N.Z. LITERATURE and schools

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25092, 25 January 1947, Page 9

N.Z. LITERATURE and schools

Limited Claims On Attention “ FALSITY IN CRITICAL ATTITUDES ” “We do tend, I think, to regard ourselves as the helpless victims in cultural matters, of our colonial origins relatively isolated Situation,” said Mr Allen Curnow in a lecture on New Zealand literature to South Island post-primary school teachers who are attending a refresher course in Training College. . . A“ IS . leads to two extremes of Wlfity m our critical attitudes,” he said. Either everything written here is condemned at the start, or else everything is forgiven and exempted from the normal rigours of literary criticism. On the one hand, a general contempt or mistrust of our own writers may blind us to real merit in its rare occurrences. On the other hand, indulgence and tolerance have too often led to the publicising and encouraging of the flimsiest and most miserable productions.

At the root of these contradictory attitudes lies the one worm of our inferiority feeling—that in our circumscribed situation we are at a disadvantage; that we are in fact an inferior order of human being. The man who brags about God’s Own Country and is inclined to jeer at foreigners tells you the next moment that we don’t know we are alive in this country. “We must indeed learn to recognise and accept fully those inescapable limitations—our insignificant history, our remote geography—but to face them and deal with them standing up, in the poise and at the stature of men, wherever they may be on earth,” Mr Curnow said. “It is not necessary to advertise ourselves as giants for fear we may be taken for dwarfs, or to crawl on hands and knees for fear of looking absurd if we stood erect. We would be less conceited if we had a better conceit of ourselves—and we would have more humility if we humbled ourselves less.” “Lost Contact with Sources” The New Zealand writer was no longer to-day, like the pioneer New Zealand writer, simply “an Englishman in a special situation.” Through the greater part of New Zealand’s first'century, he said, “by some Gresham’s Law of literature, bad writing tended to drive out good. By diluting our standards for the. encouragement of what was felt to be a native art, we lost fruitful contact with our great sources in English and European literature.

“Perhaps we should praise our early writers lor doing so much, not blame them for doing so little. Great writing, great art of any kind, seldom springs immediately from the great experience or the unusual situation. New Zealand’s pioneer experience has only in the last 20 or 30 years begun to find expression in prose and poetry of intrinsic merit. It penetrates subtly the strangely stilled- world of Katherine Mansfield—strangely near to us, yet strangely remote, as she is.”

Mr Curnow insisted that it was of first importance to the fostering of literature in New Zealand, “to broaden and deepen the streams of European, English, and classical influence upon New Zealand writers and readers. ’ He doubted if much was to be gained by the formal introduction of New Zealand literature into a school syllabus. "Even if it were done at the expense of some so-called social study,” he" said, “it is arguable that if any extra time is to be borrowed it would be spent more to our advantage upon a more lively and informal introduction to English literature. “A boy or girl who has not had a satisfactory introduction to the worlds at least of Shakespearfc, of the great Romantics, of Pope and Blake and Tennyson, is unlikely to make a New Zealand poet or a reader for a New Zealand poet. A pupil not set in the way of a just appreciation of Fielding of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky, is unlikely to give\us a New Zealand novel that will last, or to be part of an audience for such a novel." Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield had succeeded in finding a method and an idiom, in her stories which touched the imagination of England, and of Europe, he said, “because she learned to choose out of her New Zealand memories those universal elements which belong to the memory of all mankind.” He contrasted her account of a child’s journey from .Wellington to Picton with other such journeys in English fiction. In the latter, "the dominant anxiety is how to deal with the people one meets—will they be helpful or dangerous, dull or interesting?” Katherine Mansfield's “voyage” contained few people—the grandmother, the man with the rope, the man with the cart. "It is like a ritual,” he said, “in which every detail must be observed with extreme care, or else the fragile images of traditional living and manners will crumble and dissolve into the awful pale sky, the silent bush and fern, the indifferently slumbering sea." Attention in Schools

Mr Curnow suggested that the imaginations of children might be heightened by the introduction into English, or history, or geography studies, of "an occasional New Zealand poem, story, or portion of a story,” particularly those in which place names were used naturally and effectively. He quoted poems by R. A. K. Mason, Denis Glover, and A. R. D. Fairburn. Whatever attention was given to New Zealand writing, it was necessary that* the same critical standards should apply as to the selection of all English writings for study. This did not mean that advantage should not be taken of our special understanding of New Zealand writing. “A poem or a story may be important for us. and for generations of New Zealanders to come, precisely for some special quality which we would hardly expect an English or American—even an Australian—reader to discern.”

There was one argument, which might be decisive, for at least some special attention to New Zealand literature in schools, in spite of the primary necessity for English and other literary studies. “Our English studies are handicapped at the start,” Mr Curnow said, "by the obvious circumstance that much of our best and most necessary school reading deals with English or other overseas scenes, places, and histories.

Literature and Life “We study little or no literature in which the New Zealand boy or girl can appreciate directly the truth that literature is life, by recognising their own country and people in what they read. It may be answered that there is little or no such literature; but there is a little, and attention to it might check the tendency of our English teaching to be all literature and very little life. A novel easily becomes a means of self-deception rather than self-examination, and a poem an ornament rather than a thing for spiritual use.” If certain selected New Zealand writings were made known to pupils, it might be the means to a change vitally affecting the whole range of their reading. Mr Curnow urged teachers to see that pupils showing creative promise were not permitted to lapse into a “hole and corner” existence among the more normal school activities. He wondered if it were realised sufficiently at how early an age such gifts sometimes began to show themselves and to demand exercise.