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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 23. 21st September 1972

Love the Sole Vocation

Love the Sole Vocation

Have we a Synge? I suppose Sargeson comes nearest, especially in such a story as An International Occasion, which appeared in Landfall last year. This is a brilliant little portrait of our fragmented social condition, in which the mixed, isolated lodgers in a decayed boardinghouse are brought together through the missionary zeal of a Swedish sea-cook, share an uncomfortable Sunday communal meal, and retire, variously affronted, to their private occasions until flushed out, or trapped and burnt in their rooms, a fire started by the shadowboxing Chris. Chris is the unassimilable element—a simple Kiwi workingman who is paying off old scores for what the welfare state has done to him. Duggan and Gee, too, in their best stories, have a hard cutting edge, a tough satirical twist, we stand badly in need of.

Well, there it is. Perhaps we have had better writers than we deserve, though, on the whole, our public attitude towards them has almost as unappreciative as the Irish attitude towards Synge and O'Casey, Joyce and Beckett. It's my own feeling, that they have to hit us quite a bit harder, before we really sit up and begin to notice them.

Twenty years ago, Denis Glover used his mouthpiece Harry to outline the poet's task:

Sing all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.

How often since then the lines have been quoted as merely lyrical and picturesque, in the manner of paintings in a Kelliher Art Competition! But these mountains that beckon can kill; these waves that enchant can drown, suddenly and savagely. Over the years since Glover announced his "Themes", it is the harshness rather than the sweetness in our way of life that has nourished our art, and prompted its most searching insights.

Today the art that begins in joy is rare indeed. As for the "Cry against corruption" "the air is full of our cries".

I end with some lines from Charles Brasch's Not Far Off. which seem to me to catch the tone of these last years better than most:

To see your neighbour as yourself
His heart stripped self-naked
Is to confess in every heart
The hateful and the crooked
Beneath its lies and boasting.
And at the roots of hate
The trivial and vapid

To shun your neighbour as yourself
Maddened with self-knowledge.
The vapid and the trivial
That bear no human message —
Destructiveness, forgiveness
Work to the one issue :
Let hatred wreak its outrage.

That comes from Chantecler, the mask of the foiled, frustrated human lover, who cries again:

Where I love I hate
And cannot Love where I hate
But, blind in the net
Turn and burn and
Curse the foiled heart.

Whether indeed we live now in a cold ante-purgatory, or in some kind of refining fire, the strain on the creative Imagination is all too clear. Again, perhaps Brasch has found the best words for it:

Loving your fellow men
Never ask to be loved.
Loving your given and chosen land
Do not look for its love in return.

..............

Love is first and last confession
And sole vocation,
Love that gives itself
Into men's unjust hands
Love that will not be healed
Love is an open wound.

Maurice Gee

Maurice Gee

Guthrie Wilson

Guthrie Wilson