Nobody Loves a Critic

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 conversationspage 522 are intolerably cagey and stilted.

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)