On the Side of Life

Your questionnaire rang a bell at several points for me. Do you want to stay in New Zealand, or go abroad? Would you like to be a full-time writer? What do you think of the value of New Zealand criticism? Should we take rhetoric and wring its neck? The last one was like a tick biting me where I had been bitten before.

Do you want to stay in New Zealand? Yes and no. New Zealand is the right place to be in when the rocket-guns go off. One may be able to hide behind Mount Cook. And a country whose products are mainly primary cannot easily starve a man with a few simple skills and light fingers. But the real question was implied, not fully stated – Do you think the New Zealand climate encourages the growth of writers as well as gorse and Canadian thistle?

Writers require two main incentives to survive and grow. The knowledge that their self-appointed task will earn them the recognition that sociallypage 214 appointed tasks do for others; and also real themes to wrestle with, and no one to tell them what holds to use.

It would be stupid to say that there is no audience for New Zealand writing. Every brand of commercial literature, from stories and poems in school journals to high-grade radio plays, will be read and listened to, and the authors paid and praised. But does that help much? A commercial writer has his guts squeezed out from the start. He wants to write about a factory strike – there is a deadpan way of doing it so that neither a factory owner nor a trade unionist would be offended or for that matter give a damn about it. He wants to write about marriage, his own or someone else’s – there is an arch, remote way of doing it so that nobody will be really worried by the underground rumble of sex and spiritual crisis. He wants to write about God and humanity – he had better leave out the doctrine of Original Sin, offensive to a society whose wealth and culture is founded on clean refrigeration. Unconsciously, willy-nilly, all the boys and girls that start writing are gathered in by a dragnet of quiet acceptable stereotypes. They forget they ever really worried about anything. And the tough ones, the real writers, are always making intricate gestures of repudiation – to keep their feet clear of the puppet-strings. As for something real to bite on, well, a writer can find that anywhere, until his teeth drop out. But the more he tries to write about important matters the more he will find he is up against it. I seem to remember a letter in the Dominion saying how dreadful it was that our young Queen should be subjected to the decadent kind of writing that appears in Landfall; and that, worse still, that periodical is supported by the State Literary Fund. Perhaps only a straw; but the wind blows readily that way. Every now and then an advertiser of liniments for sprained consciences does in fact read a story or poem and understand it. Then he gets on his old grey mare and charges head down, St George against the Dragon. You could not tell him that poems and stories are not pills, manifestos or blueprints of Utopia, but ways of coming at life, as private as a kiss and as public as a morgue, and as different as the writers are that make them.

Do I want to stay in New Zealand then? On the whole – Yes. The audience is small for straight original writing, and commercial stereotypes have watered down the imagination even of that small audience. But if your grandmother, besides being an old lady of offensive personal habits, and her ideas drawn from Truth and the Readers’ Digest, is suffering from, say, pernicious anaemia, do you leave her to rot – or do you come forward as a blood donor? It’s more a matter of personal taste. A writer is not only concerned with an obvious audience but also with the people he grew up among. He must recognise too that there are other virtues beside those which generate an intelligent response to imaginative writing. He is not just bringing light to the Gentiles; the Gentiles themselves are the source of most of his light. In the long run, for me, to be a writer is to be committed to the world I live in, that is, New Zealand. The grass over the fence may look greener; one may push the fencepage 215 down or amble through the gate; but the old home paddock has a smell all of its own. The occupational disease of artists is itchy feet; but they often come back from the (not so fleshy) flesh-pots of Egypt looking sourer than when they went. In England and America there are more critics writing than the writers they write about. Here the reverse is true. Should we have more criticism, then? God forbid. The literary stereotype is more dangerous than the commercial.

Would you like to be a full-time writer? Yes. But let us talk seriously, and not hold carrots in front of donkeys’ noses. Who is going to pay me? And what are they going to ask, oh so subtly, in return? I have probably robbed time from many employers in order to write. I don’t think I would have written much more good verse in the past ten years if God had given me a rich, dead uncle. I might have drunk it all; or been so fascinated by it that I wanted to watch it breed. Poverty, even tiredness and lack of leisure, are not the greatest checks to good writing; rather, a too complete surrender to the local climate of opinion:

For seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we right the stars . . .

However, let us not be too high-minded either. A literary grant, with no strings attached, as a payment for simply going on living, not as a mustard- and-pepper mixture to make one lay poorer quality eggs faster – I would not turn it down if it turned up. Most writers do commercial work with their left hands, and with their right hands, occasionally, what they really can respect themselves for. It is like the aboriginal notion of Hell, the black- fellows moving forever through the smoke with their right hands immovable at their sides. One has to sell out at some point; but let it be definitely to the highest bidder.

What do you think of the value of New Zealand criticism? It helps. It lets the writer know that someone has read him. It lets readers know that the book exists. But does it really ‘determine in part the development of our national literature and self-awareness’? (I am quoting from an imaginary

W.E.A. lecture). I think not. What does a writer want from a critic? Either to be told that his writing is good when he himself is not so sure of it; or to pick up on the way the book has affected an assumedly intelligent reader. I doubt if writers change their style much because of criticism; though they may conceivably stop writing from lack of official recognition. A writer generally knows his literary vices as well as or better than the critics. He may of course write the kind of thing that a certain kind of critic will approve or editor publish. That happened with C.A. Marris’s Best Poems; it may happen at times with a periodical like Landfall; and it is a great pity. But the best Newpage 216 Zealand critics (I would instance Curnow, McCormick, Holcroft, Chapman, and reviewers such as James Bertram or Erik Schwimmer) have explored from a different, original angle the same themes that the writers deal with. It is of value as energetic private cogitation drawing some of its emphasis from writers criticised, not as measurement of periods and syllables.

Should we take rhetoric and wring its neck? Yes, if what is meant is the ornamental clichés of a poem, the dead wood. Pruning is a poet’s main job anyway. But if you mean the time-life of a poem, its existence as a rhythmical, sensory pattern in time – by no means, it can’t be done. Rhetoric is an emotionally coloured term. It may mean ossified formal language; or a poet’s method which is directed to words as an effective audible pattern in their own right. Even the best verbal pattern can only be a vehicle, a reflection of the core or matrix of a poem, that unwritten mystery which it is wrapped around. But if you deny the poet the right to play building blocks with words, you will not get poems but only animal noises. A double preoccupation is necessary, with the structure of language and with its meaning. The perfect balance would produce efficient rhetoric.

It seems to me that a writer, however muddled he may be, must first be on the side of life – which is a mystery, an ocean rather than an Admiralty chart. But the death he struggles with, as much through personal living as through public statement, is a constant and ineradicable enemy. It is within as well as without, the germ of sterility and chaos. And while social stereotypes in some form are probably indispensable, they also have something of the smell of death about them. At the time of the creation of an art form there is, under tension, a split in the artist’s personality. The live self looks at the dead self, curses or weeps; but it also goes out to meet what is alive in the world it inhabits. The process is a painful one; and as most people look on pain as a prime evil, they dislike the artist for reminding them of what they spend time and money to avoid. But they too are drawn to the creative moment, which asserts human freedom and dignity. I do not think our writers will ever lack the beginning of an audience.

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