A. R. D. FAIRBURN

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25306, 4 October 1947, Page 7

A. R. D. FAIRBURN

A SKETCH IN ADVANCE OF A VISIT (Specially Written for “The Press.’’) [By ALLEN CURNOW.] r™»^;^ D o Fa ;, rburc ’ of Auckland, to TprM™ th . e .^ outh - Island this month edS™ at mvttation of the adult atop? centr ® s in Canterbury and dirt complacent or fulsome verNet v 9 1 2 r work as a ■ Zealand poet and critic need be i™Pbed—no verdict of any kind, ini, ,nsist tha t this visit is a consideraMe event. Nor is it a quesUrtL„ how l®any of Mr Fairburn’s move d to admiration. ???I wonder. The importance lies more thir^ e c ??t res recognition that some4 1 , may be gained through these contacts, at once nearer and more extensive, between a New Zealand writer and his audience. At the Y® r T. leas t it is repairing an omission ° n the part of the poet—“a New Zealander, of the fourth generation. My grandfather was born in New Zealand in the year 1827”—who has made the ocean crossings to Europe- but has never stepped over Cook Strait. It is not to be thought that a New Zealand writer need, in the cant see New Zealand first.” When Mr Fairburn went abroad for ■ ol ?nn n ye ? rs ~ he returned to Auckland in 1932—he had already seen New Zeart?’ ? y his birth and youth in one part of it; and some early poems had ncen printed in both islands. But once ne had returned, and once he had published his writer’s allegiance to his native country in his poem “Dominion”—the most interesting, and by “ s pa £ ts the finest long poem by a New Zealander—the relationship was v ei°Ped and defined. It was time for Mr Fairburn and his country to know each other better.

Poet and Audience No creative writer in New Zealand is. a conspicuous public figure. His numerically small audience, 9 nc ®.. be is known at all, is thinly spread over the whole country. There is no one centre of urban taste and intellect where an audience may be concentrated and serve tbe poet as microcosm of the whole; and any writer must gain by direct contacts outside the centre to which he is tied by sentiment or economic pressures. New Zealand is not so large and various a milieu, culturally, that his actual, physical acquaintance with can be limited without loss. And that does not qualify in the slightest the counter-truth that with some one region of it he needs the imaginative intimacy revealed, for example, in parts of Mr Fairburn’s poetry where the warmer and more

impulsive north may be read, whether in or more subtly between the lines: From the cliff-top it appeared a place of defeat, the nest of an extinct bird, or the hole where the sea hoards its bones, a pocket of night in the sun-faced rock, sole emblem of mystery and death in that enormous noon. We climbed down, and crossed over the sand, and there were islands floating in the wind-whipped blue and clouds and islands trembling in your eyes, and every footstep and every glance was a fatality felt and . unspoken, our way rigid and glorious as the sun’s path, unbroken as the genealogy of man. (There is a point of comparison between this verse and some recent poems by Miss Edith Sitwell, in the way symbols emerge from the large pictorial generalities, from which “a purpose breaks”; precision wrought out of imprecision.) In the act of selecting a quotation I am conscious once more of the difficulty of describing Mr Fairburn in terms of his work. Try to appraise him as a poet, and you find him slipping from your hands, a modestly elusive Proteus. He would rather be a satirical ballad-maker, a political lampoonist, a critic of New Zealand from any angle, moral, aesthetic, social. He is probably the only New Zealand writer who has adopted the newspaper correspondence columns as a medium, sometimes for leg-pulling satire, sometimes for serious contention. ‘‘Sir, my’daughter returned from school the other day with a tale that froze the very marrow of my bones and about which I am impelled to make the shrillest possible public protest . . .” So, in a recent letter to a Wellington paper, Mr Fairburn proceeded to argue, with chapter and verse from Scripture, that the earth was not roiind, but demonstrably flat. Not everyone perceived that this was his contribution to the current controversy about the teaching of evolution in schools. Variety

It is hardly profitable to wonder, now, what more distinctive development might- have taken place in Mr Fairburn’s poetry but for his humorous sociability and capricious appetite for controversy. On the side of humour and satire there has been considerable gain. Time has not yet taken the edge from “The Sky is a Limpet,” in which Mr Fairburn’s text and Mr R. W. Lowry’s typography combined to satirise the first raptures of Labour administration—“how nursery it is for the devilment of our sick and dreary industries to be putsched fordward, and we must bill the nation. Our local malefacturers must be incorriged, and we must do our boast to increase the voluble prediction of goods.” Like “Dominion,” this piece, or collection of pieces, is long out of print, and properly cherished by those who possess it. There is a more bitter flavour in the pieces printed recently with the broad rollicking ballad of “The Rakehelly Man” as title poem. But, as on some sudden impulse, Mr Fairburn followed these with another cartwheel, “How to Ride a Bicycle (In Seventeen Lovely Colours)”, which is also, perhaps predominantly, a typographical jeu d’esprit by Mr Lowry. Advance

Poetically, apart from an increasing directness of idiom and a purging of earlier more “literary” elements, Mr Fairburn’s development has shown no unusual turns or changes. Which is not to say that time and experience have done nothing to him. Indeed, to have , disciplined the romantic or ironic exuberance of his earlier verse to the . substantial directness of the best pasi sages of “Dominion” or of lyrics like “A Farewell” (“What is there left to be said?”) or. of “Well Known and Well Loved,” or the ironic surrealist glitter of “Full Fathom Five,” is sufficient achievement to answer any question about his progress as a poet. Mr Fairburn has written little verse in recent years. He mistrusts transcendental ideas about the poet’s function and is 'classicist in his repudiation of the poet as bard, prophet or saviour; though he has brooded in “Dominion” and elsewhere upon human destinies, personal or social. Similarly, his symbolism, the occasional profoundly intuitive use of images ("with a rainbow of silence branching from his lips”) stands opposite his lighter lyric or satiric line. Both qualities can be observed in his two short poems printed in the “Arts Year Book” of 1946, which are, incidentally, more finished verse than any by others he has chosen in editing this section of the “Year Book.” There has been no other New Zealand poet whose verse, over such a range of theme and form, displays such energy, sureness, and positive command—within whatever limits—of the lyric or ballad tradition; nor one who knows better the language he writes in. Yet his poetic output has not been large, and where some have lacked the powers to grasp their theme greatly, he appears to have lacked the theme fully to concentrate and test his powers. Among his more recent lyrics. “A Farewell” has most plainly the colour of that finer lyric metal which, discernible also in R. A. K. Mason, has made me confident in counting New Zealand luckier than Australia in its poets of this generation: What Is there left to be said? there is nothing we can say, nothing at all to be done to undo the time of day: no words to make the sun roll east, or raise the dead. I have commented that the achievement is sufficient. That means, of course, that it is enough to make it worth while to forget, in approaching the poet’s work, those melancholy and