sat up his stretcher creaked loudly, but his parents did not stir. Stepping out to the newly trodden grass, he dressed quickly (slacks, sandals, shirt and jersey) and emerged rubbing his eyes to a sky bright with dawn. A fresh wind blew on his face as he crossed the clearing towards the truck. A tarpaulin had been drawn over it for the night. He untied a rope at the back, reached inside, and drew out his father’s rifle. It was a long- barrelled twenty-two, neat and well cared for, the wood on the stock polished with constant handling. He fumbled again till he found a box of bullets, which he slipped into his trouser pocket. Then he set off along the road, the rifle under his arm, its muzzle pointing to the ground an inch in front of his moving feet.
The feel of the rifle against his hand and elbow was exhilarating. If his father had been more ready to lend it, he would have spent all day shooting or pretending to shoot. More than desire to kill, it was the myth of the hunter that gripped him. Even now he trod warily, his muscles tense and his eyes glancing from side to side for the first scurry of brown fur. A hundred yards from the camp he left the road and clambered down a bank to the lakeshore. By now the sun showed an edge of molten steel above the mountains. Glittering tracks of light lay on the surface of the lake like the tracks of sea monsters. Overhead flew gulls, their harsh cries contrasting strangely with the splendour of their circling wings. He picked his way over banks of shingle and patches of moss where small grey insects ran like lice. There were no rabbits in sight. Nevertheless he opened the box of bullets and slipped one into the breech. Then he walked on along the edge of the lake where the stones had been worn to rough sand. The early morning sun now warmed the cloth on his shoulders. About a mile from the camp he came on a row of willow trees whose delicate light-green leaves sprang from twisted trunks half-buried in the shingle. Laying the rifle across his knees, he sat down on a log to rest. From under a matagouri bush a glinting object caught his eye. It was a condensed milk tin, not yet rusty, left there by campers. He picked it up gingerly, walked to the water’s edge, and threw it far out into the lake. There it rose and fell gently on the light waves. He sat down on the log again and took aim.
The first shot went wide, ricocheting from the lake surface and whining out of sound. With the second shot his hand was steadier, the butt firm against his shoulder. He aimed a little high and pressed the trigger slowly.
The crack of the rifle merged in the plonk of the bullet against the tin. It bubbled and sank. He rose from the log and walked back towards the camp, reloading the rifle as he went.
The gulls still swerved in wide arcs above his head. Mist rose from the upper reaches of the lake till he could see clearly the ridges on the mountain flanks that were ancient beaches where the lake had been. Beyond them lay further mountains, range behind range stretching to the cloudy buttresses of Mt Cook itself. For the first time that morning he felt hunger, and quickened his step. He wished that he had shot at least one rabbit – to show as an excuse for having borrowed the gun. His luck was out today. He would not be able to pose as the experienced hunter.
He came to where a point of shingle ran out into the lake, enclosing a basin of calm water at the outlet of a small creek. Just inside the point a gull rode lightly. It did not move as he came nearer, but preened its feathers and fixed him with a cold eye. He thought of scaring it with a stone, but the distance was too great. A strange anger rose in him against the bird. On an impulse he raised the rifle. I’ ll only scare it, he told himself. Yet, as he had done with the tin, he aimed a little high and pressed the trigger slowly. At the crack of the rifle the bird rose, and he felt a surge of relief. It fluttered two or three yards, then fell to the water again and lay with its wings outspread. Dropping the rifle on a patch of moss, he rushed forward and waded into the shallow water. He lifted it gently. The bird lay in his hand perfect and seemingly unharmed, no trace of blood on the snowy feathers. He wondered if it had perhaps only been stunned by the wind of the bullet. Then, pressing back the soft breast feathers, he saw where the lead had struck. The breast bone was smashed through, a tangle of flesh and sinew hidden by the close down. He turned the bird’s head towards him. The eye, still black and cold, had lost its living sharpness.
The whole shore seemed to watch him. The least flicker in his mind of self- justification was crushed by this open stare. Suddenly he felt sick and heavy. Scooping a hollow in the shingle, he laid down the gull, and piled stones above it till the accusing white was entirely hidden. Then he walked back to where he had left the rifle, water squelching from his sandals at every step. On the road to the camp he recovered a little of his self-assurance. It was a good shot anyway, he thought.
A plume of smoke was rising from the clearing. The smell of frying bacon drifted to his nostrils. His father was holding a pan over a fire of dry manuka sticks. Remembering the borrowed rifle, he felt his heart sink a trifle.
‘You been out shooting?’ said his father casually. His heart lifted again. ‘Yes, I didn’t have any luck.’ ‘You seem to have got yourself pretty wet.’
‘I couldn’t help it. There was a bit of bog I mistook for green grass. I had a few practice shots at a tin and sank it all right.’
‘Yes, I heard the shooting.’
‘I’ve worked up a hunger anyway.’ He walked over the short springy turf, and laid the rifle in the back of the truck. As he turned towards the tent, the light reflected from the lake dazzled his eyes.
1941-48? (30)
The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted in the deep gullies. Inside the tent he lay curled on his camp stretcher. Waking was like coming up through water from the strain of dreams to the diffuse light filtered through canvas and the smell and sound of pine branches overhead. For a long time he lay warm in the blankets staring in contentment at the near roof.
As he sat up the stretcher creaked, but his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor that had been yesterday an unclaimed corner of the camping ground, pulled off his pyjamas and put on his bathing trunks.
Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside, the birds chittered and flew in the fir plantation. He ran his fingers through his hair. The sky was darker to the west and bright above the near mountains. Their shadows lay half way towards the camping ground. As he climbed over the fence on the way to the lake he felt the first chill of the lake wind, and hunching his shoulders for shelter wished he had stayed in the warm tent. He crossed a dry watercourse lined with cutty grass and came out on the shingle banks of the lake shore, picking his way between thorn bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky was very bright. Shaking blades of light were reflected on the water. From where he stood he could see about three miles across the lake, hidden in its upper reaches by the heavy mountain flanks. It was bottomless, and the tracks of light might have been the trail of monsters.
He walked into the small waves at the edge of the lake, down over shelves of sand and shingle. Then out and along the shore to a skeleton jetty where the scooped-out shingle left the water faintly blue and very deep. He climbed the bank at the top of the beach and ran out on the jetty. The grey boards, splintered and worn with gravel, were solid under his feet.
It seemed a long way down to the water. He sat on the low bevelled parapet and hesitated. Then he stood up and jumped with his eyes shut.
He doubled up with the shock of the cold water, and swam under water till he broke surface some way out from the jetty. Then he swam back and held on to the slippery beams with their fine weed washed by the waves. When he had regained his breath he dived again, swimming down where the lake floor sloped to the deeper lake. There the waves hung above like a ceiling, and he could imagine himself a merman or a fish to whom the underwater world was familiar. Out of breath he would come to the surface with weeds
The sun was a half disc of steel over the mountain. The willow trees stood with their roots in shingle, bark gnarled and broken, but leaves delicate and light-green. He walked up the shore limping, for he had cut his ankle on a stone. He walked on the edge of his foot to keep the raw place from the rough grass. If I had drowned, he thought, no one would have known. He saw his drowned body floating and pitied his father and mother for their distress. He remembered how he had gone shooting with his father the evening before. Behind the cemetery they had walked over a dry creek-bed where the weed crunched under his sandals. His father wounded a rabbit; it screamed and kicked its way to a burrow. He ran across the gully, balancing on the tarred pipeline, and caught it by the hind legs just in time. Its head wobbled at the rabbit-punch, its white belly-fur and brown side draggled like corn flattened by rain. Blood dripped from its mouth. The eyes were sad with the terrible remoteness of all dead things. He had walked back proudly through the plantation with the rabbit hanging heavily. Then the skinning under the willows, the guts thrown on the ground and the bare flesh bruised blue. Rain had come down from the mountains, and small spiders fell on the newly pitched tent.
He crossed the road under high poplar leaves still pale with sleep. Grass was sticking to the gash on his foot. A lorry was in the camping ground, unloading packing cases. The tents were open. A woman washed her hair under a tent- flap. A man crossed the long grass carrying torn branches of broom. Smoke rose from a fireplace of blackened rocks with the smell of frying bacon.
He rounded the tent and undid the flap. His father was dressing and his mother sat up in bed.
Been for a bathe in the lake? asked his father. Yes.
What was it like? A bit cold.
The smell of frying bacon came in the door. The sun had risen. Dew evaporated from the leaves of the blue flannel-flowers. Gulls flew overhead, their feathers glistening, their cries calm music.
1941-48? (31)
It was summertime when I met her first. I was eighteen and just beginning to feel my way with women. It happened this way. I go down to the beach to bathe; it’s a fine sunny day with enough wind for a good surf, but hardly
It’s a lovely day, I say.
She smiles back and asks me if I like the surf. We’re just breaking the ice when another girl comes up behind her. I know this one, but she always gets on my nerves because she never knows when to keep her mouth shut. With her yapping away I soon find out they’ve rented the crib together for a couple of weeks. The one I know wants me to read their hands, because that’s a line I do at parties, but I say I’d better be getting along.
The next day is Friday, a bit cloudy, but I come down just the same and have a swim. There’s no one in sight at the crib, so I get dressed and hang around smoking. Before long the madonna turns up alone, and we go for a yarn and a walk on the sand. I ask her to come up to our place on Saturday evening. My people would be in town, and I could pick her up at the local dance without her girl-friend noticing anything. It takes a lot of nerve for me to say it; I can feel myself getting hot under the collar, but she agrees right away. We go on walking for a bit, and I notice the small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes when she smiles, and also how trim her figure is. But I don’t put my arm round her, I just go on talking about books and films.
On Saturday I tidy my room and put half a dozen of beer in the wall cupboard. Then I bring the radio upstairs and plug it in beside the bed. When my people go away early in the evening, I pretend that I’ve settled in to do some reading.
I think, maybe I’ll have to pay for a ticket when I don’t want to dance, but I find her waiting outside the hall. She says she’s told them inside that she wanted some fresh air. So we walk up the road and this time I put my arm round her. It seemed strange to bring her in to the empty lighted house. I take her up to my room and we yarn for a bit with the radio giving off some soft music. By the time we’ve cracked a few bottles things are going fine. She sits on the bed and I bend her head back and kiss her. Even now I can almost smell the scent she used. Then I switch off the light and we do a bit of wooing with the music still playing, and some dim moonlight coming in the windows. At first she’d pull her head away and laugh, but later on she just lies there with her face like a mask, more like a symbol of some kind than a human face. It seemed wonderful to me, her arms and the scent and the slim body and the face like a mask. Pretty soon I was putting the hard question, but she wasn’t having any.
Please, I’d say.
What would happen if I gave in to every boy I met? she’d ask.
I’m not everyone, I’d say, and so it went on, one of those arguments that get you nowhere. Nowadays I’d just get up and have a beer, but then I was apt to take things seriously.
Well, I had a pretty good time notwithstanding, because of the novelty of being there with a woman in the dark when I’d hardly had the nerve to kiss one before. Everything seemed so natural and kind of rich; even the beer had a special taste to it. When she left I walked down the road with her and kissed her goodbye. Then I went back and shifted the radio and stowed away the empties. When my people came back I was safe in bed.
The next morning I wake up with a heavy head, so I go out for a walk early. And about dinnertime I go down to see her. She’s sitting on the grass reading, with some older people that are paying a visit. Her girl-friend stays behind to have a nag, so she and I go across the bay to a possie I had picked out in the lupins. There we have another woo. She looks fine under the green light filtered through the lupins. And the sea thundering alongside. Pretty soon I have my hand on it, though she pushes it away again. Her muscles are very hard; she said she played basketball. She has white well-shaped legs and small breasts. She likes being kissed, though she told me she had been a Sunday school teacher. With the lupin flowers in her hair she hardly looks the part, and I tell her so. She nearly gives in at last. If I’d known my stuff I could have had her, but I was too much talk and not enough friction. As we go up the road again she laughs and holds on to me. I tell her how the stone lions in Trafalgar Square roar every time a virgin passes, and she says they’d roar if she passed them.
Later on I see her in town; but somehow the glamour goes out of things there. It seems she had a boy killed in the war who was going to marry her when he came back. I suddenly saw she was a good bit older than I was. And she saw me mainly when I was full of beer. So we said goodbye. Now and then I pass her in the street and say Hullo.
1948? (32)
The painting of Colin McCahon has lately aroused considerable controversy in the Listener. His critics seem to be divided into two camps – those who regard his work as being on a par with bad posters, and those who regard it as being original and naïve though technically limited. We do not claim expert judgment in matters of art, but we have seen McCahon’s work develop over several years and have found that what jarred at first became on closer acquaintance deeply moving and impressive. Knowing that for most critics, opinions and prejudice are the same thing, we have gathered by means of casual conversation from three well-known artists their opinion of McCahon. All three were agreed that McCahon’s work possessed power, depth and
Colin McCahon was born in Timaru, of pure Irish descent. Till 1938 he lived in Dunedin. He is now in Christchurch, and is making a livelihood by helping to produce miniatures and jewellery, thus supporting a wife and three children. He endured three half-years at the School of Art; has worked as a builder, also in innumerable labouring jobs, the most reputable being that of ladies’ lavatory attendant and swan-feeder in Wellington. On meeting McCahon one is struck by his obvious sincerity and admirable sense of humour. Referring to the difficulty that many find in placing his work, he remarked on one occasion that it is exactly the same kind of thing as one sees outside the Salvation Army Citadel.
The print shown above [‘River and Hills’] is one of his typical landscapes. It captures the raw harsh quality of so many New Zealand ranges, and should be an introduction to some of his more complex work. This print has appeared with others in Landfall, but McCahon’s vigorous use of colour cannot be shown. Nevertheless the rhythmic form of his art should be apparent even in black and white.
There seem to be three main difficulties found in the appreciation of McCahon. The first springs probably from an ignorance of his cultural background. There is much truth in the saying that there is nothing new under the sun. To those familiar with Bosch’s ‘Temptation of St Anthony’, surrealism will not seem strange. And as John Summers points out in his penetrating essay in Student, McCahon’s paintings would have been quite intelligible to those who saw Fra Angelico at work. Unconsciously we reject the major part of our artistic heritage for a norm founded on the chocolate box or that photographic mirroring of nature which reaches its peak in Albrecht Dürer. A fruitful comparison can be drawn between McCahon’s religious paintings and those of Blake. Both develop their own theme rather than illustrating a text; and both ally confidence and daring to a sure instinct. It would be untrue to describe McCahon’s painting as ‘mystical’ – there is nothing woolly about his method, and the device borrowed from the cartoon brings it nearer to satire.
The second difficulty is implied by the first, and rises from a misconception of the function of art. Many of us in our heart of hearts wish only to see a coloured photograph and distrust all symbolism and subjectivism. And the same problem is encountered in the literary field. Modern novels tend to be little more than accurate reporting. Jung relates how he showed a photograph to a Melanesian savage. The head-hunter turned it in his hands for some time and then exclaimed with an air of profound discovery, ‘It is a picture of white men.’ A European child would have recognised it instantly. Yet the savage was capable of creating the most subtle and expressive art forms, including no doubt representations of the human figure. We are inclined to forget that
The third difficulty comes from his choice of subject and his handling of it. The raw quality of his crucifixions might well offend a church-goer who wished to forget Christ on weekdays. There is in them a good deal of pity and terror and the monstrously ludicrous element which lies in all suffering. This may seem to a Christian blasphemy and to a non-Christian morbidity. But McCahon has done in painting what Sargeson does tentatively in prose before he cuts himself short with a sneer. He is expressing the sour and struggling piety that lies behind the blank mask of Presbyterianism. Instead of revolting from his environment he learns to accept it. His Christs and angels are reconciled with the fertile hills behind them. The curve of the wing of the Angel of the Annunciation is repeated in the shape of the peak above the square house.
The art of Colin McCahon has a fire and originality which sets it apart from that of most New Zealand painters. A.R.D. Fairburn is perhaps in some of his bush paintings the nearest to him in method and feeling. It is explorative and by standing outside schools is able to draw on the technical approach of any of them. His latest work, so far unfinished, shows a growing strength and richness. The man himself possesses great honesty and integrity, qualities which in combination with his undoubted gifts, should assure his work of the recognition it deserves.
1948 (33)
There was a large attendance at the Literary Club on July 13th to hear J.K. Baxter speak on Dylan Thomas. His address proved to be both stimulating and sound, the result of a fruitful acquaintance with the work of this poet.
Dylan Thomas, who showed great promise in his early poems of 1934, has fulfilled this promise by finding a more mature manner, seen best in the collection entitled Deaths and Entrances. However, he has not yet come to the end of his continual development.
Thomas is perhaps the most considerable of the young generation of English poets. One reason for this is his originality and integrity. Unlike many left-wing poets of the Thirties, Thomas has never said what he thought he should say, but always what he wanted to – even if this was occasionally badly said, or not worth saying. He has had the rare courage to tackle honestly his deepest personal problems, and it is in the attempt to see and feel clearly that lies the meaning of his poetry. Seen as both a creative and destructive principle, death and sin, are characteristic themes.
Thomas’s poetry is rather an explanation than a record – a reaching out
One sure sign of Thomas’s greater stature is his gusto in the use of language. This is shown in his inveterate trick of punning, whether seriously and successfully undertaken or not. Indeed verbal invention is essential to the poet who gropes for half-realised ideas and sensations, in order to express what is peculiar to him, and has not been said before in those terms. It is not enough for a poet to feel more deeply or more subtly, he must be able to communicate his experience by means of a greater sensitivity to language.
Thomas’s poetry is not for the intelligence alone but appeals as fitting to the emotions and senses as well. It should be read aloud and surrendered to, for its full effect.
1948 (34)
The remarks of ‘P.D.D.’ concerning the quality of contributions for the literary page have some validity – we would like it very much if only first-rate material were submitted. But in fact our main problem is not quality but quantity. Each week we receive about half the amount needed to fill this page, and there is a continual and disheartening struggle to make a balanced unit from fragments. Even after combing the wastepaper basket, we are often obliged to write at least twenty-five per cent ourselves. ‘P.D.D.’ seems able to express his opinions with some force. We suggest that he (and any other readers who have been irritated by the trivial content of this page) should look through his drawers for those long-buried manuscripts we all cherish and forget – or even write a review of some book he has read. Canta is no ogre’s castle or clique of long-haired aesthetes. The box for contributions is screwed to the wall below the notice-board and opposite the ’phone box in the Stud[ents’] Ass[ociation] buildings.
But regarding our correspondent’s vice crusade. We see no necessity to apologise for the mild and innocuous bawdiness of ‘Scrotex’ or the mannered introspection of ‘Gulls’. True, we would like something as full-blooded as Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’, as mordantly obscene as Byron’s epigrams, as sly and trenchant as Burns’s ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, as riotous as Shakespeare’s tavern and brothel scenes, as violently scatological as Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub’. But in this milk-and-water age we must be content with a few ashamed sniggers.
And it is very doubtful if Canta could publish any of the master-works quoted above and escape suppression. Our correspondent has an eagle eye for the ‘doubtful’ phrase; we, of grosser calibre, had not noticed anything unusual until our attention was drawn to it. The test of what is permissible in this field seems to us to pivot on a question of form rather than one of moral rectitude. Namely – is the questionable comment an integral part of the entire statement or is it an anomalous parenthesis designed purely to shock? ‘Gulls’, we consider, goes free on this score: the fault lies with the reader’s unwillingness to identify himself temporarily with a valid standpoint not his own. ‘Scrotex’ may be censurable – but as an occasional piece it has the merit of being amusing and well-turned.
What we publish as Literary Editor and what we say in our private capacity to a Varsity Club are two entirely separate situations. Nevertheless we would point out that in the second instance we made no mention of Thomas’s reported liking for pubs. If the correspondent would take the trouble to read Thomas, he would soon realise that he was up against a writer of uncommon intellectual and spiritual stature. The ‘sex, death and sin’ theme is that of every considerable poet, mediaeval, Victorian or modern. It is interesting to note that while Tennyson and Swinburne were the anonymous authors of many of the bawdiest verses of the last century, the same is not reported of Thomas in this century.
We thank ‘P.D.D.’ for his obvious appreciation and close scrutiny of this page, and hope that he will find time and inclination to express his own opinions and outlook by its medium.
1948 (35)
The Royal Visit to our ever-loyal Dominion is near at hand, when we will be paid in full by the sight of their Britannic Majesties and Her Royal Highness for the slight inconvenience that our younger men have suffered in the past eight years. I am reminded of a verse of Henry Lawson’s on a similar occasion:
And while the poisonous terrorists of Greece and Malaya are being hunted to the mountains and jungles where they belong by those Galahads of Democracy, the Government forces, lately-enlisted Dyak headhunters, and the R.A.F., it is interesting to remember a writer who was perverse enough to find fault with Democratic Progress. Henry Lawson, more than any other Australian poet, took the worm’s-eye view of society:
This kind of statement is peculiar to Lawson. The sentimentality which is a blot on past and contemporary Australian poetry becomes at times, despite his limited technique, clear and trenchant sentiment. He sees the grinding monotony of rural and industrial labour without the rosy spectacles of conventional optimism and ‘nature poetry’. From many changing impressions his Australia emerges as a harsh land, treacherous and remote, a bad wife to whom he is nevertheless indissolubly married . . . ‘Where lone Mount Desolation lies, / Mounts Dreadful and Despair.’
This view itself could be another kind of sentimentality. But in his verse as in his prose sketches, Lawson is saved time and again by a natural realism. His magnificent poem on a bush fire has indeed its stock types (the police constable, the drunkard, the cockie, the sly horse-breaker); but like Dickens whom he admired, Lawson’s types exhibit more human qualities than do most characters created by trivial reporting. The remarkable thing about Lawson’s poetry is not that he was sentimental, but that he was much less so than his contemporaries.
One is led to wonder how Lawson would have written if the three curses of shoddy models, conventional humourless humour, and hack work had not halted him. There are tentative movements in his work toward a more complete and analytical approach to society. The most remarkable is certainly ‘Ruth’, a poem in which he recreates the situation of a sordid court case in all its human depth and violence. Though hampered as always by the trundling ballad metre, he presents a picture unrivalled in Australian verse – the boy growing up in a dreary country town; the girl hemmed in by the demands of conventionality; the lovers in the bush during a thunder-storm; then the climax at the house of the bank manager, and the drawn-out dreamlike finale of the court case. Though uneven, it is Lawson’s most penetrating achievement. He strikes at the roots of his own dilemma – an inhibiting code which froze his natural vehemence into a conditioned response.
The cult of cobberdom, so firmly planted in Australian soil, serves as a thinner substitute for sexual enterprise. Lawson, a more subjective poet than A.B. Paterson, shows affinities with Whitman. He does not always feel it necessary to be a tough guy. Hence his statements of revolutionary brotherhood ring true. One can still be thrilled by the ring of the ‘Army of the Rear’ – ‘Their pikes go through the firing lines as pitchforks go through straw.’
In the first and second decade of this country there still remained a faint echo of the shout of the French Revolution. It seemed possible even then that
Henry Lawson will be remembered when many of the smart alecks of recent magazine fame are forgotten. He touched often a nerve of genuine indignation at the barbarous and oppressive indignities which working men suffered and still must suffer. And in his more lyric vein he had an original rhetoric and power. At a time when New Zealand poets were writing about fairies, he realised the curiously immature quality of N.Z. landscape –
I salute Henry Lawson, that strong and original voice whom circumstances combined to stifle.
1948 (36)
Whatever their value to the community, most freezing works are an eyesore. The one at Blackhurst is no exception. Set like a scab on a hill above the town, it draws labour from twenty miles around and in spite of the Town Council’s complaints, pollutes the creek with refuse.
On a Wednesday morning work was slackening off in the gut room. The paunches came down the chute in straggling clusters – thick yellow fat, intestines still half-alive and rippling, an occasional liver knobbed with hydatid cysts as hard as stones. Winter sunshine filtered through the small high panes. A short lad of about twenty-three who was stripping fat at the mouth of the chute, turned quickly and looked at the wall clock. It was a quarter to twelve – ten minutes to knock-off. He had been tearing guts from paunches, the hardest job on the bench, and his back and wrists were aching. As the gut hit the bench splashes of muck spotted his face and stung his eyes. He was glad of a spell. He had been married five months now, and the thought of Brenda still seemed a secret one. They had met first at a local dance, and passed soon from friendship to intimacy. Already his life before marriage seemed dreamlike and rather empty. They were saving to furnish the house and all his pay went towards it. When he was single he had spent his Saturdays in the pub with a few friends; now he dug the garden or did odd jobs about the house. Brenda did not mind him having a drink after work. But the need had left him with the loneliness from which it had sprung. He liked to take home his pay envelope unopened, and throw it down on the kitchen table as if it were a gift.
The last few paunches slithered on to the board. He wrenched them free from the guts, untying his apron as he went. He was finishing his lunch in the dressing room when Harry sat heavily down beside him.
‘Coming along for your pay?’ he asked. ‘There should be a few bob more this week.’
‘In a minute.’
‘Take it all home to Mum, eh? I’m going to go along to the Crown and Anchor and put half-a-dollar on the diamond, myself. It’s time it had a run.
You ought to take a shot. Win a quid and buy some silk stockings.’
‘I might go for a couple of throws.’ Jack put away his lunch tin and walked down to the office. A crowd had gathered round the window. He took his place in the queue and lighted a cigarette.
‘J. Chisholm?’ ‘Here I am.’
‘Eight pound twelve and nine.’
He signed for the pay, tore open the envelope, and took out the silver, leaving the notes in his hip pocket. He walked on to the butchers’ dining room. Through the door that opened on to the yard came the crying of sheep and barking of dogs. Only two days off their mountain tussock ground, they seemed to smell their own doom in the stink of blood and offal, and cried out in a shrill note of distress. Jack had seen the chain at work and had never quite lost a feeling of horror at the quick change from live struggling animals to dangling carcasses. Occasionally a ewe would escape from the pen and scramble down to the lower floor, but it was always recaptured and hauled back to the knife.
He pushed open a door netted against flies. Inside were long trestle tables where some butchers still sat eating or reading newspapers. At the middle table a tall Aussie was unfolding a piece of sacking marked in squares. A group had clustered round him. He shook the dice in an inverted leather cup. ‘Make your investments, gentlemen,’ came his showman’s patter. ‘Roll up,
roll up!’
The steady betters had found seats beside the board. The more cautious hung on the outskirts of the crowd and leaned over from time to time to throw on some small coin. Soon there was about £15 in notes and loose change.
‘Any more for any more,’ came the patter. The Aussie rattled the dice and threw. ‘The name, the game, and a diamond.’
Some turned sourly away. Others collected their winnings. A sallow-faced Dalmatian from the freezing chambers put on a florin from the pile of silver at his right hand. His mouth twitched nervously. He was the keenest gambler in the works, never missing a session, rarely betting high, and losing slowly but consistently. Jack pressed forward and put a shilling on the crown just before the banker threw.
‘Two crowns and a spade.’
His face flushed as he collected his three shillings. The fever and unreality of the game lifted him like a rising tide. Harry pushed in beside him. ‘You want to stick to the diamond, boy,’ he said. ‘It’s due for a run. The crown’s had a fair thrashing lately.’ Jack nodded but put his three shillings back on the crown. ‘Crown, diamond, club,’ came the liturgical response. He was five bob to the good. For a moment he thought of leaving the game, but decided to have one more go. He put the five shillings, his entire winnings, on the anchor. He would leave the game at least ten bob to the good, or else square. A lanky butcher with bloodstained leggings threw a five pound note on the crown.
The Aussie shook the dice and threw three crowns. With some reluctance he paid the butcher his £15, and asked him to try his luck again. The butcher shook his head, stuffed the notes into his pay envelope, and leaned against a table to watch the game. Jack stared at him enviously. He’d have a pound to the good if he had stuck to the crown. There was a touch on his arm. ‘You want to leave it now,’ said Harry. ‘You’re square. I won a quid on that last throw, and I’m pulling out.’
‘I’ll stay to watch for a bit,’ he said. He waited till Harry had left the room, then drew out his pay envelope and put a ten-shilling note on the crown. The crown seemed to stand out from the rest of the board, red and magical. He waited tensely for the throw.
‘Two diamonds and a heart.’
He felt a sudden hollowness, as if vitality had been drained from him.
Double up, he thought, it’s the only way. He put a pound on the crown. ‘Hook, diamond, spade.’
Like a robot, his head singing, he put two pounds on the crown. ‘Two hooks and a diamond.’
His arms and legs seemed wooden, and his heart pounded. As he put four pounds on the crown the banker looked at him curiously. ‘You’re betting high,’ he said. Then, as he threw club, diamond, and spade – ‘It all goes to the firm. Better luck next time.’
The air blew cold on Jack’s cheeks as he pushed through the door. ‘Last throw, gentlemen,’ sounded behind him. Then – ‘Crown, club, and spade.’ He scarcely cared. The tide had fallen, leaving him stranded on a shore of hard fact. He had twenty-two and six in his pocket. What could he tell Brenda? That he had lost it at the Crown and Anchor board? She would never forgive him. That someone had stolen it? She would want to make enquiries, maybe ring the police. For a moment he thought of going back and demanding the money from the Aussie. But he had run the chance of winning and could not complain if he lost.
The machines were starting up as he came into the gut-room. ‘Did you come out to the good?’ asked Harry.
‘No, I lost a few bob.’
One thing was certain – he would never play Crown and Anchor again. But as the first paunch hit the bench he thought, if I’d stuck to the diamond I’d be sitting pretty.
1949 (37)
Fatigue is inevitable in all kinds of work, brain or manual. The man with a hobby (in these days writing can only be a hobby) chooses one which he can work at in the half-drugged condition that comes pleasantly after the
In their late teens and early twenties many young writers solve their problems by living off their parents and ostensibly preparing for a career in law, school-teaching or the ministry. This is the golden age. But in time social and economic pressure forces them to the wall. They train in earnest for a profession; or more likely, led by a false belief that words of any kind are better than no words, they fall into the dismal swamp of journalism or radio advertising – dismal, that is, for men in love with words or ideas. Writing is done half-guiltily in moments snatched on a Sunday morning or riding in a tram. The faculty withers with disuse. But, as some critic whose name I can’t remember writes apropos of Coleridge – ‘Those whom the Muse has once visited are haunted for the rest of their lives.’ Even if the vitality of their creative impulse is so great that it can weather a long winter of neglect, the periods of incubation necessary for sustained and organic themes cannot be afforded.
In previous centuries the patronage system or private income gave writers the leisure they required. Today the State is a possible patron, but it may well demand too great a levy of ‘protection money’ in the form of propaganda, and so destroy those writers it is sheltering. Private incomes are few and far between. Some prose writers may find a market for novels as they wish to write them; but there is no market for poetry.
Of New Zealand poets, Glover is running a printing press, Fairburn does hack work for broadcasting, Curnow is a journalist, Mason has been doing secretarial work for a union. They have all many times complained of the impossibility of finding time or energy for their true job – writing. Of novelists, Sargeson is on a sick pension, and so has time to write but insufficient energy; Davin, I believe, is in a Government job. There is no way out of the dilemma, in this country at least.
There is, I think, a deeper cause of sterility. When we read the greatest novelists or dramatists, we are impressed by the extraordinary sense of actuality in their work. It is life, only larger. In composition a writer’s struggle, above and beyond his technical problems, is to rouse himself from that sleep which he normally calls waking, and see motives, moods and situations, with a naked intensity. In this, his philosophy, that is to say his world-view expressed or implied, conscious or unconscious, will either help or hinder. I believe, in opposition to relativists, that there are true and false world-views. In Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, we find the same naked glare of insight, accompanied always by an awareness of moral conflict.
But awareness of moral conflict is not over-popular with us. From every
The ‘advertising view’ of human nature, though popular with politicians, is not so with writers – I exclude the sludge of third-rate novels, digests and films. But in revolt writers have developed their own falsification. It begins with Rousseau’s Noble Savage, and ends with Hemingway’s Dumb Oxen. ‘If we cannot find a resolution of grief, anxiety, and profound malaise in a Brave New World, we will go back to our own roots. The child and the Eskimo, even the gangsters fighting in an urban jungle – these have lost their conflict, not by reasoning, but by a return to unconscious harmony.’ The psychoanalysts seem to point this way. They also point to a purely determinist pattern of society.
Among New Zealand writers, Fairburn, Glover, Davin and Sargeson present in their different ways the same picture. Fairburn more successfully in his love poetry (love poems have to be a little sentimental); Glover with a stoic tinge, drawing on the Greek epigrammatists, and gaining at times a nihilist intensity. Davin and Sargeson both show Natural Man, but Davin’s view is a coldly determinist one, while Sargeson’s leaves room for compassion.
The sterility of the philosophy of Natural Man becomes clearer as a writer grows older, losing the sanguine view of his youth. It is highly individualistic, drawing meaning from the mood of the moment, and in the long run it presents a meaningless picture.
Charles Brasch and Curnow both look for a new philosophy – Brasch (like Holcroft, but more succinctly) in the timeless and symbolic events of nature; Curnow in a history where Time personified replaces God. Though influenced by Yeats to a view of Natural Man, Curnow has kept a good deal of Christian dogma and an acceptance of moral conflict:
Last but not least, R.A.K. Mason implies in his verse a determinist philosophy. But with him, as with Housman and Thomas Hardy, God is to blame. Our virtues are the Roman ones – fortitude and justice. He is much fascinated by the figure of Christ, presenting him as hard-done-by man or impotent God, yet still regarding him as an image of compassion.
The one quality which all the New Zealand writers I have mentioned have in common is pessimism. I regard this not as a morbid, but as an accurate reading of the spiritual temperature of the times. Their writing has dwindled or ceased, partly from fatigue and lack of time, but mainly from their inability to find meaning in a world either dead or disastrous. They required a philosophy which allowed for free will, took on the whole a kindly view of human behaviour (sensual failings in particularly), yet recognised irremediable moral conflict. I would indicate an unpopular choice – orthodox Christianity.
1949 (38)
That morning on the bus I knew I’d be taking the day off work. The disastrous effect of absenteeism on national industry didn’t worry me. It was a clear summer morning, mist rising off the seaside lagoons, gulls gliding on a gentle wind – too good to spend sweating over hot steel in a foundry. As the bus passed by the works I could see plumes of steam against the black ramshackle roofs. They were getting ready for another day, without me. I was free to do what I liked; the thought gave me a sudden feeling of recklessness and power.
In town the streets were empty. The water-waggon had been past, and the gutters were still clean and dripping. I walked down by the wharves to look at the ships. There were only a few tugs, like bedraggled ducks, moored at the land end of the main wharf; but further out lay a Home boat riding in the water. One could see a gun turret at the stern and the strange blunt antennae of radar. I strolled towards her, eating my sandwich lunch and throwing pieces to the gulls that dived and squabbled in the scummy green swells. The dark blue uniform of a policeman showed for a moment from behind a shed. I turned back towards the gate, trying to look casual but feeling as though I had been caught out in a crime.
The feeling of guilt stayed with me as I went up town again. Tomorrow I would have to tell the foreman I had been offcolour. He would believe me,
The barman was polishing glasses. ‘A great day’ – the phrase was worn and meaningless, what he had said a thousand times before. ‘You are going out to the trots?’
‘I might be later on.’ I bought a handle and drank it slowly, discussing the chances of various horses. Then an old man with red-rimmed eyes and shrivelled face shuffled into the bar. He knew the barman. Soon they were talking about Harry who had died and George who had gone up north. I could drink in quiet.
After about five beers my sourness had gone and I was no longer conscious of my third-best trousers. My face in the bar mirror seemed mysterious and handsome, the face of a Don Juan or young genius gone to seed. The bar was filling up – business-men having their morning quick one, old soaks feeling the tide rise again after the night’s dryness. The sun glittered on the coloured rows behind the barman’s head. I was ready for anything. Then the swing- door creaked to let in a stocky red-faced youth in a leather coat and sailor’s jersey. He propped himself on the bar and ordered a double rum. The English burr in his voice was like a draught of sea-wind. I remembered the Home boat down at the wharves, tall and self-possessed beside the scrubby tugs.
I was wondering how to speak to him without seeming intrusive when he saved me the trouble. ‘Got a match, mate?’ he asked. I gave him a half-full box and told him to keep them. ‘Have a rum,’ he invited. ‘That chemical muck goes through you like a dose of salts.’
I finished my beer and joined him. He stood with his coat open, one foot on the brass rail. His eyes were a hard blue, set far apart, with high cheekbones and brows slanted a little. He drank his rum neat, as if it were lemonade. I mixed mine with a good deal of cloves. As the drink loosened his tongue he became more talkative. Peter Johnson was his name, from Manchester. He had spent eight of his twenty-four years at sea, but was still an A.B. ‘I’ve not got the college learning to pass the exams,’ he said. ‘But I can splice a wire cable and take my turn at the wheel with any man. I’ve been logged half my pay for coming aboard drunk, but they can’t say anything about my work.’ He had been torpedoed once in the North Atlantic and spent twelve hours in the water; had seen the backside of every port from Aberdan to Buenos Aires. To his family he was a black sheep; his mother, the ‘old lady’, had never forgiven him for being a jailbird with his name in the papers. He had been arrested for stealing a radio. It seemed a clumsy theft done when drunk. He had a girl in England and another in America, and his worries seemed to hinge on keeping them both ignorant of his whereabouts. ‘I’m married already,’ he said. ‘I’m married to the sea. I can’t keep away from it. Every time’s the last time, but I
By twelve o’clock my head was swimming and the floor undulated gently. Whenever I shut my eyes I fell down a black shaft towards the centre of the earth. Pete was less drunk. ‘Come and have a binder,’ he urged me. ‘I’ve not had a feed since yesterday.’ I let him lead me into the street. The movement and fresh air sobered me a little. We found an upstairs grill room and sat down to slabs of steak flooded with Worcester sauce. I was happy again, but felt as if I were cased in glass that might splinter at a touch. Sweat was standing out on Pete’s forehead. ‘Come down to the boat,’ he said, ‘and meet the boys. We’ll go back to the boozer after. The old girl sails tomorrow, and she’s short-handed. You can sign on as a deck-hand.’
The idea seemed a fine one. To cut clear from the whole tangle of shore life, father, mother, job, morning and evening anxiety. Strange pubs, foreign girls, myself a man among men. The world I knew drowned in an always widening wake. I could go in the clothes I stood up in. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’
We paid for the meal and climbed down the stairs to the street again. A curdled pale blue sky stood over the sunny buildings. Above iron-roofed bungalows the dark green bush belt slept like an animal. The town had never looked more beautiful to me. Down on the wharves a fresh wind wrinkled the harbour water.
I remember the policeman. ‘Maybe they won’t let me come on board,’ I said.
‘We’ll dodge up when there’s no one round,’ he said. ‘The b— bosun’s the only man likely to squeal.’
We climbed the steep swinging gangway. I felt I was leaving my life behind me, coming into a new dangerous world. Wood smell, tar smell and paint smell carried with them the unique atmosphere of a ship. A blast of music came from a radio in the fo’c’sle. The officer superintending the landing of cargo took no notice as Pete led me forward. We entered a narrow corridor that led us to the crew’s quarters. Three men sat eating at a wooden table – one lantern-jawed, who spoke with a Yankee twang; one a tough- looking curly-headed Irishman; the last a huge Swede, who said nothing but lay back looking out the porthole, chewing slowly at a hunk of dried beef. Pete introduced me. I could feel their faintly hostile scrutiny, like that given to a new boy at a boarding school. The drink was wearing off, and with it my sense of confidence.
Red, the Yank and the eldest, offered me a seat and a cup of black coffee. I sat down warily and rolled a cigarette. The sour hot coffee cut through the haze in my mind. The small room oppressed me. Theirs was a strange world, a jungle almost, where a knowledge of Mozart’s music or figures of speech would count for less than nothing; only the quick blow and native cunning could give security.
‘You ever been to sea?’ asked the Irishman.
‘No,’ Pete answered for me, ‘but he’s thinking of signing on for this trip.’ ‘You’ll find it hard. You got to be tough to make a sailor.’
Suddenly I knew that I would never sail with them, tomorrow or any other day. The thought had been a childish one, springing from an unearned holiday and too much to drink. I looked at Pete. Red baby face and aggressive build, he looked like someone who had lost his way and couldn’t find the road back.
‘I’ve got to see a cobber up town at four,’ I said. Then to Pete, ‘See you tomorrow maybe, same place.’
I walked quickly down the narrow corridor and out to the head of the gangway. As I clambered down to the wharf a cloud came over the sun, darkening town and harbour. My head ached and my legs were tired as I went on towards the bus station.
1949 (39)
After two good and capable reviews of this novel, the first a radio broadcast by John Reece Cole, the second by James Bertram in the Listener, it might seem that no new ground could be broken. Both reviewers, however, dwelt mainly on the social implications of the book. One may consider briefly its more subjective aspect.
Despite the deceptive simplicity of Mulgan’s style Man Alone is a novel of highly complex structure. Two levels of thought, two themes almost, combine, contrast, and interpenetrate. From the viewpoint of social analysis, Johnson, the dour English immigrant, is a blank cheque on whom the post- war Depression years write themselves corrosively; a mirror of the times, reflecting with equal detachment the Auckland riots or the squalid grind of a mortgaged cow farm. Mulgan has shown acumen in selecting a non- indigenous hero, since this approach allows him to present features of this country familiar to New Zealanders in a fresh and unfamiliar light. But the theme from which the title draws its significance is ultimately not concerned with ‘social’ issues. It concerns rather Johnson’s personal isolation, his place on the outskirts of society, perpetually a spectator. When he does at length acquire a kind of status, it is the inverted status of a criminal. One is reminded inevitably of Camus’ The Outsider. But Mulgan, unlike Camus, has no ideological axe to grind. The novel develops organically from Johnson’s personal dilemma. When he finally joins a volunteer contingent to fight on the Leftist side in the Spanish War the decision seems to spring as much from purely personal as from political motives. It is simply another move made by that lonely and enigmatic man in his private war with Fate.
In the first chapters the story is slow-moving and discursive. One feels
Inevitably he accepts the offer of a job from Stenning, the paranoid yet affable dairy farmer. Inevitably a triangular situation develops between Stenning, himself, and Rua, the farmer’s irresponsible half-caste wife. Mulgan treats this situation with admirable delicacy, charting every cross-current, and emphasising the casual nature of Johnson’s relationship with Rua. When the storm breaks in one brief nightmare scene, and Stenning is shot, the two survivors are left with no common ground, only their mutual suspicion and antagonism.
Johnson’s flight over the ranges is an occasion for some of Mulgan’s most evocative writing. The struggle with weather in the Rangipo desert, and his hermit existence in the river cave, though described in a manner almost pedestrian, have all the size and flavour of a myth. He emerges in a state of emaciation and exhaustion to be befriended by Bill Crawley, an old and eccentric prospector whose life is scarcely less lonely by choice than Johnson’s has been through force of circumstances. Here, as throughout the novel, the minor character is drawn with breadth and care, set vividly against Johnson’s own grey personality.
When Johnson returns to the outside world it is as a creature of a new and different species. His power to form social ties, his desire for a normal routine have been sterilised; and from thenceforward he remains always in some degree an outlaw. The doubtful reinstatement of surrender to the police he rejects, choosing rather to escape from the country. A chance meeting with Rua intensifies his awareness of danger. With the somewhat unwilling and niggardly assistance of a past employer (Mulgan remains well clear of heroics) he wangles a job as deckhand on a Greek boat and leaves without regret the country which has brought him only misfortune.
The epilogue in England and Spain lacks the tension of earlier parts of the novel. For the chief crisis in Johnson’s life is behind him. He has looked for a ‘place in the sun’ and been defeated – partly by economic circumstances, partly by some inertness in himself which casts a chill over all his relationships, freezing the springs of feeling and action. Finding no permanent place in present society he is drawn to fight for a future in which he may claim a part.
Man Alone, despite its overwide scope and uneven structure, is a powerful novel. Without a trace of shrillness Mulgan lays bare the roots of social antagonism in our society. In Johnson he has created a character seemingly nondescript who yet grips the imagination of the reader. As James Bertram remarks, he is a man without graces. The same may be said of Man Alone. It is a bare book; and one that will be remembered even if the conflicting causes of its composition are themselves resolved.
The State Literary Fund is to be commended for making possible the publication of this edition of Mulgan’s novel. Whitcombe and Tombs has done a workmanlike job of plain, quiet printing easy on the eyes.
1949 (40)
This new book of verse by Mr Curnow contains sonnets selected from previous volumes, as well as some new. The result well justifies his selection; for Mr Curnow has habitually expressed himself with greatest clarity and intensity in the sonnet form; and hence these sonnets, though not a series, have in some degree a common theme, that of his deepest fears, regrets and self-probing. Those mannerisms springing from uncertainty which have led to obscurity in much of his other work are here at a minimum, and the total effect is one of chastened rhetoric, an amalgam of poetic diction and direct speech.
In the title poem ‘At Dead Low Water’ (first published in the Arts Year Book 1945), of which only the third and last section is in sonnet form, Mr Curnow achieves a superb synthesis of three separate levels of experience – personal, symbolic and metaphysical. In its first section he develops an image which he has frequently skirted elsewhere – that of the amphibious no-man’s- land, neither sea nor land, with ‘smell of harbour bottom’ and innumerable associations of decay and rebirth:
Surely this, like Rimbaud’s boat, is a symbol of spiritual exploration. But this time the voyage has not been made, the sailor has stayed on shore watching the mudflats uncovered by a receding tide. The sea recalls earth’s beginning when the Holy Spirit moved upon the face of the waters; also human birth – this section of the poem ends with a brilliant anatomical comparison so vivid as to be shocking.
The second and third sections of the poem are at the summit of Mr Curnow’s achievement. In firm precise stanzas, comparable in maturity with Eliot’s description in the Four Quartets of his imagined encounter with the
The poem ends with the finest sonnet in the volume, which could indeed bear comparison with any sonnet in the English language.
After the sustained intensity of ‘At Dead Low Water’ the sonnets which form the bulk of the book must seem less significant and compelling. In general they have the traditional shape of the Shakespearian sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, but Mr Curnow has introduced half-rhyme and varied considerably the length of the lines. Where the impulse behind the poem is sufficiently strong, these devices are highly successful; but his more desultory poems, lacking the vertebraic column of a formal structure, tend to disintegrate to a series of ill-related clauses. One can detect the influence of Dylan Thomas in certain of the later poems; and more destructively, that of William Empson. Mr Curnow’s capacity for elaborate metaphor leads him at times to perverse extravagance. Yet in ‘With How Mad Steps’ he preserves full evocative power, though the sonnet is itself one metaphor:
A curious compound of sexual and religious symbolism, in which perhaps lies the mainspring of Mr Curnow’s poetic energy, links much of his poetry with that of Yeats’s later years. In ‘Genesis’ the weakness for purposes of art of a purely irrational view of sexual experience is apparent. Without the binding factor of a sense of relationship the poem dissolves into a cloud of Dionysiac images. One may compare this sonnet with some of Spender’s recent love poetry; the same lack of grip in both cases weakens the verbal structure and
Certain poems previously published have in this volume been emended, some for the better but some less happily. For example in that sanguine early sonnet ‘Music for Words’, the cacophonous ‘As if blood could be got out of the dry bones’ is a melancholy substitute for ‘Than a blooding of dry bones with violence’. Perhaps the growth of a more conservative political attitude may account for the change of meaning; but it is bad policy to rewrite a poem in the light of a changed philosophy; the truth of a poem is not philosophical truth but the variable truth of anything intensely experienced. Mr Curnow is inclined to elaborate a simple statement into an unnecessary paradox, in fact offending against that economy of phrase which is the mark of good metaphysical poetry. One is reminded of the purely verbal difficulty and strained epigrams of Emily Dickinson’s lesser poems. Yet this fault may serve to preserve him from the greater faults of imprecision and lushness shown in his first book of poems Valley of Decision.
In his search for precision and solidity Mr Curnow has often turned to occasional themes. At least nine of the twenty-nine sonnets fall into this category; and many of those remaining are occasional in mood. It is significant that his best long poem after ‘At Dead Low Water’, that written for the Abel Tasman centenary, was strictly occasional. An unkindly analysis would be that Mr Curnow has hoped to be a New Zealand laureate; but the main cause lies probably in the fact that like Wordsworth he requires the reassurance of tangible material to balance that state (the occupational disease of artists) which psychologists term negativistic withdrawal.
Mr Curnow remains the most fascinating and enigmatic poet in this country. The total impression of this, his latest volume, is one of vigour and coherence, supported throughout by a keen sense of poetic tradition. (For example, in ‘A Sonata of Schubert’ the associations are amplified by a skilful echoing of Blake and Thomas Nashe.) The influence of Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, and possibly Hopkins, on his later verse has led to a new fertilisation and increase in strength and subtlety. By this volume Mr Curnow retains and consolidates his highly individual position in New Zealand literature and among the best poets of this century.
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Those who saw Mr Curnow’s play performed in 1948 at the Little Theatre, Canterbury College, and had read his verse, must have been doubtful before the play whether he had the versatility, the range of mood and capacity for making situations real which one requires from a good playwright. For Mr Curnow’s lyrical and metaphysical poetry is in the main symbolic and deeply introspective. But after the play they could have no doubts. Though naturally enough the finest passages were reserved for the choruses, this play stood on its own feet; the characters were convincing as types and men; and the ideas behind the play the product of a mature and intensely original mind. One cannot gain a full impression by reading it alone; but one can savour more fully the subtleties of the verse. The images are drawn from the natural environment in which the characters move – rock, water, fire, flesh and dust – the four elements with their innumerable variations. As Mr Curnow indicates in his preface, the speech takes at times ‘the colour of a translation for which there is no original.’
The theme of the play, the conversion by force and circumstances of an island people from paganism to Christianity, touches more than a raw- nerve of history. For most of us are at heart pagan, smarting under a half- comprehended Law. And like Numangatini, the converted King, when we accept the new dispensation we tend to use it for private ends. One gathers the impression that Mr Curnow, accepting the inevitability of its destruction, is fascinated by the old animistic paganism and prefers it to the new paganism that missionaries unwittingly carried with them – the Axe, symbol of sterile power. His enigmatic choruses express desolation rather than hope of a new synthesis.
Whatever one’s personal reaction may be, it is plain that Mr Curnow has written the best play to come out of New Zealand. When one considers that it was made in the brief leisure snatched from full-time occupation, one can only marvel at his creative powers.
Mr Campbell’s first book of poems, superbly printed on hand-made paper, is a volume for the bibliophile. And the extraordinary vitality and freshness of the work of this new poet should guarantee an enthusiastic reception. Plainly Mr Campbell is an inspired poet. The innocent sensuality of his love poems is reminiscent of the Keats of Endymion, an attractive lushness at times intractable to the verse form:
Here there is no hint of relationship: the girl is put in her place so that the poem may take its course. But the group of poems occasioned by the death of a friend in an alpine climbing accident is of a different kind. Mr Campbell assumes some of the stature of the Keats of Hyperion; and his grief is expressed in dithyrambic images where no phrase can be anticipated yet each phrase seems inevitable:
In the third group of poems, ‘The Cromwell Gorge’, one can observe the emergence of a new balance of thought and feeling, especially in ‘Hut Near Desolated Pines’, a poem where metaphor and idea, concrete and abstract, are welded together in harmony. The last poem in the book, ‘The Return’, develops a mythological theme without strain or grotesqueness.
The most remarkable feature of Mr Campbell’s poetry is a passionate sympathy with natural objects which produces at its strongest the effect of genuine animism. One must hope that no circumstances will fetter his poetic development or dull an insight which could make him the leading poet in this country.
For Mr Witheford the occasion for poetry springs directly from subjective conflict. Like Rimbaud, he may be regarded as an explorer with a creed and discipline primarily aesthetic, searching for some spiritual liberation. But these poems are the record of an endless approach ‘winding through tangled woods to that clear place’, static rather than dynamic. We may suspect that the ‘clear place’ is death; but the urgency of Mr Witheford’s search for meaning in what is for him an inhospitable universe invites our respect. With a finer texture than R.A.K. Mason, though without his force, he expresses
seems rather a last-ditch defiance of the powers of despair and sterility than a convincing affirmation. Technically these poems have the balanced smoothness that comes from a long apprenticeship. But it is difficult to see what new impulse could replace the unique excitement of a sense that can smell its own mortality. The most secure poem, ‘Alone,’ may point the way to a less autonomous symbolism. The wood-cuts by Mervyn Taylor, of that excellence which we have come to expect from him, reinforce and illustrate the mood of this remarkable book.
Though Arnold Wall is one of our most distinguished elder poets, the wisdom of this new edition of a 1912 sonnet series may be doubted. The progressive sentiments which then seemed natural ring a little false after two world wars. Only an occasional landscape sonnet reaches the standard of the poet’s maturer work.
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This volume, published in England by one of the leading contemporary American poets, should interest many if only as a barometer to gauge the present climate of American letters. Robert Lowell has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and has accumulated other honours. But unlike his great last-century namesake he has in the last analysis no new thing to say:
The terse, wisecracking language, the machine-gun rattle of metaphor never slacken. This juggling resembles superficially the strained language and compression of symbolist masters. But in Lowell’s hands it is an expression of hysteria, not of the profound impulse which alone justifies and sustains a warping of speech. The same fault can be observed in the work of other modern Americans. It stems perhaps from an abundance of hair-splitting criticism and dearth of creative talent in American literary periodicals.
Though most of his poems contain allusions to Church ritual, Lowell is
while elsewhere this imagination loses itself in stereotypes, mirroring a stereotyped culture. There is no Spoon River Anthology in contemporary American literature.
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This may be described as an anthology of religious verse and prose, admirable as a bedside book. The somnolent reader makes a lucky dip, and there, presto, is one of Rilke’s shorter poems, a passage from Kierkegaard, or less happily, a rhapsody by Edward Carpenter. Since the author disclaims in his preface any intention to expound or illustrate a theological position, he cannot be accused of inconsistency when neighbouring extracts are contradictory.
The main virtue of the book, apart from the anecdotal liveliness inevitable in a selection from first-rate philosophers, poets, and theologians, lies in the fact that it does in some measure reconcile differing religious attitudes under the common blanket of charity; the main fault is that Mr Gollancz has not formed a clear enough idea of what his message shall be. A ‘mood’ is not sufficient to bind together attitudes superficially similar but fundamentally diverse – for example, Traherne and Wordsworth. The mingling of many voices becomes at times a distressing hubbub, not a harmony. One is left mildly exalted but still uncertain whom to believe. Like Huxley’s more ambitious Perennial Philosophy, Mr Gollancz’s book attempts a synthesis of discordant religious opinion and achieves it only by blurring basic distinctions.
Many readers nevertheless will be grateful to him for introducing them to new fields. The excellent selections from Hasidic sayings point to the book which Mr Gollancz could have written if he had not spread his net so wide. The combination of dry wit and profound moral insight shown in these fables, sandwiched here between passages of theological dissertation, would have been a warrant of greater unity of mood. But A Year of Grace, conceived
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The poems in this new book by W. Hart-Smith have neither the force nor the conciseness of those in Christopher Columbus, the first of the Caxton Poets series. Nevertheless, there are many vivid sketches to atone for a general lack of profundity. ‘The Ghost of Mackenzie’s Dog’ and ‘Shag Rookery’ are poems in which the theme is strong enough to bind together the free verse form which Mr Hart-Smith has used almost without variation. Though dexterous and pleasing at a first reading, the verse shows its weakness when compared with that of Basil Dowling, another poet, many of whose themes are drawn from the Canterbury landscape. Alongside the genuine article, Mr Hart- Smith’s poems (in the present volume) seem little more than guidebook stuff, neat boxes of words which exclude the infinitely complex, even shattering intimations that are the source and subject matter of mature poetry.
The poems of M.K. Joseph are, however, a different kettle of fish. A satirist requires a complete mastery of traditional verse form, a broad intellectual background, and something which badly needs saying – all of which Mr Joseph possesses. He has learnt much from MacNeice and the earlier Eliot, and from Auden more perhaps than he can easily assimilate, a tendency to separate the world of experience into brittle scientific and sociological categories. But this minor weakness is offset by his sane and vigorous humour. The ‘Secular Litany’ should be nailed on every schoolroom wall. One finds in it the same inspired social criticism which makes Fairburn’s Dominion a landmark in New Zealand letters; and it is a poem of most excellent verve and precise structure. The best of the war poems compare favourably with most of the verse in English war anthologies:
The highest test for any skilled poet lies in the composition of a good ballad – for this form complete sincerity is essential. Mr Joseph shows himself capable of handling both ballad and rigid stanzaic form. The freshness of his imagination preserves him from prosiness. He is admirably lucid. This little book would be well worth buying at double the price.
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These are the collected works in verse of the best nature poet of our century. While other writers have pursued their themes of politics or romantic love, and recorded the disintegration of established human values, Andrew Young has followed his original bent, an able naturalist and a clergyman not orthodoxly clerical. Even less than his prose works do these poems make any show of private feeling. Whether he writes of a Highland cairn, a dead blackbird, or horses drinking from a stream, his view remains cautiously objective. But the poems, as neat and finished as those of Herrick, betray obliquely the quality of the mind that produced them; and the metaphysical realities of time and earth are reflected in every second image –
In this volume are many poems lucid, intense, and technically perfect, unparalleled even by a lyricist of the calibre of de la Mare. It is a bedside book, to be read and sampled over a lifetime, slowly and quietly as it was written; and the admirable wood engravings which illustrate the poems add considerably to its value and interest.
Andrew Young’s attitude to the natural world is near to that of son to mother. He grieves at perpetual evidence of tragedy and decay, yet these very factors accentuate his love. The comfort of the resurrection is little stressed, perhaps because for him the known world of birth and death seems the more suitable subject for poetry. In the verse play Nicodemus (here included), he extends his scope, and treats a biblical theme most effectively. But essentially his poetry is that of a solitary being moved to profound reflection by what meets the eye and ear.
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The emergence of national poetry depends on a mature attitude toward the past. By this, I do not mean the analysis of the schoolbook historian, but the attitude implied by these lines of Auden –
The analogy between the processes of art and the ritual of tribal magic is an exact one. Both enable catharsis by discovering shape in history, thus relieving the isolation of the individual. I suggest that for New Zealand poets of the nineteenth-century the ancestral face was considerably blurred. The poetic legends of a man like Domett spring no doubt from a wish to discover a shape in the past of his adopted country. But for pioneers their past was an English one and their poems were written in an idiom unsatisfactory for the English contemporary scene, and quite unsuited to determine their approach to New Zealand landscape or antipodean society. They had two choices: to continue writing in an English tradition dissociated from their actual geographical and historical situation; or to begin the immensely difficult task of forging new symbols in a country whose landscape was alien and whose intelligible past was shorter than their own lifespan. One poet at least did achieve this integration at a crude level – David McKee Wright. He borrowed the sentiments and terminology of the Australian ballad writers. Significantly enough, his worst poems are poems of exile; his best do in some measure reflect the comfortless semi-nomadic existence of the swagger, rabbiter and worker on gold dredges. The continuation of a Scottish verse-tradition in Otago did bear some fruit. For example, the work of John Barr expresses adequately the situation of the transplanted Scotsman; and certain of Jessie Mackay’s poems have a genuine ballad quality. But most of our nineteenth-century poets achieved at best an uneasy amalgam of Tennysonian lyricism and New Zealand provincial journalism. The dissociation of poetry from memory and sense-perception may account for the almost universal antipathy or indifference of our people towards it. Unfortunately, after McKee Wright there has been no vigorous undergrowth of ballad poetry. Without even the shadow of a folk culture our poets and poetesses have been forced into ivory towers. Before the new school of the Thirties, or at least before the first poems of R.A.K. Mason were published, the verse output had become feeble in quality, aligned with a feeble tradition.
It has been held that for a New Zealander to see his country clearly it is necessary for him to leave it. There is truth in this view, but it does not necessarily entail a geographical change of place. One is separated just as surely by an education which has its roots in English culture as by twelve thousand miles of sea. When I was at primary-school the class-room murals represented the English seasons, with lambs and green fields in April, and the verse used most was not even Australian ballad poetry, but that of Walter de la Mare. Undoubtedly there has been a change of heart among our educationalists. But, excepting Eileen Duggan, the poets writing in the Georgian tradition do not seem to have been able to breach this Chinese wall and meet their country on its own terms.
The new movement began in the universities, almost without parentage. It gathered force through the work of Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen
Some have turned their eyes to remoter history. In particular Charles Brasch drew and has since drawn his symbolism from the natural landscape of these islands, discovering images of pain and serenity in geological form and process. And Curnow has developed his own mythology where Time and God seem interchangeable persons:
Though McCormick lays emphasis on this aspect of New Zealand poetry, it seems to me that New Zealand poets have shied away from sociological themes. The only notable exception is Fairburn, who combines social criticism with a back-to-nature philosophy in his sequence Dominion, which is still our finest long poem. But although we have tended to write more readily of mountains than of marriage, and in the language of Wordsworth rather than that of Browning, a hundred years is long enough for our society to have acquired a shape of its own. And not always by a complete break with the situation of our ancestors. The peasant clansmen of the Western Highlands of Scotland became the clannish farmers of Otago. The Otago hills and sea coast are not unlike the hills and sea coast of Argyllshire. So I have been fortunate enough to find the readymade myth of longbearded Gaelic-speaking giants distilling whisky among the flax from time immemorial. The ancestral face is very familiar to me.
Animism is an essential factor in the artist’s view of the world. The generative power of poetry comes largely from the rediscovery and revaluation of childhood experience. The loss of the animism of the child and the savage is probably the greatest privation we must suffer in a materialist technological civilisation. And conversely the greatest gift that the arts have to offer is a linking of this submerged animism with our immediate affairs. Freud contends that in Art the pleasure principle and reality-principle are amalgamated, one reinforcing the other – fantasy put to work, as it were. However that may be, a spontaneous animism lies at the roots of good nature
For an analysis of recent trends in New Zealand poetry I intend to limit myself to the five years which have elapsed since the first edition of Curnow’s anthology. During that period there has been if not a revolution at least a significant evolution. First, there are the collections of the Caxton Poets Series; Hart-Smith, Brasch, Hervey, Curnow, Dowling and my own work. But Christopher Columbus, though a major attempt in myth-construction, is New Zealand poetry only by the accident of its being published here. The poems of Brasch, Hervey, Curnow, despite their obvious merits, do not show a significant change of theme. I have chosen perhaps arbitrarily, five events which justify the statement of a change of view in recent poetry. The establishment of the literary periodical Landfall edited by Charles Brasch; the publication of Alistair Campbell’s first book of poems; the publication of Basil Dowling’s third book of poems; the publication of Ursula Bethell’s Collected Poems; and the performance in Christchurch in 1948 of Allen Curnow’s verse-play, The Axe.
There have been literary periodicals in this country before Landfall; but none of these have managed so well to combine a high literary standard with a breadth of selection. Apart from the value of essays, reviews and editor’s notes, Landfall has made possible the immediate appearance in print of poems which would otherwise have circulated only in manuscript among a small group. The cross-fertilising effect of this rapid communication cannot be measured, but must be considerable. There is of course the danger of a stereotype – Landfall poetry has tended to be subdued in tone, impeccable in technique. The editor has had the courage to set his standard by that of the periodicals of Great Britain and Ireland. Landfall has not been an arena for experiment: its mood has been one of sober critical liberalism: it has been a constant factor in stabilising literary judgment where too much is flux; and it has contained from time to time the best work of New Zealand poets and prose-writers.
The more extreme and experimental aspects of New Zealand poetry are apparent in Arachne (née Hilltop), an irregular periodical issued under the aegis of Victoria College. Most of the poets contributing have had their best work printed in Landfall. It has been valuable as a catalyst, promoting the combination of many elements; or to change the metaphor, as a ground for testing crops. Through it, and by personal contact, a group of younger poets writing in Wellington have experienced that indispensable exchange of ideas which leads to better judgment and a genuine impetus. The poetry of W.H.Shadow of the Flame, published by Pelorus Press, is of a high standard and draws on European models for its form and Asiatic theology for its dialectic rather than from immediate influences. The shortly-to-be-published verse of Louis Johnson follows American technique; for Johnson is predominantly an urban poet. This group of poets, if it can be called a group, seems in the main to have stepped free from the schizophrenia of the New Zealander who cannot distinguish himself from his grandfather. I believe a new and valuable stereotype is in process of being formed: the view of national history held by the poet who has grown up in entire acceptance of his environment, truly inhabiting the country. There are limitations in this view; but it does have the prime virtues of honesty and consistency.
Alistair Campbell is the outstanding poet of the Wellington group. His direct, sometimes extravagant rhetoric shows to its best advantage in the elegy first printed in the Landfall of December, 1949. The energy of his poetry is its most remarkable feature:
The control of a near-speech rhythm seems second nature to Campbell. His view of South Island mountain landscape is essentially animistic; and the hesitancy of many older poets is shorn away. I would compare it with some of the serious verse of Denis Glover – in particular the ‘Sings Harry’ lyrics. This kind of poetry, however, requires a quite unusual degree of mental energy; and the returns are small for a vast expenditure. It may be admired but not easily imitated. When the daemon is absent, problems of
The Trapped Hare
This is nature poetry of a high order. But what is most significant is the use of a new method in New Zealand poetry – the application of a stone- cold-sober technique to an intense and actual situation. The technique is almost that of prose: what makes the poem valid is the accurate delineation of moral intangibles.
In the writing of a poem, there are two possible methods of approach – the first is passive, where the poet is in a sense possessed by his theme and lets his daemon direct him. The results are in some cases excellent, in most cases not so; for the daemon, like all familiars, comes and goes at will. The second is active, the method of Dowling and also of Brasch in his latest work, where the poet dissects analytically the live flesh of experience and wrings meaning and beauty from the most intractable material. It means a wide extension of the field of poetry, ideally the situation which Dowling is approaching, where every poem written is a good one. Writing of this kind could result in a rebirth of narrative poetry, the verse novelette.
Much of the significance of Dowling’s poetry is indicated in a phrase from ‘Canterbury’, the title poem of his third book – ‘This is my holy land of childhood’. I believe that in this aspect, as in many others, his poetry resembles that of Ursula Bethell.
Mr Baigent has remarked in a Landfall review of her Collected Poems that she ‘was born in England, but spent her childhood and early girlhood in New Zealand. Her seventy years were divided almost equally between the two countries, and she remained throughout her life as much an English-woman as a New Zealander, firmly conscious of what each country had to offer. The poetic expression of this twofold loyalty is not a limiting nostalgia, a sense of exile from the one or the other, but an acceptance of both which enriches her awareness of the New Zealand scene.’ I suggest that though she accepted both, her attitude was profoundly different towards the New Zealand setting; that by means of her poetry she rediscovered the sensuous elements in childhood experience, and did this in terms of the Canterbury landscape. I suggest also that to her strong ethical sense her poetry must have seemed in some degree forbidden fruit:
The conflict of a rigid code of morals and manners and an acute sense of natural beauty and richness in relationships is not entirely reconciled in her poetry.
Ursula Bethell’s rediscovery of New Zealand develops from the diary form of her garden poetry to the wide sombre sweep of ‘Levavi Oculos’ and ‘Burke’s Pass’. For her as a Christian the natural world was the mirror and self-revelation of the Holy Spirit; that, not in an abstract sense, but in minute and concrete particulars. Hence she could look on mountain and sea coast as the intimate features of a beloved person. And she came to inhabit this country more deeply perhaps than any before or after. The consummation of her nature poetry is contained in the ‘Six Memorials’, where the images of bird, tree and season, become symbols of personal grief and more than personal hope.
Her poetry is without parallel in New Zealand; and likely to remain so. The combination of strong intellect, strong feeling and strong faith with great technical resource is rare. Though succeeding writers may profit by her use of assonance and speech-rhythms, these are not new things. The new thing in her verse is her (to use Eliot’s term) ‘raid on the inarticulate’. She has a phrase in one of her earlier poems – ‘It is the dumb Cosmos learning speech’. Though she would very likely have disclaimed the role, Ursula Bethell seems at times a prophetess. The ancestral face of New Zealand history was plain to her. The struggle of the pioneer with the land; reconciliation, as the features of the country possess the conscious or unconscious minds of its inhabitants; and the certain transience of human affairs (in her case complemented by the ambiguous certainty of resurrection) – these matters are clear in her poetry; and we can learn from them.
Though Ursula Bethell’s first book of poems was published in 1929 I have thought fit to consider the publication of her Collected Poems as a new event. For the organic development of her thought is clearly apparent there as it is not in the same degree in separate volumes. And her death puts upon us the responsibility of assessing her poetical estate.
We have developed traditions in prose and poetry; but in drama as yet we have only the hungry mouths of dramatic societies waiting to be fed. There has been no native drama. Hence the performance in 1948 of Allen Curnow’s verse play The Axe has a double significance, from the point of view of the literary critic, and also as the seed of a new tradition in drama. Curnow has had to bore his own wells, and much of his work has been regarded as gratuitously experimental which was in effect pioneering. In The Axe he has drawn on the Greek tradition of the chorus, as revived by Eliot. The influence of Yeats appears rather in a certain stiffening of the rhetoric of chorus and speech than in the shape and symbolism of the play. A reviewer has remarked with some reason that the symbol of The Axe itself is more contrived and less telling than the symbols of sea and island, where Curnow has undoubtedlyBook of New Zealand Verse and in certain passages of this play. Those who study The Axe will find allegory within allegory, in the manner of Melville rather than of the 15th and 16th centuries – in particular the fate of the island-city to which Davida, the representative of a Mosaic Christianity, brings not peace but a sword. Against the harsh necessity of Moral Law stands Tereavai, the ageing and impotent magician, whose imprecations cannot save his own life, yet whose gods are a hundred times more powerful and malignant when disbelieved. Auden has summed up the situation. When the last dragon has died and ghosts and goblins are museum-pieces – then the invisible power is free to work through hysteria and neurosis – ‘Ravish the daughters, drive the fathers mad’. Numangatini the gods destroy for his pride, his hubris. I feel that for Curnow as for D.H. Lawrence the Original Sin is consciousness – his pre-Adamite lovers, Hema and Hina, learn fear only with the first shadow of Mosaic Law; before that their unconsciousness is their innocence.
Despite weaknesses of dialogue, the play came to life on the stage. Though writers may use themes very different from Curnow’s, The Axe is an earnest of New Zealand drama to come.
I have chosen to speak of recent trends in New Zealand poetry because the earlier trends have been and are discussed often in critical writing, in W.E.A. groups and in lectures. It is difficult to assess the work of one’s contemporaries, and it cannot be done without treading on corns. My own work is conservative; and I may tend to overvalue the formal aspects of poetry. If I have neglected the work of recent poets (such as Ruth Dallas) it is because I am not yet familiar enough with their work to form a balanced judgment. I speak most of the Wellington group because I am acquainted with their verse and know it to be sane and vigorous.
It is to poetry as yet half-formed that we must turn in order to make prognostications for the future. For example, the publication of Wellington Training-College, Verse 1950, contains much verse of talent and energy. Anton Vogt, himself a commendable poet, has been the mainspring of a younger group, and helped to edit their work. Publications of this kind give the unformed poet the opportunity to test his or her powers in competition and in the light of criticism. And poetry may be highly imperfect in form, yet contain a spark of genuine insight. In and outside our universities there are many younger writers trying their hand, receptive to new influences, and forming that vigorous undergrowth without which the maturer poets are isolated and in a large degree rendered ineffectual.
Lately I was crossing the Straits. The wind leant the boat over; and as we came to the deep water off the Kaikouras I thought that if the Friday and Monday boats were sunk New Zealand literature would suffer a severe loss.
But we might be inclined to overestimate the setback. If every writer who has published a book in this country was rolling among the seaweed, a new generation would no doubt take over. One of the functions of artists in a community is to provide a healthy and permanent element of rebellion; not to become a species of civil servant. The younger writers are at least aware of this necessity.
I come now to what I feel to be the basic problem of the poet in New Zealand, and no doubt elsewhere – that of social criticism. In what degree should a poet be the entertainer, and in what degree the physician of his society? Plainly, a physician who has no bedside manner will get the sack. Again, a poet may feel no necessity to communicate a social philosophy: he may be content to state as adequately as possible his intuitions concerning personal relationships and natural events. But I feel that the protest of the socially minded critic is justified. We are (I speak of the human family, not only of Western civilisation) in the midst of great calamity, physical and spiritual. The poet or prose writer who turns his eyes from the fact of human suffering is involved in self-betrayal. We have greater need of prophets than we have of mechanics. Yet to submit one’s mind to an inadequate doctrine of morals and politics is equally maiming.
In this country we are in a peculiar situation. New Zealand is now an island in more than geographical terms. Our standard of living is high, while that of the peoples of Asia and Europe is appallingly low. We are removed from the immediate scene of war and starvation. It is possible without obvious absurdity for our politicians to call our country a Happy Island, in some degree a just one. But poets are different from politicians; their value depends solely on their insight. If they do not speak the truth, they may live unmolested – but their work will perish. I believe that our island is in fact an unjust, unhappy one, where human activity is becoming progressively more meaningless. The mere statement of this observation has a salutary effect. The pioneering dream was of a Just City. If we suppose that this dream has been realised we condemn ourselves to the ultimate nonentity of false prophets. If we state the truth (that we now live in an Unjust City) we thus purge ourselves of a lie commonly held to be truth and begin to speak meaningfully.
There is another image besides that of the City, an image of peculiar cogency for New Zealand poets – that of the Wilderness. In the work of poets such as Curnow, and many others, it is the Sea, the marine desert which surrounds our island City. The actual purgation which comes from the Wilderness is borne out by the often unconscious testimony of sailors and mountaineers. For the poet, whose besetting sin is usually pride, it provides a situation where he is inevitably humbled by the grandeur of natural law, and can lose the itch for flattery; also, a sojourn in the Wilderness means a period of enforced temperance. And from this situation the City is seen in its true light, as the world of triviality and injustice. Were the City a just one, the
I do not advocate that we should all put on sackcloth and ashes. But I think it reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth and that every poet should be a prophet according to his lights. In our time there has been a dangerous split between the moral and aesthetic factors in art – on one side doctrinaire expression, on the other side so-called pure art. The position of the Romantic poet inclines to that of the pure artist. His social aim, if expressed, is that every City should become a Wilderness. The aim of the doctrinaire artist, Christian or Communist, is that every Wilderness should be contained in the Just City. My sympathy is with the former, as I consider conformity a great deal more dangerous than non-conformity. But while Romantics refuse to speak in terms of any relationship but the sexual one, we must take our lead from the doctrinaire philosophers.
The typical dilemma of the modern poet is one of divided aims. A man who is working as a schoolteacher, a tradesman, or a Government official in a society which he knows to be unjust, cannot dare to think clearly on moral issues; for the society is part of his physical and even psychological security. If he breaks with the society and departs into the Wilderness in customary Romantic style, then he loses brotherhood with all but similar outcasts. What Justice demands is something more difficult – that he should remain as a cell of good living in a corrupt society and in this situation by writing and example attempt to change it. He will thus and only thus escape the isolation of the Romantic.
A bad convention, stemming from the last century, has accustomed writers to a purely aesthetic role. There is no reason why a poet should not earn his
The impetus and mood of the movement of the Thirties, here and in England, came from a new concept of social justice; and with this concept to guide them, poets were able to write emphatically and with some measure of optimism of the necessity for a just society. But the slow death of enthusiasm has left them only the most personal values. The best poets have turned from society to the wilderness. Glover, who has to my mind written poetry of greater formal perfection and emotional depth than that of any other New Zealander, has summed up the situation in a recent poem:
I have no blueprint which may help to lead New Zealand writers further than the bad alternatives of sentimentality or nihilism. But I believe that recent events in New Zealand literature indicate that men and women of goodwill greater than mine may yet speak prophetically and sanely to a wide audience.
I would like to draw together in a brief summary what has been a somewhat rambling address. Firstly, I consider that poets must have something of the attitude of the imaginative historian; and in this country only recently have our poets tackled with some degree of success the problem of writing in terms of their own history and their immediate environment. Secondly, I consider that the animism of the child and savage is an essential ingredient of goodLandfall; the publication of Campbell’s first book, Dowling’s third book, Ursula Bethell’s Collected Poems, and the staging of Curnow’s verse-play, The Axe. I have chosen to discuss Dowling’s work as peculiarly representative of recent changes in the work of older poets; Campbell’s work as a sign of vigour and excellence among younger poets; and Ursula Bethell’s because like Yeats she had the power to be a contemporary of every age-group. Curnow’s play I have chosen as the first example of successful verse-drama in this country; and the establishment of Landfall as the nucleus of higher standards in our poetry as well as in other literary forms. The fresh mood and direction of recent poetry is extraordinarily difficult to pin down to a single phrase or even a single work. I am aware that I have dealt with the development of ideas rather than the development of verse-forms; mainly because to me verse-form seems a tool for sharpening ideas.
I have no excuse to offer for the gratuitous addition of my notion of the function of the poet in modern society, and particularly in this country. But I feel that such considerations are especially relevant at the present time.
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It is unfortunate that in the clash of schools and generations one may overlook the significance of some work which overtops schools and speaks plainly across barriers of time and situation. Eileen Duggan has been writing for many years; but I must confess that only recently did I realise the excellence of much of her poetry. Her sensibility has sharpened with time; and her technique has developed beyond the limitations of the Georgian manner on which it is founded. This new volume contains some of her maturest and most finished poems. There are still, however, three levels in her poetry which rarely combine to make a completely satisfactory unity – the first whimsical, the second sensuous, the third religious and metaphysical.
At her best Miss Duggan is a fine metaphysical poet (as in her poem ‘Prophecy’), her ideas clarified by the fire of a passionate intellect. Where the impulse is less immediate, her ideas are given shape by whimsy, a play of private feeling comparable with that most characteristic in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. In poems such as ‘Lo, How the Butterfly’, the metaphors do not develop immediately from the central theme; rather they are ornament and byplay, rendering the poem more pious than religious. The final element, that of sensuous imagination, though it has no doubt given Miss Duggan the intensity which raises all her poetry above the commonplace, seems also the most wayward factor, one difficult to amalgamate with the main body of
Or the entire poem ‘Contrast’, a comparison of the reasoning and intuitive approaches to religious truth, expressed through a concrete comparison of the arrival of Magi and shepherds at the Nativity – a remarkable poem, blending the diverse elements of thought, whimsy and sensuous feeling, and fully actualised. Like Ursula Bethell (the parallel is closer and more apt than many will care to admit) Eileen Duggan can bring all her powers to bear on a religious theme. This volume is evidence of her advance in poetry from pious and aesthetic ideas to a genuine theocentric humanism.
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This is the first book of a New Zealand poet whose work has appeared in several American and English periodicals. The poems cover a considerable period of development.
Like R.A.K. Mason, Louis Johnson has found his deepest springs of thought and feeling in the nonconformist borderland outside the walls, but under the shadow of Little Bethel – he exhibits as it were a naked conscience. But where Mason has used a broad rhetoric and on the whole traditional symbols, Johnson has continually turned his eyes to personal relationships. His world is a battlefield where quarter is at times given, whether by the operation of sexual love or surgical pity.
The best poems in this volume (and despite an unevenness of quality, they will bear comparison with almost any verse yet written in this country) are sketches and character studies biographical or autobiographical. The comparative dearth of sensuous images is perhaps a weakness in Johnson’s poetry. He has not the iron-hard tenacity of Donne, who can contain a world of metaphysics in a few conceits; so where his spasmodic insight fails him he tends to become flat-footed or unnecessarily obscure. Nevertheless he impresses one as a writer with a genuine grasp on the world of relationships, a continual fund of charity and an active probing mind. He expresses a humanism verging on theocentric: ‘A Young Girl Seen on a Tram’ and that remarkable religious poem ‘On the Road’ seem complementary rather than opposed. The first thing for a reader to recognise is that Johnson’s verse, whatever its occasional metaphorical
I quote from the poem ‘Thoughts on my Schoolbooks’. The price of Johnson’s book is not prohibitive; and were the verse-reading public awake, it would be sold out in a fortnight.
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Poets may look for the peace of the soul or the peace of the flesh. It seems to me to matter little which. It has sat on my mind for a long time, waking and asleep, that at the heart of every poem is the same idea. A damnable monism! Yet what does every poet finger but the truth of himself: whether it be the ‘weeping threatening accusing thing’, or the heart that sings like a bird for no reason but the multiple mirrored face of God?
Curiously enough, the latter are often the worse poets. Their peace is possible, for a while at least, without self-analysis. The abominable operation of cutting the heart out of old Adam and holding it up smoking to the sun of godliness and peace would seem to them unnecessary, even blasphemous. But when they first know that they are dying they begin to live; and grow a little mad.
Why are the best poems of this book love poems? Because the eyes have been fixed on another creature in that strangest of all emulsive solutions to the human dichotomy of charity and lust. The words say in one breath ‘I want you’ and ‘I want you to be.’ But perhaps every poem is a love poem – the worst to oneself, the second best (and notice this) to God, the best to a fellow creature or even at times a pattern of hills, the tranquil harp of water in a summer sea.
I cannot tell you about this book: that is the poets’ job. What you get from it will depend on you all the way, as it always does. So keep your eyes open, and don’t recoil before you’ve started to understand.
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The work of Alistair Campbell has been recognised an event in New Zealand poetry – vigorous, original, with the best qualities of the Romantic tradition. He is that rare phenomenon, a poet who writes from the heart without
The ‘Elegy’, first published in Landfall, contains some of the best symbolist poetry written in New Zealand and will in its strength and clarity compare with the work of English poets such as Dylan Thomas. Seldom has any poet in his first volume shown so sure a control of speech-rhythms and sensuous imagery.
The poems which have been added to this new edition demonstrate his continued capacity to draw on sources of primitive and animistic feeling denied to most. Yet it would be false to regard Campbell as a ‘primitive’. Like Keats’s poetry, his art, though sensuous, is the product of a controlled imagination. Only where the control slackens do his poems lose clarity.
For a full appreciation of Campbell it is necessary that his poems be read aloud. The free use of assonance conveys many overtones where the immediate meaning of the verse may appear uncomplex. Campbell’s world is in the main a pagan one, of hard clear lines and masculine energy, under the heat of the meridian sun. Yet he worships, I think, Artemis rather than Aphrodite: his sentiments are, whether directly or obliquely, idealistic. One must consider it fortunate that the Pegasus Press has elected to produce this revised and extended edition of his work.
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[One of the most notable addresses at Curious Cove this year was delivered by the well-known poet, James K. Baxter. We are pleased to be able to print below a condensed version of Mr Baxter’s address, whose title was ‘Choice of Belief in Modern Society’. By ‘belief ’, Mr Baxter said, he meant ‘unconscious assumptions concerning the nature and destiny of man,’ though for his part, being a layman of the Church of England, he accepted the beliefs set forth in the Apostles’ Creed. He continued]:
At this time our sense of security can only be ‘a blind man’s dream on the sand by dangerous tides.’ The fact that the sun will rise for us in the morning (apart from Hume’s doubt) is by no means certain. We cannot reasonably expect a full lifetime in which to search for true equilibrium and understanding: many of us may die sooner than we had expected to – and violently. So it is necessary that we should assess our intellectual goods, as if to make our wills, dividing the true from the false. In this assessment the arts may assist us – for artists are driven by their dissatisfaction with ready-made intellectual furniture and must endeavour to communicate their own fragmentary intuition of what is true – an intuition that often runs counter to the popular climate of opinion.
The moral and political view against which most artists with reason rebel is that which I will call the Comfortable View. In the sphere of morals this
Optimistic slogans, a medicine for every ailment; a change of Government, a rise in wages, a winning double – the promise that we can change our natures by changing our clothes – it is with us every day and does not touch the deep sense of isolation and malaise, of meaninglessness which explodes inward and produces those symptoms which go by the name of neurosis and psychosis. Forgetting the child’s nightmare and the guilts of adolescence we can forget that life is demanding and terrible; but only at a loss.
Now, even those who do not take a comfortable view of human nature and their own and others’ actions, have a strong nostalgia for this view. In his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Siegfried Sassoon tells how, after coming back wounded from the front line, he came to the conclusion that the war was an abomination and that he must protest against it. But after talking to his commanding officers and various friends, the afflatus left him, and he began to feel that he had been a fool – this not by intellectual persuasion but by the contagion of mood. As Eliot puts it – ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality.’ Yet the work of artists, the testimony of saints, and our own experience at moments of moral crisis, points to the fact that our feeling that great wrong is done and great good can be done is truth and the Comfortable View an illusion.
Many artists, however, while accepting the fact that men can take pleasure in doing evil, consider that we have been corrupted by civilisation, and that a return to a simple life would make us good. This I would call the belief in Idyllic Man. There are some factors which make this view a plausible one. But always Idyllic Man is somewhere over the horizon – five hundred years ago, another country, another race, with the glamour of distance – especially in the childhood of the author. He is a dream figure, a little less than living; generally an excuse to blame our environment for our vices and our distress. He is not, in fact, a being capable of moral choice.
The fable of Idyllic Man has its value, if only as an alternative to the logic of the anthill. There is a poem by David Campbell, a contemporary Australian, called ‘Hatter in Utopia’:
Despite the excellence of the poem it would be disastrous to take it seriously. It represents perhaps the revolt of the individual against mechanist society: man has moved from the city to the wilderness, girl-friend in tow. As a pretty fable with a grain of truth it has its place, not as a serious attempt at a scheme of values. The poet has very suitably put his verses in the mouth of a madman.
The popular belief most widely held in Western countries is not, however, idyllic – it involves, rather, the assumption of inevitable Progress, material and moral. I remember the comment of an American doctor representing UNESCO in this country, when a friend of mine showed him some verse I had written – ‘Waal,’ he said, ‘as long as you proGRESS, you’ll be all right – as long as you proGRESS.’ Perhaps in the period before the First World War the doctrine of Progress seemed reasonable – but after concentration camps, massacres and indiscriminate bombing of cities, can we believe that human nature has really changed since the time of the Roman Empire or Genghis Khan? Certainly our tools are better than those of Paleolithic Man; but we use them for the same purposes – to acquire food or to batter in a neighbour’s skull. I feel that many political thinkers have used an unjustifiable parallel – that physical evolution implies moral evolution.
I have mentioned the individualist belief in Idyllic Man and also the popular belief in inevitable Progress. Apart from these, I believe that at the heart of modern man’s view of his environment there is a myth at least as old as the Greek dramatists. I mean the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus was the rebel, the Light-Bringer who stole fire from the gods to benefit his fellow-men; and for this he was chained forever to a rock in the Caucasus,
It may seem humourless to make much of the so-called funnies. But in the comic strips the Promethean myth occurs in its crudest form. Superman, Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel – the heroes possess great physical strength and all the equipment of the fairytale hero – seven-league boots, the cloak of invisibility, the gat that never fails. But unlike Homer’s Odysseus or the Little Tailor, they are remarkably brainless; and they never elope with the king’s daughter – sex is taboo for the comic strip hero. Neither does he ever die – and this is perhaps the crux of the matter. Our civilisation has banished insanity to the asylums, disease and death to the hospitals, crime to the penitentiary. If our faculties are at a low enough ebb, we can persuade ourselves that we are physically and morally invulnerable.
In the genuine arts the Promethean myth takes another form – no longer man the Light-Bringer, but man chained to his Caucasian rock of suffering and isolation, and groping for self-understanding. Spiritual terror and isolation form the whole vocabulary of many poets; for example, in the early work of Dylan Thomas:
Or alternatively –
The theme of angst, of suffering at the very core of the mind, is strong in the work of Thomas and that of many modern poets. Similarly in painting, the human shape is disfigured and dismembered; partly no doubt for the sake of technical experiment, but partly also as a symbol of the mutilation of man’s moral being.
The Promethean view is in the main individualistic; the occasion for works of art, with little immediate application in the social and political sphere. There is another view, primarily a political one, both adult and formidable – I would call it the belief in Revolutionary Man: that by disciplined effort and revolt against existing injustices, man in society can achieve harmony. There are, as I see it, two possible interpretations of this view – either that by revolution in a country a working-class regime can be established, no more just than any other regime that we know; or (and I believe that the dedication of Communists to their Party springs from this hope) that by the devotion of a few and the re-education of many, people will become more just and loving in their actions, within a State valued by all – if not in one generation, then in several generations.
It must have seemed to many writers in the Thirties that by a single effort of arms and character they could throw off not only constricting social injustices but also their own private burden of anxiety and solipsism. Their disillusionment may have been inevitable; but I by no means intend to join the ravens who croak at the death of every enthusiasm.
Among thinking people, especially those who are young and relatively clear-sighted, a revolutionary attitude is common and I think justifiable. One becomes aware of the greed and shoddiness, the falsehood of modern society, and the fact that many wear out their lives in meaningless and mechanical occupations. The political slogans of progress and equality must seem so much hot air. The revolutionary view is an assertion of the dignity of humans and the necessity for civic justice. But its great weakness lies in an over-estimation of one’s own goodwill and the goodwill of one’s fellow- revolutionaries.
Now these needs and wishes, as I see it, are transcendental. The revolutionary is intolerant of existing order because it seems to him mean, trivial, unjust – he breaks the law in obedience to the Law written in his own heart. But usually he does not scrutinise his own motives carefully enough: his philosophy legitimises his envy and hatred of others or his will to power, as part of the wish for justice – and this can be fatal. If he refuses to submit the whole of his mind to the Light of justice within him he cannot see clearly to build a better society; worse, he ceases to wish for it.
So far I have presented four popular views of human nature – the Comfortable View, and also the beliefs in Idyllic, in Promethean, and in Revolutionary Man. No doubt these categories are arbitrary; but I think they fairly represent the assumptions behind much modern thinking.
I come now to a different view, the one held by Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky; in part by the Greek dramatists – I mean the view that we are moral beings whose suffering proceeds from our denial of the Light of conscience and that this denial is universal among us. This I would call the tragic view.
Brutus, for what seems the best of motives, aids the assassination of Caesar. In that action is the beginning of his downfall – he is obliged to condone the nepotism of Cassius, and his desire for a just State is inevitably frustrated. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for what appear sufficient reasons, murders an unpleasant old woman. His subsequent sense of self- condemnation and isolation from the human family drives him to give himself up to the police. Anna Karenina, out of love for Vronski, leaves her husband and child. She finds that she has destroyed her own peace of mind; and her relationship with Vronski steadily deteriorates until their final separation and her suicide. Creon in the Antigone, allows himself to be swayed by his own arrogance under the cloak of civic zeal. He is at last terribly defeated by the machinery he has set in motion. The inevitable tragic repercussions of disobedience of inward moral Law compose in these recognised masterpieces the ‘moral scheme’ to which Lawrence objects so strongly. I think the evident truth and force of characterisation in these works spring from the author’s recognition of humans as moral beings capable of free choice and inescapably answerable for the wrong choice. The peculiar desolation of the tragic hero moves us because we all in some measure share it in our own lives. It is the common human predicament. But inversely it implies the dignity of man which all other views of human nature contrive to whittle away.
I do not pretend to have the full answer. But since my criticism of the more optimistic view of human affairs has been mainly destructive I intend to make some further suggestions.
In the first place I suggest that our ideas as such (Peace, Freedom, Progress, a New World Order) are practically useless. They are still conceived in terms of our over-valuation of our own moral capabilities. I suggest that the whole concept of ‘society’ or ‘the State’ must go. We continually deify our ideas and make idols of them. But what stays when all else is stripped away is the relationship of individual to individual with which all morality that we need care a scrap for is concerned. Society, so called, is as I see it a frigid overcoat designed to muffle away from each other our true natures, both the criminal odour and the spontaneous self-forgetfulness which sometimes astonishes us. By a world of aridly comfortable concepts, people cut themselves off from the only world where things make sense, where their animal and spiritual parts
What most of us recognise late, if at all, is that we have complete power of moral self-determination. The power of Government, Church or any authority has no more sanction than that which our own sense of right and wrong gives it. And the greatest public danger in this country as in others is State worship. If a man wears epaulettes or has a university degree, it does not follow that he has the right to command us or the knowledge to solve our problems for us. Many are in fact tired, muddled old men who have long buried their own power to tell the truth and act upon it. All that concerns us is the naked force for good or evil of our own relationships – and this, I would say, is part of the freedom of which Buber speaks. These are the greatest chains: the ones we impose on ourselves. But we continue to be ruled in our sexual attitudes by the prejudices of our parents or in our political outlook, by some man who carries into a political group the kind of authoritarianism possessed by many Bible Class leaders. As I see it, the type of the successful revolutionary is Francis, standing naked before his Bishop and recognising no claims before the power of the love of God in his own heart.
Hence I feel that the division of private and public ethics springs from a purely negative view of morality. One should exercise a private moral choice in all public affairs. For example in the matter of the recent Police Offences Act. Many of us recognised its inherent injustice; but relatively few of us made our voices heard. And there are other issues of equal importance. At the present time a certain number of New Zealanders are fighting in Korea. Before long many of us may be conscripted to fight in a larger war. I do not propose to discuss the pros and cons of pacifism and militarism – no -ism can be much help to us. But if we had met our Chinese neighbours with a more active charity we would have less to fear from them. In China, out of starvation and disorder, a movement has come which carries the perennial hope of a just State. I think we should consider by the light of conscience and reason in what relationship we stand to the individual Chinese citizen; and in what measure a soldier in any war is blood-guilty.
Finally I suggest that people, if they can recognise their own freedom from all except membership of the human family, should have the courage to look hard at the cancers of the world and share the physical and spiritual suffering of others. In shared suffering, I believe, lies our regeneration. We are inclined, Christian and non-Christian, to look on the Crucifixion of Christ as a single horrible event, terrible to contemplate but unique. We forget that it was the usual method by which the Romans executed criminals; and that the occasion was only unique because of who He was; and that we have it in our hearts to sanction similar barbarities, and would if we could wash our hands like Pilate.
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An adequate evaluation of the poetry of Denis Glover has yet to be made. In the space of a brief review of his latest and finest volume, it cannot be attempted; but certain comments are worth making. Glover in New Zealand, like Louis MacNeice in England, has been underestimated as a serious poet because of his propensity for satire and a subtle self-depreciation (‘These songs will not stand . . .’ etc.): also on account of the apparently casual simplicity of his style. In fact his purely satirical poems are rare and of comparative unimportance; and his lucid style is the product of prolonged and intense processes of composition, the word fitting the experience like a glove. He has assimilated to his own use the techniques of Georgian verse, of the Scots ballads, perhaps also of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse – and in this volume, it seems, of the later songs of Keats.
In the repetition and exploration of certain themes, however, lies the measure of his success beyond all other New Zealand poets. Where others have seen New Zealand in anthropological, historical, even geological terms, Glover has seen her through the wrong end of a telescope, a world of experience intensified and crystallised in a few lyrics. The first eleven poems of this volume, apart from their superlative technical brilliance, embody what is perhaps the only successful myth yet created by a New Zealand poet:
Harry is Ishmael the Wandering Jew, the Fool who is also prophet and oracle. His comment, that is Glover’s comment, on human society is invariably destructive – human beings are sick automata engaged in ruining each other. Outside human society, however, exists the Sea, image of oblivion and renewal, and the temenos of the Land where reconciliation is possible with fellow beings and with the rich presences which haunt childhood experience. Though Nature also can mirror the desolation of individual man (‘Drift’, ‘The Ware’), in general the natural world is for Glover a source of spiritual refreshment. Notably in one poem, ‘Dunedin Revisited’, he has fused completely the vision and the fact:
The love poetry, satire and the film commentary included in this volume have not been mentioned. They alone would make it valuable; but the ‘Sings Harry’ lyrics and certain similar poems are very likely the most intense, evocative and formally perfect work ever produced in this country.
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[an unsigned report]
At a meeting of the Literary Society held at St. Margaret’s College on July 10, the guest speaker for the year, Mr James K. Baxter, delivered an address on ‘Social Delinquency in Modern Literature’. Mr P.A. Smithells presided, and introduced Mr Baxter, who expressed his pleasure at returning to Dunedin to address the Society.
Mr Baxter opened his address by referring to Joyce Cary’s Charlie is My Darling, which was a study in the delinquency of a boy evacuated during the war, from town to country. Cary had been asked how he knew so much about juvenile delinquency, and had replied that his knowledge came from his own childhood. All children were, in fact, delinquent. In this sense delinquency means all that experience and expression which was outside the accepted codes of society – such things as sledging, exploring caves, robbing turnip-fields or orchards, or actual vandalism. Cary showed that his boy- hero’s criminal delinquency, his other activities of the sort mentioned above, and certain creative possibilities that he also possessed, were all part of the one general attitude; and he implied criticism of society as responsible for the delinquent form in which these possibilities were actually expressed.
The attitude of writers to delinquency had changed in recent literature. In Jonathan Wilde Fielding had implied throughout moral criticism of his hero by social standards; in Oliver Twist one was seldom in doubt whether any character was on the side of good or bad, which for Dickens meant respectability or the underworld. But in Brighton Rock the values upheld by the Church cut across those upheld by society: Pinkie was a murderer and something of a monster, yet his girl-friend Rose was in some respects presented as a character more estimable than the law-abiding but irreligious Ida, who in the end brought Pinkie to justice. Not all modern writers shared in this change, which was really a change in their attitude to society; a vast number of middle-brow novels and a good deal of verse did not touch on it at all. But the fact that modern writers of primary importance were uneasy on this question could be illustrated from Cary, Greene, Albert Camus, James Joyce and Herman Melville, among others.
Among the grounds for this change of feeling about social codes the importance of the wars could not be over-estimated. The quietness of theHoward’s End, like something seen through glass, had been shaken after 1914. Many writers had come to look on society as no longer a good father, but one not to be trusted, feeling that they had to work out their own codes for themselves. This attitude had been further strengthened by the second war; it was illustrated by a macabre and terrible Italian story by Vitaliano Brancati, ‘Sebastiana’, which seemed to say that in a world at war all that innocence could do for safety was to die, and by the contrast between All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead, a contrast between idealism and nihilism. The same change was even more clearly visible in the poetry of the two wars. Whereas Owen and especially Sassoon had been social critics, the poets of the second war were much more individualistic and judged on purely personal criteria. This was shown in such a poem as Roy Fuller’s ‘Spring 1942’:
The chaplain stood in some degree for the social code, and it was as if Fuller were accusing society of delinquency. In a similar, a social way, Karl Shapiro’s ‘Nostalgia’ expressed only the inevitable death of many men and the coarsening effect of war, while the Australian, John Manifold, in ‘The Tomb of Lieutenant John Learmonth, A.I.F.’ celebrated the courage of the solitary man, explicitly rejecting all social ideals.
In addition, however, to this quarrel with social standards, there was also some measure of collision with the social authorities who enforce them. In Charlie is My Darling the faults were on the side of the probation officer as well as on that of the boy Charlie; in Billy Budd the figure of natural innocence was unjustly accused, and Melville, like Fuller, went out of his way to take a crack at the chaplain. There seemed to be a feeling in somePortrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The growing adolescent had to form his own opinions on sex, religion, and politics; but he might go further than his growth demanded and reject all moral authority. Such was, as far as it was clear at all, the position of the existentialists. Authority condemns us all anyway, said Camus in The Outsider, so let us reject it, and take as a type for all humanity the condemned criminal. In such a work delinquency was not merely tolerated but entirely justified.
In summing up, Mr Baxter concluded: ‘The different attitude to delinquency springs from a recognition that conflict with social morals and the rejection of some authority is an inevitable part of the growth of any individual. Part of each person’s code of morals in fact belongs to the nursery. The strongest feeling among writers today seems to be that the State is by no means an absolute authority; yet in rejecting this authority, they suffer great insecurity. For the criminal is a loser in his conflict with society insofar as his creative powers have been turned to negative uses. This occurs often because he cannot break the deadlock between too narrow a code and the life that will not be contained by it. On the other hand, the social conformist is not likely to be a good writer. Criticism and growth are essential. The tension is easier for someone who accepts, as I do, the doctrines of the Christian Church. Yet there also one must go on thinking, and the university is a place where many people, however painfully, begin to think and to grow.’
[The following poem accompanied the report]
Song: Drink and the Devil
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Introduction
It is convenient to date early New Zealand poetry from the arrival of the early settlers until the Twenties of this century. In the Twenties there was a break in tradition which will be discussed in the later lecture on Modern New Zealand Poetry. The early settlers were influenced in their methods and choice of themes in verse writing by the contemporary Victorian tradition; but the isolation of New Zealanders, during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, from revolutions of literary opinion in England and Europe, was real and debilitating – for example, we have during this time no trace in New Zealand poetry of the influence of such symbolist methods as those used by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, or the realism of Thomas Hardy as exercised in his Wessex poems. One cannot avoid the conclusion that practically all the early New Zealand poetry has little literary merit, and is of interest mainly for the light which it throws on historical or sociological themes; that the writers may have our respect as personalities, but hardly as thinkers or craftsmen. I intend to set forward various possible causes for their poverty of ideas and method.
The Pioneer Poets
Many of the early settlers hoped to make New Zealand the centre of a New World culture. A brother of Matthew Arnold became headmaster of the first secondary school in Nelson. Men such as James Fitzgerald, Alfred Domett, and later William Pember Reeves, found time for versification in the pauses
Plainly this is capable ballad-writing, suitable for singing at a reunion gathering. Equally plainly, it lacks the tragic accuracy which makes the labour of a poet comparable to that of a novelist or visual artist. Verse-writing however was to the pioneers never more than a kind of recreation from the real business of breaking in a new country. Their aims were economic or political. For them the function of the arts was primarily one of entertainment or ‘spiritual’ edification: to the word ‘spiritual’ one could add ‘unnecessary’. Our source of insight into the life of the pioneers is derived chiefly from their diaries and letters. It was in many districts a wild enough life: the militia had their drunken brawls; men ‘went native’: missionaries found the conflict between Christian and pagan ethics not easily soluble for Maori or pakeha; the strange and terrible landscape of a new country opened before them – but a genteel habit kept all but faint echoes of this vivid and disturbing prospect out of their verse.
William Pember Reeves in his poem ‘A Colonist in his Garden’ presents in good Tennysonian stanzas the nostalgia of the expatriate Englishman. A friend urges him to return to England from –
He replies that he has made himself a home in New Zealand, a little England of his own. Finally –
Pember Reeves himself, knowing both countries, could fit the new experience to the categories of English verse idiom. There is, however, an underlying sense of insecurity in this poem – the ‘mad gorge wind’ which once blew his tent into the night may return. In the nineteen-thirties Ursula Bethell, herself possessing a knowledge of both New Zealand and England, paused while digging in a garden on the Cashmere Hills, Christchurch, and saw the mountains clearly as strong, indifferent presences, even as hostile to human habitation. Other poets have seen this country in a similar light. But between them and Pember Reeves is a gulf of over half a century; and a weak and stereotyped tradition which prevented the communication of any insight the poets possessed into their particular condition as individuals or as New Zealanders.
It would be idle to cover in detail the work of each early New Zealand poet; for the verse of this period (that is, of the nineteenth century) is valuable in the main only as historical data. Some, though not all and not the best, is available in the Alexander and Currie anthology of 1906. The verse of Arthur H. Adams was at times of a high standard. In ‘The Dwellings of our Dead’ (1899) he sees New Zealand in a less optimistic and sanguine light than did Pember Reeves – as the graveyard of the pioneers –
But most of his contemporaries wrote in a stilted and self-conscious manner: their verse was weighted, overweighted with moral reflections of a superficial nature. The cause lies in part at the door of the second wave of immigrants, those of the Seventies and Eighties, whose scheme of values and view of aesthetic matters we have inherited. A few were gold-diggers from Australia; a few were black sheep and remittance men; but the majority came from the ranks of farm-labourers and domestic servants. Inevitably they laid emphasis on the virtues of thrift and abstinence, by which men could succeed in a new country. Many belonged to nonconformist religious groups; and regarded the arts with suspicion, to be tolerated only if containing an obvious ‘message’. They expected also from their verse, as from their hymns, the expression of strong feeling rather than any intellectual synthesis. These prejudices have persisted to our own time; and account for the constant popularity of verse such as Thomas Bracken’s ‘Not Understood’ – a rhetorical poem, unquestionably sincere, with the heavy rhythm of a hymn. I do not intend to deprecate all verse which embodies moral truths or even truisms. Such verse can be of a high standard. But I deprecate the view that verse is necessarily good because it contains such material. In fact the poetry of the second half of the last century both here and in England, was singularly barren of lively ideas; and the crushing yoke of public moral censorship must bear most of the blame.
Discussion
Otago Regional Poetry
I have chosen to discuss Otago poetry of the last century because in that part of New Zealand one finds a different verse tradition the Scots one; because some of the verse was of a high quality; because A.E. Currie’s A Centennial Treasury of Otago Verse (published in 1949) provides a reasonably accessible text for discussion. Currie has unaccountably omitted from his Treasury the work of Jessie Mackay, an important figure in early New Zealand poetry. She had a considerable mastery of the ballad style. Much of her work is highly imaginative and romantic. To her, as to many people of Scots ancestry, the Jacobite rising and the legends of the Highlands were part of the fabric of her thought. But her poems on such themes were in the main shrill and unreal. She was, however, the first New Zealand poet to treat a Maori legend in verse with comparative success. In her poem ‘The Noosing of the Sun-God’ the latent vigour of her mind finds concrete expression.
This verse has some of the force of Scandinavian sagas; or of the actual creation myths and canoe chants of the Polynesians. But other New Zealand poets have failed to make any vital use of Maori mythology, probably because it is impossible for English-speaking Christians or rationalists of the Steel Age to enter into the world-view of tribal Stone Age Maoris. The scattering of Maori names and phrases (apart from those which have become current New Zealand diction) through poems written in the English Romantic tradition is quite incongruous. It may happen, however, that a man walking in bush or on the seacoast in the Twentieth Century is possessed by the daemon of the place and experiences the same, dread, exaltation, sense of life in inanimate creation, which a Stone Age man may also have experienced and records this in verse.
Jessie Mackay was a journalist as well as poet, and propagandist for the causes of prohibition and women’s suffrage – which were in her day more immediate issues than they are now. She is the type and forerunner of most later New Zealand women poets, possessing what is at its best a genuine restricted idealism, at its worst a disastrous lack of contact with the main stream of human ideas and experience. The dilemma of the woman writer is a painful one. In our society the status of the married woman is higher than that of the spinster; but a married woman rarely has the leisure and freedom to write. Our two most notable women poets (Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan) have been spinsters; and there is evidence in their work of considerable conflict and a sense of isolation. In itself this is perhaps of little account – some kind of conflict has always been the ground of creative processes. But in New Zealand art and letters, until recently, an uneasy gentility has held sway, which has sterilised the crude immediate vigour invaluable as an urge to experiment. By this gentility the revolutionary impulse of poets such as Jessie Mackay has been dissipated and stifled; and, most unfortunately, such writers have been the first to protest against innovation.
Jessie Mackay used ballad form, but apparently was not influenced by the work of Burns. Her verse was published at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one.
An earlier Otago poet, John Barr, who had a book published in Edinburgh in 1861, followed ably in the steps of Burns. He describes in detail the moneygrubbing propensities of a small Scottish community, sketches the town drunkard, moralises on the vanity of human wishes. His verse is hard, compact and neat, without the virtues or vices of imaginative poetry. Plainly the Scottish idiom was his native tongue. His verse is still eminently readable; but copies of his book are, I believe, only procurable in libraries such as the Turnbull.
The influence of Burns on Scottish poetry has been immense and on the whole inhibiting. A poet of the first magnitude must tend to overshadow those who follow him, especially when his words are regarded almost as a sacred book by his countrymen. I have heard an old Scotsman express the opinion that Burns was the only true poet who ever lived – ‘Some of the others had a shot at it; but they didn’t get anywhere.’ This idolatry, in New Zealand at least, was a check on any experiment in Scottish dialect verse. Taking Burns as their model, the local bard imitated his vices of sentimentality and heavy formalism rather than his virtues of huge gusto, metaphorical exactitude and satirical wit. The lonely descriptive verse of John Barr and others died out as the life of the Scottish agricultural communities also died before the withering influence of an economy controlled by National Mortgage. But there remains a little wheat among the chaff, some verse genuinely related to the life of agricultural New Zealand.
So writes an early Otago poet, using the Burns stanza anglicised.
It seems that poetry cannot flourish in any country without regional activity. Whatever the advantages of modern technological civilisation, it does not provide natural occasions for popular verse. The local landmarks are lost (the bridge one’s grandfather built; the quarry said to be haunted by a gamekeeper killed in a fight with poachers; regular festivals; the whole deep unconscious continuity of tradition, that makes one’s neighbour a member with oneself of an indefinitely extended family) and no collectively organised group activity can replace them. In particular, the metaphorical richness of dialect, springing from the oneness of sight and subjective response (e.g. ‘I saw the new moon late yestreen / With the old moon in her arms’) is replaced by the stereotyped language of newspaper and radio. Poets are obliged to make their own language. It is significant that modern poets have in many cases turned to regional sources for their methods and material – Yeats to the Irish ballad, and events of the Easter Rising and Civil War (he was fortunate in the fact that Ireland has not yet undergone industrial revolution); Hardy to the life of Wessex agricultural labourers, and in his finest poem, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, to the local ballad form; Dylan Thomas to his Welsh childhood and Cymric verse structure; Day Lewis increasingly to country matters and the methods of Hardy; MacNeice to Ireland; Eliot, in his Four Quartets, subtly and deeply to the seventeenth century rural Anglican community.
This essential regionalism we have until lately lacked in New Zealand; and even now there is no healthy undergrowth of spontaneous local composition, as there was in some degree in the Otago Scottish communities. In Australia the case has been different. Lawson, Paterson, Ogilvie, Lindsay Gordon, provided for the man in the street; and their popularity in this country is evidence that a similar kind of verse could have been and even yet might be, acceptable among New Zealanders, from local poets. I doubt, though, if it could compete with the radio. One poet, David McKee Wright, whose verse was published at the turn of the century, exhibits in a few poems complete mastery of the ballad form.
Unfortunately the ballad did not take root in New Zealand as in Australia. When new strength came into New Zealand poetry, it was from the university colleges and not from the ranks of seasonal workers, rabbiters, or men on road construction jobs. The New Zealand public have been content to accept as a substitute for folk poetry the mass-produced American song lyric.
Discussion
The Georgian School in New Zealand Poetry
The name ‘Georgian’ has been given to that school of poetry in England which originated, I believe, chiefly in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge before the First World War. Within its confines developed such well-known poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, Siegfried Sassoon. No division into ‘schools’ is ever strictly satisfactory; for each poet has his own methods and peculiar insight. But broadly speaking, the Georgians are characterised by their choice of pastoral themes, their adherence to regular metres, and their conception of poetry as a means of escape from a world too harsh and utilitarian.
In speaking of New Zealand verse I use the term ‘Georgian’ not to denote poetry written in a particular decade, but a particular kind of poetry. It is just to consider Georgian verse under the heading of early New Zealand poetry, as Georgian poets have remained comparatively unaffected by the movements of rejuvenation in the English and New Zealand poetic tradition. The anthology Kowhai Gold, published in 1930, is representative of New Zealand Georgian verse. The poems are imprecise, flatulent, unlikely to offend or stimulate. There is no evidence (except in the work of Eileen Duggan and B.E. Baughan – a poet of the older school) that the writers are aware of social change or have any experience to communicate but a fondness for scenery. Plainly the verse is a drug and not a food.
1952 (55)
Introduction
In the growth of any literature two factors are always present: tradition and revolution against tradition. A poet at the time of composition is unlikely to consider what tradition he is writing in; but the unconscious influence of all he has read, the techniques he has acquired, perhaps laboriously, determine the direction of his thought and the internal structure of the poem. A tradition slavishly followed is a strait-jacket; and the poem which ‘writes itself ’ is likely to be a bad poem, for in fact it embodies the confused memories of what others have written. Since individual experience is unique, each poem should be a unique event. Yet equally, art is communication. A poet has magnitude according to his capacity to express through vivid and accurate metaphor his private experience of reality. Plainly this means that each poet not only uses
The English and New Zealand Georgian schools of poetry had narrowed their concept of tradition to exclude pre-Romantic poetry. One might admire Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden or the Scots ballads, but these sources could not exert a living influence on one’s work. When A.R.D. Fairburn in his poem ‘Dominion’, written in irregular and muscular blank verse, quoted a Roman poet (Ovid, I believe) – ‘They change the sky but not their hearts who cross the seas’ – he was more traditional than the so-called traditional Georgians; or when Denis Glover used the ballad refrain in his satirical poem ‘The Magpies’. Similarly in the choice of themes – the limitation of poetry to ‘polite’ themes has no precedent in the writing of the great Jacobean poets, of Burns, Byron or Blake. The modern New Zealand poets have simply widened their field of reference, socially and intellectually; and in so doing have rejuvenated a moribund tradition and restored poetry to its natural place as the pre-occupation of adult minds.
The Poetry of R.A.K. Mason
The position of R.A.K. Mason as the patriarch of modern New Zealand poetry can probably not easily be challenged. Nevertheless Curnow, in the Introduction to his anthology, has tended to over-rate the part played by Mason in inaugurating new development. Even without Mason, the Depression years would have borne fruit. His output has been small; his vision, though intense, restricted; his rhetoric, though forceful, naïve. Possibly his convention of printing lines of verse without the customary large initial letters may cover a suspicion that, differently set, his poems would appear less revolutionary. But these are minor matters, when one considers the lucidity of his verse and the fact that each poem has a living core.
Though he would no doubt repudiate the idea, I feel that the mainspring of Mason’s poetry is religious conflict. His poems ‘Ecce Homunculus’, ‘On the Swag’, ‘Judas Iscariot’ and ‘Footnote to John II.4’ embody a view of Christ as a man betrayed and suffering – betrayed not only by men but by God as well, a worse betrayal:
Mason’s uneasy agnosticism is neither consistent nor jovial. His world- view coincides with that of Housman and Hardy, who doubted the existence of God, but laid the charge of responsibility for human evil and misery at
The major influences on Mason’s techniques are probably Housman, Beddoes, and Latin verse interpreted in the light of English poetry of the Nineties. But he cannot be regarded as an imitative poet. His poetry proceeds from a genuinely tragic view of the world and human destiny; and though his development has inevitably been conditioned by the demands and constrictions of New Zealand society no one of his poems, except perhaps the ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’, can be described as local. It is a misfortune that of late he has stopped writing – possibly because purely tragic themes exhaust themselves and the poet; possibly for a reason he himself has given, in a different context – ‘. . . youth having smouldered in senseless drudgery I can scarcely expect age to supply the necessary fire’. Economic necessity has undoubtedly limited the productivity of many of our poets, not so much by their poverty as by driving them to the barren and exhausting labour of journalism.
Discussion
The Leftist Movement of the Thirties
Very little New Zealand poetry of the last two decades has been specifically political in intention. But our best poets have leaned to the Left in their politics. Apart from the possibility that the position most tenable by men of acute mind and humanitarian sympathies may be a Leftist one, the new literary movement of the Thirties in England was closely linked with a Leftist political movement; and New Zealand poets were influenced at the same time by new ideas and new techniques. The Christchurch journal Tomorrow, published in 1934 and Leftist in its political programme, contained poems and short stories by writers of the new school. But certainly the most important factor promoting Leftism was economic rather than political. In the Depression years men’s faith in social stability was shaken as it had not been by the First World War; for the latter affected mainly those soldiers who saw the Front, and having no terms to express their sense of shock and calamity, they hid it away and spoke only to those who had shared it; but the Depression was a thing which shook every home. New Zealand poets felt the necessity to speak of other matters than bellbird and pohutukawa; or if they spoke of these, it was the speech of men who observe and reflect without preconceptions, with a sense of tragedy rising from the impermanence of human endeavour.
This quotation from Allen Curnow’s poem ‘House and Land’ could easily be paralleled by passages from Sargeson’s short stories. ‘Miss Wilson’ typifies the older generation of New Zealanders, who do not realise that the old structure of society is changing and disintegrating. The cowman and the rabbiter in the same poem are of the nomad class of casual labourers, without knowledge of tradition, whose habits and spiritual dilemma Sargeson has analysed brilliantly in his short novel That Summer.
The influence of Auden, Spender, and other poets of the English Leftist school shows itself in New Zealand poetry in the use of speech-rhythm words drawn from the vocabulary of popular or technical language, assonance and half-rhymes, and the influence of Eliot in the use, by Fairburn in particular, of a verse-form halfway between blank verse and the metres of Biblical prose.
Fairburn’s verse in his first book He Shall Not Rise is very lush. A poem of this period is included in the anthology Kowhai Gold. But in verse such as the passage from Dominion quoted above, he has progressed to a spare controlled rhetoric, while retaining the warmth and vigour latent in his earlier work. Though Dominion contains much keen social criticism, of the kind beloved to E.H. McCormick, Fairburn’s view of society is very different from that of Marxists. He is anarchist rather than socialist, advocating a return to simpler and more pleasurable social behaviour than the modern State can afford to its citizens. His love poetry, unlike Mason’s, explores the man-woman relationship in terms of tenderness and, at times, of mutual responsibility. In ‘The Cave’, probably his finest poem in free verse, he presents the sexual act as a means by which man is reconciled to the natural world, outside social boundaries –
This theme recurs frequently in the work of New Zealand poets. It represents a break with the genteel tradition of the Georgian school, and will be considered further in the work of Louis Johnson.
The Effect of Printing and Publishing
The foundation in the early Thirties of the Caxton Press in Christchurch and the Unicorn Press in Auckland was a factor which stimulated enormously the production of verse and prose. For the first time in New Zealand first-Oriflamme. On account of the inflammable nature of this periodical he was censured by the College Council and obliged to shift to other premises. So the Caxton Press was born, which has printed work for the Oxford University Press, and has maintained as high a standard of typography as any press in the world. The status of its founder has changed. As Glover writes –
Inevitably the poets of the Thirties in New Zealand (as indeed in England) tended to gather in cliques, and address their verse to one another rather than to a wider audience – especially when the wider audience numbered at most two hundred in a country of two million inhabitants. Glover has been under- rated as a serious poet because his verse has almost invariably an ironic twist and because of his habit of self-depreciation:
In fact he controls admirably the ballad form, most difficult of all forms to write naturally in. And his serious poetry, in particular, the Sings Harry lyrics, is the result of prolonged and intense processes of composition.
With the decay of Leftist enthusiasm, the poets of the Thirties were thrown back on their private resources; and turned to myth-making or the exploration of personal relationships. The cause for the disintegration of the Leftist political world-view as expressed in literature is outside the scope of this Lecture; but to understand the recent development of New Zealand poetry one must realise that this disintegration occurred; that the perennial dream of a just society has in the meantime faded; and that poets have endeavoured
Discussion
Symbol and Myth in Modern New Zealand Poetry
Metaphor, symbol and myth – these lie at the heart of poetic composition, and one must understand these to understand poetry. It is essential to realise that metaphor is not a writer’s game or even, despite the schoolbooks, a ‘figure of speech’. One can very seldom, if ever, describe any non-sensory event without the use of metaphor. In common language the metaphors are weak, hidden and disguised. To quote at random from the New Zealand Listener: ‘And let us most emphatically impress upon them their duty to society – we must not let them impress their personality or exert their individuality upon buildings, and indirectly us, in the slightest degree – they can be no better than their predecessors.’
In this passage the words ‘impress’ and ‘exert’ are plainly drawn from the sphere (again metaphor) of physical action; ‘indirectly’ applies non- metaphorically to movement in space . . . and so on. If I were a scholar of Latin, I could analyse this or any other passage of melancholy journalese, to find its roots in verbs or nouns describing physical events. In poetry the metaphor comes out in the open, and, far from being imprecise, by the range and strength of metaphor poetic language is usually more exact than prose. A poet can be judged primarily on his power to forge new metaphors as the occasion demands.
Metaphor, then, is the (unavoidable) description of non-sensory events on sensory terms. Symbol is an extension of the same process. To quote from Glover’s poem ‘Holiday Piece’ –
The concrete thing mentioned, the snowfield, stands for qualities of everlastingness and purity. The suns and rains, very likely (for in a good poem there are invariably depths within depths) symbolise the alternating periods of joy and desolation in the mind of men. Symbol, then, in poetry, is that use of words by which a more superficial statement (usually the mention of a natural object) represents a deeper spiritual fact.
Though other meanings are valid, myth as used in modern poetry may be interpreted as an intuitively perceived pattern in history; this pattern is indicated by verbal means. Myth coalesces with symbol, as most poems concern themselves with place as well as with events in time. For example, in his poem ‘Captain Sinclair’ Glover creates a myth: the disaster which befalls the enterprising captain mirrors the greater disaster which continually befalls man when he pits his strength against the forces of death and change. The sea, however, symbolises these forces. The most important characteristic of a myth is that it concerns man rather than the individual whom the poem is on the face of it written about: it universalises a particular situation.
Brasch, Curnow and Glover
In the poetry of Charles Brasch, the New Zealand mountains and the sea continually recur as symbols. To him the mountains seem maternal presences sheltering man; the sea appears alternatively as the element which brings destruction and oblivion, and as a power of regeneration:
This quotation from Brasch’s poem ‘The Iconoclasts’ will serve to illustrate his use of symbolism. The sea here is a passive principle of gnawing oblivion, as in the phrase ‘empty cancers in its side’; the sky also is passive, or imposes passivity on the reluctant earth. The mountain, and the mountain hawk, symbols of aspiration, are forgotten; also the volcanic fire within the mountain (a favourable symbol of Brasch’s). Thus, like the savage, the poet has by animistic projection endowed the landscape with those states and qualities which belong to his own soul.
Whether the poet was aware that he was writing symbolically is hardly the question. The peculiar power of good landscape resides in these symbols, which may not be realised consciously by either poet or reader. Curnow’s brilliant formulation, in the Introduction to his anthology, of symbolic patterns in the work of New Zealand poets, may not hold water for every New Zealander or every New Zealand poet. But the fact remains that certain symbols recur in the work of poets of widely different ideas and method. Curnow speaks of ‘. . . the treacherous beaches, none / So bloodily furrowed that the secret tides / Could not make the evening and the morning one.’
Brasch very plainly in his poem ‘Great Sea’ regards the sea as a primal healing power. Glover (a naval officer) speaks of the ‘antiseptic, salt-tongued, smothering sea’. One could pursue this kind of analysis indefinitely. But
M.H. Holcroft in his essays has done so more thoroughly than I can hope to do. I suggest, however, that the following symbols can be elucidated from the work of New Zealand poets:
The precise accuracy of these symbols need not concern us greatly – when one consciously pins a symbol down, half of its power evaporates. But symbols of the kind listed above, and no doubt others which have escaped my notice, do recur in the work of our poets.
Curnow has consciously sought for a myth to express the situation of New Zealanders. In his earlier work he has personified Time as an active principle, directing human affairs, mainly to their detriment –
A less synthetic myth is that developed in his verse play The Axe where the native Christian missionary Davida, representative of civilised order, converts the dominant tribe on a Pacific island. The outcast pagan tribe rise in revolt but are vanquished. Tereavai, the blind pagan priest, represents the impotent but very real force of those impulses which Christian order subdues in the soul of man – in particular, animistic nature-worship and sexuality. Curnow gives the best lines in the play to the pagans, and plainly laments the departure of what was rich and unified in primitive Polynesian society.
Glover, in his Sings Harry sequence, has created the figure of Harry, onlooker and outsider, Fool and oracle, whose comment is destructive upon the automatism of modern life. Here there is a close parallel with Sargeson’s heroes and with John Mulgan’s Man Alone. Glover’s Everyman turns to the wilderness for refreshment:
The preceding remarks may serve as pointers for further analysis. In this context one could study the work of Cresswell, a writer with a keen sense of the force and strangeness of New Zealand landscape; J.R. Hervey, who has
Discussion
Further Developments in New Zealand Poetry
Since the Thirties many new poets have appeared – in the Caxton Poets series, W. Hart-Smith, my own work, and Charles Spear. In the recent Pegasus Poets series, from Pegasus Press, Christchurch, Alistair Campbell (second cheaper edition), Louis Johnson (his second book), Pat Wilson, and Hubert Witheford (his second book). Anton Vogt, a lively poet, has written some new verse of a high standard and serious import – a new book of his is due from Caxton Press. Kendrick Smithyman and Ruth Gilbert have had books of verse published. W.H. Oliver, Ruth Dallas, and Keith Sinclair, and many others have had verse printed in the New Zealand quarterly Landfall. Landfall (edited by Charles Brasch) has undoubtedly done much to stimulate the writing of verse and prose of a high standard. It is not possible to consider every poet in detail. Their books are available. In general the trend of much of the new work has been away from specifically New Zealand themes toward those relationships which are valid in any setting. It is possible that the time has come when poets in this country need no longer be conscious that they are New Zealanders and there is now enough of a good tradition for considerable cross-fertilisation.
I intend to discuss the work of Alistair Campbell, Basil Dowling, Louis Johnson, Ursula Bethell, and M.K. Joseph, as presenting a wide enough variety in technique and choices of theme to give by implication an overall picture of New Zealand poetry lately written. I begin with Ursula Bethell. Though her first book of poems was published in 1929 (A Garden in the Antipodes) she has influenced mainly the modern group of poets; and she had the power, like Yeats, to be a contemporary of each generation. Her seventy years were divided almost equally between England and New Zealand but her childhood was spent here, and her affection for New Zealand landscape is evident. She has a wider vocabulary than any other New Zealand poet; indeed, her verse at times is over-weighted with Latinisms. She experimented in verse forms, in particular by her use of assonance:
The prominent features of her verse are apparent in this extract – the Latinisms; the skilful use of assonance, not only at the line-endings but also internally
(e.g. ‘dawn’, ‘austere’, ‘claustral’); the tension between formal structure and rich, sensuous images; the intellectual freshness; and the occasional amazing symbol, as when the hills are described in terms of a girl putting on cosmetics for her lover – the lover in this case being Christ, Master of the natural world. For Ursula Bethell’s work is of a rare kind where religious impulse mingles without undue strain with the other faculties of composition. Her work will undoubtedly endure; for she has combined strong intellect, strong feeling and strong faith with great technical resource.
Alistair Campbell is an outstanding Wellington poet. His direct, sometimes extravagant rhetoric shows to its best advantage in the ‘Elegy’ first printed in the Landfall of December, 1949. He has used the Central Otago landscape for symbols of pride and grief.
Campbell’s peculiar power comes chiefly from the animism of his poetry. All natural objects come to life in his verse, as the toys in the old story do when the child goes out of the room; but Campbell is in the room. His technical ability is considerable; but his themes are not highly valued. The sensuous qualities of his poetry, however, render him one of the best of the younger New Zealand poets.
Basil Dowling, a Canterbury poet, has published three books of verse. The neat, traditional and unassuming nature of his poetry has led to his being under-rated. But his poems are never purely descriptive; invariably they have a metaphysical core. To quote from his poem ‘New Brighton’ –
What was in his earlier verse a wooden exactitude of phrasing, has become freer flowing in Dowling’s last book, without forfeiting precision and clarity. His themes frequently concern the mystery of childhood innocence; or bush scenery – the themes of Georgian poetry, in fact. But Dowling, who began in the Georgian school, has purged himself of sentimentality. He has been influenced in particular by the work of the English poets Siegfried Sassoon and Andrew Young (the latter being perhaps the best English nature poet of this century).
Louis Johnson, editor of Poetry Yearbook, has published two books of verse from Pegasus Press, The Sun Among the Ruins and Roughshod Among the Lilies. Johnson’s poetry is uneven in quality but he could claim to be the most original of present New Zealand poets. He has never to my knowledge written any landscape poetry – an unusual omission in New Zealand. He is primarily concerned with human relationships, in particular those between men and women. His verse, sometimes flamboyant, inevitably breaks rules of decorum, for he deals with sexual relationships as they frequently are and not as one might wish them to be:
In ‘Poems for a Possible Eden’ he explores the breakdown of Romantic love with the compassion which is rarely absent from his poetry. It seems that he has begun writing from a standpoint of maturity which few poets achieve. A revolutionary disrespect for accepted forms is central in his poetry; as indeed it has been in all writing which has inaugurated new development. Johnson’s writing is valuable in New Zealand poetry of the present day, as a check to the myth of isolation developed by Curnow and others. One of his most successful poems is the ‘Canto at Twenty-seven’ published recently in Landfall:
Johnson’s power rests notably in his understanding of suffering; and in this respect his poems have often, though in a negative sense, a religious bias.
Excluding Glover and Fairburn, we have lacked satirists in this country. M.K. Joseph, whose book of verse Imaginary Islands has been published by Whitcombe’s, stands almost alone in this respect. His hard, clear and mannered verse, usually in regular stanzas, lends itself aptly to social satire. The philosophy he expresses is essentially that of a sanely balanced observer. In his poem ‘Secular Litany’ he has written the best New Zealand satire of our time. I feel justified in quoting it in its entirety. [‘Secular Litany’ follows.]
Discussion
Appendix – The Poetry of James Baxter
As James K. Baxter wrote this lecture, there has been no treatment of his own poetry in it. He is one of our most important poets, and so we have appended a short note on his work.
James Baxter’s first volume Beyond the Palisade, was published in 1944 when he was only eighteen. Yet the poetry in this volume was mature, controlled, and showed an unusual mastery of poetic form. In it, too, he seemed to have achieved easily and without conscious striving a poetry which was unmistakably the work of a New Zealander, but which did not seem as if he were trying to write specifically New Zealand poetry. His poetry was neither dominated by English models nor consciously reacting from them. Similarly he did not seem to be influenced unduly by the literary fads of the time. His work did not echo Auden or Eliot – or, for that matter, anyone. He acknowledges the influences of certain poets, but they seem – and seemed even in his first volume – to be completely assimilated.
He is mainly a lyrical poet, but there has been a growing didactic element in his verse, and this, together with his self-discipline and his respect for the form and architecture of his verse, has served to strengthen his work. In his poetry he has endeavoured to embrace as much as possible of sensuous and other experience and to impose a pattern and form on it. Sensuous awareness, insight, passion, a sense of delight, and a love and appreciation of the form of poetry have from the first distinguished his work.
He acknowledges the influence of Bunyan, Byron, Burns and Blake. Bunyan, Blake and Burns were early influences. From Bunyan and Blake comes his idealism and didactic element. The influence of Hardy has become more marked lately in his attempt to include what are normally regarded as prose subjects and in the attempt to harden his verse. Byron’s rhetoric and his verse, especially his use of the stanza form, have had some effect, too, on his writing.
He believes that poetry should be lucid and should reach the largest possible public. He believes that poetry should be recognised as a major artCP 121.]
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These two attractive broadsheets, the first with a cover design by Colin McCahon, printed by the Griffin Press, Christchurch, mark a necessary development in New Zealand poetry. There must be room and opportunity for unestablished poets to bring their work before the public, and this is provided suitably by use of the broadsheet. John Caselberg’s gentle and lyrical poetry at its best approaches the quality of Alistair Campbell.
J.M. Thomson displays a fresh and original symbolism nearest perhaps in spirit to modern Greek poetry. Any reader with a fondness for unpolemical and imaginative verse would be well advised to buy these two broadsheets. The magnificent study by Colin McCahon which introduces John Caselberg’s sequence is something to be treasured, also. One hopes to see another issue soon.
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The critic of Eliot inevitably tends to regard him as an English rather than as an American poet. For Eliot has increasingly relied upon English literary and social tradition for the habitual context of his poetry. It is scarcely conceivable, for example, that The Cocktail Party could have been written by an indigenous New Englander. Yet his distinctive and nostalgic imagery is drawn in a large degree from his American childhood and early youth. And as Professor Musgrove’s able and minute comparison must convince us, his view of America has been determined in a far-reaching manner by his reaction to the works of Whitman, that ‘sea monster stranded on the shores of literature’.
A study of this kind can assist considerably to a full understanding of Eliot’s poetry. But one regrets that Professor Musgrove has confined himself in the main to textual comparisons. His discussion of the basic symbols held in common by Eliot and Whitman indicates the kind of book that he might have written if he had allowed himself to speculate more fully on the theme of nature symbolisms; and in his analysis of Eliot’s and Whitman’s opposing views of human society lies the germ of a fruitful comparison of English and American mores. One feels that he has written notes toward a thesis rather
At times Professor Musgrove seems to take textual comparisons a little too far; but he protects himself with frank reservations; and plainly the main body of his comparison is valid. His work sheds new light on Eliot’s imagery and the non-doctrinal groundwork of Eliot’s thought.
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One has become accustomed to the sound of brass bands and aboriginal stick- dances rolling over the Tasman, that is to say, the expression of those cults of ‘social realism’ and back-to-nature fantasy which have tended to smother in Australian literature the development of any original talent. Therefore, it is most refreshing to read verse as various and unpretentious as that contained in Mr Mackenzie’s selection.
Some familiar poets are represented – David Campbell, Robert D, Fitzgerald, Peter Hopegood, Val Vallius and Judith Wright. David Campbell may contend with John Manifold for the place of the best poet Australia has yet produced; but one feels that he and other familiar names (Judith Wright, for example) are here represented by their left-overs – a trifle tired, the gramophone left running in the same groove. Or perhaps familiarity makes one undiscerning.
The two best poems in the anthology, however, are atypical. The clear, unstrained traditional rhetoric of James McAuley in ‘Mating Swans’ by its unity forbids quotation. And in ‘Forebears’, a poem in six parts, Elizabeth Riddell does well the kind of thing that makes every ancestor-worshipper stumble, with a sophistication comparable with that of Edna St Vincent Millay:
Some of Yeats’s hard resonance is here.
By his influence on David Campbell also, one would judge Yeats the best antidote to lushness in Australian verse. He provides a context of ideas for the antinomies of bush and sun or sun and rock, and perhaps the only possible method by which an intellectual poet can draw on Australia’s vigorous ballad
There are several poems contributed by New Zealanders who have set foot on Australian soil, including one sensitive and forceful poem, ‘The Island in the River’, by W. Hart-Smith. One has the impression after reading this anthology that Australian verse may be just beginning to find its feet.
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Sirs: I was surprised by the cantankerous attack made by Mr Noel Hilliard in your November issue upon Curnow’s anthology. He is no doubt moved by most laudable indignation against racial discrimination; but like an enraged bull is prepared to charge anyone and anything. Since I am one of the poets whom he chastises for ignoring the benefits of Maori culture, I would like to make a few points evident about Maori-pakeha relationships and their bearing on New Zealand literature.
Mr Hilliard contends that the poets in Curnow’s anthology are gravely to blame because they do not write about Maoris. This is an absurd accusation. How many New Zealand poets have lived in pas, or in close contact with groups of Maoris? I know that until I was in my late teens, living in the Deep South, I had never met a Maori. For my sins he quotes a poem which I wrote at the age of sixteen, and which derives its Maori content from the usual history- book guff. Probably Mr Hilliard means rather that the pakeha poets should draw upon Maori mythological sources. They could; but they would find (as I have found) the myth of Odysseus just as applicable to New Zealand as the myth of Maui, and more familiar to an English-speaking audience. Perhaps Mr Hilliard has not considered the possibility that some New Zealand poets would feel it an impertinence to take over the intellectual chattels of a tribal civilisation with which they have no personal link and which their ancestors helped to destroy. The Kowhai Gold school of New Zealand poets have had no such compunction: their verse is liberally sprinkled with brown-eyed Rotorua wahines and pohutukawa blossom. I remember trying to write a poem about poi dancers whom I had seen at the Wellington Town Hall. I tried to evoke the shades of the marae; realised that my attitude was necessarily that of rootless sentimentality and fortunately gave up the struggle. If Mr Hilliard so wishes, I will post him the pencil draft.
A second point. Mr Hilliard compares Curnow’s choice to that of Matthiessen in America, whose anthology ‘contains not one line by a Negro poet’. So what. The Negro poets were writing in a dialect of English, and certainly should have been represented. But does he think that Curnow should have included canoe chants in ancient Maori? Or does he think that Andersen’s or Ngata’s translations, considered strictly on their merits, should have been included? Or does he think that there are some fine poets
I think that Mr Hilliard would do well to study Beaglehole’s Some Modern Maoris or Finlayson’s Sweet Beulah Land, or simply to look around him, rather than to tilt at windmills – however good his intention. The matters which hit one in the eye concerning Maori-pakeha relationships are sociological ones; and our novelists have not neglected these. With all respect to those persons of integrity who have recently died, Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Peter Buck, and Princess Te Puea, it is folly and blindness to rhapsodise about Maori culture at the end of a process which began when the first whaler met the first Maori; to praise the remnants of a tribal unity which our own deadpan civilisation has torn to shreds; in brief to cry over spilt milk when you know it will keep on spilling. We are not likely to take more from the Maoris than we have already taken – a number of museum artifacts, their land and their dignity. I speak with feeling because my wife and two children have their adequate share of Maori blood. But that does not make me an inheritor of Maori culture. If I ever write another poem about Maori matters I am sure Mr Hilliard will like it a good deal less than the one from which he quoted.
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The title of this children’s book indicates its theme and content – a dramatic adaptation of the Gospel story of the circumstances attending the birth of Christ. Many parents and perhaps educationists also, must have felt the lack of suitable children’s literature which makes clear that ‘holiday’ means also ‘holy day’ and that Christmas is something more than the time of Santa Claus.
The old story is here freshly told in a manner which should be acceptable to Catholic or Protestant and to many who do not belong to a given denomination.
The book has three qualities which should render it invaluable as a gift to children – the lucidity and freshness of the verse; the excellence and originality of the illustrations; and last, but not least, a reasonable price. It could be used
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Among New Zealand poets A.R.D. Fairburn is notable for the freshness of his sentiment and the vigour of his thought. His poem Dominion, here republished as the first of a trilogy, must be regarded primarily as a propagandist work, though its lyrical sections are perhaps the most effective. It gathers in a coherent pattern as no other New Zealand work has done the Leftist revolutionary attitudes of the Thirties; but the unifying factor is Mr Fairburn’s individual rebellion against the canny mores of Little Bethel. In a sense the political bias of Dominion is closer to anarchism than to Communism.
The two poems previously unpublished, The Voyage and Letter to a Friend in the Wilderness, both lately broadcast, have greater aesthetic unity with somewhat less variety. Mr Fairburn, in his own words, has concerned himself in The Voyage with what Keats defined as ‘negative capability’:
In the Letter to a Friend in the Wilderness he has discussed the tug-of-war between personal and social responsibility and the wish to escape to some earthly paradise, however imperfect. As always, personal illumination is the touchstone of ideas:
Mr Fairburn has made in these poems a courageous statement of humanist values allied with personal disillusionment. And faced with the formal problem of how to contain meaningful comments on economic and social matters within a unified art form, he has cut the Gordian knot and sacrificed aesthetic unity to variety and vigour. One can only be glad that he has done so; for these three poems, though less finished than his lyrical work, have greater scope and are an invaluable contribution to the literature of our time and place.
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It is difficult, perhaps, perhaps even presumptuous, for a reader without theological training, who is not a professing Roman Catholic, to attempt an evaluation of this work by Father Bouyer, which is a meditation on the last three days of Holy Week. One can record, however, a personal impression.
Father Bouyer’s work has seemed to one reader neither an addition to pietistic and sentimental works of devotion, nor a formal analysis of liturgy. The restatement of Catholic truth in contemporary terms, without distortion, is part of a necessary exercise of Christian freedom. But some such statements seem likely to increase the real and lamentable fragmentation of Christendom; while others, however indirectly, may assist toward an inward unity of believers, in Christ.
Father Bouyer’s view of heresy must of necessity be offensive to many believing Protestants. But his meditation upon the mystery of the Redemption as shadowed forth in Roman Catholic liturgy can only command our respect and veneration. In particular, his consideration of death, of Divine love and judgment, and more generally, his treatment of Old Testament sources, have great depth and cogency. No reader with an awareness of religious problems can fail to be moved and enlightened.
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It is no discourtesy to say that Mary Stanley writes like a woman, and so has produced poetry peculiarly her own, and though supported by a considerable intellectual scaffolding, by no means cerebral. Her themes are often domestic (a word much abused); but the anxiety of a mother for her child, or the love of man and wife, are related to a wider context of human separateness, mortality, and Christian religious belief. It is a sign of this writer’s maturity that she often writes tenderly, but is never sentimental:
Rarely does one have the luck to review a book in which each poem is so plainly a real event. Mary Stanley’s style is sometimes over-compressed and convoluted; her images are drawn from many quarters, natural and mythological. But it is worth the labour to penetrate to the core of even her most difficult passages. At her best she is triumphantly simple, as in the verses beginning, ‘Husband, put down Spinoza, Pericles. . .’. In this and similar pieces the poet’s achievement is complete; and the reader receives, as it were, a blood transfusion.
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George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, was born in Leicestershire in 1624. As William Penn writes in the Preface to the first publication of his Journal, he was ‘an original, being no man’s copy’; and his great courage and
The style (in parts modernised by the editor) is entirely plain and of an excellent clarity. Like Bunyan, Fox on occasion makes natural use of symbol and metaphor; and in his narrative the inward and outward events rub shoulders, as it were:
And there came one of his servants with a naked sword and run at me ere I was aware of him, and set it to my side, and there held it, and I looked up at him in his face and said to him, ‘Alack for thee, it’s no more to me than a straw.’
And lying at a Friend’s house, I felt the evil spirit to work again to purpose, being always on my watch. I saw, as it were, a grim, black fellow, who was fettering of my legs with a cord, that I had much ado to preserve my feet from him.
Oliver Cromwell said farewell to Fox with tears in his eyes; but one would be somewhat afraid to meet him in the flesh, for he seemed to have the gift of seeing through stone walls and into the minds of men. The Journal of this extraordinary man is a spiritual autobiography of unsurpassed interest.
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Among the poets of the Thirties, Cecil Day Lewis was remarkable for a dry metaphysical wit and a strong sense of formal structure – this latter being in itself no guarantee of first-rate poetry, yet an indispensable aid in the writing of narrative verse. His narrative poem on an incident of the Spanish War, the fight of the Nabara, passes the test of heroic evocation for one reader, who is rarely able to read it and refrain from tears. With time his verse has become more meditative. He has learnt much from the irregular metres and stoic agnosticism of Hardy. This new poem is a hybrid – verse journal, narrative, philosophical discourse. In it he makes use of his peculiar gifts of irony and sensuous observation; and under all the groundswell of Romantic nostalgia. His verse is intellectually too controlled to allow often an unpremeditated lyric strength; but this control gives him his staying power. What other poet would have described five Florentine works of art in five remarkable parodies
In the first and last sections of An Italian Visit, the three-travellers-in- one, Tom, Dick and Harry (that is, Body, Heart and Mind) analyse in their respective terms the quality of their mutual experience. For Day Lewis, as is shown in his superb ‘Elegy Before Death’ (the sixth section of the poem) it finds its focus in romantic sexual love; or rather, that love rectifies and replenishes the arid mind:
Until –
Yet he retains inevitably the Romantic paradox: ‘Always? – That is the song the sirens sing on bone island.’ One can ask no more of that particular vision. An Italian Visit is an uneven poem, yet through its wit and variety, successful as a whole. It contains some of the best poetry that Day Lewis has ever written.
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The genius of Leonardo da Vinci has been held to be representative of the spirit of the Renaissance – diverse, vital and emphasising the dignity of humanity. The first two qualities are certainly apparent in this selection from his notebooks; but the bent of his mind would seem to be, if anything, anti-humanist. As in Chinese and Japanese painting, humans occupy a minor functional position in the order of things. The laws which govern the movements of air and water interest him more than the actual fate of people swept away by a deluge; the balance of stresses in the arch of a bridge, more than the peasants who walk across it. He invented diving suits, helicopters, machine guns; but their function concerned him more than the social use, good or bad, to which they might be put. In this, he is undoubtedly representative of the main tradition of modern thought. The kind of comment he does make on human nature is clearest in negative matters: ‘Avarice: The toad feeds on earth and always remains lean, because it never satisfies itself – it is so afraid lest it should be without earth.’
His preoccupation with imminent apocalyptic disaster seems to lie at the centre of his study of natural phenomena: I venture that opinion. But however repellent and strange the gist of his arguments there is no doubt that
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I imagine that if this question were asked of an equal number of Maoris and pakehas of equal social and educational status, the reply from the pakeha group would be largely negative, from the Maori group significantly non- committal. ‘The toad beneath the harrow knows / Full well where every tooth-point goes.’ For most people, however, the problem is buried under a mass of half truths and misconceptions. It may be worthwhile to discuss some of these.
A colour bar may mean one of three things – inequality before the law of two races of different colour; the discrimination, conscious and unconscious, of people of one race against people of another race of a different colour, in social and economic spheres; or a combination of both, such as now exists in South Africa. We may plume ourselves on the absence of a colour bar in New Zealand, forgetting the second and perhaps most real definition. Let us consider for a moment what associations we connect with the word ‘Maori’.
First the schoolbook tapestry of people and events, Te Rauparaha and Te Kooti, guns, flax and greenstone tikis; then, the posters of the Government Tourist Bureau, a fleshy wahine beside a smoking geyser, half historical, half derived from those we have known at work, the faces in the street. When it has all been sifted, what have we left? An elusive figure, partly of our own creation, indubitably born and brought up in the pa, a person of another culture, not fully to be trusted (for one does not trust the stranger), perhaps to be placated with awkward compliments, whose pigmentation is the badge and seal of difference. Towards this figure one has two main attitudes, often held simultaneously. One speaks of the ‘fine’ Maori race – (in what way fine? In physique? Intelligence? Moral character? Creativity?) Or one speaks of the lazy Maori, the difficult Maori, the dirty Maori, the Maori who cannot be taught anything. That is, [members of ] the Maori race are ‘fine’ in the King Country or in the Maori Battalion. Within our social structure they are an irritation, reminders that the structure is not absolute, perhaps also able to waken an obscure sense of guilt. In any discussion of the relationship between Maori and pakehas one meets this double view, at once sentimental and harsh, two sides of the same coin: essentially a defence mechanism against really
In the last century the representatives of two very different cultures met, clashed, and achieved an uneasy equilibrium. Since that time the dominant culture has squeezed the other to death. The ‘Maori problem’, except for the oldest men and women, is not one of preserving tribal tradition and racial unity; rather it is – how can So-and-So, a Maori, adapt himself most successfully to a pakeha society? And how can those pakehas meet him sanely as a man with special problems?
I remember two Maoris with whom I worked for nearly a year. Both were mutton-butchers – that is, they were among the elite of freezing-works society. A— was a particularly well-set man; a good footballer; highly efficient at the job; somewhat better read than most freezing-workers. He had no accent: he had, if I remember right, never seen the inside of a pa. He seemed to fit naturally and easily into the give-and-take of men working together, without revealing any tension. I doubt if the pakeha butchers thought of him consciously as Maori.
B— was a stocky, dark, wiry-haired man; a trifle awkward in his movements; in his early twenties. He had grown up in a pa and had a noticeable accent. He was not quite as efficient at the job as A—, and A— had rather taken him under his protection.
A black sheep escaped from the hands of a butcher and slithered to the door. Someone shouted, probably without malice – ‘There goes your brother, B—!’ B— would have knocked the man down if A— had not stepped in. This was counted peculiarly bad temper on B—’s part. I think that at all times he felt an outsider. His pa background rather than his colour was the decisive factor.
C— also, who worked in the gut room, was a very dark Maori, a heavy drinker (though no heavier than the pakeha foreman); always irritable, at times given to violent rages. In an argument a pakeha worker called him a ‘black b—!’ and C— knocked him into the tub where the tripes were boiled. This, too, was counted hypersensitivity.
From such incidents rise many of the legends of the ‘difficulty’ of Maori workers. I doubt if any of the men in the place, if they had been Maori, would have shown the humour and balance of A— (true, he was not directly insulted). The colour insult is most easily answered by a blow. A full-blooded Maori might have set his back against his family tree. But the problems of most Maoris in New Zealand are problems of the half-caste.
The bilingual difficulty is a central problem in education. There are schools in which Maori children are strapped for speaking Maori. Thus the difficulty of acquiring a new set of verbal symbols is augmented by disastrous teaching
Partly owing to these educational difficulties, partly owing to the seasonal work of many Maori families, which breaks the continuity of school work, the great majority of Maori boys and girls go into labouring jobs and domestic service. Even the Maori colleges equip only a very few of their pupils for the professions. Thus the contribution which Maori men and women make to pakeha culture is often made at the lowest social level. Similarly they also acquire the manners and habits of the pakeha labouring class, which in our society run mainly in barren grooves. If in the isolation and rough-and-tumble of city life a Maori falls into delinquency, the newspapers present the case in savage detail. No doubt the Maori clubs, such as Ngati Poneke, give some stability; but they are separate from the larger pakeha social group, and exist to help the Maori in the city who feels lost in pakeha society.
Plainly the problem of Maori and pakeha is not whether the two races should mingle. They have already mingled, haphazardly, and often, for the Maori, disastrously. The problem lies in the deepest attitudes of members of each race towards the other. How many people with rooms to let refuse to let them to Maoris on the ground that ‘they’ are unmethodical and irregular in their attendance at work? These are blanket statements, and generally founded entirely on prejudice. They indicate the existence of a colour bar. We are also offended by an attitude less anxious than our own toward money, sex, and the rougher features of human living; though we could have learned much and let some air into our hutches of closed ideas. How many Maoris also have retreated (understandably) into preoccupation with the monuments of their own culture and rejected what good we have to offer? It is difficult to say whose loss is the greater – our own, who have not profited by our temporary propinquity to a rich and intricate tribal culture; or the Maoris, who have seen that culture disintegrate and are offered in its place the worst features of our own anxious and acquisitive society – and the Church which, whatever we may think, is not our private possession and creation.
If the preceding article seems to some readers [to be written in] strong language, I would like them to ask themselves one question – If they are pakeha: Would you be glad to see your son or daughter marry a Maori? If they are Maori: Would you be glad to see your son or daughter marry a pakeha?
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In paradise Orpheus the poet and Prometheus the father of all technicians lived at peace together. Prometheus made little water-wheels and Orpheus imitated the sound of their turning on his tortoise-shell lute. Their labours were equally useless and equally blessed. But after their expulsion Prometheus, craving temporal power, made himself a stone club as well as the necessary plough. Orpheus for love of praise memorised his own songs. Since then each has pretended that their disagreement is not an inevitable result of the Fall, but the fault of the other. When they meet they hiss at one another – ‘Pansy intellectual!’ – ‘Bourgeois clod!’
*
A good poem is a love letter to the world, or rather that feminine part of it which permits the poet’s flattery but cannot be possessed. Like any love letter it is full of private endearments, protestations, swearwords and complaints.
*
When Eurydice, stung by the serpent of forgetfulness, descended mourning into Hades, Orpheus was away from home at a choral recital of his own verse. When he heard the news he ran bellowing to his brother Prometheus. For economy’s sake she had been the wife of both. ‘Alas, brother!’ he cried. ‘Our dear wife is dead and gone to Hades.’
‘So you say,’ answered Prometheus without raising his eyes from his test- tubes. ‘But you always exaggerate. She’s probably just gone to have a siesta. But even if she’s dead, there’s no need to be troubled. Look what I’ve made for the two of us’ – and he pointed to the figure of a woman, made of clay and ivory. ‘She can sweep floors, make beds and play the ukulele. Her conversation is limited. A perfect wife. Her only flaw is that she can’t have children; but I’m working on a glandular extract which may remedy that.’
The image creaked in the workshop corner. ‘Kiss me, sugar daddy,’ it squawked. Orpheus went to the door and vomited among the hydrangeas. Prometheus ran after him shouting – ‘You are a constitutional psychopath!’
*
Oscar Wilde made at his trial one truthful and profound statement. On being asked whether he considered a certain work of art immoral, he replied – ‘It is worse. It is bad art.’
This was thought to be the typical remark of a poseur. But he was right. A pornographic, a sentimental, or a propagandist poem is a lying oracle.
It persuades that all is well when all is not well, and substitutes a drugged response for the true labour of poet and reader. Yet every poem inevitably contains some thread of lying.
*
Coarseness is another matter. The obscene (in the Greek sense) mysteries of sex and death menace the shivering ghost of Adam. Rob him of his coarseness and you rob him of his courage.
*
When Prometheus asks the meaning of Orpheus’ song, Orpheus replies – ‘Listen again.’
‘But,’ says Prometheus, ‘does it incite men to the practice of virtue?’ ‘No, it restores to them the freedom to do good and evil.’
‘Then it is not ethical.’
‘No. But if you want a sermon, the churches are open.’
‘I was going there in any case; but I wanted to hear from your own lips the proof of your immorality.’
*
Even if Mendelssohn had put A.M.D.G. at the top of every page of his MS book, it would not have enabled him to compose the Brandenburg Concerto.
*
It is recorded that the legendary Orpheus met the Bacchanals as they combed the Thracian hills, raging drunk and stark naked. They proposed that he should have intercourse with them. He declined their invitation on the ground of his recent bereavement. Angry at the slight, they tore him limb from limb – and his marble head was carried down the Hebrus, the cold mouth still crying ‘Eurydice!’
Various interpretations of this legend are possible. But it seems most likely that the Bacchanals were Furies in disguise, those ungovernable passions whom Orpheus had dislodged from Hades by his unexpected irruption there. In this matter he was the archetype of the bohemian artist. But though devoured by them, he knew they were brutish and unsatisfactory partners and still languished for Eurydice. This accentuated their ferocity.
Prometheus dealt with the Bacchanals more reasonably. He installed them in State-appointed brothels, and when they had grown pale and
*
Buck Rogers is a Promethean hero: he can do anything and nothing. Charlie Chaplin perhaps is Orpheus, the clown’s mask crying ‘Eurydice!’ as it falls down the climbing escalator.
*
The punishment of Prometheus for his attempt to conquer the spiritual world by technical devices is represented inaccurately in the original legend. Nothing so natural as a vulture was sent to prey on his liver. He was left alone in a wilderness of oil derricks and chromium-plated beerpumps, with the pain caused by Eurydice’s absence but with no knowledge of its cause; his sole consolation the thud of falling markets and the louder and louder explosions of atomic physics.
He requests Orpheus to exercise his magic and dispel his abominable ennui. But the magic of Orpheus resides in the truth of his song. Prometheus asks for some gentle pastoral music; and hears a lament which reflects accurately the voice of the wind among bombed cathedrals, the weeping of ulcered children, and the anvil chorus of the pimp and D.P. So Prometheus sacks Orpheus from his job of Court poet and builds a bigger and better juke-box.
*
Orpheus has one song only: that which he sings in Hades to rescue his soul, Eurydice, from the chasm of non-being and causality.
*
Orpheus can never see Eurydice face to face. His descent and his song are endless. Yet the sight even of her damned shade wrings tears from his eyes and music from his harp.
*
Into whose mouth does Burns put these prodigious lines? Into the mouth of
Many people expect all artists to be virtuous in their lives. There is an error here. That Wilde was a sodomite and died of drink; that Villon was a whoremaster and thief condemned for sacrilege – these facts were of the deepest importance to themselves, their friends, the police and God. That is to say, they lived under the same Moral Law as other people. But their work was a creative recognition of precisely those situations which their vices had helped to create. Villon expressed the disgust of a whoremaster for his trade, the fear of the gibbet experienced by a thief, and the remorse of a man who fears damnation. Wilde in the unexpurgated ‘De Profundis’ faces quite genuinely a nasty crack up. Their gifts and not their morals make them remembered.
The demand, properly stated, should be: All people should be virtuous in their lives. Which we know already.
Orpheus is not robbed of hope by the death of Eurydice – for that came about by the agency of the undying serpent. But the moment is terrible when, after turning aside from his search to lie down in some stale tavern, he wakes to find the deceiving images of the night turned to sacks of rotting straw, and her stone blind face staring from under a rafter.
*
The original Macpherson of Burns’ poem ‘Macpherson’s Farewell’ was a cattle-thief who showed an appropriate and humble spirit at the time of his execution. But Burns did not allow him to die thus. Instead –
It is the chant of Orpheus-Macpherson, who in his heroic response to the event forgets that not song but prayer is suitable at such a time.
*
To ask that every work of art should be founded upon humility is much like asking that the sexual act should be performed in a position of prayer. Both acts, however, require guts, enthusiasm, and immediate attention to the job being done.
*
Each man is both Orpheus and Prometheus. No man has ever yet successfully played one role without botching the other. Thus the poet dreams of unpaid bills; and the illiterate film tycoon sends his daughter to the best schools to acquire culture. Unfortunately Orpheus must rely on Prometheus for a job; so his anxiety is the greater.
*
The chief folly of Prometheus is to suppose that his technical gifts are a substitute for gnosis; of Orpheus, to suppose that by his song he can bribe the Fates to overlook his misdemeanours and prevent their inevitable consequences.
*
The angels that sing Holy, Holy, Holy before the throne of the Lamb cannot understand the song of Orpheus; for they have never known the pain of separation from that inward bride which is self and not-self and carries at its centre the light of the dayspring.
*
Statements about faith and morals are charts of that spiritual country in which we live – ragged, mountainous, and by reason of the Fall frequently inaccessible. The statements of aesthetic humanism are travellers’ reports. Neither can supply the place of the other. A man may have climbed among glaciers and crevasses, or visited the swamp-dwellers at the delta of some great river. His notes are fragmentary and his memory inaccurate. If all travellers’
Religious quarrels are quarrels about the value and proper interpretation of the master chart. Aesthetic quarrels are quarrels about the veracity and style of a given report.
It is quite improper for a moralist or theologian to demand that a report should be pruned to fit his particular interpretation of the master chart. A traveller himself, who knows the chart, may find that the two versions differ. But if he is intelligent he will say to himself – ‘The country is large and the chart, though accurate, does not show every creek and goat track: very likely I have found some of the unmarked features. Or perhaps my findings are incorrect. But I know that I was in some place and set down to the best of my ability what I saw and what occurred there. That is all I can ever hope to do.’
1953 (71)
In this recent volume, to his other gifts Mr Glover has added those of a raconteur. It is a sequence of poems derived from real and imagined incidents in the life of William O’Leary, gold prospector, eccentric, and explorer of the South Island hill country. Inevitably, however, Mr Glover has written more than a verse chronicle: as a successful poem must, the sequence moves at two levels, actual and symbolic. And as Dylan Thomas expands the dithyrambic ‘A Winter’s Tale’ from three lines of an earlier poem, so Mr Glover has developed Arawata Bill consciously or unconsciously from the imaginative kernel of an earlier five-liner:
His other published verse, excluding perhaps The Coaster film commentary, has not been directed toward a conscious dramatic end. Nevertheless, in his ‘Sings Harry’ lyrics he created in the enigmatic character of Harry a highly successful unifying focus for oracular statements about human life and destiny; it may be an actual poetic persona. Harry was an ironic spectator. Arawata Bill is a man committed to a definite search, that of the alchemists, for gold, but symbolically for some unnameable good, whether it be reality, power, or beatitude:
The peculiar power of Mr Glover’s landscape poetry rises from the fact that mountain, river, bushland and sea assume in it the proportions of animistic powers; and the chief importance of Arawata Bill is that it constitutes an extension of this frame of reference. Arawata Bill moves and perseveres in the arena of indifferent, even antagonistic spiritual forces: he is the dilapidated demigod of a nature myth. In that ‘wicked country’ prayer is legitimate, but a packhorse a more suitable companion than a man. Virtues count less than tactics. There are also protective powers:
These lines have the untranslatable significance of a Chinese ideograph.
It is a measure of the strength and weakness of Arawata Bill that the poem on the opposite page to ‘Camp Site’, though superficially similar, lacks entirely the symbolic force of its companion piece. Where Mr Glover falls back on the factual skeleton of the story of William O’Leary the myth fails and he stumbles easily into sentimentality and banality. His method of direct and apparently casual statement makes him run the gauntlet of these faults, which are peculiarly the faults of Georgian poetry. In this sequence his very real debt to the Georgians is made clear – hitherto camouflaged by irony and deliberate bathos. Yet by walking a stylistic tightrope he has extended his poetic technique, and at his best has carried symbol and image to an ultimate simplicity. He has rarely written more perfect lines than those of the opening poem of the sequence (‘The Scene’) where one is introduced to the giant protagonists of earth, air and water, and the fire of the gold which emerges like a flower from the ‘womb of the storm’, the core of Heraclitean cosmos; and certainly nothing more perfect than this six-line prayer:
These are not the sections of the poem which one regrets. But it is fair to state that Mr Glover has written some of his worst as well as his best verse in Arawata Bill. Because the sequence is direct and not at any simple level humorous, he lays bare his Achilles’ heel – the sentimentality into which he frequently lapses when the tension of the poem slackens or cannot be sustained. No doubt this criticism could be made aptly of any poet living. But in Arawata Bill the new cloth at times rends the old garment. The sequence bears the relation to his earlier work which a series of rapidly executed yet on the whole masterly charcoal sketches would bear to a group of watercolours by the same hand. I must confess a liking for charcoal sketches. The price of the book is reasonable and the typography of the usual Pegasus standard.
1953 (72)
Mr Faussett, well-known as a literary critic and reviewer, has attempted in this meditation to express his philosophy of life for the benefit of a friend whose humanist faith has failed her in a time of trouble. Tentatively and with considerable wisdom he weaves together different threads of knowledge and insight – to make a lifeline, as it were. The book is written in a spirit of quiet goodwill, and may well have been of value to the person for whom it was first conceived; but how valuable it may be to the unintimate reader, one finds difficult to assess.
Mr Faussett leans heavily upon Buddhist and Hindu theology. And like Jung he is ultimately one who regards all spiritual experience as the expression of complementary opposites. Thus his approach to the problem of evil (the problem which most oppressed his confidante) is nearer to that of Christian Science than that of the main current of Western thought. For him, faith is a hold-all; faith in the Father-Mother-God and ‘an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many’.
The most unsatisfactory section of the book is that which discusses Christian belief. The unyielding materialism of Christian dogma, like that iron-grey stone of which Dante wrote repels Mr Faussett – an understandable situation. But to cite the ecstatic statements of Christian saints as evidence to
1953 (73)
The literary taste of any age is influenced by its style and quality of book production. One recalls vividly how different Burns’s Collected Poems seem when dominated by the Gothic shades of a nineteenth-century illustrator; or how much more clipped and hygienic James Hogg appears in large clear type with an Introduction by André Gide. So in this edition of Milton’s poetry the compact and careful typography and the craftsmanship for which the Oxford University Press is justly famed enable one to read Milton with new eyes.
Helen Darbishire, according to several informed critics, has produced an edition of Milton which is more in accord with Milton’s original intention than any other. Her meticulous and scholarly observation of every variation in spelling and punctuation is unquestionably a labour to be admired; but her textual commentary makes it plain that her scholarship has been illuminated by insight. Paradise Lost, to which T.S. Eliot once referred as a Chinese wall built across the road of English literature, emerges in all its lights and shades. But apart from those undeniably great passages which are scattered through this work, the section which relates to the fall of the Angels and the character of Satan, and the lyrical description of Adam and Eve unfallen alone have full dramatic force. One is overwhelmed by Milton, yet often I am dissatisfied. His earth and hell are real enough; his heaven is a somewhat draughty room.
1953 (74)
The works of George Gissing are a bridge between the three-decker Victorian novel and the modern psychological novel which rests on the immediate observation of a solitary mind. He aspired to be the English Balzac, but had not that French master’s omnivorous curiosity. This fictitious diary of a retired journalist is rightly regarded as his masterpiece, for he expresses here in all its complexity the sense of inward failure felt by a man who has been broken on the wheel of commerce; yet also the spiritual power of a man who knows that however much he has been shaped by his circumstances, he
A not entirely convincing Stoicism. Far more than for his didactic self- explanation, one is moved by Ryecroft’s description of the English seasons; there his true pathos emerges, a pathos close to that of Hardy. But which is ‘Ryecroft’ and which is George Gissing – the sententious Stoic or the humble, intense observer – one can hardly guess. Perhaps Gissing was all these things and more.
1953 (75)
In these six lectures Mr Mumford has attempted to deal with some of the most crucial problems of our age. It is a measure of his intellectual balance that while he exposes the disastrous sub-humanity of modern technological society, he does not become a Luddite caught in a blind antagonism to the machine. Apart from its breadth and variety, a striking feature of Mr Mumford’s argument is his avoidance of the repulsive gobbledegook which is a constant temptation to writers in the field of speculative aesthetics. He says no more and no less than he means.
Perhaps the fatal course all civilisations have so far followed has been due, not to natural miscarriages, the disastrous effects of famines and floods and diseases, but to accumulated perversions of the symbolic functions. Obsession with money and neglect of productivity. Obsession with the symbols of centralised political power and sovereignty, and neglect of the processes of mutual aid in the small face-to-face community. Obsession with the symbols of religion to the neglect of the ideal ends or the daily practices of love and friendship through which these symbols would be given an effective life.
These four sentences lay bare the core of his argument. He does not, however, develop this intuition as if it were a skeleton key to open all doors. Meticulously, clearly, emphatically, he explores like a surgeon the wounds of our civilisation – and without false optimism predicts a possible cure. If our statesmen had had the wisdom of Mr Mumford we would not today be awaiting the whirlwinds and waterspouts of atomic warfare. For he understands the basic duality of human conduct and knowledge, and how
1953 (76)
A study of the development of Welsh poetry more comprehensive than that of Professor Williams could hardly have been made, in terms intelligible to the reader who has no Cymric. It will be of peculiar interest to those familiar with the works of Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and other English poets whose mood and method is influenced by a Welsh background. The concreteness and variety of early Welsh poetry is impressive:
Fortunately Professor Williams has quoted lavishly from his sources, and in each case accompanied the Welsh original with spirited and sensitive translation. The whole body of verse which he discusses takes its criteria of reality from two systems of living – the feudal order and Catholic Christianity. From the feudal obligation derives the sentiment of gratitude to the poet’s patron, and the formal lament for dead heroes; from Catholicism, the tension between supernatural order and licentious wish, origin of the greatest mediaeval poetry. By the sixteenth-century the lock of tradition had snapped, leaving the door open for nonconformist sentimentality and heavy sermonising. Henceforth Welsh verse is a dog without a master; and when it found one in Dylan Thomas, he fortunately for us did not write in Welsh. Professor Williams’s book is a mausoleum of giants’ bones; but it is interesting to see how many techniques independently discovered by modern poets were alive in early Welsh. This volume should be of great value to those who wish to gain an insight into Celtic literature, without the twilight. Professor Williams’s commentary is a model of lucidity.
1953 (77)
The drama which was produced in the period between the death of Queen Elizabeth and the closing of the theatres in 1642 is frequently regarded as a mere postscript to Elizabethan glory. Yet it has its own special signature in mood and diction. It is interesting to speculate what course English drama might have taken if Malvolio had not triumphed so effectively over Sir Toby
Mr McIlwraith has chosen plays which illustrate well the diversity of the drama of the period. Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, Ford – it is as broad a selection as could be made within so small a compass. Of Webster one need hardly speak. But Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, through the character of the jealous husband, and Massinger’s The Roman Actor, preserve some of the spirit of Ben Jonson, the formal type figure which nevertheless comes to life. Beaumont and Fletcher in The Maid’s Tragedy demonstrate the easy mingling of farce and serious drama. But John Ford in ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore moves at a truly original tangent, with the inwardness of great drama which the other dramatists, excepting Webster, are without. It is unfortunate that this play, since it deals with the theme of incest, could not readily be performed on a modern stage. Ford handles hard, clear prose and rich metaphor equally well. The editor is to be congratulated on his selection; and the Oxford Press for making available lesser-known dramatists in a cheap and convenient edition.
1953 (78)
Like most writers who have laid hold on popular imagination, Robert Burns has been mythologised in various roles – as a gentle nature lover, as a drunken blackguard, as a peasant moralist dragged down by his own weakness (Carlyle’s view), as a social revolutionary stifled but not silenced by poverty and piety. Each represents the natural attempt of people to simplify a complex phenomenon in accordance with their own wishes and prejudices. But as Professor Ferguson points out in his brief and vigorous Introduction there were several factors in Burns’s environment which made it unusually difficult for him to reach equilibrium in his life and in his art. The social position of a peasant farmer in eighteenth-century Scotland was rigidly determined. Thus Burns throughout his life was obliged to show an assiduous respect to men and women who were intellectually vastly his inferiors. His very livelihood, and the survival of his family, depended on it. He writes to one patron: ‘Sir: The language of Gratitude has been so prostituted by servile adulation and designing flattery, that I know not how to express myself when I would acknowledge the receipt of your last letter . . .’.
Such language, from a man who could handle language like a rapier or
1954 (79)
Sir: Your correspondent Kenneth McKenney is unduly petulant about ‘Tribute to Dylan Thomas’. He deplores the ‘dry and almost schoolroom attitude’ of the speakers, excepting Denis Glover. As one of those speakers I should like, in a thoroughly schoolroom manner, to examine the implications of his letter.
Why can’t dead writers be left to the readers? All right, then, let us have no middlemen. Who will define and clarify for each generation the ‘formal engagement to gratify known habits of association’ which Wordsworth considers a poet makes with his audience? Critical assessments are made much more for those un- or semi-converted to an understanding of modern idiom than for the fans such as Mr McKenney. As every dramatist knows, public response to a play is determined as much by reviews as by the play itself. Is the answer no criticism? Rather, surely, responsible criticism.
‘Denis Glover did give us an honest and credible description of the man. . .’. Yes, because he had the good fortune to meet Thomas. His tribute, like Allen Curnow’s, was in part a personal one. But M.K. Joseph and myself could pay tribute only to the significance and stature of Thomas’s work.
‘Thomas was a man ripe with all the rich thoughts of a fertile lifetime. A man with an enormous lust for life – who drank too much gin . . .’. I envy Mr McKenney his certain knowledge of Thomas’s character and habits. However, as one who also mourned for the death of Thomas, I sympathise with his irascible championship of the man. Yet there is a point his warm glow of zeal has made him miss. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl has ‘rich thoughts’. They do not express them in adequate language. We honour Thomas the man because of Thomas the poet; otherwise that rum, racy little book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, would seem to us much superior to Deaths and Entrances. The enigma of genius does not reside in an artist’s personality but in his power to confront us through his medium with a mythical personality selected and fabricated from the former one – bricks out of straw, gold out of rubble.
‘Might we not just leave him that way – as a great and natural poet . . . ?’ There is nothing more unnatural than a great poet. ‘Let us be honest with ourselves.’
1954 (80)
In considering the development of the Christian Church we tend to overlook the crucial part played by the writing and example of the early Fathers. Indeed many modern apologists see only a brief light after Pentecost and then a troubled darkness in which the Church and the world become indistinguishable. Of course, it was and is never quite so. Mr Payne is on familiar terms with the Fathers: almost before he checks himself, he seems about to pat them on the back. But at some cost he has made clear their double role as men credulous, opinionated, tormented by anxieties and passions, and as Titans engaged in the construction of aqueducts for heavenly water. Without glossing, for example, the crabbedness and hatred of the flesh which characterise St Jerome, he shows that a grim hermit weighed down by austerities can also be a man of God. From St Paul to St Thomas Aquinas, with extraordinary (his favourite adjective) success, he endeavours to present the Fathers as men of their times involved in unique labours. The result is a book which avoids the errors of the pietistic biographer, a book often irritating but never dull.
1954 (81)
These legends may be of interest to the student of anthropology, for their detailed word-of-mouth exposition of the habits of Australian aborigines and the structure of their tribal groups; or to the artist, as the crystallisation of an animist view of the universe. Yet they have not been presented with sufficiently scholarly annotation for them to be placed in the category of anthropological studies, and also have plainly been selected for a public audience. No aboriginal equivalent of Leda and the Swan has been here resurrected for an Australian Yeats to use in public myth-making. By one group, however, this book should be received enthusiastically – by parents or schoolteachers who have exhausted their repertoire of nursery stories.
The world of nursery legend is strictly limited. The resourceful hero, good fairy and wicked witch, act according to rules as severe as those of classical drama. One would not have thought any real modification possible in a pattern familiar from Sweden to Japan. But here at our doorstep is another pattern, that which the Australian aborigines have evolved in their struggle for food and survival, in the unique landscape of the Australian continent,
1954 (82)
The poetry of Emily Dickinson pivots upon the sense of separation from some beloved person. Some critics have thought this person was God; others, an imaginary idol; others again, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who was for a time her literary mentor. Mrs Patterson offers an alternative argument – that Emily Dickinson’s love poetry was written to and about a woman friend, Kate Anthon; and one can scarcely disagree with her conclusion, for it is psychologically sound and supported by a wealth of detail.
She argues thus: ‘. . . A woman might conceivably write love poems to an imaginary man (it is probable that many do), and she might sometimes, but not habitually, imagine the love affair from the viewpoint of the man involved. But no woman ever wrote poems describing a love affair between herself and an imaginary woman. Only the strong compulsion of truth would dictate poems so opposed to convention.’ Her thesis will carry no weight against the invincible prejudice of readers who do not allow that a respectable poet could be a sexual invert; but it seems authentic and highly reasonable.
The weakness of the book lies not in its main theme but in the author’s method of approach. Too much space is devoted to the emotional history of Kate Anthon after her relationship with Emily Dickinson had terminated; and not enough to the sequence and symbolism of the poems which justify inquiry. In the last resort the true riddle of Emily Dickinson is the always insoluble one of the origin of great poetry. Mrs Patterson’s book sheds light only on some of the accompanying circumstances of Emily Dickinson’s creative development, and exemplifies a fundamental weakness of the biographical approach to literature – the neglect of aesthetic in favour of psychological values.
1954 (83)
To the reader acquainted only with his poetry, this selection should make it clear that Gerard Manley Hopkins was also a highly intelligent and clear-sighted critic. Today the use of speech rhythm in verse is commonly accepted; but such a practice in the nineteenth-century, when most verse was monotonously regular, showed a critical insight not subjugated by climate of opinion. Much of Hopkins’s correspondence selected in this volume discusses the intricacies of verse structure or musical theory; but when he touches on contemporary prose or poetry, his criticism is often extremely acute. He writes thus to Coventry Patmore:
There is an old Adam of barbarism, boyishness, wildness, rawness, rankness, the disreputable, the unrefined in the refined and educated. It is that I meant by tykishness (a tyke is a stray, sly, unowned dog), and said you have none of; and I did also think that you were without all sympathy for it and must survey it when you met with it wholly from without . . . I thought it was as well to have ever so little of it . . .
There Hopkins plants his finger, with great delicacy, upon the main weakness of Patmore’s work. The keynote of Hopkins’s correspondence with Patmore, Bridges and Canon Dixon, is one of passionate accuracy. He encourages warmly, listens with patience; but one feels he would rather be boiled alive than create a false impression. The same honesty informs his nature notebooks, where carefully and lovingly he interprets the ‘inscape’ of cloud, rock, waterfall and tree. How far the poet in Hopkins was at war with the Jesuit one cannot say, despite Mr Pick’s penetrating Introduction; but these pages reveal plainly that for him a natural order not governed by supernatural order was unthinkable.
1954 (84)
This is the second edition of Mrs Bennett’s book on Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw – a thorough, sober, workmanlike evaluation of four poets who bring to greatly varying themes something of a common method. The main characteristics of this method Mrs Bennett defines in her Introduction. ‘Metaphysical poetry usually comprises an analysis as well as a correlation of emotions . . . Because of this analytic habit, the metaphysical poets preferred to use words which call the mind into play, rather than those that appeal to the senses or evoke an emotional response through memory . . . It would not be wide of the mark to describe metaphysical poetry as poetry written by men for whom the light of day is God’s shadow.’
Her own criticism has, like the poetry she discusses, the virtues of
1954 (85)
Sir: As I was meditating today upon your correspondence columns, the following verses fell into shape in my mind. They may be of interest to your readers:
1954 (86)
This book is a symposium of articles by fourteen Quakers upon what they feel to be the Quaker approach in their various specialist fields. I say ‘feel’ advisedly; for each contribution, whether about peace and war, business, education or philosophy, emphasises feeling, or in stricter language, moral intuition. The pattern which emerges from their collaboration is a particularly interesting one: it may be called without unfairness an X-ray picture of a religion of social welfare. Two features of the Quaker approach are very apparent – the attention and organised charitable activity which the Society of Friends has brought to bear on many social problems, such as race segregation in America and the destitution of post-war Europe, which are amenable to direct, intelligent social action; and the absence of any creed to which the individual Quaker is required to subscribe. The first feature calls for unqualified admiration. But the second seems to lie at the root of much confused thinking.
The position which the individual member of the Society of Friends is called to occupy in society has never been clearly defined. In general Quakers have accepted the dominion of Caesar too readily. One is asked to admire ideal Quaker paternalism in the relations of employer and employee; but one recalls the passages in Logan Pearsall Smith’s autobiography where he describes the Quaker employers of his boyhood acquaintance, venerable saints in the family circle, merciless slave-drivers in their factories. Of course the criticism is unfair; we have all known, or are, bad Catholics, Protestants, Moslems, agnostics; but a denomination which has as its focus an undefined moral intuition and lays great emphasis on practice inevitably invites such criticism.
Without dogma or definition the venerable saints may have found it all too easy to deceive themselves. I recall my experience of Quaker schools, here and in England. They were both well-equipped places in pleasant surroundings. But I remember on one occasion singing a hymn about the Atonement without the faintest knowledge of the meaning of that event; and on another occasion writing a tactful answer to a Scripture question on the Virgin Birth to the effect that Jesus Christ was a remarkable man but conceived and born normally. I got full marks; but somehow I feel that George Fox would not have agreed.
1954 (87)
At the present day, in New Zealand and elsewhere, the relationship between poets and readers is rarely a happy one. On the side of the public there is indifference or the resentment of those who feel that the modern idiom is unnecessarily highbrow and obscure; on the side of the poets there is isolation, and often the touchiness of those who feel that their best labour goes unappreciated, or the aggressiveness of those who must raise their voices to be heard at all. Since I am a poet, I may tend to raise my voice.
In this country our standard of living is high; we are assumedly educated men and women; our population is many times that of ancient Athens, and though we may deny it, like Athens we have our slaves. But our intellectual climate is singularly unfertile. I do not think for a moment New Zealanders have a low standard of intelligence, in the ordinary sense of the term; rather I think that, because of various factors, some local and some shared with theReader’s Digest. Frank Sargeson, probably our most vigorous writer in prose, certainly the one who has mirrored most accurately some features of our common living, sells less than the cheapest American or English hack-writer. Verse, however, is written here and at times read. There are many men and women in New Zealand who have written a little verse, or read it; and some who are not hostile to modern idiom. It is to such people primarily that I want to speak, and if possible help them to break down the fences of traditional prejudice which prevent them from enjoying and understanding modern poetry. Auden has spoken sharply, wittily, and well about poet and audience:
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic school-teachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow- poets. This means, in fact, that he writes for his fellow-poets.
If Auden is correct, I am addressing not the fellow-poets who are always at hand, but school-teachers and pimply young men in cafeterias.
The functions of poet, reader, and critic, are closely related. While not all poets may read widely, and many readers of verse have never written a line, both must be critics. Without ability to criticise, a reader is a mere sink of ideas; without self-criticism, a poet cannot improve. The professional critic or reviewer differs from the casual reader only in making an occupation, paid or unpaid, of what all must do to understand a literary work; and he is as easily subject to prejudice. Wordsworth writes in the opening remarks of his preface to the Lyrical Ballads:
. . . by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association . . . this exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited very different expectations.
To my mind a literary critic has two main tasks: to examine individual texts; and to broaden and enrich in the reader’s mind his known habits of association, thus clarifying for his own age the nature and scope of the formal engagement. He is the best man at the marriage of poet and public, and often also the lawyer at their divorce. But in time there is great and real confusion as to what constitutes a good poem. One cannot take for granted as common knowledge even the simplest axioms of critical theory. A complaint commonly made about modern poets, after that of obscurity, is that they hamstring their verses by neglecting the laws of metre. It may be worth-while to examine this charge in detail.
There is an idol of the classrooms called prosody, in the service of whichfeet like a sheep’s carcass in the abattoirs. According to those who abide by its laws, there are certain fixed patterns of metre in English verse, which a poet can only disturb at his peril – the main patterns being called iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, and dactylic. In fact, every second line of Shakespeare and Donne, and every first line of Milton’s later work departs from so-called strict metre. In the work of the masters, this has been called irregularity; in the moderns, lack of craftsmanship. But if irregularity is found to be more frequent than the rule, and that in the best poetry written, it is time to find another rule.
On examining its genealogy, one sees that the idol prosody was born on the wrong side of the blanket; as Marvell says in another context, ‘begotten by despair upon impossibility’. Thomas Campion writes thus in 1602:
The eare is a rationall sence, and a chiefe iudge of proportion, but in our kind of riming what proportion is there kept, where there remaines such a confused inequalitie of sillables? Iambick and Trochaick feete which are opposed by nature, are by all Rimers confounded . . . .
The authorities for his argument are nearly all drawn from Latin poetry. He himself has confounded the Latin system of scansion, which is rigid and depends primarily upon length of syllable, with the English system, which is highly flexible and founded on stress. His error, after three hundred and fifty years, still determines the pattern of classroom prosody. Even Saintsbury (I say this on the authority of Professor I.A. Gordon), on account of his lacking a background in the study of Old English, makes no clear distinction between Latin and English scansion. Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, who had perhaps the most sensitive ear of any English poet for spoken verse, meets and destroys the fallacy on its own ground:
I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm . . . To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be one light and one strong. I do not say the idea is altogether new; there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets themselves . . . it is amazing that so great a writer as Newman should have fallen into the blunder of comparing the first chorus of the Agonistes with the opening of Thalaba as instancing the gain in smoothness and correctness of versification since Milton’s time – Milton having been not only ahead of his own time as well as all after-times in verse-structure, but these particular choruses being his own high-water mark. It is as if you were to compare the Panathenaic frieze and a teaboard and decide in the teaboard’s favour.
One can say briefly all that needs to be said about English metre in a few axioms:
I remember my own sense of discovery when it dawned on me in my fourteenth year that English metre is not a rigid system: I wrote then for the first time a poem which deviated from what I had supposed to be rule of prosody:
A mechanical little piece, but a good deal better than the rhythmically ‘correct’ doggerel I had written until that time.
A metrical pattern is, of course, the mere bones of verse; its flesh is the infinitely variable repetition, clashing, or correspondence of vowels and consonants. Edith Sitwell in her sensitive though highly coloured biography of Pope argues that in spite of his adherence to a rigid metrical system he avoided monotony by his mastery of these devices. Certainly the emotional impact of a poem is determined largely by them:
According to the classroom yardstick, in this final stanza of a poem by a New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson, the metre is slovenly iambic, and the rhymes are imperfect. In fact, the four strong beats – ‘you know, you know’ – give the beginning of the stanza peculiar emphasis. The substitution of running metre – ‘and the raven’; ‘at the doors’; ‘of the myriad’ – produces an effect of desolation. The internal assonance – ‘graves’; ‘raven’ – with its long heavy vowel is highly appropriate to the sense. The alliteration of harsh consonants – ‘graves’; ‘cover’; ‘crimes’; ‘croaks’; ‘came’; ‘comets’; – lends the poem a certain savagery. The main half-rhymes – ‘cover, lovers’; ‘raven, heaven’ – avoid what would here be the over-emphasis of full rhyme. The last six-beat line with its internal half-rhymes – ‘lost’ and ‘vast’ – gives strength and finality to the end of the poem. It is most improbable that the poet calculated these effects; but his mental testing of words and phrases would involve an unconscious recognition of them; and a critic who examined the auditory pattern of the stanza solely in terms of rhyme and stress would have missed the major part of it.
Much could be said of the relation of sound to meaning in poetry. For the purpose of my argument, however, it is necessary only to open the gate to an intelligent use of prosody. A sensitive ear, once it is delivered from blind formalism, can be its own guide. But there is another idol besides Prosody: it has no feet, but instead a hundred heads, like something out of Indian mythology – Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Metonomy, Transferred Epithet – and its name is Poetic Diction. There is one charming head called Tmesis (useful for crossword puzzles, as it is the only word in English beginning with TM) which could properly be called Word-Sandwich, as it consists of one word sandwiched into another. Robert Graves uses it:
and Hopkins also:
but the figure is rare and on the whole un-English.
The fault, however, of classroom analysis of the language of poetry does not stem chiefly from the innocent game of hair-splitting and calling English idiom Greek names; but from the general assumption of teacher and pupil that poetic devices are gratuitous – elaborate mechanisms developed by the perversity of poets, and removed from ordinary speech usage. This assumption makes a natural appreciation of poetry impossible. The whole picture-gallery of figures of speech can profitably be carted away, leaving one central term only – metaphor. The rest are chiefly matters of common sense. Metaphor, simile. Until its true function is grasped, there can be no common agreement about what constitutes a good poem. As a text for analysis I will quite a sonnet by Allen Curnow, in itself a sustained metaphor:
The poet equates his relationship with his absent mistress to that of the moon with the earth: he feels that he in her absence, like the moon, is cold, dumb, and sterile. And as the moon in the form of fiery gas was tossed off from the earth to cool in space, so he is torn from physical intimacy; but his mind and heart still revolve about her, as the moon does in its orbit. She, however, reflects tranquilly the image of his despair in her own fertile world, and hides from herself the knowledge of his pain. As the morning moon, pale and barren in the sky, watches the young freshness of the earth, so he watches her; and mathematical space exemplifies both the distance of their separation and the distance occasioned by their opposite states of being.
This is a subjective interpretation, but I imagine substantially correct. But shall we suppose that the poet constructed an elaborate metaphor to say what any paraphrase could say more clearly? No. The metaphor is the poem: an inward non-verbal experience expressed in concrete verbal images. Eventually metaphor is the only method by which new language can be evolved to describe a unique situation: and this is precisely the labour of the poet, by reason of which he has been called in Greek and in Scots a maker. Metaphor and symbol are the language of poetry. In fact, poetic language isArs Poetica:
It is a great thing indeed to make a proper use of these poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
In spite of the bouquet which he hands to the user of metaphor, Aristotle does not seem to have grasped that metaphor is essentially an expression of an inward situation in outward and concrete terms. His examples are all at the mechanical level of elaborate and special language; whereas metaphor is common wherever speech is vivid, just as melodies (which composers would give their eyeteeth for) have been created by illiterate European peasants.
There is a borderline at which metaphor and symbol are indistinguishable. In his sonnet Allen Curnow introduces the moon as a symbol of sterility and isolation; fire as a symbol of sexual desire; the sea becomes a glassy mirror as the symbol of the woman’s introspection. I intend to discuss further the symbolism of New Zealand poetry in the final lecture of this series. The symbolism of poetry is a wide field and not readily amenable to criticism. But, broadly speaking, it can be said that, while metaphor reflects those inward events of which the poet is clearly conscious, and involves a conscious mode of thought and manipulation of words, a symbol reflects the stirring of massive intuitions inaccessible to reason, frequently obscure to the poet himself, and only comprehended by those readers who are similarly moved.
Though the preceding analysis by no means exhausts the subjects of prosody and poetic diction, it may help to correct some common misconceptions. The so-called licence of modern poetry has precedent in the best writing of the past. Only critics who have either never read or never understood Webster, Donne, Dryden, and the later Milton, are likely to find themselves at sea; for one finds in the work of those poets the same hard accuracy of language, the same wide range of metaphor, and frequently the same troubled underworld of occasional images that characterises the work of modern poets. Only because we have been fed almost solely on a Romantic diet do we find Auden or Eliot strange. The Romantic genius, with its emphasis upon the magical effect rather than the content of poetry, though it produced a bewildering display of fireworks at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has much to answer for. The whimsicalities of Lamb, the song of Keats’s nightingale, the mysterious Lady of Shalott, the Blessed Damozel, have led us down the narrow stairs to a very draughty basement where there is little to choose between what is popularly regarded as poetry and the children’s verses in an evening newspaper. Poetry has become for many the scratching of a private itch. And those poets in this country who have climbed laboriously back up
It could be argued that a more flexible approach to the appreciation of poetry in our schools would clear the lines of communication between poet and reader. But this is a superficial solution. Quite apart from the natural mental indigestion of a reader who has attempted unsuccessfully to ‘get at’ a poet’s meaning, there is a dragon at the gate which magical persuasion cannot subdue, but only patience, tenacity and the hard edge of reason: I refer to unconscious prejudice of the reader against the central meaning of much twentieth-century poetry. At the risk of being obvious, I will quote the last stanza of ‘Brother Fire’, a poem written by Louis MacNeice during the bombing raids on London. In the first two stanzas, MacNeice expresses the plight of the Londoner whose town and life are falling about his ears; in the last he turns with daring analysis to the heart of the common disaster:
Because it is in a large measure true, the statement MacNeice makes in these magnificent lines would be quite unacceptable to the average reader. What the man in the street probably wanted, and got, was a slogan – Johnny, get your gun: the Hun’s on the run. MacNeice, however, expresses the hidden exultation of the prisoner who sees the long-loved-and-hated cellblock going up in smoke; perhaps at its deepest level the exultation of Samson, who involves in his own death the civilisation which has blinded him. But such exaltation is anathema to the social conscience; hence the average reader cannot make the necessary imaginative act of sympathy with the central meaning of the poem. He replies (through the mouths of educated critics as well as the silence of the multitude) – This is immoral; This is untrue; or, more devastatingly, This is meaningless.
In the past fifty years there have been significant changes in the kind of sentiments which poets have expressed toward common situations. This is particularly true of war poems. In the First World War, poetry was written mainly by younger single men, willing combatants loyal to some national ideal, nostalgic for a pastoral security. Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ still has some echo of the sabre-rattling ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ – the soldier is a young man among comrades, a dedicated mystic eager for death and glory. And even the trench poems of Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen carry some overtones of dedication, a sense that war experience, though calamitous,
The chaplain may know a few things which Fuller does not; but Fuller regards the war as a struggle of stick insects which has maimed for him a complex and vital relationship, the best thing he knows. He has experience on his side.
Poems are produced in response to innumerable situations; but, while it may begin at a personal level, a good poem generally enlarges to a statement about problems and situations common to all men. To save (in a purely aesthetic sense) his soul, a poet must be more honest than his everyday cowardly or jocular self. Agonies, desires, and dilemmas which the housewifely mind has cast out on the rubbish-heap must be unearthed and exposed to the sun; with those sexual, aggressive, and anarchistic motives which enter uneasily the drawing-room of verse, being accustomed to darker and worse lodging, yet provide the power that makes the poem live. Before they can be admitted, a poet has to struggle at the door with his own butler conscience; and by the time they have been washed, shaved, and deloused, they may be, except to the trained eye, unrecognisable.
Yet many critics would have it otherwise. They demand, like Carlyle, a
And what then had these men (Locke, Milton, and Cervantes) which Burns wanted? Two things; both of which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals; and a single not a double aim in their activity . . . . Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered before them . . . . In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things were subordinated and made subservient; and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing.
It seems that Carlyle does not understand the uncontrollable nature of an associative process. Though he is sensitive to other features in the poetry of Burns, he wishes to find in it an earnest moral statement, a prophetic doctrine. It is an error of simplification into which most critics slip at one time or another. I have spoken myself in much the same way, and been applauded for it; an audience is delighted to have their suspicion removed that a simple ethical interpretation may not be applicable to every aspect of human knowledge. There is, indeed, a fundamental ambiguity in Carlyle’s conception of the artist’s role. He is a Hero-worshiper; he confuses inextricably biographical detail and literary criticism. In syllogistic form – All poets are men: Burns is a good poet: Therefore Burns is a good man. The proper conclusion would be a truism – Burns is a man. The word ‘good’ is used in two senses between which Carlyle nowhere explicitly or implicitly distinguishes. It is mainly irrelevant to literary criticism (though not to himself, his wife, his friends, the police, and God) that Burns was often drunk and fathered illegitimate children. These were some of the circumstances, among many less sensational, which served as subject-matter for his verse – the value of which depends finally on his accuracy, the vigour of his imagination, and his triumphal resolution of the technical problems of his craft.
In New Zealand many hold the opinion, like Carlyle, that a poet is a vates or seer, inspired by a holy madness and exempt from human weakness: a kind of bronze griffin. Men and women are disillusioned to find a commonplace man, a little anxious, a little stupid, a little vain of his accomplishments, working as a clerk or school-teacher, with nothing to recommend him but a particular talent for the use of words. Unfortunately, it is pleasant for a while to be regarded as a griffin; so poets, when not writing, are tempted by money or flattery to become bogus oracles for W.E.A. groups, or even an audience such as the present one. The personalist heresy of equating a writer and his work can be peculiarly dangerous. On the one hand, the reader’s attention is diverted from the valuable insights which poetry can provide to a flurry of confused emotions and expectations, of which no one should be the object;
The demand, however, that poetry should contain a moral statement is not to be wholly confuted by pointing out that it springs from false expectations of the poet. One must grant that words lay an obligation upon their user – even if one rejects Milton’s appalling statement that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true Poem. But what is the nature of the obligation? To please the reader? To amplify the truths of a religious or social doctrine? To aid the establishment of a just State? To support a wife and family by writing what the radio will accept? To gratify a private itch for image-making? To offer one’s gift to God and make every poem a prayer? I believe that no statement quite fills the bill; though the last is highly seductive to an orthodox Christian. However, as the hymns of the Church show plainly, a prayer need not be a work of art; and if a work of art must be a prayer, then we sweep away the whole structure of humanist literature. The popularising of Christian theology or Marxist socialism is better helped by pamphlets written in plain speech than by odes and sonnets. In short, one’s obligation is to the language, and is fulfilled by honest use.
Sidney, in his essay An Apologie for Poetrie, puts forward some spirited arguments for the educative value of poetry. He was replying in part to the Church prejudices of his time, which tolerated uneasily rather than sanctioned the dangerous contemporary developments of literature. He writes:
He [the poet] beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness; but he cometh to you with words set in delightfull proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale that hold the children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner. And pretending no more, doth intende the winning of the mind from wickednesse to virtue: even as the child is oft brought to take most wholesom things, by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant tast . . . .
This concept of poetry as a sugared pill can hardly be maintained except with Sidney’s hand-picked examples from classical sources. How, for example, would he apply it to his elder, and near-contemporary, Wyatt?
One could no doubt wring from the succeeding stanza of the poem the moral that fornication breeds unhappiness. But the triumphant ‘Thanked be fortune!’ bears a different interpretation. Plainly Wyatt, in one of the finest love poems of the language, is chiefly concerned to mirror accurately his own longing and memory of sensual delight.
The answer to Sidney’s argument comes from the poets themselves, even from Sidney himself. When labouring with a poem, they have no more concern for its possible moral effect on the reader than a woman in child-birth has for the doctor’s fee. They have left that to the ethical critic, who solves the problems of the inner life by trampling them underfoot, as Cromwell’s soldiers paved the way with broken statues for the grossness of the Restoration. I do not hold that such attitudes are consciously maintained, or that my own analysis of the problem is final. But, lest I should be thought another Cromwellian who tears down much and raises up nothing, I will try to set down some possible criteria by which a good poem may be judged.
Metaphorical Exactitude. Metaphor must be regarded as a figure of thought rather than a figure of speech, to include all representations in concrete images of an inward event. Thus, in Wyatt’s poem, the loose gown which the woman wears is an outward sign of her abandonment; exact, because no other language could carry so well all relevant associations and exclude the irrelevant. The metaphorical exactitude is the mark of the true excellence in a poet’s work.
Clarity. Obscurity in a poem may rise from two factors: the reader’s failure to identify himself sympathetically with the poem’s attitude and intention; or the poet’s confusion of thought and inability to bring the poem to a final coherent shape. As a poem moves from private to public utterance, it requires clarity. One must distinguish, however, between obscurity and ambiguity: the many levels of meaning at which a complex poem exists must always make a cut-and-dried interpretation inadequate. Essentially, clarity is that quality in a poem by which its parts are related and subordinate to the whole meaning.
Formal Structure. By this is meant the obvious technical devices of stanza form, alliteration, assonance, rhyme and half-rhyme, patterns of stress. These should aid the development of the poem’s meaning. For example, there is a poem of Blake’s, ‘The Fly’, which he began writing in heavy four-beat lines but changed to two-beat lines because the form would have destroyed the lightness and fragility of his theme. It should be held in mind that each poem written has a unique formal structure, whether it be sonnet, couplet, or
Vigour. A poem may be well conceived and subtle, yet lack this quality. Byron, on account of possessing it, rates as a finer poet than Tennyson, though his ear is less sensitive and his intellect blunted. More than any other quality, it seems to depend on sheer animal vitality.
Glamour or Incandescence. This quality is not an essential part of every good poem; it is lacking, for example, in much eighteenth-century verse. But certain images in combination, especially in the great Romantic poets, can affect the reader so profoundly that his critical faculty is for the meantime laid asleep. The reputation of Shelley rests largely on his possession of this quality. Among New Zealand poets, Alistair Campbell has perhaps the greatest share of it:
Significance. This may be defined as the umbilical cord which binds a poem to the world of real experience. A poem with true significance is a microcosm which contains by implication the author’s central view of the world and human nature. Around it the whirlwind of critical controversy always revolves; for it is the one quality ultimately unseizable, because it depends on the relation of the poet to man, nature, and powers beyond himself.
Perhaps I have, in spite of Sidney’s warning, ‘blurred the margent with interpretations’; but without some groundwork of critical method the appreciation of poetry becomes a purely subjective matter. That one likes a poem cannot serve as a critical criterion. One may like it for the wrong reason – because it supports a favoured system of ideas; because one’s grandfather recited it when one was a child; because the poet is a person after one’s own heart. And even if the principal function of poetry were to please, one would still be obliged to ask, Why does this particular poem please me? The answer may well be that it confirms one’s own original prejudices and turns the key a second time upon the self-knowledge one has long rejected. As Allen Curnow has written in the Introduction to his anthology of New Zealand verse:
Whatever the causes, I know that this poetry has a use for us, and it is the uses of poetry we need to realise; and that what is admired, but does not change the imagination, has been wrongly admired.
A wrong admiration may proceed from many sources. There are, however, three outstanding categories in which one can place the poem which elicits
The propagandist or sentimental poem persuades all is well when all is not well. In this context I would like to quote a small parable. Prometheus in the parable is the technician or political man who manipulates the world of things to his own advantage. Orpheus is the poet, able to be bribed, but well aware that if he gives his audience the poems they ask for, he will forfeit his gift.
The punishment of Prometheus for his attempt to conquer the spiritual world by technical devices has been represented crudely in the original legend. Nothing so natural as a vulture was sent to prey on his liver. Instead, he was left alone in a wilderness of oil derricks and chromium-plated beer- pumps which he had himself created – his sole distraction from himself being the crash of falling markets and the louder and louder explosions of atomic physics. He continually asks Orpheus to exercise his magic and dispel the abominable boredom. But the magic of Orpheus resides in the truth of his song. Prometheus demands a pastoral ode or a slogan for National Savings; but hears instead an elegy which reflects accurately the voice of the wind among bombed cathedrals, the weeping of ulcered children, and the anvil chorus of the pimp and D.P. Prometheus loses his temper and sacks Orpheus from his job as Court Poet. He then proceeds to build himself a bigger and better jukebox.
For a deliberate use of political propaganda in verse, one would have to go to the United States or the U.S.S.R. But often a writer’s political preconceptions may determine his view of society, as in A.R.D. Fairburn’s Dominion, a saga of Depression days and very likely the best long poem written in this country:
So brief a quotation does no justice to the breadth and vigour of the poem. But the fact that it is propaganda weakens the force of his social statement. The workers must be good men out of a job (many in the Thirties were); men and women with money and social status must be tyrannical, inept, and overfed (as some, no doubt, have been and are). For exploration, he substitutes declamation, and for a statement about the human condition, the statement of a political and economic viewpoint, valuable in itself but antithetical to poetry.
It is not commonly realised how much religious poetry falls into the category of propaganda. A conventional stereotype of religious idealism is substituted for a vision of the real world. Because of the evocative power of traditional religious symbols, the Christian ethical critic is often prepared to call a poem good simply because it embodies these symbols; and respect those poems which deal with sexual ambivalence, the fear and knowledge of death, and the evil which people do and suffer. The Christian doctrine of the Fall should make the vision of a Christian poet more real and exact: he or he should be able to present a lifesize portrait of Fallen Man. But far too much of the religious poetry produced in this country shows a basic timidity in regard to problems of human suffering; and the criticism of a maturer approach to such themes comes frequently from a religious quarter. An awkwardness and over- sweetness of sentiment characterises the religious poetry of Basil Dowling, J.R. Hervey (with several notable exceptions), and even that of Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan. In the poems of Mary Stanley, however, published in her recent and first volume, Starveling Year, one finds a completely unsentimental, vigorous poetry in Christian terms, in which Fallen Man is given his due as capable of participating in a mystery.
She does not manufacture in her verse a fake response of religious optimism to those situations of anxiety and pain which no man or woman faces easily.
Both propagandist and sentimental poetry are characterised by a failure of the poetic imagination. In propagandist poetry, however, the accuracy of the poet’s insight is sacrificed to some system of ideas; in sentimental poetry there is a blockage of associations, a partial blindness brought about by the poet’s unwillingness to make fully conscious relevant but disturbing material. The development of most New Zealand poets could be described as a slow convalescence from the disease of sentimentality, punctuated by frequent relapses. For we are not only a young but also a spiritually unenterprising nation. Our pioneer fathers while laying waste the bushland wiped out also the spiritual flora and fauna of Polynesian animism, and replaced it with, not as we might think, the highest humanist value and the seasonal ritual of the Church, but with Douglas Social Credit and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In our arts and institutions we have cultivated a narrow ground – political loyalty; business acumen; an admiration (via the Tourist Bureau) of large scenery; the community of the hotel bar and playing field; the PuritanReport on Experience – but outside the cultivated area remain unexplored the creative powers of human beings. It is no accident that Katherine Mansfield went away and never came back. We could not have provided her with the tools of her trade – intellectual maturity and the courage to commit to paper what she had painfully learned of intimate human relationships. The pressure towards paralysing conformity seems to bear hardest on our women writers. They rarely manage to unlock their own special experience of life. Robin Hyde, in her poetry and novels and perhaps in her life also, is representative of a large group of women writers whose movement towards an intellectual rebirth has been smothered by social pressure and their own sense of inferiority and isolation. She tried to come to grips with real problems rather than the paper dragons of Georgian poetry, but could not make a clean break until it was so late that she had not the strength to make use of her new knowledge. She could say truthfully with Rimbaud, ‘The dried blood smokes on my face’, but in her hands the image would have been a knife with a turned edge.
Under the smoothness of New Zealand Georgian poetry lie many bad dreams and a fundamental uncertainty of direction. Whenever I read the poems in the anthology Kowhai Gold I am haunted by the lines written by an Australasian poet of the turn of the century. They celebrate the beauty and sanctity of a young woman who has lately been buried. After a lyrical description of bird, tree, and stream, the poet arrives at her grave and tells us that ‘Flowerets breathe forth Lilian!’ The implications of this piece of necrophilia are relevant and disturbing. There is a close connection between the state of a man’s sexual impulse and the poetry which he is likely to write. I would almost say that a poet who abolished from consciousness all sexual awareness would simultaneously murder his gift. In the work of this unnamed poet the source of his sexual feeling is dead and rotten. The sprightly young wives of Chaucer, Donne’s loved and hated mistresses, the comely witch of Tam o’ Shanter, Blake’s meditative virgins, the black-eyed beauties of Byron, the troublesome belle dame sans merci – all are buried with her in her grave, and apparently the poet and his readers found the odour of corruption exhilarating. I regard much modern New Zealand poetry as a labour to resuscitate this unfortunate lady.
The problem of pornography in poetry may seem a simple one; for, while the poetry of the sexual relation is erotic and metaphysical, pornography celebrates simple lust. Though one may in an off-moment produce a pornographic poem, it cannot by the laws of our country be published. The real problem, however, is to define what is permissible in the use of sexual imagery. The terrible dread of our older critics seems to be that our literature may become pornographic: they react to a rough word as the horse does to a horsefly. Most are totally unable to distinguish between the sexual and the pornographic image. But if we consider the pornographic poems which are the repertoire of every soldiers’ camp, we
There is always a close relation between the vigour of poetry and that of common speech. A good deal of Shakespeare’s diction must have been straight vernacular; but in an urban or suburban civilisation the forces that mould the language (radio and newspaper) demand a purely technological accuracy and in the literary sphere a colourless gentility. The native vigour of the language retreats from the drawing-room and broadcasting studio to areas where no convention applies. Our own century has seen a resurrection of this vigour in the realist novel (for example, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) and a near-poetic use in the writing of James Joyce and William Faulkner. The movement in verse is less marked; but perhaps George Barker has done the same kind of thing in his ‘True Confession’, and Lawrence Durrell in his ‘A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson’:
It is not likely that we will have ‘A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson’ written in New Zealand; though some of the founders of the country might suitably qualify for the central role.
We have all heard lamentations about the lack of a popular literature in New Zealand. But the true answer is, I think, that if one had appeared our various Holy Willies would have hunted it into the ground. Poetry, like a rose, needs heavy manuring. We need all kinds of verse, polite and impolite, religious elegy, epithalamium, and drinking song. We have come much closer to inanity in our poetry through a sentimental and genteel tradition than its opposite could ever bring about. This statement will, of course, be interpreted as advocacy of free love and the robbing of Boxes for the Blind; but I am really hinting at something much more dangerous – that we should be able to look around us and write about what we see.
Poems are not made in a vacuum. We get the writers we deserve. If we in New Zealand expect from our poets a lesser or a different thing than the truth which grows, however imperfectly, from their own unrestricted sight, knowledge, and expression, we do them and ourselves an injury. Sermonisers, poseurs, album writers, too sensitive plants: these rise up in every era to answer the request for false art, for a reflection of our ideal selves, for a poetry tailored to suit the requirements of the drawing-room, the microphone, or the lecturer’s rostrum. A Listener type of poem, a Landfall type of poem, are generated to fit the needs of a special audience, to move without catharsis, to please without disturbing, with an idealised stereotype of human thought and behaviour. A real poem, however, speaks with the difficult, many-voiced, sometimes serene, often violent language of our real selves. If we understand it, we are bound to find it disturbing; but satisfying also, like a meal of bread and meat and wine, after sugared cakes and lemonade.
Hitherto I have discussed mainly the formal aspects of poetry, and tried to establish some common ground for criticism; but the core of the matter I have hardly yet touched upon – the significance of a poem, that quality which governs all others, implicitly recognised by every critic, yet hard to grasp and harder to analyse. Like the seagod Proteus, it takes a thousand shapes – a forest fire, a bull, a serpent, a water-spout, a running river – and one has tosignificance of Poetry, only of the significance of an individual poem. Other qualities of a poem, such as clarity or metaphorical exactitude, though they depend in some measure on the subjective response of a reader, can be discussed in the abstract. But general statements about the significance of Poetry become philosophical or metaphysical statements about the nature of reality. Each poem’s significance is unique and particular. The abstract statement is dangerous ground for the critic; he may easily find that he is talking nonsense. Therefore I will confine myself as far as possible in the first part of this lecture to the discussion of individual texts, and of the process of making a poem as one knows it by introspection.
Poetry as an art form has special difficulties because its medium is words. In painting, a single line is not significant, or in music a single chord – they derive their significance from the intention of the artist, and in the final composition from their relation to other parts of a complete pattern. But each word has already a minimum significance in its own right: it has its dictionary meaning. Thus a poet may, without the impetus of a unique and real experience, so arrange his verbal symbols as to produce the appearance of a poem, as Ixion embraced a cloud mistaking it for Juno and so fathered the race of centaurs. For the sake of this argument I will now make a mock poem; not for the first time, but this time deliberately. Let the subject be Mount Egmont, because I know only that it is a mountain in Taranaki; and let the form be a Petrarchan sonnet, because in that form the metre is rigid and one rhyme can automatically generate another.
And hanging woods about for mantle green. . . Egmont is also bush-covered. A mantle hangs and so the woods must also. It will not be hard to find three words to rhyme with green. What are the most obvious kinds of mountain scenery? Waterfalls, gorges, and what runs over or through them.
Clear-sounding, dark, and turbulent are stock adjectives supplied gratis by the poets of the past two hundred years. But the vein of mountain scenery has run out. We must go back to the top of Egmont.
Cloud-piercing sentinel! . . . If there are clouds in Taranaki it is likely that the top of Egmont will be near them; and anything upright can be called a sentinel. Now every mountain has a brow; but let us be bold and call it a forehead.
A safe bet that it will be one or the other. Egmont rises out of a flat plain; and Taranaki is fertile.
The meaning of demesne I do not know, unless it is a place; but it is a good stock rhyming word. Now, what would grow on a Taranaki farm? Cows, perhaps; but they are not subjects for heroic verse. Or wheat? Harvest is a good blanket term. The New Zealand seasons are the reverse of the English – thus, December. The octave is now complete. The sestet will require some large remark about Maori legend. If I remember rightly, Egmont quarrelled with Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, and Tongariro, and went away on her own; or it may have been some other domestic disagreement; but the reference is vague enough, it will do very well. And, as the Government Tourist Department reminds us, Tane is god of the bush.
A bastion, I believe, is some kind of medieval fortification. Now for a loud noise to end with, in the words of Ezra Pound – ‘sonorous, like the farting of a goose’.
In our end is our beginning; and a sonnet has been constructed out of no material but the natural possibilities of the English language and a few rudimentary twitchings of the sympathetic nervous system.
Sonnet to Mount Egmont
(Dedicated to the New Zealand Forestry Department)
The most horrifying feature of such inflated trash is that it can often deceive the eye of a practised critic. The evocative force of the English language, in the hands of a writer accustomed to the use of assonance and alliteration, is enough to create an impression of depth, even though he has added no significance to that with which the language has presented him. Admittedly, there is in every poem a double level of significance – the rubbed and rounded unessential meaning of any verbal structure, and the new significance which a living core of experience dictates. But the characteristic struggle of poetic composition fluctuates between these two levels, now advancing towards truly significant statement, now retreating to the minimum statement of ordinary language. The unfamiliar image or word sequence, however, is no guarantee of genuine significance; in fact, much modern poetry can come under the same stigma as traditional. Here is another manufactured poem:
The basis of composition is still the same: words generating ideas which generate words. At most the poem reflects a few erotic associations. But how
In this poem there are several features which guarantee its genuineness. The images, though joined like a string of beads, are fresh and apt – ‘the branches snap their fingers’; ‘the hammock of her blood’ – and carry an immediate physical reference. Also, the images form a clear contrasting pattern – the winter melancholy with which the poet identifies his own mood and the innocent sensual lightness of the girl’s; and further, on a close reading of the poem (which I quote only in part), one senses an inner core or matrix which governs the development of images – a real girl and a November in the mind.
The difference between statement and pseudo-statement in poetry should be apparent. The statement embodied in a true poem refers to a real occasion of illumination: it is the mirror of a spiritual event. In a pseudo-statement the true labour of composition has not occurred; there is no spiritual event in which the reader can participate. What shall we say, then, of the early poems of Edith Sitwell or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear? Have they
It may be worth-while to coin a few definitions for use in examining the process of poetic composition. I do not hope to emulate the American New Critics and produce an entire new glossary – autoelic, aesthetic distance, rational coherence, concrete universal, designatum, denotatum, fallacy of expressive form. In the field of aesthetics, as in the field of ethics, one’s data are derived in the last analysis from introspection; and it is useless to attempt to reduce subjective criteria to an exact objective science. Beyond a certain point definition defeats its aim of clarifying, for the terms become more exact than the processes they describe. My definitions will be few and unscientific.
The world of Thou. Some such concept is necessary to express what lies at the heart of the making of a poem: that is, a heightened sense of reality. I borrow the term from Martin Buber: he uses it to denote the whole various world of relationship where being meets being, as distinguished from the world of It where use supplants relation. Without some such concept we are likely to fall into the fallacy of regarding an art form as a purely arbitrary structure. It may be said that I am bringing God in the back door; yet one does not have to believe in God to write a good poem. The concept is not a strictly theological one; it records a common spiritual experience rather than a dogma of revealed religion. It is enough to say that the work of most artists is convulsed about some mystery other than themselves, whether it be God, the natural world, or the life of their fellow-beings.
The Matrix of a poem. By this term I refer to the primal substance of a poem, non-verbal, which the verbal structure of a poem reflects; not its overt meaning, but its secret incandescence, its point of contact with the world of Thou.
The Form of a poem: that is the whole complex verbal pattern which the poet creates in his defining response to the matrix. It is a commonplace of the experience of artists that the form is always felt to be a highly inadequate reflection of the matrix.
Incubation. The period of gestation for a poem, during which the matrix is carried obscurely in the mind, waiting for its verbal definition. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:
Hopkins’s analogy of feminine conception is a very apt one; but it does not make plain the masculine and energetic response which is embodied in the form of a poem.
Texture. In verse the use, distinctive to each poet, of rhythm and bare or rich vowel and consonant patterns, with their accompanying emotional associations and physical effect.
Time-Life. An important concept used by Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his Book of New Zealand Verse: the form of a poem regarded as a complex ‘living’ structure in time – for, as the form of a painting exists in a spatial context, so the form of a poem exists in time.
The critic who neglects the audible pattern of a poem may find its meaning impenetrable or superficial. Thus, in one of the few good poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘The Song of the Surf ’:
The phrases Gordon uses are familiar coinage. But the audible pattern of the poem reflects closely the movement of surf on a rocky beach, and more, the poet’s underlying fatalism. The form does not exist solely in time; for the pattern of the words on the page, the long hexameters, contribute towards the same end. Even slight changes in the time-life of the poem have a marked effect:
When Gordon speaks of the drowned man, the poem’s tempo decreases, the strong stresses begin to outnumber the weak. When one has grown accustomed to the light anapaestic rhythm of galloping hooves which Gordon favoured, these changes have almost the effect of counterpoint in music: they create tension and introduce a different mood. It is most improbable that Gordon consciously contrived these effects; but he was for once inspired, and the time-life of the poem benefited
Inspiration. The traditional term used to describe the sense of heightened reality experienced in the making of a poem: literally a breathing-in of divine power, for originally a poet was regarded as one possessed by a god or demon.
The concept of inspiration as entertained by the popular reader ignores the necessity of a conscious willed response on the part of the poet, regarding him rather as a kind of somnambulist medium. The citizens of Dunedin who set Burns’s statue on a steep lawn in the centre of the town with its back to the cathedral and its face to the Oban Hotel may have shown some unconscious humour; but the sculptor made clear their notion of the poet’s role. Burns could have been shown walking behind a plough or tapping barrels in the course of his excise duties. Instead, he is seated on a cleft stump, a scroll across his knees, and a quill pen in his hand. There is an expression of expectance on his face: he is waiting for the Muse to speak. Undoubtedly there is an element of truth in the picture. Every good poem is in some sense the product of inspiration; but a writer who has no gift may be inspired to write doggerel. Burns’s countryman, William McGonagall, wrote thus at the end of last century:
. . . I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write! Write!’ So I said to myself, ruminating, let me see; what shall I write? then all at once a bright idea struck me to write about my best friend, the late Reverend George Gilfillan; in my opinion I could not have chosen a better subject, therefore I immediately found paper, pen, and ink, and set myself down to immortalise the great preacher, poet, and orator. These are the lines I penned, which I dropped into the box of the
Weekly Newsoffice surreptitiously, which appeared in that paper as follows:Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee, There is none you can excell; You have boldly rejected the Confession of Faith And defended your cause right well. The first time I heard him speak, ’Twas in the Kinnaird Hall, Lecturing on the Garibaldi movement, As loud as he could bawl. . . . My blessing on his noble form, And on his lofty head, May all good angels guard him while living, And hereafter when he’s dead. P.S. – This is the first poem that I composed while under the divine inspiration, and is true, as I have to give an account to God at the day of judgment for all sins I have committed.
This is the true Delphic utterance. With less than no talent, McGonagall has been visited by Apollo, and for the rest of his life is doomed to be the butt of drunken students and the terror of his friends. McGonagall should
It is doubtful if any analysis of the non-verbal processes which accompany the making of a poem can ever be wholly satisfactory. Yet the attempt must be made; otherwise criticism becomes a mere filing of images and counting of stresses. In this country the critical work of M.H. Holcroft and Allen Curnow has been influential because, whatever their limitations of approach and insight, they have tried to grapple with the more massive problems of self and not-self, flesh and spirit, man and society, anxiety and inspiration. Holcroft writes of Eileen Duggan in one of the best passages of his trilogy:
If she turns questioningly towards the physical environment, feeling the primal urgency beyond the deceptive bareness of outline where the hills dwarf our dwelling places, it is to discover the loneliness of the artist . . . But when she turns in thought to the enigmas of experience, or feels a reminder of them in the southern stars, her ideas flow back to the symbols of her religion, and she is safe again from the unfamiliar wilderness.
And further, of Ursula Bethell:
There are traces in some of the poems of the spiritual aftermath of vigil – almost the dryness that comes when prayer seems to be defeated by the uncomprehending silence. It is this feeling of marginal experience which gives her work a genuine religious significance, for religion at its best can never be separated from struggle and aspiration. A poet who looks into the night and ponders the mysteries of life and death with a mind creatively disposed must find pain as well as reassurance. Poetry is a striving towards enlargement. The ceaseless attempt to fix thought and feeling into perfect imagery means that something beyond the actual scene or idea – the nimbus of association – must fill the mind and leave its colouring in the completed stanzas . . .
I have quoted at length from Holcroft because his work suffers when one considers phrases in isolation. It is easy to ridicule his method of broad statement; and many of his critics have done so. But he is here attempting to define the complex movements of the human spirit which in the case of two religious poets underlie their creative activity. In that sphere there is no ready-made terminology. With, as it were, hand-made tools Holcroft makes a clear distinction between the religious timbre of the poems of Eileen Duggan and those of Ursula Bethell – by no means a simple accomplishment. His criticism has the faults and virtues of the intuitive approach. A treatment of poems purely in terms of their form would be no adequate substitute.
One can say that the form of a poem embodies the poet’s response toward that event which I have called the matrix; a knowledge of the cultural and ethical background of Western civilisation. My own knowledge is highly limited; but there are two related problems which I intend to exploretotal vision, and that of creative freedom. It may be possible to make plain what I mean by total vision by examining a few lines from a poem by St John of the Cross:
The central spiritual event to which St John responds is the Beatific Vision, the marriage of the soul to its Creator. Yet what constellation of images does he find to express this mystery? The image of a drunken herdsman who emerges from a roadside tavern to find his flock dispersed; and that of a woman in a walled garden awaiting the approach of her lover. Plainly this is the language of mysticism which must draw figures from every quarter to express an experience which ultimately cannot be formally expressed. But, though a psychological critic who was disposed to interpret the experience as erotic because the poet’s images are sensual would shoot absurdly wide of the mark, we need not therefore think that the imagery is a veil only, and that mathematical or geological images would have served as well. The poem is the response of the entire man, spirit and animal, conscious and subconscious. Thus the herdsman and disconsolate woman, appetite and feeling, are – let us not say sublimated – but gathered in to the creative response of the poet. In this sense it is as true and concrete a love poem as any written to a human lover. We touch, as it were, the poet’s work, and say: This is substantial man; not a mere ghost blown upon by Agape, but the hide, hair, and inward quality of the human creature. It may offend the conventional ear to be told that St John’s poem and Robert Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’ may be equal in quality; but in each case the creative response of the whole man, rather than the occasion which calls it forth, gives the poem its peculiar excellence.
A great disservice is done for poetry by those critics who wish to prune, purify, and make polite. Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a critic with a strong ethical bias, wrote as follows in 1888, in a letter to Coventry Patmore:
There is an old Adam of barbarism, boyishness, wildness, rawness, rankness, the disreputable, the unrefined in the refined and educated. It is
that I meant by tykishness (a tyke is a stray sly unowned dog) and said you had none of; and I did also think that you were without all sympathy for it and must survey it when you met with it wholly from without. Ancient Pistol is the typical tyke, and he and all his crew are tykes, and the tykish element undergoing dilution in Falstaff and Prince Hal appears to vanish, but of course really exists, in Henry V as king. I thought it as well to have ever so little of it . . .
Hopkins’s criticism is acute. This tykishness, the troubled energy of the natural man, gives Browning, Hardy, and even Meredith their superiority as poets over Patmore. Without it, poetry becomes a ghost of its proper self, a Testament of Beauty whose beauty is that of an ornamental duckpond. It is an essential part of the total vision which goes to make a poem; but the spiritualising tendency of modern progressive semi-Christian society is against it. There is always an element in Christian thought which is, in fact, Manichean – the old dream that human freedom is to be found by release from the body, rather than by acts of prayer and labour in a material world. It sets its face against the unity of flesh and spirit, and hence against the unity of an art form.
The problem of creative freedom has stimulated many quarrels between religious men and poets; for the individualism of artists and their stubborn adherence to the truth of a particular vision has seemed to many a Churchman indistinguishable from spiritual pride; and especially their demand for freedom in the handling of their medium, when that medium happens to be words. There may well be truth in the accusation of pride; but it is by no means the whole picture. In early centuries a St Jerome or St Augustine could exercise their creativity in the gigantic task of amalgamating pre-Christian cultural tradition with Christian theology. Jerome lived and breathed the classics; Augustine established study groups among the young men of his acquaintance, on the model of Plato’s Academy, in which they read Virgil daily, bathed and walked together, and discussed metaphysical problems. Yet both men were deeply disturbed by the sensuous power of pagan art, partly because it was associated with the vices of the theatre, but partly because the vision it embodied seemed incompatible with that of Christian moral order. Jerome in the desert dreamed that he was at the judgment seat and beaten by angels for preferring Greek and Latin authors to the Hebrew scriptures; and the story goes that he woke with the bruises of the beating still on his shoulders. Augustine wrote passionately in his Confessions of ‘that sea of custom which they scarcely escape who climb the Cross’. The moral vision of early Christian asceticism was gained at a loss – neglect of, and even contempt for created things, and a fear of natural animism. The Devil was credited with more than his due. A modern intellectual world can hardly realise how close the Fathers stood to the pagan animism against which they erected the dams of rational theology; but the fruit of their reaction is still with us,
One can trace the development of narrative in prose and verse, from the moral fable that adds point to a sermon, to the fables of Boccaccio and Chaucer, which have no such didactic intention. Undoubtedly, the tension of Christian Catholic morality informed and gave depth to the work of those writers; but the meditation of artists was now diverted from the Four Last Things to the treasures of life possessed even by the corrupt and foolish. A cut- and-dried division between Christian and humanist tradition can scarcely be made; the development of each has been affected by the other, if at times only in reaction. But the narrower Christian apologists have inclined to regard much humanist literature as ‘the wisdom of the children of darkness’; and writers such as Nietzsche and Voltaire have opposed Christianity as much for its curbing of energetic free speculation as for its ethical preoccupations. No dichotomy of form and flux, of Apollonian and Dionysiac principles within modern humanism, is so great as the gulf between the battlements of the Church Militant and the stony ground below where men struggle often with the same basic problems under different names, yet fear to accept orthodoxy lest their present armour should be called intellectual arrogance and stripped from them.
Lacking a Christian humanism, people have turned to agnostic or atheistic humanism for an understanding of their problems. Maritain, von Hugel, and a few novelists excepted, there is hardly in modern literature a Christian humanism worth the name. Perhaps I speak in ignorance. But to have an effect on the course of modern secular thought a Christian apologist has to recognise that Karl Barth, or the Council of Trent, have not said the last word about human nature, and that Dostoyevsky or even Sartre may shed light on our problem. Modern man desires as much to be delivered from an uncreative society as from his sins.
But these are large matters, and somewhat beyond the scope of my argument; so I will return to the first problem – that of significance in poetry. In attempting to assess the significance of a poem, one must realise that nearly all poetry is dramatic in character. The catharsis which a reader experiences could not occur if he felt the self that the poem expresses to be entirely actual; rather, the self is a projection of complex associations in the poet’s mind, andI of a poem may not exist. Thus, if one regarded the work of Burns as a poetic credo, one would have to conclude that he was either insincere or schizophrenic. His quiet nature lyrics rub shoulders with bludgeoning satires; the piety of ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’ with the iconoclastic wit of ‘The Jolly Beggars’; romantic love poetry with brutal cynicism. But the problem arises from a false conception of the poet’s role. If Burns had been permanently committed to any one attitude, he could not have attained the objectivity necessary to write at all.
In ordinary life each person plays many parts. We count a parson at fault who carries his pulpit self into the home; and what is good manners in the pub is not in the parlour. The self which a person unconsciously assumes in a given situation is a kind of tribal mask, for which the psychological term is persona. A New Zealand poet, Hubert Witheford, has written of inspiration as a rite which bestows on the poet a new self with the anonymity of a masked priest or dancer:
I quote from the title poem of his book, The Falcon Mask. The kind of persona a poet may assume depends on many factors – the society in which he lives, his own frustrations, his religious and ideological background. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, and in Goethe’s Faust, the poet becomes master magician; in the work of Rimbaud and Hart Crane, hobo and outcast, the scapegoat taking upon himself the burden of tribal guilt. Where tradition is strong, an Apollonian role is most probable. The poet tries to remain unmoved and subjugate his images to a formal order; as Yeats once asked the spirits at a séance why they had come, and got the polite answer, ‘To provide you with images for your poems’. Many poets, however, in the sterile order of modern civilisation take on a Dionysian persona and submerge themselves in the flux of sensation and primitive mysticism:
So writes Hart Crane – who was accustomed to compose with a jug of wine on the table and a gramophone at full blast. He eventually stepped off the stern of a ship in the Caribbean Sea, thus affording a whole generation of critics with an opportunity for myth-making. The fate of an Apollonian poet is generally less spectacular: a job in the Army Intelligence Department. But either way, one thing is certain, that an art form is not as efficient a magical symbol as a dollar bill.
One can sympathise with Nelson, grandson of John D. Rockefeller. As a member of a society based on monetary values, he feels that those values are being affronted. Irritation with the artist’s demand for creative freedom is not peculiar to capitalist America. Here is a comment from the other side of theDecision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Literature and Art, August, 1946:
What is the significance of the mistakes committed by the editors of
SvedzdaandLeningrad?The leading workers of these journals, and above all their editors, Comrades Sayanov and Likharev, forgot the Leninist proposition that our journals, whether scientific or literary cannot be apolitical. They forgot that our journals are powerful media of the Soviet state in educating the Soviet people, and especially the youth . . . The task of Soviet literature is to help the state correctly to educate the youth . . .
This is the call of the bull elephant in the mating season, echoed from the towers of Manhattan, and in a weaker voice by our own Y.M.C.A.s, school committees, and other cultural bodies. Do not imagine that I am attacking Russian Communism, and so passing the buck. It would be an error to suppose that the Decision of the Central Committee was based on political rather than social prejudice. Though the original Bolshevik revolution in Russia drew most of its leaders from the ranks of the intellectual class, the stability of Soviet society is now maintained by the support of the great middle class which in every society looks upon art forms as saleable commodities and is bitterly intolerant of the artist’s demand for intellectual freedom. Naturally so; for society cannot be maintained without commonly accepted stereotypes of thought and action, and the self-imposed task of the artist is to break down these stereotypes and achieve an individual vision, a task which runs counter to the ordinary citizen’s very real horror of freedom. The deadweight of stereotyped thinking can hardly be gauged by those who have never attempted to move against it. For example, in this country poets and prose writers are likely to be engaged in broadcasting, teaching, or journalism, all occupations that demand some literary background and skill in the use of words. The words are directed to a social aim, often worthwhile in itself, but remote from the larger preoccupations of the writer. Half his energy is devoted to working the poison of dead symbols out of his system.
The rebellion of artists against the social patterns of their time and place is often cried down as childish and gratuitous; but it is the inevitable accompaniment of their growth towards maturity. The seedtime, as it were, of creativity occurs in adolescence, that time in the life of modern man when he moves furthest from the influence of social custom, propelled by the newly weakened force of his critical faculties, and the pressure of his sexual instinct. He recognises then for the first and often the last time that he is an individual, a free agent; for a child is unconscious of its freedom, an adult generally conscious only that he has somehow lost it. Adolescence is the cradle both of delinquency and of creativity. The secret joy in the act, say of smashing the windows of an empty house, and the joy in that act of choice which lies at the core of the creation of an art form, sprang fromIt is I who choose to do this. By refusing to believe in the possibility of a fruitful freedom, a critic then relegates the creative impulse itself to the category of delinquency. In the experience of the adolescent, demonic and fruitful freedom are terribly linked, in his sexual knowledge and his acts of anger and rebellion against his home. About this spiritual crisis his struggles and his shames are bound:
Those who cannot remember that crisis are good forgetters. But too frequently the man never emerges, because the social stereotypes of thought and action smother his secret knowledge of freedom. Society fears the sexual crisis and belittles the spiritual one. The adolescent crisis in itself does not make an artist; but in an artist’s life it is invariably perpetuated in some way. Wallace Fowlie writes thus of Rimbaud:
Whereas the bohemian and the rascal oppose conventional living through some principle of reaction against the familiar, the voyou in Rimbaud (as well as in Villon, Apollinaire, and Hart Crane) opposed conventionality through a deep principle of changing his being . . .
For certain men it first is necessary to act, to explode, and to vituperate, before they can discover the reasons which prompted their deeds and explosions and vituperations.
The huge discovery of the adolescent, which brings with it a torment that most are glad to shrug off in conformity, consists in his knowledge that freedom is not an ideal to be attained but already a human condition, like a ruby in an old ring, that has been taken for a garnet. Significance in poetry depends largely on the poet’s capacity to make a free and entire response to the world in which he lives: a capacity of which he first becomes aware in adolescence. How to maintain creative freedom without its demonic counterpart is a problem of each person’s destiny – often a tragic one, for artists are generally less efficient in their lives than in their art.
One cannot ignore the part that tradition plays in generating creative freedom. Tradition is not fathered by that great incubus of the marshes, the master State, but by those people who have realised in part that freedom is a primary human condition, and have written their knowledge into
In these lines George Barker avails himself of a privilege which history has denied as yet to the New Zealand poet. He is able to refer to a Britain which is more than a geographical unit or a social structure built up by historical accident and the demands of commerce – rather a complex spiritual identity of people, time, and place, which his audience in some measure share. The lion of tradition and the armed eagle are at one level merely the insignia of a State organisation; but at another, they are still the totem beasts of the tribal unit. Where the texture of community life is sufficiently rich and complex, not only in idea but in fact, the poet can say We without surrendering his vision to the dead grip of a constricting stereotype. This unity in time and place of a complex group seems to have occurred in the Greek and Italian city-states, and in Elizabethan England. It removed in a great measure the burden of isolation from artists and provided them with a constant ground of inspiration. Why (one may ask) cannot a New Zealand poet say We as readily as I? There are many factors which prevent him; and chief among them the fact that the only language which our society speaks with understanding is the language of money and status. Perhaps on an Auckland beach or in the badlands of Central Otago a New Zealand poet may be able to say, ‘This is my country’. Our poems are largely landscape ones. The unofficial and real history of the country, its legend, remains uncreated. Not until a poet, walking up Queen Street or down Lambton Quay, can feel part of a complex spiritual identity, as Catullus did in Rome, Baudelaire in Paris, George Barker in London, can that legend begin to live. When poet and reader alike share the experience of having a history greater than their own lifespan, then full communication is possible. A society is itself the creation of its members; when it forbids their creative activity it has begun to fossilise. The pioneers wished to found in New Zealand an Athens of the South; but we are more likely to become a lesser Sparta, a community notable for its soldiers, its athletes, and its ignorance of the meaning of spiritual freedom. It is necessary for any artist to look clearly
In this lecture, setting out to discover what makes a poem real, I have ended by discussing the problems of poets. This may not be so great a divergence from the original direction as appears at first sight; for the problems I have discussed are not the peculiar property of poets. The feeling of people, even unintellectual and unaesthetic people, that they share these problems of conflicting loyalties leads them to poetry. What is forged out between the hammer of individual striving and the anvil of group necessity enriches eventually the life of the group. The significance lies in the fact that the struggle is real.
In the first two lectures of this series I have said something of the criticism of poetry and its inspiration. I have tried to speak to some purpose – but after so many words from one mouth I am reminded of a certain Chinese painter’s notion of a poet’s heaven. The beatified poets recline on clouds, each one writing interminable verses on rolls of toilet paper; the toilet paper dangles in the wind; and each poet is very much on his own. One could be certain that the poems they would write would be all bad. Poetry is written by men and women; and if there is no life in them there can be no life in their work. As Dylan Thomas has written:
Living is a difficult task and often a painful occupation; but not a job that one can walk out on – there is nowhere else to go. One can, of course, make one’s art a kind of perpetual retreat from every real problem; but in such a
Today I will say something of concrete symbolism in New Zealand poetry. There is no real contradiction in speaking of concrete symbolism; for a symbol takes its shape and colour from the experience which it affirms. Furthermore, one can hardly speak of symbolism as a conscious technique like the mechanics of verse construction. It lies at the roots of a poem where art form and suffered reality coalesce, and may be more apparent to the critical reader than to the author himself, as archaeologists unearth city after city from underneath a mound of simple rubble. Therefore it is not wholly fantastic to look for symbolism in the work of New Zealand writers who would themselves have scouted one’s findings. A symbol is often more vigorous when unsuspected by its author; as when a child relives in its play and fantasy the totemism of primitive man, or a civilised adult governs his life by an intricate ritual.
We are inclined to cry down the Victorian Age as unimaginative, and to forget the vigorous fantasy of Carroll, Lear, Kipling, or George MacDonald – the unique symbolism which could only occur in a time when progress seemed not a fanatic’s dream but something in part already realised; when children could grow to manhood and womanhood without the threat of annihilation. My grandfather, John Macmillan Brown, in whose name and memory these lectures were inaugurated, was a product of that age. I remember him as a white-haired elderly man in a black coat who inhabited a vast private library, which one entered by a varnished staircase – a benign figure who patted me on the head when I showed him my Christmas presents. No doubt if he were alive today he would find his grandson uneasy company. As a pioneer in education, whose labour and devotion helped to shape our society, he would find it hard to understand the view of a descendant that the pioneer ideals were constricting and even destructive. Yet he himself wrote a vigorous satire on his contemporary society, Riallaro; and in Limanora constructed a Utopia where people combined technological progress with moral near-perfection. At the end of the Utopian fantasy the hero and his female counterpart, Thyriel, visit the antarctic polar regions, where volcanic activity has broken out threatening the island paradise.
Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not merely creative, but destructive . . . . We hurried to the various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new volcanic vents . . .
The difficulty came when we passed beyond the Antarctic Ocean, and voyaged high above the heaving trackless desert of water which lies between the region of icebergs and the first ring of islets . . . How were we to find resting-places at night or during the day?
Eventually the hero is abandoned by his guardian spirit, whose wings have grown tired, and wakes disconsolate in a hut above the bushline of the Southern Alps. The narrative has the familiar contours of an anxiety dream. The Utopia embodies the idealist superstructure of the Victorian era. In our own time we have seen the too ethereal anima of social goodwill, romantic affection, and self-improvement, vanish, leaving us on the cold damp ground; and the volcanic forces within the soul of man blew every imagined Utopia skyhigh in two World Wars. We are still learning the hard lesson that neither happiness nor sanctity can be attained by a simple act of the conscious will. Perhaps that ‘heaving trackless desert of water’ over which the two Utopians fly is the terrifying but regenerative chaos out of which every island and myth rises, and into which it returns. Their island, with its elaborate mechanisms to keep out prohibited immigrants, natural or supernatural, has much in common with Mr Curnow’s isolated New Zealand.
A symbol cannot be explained; rather, it must be regarded as a door opening upon the dark – upon a world of intuitions and associations of which the poet himself is hardly conscious. It is the nature of symbolism to be ambiguous. Yet certain patterns of symbolism can be more or less accurately determined. M.H. Holcroft and Allen Curnow among our critics have shown most awareness of symbolic implications in New Zealand poetry. Curnow acknowledges his considerable debt to Holcroft in an early sonnet, and much of his argument in the Introduction to his Book of New Zealand Verse explores further the themes which Holcroft had already broached; but where Holcroft is discursive and speculative, Curnow works as a literary critic pure and simple, from the texts at hand. Inevitably, his interpretation reflects his own dilemmas. What he writes of D’Arcy Cresswell and R.A.K. Mason could be applied to his own work, both in verse and criticism:
These poets were two who could not falsify their situation, and that is why they made those gestures. To seem real to themselves they had to seem such solitary figures, outpost survivors of a great but dead past.
Curnow works most naturally from an Apollonian position: his omnipresent theme is that of the isolation of the conscious ego, in time and space. Like Yeats he has been impelled to construct a hieratic figure, that of personified Time, to set against the flux of events and be a mouthpiece for oracular statements, but the persona is too abstract and unstable. The oracular statement becomes confused. This is not to deny Curnow’s talent and integrity, and the value of his criticism as a springboard to further analysis. But his Biblical, geological, or entirely personal symbolism seems more immediate and fruitful than the myth of insular isolation:
In this, probably his finest poem ‘At Dead Low Water’, Curnow uses the relation of father and son symbolically to represent an age of forgotten innocence. The ‘once violent hills’ I take, perhaps arbitrarily, to symbolise the even earlier identification of child and mother (any analysis of the symbolism of New Zealand literature must take into account the great part played by mountains and volcanic activity, and that in more than guidebook terms). The splendid geological symbolism with which the poem ends rests on the antithesis of fire and cold which I have remarked in an earlier lecture as characteristic of Curnow’s poetry: the fire of instinctive vigour and the winter of necessary custom.
The myth of insularity, however, by which New Zealand became an Island in time and in human culture as well as in the visible Pacific, though cogent for the Thirties, has proved something of a stilt-house against the tide of new development. Curnow has felt, perhaps more acutely than any other New Zealand writer, the burden of social stereotypes; and his gesture is often that of a man fanning the fog away from his face. His reluctance to allow another view of New Zealand society and letters than his own intensely felt myth of isolation explains the otherwise unaccountable neglect, in bringing his anthology up to date, of Alistair Campbell, M.K. Joseph, and Louis Johnson – three poets widely differing in mood, of obvious talent and vigour, alike in their unlikeness to his prototype of what the New Zealand poet should be. At the present time our problems may not differ greatly from those of life and literature in England or America: the specifically New Zealand features of our writing are not in any case what appeals to the overseas reader, but the sense of reality suffered, which is much the same in any time or country.
My interpretation of the ‘once violent hills’ as mother symbols in Curnow’s ‘At Dead Low Water’ raises the problem of psychological analysis. How far can a literary critic be permitted to interpret a writer’s symbolism in Jungian or Freudian terms? The obvious answer is – Who is going to stop him? Yet neither a psychology of sexuality nor one of so-called archetypal patterns is concerned with the quality of a work of art: hence their analysis has a purely clinical value. All the same, one cannot dismiss a psychological interpretation as unreal. The critic who has once realised that the enchanted pleasure- ground of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ may be, at one level, a vivid symbolic
We are told that in primitive society the modern distinction between objective and subjective experience did not exist. The gods walked among people; ancestral spirits guarded every burial-ground against the trespasser; the sunrise was as much an inward as an outward event, and might not occur if certain rituals were neglected. This view of the world we may now consider superstitious; but it still governs all our most significant actions, from the planting of trees on Arbor Day to the relation of man and woman. The soldier, as John Manifold observes, goes out to battle with as much ritual observance as any aborigine:
A poet’s task is not to explain rationally the animistic pattern which underlies civilised activity; but to lay it bare, and draw upon its strength without being submerged by it – a difficult and even dangerous procedure.
The first attempts made in New Zealand to draw upon Maori legend and mythology as a source of poetry were uniformly unsuccessful: they were vitiated by a sentimental tradition. The faces that look out of the early sketches of Maori chiefs are softened by the draughtsman’s concept of the Noble Savage. And similarly such works as Domett’s ‘Ranolf and Amohia’ carry a weight of sentimental idealism. No doubt many a settler walking into the fern out of sight of his steading felt a sudden panic descend, as if the bush were more than so much timber; and no doubt many another looking along a rocky coast-line felt for a moment his European cultural mask torn away, and saw it nakedly as a Maori fisherman might have done. But these moments did not find their way into the poetry of the time. Not until Jessie Mackay’s ‘Noosing of the Sun-God’ do we find a nearer approach to a Polynesian mythological basis:
She has achieved some of the vigour of a canoe-chant or saga; and the poem stands out from similar writing like a hawk among chickens. But it lacks the immediate concreteness which the symbols must have had for the Maori: it has a tinge of the over-literary statement. There is no reason, actually, why a New Zealand poet should use Polynesian symbolism rather than the Greek myths of Orpheus and Prometheus, or the medieval legend of Faustus. A correspondence with Polynesian culture should occur naturally; and can only succeed when the symbols are an integral part of the poet’s mental equipment. Keith Sinclair, an Auckland poet, has made perhaps the only successful conscious use of Polynesian myth and symbol. In a remarkable poem, ‘Memorial for a Missionary’, he writes of Thomas Kendall, the first resident missionary in New Zealand, who was converted by those whom he came to convert:
In the haunting figure of a ruined missionary, Sinclair has embodied the conflict and merging of two cultures; and his symbols throughout the poem are drawn naturally from Polynesian sources. The sea as a symbol of death and chastity is linked to the myth of Maui and the Death-Goddess; yet recalls Hart Crane’s image of the ‘undinal vast belly’. The kauri tree as a phallic symbol is indigenous; yet the ‘waters of the underworld’ flow from the Greek Lethe. Polynesian and European symbolism merge, as they must inevitablyThe Axe, and notably in a poem by Alistair Campbell, ‘The Return’:
The images, like many of Campbell’s have an almost hallucinatory force. The Polynesian gods and demigods have returned from the sea (Jung would say, from the collective unconscious); the falling rain is a symbol of their regeneration; their bodies are ‘leaf-green’, a symbol of the energy of the unconscious mind. But, as Sinclair has done in the ‘Memorial’, Campbell uses Greek mythology also – Dionysus (perhaps in another role Eliot’s drowned Phoenician Sailor) lies submerged; a mysterious figure in this context, unperceived, perhaps the Dionysiac self which must die in order that the gods may return. Campbell’s strongest personal symbols are always of separation and death. In his superb ‘Elegy’, mountain, gorge, tree, and river, become protagonists in the drama of the death of the young mountaineer. In ‘Hut Near Desolated Pines’, perhaps his finest poem, he considers the death of an old recluse: the rats, the spiders, the wind which bursts the door open, are all animistic and hostile. The old man himself is on one level the isolated self, on another the bearer of ancestral wisdom. Campbell’s poetry is static in the sense that in it the action has always just occurred; the subliminal violence is over, but the evidence of the crime remains. The gesture of even his love poems is elegiac; or perhaps it would be true to say that the ‘Elegy’ itself is his strongest love poem.
The South Island landscape, which provides an arena for Campbell’s poetry, has done the same for Brasch, Glover, Curnow and Ursula Bethell: it may seem strange to speak of their nature poetry as symbolist, yet it is precisely that quality in their poems which by natural features assume the significance of a pattern in the mind which distinguish them from the guide- book verse which had come before. I have often felt the same excitement in reading a nature poem by Brasch or Glover as in looking at a painting by Rita Cook or Doris Lusk: the contours of mountain, bush, and seacoast, are richly alive with the animistic force of a ritual dance. Thus in Brasch’s poem, ‘A View of Rangitoto’:
The trees ‘searching the water’ for a broken image are plainly a narcissist symbol; the mountain, as Brasch describes it in his poem, is one of the clearest symbols of maternal sexuality in New Zealand poetry. If this interpretation raises any doubts one has only to examine his explicit statement in The Land and the People:
The attitude of the child to the mother and the New Zealander to the landscape of his country is identified. The marriage of earth and sea, of the static maternal element and the destructive yet rejuvenating element of flux, is also a constant motif in his poems. The maternal symbol carries the weight of human or even cosmic suffering; it is felt as a burden against which the individual strives unsuccessfully, and to which he must be reconciled in order to find peace.
In the poems of Denis Glover, the same symbols occur with a different emphasis. The sea is omnipresent, as a symbol of death and renewal:
But his later verse turns to the land, and to the imagined Eden of childhood
Very likely no better compressed statement of the modern social chaos has been made: the whole force of Christian charity and humility given over to the processes of destruction.
In Glover’s most recent work, Harry has been replaced by the figure of Arawata Bill, gold prospector and eccentric. The persona moves through a hostile country, menaced by flooded rivers, avalanche, and tangled bush. The sequence contains some of the best of Glover’s nature symbolism: one is introduced to the powers of earth, air, and water, a Heraclitean cosmos, with the hidden fire of the gold burning at its centre.
The work of Ursula Bethell, another South Island poet, is marked by her use of Christian symbolism, which does not merge easily with natural animism. The tension is often evident; but in several poems is completely resolved:
This quotation from ‘Levavi Oculos’ shows a use of symbolism at many levels. The hills are identified with nuns rising before the dawn: they symbolise thus the purity and strength of the natural world when theocentric. The sun comes like a lover; but in this context the sun symbolises Christ, the Master of nature. The hills are ‘gilded’; that is, they take their light from the Face they look upon: they use it as a girl uses ‘cosmetics’ to prepare for her lover. A breath- taking symbol and extraordinarily apt. One may say that the hills themselves symbolise the instinctive human life, which is quickened and changed by the power of the resurrection. Ursula Bethell’s work is remarkable in that she sees the Christian drama of redemption performed in the natural world, in the Southern Alps and the Canterbury foothills. She belonged by age to an earlier generation of poets; but, like Eileen Duggan, had the intellectual fibre to grasp the benefits of a modern tradition.
If, as many critics are inclined to do, one were to take leave of the symbolism of New Zealand poetry at this point, the impression would be
This poem, with a few extracts from ‘Golden Wedding’, could well have been included in the Book of New Zealand Verse in place of the somewhat arid meditations of Arnold Wall. The ‘stiff palms’ and ‘grenadier shrubs’ are effective symbols of the rigidity of a rich suburban household; the ‘grass, cropped’ like a convict’s hair, as if criminal, represent the rejected energy of the natural world. The daughters are ‘dry-stalked’, since a lady must learn to wither becomingly. The ‘body within the rimu’ may have symbolised for Mulgan the death of the instinctive man within a too rigid social order. Mulgan shows a profound grasp of the pressures at work within the family:
In the father-son relationship, Mulgan makes concrete the whole tension between the individual and the social mores. The loose running hexameters and the hard, clear metaphors are a sign of the release that occurs within this poem. If Mulgan had been able to keep the vantage-point he achieved in ‘Success’, his work might have been different in character. But writers as able as any today were strangled by a bad tradition. The Georgian dilemma had its roots in the structure of New Zealand society: in the great pressure towards conformity which prevented poets, and novelists also, from exercising a free and critical insight. They were quite literally afraid of what they might find
She feels that she is dealing with forbidden material; and the gesture is partly one of apology for writing at all. But the poem derives its strength from the direct sexual implications. This particular sequence is called ‘The Beaches’. It seems that the ‘beach’, which symbolises a no-man’s-land between conscious and unconscious, plays a most important role in New Zealand poetry. Sinclair writes of the ‘beach’ which ‘fends off the wild-tongued sea . . . from our bright crumbling enclosure’; almost every New Zealand poet uses the symbol at some time or other. One might infer from the evidence of our poetry that every erotic adventure which finds its way into print has its setting somewhere among the sandhills; a nonsensical conclusion. But the Sea symbolises the fruitful chaos which nourishes the sexual instinct; and the Beach the meeting-place of conscious and unconscious, the Dionysiac ground the haunted playground of children and lovers, scattered with orange-peel but swept clean each day by the tide, the place where we can sleep without bad dreams and wake refreshed. It is not strange that Robin Hyde should turn to this arena; since it is far removed from the closed room where poetry becomes a rather desperate parlour game. We can realise how much of what is shoddy in her writing came from the verse tradition of her time, when we see the clarification and maturity which has come about in the work of her former protégée, Gloria Rawlinson. Many
One could make a simple, though by no means exhaustive list of the larger nature symbols that occur in New Zealand poetry:
Each poet has, of course, his own unique emphasis, and his original version of the general ideograph; but the symbols recur so frequently in the work of poets otherwise quite dissimilar in intention that one must conclude that some deep connection exists between these natural features and certain areas of spiritual experience. What the connection is, psychologists may explain; but it lies outside the scope of literary criticism.
The dominant symbol, however, of New Zealand literature has not yet been touched on: Man Alone. I take the name from the title of John Mulgan’s novel. The symbol, no doubt, is characteristic in all modern literature; but in New Zealand prose and verse it has taken on a local colour and a central importance. The ‘Man Alone’, whether young or old, lives on the fringes of society, often eccentric, sometimes criminal, aware of acute isolation from every social aim. He is the central figure in most of Sargeson’s work; and appears regularly in the work of every other prose writer of note. I intend to
As Auden writes, Narcissus is not the archetype of the poet as such, but of the poet who loses his soul for poetry. Yet it does not seem that a man can be an artist without also being narcissist – that is, without creating a fictitious self, more powerful, knowledgeable, and loveable, than, in fact, he is. This self appears in fairy stories as the fortunate Younger Son who kills the dragon and marries the princess; and in the comic strips as Superman. A child, however, soon realises that its fantasies are, in fact, impossible. It will never become a Napoleon or a Nansen; nor will it ever be loved very much or very long. Most people after adolescence reject their own fantasy life and concentrate on what they can actually do. But artists retain the early image of themselves as important – capable of learning the secret of the universe; possessing a magic that rearranges, not, it is true, the laws of nature, but the inner world of symbols. The insane person with delusions of grandeur possesses very much the same image of himself. But for the artist we must add another characteristic, which children have also, along with their egotism: a love of the world, and a wish that it should respond to this love. Every good poem is in a sense a love letter to the world; and, like all love letters, full of endearments, private language, complaints, and swearwords; but worth more to the beloved than a drawerful of statistics.
The composite image of a child, magus, and lover, must of necessity be solitary; for its fantasy can only be made real in and through the poem. When Basil Dowling writes:
the knowledge he speaks of was never truly possessed by the child, except, as it were in a dream. It is paradisiacal knowledge, which the weakness and humiliation of a child’s life denies at every turn. Similarly, when Louis Johnson writes
he records an innocence in the relationship of man and woman not possessed in fact but in what he specifically calls the ‘summer dream’. Yet the vision of a perfect knowledge, of an undivided love, and a sense of dereliction at its unfulfilment, are the constant subject-matter of poetry; and to dismiss thempersonae of child or lover which the poet wears are variants of the central role of magus, the Man Alone who, by the performance of a symbolic ritual attains to forbidden knowledge. William Hart-Smith uses Columbus as a magus-symbol: the man who goes out to find the Earthly Paradise. And Hubert Witheford conceives of the poet’s task as a symbolic ritual:
The poet begins with the desire for wisdom, for a changing of his being, and ends with a poem on his hands which may be no more than a record of the search. Very likely the symbol of Man Alone does not, in fact, reflect a morbid state of isolation from the European cultural tradition, but rather the condition of solitude essential for the performance of a ritual act. The anxiety, however, which accompanies the taking on of this role is a different matter. It seems to derive from the artist’s awareness that his activity is regarded with indifference or even hostility by the society in which he lives. The symbol of Man Alone is thus objectified as the hobo, the social outcast, standing for the outcast energies, both criminal and creative, which the artist tries to reintegrate in his view of the world. The hero of Sargeson’s That Summer, Bruce Mason’s Firpo in Summer’s End, Denis Glover’s Arawata Bill, and many less obvious personae in prose and verse fall into this category. The hobo or eccentric, however, has not chosen his role of isolation: it has been forced upon him by his inability to cope with the pressure to social conformity. Nor has he the compensating power of the artist to make use of his position outside society as a vantage- point from which to see more than those within. Yet, since an artist’s sole justification for his departure from the social stereotype lies in his work, and that work is generally limited in quantity and unpredictable in quality, he must share in some degree the same tensions. An artist also is likely to have discovered early in his career the inadequacy of the social categories of good and bad, since he has disinterred in his own mind the same anti-social motives which many citizens regard as the peculiar property of those who go to jail. The act of sympathy with the Man Alone who has incurred the disapproval of society is a basic element in many works of art; and R.A.K. Mason takes the act to its logical conclusion in his poem, ‘On the Swag’:
He implies that the rejection of a man is equally a rejection of God. And this attitude is a mainspring not only in much of the social idealism of the Thirties, but also in some of the best New Zealand poetry of the past decade, even where by no means specifically religious. The Second World War which on the face of it has brought them face to face with the suffering of their fellows, perhaps nearer the suffering of the Man on the Cross. M.K. Joseph writes in ‘Simon of Cyrene’:
The agony of the Stations of the Cross has for its background the entirely natural picture of a city riot; just as the Italian masters rightly would have painted the same scene in contemporary terms. In Joseph’s work the symbols recur of a culture broken apart in order that truth may emerge: he does not turn a blind eye to the modern chaos. And, as in the poems of Louis MacNeice, his symbolic use of the furniture of civilisation is extraordinarily vivid and natural. His best poems rarely contain an obvious New Zealand image. He is not, it seems, vitally concerned about being a New Zealander. It happens to be the country he lives in. Similarly, Kendrick Smithyman:
The symbol of a glass tower for romantic love could come from any fairy story; the dove and the eagle, the bright pavilions, have no locale except that of the poet’s inward experience. Yet the immediacy of Smithyman’s feeling, and his very real sense of tragedy in human affairs, sustains the symbolic structure. His own poetry, and that of M.K. Joseph and Louis Johnson, shows plainly that the myth of the isolated New Zealander is not of universal application. With the ordinary cultural background of an educated man, talent, and a mind alive to the meaning of his experience, a New Zealand poet need be no more isolated than one living in London or Greenwich Village. Even the inevitable isolation of an artist can be over-emphasised; for it exists not between person and person, but between the poet in action and the dead wood of society on which he sharpens his teeth and claws. A society is constituted of individuals; and often their chief insight into their own condition is derived from the work of artists. The adolescent finds that his or her problems are shared by others, the older man or woman renews the power of growth and perhaps a failing courage. The subject-matter of a writer is often precisely those wishes and fears which paralyse the capacity for action, the shames and unsolved problems which are quietly locked away in the social cupboard. The work of a writer is one of liberation – not the persuasion to good or evil, but the liberation of the creative will of both himself and the reader to do either – a work continually renewed and never done with. As an example of what I would call genuine social poetry, I will quote a poem by Louis Johnson, ‘Magpie and Pines’:
One might have expected that a poem with this title ‘Magpie and Pines’ would turn out to be a metaphysical nature poem – a trifle arch, neatly turned, telling us what we know already, that birds and humans must die. But Johnson’s ‘dandy black-and-white gentleman’ in five words brings before our eyes the actual magpie, inquisitive, sprightly, and menacing. The ‘secretive trees’ symbolise the warm hidden life of instinct and emotion: under their shelter the children play and the lovers spoon. The kind of ‘treasure’ that the boys bury and the lovers find is of the magical variety which retains its value only in the half-light under the trees. But the central and terribly acute symbol of the poem would probably be clearly apparent only to a person who had spent his childhood in the country. Magpies are accustomed to attack children; and, whether or not fairly, are accused of pecking first at the eyes. This blinding, as in the legend of Oedipus, is symbolic castration: so the ‘strangle of screams’ is justified. The magpie at one level may be the bird of Zeus, the avenging eagle that punishes Prometheus; but principally is the ‘guardian angel’ of moral law, the spy for a jealous father-god who does not much like his creation – as such the symbol of a kind of clerical sadism not unknown in this country. Johnson has presented the clash of the libido and moral law in concrete symbols. It may be that the phrase ‘new, ironic ballad’ echoes Glover’s poem, ‘The Magpies’, in which the song of the magpie provides an anvil chorus to social, economic, and personal disaster. Like Glover, Johnson presents a situation in symbolic terms and does not argue about it. What is important for us is that Johnson has made a completely real and personal use of symbols which New Zealand poets have in the past used very differently. The courage and conviction of experience sustains the poem, rather than the scaffolding of an artificial myth.
There is another large symbol which underlies much New Zealand poetry: that of the ‘voyage’ or ‘journey’. Though it is probable that our geographical and historical environment has predisposed New Zealand poets toward the use of this symbol, one need not postulate, as M.H. Holcroft has done, an ancestral memory of early settlement or Polynesian migration. The ‘voyage’ or ‘journey’ recurs in all literature as a symbol of man’s life-span; but, more specifically, as a departure in search of new knowledge. As Curnow writes at the beginning of ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’:
A.R.D. Fairburn, however, has made the most comprehensive and successful use of the symbol. In Dominion he devotes a passage of magnificent rhetoric to the arrival of the ships of the early settlers; and in his recent poem, ‘The Voyage’, describes symbolically the departure from youth:
The peculiar force which Fairburn can give to a very simple statement is a mark of his stature as a poet. He has entertained perhaps more consistently than any other New Zealand writer the vision of the Earthly Paradise; and this poem is in one sense a relinquishment of that dream, but in another its fulfilment, in recognition that the natural world is not our final home. The ‘three sailors’ may be the Jungian faculties of sensation, emotion, and intuition; while the ‘master’ can be identified, though not completely, with human reason. His role is Apollonian; and the sea over which he sails symbolises the Dionysiac flux of experience. But Fairburn makes of the ‘voyage’ more than a personal symbol. The tragedy (in the Aristotelian sense) of social humanism is the live core of the poem; and the sense of a deep love of the world frustrated.
I have necessarily omitted in this lecture to discuss a great deal of New Zealand poetry which could have served equally well to illustrate my theme; but I have probably said enough to indicate that our verse contains more than guide-book references. Other critics better informed or more acute may have a totally different view of the same material.
In this series of lectures I have spoken on three related topics: criticism, inspiration, and symbolism. None of these matters is susceptible of final definition; but each is related to the central problem of the significance of any given poem. Lewis Mumford has written in Art and Technics:
Western man has sought to live in a non-historic and impersonal world of matter and motion, a world with no values except the values of quantities; a world of casual sequences, not human purposes . . . we must salvage and redeem the Displaced Person; and that means that we must pour once more into the arts some of the vitality and energy now almost wholly drained off by depersonalised technics.
In this country, or any other, such a renewal cannot occur until it is realised that an aesthetic statement is a statement in the context of human purposes. Indeed, we have looked upon art too often as an escape from everything human. The wonder is not that our writers are often isolated people, whistling to keep their courage up, but that we have any literature at all. Yet without literature and other art forms we would be a great deal worse off than we might suppose; for a living work of art can assist the restoration of hope – not only the hope of Heaven, but the hope that our lives, however harsh, may be real, and our thoughts and actions those of human beings rather than of automatons. That paralysis in the mind which is a product not of age but of our submission to the weight of custom is overcome when we share the purpose and understanding of other people. And even the most negative poem rests on the basic affirmation that human experience is worth understanding and that the buried power to enter into relation with person and thing can be renewed – without which the most perfect Utopia would be a Hell on earth. Hope is a secretive virtue. It survives many droughts and tramplings, like the scabweed in Central Otago; but it cannot survive the death of the creative will. As a final symbol to end this talk on symbolism, I will tell again a story that I once heard Frank Sargeson tell.
Christmas had come round again; and with it, the local Chinese green- grocer to the back porch of one of his customers – a lady, a New Zealander and a keen evangelist. He brought with him the gift of a jar of preserved ginger. The lady accepted it; and a one-sided conversation began. Soon the crucial point was raised: ‘John, have you been saved?’
It seems John’s answer was unsatisfactory. In return for the stone ginger he received a Christmas card with a suitable text on it, and also a lecture on the Atonement. But there was a language difficulty; he did not seem to grasp what it was all about. So there on the steps of the back porch the Crucifixion was enacted in pantomime – the lady evangelist meanwhile grasping firmly in one fist the jar of ginger. The moral, for the New Zealand writer, seems to me obvious: Write what you like; but keep a firm hold on that stone ginger!
In these lectures I have attempted to outline some of the larger difficulties of writing and the criticism of writing, with particular application to modern
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a moral fable
‘Thou whoresun tidy little Bartholomew boarpig.’ (Doll Tearsheet to Falstaff).
Once upon a time a sow gave birth to a litter of eight. The first seven piglets were robust enough children, whose sole interest lay in grunting in chorus and devouring their apple mash at breakfast, dinner and tea. But the last one was small and a bit poorly. What he lacked in stature, however, he made up for by an inquisitive and analytical turn of mind. As is often the case, his mother doted more on him than on the other seven put together. She named him Bartholomew, in memory of his father who had been made into bacon the year before.
As little Bartholomew grew in bulk and wisdom he took stock of his surroundings. The roomy pigyard in which he lived was bounded to the east by the sheds in which the pigs sheltered at night; to north and south by high stone walls; and to the west by a gate which was always barred except when the farmer’s men came in to sweep the yard or to dole out to the pigs the apple mash which was their sole diet.
‘Mama!’ squeaked Bartholomew one fine day. ‘Mama! What is there on the other side of that gate, and why is it always kept shut?’
The old sow gave a nervous squeal and dropped the piece of soggy mash she had been munching. ‘Oh, Barty!’ she cried. ‘Whoever have you been talking to? Nice piglets don’t ask such questions. If your poor dear father had been alive he would have explained it to you. All I can tell you is that there’s a dreadful, dreadful place called an orchard on the other side of the gate, and any pig who eats an apple from the trees will be very sick indeed. But you must go tomorrow and see Methuselah Boar. Tell him the Widow Sow sent you. He’s the best and wisest pig in the yard and he will tell you all that it’s proper to know.’ Widow Sow had begun to perspire with embarrassment and emotion.
Bartholomew, in the manner of children, said nothing: but his brain was working overtime.
That evening at dusk he squeezed under the gate (he was still very small for his age) and ventured along the track in to the orchard. The dark trees
As he ambled stealthily back toward the sty he heard a rustle in the grass ahead of him. A great dark mass darted to the gate and disappeared. It was nearly night, but Bartholomew’s eyesight had always been acute. There was no doubt in his mind. Methuselah Boar, the custodian and exemplar of pig morality, had been in the orchard too! But when Bartholomew reached the gate there was no trace of him; only the snuffle of pigs going to sleep, with the occasional squeal of a sow bitten by an irritable neighbour.
That night Bartholomew had the worst bellyache in all his born days.
Next morning Bartholomew somewhat timidly approached the place on the south wall where Methuselah Boar was engaged in scratching his back on a projecting stone.
‘Reveren Sir!’ he squeaked, ‘The Widow Sow, that’s my mother, wants to know if you can tell me about the orch— what’s on the other side of the west gate, and why it’s always kept shut.’ The last few words came out in a shrill quaver.
Methuselah Boar finished his toilette before he answered Bartholomew. Then he gave such a savage glare that Bartholomew thought he was going to be bitten in two. It melted into a deadpan pious expression. ‘Well, son,’ he rumbled at last, ‘your mother did right to send you to me. My, you’re a fine sturdy piglet! The image of your dead father. But a bit small, a bit small – you must eat up all your apple mash. It’s the only way to become a strong, clean- living pig. But about your question. I’ll be frank with you, son – on the other side of the gate there’s an orchard. The apples there may look all right, but they’re rank poison – no pig who eats apples from the orchard can ever come to anything. I’ve lived a long time, and I’ve known pigs who did it – none of them friends of mine, mind you – and they all broke down physically, mentally and morally. A weedier, more stunted-looking lot of pigs you never saw! They got worms, went mad, and stank horribly. There’s a reason for it, of course. The Ancestor of all pigs lived with his family in a yard far bigger and better than ours. He had an orchard to root in too. All the apples were good for eating, except for one tree whose apples were poisonous. That one tree, for his own good, he was forbidden to touch. And what did that poor silly pig do? He ate the poisonous apples. And so the farmer put him in a sty and fed
Bartholomew saw the way things stood. So he asked no further questions about the orchard, and visited it only at dusk, and sometimes before dawn. He soon found by experience which apples were edible and which were not. The fruit of some trees could be eaten only at full moon, and others only when the moon was waning. Some never upset his digestion; and some brought on vomiting and loose bowels. At the cost of a few belly-aches he learnt nearly all there was to know about the orchard. Gradually he found that as well as Methuselah Boar, most of the pigs in the yard visited the orchard from time to time, and that the most frequent visitors grew to be the largest, gruffest and most intelligent pigs – while those nourished mainly on mash were seedy, under-developed, and subject to skin disorders. There were some pigs, most of them sows, who had in fact never entered the orchard. These pigs were inclined to take fits, in which they would rush round the yard, snapping at their neighbours and frothing at the jaws. Publicly these fits were attributed to the effects of poisonous winds blowing from the orchard.
Though the majority of the pigs derived a great part of their nourishment from the orchard, no pig would admit to ever having been there, except in jokes – most pig humour consisted of saying, ‘I saw you in the orchard last night,’ and following this up with a great belly grunt. All the pigs combined, especially on public occasions, in extolling the health-giving virtues of apple mash. Any piglet who succeeded in swallowing more mash in a shorter time than his companions could do, was sure of approval from his elders, and might even as a high honour be given an extra piece of mash by Methuselah Boar himself. There were Mash Clubs for the younger pigs, and organisations of the hierarchy of the sty proceeded from the common belief that all good came from the mash and all evil from the orchard apples. Bartholomew became an active member of a Mash Club. He was increasing rapidly in size, and his tusks were growing longer. It was he who originated the mash initiation ceremonies, in which new members were dragged up and down a mash trough by their hind trotters and bitten on the ear by each older member present.
One morning Methuselah Boar emerged from the pig-sheds with a peculiarly ferocious and occupied air. Solemnly he mounted upon the mash- trough and addressed the assembled pigs, who fell neatly into regimental order.
‘Fellow pigs,’ he roared asthmatically. ‘I have mounted this platform for a melancholy reason. We all know that the strength, purity and progress of
The pigs turned to stare at the half-grown, pink-eared sow standing nervously on the outskirts of the group. Bartholomew, being quickwitted, was the first to act. With a noise like that of escaping steam, he rushed forward and bit her savagely on the ear and rump. The older sows were quick to follow his example. Veronica fled crying to the recesses of the sleeping shed.
From this time forward Methuselah Boar showed marked favour to Bartholomew. Little more than a year later Methuselah became decrepit and died. The funeral oration was given by Horatio Pig, one of the few male pigs who had never visited the orchard.
‘We have lost a leader, a counsellor and friend,’ he grunted shrilly, ‘but more, we have lost a boarpig whose moral calibre cannot be equalled in this decadent age. From infancy his adherence to the principles of Mash was compete and indisputable. By his consumption of mash he grew in stature and knowledge; by his example he has been a beacon of moral truth to those who follow after. We need have no doubt that in a better place than this he will consume mash from golden troughs for ever. . . .’ Horatio continued in this strain for half an hour. The pigs then struck up their common anthem – the last lines of which have a touching solemnity:
At the close of the anthem Horatio spoke again. ‘Beloved brother pigs,’ he grunted, ‘it is my pleasure to inform you that our departed leader, Methuselah Boar, in his dying moments named as his successor a pig, rather should I now
Bartholomew snorted gruffly but modestly. He became in later years even more severe and unapproachable than Methuselah had been; and his dying words were reported to be – ‘Let me at the mash!’
1954 (89)
Sir: Your correspondent Jean Irvine in her letter concerning my review of The Quaker Approach to Contemporary Problems has raised several important points of criticism. The field she has opened up is a large one. A full answer would probably require a detailed analysis of the historical development of Protestant and Catholic Christianity. I cannot offer that; but I will try to answer a few of her objections.
She asks, ‘Can confused thinking lead to such a remarkable unity of action as the Quakers show?’ I would not dare to suppose that members of the Society of Friends cannot, by submitting their wills to the will of God, perform acts of invaluable service to their fellow human beings. But this is hardly the point I raised: that, as set forward in the book under review, Quakerism has become in a large degree a religion of social welfare. I would like to express my point of view more fully.
I am of the opinion that those sections of the believing Christian community who lay very great stress on works and do not examine their faith intellectually may, while aiding their fellow humans in material things, weaken by confused thinking the structure of values which makes such acts of charity possible. How often is work for social welfare or the abolition of war (I am myself pacifist by conviction) not based in part upon an anxiety that such works alone can save humankind, yet that the forces of destruction are too virulent to be overcome?
The three parts of the Creed which your correspondent quotes as so difficult to give intellectual assent to, are in my opinion essential parts of a view of the world which removes that anxiety. The promise of the Resurrection of the body implies that people as they essentially are, a hybrid of spirit and animal, not a ghost or Platonic Form, shall live at one with God through the mystery of the Resurrection of Christ. The doctrine of the descent into Hell implies the release of all imprisoned souls, not from the world of sense, but from the form of death and corruption which afflicts us all. The doctrine of the Communion of Saints asserts precisely that mutual help of all, living or dead, who are in God’s will, which sustains the universal Church, including the Society of Friends.
These are deep waters; but we are told that Much-Afraid passed over the river singing. No one could tell the meaning of her song; for it was the expression of a private joy. But the exercise of common faith and a most
1954 (90)
A photographer and a dramatic critic join forces to make hay of prominent personalities. In their introductory note they state that the list is a personal one; and that if one’s personal taste should happen to coincide with theirs, one may be grateful for this book. But where Picasso rubs shoulders with Gary Cooper and the Crazy Gang, the limitation of a choice dictated by private enthusiasm becomes apparent. Mr Beaton’s photography is lively and incongruous. Mr Tynan’s commentary lively and superficial. One would have preferred a less sumptuous edition, and subjects selected in accordance with a standard less private.
1954 (91)
In these days, when Indo-China, Burma and Siam have become symbols in the popular mind of a faceless Asiatic horde, a book such as this is invaluable, presenting as it does in abundant detail the evidence of a living history in these places and a continuity of culture. It may be argued that dialectical materialism will oust there every manifestation of the deeper springs of action and meditation – but only by the doctrinaire critic who has forgotten that men fight less often for intellectual reasons than for food and a restoration of human dignity. This book is not political. Emphatically it is the kind of book one can bathe in and rise from refreshed. Mr le May traces the seed- time, flowering and fruiting of Buddhist temple-building and statuary from the Third Century A.D. to the Sixteenth. His style at its best approaches the evocative, sensuous beauty of D.H. Lawrence’s writings in Etruscan Places; certainly his approach is always a live one. One detects the reason implicitly throughout the book, and explicitly at the end of the ninth chapter –
To Europeans the Khmer forms are generally considered more pleasing, but that is because the Europeans generally prefer the individualistic or human rather than the symbolic form of art. Each is entitled to its share in appreciation in our appreciation of beauty, but the more we live with and strive to understand the symbolic form, the more we shall tend to enrich our spirit as opposed to our senses. It has taken me personally a long time to realise this truth, but my own experience has been such that I cannot doubt it now.
Mr le May, by the discipline of archaeology, has come to know more than archaeology. His book would be worth its price for the accompanying plates
1954 (92)
It is good news that an anthology of modern American poetry has now come within easy reach of the pocket of the ordinary reader. After Carlos Williams’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry there is no other book of this kind to present a varied and adequate selection from this complex field. Ignoring the smoke- screen of factional argument which American critics have themselves put up, one can distinguish three main lines of development – the ‘Here is America’ approach, deriving from such exemplars as Whitman and the author of the Spoon River Anthology; the ‘Court poetry without a court’, written, though not exclusively, by southern poets; and the ‘scientific language’ of Karl Shapiro and many other recent poets. It would seem that America presents her poets with too little and too much: a wealth of crises and a dearth of stable notions of God, society and themselves, by which these men could be linked and interpreted. Thus comes the paradox, recurrent throughout these poems, of a social-optimistic myth coupled with an intensely negative personal view of life. Shapiro writes –
One has the sense of a skeleton in a closet and poets too erudite to know the simple words that could pulverise it or bring it to life again. Perhaps the Southern poets are the most fortunate, who have ready to hand a Homeric myth, anti-urban, the old hates and blood-guilts of the Civil War. The elder and more formal poets impress me most (Frost, Robinson, Eliot, Crowe Ransom) – not on account of their technical competence (some of the younger have them there on the hip), but by simple evocative diction and a sense of continuity in the natural world and in the lives of men. Their work has its distinctive tang; but they seem, happily, to have paid little attention to critics trying write their poems for them.
1954 (93)
Sir: May I submit a point of correction to the recent discussion in your columns concerning the periodical Numbers? I take it that your reference in an editorial note to a letter that ‘one story by another contributor had already been published elsewhere,’ was a reference to my short allegory ‘Apple Mash’. This story had been published some time ago in a cyclostyled and necessarily ephemeral production of very limited circulation, the ‘newspaper’ of Wellington Teachers’ Training College. Your note may give readers the impression of a more permanent kind of first publication.
1954 (94)
This learned and sympathetic analysis of the origins of Christianity is a pointer to how far Biblical criticism has travelled from the confidently destructive approach of many writers of the last century. Dr Goguel sets the tone of his argument in the Introduction –
Social religion emerges from personal religion; the obverse is also true. All personal religion comes to birth in the setting of a social religion, even when it assumes a new form. It is purely a question of theory and impossible to verify by observation whether personal or social religion appears first . . .
Inevitably, since he is not a believing Christian, Dr Goguel is obliged (though not in so many words) to reject the hypothesis of an actual Resurrection; for this assumption is meaningful and possible only if one accepts also the actual divinity of Christ. Instead, he presents the events of Easter Monday as the projection in mythical form of certain profound and convulsive changes in the unconscious minds of the first Christians. He drives a decisive wedge between Judaic and Hellenist Christianity, suggesting a crucial antagonism between the theology of St Paul and St Peter, also between that of St Paul and St John. These are matters which can only be fairly discussed with meticulous examination of detail, and then by scholars as fully acquainted with the sources of the Gospels and Epistles as Dr Goguel himself.
Dr Goguel’s method, however, can be appraised by the unlearned reader. It is ultimately the method of behaviourist psychology, illuminated by considerable wisdom and reverence for religious concepts. After reading this voluminous and careful account of the early development of Christian belief, one is left with a question mark. Has one really learnt any more about the birth of Christianity? Did it occur in the minds of men or in a manger? Were the ‘appearances’ real, as you and your wife are real, or old and desolate fantasies renewed? Why is gnostic mythical literature so unconvincing alongside the unpretentious reporting of the Gospels? Not How – but Why? Not What
1954 (95)
Martinique, Trinidad, Dominica, Barbados – these names have for most people old and obscure associations of piracy, slave-trading, wrongs criminally inflicted and criminally avenged. Mr Pope-Hennessy describes his book as an ‘extended footnote to the work of that great writer, James Anthony Froude’, the author of English in the West Indies. He is perhaps too modest. His own sensitive, unprejudiced eye lacks the special focus of the historian and sociologist. But he has obviously an affinity with the squalidly exotic landscapes he has passed through and the deeply passive genius of the transplanted Africans. For the French administration of Martinique, its order and efficiency, he has several good words to say; his view of British administration is less sanguine: ‘. . . the ragged clothes spread out to dry by washer-women on the shores of the Roseau River, which daily and publicly proclaim the inexcusable poverty in which the working people of Dominica are maintained.’
The condemnation is sharpened by its sharp concrete reference. Mr Pope- Hennessy is a tourist, with a difference. His grandfather, as a benevolent Governor of Barbados, abolished flogging in the eighteen-seventies, thus arousing the bitter enmity of the white planters; and he himself in 1938 was private secretary to the Governor of Trinidad and Tobago. Thus he is linked to the West Indies by birth and occupation. But there is a closer spiritual link of attraction and repulsion to the haunted luxuriance of these islands, their juxtaposition of death and fertility. He defines this bond in a balanced and lurid prose, which becomes at times prose-poetry: ‘All down the coast the sand was black and ashy soft, unlike the tumbled stone beaches of Dominica
. . . huge nets were stretched along the beach on poles, as though someone were trying to fence in the land or fence out the sea.’ One would like to see more of the world through the eyes of this author.
1954 (96)
‘Frankly, I think you young writers are taking yourselves too seriously. Another magazine isn’t going to change the face of the country. . . .’
‘Maybe not. But why young writers? Most of the writers in Numbers are at least thirty, with wives or husbands, and children, and their own share of trouble. If they know nothing now, they’re not likely to know more at fifty.’
‘Well, in that case, why all this noise about Dada and the wicked society we live in?’
‘Dada is just a slogan. As for the wicked society, dead was the word, I think.’
‘Dead, then. Why dead? We’ve got books, music, football, theatres, churches, people who know what they’re talking about. It’s the isolated intellectuals who imagine that everyone else is dead because they live in their own fug.’
‘Maybe you’re lucky and have no trouble keeping your mind and heart alive. But do you ever listen to the radio?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And do you find you can think at the same time?’ ‘Personally I find some of the programmes very instructive.’
‘Yes, but by supposing you were really trying to work things out the hard way, wrestling to keep that flicker of a real idea awake in your mind and set it down on paper at the same time.’
‘It all sounds too desperate to me. Couldn’t you switch the radio off?’ ‘There’s a radio going in one’s own head which it’s very difficult to switch
off. All the junk of half-baked notions and old obsessions going round and round like a gramophone disc.’
‘You can’t blame that on society.’
‘In a way. Has it ever struck you how afraid we are of silence? The headlines, the clanging trams, the talk in the pubs and shops and cafeterias. Can anyone stop to think why they were born and what they’re going to do before they die?’
‘You’re on religion now, not art.’
‘I don’t see much difference. They work at the same level.’ ‘What level?’
‘Good and evil and human pain or happiness.’
‘That’s a point I’d like to take up. Most of you younger writers take a worm’s eye view of things. Sordid. What happened to Jenny in the back parlour? Nothing about ordinary people.’
‘Perhaps people aren’t as ordinary as they look.’ ‘We’re ordinary enough.’
‘Did you ever read Dante?’
‘Yes. He put all the people he didn’t like in Hell, didn’t he? And God and Beatrice mixed up together.’
‘I’d say he wrote about spiritual states, states of being. You’ve missed out Limbo and Purgatory anyway. All the dry, canny intellectuals went to Limbo. They sat on a green lawn and discussed Philosophy. Inside Hell’s Gate. They didn’t feel any pain. But in order to get to Purgatory he went round and round the Pit, right to the bottom, and came out by a little rock stair in the antipodes. Maybe in New Zealand.’
‘I don’t see that Dante’s got much to do with New Zealand.’ ‘He was a man too. . . .’
1954 (97)
Since Keats a good many poets have died earlier than seemed inevitable; the latest being Dylan Thomas in New York. But more disturbing for his always limited public is the spectacle of a poet going on writing after his gift has died. How does it come about? Those who regard the writing of poetry as the activity of a kind of somnambulist ape prefer to speak of the ‘departure of the Muse’ – as if it were all just a matter of bad luck. But the true picture has been put plainly in a story of Irish origin.
A man walking along a boggy, Irish country road saw a hat gyrating in a puddle by itself. He lifted it. Underneath was a man’s face, set grim and surly.
‘Are you in trouble?’ asked the traveller. ‘No,’ replied the head.
‘But you’re bogged up to the neck, man.’
‘I’m going to the fair at Connemara, and there’s a good fine horse under me to carry me there.’
I suggest that Mr Barker is in the situation of the Irish horseman. For some years he has celebrated in vigorous and strident poetry the death of the heart. But the dying swan must at length indeed die: she is committed to that occasion by her own persistent elegy. In this his latest volume Mr Barker examines further his own state of sinfulness, in the light of Manichean cosmology. The brass band of self-accusation has played already to considerable effect in ‘The True Confession of George Barker’:
But he thumps now on an empty drum. The failure of this volume (redeemed by a couple of magnificent necropolitan laments) seems due to his no longer writing from a core of existential knowledge. In the dialogue of the Angel and Goodman Jacksin, the optimism of the latter rings a little hollow:
The ‘revelation of verities’ in terms of which Goodman Jacksin preaches his negative sermon is inappropriate to the actual spiritual condition which Mr Barker cultivates as his personal territory. One feels that a more convenient allegory would be that of an ageing drunk wakening in the cold middle of a vast, white-tiled public urinal. We know (or should know) that pain, grief, remorse, a giddiness of heart and mind, are common to each man living. But frankly, Mr Barker’s treatment of these features of our environment does not convince. He falls too readily into bathos:
In a lesser degree the same ossification of verbal structures has gripped his poetry which is so glaringly apparent in Stephen Spender’s last book of verse, The Edge of Being, also, alas, in Auden’s Nones. True, Mr Barker has never yet written of two lovers as those who ‘physically inter-penetrate.’ His gloomy ‘Epithalamium for Two Friends’ –
does not rouse in the reader the same fascination as Mr Spender’s poem on a similar subject, the fascination which one feels on seeing a half-frozen maggot climbing laboriously over the rim of a gravy-dish; but Mr Barker has almost ceased to display that genuine concern for the misery of the human race which lay like a swollen pein at the heart of all his earlier cogitations. It was perhaps the result of English slum housing, with which Mr Barker was closely acquainted in childhood and youth. His attention has since been directed instead to the erection of a Manichean myth above the tomb of certain private calamities. For the vision of a heart demonstrably human has been substituted a vision of beasts and gods. The Spirit has won a sterile and destructive victory over the Natural Man, planting (in the words of Baudelaire) the black flag of pain in a human skull. Mr Barker will no doubt eventually sit like Mr Spender, though with less of a gentle zombie smile, upon the stool of the Professor of Poetry at Minnesota. Yet as a genuine poet with some elements of greatness, he has not even in this book relinquished wholly his own ironic wit and negative passion; especially these are evident in that superbly lucid and energetic poem, ‘Channel Crossing’:
A question relevant to this country as to an older one. The head is still to be seen under the Irish hat.
1954 (98)
One reads the letters of a great poet for various reasons – not least among them, the hope of discovering some part of the circumstantial scaffolding of his poems. In the case of Wordsworth there is added another main reason for scrutiny – to find a clue why poetry of Lucretian magnificence gave place to verse of pedestrian bathos. These letters do afford the hint of a cause. There are strong contrasts of style and content between the earlier and later letters of Wordsworth. In June, 1794, he writes to W. Mathews condemning ‘hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species.’ In December, 1821, he writes to James Losh: ‘When I was young, giving myself credit for qualities which I did not possess, and measuring mankind by that standard, I thought it derogatory to human nature to set up Property in preference to Person, as a title for legislative power. That notion has vanished . . .’.
It is hardly the part of the literary critic to discuss in which view Wordsworth was nearer the truth. But after 1805 a gradual, permanent and profound change is evident in Wordsworth’s view of society and of himself. From intuitive pantheism he progresses, not to a Christian vision of God immanent in His creation, but to stoic moralism – ‘Every great Poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered a Teacher, or nothing’. Wordsworth was indeed at all times a man of acute moral feeling. At the age of thirty-four he wrote to De Quincey, then at Oxford: ‘. . . I am anxious to hear . . . above all, that you have not been seduced into unworthy pleasures or pursuits . . . I need not say to you that there is not true dignity but in virtue and temperance, and, let me add, chastity’. These words might come well from the pen of a Bishop; but scarcely from an older writer to a young literary acquaintance.
Wordsworth’s positive counsels are over-tame. His scathing exhortation of Coleridge in 1808 seems the voice of one folded in the coils of the Cold Dragon who observes the danger of another in the gullet of the Hot Dragon, but not, alas, his own. The estrangement from Coleridge deprived Wordsworth of an irreplaceable literary collaborator. Thenceforward he enters a private winter, with no profound literary companionship, excepting that of his sister. The relation between William and Dorothy Wordsworth has been often extolled. I hazard the view that its exclusive nature, beyond all other factors, led to the
1954 (99)
Lately I was reading the Salient literary issue of 1953 and was troubled by the realisation that most of the prose contributions, including my own, were a kind of verbal sharpshooting at the morals and manners of New Zealand society, without much depth or outgoing sympathy. It seemed to me (old enough to know better) and other admirers of their own words in print, that those thousands upon thousands of mysterious lives that suffer and exalt, dread and endure behind the lights on the Wellington hills had inexplicably become a Gorgon’s head, a stone mask of Stupidity from which we were almost prepared to run screaming. Perhaps we had meant not the people, but some part of their doing and thinking, an automatic response to events – which we of course would have to acknowledge that we shared; but where in cold print had we in fact acknowledged it? From this disturbing thought an uglier one crawled out like a blowfly out of its chrysalis. Suppose, only suppose, that the intellectual student population for all their ideas about Bach and Baudelaire, Karl Marx or St Thomas Aquinas, were fools and worse compared to the ordinary race-going navvy or rose-manuring clerk; that the anxious mammas and the men with dog-collars were in the right of it after all, changing the baby’s pants or putting up with talkative parishioners, while the brighter student was feeling his own pulse. It was a bad moment; and even now it stops me from laying an expert hand on the aesthetic tom-tom.
Still, it is not so strange that people aware of having intellects should develop some degree of intellectual arrogance; just as a man who hopes to be a champion middleweight boxer may practise on his friends at parties whether they like it or not. It leaves us, though, with the job of finding what things of value really happen to people at varsity to offset the apparent danger of a monstrous isolation. For this purpose we will follow the hypothetical history of student YZ.
YZ’s childhood was not a happy one. I regret to say that his parents placed great restrictions on his normal libidinal urges. At the age of eight he was attacked by his mother with a broom handle when he enquired for the hundred-and-twentieth time that day whether he could go out and catch crayfish with a friend of the same age. This, as his psychiatrist later assured him, was a traumatic experience; and from it proceeded his later almost pathological aversion for sustained work, the broom being (a) a symbol of maternal domination; (b) a symbol of drudgery; (c) hard, heavy and inflexible.
YZ’s school career was on the whole a successful one. He had several verses published in the school magazine and coasted through examinations
In his first year at university, YZ became a member of the Literary Club, the Debating Club, and another less formal society known as the Frothblowers’ Association. At any of these gatherings he was prepared to speak at a moment’s notice on any topic. His examination results, however (he was studying for a B.A. in English), were less promising. He regarded the lecturers in the main as fools, and their view of him was no more charitable. He was floored in three subjects in Finals (Philosophy; Education; Greek History, Art and Literature) and passed English 1 with a mark of 52%. His parents were disappointed. He lost his Bursary.
YZ entered upon his second university year a little chastened. This year he attended most of his lectures and read most of the set books. He developed also a friendship with a red-haired girl who sat beside him on the back bench in Philosophy lectures. Upon her he practised the rational approach which he had learnt in his W.E.A. course; but strangely enough, she was not impressed. About this time a certain light began to dawn on him. . . .
All this, of course, is caricature. But if one could in some way trace to its source the light which dawned on student YZ, one could know a little more about the meaning of university education. Apart from all the language of jackdaws and crows, there is some shaping force at work in that sphere which is capable not only of purifying the intellectual sight but also of setting the inward being at rest. It is worthwhile to remember that though our universities are now in constant danger of becoming training-colleges for the civil service, the university tradition began in monasteries. The ‘something else’ which we obscurely demand of universities may be the balance of contemplative and activist living. There is in each man two selves whom I chose to symbolise as crow and phoenix. The crow is analytical, predatory, assertive. Passing over the desert, it sees the bones of Leviathan where the Deluge has left them uncovered. It enters the cavern of the great skull, pecks out a morsel of gristle that still adheres to the bleached nostril, caws twice for the pleasure of hearing the sound of its own voice amplified, and flies on towards Babel which is its spiritual home. The crow is incapable of love or reverence; but it has strong
The phoenix builds regularly in the Arabian Desert her funeral pyre of cedar and balsam on which she is consumed and recreated. The torture of the flames she dreads, yet loves, because it is inflicted by the Sun, the Father of all birds. This, to the crow, is obsessional masochism. It has been promised to the phoenix that after many deaths she will become all fire and rise to live for ever in the heart of the Sun. Her plumage, beautiful to others, seems foul to her because it prevents the Sun’s rays from piercing her heart entirely. She desires the solitude of the desert, not because it is lonely, but because there the Sun’s light is clearest and strongest, so clear and strong that He seems at times to descend to earth and dance among the ruinous caves. Strangely, the places where this vision occurs are marked afterwards not by disfigurement but by cooling oases.
Undoubtedly without the crow we could have no civilisation; but without the phoenix that civilisation would have no centre of gravity, ultimately no meaning. In a world of secular values the university is an anomaly, a hybrid organism. However regimented its students may become, somewhere in its recesses the monastic phoenix has hidden herself. A student who begins with a sense of obligation to his parents or his boss, ends with a sense of obligation towards the material of his labour, for Truth’s sake. A student who begins with a sense of onerous burdens, ends with the acceptance of a mysterious discipline most fruitful often when most laborious. A student who begins with intellectual arrogance ends with the sense of the slightness and shoddiness of the best he can do. Perhaps even with a genuine poverty of the spirit. Which is from the Sun, the Father of all birds, even of the spotted crow.
1954 (100)
Your questionnaire rang a bell at several points for me. Do you want to stay in New Zealand, or go abroad? Would you like to be a full-time writer? What do you think of the value of New Zealand criticism? Should we take rhetoric and wring its neck? The last one was like a tick biting me where I had been bitten before.
Do you want to stay in New Zealand? Yes and no. New Zealand is the right place to be in when the rocket-guns go off. One may be able to hide behind Mount Cook. And a country whose products are mainly primary cannot easily starve a man with a few simple skills and light fingers. But the real question was implied, not fully stated – Do you think the New Zealand climate encourages the growth of writers as well as gorse and Canadian thistle?
Writers require two main incentives to survive and grow. The knowledge that their self-appointed task will earn them the recognition that socially
It would be stupid to say that there is no audience for New Zealand writing. Every brand of commercial literature, from stories and poems in school journals to high-grade radio plays, will be read and listened to, and the authors paid and praised. But does that help much? A commercial writer has his guts squeezed out from the start. He wants to write about a factory strike – there is a deadpan way of doing it so that neither a factory owner nor a trade unionist would be offended or for that matter give a damn about it. He wants to write about marriage, his own or someone else’s – there is an arch, remote way of doing it so that nobody will be really worried by the underground rumble of sex and spiritual crisis. He wants to write about God and humanity – he had better leave out the doctrine of Original Sin, offensive to a society whose wealth and culture is founded on clean refrigeration. Unconsciously, willy-nilly, all the boys and girls that start writing are gathered in by a dragnet of quiet acceptable stereotypes. They forget they ever really worried about anything. And the tough ones, the real writers, are always making intricate gestures of repudiation – to keep their feet clear of the puppet-strings. As for something real to bite on, well, a writer can find that anywhere, until his teeth drop out. But the more he tries to write about important matters the more he will find he is up against it. I seem to remember a letter in the Dominion saying how dreadful it was that our young Queen should be subjected to the decadent kind of writing that appears in Landfall; and that, worse still, that periodical is supported by the State Literary Fund. Perhaps only a straw; but the wind blows readily that way. Every now and then an advertiser of liniments for sprained consciences does in fact read a story or poem and understand it. Then he gets on his old grey mare and charges head down, St George against the Dragon. You could not tell him that poems and stories are not pills, manifestos or blueprints of Utopia, but ways of coming at life, as private as a kiss and as public as a morgue, and as different as the writers are that make them.
Do I want to stay in New Zealand then? On the whole – Yes. The audience is small for straight original writing, and commercial stereotypes have watered down the imagination even of that small audience. But if your grandmother, besides being an old lady of offensive personal habits, and her ideas drawn from Truth and the Readers’ Digest, is suffering from, say, pernicious anaemia, do you leave her to rot – or do you come forward as a blood donor? It’s more a matter of personal taste. A writer is not only concerned with an obvious audience but also with the people he grew up among. He must recognise too that there are other virtues beside those which generate an intelligent response to imaginative writing. He is not just bringing light to the Gentiles; the Gentiles themselves are the source of most of his light. In the long run, for me, to be a writer is to be committed to the world I live in, that is, New Zealand. The grass over the fence may look greener; one may push the fence
Would you like to be a full-time writer? Yes. But let us talk seriously, and not hold carrots in front of donkeys’ noses. Who is going to pay me? And what are they going to ask, oh so subtly, in return? I have probably robbed time from many employers in order to write. I don’t think I would have written much more good verse in the past ten years if God had given me a rich, dead uncle. I might have drunk it all; or been so fascinated by it that I wanted to watch it breed. Poverty, even tiredness and lack of leisure, are not the greatest checks to good writing; rather, a too complete surrender to the local climate of opinion:
However, let us not be too high-minded either. A literary grant, with no strings attached, as a payment for simply going on living, not as a mustard- and-pepper mixture to make one lay poorer quality eggs faster – I would not turn it down if it turned up. Most writers do commercial work with their left hands, and with their right hands, occasionally, what they really can respect themselves for. It is like the aboriginal notion of Hell, the black- fellows moving forever through the smoke with their right hands immovable at their sides. One has to sell out at some point; but let it be definitely to the highest bidder.
What do you think of the value of New Zealand criticism? It helps. It lets the writer know that someone has read him. It lets readers know that the book exists. But does it really ‘determine in part the development of our national literature and self-awareness’? (I am quoting from an imaginary
W.E.A. lecture). I think not. What does a writer want from a critic? Either to be told that his writing is good when he himself is not so sure of it; or to pick up on the way the book has affected an assumedly intelligent reader. I doubt if writers change their style much because of criticism; though they may conceivably stop writing from lack of official recognition. A writer generally knows his literary vices as well as or better than the critics. He may of course write the kind of thing that a certain kind of critic will approve or editor publish. That happened with C.A. Marris’s Best Poems; it may happen at times with a periodical like Landfall; and it is a great pity. But the best New
Should we take rhetoric and wring its neck? Yes, if what is meant is the ornamental clichés of a poem, the dead wood. Pruning is a poet’s main job anyway. But if you mean the time-life of a poem, its existence as a rhythmical, sensory pattern in time – by no means, it can’t be done. Rhetoric is an emotionally coloured term. It may mean ossified formal language; or a poet’s method which is directed to words as an effective audible pattern in their own right. Even the best verbal pattern can only be a vehicle, a reflection of the core or matrix of a poem, that unwritten mystery which it is wrapped around. But if you deny the poet the right to play building blocks with words, you will not get poems but only animal noises. A double preoccupation is necessary, with the structure of language and with its meaning. The perfect balance would produce efficient rhetoric.
It seems to me that a writer, however muddled he may be, must first be on the side of life – which is a mystery, an ocean rather than an Admiralty chart. But the death he struggles with, as much through personal living as through public statement, is a constant and ineradicable enemy. It is within as well as without, the germ of sterility and chaos. And while social stereotypes in some form are probably indispensable, they also have something of the smell of death about them. At the time of the creation of an art form there is, under tension, a split in the artist’s personality. The live self looks at the dead self, curses or weeps; but it also goes out to meet what is alive in the world it inhabits. The process is a painful one; and as most people look on pain as a prime evil, they dislike the artist for reminding them of what they spend time and money to avoid. But they too are drawn to the creative moment, which asserts human freedom and dignity. I do not think our writers will ever lack the beginning of an audience.
1954 (101)
In first considering the work of Frank Sargeson it is well for us to forget for a while that he is a New Zealander. Many critics in this country overestimate the influence of regional tradition and habit on New Zealand authors. There has even grown up a cult among our intellectuals which traces our cultural deficiencies from an unspecified separateness from English and European
I have found two levels in most of Sargeson’s work. The first, social; the second what I will call for want of a better word existential. The social trend of Sargeson’s thought is clear enough – it has endeared him greatly to Leftist reformers. Superficially at least, his short sketch ‘In the Department’ is a criticism of the waste and muddle of a Government department. The story could have been written by G.R. Gilbert, but a bitter tang marks it with Sargeson’s private stamp. In ‘An Attempt at an Explanation’ Sargeson tackles a much more subtle and ambitious theme. A church-going family, mother and son, are on the brink of starvation. They try unsuccessfully to pawn the family Bible; and, still hungry, sit down to rest upon a park bench. The minister of their church walks by looking at flowers, and greets them politely. That is all. The story is told through the mouth of the boy. Here Sargeson is the social moralist; and the bite of his sermon is heightened by his carefully casual idiom. The fault of the story lies in the fact that as in all propaganda, the dice are loaded. He leads one to expect a revelation of the human heart and leaves one with a moral text. At such times his characters become puppets, and no amount of fascinating and pawky conversation can bring them to life. A sermon is valuable in its own place; it is when it is dressed up as a story that one must object. In a sketch such as the title piece of his first book ‘Conversation with My Uncle’ the moralising intention is so obvious that one is not offended.
Yet Sargeson, being a creative artist as well as a moralist, is concerned with people more than with ideas. On an existential level his view is sourly compassionate, and at times perhaps he probes deeper than he knows. That superb and tender story ‘An Affair of the Heart’ leaves no room for anger or judgment. Mrs Crawley’s love for her son, though it eventually destroys her sanity, carries its own terrible justification. Truly it is an affair of the heart.
For a proper evaluation of the significance of Sargeson’s work, one must consider it in the light of contemporary conduct and belief. We are too close to the writing of our own century to see its strangeness, the peculiar warp which is in us also. Writers in the past could assume in their audience a common acceptance of their own scheme of values. From Shakespeare’sOthello to Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, characters in fiction could be regarded as independent beings, capable of choice (and hence of their own destruction), in the main controlling their own destiny. Their actions mattered. In the background stood always the yet unbroken structure of Christian faith and ethics. But science and humanism, impelled first by the Renaissance, have since undermined it. By science I mean the liberal philosophy which applies the theory of evolution to moral growth also, regarding this growth not as a matter of individual faith and conflict but as the inevitable concomitant of change. In this country the prevalent philosophy is an amalgam of liberalism and broken-down Protestantism. Ethics remain with us though faith has departed. Condemnation is laid on the more obvious sensual vices, while spiritual pride and complacency have an open field
Idealist Eros replaces the fact of Agape. The Platonic Form replaces the Mass.
The instinct of writers has drawn them to concrete experience, the mystery of fact rather than concept. It is interesting to observe that Sargeson reserves his big guns for the Protestant clergy. One may be sure that in a Sargeson story a minister will be ineffectual, hypocritical, or homosexual. To Roman Catholics he is much more kindly. The Orange grandfather of ‘Two Worlds’ is an ugly bigot, the old priest a most attractive character. In ‘They Gave Her a Rise’ the Roman Catholic narrator is momentarily shocked by the hysterical and informal prayer of his landlady. Above all, Terry, the consumptive barman in Sargeson’s masterpiece That Summer, is a Roman Catholic:
So I doubled his pillow up and used my own as well then I got him undressed, and I’d never noticed it before, but there was a string round his neck with a medal-thing at the end of the loop. I had a look and it said
I AM A CATHOLIC. IN CASE OF ACCIDENT, SEND FOR A PRIEST.
If Sargeson’s effects were ever accidental, this passage could be regarded as part of the accidental scenery. But in the grim spiritual desert of That Summer it stands out like the hieroglyphic of another language – that of meaning and reconciliation.
It is probable, however, that Sargeson’s kindness to Roman Catholics springs mainly from a shallower source. Since their theology banishes the
Life was pretty quiet there, the old man said, there wasn’t any hurry and bustle, it was just real old-fashioned country life. Now and then there’d be a picnic in the school grounds, where the trees were very thick and shady, or perhaps they’d hold a dance in the school itself but that was about all. You couldn’t have found a nicer place, the old man said. His uncle’s house was an old place just about buried in a tangle of honeysuckle and rambler roses, not the sort of farmhouse it’s so easy to find nowadays. The railway ran alongside but it was a branch line; there weren’t many trains and they’d run at any old times. Why, the old man said, he could remember one time when the driver stopped the train to get off and buy a watermelon from his uncle. But nobody worried, because people took life differently in those days.
The scenery is dwelt upon lovingly and precisely. Though the actual conversation in a Sargeson story is close to the Hemingway patter, much of his description verges on prose poetry. In that macabre sketch ‘A Great Day’, the description of the calm sea and dinghy riding the tide makes up for a plot a trifle too loud. And the New Zealand idiom itself is as carefully and consciously handled as the language of any poem.
One must remember that since Elizabethan times there has been a progressive devaluation of words.
In 1593 when Thomas Nashe wrote the lines quoted above, what a man saw and heard and what he felt could be completely welded in words. Death
Though this kind of writing can become irritatingly monotonous, it has at its best a considerable liturgical power. Its value lies far less in an accurate reproduction of common speech than in the creation of a new art form.
While Sargeson may be compared stylistically with Hemingway his view of the world and human nature is subtly different. Hemingway’s characters lust, kill and die with bravado; they rarely show sympathy with the objects of their aggression; and among them a true I-Thou relationship is inconceivable. Sargeson’s characters are more introspective and capable of considerable compassion. The truth is that Sargeson, never far from being a moralist, has not rejected the nonconformist scale of values. He has merely inverted them, and perhaps improved upon them. His tolerance extends to all lost men, cranks and sexual perverts. It is the self-righteous whom he most condemns. Ethically the view is near to that of orthodox Christianity. He expresses it explicitly in a good sermon and half-made story, ‘The Good Samaritan’. The narrator’s friend finds a ship’s fireman dead drunk and retching near the
The ubiquitous ‘I’ of Sargeson’s stories comes fully into the light in his powerful novelette That Summer. I leave aside When the Wind Blows, for I feel that Sargeson has not shown that he can write a full-length novel. In spite of fine and moving passages this novel is undeveloped, the ostensible theme too mechanical, the deeper currents too vaguely indicated. It is rather the raw material which could be worked into a number of excellent short stories. That Summer on the other hand, brings to full stature a form which he has mastered. Before discussing the place and value of this story in Sargeson’s work, it is necessary to make some comment on his treatment of sexual themes.
Some of his second-rate work is obviously designed to shock a conventional audience. And yet a conventional reader is unlikely even to begin a book by Sargeson; while the semi-illiterate would consider him highbrow. ‘Sale Day’, ‘I’ve Lost My Pal’, and perhaps ‘A Man and His Wife’, all show a crude and sneering insistence on sexual abnormality. He has nowhere a convincing and coherent picture of married life. Even his greatest story is saved only by the intensity of its realism from becoming a bad homosexual joke. But behind the sneer lies a deep and genuine valuation of that kind of friendship which merges imperceptibly into homosexual love. The centre in time round which his stories move lies in the Depression days of the late Twenties and early Thirties. At this time the always existing group of drifting job-hunters, homeless and classless men, was swelled by an influx from above as businesses crashed or pruned their staffs to a minimum. In this melting pot the virtues of tolerance and group loyalty crystallised; a powerful though inarticulate Leftist movement emerged, which was eventually to bring about a change of Government; and the keen friendship of ‘cobbers’ was the strongest tie. Sargeson can evoke as no other New Zealand writer has done the atmosphere of tension and the sense of freedom from all conventional obligations which this period stimulated.
In That Summer the myth of the lost man who has no place in society and scarcely desires it is fully developed. One is struck immediately by the similarity of the world-view implied in this story and that which French existentialists have given a philosophical context and some French novelists a voice. (It is surely no accident that Sargeson’s book was lately translated into French.) If it rested on philosophical distinctions, the comparison would be at fault. For Sargeson, as I have attempted to show, has many of the characteristics of a Christian moralist. But existentialism has a lyrical rather than an intellectual basis. By it the criminal who lives in continual fore-knowledge and acceptance of his death is exalted to heroic stature. The plot of Camus’ The Outsider is simple enough. A man attends his mother’s funeral without grief; picks up a girl the same day and begins
Sargeson too lays strong emphasis on spiritual isolation. His hero indulges less in cerebration than does the Outsider, and consequently the sincerity of mood is evident. But despite similarity of mood, the great difference between That Summer and The Outsider lies in the fact that while the Outsider does not achieve an I-Thou relationship with any person and remains imprisoned in his death-conscious self, Sargeson’s Bill does indeed, however inadequately, love his consumptive ‘cobber’. That Summer is a love story.
In keeping with Sargeson’s careful elimination of any way of escape from the razor-edge of existential awareness, Bill disowns his brief moments of altruism:
I’ll meet you at the Dally’s at twelve o’clock for dinner, I said, and I gave him half a dollar. And I went off whistling and feeling life was good when a man had a cobber like Terry to kick around with, and maybe I was feeling good because I was thinking what a hell of a good joker I was. Though if I was I was kidding myself, because when all’s said and done I was only doing what I was to please myself, though it might have been a roundabout way of doing it.
The story within a story of the sailor’s ‘wife’ who turns out to be his catamite seems to have no bearing on the main theme. Perhaps Sargeson intends an illuminating parallel between the physical relationship of the Popeye couple and the subtle emotional relationship of Bill and Terry. Or perhaps he is playing a joke on the earnest reader. The jail scenes are certainly sensitive recording, and one would be loath to part with them. The insistence on detail in all of Sargeson’s stories is characteristic of writing that verges on existentialism. The detail is a web stretched over an appalling inner void; at times it wears thin and one can see the blackness underneath:
I couldn’t decide what to do to fill in the time, and I couldn’t keep my mind off thinking about a job. I tried reading my True Story but it was no good. I’d just lie on my bed but that was no good either, and I’d have to keep getting up to walk up and down. I’d stop in the middle of the floor to roll a cigarette and listen to them downstairs. I’d think, my God I’ve got to have someone to talk to, but even after I’d turned out the light and had my hand
on the door knob I’d go back and just flop on the bed. But the last time I flopped I must have dozed off, because I woke up lying in my clothes, and I wondered where the hell I was. I’d been dreaming, and I still seemed to be in the dream, because there wasn’t one sound I could hear no matter how hard I listened.
A critic has compared That Summer to washing hung on a line. The comparison is apt – the succeeding sketches are the clothes (some of them could be called dirty linen) and the line is the ironic, scarcely articulate love story moving inexorably to its tragic ending. Among the sketches one finds some of Sargeson’s tenderest and best. The story of Fanny and the money tree has a gentle humour not paralleled elsewhere. In another section Bill, whose money has been stolen by a man and his girl-friend lately met and befriended, shows an astonishing yet quite convincing degree of charity. Sargeson walks securely the delicate tightrope between sentimentality and mock-toughness.
At the beginning of this article I said that for a full appreciation of his work one must forget that Sargeson is a New Zealander. Having indicated the wider context of his writing, I partially withdraw that assertion. Speaking more personally than perhaps I have a right to, I can say that my own poetry has been warped and coloured by the unique quality of New Zealand landscape and New Zealand customs. I regard myself as being willy-nilly a New Zealander. The conformist morality of this country which has given Sargeson’s prose its impetus and direction is different from similar mores elsewhere, since more blanketing and deadly. Our community is too small for rebels (and artists are of necessity disloyal to their community) to form an ingroup. The first flush of enthusiasm past, they are glad to retreat into conformity and disown their tentative recreation of perishing values. I am not crying out against the live nerve of religious existence which gave for instance to the Scottish Presbyterian immigrants their peculiar tenacity and sombre realism. It is Piety, that morbid growth on religion, and Grundyism without source or aim, which leads to the emasculation of art. In Roads from Home Dan Davin elucidates an older and richer tradition of suppression and rebellion. One could come to terms with this and lose no great part of one’s freedom of mood. But that stream which once fertilised the poems of Burns, Hogg’s Confessions of a Self-Justified Sinner, and even the hymns of Charles Wesley, has here run dry. It is natural that both poets and prose-writers should look to the cow cockie or the West Coast bushwhacker for a new power. The trend is evident in much New Zealand painting. But in fact we find only a different kind of desert. Sargeson in That Summer has pointed a negative path – a self-mortification, accepting no virtue but compassion, a life in the loneliest part of the desert, where the bare facts of existence may teach us the ABC of self-knowledge.
A fruitful comparison can be made between Sargeson’s stories and the poetry of R.A.K. Mason. Mason also leads us to the desert and a bare altar. In his poem ‘On the Swag’ one can see the genesis of a half-sentimental social
Sargeson, however, despite the fact that much of his writing shows the justified resentment of the underdog, has no illusions about the motives and lack of direction of this resentment in others; and he can turn his satirical guns against the revolutionary idealist:
Wait, he said, yes, wait till the guns go off. You wait, boy, he said, you’ll find out you were born just at the right time.
But, knocking around, I’d heard all that sort of talk.
From this detachment Sargeson draws much of his strength. His disillusionment with liberal society is shown clearly enough in a story like ‘White Man’s Burden’; his disillusionment with any expectation of change flickers in a passage like that quoted above. He retains a nostalgic feeling for land work and the wider horizon of childhood. If even this support were denied him, he might make the step Camus has made from The Outsider to The Plague – a virtual denial of the philosophy of Natural Man and a return to belief in Original Sin, with an accompanying depth of treatment. But in Sargeson the change seems improbable; for though he is a highly self- conscious stylist his awareness of the context of existential writing is limited. One observes that the mood induced by an awareness of Original Sin may remain when the actual dogma has been rejected. In Davin’s war novel For the Rest of Our Lives the mood is primarily determinist and stoical; but in Roads from Home his characters possess freedom of choice and recognise their common imperfection. Childhood experience is not sentimentalised. And Ned’s relationship with his mother allows for tenderness and some degree of mutual detachment. David makes a truce with the Church through acceptance of the clan. Employing a device similar to that used by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, Sargeson frequently uses the child or eccentric as a scale by which to measure our own deficiencies. In When the Wind Blows the child hero comes upon his father crouching motionless in the garden and staring
Rarely do we read a Sargeson story entirely without acrid comment. This saves even the weakest from becoming magazine stuff. ‘Gods Live in Woods’ might have been taken from the Argosy. But the contrast between the free- thinking nephew and dour farmer uncle reclaims it as Sargeson’s. Unqualified realism seems to be his natural vein – with the touch of caricature which makes it a landscape and not a photograph. Perhaps his nearest rival in his own field is A.P. Gaskell, whose book of short stories The Big Game shows him to be capable of pressing on the nerve of contemporary life and manners. Sargeson’s age here stands him in good stead; for the world of the Depression years, bridging two eras, is better suited for near-great writing than the less seedy but more disastrous one which we now live in. Roderick Finlayson in Sweet Beulah Land takes his notebook to the Maori tangi. But his characters unlike Sargeson’s have not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They remain gentle, humorous, and decorative – like a Goldie drawing. G.R. Gilbert would be in the running if his habit of flippancy, inherited from Saroyan, had not invaded and sterilised his serious writing.
Sargeson, despite his obvious weaknesses, stands head and shoulders above all his New Zealand contemporaries except Davin. And Davin is primarily a novelist. The short stories of The Gorse Blooms Pale have those faults which can become virtues in a novel – longwindedness, excessive introspection, formlessness. They read like rough drafts for chapters. The stories of Graham Greene are very similar. Sargeson, on the other hand, writes with a diamond on glass. Where Davin is lush he is spare. But a good novel requires not dry comment but staying power, a virtue that Sargeson (perhaps for constitutional reasons) appears to lack.
Some may quarrel with Sargeson for his insistence upon the spiritual dryness of our lives and culture. To my way of thinking he is accurate though limited. For his limits are our limits; he is truly a New Zealander. He does not, like Shakespeare, hold up a mirror to fallen nature – but to fallen nature which has forgotten its fall. I have seen the setting of a good Sargeson story fully intact in a hotel bar on a Sunday morning. The morbid lucidity of hangover, the empty raw morning sky looking between curtains. Along the bar the derelicts, overblown pansies, lost men, going through the ritual of a church of negativism, their thoughts crawling sluggishly like a hive of smoked bees. They are unaware of the existentialist philosophy or the ‘dark wind’ of
1954 (102)
There are many children’s books on sale today, good of their kind and profusely illustrated, about ‘The Little Engine Who was Tired’ or ‘How Bill and Patsy Built Their Trolley’. These are part of the imaginative world of the modern child; yet at times they seem also too efficiently extroverted, too consciously a stage in the education of Healthy Citizens. Children themselves will still listen hungrily to the story of the Snow Queen or sad Pinocchio; for folk tales and fairy stories are unexpurgated fantasy, the coil of dream knowledge, the delusive third road seen five centuries ago by Thomas the Rhymer, which leads neither to Heaven nor Hell, nor for that matter to the Welfare State.
In praising almost without reservation these tales from the Irish, I am aware of deep prejudice rising from a childhood saturation in myth and folk-tale. Fergus Oisin and the Children of Lir were known to me also, as intimately as the face of the New Zealand night sky. Eileen O’Faolain has not avoided entirely the Irish trick of prettification. But no one (barring St Patrick) can make the Irish heroes into Christian gentlemen. They are incurably gluttonous, arrogant, quarrelsome, and bloodthirsty – in a word, heroic:
And the tumult of noise, said Fergus, was the crashing of shields, the jangle of javelins, the ringing of helmets and the clangour of breastplates, the straining of ropes, the whirr of wheels, the tramping of horses and the creaking of chariots and the great battle-cry of the fierce and terrible, bloodthirsty Warriors of the Red Branch hastening to the cleaving and the carving the hewing and the hacking of the Men of Erin.
I look forward to the time when I will have the opportunity of reading the book aloud to my own children; and I am grateful to the translator. The seven particularly lovely illustrations in colour, black, white and green, are entirely suited to the contents of the tales, and perfect in their kind.
1954 (103)
It seems that the Australians, more than we have ever done, turn their writers into national monuments. Take for instance their view of Adam Lindsay Gordon, who is revered as a horseman with side-levers, not as the man who
It is not Dame Mary Gilmore’s fault that she is described on the dust-jacket of this book as ‘one of those rare personalities who become legendary figures in their own lifetimes’. She is a poet of obvious sincerity, wide sympathies, and a limited talent. Her work has the undiscriminating vigour of primitive literature, that says all it has to say and a little more, never doubting that ethics and poetry are one thing called by two names. There is something of the appalling certainty of a woman, wife and mother, that if the world would take her advice its ‘problems’ would turn out to be a teething colic. Yet at times she comes close to speaking in the voice that might have been hers if she had not tried to sit on the Delphic tripod –
A broad sentimental humour runs through her description of various Australian demi-gods:
If you see people in that light, you will like this book of poems very well. There are certainly worse ways of looking at the world.
1955 (104)
This book of Eliot’s shorter poems contains nothing we have not seen before. It omits several of his New England poems. Yet it is a necessary acquisition for any bookshelf where the work it contains has not yet found a place. On reading (or re-reading) these poems one can see clearly why Eliot has had a major formative influence upon the development of English and American poetry of this century. The answer does not lie in originality of content or a totally new treatment of the material that has come to the poet’s hand. Many Georgian poets (Harold Monro, or at an opposite pole, D.H. Lawrence) had illuminated for us the bric-à-brac of personal experience; many had written lucidly and rhetorically. But they lacked one thing, style.
Eliot’s private statements assume in the reader’s mind the stature of general statements about spiritual reality mainly because every phrase and echo in his verse conveys from the beginning an impression of dispassionate maturity, of a mind native to the analytical tradition of Western culture. A code of manners to him is a subsidiary division of a code of ethics; and more important, a guide to the labyrinth of the modern world. His true progenitor is not Dante but Henry James. The delusion that society can make its members happy never occurs to him; nor the more profound delusion that people can exist meaningfully outside society. Passion expressed within the social forms (as in ‘Prufrock’) is irony, the wound, in Eliot’s own later language, by which what is eternal drains away into time:
As the prophet and the seer of ‘The Rock’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ Eliot has great virtues, which could only be discussed at considerable length. But he has set a balanced and elastic style (so simple a gift, it would seem) before the eyes of his barbaric contemporaries, to drive them to envy and despair.
1955 (105)
The correspondence of literary men is commonly dull. In Wordsworth’s letters one finds hardly a fragment of that massive genius to which nature revealed herself like a bride. No doubt if Shakespeare’s letters had been preserved for us, they would have turned out to consist mainly of flattering notes addressed to possible patrons, complaints of poverty, bald business references to plays performed. In fact, a letter is a one-sided conversation; and to write great or even charming letters requires a gift as special and rare as that of a greatis the real world and one’s opinion worth the reader’s attention.
Byron’s letters show this response and conviction; and so do those of Keats. In this full selection by Mr Page the enormous richness and variety of Keats’s imagery is shown at its source. Surely there never was a mind and heart so generously awake to every impression of the senses and subtle movement of another’s spirit! Fortunately, Mr Page preserves the words which Keats crossed out in his letters. One has the impression of seeing his thoughts take shape. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ appears (with several emendations made by Keats on the spot) sandwiched between Voltaire and an expedition to the North Pole, in a long letter to his brother George and wife. What did they make of it? To Fanny Keats, as Mr Page remarks, he is the perfect elder brother. To his correspondence with John Hamilton Reynolds we owe what is perhaps the first coherent exposition before Rimbaud of Romantic aesthetic theory. Concerning Fanny Brawne, to whom Keats wrote little, a reader of those few intimate and tortured lines can best say nothing.
1955 (106)
Sir: I have already had the pleasure of receiving privately two ill-mannered letters from your correspondent F.W.N. Wright on the same subject which he has broached in your columns. I have no wish to prevent any person from airing their prejudices in print, even at my own inconvenience. But I fear that your correspondent is trying to bamboozle me and himself with heavy Latin. So I will try to translate my statement and your correspondent’s into plain English.
This ‘Increment of Association’ I take to be the simple fact that we gain by being together. This is not strictly true, for we get both good and evil from our fellows, and who but God can reckon the account? To be happy we need our fellows or the thought of them; but the more we are under the influence of Society, that mechanical mother we have invented for ourselves, the less we see or know of our fellows, and that little is often the deadpan, doughnut-eyed, clawed and shambling husk of them.
Yet Society keeps alive the memory of what our fathers did and a few of their skills. We remember what we did by proxy; we imagine what our children may do in spite of us; and so man appears to us a creature extended in time, armadillo-scaled, the individual sin sloughed off the collective back. This fantasy is necessary to keep us interested in large social issues such as killing people we have never met and bulldozing mountains into the sea; but it does not really make us happy. Your correspondent says, too, that I meant, but did not say, that we should all have more money. I did not mean any such thing.
A persistent preoccupation with money seems to me quite deadening to every other feeling. I would recommend your correspondent to forget the ‘present monetary system’ and take up the study of compost.
1955 (107)
Since Mr Gollancz first began to offer the fruits of his spiritual progress to ‘Timothy’ and to the modern intellectual world, the firm of Victor Gollancz Ltd. has been employed (along with strictly temporal publishing activities) in laying the foundations of a new Church. For the sake of brevity one may call it the Church of Inbetweeners. For it is based upon the natural wish of every agnostic to retain the benefits of religion without the pains of actual religious commitment; and it aspires to lead our intellectual pugilists out of the ring where they are clinched so savagely with the World, the Flesh and the Devil, to a permanent and enlightened ringside seat.
Miss Isherwood is a member of this congregation. She writes with evident sincerity, about what is perhaps the most difficult problem of all, the adjustment of religious education to the psychological requirements of a growing child. One admires her intention. But as the title of the book indicates, and its content confirms, her agnosticism is not neutral but militant. She quotes with complete aplomb St. Bernard, Ramakrishna, Keats, Hesiod, Adler, Eckhart and Charles Morgan, to support a syncretic programme of religious education. There are many case histories embedded in her text to expose the stultifying effect of dogma upon the minds of children and adolescents. With this exposure, on a basis of simple observation, one must concur. But Miss Isherwood’s sense of proportion fails her when she suggests that the spiritual devastation wrought by loss of faith can best be avoided by removing faith from the young and replacing it with intellectual tolerance. Would any man willingly barter the power to say, ‘God help us,’ and mean it, for a dish of metaphysical porridge made from Indian grain, salted by Jung, and stewed in a clinic?
1955 (108)
Each individual believer and unbeliever has no doubt a different conception of the humanity of Christ, his appearance, his character and activities beyond that limited survey which we derive from the Gospels. It is a strong temptation to each of us to make Him in our own image. To one who is in the strict sense a believer the accuracy of his private image is not of prime importance; but it is all-important to one who does not believe in Christ’s divinity. Upon its accuracy depends his sense of moral security; for he must feel that the Man was of such a kind that He would have held the same view of life as himself and
Upton Sinclair presents us with an interesting historical Jesus – though most interesting as a guide to the personality of Upton Sinclair. His chronicle is constructed in three parts – ‘Youth’, a simple and moving account of what may well have been the outward circumstances of Jesus’s boyhood, as a member of a wandering group of carpenters; ‘Mission’, an interpretation of the Gospel narratives; ‘Spirit’, a somewhat harsh and controversial exposition of the growth of the Christian Church.
The second and third sections are vastly inferior in style and content to the first, for in them Upton Sinclair becomes the first pamphleteer. He sees Jesus as a politically-minded evangelist, and summarily rejects the Gospel of St John – ‘If the Son knew all these things it was easy indeed for Him to die, but why should He die, since the Father had all power, and could have saved Him and all the rest of mankind without going through such an unpleasant procedure?’ Why, indeed, unless love is the hardest of all things for men to grasp and understand? There is some love behind Upton Sinclair’s book; but it is strained through a political sieve.
1955 (109)
There are many critics of poetry who state or imply that poetry is a natural growth, the product of heart and mind working in unison upon their proper occasions – for example, the response of a child to the green enclosure of native bush, of a man or woman, after absence, to a beloved person. One need not deny that first poems are often of this kind; but it seems that symbolism, which is the life of full-grown poetry, occurs when the natural vision has been shattered by a second Fall, and the poet begins to try to piece the world together in a new synthesis. The sense experience no longer dictates to the poet; it becomes the cloak of his or her inward and actual drama.
These considerations may explain in part why Nan McDonald, a poet of considerable force, sensitivity and natural passion, has succeeded only rarely in any transmutation of her material –
The unpretentious record of impressions is effective on its own level, admirably true to life. But compare it with any poem by that equally unpretentious American, Robert Frost. For him, the apparently spiritual drama finds expression in the image of the ‘frozen groundswell’ of the earth under
1955 (110)
Between the nineteen-hundreds and now, there have been huge changes in life and literary thought. Even the rock under the shade of which a poet must pitch his tent, the knowledge of good and evil, seems at times to have shifted on its base. Where there are great changes two kinds of poets can best survive them – the brilliant improviser and the inveterate stoic. I suggest that Walter de la Mare, unlike most of his contemporaries, is the second kind of poet. The grief of knowledge and the knowledge of grief, expressed in the most sensuous and melodious language, has been his constant theme. His poetry is, under the draperies, a modern Book of Ecclesiastes. Those who love de la Mare’s poems, the school teachers and the pastoral sympathisers, will disagree with this judgment. The images of ice and fire, sunset rooms and haunted groves, appeal to them as the legitimate special province of poetry. Rather these images reflect de la Mare’s acutely honest charting of the unspoken fears of Everyman, fears of moral evil and spiritual isolation:
It is a solitary view of experience, in which the poisonous Tree of Life tempts and betrays; countered only in de la Mare’s poetry by a real but over- spiritual Puritan Christianity. The child’s world also (from which he draws his hallucinatory imagery) is besieged by premonitions of evil, the poet himself being represented as a child who has somehow escaped the breaching violence of puberty, sealed in his sunset room of imagination, yet menaced like the child by the fangs and claws of darkness. There is serenity in de la Mare’s later work; but unlike Dylan Thomas, a poet whose vision of life is similarly obsessive and
1955 (111)
This acidulous, detailed creation of a small French village is in its own way magnificent. If the translator’s prose gives a correct indication of the French original, M. du Gard has true style, the capacity to produce a verbal equivalent for each and every kind of sensibility of which he is aware. One’s criticism comes from another quarter, possibly illegitimate. The book, for all its brilliance, drains the reader; for it is the description of the interior of a prison without doors. The cover blurb describes it as ‘unsentimental’. True; but what has M. du Gard found to replace sentimentality, that refuge for the weak mind offended by human evil?
His central character, the postman Joigneau, strides through the pages like an incubus, his hairy hand on the pulse of the secret life of the village, and motivated by a lust for power which can be gratified as efficiently in the sharp- edged village world as in the larger arena of commerce and politics. The men and women whom he meets on his daily round are shown to us in undress, in the midst of their furtive desires, their domestic hatreds, their defensive mechanical piety. The author has not seen fit to cover them with the coat of his own compassion. He is indeed in the line of direct descent from de Maupassant. His splendidly convincing portraits in vinegar derive three-dimensional solidity, not through an exploration of their states of being, but rather from a complete understanding of their animality.
This is in itself strong medicine, and within its own efficient scope, much to be praised. But the author’s work remains static. That area of conflict which provides the great novelist with his themes, the remorse and redeeming tenderness that shadow the sexual wish, the ghost of human dignity and virtue always ready to burst its egotistic chains and become real – that true battlefield of the heart and mind is beyond his scope. His world is smaller than the one we live in.
Oscar Wilde is one of those men of whom there are a few in each century, who seem to stand in a peculiarly close symbolic relation to their contemporary society. It has been said that Wilde lived out his art, that his contribution was
I believe to be utterly false what he (Maurois) repeats after so many others, or what he lets be assumed: that Wilde’s way of life was a dependence of his aestheticism and that he merely carried over into his habits his love of the artificial. I believe quite on the contrary that this affected aestheticism was for him merely an ingenious cloak to hide, while half revealing, what he could not let be seen openly; to excuse, provide a pretext, and even apparently motivate; but that the very motivation is but a pretence . . . . This artistic hypocrisy was imposed on him by respect, which was very keen in him, for the proprieties, and by the need of self-protection. . . .
Wilde’s writing, seen as the literary affectation of the lion of a clique, wearies one with interminable egotism; as the expression of the basic social and moral tensions of a man whose experience of the world is irremediably homosexual it assumes an entirely different aspect. Possibly Wilde’s early posture of art for art’s sake was undertaken lightheartedly; but the war on society of his mature years was defensive and real. He had set out to find his true self, and found it, over the tin fence, not only outside the structure of
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself . . . . Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies . . . . –
in the second stage, as expressed fragmentarily in ‘De Profundis,’ Dionysiac, through the experience of tragedy:
The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an earth goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the moment of her death.
The tragedy, for Wilde, was not imposed from without by a revengeful society; it was inherent in the processes of homosexual experience. The growing conviction that the Devil had him over a barrel, projected first in the Gothic fantasy of ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’, becomes conscious in ‘De Profundis’: ‘What seemed to the world and to myself my future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking the action against your father: I had, I dare say, lost it in reality long before that.’
The tragedy of Oscar Wilde, in its strictly personal aspect, cannot be regarded as exceptional. He had become a member, through circumstances largely outside his control, of the closed world of homosexuality, which in England, as in New Zealand, has its own language, its own hierarchies outside society, and a highly evolved organisation for defence. But his attempt at an ideological synthesis of the warring elements in his life and art places him in a different position from the homosexual whose art is purely a reflex of self-defence, hence sterile, and gives him (Wilde) a genuine symbolic relation to the society which he could not inhabit. This relation was not clear to me until I read, in the new Penguin edition, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ‘The Decay of Lying’, and the unexpurgated ‘De Profundis’. His political theory tends naturally toward anarchism rather than true socialism; but his sympathy with the English proletariat is a great deal more real than that of Shaw and Wells:
We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel, to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.
The natural sympathy of the non-conformer enabled Wilde to meet the miners of the Middle West on equal terms. He delighted in irritating the bourgeoisie; and they have had their prolonged revenge on him. He valued the tolerance of the English proletariat, who were acquainted with suffering and privation and did not regard the moral lapses of others as an assault on their own spiritual security:
The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply.
Few members of the working class have read ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’; but a great many know and value ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. The oppressed and inarticulate, the rejected debris of modern capitalist society, regarding Wilde as a spokesman, have set the seal of their approval on the Ballad by making it part of folk literature. In the figure of the hanged guardsman Wilde projects something of himself: the confused composite symbol of the criminal who through suffering becomes the holy victim, the scapegoat and sin-eater. Imaginatively he performs the act which in reality he was unable to make: an acceptance of divine Justice which frees the offender from the terror of human justice though not from its mechanical process:
The Ballad runs counter to Wilde’s earlier conception of art as Apollonian and self-renewing. It sacrifices balance to vigour, scope and sincerity. It is the one major poem which Wilde wrote.
It is now possible to understand the relation in which Wilde stood to the bourgeois society of his time. By his homosexuality he was committed to a situation which that society had not the tools to help him understand or solve. Hence his courageous though inadequate attempt to find integration through
In ‘De Profundis’ Wilde explores the spiritual crisis which has come to a head with his social denigration. The unexpurgated version must remove from any reader’s mind the illusion that Wilde’s homosexuality was a temporary or superficial deviation. He makes his own position quite clear:
When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. . . . To regret one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
On account of this statement, and others like it, Wilde is often accused of insincerity in his partial profession of Christian belief. But in fact ‘De Profundis’ derives its unique value and interest from Wilde’s perception of a genuine incompatibility between the moral and the aesthetic vision of life. Verlaine, in a similar situation, repented of both life and art (since his homosexuality was a component of the artist’s persona which he inhabited) and thus committed himself to an intolerable hypocrisy. Wilde recognised that the moment of aesthetic recognition, in which the artist draws triumphantly upon the undivided powers of flesh and spirit, annulled the moment of repentance. Nevertheless he was obsessed by an awareness that his aesthetic vision was being torn apart by the very powers, now demonic, which had generated its intensity; and that his one weapon, sensitivity, had begun to melt in the poisonous blood of the decapitated Gorgon. In reviewing the process of decay, he calls Alfred Douglas bitterly to account as the one person
. . . I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him . . . it was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. . . . But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place. Of course, I discern in all our relations not Destiny merely, but Doom: Doom that (always) walks swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood.
Yet ‘De Profundis’ is nothing if not the complaint of a wronged lover. Wilde accuses Alfred Douglas of behaviour based solely on selfish and sensual motives: this is the central theme of ‘De Profundis’: and it implies an ideal of homosexual friendship which would demand more altruism of the partners than is normally present in matrimony. Wilde’s argument, when the superficial recriminations have been shorn away, is essentially this: that Douglas, motivated by hatred of his father, has wantonly ruined Wilde’s life and reputation, and in so doing has revealed the ‘supreme vice of shallowness’. The picture he draws of Douglas is extraordinarily interesting, for it corresponds in its main detail to the type of the uncreative homosexual who is always active in literary politics and brings into being the lunatic fringe of literary Bohemia, troglodytic and rapacious, which works against the establishment of sane values. The seed of chaos in Wilde’s mind responded to the scorpion quality of Douglas, appalled and admiring, and flourished under its influence. Certainly he was physically attracted. His role, at least psychologically, was a passive one, for he had not the constant stimulus of hatred to sharpen an appetite for destruction; as a creative artist, his philosophy was at its most rebellious merely anarchist, not nihilist. He imagined, moreover, that he had a soul to lose. Wilde’s greatest misfortune was not perhaps that his aesthetic sensibility contained a permanent homosexual component, but that his deepest ties were finally made to a person devoid of any perception of the altruistic and compassionate aspects of homosexual love:
The day he (a solicitor’s clerk) came to receive my depositions and statements, he leant across the table – the prison warder being present – and having consulted a piece of paper which he pulled from his pocket, said to me in a low voice: ‘Prince Fleur de Lys wishes to be remembered to you.’ . . . You were in your own eyes still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy . . . .
It is possible that if Wilde had been able to avoid pederasty after his release from prison, if his chosen companion had not been Alfred Douglas, if he had not been bankrupt, if his incipient alcoholism had not gained an unbreakable control, he might have rehabilitated himself. A social rehabilitation would have been most improbable; but the Church has before now provided a refuge
1955 (113)
Sir: I read with pleasure and sympathy Mr D.H. Munro’s article in your last number, on juvenile delinquency and divorce. Naturally he is able to make hay with the vague and pontifical Report of the Special Committee. But I feel that he hardly does justice to the bewildered good intentions of the group who framed the report; or to the complexity of the situation which has plainly stumped them. He suggests as the most suitable course of action ‘. . . to investigate these effects with an open mind and with careful attention to such evidence as is available from the Kinsey reports and other sources.’ The ‘other sources’ he has in mind are no doubt, like Dr Kinsey’s study, scientific reports on the sexual behaviour of men, women and children in various social groups, which exclude moral comment. But surely the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents could scarcely, by its very nature, avoid moral comment. To understand its aims and attitudes we must recognise it for what it is – a more official and less effective type of the innumerable local associations which are called upon to deal with similar problems, much as the fire station is called upon to combat a gorse fire. True, this time the pumps were out of order and the water was cut off at the main. But we do not condemn the School Committee, Women’s Guild, Parent- and-Teacher Association, or meeting of tribal elders in a Maori pa, if they do not approach the ‘problem’ of boys and girls playing too late in the long grass with the impartial scientific spirit of a visiting anthropologist among the Trobriand Islanders. At their best they combine moral comment with charity and good sense; at their worst they are hideously inept and blundering. But, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, their prejudices may represent in fact their unconscious wisdom. Whether the Special Committee had even the doubtful wisdom of prejudice, is of course another matter.
Mr Munro has put his own point of view forcibly: ‘But wouldn’t it be better, in the long run, to bring morality down from the moon and try to find a rational basis for it? The Committee, however, does not believe in a rational basis for morality. The basic assumption behind this report is that morality consists in adhering blindly to a code of behaviour with which children must be indoctrinated as early as possible . . .’. His ‘rational morality’ is plausible. God forgive that we should cease to use our brains. I think most people
I emphasise the mitigating and healing aspect of Christian belief and action. Its repressive and legalistic aspect has undoubtedly made many more delinquents than it has helped in their difficulties. The ‘girl who goes wrong’ is much more often a child who lacks love and security and status, looking for it in unlikely places, than a cheerful hedonist. I suggest that both in the Report of the Special Committee and in Mr Monro’s lively and incisive review the central factor has been overlooked – the individual suffering of the juvenile delinquent.
1955 (114)
I had been looking for a job for ten days. At the time I was living on my own in a shack beside a garage behind an old boarding-house in a suburb of Christchurch. A little dog-kennel of a place with a stretcher, a gas-ring, a chest-of-drawers and a ripped gas-light on a pipe from the ceiling. Sometimes I wanted to plug up the door and turn on the gas without lighting it; but other times, especially on a fine morning, you could see hundreds of wax-eyes swinging on the sow-thistle heads outside. It was only eight bob a week, and that meant freedom as I saw it then, to work or not to work, to come home as late as I liked, to put into words the shape of the world inside me (though
The job I’d been in before had lasted three days. It was a job grinding brass taps. You wore gloves, but the brass dust and the emery wheel wore through the gloves and they didn’t supply new ones just for the asking. I had been drinking a lot the week before I took the job on, and the cold weather and the brass dust made me feel worse instead of better. So when the foreman said I was bloody useless, perhaps he was in the right for once. All the same, it wasn’t the kind of job anyone would stay at long.
The money from that job kept me going for a couple of days. And when it was gone, the milkman still left two bottles at the door of the shack every morning. I would sleep till the early afternoon. It was very quiet in the afternoon, almost as if the world had ended and everyone else had died. Every day I’d pour the milk, pure and white and cold, into a grimy glass I’d pinched from a pub somewhere, and gulp it down, and go out into the hardworking city afternoon to look for another job. But no one needed a young man with stubble and overcoat and a look of not belonging – not the gasworks, nor the wet timber yard, nor the boot factory that only employed girls, and least of all the Employment Bureau. So I bought an apple and went into Hagley Park to look at the swans. A lot of things worried me then that wouldn’t worry me now in the same way – God, and sex, and the old men like broken- down horses who polished brass taps and sat in a corner of the pub saying nothing, and the high pale clouds over the park trees. It seemed to me the world couldn’t go on the way it was going. There was a secret switch, almost within reach of anyone’s hand, that would change the raw, tangled lives in a moment to real love and wild creative joy. The park trees promised it. The swans ruffled their feathers on the slaty, ruffled water.
I could have got a meal at a friend’s house, or borrowed a pound. But I didn’t. It was one thing to borrow money for drinking, when everyone was drinking – ‘Could you lend me half a dollar, Tom? I’ve not got enough for the round’ – but it was different to bring private hunger to someone else’s table. So the distance widened, a gap between me and the substantial world, and a dark wind was blowing there that scattered every wish like the sheets of newspaper in the street outside the theatre foyer where I picked up quarter- smoked women’s cigarette butts, tinged with lipstick, undid them, and rolled them again with the burnt end towards my mouth. A great lethargy, like the first wave of a rising tide, rose over me. It would have been easy to stay all afternoon on the sagging stretcher under the grey blanket, and sleep and wake and sleep again till the wax-eyes flew in the window with seeds to drop on my breast.
One day I stood at the door of The Shades, that vaguely unrespectable cellar in the centre of Christchurch, where dead men trapped with climbing rats watch the strong waters creep over their bootsoles. A man of thirty in a
‘Lend us a quid, mate. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow. Hell, I’ve got to have it for a feed and a taxi tonight. There’s a dame I’ve got to see at New Brighton. Her old man’s got plenty of money, but I’ll have to be in sweet with her to lay my hands on it. I can’t go out there with nothing in my pocket. You know me, mate . . .’.
I knew him. He had stayed with me a day and a night, and left while I was away at work, taking with him my best suit and all the books he could carry. The veined eyes, full of secrets no one would want to buy, went begging in the seamed baggy face – for money, for mercy, for anything but an honest answer. A sailor who had skipped his boat, with a wife in Scotland and another in Auckland.
I pulled out the pennies I kept to rattle, and showed them to him on the palm of my hand. He looked for a moment, and swore, and dived up the street. In his place leapt a little man, the original advertisement for Michelin tyres, squat and predatory, with brown rubber eyes and his hands deep in his overcoat.
‘What did that man give you? I know, so don’t try to dodge out of it.’ ‘He didn’t give me anything. He asked me for a loan.’
‘Don’t come at that one. I know. We’ve got our eye on him. How did you come to meet him?’
‘We met in a pub once.’ ‘Nice friends you have.’
He turned his gelatine eye on my coat and shoes.
‘Why don’t you dress decently? Have a shave? Brush your shoes? Where do you work anyway?’
‘I worked on The Press for a while. I’m looking for another job now.’ ‘You’re not looking far then. You don’t find jobs in a pub. We don’t like
your sort in this town. We know how to deal with them . . .’.
The patter of insults continued for some minutes. He was waiting for me to show fight, or use a four-letter word, so that he could take me in charge. At last, disappointed, he moved away, mincing through the crowd, spruce watchdog of the Public Good; once a detective always on the outer.
The anger from that meeting was like a hormone injection. The next morning I found a job as a hotel porter.
1955 (115)
When William, Duke of Aquitane, butchered his mistresses and wrote poems of Courtly Love, a literary convention was being born which masked the violent tension between real and ideal in the relation of the sexes, yet drew its life from that unacknowledged source. In Mr Sinclair’s poetry sexual idealism
It is unfair to Mr Sinclair that such verse should appear in a published volume. Perhaps one should blame the inscrutable processes of the Caxton Press which ensure a vast time-lag between published work and present labour. But though as a troubadour Mr Sinclair seems muffled by a heavy cold, in ‘Te Kaminara’ he has expressed admirably the unity of lovers with the natural world –
Here Mr Sinclair, if he raised his eyes, might see at the waves’ edge the fading footprints of Mr Fairburn, a poet whose voice also seems at times that of the lion among the jackals. The most coherent satisfying works in this collection are the longer, more objective poems rooted in time and place – ‘Ihumatao’, ‘Waitara’, ‘Te Kaminara’, and possibly ‘The Ballad of Halfmoon Bay’. The innocence of Natural Man, the sense of ritual enjoyment grips and persuades the mind. He has come nearer without strain to the Polynesian universe than any other poet in the country.
1955 (116)
Life presents few mysteries to Upton Sinclair; but there are one or two problems he would like to see tidied up. One is the matter of the Christian faith, which has deceived the gullible minds of many, from St Augustine to Albert Schweitzer and Nicolas Berdyaev. The narrator (Mr Sinclair in a cellophane nosebag) meets Tom Strawn, an American young man of sub- average intelligence. Tom Strawn has met an angel, and has been given the power to perform miracles in order to reform the world. He orders a celestial
The tale becomes drearier as it proceeds. The new apostle creates a synthetic cult which inevitably suffers from the corruption of its officials. Miss America without makeup, chosen for her suggestibility, is made ready for miraculous pregnancy without fertilisation. But instead Tom Strawn, with the first glimmer of intelligence he has shown, marries her and breeds a child by normal means. They are admirably suited. In this dreary little tract Mr Sinclair plainly intends satirical comment on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ, and on the love and reverence given by believing Christians to His Mother, of whom the old ballad says –
Has Mr Sinclair discovered no more than this in a lifetime of rational humanism? A man with a bag over his head can see no stars – a pity it is such an old, dry bag, smelling of mousedirt and woodshavings and the crumbs of long-departed social enthusiasm.
1955 (117)
William Cowper, who knew Herbert’s poems well and found them a source of religious comfort, yet believed them to be ‘Gothic and uncouth.’ Our own age perhaps tends rather to regard them as neat, plain and puritan; for the spiritual life of a seventeenth-century country parson seems to possess an order and singleness of devotion not now accessible to us when society is unstable and most values ambiguous. This, however, is a false simplification which history imposes; and Mr Summers’s balanced study of Herbert’s life and work presents them in their true complexity.
Herbert’s apparent serenity as a shepherd of the fold was won at the cost of conflict, self-denial and rigorous self-examination. He was a man of strong natural ambition, attracted to the life of the Court and acutely disappointed by his lack of preferment in that sphere. He enjoyed greatly the pleasures of music and civilised society. In the deepest sense he was required to make a virtue of necessity: ‘I now look back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think myself more happy than if I had attained what then I so ambitiously thirsted
There is a faint savour of sour grapes in this otherwise admirable statement. Mr Summers chronicles the gradual subjection by Herbert of all his activities and wishes within the compass of his priestly duties and his growth in humility. He learnt plainness of writing from the plainness of speech needed for a sermon to countrymen. It is interesting to speculate what George Herbert would have been as a Court poet. In a country parish he found a different and more lasting excellence.
1955 (118)
A moralist is never a popular man. ‘Why should he think he can tell us what we ought to do? Let him practise first what he preaches.’ And what of a woman moralist, Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did in crinkly black with a face like a temperance reciter. ‘Give her a book on psychology, tell her what she’s missing, pinch her to make her laugh.’ But somewhere at the back of a child’s bad dream she wears another face, not the caricature we have made with soft sly jokes, but the face of the last comfort, the rock in the quagmire. Mr Eliot’s ‘Dying nurse whose only care is not to please,’ with purges to make us whole again. When the many jokes are over she will still be there. Miss Davidson wears the moralist’s cloak with zeal, humility, and great intellectual vigour. She explodes errors with the skill of an accomplished balloon-burster. She is not depressed by a world of evil-doers, though as a Communist turned Christian she has too many harsh words to say about her first teacher, the Party. Her interpretation of the Ten Commandments is positive throughout: a book as refreshing as a thunder-shower on a hot, dry day.
A quotation from Evelyn Underhill’s book will suffice to give the temper of the whole: ‘. . . the complete experience of everything of which we are capable . . . means chaos, not character. We must select in order to achieve; not only develop some faculties at the expense of others.’ A simple statement, the truth of which is made clear to most men only after years of bitter unsuccess. One remembers the reader who picked up St Augustine’s Confessions, looking for some spicy weekend reading, and afterwards complained that there was very little about Augustine and a great deal about God. Similarly in Evelyn Underhill’s book, practically no personal material is set down; the language is as deceptively plain as an insulated wire that carries a thousand volts. It should grow in value with every re-reading.
1955 (119)
‘I’ll see you at the Riggerstring,’ she said. Her voice put out the Presbyterian moon, one-eyed in a blowing sky, and answered back the railway station clock. We were holding hands in a cat-smelling narrow alley beside the milk depot, at two in the morning, when the real town was in bed and only drunks and spooning lovers coughed on park seats and clinched in the tubular concrete air raid shelters under Queen Victoria’s statue in grubby icing sugar. A warm wind blew down the Northeast Valley, and Venus winked a thousand miles off in her western bed, rising from the South American waves to tell the world that she had never had a lover.
She tugged away from my hand, then pressed close again. I kissed her against the wet brick wall. My other hand was in the pocket of her lambswool overcoat. She was a spring chicken, a trout waiting to be tickled, the King of China’s daughter, the cave of the forty thieves. I had learnt the Open Sesame once, but every day I found I had unlearnt it again. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t stay away from her and counted the hours by her coming and going. She rode in my mind like night-haired Venus making a home of the sky. ‘Let’s go on up to my room’, I said. ‘Nobody will see us come in, and you can get away early in the morning.’
‘No, not now,’ she said. ‘You never count on a girl wanting to make her own mind up, do you? But you can take me home after the Riggerstring.’ The Riggerstring was the annual Boat Club Ball. A real hooley, the best and the worst hop of the year. It was held in a boat-house on the waterfront. Mining students roared in the cloakroom while the couples lunged above their heads; the dead marines rolled down the stairs and spun from the top windows to plop in the salt, sober harbour. The year before the police had to be called in. ‘I’ll be there,’ I promised. We said goodbye twice running. I heard the click of her shoes fading; and I climbed the gulf of the streets up towards Maori Hill, where the birds in the bush belt still talked together in code at half past two, and pushed the slow door open, and trudged upstairs, and turned the key in the lock of the airless cupboard I rented for thirty bob a week, and undressed in the dark. Then four angels nailed me into my coffin and plunged me to the bottom of the Dead Sea, where I lay all night in despair, unable to shout, with a cloth over my mouth, knowing that the Riggerstring had gone by without me, and she had gone home with a whiskered red-haired student who called me ‘Snow’, driving in a slow taxi and laughing at his whispered stories, and telling no one when his hand rose under her skirt. But in the morning I climbed from the grave like Antaeus. The sun was lovely over the kitchen window where an old pensioner who lived in a room below the stairs used to grow parsley and runner beans. I lay in bed with my shirt on, reading A Dominie’s Log by A.S. Neill. It told me that the stiff-muscled fathers had ruled too long. I asked my private god to be
At noon I walked down the sixty-eight steps to the back of the Town Hall. The town knew me, the heir to Adam’s lost fortune whom the lawyers had given up hope of finding; and I knew the town. It opened its brass-buttoned coat for me to hide inside. Robert Burns, two hundred years dry on his tree stump above the Octagon, waited for the traffic to stop so that he could step down to the Oban Hotel, bang on the bar and order a bucket of gin and Harpic. At any moment now a young man in a sailor’s jersey, a sheaf of bad poems in his pocket, would sprint up the street and ask me for a quid I had owed him since Easter; we would share our debts, eat eggs and steak at the Silver Grille, and drink portergaffs till sundown at the slide of the Bowling Green Hotel, talking sex and socialism. But the clock struck twelve, scattering pigeons over the sun-roofed town. They roosted again on Robert Burns, clucking and dropping their dung on his ploughman’s collar. And out of the corner bookshop, where he had been mooching all morning like Jonah waiting for the gourd to grow, came Jack Galbraith. His father knew my father. He was a lanky mining student a year younger than myself, with pimples and a bad breath and no hope in the world.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘For a feed. At the Silver Grille.’
‘I’m feeling crook today. I think I’ll do the same.’
The fathers climbed back on their wooden horses. A mineral age was reborn and the world’s leaf withered on its stalk. In the narrow cubicle of the hash-shop, over oysters and bitter coffee, he confided that he could not work. The sore red-rimmed eyes in the freckled face gazed round their cage. ‘Dad reckons if I don’t pass this bloody exam he won’t let me go on. It’s no use trying. I haven’t a show.’
‘You don’t want to worry too much,’ I said. ‘Tell him to go and jump in the creek. Go and get a job on the wharf at Port Chalmers. You could knock out twelve quid a week there.’
‘It’s no bloody good. You don’t know what they’re like. They keep on telling me I’ve got to pull my finger out. I don’t worry so much about Dad; but it would break Mum’s heart if I gave up now.’
‘Well, why don’t you get stuck in? The clods who get through haven’t got any more brains than you have.’
The raw eyes came closer and the bad breath hit me in a wave. ‘God, I try to swot but I can’t. Every time I pick up a book I start thinking about girls. Girls all the time. Without their clothes on. It’s driving me crazy. You do all right for yourself. I’ve seen you with that blonde sheila. . . .’ His voice meandered on, charged with the grief of the unwilling celibate. He had been to a lot of parties, but didn’t seem to latch on; each time he would take a poke
That afternoon we drank in the City Hotel. Jack would have preferred the Prince of Wales, because they cleaned the brass pumps more often; but I had celebrated my twenty-first birthday there, by crawling in on my hands and knees, dead sober, and barking at the ulcerous Scots barman. He heaved me out on the street. I returned with a young policeman, complaining that I had been refused a drink though I was over age, and left them wrangling at the bar. The afternoon swam by with sunlight mapping the floorboards, while Russell Clark’s dancing moujik levitated furiously above the door. Even Jack grew pleasanter. An old web-footed soak trod water at his elbow, with long stories of gold on the West Coast; and Jack, with the beer inside him, basked in the old man’s gentle soft-soaping – ‘I can tell you’re a smart lad; but there’s things you can’t learn out of books . . .’. The clock spun slowly. At six o’clock we bought a dozen of beer and a bottle of ready-made Diesel cocktail. The wind was cold now outside the pub. Among the railwaymen and clerks on the rolling pavement I felt I was only a parasite, a useless limb who drank all day while other men were working. But the harbour lights comforted me with the promise of the Riggerstring. With a huge parcel of fish and chips we knocked on the door of my closest friend. It was a house condemned already by the City Council; and its upstairs window commanded a fine view of the fire escape at the back of the Oban Hotel. Wally had decorated the interior with hanging island mats and shells and polished driftwood. According to him it had been a sailor’s knocking shop in the whaling days. The drunk ghosts still lumbered on the stairs; and the beds would shake at one in the morning with remembered earthquakes. Wally had no fixed profession. He worked by day in a tinsmith’s shop; but he found Taoist satisfaction in growing cactuses and painting heavy nudes. A discarded masterpiece of a blue woman pouring water from a red stone jar hung inside the lavatory door.
When Wally opened the door Jack offered at once to punch him in the snout; but later he fell asleep in the sitting-room with his head on the carton of beer. We opened the Diesel cocktail and drank it with the fish and chips, from thick flower-out handles. The Riggerstring still rose in my mind like a whale under ice. I woke Jack and fed him the last of the fish and chips. We filled our pockets with the beer. We found a taxi in the lighted Octagon and rode out to the Riggerstring, two Africans coming to convert the missionaries.
The hall was ablaze with music. A man in a dress suit stopped us at the door. ‘Where are your tickets?’ he asked. I recognised him. He was an elderly medical student with a liking for Mozart and cherry brandy. He had befriended me as a lamb among the Philistines; and told me often his harsh history as a pub-owner’s son and a lapsed Roman Catholic. In hangover I sat in his room cluttered with finger-bones, and listened unhappily to endless
‘You know me, Ivan,’ I said.
‘You’re all right. But your cobber’s as full as a boot.’ ‘I’ll look after him. He won’t get into any trouble.’
‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’ He motioned us toward the cloakroom. There the mining students drank and bellowed and sang Ten Green Bottles. Jack sank out of sight among them like a porpoise into its shoal. I climbed the stair to the crowded dancing-floor.
There the spruce, wise boys spun like planets; and with them their accompanying moons, the soft girls and the hard girls, the quiet girls and the loud girls, in print and satin and silk and taffeta, like flowers drifting on the high tide of the music. This was the closed heaven; and outside, the twisted streets, the empty seaways, the moon-troubled harbour, and the sighing pits of purgatory. She swung there too in her bright orbit on the arm of the red-whiskered enemy. She saw me standing in the stag line, and smiled and waved. Then the cocktail rose and exploded in my head. I stumbled down the stairs, and out to the disused ground behind the hall where the moon was freezing the night grass; and vomited until the harbouring dark rose over me.
I woke with someone shaking my shoulder. It was Ivan. ‘Come and get your cobber,’ he said. ‘He’s raising hell in the cloakroom. You’ll have to get him out of here before the cops come.’
‘What’s the time?’ I said. ‘Two o’clock.’
I stood up like a zombie and walked woodenly to the hall. Sea-bells rang in the holes in my head; but the walls of the night were firm around me. The lights of a mausoleum-to-be glittered on the hills beyond the harbour. I was stone cold sober. The Riggerstring had hauled its mastodon length to a standstill without me, leaving a small army of dead marines, several living bodies stretched on the pier, a heaviness in the mind and an echo of music in the air. In the cloakroom three mining students held Jack. A fourth sat on the floor weeping, a cut streaming blood above his eye and his broken glasses in his hand. Jack swayed forward as I came in the door. His lank hair hung down his eyes and he tugged furiously against the grip of his admonishers, Galbraith alone against the berserkers.
‘I want a fair fight!’ he shouted. ‘There’s not a real man among you. You’re just a bloody lot of pansies.’ Then he caught sight of me. ‘Good old Jimmy! You’ll fight me, won’t you? You’re a man all right. You don’t let your cobbers down.’
‘I don’t want a fight,’ I said. ‘Hell, you’d knock me down with one clout. We’ll have to move out of here, Jack. The cops are on the way now, and your old man won’t like it if he has to bail you out in the morning. We’ll get out of here and have some more grog at home.’
His face brightened. Two of the warders let go of his arms; but the third, a
‘You’ve had one too many,’ I said. ‘What you need is a bit of fresh air. I reckon that’s the cops’ car coming now.’ A javelin of light shot round the bend in the road. We crouched behind the corner of the hall. But by the blue glow on the roof we could see it was a taxi. Two people stepped from the shadows of the pier to meet it, a man and a woman, their faces blank in the glare of the lights. The man was Red Whiskers; and she was the woman. I walked across in front of the taxi. She turned in surprise; and when she saw me she moved away a little from Red Whiskers’ side.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for you half the night.’
‘I was a bit tired. I had a lie down.’
‘You don’t look too well. I think you’d better go home to bed. Jeff has been very helpful. This is our taxi here now. I’ll probably see you sometime later on.’ She smiled stiffly and began to climb into the back of the taxi. Red Whiskers followed her. The taxi door slammed. I caught a glimpse of them as it turned, she leaning far back from the window, her face a blur, her body clasped by the hateful arm. My mind and blood went after the retreating car, as it moved beyond sight and sound into the live heart of the night.
With high forehead and full mouth, with doves about her feet, small- breasted and wide-thighed, her hair a bright cloud at her shoulders, Venus trod swiftly over the wooded slopes on yielding air. The blind earth kindled. Bull and heifer, stag and hind, all beasts and birds coupled in her path, each according to its species, so strong was the influence of the goddess. To the hut of Anchises she came, entering to the fume of the woodsmoke; and lay that night in his arms on a rough sheepskin. There the Trojan shepherd drank from her embracing limbs the medicine of immortality, bitter to men. For he grew old, chewing the cud of knowledge, and when he wished for death the earth barred its gates against him. But she lived on, without remorse, for her nature was not subject to decay.
By the time we reached the railway tracks, where a white eye shone down from a signal tower, Jack had grown maudlin. His arm was heavy round my shoulders and his feet tripped on the clinkers. ‘You’re a good sort, Jimmy. You wouldn’t let a cobber down. It’s a great thing for a man to know that he’s got a real cobber. You and me, Jimmy, we make a good pair.’ And clambering on through the acrid haze of the railway yards I seemed to see a vast tragic meaning in his babble. This was my real place, outside the living centre of the world, among the deadbeats and the half-men, not tall enough to try, going
And not long ago I stood again in the bush belt above the town where I came to life and died again. The night before I had come down by plane from Wellington to talk about Why Writers Stop Writing to the kind of people who are the main cause of it. I had stepped out of the dead belly of the thunder-bird to a stubble field and the sight of familiar raw scrub hills. And the next day I wandered through streets where the frost stood like fur on the sunless pavements; through iron-branched parks and pubs like morgues where no one walked or talked but the bird-voiced, smiling strangers. The hot, live, ringing town had gone as if it had never been, with girls in overcoats and boys in corduroys, the night’s manna and the day’s longing. The old bludgeoned core of knowledge under my singlet woke and winced again.
What happened to that stupid and sad young man? I asked the clock ruled spires and the grey plumed station. Who put Lysol in his rum and cloves? Who killed cock robin with his drumming heart and his head full of feathers? ‘Time,’ said the Town Hall clock, the four-faced master of the windy year. ‘Sin,’ said the First Church spire, needling up to the vague Otago heaven of tombstone clouds. But the Leith Stream, the last and only woman in the world, lulling the dead sky in her arms, sighing under bridge and over weir down to the flat crab-wet harbour, had nothing at all to say.
1955 (120)
It seems a little strange for someone to be talking about the ‘world of the creative artist’ who is deaf to music and sings like a crow, whose liking in painting is for simple religious pictures or attractive nudes, and who reads Science Fiction for pleasure. But of course there is poetry as well. I sometimes write poems; and perhaps there’s some kind of underground communication between painters and poets and composers and sculptors and novelists, each chipping away like a deaf miner in the dripping dark at his own coalface of human knowledge; perhaps the coal is the same for each, though each one uses different muscles and different tools. So I can ignore the history of art and literature, about which I don’t know much, and talk instead about the world I inhabit, one man’s world that I make poems in, and grieve and act and love in, and see out the bathroom window when I am shaving. I know only a little about the world; and most of it is somewhere in the poems I have written – but of one thing I am quite certain, that it never is or can be a private possession. We all come into it hot and kicking and go out of it when we are too cold to kick any longer. We will get all the privacy we want in the cemetery. At bottom an artist’s job is no different from that of any other man: to maintain a relation to a living centre, so that he can keep his heart and mind alive as far as the grave and it may be beyond the grave. When I
In our own time people have tended to rely greatly upon, even at times to worship, the discipline and method of science and the authority of the human intellect. The dependence is natural enough, but it can be blind and dangerous. The obvious value of scientific knowledge as an aid to understanding the processes of natural law, and as a tool to control our physical environment; the aura of greatness which surrounds the atomic physicist who can demolish matter, the surgeon who can stave off death, the jet pilot riding his thunderbird – these influences lead the mind away from the dark, secret chamber of individual being, the internal weakness and confusion from which these apparently godlike powers have emerged. The physicist, lying awake at midnight, asks an unscientific question – Who am I? What is the World? Why does my life wear at this moment a negative and terrible face? The jet pilot, standing at the canteen door, sees his girl dancing with another man – his heart turns over in his breast; he goes and gets bitterly drunk. The surgeon comes back after twenty years to the farm he grew up on, and is confronted by a younger and judging self in every paddock and turn of the road. These are the inward occasions of poetry. It must enter the chamber of individual being and give a voice to the prisoner who waits there; some have claimed that it can give him the prison keys, but that is wishful thinking. I believed it once myself. I looked on the processes of art as a kind of magic which could change the laws under which we live; just as many people secretly look on science as a similar kind of magic. But there is no magic, only the look of recognition between living creatures in their weakness and suffering, and the voice of intercession which speaks for all people through the mouth of one man:
Karl Shapiro, an American poet, wrote that as a soldier in the recent war. In some ways it is a very private poem; but when Shapiro speaks truly for himself, the blood flows onto the ground, and it is the same colour as mine or yours. He does not speak with the authority of the human intellect, but with the authority of suffering. This private elegy and love poem finds a voice for the deaths which each man has to die, not just a soldiering death: so at its deepest level it ceases to be private and becomes an act of intercession for mankind.
There have been a good many times when I have felt that my own poetry was valueless, because a great deal of it embodied private sexual fantasy or alcoholic depression. But the particular kind of private material my life was giving me to use didn’t really matter much. If I was standing on the rock of real knowledge when I wrote, then the poems would be significant for other people; and in some cases I had been standing on the rock.
Through education and example we have become used to devaluing any kind of knowledge which cannot be tested at least by intellectual processes, preferably by experimental method. I suggest that in so doing we are trying to make a philosopher’s stone out of what is at best an admirable tool. The difference between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge (both of which I value) is fairly plain if we consider the different approach of a poet and a scientist to the natural world.
The scientist is concerned to construct hypotheses of cause and effect for the elucidation of natural law. The fossil bones of a whale are to him evidence of a significant pattern in time and place, especially in time. His wonder at the hugeness of the creature, his joy at the discovery, are subordinatedCan’st thou catch Leviathan with a hook? or make him a plaything for thy hand-maidens? Who and what is Leviathan? A holy mystery of natural pride and energy; a symbol of the unconscious forces, creative and destructive, in the mind; Ikthus, Christ the Fish swimming in the baptismal font of the Pacific Ocean; Moby Dick, the Great White Whale of Melville’s allegory, the submerged evil which must be encountered, known and overcome – when Captain Ahab goes out to meet him it is the last autumn of the world and the mowers have been mowing on the slopes of the Andes; Leviathan vor, the big whale, about whom my grandmother used to read in her Gaelic Bible. Through nature a poet elucidates not natural law but our nature and destiny. Is poetry therefore more subjective than science? As a reader of Science Fiction, perhaps I am no good judge; but it seems to me otherwise. Through science the human intellect, confronted by the natural world, draws its own conclusions, hypotheses checked by experiment. Through art the whole human nature, intellect, feeling, sensation and intuition, rises to meet a new occasion: a work of art is a record of that strange meeting. You can understand then why there is antagonism between poetry and science, not between poet and scientist looking for significance in different ways, but between the language and vision of poetry and the prevailing climate of tired rationalism which has emptied the world of human significance. George Barker, an English poet, has stated the case for poetry very clearly:
We see them out of the corner of our eye, the lovers walking by the swans and the ruffled water in the park, the child playing Indians in the long grass beyond the railway yards. For them our casual nightmare of blind matter and impotent affection does not exist; they are temporarily free to do as they choose, and what they choose is right. That is the climate of Heaven. Wordsworth wrote that Heaven lies about us in our infancy; one could say with equal truth that Heaven and Hell lie about the adult person. Hell is the place of iron causality where we are always what we have been, the city of iron-grey stone which Dante entered in imagination, and which a part of our nature belongs to. There intellect can concern itself only with phantasmagoria and pain. But poetry is concerned with a living centre, and a different kind of suffering, that which rises from incomplete relationship, whether with the natural world, with God, or with one’s fellow creatures.
The popular conception of an artist at work is that of a man full of confidence, exercising his skill in self-chosen isolation. My own experience has been very different. I have little pleasure in making poetry; though some in looking at it after it is made. I am never more keenly aware of my own stupidity and clumsiness, the inadequacy of my faculties to cope with a real occasion. It is like a man wearing three pairs of gloves and trying to pick up a key from the ground; or like a man almost blind trying to distinguish the colour of a flower he has never seen before. Consider also the horror of artistic impotence, those periods of dearth and dryness when all effort is useless, the mind and heart sluggish, and when one can only fill a sheet of paper with junk, junk, junk! I do not know any frustration to compare with it.
The bright gun of the intellect can be used to shoot down any chimera. That is all for the best: we cannot afford illusions, they eat us out of body and soul. But modern man has turned the gun on himself by asserting that an idea without a concrete referent is meaningless. I am not competent to discuss the philosophy of Hume or the discipline of logical positivism. But when I see the waves breaking on the rocks, I know that I stand on the edge of another sea whose reality will, if I let it, enter and suffuse my mind and heal me of the blindness and dumbness which is my ordinary condition:
There is intellectual method in the construction of a poem; but it is the servant of reality enjoyed or endured. I know that I could never write a line of more than trivial, competent verse if I did not search for, and even pray for a heightened knowledge of my own nature and the nature of the world I live in. Such knowledge is never of a comfortable kind. It is usually the factors in human living most neglected by the age which art brings to the surface. For example, in Roy Fuller’s poem, ‘Harbour Ferry’, written like Shapiro’s in time of war, matters of patriotism are quite irrelevant, and even matters of politics, though Fuller has a Marxist view of history. He expresses the private grief of the married conscript, but goes far beyond it:
A question entirely relevant in the age of the Atomic Bomb. One could stress the technical excellence of Fuller’s poem; but I would rather point to what he is saying:
Fuller confronts simultaneously the mystery of isolated human identity and the mystery of the natural world. He sees the demonic forces in human nature infecting man’s relation to the natural world with a terrible sterility. The moon, a customary symbol of fertility, brings rigor mortis to the war- broken ships and the men on the battlefield. Like the archaic Gorgon on the wall of a Greek temple, with ‘furious steps’ she scatters death and poison, a devouring force of blind causality; and love as well as war comes within her orbit. The ‘fatal chasm’ of which he speaks is more than a state of purely personal weakness or expected death. It is the loss of relation to a living centre, endangering (in Fuller’s view) the human race:
He personifies the ancient strength of nature as a lion. To the intellect the natural world is neutral and objective; but at the moment of full relation it is either lovely or terrible, and in Fuller’s symbol both aspects are contained. The final question comes with an undertone of accusation:
Fuller is a humanist who questions the power of human will and reason to create a fertile order. He sees the same destructive forces at work in the microcosm of personality and the macrocosm of collective civilisation.
Where does this lead us to? To a conception of art as a process which continually lays bare realities of our human situation with which the systematised thought of our society is unable to cope; lays bare not only the destructive but also the healing powers.
I remember a chap I knew in my late teens, a drinking cobber of mine. He had been a science student for several years, working through a rational
That vision cracks open, like a nut, the causal universe.
An artist struggles to give shape to an experience in its entirety. But as we become more and more a community of technocrats we tend to departmentalise our living – No, Madam, you won’t find love in this Department; I suggest you try the Department of Internal Affairs. We are all specialists, or in the process of becoming. I am a specialist, though a poor one, at pushing and coaxing children in a primary-school classroom. This job has its special language which I find extremely depressing to read or listen to. But when I write poetry I am not a specialist. The words I use are mainly from common speech; the material I work with is the raw, unclassified, uncontrollable occasions of my own life which I hold in common with other people. Dylan Thomas once said ‘I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval . . .’. Now I don’t think Thomas looked upon himself as a stray into the human fold from some region of gods and demons; he thought that other people were much the same as himself. But his view of himself and other people was more honest than the highly selective one which our society enjoins upon us. Not long before he died he spoke in these words about the plan of a new poem:
The godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamplighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker – He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called His country, one of His worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself.
And, when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the poem-to-be, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the country-men of Heaven crouch all together under the hedges, and, among themselves, in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow men who were once of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairsbreadth of the mind, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all that you and I know and do not know. The poem-to-be is made of all these tellings.
And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness.
Part of this poem was completed; and it nearly accomplishes what Thomas asked it to do. Thomas’s own comment expresses a good deal better than I can what the world of the creative artist is, or can be when it is integrated. In the long run all art centres upon human beings – not just social beings, but the incarnate mystery who lives in squalor and anxiety, suffers death, and is capable of love. There is no answer in the language of art, or science, to the real problems of adult life – How shall I avoid an inward death? How shall I learn to love my neighbour when he is so much like myself? – but an art form can state the human situation in something like its entirety, when the voice of the flesh and spirit are bound in one. In John Donne’s words –
To the rational eye, the world is an environment, a sphere of operation. To the eye of the artist, whatever his belief, it looks more like an annexe of Purgatory, which the mediaeval writers described simultaneously as a place of torment and a garden of flowers.
1955 (121)
This is the fourth issue of NUMBERS; and the time may be ripe to reconsider its function and its possible future. In the capacity of editor I have become convinced that the gamble of that group (of which I was one) who firstNUMBERS, with little finance and no certainty of contributions except from the junk-pile of accepted writers, has been justified to the hilt. Money is always hard to find. Yet comparing NUMBERS with the great echoing morgue of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-liberal, pseudo- humanist verbosity, ENCOUNTER, stamped with the dollar sign on every other page, a nuisance committed in the name of art, one sees that only the willing whore can be sure of financial assistance – she gives away more than she gets, her potential creativity. We believed that editors and critics were becoming too exclusive in New Zealand, that even our best writing tended to sameness, and that fresh work remained unpublished or even unwritten because of a cramp in the weight-lifting muscles, an over-attention to past achievement on the part of established writers, and fear of the critic’s yard-rule on the part of the unestablished. It was a hunch, a gamble, no certainty, that we would find a vigorous, growing literature, varied and atypical, where Mr Holcroft stated, Mr Brasch implied and Mr Curnow austerely lamented that none could exist. I suggest that the material in this fourth issue, in particular the poems by Louis Johnson, the short story by Maurice Shadbolt, and the poems by Leon Phillips, fully justifies the continuance of NUMBERS. We have greater need of the vigorous and imaginative work of the new man or woman than the illusory pursuit of ‘greatness’ which feeds on its own bowels.
Once I believed what my schoolmasters taught me – that critical standards determine all. I did not ask the relevant question – ‘Whose standards?’ Year by year I become more distrustful of my own ability, and that of others, to deliver final literary judgment on any work. Entirely contradictory yet plausible judgments on books of prose and verse are made every week in our periodicals and newspapers. My own experience as a reviewer has led me to the conclusion that the best one can expect from any critic is informed opinion, though what one often gets is uninformed prejudice. The value of criticism lies mainly in the interaction of two minds, that of the writer and that of the reviewer. If one cannot judge with certainty the value of a given work, how much less can one judge the possible development of a writer not yet mature? To be entirely frank – I believe (heretically) that the fructifying influence of criticism, by editor or reviewer, is negligible upon writers established or unestablished. Nor does Mr Curnow’s suggestion that we should all ‘raise our sights higher’ impress me at all. Mr Curnow falls too readily into the pose of the lonely survivor celebrated in Anglo-Saxon poetry, who sits on a rocky beach and sees the shapes of vanished greatness in the sea mist – ‘Alas! the byrnied warriors; Alas! the gold-giver; Alas! The mead-benches . . .’. The vital problems of our literature lie elsewhere.
A meteorologist, pre-occupied with statistical data of wind-direction and rainfall, may eventually delude himself to the point where he considers that he controls the weather. His public also have a natural inclination to magical belief, and listen anxiously to the weather forecast, as to the voice of a tribalLandfall as light-bearer in the dark antipodes. I have no violent quarrel with the opinions expressed by either person, nor with those of Mr Holcroft. They have each on occasion talked horse sense. But I consider the potential freedom and fertility of New Zealand writers a far more important matter than the final accuracy of their opinion or my own. The processes of literary composition are largely uncontrollable and inaccessible to critical intelligence. One can meddle with a writer but one cannot make him or her. The chief factor which inhibits the growth of the younger writer and prevents the rejuvenation of the exhausted veteran is lack of trust in their own powers, lack of fidelity to their own unique situation, and above all, anxious dependence upon the opinion of critic and editor. The spring must run muddy before it can run clear. We may provide a channel. We do not govern the spring.
1955 (122)
If any plain message has come to us from the turbulent idealism of the poetry of the Thirties, it is that young men grow old and a burning heart is quenched soonest by the smoke of its own conflagration. The tragedy cannot be glossed over by easy words; for it involves more than the words that came out of it. Before the Second World War, in England, Europe and America, there existed both among intellectual men and women and some not intellectual, a strong sincere hope for more than private freedom, justice and creativity. Political elements, though important, were not central in the Leftist world- view. Which of us, then in our teens or twenties does not remember the clang of the armourer’s shop, the exhilaration as of mountain air, the sense of a great journey to be undertaken, above all the shaping of a new language to express a vision only partly comprehended? That vision of potential greatness in the human heart moved dilettantes to write strong factual prose and minor poets to write a handful of magnificent lyrics. And if we say resignedly that after all no human structure is stable, or that good and evil are mixed everywhere, how does this compensate for the vision lost any more than, for a woman, the tolerance of a companionate marriage can fill the gap left by the first disastrous love affair on which she squandered her virginity, her idealism and the generous force of her nature? We expect less than the writers of the Thirties did; and are no better for it. We are involved, too, in their failure; for our own failure of passion stems from it.
Though they differ greatly in their methods of writing and in the texture of their poems, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, by belonging to the
Day Lewis expounds a mysticism at that time new. Trust in the health of natural processes is strong in his early work; the necessities of social action seem almost peripheral. The ambiguous ‘we’ refers equally to the socialist elect, and to the poet and his sexual partner who expect, too, that their path will be smoothed by benign powers. In later poems ‘we’ ambiguously refers to man and woman; but still Day Lewis is sharply aware of other people as part of the Kingdom of Ends. The wintry landscapes through which the married lovers move contain places, events, a world of change and suffering, more than their own tragic patterns in the snow. Spender’s best poetry, on the other hand, is chiefly the expression of the sexual and exploratory impulses of a solitary and very young man:
What power, may we ask, murdered Spender’s gift and narrowed Day Lewis’s imaginative scope to spirited translation of Virgil and a garden haunted by the ghost of one much-loved woman? The whole answer lies probably in the partial collapse of a civilisation; but the individual failure can be traced to the areas of experience which socialist humanism ignored. At some moment each of the writers of the Thirties, looking at bombed Germany, at the charred bones of Hiroshima, or even at their own face in a bedroom mirror, saw the face of the human species (in Chekhov’s idiom) as that of an unclean beast of prey. On their reaction to this vision of the Pit depended the wholeness of their future response. The strongest were moved to intercession; the weakest (Spender among them) retreated nervously to the
Many influences have shaped his work – social idealism, the classics, Auden, Hardy, Blunden – but he has retained what can only be called artistic integrity. From The Nabara, that powerful celebration of human courage in extremity, to the elegiac section of Italian Journey, one retains the certainty of contact with a living heart and mind, labouring and suffering, maintaining the uneasy balance of a Romantic Stoic. He may stand the test of time better than most of his more widely anthologised contemporaries.
1955 (123)
I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this discussion of New Zealand poetry. To begin with, we must be sure that the animal really exists; and of that I am not entirely sure. Is there a large body of work, coherent, relying upon some common tradition, understood at least superficially by most educated readers? All we can really say is that there are some poets here. There is a sprinkling of sympathetic readers too; but no certain audience, and little agreement upon what is good.
I don’t propose to talk about New Zealand poetry quantitatively, in terms of the number of books published. That’s a bookseller’s or a publisher’s business. But the qualitative side seems to me all-important. That could mean two things – that I put an invisible yardstick alongside every poem I read, and if it doesn’t measure up, chuck it out; or that the meaning of the words is more important to me than the number of words on the page. I hope it’s mainly the second: one grows tired of invisible yardsticks. All the same, it is worth remembering that in 1945 Allen Curnow included only sixteen poets in the first edition of his Book of New Zealand Verse. You may quarrel with his choice – that’s not the point – he was trying to avoid the quantitative kind of anthology which regards a poem as a museum-piece as soon as it is written.
Whenever I think of poetry in New Zealand I think of two men, or it could be women, one young, the other not so young. The first may be a solid member of the S.C.M. or else living uncomfortably with a series of girlfriends in a dirty little bach. It doesn’t make much difference: the poems have a family likeness. They are the fragmentary records of spiritual passion, the convulsive movements of a soul in chains, whether to propriety or to Bohemia. Some
The other person who haunts, me, not so young, is the man I see in the shaving mirror – who has come a good way and knows less than when he began. The most dangerous time for him is the day he first uses the word ‘adolescent’ to describe the things he does not like; when he rejects one half of his universe to make the other half safe. In that context I will tell a moral fable.
Once upon a time a wandering scholar tramped the roads of Europe in rags, folly and disrepute; but with satire so sharp that the Archbishop of Salzburg had him arrested and thrown into a dungeon. There he was converted by a talking crow which sang psalms outside his window night and morning; and on his release became a respectable monk. Soon the fame of his sanctity and good works spread as wide as his wicked songs had done. The Devil got wind of it, and came to tempt him – first of all in the shape of a willowy dancing-girl.
‘You’re wasting your time, my dear,’ said the monk. ‘I’m a dry stick now, and much too old for your kind of games.’
The Devil then came to him in the shape of a lawyer, telling him that a great inheritance had been left to him. He had only to go and claim it.
‘My good man,’ said the monk, ‘I gave up the flattery of beggars and kings to get peace of mind. Do you think I’d give it up for a few miserable bags of money?’
The Devil then came in the shape of the Pope’s ambassador, begging him to accept the Chair of Theology at Cologne.
‘All Professors are proven heretics,’ said the monk. ‘I’d rather avoid offending God than teach about His attributes.’
The Devil was in despair; but he decided to stake his luck on a last throw. So he appeared, horned and hoofed, without disguise, in the monk’s cell. ‘I
What has all this to do with New Zealand poetry? Only to say that its future is quite incalculable, for it depends on the poets themselves. No one can write their poems for them. But we can hinder them a great deal by offering good advice.
1955 (124)
The Christian view of homosexual intercourse is sharply divided – on the one hand we have the view of the framers of monastic Penitentials, who regarded such intercourse as a sin much on the level with adultery, and whose discipline was tempered with charity and common sense; on the other hand, the heavy-handed zealots, who believe that such intercourse provoked the special wrath of God, citing invariably as an instance the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah. Dr Bailey’s scholarly and superbly balanced investigation no more than skirts the tangled and subjective field of ethical judgment and psychological justification; he wisely restricts himself to an analysis of the opinions expressed historically in Scripture, in Roman Law, in Church teaching and legislature, and in Norman England, with a brief discussion of the situation in modern English law. His findings are extraordinarily valuable, and should help to stabilise modern Church opinion, both privately and publicly, in a greater tolerance.
It emerges clearly from his analysis of the Hebrew texts that the focus of the Sodom story is not homosexual, as popularly supposed by the Church Fathers and ourselves; that it turns instead on the breach of hospitality to angelic visitors (the Greek legend of Baucis and Philemon is the nearest pagan parallel). He further establishes beyond dispute that the Church, while enjoining repentance, constantly protected its homosexual members from the rigour of Roman Law from the time of Justinian onwards. He does not find any support for the extreme Puritan view that the practising homosexual is automatically excluded from Church membership.
Dr Bailey makes the important point that a homosexual temperament cannot be regarded, on Christian grounds, as morally reprehensible. His broom sweeps clean in an area much cluttered with traditional prejudice and misapprehensions. His work provides a valuable corrective to the false pride of
1956 (125)
A just consideration of the writings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift will inevitably reflect also the political, social and cultural structure of eighteenth- century England. The Hanoverian kings sat on an uneasy throne: in the first half of that century there were two attempts, one very nearly successful, to unseat them in favour of the exiled Stuarts; there was always the pop of the bursting bubbles of Jacobite plots. The legal persecution of Roman Catholics affected Pope lifelong. He writes thus in 1753 in his brilliant and scathing letter of defence against Lord Hervey’s libels: ‘I beseech your Lordship to consider the injury a man of your high rank and credit may do to a private person, under penal laws and many other disadvantages . . . It is by these alone I have hitherto lived excluded from all posts of profit and trust’.
Swift was as much embittered by the sufferings of the Irish poor as by his own; and even attempted in later years to organise the maimed beggars of Dublin into a kind of trade union. Nor was London a paradise. Capital punishment could be and was inflicted for nearly two hundred ‘crimes’; the gaols stank; yet thugs and footpads roamed after dark, those gangs against whom Fielding broke his health if not his courage, and preserved for us in all their squalid anarchy in Jonathan Wilde. One must set the leisured, delicate world of The Rape of the Lock or Swift’s discourse on bad servants against this harsh background. Swift, however, had always one eye and one ear (till inflammation swelled one to the size of an egg and deafness closed the other) awake to the faces and voices of the submerged class. It is he, not Pope, who suggested to Gay that it would be a pretty thing to write some ‘Newgate pastorals’, thus planting the seed of The Beggar’s Opera. Swift, an Irishman and political pamphleteer for both Whig and Tory, stood always a little outside the maze of English social and literary hierarchies; to Pope, despite his disabilities, these were the breath of life. Hence Pope speaks to a modern reader at a remove; for all his talent, he is dated. The satire of each man has a different basis. To understand this it is necessary to examine briefly the inward as well as the outward environment in which the solitary powers of each were developed.
In her informative but highly coloured biography of Pope, Edith Sitwell draws the conclusion that he is a much maligned man, who was embittered
Pope is no great philosopher, which is perhaps why he has become in some degree the philosopher of the man in the street; but he is great in anger, and directs the point of a burning-glass upon the vices and follies of persons. Not the state of Denmark, but the character of an individual member of the Danish court is always his perfect theme and playground:
The force of such lines is contained in the use of the particular word or phrase – ‘curd of ass’s milk’, ‘spaniels’, ‘familiar toad’ – instead of that generality of which Dr Johnson approved. Here too Pope stands beside the Latin poets. The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic poem, contains fewer of these diminishing images than does his straight satires; for its intention is not to expose sores.
The broader and the more general satire of later parts of the Dunciad was very likely inspired by Swift, who had encouraged his ‘flair for lampooning and the invention of ludicrous incidents’. (Ian Jack in Augustan Satire). The continual embroilments of Pope’s life, his necessarily sedentary habits, kept his eyes fixed either (in satire) upon his opponents in literary politics or (in elegiac and lyrical verse) upon that sphere which his grotto at Twickenham and landscape garden symbolised –
He was at best a satirist of minute particulars; and as such the unifying focus of eighteenth-century poetry.
Swift and Pope, apart from friendship, shared two things – the attention of a wider number of cultured readers than England has provided before or since; and the consciousness of grave personal defects. Pope was dwarfish and weak; Swift suffered from increasing deafness, vertigo, and the inroads of manic-depressive insanity. It is possible that Swift’s very plainness of style is an attempt to conquer by conscious levelling the rebellious under-world of his mind. He was influenced by Voltaire, and by Rabelais – whom Pope ‘could never read . . . with any patience’. Pope criticises society from within, by its own moral standards; Swift is the man from Mars to whom all human vanity is apparent, directing his satire against society, from the outside. Like Diogenes he revolts against the human race; and hence comes near in spirit to the modern Romantic. Joyce in Ulysses draws heavily on Swift and Blake, for the energy of these writers was of a kind which did not fit easily either into the cult of sensibility or current rationalism; it was derived from an earthquake- fault in the world of stable knowledge where Swift’s images are frequently surrealistic. He describes in prolonged detail objects of wood, glass and metal. One is reminded of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, where the same keen interest in physical phenomena is coupled with remoteness and distortion in the human sphere. His satire succeeds not only by bathetic analogy, as in The Tale of a Tub, but also by a dehumanising of human events, so that they can be regarded impersonally as mean and ludicrous. The description of the female Yahoo who approaches Gulliver amorously, or of the various inhabitants of the Tub, carry satire to its polar extreme; for the attitudes of sex and religion, those two incubi and energisers of man, must inevitably appear ludicrous to an outsider. Swift takes the position of an outsider. In The Battle of the Books he comes closer to Pope’s ground. One gathers that this satire was an offspring of the Scriblerus Club, for which Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot were responsible; yet even here depersonalisation is at work. He is indeed capable of genial humour, as when he writes verses on his maidservant, or tenderness as in his letters to Stella. But his greatest work, in prose or verse, rises from a sense of sickness in the scheme of things –
Swift is the satirist par excellence: he satirises everything, even himself. Yet his public satire bore fruit. While Pope gave benefactions in private, Swift defended the Irish poor with volcanic indignation; perhaps because, like himself, they were outsiders.
1956? (126)
Stephen Spender’s book of short stories was first published in 1936; Dylan Thomas’s unfinished novel, here published as a unit, was first brought out in the second and third Mentor Books in 1953, those lively American paperbacks. One could not imagine two books more different – a war lies between them, and between the authors’ many light-years of experience. Spender’s work is above all sensitive. His characters exist in total separation, alone with their inhuman past and terrible present in which every gesture of communication withers because only states of mind are real. His stories are technically imperfect; they tend to sprawl, the style is often rather trite and wooden: yet a sense of struggling sincerity binds them together. They are not tragic, for tragedy requires a solid universe, a harmony to be shattered – the characters in these stories are all sleepwalkers. In the words of the young dipsomaniac in the finest story of the collection – ‘Those whom one saves are oneself, and there is nothing outside oneself, not even that which is to be saved.’ In face of this recurring zero politics becomes opinion, sympathy a hypochondriac’s muttering, sex a nervous habit, the vigorous known creation an unconsoling painted mirage. It is life of a kind; and in 1936, new to it, Mr Spender described it very well.
One suspects that Dylan Thomas had an intractable conscience. Adventures in the Skin Trade was (one hears) mortgaged to two separate publishers, to each without the other’s knowledge; and perhaps the sense of trouble ahead made Thomas stave off the projected ending, when the country innocent, Samuel Bennet, would stand stark naked on Paddington Station after the skin traders of London had had their way with him. We can only mourn for what was never written, and rejoice in what is. From the moment Samuel Bennet wakes in his suburban bedroom and creeps downstairs to blacken his sister’s doilies and crack his mother’s china the story never flags, the hullabaloo is strong and loud, the picaresque menageries charge hairy and shouting. But no one is really hurt. Perhaps tragedy is no more possible in Thomas’s crowded world’s fair of cosmic innocence than in Spender’s arctic drawing-room though for a very different reason. Perhaps words do not describe the real world anyway. But in Thomas’s work there is at least a loving hand at work and a strong wind of rebellious laughter.
1956 (127)
What can a New Zealander say to an Australian? – except, We’ve met before. Met where? In hands-across-the-Tasman literary log-rolling? In common opposition to irresponsible censorship of expression? In the great Never Never Land of ideal wish-fulfilment? I don’t think so; though these thingsOver the Sliprails, by Henry Lawson. I’d been familiar with Lawson’s poetry for a long time – my father used to roll out the long trundling ballad lines; I loved them dearly, and no doubt that bedrock sentimental nostalgia is with me still. But the myth of Lawson’s greatness seemed to me largely a fabrication of the Australian hard-case joker telling the world he was a child at heart; and of course the Leftist pamphleteer:
I quote from memory. Lawson is onto something, the vision of despair redeemed by compassion; but the verbal statement is always a bit too much the expected one. You can be sure of Lawson’s sincerity in his verse – it carries it a long way – but will it stand without the scaffolding of a particular epoch and personality? Well, I read ‘An Incident at Stiffner’s’, and the whole card- house of reservations came toppling down. Here was compassion deep as the grave, the gigantic torso of human dignity and suffering – the shape buried somewhere behind the sentimentalities of ‘mateship’ and the slogans of early unionism. It was Australian all right. It had its echo too in New Zealand prose; it was a hidden pulse in R.A.K. Mason’s poems and in a few of the best that came after – a blind and dumb pietà hewn in rock. Perhaps it came into being when the eyes of two colonisers-to-be, Australian and New Zealand, met above an open convict’s grave on Norfolk Island.
1956 (128)
This poetry is essentially honest, perhaps of all gifts the most necessary to a growing poet. There are so many pressures, internal and external, pressing equally on the girl at training-college, the boy at varsity, the housewife-poet who cares what the neighbours say and the Listener does not print, the old stager condemned to the whisky mines: pressure to choose for oneself another’s good, to accept social anaesthesia for individual pain, to fill in the well when water fails instead of digging deeper. So many succumb, and are inevitably silenced, that one looks first, in a new first book, not for the graces of poetry (wealth of imagery, stanza control, assonantal harmony) but for the grit of
I must confess a bewilderment, as reader and reviewer, on first reading the love poems in this volume. The dilemma of flesh and spirit which they conceived and stated seemed curiously remote; I could not imagine it my own. Another poem, ‘The Young Legend’, presented the same difficulty. Then the scales fell from my eyes with the realisation that Paul Henderson is a woman poet writing under a pseudonym; and a world of vigorous, actual knowledge was exposed to me.
A living poem, being child of the flesh and spirit, rests on a subtle balance of intellectual and instinctual forces. The necessary identification of the reader with the poet requires him to sustain, for the moment, a parallel balance. Hence a male critic is handicapped in dealing with the work of a woman poet by his masculine pattern of instinctual response; hence, if obtuse, may regard a vigorous and well-balanced poem as a mere formal exercise. (I believe that some such confusion has often lain behind the comment of male critics on the work of Katherine Mansfield.) The resultant deprecation of the work of women writers has in the past led them to take up extreme positions – either a defensive feminism, with crude emphasis on ‘female sensitivity’, or a masking of difference, equally defensive, with the assertion that the intellectual and instinctual processes of a woman’s mind are identical with those of a man. It is very natural that a woman poet, bringing out her first volume, should choose a masculine pseudonym.
Like Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, and in a lesser measure, Ruth Dallas, Paul Henderson has produced durable poetry from areas of experience mainly inaccessible or unrewarding to the male poet. The symbol of the inhabited temenos in ‘The Island’, and in several poems of house and garden, is explored with unsentimental delicacy and vigour. In ‘Rock Garden she employs flower names (as Ursula Bethell did) to evoke a mystical experience:
Her most characteristic poetry, however – as in ‘After Flood’, ‘New Year Bonfire’, ‘The Ghost Ships’ – has scope and energy far beyond the accustomed boundaries. The packed long line, the sharp visual imagery, even the occasional rawness, links her work with the best of Robin Hyde. In such poems, where human endeavour and habitation contrast and mingle with the terrible, regenerative wilderness, one feels that she has already travelled far, escaping the Scylla of abstract metaphysics and the Charybdis of ‘female sensitivity’. The ‘New Journey’ which she celebrates in the last poem in the book has been toward greater density of statement and a fuller awareness of the ambiguity of instinct:
Plainly a real poet is among us. One hopes that her impulse will not be curbed or sterilised by the pressures from within and without, towards stale conformity, with which we each are obliged to contend.
1956 (129)
Not long ago there was a rabbit called Butch. During the week he worked in a carrot factory and on Saturday nights he used to put on a hula-hula tie and stand at the street corner and say, ‘Hot bunny!’ to the girl rabbits that went past. Before long he met a little girl rabbit with a pink nose and sensitive whiskers (her mother was an albino and she was rather proud of it) and he knew that this was the real thing. So he gave away the hula-hula tie and took up ballroom dancing and opened a bank account.
But the day after they were engaged, he was dusting the top shelf in the carrot factory, when the ladder went for a skate. He fell like a sack of greens and everyone thought his last hour had come. But halfway to the ground his waistcoat burst open and two furry wings sprouted on his shoulders. He zoomed round the factory like a jet bomber and crashed into the manager, a bald bad-tempered rabbit who had come to the office door to see what all
The little girl rabbit was very upset though Butch explained it wasn’t his fault and after all he was still alive, wasn’t he? She said she could never marry a rabbit with wings. She wouldn’t feel safe in bed because he might suddenly take off without meaning to; and besides the deformity might be transmitted to their children. Butch began talking loudly about albinos and they parted on very bad terms.
After this his character began to deteriorate. Instead of getting another job he hung around the pubs drinking applejack and saying his wings were really an example of mutation and an evolutionary jump forward for the rabbit race. When he was drunk he would give flying exhibitions in the town square, looping the loop and turning in figures of eight. A lot of rabbits knocked off work to watch him and the rabbit children started to play the wag from school. There were complaints to the police from the Chamber of Commerce and the Home and School Associations. A rabbit policeman finally took him in charge by lassoing him from a helicopter when he was sleeping off a bout behind the town hall clock. There were photographs of the capture in all the daily newspapers.
The next day Butch appeared in court. He was very defiant and claimed that there was no law in the statute books which forbade rabbits flying in the town square. The magistrate remanded him for medical examination. The psychiatrist’s report stated that Butch really thought he could fly, which was a plain case of manic delusion complicated with alcoholic symptoms. It recommended hospitalisation and shock treatment as a possible cure. So Butch, on the authority of two doctors and with the full consent of his relatives, was shunted quietly up the line.
Butch became very gloomy and depressed in the mental hospital and didn’t react at all favourably to shock treatment. He had to be put under constraint for socking an attendant who talked a lot about bunny-hops. A friendly doctor decided to humour him by pretending to examine his wings and was surprised to find that they really were there. From this point it was all plain sailing. A famous rabbit surgeon was sent for and Butch was given a shot in the rump. When he woke up again his wings were gone; and as he made no complaints he was soon released as a cured patient.
There were not many rabbits who were ready to employ Butch. Most of them knew of his record of mental instability and his anti-social behaviour in his flying days. But when he became prominent in the ranks of Moral Re-Armament he gradually got back his status in the rabbit community. The friendly rabbit doctor helped him to get a job in Drainage Disposal; and his albino girlfriend, who really had a heart of gold, forgave him and agreed to renew their engagement.
Alas, this is not quite the end of the story. Butch seemed very happy in his
1956 (130)
1
It was the early summer of ’55, about the beginning of December, one of the driest spells for twenty years. I’d been lent a bach at Paraparaumu, near the sandhills, a ramshackle place with cocksfoot grass growing high round the back verandah. Day after day the sun rose like molten steel, and I lay out on the sand, or in the sand of the bamboos at the bottom of the garden, too dozy to roll over, reading Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade – ‘Ninety- eight per cent of the human body is water,’ he thought. Polly Dacey is all salt water. She sat by his side like a flood in an apron . . .’.
I lived on eggs and bacon and mushroom soup heated on the electric range in the small, smelly kitchen. My wife was away down South. I would have spent the evenings in the new posh pub built at the corner for motor campers; but I’d had to lay off the grog six months before, and I knew what it would do to me if I got on it again. So I went to the pictures on my own, and walked along the wet sand, thinking about God and Te Kooti and my old girlfriends, while the sun flamed down behind Kapiti and young mosquitoes whispered in my ear. That’s how I came to meet the Mathesons. One evening, a few nights after I’d settled in, I was standing on the beach watching a plane glide down towards the ’drome, straight as a carrier pigeon, on a perfect tilt,
‘A fine sight, isn’t it?’ he said. His voice had a brassy, optimistic ring, the voice of the Old Man of the Sea, exercised in a hundred school staffrooms and meetings of the Ratepayers’ Association, confident that a man-to-man talk can cure anything from bleeding piles to juvenile delinquency. ‘I often stand here and watch the planes come in, and think of the fine young men who become pilots these days. A life of adventure. We’ve made great strides, great strides . . .’. He went on in this strain for some minutes; and I did not try to check him, though vacuous depression rose like a groundfog in my mind. ‘You’re new in these parts, aren’t you?’ he said at last. ‘My name’s Matheson. Arthur Matheson. I keep an eye on everything that happens on this beach. A beach holiday’s a fine thing after the year’s toil. And you’re out here on your own. A meditative man, like myself.’ He laid a talon lightly on my shoulder. ‘You must come over and see us some evening. Just me and my wife and our son; John, he’s the youngest of five. There’s no ceremony with us. Just drop over. What about tomorrow night?’
The snare had tightened round me. I mumbled an answer which he took for assent. His thick, androgynous body swerved aside and he began to climb a track through the gritty swordgrass. ‘Remember,’ he shouted, beaming at me over the top of a brushwood fence as if about to whinny. ‘Tomorrow night, Mr Gantry.’ How he knew my name I could not guess. Perhaps he had asked at the store. He left me, as a bulldozer leaves a field, scraped clean down to the grassroots. That night his hunter’s voice blared endlessly among my dreams.
At eight o’clock the following evening, in sandals, floral shirt and my oldest flannel pants, I walked up the steep gravel road towards the Mathesons. Their house was unmistakeable. Among the shabby baches its trim green lawns, knee-high fence and rose arbour, sang protest to the world. On the front lawn stood white plaster penguins, dogs and gnomes. They would never bellow, bark, or waddle through town to the bright blue summer sea. They were taken inside every evening after nine to sit beside the coal-box and the broom bucket.
Old Man Matheson was watering hydrangeas by himself. The brisk water- jet gave a curious impression that he was urinating into the bush. I saw him now more clearly than I had in the half-light of the beach the night before. His back was straight, his belly round as a Christmas pudding; his wattled face shone with health; but the hard, dead bird’s eye stared down at the flowers as if they were children whom he suspected of talking in morning assembly. This, and an indefinable rigidity in his posture, convinced me that he had been long years in the same profession as myself. One can smell a schoolteacher, even watering a bush in shorts and sandshoes. The trace of
‘Ah, Mr Gantry!’ He smiled a wide sentimental smile. ‘You’re here in good time. Punctuality. It’s part of good manners, I always say. But not all the young people are the same as you.’ The thick-fingered talon rested again on my shoulder. ‘Come in, come in, and make yourself at home.’ He steered me up the concrete path to the front door. Though the air was heavy with the heat of the day a coal fire burned in the sitting-room, behind a brass firescreen polished to brilliance, representing an Arab and his camel. In the small glassed bookcase beside the window stood a few unfingered books. I moved closer and glanced into it. A Living Philosophy of Education by Carleton Washburne; Ideas Have Legs by Peter Howard; Familiar Quotations by J.C. Grocott; three volumes of Winston Churchill’s memoirs; These New Zealanders by Robin W. Winks. He saw me looking and smiled again. ‘My little treasury,’ he said. ‘Since my retirement I’ve found great refreshment in books. Ideas have legs. The world of tomorrow will be changed by ideas. Mother’ – he turned towards the fireplace – ‘Mother, this is Mr Gantry, the young man I was telling you about. He and I had a most interesting little talk on the beach yesterday. What did you say your vocation was, Mr Gantry?’
I had said nothing to him about my job. But the heat of the sitting- room and his cheerful hypnotic voice overpowered me. ‘Schoolteaching,’ I answered. ‘I’m teaching at Miramar’ – and then more rashly – ‘sometimes I do work for radio as well.’
A shapeless shadow detached itself from the corner beyond the firescreen. The ebbing light from the sky beyond the window showed a woman with a heavy, spade-square face. The lips were pale and moustached. The eyes had an irritable needle brightness which I had seen before only in the eye of a broody hen. She wore a thick wool cardigan. Her lank grey hair, in an unbecoming pageboy cut, hung over long, burnished earrings. Her broad, misshapen, almost dwarfish body gave a sense of huge vitality turned in against itself and continually jarring.
‘Mr Gantry. Yes, I believe I’ve seen your name in the Listener. You write verses, don’t you?’ The last remark was made in a tone suggesting that my credentials would have to be examined carefully.
I nodded and mumbled as my head swam in the heat. Then I sat down carefully on the edge of a leather armchair which gaped behind me like an undertaker’s wagon. ‘Our son, John, has shown a talent for poetry. He has written several poems about birds. There are a great many birds in this neighbourhood. A worldly neighbourhood.’ She did not make it clear whether birds were worldly per se, or whether the neighbourhood made them so. ‘When Arthur retired from teaching we decided to settle here because it was the best climate for my arthritis. Arthur, as you will know, was headmaster at Northland School. A profession only suitable for a man with a true sense of vocation.’ The needle eye bored into my face. ‘I have hopes that John will
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, of course.’
‘The youth of this country are in special need of guidance. But there are wolves among the flock. I’m afraid that moral laxity is widespread, even among professing Christians.’ The spade face buckled slightly at the edges. ‘Have you been long in Paraparaumu?’
‘Not more than a week.’
‘I trust you will be able to accompany us to church next Sunday. Our minister is a man of great eloquence. We are members of the Methodist congregation.’
‘I should really go to the Anglican church,’ I said.
She did not seem disposed to accept the evasion. But her husband broke in. ‘We mustn’t press Mr Gantry, mother. After all, John Wesley was Church of England.’
‘Yes, that is true. I have heard from Arthur that you are staying in the Randall’s house. I have met Mrs Randall. She has most peculiar views on the rearing of children. I’m afraid that God has played little or no part in that home. The house is in a sad state of disrepair. I believe that Mr Randall’s addiction to drink is one of the main causes. Have you sufficient bedding?’
‘I sleep on the floor. In the spare room. I only need a single blanket.’
Her face stiffened visibly. She seemed about to give birth to a crayfish. But the door opened quietly. A boy of fifteen stepped into the room. She turned her face toward him. ‘Shut the door behind you, John. My arthritis will not allow me to catch cold. This is Mr Gantry, whose verses appear in the Listener. I have told him of your interest in that branch of literature.’
The boy blushed from his neck to his hair. He was a slight, fair youth in patched long trousers, ungainly in his movements, with dark hollows under his eyes. His expression in his mother’s company was continually anxious.
‘Mr Gantry is also a teacher,’ said his father. ‘He might be prepared to give you some coaching in football. Mens sana in corpore sano, as I always say. I’ve tried to interest John in fishing and duck-shooting, Mr Gantry. Both manly sports. They were my favourite sports in my own youth. But unsuccessfully, I fear.’
That evening I learned a great deal about the need of Moral Re-Armament in the teaching profession. The boy made no contribution to the conversation.
I paid only one more visit to the Mathesons; and that was nearly a month later. But the weekend after my first visit, on a scorching Saturday afternoon, I was lying under the bamboos at the bottom of the garden. Beyond the island of shade the ground roasted quietly, brown grass over baked sandy clods. Tom Randall did not love gardening; beyond Social Credit and bottled beer, he did not love anything but his hard-dialled, sweet-as-a-nut, garrulous wife and, at third remove, his three scruffy kids. That day I had given up
‘I’ve got something I’d like you to look at,’ he said. ‘If it’s not bothering you too much. Poems. I write them myself.’ He handed me the parcel and then stood still for a moment. Colour flooded his face. Before I could speak he had turned and run out the gate.
That evening in the bare front room with its view clear out to Kapiti I read through the manuscript. Two grubby school exercise books; the verse written in a sprawling hand – much of it, as I had feared, thin lyrics in the style of Harold Monro about the reassuring song of unidentified birds, and stillborn meditations on God and man. But the last poems in the second book showed a remarkable change. They were photographs of a spiritual landscape, desolate and forbidding; the verse had convulsive energy. I found myself reading some lines again and again –
The rest of the poem relapsed into a conscious piety. But these lines, whatever their meaning, expressed a very different mood. It appeared the boy had been reading Wilfred Owen – his ‘piteous entreaty in fixed eyes’ was almost a direct lift from Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. But, rightly or wrongly, I felt he had penetrated to the bitter core of the negative spirituality which blanketed both his parents. It shook me considerably. I did not want to be involved in the problems of an adolescent boy locked in a concrete dungeon with Methodist Manichees. Yet he had brought the poems to me, for ‘criticism’, and he would expect a real answer. I waited with mixed feelings for his next visit.
It did not happen for several days. Then one evening at half-past eight I heard a light knock on the door. I opened it. There stood the boy, gawky in school shorts, wearing also in spite of the heat a gabardine overcoat. The dust of the road lay thick on his woollen socks and sandshoes. I felt a strong impulse to give him back his manuscript, with a few polite remarks, and send
He sat at the square rickety table Tom Randall had made, his body rigid, his fist clenched under his cheekbone. ‘I had to tell a lie at home,’ he said, fixing his gaze on my floral shirt. ‘Mother didn’t want me to come and see you. She said that any friend of the Randalls can hardly be a true Christian.’ ‘What do you think?’ I asked. It seemed that the Mathesons saw me as
a potential corrupter of their son. The situation both irritated and amused me. It crystallised my vague intention to draw him out a little; to give him ammunition for a war he would one day have to fight.
‘I don’t know,’ he said frowning. ‘Mother is a very good woman. People think she is a saint. But she must make mistakes sometimes.’
‘I’ve read your poems. I think some of them are very fine indeed. Don’t take too much notice of me or anyone else, though. A man’s got to follow his own line. You’ve been reading Wilfred Owen?’
His face brightened astonishingly and his body relaxed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone in the world can write like him.’ He walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up a piece of twisted driftwood which the Randall children had found on the beach and which Jean Randall had polished. He caressed the smooth, female surface of the wood. Then he began speaking about Wilfred Owen. In a high, light, monotonous voice he recited Owen’s poem about the dead soldier:
His recitation moved me. It was entirely real. It seemed as if he was able to stand completely behind the poem and see the world through Owen’s eyes. Yet what, I thought, does a fifteen-year-old boy know of death? Death of the body or the smaller deaths of an agony of mind.
‘You know what Owen is getting at,’ I said. ‘A pity he was killed before he could write about a different kind of life. Or perhaps he was burned out anyway, like a flare in the dark. What do you think, John?’ It was the first time I had used his Christian name.
‘Call me Jack,’ he answered sharply. ‘That’s what they call me at school. They always call me John at home.’
We talked for several hours while the big moths, with glowing eyes, and brittle wings banged on the window. Of his own poetry and the philosophy of Wilfred Owen he spoke without reticence, even brilliantly. On all other grounds he was as naïve as a ten-year-old, echoing, as if word for word, his mother’s pious dogmas and his father’s elephantine clichés. Once I tried to break through the crust. ‘Have you got a girlfriend, Jack?’ I said. ‘You must
His face became completely blank. ‘No, I don’t know anyone like that,’ he said. ‘Mother says people shouldn’t go out together till they’re grown up and going to get married.’ Only his hands desperately gripping the edge of the table showed that the remark had any meaning for him. I did not try the same tack again.
From that time onward, usually three times a week, sometimes more often, he would call at the house. Sometimes he would bring a new poem. He would talk excitedly for hours. He had lately bought a volume of Keats’s letters and knew many of the passages by heart. Adolescence is tough for everybody, I thought. I did not always welcome him very warmly. But for a month, while Christmas came and went, we talked together in the Randall’s bach. The waves lapped or grumbled on the beach; the drought held. Then, just after the New Year, my friend Butch Kent drove out from town to visit me. He parked his tarry old Buick half in the ditch and half in the gateway.
‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said bashing me on my sunburnt back. ‘You old sodomite. You may be off the grog but I’m not. You’ve been sitting on your sucker too long doing nothing.’ Butch looks like Lofty Blomfield and only likes people, especially people in the King Country where he teaches. With him he had brought his girlfriend, a lush thrush in bell-bottomed trousers with a voice like a mason fly. They tried to get me to go down to the pub with them. When they could not, they went down themselves and came back with a bottle of Gordon’s gin. As Butch shambled in the gate, bottle in hand and yelling, I saw Old Man Matheson hurry by on the opposite side of the road. He did not stop or speak.
We sat in the front room and babbled like canaries. Butch had brought a tape recorder, with recordings of a number of obscene army songs. The bold, canned voices bellowed out over the sandhills to the sad, moonlit sea. I was very happy.
When Jack walked in I did not see him at first. I looked up from the girlfriend’s rope sandals and trim red toenails to see that thin, grotesque figure standing motionless in the doorway. The gin bottle stood half empty on the table; I was trying inefficiently to make the lush thrush sit on my knee; Butch lay flat on the floor doing chest exercises. The tape recorder was telling the world the story of Eskimo Nell. No doubt it seemed to him a pagan Saturnalia. He did not stay more than a minute; and during the next week I saw nothing of him.
Then on an early Sunday afternoon I was sitting outside on the front steps reading a letter from my wife. She said she hoped I was bearing up under the strain of baching, and that she had bought a new strapless bathing suit for three pounds ten. The rest of the letter was a list of the groceries I would have to get the day before she came home. At the bottom of the letter one of the
The gate banged suddenly open and an old untidy man strode up the path. It was Arthur Matheson. There were tears running down his cheeks. For once he had nothing to say. Roughly he gripped me by the arm and dragged me out into the road. Somehow he did not look foolish any longer. ‘John’s dead,’ he said. ‘Dead. Come and look at your work.’
I walked beside him up the road to the Mathesons’ house. He led me round the back. A small army hut stood there, with climbing roses on the walls and roof. He pushed me up to the door. ‘Go in,’ he said, and look at him.’
The one room of the hut was very tidy. Beside the wardrobe stood a fishing rod; on the round mahogany table a pile of books; and above the head of the narrow camp stretcher an enlarged photograph of Mrs Matheson. It was splashed with blood. The boy lay curled on the bed with bare feet and the muzzle of a shotgun inside his clenched jaws. A mess of hair and brains covered the pillow; his eyes were wide open. The back of his head was blown off.
I turned to the table and picked up the copy of Wilfred Owen which lay on the edge. A folded paper beneath it began to unfold as I lifted the book. I read it standing there in the middle of the room: –
Dear God – I can’t go on the way I am. You know I’ve prayed again and again for you to take this terrible thing away from me. Sometimes I’ve wanted to tell other people, but I know they would only lock me up, and it would still be with me. Why did you have to make me at all? You know I don’t want to hurt Mother and Father. But I would rather die now than go mad when I am older. I’ve tried again and again to stop but it’s no use. So forgive me for what I’m going to do now.
The letter was unsigned. I put it in my pocket with the copy of Owen.
Matheson was waiting for me outside the hut. ‘You’ve seen him,’ he said. ‘Then you can go. Go to Hell where you belong.’ I wanted to punch him in the middle of his tear-wet pudding face. But I went out instead, down the concrete path and out the gate, away from the plaster gnomes and penguins and dogs, into the cool sea air and the rain that was beginning to fall.
1956 (131)
Sir: I may be a peasant, but your correspondent ‘Pleasant Pheasant’ seems to me both irritable and gratuitously unpleasant. My Book Shop review of Ruth Gilbert’s The Sunlit Hour was unfavourable. Surely that is the real bone of contention. If it had been favourable, your correspondent would not have grumbled at any analogy, whether drawn from the animal or the vegetable
1956 (132)
So often one picks up a book of Australian verse with misgivings, expecting either a trite homily on life and art and the talking bones under the gum- tree, or else ‘social verse’ as humourless as the laugh of the kookaburra. It is pleasant to be proved wrong. At least half the poems in this new selection are about real occasions; and the strident note of the boy or girl scout leader is almost entirely absent. Judith Wright, David Campbell, John Manifold – these veterans fight a strong rearguard action though traces of tiredness show. James McAuley, writing of New Guinea and the death of a Catholic Bishop, justifies his theme completely. Elizabeth Riddel, Rosemary Dobson, Nan McDonald – each one moves out of lotus-land toward intellectual honesty. Australian poets seem to be returning also to a conservative use of form. But the strongest and loveliest poem, the war-boomerang tall as a man, is A.D. Hope’s ‘Chorale’, a love-lyric which knocks the high nut from the tree. It is very pleasant to be proved wrong.
Douglas Stewart, represented in the year’s anthology by two of his softer poems, does not quite come clean in the first twenty-six pages of his new book. Do birds, frogs, crabs, cicadas, foxes, orchids, wombats, magpies, gum-trees, moths, grasshoppers, really mean as much to him as the poems would like to say? The large pale statements of Elegy for an Airman have long ago hardened to exact rhetoric. His nursery-rhyme technique explodes ideas into images. But the second half of the book, a sequence of poems about the Lake Eyre basin in Central Australia, takes us from nature study to the more difficult study of man. The best Australian poems are generally poems of spiritual extremity – in David Campbell, this side of despair, in John Manifold, entering the eroded badlands beyond – and now Douglas Stewart also finds the gold that will not buy water, under the man-eating sun of Central Australia. Thus, as a Lutheran missionary –
It could not have been written here. Douglas Stewart’s maturity is Australian in method and origin.
1956 (133)
For twenty years I have been a poet, and not yet seen good reason to repent. Admittedly, reading Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ or Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’, I am strongly aware that my own works are those of a little boy playing marbles in the dust. But grubby little boys may sometime grow up, and have each a vision of the world which they neglect at their peril. So I would like, avoiding the large abstract statement about life and art which comes too readily to mind and mouth, to speak some kind of personal truth about the way poetry and Christian belief cohere or tug against each other in my own experience. Often I have found difficulty in communicating this kind of truth to a Christian audience. Not long ago I was talking to a Catholic Reading Group about Poetry and Us.
God knows why; perhaps the same sort of impulse that led me once, on Guy Fawkes Night, to let off a cannon cracker in every bar on my way up Lambton Quay, till at the Grand the manager spilt his beer down his waistcoat and hoisted me into the street.
Ten good people, in a public morgue upstairs trying to understand the statement of the eleventh person that one does not write poems in order to reform the world. Of course I soon reached the stage of talking solely about Poetry and Me. Then a strong-looking woman with her hair in a bun got up. Didn’t I think, she said, that artists should consider very carefully the possible moral effect of their work on the people who came in contact with it? – especially the young ones. That one had me on the hip. If I said Yes, I would be telling a lie; if I said No, she would be bound to think I was driving a wedge between Art and Goodness. If I hummed and hawed I would be lost like a heathen Irish sacrifice in a Killarney bog. But the day was saved for me. A youngish member with a lean, booze-battered face rose to his feet.
‘I don’t know what our speaker thinks,’ he said. ‘But I do know that if I were a writer I’d be mighty upset to think that every time I really got on the job, Miss O’Reilly was looking over my shoulder to see if what I wrote could possibly offend some weak-minded Child of Mary.’ Then he sat down again. It was, as I said, a Catholic Reading Group; but it could just as well have been the S[tudent] C[hristian] M[ovement].
I remember also how in my first year at university I was approached by a buxom woman member of the E[vangelical] U[nion]. She was blond, a trifle faded, and wore an habitual expression of triumphant sweetness. Day by day she left notes for me in the cafeteria letter-rack, urging the spiritual advantages of E.U. membership. In guilt and irritation, conscious of my sins,DEAR MISS X—, I AM AN ATHEIST AND INTEND TO REMAIN ONE. – J.K. BAXTER.’
If I were choosing a book as a Christmas gift for an intelligent S.C.M. member, I don’t think I would choose The Screwtape Letters or something by Schweitzer. For a man I would choose perhaps Zohrab the Greek or The Way of All Flesh; for a girl, the stories of Katherine Mansfield or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I’d think it very likely that they already knew too much about religion in its intellectual aspect and not enough about themselves and their fellow beings in God’s vigorous and infinitely various world:
The problems which most obsess a university student can hardly be solved solely by an act of faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s Passion, though such an act, if made, must infinitely refresh the soul. We are all too prone to suppose that spiritual action on one level is an effective substitute for the slow painful business of personal growth in grace and understanding. Indeed I have thought (perhaps unjustly) that intellectual discussion of the Christian faith, as distinct from a simple act of faith in Christ, provides for the S.C.M. members a bolt-hole from the painful realities of his or her existence. These real problems are likely to fall under all or some of the following headings:
Family difficulties –
Economic and emotional dependence on parents conflicting with the natural assertive and explorative impulses of young people; nostalgia for the safety of the home and fear of the world outside; clash of intellectual development with the home environment.
Social difficulties –
social awkwardness, especially in mixed company; acute isolation from the life of the varsity community; fear of unpredictable situations.
Sexual difficulties –
guilt about masturbation; fear of the opposite sex emerging in hostility or mock indifference; in some cases homosexual traits unexpressed but creating deep tension; an aversion to psychology, rationalised in religious terms, springing from a fear of suppressed sexual contents.
Difficulties in work –
acute anxieties at exam time; strong admiration or detestation of lecturers, on mainly invented moral grounds; partial paralysis of the intellectual faculties, rising from suppressed resentment towards parents.
In such a maze of personal anxieties a student will very naturally yearn for definite signposts; will follow readily any person who assumes parental authority; will accept readily a religious programme which regards overt sexuality or aggression as sinful. Yet these impulses are part of human nature, ineradicable, gifts of God for the furtherance of our personal good. We perish inwardly if we neglect them; and we need all the secular knowledge available to help us cope with their development, as well as the practice of prayer and self-examination. Therefore I would not choose The Screwtape Letters as a gift for an S.C.M. member.
I would like to set before you two distinct visions of the world expressed in the work of two Christian poets, both writing roughly a thousand years ago, one in Latin and the other in Old English. First then from the Confessio of the Latin Archpoet:
In my own translation the English runs something like this – ‘Should you bring Hippolytus into Pavia today, he will not be Hippolytus tomorrow: all roads there lead to chambers of love, nor stands among its many towers one turret of Diana.’
The next quotation comes from The Dream of the Rood which many consider the greatest poem in Old English:
Then the young man stripped himself, who was God Almighty, strong and resolute; he climbed upon the high gallows, bold in the sight of many, because he wished to redeem mankind.
From these two visions, one of Pavia, the city of carnal love, one of the hero Christ making ready to redeem the world, flows the stream of poetry which is not yet spent in us. To the Fathers in the desert Pavia presented no real problem: she was to them an image of concupiscence, to be rejected at
Our definitions of Christian chastity are generally all too negative. The sexual vision is one approach to God immanent in Nature. If we regard it as an evil we are probably thinking blasphemously. Yet in our present society the girl who menstruates and finds she is a woman, the boy who discovers his own virility, if Christian, are all the more likely to feel themselves cursed. They are shut out from Pavia, and feel the deprivation though ignorant of its source. The Archpoet, standing at the monastery door and looking towards the world, saw Pavia ambivalently. She was to him the female mystery, a menace to monastic asceticism; and yet, without her, the life of the senses and the fullness of poetry were impossible. In the agony of sin, seeing Christ dead on the Cross, he denied her; in the morning of repentance, seeing her lovely and abundant, as if fresh from Paradise, he fell again at her feet. She was not Jerusalem, that city of living waters, to which the Christian pilgrim journeys. Jerusalem is to be and Pavia is always now. She was not Babylon, the gilded husk of temporal cruelty and power. If he clung to her he might fall again into the death of sin; if he rejected her he might cease to be human. What ground should he stand on and live?
It is of course true that God may be looked for and found by the discipline of conscious prayer and theological discussion. He may also make Himself known to us in spite of these. But what about all those who live otherwise? – the mechanic oiling a car; the man at the races watching the strong, swift horses; the woman putting on lipstick or window-shopping; the lovers twined under the park bushes or between smooth, proper sheets; the Maoris crying at the tangi, spearing eels, rolling stomachs at the concert party; the old man telling yarns to his cronies; the old woman gossiping over her tea. Are they denied the presence of God? By no means. God immanent in Nature surrounds us who are part of Nature, touches us at every point, sustains us as the sea sustains the swimming shoals of sprats and whales, sharks and octopi.
We think of Christ solitary on Golgotha, separate from us. But in His Divinity He is mother, nurse, and infinite Consoler of His creation. For love, having made us, He carries always our being in His hand; for love, having died for us, He carries our sins as well.
What then is Pavia? She is Alison walking among the medieval orchard trees. She is the Wife of Bath and the young witch of Burns’ ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. (Poetry is the language of immanence; this accounts in great measure for its moral ambiguity.) She is Christchurch seen at dawn from the Cashmere Hills. She is a symbol of the power and beauty of God immanent in flesh and nature. Within her orbit lies the whole imperfect, suffering creation in its process of becoming real in Christ. To the man whose eyes are darkened by his sins (and all eyes are at times darkened) she appears as a succubus, a devourer, a menacing and irresponsible evil; to the saints of God she is the very real and lovely world, whose dirt even they would not wish to remove lest she should be diminished. Her city gates are the womb and the sepulchre. In her marketplace, visible or invisible, stands the Rood, gathering the living and the dead, not in accusation but offering the gift of holy freedom. The poets, who have loved Pavia and suffered with her through many changes, though many have been fools and some criminal, may hope at their end to be contained in that freedom –
These notes and jottings contain no doubt, like poetry, a good deal of wishful thinking and personal fantasy. I offer them to fellow Christians as a contribution: something to consider.
1956 (134)
He drove the axe savagely into the rotten wood. It split lengthwise and fell apart, baring the wet sawdust tunnels of woodgrubs. He put the inch-long grubs on top of the chopping stump, their white wrinkled bodies curling blindly in the foreign sunlight; then spattered them one by one with the back of the axe. God made you; God will look after you, he thought; but remembered the story of Buddha cleaning the tiger’s wound and making another wound in his own body for the worms that lacked a lodging. The dank wood smell rose in his nostrils. The wind blew gently over banks of convolvuli where hairy bees scrambled and sucked. It stroked his chest under the flannel shirt. The leaden irritability which had lain on his mind since waking began to fade and vanish like fog from the morning town that lay below the bush. He straightened himself and walked down the gravel path to the back door of the house. The kitchen was empty; a brown vase of newly picked irises stood on the bench. In the bathroom he could hear his wife
Her voice echoed from the shining bath. ‘Oh you always say that. I don’t think you notice what I’m wearing. Do you know what day it is?’
‘Of course I do.’
Her half-girlish body leaned forward as she polished, round trim buttocks, strong waist and small breasts. A huge longing gripped him to reach out and cup his hands on each breast. An image from Boccaccio rose to his mind, of Scythian mares. No, no, he told himself; for he knew that she hated to be touched except at the expected moment. And with that strangling of desire, a hot band tightened on his forehead.
‘Of course, it’s our anniversary.’
Awkwardly he touched her bare arm. Her face came up from the bath, wearing the slightly anxious expression and the small wrinkle on the forehead which he knew and dreaded.
‘Did you see the irises I picked?’ Her face grew calmer, the moment of contact over. ‘Come and look at them. They’re the best in the garden.’ In red heel-less cloth shoes her feet moved gracefully over the flax matting. She stood beside the irises, by the open window, cool and totally inaccessible. ‘What do you think of the way I’ve arranged them?’
‘They’re very nice.’ A vacant coldness settled on his mind; under it anger moved obscurely, that she could walk lightly in the sun, unmoved by the violence of his own pain and desire. She would respond to a flower, a painting; but not to him, not to a man. She should have been born an iris.
‘Just nice? I don’t think you’ve really noticed them at all.’ ‘They’re lovely. You’ve arranged them perfectly.’
At all costs they mustn’t be at loggerheads today. He smiled unconvinc- ingly, with what she called his rabbit’s smile, a baring of the teeth while the eyes did not change. A whimper drifted through from the front room, where the child lay kicking in its bassinette. She turned quickly, the irises forgotten. ‘Oh, would you be a dear and get Beth up. Give her a teaspoon of orange
juice after her milk. I really must finish the bathroom.’
The child lay plump and small in the bassinette, her iris-blue eyes open. He changed the soiled napkins, lifted her out, and sat on the edge of an armchair to give her the bottle. This was the one certain pleasure of the day. She played with the teat sleepily, sucking and refusing to suck, and kept her large eyes fixed upon his face. He tucked the woolly blanket round her head. In a tuneless voice he chanted nonsense songs, and rocked her to and fro.
Give her time, give her time, he thought; it was worth any amount of tension if the child was all right. Give himself time too. He remembered their plans before marriage: a house beside the beach, time to make bags out of the
The child sighed and belched. He wiped the trickle of milk from her chin. Those plans had been no more lasting than the shifting leaf-patterns thrown by the street-lamp on the wall of the room where they lay together, alive in the unrespectable night. The axe had fallen: for a life a death. Their wedding had been a confused shambles, where relatives talked in whispers with gravestone faces. From their few sexual encounters during her pregnancy he had come away bitterly ashamed, with the sense of having forced his attentions on a tired and ailing woman. So sex gave place to a brittle tenderness unreal as a pagoda above the lake of coiled obsession. The birth itself wakened him to enormous care for her safety and that of the child. Her face, blue from anaesthesia, looked at him, however, from the closed world of maternity. Her tiredness and irritability while nursing the child increased his conviction that his sexual need was a parcel delivered at the wrong door; but the conviction did not remove the need. If anything, it grew stronger.
Nine months after the birth his careful efforts to please alternated with fits of savage depression, when he chopped wood out of earshot of the house or flew into pointless rages. About this time he began to visit the pub on his way home from work. Drink relieved the tension for him. In the pub he could express obliquely his anger at her tormenting presence, joining in the small-talk that reduced every wife to a comic antagonist and moral censor. In the dark fug and babble, under the hanging bar-signs, he resumed the single man’s rebellion against the hand of the castrator. Now he saw her not, as once, a fellow-conspirator, but one of the enemy. Yet he hated himself for neglecting her. She was the Sleeping Beauty inaccessible within her wood of briars. He came home guilty to her angry silences and her back turned to him in the double bed. There was relief in his mind each morning as the train pulled out of the station, and he could watch the harbour waves rise and fall beyond the circle of his own dilemma. He would relive erotic episodes in his single life; and then turn back in shame to the image of her calm face bent to the feeding child.
Last night, moved perhaps by the thought of their anniversary, she had gone to bed early and waited for him. But the habit of suppression, developed over months, did not break readily. Without emotion he had seen her black hair spread on the pillow. And after the solitary spasm he had lain awake, his inward hunger unsatisfied, thinking – Our marriage is dying. Will we always lie like this, rock beside rock, and communicate only through our angers?
‘Was it good for you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he had lied. Later in the night he had tried to rouse her; but she was fast asleep.
She came into the room humming, a duster in her hand. ‘My goodness, you’ll never feed her at that rate. Here, give her to me.’ She picked the child up, patted its back, and expertly slid the teat into its mouth. ‘You could go to town for me and do some messages. We need green vegetables; a cabbage would do, or some brussels sprouts. You’ll find the money in my purse.’
At the sharpness of her tone the coil of resentment tightened in his chest. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for lunch.’ But the calm, bird-thronged bush towered over him on the path to the road. Lord, I must grow! he thought. Calm like the trees. She has her own worries, poor thing; and I only add to them by wanting something she can’t give.
He caught a tram to town. The Saturday streets were full of brash wide- suited boys and high-heeling sweatered girls. The tram moved slowly up Lambton Quay. Fat pigeons hopped outside the Farmers Co-op. In the doorway of the National Hotel a young truck-driver stretched himself and looked at the drumming town and pavement-walking floosies with the eye of a bull in clover. A florist’s shop crowded with satin blooms glittered primly at the next corner. He jumped down from the moving tram.
‘I want a rose,’ he said. ‘A red rose. Not in full bloom.’
The plump, grey widow behind the counter drew a sprig out of a vase. A bud just opening, dark red in its heavy sheath. ‘Will this one do?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be one and ninepence, please.’ She wrapped the single stalk in waterproof paper, folded and pinned it. She smiled as she handed it to him. ‘For a girl-friend?’
‘Yes.’ He rested the rose gingerly on his sleeve. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It could hardly be mistaken for a tired husbandly gesture.
At the greengrocer’s he bought a pound of brussels sprouts. The door of the National lay between him and the tram stop. Time for two beers. Not today. Then he remembered the night before, lying coldly awake at her side and the rose seemed a symbol of frustration only. Why should a man live like a dog in a kennel? He walked heavily into the public bar. The barman in shirtsleeves, round as a blood pudding, confessor of the poor, leaned over.
‘Hullo, Jack. You’re a stranger.’
‘Uh-huh. I’ve had a lot of work to do.’ ‘Flowers for the girl-friend?’
‘No, for the missus. Wedding anniversary.’
‘You want to sweeten her eh? We’ve all got to do that sometimes. What’re you having today?’
‘One long beer.’
The barman had grief on his mind. His fringe of grey hair hung like grass on an uncut grave. He drove a cork into a barrel, handling the spigot like a mother, and resting between blows. ‘It gets harder all the way,’ he said. ‘Look at me. My old man owned a pub bigger than this one.’
‘It’s a good job.’
‘Good for a man who doesn’t drink. The three permanent professions – doctor, barman and undertaker. I worked with an undertaker once. I could lay out a dead man in twenty minutes. The boss was buried in a coffin he made himself. Heart rimu. He liked his brandy too much.’
‘Have one with me.’
‘I’ll do that.’ He filled the empty beer-glass and a pony for himself. ‘Here’s keeking up your kilt. I can’t start on the spirits this time of day. Jack O’Brien was asking for you. He came in about five yesterday.’
‘I didn’t know he was in town. Maybe I’ll see him.’ ‘He said he’d be in today again.’
‘I won’t see him today. I’ll be home this afternoon.’
‘Good on you. Always remember your wife’s your only sweetheart. Have another before you go.’
‘All right.’
When he came out of the pub the noon sun hung brassily above the town, pure and ancient fire in the cindertrack of the sky. It shone equally on chirruping shopgirls eating their lunches below the cenotaph and the blind man at the corner who knocked with his stick on the pavement for the earth to open her door and take him in. And on a half-drunk young man with a silly rose in his hand. Praised be the Lord for our Brother the Sun; for he is very bright and shining. O Lord, he is Thy similitude.
It would be just on lunchtime now. Only half an hour late. He crossed the road and climbed into a wealthy black taxi. The driver sat with his glasses on, reading a racing guide. He looked up, sorry to be disturbed, a stringy-necked worried man who did not love himself.
‘Where to, mate?’
He gave the address and leaned back in his seat. The rose slept on his knee beside the bag of brussels sprouts. His hopes flourished. They would go to the park in the afternoon. To the pictures in the evening. A French picture about love in wartime. Tonight they would lie down in harmony. Their love would be like rain falling in the bush gullies, knocking the heavy chestnuts from their branch, peeling black leaves from the young earth. She walked swaying before his mind’s eye. Wild mare of Scythia, fertilised by the wind.
But stumbling in through the bush track he felt the leaden doubt rise again. No magic tree had grown up to cover them with its healing branches. She would remain herself: sharp, sensitive, locked in her own sufficient world where an iris was lovelier than a phallus. And he: tongue-tied, inept, a stumbler all the way. She would not welcome him; least of all, with beer on his breath.
The table was laid in the living-room: a clean cloth, brightly coloured earthenware, a bowl of fruit, flowers, chicken and salad. Her surprise gesture, her wedding feast. The irises stood now on the mantelpiece, and she below
‘Why are you so late? I’ve been waiting half an hour.’ ‘It took a while to get the shopping done.’
‘There was nothing to do. Have you been drinking? You have, haven’t you?’
‘I just had a couple.’
‘Oh I hate you! You spoil everything, everything.’
Rigid with anger she ran from the room. Slowly he unpinned the rose. He was about to put it in the vase with the irises, but saw that it would spoil their arrangement. He laid it on the shelf beside the bookcase.
1956 (135)
‘Grant me an old man’s frenzy’ – so Yeats wrote in one of his great last poems, oppressed by a searing discontent with every created thing. ‘Myself I must remake’ – in a quiet way Mrs Saunders would agree with the second statement, but hardly with the first. She brings together in this volume quotations from Chekhov, André Gide, Wordsworth, Montaigne and a hundred others. Her own comments are sensitive and mainly just – ‘Not many would have the temerity to live their lives again. Looking back on the plain of the years from the heights of age I see when I took ‘the road that led my world astray’. Yet, given another chance, even if I avoided my former mistakes I should almost certainly make others, perhaps more stupid and far-reaching.
She emphasises the consolatory aspects of old age – the calmness of detachment, freedom to follow one’s whim, various new pleasures of society and solitude – but at its deepest level her comment is always pessimistic. The fires burn low. Death is near. With the riddle of the stars still unsolved we go down to darkness. So Mrs Saunders gently implies. Yet we have heard of old people (by no means all of them saints) who swore before they died that the meaning of the riddle was joy. We hope to belong to their company.
1956 (136)
For twenty years I have been a poet, and not yet seen good reason to repent. I am strongly aware that my own works are those of a little boy playing marbles in the dust outside the tin wall of the Girls’ Lavatory. But grubby little boys may sometime grow up and have each a vision of the world which they neglect at their peril. Every now and then an advertiser of liniments for sprained
1956 (137)
In an author’s note Mr Durrell tells us that the Tree of Idleness stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and confers the gift of pure idleness on all who sit under it. That gift has yet to be conferred on today’s Cypriot nationalists and on the British troops now on the island; but Mr Durrell has undoubtedly accepted it and benefited. We remember that vigorous, obscure poet celebrating the power of sexual love, the immediacy of rock, air and sea, and the beauty of Greek nouns. His gift seemed partly a flair for eccentric verbal architecture. We thought he would end exhibiting other people’s wares, editor of an anthology of scholarly translations from the modern Greek. But instead Greece took him to her flinty Byzantine heart, breaking his own, and conferring the gift of idleness, freedom to know oneself without hope or self- pity. Hence Mr Durrell, alone among veteran poets of his generation, is able to produce a book of poems in which every phrase rings true. And hence one wishes absurdly to quote every poem:
He discusses degrees of survival, then gently rejects them in favour of a personal negative credo:
There are other pieces also in Mr Durrell’s book which his irony, courage and controlled negative passion brings to the verge of greatness. Many are quietly terrible poems. His theme is the decay of sexual love and the vast unusable freedom it leaves in its wake. One might desire another kind of poetry; but of its kind, his poetry stands without competition and without parallel in modern English literature.
1956 (138)
In my ’teens I was an omnivorous reader of ghost stories. Skeleton nuns and vampires, fiends and the living dead, were nasty in my mind on rainy Sunday afternoons. ‘With swift, hobbling steps a squat, malignant figure oozed up the mossy steps of the twilit sepulchre . . .’. Often I was afraid to look behind me. At night I pulled the bedclothes, ostrich-like, above eye level. But no image from a book could pluck at my nerves more terribly than a familiar empty room and half-open door. The unknown god or devil is always the most dreadful. The best fiction writers know it; but Mr MacGregor does not. His ghosts are as homely as sewing-machines. His ‘faery dogs’, vouched for as supernatural by ten trusty witnesses, frighten me no more than a boisterous Great Dane. For the very lovely photographs, especially of the Scottish Highlands, with which his book is studded, I thank him many times over. One ghost, the Maid of Glen Duror, is a member of my father’s family. But the Black Shuck, the Martyr King, Madonna lilies and poltergeists – at twelve o’clock, alone with a bottle maybe; but not under the influence of Mr MacGregor’s journalese.
1956 (139)
How good is a good minor poet? Perhaps within a very generous estimate Mr Guinness would qualify. Plato excluded all poets from his Republic; and we must beware of the wish to exclude, on different grounds, all tame, weak ’prentice work. Mr Guinness can write with some felicity –
It is called, appropriately enough, ‘Sunrise in Belgravia Square’, and represents the Muse’s response to Mr Guinness’s prolonged and rather queasy courtship.
Mr Sansom’s work has deeper virtues and weaknesses. He never quite reaches the naked clinch with a mystery which could rejuvenate his language. Like our New Zealand poets of the first quarter of this century, he can be arch and wilful as a lady with a fan – or an idiot child. Like them he is too often an ornithologist. Joy comes oftener to him than to his reader. But his grip on language, often slackened, is never quite relinquished. His dramatic commentary on the life of Christ, ‘The Witnesses’, though marred by a breath of Y.M.C.A. blunt familiarity, has real stature –
So speaks the Centurion, at least with relevance; and ends his soliloquy – ‘Ah well, poor devil, he’s got decent eyes’. One is led to consider how far the peculiar limitations of English middle-class society have aided, and how far strangled, a strong and genuine talent.
1956 (140)
Cresswell is a true poet: his heart is in his job. In the jungles of Bohemia, in the half-world of the cultured tramp, he has kept that elusive quality, artistic integrity. All very well for me, with a wife and two children, a bought house, a new job in the civil service, to say – ‘Ah Cresswell, yes, if only he had become socially adjusted’. The Pythian Muse would haul down her skirts and boot me justly, from the door. Of several possible ways of coping with the dilemma of a vocation to poetry, he has chosen the way most often discussed and most rarely taken – to live by one’s wits and serve only the Muse. So if I do not praise greatly The Voyage of the Hurunui let no one suppose that I lack admiration for the author of A Poet’s Progress and Present Without Leave, those lively, brilliant and original journals of a dedicated life. I would like to hear a great deal more of the comment we deserve from a nomad living unwillingly among our cultural morgues and money-breeding hovels. My basic disagreement with Cresswell is not on social grounds, nor even ideological (though I do not believe that a mystique of homosexual love, however loyally held, however justly conceived, can adequately answer our demand for human brotherhood) – but on grounds of poetic method. No verse technique can supply a lack of inspiration; but a false direction to the development of idiom can gravely injure a poet’s best passages and completely wreck his tradesman’s job-work. The occasional italicised stanza in the Voyage,
His use, then, of archaic idiom (‘And ’twill grieve him sore to turn from shore’) – of hortative language in place of metaphor drawn from the senses (‘He rules Mankind through the abstract mind, / Through an abstract false ideal’) – of exclamation marks scattered like pylons through the text – these uses, leading quite often to bathos, spring not from a lack of poetic ability in Cresswell, but from his ingrained view of poetry as a ‘special’ language. No one who reads this ballad with the care it deserves can avoid the conclusion that a very good poet indeed is cutting his own throat:
Such verse is not in fashion, but it has power and full validity. Cresswell does not fail by writing at times like Coleridge or Wordsworth; he fails by writing more often in the style of the ’prentice Byron or Shelley when didactic. He is, one feels, pig-headed. A powerful ballad allegory spoiled by muddy method is a sight to make the angels, or Cresswell’s own nature spirits, weep.
1956 (141)
Posterity is often harsher in its judgment on critics than on poets. A bad poet remains unread; a bad critic is dragged from his tomb, to answer the charge of malicious pontificating ignorance, or even (as in Byron’s quatrain above) the charge of homicide. Such judgments are far too sweeping and partisan. How many of us, in their shoes, would have assessed the merits of the writing of the time more accurately than did the Quarterly, Blackwood’s, or Edinburgh reviewers? How many of us can now assess accurately contemporary work? Gifford, of the Quarterly (quoted by Mr Crawford), wrote in 1810 of Crabbe:
The peculiarity of this author is that he wishes to discard everything like illusion from poetry . . . To talk of binding down poetry to dry representations of the world as it is, seems idle; because it is in order to escape from the world as it is, that we fly to poetry.
These sentiments have a most familiar ring.
Mr Crawford has laboured to show that criticism of the Edinburgh Review, unlike that of the Quarterly, was a genuine and sympathetic attempt to bring views of art and life into alignment – sometimes incomplete, rarely ignorant or petulant. He points out that Jeffrey’s judgment of Keats agrees substantially with Keats’s own self-criticism; that Jeffrey criticised the Lake poets for a ‘defect of realism’ which Coleridge also recognised; that under Jeffrey’s scholarship the reviewers had progressed from ‘the 1797 attitude of mind’ to ‘something resembling alliance with the second generation of Romantics’. These points are a mere skimming of his exposition, which is concise, energetic and (since fashions change but not the hearts and minds of man) cogent for our generation.
1956 (142)
Many years ago (or it seems many years) I was lent a copy of The Apes of God, by John Moffett, then Literary Editor of the Otago Daily Times. The book fascinated, horrified and bewildered me. It seemed to be written about an order of beings who could not, or at least should not, exist. The same blend of fascination and horror overcame me as I burrowed through the pages of The Human Age; for there is only one Wyndham Lewis. But today the bewilderment is less – for I know that such beings do exist. Wyndham Lewis presents us with our unregenerate, shuffling, gabbing, horrifying selves. He does not add that love can and will, with a dexterous conflagration, consume these effigies and remake them; but he does make it abundantly clear that such a happening would only be plain, pure miracle. Love, of course, is outside his province. He is a satirist, a writer with direct moral intention, wielding Rabelais’s bludgeon, though without the tolerance shown by that great Catholic humanist toward the poor, forked, mandrake flesh.
The Human Age consists of a trilogy – The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta – of which only the last two books are contained in the present volume. I have never read The Childermass, but it is my intention to buy, borrow or steal it when it is ‘in due course published in the same format’. The plot of Books Two and Three, however, presented no difficulty on this account. James Pullman, a writer, and Satterthwaite, the boy who had been his fag at school, have passed over to the Other Side. There they find conditions similar to those on earth. There are political factions and hierarchies in Hell. The Devil cannot bear the sins of the flesh or the company of women. Pullman is drawn into infernal politics . . . It is impossible, by description or quotation, to convey the terrible hallucinating force of Wyndham Lewis’s satire. But if you read it, you will tremble and rejoice at this whirlwind in our midst.
1956 (143)
In this article I wish only to say a few simple things – to give one man’s point of view on teaching. If I had greater knowledge of educational theory, or ten years’ teaching practice behind me, then I would write a very different article, quoting Plato instead of Eliot and putting forward a new theory of the place of phonics in the reading programme. We tend to see the problems of our profession as a ship’s engineer would see problems of navigation – in terms of fuel pressure, lubrication, the right thing done at the right time. I offer the comment of the ordinary A.B. who has time, between watches, to observe flying fish, quarrel with the cook, and wonder how the engineer gets on with his wife. It is of course an ignorant, prejudiced view. When, for example, I mention Thomas Dewey, I consider only his influence on disciples, not his true status as an educational philosopher. But engineer and A.B. have this in common – they are each involved in a public role which can make or mar them, in so far as they retain their own eyes, their own powers of judgment, or alternatively become robots. On the educational ship we can do more – we can determine a little the course that the ship is to take. I offer these comments to my fellow teachers, on behalf of the children, who will not read them, but who have taught me slowly, over several years, that educational problems are problems of the whole personality, and woke again in me an almost defunct belief in the goodness and sanity of human nature. I will begin with a story.
The electric unit started with a jerk. Then smoothly and swiftly it rushed along the sea wall, scattering the smart gulls who make a fat living at the
‘Errhm!’ he said, as the wheels of his mind began to rev. ‘It’s good to relax after the day’s toil.’
‘You bet,’ I replied.
But he was not entirely satisfied. He linked his fingers and drummed them on his waistcoat. The whitish cod’s eye gleamed upon me from a map of wrinkles.
‘It’s a great thing, James,’ he began slowly – ‘It’s a great thing, for a man of my age, to feel that one has the full respect of one’s colleagues.’
‘I’m sure it must be,’ I said. The dry docks slid slowly past the train window, and a heap of rusty girders under a clump of fennel.
‘Respect and trust,’ he said. ‘Do you know how to gain that respect and trust?’
‘No,’ I confessed.
‘Discipline,’ he beamed. ‘Discipline and efficiency. A classroom in order and every child at work.’
‘I thought of my own disordered classroom. I thought also of Celia, seven-and-a-bit years old, who could not write a sentence that made sense, except the one she wrote about her brother ‘My brother is the bravest of them all.’
‘It sounds a bit too simple,’ I said.
The old eye frosted, as if it had seen lunch-paper in the school corridor. ‘Not too simple, my boy, not too simple. You’re only beginning at the game, remember.’ He patted me on the shoulder, while the train jolted to a stop at the Wellington platform. The pneumatic doors opened to let in a drizzly gust. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, James. No late hours, remember. A teacher must be fresh for the morning.’ He toddled onto the platform, suitcase in hand. The square, old lifeless mouth sank down at the corners as he looked savagely at a bunch of immigrant Dutchmen who chattered and cat-called to their girl-friends. ‘The young,’ he whinnied.
‘There’s great deterioration . . .’.
But I had seen my path to escape through the crowd, and mumbling goodbye I darted to the safety of the bookstall . . .
His composite ghost looks over my shoulder as I write. It protests that I have missed out the touch of human dignity, the privacy which makes any man or woman vulnerable and real. And I answer that this may well be so, since I have not, and scarcely desire the strength to crack the armadillo hide of a private man devoured by a public role.
I write now not as an artist flailing bourgeois society, but as a man who is also a schoolteacher. Against that sketch I could set a hundred better things
‘Hot,’ he said.
That did not need an answer.
‘I’d thought of taking the car down to Lowry Bay,’ he said. ‘There’s a spare pair of bathing trunks in the back. Would you care to come along?’
I would.
At Lowry Bay we swam out beyond the lion rocks and seaweed. Then we lay down to dry in the grass by the bathing shed. He talked of his days as a country teacher – and as always, his genuine care for the children as persons rang out behind the careful phrases. He told me how a Maori girl had played the wag when the health inspector came.
‘At playtime she was missing,’ he said. ‘Out she went and hid in the flax. I sent some of the big boys out to find her. But it was no good, she’d gone to earth like a rabbit. So I went out myself, and I found her in the bushes just above the creek. There was a high bank above it, just like that one’ – he pointed to the crumbling cliff above the bathing shed. ‘Rita!’ I called, ‘Rita!’ But down she ran, straight down, from bush to bush, straight as an arrow. She didn’t come back that day. I found afterwards that she thought a health inspection was something like docking the lambs . . . Here have one of these.’ He offered me a home-grown tomato.
Bill – I mean Mr Donovan – was and is a headmaster.
It is perhaps ingratitude to beat an old tired nurse. There are thousands of men and women in the profession who know more about the handling of children than I will ever know. Yet, ignorant and fumbling, I have gradually become aware of a basic ambiguity in the role of school-teacher, for me, and perhaps for others. On one side stands the world of schemata – the civic offices of Mr Dewey, the grubby cardboard palace of Washburne, the cold dry workshops of syllabus and Infant Training Manual; on the other side, a hot jungle, full of life, colour and noise, smell, violence, joy and grief, where alligators and birds of paradise swap yarns daily. It is no good deceiving ourselves that we are natives there. Once we were; but now we inhabit, as those children will, another world – the adult jungle of difficult love, appalling ambushes, and unintelligible ruins, where light comes, if at all, from a sun beyond our astronomy. So we come to the children’s jungle as explorers, doctors, anthropologists, drawn (if we will admit it honestly) more by its life-giving warmth than by any certainty that the gifts we bring are the gifts they need.
It seems to me that a great deal hinges on the attitude of the teacher towards this jungle in which he stands as an adult stranger. It is even possible for him to ignore it and bury his head in a bucket of statistical sand – intelligence quotients, tests of vocabulary, charts of reading progress, a mass of exercise books to correct in detail – all the paraphernalia by which we persuade ourselves that we have the situation in hand. ‘This is my job,’ – he will say, ‘to fulfil my responsibilities to the children, to the parents, and to the Board that employs me – to become an efficient teacher.’ I remember going, as a student, to an Infant Room where a female martinet drilled Primer One children by numbers. She had control – God help her. Her grading was, I know, very high. One little Hindu beauty, with a red caste star on her forehead, sat and gazed at her instructor with dark, remote eyes. Every day after school this child wept her way through the words of a language unintelligible to her, while the voice of the big woman rose in anger. Yet she was, I am sure, at heart a woman of goodwill, maimed by circumstances beyond her power to cope. She had lived so long in the cardboard house of educational schemata that it looked like home to her.
Along the corridor, two doors down from this House of Correction, another woman flourished among her tribe. I think she had forgotten even the original missionary intent that brought her to them. Her classroom was a calm island where children ambled about their pursuits as if in a ritual pattern. The jungle of their minds climbed freely from floor to ceiling, in grease crayons, chalk, paint, and coloured paper. No doubt this woman inhabited like a goddess the country of their dreams where tigers lived in wardrobes and goosegirls became princesses at the drop of a gnome’s hat. She too had control.
With infants the inadequacy of a purely schematic approach is very obvious. For those small creatures, still young enough to hide behind their mother when a stranger comes to the house, a man teacher would seem something out of joint, a policeman in the nursery. Their relation in the classroom to their secondary mother reflects the relation to their true mother at home. Hence an Infant Mistress either mothers and teaches or fails to teach.
At the Standard level the role of teacher ostensibly changes. One becomes guide, mentor, counsellor, friend, and adviser to the children under one’s care (I write remembering various brochures in which we advertise our profession to ourselves). The schemata of education become one’s tools of trade. It is at this point that the (to me) dangerous ambiguity of the teacher’s role begins. Though ostensibly a guide, he is ignorant of the terrain of childhood. His very maturity separates him from full identification with a child’s wishes and fears. Ostensibly a friend and counsellor, he remains at a deeper level the father-figure whose edict can crush, not because it is just, but because of who he is. On this foundation – which our schemata interpret variously as ‘reason’, the child’s ‘instinct for justice’, or his ‘natural
As unconditioned observers we would very likely identify ourselves most readily with the child outside the door. His state of mind is that of our own anxiety dreams. As schoolteachers we are the man inside the study, whose situation contains the dangerous ambiguity of which I write. If that man were in fact friend and counsellor, the following conversation might occur between him and the culprit:
‘Well, Jack, I hear you pinched a comic from Mrs Taverner’s shop.’
‘Not pinched, Sir – took. I only took one, but Billy took three. It wasn’t worth it either. I got one I’d read before.’
‘I used to like Rockfist Rogan best.’
‘I don’t like Champions much. There’s too much writing and not enough pictures.’
‘Well it’s a bit hard on Mrs Taverner, isn’t it? She’s got enough to do with twelve of a family and Mr Taverner, without having to watch out for you and Billy too.’
‘She’s a mean old b—. She always gives you short weight when you get sixpence worth of caramels.’
‘I see what you mean. You think the comic makes up the short weight in caramels.’
‘That’s right, Sir.’
‘I used to know a storekeeper like that. We stuck a bit of chewing gum under the scales so that he had to give us half as much again.’
‘Cripes, that was a good idea. We might do that too.’ ‘Now about this comic, Jack . . .’.
Unfortunately that kind of conversation never occurs. Instead the teacher, with largely artificial severity, hauls the culprit over the coals. It is, after all, part of his job – by speech and example, to lead the children under his care into good social habits. And as the years go by, the policeman’s overcoat, worn at first uneasily, tends to settle snugly on his shoulders. The severity
Our schemata of education gloss over the psychological problems of the man or woman on the job. For a job it is. On the job we have no gospel to preach. We have at best some skills to transmit in the restricted and artificial field of a school classroom or playground. Do what we will, the children will regard us as surrogate parents. Hence we need far more knowledge, whether we ourselves are married or unmarried, of the intricate relation of parent and child than most parents possess; and courage to deflate our role and meet, as learners, the children on their own ground. I have slowly come back to the conclusion, once abandoned, that A.S. Neill was on the target and all the official marksmen are firing in the wrong direction.
Perhaps I have given the impression of not caring much whether our children are educated or not. If so, that is a false impression; I do care. But in looking at the problems of children we teachers tend to ignore the dangers of our own situation, which are considerable. We can become time-servers, going through the motions of classroom instruction, without heart in it; we can become idolaters worshipping schemata. But if we remain critics of our educational system, critical of the society we live in, if we remain aware of our own incompleteness, we will be more tolerant of the incompleteness of children. The best teachers are still the revolutionary ones, the so-called eccentrics; for they bring into the classroom the thoughts and actions of whole people, and to these the children can respond freely.
Some questions must be asked before one can begin to think as a whole man. Kierkegaard held that a religious man needs to ask the question, ‘Is God in fact wholly good and loving?’ – or else remain perpetually in a no-man’s land of doubt and aridity. There are certain questions that seem to me just as necessary for a schoolteacher to ask and try to answer. The stock answers can be found by recourse to educational schemata. They will resemble in kind the answer of a soldier in the trenches who, when asked why he is fighting, replies, ‘For my King and Country’. In the obscure war on ignorance, in which our classrooms are trenches and the Department of Education perhaps a supply depot, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Are the war aims meaningful or meaningless? Who are in fact the enemy? Why am I teaching at all?’ The real answers may be surprising. And at least the man who questions his role is not so likely to be destroyed by it.
1956 (144)
‘Boldness be my friend’ – this motto should be recommended to every anthologist. In selecting a book of representative Australian verse Judith Wright has not been bold enough. If she could not find enough good poems written by Australians between the days of settlement and now, then why not make (like Ann Ridler) a shorter book and a better one? We know Judith Wright as a vigorous poet inspired by themes of love, maternity and death; we must unwillingly conclude that she has not the acumen, breadth of sympathy, variety of critical response, to make a successful anthologist.
If one certain thing can be said of Australian poetry, it is that ballad vigour has again and again transcended the confines of mock-aboriginal themes, narrow political commentary, and a dreary late-Victorian verbalism. Where are her balladists? Adam Lindsay Gordon (who wrote three superb ballads, the rest undistinguished) – not represented; Banjo Paterson, whose lines can cut like a whip – not represented; Ogilvie, who wrote of horses as if he were himself a centaur – not represented; Henry Lawson, whose verses like Ned Kelly’s armour, will always look out of place in a museum – represented by one tired though great-hearted ballad; ‘Anon’, the one balladist without patrimony – not represented; A.D. Hope, John Manifold, David Campbell, who have each in their way lifted the embedded sword from the stone where Lawson left it, represented most imperfectly.
The editor pleads that ‘the balladists did not contribute anything to the solution of the problems of Australian poetry.’ She admires rather the sensitivity, archness and languid charm of Hugh McCrae, the clay- heavy didactic rhetoric of William Baylebridge, the manufactured myths of Kenneth Slessor. Well, it is a point of view. Three poets who stand out somewhat from the ruck have been published also in New Zealand – W. Hart-Smith, Douglas Stewart and Eve Langley. Inevitably this Australian anthology invites comparison with the New Zealand anthology recently edited by Robert Chapman and Jonathan Bennett. Chapman and Bennett also weighted their anthology in favour of younger poets; they had a special view of New Zealand poetry; but they included at most one mock poem. Judith Wright has included at least thirty. One hopes that in any revision of this anthology the editor will also revise her view of Australian poetry.
1956 (145)
Almost exactly two hundred years ago the Lisbon earthquake occurred – a calamity which affected the people of that age as much as the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima has affected us in this century. The earthquake lasted about ten minutes. It shook the whole south-west corner of Portugal.
Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand people lost their lives in Lisbon alone, from the effect of fire, falling buildings, and the overflowing of the River Tagus.
Sir Thomas Kendrick, Director of the British Museum, has traced in this book the effect of the calamity on popular thinking. Throughout Europe men’s minds were shaken; the sense, easily held in times of prosperity, of a beneficent natural and supernatural order gave place to spiritual insecurity and fear of God’s wrath. The priests of Portugal blamed the sins of the Portuguese; the Jansenists groaned that Lisbon was the cradle of the Jesuits; Voltaire proved that philosophical optimism was meaningless in the face of human tragedy. It is a fascinating story, and the author presents it with balance and understanding. But one remembers most the acts of courage and charity – the injured priest ministering to the survivors; the doctors and Government officials bringing order out of chaos and calming an hysterical population. Here perhaps is the deeper meaning of the catastrophe, not Divine retribution nor an occasion for scientific rationality, but a courageous human response to the suffering of others.
1956 (146)
This book, an inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the mid- twentieth century, has been received with acclamation by critics overseas. It is necessary, however, to examine it without preconceptions of its value. Mr Wilson, we gather, is a young man; he is also a wise one, for he speaks for no special school of thought and raises no flag of revolution against the ruling cliques of literary opinion. He is truly concerned to find out the truth about modern man, and the integrity of his research carries him undamaged over ground where the best might stumble.
Briefly, his argument is this – that our own age has produced men with special spiritual qualities, men who grapple in their lives and work with problems of negation, evil, and the absence of God; and further, that their special experience divides them as Outsiders from the Insiders whose experience of these problems has lacked the same total urgency. It is indeed a fascinating and persuasive study; and particularly hard to assess because Mr Wilson proceeds more by a series of insights than by logical sequence. His list of Outsiders is heterogeneous – H.G. Wells, Sartre, Camus, Boehme, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hemingway, James Joyce, T.E. Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, T.S. Eliot, George Fox, W.B. Yeats, William Blake, Ramakrishna, Gurdjieff, and several others – but one thing is noticeable, that most, though not all of them, are artists. True, Mr Wilson (rather arbitrarily) cites Shakespeare and Dante as artists who were Outsiders but one feels that, broadly speaking, he tends to regard major
The grain of truth in this conjecture, as he presents it, skilfully, sincerely, and even humbly, prevents his book from becoming a mere apologia for aesthetic self-determination. The sizeable grain of error proceeds from his apparent ignorance that the spiritual experiences of Insiders can be as remarkable, as devastating, though not so articulate, as those of any artist. Perhaps Mr Wilson would reply that such people are Outsiders in disguise. In that case his dividing line would become so tenuous that no one could apply it. Yet, as a study of spiritual crisis among culturally prominent individuals, his book is of unique value and may shake the defences of many who believe that the problems of our time are soluble in terms of Land Lease or Moral Rearmament.
1956 (147)
Sir: Why is Mr Smithyman so anxious to save me from the sin of ancestor- worship? I remember reading about a village, in the Solomon Islands I think, where each man kept a pile of family skulls under his own gumtree. A European passing by happened to see a Solomon Islander holding an aged skull in his hands and blowing tobacco smoke lovingly between its jaws.
‘Ahyee, Grandpa!’ he crooned. ‘Does it taste good?’
The skull was his grandfather’s and tobacco was not grown in the spirit- world.
All that Mr Smithyman says of Mr Cresswell’s ballad is true enough. But what Mr Cresswell, Mr Alan Mulgan, and David McKee Wright have in common is that each of them has written at least one whacking good poem (Mr Smithyman has written a good many). I count a man who has written one good poem a poet; and further, I am inclined to believe that the one-good-poem man is a tragic figure. What, I wonder, prevented him from finding again the spot where he buried his insight? Good advice? A withered spermatic cord? Journalism? Burns Night gatherings? Auckland booze? Marriage? A varsity lectureship? The NZBS? The herb of intellectual passion does not grow in that dark world where he wonders. Why should I not blow a whiff of it between his aged jaws?
1956 (148)
Before the hydrogen bomb had been invented to teach fishes and birds to behave, before the African anteater had been brought to Central Otago to kill the mammoth beetles already brought to kill the wasps that like to nibble
But for years and years before I was eight, the town stood plain, huge at the world’s centre; its gravel roads shining like snow; its lupin jungles unexplored (except by me and several cousins); its bluegums tall as mountains; its houses bigger than barns; and above it, higher than any mountain in the whale-backed island, Saddle Hill, ready at the drop of a hat to erupt like Stromboli and blow the known world to atoms. A river full of eels and boats and swimming cows flowed past the town’s edge, long, deep and dangerous, a smaller Amazon. One could sit on the weed-green, slippery piles below the bridge, all through a summer afternoon while trucks and buses rumbled overhead, catching cock-a-bullies finned with fire, on a line of black cotton and hooks baited with sausage meat that were five a penny at Murdoch’s Store; or cross at low tide and climb the south face of the Matterhorn on Barney’s tussock island; or beyond all family warning, explore the sea cave under the Bishop’s Rock where waves drummed in the long, black mussel aisles and octopuses with kelpie arms and eyes like dinner plates waited, just out of sight.
The house I lived in then had three storeys, one for birds, one for people, and one for cats. Birds told stories all day in the space between the ceiling and the hot, corrugated iron roof; cats yelled and wrestled and held midnight concerts in the dry smelly dark under the floor. A ginger tom, whiskered like a general, thumped his tail against the floorboards for the silence that never came. Those were bandit cats, with torn ears and bitten tails, who darted in the daytime like tigers through the jungle grass. The family cats were sleepy, grey and purring. When the grandmother had kittens under the sofa she made a soft bed for her confinement from shreds of comics lent me by the boy next door. She could have chosen any of a hundred newspapers.
At seven o’clock in that early town, when the sun bugled up from the sea, there was a lifetime to spare. Fly a kite out of eyeshot and send messages up on the string; eat sherbet at the Black Bridge, lying flat in a boat among the crackling broompods; pull open the white hermetic cover on a gorse sprig and watch the spider children dance; race sledges down the hill to the Giant’s Grave, over dry cowpats to the slimy swamp at the bottom, while the grass- heads threshed at your knees; cut sea-weed balls from trunks of kelp, or bags from the bubble fronds to carry mussels in, and find a fish with a sucker on its belly; run through resinous tunnels at the tops of macrocarpas, where the wind was always blowing, and one could see ships and whales and icebergs
What about the people? They did not change or die. Old women picked roses and made giant balls of silver paper; old men, smelling of gum leaves, smoked pipes with tin covers beside the kitchen range. One I remember, a great-uncle with moustaches like the ginger tom. He took me quietly into his room, shut the door, and showed me a brimming crystal jug.
‘Whisky,’ he said, with a secret smile. It was water really.
Winter came with coal-eyed snowmen; spring with mustard-and-cress on flannel in the school classroom, Duffy’s truck plunged into the river at Mackintosh’s bend, and the eels swam round the lights still burning under water, but no one was hurt. Duffy sat on top of the cab, drunk and awash till morning, cursing himself sober. My cousin made forty water-colour pictures of the Big Rock, each one more perfect and identical than the last. But the world did not change. It stood unshakable on the back of a Chinese tortoise; or as Julian of Norwich saw it, a hazel nut in God’s hand.
Then the town sank. Over it grow the grey, implacable forests, and fish nose into the dark houses. But no doubt it stands high and dry in the eyes of a hundred children, ringing and abundant, like Noah’s faithful ark, hidden from us as we go about our deaths.
1956 (149)
I walked up Castle Street, a fat man in sandals, at two in the afternoon. The engines in the station yard sighed and shunted behind me like hot asthmatic bisons. A raiding gull riding high on the harbour wind crossed invisible bomb sights on my floral shirt; then changed its mind and glided off to practise aerobatics over Anderson’s Bay. The sun bludgeoned down from a dusty sky on the new, black, puddled tar where the tramrails had lately been. Nobody else was out in the glittering afternoon, except one boy of five, holstered and terrible behind a bath tub in a vacant section, and an elderly she cat mewing for admission outside Queen Mary’s Maternity Hospital.
Suddenly a quick wind, from a ten-year-broken bellows, blew down the pavement and scattered no leaves. A rocking tram clanged and bucketed down Castle Street in the curdled adolescent weather. A girl ghost stood on the kerb, brisk as a nanny goat, with check coat and skirt and orange lipstick. The tram screeched to a stop. With a backward smile she skipped on board.
My floral shirt and the spare tyre under it were blown off me in a magician’s moment. Lean as a poker, nimble and blushing, I scrambled on to the moving tram and sat down beside her, afraid to say a word. The conductor, captain of the Castle Street tugboat, lurched up to us. I paid her two-penny fare.
‘What did you do that for?’ she asked. ‘You’re so silly.’
But her smile revved a dynamo in my chest and exploded tombstone clouds in the vague Otago sky.
At Frederick Street I turned to the left. My traveller’s compass began spinning as I neared the magnetic pole of Dunedin, the student’s home from home, the Bowling Green Hotel, where Mahomet’s coffin hangs between earth and heaven waiting for the six o’clock judgment hour. In the shabby side bar one could eat bread and cheese and cold sausage, talk sex and politics and religion and poetry, drink raspberry portergaffs and listen to a medical student with a handlebar moustache blow a fine spray of Scotch from his whiskers and tell a highly clinical story to the barman. So I pushed open the swing door. There was no side bar. Instead of bread and cheese, an advertisement for Vodka; instead of the blurred picture of Phar Lap, a plush lounge. I drank a lemonade and went out into the street again.
Beyond the varsity bridge, in the bed of the Leith Stream, thick willows were growing. Two little girls waded upstream. A boy with a pole and line, ready for giant swordfish, was flogging the water savagely. Too real for nonsense, they scared away the ghosts. I went on toward the quadrangle, under the archway where Tubby Matheson hung six hours in a basket for riding a motorbike without an exhaust. Echoes of supernatural music reached me from Allen Hall, and the louder shouts of mining students being happily sick in the basement. But these faded as I read the examination lists under dull glass on the wall that faced the shut cafeteria:
The tall clock above the quadrangle struck half-past two. Its voice reverberated and grew in the Presbyterian silence. – You’re late! You’re late! You’ll be late when the trumpet’s blown. I’ve seen you, I know you. Where were you on Monday? Drunk in the Bowling Green. Where were you on Wednesday? Smooging in the town belt. Where were you on Friday? Nobody knows. What would your parents say? What will the examiners say? No application. No team spirit. No sense of decency at all . . .
Grey as a hangover conscience, the old clock looked down on me; but as the chimes died irreverent sparrows flew back in a cloud to squabble and skitter and nest in his elder’s hat. I walked on and over the footbridge where
– Forget me, said one.
I hadn’t.
– Look after me, said the other.
I didn’t.
Then the bell of All Saints swung slowly in its steeple. ‘Requiescant. Requiescant in pace,’ it tolled. Faces and voices died. The ordinary sun stood over me in a blue sky of crumbled quartz. It was very pleasant to be a fat man of thirty walking down Cumberland Street in the sun.
1956 (150)
This play was written for the speaking and the singing voice, and for radio. I had in mind a form midway between the campfire or bar room yarn and the objectified drama of the stage. The debt to Dylan Thomas is obvious enough; less obvious, but equally real, is the debt owing to my father for many fertile conversations on every subject from alluvial gold mining to demonology. Is the play meant to be historically real? God forbid. But there is one notion that lies behind the play; and in a sense accounts for it: that the shedding of blood christens a place, makes it part of the soul and imagination of man; that the natural world shares in our guilt, agony and perhaps redemption.
1956 (151)
Sir: Your correspondent ‘Atalanta’, not having read or heard Under Milk Wood, and having glanced at Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘In Country Sleep’ in a magazine somewhere, compares Dylan Thomas unfavourably with Swinburne. Setting aside Thomas’s own self-deprecatory remarks, what truth can be found in the comparison? Your correspondent speaks of a ‘similar facility for writing poetry.’ Vernon Watkins, Thomas’s friend, has told us that Thomas wrote at a ‘glacial’ speed. There are five hundred progressive drafts of that profound, lucid villanelle, ‘Do Not Go Gentle’. Your correspondent ‘got very little out of Dylan Thomas’s surge of words.’ I suggest that while we can read some poems as we read soap ads, there are other poems which we have to live with and grow with, often over years.
Who is the thief meek as the dew? Satan. Who is the ‘lost love’? A personal Eve. If we read this poem in the broad context of belief in the Fall of Man, it will open gradually to our touch and meditation, though the sense of abysses which occurs throughout Thomas’s work will remain. Can Swinburne give us anything comparable? Our hearts and eyes and ears open towards Thomas: they are never wide enough to hear the last of him. Towards Swinburne they close: we fall into a drugged sleep. Thomas mastered language; language mastered Swinburne. In the moment after birth and before death, in the gulf of our unquiet nature, Thomas stands with us, and ‘the soul walks the waters shorn.’ I, at least, read Thomas with joy and awe that so great a thing could happen in our time; Swinburne I read mostly for fun.
1956 (152)
The last thirty years have seen a great movement towards non-denominational Church unity. This series of five small books, mainly Protestant in tone and evangelical in appeal, makes a valuable contribution to this trend, by its almost total lack of denominational rancour, its lucid and practical moralising (we jib at the word – I wonder why); and its illumination of the scope and meaning of Christian love. Each writer has a deep, practical concern with human problems. Each explores, in his own way, the holy paradox of Christian living undertaken by weak, ordinary men in the world we know. I personally have found the first and fourth books in the series the most interesting and original. Alexander Miller writes: ‘The difference between the Church and the world is not that God rules in the Church and does not rule in the world: the difference is that within the Church it is known under Whose governance we stand.’
Edmond Cherbonnier goes out boldly to battle with Pelagian and Augustinian dragons on behalf of the inherent goodness of created human nature. It is not possible even to summarise the content of the series. But we have need of such writing, with its emphasis on freedom, moral choices, and its optimism founded on faith in God and chastened by a knowledge of human weakness.
1957 (153)
Sir: Is Mr Thornton a foghorn? If not, how is he able to ‘send forth blasts across Cook Strait’? I have never, to my knowledge, met Mr Thornton. His special knowledge of my background and that of others belonging to an imaginary Wellington ‘coterie’ is most surprising. One earns a living as best one can; one writes when, how, and as well as one can. A disappointed and disgruntled journalist playing possum in Fiji should have no reason to feel superior to any man or woman trying to write well in New Zealand.
Good luck to Mr Thornton in his kava saloon. For the length of his letter he says very little. If he had ever written one line of readable verse or prose, I would listen to his views with more respect and interest.
1957 (154)
The Primary School Bulletins were begun in order to fill a special need in the schools for source material on specifically New Zealand topics. The limiting of bulletins to New Zealand topics is a measure of necessity, for to produce bulletins that explore adequately social and historical situations beyond New Zealand would require organisation and labour far beyond the resources of School Publications – we would need to produce twenty, rather than five or six, bulletins each year; it is justified also by the rarity of books, suitable for social studies requirements in the primary schools, on the history, industries, agriculture, and social development of our country. We are obliged to make our own books to fill this gap. And as far as possible we try to make each bulletin a real book, a story meaningful and acceptable to primary school children, in which they can see social and historical themes in organic unity: not as an abstract pattern, but as a segment of the world seen through the eyes of fictional characters who are usually themselves children.
It is a possible criticism of the Primary Bulletins that they are rather too broad in scope and not sufficiently in alignment with the social studies syllabus requirements. There are two main considerations here – that the programme of Primary Bulletin production is in general experimental; and that the syllabus itself is a suggested guide for teachers, ‘not a minimumbeyond the syllabus and use whatever relevant New Zealand material comes to hand. We have, I feel, been fortunate in our writers and illustrators. Their work has made for richness and variety in the bulletins and prevented the rigidity of formal text-books. But the problems of planning and editing are always considerable. A writer who can deal suitably with a given aspect of the New Zealand environment may not be available when needed; an illustrator, say, of scenes in a Maori pa may be lacking. Writers and artists must be commissioned, often as long as two years before a bulletin finally appears. To use a natural analogy, one could compare the work of producing Primary Bulletins to the work of a gardener. Some plants wither; some grow too rankly. The work of an editor involves planting, watering, and pruning. The bulletins are subject to rigorous criticism both before and after publication. Our severest and most detailed criticism has come generally not from the schools but from our own staff and from within the Department itself. Since the planning of the bulletins is discussed with inspectors and finally approved by the Department, our choice of topics is usually governed in the main by syllabus requirements.
Bulletins published in 1956 included ‘Timber’, an experimental bulletin written and illustrated by the children of the Mangapehi and Whitiora schools. Without underestimating the good work done by these children, and its educational value for them personally, one could see that their approach was inevitably local, and lacked the broader scaffolding of an adult approach. In 1957 we will publish a companion bulletin, ‘Sawmilling Yesterday’, written by Ruth Dallas. Like ‘Timber’ it is intended for use by Standards Three and Four.
The bulletin ‘Timber’ was in a sense a highly developed piece of project work. The relation between bulletins and the projects of primary classes is very close. The bulletins, however, can never be a substitute for research work done by pupils or teacher; they exist rather as part of the material available for this kind of work. One would hope that each child would be stimulated in some degree by the story or illustrations, but the help and interpretation of the teacher are still necessary at every turn.
The first part of the bulletin ‘Kent to Wellington’, by Michael Turnbull, was published in 1956; the second part is scheduled for publication in 1957. This bulletin is an instance of a study of New Zealand history which does link up with social and historical situations beyond New Zealand. The writer tells the story of the colonisation of Wellington; and by doing this in some detail, conveys enough information about and understanding of the whole problem of colonisation to lay a groundwork for the study, in further bulletins, of other settlements, Nelson or Canterbury or Otago. This broadening of the subject makes the bulletin long, and multiplies the number of characters. The story begins where colonisation began, in England. It is, in the first half,
The writer of this double bulletin has built up his picture by a number of scenes, often involving fresh characters, but three people (or groups of people) link the scenes – Wakefield, Mr Hopper (a land-purchaser and future merchant of Wellington), and one of his workmen with his family. The first bulletin tells of the planning of the enterprise and the preparations of the emigrants for departure; the second will describe their departure from England and arrival in New Zealand, and will attempt to show how and explain why the colony they founded was vastly different from the colony of Wakefield’s dream.
Reasons for the discrepancy which teachers may find between the writer’s account of colonisation and that generally accepted will be stated in simple form in the Author’s Note at the end of Part Two. His conclusions are the result of original research into documents that were not accessible to earlier writers. All conversations or happenings which have any bearing on this interpretation of colonisation are taken from written records. The bulletin may help to fill the need for accurate historical information about the era of colonisation, in a form assimilable by children of Forms I and II.
Three bulletins, written by Roderick Finlayson, which trace the history of Maori-European relations from the coming of the first Europeans to the pre- sent day, were published in 1956: ‘The Coming of the Musket’, ‘The Coming of the Pakeha’, and ‘The Golden Years’. From recent correspondence I gather that these bulletins can be used effectively in Maori schools to supplement and extend the oral tradition which the Maori children receive from their parents. Each bulletin, naturally, has been checked for accuracy in matters of Maori custom and folklore (which is now called ‘Maoritanga’) as well as for accuracy in the sequence and details of events. These bulletins are designed for Forms I and II. Three further bulletins in the same series will be published in 1957: ‘The Return of the Fugitives, ‘The New Health and Learning’, and ‘Under Another Rooftree’. The last two titles are tentative only. It is perhaps relevant to say that Mr Finlayson’s experience as a novelist and short story writer has been of value in the making of these six bulletins.
Two other bulletins which will be distributed early in 1957 are ‘Change in the Valley’, by Geoffrey Nees, and ‘Making a Town, a bulletin on the topic of town planning, both designed for use by children from Standard
‘Change in the Valley’ is part of a projected series of bulletins dealing with social change in New Zealand (including a bulletin on the changes which have occurred in housing in the past hundred years). No bulletin in this series, however, will be published in 1957.
‘The Rock Pool’ by Arthur Torrie, to be published in 1957, is one of a series of nature study bulletins which has already included ‘The Pool’ and ‘Jungle in the Backyard’. The preparation of a nature study bulletin, especially the collecting of suitable photographs, is necessarily a long and difficult process; but the demand in schools for these bulletins seems to be constant and considerable. ‘The Rock Pool’ will be followed by a bulletin on ‘Insects’, probably in 1958.
A bulletin on the oil industry is also being produced for publication in 1957. It will lay particular emphasis on the industrial uses of oil within New Zealand, and will be suitable for use by children from Standard III to Form II. Further bulletins beyond 1957, will include a whaling bulletin written by an American authority on whaling, including American social and historical background, and cast in the form of the story of a whaling voyage; a bulletin on West Coast mining, by P.R. Earle; a bulletin on the Treaty of Waitangi, by R.M. Ross; and a bulletin on the settlement of Stewart Island. We will endeavour to keep a balance between the emphasis on the development of New Zealand society in time – that is, a strictly historical approach – and on a regional approach to the pattern of living of people engaged in a particular industry or branch of agriculture.
1957 (155)
‘. . . at a great distance he saw a most pleasant mountainous country beautified with woods vineyards fruits of all sorts flowers also with springs and fountains very delectable to behold . . .’. This is part of the quotation from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress which Maurice Duggan has set at the beginning of his book. The country is seen ‘at a great distance’ – it could, of course, be Immanuel’s Land as Bunyan meant, the heavenly kingdom, to which Duggan points as the symbolic centre of his work – but one suspects that he interprets it privately, looking back, not forward, to the more-or-less
. . . And the shotguns firing very ragged in the cold light and the retrievers out of the boat into the cold swamp water. Breakfast on hash and eggs and the long ride back through the mangroves, riding Maori horses mud- splashed and jaded with standing saddled all night. And the birds ruffled and shot strung together over the saddle, thumping against the horse at every step.
There are many such passages in this book, in which sensory impressions are accurately and lovingly recorded. ‘Six Place Names and a Girl’ (which contains the passage quoted above) and ‘Voyage’, an imaginative diary of a trip to Europe, both belong to the rare and difficult genre of the prose-poem. Duggan’s rich fantasy, and power to manipulate symbols displayed in these, completely justify his choice of medium. Nothing like them has been written in New Zealand, or seems likely to be written, for no other writer possesses the same combination of intellectual lucidity and complex poetic intuitions. One can detect in several of the stories the influence of James Joyce, whose preoccupation with the role of the artist and Roman Catholic background Duggan shares. Occasionally one feels that too much is premeditated, that the attention of the writer has been given more closely to form than to content. This is particularly true of his earlier work, where much labour is expended on minor themes, and a slight savour of the literary mandarin, the over-conscious stylist (yet we lack stylists) can set one’s teeth on edge. But in his later work he has left that country behind him and set his feet upon the rock.
The themes of his stories fall into three main categories – the life of teachers and pupils in Catholic schools; the world of adolescence; the point of impact where Maori and pakeha meet, wonder, and judge each other. How surely, with what objective compassion, he handles the relationship of teacher and pupil in the story ‘In Youth is Pleasure’, a study in clerical sadism! How well he conveys the half-conscious stresses between the members of two races in ‘Chapter’, where young Maoris drink and sing in the back of a hurtling bus, while two pakehas sit together, one in rigid disgust, the other torn by embarrassment and sympathy! His subtle, fluent prose is a perfect medium. His understanding of innocence and experience in human relationships goes deep; his courage and exact patience in setting down what he knows are very great.
1957 (156)
There was once a King who had two sons. Throughout their boyhood he set tutors over them, who instructed them in rules of decorum, the natural sciences, the history of their country, and the truths of ancient philosophy. The eldest boy was obedient and sharp-witted. At the age of ten he knew seven languages; at fifteen he had mastered mathematics and knew the name and nature of every creature in earth, sea and air, and beneath the earth; by the time of his majority his voice carried weight in his father’s council, for no youth had a graver presence or could unravel so well the problems of State policy. At tournaments and in the hunting-field none was swifter than he; yet he was modest, listened to everyone, and weighed equally the words of peasant and noble. His younger brother was a different lad entirely – the despair of his tutors, he wandered through tavern and marketplace and even, it was said, the red light district. If a brawl began, he would be watching – not joining in the fight, but shouting to the by-standers who was up and who was down. In his father’s council he sat by the wall and played knucklebones with a favourite page. He liked best the company of fishermen; he even dressed like one of them and learnt their songs and sailed with them when his father did not forbid it. The only extraordinary gift he had was in the making of verses – some to women, some satirising public men, all with a note of insolent rebellion. His father did not restrain him from this, though some doubted his judgment on this account.
The time came when the King fell sick. He called the two lads to his bedside. The elder came and knelt gravely by the bed; the younger stood by the door, but there were tears in his eyes for he had loved the old man dearly.
‘My dear child,’ said the dying man to his elder son, ‘you will reign after me. All men respect your judgment, and I have no fear for the kingdom in your hands. But one thing I must say to you before my tongue is silent for ever. Turn now, and look at your younger brother.’
The King’s heir turned with some reluctance to look at his scapegrace brother. They had never been close companions and much of the younger man’s satire had been thinly veiled in its personal references.
‘Look well,’ said the King, ‘for while he lives your kingdom is secure. To him I leave nothing but his liberty, and the love which I bear equally towards you both. You will be content in high office and the possession of a good conscience. He will never be content this side of the grave, for the spirit of turbulence in his heart will reject every custom, law and institution, asking from man and nature an impossible harmony. Yet his songs are the fruit of that harmony, which he knows best by the pain of its absence. He will always jerk against your yoke; and you will always find him hard to bear. But without either of you my kingdom would not be complete and my love
1957 (157)
Sir: We wish to bring to the notice of your readers a matter which we believe to be of importance to all people in this country.
Last year a petition concerning the need for the cessation of the use of nuclear weapons and for eventual disarmament was presented to the House of Representatives. The following, in essence, were its clauses:
This petition was ‘referred to the Government for most favourable consideration’ by the Petitions Committee. The recommendation occasioned an unusually interesting debate, in which the House supported the petition.
We believe that this petition voices the deep misgivings of a majority in our country. Yet the building up of stockpiles of atomic missiles continues throughout the world. Britain has almost completed the development of her first megaton bomb. Christmas Island has now been chosen as a ground for new tests of nuclear weapons.
How long can our imaginations remain blind to the implications of the further testing of nuclear weapons? Can we support, even tacitly, the development of weapons which can bring about the incineration of great cities, genocide, and probably the hideous malformation of children yet to be born? Scientific opinion concerning the effects on man and nature of nuclear weapons tests is divided. It is not divided concerning the effects of warfare in which these weapons are used. An expression of the conscience of the common people of this country may have an effect far beyond the boundaries of race and ideas. Is it not time for us to urge our Government to implement,
Andrew J. Johnston
James K. Baxter
Alun Richards
Wellington
1957 (158)
Edwin Muir is one of the old-stagers of contemporary English poetry. The gold rush of the Thirties came and went; he stayed with pick and basin fossicking in his private claim. For those who want quick returns from poetry, novelty, noise and panache, Edwin Muir can provide little. Beginning with private emblems and a preoccupation with the mystery of time, he has developed slowly and naturally towards a specifically Christian interpretation of experience. His verse method is plain to the point of monotony; but how expertly he moves within his chosen limits:
One feels (perhaps on too slight evidence) that here at least is one poet who will never be strangled by the cliques, who has braved out the demons of sterility and melancholia, who could not write a smart poem if he tried, though he might produce an honest, dull one. Where does the peculiar sweetness of Muir’s poetry spring from, like honey from a hive in the rock? I think it may come from his never having really lost contact with the first world of experience, the child’s vision of indubitable reality in man and nature:
We others, who have lost contact and scarcely desire to regain it, recognise all the same the language of home, both foreign and familiar. Edwin Muir communicates that most difficult truth: the holiness of the familiar world.
1957 (159)
Fairburn is a liberating force, a writer from whom one learns courage.
1957 (160)
Both these poets are unfamiliar to us as names in modern English poetry. Miss Scovell, one learns from the dust-jacket, has already had published two books of verse; Mr Press, on the other hand, is making a first appearance. The Oxford University Press is to be congratulated for unusual generosity in taking the risk of publishing the work of a new poet – a risk which most publishers now avoid like leprosy. Mr Press justifies their parental trust. His poems are highly readable, intellectually acute, and essential normal ’prentice work. But a tendency to abstract language makes his verse too thin at times –
This is an example of the good half-poem (good as exact statement, but only half a poem) which Mr Press writes rather too often. Africa, however, renews in him the fibres of poetry: it horrifies him with violence, in female circumcision rites; it moves him also to grief and a trace of envy. One feels that he leaves Africa too soon behind.
Miss Scannell brings to her poetry a most rare innocence and maturity of heart and mind. Her themes are not unusual – chrysanthemums in a garden, the habits of children asleep and awake, isolation, distance, the mystery of human identity – but her strong delicate poems, like scrollwork done in steel, reveal the truth of her unique experience.
These four lines come from a sequence quite unparalleled, I imagine, in English poetry – ‘The First Year’, love poems of a mother to a child, in which no trace of stereotyped feeling or language appears. She understands so much and pretends so little. Her descriptive and metaphorical powers match her insight.
1957 (161)
[an unsigned newspaper account of a public lecture]
The ‘Bohemian reaction’ was the detonator which set off the explosion of self-knowledge that may lead a man either to destruction or to further [knowledge?] James K. Baxter said on Monday night. Mr Baxter was giving an address sponsored by the Otago University Literary Society entitled ‘Poetry as Bush Carpentry’ to an audience in St Margaret’s College Hall.
His main thesis dealt with the Bohemian-suburban relationship as it affects the poet, contending that the poet needs to react against the social norms ‘in order to find himself. Does the poet not return to society, examine it or try to understand it?’ he asked. ‘Surely the society in which he lives is part of the necessary material of his art?’
But the making of poems was a difficult, ‘even dangerous occupation’, said Mr Baxter. ‘For the poet is a man who, without sanctity, claims the original viewpoint and some of the spiritual freedom which society has granted (or refused to grant) to the saints. Jacques Maritain has pointed out the dangers of revolt against the norms of society; that a man may, in casting off the leading strings of the nursery, reject all transcendental values and fall eventually into idolatry, worshipping his own creations. It is questionable, however, if an artist once visited by the daimon is in a position to turn back.’
He maintained that ‘a breakdown in the relation of man to his environment has occurred even within our lifetimes.’
‘In the monstrous shape of the atom bomb could we observe the symbolic disintegration of the natural order; a world where relation is supplanted by use, and the charred corpses of the children of Hiroshima evoke meaningless horror or a further justification in terms of abstract thinking.’
Mr Baxter stayed last night in Dunedin and is returning to Wellington this morning.
1957 (162)
Yeats and Thomas are dead. Eliot sleeps and Auden dozes. Edith Sitwell adds like Penelope another scene to her unfinished tapestry. George Barker sends us grim messages from the snake-pit. In America, Wallace Stevens for
This is a complete poem, ‘Niki’, the shortest in the selection. We have seen many different Durrells flash out from the earlier poems – the friend of Greece, the lover complacent or deprived, the tightrope-walker above Niagara – and all of them seemed true in the moment of occurrence; but in his most recent poems he has come to his full strength, as a man too old to enter again the jaws of the social dragon, who speaks from a better and a worse place; as a husband and rejuvenator of the language. We can only regret his ascetic impulse which has made this new selection much too stripped; and in each fresh poem we rejoice.
1957 (163)
The keynote of Marianne Moore’s work in verse or prose is precision. Her book must surely be the only book ever printed by Faber and Faber to be prefaced by precisely twenty ‘changes from the printed text.’ Just as her poems are inspired sampler work, so in these critical appreciations of poets, essayists, a novelist and a ballet dancer, one has the impression of a botanist with a magnifying glass, to whom each and every detail of plant or weed is of equal significance. It never occurs to her to doubt a poem’s credentials. To Wallace Stevens, that mandarin of American letters who, by subtlety and urbanity, has conquered a thousand critical strongholds with poems essentially dull and trivial, she pays special homage. Her own genuine humility is a stumbling- block. She herself has a gift for the pungent phrase, as when she writes of Ezra
Dr Tillyard suggests that Milton ‘. . . is more like Jonson and Marvell than he is like Donne or Crashaw.’ He also opines that ‘Milton is more reflective than Shelley’, that he ‘believed human life on earth was sinful’, and that he ‘was very much a person.’ Dr Tillyard has written another of those comparative essays in literary criticism, developed from lectures, which leave the mind stale and the imagination dulled. In comparison with Dr Tillyard, Marianne Moore is very much a critic.
1957 (164)
These seven new books can fairly be regarded as representative of the best recent poetry published in England; and a New Zealand reader may be forgiven for having opened them with something of that anticipatory joy reserved by most of his fellows for race meetings. Is it churlish to record, after a month’s reading, chiefly an obscure but real sense of dissatisfaction? Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis are continuing to produce those well- made poems which one has learnt to expect from them, exploring the dusty corridors of middle age, one juggling oranges with renewed Irish energy (Visitations has much more grit in it than Autumn Sequel), and the other humming old nostalgic tunes. If the juggling seems a trifle mechanical, if the tunes are from a music-box, can one legitimately complain? Both poets are coping courageously with the unanswerable questions of a diminished world. Richard Church, an older man, writes with the freedom of one who knows that most of his life is behind him; he also displays an unfailing courage. With rhetorical gestures stripped to the bone, he records truthfully the loves and insights of advancing age. Yet in many of its phrases his poetry demonstrates a tendency apparent also in the work of five of the six younger writers – a tendency to substituting ‘reporting’ for interpretation –
The first line and a half are entirely relevant to the central meaning of the poem; but the ‘easterly hiss’ unexpected, exact, yet for all that adding no new dimension to the poem, is in accord with this disturbing tendency. Church,
One notices first that these extracts exhibit poetry of a very low intensity. Any idea, any fact, any state of feeling can be contained within the hold-all of a poem. One has also the sense of being invited to share a confidence (‘You know what happened to me on Wednesday?’) expressed in casual language, a flattering sense of being allowed to look into the disarranged cupboards of the poet’s mind. Yet there follows an aftertaste of having been cheated. From where does it come? MacNeice and Day Lewis are both poets with valuable intuitions to transmit; Gunn has, in his bluntest Yeatsian poems, a genuine metaphysical force; Trypanis, though very much a scholar, can at times re- animate the stones of Troy; Kirkup possess the shrewdness of a magpie as well as its liking for any bright metallic object. I suggest that one’s dissatisfaction rises from contact with the view of reality which prevails at present in English literary circles. The poem is regarded primarily as an artifact. Perhaps by a false application of psychoanalytical theory, both poets and critics tend to accept as adequate any symbol which reflects closely the processes of a mind occupied with itself. Thus the barren mystery of self-naming becomes the centre of each man’s work. The link between poetry and significant action is snapped.
In contrast to prevailing literary fashion, the poetry of Charles Causley is concerned chiefly with the mysterious relation of sailors to the sea. His major overt theme, the significance of homosexual love, is shared with at least two of the poets under discussion. Repetitive barrel-organ metres and excessive use of internal rhyme restrict him from formal experiment. But despite irritating mannerisms his poems have a solidity and immediate force which guarantees the authenticity of his experience:
The shadow of Waiting for Godot has not yet fallen on his verse. One could conceive him, however, waiting for God.
1957 (165)
‘Happy love has no history’, writes de Rougemont, in an introductory chapter of a study peculiarly French. He then proceeds to elucidate the origins and significance of that darker Love which is neither charity nor sensual desire, and whose devotees do not require most one another’s presence, but one another’s absence. His arguments are psychologically convincing, indeed, formidably so – after reading this book one can scarcely regard romantic adultery as the cosy thing our films and novels have made it. Can one imagine a Madame Tristan, good-humouredly sewing her husband’s socks? As de Rougemont amply demonstrates, Iseult is a woman beloved, but she is also more than this: she is the symbol of Love itself. Every boy or girl born into our European culture inherits a deeply-rooted conception of Love, of an ambiguous state of being overtly linked to the normalising effect of courtship and marriage, but tacitly opposed to both. Sex is too gross for the true Romantic lover; and charity is too dull. The author of this brilliant and subtle study deserves our applause for exposing the delusive and demonic character of this passion, though one can hardly hope that one book will seriously obstruct the working of a complex narcissism through which many lives founder daily in divorce, violence or suicide. Only in a monastic community could you or I avoid its influence.
It is not difficult to accept de Rougemont’s identification of Romantic love with a mysticism that despises the created world and longs for death; even his detailed and positive assertion of its origin in a cult of Courtly Love practised in the twelfth century. But the links in his argument are weakest when he equates the inward passion with outward conscious adherence to the Catharist heresy. His case is a forceful one; but not able to be proved to the hilt. Catharists there were; Romantic lovers are yet amongst us – between the two it takes a cunning man to build a bridge.
1957 (166)
The imagined platonic dialogue that follows is an extract from a lecture I gave to university students in Dunedin earlier this year in which I took another look at that rather nebulous and over-rated phenomenon poetic inspiration. To help place the dialogue in context I have included a few extracts from that part of the lecture which preceded it.
*
The conception of a poet as a man possessed by a power greater than himself, divine or demonic, has been held by cultures. It is of course largely inaccurate. There is no irreversible driving force to make a man write poems. Almost all of a poet’s life is spent in non-poetic activities – working, talking, eating, drinking, betting, watching films, reading books, playing with his children, courting, sleeping – or that universal hobby of the human race, doing neither what he should do nor what he wants to do. . . .
*
To make a poem is an entirely gratuitous act: no one but the poet will really miss it, if it remains unwritten; no one will pay highly for its production; no one’s salvation or damnation will depend on reading it.
*
The majority of our successful New Zealand poets have graduated in Bohemia. Bohemia is a state of mind, a view of oneself: its influence is essentially liberating. Bohemian and suburbanite are accustomed to glare at each other across barbed wire. For the sake of making their internal argument clear, I will construct a Platonic dialogue.
*
George and Nathaniel Jones, two brothers, are sitting under an apple tree in Nathaniel’s back garden, drinking beer on a spring afternoon. Nathaniel is an intelligent man of thirty-five, First Assistant in a Grade Seven School, temperate in his habits, authoritarian in the classroom, tolerant in the staffroom, a little bald, but still spruce and active. He has two children and is active in the local Parent and Teacher Association; and except for one lamented occasion on holiday in Rotorua, he has always been faithful to his charming wife. He has a rather strong dislike of Leftist political views. In his youth he had a stab at painting, and still wishes his job gave him time to take
George, on the other hand, has held down briefly a number of jobs – journalism, scrub-cutting, a job as a hotel porter, and lately a short spell as editor of an astrological magazine for better betting. At thirty-three he looks older than Nathaniel, saggy round the jowls, with a heavy paunch and a bloodhound’s eye. He has produced a good deal of literary work – a book of poems and one of short stories (the first obscure and the second rather scabrous); a few inflammatory political articles; and an unfinished novel about his first marriage. He and his second wife and their four children live in a shack in Auckland, on the North Shore, with chickens and an acre of vegetables. Their parties are famous throughout the district.
In real life George and Nathaniel avoid each other like the plague. They never meet except in times of family sickness. But today they are sitting under the apple tree.
Nathaniel: ‘A beautiful day, George. How good it is to relax after the week’s work. Look at the apple blossom on the grass. Like ballet dancers. It reminds me of that great line from Keats –
George: ‘The flowers remind me of kapok. From a burst mattress.’
N: ‘What a horrible thought! I sometimes wonder why you are the poet of the family. It seems to me that you’re more interested in the label on a whisky bottle than in any works of nature.’
G: ‘I can answer your Keats with a better line from Durrell –
The trouble with you boys who don’t write is that you want to eat the icing and leave the cake. What I want is real experience boiled down into a few phrases. Do you know Johnson’s lines on Hart Crane –
That’s where the steel strikes the flint. It could be you or me crossing Cook Strait.’
N: ‘You or I! No, it couldn’t. You always like the gloomiest poems, George.
A worm’s eye view of life. What has the suicide of a drunken writer got to do with us?’
G: ‘As the lights in the penitentiary grow dim when the current is switched on for the electric chair, so we quiver in our hearts at a suicide, for there is no suicide for which all society is not responsible . . .’.
N: ‘You must have a filing system in your head; but it makes no difference to juggle quotes. Society can’t be held responsible for its misfits.’
G: ‘Misfits be damned! I believe in the human race: you and me and Hart Crane. You can’t show me a single man without scar tissue an inch thick on his hide. But you want to pretty it up – happy husbands and smiling wives; the manager of the store patting the head of the office boy; progress with a capital “P”. When you were twenty you knew better than that. Or did you? You’ve shut the doors one by one, playing policeman to kids.’
N: ‘You don’t believe in any standards, do you? Well, I’m different. I think we’ve got to be realists. A man is a social being; from the time he is born he has to conform to certain accepted standards of thought and behaviour which he derives from his parents and the people around him. Otherwise we’d have anarchy – each man pulling in a different direction, robbery, rape, chaos.’
G: ‘I didn’t say I had no standards. It’s just that we have a different sense of values. What do you value most in the world?’
N: ‘A clear conscience and the feeling that I’ve done my duty.’
G: ‘Like a baby that’s just come off the pot.’
N: ‘Well, what do you value most?’
G: ‘Love.’
N: ‘Love can mean a lot of things.’
G: ‘There’s a better word for it in the vernacular.’
N: ‘You’re quite impossible, George. If you weren’t my brother I’d say you were insane. When I think of what poor Marge has to put up with. . . .’
G: ‘Don’t you worry about Marge – that’s between me and her. You don’t buy the right to read me a sermon just because I happen to be drinking your beer. I didn’t say it was the only thing I valued; I said I valued it most. After that, the company of friends, a Chinese meal, swimming in the surf, walking in the bush, writing and reading, the earth itself –
N: ‘Do you believe in God?’
G: ‘Yes, I do.’
N: ‘What God, then?’
G: ‘The Man on the Cross.’
N: ‘You’re a strange mixture, George. One minute you talk like an out- and-out pagan and the next minute like a lad from the S.C.M. I must admit that lately I’ve been thinking along religious lines myself. Material values aren’t everything, George. Sometimes I wake early in the morning and lie there in the dark, with my life laid out in front of me – school, home, Gillian, the P.T.A. – and it all amounts to nothing.’
G: ‘That’s what I call the two-in-the-morning blues.’
N: ‘Yes. Well, Gillian said I should go and see a doctor; but instead I’ve been making a study of Moral Rearmament. There’s a religion for you, George. Undenominational. Recharge your moral battery from the Great Accumulator. There’s no need to change society: Just change yourself. Let God take over. If you can measure yourself against the Four Absolutes – Absolute Love, Absolute Honesty –’.
G: ‘Absolute bulldust. You try to give an ideological answer to an existential problem. It can’t be done. You remind me of the story about Plato. He lay in his bath one morning, trying to figure out the uses of the navel. Two hours he lay there, running in hot water every time the bath got cold. Working it out by logic, he decided the navel had no use at all. So he unscrewed it, and tossed it over his shoulder. Then he stood up in the bath with a sense of a good job done. And his backside fell off.’
N: ‘Whenever I try to talk sense, you refuse to be serious. Just for once I’d like to hear you justify your own view of life. I don’t think you’re a bad man; just muddled; a bit of an actor too. You say that the world is a kind of a cesspit, full of misery and hardship and wrong-doing. Well, even if that’s so (and I think it depends on our own choice what we make of life) how are you going to set things in order without education, hard work, moral standards and self-respect? If you had your way, we’d all be living in caves – and where would your audience be? Who’d print your books?’
G: ‘All right, I’ll try to answer you – though I don’t like using your language; it twists the things I want to say. Here am I, George Jones. Thirty- three. When I was a boy I looked around me and liked what I saw – things, people, the sky and earth. I wrote my name with a stick on the sand and the tide washed it away again. There was a mystery to which I belonged – it looked back out of the flax bushes, from the holes in the asphalt where we played marbles, from the food steaming on the plate, the rain running down the window, and a girl’s round face, a Madonna with pig-tails. It burned inside me like a hot wire. But the old voices said – “Wait till you’re older, George. Then you’ll understand.” And I listened to them. I went to school and learned how to add money and who were the Kings of England. And slowly I saw myself as a different person – George Jones, accountant, polite to customers, doing the right thing, saying the right thing, digging the garden in the week-end, anxious whenever the train was late. But the stories and poems were not about that – they were full of violence, myself
‘Two marriages, two books, and a lot of booze – what do I get out of it? I think I know myself better than I did then. Did I just leave home in order to get drunk and climb in a woman’s window at one o’clock in the morning? You might as well say that a freezing worker strikes for the threepence an hour raise. We both strike because our society is a half-world, not real enough to live in.
‘Three years ago I nearly changed my mind. Marge had left me, and gone up north with the kids. I’d been hitting the bottle for months, and I lay there in the dirty shack, out of a job, sick, and riddled with self-pity. It seemed to me that a man with a pot belly and a grey business suit walked into the room. “Well, George,” he said, “I’ve got you at last. You’ve no one to blame but yourself. Always you’ve followed your own selfish view of things, and look how you’ve ended up. On the rubbish heap. There’s a razor in the drawer. Why don’t you take it out and use it on yourself?”
‘Then I knew who it was, the Father of Lies: but I couldn’t think of the right answer. He gave me an old, sanctimonious smile then. “There’s no sense in kicking against the pricks,” he said. “We are all sinners. You have the same faults as the rest of mankind – lust, anger, laziness and pride. But the last is the one that is killing you. Why can’t you put your head down and pass under the yoke?” “Whose yoke?” I said. “My yoke. In time you can even come to like it.”’
‘Then I thought of Marge, and suddenly knew the answer. “Go back to where you came from,” I said, “Amo ergo sum: I love therefore I am.” And as he went out the door a new day was beginning.’
N: ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. . . .’
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1
On the East Coast of New Zealand, between Cape Turnagain and Castle Point, and more narrowly, between the Akitio and Aohanga Rivers, lies that slab of country with which I am concerned in this study. The cluster of houses and homesteads at the mouth of the Akitio River may be called Akitio proper: in the following notes I will refer to this area, and the beach and farmland surrounding it, as Akitio. The present population of the whole
In the memory and imagination of the present inhabitants of Akitio (and hence in the minds of their children) the pioneering and sawmilling days stand out as a Homeric era. The energy of the conquest spent itself in the destruction by fire and axe of the large totara and matai forests. Stumps are still standing on many river flats. Bullock wagons were used to bring wool to the coastal steamer until 1944. The bullock driver stood waist high in the surf, cracking his long whip, while the bullocks plunged out and pulled the wagons alongside the lighters. A wagon still rusts on the sand above the ruined beach jetty, of which the broken supports remain and one horizontal slab of timber pointing like a gun seaward. Until a bridge was built in 1914, draught horses brought the baled wool by dray from Akitio homestead to the river, where it was ferried across in a boat. This boat now rots in a pine plantation below the bridge, orange-coloured needles raining down upon it, mossy but solid still, with square-headed copper nails in its thwarts and small saplings growing through its hull.
The Akitio Estate was sold by Sir Donald MacLean to James Armstrong, grandfather of the present owner of Akitio Station. The first Akitio homestead, a one-storied house with a verandah, was built about 1876 and pulled down about the turn of the century to make room for the present homestead, two-storeyed, with lawns, stables, gardens, tennis courts – and within the house, a hall, a billiard room, a wide staircase, and servants’ quarters. In the private graveyard of Akitio Station stands a handsome monument inscribed thus:
In memory of /
JAMES ARMSTRONG/ born July 25th 1832 / at Henwoodie / Roxburghshire, Scotland: / and was drowned in / Akiteo River / September 1st 1880 . . .
On another face of the monument is a further inscription:
In memory of
ARCHIBALD ARMSTRONG/ aged 24 years / who was drowned when / trying to save his uncle /JAMES ARMSTRONG. . .
Around this monument lie the graves of those who have lived and died on Akitio Station – the wife of a sawmill manager, a shepherd and his wife who came to New Zealand with the first Armstrong, two children who died of English cholera, a groom killed by a bucking horse, and a cook whose concrete gravestone bears no inscription because no one knew his name.
The first Armstrong was sucked down with his horse by a quicksand at the cattle crossing near the mouth of the Akitio River, while loungers on the verandah of the long-vanished hotel tried unsuccessfully to launch a boat. In the history of Akitio the river assumes early the character of an uncontrollable local deity, fished in, harnessed to float logs from the sawmills to the sea, but treacherous, able to rise thirty feet in twelve hours, destroying roads, bridges, stock, and even human life. In Akitio, as in any country community, the lives of children and adults are modified greatly by the natural surroundings. A farmer’s work, or school routine, can easily be disrupted by weather conditions. In the logbook of Waione School, kept since 1900 – Waione is nineteen miles upriver from Akitio – one finds continual reference to the effect of weather upon school attendance:
The roads are very bad and nearly impassable . . . (This statement, or its equivalent, occurs like a refrain throughout the logbook.) Unusually heavy rain for twelve hours caused the river to rise in full flood. Much damage was done to the mill property . . . Eileen H. has gone to town with her mother – their house had 5 ft. of water in it . . .
The winter attendance problem has been at times equally real in Akitio:
13/10/52. Took charge of school today from two sheep who were promptly evicted. Bus not running today as no licensed driver available. Children from Ora and Low-level being transported by parents’ cars . . .
1953. 9th June. School visited by Art Specialist. 1.45 p.m. School evacuated, heavy flooding . . .
June 15th. School bus not running, roads washed out. Low-level and Glen Ora children receiving lessons at home . . .
These extracts are chosen partly for their documentary value. The life of teacher, parents, and children must be seen against a natural background which is by no means static and may at times take control of the stage.
2
A school was built about 1906 at Akitio Station for the use of those children whose parents worked on the station. In 1909 a Mr Grant was teaching at
The flexibility of outlook required of a country teacher and the courage to adapt to difficult conditions are developed in response to three main factors – isolation in one form or another, irregular attendance of children, and problems of accommodation. Mrs Berry, now wife of the manager of Glen Ora Station, taught at Akitio in 1934 and 1935. There were nine children at the school when she began teaching. Over the two years she was obliged to board with several different families. She was keenly aware of the lack of social life in the district. Dances were then held only at Pongaroa. Most of the men working in the Akitio area were single. In recent years, however, in order to hold their staff, the station owners have been obliged to build houses for married couples, and the school population has swelled, though it still fluctuates considerably. Eighteen pupils attended in 1953; in 1956, twenty-seven; at the end of 1956, thirty-three; at the beginning of 1957, twenty-four. A child may often attend school for five or six weeks, then leave when the father (a shearer, contract fencer, cowman, or scrubcutter) shifts to another locality. Hence problems of remedial reading are permanent in Akitio School.
When the school was rebuilt, in the winter of 1949, it was brought in sections from Kaituna in lorries. The roof of the old school was sagging, and the committee had decided that it would not last the winter. The erection of the new school was a community project. Labour was given free – this is typical of the communal activity of Akitio.
Fenced round with ngaio trees, under the bare sheep-nibbled hills and less than a hundred yards from the beach, the area on which the school building stands has been cultivated by the children. With stones carried from the beach they have built cemented terraces; they have made a flower garden and paved the playground with shingle. In the garden grow irises, marigolds, broom, native shrubs, hollyhocks, and lupin. The school itself is a one-roomed structure. New lavatories have lately been built, and shrubs supplied for shelter belts after discussion with nature study specialists. Such developments depend largely on the initiative of the teacher and his ability to co-operate easily with children, parents, and the School Committee.
Within the school two dozen children, ranging in age from five to thirteen, sit at their desks – at least, during formal lessons they sit, but in the freedom of the afternoon some child is usually on his feet – leaning over a desk, discussing project work with animation, sharpening a pencil – part of the slow natural circulation of the group. A projector, bought with community funds, stands on a cupboard in the corner; around the walls are pinned the inevitable drawings, newspaper photographs, and printed items
In a town school, teacher and parents can be, and often are, comparative strangers. The teacher’s work, if he so wishes, can be restricted to the narrow field of contact with the children which is possible in classroom and playground, and to the time limit of an eight-hour day. In a country school no clear division of private and public function can be made: a country teacher is, whether he likes it or not, a member of the community. If he does not adapt readily to new circumstances, if he tends to be cold, suspicious, over-anxious, or timid in his dealings with people outside the classroom, his experience of country teaching can be calamitous. Sociability is the quality most prized in Akitio. In a community of widely separated families, social occasions are more than peripheral activity. The solidarity of the community, its common assault upon the isolation which each farming family must in some measure put up with, is greatly strengthened by every communal gathering. A country teacher may, if he wishes, guide or innovate such activity; for his own survival, he is obliged at least to participate.
I recall the Akitio teacher, Mr White, driving the red, squat school bus, up-hill-and-down, round the bluffs above the Akitio River. The bus was full of long-haired, clear-eyed country children, many of them barefoot, who sang in unison, ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ and ‘Show me the Way to Go Home’. As the bus came up a steep rise, a herd of Polled Angus steers, escorted by four mottled dogs and a young man on horseback, blocked the road. Mr White exchanged news with the horseman. Their informal conversation seemed to me the expression of a permanent relationship which existed between them – between two members of the Akitio community in an environment where even the most casual contact had social and personal value.
I recall too a Saturday morning spent on the Akitio reef with Mr White and three children. We waded through pools and channels, through bushes of seaweed, over layered rocks, waistdeep and neckdeep. The two boys and their teacher, feeling with hands and feet first to the bottom, emerged with crayfish writhing in their fists. The girl held the sack ready for each crayfish. It was work and play at once. Mr White, who is by no means a ‘soft’ teacher, had the full respect of the children and did not lose it by disappearing under water. That rare thing, a natural ‘child-teacher relationship’, existed
3
The leisure activities open to a country child are vigorous and innumerable – riding in a Land Rover across the bumpy swamp; hunting opossums (there is a halfcrown bounty for each token, a strip of skin taken from the back and including the tail); catching tadpoles; climbing trees; riding wooden sledges down a grassy hill; fishing, swimming, paddling on the reef; catching crayfish and paua, or gecko lizards from under logs, and fearlessly turning over stones to catch and crush the poisonous, orange-backed katipo spider; looking after their pets.
Lately the Akitio children, by arrangement, spent a week in Wellington, and later, children from a Wellington school visited Akitio. It seems likely that the Wellington children had the best of the bargain. They rode horses, travelled in a ‘cage’ across a flooded river, bathed in the surf, held eeling parties, caught whitebait, hunted opossums, watched farm machinery at work, and held a picnic around a bonfire on the beach. The Akitio children remembered chiefly their visit to the Wellington wharves.
Though full evidence would be hard to get, I have a strong impression that country children are generally more stable, mainly because of their close acquaintance with the natural world. The births, deaths, and matings of animals, the docking of lambs, the branding of calves – these recurring features of farm life, experienced not erratically but in a yearly cycle, accustom the children early to an acceptance of facts of growth, pain, sex, and death which are either (imperfectly) concealed from town children or experienced by them in sudden leaps of knowledge without the sense of a regular sustaining pattern. It is necessary for a country teacher to recognise that the children whom he teaches may know more than he will ever know about many important aspects of their community and environment. At Akitio a boy of twelve may already be a responsible helper on his parents’ farm, milking, chopping wood, administering penicillin to sick animals; a girl of ten may assist her mother in farm and household work, and help her to prepare ‘demonstrations’ for the next meeting of the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers.
In such circumstances education must take a different shape from that pattern of social studies research, nature study expeditions, essays written about trips to the seaside with which a town teacher is only too familiar. The country community and environment supply the teacher with an embarrassing richness of material. The teaching of basic skills, perhaps, will need no change; but if a country teacher retains an orthodox approach to the less formal work of the classroom, he may find himself absurdly offering
One notices how rarely their mothers appear as characters in the children’s stories. It is as if the active outdoor life of the farm, in which their fathers play the central role, occupies the forefront of their minds, while domestic life occupies the permanent, unacknowledged background.
Mr White, who has a strong interest in number work, has set a group of older children at work marking out areas to scale in the section above the school. Within the school buildings a ‘school shop’ was in constant use, particularly valuable to the children in a community without shops, where opportunities for the use and recognition of money is limited and goods are ordered by toll call to Dannevirke or Pongaroa. A school magazine had been established in which the children expounded their own theories about the origin of the huge deposits of stones which pile up on Akitio beach during the winter months. Their strong interest in, and familiarity with all types of machinery found expression in a detailed account of the working of the ‘Quickway’ diesel crushing machine with which a Dannevirke contractor, after he had bulldozed the stones into even huger piles, crushed them for use as road metal. The children have also exchanged news sheets with a town school in Masterton, and sent other written work to a sole-charge school in the King Country. The news sheets consisted chiefly of nature study material, written and illustrated. The Akitio reef is an inexhaustible treasure-house of just such material.
In the course of an ordinary week the children perform several plays developed from stories; and at the end of the year all sole-charge schools in the district combine for a Cultural Day at Pongaroa, where art and craft exhibits are displayed in the Community Centre building and each school ‘puts on’ an item. The art work of the Akitio children earned special comment from a visiting Fulbright scholar.
The methods used by Mr White to cope with special teaching problems are perhaps the stock-in-trade of every schoolteacher. But it is very noticeable that the function of Mr White in the Akitio community extends far beyond the minimum role of instructor and classroom disciplinarian. He is secretary of the social committee (a body entirely separate from the school committee) formed to organise games evenings, dances, and other social gatherings. These gatherings are usually held in the ‘landing shed’, a large barnlike structure built near the beach on the property of a local farmer, and used until the nineteen-forties for storing wool. He is projectionist for the films which are shown every second Saturday, also in the ‘landing shed’. The older children send out written notices for these showings, as for other social events:
In effect the children are liaison officers who make easy contact possible between the teacher as accepted organiser and their own families. To take on the role of organiser requires considerable social acumen, and a finger on the pulse of community feeling.
As the working year of the farmer has its regular cycle of activities – mustering, crutching, lambing, shearing – so the leisure pursuits of the people of Akitio follow a yearly pattern. From the end of January to the beginning of March, horse sports are held at Glen Ora station, at Weber, at Aohanga, and at Pongaroa. These meetings are advertised by poster:
WEBER/ Combined Athletic and Horse /PICNIC SPORTS/ To be held at Weber on Grounds Kindly Lent / by the Hales Family Opposite Weber Church . . .
Older children are allowed to compete at these sports meetings. The events are tests of speed and horsemanship – jumping, turning around obstacles, ‘threading the needle’ (in which event the horseman carries an iron ring to his partner, waits till it is threaded, then races to the end of the paddock). Since both children and adults are usually expert riders the standard of performance is high. There are also purely athletic meetings. At Glen Ora the sports day often finishes with a dance in the woolshed.
Anzac Day is celebrated on the school premises with as many as fifty participants. Flower shows are held regularly in the ‘landing shed’ by the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers; and the children also hold yearly a small flower show. The major event of the children’s year, however, is the Pet Show, for which they prepare for months beforehand, training and grooming horses, pet lambs, dogs, budgies, and magpies. Finally comes the New Year Dance in the ‘landing shed’, during the camping season, a festival at which three hundred may attend. But the gatherings which play the largest part in holding the community together are the regular weekly games evenings, held each Wednesday night. Farmers and farm workers, men and women, mingle to play darts, deck croquet, indoor bowls, and table tennis. Money collected at the games evening is handled by the social committee, who give a grant of about thirty pounds to the school each year. Children come with their parents and sleep under blankets in the cars. I remember seeing one boy asleep on a pile of dry seaweed [‘Agar’ seaweed collected on the Akitio beach and sold for jelly-making at £17 a bale] in a corner of the ‘landing shed’; his father roused him at the end of the evening and led him out by the arm, still half-asleep. As in a tribal group, the children of Akitio participate from an early age in adult gatherings.
Since there is no hotel at Akitio, most of the people keep drink in their houses; and most of the men would rather have a drink at their own or neighbour’s fireside than spend an afternoon at the bar in Dannevirke. In this their drinking habits compare favourably with those of townsmen. The whisky bottle is a symbol of that sociability which they value; and their womenfolk seem on the whole to accept it as such. They too have their ways of overcoming the pressure of isolation which is always present in the life of a country community. One woman, the wife of a station manager, sitting at the wheel of a new car on the road below the school, expressed it very clearly. ‘I get books from the library,’ she said, ‘but I can’t settle down to read them. I always want to be up and doing. There’s a homestead built further back on the place, out of sight of the road – but it wouldn’t do me, living there. I like to be able to see whatever’s passing on the road.’
However well-equipped her kitchen, however large the wool-cheque, however modern the car and radio may be, without regular neighbourly contact the life of a country woman would be unendurable. Thus sociability and participation in local affairs are not simply matters of private choice and liking; they are an essential groundwork making community life possible. In this context of necessary activity the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers occupies a special place. The Akitio Division, formed in October 1954, meets every second Wednesday in the month. The meetings are held either in the ‘landing shed’ or in the home of one or other of the members. Children under school age accompany their mothers to these meetings. The immediate practical aims of the Division include work for CORSO, making soft toys for Dannevirke Hospital, knitting, preparing for and holding flower shows, ‘demonstrations’ (for example, of the making of table place mats), and of late the financial support of a child in Lebanon. Members from Akitio attend the ‘birthday parties’ of other Divisions in Pangaroa, Waione, or Horoeka. The attainment of a sense of solidarity as a group, a keeping up of morale, is plainly the central aim and function of the Division.
The deep mutual dependence of members of the Akitio community tends to reduce feuding and harsh gossip to a minimum; and the sociability of the parents is reflected in the children’s attitude to one another. Allowing for the aggressiveness natural to their age, the Akitio children seem singularly helpful to one another. The elder children look after the younger, drawing them by degrees into the working routine of school as they have already drawn them by example into opossum-hunting expeditions, the gathering of shellfish, and innumerable other activities.
The standard of literacy in the Akitio community seems reasonably high. Though naturally the interests of country children are turned outwards, many of them in Akitio read widely and enjoy buying books on a trip to town. The local Country Library Service is managed by Mrs White. Books on travel and biography are favourites; and one farmer, through the library
4
Since the greater part of the life of the children of Akitio is spent at home, it is essential to include in these notes some sketches of their physical environment. The country near the coast is very rugged. I remember climbing the steep hill above the Marainanga homestead – so steep that not even a Land Rover can get up it. The homestead itself, which I could see below me, is one of the oldest in the district. Thirty years ago two full-time gardeners were employed there, and probably at least two maids. At the side of the house stands a strongroom, curved like an air raid shelter, where jewels were once kept and money for the payment of staff. A wooden plate on the wall near the office, with two crossed flags and the name PLEIADES, is a relic salvaged from a boat wrecked, probably for the sake of insurance, at the turn of the century, the bones of which, black and mussel-covered, still project above the water at low tide on Akitio beach. Four blue glass bottles stand on a shelf in the office, hand-grenade fire extinguishers patented in 1884; a map on the wall, made in 1895, has unformed pencil writing upon it, scrawled perhaps by the child of a station owner when her governess was not looking. The homestead is two-storeyed, high and red-roofed, with fruit trees at the back, grapes in a verandah greenhouse, and piles of timber cut in the yard.
A jeep is pulling a trailer along the road beside the pine plantation. A man is sharpening a circular saw in the woodyard, while a younger man tests the engine. The chugging, panting sound rises up the hill to me. From the top of the steep grassy face I can see the Akitio coast from Cape Turnagain
The manager of Marainanga and his wife (father and mother to the Whites when they first came into the district) occupy only a part of the homestead, which was built for a family of eight or nine in the days when there was no shortage of staff. Their youngest child goes to Akitio School. I remember him curled up with a book in an armchair in the large sitting-room, stocky, vigorous, and alert, while his father explained to me the cycle of the farming year on Marainanaga Station.
In January and February the sheep are mustered to finish weaning. The sheep are also dipped, and the poorer stock is culled from the better and disposed for the ewe fairs. These are dry months.
In March the rams are freed among the ewes and sheep are mustered for grazing purposes. March is usually a lean month. If rain comes it will lead to good growth, though facial eczema may increase among the ewes. In April the cattle are weaned and stock is shifted for feeding. In May and June the sheep are crutched. In July the breeding ewes are sorted and put into lambing paddocks. (The time of pregnancy of a ewe is 21 weeks.)
In August and September lambing occurs and cows calve. In the latter part of September the young lambs are docked. In October ‘dry’ sheep are shorn – that is, wethers and those ewes which are not feeding lambs. In November and December the ‘wet’ sheep are shorn. Calves are marked and branded. The bulls are let out to the cows.
Those events are part of the boy’s permanent environment, the unconscious education which he acquires every day of his life. Since there is no secondary school nearer than Dannevirke, it is likely that he will eventually go to a boarding school where he will learn many things unrelated to his early experience. But if he becomes a farmer in later life the knowledge which he has taken for granted and even forgotten will rise again in his mind as soon as the smell of a stable enters his nostrils.
From the top of another hill, on Te Tumu Station further inland, the station owner showed me the two-mile-wide belt of clay gashes which heavy rains had made, moving across the land like a scythe. Erosion after heavy rain is a constant problem for the Akitio farmer, and has been ever since the bush was cleared. On Te Tumu Station a tractor with hydraulic lift was shifting the stumps of timber that remained on the river flats. A topdressing plane took off from a strip beside the river. A plume of superphosphate fanned out behind it and drifted down on the hill paddocks. Incredibly large silver-
Each station is in a large degree self-contained and self-supporting. Sheep for the cookhouse are killed on the station, and other food, brought by van from Dannevirke, is kept in stock in case of isolation by bad weather. Yet each farmer shares the problems of his neighbour – how to prevent facial eczema among ewes; the need for rotational grazing; whether to use concrete posts or totara for fencing, or, as at Te Tumu, stainless steel chains. The farmers have in most cases an aerial map of their property, essential for efficient topdressing, marked with the names of paddocks – ‘Front Sawpit; Back Sawpit; Pohai; Trig; Hundred Acres; Rough; Brodie’s Holding; Hikurangi; Whare; Spring Flat; No. 1 Cadmus; No. 2 Cadmus’. The children look at these maps over their father’s shoulders and join as they grow older in the discussion of tactics – to preserve stock, to increase the fertility of land, to avoid disease. A wet season increases footrot. Cold, dry weather kills parasites. Thus the children acquire an extensive and mainly unconscious knowledge of their environment. It would be superfluous for a teacher to instruct them formally in these aspects of Social Studies.
5
I have already suggested one possible reason for the vigorous community life of Akitio – namely, the constant need of the people to band together against isolation. One other possible reason I will put forward tentatively. The society of Akitio is not sharply stratified into classes. Though incomes vary, the possession of a large income in Akitio is comparatively unimportant as a measure of social status. Even in the early days when station owners lived like country squires with many retainers, it seems likely that they valued a way of life much more than any monetary reward. Today a more democratic relationship prevails. In their leisure-time pursuits employer and employee mix on an equal footing, and the wife of the fencer knits with the wife of the station manager. The middlemen of an urban community, those who are concerned with ledger work and the sale of goods, have no immediate place in Akitio. The chief division of status occurs between the ‘settled’ and the ‘unsettled’ members of the community, between those who have lived long in Akitio, whether they are owners, managers, or station hands, and the floating population who have no special attachment to the district. Despite the use of farm machinery, the society of Akitio closely resembles a pre-industrial society. Its cohesive power is very great. One would expect the pressure upon
1957-58 (168)
L.A.G. Strong and John Pudney are both competent writers. Yet their poems lack the power to pierce the skin of events and reveal a hidden world. One can forgive a poet anything but ordinariness.
Mr Strong’s epitaph on a village postman depends for its effect solely on whimsy and the automatic structure of the verse.
Mr Pudney’s ‘Twentieth Century Valediction’ establishes a different set of mannerisms – modern, with a jolting slangy rhythm, but still without a centre. Mr Pudney’s poetry was a war rocket, dazzling the popular imagination when any poem about death in the Armed Services could get a quick response. Now he holds up the rocket stick for us to admire. Much less competent writers succeed, where these two have failed, just by being bold enough to concentrate on the core of personal experience. Stevie Smith, bless her, is one of these.
She is a jewel, a joy and a delight. The large solemn remarks of Mr Pudney and the rural epitaphs of Mr Strong have no chance at all in her company. By simply writing down her real thoughts she has produced nonsense poems as good as those of Edward Lear, several exemplary satires, and a few lyrics which could have come from a lost Blake manuscript. It all seems to depend on being yourself; but not all of us have her gift for it.
1958 (169)
Yearly anthologies are like harvests. Some years the crop is poor, and no labour by editors can remedy it; some years the grain will stand as high as one’s head. This new selection for 1957 is a good medium yield. Yet it leads one to question the value of yearly anthologies. The best poems in the book have almost all been written by old stagers – George Barker, Jack Clemo, C. Day Lewis, Richard Eberhart, G.S. Fraser, Roy Fuller, Edwin Muir, Vernon Watkins. The last-named poet is represented by a superb formal meditation on the Arthurian legends:
The anthology is indeed a fine selection of mature work. Yet any of these poets could, without loss, have saved their poems for their own next books. There is little or no new blood in England. Anthologies should be experimental. Their function is that of a catalyst, to combine new elements, and when those elements are lacking, anthologies should lapse into silence.
The Hawk in the Rain, a first collection of poems by a young Anglo- American, shows on every page a fiercely idiosyncratic energy:
Mr Hughes’s poem, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, recalls the jolting violence of Browning. He gives us all we can hope for in a first volume – direct, slashing poems, in which every word carries its full weight. Even his failures expose an abundant vitality not yet fully crystallised in form. He is many miles from the old man’s mellow tiredness which so strangely encumbers the work of other young English poets. One hopes he will have the luck to remain free of it.
1958 (170)
On April 27th James K. Baxter addressed the Society in the library of Rochester Hall. An audience of between seventy and eighty heard him recount his religious experiences and outline the reasons that led to his recently entering the Catholic Church.
He mentioned among other factors that influenced him, Graham Greene’s book The Power and the Glory. What impressed Mr Baxter in this book was the clear distinction drawn between the personality and the office of the ‘whisky priest’ who is its hero. This priest, despite his grievous moral weakness, remained a dispenser of authentic doctrine and valid Sacraments.
Within the Church, Mr Baxter concluded, one felt a great sense of freedom, because of this independence of the personality of any particular individual.
1958 (171)
Here two spiritual landscapes are set before us – that of the child and that of the contemplative monk. To begin with the child – the sad face of a little girl looks back from the cover of Minou Drouet’s book; and one cannot help wondering what warp of pain and isolation first triggered off these solitary poems, and what life lies ahead for their authoress. The poems have the strange calm and crystalline order of a child’s world before puberty. Every event has depth and significance; one could say, indeed, any event, because Minou Drouet can contemplate a holocaust of fire or the eyes of her Persian cat with the same fluid verve of association. Yet she is no mere exhibitionist. Her poems give the impression of being the effortless and sincere statements of a child intensely absorbed in her own emotions and sensations. Their tragic undertone comes from the knowledge of the reader that this child has not yet tried out her own powers of destruction, has not yet entered the common gaol of adult experience. So she observes, promises, and even threatens with a whole heart and mind –
Life, beware, for I’m on the watch just as summer’s on the watch for fruit, in which she’ll sink her golden teeth . . .
Who could read these lines without a protective care and grief?
In the poems of Thomas Merton one finds a different kind of simplicity – the rediscovery of innocence by the adult soul which divests itself of all attachment to created beauty in order to learn its own nothingness and be restored to its true identity
This Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky has written over fourteen books of prose and verse. There is no slackening of his powers; rather an emergence from private writing to a lucid, controlled bone-bare statement of the central themes of human sin and divine redemption. His poems reveal a living man, never just a moralist. He is the best Catholic apologist I have ever read.
1858 (172)
Mr James K. Baxter, the poet, who has been given a UNESCO grant to work in India for six months, believes New Zealand needs contact ‘other than technological and political’ in Asia.
‘I hope to be a small part of that,’ he said yesterday. He described himself as the first New Zealand link in what he hopes will be a chain of cultural exchanges between East and West.
Main purpose of the visits, of which his is the first, is to let textbook writers and illustrators in Asia and New Zealand exchange information.
Mr Baxter, who works for the school publications section of the Education Department, will make his first stop on the way to India at Tokyo, where there will be a conference on the representation of the West in Asian textbooks. Mr Baxter will be a New Zealand observer.
1958 (173)
Problems of religious adjustment narrated and analysed by some troubled spirit, are of perennial interest to the modern reader because an age awake with rumours of Armageddon prompts us to dig deep and search widely for the spiritual equivalent of a bomb-proof shelter. Yet Colin Wilson’s new book, despite its provocative title and the unusual accolade given by critics to its forerunner, The Outsider, is both unoriginal and unadventurous. This earnest young artist-to-be (he explains in an apologetic Introduction that he has in mind a series of novels and plays in which ‘the Outsider idea’ would be explored) presents his readers with a popularised ABC of existentialism and a guide-book to the work and lives of a number of artists and mystics, chosen to illustrate his central thesis – that man needs a religion, but no religion is really satisfactory. A writer who is capable of citing in one breath Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Bernard Shaw, George Fox, Jesus Christ, and Kierkegaard as existential heroes has not left behind him the level of the schoolboy essay. For all his analysis, his own concepts remain unanalysed –
The scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church, a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St Peter, of St Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth-century is no exception.
This will never do! Mr Wilson plays with words as a child plays with blocks. He should re-read Albert Camus to find the terms even in which to express a passionate unbelief. We may then find the inclination to read his next book more than once.
1958 (174)
Michael Roberts is likely to be best known for his editing of the first Faber Anthology of Modern Verse, and for a few poems on mountaineering. His poetry is representative of a mood and a political direction which has already dated a little:
It is perhaps unfair to illustrate his work by a quotation from a propa- gandist poem. But a certain propagandist rigidity disfigures the majority of the poems in this book. The curt, exact and pseudo-oracular statement is seen as only a paper lantern when the candle of Marxist enthusiasm is removed. Fortunately Michael Roberts had two very different sides to his nature, as his wife has made clear in a well-controlled Introduction – on one side the brilliant Leftist schoolmaster who ‘expected people to stretch themselves rather more than they had any wish to’; on the other, a passionate mountaineer who dedicated his second book of poems to his wife and to an Alpine guide, who found in climbing a mystical knowledge of the Logos (though he would never have used the term) immanent in created things:
Significantly these lines occur in an elegy for fallen climbers. The ecstasy and release are always very near to the moment of death – ‘their eyes are ringed with flame, their fingers bleed. . .’. It is a perilous deification, and strange from the pen of the Marxist schoolmaster.
1958 (175)
As happened with Byron in English literature, so Baudelaire fulfils a symbolic role in modern thought – either as a Promethean hero, one who snatched fire from the caverns of the unconscious mind, or as a diabolist, an enigmatic monster who combined extraordinary depravity with unusual literary powers. Undoubtedly Baudelaire’s own writings, Manichaean in their religious tendency, have fostered both myths. He was greatly preoccupied with the situation of the artist as a dedicated rebel; he explored the disorder of the senses brought about by orgiastic sexual experience and drug addiction; he tended to dramatise his own conflicts on a cosmological scale.
One could (and many critics do) all too easily accept the dramatic mask of the poems as a true self-portrait. Therefore it is very salutary to read this wide selection of Baudelaire’s letters, in which the man emerges, lucid, unhappy, solitary to an extreme, yet possessing deep affections and loyalties. His
Like Dylan Thomas, Baudelaire was a leaner, a man who retained the deep dependence of childhood. His letters to his mother express the uneasy, ambivalent dependence; and it may well be that his disturbed relation to the Church stemmed from the same source. But in that very area where his conduct has come under most fire, his relation to his mistress, Jeanne Duval, he shows himself no egocentric dandy, but a mature lover of heroic generosity, supporting her in illness, forgiving her frequent unfaithfulness. It is a heart- warming record, though often horrifying in its detail. The annals of literary failure and success, the anecdotes of fastidious flirtings with blue-stockinged empresses of the salon, seem trivial in comparison.
1958 (176)
The author of this book is strongly partisan: and while no one can quarrel with his effort to gain greater recognition for Edward Thomas, it is unfortunate that he finds it necessary to claim that a good minor poet (comparable with Edmund Blunden) was also a first-rate essayist and critic. Quite plainly the pastoral impulse which emerges in his lucid, highly controlled poems was pumped dry to provide pot-boilers in prose for a mainly uncritical audience. Mr Coombes remarks that –
. . . Material difficulties increased during the years that followed, when the Thomases lived in London, Kent, Hampshire. The money he earned by reviewing and by (mostly) commissioned books was never enough to keep off anxiety. There were three children. But despite the melancholia that frequently and for long periods oppressed him, he worked hard, often on material uncongenial to him . . .
A more perceptive biographer might have deduced that Thomas’s melancholia proceeded from his conditions of employment and the tragic smothering of a lyrical gift by enforced journalism. ‘With regular army life’ (R.P. Eckert is quoted) ‘his melancholy and dark agonies disappeared for ever.’ It could well be so. Even today a free-lance journalist, who was also a fine poet, might find great relief by enlisting in the army and ceasing to support his family with an overworked brain. The hand-picked quotations from Thomas’s prose writings are still verbose (a necessary feature of journalist prose if one is paid by the line) and smell strongly of the lamp. The book which could have been written on Thomas’s poetry has been squeezed into the last chapter; and
1958 (177)
A comprehensive collection of George Barker’s poems is certainly, as his publishers assure us, not only timely but overdue. Why then should we be obliged to suffer tamely the statement, following a list of contents? – ‘One long poem “The True Confession of George Barker”, which Mr Barker wished to include in this volume, has been omitted at the publishers’ request.’ It is an admission of shameful timidity, for the poem in question comes near to greatness and cannot be regarded as insignificant in an assessment of Barker’s work. Could it have been omitted on the grounds of blasphemy? The magnificent (and blasphemous) ‘Elegy V’ has been included. On grounds of near-obscenity? Several poems included (‘Monologue of the Husband’, for example) are as near to being obscene as anything in the ‘True Confession’. It is the kind of mystery to make a fellow-poet grit his teeth.
The fact that his publisher should feel obliged to make this omission indicates the flamboyant and explosive character of Barker’s poetry. He is a religious poet, recording an agonising private war with God; an erotic poet who records exactly the nightmares as well as the sensual paradise open to a lover. His autobiographical novel The Dead Seagull sheds much light on the causes for his preoccupation with unhappy love. In a sense his greatest poems are created from pain – he begins speaking where another poet would have fallen silent:
The poem flows as naturally and inevitably as a jet of blood from a sudden wound. The tears and wounds, the demigorgons and glass unicorns of Barker’s poetry become real immediately one realises that his utterance is a record, inspired by pain, of actual spiritual conflict between a vision of love’s innocence and a knowledge of love’s depravity. We both love and destroy what we love. George Barker does not accept it peacefully. That is why his
1958 (178)
‘I wrote the play in about three and a half weeks. This was in the evenings after teaching during the day,’ James K. Baxter told the Listener. ‘In Jack Winter I was concerned with two problems: one, to write a play with an authentic New Zealand setting; secondly, to write it as especially suited for radio. I wanted something that develops from a yarn – thus the narrator, introducing and commenting on the characters, plays a large part. I noticed in Laurie Lee’s Magellan that a play gains more by having a narrator; this method was also used in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which play I used as a springboard for my own.’
There were three separate themes in his play, said Mr Baxter. Age in the person of Jack Winter; death, in the murder of the young miner; and love – in the scene between the young miner and the pub-keeper’s daughter. One of the three miners staying at The Drover’s Rest (Preaching Lowry) could be called the conscience of the piece.
Another ingredient of the play was locality. ‘When I was a child I spent a good deal of time in Otago and the Lake district – an area, I suppose, that has come often into my poetry – and this landscape I tried to make come to life, to play its part, animistically, in the story. What I had in mind was somewhere near Naseby, but whether the yarns told me by my father which form a basic stratum in the play were really centred there, I would be unable to say.’
What dictated his choice of strong poetic language – as opposed, say, to the more astringent style of T.S. Eliot?
‘In a radio play,’ Mr Baxter answered, ‘all those things that would otherwise, on the stage, be visual – gesture, setting and appearance of actors – must find emotional equivalents in the spoken word. That is why the poetic prose method is very suitable.
‘Language can make this difference: if it is the language of the people it is figurative language and helps the writer. This is true in broad Scots, also in Irish – that is what helped Synge; he could draw on figurative language used by the people. You cannot do that here.’
T.S. Eliot, said Mr Baxter, in his thinning out of language, tends to be ‘passing blank cheques’ all the time. His characters do not speak as people speak in the street; for a convention of real language he has substituted one of thin language. This was all right on the stage, but not in radio.
‘Thinning down is not so suitable for radio. That is why Ashley Heenan is just as responsible for the final form of the Dream as I am. His music gives
1958 (179)
In plain English, a vocation is a calling, a way of life which people must follow in order to become their true selves. Heads of training-colleges in their speeches to students freely refer to teaching as a vocation; perhaps too freely. Joe Smith and Sally Brown may be working as teachers in the same school. Though Joe is by no means efficient, he knows obscurely that he has found a true vocation; the kids like him and he likes the kids; things are working out right for him at quite a deep level. Sally is a more efficient teacher, but somehow she is losing touch. She has the sense of being up against an invisible barrier; there is always a sense of strain in the classroom, and on Sally’s side a deep frustration. She decides, for no very serious reason, to apply for a job teaching subnormal children; and strangely enough it works out right for her. That is her actual vocation. But only she can judge it. The visiting inspector (if he thinks about it at all) may have decided that Sally is a good teacher and Joe a poor one.
A man may, at one and the same time, have several vocations. I am a writer by vocation; also a husband and a parent. I doubt if any of the twenty- odd jobs I have held down in the past fourteen years were in any true sense vocations. But writing and married life are undoubtedly two vocations whose demands I am obliged to fulfil in order to become myself, the man God intends me to be. A vocation may also be temporary. One vocation may lapse in favour of another, as when a nurse leaves nursing in order to become a nun or a married woman. The nun has a period of probation during which she can test whether her vocation is real or not; the married woman generally takes a gamble, depending on ‘love’ to pull her through, and perhaps that is one reason why so many marriages come to grief. But these are fairly obvious vocations, approved and understood by most of one’s fellows, and even by the potential artist himself. Therefore I intend to discuss briefly the meaning of a writer’s vocation and some of the ways in which it may be tested.
It is quite possible that one in every ten people who start writing in their teens or early twenties may have a true vocation to be a writer. God means them to find their true self by writing (as well as in other ways), and by smothering their gift they may lose the key to their own interior life. ‘That’s all very well. I had a few poems published in the varsity magazine, when I was your age, myself. But what are you going to do?’ An understandable reaction from the ordinary parent (or teacher, or pastor, or vocational guidance officer) when an adolescent explains that his or her main bent is ‘writing’. I remember how in my late teens my parents presented me with a tentative programme
How very egocentric! Yet a man must look for his own good where he finds it; and if a saint gives him advice that goes against his own sense of vocation, he must say: ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m travelling by a different road.’ Of course, one of the striking characteristics of saints is their ability to help others to discover a true vocation. They love to see others exercising a free choice. But a great many good men and women, who are not yet saints, stand beside an adolescent and tug his sleeve, saying: ‘Use my wisdom. Use my prudence.’ This applies especially when the choice of the adolescent seems likely to endanger his or her chances of material success, or when the choices seem morally dangerous (as when a girl becomes attached to a man with many and obvious faults). To have a vocation as a writer is like holding to the stirrup-iron of a swift and lively horse. One may be pulled through the brambles and across stones; to the onlooker the choice will appear dangerous, or even utter folly. But the horse was bred in heavenly stables; and the vocation is a true one.
We do not readily recognise an artistic vocation. But if you think you are born to be a writer, then test it out, write screeds (it does not matter if a great deal of it is junk), think over it, quarrel about it, read the work of others. If your job is not suited for writing, then take another job. A job is not a vocation. And if you find eventually that you were mistaken, there is no need to get sour. Some have a vocation to teach; some to write poems; some to jive, drink beer, and laugh loudly and often; some (there are very few of these) to give other people advice. But all are pleasing to God in the degree that they become their true selves, the selves He holds in keeping for His and their eternal enjoyment.
1958 (180)
An aardvark and an onager lived in a cave together. An aardvark is an anteater, with a long snout for digging up ants, and a big brown, bushy tail. An onager is a kind of wild donkey. These two animals lived happily in a cave at the edge of a jungle river.
One day the aardvark was busy sweeping out the cave with her brown, bushy tail. She whisked and whisked, and the dust rose in clouds. Just then the onager came home. He was tired and hungry, for he had been out hunting all day and caught nothing, not even a little bush rat. Usually he ate thistles, and of course she ate ants, but they both liked to eat meat as well.
The onager was cross. He drummed his four hooves on the ground and brayed loudly. ‘Stop whisking!’ he said. ‘You’re making so much dust that I think I want to sneeze.’ And he did sneeze, three times, very loudly – ‘Ah- tish-oo! Ah-tish-oo! Ah-tish-oo!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said the aardvark. I’m going to go on sweeping till this cave is quite clean. You’ve got an easy life. You wander round and scratch your back and watch the humming-birds, while I stay at home and do the work.’ She raised her long snout in the air and snorted.
The onager was still cross. ‘You nasty animal!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t snort at me! I think you ate too many ants yesterday. You’re so greedy that you don’t know when to stop. Now you’ve got a sore tummy, and it’s making you cross.’ He knew that he was really the cross one, but he didn’t want to admit it.
‘If you’re going to be so rude,’ said the aardvark quietly, ‘I think you should go and live somewhere else. I won’t be sorry. Your coat is always full of bits of dry thistle, you snore at night, and if you’re going to be rude as well then we might as well not live together.’
‘All right, I’ll go then!’ the onager shouted. He drummed his four hooves on the ground again, brayed loudly, and galloped away along the river bank. The aardvark watched sadly, for she really loved the onager very much. She hoped that he would soon come back in a better temper.
But a week went past, and then two weeks, and the onager did not come back to the cave. Then aardvark found a lovely big ant hill underneath a mango tree. She licked up the ants with her long, red tongue till she had eaten four thousand, two hundred and fifty-three of them. She wasn’t sure whether it was two hundred and fifty three or two hundred and fifty two, and she wished the onager was there to count with her for she always liked to know how many ants she had eaten. Then she began to feel sick inside, because she had eaten too many ants.
‘I’ll go to the river,’ thought the aardvark, ‘and have a drink of water. It will wash the ants down and make my tummy feel better.’ She trotted down to the river and buried her long snout in the cool water.
Just then a big, grey log drifted down the river. At least, it looked like a big, grey log to the aardvark, but it was really a wicked old crocodile. His jaws and legs and tail were hidden under the muddy water. The only parts that showed were his round, yellow eyes and the tip of his nose.
The aardvark went on drinking. The crocodile drifted closer and closer. Then suddenly he rushed forward. ‘Snap!’ – his big ugly jaws shut tight on the snout of the poor aardvark.
‘Help! Help!’ she called. But she couldn’t call very well, because the crocodile was tugging at her snout. ‘Help! Help!’ But she was being pulled down the slippery bank into the water. Soon the crocodile would swallow her whole.
All at once a thundering noise grew louder on the bank above. It sounded just like the noise of hooves. Someone sprang through the air and landed on the back of the scaly, old crocodile. He drummed with all four hooves at once. He kicked and banged and bit. It was the onager.
The crocodile let go his hold on the aardvark’s snout. He turned to grab the onager. But the onager was too quick for him. He leapt on to the shore. The wicked old crocodile was very angry. ‘You wait,’ he grunted. ‘You got away from me this time, but you won’t next time.’
‘There won’t be a next time!’ shouted the onager. ‘Come up here so that I can kick you again. And leave animals smaller than yourself alone.’
The crocodile rumbled in his throat. But he knew that the onager had beaten him. He turned slowly and slid back into the muddy river water.
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ said the aardvark, as she rubbed her nose where it was sore. I don’t mind a bit if you snore at night, and if you’ve got thistles in your coat.’
‘And I don’t mind if you dust the cave every day of the week,’ said the onager. ‘It was my fault when we quarrelled.’
‘Yes, it was,’ said the aardvark. ‘You were rather silly really. But you made up for it today. I’ve often wondered why you have such big hooves, and now I know. They’re for thumping crocodiles.’
‘That’s right,’ said the onager. ‘Let’s go back to our cave together.’ And they did.
1958? (181)
15 Sept. [1958]
Clearing up of office. Farewells. Up [to Auckland] by plane. Sitting alongside Fr Branagan on plane.
‘Revelations of Divine Love’ – visions – one sister had visions – the other rejoiced in them.
Green fields of Auckland. Egmont like a great . . . Sea like beaten copper.
In Auckland met Angela and Jean. Small rosary. . . . Visit to St Patrick’s [Cathedral]. Statue of Jesus the Workman beating out his own cross . . . Studied the hands. Confession – ‘Father, I can only number one sin – impurity of thought – spirit of joy and . . .’.
‘Stay off the grog, it makes a fool of a man.’
House in Ponsonby – square of light from door into shadow out by tree.
Hand on her thigh in taxi – rending limbs of Christ. . . .
Psalmus XLVII: ‘the thighs of the north’. Character of Jean – moral. Late Bohemian conversation – yarns at the table – Jean and Angela and Cushla. To bed by starlight in big-windowed room – meaning of pictures – uneasy dreams.
16 Sept.
Early rising – toast and marmalade and coffee – But finally with taxi driver . . . Shadow of plane on clouds . . . climb into milky whiteness.
Last sight of N.Z. mudflats and breakers.
Above 3 tongues of land – sandwiches and coffee at 12,000 feet.
Dark the cloud-shadows on water. . . . Burly elbow of the rivers. Farms and wharves. Long fire-break . . . through the bush. Above Australian scrub.
Plane tilting at sharp angle. ‘Extinguish cigarettes and fasten seat-belts.’
COUNTRY LIKE A WORN MAT, scrubbed too often. Hilltops scraped by bulldozers.
Hotel sumptuous to me. A cab driver shouts ‘You old [sexo! ?]’ along the street. ‘Watch out for yourself ’ is the reply. Faces – one can see where Mr Nash got his fun. Red, lined faces and dull eyes. . . .
At Mass at the Basilica twenty to six (p.m.) Huge holy water fonts like baptismal basins. Tiredness in the air. The vault of God where Verbum caro factum est. In Confession the young, dark priest . . .
‘I’ve [told?] some very crook stories, Father.’
‘Ask God and His Holy Mother to give you a true sorrow for the scandal you have caused, the harm you may have been to their souls.’
In this violent country everything seems excessive. . . .
17 Sept.
Evening spent yesterday with Fr Molloy. Collar off and jersey on. A wrestler at heart: tough . . . Talked of purity of Fra Angelico’s work – green and other colours – yet Yanks who tried to do it got muddy results.
Fr Molloy . . . on Asian students’ problem – 50% Asian, 50% student. Talked till three in morning till ashtray was full of stubs. Meal: oysters, eggs, prawns, chips.
Could not sleep – fell asleep at three – dreamt of Jacquie – teeth (my) broken by fall on verandah – she comforting me. Woke spitting and afraid of demons: too dark in room: claustrophobic . . . ghost in bathroom. Read C.S. Lewis’s book about Ungit – Till We Have Faces.
Relationship of laity to clergy – difficult but rewarding.
Morning to Mass – Our Lady keeping promise to get me to daily Com- munion. Praise her! Statue in basilica is Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. . . .
Talk over FIVER – well deserved.
Visit to A.A. Headquarters – with maps of Australia and of Sydney: Grace and Jack. Coca-Cola and sandwiches.
Met John Childs and wife in the street . . . coffee together.
CONSTELLATION at 7.30 p.m. . . .
‘Attachez vos ceintures’ in some way more significant that ‘Fasten seat belts’. Japanese with me at the front.
Flying at night – the flame streaming from exhausts is plane’s enormous spit – demonic power ⇢ Darwin.
18 Sept.
Psalmus XV: ‘Keep me safe, Lord; I put my trust in thee . . .’
‘Blessed be the Lord, who schools me; late into the night my inmost thoughts chasten me.’ As at Bab’s and at the hotel.
First rays of the sun behind a frame of clouds. One star shining in the east. Cloudless heaven above the clouds – the Little Flower speaking of the world as a country under fog. The old dream of the Void . . . but only space.
Rough ride through clouds into Manila. Rain-soaked country. Humid. Typhoon over Tokyo might hold us up over Manila.
In airport restaurant Italian priest in rattling conversation with Filipino hostess. Man with timid, full face and bloodshot eyes. She is trim, childish body.
He is from Saigon. Talk of exchange of money, living-quarters, Seville, Rome.
Gave him tin of cigarettes – at first declined, then accepted.
Take-off from Manila in the rain – cool towels for forehead, and fruit juice. Flooded fields alongside coast; arrow-shaped . . .
Green and white (?) squares alternating under torn drifting rushing clouds. Towns among trees at intervals.
‘position of Typhoon Helen – will have shifted from Tokyo.’
17,000 ft. above the Pacific Ocean – going to the dyke, reading, smoking.
Nearing islands, torn clouds like feathery islands in the sea. For the first time can see wrinkles of waves below – v. clean air.
Rosary and Stations of the Cross – Joyful Mysteries – a planeload.
Coming into Tokyo – first tiny green light on wingtip; the blue flame from exhaust engines as evening comes on. ON LEFT.
ON RIGHT – Oshima Islands, bordered by red ribbon of sunset. Tip of volcano visible against sky. 84° F. in Tokyo.
Difficulty getting hotel and transport. Put up by QANTAS at the ‘Akasaka Prince Hotel’. Streets of Tokyo – side-streets full of sharks – walking the pavement between 10 and 12 – taxis everywhere – must have been trouble with . . .
19 Sept. Unable to sleep properly. Kept light on. Dreamt of Jacquie.
3 baths a day in square bath-tub.
St Ignatius Cathedral – shop selling Catholic supplies – prints of Our Lady shown as Japanese woman.
Meal of fish and eggs and rice at small shop (90 yen). Eating with chopsticks – wood in one piece, to be broken. Courtesy of management. Television screen, blank.
Met Mr Pereira from Ceylon – in charge of distribution (?) of textbooks. And Dr Abrahams. Drink in town with Dr Abrahams at ‘The Castle’ –
Television Seven showing women’s fashions.
Visit to N.Z. and British embassies. Two dogs rooting on a corner in the heat. Toys in toyshop. American woman buying for her child. Robots, boats, cars, dolls.
Trip by tram to Chagasaki. Blue plush seats. Cleanliness of Japanese. Wooden shacks surrounding Tokyo. Uniforms of white shirts and dark pants. Women dressed in European style and conventional Japanese.
Closely cultivated fields alongside line. What it means to be in a pagan country.
Posters advertising – some blown over by typhoon. Dark hawks as scarecrows. Fields on fields of vegetables.
Off with crowd at Chagasaki. Trying to find Fr Morris. Tall priest with twang and glasses. After 5 minutes comes to meet me.
Evening Mass – about 18 present, mainly women. Mural painted by previous priest of Our Lady standing on the moon, flanked by two . . . angels. Priest without server.
Plenty of books on shelves. Chesterton, Knox etc. Meal of eel with Japanese housekeeper serving.
Evening at N—s. Ride on motorbike through backstreets. House among dwarf pines. Slippers at door. Three attractive daughters and parents. Discussion of whether daughters should go to America to marry Yanks.
TV Seven showing wrestling and crime serials. . . . Sweet cakes and fish and tea.
Queasy stomach. One girl Catholic.
Easy conversation of priest in Japanese. Better class family.
Fish, vomited in evening back at presbytery.
20 Sept.
Early Mass. Drowsy. Squeaky shoes. Women with veiled heads. Talk with Fr N— in his shirtsleeves.
Then to sculptor Mr O—. Passed old Shinto temples among pines, with children’s playground in temple grounds. Smell of farm animals. Men living against back of stream.
Sculptor in shed dabbing whitewash on sculpture of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Wife and five children – wife with one child strapped on back.
Sculptor small wrinkled formal man, v. cheerful. Family live in one room.
Visit to Fr P—. Chapel in converted mansion. Fr O— a keen gardener.
. . . Shelter in back flattened by storm. . . . Milky drink = cordial.
Irish young Columban priest visiting – speaking of Irish fighting. Clear blue eyes. Bath in wooden tub. Walk in bush with Fr N— . . .
Dream of being squashed to death – strangulation – demons etc.
If prayer doesn’t help, must be . . . as God’s will. But turn on light and read a little.
Jacquie, I love you – I wish you were with me now.
Dream of violence, and child prostitution. Satanist pact involved.
21 Sept.
Mass and Benediction. Full church. Reading Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened and J.P. Morton on Belloc. Able to join in the Latin – ‘Tantum ergo sacramentum’.
(Remember shame at not being able to serve Mass.)
[Name and address of Japanese educators / writers listed.] Discussed possible exchange of manuscripts and illustrations.
Books for children of primer level chiefly. Illustrations from children’s own pictures, though by adults.
Miss ISHII MOMOKO writes for children. Adviser to IWANAMI Publishing Co.
Mr WATANABE
Japanese-style church – squarish; sliding doors.
Swiss-style church – Graveyard of nuns alongside . . . Nuns of Japanese
origin. Hospital T.B. run by Sisters of the Visitation. Old French priest – translating Japanese-French history. . . .
Visit to technical school and printing works in afternoon.
In evening walk and discussion with Soviet professor. Still pedantic but sociable.
Bought 12 cups for Jacquie. Muslim restaurant 60 years. Eating with chopsticks.
Evening. Show of slides of Japan and China by Mr Pryor (English). Show of two films – Deccan Village and Afghanistan.
Soviet prof ’s comments – too gloomy a view of life.
Sitting in bar afterwards with Pryor and . . . Ironing out of crisis.
25 Sept.
Visit to technical schools etc. Coming of typhoon interrupted this. Children singing Japanese songs to Western music. . . .
Typhoon Ida shown on television – flooded streets – landslips – swollen rivers.
Crooners and wrestlers on television. Domestic love stories.
At night. Rosary in room. Attempt to write paper. Dream of wife-murder, criminal with tobacco in place of brain; for analysis; sleeping beside corpse of wife. ‘Now his loss of the soul can express itself.’ Later wishes to stress he (the murderer) is in fact schizophrenic. Wife is Polynesian (Jacquie) and prefers celibacy in marriage (Jacquie). He kills her with an axe. Flower that comes alive is in child’s story . . .
26 Sept.
Late leaving from hotel because of effects of typhoon. Two reporters in hotel grounds. I start paper on non-audio-visual teaching only.
Flooded streets – small wooden houses – shopkeepers with wares lifted down ahead of water – man on a raft of oil drums – children playing in water – older children wading with younger children on their backs – flattened crops – landslides pushing houses over – bus held up by water and landslides for 2 hours. Man in service station crouched on chair, but asleep still.
. . . as in N.Z. but far more crowded. Mountain groups, waterfalls, suspension bridges . . . room at hotel open – Fujihakawa. Low tables, sleeping on mats. Sulphur baths – ritual of washing before entering. Boiling hot. Then cold shower. Communal bath-place.
Walk with Mr Pereira by moonlight – in busy days – realising good to walk in. Under large moon. . . . Communication with Mr Win, Chinese Anglican. Communists are anti-Government. Face and intelligence of evangelical. Objects to attempted rule of High Anglican Bishop. Discussion of Communist methods on one Ritualist who preached openly till 2 years ago – then arrested and disappeared – crowds used to gather to him. Sharing room with Mr Win. Then we sleep.
27 Sept.
Clatter of workers and scaffolding. Steam rising from sulphur spring. Whistle of birds. Early bath in sulphur spring. Mr Pereira on animal-killing; tigers are friendly. . . .
. . . of jet plane above the mountains. Sight of Mount Fuji above cloud. . . .
Visit to printing works. 7-colour printing. Attractive girls. Huge press working.
Small . . . in coffee glass.
Back by 10. Conversation with Prof. [Karasawa] on Buddhism.
Writing paper for conference. Paper finished. Reading Husband of the [Lord?].
Mild earthquake at 1 o’clock.
[The following entries for September 28, 29, 30 and October 1, 2, 3 are illegible to me.]
4 October
Left hotel at noon, after drafting of final report. Prof. Karasawa presents me with ‘crying doll’ and explanation.
Trip on tram down to Cho-Shi – boys in procession, school uniform. Father playing with child.
Housekeeper at Cho-Shi, Catechist and cook. Motherly smile. Discussion with Frs Bradley and Cain. Importation of drugs into Japan – revenge of Red China. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed many Catholics. Early Catholic martyrs – girl hung head down for 16 days over pit of burning oil, with temples pierced so that blood would flow and she would not die. . . . Jesuits executed at Nagasaki.
Sleep with bad dreams; back to bed with rosary around the neck.
5 Oct.
Early Mass. Many hymns. Housekeeper wanting references for people. . . .
Many women at Mass.
Visit to hospital in afternoon. Procession of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.
Procession through hospital wards – sick man smiling in bed repeating words ‘Ave, ave Maria’. Benediction. ‘Tantum ergo sacramentum’.
6 Oct.
Visit to Chiba. Monthly meeting of priests. Esprit de corps.
Flooded paddy fields surrounded by storm fences.
Back to Tokyo, to Columban College. TV in recreation room.
7 Oct.
Three priests saying Mass in chapel. Reception of Blessed Sacrament. Visit to town – coffee in coffee-shop. Buy drugs. Met two Yankee sailors;
direct them and give them coffee . . .
8-9 Oct.
Coffee shop under railway bridge. Meeting university students; talking of unionism and teachers’ strike. Dinner at McAlpine’s. Massage in barber’s shop.
DEATH OF THE POPE. Discussion at table. Off to airport.
10 Oct.
Journey on plane – talk to owl-eyed American.
Hard face became sensitive, talking of Japan.
Over the harbour and mountains into Hong Kong.
Crowded streets, beggars, rickshaw men . . .
Mr J.M. Tan at office – sent me to Shamrock Hotel.
At Tan’s place – Chinese poet – ruined idealist, face of.
Tan talking of suffering of people – eloquent on faults of colonialism.
Living in a sarcophagus. His wife taking of dogs – humanitarian – admiration of Quakers.
11 Oct.
Dalmatian priest up at rectory. . . . Singing of Japanese . . . Chinese woman kneeling before Blessed Virgin.
Enormous congestion; guards in the banks with rifles. Whore in dark glasses – neatly dressed – ‘Come to my own house.’
Patched sails of yachts, tattered, alongside fresh yachts.
12 Oct.
Water through streets. Old women in black shifting forward at quayside. Gift of chess-set . . . medal of Sacred Heart . . . Children playing with shouts. . . .
Sung Kyrie. . . .
At rectory, dog jumping up, priest with little [can heating his dinner?] ‘Japanese Catholics are the best of all.’
Forgive me, father, for saying it, but mentions Our Lord, Our Lady, and the blessed saints seen in heaven, and us left on earth to fend off . . .
J.M. Tan speaks of Japanese atrocities – people tied to trees and left to die. Raping of nurses in Red Cross hospital. Woman hiding behind bathroom door.
Dream: my familiar alter ego: the suffering criminal. Je suis forçat; je suis nègro. . . . [Most of this page is illegible to me.]
Dear Jacquie – Once I was one of those people who, if they are thirsty enough, will drink salt water; now I am like you, I would rather die of thirst – but one does not die, somehow a little water . . . on canvas. One is kept alive by [minority?] – statement on sex.
Those who have been without food a long time: their stomachs may [burn?] if they eat. . . .
13 Oct. [Entry illegible to me.] 14 Oct.
Plane to Bangkok – Sat beside Chinese-English woman teacher. Lady.
Thailand people are water dwellers. A lot of canals and wooden huts. Huge war memorial at Bangkok. Men with helmets.
Buddhist priests in street with yellow robes. Boy riding on back of buffalo.
Children swimming in canals. Meal of rice and sauce and tea and soup and cakes. Cheap.
[Reflection of light through bamboo slats. Card-playing on mattress. Shaving with cold water, dressed in loose pyjamas. The green rice swaying above the water.]
Can’t sleep in hotel room. Great fan spinning continually. Cold shower.
Dream of trying to dynamite House of Parliament, but fuses have become wet. . . .
15 Oct.
Green fields full of fords; brown rivers and stilt houses. I would like to know the Thai character and sign for peace. . . . fleecy tall clouds marching across this green country. . . .
Perhaps our muscle-bound culture is what it is because we have never become a nation. The secret about peace is written in the hearts of one or two poets and painters. Some special secret aspect of the beauty of God is revealed in each country: it cannot be normal, but it wounds the soul with grief and delight. . . .
Rivers like great lizards – spreading silt far into the sea – the water dragon. . . .
New Delhi – rains and buffalos and many turbaned Sikhs. Wide plain for many hours – vastness of India apparent. Camels and forests and paddyfields and reservoirs.
Met at the airport by 2 Ministry of Education people. . . .
Large dish of curry and chicken.
Terrible dreams – Jane with a crumbling, anguished face.
Jacquie [arriving?] at the house – the demons have to leave.
16 Oct.
8 o’clock Mass – My clumsiness at Requiem Mass – Weep in cathedral.
Fortune-teller in the street. Hi-jacks me for 5 rupees.
Met Miss V. ‘Kitchlou’ and Mr Sharma.
First discussion of programme – 2 grades of primary school (6-11, 11-14).
Will meet writers in Delhi and elsewhere.
Tomorrow to see Mr K.P. Misra (Community Development).
Ride in motor bicycle rickshaw.
Walk down street. Beggar with baby (man beggar).
Boy homosexual offering me sex. ‘One rupee’ – you come home.
‘I am Catholic’ – show him crucifix on rosary. He is hard to convince.
He says [two types of tobacco] are too rough for his throat.
Very cheerful boy dressed in dirty white.
Then to hotel room. Write to Jacquie and Derek . . .
Rosary, bath and bed. HE is now with me.
17 Oct.
Early Mass. Go to John Corren’s place in the early morning. Eastern house with locked doors, bars, chickens in the yard.
See houses with Mr Kawa. . . . New houses. 500 rupees a month.
See Mr K.P. [Misra?]. Community Development all over India. Officials and sub-officials. ‘Brahmins were the teachers.’ Will visit C.D. 8-16 November.
Evening talk with John and Leo. Leo’s book on Goa.
Dreams confused of death and pain. Leper in the street with stumps of limbs.
18 Oct.
Visit to Hospital of the Holy Family, with Leo. Brother, his wife (also Catholic) is doctor-surgeon. One day off in fortnight.
Moslem hospital run by nuns, endowed with American money. Waiting for bus. Monkeys in the trees.
[Earlier visit with Leo to Agra Dam. Brown water boiling over the weir. Whole family of monkeys kings in own tree. Hindu faith is the banyan tree.]
Beggars and beggars. Risk in crowded bus. I’m thinking I should get another home.
Visit with John to market. Shop-keepers sitting in street, with wares. Mats etc. Working late by light of fires. Sitting in cane chairs outside shops.
Dream of Beatrice in Purgatory. Her eyes draw me on.
19 Oct.
Up at 4.30 a.m. Cold shower. Early Mass. Very sleepy.
Nuns in white. Breakfast at hospital.
Leo and Bertha and I go to Red Fort – old Mogul palace – magnificent gardens once – onyx and jade decorations – bottom – War Museum.
Visit to market in Old Delhi. People with sores. Food sold everywhere in the street. People sleeping on the pavement in the sun. Crowd and . . . Statue of Gandhi in Gandhi Memorial Park . . . Almost naked youths sleeping on grass and on pavements. Coloured prints of the Sacred Heart and of Gandhi.
Back by bus. Crowded. Women with silver bangles on arms and legs. The Elephant God.
Women everywhere with nose ornaments. Festival of Kali in the square . . .
20 Oct.
Find, by the help of Our Lady, a good home at Nizamuddin East. Will require furnishing – also a good cook-bearer.
Visit Kaura and tell him what has been done. Return early to John’s place and sit outside until the cook-bearer appears.
Write letter to Jacquie – good on me! Dream of a demon throttling me – have to call on Gandhi to drive him away.
21 Oct.
Post letter to Jacquie. Type poems and write-up for Leo.
Visit to Exhibition. Yarn with . . . from Ceylon. Sitting in café talking about emancipation of women. Exhibition very effective. Coir matting.
Talk with Leo and Bertha. A dead owl in the water tank(?).
22-26 Oct.
Arrangements of home – geyser etc. Visits to hospital. Meal with John in upstairs restaurant.
26 Oct.-3 Nov.
In Bombay – ‘Into Egypt’
[List of names and occupations of seven people he met and six members of the Asiatic Society.]
3-6 Nov.
Mons. Lobo. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Talk to Theatre Unit. Dinner with Arab family.
[Followed by planning notes for rest of trip. Second version is (1) Sunday 23 November leave Delhi⇢Calcutta – 24th Monday. (2) Madras – Sunday 14th
December. (3) Bombay – 18 January]
7 Nov.
Train journey with Leo, Jacquie and the kids.
7-12 Nov.
Settling into house adjustment to the cook-bearer.
Maria, ora pro nobis.
12 Nov.
Visit to Mrs Kitchla – morning programmes arranged.
Visit to Mr Misra – afternoon – C.D. programmes arranged.
Dream of fighting woman with foil – playing foil home in dress, v. satisfactory –Chinaman emerges with scissors.
Jacquie wrenches her hip. Hilary’s dysentery is better. Meet Indian contractor in restaurant. Yarn to him. [Notes on bus times.]
13 Nov.
Visited Community Development Centre –
Making of dolls etc. from paper and clay
Hospital and clinic
Training School for young men from villages.
Veterinary centre.
14-23 Nov.
Visiting villages –
23-24-25 Nov.
Little sleep in train – snoring of . . . alongside. Reading Ribald Tales in early hours. . . . quoting Tagore about a snoring – also ‘He comes, He comes, He comes’. Sitting smoking on the conductor’s bench . . . escort me to taxi – to hotel.
. . . meet taxi in street – ‘French or English girl, very nice, schoolteacher’ (!) . . .
Prayer ‘Mary, Mary’ (TWICE, in case once not enough).
Urge to self-rendition – letter to my mother, later torn up. Hot Water in bath.
Mass at 6 – St Francis Xavier and St Ignatius . . . with unostentatious robes . . .
25 Nov.
Visit to Boys’ Home. RAMAKRISHNA.
Swami. Swimming tank. Machines from Russia. Library. A magnificent show-piece. Some boys ‘rest against it’. Coconut trees. Hot coffee and religion. . . .
Big tank near Writers Building – with people . . .
26 Nov.
Mass at 5.30. with birds in swooping . . . above altar – do they dung it? Perhaps a miraculous continence. Beggars outside – the drug-addict again; and the boy with foot and leg grown together, about 20 – one rupee each. . . .
Visit to St Thomas’s School – emphasis on English life. Anglo-Indian . . . ‘They fall sick when it is examination time’ – early exile of English children from their mothers . . .
. . . Whoever looks into my heart will see a spring full of giant roots – the disordered passions of twenty years.
Reading of Ribald Stories – Papal Encyclical on Christian Education, Marriage and the Priesthood. The bearer at 30 rupees a month. ‘I am a small man.’ Dignity greater than that of hotel-keeper . . .
[List of names, occupations, addresses. The second name listed was that of his friend Leo who lived at 547 Kalbaderi Road, Bombay. JKB did not supply Leo’s surname but referred to him as ‘mon frère’.]
27 Nov.
Girls’ school.
28 Nov.
Leper in the market beyond Howrah Bridge. Stretched out on back on pavement; curiously dignified attitude, with head thrown back. Threw 10 n.p. beside the fingerless hand pierced by sores – still don’t dare touch.
Policeman in shorts with lothi – ‘Why do you give him money? It’s the last time.’ Abdomen just moving; foot (gangrenous?) swathed in huge bandage; match-like legs; flies on eyes and nose. Jesus was coming down from the Cross among the beheaded coconuts at the back of the market; but no one was there to welcome Him, not even His Mother.
Wild, fierce head carved from mahogany. He had found the only exit from Calcutta. It is conceivable that he died without hope, and exchanged this terrible human exile for a worse one. But St Francis Xavier, a most practical saint, would have something to say about it; and might at that moment be gripping him to a bearded chest. I was too cowardly to put my arms around him or even hold his hands; but prayed for him willingly then and afterwards.
‘I get you one tala’ – ‘Two tala’ – ‘Three tala blue bhang’.
The Vale of Bhang
Forests of musical colours, dark green and red and gold, where the fruits are metaphysics. Stairs and galleries and ever-changing fountains of colour and music and meaning. The Blessed Virgin Mary is
She who is lovely has led me along strange galleries in the Vale of Bhang. Now She bids me write this story so that Her loveliness should be known – and Her sense of humour. Here as always She is with me, for She belongs to Them (the Trinity) and His Throne. She led me down strange galleries, my Beloved Mother, and She scolded me and laughed at me and often made me silent – with the most joyful shapes and shapes of joy – coming from Her. She said IT was Her – What Is Perfect – and so everything is made perfect through Her; because She is in Him; and I was going to say ‘Him is in Them’, but no, He is One of Them. She kept me safe – when I was afraid of dying and of the demons, and above all She kept me from sinning, and made me say my Rosary through the worst of it (the Sorrowful Mysteries) – my mouth was cold and stiff – and She is with me, my mother MARIA DE PERPETUAL SUCCOUR – you see, mother, I don’t know Italian – not even Latin. Help Me Mary.
[Various notes, names and addresses follow.]
30 Nov.
Visit to Bishnu Dey – cheroot and coffee and nuts – discussion of Communism – beautiful face of poet – house in by-street close to water and coconut trees. . . .
Talk with tout at street corner – wife has had injections . . . 4 rupees for bed . . . ‘student girl’ – but a natural family man . . . a European passed me and gave me a sour look.
Fires in the street in the early morning with people washing their kids.
Small huts near Sealdah – against street wall – a few mats spread out – boy asleep inside – shopman spreading wares.
Dignity of the bearing of the common man and woman.
Children begging – but laughing as they went with me down the street – 1
n.p. only.
1 Dec.
Travel on train. Family with me (is) old man with long grey hair and beard, sitting cross-legged – superior to old N. 2 man because still head of family (ii) woman with children (a far more contorted face than you would see at 6 o’clock on the bus in N.Z.) laughs and blue sari (iii) son with glasses, in dhoti like father – will act sanction part of father (iv) widow in corner, in white edged in black, v. humble-looking. Would not accept dates I bought – dates with small amount of ants in them.
A man becomes a poet only when he comes to realise – morality is dialectic of self-discipline and self-knowledge, but art steps free of the self, like a child plunging into a pool and swimming, forgetting study that it has not learnt . . .
[A name, address and financial calculation follow.]
VILLAGE SADHU – in grass hut alongside temple; talking freely to villagers and mixing among them; they touch his feet at arrival and departure. Full-faced, sturdy man of 50, neatly dressed, with long brown
‘Yoga?’ ‘There are 1½ lakhs of different kinds of yoga.’
‘Morality?’ ‘The lines separating one person’s field from another’s.’
‘God?’ ‘Each man can become God, as soon as he forgets himself.’ Squirrel popping over . . . on table. (Beasts and Saints) – calf gently and happily chewing its cud. . . .
[JKB mentions a visit to Hindu Theological College and a High School in Madras. This is followed by a list of names and contact details of some authors. Then he mentions a visit to St Thomas Mount, including a shrine of St Thomas, two other schools and a hospital conducted by the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The notebook ends with two drafts of the poem ‘Howrah Bridge’, a draft of a ballad (‘Song of Custoba’), and four names, three of them with contact details, including ‘Jim Baxter, 41 Collingwood St, Ngaio, Wellington, New Zealand’.]
1958 (182)
Joy is the core and meaning of Catholic life: a blazing supernatural joy, crowning nature as the flame crowns a bonfire. The fuel of a human heart in Heaven will blaze in joy for ever and not be consumed. All the vigils, the fastings, the agonies and mortifications of the saints, lead to this one aim. Before I was received into the Catholic Church, I did not understand this – or if I understood it, the understanding was intellectual only, not a present and actual process involving my whole being.
Our Blessed Lady, the cause of your joy and mine, has led me through darkness for a year now. She calms my violent, childish longings, and teaches me to do whatever has to be done, not by means of some imaginary rule-book (the burden of the Protestant believer) but for love of her charming, wise and joyful self.
*
Mirror of justice, pray for me! Your Child is the Sun of justice, but His beams often burn too brightly for my sight, and in the gentle mirror of your face I see them reflected without confusion.
Mother of Perpetual Succour, under that title you came to me when I lay broken among the thorns, simply because I called on your name, and led me to the Holy Catholic Church which is your care and your stronghold.
You washed my filthy hands and heart and taught me the beginning of patience and obedience, as a true Mother, teaching her child the letters of the alphabet.
You made a man of me; yet I am still an infant in your holy arms. You have laughed my sullenness away and shown me the beauties of your everlasting garden. You have never abandoned me for a moment, in spite of my rebellions and treacherous follies.
Throughout the East your children praise you and love you with a devotion beyond measure. Not only to Catholics do you give the protection of your mantle, but to Parsee, Buddhist and Hindu, despising no soul that entreats your care. And to each soul you give a unique and individual love.
For me, who had no sister, you deigned to become a miraculous elder sister, never leaving me solitary, guarding me from the malice of the enemy and my own disordered nature.
Is it strange that you are my joy and my Heaven on earth? How did I live so long without you? Now my soul is at peace, and my life rests in your hands – Mirror of Justice, Cause of our joy.
*
Yet joy at times can be achieved only through its absence – that half of Catholic life which the world rejects as too severe.
The Japanese Catholics are the best in the world; and their martyrdoms were the most cruel. One girl hung head downwards for sixteen days over a pit of smoking charcoal, her temple pierced so that the blood could flow, holding her back from the peace of death. What torrents of grace her passion must have released in the souls of her countrymen!
I remember the transparent face of a patient in the T.B. hospital near Choshi, lit up with ascetic joy as the procession of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary passed singing down the corridor – his labouring hands folded on his consumptive chest.
In the peace of the Columban chapel in Tokyo, where those loving and generous Fathers bathed my self-inflicted wounds, an image of Our Lord, a young and beautiful athlete carved by a Japanese artist, hung all-but-glorified above the altar, some drop of that abundance watered my dry soul; and I understood for the first time that the Cross was planted in Eastern territory, and that the Flesh we eat is the flesh of an Eastern man.
We do not have to be saints in order to begin to suffer with Our Lord.
Perhaps the choice of each moment is in fact a choice between the suffering of the Penitent or the Impenitent Thief. Undoubtedly we are all thieves, and suffer deservedly; but when we welcome the rigour of God’s justice, the horror of isolation leaves us and our pains become purgative.
But I speak too abstractly. In the East the effects of the Fall are less mitigated than in New Zealand, where the rejuvenating power that flows from the Sacrifice of the Mass reaches even those souls who reject its meaning.
Or is that a fallacy? The Mass is not held in by geographical limits. At least the unkemptness of an Eastern city, the filth on the pavement and the veneer of dirt on every wall, the deformed beggars and murmuring touts, the odour of despair that breathes from its rotting shacks, force home the moral that the pagan world is essentially disordered and unhappy, groaning for the bread of the Incarnate Word.
The following lines were written in Calcutta, as a verse letter to my wife, and take their title from the Howrah Bridge, that massive symbol of modern technology:
The last two lines are taken from a ballad of Goa, that Portuguese and Catholic enclave in India. There St Francis Xavier and Our Lady of Fatima are supreme; indeed, St Francis holds honorary rank as an army officer (a
The Goans desire to preserve their independence and identity in a Hindu environment. The Government of India, on the other hand, resents the existence of Portuguese authority on Indian soil, and has conducted a cold war to ‘liberate’ Goa.
The spirituality of Hindu culture is largely an ideal, not a fact. Yet the Hindus have their own dedicated men. The statue of Gandhi, an emaciated yet triumphant wayfarer, unveiled recently by Nehru in Calcutta, is a symbol of shared suffering and the spiritual renewal engendered by it.
Let us not assume, though, that the creative intuitions of Gandhi sprang solely from meditation on the Vedas. In his mind the Hindu ascetic detachment combined with the Christian ethic of close relationship and identification with the suffering of others. It was he who gave to the Untouchables the name of Harijans – ‘People of God’.
One incident among many of the past two months has burned itself into my memory. On a pavement by the river, near the Howrah Bridge, among the fruit stalls, a man lay on his back – a leper, with arms extended, and one foot, gangrenous perhaps, swathed in a gigantic bandage. I dropped a couple of coins beside his fingerless palm. Though one cannot give to every beggar (it would mean bankruptcy in a week), lepers and the blind have a special right to the charity of the undiseased. Yet I confess, to my discredit, that I yielded to a certain revulsion.
As I turned away from him, a policeman spoke to me, smart in his khaki uniform and carrying the bamboo staff of his profession. ‘Why do you give him money now?’ he asked, with an ironical smile. ‘It is the last time.’
And looking back at the leper – his wild, fierce head thrown back, unmarred by the disease, his abdomen rising and falling almost imperceptibly, while flies clustered unhindered on his eyes and nostrils – I realised that the policeman was more observant than I. The leper was making his last and only exit from the streets of Calcutta. In another country he would have died secluded in a white bed – but unless he were tended by nuns, could he have been certain of a personal and loving care?
In New Zealand we evade the fact of human pain, more perhaps than people do in India. Pain is hidden below the surface of our lives. The lunatic asylums and the jails, those monasteries of suffering, receive our unloved brothers and sisters. But here Christ was coming down from his Cross on the pavement beside the fruit markets; and no one was there to receive His Body except myself and the policeman.
And the only true alternative to his fatalistic irony would have been for me to sit down beside the leper and take his head on my knees and wipe his face with a handkerchief; and afterwards to have washed his body and prepared it for burial. Who am I to speak of brotherhood when that is the one thing I
Yet I would pray to Our Lady and St Francis Xavier, as the policeman could not. And I trust that St Francis, so business-like in his trim robes and halo in the Church of St Thomas the Apostle near my hotel – where birds swoop above the Host from their roosts on the pillars – has already taken the leper to his bearded breast.
He who could silence armies with a word will not be robbed easily of a single Indian soul. And Our Lady, as we know, has power as well as beauty beyond measure.
1958 (183)
[Pat Lawlor is the SIJ (sorrowful Irish Jansenist). Baxter is the SCP (sinful Catholic poet)].
SIJ: ‘I see you’ve been dabbling in the mud again, James.’ SCP: ‘Very likely, Pat – but how exactly, this time?’
SIJ: ‘In the fifth stanza of the “Ballad of the Holy Ghost” – oh, what a pity you have to drag in that sort of thing! It is a relic (no, a remnant) of your non-Catholic days.’
SCP: ‘Mea culpa! It has obviously already offended one adult reader, so I’ll have to take a close look at it. Is it the intention behind it that you feel to be at fault? Or its likely effect?’
SIJ: ‘Both, James. Your intention, if not actually impure (let’s be charitable) is thoroughly flippant, making fun out of fornication. And its effect would be to scandalise the pure-hearted, in a ballad with such a title, and to give an unstable youngster the notion that fornication was just fun.’
SCP: ‘But, Pat, the whole poem, on the same score, mentions heavy boozing as if it were a joke – which we both know it not to be. Indeed, the mediators of grace are Irish Catholic barmen. I grant you, it is the Faith, not their boozing, that gives them gay hearts.’
SIJ: ‘A man can drink without sin, if he’s lucky, and can carry it – but not the other.’
SCP: ‘I think you have me there. Still, the old Catholic tradition of the drinking song and the wenching song grew up in the shade of the monastery wall.
‘The young lay clerics roamed the roads, slept in the ditches, drank in the pubs, prayed and cursed and read Aquinas, had their love affairs (real or imaginary), and started European literature. In a picaresque ballad, with a moral, you should allow me one stanza devoted to the frail sex.’
SIJ: ‘Father Murphy takes my view.’
SCP: ‘Father O’Rourke grinned all over his dial when he came to the doubtful passage.’
SIJ: ‘It’s a matter of whether a dog has fleas, or not. Even one flea can be a carrier of sickness. Could you turn quite happily to pray to the Mother of God immediately after writing that stanza?’
SCP: ‘Before her face nearly everything I do or write looks like rotten wood. If I took that approach, my vocation would be silence, not poetry. But she knows I am like a child spluttering over its porridge – to eat it, I must splutter, though spluttering is not part of eating.
‘Certainly, I couldn’t allow myself to write a pornographic poem now. If I were a saint, then I’d write her a thousand perfect songs, pure as crystal, but in writing I express that imperfect nature, labouring under the Grace of God, that it seems I must carry to the grave and beyond.’
SIJ: ‘But does that allow you to make an easy joke of fornication?’
SCP: ‘Not just a joke, Pat – “But still the more we bounced in bed the more our hearts collided” – it does show the pain of the flesh at ease and the spirit at odds.’
SIJ: ‘Well, your intention does seem to have been above board; although I couldn’t have written those lines myself without feeling I was smuggling in the Devil’s wares. But what about the possible effect on the reader?’
SCP: ‘I’m always up against the problem of scandal. But various priests (and they should be our guides in the matter) have told me that a writer should have in mind the possible effect on an ordinary, balanced reader. Not a smut-hound. Not a girl of fourteen who blushes when she hears her brother swear. But an ordinary, balanced reader – maybe there’s no such creature.
‘I don’t suggest you’re not balanced, Pat – but you do lean by nature to the fastidious side in these matters – most Catholics since the Reformation (good Catholics, I mean) have done so.
‘Take Chaucer as a test case – “The Reeve’s Tale” – now, if I had written that magnificent poem, I’d have half the Catholics in Wellington on my back, saying that I was poisoning the family wells.
‘The atheists and agnostics have taken over the rough side of life – why shouldn’t we take it back from them and put it in the setting of Catholic thought, where it always belonged?’
SIJ: ‘Aren’t there better jobs to do, James? I’m not too happy about this notion of the “ordinary, balanced reader” – it leaves a whale of a lot of leeway for the voluptuary writing for voluptuaries.
‘But what about an unstable youngster? You are responsible before God for your effect on his or her soul. Remember, a writer carries a lot of authority these days.’
SCP: ‘Surely that’s where the censorship of the priest and the parent should come in. There’s a great deal I’ve written, and a great deal more I read, which I
1959? (184)
I know very little about poetry because I write poems, and so have not had the leisure or inclination to read new, badly-written biographies of poets, or theories of composition which earned lectureships at American universities – Blake’s Prose and the Land of Enclosures by Talullah Hornbuckle – much as I admire the donnish authors, who can live happily for weeks on a page of Donne and the smell of a worn typewriter ribbon.
I do not want to see them exterminated, not even the venomous ones. Like the Abominable Snowman they add something to life; I see them now clearly, clinging to their Tibetan ledges. They know all the things about poetry that I have never had time to learn; they have named it and counted its teeth and tracked it down. They even invented prosody, God bless them! In America where they breed and swarm they make blueprints for poems, and the poets write obediently according to the blueprint. Did ever Catholic obedience stretch so far? But a fatal, tireless, persistent dryness in the throat grips me whenever I pick up one of their volumes – so earnest, so tedious, so trivial, so true. Whereas poems are born, like Eve from Adam’s side, incalculable, as primitive as a spoon.
The sad thing about Catholic poems is that they are rarely incalculable. Take Chesterton, for example. Earnest, hopefully, even prayerfully, he drums up a theme. The cardboard knights go through their capers, the wooden swords whistle, the world hangs from a thread of tarnished gold – and the moral comes pat, that it is far better to be a chaste, good-living Catholic ironmonger than a cold-hearted, immoral, free-thinking coffin-maker. Which we know already.
I’ll grant you that Chesterton wrote often for the press – he had to make his point for someone reading on the evening train. There is always genuine feeling in his poems, but the form is often mechanical and stereotyped.
When he writes of something he really loves, like good wine, the punch is there all right, smoking in the bowl; when his deep love for Our Lady, in ‘Regina Angelorum’, blows like a gale through his heart, then the poem itself lives and moves with the power and balance of a breaking wave. But far too often he substitutes the machinery of thought (‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ one hears him ask belligerently) for the incalculable sources in life itself which a poet, Catholic or Protestant or pagan, must learn to rely on.
Take our good father and mentor, Gerard Manley Hopkins – why did
Our Catholic poets, since the Reformation, have been cursed with an audience who ‘love’ them only too well. If a poem celebrates Our Lord or Our Lady, then it will go over in a big way, even though it may be as weightless as a child’s balloon. The poet is presanctified; he has (we take it) been through at least the fringes of the Dark Night of the Soul, when the editors grew choosy and his creditors began to hammer on the door. He is, above all, safe.
I do not feel that this rarefied atmosphere helps a Catholic poet; it may lead him to the dangerous eminence of a self-made rebuker of the modern world. The audience is confused. They know that the intention is good, and confuse intention with performance.
There is a powerful temptation to a Catholic poet to deal in short measure – ‘I am writing for the little sheep,’ he tells himself, ‘for a family audience. This work is apostolic, beyond the measurement of ordinary criticism.’ And so, to a barrel-organ metre, he trundles out the story of the Pilgrim and the Pope in the hundred tired couplets; whereas the best and most heartfelt reference to that miraculous incident occurs probably in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, when he writes of the conjectural redemption of the hanged guardsman:
I grant that it is difficult, anyway, for anyone to write a really good poem; but the difficulty is increased for a Catholic poet if his audience is too readily content. Should we write like Caedmon? Like Mistral, perhaps? Or like Lorca?
First, I think, we should write like grown men and women, living in this grim century (‘a century of ruins and excavations’, Claudel called it) and the Catholicism in our bones will find its way into our verses. The Church indeed has the answers to the problems of the modern world, but one would [not] gain that impression from the diet displayed in the average Catholic’s library. Who reads Leon Bloy in New Zealand? I had to come to India to find him.
There is another subtler temptation for a Catholic writer. It sits grinning at my elbow as I write. I think I know how the Devil would present it to me. First he would persuade me that most priests are to be revered on account of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, but otherwise hardly fit intellectual company for a giant like myself. Next he would try to tell me that the Holy Father, infallible, of course, when he speaks ex cathedra, is at all other times an ignoramus.
Then someday, as I am leaving the confession-box, after a heavy session with a strict confessor, more conscious of new wounds inflicted on the ego than of the effect of Divine ointment, he would spring the thousand-dollar question – ‘Do you really always have to obey?’ Then, if I answer that question the way he would most like, he will lead me gently but surely into the desert, under the banner of a crusade for the working-classes, Jimmy Baxter, the martyr of the century, exponent of the only true, aesthetic, modern, trigger- happy Catholicism.
But would Our Lady let it happen? I rather doubt it.
1959 (185)
Very likely no authoritative pronouncements of the Catholic Church rouse more antagonism among her critics and less enthusiasm among a majority of her children than those which deal directly with the Sacrament of marriage, or refer in general to the relations between men and women. When the Holy Father makes reference to immodesty in women’s dress, a typical non- Catholic reaction may be formulated in these terms –
‘Why waste time on such trifles? The Third World War is on our doorstep, and the Bikini Tests are more formidable than bikini swimsuits. Of course the Pope is conditioned by his seminary training – all priests are Puritan at heart – it’s one of the irritating aspects of the celibacy of the Catholic clergy.’ The comment may indeed be much more explosive. The commentator has not recognised the closely-knit organic structure of the life of His Church, an extension of the life of the Holy Family at Nazareth. It is the office of the Holy Father to protect and guide his gigantic family – to tell the men that they may not let off dangerous crackers, and warn the daughters that they too are in possession of weapons of mass destruction. In a world where continence and chivalry are the first casualties in the battle of the sexes, the Holy Father’s edicts are, to say the least, refreshingly old-fashioned. They happen also to have the sanction of Divine authority. The familiar bogey of
There are two ways by which a woman can bind a husband to her – I speak in terms of nature only. The first is by beauty, abnegation, the gift of her body and heart, an active desire to be pleasing to him. This is the archetype of the women’s roles in Eastern marriage, and its danger lies in the fact that the woman also carries the cross. The archetype of Western marriage is a different one, sprung from the strange sort of troubadour romance. Here the man offers service in exchange for the gift of the woman’s person. Her fluctuations/ feelings, likings and antagonisms, determine the course of marriage. (‘John, you will have to get another job. I can’t bear the climate any longer.’) – and she chooses the time and number of children to be born. For a man who accepts the romantic myth, the woman has power to bind with hoops of steel. Her unhappiness strikes chords in him of guilt and obligations which are far more apparent than any sexual attraction. She is, as it were, a modern goddess, Diana and Hecate by turn, preserving and killing life, giving and withholding.
1959 (186)
Not long ago I was travelling on a train, on the thirty-hour journey between Calcutta and Delhi. My neighbours in the second-class compartment were reading, eating, talking to each other, and drinking hot sugared tea from clay cups. They were Brahmin farmer people, on their yearly pilgrimage to the holy places of the north – a sixty-five-year-old grandfather, grey-headed and long-bearded, a magnificent figure of a man, who had brought up his three sons single-handed when he was left a widower; his eldest son, lean and active, who was able to discuss the development of village cooperatives with me in fluent English; the son’s wife, in a blue sari, handling her two little girls with the greatest patience and affection; and a widow, in a white sari edged with black, who ate only fruit, and sat withdrawn in a corner of the compartment. I thought her excluded from the family group until I heard her laugh at a sally of her brother-in-law.
This family is representative of the 80% of Indian people who live in villages. It often happens that a foreign visitor gains his impression of Indian life solely from contact with the officials and businessmen who live in the towns, his own servants, the taxi-drivers who overcharge him, and the crowd of beggars, fortune-tellers, acrobats, and snake-charmers who regard him as a legitimate source of income. Yet he has only to walk down a side street from his own back door to find himself in the heart of one of those villages which
One has to grasp something of the structure of village life in order to understand the distinctive problems of education in India. As I have often heard it expressed by Government officials and villagers themselves, Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life – a way of life which has grown up over millennia in the Indian villages, intricate, stratified, and essentially static. In the last generation that way of life has encountered and absorbed the revolutionary force of Western technology; and India is now in the middle of an immense, though extremely slow, process of reorganisation. The construction of schools, the development of village sanitation, of village hospitals, cottage industries, veterinary clinics, and agricultural aid and advice given to the farmers by trained Government representatives – these are the vehicle and symbol of the new educational revolution. One expects to see textbooks, and one is shown a grain store.
The basic Indian problem of adult illiteracy does not exist in New Zealand. It would be all too easy to assume that the difference represents a simple educational gap; and Western observers do perhaps unconsciously assume this, while the literate Indian suffers from an unnecessary sense of national inferiority in the educational sphere. I have often heard, in the past three months, a headmaster or librarian apologise for sparsity of equipment or some small defect in organisation, with the inevitable proviso – ‘Of course, you must give us time to catch up. India is a poor country, and our problems are vast. We are still suffering from the bad effects of the British Raj.’ In fact the apology is unnecessary. The Indian educationist rarely recognises that literacy and education are not coterminous. In the communal life of her villages, India already possesses a constant cultural reservoir, independent of schools and book learning, which New Zealand, for example, has never had. The average villager, though not fully literate, is by no means uneducated. Mahatma Gandhi, instigator of basic education in the villages, intuitively recognised this essential fact; and the present revolution in Indian village life is in effect the wakening of a gigantic constructive force, under the stimulus of Gandhi’s ideas, modified to suit changing conditions.
In the large towns of India a veneer of Western manners has overlaid the Hindu way of life. Most educated Indians, though they will pay lip service to the official policy by which Hindi is taught in all schools, want their children to learn to speak and read English well. Families are limited in number. Girls are educated for careers, in conflict with the older Hindu domestic pattern; and marriages are not now invariably arranged by parents. England, Europe, and above all America, is the Promised Land. This last feature of modern Indian thought is a natural product of the reflection of an Indian
The Indian villager, however, is likely to remain unaffected by the desire to emulate the Westerner, except in the immediate practical sphere of seed selection, improvement of herds, irrigation, and soil conservation. He sees the world from the framework of a semi-tribal society and a ten-acre farm. In discussion with Indian villagers I have found it extremely difficult to convey an impression of a country (New Zealand) in which most farms are large, and village communities are all but non-existent. The immediate concern of the villager is to make two grains of millet grow where one has grown before; but his material impulse is curbed by a strong communal bias in his thinking. While the Indian townsman is normally motivated by a strong desire for the material success of himself and his family, the villager, less solitary, feels bound to consider the welfare of the village as a whole. He is governed by the need for social approval, even when he is in a position to lend money at interest to his poorer neighbour; and social approval is the lever by which the Government of India, through its village level workers, has accomplished many reforms.
The Hindu way of life, so strong and even formidable in its close-knit family structures, so difficult to grasp in Western terms, remains essentially unchanged in the villages. I remember a visit which I made one frosty morning with Mr H—, a village level worker of the Alipur Land Development Block. We had often discussed the implications of Hindu thought in the village revolution, and he had confessed that whenever he reached an impasse in his own relation to the villagers, he would seek advice from a certain ‘holy man’ in a neighbouring village. This morning he had invited me to accompany him on such a visit. We walked along the tarmac road, where a vulture by the roadside was tearing with its strong beak the sinews of a dead calf, run over by a bus or truck, and women stood gossiping, balancing brass pots and baskets of cattle dung on their heads, their heavy ankle-rings of hammered silver clasped on dusty bare feet. We crossed a ploughed field, the property
I had expected to meet some emaciated begging sadhu, smeared with ashes; but the man who sat on the temple step, chatting unaffectedly with the villagers, was vigorous, smooth-faced, with neat clothing and carefully tended brown hair hanging to his shoulders. A mother approached him, carrying her sick child. He leapt to his feet, and entered a building near the hut, emerging with dried herbs in his hands. His speed of movement was astonishing, in the painful wooden sandals which left calluses between his great and second toe. The woman received his instructions, and before departing, bent down to the dust and touched his feet with her hands. Later he joined us, greeting Mr H— in a friendly fashion, then stretching out on a bed of plaited cloth and offering us some sweets, presents from the villagers. Mr H— had already told me that he distributed all the presents he received, keeping only enough for his own very meagre diet. His conversation, though valuable for me personally, is scarcely relevant here; but he was undoubtedly a highly intelligent, broad-minded, and practical man, with a training of some twenty years in yoga and meditation. His manner towards the villagers was unfailingly gentle, warm and courteous. It was evident they regarded him as a true father, and brought all problems of village life to his notice. His reputation had been increased by an accurate prediction of the course which would be taken by a cattle disease which had recently menaced the district; but there was no trace in him of the showman or bogus prophet. Such men occupy an indispensable position of trust and authority in the pattern of village life.
Each Indian village is in effect a culturally autonomous unit. A school teacher or village level worker has to meet the people on their own terms; what he or she has learnt in another village may not apply. Certainly the cultural distance between a village of the Punjab and a fishing village of the Madras sea coast is far greater than the distance between a Southland dairy farm and a Ratana Pa in the King Country. Language, customs, traditions vary enormously throughout India. India is theoretically a political unit; but there are extremes of cultural diversity. A child in a high school in Madras may be required to learn English, Hindi, Tamil, and Sanskrit. For
1959 (187)
Sir: A month ago I returned to New Zealand from India. After a limited experience of the vast social problems of the East, I saw New Zealand for a moment through rose-coloured glasses: a land of security and promise, her mountains and beaches inhabited by angels, her people free to pursue an approximation to the good life. On my first day in New Zealand I picked up the ninth issue of a literary magazine of which I happen to be co-editor, and read it from cover to cover with the greatest interest. Here was something worth waiting for: three short stories (one of them the best which had ever been published in Numbers), some first-rate poetry, a long essay on the work of George Barker, remarkable for the subtlety and maturity of its analysis, and several highly competent reviews. It was foolish of me to imagine that the leopard could change his spots, that the country which exhibited a stolid and hostile indifference to the works of Katherine Mansfield, which all but refused to honour Frances Hodgkins, could tolerate for a moment the presence of writers who had begun to handle real themes with courage and delicacy.
The word ‘delicacy’ in this context may surprise the blind sharpshooters of the Press, yet I have not read a more delicate exposition of a woman’s experience of love than that contained in the story ‘For the Novelty’, and Mr Packer’s sensitive delineation of adolescent conflicts and violence, though it may jar a little at a first reading, has not overstepped the boundaries of aesthetic prudence. Nor can I find in the third story, or the poems and article, the mark of the cloven hoof. How delightful it is to find that our journalists, after a century spent in airing the dirty linen of their neighbours, have put on the armour of Sir Galahad, forgetting (in their bottomless zeal for purity) his traditional chivalry towards women!
If the issue were merely one of local literary politics I would not ask the courtesy of your columns to reanimate a discussion which has lapsed. Your own moderate and judicious statement has heartened me, however, to expect that courtesy. The true issue is far more serious, and one which concerns
I speak now not from the doubtful standpoint of a rebellious aesthete, claiming a total and irresponsible freedom, but from the old and solid ground of Catholic humanism. The shadow of Calvin rests still upon the hearts and minds of our countrymen, dividing grace from nature, and refusing our artists their legitimate entry to the garden of a mature vision of life. Let those critics who are Catholics open the works of Jacques Maritain, which they have never opened before, and consider his generous and brotherly praise of the experiments of the French surrealists. Let those who hold some other faith examine again that neglected homily, John Stuart Mill’s ‘Essay on Liberty’. Then let them reconsider, with a suitable humility, the works of legitimate freedom which they censure, attack, and so rarely understand.
1959 (188)
If any one doctrine of the Church could be called more Catholic than the rest, it is surely that of the Communion of Saints. Its implications are enormous; for it implies that all members of the Church, living and dead, are part of a family, held together in bonds of love, in which Our Lord is father and brother to us all, and Our Lady mother and sister. There is no high wall dividing us from the holy Ones, the members of the Church Triumphant. Here is the great open secret of the Church, a source of pharisaical scandal to the half-believer and the unbeliever.
A human soul needs human helpers. Suppose each soul were confronted from birth to death by the naked reality and majesty of God. Inescapably drawn by His terrible Beauty, aware of its own hideous imperfections, it might so easily despair and perish. But God has not planted each soul in a desert by itself. He plants it in a garden, in the rich soil of human memories, feelings and associations, among creatures of a like kind. In the garden of the Church there are no walls except those we erect by our own blindness or lack of belief. The saints, the angels, and God Himself, are continually accessible to us.
Some faint reflection of this truth had entered my mind long before I was received into the Church. Like an adolescent burning a candle before the
It was not so absurd, after all. The Bohemian writers I had chosen as exemplars had each some spark of unpredictable hunger that led them to the mountains and abysses of the interior life: a hunger for God perhaps. Misdirected, it can destroy the soul; as a lamp-flame turned too high will crack the glass chimney that contains it; but when the wick is trimmed by obedience, it becomes a light to lighten the whole house.
I suppose that each Catholic constructs some kind of private, unofficial litany to honour his chosen saints. My own was built up by degrees, and it is still growing. In ten years’ time I fear I may have to begin to prune it, in case it swells to contain the whole of the Church Triumphant.
First, there was St Joseph, whose name I took at Confirmation. He seemed entirely willing to look after the practical details which I so often, in a fog of absent-mindedness, had overlooked. He has helped me to catch a hundred trains, paid the grocer’s bill, hailed taxis, brought the children safely home from school, and staved off family quarrels.
Then there was the Little Flower, St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who led me by the hand like an elder sister – ‘a very strict saint’, a new Catholic friend confided to me, ‘but very powerful’.
St Anthony also can be strict; and he has an excellent sense of humour. An Indian friend told me about a girl who had prayed for years to St Anthony for a good Catholic husband. At length, exasperated by his lack of cooperation, she seized his image and threw it from a top-floor window. It fell on the head of a young man passing by. So the introductions were made for a good Catholic marriage.
In India, too, I made the personal acquaintance of St Francis Xavier, whose mummified body still rests in Goa. He, too, can be strict in his dealings with the wayward Catholic: especially the man who is afraid to witness to the Faith in a pagan environment.
The Goan Government, relying on his intercession, has made him an honorary captain in the army – his salary is paid regularly as alms to the poor. One Governor decided to dock the salary, but his home (if I remember the story rightly) was immediately shaken by an earthquake, and next pay day the money was paid in full.
Then there is St John Vianney, whose image stands in the small Church of the Sacred Heart, in Madras. He comforted and healed me when I came there sick with dysentery. A small man in black robes, with a wrinkled, emaciated, gentle face.
Then there is St Thomas the Apostle, whose tomb I visited at Mylapore. He gave me great peace and freedom from many doubts.
And among the all-but-saints, Holy Matt Talbot, the Dublin alcoholic, a good friend for an ex-drunk; and Father Miguel Pro, to whom my friend Rod Finlayson introduced me, a merry martyr, who liked to hold missions among taxi-drivers in Mexico City, and who is an expert at healing family breaches. . . .
The list is long, too long to set them all down. But I hope to see their faces in Heaven one day. A human soul needs human helpers, and the Church gives them to us in abundance.
1959 (189)
This critical miscellany, as the author tells us in a frank and disarming preface, has been ‘gathered . . . from an extraordinary variety of sources’, from broadcast talks, lectures and reviews. Mr Fraser is in fact something of a professional explainer of other poet’s work: a dangerous profession, in which one soon learns to slip on an attitude like a glove. He is no great scholar. His insights are not profound. He seems constitutionally unable to suggest that an established poet (Wallace Stevens or Stephen Spender, for example) may be flooding the market with junk. Yet I would recommend this uneven collection to anyone who wanted to know what modern poetry is about, rather than any magisterial essay by T.S. Eliot or Allen Tate. The point is that Mr Fraser has no grand thesis to illustrate. He is simply a good, intelligent listener, and such people, at a critical level, are very rare indeed. On account of this, he is often able to shed new daylight on the work of ‘difficult’ poets. His study of Dylan Thomas is particularly rewarding – ‘I have been told that some work he (Thomas) did on a documentary film on the bombing raids, which in the end was found too grim for public release, had a profound effect on his imagination; an effect that may partly explain the retreat, in many of his later poems, to the theme of childhood innocence and country peace . . .’.
Mr Fraser recognises that poems are written by men, not by electronic adding machines. His approach is invariably personal. His assessment of the poetry of W.H. Auden fails as a whole, because he feels little sympathy with that cosmopolitan poet-philosopher. Yet his book contains the most stimulating essays to be found on the work and personalities of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and the young modern English poets. It deserves to be read widely.
1959 (190)
Any book by Thomas Merton is worth reading; for even his flimsiest comments bear some relation to the gravity of purpose and penetration below the moral surfaces which led him to a successful vocation as a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky. Yet it is, to say the least, peculiar that a member of a silent Order should become a prominent exponent of monastic life to laymen, and even assume a prophetic role, as a modern John the Baptist calling an Atomic Age to repentance. Only Merton’s utter sincerity and rock- bottom monastic obedience saves him from the brand of showmanship; but it does save him, where many evangelists stumble.
This Secular Journal covers the years between 1939 and 1941, after the author’s reception into the Catholic Church and before his entering the Cistercian order. It is a curiously weightless document, a thing of bits and pieces, unpretentious, and most illuminating where it is least personal: ‘Tribulation detaches us from the things that are really valueless, because their attraction cannot stand up under it, and all satisfactions that are meaningless appear as such when we are filled with tribulation. Therefore we should be grateful for it’.
The man who has such thoughts is a proto-monk already. Only a monk’s vocation could satisfy a soul that continually sees through illusion to the bone. Merton is an exile in New York and Cuba; he hangs his harp on a tree by the waters of Babylon. Only in Harlem does he find (outside Gethsemani) some shadow of the simplicity and charity he is hungry for. How many with the same hunger move from job to job, liaison to liaison, or wait like ghosts in the psychiatrist’s anteroom? This sad little book has a happy ending – that one man searched for an actual cure, found it, and did not let it go.
1959 (191)
In the second term, the Upper Sixth English class were honoured to have the opportunity of listening to a talk by Mr James Baxter, one of New Zealand’s leading poets. Mr Baxter spoke on Modern Poetry, taking as examples various works by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and George Barker. The members of the English class gathered in the Library, where Father McKay introduced Mr Baxter to them.
After examining and pointing out the attitudes and techniques of the three poets, Mr Baxter spoke on the move towards greater lucidity in poetry. Mr Baxter gave a very interesting and penetrating view of Modern Poetry. His comments on various forms of versification and metre will no doubt help budding poets of the Upper Sixth. Mr Baxter added to our enjoyment
A short question time followed Mr Baxter’s talk and all who had listened to him were sorry when the bell at the end of the period summoned them to another class. Thank you, James K. Baxter, for your enlightening and informative talk on Modern Poetry.
1959 (192)
In this comprehensive work Professor Mukerjee has set down the broad philosophical and religious movements of India from the time of the Indus civilisation until the present day. It was Gandhi (I think) who compared Hinduism to a banyan tree: the aerial roots multiply and in their turn become secondary trunks of the parent tree. It would be presumption to criticise, from an inadequate knowledge, this master-work of a scholar and a sociologist. Yet Professor Mukerjee’s analysis of humanism in early Buddhist art, of the warlike chivalry and glamour of the Rajput Renaissance, of the resurgence of Hinduism, is quantitative rather than qualitative, itself another root of the banyan tree. Here is one of its key quotations –
I am the Primeval Cosmic Man, Narayana; I am the king of Gods, wearing the garb of India. I am the foremost of the immortals. I am the cycle of the year, which preserves everything . . . but at the same time I am the whirlpool, the destructive vortex, that sucks back whatever has been displayed . . . I put an end to everything that exists. My name is Death of the Universe.
A suitable epitaph for the tombstone of Atomic Man. The strength of Hindu culture, exemplified in Professor Mukerjee’s chronicle, is its unyielding absorption of every influence; its weakness is a formless dualism that obliterates all boundaries. The many magnificent illustrations, from paintings and temple carvings, themselves illustrate the author’s thesis: the unity in diversity of Indian civilisation. Yet it is well to remember also those factors which he minimises, the disparity between a humanist idea and a rigid caste system, the pains of Indian village life, the bone-fed soil on which the banyan tree flourishes.
1959 (193)
In this swag of poetry the common denominator is not hard to find. The good poets are almost without exception the established ones. Edwin Muir’s selection (three poets in all, Iain Crichton Smith, Karen Gerahon, Christopher
His poem is called ‘Hospital for Defectives’. It deeply and reverently questions the goodness of God.
The sonnets of Eleanor Farjeon should be to the taste of those who like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese – their theme and treatment are very similar. There is happy evidence, however, that the life which is mainly lacking in England is present in America. Robert Penn Warren writes most convincingly of dragons, ancestors, and skeletons in the family wardrobe! Robert Lowell understands the sub-zero life of New England and does not like it one bit. It seems that he periodically retires from it for a drying-out spell in a sanatorium for drunks: a lapsed Catholic and an excellent poet. Long may the gin wells flow for him! His sketches of Bostonian family antics are quite unique.
1959 (194)
Sir: I read your editorial on Byron and Allegra with interest and some disagreement. It is evident from Byron’s correspondence that he did what he thought was best for his daughter. Several of Shelley’s children had died of food poisoning. Byron did not approve of the Shelley ménage and did not consider Shelley an authority on child care. It seems to me that Byron has been too readily tagged with abnormal egotism by a succession of critics from William Hazlitt onwards. I suggest that they have been misled by the
These are the kind of faults circumstances engender. The last has been interminably discussed and publicised – but what man has ever succeeded in treating a number of women well? Or even one woman to the entire satisfaction of herself and his biographers? Byron’s personal friends testified almost unanimously to his loyalty, magnanimity, and sense of obligation to others. He showed a devoted, protective care for those who worked for him and marched under him. His last letter (I think it was his last) is a plea for the clement treatment of war prisoners and refugees. Many men and some women sincerely mourned his death. He wore his faults on his sleeve – but there is a largeness of mind and largeness of character in Byron which does not fit the portrait of a full-blown egotist.
1959 (195)
Though this book contains several excellent poems, one questions the judgment of Capricorn Press in allowing an uneven selection, undistinguished setting-out, and most inappropriate cover design to pass muster. This poet has been badly served by his publishers. No cover design would have been better than the robust gentleman with a pipe who ‘muses’ and looks at a child’s outline of trees and ranges. Some judicious weeding-out of poems would have been of great benefit. As the selection stands, the gap between Mr Hardie’s best work and his worst is so great that one is tempted to suppose a case of double identity. The following lines come from the beginning of his poem ‘East Wind’ –
One experiences fraternal envy on reading these lines. The east wind is a wind of the soul. But then, on the next page of the book –
We have heard these bells before. They ring only in the flaccid conceits of Georgian poetry. We have endured this plague for over fifty years. It requires its devotees to write as if they were imbeciles, unpleasant imbeciles – ‘girlish, giggling and gaunt,’ as Mr Hardie so accurately, if unconsciously, defines ‘this rhyme-stupid garden’. He has no need of it; for he can write like a born poet –
This true vein rarely lasts for the length of a poem. But if Mr Hardie were to set aside all notion of poetry as an eccentric self-indulgence, he could write most forcibly and well.
1959 (196)
Professor Ernst has brought together in this volume three Japanese plays never before published in an English translation, each one being representative of its particular form of Japanese theatre: the No, the Doll Theatre, and the Kabuki. Each play has an introductory essay in which the history of the form and its stage conventions are discussed in some detail. Though The House of Sugawara and Benten the Thief have each considerable force and humour, The Maple Viewing (a No play) seems likely to appeal most to a European reader, on account of its remarkable lyrical passages. Among No plays there are five principal groups: god plays, man plays, woman plays, plays of mental derangement, and demon plays. Yeats experimented in the form of the No, and Maeterlinck in his plays and essays suggested a similar theatre. The Maple Viewing, despite its idyllic title, is a demon play. Koremochi, a great general, is sent to Mount Togakushi to exterminate a nest of demons. He falls in love with one of them, in the guise of a beautiful gentlewoman. One cannot
This translation, by Meredith Weatherby, is superior in quality to those in which Professor Ernst has collaborated with Japanese translators. It may be that Professor Ernst is a better editor and essayist than translator or poet.
1959 (197)
[A good critic is even rarer than a good writer, according to James K. Baxter in an address to the P.E.N. Writers’ Conference in Wellington early this month.] ‘The first thing a critic needs is humility towards the work he is examining, even if it is a child’s first poem,’ said Mr Baxter. ‘He must be without envy. He must have no axe to grind. That is not easy. Many critics are themselves retired poets or failed novelists and this fact may unconsciously influence
their approach to new work.’
Mr Baxter said that a writer – as a writer – didn’t need critical standards. They were a nuisance, standing between him and the truth he served, the life he re-created on the page. A writer did not have to decide whether his work was good; he was inside the work, trying to make it good. When he stopped writing, he became a critic of his own work. But not till then. Mr Baxter referred to the ‘appallingly sterile background’ and ‘the brick wall that surrounds any person who tries to come alive and start feeling and thinking and writing in this country’.
‘To me I’m afraid it [this country] looks like a plush coffin, cut out of heart rimu, with handles taken off the nearest beer pump,’ he said. ‘I do believe it is vitally necessary for a writer’s mental health and the health of the work done that he or she (whatever dreadful characters they may be themselves) should keep on criticising the society in which he or she is obliged to exist.
Not criticism as the Marxist or religious propagandist imagines it. A writer serves truth alone. Some of you may remember that Chaplin film where a civic statue is being unveiled by the Mayor or someone. The big dust-cover is hoisted off the statue, and there is Charlie, curled up asleep in its lap. He slides down the knee of the statue, gets up, straightens his cuffs, swings his walking stick, and life has begun again, thank God. The speeches and the statue are shown up as dead words and dead concrete. The man behind the mask, the terrible, loveable fool, the everlasting hobo, has arrived. That is what I mean by the criticism of society. Charlie criticises everything by continuing to be himself.
‘I want to emphasise the fact that critical standards cannot be abstract. A writer criticises life. His or her critical standards are implicit in the work done. A literary critic criticises the work. A man may become both a writer and a professional critic. It is a dangerous amalgam. I have at times produced criticism myself, with a strong sense of danger in putting on the pinstripe uniform instead of my own true, well-ripped boozer’s overcoat. God help me, I mightn’t be able to unbutton it again.
‘A critic has to serve in a different way the same truth that the writer is serving. Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that one has to be homosexual to criticise the works of André Gide. I mean only that Gide would yield up nothing (or very little) to a critic who regarded homosexuality as a habit of temperament that no friend of his could conceivably possess. There are more kinds of people than one might suppose. It is a great asset to a critic to be basically as unshockable as a mature priest or a trained psychiatrist.
‘I remember Mr Allen Curnow, for whose opinion I have the deepest respect (though I do not always agree with him) saying or writing once: “Our poets must set their sights higher”. That, of course, is one part of criticism: to see New Zealand writing in the context of world writing. The double standard is dangerous and useless. It breeds inferiority and robs our writers of courage. I am disturbed not by the ham-handedness of those who are learning the trade, but by the lack of significant content, of growth, of development, of an extension of insights, in the work of our older writers, among whom I will soon reluctantly take my place. Let us not reach out for the pruning-shears when the apple tree is bearing little or no fruit.’
1959 (198)
One could not find in a year’s reading poems more different than those contained in these two books. They illustrate a principle too easily forgotten: that the value of a poet’s work depends far more on his grappling with (for him) central life issues than on his technical achievement. Out of the
I quote from the guidebook poem ‘Firenze’. It is a sincere, moderate statement, in the low conversational tone favoured by most of the new English poets – as if to say, ‘This is my world, not a very interesting one, I grant you, but the kind we both have to put up with.’ But is sincerity enough? John Berryman’s work, in unfair comparison, is violent, contorted, obscure, uneven, the real speech of a man on a real rack –
It is Mistress Bradstreet born 1612 talking; and thanks to John Berryman she is unmistakably alive. Perhaps she is the true ghost of America, under the chromium surfaces, a Puritan pioneer, a woman spiritually fertile yet hung on the hooks of Calvin’s dialectic. Mr Berryman is all too conversant with demons; but I like him nonetheless for it. One cannot summarise the workings of genius, but one can read and read again.
1959 (199)
It is part of the professional critic’s repertoire to refer to a new poet as a poet of ‘promise’; yet these exuberant and untrimmed poems are perhaps most impressive on account of the load of strong feeling and half-forged insights which they carry – feeling and insight which establish Mr Mincher’s right to speak, but hardly yet enable him to reach a mature balance. They promise more than they achieve. Reversing Roy Campbell’s dictum – the horse is undeniably present, a healthy bucking bronco, but the snaffle and the bit are inclined to slip off. The ballad of Barlow, ‘the man from Mahoanui’,
The first stanza quoted should serve to illustrate Mr Mincher’s superb, ferocious gift of metaphor (the one certain mark of genuine poetic powers); the second stanza illustrates the unfortunate florid language into which the poem too readily collapses. At the same time, I have no fault at all to find with Mr Mincher’s traditional sentiments. Consider the ‘working man’s wife’ whom he sees at the cinema –
Sophisticated readers may find the statement naïve; but others will recognise the thud of the bullet in the middle of the target. None of the twenty-three poems is trivial, and some have as much to say as Basil Dowling, but with a racier movement. The Handcraft Press is to be congratulated on this necessary publication.
1959 (200)
The poems of Brenda Chamberlain illustrate a fact too rarely recognised by modern critics – that a writer has to possess a vivid and energetic interior life, in addition to mere verbal accuracy, in order to write a poem that will wear well. These delightful poems spring, every one, from an intimate relation to person and thing within the microcosmic universe of Wales. They are unpredictable, perfectly proportioned, substantial as a living birth –
Some deep honesty of the emotions makes it impossible for this poet to put her foot wrong – how obtained, how preserved, when so much of the verse of our times lacks all heart, one can only conjecture. Many are love poems; some are elegiac; a few are religious; all are poems of place. They will last beyond fashion.
Mr Griffin deals in abstractions, for most poets a fatal procedure. His rarely lucid images indicate perhaps the source of his (though not humanity’s) deepest problems –
This is one of the best passages. Elsewhere Mr Griffin seems to talk in his sleep. Nor is Mr Hamilton more inspired, though he is at least capable of a well-turned lyric stanza.
The Poetry Handbook compiled by Babette Deutsch may be of interest to many readers and of use to a few conscientious poets who wish to know why they write as they do. A knowledge of prosody was after all no real handicap to Gerard Manley Hopkins or to Milton.
1958 (201)
Lately I had the pleasure of reviewing three American poets (John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell) whose work seemed to indicate a new development of content in American poetry. Their work had a real, if rugged interior life. But Mr Kunitz, though he has obtained a Pulitzer prize and, in the course of a lucrative career, two other prizes, a medal for poetry, two fellowships, an award, and two grants) cannot in any sense be called a pioneer. He writes according to the blueprint –
One cannot blame Mr Kunitz for feeling he has to be daimonic. The example of Hart Crane is before him. The critics chant, ‘We want blood on the page. Be smart as you like, boy, we like it, but you gotta be daimonic.’ So enters the weird humourless figure of Mr Kunitz as fireman, naked, dragging a sack behind him, scourged by unnameable temptation, and banging once with a big thighbone on a carved door. One wishes faintly that the life would climb out of the sack and speak; but it never does. Mr Kunitz writes very well. He has cashed in, quite unconsciously, on the great American patent – that electronic punching device by which anything can be turned into a poem – a lost wallet, a mailbox, a pigeon, a queasy feeling in the colon. And the ghost of Wallace Stevens, playing in limbo with a Chinese paper-snake, smiles benign approval.
1959 (202)
This play has no message. It simply holds up a mirror to certain relationships among people. The Wide Open Cage is life itself; or, if you like, the inordinate love of creatures. The people in the play are each in their different ways trying to find happiness in other people; except for the priest, who is out of the running, and Hogan, who loves nobody. The fact that three of the people are Catholics is really incidental. Catholicism brings to a head certain problems of freedom and involvement which are latent in all human relationships. To those inside the cage release seems to be the death of love.
I have tried to make the people in the play say freely what they think. It requires therefore a broadminded producer, an uninhibited cast, and an audience who do not mind being jolted a little. Fortunately the first two requirements have been fulfilled. I am grateful to Mr Campion for his support, advice, and enthusiasm, and to another friend whose illuminating conversation planted the germ of the play in my mind and helped me to develop the character of Skully.
1959 (203)
The text of this new edition of Maritain’s magnum opus is a translation from the French by Father Gerald B. Phelan of Toronto and five other companions. It has the complete approval of the author and is now the only authoritative English version in print. The master work of the finest Catholic mind of our time could hardly be summarised or introduced by something less than a long critical essay. Yet one is bound to record certain impressions. The Degrees of Knowledge constitutes an examination, in the light of Thomist philosophy, of modern science, idealist philosophy, metaphysical knowledge, and the mystical experience of St Augustine and St John of the Cross. This examination is sufficiently broad and humane to bring the book completely out of the special class of seminary textbooks. A very brief and amputated quotation may serve to illustrate the difference between Maritain’s approach to the darkest problems of our time and that of (let us say) Bishop Sheen –
. . . More cynical and brutal than the education by omission with which Western liberalism has stifled childhood, a painstaking, pedagogical surgery is operating on souls to extirpate from them the image of God. And despite everything, this image will be reborn: a poor child who believes he is an atheist, if he truly loves what he takes to be the face of goodness, has turned to God without knowing it. It is with deep respect that we speak here of the Russian people and the spiritual tragedy in which it is involved
. . . Do they (the men of our time) understand what spiritual density, what deep ascetic violence, Marxism and hatred of a world held to be accursed by history, must have assumed in the invisible universe of a Lenin’s heart, in order to burst forth so tellingly? God has warned us that he does not put up with lukewarmness . . .
Slowly, painfully, a trained or untrained mind can absorb the complex truths that Maritain proposes. There is no question of potted knowledge. To read Maritain seriously is to enter into the night of the intellect, to follow the humblest of living guides, an astronomer who reveals new galaxies, both the ordered systems of philosophy, and those remoter suns that contain the crucified wisdom of the Fathers and mystics. It is a most profound book, a work of controlled passion – a great river moving between strong banks – in Milton’s phrase, the life-blood of a master spirit.
1959 (204)
This new volume contains the Columbus sequence first published by the Caxton Press, and three other sections, including New Zealand and Australian poems. In feeling and method Mr Hart-Smith is an antipodean Lawrence, though he lacks the range and profundity of his master. The same lens is focused
It is the same method that Mr Glover has used to overcome similar original weaknesses in his poetic training. But Mr Hart-Smith, whose experience of the chaos of the modern environment is equally great, lacks the developed irony which Mr Glover has used to meet and conquer it. One senses his disquiet, as in the final lines of ‘Kangaroo’ –
These lines convey powerfully the quality of meaningless and violent surface activity. But the lens of a Lawrentian nature mystique is inadequate to see beyond nature to a possible resolution of conflict. Mr Hart-Smith’s best work is still contained in the Columbus sequence, possibly because the lens of the fifteenth-century Spanish navigator was a different one, and through it the world could be seen as a whole.
1959 (205)
Sir: No one who has studied Landfall reviews over the past ten years would be so naïve as to expect in your pages a considerate or gentle treatment of a first novel by a New Zealand novelist. Ungenerosity is the norm. How otherwise
How right it is, too, that a special severity should be extended in the case of a first novel by a woman! I was deeply delighted by the quiet surgical butchery which one of your reviewers performed recently on The Race by Ruth France. A genuine hysterectomy. But I must congratulate even more your reviewer, Paul Day, for his arbitrary and obtuse review, in your September issue, of A Gap in the Spectrum, by Marilyn Duckworth. In two hundred words he has given a rough inaccurate synopsis of the plot of the book; and added the illuminating rider that he does not know what the book is about. A publisher’s blurb could not have done less. He has succeeded in missing every signpost which indicates a serious or satirical intention – the resemblance of the imaginary country of Micald to certain closely-walled suburban areas of our own beloved Pig Island; the implicit compassion of the ‘nightmarish’ asylum sequence; all comment on the battle of the sexes; and the possible symbolic implications of the hair-dyeing episode. Very properly he assumes that because the style is simple the author must be simple-minded.
I am not suggesting that A Gap in the Spectrum should be considered a neglected masterpiece. It is rather a matter of neglected education. Marilyn Duckworth’s novel belongs to a well-known genre: let us call it, for brevity, the female picaresque, a variety of the literature of protest developed, for example, by Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and Colette.
I applaud again your reviewer’s intention. As a Christian gentleman and pub-trained Pig Islander, I am firmly of the opinion that the female psyche was invented by Freud, and will cease to exist if we tell it plainly enough that we do not like or understand it. But one needs to know a little more than Mr Day in order to put on the black cap successfully.
1959 (206)
It is not easy to judge from the first volume of a sequence what the total work will be like; but Mr Sitwell’s plan is a gigantic one. In a disarming note of explanation he states . . .
The subject is, in short, the problems and mysteries of life and death . . . One of my deficiencies is that I am not at all religious . . . But in an ideal world one need not be Christian or Buddhist in order to paint a picture of heaven or nirvana. I have taken a huge subject, and done the best I can with it in several years of work, hoping that in the course of that I have given no offence and hurt no susceptibilities . . .
Mr Sitwell’s book presents, as it were, the chart of a sensitive agnostic mind grappling with profundities. Indeed I would not lend it to a boy or girl in their teens. His frequent preoccupation with the details of physicalDivine Comedy. Mr Sitwell has produced instead a very private modern version of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He takes us on a conducted tour of his own labyrinthine subconscious mind, leaving a strong impression of an ‘interior life’, but no real suggestion of an ‘afterlife’, whether natural or supernatural. Mr Sitwell has done the same kind of thing before, not quite so well perhaps, but in no way differently. One can tire of five hundred pages of free association, even when the mind which associates is that of a sensitive encyclopaedic scholar and traveller. But perhaps in the succeeding volumes he will break new ground.
1959 (207)
John Malcolm Brinnin writing on Dylan Thomas; Lytton Strachey on General Gordon or Florence Nightingale – there is something perverse in each of us which responds to the debunking of a public figure. This book debunks James Joyce very gently indeed. The authors, man and wife, might even claim that it is a tribute to a great man and a family friend. The picture they paint, however, from a number of scrappy, vivid reminiscences is by no means flattering – Joyce is shown first as a conceited young man and later as a paranoid Irishman in exile. One does not have to question the veracity of the Colums’ account, or their good intentions. But what precisely is the permanent value of this kind of anecdote?
One day Joyce came to me with a request for the loan of a half sovereign. A financial scheme was involved in its use. He had been given a pawn ticket as a contribution to a fund he was raising for himself. Now, to anyone else a pawn ticket would be a minus quantity . . .
Joyce’s poverty and ingenuity in raising money bear as little relation to his writing self as Dylan Thomas’s drinking habits bore to his function as a poet. It is the lack of profundity shown in a consideration of a profound-minded man which irritates most when one reads this amiable Irish gossip. The Colums give no real clue on the main issues – the origin of Joyce’s virulent anti-clericalism or how he came to disinter the body of Venus from a Dublin slum. For that we have to go back to the enigmatic works. The sketches of Joyce’s Bohemian youth, however, and his painful family life in Paris, seen as it were through bi-focal lenses (husband and wife taking turns at the washing up) will have no doubt for many readers their own kind of interest.
1959 (208)
Both these books are, in a sense, about the same things – the progressive loss of simplicity and confusion of ethical values belonging (though by no means peculiar) to the present age. Mr Yarnold argues that if we are good Christians we will be less likely to exterminate ourselves. He advocates repentance –
Granted the ability to wage war with thermo-nuclear weapons, granted also the fact of human freedom, and the continuous repudiation of the law of God, the end is logically inevitable. The one thing which conceivably can alter the present movement of human history towards its climax and ultimate judgment is the fact of Christ. The way of repentance is always open . . .
Men like Mr Yarnold argued in the same way at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Black Death. What does he require of us? Individual prayer and repentance? Very good. A huge collective conversion of any one or all of the thousand or so Christian denominations? Hardly. Protest marches against the Hydrogen Bomb? We have them already.
Professor Niebuhr’s essays are disturbing. In his able analysis of American social life, Christianity and Judaism, the American Negro problem, he tends to accept too readily the relativism of the religious anthropologist. Vigorous, persuasive, erudite, conversational; he is like a climber on a precipitous mountain who from time to time jettisons his spare boots, his bar of chocolate, and his sleeping bag, to make the ascent possible. One fears that the ice axe will go next:
Clearly (he writes), the life of the community requires the give and take of competitive striving, the calculations of justice and the mutualities of family and community for its proper order and health. Any offer to solve these collective problems by the hope that sacrificial love will change the stubborn nature of men and shame other people into the goodness which the saint has achieved, is bound to be reduced to sentimentality in the end . . .
He would, it seems, wholeheartedly approve of the via media of Pandit Nehru, and reject as ‘impractical’ the difficult sanctity of Mahatma Gandhi. Yet it is Gandhi, not Nehru, who still obscurely moulds the conscience of India. Professor Niebuhr divides too sharply the natural and supernatural spheres, evidently daunted, like Mr Yarnold, by the Gorgon’s head of human sinfulness.
1960 (209)
The ‘floating world’ considered in this book ‘floats’ on the double tide of sex and money. ‘Above all,’ writes Mr Hibbett, ‘ukiyo meant the life of pleasure, accepted without thinking of what might lie ahead. In Asai Ryoi’s Tales of the Floating World (c. 1661) it is defined as living for the moment, gazing at the moon, snow, blossoms, and autumn leaves, enjoying wine, women, and song, and, in general, drifting with the current of life ‘like a gourd floating downstream.’ Still,
Mr Hibbett has made an intelligent resume of the low literature current in Japan during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the first half of his book he enumerates various writers and artists of the period – Ihara Saikaku, Ejima Kiseki, Hishikawa Moronubu – and discusses the social setting of their work. His book is a sociological document, exposing the sordid vigorous life of eighteenth-century urban Japan; and this effect is achieved mainly by the excerpts from Japanese picaresque writing which constitute its second half.
One can only regret that Mr Hibbett did not choose to make full translations, and let the novelists speak for themselves, instead of producing a pot-pourri of social analysis, imperfectly reproduced illustrations, and truncated excerpts. It is disturbing too that he seems to regard the genial fictions and idealisations which the (male) authors put into the mouths of their courtesan-heroines as an adequate representation of the view which prostitutes might take of their profession. The picaresque novelists do obliquely disclose an actual and horrifying abyss where money (for women) and sex (for men) are the determining factors, from which the only door of release is the grave or the seclusion of a Buddhist hermitage. It is sobering to reflect that for many people in the East this world may be entirely contemporary.
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This is an age of experts. People like to feel secure in the knowledge that someone somewhere has the answers they cannot find to their oldest, most agonising problems. And since a large and salty part of the sea of human misery flows from the misconceptions or mishandling of sexual relationships, we look to the ‘informed’ physicians to tell us what to think and do about it. In these two books two well-intentioned doctors write authoritatively about problems of sexual growth and problems of homosexuality.
‘The ordinary normal man,’ writes Dr Matthews, ‘falls in love with a girl and marries her. They desire each other passionately, and they give expression to this desire by love-making . . . without haste, risk or guilt, as often as they both desire it. From this love-making spring children who regard them as the greatest people in the world . . .’.
Dr Chessner, as suits his grave and difficult theme, has a more truly ‘scientific’ approach – ‘It cannot be doubted that the late awakening of sex in human beings serves nature’s designs. Man is unique among other animals in
It may be discourteous to express doubt concerning the effect of these homilies. But have not Dr Matthews’s imaginary idyllic pair, described in all-but-identical language by a thousand medical sentimentalists, ruined the equilibrium of a million suggestible housewives whose husbands (as husbands do) prefer the pub to wives who read Dr Matthews? And has not the siren song of Dr Chesser, interspersed with case histories, lulling the ear with news of ‘Nature’s design’, brought many fools to solemn acquiescence that people can, must, and do behave like monkeys? It may be discourteous and yet a bitter truth.
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It can be dangerous for a writer to pass judgment on the state of literature in his own country. What after all, can he know about it? The true state of New Zealand literature exists, undiscoverable at this very moment (or so one hopes), in poems, stories, novels, plays, still shapeless as an unmade bed, in the semi-conscious minds of housewives, school-teachers, farmers, asylum patients and quarrelsome undergraduates.
The worst danger of a judge, however, is not assassination. Recently I saw the photograph of the so-called ‘vegetable caterpillar’, discovered under moss on the slopes of Mount Egmont. This caterpillar had been the unwilling host of a parasitic fungus. The spores of the fungus developed within it, enlarging its size and turning it to a kind of wood – then, when the caterpillar host was quite dead, a triumphant vegetable trident emerged from its mouth to wave above the forest floor.
It seemed to me an instructive natural parable. The vegetable caterpillar is myself or any New Zealand writer, slowly becoming a public figure, consumed by the spores of kudos, developing the reviewer’s shamble, the critic’s stoop, and accepting finally a permanent job at a university.
Works of art and works of criticism are, I feel, different in method and origin. The American poet, Allen Tate, suggests that ‘a man of letters must recreate for his age the image of man’. Such a labour is deeply private, unpredictable – and while criticism may codify the results, it has little to do with the process of gestation.
Then there is the matter of honours. I was pleasantly surprised three years ago, when the Oxford University Press accepted for publication a book of my poems, In Fires of No Return. It is not easy for a New Zealand writer to get work published in England. I think New Zealand poets must seem a little off-key, even exotic, to English readers. The signposts are different over there.
The Oxford University Press produced an attractive volume. But were the poems, many of them hammered out originally in obscurity and solitude, any better or worse for being well-printed and well-bound? The point at which growth occurs is in the writing or re-writing of a work, not in the publication of a book.
This book received the Jessie Mackay Poetry Award for 1958. I feel that the ghost of Jessie Mackay might be a trifle bewildered by the content of the poems. She pinned a sprig of heather to my father’s coat when she met him, a tribute (I think) to his Highland ancestry and Socialist sympathies. But I am not sure that she would have liked my verse. She herself wrote mainly of an ideal Scotland: at least her verse was deeply coloured by such an idea. Whereas I, belonging to a later generation, have written of those aspects of New Zealand which are visible to me – the Otago landscape and seascape, the mangrove swamps of the North, and an age of conflict when all ideals are shaken and muddied like sheets in a strong wind. At any rate, the Jessie Mackay Award was supplemented by £25 from the State Literary Fund. I received altogether £50, a welcome gift for a man with a family.
It was another surprise to me when a recent play of mine, The Wide Open Cage, was on the whole well received by Wellington audiences. I have a genuine horror of success. Neither God nor the Muses visit a man who has bandaged his wounds and settled down to fulfil the expectations of his relatives, his audiences, his bosses and his religious advisers. When someone likes what I have written, it seems to me probable that they have misunderstood it.
The play in question contained a fair amount of vulgar vernacular speech and the characters discussed their feelings very frankly. It may be that the talents of a Unity Theatre cast and the excellent production of Richard Campion stimulated the audience, or conceivably, the human image which I had endeavoured to recreate, the holy and terrible face of one’s neighbour in a suburban boardinghouse, stirred their minds and imaginations.
But some humour present in the work was very likely helpful. I am often depressed by the humourless approach of my fellow-countrymen to writing and the criticism of writing. In quite a primitive sense, it is the job of a writer to entertain. He may or may not instruct, as he chooses. Vitality rather than politeness seems to me the most essential virtue of a work of literature. The living caterpillar is always less polite than his vegetable brother.
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If you come by air from Calcutta to Delhi, you will see the villages of India stretched out below you like an endless threadbare patchwork quilt. To the right, at the rim of the plains, stand the gigantic ramparts of the Himalayas; but the plains themselves are entirely flat – fields of rice submerged by water (in
Delhi itself is two towns in one – the ancient and typically Indian town of Old Delhi, with the crowded, swarming life of bazaar and slum, open to the villagers who come to market there; and the tree-shaded administrative blocks of New Delhi, the seat of the Indian Government, with prosperous suburbs, modern hotels, and a high scale of living. New Delhi is built among the palace tombs of the Mogul emperors and their retinue. Taxi, tonga, motor- scooter, bus, and bullock-cart hoot and grind below the broken tomb walls, and many destitute people have made their homes in the burial chambers. Washing is hung out in the archways; fires are lit to blacken the flower-carved ceilings; and the sound of guitar music can be heard there in the long, hot evenings. The suffering of the poor is very great, yet they find means to keep life moving.
Quite different images rise in memory when one considers the life of the villagers. A drum hanging in the porch of the headman’s house at Kilokery, beaten for the daily meetings of the Punchayat, or village council; an old man seated cross-legged on a bed, smoking a hookah in the corner of a mud-walled yard; a group of women, very strong and graceful, filling their brass pots and gossiping at the village well in Kalekhan; a steel pylon striding above a field of maize. The village communities are each autonomous, each a small republic, as it were. Despite their evident poverty, the villages convey an impression of relaxation and well-being, which springs no doubt from a life lived in deep accordance with natural law.
One enters Kalekhan by crossing the railway line beside the suburban station of Nizamuddin. A local train goes by slowly, crowded to the doors with turbaned villagers, en route to the markets of Old Delhi, where they will sell their vegetables at a meagre profit. They sit in the doorways of carriages, their feet dangling, enjoying the winter sunlight. Mist rises from the morning fields. Hawks are circling above the blue weathered dome of the tomb of the tutor of a Mogul emperor. In the narrow streets of Kalekhan, where sewers once lay open, transforming each street to a bad-smelling marsh, the villages have laid down brick, working under the Community Development Scheme, and confined the sewage to a concrete gutter. A community centre has been built, its white walls decorated with geometrical design. But village life ispurdah is still firmly established. In the yard of every house stand square mounds of cowdung, shaped like small temples. Cowdung is the most valuable commodity of village life – a fuel, a manure, and a mortar. Stubble, cowdung, and mud are mixed to make fresh mortar for building and repairing the walls of houses.
Consider the daily life of the woman who climbs the street. She was probably betrothed at five or six years old and married before she was sixteen. It is unlikely that she has borne less than four children; she may be a mother of twelve. Her expectation of life is perhaps fifty years. To any normal New Zealand woman her situation would seem an intolerable one. Yet the vigour and cheerful bearing of the women of Kilokery and Kalekhan is most remarkable. They know exactly what is expected of them and it is within their powers to perform it. This woman rises at three or four o’clock in the morning to plaster her kitchen and chula, or smokeless stove, with clean mud and cowdung. She then milks the cow, gives fodder to the cattle, and prepares a breakfast of chapatis and seasoned vegetables for her husband and family. Chapatis are wheaten pancakes roasted on an iron griddle: these pancakes are commonly kept fresh during the day in grass baskets beside the fire. After getting her children ready for school, she takes his breakfast to her husband in the fields. Then for the rest of the morning she collects cowdung, pats it with her hands into small cakes, and lays these cakes in rows in the sun to dry, or collects wood, or draws water from the well, carrying it in summer in earthenware pots and in winter in brass ones. She prepares the lunch and takes it to her husband. In the afternoon she may work with her husband in the field, cutting the crop or weeding it. I recall seeing a husband and wife working together on a small plot of land outside Kilokery, crouched on their haunches, cutting bunches of meti (a green vegetable resembling watercress) with sickles, and holding in their mouth the strips of dry grass for binding – they impressed me by the courteous, gentle manner of their speech to one another. Husband and wife will return home at six or seven p.m. The wife will then light the kerosene lamps and prepare the third meal of the day – curded milk, chapatis, potatoes, tomatoes, lady-fingers, carrot, and cabbage. Threequarters of the villagers are entirely vegetarian in their diet, since a majority of them belong to the Brahmin caste. The term ‘Brahmin’ seemed to be used more loosely among them than it is by students of the caste system. A man whose forefathers had belonged to the Khatri, or warrior group, or to the Waish, or merchant group, was entitled to call himself a Brahmin. The menial caste are called Shudra, or Conquered Ones, a relic of ancient enslavement;
Bargaining over dowries is a common feature of village politics. The relatives of the prospective bride are heavily mulcted by the bridegroom’s family. Though dowries may include buffaloes, clothes, and cooking utensils, gifts of gold and silver are invariably paid to the father, mother, and sisters of the bridegroom. Nor does the debt cease when the marriage ceremony is over. At festival time the bridegroom’s family receive further gifts of sweets, clothes, and sometimes a little money. A mother-in-law may in some circumstances transfer a portion of her daughter-in-law’s dowry to her own marriageable daughter. Jewellery is the villager’s equivalent of money in the bank. A married woman wears her fortune around her waist, and on her face and arms and legs, in the form of anklets, bangles, a gold or silver belt, nose- rings, earrings, and elaborate jewellery worn on the forehead. One Indian friend assured me that in ancient times there was a deep respect for women, and no bandit, however rough, would rob a woman of her jewellery. The newspapers of modern India, however, have a different tale to tell.
The village headman of Kalekhan was glad to welcome strangers to his house, for good luck would certainly come from such a visit. It was the largest in the village, its doorposts carved with patterns of elephants and leaves. From the basement, storehouses with wooden doors opened on the village street; the house itself was built round a courtyard where heaps of cut hay were piled in corners, and a cow and her calf lay under a large tree. He was the local zemindar, or landowner: a thin, old, moustached man in turban and shawl, wearing a thick, heavy cotton robe and leather slippers. His type exists in a thousand Indian villages. He sat on a bed of plaited cloth (the narrow strips woven on a village loom) and offered me and my Indian companion salted buttermilk to drink. He owned a large share of the mile and a half of open fields between Kalekhan and Kilokery, skirted by the highroad to Delhi and bisected by the sewage-laden waters of one of the town canals. Some of the land also rested in the hands of a Nizamuddin business man, a Hindu from Sind who had lost his property at the time of Partition, and had received temporary possession of this village land as compensation from the Government of India.
The paths through the fields were trodden hard as iron by the bare feet of villagers. A fodder crop of yellow-flowered javi and lucerne stood shoulder high. It is a peaceful place. Bullocks turned a Persian wheel beside the canal: the buckets flashed in the sun, and water poured into the irrigation ditch, flowing out over crops of carrot and turnip. An old peasant prayed and cursed by turns as he prodded the bullocks. The Persian wheel is a modern innovation; until recently all water for irrigation had to be hauled up by rope and bucket. Women crossed the canals on precarious stepping-stones, lifting their saris above the filthy water. When the canal floods, during the monsoon
I have seen the village potter at work in Kilokery. The pot is begun on the wheel, a high stone spinning-top which he sets whirling with a pointed stick. Then it is lifted off and moulded by hand, much as a coppersmith would beat out the dents in metal, for the potter pats the clay continually with a wooden spoon-shaped hammer, or thape, while his left hand inside the pot holds a wooden knob, or paindai. Slap! Slap! Slap! The pot grows under his hands while the village children stare. Then the pot is plumped down in a basket mould, with a plug in its mouth, so that the air inside the pot balloons it into shape. The plug is removed and the pot is left ready for firing. All the village water pots in the area are made by this potter, and he also supplies a market in Old Delhi. The simple geometrical decorations have remained unchanged since prehistoric times.
The village potter also makes the small clay lamps which are set outside every house at the time of the Diwali festival. This is the Festival of Lights, held in October or November, in honour of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of good fortune. The other important festival of the Hindu year is Holi, held in March or April, at the time when winter changes to spring. The origin of the festival is a celebration of the mythical loves of Krishna and the milkmaids. It is difficult to ascertain how seriously the townsmen of Delhi or the villagers of the surrounding country retain and observe the Hindu traditions. One gains the impression that Diwali and Holi mean little more to them than Christmas and Easter mean to a New Zealander who is only nominally Christian: a holiday, a time to lay down tools, a family jollification, of which the religious significance has long been overlaid. The Festival of the Lamps is a time for the giving and receiving of gifts. A few annas and cakes are placed on a saucer with a burning candle as an offering to the goddess in each home. At Holi the children run wild in the streets smearing passers-by with red and blue paint, frequently of an indelible variety. The festivals provide an occasion for an outburst of energy which is habitually crushed by a hard and rigid working routine.
On the other hand there is a certain residuum of religious thought among the common people. The phrase, ‘It is the will of God’, is often on the lips of villagers. In the markets of Old Delhi, coloured prints of Lakshmi, Shivam Kali, and Ganesh rub shoulders with crude still lifes and pictures of Scotch terriers drinking from bowls. The idea of good fortune, success in business or marriage, seems dominant in Hindu popular thought. For this reason astrologers and fortune tellers are consulted regularly at times of crisis and decision. No village marriage can be contemplated if the horoscopes of the
At Kilokery a new tube well has been sunk in the yard of the village temple. It had to go down a considerable depth to avoid seepage from the lagoon of water and sewage which lies below the village. The steps of the new well have been decorated with designs and religious inscriptions. The well is more prominent than the temple itself – a small room containing images of Shiva and Kali and Ganesh, where each worshipper comes alone to make his devotions. The custodian of the temple is an ambiguous figure who occupies a position midway between that of priest and that of caretaker. Since any Brahmin can perform the marriage rites or conduct communal prayers, the temple custodian has no privileged status. In ancient days the Brahmins were the sole teachers. Today a schoolhouse stands on a knoll above the path that leads to the village.
On our second visit to Kilokery, my Indian friend and I walked along this path, below a clay bank riddled with holes. Rabbits and snakes lurked there, unlikely companions. The boys of the village were accustomed to chase the rabbits and kill them with sticks. We climbed a well-worn track to the school, accompanied by many of the smallest children, dressed in shirts only and chewing sticks of sugar cane. It was February and a few French marigolds, planted by the children, were growing in a corner of the iron-hard clay yard. There also stood a water pump. In the school itself fifty children sat in rows on mats on the concrete floor, cross-legged, holding wooden slates. They smeared these slates with tailor’s chalk, then wrote upon them with a sharpened wooden pen, dipped in black ink. After each lesson the slates were washed again and rechalked.
With an almost absolute shortage of equipment, the teacher and his young assistant taught mainly from the blackboard, speaking to the class as an entire group. Some simple textbooks were available (pamphlets of a composite nature dealing with social studies and nature study) and these contained lists of questions after each chapter. All teaching was done in Hindi, the regional language of the Delhi State, and the universal official language of India. There were also pamphlets, supplied by the Government, which presented Indian legends and folk tales in dramatic form. These had been produced at Jama Milia, a Moslem College near Ohkla, and distributed to schools through the embryonic school library service. They were most attractively illustrated, and were of quite exceptional standard. Most textbooks in the Indian Schools are poor in quality.
We conversed with the teacher. He was most affable and enthusiastic. His salary would be, at the very highest, £6 a month. It is men like him who form the spearhead of work for literacy in the Indian villages. Later the children demonstrated their dances and plays in the schoolhouse yard. They were fortunate in their teacher. In most Indian primary-schools the three R’s comprise the entire educational schedule. But the little girls of Kilokery
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21 Feb. [1960]
Diving with goggles, flappers and snorkel at Point Jerningham. The water is misty but clear down underneath. Among the small fish. If I were drowned and floating, they would nibble the flesh away. I brought a sea-egg out and gave it to J. It moved in my hand, walking on its spines.
Stones, light and water, preach peace. We are incapable of entering that primitive obedience. J.M.’s son is a potter in his teens. Bringing form to what is formless, bat at the wheel, his fingers clogged. J.M. like myself is tormented by the noonday demon.
Drove back along the waterfront. Clouds like towers in the pale night sky.
The dilemma of faith: to live without joy, in the solitary cell of the heart, without God, though God only can deliver me. All roads out lead to torment. I must wait, a lifetime perhaps.
In this journal I will not set down anything for the sake of writing well; or anything that blabs out the evils best kept for a priest; or anything destructive of another creature’s . . . That is to run the risk of saying nothing.
The poems have dried up. I have one ill-made play to my credit. Yesterday I put aside for good that study of adolescence: ‘the torments of adolescent persons are threefold: unwanted solitude, ignorance of life, and sexuality without love . . . He did his time there . . . like those other children in the furnace of the Assyrian king.’ Perhaps. But this furnace of self-love is not extinguished after eighteen years, a moving, two Baptisms, and . . . Sweet Lady, you travelled to the heart of the Egypt of our prisons, and rejected
Feb. 22nd: A dream from the old boozing days. A nurse from a hospital, herself a cripple. I took her in my arms and tried to comfort her. Two men were drunk in the house with me, and one of them was B—. He threw the crippled girl on her back on the concrete. I took a brown bramble (?) and broke his arms and legs. In revenge he began to break the ribs of one kitten with his fingers. I trampled on him with hobnail boots. He climbed into a truck with a notice on its door: Society for Undistributed Pronouns.
My dreams, when they occur, are full of executions, murders, rapes, exhumations. One just has to get hardened to it. An exact image of the soul: a nurse from a hospital, herself a cripple. Such dreams have their causes. Later in the day I went to Confession at the monastery. A slow-speaking, throaty- voiced priest. There was a mortal sin to confess. I had murdered Christ and buried him in the dunghill of my soul. Now he shines there, alive again. A sun resting on a dunghill. The terrible paradox of life in the Church: to put God into the hands and mouth and heart of a criminal hobo. Little Flower, daughter of God, Teresa of the Holy Face, obtain for me the gift to see that battered Face always, and only his eyes in the faces of men and women.
F— called on me at the office. I . . . how he stayed a day or two at my boarding-house room, the year I was away from J[acquie] and the children. Newly discharged from the asylum, with burnt places on his head from the electrodes. He brought a most hopeful and tender peace with him, like a gutted house bare to the sunlight. It comes from his carrying the visible marks of the Passion. Today he was troubled about his . . . and I think I was able to help him.
Then D— was at the midday Mass. I have to kneel down there like an animal, or a deaf and dumb child learning to speak. I am there in the darkness, and he is there in the light . . . Then he comes, the Child into the dirty stable, the Light of the world, the Maker of Sirius and Orion. And what he does with my soul I cannot say.
D— wants my friendship badly. But I have to refuse it often, because she comes there to meet me and not to meet him. I wish she would see I have nothing to give her or anyone. My first self is walled up in the soul, speechless and alive, while my second self walks like a ghost and does what has to be done. Love is death for me, because it takes meaning from him.
M— is back from Australia. She was afraid to go to Confession, but I met her in the coffee shop, and shocked her with some silly stories, and led her up to the presbytery. Like myself she suffers from the pains of the convert . . . I did the Stations of the Cross for her and C— and all of them. Then I stayed for the communal rosary . . . A girl came in and knelt beside me for a couple of minutes. Trim and slight and devout . . . Her perfume rose up to me, and I could not pray, except confusedly from the fringes of the flame. I was made
J[acquie] would say, perhaps rightly, that M— or D— are not my business. And my boss would say that F— took me away from necessary work. So I have to go on being a thief. A schizophrene with an alcoholic memory. A creek running down from pool to pool. He doesn’t tell me what to do, but leaves me to make my own decisions. Who would put an empire in the hands of a child? . . .
23 Feb. There are mornings I wake now without any pain of soul or body. It is five years since I ceased to be a habitual drunk; two years since I was baptised a Catholic. Had my last drink the September before last – aromatic saki in a restaurant in Tokyo. K— was there, a Northcountryman . . . He had known Dylan Thomas in London. Dylan, son of the . . . pray for me. I have often prayed for you. Pray for me at the heart of the good fire.
Then there was E—, of the life labours. With the marks of old ulcers on her legs, from poverty as a child. Her father sold her into the job. I saw her share her rice with a younger girl from the street. With the tact and grace of perfect generosity. King and father, I see the suffering of your poor. In the chapel of the Columban fathers, . . . and drunk for hours, I let her ulcers tell me what I don’t know. . . . I learned that the body of God is the body of an Easterner. It is not what we are that prevents our becoming holy, but what we think we are.
. . . sloth, incapacity to do a good day’s work. Confusion and tension. One just has to plough on slowly through the day. Temptation to daydream. Daydreaming about God is still daydreaming. That is where J[acquie] rightly rebukes me. Inch by inch I am sorting out the Seminar report. Letters, manuscripts, the whole swag of an uncorrupted life. Is it a cross or a self- made burden of sin?
J[acquie] rang me up to get seats at the ballet. If I don’t write down the simplest instructions I can’t remember them. ‘Go to the confectionary shop at the Opera House. Find out when they are selling seats; whether they are selling reserved seats or just tickets; whether they are selling seats on Friday morning for the Saturday performance.’ J[acquie] keeps me from falling apart and slowly counters the hobo instinct of revolt and flight. She knows me through and through. Holds up a steel mirror to my faults. Chesterton could not get out of the bath without his wife’s assistance. We would like to offer him to our wives; but they know we are donkeys. God gives us the wives we need. A gadfly for the sullen ox. . . .
J[acquie] is a good wife. Astringent and utterly . . . My movements away from her are movements away from the bare centre of reality. . . .
No Communion today because I had to meet M— at 6 – and now at the Arts Centre, where J— was bringing the car. Loitering in a bookshop . . . the few minutes of the Mass. I stayed till the Consecration and asked Him to
G— looked well, eight months pregnant, in her red dress. She like J— is made of the true steel. M—’s . . . his sports. I told him it looked like an old . . . Our myths set a man at ease, but not the best way. We ate salads and curries, and M— talked to me about his new play. It may be on the stage soon.
I am stuffed in the belly of the UNESCO whale . . . blotting paper, dry inkwells. Harmless but deadly. Old father Abraham, bring this Lazarus care. Angel of my nativity, spirit of the river, spirit of the future, bring me a little water. In the tin mug of a Delhi leper, where I once dropped a quarter rupee. Water the ashes well.
Alcoholism is a strange demon: a kind of tertiary syphilis of the soul. An alcoholic hates life because he can’t handle it. Everything he touches burns him. He wants to escape into . . . childhood; and the only way he can do it is by killing himself with grog. But it doesn’t work. If he goes into a Catholic church and uses his eyes he would see God Himself moving in a terrible, staggering procession around the walls. In the Stations of the Cross he would see his own destiny. To fall and rise and fall and rise and keep on moving to the end. . . . God may move him directly if he submits his life and will to Him. Yet even if he never learns what is required of him, he will be protected from habitual evils, because he is helpless, and God protects the helpless. I saw Dusty in the Hot Dog, full of meths, very dirty, and his eyes bright and staring. He smiled, and accepted a meal, and talked naturally. He has only half a stomach left. The man inside the husk is (I think) . . . than a child. . . . I don’t think one’s love can be mistaken: he is carrying a cross of sin, the heaviest of all to carry. . . . But when the demons (the Law’s sergeants, or the younger ones, detectives) look for his soul they can’t find it. It has escaped all justice, human and divine, and is hidden in the dead pierced heart of God.
Some may think it [strange] to apply the words of St John of the Cross to a metho; but they have never met D—, and perhaps do not look far into the meaning of absolute poverty. . . .
M— is a convert of long standing, and tries to take the new arrivals under her wing. There is a trace of the schoolteacher in her approach. Once I thought I should obey her; but now I obey only the priests who counsel me and the voice of my own conscience. She is sad and fearful (I think) for my salvation. The truth is that of human attachment. In Protestant life each person finds a model among ministers, or doesn’t find [one], or a third finds a guru. It leads to conflict and the loss of liberty. We Catholics have a need of that substitute obedience. This, the religious obedience to a Superior, is the anvil on which
24 Feb. . . . Trying to get a can of peaches at the fruit mart for J[acquie] to bottle. I am too late with it . . . and J[acquie] was rightly angry. It is difficult to know one is a fool and admit it and accept a fair rebuke. People are so made that they do not consider any rebuke fair. Tomorrow I must take the peaches back to exchange them or get the money refunded. That will be another hoop to climb through. Factors that make me foolish – an alcoholic memory, fear of admitting I am a mug, and the . . . to use my own judgment. A man hates being a fool more than he hates being a sinner: that is our . . . pride. I used to blame poor J[acquie] for telling me off, as any wife has a perfect right to do. Now I take it, acknowledging it is just, but still don’t like it. Let me remain a fool, dear Lady, but ask God to take my sins away.
J[acquie] is tough, like many holy people. She never gives me sympathy in hangover, knowing it would only increase my self-pity. Bit by bit I am learning her spirit of detachment. She belongs to the daylight, and I to the night. It is strange that I should be the Catholic, and she the undenominational Protestant. She deserved the Faith more; maybe I needed it more. I have never known her to tell a deliberate lie. There is a photo of her at fifteen or so, standing on a verandah, on one leg, like a bird about to fly. There is a diamond purity deep in her heart, now as then, which I did not . . . till I came to Our Lady. I judged it to be cold; but it is hardened in the fire of the spirit. She often sings in the house now. . . .
1960 (214)
This questionnaire raises all, or nearly all, the practical problems that are likely to worry a man who wants to spend some of this time writing. They are chips off a single granite block, possibly from that remarkable boulder which Sisyphus, streaming with sweat, shoves uphill every day and night in the not- so-imaginary Greek underworld. It seems to me that no one is likely to be contented with a series of deadpan answers. The real problem raised concerns the weight, size, shape, geological or theological formation of this boulder, and what handholds (if any) can be found on its surface. So my answers will be aimed, however obliquely, at a solution.
I have never had enough time to write. In my late teens I developed the habitBlow, Wind of Fruitfulness) were written in this way. But nowadays I have no time at all to write. From 7.30 to 8.30 a.m. on a weekday I am occupied in getting to work; from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. I am occupied with work; between 4.30 and 5.30 I return home; from then until midnight I am occupied in meeting the very real demands of family life and social life. The weekends are very properly devoted to gardening, family outings, painting the kitchen ceiling, a little reading, changing the night soil for the cat, conversations with my wife, and answering a voluminous correspondence. The time between midnight and 2 a.m., which younger men devote to erotic entertainment, is the only time free for serious concentrated writing. Fortunately I have a robust physique. But the time-picture is a misleading one. In fact, for the past fifteen years, I have found time for writing by robbery – robbery from my employers, from my wife, from my children, and possibly from the Almighty. By an artificial schizophrenia, never giving my full attention to any work on hand, I have been able to sustain that interior life which in its turn leads to crime, divorce, hypocrisy, and the incubation of poems. This requires a casehardened conscience. As the carpenters arrive, as the telephone rings, as children sicken and wives explode like cannon crackers, as the priest repeats the absolution, the poem-making machine grinds on regardless. It is, I think, a genuine diabolical miracle.
Money is also a problem. It distracts the mind from any sustained meditation. If one has it one thinks about it. If one has not got it, one thinks about getting it. I dislike money intensely. Once I earned £50 in one year by writing; and for my worst (and only) piece of sustained non-critical writing, Jack Winter’s Dream, I received about £20 from the N[ew] Z[ealand] B[roadcasting] S[ervice] and about £15 from Landfall. That kept me in tobacco for the year, but not in coffee.
I have been abroad once during my adult life – to India, under a UNESCO Cultural Grant, in 1958. It came as a great surprise to me, and I do not expect to be able to repeat the experience. But I would like to go to France before I die; and to the Holy Land, if that is possible. These are irrelevant wishes. I have had nearly thirty jobs in the past fifteen years; all of them kept me alive and tended to prevent me from writing.
Quite frankly I do not think that travel grants, commissions, different jobs, or even leisure, could give me ‘freedom to write’. It is my family who need the money, not me; or who will need it if I stop work and thus cease to support them, or die, or go for a long rest in Avondale; but they will need thousands, not hundreds, and only hundreds are likely to be offering. In Freudian symbolism, money equals dung, and dung is necessary to manure the crops. I would be glad to see new prizes and grants. I am quite ready to get on the gravy train. But I will never take off my hat to the driver.
One becomes used to living on the razor’s edge. If my economic or social or domestic condition were alleviated in such a way that I had more leisure to write, and possibly more stimulus to write, I would be a Sisyphus divided from his boulder. The gritty touch of its huge surfaces, the grinding weight, the black shadow which it casts, are the strongest intimations of reality which I possess, and the source of whatever strength exists in my sporadic literary productions.
I remember seeing in the Turnbull Library a document which moved me greatly – a manuscript of Henry Lawson’s, in round unformed writing, in which he described how he had received notice of the acceptance of an article or poem by some periodical (I think it was the Sydney Bulletin) while he was sandpapering the walls of a hearse. The hearse of the Welfare State is jet- propelled. It is part of my peculiar destiny to sandpaper its walls. I fear that more money or more leisure might make me less angry, lessen the muscular cramp, persuade me that it is not a hearse but a winged chariot. I might become divided from my fellow D.P.s. That would be quite fatal.
1960 (215)
It is heard by many people, and with some justice, that a Catholic man should be joyful. I see a difficulty in this point of view.
The Church, which introduces us to the truth about God, as far as such truth can be expressed in human concepts, introduces us also to the truth about ourselves. On both subjects modern people may be surprisingly ignorant.
In the Litany of Loreto Our Lady is addressed specifically as the ‘Cause of Our Joy’. This is reasonable, since the Incarnation hinged on her consent, as in a darker manner the Fall of Man hinged on the consent of Eve; and whatever permanent joy we have flows and will flow from the Incarnation. Yet the face which we look on in the Pietà is the most sorrowful face the world has ever seen. Her soul has become grief itself; she shares in the sorrow of God. Her grief is occasioned by sin, and the effects of sin, in the hideous butchery of her Son.
No doubt her grief, in that eternal moment of the Pietà will turn into an everlasting joy; but while it lasts it is all grief, yours and mine, the grief of the concentration camp and the home torn apart by sin; her soul is drowned by it, her soul lacks any joy, and only the consent of her will remains unshaken.
How can Catholics be joyful, who see in their own soul, and the souls of others, the seemingly endless havoc of sin? Truly, they believe, they hope, they endeavour to love. But the sense of sin remains – not the sense of responsibility for specific sins (though this may be very real also) but the sense of the alienation of human life from its source and centre, from God the Truth who underlies all secondary truths. This, as I take it, is the meaning of a sense of
The friends of afflicted people may say to them: ‘Have courage. The very affliction which you endure will be the agent of your eventual joy.’ Yet could they have said this to Our Lady when she held her dead Son in her arms? They could only have been silent in the presence of supernatural grief.
One part of the lesson we are taught by Lent is perhaps to be silent in the presence of true affliction. Lent is the winter of the soul. Through the penances of Lent we learn to identify ourselves silently with the affliction of Our Lord. The best fruit of Lent may be an unquenchable hunger for that Reality from which we have learnt that we are alienated, as God was mysteriously alienated from God in Our Lord’s cry of abandonment on the Cross.
It seems that God rarely removes from us our natural defects of will, memory and understanding. We may try most resolutely to mend our lives and see no visible sign of improvement. But our grief itself may reduce the soul to a knowledge of its true stature (small, weak, fickle, subject to nature, real only insofar as God sustains and inhabits it) and so make possible a fuller reception of grace.
Let the delusions go from us and God will take care of the rest. Yet it seems that the new delusions of knowledge, virtue, self-importance, which fill the house of the soul can only be banished by affliction. Affliction is the broom of God. When the house is swept clean, the householder can laugh again, but the laugh will have a different ring to it.
1960 (216)
Sir: I find Doug Laurenson’s diatribe against the songs of Tom Lehrer ‘disquieting’ and even a trifle absurd. He seems to make the error, fatally common in a Puritan culture, of confusing virtue with inhibition. Tom Lehrer has guyed successfully, to the delight of many, the sugary lyrics which emerge from the jam-factories of America. It is difficult to see where Mr Laurenson finds ground for his charges of neo-Satanism, perversity, decadence and criminality. Does he seriously think that Tom Lehrer, by writing ‘The Old Dope Peddler’, is attempting to promote the sale of marihuana to teenagers? Or does he think at all? He quotes two inflated lines of Rupert Brooke’s in support of cantankerous moralism. Probably Rupert Brooke’s best poem is the one that savagely and humorously describes the poet vomiting over the rail on a Channel crossing, and thinking meanwhile of his beloved – a poem many degrees removed from sentimental nationalism and not too far from Tom Lehrer. I do not share Mr Laurenson’s desire to keep the party clean. Every party needs an uninhibited, satirical entertainer. Tom Lehrer provides bile pills to swallow after the sweet fudge of the Reader’s Digest. If Mr Laurenson repents within a fortnight, I will send him a Tom Lehrer disc;
1960 (217)
Mr Updike’s poems are light and sometimes witty. He has a liking for conundrums, and one can pass a pleasant half-hour trying to solve them. It is a misfortune for him that Ogden Nash has already written so much better in the same vein. The new Penguin book of comic verse has the merit of cheapness; but the editor, after several stronger collections, has begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel. In undistinguished company, there are a few good epigrams, such as this epitaph on a party girl –
There is nothing in the anthology of Welsh poetry to rival this, if one excepts three poems by Henry Vaughan and two by Dylan Thomas. Like Maori chants, Welsh poems in translation are all but incomprehensible unless the reader has sufficient anthropological knowledge to recognise the allusions to vanished customs and forgotten tribal chiefs; and the poems in English by Welshmen are notable chiefly for their unenterprising piety.
Mr Kirkup is quite a different kettle of fish. His poetry, nervy, erratic, formless, belongs unmistakeably to the hydrogen age. For inward unity he substitutes exact reportage. He celebrates a world of wandering boys who never come home –
This imprecise but very real sensation of self-alienation sustains his better poems, though his many failures resemble cut flowers standing in dry vases. Perhaps reportage is his true medium. The poems written in Japan, like Zen Buddhist arrangements of stones, assemble detail to accentuate absence of being. The casual style hardens into an oblique but penetrating language.
1960 (218)
Sir: As lonely in Pig Island I searched the cat for fleas, I heard a strain of revelry come riding on the breeze ‘Tom Lehrer’s at the party,’ my friendly neighbour said – ‘I suggest we ask him over to sing for us instead.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Mr Laurenson, and banged his Bible loud. ‘The bodgies and the widgies will be dancing in that crowd. With a bunch of Screwtape letters and the Mazengarb Report I can prove that Mr Lehrer isn’t doing what he ought.’
Very civilly I answered – ‘Are you absolutely sure? Don’t you think it would be selfish to keep the party pure by closing down the party? I have heard it from a friend that the wheat and weeds together must flourish till the end.’
‘Oh, no,’ wept Mr Laurenson, ‘I tremble and I shake when I think of Christian values and the soul of man at stake. Tom Lehrer may be clever, but the heart of man is frail, and I know my teenage daughter (if she heard him) would grow pale.’
‘Gor blimey,’ said my neighbour, ‘you are a funny bloke! There’s eighteen hundred paperbacks to send her up in smoke. Tom Lehrer, he’s an egghead and a moralist as well. Don’t imagine that she’d listen. You’ve been reading “Little Nell”.’
‘Oh, no,’ sighed Mr Laurenson, ‘I fear the taint of sin. His barbarous songs will never make a decent Kiwi grin. Excuse me if I leave you. It’s after five p.m. I must buy a one-way ticket to the New Jerusalem.’
1960 (219)
Rain was drumming steadily in the street outside the phone box. The winter sky opened like a grey Aeolian bag and loosed a fury of negation above the tin roofs of the town. The boy inside the box was trying to remember a name – ‘Robertson . . . Robinson . . . Rowlandson . . .’. But the weight of gin fumes in his head would not let it past. Hell, he thought, there’s no one to see, nowhere to go. Somewhere people sat around gasfires and played poker; somewhere there was company and light and colour – and girls, girls with sweaters on or off, girls with page-boy cuts and flowered dresses, stewing coffee and bringing it to the lucky ones. Hanging gardens. Doorways into the cave of Aladdin. Clueless bitches.
He remembered at least half of the party. Its effects were still present in his wrinkled coat and trousers, dried out too close to the fire, and now half- wet again with the rain. He had staggered out from Tony’s flat, over the road and on to the river lawn, to bathe his head in the Shannon – then head over heels in a somersault, to land sitting in the river among the fishy weeds. That had been the best part of the evening. The weeds and the water and the gin
‘Who is she?’ he asked Tony.
‘Her? On the end of the sofa? Celia. Celia Robinson’ – the name burst triumphantly now through the eddying wall of hangover – ‘if you want a sure thing, she’s the one. Half the Art School have been through her.’
‘Only half? She’ll do me all right.’
He found the number and dialled it. The phone bell rang again and again, in some dry suburban house, with a hallstand and Japanese vases on the mantelpiece. A vague sense of enormity struggled to the surface of his mind. Bees crawling in a smoked hive. What should he say to her? Then the half- remembered elocutionist’s voice answered him.
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Jack. Maybe you remember me. At Tony’s party. I’m not doing anything today. I’d like to come round and have a yarn. Jack Swann.’
‘Yes. You fell in the river.’
Bloody bitch. Her voice held for him the echo of the women’s gang, the Hostel brigade, the teatable titterers, chewing the cud of male deformity. You couldn’t get past them. His resolution strengthened. Lay it on thick, he told himself. With a trowel.
‘I remember you, Celia. I wanted to have a yarn with you then, but I didn’t get a chance. It’s only now and then you meet someone you really want to know. Yesterday I was drunk but today I’m sober. And you’re the one person I remember from last night. I heard you talking about Brahms. You must think it cheek, me ringing you up when we’ve hardly met. But it’s the only way I had of getting in touch with you.’
‘Do you really want to see me?’ The voice had lost its remoteness. ‘Well, Jack, it’s not the best time of day. My father and mother are in.’
A touch of vinegar there. She didn’t like them much. They’d probably told her to lay off the bedroom game.
‘But they’re going out this afternoon. If you’d like to come round at half- past two . . . Just for an hour.’
‘I’d love to, Celia. Have you got a radiogram?’ ‘Yes. I’ll sort out some records for you.’
‘Right-oh. Expect me at half-past two, then.’
He felt the briskness of lust moving in his belly. She was a bag all right, but a man couldn’t be choosy. It was Brahms that did the trick. He couldn’t tell one piece from another, but that would make no difference. He came out of the phone box, into the rain, whistling and buttoning his overcoat. The
At twenty-five past two his taxi pulled up outside a brick bungalow, built on the swampy reclaimed land at the edge of town. The after-effects of the gin had left him old and empty, and the dead afternoon hung round his neck like an albatross. Nine bob. Too much to pay for this outing. She may not want to turn it up anyway. I’ ll be back at the pub by four.
He rang the doorbell gently. There was silence in the house, then the sound of sandals clopping in the passage. The door opened, and the girl stood there, her yellow hair combed back behind her ears, wearing a new print frock and a strained smile. How big her mouth is, he thought.
‘Hullo, Jack. It’s nice to see you. I thought you mightn’t come.’ ‘Of course. I told you I’d be here on time.’
‘Come in. My father and mother have only been gone an hour. I told them I had a headache. Come in and sit down.’ Awkwardly she led him down the passage, her thick rope sandals clumping again on the varnished floor. They entered a room with orange curtains and low bookcases. The radiogram, a square Aztec idol, stood at the foot of a blue divan.
‘Would you like a drink, Jack?’
‘You bet I would.’ For the first time a real gratitude flickered in his mind. ‘I’m as dry as the hobs of hell.’
‘Gin or beer? That’s all we’ve got.’ ‘Gin for me.’
She disappeared into the kitchen. He could hear the rattle of glasses and the opening and shutting of a fridge door. She re-entered the room. Carrying two beer-glasses.
‘You’ve been generous with the gin, Celia.’
‘This is my special. Gin up to here. Then a dash of lime. Then a long cool splash of water to drown it. I call it my Ophelia drink. It makes me sad in a happy way.’
She’s no fool, he thought. With a sack over her head, we’ d get on well together.
He leaned forward from his seat on the divan and grinned at her.
‘Celia, let’s hear the Brahms. I’m better off now than King Farouk. A drink and music and a girl like you. What more could a man want?’
She flushed and turned her back on him, holding her glass rigidly. ‘You don’t have to flatter me,’ she said in a small colourless voice.
‘God help us, I wasn’t trying to flatter you! It’s just that you make me feel good.’
Without a word she switched on the radiogram and set a record turning. The booming chords filled the room like the branches of a forest. She sat down beside him, carefully avoiding any contact. He sipped his drink and pretended to listen to the Brahms. Then he rested his hand on her bare upper arm and stroked it gently in time to the music. She turned her head and
‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’ He shifted his hand to her forehead and stroked her hair. She gripped it by the finger-ends and kissed the palm.
‘You’re awfully nice. I was afraid you were just making it up. About liking me, I mean. What did Tony tell you about me?’
‘He said you were the intellectual type. A bit Bohemian and very intelligent.’ He shifted his hand again and pressed her breast. She breathed hard and dug her nails into his wrist.
‘Oh, Jack, we’ll see each other again, won’t we? I couldn’t bear it if we didn’t.’ She took off her glasses and turned her blind face towards him. The record ran down and switched itself off automatically. Rolling up her sweater, he saw with surprise a green cord looped round her neck, and suspended from it an oblong piece of cloth marked with a heart pierced by a sword.
‘You’re a Doolan, are you, Celia?’
She raised herself on her elbows, her face reddened and shining. ‘Not a real one, Jack.’ Her mouth twisted harshly. ‘Not the proper kind. Not like the girls who go to the dance at St Joseph’s. You know what they say – “Never let a man go too far. A Catholic girl must know when to draw the line.” I’ve never been able to. And then I used to tell the priest lies, when I was at school. I used to make up all kinds of dreadful stories to try and shock him. They call it sacrilege. I can’t ever go back again. Not now.’
‘Then why do you wear that bit of cloth?’
‘It’s called a scapular. My brother gave it to me. I don’t know why I wear it still. Perhaps I’m a hypocrite. I can’t go back and yet I can’t let it all go.’
He was amazed to see her eyes fill with tears. Maybe I’ d better lay off, he thought. But her shuddering response to his deliberate love-making reassured him. Riding the dolphin of Arion, a woman’s body, through the dead seas of the afternoon, he looked down at her face with a mixture of anger and complacency. It was for the moment all but beautiful, a primitive mask of desire. No trouble at all. Tommy will be in the pub by now. I bet he’s knocking back portergaffs.
One surprise remained for Jack. When he had buttoned his trousers, and she had rearranged her clothes and face in the bathroom, and both stood awkwardly in the centre of the room to say goodbye, a vague feeling that something was lacking disturbed his contentment. Carefully he put his hands on her shoulders, drew her towards him, and kissed her as a man might kiss a prettier girl who was his sweetheart. The explosion of tenderness which this gesture evoked from her remained sunk in his memory, the buried fragment of a meteorite, unexplained and inexplicable, long after he had forgotten her name.
1960 (220)
‘Who are you? Are you somebody sent to torment me? No living man ever walks on these slopes.’
‘I am the angel of your fate, Sisyphus.’
‘I cannot speak to you. The sentence I am under stipulates that I may not cease rolling this great stone uphill, even to speak to an angel.’
‘There is always a moment outside justice. That moment has arrived. If you leave the boulder, it will not shift from its place.’
‘I believe you because your face is like one I saw a long time ago. Too early to remember well. My mother’s face or the face of a strong young laughing nurse. If you are my angel, can you answer three questions that trouble me?’
‘Ask them.’
‘Why am I condemned?’ ‘You are not condemned.’
‘What do you call this labour then? Each day I have to shove this great stone to the mountain top. I am a prisoner, though without visible chains. If I shift away a yard from the stone, my strength fails me and anguish drums in every nerve of my body. Morning and evening an invisible warder brings me bread and meat and wine. Never enough for a feast. Only sufficient to strengthen me for labour. The murmur of the sea, the shadows of the riding clouds, used to enchant me. I could hear voices crying, “Sisyphus, immortal happiness is in your reach. Pluck it from the tree.” And a branch came down from the clouds, loaded with aromatic fruit. But when I tried to pluck the fruit, it swung away from me and the sky darkened. And once a girl climbed the mountain and stood at my side. We shared the same cloak at night and spoke together in secret loving parables. But she grew to hate the stone. She said I was an egotist, and left me, in anger and sadness. Only the stone remains, and it grows heavier each year. My shoulders are bent and my hands are callused and thickened with pressing on its granite surface. My soul itself grows coarse as old sacking. If this labour is not a life sentence, what other meaning do you find in it?’
‘The meaning of your life is conquest by surrender. Divine Love ordains it; and no other life is possible for you.’
‘Where did the great stone come from?’
‘The stone is that which lay on the grave of the Incarnate God. It is your humanity, Sisyphus, which He chose to share with you. As long as you embrace it, his strength will fill your veins. And what is the third question?’
‘Who am I? What is the secret of my identity?’
‘That I cannot tell you. It is hidden even from the angels. The day of your death will reveal it to you alone. If you look within, you will see chaos and endless corruption, a field sown with the seeds of evil dreams. If you look without, you will see a world of sterile forms, atoms and nebulae
‘I can’t sing in tune.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Sing all the same. Perhaps you will make the angels laugh. Angels and humans both need to develop a sense of humour.’
1960 (221)
This book originated as a thesis submitted for the doctorat d’Etat at the Sorbonne; and like many published theses, it smells of the lamp. The author asks no questions except the scholarly where and when – the terrible why, which can transform a factual commentary into a speculative essay on the human condition, does not seem to have entered M. Ritz’s consciousness. More could have been said about a Victorian literary friendship between the Great White Whale of modern poetry and an irritable Laureate-to-be. This is M. Ritz’s comment on the one letter of his own which Robert Bridges did not destroy from the twenty-five years of correspondence between him and Hopkins:
. . . This last message of true affection, which reached Hopkins a few weeks before he died, must have brought him one of his last great joys. As he lay dying, Hopkins may have reflected that in spite of disagreements, conflicts and misunderstandings – fleeting shadows – there had burned in two noble hearts a strong fire of love . . .
Possibly. But Hopkins could just as likely have reflected wryly, though fondly, on a gap which affection could not bridge. In that difficult friendship Hopkins had made it his business to understand his friend’s neo- platonic outlook; yet it seems that Bridges never grasped what it might be for Hopkins to live simultaneously as a powerful intuitive nature-poet and a dedicated Jesuit. The fundamental aim of Hopkins’s work (to synthesise Christian and animistic experience) was entirely obscure to him. Apart from their mutual affection, the two poets seem to have found only one sure basis of agreement and understanding. Both were Victorian, and they shared the belief, implicit in their correspondence, that a good artist must also be always a gentleman.
1960 (222)
It is perhaps not strange that a Field Marshal should compile an anthology. Yet it seems so, as if the eagle or the butcher-bird should happen to build a jay’s nest. Military men may have enthusiasms outside their profession, even in an age of specialists. It is significant, however, that the best of Lord Wavell’s selection comes under the sub-heading of ‘Good Fighting’, and that his taste, outside ballad poetry, swerves toward the sentimental lyric of a nationalist variety.
The selection (it can hardly be called a full collection) of Roy Campbell’s translations is not adequate. It includes many polished but uninspired renderings from the Portuguese and from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, whereas the poet’s truly magnificent version of the poems of St John of the Cross has been clipped severely, and Lorca too has suffered. Enough remains to show Campbell’s rhetorical strength and something of the genius of the originals.
The off-beat talent of Wyndham Lewis seems always to fall short of a balanced maturity in painting, prose or verse. One suspects that he is too much an arguer, a propagandist, to achieve the contemplative serenity a major work requires. Fancy intrudes on imagination; argument silences the oracle. If there is such a thing as poetry of the ego, Wyndham Lewis has written it –
So runs a relatively lucid passage of ‘One-Way Song’, written in 1933. It is good fun, but is it poetry? Mr T.S. Eliot in his Introduction warns against that question, but I will ask it. Is it even well-made verse? The heavy abstraction of the more difficult sections exhibits often obscurity without depth. Yet the ferocious individualism of the writer compels one’s admiration.
1960 (223)
The endless subjective ‘epiclesis’ of the Cantos will continue very likely as long as Ezra Pound lives. It embodies the accumulated, though fragmentary knowledge of an American scholar-poet whose sanity has been in question.
Some critics regard the Cantos as a master-work. I prefer to see them as the debris of one man’s inner world interspersed by poignant, though equally fragmentary lyrics. In this latest collection the lyrical passages are few and the Chinese ideograms are many.
Mr Duncan has tried to imitate Catullus. Sincerity, accuracy, an intensely personal note, in these poems provoked by a love-affair, do not wholly balance the lack of formal unity. Nor is Mr Duncan’s bitch-goddess ever as real as her archetype, Lesbia. Yet he writes with dramatic effect; and contrives in one poem to introduce four-letter words without smashing the pattern of argument – in itself, a rare enough feat.
The knotted rhythms and compact metaphors of Mr Hughes’s poetry spring naturally from his deep, original vision of man and nature. He seems to understand and penetrate the irrational life of animals. In parts his book reads like a modern bestiary –
These six oblique lines make up an entire poem, an epitaph. The dead man and the weasel join in one image. It is very like the world of a child’s imagination – equally pure and equally ferocious. Whatever the writer touches (a dead pig, Cleopatra, an old man in a pub) comes immediately to life with an obscure physical violence. It could be whimsy; but it is more likely a rare intuition that perceives directly the mysterious thing-in-itself. Mr Hughes has forged out a most effective medium to clothe his intuitions.
1960 (224)
1960 (225)
The commonest difficulty of the interior life, certainly for Catholics, probably for many who never belong to the Visible Church, is to continue to cope faithfully and charitably with daily events when the sense of pleasure in those events has unaccountably vanished. It is apparent in a man’s working life when every decision and action has to be made, as it were, against the grain – when the ordinary sense of satisfaction has been replaced by an opposite feeling of tedium, discord and personal incapability. It is apparent in home life when, for example, a woman feels that she no longer ‘loves’ her husband, that her children are eating her alive, that she is bound to a bleak and terrible routine. These are not abnormal states. After the departure of the special spiritual or biological bonus that the Creator seems to give to the young, they are recurrent in the lives of all adults, though fortunately permanent for only a few of us. In advice to a penitent, a priest will usually call these states of mind crosses, suggest a relaxed abandonment to the Divine Will, and offer one or two minor practical ideas for better adjustment. I suggest (perhaps presumptuously, and chiefly to myself, though it may be of use to others) a form of prayer one could use on such occasions.
Prayer Expressing a Dislike for the Human Condition
Dear Lord – You are the King and I am the servant: you are the Landlord and I am the tenant. I confess that I have often abused your hospitality. But at the moment my own faults are not foremost in my mind. The inscrutable way other people behave does trouble me – they are so unpredictable, so demanding, so oblivious to my needs. I recognise that the Fall of Man is largely responsible for this; but that doesn’t make me like it any more. It hurts me too when those nearest to me, my lifelong companions, have the same faults as myself – or different faults – but either way, apparently designed to
The weather, the sequences of time, human society, and my own psychology and biology, seem to be peculiarly designed for my discomfort. I don’t like this at all. When I look at You on the Cross, I see that You suffered all this, and far far more. It should make me ashamed of grumbling. But You know I am not You. A small fraction of your suffering would drive me round the bend in no time at all. Suffering has no appeal to me. I want sweetness, love, harmony, friendship – I am at present a small cold frog in the middle of a big, smelly bog.
You could answer – ‘Child, why all this emphasis on the First Person? Can’t you love a bit more and forget yourself?’ Well, Lord, that sounds excellent; but it’s not the way I’m built. You made me, a human organism, sensitive to every change in the world around me, acutely aware of self; You implanted in me this ferociously strong instinct of self-preservation, this inextinguishable desire for happiness. There was a reason for it; there’s a reason for everything You do. The answer is that I’m not intended chiefly for earth, this place of darkness and exile, but for Heaven. But I don’t like the road there: the pains of age, the slowly failing faculties, the unavoidable gate of death which is my admittedly suitable share in your Cross. No; I don’t really blame my fellow-beings. At times, my God, I secretly, semi-consciously blame You – for being so different from me, for seeming to disregard what I am able to bear or not able to bear.
Dear Lord, there You are! The terrible secret is out now, of which You were perfectly aware all the time. There are occasions when I dislike You. Nevertheless I trust in You; nevertheless You are my King. A child is unhappy when its toys are taken away – intellectual pleasure, human love, physical well-being, sex, alcohol, the making of poems, pleasure in a good meal or the waves breaking, a satisfying conversation with a friend You have shut away these toys in your cupboard. Please give me some of them back now and then. What did you play with when You were a Child? The story goes that You made clay birds and turned them into real ones. Remember I am still, and may always be, nothing more than a child.
1960? (226)
It is an irritating habit of reviewers to speak of ‘promise’ instead of defining the actual achievement of a new poet. Yet Mr Fisher’s poems are particularly promising. Certain resonances of feeling emerge clearly, as in ‘The Rain has a Secret’ –
A suitable comparison would be with the early poems of Carl Sandburg. The units of emotion pulsate like separate twanging notes of a guitar. When Mr Fisher wrestles with larger themes of age and youth, or the social implications of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he loses resonance and tends to harangue us. Yet none of the poems in this pamphlet are insincere or totally lacking in originality. ‘The Ballad of Eliza and Edward Hill’ is certainly the best – a song about and story of a pioneering couple, well-focused, with the quality of a genuine folk-poem. It begs for guitar accompaniment. One dares to hope that Mr Fisher’s gift will grow and not be crushed by his own inner moralist or the brutal automatic pressures of life in the Welfare State.
1960 (227)
Sir: I am grateful to your correspondent ‘Marguerite’ for reading my verse so thoroughly. Her comments on my lack of gardening knowledge seem a trifle harsh. I have found that if the ground is deeply trenched and the couch grass well covered, at least some of the grass will rot. At the same time I suspect it is my Puritan heredity that prompts me to this measure. Like a great many of my countrymen, I am inclined to imagine that if an insoluble problem is buried deep enough, and the surface of the ground is optimistically smooth, then the problem is done away with. In this respect I resemble Norman Vincent Peale, most journalists, and all our local politicians, whether they belong to the party of King Log or King Stork.
Your correspondent takes me to task for saying that puha is blood-red. The puha in her own garden may be orange or violet in colour; but the mature plants which grow on the terrace above my house have stalks (attractively translucent when young) the colour of dried blood. I have eaten puha at home and at the Waiwhetu Maori meeting house. It seems to need cooking with pork or corned beef to bring out its slightly rank but interesting flavour.
1960 (228)
I’m going to read a poem of mine that I wrote a while ago. I chose it to read and talk about, because on the whole it’s a simple poem that anyone should be able to get the guts of by hearing it once. It is called ‘The Fisherman’. And this is the way it goes –
Who is the man in the poem? He is certainly not myself. Is he somebody I know well, then? In a sense – Yes; in a sense – No. When I was a boy I often watched my father and my uncles fishing on the rocks below Brighton. Brighton is the township I grew up in, about twelve miles south of Dunedin. Nearly all the pictures in the poem are what I remember from the time – the channels among the rocks; the herrings flapping on the beach; the church bell ringing in the evening; the men swinging their lines and sinkers out into the deeper water . . . . It used to be a curse if the hooks got caught on the bottom
Who is the man in the poem? He is a single man – that is, he is unmarried. He was wounded at Passchendaele in the First World War – so he would probably be getting on for seventy years old, at least. He is probably a solitary man. He does not say anything about other people – at least not directly. He is my picture of a certain kind of New Zealander.
‘The Fisherman’ is a rather cold poem. People are inclined to like more life, more jump, more variety in the poems they read. Why does the fisherman have so little to say about himself and other people? I think – because he is a poor man. There are a great many things other people take for granted which he hasn’t got – marriage, money, religion, good health even – these are like circles within which people recognise each other. But he is standing outside all the circles. In a way the poem is about his particular kind of poverty.
The poem could have been given a different name. It could have been called ‘The War Hero’. After all, he belongs to that group of men in honour of whom our War Memorials were built – though of course he did not die in the war – he is still alive. But in some ways the poem is putting on one side the usual idea of what a war hero is. This man is the real hero. He has a pension; but not quite enough to live on. To keep on going in age and poverty and solitude may be very difficult for him. To put it very mildly: a person who read this poem of mine very carefully might suddenly have a different view of war and soldiers and War Memorials. He might say to himself –‘Yes; we honour the dead – but do we give much care, mercy, friendship, honour to the living?’ There is a touch of anger about this somewhere underneath the poem.
A lot of my poems are beach poems. That is, I will imagine I am walking along a beach – usually the beach at Brighton where I grew up – and this helps the pictures and the words that make a poem to rise up in my mind and take shape. In a poem everything means both itself and something else. So when the tide is rising at the beginning of the poem, it can mean both itself and the rising of old memories in the mind of the fisherman.
And when the herrings are thrown up on the beach, the fisherman thinks of them as ‘soldiers dressed to die’ – they are brightly coloured as some soldiers are in uniform – they are helpless like the thousands upon thousands of men who fell into the mud of Passchendaele and never came out again. The fisherman is not just thinking about English or New Zealand soldiers. He is thinking about soldiers anywhere. Just soldiers. Whether they are English or German or American or Russian or Japanese doesn’t really matter at all. They are just human beings in uniform who were born and have to die.
The fisherman is fishing while other people go to church. Perhaps in his own way – by staying and fishing – he is holding a service over the dead soldiers who are more real to him than the living people round him. He prefers the wave that has no eyes – that will not intrude on his private thoughts – to the company of people who will understand his situation even less than he does. And he has his wound to keep him company. Not only a wound in the body – a wound in the mind as well – for the deepest wounds left by wars are always in the mind. So I leave him with his own kind of pain and his own terrible peace.
[1960?] (229)
Sir: The most competent reviewer can make a slip sometimes. In a laudatory review it seems to matter less – we can put it down to disordered generosity. But Mr Hall’s review of Incense to Idols by Sylvia Ashton-Warner is neither laudatory nor generous. Permit me then to tabulate his errors.
It is a measure of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s success that a reader’s sympathy (Mr Hall’s or my own) can be fully engaged by a character whose emotions are deranged. I hope my remarks will lead your readers to question Mr Hall’s assessment of the book.
1961 (230)
Dear P—,
It occurs to me there may be good reason to set the ball rolling in a discussion of the situation of women writers in this country. I have heard more nonsense talked on this subject than on any other. And perhaps more women than men in New Zealand have killed their talent, or allowed it to be killed. At least, like the man who pushes an asbestos shield towards a blazing oil gusher, I do not expect to escape without burns. The topic is an explosive one. Instead of writing some pontifical article, I address this brief letter to you, so as to have you, a practising woman writer, directly in my thoughts; for the sake of friendship also, and my own unreserved respect for your intellectual courage.
I do not envy any woman who puts pen to paper here in Pig Island. The boars will grunt and snuffle. Unless she adopts an entirely neuter idiom (difficult to master and worthless anyway) she will meet a fair amount of subtle down-classing. I mean by this that the average male reviewer or editor brings to a woman’s work the armoury of unconscious prejudices which he already holds towards women in general. He can only escape this by bringing them into full consciousness and holding them at an arm’s length. There is another factor too, which I can illustrate from personal experience. In a woman’s work he will not find the symbolic clues to which he is accustomed.
I recall being asked to review a new book of poems. On a first reading, I found them technically satisfying but curiously strained in their imagery. The name on the book’s cover was that of a man, hitherto unknown to me. In the poems there occurred a strange shifting of familiar landmarks. Mountains, bays and islands, carried an obscure symbolic connotation, and the most personal work, the love poems, seemed ‘impossible’, outside the pattern of love as I knew it. Then light broke in on me. I assumed, correctly, that the author was a woman who had used a masculine pseudonym. The picture began to fall into focus. The landscapes which she explored so vividly were symbolic extensions of her own body (not, as they would be in the case of a man, a hostile or welcoming other); and the love poems were sincere and accurate confessional documents. But suppose I had been incapable of making the shift of imagination which the poems demanded from a male reader – I would have remained in the dark, and another good woman poet would have received less than justice.
I think most women writers are aware that they start at a disadvantage when they expose their work to the criticisms of a man. A hundred pathological responses may spring from this discouraging knowledge. The more or less inevitable paranoid tendency of artists (‘You do not like my work because you do not like me’) may flourish to the point of mania. Or the woman in question may develop a bogus high-mindedness, an assumption that her work possesses some rare spiritual and prophetic quality which the indelicacy of aform, and rewrite a story or a poem fifty times, searching for the hair-line of exactitude which may meet with an editor’s approval. All this is a smokescreen, as you well know, P—. The true course lies elsewhere: to ignore the boys, unless they know what you are talking about, and begin the long archaeological job of self- discovery. Unearthing truth from the dunghill of memory. For we can only write truthfully about what we know; and if we turn our backs on knowledge, even the harshest, we are damned as writers.
Mind you, I think the sows have a lot to answer for, as well. I remember hearing about an old lady in Karori who had known Katharine Mansfield when she (K.M.) was a girl. She had only one comment to make – ‘Oh! That girl? She was quite mad about men.’ The moral pressure of the Women’s Trade Union must press like a ton of bricks on the shoulders of any woman who wants to find out who she is. Imagine a woman Durrell! She would be hounded into Porirua by a baying pack of relatives. The escape routes are so easy too. The Church, taken like an aspirin in a glass of water; the duties of a housewife; a feminism that concentrates on abstract issues. I do not envy a woman writer here; and I admire wholeheartedly those who keep on moving.
Consider the strength and weakness of the women writers we have had. K.M. herself, ploughing through the bitter herbage of the German Pension, raw, bewildered and untrained, relying always half on fantasy (I mean the special inner world of nursery images, as opposed to the imagination that illuminates what is truly known) till she broke through, not caring, to that last giant lucidity. Robin Hyde (the idol of the abstract feminists, who would hate her work if they knew its meaning) making flowery tapestries from the life of Baron de Thierry, bringing in ‘rough stuff’ awkwardly, full of theatrical gestures, till she too struck oil, in China, and at last, like K.M., could write about the New Zealand jail she came from. Janet Frame, with her piercing asylum stories; Helen Shaw, writing chiefly of eccentrics; Sylvia Ashton- Warner, who writes so vividly of the infant room, but whose male characters are clouds in trousers; Marilyn Duckworth, whose heroine finds that what seemed a door was really painted on the wall – an exact dilemma, but why does she choose it? I will leave the poets aside, for they are a different hornets’ nest. But God help us, P—, these writers had to travel a long way before they got off the concrete and on to the grass – further than most of the boys have to go. There must be a reason for it.
I think it turns on that one essential writer’s virtue of honesty. As the world goes, we are all trained to be dishonest, from kindergarten upwards. If the
But the situation of a woman writer is different. She is usually holding on. She finds it harder to distinguish the dead wood from the green. Her domestic relationships very likely mean a great deal to her, and her attack (to be honest always means some measure of attack) is muffled at the outset by the fear that her anti-social writing may also be anti-human. The narrow optimism that rises in her when she sees a hydrangea bush in flower, or the real joy of hearing a child bawl for its milk, may easily divert her from the recognition that a hypocritical education has condemned her to a life of lies, a half-life in which most of her powers are unused. In Germany a lot of good housewives hated the Jewish intellectuals – ‘They analyse too much; they are immoral; they want to smash things’ – and threw in their lot with the ‘safe’ Nazis.
Do you think I am near the truth? It is probably only those who are particularly desperate, who have been all-but-killed by some virulent falsehood, who are prodded into writing. And what are the rewards? To become oneself, I think – to become oneself in a bottomless solitude, surrounded by the night. Nisi granum frumenti . . . I remember, for two hours, making boats out of silver paper and sailing them down the gutters of Dannevirke. The jail door swinging open.
Both these books are new studies of much-examined writers by critics of sufficient knowledge and intellectual subtlety to avoid the obvious and make the theme their own. Mr Kenner has the advantage, among critics of Eliot, of being an American. He sees Eliot as the great expatriate American poet which
‘Gerontion’ was written by an American, who, acquiring this corrupt tradition by great labour – notably by detailed studies of the later Jacobean dramatists – resembles no other American writer so much as he does Poe. . . Eliot’s ventriloquial pastiche incorporates with great deliberateness the possible historical range of every word, each word adjusted to its neighbours in order to generate a maximum of controlled ambiguity . . .
The parallel is a just one, which probably only an American critic could have deduced. Mr Kenner examines the entire range of Eliot’s work, critically, learnedly, and often wittily, giving us new bearings on Eliot the poet and reducing considerably the anonymity of Eliot the man.
Mr Levin’s book is an equally fruitful survey. He traces the development of Joyce as an artist with intricate knowledge and no discernible prejudice; and he has made a new contribution to the criticism of Joyce by providing an intelligible key to the hieroglyphic code of Finnegans Wake. The clue in this case is the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, an Italian anti-scholastic whom Joyce read with approval, who regarded history as a merry-go-round that repeats itself – in Joyce’s phrase, a ‘wholemole mill-wheeling vicociclometer’. In the dream of Mr Earwicker, that dubious and earthy Irish publican, the whole of human history revolves. And why indade should it not be so?
1961 (232)
It is natural that a review of the new Penguin anthology of New Zealand verse, edited by Allen Curnow, should take the form of a comparison with its immediate predecessor, An Anthology of New Zealand Verse, edited by Robert Chapman and Jonathan Bennett. In its most public form (more people read anthologies than will read separate volumes, and overseas readers will probably make their sole contact with New Zealand poetry through our anthologies) New Zealand poetry bears a resemblance to a three-legged stool – one taken from the cow byre perhaps, for the occasion. The Chapman anthology and the two Curnow anthologies are its legs. One can set aside A Treasury of New Zealand Verse, edited by Alexander and Currie, and Kowhai Gold, edited by Quentin Pope, for these selections are out of print and contain perhaps four good poems between them. On closer inspection one finds that the stool is actually two-legged. Mr Curnow’s A Book of New Zealand Verse, in its two editions, and the new Penguin book are, in fact, one book modified for differing occasions. Mr Curnow has himself pointed this by refurbishing for the new book what is in fact the Introduction for the old ones. In these
The editor of an anthology needs special qualities of training, intellect, and imagination. He should be thoroughly familiar with all possible sources. He should be able to distinguish a good poem from a bad one, and (a rare enough ability) the first-rate from the second-rate. He should be catholic in his sympathies, able to appreciate poetry of a kind which he, if he is a poet – and both Mr Curnow and Mr Chapman are themselves poets – might never dream of imitating. He should not be influenced by special piety towards old friends or (it goes without saying) special animus towards those who are not his friends. A further quality is indispensable for a New Zealand anthologist: he should provide a relatively just selection of all good poetry in the field. In England it might not be unfair for an anthologist of modern verse to omit, for one reason or another, examples of the work of Robert Graves. There would be other anthologists to pick up the fallen plums. In New Zealand, on account of the meagre avenues which exist for a poet’s work to reach a new public, it would be grossly unfair for an anthologist to make any major omissions.
In training and scholarship Mr Curnow and Mr Chapman need not be compared to either’s discredit, though I think it would be commonly acknowledged that Mr Curnow is the better poet. They have both scoured the archives for material. Mr Chapman rarely includes a poem of dubious merit. In the uncertain cases of Jessie Mackay and Hubert Church (the one, what Mr Curnow aptly calls a ‘ghost-poet’, and the other a didactic rhetorician) he might plead that the standard had to be lowered to admit any verse before the Twenties of this century; as Mr Curnow might also plead for his inclusion of the singularly empty verses of C.C. Bowen and Arthur H. Adams. But the scales tilt strongly against Mr Curnow’s selection when one sees that he has included four slight pieces by Arnold Wall (a competent versifier but scarcely a poet) and a turgid eight-page poem by B.E. Baughan in place of, let us say, a ballad by David McKee Wright. It is plain that Mr Curnow’s piety has misled him. He is considering Professor Wall, the man, rather than Arnold Wall, the versifier. And the inclusion of the ghost epic by B.E. Baughan may have happened on account of Mr Curnow’s intense preoccupation with landscape poetry, time, and the cult of isolation. The poem is about an isolated bush child brooding on time to be.
With poetry from the nineteen-twenties onwards both Mr Curnow and Mr Chapman are on firmer ground. They have a large amount of good verse to select from; and neither anthologist has included any real dross. As a result both books are of a high quality, and compare most favourably with Judith Wright’s recent disastrous selection of Australian poetry. There is still room, however, for the bias that comes from piety. It is possible that Mr Chapman included too many poems by James K. Baxter, because he wished to highlight the new development of New Zealand poetry in the Forties and Fifties, which
The bias would be less disturbing if new poets of the Forties and the Fifties were adequately represented. But Anton Vogt, Colin Newbury, Charles Doyle, Peter Bland, and Gordon Challis, all poets who have on occasion produced first-rate work, are not represented at all. M.K. Joseph is represented by three poems; Louis Johnson by three; Hubert Witheford by three; Paul Henderson by three; Alistair Campbell by two; Pat Wilson by two; W.H. Oliver by one. Two thin poems by David Elworthy and C.K. Stead’s lively London pastiche do not counterbalance the omissions. If Mr Curnow was looking for new substantial work, the poems of Barry Mitcalfe might well have served his turn. Mitcalfe is a maturer writer than Stead or Elworthy. The most disturbing feature of all is the total exclusion of verse by Mary Stanley. This poet is wittier than Ursula Bethell, more original and profound than Robin Hyde, though the body of her published work is small. It would not have been necessary for her to elbow out Gloria Rawlinson or Ruth Dallas, from each of whose writings Mr Curnow has made a wise selection, or some poorly represented other poet. It would have been sufficient for Mr Curnow to have whittled down some of the works included through piety in the earlier pages of the anthology.
There is no comparable bias in Mr Chapman’s anthology. He did a most valuable pioneering work in his magnificent, robust selection from Kendrick Smithyman’s poems. Though Mr Curnow also highlights Smithyman, he attempts to represent him as a nature poet preoccupied with historical themes, instead of the robust metaphysical love poet which he is. There is no comparable pioneering work in the Penguin book. One was crying out to be done by a bold anthologist. A full strong selection from the work of Louis Johnson (a poet as vigorous, varied, and uneven as Smithyman) would have astonished and delighted many readers, broken the monotonous sequences of nature poetry with which Mr Curnow regales us, and made literary history in this country. But Mr Johnson is not Mr Curnow’s cup of tea. The chance has been let slip through prejudice or timidity.
The delicate and difficult question of modesty in an anthologist must here be considered. With an exceptionally lengthy Introduction, some plodding translations from the Maori, notes on contributors, and his own well selected poems, Mr Curnow has written considerably more than a third of the actual words in the new Penguin book. As an editor he cannot be denied the right to do this, if he so pleases; but the impression is unfortunate. Mr Chapman made no such error in taste. His notes are few and his Introduction brief, though pithy. One has the impression that Mr Curnow genuinely desired
The central difference between the two anthologies is one of catholicity. There have been two revolutions in New Zealand poetry in the course of this century. The first was the movement of the Thirties, in which a Georgian style of writing was modified or rejected, while social changes within New Zealand opened the eyes of our poets to the unexplored history and physical environment of their country. The seeding influence of new writing being done overseas, especially in England, aided this revolution. In a sense this group developed a private mythology in which mountains symbolised many things and some ancestral voyage had been made and New Zealanders were very lonely people on the outskirts of the circus tent of the human family. The poems were good, especially the unselfconscious ballads of Denis Glover (Mason, though he wrote well, has been overrated; his range is very narrow indeed), but the mythology was private and often highly dubious. Unfortunately Mr Curnow takes it very seriously indeed. It is his Procrustes bed on which all New Zealand verse must be stripped and measured. In this he is not alone, since Charles Brasch, another member of the Thirties group, has exercised for many years, as editor of Landfall, our sole permanent and well known literary periodical, a similar restrictive influence. Though recent issues of Landfall indicate Mr Brasch’s genuine effort to broaden his editorial tastes, he has an ingrained predisposition to prefer poetry that chimes in with the mythology of the Thirties. I do not set aside the achievement of both men as writers; it is as editors that I suggest their influence has been restrictive and often pernicious.
The second revolution has been less obvious but no less complete. In the late Forties and the Fifties a number of poets seceded from the self-conscious New Zealandism of their immediate predecessors and began to write simply as people who happened to live in a given time and place. Their experiences frequently overlap with those of their predecessors but the sense of urgency about having been born a New Zealander seems to have gone for good.
Mr Curnow has recognised the first revolution (he was after all in the thick of it) but remained wholly blind to the second one. In his Introduction he postulates a specific New Zealand experience, an urgent sense of isolation founded on the sense of being ‘colonial’. The truth is that most New Zealanders
The Chapman anthology is a better book than the new Penguin one. But the Penguin one is cheaper, and this will probably facilitate its sales. A teacher in our secondary schools might do well to have both on his shelves.
Mr Oliver’s broad lucid account of the development of New Zealand poetry, with its full quotations from poets of both revolutions, should provide a salutary antidote to Mr Curnow’s New Zealandism. He rightly stresses the social content and the element of satire which has become pronounced in the writing of the Fifties. His bulletin is necessarily limited by its intended audience of secondary school pupils; but it is balanced enough to be of value to adult readers as well. One remembers Mr Oliver’s brief interim editorship of Landfall, in which he showed an essential catholicity of sympathies, and one cannot help considering what he might have done as editor of the Penguin book. Having no axe to grind, he is a good critic, generous, and exact, and the map he provides is a sound one.
1961 (233)
Many modern poets, whatever the quality of their work, do not try to recapture the ground annexed from poetry by the novelist and the prose playwright in the past hundred years. William Plomer, however, is a notable exception. His poems would often bear favourable comparison with sketches by Somerset Maugham. One notices first the variety of places which have supplied him with poetic material: Johannesburg, a flooded African river, a cave in the veldt, two Japanese hotels, a Greek café, a street girl’s flat in Maida Vale, the British Museum Reading Room, a beach at Ostend, a ski-lift in the Alps – each place the setting for a profound or witty poem; and infrequently Mr Plomer can be simultaneously witty and profound –
It may be that the highly relevant crocodile-image in ‘The Playboy of the Demi-World: 1938’ rose to Mr Plomer’s consciousness from a memory of South Africa, his country of birth. He is a satirist as profound as Horace or Juvenal; an all but vanished breed of poet. And his satire covers equally private lives and public follies. A certain lyrical fragility is evident in the later poems. The wit grows more urbane, and tragedy turns to pathos, as in the story of Margaret Mackintosh, the naiad of Ostend, who died from a surfeit of sea-bathing. But his best lines are carved on granite, evidence that a poet can be a man of the world and gain by it.
1961 (234)
Albert Camus’s play, The Possessed, is a posthumous publication. As such, it is bound to be of interest to those many readers who admired this great French writer and grieved at his early death. But those who look for the harsh lucidity of The Plague or The Myth of Sisyphus are likely to be disappointed. The play lacks the extraordinary light of intellectual compassion which permeates the novel of Dostoyevsky’s from which it is freely adapted, and in a very different way, Camus’s own original writings. Camus falls between two stools. He grafts existential theory and the violences of the French Resistance Movement upon Dostoyevsky’s martyrdom of nihilism. As a result the characters are like dough imperfectly shaped, limbo characters whose rage and despair and endless rationalisations seem curiously trivial. One would have to see a full stage production, however, to be sure of this.
The Blacks is a play about racialism, written for an all-Negro cast. In the irrational force of its rhetoric it comes close to the incantatory language of Haitian Voodoo rites; and the climax to which the play moves, a highly stylised, ritual murder of a white woman by a Negro man, possessed similar undertones. There is no doubt that M. Genet has understood and transcribed many of the subconscious tensions of a Negro community dominated by Europeans. Yet he has an axe to grind; the familiar axe of the intellectual who, disliking his own culture, idealises a more primitive one. I doubt if M.
1961 (235)
This poem, now published in a thoroughly attractive pale green pamphlet (the colour suits perhaps its Irish theme) appeared first in the pages of Landfall. It belongs to a special genre: the poem which has a centre of tension in poetry itself, albeit the poetry of another man. There are fairly obvious dangers in this type of poem. It is a mirror held up to a mirror. Mr Wilson’s verses could have been, in dubious humility, just a parasitic growth on the body of Yeats’s thought; or, short of this extreme, the internal argument of the poem might have lacked the necessary scaffolding of sense impressions hewn from Mr Wilson’s private plantation. By using Yeats’s imagery, he could have neglected fatally the need to use his own axe and saw. The analogy is apt enough; for Mr Wilson’s poems are the work of an expert bush-carpenter. He uses what he knows, nothing else, and often anything he knows.
I must confess that when I first read the poem, cursorily, in Landfall, it seemed unduly private, untidy and oblique. Since then I have gained a better appreciation of Mr Wilson’s methods. A strong, back-breaking effort to avoid the inflated phrase; a use of small coins when the fiver and the tenner are suspect (there are forgers among us, gentlemen); a romantic imagination governed and reversed by patient intellectual irony. These habits of thought and method link Mr Wilson with the younger Englishmen – D.J. Enright, for example. They suppose, by implication, an audience acquainted with the decay of rhetoric. At their worst they lead to the construction of birdcages with no birds inside; at their best they cut deep enough to draw blood. Mr Wilson does not lack depth. Perhaps the deepest irony of the poem can be found in its dedication to Alistair Campbell, the one undeviating Romantic of New Zealand poetry, and the use of anti-rhetorical language in praise of Yeats, the man who cleaned and re-loaded the gun of rhetoric for modern handling.
In the course of this six-hundred-line poem Mr Wilson describes in thorough detail a pilgrimage he made from England to Dublin to Sligo to Drumcliff and Ballylee, in order to visit two shrines: the grave of Yeats and the Tower he lived in. To make effective pilgrimages one has to be a believer. A belief in the world-transforming power of a great poet’s mind – that may serve, at least, as an approximate formula of the piety which subtly sustains the poem, and fills its crevices like honey in the comb. But Mr Wilson has put it much better –
It is clear that the informing spirit of Yeats’s poetry had become for Mr Wilson, in New Zealand, more than a gift to be grateful for; rather the spirit of a cult, in the best sense of that doubtful word. Yeats was the banyan tree under which Mr Wilson and his friends could converse, act or meditate in spiritual security. New Zealanders may have a special need of such protection, in a culture that fluctuates between intellectual and animal crudity. And how powerfully Mr Wilson expresses the strength of the bond! But the final tenor of the poem is tragic. He finds the mansion of Coole a wreck, where Lady Gregory held court for the Irish intelligentsia, and no comfort at Yeats’s grave. After nightmare wanderings and misdirections he arrives at the Tower itself, the hub in time and space of the mythic universe Yeats inhabited. It too is a ruin –
If the climax of the poem is a disillusioned piety, an expulsion from some chamber of knowledge where heroic words had meaning, its secondary power lies in the blow-by-blow description of a circuitous journey through the Irish countryside. A most effective quiet realism supplies the scaffolding
1961 (236)
These two books, apparently dissimilar, have one thing in common. Both authors approach the mysteries and authoritative structure of the Roman Catholic Church with a view to finding some plainer human explanation of her nature and function than the Church herself would give them. I must confess I prefer the mythopoeic creation of Royidis to the laboured reasonings of Jaroslav Pelikan. Pope Joan is a hilariously funny book, in the anti-clerical style of Rabelais and Boccaccio, though lacking the volcanic gusto of the first master and the cynic wisdom of the second. The Greek Orthodox Church authorities who banned the book and excommunicated Royidis must have lacked a sense of humour. It is pleasing to note that the French Catholic press, gave the book a good welcome (in the Sixties of the last century) for its very real literary qualities and did not rise to the bait of an imaginary female Pope.
It seems that Royidis was a little in love with his creation and could not be dissuaded from the view that she had actually existed. She did exist, of course – not on the Fisherman’s throne, but in the caverns and half-light of the mediaeval mind where fact and folk-tradition lay inextricably mingled – and what humorous man could grudge her that reality? The anti-clerical humorous tradition is a safeguard against the solemn follies of bookmen. It eases the stresses that the demand for holiness imposes on brittle human nature, shows the man below the surplice, casts out the cruel Calvinist or Jansenist logic and gives the saddle-galled Ass in us a chance to kick and bray.
There is no point in setting down here a chart and synopsis of the wanderings and love-life of Johanna. They are riotous, often erotic, never obscene, and loaded with pseudo-theological gunpowder. I commend the book to any sane reader, excluding bigots, prudes and children, and any who still accept as gospel the ravings of ‘Maria Monk’. Royidis could not have had a better translator than Lawrence Durrell, the wittiest and broadest- minded novelist of our time. Very likely Durrell has improved on the Greek original.
Jaroslav Pelikan is a solemn and well-meaning writer. He takes us on a conducted tour of the Church. He writes – ‘Neither Mary nor Pilate is important as a figure in history except for the role each of them played in the career of our Lord.’ He laments the division of Christendom and recommends that Protestants and Catholics should learn more from each other’s faith and practice. He has not quite grasped, however, the difference between a formula and a family – that the first requires only a brain to conceive it (an electronic
1961 (237)
Sir: I must thank your correspondent ‘Zosimos’ for his criticism of my review of Harry Levin’s book on Joyce; and for supplying me with information that I did not possess before – namely, that ‘the importance of Vico as a structural basis for Finnegan’s Wake has been known since 1929’. It was not known by me. The other points your correspondent raises seem to concern matters of taste and interpretation, on which we happen to hold different views. I am glad that somebody reads my reviews, even if only to disagree.
1961 (238)
It would be easy to write off Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Incense to Idols as a bad cheque. The academic critics will do that like a shot. I remember Grigson’s long, careful, destructive analysis of Dylan Thomas’s work, in which he proved by algebra to his own satisfaction that Thomas was writing crap: obscure, bombastic crap. The point about Thomas, of course, is that he was writing up to his neck in a bog, the bog of his own instincts, with speech wrung out of him by the knowledge of a birth behind and a death to come. The speech carries the electric charge of the situation. And the obscure creative anguish that lies behind Thomas’s work is not so very different from that which lies behind Spinster and Incense to Idols. I began writing about this book in the Grigson style (it is a habit I slip into easily from hearing the sound of my own voice too often when I talk for money to Adult Education classes) and then repented my error and burnt the bad words. I will not count the adjectives, check the cross-references, compare it adversely with Flaubert, in the college staffroom game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo. No, it may be misshapen, but it is a genuine birth. I will enumerate the things I think Sylvia Ashton-Warner has managed to do in this strange, makeshift, crude, showy, sophisticated, magnificent book.
She has thrown away the best part of Spinster, the intricate classroom relationship of the woman teacher with her Maori kids, and developed a new book from the cloudier part – the relationship of the woman teacher to the men in or out of her life. I do not suggest that Germaine de Beauvais is the same character as the heroine of Spinster. She bears the same relation to her prototype that the fully fledged butterfly does to its horny pupa. Where thepar excellence: brandy and music certainly, but wit and courage and youth and the full resources of the make-up box as well.
It is in the creation of Germaine’s Mask-Self that the author shows her finest subtlety. I think the critics who have tagged Germaine as nymphomaniac are totally mistaken. A man’s love means, for Germaine, his belief in her Mask, her magical totem; and the Minister baffles and frustrates her above all by his refusal to believe in it. Coition, when it occurs, is an aid to Mask-worship, never vice versa. The clue is given clearly in the title of the book.
In a way, the author has spiked the critics’ guns in advance, by the ruthless simplification of letting Germaine tell her own story, with no back-chat from the bystanders. At no point do we see her through the eyes of her lovers, friends or acquaintances. But supposing the Minister, Brett Guymer, had kept a diary, and noted down –
Friday the 13th. Called on Mrs Jones. At least she calls herself Jones, though her real name is de Beauvais. A Minister’s life can be tough. She met me all dolled up and seemed to want to entice me into bed. Potiphar’s wife without a husband. Her trouble is brandy, hysteria and too much introspection. Grief at the death of her husband, perhaps? Unpromising ground. Must be charitable to the stranger within our gates. But hysteric cases are very difficult. Help me, Lord, to shoulder this cross also . . .
It would have smashed the fascinating subjective web of Germaine’s meditations as a flowering shrub is smashed by a boulder. The author has chosen the right course. We see Germaine’s world solely through her own eyes. The profound validity of the novel lies in its subjective truth. The creative monologue is Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s natural medium, as it is Henry Miller’s or Samuel Beckett’s, and while she could perhaps polish it more, she would be a fool to abandon it.
It would be unwise, though, to consider the book a study in abnormal psychology. Certainly Germaine does not resemble the vegetable sheep and whimsical nonentities so dear to the N.Z.B.C. But her amorality does not seem to me to amount to any real abnormality. She tends to reject the Reality principle as a peculiar and obstructive creation of the masculine intelligence. This is not new. One can imagine Eve’s original conversation with Adam – ‘Adam, dear, the apple tastes lovely. I have felt much more at ease with myself since I swallowed it. If you really loved me, you would take that prim look off your face and have a bite too. I know it’s good; and no intellectual guff will convince me otherwise . . .’. There is no doubt a Germaine in the heart of even the best-behaved suburban housewife. One cannot quarrel with the author of Incense to Idols for her thorough exploitation of such a basic theme. When Germaine has procured an abortion, or stolen another woman’s husband, she says in effect – ‘It’s all right because it’s me that’sis subjective, it would falsify the account if Germaine were unduly self-critical.
The Mask is the central creation, Germaine’s lifework; and I suggest that it is an entirely normal feature of female psychology. It is noticeable that none of Germaine’s boyfriends speak to her without at least a minimum of courtesy; and while such forbearance is not likely among the Lotharios of New Zealand society, it is subjectively correct, since discourtesy would imply disregard for the Mask, and Germaine would suppress the knowledge of any such event as unbearable. Furthermore, though her affairs are frequent and tangled, she never makes direct reference in her narrative to the act of coition itself. Such decorum would be true to character, since coition is the one point in a love affair when the Mask is most in danger, from the grating of conscience and above all the sense of being dishevelled and not wholly mistress of the situation.
Germaine, as we all do, warps reality to fit the pattern of her strongest desires. As a result she is the only complete character in the book. But what a character! We have become used to the rogue male as commentator in the New Zealand novel (Sargeson, John Mulgan, Davin, Cross) and here is the rogue female commenting on life behind the woollen curtain. Germaine is a French exile who settles in a New Zealand town. It could be Hastings. I do not think the objective identification of the character or the place is of much importance; though the academic boys will probably spend all their bullets on that target. Within the limits of the interior world of the heroine one can accept her self-identification with the symbolic city of Babylon and the nature-god Baal. Her fascinated and tragic pursuit of the non-conformist Minister is seen wholly in her own terms of reference. He too must be fascinated: he must accept the Mask as the true key to her personality. He may of course be repelled, by the threat to his brittle purity. But the third alternative of charitable indifference is unthinkable to Germaine. She is a practising solipsist. The only Power which she recognises as greater than herself is situated in the Church Puritan and its Spokesman. And this Reality principle is inimical to her very life, since she would be forced, if she accepted its domination, not only to recognise herself as a being subject to spiritual laws, but also to demolish the Mask, her adored second Self. In a sense she is the woman-who-tries-to-seduce-God; and her failure is her catastrophe.
Incense to Idols expresses in dramatic form an Outsider’s comment on New Zealand society. It is suitable that the comment should be made through the mouth of an ex-Parisian. The Kiwi, stripped of his feathers, is seen through her eyes as a most ungainly bird. Brett Guymer, for example, is a typical Hawke’s Bay steer, a small-town Gideon who derives his spiritual strength from the confusion of inhibition and virtue. Germaine is captivated, poor girl, by his mellifluous preaching voice. He is in fact a prophet of the sameSylvia Ashton-Warner exaggerates the danger of the situation. A false answer, for Germaine, proves more disastrous than no answer at all. A man truly skilled in spiritual direction might have been able to help her; but such men are found rarely, if at all, among the Guymers of this world.
The minor characters – a boy drunkard, a violent musician, a pillar of the Kirk who does not mind sleeping with Germaine while his wife is in hospital, a local doctor – make their contribution to Germaine’s life-pattern. They rarely step out of their places in the dance. Their conversations are perhaps too often set pieces. But I must stress finally the strong element of wit and satire which saves the book always from incoherence and puts a skin on what the author has to say. I raise my hat to her. She has given us the fullest, clearest, most precise document of a woman’s interior life to appear yet in New Zealand literature.
1961 (239)
Madeleine Slade, the daughter of Admiral Slade, born in 1892, grew up in India and in England in the conventional chrysalis of the upper middle class milieu to which she belonged. Some unmarried women in this situation may learn to paint, collect bric-a-brac, or take to drink or spiritualism. Madeleine Slade did something much more unpredictable. In 1925, after a conversation with Romain Rolland, she travelled to India and became Mira Behn, the trusted lieutenant and spiritual daughter of Mahatma Gandhi. This book is her autobiography. It is a true saga of the spirit. It contains an unsentimental account of her difficult adjustment to a life of poverty and Hindu asceticism. Her admiration and love for Gandhi is perhaps too unqualified – but saints do inspire absolute devotion in their followers. The most interesting feature of all is her description of the way Gandhi gradually weaned her from a personal love for him to an unattached charity towards her fellow men. There are many valuable insights and observations in this book for the Western student of Gandhi’s life and work.
The Marriage of Gor is sub-titled ‘the true account of a white girl’s life with a black man’ – not vice versa. Miss Lawrie, who tells the tale, unfortunately lacks the inter-racial consciousness of Mira Behn. As a voluntary do-gooder, she visits Koku Gor and his de facto wife Doris over a period of eighteen months, and finally persuades them to legalise their relationship. But though she learns to care for them, and they for her, there is little sign that she has learnt by the end of the book to modify her conditioned response to lack
1961 (240)
Sir: I had hoped to avoid an elaborate controversy with your correspondent ‘Zosimos’ about the principles of critical reviewing. But since he has reopened discussion, I will make two necessary points.
I do not consider it only a matter of interpretation that Harry Levin’s book on James Joyce has been published seventeen years. On the other hand, this fact, of which I was unaware, has practically no bearing on the content of my review. There is a principle of accuracy involved. I think that a reviewer is bound to be accurate within the limits of his knowledge; but I do not think that a reviewer must necessarily have a full, scholarly, bibliographical knowledge of the background of the book he reviews. It depends, of course, on what periodical he is reviewing for. A review, let us say, of an anthropological work by Sir Peter Buck, for the Polynesian Journal, would have to be exhaustive and scholarly; a review of the same book for the Listener might be scholarly, but would not have to be. My own qualifications for reviewing Levin’s book were a full knowledge of Joyce’s writings, not scholarly but literary. I think that ‘Zosimos’ is expecting scholarly qualifications.
When I write of Joyce’s ‘hieroglyphics’ I am employing it as a metaphor. The exact term for Joyce’s coinages (another metaphor, I fear) would be ‘neologisms’. Apparently ‘Zosimos’ holds that a reviewer may not use metaphor. This is certainly a point where we differ radically on a point of taste; and I think that ‘Zosimos’ would find that an overwhelming weight of literary opinion would fall on my own side of the scales (another metaphor, I regret to say).
1961 (241)
The poems of Dom Moraes have maturity, the seal of a personal idiom that comes less from the conquest of form than from a world of experience accepted and understood in solitude:
I quote from the second of two poems ‘From Tibet’; and I would claim that these simple words are in themselves the pure blood of poetry, quite inestimable. It is the place the words come from that gives them their peculiar weight and resonance: not Tibet, no, but a contemplative silence on the far side of human conflict, longed for by many, reached by a few men only in each generation. There are reasons why Dom Moraes should be such a man and writer. Indian by birth, he has survived the wintry invigoration of an English literary training. Hence he is the one Indian poet with complete colloquial mastery of the English tongue. Further, he has not chosen to deny his race, but accepted the deep exile of being an Indian to Englishmen and an Englishman to Indians.
Such solitude is very rare. It places him precisely at the confluence of two cultures. It is possible that the inward injunction – ‘Know yourself ’ – came to him in a harsher form – ‘Know yourself or die.’ Moraes knows himself, and writes of India and England with deep tenderness, knowledge, and a most individual savour of irony. These twenty-five poems are a true portent, like a meteor in a dark sky. Moraes is probably a great poet, and probably also the one person who does not care greatly about it. The finest poems in the book are love poems.
1961 (242)
In 1953 Dr Walter Oakeshott, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, found by chance a hitherto unknown poem in the autograph of Raleigh, which proved to be one of those addressed to Queen Elizabeth under the name of Cynthia. The poem was written on the flyleaf of a notebook compiled by Raleigh himself while he was writing the History of the World, during the long imprisonment in the Tower which preceded the final voyage to Guiana and his execution on his return from it. With the inimitable enthusiasm of the literary historian, Dr Oakeshott has sifted out, from this slender beginning, the relation of Raleigh the courtier to his maiden Queen, in the light of the verses which she encouraged him to write to her. The pity is that the poems
She was on terms of delightful intimacy with many of her administrators and courtiers; not only with Robert Dudley, ‘her eyes’, but with her ‘spirit’, Burghley, her ‘Moon’, Walsingham, and with her ‘Mutton’ or ‘Bell-wether’, Hatton . . . Hatton found reason to suppose that Raleigh, whom she nicknamed ‘Water’, was replacing him in her affections . . . There came a time when some one man, Raleigh it might be, or later Essex, was universally recognised to have attained a dominating, if hazardously insecure position, and when the Court rivalries assumed the aspect of a girl’s school rather than that of an adult society . . .
It follows that this book is about two things: the poetry of Raleigh and the pathology of ambition. As a study of the first, it has its interest; as a study of the second, it lacks a true analytical discernment.
1961 (243)
These thirty-eight essays on Dylan Thomas are divided into two sections, headed respectively ‘The Man’ and ‘The Poet’. In practice the two categories overlap. One can say roughly that, among those who write of the man, some could see round his alcoholism and some could not. Augustus John, Lawrence Durrell, Philip Burton, John Davenport, Louis MacNeice, and above all, Roy Campbell, seem to have grasped that the man was bigger than his bio- chemistry, and so they have much good news to report of Thomas living; whereas others are daunted and confused. This is Roy Campbell’s inimitable comment:
He was quite stout now, but I recognised the voice and the eyes. What he had lost in beauty he had made up in character, wit, and knowledge. Those extraordinary bumps on his forehead had grown more rugged. He was less self-conscious and had none of that English reserve and restraint which he had affected for the first half hour when I met him first. Success had made him modest instead of having the usual opposite effect . . .
Campbell’s portrait is very positive and convincing. Thomas’s American friends, however, seem to have been more easily hypnotised by the nimbus of mediumistic grandeur that surrounded his verse-readings. And since Americans are usually at heart conventional people, Thomas’s alcoholic ribaldry often shocked them more than it need have done. The English portraits are the best.
On the other hand the American critics of Thomas’s poetry are on the whole more perceptive than the English. They never come near making, for example, the grotesque mistake that Geoffrey Grigson made when he dismissed the poetry as the ‘peeling off of dirty drawers’. American critics appear to understand symbolism. Even Karl Shapiro’s debunking essay treats the work with full seriousness.
The book provides, in its totality, an interesting corrective to the Thomas legend and comes as near as a book can to giving a clear outline of the life and work of this many-sided man.
1961 (244)
Mr Rieff’s sympathetic yet truly critical study of Freud exposes certain confusions which underlie the norms of mechanist psychology. On the one hand Freud admired the ‘instinctual hero’; on the other, the aim of Freudian psychiatry is not the triumph of instinct over moral feelings but the ‘reconciliation of instinct and intelligence’. Mr Rieff’s study is lucid, thoughtful and temperate. One can freely recommend it to the ordinary reader.
Professor Kauffman is a less temperate writer. His book belongs to that genre in which literary figures of different eras are made to rub shoulders, exchange compliments, and express opinions which they might or might not have acceded to. It seems that the author has two unrelated major aims – to prove that Shakespeare, Goethe and various other great writers, were agnostics, and to prove that subjective enthusiasm in philosophy produced and could again produce Fascism and anti-Semitic atrocities. In neither aim does he wholly succeed, for his illustrations are frequently arbitrary, though the quality of his thought is diverse and fecund.
It is pleasant to meet in Dr Wilson’s survey and analysis of Yeats’s symbolism a book that one can praise without reservation. He examines Four Plays for Dancers, The Cat and the Moon, and twelve related poems, and interprets them by a broad use of the alchemical and Hermetic philosophy which undoubtedly influenced Yeats’s thought. A good analysis deepens one’s understanding of a text. The subtlety and vigour of Dr Wilson’s exposition leaves nothing to be desired, and any student of Yeats will gain immensely by reading it.
1961 (245)
Though this new collection by A.D. Hope contains several poems not included in The Wandering Islands, there is none which shows any striking advance in theme or method. Mr Hope’s broad, direct narrative style, hisAustralian Poetry, 1960. But he is still the most vigorous poet in modern Australia.
The anthology itself is unremarkable. In this selection from a year’s Australian verse, all the poems are competent and all lack fire. The best poems are ‘Lament for the Makers’, by Vincent Buckley (a modern version of Dunbar’s masterpiece) and ‘The Garden of Ships’, by Douglas Stewart, who is slowly growing in strength and lucidity.
Fyodor Tyutchev influenced the development of Pasternak’s poetry. These translations carry a strange spirit of desolation, which can only have come from their originals –
The lines here quoted are taken from a piece ‘On His Brother’s Death’; but they are characteristic of the undercurrent of Tyutchev’s work. It is a harsh, original voice speaking from a hundred years ago, and through the words of the translator. Since nearly all translations from the Russian are absurdly inept, I hope that Charles Tomlinson will continue to use his rare talent in this way. We could do with some good translations from Pushkin and from Blok.
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The new writers in this prose anthology – A.O. Chayter, Alan Coren, Ted Hughes, Jim Hunter, Julian Mitchell, Jason McManus – are all British, with the exception of the last named, who is an American. One remembers nostalgically that great fountain of modern prose (documentary and fictional) which burst forth in John Lehmann’s New Writing, and never became a river, but sank back underground. These later writers, none of them old, possess many virtues but lack hope; and so they lack gusto, which needs hope to survive. I recommend ‘The Cactus Land’ by Alan Coren as an exact account of the relation between the Arab gigolo and an American woman tourist. It has the sardonic bite of Moravia. His fellow writers do not reach this standard, though all are very readable.
The novel by Kamala Markandaya has not the communal breadth of her earlier work, Nectar in a Sieve, but it is perfectly and simply made. She tells the story of an Indian clerk whose wife has begun to follow a guru, to gain release from physical and spiritual sickness. His sense of insecurity leads him to seek out prostitutes (she, as a Hindu wife, would withhold blame) and bring pressure on the guru to leave the neighbourhood; he is successful, but the guru conquers on another level, for he finds he can no longer close his heart to his destitute fellow-creatures. As a sketch of a warm, mature marital relationship subjected to hard stresses, this novel lacks nothing. It could scarcely have been written outside India, where the mutual obligations of husband and wife are so strictly and sanely defined. The author has a sovereign command of English, and this is a rare thing even among the best Indian writers.
1961 (247)
They sat on opposite sides of the table in the small room. A young man, his clothes a little grubby, his dark hair uncut in front of his ears in the new-old side-lever fashion. A thickset grey-haired priest with the black gown and belt of a Religious. The young man stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette nervously. ‘. . . Gloria was too young. Father, I don’t think she understood what marriage means. First there was lodging trouble. She had to stay in that damned flat all day, with a new baby, sharing a kitchen with only a lot of sour old hens to talk to. And then there was in-law trouble. My mother disliked her from the start because she wasn’t a Catholic. Oh, she was pleasant enough, she’d talk about the child and so on, but cold as an iceberg underneath . . .’. ‘Was your wife ever instructed about the Faith?’
‘Yes, Father, she was, but I think it was just water off a duck’s back. Of course, I didn’t help much. I’d played around a bit before I met Gloria; and then when the rows began, I used to go out and get tight. If I hadn’t loved her, I wouldn’t have cared so much. It was my fault as much as hers.’
‘You say she’s applied for a divorce?’
‘Yes, Father. She wants to marry this other bloke. He’s an electrician or something . . .’.
‘How long have you been living apart?’
‘Three years. I’ve tried to get her back, but she won’t play. She’s not nasty about it. She just says it was all a mistake.’
‘And what about this other woman? What kind of relationship is there between you?’
The young man’s face lightened. ‘She’s a very good friend, that’s all. I never knew till I met Barbara what a woman’s friendship could be like. We go out to the pictures now and then together. And sometimes I go round to her place
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-five. Two years older than me.’ ‘Does she know you’re married?’
‘Of course. I told her the second time we met. I know she likes me, Father, but she’s a good Catholic. She never lets me kiss her or anything like that . . .’. ‘I take it you’ve tried.’ The priest’s voice was sharp. The young man flushed and shifted on the hard chair.
‘Of course, Father. God help us, I’m only human.’
The priest’s face softened and he spoke more gently. ‘That’s the trouble, Kevin. We’re all of us only human. If you continue to see this girl, except in the company of other friends, the strain will be too great for both of you. You’re placing her soul in danger as well as your own. God won’t give us the grace to resist temptation if we deliberately seek occasions of sin. And what have you got to offer her? You’re a married man. Let her go and find someone else. It’ll be hard at first, but better in the long run.’
‘What do I do then?’ the young man said roughly. ‘If Gloria gets her divorce, I’m still married in the eyes of the Church. I might go on for fifty years yet, not married or unmarried. Do I have to live like a hermit?’
The priest was silent. His red, lined face looked tired. His hands were tucked in the sleeves of his gown.
‘It’s different for you,’ said the young man. ‘You’ve taken a vow of celibacy. I never took one.’
The priest rose to his feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You know the answer yourself. Look up there’ – he pointed to the large wood-and-plaster crucifix on the whitewashed wall – ‘to the world that looks like nonsense. Death. The end of life. To the Church – and that means you and me – it’s the only life possible. We have to join Him in order to save our souls. Often unwillingly. But it’s only then we begin to understand why we were born.’
For a minute or more the young man stayed seated, looking at the crucifix. Then he crossed himself and stood up.
‘Well, Father, Barbara’s waiting outside. Do you think it’s all right for me to tell her how we stand?’
The priest smiled an extraordinarily warm smile, like light reflected on a pool of water. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘explain it to her. But don’t go home together.’ He paused, then spoke again. ‘And ask the Blessed Mother of God to help you. Put everything into her hands and leave it there.’ Then more gently, ‘Pray for me.’
The priest watched from the window. He saw the young man cross the rainy street in the darkness lit by a few street-lamps. From an open garage door a tall girl in an overcoat stepped out. The priest could see the clear-cut, wide mouth, the bright eyes, and the red-gold hair under a hood. She was
1961 (248)
Sir: I think that your correspondents are gravely mistaken in their estimate of Fleur Adcock’s prize-winning festival poem. No doubt the full rhyme and tom-tom rhythms of Tennyson’s In Memoriam would have contented them; but each poet has to find his or her personal idiom. Fleur Adcock’s poem relies on conversational rhythms and delicate half-rhymes. The final shape, appropriate for an elegy, is like that of stone from the quarry with some of the chisel-marks showing. The reticence and indirectness of the poem seemed to me, after several readings, to give an exact and very moving impression of grief held in check by a difficult resignation. It did surprise me that a prize- winning poem should also have happened to be a very good one and I was glad that the Listener had chosen to make it available to a wide audience.
1961 (249)
The translator of these last poems by Boris Pasternak tells us that the poet’s intended Russian title for the collection was a phrase of two words, meaning roughly, ‘When the weather is going to clear up.’ The fact that we know the weather did not clear up for Pasternak gives an edge to our inquiry into his work. One realises before one is half-way through the book, with an old frustration renewed, the severe limits of all verse translation. Michael Harari has no doubt done a thoroughly workmanlike job. At times the page leaps to life –
And one suspects bitterly that the Russian on each alternate page is loaded with such significant images that have been damaged in transit across the English frontier. There is another obstacle. Pasternak happened to be a major novelist and a minor poet. These small, glass-like pastoral slides shown on the
Padraic Colum would not agree with the character in one of Yeats’s love poems who speaks of Ireland as ‘a land of plaster saints’ or with the bare violent wit of Brendan Behan. Unfortunately Colum writes as if Ireland were always holy; he lacks the needle of satire to thread his beads together, and they spread and roll on the floor. The best thing in the book is a bare non- Irish poem on the Stations of the Cross.
1961 (250)
Recently I received a letter from a young New Zealand poet, in which he made the following comments on The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and Mr Curnow’s methods of editing and selection:
. . . One more thing, Jim. I know I’m only David, but I think my Goliath in question has plenty of weak spots. (Allen Curnow in the
Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse– I’ve had a glimpse at it.) I think that not only is he downright wrong about your poetry, in many ways, but seems to show a strange ignorance, even antipathy towards it.I’m no judge, yet it sticks out. Have I any foundation for my suspicions at all? I disagree with his well-written thesis on N.Z. poetry too, in his Introduction. If he is a friend of yours, I hope I am not offending, Jim, but what a queer exposé . . .
About the same time I received a letter from another New Zealand poet, which contained this passage:
. . . I am thinking of a review you wrote of the
Penguin Book of New Zealand VerseinEducation, or some such educational review. While you. . . defended the rights of other poets to be included or to be included at greater length in this volume, of your own selection you said you were reasonably satisfied. I might be wrong . . . but it did seem to me that you were done less than justice. Of the poems inIn Fires of No Returnwhich I presume you especially wanted preserved, there was only one or two in thePenguin. And of your later poems which seem to me your very best (I am thinking of the third part ofFires) if I am not mistaken, there were none at all . . .
These interesting comments, from people who had no axe to grind and with whom I had never discussed the Penguin Book, started me thinking again. Since this particular anthology is likely to have a wide circulation in New Zealand, and may be in many cases the only means by which overseas readers are able to form an opinion of New Zealand verse, it may be worthwhile to go
About a year before the book was published, the proof sheets happened to come accidentally into my hands. I had known previously that Mr Curnow was preparing a new anthology, and hoped that he would broaden his very personal view of New Zealand poetry and include a just selection from the poetry of the Forties and the Fifties. Mr Curnow’s view is well expressed in a line from one of his best poems –
This second whimpering unlicked self my country. . . .
This view of one’s country as an extension of oneself can provide a powerful metaphor; but when it is applied to the work of other writers, in the Introduction and selection for an anthology, the results can be absurd and disastrous. One fears that Mr Curnow as editor has seen himself as a mother bear licking her cubs into shape.
On reading the proof-sheets, I found that Mr Curnow had made some mistakes disastrous if the book were to be more than a private thesis illustrated by poems selected to prove the thesis. With a long Introduction, translations from the Maori, his own verse, and copious notes, he had written more than a third of the anthology himself. In selections from individual poets, he had shown a gross bias in two ways – by excluding new work of the Forties and Fifties, except when it came from poets already established in his pantheon; by selecting poems to represent his individual view of New Zealand writing as blood issuing from a deep wound of neocolonial isolation, regardless of the actual main preoccupation of the poets concerned. His selection of my own work suffered under the second head, though not under the first.
I wrote to Mr Curnow and to Penguin Books, pointing out that I could not allow any of my own poems to be included in so unrepresentative an anthology, making it quite clear that the bias in his selection of my own verse would not alone have led me to take this step. An editor must be allowed his foibles. But Mr Curnow’s appallingly meagre selection from work of the Forties and the Fifties amounted to a grave injustice to the poets concerned. Several other poets joined with me in refusing to allow their work to be included, since Mr Curnow showed no intention of amending his selection; and my eventual agreement to let my work be included in the book was given with deep reluctance, and only when I realised that not all the other poets concerned could continue to withhold their work. I remember too that Mr Brasch, the editor of Landfall, urged me very strongly to allow my work to be included and protest only when the book was published. My respect for Mr Curnow was also a factor. It seemed better that a bad anthology should be published than that either of us should fall into a tedious wrangle which might involve personalities.
In the following eclogue I have selected passages from Mr Curnow’s Introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, and commented on them in such a way that there is the give-and-take of conversation expressing two widely differing points of view.
Mr Curnow: This is a stranger country than either strangers or its own inhabitants have been accustomed to suppose . . .
Reader: There’s a taniwha breathing down my neck? Dear me, Mr Curnow, you really scared me that time. I wish you’d put away that wand and explosive powder.
Mr Curnow: Such questions drop into a silence, broken only by a whispering of Pacific winds and surges, unless a New Zealand critic can offer intelligible answers.
Reader: I begin to feel drowsy. Why, why, do you have to impersonate the Ancient Mariner, Mr Curnow? I’d almost rather be caught in the five o’clock traffic in Cuba Street, or meet a bodgie with a bike-chain in the La Scala.
Mr Curnow: There is an island story here, which is the human and historical context of the poetic vision. If it is not told, at least in part, the poems cannot be known everywhere for what they are, or correctly compared with other verse in English. This is part of my excuse for an Introduction of more than ordinary scope . . .
Reader: It’s not really a good enough excuse. Your prodigious Introduction is an example of the tail trying to wag the dog. They must have given you a real bad time at Oxford and Yale. And since when was ‘poetic vision’ not itself human and historical?
Mr Curnow: It may be said here, in passing, that the pakeha (European) has generally felt his own New Zealand tradition to be enriched and dignified by association with those older Pacific navigators and colonists, his forerunners and fellow-citizens . . .
Reader: A nice gesture, Mr Curnow. It would do quite well in a brochure from the National Publicity Studios. But it might have been more to the point to have made some comment on the verse of Hone Tuwhare, or even to have included a couple of his poems in place of your own painstakingly academic translations.
Mr Curnow: There are good lyrics of our later times – like Pat Wilson’ssuperficially no sign that the poet has still to reckon with anxieties about his country, his very footing on the earth, and how he stands towards any tradition.
Reader: May you not be projecting something into the poems you read, Mr Curnow? The peculiar anxieties you detect, or think you detect, may spring from the usual difficulties in getting a girl-friend or a job. I can’t speak for Spear or Fairburn, but I suggest that a Pole who had the job of sweeping out a morgue might feel just the same about it as a New Zealander. Since I last had the D.T.s I’ve not had the slightest worry about my footing on the earth – no, I’m not worried, as you are, by a fear that New Zealand might slide off the map, and I actually enjoy earthquakes. And as for traditions, there are two kinds to consider, literary and social. Anxieties about the breakdown of social tradition are common to Western culture, wherever village life has been replaced by the factory and the suburb; and the breakdown in literary tradition is probably more marked in Chelsea or Greenwich Village.
Mr Curnow: Time and loneliness have taught them to discover, what their colonial forebears could not, ‘where they lie, and what realm it was they so rudely and rashly disturbed.’
Reader: There’s another taniwha coming down the chimney! Please, please, Mr Curnow, throw away that magic crystal. You quote from D’Arcy Cresswell, who spent most of his life in London – a very Romantic writer indeed. But surely many New Zealanders have been much more frightened by the waving of a curtain in an empty room, or by the fact they had just put the typist in pod, than by the sight of the Rimutakas by moonlight. The typist might be Cockney and the curtain may have been made in Honolulu.
Mr Curnow: Butler knew also ‘that dreadful doubt as to my own identity.’
Reader: Perhaps Samuel Butler’s vicarage training had something to do with it. Would you suggest that the heroine of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry is psychotic because she is a New Zealander, or for some more personal reason? It is possible that even a New Zealander could get some advantage from studying Freud.
Mr Curnow: David McKee Wright’s ‘In the Moonlight’ is no better than a journalist’s jingle . . .
Reader: Tut, tut, Mr Curnow. That was unwise of you. Some of those present have written journalist’s jingles. McKee Wright has given a vivid impression
Mr Curnow: I like Tregear’s ‘Te Whetu Plains’ because it expresses, with none of the familiar flatteries and pretences, the colonist’s true response to a landscape he found not merely alien, but repellent and terrifying . . . His poem expresses a mood which other and later New Zealand poets have had: as if all human history had lapsed behind them, ‘and left strange quiet here’.
Reader: The mysticism of the Void can be very compelling. But why do you so much prefer the mental constipation of the man who sees only himself and a repellent scenic backdrop to McKee Wright’s view of a country populated by nomadic casual labourers?
Mr Curnow: She (Blanche Baughan) cannot bear to leave little Thor Reden in the ‘disconsolate kingdom’ where she found him, and there is true feeling, not merely the facile optimism of her generation, in the interrogations with which the poem concludes.
Reader: If this unfortunate subnormal child is meant to symbolise the soul of New Zealand, I find that I, unlike Miss Baughan, can leave him behind with the greatest alacrity. But apparently you cannot, Mr Curnow, since you devote eight pages of your meagre selection to this poet’s turgid groanings, thus leaving still less room for the writers of the Forties and Fifties.
I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood. . . .Mr Curnow: She (Katharine Mansfield) may not have been more than twenty when she wrote the passionate stumbling prose (for it is barely verse) of her little-known poem in memory of the Polish dramatist-patriot Wyspianski:
The telling word is ‘taint’. A New Zealand critic must not try to gloss over its implications. The feeling is something like shame for her country: for its childish clumsiness, its merely physical preoccupations (‘handled the clay with rude fingers’), its ignorance of, indifference to, ‘ghosts and unseen presences’.
Reader: That’s a great deal to hang on one word in a bad poem, Mr Curnow. It may prove no more than the fact that K.M. at that stage of her life still held unconsciously to the class snobbery of her family. But I can see why you like it. It chimes in with ‘this second whimpering unlicked self ’, doesn’t it?
Mr Curnow: The ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’ (written before Mason’s twentieth
Reader: Why not take Mason’s word for it? After all, he wrote the poem.
Mr Curnow: Fairburn’s vision was more outward-looking and he ranged more at large over scenes and experience than Mason. His poetry is more relaxed, altogether more sociable in tone. Yet its finer qualities may be obscured if it is not realised that Fairburn, while he postulates in every line a ready and understanding listener to his verse, is engaged in a poetic strategy to defeat an essential isolation. And the strategy succeeds . . .
Reader: Now you’re coming out in the open, Mr Curnow. We can take it from your set frame of references that when Fairburn’s strategy succeeded he passed outside the shamed cycle of isolation and seemed to be a New Zealander, You just couldn’t permit an un-isolated New Zealander to exist. But couldn’t whatever ‘essential isolation’ there was in Fairburn belong simply to the onanistic idealism of adolescence which he describes so wittily in ‘Disquisition on Death’ and ‘Rhyme of the Elder Self.’ When he emerged from adolescence he lost the ‘essential isolation’. You have spoken yourself of an unduly protracted adolescence and the ‘amphibious haunting of beaches’. Good luck to you in your constant mining of that vein. But why assume that nobody also grows up either. Or is your intention a different one?
Mr Curnow: The signature of a region (in Brasch’s poems), like that of a witness written below the poet’s, can attest value in the work . . .
Reader: Are there no other values than regionalism, Mr Curnow?
Mr Curnow: Here and there in Ursula Bethell’s poetry occurs the kindred thought that man’s estate here is a transient concern, and the land does not much love or want us . . . What Ursula Bethell calls (‘In Burke’s Pass’) ‘this planetary decoration’ supplies her, chiefly, with a language to express the truths of her religion. It heightens and gives sensuous bulk to her vision of life’s brevity and fragility . . .
Reader: I think you are making the same mistake you did with Mason, Mr Curnow. This time there is actual contradiction. First you suggest that Ursula Bethell felt New Zealand didn’t want us; and later that she felt the whole world was transitory. Which did she mean? The latter, surely.
Mr Curnow: Of course Spear does not mean to be ‘minor’, in that dominant sense of the word. Nor does he mean to be fitted into any argument about the character of New Zealand verse. But his whole poetic strategy, the intentness and seriousness with which his poems mime the questions they do not ask, could be seen as one poet’s answers to the special problems presented by New Zealand in its individual talent.
Reader: It could, Mr Curnow. But only if one pre-supposes that every N.Z. poet is caught in a mysterious mesh of isolation.
Mr Curnow: In Johnson we have the irritable poet of New Zealand suburbia, who might wish to draw the curtains tight and set the clock to Greenwich Village mean time, but the Cook Strait gales keep the windows rattling in those
Reader: Who is ‘irritable’, Mr Curnow? In Louis Johnson you have one good poet who cannot by any stretching of the net of ‘essential isolation’ be hauled aboard your private lugger. Hence in your absurdly meagre selection from his work, you have chosen only those couple of poems of his which could be interpreted as illustrating your personal thesis.
Mr Curnow: In an unpublished letter to A.R.D. Fairburn, Geoffrey de Montalk writes – ‘K.M. has had one most deplorable result – that of giving N.Z. women a swelled head.’
Reader: Isn’t that a little unchivalrous, Mr Curnow? Our best woman poet, Mary Stanley, will be in no danger of getting a swelled head, since you have included none of her verse in your anthology.
Mr Curnow: For younger poets like Keith Sinclair, Kendrick Smithyman, and James K. Baxter, it was something that the predecessors of the Thirties had established the art as an acknowledged function of the country’s life . . .
Reader: Maybe. But an English or American poet (Yeats and Wallace Stevens in your own case) can have far more influence on a New Zealand poet than any ‘predecessors’.
Mr Curnow: Islands breed illusions, whichever end of the telescope one takes
. . .
Reader: I fear they do, Mr Curnow.
Mr Curnow: The true poet is more apt to feel underprivileged in his geographical isolation . . . When he recites his pieces they do not come, like Alice’s, wrong from beginning to end, but with ever so slight differences . . .
Reader: My word, they must have given you a tough time in Oxford! Do you really feel that you must conform absolutely to the English standard of what is significant?
Mr Curnow: He (Smithyman) has found a means to sink his cause as a New Zealander in the common cause of modern man . . .
Reader: I wish you could find means to do the same, Mr Curnow.
Mr Curnow: Baxter, in his disconsolate kingdom could be the little boy of Miss Baughan’s ‘A Bush Section’, grown up to give ambiguous answers to the hopeful questions with which that older poem ends. Or he is perhaps Butler’s Erewhon-bound traveller, sleeping rough among the terrible mountains, troubled by organ-pipe dreams.
Reader: Could he, Mr Curnow? He could also be Baxter. But I like the little Freudian touch about the organ-pipe dreams.
Mr Curnow: Nowhere in the last decade have there been any poetic departures worth mentioning . . .
Reader: That is where we disagree, Mr Curnow. I could give you twenty names, and two hundred poems as good as any you have selected for the Penguin Book.
Mr Curnow: New Zealand may hope for still other young poets, who will tackle the difficult orientation of self and art which has to be achieved – in their own land – before they can speak to any purpose before an English- speaking audience at large. They have to learn, one way or another, to name those ‘nameless native hills’, that loom across their inward or outward vision . . .
Reader: Do they really have to Mr Curnow? Why couldn’t they just write about what they know, without being infected with your particular obsessions? You are trying to lock the door, but the horse got out of that particular stable more than fifteen years ago.
[1961] (251)
It can at times be a good thing for a reviewer, after reading a controversial book several times, to set it aside, let the story settle to the bottom of his mind, and then write down his conclusions without further reference to the book. That is what I am doing now with Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. The burnt-out case is M. Querry, a Catholic architect who loses his faith and retreats from wordly success and a sequence of mistresses to a leper hospital in the Belgian Congo. There he uses his builder’s talent to help the Fathers and their atheist doctor to build new huts and latrines for the lepers. By this labour for his fellows he emerges in some degree from his emotional and spiritual coma, and achieves a measure of happiness; but as one could guess, in life or in a Greene story, there are several flies in the ointment.
Father Thomas, a member of the community who suffers from a kind of spiritual hypochondria, begins to plague the unfortunate Querry with a lionising friendship, and comes to the conclusion that Querry is a saint who experiences extraordinary aridity in prayer. M. Rycker, the local owner of a palm-oil factory (I think it was palm-oil) decides likewise, and persecutes Querry with discussions, completely one-sided about the love of God and the matrimonial defects of his (M. Rycker’s) immature but attractive wife. Rycker eventually shoots Querry because he comes to believe, quite erroneously, that Querry has cuckolded him. Querry is tormented also by Parkinson, a visiting English journalist, who produces a series of sensational articles about Querry’s problematical repentance and impending sanctity. Father Thomas, Rycker and Parkinson, hunt, as it were, in a pack. It is a subtle variation on Mr Greene’s favourite theme of the Hunted Man.
The atmosphere of the book is necessarily clinical, since the action centres in a leper hospital. In a sense it is an optimistic book. Hospitals are not usually places of despair. Some actual good is always being done in them. Doctor Colin, the Good Atheist, is a fountain of medicinal goodwill and commonsense. He diagnoses Querry’s complaint accurately enough – Querry has lost the pains of life and faith at the expense of mutilation – and prescribes a course of treatment. The Fathers, excluding Father Thomas, are practical tolerant men, more concerned to build dynamos than to eliminate the weaknesses of the flesh among their charges. The cheroot-smoking Superior (‘I do not try to look for motive, Doctor’) is indeed a gem, a Mogul diamond. Whatever else the book may be, it is certainly not anti-clerical.
It is in the construction of the character of Rycker that the author’s satirical genius reaches its high water mark. Rycker is a monster of devout complacency. The near-to-bedroom scenes (Rycker is never far from God or the bedroom) between him and his morally bludgeoned wife permit Mr Greene to express more pungently than any other writer could or would the tragedy of mis-mating possible within the boundaries of Catholic marriage.
The terrible point is that Rycker, a man incapable of love, is acting superficially in accord with the intentions of the Church. Ejected from a Jesuit seminary, loaded with dry faggots of theology, he has precedent for demanding his marriage rights; he has precedent for his psychologically disastrous assertion of authority; he has precedent for the highly pitched curtain lectures on the nature and sanctity of marriage which make his young wife’s existence an echoing desert. Rycker is entirely credible. He knows his moral theology; he knows nothing whatever about the young woman he has married. Mr Greene has put his finger directly on the ulcerated area which leads to a great number of lapses from the Catholic Church; the frequent exercise of authority without love or wisdom in Catholic families. We can note with gratitude that he does not charge the clergy with the same offence. It would be prudent for his Catholic readers to re-read these passages many times, with humility rather than with acrimony. It is true that the Church recommends to her members a vocation of suffering; but she has shown no inclination to canonise her martyr-makers, the Ryckers of this world.
Madame Rycker is not so remarkable. She is a familiar Greene heroine, the somewhat awkward tear-smudged girl with a collection of childhood fetishes, midway between a madonna-figure and an irresponsible sixth-former. It is a welcome divergence from the author’s customary idealisation of such characters that he makes no attempt to prove her a saint. She is a nice enough girl; but her criminal irresponsibility in endeavouring to father her child on Querry – she loves him and would have preferred him to be its father – leads directly to Rycker’s murderous attack on him. She is at times a very nice girl; but quite capable of smashing anything or anyone to get her own way, once she had made up her mind to act. This familiar truth, first made plain in the Garden of Eden, is one which Mr Greene has been slow to recognise and express. He has been held back, one likes to think, by a measure of old-world chivalry.
A Burnt-Out Case is quite distinctly a novel, not, in Mr Greene’s terms, an entertainment. It is a novel about the loss of faith, a theme which the author has never before treated directly. Querry’s dilemma is by no means a private one. In a sense his attempt to keep it private leads to his downfall. One has to go back to The Heart of the Matter to find his prototype in Scobie, the Catholic police officer who commits mortal sin out of pity for his wife, and who commits suicide out of pity for his crucified Creator. I have noticed, hearing various people discuss The Heart of the Matter, that Scobie’s torments of conscience appear on the whole unreal to the non-Catholic, but very real to the Catholic. It is perhaps only the Catholic who can find his strongest interior motivation in the desire to have mercy on God.
Pity can be a passion, like fear or hope or anger. The passion of pity disorders Scobie’s judgment and leads him step by step to self-destruction. Querry is wiser in his relations to other people than Scobie was. He consciously
The most remarkable single passage in the book is probably the long autobiographical fable which Querry relates to Madame Rycker in a hotel bedroom. It is the story of a King’s jeweller who begins by making Easter eggs surmounted by crosses and ends by making jewelled toads for women to wear in their navels and cloth-of-gold condoms. It is a parable on the dangers of the vocation of a Catholic artist. One can scarcely avoid the conclusion that Mr Greene intends us to see in the fictional Querry and the doubly fictional jeweller a distinct type of negative spiritual experience. Both are Catholics who find the Faith too much of a shirt of flame and withdraw in order to find new bearings. In fact Querry’s loss of faith is ambiguous. He speaks of it alternately as unbelief and ‘retirement’ – and though he strenuously resists the imputation of an absurd sanctity, he recognises a mysterious regenerative power in the company of people devoted to humane tasks. All in all, the climate of Mr Greene’s spiritual country has changed. He has ceased perhaps to be an unconscious dualist in the Catholic camp; and whatever the change may signify for him personally, it has led to the production of a profound, humane, intelligent book, with few traces of stageyness or morbidity. In many ways it is the most valuable book that Mr Greene has ever written.
1961 (252)
To a mind simultaneously passionate and logical Pascal’s ‘Thoughts’ will always be attractive; for they present Christianity as an enigma and an adventure. Mauriac records – ‘That little book, carried about with me everywhere since I was in the fourth form . . . closed and to all appearance dead in times of folly and distraction – came to life once more, opened up again, on certain evenings, along with my soul; and with the return of my thirst the spring bubbled up anew.’
Pascal will never lack disciples; for he exhibits profound human sympathies crucified on the Jansenist belief in a predestined minority of the elect. Time has swept away the Jansenist controversy but Pascal remains because he knew doubt and the war of heart against head so characteristic of our own difficult century. Mr Cohen’s translation is thoroughly readable.
It is doubtful how far The Cloud of Unknowing can be of use as devotional reading for the Christian layman who leads an active life. It was written by a contemplative for other contemplatives living under monastic discipline. Yet I have known a woman who used it successfully and it may be illuminating for others who wish to share at second hand a mystic’s experiential knowledge
There is another spiritual dodge to try if you wish. When you feel that you are completely powerless to put these thoughts away, cower down before them like some cringing captive overcome in battle, and reckon that it is ridiculous to fight against them any longer. And this humility causes God to come down in his might and avenge you of your enemies, and take you up, and fondly dry your spiritual eyes – just as a father would act towards his child who had been about to die in the jaws of a wild boar, or mad, biting bears! . . .
The blow-by-blow account of the pains of mental prayer has a piercing actuality.
1961 (253)
Sir: The letter of your correspondent, J. Holdom, about Mr Crump’s deviations from standard English, depressed me deeply. Not that Mr Crump will be worried. He will no doubt continue to speak in the way that most New Zealanders outside the Civil Service (and a few inside) do speak; and to write in the same vigorous dialect. But your correspondent is a schoolteacher, and he no doubt will also continue in his self-appointed task of trying to make young men and women observe some totally imaginary standard of speech. That is what depresses me. I remember a friend of mine with a strong, rich North Country accent, asking me whether he shouldn’t try to eliminate it, for social reasons. Of course I told him I thought it would be a tragedy. Why should Mr Crump not continue to possess a New Zealand brogue? Dialect and vivid metaphor commonly go hand in hand. And the word ‘boozer’ as an expressive alternative to ‘pub’ is a variant imported from the common speech of England. I use it myself in conversation; and may some day use it in a poem or a play or a talk on the radio. Your correspondent, like so many misguided members of his profession, seems to want to put the language in a strait-jacket.
1961 (254)
If I understand the author’s intention correctly, the longest poem in this book, ‘Notes for a Biography’, is about the making of a demagogue. The critics who pay attention only to form, never to substance, may dismiss its laconic telegraphese; but I think it is the first considerable political poem published here since Fairburn’s ‘Dominion’. Mr Mitcalfe has an X-ray eye for those potential energies, those moments of imprisonment or liberation, which exist like winter bulbs under the iron-grey soil of our Puritan culture –
These lines are by no means the strongest in the poem, but they do show Mr Mitcalfe’s grasp of that social process by which the ‘adjusted’ man betrays his own deeper self and his fellow-workers – the essential tragedy of socialism in this country.
In his sequence ‘The Parihaka Block’ Mr Mitcalfe attempts to describe another process, the seizure by force of Maori lands, under legal pretexts, illustrated by the brutal sacking of Parihaka and the barbarous imprisonment of Te Whiti. The argument of the last poem is bare and exact as a knife blade –
but the sequence as a whole does not quite hold together.
The ‘Country District’ sequence of six poems contains the best Mr Mitcalfe has to offer, a perfect marriage of rich substance and adequate form –
I wish I had room to quote the whole poem, as good as any included in the recent Penguin anthology of New Zealand verse. Mr Mitcalfe has staying power and a clear eye. I look forward eagerly to the publication of his translations from the Maori.
1961 (255)
1961 (256)
There are three main aspects discernible in the life and activity of Rabindranath Tagore, who was born in 1861 and died in 1941. He was a great Bengali poet, song writer, and playwright. He played an important part on the world stage as an international prophet and humanist, a mediator between Asian and European cultures. And at Santiniketan he established a rural university which was the experimental workshop for an attempt to knit together individual and communal development in Indian education, an institution with its roots in the soil of India, yet open to European influences. As a writer he produced long metaphysical poems, plays for his students to act in, and his most lasting achievement, scores of songs which are still sung in Bengal. As an international prophet he most aptly warned the Japanese against ‘Christian civilisation’. A revolutionary in the field of education he propounded his four cardinal principles:
These principles, stated baldly, have the distressing vagueness with which New Zealand educators are only too familiar. Tagore’s generalities (with the exception perhaps of ‘active communion with nature’) can be found in our
In New Zealand the escape into generalities occurs for different reasons: but not so far different that we cannot sympathise with Tagore. An abstract, optimistic manifesto is one tangent which habitually offers comfort to the mind of any Indian writer or educator faced with prodigious social problems and the uneasy juxtaposition of Asian and European cultures in his country. If we take Tagore’s generalities at their face value, we will under-rate his knowledge and achievement. I will try to shed some light on his special difficulties, as a writer and as a man, and show his work in education as an attempted solution.
Tagore’s international reputation as a poet reached its high-water mark after the First World War; since then it has fallen to a very low ebb. There are two main reasons for this reversal. The first reason is plain enough after the event. His English translations were aimed at the post-Edwardian audience which found the works of Rupert Brooke, or the younger Yeats, or Bridges’ Testament of Beauty, exactly to its taste. The English literary currency was inflated. The blame for an atmosphere of ‘patchouli and rose water’ can hardly be laid at Tagore’s door. His English Gitanjali was reprinted twenty times in the first two years. The poet was awarded the Nobel Prize as well as an English knighthood.
The second factor is a more delicate one. Tagore had doubts about the quality of his translations. In 1921 he wrote as follows to his friend and biographer, Edward Thompson:
I timidly avoid all difficulties, which has the effect of making my translations smooth and thin . . . . When I began this career of falsifying my own coins, I did it in play. Now I am becoming frightened of its enormity and am willing to make a confession of my misdeeds . . . .
Why, then, did he not recall his translations? His publishers were partly to blame. They urged the poet to produce more and more English books; and he yielded out of altruism – all his profits went to the university at Santiniketan, which just then badly needed money. The writer was sacrificed on the altar of education. Furthermore, though he had a fluent command of English, Bengali was his mother tongue. It is possible that the labour of reproducing the nuances of Bengali in English was too great for him. He tried to side-step the difficulty by reading through batches of the original poems, and then writing down as much as he could remember of them, in English, in lines of varying length. The difference between his translations and a literal rendering from the original Bengali is very great. These are the last lines of the famous patriotic hymn, ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’, as Tagore translated them in the English Gitanjali:
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.
The original, rendered literally, is a quite different statement –
Similarly, here is an excerpt from Tagore’s ‘Fruit Gathering’:
I know that at the dim end of some day the sun will bid me its last farewell. Shepherds will play their pipes beneath the banyan trees, and cattle graze on the slope by the river, while my days will pass into the dark.
The contrast with the original is even more striking –
The herds on the river bank, the flute player in the roadside dust, the children shouting in the courtyards, are images drawn direct from the life of Bengal. In Tagore’s own translation they lose their distinct character. One would not guess that the force of his Bengali poetry comes from his use of the simplest vernacular.
As well as being a poet, Tagore had some talent as a painter, though not the ability of his nephew Abanindranath Tagore. His paintings developed by free association from doodlings in his manuscript. In this he anticipated that reliance on the subconscious mind which is part of modern methods of art teaching. Tagore had a genuine loathing for academic education. Describing his own schooldays he recalls, ‘We had to sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons were pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers. . . .’
He assumed, as we do, a natural harmony, receptivity and initiative in children which tends to be crushed by drudgery and formality. Rebelling against the educational practice of his day, both British and indigenous, he found, however, different solutions from ours. His thoughts turned to the forest schools of ancient India, where students sat at the feet of their gurus and were instructed in the open air. From a very small beginning with only five pupils he built up the university at Santiniketan, which combines primary, post-primary, and university education in one institution. Santiniketan has been variously interpreted as the centre of an Indian Renaissance, as an international seat of learning where Hindu, Islamic, and European cultures meet and jostle on an equal footing, and as the mainspring of a social and economic movement for the uplift of Indian village life. The word ‘uplift’ is not incongruous; it is the word that Indians use freely at the present day; and it expresses both the Puritanism and the powerful communal endeavour of modern India. In Tagore’s opinion, an important part of the work of an Indian university was to gather accurate information about village conditions and discover how to use that knowledge to solve village problems. Sriniketan, an institute of rural reconstruction, allied to Santiniketan, was founded in 1922.
In this effort to make closer contact with the villagers, Tagore had moved a long way from his early conditioning. He had grown up in luxury and seclusion as the fourteenth child and youngest son of wealthy Calcutta parents. At the sudden death of his grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath, he was obliged to take over management of the family estate. His son, Rabindranath Tagore, has written – ‘In looking after the estates, Father had constantly to tour through many districts of rural Bengal, since our properties were over Nadia, Pabna, Faridpur, Rajshahi, Bogra, and even Cuttack in Orissa. . . .’
Tagore enjoyed journeying by water; and many of his songs were composed to the stroke of the paddles of the boatmen. One gains a picture, not unfamiliar in India, of a cultured Brahmin landlord, acquainted with Western customs, belonging to the small wealthy minority in a nation of the poor. It is greatly to Tagore’s credit that he was able to step outside the barriers of caste and money and approach the villagers on equal terms. In this he was at one with Gandhi, though they disagreed strongly on the issue of Indian nationalism, where Tagore’s view was non-partisan. He distrusted ‘an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality’.
The ‘living reality’ with which Tagore was acquainted included both the humanism of England and Europe and the vigorous ever-changing life of the Bengal province:
Bengal is full of rivers, and our people are truly fond of them . . . . Groups of women with their earthen pots poised gracefully on their hips, coming down the ghats: children swimming boisterously, splashing water at each other: fishermen with their innumerable ingenious devices engaged in
trapping fish: peasants loading their harvest on to boats till the brims almost touch the level of the water . . . .
The description was written by his son; but this is the reality which lies behind Tagore’s work, both literary and educational. His abstract postulates can be re-interpreted in the context of the life of Bengal:
- (a) A psychological freedom already existed in the impoverished village communities. Tagore tried to expand the classroom situation to include it.
- (b) Creative self-expression through arts and crafts had never entirely vanished from India, even under British rule. Potters and boat-builders and makers of sandals remained in the villages. Tagore tried to canalise an already existing creative potential, especially through the medium of the dance.
- (c) Though Tagore’s expression of it may be unduly abstract and tinged with sentimentality, the active communion of the villagers with their natural habitat was an observable fact.
- (d) The direct relationship which he wished to establish between his school and the surrounding communities required only some courage and initiative. He did not have to build a new house, only to use the fabrics that lay ready to his hand.
The methods he chose were in accord with Hindu tradition. Santiniketan is a modern ashram, a Hindu centre for study and religious devotion. There is a danger inherent in the Hindu pattern. The ashram cannot exist without gurus, instructors, men regarded as holy by others; and to Western eyes it may seem that holiness can be acquired too cheaply in India. A poet, a teacher, a political leader, any person with unusual talents, some integrity, and a message to convey, can put on the cloak of the guru and gain a following. Gandhi knew the danger of this to the guru, and always advised his disciples to regard him simply as a fellow-searcher for truth and justice. How far Tagore was aware of the same danger it is difficult to say. By founding Santiniketan he became, no doubt unwillingly, an Indian cultural leader, a guru, and qualified for the title that Gandhi gave him – more binding than an English knighthood – of ‘The Sentinel’.
Santiniketan today is a thriving cultural centre. Music, the fine arts, and dance-drama play key roles in the curriculum. There are lectures and discussions on the principal religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. In the library there is a unique collection of Sanskrit and Bengali manuscripts. The university is coeducational. The day begins before dawn with prayers and hymns. The schedule includes classes
Such an institution could perhaps only exist in India. The Hindu view of life has been compared to the banyan tree, which extends itself indefinitely by dropping new aerial roots – an all-inclusive idealism which can venerate Gandhi, Lenin, and Christ, equally, without contradiction. To Westerners this kind of spirituality can be irritating; for we proceed on the assumption that some ideas, some beliefs, are true and others false, though we may argue strenuously which are which. I am inclined to think that the most important asset of Santiniketan is not its internationalism, but the links which it has maintained with Indian village life. The dances and the paintings have sprung from the soil of Bengal. But whether the students at Santiniketan achieve that creative freedom which Tagore hoped for, must remain an open question. The present cast of Indian education is authoritarian. No doubt, as in New Zealand, it depends on the integrity and insight of individual teachers.
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Mr Crichton Smith shares something with the American poet Richard Eberhardt – his poems are products of the intellect and will, with rarely that cooperation of nature or the subconscious mind which gives blood and ballast to a man’s writing –
Rum in the high air: the Indies breaking on the hinged horizon. All the huge conceit of water winking towards decks. That real arrogance when nothing’s vague but brims for his own sake.
And sailors, salted to the carved hair, cut tunics from the sky . . .
I quote from ‘Sea-Song’, one of his best poems. Everything is present in the poem except the sense of a world outside the poet. He writes on Hebridean villages, girls, John Knox, a dead sheep, a sick gull, Kierkegaard, Culloden and his mother: and what one gets is an attitude, never more than a trace of the substantial creation he is writing about; though the images are bright as paint and sharp enough to cut your hand.
After Ten Burnt Offerings and Autumn Sequel and Visitations it was permissible enough to conclude that Louis MacNeice had lost the powers that made him the liveliest, wittiest, warmest poet of the Thirties. A few vague Buddhist or Taoist stirrings under a cold husk of reminiscence were no comprehension for the loss of a very good companion. People change;
I find them intensely moving.
1961 (258)
Sir: Having heard from the Editor of one of our national dailies that a large proportion of newspaper correspondence comes from the mental hospitals I tremble each time I post another letter to the Listener. Yet I must point out an unfortunate error which your correspondent Joan F. Proctor has made in her zealous letter attacking my review of a new translation of that great classic of devotional literature, The Cloud of Unknowing. I applaud her zeal. But the paragraph beginning ‘There is another spiritual dodge to try if you wish . . .’ was written not by myself but by the translator, and at a further remove by the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. So your correspondent’s anxiety about my spiritual state, on this score at least, can now be transferred to its proper target, the unknown mystic or his translator.
1961 (259)
A few writers in the past hundred years have been fortunate enough to have access simultaneously to the world of the peasant (on which European civilisation was first founded, and without which it may yet founder) and the world of modern technology, power politics and urban culture. An even smaller handful have been able to construct a lens through which they could see and record the profoundly fertile depths of peasant life without misrepresentation. I think of Tolstoy in Russia, de Maupassant in France, Mulk Raj Anand in India, and Kazantzakis in Greece. In some ways the
In Christ Recrucified the peasants of a Greek village ruled by the Turks decided to enact a Passion Play; and one by one the participants, undergoing their spiritual preparation for the play, become like those originals whom they were chosen to represent. A wandering village of refugees, uprooted by the Turks, come to Lycovrissi in search of land and bread. The priests of the two villages clash; for the peasants of Lycovrissi, whose fields and olive groves are as much part of them as their hands or lungs, see the newcomers as robbers and supplanter. Manolios, the young man chosen to play the part of Christ, tries to help the people of the destitute village. And so the story rolls on, like a torrent of wine and blood and tears, with some holy war added for good measure. The greatest magnificence of the book lies in its characterisation. Everything Kazantzakis touches springs to life, sweats, curses, bellows and prays.
The Last Temptation is a fictional biography of Jesus Christ. In effect Kazantzakis represents him as a Greek and Cretan peasant. The motive is plain enough. Kazantzakis felt that the Christ of his Greek Orthodox Church lacked humanity (it is the old Byzantine tendency to represent him as more divine than human); and so he made a Jesus intensely human according to his (the author’s) experience of men, capable of human failings, though still the Son of God. One can see why the Greek Orthodox Church thought ill of Kazantzakis. The crux, the true cross of the novel is Jesus’s choice of death by torture instead of a good life as a family man. It is an extraordinary book, less down-to-earth than Christ Recrucified, yet still gripping, and full of life. Kazantzakis’s fictional presentation of Judas is peculiarly interesting. He shows him as a Zealot, a prototype of the modern revolutionary, the tough man among the disciples. A real love and reverence for Jesus, as the author understands him, shines through the struggle and paradoxes of the book.
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The author of this book is an Indian, a journalist with an Oxford education, and a friend of the poet Dom Moraes. It is a lucid, sometimes witty account of his return to India in the company of Moraes, and their adventures in Delhi, Benares, Nepal and Calcutta. He does not avoid the knottiest problems of the New India – extreme poverty, and the deficiencies of political life. The most interesting sections of the book describe his meeting with the dying Nepalese poet, L.P. Devkora, a pilgrimage to Hardwar to bathe in the Ganges, and a long interview with Nehru. Mr Mehta is an orthodox Hindu.
The tension between Oxford culture and diffidence and the pieties of Indian family life give his account a deeply confessional flavour. As a portrait of the situation of a modern Indian intellectual, it could hardly be improved on. The family tailor, who has known and loved Mr Mehta as a child, rebukes him –
Though he loves Englishmen, and therefore England, he chides me for my English ways. ‘Sahib,’ he says, ‘you’re Indian, and not English.’ Then he returns to his machine and spins the wheel, circle upon circle, stopping now and again to give me counsel. He recommends a visit to Hardwar, where for untold centuries Indians have washed away their sins and deposited the ashes of the dead . . .
The suggestion strikes me as bizarre. My English self recoils from the centuries of superstition behind his words. But somehow I feel impelled to go to Hardwar . . .
In a sense Mr Mehta, like Dom Moraes, belongs neither to India nor to England. But his final choice is to identify himself with his motherland; and he is helped towards it by Nehru’s tolerant wisdom and encouragement.
It is a surprise to find out from the Publisher’s Note that Mr Mehta is totally blind.
1961 (261)
From the delicate, though uneven talent of Mr Fisher’s first book of verse, The Rain on the Water, there is a steep descent to the present book. The author’s misfortune has been to mistake strident social comment for poetry –
This extract from the title poem is by no means untypical of Mr Fisher’s present style. It is one thing to have political convictions; it is another to allow one’s imagination to be bound up in a doctrinal straitjacket. In a sense one could say that Mr Fisher is writing bad devotional verse. The paradise of working men to which he points is naïve to the point of absurdity –
In this poem Mr Fisher is saluting the inhabitants of Beeville. The catastrophic double meaning of ‘bees’ has escaped the author but can hardly escape the reader. One or two love poems, formless but evocative, remain outside the concrete mixer. In the hardening cement a poet lies imbedded.
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One should record at least a pleasant astonishment that the least pretentious richest English anthologies continue to be the Guinness series. They even include ribaldry, as in George Barker’s ‘VIII Beatitudes to Denver’, and are not afraid to make room for verse of less than geometric perfection, if it is about the way people live, as in F. Pratt Green’s ‘Sonnets for a New Decade, or Lil and Merle’, or else the way they die, as in some extracts from ‘Go Back, Lazarus’, a prize-winning sequence by the New Zealand poet Mark Richards. But morose, witty, unquotable George Barker is still the daddy of them all.
Ode to the Shadows is a shadowy book, the memoirs of a globe-trotter, it seems, combined with meditations on the Torah. Mr Lutyens is often all- but-delivered of some strong oracular statement; but then the memoirs begin again, the scene shifts from Spain to Bismarck’s Germany to London. It is perhaps an American habit.
Jon Stallworthy’s poems are of quite a different calibre. The author claims to regard them as the work of his apprenticeship. If that is so, he may become a formidable blacksmith –
Too many of the poems, perhaps, are about the poet’s vocation, poems about being a poet; too many echo Yeats or Dylan Thomas; yet one feels that Mr Stallworthy is his own man, possessing a durable, enigmatic vision. He is still in what Keats called ‘the chamber of maiden thought’ – more to bite on, that is all he needs.
1961 (263)
Somebody suggested to me that I might write an article about Higher Learning in New Zealand. From a writer’s point of view. A new angle of approach. It troubled me to know what to say. Indeed I had had a long, unsuccessful love affair with the Higher Learning, beginning when I timidly entered the Registrar’s Office at Otago University, with a head full of bad poems, at the age of seventeen. But had I ever really got there? That was the question.
My mother was a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied Old French for her M.A., and enjoyed punting on the Cam. I think she hoped that some day I would climb the ladder of academic distinction, and go there too, go and get some manners, and come back to be a Senior Lecturer. I almost felt I ought to. What else was there to do? I remember also the clear warning she gave me before I arrived at the Registrar’s Office – ‘James, you may meet some girls at university who want you to sleep with them. I’m not saying you will, but you may. Keep away from them. That kind of thing is wrong and it only leads to trouble.’ There was a strong, loving wish to be of help behind her words, and I appreciate it better now than I did then. In one sense her prophecy was erroneous. No Otago girl ever tried to rape me. For many months I searched hard for such a siren, without success. Those iceberg virgins never melted. But my mother had made a correct estimate of her son’s character. My ambitions, then as now, were pudendal rather than academic.
But I was seventeen still, and a strange glamour rested on those grey pseudo-Gothic arches. On a lawn that resembled Dante’s Limbo one could sit and watch the waters of the Leith Stream sliding endlessly over weirs. And one of those grave, charming, untouchable nymphs might appear and sit down on the green grass and say, ‘Hullo’. At that time I attributed the mental paralysis that coated my faculties with a thin ice film to the deplorable practice of nightly self-abuse. It did not occur to me that Boring, Langfeldt and Weld, those grave-diggers of the human psyche, or Mérimée’s Carmen, written in a language which was then and is now still fortunately Greek to me, might have had something to do with it. Yet the primitive self that writes
Per ardua ad astra is the motto of Otago University; and the last two lines of the poem are designed to call to mind those tragic messages one sees pinned on varsity notice-boards – ‘Lost, a gold bangle with the initials J.A.’ I composed the poem later on in the less inhibited atmosphere of an iron rolling mill, sweating out the night’s beer over a forest of red-hot half-inch rounds. But it does put a finger on that peculiar schizoid calm that characterises university life: the calm of a populous graveyard.
Good things came to me from Otago. My incipient alcoholism took wings like a bush fire, leaping fence and river, in the Bowling Green, the Royal Albert, the Captain Cook, the Grand, the City, the Oban, the Shamrock (on Sundays), and the Robert Burns (my best friend had a flat above it). The Furies, those Muses of black-humour poetry, roosted on my doorstep like great scraggy chickens, and never left it again. It is, after all, their proper home. A female medical student taught me another kind of knowledge in her Castle Street lodgings:
God also, whom I had not met till then, revealed Himself to me one day when I had reached the middle of a disused railway tunnel, in the grip of a brutal hangover. But was any of this a necessary part of the Higher Learning? It is hard to say. Aphrodite, Bacchus, and the Holy Spirit were my tutors, but the goddess of good manners and examination passes withheld her smile from me.
Well, I had a difficult session with my mother. She felt (rightly) that I was in danger of becoming a hobo, and should return to varsity to work. I thought (privately) that I had to find out who I was or else take a large dose of strychnine, and that I needed more elbow room to get on with living and writing. I won the duel, but went out afterwards and wept under a gum-tree on the river-flat below the house.
A year or two later, after much apparently useless experience in various factories, farms, dens, bedrooms, pubs and hovels, I travelled to Christchurch, ostensibly to begin a second varsity career, actually to visit a Jungian psychiatrist. Somehow the Higher Learning still eluded me. I lived inside the spiritual bomb-shelters erected by Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane. The irrigating river of alcohol flowed continually through my veins. I annoyed the landlady of the girl I was later to marry by climbing down the fire-escape at five in the morning. Once or twice I sat in a lecture room and watched the inaudibly moving jaws of that wise and brilliant man, Sinclaire, who had then reached his dotage. I worked in a TB hospital and as a copyholder on The Press; had something suspiciously like the DT’s, and edited a literary page on Canta. It was particularly convenient to have access to the Canta room for an amorous rendezvous or a place to lie down in when one couldn’t stand up. In Christchurch I associated with Denis Glover and Allen Curnow and became a member of the Church of England. This was unquestionably a seeding-time, when I became a man of sorts and ploughed under everything I had ever known, as a farmer ploughs in autumn before the hard frosts arrive.
Later on I married and came to Wellington. Ever since I had failed in Otago to master the Higher Learning, a sense of incapability had gnawed like a rat at my diaphragm. To quiet this rodent, I acquired extra-murally a unit in Greek History, Art and Literature, while working in the Wellington abattoir. After a year or so as a postman (I was sacked from that job when the bosses found me asleep dead-drunk with my head on a full satchel of letters in the Karori post office) I came to training-college. There I associated frequently with Louis Johnson from whom I learnt to write about the kind of things that make most people silent. It was possible at that time to take two varsity subjects a year.
This period is a trifle foggy. I gave three Macmillan Brown Memorial lectures. I passed Stage II Latin with the help of an admirable tutor (the Latin was a help to me in reading my missal when I became a Catholic) and passed
Along with a genuine admiration for the character-shaping power of our institutions of Higher Learning – some of the toughest psychotics in the country inhabit those walls – I feel that they have had little effect, except a negative one, upon the processes that make me tick as a writer. Writing, in my case, has proceeded entirely from Lower Learning, learning who one is. And this is not learnt in a lecture-room or library, but in the jails and torture rooms of a private destiny, or conceivably planting potatoes, or conceivably kneeling blindly at the Mass. In fact, I believe that the gulf is so great between these two kinds of learning, that I would never take a permanent job teaching at a university, in case the seed-beds of my life should be turned, by accident, into a concrete playground or the foundation for a building devoted to Aesthetic Research.
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Introduction
This book invites you to make a journey. You may of course treat it, if you wish, as a random collection of photographs, to thumb through on a wet Saturday afternoon. But those who obtained the pictures, selected them, and added a written comment, had something more in mind. A pattern emerges from the series – not imposed by photographer or writer, but there from the beginning – the face of the country itself, at times domesticated and respectable, at times the face of a primeval goddess, pitted by the sun, by earthquake and the waves of the sea. This book invites you to explore this pattern and come one step nearer to seeing New Zealand as she actually is.
Writing about the island of Rhodes, Lawrence Durrell mentions the mysterious disease of ‘islomania’ – those who suffer from it are pulled towards islands as if by a magnet. The mere fact of being on a small piece of land surrounded by water fills them with a lasting exhilaration. Any New Zealander, whether one by birth or by adoption, who cuts the navel-cord that binds him to England or Europe, and lives his life through on the terms that these islands dictate to him, is probably in Durrell’s sense an ‘islomane’. In his poem, ‘Dominion’, A.R.D. Fairburn has recorded the sea-change endured by the first European immigrants. . . .
Those first architects and adventurers carried in their minds an image of the society which they desired to create. A Utopia, a Happy Island, a Just City, in which the best of the Old World would survive, taking new antipodean forms. And though all Utopias are countries of the mind, their actual achievement was not negligible. Our difficult balance of power between labour and management, our early universal franchise, our legal equality of Polynesian and European, our state welfare for the young and the sick and the aged, have developed by degrees from their original foundation.
You can get a clear enough idea of the human acts of the past hundred years from any New Zealand history book. A City of a kind has been made. The hydro-electric dams at Roxburgh or Mangakino, the productive farms in place of endless tussock or bush, the tidy townships, the suburbs that climb hill-slopes towards the sun, and the honeycomb of factory and office buildings where each man has his appointed job under the eye of the clock – these are the works of the City, finite, exact and reasonable, designed for the fulfilment of limited aims. But alongside the human City, indifferent or even hostile, remains the Wilderness, whose time is still that of the sixth day of creation and whose works belong to the Power that created her.
It would have been possible for this book to have been a record of industrial and technological achievement in New Zealand; and perhaps it would have pleased those readers who hold that the Wilderness exists only to be subjugated and contained within the pattern of the City. Instead of cities, towns and settlements, we have chosen to reveal mainly the natural features of the country, sometimes where they meet the City, but more often here they compose the Wilderness of lonely coast or mountains; and our comment includes references to Maori legend and quotations from contemporary New Zealand poets. On its own the City does not readily engender works of art. At the fringes of the human domain, where the City encounters the Wilderness, artists are able to discover those forms which become the treasures of their race, and the real knowledge which liberates the intellect . . .
The City is never truly self-sufficient, for it possesses only the power to use and organise a world which it has not created. Perhaps the Maoris, to whom many references are made in these pages, attributing spiritual powers to the Wilderness, refusing to fell a tree until the deities of the bush had been propitiated, were wiser than their European successors. The springs of thought and feeling did not dry up in them, and they have remained to a large degree unruled by the stiff hands of a clock. A very few pakehas also – fishermen, deer-cullers, back-country shepherds, gold prospectors – have established a true relation to the Wilderness and been able to inhabit the country they were born in. To such men this book would seem unnecessary; for they already know all it could show them.
To others it may bring a composite impression of a country not long settled by Europeans, whose predominant colour is the green of farm and bushland, a country without smog, whose people, industrious by habit, have a great potential freedom, since few of them have ever known hard poverty. The journey which you may follow, through the pages of this book, begins at a lonely cape on the top of the North Island and ends in the extreme south. Its time pattern commences in the spring of one year and concludes in the early winter of the next. Let the photographs tell their own story.
Plate 1
Looking inland from above Omapere Bay, Hokianga Harbour, Northland.
From a steep cliff on Cape Reinga, according to Maori belief, the spirits of the dead set out on their journey across the landless waters to Hawaiki. Now there is a lighthouse to guide the living sailors. You will find a picture of the cape, half-screened by slender toetoe plumes, on the dust-jacket of this book. The spirits, as they passed north, knotted the sandhill grasses to leave a memento behind them.
Facing this page you can see Omapere Bay, in Hokianga Harbour, with many-headed New Zealand cabbage trees in the foreground. The tender
Plate 2
Kauri trees by the road, Waipoua Forest, Northland
This is the motor road through the Waipoua Kauri Forest, Northland, with the Waikohatu Stream in the foreground. The best-known of the larger trees is ‘Tane-Mahuta’, reached by a short track from the roadside about forty miles north of Dargaville – a true giant with a girth of forty-three feet, not less than twelve hundred years old. The kauri logs make good ships’ timber, and the timber trade began early in New Zealand, when Captain Dell, master on the Fancy, made contact with the Maoris in 1794 . . .
So Gloria Rawlinson writes in her ballad, ‘Captain Dell of the Fancy’. Many kauris were chopped down and others destroyed in the fires by which the first European settlers cleared the land. Gum-diggers came to probe the earth for the hardened blood of the kauris, the valuable resin. You can find in our museums spiders and other insects embalmed, perfect as in life, in the amber gum-stones. But Waipoua is now the last extensive tract of kauri forest left in New Zealand.
Plate 3
View overlooking Parua Bay, towards Whangarei Heads, Northland.
Parua Bay, an inlet on the northern shore of Whangarei Harbour, is a place for camping and bathing and fishing, and sport can be had with big game fish
Above Whangarei Heads stands the curiously shaped peak of Manaia. Its name is the same as that of the human figure with bird-like features which appears on the carved barge-boards of Maori meeting-houses.
Plate 4
Auckland City and Rangitoto Island from Mt. Eden.
The city of Auckland looks almost pastoral, seen from the slopes of Mount Eden, with the island of Rangitoto (another extinct volcanic cone – the city is pimpled with them) visible in the background. Yet Mount Eden was once the scene of many tribal battles.
The Aucklanders are by habit less inhibited than their southern neighbours. Perhaps it is the climate. In sunny weather Queen Street swarms with tanned legs and coloured dresses and headgear. Or perhaps it is the wind from the vineyards that surround the city, many of them owned by Dalmatian settlers. A.R.D. Fairburn, an Aucklander, caught something of the spirit of the town in his ballad, ‘Down on My Luck’ . . .
Plate 5
Yachting on Waitemata Harbour, Auckland.
The yachts move out, with spinnakers hard as drums, across the ruffled waters of Auckland Harbour. In the background you can see the new bridge that joins the North Shore to Westhaven – another reminder of the likeness between Auckland and Sydney.
Some ferries still cross the harbour. It will be a pity when they all go out of fashion. Many people have had the experience of coming from a labyrinth of
But even if the ferries go, the yachts will remain. With centreboards or keels, brand-new sails or patched ones, they skim like molymawks on a summer day over the sea that invades the town. It must be worth the pains of growing up to be young in Auckland.
Plate 6
Nikau palms near Amodeo Bay on the Coromandel-Colville road.
Little islands flock along the Coromandel coast, due east and forty sea miles from Auckland. The peninsula, the mountain range, the eastern harbour and its township – all bear the exotic Indian name of Coromandel. Bush still covers much of the high hill-country, and the roads wind round unexpected bends and up impossible spurs. Holiday-makers swarm out from Auckland in summer to camp in the warm coastal bays.
Gold first brought the European settlers to Coromandel, but the claims were soon worked out. The shafts have long since fallen in, but the batteries that stamped the gold out of the ore still rust there, gripped by vines in the silent bush.
Rock oysters grow at Amodeo Bay, nine miles north by road from Coromandel, beached with gravel like many similar bays on this side of the peninsula, and sheltered by red-flowered pohutukawas. In the foreground appear the stately nikau palms, whose leaves have served to thatch many a Maori whare and settler’s hut.
Plate 7
Dairy herd and farmlands near Te Awamutu in the Waikato district.
This dairy herd is grazing in the paddocks of the Mangapiko district, under the slopes of Mount Pirongia.
The New Zealand farmers, self-reliant men, claim often that they are the backbone of the country. Certainly they have changed its face and made the bush lands into fertile pastures. Barry Mitcalfe has celebrated the harsher side of farm life in his poem ‘Sharemilker’ . . .
But the farm in the picture is probably more prosperous than the one sketched in Mitcalfe’s poem. The farmer may own a new Zephyr and his wife may attend adult education classes in the nearest town.
Plate 8
Limestone outcrops beside the Te Kuiti-New Plymouth highway near Mahoenui.
These limestone outcrops, like the walls of a medieval castle, occur frequently in the country from northern Taranaki to the outlet of the Waikato River, south of Auckland city. In the limestone country, underground water makes caves and potholes, some of which may still be undiscovered, through the most famous caverns have been developed as a tourist attraction at Waitomo.
This photograph was taken at Mahoenui, on the Awakino Gorge road between Te Kuiti and New Plymouth, a road that follows the twists of the Awakino River to the sea. The name Mahoenui refers to the ‘large mahoe trees’ of a densely forested region that has had to give ground to the grasslands of the farmers. Near this place a natural bridge of limestone spans the deep bed of the river. At either end of the arch stand ancient sites of Maori pas, reminders of the days when each Maori settlement was built on some high place hard for attackers to scale, and guarded by deep ditches and strong palisades.
Plate 9
Looking south from Tongaporutu in the North Taranaki Bight.
The cliffs at Tongaporutu crumble slowly before the winds and waves that beat in from the stormy Tasman Sea. Their white limestone foreheads are turned to the west, contrasting with the black ironsand beach below them. Mount Egmont would be visible to the south if it were not hidden by cloud.
It was at the mouth of the Tongaporutu River that the Tokomaru canoe of the ‘Maori fleet’ made its final Landfall after the arduous journey from the homeland of Hawaiki, near Tahiti, more than six centuries ago. The name Tongaporutu may well refer to the hour of arrival, for it can be freely translated as ‘the head-on butting (of the canoe) into a southerly gale at night’.
Each of the fleet canoes ended its journey at a different part of the New Zealand coast, and settlement spread inland and southwards. The Ngati-
Plate 10
Mt Egmont from Churchill Heights, Westown, New Plymouth.
Here Mount Egmont is clearly visible from Churchill Heights, New Plymouth. An extinct volcano of almost perfect proportions, this mountain stands alone above the spreading slopes of Taranaki province, much as Fujiyama dominates its surrounding countryside in Japan. Captain Cook and his ship’s company sighted the mountain in 1770, and he described it as ‘. . . a very high mountain and in appearance resembling the Peak of Teneriffe’. It is over 8,000 feet in height, bush-clad to the winter snow- line and capped by snow and ice except in the warmth of summer, and it draws rain to many of the dairy farms that lie near its base. It has proved dangerous to mountaineers who are misled by its deceptively easy slopes where the snow can harden in an hour to ice. The Maoris regarded the mountain as a holy place.
New Plymouth, less than twenty miles south of the mountain, was settled first by whalers at Ngamotu Beach in 1828. At Pukekura Park there is a small lake set among trees and ferns, and a sportsground in a natural amphitheatre. New Plymouth is the seaport for the Taranaki dairylands.
Plate 11
Raukawa Falls on the Mangawhero River, between Raetihi and Wanganui.
Here the Raukawa Falls, on the Mangawhero River, are seen from the Parapara Road, until recently a route of fabled difficulty for the motorist, but now a high-speed link between National Park and Wanganui. The road follows part of the Mangawhero River, which rises as a trickling stream almost 8,000 feet up on the slopes of Mount Ruapehu, losing its identity when it joins the Whangaehu a short distance above Ngaturi.
Cataracts such as this may be found on many New Zealand rivers, where earthquakes have raised or lowered the level of the country. In this picture autumn leaves add their colour to the green of the bush land.
Plate 12
Mt. Ngauruhoe and the Whakapapanui River, Tongariro National Park.
Above the water-worn boulders of the Whakapapanui River and the wastelands of the central pumice plateau, stands the active volcano, Mount Ngauruhoe. Situated between Tongariro to the north and Ruapehu to the
The Maoris regarded these three mountains as guardian deities. There is a legend to the effect that Ruapehu, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Taranaki (the Maori name for Mount Egmont) were once grouped together, but that Taranaki departed to his present position because of a domestic quarrel.
Plate 13
Looking across Lake Taupo from Mission Bay to the Tongariro National Park mountains.
This view looks across Lake Taupo, New Zealand’s largest sheet of fresh water, from Mission Bay, towards the National Park mountains. In ancient times Motutaiko Island in Lake Taupo was a Maori burial place, and some of the interment caves can still be seen there. Pohutukawa trees grow on the island but, according to the Maoris, do not grow naturally anywhere else around Lake Taupo. The Tongariro River flows into Taupo by a delta of five mouths. The waters of the lake occupy a depression caused by volcanic agency, and many streams enter it from all sides.
At the head of the Tapuaehururu Bay, where the Waikato River leaves the lake, stands the township of Taupo. It is a town built largely round the tourist trade, with hotels and motels, launches for hire, trout-fishing facilities, and intense thermal activity at Wairakei, where the sources of natural steam have been tapped to provide power. It is best perhaps in this area to travel by car and find one’s own camping-ground in one of the secluded places.
Plate 14
The Huka Falls on the Waikato River at Wairakei.
The word ‘huka’ itself means ‘foam’. The Huka Falls, on the Waikato River, can be reached by side road from a turn-off three miles beyond Taupo. Here the river, hemmed in by a narrow rocky cleft, pours out from the giant’s bath that is Lake Taupo, to drop more than thirty feet. This view is seen from the easily accessible look-out point provided for passing motorists. But if you have strong nerves, you can go over a narrow wooden foot-bridge just above the falls, and see them closely from many angles. The roar is continuous.
Downstream from Wairakei, the river plunges through the Aratiatia Rapids, where a dam is being built to harness it for hydro-electric power. Here too there are well-fenced look-outs high on the bluffs. The river discharges more than 800,000 cubic feet per minute. At various places hydro-electric stations have already been constructed, taming stretches of foaming rapids and replacing them with deep green lakes, where motor-boats troll for trout or haul water-skiers behind them in endless curves.
Plate 15
Waiotapu thermal area, looking towards the Kaingaroa Plains.
The name Waiotapu means ‘sacred waters’. At this thermal resort, eighteen miles from Rotorua, there are a geyser and several other spectacles, including Frying Pan Flat and Green Lake, which are visible in this picture. To the north-east of Waiotapu stands Rainbow Mountain with its multi-coloured sides. In the background lie the vast Kaingaroa Plains.
The Rotorua-Taupo thermal region has its own strange beauty, though hot springs can be found elsewhere in New Zealand. You will find boiling and ice-cold streams flowing side by side; the weird colours of mud `and clay and sulphur rock; or a mud pool quaking like porridge in a bush clearing. The steam that rises from thermal vents can often be seen from far off. It is as if the too-often-neglected earth had suddenly shown aggression towards man, the anger of the Earth Mother.
Plate 16
Douglas firs beside the road through the Whakarewarewa State Forest.
These Douglas fir trees in Whakarewarewa State Forest, a little south of Lake Rotorua, are typical of the many miles of planted forests that grow on the once barren volcanic plateau. In a certain measure the New Zealand Government, through its Forest Service, has atoned for the reckless devastation of native bush by the first European settlers. These firs will not shelter secondary growth as the totara and rimu once did; but they are fast-growing and provide a valuable source of timber. Indeed the quick growth of various species of pine in the New Zealand climate has provided the country with a new industry. The forests are cut down and pulped to feed the world’s insatiable demand for newsprint.
The curse of the new forests is fire lighted by careless campers, or even by the sun itself, when it happens to concentrate its rays through a piece of broken glass. Firebreaks have been made at regular intervals, men keep guard on high, raised platforms, while planes and helicopters are used for observation. But in the dry summer months fires do break out and are hard to control.
Plate 17
Pohutu Geyser, Whakarewarewa thermal area, Rotorua.
This is the Pohutu Geyser at Whakarewarewa, one of the finest in the region. By the gates of the Maori village visitors are met by licensed women guides, members of a unique profession. Children dive for coins in the shallow waters of the Puarenga Stream. The whole village is built on a crust of ground above the thermal caverns and the Maoris use the boiling pools for both cooking and washing. It is no unusual thing for a householder to wake and find that a new steam vent has opened in his yard.
A path, fenced by carved posts, leads up past the Maori graveyard to the entrance of the maze of geysers and mud pools and silica terraces, and at its further end stands a model pa which reproduces the ancient kind of fortified village.
At the other side of the town of Rotorua, there is another Maori village called Ohinemutu. The carved interior of the Anglican church there is famous for its tukutuku panelling and carved woodwork.
Plate 18
‘Te Takinga’ Maori meeting-house, Mourea, Rotorua.
This is one of the many meeting-houses constructed and used by the sub- tribes of the Arawa Maoris. The powerful Arawa tribe occupied the land between Maketu in the Bay of Plenty and the Rotorua Lakes. ‘Te Takinga’ is built on the neck of land between Lake Rotorua and Lake Rotoiti, in the township of Mourea.
The house itself, though of modern construction, is complete in its traditional details. On the gable is a carved figure (tekoteko) of the principal tribal ancestor – in this case Takinga, a warrior chief descended from Pikiao who founded the Ngati-Pikiao sub-tribe of the Arawas.
During and after the Maori Wars a large number of the great meeting- houses were destroyed or fell into disrepair. The present generation, however, has been called ‘the generation of the meeting-house’, because so many Maori communities have re-erected their meeting-houses, often with the help of Government subsidies.
Sir Peter Buck, the Maori anthropologist, has written that the whare whakairo formed the peak of Maori architectural development. Each detail of carving and decoration has its symbolic meaning, embodying the legends and history of the tribe, and of the Maori race itself. The meeting-house and its marae – the courtyard in front of its porch – was the focal point of Maori social life and Government; and at the present day, under changed circumstances, this is still true for many communities.
The Maoris, who seemed at the turn of the century a dying race, have
Plate 19
Okawa Bay, Lake Rotoiti, on the Rotorua-Tauranga highway
Holiday homes and pleasure craft crowd the shore of Okawa Bay, on Lake Rotoiti. This lake is joined to Lake Rotorua on the west by the Ohau Channel, and drains to the Bay of Plenty by the Kaituna River. In 1823 the Nga- Puhi chief, Hongi Hika, brought his canoes overland to Lake Rotoiti and proceeded to the island of Mokoia in Lake Rotorua where he launched a devastating surprise attack on the Arawa tribe. Along Hongi’s Track, where the straining warriors pulled the canoes through bush and fern, a smooth tar- sealed motor-way runs now, though the same tall trees that looked down on Hongi still overshadow the road.
In 1864 the eastern part of the lake was the scene of a battle between the Arawas, loyal to the Government, and a band of supporters of the Maori King from the East Coast. Four hundred Arawas swept across Rotoiti in a flotilla of war canoes to establish a base in the palisaded pa of Komuhumuhu. Today the blue waters are disturbed only by the chug of launches and the creak of rowlocks.
Plate 20
The Bay of Plenty coastline from the Whakatane-Ohope hill road.
On the magnificent curve of Ohope Beach, four miles from Whakatane, sea- foods are plentiful. It is a holiday resort backed by rich farmlands. Of such a place Keith Sinclair has written in his poem ‘Ihimatao’ . . .
This coast was named the Bay of Plenty by Cook, because his hungry ship cast anchor here and sailed away well provisioned by the friendly Maoris. Whakatane itself is almost a land-locked port. Maize is grown in the districtLandfall from Hawaiki, the chiefs of the Bay of Plenty signed the Treaty of Waitangi, handing over their sovereignty to Queen Victoria in exchange for Government protection.
Plate 21
East Coast seascape; Makarori Beach from the road north of Gisborne
Sea breakers with the shape of a bird’s wing foam in on Makarori Beach north of Gisborne. The view looks from north to south. Makarori is typical of the many wild beaches of the East Coast, where the waves of the Pacific carve strange shapes in the rock, and the giant roots of the pohutukawa trees go down to the water’s edge; and where the high peak of Hikurangi is lit by the rising sun, while land and ocean still wait restlessly in shadow for the dawn to come.
You can travel this coast for half a day and meet only a boy on a horse and a few stray cattle. But when the pohutukawa blossoms flare out like gunfire, it is the sign for city dwellers to pour this way in cars, with food and stoves and sun-tan lotion, to pitch their tents and park their caravans on the shore below the Maori farms.
Plate 22
The Tukituki River and Craggy Range near Havelock North, Hawke’s Bay.
The imported poplar and the indigenous cabbage-tree frame this view of the bed of the Tukituki River, at Craggy Range, near Havelock North. Craggy Range itself is twelve miles by road from Hastings, the centre of a district engaged in farming, fruit-growing and nursery gardening.
There are few large buildings in the two major towns of the Hawke’s Bay province, Hastings and Napier, since many buildings were razed by earth tremors in Napier and by fire in Hastings, in the disastrous earthquake of 1931. There is a bird sanctuary at Lake Tutira, twenty miles north of Napier, where a sheep-station owner, Guthrie-Smith, wrote his classic work on local flora and fauna. Bishop Bennett, a Maori and the first Anglican Bishop of Aotearoa, though a member of the Arawa tribe of Rotorua, made his home in Hawke’s Bay.
Plate 23
Mustering along the Lake Rununga shores between Napier and Hastings.
Here Romney sheep are being mustered on the shores of Lake Runanga, near Fernhill, six miles north of Hastings. The familiar sight of man and horse and dog can be seen on every sheep-farm in New Zealand during mustering. His
The cross of Romney rams with Southdown ewes produces fat, strong lambs for the freezing works. There is no fixed price for wool and mutton, as there is for dairy produce, but since last century the economy of New Zealand has depended heavily on the export of refrigerated meat. In Hawke’s Bay, as in parts of the South Island, the big sheep-station owners became perhaps New Zealand’s only aristocracy, influential in provincial and national politics. Today the farms are smaller, but the sheep-farmer, unlike his ‘cow-cockie’ neighbour, still has a life that allows some room for leisure, in spaces of the annual cycle of lambing, docking, drenching, shearing and dipping.
Plate 24
Looking north from Paekakariki Hill along the coastline to South Manawatu.
This is the Paekakariki Beach, north of Wellington, showing the highway, and the settlements along the coast, where many workers in Wellington live, going daily to and from the Capital City by rail. Many also visit the beach in weekends or on holidays, for swimming, boating and fishing. The name Paekakariki means ‘the perching-place of the green parakeet’.
The high offshore island of Kapiti is now a sanctuary for native birds. The warrior Te Rauparaha with his Ngati-Toa people, who migrated from Kawhia early in the last century, captured Kapiti about 1820. The islands and the rocks off its sheltered southern shore were bases for whalers also in those days. A Wellington poet, Alistair Campbell, in his poem ‘Looking at Kapiti’ has indicated the impression one gains of the island on a stormy night . . .
By sunlight, on a clear day, it is a bold landmark only, sharpening to a silhouette as the sun sets in the sea beyond.
Plate 25
Wellington City and Harbour from Tinakori Hill looking east.
This view shows Wellington City, the capital of New Zealand, though Auckland has always been ready to contend her title. Looking down from the Tinakori Hills, you can see in receding order the old wooden Government Buildings, modern blocks of offices, the railway station, the wharves, part of the harbour large enough to shelter a navy or two, houses on the steep hill- faces above Oriental Bay, and a glimpse of the heads and the outer sea.
Wellington, founded in 1840, is becoming increasingly a city of suburbs. Beyond the picture, to the right, lies the Hutt Valley, where expanding industries have led to the growth of new housing areas. Perhaps Louis Johnson has caught the spirit of the suburbs best in his ‘Song in the Hutt Valley’ . . .
Plate 26
Wairarapa pastureland at Clareville, between Masterton and Carterton.
This quiet sheep pasture at Clareville, north of Carterton, in the Wairarapa, could almost be an English country scene, though the corrugated iron roofs of the farm-house and sheds are distinctively New Zealand. Carterton is a farming township with dairy factories, and small local industries. Less than twenty miles away stands Mount Holdsworth, a peak of the Tararua Range, of which C.K. Stead writes in his poem ‘Night Watch in the Tararuas’ . . .
To reach the Wairarapa the road zig-zags up and down the steep flanks of the Rimutaka Range and crosses its windy crest. From the north it runs along the deep scoured gorges of the Manawatu and Makakaki Rivers.
Plate 27
Sunset near Napier, Hawke’s Bay.
Our North Island sequence ends with a sunset over lagoon waters near Napier. These recurring colours of sky and water, seen by Cook and Tasman, by European settlers and a million Polynesian tribesmen before them, are unrelated to human endeavour. They have flamed impartially over births and battles and funerals; over the mission churches and the grog-shops of the whalers; over football crowds and farmers working late with tractor and plough, and civil servants hurrying to their trains.
They stand perhaps for what can only be known through silence and patience – a lucidity which man stands outside, an order greater than the human one. In a sense our sequence is made to direct your attention to this world in which we live but to which we so rarely belong.
Plate 28
Lyttelton Harbour looking towards the Heads
For those who cross Cook Strait by the interisland ferry steamer, the Lyttelton Heads are one of the northern gates to the South Island . . .
This view of Lyttelton Harbour shows the Heads clearly, and the open sea beyond, with the settlement at Governor’s Bay visible in the left foreground. The harbour cuts deep into the land, for the sea has breached the wall of the huge volcanic cone, once an island, that is Banks Peninsula. The immigrant ships with the first Canterbury settlers arrived here in 1850. A railway-tunnel pierces the Port Hills at their narrowest part, leading through to the city of Christchurch and the Canterbury Plains.
Plate 29
Christchurch. The Avon River winds through the city and its parks.
The River Avon winds through the city of Christchurch, its surface broken by trailing willow branches and diving ducks. Christchurch carries still, more perhaps than any other New Zealand town, the mark of English settlement. Eastward like the marine suburbs of New Brighton and Sumner; westward and southward the flat farm country of the Canterbury Plains, sloping up to the foothills of the Southern Alps. This is the country of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, tussock land, where the big sheep-runs were established soon after European settlement.
In Cathedral Square, at the heart of Christchurch, stands the statue of John Robert Godley, founder of the province. Denis Glover, a South Island poet, has written aptly of the pioneers . . .
Practical men, yet troubled by dreams and ideals; Spartans and pilgrims who longed to graft a new shoot on the English tree. Perhaps they did not achieve their vision. But the vividly carved and painted interior of the Canterbury Provincial Building bears witness to them, and the many streets in Christchurch named after Church of England bishoprics.
Plate 30
The coastal township of Kaikoura on the Christchurch-Blenheim road.
This view from Fisherman’s Wharf, shows the town of Kaikoura on the coastal route between Christchurch and Blenheim. Across the bay are the Seaward Kaikoura Mountains fresh with winter’s early snows. The name Kaikoura has been abbreviated from ‘Te Ahi-kaikoura-a-Tama-ki-te-Rangi’ which means ‘The fire in which Tamaki-te-Rangi cooked crayfish’. The cane crayfish pot in the foreground shows that this favourite food of the Maori is still available hereabouts in ample quantities.
The Kaikouras were sighted by Captain Cook, and named by him ‘The Looker-On Mountains’. Passing them by plane, or daylight ferry, you cannot fail to be impressed by their jagged, invulnerable heights. European settlement began with shore whaling in the early part of the last century. When excavations were made for the first house in the settlement, a moa’s egg was discovered, the first intact egg to be found in New Zealand. It was sold later in England for a hundred guineas.
Plate 31
In Queen Charlotte Sound.
Queen Charlotte Sound, here seen from Queen Charlotte Drive, Marlborough, is the easternmost of the drowned valleys that comprise the Marlborough Sounds. Captain Cook, who named the sounds, visited it three times to refit and repair his ship and refresh his crew.
Picton, which lies at the southern extremity of this sound, is the main export outlet for the Marlborough Province. From here a regular steamer service operates to and from Wellington, carrying in summer full cargoes of holiday-makers bound for the bush-clad bays, the blue water and the peace of ‘The Sounds’; or heading back home with memories of lazy days and energetic fishing trips.
Though the sound is here shown in a peaceful mood, winds can swoop down from the hills with little warning and raise storms dangerous to small boats. At such times the wise launch captain runs for shelter.
Plate 32
In the Kaituna Valley on the Blenheim-Nelson road.
Here the morning frost still clings to the roadside grasses in the Kaituna Valley, on the main highway between Blenheim and Nelson. This is sheep country, north of the Wairau River. Of such places Denis Glover has written . . .
Plate 33
Riwaka Valley in the Nelson Province, looking towards Motueka.
Riwaka is in Nelson Province, and lies near the coast of Tasman Bay, on the fertile flats of the Riwaka Valley. Nearby is the larger township of Motueka and the two places are so fortunate in climate and soil that they provide all of the hops and tobacco grown in New Zealand, as well as vegetable and fruit crops. In the harvest season fields swarm with baked-brown migrant workers, and picking machines seem to float over the tall, green tobacco plants like Indian howdahs – without supporting elephants.
To the south is the provincial centre of Nelson, a city favoured by sunshine and the prosperity of the surrounding countryside. North of Riwaka the Takaka Hill rises as an abrupt barrier, and its popular name of ‘The Marble Mountain’ reminds us that the stone used for the Parliament Buildings in Wellington came from here.
The agricultural calm of the Motueka, Riwaka and Takaka valleys has its contrast in Abel Tasman National Park, which runs north from Kaiteriteri Beach to the Abel Tasman memorial plinth near Tarakohe. This stretch of tumbled hills and forested coastline, as beautiful as any in New Zealand, is well-known to Nelson folk but has yet to be ‘discovered’ by most New Zealanders.
But its first discovery by Europeans was notable indeed. Abel Tasman hove to off Tarakohe in 1642, lost three of his men in a brush with the Maoris, and sailed away, never to set foot in the new land he had found. In 1827 the next explorer in these parts, the famous French navigator Dumont D’Urville, took shelter in Astrolabe Roadstead, a few miles north of Kaiteriteri.
Plate 34
The Buller River near Inangahua, on the Nelson-Westport highway.
A trace of early morning fog rests on the deep-flowing Buller River, close to Inangahua, on the highway between Nelson and Westport. The Buller
The Buller Gorge is in the Nelson Province, but further south lies Westland. The province of Westland, producing gold and coal and timber, as well as farm produce, has a very distinct character. The rainfall on the West Coast is heavy, because the Southern Alps, east of the narrow coastal area, catch the moisture-laden clouds brought by sea-winds; and there is a lush growth of native bush, with stream and rivers that swell suddenly. The people of the West Coast are, in popular opinion, rugged and open-hearted, with a strong tendency to local autonomy.
Plate 35
Woodpecker Bay on the West Coast between Westport and Greymouth.
Here we look south across Woodpecker Bay, on the Tasman coast between Westport, on the Buller River, and Greymouth, on the Grey. The road that links these West Coast towns follows some forty miles of rugged coastline.
Woodpecker Bay is of no commercial consequence today but a hundred years ago it served as one of the many makeshift ports that brought miners and supplies to the gold diggings of the Coast. Nearby Tiromoana, then known as Brighton, was the scene of a goldrush, and to the north were the boom towns of Charleston and Addisons.
Just to the south is Punakaiki, where occurs one of the most remarkable natural features of the West Coast: a limestone headland, its neck covered with bush and nikau palms, its rocks weathered in many places by the turbulent Tasman Sea to resemble piled-up heaps of pancakes, with caves, chasms and blowholes. The display of geyser-like jets is accompanied by a thundering noise in the caves, and in heavy weather the sight is worth coming many miles to see.
Plate 36
The terminal face of Franz Josef Glacier, reflected in Peter’s Pool.
The Franz Josef Glacier, twin glory and pride – with its neighbouring Fox Glacier of South Westland, is here seen flanked by forest growth and reflected in Peter’s Pool. This great river of ice is born in the snowfields of the Southern Alps, and descends about eight thousand feet in its eight-mile course, until it unfreezes at around seven hundred feet to form the Waiho River, which
In winter the ponderous movement is halted, but in the summer thaw the glacier loosens its icy grip on the rock and moves in imperceptible majesty, groaning, rumbling and squealing as the vast mass yields to millions of tons of pressure above.
The glacier was named by its discoverer, the geologist von Haast, in honour of the then Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Peter’s Pool was named for Peter Graham, one of two mountaineering brothers who pioneered routes and guided climbers up the peaks and across the passes of the Mt. Cook region.
Plate 37
Beech forest on the Lewis Pass Road near Springs Junction.
These delicate beeches near Springs Junction, on the Lewis Pass highway between Reefton and Christchurch, are typical of the forest through which many South Island roads travel. Of trees such as these a New Zealand poet has written . . .
The Lewis Pass route is an ancient one. East Coast Maoris travelled this way across the Main Divide to obtain supplies of West Coast greenstone (jade) for their ornaments, tools and weapons, and to trade with North Island tribes.
There is another view of this region on the back of the jacket of this book.
Plate 38
The Rakaia River and the foothills of Mount Hutt Range, Canterbury.
The Rakaia River flows from Lake Coleridge to an outlet south of Banks Peninsula. This view shows an interesting terrace formation in the riverbed near the Rakaia Gorge bridge, and indicates clearly the ancient river levels. The foothills of the Mount Hutt Range can be seen in the background. When the snows melt in the spring, the Rakaia, like other rivers fed from the Southern
These foothills of the Southern Alps, tussock country, provide good grazing for sheep.
Plate 39
The Mackenzie Country, sheep grazing lands in inland Canterbury.
Here not far from Burkes Pass, we see the darkness of a storm approaching over the tussock lands of the Mackenzie Country, in inland Canterbury. The Mackenzie Country takes its name from a Scottish Highland shepherd who discovered the pass in 1850 and promptly used it to spirit away flocks of sheep stolen from the landowners.
Ursula Bethell, in her poem ‘By Burke’s Pass’, has left us a vigorous description of the place . . .
To her, as to me, the country seemed hostile as well as magnificent. But to the shepherd McKenzie, already accustomed to the bare rocks of the
Plate 40
Mt Cook (12,349 ft.). A view taken from The Hermitage.
Silver beeches show their bright autumn foliage in this view of Mt. Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain, seen from The Hermitage resort hotel. The Maori name for the peak was Aorangi, ‘cloud in the sky’.
The mountain was first climbed on Christmas Day, 1894, by three young and inexperienced Canterbury men, who were determined that New Zealanders should reach the summit before an English mountaineer, who had come to New Zealand for the purpose, could claim it.
Mt Cook rises 12,349 feet at the head of the Hooker Valley and dominates the Hermitage scene. Almost a thousand feet higher than Tasman, its highest neighbour, it stands among twenty of New Zealand’s highest mountains, all of them over 10,000 feet.
The Hermitage and its attendant buildings form a little settlement in the heart of a magnificent alpine region. In summer mountaineers come to risk their lives in difficult ascents and ski-planes land skiers in the high snow-fields. Less venturesome folk have lower peaks and glaciers to explore, and tourists can walk through alpine valleys to lakes and lookout points, or obtain a bird’s-eye view of the whole region in an hour’s flight to the high summits, across the Main Divide, and back again.
Plate 41
Lake Ohau and the Dobson Valley looking towards Glen Mary and the Ben Ohau Range.
Typical of the mountain lakes of the South Island is Ohau, close to the sky, ruffled by the wind that blows down from the tussock ranges. This view looks into the Dobson Valley at the head of the lake, with Glen Mary peak on the left, and the Ben Ohau Range, glittering with the first snows, on the right.
Ohau stands higher than her sister lakes, Puakaki and Tekapo, within the grip of the Southern Alps. Her waters are crystal-clear, home of the silver-bellied eels. On her shores grow manuka and matagouri, the grey thorn-bush; and a number of mountain streams flow down through pool and cataract into her shingle basin. Here you can camp among the flowering manukas, lay lines for the eels (which taste better than trout if they are first boiled to remove the fat and then fried) or perhaps shoot a hare and cook it Maori-style in a pit with hot stones on the lake shore.
Plate 42
In the Lindis Pass which links Canterbury and Otago. View looking westwards.
At the Lindis Pass the main inland highway running along the foothills of the Southern Alps reaches a height of 3,185 feet above sea level. This view looks westwards over the endless tussock-lands.
The bareness and wide spaces of Central Otago, the clear light and treeless hillsides, give the traveller the impression that he is entering some kingdom of the elements quite uninhabited by men. As one New Zealand poet has written . . .
Plate 43
The Clutha River between Tarras and Cromwell, Central Otago.
Here the view is south, looking over the swift waters of the Clutha River, from the main inland highway between Tarras and Cromwell. The three main source lakes of this river are Hawea, Wanaka and Wakatipu, and for its length it has as large a flow of water as any river in the world. One of the great water-dragons of the South Island, it rises periodically and floods the farms that lie alongside its banks in the coastal area. Its grimmer aspect has been celebrated in New Zealand verse . . .
The iron cages are the chairs slung on a wire cable, relics of goldrush days, which are still used here and there to cross the gorges of the Clutha where there is no bridge. It is a remarkable spectacle to see at Cromwell the blue water of the Clutha and the water of the Kawarau join and mingle. Twenty miles downstream is the major junction, where the Clutha absorbs
Plate 44
Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables from near Queenstown.
Lake Wakatipu, the longest of the Southern Lakes, is shaped somewhat like an elongated ‘S’. Like the mountain lakes of Switzerland and Northern Italy, it is of glacial origin, and the terminal moraine of the ancient glacier formed the land where Kingston now stands. In this view one sees the jagged slopes of the Remarkables, which extend along the eastern shore of the lake, clothed with snow and sunlight and a few clouds.
Queenstown, on the shores of a bay on the eastern side, is the headquarters of those who come for sight-seeing. In the early days of settlement sailing craft were used on the lake; today there is an aged and elegant lake steamer, and motor launches. The bridge across the outlet where Lake Wakatipu flows into the Kawarau River runs across a set of locks built to lower the head of the river for the more efficient working of alluvial gold deposits. The dam failed to hold back the waters and not an ounce of gold was won by its use.
Ski-ing grounds have been developed at Coronet Peak, about twelve miles from the town by way of Skippers Road.
Plate 45
The Shotover River on the Queenstown-Arrowtown Road.
The Shotover River is seen here in a golden light that reminds us of the gold that was won from its shingle a hundred years ago. Queenstown was then the centre of a rush that brought thousands of men to the river gorges and the lonely creek beds. Thomas Arthur, who gave his name to Arthur’s Point, the scene of this photograph, took two hundred ounces of gold from the river sands of the Shotover in eight days, and four thousand pounds worth in two months.
Denis Glover has written a sprightly ‘Holiday Piece’ about this area . . .
Plate 46
Skippers, looking along the valley; Lighthouse Rock in foreground.
The road from Queenstown to Skippers rises 3,000 feet and snakes around 480 bends, all in a matter of fourteen miles, and the excursion is as noted for its spine-chilling bends and precipices as for the grandeur of its scenery. This photograph shows the narrow road, with Lighthouse Rock in the foreground.
Skippers once swarmed with diggers. In a matter of years every square yard of soil was washed or sifted, every pebble scrutinised, every cranny explored – but no one values its lonely valleys now. Only ruined buildings and rusted machinery remain to comfort the ghosts of eight thousand miners who fought for the yellow fruits of its otherwise barren hills. The last of the miners died only a few years ago, a victim of the snow and the freezing cold that claimed so many of his fellows in the 1860s.
Plate 47
The Eglinton River near the shore of Lake Te Anau.
The moment of success is captured, as a fisherman nets a trout in the Eglinton River, a hundred yards from the shore of Lake Te Anau.
The lake is the South Island’s largest and a holiday resort in its own right, as well as a staging post on the route to Milford Sound. Launches explore its bush-clad waterways and visit its glow-worm cave. The Eglinton Valley narrows northwards between mountain ranges, and a few miles south is Manapouri, ‘the lake of a hundred islands’. From the head of the lake the Milford Track provides an easy three- or four-day walk to Milford Sound.
Across Te Anau is Fiordland, where no men live (except at Milford Sound) and where only hunters and trampers venture. But the Murchison Mountains, in the background, are home to an important community, the sole remaining colony of the flightless notornis, which was discovered in 1948 and has been carefully protected since.
The Murchisons separate the glacial valleys of the lake’s South and Middle Fiord. To the west, fiords of similar origin but which are called sounds, bring the sea into the heart of the mountains so that, as the amphibian flies, there is a mere ten miles between fresh water and salt. But anyone who knows the Fiordland terrain and weather, and its annual rainfall of 250 or more inches, will laugh at the phrase ‘a mere ten miles’.
Plate 48
Mount Talbot in the Upper Hollyford Valley on the road to Milford Sound.
The precipices of Mount Talbot tower above the headwaters of the Hollyford River, near the Homer Saddle.
In his remarkable elegy for a friend killed in the Southern Alps, Alistair Campbell has described the Hollyford Valley in winter . . .
The Homer Saddle has been part of the route to Milford Sound for over fifty years. Mountaineers who tramped up the Eglinton and Hollyford Valleys would ascend the saddle, work their way around the Grave-Talbot Pass, and descend to Milford by a circuitous route.
A 63-chain tunnel under the saddle was begun in 1935 and opened to traffic in 1954, thus completing the road link that commenced as a Depression project at Te Anau in 1929. Except in the savage months of winter, when the avalanche risk is high, the road remains open and its 74 miles constitute probably the finest scenic highway in New Zealand.
Plate 49
Mitre Peak, Milford Sound.
Famous Mitre Peak rises more than five thousand feet directly from the waters of Milford Sound, and the flank of the mountain occupies almost all of the fiord’s southern wall. As New Zealand’s most distinctive and publicised landmark it never fails to impress, or to dominate the scene. There is power in its upthrusting ridge, grace in the final sweep to the summit, loneliness in its noble crown, and a variety of moods that follow changes in the weather and in the day or night sky.
The little promontory in the foreground is Cemetery Point, the delta of the Bowen Falls, which thunder 530 feet down a rock face from the valley of an ancient glacier. All this is ‘glacier country’. The near-vertical, scarred mountainsides and the narrow valleys that twist to the sea are plain evidence of an era when ice was the master of granite.
Fragile toetoe grows among the foreshore boulders and the forest behind is predominantly beech. The word ‘fiord’ means a threshold in Norwegian, and Milford is a true threshold to the northern fastnesses of Fiordland. Maoris knew its loneliness, for they came here for tangiwai, the ‘tear-drop’ greenstone. Europeans first visited in 1823, and in 1877 Donald Sutherland, ‘the hermit of Milford Sound’, arrived and stayed on until he died, 42 years later. His accommodation house has been replaced by a fine Government hostel.
Plate 50
Southland pasturelands between Lumsden and Dipton, en route to Invercargill
In 1844 the Chief Surveyor of the New Zealand Company reported on Southland and described it as ‘a mere bog and unfit for habitation’. He was proved wrong. In 1861 Southland became a separate province; but after financial difficulties rising from a disastrous flood and an attempt to construct railways with wooden rails, the young province was re-united with Otago. Southland is chiefly a centre of extensive primary industries – agriculture, pasture and timber, served by the city of Invercargill, which has an air of confident prosperity and by the expanding port of Bluff, where there are commercial sea fisheries and oyster-canneries.
Here is a view of sheep-raising country between Lumsden and Dipton. In the distance stands the Hokonui Hills, where, according to popular report, illicit whisky stills have operated and may still operate. Lumsden, approximately forty miles from Invercargill, is close to the Oreti River, a singularly lovely stream which rises in the mountains west of Lake Wakatipu and flows south to enter Foveaux Strait.
Plate 51
Dunedin City and harbour from the vicinity of the observatory.
This view shows part of Dunedin city and harbour, from near the observatory. The Otago Province was founded by immigrants from Scotland in 1848. In the city many traces of Scotland still remain – in the names of streets, the University with its heavy grey clock-tower, the Leith Stream that flows over cylindrical weirs, and the statue of Robert Burns sitting thoughtfully in the Octagon, with his back to the Cathedral and his face to the Oban Hotel.
More clearly than any visual artist Denis Glover has caught the life- rhythm of Dunedin in these lines.
Plate 52
Karitane Beach and headland on the Dunedin-Oamaru route.
This last view shows Karitane Beach and headland, on the eastern coastal route between Dunedin and Oamaru.
The waves move in from the cold Pacific; the trees go down to the water’s edge. Karitane is now a farming community and a holiday resort but it has been a place of consequence in Maori history and the scene of early European labours in Otago. A fortified Maori village on the little peninsula successfully withstood a siege of many months; whalers, the first pakehas to settle, established shore stations in these bays and they were followed by a mission settlement.
Our photographic sequence now comes to an end. It began at Cape Reinga, the ancestral departing-place for the spirits of the Maori dead, traversed the North and South Islands of New Zealand, and closes at Karitane, where Maori and pakeha have lived for many years at peace together. We hope we
1961 (265)
Thomas Merton, who is, after God and herself, the agent of my own conversion, has made some powerful statements about the Blessed Virgin. He says – ‘without her, the knowledge of Christ is only speculation’ and ‘what people find to say about her sometimes tells us more about their own selves . . .’. It may be that what I write of her reveals too much of my own nature. I hope it is not so.
The holiness of Almighty God seems terrible to a sinner. To him that holiness looks like Everest, crowned with blizzards and sunlight, to the eyes of a mountaineer in a little valley. ‘Do not go there,’ his heart tells him, ‘or you will die among the avalanches.’
And even the face of the Son of Man, father and friend of the poor, troubles him. It is the face he has most offended. It calls him, however gently, to stretch himself on the right-hand Cross and receive the words and the secret look given to Dismas. In that look the history of all human sanctity is contained; except the sanctity of Mary, who had no sins of her own to expiate.
The sinner is torn two ways. He desires to obey and yet fears the Cross. And to that man, any Catholic man, standing on Golgotha, the Blessed Virgin turns her eyes, and says: ‘My child, it is not difficult. One step at a time is enough. Go to Confession. I will obtain for you the contrition you need. If you do not leave me, I will never leave you.’ And so that man takes his first uncertain step.
There are many things spoken between a child and its mother which would seem foolishness to an outsider. Complaints, loving rebukes, gifts of no value (the child brings a pebble, and the mother pretends it is a jewel, both knowing otherwise), irrational fears banished by a word or touch, household humour.
Many modern men have had no true childhood. Unbaptised, pulled apart by conflicting passions, growing up under the enigmatic weight of a sky where no God lives, they travel early into the desert of sin and seem doomed to perish there. The face of a natural mother may console them, but cannot reach or dispel the deepest terrors of interior darkness. For such men (among whom I would count myself to be) Mary, their supernatural mother, comes like an unhoped-for spring, driving out the devils by a look, and captivating the soul with the reflected beauty of God.
I remember when I saw her image first, with inward as well as outward sight, surrounded by daffodils (for it was spring) and floating above a sea of bright candles, Our Lady of Good Counsel. My soul came out of darkness into sunshine, into a world it had never known, a world where evil was kept in chains and the Blessed walked among men. All the later tears and errors and betrayals could not dispel that moment of recognition; indeed they could only
When someone says, ‘How did you become a Catholic?’ – what reply should one make? Perhaps – ‘I came to the Church to get rid of my sins’ – or – ‘the Holy Spirit gave me faith.’ But the truest answer, for me, would be that of a child – ‘I wrote a letter to God’s mother and she obtained the gift of Faith for me.’
‘But,’ such an enquirer may reply, ‘you are an educated man! You are able to read and write. How did you find it wrestling with Aquinas? What is your view of Papal Indulgences?’
I think the best answer is contained in an old fable. The unicorn lives in a dark forest, far from human dwellings. The bravest hunters who go out to catch him are slain by him. But a Virgin goes out without weapons, and seats herself on the ground, and the terrible unicorn comes out of the forest and sees her. Against her beauty and her sanctity his rage is powerless. He lays his head on her lap, sleeps, and is taken by the hunters.
This fabulous unicorn, to my mind, is the ‘wild living intellect’ of which Newman speaks with dread. Its single horn symbolises the power of a self- centred universe: the analytical power of science or art divorced from God. The hunters are the great theologians and their spears are forged in the smithies of reason. But the unicorn cannot be wounded by them, because they do not touch its heart, which rests in an inhuman purity of self-contemplation.
At the centre of the forest is a cave and a pool. The unicorn sleeps in the cave, and in its dreams a sterile universe revolves endlessly to no purpose. At dawn it emerges and gazes at its own image in the pool, thinking, ‘What am I? Who made me? Why is my existence never free from pain?’
The Virgin symbolises nature in union with God. The unicorn of an archaic human reason is spell-bound at the sight of her. He must sleep and be slain in order to be reborn as a living man.
The human heart often expresses its deepest need in symbols. But God is scarcely a symbolist. His thoughts are acts and the acts issue in creation. He has given us no mere symbol, no Byzantine Sophia crowned with jewels, trembling between being and not-being, but an actual human person in whom nature and the life of God are in perfect harmony.
One cannot see the necessity that God should have a perfect sinless Mother. It is not the necessity of His own holiness, however, but the answer of divine generosity to our deepest human need, which gripped our souls when, in the middle of His passion, He gave us the Blessed Virgin as our own mother. He was not content to redeem us. He gave us as well a living protector and guide, in herself the archetype of human sanctity, who would lead us easily and gently, as children, into the pattern of redemption.
Learned and unlearned men, tough sailors, tidy diplomats, anxious housewives, innocent children, men and women hardened in sin, nuns and priests, the rigid and the careless, speak daily and nightly to Mary, setting
The presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is the first great secret of Catholic life, incommunicable to those who do not believe, however much we may desire that they should share in it. The second is the Marian secret; for in Mary is the pattern of material Church itself, entirely subject to the will of God. Her prayer contains and sustains the prayer of the whole Mystical Body. And she does not waste one iota of what is offered to God through her.
Each country rightly sees Our Lady as its own – in Japan, a Japanese woman; in Mexico, a Mexican. For she is the Mediatrix who perfectly measures the gifts of God to the varying needs and natures of races and individuals. She gives birth to Christ again and tends Him and nourishes Him in each faithful soul. These statements seem hyperbole; but they are attested by the doctrines of the Church and the experience of multitudes.
Mary, cause of our joy, pray for us.
1961 (266)
It seems that Mr Duggan soaks himself regularly in the details of an historical period, and then tries to reconstruct the people and their motives, remembering (and this is his great strength) that human nature varies little from age to age. I would recommend this book on King Alfred to any reader or any teacher. It is never stuffy and always credible. The battle sequences are most workmanlike. Yet I doubt whether Alfred’s weakness of the bowels really was the thing that most shaped his character.
Mr Kersh, in his fictional life of St Paul, runs more risks than Mr Duggan – King Alfred, after all, is not the first father of Christian theology. For two- thirds of the book I thought he was wildly off the beam; yet he finally convinced me that Saul of Tarsus might have been like that – neurotic, implacable, loaded with an arrogant scrupulosity. The fictional narrator is Diomed, Roman prefect in Tarsus, an experienced man with some humour and wisdom. He holds the book together and gives it its special bite.
Neither of these books has the trace of genius, the obsessive vitality of Mr Treece’s Jason – a jewel of a book, direct, poetic, and perfect in shape and style. Mr Treece has done what Robert Graves failed to do in his retelling of the legend of the Golden Fleece. He has reconstructed the mythological age in a way that is not only intellectually credible but also psychologically convincing. His Jason lives and breathes and walks, and so does every other character. More than this; one feels that the secrets of life which one hopes to find in the finest novels or poems are expressed by Mr Treece obliquely in this inimitable,
1962 (267)
The first two books, numbers eight and nine respectively in Gollancz’s ‘Common Sense Series’, are the fruits of ecumenical thinking. Both writers are members of the Church of England, and share a broad, humane approach to world problems, and a strong tendency to shrug off formal definitions of belief. Mr Hadham has the harder task, for he has endeavoured to discover the basic elements in the life of the various Christian denominations, in Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, which might serve as a common ground for co-operation in worship. He comes close in spirit to Matthew Arnold, the father of the Modernists, who defined God as ‘that power, outside ourselves, which makes for righteousness’ – and he continually slides over the real contradictions which need to be recognised. Can one equate, for instance, as Mr Hadham does, the Buddhist idea of peace with that peace proclaimed by angels in the Gospel story of the birth of Christ?
Canon Carpenter’s task is more rewarding. He can leave Buddhism to the Buddhists and speak directly from his own position – a thoroughly pragmatical one. The most vital portions of his book are those which deal with problems of the Christian conscience scandalised by modern warfare and the hydrogen bomb. He appeals, very properly, to what he feels Christ’s own attitude would be, and prefers the prospect of a world dominated by Communism to the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Dr Harlow’s account of his own personal experience of paranormal phenomena – inkwells mysteriously shattered, ectoplasm, spirit voices, apparitions, telepathy, typewriting horses, apparent reincarnation – is patently sincere. The author claims that these experiences have strengthened his faith in personal immortality and enlarged his spiritual horizons. Yet his book has this in common with other spiritist literature – the written and spoken communications which he has received from the ‘spirit world’ would seem to indicate either that death makes morons of us all, or else that the inquirers are fooling themselves or being fooled.
1962 (268)
This small anthology of Australian verse, though perhaps unduly expensive, should be useful to readers who have no previous knowledge of the Australian literary scene. Notes by the poets (or their relatives) accompany the poems selected. Many of the poems are good reporting; but one grows tired of the
Despite Kathleen Raine’s generous foreword – ‘in a treeless waste a seed is better than a pebble’ – the aphorisms of Mr Menashe are too slight and personal to warrant publication. But the newly selected translation of the poems of Boris Pasternak read much better than other renderings from the Russian (or from Pasternak) that I have so far come across. They are the poems of a recluse – sharply drawn etchings of the Russian countryside are constantly set against an extreme personal isolation and mannered seclusion. One finds again that ambivalence towards the Soviet regime which lies coiled in the pages of Doctor Zhivago. And Pasternak writes, perhaps unknowingly, his own epitaph –
The Zhivago poems, however, are still the high tide mark of the collection. The translator deserves our praise and thanks.
1962 (269)
Both these plays are extraordinarily interesting as vivid studies of historical personages, as modern works that tackle religious problems common to a past age and to our own, and simply as plays. The last thing one would have expected from Mr Osborne would be a play about Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk whose convulsive energy created a new form of Christianity, dependent on the Book, not the Church. The temptation for Mr Osborne must have been either to take sides in the complex Catholic-Protestant controversy (thus producing a dramatic vilification or justification of Luther) or else to rely cheaply on the findings of modern psychiatry in presenting, for example, Luther’s decision to abandon his vow of celibacy, or his frequent use in his writings of excremental imagery. Mr Osborne does not take sides. He shows Luther as he may well have been, a man of tormented but real integrity, a peasant visionary; he also shows Cajetan, the Cardinal who tried to reconcile Luther to the Church, as a man of real tolerance and understanding. But the smell of latrines is perhaps too strong
Jean Anouilh’s study of Thomas A’Becket has a diamond clarity. The dramatic development of the breach between Thomas and King Henry II is perfectly handled. M. Anouilh has the edge on T.S. Eliot. Becket is a better play than Murder in the Cathedral, because no one preaches in it, and the characters have full personal substance. It is a broader play than Luther, because of its theme – the clash of the authority of Church and State, a more objective issue than the clash between Luther and Papal authority. In this fine translation M. Anouilh’s language rings like a struck wineglass. The play should stage magnificently.
1962 (270)
The difference between these two books is the difference between self-fertilising verbalisms and poetry which reflects an actual world. It is strange that Hugh McCrae, with his satyrs, nymphs and Columbines dancing on moonlit lawns, should have acquired the reputation he has in Australia. Perhaps it had something to do with the personality of the man, apparently an agreeable one. His poems are all form with hardly a shred of actual content. The tradition which imprisoned him throughout a long life is the same which makes an echoing desert of the Alexander and Currie anthology of New Zealand poetry. One can hardly avoid considering such verses as the following in terms of mental pathology –
Yet this kind of moronic babbling passed for poetry here too for several decades; and would still, if there were no one to laugh at it.
Kenneth Mackenzie, born in 1913 and drowned near Goulburn in 1955, must be an irreplaceable loss to Australian letters. After Hugh McCrae, reading his verse is like emerging from a stuffy room to an open street or beach –
Here he celebrates an Australian river; and in many vigorous love poems writes with something of the breadth and magnanimity of A.R.D. Fairburn. Though it is at times diffuse, the fundamental honesty of his work sets him high among Australian poets.
1962 (271)
Despite its unfortunate title, this book of verse, by a New Zealand poet, is neither trivial nor amateur. The poet knows her own mind and does not try to borrow anyone else’s. According to her own account, she received the gift of poetry from a unicorn –
The unicorn was replaced by a different daemon, a donkey, an animal prone to irreverence but more easily domesticated –
The ass, the beast of burden, is most efficient: and an ass’s heel can kick hard. This book contains poems in many styles on many topics, with an epigrammatic style and domestic topics predominating. The poet has all the command of the formal craft of verse-making that she needs. She has already enough insight to see under the shell of society; but her vigorous intellect tends to sterilise its subject-matter. There is a sense in which reticence is a handicap for a poet – a poet may leave the best poems unwritten because they are too near the bone. I think this poet should risk more, give away more, cut deeper. Reticent, witty, indirect, she is too often carving cherrystones when she could already be writing most of the time about what concerns her most. ‘Happy Ending’ (a poem about a cat which is also a comment on human isolation and endurance), ‘Factory Girl, 1944’, ‘Air Raids at Seventy-five’, ‘Crevasse in Time’, ‘Blue Peter’, ‘The Long Parting’, and certain passages in a semi-narrative poem
1962 (272)
In compiling this collection of his own prose and verse, Bertolt Brecht had in mind the ‘peasant calendars’ of the past, in which anecdotes and aphorisms provided a satirical and entertaining comment on everyday life. Brecht tried to write for the people. He understood very well those humiliations which the man without property has to put up with. This knowledge gave blood to his Socialist view of the world. In ‘Socrates Wounded’ it is Socrates as cobbler whom he describes; and in his fictional account of the assassination of Caesar, it is Carpo, leader of the plebeians, who stands out –
First Carpo has to be found. There are so very many erstwhile plebeian prisoners in this dungeon that they are rotting away by the dozen. But after some coming and going the building worker Carpo is hoisted up out of a hole on long ropes and now the dictator can talk to the man in whom the Roman populace puts its trust.
They sit face to face and eye each other. Carpo is an old man; possibly he is no older than Caesar, but the fact is he looks eighty. Very old, very wasted, but not broken. Without beating about the bush Caesar expounds his incredible plan; to reintroduce democracy, hold elections, retire into private life himself, etc., etc.
The old man is silent. He does not say yes, he does not say no; he is silent. He looks at Caesar fixedly and utters no sound. As Caesar takes his leave, he is lowered into his hole again on the long ropes. The dream of democracy is over . . .
This long quotation may serve to illustrate Brecht’s peculiar strength, which is not achieved by a single image, but by cumulative detail, and which continually sets against any Caesar the gaze of the permanent underdog.
1962 (273)
Sir: Your editorial of May 18 could create a false impression in the mind of a reader who had not listened to the session of the Arts Review on which you are commenting. I cannot speak for the other members of the panel; but I know that we were asked to join in an ad-lib conversation which was afterwards cut, no doubt, to remove superfluities. This method leads to conversational freedom rather than clear second thoughts and comprehensive accuracy. I still think it was well worth doing this way – many prepared radio conversations
I think you draw too much from my remark that ‘New Zealand has had no real criticism apart from a few efforts from myself and Mr Curnow’ – those were not the exact words, but I will accept them as a summary. At this point in the panel discussion I had in mind the kind of broad survey of any writer’s work which has been produced, for example, by Thomas Blackburn in England and Edmund Wilson in America. You are right to suggest that New Zealand reviews can be helpful to readers; but they are too brief to do much for writers – and the panel discussion was about the effect of criticism on New Zealand writers.
On second thoughts I might well have mentioned McCormick’s Centennial survey of the arts, and Holcroft’s trilogy – yet the first is more descriptive than critical, and the second contains more sociological and mystical reflections than direct examination of texts – each has undoubtedly influenced writers, yet neither does the job which the formative English and American critics have done. Mr Curnow, on the other hand, despite some special pleading, does make a broad exact survey in his two anthology Introductions, and I think that I, despite the formlessness of my three essays in The Fire and the Anvil, attempted something which was not reviewing, or a guidebook tour, or (though this is more doubtful) simply the expression of personal intuitions about life and literature. Of course we were both writing about New Zealand verse; there are no parallel surveys that I know of which deal with New Zealand prose writers.
I trust that this explanation will serve as an apology for saying too little in the panel discussion. As for the ‘moribund condition of the populace’, I have rarely met an immigrant from England or Europe who has not, while admitting the various social virtues of New Zealanders, deplored our almost universal crudeness in matters relating to the arts. The prevailing opinion of such Outsiders is that we live in spiritual gun-turrets with the smallest slits cut for observation; and on the whole I agree with them.
1962 (274)
Mr Clarke’s poems constitute a commentary on Irish life, the earlier poems passionate and mediaeval, the later ones hard-bitten and acrid with disgust. The poet’s own words to Robert Frost describe his process exactly – ‘I load myself with chains and try to get out of them.’ Those who like the rhymeless intellectual Irish ferocity will like these poems very much.
The ‘correspondence for the stage’ which Mr Duncan has constructed from the seven original letters between Abelard and Heloise is as good as anything he has done. The two characters come to life, the quality of obsession in their love is fully captured by Mr Duncan’s colloquial rhetoric.
Yet something is missing. One hears a man’s voice speaking, a woman’s voice speaking, personal, exact, and those two great archetypal figures of romantic love somehow cease to exist.
Mr Gunn’s poems are wholly his own. One learns not to look for visions and affirmations among the best poets now writing only a sad hangover honesty appropriate perhaps to the Hydrogen Age. This poet’s verse-structure is itself like the ring-mail he describes in his poem ‘The Byrnies’ –
There is little difference between the marauding Norsemen, so perfectly evoked, and the young van-driver in ‘Black Jackets’ who wears tattooed on his left shoulder the name of his gang, ‘The Knights’, and on his right shoulder the slogan ‘Born to Lose’. These two poems, and several others, are beyond critical ferreting. Mr Gunn understands our barbarian age better than it understands itself. He knows its animal vigour and nihilist endurance, and between the words, like blood or serum, he allows a suggestion to seep out of what it has lost.
1962 (275)
(comments on the art of poetry)
Not long ago, in the scuffle after a verse-reading at which my confrères and I read our own verse, a charming woman spoke to me: ‘I liked your poems, Mr Baxter,’ she said. ‘But you’re too young to be disillusioned.’
It woke me a little out of my after-reading stupor. By ‘disillusioned’ I think she meant something more – misanthropy perhaps. I have thought about her remark several times since then. And the poem that follows, and the comments on the poem, may go some distance towards answering it. The poem is about Rotorua, and also about the human condition . . .
A poem is a symbolic microcosm of the known universe of the man who writes it. Looking at this poem, I can see what the lady meant by ‘disillusionment’ – not political, say, or social, but sexual disillusionment. The poem also contains some pieces of Rotorua – scrub fires, campers, a snippet of local legend, the Maori cemetery where steam-vents come up through the concrete) but the central action of the poem is a shift of maturity – a shift from double-bed to single-bed thinking. The lady was wrong if she thought I denied this shift. I had fought it strenuously for a number of years. But lately I had woken up on several winter nights, and seen that dark hole in the ground towards which the years were taking me, with no romantic satisfaction whatsoever. Before thirty, death is a theme for interesting romantic speculation. (A.R.D. Fairburn’s ‘Disquisition on Death’, for example, is the poem of a young man.) After thirty, it is a hard undodgeable fact related directly to oneself. A number of my recent poems have been death poems.
Inevitable physical death is not exactly the most disquieting thing. One does not have to struggle against what is not yet occurring. It is rather the state of death-in-life, life lived without profound organic satisfaction or significant communications with others, which disturbs most. Indeed, granted Catholic
Some comment on the plagues of the human condition which I encounter in the poem may be called for:
Misapprehensions I conceive of as being the customary plagues of those who love one another. Some people may remember a poem of mine called ‘Ballad of Calvary Street’, in which an old couple proceeds to the grave without the power in either to recognise the other’s true face or loving intention. It is not a defection from an impossible harmony between lovers or friends or married people which I regret; but the bungling due to habitual fear and habitual prejudices, which insists that one should wear a mask, displaying only a portion of one’s true face to even the most intimate, and the misapprehension that follows any effort to remove the mask. One does not have to be an anthropologist to see that the relations between men and women . . . are riddled with misapprehensions.
There are drugs offering on every street-corner – alcohol, the Reader’s Digest, meaningless liaisons, refrigerators, films, Adult Education groups. In my own experience, before thirty, the drugs were effective enough; if one faded, there was normally a stronger one at hand. But after thirty, the drugs lose their power. I remember smoking hashish in Calcutta, and realising after one night of it, that it could do nothing except strum tunes on the nerves which I knew already. Drugs provoke fantasy. But one loses the taste for being a one-man menagerie.
The demon of lucre is a powerful enemy, chiefly because of his thorough respectability. I have seen good friends butchered by him, one by one. He works on the paternal and uxorious feelings. An artist who [dreams of ] selling himself for money alone, who knows that money is poisonous dirt, will produce glib drugs for an advertising agency or castrated scripts for radio, because his wife needs a washing-machine or his children coats to wear. Perhaps only the destitute, the hobos who sleep in railway carriages have a chance of evading this demon; and they must lie to get there . . .
The demon of ennui, in my experience, is the constant companion of bureaucrats. I think it is because Caesar rules by dividing symbols from facts, a practice painfully obnoxious to poets. Anyone who can read one of the reports that function as ballast to prevent the Wellington offices from toppling in a high wind – just one report, let us say, on ‘Cultural Integration in the Field of Education’ – and does not emerge paralysed with boredom, has my envious admiration. It is Caesar’s logic that prevails when fishermen are arrested for using exact four-letter words in town, while bureaucrats are
1962? (276)
1
Most critics spend their time wrestling with their own mental processes, instead of shedding some light on the books they have read. Like a man going on holiday who spends half of the first morning oiling his car: he gets there, but he gets there late. New Zealand critics are no exception. The best of them, Allen Curnow, is the cruellest. He beats his nurse, the big jaw-boned drayhorse of a New Zealand muse, continually, and only comes as an afterthought to the corpus of New Zealand poems which he didn’t write himself. The broadest of them, McCormick, tries to set down everything important that has happened. It all has to be measured and noted, like the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple; of course he merges the critic in the historian. I have never been a critic’s arse, thank God, and become less of one as I get older; just an occasional reader who also thinks; and I’m too long in the writing job myself to think I know the answers.
2
I remember coming near the end of a long poem called ‘The Sirens’, and going down to a certain Wellington hotel to see the barman, Fitz. When I had no money on me, I’d bring a half bottle of gin, and Fitz would put it under the counter and serve me from it. There was a word in the poem I wasn’t satisfied with –
The word ‘carnivorous’ didn’t suite the sea or Ulysses’s heart. I explained the difficulty to Fitz. He thought for twenty seconds, and then said, ‘It should be omnivorous. The sea eats up everything. So does life.’
Of course he was quite right; and the poem stands as he amended it. If I had asked one of our varsity critics he wouldn’t have had a clue.
3
I remember going up to the chartroom on a fishing trawler, the first morning
‘It’s an instrument for measuring the depth of a woman’s c—’, he replied. The Skipper, like the barman, knew something. If you split an idea too far it will wound your mind. By his reply the Skipper gave me the first part of another poem –
I just had to paraphrase his intuition, set it down in terms of my own life. Any bright member of the Department of Fisheries could have told me all about echo sounders, how they worked, what they were made of, how many ships had them. I wouldn’t have got a poem out of those boys.
4
It seems ignorance is the best teacher. You have to go back where you started from to find out where you’re going to. The Catholic Church has always understood this. The darkness of the confessional is the darkness of the world, of the depths of the sea, the whale’s belly, and one has to enter this darkness to be reborn. The Mass is a daily return to the darkness of Mount Calvary, when the sun was darkened and the Temple veil torn in half by the shuddering of the world at the death of God. Knowledge of ignorance is the pre-requisite of any new creation.
5
If a new literature were to grow up in the country, or if the literature we have were to put down roots, I can’t see that the universities would do much to help it. By comparison of and comment on the writing that exists, they can help people to cultivate a sense of form; but they can teach no man with any sense unless it’s by reading and discussion with his friends.
1962? (277)
These three paperbacks are each reprints. R.G. Collingwood’s classic essays should be of value to a wider audience than history students. Like many Englishmen who also happen to be specialists, he is not content to expound a discipline; he simultaneously meditates on the methods of historians and the function of the human mind itself in its labours to apprehend reality. In a sense, he sees history not as ‘what happened’ but as the re-enactment of ‘what happened’ in the mind of an historian. There are dangers of excessive subjectivity in this approach; and Collingwood, being idealist in philosophy, does not wholly avoid them. He will shake the confidence of any reader who naïvely supposes that any historical work can be a simple record of knowable facts.
A.D. Nock, in his survey of religious conversion to Christianity and to pagan cults during the Roman Empire, sidesteps one difficult issue – that to a convert his conversion does not seem a sociological event, but an event which establishes a new relation between him and God, or at least the cosmos. Mr Nock’s approach sidesteps the actual meaning of conversion; and consequently he tends to under-rate the difficulties of conversion and see Christianity too simply as a mystery cult which has happened to outlast the others.
Dr Geddes is a New Zealander, at present Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His account of life among the Dyaks of Borneo is a very lively and attractive document, well-illustrated with photographs, and comparable in miniature to Grimble’s Pattern of Islands. The long Dyak yarn which he seasons with comment is almost a picaresque novel in itself. The book is a delight to read.
1962 (278)
It is hard to see why the first book is priced so high; it is long (over four hundred pages) and well-printed, with plates, but not on gold leaf. Furthermore, Mr Lehmann has not been able to conceal that Saint-Beuve as well as being an eminent man of letters was also a bore. This is unfortunate. The literary factions of France in the early nineteenth-century; the liaisons; the quarrels; Saint Beuve’s own study of Jansenism, that extraordinary sect one of whose leaders claimed to know omnisciently that ‘out of a thousand souls, not so many as one returns to God’ – these matters could all be enthralling, but the style of Saint-Beuve (like cold rice pudding in translation) forbids it. He was a commentator, never a catalyst; and Mr Lehmann has not managed to thaw him out.
Mr Bloom’s book has real enthusiasm and many insights; though he does tend arbitrarily to interpret Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats
Professor Staples’s book on the modern American poet, Robert Lowell, is that rarest thing in literature: a critical study entirely just, informed, witty, profound and generous, which sheds enormous light on the texts of a difficult though excellent poet. How lucky Lowell is to have a perfect critic, a middleman with a mind as broad as the Golden Gate Bridge! One sees through Professor Staples’s lens not only Lowell but a comprehensible New England: layer upon layer of social conditioning, from the hellfire preaching of Jonathan Edwards to the frozen upper crust of modern Boston that Lowell consistently rebels against. And Professor Staples has provided for his readers, from love, one must think, in an appendix, Lowell’s remarkable narrative poem, ‘The Mills of the Kavanaughs’, not otherwise procurable in this country.
1962 (279)
A Novel
A Ghost in Trousers
Timothy Harold Glass woke slowly from a dream of crocodiles. The jabber of starlings under the spouting, outside the window of his upstairs room, did not make him happy. Neither did the Sunday morning sun, already high above the old-maid bluegums, stabbing uncomfortably close to his pillow. Timothy Harold Glass had a whisky hangover. He had learnt the day before that he had failed his first-year examinations in Latin, French and Psychology, and gained a poor pass in English. His mother would want to talk about it.
There had been more than crocodiles in the dream. It had begun with him striding above the town on enormous stilts, in danger of freezing in the acrid air. Then he had stood wool-gathering in the second bench of the Lower Oliver lecture-room, while Miss Gallon, the yellow-faced and spectacled French lecturer, said sarcastically, ‘Now we will have the pleasure of hearing Mr Glass translate for us.’ When he had looked down at the copy of Merimée’s Carmen open in his hand, all its pages had been blank. And later he had been trying to make love to Fern, his medical student girlfriend, on a big bed in the middle of the private bar of the Bowling Green. Fern had objected. ‘No, Horse, not here! Not with everyone looking.’ Fern called him Horse, partly because she liked horses, and partly because he usually trod on her feet when he tried to dance with her; and the name had spread among his other friends. Then a man whose face he couldn’t quite see had come and led
He could hear the clanking of a bucket in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. His father would be there, taking out a small drayload of lettuce leaves, soaked bread, meat bones, potato peelings and tea leaves to the gorged hens on the other side of the double section. If he had only had to explain things to his father, life would be a lot easier.
‘Where were you last night, Timothy?’
‘I went to a party and got a bit drunk.’
‘Ah-ah.’ The bucket would be hoisted over the wire netting. The bread and lettuce would explode on the dry ground of the hen run, splattering his father’s worn grey trousers. Then the Old Man would straighten up, his eyes on the scrabbling hens, and clear his throat –
His father habitually quoted Burns in times of crisis. It gave Horse the same sense of comfort that he had had as a small child, crouched under his father’s knees, and looking into the glow of a manuka fire.
‘Timothy, your mother says you’ve not been doing too well in your work at the University.’
‘I don’t like it there. It reminds me of a cemetery. I’d rather be shifting round from job to job and trying to write.’
‘I can’t quite see you a college man, myself. They gang in stirks and come out asses. . . . Do you know what a stirk is?’
‘No.’ Horse knew well enough; but he knew too that the Old Man enjoyed expounding the text.
‘A stirk’s a steer. A bullock.’ His father’s eye would light up with the joy of the Scotsman commenting obliquely on the facts of life. ‘The varsity men are nothing but educated bullocks. That’s what Burns thought about it.’ Then his face would lengthen into the mask of the peacemaker. ‘All the same, your mother went to Cambridge. It did her no harm. You’ve got to try and understand her, Timothy. She wants to see you do well. And there’s the money to be considered. A man’s got to work at something. I earned half-a-crown a week when I started ploughing for old Runciman. I was twelve years old, six years younger than you, and I wasn’t tall enough to reach up to the horse’s
That conversation would not take place. Instead the battle would be fought out in his mother’s bedroom, behind drawn blinds. She had already guessed about Fern. Probably she had worked it out from the stains on his underwear. The kind of man she wanted him to be would never have had the guts to move in on Fern. She would have all the good reasons on her side. Money, virtue, common sense. Even God. Horse had no clear idea of God, but he suspected that God and his mother were uncomfortably like each other. It seemed more than likely that God intended him to be a stirk. He had made the frame for it so exactly. The grey-green monotonous hills, the tombstone clouds, and the endless sad wash of waves on the Otago beaches. A dry Book of Genesis where He wrote all the questions and answers. And Fern would never appear in that Book, except perhaps as Lilith, the demoness who tempted Adam.
A monotonous buzzing sounded from a web above the sun-faded curtains in the corner of the room. It died away to a shrill sporadic whine as the small hairy poison-fangs bit home in the rind of a fly. Horse curled up like a foetus in the sheets damp with the booze sweat of the night before. He closed his eyes, and his hand moved down to his crutch, groping for the key to unconsciousness. The image of Fern rose before his mind’s eye – her firm bum, her breasts, the yellow-brown hair that hung down to her waist when she unplaited it, and those other hidden parts he valued more than the rest put together. Her face remained unassembled; though he could visualise with an effort the hard blue eyes and clear-cut mouth. Horse found it hard to remember faces.
Then resolutely he drew his hand back. A boy might do that; a man of eighteen, Fern’s lover, couldn’t. In one movement he woke up entirely, threw off the bedclothes, and jumped out on the floor. He was naked, for he had been too drunk to look for his pyjamas when he had crept into bed at one o’clock that morning. His slacks and shirt and black polo-neck jersey lay tangled where he had dropped them.
While he dressed Horse looked through the half-open window at the dead township. The sea lay grumbling on the rocks. Some early cars from town wound their way on to the treeless Domain. Later children would grub in the sand there and fathers and mothers would sit in a Sunday coma under the grooved banks. A few young men would take their girls into the lupins that grew along the sandhills, to lay down their overcoats and bang them in peace, absorbing the healing influences of the sea and soil. Not Horse. He would paddle a canoe up river and sit on the branch of an old willow and make a bad poem about God. The whisky dregs rose to his head. You’d better have it out with her now, he thought, while you’re still half-pissed.
He shaved slowly in the narrow bathroom at the bottom of the stairs. His twin and incubus, Timothy Harold Glass, with beeswings under his eyes, pursed a weak mouth and stared back at him from the loony mirror. Pud-puller! he whispered bitterly to his reflection. A sniper’s rifle cracked soundlessly from outer space. Two bullets passed through the bathroom wall, above the cistern that never worked, entered his cranium and emerged through his mangled jawbone. It was a cold day for the funeral. His father and mother stood by the graveside bewildered, while the clods fell on the varnished mahogany lid. His mother wore a navy-blue coat-and-skirt with white ruffles at the neck.
‘Why did he do it?’
‘Nobody knows. He was a strange boy. If he’d lived he might have been a great writer. The doctors think he must have had some secret worry.’
‘We never knew. We thought he was happy with us.’
Pine needles fell on the raw gash of graveyard clay. A high shrill music sounded above the wandering clouds. Six feet underground a young man’s bones lay quiet until the ending of the world.
Having attended his own funeral, Horse moved gingerly through the house on stockinged feet. The slow chirr and clang of the black-and-gold mantelpiece clock began as he entered the dining room. The clock sounded like a tired man who had just made it. The time was a quarter to nine. Newspapers and travel magazines lay piled on all the chairs. The sofa was buried under an avalanche of them.
He paused at the door of his mother’s bedroom. The whisky had faded again, leaving him dull and giddy. He could hear the crackle of the morning newspaper from inside the room, and her small sounds of movement under the bedclothes. She would be lying back with her glasses on, soaking up the mass bombing of Germany. His mother had lived for two years in Germany as a girl; and now she sent regular food parcels to German civilians. Every block-buster that the Yanks dropped smashed another piece of her youth, that remembered idyll of Moselle wines and young men in climbing boots and alpine flowers. At that moment Horse felt grateful to the Yanks. They would divert her attention from his own enormities.
He stiffened his muscles and edged the door open. His mother put down the paper and gave him a searching, anxious look over her glasses. The room had a dry smell of sun-baked books and talcum powder. As he drew near the bed, she lifted her face to be kissed, a face whose power lay in its capacity to be hurt, framed in grey hair and a pink nylon bed-jacket. His stomach sank like a stone in a bog. Horse and his mother loved each other. The misunderstanding between them, more profound than any communication, stretched right back to the cotton wool and enemas and foreskin-clipping doctors of a Karitane nursing home. Bending over the pillow, he received the sacramental kiss, dry and cool and faintly sweet as apples kept in a loft. The danger of collapse into
The Americans have bombed Ulm,’ she said. ‘They’ve damaged the cathedral.’
‘That’s bad,’ said Horse.
While his mother angrily re-edited the history of Eastern Europe, Horse shifted his mind into neutral. After five minutes she paused for breath.
‘Mother, I’ve decided not to go back to varsity next year.’
Horse, the redhot stovesitter, the boy with the glass belly, had hurled the grenade. Timothy Harold, the good son, stood to one side with his hands over his ears, blinking and frozen. Stopped in midstride, his mother said nothing. When she finally spoke, it was in a very mild tone, as if to a child of six who had soiled his underpants.
‘Don’t be silly, Timothy!’ I can understand you being disappointed at the exam results. I was very disappointed too. It’s partly my fault for not making sure that you worked regularly at home. I think it would be better if you took three subjects next year. You’ll have to really concentrate this time. And I think you should stop drinking altogether. You’re far too young to start that kind of thing. I’d often wondered where the money I put in the bank for your books was going to –.’
‘I’m not going back.’
‘Why on earth not?’ His mother’s voice became shriller. ‘You’ve never talked like this before. It would be absurd to let all your education go down the drain –.’
‘I want to write.’
‘Write, then! I’ve nothing against your writing. You can go to University and write as well.’ Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were burning. This was the climax he had feared. If he began to argue, he would be lost. On open ground her cavalry would cut his forces to smithereens.
‘I need to sort things out.’
‘Nonsense! Utter nonsense! You just want to spend your time at drunken parties. You’re turning into a hobo, Timothy. Where were you last night?’
‘At Tony’s place.’
‘At Tony’s place. I thought so. And I suppose you were as drunk as a pig.’ ‘Pigs don’t drink.’
‘I don’t care what pigs do. It’s Tony who’s the cause of all this nonsense. He’s helping you to ruin your life.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Tony.’ The palms of Horse’s hands were wet on the varnish of the bed-rail. He knew that she knew that Tony was a queer. ‘Nothing wrong?’ She laughed with a shrill neigh. ‘You must think I’m blind as a bat. You’ve got no standards, any of you. When we did wrong, we knew it was wrong, and tried to put it right again. But the people you know are just a pack of dirty little animals. Tony and Fern and the lot of them. And
‘I’m sorry, Mother. A man’s got to choose his own friends. I’m not going back to varsity. I’ll get a job instead.’
‘Well, you can go to Hell in your own way then. You’re mad! Quite mad!’ She shouted these words at the top of her voice, then sank back exhausted on the pillow and glared at him from a reddened mask.
‘I’m sorry,’ Horse said again. He felt a sharp twinge of sympathy for her and an impulse to put his arm round her shoulders and comfort her. But it would be no use. That way lay surrender. He walked numbly through the house, and down the shaky verandah steps, his own face burning. He felt as if he were treading on thick wads of kapok.
The sky had clouded and a few drops of rain were falling. His father was digging round the roots of an apple tree alongside the house. He wore a mackintosh draped over his shoulders, his oldest hat, and thigh-deep gumboots. As Horse came out of the house, he straightened his back and raised one hand as if to beckon to him. But Horse hurried down the lawn. He pushed through the gap in the hawthorn hedge at the place where the outflow from the septic tank had made the ground boggy.
The Old Man must have heard her shouting, he thought. He remembered how his father had had to dig up the septic tank after the MacLennans had rented the house in the holidays. It was blocked by about fifty condoms that looked just like tomato skins. Now, whenever the MacLennans were mentioned, the Old Man was accustomed to refer obliquely to this mystery.
He crossed the gravel road below the house, climbed through a wire fence, and ran zig-zag down the steep hill paddock to the river. He crouched as he ran. Suddenly he remembered running up the road in the same crouching position at the age of seven. He and Billy Turner had set fire to the Ramsay’s gorse hedge. They had not meant to set fire to it; but the flame had spread from another gorse bush, creeping along the dry grass, and the hedge had gone up in a roar of sparks and black smoke. He had spent the rest of the afternoon hidden under an empty house beside the bowling green, inhaling the smell of dog-dirt and guilt, and had come up the road again at dusk. Mrs Turner, leaning on her gate, had seen him pass thirty yards away, and shouted bitterly, ‘If I was your mother, I’d tan your backside for you! I’d skin you alive!’ He did not remember the long post-mortem in the sitting room at home as clearly as the magnificent and horrifying moment when the hedge had gone up in flames, a pillar of thunder licking towards the soft womb of the clouds.
It was only when Horse was right out of sight of the house, sitting on the bare earth under one of McArthur’s gum trees, that he realised he was shaking all over. He burst into tears and gripped the huge smooth bole of the tree as if it were a human body. When the spasm had passed he stood up and lit a cigarette. Sheep were grazing on the slope of the hill above him.
A hundred yards away the river ran brown and sluggish under gorse-pods, cutting the earth away from under the edge of the cattle-flats. He had sailed flax-stick boats on it often enough, and gaffed eels among the weeds with a fish-hook nailed to a stick, and hauled canoes across the muddy shallows. The sight and sound of it calmed him now as it had always done. He was aware of the pressure of the leather belt he wore, cutting his waist, the sharp salty taste of the cigarette, the movement of his muscles, the warmth of the sun on his neck and the back of his hand as it sailed out again from behind a cloud. At that moment it seemed as if Timothy Harold Glass, the ghost in trousers, had dissolved into thin air, and only Horse was left alive.
The Mills of God
The fourth heat of the afternoon was just over. They had been half-inch rounds, the kind that Horse liked least. They shot out from the rolls like red-hot snakes. Horse had been taking his turn on the narrow gut of flooring between the small rolls and the boiler house, grabbing each one with the tongs as it came from the rolls, and hauling it across the grooved and polished floor that made his boots smoke. The old boilerman watched him from a window in the boilerhouse wall. He could sit down there all day, the easy job he needed because his vertebrae were welded solidly together. He had told Horse correctly that if he dropped one of the rounds, it would probably strike the edge of a floor plate and drive itself clean through his clothes and guts or else whip round his neck like a lunatic python.
Horse rested low against the bench in the smithy and watched Charlie, the blacksmith’s helper, hammer out one half of what would eventually be a new pair of tongs. Charlie weighed something over twenty stone. His belly prevented him from bending over the anvil, and his apron could have been used as a small horse-cover. He raised the hammer slowly to shoulder height, then let if fall by its own weight – crack! – then slowly up, and – crack! – down again. His huge brandy-swollen face was hardly capable of expression; but his small blue eye was charged with an experienced sadness.
Between five and six the night before, Horse had had the pleasure of sinking fifteen handles at the Green Island pub. Gandhi, the bald rollsman, had held up his first beer to the light and examined it carefully. ‘Cow piss!’ he had said. ‘The old boys up in the marble orchard would give their eyeteeth for this. But they won’t be getting any.’ Then he had downed it and ordered another one while the radio blared out the race results from Wingatui.
Horse had found that the residue of one night’s beer could easily be sweated out the next morning. At the mills each man was drenched continually in sweat, except for the men in the stacking yards and the boilerman and the polished clerks in the office and old Voss who owned the place. Dead Loss Voss, a scraggy man who wandered like a camel from the office to the furnaces
The iron was gradually taking shape on Charlie’s anvil. Each time it grew cold he replaced it in the hot coke bed of the forge furnace.
‘Have a smoke, Charlie,’ said Horse. He extended a damp packet of Capstans.
With the same exaggerated slowness that belonged to all his movements, Charlie took the cigarette, placed it in his mouth, removed the half-shaped iron from the embers, lit his smoke with the reddening metal, and replaced it. ‘What did you do before you had this job?’ Horse asked. ‘Were you always
a blacksmith?’ he knew that Charlie had spent most of his life at sea. This vast human sack had been agile once and sharp as a needle. It carried the memories of typhoons and bazaars and brawls and drinking bouts and the flesh of a thousand women asleep in its net of nerves.
‘He’s not a blacksmith’s arsehole,’ said a voice from the door. Gandhi came in, mopping his arms with a sweat-rag. ‘He’s an old brown-hatter. Watch out, Tim. He’ll be up you like a rat up a drainpipe.’ Gandhi grasped Charlie from behind, fastened his hands under his middle, and strained to lift him from the floor, making sucking noises with his tongue. ‘An eight-pound snooker, I’d say. Or else a barracuda.’
Charlie’s face broke into a calm smile like the wind on a summer sea. ‘Look at him! He loves it!’ shouted Gandhi. ‘He’s waiting for his turn in the barrel.’
Charlie detached Gandhi’s hands. ‘I’ve seen things you wouldn’t read about, Tim boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve killed whales and I’ve killed men too. I killed a man with a bottle in Calcutta. He tried to get hold of a girl I wanted. But there’s no sense in it.’
‘All you ever killed was a quart of Hennessey’s,’ said Gandhi.
‘I’ve seen things nobody else could tell you,’ said Charlie. ‘But he’s right.’ He nodded to Gandhi. ‘The brandy’s got me. The doctor said if I didn’t lay off it I’d be dead in a year. On Saturday I saw a cat burning in the kitchen stove. They’ll take me up on the hill soon and shovel the clods over me. Then I’ll be happy again.’
‘You old loony,’ said Gandhi. ‘A man can’t be happy dead.’
‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve not lived long enough yet.’ He threw his butt on the glowing coke and pulled out the iron. As he did this, there came a shout from outside the forge.
‘Come on! Get shifting!’ It was Voss’s brother, the foreman, announcing the beginning of the next heat.
Horse stepped out with Gandhi into the open shed. There were no walls to the sheds of the mills. The afternoon sunlight streamed through the props and girders, making squares and triangles on the uneven steel-plated floor. A breeze blew down the neck of Horse’s wet flannel shirt. He accepted the attention gratefully.
A man danced on the balls of his feet from the furnaces, gripping in long clawed tongs a hundredweight cube of white-hot steel that blazed and dripped slag. The tongs were suspended by a chain from an overhead pulley. He dropped the cube with a thud by the rolls. Gandhi had tied his sweat-rag round his neck. He seized the cube with his own tongs and levered it under the first roller.
‘Here it comes,’ he shouted. ‘Seagull shit!’
The rolls shuddered and water hissed on the blackening scaling mass of white steel as it squeezed rumbling through. The second rollsman, old Voss’s nephew, caught it on the other side.
‘It’s your turn on the trolley, mate.’ Peter stood at Horse’s elbow with the two-wheeled trolley. Horse caught hold of its single handle. Rivulets of sweat were pouring down Peter’s moon-white face. ‘Be in,’ he said. ‘We should be off early today. We’ll be in the Grand by half-past four.’
Peter had jumped ship in Dunedin and somehow dodged the cops. He had been working on the ‘plate’ for a month now. He and Horse worked easily together; more easily than either of them did with Ivan, the thin dark mournful Irish Catholic soak with whom Peter was lodging. Peter had explained the situation to Horse in a few words.
‘The bastard has me there because I pay for his booze. He’s a dreary clod. I’ve never seen him smile yet. A real Kiwi.’ Then he looked at Horse sideways, remembering that he too was a member of the same tribe. “Not that there aren’t some good Kiwis. But this bastard never pays a round. And he can’t talk about anything but the pains he gets in his guts. His old woman likes me though. One of these days I’ll wake up with my throat cut.’
They were sitting on a board in the lunch hour. The rolls were quiet and sparrows flew in and out of the shed to pick up crumbs. Horse crumbled a sandwich and threw it to them. He couldn’t eat much on the job. With the heat and the hard yacker it seemed to stick in his gullet.
‘You could get married,’ he said. ‘Not to her but to someone else. You could settle down here.’
‘That’ll be the day. I’ve got a wife in Bristol.’ ‘Don’t you want to get back to her?’
‘I can’t go back. The cops would grab me. One day after I’d cleaned up a bottle of rum I climbed into the backyard of a shop. An old Jew owned it. He used to sell radios and sports goods. Well, I headed off up the street with a radio on my back – that was all right, but I was half-boozed, and I kept on coming back. I couldn’t have sold the radios anyway. When I called in about
Peter bared his shoulder and showed Horse a long white scar. ‘I got away all right, but he had the cops after me. So I signed on board a ship the same day that was going to the Argentine. I reckon the cops are still waiting. The only thing I’m worried about is the Old Lady.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Talk sense, mate. The Old Lady. My mother. She’ll be wondering what happened to me. She used to pray for me every night. And when I’d come home boozed she’d throw everything at me but the sideboard. She tried to bring me up right, but I was always letting her down.’ Then his eye brightened. ‘On the Howard Castle there was a cabin boy of sixteen. An orphan. He’d never had a chance. I reckon that boy loved me. He looked after me better than a woman. It’s different at sea, mate. You’d be about the same build as him.’
He had given Horse a speculative look; and Horse had felt a familiar sinking of the bowels. In Peter’s company the world turned round on a solid hub. But he had no wish to take the place of the cabin boy. He remembered the amateur psychiatrist at varsity who had offered to cure him of the booze habit by hypnotism, and when he thought that Horse was in the hypnotic trance, had kept on murmuring, ‘You are my wife; you are my wife.’ And then he remembered the dream he had had, in which he lay in a ship’s bunk with Fern, and Fern had turned into Peter, amorous and stubbled, with a whisky glint in his eye. This dream had depressed Horse greatly.
The steel thundered out from the last roller, black but still glowing. He ran the trolley in close and caught it as it fell. Leaning back from the biting heat, he juggled the trolley on to the ‘plate’ and slid the fat steel bar off beside the saw. The man at the saw knocked the bar into place and swung a lever over. There was a prolonged shriek of tormented metal and a fountain spray of sparks shot up towards the rafters of the shed. Horse moved into the shelter of the structure that held the saw, but a few sparks fell on his head and stung his scalp. Peter gripped the square-sawn end of the bar with his tongs and hauled it up to the ‘plate’, his boots slipping on the shiny surface.
The saw shrieked again. Peter dragged the bar to the middle of the ‘plate’. There Ivan and Brian attacked the bar with mallets. A spurt of flame and smoke burst from the wooden mallet-heads each time they struck the steel. When they had hammered it straight, they shoved it across the cooling- bars with iron pushers that resembled hoes. Brian sat down in the earth pit alongside the cooling-bars and mopped his face. He looked as if he were going to fall apart.
Horse had fallen out with Brian. A week earlier the rolls had jammed, and the men who worked on the ‘plate’ had gone into the storage shed to play cards among the wool bales. Some of the rollsmen had joined them
A card slipped down between two bales. ‘You get it, lad,’ said Gandhi to Brian. ‘You’re as skinny as a weasel. It won’t be any trouble to you.’
‘No,’ Brian had answered stiffly.
‘What’s wrong? Nobody’s asking you to play. I just want you to fish up the jack of diamonds.’
‘I don’t believe in gambling.’
‘You don’t believe in gambling. Or in drinking. What about sheilas? You need a good sheila to fix you up. I could put you on to old Rosie in Mosgiel.’ ‘Leave the boy alone,’ said a grey-headed rollsman. ‘It’s not his fault. His
old man’s always banging the Bible.’
‘Banging the Bishop more likely,’ Gandhi muttered. He climbed down among the wool bales and extricated the card from a ledge of a crevasse. The game started again in silence. Later on Horse had cornered Brian.
‘Why did you treat Gandhi like that?’ he asked.
‘I’m not going to help people break the Ten Commandments,’ said Brian. ‘You know the kind of language they use. When I hear a dirty word I always think of Jesus. He didn’t swear or drink or go with women.’
‘He did drink. He turned water into wine.’
‘It was non-alcoholic wine. Grape juice. You’re just as bad as they are. I’ve heard you talking to that English sailor. Do you ever pray?
‘I pray to the Devil sometimes,’ said Horse. ‘This was only partly true. Horse had composed a long poem, an imitation of Baudelaire, to Lucifer the Earth-Spirit, who would help him to stay alive and hang on to Fern.
‘What do you say to him?’
‘I just say – ‘Bring me some money; bring me a woman; bring me a bottle of plonk . . .’.
‘You’ve got the mind of an animal,’ said Brian bitterly. ‘I’ve met your father and mother too. They’re good people. Not like these ones here.’
‘You can go and stuff yourself,’ Horse had replied. Since that time he and Brian had not spoken to each other; though Brian’s look of aggrieving angel of judgment followed Horse now as he trundled the trolley back to the rolls.
Another bar was coming through. The tormented bellowing of the machine, the hiss of the water-jets on slippery white-hot metal, Horse’s own aching sweating body, the calluses on his hands where blisters had split and
The Name and the Game 1
By five o’clock Horse was propping up the wall of the side bar of the Grand. He had left his dungarees in the shower room at the mills, and wore instead the grey slacks and black polo-neck jersey and gabardine overcoat in which he commonly lived and slept. Peter was at the bar with Ivan, and Horse could hear Ivan’s monotonous voice reciting the saga of his urinary tract: ‘. . . and when the bloody quacks opened up my bladder they took out three stones as big as nuggets. I’ve got them in a bottle at home. I couldn’t piss properly for a month afterwards. They reckoned I was lucky to be alive. I’ve always had trouble with my water, Pete. Ever since I was a kid. The old man used to give me a hiding every day for wetting the bed. But I’ll say this for him, he made sure we never missed going to Mass on Sunday. He’d drag us out of bed by the ear, and I used to get the hiding after I came back again. A good belting never does a kid any harm though, Pete. It puts the fear of Christ into them. . . .’
Peter in his tight blue suit rested his elbows on the bar and stared into his empty handle. ‘It’s your shout, mate,’ he said.
‘By gum, you’re right,’ said Ivan. He rummaged in his pocket, brought out a shilling, looked at it, and put it back again. ‘Look, Pete, I don’t want to open the pay pocket till I get home. You know the way it is, Pete. You’re single. But it sweetens Mollie up a bit if I just give her the packet.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Peter sourly. He put a pound on the bar and turned to Horse. ‘Drink up.’
Horse swallowed the dregs of his handle and placed it on the puddled bar ‘Make it half-and-half,’ he said.
‘Good on you,’ said Peter. ‘Stout’s a food. Back home they put an egg in it. It’ll put a shine on your knob.’
The grey-haired barman refilled the handles and gave Peter his change. Peter passed it on to Ivan. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’ll keep your old woman quiet.’ Ivan pocketed it without a word.
Horse could feel the grog blossoming in his veins. Bull’s blood, he thought; that’s what I need. He swallowed the beer-and-stout in two long draughts and put a ten-bob note on the bar
‘Rum and cloves,’ he said. ‘Have a rum, Peter.’
‘That’s it. Rum,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll take a bottle with us.’
By half-past five the rum sang like a choir of birds in Horse’s cranium. When the counter lunch came in he ate five saveloys and burnt his fingers on the hot red greasy skins. Peter told him privately how his ship had sailed from Sierra Leone without him. He had lain for a month in a native hut visited by pubescent girls who supplied him with home comfort and African beer. He had grown tired of it and signed aboard another ship.
‘I had the dingbats for a while,’ he said. After I jumped off the Howard Castle. The Old Man logged me half my pay for getting drunk in port. But he couldn’t say I wasn’t up to the job. I’m not just a deckhand. I’m an A.B.’ – Horse reflected that A.B. was the same as B.A. spelt backwards – ‘I can steer by the compass and splice a steel cable. Well, when I had the dingbats there was a bloody great Negro’s face an inch away from me all the time. It must have been bad grog.’
On the wall above the sweating barman the hands of the clock shifted. A scrum of drinkers had packed the room. Suddenly an electric buzzer bellowed.
‘Time, gentlemen,’ droned the barman. ‘Finish your drinks, please.’
Peter passed a final rum to Horse above the heads of a trainer, a jockey and a retired policeman. ‘It’s a double-header,’ he said. ‘One for the road.’
Horse drank the rum at a gulp. There were no cloves in it, and it fell to his stomach like a hot lead weight. The crowd was beginning to straggle grizzling out of the bar. He found himself alone on the pavement, confronting a Maori who had seated himself on a full beer carton outside a tobacconist’s window. The Maori was shaped like a pyramid. Huge and seal-like, his body spread out and down from a square close-cropped head and expressionless features. Horse saw him as a stone kumara god, the true master of life.
‘You are my brother,’ he said.
The Maori looked at him. He removed a half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and threw it into the gutter. Then he rose slowly. His hands were as large as fire-shovels.
‘I am not your brother,’ he said in precise English. ‘My brother lives at Kaitaia.’ He gripped Horse’s left shoulder. A violent pain exploded in Horse’s collar-bone and his legs buckled.
Peter and Ivan came out of the bottle store. Ivan carried two bottles wrapped in brown paper. Peter’s hat was tilted back on his head. He was carrying a carton under each arm.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Peter. He caught the Maori’s wrist. The Maori let go of Horse and gave Peter a push that sent him staggering into the tobacconist’s doorway.
‘Your cobber’s a bloody queer,’ said the Maori. His eyes were hard and glinting. ‘He needs a good kick on the arse.’
Peter stacked the cartons, wiped his mouth with one hand, and began to shape up to the Maori. Ivan stepped between them. ‘Take it easy, Pete, take it easy,’ he said. He turned to the Maori. ‘You remember me, Joe? I’ve lost a few
‘He’s too pissed to know what he’s saying. We’ll look after him O.K.’ ‘You’d better. He’s not right in the head.’ The Maori tapped his own
forehead. ‘You can tell him his mouth’s too big. I don’t want any pakeha telling me I’m his brother.’
‘Ok, Joe, O.K. We’ll look after him.’
In the air of Rattray Street Horse unfroze again. The buildings were warrens full of dark burrows from which butter-thighed girls, web-footed hags, boys on bicycles, men with iron moustaches, the whole stumbling dying hoping despairing menagerie of the unbelievable town burst upon him like a landslide. I was lucky I didn’t get a clout on the ear, he thought. The imagined pile-driving fist of the Maori had knocked a hole in his private world. He held one of the cartons like a baby, but it threatened to slip through his fingers with every step. Ivan steered him with an arm round his shoulders. Then, as a taxi swept the three of them and the grog into the unknown evening, his stomach grew uneasy, and he sank like a man in a lift down, down towards the centre of the earth. He knew he was going to spew soon. He shut his eyes and thought of lighthouses, mountains, Fern, God, rivers running over shingle, anything that would keep the rum inside him.
The taxi stopped. Still holding the carton like a lifebelt, he lurched up some broken steps, round a corner, into a small yard, and through a kitchen door. He saw a stove, a table, an almanac, and the astonished sulky face of a young woman in a green dress who was feeding a baby in a high chair. Then he was doubled over, with the hard rim of a bath against his belly, spewing up the whole world. As he plunged into ringing black space he could feel Ivan’s arm, like that of an expert nurse, holding him steady round the chest, and hear his voice saying, ‘Easy, boy, easy. Take it easy.’
2
When Horse woke again he was lying in the dark. At first he thought he was in bed at home. A pillow was under his head and an overcoat covered him. He stirred cautiously. His shoulder was stiff and numb, and his body felt weak and light, like a half-empty sack of spuds. His shoes were still on his feet, but unlaced. A murmur of voices and a trickle of light came from beyond the door. Slowly the memory of the botched beginning of the evening returned to him. He levered himself from the bed, laced his shoes, hung the overcoat on his arm, and walked out.
Ivan and Peter were playing cards at the kitchen table. There were some shillings in a saucer. A bottle of rum stood three-quarters empty.
Ivan looked round. ‘Hullo, boy. We thought you were dead. Mollie nearly rang the doctor. She thought the bath was full of blood. It’s lucky I knew
‘I’m all right,’ said Horse. There were black patches of nothing hiding half of what he looked at; but what he saw he liked. He laid his coat on the sofa and sat down beside it. ‘Thanks for looking after me.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I used to get sick on the booze myself for years. It was the rum that did it. Have a beer.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Ivan pulled a bottle from the carton under the table, jerked the top off it with his teeth, and handed it foaming to Horse. ‘You’ll find a glass in the cupboard. I learnt that trick in the Army. Don’t try it though. You’ll break your teeth unless you’ve got the knack.’
Horse found a glass. He poured a beer and drank it.
‘Go on. Get stuck in. You’ll need it. Don’t worry about us. We’re sticking to the rum.’
Horse became aware of a desert inside him which had been dry since the beginning of the world. He was grateful to Ivan for recognising his exact condition.
‘Mollie’s gone to bed with a headache. You can put up here tonight. If you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa.’
‘Thanks.’ Horse refilled his glass.
The rum seemed to have made Peter feel unhappy. Since Horse’s entry he had been brooding in his chair. Now he turned his red-rimmed gaze on Ivan. ‘You should have let me take a poke at that Maori bastard,’ he announced.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Ivan.
‘You should have let me take a poke at him. I don’t let any black bugger push me around. Or any Doolan either.’
Ivan ignored the challenge. ‘We’re all the same in the dark. Joe’s done me some good turns. He runs a crown-and-anchor game down in McLagan Street.’
‘You should have let me take a poke at him.’
‘It’s on tonight. It’ll be going till about three in the morning.’ Peter accepted the diversion. ‘What’s the time now?’
Ivan looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s getting on for ten. You want to have a crack at it?’
Peter nodded. ‘Sometimes I’m lucky on the board. I always bet on the hook. I’d rather do that than play for peanuts.’
‘OK. I might put a couple of dollars on.’ Ivan turned to Horse. ‘You want to come with us?’
‘You bet.’ The thirst had gone underground like a peat fire. Horse’s head was steady now and the evening still young.
Ambling down the path with two full bottles swinging against his legs in the pockets of his overcoat. Horse was able to take stock of the surroundings he had not noticed at the time of the taxi ride. The shapes of rickety houses
He cracked another bottle by placing a penny on the edge of the brick wall that fenced in somebody’s garden and knocking the cap off with his fist. The beer sprayed out on his coat.
‘Have a drink, Ivan. A drink, Peter.’
‘The rum will do me,’ said Ivan. Horse and Peter shared the bottle, not wiping the neck between each other’s drinking.
‘I need a hose,’ said Horse. He unlatched his fly and watered the base of a hydrangea bush. In the spring that bush would surprise its owner with Horse- coloured flowers.
In McLagan Street there were few lights on. They climbed a flight of wooden steps to a house where the blinds were drawn. A low babble of voices came from inside. Ivan knocked gently at a side door. There was a sound of footsteps, and the door opened a few inches.
‘It’s me. Ivan. With two cobbers. We’d like to have a go on the board.’
The door opened wider. Horse could see a swarthy woman in a dress that looked like a worn-out flour sack. ‘All right. You can come in. We had the johns here on Monday. Joe had to give them thirty quid to get them to go away again.’ She caught sight of Horse.
‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a cousin of mine,’ said Ivan. ‘Down from Alexandra for a day or two. He’s been working on the dredge.’
‘All right. He can come in this time. But another time don’t bring him. The young ones can cause trouble.’
Horse followed Ivan and Peter down a passage where the wallpaper sprouted faded climbing roses. They entered a small smoke-filled room with a table in the centre. It was nearly as crowded as the bar of the Grand had been. A number of middle-aged men and two sagging girls crowded under an unshaded light and grunted disappointment or approval. Joe the kumara god sat behind the soiled and coloured canvas squares. He rattled three dice in a leather cup.
‘Come on. Place your bets. The board’s not covered yet.’
A short-legged man put two pound notes on the diamond. One of the girls
‘The hook or the crown, lady?’
‘Leave it on the crown,’ she said. ‘It might be lucky.’
‘That’s right. You might break the bank.’ The kumara god laughed. He lifted his grey bullet head and caught sight of the three newcomers. ‘Hullo. Here comes my pakeha brother from Invercargill.’ Horse blushed. Several peopled turned and looked in his direction. ‘Well, his money’s as good as mine. Step up, boy. Place your bet.’
The kumara god rattled the dice again. Horse shelled out a note at random from his hip pocket and put it on the spade. Only when he saw its blue colour did he realise it was a fiver. But it was too late to take it back.
‘The big money, eh? Place your bets, gentlemen. Place your bets.’
All six squares were quickly covered with notes and silver. The kumara god rattled the dice quickly and lifted the cup. The upper surfaces of the rounded ivory cubes showed a crown, an anchor and a diamond.
‘The name and the game and a diamond.’ His tattooed arms swept up the silver and notes, including Horse’s fiver, from the squares that carried the heart, the spade and the club sign. He doubled the money on the winning squares. ‘You’re lucky today, Shorty. Will you leave it on for the next throw?’
‘No. That’ll do me.’ The short-legged man removed his four pounds, pocketed them and retreated. Among the winners only the girl left her money on the crown.
‘Let it stay, Joe,’ she said.
Horse’s brain was numb. The spade’s bound to come up soon, he thought. He laid a pound on the spade square. The others placed their bets. The dice rattled.
‘Three crowns.’
The kumara god swept the board clear except for the crown square. There Horse’s pound replaced the girl’s five shillings. ‘You’re lucky, lady.’
‘Leave it,’ she said.
Horse decided to double up. He put two pound on the spade. He was now six quid down. If three spades came up, he could quit even.
‘Two crowns and a heart.’
The girl smiled as she took three crumpled notes from the crown square.
Horse calculated that he had lost eight pounds. It was plain that the crown was having a lucky run. If he put a fiver on the crown, and one crown came up, he would be only three quid down. If two crowns came up, he would be two quid to the good. More than the price of a bottle of gin. If three crowns came up again, he would be seven quid to the good. He took his money from his hip-pocket and examined it. There was a fiver and a ten-bob note.
Ivan touched his arm. ‘You don’t have to bet with notes.’
Horse shrugged him off. His throat was dry, his ears ringing, and his
Horse reflected bitterly that if he had stayed on the spade he would now have twenty quid. He had lost thirteen quid in less than five minutes. He saw in this event the morose intervention of the wowser’s God.
Peter moved in to the table and began to bet determinedly on the hook, doubling up in florins. Horse and Ivan stood back. ‘You struck it solid there,’ said Ivan. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to shift to the crown. But Joe’s got the odds on his side.’
Horse said nothing.
‘You may think I’m a bit of a drongo,’ said Ivan surprisingly. ‘Letting that big Pommy bastard horn in on me and Mollie. Well, I know what I’m doing.’
‘It’s your business.’
‘Not just my business. A man’s got to keep himself square with other people.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s easy to get it wrong,’ said Ivan. ‘Now, I’m a Doolan. What do you think is the main thing the Church has got?’
Horse began to throw off his gambling stupor. ‘There is an old man in Rome who leads his people home,’ he said.
‘That’s poetry. I used to know all of Eskimo Nell. . . . . No. The Pope’s the Pope. I don’t think about him myself. The one thing that holds the Church together is that she knows what a man is. A man’s a crocodile.’
‘Women don’t think that way.’
‘You can say that again. A woman’s full of ideas about herself. Mollie’s still young. She reads all these women’s magazines – True Confessions; How-I-Got-Shanked-by-the-Boss’s-Son. If I turfed that Pongo bastard out of the house she’d go with him. And then she’d be a crocodile all right. She’d get away from the Church, and after he’d ditched her she’d take up Christian Science or something and get the idea she was growing wings. The poor bitch would end up in Hell.’
‘I’m not a Doolan, Ivan.’
‘I know you’re not. But if you’re ever looking for a Church, don’t by-pass the one with the big stone steps and the line twenty yards long outside the confession box. It’s the only one where they know that a man’s a crocodile.’
Horse did not relish this instruction in moral theology. He was prepared to shout from a roof-top, if necessary, that he was a crocodile but he did not believe that Fern was one. But he was slowly becoming aware of a different Ivan. Ivan was at the same time himself and believed. It had not been possible in the world Horse grew up in.
The three men left the house in McLagan Street together. Peter had lost
‘We’ll clean up the rum,’ he said. ‘Take it slow this time, boy, and you’ll be all right.’
Peter set out the glasses. As Ivan’s star brightened his own seemed to grow darker. ‘I still reckon you should have let me take a poke at that Maori bastard,’ he said.
‘Don’t let it spoil your drinking,’ said Ivan. ‘Do you know the story about the bloke that was tearing one off with his cobber’s wife?’
‘No,’ said Peter suspiciously.
‘This bloke,’ said Ivan, staring at his rum, ‘went round to his cobber’s place to tear one off. And he found her there and his cobber in bed, dead drunk in the same room. They’d got twin beds, you see. Well, first of all he had a bit. And then he got worried that his cobber might be pulling a fast one. So he tiptoed over to have a look if he was really asleep. And the first thing he saw was a great fat arse sticking out from under the bedclothes. So he bent down’ – Ivan imitated the movement – ‘and he pulled out a hair, just to make sure. And the old man gave a grunt and rolled over. So the bloke went back and had another bit. But then he got worried again. So he went along again and pulled out another hair. And this happened five or six times. And the very last time the old man sat up in bed and looked at him, and said – ‘You know, Alec, I don’t mind you shagging my wife. But I bloody well object to you using my arse as a scoreboard.
Ivan laughed loudly at his own story; but Peter did not. He looked much like an eel that finds itself floundering on a dry bank. And Horse could see that Ivan’s tactics might work in the end. He had the wisdom of the crocodile and the patience of that unique animal, whose strength is in its jaws and its tail. Horse consumed slightly more than his share of the second bottle of rum before he fell asleep on the sofa.
The Quick and the Dead 1
The next morning, when Horse clambered up to daylight from his burrow, he was far from happy. Impaled on a bamboo stake in a schist-rock desert under the merciless sun of a hangover conscience he did not dare to make a movement of mind or body in case his bowels should burst open, his brain explode, and the walls of the kitchen fall in on him. He knew that he, Timothy Harold Glass, had poisoned the tribal wells. And to him, lying speechless, there came a strange procession. Old men in tartan kilts with bagpipes under their arms, housewives with faces as long as their aprons, the dead and living
‘I wanted to treat him right,’ said Old Voss. ‘I tried to be a second father to him. But he’s a waster. He’ll never do any good.’
‘He lacks the capacity for love,’ said his mother, her face reddened and averted.
‘He has rejected Jesus,’ said Brian, who now wore his collar back to front. ‘He is a vile drunkard,’ groaned an emaciated widow, her tattered lace shawl smeared with cat manure. ‘He drank a pint of milk from my doorstep while passing intoxicated at five in the morning. Then he urinated in the
bottle and left it there. My cat and I have both been poisoned.’
‘He was looking at the hole in my knickers,’ said a girl of eight, ‘when I was swinging in the park. I knew he was a bad man.’
‘He is a constitutional psychopath,’ said Professor Wardle of the Practical Psychology Department.
‘He’s a sexual maniac,’ grieved Fern, who had joined the accusers. He tried to make me do it three times when I had my period.’
‘He’s a gutless wonder,’ muttered Joe the kumara god. ‘He doesn’t even know how to bet properly.’
A shower sprinkled the kitchen window. Horse’s right leg muscle, maltreated by rum, swelled agonisingly like a cricket ball. He twisted on the sofa and banged it flat again with his fist. A regular thudding noise came from the yard where the wind was slamming the washhouse door. At this sad moment Horse raised his eyes and saw a deeply consoling vision.
A Japanese girl, plump in a filmy kimono, smiled at him from the greengrocer’s calendar above the range. The sun rose behind her across a vague sea, and a spray of cherry blossom hid her most intimate charms. There was no shadow of accusation in her gaze. Like the mirrors hung in a Shinto temple, her eyes reflected the secret purity that exists in the soul of every believer. I am eternal, she murmured. I am the living heart of the world. Cherry blossoms began to fall like snow from the spaces behind the clouds. They covered the mica desert. And the accusers, ravaged by the Horse demon, melted away one by one. Horse fell back into easy sleep and did not wake till Ivan came in the door.
‘Wake up, brother,’ he said. ‘How’s the head?’
‘Fair enough,’ said Horse. This was true. He had often felt worse. ‘Going to the mills today?’
Horse hesitated. After the disastrous defeat at the crown-and-anchor board he would need money; but the mills would not pay out again for a fortnight. He decided to bludge what he could in town. And Fern would certainly be home on a Friday afternoon. Swotting. ‘No,’ he said at last.
‘O.K. You’re single; I’m married. Pete’s not going either. He said he wants to meet you in the Grand at five. He’s got something up his sleeve. Watch out for the bastard. He could get you into trouble.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve got him well sorted out.’
‘O.K.’ Ivan was dressed for the road. He carried a tin lunch-case. Suddenly he grinned, a singularly pleasant grin that showed a double row of stained teeth. He reached into his inside pocket, pulled out a pound note, and offered it to Horse. ‘Here. You might be needing this. You can pay me back next payday.’
‘Won’t it leave you short?’ Horse was reluctant to take a loan from a married man.
‘I’ve got a few quid stacked away. Here, take it.’ Horse took the pound.
‘You’ll find a razor in the bathroom,’ said Ivan. ‘Don’t cut your throat. You’re too young for that.’ He grinned again. ‘Mollie and the kids won’t be up for a while. It’s a holiday for them. I’d head off and get a feed in town, if I were you. Mollie won’t be in a good mood when she gets up. She was sore about you spewing in the bath.’
‘O.K.’ Horse realised that he had been lying down while Ivan was standing. He rolled back his overcoat and blanket and stood up clumsily. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Good luck.’ Ivan went out the kitchen door.
Horse shaved carefully with Ivan’s razor. Fern would not appreciate a hangover stubble when he called to distract her from her labours. He whistled as he shaved. The day had begun well. He thought that he should say a word to Pete before going; but when he crept down the passage and opened the second bedroom door – the first one had shown him two children, both fair- haired, apparently still asleep – he saw heaving bedclothes, the determined bare shoulders of Peter, and Mollie’s face, no longer sulky, with eyes closed, relaxed in the glowing archetypal mask of a woman enjoying a good bang. They did not notice him. He inched the door shut, walked quickly back to the kitchen, out through the yard, and down the path to the street.
The sun was pouring down light and heat on the wooden hives of the town. The ruffled harbour glittered white and blue. A skein of side-streets led Horse down to the top of London Street. Here was a church on his right which he knew to be Catholic on account of its gloomy utilitarian squareness. Horse remembered the gist of Ivan’s injunctions. Brusquely he ran up the stone steps. In the porch he hesitated, looking at the holy water stoups, which resembled bird-baths to his eyes. Not knowing what to do about these, he dipped his hand in one and rubbed the water on his forehead. Then he entered.
Horse had not been in a Doolan church before. The mixture of gloom and brightness surprised him. A relief round the walls showed Jesus carrying his cross with several other people. Horse had always thought subconsciously of Jesus as a man alone; but here he was all but submerged in a crowd ofThat end seems quieter than this, thought Horse. He wondered at the light, but walked quietly up the side of the church till he reached a chapel which contained a statue of the Blessed Virgin, dressed in white and blue and gold, holding the Child in her arms. Some kind of brass arrangement was there for holding lighted candles. An old woman of the kind that Horse had often seen emerging from bottle-stores with a full shopping bag was kneeling in a pew. She did not move when Horse passed her. Maybe she’s dead, he thought. Then he saw her lips moving and her fingers stroking a chain of brown beads.
He took a candle guiltily from the pile, lit it from one already burning, and stuck it in a holder. Then he put a shilling in the slot of the brass box, knelt down, and prayed. Unbaptised, uninstructed, Horse’s prayer to the Blessed Virgin was admirably simple. Help me. I’m a bloody fool, he prayed silently. Then, thinking of Ivan, he added – And help Ivan too. And Peter and Mollie and Fern and Tony and Mother and the Old Man. . . . The litany of names petered out after a minute, and Horse took fright. Something in the downward gaze of the Virgin, more absolute and incomprehensible than that of the girl in the kimono in the kitchen calendar, made him rise again and go quickly from the church, like a bather hurrying from deep water to the manageable shallows. The sunlight in the street was a relief after the dark quietness he had come from.
The need for money was uppermost in his mind. Ivan’s quid would get him three feeds of steak and eggs at the Silver Grille. But there was grog to be considered, and also other secondary matters – condoms and taxi fares, for example. Tony would have the kale. But he did not like putting the bite on Tony.
Horse did not mind living off the land. A natural hobo, he had often scrounged the quarter-smoked lipstick-reddened cigarettes from the sand- trays in the foyer of the Regent picture theatre, when the need for tobacco was absolute, split them open, and rolled them again with the burnt end toward his mouth. But he already owed Tony a tenner. Still, Tony was the one person who had never tried to dress him down. If he followed his regular habit, he would be in the Bowling Green between nine and ten.
Horse entered the lounge bar of the Bowling Green shortly after nine. It was empty except for a middle-aged barman polishing glasses. He shifted along the counter to meet Horse.
‘A long beer, Fitz,’ said Horse. ‘And put a dash of soda in it. My guts are crook; or at least they should be. I’ve not had a feed as yet today.’
The barman served him and took the money. ‘On the table,’ he said. ‘Take a look. If you get stuck into that lot, you won’t need any more for a week.’
On a table in the corner of the room Horse found the funeral meats of the day before – a black pudding, slices of cold mutton, and a hunk of blue-
While Horse sat upon the bench and loaded up on this pilgrim’s diet, using his fingers and a knife supplied by the barman, he thought about the part that the Bowling Green played in his life. Ever since he had climbed the wall to get grog for a dance, a gloomy and celibate fresher, it had been his thieves’ kitchen, bombshelter and home from home. Old Grady, the smooth tubby publican, hated students; but since fifty per cent of his custom came from them, he had to keep his trap shut. He and his bone-china wife took turns to visit the Seacliff mental hospital for a booze cure. Horse had once heard him open out, late at night, on whisky and crème de menthe. Unforgettably he had flayed the varsity population for an hour, dwelling in turn on their sex habits, their conversation, their clothing, their small spending power, and their tendency to vomit freely. But the next day he had served at the hatch with his usual polite waiter’s smile.
At the Bowling Green Horse had polished his glass belly and become a druid. The news that the human race is not vertebrate but crustacean had first reached him here. Born by good luck under the sign of the Crab, he had sunned himself in this deep rock pool, while the big surf crashed beyond, wearing a protective seaweed foliage of anecdote and moving sideways with his nippers waving. Here he had learnt the basic obscene metaphors by which the human spirit expresses and conceals its tenderness, its grief, and its longing to return to the Garden of Eden. The Bowling Green had been helpful. If it ever came to a toss-up between Fern and it he would have to think twice.
Absorbed in this meditation Horse did not notice that he now had company. A low growl, the snap of enormous teeth, and a slice of sausage disappeared from his fingers. The fingers were grazed but unhurt.
‘Hell!’ said Horse. ‘Take your mongrel out of here, Daniel.’
‘Hannibal loves black pudding,’ said the owner of the dog, a plump youth with curly dark hair and a burning eye. ‘You should have offered him some. Are you having a beer with us?’
‘Does Hannibal drink?’
‘Not alcoholic liquor.’ Daniel set up two beers on the bar. ‘Dogs are wiser than men, you know. I think Hannibal is the reincarnation of somebody very wise. Somebody like Socrates.’
‘In that case,’ said Horse, ‘he’s not wiser than a man. He’s just a wise man inside the skin of a mongrel.’
Hannibal growled softly. In a sitting posture his head reached higher than Daniel’s middle. Horse reflected that he looked like a cross between a St Bernard and a kangaroo, though this fusion was anatomically unlikely.
‘He knows what you’re saying. Not you calling him a mongrel. He’s too wise to take notice of stupid remarks. It’s your being logical he objects to. Logic means the death of poetry. Hannibal understands my poetry. I read it to him often at night. Last night I read him a poem about a seagull. WhenHard Times in a paperback – ‘when I look around me, and then look inside me, I know that poetry’s the only thing that can save the world.’
‘When I look at you and that dog,’ said Horse, ‘the question I ask myself is – ‘Who’s up who? Are you up the dog or is the dog up you?’
Daniel’s face reddened. ‘You see everything in terms of sex. I don’t know how a sensitive person like Fern Mitchell ever got tangled up with a man like you. She’s like a Greek goddess. Statuesque. I read her a long poem of mine at a party at the Adamses. She said she liked poetry better than anything else.’
‘I know what she was thinking,’ said Horse. ‘She was wondering if anybody there would give her a good bang.’
‘You’ve got a dirty mind.’
Horse was feeling the strain. ‘While we’re on the subject of Fern,’ he said – ‘who took her to the Adamses? Who was she with? Was it Monty Cresswell?’
‘No. It was Jock Saunders.’
Horse’s beer tasted like soap. Jock Saunders was a tough active ram, a dental student with a car and a flat. No doubt he had been banging Fern daily in the peace of his Royal Terrace flat, between gin-and-limes, while Horse sweated over hot iron at the mills. Fern had mentioned several times that she would have preferred Horse to get a flat in town. He felt grief at having bounced Daniel. Was it more ludicrous to love a dog than to love a woman?
‘I’m sorry, Daniel,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that about you and Hannibal.’
Hannibal doesn’t mind. He’s used to being misunderstood.’
A small, scraggy man came in the door of the bar. He wore a brown suit patched with leather at the elbows, and ill-fitting. His cheeks were wrinkled like a rune and his hair receded from both temples. But the eye was a mild bright blue.
‘Tony, you old bugger,’ said Horse.
Hannibal growled stridently. ‘He doesn’t like you,’ said Daniel to Tony. ‘I don’t like him,’ said Tony. ‘Not that I wish him any harm.’ He ordered
a gin and squash.
‘When Hannibal doesn’t like someone,’ explained Daniel, ‘there’s always a reason for it. I don’t think it’s good for them to stay.
‘Bye-bye then dear,’ said Tony. Daniel flushed and left the bar, leading Hannibal by a leather mooring-hawser. Hannibal seemed loath to go. ‘A clear case of demoniacal possession,’ said Tony, moving up alongside Horse. ‘Which is the man and which is the dog?’
‘He’s not too bad really.’
‘My mother used to say that animals always resemble their owners. An old Irish biddy. I believe I’m very like her. But a great deal more shop-soiled. Do you want a drink? Or has love destroyed your digestive powers?’
‘Not yet,’ said Horse. ‘I’ll have another beer.’
Tony ordered and obtained the beer. ‘Your friend is rather like a camel,’ he said. ‘Not that I mind.’
‘Tony,’ said Horse. ‘I’m broke.’
‘If you weren’t broke,’ said Tony, ‘you wouldn’t be so glad to see me. Being broke is a very human ailment. How much do you need?’
‘A fiver would be enough.’ Horse was as red as Daniel had been.
‘I can manage eight pounds.’ Tony counted the money out on the bar. ‘But don’t make it an excuse for not calling on me. Preferably not with your girlfriend.’ Horse winced. ‘There are friends and friends,’ said Tony softly. ‘Your mother thinks I’m corrupting you. As one old woman to another, I could tell her that nobody was ever corrupted by having a place to lie down in.’
2
The tenets of the Horse religion were simple and experimental. Horse himself had never set them down. But if he had, an archaeologist from Alpha Centauri – a star with a Horse name – might have uncovered in the year 3045 from under the scrub-covered ruins of Dunedin a sealed silver box; and opening it, would have found a handwritten manuscript expressing these intuitive conclusions –
The Dead fell into two categories. There were those who had enjoyed having a bang while they were alive, or would have if they had had the chance. With these green-boned ancestors Horse communed when he was on
The second category, however, were the more numerous – those who had been glad to die because it was purer than life, masters of the snowflake and the grey asphodel. Their brownish photographs and spidery handwritten letters were piled in the thirty-five sacks his parents preserved in the room behind the stairs. They had enjoyed the dullest parts of Virgil. They had travelled round the world and noticed only the scenery; they had begotten children without joy; and they retained their hold over the living by the injunctions of newspaper leaders, advertisements against bad breath, Travel Bureaus and varsity lecture rooms. A good bang made them shake with anger in their tidy shrouds.
Horse left the Bowling Green at two o’clock. He had benefited from his two-hour session with Tony, drinking little and talking much. Tony remained himself, however wintry the spiritual climate; and he had endured with flinching Horse’s most recent poem –
Horse repeated these lines as a charm against the Dead as he came in sight of the sparrow-haunted clock tower of the University. A group of chooks in bell-like skirts and yellow jerseys or Girls’ College blazers were sitting on the sloping lawn above the Leith Stream, nattering or swotting. Apart from them, on the edge of the concrete retaining wall, crouched Daniel and Hannibal. Daniel was dropping twigs into the water, and Hannibal stared wisely at the circular ripples. They did not look up as Horse went by.
Soon he was outside Fern’s flat. The venetian blinds were down but the slats were open. Through them he could see the back of Fern’s head visible above her enormous sofa. She would be swotting there with her knees drawn up, eating apples. Till she got the skitters. If he was lucky she would be ripe for an erotic revolt against her oppressors.
Yet the sense of an invisible barrier kept him loitering on the pavement. Fern was dedicated to the world of ladders and ideas; and he by comparison was only an aimless barfly. Each time he embraced her he felt that his term of office had already nearly expired. She had been growing more abstracted
Fern was a child of that monolithic structure which has shaped the conscience of the modern New Zealander: the Church of the Extreme Left. Her father had been the militant secretary of a Southland timber workers’ union. From Winnie the Pooh she graduated to Bertrand Russell and Kropotkin. Fern had never had any personal interest in politics; she accepted the socialist and rationalist classics much as the average Catholic child accepts the papal encyclicals – they were there; they showed the way the world worked; one did not question them. She solved her ethical problems by classifying human thoughts and actions into two categories – nice and messy. Money and sex and friendship were nice. Poverty and celibacy and quarrels were messy. Abortions were messy too; but not as messy as having an illegitimate child. The existence of a God or a devil would have been too messy for words.
Fern’s sexual education had begun at the age of seven, when a Plymouth Brother uncle, the only religious member of the family, had deflowered her in a gardening shed. A wise child, she conjectured that though defloration was messy, telling her parents about it would be much messier. As a result she had avoided the trauma that might have sprung from an intricate post-mortem on the event. It had left her only with a reinforced dislike of religious people. The only verbal instruction she had received regarding sex was a remark made by her mother the month before she went to varsity, when they were washing up dishes together – ‘I’m not advising you to go out and have sexual intercourse with anyone, Fern; but if you do, use Bellamy’s pessaries. I always use them myself.’ This put the whole problem on a non-messy basis. Monty was also able to eradicate Fern’s maidenly qualms, a week after she arrived at the varsity, by saying – ‘You’ll be here for six years, Fern. People can get in a bloody mess if they don’t have their sex life in order.’ And it was Monty’s despairing and human effort to poison himself with mercury tablets which had finally alienated Fern. ‘Suicides are very selfish,’ she had said to Horse. ‘They leave all the mess for other people to clean up.’
Because of her training Horse had the feeling, when in tune with Fern, of being on the edge of a vast subconscious area, more primitive and impenetrable than the psyche of any Sea Dyak. Her name was suitable. Perhaps some vague hankering after forbidden spiritual knowledge had influenced her mother in choosing it. Like a fern below a waterfall at the middle of the Southland rain forest, she flourished in total ignorance of the laws of her own being, prudent, modest, obedient to lawful authority, fed by secret streams and the grey light that filtered down to her through rationalist branches. She was a godsend to a man who wanted a perfect bang.
This afternoon, going in at the gate, Horse remembered the first time he had banged Fern. After a long and gruelling bash, having nowhere else to go, he had settled himself for the night in a bus station broom-cupboard. There he had lapsed into coma, wedged upright among the brooms; there he had wakened numb at five on a frosty morning. He had crawled out of shelter, his clothes dusty with old whitewash, and the winter of the town and the winter of a year’s unwilling celibacy had crushed him between their double millstones. Then he had thought of Fern, warm in her single bed. Horse had visited Fern twice before, sitting and making small-talk. Each time an attempt to come to a clinch had led to her pushing him firmly away with a strained smile. But that morning he had known he was on the real plank above the sharks, the unforgiving and iron-jawed Dead. So he had wandered up Castle Street while the morning birds jangled above him, and shoved up Fern’s window and climbed in, not caring whether she rang the cops or the fire brigade.
‘Who’s that?’ she had asked from the shadows.
‘It’s me. Timothy. I’m psychologically damned.’ Then he had unbuckled his belt, kicked off his shoes, and dropped his whitened trousers on the floor. When he had clambered in beside her, he found for the first time in his life the gates of that paradise from which runs the great river Euphrates. After a short palaver, Fern, warm and milky from sleep, had embraced him. The thorns of betrayal that stuff the pillows of older lovers were absent; if Fern experienced them, she did not mention it.
He knocked quietly on the door of the flat and waited. After a while Fern opened the door. She was wearing a red dressing-gown. Her golden-brown hair hung like a rippling carpet to her waist.
‘Oh, it’s you, Horse.’ ‘Yes.’
‘You can come in. But don’t make a noise. Mrs Whitaker’s being very difficult.’
Like many-eyed Argus, the monster who guarded the sacred heifer Io, Fern’s landlady lived through the wall and knew everything that went on. Horse had never met her. But whenever he visited Fern he felt her presence like the weight of an old stable blanket. Twice widowed, she had succumbed to the domination of the Dead, and lived like a Haitian female zombie,
Fern seated Horse on a tall padded chair. The stretcher bed was unmade. Open textbooks lay on the table, surrounded by human fingerbones and Japanese teacups and apple cores. ‘I’ve been swotting,’ said Fern unnecessarily. ‘Professor Mac said he’s not sure he can give me terms.’
‘Bugger terms!’ The room depressed Horse. The mention of Professor Mac depressed him too, for it showed that Fern’s mind was fixed in an ascetic groove. Her deepest anxieties centred on that trim moustached father figure. Horse leant forward on his perch and grabbed her hand. It lay passively in his own. He pushed his fingers between hers till they spread out in a fan, and rubbed her palm with his thumb.
Fern jerked her hand away. ‘You’ve been drinking.’ ‘A few beers with Tony. I was feeling crook.’
‘I’d feel crook if I spent half my life in the pub. I wish you’d take up a sport. Jock plays tennis.’
‘Bugger Jock! He’s never read a book in his life.’ Even as he spoke Horse knew the weakness of the criticism. Jock’s illiteracy probably attracted Fern. She liked men to be single-minded and confident, making their way in the world.
‘At least he doesn’t come round to see a girl half-drunk.’
‘I tell you I’m not drunk. The amount I’ve had couldn’t make a fly drunk.’ ‘You smell of beer anyway.’
Horse saw his chances of an afternoon spent in banging Fern dwindle to zero. He decided on assault. Levering himself from the chair, he dropped to his knees in a praying posture and gripped Fern by the buttocks. He then nuzzled the disputed area, burying his face in the cloth of her dressing-gown. In a minute or so Fern’s hands slid down and stroked him below the ears.
‘Good dog,’ said Fern. ‘Poor doggie. Is he hungry? Doggie say bow-wow.’ ‘Horse responded with a sharp dog-like bark. He nuzzled her more briskly. When he stood up he could see that Fern’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes slightly glazed. His heart grew light. He kissed her, and they fell into a long clinch on the sofa. He slid his hand under the top fold of her dressing-gown.
‘Not here, Horse. She’ll be listening.’
He sat up and combed his hair back with his fingers. ‘We’ll go to Tony’s,’ he said. ‘Tony won’t be home. He said he’d be in the billiard room till six.’
Half an hour later Fern and Horse scrambled through a broken fence into the small backyard of Tony’s flat. A japonica bush shot out a few green twigs from the cat-fertilised soil. An oil drum incinerator stood just inside the fence. Horse hunted for the key, first under the door mat, then on top of the cistern in the outdoor lavatory.
‘I can’t find it,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to break in.’
‘Will Tony mind?’
‘I don’t think so. If he does, he’ll just have to.’
He embraced Fern standing, to make sure she did not emerge from the erotic coma. Fern thrust her tongue into his mouth. ‘Be quick, Horse!’ she said, when he disengaged himself.
Horse hoisted himself painfully through a large open fanlight, his shoes scraping on the paint of the kitchen wall. His trouser pocket caught and tore as he wriggled through. He landed with a crash on the sink bench inside. Then he unlatched the door, and Fern entered, carrying the bottle of beer he had left outside.
‘It looks messy,’ said Fern, gazing round the kitchen junkyard, where empty whisky cases rubbed shoulders with painted canvas screens. Tony had at times done some stage designing.
‘Upstairs,’ said Horse. He led her into the passage and up the wooden spiral stair to Tony’s sleeping quarters. Here island mats hung on the walls and bronze jugs stood on platforms. The window commanded a fine view of the fire-escape of the Ballachulish Hotel. Horse was not interested in the view. A broad divan lay in the alcove, at floor level, covered by heavy rugs. Tony invariably referred to it as ‘the seducery’.
‘Do you want a beer?’ asked Horse. ‘No. Not now. Do you?’
‘No.’
Fern sat on the edge of the divan and unfastened her corduroy pants, the heels of her shoes clacking on the floorboards as she did so. Horse kissed her on the neck.
‘Don’t be slow, Horse, Get undressed, you oaf.’
Both were naked under the rugs. Horse ran his hands over that endlessly remarkable body, and rubbed her nipple between finger and thumb. Fern groaned immediately he mounted her. The fire and water of the first bang astonished him. Later on he lay on his side, his iron fresh from the rolls, and saw the sparks of a forest of rockets dropping slowly into a dark sea. The ghosts of eighteen never-to-be-born children gazed sadly down on him from the beams of the roof.
‘It makes a girl feel grateful,’ murmured Fern.
These words refreshed Horse. He explored her anatomy, and in twenty minutes they had begun the second bang. Horse wandered among the curtained foliage of a rain forest, peered into the darkness of limestone caves, and came upon a high bare lake where silver-bellied eels swam over clean shingle. He died in this lake, then floated to its surface and drifted on its pliant waves.
‘You don’t think I’m too sexy, do you?’ asked Fern. Her forehead was wet, her lips very red, though she wore no lipstick, and she smiled at him sleepily as if from the bottom of a well.
‘No,’ said Horse. He propped himself on his elbows and looked down at
‘Hell, no’ – Fern sat hastily up in bed. She wore the expression of a swimmer startled by a shark. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, but it couldn’t possibly work. I mean, it’s nice to be proposed to, but it would be terribly messy. We don’t really know each other.’
‘No,’ said Horse. He reflected that Fern was probably dead right. He knew very little of what went on behind that warm Venusian mask. And what she knew of him would hardly encourage her to want him as a husband. A poet and a foggy barfly. His only recommendation would be that he was tolerably good in bed. Yet he found it hard to endure the knowledge that Fern would one day leave him.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fern again. ‘Dear Horse. It was nice of you to say it. You make me feel an abandoned woman.’
‘I think I’ll have a beer,’ said Horse. He climbed out from under the rugs, uncapped the bottle, and drank from it, sitting naked on the bed. Then he lit a cigarette.
‘Don’t be cross,’ said Fern. ‘You could give a girl a drink.’
Horse found a glass and poured her a beer. He lit her cigarette for her, then lay down beside her again. Fern took charge of the third bang, as a consolation prize to Horse for having rejected his proposal of marriage. Like Thetis on a dolphin, or a child riding a log across a lagoon, she rode her prostrate Horse to final victory. The brown-walled tent of her hair surrounded Horse, and her face, a few inches above his own, glowed with the nimbus of the goddess. When the thunderhead descended on them both, and lightning struck at his loins and head, Horse heard the graves open. His ancestors emerged, tears falling on their mossy beards, their rotted members whole again. Blessed be the light that dies, they cried in Gaelic. And with blinding X-ray vision, he saw the mad on their asylum pillows, the crimmos in their monasteries of pain, the destitute on park benches, the prim girls afraid of their goatish lovers, the old women waiting in fly-specked sculleries for the burgling touch of the Black Angel, gazing and stumbling with bottomless joy and sorrow towards the light they had never known, the rekindled torch of Eden. Then he fell, away from Fern and that light, into the darkness behind the fixed stars.
When he and Fern sat down together, an hour later, in the Bon Ami milkbar, Horse had premonitions of grief to come. Anyone looking at Fern would have supposed her to be an impregnable varsity virgin who valued only campfire outings with the S.C.M. Her hair coiled neatly on her head, her sensible shoes tucked under the hospital-green bench, sipping her sweet and oily coffee, the only goddess she now resembled was Pallas Athene, patroness of schoolteachers.
‘When will I see you again?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. There’s a writer from Auckland who’s going to talk at the Literary Club. Grummet, I think his name is. You should be interested. He’s a poet. I might see you there.’ She paused ‘There’s going to be a party afterwards.’
Fern spoke a trifle irritably. Horse understood that in her mind the events of the afternoon had been ruled off, and the page turned over. She had guessed that the third bang meant to Horse what the sudden finding of an untouched moa hunter camp would to a devoted anthropologist. Horse had had his reward. And she could now return to her swot books and Professor Mac without the hindering pressure of sexual frustration.
‘All right,’ said Horse. ‘When are they holding it?’ ‘Next Saturday. Not tomorrow. The Saturday after.’
Horse reflected gloomily that this implied that Fern wished to remain celibate for the next eight days. In that time anything could happen. Jock Saunders might plant his climber’s flag on the Mons Veneris; if he had not already done so.
‘O.K.,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll call on you.’ He would have liked to have added – ‘in the afternoon’ – but Fern’s expression of a schoolmistress unwillingly pestered by a debauchee held back the words on his lips.
‘That will be nice.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock. I’ll have to go home and work.’
‘O.K.’ he stubbed out his fag in the saucer. ‘I’ve got to meet someone at five.’
‘Tony?’
‘No. A sailor chap I work with.’
‘I think you should go to bed early. You look worn out.’ ‘I might and I mightn’t.’
‘Fern frowned a little. ‘You couldn’t bear to miss the chance of a beer, could you?’
‘Let’s not argue.’
‘I was just expressing an opinion.’
Horse would have liked to have said ‘Don’t tell me off; I can’t stand it’ but the words, as usual, were not the right ones. They finished their coffee and rose together in silence. Horse watched Fern retreating down the old canyon of the street, a rational soldier on the march, and a stranger again.
Breaking and Entering 1
Peter was well lit by the time Horse arrived in the Grand. ‘That crown-and- anchor game was a dead loss, mate,’ he said. ‘Where did you get to? I’ve been here since one.’
‘I went round and saw a dame.’ Horse hoisted his first glass of beer gratefully. After the session with Fern he needed it to fill his hollow legs.
‘You’ll die on the nest one day,’ said Peter. ‘That bloody moll up the road just about killed me. She tore the skin off my back with her nails.’
Horse felt unwilling to speak of Fern and Mollie as sisters ‘This one’s very quiet,’ he said. ‘Just like a kid in some ways.’
‘The quiet ones are the killers. My missus in England nearly finished me off. She was a quiet one.’
‘How did she do that?’
‘She put those pills in my beer. Antabuse. The first pint I swallowed I thought the roof had fallen in.’
‘Did it work?’
‘It worked all right. I gave her a couple of shiners.’ ‘What did you want to see me about?’
Peter glanced round him at the gathering crowd. ‘Come over here, mate,’ he said. ‘Over in the corner. You never know when there’s somebody listening.’ They shifted their glasses to the window-sill at the bar corner. Peter leant close to Horse. ‘I’ve got a job on, mate. I need some help.’
Horse did not understand him. ‘What job? Scrub-cutting?’
‘Don’t be wet behind the ears. I mean a real job. Cracking a peter.’ ‘A peter?’
‘Can’t you talk English? A safe. A peter. It’s the same thing.’ Peter spoke impatiently.
Horse felt the cold breath of danger. He remembered Ivan’s remarks about Peter. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.
‘Quiet, mate, Don’t let the whole bar know.’ Peter put his arm round his shoulders and breathed in his ear. ‘Down on the wharves. A boot factory. I worked there for a couple of days after I’d jumped off the Howard Castle.’ He grinned. ‘You’ve got to be bright, mate. I had a look round the office; I sneaked in there in the lunch hour. I know how to get at the peter.’
‘Couldn’t you do the job on your own?’
‘Sure thing.’ Peter drew back his arm. His face shut like a door. ‘If you’re scared you’ll land in clink. But there’s nothing to it. I thought you might be able to use a few quid.’
Horse reflected on his financial situation. If he got, say, thirty quid out of the job, he could pay Tony back the eighteen he owed him and have twelve quid left for spending. And he had no wish to fall out with Peter. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘What time and where?’
Peter’s booze-veined eye brightened. ‘That’s the boy! I thought you’d be in on it. What we get at the mills, it’s just chickenfeed.’ He leant close again. ‘Half-past one tonight. Outside the wharf pub. I’ll be there. Have a rum, mate!’ He pounded Horse between the shoulders.
They drank together till closing time. Peter then headed back to Ivan’s
2
A light was on in the ground floor of the house behind the Ballachulish. When Horse knocked Tony opened the door immediately. Horse was carrying the carton under one arm and a bundle of fish and chips in the other.
‘Come in, stranger,’ said Tony.
They sat down at the clear end of the kitchen table. Tony provided two plates and a bottle of tomato sauce. When they had finished their meal Horse tore open the carton. They drank for a while in silence.
‘I’m a bastard for mentioning it,’ said Tony, ‘but I think you’ve cracked the sink.’ He gazed at Horse without reproof. ‘In future I’ll leave the key in a flower pot. Under the japonica.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I might want to.’ Tony leant forward and pressed Horse’s knee. ‘You can’t very well fornicate on the cable car.’
Horse froze. Tony had never made a pass before.
Tony drew back his right hand and slapped it with his left. ‘Lie down,’ he said to it. ‘You’ve got no sense.’ Then, to Horse – ‘Some would say I was aiding and abetting you. They’d be wise, of course. But I’m too old to weigh the pros and cons. You can come to the flat whenever I’m out of it.’
‘You don’t like Fern,’ said Horse.
‘I neither like her nor dislike her. She is not a friend of mine. I think she regards me as a dangerous monster. Possibly pitiable. I don’t object to pity. In this case, though, it comes from lack of knowledge. Non-culpable. She had never had occasion to know. But few women are charitable towards their sisters with balls.’
‘How do you square it out?’ Horse asked. ‘With yourself, I mean.’ Horse had wakened on many mornings in the seducery to find Tony beside him, on the broad of his back, staring into the half-light and thumbing his rosary beads. When Horse spoke of it, Tony replied that they kept his hands occupied.
‘Being camp?’ said Tony. ‘You don’t have to be queasy about it.’ He sighed. ‘I knew it would come up sooner or later. Now I’ll have to explain the facts of life to you.’ He set his beer down. ‘I have no authority to instruct.’
‘I’m sorry. I –.’
‘Don’t be sorry. The enquiry is an intelligent one.’ He gave Horse a cigarette, took one himself, and lit them both. Then he lay back in his chair and blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘I must get the facts in order. First there is God.’
‘God?’ Horse felt that the mention of God was hardly suitable.
‘God. I do not know Him but I believe in Him. It seems that He has made some men with the nature and habits of women. I don’t quarrel with it. I used
‘Did you ever try having a bang? With a woman?’
‘Yes. It was very unpleasant. I had to imagine she was a young man. Poor dear. She found out about me and turfed me out. I think she must have sprinkled the sheets with Jeyes Fluid afterwards.’
‘What about the Church?’
‘The Church does not permit sodomy. There are a great many things the Church will not condone. Despair is one of them. When I was in my teens I went to a priest and told him I thought I was already damned. The Jansenist heresy. I used to haunt the bathing sheds. To admire the boys undressing.’
‘What did he say about it?’
‘He told me I was up a gum tree. He said that a man’s temperament was only partly of his own making. He mentioned David and Jonathan. The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. How are the mighty fallen. He warned me against the two extremes – bending myself in a hoop, and taking other people’s view of me as the right one; or else just raising my hands and sinking under water. He said that for me a homosexual temptation was equivalent to another man’s being tempted to sleep with a woman. The Church does not permit fornication either.’
This explosion annoyed the puritan in Horse. ‘You’ve got it pretty easy then,’ he said. ‘Everything running on rails.’
‘Not easy. There is such a thing as love, my dear. When I was in my thirties I fell for a Yugoslav ski champion. A magnificent creature. I left the Church and followed him like a trained bitch. When he left me, for a younger man I wrote an anonymous letter to the police. Many would regard it as a highly meritorious act.’
Horse was silent.
‘He got three years,’ said Tony. ‘If I go to Hell, it will be for doing that.’ ‘You believe in Hell?’
‘I believe in personal responsibility. If you add God to that, Hell does not seem unlikely. His own place, as they said about Judas, who also betrayed a friend.’
‘A friend wants me to help him burgle a factory,’ said Horse.
Tony sat up with a jerk. ‘Tut! Tut!’ he said slowly. ‘You do choose some peculiar friends.’
‘He’s a sailor.’
‘A very irresponsible tribe. Is he camp?’
‘Not exactly. He used to sleep with a cabin boy on board the Howard Castle.’ ‘Situational,’ said Tony. He reflected. ‘When is the burglary planned for?’ ‘Tonight. At half-past one.’
‘I see. I take it you want to use this place as a base. I must warn you I don’t approve of burglars.’
‘No. I thought you mightn’t.’
‘But I don’t approve of myself either. Burglars are very compulsive people. Do you feel you have to?’
‘Not exactly. But I have promised.’
‘You’ll need some sleep then. I’ll stay up till you come home.’ ‘I’m not tired.’
‘Have another beer then. I wish I had your resilience.’ Tony cracked two bottles and passed one to Horse.
‘Tony,’ said Horse after a silence. ‘Do you think I’m camp?’ There seemed nobody more likely to have the right answer.
Tony laughed till his false teeth were bare to the gums. ‘Not you, boy,’ he said when the spasm had subsided. Not you. What made you think you might be?’
Horse recounted his homosexual dreams.
‘That proves nothing,’ said Tony. ‘It would make everyone a queer if it did. It just means you’ve got a subconscious mind. There’s only one test I know of.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you regularly get a hard on in the company of men, then you’re camp all right. It’s not a fault; but it’s a fact. If you hardly ever do except in the company of women, then you’re hetero. God help you either way.’
‘Haven’t you ever thought I was camp?’
‘If I thought it, I’d never sleep in the same bed with you. No. I’ve sometimes thought you might be an alcoholic. The cross of sin, they call it.’
‘Sin?’
‘You keep on doing something you don’t want to. It’s the hardest cross. You get no kudos for it. Have you ever made a Glasgow cocktail?’
‘No.’
‘You stick a gas-jet in a glass of milk and let it bubble for twenty minutes. An uncle of mine used to do that. When you get to that stage, there’s no doubt, you’re alcoholic.’
Horse yawned.
‘You must get some sleep,’ said Tony. ‘Remember, you’ve got a friend to meet. You can take a bath if you like. There’s clean pyjamas on the chair beside the bed.’
Bathed and relaxed, Horse fell asleep alone under the rugs that had covered him and Fern five hours before. He could smell her special odour faintly in the darkness.
3
Horse was wakened again by someone shaking his shoulder gently. ‘Get up,’ said Tony’s voice. ‘Rise and shine. Remember, you’ve got to go out burglaring.’ Horse sat up. Tony had set a cup of hot coffee and some biscuits on the chair beside the bed. The sleep had cured Horse’s depression. And he felt
‘It’s a hell of a night,’ he said, dipping biscuits in the coffee and eating them.
‘Why not leave it? Your friend’s probably taking you for a ride. Not that I blame him.’
‘Is there any beer left?’
‘There’s three bottles in the carton. I do hope you’re not becoming a soak. I’ll have to say an extra decade for you in the morning.’
Horse finished the coffee, dressed himself, and went downstairs. He drank two of the three remaining bottles by himself, for Tony had said he would prefer to remain on coffee. But he was near enough to dead sober when he stepped out into the street. He moved in the great belly of the whale and found it comfortable there. Booze or no booze, Fern or no Fern, life or death, he did not care at all. The night air brushed his cheeks damply. Overhead vague changes of light and darkness indicated the passage of clouds. The street lights glittered in this deserted underworld. As he came to the bottom of Rattray Street he saw a cop shining his torch in shop doorways.
Horse smiled at him. He felt no fear. The john hop could not see into the crannies of his criminal brain. ‘Good night,’ he said.
‘Good night, lad. You’re out late.’
‘I’m heading off home. I’ve been to a party.’ ‘Where do you live?’
‘In Castle Street.’ Horse alone knew that he lived nowhere.
‘Well, you’re sober. I can’t run you in, can I?’ The cop grinned sourly at his own joke.
‘Not tonight. I’ve got work to do tomorrow.’ ‘Saturday?’
‘Yes. I work in the Milk Department.’ ‘Well, good night, lad. Stay out of trouble.’ ‘You bet.’
Horse crossed the road, a respectable lad with a job on a milk run, going home to his verandah bedroom where a football cup stood on a napkin beside the mirror. The lit-up dial of the Exchange clock told him it was twenty past one. He walked quickly along the edge of the Queen’s Gardens where the floodlit war memorial pointed a dead phallus at the stony heavens. The boys in khaki would not come back. They had left their fiancées for good, to be banged by drunk Yanks in the tubular concrete air-raid shelters. Horse had once seen a gigantic Marine stagger on to the lawn, scattering the blue-coated pigeons, on an afternoon when the wind blew straight from the South Pole, and bare the mat of curly black hair on his chest to that wind, and bellow to the shocked town – ‘Here it is, girls! Come and get it!’ But now the Fleet had
Horse crossed the railway lines. His heart thumped as Peter’s stocky shape separated itself from the wall of the wharf pub to meet him. The harbour smell, old rope and oil and sacking and salt water, entered Horse’s nostrils. It smelt of endless possibility.
Peter was nervy and preoccupied. ‘I thought you mightn’t be coming, mate. Did you see any sign of the cops?’
‘I saw one at the bottom of Rattray Street. I told him I worked in the Milk Department.’
‘Never tell a cop anything. Those bastards can get you. They put it all down in a book.’
Through unlit streets, past yards full of timber and rusty dredge buckets, and flaking houses where wharfies and railwaymen drowsed or banged the night away while their children whimpered in the next room, they came to the high fence of the boot factory.
‘I’ll nip over first,’ said Peter. He took off his coat. Swift as an ape he climbed the hinges of the double gate and folded the coat over the three strands of barbed wire at the top. Then he swung his leg over and dropped to the ground on the other side. ‘Come on, mate. Pull your finger out,’ he whispered through the bars.
Horse climbed more awkwardly. While detaching Peter’s coat he cut the palm of his hand on a prong of wire. Nursing the hand and the coat he descended slowly to the dark yard. ‘I’ve ripped my hand,’ he said.
‘You’re a mug. You might get blood poisoning. Well, let’s get going. You follow me.’
He followed Peter to a pile of girders beside the wall of an engine shed. Carefully they heaped them higher till it was possible to climb up to the roof. The dull clang of iron on iron struck Horse’s ears more loudly than a kettledrum. The harbour breeze no longer comforted him. He expected to see at any moment twenty black-booted cops with torches rush in on the yard. Peter grunted but seemed to have no fear.
‘We’ll be up soon, mate. There should be a skylight open somewhere.’ They climbed to the roof of the engine shed, and from there to the glass-
panelled roof of the factory itself. Moving along the safe ridges, crouching, they came to a half-open skylight.
‘That’s the one. They prop it open to air the storage room.’ Peter raised the skylight to its full extent and shoved the hoop of notched iron into place. ‘I reckon that’ll hold her. You go down first.’
Horse lowered himself into the vacant pit, gripping the edge of the window frame. It creaked but carried his weight. His feet swung above the chasm. He saw the dim bulk of a high cupboard and launched himself on to its dusty top. There he crouched and waited.
‘How’s it going?’
‘I’m on top of a cupboard.’ ‘Good on you. That’s the style.’
Peter’s heavy body joined him. ‘We’re over the pig’s back,’ he said. ‘There should be a ladder down there. But we’ll have to jump. Try to land on the boots. Otherwise you’ll break your bloody neck,’ He gathered himself and flew into space. There was a loud grinding crunch as he landed, and a series of swear words. Then – ‘She’s O.K. No bones broken.’ His voice floated up to Horse. Get a move on, mate.’
Horse jumped with all his strength. He landed on tiers of cardboard and felt them give under him. Then he rolled to the floor, surrounded by invisible tissue paper and shoes. There was enough light to see Peter standing by the door. He had produced a small pocket torch with a needle light.
‘I didn’t want to use this before. The cops might have seen it.’
They walked past rows of unmoving machines to the glass-walled office. When Horse entered he found Peter already squatting by the safe. He was pulling on woollen gloves. ‘No prints,’ he said. He shone the torch on the lock and juggled with the combination. Horse looked round the office. The light of a street lamp showed a raised desk and four stools. A tin of Milo and a packet of chocolate biscuits, partly eaten, stood on the sink bench.
Peter had begun to slap the lock with the heel of his hand. Then he stood up. ‘It’s no go. I’ll need a crowbar.’
It was Horse who found a crowbar leaning against the wall behind one of the machines. They returned to the office. Horse had begun to sweat. He judged that they had been in the factory more than an hour. The cops would know of their whereabouts by telepathic communication.
In a crystal-clear vision he saw his father standing sadly at the back of the courtroom, his gardening hat in his hand, while the magistrate scratched his haemorrhoids and passed sentence on Horse.
‘Remanded to the Supreme Court. A very serious case of burglary.’
‘We never knew he’d do a thing like that,’ said Mrs Faulkner, the grocer’s wife, clucking loudly under her bird’s-nest hat. ‘But I’m not surprised. It only shows they should have taken the belt to him when he was a brat.’
Peter meanwhile was heaving on the crowbar. ‘Here, give us a hand,’ he roared softly. ‘She’s beginning to shift.’
Horse lent his weight and tugged at the crowbar. There was a loud splintering noise and the safe door flew ajar.
‘That’s the style. We’ve done it!’ Peter’s face shone with sweat and jubilation. He pounded Horse on the back, and then dived down to the open safe. He removed a ledger, a ten-shilling note, and finally a crumpled pair of silk stockings. ‘Bugger it!’ he said. ‘The bloody peter’s empty.’
They rummaged through the office drawers and found nothing but pens and stationery. Eventually Peter kept the ten-shilling note and handed Horse
It was hard going on the return journey through the skylight. There were no ladders to be found, and they piled boots on boots to reach the cupboard top. Horse tucked a pair of galoshes inside his jersey. They might just do for Tony. In the yard outside a violent urge to defecate overcame him. Having no paper, he wiped himself with the silk stockings and left them in a corner of the yard.
When they reached the railway crossing, and Peter had silently left him, Horse felt the renewed bite of anxiety. He had worn no gloves. His hand had bled on the book of stamps, and very likely on everything else he had touched inside the factory. The cops would make a laboratory test and work it out by algebra.
‘That blood belongs to Timothy Harold Glass. A rogue and a vagabond.’ ‘Yes, we know him by the colour of his dung,’ said another analyst, holding up the ravished stockings. And the cop he had yarned to in Rattray Street added his evidence – ‘I saw a young man with a big nose and red ears.
He had a mole on the side of his neck. I knew he was a criminal by the way his hands trembled.’
‘My stockings!’ the office girl wept. ‘Oh, the brute. My only pair of good stockings!’
Weighed down by remorse he dropped the book of stamps through a grating in front of the railway station. When he came to Tony’s door the sky was brightening. Tony let him in.
‘How did it go? Have you brought back a diamond necklace?’
It was only then that Horse remembered the galoshes. He pulled them out from under his jersey. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said.
Tony grinned. ‘Stolen goods,’ he said. ‘Let me try them on.’
The galoshes were the size of small fishing-boats. The next day Horse burned them in the incinerator in Tony’s yard.
Bulls and Cows
Horse arrived late at Mr Grummet’s lecture. He had rectified his money losses by a three quid place bet on a trotter called Sandpiper at Forbury Park. The horse was owned and trained by Gandhi’s brother-in-law, and Gandhi had emphasised that it would only run for a place.
‘Merv’s trying him out,’ he said. ‘If he gives him his head at Forbury he won’t pay out much of a divvy at Auckland in October. But he’s a sure thing for a place. Put a fiver on the bastard.’
Horse had spent a hard Saturday at Forbury. Between the races he drank pony beers, watery in taste, at the bar behind the stand. He lost heavily on the first three races, going by his own hunches, and when Sandpiper’s race,
The tote closed. The balloon went up. The light low sulky flew round the course. Sandpiper, the outsider, came third by a nose. And Horse collected twenty-two pounds ten shillings and some silver for his three quid bet. He then experienced the mainly aesthetic pleasure of betting on that great pacer, Highland Fling, and seeing the small grey horse move steadily up like a railway train from the back of the field to win by half a furlong. Highland Fling paid only twenty-four shillings for a pound and nineteen and six for a place bet. The Jockey Club, not the punters, was the richer by it.
He left the course, his veins full of grog and water, while torn tickets blew round him like a snow-storm and the blue-jowled hangdog losing punters gazed grimly at the ground. On the tram to town he heard one happier punter explain to a neighbour his private method of selection.
‘I study the Turf Digest and Bet Bets and the tips in the Star. And then I stick a pin through the race book. And then I put a list on the garage door and throw darts at it. And then I let the Old Woman pick them by the names she likes the sound of. She always strikes a good outsider.’
Gandhi, his pockets stuffed with blue money, insisted on shouting seven dog’s-noses for Horse in the bar of the Shamrock. When Horse eventually reached Fern’s flat the bird had already flown. He returned wearily to pay his debts to Tony and share a meal of oysters, steak, onions, eggs and chips, with him at the Silver Grille. Now he entered the mock-Gothic archway that led into the varsity enclosure. Here Jock Saunders had once hung for six hours in a beer crate, suspended by a rope from the window above the arch, for riding a motor bike without a silencer on the grey asphalt paths. The memory of that event lightened Horse’s gloom. He peered at the glass-covered baize of the notice-board on the wall of the arch, and read with difficulty –
The swots, thought Horse sourly, the prunes and the prisms, who knew the date of publication of every folio of Romeo and Juliet, and rejoiced in the operations of Grimm’s Law. They would go on to be High School teachers and wear thick woollen stockings in winter. He remembered Ophelia Bates, a tall girl with glasses, who had complained to the Executive about his habit ofCritic, the varsity rag. He pushed open the swing doors that led towards the cafeteria. The modulations of someone’s voice, like a foghorn under water, reached him through the closed door beyond. Grummet was already on the go.
Cautiously he opened the cafeteria door. The room was nearly full. Horse slid into a pew at the very back. A woman with cropped black hair and wooden beads round her neck shifted over with a bad grace to make room for him. Horse recognised her as Zoe Virtue, the lanky spouse of Gordon Virtue the varsity librarian. Whenever she met Horse she rattled her beads and questioned him earnestly about his poems. Horse had rejected three separate invitations to a literary evening at the Virtues’ place, where Zoe queened it with coffee and salted peanuts and readings of T.S. Eliot.
Horse crossed and uncrossed his legs mournfully. He could see Fern’s crown of plaits three rows from the front and beside her the reddish turnip jowls of Jock Saunders. The enemy had entered the gates. I am a burglar, said Horse to himself hopefully, but no spark rose in his blood to support the statement. He was no berserker, only a scrambler over midnight roofs. If it came to a brawl Jock could beat him up with one hand tied behind his back. The choice lay with Fern; and it seemed she had already made it.
‘– but shall we go to the grave on all fours? Citizens of Colonus, a man is a walking bundle of tripes, yet he is capable of knowledge.’
Horse saw with peeled eyes a strange figure at the other end of the room, swaying on its feet, its back to the dead coke fire. A man in his fifties, paunched and stooping, with a yellow tie like a noose tugged open below the neck of an unbuttoned shirt. The man looked as if he had just climbed out of bed and put on his clothes in the dark. His face was purple and gnome-like. Horse recognised with sudden joy that Mr Grummet was nearly dead drunk.
‘I myself am blind!’ Mr Grummet gripped the table and stared at it. ‘I am Oedipus, the King of many-gated Thebes. This slab of wood, or it may be stone, is, I believe, the doorstep of the goddesses who send us dreams of damnation, the powerful Eumenides. I, Oedipus, alone may sit upon it.’ Mr Grummet lurched round the table and seated himself on the front of it. He stared at the audience. His eyes were pillar-box red. Jack Cavendish, the Literary Club secretary, sat close behind the table, his face buried in his hands, as if he were praying for Mr Grummet to die.
‘Citizens of Colonus,’ said Mr Grummet softly, ‘I will not split hairs with you. By the mercy of God, I am drunk tonight. You had hoped perhaps to hear words spoken about the development of the arts in New Zealand. I am glad to disappoint you. The arts do not exist. The foul water does not run clear. The New Zealand you imagine does not exist. Your world, the creation of the schoolmaster, the accountant and the bureaucrat, is a golem, a clay man made by magical illusion to turn the mills of death. The true world is the
‘Citizens of Colonus, knowledge comes rarely even to those who walk on two legs instead of four. Recently, after litigation, my third wife left me. In a hotel at Coromandel a Latvian waitress applied ointment to my lacerations. These are the words I set down to celebrate the occasion. She suffered from hernia and she had flat feet.’
Mr Grummet descended from the table and pulled a soiled envelope from the inside pocket of his coat. He proceeded to read from it hoarsely –
‘It is, if you like, a poem about the female pudenda. The house of death,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘That is the phrase the Maoris used for it. Life can be difficult. One has to get down low. Down low.’ Mr Grummet smiled sadly, drooped his head, coughed, crumpled, and sat on the floor.
There was no clapping. A loud buzz of talk began in the audience. Jack Cavendish lifted his head painfully from his hands and rose to his feet. ‘I must apologise,’ he said. He stood at attention with his eyes riveted to a poster on the opposite wall that advertised sunny Nelson apples; he looked like a man on the gallows. ‘We had no idea. Our visiting speaker is obviously unwell. I can only ask – ’.
The members of the audience were rising. Horse pushed his way to the front. He brushed past Fern, who smiled a small chilly smile, as if from the metal wall of a departing inter-island ferry to an unregretted and elderly relative on the wharf below. Among the crush Zoe Virtue was hobnobbing with Miss Gallon.
‘I call it disgusting,’ said Miss Gallon shrilly. ‘The man was quite plainly intoxicated. He had nothing to say at all that made sense. He may be insane, of course.’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Zoe. ‘Poor Gordon will be so disappointed. He takes these things to heart, you know. I couldn’t understand a word he said myself. But didn’t you feel there was something – well, Dionysiac about it!’
‘I couldn’t agree less,’ said Miss Gallon. ‘I’m not blind or deaf. I came here to listen to a lecture on poetry. Not to hear somebody discuss the details of his squalid private life in public. It will encourage the worst elements among the students –’.
Mr Grummet was still sitting on the floor in what seemed to be a yoga posture. Jack Cavendish was trying feebly to tug him to his feet. Horse drew near them with the deeply reverent joy of a Hindu who encounters, after searching vainly through a hundred burrows and ashrams, the guru who was born to be his teacher, sitting naked among the open crematoria of Benares, his ribs furrowed, his hair clotted, his eyes rolled upwards towards the centre of his forehead – but alive, alive! He wanted to lay his money, his useless bag of poems, his heart and liver at Mr Grummet’s feet.
‘Leave him alone, you bloody clot!” he said to Jack Cavendish. ‘He’s got more brains in his arse than you’ve got in your head.’
Jack retreated. Tenderly Horse bent down, put Mr Grummet’s left arm around his neck and his right arm around Mr Grummet’s waist. He then heaved upwards. As he took Mr Grummet’s full weight the prophet’s legs straightened. ‘You’re a bloody good cobber, Basil,’ murmured Mr Grummet. Horse was happy to be included, though under a false name, among the number of the great man’s disciples.
Gordon Virtue arrived briskly. A failed parson who now believed in culture and preached the gospel of inter-racial communication to Adult Education classes. He wore a malarial twitch as a badge of honour after three months of cultural reconstruction in the swamps of Thailand. ‘Good man, Glass,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the right idea. A Samaritan, eh? Our friend should really be under the doctor. A brilliant mind going to pieces.’
Horse would have liked to plug him. Just one good clout on the high anthill dome where the thoughts moved in chain-gang order. But the prophet was heavy. ‘You take the other arm, Mr Virtue,’ he said politely. ‘I’ll steer him.’ Soon a small fleet of cars moved round the harbour and up winding roads to Virtue Castle. Gordon and Zoe had engaged an Estonian architect to build them a habitable box of metal and glass under the brow of a hill that commanded a view of the Heads. This nightmare edifice had cost nine thousand pounds. Many of the Church of the Extreme Left regarded it as a shrine. ‘Zoe and I have bourgeois tastes,’ Gordon said humorously to his visitors. ‘We like our comforts. But the day’s coming when every worker will have a home like ours.’ The house stood on concrete stilts. Its furniture was
Horse found himself at the head of the procession, in the back of Gordon Virtue’s car, with his arm round Mr Grummet’s slumbering shoulders. Zoe sat in front. Throughout the journey she talked rapidly.
‘. . . I always say to Gordon that we need more intellectual life in Dunedin. Some kind of stimulus, I mean. That’s why we started our Thursday Evening Group. I’m sure you’d be interested, Mr Grummet. A pity you’re only going to be with us for two days. I’d rather hoped you might have been able to doss with us – very simple and homely, I know, and perhaps you’re more attached to the fleshpots than we are – but it did seem strange to me that you’d chosen the Prince of Wales. I believe a great many horsey people go there – jockeys and bookmakers and so on – it hardly seems to me it would provide you with an intellectual atmosphere. Of course we live very quietly. But I think we can understand the Dionysiac spirit. I mean, an artist must express himself. You’d have had a perfect view of Mount Cargill from the patio. I would have liked to just leave you there for an hour or two, and let you gather inspiration. I was only saying to Moira . . .’.
Half an hour later a group of about thirty people were assembled in the Virtues’ habitable glass barn. Miss Gallon and several of her friends had declined an invitation to the party. Jack Cavendish, recovered, was nibbling at the fruit punch Zoe had provided. It was made by mixing eight bottles of cider, a bottle of bad sherry, a bottle of gin, and a number of cans of fruit juice in a large plastic bucket. It tasted like hot fruit salad; and five glasses would stun a bullock. Mr Grummet had declined the mixture and settled down to a diet of gin and water.
As president of the Students’ Union – an office he had recently risen to on account of his fine sports record – Jock Saunders was present; and with him, Fern. She had removed her lambswool overcoat, and after three heavy doses of punch, was entertaining a small group of males in an alcove. Gloomily Horse heard her singing her favourite number –
Her face flushed and innocent, her limbs moving in an impromptu solo dance, she gallivanted in a separate orbit, as remote from Horse as Arcturus.
After twenty minutes of unrewarding prospector’s work on Mr Grummet
‘I must thank you,’ said the prophet. ‘I believe you helped me out of that rat-infested dungeon. One could have been eaten alive.’
‘You were magnificent. It was the best talk I’ve ever heard.’
‘It was shit. We must get drunk together some time. These porcupines with their glass quills. They frighten me. How did they all get here?’
‘I think they use them to walk on.’
‘You’ve struck it. Just like a sea egg. What’s your name?’
‘Horse.’
‘Excellent. My name is John.’
‘You said it was Oedipus.’
‘From the bottom of a well the stars are visible. In daylight. Who you are depends on where you are.’
‘Why do they talk the way they do?’
‘To convince themselves they exist. The load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs. Chesterton. The Grey Wolf of Rome. Her milk is bitter but medicinal.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘You will. I can’t. Women. Either Christ or the death goddess.’ ‘I would have said the love goddess.’
‘The death goddess. The sacred earth. Maui entered her gate. It closed upon him.’
‘You can write,’ said Horse softly.
‘The ejaculation of the dying. For the country of death is the heart’s size and the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘The fire consumes itself. The heart is broken by its own evil.’ ‘What after that?’
‘Mercy. The gift of one beggar to another.’ ‘I love you. You are my friend.’
‘Yes.’ Mr Grummet touched his glass to Horse’s and drained it. He then pointed with the empty glass towards Fern. ‘Who is that child?’
‘She’s my girlfriend; or at least. . . . Her name is Fern Mitchell.’ ‘You must introduce me. She appears to exist.’
Mr Grummet rose to his feet and lumbered towards the group in the alcove. Horse followed him. Fern had finished her dance and was sitting on a cushion on the floor. Mr Grummet lowered himself to the carpet beside her. He did not wait for the introduction. He gripped Fern’s hand in his own puffy talon. ‘I am an expert palmist,’ he said. ‘Would you let me read your hand?’ Jock Saunders had moved rapidly from the other side of the room; but he was too
‘If you like,’ she said. ‘I don’t really believe in it.’
Mr Grummet opened her hand, pressed its cushions, and drew a finger gently along the lines. ‘You are a practical girl,’ he said. ‘You’ve worked out where you’re going to. Some kind of social work.’
Fern pursed her mouth. ‘It sounds like a school-marm. I won’t tell you anything. Go on.’
Mr Grummet drew the tips of his fingers lightly across her wrist. ‘Healthy, moderately wealthy, but given to fits of depression,’ he said. ‘If I were a doctor I would recommend laughter, flowers, not caring what other people think.’
‘I’m going to be a doctor.’
‘I’d be glad to be your first patient. An old wound is opening. Just here.’ He touched himself below the chestbone. ‘A dance with you would cure it.’
‘It might make it worse.’ Fern was now laughing.
‘I’m entirely ready to run that risk.’ He stood up and drew her to her feet. Horse and Jock both watched, bitten by the adder of jealousy, while Mr Grummet steered Fern to the centre of the floor. The dance was not graceful. Fern had put her arms round Mr Grummet’s neck, and Mr Grummet appeared to be carrying her on an invisible tray. Zoe Virtue and several of the guests were gazing at this sight in baffled horror when Mr Grummet opened the door of the room and led Fern out by the hand. There was complete silence for a moment. Horse could hear the night wind sighing among the cables that braced the globular aluminium roof. Jock Saunders walked rapidly to the door, hesitated, turned on his heel, and marched to the electric wall heater, where he stood, glass in hand, a soldier in burning Pompeii, obedient to the rules of the game. Looking at that honest bulldog stance Horse remembered Hannibal in the pub and found it almost possible to regard him as a comrade. He too was a beggar at the gate. The goddess and the guru had left them both standing. Horse knew that Jock, longing to hit Mr Grummet with a flying rugby tackle and bury his shattered bones under a gorse bush (‘We fought it out man to man’), was deterred only by the certain knowledge of Fern’s iceberg withdrawal (‘A girl doesn’t like being snarled over like a bone, Jock.’).
Zoe was the first to speak. ‘Well! I do think that occupational therapy can play a great part in the rehabilitation of the insane, Professor. I’m quite sure that Japanese rock gardens could be used. A friend of mine came back from Japan with some marvellous ideas. And then there’s flower arrangement . . . .’
An hour later Horse had had it. Eight beer glasses of Zoe’s punch had endowed him briefly with the mental processes of Te Rauparaha. He strode through rustling flax bushes to the door, grasping a bottle like a taiaha. Outside the door he found himself in a dark cupboard-like passage. The sound of giggles and a thin slab of light came from under another door. He shoved it open, and stood inside the bathroom.
The bathroom, floored with non-porous rubber, was the second largest room in the house. Upon a mosaic of geometrical fish the Olympians were at play. Fern, on her hands and knees, her hair unfastened round her face and hanging to the floor, was mooing gently like a cow. Mr Grummet, in his shirt-sleeves, his trousers partly off, was also on his hands and knees. The noise he made was a soft melancholy roar. From time to time he and Fern approached each other from opposite ends of the room. They touched their heads together most peacefully and rubbed flanks, mooing and roaring. Occasionally Mr Grummet tried to bite Fern on the ear or the rump; but the scene was not an erotic one. It was extraordinarily innocent. The couple had, it seemed, regained the knowledge of Adam and Eve, who understood the language of beasts before the Fall.
Hearing the door open, Fern lifted her hair back from her eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you, Horse,’ she said with a giggle. ‘We’re playing bulls and cows. It was John’s idea. Isn’t it lovely? You can join in if you like.’
Mr Grummet’s rump, clothed in woollen underpants, presented itself less than a yard from Horse’s feet. The guru was still roaring, and prancing a little, as he began another circuit of the room. Horse wrestled with an all- but-overwhelming impulse to boot the prophet with all his strength on the backside. Slowly he subdued it. Grummet the merciful; Grummet the blind; Grummet the wounded, the true bard, tormented by the gods; Grummet the wise – he had a right to this holy relaxation. In a sense he and Fern belonged to each other. Horse was the real intruder. He lowered his foot, already lifted for sacrilegious assault, and retreated on tiptoe, closing the door behind him.
Horse sat down again in an empty chair behind Zoe, still overpowered by the sight he had just seen. He recharged his glass with punch. Gradually, like the drone of a mason-fly, Zoe’s monologue began to penetrate his skull – ‘I mean, we’ve got to have standards, haven’t we? We can’t all go around wearing flowers in our hair and copulating under bushes. I can’t help feeling that a great deal of modern writing is escapist. I’d like to read something about the ordinary people. People like us. Not that I object to sex in its proper place. . . .’
She laughed bitterly. Though Horse did not know it, Zoe Virtue was a desperate woman. She had been reared as a cloudy Methodist; but Gordon Virtue, removing her faith and her virginity simultaneously, had converted her to the austere dogmatism of the Extreme Left. She had no doubt whatever that in less than forty years she would be dead for good. Life had thinned out remarkably for her in the past five years. An attempt to help Gordon in his Adult Education work had failed acrimoniously; and the Thursday Evening Group was a last-ditch retreat attended only by women like herself who found themselves with too much time on their hands and hoped vaguely that culture would fill the breach. The Church of the Extreme Left had taught her that marriage without a satisfactory sex life was unacceptable. She knewDon Juan, while he admired her sensitive profile. Fern and the blond divorcee were the same person in Zoe’s subconscious menagerie. Men only wanted sex; and even then, not the cultured sex that Zoe felt she could have given them. She had begun to despair.
Horse knew nothing of this. He heard only the endless flow of twaddle that fell from her prominent orange lips. It occurred to him that she might be a zombie, like Fern’s landlady, a sexless and soulless body kept in motion by the angry Dead. Fuddled with punch he gazed at her bony goosefleshed back, exposed in a long V almost to her buttocks by her stylish evening frock. Is she dead or alive? he asked himself. He leant forward and slowly stubbed out his cigarette somewhat to the right of her spine.
For a second there was no result. Then Zoe catapulted with a shriek into Jack Cavendish’s unready arms. ‘Oh, you bastard!’ she shouted.
Jack imagined that he was the person addressed. ‘For God’s sake,’ he protested. ‘I never touched you.’
‘Not you, you bloody fool!’ wailed Zoe. ‘Somebody burnt me on the back!’ Horse was suddenly seized by the shirt-collar and dragged to his feet, his bucket-shaped chair falling on its side with a clatter. Jock Saunders had found his man at last. Horse and Mr Grummet were, to his mind, two heads on one
intellectual pansy viper.
‘It was this crawling bastard!’ he shouted. ‘He did it. I saw him. He’s a bloody maniac. He’s not fit for the company of any decent woman. I’m going to settle the bugger.’
A sledgehammer blow struck Horse on the jawbone. As he fell back, in the moment before night descended on his eyes, he saw Fern standing, tidy now and surprised-looking in the open doorway.
The Lion’s Cage
When Horse was delivered at his door by taxi early on Sunday morning Tony did not show much surprise. He fed the wounded soldier black coffee and bathed his swollen jaw and cut cheekbone. A good mother, he asked few
On Sunday Horse wakened under a cloud. The events of the night before were not fully clear to him, but one thing was glaringly apparent – he owed Zoe Virtue a mountainous apology. The effect of two different kinds of punch – Zoe’s and Jock’s made him long for a patch of chickweed and a tombstone with a grey carved angel on it, where the birds could settle and conduct lives less complicated than his own; but there was a work of reparation to be done before he expired. After a barber’s breakfast – the dry retches, a bottle of beer and a cigarette – Horse went to a phone box and dialled Zoe’s number. When he got through, a glum male voice replied.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Timothy Glass.’
‘I don’t know what you’re ringing for. I suppose you want to apologise. Some things are better left alone, Mr Glass.’
‘Could I speak to Mrs Virtue?’
‘I’ll be most surprised if she’s able or willing to talk to you. Your behaviour last night almost brought on a nervous breakdown.’
‘I’d just like to tell her I’m sorry.’
‘Well, I’ll get her. If she’ll come. I’d like you to know, Mr Glass, we did think of calling the police.’
‘I know. I mean, I know what you mean. I want to tell her I’m sorry.’ ‘All right then. Hang on a minute.’
Horse waited. This was the death cell. Soon the parson would read a few prayers, and they would tie a bandage over his eyes, and he would go down feet first.
‘Is that you, Mr Glass – Timothy?’ It was Zoe’s voice, a little chilly but unhysterical.
‘Yes. I want to say I’m sorry.’
‘I must say it surprised me. You mustn’t go round burning people with cigarettes, Timothy. It’s not done.’ Her voice was warmer now. ‘It made me feel you were trying to work something out. Of course it was a terrible thing to do. But I feel we can’t just leave it at that. I’d like to have a little talk with you some time. About life. I think I might even be able to help you.’
God! thought Horse. He saw a different trapdoor and noose. The noose of culture and the trapdoor of a queasy friendship. ‘I don’t think it would do any good, Mrs Virtue,’ he said.
‘You can call me Zoe. No, Timothy, some things have to be thrashed out. A little quiet talk. Gordon has to go to Balclutha today. Another of his talks to farmers’ wives.’ Her voice hardened again. ‘You must come up today, Timothy. I’ll expect you for lunch.’
Both feet already in the bog. Horse struggled feebly. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Virtue – I mean, Zoe. It’s awfully nice of you. But I’ve got to see a bloke today –’. There was no bloke for Horse to see; and Zoe detected this from the tone of
‘Don’t be shy, Timothy! I’m not really an ogress. And you did burn me rather badly. I’ve had to cover the place with Elastoplast. I’ll expect you about twelve o’clock.’ The receiver clicked at the other end, and Horse was left to meditate on the results of a life of crime.
He arrived by taxi at Virtue Castle a little after twelve. He had spent the morning with Tony in the Shamrock, fighting a king-sized hangover and watching the grey Sunday-drinkers emerge from the holes of the town like bees from a smoked hive.
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Tony. ‘You really are a masochist, my dear. Anyone who drinks punch at a party is signing their own death warrant. I remember one frightful night in Remuera. . . .’
Zoe came down the rock garden steps to meet him. She was wearing black skin-tight slacks, green sandals which exposed her red taloned toe-nails, and a frilly flowered shirt. ‘You are a dear, Timothy,’ she said. ‘I know it must have taken courage. Real guts. I mean, after last night. Come up on the patio. Our little feast of reconciliation. Do you like crayfish?’
‘Yes,’ said Horse.
‘I’m so glad. We’ll have a simple meal together. And just talk.’
Horse sat down awkwardly in one of the bucket-shaped chairs on the patio. The wind whistled between the table-legs. But the spread was a reasonable one. Crayfish and goo and lettuce and thin buttered slices of rye bread. He balanced his plate between his knees. Zoe’s mannish and somewhat weather-beaten face turned towards him with a warmth that froze him.
‘Our little tête-à-tête,’ she said. ‘You’re a bad boy, you know. We were so disappointed that you never turned up at our Thursday Evening Group.’
Horse was having difficulty with the crayfish and lettuce. The goo was inclined to spread. He licked his chops nervously.
‘We had hoped you would read us some of your verse. I’ve clipped out all the pieces you’ve had published in Critic. Very strong, I felt. I do love to see a new talent shooting up. Fresh out of the smithy. How do you get your inspiration?’
Horse thought of Fern and the gun-emplacement. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose it just happens.’
‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,’ said Zoe. ‘What’s the last thing you’ve hammered out? Say it to me, Timothy. I want to hear it from your own lips.’
Horse’s last poem, a satire on the University administration, had included a number of four-letter words. He decided that Zoe would like better another one he had made about crossing the Straits on a wild night.
‘It’s a bit like Whitman,’ he said apologetically.
‘Say it to me. Please.’ Zoe folded her hands and gazed at the glittering roof- bubble of Virtue Castle.
Horse put his plate on the table and concentrated. He had never felt less like orating –
He paused in his droning to gather breath. In actual fact he had been very seasick on the one occasion when he had crossed the Straits.
‘Lovely,’ said Zoe. She interpreted the pause as an indication that the poem had ended. ‘What ignorance of pain? . . . I often feel like that, Timothy. As if nobody really cared. I think I’m a poet too. . . .’
Zoe felt that her labours in the paddock of culture were at last bearing fruit. The poem was not vulgar; and it had the kind of liturgical sound, a church noise, which she liked in the recordings of T.S. Eliot, possibly because it brought back nuances of her religious childhood. She had no idea what the poem was about; in fact it did not occur to her that it should be about anything. She hoped that Timothy had noticed her profile. He was a louche boy, but really sensitive underneath.
Horse realised that he would not have to finish reciting the poem. This took a weight off his mind, for it was a long one, and some of the later stanzas referred very directly to Fern.
Zoe rose to her feet and clapped her hands. ‘Now for another treat!’ she cried. ‘I’ll take the remains into the kitchen. You bring in the chairs and table, Timothy, there’s a dear!’
She shifted the fodder and Horse shifted the furniture. When the job was done, and Zoe had brewed some coffee, she produced the special treat. It was a Dvorák long-playing record.
‘Music!’ cried Zoe. She put the record on the player and adjusted the arm. ‘Just sit down and listen. Let’s be comfy.’ She arranged several cushions on the floor and beckoned to Horse. ‘Sit down, Timothy. Don’t look so worried! Just be your own natural self.’
Horse sat down stiffly beside Zoe. The noises that reached him from the radiogram were hard to bear. An endless succession of melancholy twangs and thuds. It so happened that Horse was tone-deaf. As the minutes rolled by his boredom increased to genuine anguish. It burned in the pit of his
‘You’re very shy, aren’t you, Timothy?’ said Zoe.
Zoe had interpreted the cigarette incident in her own way. Either Timothy Glass was completely insane, or else he had conceived a boyishly romantic yet violently sensual love for her, which he could only express symbolically. The second alternative seemed the most likely one. After all, she had her own mature charm – and what could be more Freudian, more like a phallus than a lighted cigarette? Zoe had never acquired a lover, though the heroines of the books she read were constantly doing so. No one had turned up who looked in the slightest degree eligible; and besides, she did love Gordon. But Gordon had betrayed her; and the joy of being loved by a young man, a budding poet, even if his ears did stick out so, refreshed her greatly, like rain falling in Death Valley. Timothy deserved a reward. She would not let her scruples or his timidity stand between them. Indirectly she would be furthering the arts.
Horse’s view of the situation was a different one, yet it seemed likely to lead him to the same physical conclusion. He felt strongly that he and Zoe were two Emperor penguins perched on a dung-spattered ledge of the Antarctic ice-cap. Communication had been impossible from the start. Yet their physical propinquity was undeniable. A rudimentary sense of chivalry had begun to stir in Horse. Zoe had had a hard life. Anyone married to Gordon Virtue, unless made of zinc and leather, would go crackers in the end. She had fed him, Horse, and forgiven his hideous boorishness of the previous night. If she wanted a good bang, then it was his plain duty to give it to her. Who was he, anyway, to count himself superior to Zoe? With a bag over her head and her voice-box out of commission, Zoe Virtue could be approached and mounted. Gordon had apparently done it; why not Horse? Horse the punter; Horse the burglar; Horse the adulterer. The progression was logical enough. Yet he longed with all his heart for the peace of the Shamrock, sinking another handle with Tony. He remembered Tony’s best story of the morning – ‘. . . so the landgirl came back in the evening, and the farmer says to her, “Where the hell have you been all day? All I told you to do was take the cow to the bull.” And the landgirl says to him, “It’s all very well for you, you’ve had plenty of practice. But I’m new at the work. It took me twelve hours to get that blasted cow to lie down on her back.”’
The Dvorák record gave one last tuneless wail, the arm swung back and the disc continued to revolve with a thudding sound. Horse began to rise to switch it off, but Zoe gripped his arm and held him.
‘Not now, Timothy,’ she said softly. ‘Just leave it.’
He found himself staring down at the brick-red face of the afflicted woman. Her large orange lips rose to meet his own – like a gas ring, thought Horse, then rebuked himself for his lack of chivalry. He found the contact unpleasant and stifling. He had no physical reaction other than a feeling of nausea and weakness, as if the blood were being drained from his veins. The fear of impotence rose to torment him. It would be the last straw if he couldn’t do the job.
Horse braced himself for appropriate action. He put his hand under Zoe’s shirt. She winced, and he withdrew it hurriedly. ‘It’s still sore where you burnt me,’ she murmured.
Ten minutes later Horse and Zoe were in bed together. Horse did his best to give Zoe a good bang. His own mind and body were numb, as at the dentist’s after anaesthesia. The only serious obstacle was the unusual largeness of Zoe’s private anatomy. Horse felt like a boatman entering the Roxburgh Gorge in a canvas canoe. After the act they lay quietly side by side. The wind whined outside the window. Dismasted he lay in the dead centre of the cyclone. I’ll have to let her down gently, he thought.
But Zoe was the first to speak. ‘If I gassed myself my lungs would bleed,’ she said in a small, clear voice. She had often considered gas; though only in fantasy, for the fittings of Virtue Castle were all-electric. In the post-coital trance it seemed natural to her to open to her bedroom companion the inmost chamber of her mind where the true Zoe screamed soundlessly night and day. The effect on Horse was spectacular. He shot from the bed, as if ejected from the pilot seat of a plane going down in flames, and stood, clad only in his shirt, on the foam-rubber mat, wide awake and trembling.
‘What’s wrong, darling?’ said Zoe. She sat up in bed.
Horse reflected in the middle of his horror that the true Zoe was the one he had to be decent to. She at least was more real than the nattering party ghost. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a bad dream.’
‘Silly boy! Come back to bed. You’ll get cold there.’
Unwillingly Horse lowered himself back again into the jaws of the grave. With a damp hand Zoe pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘Do you really love me, Timothy?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t.’
Horse tried for a compromise. ‘You’re another human being,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I said. Do you love me?’
Horse remained silent. He did not want to lie. The long pallid body beside him, neuter rather than female, seemed that of some fellow-inhabitant of a tomb. But he felt a dragging pity for Zoe. Stretched out on this ancient and famous rack, he replied slowly, ‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s hardly an answer.’ Then, very swiftly – ‘Who are you thinking about?’
‘Fern.’ He spoke truthfully without thinking.
‘Fern? You mean bracken.’ She laughed. ‘You do have a literary mind.’
Then Zoe remembered she had asked who, not what. ‘Fern!’ she screamed. ‘You mean Fern Mitchell – that filthy little harlot!’
Zoe’s language was biblical. But she had assumed the mask of a pre- biblical personage. A gale of rage and despair was sweeping through her. The pupils of her eyes grew huge and black; her teeth were bared in a snarl to the gum-line; her face was purple and the veins of her forehead swollen; her red- varnished fingers were raised like talons. It even seemed to the horrified Horse that her short black hair stuck out round her head in rigid spokes. It needed only a chain of skulls round her neck, and Zoe would have become Kali, the death-goddess whose face dismays equally the child in the dark, the man on the grog, the Prime Minister and the lavatory attendant.
‘You bastard! Oh you bastard!’ Zoe shouted. At this moment, to her eyes, Horse was not Timothy Harold Glass alone, but every man on the face of the globe, including Gordon and Mr Grummet and the scholarly father who had carried her on his shoulders when she was little and later left her and her mother for a younger woman. She lunged at Horse, who leapt from the bed, tangled in a blanket, and seized his trousers and ran. A glass ashtray exploded on the wall beside his head. But Zoe did not follow him into the living-room. He dressed himself warily with an eye on the bedroom door. The sound of rending sobs came from beyond the wall. He tiptoed in to get his shoes and socks and jersey. Zoe lay face downward on the bed, almost naked, and weeping as if she were about to vomit. Loaded with guilt, Horse touched her gently on the shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Zoe,’ he said.
Zoe lifted the same mask of rage and sorrow, shiny with tears. ‘Get out! Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Oh you bastard! You filthy bastard!’
Retreating through the living-room Horse noticed that the disc of the radiogram was still spinning and thudding. He switched it off before he went.
The Pay-Off
Zoe Virtue was not an untruthful woman. But she was still a woman, and she had to find an interpretation of what had occurred between her and Horse which would allow her to retain her self-esteem and sanity. After a day and a half of cruel struggle she found this interpretation; and the conclusion she arrived at impelled her to obtain Fern’s address and write a letter to her. As a result, when Horse next visited Fern’s flat he did not receive a warm welcome.
‘Let’s go round to Tony’s,’ he suggested.
‘I do not intend to go to Tony’s or anywhere with you.’
‘Why? Just because I got drunk and burnt someone with a cigarette –’. ‘You’re really very stupid, Horse. People get to find out about things. Zoe
Virtue has written me a letter. Would you like to read it?’
Horse flushed scarlet. ‘Yes. All right,’ he said. Fern opened a textbook and took out a page of blue linen notepaper. She handed it to Horse to read. ‘A girl doesn’t want to get a letter like this about somebody she knows.’ The letter smelt faintly of soap, and the handwriting bold, though jagged.
‘Dear Fern,’ Zoe had written, ‘I think I may call you Fern because I am writing to you about somebody we both care for. As a woman you will understand why. I am worried about Timothy Glass. You were present at the party on Saturday, and I must thank you, my dear, for helping us to entertain Mr Grummet, who might otherwise have been difficult. As you know, Harold burnt me severely with a cigarette. I realised the poor boy was very intoxicated and blamed myself for letting it happen; and I felt dreadfully sorry that your other friend, coming to my rescue, felt obliged to strike him. On Sunday I got in touch with Timothy and invited him to lunch. Again I made a serious mistake. My husband was not at home, and Timothy attempted to assault me sexually. I managed to fend him off, but the whole matter weighs heavily on my conscience. I feel that Timothy needs psychiatric help. It is such a delicate matter that only someone who knows him really well could make the suggestion. I feel that you, with your medical training and your close friendship with Timothy, are the person to do it. I would do it myself but Timothy’s peculiarly aggressive attachment to me would, I fear, prevent my advice from having any positive effect.
‘Please excuse my frankness. I have only written this letter because I feel that poor Timothy can be helped and should be helped.’
She had signed the letter, ‘Your sincere friend, Zoe Virtue.’ ‘Well?’ said Fern.
‘I never tried to rape her.’
‘I find the whole thing disgusting,’ said Fern. ‘People don’t have to get involved in a mess like that. Not unless they want to.’
‘You did all right for yourself with Mr Grummet.’
‘I don’t see that there’s any comparison. She’s old enough to be your mother.’
‘Hell!’ shouted Horse. ‘Do you want it in writing? I didn’t rape the bitch. She more or less dragged me to bed with her.’
‘Don’t swear at me, Horse. It’s disgusting whatever way you look at it. It’s not just this thing anyway. I think you drink far, far too much. It’s beginning to affect your brain.’
‘OK. I may be nuts. But I love you.’
‘You’ve got a very peculiar way of showing it then. I’m not blaming you, Horse. I’m still fond of you in a way. But living with you would be the most horrible mess I could imagine. As a matter of fact I’ve made up my mind to marry Jock. We’ve arranged it for October. I’m sorry to tell you about it this way.’
‘Well, he’s got money.’
‘You’ve got no right to talk about it like that. He loves me, and he knows how to show it, and he doesn’t get into messes.’ Fern opened a drawer and removed, from among shells and beads and several certificates for expert horse-riding, the stone phallus Horse had given her. ‘You’d better take this.’
‘Thanks,’ said Horse. He put the phallus in his overcoat pocket. ‘Goodbye, Fern.’
‘Goodbye.’
As he passed over the Leith Stream bridge, on his way from Fern’s flat to the Bowling Green, Horse gazed speculatively at the water frothing over the weirs. He pulled the phallus from his pocket, looked at it, kissed it goodbye, and tossed it into the middle of a whirlpool. It sank immediately.
At the Bowling Green Horse had the pleasure of seeing John Grummet again. The great man was still drinking gin and water. He recognised Horse.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Phar Lap himself. I’m glad to meet you.’ He shook hands. ‘My girlfriend has just given me the bum’s rush,’ said Horse.
‘They all do. They all do. It leaves a space behind.’ ‘I’m not happy about it.’ Horse ordered a beer. ‘Nobody ever is.’
‘I thought you were back in Auckland.’
‘No. Gordon Virtue persuaded me to stay for a week. He’s jacked up some lectures for me to give down south.’
Horse was silent.
‘He tells me you tried to rape his wife.’
Horse gave his own account of the saga of Virtue Castle.
‘That sounds more like it,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘You can’t really blame her. That’s the way they bring them up. Honesty is a difficult virtue. You ought to leave that kind alone.’
‘You said it was Christ or the death goddess.’ ‘Did I? One doesn’t like to be quoted.’ ‘Where do you go if you don’t want either?’
‘Up country,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘Have you ever been in the Matukituki Valley?’
‘No.’
‘The entrance is called Hell’s Gate. But inside there is a series of river flats. A peaceful place.
‘That’s really all I know about it.’
‘You’ve been there?’
‘Yes. With some people who wanted to make a film. The film was no good. But I saw some cattle being driven across the river. A big herd, with the men standing by on their horses. The river water is very cold. One calf got separated from its mother. It was too young to swim, though it tried. It got to its feet several times, but the river water swept it away. Down among the boulders. The men couldn’t do anything about it. It floated when it was dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Horse slowly.
‘It is difficult to avoid being swept away. No one is old enough. One really needs a mother.’
‘I can’t find one,’ said Horse. ‘Except Tony perhaps.’
‘Tony?’
‘He’s a friend of mine. A queer.’
‘Ah, yes. Queers make good mothers. For a while.’
‘I prayed to the Blessed Virgin once.’
‘You’re lucky to be able to. Keep on doing it.’
‘God never seems to be quite real.’
‘One knows Him by His absence perhaps. I distrust piety. It leads to self- dislike. Do you know the story of the Turkish Beggar?’
‘No.’
‘It has often consoled me. This old beggar had been bludging off the inhabitants of a certain town in Turkey for a number of years. They got sick of him. So they loaded him on to a camel and took him out fifty miles into the desert. They put him down and they said to him, “Man, if you ever show your face within twenty miles of town again, you’ll be a shot duck.” And then they rode off on their camels and left him.
‘Well, this old bludger looked around him. There was nothing but thorn bushes and snakes and a few camel bones as far as the eye could see. And he thought, “There’s nobody to bludge on here.” And then he thought, “Who haven’t I bludged on yet?” And then he thought, “There’s only Allah left.” So he got down on his benders in the sand and raised his hands to heaven.
‘“Oh Lord,” he said, “I am a poor man. I have no money at all. Other men have money. They have many piastres. They have gold and silver in large wooden boxes. But I have nothing. O Lord, why is it so?
‘“Oh Lord, I am a poor man. Other men have women. They have big harems full of women, brown and white and black and yellow. I have no woman at all. Not even one little call-girl to keep me company. O Lord, why is it so?
‘“Oh Lord, I am a poor man. Other men have houses. They have roofs over their heads and they sleep in bed on sheets of good linen. I have no roof. I have only the bare ground to sleep on. O Lord, why is it so? Tell me why, O Lord!”
‘And when the old beggar had finished his prayer there was a great clap of thunder. And the sky opened from east to west. And Allah looked down
After telling the story of the Turkish beggar, for Horse’s instruction, Mr Grummet became abusive to the barman. And Horse, having drunk at the holy fountain, felt it was time to go. He spent the afternoon with Tony at the Shamrock but was not able to get a spark up. That night he had several unusual dreams.
In the first dream he was sitting on one end of a bed and Fern was sitting on the other. He tried to approach her and embrace her. But she changed into a demoness with a black face whose eyes spouted flame. The demoness said to him, ‘You must love me with a Christian love.’ This surprised Horse, since Fern had never been a Christian. He retreated to his own end of the bed, and she became Fern again. In the sequel to this dream he was leading Fern by a halter, in the shape of a small brown heifer, to hand her over to Mr Grummet, who was wearing the clothes of a farmer.
In the second dream he was standing in a high place, behind a concrete parapet, above a gully of rocks and thorns. He saw Zoe Virtue walking along this gully. She wore a dark dressing-gown from which a long silk tassel swung to the ground. As he watched, he could see that there were lions among the rocks, moving like shadows among the shadows. He shouted to Zoe to warn her. Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, and at the same moment Horse became aware that Gordon Virtue was standing beside him. The expression on Zoe’s face was one of harsh stony anger towards both him and Gordon. She began to walk on down the gully, away from them, and Horse could see that the lions were following her. One great beast had begun to play with the tassel of her gown. Horse knew that the lions would devour her soon. He felt intense grief and a longing to help her. But he knew in the dream that the gap between the parapet and the gully was too wide to be crossed.
In the third dream he and Peter were being hunted by the cops. The chase continued for hours through many backyards and alleys. Then the cops captured them and took them to a building which resembled a cellar or the cavernous crypt of a church. When Horse looked round at the circle of cops, he saw that they were extremely ugly men with tough stubbled faces, but with the confidence possessed by those who represent a crude justice. Peter sat on the floor of the crypt beside him, curled up, his eyes shut and his head resting on his raised knees, in a pre-natal posture that showed his habitual attitude to life.
Horse, however, raised his own head, and saw on the wall of the crypt three whitish transparent tiles side by side. The tiles to the left and the right were dull and blank, but the middle one had a light behind it. It kept flashing on and off, like an advertisement or an air beacon, illuminating in bold black letters the name of Jesus. Horse looked down at the floor
From this last dream Horse woke up sweating and bewildered. But the sound of Tony’s quiet breathing reassured him. He fell asleep again and had no dreams.
1958-1962 (280)
Mr Currie’s translations from Verlaine are delicate and well made. But it is relevant to wonder why he chose these poems and this poet. Verlaine’s monotonously sentimental hedonism is in itself one of the dreariest blind alleys of French literature. And Mr Currie has not chosen to translate the few jail poems that strike a different note. Verlaine’s lyrics survive by virtue of a certain melodic gift; but this is one quality which no translator can hope to get past the customs barrier of language. Caxton has not improved the situation by putting a little tame satyr on the front of the book. Mr Currie’s gifts are not in question. I hope he will turn them towards poets such as Rimbaud or Louis Aragon. I notice that Robert Lowell, in his recent translations from Rimbaud, used a mixture of his own (Lowell’s) and Rimbaud’s images to build up equivalent poems on the English side of the fence, with the result that his translations stand up as good poems in their own right; and I respectfully suggest that Mr Currie might follow this method with advantage.
Both Ruth Dallas and Paul Henderson have broken new ground. Perhaps our New Zealand critics and reviewers have tended to write off Ruth Dallas too readily as a purely pastoral and regional poet. The quietness and decorum of her verse concealed its potential energies. It seems, from the evidence of a verse sequence addressed to the dead Chinese poet Po Chu-I that Ruth Dallas has absorbed this poet’s work in translation and learnt a great deal from it. I do not know the precise philosophical school to which Po Chu-I belonged, and will leave it to the academic lads to inform me; but I take it that his themes are Taoist. At any rate, the seed from China has taken root and flourished in soil ready to receive it:
It was necessary that Ruth Dallas should find some such influences, if she were to write more than a few slight, perfectly made, in their own way monumental lyrics about time passing and the burden of mortality. I feel that the influence of Basil Dowling on its own might have hindered her, since that poet relies so strongly on neat and polished forms. But her development in this new book is more than formal. Her earlier poems seemed often curiously static – pebbles arranged in pattern, sampler-work – but the poems of this book skirt the Taoist void of creativity, not that of nullity:
These verses are plainly the true result of a deep natural contemplation. And the poems have changed – formally towards greater diversity of rhythms; in substance, towards an increased expression of concern for people. The poem to her sister, ‘Singing in the Backyard’, shows an acute and tender irony which is lacking in her earlier work. That self-discovery and discovery of the world which one most desires to find in a poet’s work is present abundantly in The Turning Wheel. And the cement of the work is irony.
The poems of Paul Henderson celebrate frequently a certain raw and meagre quality in New Zealand life – her protagonists seem often to move along wind-battered ridges of rock towards annihilation. The elegy on a drowned boy at the beginning of this new book achieves an admirable and difficult balance between nihilism and pity:
It is this poet’s discovery and handling of a sensual element in personal experience and in the landscape of this country which impresses me most. She has the potential powers which could produce poems comparable with the great last poems of Robin Hyde; without, one would hope, so crippling a cost. Where Ruth Dallas’s new book gave me a sense of clarity and enlargement – I am speaking of nuances, and therefore speak vaguely – Paul Henderson’s gave me a strong sense of material half revealed and half-buried. The poems are works of transition. I am reminded of the experience of the early gold-diggers in Otago who stripped the goldfields bare of soil, finding many nuggets on the clay bottom – yet other diggers came after them, with strong hoses, and broke through to the rock itself where the most valuable deposits lay. There is a powerful drive and impatience in Paul Henderson’s work:
This is not the poetry of resignation but the poetry of conflict. It may have the quality of a private code, but it is not to be set aside. It contains nodules of experience reached for and exposed before they have come to their full growth in the mind; and this may at times be the only way a poet can excavate towards the truth. The ‘we’ of the poem is intended, I think, to be twofold – the erotic ‘we’ and the communal ‘we’ of those caught between ignorance and mutual knowledge in the New Zealand arena. The ambiguity of much of Paul Henderson’s poetry comes from her effort to uncover the life process itself. There are some very fine love poems in this book – a great delicacy of feeling runs through them, though the final separateness of one self from another, felt as affliction, remains the dominant theme. She is forging a new idiom. The Halting Place is a book I have been driven to re-read many times and that, for me, is the most cogent test.
1962 (281)
Phyllis Garrard’s verse is, I think, the kind of thing most New Zealanders secretly consider poetry to be – an exercise in adult childishness, star-gazing and sentimental. The pity of it is that this writer has a real ballad gift. But her shearers speak with a bogus dialect, and Moana, her young Maori girl, is idealised out of recognition. I recommend her book to those readers who will naturally prefer it to Bruce Beaver’s wry honest verses –
The word ‘dingo’, with its precise nuances of feeling, lifts the whole stanza from the ordinary to the excellent. There are many such happy strokes in this book. At times, though, Mr Beaver muffles his poems with too much comment. The poems in which he had learnt a light handling of his themes from Louis MacNeice are much better than those which betray the heavy influence of T.S. Eliot. His range is wide, however – children, lovers, old age pensioners come to life in his pages – and if I were editing a present-day anthology of New Zealand verse, I would choose several from this book.
Nobody interested in the development of New Zealand verse or prose could afford not to read this year’s selection from Otago University. It happens to contain three new and surprising love poems by R.A.K. Mason, a story by Barry Crump far more hard-hitting than anything he has turned out for money, two good acrid poems by David Holmes, the best verse that Victory O’Leary has yet written, and an amazing story about a lycanthropic parson by Peter Burns. There are other raisins in the pudding, and the lay-out by Geoff Adams, is first-rate.
The Palmerston North periodical is more in the common run of university magazines. It contains, with some lively intelligent verse and stories by writers in the making, two very good poems by Stewart Slater and a delightful monoprint by Douglas Lunn.
1962 (282)
This is a very good first book of verse by a New Zealand poet. One requires of such a book, for satisfaction, that the poet should know what he is doing with form and that the book should reveal some energetic graph of experience, a more or less recognisable yet unencountered world. Mr Slater’s work fulfils
That is the first stanza of a clear-cut memorable poem called ‘Party’. It swings, of course, on the ambiguity of ‘Coppermouth’ – the colour of the girl’s lipstick, and recalling obliquely the name of a dangerous snake. Mr Slater possesses an active intellect; but he does not fall into the trap of being cleverer than the poem requires. One is aware of a world behind the poems – a world of substance with which the reader makes contact through the poet’s preoccupations – mountaineering, music, the physics laboratory, and varsity parties. I feel that the dull metallic lustre of Mr Slater’s love poetry is something quite new –
This is a complete poem, ‘Haiku’, the best haiku I have ever read, possibly the finest poem of the selection. Mr Slater has also succeeded in echoing Martial and translating Catullus. In his case one does not have to speak of promise. The real enigma is – how did such well-hammered poetry get made here at all?
1962 (283)
I remember, not long ago, sitting in a car and listening to the grief-laden story of a woman in her fifties. I must confess my heart went out to her. She was a devout Catholic. According to her account of it, when she was a girl an artistic career had been open to her; but this venue had closed when she became married.
Her married life had apparently been a veritable Way of the Cross. Her husband was a healthy robust extrovert, who brushed aside her sensitive qualms and wishes. From the earliest days they had not hit it off together. She had concentrated her affections and ambitions on her only daughter. This girl, she felt, would live the life she had been unable to lead – receive training
She could only attribute the calamity to diabolic influences working through the man concerned. He, she was convinced, was the serpent who had corrupted her child and laid waste a paradise in which mother and daughter were united by their devotion to God and to ballet-dancing. I could see her point of view; and there was no doubt that her anguish was real. But it so happened that I had also met her daughter. The daughter – a buxom, maternal lass whom anyone would associate with prams and napkins – had told me that she had a horror of the Faith.
To her it meant primarily the endless unhappiness and wrangling which she had witnessed between her father and her mother. In her early years she had taken her mother’s side; but as she grew older she had begun to see her father was not a monster but an ordinary bewildered man. She had decided to stake her cards on the chance of natural happiness, outside the Church, with the man of her choice.
It was no use my trying to tell the unfortunate mother that the Faith and ballet are two separate things; that her own inability to enjoy married life had engendered in her daughter a conviction that the practice of the Faith spelt permanent unhappiness on earth. It was too late; and it would have been impertinent anyway.
Nor could I persuade the daughter – though I did try a little – that the unhappiness of her parents did not invalidate the teaching of the Church. The damage was already done. Most people, lacking the logical powers of Saint Thomas Aquinas, make decisions on the evidence of their feelings. The man whom the daughter wished to marry was, incidentally, a sincere and humane agnostic.
It was still possible for the mother to regard herself as a person to whom God had sent three very great afflictions – an incompatible husband and a daughter who disregarded her dearest plans for her and married outside the Faith. Her real suffering could not be doubted. Yet I felt that the whole tragedy could have been avoided if the mother had somehow been able to accept the difficulties of her marriage wholeheartedly and minimise them.
One does not readily leave the place where love has been given and received. I am inclined to think that the majority of lapses from the Faith occur when people have only a sense of duty to oppose to temptation, not a sense that the Church is where human love flourishes best.
There are, as I see it, two kinds of suffering. They are shown to us in the traditional interpretation given to the action of Simon of Cyrene. Simon was first singled out from the crowd and given the Cross to bear – we may suppose
The second kind of suffering began when he realised whom he was carrying the Cross for. The burden, though it grew heavier step by step, became a holy gift. He would not have exchanged it for a sack full of diamonds. When his revolt left him the sense that the burden was unendurable left also. He could say, in effect, ‘This is what I was born to do.’ I believe that the first kind of suffering is not intended by God, though He permits it; whereas the second kind is His very lifeblood.
I think that we Catholics do not suffer less than others. We may indeed suffer more. But if our suffering is unwilling and neurotic, the world will judge the Church by it and decide that there is no joy to be found there; whereas, if our suffering is joyful (and best of all, hidden from sight) the world will be drawn to it as if by a magnet. One of the mystical writers describes a vision in which she saw the face of Our Lord in His Passion, and it was joyful.
1962 (284)
‘Just about every poem I’ve written seems to have sprung from pain or resentment over things being out of order . . .’.
Sitting there in the scattered yellow shadows of the coffee bar, James Keir Baxter, to many the oracle of New Zealand poetry, seemed to have a long association with pain. It was reflected in his suffering face, in his heavy eyes and shoulders, in his voice. As he talked he gave the impression of a man on parole.
‘My life is like a quilt – full of holes. But the holes don’t go into my poems.’ Where did the quilt begin? He was born in Dunedin ‘of Scottish – socialist – pacifist – puritan stock’ and, as he says in one poem ‘plunged early into the abyss of life where the tormentors move’.
Following a turbulent youth, he worked at many jobs on farms, in factories and in freezing works; later became a teacher, is now assistant editor of School Publications.
He and his wife Jacqueline, who writes short stories have a daughter of thirteen, Hilary, and a nine-year-old son, John.
Much of his experience from this varied working background ‘seemed to be useless or negative at the time, but it became useful later.’
Though he holds a B.A. degree, he considers he has learned more from ‘listening for many years to people in pubs’ than from books. Practically every pub at some stage has been this poet’s pub.
Hunching his shoulders more pronouncedly under the ageless gabardine
‘It is a defence mechanism against examining the atrocities of this century, the twentieth century smell of the execution yard. There are no heroes in our day.’ And more in this vein. Suddenly Baxter became conscious of the time. He had to collect his daughter from a ballet lesson. He must rush. The scattered yellow shadows of the coffee bar laid their tracery on the departing gabardine.
1962? (285)
A poem has substance and form. Poets are concerned with the substance most – you see, they hope to write again some time, they are looking forward, and they can borrow form or trim one up any day of the week, but substance is hard to come by. The icy brooms of cloud are sweeping the top of Mount Kaukau. Tomorrow I will go through five tunnels into that great ditch called Wellington City, whose own quiet inanity is much more terrible than any vial of plague an angel could empty on it; and I will swim there with other newts through office and coffee-bar, and watch other newts trying desperately and angrily to climb up high straw ladders; and I will light the gas fire in my hutch and work the typewriter like someone playing the banjo with his feet:
The academic critics study form. Like punters. That is because they make a living by it, in the universities; or gain kudos by it, in their hair-splitting reviews. I remember C.K. Stead about five years ago taking apart Alistair Campbell’s ‘Elegy’ in Landfall – he listed fourteen nouns, eighteen adjectives, and thirteen present particles, and groaned about the welter he himself had made, as if Campbell had been to blame for it. The point of Campbell’s poem lay in its extraordinary substance: the animistic lament of a Southland valley for the death of a mountaineer. It had enough form to make the substance plain; and that is all it needed. Form is only of primary importance in light parlour verse.
I see New Zealand verse afflicted with a disease of formalism. Waiting for the formalin bath of the academic anthologist. If you read Landfall, you will find that at least half the verse included there is anaemic in substance, intricate in form – wire and glass structures, light-weight, like the mobiles they hang up in a pub lounge. The substance depends on what the man knows, at the time of writing; the form depends on his skill in expressing it. Who wants to be told, in five well-wrought stanzas, that it’s a nice day, the poet had radishes for dinner, his wife has yellow hair, and he’s feeling a bit queasy? When you look at what’s behind it, you can find a gently sighing void. Yes, of course, Picasso can make a lively bit of sculpture by putting the handlebars of a bicycle on to a horse’s skull; but Picasso did that for fun; he also painted ‘Guernica’.
I find this lopsided emphasis on form throughout Curnow’s new Penguin anthology. If it becomes popular in the secondary schools (and of course it will be, being cheap) we will have a fresh generation of poets fitting together bits of wire and glass. It wasn’t really a revolution in form, though, when Curnow and Mason and Glover and Brasch and Fairburn first got under way. Mason used the old gas-bracket Housman had left behind him; Brasch picked up a bit from Rilke and a lot from Yeats; Glover used the Georgian forms, jazzing them up with a bit of conversation; Fairburn developed a loose, sometimes sloppy free verse from Eliot and some of the other Americans; it was only Curnow who experimented a lot with form, and after all (not being nasty) he did have the least to say; and his sonnets are generally as makeshift as Fairburn’s free verse.
No, the revolution was a revolution in substance. (Plenty of the deadbeats in the C.A. Marris school could turn a sonnet formally as well as Mason could.) The thing was that all these poets knew something; and they managed, against external and internal censorship, to get what they knew down on paper. Glover knew that life was tough in Pig Island, even for a Captain Cooker; Fairburn knew that some women can do surprising things; Mason caught the whiff of Grandfather’s corpse laid to rest in the earth closet; Brasch noticed that Rangitoto resembled Mum; and Curnow re-wrote the Primary School history-book.
I grant you that they needed form to put these things across. But it was their eyesight, not their skill in placing commas, which made them good poets.
Getting back to the Penguin anthology – Curnow makes it abundantly clear in his Introduction that only one kind of substance will pass muster with him: Kiwi stuff, bush broodings, seacoast broodings, mountain broodings, by poets who still think of London as the centre of the cultural universe. He even tries to twist Mason’s ruminations on the isolation of the human race in the stellar system into a poem about the second Fall: the fall of Grandad from an English country vicarage to a Canterbury sheep-run. I grant that this kind of substance can be found scattered through New Zealand poetry; but it’s not the only kind of substance. Take Louis Johnson’s explorings of the Don Juan situation; or Smithyman’s wry, tender reflections on married life; or Peter Bland’s Orpheus of the Jazz Age; or my own elegy for an Irish publican. Their substance is richer than almost anything you’ll find in the Penguin anthology; but they don’t fit Curnow’s box, so he doesn’t want them.
Poems are loopholes into human experience: symbolic microcosms of the world of the person who makes them. I can think of plenty of fine poems (the Spoon River Anthology, for example, by Edgar Lee Masters) in which the formal element is cut to the minimum, a mere hole ripped in a corrugated iron tank, but the substance of the poems is so real, so fertile, that you can read them a thousand times and still come back for more.
A training-college boy writes a bit of free verse; a female librarian writes a sonnet. They show it to you, and you say something about its form, God help your hypocrisy, and I mean my own – because the truth is too impolite – ‘Dear Jack, dear Sally, your poems are the product of the pressure of intolerably vacant, hide-bound lives. I don’t blame you much. Calvin had something to do with it; and his unconscious disciple, Peter Fraser. But if you can’t find a way out of it, get hold of some actual substance, you’ll never write a line that makes sense, and you’ll live and die wondering why.’
Those who think and write about poems primarily in terms of their form imply that there are tricks of the trade; and that anyone who learns these can learn to write. That is nonsense. A blind man cannot tell you what an ostrich looks like, not if he knows every word in the Braille dictionary; a man who has never experienced love cannot write a love poem. The present black frost in New Zealand letters can only be lifted (I think) by a few people (who must possess, I grant, a minimum capacity to write) getting off their suckers, forgetting the kudos game and the hair-splitting reviews and the echoing university morgues, and finding out and setting down what they actually know. And if they find that after thirty years’ intensive State education they don’t know anything at all, and decide to remedy the situation by getting a job as a chucker-out in a brothel – well, they’ll find it hard going, because
1962 (286)
Sir: I would like to congratulate your correspondent, A.W. McNamara, on his clear presentation of the view commonly held by Catholic theologians in regard to abortion. Like him I bow to the Church’s teaching on this matter; yet I feel he has left unstated a factor of enormous practical importance – the psychological state of a modern woman, married or unmarried, who has the misfortune to be pregnant. Let me set down some of the possibilities:
I do not want to give anyone the impression that I think our social and sexual values are sane ones. But I think your correspondent should recognise that a great many New Zealand women, finding themselves pregnant, would have to exercise heroic virtue in choosing not to have an abortion. From observation, I do not think women ever have abortions light-heartedly. The
1963 (287)
Sir: It seems to me that your reviewer, R.A. Copland, has made a very real blunder in his destructive review of Maurice Gee’s first novel, The Big Season. Mr Copland flagellates Mr Gee for a ‘sophisticated liberalism’ that ‘turns for its values to bone-headed delinquency’. I have read Mr Gee’s novel with great interest and enjoyment and I find no evidence whatever that he approves ignorance or crime. The point about Mr Gee’s burglar is that he is a very real, honest, sensitive, humane person in his dealings with others – his burgling is an obsession which he himself compares with booze or drugs. What Mr Gee exposes is the blindness of a New Zealand small-town community to the fact that they have a good man living among them. I don’t think he is suggesting that all burglars are good men, or that all footballers are bad ones. But the experience of maturing through which the adolescent hero passes as if through a furnace is (a) a recognition that the communal social judgment is erroneous, and (b) a recognition that the community and his own family regard him as a traitor for forming a different judgment from theirs and acting on it. This may not be the experience of every young New Zealander. It is certainly the experience of a great many young New Zealanders who are socially adventurous and who do not possess closed minds. I don’t think Mr Gee over-emphasises its importance. I don’t think it can be over-emphasised. It was the respectable family-centred German citizen who allowed the Nazi crime of genocide by just closing his eyes to it. In Mr Gee’s book the respectable New Zealand citizen closes his eyes to the sadism of policemen and prefers to watch a football match. Mr Gee makes a clear, passionate, yet essentially moderate criticism of the unconscious cruelty and hypocrisy of the conformist New Zealander.
The family of the adolescent hero tried to ‘buy’ him back to their own camp by offering him praise and social status. Has Mr Copland no knowledge that this is precisely what happens to any New Zealand artist who tries to develop
1963 (288)
Not all New Zealanders are directly acquainted with the world which Barry Crump describes – the limbo through which nomad workers move from job to job, generally without effective family ties. It is not the whole of New Zealand, but it certainly exists, and Crump is surely to be honoured for setting down some part of its everlasting chronicle.
His first book, A Good Keen Man, provided an idyll of tall tales about deer-stalking and job-getting for the stay-at-home Kiwi reader. This may have accounted in part for its astonishing popularity. But the point to recognise is that the basic material was drawn directly from the author’s experience. In his second book, Hang on a Minute, Mate, and his third book, One of Us, Crump has developed an assemblage of picaresque characters dominated by the central figure of Sam Cash. To some extent the material thins out, but the quality of Crump’s writing has been correspondingly sharpened.
After reading One of Us I realised that one cannot dismiss Crump as a raconteur who happens to have struck the big money. True, the story is well pruned of any element that might disturb the decorum of a middle-class reader – otherwise the sales of the book would have fallen with a thump and the elaborate humour of situation give an appearance of geniality. But I suspect that One of Us is the satire on New Zealand manners and morals which nobody else had written, except Sargeson in an occasional equally wry fable.
Where Sargeson would use a meat-skewer, Crump uses a club. He presents obliquely, by the medium of a humorous tale about three no-hopers in search of food and lodging without work, a picture of a country where men are obsessive ladder-climbers, women are domestic ogres, and only the nomads retain a certain negative power of choice along with an unjudging spirit of camaraderie. The difference between Sam Cash and his two companions – Ponto the scrounger and Toddy the man-in-a-burrow – lies in the fact that whereas they have not been able to afford a ticket to the social picnic, Sam has considered the price and found it too great. Crump’s books belong to the literature of masculine protest. I think that this is one central reason for their great popularity.
1963 (289)
American idealism and the mood of urban exhaustion which is also characteristically American tug two ways in Edmund Wilson’s private miscellany. I read Wilson (perhaps unwisely) as a guide to a still unsurveyed continent. One receives messages; one sees smoke-signals; but the subconscious life of the American people remains largely hidden. Edmund Wilson exposes the area where a regional and Puritan culture develops either to intellectual Marxism or hedonist art with a strong hankering for the flesh-pots of Europe. Fortunately he is a master of satire, unashamedly partisan, with several axes to grind. The whirring of the grindstone is particularly audible whenever he identifies the spoor of a Catholic.
In Doris Lessing’s play a man and a woman express their recriminations in a dual monologue, refereed by unhelpful friends. Mrs Lessing explored the same situation more expertly and more briefly in her remarkable novel, The Golden Notebook.
To go by the comments of recent English and American critics, Jack Kerouac’s stocks have fallen since he wrote On the Road, that masterpiece of the psychology of flight – flight from marriage, from settled occupation, and from what other people think of us. I must confess a prejudice in his favour. Lonesome Traveller is not his best book; but it still has the unique Kerouac flavour of unjarring self-absorption and Beat mysticism.
It is a tired book perhaps. The hero (in this case Kerouac himself ) works on shipboard and at firewatching in a forest reserve, and travels briefly to Europe – he has some reason to be tired. I find the sense of a pilgrimage without destination entirely moving and convincing. The Beat writer does not usually distinguish sharply between art and life, what a man does and what he is. Where the life grows thin the writing thins out also. Jack Kerouac’s effort to make sense of the gaps, to assert the value of meditation in a civilisation hysterically devoted to action and material function, seems to me both necessary and admirable; and he is at times a very good prose poet.
1963 (290)
I don’t see the world as a place where a man can rest. There is always some kind of battle going on. People talk about wartime and peacetime. I think the difference is less than they suppose. Many men found it a relief to go and fight in Korea, for example, to escape from a different kind of battle – the struggle to keep alive in a society devoted to the pursuit of money and status and gentility. I had this everlasting secret war in mind, a short while ago, when I wrote a poem called ‘The Soldier’:
I find that certain happenings illuminate the meaning of this battle. Up to a point one has to take sides. Roughly I feel that on one side you find the clerks and the cops. No doubt there are good clerks and good cops. But what I object to in them is their use of the blueprint and the rifle to express a point of view that they didn’t ever work out for themselves. A clerk or a cop is always a bought man. It was not an anarchist with a bomb, or a boy swinging a bike chain, but respectable clerks and highly efficient cops, who engineered and carried out the gigantic massacres of this century. I find it important to remember that.
On the other side of the fence are the beats, the people who value human beings for what they are – some loud, some quiet – the people who play it by ear, the people who want to belong to a tribe, not to a system, the people who look at the face, not at the book. And there’s an endless, hidden battle between them and the clerks and the cops. Because they value most what is just beginning, what has not yet occurred – call it love, call it maturity, call it, if you like the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I remember an occasion, a little over twenty years ago, when I decided to blow my brains out. The brains were there all right, inside my head, and the gun was there as well, a sawn-off ˑ22 I kept on a ledge above the door of the coal house. I think I got it from my cousin. I used it for shooting rabbits. Well, on this occasion I went into the coal house and took hold of the gun and loaded it and put it inside my mouth. I’d learnt from the story books that that was the best way to go about it. But the hard, cold metal resting on my tongue was a bit too real. And I thought it would upset my father and my mother a great deal if they found me with a hole in my head. And there
Of course a great many young people feel that way. Partly the discovery that life can be very painful, and partly self-dramatisation. Looking back, I can see that my feeling of hopelessness was not necessary. The education I’d been given, at home and at school, had fuddled my thinking to such a degree that I thought whatever was wrong with me must be entirely my own fault. And even a lot that was right with me – physical energy, adolescent curiosity – looked wrong when I saw it from other people’s points of view. Right at the beginning of the battle, I’d got trapped on the wrong side of the fence. To stay alive, I needed a point of view of my own, and I had to travel quite a distance in order to get one.
I had to find out who I was. That sounds peculiar. In a sense I already knew who I was – James Keir Baxter, born on the 29th of June, 1926, a boy who wrote poems in his upstairs bedroom and blushed all over in the company of women. From what people say, I believe I was a very good-mannered boy. But somewhere inside me there was a man, not yet grown up – a man groaning and swearing and singing in the dark – a man full of anger and love. I did not yet know him properly. I was conscious of this man inside me, my actual self, as a pressure, a hunger, and at times an agony. I had to find out who he was, or else remain deaf and blind and dumb.
Of course nobody who had the job of telling me what to do – parents, teachers, lecturers, parsons, official and unofficial cops – could tell me who I was. Usually they didn’t know who they were, or else they had forgotten. I had to find it out for myself. And this is more or less the way it happened:
For a pakeha New Zealander, growing up is a very painful and a very solitary business. I think it may be different for some Maoris. I was talking recently to a Maori man in his fifties or sixties. At a certain point in the conversation, he rested his hands on his knees and said – ‘I have one leg in Taranaki and another on the East Coast.’
I may have the places wrong, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter anyway. The point was that this old man identified himself with the soil of the country. As my wife explained to me later, the word ‘iwi’ means both tribe and bone. The old man was saying that he came from two tribes – but he was also saying that his bones and the bones of his ancestors were like a single sacred tree, and he, as their descendant, straddled the country. This old man was respected among his own people – nobody would ever be able to bundle him out of the way. It would take more than a few bulldozers. He had
When I have clear evidence that our bureaucrats have spent a year or so in the company of such men, not in order to instruct but in order to learn what a man is, I might begin to listen to those bureaucrats. And again I might not. The leopard can’t ever change its spots, or so they say.
I remember also a trip I made from Wellington to Lyttelton. Somehow or other I’d been given a bunk in the big cabin at the stern that houses thirty or forty people. And I was lying awake reading, feeling the movement of the boat. All round me there was the giggle and chatter of a squad of schoolboys going to some athletic function in the South Island. It was harmless chatter, the bubbling of a pot, or the conversation of a flock of birds in a tree at sundown. But the man in the bunk below me stuck his head out and grizzled up at me – ‘Listen! Just listen! I’d tan their backsides for them!’
‘That’s right, mate,’ I said.
‘They’re smoking,’ he said. ‘My word, I’d like to teach the young b—s a lesson.’
‘That’s right, mate,’ I said again. I’d just given the boy nearest to me a cigarillo, and he was making heavy weather of it. I knew from twenty years of lost battles that it was no good arguing with the red-faced Kiwi. He knew what was wrong with the world. The young b—s were poisoning his guts. The thing to do was to agree with him and wait for him to shut up.
After a time he did shut up, and I felt the need of somebody to talk to. I’d already noticed an old drunk who’d come in late from the ship’s bar. He was lying down and groaning to himself a couple of bunks along from me. So I climbed out and sat down cross-legged on the deck beside him with a big bottle of Coca-Cola. He sat up in his bunk. A gaunt, oldish man with a stubble.
It took a few minutes for him to lose his suspicion of me. He thought I was a do-gooder come to tell him that he ought to lay off the grog. He offered me a drink, and when I said I had to stay off the grog myself because it made me crook, he said there was nothing worse than a reformed grog-artist. But after a while he opened out.
He was travelling down from Rotoiti, the drunks’ island, to see if he could get a job at the freezing works at Invercargill. He’d fought in the ring, and his friends called him Hurricane Harry.
‘But I’m only a breeze now,’ he said.
He’d had a sailor’s ticket on the coastal boats, but handed it in, and got a ticket on the Wellington wharves instead. When the big dispute blew up in the Fifties, he lost his ticket. After that he spent a lot of time in the pubs.
‘They didn’t manage to buy you anyway,’ I said.
His face lit up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can sleep easy at night.’ And he explained
Our society won’t learn anything from men like the old Maori, or even from men like Harry. Probably he will end up in an Old Man’s Home. That is bad luck for our society.
Don’t imagine I’m talking about something that only concerns writers. The battle of which I speak includes everybody. Simply to keep on moving is not enough. One has to wear a gun; one has to avoid becoming, after twenty- five, a bundle of reflexes. Recently I shifted from an office job to a job where I have to use my hands. It was a difficult change, and I wrote a poem about it. The word ‘whins’ in the poem means ‘gorse-bushes’. And my father’s mother’s name was McColl:
It is important for me that my forefathers were clansmen in the Scottish Highlands. As the Maoris fought in this country, so they fought to preserve their tribes. They lost that war, but the habit of fighting remains. The battle nowadays is a battle to keep one’s own point of view – to preserve the salt in the porridge. For those who can’t see there is a battle, it is as useless to talk about it as it would be to tell a blind man the difference between green and purple. But if I did not know the difference between a bought man and an unbought man, I too would be blind, and I would never be able to write another poem – or think straight, which is more important.
1963 (291)
There seems an element of duress in bringing out two poets in one book – you have to buy one you may not like, to read one you do like. In this case I swallowed Ted Hughes for the sake of Thom Gunn, because Mr Gunn writes about people – soldiers, women, beatnik boys, himself – while Mr Hughes writes more about himself and animals. But both are most humane, accomplished poets. A razor-blade edge of style is apparent in the work of each, and they do not merely cut themselves with it. Mr Gunn is near to being a major poet. He understands so exactly the terrible world we live in, the world that bred us and the Nazis:
It is poetry where the pity is all implied and never leaks out to the surface. This particular poem is aptly called ‘Innocence’.
Alan Ross is a slighter and a drier poet. But his sketches of Africa are peculiarly relevant to present-day problems. The best are about men and women who ‘transgress’ the colour bar. One can see how well the modern
1963 (292)
Sir: I do not greatly sympathise with Norman Bilbrough’s blanket criticism of the quality of the material published in the Listener; though this may seem thankless when he has exempted some of my reviews from condemnation. In my own experience of editing a literary periodical, it struck me forcibly that the quality of a magazine depends on the material offering. I imagine this is largely so in the case of the Listener. Only in the case of editorials and the work of staff reporters can this periodical create its own material; otherwise it is dependent on broadcast scripts, stories, poems, reviews and the contributions of correspondents such as Mr Bilbrough. Therefore I feel it is unrealistic to expect anything but a varying standard of quality and interest.
On the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr Bilbrough’s view that a prevailing flatness in New Zealand life is in turn reflected by writers for the Listener and other periodicals. And if his own strictures were somewhat excessive, the comments of the correspondents who have so far disagreed with him have been very inaccurate.
Your correspondent D.F. Lorking takes Mr Bilbrough to task for stating that the Students’ Congress is characterised by drunken binges and sexual frustration. Is this so peculiar? Drink is a recognised palliative for young men who lead lives of enforced celibacy. Their sexual frustration no doubt does them credit (I tentatively include the young women among the frustrated) – our social norm of marriage at least eight years after puberty guarantees frustration. Mr Bilbrough has been moderate. He does not suggest that the students indulge in orgies; he only says they are frustrated. Congresses without drink have been tried, and the students did not like them. For many people, not alcoholics, drink is part of a holiday; and in learning to handle liquor people are inclined to get drunk. With no way of letting off steam, an intellectual seaside holiday in the company of lightly clothed members of the opposite sex could be very frustrating indeed. We are not all as strongly attached to higher things as D.F. Lorking would hope.
Your correspondent T.G. Aitken, on no evidence whatever, suggests that Mr Bilbrough is a poetic disciple of mine. I have no disciples that I know of, and I am sure Mr Bilbrough is more than capable of standing on his own feet. His poem – which I take, at its face value, to have been written about
Broadly, though, I feel that Mr Bilbrough has the advantage, which both of your other correspondents apparently lack, of a profound dissatisfaction with the norm of New Zealand life. That, I take it, is why he is able to write.
1963 (293)
These four books, attractively published and printed by the same firm, ratify one’s previous impression of the present high standard of craftsmanship in Australian poetry. The hot, noisy poems of ten or fifteen years ago, bursting at the seams with strained metaphors, striped with white clay and ash from aboriginal campfires, have disappeared for good, it seems. The doctrine of mateship too is out of date. Almost without exception, these carefully worked verses exhibit a life that endures whatever happens and expects no apocalyptic revelations. It is the subdued language of the Atom Age. Respecting this development, I still regret that the poets have learnt so rapidly from the critics who advise them to set their sights high – because the results are so impeccably moderate. Not one of them is guilty of overestimating his or her gifts.
Apart from two autumnal poems by David Campbell, the 1962 anthology is unremarkable. I will quote one of these poems in its entirety –
As with Campbell, there is a casual, austere authority in the poems of Robert D. Fitzgerald. They deal chiefly with problems of perseverance in the face of time, ageing and death. They are all muscle. Douglas Stewart, on the other hand, is still inclined to produce too many set pieces. The best poem in Rutherford is not the title poem (who cares now who first split the atom?) but one excellent ballad in the tradition of the Aussie tall story, called ‘The Man from Adaminaby’.
Judith Wright’s verses exhibit well the beauty and cruelty of birds, though they do not say enough to carry the symbolic weight she has tried here and
1963 (294)
Let’s keep our minds free of culture! Culture begins when people have some time to fill in, and look for something big and glossy to fill it in with. So they buy themselves a radiogram. And a radiogram without records is no good to them. So they get a couple of long-playing records of Dylan Thomas reading his own poems. And then they invite their friends over for a couple of hours of culture, and everyone sits around and says nothing for a couple of hours while the needle scratches and the voice booms on and the record-changer makes a clanking noise. It was this kind of thing that drove Thomas up the wall in America.
If poetry is related to existence, then a great deal of Thomas should be listened to when you’ve got a hangover. If you never have hangovers, it might be better to buy some records of John Donne. But why listen at all, if you’re not absolutely in the mood for it? That’s the curse at the verse readings in a varsity theatre, where people come along for a bit of culture, because they can’t find anything better to do. They don’t understand the poems, because the poems are about things they have never begun to understand in themselves.
Setting aside culture, there are several good reasons for listening to poetry. Because one’s wife or husband has gone away for an indefinite holiday, and one wants to get a bit of courage to go on living with. I’d recommend the old Scots ballads at such a time:
Or else you might want to listen because you’ve just committed a murder. Don’t tell me that’s impossible. We all commit murders from time to time, though the blood is not always visible. Then you can listen to the voice of Mary Hamilton, after she had killed her new-born child:
Myself, I listen to Thomas’s ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ for the big magic when things are falling apart:
Among other things, a good poem is a charm, a piece of magic, to be used for a purpose. When I was a younger man, Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’ was a charm used frequently for purposes of seduction by young men at mixed parties. There is always a judgment, though, on people who use charms for an ignoble purpose. They turn into ladder-climbing civil servants or university lecturers quarrelling over somebody else’s interpretation of the bad quarto of Romeo and Juliet; and their wives run away with people who own horses.
By a charm I mean, at the very least, a pattern of words that restores a dislocated contact between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind. It is anti-educational. It has nothing to do with culture. You have to know the poem by heart – it has to be part of your soul and brain and guts for the charm to be really effective.
I remember helping a young friend up a steep street in Dunedin. He was drunk of course. But the main trouble was that he was feeling the pinch of our loveless, ugly, mechanical society. And so he was bellowing loudly in the grip of the octopus. The charm I used on this occasion was the poem of Yeats called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
And so on, to the part of the poem where Yeats applies his rock-drill to the human heart itself:
The charm worked, of course, because it was part of his being and part of mine. Even more part of his being, because he was younger than me. A young man feels the pinch in a different way – ‘Sick with desire. And fastened to a dying animal’ – that is not an old man’s statement, but a young man’s statement. Old men don’t worry much about dying, I think – more about their bank balance or their grandchildren. It was the young man in the old Yeats who said it, the one who believed that life was, or could be, a matter of holiness and fertility.
I can remember other poems I have used as charms. A year or two back, when I was going through a wide flat desert, I used often to chant a poem by Lawrence Durrell:
I remember chanting it as I swam in the big baths at Ardmore Training- College. It was a great relief. The point was that Durrell had constructed
Well, I have given you a few notions about the use of poems as charms. Not to blur the intelligence, but to set it in order. Not to put the heart to sleep, but to give it courage to survive. This, I think, is the true relation of any good poem to the existence of the reader. But its relation to the man who writes it is something rather different.
Men are sleepwalkers by nature. It is part of the result of the Fall of Adam and Eve. We can live for years without knowing we are alive. We can imagine we are secure on a ledge three inches wide on the face of a 1,000 ft. precipice. I think a poet is concerned to record for himself mainly, but also for others, those rare moments when he is alive and awake.
It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better. Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him up by the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up.
Of course this applies, if it is true, just as much to a cabinetmaker as to a poet. I set aside the accountants and the bureaucrats, because they belong to Caesar, and have chosen to live inside the social machine. It is not really my business to blame or praise the social machine. But I do not think a man can become an accountant or a bureaucrat, handling money or words in the interests of Caesar, and remain a poet. I am a bureaucrat.
Writing, good writing, is a function of a man’s existence, like eating or working or praying or making love. If writing becomes something else, a function of money or prestige or education or culture, I think it begins to fossilise or fall apart – because the man who writes is beginning to fossilise or fall apart. The best poems are like threads of light or dark cloth pulled from the frayed sleeve of the coat which is the existence of one particular man.
To write well, one does not have to talk about writing at all, or think about it much, except at the moment when one is actually writing. A short while ago I met R.A.K. Mason in Dunedin. We did not talk about his verse or my verse. We talked about the faults of the New Zealand police force and the troubles of certain friends whom we cared for. And later on, with another man who is also a poet, we walked through the town without saying anything at all. That is the way it should be, I think.
Here is a poem that I wrote recently, which comes very close, I think, to my existence. It concerns to some extent my fellow-clansmen, the alcoholics who use the Bolton Street cemetery as a private bedroom. And the cypress
Thoughts in my Thirty-sixth Year
Which means, I suppose – ‘as I get older, I don’t get any younger’. It is a gloomy poem; and it cheered me up to write it. But it has nothing to do with money, or prestige, or education, or culture. And here is another poem, which I wrote to my wife:
They are as honest as I can make them. And I do not know whether these poems are very good, or not. But I know that they refer to important moments in my existence, moments of knowledge which do not occur often. They may be helpful as charms for other people, such as yourselves, who also go sleep-walking along a dangerous track between an unremembered birth and a death which has not yet happened to us.
1963 (295)
Not all these poems are deeply significant, not all of them are well made, but each undoubtedly carries the imprint, like a thumb-mark on clay, of one man’s knowledge of life. If one were looking for a parallel in New Zealand writing, the nearest would be the deeply melancholy idiosyncratic work of the early Mason. But comparisons are odious; and Mr Ireland has his own tune to play –
I don’t know another New Zealand poet who would be content to indicate the opposites of youth and age, love and violence, so quietly, so delicately, and sum the whole thing up in an image so familiar and yet so gripping.
The Introduction by Barry Crump had (one would have thought) only a chance in fifty of succeeding. Introductions by friends are even more odious than comparisons. But this once the chance has paid off. Barry Crump’s brief remarks do in fact help along the poet’s dialogue with his readers. Crump tells us that when Kevin Ireland was preparing this book of verse, he made paper boats out of the rejects and floated them down the Thames, one of Crump’s favourites being among them. If true, the story is magnificent. It is the kind of thing one wants to know.
One regrets the other verses at the bottom of the Thames; but very likely Mr Ireland will remember what was good in them. When he writes with images taken directly from nature, the poems have a great freshness and solidity, and a fluid rhythm. There are several fine love poems in this small
1963 (296)
To understand a philosophical argument one must make an intellectual effort; but men are not commonly convinced that an argument is true by intellectual means alone. One has to understand further why a given philosopher has explored a given problem, what tools his age gave him to use, and above all, what kind of universe he inhabited – for a Hindu mystic, a scholastic philosopher, and Norman Mailer, inhabit universes so different that exchange might appear impossible between them. There is no such thing as thought without somebody thinking it. Josef Pieper presents us with the somebodies – Boetius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas – as intelligible persons, and then shows us how they thought about God and the Creation. In this context Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, to take one example, looks much more convincing. A great deal of Josef Pieper’s book is difficult reading, but no paragraph of it is dust-laden.
The same cannot be said of Jean-Paul Sartre. A less imaginative essay cannot ever have been written about imagination – Coleridge must surely have spun like a turbine in his grave when it was published. Sartre is more scholastic than the scholastics, for he applies their intricate methods to the impoverished universe admitted by existential logic. Much of his argument seems to be a knocking down of straw men. He does prove, however, that images of things do not exist in the same way that things exist. One had perhaps taken this for granted.
1963 (297)
Vernon Watkins is a prolific poet. While this is no sin in itself, yet it does look at times as if he could write a well-made, sonorous, philosophic ode on any theme whatever – a school break-up, the flight of a bird, or a rainy day. I think he has accepted the Welsh bardic tradition and developed his own modern variation. This collection contains a great many poems addressed to or concerned with other poets – Charles Williams, T.S. Eliot, HÖlderlin, Heine, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning – but I feel that these eighteen-gun salutes to brothers in the sacred craft become eventually monotonous, whereas the shorter autobiographical pieces are the best of Watkins.
If Watkins is primarily a very careful craftsman, Gregory Corso is a poet who relies almost wholly on ad-libbing. Perhaps in reaction against the poems
I like this very much, for I often want penguin dust too. Corso’s poems are founded on an unplanned flight from the gregarious instinct.
Though there is one very good poem of social indignation in Susanne Knowle’s book, her rich sampler-work proves chiefly that English people find only England wherever they go.
1963 (298)
At times in the past I have made comments about New Zealand poetry – what kind of creature it is, where it came from, and what should be done about it. Looking back on those comments, I see many red herrings, an uneasy amalgam between the personal and the academic, and a possible disservice to the writers whose works I have discussed. Not that one should apologise. It takes brains to make a critic; a poet depends much more on luck and his own peculiar kind of honesty. Writing poetry is a vocation, like being a good barman or a racetrack driver. It has its public rewards and its liabilities. It’s very easy, for example, to slip into a delusion that one is a minor prophet. If I had a choice, I’d want to be Hosea, the man with the wife whom he always forgave when she’d been playing up with other men. But my delusion more often tells me that I’m Jonah, a long way down in the gullet of the whale.
There may still be something I’ve not yet said about New Zealand poetry – the wheat and the weeds whose roots are inextricably mingled together – after too many radio talks and Adult Education lectures; but you must remember I am not a lecturer by profession. There is a genuine difficulty. When I write poems I am serving some kind of difficult truth; when I talk about New Zealand poetry I am serving some kind of incubus dreamt up in a classroom. There are several myths about the origin of New Zealand poetry. There is probably a Curnow myth. I do not propose to argue with it, or add
There was once a boy who went out to seek his fortune. He went with his mother’s blessing, a bottle of water and a loaf of rye bread. And he had not gone far before he came to a forest, and in the middle of the forest was a cave. In this cave lived a giant. This giant possessed a magic table. When he cried out, ‘Turkey!’ a plucked and roasted turkey would appear on the table. When he cried out, ‘Mutton birds!’ straight away the table would provide mutton birds. He offered this magic food to the travellers who came inside his cave. For himself, he was more ascetic. Human flesh, the traditional food of giants, did him very well, boiled in a pot with a few potatoes and cabbages.
After midday the boy arrived at the mouth of the cave. It was large and gloomy, but he remembered his mother’s blessing, and went in fearlessly. The giant welcomed him. ‘Come in!’ he said. ‘You must be hungry. You’ve come to the right place. Sit down and I’ll get you a meal.’
The boy thanked the giant and sat down at the magic table. ‘Clear soup!’ cried the giant, and a bowl of soup with noodles in it stood smoking on the table. The boy needed no further invitation. Soon the bowl was empty. ‘You still look hungry,’ said the smiling giant. ‘What would you like now?’
‘Sheep’s heart wrapped in bacon,’ said the boy.
‘Sheep’s hearts!’ cried the giant, and there stood a dozen sheep’s hearts in a dish. And so the meal went on, till the boy had tasted every delicacy he could imagine. But his hunger was not satisfied; if anything, it had grown greater. And this wasn’t really strange, because the food that the magic table provided was made entirely of bubbles.
The boy rose from the table as the sun began to drop over the mountains to the west. ‘Have you had enough?’ asked the giant. ‘My word, you’re a small eater.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the boy. ‘I’m sure some people could live on your victuals quite easily. But I think I must have a peculiar kind of stomach. Your food does not satisfy me.’
The giant grew very angry. ‘You’re maladjusted!’ he shouted. ‘What’s good enough for other people should be good enough for you. I’ve never seen anybody more conceited or egocentric.’ Part of his anger came from disappointment. When the boy had become feeble, chewing endlessly at the food made of bubbles, the giant had intended to grab him and make a meal off him.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the boy. He remembered his mother’s advice to be polite always to people who were trying to be helpful. ‘Probably there’s something wrong with my stomach. But I still am hungry.’ He went outside the cave, leaving the giant, who was unable to live in sunlight, in an even worse temper, and sat down between the roots of a great tree. There he opened his knapsack, said grace, and ate bits of the rye bread his mother had given him, washing
This story, to my mind, expresses exactly the relation existing between anyone who wants to write truthfully and the apparatus of culture, money and education which our society has to offer. The rye bread and the water are the stuff that poems are made of; and the poet needs also the blessing of his mother, the earth, from whom he came and to whom he will go back.
I remember walking down a Wellington street with a young Maori who was bent double with the effort to reconcile the view of life he had obtained from his own tribe and that which our pakeha society held out to him. ‘I think it is the Temptation in the Wilderness,’ he said at last. Perhaps he was thinking of the technological assets of the modern world, the conversion of stones to bread; perhaps he was thinking of the temptation to personal power, the view of the cities of the world seen from the top of the mountain; but either way, he felt there was a price to be paid, the loss of some primitive order of love and justice in which the face of one’s neighbour was what mattered most. And the price seemed to him exorbitant, the loss of God’s light in his heart. Also, with the price not yet paid, he was able to make action songs for the group which he happened to be a leader of, as naturally as a duck skids down on the water.
Like most pakeha New Zealanders I had no access to Maori poetry at the time of my growing up, except for an occasional very bad translation. And I knew nothing of the spadework which was being done by Mason, Fairburn, Curnow, Glover or Brasch. On the other hand, my father, a New Zealand farmer of Scottish descent, had his head full of Burns, Byron, Blake, Shelley and Thomas Hood. With no secondary-school education to fuddle his brains, he tried to write in the manner of the poets he most admired. These lines of his, put into the mouths of the spirits present at the creation of the world, were very likely modelled on the choruses of ‘Prometheus Unbound’:
It was a good poem in the Romantic mode, and heady stuff as well for the ears of a six-year-old, especially when it came from the lips and the mind of a man whom it was never a penance to love. On its own, it could have inclined me to regard the making of poems as a kind of Delphic mystery, not to be connected with everyday happenings. But my father’s deepest attachment was to Burns. He did not imitate the bawdiness of Burns, though he liked it well enough, or his lyrical writing; instead he used the Burns six-line stanza as a mirror to the events of local society and politics. When a certain farmer boiled over at the action of the County Council in driving a road through the centre of his property, my father wrote a verse lament on this man’s behalf – ironically, because he himself, having built roads under contract in many places, thought this particular road needed to be put through – and he laid the completed poem on the County Clerk’s table:
Then comes the bellow of a ringed bull from the farmer whose land and possessions (as much a part of him as the hat on his head) are being split in two by local Government action:
Again, the poem is good in the satiric mode. Under this kind of stimulus it was not strange that I too should want to write. It was probably some sense of depression, or a failure to hold my end up in the battle to avoid getting beaten up or educated, that took me at the age of seven to a promontory not
This extraordinary message – that fishes resemble stars – is all I can remember of a long dithyrambic ode which dealt also with the fate of the souls and bodies of the drowned. A good deal later on, I made it into a formal poem:
But in some ways I still prefer the first version. It was less pretentious.
Again, like most New Zealanders, I remember adolescence as a very arid time. A time when sex and intellect are both active but have nothing to feed on but the sight of a girl’s legs in the bus and coloured diagrams of test-tubes in a science notebook. Like certain animals in cages, the adolescent begins to devour himself. Slowly the manuscript books were filled up with private junk. Occasionally the verse was good:
The emblems of adolescence, however, are the private demon, the spider on the wall, and rat-eaten books in old cupboards. I don’t object to this. I think
I remember Lehmann’s New Writing in Europe bursting like a bomb in the middle of my unlimited private desert. There was the noise of trumpets in those early poems of Auden and Day Lewis. Somewhere a battle was being fought. I think there may have been a subconscious link for me between the poets of the Left in England and the Australian balladists I had known by heart in childhood:
Lawson and Paterson had resembled somewhat the leaders of a Maori action song group, or the Viking bards who chanted while their companions straddled a bench and recapitulated the voyages of the dragon ships. They were often sentimental. Their stereotypes of Australian backblocks life did not greatly resemble the life of the New Zealand farmers, rabbiters and workers in road-building camps who carried the paper-backed books in their swags or kept them on a shelf. But they were the nearest thing to popular poetry this country has ever had. I felt that Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender, were giving voice to the social battles of our own time. And even though the vision of a new society proved to be a false sunrise, the sense of contemporaneous idiom remained with me. The poems of Dylan Thomas are a different kettle of fish. They became part of my mind, and still are.
What about the other New Zealand poets? The truth is I did not know they existed. Some time in 1944 I took a book of verse to the Caxton Press in Christchurch and they agreed to publish it. I had read a few of the rhymesters in C.A. Marris’s selections of so-called Best Poems, and saw that they were building bird-cages with no birds inside. The idea of any real cliques existing among New Zealand poets is nonsense. Certainly friendships do occur, but each poet that I have known has gone through his formative years in the profoundest solitude. Somebody told me in 1944 that I should write to Fairburn, and I must have done so because that amiable and immensely tolerant man sent me good epigrams in return for my own bad ones and gave me excellent advice (which I did not take) on the conduct of my sex life. I must have read him first in 1945. The characteristically warm sexual tone of his poems was like a tonic. It was Fairburn who broke the sex taboos, in a
I think Fairburn’s handful of love poems could hardly be surpassed; a great treasure, so very untypical of this country. I have often felt a resemblance between his work and that of the Australian poet, A.D. Hope. Both are essentially solar poets, with frankness in their handling of sexual themes, using the bludgeon rather than the small knife, and capable of giving intellectual courage to others.
I met Brasch in Dunedin when he was just beginning to edit Landfall. There was some divergence of opinion. Brasch was a kind man. But he believed in culture more than I did. I then came to Christchurch and got acquainted with Glover and Curnow. It was good to be able to converse with people who were writing poems from the rock bottom. I saw most of Glover, and cannot remember discussing verse with him much; but I think I learnt from him the way in which various problems could be tackled, seeing the contemplative process at work in him. I had never met a man who was more aware of his own destitution:
Later I was able to learn a great deal from another New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson. In Johnson’s case, it was the sense of being in the lion’s den which he could give shape to:
I was able to learn something from this; again, a certain injection of intellectual courage at the right moment.
Does all this add up to much? I don’t know. But to strike a lighter note, I will give you a description of an imaginary cultural gathering, in a South Island town, where a young man named Horse comes under the influence of an imaginary New Zealand poet called Mr Grummet. Horse is having difficulty with his girlfriend Fern, who has begun to prefer another man. The cultural factor in the equation is represented by Zoe Virtue, the wife of the varsity librarian . . .
[‘Bulls and Cows’, an extract from Horse, followed. (See No. 280.) Because it is included in the full text of the novel it is not included at this point.]
I will leave it to your discretion to work out what relation the adventures of Horse have to the growth and continuance of New Zealand poetry – saying only that, to my mind, Zoe represents culture and education, while Fern is the goddess in charge of the natural paradise. You have been very patient with me.
So far, in this talk, I have made my own kind of clearing in the scrub.
In my next talk, ironically entitled ‘Poetry and Education’, I will have the pleasure of quoting a good deal of other people’s verse. If you wanted a conducted guidebook tour of New Zealand poetry, or even a careful point-by- point evaluation of the poems that have been written, you should have picked on another man – preferably one who does not regard whatever work he has done on behalf of education as a kind of apprenticeship to the undertaker. Through the labours of Mr Curnow and Messrs Chapman and Bennett anthologies already exist which put some, though not all, of our established poets on display. One notable exception is Charles Doyle:
I am quoting from his poem ‘Winter Beach’ which expresses so exactly the profound negative force of this age of destitution. I cannot imagine why the anthologists did not take the trouble to find it. If I were editing an anthology (which, thank God, I have no intention of doing) I would include also a good handful of poems by Fleur Adcock. This magnificent sonnet is called ‘Before Sleep’; it comes from a longer sequence called ‘Night-Piece’:
It must have required not only talent but also great intellectual courage for a New Zealand woman to write this poem. I believe that our poets write well in spite of, not because of, their social conditioning; and this is particularly true for a woman poet. There are, of course, external factors – I remember one woman novelist telling me, having written one vigorous novel, that she had decided to write no more – the buzzing of the grape-vine among the women she knew, and the obscene expectations of her male acquaintances were too unnerving. But I think the most difficult factors are internal. Most New Zealand women have had enough experience of life to give them the material for any number of poems or stories. It is another thing, though, to set down on paper the crises of lovemaking or childbearing or the death of relatives. A deep negative tradition of moralising, whimsy and camouflage is likely to take charge at this point and the woman who goes against it will feel herself to be in a position of extreme vulnerability and solitude. What strikes me most, though, in Fleur Adcock’s poem is the way in which the images of public calamity – refugee children, men blinded, women whose sex has been damaged – the habitual atrocities of our time – enter the closed world of the love poem so easily and so exactly. It is as if, touching her private bedrock, the poet finds it is alive with the communications of all who suffer everywhere. It is worth the struggle to break the negative conditioning.
Perhaps there is no other choice. As I have suggested, this is not only the Atom Age; it is also the Age of Destitution. The experience of monotony within the social pyramid; the gigantic public atrocities of genocide, mass bombing, and so on, in which we are all implicitly involved; the anarchy that occurs when the social forms are all but entirely divorced from the actual needs of adolescent or adult people – these wounds like craters in the body of humanity lead honest writers to a separateness, a habit of not trusting the ways of looking at life that have allowed these things to happen. I see
In spite of the insularity of New Zealand – a geographical and cultural accident which some of our critics have stressed far too much – our poets have had certain advantages. One is the absence of any clear-cut critical doctrine formulated in the universities. In America the poets labour under a vast load of academic criticism, and it has made them fidgety and sapped their confidence – I think, for example, of Karl Shapiro, who wrote some good love poems and satires and then camouflaged himself as an academic pundit. We have not had so much of that business here. The other advantage is a positive one – the existence, here and there, of an active Bohemia.
Bohemia is frequently the only situation where a modern writer can acquire the outlook and habits of a tribesman. The values of our Bohemia, as I recall them, were something like this:
An insistence on the value of conversation, as a way of sorting out one’s problems and helping others to sort out theirs;
An insistence on the relative unimportance of regular work and money- making. A man with his eye on the pound note might not notice that his neighbour needed him;
An insistence on an appreciation of the value of sexual experience. On all accounts this is the main point where Bohemia clashes with the established order. But the emphasis is not laid on cold promiscuity, but on growth, colour, vitality, and very likely, subconsciously, fertility as well. The slogan is ‘I may be wrong, but I’ll be right some day’;
Sympathy and understanding towards those whom the established order tends to reject: the alcoholic, the homosexual, and so on. The notion that no one is really so very good or so very bad;
A tendency towards the periodic explosion, get-together, communal orgy;
An appreciation of the savour, quality, colour, of the New Zealand landscape and seascape, and of works of art that reflect this;
A strong pro-Maori bias;
A Leftism not based so much on Marxist doctrine as on a more flexible and primitive feeling that the Government and its agents had too much say in people’s lives, and that the working man had salt in him . . .
Bohemia has its obvious disadvantages. It does not, for example, generally lead to a stable family life. Perhaps Bohemia is based on a flight from the inescapable – from the death each person must undergo. But it is an excellent situation for a young writer who wants to know people, find his or her feet, develop his or her own point of view. And Bohemians make good friends. I know this myself. Whenever I have been flattened, blinded or bewildered by personal problems, I found that the only people who could provide an atmosphere for recovery and understanding were Bohemians. When they shovel the clods over me, I would like them to cut these words on the bit of marble – He had good friends.
The fruit of poetry is in the intellect; but its roots are always in the obscure soil of personal relationships. If there are no relationships, how can the tree grow? I am not suggesting that I ever found Bohemia a wholly satisfactory condition; it depends a lot on one’s natural vitality, which becomes less as one grows older; and Bohemia does not count the cost of any expenditure, physical or spiritual. Here are some lines I wrote on the subject to an old friend in Auckland:
No doubt one has to live by one’s responsibilities, at times without any vision at all, like the blind camel turning the water wheel, who cannot even stoop and drink. But without visions, no poems can be written; and I would regret it if there were none. One fights not for justice, but to retain a little hearing and eyesight among the picture-boxes and noise-boxes which are sold
Beyond the island at Waimarama there is a river that rises from the bottom of the sea. It rises with such pressure that it forms a mound of fresh water on the surface of the sea. It is a tree of water rising from the sea bottom. It is more primitive than Arethusa, the Greek fountain who plunged under the waves to escape or meet her lover – I forget which. It is beyond the reach of the Tourist and Publicity Department which kills every blade of grass on which it focuses its lenses. I think of that river sometimes when I am falling asleep. While it goes on rising it will be possible to write poems in this country.
1963 (299)
Today I am talking about poetry and education. I will begin with the sad case of Matthew Arnold, who became a school inspector and ceased to be a poet. Matthew’s father, Thomas Arnold, was the man who turned Rugby into a high-minded school. Though he had a great personal love for the Gospel of St John, Thomas Arnold did not believe that the Christian dispensation extended to schoolboys. Their natures were too brutish, too inclined to evil. They had to be ruled by the rod and the Mosaic Law, like the old tribes of the Jews. All this is set down in the sermons of Dr Arnold. It must have been a source of grief to him when Matthew became a poet, losing en route his evangelical faith. Matthew remembered his father with tenderness and grief, mingled with deep admiration:
A curious picture of Dr Arnold giving stiff lectures to the blessed spirits. To keep his talents occupied, some of them would have to be capable of doubtful
It is an extraordinary picture of a father-son relationship. I suggest that the symbols of Matthew Arnold’s poetry indicate that his individuality was wounded by the authority, educational, parental and ecclesiastical, embodied in his formidable father. What happens when Sohrab, the inner self, the man capable of natural contemplation, the poet, dies? I think he becomes a ghost and writes long essays about literature and dogma, trying to prove that poetry has a moral task. The poems, however, reveal a much more fundamental conflict, between the energies which the Victorian moral order could not utilise or render fruitful, and that massive ordering authority itself. In ‘Empedocles on Etna’ the philosopher meditates endlessly, like a wound- up clock, on the absence of natural joy in the world, before plunging into the crater of the volcano – a dramatic symbolic return to the womb of the earth mother – and meanwhile Callicles the shepherd-boy sings below about the torture and imprisonment of Typho the rebel Titan:
The groans of the rebel Titan are heard on Mount Olympus and the reaction of Zeus is a most enlightening one:
Is this Dr Arnold dining at a high table with his prefects, while the rebel meditates on his sins elsewhere? I think it could be. It is certainly a vivid picture of power and complacency. The shepherd-boy – that is, Arnold’s intuitive faculty, which has not yet lost the key to the natural paradise – presents the situation clearly in images. But Empedocles – Arnold’s highly developed academic faculty of reason – misinterprets the evidence. He concludes that the images indicate only that cunning people triumph over the brave and impetuous ones, and locks the conflict out of sight with the remark that the noises of the mountain are only natural phenomena – a familiar trick of the abstract mind. So Empedocles is left in despair.
I have spoken at length about Matthew Arnold because his life and work illustrate exactly a certain kind of conflict between the creative powers in the depths of the human mind and the formal educative process by which the individual is conditioned to think and act socially. That’s what one would say in the problem-dodging language of the Department of Education. A statue of Matthew Arnold, with the sad eye and the air of a greyhound that has lost the scent, should stand in the central offices of every Department of Education. But let us consider broadly what this conflict implies for New Zealand poets.
From an abstract point of view, there seems to be no reason why New Zealand poets in the making should not benefit from their time in our schools, or why the work of established local poets should not be used as material – shades of the lumberyard! – in our classrooms. In practice both
A New Zealand child will generally come to school with its inner mind loaded with images purloined from the natural paradise in which it has begun to grow up – the first cigarette tasted in the top branches of a macrocarpa tree, the mud-eels hooked or gaffed from the creek below the house, the limestone cave where somebody reckons the Maoris used to bury their dead, the girls undressing in the bathing-sheds, seen through a crack in the wall – I am speaking of a country child, but even a town child will no doubt have something of the kind. These experiences, relatively unimportant from the point of view of the educator, are the seeds of what may later enable a person to write or appreciate a poem. When I speak of ‘the natural paradise’ I am not talking theologically. A sense of absolute value in what is happening; a sense of being in relation to other people and to things; a sense of endless possibilities of fruitfulness; and above all, the habit of natural contemplation, of letting the mind rest upon, draw nourishment from, the images of nature perceived as an organic whole – these things constitute, to my mind, a paradise, as far as such a condition is possible after the Fall of Man. Our poets continually return to this treasurehouse of images. Here, for example, is one poem by Pat Wilson – ‘The Anchorage’:
This lucid, charming poem would not conflict with the canons of taste that prevail in our classrooms. It could be ‘taken’ with a primary or secondary class quite easily. But the habit of contemplation, the view of the world it
A bit grim, eh? And what has it got to do with poetry and education? The point is, I think, that there are quite a few Miss Glubbs in this country – God help them and us! – and if they are teaching poetry it will bear the impression of their personalities. I would prefer to have no poetry taught. Let the books be there in the schools – plenty of Negro blues and Australian ballads, and as little as possible of Wordsworth or T.S. Eliot – and if the kids want it, they can read it and even possibly recite it. Often they are inclined to pick up one or two things that suit them and leave the rest.
Poems that refer directly to the natural paradise can generally be set before children without worry to the teachers. No child – they think – could be bewildered or corrupted by a poem about trees. Yet certain difficulties remain.
I remember something that happened when I was about thirteen. At that time I was a pupil at a North Island boarding school. The headmaster was a vigorous red-headed man, given to fits of violent temper, and in his own way deeply religious. I am indebted to him for an early knowledge of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story about the devil in the bottle – he used to read it aloud to us in the evenings. So if what I tell you shows him up in an unfortunate light – well, he was a man who happened to have wandered into
It happened one night that the headmaster’s son suggested to myself and another boy that we should get out of bed and go down the road in our dressing-gowns to a place where a bulldozer had been working. It was a clear, moonlit night. The two of us crept out of the school grounds and went to this place, where there were great mounds and gullies of sand. We played in the sandhills, climbing up them and sliding down again. I remember a sense of mystery and exhilaration – the unfamiliar lights and shadows that the moon created – a sense of unlimited space in the blowing of the night wind – something quite different from the daily life of the school, where it seemed often that you had your head inside an old paper bag.
When we came up the road again, we were met by a procession of all the school staff with torches. It was quite an unnerving sight. There were long interviews and questions galore. There were threats of expulsion. The point was that the headmaster thought I had been practising sodomy – whereas in fact I had been renewing my acquaintance with the natural paradise. Eventually a verdict of Not Proven was reached, and I was placed under probation till I left school at the end of that year.
The headmaster’s mistake was a natural one. After all, he was a pedagogue – an agent of the community whose job it was to see that children became socially adjusted – and from a pedagogue’s point of view, sodomy and natural contemplation are very much alike – subversive activities with a strong flavour of personal enjoyment. It is generally impossible to explain the difference to somebody who doesn’t already know it.
The headmaster’s religious background was no help to him. Matthew Arnold has some interesting comments to offer on this point:
When Arnold wrote these lines, he was convalescing from a bad fit of the blues – brought on no doubt by his labours in the field of education – as a guest in a Carthusian monastery. A very good place to find some peace and quiet, among those who practise supernatural contemplation – but the conscience of a pedagogue, implanted by his early training, told Arnold that any such retreat was vaguely immoral and smelt of the tomb.
I must confess to grave doubts about the high white star of Truth. What kind of truth was it? It did not get rid of the whipping-block at Rugby School. It could hardly have been Christian, because Dr Arnold did not believe a boy’s mind could grasp the niceties of the Christian revelation. Anybody who is engaged in staring at a high white star is less likely to notice that somebody else is stealing his purse or putting his personality in a strait-jacket. I suspect that the star was the hypnotic silver ball of Honour – or else, the Team Spirit – that English pedagogues have been accustomed to dangle before their charges. One does not question what is being honoured, or whether the Spirit may not be a shabby poltergeist. It is certainly a Spirit prone to generalities and boredom. I would prefer not to be haunted by it. I think my unfortunate headmaster was in its grip.
There is a Hindu story which may help to clarify some of the problems of personal freedom and social authority which I’ve been discussing. There was once a female tiger who gave birth to her cub while she was chasing a flock of sheep. Frightened away by the shepherds, she left the cub behind her, and it was adopted by an old ewe and raised as a lamb. The Tiger-Sheep thought he really was a sheep. He learnt to baa and eat grass, to obey the laws of the flock, and to run to shelter if any tiger was seen in the neighbourhood.
Now there was an old tiger who lived in the jungle near the village. And he got to hear about the Tiger-Sheep, and it upset him terribly. He chose a time when the Tiger-Sheep was grazing near the jungle, and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to a waterhole. The Tiger-Sheep was naturally terrified. He expected to be devoured any minute. But the old tiger said, ‘Look! Look into the water and tell me what you see there.’
The Tiger-Sheep gazed into the pool, and saw a fierce young tiger looking back at him. ‘It’s bad magic,’ he baa-ed.
‘It’s not magic at all,’ said the old tiger. ‘It’s your own face. Look now’ – and he brought his head alongside that of the Tiger-Sheep, and the Tiger- Sheep saw two tigers looking at him from the pool.
Gradually he became convinced that what the old tiger had told him was true. He ceased to baa and he began to eat meat instead of grass, though out of respect for the flock that had reared him, he did his hunting on the other side of the mountain. Among the flock, he was remembered as the Sheep Who Went Wrong, and held up to the young lambs as an example of what not to do. He was not particularly happy, but at least he knew who he was. Often, before, his claws and teeth and whiskers had alarmed him, and made him think he was a monster. Later on, he severely mauled the old tiger in a fight, and took over his section of the jungle.
Sheep ruminate. Tigers contemplate. Don’t get me wrong. I think every man is a tiger dressed up as a sheep. Man is made for self-knowledge, for spiritual deserts, for wrestling with the problems of the inner life, as the tiger is born to eat meat. But the pedagogues are accustomed to treat those whom
The crux of the matter is not any given experience, but the understanding of it. It is an error not only of Bohemians, but of young people everywhere, to suppose that a lot of things have to happen to you before you can write. Generally more than enough has happened already – it is the understanding which lags behind. I think our schools hinder the development of that understanding. They could hardly assist it to grow; but they need not hinder it as much as they do. There is a touch of arrogance in the pedagogue’s assumption that he or she knows what is good for another creature. Perhaps some teachers are not pedagogues – the farmers and fishermen and rouseabouts who have lost their way and stumbled into the profession by accident, and wonder why they don’t like it, and are a cause of great joy to many children who are looking for a kindly father. I remember one old man, a headmaster, whose wife had died. He used to sit in his office and let the children climb over his knees which resembled the roots of a tree. He paid no attention to his staff, who were quite able to keep up their feuds without his intervention. And I remember a Maori lad, a heavy drinker – I shared a bottle of gin with him once under a park bench – who used to take his entire sole-charge school on to the reef on fine days and spend the time fishing with them. But these were exceptional men, jewels in the mud; and women who do the same are even more exceptional.
My quarrel with our schools, and equally our universities, is not simply because they exterminate poets. That would be a narrow reason, though understandable, like that of the craftsmen who objected when machines were brought in to do the work faster. But there is an older battle, which has been going on a long time, between people with a deeply-rooted, regional, primitive cast of mind – peasants and tribesmen, for example – and the rootless, abstract, cosmopolitan way of thinking belonging to the politicians and pedagogues and businessmen who govern the modern world. The battle is always lost at the political or military level. It was lost at Parihaka when the Maori elders were arrested and carted off to jail; it was lost at Culloden when Cumberland piled up the bodies of the wounded clansmen and used them as targets for his cannon; it was lost in America when the Indians were fenced in on their reservations, or when the Northern troops burned the plantations and brought another kind of slavery to the Negroes. Allen Tate expresses the feeling of it in his poem, ‘To the Lacedemonians’, where an old Confederate soldier meditates at a reunion of veterans:
I do not think Tate is suggesting, through the mouth of the Confederate veteran, that the Yankees are bad men and the Confederates good – only that the sense of some sacred tribal identity has been destroyed, and with it the sight that is more than eyesight, the natural contemplate power.
Yevtushenko, the best of the modern Russian poets, has also described this death-in-life as it shows itself in Soviet society; not because the society is Marxist, but because the pedagogues and bureaucrats are in control:
Yet one can find men who have avoided this kind of death. I remember a trip I made on board a fishing-trawler, in connection with some work I was doing for the Department of Education. The first day at sea, after a night of violent sea-sickness, I entered the wheelhouse – and pointing to an instrument on the wall, I said to the captain – ‘What is that for?’
‘It’s for measuring the depth of a woman’s private parts,’ he said. Not in those exact words. Decoded, I think the captain’s message would run like this:
I am a piece of red earth from Stornoway in the Isle of Lewis, whom the Lord God put breath into for His own purposes. I could speak no English when I came to school, and my schoolteacher thrashed me if I spoke a word of Gaelic, because he was a Sassenach, an intellectual monkey made out of wood and wire. My schooling left me with a stammer, but my subconscious mind still speaks the dialect of the tribe. Never try to treat me or my boat as if we were an It. You won’t find out how I know where the fish are when no other captain can find them; I don’t know myself how I know, and that’s why I am the best captain on the coast. With this boat, which is part of my own body, I go into the private parts of the sea, the death goddess, whom I am in love with. In the end she will kill me. That is what it is to be a man. If you don’t understand me, go back to your books.
I think I got the captain’s message. As a result, I was able to write a poem to my wife, in which I compared myself to a fishing-boat and her to the sea:
If the captain had been a man whom education had taken hold of he could not have spoken to me as he did. He would have said – ‘This is an echo
The educated sense of decorum may prevent a reader from understanding a poem. Here, for example, is one by an Australian woman poet. It is called ‘Prayer to Hekate’:
I can imagine a secondary-school teacher, or even a university lecturer, discussing this poem with a class, and missing the bus completely through not realising that it celebrates an abortion. Not that abortions are remarkable. They are the standard modern solution to late marriage and the housing problem. But this poet is aware than an apology is required to some sacred power of fertility which has been violated. The aborted child and the love relationship itself are closely associated. The crescent moon (the child curved in the foetal position) had not yet become an eye – an eye that could see things, or the capital ‘I’ of identity. It is a sad poem and a very good one. The clues are plain enough; but an educated sense of decorum might blind the reader. And then one would have the complaint that modern poetry is too obscure. It would be less obscure to a Maori or an ancient Greek. One has to get de-educated to understand any poem well.
The fires of tribulation through which the modern world is passing have stripped away a great deal of the rational optimism and the belief in inevitable progress which our fathers possessed. Technological development may be as much a spiritual burden as a material asset. The exploration of space hurls one’s mind against the void.
I think I can detect in the work of many younger poets the return of a mediaeval conception of human nature. Here are the first and last [stanzas] of a poem by Louis Johnson, entitled ‘Bread and a Pension’:
Johnson is no doubt describing the view of an ordinary Belsen guard; but the implication is that a great number of men would act and think the
(Challis has another poem called ‘The Asbestos-Suited Man in Hell’)
This is the language of the modern age, gaunt, precise, conversational. The experience of the void that remains when the earth is no longer sacred, and each man stands on his own two feet, at the heart of a sterile intellectual universe, is perhaps the one genuine benefit that education gives a poet. If the weight of this experience can be carried, without idealist subterfuge, it has its own religious quality. The void can be the place where man dies or the place where he waits to be born. I think that something like this is expressed in a poem by Peter Bland, with which I will conclude this rambling and prejudiced talk:
These are the songs of experience; it may not be possible for many of us to write songs of innocence. Unconsciously, poets both here and overseas, try to enter and write from the situation of destitution, where one is not taken in by the slogans, the money, or the intellectual maps that leave out precisely this point at which creation becomes possible. This is not mere primitivism, a retreat from a world which does not understand the poet. It is an attempt to understand a world which does not understand itself.
And here is a small poem of my own as an epilogue:
1963 (300)
[The interview began with a reading by JKB of his poem ‘The Advantages of Not Being Educated’. Then the interviewer gave a brief introduction.]
INT. James K. Baxter wrote that poem, ‘The Advantages of Not Being Educated’ – perhaps a rather strange choice for a man who’s a trained teacher. But some time ago he forsook the classroom for a postal run. James Baxter is known as ‘our postie poet’, a less demanding occupation that leaves him much more time to write. He says he’s never had enough time to write and for a man of his energy and imagination he probably never will. But he’s been writing a long time now, long enough to reminisce about his early work.
JKB. It seemed to me that I was in a bit of a straitjacket and trying to get out of it. It’s idealistic and in the higher registers, you know, as in music, up among the high notes, that kind of thing. I think that’s quite natural because I started young. I think I was writing good stuff in the middle teens. It’s not so common, but I had started very young.
INT. How young?
JKB. Oh, about seven or so, with stuff that, of course, was childhood stuff. And coming on, I got some formal control about the middle teens and had something to say, and that fell away again – it comes in fits and starts at any time, I think.
INT. But there have been some fits and starts that have meant more to him than others – certain basic but important things that have affected his writing.
JKB. Oh, I’d say being born was one, but that was before I started. Getting married was another.
INT. Do you notice a change in your writing from the time that you married?
JKB. No, no, not really; but it could be a ready influence. It would be a position where, because one is married, one has a centre of a certain type of tranquillity – I don’t mean something obviously tranquil, but a certain type of tranquillity that you can write from; you’re not thrown to pieces by things. And becoming a Catholic would be another one, I think; and in a lesser degree, say when I was about twenty-one, becoming a Christian at all.
INT. Looking back at these things, particularly the religious changes, can you see a change in your writing?
JKB. No, not so much. I can see a change in getting off the grog – I was on it pretty solidly and then getting off it I can see a change – it became worse, the writing did, at that point, perhaps because I lost confidence a bit. Later on it picked up again.
INT. Today James Baxter’s writing is to some extent concerned with social problems, like those of the criminal, the drug addict and the alcoholic.
JKB. I think so much in this society, most Western society, is on a rather high abstract level, the bureaucracy, the various media and communications. Things are a bit abstract. You have to get down nearer the ground. Often the person has fallen off something – a ladder, or a bus, or something. You see, he’s down nearer the ground. He gets the worm’s eye view, you might say. For myself, well, I spent a lot of time in the pubs when I was young. I had some problems with the grog, and so on. This gave me a sort of open door. One makes use of one’s liabilities from time to time.
INT. Does that give you a rather confusing outlook/attitude in your writing?
JKB. I think not, because someone, say, who’s sleeping in me, spoke, and that because they’re on the grog too much, or he’s in a mental hospital; well, they’re inclined to see society a bit from the outside. It’s as if they came from another country; they see things that the other person doesn’t. You get that stereoscopic vision which is very useful to the poet. If you write just about the things you’re entirely used to your writing’s [bound] to be a bit flat. But if you see the old things in a new way – that’s what’s needed.
INT. Is there not a danger of cutting yourself off from the sort of ordinary
JKB. Well, I think they’re at the cellar of the mind, if you can put it that way. Everyone has a cellar to their mind; for quite a number the trapdoor doesn’t open; it doesn’t have to. But some crisis comes and then it does open, and then you’ve got the whole mind instead of just the upper storey. I think, too, for a poem to have full power, it has to use all the levels of the mind, at least be inquisitive. I think that’s it.
INT. Much of your writing seems to point to a sort of isolation of yourself, particularly in writing like Jack Winter’s Dream, The Wide Open Cage, ‘Evidence at the Witch Trials’, to a certain extent. Do you, in fact, feel this isolation?
JKB. Well, there’s two ways of looking at that. One would be Freud’s way, sort of, that Art proceeds from neurosis – the person who’s neurotic is isolated from his fellow beings, and so on. To some degree he has blockages in his thinking. I think that’s probably true of just about every civilised person. And so, if one writes about this, one is probably sharing problems of isolation that are common with other people. They may not have looked at them so hard. One may have had periods when this was pretty tough. Often a person decides to become a writer in an illness or something like that. It didn’t happen to me, but it does happen to some. And then, how far is this ‘isolation’? I think that I would see the art not as proceeding from a state of sickness, but as a means of healing it – that’s pretty much the way of healing the intellect.
INT. He sees Art as therapy and finds people who absorb it better off for doing so. He thinks people pretty good on the whole and prefers those who aren’t much concerned with the promotional ladder, and likes to write quite a bit about personal relationships.
JKB. It’s rather picking up on what one might have missed out. The mind is not symmetrical. Relationships between people are not symmetrical. If you just sort of bore straight ahead as in some works on how to have a successful marriage, or something like that – well, I remember I was once in Ardmore [Training College] where you had to do such. It was a refresher course for teachers and you were putting together lumps of colour and seeing what picture you made out of them. Well, someone had a bull and a cow in a field, and someone had a waterfall, and I had a man coming home at 4 in the morning and his wife comes from under the stairs swinging a cannon ball around her head. And there’s a pelican sitting up by the light who’s reading a book on the psychology of marriage, and also a bat flying around. Well, they thought I was trying to get at them, but it happens to be the way my mind
INT. Is it something you’ve had all your life, or something that’s developed through your writing as you learned to know yourself?
JKB. Well, I think when I opened the cellar and went down into it there were loud explosions all round – for some people it’s quite a quiet place, but I’ve never found life uninteresting.
INT. Life could never be uninteresting for a man that has the sort of ideas that prompted him to write a poem like ‘Regret at Being a Pakeha’.
JKB. I’d say that I’d felt for a long time that there was something missing, like an essential element, cobalt, in the soil, or something like that – something missing in Western society. I had felt that it was the tribal situation where, say, fifty people would care whether you were living or dying, instead of just one or two or none at all. I have a nostalgia for this, a longing to belong to some such thing. One doesn’t, of course, because one is brought up differently, but no one regrets being a pakeha. You could say I regret not being an Eskimo even, you see, it doesn’t have to be a pakeha man. [At this point JKB read ‘Regret at Being a Pakeha’.]
INT. Like his contemporaries, James Baxter finds there are several difficulties attached to the business of writing.
JKB. I think the difficulties are that, in a sense, life is too easy. On the surface, it’s too easy. The conflict – one can’t say, ‘Look, God, help me! I was born in a slum and I hope the workers win the strike’, or something like that, because one wasn’t born in a slum. One might hope the workers win a strike, but not in the way a person would in, say, some countries in Europe, and you can’t say . . . In many ways things are smooth, they’re smooth economically in a greater degree. All the things are there that are in the other countries, but very deep. They’re probably more often psychological than economic. Perhaps all problems are in the long run.
INT. Do you feel imprisoned by a sort of tradition at all.
JKB. Imprisoned by the tradition of the Western world, yes; not by New Zealand tradition, in particular.
INT. Could you earn your living as a writer if you wanted to do so?
JKB. Yes, I could. But I would have to be producing junk as I see it; quite good junk, maybe, but stuff that didn’t touch me at all.
INT. It’s an economic necessity.
JKB. Yes, that’s right. I could do it [by] writing – it would be difficult. It would mean being a free-lance journalist, and couldn’t be by writing verse. I don’t think I have a talent for writing novels of the kind that would go over. I have tried but I don’t think I have. I think if they have a sort of germinal power the very best critics are really writing creatively themselves, Trilling in America, or Edmund Wilson – they’ve often written some good things other than their critical writing. Allen Tate would be another. Again quite a good poet – more than quite good – and he, I feel that his criticism is germinal; in this way this can help a writer. The type that sort of puts you upon a certain scale or tries to pigeon-hole your work (it only tells you what you’ve done; it doesn’t give you any ideas what to do next) – I would call it broadly academic. Some think that [kind of ] thing unfair. But I don’t mean by that belonging to the universities. A person can be academic in that sense who’s never been to university, but a person in the universities could conceivably not be academic – by ‘academic’ I mean a tendency to be ungenerous.
INT. A few years ago James K. Baxter said most New Zealand poetry was ‘anaemic and lightweight’ and he doesn’t feel very differently now.
JKB. I think it still tends that way; there’s a touch of greyness; there’s a touch of the lightweight often. It’s as if they have [travelled] quite a long way to get to what they really need to know. The social attitudes don’t seem to help much – they have to ignore them to a fair extent. It’s the voice of the lecture god, as it were, who’s not interested in literature though he has this importance. It’s no good talking to him about literature; you just have to ignore him and carry on.
INT. Which is exactly what James K. Baxter will do. [JKB reads ‘Wilderness is wilderness’.]
1963 (301)
As Paul Tillich has said, speaking in America, the job of a creative critic is to reveal the profound ambiguity of life, but ‘it is an almost irresistible temptation for contemporary creative minds to produce in order to sell.’ Perhaps Peter Shaffer’s and Elaine Dundy’s plays were made to be sold. The
M. Genet’s play is about the human condition as it has revealed itself in the recent Algerian war. It could never be produced on a realist stage, but it has its own grandiose power. In it, very suitably, the living and the dead mingle and converse. M. Genet assumes that men fight wars for private reasons, desiring release from conscious identity by means of a myth; or to put it another way, that in war the powers of man’s sexual nature are given over to a cult of death. His characters – peasants, politicians, soldiers and prostitutes – are never persons in the realist sense. They typify aspects of the conflict.
Such a method demands the powers of a dramatic poet, and M. Genet possesses these in full measure. The play is in many ways a horrifying work. It could hardly be otherwise. How can the savagery of our times be given a dramatic pattern – other than the spurious pattern that belongs to political rhetoric – except by the logic of dreams and nightmares. I found The Screens a haunting and compassionate work of art. The translation by Bernard Frechtman is a valuable gift to the English reader.
The collected second volume of Bertolt Brecht’s plays contains Mother Courage, Saint Joan of the Stockyards and The Good Person of Szechwan. The ironic ambiguity of Brecht’s work, springing from a perception that the obstacles in the path of social justice are as much in man’s nature as in exterior circumstances, is evident in all three of them. Brecht was an unbuyable man; and that is perhaps one reason why his plays never gather dust.
1963 (302)
This survey of the causes of stagnation in New Zealand politics deserves to be read in every bus, office, and farmhouse kitchen. Mr Innes’s view of New Zealand businessmen as economic schizophrenics, who recognise the value of Government planning by its effect on their bank balances, yet publicly castigate their nurse, seems a fair one. Equally I agree with his analysis of the semi-religious basis of the Social Credit movement. But the hard core of the book – its timely contribution to the literature of protest – develops from his sympathetic understanding of the way in which the Labour Party has been digging its own grave with the very machine which it constructed to bring unprecedented prosperity to the people of New Zealand.
The absence of ideas – other than the idea that working men should be content with their lot, or alternatively, that pay packets should be fuller each year – in New Zealand political life is indeed a chasm of dullness. I agree with Mr Innes’s diagnosis. But in his suggested solutions – trade with Asia, the provision of economic data to representatives of management and worker
1963 (303)
Barry Crump and Stewart Kinross are both intelligent writers, and each in his own way is a satirist. In Crump’s case the satire could be described as heavy sniping with a ˑ303 rifle. This new book about Sam Cash, the wandering Kiwi yarn-spinner, is in no sense a new departure; it is simply a sister volume to One of Us, the book in which Ka Lung Crump unrolled his swag to entertain whoever happened to be listening, and incidentally poured borax on every life-form that New Zealand has so far developed, with the possible exception of drunks, dogs and horses.
The first two-thirds of There and Back is occupied with Sam Cash’s relations (financial, advisory, and even theological) with a publican, a farmer, a bush-boss, and several other people. The story ambles on quietly, and the body of it lies either in meticulous accounts of work done, or else in Sam Cash’s pungent yarns about Old Hammergun and Saddleblanket, friends of his. But the Hero lacks an offsider till Arnie Small puts in an appearance – too late, I felt – in the seventeenth chapter.
In some ways Sam Cash is any New Zealander’s idea of himself (self-reliant, competent, full of Odyssean cunning) and Arnie Small, the embryonic no- hoper, is the sadder reality. When the two are together, the story tightens up, and the full resonance of Crump’s satire can be enjoyed or endured. I did enjoy it greatly. And Crump’s prose has now reached the limit of terseness and laconic energy.
On the face of it. Stewart Kinross’s satire is much kinder. I had heard his account of the meteoric career of Sid Smith, that champion batsman of the cow paddock, on the air, and woken up from my after-dinner coma to recognise a first-rate radio humorist. I was prepared to be disappointed by the book; for it is extremely hard to keep the humour from oozing out in cold print. But Stewart Kinross’s warm, witty account of small township habits and customs is, like Crump’s saga, worth its weight in borax. And he explores an area which Crump has tended to neglect – the mating habits of the adult Kiwi – with an irony which indicates that his easy-going style may be a trifle deceptive.
A clear eye for significant detail – the sticky paint on the church pews, a hat blown into the water, a girl’s choice of a manageable partner – gives this satirist his peculiar strength. These accurate reports on New Zealand tribal behaviour have more to say than many of our novels do. And nothing can be funnier than a participant’s account of what actually did happen at the family picnic.
1963 (304)
Because the idiom is colloquial and the tone often subdued, it could happen that a casual reader might miss the unusual quality of this first book of poems. The biographical note indicates that the author is a New Zealand-born Marist priest. Leaving aside three or four poems with specifically sacerdotal themes, I doubt whether one who had not been told would recognise John Weir’s primary vocation; and this is as it should be. Poets are not inspired in the prophetic sense (though many delude themselves they are), nor should a priest exercise his teaching authority by writing rhymed sermons. John Weir (I think) avoids both temptations. Yet I feel his poetry is coloured by special experiences of tension, solitude, and that sign of contradiction which belongs to those who have a strong and real double vocation.
There are roughly three kinds of poem in this book – poems of place, poems that hinge on the author’s relation to God, and poems that crystallise around some relation to another creature. The poems of place are often singularly beautiful and perfect in execution:
I quote from the second stanza of ‘Karamea’. In this poem, and in several others, John Weir writes as a New Zealander, exploring the body of the country, and because of their great beauty and lucidity some readers may prefer them. Yet the strictly devotional poems (‘Prayer to the Saviour’, ‘Early Morning Near Napier’, ‘For the Grace of a Good Death’) dig deeper, exercising the last inch of the muscles of the mind; and the poems about people (‘In Willis Street’, ‘Elegy for My Father’, ‘An Old Man Thinks of His Childhood’), though sometimes awkward in their combination of strong images and colloquial language, areThe Sudden Sun is an astonishingly mature first book. One hopes that John Weir will be able to continue; for he possesses intellectual courage and an awareness of the deep wounds and ambiguities of the present age.
1963 (305)
One could give this book the familiar dry reception – a capable handling of speech rhythms, the tricks of the trade learnt to the hilt. It would be true enough, but not worthy of this poet. Maturity is hard to come by; and Gloria Rawlinson has laboured to the point of break-through, where the inner and outer worlds coalesce and the words obey the difficult vision –
I quote from the beginning of the poem ‘Black Swans’. One gathers that the repose of the swans on the water, representing the wild peace of the natural world, both tempts and shows up, by contrast the repose of the Christian believer.
Some such tension is the steel cable by which Miss Rawlinson has learnt to lift heavy weights. If you contrast the one ill-chosen poem in this book, ‘Bush Economy’, with another poem, ‘From Ur to Erewhon’, Miss Rawlinson’s early weakness and later strength will be clearly apparent. In the first poem a gnome with a wagging beard offers flower-dolls for sale at a log counter. This kind of image was the tedious stock-in-trade of her first literary milieu, evident in The Perfume Vendor; most New Zealand poets of the time were trapped by it, and I suspect it sprang as much from the airless domestic boxes of our nation as from a specific mandarin tradition. But whimsy is set aside in her mature work for genuine apocalyptic fantasy –
The technical development is very great; yet I feel that the break-through turns far more on the acquisition by the poet of a stable view of reality than
1963 (306)
After Ned Kelly, it may well be that Henry Lawson, the Poet of the Left, is Australia’s greatest mythological figure. I seem to detect in Mr Prout’s informative and interesting biography an effort to cut Lawson down to human size. The effort has misfired in two directions. The biographer shows a regrettable tendency to moralise over Lawson’s alcoholism, whereas it would have been more to the point to blame the greater malady of journalism for cash as the boa constrictor that throttled Lawson’s magnificent talents. He also quotes Lawson’s jingoist verse very freely (none of it worth a second reading) and neglects the biting social satire he wrote as a spokesman of the working-class.
The Australian people loved Lawson because they knew his heart was with them. Mr Prout castigates Lawson for his habitual gloom, not caring to look further and see that this gloom frequently mirrors the emotional destitution of a society where the economic millstones grind people to powder daily. Perhaps all this amounts to no more than the fact that Mr Prout is a conventional man examining the life and work of a man whose mind, however muddled, was never wholly conventional.
Setting aside these serious limitations, Mr Prout’s book is most readable. Lawson’s disordered and pain-filled family life is examined in considerable detail; and there are numerous anecdotes from the mouths or pens of Lawson’s acquaintances which Mr Prout has gathered and preserved. I could have wished for more of them, and less biographical comment, since Mr Prout does not succeed well as an interpreter. There was one suggestion that raised the hair on the back of my neck – that Lawson benefited from the pruning of his verses by the editors of The Bulletin, who smoothed out its roughness and made it scan. Lawson’s greatest single technical gift lies in his handling of the dour Australian vernacular. One shudders to think how many condescending half-wits may have tampered with its fruits.
Lawson’s powers were stunted by the environment of arid gentility in which his literary mentors moved. The sources of his strongest stories and poems, however, lay in a different area – in the streets and pubs, on the bush farms, where the early Labour movement also had its roots. That militant Antaeus
1963 (307)
A Note
In this poem I imagine a conversation between the soul of a man who is at the point of death and the Blessed Virgin. It could happen in an instant before the Particular Judgment.
I wrote the poem to make plain to myself certain fears and tensions – which no doubt many other people have – about dying and one’s ultimate salvation. This poem was the end and crown of a long series of letter poems written to a friend in Otago.
The actuality of death is different from the idea of death; just as the actuality of God is different from the idea of God. This man (myself or anyone) is very destitute. He has come to death without the Sacraments and with sins to repent of.
The poem begins in that state of darkness which resembles the situation of the prophet Jonah in the belly of the whale: a time when the sense of God’s love, perhaps even the idea of God, are taken from the soul, a time of waiting without light. It is natural that one should speak to Our Lady at such a time.
The man is knocking on the door at Nazareth, like a leprous beggar or a homeless drunk. I see the Church itself as an extension of the Holy Family. Thus the door of the house at Nazareth is the door into Heaven.
Our Lady answers the door, as a housewife will. She points out that the
The man pleads his absolute solitude and destitution, his loss of the support of all creatures, material and intellectual. She comes straight to the point – ‘Why are your hands not clean?’ For he is dying in his sins. He replies that the ‘soap’ of the Sacraments was not available. She reminds him that contrition is necessary to obtain grace; and he replies with my own private credo – ‘Your face is my theology’ – meaning that he places absolute trust in her, that all other acts of the soul are swallowed up in this dependent love, as when a small child gazes on the face of its mother.
She speaks then of a ‘jewel’, which could be Sanctifying Grace, and which is also a ‘signet ring’ – implying the mark on the soul of a special pact with her – that of a Slave of Mary, let us say. He replies that he has lost it in ‘the thick gorse of the gully’ – in the wilderness through which he has travelled.
She speaks what seem to be words of rejection; yet he remains at the door. He pleads then his identification with the dying Christ – a ‘convict’, having ‘become sin’ for the sake of those who sin.
She then receives him.
The poem concludes with an image of the welling up of the life of God in the human soul.
(Where Mary is there is the Church: where love is there is God.)
1963 (308)
Mr Fiedler is a lively and aggressive critic, an iconoclast in the tradition of Mencken. His essays on Whitman, R.L. Stevenson, Robert Penn Warren, and others, resemble the work-out of a champion boxer – the books and the writers are punch-bags, objects for a powerful analytical wit. In some ways this kind of criticism is more honest than the assumed universal objectivity of the carefully academic commentator. I find those essays in which he meets his own problems head-on, and discusses the difficult minority status of American Jews, the most rewarding. His analysis of public attitudes to the Leopold-Loeb trial is quite masterly. Mr Fiedler (with a few cracks in passing at the gross anti-Semite) reserves his best punches for the muddled liberal conscience which desires to extend tolerance equally to Jews and homosexuals. One can only applaud him. Such boils need to be lanced. And who would have more right to do so that Mr Fiedler, who has no doubt suffered interminably at the hands of self-styled tolerant [people?]?
Mr Braithwaite’s book is equally controversial. A Negro born in British Guiana, educated in New York and England, his iron-clad intellectual grip has been developed in contact with the so-far-no-further social attitudes of the white races. In many ways Mr Braithwaite thinks entirely like an Englishman; perhaps his situation, setting aside the colour-bar, resembles most that of a New Zealander who goes to London only to find suddenly that he is a colonial. But (unlike that New Zealander) he has, if he chooses, an ancestral motherland – the continent of Africa, where many Negroes have developed the hope, the full political rights, and the mutual respect and understanding denied them elsewhere. He visits Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, and what he finds there is in effect a buried part of himself. His traveller’s commentary on the rising nations of Africa is unsensational, but very cheering: for under great poverty and political conflict Mr Braithwaite discerns the new solidarity, mutual love and serious purpose of a long-deprived people.
1963 (309)
Dear Nathaniel – I was pleased to get your letter with the poems enclosed. There’s nothing really I can do about the poems, except send them back, and tell you I liked them, especially the one about [the thoughts you have] when sitting on the earth closet. I’m not an editor thank God – and I’ve given up being a critic. Poets don’t want criticism but encouragement. I liked your poems. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be replying to your letter.
I will try to do the other thing, though. Explain some of the rules of the road for a poet who lives in Pig Island. As a matter of fact I don’t think the Pig Island part of it is very important. You and I just happened to be born here, that’s all. It would probably be just as easy or difficult to be a poet in Zanzibar.
The fact that you are living on a farm in Waikikamukau may be an advantage. I can understand your longing to get to the city lights: women, grog, motor bikes, people, women. You said you wanted somebody to talk to. Well, I can’t find anybody to talk to, most of the time in Wellington. I mean, I can natter all right – but apart from the other drunks, I don’t really find it any less solitary than you do.
It’s an illusion that a town is a place where people get together. They live in their various boxes and don’t often say Hullo to each other. And as far as writing goes, I mostly write about the country area down South where I was born. Far more seems to happen in the country. Cows get stuck in fences. Landgirls get pregnant. Farmers get drunk on Corio and fly an aeroplane into the side of a hill. The same kind of thing happens in town, of course, but it all happens under a lid somehow. I think you can find quite enough to write about in Waikikamukau.
You seem to me rather too much worried about your mental health. There you are – a compulsive, neurotic, staggering wreck of nineteen; and here I am, a hardened, irritable psychopath of thirty-seven. It’s a good sign that you know it, of course. Most people go right round the bend without a notion that it’s happening to them. I suggest you should relax and enjoy it.
My own mental health has not really improved much since I was your age. It doesn’t worry me, though. The thing is, I put nearly all my obsessions into my poems. A poem is a kind of crystallised obsession, I think. Anyway, I think the psychologists invented the idea of mental health so that they could go on getting dough off people who don’t like having to go on being themselves. If you weren’t a ratbag, you’d probably be satisfied to go on making money off the land. There would never be a chance of your becoming a poet.
I liked what you said about the girl you met in Patea – that you didn’t mind the sex part of it; that it was the girl herself that worried you. Women do present a real difficulty. A lot of good writers have been ridden into the ground by them. Not what you think. People seem to think the problem men have with women is sex. That does occur of course. I mean, a woman’s point of view can be rather overpowering. Especially in Pig Island. Frank Sargeson used to say that the motto for the Pig Island coat of arms should be: Mum knows best.
Well, I think it’s fair enough for a writer – or any man, for that matter – to take a woman’s point of view into account. The difficulty begins when one adopts a bogus personality in order to please them – politeness, sweetness of character, love of flowers, a readiness to help old ladies over railway crossings. I think you have a touch of that, Nathaniel. The poem about pungas in the bush had a good deal of it. Actually I’m pretty sure you were born to be a hangman.
And then of course there’s the matter of imitation. You said that you’d been reading Robert Lowell; and that you’d tried out some of his stanza forms. That sounds quite O.K. As long as you (or I) don’t invent imaginary experiences, we can dig into other people’s rubbish dumps as far as we like. It helps to learn the tricks, even if you only use one or two of them. And another poet may certainly lead us to a different view of our own experience. As long as we don’t imagine that we can use his experience: that’s all.
I’m rather impressionable myself in this way. I find myself writing other people’s poems for them. It’s a bad habit. It’s inclined to happen when my own mind has nothing whatever to offer. The poems I write at such times are invariably bad and corny: often they have a strong religious flavour. I’ve just about given up reading in order to stop this kind of thing from happening. I like Robert Lowell best when he’s writing about Hell. It reminds me of Sunday morning in a Pig Island pub.
You did mention that you’d missed a good deal of your education. That probably accounts for your being able to write with some guts right from the
Some of your worries may come from a conflict between your religious background and your actual experience. This is a common difficulty in Pig Island. You say you were brought up as a neo-Memnonite. I don’t happen to know the sect; but I suppose it puts a good deal of stress on the Last Judgment and keeping the party clean. Well, I think when one is writing poems, it’s best to stick to what’s already and actually happened – I mean, what has happened to oneself. Your poem about seeing the Angel Gabriel in the railway paddock was a very fine imitation of Lowell; but if you had seen him, you probably wouldn’t have written about it. I take it you didn’t see him, but thought you would have, if you’d been holy enough. Far be it from me to deny another man his religion. I have one of my own. But I think poems about imaginary experiences are always bad poems. The pages of Landfall and the Listener are full of them.
I hope my remarks are of some use to you, Nathaniel. One never knows. If I ever pass through Waikikamukau, I would be very glad to call on you. Not at home, but at the pub you mentioned.
[1963?] (310)
Louis MacNeice died recently. Among the English poets of the Thirties he stood out as a one-man variety show, embodying the confidence in humanist values, the intellectual energy and the sense of expanding horizons that belonged to that epoch. That will do as a solemn epitaph. But, coming nearer home, MacNeice could touch the heart. One gained the over-all impression of a warm, versatile, witty man, never a woman-hater, one who liked the glitter of big towns as much as the green quiet of an Irish village, the only real hedonist among the moderns, who insisted that what is natural is mainly good, a broad-minded agnostic with a respect for the other man’s religion. Some biological element gave his poems their subtle verve and brightness, like a ball balanced on a fountain. The presence behind the verses, knowledgeable and humane, seemed that of the perfect lounge bar companion, the man who
The war turned MacNeice for a while into a great poet (I think of ‘Prayer Before Birth’, ‘Brother Fire’, ‘The Libertine’, ‘Prayer in Mid-Passage’, ‘The Streets of Laredo’, ‘Slum Song’ and ‘Street Scene’) – as the wave swells to its greatest height before toppling. A man as much in tune with the lives of others as MacNeice was, is obliged to share completely their heroism or stagnation:
I quote from ‘Goodbye to London’, one of the many good, sombre poems in MacNeice’s last volume. After the war MacNeice lost the thread of meaning in the urban labyrinth, but in these last poems he recovered it again. The voice is direct and steady, with no trace of spurious consolation:
MacNeice’s last book is in a sense a summing-up, a paying of bills left long unpaid, personal rather than political. There is deep melancholy at things
1964 (311)
Both George MacDonald and Charles Williams are writers with a theological bent who mix realism and fantasy in unpremeditated doses. Furthermore, both owe something of their popularity to the powerful advocacy of Dr C.S. Lewis, who shaped the conscience of every S.C.M. member throughout the world with his grim little book, The Screwtape Letters. Dr Lewis has convinced himself, and possibly many others, that in the normal course of events religion begins with romanticism, and theology with fantasy, and hence his two favourite writers are sages and seers, interpreters of supernatural events. What he does not say is that they are respectively a Victorian Scotsman and a neo-Victorian Englishman.
I owe a debt to George MacDonald for his two superb fairy-tales, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie, and a less certain debt for another one, At the Back of the North Wind, from which I absorbed early and erroneous views on good and evil, the life of children before birth, and the kind of death one should wish for. But Phantastes, and in a greater degree Lilith, are the unworked ore of George MacDonald’s imagination – a journey into that writer’s subconscious mind, which is no less cramped, disordered and bogie-haunted than yours or mine. In Phantastes a bevy of archetypes of the Jungian variety help or hinder the cerebral hero: in Lilith we are given George MacDonald’s subconscious vision of Woman as Temptress, and very gruelling that nightmare becomes, sweetened by a series of necrophiliac rhapsodies. For the first time in years I was grateful to the schools of modern psychology which enable us to disbelieve a little the urgent message from the cellar – ‘Kill Mum before she kills you’. Dr Lewis in his wide and varied reading has apparently bypassed the works of Freud and Jung.
Charles Williams has undoubtedly written several plays which could go well on the boards. He chooses – rightly, on account of his bent – the one kind of drama in which ideas are given legs, the morality play. Though Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury comes the nearest to it, I do not think any of his plays have people in them. And there is another difficulty. The success of a dramatist, much more than that of a poet, depends on how true his vision of reality is. Eccentric ideas about the way the world works can vitiate a play. It seems quite clear that Charles Williams believed in magic, especially the raising of spirits; and while this factor adds variety and sensationalism to his plays, there is always the point where one gets tired of the game – if one does not happen to share the author’s belief. It is really the same difficulty as that which occurs with George MacDonald’s Lilith. One is being asked to acceptThe House of the Octopus, a very well-constructed play, would try to convince us that disguised cults of Satanism are the chief danger of the modern world. I suspect that normal bone-headed dislike of people who speak with a different accent from one’s own has a larger part to play.
1964 (312)
Sir: I wish, if possible, to make some moderate comments on your immoderate and illiberal editorial on the matter of the withholding of a grant for the last issue of Poetry Yearbook by the Literary Fund Advisory Committee. I am one of the members elected to represent New Zealand writers on that Committee; and three of the poems which your editorial designates as ‘bad’ were written by me. Naturally, when the decision to withhold the grant was made, I offered to resign from the Committee; and remain at present a member only on condition that I should be free to make public comment on that decision. Further, I made a private decision to avoid personalities in any such comment, and to avoid divulging the proceedings of the Committee. The second point I have departed from, in one minute particular, by including in a statement for the Christchurch Press the information that the Committee’s decision would not have been unanimous even if I had abstained from voting. If the reason for this departure is not clear, it should be to anyone who thinks the matter over.
As a person quite as deeply involved in the present dispute as he is, I wish to point out that my own action has been undertaken quite independently from Mr Johnson. We are not, and have never been, Siamese twins. For example, when I allowed Truth to publish one of my own condemned poems, it was without Mr Johnson’s knowledge and contrary to his later expressed judgment. What Mr Johnson and I have in common is that we are both New Zealand poets and both have reason, in the present dispute, to object to a judgment based on a standard of gentility.
I wish to express astonishment and concern at the tone and content of your editorial. Without breaking that same membrane of gentility, I cannot see how the attack on Mr Johnson’s editorial efficiency could have been made stronger. How can such an attack be objectively justified? No editor is infallible. Yet, going simply by the poems I have read (and had published) in these periodicals, I see no reason to suppose that Mr Johnson’s selection for Poetry Yearbook has been less capable than that of the Editor of Landfall or the Listener. The Literary Fund Advisory Committee itself bore negative witness to his editorial judgment by continuing to make a grant until this occasion. It is Mr Johnson’s lack of editorial gentility which has raised thePoetry Yearbook was an objection to the use of a four-letter word in a poem by a most capable poet. The poet solved the problem by agreeing to change the word; much to my own dissatisfaction, since the poem was better with the word left in.
I think Mr Johnson can reasonably claim that he has been shabbily treated. I can understand and in a large measure accept the view that the Listener should be bound by the standards of gentility held by many of its readers, since it is only in part a literary periodical. But why should the Literary Fund Advisory Committee choose to consider that it was its job to perpetuate these standards, which are of service neither to good writing, good spoken communication, or good mental health? I notice in the same issue of the Listener as your editorial, the comment of Ernest Hemingway’s mother on her son’s writing: ‘With the whole world full of beauty, why does he have to pick out thoughts and words from the gutter?’ Exactly. Her lament strikes a chord in all of us, who would like to live in a world where honesty cost nothing. But she did not take on the job of writing the books. Nor could she have. Her gentility would have prevented it.
1964 (313)
Among New Zealand poets Keith Sinclair has been distinguished by a warm, romantic, lyrical gift, and a tendency to use the extended conceit or metaphor. Some of the warmth perhaps and certainly many of his images have come from the soil and beaches of the Auckland region. There was at times a fault in his work of loose, careless improvisation. Lately Dr Sinclair had been producing less ebullient verse. Whatever saw the light of day was most carefully worked. One had the impression of iron hammered out cold and regretted a little the absence of an earlier fire. This new volume, however, can be regarded as a personal and literary triumph for Dr Sinclair, for fire (and ice) and careful workmanship are together present in it. Many of the poems celebrate, both nearly and remotely, the power of that antipodean Venus who troubles and revives us all. Such a theme is neither strange nor new, but the poet’s complex honesty is a clear sign of a new strength and maturity –
Dr Sinclair has isolated the painful centre in New Zealand social life from which so many tensions, rebellions and calamities originate: a domestic pattern which forbids by its very nature, the full functioning of the adults who come together to form it.
Though the best poems in this book are straight love poems (I have not quoted from them, since it would be unsuitable to dismember them), the most interesting in the light of possible further development are those in which Dr Sinclair holds up an ironic mirror to suburbia. The irony is tempered with grief and tenderness. In these poems Dr Sinclair binds together the intuitions that were separate strands in his earlier work, and establishes his right to be regarded as one of the few New Zealand writers who understand the country they were born in.
1964 (314)
Not long ago I was asked to contribute some verse to Craccum. The request pleased me, as I have always felt the varsity newspapers were able to provide a livelier and less hidebound slant on the customs of Pig Island than our established and solemn periodicals are able to do. Instead of giving Craccum my ODE TO A SEAGULL SEEN FROM THE TOP OF MOUNT VICTORIA, a five-hundred line poem in the manner of the early Shelley, which I am keeping as a money-maker for the school anthologies – I sent up THE SAD TALE OF MATILDA GLUBB, the story in rhymed couplets of a primary school teacher who learns too late that she has chosen a dead-end profession. Later on I heard that the story had been printed, but that some people, on the advice of a lawyer, had prevented that issue of Craccum from being distributed.
This information has depressed me. I recognise that not everything a man happens to write can be published. In modern times all rogues and fools in public positions are carefully protected from criticism by laws of libel and slander. But Miss Glubb is a fictitious person. There is also a delicate moral issue which I, as a member of the Catholic Church, have to consider whenever I let a poem of mine be published – would the poem be likely to influence some person, not already so disposed, to an act of self-abuse or some less obvious sexual misdemeanour? I cannot see that THE SAD TALE OF MATILDA GLUBB could lead anyone to do anything except resign from the teaching profession.
There is also the even more delicate matter of my private intention in writing the poem at all. My intention, as I now recall it, was to expose and lay
I remember how, when I had included this poem in a talk to an audience composed mainly of teachers, given in one of the Auckland University buildings, an oldish woman approached me after the talk, fixed me with a very sad eye, and said – ‘I am Miss Glubb’. I could tell you other anecdotes of a similar kind. But the point I wish to make is this – that I was not just letting off my gun into the air for the fun of it; I was shooting at a definite and real target.
Perhaps the lawyer’s objection to the poem was on the grounds of the language used. The word ‘menstruate’ occurs early in the poem; the word ‘penis’ occurs once, and the word ‘shit’ three times, at the end of the poem. In each case a macabre and comic effect is intended; I think this effect is achieved. I had carefully avoided the use of words commonly regarded as obscene. The word ‘shit’ is simply part of the gross vernacular, and is used often by poets – Swift and Robert Burns, for example, – as part of the language in satirical and black-humour poems.
The point here, as I see it, is that the poem involves a breach of decorum – not pornography, that is quite a different matter – and the kind of poem that breaks decorum is a regular part of satire in the English tradition. The word ‘shit’ written large on a lavatory wall, and the same word incorporated in a satire, are expressing different impulses and fulfilling different functions. Perhaps your lawyer is not in the habit of reading verse. His name is Leary, isn’t it? I haven’t heard of the learned gentleman; but the name is Irish. Perhaps he was having a little joke with you. Irishmen love to have their joke.
The thing that troubles me most is not the fact that this issue of Craccum was suppressed, and thus many students were denied the pleasure or annoyance of reading my poem. It troubles me much more that Auckland students should expose themselves to ridicule, and present themselves to any person who hears of the matter and understands the issue, as a bunch of timid old men and maiden aunts, running to the shelter of authority as soon as there seemed a likelihood that somebody might be offended by something published in Craccum.
The conservative group among you may be no more than a very vocal minority; but the outside world may be inclined to judge the whole student body by the actions of this small group. Broadly, I am concerned about the future. No doubt there will always be bureaucrats and censors and academic people with minds as narrow as a bootlace. But it is a great pity that they should come from among the student body.
I remember Bob Lowry, that Aucklander who loved his fellows greatly,Craccum (no doubt unimportant in itself ) seems to me contrary to the spirit of Auckland as I have known it.
I suggest that you forget about the buildings that have to be built (what use are buildings if they are inhabited by cretins?) and forget about the law, and let Craccum be distributed as originally intended. The Pig Island garden could do with a little night-soil.
1964 (315)
some comments on censorship
Recently the Auckland Students’ Executive, acting on the advice of a lawyer and under strong pressure from the varsity authorities, insisted on the removal of a book review and a poem from the newspaper Craccum. Further, they censured the editor, Mr John Sanders, for conducting an ‘experiment in law’ – whatever that peculiar phrase may mean. Mr Sanders and other Auckland students then resorted to the time-honoured practice of publishing an unauthorised newspaper called Wreccum, in which they criticised the actions and attitudes of the Students’ Executive and the College authorities. The last I heard of the matter, it seemed that these students were at least in grave danger of expulsion. If they were expelled, it would be a horrifying misapplication of disciplinary power; for these particular students have given thought to issues of propriety and censorship, and have begun to examine critically the customs and prejudices of Pig Island society. They have begun to think. The varsity authorities should utter prayers of thanksgiving that a few students at least had grasped what a university is meant to be: a place where people learn to think for themselves.
I would grant readily enough that the majority of men and women who pass through our universities are not concerned with learning to think at all. They want to pass their exams and get good jobs as chemists or librarians with the least possible fuss. The varsity is a tunnel through which they pass from a suburban home to a city office or laboratory. Furthermore, I am sure that our Departmental heads and city fathers are delighted that it should be so. They
But there is another and older tradition. Since the University of Paris developed in the shade of the Church, there has existed in each generation and in many countries a creative tension between university thought and the habitual attitudes of the wider money-ruled community. In Russia some university students are prepared to criticise the regime; in America some students are preoccupied with racial issues; in England, as in New Zealand, some students join in marches to demonstrate against the use of nuclear weapons. It is precisely this readiness to think, speak, write and act on behalf of causes which lack support from, or may even be opposed to the policy of those who have most power in the community, that distinguishes the thinking students of a university from the pupils of a higher-grade technical college. The existence of such a group will always irritate the bureaucrat and the city father. They will attribute hooliganist and irresponsible motives to its members. They will say – ‘The students should work harder. It isn’t their job to criticise the way the world is built.’ In part the irritation rises from a feeling of personal affront that any point of view different from their own should exist; in part it rises from the chagrin of the fox who has let his tail be chopped off, objecting to the brown, hairy plume of a more fortunate, younger fox. When any clash occurs between students and the authorities of the town or the university – as on this recent occasion in Auckland – the authorities tend to exercise their disciplinary powers with a paranoid severity. It is understandable; for student thought can in the course of a generation change the status quo; and that is what the bought man fears most.
I was unable to read the book review in Craccum since I have not been able to obtain an uncensored issue. The title of the review – ‘The Vaginal Viewpoint of Mary McCarthy’ – is a shrewd one. It sums up in a nutshell the particular bias of that tough American writer. I am sure she would have counted it both amusing and just. The poem which was censored was one I wrote myself – ‘The Sad Tale of Matilda Glubb’, a verse chronicle describing the gradual lapse from sanity of a Pig Island primary-school teacher, whose pattern of gentility does not survive the stresses of the classroom. I had used in this poem, for purposes of satire, the mildest four-letter word – the one
I can accept a censorship which tries to prevent pornographic writing from being published. A pornographic story or poem is one which is designed or likely to stimulate the reader to sexual daydreams or misdemeanours. In a broad sense a detailed description of torture or atrocities could be termed pornographic, because of its appeal to the sadistic or masochistic proclivities of the reader. But as a literate person I cannot accept a censorship which hinges on another man’s sense of what is proper. It would be a melancholy situation if what one was allowed to write or publish or read depended on the state of the subconscious mind of a Pig Island businessman, a cop or a varsity professor. Standards of decorum vary enormously, among writers, among the general public, and in varsity circles. I cannot see why Craccum should not publish a poem or story or book review which some of its readers might consider indecorous. It means otherwise that a small pressure group can impose their standard of taste, by means of censorship, on other literate people.
Of course the issue goes much deeper. In many respects gentility is the glue which holds the status quo together. A genteel man can be counted on to take the side of the cops, because his mind is fuddled, and what Ernest Hemingway called his built-in dung-detector has been put out of action. (I have not used Hemingway’s exact words in case Salient also should be censored on account of indecorous language.) It is very easy for any demagogue or religious charlatan to put it across a man like that. It was the genteel middle classes in Germany who welcomed Hitler as a bulwark against the indecorous speculations of the Jewish intellectuals who were (they thought) corrupting the youth of the country. And when the smoke blew their way from Belsen they didn’t think about it because it was unpleasant. We have no Belsens here; but I have seen women go crazy in the tidy vacuum of a primary-school classroom between a glass tank and a vase of daffodils; and when I write a poem about the psychological dangers of the teaching profession (a matter of great relevance for student life) my genteel readers notice only that I have used Hemingway’s word for dung three times, and start to call out the cops.
The curse of intellectual barrenness which rests like a black frost on the paddocks of Pig Island may have sprung in a large degree from the neo- Victorian gentility inculcated in our schools. Ordinary working people are
*(Mound of moss found in Central Otago closely resembling sheep.)
1964 (316)
The translation from Racine by Robert Lowell smells somewhat of the lamp. Lowell is a most painstaking craftsman, and it is something to bring the heroic couplet to life again, but in some way he and Racine are at loggerheads. I suspect that Lowell’s essentially romantic approach is the main difficulty – he is at his best in the long soliloquies, but in the quick interchange of comment and idea the signs of strain begin to show. Unconsciously he has conceived of the play as a dramatic poem, and finds it hard to subordinate individual feeling to the bare algebra of Racine’s action.
Richard Wilbur’s Advice to a Prophet is the fag-end of a book composed too much of trivial epigrams and laboured translations. Milkweeds and stones converse in order that a poem may exist, and the prophet is advised not to tell people who cannot imagine it that the world may end tomorrow. Perhaps Mr Wilbur has taken his own advice too seriously.
Anne Ridler’s play, ‘written in verse to help the actors’, achieves an impressive structure of unity in variety. An unpopular factory owner is beaten up and killed outside a pub by some of his workmen. The action of the play develops from the endeavour of his daughter to find out how and why her father died. It is a severe limit to the dimensions of Mrs Ridler’s play that none of her characters are aware that some people believe in the existence of a class war. But granted this, the events are wholly credible, the characters true, and the language lucid, flexible and admirably adapted for the theatre. I feel that Mrs Ridler owes a mild debt to the T.S. Eliot of The Family Reunion. She has, however, more sense of the way people live than her master has commonly shown. I would like to see the play put on the stage some time.
1964 (317)
I cannot recall, since Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who is also a good English poet. The matter may seem irrelevant; yet it is not, for priests, like family men, have a vocation that is bound to colour all their thinking, and the extreme vulnerability of priests to public or private scandal must often have dissuaded those who have had the gift from the dangerous second vocation of being poets. If they do write poems there is a standing temptation for them to write edifying verse and avoid the terrors and ambiguities of a vocation that hinges on the public expression of private knowledge. Therefore (already prepared by Peter Levi’s first book, The Gravel Ponds, and his magnificent translation from Yevtushenko) one opens his second book with a certain dread and joy – dread of some easy attempt to fake a credit balance in the account books of the spiritual life, joy that a man exists who can bear the weight of the double vocation –
It is a bold priest who publicly expresses his private preference for suicide over murder. The reward of boldness is, in this case, a wintry fire, and what began as the jottings of a seminary student who loved animals, solitude and his friends, has become a latter-day simulacrum of the mournings of Jeremiah. Peter Levi’s poems are simultaneously faithful to his private knowledge and to the harsh contours of modern life.
1964 (318)
Sir: It is not new that a Landfall review of a New Zealand poet’s first book should be ungenerous: that tradition has been firmly established over years. But R.L.P. Jackson in his review of John Weir’s The Sudden Sun travels far beyond his predecessors towards some terminus of academic desiccation
(a) The method of attempting to prove that poems are badly written by listing some of the words that are used in them has already been tried out by an earlier Landfall reviewer on Alistair Campbell’s verse. Let me try it for a moment on one of Yeats’s finest poems.
Here are the adjectives – ‘Bitter’, ‘soft’, ‘rich’, ‘fat’, ‘rough’, ‘great’, ‘wild’, ‘loveless’ – and here are some of the nouns – ‘sweetness’, ‘inhabitant’, ‘cheek’, ‘girl’, ‘man’, ‘affairs’, ‘flocks’, ‘fields’, ‘calamity’, ‘brother’, ‘brother’, ‘friend’, ‘friend’, ‘family’, ‘family’ – and I will undertake to prove anything (or nothing) about the value of the poem.
It is plain, for example that Yeats didn’t like (or didn’t know) any adjectives more than two syllables in length; and he must have had an obsession with family matters, for ‘brother’ is repeated twice, and ‘friend’ twice, and ‘family’ twice. This method will not, however, convey to any reader the knowledge that the poem is a magnificent rendering, both passionate and mannered of a chorus from Sophocles.
1964 (319)
Pope John XXIII, whose wisdom, benignity and fatherly warmth, like a green oasis in the deserts of modern fear and hostility, gave hope to Catholic and non-Catholic alike, intended that the spirit of the Second Vatican Council should be pastoral rather than severely legalistic. He seemed to have in mind equally a spring-cleaning within the Church (for example, a free use of the vernacular in the liturgy where the people would benefit by it) and the restatement of Catholic doctrine in forms acceptable to the minds of modern men, with the special aim of facilitating a further dialogue with Christian believers outside the Church.
Several commentators have cast the Roman Curia in the role of villain in this progressive drama. Yet I suspect that Pope John would not have wished them out of his way – the ecclesiastical bureaucrats represent that curbing, limiting, inhibiting factor, so repugnant to the idealist, the cold breath of the status quo which turns poets into fat, old bibliophiles, lovers into sagging husbands, and revolutionary mystics into fund-raising parish priests. Without the Curia the Council would have lacked its full human dimension.
The particular issues which were discussed between 2 October and 8 December, 1962, were respectively the renovation of the liturgy, the sources of revelation, the meaning of unity, and the nature of the Church. The lively debates on these issues have been reported by the author of this book in great detail. Cardinals, Bishops and patriarchs presented forcibly opposing points of view. There was no lack of the yeast of fresh ideas. Observer-delegates from non-Catholic churches were impressed by the warmth of their welcome and the freedom of controversy in the Council.
Behind the scenes Pope John kept a light hand on the tiller, intervening only when it was strictly necessary. Plainly Xavier Rynne favours the progressive, modernising school of Catholic theology, which desires, for example, a greater administrative autonomy for Bishops. He presents in an
Apart from the evident value of the Second Vatican Council in its work to purify and strengthen the Catholic Church, there is a secondary value in the picture it presents to the non-Catholic world of the old tree, the mother oak, putting out new branches and renewing herself after the winter. Not without reason, non-Catholics often doubt the power of Catholic thinkers to make honest judgments on the basis of research, observation and experience; Catholics themselves have at times doubted the existence of their own liberty. This book should help to clear the air.
1964 (320)
I had prepared a solemn Introduction to this book; and then, looking it over, decided to burn it. It flared up very quickly, for it was a wet June night in Wellington, and I had a heavy fire on.
The poems in this book are none of them very complicated. Some are ballads. They are also reasonably polite in their language. I chose the plainest poems so as not to add a weight to the back of anyone who feels already like an overloaded carthorse, waiting for the day when he (or she) can leave school and get a job, and read as little as possible for a change. I chose mainly polite ones for the sake of the teachers, who are quite often very polite people. Some of the best poems I happen to have written are more complicated and less polite. You will find them in other published books of mine.
These peaceful, melancholy poems of mine are like hand-grenades. They are loaded with the few things I happen to actually know. If I try to write about something I don’t know, the result is a half-poem, with the shape of a poem but with no explosive charge inside it, an empty hand-grenade. This can happen very easily. Many of the poems in the school anthologies are like that. It is a great pity.
One has to have somebody in mind when one writes a poem. A friend perhaps; or somebody imaginary to whom nothing has to be explained. I have in mind an old Dalmatian butcher with whom I worked for a year and a half in the city abattoirs. After many years on the chain, his hands were seamed with fine scars from the times when the knife had slipped. He could read a little, enough to follow the horses. A poem that he could not understand at all would have something wrong with it; and if he could understand it, it wouldn’t matter that a university man could not make head of tail of it. Education is a disadvantage for writing poems.
I have noticed that a good many Maori people seem able to make poems without much difficulty – a good action song, for example, or a poem about
It is best to use as few tricks as possible. The dead tricks petrify the language of a poem, and conceal the meaning which should be revealed by the words. I remember the beginning of a poem I wrote when I was seven years old:
When I was fifteen or so, I jazzed it up a bit. The new version ran like this:
The second version would go into an anthology, because it is polished and musical; but the first may have been the best. It had some kind of peculiar knowledge about the sea which is lost in the second version, in favour of imaginary cherubim.
People often talk about Beauty in connection with poems; but not often the people who write poems. Beauty is a by-product of poetry, I think. Certainly poems are not like vases of cut flowers which people can put on the mantelpiece and call beautiful. A good poem is more like a kumara dug up out of the ground. It has to make sense to the whole person, not to part of him or her, as a science formula or most of the pop songs do. A good poem makes life worth living.
People talk about New Zealand poetry too, but I doubt if there is any such thing, unless they mean simply that some people have written good poems in this country.
Poems come out of the chaos inside people, which the ordered world around us has no use for. This chaos cannot be house-trained like a dog or a cat. It is permanent and painful. It cannot be understood by the use of a formula. A man who writes poems makes it serve him by serving it. The same impulse that makes somebody smash the windows of a telephone kiosk can lie behind a good poem; but in the first case he does not understand why he is
It is a terrible thing to be a man or a woman, because one needs answers, and there are none in the books. The problem is to become wholly alive. Sometimes to read a poem, or look at a picture, or hear a song sung, may provide the beginning of an answer; but more often, to write the poem, paint the picture, or sing the song oneself, and preferably in company.
1964 (321)
This short book is a striking example of the kind of novel which breaks down the mental habits of propriety in order to attempt a greater unity than could otherwise be achieved. A woman commits bestiality and is burned to death. A young priest goes on a nightmare journey through the slums of New York, in search of his sister, who has disappeared after murdering her illegitimate child. Miss Helegua writes with a mixture of realism and surrealism. Emphatically the work is not a melodrama. The various horrific episodes are wholly convincing.
The young priest, who is the central character of the book, has been in one sense deranged by a vision of the unrelieved and absolute suffering by which certain of his parishioners are devoured: in another sense, he is brought to his senses and made able to approach his suffering neighbours as a fellow-victim. But the change involves a break with the ordinary pattern of his priestly duties. I feel that Miss Helegua intends to present him as a type of Christ in the modern world unaccepted because the world shuts out the knowledge of a suffering which seems too great for human participation. His search is inconclusive, and the book ends with his being thrown out of a church for preaching an unauthorised sermon while another priest is saying Mass.
As with most writers who draw on their experiences of the Catholic Church for use in fiction, there is a strong anti-clerical bias in Miss Helegua’s work. A mad priest is held up as an exemplar to the sane ones, so that they may not so easily forget the existence of the human heart. In practice such an exemplar would be of help to nobody; but in Miss Helegua’s story, the portrait is convincing and the sense of moral urgency is communicated.
1964 (322)
Mr Henderson’s sympathetic account of the origins and growth of the Ratana Church makes absorbing reading. Apart from the practice of faith-healing, Wiremu Ratana’s contribution to the life of the Maori people was threefold – a
Ratana’s grasp of Maori humour, his ability to know which way the wind was blowing, his use of religious symbols, even his very human thorns in the flesh, combine to make a most challenging and magnetic figure, unmistakeably Maori, himself a meeting-place for the desires of his people. There is one difficulty, however, which Mr Henderson chooses to skate over, as a matter for theological disputation only – the fact that the Ratana Church abandoned the traditional Christian rite of Baptism, substituting a form of its own. Granted enormous variations in the interpretation of Scripture, and equally varying degrees of devotion to the Person of Christ, the one objective factor which unites the majority of the Protestant churches is the retention of the traditional rite of Baptism.
The intense allegiance of Ratana’s followers to him as a prophet was perhaps no more than the natural due of a leader who had brought them hope in a time of darkness and racial humiliation. The founding of a separate Church was in no way contrary to the ordinary process of fission which is a characteristic of Protestant religious development. Politically and socially the Ratana movement did answer and continues to answer some of the real needs of the Maori people. The difficulty lies in another quarter – that what was brought into being as a bulwark against tohungaism could end nearer to what it resisted than to what it defended.
1964 (323)
In Thomas Baird’s humorous novel, the sale of the works of old masters is inextricably mingled with the domestic entanglements of the rich. The flash- point of the novel occurs when the son of a rich American pairs off with the daughter of a Greek millionaire. The two young people seem curiously human and fragile in a world of moneyed armadillos and troglodytes. The book is very readable, a first-class work of light entertainment.
A Cage of Humming-Birds is also most readable, an intricate story of tension and inter-marriage between two South African families, with (what is rare in these days) no comment whatever on racial problems. Perhaps it is the insularity of the white enclave in South Africa which accounts for the sense Miss Drummond conveys of a closely inbred society. The heroine, Sabrina, intended to represent a latter-day Helen of Troy, for whom the towers of the Wittlin family burn, is unfortunately never quite a believable character.
Mr Youd’s competent but flat account of a liaison conducted in the shadow
Predictably enough, the best novel is the last one. Told in the first person by the local baker in an English country town, it describes his canny involvement with Mrs Brackett, the wife of a local flamboyant ne’er-do-well. Each character – the baker’s mother, his dead father, Mr and Mrs Brackett, and various other local people – comes to life in the space of a few words. The yarn rings true from start to finish.
1964 (324)
It may seem peculiar that a poet should have the job of opening the first exhibition of a New Zealand painter. In a way it is; in a way it is not. The language of the art critic is (thank God) a closed book to me. Yet, though the mediums are various, a certain basic faculty of natural contemplation precedes and underlies the creation of any work of art, whether it be a poem or a picture or something else. So I can speak from that primitive common ground.
I remember, in Christchurch, having the privilege of the company of Colin McCahon. On one occasion we sat on the bank of the Avon and threw empty bottles at the ducks. We did not discuss poetry or painting, but various other matters that concerned the lives we had to live. McCahon was then working as a market gardener. He thus divided the work for which he was paid from the work which he was born to carry out. I remember him saying that he would continue to paint crucifixions till he could paint a happy one. Most New Zealand artists have to go young into the houses of ill fame. One has to have a clear mind and a strong will to avoid this. McCahon avoided it. I think Drew Peters has also kept free of it. This gives him a great initial advantage.
A girl who had worked in a house of ill fame once remarked to me that though she had quite liked the work and the pay was good, she found it unendurably irritating when the clients spoke of love. In the same way, I think, the clients of the commercial artist should abstain from speaking of art, when they want a sketch of somebody wearing brassieres or a new mural for a power station. Let us talk of technique but not of art, in relation to the works of the journalistic brothel. To do otherwise is to insult the despair of the performers.
It seems to me that our art schools are places where the old whores teach the beginners the tricks of the trade. I have heard the story (it could be apocryphal) of the teacher in one of our art schools who was also a producer of popular works. He had a filing cabinet loaded with geometrical sketches (A – a hill and a tree; B – a road and a house; C – a creek and a toetoe bush
. . .) and was able to combine these sketches in endless combinations for his moneyed public. I believe that in later life he tried to leave the house of ill fame, but could not manage it. The habits had become part of him.
For some the position is even simpler. There was the young man, who showed some talent in High School, and got a job putting the dot on the ‘I’ in the advertisement for Zip heaters.
To speak instead of art. If you look round these walls you will see many images of death. Drew Peters has mentioned in his brief written statement of his experiences as a young man at the time of the bombing of Europe. The sense that death is part of life is a central theme with which he grapples; as McCahon did in his crucifixions. It is an inevitable theme in this age.
A work of art is not a representation but a sacred object. The tribesmen made their masks with beards of grass to ward off the demons and bring rain. Two forces were at work: the benign power of life that tries to absorb and include what would otherwise destroy it; and the response of the artist, including at least a minimal technical ability. Drew Peters is drawn somewhat to the making of ikons. After what I have already mentioned, his integrity, I would stress his originality; not novelty, but a return to natural origins, the tranquil shapes of nature torn open by the power of death. These shapes exist in the void of unhope (so different from the cheerful and soothing hell of the journalistic brothel) and await the birth of new life as the images of the tribesmen awaited rain and fertility. Et verbum caro factum est . . .
What is the position of the artist at this present gathering, this cultural ceremony? Art precedes culture; culture springs from art, as a reflection of a reflection of what is known. Thus the natural position of the artist is one of humiliation, spiritual destitution, a darkness that waits for the birth of light.
1964 (325)
It is a sign of the breaking of barriers between New Zealand and England – the falling into disuse of the old fallacy of condescension towards ‘colonial’ culture – that the Oxford University Press has published yet another book of verse by a New Zealand poet. Enough good poems had been written here ten years ago to warrant overseas publication; but English publishers had not yet changed their habits of thought. The Oxford University Press is to be congratulated on its timely and positive move, and, in the case of Mr Campbell’s book, on a superb format and cover design.
Mr Campbell has suffered perhaps from being regarded as pre-eminently a poet of youth – the power, glamour, and legendary invulnerability of youth. It was this quality in his work which made him our most popular poet. The poems deserved it; but that’s beside the point. People have always wanted poets to be undomesticated creatures, sensuous though not sensual, survivors from Eden, myth-makers, fated to die young. The poets disappoint them. In Mr Campbell’s case, after a long period of hibernation, he began to write different poems – stripped, hard, ironical poems, relying on structure rather than glamour to carry the mood:
I quote these lines from ‘The Climber’, a poem of Mr Campbell’s second period, as good as any he wrote in his first, not excluding even the magnificent and well-known ‘Elegy’. Among new material, there is also the sequence ‘Sanctuary of Spirits’, written originally for radio, in which Mr Campbell makes a mainly successful use of episodes from the career of Te Rauparaha. Any readers interested in a modern handling of Maori themes should buy the book and read it.
1964 (326)
A double anthology of Australian verse, covering the time from 1788 to the present day, must obviously present special problems for its editors, and most of all, a difficulty in the decision whether to give prominence to work on account of its place in the development of Australian language, myth and manners, or simply on account of its merit as writing. Inevitably the task of Professor Moore is the harder one. He has made a selection of verse from the time of settlement until 1930, dividing his book successively into – Folk
His preference for and appreciation of ballads saves the book from becoming a mere historical compendium of mediocre verse. It is good that he gives Ogilvie and Lindsay Gordon their due, especially the latter, whose few good poems are indestructible: on the other hand, following the present trend in criticism, he allows too little value to Henry Lawson’s work, which has the breadth and monotony of a groundswell after a storm, and for all its clumsinesses, does not date as the work of the cleverer Paterson does.
The descent from the balladeers, and those who philosophised on nationality and exile, to the poets of the Nineties to the Thirties, is like entering a stuffy sitting-room after a walk out-of-doors. Almost without exception, their poems are purely literary constructions, a narrow algebra ringing the changes on Fate and God and Time; and the worst of them, Hugh McCrae, has been given the most space. I cannot agree either with the editor’s inflated estimate of Mary Gilmore, undoubtedly an impressive personality, but a writer whose work is vitiated by generalities.
After this dimly-lit burrow, it is a relief to come to the second volume and Kenneth Slessor’s great poem, ‘Beach Burial’ –
There are still many generalities, but the dry watershed has been crossed: and the verses of Fitzgerald, Hope, Campbell, Manifold, McAuley, Buckley, and Douglas Stewart himself, express a mature, exact appraisal of the human condition. One notices that the emphasis on Australian nationality has slackened. Women writers – Wright, Dobson, Cato, Harwood, McDonald – are well represented. There are few poems that fail in quality and conciseness. The commentary can suitably end with a quotation from Gwen Harwood’s remarkable poem ‘Last Meeting’ –
The personal occasion has been re-established as the central matter of poetry; and the poets who write in Australia no longer lack good models.
1964 (327)
It is difficult to say exactly what sets a poet in the first rank of his generation or decade. It cannot entirely be gained by trying; or by brains alone; or heart alone. The capacity to bring the whole of one’s mind to bear upon some real part of one’s experience would come pretty near to it – this augmented by style, which is far more a quality of mind than a habit of technique. It seems to me that Alexander Craig, an Australian poet not previously more fecund or able than others, has begun to write not just poems, but poems of our time from which meaning exudes, like sweat from the pores of the skin –
I quote the beginning of ‘Lovers in Winter’; and it is hard to draw back from quoting the whole poem, since part of the excellence of Mr Craig’s verse is a strength of total structure – thought, feeling, image, combined in each
1964 (328)
These little books of verse provide some immediate answer to the publisher’s problem of making the work of new poets quickly and cheaply available. But they are not wholly satisfactory in format. The typography, though clear, is undistinguished; the poems are too crowded; and the books have the appearance of impermanence.
Nancy Bruce’s poems express on the whole the kind of emotion that people feel on public occasions, reflecting rather what many New Zealanders think of their country than what that country is. The verses on Maori themes are perhaps too vaguely optimistic. One is tempted to suggest that the poet should take a trip up the Wanganui River, where the lands, homes, meeting houses, battlegrounds and graveyards of the Ngati Awa are soon to be drowned under an artificial lake so that our factories may have a little more electricity to make plastic toys – and then that she should write an exact documentary poem on the projected destruction of a longstanding community. That would command respect, and would not be beyond her quite real journalistic powers.
I suspect that shoddy models are to blame for certain languors and vaguenesses in Mr Parmée’s poetry. In his best poem, ‘The Pa’, one can distinguish the emergence of an elsewhere half-buried vision –
It gives one hope for Mr Parmée’s work in the future.
In some ways Patricia Godsiff has achieved the imagist goal of abstract statement in poetry. ‘Regatta’, ‘Moonlight Sonata’, ‘Drowned Girl’, ‘Sunflowers’, ‘Fishing Village’ – I feel that in these poems she is doing what a painter commonly does – presenting the observer with an apparently impersonal microcosm of reality. The formal quality of her work is not, I think, in doubt; it is her highly oblique approach which leaves me uncertain, for it could well lead to a mannered poetry of the shallows. There are parallels in American verse – Marianne Moore, for example, whose intricate brocades
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These four poets have some common links of style – the somewhat muted philosophic verse with an accent on craftsmanship which serves Australian poets as a hold-all. One notes with interest a steady withdrawal to traditional forms, the sonnet, the four-beat line, the regular stanza. But John Blight’s competent sonnets are curiously bookish; Francis Webb’s carefully worked stanzas bring a lens of Thomist philosophy to bear on events both arbitrary and chaotic – the music of Bruckner, a kookaburra seen on television, the pains suffered by the inmates of a mental hospital ward; and John Thompson never quite leaves some kind of whimsical weekday pulpit.
The difficulty is, I think, that each poet (of the three so far mentioned) has tried to build poems from philosophical comment on particular events, rather than by striking a spark from the event itself, and letting the poem take its course. There are even fewer good philosophers than good poets in the world; and their combination in one man is a greater rarity. These poets write carefully, but in their work one rarely gets the impression that the event demanded the poem.
James McAuley is, however, a poet of quite a different fibre. One had heard his austere voice come remotely over the Tasman, telling the moderns to repent and return to regular metres, logical metaphors, and the forsaken grove of Dryden. It seemed the voice of a misguided antiquarian; and no less so when linked to a somewhat illiberal Catholic political mysticism. But Captain Quiros forces an unintended capitulation and assent – a successful short epic, in regular pentameters and seven-line stanzas, about the lifelong meditation and voyages of a Spanish navigator.
I have not read a poem like it, written in this century, and would have thought the job could not be done. But McAuley has done it, with a quiet success that elicits admiration and indeed some awe; for the poem is a very beautiful one, clear-cut, lucid, chiselled from the rock, with human force and robust melancholy, a work relevant to the mysteries of identity that afflict Australians and New Zealanders alike. The narrative has a truly oracular quality, as if the words were spoken by the figure-head of Quiros’s own ship. It is a formidable achievement.
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This book contains a careful selection of the poems of Hone Tuwhare, the best-known poet of Maori descent writing in English. Tuwhare’s style owes something to free verse tradition, something (whether or not the author is bilingual) to the energy and natural metaphors of Maori speech, and only its faults to a certain debris absorbed from versifiers less gifted than himself. When Tuwhare is boldest and most his own master, he breaks all nets of imitation with a bare statement of the condition of man:
or –
or –
The last quotation I have given here, from the poem ‘Tangi’, would lose much of its meaning for a reader who lacked knowledge of Maori funeral ceremonies, and especially the carrying of green leaves by the mourners. And this raises the point of possible obscurity. Has Tuwhare the right to use images whose meaning will be inaccessible to those who are ignorant of Maori thought and custom? I think he has that right, since greater richness comes from the double level of symbolism; and a reader worth his salt would be led
The keynote of Tuwhare’s writing is an uncommon emotional honesty. There is hardly a trace of padding, of constructed abstract comment in his work. As a result he writes either superbly (as, for example, in ‘Roads’, ‘Tangi’, ‘A Disciple Dreams’, ‘Monologue’, ‘Moon Daughter’, ‘The Girl in the Park’, ‘Importune the East Wind’) or imperfectly, with a cluster of fragments, true in themselves but not joined in a total unity. There is no middle road of the merely competent; and the reader has the advantage of knowing that the reality prior to the poem is never faked or invented. Each poem is alive from start to finish.
Tuwhare’s verse could be admired for reasons outside the value of the poems themselves – because he is Maori (a reason for the keen racialist); because he is a man who works with his hands (a reason for the romantic Leftist) – but these things are in the long run irrelevant. It is certainly true that he uses the English language with a new slant, a new emotional element, from a Maori point of view; and his occupation may deliver him from the academic vices. But the best poems stand beyond this, on their own merits, as authentic personal intuitions of the meaning of life and death. I find Tuwhare’s work most nearly perfect when he deals with the relationship of men and women, or alternately with the inner darkness and poverty experienced by a modern man who is gripped by the mechanical necessities of Western life. The shock of warmth and discovery, as one reads these poems, happens again and again.
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The rising cost of books at times seems astronomical. When I was a boy (not an astronomical time ago) this Australian book would have cost me at most five shillings; it now costs fifteen shillings, which means that something has tripled, and I do not think it can be solely the cost of living or the cost of paper. Meanwhile the cost of liquor has only doubled. A thrifty man would drink more and read less.
But the Australian selection is certainly worth buying. I notice, in particular, ‘Person to Person’, by Gwen Harwood, ‘The Convict and the Lady’, by James McAuley, ‘Words with Galatea’, by David Campbell, ‘Jack the Ripper’, by Charles Higham, ‘Country Idyll’, by Dorothy Hewett, and ‘Crossing the Frontier’, by A.D. Hope. And this list suggests that I value the established Australian poets most; which is true, for I find chiefly among them a genuine myth-making power. The newest writers seem all too well adjusted to the Age of the Computer. The Australian poets one returns to
It is unfortunate that the publishers of Mr Walsh’s small book of verse thought fit to include a four-page Introduction by a friend. The poems do not need interpretation. They are naïve, sincere, idealist comments on God, culture, sex and American college life by a lecturer in English who is also an Episcopalian clergyman; and behind them one seems to detect an unfathomable tiredness.
A translation of Gide’s early surrealist account of an imaginary voyage (written in 1892) is of interest chiefly for the light it sheds on other works. Its ornate erotic style and highly literary images seem now merely pretentious; but the passages which refer, under the name of Ellis, to Gide’s cousin and wife-to-be, Madeleine, are still real and forceful.
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Samuel Beckett’s Play was performed in Germany in 1963. Three characters, a man and two women, occupy three large urns on the stage. Their monologues (monologues even when recited in chorus) recapitulate the contours of a hopeless triangular relationship. It seems likely that Beckett is dramatising an imagined state of life after death similar to that envisaged by Sartre in the play In Camera. The language is dense, fragmentary and obscure: but the vision has its own perverse force. The two small radio pieces, Words and Music and Cascando, are more private and disjointed. It is doubtful whether even a true poet of the Absurd, such as Beckett, has tried to be, can write successfully for public media in a code language.
A selection from the Times Literary Supplement 1963 contains, among other pieces, a survey of the critical standards of W.H. Auden, some valuable political comment on Hitler and his generals, and a down-grading review of Henry Miller’s until-recently banned writings. The selection is necessarily very heterogeneous, at its best an interesting rag-bag.
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It is possible that I don’t know enough about Australia to write accurately about that country. On the other hand, many New Zealanders may know less. I don’t mean objective facts – imports, exports, rainfall, population. These clutter up the mind and obstruct understanding. I mean the special smell of the Aussie, the way he appears to others and the way he looks at himself. A couple of generations back the Kiwi learnt something of this from the bush balladeers, Paterson, Lawson and Ogilvie. In half the farmhouse kitchens and
Knowledge of another country generally begins with the spectacular and exotic: the kangaroo, the platypus, the fist-fight and the swear-word. But I suspect that the ordinary Australian shares a great deal with his New Zealand cousin – each is a branch of the tree of Western man, that tree which is tougher than iron, whose sap is money and whose leaves are abstract thought. Thus the pains of the Aussie may well be the pains of the Kiwi.
Perhaps the true image of Australia would be a country girl come to town, Queen of the Wool Festival, standing awkwardly in front of the cameras, with her eye on a steady man and a house in the suburbs, and her heart hidden under a tea cosy. It is not a cheering thought. I know the lady well enough from her New Zealand counterpart. The same vacant doll’s eyes: the same certainty that only cranks love truth and only queers write poems.
It is an image of arrogant prosperity. The Aussies, when they brag, go a long way to confirm it. But bragging is only an aspect of the world of mirrors by which Western man tries to conceal from himself his anguish and his doubt of personal identity. I think the real Australia is less successful and more human.
Some time ago, in a Wellington hotel, I met an Aussie professional gambler. A redfaced hulk of a man in his late forties or early fifties, he was lying in bed with a bad attack of brewer’s asthma; and he talked to me for a little. Apparently he followed the gambling schools in a kind of seasonal migration from Australia to New Zealand to Hawaii, a bird of passage dodging among storms.
He had something in common with other Aussies I have met – a dogged belligerence that covered, like a lid, a bottomless sense of being in the wrong. I remember the housemaid coming into the room to give him a piece of her mind – he had done or said something that offended her – and how he accepted it without protest, as if it was his natural due from life. I think he saw, behind the housemaid’s hard face, the image of an aunt or a mother – someone permanently and bitterly in the right, whose voice echoed in the rooms of childhood. And the sound of that voice reassured him. She was in the right, he was in the wrong, and so the world turned round on a firm hub. It would never have occurred to him, I think, that any other order was possible, or that the solitary sensitivity he carried through life like useless luggage might have received a better welcome.
The same reactions are often visible in the adult male Kiwi. But I think the Aussie wanders more, expects even less, and is even more markedly a stranger in his own house.
This Aussie had a romantic view of his own upbringing. The Mum, the Dad, the brothers and sisters, in the old homestead with the rose trellis at the back door, were great people. They still waited, in a foggy area at the back of his mind, and worried about the black sheep of the family. Perhaps if he had been able to see them differently – to see more exactly the grim shack or suburban box from which he had fled like an opossum from a burning tree, and the real companions of that first ordeal – then he might have been able in turn to break free from the death-march of hotel rooms and easy money and frayed nerves, and in some way have become glad to be himself. But he was trapped by his idea of his own iniquity, a sad sheep in wolf ’s clothing.
They seem to breed the women tough in Australia. I remember staying about thirty years ago with a great-aunt in a Sydney suburb. Her house stood in a patch of uncleared bush. I remember watching the bulldog ants marching aggressively over the sun-cracked ground at her back door. Huge brown spiders used to scuttle up the walls; and the girl who helped in the house used to knock them down nonchalantly with a broom. A New Zealand girl would have stood and yelled.
My gambler acquaintance did not hate women. But he did not like them much either. I think he had found the Aussie women too tough for him. He did not feel they would ever join him to the earth he had come from, or give him a place of rest. His masculinity had been bent back on itself like the club root of a tree growing in a stony soil.
This kind of thing may account for the ideal of ‘mateship’ put forward by Henry Lawson:
It is a comradeship established on the edge of despair, between men wandering or working together, in which all faults are accepted or overlooked. I have a great respect for Lawson. He cuts away the pastoral dream and shows the harshness of Australian farm life, and the deep solitude of the individual Aussie, his barren eccentric freedom and his unused sensitivity.
Perhaps I build too much on a small knowledge of those who wander inside or outside Australia – the people of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – but it seems to me that a hatred of established authority lies deep in the Australian mind. I envy Australia the bones of her dead convicts. The Aussie has the ghosts of his great-granduncles to remind him that the society he lives in (like any other human society) is a prison cemented by the blood of underdogs, and that men are not capable of much justice. The Kiwi finds this more difficult to realise. Unless he was born a Maori, his view of the law and
I see the convicts as the fathers of the Utopian socialist dream of the underdog which springs up in Australia again and again like grass on the plains when the drought has broken. At the building of a palace, the kings of the old civilisation would kill a slave or two and bury them under the doorstep. The ghosts of the slain would then function as guards and doorkeepers. So under the doorstep of Australia – that welcome mat of dry earth and scrub which the visitor sees first when his plane noses in from the Tasman – the bones of the convicts lie to remind the world that no society is just.
And who was Ned Kelly? I remember the striking pictures of a modern Australian painter who shows Kelly as the man in the iron mask, riding among the flowers of the Australian spring, or striding out to his last stand from the burning pub at Glenrowan. John Manifold speaks of a friend who died in Crete in almost the same way:
I think this tremendous nihilist courage may have been handed down from those who died on the gallows or under the lash. It has little to do with the noise of radio commercialism that batters the mind in the Australian cities; and it has not bred tolerance of the aboriginals or the New Australians. But it can perhaps carry the iron mountain of the modern world on its back, and not be destroyed or cry out under the weight.
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In the spiritual life, I have often suspected there are two kinds of people – no, not saints and sinners, but methodical people and muddlers. (As you may have guessed, I belong to the second group, with the postmen who cannot tell what month it is, and housewives who burn the roast.) Father Clynes’s book
For the awkward squad in particular, I must wholeheartedly recommend Michel Quoist’s book of prayers. For the best devotional reading, I think three elements are required: a conformity with Catholic truth, a connection with the everyday experience of believers, and the kind of freshness and depth that belong to a mind and heart open to the influence of the Holy Spirit. These three elements combine most fortunately in Michel Quoist’s book –
These prayers should rather be called meditations. They have the effect of a diffused and primitive poetry. I cannot imagine that anyone, despite the author’s expressed intention, would use them as personal prayers; but I can well imagine that many readers will find their spiritual life jarred, jolted, refreshed and enriched by them. They spring from many circumstances of daily life – the care of children, the use of trains and telephones, a funeral, a separated marriage, hunger, housing, a hospital visit, a drunk man in the street, a bald head at a lecture, a game of football, and the various interior states of peace, conflict and dereliction which are part of a life given to the charge of Jesus.
The chief truth which the author urges by many anecdotes is that the best (and often the only) way to love God is to love one’s immediate and distant neighbours with a burning, practical, patient and sacrificial love. He points out that this may well mean the loss of one’s somewhat selfish peace of mind;
It is a book to be read, a book to be lived, and a book to be loved.
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Edith Sitwell, born in 1887, died near the end of 1964. In the November issue of the London Magazine of that year, Mr Julian Symons wrote:
Edith Sitwell’s rhetoric is the product merely of words ringing like bells in her head. Those who thought otherwise for a few years were deceived by the experience of war . . . . At no other time than during the war could poems which reverted in their language to Victorian archaism and rhetoric, poems so lacking in coherent thought and so determined to ignore the world of objects in which we live, have deceived so many intelligent critics . . .
I quote Mr Symons because he is the sort of critic – and there are many of them – who are fundamentally repelled and irritated by Edith Sitwell’s poetry. In a long debunking article, he argues that her verse is out of touch with reality – that no intelligent critics have been taken in for long by it – that her works of criticism are mainly nonsense – that she has desired above all to be fashionable – that she indulges, in her later poems, in ‘a rash of capital letters’ – that in her verse ‘there are few memorable and exact images, there is nothing but an endless Swinburnian flow of would-be evocative words’.
Mr Symons’s main argument boils down to this – that Edith Sitwell took the content of her poems almost entirely from literary sources, not from any experience of life. I think he is mistaken; and I think I can prove it. That will be my own modest way of paying a tribute to a great modern poet who has just died.
Mr Symons is not a woman; nor am I. But I have suspected that the experiences of men and women are in certain ways different; and so the symbols they use are different. There are no male Emily Brontës, no male Colettes, for example. To understand the writing of Emily Brontë or Colette – or, I suggest, Edith Sitwell – a man has to make an imaginative leap – he has to see the world from a woman’s point of view. Otherwise he will think: ‘Why the hell can’t this writer express the feelings I would have, only better; think the thoughts I would think, only better? Why does she persist in seeing blue where I see green?’ I think Mr Symons has made this mistake. Edith Sitwell is a remarkably female poet, and not perhaps in a way that Mr Symons is used to. I am quite willing to grant a number of Mr Symons’s minor contentions:
That Edith Sitwell was limited by an upper-class environment.Yes; but she dug deep, which is usually a woman’s way of coping with limits.
That Edith Sitwell wrote a lot of silly criticism.Yes; but the silliness usually took the form of hero-worship for dead writers, an amiable enough vice. And it did not affect her poems.
That Edith Sitwell was personally flamboyant and eccentric.Yes; I think it was again a woman’s way of coping with limits; perhaps an old-fashioned way. She was a Victorian in her childhood. Eccentricity is one alternative to rebellion, I think – and it does show in her poetry – that she had a great sympathy with the weak, the sad, the cramped, the people irretrievably deformed by their conditions of life, and a horror of hurting them. Perhaps she felt that way about her own equally eccentric family. The brusque normality of modern life is often only a shell, anyway.
That Edith Sitwell’s theories about assonance and alliteration were often rather far-fetched.Yes; but I think she concentrated on theories of form as a counter-balance to the massive, private, and highly-charged experience of life that lay behind the poems.
Speaking of fashion – as Mr Symons does – it is not the fashion at the present time to admire broad, massive structures in poetry. Lord Byron would hardly get a look-in with the modern critics, American or English. William Blake would be a dead duck. The reason for this lies chiefly in the dry, anti- emotional quality of intellectual life in the age of the computer and the atom bomb. Some writers can fit in with it; but some just can’t. Dylan Thomas fought it successfully, establishing his own norms; and Edith Sitwell did the same. Because they had to, or else not write at all.
At this point, I think we can forget the unfortunate Mr Symons. He had the bad luck to get his lively, destructive, controversial, abusive, debunking article published just about the time when Edith Sitwell died. Death takes the fun out of things. It also puts a seal on the work of any writer. Often a pattern emerges from the work which was not so clearly apparent during the writer’s lifetime.
Roughly four stages, or phases of development, can be distinguished in Edith Sitwell’s poetry:
A stage of innocence, during which the poet experimented with rhythms, and wrote lively, obscure poems based on childhood and adolescent experience; a stage of pain, darkness and crisis, when she wrote several passionate love poems, and expressed a new knowledge of human evil; a brief period – related to the one I have just mentioned – when she wrote war poems with a strong religious emphasis; a final stage of gradual reconciliation to old age and the inevitability of death.
This is not a biographical talk. I do not know much about Edith Sitwell’s life; nor do I want to know much about the trivialities that are often called a life – who her acquaintances were; whether she was a meat-eater or a vegetarian; what she said when she lost her temper. The significant events are already explicit or implicit in her poetry.
The early poems have been widely anthologised – perhaps because they have a high surface polish and remind one, at first, of sophisticated nursery rhymes. In his Introduction to the Faber Book of Modern Verse Michael Roberts spoke of ‘the relaxation-poems . . . those in which words associate themselves mainly according to relations and similarities of sound, as in Miss Sitwell’s “Hornpipe” . . .’.
But is this true? Perhaps the critics and editors have been lazy.
The poem ‘Hornpipe’ begins with dancing sailors, as if in a Benjamin Britten ballet. The white horses of the sea are specifically the rocking-horses of early childhood. The sky like a huge, dumb rhinoceros watches Lady Venus rise out of the ocean. She resembles an opulent musical comedy actress, a Victorian ‘shady lady’, sitting or lying on a horsehair sofa. Meanwhile Lord Tennyson writes his poems, and Queen Victoria comes riding on an iceberg whose colours resemble those of the Albert Memorial.
They both see an Emperor from Zanzibar laying the kingdoms of the world at the feet of Madam Venus. Two characters – one military (Captain Francasse) and one a baronet (Sir Bacchus) – are drinking brandy together (‘the black tarred grapes’ blood’) – and the grapes were plucked from tartan leaves by a wind whose grief age could not wither – the grief, I take it, of Queen Victoria at the death of the Prince Consort.
Queen Victoria, riding on the rocking-horse of a wave, remarks to Lord Tennyson that Madam Venus is very far from being her cup of tea; in fact the whole situation is out of hand –
This is hardly the geometry of Euclid; but neither is it nonsense. It is most distinctly a poem about the Victorian age. Not just memories of childhood – but the shrewd, unsentimental child’s vision itself, in which there is no
The Devil is again a hard-drinking baronet; and the hotel is located in Hell, where a Victorian temperance worker might expect to find it. But Hell is also the Greek Hades where Proserpine fell from the light of the sun – that is, where she became a fallen woman. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears in this poem also, persecuted by a deputation of temperance workers; and finally –
The waves of the sea resemble the wooden soldiers of the nursery. The world is a hot, explosive place, where the forces of instinct and the forces of morality and custom clash head-on.
The strong irrational fears of childhood are present in several of the early poems –
Some critics have objected to the artificiality of the early poems – (for example) ‘what is noticeable . . . is that they almost exclude reference to the world of natural objects . . .’. But surely this is inevitable, if – as I suggest – the poems are based on childhood experience. One has to see in the mind’s eye, a young female child growing up in a large country house, first in Victorian, then in Edwardian England. She contemplates the objects of the nursery or the strawberries in the kitchen garden at the back of the house – she senses the eccentricity of her baronet father – she loves and sympathises with the old gardener and the tired timid housemaid – she resents the French governess whose job it is to turn her into a lady –
The child is very much aware of the ambiguity of adult life. If she herself were not present, she feels that the Frenchwoman would turn back to somebody milking goats – or possibly into an actual nanny-goat. This child – thank God – is never wholly absent from Edith Sitwell’s understanding of life. She keeps the odd-woman-out position of a child eavesdropping from the landing on the incomprehensible adult conversations – sympathetic to waifs and no-hopers – afraid of death and the dark, yet believing that somehow the Garden of Eden can be found – a painful, solitary position, which nevertheless contains an inextinguishable spark of innocence and a lifelong passion to create and harmonise and reconcile.
One obstacle to understanding the poetry of the second stage is the open secret of Edith Sitwell’s life – a secret that her critics have lacked either the brains or the sympathy to penetrate – the fact that her love poems are written to other women –
The poet sees herself as a masculine fool or jester unsuccessfully courting a princess. Sometimes, though, the love is mutual and reciprocated –
But Eros is a dangerous god; and the dangers of homosexual love – I use the term with the utmost respect – are particularly great, because of that sealed-off, terrible underworld which waits for anyone who falls from the tightrope of fidelity. From the interior evidence of the poem ‘Gold Coast Customs’ I conclude that the woman to whom the poet was most deeply attached left her and chose instead a wealthy, corrupt, Lesbian socialite as a partner –
The beloved has crossed the hairline that divides the anchored from the lost in homosexual society –
By this defection she has destroyed the poet’s paradise of difficult innocence –
The torment comes partly from the fact that the innocent love can no longer be separated from a run-of-the-mill liaison inside the Lesbian socialite menagerie. There is some danger of the loss of reason –
At least the poet could lose her inner sight, which depends on retaining a centre of innocence. But what happens is different. ‘Gold Coast Customs’ is Edith Sitwell’s version of Dante’s Inferno. The customs of modern London are identified with the markets of the Gold Coast in the early nineteenth century, when human flesh was sold openly for cannibal consumption. The hideous fashionable parties go on cheek-to-jowl with the life of the outcasts of the city – sailors, beggars, prostitutes and the neglected old. In part, the poem is a savage satire on the callousness of the rich; but it digs deeper, into the horror of spiritual death which underlies the world of rich and poor alike. I regard it as a key poem for the understanding of Edith Sitwell’s work. Most of the images of the later poems can be found – at least embryonically – somewhere in its magnificent, ferocious, compassionate, sprawling length. It embodies a creative response to the problem of human evil.
The experience of what seems betrayal in love – the sense of some almost fatal wound inflicted – the sense, above all, that Love, or God, or one’s own soul, are dying – this experience is all but universal for the human race. And a writer can hardly write for the multitude unless he or she has been burnt by it. The particular happening – a lost lover, a death, some fault of one’s own – hardly matters. The point is – at least for a writer’s purpose – that he or she recognises inwardly what a child recognises only outwardly – the mystery that theologians have called the Fall of Man. The experience presents a hurdle. Either the writer stops writing; or else writes as if the Fall had not occurred – dead work, sentimental work – or else begins to write truthful poems about the Fall. Edith Sitwell, to her credit, accepted the hardest alternative. And this meant that from then on she stood outside the pattern of bourgeois society – because in bourgeois society only other people are fallen – never oneself, or one’s friends and neighbours.
The poems of Edith Sitwell’s third phase – the war poems – are an offshoot of a basically Christian approach to the problem of human evil –
The Rain is the flood of bombs that descended on London in 1940. The poet does not dodge the essential problem – she does not even mention the war in nationalist terms – because the offence is by humanity against humanity. She does make the comment that the Rich and the Poor, at the point of death are no longer divided. Christ Himself is seen as one of the Poor – the Starved Man, who is at the receiving end of all historical brutality. Edith Sitwell was peculiarly sensitive to the hidden crime of callousness by the Haves of the modern world towards the Have-Nots – perhaps because she grew up in a well-to-do family. Her answer is not political but religious – a regeneration of the spirit of charity among men.
In the second of ‘Three Poems of the Atomic Age’, she sees the atomic explosion at Hiroshima revealing as if in a huge gash in the earth ‘the body of our brother Lazarus’ – observing correctly that (outside political or national categories) that atrocity was a massacre of the Have-Nots by the Haves. The poem is one of accusation –
I do not feel that her religious poetry is wholly successful. She abandons the early experiments with verse-form and relies on the force of an enormous sincerity. Yet perhaps her partial successes in this field are more significant that the dry, accurate trivialities of many of her contemporaries. At least she has tackled at depth the problems of the modern world. I cannot see how any critic could claim that her later work is over-literary.
The fourth and final stage is the one which I have chosen to give a title to this talk – the time of the Pythoness. An old woman has the right to give her thoughts to others – a speaking part of the earth itself – like the priestess of the Delphic oracle – from outside the cycle of generation. In these last poems Edith Sitwell acknowledges fellowship with all living creatures. Thus, in her sequence, ‘The Bee Oracles’ –
Some critics may think this is outdated nonsense. I think it is the rarest of all things – the triumph song of an old woman, able to accept whatever has happened to her, and whatever is going to happen, including death. And I think it will outlast many generations.
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The artist Albert Namatjira was one of the very few Aborigines who have gained a partial acceptance by the highly colour-conscious Australian white community by virtue of a special talent. Mrs Batty, a student of Aboriginal legends, who was closely acquainted with Namatjira, has written this account of his life and work. It seems that Namatjira steered a difficult middle course between the tribal groups, which he never abandoned, and the adulation of members of the white community, who regarded him as a curiosity. Mrs Batty writes unpretentiously and with evident sympathy, though there are touches of condescension in her description of the culture of the Aranda tribe to which Namatjira belonged. There was in fact a school of Aranda artists, who had adapted the method of Aboriginal art to produce mock weapons for sale, with designs burnt into the wood with red-hot fencing wire. Namatjira extended their techniques, using mulga plaques; and eventually, instructed by the artist Rex Battarbee, he learnt the use of water-colours.
Namatjira’s subsequent life was not wholly tragic. He raised a family, and his paintings earned money which he used chiefly to benefit his tribe. But the irony of his relationship to the white community is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that having been granted full Australian citizenship – a right denied to the Aborigines – and thus having acquired the right to buy liquor, he was sentenced in 1959 to six months’ hard labour for supplying liquor to a fellow tribesman. The sentence humiliated him and extinguished his desire to paint. He died soon afterwards. Mrs Batty’s account of his last years is particularly effective. It could be said that Namatjira died a victim of that dubious scale of values by which a man is considered important because of what he does, not because of who he is.
1965 (337)
Peter Bland, an English immigrant, began his writing career in this country and has had verse published freely in local periodicals. He became the most vigorous of the New Zealand poets of the Fifties. The work in this book shows a broad humane grasp of the middle range of experience – happenings in the lives of the poet’s children, the pleasures and pains of marriage, the small incidents which strike a spark from the stone of daily monotony. It is precisely
Thus he has a double vision – two countries, two ways of life, seen in juxtaposition – and when he examines the characteristic rootlessness of New Zealand suburbia, the images have stereoscopic depth. His laconic style is deceptive. In fact his work possesses a formidable maturity.
The poems in Richard Packer’s first book fall broadly into two categories – personal and apocalyptic. That perfectly constructed poem, ‘No Way Out’, is representative of the first kind –
Though admirable in its vigour ‘The Night after Wormwood’, a colloquy between the last man on earth and his guardian archetype, is the kind of poem one has often hoped for and almost never found. There are one or two poems where an extreme compression of metaphors leads to an opaque density, but they should open out in a degree to the many readings they deserve. Mr Packer’s hard, violent poems express most powerfully the tensions and despairs below the moral surfaces of an affluent society. I have rarely been more invigorated or compelled to greater respect by the work of a New Zealand poet.
1965 (338)
Sir: In the second paragraph of his review Mr Jackson, with engaging humility, expresses genuine doubt concerning his own competence to assess Mr Johnson’s work – ‘other reviewers have admired Bread and a Pension and
I suspect that the fissure between Mr Johnson and some of his readers begins outside the sphere of literary criticism per se. Why did many devoted Wordsworthians in the last century find it so hard to find real merit in Byron? Because of the poet’s subject matter – or, more explicitly, his personal area of knowledge won by conflict – and because of his approach to that subject matter. Many New Zealand readers simply do not find it possible to accept Mr Johnson’s view of himself, themselves, and this country. They do not see that face in the mirror. They do not see that world when they look out the kitchen window. Mr Johnson’s own tendency to polemical dispute has sprung inevitably from this disagreement. I remember how, when his second book of verse, Roughshod Among the Lilies, was published, some hysterical women writers in Wellington tried to get him fired from the teaching profession on the grounds that a man who could write that kind of verse should not be in charge of young children. Nonsensical? Of course; but not irrelevant. In more civilised critics the disagreement show itself in the form of a mental blockage, a curious kind of blankness when confronted with a fully developed Johnson poem.
I think something of the kind must have happened when Mr Jackson examined the first stanza of ‘Down to the City Airport’. Certainly the subsidiary image is that of a gull descending; but the central and strongest image is that of a demi-god defecating from the sky on to a crowded town. It stems, I think, from the phrase in New Zealand vernacular – ‘shit on them from a height. . . .’ Bombs, faeces, eggs – these are the shifts of metaphor – and it is the young blowflies born from eggs who will ‘gorge on crumbs’. They are the images of the spiritual death which the poet-narrator feels he may inflict on his associates; and they are also instances of Mr Johnson’s peculiarly grim humour. I can well understand that a poem which derives a large part of its meaning from a faecal analogy might be obscure to a certain kind of reader; yet, strictly speaking, the fault is in the reader, not in the poem.
There is too a real problem of poetic method. Mr Johnson continually heightens his language by rapid shifts of metaphor. A grammarian would condemn this; yet it is the stock in trade of the two most powerful poets of
Then Mr Jackson takes Mr Johnson to task for the ‘lifeless diction’ of the poem, ‘Any Old Iron’. I cannot understand this. The poem has great fluidity of language, certainly; but the images are numerous and exact – and the identification of the death of love under the slow, wearing pains of age and domesticity with the crucifixion of God in man is, I think, as perfectly handled as anything Mr Johnson has ever done. I can agree that there are certain poems of Mr Johnson’s in which he uses clichés very freely. Mr Jackson suggests that ‘The Madwoman in the House’ is one of them. Surely, though, this poem belongs to a particular genre – the ironic half-poem in which cliché is used in invisible inverted commas. In such poems Mr Johnson uses flat newspaper language as part of a sort of montage – they are nearly always surrealist in character, and the images, when you meet them, almost jump off the page. Incidentally it is Mr Johnson’s very fluid use of language – like pools of mercy dispersing on a table top – from which I have been able to learn most in loosening up my own techniques with language. One has to be very much ‘with’ the subject, very wide awake – but the results can be spectacular. A constipated neo-Victorian use of language is one of the major curses of the New Zealand poetic tradition (look how R.A.K. Mason had to wrestle with it) – and Mr Johnson has done us a service by breaking the ice.
I could examine Mr Jackson’s criticism more closely; but I prefer to draw attention to the fact that he has neglected in his review nearly all the best poems in Mr Johnson’s book – ‘Adversaries’, ‘The Poisonous Mountains’, ‘My Wife Doesn’t Understand Me’, ‘Librarian’s Love Song’, and the title poem, ‘Bread and a Pension’, to name only a very few of them. Where he does examine one of the best (‘Fresco of Boys and Beach’) his criticism is peculiarly carping. In this poem the compression of metaphors and the alternation between sensual images and abstract comment are perfectly sustained. But I prefer not to argue the matter. Mr Johnson is certainly capable of confused and slipshod writing; but not much in this volume, and not at all in its best poems. I suggest that Mr Jackson should re-read the book once a year, and see whether his own experience of life does not increasingly open out to him the poems which are closed at the present time. In particular, I suggest that Mr Johnson is the only New Zealand poet who has shown evidence (on the printed page) of any understanding of the psychology and spiritual crises of women. In his own words –
Mr Johnson’s work has its formal merits; but there are other merits to be considered – for example, the ‘originality’ that Mr Jackson mentions with disbelief at the beginning of his review. I suggest that this originality is so basic to Mr Johnson’s work that it constitutes an obstacle to reviewers.
1965 (339)
One should not ever have to defend or justify among one’s fellow-Catholics a life which pivots on devotion to Our Lady. We know from the authoritative statements of the Church, and equally from the vast communal experience of all Catholics, that where devotion to Our Lady is strong, allegiance to Our Lord is also strengthened. The critics who think otherwise are self-deceived.
Yet every now and then some fairly wise man or woman is disturbed by ‘excesses’ – they have struck a Marian prayer perhaps, in which the atmosphere of devotion seems to them too womb-like, or they suspect that somebody else likes making Novenas better than going to Mass.
These possible ‘excesses’ do not worry me. Like a man groping in a dark room for the light switch, I like to know where the switch is – and when I say the name of Mary, I have found it. I think no man is likely to be worse for having a ferocious, untameable and passionate devotion for something, or especially for some person – a rock-shattering love, of the kind that Chesterton expressed so exactly in that great, neglected poem, ‘Regina Angelorum’ –
Mary was not necessary to our salvation; God could have redeemed us by a single act of His omnipotent Love. But He chose to accommodate grace to nature, to become a man and speak our language, and remould us gently as the potter moulds the clay, and in such a way that no scrap of the clay need be lost. And it is, I think, in the choice of a woman as the vessel of His Divine power and love that He brought redemption not just to the market-place, or to our back door, but to the innermost recesses of the human heart.
One can understand readily the devotion of a good housewife to Our Lady her sense that every decision and trial can be shared with the Housewife of
The jaws of this world, seen under the aspect of a grave, close on a man early. He is obliged to learn a number of disciplines, intellectual and physical, while segregated with other adolescent males. A certain combative energy is necessary to him, even to work and raise a family – let alone to stand on the football field, or in the boxing ring, or in the trenches during a war. He will be a rare and lucky individual if he does not share, at least in his manner of thought and speech, something of the intemperance and sensuality which are often regarded as the masculine vices. A woman will generally shield herself from these; but a man can’t in the same degree. His very friendships will betray him.
With ungrudging respect for those who hate that sport, I tend to see the core of my life, or any man’s life, in terms of the bullring. The bull represents those forces of death and chaos inside and outside the human heart, which a man must encounter daily – meet, dodge, fight, overcome – on the slippery sand wet sometimes with his own blood, sometimes with the blood of the bull. Those who are watching do not matter much – except that in this fight one is protecting them – the battle lasts as long as life itself, and is a very solitary thing.
It is, as I have implied, a peculiarly masculine struggle. At the moment of choice a woman’s help or advice will very likely not be of service – she would say, ‘Why are you here at all?’ – or – ‘Run for shelter’ – when one knows it is necessary to go within reach of the horns. There is one exception however. Our Lady, having a share in God’s wisdom, knows the masculine heart as well as she knows the feminine. It is she who gives the man his sword, she who lifts him up when he slips, she who takes away the cloud of weariness from his eyes – and in the battle it is her he serves, as in the forgotten times of chivalry, and her to whom he gives whatever trophies he may gain. A look from her eyes is the reward. Certainly she is Our Lord’s agent. But he chose that our prayers should be offered by her, and all graces come to us through her hands.
I like that passage near the end of the Fifth Canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, which describes the death of an unshriven Catholic –
Dante finds this desperate soldier, a man of many evil deeds, redeemed and waiting at the foot of the Purgatorial Mountain. An instinctive and ineradicable devotion to Our Lady has saved him – or rather, she herself has saved him, because he called on her. I take him as a type of common manhood.
1965 (340)
On Easter Sunday, 1144, the dead body of a boy of twelve was found in a wood outside Norwich. He had been stabbed, and there was some evidence of torture inflicted before death. In our own times such an event would be reported sensationally in certain newspapers; some would gloat, some would pity, and sooner or later an abnormal person would be judged guilty (or guilty but insane) and spend the rest of his life in new circumstances. But in Norwich, in the twelfth century, things took another course.
It is hard for us to re-enter the labyrinth of the medieval mind. Intense prejudices, ferocious legal penalties, a welter of superstitions co-existed with a profound sense of ritual, a closely-knit hierarchical social order, and a semi- tribal awareness of one’s neighbours’ activities. Above the maze stood the two great powers of Church and Crown, each more nearly autonomous than we would consider just or possible.
In this context occurred the terrible and recurrent phenomenon of Christian anti-Semitism, held in check by some kings (in England the Jews were under the special protection of the Crown) – by some popes (prejudices wore thin in Rome, where Christian minds were at least partly open to the true ethos of the Synagogue) – and by those people of a finer calibre who come to the surface in any age. But popular superstition and prejudice, sharpened by envy and avarice, are powerful forces.
In Norwich the local cathedral needed a miracle-vending saint. And the local Jews were affluent, sometimes unwisely ostentatious. A boy was killed, and the old hideous charge of ritual murder was revived. Some agreed; some disagreed. Miss Anderson analyses the contradictory statements in a twelfth- century text, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, and examines the wholly circumstantial evidence.
I do not find myself much affected by the details of the development of the cult of William of Norwich – they seem to me to belong to the long history of religious pathology, which, like a grotesque shadow, accompanies the growth of Christian ritual and doctrine – but I find myself enormously affected by the re-creation of the atmosphere in which the life and liberty of Jewish people were in danger whenever a child happened to be murdered or a monk happened to have a dream. If this book helps to dissipate any vestige of the evil fog of anti-Semitism existing in the mind of any reader, then Miss Anderson is to be commended for writing it.
1965 (341)
In this book David Holbrook examines Chaucer’s poetry, Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the light of psychoanalytical theory, to deduce the authors’ views of sexual love. Chaucer comes off well; Shakespeare comes off well; but Lawrence gets the horse- whipping due to a cad.
Mr Holbrook is evidently a warm-hearted, chivalrous man, as well as being a capable essayist. His comments on Chaucer are subtle and rewarding. There is less penetration in his analysis of A Winter’s Tale – perhaps because it is a rather dull play.
His comments on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, however, reveal more about Mr Holbrook than they do about Lawrence. I feel that this controversial novel should properly be regarded as a modern idyll, corresponding to the Greek stories of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, or the first chapters of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass – it expresses the perennial and very human dream of a sexual paradise not in fact to be found east or west of the Bamboo Curtain. One should deal gently with this dream, for without it poetry might vanish from the world. But Mr Holbrook, armed (one suspects) with some dreary marriage manual, bristling with certainty that his own version of the sexual dream is the right one, advances against Apollyon-Lawrence – charging him with infantilism, misanthropy, sadism and several other things. He claims with assurance that Lawrence lacked an understanding of what is shared and mutually exchanged in man-woman relationships. What he does not recognise is the truism that the sexual dream (Lawrence’s or Holbrook’s) begins to expire as soon as either partner regards the other primarily as a person – or, in the Christian sense of the word, a ‘neighbour’. It is all too solemn for me – a heresy trial in the Courts of Love. I enjoy idylls, in particular Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though they very likely do not weigh a straw against the immense fortitude with which ordinary people live and act in a dreamless world.
1965 (342)
Professor Gurko has written an absorbing work of biographical criticism about that enigmatic English novelist, Joseph Conrad. He may seem to stress the obvious – that Conrad was a Pole – yet it is the Polish influence on Conrad’s thought which has remained subterranean, considered too little by his critics. Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett in 1907: ‘You seem to forget that I am a Pole. You forget that we have been used to go to battle without illusions. It’s you Britishers that “go in to win” only. We have been “going in” these last hundred years repeatedly, to be knocked on the head only. . . .’
Professor Gurko, with good reason, sees in Conrad a Polish sensibility – protean, time-haunted, alternately passive and rebellious – expressing itself by the medium of English prose. His inquiries into the process and origins of Conrad’s novels cannot be paraphrased. They seem to me to bear the stamp of true creative criticism. He is imaginatively in tune with Conrad. Speaking of that masterpiece Typhoon he says, ‘And Jukes, at the crest of the typhoon, falls into the psychic apathy which is the imprimatur of a Conrad novel. . . .’
In a sense, Professor Gurko’s book is an exploration of this ‘psychic apathy’ in Conrad’s life and writings. He is wise enough not to try to identify it in psychological terms, but faithfully follows its nuances in geographical, erotic, and political dimensions. What emerges from his inquiry is precisely that tragic acceptance of anti-human forces operating within the human condition which constitutes the ethic of the Conradian hero. Eventually one sees Conrad’s own ‘exile’ as a type of the common exile of the human race from spiritual security and beatitude. At least, that is how I read Professor Gurko’s profound commentary.
1965 (343)
I remember once hearing Bernard Leach talk to a small group of people in the Department of Education. He was talking about art, in particular about his own art of pottery. After a while he paused, and one well-feathered bureaucrat asked him – ‘What can we do about this in the schools, Mr Leach? How can we recognise the potential potters among the children – how can we help them to develop their creative faculties?’
‘You needn’t worry too much about that,’ Leach said. ‘The best potters will very likely be the rebellious and ineducable ones. Just leave them alone. Give them the materials and leave them alone.’
Perhaps I’m putting words into Mr Leach’s mouth; but that’s the way I remember it. He was paying a tribute to the creative faculties that most children have anyway, with a side-swipe at the educational process which so often reduces these faculties to nothing or to a feeble imitative gesture.
So one must recognise from the start that this magnificent book was not created by Elwyn Richardson or by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. The noonday demon of abstract boredom which has its home in our offices and schools is not its progenitor. The book was made in spite of that all-pervading power; and Mr Richardson is to be congratulated chiefly for his humility. He made it possible for Dennis, Eric, David, Mavis, Barbara, and the rest, to make pots, lino-cuts, printed fabrics, drawings, paintings, stories and poems at school. He did not stand in their way any more than he could help. And the fruits of their creativity and his humility are offered to us in a selected form in this book.
The problem of the teacher of art is always that he finds himself dealing with pupils, not with people; and there is no way round it, except the way of abnegation, by which the teacher ceases to be teacher and becomes the eldest of a group. To the extent that he does this he has ceased to do what he is paid to do; he is concerned with relationship, not with instruction, with the free acts of the creative will, and only by chance with the acquisition of supposedly useful skills. I have held that it is impossible for anyone to produce works of art in a classroom but Mr Richardson has all but convinced me that the impossible has been achieved. If so, there must have been occasions when his school ceased to be a school and the angels held their breath. If I were in control of our local bureaucracy I would have Mr Richardson jailed immediately as a saboteur. He has wantonly thrown a spanner in the works of that machine in whose grim bowels human beings are turned into computers and filing cabinets. To the chain gang with him!
Pictures of pots are not so good as pots which one can touch and handle. But pots can’t be divided and multiplied, and remain the same, as poems, and in a far lesser degree pictures, can. As far as I can judge, the children’s pots are good. They are strong, lumpy, asymmetrical pots, with bold incisions and broad marks like bandages. I think they have that quality which belongs to all child art – they aren’t built to last for ever – they would be good to make and also good to smash – except for one or two that would be kept as a memento of a time when one felt particularly full of satisfaction. Because most children feel (so rightly) that they will never die, the urge to make remarkable monuments is usually absent from their creative action. It is one of the points of separation between the lives (and so the art) of children and the lives (and so the art) of adults. I have seen squarish Japanese vases in which the urn-quality, the endurance of the knowledge of death by the living, was so much part of them that I found it hard to look at them for long: one should not look too long at death or at the naked sun.
The children made masks. Naturally they resemble most the geometrical spirit-masks and ancestor-masks of Africa. A certain amount of a child’s sense of what is terrible is represented (or rather, signified) in them. That is the way they affect me.
At the risk of being mistaken, I would like to make a crude distinction between craft and art. The small, beast-headed, callipygnous earth mother which I carved out of wet pumice with a rusty nail, and which now stands on my window shelf, is a work of art, however ill made. I made her to outlast the Hydrogen Bomb. Three things combined to make her: my slight skill, the wet pumice which taught me what I could do and couldn’t do with it, and a mainly subconscious feeling-state connected with motherhood and beasthood and whatever endures. The first two things (skill and material) go to make craft; the third is necessary, however nebulously, to make a work of art. In my own art, the making of poems, there is no such thing as craft alone. Poems are either symbols or nothing. But in all the arts where one carves, shapes, decorates, craft can stand separate from art. There is a school of thought which holds that craft is art, that the essential relation is that which exists between the artist and his medium – an attractive notion, but in the long run depressing – too far, I think, from the primitive sources where some touch of the sacred symbol lay on everything made. But our educators love this notion; for it delivers them from any encounter with the numen . . . Instead one has little houses made of ticky-tacky in which little children made of ticky-tacky grow up to be big people made of very thick strong rubbery opaque ticky- tacky. And I must get down from my soap box.
The fabric prints pleased me least (though even they were good to look at) – chiefly because I suspected the children had been ‘encouraged’ to look at caterpillars and leaves and make up patterns that resembled them. It’s a way of integrating Nature Study with the art syllabus, God help us! I remember some gruesome hours at an Ardmore Training-College Teachers’ Refresher Course when we had to look at leaves through magnifying glasses, and then paint them, and then write poems about them, under the guidance of an incarnation of the noonday demon, a youngish art instructor on his way to the top of the ladder. There were ‘extension exercises’, if I remember rightly – something like being hung up with weights attached to one’s ankles. I wrote and circulated a number of obscene quatrains in order to fend off the power of that boring devil. Perhaps Mr Richardson has ‘encouraged’ his children; perhaps not. Some of the fabric prints look the nearest thing to it – very two- dimensional, very nice and flat.
When you buy this book, you must look yourselves at the passages where Mr Richardson tells how they built and used their kiln. I liked reading about it. But you would know precisely what was involved in it.
It seems that Mr Richardson was prepared to accept whatever the children produced, to get their confidence – it would take a good while – and then let the whole group make comments. My own doubt about whether actual works of art can be produced in a classroom rises to the surface when I read the children’s poems –
That poem by Owen gives me great satisfaction; there are many others nearly as good. Yet I notice it follows the present style for classroom poetry – wherever the children are ‘encouraged’ to write it – a clear, hard, exact image (often, though not in this case, a simple comparison); something observed; a tiny, broken fragment of experience; something expressed very visually; a form reminiscent of the Japanese haiku. Like some of the fabric prints, it side-steps the essential problem – that children are very loath to express their actual feeling states in the deeply authoritarian world of the classroom – they will imitate, improvise, make something in order to please. In the broad terms of Carl Jung, intellect and feeling predominate; intuition and sensation remain for the most part asleep. To go back to the pictures – or forward, if you like – would the children from time to time when they represent people show them equipped with genitals? I doubt it; I doubt if it would occur to them to do so, except on the dunny wall. The world of the school and the world outside the school are still separate – yet I deeply respect the working compromise initiated by people like Mr Richardson. Let us not say, though – ‘This is free; this is art’ – let us rather say – ‘This is a development of a part of the creative faculties in a situation of compromise; may it continue.’
On the whole I was much moved and cheered by this book. Some of the work is very beautiful. And all of it was done by the children. They can do it anywhere if they are allowed to.
1965 (344)
I must accept the strongly worded rebuke of your correspondent ‘T.K.’ – for if my article on ‘Our Lady in the Bullring’ led even one reader to suppose that I considered a Catholic might legitimately seek out occasions of sin, then my argument was too unclear.
I must also thank your correspondent for extending the analogy of the bullring to include the innocent horses. One can indeed refuse to enter a conflict because too many people will be hurt. I remember sitting recently on a bench in front of the Parliament Buildings between an old Methodist minister and a union man; and then speaking against the Government’s decision to send troops to Vietnam. I felt (as a number of people do) that too many innocent horses were being gored in the American matador’s conflict with the Communist bull. And I felt a strong grief that no other memberPacem in Terris as my guide, and some personal experience of the terrible slums of the East, fighting against the popular anti-Communist and anti-Asian obsession.
Yet I knew I could be wrong. A deep commitment to any temporal action leads to problems of moral uncertainty. Only a bigot or a quietist can be wholly free of them. That is the essential atmosphere of the bullring necessary action combined with moral uncertainties. How did the early Christian martyrs feel, when they knew that by burning a pinch of incense in front of Caesar’s statue, they could save their wives and children from slavery, destitution, perhaps enforced prostitution? Some of the apostles, torn in half by uncertainties, may have earned a less evident martyr’s crown. The wives and children would be, in your correspondent’s terms, the innocent horses.
These are public issues. The uncertainties of private life are more frequent; though by discussing them in the forum one may run the risk of scandal. But there is one area blessedly free of uncertainty. Regarding the immense power of Our Lady’s intercession, for quietist or bigot or the spiritually careless or even downright rascals, I have no doubts at all.
1965 (345)
For most people, whether Catholic or not, the life of Pope John XXIII was a magnet and a mystery. This elderly man, chosen by the Holy Spirit to rule the Church for four years, became an extraordinary portent, symbolising the Divine Fatherhood by an unshakeable benignity shown towards all members of the human race. I doubt if the attachment which many had to his person was excessive or sentimental.
For myself, I must record that joy springs up in my soul even now whenever I think of him, and that he exercised great power for good in my own life by intensifying my love for the Church and her pastors and by opening a way of understanding and positive tolerance towards my brothers outside the Visible Church.
For others I cannot speak – except to mention one incident. At the time of Pope John’s death agony, a girl wrote to me who was herself oppressed by many human difficulties. She enclosed a free verse poem in which she stated that she had just tidied her room ‘for John’, a task she might otherwise have neglected – and mentioned that his fatherly love had seemed to her (a non- Catholic) a source of warmth and brightness in the freezing desert of the world. Such personal influence is, to say the least, unusual.
Though he has not been canonised, it does seem to me that his holy life and sacrificial death make it reasonable for a Catholic to regard him as a saint. I pray to him daily for the protection of my family and for peace in the world, under the common title of Good Pope John.
Furthermore, I have found his encyclicals a source of illumination in social and political matters, and have tried consciously to think in the way he did. ‘Observe everything; overlook much; rectify little’ – this is a bold example to follow, and implies the necessity of abandonment to the Divine Will. Yet I have found it more fruitful than the counsel of more rigid exemplars. The testimony of the ardent disciple is perhaps inadmissible – yet I recall that other John who, in old age, addressed his flock as ‘little children’ and admonished them to love one another.
What then have the private notebooks of Pope John, now published in a book of four hundred and fifty pages, to say to us? Some readers may find them a little disappointing. They are not autobiographical – that is, they do not reveal much of the day to day detail of the life of the child of a peasant family, the seminarist, the war chaplain, the Bishop, the Papal Representative in Turkey and Greece (and later in France), the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, and the Vicar of Christ. Nor are they pastoral statements on social matters – the reader who looks for the closely reasoned and balanced arguments of the Encyclicals will look in vain. These notebooks are primarily devotional – the unfading impulse that moves through them like a deep sea current is the quest of perfect obedience to the Divine Will.
In the seminary in Rome in 1902, he wrote some words which now seem prophetic:
. . . Even if I were to be Pope, even if my name were to be invoked and revered by all and inscribed on marble monuments, I should still have to stand before the divine judge, and what should I be worth then? Not much. I can hardly believe that my Jesus, who today treats me so tenderly and kindly, may one day appear before me, his face suffused with divine wrath, to judge me. And yet this is an article of faith and I believe it. And what a judgment what will be! The stray words during the time of silence, the rather mischievous expression, the affected gesture, the furtive glance, that strutting about like a professor, that carefully studied composure of manner, with the well-fitting cassock, the fashionable shoes, the daily morsel of bread – and then thoughts, the castles in the air, the wandering thoughts during my practices of piety, however short these may be – all will be told against me . . . .
A globe of purest crystal lit by the sun’s radiance, that is how I see the purity of the priest’s heart. My soul must be like a mirror to reflect the images of the angels, of Mary most holy, of Jesus Christ. If the mirror should cloud over, however slightly, then I deserve to be broken in pieces and flung onto the rubbish heap. What sort of a mirror am I? O world so ugly, filthy and loathsome! In my years of military service I have learnt all about it. The army is a running fountain of pollution, enough to submerge
whole cities. Who can hope to escape from this flood of slime, unless God comes to his aid? I thank you, my God, for having preserved me from so much corruption. This has really been one of your noblest gifts, for which I shall be grateful to you my whole life long . . . .
One obvious thing about these journals is that they are the record of the private meditations of an extremely good man – always good, from beginning to end, who never offended, in a long life, against purity, and little against charity or justice. The struggle, the torment, may seem to us unnecessary – what had he got to worry about? But he was bent on serving God perfectly; and the smallest transgressions were a thorn to pierce him. The experience of army life seems to have provided him with a full second-hand understanding of human degradation. Much later, when he was Pope, he must have been remembering the experience of a young, pure lad plunged into the abyss of barracks life, when he emphasised the hideousness of war as a source of moral evil.
In most of us – all of us, I was rashly tempted to say – a crevasse of moral failure separates the child from the adult. Our childhood experiences seem remote, like a mountain range – crag and gorge, voices from tree and cloud – observed from the dry flat plain. But in the life of Pope John, as revealed in these notebooks, there is little discontinuity, since he almost certainly never fell into mortal sin. The child survives as part of the adult – a deep fountain of innocent knowledge. He was a country lad. The life of his peasant relatives, their unhurried piety and fresh intuitions, seemed to him the normal life of man. He may well have been right in his judgement.
Of his sufferings as Papal Representative in Bulgaria – sufferings that sprang apparently from a faulty liaison with the Vatican, or actual mistrust in those circles – he wrote in 1930: ‘I must say very little to anyone about the things that hurt me. Great discretion and forbearance in my judgement of men and situations: willingness to pray particularly for those who may cause me suffering’.
There is a steady increase in serenity of soul throughout these pages, moving from the scrupulosity of the young priest bent on perfection, through various interior deserts, to the ultimate stability of the old man who wrote ‘I consider it a sign of great mercy shown me by the Lord Jesus that he continues to give me his peace, and even exterior signs of grace which I am told, explain the imperturbable serenity that enables me to enjoy, in every hour of my life, a simplicity and meekness of soul that keep me ready to leave all at a moment’s notice and depart for eternal life. . . .’
Characteristically he then remembers his ‘sins’, in the midst of which he feels the ‘caressing hand’ of God.
These notebooks, then, made chiefly during retreats, must be regarded as devotional writing. Yet I cannot review them formally, as one would reviewJournal of a Soul a little terrifying at times – one drifts through it, picking up a maxim here and there, and then suddenly one realises that a man is being consumed by the Divine Love in front of one’s eyes. A gigantic lifelong effort of self-abandonment lay behind the fatherly kindness, the diplomat’s knowledge of men, and the shrewd peasant wit. He was absolutely in earnest. We have not the stature; not the innocence; not the endurance – what can we learn from this successor of Peter who is himself a Rock? Slowly – very slowly, I find – something of his quality invades the mind. One’s soul grows quieter; one’s useless anxiety is set at rest:
There are two gates to paradise: innocence and penance. Which of us, poor frail creatures, can expect to find the first of these wide open? But we may be sure of the other: Jesus passed through it, bearing his Cross in atonement for our sins, and he invites us to follow him. But following him means doing penance, letting oneself be scourged, and scourging oneself a little too. . . .
It’s obvious enough; but the person it comes from gives it ten times the weight. A man crucified; a man willingly lost in the deserts of God.
1965 (346)
1965 (347)
The precise motive behind the writing of this book needs to be ravelled out – for, as the dustjacket blurb specifies, it is neither definitive biography nor literary criticism. The author has side-stepped the massive problems of evaluating Pound’s poetry and interpreting his personal and literary motives.
Her view of Pound rests on the primary assumption that because he is an important writer a reconstruction of the milieu, principally Edwardian, in which his youth was spent, must be of maximum interest. But reality is not in itself interesting (if Oscar Wilde didn’t say this, he should have) – or rather, its interest is best served by uninhibited gossip. In a sense this book belongs to the genre of high-grade literary gossip. But it lacks the sharpness necessary for success in this genre – who quarrelled with who, who slept with who – those clearcut anecdotes which made (for example) John Brinnin’s book on Dylan Thomas so thoroughly readable and unpleasant.
Thus Patricia Hutchins’s book falls between several stools – neither biography nor criticism nor part of the annals of popular legend. One finds instead an assiduously collected magpie-stack of more or less unsorted facts, events, quotations and opinions. Pound’s own dismembering and iconoclastic spirit does flash out at times through the cracks in the book; but even the sense of literary revolution, thunder among the tea-cups, is all but stifled. One would get no idea from this book just why Pound was able to invigorate T.S. Eliot. I am driven to quote a key passage from the author’s Introduction: ‘. . . Pound’s later interests have alienated a few acquaintances and there is still much suspicion of his motives. Yet to those who knew him during the Kensington years, as Harriet Shaw Weaver said, with a little laugh in her voice, “He was always awfully nice”’.
This twaddle is simply inadequate as comment on man or artist. One turns back with a sigh to the scabrous inscrutable Cantos. If you want to know who Ezra Pound met in London before the First World War, and where he met them, Patricia Hutchins’s book can tell you about it.
1965 (348)
Sir: After reading the varied opinions put forward by your correspondents in the last month on the subject of New Zealand’s commitment in the Vietnam War, I wish to set down as a possible help to clearer thinking the main reasons why I, as a Roman Catholic layman and New Zealand citizen, have consistently opposed this commitment.
1965 (349)
The milieu of Mr Duggan’s stories is in the main middle class New Zealand Irish. One hardly notices it, because neither nationality nor class obtrude. Mr Duggan is more than an accomplished writer. He achieves the minor miracle of winning a reader’s acceptance that this, after all, is what life is like – a series of acrid compromises which deform the natural man (or woman) for the sake of a doubtful gentility.
There are several stories which show no more than this – ‘The Deposition’, ‘The Departure’, and possibly ‘For the Love of Rupert’ – but Mr Duggan’s sense of the primitive community opens an escape hatch. That carefully worked story, ‘Chapter’, demonstrates like a theorem that a Maori without money may possess time and the earth from which her own gentility excludes the pakeha schoolteacher. An example of mosaic art, it is probably the best story Mr Duggan has ever written. One would have to look back to Katherine Mansfield to find a similarly perfect interweaving of narrative, quotation, conversation, and pastoral detail. Yet I prefer the wild monologue of ‘Along Rideout Road That Summer’, in which Mr Duggan, through an adolescent narrator, implies that the primitive idyll can be contemplated, even loved, but not achieved.
As a poet (and Mr Duggan is nothing if not our finest poet writing in prose) he offers us a voyage without beginning or destination, unless death can be called a destination. The meaning lies in the pain of lack, the tormenting cycle of the natural world from which man the observer is excluded. It could become monotonous. But the force of his social satire breaks the ice. In ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’ the ageing music teacher requires most aptly a little human warmth. She does not receive it, and her final laughter – the comment of the victim being buried alive by the shovels of gentility – is more piercing than a shout of revolt.
In Mr Duggan’s stories, not the meek, but the vigorously and conventionally stupid inherit the earth. The possibility of any supernatural deliverance is not discussed – with good reason, since in Mr Duggan’s not-so-private country the ecclesiastical and tribal chains are indistinguishable, and religion can very readily be seen as the opium of sleep, the great enemy of the living intellect and the natural man, which would conceal rather than heal despair. Mr
1965 (350)
Interviewer: Do you think the New Zealand climate is good for writing – the psychological climate, I mean?
Poet: Fifty years ago they hung my father up to a post by the wrists, day by day at Mud Farm in the middle of winter, because he would not put a bullet through a fellow worker. Twenty years ago they put my brother behind barbed wire, to be eaten alive for five years by the devil of boredom, weeding flax in a bog at Shannon, under the dead eyes of the screw and the gauleiter. Now the smoke of burning bodies comes over the sea from Vietnam. The cops and the bureaucrats are at their butchering again. I have only one son and I’m afraid what they’ll do to him.
Interviewer: I quite understand what you mean. Though I’m not a pacifist myself, I can respect another man’s point of view. But to get back to –
Poet: It was better than a Chinese meal to hear that the men in Mount Eden had burned the jail down: that old, foul monastery of pain. Now, a man could make a ballad about that – .
Interviewer: You feel that the ballad form can be used to reach a wider public in New Zealand?
Poet: Heroic action is the natural theme for a ballad. But somebody would have to take an axe to all the TV sets before the people here would listen to a ballad about themselves.
Interviewer: I would have thought that radio and TV offered a new opportunity for poets to reach a wider public – a new medium –
Poet: When the men were smashing up Mount Eden Gaol, they said, ‘Don’t help the screws; they’re crucifying us!’ That’s one kind of crucifixion: monotony, malnutrition and sly brutality inflicted by men who don’t know what a man is. But there’s another kind. Again and again I meet people in offices and kitchens and coffee bars who have the minds of refugees from Belsen. They’re being crucified by their own interior vacancy: a sense that they’re waiting to die and that nothing real is happening to them. I’ve seen it in the mind of a girl who’d just got rid of her second husband. I’ve seen it
Interviewer: You seem to have a rather melancholy view of New Zealand society. Myself, I feel quite cheerful about the way things are going. Good pay, good houses, good meals, good education. After all, you have to rely on a civilised educated audience for what you write.
Poet: I’ve found barmen who understood poems better than schoolteachers do. I remember getting stuck in the middle of a long poem that tried to set down what the sirens sang to Ulysses. They said – ‘How then shall your heart that like the sea becomes / Carnivorous, a sepulchre of storms, / Love concord and an old man’s idleness?’ I knew the word ‘carnivorous’ wasn’t right; but I didn’t know what to put in place of it. And this barman who was a friend of mine told me it should be ‘omnivorous’ – of course he was right. I doubt if a university lecturer would have had the answer. The point was, I knew his mind and he knew mine.
Interviewer: He must have had a good education.
Poet: He went to Mass sometimes, and he’d grown up in a house where there was a great deal of booze and a great many dogs.
Interviewer: You seem to have a prejudice against lecturers and schoolteachers.
Poet: And interviewers . . . No; I can see they have to exist. But they’re the middlemen of life and literature. They are servants of the culture machine. It’s death to any writer to spend long in their company.
Interviewer: Why?
Poet: Because a writer has to think his own thoughts. The discussions that occur in those circles are useless because they leave out the parts of the jigsaw that civilised people agree to forget.
Interviewer: I get you. You mean the private parts.
Poet: The way you say it is the way they say it too. But I’d like to make it clear
Interviewer: I can’t say I have.
Poet: Well, it shows Jesse lying on the ground. And from his body a tree is growing, each branch of it a human being, culminating in Mary and Christ as the topmost flower. The tree is in fact his organ of generation. I think the picture would be easily understood by a Maori who knew his own genealogical tree – even now the Maoris still tend to associated sex with fertility. But I think a pakeha schoolchild looking at it would think it funny or obscene or both. On the whole we don’t associate sex with fertility. In fact I think we have a deep fear and distrust of fertility of the body or the mind. It makes an artist seem as peculiar as the father of a big family –
Interviewer: Thank you. I’m afraid our six minutes are up. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been listening to an interview with Mr J.Q. Oxter, one of our leading poets. Next week Miss Fanny Arbuckle will tell us what the modern girl thinks about sex.
1965 (351)
The beginnings are tied up in a bundle somewhere near the beginning of the track itself – like the dead cat in a bag floating and tugged at by eels on the surface of the black bottomless river hole two hundred yards down from the house where I lived till I was eight. The poem-writing habit began when I was seven. All mental reconstructions of those early events seem likely to be false – not deliberate lies, but an improvised and artificial childhood tidied up for others to look at. I am one of those people who can’t give a clear account of what happened the day before yesterday – it might as well be the day before Noah’s Flood, as far as I’m concerned – and while this is usually a great blessing, it cramps my style in autobiography. Objectively I remember my childhood as a happy time. My health was good. There were plenty of things to do. My parents, my schoolteachers and my companions treated me well enough. Yet a sense of grief has attached itself to my early life, like a tapeworm in the stomach of a polar bear. I would not like to turn it into a sense of grievance – that interminable groaning noise which a man may make to a well-paid psychiatrist or a cobber in the pub – ‘They never treated me right, and that’s why I feel crook.’ Yet the sense of having been pounded all over with a club by invisible adversaries is generally with me, and has been with me as long as I can remember. It is probably the universal confession of the human race; and it has little bearing on the poem-making habit, except
A sense of grief – even at times a sense of grievance – helped me to write poems. In a way the poems sprang out of a quarrel with the status quo. It could be that the root of it all was no more than an early perception of the state that theologians call Original Sin. An alcoholic grave-robbing friend said to me the other day, as we sat and watched the milkbar cowboys come and go – ‘I took the wrong turn round the cabbage tree, Jim, a long time ago; and since then I’ve not been able to change it.’ He was mythologising his life; and that’s what a writer does. The trouble is, I can’t demythologise it. What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology. Even the moment of my own birth:
That is the exact mythological record of my birth. My mother had a Newnham M.A. degree in Old French; and my father was a self-educated Otago farmer who recited Burns and Shelley and Byron and Blake and Tom Hood and Henry Lawson when the mood took him. Somewhere back in the Freudian fog belt these two strong influences began to work on me. With the same place – the bare coast between Dunedin and Taieri Mouth – and the same people, someone else might have become a prominent Social Creditor and a collector of gold-bearing rocks. But instead I broke out in words.
How did it come about? Well – as in all good mythologies – first there was the gap, the void. After reading The Heroes of Asgard, I described it in a very early piece of verse:
I think that various factors combined early to give me a sense of difference, of a gap – not of superiority, nor of inferiority, though at times it must have felt like that, but simply of difference – between myself and other people. There was a great difference between the big house on the Cashmere Hills where my grandfather, Professor John Macmillan Brown, lived, and the closely-knit Otago tribes of my father’s family – the difference sank into my bones early and became part of me – and there was the greater difference between my own socialist-pacifist family and the semi-militarist activities of the people round about as the country moved towards war. The Pacifist Church had its confessors and martyrs – my father had been one of the greatest, and suffered almost to the point of death as a conscientious objector in France in the First World War. It also had its Scriptures – Tolstoy and Gandhi and the New Testament suitably interpreted. And it had its persecutors – the police and one’s excessively patriotic neighbours. I remember how in my teens, we could not put on the light in the upper room at night, because such neighbours would imagine we were signalling to Japanese submarines. I remember the long discussion of moral theology – whether or not a conscientious objector should obey the military order to report for medical inspection – and I remember the time when a crowd of boys of my own age surrounded me in a shelter shed at school, shouting abuse and inflicting a certain amount of physical violence. These experiences were in the long run very valuable, for they taught me to distrust mass opinion and sort out my own ideas; but at the time they were distinctly painful. I could compare them perhaps with the experiences of a Jewish boy growing up in an anti-Semitic neighbourhood. They created a gap in which the poems were able to grow.
The first poem I wrote was, no doubt, significant, if not in its form or content, at least in the way I approached the writing of it. I climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea, and there fell into the attitude of listening out of which poems may rise – not to the sound of the sea, but to the unheard sound of which poems are translations – it was then that I first endured that intense effort of listening, like a man chained to the ground trying to stand upright and walk – and from this intensity of listening the words emerged:
I don’t think my methods of composition have changed much since that time. The daimon has always to be invoked; and there is no certainty that he will answer the invitation.
I think the sense of a gap between myself and other people was increased considerably by the fact that I was born in New Zealand, and grew up there till I was nine, and then attended an English boarding school for a couple of years, and came back to New Zealand at thirteen, in the first flush of puberty, quite out of touch with my childhood companions and uncertain whether I was an Englishman or a New Zealander. This experience too, though very painful, was beneficial; for I fell into the habit of poem-writing with a vengeance and counted it a poor week when I had not written four or five pieces of verse.
At puberty the door had opened into some kind of cellar of the subconscious mind. A number of sensational ghost stories which I read at this time helped to give shape and body to the subconscious terrors. The one which impressed me most was about a lad who dabbled in black magic, or something of the sort. At the end of the story the moralistic narrator observes him at dusk running and crouching among the long grass of the churchyard, and finally scrabbling vainly at the heavy closed door of the church while large black supernatural dogs drag him down. I think it stirred up in my mind the Calvinist image of reprobation. I had only to substitute auto-erotic practices for black magic, and there I was in the centre of the tale.
The earliest poems, written from seven to fifteen, were undoubtedly imitative – I had absorbed the Romantic poets from my father – and their subject matter had little to do with my own life. They were curiously insubstantial. Thus I wrote, at thirteen, a poem called ‘The Atheist’, pointing out the pains of those who lose their faith – thinking that I myself had a faith, though in fact I believed in little except some obscure Cosmic Principle who did not particularly like me:
Probably the spiritual fact that lay behind the poem was the authentic and terrible grey rock desert of adolescence; but I didn’t exactly face up to it, I preferred to look at it sideways, feeling perhaps that I shouldn’t be there at all.
I would show my father nearly all the poems I wrote – partly for his approval, and partly because I knew they would give him genuine pleasure – yet I felt that he, and my mother too, if they had known the territory where the poems were born – that foggy Belsen of the imagination – would have been less happy about them.
All the pressures were on me at this time to accept the Calvinist ethos which underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot – work is good; sex is evil; do what you’re told and you’ll be all right; don’t dig too deep into yourself. I could not fight these chiefly inward pressures. I lacked the experience to contradict them and forge against them. All I could do was wait and sit it out. The image of Prometheus recurred in my poems:
The words are well put together, no doubt; but after all, there was very little to write about. I had no tools to deal with the central anguish of a child hurled into the adolescent abyss, at the mercy of his imagination and the impulses of his body; for our civilisation has no such tools to give. It was some time before I could forge them for myself.
In a rather Robert Lowell-ish poem I set down recently a sketch of my adolescent home environment, seen more objectively than I could see it at the time:
The tightly bundled energy of a New Zealand home was all there – at the time I couldn’t use it, but later on I learnt to. The danger was that I might sentimentalise, or make one or other of the compromises by which our culture mutilates itself. In the long run it is an intellectual problem.
There were three books which helped me. The first was John Lehmann’s Penguin survey, New Writing in Europe. Re-reading it now, I can’t quite see the cause of my enthusiasm, for the Leftist ethos has long since been blunted and fragmented by politicians and other dreary men; but at that time it burst in the middle of my desert like a nuclear device. I imagined a secret tribe of friends and lovers who waited, guns and poems and contraceptives in their hands, to welcome my coming of age. The experience had some of the force of a religious conversion; and more important, I had the sense of a possible audience for my own verse, and began to discard the dismal models I had been snared by – C.A. Marris’s anthologies and the more sluggish English pastoral poets. The second book was a sloppily written anarchist tract by Ethel Mannin, called Bread and Roses – it emphasised, very justly, the importance of free will, and made me realise that I could in fact determine in some degree what course my life should take. I decided, with no hesitation at all, that it would flow like a river into the gulf of Bohemia. And the third book was Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. It offered the possibility that my subconscious mind might contain sources of peace and wisdom as well as ghosts, werewolves, hags, demons, and the various zoo of the living dead who crowded round my bed at night. These three books were each helpful to me in quite different ways.
I like to think of God and some hard-bitten angel discussing the just distribution of afflictions to the human race – ‘We’ll give this one a cold heart and a money-grubbing tendency; and this one a job in UNESCO; and this one a really painful marriage; and this one a homosexual temperament
It seems to me, looking back, that the negative aspects of my growth were in the long run of most help to me as a writer. They tempered the axe of intellect, as it were. A writer cannot avoid the task of exploring and understanding the private hell which lies just below the threshold of his own mind. I doubt if he can begin to understand the threefold aspect of the modern world – monotony, atrocity, anarchy – if he has not first done this. But while this growth was going on, I was of course a very quiet New Zealand lad doing this and that in a quiet New Zealand town.
1965 (352)
Sir: May I venture to congratulate you on your just and clear-headed editorial on the subject of a possible tour of New Zealand by Miss Rice-Davies? That able young Englishwoman has had her wry laugh at us. It is strange that she wishes to visit our grim mausoleum of the All Black and the Polled Angus heifer. The reward would be wholly financial, and even then not great. But since, for one reason or another, she has agreed to come, we should surely welcome her gladly, on account of our great poverty of local cabaret entertainment.
I wonder if that group of New Zealand women who are trying to oppose her admission to this country have an inkling of the distorted shadow cast by this public gesture of Pharisaism? It is gruelling to be a New Zealand man, and see one’s countrywomen rushing to accept the role of the Ugly Sisters at Cinderella’s ball. One knows only too well the raw, disturbed impulses which lie behind the gesture – one would like to be able to say, ‘Take it easy, take it easy.’ But one has to stand on the sidelines and writhe. People overseas will not know that the hostile group is a small minority, and that most of our women could not care less, having other things to think about.
I suggest that it is not too late for the group to change their minds – to cable Miss Rice-Davies an apology and her air fare, and invite her to their homes, and learn from her some ways and means of cracking the glass dome of boredom that fits so snugly over our metropolis. Morality is hardly the issue. If one inquired too closely into the private lives of public persons, one would be unable to visit any cinema, or play any recording, and certainly one would have to burn one’s copy of Hansard.
1965 (353)
Some time ago I reviewed in these columns two earlier plays by Peter Shaffer, and expressed the opinion that they were on the whole showy and superficial. There was in fact hardly a flicker in them of the wisdom and tragic acceptance of life which lie behind every word of The Royal Hunt of the Sun. In other hands I am sure this play would have become a mere pageant, one of those works of historical journalism which clutter our schoolrooms; but Mr Shaffer has avoided by a miracle the dead hand of reportage.
The narrative of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, and the treacherous execution of the Inca Atahuallpa, grows in his charge to a dramatic discourse of great imaginative power, in which the Christian and primitive non-Christian religious symbols clash and mingle. The Pizarro of the play is mesmerised less by gold than by the myth of a life in accord with nature which the Incas seem to offer. Mr Shaffer has made a profound allegory of the solitude of Western man and his recurrent dream of the garden of irrecoverable innocence. The play reads as if it could be staged magnificently.
John Osborne is acknowledged to be one of the best, perhaps the best contemporary English playwright. He has increasingly made use of the technique of a stream of consciousness in his dialogues, without approaching incoherence. Inadmissible Evidence has as its hero a middle-aged decaying lawyer, unfaithful to his wife, but faithful to some inner sense of human vitality and dignity. I find the play both moving and authentic. With a cast of eight, predominantly female, it should be able to be staged easily by any good amateur group.
1965 (354)
I often think that the ‘Non serviam’ of Lucifer – that mysterious preference of his own will to the will of God, so terrible in its effect on the created universe – is more regularly misinterpreted than any other event in the history of things.
If adolescents disobey their parents, if the building workers carry through a successful strike in defiance of the Government, if artists exhibit a critical spirit and produce works that offend our sense of decorum, it is only too easy to shake the head and attribute to those who disturb the settled order a Satanic intention based on pride.
I think such a view is generally quite mistaken. Obedience is indeed the fence that shelters all other virtues. All the saints praise it and exhibit it in their lives; and it can only reach its full flowering within the Visible Church, where spiritual authority has been given by God to men.
I saw my parents before their reception into the Church accepting with
We recognise the Satanic disobedience as a deep monstrosity and the type of all sin to follow because of the Person against whom it was directed. The meaning of virtue is an ordered love of God; and this love implies the intention of absolute obedience. By obeying God a creature obeys also the deepest laws of his own being; by disobeying Him one frustrates and fragments one’s own life. Only the very innocent doubt this. Every drunk or divorcee is well aware of it, whether or not they give the knowledge a conscious expression.
But the demand for absolute obedience – I except the case of those in religious Orders – is a most perilous and doubtful thing among creatures. When Abraham’s faith was tested, and God demanded that he should kill his son, Isaac – then he obeyed in blind trust, and in the event Isaac was delivered. But if a human father ordered his son to kill another person, the son would be justified in refusing, on the ground that he considered it contrary to the will of God.
I can think of a less extreme illustration in my own life. When I determined to leave the Church of England and become a Catholic, I was obliged to disobey my spiritual guides within that church and set aside whatever docility I had shown them in the past. No angel descended with a scroll declaring in letters of fire the precise will of God for Jimmy Baxter. It was a doubtful and difficult occasion, full of pain for myself and others, where old ties were broken and new ones had yet to be formed. There was more than mere human respect involved; I had every reason to consider my Anglican mentors as my moral and mental superiors, and the intellectual side of it was thorny, because to many Anglicans the Church of England seems already wholly Catholic. To put it very bluntly, I had to use my own sense of smell. Certainly Our Lady took my hand in hers and led me forward through the dark; and for that I praise her now and hope to praise her for ever in Heaven. It was a case where the deepest obedience was to disobey.
Such experiences are formative. I see them as a kind of spiritual coming of age, when God leads a man beyond the shelter of the tribal fences and reveals His holy will to the human heart.
But – you may say – no such problems are likely to occur in the Visible Church; for there human and Divine authority are mercifully the same. I cannot wholly agree. In any Catholic community there are two great
One sees the two authorities functioning through the person of any parish priest. As a priest, he is Father Flanagan, Our Lord’s representative in the celebration of Mass, in the confession box, in the administering of the Sacraments at many times and in many places, and also – though here he may happen to be fallible – as the interpreter of the mind of the Church for his particular flock. To Father Flanagan we kneel with a confident docility, even if our knees creak in cold weather. But there is also Tom Flanagan, the tribal elder, who believes that the Beatle haircut is deeply offensive to God, and who much prefers a book on the All Blacks to the ambiguities of Graham Greene. We will pay him a proper human respect – but we do not have to share his prejudices.
This is the point where difficulties are inclined to crop up. For the good man may not himself have distinguished clearly between his priestly and his tribal authority; and not all the laity are tactful in the way they express disagreement. The fur and feathers may fly. And sometimes a young person may cease to receive the Sacraments on account of a gross mistake – an assumption that rebellion against tribal authority is rebellion against the Church. One needs to be very clear-headed on this matter.
There is commonly a time of crisis in late adolescence and another at the beginning of middle age. In the first the girl or lad has more or less outgrown the need for the kind of authority that parents exercise over younger children – there must be some moment when filial obedience can rightly be replaced by respectful disagreement, when the tribal authority ceases to be binding, but exactly when is usually the bone of contention. Sally thinks wrongly that it has arrived when she is just thirteen; and Sally’s mother equally wrongly thinks it has not arrived when her daughter wants to leave home at eighteen and take a job in Auckland. And when Sally packs her bag in a huff, the mother may begin to enter her second period of crisis, and question the value of a world in which children are ungrateful and people must grow old in pain.
I believe that the existence of the two authorities is in fact providential – since it allows both for necessary obedience and for legitimate rebellion. But the period of rebellion is a time when the tree is shaken and some fruit falls to the ground.
I can only speculate about the spiritual growth of those who come from Catholic homes, for I did not come from one myself – but it seems to me that a Catholic child is likely to accept the Faith on trust – he believes because disbelief would be absurdly contrary to the world he knows – the warm and vigorous world of the tribe. God for him is certainly the God of my fathers, but, lacking some special illumination, not in the same degree, my God, the
The time comes perhaps when he leaves a Catholic college and goes to varsity – and the lecturers there, who have no great interest in Our Lord and place no credence in the Church’s authority, seem smarter and more down to earth – or wiser and more up to date – than Brother Smith and Father Hogan. And so the tree is shaken; and with luck – or rather, God’s grace freely accepted – this Catholic lad comes to see that Church and tribe are not one and the same thing, and for the first time freely and consciously surrenders to the Bride of Christ, the Mystical Body. He has disobeyed the tribe in order to be free to obey God.
And his sister Sally has met a most charming, gentle and handsome divorced man in Auckland – and she too has her conflict between natural and supernatural love, and perhaps for the first time in her life freely chooses the latter – if she had not disobeyed the tribe, the tree would not have been shaken. The unshaken tree (in my opinion) is inclined to turn to dead wood.
Yet I would like to see the danger of real or apparent loss of faith lessened by a clear perception among both clergy and laity of the differences between obedience to God and obedience to the tribe, and between the two authorities – the one infallible, the other highly fallible; the one fixed, the other variable; the one God’s gift, the other the gift of man.
1965 (355)
This book comprises a civic history of Dunedin from the time of settlement till the present day; and one takes it to be a commissioned work. Thus the author has produced it, as it were, within a double frame – the limitations entailed by the somewhat narrow theme of civic Government, and a further necessity that the finished work should be acceptable to those who commissioned it.
One cannot fairly expect the diversity, the play of ideas, or the dramatic development of a piece of unconditioned historical research, such as (for example) John Miller’s book on the founding and first growth of Wellington. It is apparent that Mr McDonald himself has been irked from time to time by these limitations. He frequently digresses along some interesting by-path involving biographical or political comment, and draws back from further exploration with an audible sigh – ‘I would like to have told you more about this, but it doesn’t quite fit into the box of civics.’
One is able to conclude that Mr McDonald has done the best he can with the material at his disposal. Inevitably the first part of his book deals more with people and less with the mechanics of civic administration, for it describes the time of actual settlement. A curious worm’s-eye view of the city of Dunedin emerges from these pages – for one sees the gradual
The endless financial wrangles between the Town Board and the Provincial Government, and the duck-shoving for position of men prominent in local affairs, supply the ironic drama of this phase of development. The later parts of the book, dealing with the development of transport, water supply, gas and electricity, and the amalgamation of various autonomous areas into the city proper, are necessarily more abstract.
I do not propose to offer a synopsis of Mr McDonald’s closely linked chain of facts – it would be no help to the prospective reader, who would be better advised to browse through the book and pick up whatever suits his particular interests. But I admit a certain bias against the educational and social assumption which must have motivated the assembling of a jigsaw of twenty thousand pieces – an assumption that material progress is in itself admirable and a measure of man’s stature.
When one compares the early town, sprawling, insanitary, and frequently ramshackle, with the monotonous, undistinguished settlements that plaster the hills of modern Dunedin – one of the most valuable features of this book is a series of photographs showing the town at various points of its history – one’s deepest reaction is not euphoria but sadness. A community died and a city was born. It is perhaps a microcosm of changes which the world is obliged to endure.
1965 (356)
Sir: Something more needs to be said on the issue of Miss Rice-Davies, but I think it has to be expressed in allegory. It is not wise even for saints to make war on the goddess Venus, or on one or other of her minor representatives. She is seldom reputable. She does not explain herself. One knows that her other face is a skull. Yet without her, the crops fail, beauty goes into mourning and the arts decay. I know nothing of Miss Rice-Davies. But in the popular mind she has become a minor representative of the goddess. I felt that those who wish to keep her out of the country have acted unwisely – symbolically they exile that part of themselves which she represents, and this, with many other things, is needed if our culture is to be a whole one, and not the mere barren shadow of life which it so unfortunately and so often is. I felt a moment of anger about it; but now, as usual, I feel grief. And I apologise if I have hurt the feelings of well-meaning people who, in my opinion, lack wholeness in their thinking.
1965 (357)
Dear Mr Shand,
Many of us were surprised and enlightened to read the report of your impassioned outburst in a recent session of Parliament, when the possible admission of Miss Rice-Davies for a tour of entertainment in New Zealand was being discussed. Your language left us in no doubt concerning your personal views on this matter. You referred to this young Englishwoman as a ‘gangster’s moll’ and implied that some unstated moral harm would result from her admission to this country as a travelling entertainer. Some people might consider your statement an exhibition of gross prejudice. After all, the Profumo case is now dead and buried. The gutter press has turned its attention to new topics. It would have been possible for you to let the dead bury their dead, and allow this young person to visit our shores. The private lives of entertainers are rarely free from some taint of scandal – but this need not prevent us from accepting their contribution to popular culture – and our country has a grave lack of local talent in the field.
But you chose the sterner, higher road – and we must congratulate you, for we think we know the secret source of your decision. It is your sensitive awareness of the enormous value of moral purity which has led you to this hard decision. Your sensitivity to this virtue is so great that even the whiff of an old scandal makes you recoil as a housewife might at the sight of a weta in her linen cupboard. Do not be ashamed of it, Mr Shand! We do not wholly share your sensitivity, being perhaps a little coarser in grain – or rather, in us it operates in a slightly different area. The rain of unquenchable phosphorus which our New Zealand artillery is at present unloading on Vietnamese villagers horrifies us much more than any breach of the sexual code. Yet we can understand that people differ – one may follow St Francis, another St Jerome. In some respects your crystalline purity fills us with awe. Another man might have felt there was a danger of making a fool of himself in public, of playing the Puritan in a worldly modern age – but if such a thought occurred to you, it did not deter you. For you, the virtue of purity had to triumph at all costs. You said what you had to say; you did what you had to do – and while we marvel, we also admire you for it.
There are facts we must bring to your notice – facts which have wholly escaped your attention. We refer to the social disorder which has developed in South Vietnam now that more than one hundred thousand American troops are quartered in that country. The bar girls of Saigon have not been sufficient in number to cope with the brunt of the sexual demands of this new army of crusaders. A number of ugly incidents involving sexual assaults made by soldiers against Vietnamese womenfolk have steadily worsened the relationship between the people of that nation and their saviours from overseas. We quote a leading Vietnamese Catholic priest, militant against
‘How lucky you are!’ they often say. ‘A convert comes so freshly to the things we have become too much used to.’
There is a grain of truth in the comment; yet I feel that the real target is somewhere else, that freshness or lack of freshness have little to do with the Faith. I remember the vivid honeymoon with gratitude. Our Lord enclosed me in an envelope of love. Our Lady gave me such joy that I walked down from St Gerard’s one blazing day calling out – ‘Ave! Ave! Ave Maria!’ – for the seagulls and the old age pensioners to hear and wonder at. But then there were other days – the times of violent grief and bewildered contrition. How could a man already half in Heaven fall back into serious sin? I was like a ball bouncing first this way, then that way, and sooner or later it had to come to rest.
Today a good friend, a priest who had been studying in England, gave me a head-and-shoulders statuette of Our Lady which he brought back with him from Rome. How could a Marian, bound to Our Lady by chains of love that go much deeper than the grave – and moreover, a writer, a poet, pledged to give her public praise and honour – look at that image without an impulse
It seems necessary that feelings of devotion should wither back into the soil they sprang from. One could not carry weights, think clearly, make correct judgments, control one’s irritability, be of use, if the vivid life of the feelings were present to distract the soul. Yet I doubt if anyone experiences the loss of such feelings without regret. It is not easy to pray regularly to a God no more present to one’s feelings or imagination than He might be to a negative agnostic. There is a sense of non-reply. And the equal absence of Our Lady (who has very suitably departed along with her Son) brings a particularly piercing sense of having been left to oneself – for she appeals to and replies to the child still present in the man, and so it is the child who wishes to weep. I could imagine a not-too-wise Marian sliding half- consciously into some obvious fault simply in order to be able to ask her to dress his wounds. Children often behave like this. They grow naughty in order to gain attention. But the whole point of the experience is that one is being asked to be docile and God-reliant without feelings – to change, that is, from a child in the Faith to a man.
At this point the convert comes of age. He begins to share the experience of the vast majority of his brothers and sisters in the Faith, who work quietly, efficiently, sometimes heroically, with no special consolations. I think such people commonly misjudge themselves; they mistake aridity for lethargy and develop a sense of vague guilt which God does not in fact require of them. They feel mistakenly that fresh converts are nearer to God than they are. At such times one needs perhaps a good spiritual adviser.
Our Lady then is nearer than ever, though she is no longer known to the soul in person. She is showing the dark side of the Faith, the void in the heart where God prepares a temple for Himself. Our Lady of silence, Our Lady of darkness, Our Lady of the desert – show us the immeasurable depth of the God whom no images can truly represent – lead us deeper into the night where no roads exist – pray for us now and at the hour of our death!
1965 (359)
Anthologies can be, for poets and their readers, but especially for poets, source books where they learn an attitude and a style of thought. England’s Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allot in 1600, was one such, and The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts and first published in 1936, another. It helped to shape the style of a generation.
A solar energy rises from these pages, a confidence in myth-making, such
There are a few obviously bad apples in the crate – Hopkins’s ‘The Candle Indoors’, T.F. Hulme’s ‘The Embankment’, Wallace Stevens’s ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’, Wilfred Owens’s ‘Greater Love’ (a poem expressing, not describing war hysteria), most of Laura Riding, Edith Sitwell’s ‘The Bat’, William Empson’s ‘Invitation to Juno’, a good deal of Stephen Spender, all but one of Charles Madge’s poems, and David Gascoigne’s surrealist confection – it is worthwhile pointing them out, to show that Roberts’s book never amounted to Holy Writ. His mistakes were those of the academic man taken in by elaborate word-games or else by the subtly sentimental job.
But Donald Hall, by contrast, tends to choose the poorest poems available from the tamest poets, except where some modern classic obtrudes itself under his nose – as in the case of Robert Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. I do not find his selection wholly unreadable. I am grateful for one charming short poem by James Dickey, called ‘The Heaven of Animals’, which gave me some illicit comfort lately when my tomcat died of a bladder infection. But either most poets since the Thirties have been carving cherry- stones, or Mr Hall thinks they have and likes it. I don’t think they have. Mr Hall has added a poor gloss to a book that was great in its way.
The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse is a far livelier collection: though it has its dead patches and its flashes of eccentricity. One could do without William Bell, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rupert Brooke, A.E. Coppard, C.M. Doughty James Elroy Flecker, W.S. Graham, Brian Higgins, Wyndham- Lewis, Edgell Richword, Dorothy Wellesley and Charles Williams – some have had a good hearing already in the high school anthologies, and some show the editors’ inveterate liking for curios.
But there are a number of magnificent revelations and discoveries. The selection from W.H. Auden is impeccable. They have opened the door to the small but real best of Chesterton and Kipling, and resurrected those two biting satires, John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Holy Office’. Perhaps there is too much of Hugh MacDiarmid’s philosophising, but a little of it was a good idea. The only thundering mistake is Robert Nichol’s coy, arch, awkward poem, ‘Harlot’s Catch’. The selection from Edith Sitwell includes some of her best and none of her worst. One feels that the editors are not solely interested in the development of the English language. Human behaviour plays a part in this book. I prefer it that way.
1965 (360)
The authoritative voice of T.S. Eliot seemed to be at the same time English and cosmopolitan. I think that unconsciously both his readers and his critics (not necessarily the same people) assumed that Eliot was an English poet who had broken through the barrier of insularity that tends to separate English culture from the traditions of Europe and Asia. We praised him for it. We respected this intelligent moralist, the Matthew Arnold of our age, who analysed the Jacobean dramatists, but whose own hybrid genius had more in common with the Milton of Samson Agonistes. We even loved him with the uneasy love reserved for the ideal father figure, a traffic officer at the busy crossroads of the spirit. But we forgot he was fundamentally American – and Mr Howarth’s book remedies the unaccountable omission.
Mr Howarth traces in abundant detail the Unitarian thought of the Eliot family and their forays into the fields of philosophy and social reform. This portion of the book reveals clearly the vigour and the eccentric privacy of American culture before the turn of the century. In particular T.S. Eliot’s mother emerges as the many-handed American goddess – genteel, imaginative, energetic in good works, yet defeated by a too great fear of the coarseness of life – an able writer herself of Utopian verse. I was much moved to read how, when The Waste Land was first published, she deplored its lack of a positive message, yet defended it against the negative comments of the men of her household. One suspects that Eliot’s own lifelong conflict between an enormous sense of duty and a solitary free-booting imagination derived in a large degree from the influence of this remarkable woman.
The development of Eliot’s tastes and character, first at Harvard, then in France, could no doubt be paralleled in many biographies of American writers. He remains the observer and interpreter, influenced a trifle by Asian studies at Harvard, thrown off his feet by French scepticism, and then asserting through the mask of Sweeney the hard-bitten American comic spirit. This book, however, is not a biography – rather it is a loosely bundled thesis on Eliot’s literary mentors. Perhaps only an American, always a little outside the conservative structure of English society, could have become spokesman for that society and for what is best in the Church of England. Mr Howarth’s writing, though undistinguished, is lucid enough; and one is grateful for the material he has unearthed. The sections on Eliot as editor and dramatist are perhaps the least satisfactory. They imply no separation between a journalist’s and an artist’s world. Nor is it made plain just why Eliot remains unshakeably the one great Christian moralist of our century.
1965 (361)
Books – books are the greatest enemy of man – after the radio, that is. Just think. If ninety per cent of the population couldn’t read, all their thoughts would be their own – you’d get ballads, legends, everything, pouring out of the popular mind – but the way it is, they can read, and so they just echo the books. Books mean the end of original thinking.
Because I am a poet, and have to have my own ideas to put down, I read very few books – and a big proportion of the ones I do read are other people’s poems. You might say I read poetry to get to know the way other poets write – it’s a matter of the tricks of the trade. But I won’t talk to you about that. It’s too technical. Instead I’ll talk about those very few books which have been of personal value to me, which have helped me to grow, as far as I have grown.
When you go into the bookshop, and look round, you just might see me there. That intellectual-looking man with a new edition of Keats’s letters? No that’s not me. That’s a Professor of English. He wants to find out how badly his chief enemy has edited the book. The man with the stubble and overcoat mooching round in the paperback section? That’s me! What’s he reading? Let’s take a closer look.
I was Stalin’s Concubine: a story of torture, rape and extermination in the deserts of Siberia. That’s right. My favourite author – Anon – masquerading as Zaranovya Oubolovski, a black-haired lady in a sweater with a face like a Byzantine ikon. That’s me, all right – lapping it up. And you won’t see me pay for it either. When I’ve galloped through it, I’ll just put it back on the table, and get out of the shop as if I’d suddenly remembered an important engagement.
My reading has always been unhealthy. Or put it another way – I read in order to get second-hand experience. A man can’t do everything – be a Hindu, a Muslim and a Communist – smoke opium and climb Kilimanjaro – have ten wives and play the saxophone – it would wear me down to the bootsoles even to do half of it. But I want to know what it’s like – how other people get their kicks – that’s how the young people describe it. I’m not young. But I’ve got a strong interest in human nature. When it comes to an end, I’ll be ready to come to an end.
I ploughed my way through most of Walter Scott’s novels when I was a kid. Out of boredom probably. But the books I remember are the ones I discovered for myself – Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra, Nada the Lily, Ayesha, She – marvellous books! Radioactive! And earlier still – Champions – Rockfist Rogan R.A.F. hanging on a ladder from the wing of a plane. Or those girls’ comics, with a ghost surrounded with green light gliding along the corridors of the old castle become boarding school. I couldn’t sleep after reading them – I’d pull the blanket over my head and shudder. There were acres of ghost stories. They helped to turn me into a nervous wreck at thirteen (if a boy
Books have one important function for the adolescent in our society, where physically mature boys and girls are still treated as kids. They help them to form a clear picture of what adult sex could be like – above all, an image of a partner. I remember the novels of Dos Passos with gratitude. They satisfied my gigantic curiosity. [And then there was one of the Winds of Love – East, West, South or North – by Somebody Mackenzie. I wouldn’t dream of looking the name up. It doesn’t matter. But there was a passage where a smooth but motherly girl teaches the adolescent hero how to fornicate in a shrubbery somewhere after a party. I owe a debt of gratitude to Somebody Mackenzie. I must have re-read that passage at least nine hundred times. The advocates of clean books for adolescents should remember their own adolescence. How can you get a clear image of what it’s all about from a clean book? My sex instruction came from American novelists – a bit romantic maybe, but not hazy, not too vague. They don’t fascinate me so much now. But that’s natural. I’m thirty-eight, not eighteen.]
Tolstoy was a help. He’s broad and deep, like most of the Russians, even the Marxist writers. His Death of Ivan Ilyich literally taught me what it was to die – the absolute helplessness, the inevitability, and the blindness of those whose turn hasn’t come yet. It showed me that men might live without God, but they couldn’t die without Him. Later on W.H. Auden put it another way:
That comes from Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. I wasn’t a Christian; but he almost turned me into one. He showed me that the Christian mystery embraces doubt and atheism and the labyrinth of evil – as indeed it does, on Holy Saturday, when God has died, and even the Cross is taken down, and the universe stands bare as an empty house.
But it was Dylan Thomas who actually made a Christian of me:
He enters the wounds of Christ; and in another poem he announces the marriage of the soul to God in terms of sexual intercourse:
When I got a copy of that little book, Deaths and Entrances, I carried it in the inside pocket of my working coat – through the iron works, the freezing works, the pubs – drunk and sober – until those poems were part of the structure of my own mind. That’s what a real book can do. It turned my soul inside out.
I was nineteen or twenty. I can think of several other books that were almost as valuable to me – C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, John Lehmann’s New Writing in Europe, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. But most books are chatter, garbage, dry rubbish, wadding . . . Naturally enough; because they are written to make money.
[What about reading for escape? Well – I used to read Wild West stories – but I don’t any longer. Not that I’m too proud – I just lost interest. I’d rather write, talk, work, sleep. What is there to escape from, anyway? Oneself? It can’t be done.]
Remember this, though – if you see your son or daughter reading True Confessions or a lurid paperback, don’t interrupt them. They’re getting some valuable second-hand experience. Half of it may be guff. But where else are they going to get it from?
1965 (362)
I don’t have TV in the house. One winter I tried it out for a month to keep the kids entertained. It’s a powerful monster. I wouldn’t have it again. Reasons: –
I like the ‘Laramie’ series and ‘Steptoe and Son’, but I’m prepared to do without them.
1965 (363)
A Meditation for Christmas
It is the feast of the innocence of God; and since He is now true man, it is equally the feast of human innocence. One enters that small cave shelter, where animals are fed and drop their dung – and one kneels down at a distance from those three people, the only true royalty the earth has ever possessed – at a distance because the human heart cannot easily bear the light of innocence.
By its very existence it searches and judges as no law ever will or can. One would like to get up and go away. Yet one stays, kneeling rigidly, with hands clenched and knotted together and the chin against the chest – because the deeper knowledge is that there is nowhere else to go. Here is the soul’s light and nourishment and its only source of being. Elsewhere one will find only drugs and distraction, shadow fruit, mirages and poisoned water and the jaws of the lion.
One is aware of many scars deep in the soul left there by old encounters with the lion who devours innocence. Yet by the mercy of the Child who is also God one is alive now and kneeling at the centre of the world, in the cave shelter –
And so by the last of many gifts, the gift of perseverance, we may see Him in heaven.
But here and now one sees Him only by intellect and imagination, not by naked sight; though obscurely, like an always smouldering fire, the heart burns for Him and is satisfied with nothing less than Him. And so there is an element of torment in even the happiest life on earth, since we do not possess the One whom we were born to possess for ever.
The innocence of Our Lord is shown to us most clearly in his Nativity; for then He had, as it were, a breathing-space before his love led Him to plunge into the night of our sins. His Mother and his foster-father did not have to shrink from his light, for they had neither sins nor the scars of sin to make them afraid. The two beasts between whom He lay, scarred no doubt by man’s cruelty, were not sinful, because all beasts obey the law of God. At the feast of our Redemption He would hang in agony between two thieves, rejecting them no more than he rejects the sinless. His innocence then would be no less than it was at the moment of his birth, for He was and is always the Holy Child: but it would be veiled by the blackness of our human night.
I pray that at the moment of their deaths all men, in union with his suffering, whether they know it or not, may be granted a share in his innocence, and so enter Heaven as children, each bearing the Holy Child at the centre of his soul.
Kneeling among the stones and straw under the clear gaze of the Holy Child, it is the faults of chronic stupidity, not even actual sins, that trouble me most. That good woman who wrote me a bitter rebuke for my public opposition to legislation that prevented a young cabaret artiste, well known for her part in an English scandal, from visiting this country – I had replied to this woman with a blistering comment on the mating attitudes of young New Zealand males – and she, much disturbed, had written again to tell me I would roast in hell for corrupting the young. I had terrified one of the little sheep, already frightened of the dark, till she mistook my stupid self for the lion. And then there was the Maori primer child I threatened with a strapping for some crime against the grim gods of the classroom – I forget what – his dark eyes look at me still in grief and bewilderment.
The order of things is reversed – small matters loom large and large matters seem negligible. The coarse jokes I tell at work don’t matter – they dissolve like bubbles on the stream – and the actual faults of the flesh seem to have shrunk to vanishing point. The Child does not even know they exist.
But I remember the time of the house-warming party, when my own children were wakened by the noise, and I went through to sit in a chair between their beds and calm them by making fiery rings in the air with my cigarette. From an adult point of view the party was innocent enough – but no such gathering is free of its quota of boredom and malice – and the same light which streams on me now streamed on me then, accusing me not of actual sin but of blindness, coarseness, dullness, and a false direction of the soul. So what any priest would brush aside in the confessional seems now like a coat of dust and cobwebs. Yet nobody has told me that I cannot stay. I am permitted to be present at the feast of God’s innocence. To remain here seems the best – to remain at the edge of light, neither accepted nor rejected. When the light of God shines into the soul one cannot actually pray – for prayer is a
There are two things which happen to encourage me. The first is the realisation that I am not alone in the cave of refuge. Around me, visible and invisible, kneel an enormous multitude – people of all races, all nations, all times. They are my brothers and sisters, who have come here, they hardly know how, to receive the blessing of the Child. Their presence comforts me; for they too are deeply imperfect yet not denied the virtue of hope.
And the second thing happens when I raise my eyes and look at the Child’s wholly human Mother. Her face reflects His light as the moon reflects the sun – and the brightness one might otherwise shrink from is made sweet and bearable to human eyes. Moved by love, I said to her long ago – ‘Your face is my theology’ – and that is true, for whatever I know of God I have learnt by looking at it. From her I derive the confidence to approach the Holy Child, at this midnight Mass when we celebrate the innocence of God.
I kneel again at the altar rail and the priest places the Host on my tongue, saying ‘The Body of Christ’. (It is the Holy Child whom one possesses and is possessed by even here on earth – He Himself has entered to heal the soul that cannot heal itself. So we too are made members of the Holy Family.) ‘Amen’.
1965 (364)
Some years ago I was working as a teacher at a school in the Hutt Valley. The ages of the children in my class ranged from seven to nine, or thereabouts; and while they were lively, sociable children, patiently ready to instruct any adult in the art of living, they were not so patient with my own attempts to instruct them in other matters. My sympathy lay with them; but there were ‘problems of control’ – those tensions which make teachers wish they had stayed pushing a pen or shovelling coke at the gasworks. Some answer had to be found; and these jingles, rhymes, poems made to be spoken, were part of a possible answer.
Thus the poems were not only made for children, in the sense that I had children in mind when I wrote them. They had also to satisfy the demands of children, keep them moving, catch and hold their attention; or else they would have been useless to me as a teacher, and probably to those for whom I made them. If I had been following my own wishes, the poems might well have been smoother, more symmetrical, ‘better poetry’, made in part to suit the adult critic inside myself. But the children required direct speech, simple words, plain rhymes, and plenty of action. Some of the poems were action poems, made for them to chant with appropriate movements; two at least were made for boys and girls to chant alternately; some were made for
The poems bridge a gap, I think; for when I was teaching I found that there was much verse for infants and some verse for children over nine or ten – when they are at least able to listen to ballads with satisfaction – but nothing for the in-betweeners, the ones who are neither infants nor fully literate. If poems by other writers had been available for this age group, I might, being a lazy man, have used these and written none of my own; but I searched and could find literally nothing for the in-betweeners.
The themes sprang up in part from the children’s conversation – about animals, boats, railways trains, houses on fire, conditions of weather – and in part from my own memories of childhood. It was necessary to write mainly about things they knew, or imagined they knew. A few of the poems were constructed as an aid for speech training. When I stopped being a teacher, I set the poems aside, partly because I had no more need for them, and partly because they were not ‘literary works’ – were, in a sense, never designed as literature. I did not in fact retain copies of all of them.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr J.C. Ward, who was headmaster of the school in which I made the poems – for he encouraged me to make them and use them in the first place, and kept copies of them himself, and later brought them to the notice of publishers, and urged me to have them made into a book. And when I looked at them again, it seemed to me that they might well be heard and read and learnt by other children, now that the ones for whom they were written are burly teen-agers, and that such a book might be more enlivening than a great deal of the solemn rubbish that passes as children’s verse. This, then, is a book of poems for children.
1965 (365)
‘James K. Baxter will continue to enjoy the widest repute in his native land,’ wrote Allen Curnow in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. To the one hundred sixth formers who heard his lecture at the end of May, ‘widest repute’ seemed something of an understatement.
The lecture began with a brief survey of New Zealand writing up until the Thirties. The tradition which Thomas Bracken and his associates tried to establish was dismissed as a bad one, and N.Z. writing during this period was broadly described as Victorian and pastoral.
With the Thirties began a stream of N.Z. conscious poetry which has been developed through to the present day. When dealing with individual
N.Z. poets, Mr Baxter displayed a remarkable talent for summing up in a single apt phrase the particular character of the writers; R.A.K. Mason, for example, was said to be ‘melancholy and truthful’, Denis Glover expressed a
Mr Baxter’s treatment of individual writers was discerning but sympathetic, and in analysing the N.Z. environment from an artist’s point of view, he displayed that same sensitivity and acuteness which we had already seen in The Fire and the Anvil.
Taking as his basic premise the fact that poets must write about what they know, Mr Baxter showed that N.Z.’s egalitarian and materialistic environment could not often produce good writing apart from satire.
When speaking of his own work, the poet’s integrity as a writer and his deep appreciation of the Faith became quite obvious.
As a climax to the evening, Mr Baxter read to us his ballad, ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’, and then, at a request from the floor, ‘A Rope for Harry Fat’.
The memory of this most informative lecture, coloured throughout by a touch of wry humour, is something which I, like many other sixth formers, will hold for a long time. We are all very grateful to Mr Baxter and offer him our heartiest congratulations upon his being awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship.
1965 (366)
Once the men possessed the forms of the day and the women the forms of the night. Now it is changed. The women have been conquered by the metals of the sun. Neither can get peace. The world spins round like an iron disk. That talking branch, the ancient phallus, is now only a bandaged stump. One has to go fresh to the place where the tracks divided.
I cannot speak of the Bride and the Groom. But in a green place, a very quiet place, we find our beginning. The soul rose up and fell again in the rock pool at the source of the river. Pyramids of soul rising and falling with the invisible current that comes up out of the ground. In the dry nights I remember that place.
I am Negro.
1965 (367)
The problem for me in the Forties and Fifties was to get rid of the mere echo language in my poems, the twists of phrase (and so of thought also) that belonged by right to Hardy or Yeats or Dylan Thomas or Louis MacNeice. I have been from the start a very imitative writer. Not a bad thing in itself,
In the final published version of the poem ‘Wild Bees’ the stanza-form is lifted from Louis MacNeice (a loose six-line stanza, like a bundle of faggots, with two rhyming lines tied round it like a cord) – but that poem was well founded in experience, and had gone already through several drafts, beginning with the crude version I wrote in stress hexameters when I was fifteen. But there are other poems, particularly those influenced by Yeats, in which the content itself was manufactured to fit the other man’s style. I think I have learnt to recognise and reject these. The temptation to write them is strongest when one is fiddling with words in a time of dryness.
At the same time, another man’s poem may act as the detonator to set off various land-mines of buried experience in oneself. I find Lawrence Durrell and Robert Lowell particularly helpful in this way – Durrell loosens up the chains of association, helping me to avoid heavy aphorisms about Time or God, and keep the eye on the invaluable sensory image; Lowell has helped me to use words as a straitjacket to contain the violent experiences of the manic- depressive cycle. Both have led me nearer to my own true subjects. Neither poet is a New Zealander.
Our people do not seem, even in any embryonic fashion, to regard local places or events as a focus for legend. As a result they must regard the private legend-making of our poets as an inexplicable cult, the kind of yoga performed for reasons of health on sunny mornings. This is a real privation. One lacks an audience because the audience lacks certain interior facilities that other races have regarded as part of the normal human equipment. I am reminded of the story of the Thai poet who was sent on a diplomatic mission to a southern province. His mission was unsuccessful; for he fell foul of the governor of the province by making unsuitable proposals to the governor’s wife. A few minutes before his execution he wrote his last poem – a satire, no doubt, on the governor, written with his bare toe in the dust of the execution ground. It is highly probable that the poem was memorised by his audience on the spot, and recited in the huts that night. One feels a certain nostalgia for the situation where such a close rapport between poet and audience was possible. The same man (wearing your clothes or mine) receiving shock treatment in a New Zealand mental hospital, would find the nurses and his fellow-inmates less open to the seed of private knowledge.
Two methods appeal to me, at the moment, according to the kind of poem I am making – a straitjacket of formal rhetoric, with full rhymes and references to Greek mythology, fathered by Robert Lowell, to deal with the experiences of those who habitually embrace red-hot stoves; or a loose hencoop, erected by rule-of-thumb bush carpentry, fathered by nobody,
I learnt from Denis Glover long ago to leave out most adjectives. The sessions were conducted in the Gladstone Hotel, where Glover’s contemplative powers had their full flowering. I learnt from Louis Johnson that New Zealand and the continent of Europe are joined under water; and that women also can be people. This last discovery is one I am still pondering over.
There is a spot in the arena to which the fighting bull returns (a different spot for each bull) and from which he comes out more assured and formidable. For me it was once the beaches of the place I grew up in; then the pub; and latterly perhaps the hour of death which one looks forward to. If this spot is correctly located one can generally go on writing.
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Somewhere in the King Country a bureaucrat was riding along a country road in his Jaguar. He had come off the main highway in the hope of finding a short-cut that would take him through to Auckland, where he had to chair a big Conference. But he had lost his way. And he came to a crossroad where the signposts had become illegible by age and the action of the weather. An oldish Maori man leant against it smoking his pipe. The bureaucrat questioned him. ‘Where does that road go to?’
‘That one, ehoa? That goes to my brother’s farm.’ ‘And that one?’
‘That goes to the sea. Where we get the pipi.’ ‘How can I get to Auckland from here?’
‘Auckland? I don’t know about that. It’s a long way to Auckland . . .’. ‘Look here,’ said the bureaucrat. ‘I’ve got an important meeting in
Auckland. They can’t run it without me. I’ve got to get there quickly. So you’ll have to put me in touch with somebody who knows the way. As a matter of fact, you seem to be lost just as much as I am.’
The old man puffed his pipe for a while, and then he spoke slowly. ‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘I can’t be lost, mate. I’m not going anywhere.’
The story has something to do with the idea of Progress. There was the case of my grandmother too. When she saw her first aeroplane, she went inside and brought out her family. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look! It’s the Devil riding in his chariot.’
I may have dramatised the occasion; but that was more or less the way she reacted. When the thunderbirds fly over the jungle, unloading fire, a Vietnamese peasant woman might react in a way not too unlike that of my grandmother – except that she would not say, ‘Look!’ – she would say, ‘Come and hide! Let us hide ourselves in the belly of the earth . . .’.
It is a truism that modern technological development has outdistanced the capacity of men to judge, control, distinguish. On the plain of Armageddon all the soldiers lack faces. I have feared often that – even if war should cease – we may finally establish in New Zealand a society where all are equally arid, all are equally hutched and fed, all are equally devoured by tedium, all are equally gutted by the mechanisms of propaganda and commercial advertising.
The danger does not really lie in the fact of technological progress – that, for example, one can use a bulldozer where once one had to use a shovel – but in a narrow and arrogant spirit of grinding secularism that inhabits our bureaucracy. Perhaps I may set down roughly the tenets of this cult:
That is what my grandmother should have done when she saw her Satan, the god of Progress, riding his cloudy chariot over the land. She should have laughed till the tears ran down. It is still not too late to do so.
1965 (369)
I began reading A.I.H. Paterson’s book of poems with a trace of prejudice, since this writer’s verse had in the past seemed to me too much a series of manufactured articles, like the wire-and-tin mobiles that people hang up in pubs. But a verse collection is different from a few poems scattered
This quotation from one of the best of Mr Paterson’s poems, the first from a sequence concerning the disillusionment inherent in the settlement of New Zealand, demonstrates his intellectual grip on a complex metaphor, and equally his vision of the causes of spiritual barrenness. Perhaps a third of the poems in this book have a similar control, authority, and openness to the life of this country – not by any means a small quota for a first book – though the rest of them suffer either from fragmentariness or from a sense of verbal strain as if the poet were unsure of his theme. I feel free to welcome Caves in the Hills and hope that the desire for inner solitude implicit in most of Mr Paterson’s work will not lead to any retreat from the wars of language.
Sylvia Thomson’s verse expresses strong feelings about various matters – music, a white heron, Peter Pan, Pompeii, Joan of Arc, Anzac Day, a last- century cricket match. Among much debris there are some flashes of real eloquence and intuition. But the poet was ill-advised to rhyme ‘Mowries’ with ‘cowries’ in an unsuccessful poem on the 1953 visit of Queen Elizabeth II to New Zealand. In a moment of aberration, at some official welcome, a member of the Ngapuhi might happen to transfer her to an earth oven.
1965 (370)
Sir: I notice that Senator Robert Kennedy (no Vietnik) has expressed grave perturbation at the fact that the American Government has ignored three feelers towards negotiation from North Vietnam during the past seven months. I too am perturbed. A great many New Zealanders undoubtedly accepted the assurance of our Prime Minister that, while sending aid to the South Vietnamese Government, he would try in all ways to work for a negotiated peace. At that time we were informed that North Vietnam was wholly intractable. It now seems that we were misinformed. Either our Prime Minister was himself gravely misled, or he was consciously misleading us. Had the delegation of New Zealand churchmen of various denominations who approached him, urging a negotiated peace, known that the rights that might lead to that peace were being deliberately ignored – one supposes, in
I believe that we live in a century more merciless than that of Genghis Khan. The massacre of Jews, the starvation of kulaks, the extermination of the civilian population of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Cologne – these monumental atrocities must be understood, digested, to establish a decision in each man’s heart that he will never again be more merciless than any beast. May I associate myself with the statement of that Catholic priest who had seen his village, empty of Viet Cong, containing only old people and children, consumed by explosive fire? – ‘I have seen my faithful burnt up by napalm
. . . By God, it is not possible. They must settle their account with God . . .’. To reject possible negotiations in the circumstances of this demonic war is to become, I think, a trifle insane. I pray each day that the mad will be made sane, and hearts of stone turned back into hearts of flesh.
Decorum is part of the problem. How does one explain to polite, reserved, military-minded people that modern war is itself an atrocity – in the Hiroshima panels, a plain full of burnt, flayed, naked, staggering people, whose threatening, asking ghosts are now part of the collective mind of modern man? Do our neighbours remember that children frequently become insane under modern war conditions? Do they have no bad dreams? Have they lost the power to love beyond their own families?
1965 (371)
Sir: Through some oversight, in a recent letter in which I enumerated the crimes against humanity perpetrated in this century, I omitted to mention the worst and largest – the massacre, for profit, of many million Africans in the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo. This, and other forms of exploitation by Europeans, including the recent establishing of a police state in Rhodesia, have made it impossible for any person of European descent, without absurdity, to describe any African nation as ‘uncivilised’. It is equally absurd to describe as ‘children’ people in adult life who work, rear children, and engage in complex communal activities. In mentioning these truisms, I am not protesting solely against the immature ramblings of a U.K. delegate most unfortunately present at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference in Wellington. I wish also to apologise, as a man of European descent and a writer resident in this country, to African visitors for insults they have had to endure in the town I live in.
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