NEW ZEALAND WRITERS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 54, 1 September 1923, Page 19

NEW ZEALAND WRITERS

CRITICISMS OF THEIR WORK

COMMENTS IN THE "LONDON

MERCURY."

" " The London Mercury " publishes " A Letter from New Zealand," written from Auckland by Mr. Alan E. Mulgan, his subject being writers and publishers.

Headers are told that publishing is a restricted industry in the Dominion, because it has had to struggle with three adverse factors: "The gmallness of the population, the cheapness of production in Britain and America, and the lack of' interest among New Zealanders in books written about New Zealand. The average reader of fiction—and in New Zealand, as elsewhere, books to niost people mean novels—prefers a, etcry about London or Devonshire, or Wyoming or Ruritania, to one about Auckland or Wellington, or the sbeep on a hundred hills at the back, of the Canterbury Plains. ,Ho would probably explain to you that he is not particularly interested in a novelist's conception of the life that he sees about him, a life that seldom strikes him as romantic in any sense of the term. He is rather like the Londoner "who refused certain refreshment on the ground that he worked where it was made."

Some spaces is devoted to the books brought out by Messrs. Whitcombe and Tombs, and to their authors. A recent undertaking of the firm has been the publication for the .Government of the official history of New Zealand's^ part in the Great War, and the first editions of the various volumes have been issued, thanks to a State subsidy, at below'cost price, so that the books may be within reach of many who fought in the war and relatives of living and dead. The prices of war books in England make one wonder (says Mr. ' Mulgan) now many of those who fought, and those Who, mourned, can afford to possess copies. Eeference is' also made to the Government as a publisher, and to Mr. James Cowan as the historian of the New Zealand Wars.

Mr. Mulgan considers that in the field of imaginative literature the prospects of the aspirants are very dim. " The amount of fiction published in New Zealand is negligible, and the owner of a bulky manuscript is .separated by the width of a world from the English publisher. Besides, this is, a small and remote Dominion, and London can hardly be blamed if it doubts the probability of a story of New Zealand life appealing to the British public. Distance, indeed, is. a most serious obstacle to a New Zealander's success in either journalism or literature in England. The Writer is too far away to grasp the skirts of passing events." ■ . ■ i:

Among New Zealand writers who have successfully wooed fortune in London, mention is made of the late H. B. Mar-riott-Watson, Katherine Mansfield, whose descriptive "Attlie Bay" is unforgettable ; . William, SAchell, , Arthur Adams, "G. B. Lancaster," Mrs. E. Searle Grossmann, and Miss • Jane Mander. " Intellectually Mrs. Grossmann stands first among Now Zealand novelists." Miss Mander's "The Story of a New Zealand River " contains some excellent writing. "Mies Mander's chief fault is -her obsession with sex; a little more reticenco would do her no harm. Her second book, ' The Passionate Puritan," is so inferior, to her first that one loolis!forward to her,, third with a little anxiety." ; : .

To' Mr. Mulgan " it is not surprising that New Zealand novelists should be preoccupied with country: life, and that they should write long descriptions of scenery. Indeed, one suspects that the extraordinary loveliness and variety of the New Zealand landscape lures, the novelist away from the sterner and'more difficult tasks of narrative and character drawing. The-New Zealand novel is deficient in humour. The town life .of New Zealand and the comedy of colonial manners await exploitation. . . . The gold diggings" in Westland, to which thousands of men rushed to win wealth from a region of heavy bush and swift rivers between snow-clad Alpi and open ocean, contained a rich store of that romance that made Bret Harte famous The heyday of the West Coast .however is now many years distant, and jio Bret .Hart has arisen to do justice to its stoiy."