This Time the Flood

During the People’s Revolution, in a small Balkan state, two peasants were engaged in sawing the local landlord in half in the middle of the village square. One of them paused for breath and rubbed his sweaty forehead. ‘Saw a bit more slowly, Gregor,’ he said. ‘Old Sergius gave me an apple once when I was a boy.’

This anecdote illustrates admirably the current practices of New Zealand literary critics. Their mercy is perhaps more to be feared than their hostility. Yet fifty years from now (if civilisation has not died, or changed beyond our imagination) the people who read poems written in these days will not be much interested whether or not some editor of a literary quarterly accepted them, or some sharp-fanged reviewer approved of them, or some anthologist thought they would fit easily into his book. They will be interested chiefly in the poems as literary documents, windows on the human condition. I think it is worthwhile to remember this.

Perhaps one cannot be wholly detached from fashion and cult. Perhaps it would be unwise for a writer to be wholly detached, since cults – the Beat Poets in America may serve as an example – often give direction and confidence to their devotees in an otherwise directionless society whose signposts are mainly ‘Keep Out’ notices. But I think it is wise for a critic, a literary commentator, to avoid this kind of tribal warmth, and honour, if he can, the kinds of writing whose impulse and view of the world he could never share. The nearest thing to this objective generosity I can find in New Zealand criticism is in Kendrick Smithyman’s long-sighted and meditative commentary on our poets in the periodical, Mate. There he writes

page 117

. . . it is pretty hard to decide what any individual has achieved if he has no book to his credit, a book being fairly definitive of what he thinks his talent is, and this is unhappily the situation of Bland, Challis and others at the time of writing . . .

That was in 1963. Since that time a great many new books of New Zealand verse have been published. The total list is a staggering one, a veritable Noah’s Flood of verse, a credit to local publishers and in one instance to an overseas Press, a cause of joy to any man who wants to see New Zealand poetry grow and change, and a list to daunt the most hard-headed literary commentator.

If one were to put on the totem mask of a critic of our local academic cult, the task of just comment on the works of seventeen poets would become negligible. Glover and Brasch would receive a somewhat clammy handshake, as veterans surviving from the legendary Thirties. The ghost of Mulgan would be ignored, as in life, because he fought on the wrong side in those old skirmishes. Rawlinson and Adcock are both women – I doubt if they would get a leg in, though Adcock might get a small pat on the rump for being able to read Latin. Sinclair might get past the electronic eye – at times he reads like a translation from Lorca, and there is an air of sound scholarship about his footnotes on the cargo cult. Bland, Challis, Doyle, Packer – no, they have made their bed in Wellington, and they must lie on it, though Doyle is physically in Auckland, he is still a spiritual émigré from the dark and dirty South. Campbell and Ireland – well, perhaps there is some codicil to Leavis’s last will and testament, a special dispensation for Romantics, leaving them an old pair of suspenders to share between them. Tuwhare – go carefully, brother, Tuwhare is undeniably Polynesian – perhaps we can link him to the canoe-building chants. Weir and Hooper – we can ditch them at the start – they haven’t waited the requisite ten years before getting their verse published. And Johnson – bring out the tear-gas, boys! – the anti-academic dragon is at the gates. This leaves Stead, a good lad and true, with all his tropes in order, who can load ten lines with twenty-eight literary echoes. For him alone, a small sliver from the Laureate’s crown of thorns . . .

Perhaps I am a little too hard on the academic critics – they do contribute a touch of intellectual stiffening – yet from a number of Landfall reviews and the austerely regional selection Allen Curnow made earlier, for the second edition of his anthology, and can infer two highly dangerous premises held by members of the academic cult – that there is only one way of writing good poems, and that a metaphor not able to be examined with the kit of tools Leavis left behind him is no true metaphor. I cannot wear that totem mask; nor do I wish to wear any other – for in my estimation critics should interpret and assess the work of poets, not make blueprints to indicate the way poems should be written.

Among the newly published books, I notice in particular Denis Glover’s collection. This legion of poems, marching to the attack in (I think) the Roman page 118 tortoise formation, should explode for good the legend that Glover is chiefly a desultory satirist. The poems fall very roughly into two chronologically separate groups. The early lyrics and satires, and the Sings Harry sequence, provide the ground on which Glover’s reputation is most securely founded. They have often the tone of ballads made to be sung on the scaffold, needing, one feels, the last words of a surviving spectator – ‘. . . and then his neck was broken, clean as a whistle!’ Those lucid, piercing lyrics of nihilist idealism, nearer the bone than anything this country had seen before – it could lead to interesting reflections on the kind of life as we live here, that they seemed to so many readers the true New Zealand thing, Perhaps Glover has lived longer and more honestly with the corpse of God – for Whom we have so many ceremonies and so little grief – than the rest of us have done. But a new struggle began about the beginning of the Arawata Bill sequence. Glover started to unloosen the decorous noose at the throat and to celebrate the shifting contemporary realities. His hold on rhyme and metre undoubtedly slackened – there were a number of unfortunate lapses into banality – yet the increased variety of his themes made for a more human view of the world. His personae still on the whole belonged to the death-bound category – wanderers, misanthropes, embracers of red-hot stoves, not quite at home except in the grave – but they have their own very lively idiom. The best of the second period is probably the long Mick Stimson elegy, and the worst, being mere verse journalism, the snippets on an air race.

I can’t say that Glover’s mahogany-thumping satires appeal to me, or his way of ending a stanza with a single rhyme as a man might hammer up a shelf with a single nail. But these are trivia one can safely leave to the academic-minded. Glover’s unique and exemplary virtue has been to present a true vision of the New Zealand earth and sea as the nourishing and destroying mother, the beginning and end of natural man. It may seem a narrow achievement; yet I doubt this – that kind of vision can only be bought at the cost of a lifelong ascesis, How great the cost might be looks at us squarely at times from between the hammered stanzas. One should not, either, fail to consider the formative effect of the military ethos on Glover’s sensibility. His most deeply nihilist poem, ‘Loki’s Daughter’s Palace’, meditates the eternal fate of those who have not managed to get themselves killed in battle –

Precipitous the threshold
Of Loki’s daughter’s palace, sheer
Falling as empty talk down years.

Above the gates of Helheim
ANGUISH it said in clear
Runescarved cold as fear.

page 119

The straw-dead comers prepared
Through dark doors gaping wide . . .

A poem in tune with the true sentiments of an R.S.A. reunion; and no one else has said it. In many ways the later Glover is the one I see most reason to admire.

Among our local Poets of the Thirties, it has often seemed to me that Charles Brasch has not received justice – he stands always a little in the background, the quiet member of the tribe, accepted but passed over. Perhaps his long editorship of an influential literary quarterly has overshadowed his real and vastly more important function as a poet. This may well have been a cause of melancholy for Brasch, who was well qualified to be the prophet of a cult – the cosmopolitan man, the entrepreneur between New Zealand and Europe. In his most recent book, Ambulando, there is the pervasive sense of an unusual integrity developing in solitude. It reminds me curiously of the later passages in Dag Hammarskjold’s perennial diary. There is the same austere spirituality, the same underlying allegory of a journey made across desert country towards a not unwelcome grave. A number of threads are drawn together – the pains of encroaching age, a wry self-knowledge –

No one has clean hands,
None a pure heart.
We shall be part of one
Another to life’s end
Whether we would or not,
But now break, go,
Let silence fall like snow:
Together we offend . . .

The insistence on the absence of purity like an echo provokes that theme of an ideal purity – in man, in society, in mutual love – which Brasch’s verse has never moved far from. As with Hammarskjold, one feels that his sparse images are brought in only for a likeness, for illustration – the text itself is imageless, a dialogue between the Self and the Beloved, the unknowable Other. The harsh observed detail of South Island landscape is no longer omnipresent in Brasch’s poems; and I think this is a gain, for he was never a regional poet – his true region of knowledge is interior, it is easier to see the beauty and relevance of these gaunt, mature poems now that the slogans of the Thirties have faded into oblivion, and Brasch can stand out on his own, principally as a Kierkegaardian love poet who is not too proud to take some of his methods from the Beats.

Setting aside the useless regional categories, I find that Doyle, Challis and Stead have a good deal in common. Each belongs by temperament to the page 120 less intense, more subtle type of poet, whose strength must lie in nuances of feeling and careful close observation. When Doyle re-enters his ancestral cave of Celtic gloom, his temptation is to be sentimental. He has to work hard for the finished poem. For example, in a semi-devotional poem, ‘After a Retreat in St Gerard’s’, Doyle, by doing without the scaffolding of acrid images which have given him good results elsewhere, fails to notice a gap in the planking –

. . . where my future broods
impassive, waiting
in dark latitudes
of time’s begetting,

I pray God’s sign be given
in men or sky.
All our alphabets
cannot tell why

in a green country
where the cricket sings
there is such heartache
at the heart of things . . .

The third-last and second-last stanzas keep balance, but the final one tumbles straight into the man-swallowing lap of Dark Rosaleen. A portrait of a hard-headed Redemptorist lay-brother, carefully etched in acid and holy water, would have been nearer the mark; and the point is, Doyle would be quite capable of it. He underestimates the power of the dragon latent in his verse. Still, there is quite enough negative thinking in Distances to make one cheerful for the future.

Challis is a thinner man; but he makes up for it with parables as exactly fashioned as the mobiles they hang in pubs. The people of his poems are made of quartz and silicon –

The brittle crystal structure of your silicon,
if shattered, lacks that green organic knack
of carbon which can give and grow again;
however deft your step a stone may slip;
in bracing for the fall a bone may crack . . .

Yes, indeed; we have met them too, but hoped the state might not be permanent. Challis feels it could be; and of course he may be right. These brilliant parables of spiritual death, owe a good deal to Louis Johnson, I think – but Johnson uses him as a fill-in when not much else is happening. page 121 Something is present and something is undeniably lacking in Challis’s work – a sense of possible change perhaps.

The movement of C.K. Stead’s verse is that of a man in muddy ground, for whom each step is a hard exercise in detachment. I still like best his early ‘Pictures in a Gallery Undersea’, because the associative power is not cramped there by the many sidelong looks at the process of poem-making itself. Perhaps it is pastiche

Far from her ears, airy and thin, the beat
Of goldsmith’s hammers rang in Devonshire Street,
And spent, above a quarrel of barrow wheels,
Songs on the night . . .

No – somewhere behind the poem, a young student is hoping to see his girl in a cloakroom after the Riggerstring Hop. The brevity is all there; and the genuine sadness. But who, more than Stead, needs to quarry for new themes? Doyle may have to sharpen his butcher’s chopper; Challis may still be able to dig up new exhibits from the mud – depressive words, but Stead, in a sense the wisest, should benefit, I think, from a year’s burial in the King Country or a holiday on marihuana. One may prescribe, of course; yet who dares, after thirty-five, to set an example in knocking holes in the roof to let the rain in?

The traps for tired writers are the same in every age. One thinks one has found a formula; and then the Muse hauls up her tweeds. It was so with Alan Mulgan, I think; though for him the formula was not an academic creed derived from Leavis, but a ceremonial piety appropriate to a Hawke’s Bay Flower Festival. I knew him as a sensitive, awkward, most terribly Muse-haunted man – she had left her talon-marks for ever on his gizzard, And in ‘Success’ and certain passages of ‘Golden Wedding’ one can detect the throb of a nihilism too extreme to be fully uttered. Perhaps Glover learnt to say what Mulgan could never quite say, for fear that Grandad’s picture would fall off the wall square on his head; and the moderns dig in the graveyard where the Georgians were accustomed to bring a rag to polish the slabs. Hooper’s talent, in A Map of Morning, is adventurous, but real within its limits – a series of elegies for the death of the heart, in that most deadly of all professions, school-teaching. Weir’s poems, though uneven, have great freshness, and I prefer some of his parables to Challis’s because they still have their roots in nature –

Saw there the strange island we never raided
and light smoke threading the house in the trees
where old sailors lived, my grandfather said,
as we fished in rock-pools writhing with weeds
under skies blue as a child’s painting . . .

page 122

Weir has the essential talent that Hooper lacks – the power to create a live interior landscape. If good poem-making depended on our being capable philosophers and logicians, as the academic critics imply, then few good poems would be written. Fortunately the power to create a living image is sufficient. I do not fully understand the impulse which led certain academic reviewers to turn their howitzers on Weir’s lucid, lively, unpretentious poems. He has endured also a sniping from the semi-literate Catholic pundits, who would prefer a set of rhymed couplets addressed to Saint Philomena. God help us all; especially those with weeping eczema and chloritis.

Louis Johnson’s eighth book of verse – including several written in collaboration – should rightly be regarded as a triumphant display of his maturity. Here the many fables are interwoven in a pattern that reflects accurately the painful crises of our time; here a slowly gained objectivity enables the necessary distance between the poet and his material; here Johnson, for the first time, makes the rapid shifts of metaphor which his method demands, without the awkwardness noticeable in earlier work. Yet the signs of what he might do were already there in his first book, The Sun Among the Ruins, published in 1951 –

Night, like a candle spent, and love
a memory of the wax-white loin and long
lip-kissing . . .

The one talent with which modern critics are rarely equipped to deal is that of sensual abundance – the basic talent of Keats and Dylan Thomas – because it demands that a dry man should look into the world of a green man, with understanding and without envy. Johnson graduated at the University of Bohemia – founded by Pope Joan, endowed by Rabelais and Balzac – and from the dialect of its tribes learnt to construct his own more severe idiom. He turned to the French and American models whom our Londoncentred literati had hardly heard of. There are three possible reasons why his New Zealand commentators (with the sole exception of Smithyman) have been uniformly indifferent or antagonistic – native, chronic ill-will; some fatal defect in Johnson’s work; or an exceptional demand made by that work upon its readers. The first reason though now possible, I must set aside; the second will hardly hold water, for the defects in Johnson’s work were those of hurry, pressure of images, an excess of surrealist method, which belong to abundance, and which he has almost entirely outgrown. I think the third reason – an exceptional demand – must be very seriously considered.

One can see with sympathy the semi-conscious dilemma of the academic critics. If Johnson were admitted as the possessor of a talent, it would be a major one – such force and abundance combined had not been seen in the country before. Moreover, Johnson knew the country better than they did, page 123 especially below the belt. If his credentials were accepted, then Valhalla would plunge into Helheim, and a B.A. would be no better than an A.B. So they dug their toes in and waited while Johnson, with some help on the side from Smithyman, proceeded with that work which Freud compared to the draining of the Zuyder Zee – the gradual integration at a conscious level of the aspects of human behaviour which our Victorian grandparents exiled from the drawing-room, from the lecture-hall, but not from happening. Every poem was a new departure – not one of them as obscure as Dylan Thomas’s early germinal sonnets – yet they provoked the same reaction from the established men that Thomas provoked in Grigson – an irritable bewilderment and an invocation of the gods of order. Again one can see why it was. Take ‘Fable of a Forgotten Woman’, perhaps the finest poem from Roughshod Among the Lilies–

She has returned from Paris, I am told,
riddled with typhus, vastly pregnant, old
in the face and mind and clutching the arm
of a new, bewildered lover like a charm
that is wearing thin . . .

No doubt the woman behind the poem is real enough; but at the mythical level she is also the Bohemian bitch-goddess, Cybele wearing the beast-mask; and one cannot remain indifferent to this archetype, one either moves in her orbit or most strenuously closes the gates of the mind against her. I think the established men did the second thing; and justified it by an unjustifiable condemnation of Johnson’s ‘loose technique’. All Johnson’s technique is deployed to increase the immediacy of the reality behind the poem – fluid language, the biological metaphor, a montage of images – did the critics expect him to write like Curnow or Brasch, who had a totally different reality to convey.

The point is, I think, that some poets are simply poets, and others are prophetic with or without desiring to be so. Johnson invites the reader to share a view of life as an abyss in which experience illuminates and kills. The problem for his critics has always been that Johnson’s . . . [incomplete]

1966? (407)