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Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand
(for John Weir)
The archetype that best expresses the situation of New Zealand poets is, to my mind, not Orpheus, the man whose music made the stones dance, but Phaeton, who stole the sungod’s chariot and did not drive it well, or Icarus, whose father unwisely made him wings, and the wings fell apart when he ventured too near the sky. These images signify the minor talent determined to be major; and I do not find the ambition in any way unsuitable or singular. Major talents are not born into the world fully fledged. They develop by struggle, strain and the endurance of frequent unsuccess. The Muse after all is a tall girl. Sometimes all that a growing poet can do is put a bucket over her head and swing on the handle.
In this talk I will be constructing a number of generalisations about New Zealand poetry; and it is well for me to confess at the outset an uncertainty that valid generalisations can yet be made. Our literature, in both prose and verse, is various, uneven and idiosyncratic. When I look at it without forethought what I perceive resembles a bucket of live crabs, each climbing over the other’s back, influenced by one another in quite erratic ways, often ferociously individualistic, sharing only a strong desire for creative action in page 326 a mental climate that offers little support for it. One could make a series of chronological divisions – the poetry of settlement; the poetry of the Nineties; Edwardian and Georgian poetry; the poetry of the Thirties; the poetry of the Forties and early Fifties and a new fringe of writing less distinct because contemporary. But the two phases of New Zealand poetry on which it seems most apt for me to concentrate are, first, the emergence out of Georgian writing ofa newgroup in the Thirties(theyincludedMason, Fairburn, Hervey, Bethell,Hyde, Dowling,Brasch, Curnow,Glover, Cresswell) – and, secondly the emergence of another group in the Forties and Fifties (they included Smithyman, Johnson, Baxter, Joseph, Sinclair, Stanley,Witheford, Campbell, Wilson,Oliver, Stead,Adcock, Rawlinson, Bland,Challis, Doyle,Leeming). Neither list is exhaustive and each will have its contradictions. Dowling and myself, for example, seemed to occupy a middle position between the two chronological groups; and Gloria Rawlinson began writing as an out-andout Georgian – I include her in the latter group because all her mature work belonged to the second period. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the first group as transitional poets – their labour was to bring our poetry out of a long Victorian shadow into the confused and confusing light of twentieth century thought and action – and to the second group as post-transitional poets, since their labour was one of consolidation, adjustment and further discovery. If the categories are in measure unsatisfactory, I would still claim they are tools one can work with. They convey at least a divergence from the categories ofAllen Curnow, as expressed in his two anthology Introductions, who makes only a necessary primitive distinction between Georgian poetry and the poetry of the Thirties.
Trying to disentangle our difficult canons of criticism, I remember two poems that my father wrote some time in the Edwardian period. The first poem represented the song of angels or nature spirits at the creation of the world. It went thus –
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 in the pride
Of her sweet virgin beauty in us did confide;
Then we rustled and played
Though her forests, and swayed
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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.
The second poem, of which I will quote one stanza, was a ballad about a local farmer who had fallen out with the county council:
Through all these gullies I’ve made bridges
With great logs split with mall and wedges;
I’ve mown the fern from off the ridges
To make pig-bedding,
And with great care I’ve nurtured hedges
Around my steading . . .
In these two poems (which I do not quote just for reasons of family piety, but because of their obvious relevance) one can already distinguish the two modes of poetry which have most occupied the attention of our critics. The creation chorus is a poem in the Romantic mode, general and lyrical in emphasis, very likely modelled on the form of Shelley’s choruses in Prometheus Unbound. There is no specific New Zealand reference, except perhaps to the ‘brackens’ in the second stanza. The poet does not write consciously as a New Zealander, even though the awareness of a country still existing mainly in the pre-animal phase of creation may have been close to him and influenced his approach to his theme. His supposition of the poet’s role is vatic and inspirational.
In the second poem, however, the mode is quite different. The model here is Robert Burns’s pastoral satire; the vocabulary is square-cut New Zealand farmer’s language; and very likely without a local audience the poem would not have been written. The ballad goes on to emphasise that the farmer’s labours have been useless because the council have decided to make a road through the middle of his property. At bottom it is a parable of the conflict between individual energy and social authority. I think that these two modes of writing illustrate a division of poetic opinion and practice that still persists to inhibit us. Those who advocate a strictly regional poetry would approve the ballad and reject the chorus. In fact both modes are possible, though the first is more difficult to handle without stumbling; and our poets have commonly explored both modes, whatever their public view of the matter may have been. The verse of Mason, for example, is predominantly vatic and inspirational, with no strong New Zealand emphasis; the verse of both Curnow and Johnson, though sometimes vatic, is minded towards social comment and satire; the verse of both Fairburn and Bland is rarely without some regional social emphasis. A perception of these similarities can help to page 328 explode a too rigid critical division of the regional and the so-called universal.
The endemic problem of our poets does not, I think, lie in this area at all; but rather in a struggle with the austere anti-aesthetic angel of Puritanism. Where the struggle has gone well, our writing has broadened; where it has slackened, the vigour of our prose or verse has also slackened. I do not deny that a Puritan society can contain a great deal of primitive energy; but to transform this energy into aesthetic forms, one has to develop non-Puritan modes of thought and feeling. Since Puritanism is essentially an aggressively negative view of the natural forces latent in society and in the individual, the Puritan, as such, is helpless to deliver himself from a cage of his own making. That the acquisition of a positive attitude involves some kind of spiritual commitment, and many dangers, need hardly be said. In this context I will mention two social and literary examples.
There was a certain New Zealand woman novelist with whom I corresponded briefly. She had written a vigorous and perceptive book about a group of construction workers and their families living in one of those temporary townships that spring up where a dam is being built. It included some unique sketches of communal entertainment and a sincere, intelligent portrayal of the life of a young married couple. There were a few times when the author tried to take the bull by the horns, and set down squarely the nature of their love relationship: it was a necessary task if the novel were to succeed, and on the whole she managed it well, even when the occasions were a trifle sensational – as when the young wife privately regretted the fact that her husband had lost the habit of shutting the doors of the house and making love to her on the floor. But the story as a whole was not deliberately sensational. Its dimensions were human and real. It seemed to me, when I read it first, that it only began to fail a little when the writer tried too hard to round off the edges of the plot; and it struck me as a favourable mark of the times that a New Zealand woman writer had been able to set down broadly and squarely what she felt, imagined or observed. But this writer told me that the reaction of her local community to the publication of the book had been so brutally and salaciously negative that she had lost the courage to write again. The fact that she was a believing Catholic accentuated her ordeal of self-doubt. I tried to persuade her to ignore the reaction and carry on writing; but without success. Her case illustrates the fact that a Puritan community may severely inhibit its writers and even throttle them.
And among the poets I remember the case of my friend Percival. He and I used to meet quite often at the side bar of the Royal Oak in Wellington. He was a witty, lively, humane old person with a great stock of penetrating comment on the literati of his own time. Though he had had some verse published, these same contemporaries had agreed to shove him off the brink of Mount Parnassus – not because the verse was bad; their own verse was no better – but because Percival had made some slip in business and served page 329 a prison sentence. I was sorry when he died. And the following anecdote is not designed to throw mud at his gravestone; I think it illustrates rather a common literary and social dilemma.
On a certain occasion Percival, very drunk, was paying a visit to a brothel on the Terrace. Unfortunately the police chose that same night to make a raid on the place; and Percival was caught hard at work with one of the girls. The detective sergeant clapped a hand on his shoulder – ‘Come along now,’ he said.
‘You get to hell out of here,’ answered Percival. ‘Can’t you see I’ve not finished yet?’
Percival, like most of us, was a Puritan born and bred. His personal habits are not the crux of the matter. The significant thing is that no trace whatever of the other self, the aggressive brothel-visiting drunk, ever appeared in his verse. Most of his poems were carefully polished and saccharine descriptions of the joys of domestic life. Whenever he sat down to write, the voice of that part of him which had endured and accepted many hard things was drowned by the chorus of Edwardian angels chiming at his earhole. His problem was not, I think, hypocrisy, but rather a variety of socially induced neuroses. He had a permanently split mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no great love for the psychiatrist’s clinic. Often the clinical men, trying to improve us, only change us for the worse, substituting a radioactive Stop-Go sign for the old fashioned leper’s bell. But I think many New Zealand writers at one time or another have stood in Percival’s shoes. I do not count self-knowledge a state easily achieved; though some measure of it is essential if one is to write well. Most of us come to it only spasmodically. But a Puritan ethic promotes neurosis, by confusing magically the knowledge of those acts that proceed from the Fall of Man and the acts themselves; it ignores the boundary between will and intellect. And neurosis, because it is a disorder of the intellect – a blocking from consciousness of necessary knowledge about oneself – plays havoc with the communications of art.
In a good poem, inward and outward knowledge are perceived, as it were, in the same instant, by a single intellectual act, and the natural verbal form to enclose the moment of perception is the metaphor. Thus, when Louis Johnson writes about the death of Hart Crane –
. . . he came
pale on that northbound ship, dreaming release
in the lion’s den . . .
– the objective circumstance of Crane’s death and the inward knowledge which Johnson, as poet, has of his own and other people’s natures coalesce in a single verbal unit of metaphor. There are, I think, religious connotations page 330 embedded in Johnson’s metaphor. Satan is the prince of the north; let us say, the Satanic mills of industrial North America towards which Crane is making his death voyage, or even of our own North Island, since one may legitimately transfer Crane in imagination from a Caribbean liner to the Cook Strait ferry. And Satan could also be the lion who is about to devour the protagonist. These are speculative suggestions. But the profound force of Johnson’s metaphor springs from the fact that he is using the basic Puritan symbols in an anti-Puritan way, to uncover rather than to conceal, to affirm identity rather than to dislocate it.
Our transitional poets were rarely able to wrestle so directly with the ambiguous Puritan angel. It is customary to speak of early New Zealand poetry as a desert stretching from the time of settlement to just after the First World War. But I think the picture is not wholly true. No doubt the ceremonial verses of Thomas Bracken, or the archaisms of Jessie Mackay, or the spongy verbalisms of those who contributed to C.A. Marris’s verse periodicals, did not deserve the reputation they gained. Yet sentimental poems sometimes fulfilled an important social function, as in the case of Harry Holland’s ‘Red Roses on the Highway’, which became a kind of litany for the early Labour Movement. Nor was the time of transition – when sharp-minded, intellectually vigorous poets abandoned the Georgian tradition or shaped it to their own use – as novel or complete a thing as our critics have tended to assume. It would be an instructive exercise, for example, to compare Glover’s work with that of Alan Mulgan; or Curnow’s with that of Domett; or Ursula Bethell’s (as M.H. Holcroft in fact did in one passage of his trilogy) with that of Eileen Duggan; or Fairburn’s early lush verse with that of the Georgian models whom he was then imitating. The boundaries are never exactly definable; though it is plain that a change did occur, and that the change was salutary.
One obstacle to a clear evaluation of the poetry of transition has been the literary canonisation of R.A.K. Mason. One can see reasons which may have made this tribal ceremony seem obligatory. For example, the transitional poets were most of them favourably minded towards Marxism, but Mason alone formally embraced that dialectic. Among the uncommitted he earned the special respect due to the committed man. He was, as it were, their communal sacrifice on the altar of social realism. Furthermore, his verse tends to be didactic and hortative; it urges implicitly various moral imperatives. Thus with Mason the transitional poets acquired a prophet and a father figure. And, most important, writing the bulk of his verse early in life, with only a very late resurgence, he had the merit of a present silence: it is so much less costly to canonise a literary forerunner than a literary competitor. In the Introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse, published in 1945, Curnow urges us to accept Mason as pre-eminently a poet who writes from the heart of life itself:
page 331He is able to satisfy Yeats’s requirement that ‘a work of art can have but one subject.’ His poetry is nearer than any here to that least questionable kind of all, which is like an occurrence in nature . . . Mason has tried to deal direct with life . . .
One has to make allowance here for Curnow’s bias towards a kind of tribal piety. From his description one would gain the impression that Mason’s verse had an innovating force comparable, let us say, with that of Dylan Thomas in England. But to read Mason is to learn how little poets of transition departed from Georgian or even from Victorian models. Thus, in his poem, ‘The Just Statesman Dies’:
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 a 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.
There were hands that held me
far up towards the skies
and their soft disdain
of the sacrifice.
All 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.
Days of old, misty hills, lone cliffs, a girl like a pearl, soft disdain, spirit transcended, fulfilment – Mason uses (for his own purposes) a well-worn page 332 poetic diction. But does the new note he has struck absolve him from the need to renovate the language? It is the same question one has to ask frequently when one reads the poets of transition. It does not disturb me much; for I think of the act of writing as a broad gate. But imagine how a Landfall critic, bred in the varsity stable – or Curnow in his later and more truculent criticism – would tear these lines to pieces if they had been written, let us say, by Louis Johnson! Two of the stanzas seem to have unrelated participles; in two instances at least the full rhyme is handled in a clumsy fashion. The furniture of the Nineties has been brought out of the lumber room, dusted a little, and displayed as if it were new – and whoever spoke of Easter as ‘the Feast of Crucifixion’? The poem is much better of course than such haggling criticism would indicate. However he chooses to write, Mason is aware that our people, at the level of feeling, live like slaves in the quarries of Syracuse; he knows the meaning of destitution – and something of this moves behind any poem he has written.
But the problem of a double standard of criticism has often muddled us – not only, as Lawrence Baigent once remarked, in a review of Ursula Bethell, that a major New Zealand poet may be a minor poet in the whole field of English writing, but more sharply, that some of our critics have shown an excessive piety towards the work of our transitional poets. I take Curnow as the chief example of such piety. In his two Introductions, first to A Book of New Zealand Verse, then to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, he has been our most influential critic of poetry. He brought to the task a vigorous, aggressive mind, a well-knit prose style, and a number of strongly held preconceptions. One does not dispute Curnow as poet. There his example of complex diction and a knotted intellectual vigour has extended our literary margins. It is as critic and anthologist that one has in justice to dispute with him.
His critical theory contains four definite limiting actors – his tendency to see the poet in a hierophantic or messianic role; his deeply held personal fiction of the spiritual isolation of New Zealanders; his negative pre-occupation with colonialism; and a tribal piety in his evaluation of the transitional poets.
It was the last factor that added some sharpness to a dispute otherwise mannerly at the time of the publication of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. It seemed that Curnow, in 1960, was unable to recognise that much good writing and new modes of writing had come to light in our poetry since 1945. One can indicate the bias most easily by a gross and simple counting of heads. In that anthology, intended for wide paperback distribution, of the transitional poets, Ursula Bethell is given in effect fifteen poems; Hervey, three poems; Cresswell, in effect fifteen poems; Fairburn, in effect twenty-one poems; Mason, eighteen poems; Robin Hyde, five poems; Brasch, twelve poems; Dowling (whom one may or may not call transitional), eight poems; Curnow, in effect seventeen poems; Glover, in effect twenty-five poems page 333 – whereas of the post-transitional poets, Spear is given fourteen poems; Hart-Smith, four poems; Henderson, three poems; Joseph, three poems; Rawlinson, in effect eight poems; Dallas, five poems; Witheford, three poems; Chapman, one poem; Sinclair, in effect ten poems; Smithyman, in effect ten poems; Johnson, three poems; Campbell, two poems; Oliver, one poem; Baxter, nine poems; Wilson, two poems; Stead, in effect twelve poems; Elworthy two poems; Mary Stanley, no poems; Ruth Gilbert, no poems, Fleur Adcock, no poems; Bland, no poems; Challis, no poems; Doyle, no poems; Leeming, no poems; Weir, no poems; Boyd, no poems; Mitcalfe, no poems; Vogt, no poems; Tuwhare, no poems; Slater, no poems . . . The effect of Curnow’s selection was to concentrate mainly on the poets of transition, with Smithyman, Sinclair and myself as the only notable exceptions; and what the three of us had in common was a tendency to approach the problems of New Zealand life from the same angle as the poets of transition. The thirteen able poets excluded from his selection, and the nine or so represented by far too small and biased a selection, had grounds for complaint. The time has not yet come when a New Zealand anthologist can be wholly personal in the type of selection he makes.
The factor of the messianic view can be seen most clearly perhaps in a prose section of Not in Narrow Seas, published in 1939:
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, has been 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 suffering the wheat lands, the cattle country and the sheep country, may be born again. At present, however, an artist can only suffer, and record his sufferings; hoping to make others suffer with him the necessary agonies of first self-knowledge.
This kind of broad messianic statement belongs very much to the time in which it was written; and its messianic note – ‘out of their suffering the country may be born again’ – is readily understandable when one considers that cloudy ferment of Marxian enthusiasm and literary innovation. But I doubt if Curnow, once having held this view strongly, ever really abandoned it. He was much influenced by the critical essays and nature meditations of M.H. Holcroft. In one sonnet he mentions that Holcroft’s intuitions are leading the country towards a new ‘intelligible hope’, seen principally in aesthetic terms. Later on he curiously ceased to acknowledge his fundamental debt to Holcroft.
The prime difficulty is that what was speculative in Holcroft – the myth of voyage, the mountains seen as hostile presences – tends to become prescriptive in Curnow’s criticism. He indicates, though subtly, that such themes are the New Zealand reality. His conception of the poet as hierophant page 334 can be illustrated best perhaps by a private occasion when he mentioned with special approval Yeats’s dream of re-founding the old Druidic colleges for poets in Ireland, and suggested that similar institutions would be helpful to New Zealand poets. One may be forgiven for supposing that in his mind the university unconsciously came to stand in place of the Druidic college. Such fantasies ran counter to the individualism of the post-transitional poets.
Curnow’s literary fiction of the spiritual isolation of the New Zealander bore good fruit in his own poetry; but transferred into criticism it became something of an incubus. Thus, he writes in the Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse:
. . . the ‘Kiwi’, though the term is of recent adoption, and for all his insecurity and raucousness, is a bird of some social ancestry. Our Victorian founders, by the mere act of turning colonist, made irrevocable divorce out of their country’s separation of the poetic and the practical. If their descendants, when they write, are apt to force their voices, it is in part to persuade themselves that the poem matters at all. Or if they mumble halfheartedly, it may be so as to reassure themselves that the poem does not matter too much . . .
His point concerning separation of the poetic and the practical is well taken; but the tone of the rest of the passage is surely too aggressively negative, implying an intense spiritual isolation and unease which may conceivably have been felt by Curnow himself, or other of the poets of transition, but has since fallen into the background. Regarding the situation of the New Zealander as ‘colonial’, the following anecdote may serve as a door-stopper.
My parents were once travelling on a train in England, going to a semi-political rally, just before the Second World War. The man with whom they shared the compartment was going to the same rally. He happened to be a member of the English aristocracy. After an hour’s journey in silence, he spoke to them.
‘Where do you come from?’ he enquired politely.
‘From New Zealand,’ they replied.
‘Oh,’ said the Englishman. They spent the rest of the journey in silence. This kind of ordeal can be nerve-shattering. I have seen several New Zealand writers come back from overseas, their confidence shrunk to a dried bean, glancing nervously over their shoulders, afraid to set pen to paper in case they betray their colonial rawness. Myself, I think the best answer is a gigantic belly laugh.
The myth of colonial isolation and inferiority seems to me to be connected broadly to the theological concept of the Fall of Man – the immigration of our ancestors was, as it were, a second Fall, a departure from a Garden of Eden, situated somewhere in Victorian England. Like other myths of inferiority (as in the reaction of a Jew to anti-Semitism, for example) the loss of self-confidence is insidious: no labour of intellect or will can ever really page 335 bridge the predetermined gap. Many New Zealanders who go to Britain (to go ‘back Home’ is the code word for it) may be unconsciously making a trip to a land that does not exist: the land of their great-grandmother’s exiled fantasy, with the Old Lady still drinking tea and whisky at Windsor, the village cricket team still playing in the twilight, and Oscar Wilde riding off to jail in a hansom cab. But not all of us are bound by the myth. Personally I prefer the dark country I was born in, with its man-eating pigs and politicians imported from Australia, where, if you break wind at the Bluff, you can be heard in Auckland. There are literary advantages to living in a small country. What one writes can be more readily understood. And the breakdown of the English class structure is an unmixed blessing.
One must, however, setting aside these temporary disputes, give honour to the poets of transition. They saw that our literature had slid into shallow mandarin writing; that many of our communal myths were moribund; and instead of sighing and accepting the situation, they tried to come at the truth by rough tactics. The following are some of the changes which they were able to bring about.
| 1. | An entry into the socialist climate of opinion. This change corresponded closely to social and literary changes overseas. The Utopian myth had been an element in New Zealand thought from the time of settlement onwards. It had had many practical effects on our society and legislation. The Depression of the Thirties gave it a new impetus. It was not necessary to become a Marxist. The mystique was much vaguer than that, amounting 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. Though few of the poets of transition ventured into an explicit social realism, they were all affected by the thought that the Revolution might be at hand, and some of the explicit results of the mystique can be seen, for example, in Fairburn’s poem, ‘Dominion’. |
| 2. |
A partial break-through on the level of sensation. In practice this meant that new qualities of our natural scene found their way into their imagery. The poets of transition write much more concretely than their predecessors. It could have meant a breaking of the Puritan deadlock with many good poems on erotic themes. In fact the poets of transition rarely wrote love poetry; with the exception of Fairburn. He is predominantly a poet of sexual idealism. But he did not write much personal love poetry. His women are on the whole type figures, bearers of a life-giving power that is also death-giving. Some of his poems read like passages from a Hindu Scripture:
Now, in this night we shall afterwards remember
now in this great glory, with the arched branches and the stars between,
now, when my armed thoughts are withdrawn from the outposts of space
now, in this luminous darkness, as we take the tide of the earth,
now is the time of peace; let fear be past:
First vision of the world, O fire and fairest light,
Whatever their literary merit (and I think they are unusually successful in their mode) the therapeutic force of Fairburn’s love poetry, his bursting of the Puritan straitjacket, can hardly be over-valued. His harmonious combination of erotic and landscape imagery left a permanent mark on our literature – a poem such as Sinclair’s ‘Te Kaminara’ could hardly have been written without Fairburn’s example – and moreover, any New Zealand adolescent, stumbling on these poems, could feel relieved, if only for a moment, from the communal legacy of sexual imprisonment and self-doubt; could perceive some positive light and warmth in the negative jungle. It is Fairburn’s break-through at the level of sensation that makes this possible. |
| 3. | The development of ribaldry and casual wit. Especiallyin balladsand epigrams by Fairburn and Glover one finds a new casual lightness of the kind that comes when one is talking to or writing for close personal friends. It is masculine in quality and mildly anarchic in tone. It may have had its roots in bar room conversation. Though it implicitly excludes the milieu of our women poets, at that time devoted in the main to genteel whimsy and sabre-rattling moralism, this heavy light verse loosened up the reflexes of the transitional poets, and set a current in motion that still warms our literature like a Gulf Stream. It may be the nearest we have come to New Zealand folk poetry. |
| 4. | A greater freedom of verse structure. The poets of transition were hardly formal perfectionists. Mason could be slipshod; Fairburn relied much on a loose liturgical structure; Bethell’s free verse attempted no more than the minimum of control; Curnow often sacrifices meaning to pattern; Glover can force a rhyme when he feels like it. The post-transitional poets exhibit a craftsmanship much more notable than that of their predecessors. One page 337 could say that by then the pressure was on. I suspect that the origin of much of the poetry of transition was more accidental and inspirational than our later critics have supposed; that the poems, as it were, found their own form. Speech rhythms and half-rhyme were their chief technical innovation. |
| 5. |
The development of a strong mystique of New Zealand identity. It was natural that the transitional poets should concentrate on the New Zealand experience, the New Zealand thing, the New Zealand poem, in reaction from the mandarin writing of our poetic Kuomintang – Mulgan, Marris, Schroder, and those who felt at ease with them – who were in no sense ill-educated people but had shared the misfortune of my friend Percival. Brasch expresses the New Zealand mystique sincerely and lucidly in an early poem, ‘The Iconoclasts’:
Channel and swelling cave divide
And heaven that is the sea’s ally
Sleep in the dark of waves, the grey
In this poem, without much elaboration, Brasch conveys the sense of man as a spiritual wanderer who emerges from the womb of the land only to perish in that inhospitable maternal wilderness. I do not question the poetic force of the mystique; and Brasch himself, as a critic and in his long editorship of Landfall, did something to mitigate its narrowness and allow new attitudes and methods to emerge. What I question is its universal validity as a New Zealand experience. |
| 6. |
The imitation of new and better models. The publication of books such as John Lehman’s New Writing in Europe, or The Faber Book of Modern Verse, with the accessibility of many poems by the English poets of the Thirties, page 338 produced an answering reverberation in New Zealand. Our poets of transition were content to follow the new models in a quiet way. One can see the degree of change (or lack of change) in Glover’s remarkable literary prayer, put into the mouth of Arawata Bill:
Mother of God, in this brazen sun
I quote from memory, and I hope exactly. The invocation was made to the Blessed Virgin because (one supposes) the old prospector was a Catholic. There are nuances of the style of T.S. Eliot in the simple oppositions of height and lowness, dryness and water, and a definite echo in the internal rhyme at the end. Yet the diction still owes something to Georgian examples. Glover has stiffened the lax lines; he has given the images a direct relevance to the objective New Zealand natural scene; he manoeuvres his language towards a formal use of the vernacular; but, beyond this, he is not an innovator. The real shift is in depth of content, not in formal development. |
To contrast and compare our transitional and post-transitional poets is no easy task, in part because we have lacked critics, and one has to coin one’s own critical language. Our first serious critic was Holcroft; and I can remember the reverence with which in the early Forties his meditations were received and handled; but at the time there were fewer good poems to be examined, and naturally enough Holcroft tended to write in generalities. Taking a cue from Holcroft, and from Cresswell’s eccentric mythic gestures, Curnow made a unique anthology in which the poems of his contemporaries illustrated an austere but fruitful thesis of national identity: his Introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse was in 1945 our only detailed survey of poetry to date, and it remains a high water mark in our prose writing. His solitude as commentator made him all the more influential. The historical survey of our literature, prose and verse, made by Eric McCormick is by its nature descriptive and discursive rather than analytical; though it bears the imprint of a searching cultivated mind. Robert Chapman’s brief Introduction to the Chapman and Bennett anthology, published in 1956, is of great importance because it raises publicly the issue of unforced indigenous writing. Chapman wrote –
page 339The very success of the generation of the Thirties – their fusing of New Zealand patterns of life and thought with their poetry – has enabled poets here to feel so at ease in their environment that they can simply assume it and find themselves freed to deal directly with the concerns of poetry everywhere.
That is precisely the issue on which many post-transitional poets had diverged from Curnow’s prescriptive canon; and the Chapman and Bennett anthology established beyond doubt that much good writing had been done since the early Forties. Chapman made a magnificent selection from the verse of Kendrick Smithyman; but one had to wait another ten years before Charles Doyle, in his anthology, Recent Poetry in New Zealand, gave an adequate representation to Louis Johnson. That fact may illustrate why an anthologist in this country can hardly in justice afford yet to make a personal and idiosyncratic selection. Twenty years is a long time for any poet to wait for just recognition.
Kendrick Smithyman’s own book of verse criticism, A Way of Saying, was published recently; and in it he explores in detail the problems of post-transitional poets. If Smithyman’s style is somewhat convoluted, and if he seems often to hedge his bets, he does fulfil the dictum of Herbert Read, that a critic should be generous, because ungenerosity will make him unperceptive. Smithyman is generous and can at times see half way through a brick wall. He notes a progression of New Zealand poetry from Romantic to academic modes; he stresses the local and regional factors which influence, for example, those whom he calls the Wellington group of poets. Perhaps through having experienced the lack of a wide audience for, or any clear critical understanding of his own rich and mannered verse, he has obtained the knowledge that poetry is a wide gate, and that it is more suitable for a critic to hold it open and count the flock than to try to jam it shut. But Smithyman comes too late. For criticism we have had to depend in the main on sporadic reviews, articles in literary periodicals – such as I.A. Gordon’s New Zealand New Writing, Arena, Landfall, Hilltop, Numbers, Mate, Image – most of which ran only for a few issues – and notably on the comments of Charles Brasch as editor of Landfall and Louis Johnson as editor of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. Many critical problems that should have been settled remain unsettled. At the present time the main divergence seems to lie between the university critics who favour an impersonal and academic mode and the various poets who progress to an anti-Romantic Romanticism. This last situation may be illustrated by the example of Alistair Campbell, whose early verse was lush and evocative, but who, under the influence of American models, and after an uncreative period, has learnt an infusion of irony and a strict verse control; as in this poem, ‘The Climber’:
Sometimes the weather clears, and far below
I see the pains – what brought us to this height?
The bones of fallen climbers shine like snow,
And I secure each foothold as I go.
In my exhaustion it has sometimes seemed
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That we were climbing up the face of God,
And that the water falling on us streamed
From His eyes – but I woke and knew I dreamed
And wept bitterly, though I hid my tears,
Pretending to be gay when I despaired . . .
My children climb the mountain unawares,
As eagerly as up a flight of stairs . . .
The tone is contemporary, a balance of strong feeling and rational scepticism; one finds something similar in the poetry of Dom Moraes, and Campbell’s later verse will easily bear the comparison. But the methods of our post-transitional poets are so various that one cannot readily set down the changes they have brought about. I suggest the following developments; but with no sense of final knowledge.
| 1. |
A change from a prophetic to a therapeutic view of art. The post-transitional poets have had no group mystique corresponding to the Marxian hope of the Thirties; and they have tended to reject explicitly the New Zealandism propounded implicitly by Curnow. The notion of therapy implies a social emphasis: the wish to make an uncreative society more creative. Something of the new tone has been defined by Kendrick Smithyman, writing about Johnson’s verse: ‘Johnson has had his own dark angel, fluent, expressive, persistent, persuasive, but generally minded towards the times, their occasions and their right diction . . .’. One has felt that those critics who confessed an inability to grasp Johnson’s methods were often baffled by a new mode of thought, feeling and language – one could almost say, a new dimension of reality approached and recognised. After the mainly vertical dimension that the transitional poets had explored (Curnow writes somewhere about Glover: ‘You were the pine in the park, / The toughest, that we admired . . .’) some kind of horizontal corrective was needed, an exploration of man’s nature in a world of flux. One finds this horizontal dimension clearly indicated in a late poem of Johnson’s, ‘Age of Discovery’:
How our conceptions crack; constructions fall.
Suddenly all is broader; there’s more light.
What he will make of this will profit death
But look! There’s gold: strange fruits and dreams:
Progress leaves prints across the beaten world.
This is Johnson’s mature language, cool, controlled, urbane, resembling with its end-stopped lines the powerful mannered drive of a Roman legion on the march. One may fairly contrast the poem with Curnow’s well-known ‘Discovery’: ‘How shall I compare the discovery of islands?’ – in which Curnow spoke as a conscious New Zealander, considering the processes of tribal inheritance, looking towards origin, indicating implicitly the theological doctrine of the Fall of Man. Johnson, equally suspicious of the ultimate value of technological progress, speaks a much more cosmopolitan language, influenced (I think) by Baudelaire in translation, and is concerned with the dilemma of the modern Faust, whose magical discoveries presuppose a new pact with the power of death. His argument is Promethean rather than Judaic. |
| 2. |
A closer examination of structure and technique. This development has involved more than an advance in verbal method; it implies also a view of the poem as object, a shift away from the warm matrix of inspirational feeling. Fleur Adcock’s comment in an Introduction to the selection from her verse contained in Doyle’s anthology – Doyle had with a modesty rare among editors requested such an Introduction from each contributor, and gained some valuable results – Adcock’s comment exemplifies both a new sense of form and a sense of the tyranny of form:
This admirable analysis of the problems of form could hardly have been set down by a transitional poet. Adcock sees herself simply as craftsman; does not plead colonial poverty; and makes only a brief, succinct reference to her situation as a woman writer in what might appear at times a man-dominated literary milieu: ‘It occurs to me . . . that a certain submissiveness in my approach to writing might be attributed to the fact that I am a woman; I don’t really see this as a valid explanation, but to answer it here would open up too large a discussion . . .’. Her comment, however, leads me to consider a third point of development. |
| 3. |
A deepening and enlargement of the themes used by women poets. Some of the factors that have made this development possible may be social – as, for example, the number of women now permanently employed outside their homes. I think also that women writers are naturally conservative and suspicious of change, but will, after a time-lag, follow what are evidently better models. To look back a few years: 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 –
Swift speeds the time; but lithe and young as rain,
The theme is a narcissist one. The willow reflected in the stream is perhaps the poet’s persona, her image of herself, and the wind a ghostly lover who may have the power to deliver from narcissism. But the language of the poem is so clogged with a lush growth of metaphor, so dependent also on the poet’s wish page 343 to have a formal rhyme structure at any cost, that the poem is a kind of mask hiding the true theme, which only emerges 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, I do not speak without sympathy. The literary milieu to which Robin Hyde first belonged (and there was no other group readily accessible) encouraged the use of this mandarin language. The view of a poem as a mask is particularly tempting to women – by the use of cosmetics, in ordinary life, a woman can create an apparent second self, a work of art that walks and talks, and so the notion of a purely instrumental personality can easily be carried over unconsciously to literature – but poems of this kind are false poems, they dodge the issue of knowledge of self and the world. In her later work Robin Hyde frees herself all but completely from the mandarin style:
She was a red-haired woman, two little lines
Here the feminine narcissist element, of young girls being dressed for the dance of the world, is perfectly stated with a domestic and realist focus, while Hyde threads out the bond and ambivalence between daughter and mother. Such writing is an early type of post-transitional method: near to its occasion, anecdotal and exact. It is possible that the creative rhythms of women artists are different from those of men. I remember Adcock mentioning once that she could only write very slowly and with difficulty, like a sculptor working in some hard material, and that her true themes came to her comparatively rarely. And there may be several negative factors, in New Zealand, which influence the creative situation – to begin with, the heavy conditioning of young women within page 344 a predominantly matriarchal society – the woman has an expected 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 laboursaving devices. In fact I doubt if women have much less leisure than man, now that families are small and men quite commonly give help in the household; at any rate, single women can theoretically use their time as they like. It is rather a matter of the psychological role for which they are conditioned. Women frequently do have real difficulty in getting their work published, though this situation has improved a great deal in the past ten or fifteen years – in particular, through Johnson’s intelligent editorship of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. Nevertheless, the work of women poets has usually to meet the scrutiny of male editors, who may fail to grasp a different use of symbolism, or may have an unconscious negative bias against a feminine tone. The most radical division is probably in the use of symbols. Thus, if a man writes of 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
Thus Marlowe, signifying the sexual conquest of Hero by Leander. A woman, on the other hand, will very likely see a garden as a symbolic extension of her own soul and body; as perhaps in the poem ‘Householder’ by Mary Stanley:
And yet I liked this house under the pines.
No manual can coax this stubborn earth
Remembering the Spaniard, Manuel Labor, one may be forgiven for detecting an unconscious Freudian pun in Stanley’s use of the word – ‘Manual’ – manual, belonging to the hands; and manual, the gardening book belonging to the codifying masculine world. I have wished to indicate, with sympathy, certain nuances and tensions; to suggest that some timidity, uneasiness, even paranoid symptoms, are understandable in our women writers, given their uncertainty of status; and to welcome a greater sureness – in the later work of Rawlinson, in Stanley’s verse, Adcock’s, Henderson’s and Dallas’s – with a sense of the untying of strait-jackets. page 345 |
| 4. |
A shift from a regional to a social emphasis. The term ‘regional’ can be used in various ways; but I suggest that for New Zealanders the most cogent would not refer to New Zealand as a whole (this would be to equate regional with colonial) but to an area, such as Auckland, Wellington, the Otago coast or the Canterbury foothills; and equally that our poems have been most regional when the poets have drawn their images from the natural scene. Thus Curnow, in ‘House and Land’, writes Canterbury regional verse with a negatively colonial emphasis; in ‘Spectacular Blossom’, Auckland regional verse; in ‘To Forget Self and All’, verse that is metaphysical and in no way specifically regional. Wherever the emphasis shifts from a specific landscape or seascape to forms of human knowledge and behaviour, or reflection on these forms, diction tends to become more general, and the verse cannot be readily identified in terms of region. A dimension is certainly lost whenever region is abolished; yet one can do without it, if the resultant more general writing has a sharp social emphasis. Thus, Bland and Johnson have both written poems with regional reference to the Hutt Valley area; yet the bulk of their work is not regional. Nor can it properly be tagged as urban or universal. Behind their verse one has the sense of a society or self, or self conjoined to or at odds with a society, without the special pieties of regionalism, but still identifiable and particular. The poets deal thus with the New Zealand situation as a variant of the condition of Western man. Though most of the post-transitional poets have evident regional roots, they tend to lay far less stress on regional pieties than their predecessors did. Thus, in Peter Bland’s ‘Lines on Leaving the Last Reservation’ –
I’m barely sane . . .
I’d like to think we’re getting out
The spirit here has learnt a shrewd
Thank God we’re off!
Bland’s melancholy and paranoid householder could even have been an American. The small man of the Computer Age, one would not expect to find him in the verse of the transitional poets. Bland has been able to learn from American models without losing his own distinctive idiom. The key to his poetry, however, lies in its aggression. An immigrant from modern England, Bland is never much haunted by pieties of land and habitation. He is able to see New Zealand society much as it is: an uninspiring offshoot from the tree of Western civilisation, in which the sap has never been very green. His tone of satire is rarely shrill. He is helped by a native sense of humour and a touch of the positive resignation of the underdog traditional in English folk comedy. Much anti-Puritan writing betrays the ambivalence of the man tormented by an unconscious Puritan heritage. But Bland’s anti-Puritanism is no more and no less than it claims to be – as when he observes in imagination the big-bellied settlers’ wives coming ashore from the boats at the time of European settlement, more like characters from a Greek satyr play than monuments of ancestral gravity. Their fertility fascinates him. Since he too is an immigrant, they are his spiritual sisters and cousins, not his great-grand-mothers. One could mention many other examples of a new social emphasis among the post-transitional poets. I will content myself with a quotation from Doyle’s poem, ‘To George Wilder’:
However long you were marooned
not crimes, merely annoyances
Already in the beginning of the poem Doyle has given us a series of social minutiae which subtly indicate that Wilder is not free simply by being out of jail, and that whatever imprisonment Wilder may suffer is ours also, since we share the same all but absolute social boredom and solitude. An exact portrait of a typical Kiwi rises to the surface of the poem; no larger than life, and all the more terrifying for that. The controlled speech rhythms of the poem move very quietly. The tone is deceptively casual. One has the sense of some grey abrasive reality of inward destitution. Doyle is on the New Zealand wave length without having to emphasise it by regional images. |
| 5. |
Various extensions of the literary erotic mode. This can be seen as a new psychological emphasis, though it includes much more than that. As illustration I will quote first from Johnson’s ‘Fable of a Forgotten Woman’:
She has returned from Paris, I am told,
Here, in addition to the mode of social documentary, Johnson explores one of the common denominators of erotic folk myth, the transformation of goddess to hag. Thus the tone is both compassionate and satirical. Though poems like this one have daunted the university critics, Johnson’s erotic verse is never merely sensational. There is flamboyance in it certainly; but this is balanced by a sense of human experience as an abyss. Johnson shattered the New Zealand habit of regarding poetry as simply a marshalling of ideal projections. It is again her use of the negative aspects of the erotic that makes Adcock’s sonnet ‘Before Sleep’ so electrifying:
Lying close to your heart-beat, my lips
The emphasis moves in a perfect balance between passion and irony; the poem in a sense is about the vulnerability of human beings. The success of the poem depends, though, on a fresh conquest of the Puritan dilemma. The problem was that our Puritans could not envisage a creative use of the sexual imagination. They chose to forget or ignore what primitive communities have always known – that the erotic mode is a hinge of the imagination; that Eros, or even Priapus, are gods of dreams and doorways. Until the dictum was reversed our poets could not become themselves, let alone produce witty and balanced fictions. One detects a use of the erotic mode as dramatic wit in Rawlinson’s complaint of a young girl to the goddess Venus:
Under the rosepink paper bell
‘Where is your birdwheel? Where is your loveherb?
Rawlinson did not entirely put overboard, any more than Robin Hyde, the neo-Georgian decorative quality: in her later verse it reappears as an element of fantasy or verbal wit enlivening an immediate dramatic theme. But the breakthrough was not merely on a technical level, though Rawlinson herself may have seen it in those terms; it involved a hard-won battle on the human level to move from solipsism to a new and difficult existential freedom, towards which in particular our women writers have had to move, for freedom in the use of their own kind of symbolism, for the right to speak from a private centre not necessarily marked on any of the literary maps. page 349One finds the dimension of the social erotic stated very plainly in Sinclair’s ‘Notes from the Welfare State’:
In a government basement priest-physicians have thrown
There have been many extensions also of the love poem simple; and I will quote in its entirety Smithyman’s poem, ‘Could You Once Regain’, which remains erotic within the ideal mode:
Girl, could you once regain
If you held that purity
A poem like this makes me wonder what our exponents of colonial inferiority are talking about. It also makes me speculate in what degree Smithyman’s later departures into the academic mode are not secret variants of, or hidden counterpoises against a Romantic and inspirational energy comparable to that of Fairburn as love poet. One notices, however, that Smithyman’s poem is not idealist in the manner of Fairburn. The mode is partly domestic; the protagonists ‘companionably yawn’; the light and the vision belong to Eros illuminated by Agape. The household gods are also watching from the shadows, aware that their reign has been only interrupted, not terminated, as Troy goes up in flames and Helen comes down from the battlements to walk the dirty street. It would be an error to regard Smithyman chiefly as an Auckland regional poet; his strength and subtlety belong quite as much to a dramatising of the social and domestic as do the regionally different talents of Johnson and Bland. For a final example of the range and variety of the erotic among post-transitional poets, I will quote from a recent poem by Richard Packer, ‘The Brandy Shortage’:
Tonight I am ferrying the straits
from one nagging germ of love to
suffered in some technicoloured pavilion,
Packer identifies himself as a neo-Catharist suffering the pains of a troubadour’s devotion; and wisely he balances his statement at the end with page 351 a realist vulgarity:
I’ve no guts for whisky, so hoping
perhaps now rinsing your divine panties,
The hard electric idiom of this poem is Packer’s own; but it belongs in some degree also to the latest generation of post-transitional poets, who have the sense of nuclear groups forming among the young. It would not be safe either to dismiss Packer’s claim to Catharism as a mere thumbing of the nose at the orthodox. ‘The Brandy Shortage’ is a rich poem with many levels of significance. I will mention two of them – that this Tristan meditates on his Isolde in a recognisable here and now, the bar of a Cook Strait ferry; and that Packer clearly signifies by the fiction of the poem his experience of the anima, the omnipresent female Other, as a God-symbol, an identification hardly possible within the orthodox Christian-Judaic tradition. The erotic theme has here actually become religious without losing its contemporaneity. |
| 6. |
A new awareness and use of Maori material. Partly through anthropology, partly through an increased social contact between the two races and cultures, pakeha poets have been more able in the post-transitional period to use Maori themes. I think of Mitcalfe’s lively translations from the Maori, and their effect on his own poems; or of Campbell’s Sanctuary of Spirits, in which he uses a loose verse structure that allows nuances of Maori idiom:
No use. No use at all.
Here the use of direct natural similes accords with the manner of Maori oratory. Campbell’s sequence was originally written for radio. In that medium page 352 one thinks also of Adele Schafer’s The Spiral Tattoo, a verse play constructed around the rites of initiation; and Dora Somerville’s Maui’s Farewell, a verse monologue put into the mouth of that Maori demigod. The treatment of Maori themes by both Schafer and Somerville goes far outside the whimsy and awkwardness so marked whenever earlier New Zealand writers tried their hand at it. Here the advance is partly technical; but it includes also an imaginative interpretation of anthropological material. Some poets of Maori extraction are now writing in English. Erik Schwimmer’s creative editorship of Te Ao Hou, a Maori Affairs periodical, helped a number of Maori writers to find their feet. I think in particular of Rowley Habib and Hone Tuwhare; though Tuwhare gained much of his intellectual training within a modern Marxian tradition. Tuwhare’s verse is uneven, but exceptionally vigorous. With access to Maori cultural norms he is able from the start to avoid the Puritan dilemma. Thus, in one fine poem called ‘Moon Daughter’, he considers with total sympathy and balance the situation of a girl just entering puberty, her growing life and the dangers that lie about her. And Habib has a poem in which he eats a fish and experiences in imagination the ancestral voyage from Hawaiki, since through him his ancestors participate in the feast. He inclines to a long dithyrambic structure which may have parallels with Maori chant. |
| 7. |
A new metaphysical and pastoral idiom. This is an area where the boundaries can hardly be drawn exactly. One could evoke the spirit of Wordsworth, as Smithyman has done, and W.H. Oliver also in a well-made booklet written for the secondary-schools, supposing an opposition of urban and country writing; or consider how far Glover’s Arawata Bill may be a figure of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, for whom the entire bureaucratic and technological culture stands as the City of Destruction. But the emphasis would still be too exact. It may be enough to say that pastoral writing, as distinct from regional, implies a generality that requires metaphysical intuitions to give it shape; that New Zealanders are by habit a rural nation; that for the townsman the country suggests often innocence and the discarded energies of childhood. A new amalgam can be detected in Kevin Ireland’s old men rolling their cigarettes by the wharves, with the smell of tobacco and seaweed in their nostrils; in C.K. Stead’s ‘Night Watch in the Tararuas’; in the recently published work of O’Sullivan and Raymond Ward; in the later lyrics of Victor O’Leary, who has been a persistent and effective Romantic; in the metaphysical vernacular of Hilaire Kirkland; and in the personal idioms of John Weir and F.M. McKay, as in McKay’s poem, ‘Island Bay’:
We are not constant as the sun
In McKay’s unostentatious rhetoric one is aware of a permanent substratum of our local experience: the sense that home is never entirely home, that man is an exile from himself. And I think the intuition is sharpened by the intense inner solitude of the urban New Zealander, mocked by material comfort in a community where most spiritual roads turn out to be blind alleys – and less consoled by domestic pieties, more tormented by foreknowledge of the grave, than one might imagine. |
Much more could be said; but I have already over-run my time and my thesis. Since my emphasis throughout this talk has been on the therapeutic value of art, I will close with a quotation from the cover of an album of songs by Bob Dylan:
I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to some day . . . . You see, in time, with those older singers, music was a tool – a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better some times, but at other times, it’s still hard to go to sleep at nights. . . .
One dare not prophesy; but I think it possible that poetry in this country, especially among those who have just begun to write, will tend to shift along the therapeutic road indicated by Dylan’s remarks, and so perhaps come nearer to the people. There are several writers – Karl Stead, John Weir, Ruth Dallas, Dave Holmes, for example – whom I now remember with regret that my choices in this talk have by limitation lain elsewhere. It should not matter greatly. In the long run critics are middlemen who follow after poetry as a dung-collecting householder may follow a horse with a spade. One cannot presume to imagine that, by criticism, one helps to create the works that one describes.
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