Immanuel’s Land

‘. . . 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-lesspage 316 innocent hedonism of childhood and adolescence. Duggan is no evangelist, less so indeed than Sargeson, who is not above pointing a moral. His very simplicity gives the impression of infinitely careful workmanship, each word and phrase hammered out to indicate the ambiguous, variable truth of experience –

. . . 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)