THE NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22419, 4 June 1938, Page 18

THE NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORY

An Anthology Tales by New Zealanders. Edited by by C. R. Allen. British Authors’ Press. 27G pp. (7/6) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. [Reviewed by QUENTIN POPE)

This book, for all its badnesses, its hollow laughs, heroes whose faces harden, and heavy-handedness with the English tongue, is as bright a sign as has been written on the country’s literary horizon in the last generation. It is not that the stories here are outstanding in quality, or that they are even ambitious. Quite a number of them cannot fail, because they never attempt anything much. They are sketches, not stories. But in the pages of Mr Allen’s book, with its disarming title and unpretentious form, there are two qualities essential in any literature: what might be called, for lack of better phrases, reverence in approach and honesty of purpose. Only occasionally, in such stories’ as “Welcome Stranger,” and in the cocksureness of G. B; Lancaster’s native psychology, are there discordant notes. There are blunders of observation and of knowledge of behaviour. Miss Scanlan discovered snow about Balloon Pass on a sweltering day in midsummer. Mr von Keisenberg makes a country girl put on her gloves for a 10 minutes’ walk to a farm manager’s house. There are crudities. (God, what a brute the man was, reflects Miss Boswell; C. H. Fortune creates a character who is forever wincing and deciding that his friend has no soul; Mr von Keisenberg can tell us of “the intangible dislike that a good woman has for a certain type of man” and of “an indefinable feeling that defies analysis.”) But there is also a redeeming absorption in the native scene, a refusal to trade koromiko and flowering flax for non-native things. There are melodrama and cloying sentimentality, but also a realisation that the drama, the sentimentality, may surround New Zealand things. This, in light of recent developments, may not seem a long step down the road of letters. In point of fact it is as definite a sign of the rising sap of a native literature as one could discover. For it clearly indicates the awakening of an interest in the scene at home as a setting for events as significant as those taking place by Thameside—the realisation, in short, that New Zealanders are made of such stuff as their forbears and as well worth writing about. Literature Finds its Own Home There is, whether of deliberate intent or not, a remarkable absence of nostalgia about this book. The one story devoted to it (“Ultimate Achievement”) reaches the conclusion that a second generation looks at the matter with different eyes and revels in rugged hill and green bush more than in any tales of a trim little land from which its fathers and mothers came. There is, in fact, even the breath of cynicism. Mr Alan Mulgan, whose fate it is to be accused of being a lifelong prophet of England, seems to suggest that perhaps the enterprise of settlement was not worth all the trouble after all. We are, indeed, progressing, first discovering the stimulus which may produce our Whitman or Emerson, then detecting signs of an age of critical realism, of our Sinclair Lewis and Malcolm Cowley, before ever Whitman has piped a note. But meantime there is evident an abundant preoccupation with themselves on the part of a home-keeping people. Mr Allen himself is the only writer who allows his scene to shift far from New Zealand, and, curiously, after announcing an interesting theme, he shirks the full development of it, though perhaps the full development would take a book of the dimensions to suit a Sigrid Undset. A dozen influences are in curious rivalry in this Antipodean suite. There is D. H. Lawrence’s quiet insistence on the appearance of everyday things; there is Coppard’s sensitive attempt to penetrate behind surfaces; and at the other end of the scale there is the sprawling figure of the sixpenny magazine writer, with his lighting of pipes and facile sentiments and omniscience about women. But for the most part the authors speak with their own voice, in a medium which their honesty has given them some opportunity to master; for a simple, unaffected tale may, often challenge the creations of a master hand. It is so easy for a master hand to forget simplicity. And the themes which the authors have attacked are of the very stuff of national life. The land, the pattern of life in a tiny village, the blighted romance of an old clerk, the colour line, a socialist agitator in gaol, the strange web of Maori beliefs, the undying hatred of the New Zealander for the man who knows too much—they are not used

to the fullest advantage, perhaps, but the recognition of them is refreshing. And for the most part the stories make few concessions to the reader overseas. They are —and it is remarkable what a difference in general outline it makes—tales of New Zealand for New Zealanders. The purely local, well-understood things are not translated into other terms for the benefit of a people that knows not Mount Cook or the Canterbury Plains. Or one should say they are I most untranslated, for there are one or two exceptions, notably G. B. Lancaster. The Rivals On the whole, the men come out of it with the honours. For the stories of the women express a rarefied sensitiveness, a retreat from life which reaches its apogee in the sentimental nonsense of “The Tree, ’ with its shy, unworldly maiden and a great deal about keeping life clean and beautiful. The manner, with them, sometime overlies the matter, as in Dulcie Deamer’s plain, tale of an old grandmother who painfully sees a tragic situation repeating itself, a tale which is embellished, to its detriment, with a great deal about a sunset. Even Mary Gurney’s dramatic story of Old Mortality, who dies on his home hills, is overwritten. They might, all of them, take a hint from Gloria Rawlinson, whose accents give unmistakable evidence that she knows what she is writing about, and who has studied her Katharine Mansfield to some purpose. No man has contributed anything quite so bad as one or two of the women’s tales. But then the women are heavily in the majority. And it is the women, mostly, who show that they have discerned the material that lies in our already remote historic past, in white and brown chieftains and the carrying out of their pledged word. It is, in fact, an interesting book, even in its badnesses. There is a wide range of authors, some well known, and the subjects range from delusion to Edward Gibbon Wakefield. But it is not well arranged. The alphabetical order followed by Mr Allen has several defects. It throws together tales with a similar theme. The “Foreman of the Road Gang” and “Welcome, granger,” both of which deal with insanity, are neighbours; and so are two Maori tales, “The Story of Wi” and “The Slave’s Reward.” And it places too many stories by more practised hands late in the book.