"Short-comings" In N.Z. Literature

Press, Volume C, Issue 29635, 4 October 1961, Page 17

"Short-comings" In N.Z. Literature

"The Press” Special Service

WELLINGTON, Oct. 3. New Zealand suffered from having a literary “academy” which has led readers, writers themselves, university lecturers and their students, up a garden path and a blind alley for.too long, said Louis Johnson, a writer and critic, at a literary school run by the Regional Council of Adult Education in Waipawa. This, he said, had created a hardened, minor realist tradition in New Zealand fiction and in poetry a narrow, localised outlook in an endeavour to get an indigenous literary tradition. This may not have been noticed but for the emergence of new styles jn writing, which showed that the realist tradition was not the only way a New Zealand writer could approach his subject. Sylvia Ashton - Warner, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame, Maurice Shadbolt and lan Cross were quoted as writers who, in various degrees, were trying to extend the New Zealand view of literature. Mr Johnson said

'he realist and naturalist approach had become accepted as our “official” art line and threatened to hamper development. “It has assumed the proportions of a New Zealand academy, has been given the accolade in high places, praised by professors and propped up by grants and awards that kept the whole thing solvent.” He described a recent lowpriced anthology of New Zealand verse published in England as presenting a bucolic, country-boy view of New Zealand writing so distorted in its factual record as to almost be something of a hoax. The recent announcement that the Arts Council would, in future, not give grants to organisations, but would commission works, was a further step toward cultural dictatorship.

"A committee will now not merely decide which groups to assist. It will .decide which works those groups shall perform—in theatre and music one presumes—and thereby take it upon itself to decide what we shall see.

“Only Russia, that I can think of, takes such a dogmatic official view of the arts,” said Mr Johnson.