Short-lived literary magazines and journals of opinion have occurred in New Zealand from the earliest years, even though they have not always equalled the quality of ordinary journalism, their relentless competitor. The first, the quarterly New Zealand Magazine, appeared in 1850 in Wellington, exactly twice. It was founded to “aid the progress” of the new colony and its articles were on utilitarian themes (whaling, geology, the Maori) by such writers as the Rev. Richard Taylor, W. B. D. Mantell, and William Swainson, whose tiff with Jerningham Wakefield provides one of the few gleams of liveliness in a worthy production which in tone anticipated the learned articles of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, a series that began their stately progress in 1869. Again in Wellington, in 1857, a New Zealand Quarterly appeared for three issues. It was in a strict sense a review, and the leisurely and informative articles were based wholly on published books.
In 1860 Taranaki of all places, ironically when one considers the fortunes of war, produced the first of a series of short-lived imitations of Punch which proliferated throughout the country until the eighties. Some of these reached a standard not too far behind the original, and their crude, vigorous cartoons added zest to political encounters and were an amusing distorting mirror of provincial personalities. The most successful of the early versions (which somehow never survived more than a few issues) was Punch in Canterbury (1865), which carried cartoons of quite sophisticated artistry and succeeded in imposing on the popular imagination its own version of stock colonial types, such as the squatter, a rather raffish character combining both privilege and enterprise. Next in merit was Otago Punch. Twenty years later, in 1888, the Dunedin-published New Zealand Punch was a distinguished production and the last in the succession.
Chapman's New Zealand Monthly Magazine appeared in Auckland in August 1862, surviving until December. Its articles were in the same vein as the New Zealand Magazine and attracted some of the same writers.
In spite of this discouraging augury, Aucklanders in 1863 founded the Southern Monthly Magazine which flourished for three years. Aimed more consciously at the “general reader”, it regaled him with fiction, verse (much of it frankly lifted from overseas sources), “colonial experiences”, and good advice on such engrossing topics as draining and fencing. It kept a close eye on the events of the Maori Wars but also scrutinised overseas affairs. The sixties also saw, in gold-endowed Dunedin, the emergence of the first virulent publication of a licensed eccentric, J. G. S. Grant. His weekly Saturday Review (1864) was the vehicle for his waspish attacks on his political and personal enemies and, in fact, on society as a whole, as its editor-author showed marked persecution mania. In 1868 he founded the Delphic Oracle, later to become The Stoic, to be followed by further journals in the eighties. R. M. Burdon gives Grant credit for critical ability and genuine appreciation of the beauties of nature and of the romantic in literature. “When dealing with people or things with which he did not come into immediate contact he kept his head, put some restraint on his prejudices and wrote fairly well.” Grant's chequered career has an eighteenth century flavour: he built his own Grub Street in Dunedin.
In January 1876 the New Zealand Magazine, a quarterly “journal of general literature”, began publication in Dunedin and lasted eight issues. Its editor, R. L. Stanford, enlisted the leading intellectuals of the day – J. E. FitzGerald, William Fox, Robert Stout, the Rev. W. Salmond – and re-examined the scientific and religious topics of earlier journals, but with a new emphasis on political and social questions.
The nineties were to see a good deal of literary activity. First in the field was the monthly Triad, begun in Dunedin in July 1893. Its editor, C. N. Baeyertz, later transferred it to Wellington and, after some years of simultaneous publication in Sydney, in 1925 removed there, where the journal lasted into the nineteen thirties. The Triad's links with music and the stage were closer than with literature (it was owned at first by the Dresden, later Bristol, Piano Co.), but it provided a profusion of stories, poems, and reviews, and lively sallies somewhat in the vein of its Sydney contemporary, the Bulletin. It carried a good many illustrations, occasionally original caricatures, but more often portrait photographs or reproductions of the “story pictures” which still adorned Royal Academy exhibitions. Such writers as A. A. Grace, Charles Wilson, Frank Morton, and Alice A. Kenny were frequent contributors.
The Citizen, a monthly announcing itself in September 1895 as the “journal of the Forward Movement”, lasted eight issues. Its tone was serious and its contributors frighteningly respectable – A. R. Atkinson, Stout, T. W. Hislop, George Fowlds, D. E. Beaglehole, T. H. Sprott. It was preoccupied with social and political topics, but was not above “borrowing” poems by the pen of Whitman or W. E. Henley.
Near the end of the decade (October 1899) the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine first appeared and kept on until 1905. This was at last a successful general-interest monthly, copiously illustrated both by photographs and by the original work of Frances Hodgkins, Bowring, and Herbert Fitzherbert. It noticed sport, as well as everything of importance in drama (delighting in photographing visiting actresses), music, and literature. It printed a good deal of verse and fiction, including serials. It attracted the best talent of the day – James Hight, Professors Bickerton and Maclaurin, Forrest, and Malcolm Ross, James Cowan, Guy H. Scholefield, Elsdon Best, H. M. Stowell, Johannes Andersen, Jessie Mackay, Alan Mulgan, and Robert Stout. It was perhaps too self-conscious in its determination to be New Zealand, but to a great extent succeeded in reflecting the best of its epoch.
The lean period that followed lasted until the appearance in November 1924 of E. J. McEldowney's New Nation, a weekly with close links with the academic world, particularly Victoria College. When it gave up publication, in July 1925, it had printed work by Stout, T. A. Hunter, I. L. G. Sutherland, P. W. Robertson, J. C. Beaglehole, H. C. D. Somerset, F. L. Combs, R. F. Fortune, H. von Haast, H. D. Skinner, and Mona Tracey.
In September 1928 a man of faith, the printer H. H. Tombs, brought out the quarterly Art in New Zealand. For the first time paintings were regularly reproduced in colour. Such writers as Eileen Duggan, Robin Hyde, C. R. Allen, and Mona Tracey – and in later years many more – had found a suitably dignified vehicle. Dignity was perhaps overdone, as the journal tended to be too expensively produced ever to pay, but it continued even through the war years, though with a change of format, and finally in 1945 became the Arts Year Book which, under Howard Wadman's editorship, lasted several years more. Mr Tombs could take pride in looking back at a periodical which had rendered signal services to the arts.
Late in 1932 a Canterbury journal of student opinion, Oriflamme, was suppressed after one issue by the governing body of the University College, but had a brief continuance as Sirocco.
University magazines have always been a source of wit and liveliness. Phoenix in Auckland in 1932 and 1933 was something more. For one thing, it was superbly produced. Contributors included all the bright young men of the day, however slender their connection with Auckland – A. R. D. Fairburn, Ian Milner, Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, J. C. Beaglehole – and its editors were James Bertram and R. A. K. Mason. It is astonishing that so lavish a production braved the slump years even for four quarterly issues.
The harsh facts of the slump prompted a heightened consciousness of social problems and found a voice in the radical weekly (soon to be a fortnightly) Tomorrow, first published in July 1934 in Christchurch by its editor-cartoonist, Kennaway Henderson, who was to make great personal sacrifices to keep it going. This journal (“Tomorrow is a satire on today and shows its weakness”) kept in close touch with world affairs and deplored the rise of Fascism. Although closely linked to the Labour Government of 1935 (W. N. Pharazyn and Ormond Wilson were contributors), it had a feeling for the unpopular cause or person (e.g., John A. Lee in April 1940). It is said that its hospitality, courageously continued after the outbreak of war, to pacifist writers (the Rev. O. E. Burton and A. C. Barrington among others) brought about the circumstances that caused it to cease publication in May 1940. Although it clipped a good deal from overseas journals and had never quite reconciled its Marxist crusaders and its less engaged writers, its list of contributors is a proud one, ranging from the irony of G. W. von Zedlitz, the rectitude of W. J. Scott, and the dedicated fervour of H. Winston Rhodes to the keenest satires of Denis Glover and A. R. D. Fairburn or the “straight” literary offerings of Sargeson, Dowling, and Brasch.
More exclusively literary periodicals were springing up at this time, both stimulated and hindered by the war. The typewritten Oriflamme (Christchurch 1939) produced four issues in two years. Christchurch's Caxton Press, a powerhouse of good taste and good writing, produced the first copy of Book in March 1941; the ninth and final issue appeared in July 1947. With a roll call including Glover, Curnow, Vogt, J. R. Hervey, Isobel Andrews, G. R. Gilbert, Holcroft, J. R. Cole, Baxter, Sargeson, de Mauny, Smithyman, Dennis McEldowney, A. P. Gaskell, G. leF. Young, Duggan, and Louis Johnson, Book had cast its snares over the future. The Progressive Publishing Society's New Zealand New Writing (four issues 1943–45) with a greater seriousness of tone attracted many of the same contributors and under Ian A. Gordon's editorship might well have flourished at a more propitious time.
The New Zealand Listener first appeared in 1939. Under its successive editors, Oliver Duff and M. H. Holcroft, this national weekly journal of the Broadcasting Service has made its own place as a journal of opinion relating especially to the arts and has transcended its narrower task (still punctually performed) of printing the broadcast programmes and explaining them. The stories, poems, and articles have been contributed by New Zealand's best writers, many of whom have been encouraged to do work for which no other journal offers scope.
The forties saw several new enterprises emerging. The quarterly Arena first appeared in Wellington in June 1943 (“We enter the Arena”) and its regular production is a credit to the enthusiasm and steadfastness of its printer-editor, N. F. Hoggard, who has had unusual success in attracting the “first appearances” of writers later to become well known. An enterprising bookseller published in Wellington the bi-monthly journal Parsons' Packet in October 1948 (desisting in 1955), reviewing current imported literature. In 1948 also an Auckland group began Here and Now, which inherited some of the mantle of Tomorrow and for several years provided primarily a journal of opinion with some attention to the arts. A section of the same interests are still served by the cyclostyled Auckland trade union literary journal Fernfire.
In March 1947 the Caxton Press began publishing Landfall, edited by Charles Brasch. This quarterly has kept up a quality which has disarmed the gloomy prognostications based on the fate of journals of the same scope (it has lasted longer than either Life and Letters or Horizon), and has become the recognised vehicle for the best work of New Zealand writers.
Today several journals exist to express the mind of a group. Victoria University of Wellington produced Hilltop in 1949, which became Arachne but did not survive. Numbers (“edited” by a committee of five which included Baxter and Johnson) flourished for several issues. Mate, beginning in Auckland in 1958, has achieved a flavour of its own. So, too, has Image (1958, Auckland). These periodicals, never tied to a dismal regularity of appearance, have produced some fiction and poetry of excellent quality. A quarterly journal of opinion, Comment, begun in Christchurch in 1959 and now edited in Wellington, expresses the point of view of a group of younger Roman Catholic writers and is vigorous within its chosen field, sticking closely to events in this country, including those in the arts. The New Zealand Monthly Review began in Christchurch in May 1960 edited by H. Winston Rhodes and resumed some of the themes of Tomorrow and Here and Now.
The New Zealand Poetry Yearbook began in 1952. Its editor, Louis Johnson, has conscientiously cast his net as wide as possible, including a proportion of reprinted work; the critical material occasionally included has been markedly below the standard generally achieved by the verse.
One of the casualties of wartime paper shortages was the occasional publication of fiction or poetry by local newspapers. Few journals today will accept literary material. The Weekly News and the monthly Mirror occasionally print fiction. (As did the defunct Free Lance and Railways Magazine.) Periodicals of national scope have a difficult task to survive because the scattered centres of New Zealand make distribution expensive. One journal should be mentioned which is published outside New Zealand, the Sydney Bulletin, which has often opened its pages to our writers, even though it irritatingly persists in deriving them from an entity in its own mind, “Maoriland”.
Looking back with the privileged clairvoyance of hindsight wisdom, we are perhaps more impressed with the successes rather than the failures of New Zealand literary magazines. The Triad and the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine have the flavour of their times, something too of provinciality it must be admitted. The precocious brilliance of Phoenix and the social conscience of Tomorrow reflect the maturity that came to a generation which in the slump years had been given to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In our own day the steady performance of the Listener and the more leisurely voyages of Landfall are rewarding and offer some of the satisfactions of the ship come home.
Critical writing by New Zealanders relating to their own literature has been inhibited by two considerations – one, that public interest obliges newspapers to review a large number of books published in England; two, that criticism of local books tends to be more cautious than that of overseas work. Many newspapers have for many years regularly printed a page of reviews, but these vary considerably in authority and, unfortunately, standards seem to be declining rather than rising, though some journals, such as the Press (Christchurch), can be relied on to commission good reviews, by persons with a suitable background of knowledge where this is needed. Even pedestrian reviewing can be sound and successful where the same critics (in, for instance, the Otago Daily Times) are regularly employed to handle the same type of book. The New Zealand Listener maintains much higher standards than do the broadcast review sessions, whose preoccupation with making new books an entertainment shows little understanding of the critic's integrity. Landfall's practice is for once disappointing, for although it can afford the space for a long review and does in fact notice nearly all books of any stature with a New Zealand interest, it too often entrusts them to inexperienced people who are thus induced to enter its pages. Extended critical essays have been rare, and the symposia which it printed on Ursula Bethell and D'Arcy Cresswell, written with a partly lapidary intention, were chiefly of biographical interest.
Hocken's famous bibliography (1909) contains, with gnarled biographical sketches, occasionally equally summary critical judgments. It is impossible to withhold affection from Hocken's commonsensical approach to literature, even when it leads him to self-exposure in his treatment of imaginative writing. He deals with two early novels of G. B. Lancaster in identical terms: “A coarsely told story – locality, New Zealand.”
The first extended critical study of our literature was E. H. McCormick's excellent Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), one of the centennial programme of publications, which in its field set standards of scholarship unlikely to be surpassed if indeed they are ever equalled. McCormick did ample justice to the history of our literature. Moreover, his sensitive, critical judgments are generally accepted and have tended to colour the thinking of most later writers or to oblige them to rationalise their disagreement. McCormick has carefully revised this book in New Zealand Literature (1959) which extends his scrutiny down nearly to the present. (It omits the material on art.) His criticism of art has found a parallel development in his studies of the work of Frances Hodgkins and in other essays.
Just as aware as McCormick of the interaction of life and literature, M. H. Holcroft in his Centennial Prize essay Encircling Seas (1940), the first of a series of complementary studies with somewhat similar overtones, examined the influence of the physical environment on, inter alia, our writers, with originality and deep feeling, valiantly entering a region of intangibles to achieve a valuable synthesis. This passage in The Waiting Hills (1943) will serve to indicate the trend of his mind: “The hills, the rivers, the plains and the forest: all the moulded contours, the granite foundations and the vegetable growths of our moist soil are new things, new combinations of form and colour in the world which poetry builds anew from the flow of appearances. They are not to be reproduced by a conscious artistry, but must come gradually and through an infinite patience of suggestion into the texture of New Zealand poetry”.
In Creative Writing in New Zealand (1946) J. C. Reid covers a good deal of ground competently in short compass. He reacts against Holcroft's mystique and is himself inclined to rely instead on a background of conventional religion, which makes for balanced judgments unimpaired by surprise.
The poets of the nineteen thirties found a superb spokesman and a skilful exponent in Allen Curnow, whose preface to his anthology A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45 was a virile manifesto of his generation. Curnow's preface to his recent Penguin selection is interesting, if a little crochet-ridden, but lacks the fire of his earlier essay and seems to indicate a narrowing of his sympathies in spite of a somewhat fumbling attempt to examine Maori poetry.
The poets of a younger generation found an even more eloquent protagonist in James K. Baxter, first in his 1951 address at the first New Zealand Writers Conference Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry, which seemed to offer some of the apocalyptic satisfactions of a revivalist. In this lecture he sought the rejection of a “purely aesthetic role” for the writer: it was “reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth”. The 1954 Macmillan Brown lectures (published as The Fire and the Anvil) show a rather more mature Baxter who comes to grips with the technical problems of poetry as well as recognising the need for poets to “feel part of a complex spiritual identity” with their own country.
In Spring Fires (1956), another lecture set out in print, the Rev. Ormond Burton vigorously stresses the voluntary nature of literature, which “must rise freely and spontaneously from deep feeling” and reassesses New Zealand writing from this point of view.
Several studies of Katherine Mansfield have appeared, from the short luminous essay by Arthur Sewell (1936), some work by Ruth Manz and Pat Lawlor, down to the thorough and exact but unexhilerating critical study by the American scholar, Sylvia Berkman (1952), Anthony Alpers' excellent life (1954), and Ian A. Gordon's lucid and well-proportioned British Council pamphlet (1954). The last three, together with the fuller text of the letters to John Middleton Murry, equip us better than ever before to assess the work of New Zealand's greatest writer.
In The Puritan and the Waif (1954), edited by Helen Shaw, eight writers as various as D'Arcy Cresswell, Baxter, and Dan Davin contributed studies of the work of Frank Sargeson, but this symposium remains more an act of well deserved homage than an exercise in criticism. Moreover, it was published ahead of some of Sargeson's best work.
Now that New Zealand has produced critics with the scholarship and self-awareness of McCormick, the imaginative insight of Holcroft, and the spirit and “engagement” of Baxter, the quality of future work would seem to be assured. But maturity is still rare enough to need cherishing.
by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).