NATIONAL CULTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1945, Page 6

NATIONAL CULTURE

U.S. AUTHOR'S VISIT

LECTURES'ARRANGED Dr. H. S. Canby, professor of English at Yale University, will speak at Victoria University College on "The Importance of National Culture." This will be the first of a series of lectures that he will deliver in Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Auckland. Dr. Canby, who has been on leave of absence from his university for some years, is editor of the New York "Saturday Review of Literature," and chairman of the board of judges of the Book of the Month Club. The American professor came to Australia at the invitation of the University of Melbourne, under whose auspices he gave 12 public lectures on the development of American literature in its relation to American history. Since then he has spoken in Tasmania, at Canberra, and at Sydney. He will leave for the South Island on Monday night, and before departing from New Zealand will spend a few days recuperating at Rotorua. "I have been in New Zealand for too short a period to be able to make any important differentiations," he said today. "But I have observed that

you New Zealariders differ from the Australians. I have noticed, too, that Australians and New Zealanders differ very considerably from Englishmen. In some respects your way of life, and in your thinking, too, you resemble ourselves." Dr. Canby does not interpret literature in any narrow academic sense. On his trip across by air he read one of Ngaio Marsh's detective stories. The work of Katherine Mansfield was, of course, well known to him, and he knew something about Samuel Butler's early associations with Canterbury. "Though I have read a good deal about New Zealand," he remarked, "I must confess that I have not done so very profoundly." , However, he was looking forward with much interest to meeting some of the Wellington writers today. Sir James Elliott, president of the New Zealand Centre of the P.E.N., had arranged for the visitor to meet them. Dr. Canby is a former chairman of the New York centre of that world-wide organisation. THE WRITTEN WORD. Dr. Canby is keen that every country should express itself through its own writers. "When I talk of national culture I do not mean that we should drop the English culture," he said, "but I hold that no country is ever quite articulate until it has its own! books. It seems to me the problem is first to get a reading public, and then your own writers have a chance." He believes that the visit of so many young Americans to New Zealand and Australia will have a beneficial effect on relations between those countries and his own. "Of course, one has to remember that many of those boys had not been more than 200 miles from their own particular home towns until the war came," he said. "There are some upon whom travel will not make much impression. But there are others upon whom the experiences gained during the last few years will have a lasting effect throughout their lives." In Australia he found that, on the whole, the Americans had got along very well with'the Australian troops —indeed, far better than had the Americans with the British in the last war. As for New Zealand, while he had no time as yet to assimilate impressions, there was one that could not be removed from his mind. "And that is the beauty of your country," he said. "It is certainly extraordinary." Between interviews and the preparation of his lecture for tonight, Dr. Canby was engaged today in shopping for a necklace of paua shell. I am told that such things are made by your ex-servicemen," he said, "and I am determined to take one back with me to the States as a souvenir of my visit to New Zealand."