A Vegetable Bouquet for Mr Curnow

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 Verse in Education, 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 in In Fires of No Return which I presume you especially wanted preserved, there was only one or two in the Penguin. And of your later poems which seem to me your very best (I am thinking of the third part of Fires) 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 gopage 460 over exactly the history of a certain disagreement between Mr Curnow and myself about the content and bias of the book.

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.

page 461

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’spage 462 ‘Watch’, James K. Baxter’s ‘The Morgue’, almost anything by Charles Spear and a good deal by A.R.D. Fairburn – which show superficially 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 impressionpage 463 of men at work, rabbiting, dredging and harvesting. And in this poem at least, his handling of the ballad metre is superior to that of his Australian mentors.

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.

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 twentiethpage 464 year) has been taken for a simple one-level allegory and ‘this our race’ for the New Zealanders; the ‘far-pitched perilous hostile place’ is New Zealand. Mason has protested that this is not so. He was thinking of the human race and the planet Earth . . .

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.

page 465

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

. . . valleys
Where the muddy rivers run
Past houses, groves and alleys
In the residential sun.

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

. . .

page 466

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)