"My intention for this occasion is to consider one or two aspects of the writer's problem of how to discipline, or how to order the chaos of his experience, for the imaginative purposes of his prose." said Maurice Duggan, the Burns Fellow 1960, in his address. "Talking of Writing." to the Otago Literary Society recently.

"Two or three examples will suffice to represent experience, in the one case literary, or passing for that; and in the other, direct and nonliterary. The question will be, for me, to question this experience for my writing. They are moments, or memories, possessed of some vibration, for me. They are moments when one felt one's powers of perception to be full.

(From an Extrav rehearsal.)

"Parse The Following"

"I can hear the voice quite clearly now: 'Parse the following —scan the following. Give example boy, of metaphor simile alliteration, onamatapoeia. Copy this down, all of you: Poetry equals the best words in the best order. It is important that you should understand the difference between prose and poetry

"Our puzzlement, my puzzlement, was great. Surely the difference was plain? Surely it did not need the weight of this critical authority to explain the obvious. Poetry looked different, poetry sounded different … And I have some memory of it yet: Something about the while walls of Tunis: Something about a dying slave something about a square that broke, All committed, at one time to memory; all reguitated, in mindless rote, during the doodling dozing, buzzing hour of the English lesson…

Maurice Duggan holds the Burns Fellowship at Otago University for 1960, Aged 37, he is a first generation New Zealander. A collection of his short stories has appeared under the title "Immanuel's Departure: won the £50 Katherine Mansfield short story award last year.

"And the other? The unlettered breathless brawling thing we did not know experience at all but only as something, an element in which like a trash of leaves and twigs on a stream, we floated stranded, spun and drifted…

"In time I proved my education false; or so it seemed to me then. I did not know what might be done with the literary side of that education. It had no use; it was sealed off; it shed no light on my experience; it had no voice for me. Arithmetic, yes; that assisted me, directly, in the long exhausting 'fiddle' of a childhood and adolescence dominated by a parental resolve to teach me 'the value of money' by keeping me always short of it … These 'happiest days of my life', then—days marked by puzzlement and arbitrary poverty, by rage, boredom elation, distemper, corporal punishment (lots of that), moods of fervent depression, scorn, obscenity, football, swimming, the mowing of lawns and the memorising of The Slave's Dream and The Walls of Tunis and The Torch of Life— these days ended at last.

"Perfectly unequipped, I was thrust out into Life's Great Adventure. into the cruel World; into the Ratrace; into the World of Adult Values; into Opportunity with a knocking heart. And I found myself very much at home in it, Its values were not , after all, so different from the values of Form 3C and Form 4D. I was put to no trade and pushed into no profession. I was strong: I could sell the strength of that arm. My dim knowledge of a dim arithmetic might fetch a shilling; my recita lion of The Slave Dream was not a marketable thing.

"I Joined A Union"

I joined a union, many union before I was done (and I'm not done yet), and more or less happy at last, in a miserable sort of way, I batted about in dangerous cars drunk on rum-flavoured milk-shakes and round-wine biscuits. I batted about with the boys—and with the girls. Oh, the girls— before whom all the values of money and a purely vestigial morality, came so soon to grief. I did not so much drift from job to job as rush in a fever of excitement, a fever of hope, from one unskilled and unending chore to the next.

"I have collected officers' dirty dhobi from a thousand quayed-up ships: I have trafficked in suburbia's dirty linen. I have roasted coffee and gutted fish and mixed mountains of curry powder on a concrete floor with a square mouthed shovel. I have packaged sweet smelling herbs. I have can ned pork and beans, sitting before a primitive machine, in a spray of tomato pulp. I have dug, delved, clipped and pruned: I have driven buses, taxis, trucks; and in a dark, peaked cap played chauffeur to someone's pomp and wealthy circumstance. I have stood at the tradesman's entrance of a thousand stately homes. Insecurely horsed, I have driven cattle to slaughter. I have greased cars and painted houses, punched hole in metal sheets, and filled in holes punched in metal sheets; sheeted up merry-go-round horses at the closing of the fair

"To what purpose? It is called experience; it is common to all, it is earning one's keep …

"Somewhere at this point, and under an impulsion not part of the subject here, I sat down at a kitchen table in a boarding house room to write a short story, A hard-fingered larrikin, a wide boy in leather jacket and trousers with 24-inch bottoms, and even, for all I can remember, in black shirt and white tie, with hands the colour of coffee. I sharpened a pencil, opened an old school pad and began— on the downward path. And just at this point the dying slave, the white walls of Tunis, the breaking square, came into their own

"The problem, or so I see it now, was a problem of relation; of establishing that connection. Of establishing a connection between that eternally moribund slave [and the wild ferry-rides of His youth]; between the white walls of Tunis [and the blazing bonfires that so impressed him in youth]; between the factories, the girls, the laundry, life and art

"Smoke"

"The story was called Smoke. I remember burning it, furtively yet with great relief, some years later. I cannot remember in any detail what it was about: I doubt that it was about anything at all. I have a very clear and very humbling remembrance of the quite incredible badness of the thing—the quite alarming ineptitude. I re member also that it was written at one sitting, from start to finish, and that it was without erasure or deletion of any kind…

"I had behind me, so to speak, an education of a sort … I had behind me the experience of a great many jobs. And I chose to write about Smoke—An abstract consideration of man's destiny—no less. In a manner unsuspected that royal slave was being celebrated again; those Tunisian walls glared White; the square was breaking and the light was blinding. I wrote, that is to say, in reaction to literature—and not to life. I could not connect. Not knowing what was involved in the sort of expression I was attempting; quite unequipped to attempt it; and knowing nothing of the purpose— knowing nothing and having no thought of representing life—I simply turned my back upon the problem and wrote about Smoke …

"With Myself"

"I began where, I imagine, so many writers begin—with myself. I was possessed of all the wonder ful freedom of a complete ignorance; excited by possibility so vast that, ludicrous and untutored though I know the view to have been, I can yet sigh for the faith of it, the strength of it. I can hear still the crazy voice of com plete confidence, and as though it were a figure beyond me, I would avert for it. if 1 could, that harshness of discovering how crazy will be the failure

"The autobiographical form is a common one for beginners. It is a natural starting-point. Even some years later than this, I still stood plumb.-centre in my disordered and motiveless world, and endeavoured to deal with that chaos by reaching out and grasping haphazard pieces. But now, though the ex pression was graceless … I was looking out, whereas before it had all been a matter of looking in, of trying to give expression to my own ferment…

"What was it, then that that jacketed boy had to learn? No less than everything … What he was endeavouring to do, crudely, was to organise his experience into some pattern.

"I see him waist deep, then in the flood; in a landscape where was no sign of dying slave or breaking square; where the deseriptions he had been given, the map he had been taught to read, made no reference to these high bluffs and broken boulders, these peaks of snow and plains of tussock. What he had to do was to unpick the reach-me-down cloak of his education. Trained to think, for example, of beauty as residing in the object he had to learn that it true character lay in the strength of the imaginative response. His problem is mine."

In conclusion, Mr Duggan pointed out that the "leather-jacketed youth" was meant to be "something of a tease," drawn from selected facts and filled out by invention.

"Critic."