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Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays
IX
IX
Of course this is to concentrate on the worst and forget the virtues. These intellectuals and writers have in the last twenty-five years created something that wasn't there before, the beginnings of an articulate national culture. I am not blind to the achievement. What I want to say is that if we continue to alienate ourselves from the people we live amongst we will etiolate our art. It is a matter of balance, and no one can lay down a programme. If we capitulate too easily to the narrowness and the puritanism we can't write honestly. If we flatter ourselves we are above it, we may be just as dishonest. If we do nothing but:fight it, we put ourselves in a position just as narrow as that of our opponents.
The intellectual usually assumes that the worst enemy is puritanism: disinfect the snuffy tin-roof-chapel conscience, he says, and our way of life will flower. But this is questionable. The puritanism of Littledene is not all debit. With the concern for our neighbours' morals goes a concern for their welfare. The gossips are at least interested in other people, they help them in sickness, help with one another's ploughing and shearing and harvesting. But when the puritan shell is cast there is nothing to replace it except perhaps a dimly expectant hedonism inspired by radio-serials and films. And the intellectual has nothing to offer either except a tepid and equally prim hedonism which he calls 'the good life'— conscientious and enlightened self-indulgence. When puritanism goes the New Zealander is left with that ugly 'reality': he begins to look after number one and connives at his neighbour's devotion each to his own pleasure and security. Already in the North Island there are attitudes emerging which haven't yet shown in Littledene—shallow and sneering hedonism, the disavowal of responsibility to and for one's neighbour, less restraint in antipathies to minorities like Maoris, Catholics and especially Jews, priority given to the pursuit of money and pleasure— generally a slicker and more hard-boiled attitude. It is possible for a South Islander in Auckland to feel uprooted in the indifference and hostility of the people.
Puritanism runs in a spiral: first its religious context is lost and with it the justification of the restrictions on enjoyment of the senses, it hardens into habit: second, a younger generation rebels and seeks what was forbidden, the thrill of the chase is spiked with a sense of guilt. What they hunt is symbolized in the sex act: but since the pleasure, if isolated, is momentary and the more it's sought the less it can be found, they are tracking down a mirage, and they end in and out of the lupins with this girl and the next one, and have to remind themselves that they did get what they were looking for. When they marry, the men and women of this generation transmit their dissatisfaction to their children, or the children sense it and grow up with a cynical, street-corner dog-like attitude to sex: everyone is after it but there's nothing in it. A new page 27 austere puritanism grows which is a contempt for love, a sour spit, a denial of life itself: the puritanism of Graham Greene and George Orwell (e.g. Pinkie in Brighton Rock, Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, and the official attitude to love in 1984). We in New Zealand are somewhere early in the second stage. Intellectuals who talk of getting rid of the nonconformist conscience should take care that they are not allying themselves with Hollywood, the ZB stations, the gutter press and the American-style comics that our children and jockeys read, in ushering in a period of decadence. The breakdown of puritanism is the dissolution of one of the cementing elements of our society: when every man cooperates only so far as he has to earn money and in his leisure pursues his sensual pleasure, society is due to break down. Because we are then, in working hours, a community of convenience; in leisure we are, in Coventry Patmore's image, like the sheep's carcass that looked alive from a distance but only because it was a mass of maggots busy battening on the corpse. The process would probably have to take its course if it were to be left to itself. But it is likely to be interrupted by the political upheavals occurring all over the world. If, for example, the American generals and financiers succeed in their plans for a third war New Zealand is due to suffer as it has never before suffered, and out of that bitter experience will come the themes of later poets. By then, puritanism as we know it will be a thing of history and all I have said about the New Zealand character will no longer be true.