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The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965
I Saw ..
I Saw ... I Saw in my Dream, falls into two parts. In the first, Henry, son of middle-class, church-going parents, and too much loved by his mother, is shown setting off on his pilgrim's road through life, with assorted giants to bar the way, obsess, and terrify. This is in a small town somewhere in the North Island. In the second part Henry, now become a new personality so different that he is called Dave, works on a sheep farm of marginal efficiency. The first part is the short novel, When the Wind Blows, published in 1945.
Henry-Dave is nebulous as a character, a mere receiver of sensations. The value of the book is perhaps in the picture of New Zealand suburbia, and in the attack on puritanism, sentimentality, mediocrity, fear of ideas, fear of commitment. Jane Mander, you remember, noted our puritanism in The Story of a New Zealand River, saying "Puritanism is an awful disease". Frank Sargeson also sees it as an eroding sickness, responsible for some of the failure among us to respond fully to the experience of living.
I Saw in my Dream is not a realistic novel. Sargeson's New Zealand is a world of shadows, in which the hero is struggling with the dream of the title. Where can a man escape to? "Ron said the escape idea would be all right if there was anywhere to escape to ... If there's page 72 a cave, Cedric's gone to live in it. Lots of people wish they could go away and live in caves." "That's where I've got to get, into that blue bush, and away beyond, away into the blue."
Dave sees in the end that it's not a question of place, "Because, look! A dream comes true . . . The happy land, where there is neither rain nor snow . . . I'm not Dave, not exactly . . . I'm what I was. Henry. But I'm also what I have become. Dave . . . The right place is the wrong place if you're the wrong me. And you have to BE the right me . . . No fretting for the moon. Accept."
The search which the novel prosecutes is for a real self. Sargeson makes more of this than merely the "growing-up" theme we have already met. In the process of knowing himself Henry-Dave comes to terms too with his country. It is a very New Zealand book. Sargeson commented, in 1947, "The writer should have the capacity to hear, see, feel, think, imagine, invent, and arrange; ... his capacity for using words should be such as to make the reader feel that he had received an important communication—one that would be, among many other things, both moving and entertaining, and one that would be truthful above all other things; . . . directly or indirectly, everything he wrote should reveal an attitude." It is in this sense of communicating an attitude that this novel is so remarkable. But it is not a unified whole.