NEW ZEALAND NOVELS

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST

ENVIRONMENT tsrzn/u.i.r TRrTTEK tor tub rasas.) [ By J.WE M AVDER] 11. We come, last, to the lack of firstclass literary fiction in New Zealand. May we hope soon to have writers who can challenge in thought and style the best English ones of this century? I don't despise the past: but there is a generally accepted theory that the greatest art is produced by those who best express the conditions and aspirations of their own time. There is plenty of evidence, certainly, that many young English writers are influenced in style by Jane Austen, or Meredith, or older masters of English prose. But it would be as well, I think, for our writers to remember, since most artists naturally wish for recognition in their own lifetime, that nowadays they have to compete with brilliant modern writers, to supply the demands of strenuously competing modern publishers, to please an ever-enlarging public of exacting readers, and to attract the notice of overworked reviewers. Equipment To judge by most of the work that has been sent in to me for criticism, work intended hopefully to see the light, in London, our writers have not the faintest notion of the stand-a-1 now set there for good fiction. The first obstacle in the way of better novels here is the lack of mental equipment in our writers. It is not essentia! for a good writer to know everything and travel everywhere. It would be foolish to say that no great book can be written nowadays without the surprising versatility shown bv many English writers. The great New Zealand novel may yet be written by someone who has never left a bush settlement. But even so, it is as well to remember that our best book must stand some comparison with the work of John Galsworthy, which shows a rich background of travel and a wide knowledge of men and things; with the work of Maurice Baring, a connoisseur of philosophies, literatures, and languages; with the work of Charles Morgan; with the books of E. M. Forster. one of the most luminous prose writers of our time; with the Australian saga of Henry Handel Richardson, quite the most erudite woman writer I have met, and one who adds a professional knowledge of music to a prodigious mental equipment: with the books of Virginia Wolfe, Dorothy Richardson, Viola Sackville-West, and similar fine stylists who have all the advantages of university education, travel, and contact with cosmopolitan interests.

To overcome the ramparts of such contemporaries as these our "best" writer would have to have an equal gift for writing and imaginative insight out of the ordinary. And in these days another arrow in th" quiver must be a knowledge of psychology. This does not necessarily mean a study of Freud and Jung, or visits to charlatan psychologists. Heaven preserve this country from the nauseating revelationmongers of other places! There has recently, as everyone knows, been a surfeit of "frankness," a reaction against the hypocritical mawkishness of last century. But such frankness has hardly impinged upon New Zealand fiction. Our writers still proceed on the theory that we are some special sort of race that never has an indecent thought; and our insides might be made of plaster of paris for all the notice that is taken of them. And yet we all know that our insides have a'tremendous effect on our thoughts, our motives and our actions, our struggles, our achievements, and our failures. It is the everlasting battle between the mind and the body that makes great drama. I am not suggesting that we try to imitate D. H. Lawrence; but great writers see the dsrkr.ess in life as well as the light. The " Odd " Artist Besides the personal limitations just mentioned, our potential firstclass writers would be seriously handicapped by the parochialism, probably of their families and certainly of their environment. The famiiy obstruction is not peculiar to this land. It would almost, seem that there was a law in the universe about giving great talent and genius to one member of a family whose other members were bent upon destroying the gift by every means in their power. The history of the struggle of genius with its relatives is one long epic of suffering. The discipline any artist has to undergo for his work "is hard enough without hostility from, relatives, ii is true that the artist is a difficulty in any ordinary family, especially if it is a poor one. His desire for aloneness is queer. His moods are queer. His earnestness is queer. His frequent refusal to take- a "job" is more than queer. He "wastes his time" (that most untrue of all accusations against the dreamer who will one day make his dreams come true). This is the worst sin of all in any bustling household, and reaches its depths of infamy in pioneering countries, where more than elsewhere well defined males and hearty females are required for "practical" life. Persecution is the result. The layman will never understand that the writer is more sensitive than ordinary man, that his imagination creates a new world of terrors as well as of delights, that he needs more desperately than other People an atmosphere of sympathy. The layman will never understand the deadly seriousness of the artist, nor why he is willing tp starve for his mysterious urge, which is his life. The lover of beauty and the commercially minded have no point of contact at all. Now in other countries the Arnold Bennetts and the Jacob Wassermanns can escape from families and narrow environments and get to Meccas like London or Berlin. But in this country what hope has the penniless writer, his gifts unsaleable here, to get the Peace and leisure necessary for this development? Not only is his own family against him, but the collective indifference of the country is against him. ; Stupidity Street There is isolated interest in good work of any kind in this country; but it is little more than a glimmer °f light, with no shrine as a rallying Point. The country as a whole has no flicker of concern for its artists. There is no help for them save by an

occasional impulse of patronage on the part of some kindly person, often more kindly than art-loving. For people who deviate from the herd mentality there is no escape within New Zealand, no centre where they may be spiritually free. Writers are lucky to know one house in which there is a fearless speculation about life. Unfortunately the one who needs it most seldom has access to such a house. Is it any wonder that such pioneers as we have flee at the first opportunity to London where thought is as free as air? But if the exodus goes on we shall become, in an even greater degree than we are now, one of the backward peoples of the earth. The community does not realise that great writing is produced by men who are above the prejudices of the mob, but that, curiously enough, while thus mentally and spiritually detached, the artist is at the same time cruelly at the mercy of the prejudices of the herd, and that in a place so isolated as this he is slowly murdered by stupidity and unkindness. Progress? Besides kindness and material benefits (which for the struggling writer seem invariably to be reduced to the minimum possible for mere existence) ideas are needed for the fructifying of any power, and particularly for that of literary talent. What sort of collective stimulus does this country offer to its potential creative workers? What ideas are associated with the name of New Zealand to-day? Twenty years ago when I first went to New York to Columbia University I was astonished to find myself regarded as an "event of importance," the first New Zealander to enter there as a student. I was an "object of inspiratidn," and was subjected to exhaustive questioning because of the excitement over what my country "stood for." We were then leaders ' in social legislation! We were highminded about the value of human life! We were socialism without bloodshed! We were Utopia materialised! Yes, all that. A positively exciting country! And its glory reflected itself on me, and I became a university pet, and even the entrance rules were amended to meet my "case," such was the enthusiasm. And now? It would be an optimist indeed who associated our name with leadership in social legislation today, with leadership in any valuable cause. As a matter of fact we have for the rest of the world to-day no ideas worth a tinker's cuss. We are afraid of new ideas. We forbid our citizens to go to countries that specialise in new ideas. We have, mentally and spiritually, I repeat in all seriousness, become one of the backward peoples of the earth. Nobody expects anything wonderful from us any more. What do they say of us in England now? Long before I came out men in places diplomatic and otherwise responsible were saying to me, "What has come over your country? When your women come here the only thing they can think about is being presented at Court, and all your men can talk about is the price of wool and butter and the scores of the All Blacks." Even Mr Fred Doidge, whom nobody can accuse of being a soft sentimentalist, deplored to me that he was sick of hearing the New Zealand wails about wool and butter in England that has suffered a hundred times more since the war than we have, and has not said one-tenth as much about it. In j a terribly worried family of nations. ) with ideas battling for life against j national disruptions, with beauty | fighting a gigantic war with ugli-j ness, with courage required as never before in the history of the world, j all that we, the most-favoured country in the world, can do is to thrust our silly little wails and snobbishnesses in the world's distracted face. The Dictatorship What a temper, this, for the inspiration of first-class fiction! What an atmosphere for the encouragement of the writers, and artists whose work may one day be the only evidence to the outside world that our people ever existed! War in the past has destroyed man's material handiwork, and is more likely than ever to sweep it to ruin in the future. But ideas it cannot destroy. The love of beauty in Greece has become a reality more powerful than its wrecked Acropolis. Ideas have a way of evading bombardments, drifting above gas attacks, escaping from prisons. And strange as it may seem to our parochial and complacent average citizen, the rest of the world cares more about ideas j than ever it did, and it is we who lag far behind with nothing worth listening to. The mumbo-jumbo of the herd still prescribes what most of our people shall think. We have flourishing in this country all the old hangovers of intolerance, narrow respectability, fear of criticism, lack of moral courage; and, in spite of recent able and heroic efforts on behalf of freedom of speech, we really have no spiritual freedom worth the name. We have the comedy-tragedy spectacle of self-constituted critics with no knowledge who far too frequently affect opinion. There is a certain type of female in particular, who, simply because she has brought up a family of children, arrogates to herself the right to define goodness and badness in art for the community. To sell a story about this country in this country the author must conform to the conventions in the mind of this class of person. How can we expect to develop an artistic consciousness where there is this confusion?

Anyone who has travelled about Europe knows that there is no such parallel stupidity there. Nothing lias more astonished the modern observer than the vitality of the renaissance in art throughout Europe since the war. There is not a country without some local expression of the beautiful, and this in spite of mass production everywhere. Indeed, it may be interpreted as a gesture of defiance to that monster of ugliness. At any rate, there is a continual stirring of the dry bones in this matter of beauty versus ugliness. Even the government of that pariah, Russia, has preserved intact its Moscow Art Theatre, its Mariansky theatre (the school of the Russian ballet), has erected huge studio buildings for its poor artists, and is allowing such books as And Quiet Flows the Don" to be freely circulated. Would a book similarly truthful and frank about this country be allowed free passage through its libraries? Hunger To starve the sense of beauty on any wide scale in any country is to invite a whole crop of mental disorders. Already we have in this country an amount of adult insanity that staggers visitors to our shores. It is not at all puzzling to the psychologist who knows the deadly results of the psychic starvation induced by the small town mind. Financial worry is not by any means the main cause of this insanity In comparison with places on the other side of the world this country does not know what war strain is, nor what destitution is.

The war only temporarily touched this country, and a little physical hunger won't do us much harm. They have perennial hunger in many places in England. But spiritual hunger is worse for the mind than physical hunger for the body. Starve people of ideas and you will produce mental disruption. If this country doesn't mind it will soon be known as the place where more adults g'j mad than in any other place in the world, and we may achieve a new publicity as the world's greatest madhouse. This is not a joke. There is more to escape from, spiritually speaking, in this country than in any place I have lived in.

Hero indeed is a subject for outpotential great novelist. The effect of this psychic starvation upon a sensitive and beautiful mind could be shown so vividly that a body of effective people might arise to do something about it. A new literature of escape should flourish here, or some D. H. Lawrence arise to write savagely of our mediocrity. One looks in vain for any collective aid for the genuine artist. Beyond the purchasing of a picture now and then by one of our galleries there is no municipal help I know of for any creative worker. Tt is acknowledged elsewhere that we have respectable verse makers, even poets of degree, but so far as I can find out, they are nearly all starving, or reduced to the most absurd jcibs. While the All Blacks cavort' about the world our artists live in obscurity and dangerous proximity to hunger. The Government votes pleasant bonuses to spectacular air exploits (I am not trying to depreciate the value of nerve and genius in the air. They thrill me as much as nerve and genius do anywhere); but an exploit in art excites no one. The Heal Slump The claim that we are a very young country, that we have not had time to develop the taste of olderlands, can be repeated ad nauseam. The truth is that we have never had the desperate pioneering conditions of other countries. We had to deal with the easiest native race known to history. We did not have to shudder at the roar of the lion by night nor the sting of the laran--lu!a by day. We did not wake to find snakes on our chests, nor have to struggle for sleep in a mngle cacophony. Save in the extreme south our climatic conditions have been better than those of any colony for centuries; and never at any time, even in the south, has Natural Deviltry had the force of that in Canada. Once bushfelling was over, our labour on the land has never amounted to the labour of an English farm through all the seasons. In fact, our pioneering difficulties would make an Australian or a South African or an American grin. It is high time we stopped making them an excuse for lack of taste. Moreover, we are backsliders of the worst kind. We were started off by an idealistic band of educated Englishmen who nursed us with fine traditions and with protests against the stupidities of older countries. We have betrayed the trust they left us, and generation accepting trie worst junk in material and spiritual things that could be imported from unscrupulous people who were thrilled to exploit us. And so to-day when we ask what we mean to the rest of the world the answer seems to be that we are a convenient dump heap. And when, we ask what art it is that rouses enthusiasm in this country the answer seems to be that for women it is cake-making, and for men chest development. And if that be true of us then aesthetically we (Concluded.) i