UNDERSTANDING OF MAORI LIFE

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33455, 9 February 1974, Page 7

UNDERSTANDING OF MAORI LIFE

Brown Man’s Burden and later stories. By Roderick Finlayson. Edited by Bill Pearson. Auckland University Press, with Oxford University Press. 147 pp. Glossary, notes, bibliography. (Reviewed by H.D.McN.) I he more New Zealand’s literary past is probed, the more one becomes aware of the remarkable talents that appeared between the wars and whose achievement has been allowed to fade subsequently. For many years, the general reader who does not want to fossick round in library stacks has encountered the work of Roderick Finlayson only as he is occasionally represented in short story anthologies; it seems incredible that a collection of his Maori stories has not been published until now, but the quality of its presentation in the New Zealand Fiction series and of Bill Pearson’s editing compensates to a degree for the long wait. Pearson’s introductory account of Finlayson’s life comes remarkably close to the career of Frank Sargeson in many respects: early professional training which was not pursued, an uncle’s farm offering a refuge to the voung man, unemployment during the Depression (Finlayson did not get another steady job until 1957), and a lot of mixing with social under-dogs wno were to provide material for stories. Stylistically, there are parallels, too. Both writers were '’discovered” by “Tomorrow” in the thirties, and, especially in their early period, they both managed to couple "a resonance of ideas with a very lean style. Finlayson actually acknowledges that his first real literary model was the Sicilian Giovanni Verga, whom D. H. Lawrence translated in 1928, and Pearson develops the parallels well.

But this was a general style which was fairly much in vogue in the twenties, and one imagines that Finlayson could just as easily have found his stimulation in a number of other writers — like the Russian Isaac Babel, for instance. So it would probably be wrong to over-estimate Finlayson’s dependence on Verga, or to postulate anything more than recognition of sympathy in Sargeson. However, once one gets down to details of their technique, some radical differences appear: whereas Sargeson seems very much the professional “writer”, Finlayson appears rather as a highly-talented story-teller. Sargeson moulds every word into something so tight that it sometimes verges on poetry, but Finlayson settles for the relaxation and informality of a raconteur who is living the story as he tells it. This last observation seems to explain a lot about Finlayson’s work, his changes of direction, and the irregularity of his output. “Brown Man’s Burden” was Finlayson’s first book, published in 1938, and all but one of its stories are included here; three related tales have now been very satisfactorily grouped together under the title of “Hemi’s Daughter”. As one rereads these early stories, one is again struck by the depth at which Finlayson understood Maori life, and his amazing skill at evoking its humour and absurdity without in any way detracting from the reader’s respectful appreciation of it; the early Finlayson was a master at understanding the comedy of Maori life without ever seeming to patronise it. Stories like “The Totara Tree”, “A Man of Good Religion”, “Hemi’s Daughter”, and “Wi Gets the Gospel” are masterpieces. “Sweet Beulah Land” (1942) marked Finlayson's maturity, and its five Maori stories are included here, as well as three “Bulletin” stories of

about the same period and an autonomous chapter from the novel “Tidal Creek” (1948). The previously uncollected “Bulletin” stories are splendid comedy; “Johnny Wairua’s Wonderland” is about an attempt to turn a back-yard mud-hole previously used as a rubbish dump into a thermal wonder for the tourists, and “Like the Pakeha” is also about keeping up with the white commercial world, this time as a “registered Maori interpreter”. But with “Sweet Beulah Land”, Finlayson’s vision of Maori life becomes more sombre. The irony of the title infiltrates most of the stories, the tribal relationship is fragmented, and the theme of dispossession is always latent. Land sales, the corruption of city life, and working in Chinese market gardens ar- central subjects, and the humorous vitality of the early stories is grimly absent.

In the most recent stories, one of which first appeared only last year, the grimness turns into despair, and the switch to first-person narration seems a last-ditch attempt at salvage. There is a kind of tragic completeness after the “Sweet Beulah Land” Maori stories, and continuing to grapple writh the same material in the last three stories is literary masochism — Finlayson has out-lived his stimulation. However, Finlayson’s determined commitment to his subject area in these last stories does reinforce the impact of the earlier work: the Brown Man's Burden was a literary vocation for Finlayson, and his treatment of it will remain one of the valuable classics in our literature.