Literary Fund Member Will Not Be Replaced

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30426, 28 April 1964, Page 3

Literary Fund Member Will Not Be Replaced

(From Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, April 27. Dr. Margaret Dalziel, reader in English at the University of Otago, who has resigned from the State Literary Fund advisory committee over incidents connected with the committee’s refusal to subsidise the 1964 New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, will not be replaced on the committee.

It is probable that when the terms of the remaining members run out, the work of the committee will lie taken over by a subcommittee of the n e w 1 y - constituted Queen Elizabeth II Arts Advisory Council.

The committee was appointed for a three-year term in August, 1961, so that the remaining five members have only three months to serve. They are Professors L A. Gordon, J. C. Garrett and E. M. Blaiklock, and Messrs J. K. Baxter and M. H. Holcroft: “We are all in the final months of our term,” said the chairman (Professor Gordon) this afternoon. “In normal circumstances a new committee is due for appointment: and although none of us has had any communication to that effect I believe the new committee may well be set up under the Arts Council.”

Dr. Dalziel’s resignation came after an editorial in the “New Zealand Listener,” written by its editor, Mr Holcroft.

The editorial made references to the Poetry Yearbook

and its editor (Mr Louis' Johnson) which drew letters of protest from many of New Zealand's leading literary figures. REASON GIVEN Dr. Dalziel has said she resigned because she would not be associated with the kind of attack made in the “Listener” by a person who was a member of the committee .“but who used his position as editor of the ‘Listener’ to take up a matter which was entirely a business matter for the committee.” The committee refused to subsidise the Poetry Yearbook because it contained sixpoems .which the committee decided were an offence against taste. The Poetry Yearbook will be published without subsidy within a fortnight by Pegasus Press, Christchurch.

“It would not be published at all if Mr Albion Wright had not said he was prepared to cany on regardless of subsidy,” Mr James K. Baxter said tonight. “We owe him a very great deal indeed.”

Asked about his own position on the committee, Mr Baxter, who is author of three of the poems objected to by the committee, said he

had considered resigning also, but had decided to stay on the condition that he had complete freedom to speak and write. “It has been a difficult position,” he said. “My view has been that, as the representative of the P.E.N. dub, my duty was to stay on—and indeed to argue and if necessary to quarrel with any opinion expressed thereon which ran counter to our views and beliefs.” PRINCIPLE OF CHOICE The “Listener” editorial said that Mr Johnson, as editor of the Yearbook, should have known what principles must govern the choice of material.

It said six poems were “bad poems” for other reasons than that of bad taste. Replying in the “Listener,” Mr Johnson claimed that Mr Holcroft had abused his public position “by spending public money and resources on a largely personal attack.” He also charged the committee with unfair discrimination.

Professor Gordon tonight confirmed that several years ago the then Minister of External Affairs (Sir Leon Gotz) had told the committee it must tighten up some of its subsidised publications.

The committee had resisted this view, and the current situation was not connected with this incident. “It might well be that the committee might reject a poem interided for the Yearbook which it would accept in . the book of an individual author,” Professor Gordon said. “The Yearbook is used, for example, in schools.”