FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 115, 16 May 1936, Page 28

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

OF N.Z. LITERATURE

The deficiencies of New Zealand literature and its possible future development were subjects upon which Prq'essor W. A. Sewell expressed opinions vhen speaking recently in Auckland. "I do not think that Authors' Week really has very much effect on a'.cbun;ry like New Zealand if the nation it;elf is not interested in its own; litera;ure," he said. "The value of. tHe veek is that it is a sign "of considerible public interest in our own auth>rs." The lectures given and. ;the dis)lays of books have shown that many people did not know that there is juite. a considerable amount of literaure about New Zealand and'by New .JesJanders. I think also that one .tnay say that the week has directed people's minds to the sort of thing that migKt constitute a national Jiterature. For example, a national literature, as Mr. Shaw pointed out, is not merely made of indigenous elements like tea-tree and a kiwi. It is something that grows in relation to the political-development." He instanced the Afrikans literature in South Africa. . When it was fostered, he said, it was bad. Only now when it was self-critical and able to laugh at itself,, when it was not so militantly and- abstractly national, was .there being expressed the Dutch temper in South Africa. In New Zealand he did not know what the constituents would be. "We are handicapped by being dependent on England, and we find such echoes of English feeling and temper in the country and literature," he added. "It is possible that brie of the great values of the week will be, so'to speak, a declaration of Dominion status in the world of letters," One did miss in New Zealand literature, the literature 'of rebellion, the Professor added. It very rarely trespassed beyond the genteel, notable exceptions being J. A. Lee's "Children of the Poor," and D'Arcy Cresswell's "Recent.'Sonnets .on Christchurch." "No country, of course, can be said to. have a literature at all until it is rich in rebellion," he said, "and perhaps one of the points about Authors' Week was a .certain complacency in our own assessment of ourselves, and an absence of any comment on the relationship between the world of letters and the world of politics. "One of the differences between good literature and bad literature is the difference between first and second hand experience," he continued. "Most of our literature has been a little slavishly traditional, just like our painting. The things we feel most keenly at first hand, are, as a rule, the things we rebel against. National literature can only be produced, surely, when men write about something they have Keenly felt at a particular time and a particular place." There was not much in New Zealand literature which expressed ,any kind of vision of what New Zealand might be, arising out of such rebellion.■■•-. That had been remedied to some extent by young poets such as lan Milner, • Allen Curnow; J. C. Beaglehole, and A: R. D. Fairburn.