LITERATURE – FICTION

The first writings provoked by European contact with New Zealand are concerned not with fiction but with facts. Cook, Marsden, Wakefield, and their successors published on their return to civilisation the many Voyages, Narratives, Journals, Letters, and Travels which gave the Old World its picture of the New. Doubtless imagination touched up these accounts, but there is nothing that can be called fiction until exploration had given way to settlement. It was not until 20 years after the Treaty of Waitangi that the first novel appeared in 1861.

From 1861 to 1920 New Zealand fiction falls into four main groups. Most writers were either recording pioneer experiences, or exploiting the possibilities of an exotic setting. In the years 1890–1910 a number busied themselves with preaching for various good causes; some few, from 1890 onwards, attempted to interpret New Zealand life. After 1920 the recording novel died out, while the preaching novel withered, except for an occasional item. The exploiting novel continued to flourish, offering popular entertainment in feminine romances or masculine action yarns. In the period 1930–60 more writers attempted to realise New Zealand experience truthfully and to interpret it. Nineteenth century fiction is of historical interest only; it is included, however, along with minor work in the present century, so that this survey may be reasonably complete.

The survey is limited to works which have some relevance to the New Zealand land or people. Expatriate New Zealanders who have made reputations overseas with work not so relevant are disregarded, as is the non-New Zealand work of local authors.

Early Fiction

Recording and Exploiting

The first New Zealand novel is Major B. Stoney's Taranaki: A Tale of the War, 1861. The second is Mrs J. E. Aylmer's Distant Homes, or The Graham Family in New Zealand, 1862. The first exploits, the second records, the scene; between them they set the pattern of the next 30 years.

The Settler-family Type

The recording novel is very close both in construction and in content to the pioneer narratives and journals. Its basis is some settler's experiences, presented as the plot-threaded adventures of somebody else. Isabella Aylmer, who was never in the country at all, compiled her “novel” from the letters of kinsfolk, filled out with information from the handbooks of the time. Distant Homes is, as the word “distant” indicates, intended for English readers; its material is presented in artless chronological order, beginning with The Voyage Out. Typical chapters in these recording novels might be labelled, Leaving the Old Home, Shipboard Life, First Sight of Maoriland. At this point the authors usually pause to give us the history, geography, flora, fauna, Maori customs, and so on of “the land we are going to”. There follow: Our First Home, Christmas at the Antipodes, The Bellbirds' Morning Hymn, The New Church, A Maori Scare. The usual ending might be entitled Success at Last, and would show a group of decently clothed natives, suitably subservient and pious, celebrating with the family their happy establishment in a smiling, tamed countryside. The whole is liberally spiced with the strange new vocabulary: “cowrie” (kauri), “billy”, “tussac”, “swag”, “Pakeha”, and with patches of purple prose inspired by birds, dawns, alps, and bush.

Other novels in this settler-family class are W. H. G. Kingston's Waihoura, 1872, which brings a grateful Maori princess to the aid of a North Island emigrant family, and John Bell's In the Shadow of the Bush, 1899, which deals with the later pioneering of the Scandinavians in Wellington Province.

Picaresque

Another type of recording novel is that where the material is the travels of a footloose, casual adventurer (though Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone, 1886, is only an exploiting love story). H. W. Nesfield's A Chequered Career, 1881, and Thomas Cottle's Frank Melton's Luck, 1891, are examples. The most amusing of these picaresque yarns is W. M. B(aines)'s The Narrative of Edward Crewe, 1874, an account of the doings of the author-hero. Arriving in Auckland in 1850 “Crewe” plunges – after preliminary chapters on history from Hawaiki to Hobson – into every experience which the North Island can provide. He sets up a sawmill and store near Coromandel, describes the kauri industry, dams, trees, axes, and boatbuilding. He finds gold, works a mine, catches a sea serpent, and has adventures canoeing, hunting, fishing, and on the gumfields. Such tall tales were a colonial speciality, and Baines is the earliest New Zealand example.

South Islanders

The South Island varieties of recording novel sound a more moral note, taking usually the theme of New Chum Makes Good, with strong Presbyterian overtones. Alexander Bathgate in Waitaruna, 1881, hopes, in his preface, “that the simple story ends in removing, however slightly, the great ignorance which prevails among many of the people of Britain, regarding these fair Southern Islands….” Bathgate presents two New Chums. One abandons the stiffer morality of Home to become only too colonial, and sinks to landlording in a shanty pub, married to the barmaid. The other, a cadet of more incorruptible fibre, makes good on a Central Otago sheep station, and is rewarded by marriage with the owner's daughter, the quickest way of all to pioneer riches. Virtue is similarly rewarded in William Langton's Mark Anderson, A Tale of Station Life in New Zealand, 1889, after a plot which by an unusual twist shows the New Chum as no humble Homey, but an altogether superior product of the Manse. Dugald Ferguson offers the same autobiographical-pioneering stuff in Vicissitudes of Bush Life in Australia and New Zealand, 1893, and Mates, 1911.

Goldfields

The goldfields also provided material for fiction, and still do so. First to use the setting was Benjamin Farjeon, in Shadows on the Snow, 1865, but the best-known name is that of Vincent Pyke, an Australian miner who became secretary of the Otago Goldfields in 1862, and later a member of Parliament. Pyke contributed stories of the diggings to Chambers's Journal in the 1860s, and produced two novels, Wild Will Emderby, 1873, and a sequel, The Adventures of George Washington Pratt, 1874. These were, remarkably for the time, published in New Zealand; there was nothing of “those distant islands” in Pyke's attitude to this country. His novels are entertaining because of their exuberant life, in spite of crudities of plot and prose.

Maori Life

Lastly, there are the recorders of Maori ways. Most writers on Maori themes followed Major Stoney's lead in Taranaki, and set out to exploit the fictional possibilities of savages. Two novelists, however, offered serious studies. John White's Te Rou; or The Maori at Home, and G. H. Wilson's Ena, or The Ancient Maori, both appeared in 1874. G. H. Wilson's motive is, like Bathgate's, stated in his preface: “This not altogether fictitious story will be acceptable to many who desire to know something of those distant islanders”. Unlike Bathgate, however, Wilson retained the English point of view. John White, a notable Maori scholar, is equally highminded in his intentions. But neither writer was able to overcome the handicap imposed by the intractability of Maori material. Too much had to be explained; no literary conventions existed then – nor do they now – for rendering Maori speech; too little can be assumed about the psychology of the Maori protagonists, while tribal life, history, customs, and legends continually distract the authors from the business of the story. Later novelists have fared no better than Wilson and White; the problem of portraying the ancient Maori in fiction remains unsolved.

Matters are different for the unashamed exploiters. Most Maori novels in the nineteenth century follow Stoney's lead in the presentation of colourful events against a Maori backcloth. The genre still flourishes under the guise of popular historical fiction. The usual mixture served up to London publishers at the end of last century derives from Rider Haggard or Fenimore Cooper and includes a white hero, preferably of officer caste, a Maori princess or a settler's daughter, tribal jealousies, a tohunga or two, some musket and tomahawk skirmishes, and a few bloodcurdling yells. The novelist's Maori speaks a lingo compounded of Cockney, the Bible, Ossian, and Red Indian of the “Ugh Ugh” tradition. He is cast only as a provider of sensation or sentiment, in creaking Victorian plots. Achievement varies between Henty's dull accuracy in Maori and Settler, 1891, to the amusing impossibilities of Jules Verne in 1877. Some titles will indicate the range of this Maorified fiction. H. B. Marriott Watson, The Web of the Spider, 1891; R. P. Whitworth, Hine-Ra or The Maori Scout, 1887; H. Nisbet, The Rebel Chief, 1896; R. H. Scott, Ngamihi, or The Maori Chief's Daughter, 1895; Rolf Boldrewood, War to the Knife, 1898; and W. R. Hodder, The Daughter of the Dawn, 1903.

Exploiting Novels

The exploiters of the Maori are, in the nineteenth century, all men. Another major branch of the exploiting novel, however, is that by and for the women, which also begins early, with Lady Campbell's Martin Tobin, 1864, the third New Zealand novel to appear. This is a three-volume concoction for circulating library readers, with a romantic plot in a colonial setting where, so the authoress supposes, anything may happen. Mrs Charlotte Evans comes next, with two novels in 1874, both originating as magazine serials of the Family Herald type, A Strange Friendship and Over the Hills and Far Away. Forgeries, disguises, elopements, repentant deathbeds, and fortunate legacies make up the plots; only by courtesy of their settings are these New Zealand novels, though Mrs Evans had struggled on a Canterbury back-country station. Her characters remain nostalgically English and stubbornly cultivated. They take champagne and turkey for the simple bush picnic, and display on their drawing-room shelves, “Kingsley in blue, Macaulay in brown, Thackeray and Dickens in red, and a complete set of the Cornhill Magazine in handsome bindings”. The Canterbury scene and life are only incidental; there are some horses, dogs, sheep, paddocks, but the core of the book is sentimentalised personal relationships from the woman's viewpoint.

This type of light love story, like the Maorified adventure yarn, finds writers and readers still. Many New Zealand women have written fiction at this level. In the 1890s Louisa Baker (“Alien”) was popular, with earnest, feminist romances rich in piety, love, scenic beauties, and Wordsworthian musings emotionally described. Later and more sophisticated writers in the genre include Rosemary Rees, Nelle Scanlan, Mary Scott, Margaret Jeffrey, and Ruth Park. Many other names could be listed, for this is the most numerous class of New Zealand fiction.

The few short stories of the period to 1890 are also of greater historical than literary interest, except for the work of Lady Barker. Both in the sketches with an autobiographical base, Station Life in New Zealand, 1870, and Station Amusements in New Zealand, 1873, and in the stories in A Christmas Cake, 1871, and other volumes, Lady Barker records her life with spontaneous detailed clarity. Henry Lapham's We Four, 1880, offers colloquial salty yarns of gold-mining days in Otago and Westland.

After 1890: Preaching and Interpreting

After 1890 the picture changes. Pioneering is becoming settlement, town can be distinguished from back-blocks, native-born white New Zealanders of the first or even the second generation begin to predominate. Maori wars and gold rushes recede into the past.

This New Zealand is reflected in its fiction, which moves into preaching and interpretation. The earliest interpreting novel is George Chamier's Philosopher Dick, 1891, which brings to the standard South Island New Chum material a fresh critical perception. Chamier's hero not only lives the settler's life; he also stands aside and philosophically analyses its qualities, particularly its failure to exemplify the Utopian pilgrim dream. His novel relies on the fictional clichés of the age, with diaries, letters, inset tales and authorial intrusions. Chamier's protagonist is the stock emigrant-author-hero, whose revolt against the materialism of his station mates drives him to the lonely life of a boundary rider, where he can consider the universe in musings which recall Hardy's. The result is a muddled, intelligent, sardonically amusing book.

The women of the 1890s busied themselves with the good causes of religion, temperance, and feminism, and mirror the developing social tensions of town life. Anne Glenny Wilson's Two Summers, 1900, set in Auckland, notes the colonial's growing uncertainty about identity; was he an Englishman or a New Zealander? Jessie Weston's Ko Meri, 1890, which also reflects Auckland society, deals in particular with the social and religious education of the half-caste. The heroine, Mary, is shown as only superficially adapted to the white world. When her English fiancé is killed, she returns to the pa, saying, “The night that has fallen upon my race has fallen upon me, and it is well that I should share the darkness with my own people.”

The Maori Problem

The problem of the Maori's future occupied other writers at this time. A. A. Grace dealt with it in his novel Atareta, Belle of the Kainga, 1908, and in his stories, Maoriland Sketches, 1895, and Tales of a Dying Race, 1901; William Baucke was also concerned with it in Where the White Man Treads Across the Pathway of the Maori, 1905. Both these men, knowledgeable and without illusions about Maori ways, are driven by the Pakeha sense of guilt into the contradictory attitudes of sentiment and satire. For the problems of the mixed race, two solutions are offered, the one Jessie Weston's, that the half-caste cannot be naturalised in European society, and the other, A. H. Adams's, in Tussock Land, 1904, that further intermarriage will solve things in time. Adams's half-caste heroine is said to belong to “a newer people, a nation that has no past”, only the future; his white hero is weak, one of what Adams views as “the dying race”. Their marriage brings strength to the boy, security to the girl, so that the New Zealand future lies before their children. H. B. Vogel's A Maori Maid, 1898, also offers wedding bells as a solution, but explores the problems more fully. Katherine Mansfield was attracted by the topic, and planned a story Maata which was to have been “a psychological study”. An isolated return to the idea is F. E. Baume's Half-Caste, 1933. The half-caste girl remained a useful plot ingredient, but no honest attempt was made to embody the theme again until Noel Hilliard, in 1960, made a study in modern terms in Maori Girl. Hilliard's novel reflects today's attitudes, as Jessie Weston's does those of 1890; he sees the problem as not the racial mixture, but the social mixture, when the country-bred Maori has to move into city life without the moral support of the tribal community. Hilliard offers no solution at all, being content to stimulate thought and feeling about race relations.

Utopia and Feminism

Other social problems which occupied writers in the 1890s were those of economic and socialist reform, temperance, and the emancipation of women. Reform of various brands is advocated by sundry minor writers in Utopian fantasies, satire, and pamphlet novelettes; none has the bite of Samuel Butler'sErewhon, 1872, which is marginally a New Zealand novel, qualifying by reason of its brilliant opening chapters about the narrator's Canterbury journey. Feminism, often combined with prohibitionist propaganda, inspired a number of women, of whom Louisa Baker was the most popular, and Edith Searle Grossman the most ambitious. Independence, wrote Louisa Baker “is the great hunger of the common sisterhood”, a thesis which she illustrated in a series of harrowing love stories. Mrs Grossman began with several crusading novels, two set in Australia, attacking with rhetorical overemphasis the trio of atheism, alcoholism, and the subjection of women. Her last novel, The Heart of the Bush, 1910, is fully representative of its time both in its themes and in its technical deficiencies. Her heroine, returning to Canterbury from an expensive English education, faces a choice between two worlds, presented in the romantic terms of two suitors, the polished wealthy Englishman, and the bronzed uncouth colonial. Mrs Grossman's heroine chooses the New Zealand rough diamond. “How will it all turn out, … the marriage of the leisured and the labouring class, of art and nature, of civilisation and barbarism?” asks the author. The particular pressures upon colonial women are explored with considerable insight, “a struggle for years … a lonely life on this bush farm … work all the year round … wait till the children come!” In addition, Mrs Grossman probes again at Chamier's questions, the spiritual inadequacy of pioneer materialism, the sense of guilt suppressed in a society founded on the slaughter of animals, and the need for a way of life more balanced than that offered by backblocks “work all the year round”. The Heart of the Bush is not a good novel, but it remains an interesting one.

The temperance novels, almost all by women, handle similar matters, but reduce them to the simple issue of drunken husband and moral wife.

William Satchell

Only one novelist between 1860 and 1914, William Satchell, is still readable today for his own sake. Three of his novels are set in the kauri gumfields of North Auckland, and may be said to have created the lasting image of that life which marks him as our first regional novelist. In his best novel, The Land of the Lost, 1902, Satchell manages, in spite of a melodramatic Victorian plot, to bring to life both land and people in a manner reminiscent of Hardy. He is conscious of the littleness of human events in the context of space and of the earth's long history; the gumdiggers, searching for riches derived from age-old forests, and doomed to pass on before seeing the “apple orchards and vineyards of the future”, are not only well drawn in themselves, but intended as analogues of human fate. In The Toll of the Bush, 1905, Satchell comments as Hardy might have done: “The order of things is not changed in deference to human desire. In the end we have to make up our minds to the inevitable”. Satchell's most popular work has proved to be his last, The Greenstone Door, 1914, a historical novel of Maori and Pakeha between Waitangi and the Maori Wars. Though the characterisation has not the vigour which personal experience gives to The Land of the Lost, Satchell makes a good enough story out of simple material; the Maori people are sentimentally unreal, but much of the background is accurately portrayed.

Jane Mander

Last of the novelists of the 1900s is Jane Mander, whose first novel, which she kept and reconsidered for some 15 years, was not published until 1920. It springs clearly from the preoccupations of intelligent girls in the 1900s. More openly than her predecessors dared, Jane Mander deals with their themes: the lot of the cultured married woman in the backblocks, the religious, socialistic, and sexual explorations of the day, New Zealand's brand of pioneer puritanism, and the discrepancy between the aims of men and women in the working out of the colony's destiny. She brings in also the conflict of the generations, especially that relating to the new freedom of womenfolk. Like her other novels, The Story of a New Zealand River is set in the timber settlements of Northland, and has considerable background interest; local colour is often clumsily handled, but essentially Jane Mander is using the New Zealand scene with which she is familiar not as a tourist attraction of an exotic kind, but to present an interpretation of life. Later titles are The Passionate Puritan, 1922, set in a mill township; The Strange Attraction, 1923, dealing with country journalism; Allen Adair, 1925, a gumlands study of the tensions between “Home” and “home” which preoccupied the 1920s and 1930s. This split in colonial loyalties, already noted in Anne Glenny Wilson's novels, is marked in the next 20 years. Looking back on them in 1938, Robin Hyde noted that, while the first generation of New Zealand writers were Englishmen, “whole people”, the Mander-Satchell generation were “exiles or minds divided”; it was only in the third generation, her own, that the division was healed. “Remember us for this, if for nothing else: in our generation, and of our own initiative, we loved England still, but we ceased to be ‘forever England’. We became, for as long as we have a country, New Zealand.”

Conflict of Loyalties: Katherine Mansfield

The conflict of loyalties which made it so difficult for local writers to accept identification with these “distant islands” is seen at its most tragic in Katherine Mansfield. The finest creative writer New Zealand has yet produced, she worked solely in the field of the short story. She was born in Wellington in 1888 into the family of the minor colonial magnate, Sir Harold Beauchamp, and had her schooling both locally and in London. On her return, in 1906, she was in bitter rebellion against Wellington society's expectations for girls, and against what she called “Philistia itself”. In 1909 she left New Zealand for good, only to spend the rest of her brief life in Europe recreating imaginatively her New Zealand experience. Incomparably her best work is in the stories relating to her home and girlhood, whether they are openly located in New Zealand or thinly disguised with other names and settings. Sensitivity to home and sexual tensions, poetic evocation of mood and moment, sympathy with the young or the unprotected, and disciplined artistic integrity make her work remarkable in any context; but in the colonial context in which she grew up, it is more remarkable still. Only a few early stories have the crude realism or amateur technique usual at the time. The kind of thing she might have written, had not genius combined with exile given her wings, may be seen in the work of A. A. Grace and William Baucke, in G. B. Lancaster's Sons o'Men, 1904, or B. E. Baughan's Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, 1912. These stories feature the comic Maori caricature, and the Kiplingesque action hero, with exaggerated episodes and supposedly “colonial” dialect based on literary Cockney. Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, is, as the title shows, apologetic about itself. B. E. Baughan was aware of her inferior status, and of the problems which her generation faced in attempting artistic activity in a new community. “Art at all times,” she wrote, “appeals scantily to the backblocks … what have we … to exercise our higher faculties, and so give us, in addition to material existence, life?” Her sketches grow out of simple everyday material, especially in relation to those who had not become fully acclimatised, the English settler, the Maori ill at ease in the Pakeha world, or the homesick European immigrant. The distance between her stories and those of Katherine Mansfield is a measure not only of the authors' differing intrinsic gifts, but also of the clogging handicap which the colonial context imposed. This handicap may be seen also in the stories of Alice Webb, Miss Peter's Special, 1926, which describe small town life with a mildly salty pen, but little art.

Between the Wars

After the 1920s there was a mild spring tide in fiction. Only one novelist followed Jane Mander in attempting to speak openly on controversial themes, Jean Devanny, who combined a lurid feminism related more to the past with socialistic notions unacceptable to most New Zealand readers. Her first novel, The Butcher Shop, 1926, is violently sensational, but has moments of insight. C. R. Allen, a quieter writer, portrayed boyhood and young manhood in Dunedin in A Poor Scholar, 1936, and The Hedge Sparrow, 1937, opening up in this way a topic, the “portrait of the artist as a young man”, which has proved only too attractive to New Zealand novelists.

Fiction at this time still exhibited major technical inadequacies; a perusal of the novels of these two writers, as well as of those of Hector Bolitho, Pat Lawlor, M. Escott, Alan Mulgan, J. A. Lee, Nelle Scanlan, and John Guthrie suggests that New Zealand novelists, even with promising material, failed to be more than provincial because their literary models were so old fashioned. Few of the creative experiments in England or America seem in the 1920s to have crossed the Pacific. Nelle Scanlan is the most productive and lastingly popular of this group, but although in Pencarrow, 1932, she established the saga of pioneering as a topic, she handled it only at the level of light fiction, so that the conventions of romance prevent more than a superficial treatment; her best work is in her studies of women and girls. A writer of more originality is F. S. Anthony, a Taranaki ex-serviceman and journalist who died in 1925. A novel, Follow the Call, was published posthumously in 1936, followed by the sketches Me and Gus, 1938. These, somewhat mutilated, enjoyed a belated radio popularity in the 1950s. Anthony's books are notable for their broad humour, easy rendering of cow-cocky lingo, and dramatic evocation of a stylised Kiwi persona.

Another Taranaki writer who made New Zealanders laugh at themselves is John Guthrie, in The Little Country, 1935, a crackling little satirical piece. His So they Began, 1936, reflects the public interest in history which developed as the year of the National Centennial, 1940, approached. Few, however, who have attempted the historical novel in New Zealand do more than recapitulate the clichés of pioneer fiction, exploiting rather than interpreting their material; John Guthrie is no exception. Other historical novelists of this period are Beryl McCarthy, Joyce West, G. B. Lancaster, Frank Acheson, and Robin Hyde.

Frank Acheson returns to the Maori of early times; in Plume of the Arawas, 1930, a story set in pre-Pakeha days in the Taupo region, he almost overcomes the difficulties of the genre. While there is the usual guidebook clumsiness, Acheson's love of the people, intimate knowledge of the past, and poetic sensitivity to tradition give his novel some strength.

Depression, 1930–1940

All these writers, however, were avoiding the real troubles of the years 1930–39 in New Zealand. In the work of the four who did not do so, John A. Lee, Robin Hyde, John Mulgan, and Frank Sargeson, New Zealand fiction may at last be said to reach maturity.

Of these John A. Lee is artistically the least disciplined. In Children of the Poor, 1934, and its sequel, The Hunted, 1936, he draws on material from his own poverty-stricken and delinquent boyhood in the depression of the 1890s in order to stimulate the emotions of readers experiencing similar conditions in the 1930s. These novels are in the ninetyish preaching tradition, but with an added violence derived from the overseas literature of protest. “The gutter,” Lee proclaims, “is not of Paris, of London, of New York, alone. The social gutter is of every clime and race, of village as well as of town, of the New World as well as of the Old.” He was the first to explore the experience of the urban proletariat. Similarly, his Civilian into Soldier, 1937, though marred by crude emotionalism, ventures to discuss matters previously disregarded in New Zealand fiction.

Robin Hyde

Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson) continued this exploration of the underworld in her two “Starkie” novels, Passport to Hell, 1935, and Nor the Years Condemn, 1938, which recreate the life of Douglas Stark, “the Red Indian Savage”, delinquent, Borstal boy, war hero, and civilian misfit. Check to Your King, 1936, is an uneven historical novel about Charles de Thierry, an idealist adventurer of the 1830s. The Godwits Fly, 1938, is the most successful of her novels; it is a study of the growth, maturity, and disillusionment of a heroine in a Wellington suburban setting.

Robin Hyde's achievement is to have recognised that local colour was no longer enough for a writer in New Zealand. Exploitation of the exotic, by “sitting about singing to tuis and babbling to bellbirds for the term of your natural life”, was futile. “I hate these aggressively insular New Zealanders.” Writers must seek instead to deal with “something that might have occurred just anywhere in the world of man, woman and child”. In her short life Robin Hyde is important because she established local fiction as something of serious, adult content, no longer “forever England”, though the task of putting New Zealand on to paper was not easy. She was conscious of, and vocal about, her sense of mission. It was the writer's task, said Phoenix, a little magazine of the time, to find “the words that shall show us these islands and ourselves; that shall give us a home in thought”. The writer's emotional wavering between England and New Zealand is often referred to between 1900 and 1940. Katherine Mansfield, in a Wellington notebook of 1908, urges herself, “Go Anywhere. Don't stay here”. John Guthrie, in The Little Country, 1935, remarks, “We've got no national consciousness, partly because we've got practically no native songs and little native literature…. Mentally we're still the nurslings of Britain … there's something that stunts our writing in this kinship …”. Robin Hyde has already been quoted; in The Godwits Fly she speaks of a childhood lesson on the migrant godwits, “They fly north, they fly north…. Most of us here are human godwits; our north is mostly England. Our youth, our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful, must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand”. In her novels, as in the stories of Frank Sargeson and in the one novel which John Mulgan lived to write, readers may observe the process of change by which writers resolved these tensions and “became New Zealand” … “whole people, not exiles or minds divided”.

Frank Sargeson

The kind of mature interpretation of the world of “man, woman and child” without overt national self-consciousness which Robin Hyde referred to is seen in the fiction of Frank Sargeson, New Zealand's most skilful artist, after Katherine Mansfield, in the short story form. Sargeson's stories began to appear in 1934; Conversation With My Uncle, 1936, and A Man and His Wife, 1940, offer deceptively simple tales, often in colloquial monologue, which expose the seamier underside of social conformity and the bourgeois ethic. Sargeson's characters are inarticulate, sub-average folk, rouseabouts, factory hands, shearers, ordinary boys, and struggling ordinary women. The dominant note is a wry pity. His social-radical tone diminishes in That Summer, 1946, a nouvelle notable for its picture of urban shoddiness. Technically Sargeson learnt much from America; his stories injected new life into a flagging genre, so that few subsequent writers have escaped his influence, both in content and in craft. I, for One, 1954, is an ironic presentation of suburban mores from the point of view of a prudish spinster. Sargeson's one full novel, I Saw in My Dream, 1949, is a study of a boy searching for his real self, but inhibited by the cramping pressures of a puritan environment. The picture given of New Zealand during the years of Sargeson's lifetime is excellent, but the novel splits unfortunately into the two parts of its original conception. Over the whole range of his work, however, Sargeson's achievement is among New Zealand's finest.

To digress a moment to another short story writer of the time, Roderick Finlayson. Brown Man's Burden, 1938, and Sweet Beulah Land, 1942, resume the Maori theme, this time in contemporary society. Finlayson sounds a new note of compassionate tolerance, but succumbs to the modern temptation of using the Maori as a stick to beat the Pakeha. The Maori's communal virtues, his generosity, courtesy, and personal warmth, may easily be elevated into the uncorrupted innocence of the Noble Primitive by a writer anxious to attack European acquisitive individualism. In particular, Finlayson's notion of “identity with the soil” as “the pride and birthright of the native” gives a sentimental bias to some of his stories. Tidal Creek, 1948, a series of related sketches rather than a novel, expresses distrust of the city dweller's divorce from the land.

John Mulgan

The last of the quartette who gave New Zealanders a “home in thought” in the 1930s is John Mulgan. In Report on Experience, 1947, Mulgan describes how he, like Robin Hyde, resolved the split in his loyalties. “You were English and not English,” wrote Robin Hyde, … “… Don't you think we live half our lives in England, anyhow? I was thinking – there can't have been anything quite like this since the Roman Colonists settled in Britain; not the hanging on with the one hand, and the other hand full of seas.” What taught John Mulgan, as it taught Katherine Mansfield, to which hemisphere he belonged, was the “long migration” of exile. “If you try to forget the country of your youth, as I did for a long time,” he wrote, “you will lose the fight and wither internally of homesickness.” The product of this experience is the Report, and one novel, Man Alone, 1939. This explores territory similar to that of Lee, Robin Hyde, and Sargeson, the world of the casual worker, the fugitive, the man without ties or responsibilities. “Man Alone” is figured in one Johnson, ex-soldier emigrant in the 1920s, who sees New Zealand with fresh eyes, without sentiment, and who lives through its history of boom and slump until his escape during the Depression. When the European fighting breaks out again, in Spain, Johnson enlists, the war providing him with that external motive for “doing something together” which the peace could not provide. Indeed, peace is only “the bit in between”. Mulgan explores “the world of man, woman and child” in the antipodean setting he knows, without any “aggressive” insularity. Man Alone is the most polished New Zealand novel published before 1940.

Post-War Developments

Since the war, writers have consolidated what had been won. Good novels and stories cease to be rare. While the exploiter of New Zealand for popular entertainment continues to find material and a market, more writers offer, with increasing virtuosity, interpretations of life. Self-conscious nationalism is found today only in the tourist romance, which also alone continues to harbour the old-time plots, heroes, heroines, and villains. A mild regionalism has developed in writers such as Courage, Finlayson, and Davin. There is a group of novels with overseas or Pacific settings. Lower suburbia realistically rendered continues to occupy the short story writer, but Katherine Mansfield's influence has begun to counter-balance Sargeson's. Both in novel and in short story, New Zealand writers since 1940 have been more aware of the creative experiments overseas, and have made some of their own.

Popular Entertainers

Among the popular entertainers, Ngaio Marsh is pre-eminent; she has set three of her detective puzzles in her own country, Vintage Murder, 1937, Colour Scheme, 1943, and Died in the Wool, 1944. Mary Scott, who also first published in the 1930s, has made herself a corner in the light comedy of North Island backblocks life, romantically heightened for feminine readers. Dorothy Eden, like Ngaio Marsh, provides suspense for the English market, but has set several stories here, including two early novels which show some insight into family tensions. Elizabeth Messenger contrives local mystery stories.

The domestic romance is the largest class of fiction: writers include Rosemary Rees, Dulce Carman, Essie Summers, Eva Burfield, Mavis Winder, Jean Hall, Frances Keinzly, Grace Phipps, and Hamilton Grieve. More ambitious, with serious themes, though conforming to the requirements of the romantic genre, are Florence Preston, Margaret Jeffrey, Marilyn Duckworth, and Ruth Park. The well-documented historical Maori novel still attracts authors, but remains unmanageable, as laudable attempts by J. F. Cody and Leo Fowler show. Thriller writers for male readers exploit the supposed sexiness and violence of the pioneering days. Readable average stories for menfolk have been published by Michael Ellis, Diarmid Cathie, Albert Lord, and Denis Rhodes. John Gillies in Voyagers in Aspic, 1954, satirises the New Zealand tourist at sea.

Historical romances continue to appear, with varying degrees of imaginative success; among them are novels by Olga Stringfellow, Will Lawson, David King, Julian Mountain, Georgina McDonald, and Helen Wilson.

Dan Davin

The first of the post-war writers of high artistic purpose was Dan Davin who draws upon the Irish Catholic communities of the South Island. Cliffs of Fall, 1945, presents a typical New Zealand figure, the young adolescent rebel chafing at respectability and determined to escape the nets of home, religion, and nationality. “I want to get out of this country and over the sea.” But Davin's “godwit” does not succeed in making the long migration: he comes instead to disaster over the “cliffs of fall”, personal ties which block his ambition. In Roads from Home, 1949, Davin again takes up the theme of choice, handling the tight little Irish community with less arrogance and more affection. It appears again in No Remittance, 1959, a novel presented in slangy New Zealandese by a teller reminiscent of Joyce Cary's rogue heroes. A “remittance man without a remittance”, and a Protestant, Davin's narrator is an outsider in race as in religion, and makes a good recorder of the tenacious grievances, loyalties, and emotions of this regional group. Davin has set two novels overseas: For the Rest of Our Lives, 1947, is a novel of the 2nd NZEF in the Middle East War, acclaimed as brilliant reportage in its desert scenes by those who were there. The Sullen Bell, 1956, is a kind of sequel, picturing assorted New Zealand expatriates, mostly war veterans, in casual London meetings where they endeavour to forget the dead.

James Courage

James Courage is, like Davin, a permanent exile still writing of his homeland. The Fifth Child, his first New Zealand novel, appeared in 1948. Like Desire Without Content, 1950, Fires in the Distance, 1952, and The Call Home, 1956, it is set among the Canterbury station owners of Courage's boyhood. His themes are family tensions, neurotic obsessions, and social conflicts, all within the narrow society of the sheep-farming foothills of Canterbury. His characters, like Lady Barker's, Jane Mander's, and Mrs Grossmann's, are continually talking of “Home”, and move in this respect in a pre-Hyde and pre-Sargeson world. Courage's perception of detail is diluted as his distance increases from the time of which he writes, so that the effect of his work is often thin and unreal. His finest novel, The Young Have Secrets, 1954, is, however, redeemed by its constructive skill. It tells of the experiences of a 10-year-old boy in Canterbury at the time of the 1914 war. The material is familiar enough in this century, being the impact of the adult emotional world upon a young person encountering it for the first time, but Courage's handling of it is distinctive.

Two solo performances of the 1940s should be noted: David Ballantyne's The Cunninghams, 1948, an ironical compassionate picture of the lower middle class home between the wars, and Erik de Mauny's The Huntsman in His Career, 1949, a study of personal responsibility, as encountered by a young intellectual, newly enlisted, who finds himself one of an Army team detailed to hunt down a murderer.

The Second World War

Guthrie Wilson is, like Davin and Courage, a New Zealander who has made a reputation overseas since the war. He began with Brave Company, 1951, based on a battle incident in his own war service. Its theme is the corporate bond which a group of soldiers develops, and the consequent value of the war experience. The Feared and the Fearless, 1954, is more openly brutal. Strip Jack Naked, 1957, a civilian novel, is also a deliberate exploitation of violence. Julian Ware, 1952, deals with the pastoral society of Canterbury of which Courage writes, while Sweet White Wine, 1956, is a competent exploration of personal relationships in a North Island setting.

War service is also the subject of M. K. Joseph's I'll Soldier No More, 1958, which follows men through their behind-the-lines training in England, with its intolerable, boring disruption of life. There are scenes in France and occupied Germany, but Joseph is concerned with philosophic and religious issues rather than with action or bloodshed. Action, on the other hand, is the material of Errol Brathwaite's Fear in the Night, 1959, and An Affair of Men, 1961, which deal with the war against the Japanese enemy. Both have stronger characterisation than is usual in swift straightforward writing of the type.

One novelist has written of the returned servicemen's troubles on returning home. Gordon Slatter's A Gun in My Hand, 1959, has a rich Kiwi gusto. As his hero boozes his way through the country to a battalion reunion, Slatter satirises with lively distaste most of the less flattering aspects of post-war New Zealand life. The book is overcrowded, but vigorous, and very successful in rendering the colloquial idiom.

After 1950

Janet Frame

In the 1950s three new writers appeared whose work was at once acclaimed, Janet Frame, Ian Cross, Sylvia Ashton-Warner.

Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry, 1957, is in the tradition of Virginia Woolf, expressing with adventurous technical complexity a private vision of life. The Withers family live in a little New Zealand town, “Waimaru”, but Janet Frame is not concerned with local manifestations so much as with life itself, with “something that might have occurred just anywhere in the world of man, woman and child”. She makes a penetrating examination of “normal” values, of “what is treasure and not treasure”, and of the abysses that lie below the threshold of sanity. Owls Do Cry is a rich, poetic work of real distinction.

Ian Cross

Ian Cross now has three novels in print, The God Boy, 1957, The Backward Sex, 1960, and After Anzac Day, 1961. The God Boy, though reminiscent of the literature of American teenagers, is a very New Zealand book. A 13-year-old boy recalls and puzzles at the parental drama and disaster in which he had been involved two years before, adopting in the end an adolescent defiance, an attitude of “I don't care”, even about God. The novel is remarkably successful in evoking the atmosphere of a boy's world in a small North Island township today. The similarity of the material and technique in The Backward Sex raised some doubts about Cross's staying power, but After Anzac Day ranges more widely, picturing the contemporary adult New Zealand world.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Sylvia Ashton-Warner in Spinster, 1958, is not as finely controlled as these two writers, but is equally adventurous. The originality of her subject-matter and the force of her vision outweigh the sentimentality and other deficiencies of a plot geared too closely to the presuppositions of popular romance. Spinster is a study of relationship and communication, the “something that goes between Thee and Me”, between, that is, men and women, adults and children, white child and brown. The novel rests firmly upon the author's experience in country infant school rooms, and derives some of its quality from unorthodox beliefs about teaching. Nothing as good as the scenes with the children is to be found anywhere in New Zealand literature about Maori and Pakeha, though Hamilton Grieve in Sketches from Maoriland, 1939, dealt with similar school material. Sylvia Ashton-Warner is not in full control of the lush confessional prose in which she makes her heroine pour out her emotions, but so much in the book is brilliant that its flaws can be overlooked. Of her second novel, Incense to Idols, 1960, the same cannot be said.

Also contributing to the surge of good fiction in the 1950s is Ruth France's novel, The Race, 1958, founded on a Cook Strait yachting disaster. The men at sea and the womenfolk waiting for news at home are presented alternately day by day in a neat story.

Noel Hilliard's novel Maori Girl, 1960, about the urbanised Maori, has already been discussed; it is another item in our literature of protest.

Short Story

The art of the short story was mastered in New Zealand before the art of the novel: doubtless the examples of Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson partly account for this, though the local writer's meagre opportunities and part-time status are also contributory causes. Sargeson remains New Zealand's finest short story writer today. A number of the novelists already discussed have written excellent short stories. Davin, in The Gorse Blooms Pale, 1947, is seen at his best. Janet Frame in The Lagoon, 1951, writes on themes of insecurity, exile, loss, and homelessness of spirit as these may be felt by the child or the unstable personality; in their poetic impressionism and their understanding of children, these stories recall Katherine Mansfield. Finlayson's collections have been discussed. Also noted for their stories, which have not however been issued in book form, are James Courage, David Ballantyne, Ruth France, and Noel Hilliard; their work will be found in the pages of Landfall, the New Zealand Listener, Arena, and other periodicals.

Among authors who have confined themselves to the short story form, C. K. Stead, Maurice Gee, Bruce Mason, and John Caselberg, all talented writers, have not yet published collections.

Short Story Collections

There are a number of volumes of collected stories to be noted. G. R. Gilbert's Free to Laugh and Dance, 1942, employs the American style for New Zealand material. Douglas Stewart, in The Girl with Red Hair, 1944, pictures life in small places, with their humorous debunking of official pretensions, their enjoyment of gossip, and their local crustiness of character. His one Maori story, “The Whare”, touches a sensitive point of race relations.

A. P. Gaskell, in The Big Game, 1947, works in a colloquial medium for which he may be indebted to the example of Sargeson and the Americans: he writes skilful sardonic stories of ordinary New Zealand activities, a football match, a school picnic, life in military camp. This is the world of the good-time Kiwi. J. R. Cole, in It Was So Late, 1947, probes more deeply, particularly in his stories relating to Air Force men during and after the war. Both Gaskell and Cole give some grim insights into Maori-Pakeha tensions, working through the medium of compassionate irony.

Helen Shaw's talent is more poetic: The Orange Tree, 1957, deals sensitively with quirks of personality, odd irrational episodes, and the passing away of old people and old settlements. In The Stone, 1959, O. E. Middleton evokes the unforgettable moments of boyhood, in an underplayed style accurately suggestive of the average New Zealander. His stories are less artless than they may appear to be. Phillip Wilson in Some Are Lucky, 1960, also has an ear for the vernacular of the casual New Zealander, and writes loose, gritty stories of young people, often in outdoor settings.

A Good Keen Man, by Barry Crump, 1960, is, like Roderick Finlayson's Tidal Creek, F. S. Anthony's Me and Gus, and John A. Lee's Shining with the Shiner (1944), a series of loosely related sketches akin to the tall tales of pioneer days, rather than a set of stories. Crump's work, in this and in Hang on a Minute, Mate, 1961, is notable for its vivid rendering of the local patois, its gusty comedy, and its original material. These are uninhibited picaresque yarns of deerstalkers and swaggers.

The two most distinguished artists among those whose output has warranted collection in book form are Maurice Shadbolt and Maurice Duggan. Duggan in Immanuel's Land, 1956, is an assured craftsman, working with meticulous care in a variety of modes and in flexible subtle prose. His stories have human feeling at their core, but are never fluffy or sentimental: the Catholic basis of some of them provides strength as it does in Davin's fiction. Of the men writing today, Duggan comes nearest in kind as in achievement to Katherine Mansfield. Shadbolt is more varied, with less poetry and less precision. His volume, The New Zealanders, 1959, includes stories of European origin, as well as some notable longer tales set in New Zealand. He is best at the portrayal of the younger generation.

Other writers of short stories may be briefly noted: Marie Insley, Alexander Guyan, David Anderson, Dennis McEldowney, Thomas Hindmarsh, Denis Glover. Two young Maori writers, Rora Paki and Rowley Habib, write in English of their own people.

Fiction for Children

There is little New Zealand writing for children. In colonial days, the stories of Jules Verne, G. A. Henty and others exploiting adventure were intended for younger as well as older readers; titles such as The Boy Settler and The Young Adventurers appear in the early lists. First to be well known as a writer for children was Edith Howes, a teacher whose stories served the double purpose of entertainment and instruction. Most are fantasies woven about a nature theme, botanical or biological. The Cradle Ship, 1916, had a sentimental popular appeal. In Maoriland Fairy Tales, 1913, she pioneered the use for children of traditional Maori lore. Not until A. H. Reed's Myths and Legends of Maoriland, 1947, were young readers again adequately served in this field. Another popular writer, Isabel Maud Peacocke, set some of her many stories in this country.

In the 1920s, Esther Glen, a journalist working for the Australian and New Zealand market, did much to encourage the writing of fiction for children; among her stories are Six Little New Zealanders, 1917, Uncles Three at Kamahi, 1926, and Robin of Maoriland, 1929. Her name has been remembered in the Esther Glen Award, given by the New Zealand Library Association for the most distinguished contribution to New Zealand literature for children published in New Zealand. That the award has been made only four times since its founding in 1945 indicates the weakness of this section of our writing. Winners are Stella Morice, The Book of Wiremu, 1945, a delightful portrayal of a small Maori boy; A. H. Reed's Myths, already mentioned; Joan Smith's The Adventures of Nimble, Rumble and Tumble, 1950, a picture book; Maurice Duggan, Falter Tom and the Water Boy, 1960. This last, a notable little book, was, like much of the good work in the field today, originally commissioned by the Department of Education, which has a fine record in fostering local talent. The School Journal and the various special school bulletins consistently print high-quality work; writers include James Baxter, Roderick Finlayson, Barry Mitcalfe, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Alistair Campbell. Campbell's The Happy Summer, 1961, is one of several stories which deal with Maori themes. Others include The Hole in the Hill, by Ruth Park, 1961; The Boys of Puhawai, 1960, by “Kim”; and Kuma is a Maori Girl, by Pat Lawson, 1961. Roderick Finlayson has written much for the School Journal, but so far has not published these stories outside the educational market. The Polynesian voyages are the subject of Rangatira, 1959, by N. B. Tindale and H. A. Lindsay. Ronald Syme's historical novels include two with New Zealand backgrounds, Gipsy Michael, 1954, set in the period of the Maori Wars, and The Spaniards Came at Dawn, 1959, a seventeenth-century tale of excitement.

Life on a North Island sheep station is described well in Joyce West's Drover's Road, 1954; in The White Deer, 1961, John Tempest pictures country life in the South Island.

More routine stories introducing obvious local colour include Sally Becomes a New Zealander, 1960, by N. D. Thompson, and Gold at Kapai, 1960, by Phyllis Wardell.

Stories in Maori

Mention should be made also of the stories written in Maori for the Department of Education's School Bulletins. These, together with similar stories published in the Department of Maori Affairs' periodical, Te Ao Hou, may be the beginning of a revival of creative writing in Maori.

by Joan Stevens, M.A. (N.Z., OXON.), Associate Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington.

• New Zealand Literature, A Survey, McCormick, E. H. (1959)
• The New Zealand Novel, 1860–1960, Stevens, J. (1961)
• A History of New Zealand Fiction from 1862 to the Present Time, With Some Account of its Relation to the National Life and Character, Smith, E. M. (1939)
• Landfall, No. 25, 1953, “Fiction and the Reading Public”, Chapman, Robert
• Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 67, No. 3, 1958, “Attitudes to the Maori in Some Pakeha Fiction”, Pearson, W. H.