The Innovators

I distinguish (with the agreement of most of our critics) three broad stages in the chronological development of New Zealand poetry: the time of the Forerunners, dating from European settlement until the late Twenties of this century; the time of the Innovators, dating roughly from the Twenties until the middle Forties; and the time of the Broadeners, dating from the middle Forties until the present day. These categories are necessarily inexact. Where would one place Eileen Duggan, for example, who began writing within a romantic pastoral Georgian tradition, never abandoned it, yet has strengthened her verse in later years by an intellectual structure that belongs chiefly to the time of the Innovators? And where would one place Denis Glover whose later work is much more varied and less austere than the place-poems and ballads which he began with? The categories overlap – many page 47 of the Forerunners must have seemed to themselves to be attempting the hardest innovation of all, the creation of a poetry national in character where none had been before, except in another language and with a symbology inaccessible to the European mind, among the Maori people; many of the Innovators must have felt that their chief task was to broaden a narrow and all but sterile tradition regarding the proper content of poetry; and many of the Broadeners would regard themselves as Innovators, in the sense that they were departing from a newly grown but authoritative tradition which emphasised above all the singularity of New Zealand life. Yet I will let the categories stand; and begin by offering you a poem which may typify the first stage of development. It was written by my own father. I quote it only in a slight degree from a sense of family piety; chiefly because it is a good poem within its mode, and good poems, as our anthologists recognised, are hard to find in the writing of the Forerunners. It was probably written some time after the turn of the century. It represents the song of angels or nature spirits at the creation of the world –

Spirits of Harmony, Music and Love
In the elemental chaos
When the worlds were in the making
None could rule nor disobey us;
We were there in all partaking,
And we caught the rhythmic motion
Of the orbs that roll and swing
In the vast ethereal ocean
Deep beyond all fathoming.
And it was our delight, when the Earth is in the pride
Of her sweet virgin beauty in us did confide:
Then we rustled and played
Through her forests, and swayed
All the reeds and the brackens and bade them rejoice,
And the birds in their flight
When the sunshine was bright
Caught the sound of our music and each found a voice.

There are several things which mark this poem as the work of one of the Forerunners. The theme is elevated and in the main pantheistic, in a direct line of descent from the choruses of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. The anapaestic rhythms (highly suitable for conveying a mood of lyrical joy) are not checked or counter-balanced by speech-rhythm; the structure of the poem does not depart either from the formality of full rhyme. It would be unfair to object to the use of romantic diction by the poet; for the poem, page 48 unlike so many written by the Forerunners, is successful within its mode and plainly depends on a real personal experience of nature mysticism.

The Muse, not the tradition, gave him strength. Yet the choice of this theme rather than another may still have sprung from the nineteenth century conflict between poetry and rationalism: poetry, in Matthew Arnold’s terms, fills the emotional gap left when precise objective faith has departed. On the other hand, the orbs rolling and swinging in the ethereal ocean are properties of the Newtonian scientific universe, with a backward glance to the mediaeval music of the spheres. What strikes me most, however, is that my father, though himself a New Zealander born and bred, did not write in terms of his own physical environment – the river, the flax bushes, the hills and the seacoast – even though the awareness of a country still mainly existing in the pre-animal phase of creation, only very recently inhabited by men, must have been close to him. He felt obliged to express his intuitions in general Romantic terms. He writes of ‘forests’, not of ‘bush’, of ‘birds’ in general, not of the fantail or the parakeet, which he would see every second day of his life. The ‘reeds’ and the ‘brackens’ are, I think, taken from his immediate sensory knowledge, and they do add a sharpness and a personal note to the poem; but there is little else to indicate that the poem was written by a New Zealander, except the time-lag, the fact that it seemed appropriate to a man born sixty years after Shelley died to write in the Shelleyan mode.

In a quite different mode he could include his immediate environment without strain – as in a satirical poem of his called ‘McLeary’s Lament’, a humorous complaint which he put into the mouth of a local farmer who objected to the attempt of the County Council to put a road through his land –

In all these gullies I’ve made bridges
With great logs split by mall and wedges;
I’ve mown the farm from off the ridges
To make pig-bedding;
And with great care I’ve nurtured hedges
Around my steading . . .

This is a square-cut New Zealand farmer’s language, built close to the ground like a bluegum fence, with a Scotticism thrown in at the end in honour of the Burns stanza. Without a local audience the poem would not have been written. My father, as a joke, put it down as a formal petition on the desk of the County clerk, with whom he was on good enough terms as a local road contractor. It would be merely pedantic to examine here the metrical variations of the Burns stanza; but my father struck the problem that troubles any writer in modern English who was to get a complicated stanza moving naturally. There aren’t enough full rhymes to go round. And page 49 he solved it in the way that others have solved it since by alternating full rhyme and half-rhyme.

It would be absurd to imagine that the first poets of a new country have to create new verse forms or an entirely new literary idiom. What happened in America, Australia, and in a lesser degree Canada and South Africa, where English-speaking immigrants or their descendants began writing poetry, was a new amalgamation of borrowed forms, modified idioms and indigenous material. The changes in the nuances of language may be very slight. My father’s ear and nose were leading him in the right direction when he borrowed the forms and something of the language of Burns and applied them to the situation of a New Zealand farmer at war with the County Council. Probably The Biglow Papers of the American poet [James Russell] Lowell helped him along that road. But the few good poems he wrote were anomalies. Anyone who looks at the work of the Forerunners in this country will be haunted by a sense of waste and a persistent Why. Why were the good poems so very few? Why did the Forerunners (Thomas Bracken, for example) build a series of verbal monuments almost wholly lacking in immediate content? Why did the situation get worse instead of better, until, by the Twenties of this century, at least two generations of poets were trapped in repetitive verbal gestures that bore little or no relation to their lives?

The lives were real enough. I remember one of the Forerunners, now dead, whom I used to meet regularly at the side bar of the Royal Oak in Wellington – a witty, lively, humane old person, with a chip on his shoulder because the literati of his own time had elbowed him aside. He had once done a prison term for some business defalcation. And the story – never told by him; and I would not repeat it if I thought it showed him in a bad light – the story went that old Percival (not his actual name, but the name of one of the knights of the Holy Grail) was paying a visit on one occasion to a mollhouse on the Terrace. The cops chose that night for a raid on the place. And Percival was surprised, hard at work with one of the girls. A detective clamped a hand on his shoulder – ‘Come along now,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone!’ said Percival. ‘Can’t you see I’ve not finished yet?’

There must have been the material for a hundred good ballads inside that cranium. A certain amount trickled out in his bar room conversation. But none of it ever overflowed into his poems. They were intricately built saccharine descriptions of the joys of domestic life. You can probably still pick them up in the second hand bookshops. Percival, like all his contemporaries, had a split mind. When he sat down to write, the voice of his outcast self, the drunk, the jailbird, the mollhouse visitor, never had a word to say – instead of that, Edwardian angels whispered in his ear and told him what to write. No doubt in order to be honest, in that time and place, he would have had to run the risk of being regarded as a monster. But lacking honesty, at least in his poems, he had to pay the penalty of having nothing real to say, and page 50 carry, I think, a dragging weight of neurosis. I don’t speak clinically. Neurosis and psychosis are part of the world we live in; and the clinical men, trying to improve us, generally change us for the worse, giving us a Stop-Go sign that flashes on and off instead of the oldfashioned leper’s bell. But neurosis, being a disorder of the intellect, a blocking out of consciousness of necessary knowledge about oneself, is bound to disrupt the communications of art. Percival was a victim of his times. François Villon, no doubt, was a much uglier man than Percival – a pimp, a robber of churches, with one or two murders to his credit – but Villon didn’t have to pretend to himself that he was really a quiet contented homebody. When he wrote, he wrote about what had happened to him; and as a result, his poems are still alive –

I think now of those skulls
Piling up in the morgue –
All masters of the rolls,
Or the king’s treasurers,
Or water-carriers,
Or blacksmiths at the forge.
Who’ll tell me which is which,
Which poor, and which were rich? . . .

Poor has-been lords, you die,
You are lords no more. Look,
King David’s Psalter says,
‘their place forgets their name.’
I’ll let the rest go by,
It’s not my business –
Teaching preachers the book
Is not my trade and game . . .

One can still learn from Villon; but not from Percival, who died with his Testament unwritten – God rest the man! – crucified, like the rest of us, by unreality. Art does not propose a moral change; it proposes intellectual change, pointing by fictions to a deeper grasp of reality. The Forerunners were frustrated, I think, by the same obstacle occurring at three levels, like a wall that blocks access to or from a building, in the cellar, on the ground floor, and on the first floor – this analogy is intended to indicate the three levels of sensation, feeling and intellect in the human soul. To escape over the roofs was useless; though writers like Jessie McKay tried it, writing about an imaginary Scotland where her ancestors lived like ghosts in an attic. The blockage at the level of sensation was a paralysis that afflicted a great deal of Victorian writing. In this only just post-Victorian society I doubt if we are free of it yet. A change at this level involves any writer in the difficult page 51 acceptance of his or her sexual and aggressive impulses. A.R.D. Fairburn, one of the first and best of the Innovators, described the change in a poem called ‘Remembered Cowardice’ –

Shapeless and soft with slime I pictured him,
that loathsome beast that stirred and slopped the brim,
and heaved his body through the brain’s black mud,
fouling the sweetness of my living blood.

I gazed at the flowers that grew beside the pool
and made them fairies, played the moonstruck fool
with thought and sense, cast off the load of mind
a dozen ways, all timorous and all blind.

And then, with shame and agony grown bold,
one day I fumbled in the ooze, took hold,
and shuddering dragged him from his watery lair
and threw him on the sward, a-gasp for air.

All that I saw, for the horror that had been,
was a great fat bull-frog, sleek and grassy green,
a comfortable beast, with friendly eyes,
who gasped, and blinked at me in dumb surprise.

Formally the poem represents no great advance on the Georgian models from which, without exception, the Innovators took most of their language. But it is of real importance as a document in which the poet dramatises his clumsy but effective conquest of an area of sensation. Like Percival he had suffered from a split mind, imagining that part of himself which made contact with the world by sensation to be in some way monstrous, and had made use of the Georgian stage properties – flowers that resembled fairies – but this poet came of age, and accepted the weight of his adult nature, to find it much less terrible than he had supposed. I think some such change has to happen even now in the mind of any New Zealand writer who wants to go beyond the nursery. In Fairburn’s case, the result was that he gained the power to write one or two of the best love poems we are lucky enough to have. I will quote one of them, ‘The Cave’ –

From the cliff-top it appeared a place of defeat,
the nest of an extinct bird, or the hole where the sea hoards its bones,
a pocket of night in the sun-faced rock,
sole emblem of mystery and death in that enormous noon.
page 52 We climbed down, and crossed over the sand,
and there were islands floating in the wind-whipped blue,
and clouds and islands trembling in your eyes,
and every footstep and every glance
was a fatality felt and unspoken, our way
rigid and glorious as the sun’s path,
unbroken as the genealogy of man.

And when we had passed beyond into
the secret place and were clasped by
the titanic shadows of the earth,
all was transfigured, all was redeemed,
so that we escaped from the days
that had hunted us like wolves, and from ourselves,
in the brief eternity of the flesh.

There should be the shape of leaves and flowers
printed on the rock, and a blackening of the walls
from the flame on your mouth,
to be found by the lovers straying
from the picnic two worlds hence to be found and known,
because the form of the dream is always the same,
and whatever dies or changes this will persist and recur,
will compel the means and the end, find consummation,
whether it be
silent in swansdown and darkness, or in grass moonshadow-mottled,
or in a murmuring cave of the sea.

We left, and returned to our lives:

the act entombed, its essence caught
for ever in the wind, and in the noise of waves,
for ever mixed
with lovers’ breaths who by salt-water coasts
in the sea’s beauty dwell.

The poem finds its own form. Beyond the movement into simple speech rhythm there is little metrical invention. Indeed Fairburn was never a technical innovator. It shows a certain lack of justice among the critics of his own generation that they lambast the Broadeners often enough for a lack of technical invention, yet I accept Fairburn’s long loose rhythms for what they are, the minimum control necessary to put a skin on what is said. Once when I was in my late ’teens I sent Fairburn some love poems I had just written, and page 53 he wrote back with his customary generosity, saying he liked their muscular quality, and enclosing a quatrain about the girls who work in the Roslyn woollen mills –

The mills of God grind slowly,
They grind exceeding fine,
But the girls who work at Roslyn
Are grinding all the time . . .

He also remarked that he himself hoped to be remembered for his love poems.

Twenty-five years after it was written, ‘The Cave’ does not seem extraordinary: it falls into place at the centre of a hundred love poems written by New Zealanders which include the beaches or bush or mountains as part of an erotic cosmos. But when Fairburn wrote it, it was an entirely new thing, probably the first undisguised and successful love poem this country had seen. The cave in which the two lovers of the poem are united is birth cave and burial cave: it represents, I think, the dual nature of the sexual act itself where joy in life and the heaviness of mortality are felt in the same moment. As a psychosexual symbol it is of course inevitably female. But the quality of a masculine and solar energy dominates the poem

. . . rigid and glorious as the sun’s path,
unbroken as the genealogy of man . . .

The male protagonist discovers his own nature by means of the encounter; and there is an indication of a legacy handed on to other generations – a legacy which later New Zealand poets have picked up, I think, and understood. One could say that Fairburn had rediscovered for us a kind of primitive heritage, so that it is possible for us to write and think positively about sexual matters; and the symbolic properties, the world of cave and beach and sea, are seen in a different perspective because of his exploration. It seems, though, that Fairburn in his own interior life had to pay a price for this discovery: on the whole his later poems either lament the departure of the moment of solar domination, or engage in witty sniping at politicians or literary nabobs. Here he is at his best a lively Dadaist, an intellectual catalyst more than a poet. The role is necessary and should not be despised. Once I heard him tell a story at a party in Dunedin, about the Loony and the Village Milk Cart, an endless yarn which depended for its point on repetition; and every point was made perfectly, every minor squib exploded exactly on time, until the final cannon cracker was lit and shoved under the table. He had come down from Auckland, though, to talk about De Rougemont and the Catharists; he was still trying to grapple with the dilemma of sexual idealism which had caught him, as it were, in the groin. I will not try to analyse the social page 54 revolutionary mystique of his first long poem, Dominion; or that great dialogue offriendship and pessimism, Letter to a Friend in the Wilderness; or his attempted marriage of vitalism and proto-Christianthought in The Voyage. He was accustomed to use the broad and simple affirmations which belong to a certain type of religious temperament; though he remained, I imagine, a positive agnostic. One can drive a bulldozer through his arguments, and, because of their breadth, still leave them untouched. It seems to me he was that rare phenomenon: a sexual idealist whose experience has been such that he actually believes what he writes. Fairburn has suffered a little from the kind of literary canonisation which honours a writer by putting him on the shelf. That volume of his verse, Strange Rendezvous, which issued from the Caxton Press, with four pages devoted each to a two-line squib, did not help; it established him as an elder poet whose nose-pickings are cherished and printed by his friends who happen also to be his publishers. No one could get away with it now; and the situation is much healthier for the change. I have no wish to assess Fairburn; I don’t keep a slide-rule in my pocket; but I think his most real innovation was to write love poems that had the force and depth of a Hindu prayer to the God of nature. He broke through the wall of the Victorianbasement in our old-style colonial two-storeyed house.

If Fairburn ran the risk of canonisation, R.A.K. Mason, the friend of his varsity days, seems to have met that hard fate and accepted it as he did various other ignominies. To read Mason is to learn how little the Innovators departed from Georgian or even from Victorian models –

But once I remember
in days of old
I walked on misty hills
all night vague and cold:

And in one hot summer
I lay with as girl
more fragrant than cinnamon
lustrous than pearl:

And again comes back to me
one holy day
near the Feast of Crucifixion
on lone cliffs I lay.

They were hands that held me
far up towards the skies
and their soft disdain
of the sacrifice.

page 55

All the day like a god
with spirit transcended
in warmth light and colour
my senses were blended.

This was time not wasted
this was time well spent
this was fulfilment
and I die content.

Imagine how a Landfall critic nowadays, bred in the varsity stable, would tear these lines to pieces! Two of the stanzas have unrelated participles; in two instances at least the full rhyme is handled in a clumsy fashion; the furniture of the Nineties is brought out from the lumber room, dusted a little, and displayed as if it were new – and whoever spoke of Easter as ‘the Feast of Crucifixion’? Yet I think Mason’s poem, ‘The Just Statesman Dies’, works well within its own mode. Mason’s poetry verges often on being a poetry of cliché; but he saves it by the ironic twist of thought that turns a poem back on itself. Like Thomas Hardy, he is an anti-Romantic Romantic. He breaks through the Victorian wall on the ground floor of feeling, showing us the near-despair that underlies the notion of inevitable moral or social progress, and the irrational elements that go to make up rationalism. I cannot see that he corresponds in many ways to the prescriptive dictum put forward by Allen Curnow, as critic, that New Zealand poetry should come to terms with its own regional environment. Yet it was Curnow, more than any other critic, who canonised him. I remember meeting Mason in Dunedin not long ago; I think he was Burns Fellow at the time, as I am now. We sat in his flat for a while, drinking the worst coffee I have ever drunk, and discussing not verse but the misfortunes of various mutual friends who had fallen foul of the cops. One can understand why Mason was canonised: he, alone among our writers, sacrificed himself on the obscure altar of social justice. The sympathetic critics had to prove the unprovable thesis that a man can be a Marxist and still write good poems. I doubt if it is possible: Mason’s poetry is connected with his knowledge of human pain, but hardly with his variant of Marxism. Technically he is old-fashioned; he has learnt almost nothing from his English or American contemporaries. Yet when I pick up a poem of Mason’s it is like picking up a thread pulled away from the sleeve of a dark old coat which is the only one the man wears. I felt the same when I saw Lawson’s handwriting, large and rounded, on a few pieces of ruled paper in a box in the Turnbull Library. He knows the meaning of destitution. He knows that at the level of feeling our people live like slaves in the quarries of Syracuse. He never writes nonsense. He writes like a man buried up to the waist in the ground. He has his own identity. I won’t be stupid enough to try to assess the work of page 56 Mason. But I doubt if anyone can learn anything from him except integrity which is all one wants to learn from another human being.

When the Innovators came on the scene, in the Twenties and the Thirties, they had to contend, naturally enough, with a kind of Old Guard who had not shifted much from the position of the Forerunners – the best of them among the men would be Alan Mulgan, and the best among the women, Eileen Duggan. At the time it must have seemed to many a simple clash of the generations. The Old Guard had their obvious merits. Parts of Mulgan’s ‘Golden Wedding’, a sequence in which he sees the life of the New Zealand squattocracy through smoked glass, will bear comparison with anything written by the Georgians in England; and in one poem, ‘Success’, he observes the human failure of the life of a successful business man with a hard naked glance. Eileen Duggan was always capable of rising above her own mock-pastoral level to a genuine metaphysical insight. But I remember reading in my ’teens the dreary issues of C.A. Marris’s Best Poems, the periodical of the Old Guard, and realising that something was wrong with it – there was no bite, no freshness, no real intellectual content – instead the sense of somebody half-suffocated by a heater, eating biscuits and oranges, and exploring the foggy contours of their own solipsism on a dark rainy afternoon. It was no hard job for the Innovators to break down this brushwood fence; yet one has to remember that each of the Innovators – Fairburn, Mason, Brasch, Curnow, Glover, Dowling, Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde, Hervey, and perhaps Cresswell – had been inside it and learnt the beginning of their trade there. What was their real innovation? The changes in style were less than one might suppose. I suggest the following points of difference:

(a)	In some cases an entry into, in most cases a tolerance towards the contemporary socialist mystique which had gripped the best English poets. It was not necessary to become a Marxist. The mystique was much vaguer than that. It amounted perhaps to a broad sense that the times were changing; that the class structure in New Zealand was breaking down and could be broken down further. The common negative experience of the Depression years had a great deal to do with it; and the mystique, however disappointing it proved in the long run, freed the minds of the Innovators to examine their own social environment critically.
(b)	A break-through on the level of sensation, of the kind which I have considered in connection with the work of Fairburn. It was possible to write good love poems, though very few did. Perhaps in the broadest sense the influence of modern psychology played a part. The missing pieces of the jigsaw could be found, whether or not one chose to fit them into place. Each writer would tend to regard their own art as a process of personal therapy, of public value because each mind has much in common with other human minds. page 57
(c)	The possession of different, new and better models. The innovation of Pound and Eliot, and later the publication of John Lehmann’s New Writing in Europe and Michael Robert’s The Faber Book of Modern Verse, gave our own Innovators a sense of having company overseas. Stylistically the models were helpful by a strong emphasis on clear, exact images, and by the introduction of speech rhythms; but I think the main influence was one of sheer intellectual vigour and variety. Anyone who read the Faber Book of Modern Verse for the first time might well imagine himself to be in the middle of an intellectual renaissance, and could feel proud for the moment at least, as a writer, of the century he belonged to.
(d)	A strong mystique of place. I imagine that this had already existed in the minds of the Forerunners, but it hardly ever emerged in their work. Holcroft crystallised it in his literary and sociological essays; and Curnow later, picking up the ball from Holcroft, made it the basis of his prescriptive argument in his Introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse. It was natural that the Innovators should concentrate on the New Zealand experience, the New Zealand poem, as a positive counter-balance to the mandarin writing of the Old Guard; many of the best poems they wrote sprang out of this concentration; but it seems unnecessary to ask for the same concentration at the present day, when those battles have long been fought and won.
(e)	A tendency towards the witty, even Dadaist improvisation. Much of Fairburn’s and Glover’s light verse falls into this category; and it was very likely a by-product of the lively group sense of poets who felt themselves to be pioneers of language. A group can become a clique; yet on the whole the lightness, the sense of irresponsibility a poet can feel in talking to and writing for personal friends who practise the same trade is beneficial, particularly in a society which has very little use for art. Among our Innovators this kind of group often had its social base in drinking sessions and the bar room conversation; it was predominantly masculine in character, mildly anarchic in tone. Women writers also had their groups; but unfortunately these tended to associate themselves with the Old Guard and be dominated by sabrerattling moralism. To develop their own style and outlook, our women poets have invariably had to cut themselves free of their nourishing but smothering groups.
(f)	An ambivalent relationship between the Innovators and the universities. Nearly all the Innovators had some experience of the varsity kind of intellectual discipline – on the one hand this may have helped them to sharpen their language, and promoted intellectual self-confidence; on the other hand it may have cut them off during a formative period from a broader contact with their fellow-countrymen. I am inclined to think that the social life of the universities was the main positive factor – it can assume the force of a ceremony initiating adolescents into manhood; and it provides a temporary foothold half outside society from which a growing writer can criticise his world. page 58
(g)	The existence of printing presses which were prepared to publish poetry. In a sense the writers themselves began to provide their own means of publication, differing in their point of view from that of ordinary business men – I think of Glover in Christchurch, shifting his handpress from the varsity buildings to other premises, under fire from the varsity authorities; or Lowry in Auckland, who wrote little, but published some verse, and opened his mind and heart like an inn to those who were trying to develop a literary talent, in his later years continuing to publish Here and Now, with a tragic and magnificent disregard for financial considerations; and various others who may have been in part business men, but had had their minds broadened by contact with men such as Glover and Lowry. A book of verse well printed is like a child brought into the world, undamaged, from a difficult birth by a skilled doctor. Their publishers undoubtedly helped to keep up the morale of the Innovators.
(h)	The establishing of new periodicals. Tomorrow, before it was closed down by Government censorship; the issues of Book from the Caxton Press; various periodicals that lived for a little and died – these are now collectors’ items, but in their time they helped the Innovators to assess their own work and that of others, and gave the possibility of communication with a wider audience.

These points of difference are what I suggest to distinguish the Innovators from those who came before them – and among the differences New Zealandism appears only as one factor. Nevertheless Denis Glover was a poet who chose from the start to explore what it might mean to be a New Zealander. I will quote a poem of his, ‘Returning from Overseas’, which may justify that assertion –

In the sea’s window lie
Island confections on display.

Look, there’s Cape Brett, and there
The Hen and Chickens roost on the air.

But to all glad pretence
The land shows indifference.
When we left it sorrow-kissed,
Slumbrous, afloat in western mist,
The land of our remembered past
Stood as the loneliest the last
Lovely remote Hesperides
Nourishing its golden trees.

This sullen and perplexing coast
page 59 Makes no assertion, no boast,
No positive utterance; and yet
Somewhere there’s concealed a threat,
Somewhere home-coming elation
Feels an old strangulation.

Collect the levy book and look
For familiar faces,
Go to reunion dinners
And theraces.

It is worth noticing how Glover handles the Georgian remnants in his verse: the sorrow-kissed, slumbrous land might even have risen out of the earlier Celtic twilight; and the simple short clanging couplets are part of the Georgian stock-in-trade. But Glover, like Mason, works as an anti-Romantic Romantic. He is concerned above all to make good sense. And having drawn a circle round the double nostalgia of the serviceman going into exile and the serviceman returning who realises that exile is a permanent human condition, he ends with a distinct wry Kiwi flatness, like the click of a coin dropped on a wet bar. His metaphors do not straggle. In fact they have a tendency to be self-destructive on account of their exact precision: the islands are sitting in the sea’s window like piles of sweets in a sweetshop – a metaphor taken from childhood, which tells us more about Glover’s irony than it does about the islands. He has a genius for the precise conceit, derived perhaps from early poets like Marvell and Herrick, and smuggles the Hen and Chickens into the poem by a mainly verbal association. From anti-Romantic he can move further to a Philistinism which is the strongest gift he possesses, and wring the poem’s neck with a single nihilist gesture. I say ‘nihilist’ advisedly, because I do not think that any political, social or personal view of human progress has contented Glover for long; he tends to nihilism, the attitude of the man aware only of death, himself and his dying neighbour. And in this lies his enormous strength and his power of touching the minds of other New Zealanders at an unusual depth – we recognise, I think, under the straitjacket of Glover’s verse our own predicament; not the mythical isolation of a post-Victorian pilgrim wandering through the tussock lands, but a local type of the isolation of Western man, to whose desire for a place to live in, or even a place to die in, his enigmatic society has answered nearly always, ‘No.’ The echo of that ‘No’ is the permanent undertone of Glover’s poetry; it is his barbarous honesty to refuse to mitigate it, and his unending dilemma to alternately expose it by means of elegies cut in the rock, or to conceal it, if necessary, by verbal clowning. One learns from Glover that death may be the only cure for spiritual solitude –

page 60

Now the hills fold over
Your time-elapsed frame.
The cocksfoot and clover
Creepingly cover even your name.

You are salty dust where you lie
But quickened is the anonymous sea,
And the hours lick endlessly
At the stone of the sky.

It may be the best writing we have been given; but there are other things to be said, very likely not as well, from situations less absolute. I found that when I was young, I tended to be hypnotised by Glover’s surgical honesty; but what I learnt from him in a most valuable year spent in his company among the circles of a cold inferno which shows on the map as Christchurch, was to be less honest, and fight an art-killing and man-killing society by slow cunning, by wars of attrition, by shifting behind walls. Perhaps that unconscious decision cost me a share in Glover’s own diamond-clear vision of man and nature; but it may be unwise to follow in another man’s footsteps, whatever his stature may be. At least he taught me that man exists, outside all categories; and what was of use to me at the time, to leave out adjectives from my poems, unless they were as much part of the structure of a poem as the verbs.

At that time also I came in contact with Allen Curnow. He was a senior reporter or sub-editor (I forget which) on the Christchurch Press, and I was a copyholder on the same newspaper, absorbing gin by day and benzedrine at night. I remember with gratitude his personal encouragement given during certain walks in the small hours, when he was going back to his house in the suburbs, and I to a dog-kennel alongside a garage which I was renting for eight shillings a week. On account of his enthusiasm for the arts he was prepared to share his thoughts freely with a younger, scruffier, and more ignorant practitioner. I remember his mentioning once the idea that Yeats had had, to found a college for poets, conducted somewhat in the manner of the ancient Druids; and saying that he too had thought of this from time to time as a possibility for New Zealand. Very likely it was no more than the stray thought of a tired man, letting his imagination wander after a hard day’s work – but I have thought since that it indicated Curnow’s unconscious tendency to think of the poet’s role as hieratic. A hieratic view of himself may lead a poet to write with admirable balance and depth, as in the case of Yeats and possibly also Dylan Thomas; but in his relation to other writers it may impel him to prescribe unsuitable methods. A poet of this kind will tend to regard new rituals, or new variants of the ritual to which he is accustomed, in a negative light. I offer this suggestion in a spirit of compromise, outside the page 61 heat of controversy. The force and elegance of Curnow’s critical arguments have had a much wider influence than his wholly legitimate practice as a poet. From the start, I think that Curnow saw his role among the Innovators as interpreter and codifier of poetic and social theory, a natural bias since his own break-through was achieved mainly by intellectual development, not in the cellar or on the ground floor but at the level of the first storey. In a prose section of Not in Narrow Seas, published in 1939 but written earlier, he wrote –

Yet, out of the orgy of imitation, there will in time be born men of spirit. So far the country has not been able to contain its great spirits; that, perhaps, is because there have been none great enough to expand the country till it is able to sustain them. Poets, painters, musicians, scientists will suffer agonies in a country serving under gross masters. But out of their sufferings the wheat lands, the cattle county and the sheep country, may be born again. At present, however, an artist can only suffer, and record his suffering; hoping to make others suffer with him the necessary agonies of first self-knowledge . . .

There is a sexual nuance in the phrase ‘great enough to expand the county till it is able to sustain them’ – legitimately enough, Curnow sees the symbolic relation of artist to country as that of husband to virgin bride – one can support this interpretation from several other poems of his, notably ‘To Forget Self and All’. But the chief symbolic role is messianic. The artist suffers in order that the country may be ‘born again’ – I do not think the Scriptural connotations are accidental. Through an early sonnet in which he acknowledges fully his debt to Holcroft, Curnow also expresses the Marxian thesis held loosely by many of the Innovators –

No ancient singing dancing infancy
Made luminous, made wise our island earth . . .

Once I had nothing better to suggest
Than a blooding of dry bones with violence . . .

He explicitly states that Holcroft’s intuitions have led him away from revolutionary socialism to an ‘intelligible hope’ seen principally in aesthetic and cultural terms. In a later version of the sonnet Curnow changed the line – ‘Than a blooding of dry bones with violence’ – to – ‘As if blood could be got out of the dry bones’ – suggesting by this a further rejection of the Marxian view. But the first version carries undertones of revolutionary bloodshed regarded as ritual: the Resurrection, not to be achieved in a Christian mode, may happen as a result of social militancy.

I mention these matters in order to make clearer some of Curnow’s earlier intellectual preoccupations. Problems of belief have never been far from page 62 his private thought or poetic practice. In a poem, ‘Expect No Settlements’, published in 1941, he expresses vividly his own sense of the spiritual isolation of the New Zealander –

Expect no settlements or certainties
From volleys in deserts, explosions by rivers;
By no such loud and bloody exorcism
Will thunder quite the hills, sourness the plain;
Now hopes go little beyond remission of taxes,
Dangerous are tongues that wage of the desperate coast
To which all bear their obsolete equipment.

I have emplaced cannon at all my windows,
At midnight sharpened arrows with a carpenter’s file,
By digging under a pear-tree found poor shelter;
Do you think there is energy unspent in battle?
No place I visit but has twist or scar of violence,
Though here’s no war gear, regimental number,
Or picking over of the dead for burial.

Now that events zoom on with throttle wide
Permitting one passage where a million clamour,
Now fronts dissolve and pestilence burns clear
Its lines of access to the spirit within,
Banish from the house the current fury;
Anticipate ruin, blank reversal of prayer;
Part death from doom, making it possible.

On a surface interpretation the poem indicates the tensions of a New Zealand householder at the disastrous beginning of the Second World War; though very likely it was written earlier than that, in a prophetic anticipation of events. Curnow’s style makes over the dry imperatives of the early Auden, with equal connotations of an exterior and an interior battlefield. The poem, though complex enough, is fortunately free of the quality of the laborious conundrum by which Curnow has often hardened his style but lost his readers in the thicket. It begins with a play on words. One is told not to expect a new occurrence at a spiritual level of the first settlement of the pioneers in this country; not to expect a settlement, a truce or pact, to put an end to interior battle. The country and the soul are cursed by the thunder devil and the devil of sourness; or, it could be, the wrath of Jehovah. The battle is secret: it is dangerous to talk about it: an echo, I think, of revolutionary secrecy, congruent with Auden’s early social attitudes, but equally indicating the struggle of man and artist to survive in a hostile or indifferent society. page 63 In Curnow’s poem the protagonist takes defensive measures, by the civilised cannon and the archaic arrow; he finds poor shelter under a pear-tree which may be a relative of the apple-tree planted in the Garden of Eden – the image records the sense that religious security is inadequate, since the fall of man is close to being complete. And the poet is aware of a violence just under the skin of his society as real in its manifestation as the wounds given and received on any objective battlefield. The poet ends with a negative religious invocation – since prayer is unlikely to avert ruin and pestilence in the interior man, let there be action, decision, a separation of death from doom, of chosen grief from calamity passively endured. One recognises in this poem, as in many of Curnow’s, a deep exploration of negative modes of existence not peculiar to New Zealand but certainly endemic here.

I suggest that Curnow’s intellectual development has had three phases – an orthodox Christian phase, prior to his emergence as a writer, founded in Anglican belief and connected with the mores of Canterbury urban and rural society; a brief Marxian phase, modified by various notions of the artist as hero and hierophant; and a final settled view of art as ritual, but in which man is able to endure, accept, and partially understand his own nature and a separate but complementary creation – ‘a condition within the human condition’ I heard him call it once in a tough, brilliant lecture. The phases are not mutually exclusive. I suggest that they correspond to Yeats’s attempt to meet the problems of formal unbelief. In 1929, after a conversation with Ezra Pound, Yeats recorded in his journal a tentative solution –

I agree with Ezra in his dislike of the word belief. Belief implies an unknown object, a covenant attested with a name or signed with blood, and being more emotional than intellectual may pride itself on lack of proof. But if I affirm that such and such is so, the more complete the affirmation, the more complete the proof and even when incomplete it remains valid within some limit . . .

Such affirmations depend entirely on the power and plausibility of a work of art – they are in effect the structure of a convincing aesthetic ritual – but when Curnow, beyond the practice of his art, attempted, however subtly, to prescribe the same kind of ritual for other poets, there were bound to be collisions. The Innovators of his own generation in most cases remained uninfluenced by his social and aesthetic theory; and the succeeding generation whom I call the Broadeners have clashed sharply with him as a prescriptive critic, while retaining a real respect for his pioneering work of poetic innovation. One learnt to respect in Curnow an admirable intellectual tenacity, while keeping one’s reservations about a less admirable narrowness that did not all own for the need of other (and, one must admit, in general lesser) talents to find their own models and fight their own battles.

A similar influence of poetic practice and critical opinion has characterised page 64 Charles Brasch’s contribution to our literature. When I first considered preparing these talks, it was suggested to me that I should include, where possible, references to Landfall Country, a selection of prose and verse from various issues of Landfall which is a set book for the English course in this university; but I had to decide against this, because the selection is in effect a skimming of skimmings, and talks built around it would be insufficiently analytical. I hope, nevertheless, that my comments about New Zealand poets will give you a new angle on this and other selections. Quite apart from his example as a poet, Charles Brasch inaugurated Landfall and has edited it for a number of years with a sacrificial devotion. If I indicate divergences from him on points of critical opinion, this does not set aside a debt which many New Zealand writers owe to him as a scrupulous and conscientious editor. I remember being present when the beginning of Landfall was being discussed by Brasch and others in a flat in Dunedin. Some of the local Marxists made a mild attempt at a literary coup d’état; but Brasch wisely resisted them, holding with good reason that a strong Marxian bias in the production and selection of work submitted to Landfall would turn the periodical into a factional instrument and inevitably erode its necessary literary standards. Yet Brasch, like any other editor, has had his own limits and bias – in particular a limit of decorum (less evident in the last year or two) and in his choice of poems a bias towards the pastoral mode. On one occasion in Christchurch I remember saying rather boorishly to him – ‘Look, why should any of us write about mountains? There they are, standing in the middle of the country, great useless hunks of rock and ice! Why don’t we write about something quite different?’ And Brasch replied with the passion ofa devotee whose ikon is being trampled on – ‘James, you owe a great deal to mountains!’ Which was no doubt true. Yet this somewhat absurd mountains-or-no-mountains controversy foreshadowed things to come.

A generation of poets have risen up since who, without despising nature mysticism, have looked for their themes far more in the immediate pressures of urban or suburban conditions, or in personal relationships, with little or no reference to the physical landscape and seascape of New Zealand. In this context Landfall has exerted both a stimulating and an inhibiting influence. If we had had five other permanently viable periodicals of equal stature, there would be no need to mention Landfall ’s limitations; one would simply be grateful that a good periodical existed. But this has not been the case. Many of our recent poets – I think of Johnson, Bland, Doyle, Kevin Ireland, Hone Tuwhare, and Gloria Rawlinson in her best and later work – have been obliged to develop quite independently and look for publication either in ephemeral local periodicals or (with greater difficulty) overseas. There are bound to be others whose gifts were fatally inhibited by a lack of any sense that they belonged to an emerging group. I recall the sense of relief that entered my own mind when I began to share ideas with Louis Johnson in Wellington, page 65 and realised that he had some of the tools I needed to cope as a writer with experiences which the Innovators had not encountered or at least not dealt with – the contact freed me from a sterile concentration on remembered or too frequently invented moments of nature mysticism. Johnson saw poetry at least in part as a kind of social therapy; and while this also had its limits, it was salutary for me at the time.

In his poetic practice Brasch was a cautious innovator, relying, I think, less than his fellows on a development of the Georgian style, but continually aware of European models. I will quote the end of the poem, ‘Genesis’, from his book, Disputed Ground, published in 1948 –

‘Man,’ they said, ‘inhabits many worlds
And times, in the same breath is here, elsewhere,
Passing continually from scene to scene;
In every place and at every moment
By recognition, recollection, finds
A different light on sea and land
And in himself another being;
The years of his fulfilment but preparation,
All his wandering a shadow of wandering stars.

Departing, he returns many times,
In many guises seeking his first station,
That in the transformed he may recognise
The dreamed, the lost, the islands waiting,
And wings and voices of the darkening air.

And in the silence, listening, their sons
Felt the winds waking, caught
A shuddering breath of the sea in their hearts.

And one by one among the falling years,
After the fruits, after the leaves,
As the new buds formed, and earth
Made preparation for another spring
Beyond the winter silence,
They heard one by one their fathers departing
By night and by water,
Led by the unnamed stars beneath the sea.

This austere archetypal poetry may seem at first abstract and imageless, a philosopher’s disquisition on the meaning of life and death. But one becomes aware of a pulse beating, like that of a river beneath the ice, and that the page 66 slow rhythms and subdued images combine to make this poet’s distinctive idiom. His formal control is no more than that of Fairburn, a balance of stresses and a grouping of phrases; but unlike Fairburn he proposes always a lucid intellectual argument. The argument is most remarkable for what it leaves out – the warmth, confusion and detail of common life in order to build an architecture of silence and shadow, departures and doubtful arrivals, exile from self and exile from place. The spiritual core of Brasch’s work is deeply ascetic. In the lines I have quoted a specific New Zealand reference is lacking, except perhaps ‘the islands waiting’ and I chose them for quotation because they illustrate a quality that Brasch shares with Curnow – both poets use the New Zealand setting to give an apparently objective form to a highly subjective sense of isolation. For both, the isolation is not something discovered as a quality belonging to the New Zealand landscape and society; it exists subjectively before any discovery is made, and the objective world provides symbolic counters to express it. I do not quarrel with this way of writing: it is a natural Romantic mode. But once the point is grasped – namely, that the poets in question are expressing a subjective state which may or may not be shared by their fellows – any attempt at prescriptive criticism becomes quite unsuitable. Bland, for example, feels no mysterious weight of isolation or deprivation resting on his spirit when he walks down Lambton Quay; Rawlinson has felt, no doubt, the particular isolation of the woman writer who finds it hard to get published; Glover, in his own way, has felt the pull of the Curnovian mystique but left it behind him to move by even rougher tracks. Writers vary. Some feel isolated and some don’t.

A factor commonly unregarded may play a large part in the experience of spiritual isolation and exile which undoubtedly has provided a theme for a number of New Zealand poets. A New Zealander who goes overseas may and commonly does feel cut off both from his own country and his country of adoption. The causes of this painful situation are in the main social. My parents, visiting England, travelled once on a train with a member of the English peerage. The lord, who shared their political views and was travelling to the same conference, unbent and asked them – ‘Where do you come from?’

‘New Zealand,’ they answered.

‘Oh,’ said the lord. For the rest of the journey they travelled in silence.

This kind of experience can have a shattering effect on sensitive natures. I have known New Zealand writers to go overseas, full of themselves and their own work, to return muffled and paranoid, afraid to set pen to paper without an English or American anthology at their elbow. Personally I would prefer to retire to my igloo with an enormous belly laugh. But I grant that the determinedly Anglicised New Zealander may find it heavy going. Some, like Basil Dowling, in his poem ‘The Unreturning Native’, look back to New Zealand as a hard barren old bitch, but their only real mother –

page 67

Above the sounds that echo eerily
Still in my mind
I hear those Valkyries of wild sea-wind,
Though now they blow more kind.

Of all lost faces one remains with me,
The downcast face
Of that dark, woebegone, uprooted race;
But now it haunts me less.

That raw harsh landscape in my memory
Once seemed hostile,
But tones more truthfully with human ill
Than gentle vale and hill.

Old friends beloved and loving faithfully
There yet abide,
But like a wounded animal’s is my pride
Who even from love would hide.

No, may that love, that land, and that blown sea,
Though never again
Present to prick my heart and eyes, remain
As constant as my pain.

I owe the use of that poem to its publication in Landfall Country; you will find it there, with another of Dowling’s equally clear-cut and forceful. Dowling was one of the Innovators who fell foul of the Georgian mode to a degree where such hard firm language would have seemed impossible. Yet by a study of Thomas Hardy and his own inner development he has become one of the most convincing of the anti-Romantic Romantics.

There are other Innovators one should consider, J.R. Hervey, for example, developed a strict impersonal idiom from a lush Georgian beginning; but I have felt that his innovations are mainly verbal, a matter of apparent novelty achieved by the unexpected adjective, while his themes remain undistinguished. D’Arcy Cresswell returned to a pseudo-Byronic idiom which has its moments of real grandeur –

Then Phoebus’ coming the complexion’d cloud
Shall turn to silver; and the merry Pan
Awake the Muses in their mountain shroud;
And all the sensual growths to music fan;
And on the rock the cricket cry aloud
page 68 Like morning singing in the heart of Man . . .

But the idiom could hardly be maintained; and Creswell wasted his talents in eccentricity and a guarded sniping at modern social forms. With full respect for another man’s temperament, it is worth pointing out that Cresswell’s failure and phobias may well have sprung from the pressure of a social order that denies status or even existence to the adult homosexual. I have heard that he wrote some good love poems but did not publish them. He devoted himself to the glorification of an ideal ancient Greece (since that civilisation did not persecute its homosexuals) and did give us in his prose works, A Poet’s Progress and Present Without Leave, some admirable sketches of a hobo’s life both here and in England, with some guarded glimpses of the homosexual underworld: enough to show that in different circumstances he might have been a witty and accomplished raconteur.

I have already indicated, perhaps clumsily, that women poets have found it hard to reach maturity in New Zealand. There are several negative factors which influence their situation – to begin with, the heavy conditioning of young women within a predominantly matriarchal society – the woman has a role to play (organiser, domestic authority, sheepdog of the flock) and the role of an artist, accepted seriously, would contradict this. If it were simply a matter of biological limits, lack of leisure, and the weight of family tasks, the situation would have been changed radically by the advent of contraception and time-saving gadgets. In fact I doubt if women have less leisure than men, now that men commonly give help in the household; and at any rate, single women can use their own time as they like. It is rather a matter of the psychological role which they feel is required of them.

Women do frequently have real difficulty in getting their work published; though this situation has improved a great deal in the past ten or fifteen year. Their work has to meet the scrutiny of male editors, who may fail to grasp legitimate patterns of female symbolism, or may have an unconscious negative bias. For example, if a man writes a poem about a garden, he will tend to see it as a private paradise, a sacred place, a womb perhaps, which he enters from the outside –

Leander then like Theban Hercules
Entered the orchard of th’Hesperides . . .

So Marlowe wrote, signifying the sexual conquest of Hero by Leander. A woman, on the other hand, will very likely see the garden as a symbolic extension of her own soul and body –

And I chose you to be planted in a difficult place,
In the pathway of the east wind;
page 69 Where at times, too, your roots might become thirsty,
Although I have a thirty-foot hose.

You have thriven in spite of these disadvantages.
When your first shoots were battered by the spring storms,
Others pushed forth perseveringly.
You have been my treasure, Pilgrim Rose

Here Ursula Bethell, one of the Innovators, close to the threshold of old age, expresses a spiritual and biological delight in the growth of a flower which signified her own late renewal. Some critics have found fault with the many Latinisms with which her poems are sprinkled; but I see these as a natural indication of her difficult struggle for an abstract objectivity, for intellectual maturity. She had also one of the few advantages our society grants to the woman writer. She was more fortunate than Cresswell. The love she felt towards her female companion (I speak again with the utmost respect) may have roused some social uneasiness; but it is among us a minor and permitted eccentricity; and she was able to work through undisturbed towards the magnificent elegiac love poems with which she mourned and accepted her friend’s death –

Return I now to join a casual throng. No more
Rounding, alone, a coign of the sea-scalloped track,
Shall I, surprised, perceive my dear, with eager pace
Coming to meet me, and with eager look of love,
And go companioned; nor may I ask to know
Such cherished company, such tender love again.

To me, unworthy, once in punctual succour sent,
By the same sacred Will on sudden caught away,
You left me, darling, desolate – might it not be to find,
To accomplish in my solitude some unfinished work,
To glean some stormy harvest that yet remains? – oh rest,
Rest in your lucid haven. See, I am content,
Rest peaceful. The task ended, then I follow on.

Ursula Bethell began her mature work late in life; as if age delivered her from conventional burdens. In the case of Robin Hyde, who died in her thirty-fourth year, the early poems, though technically competent, consist often of rhetorical gestures; one has the sense that a true theme has not been found, that some actual knowledge is being suffocated. Thus, when she writes of a willow tree –

page 70

Swift speeds the time; but lithe and young as rain,
When spring has drawn the circle round her hour,
Shakes she, to brush the waterglass again,
Green tresses, heavy tresses from the tower.
And tree-Rapunzel motions to the wind,
Who, the green ladder mounting to her breast,
Draws leaves across his eyes, lies lost and blind,
His sandal dipped no more in hillward quest . . .
I saw my green hour kindle, watched it pass,
From crumbling brinks my roots search out in air . . .
A dying tree has cracked the waterglass,
Winds wrench the ladder of her tattered hair . . .

The theme is one of narcissism; the willow reflected in the stream is, I think, the poet’s persona, her image of herself; the wind is perhaps a ghostly lover who may have the power to liberate from narcissism; but the language of the poem is so clogged with a lush growth of metaphor not warranted by the theme, and, one feels, so dependent on the poet’s wish to have a formal rhyming structure at any cost, that the theme is lost among the rushes. Or, let us say, most of the poem is a mask hiding the true theme, which is contained in the last four lines: an hour of vigour and joy that has departed, roots finding air instead of water, a dying tree, and the cruelty of the winds – if, as I suggest, many of Robin Hyde’s early poems are smiling painted masks covering a tormented face, you will understand that I do not speak without sympathy in saying this has been a common occurrence among our women poets. The female literary groups to which she first belonged did not help Robin Hyde to develop; they encouraged the use of this mandarin language, to disguise rather than explore and alleviate neurosis. The use of a mask is particularly tempting to women – by the use of cosmetics, for example, a woman can create an apparent second self, a work of art that walks and talks, but a poem of this kind is a false poem, since it lacks a foundation in experience. But Robin Hyde, late in her short and very painful life, freed herself from the mandarin style and expressed the pain she knew about. Here is her very moving portrait of her mother –

. . . She was a red-haired woman, two little lines
Sharp cut between her brows: her eyes looked tired
As long as I remember, and her strong mouth sad.
Still she held firmly: when we went for walks
It was I who flagged: You’d never guess what frocks
She made us, while the clean thread broke and broke,
And I stood pricking at red sateen, or spoke
Roughly: that dance, the only one we had,
page 71 I remember Judy’s frock of petals, wired
Bright blue, with silver wrappings round the stalks.
Sometimes I loved her: but I liked the smooth faces

Like the other mothers had, and told her so.
She laughed: she was never frightened: she took knocks
Square on the mouth, and wouldn’t hit you back:
I never saw my mother dressed in black
But grief came . . . and she never let it go.

An exact, compassionate view of an early family relationship – but the natural vision won at such a great cost! – the cost of alienation, grief, self-hatred and eventual suicide – that, or something like it, has often been what our women writers have had to pay in order to detach themselves from the blinding norms of the matriarchy. Among the Innovators Robin Hyde made that journey and paid that cost. We should certainly honour her courage.

1966? (387)