LITERATURE

The first contributions to New Zealand literature took the form of books about this country written by navigators and travellers. Cook'sVoyages were an eighteenth century best seller, and it is only in the last few years that the Hakluyt edition of the First Voyage (1957, edited J. C. Beaglehole) has revealed the quality of Cook's own journal and made us regret the smoothing process of Hawkesworth's polite edition. Visitors like Augustus Earle (Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence; 1832) and Charles Darwin were soon succeeded by traders and residents like J. S. Polack. The New Zealand Company settlers, well educated, articulate, and anxious to persuade others to join their enterprise, published many accounts, propagandist or defensive; by far the best of these was the lively, unscrupulous, graphic Adventure in New Zealand 1839–1844 (1845) by Edward Jerningham Wakefield, which is as picturesquely enthralling as it is prejudiced.

Many other books soon followed which interpreted the Maori as the early settlers first knew them. F. E. Maning'sOld New Zealand (1863) and The War in the North (1862) made the Maori a conventional figure of humour, mixed with a modicum of affectionate admiration, rather like a Victorian novelist's Irishman. J. Logan Campbell'sPoenamo (1881), although not written till many years later, also looked back to the same period, perhaps idealising it a little and, like Maning, depicting a sort of golden age of unextinguished mutual respect between the races, almost as remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. More serious and noble aspects of the Maori character were described in John Gorst'sThe Maori King (1864) which chronicled sadly the tragedy of the breakdown of Maori-European relations.

The Canterbury settlement had attracted many of the best-educated settlers and, although they lacked the stimulus of a conflict between the races which existed in the North Island, these men and women produced a number of good books. The comparatively easy pastoral conditions of this area are well described in Lady Barker's attractively feminine Station Life in New Zealand (1870) and Station Amusements in New Zealand (1873). The same world produced Samuel Butler'sFirst Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), a work he later despised unduly because of distaste for his father's editing of these letters home. The opening chapters of his satire Erewhon (1873) describe the eastern approaches to the Southern Alps but this scenic identification, though interesting, is hardly significant in a book whose merits lie in the daring of its ideas. The germ of these can be found in certain papers Butler contributed to the Christchurch Press towards the end of his five years' residence in this country. A retrospective echo of the early years of Canterbury was provided by Charlotte Godley's vivid Letters from Early New Zealand (1936). A novel with some mildly satirical touches, George Chamier's Philosopher Dick (1891), also looked back to the sheep-station society of the early years.

All these books owe some of their merit to the strangeness and zest of exploring and explaining a new country. It was to be many years before a genuine indigenous literature was created by and for people living in New Zealand. In a curious way the early settlers, some of them perhaps romantic fugitives from an England besmirched by industrialism, accepted the fact of their transplantation more wholeheartedly than did their children, who, conspicuously less well educated than their parents, tended to focus their unappeasable yearnings on the country their parents had left whose superiority filled them with a sense of inadequacy. This contrast between the generations is touched upon, almost involuntarily, by Thomas Arnold (a brother of Matthew, who had lived in Wellington and Nelson for a few years in the forties) in his Passages in a Wandering Life (1900): “The ardent poets, the gallant soldiers, the organisers of institutions, the scholars, the explorers of deserts and mountains, classes of English society of which more than a sample had come out to New Zealand under the auspices of the Company – were fast dispersing different ways, and the pursuers of the ideal sought these shores no more. Trade, engineering, the exploitation of land, politics, and many other practical activities engrossed the energies of the thousands who soon flowed into New Zealand from the mother country”.

Although Arnold's views fit some of the facts, it was perhaps unlucky for his thesis that one poet he must have had in mind, since there was friendship between them, was Alfred Domett (the original of Browning's “Waring”). Some of Domett's early lyrics are superior to his elaborate and lumbering narrative poem about a runaway sailor and a Maori princess, Ranolf and Amohia (1872), whose many descriptive passages were seldom successful because of his fatal habit of diffuse over-elaboration. In some ways the humbler poet John Barr, of Craigielea, who stated in Burnsian imitations something of the aspirations of the dull striving years of Otago before the gold discoveries, struck a truer note. Barr's strength is in his satire, strangely enough unfailingly ignored by anthologists.

Crusading Urge

When in the second generation of settlement native writers began to appear there was a marked tendency even for imaginative work to take a crusading form. Edith Searle Grossman published novels in the nineties which broke a lance in favour of women's political rights and conveyed horror at male brutality and drunkenness. Even the poems about the same time of Jessie Mackay when they descended from themes of heroic or historical origin, became protests against abuses, Jessie Mackay had an integrity which commands respect. The mood of moral indignation came easily to the generation which spawned Seddonian liberalism, though the writer most closely associated with the regime, William Pember Reeves, has the calm of more completely developed intellectual powers. His poetry, like Jessie Mackay's, preferred public themes to private emotion. Reeves' The Long White Cloud (1898), still the best general account of our history, has an easy flow and little trace of partisanship: later editions added to its quality.

The strongest contribution to the literature of protest, John A. Lee's novel The Children of the Poor, appeared in 1934 when a new slump gave it even more emphatic point. Even today this tradition (which inspired the periodical Tomorrow and had its effect even on the poetry of the nineteen thirties) is unextinguished, though its latest product, Noel Hilliard's novel Maori Girl (1960), has a higher status as a work of art, though it lacks Lee's passion. In the same vein are the narratives of pacifist experience in two world wars, Archibald Baxter's We Will Not Cease (1939) and Ian Hamilton's Till Human Voices Wake Us (1953).

Nostalgic Expressions

The nostalgia for a supposedly splendid and certainly ceremonious England which grew up at the end of the nineteenth century among writers and artists especially found its clearest expression in Jessie Weston's novel Ko Meri (1890): “It is the centre of attraction for the whole of the ever-increasing, ever-extending Anglo-Saxon people, whose thoughts, even at the uttermost ends of the earth, ever gravitate towards the Mecca of the race, London”. This impulse was strong still when Katherine Mansfield 20 years later abandoned New Zealand for Europe. Ironically, long before her death in 1923, she had been overwhelmed by the reverse nostalgia and based her short stories, which acclimatised in English the subtle, elusive, sensitive, “plotless” method of Tchekov, on her memories of her New Zealand childhood. This feeling is reinforced by her careless, brilliant, spontaneous letters, which may in fact be the work for which the future will honour her instead of for her more finely wrought short stories Katherine Mansfield's troubled life is well described in Anthony Alper's biography.

Much of Katherine Mansfield's own rejection of the crudity of bourgeois New Zealand, the money-grubbing practical race which had replaced with its calculations the generous spirit of the pioneers, is to be found in Jane Mander's novel The Story of a New Zealand River (1920), which has overtones from the crusading era, finding women the banner bearers of refinement, men the crude animals robbed of all qualities except strength and, if refined, then weak. But Jane Mander, to whom words were stiff, sustaining stays, was a committed New Zealander, as was Katherine Mansfield herself, in her work if not her life. William Satchell, who shared with Jane Mander an old-fashioned straightforward narrative method and the chiaroscuro of characters more wicked or more virtuous than life, also found his themes in this country, in The Land of the Lost (1902) and The Toll of the Bush (1905) going for his material to the same North Auckland area, a derelict country which history caressed briefly before 1840 and then passed by. His historical novel The Greenstone Door (1914) deals with the events of the Maori Wars and inflates Sir George Grey to heroic proportions.

Our best historical novel is Robin Hyde'sCheck to Your King (1936), for which the Baron de Thierry a muddle-headed adventurer of the early days provided a theme rich in irony. Robin Hyde felt strongly the impulse to leave New Zealand for the wider opportunities of England, making it the subject of her last novel The Godwits Fly (1938). When she herself made the journey it was to end in disaster, but not before it had produced Dragon Rampant (1939), the story of her journey in war-torn China. Robin Hyde's life, dedicated but always attempting a little beyond her capacity, is as tragic in its own way as Katherine Mansfield's.

New Zealanders have always been credited with special competence in the production of books on practical themes. H. Guthrie-Smith'sTutira (1921) was a practical book in a new dimension: it is a study of a sheep station in depth, including everything from ecology to the human beings who find on it their way of life. Guthrie-Smith's bird books and his masterly Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist (1936) show the same love of nature and wry human quality.

New Impulses

By the nineteen thirties the slow enrichment of New Zealand literature by New Zealanders had reached an advanced stage. The events of the slump years in the early part of the decade provided the moral shock which awakened many writers to a consciousness of the country and time they lived in. John Mulgan'sMan Alone (1939), a realistic novel but tinged with the romanticism of the left, linked the New Zealand of the slump years with the English intellectuals who saw in the Spanish War an event emotionally more evocative than the greater war which followed hard upon it. The slump years also matured the art of Frank Sargeson, who in his short stories created a local idiom which has a rugged authenticity far stronger and more wholesome than anything written by his predecessors. Although Sargeson entertained what has been described as a “slump fixation” and also was coloured by the clichés of thought of the left, his work has force and originality; he reached full maturity in the stories collected in A Man and His Wife (1940). This was the voice of New Zealand. His later work, the novels That Summer, also slump dominated, I Saw in My Dream, and I, For One … have added to his stature, especially the latter in which he sets aside all his earlier habits of thought.

One sincere and graceful novel of the thirties, the still underestimated Show Down (1934) by M. Escott, stands aside from its contemporaries, forming no part of any “movement”.

If prose was still the field for the strong who could, like Sargeson, engage themselves in the huge task of creating a new idiom, a school of poetry developed which leapt effortlessly into existence fully armed, clear eyed, and defiant of all but the same preoccupations of radical thought which the slump had engendered in prose. It quickly displaced the fumbling “Georgian” poets of the first three decades. R. A. K. Mason, who had conquered a certain public even as far afield as England in the twenties, has his best work flavoured with the astringent taste of “social consciousness”. A. R. D. Fairburn, an intellectual who spent his talents in pursuing a wide variety of objectives, was at his best in verse, where his ruthless wit jostled a subdued lyric gift. Denis Glover, too, began his long career in satire with a pungency nearer to the loved grossness of the common man. Allen Curnow explored his own talents, with a taste for experiment and the ability to make a high art of poetry which to others was too often a ragbag for involuntary emotion. These four men in Auckland and Christchurch set up their gonfalons and led forth their cohorts of words with a gaiety and an authority founded on youth and a fresh, insouciant view of their country.

The young men had indeed been anticipated by the old women (if the survivor will pardon the ungallant word), Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan. Both were sustained by strong religious feeling. Both practised the art of poetry with dedicated singleness of purpose.

One poet of the thirties was of strange achievement. Walter D'Arcy Cresswell, mediocre as a poet, stated overwhelmingly in two works of autobiography the justification for leading the life of a poet. The Poet's Progress (1930), mannered eighteenth century pastiche, and Present Without Leave (1939) show the same magnificent contempt for common prudence that Thomas Arnold had attributed to the heroic age of early colonisation.

The New Zealand Government's 1940 centennial series produced some good books – E. H. McCormick'sStudy of New Zealand Writers and Artists, Oliver Duff'sNew Zealand Now, Helen M. Simpson's The Women of New Zealand, and J. C. Beaglehole'sDiscovery of New Zealand. One of its associated competitions gave a prize to the first of M. H. Holcroft's original studies of the interaction of the New Zealand environment and the arts, afterwards collected in Discovered Isles.

The Second World War caused less intellectual upheaval than the slump. It did produce some good narratives of escape of which W. B. Thomas' Dare to be Free and James Hargest's Farewell Campo 12 were the most considerable. The best war novel was Guthrie Wilson's first book, Brave Company. R. M. Burdon's biographies, especially the New Zealand Notables series and King Dick, rugged, iconoclastic and well-proportioned, opened new territory.

Recent Trends

The post-war scene has been enlivened by much new work in fiction. In the short story A. P. Gaskell's The Big Game, Janet Frame's The Lagoon, and Maurice Shadbolt's The New Zealanders, and work by J. R. Cole, Maurice Gee, Phillip Wilson, Maurice Duggan, and O. E. Middleton illustrate that this form, out of favour beyond these shores, is still effectively practised here. The novelists have come into their own with the work of three writers of considerable staying power, who have each written a number of books, Dan Davin, James Courage, and Guthrie Wilson. Davin has based himself on the experiences of the war and on his memories of his upbringing in an Irish enclave in Southland; the original but flawed Cliffs of Fall and the Careyesque No Remittance are his best books. Courage has made good use of his Canterbury pastoral background in Fires in the Distance and The Young Have Secrets but has broken free of it with profit in The Visit to Penmorten; he is gifted with a tranquil, graceful style and writes the best prose of the three. Guthrie Wilson's later novels have been disappointing, but his most recent, The Incorruptibles, is a distinguished achievement.

In her novel Owls Do Cry Janet Frame gives an impression of tragic and disordered power, but does not surpass the best of her short stories. Her three later novels show a sustained achievement. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Spinster conquers new material, the Maori school infant room, in a brilliant first novel, whose successor is less rewarding. Ian Cross's The Godboy is a strongly drawn study of troubled adolescence from within, and his second novel, The Backward Sex, shows, in a rather similar theme, the same insight; Cross's After Anzac Day is a more complex book. M. K. Joseph's I'll Soldier No More, although its scene lies among the events of the war, is primarily a successful piece of characterisation. His second novel, A Pound of Saffron, deals successfully with university life. Ruth France's The Race has a perfection of form in its contrast of action, a storm-tossed yacht race, and inaction, anxious women ashore, which makes it much more assured than most first novels. Its successor Ice-Cold River fulfils this promise. Some interesting work has been produced, too, by Roderick Finlayson, Marilyn Duckworth, and Helen Wilson, with good new novels, too, from Bill Pearson, Maurice Gee, David Ballantyne and Phillip Wilson.

The talents of Helen Wilson were displayed more directly in her autobiography My First Eighty Years, an account equally witty and courageous of various forms of pioneering by a woman of great wisdom. She vies with the novelists and short-story writers in capturing the authentic note of New Zealand life. Where Helen Wilson is excursive, both in time and place, Dennis McEldowney has necessarily turned inwards: The World Regained is a moving story of recovery from mortal illness. E. H. McCormick, New Zealand's major critic, has added new cubits to his stature with his biographical study of one phase in the life of the New Zealand painter, Frances Hodgkins: The Expatriate concentrates on the relations of this brilliant woman with her own neglectful country, a satisfying parallel to the life of that other great exile, Katherine Mansfield.

Conditions are only just beginning to emerge which favour the development of a New Zealand theatre offering scope to original playwrights. Here Isobel Andrews, Bruce Mason, Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, and Stella Jones have achieved most and more may be expected of them.

New Zealand has an extensive literature of exploration. In this field G. E. Mannering'sWith Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps (1891) chronicled the struggles of early mountaineers, and in Mr Explorer Douglas John Pascoe presents an extraordinary character, recluse, explorer, naturalist, partly by biography, partly through his own writings.

In Arawata Bill, a sequence of poems about a rather similar character, Denis Glover offers his most satisfying work. He and Curnow have gone on writing poetry and the stature of both has increased, even though many new figures have emerged in the years since youth and hardship were a first stimulus to their generation. The exact description of nature by Basil Dowling and the poems of sensibility of Charles Brasch, their contemporaries, remained unshaped by the events of the thirties. Since then a new generation of poets has come to maturity, led by James K. Baxter (also eminent as a critic). The roll call of their names – Hubert Witheford, Louis Johnson, Robert Chapman, W. H. Oliver, Keith Sinclair (who remind us how often historians are poets), W. Hart Smith, Kendrick Smithyman, Charles Spear, Ruth Dallas, Fleur Adcock, Alistair Campbell, C. K. Stead, Pat Wilson, M. K. Joseph, and more recently Alan Roddick, Peter Bland, and Stuart Slater – is somewhat bewildering evidence of the widespread competence in poetry of those who have inherited the domains pioneered by Mason, Fairburn, Glover, Curnow, and Ursula Bethell (who have most influenced the practice of others). Some 10 years ago the present writer in a broadcast committed himself to the judgment that New Zealand was passing through a poetic golden age without realising it. He does not see any reason to modify this statement, as unfortunately these poets have not yet been accorded a degree of recognition which would show an awareness of their quality.

The only modern Maori poet, Hone Tuwhare, writes in English. Barry Mitcalfe, known also as a short-story writer, has made some interesting translations of traditional Maori poetry.

State Patronage

It is mentioned elsewhere how certain periodicals, the New Zealand Listener and Landfall pre-eminently, with the assistance of intermittently appearing “little” magazines, provide rallying points for groups of New Zealand writers. While the number of journals which print original verse or prose is limited, there is some ground for thinking that little work of merit remains unpublished. The Literary Fund Advisory Committee, disposing of about £3,000 annually provided by the Government, has subsidised the publication of commercially unviable work of quality and has also made sustaining grants to writers to free them to continue their work. The scale of this assistance is too meagre to inhibit self-reliance. Indeed, the writer in New Zealand faces very great material difficulties because of the small market for his work, unless he is lucky enough to find publication in England or America. Some Government agencies, such as the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education, have a good record in commissioning work by local writers, and the Broadcasting Service is a valuable patron. Direct State patronage is perhaps less valuable as a stimulus than public appreciation. It cannot be claimed that New Zealand writers have yet built up a climate of opinion favourable to local work in the minds of the public at large such as exists, albeit in a rather naive form at times, in Australia. But even uncritical acceptance would benefit writers more than the indifference of many New Zealanders to the merits of a literature whose variety and vigour they have never attempted to explore.

by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).

• New Zealand Literature, McCormick, E. H. (1959)
• A Treasury of New Zealand Verse (jt. ed.) Alexander, W. F., and Currie, A. E. (1926)
• A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–50, Curnow, A. (1951)
• An Anthology of New Zealand Verse (jt. ed.), Chapman, R., and Bennett, J. (1956)
• New Zealand Short Stories (ed.), Davin, D. (1953)
• New Zealand Verse (ed.), Curnow, A. (1960)
• A Survey of the Arts in New Zealand, Simpson, E. C. (1961).