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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

When the Wind Blows

When the Wind Blows

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.

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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 bypage 34 no means unique. The same kind of thing has been done a thousand times by Hemingway and his disciples. But we are not used to hearing our own voices recorded, and the strangeness may at first make us antagonistic. Most adverse critics of Sargeson find fault with his honesty rather than with his weaknesses of presentation. From a solitary and highly individual position Sargeson has come to be accepted as part of the foundation of such national culture as we seem likely to possess. John Lehmann has published a collection of his stories, and this has appeared in a French translation. Inevitably he has become a tin god in the eyes of some; but we can regard him, retaining the critical attitude which it is necessary to maintain towards any author foreign or indigenous, as a pioneer and vital power in the literature of this country.

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