THE BACKGROUND

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21354, 22 December 1934, Page 17

THE BACKGROUND

THE NOVELIST'S PROBLEM (SPECIALLY -WRITTEN FOB THE PRESS.) [By NGAIO MARSH] Miss Jane Manders articles on the New Zealand novel come in good season. If she writes with all the exasperation of one who has been baulked of an interesting rendezvous, yet her exasperation is not amiss. One is reminded of the treatment that is occasionally given to new-born babies who have difficulty in breathing. The infant is seized upon by mid-wife and accoucheur, violently swung to and fro, submitted to scientific buffetting, tossed up and down, and knowledgably slapped until it draws breath and takes life. Miss Mander's energy tempts one to liken her to a sort of literary mid-wife and to hope that the inert infant may respond with a lusty howl. It is when she deals with the technical problems of the New Zealand novel that I find her most enthralling. Among many others I have tried to write such a novel and have at once found myself confronted by difficulties as great as they are hard to define. Miss Mander has defined them and anything that I may add will be no more than a footnote to her articles.

When a painter in oils attempts composition he must paint his background at the same time as the figures that are to come out in front of it. Wherever the background touches the figure, both must be wet. It is quite hopeless to complete a background and then, on a dry surface, impose the figures. The result of such a method would be an uncomfortable and arid dissonance. Such, I believe, is the problem of the New Zealand novel. It is a problem of background. There can be no help at all in the construction of a careful mise en scene, overloaded with local colour, unless the characters grow out of it and live in front of it. Even then they may be embarrassed and made foolish by their surroundings.

Unadapted I In writing of his own country the [ New Zealander is at once too complacent and too self-conscious. He ■ pitchforks sheep and Maoris into his composition as indiscreetly as producers of melodrama used to pitchfork livestock on to the stage, to the confusion of the piece and the embarrassment of the actors. It seems to me that in this country we do not yet grow out of our surroundings. Perhaps this is because we have had, as Miss Mander points out, a relatively easy colonisation. We are transplanted English. We move across the surface of this country, we superimpose our racial habit upon a dry background. We have no national architecture. Our houses are English houses adapted unwillingly to the exigencies of the climate. We have no national school of painting. Our painters follow one or another of the European methods. This is reasonable enough. It is no good trying to force an individual art or to reconcile things that are, at the moment, irreconcilable. Is this situation matter in itself for a novel, "No Background?" In England, perhaps a little under the influence of nostalgia, I began to think so. I wrote the opening chapters of a novel in a New Zealand setting. For a time it seemed to me that background and figures worked well together, the one growing up out of the other without too much insistence on either. Then, after an interval, I read what I had written and at once realised that it would not do. Already I had lost my first intention and was steaming off busily down the well-worn rails of the colonial novel. I had merely changed the landscape and might as well have sent my characters to Canada or Jericho. Gone was the idea which was to have been the whole matter of my book. I turned, more successfuly, to crime fiction.

How the Landscape May Live Evidently I had tried the wrong method of approach. One must choose, consciously or unconsciously, a definite method of approach. "Fool," said Sir Philip Sidney's muse, "look in thy heart and write." But she was not above directing his attention to Petrarch and Ronsard. Miss Mander directs our attention to E. M. Forster, Henry Handel Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, and others. Each august name is another of those slaps and swoops by which she hopes to make the flaccid infant draw in a lungful of wholesome air. Excellent advice, for certainly it is no good to look in one's own heart and write bad prose! I believe that it only by the practice of a most stringent austerity in style that we have any hope of achievement. It also seems to me that the landscape can be feU only through the spiritual and mental experiences of human beings. If these are realised it may be that the shapes of mountains and rivers will appear, not as so many theatrical properties, but inevitably, so that the story could have unfolded in no other setting.

Miss Mander ends with a fine arraignment of the people of this country; their indifference to aesthetic achievement, their complacency, I their stupidity. ("Isn't it extraordinary, the mother takes no interest in baby?") It is all quite true, and that 'tis true, 'tis pity, but it will not stop peculiar people trying to write. Lack of aesthetic sympathy, though to be sure it flourishes here, loathsomely enough, is not peculiar to New Zealand. Nor is lunacy, though Miss Mander's prognostications are alarming. Even if there is madness in the family, the child may yet thrive if Miss Mander can shake a gulp or two of air into its lungs.