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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The World of Sam Cash

The World of Sam Cash

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)