LITERARY CENSORS DISCUSSED

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22402, 24 April 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERARY CENSORS DISCUSSED

New Gospel o£ Candour BY'ISABEL M. PEACOCKE A n Authors' Week Exhibition of books written by New Zealanders commences in Auckland on Monday, and it is interesting that at this juncture the old, vexed question of literary censorship should have come up again for discussion. Much plausible argument for and against its imposition hau been heard from time to time. On one side we have the Puritan point of view which is that unless a book has an uplifting or refining influence it is a harmful agent and should not be allowed to circulate to "corrupt good manners." On the other -hand there is the intellectual's instinctive revolt against coercion in the matter of his reading. This rebellion is right in principle. Reading is a matter for individual taste or judgment and it is both irritating and humiliating that the adult mind should be put in literary leading; strings, for intellectual liberty should be the first consideration. Superficial Cleverness,^ It cannot bo denied, however, that many books being released to the reading public to-day would serve a better purpose if used 'for lighting the fire. They are unreal, over-dramatisfld, overand the superficial cleverness, even / brilliance of the treatment of many of them is merely a snare to trap readers into the belief that here at last is truth stripped of all artificial glamour. Once these books are in the market no person: or body of persons has the right to proscribe them for general reading; but a wise and discriminating publisher could and should exercise the power of censorship by declining their publication, without the risk of offending the public's right of choice. In New Zealand very few books of

this morbidly-brilliant type hitve been / attempted, to which fact we are told we owe our undistinguished place in letters. Certain distinguished critics from overseas tell us that we are not sufficiently daring; our novels are lacking in red corpuscles; a fatal delicacy prevents us from shattering th<3 old accepted canons of nice behaviour with a sledge hammer. In a word our literature is - "old-fashioned" and until we can throw off our habit of reticence and "tell everything" we cannot hope to compete with those writers who admit no reserves and are unhampered by any thought of normal decency. There may be something in this contention from .the point of view of the average literary taste of to-day but as a criterion of worth as literature it does cot carry much weight. Breaking Down Old Reseives The new gospel of absolute candour in art and literature rather self-con-sciously sets about breaking cown the old reserves on matters which custom has decreed, more as a matter of good taste than morals, to be subjects not admissible as drawing-room tojpics. The unbiassed reader who looks at life as a whole will detect in such literature the artificiality, the suppressed hysteria as it were, under the apparently stark logic of the theme. After all life in the main is a sane affair, conducted by well-balanced, reasonable people in a sane manner. That we have at times wars, murders, assassinations, abductions, crime:? of morbidity and passion, and at all times, roguery, chicanery, corruption in high places and so on, does not affect the question at all. Widespread as these .conditions may appear to a student of the newspapers, they are in reality onlysporadic evils and we have to reflect that in the vast mass our daily lives go on in well-ordered grooves, too well ordered to make copy for the press, and so they are unrecorded. In the main we are governed by accepted rules of decent conduct and moved by kindly impulses, £io let us preserve a sense of proportion. It is as false'to Nature as to art to depict life as filled with gloom and horror, as false in its way as were those books which, metaphorically speaking, insisted on draping the piano legs and drawing the blinds on Sundays. A Sturdy Sanity Generally speaking, the New Zealander who takes up the pen as a means of living or self-expression is healthyminded and not particularly complex. He has a.sturdy sanity of outlook which enables him to see life as he knows ifc, intact, but with an infinite variety of , facets, some bright, some dark, some flickering from bright to dark, from dark to bright in the interplay of human passions and emotions. Yet his 6tory. is often regarded as "tame" and it is more or less charitably assumed that, living in these remote isles, he does not know the world. So in desperation .he is tempted to sell all he has and journey to the great heart of things in the older lands, only to find that, as there is a whole microcosm in a drop of water, so the smallest community holds*a world within its narrow confines. Perhaps he becomes infected by the intellectual arrogance of the advanced modern who decides that a writer is bound fast in the toils of Victorian conversatism unless he can splash his pages with scarlet patches of libidinous detail. The result when the New Zealander tries this—and it has been done on more than one occasion—is not impressive but/merely"'nasty and a little pathetic. Truth and Beauty It is decidedly not his line and gives rather the effect of the unpleasant little boy who scrawls a prohibited word on a fence, and waits, half exultant, half unfor the result. It Beems obvious then that New Zealand should be allowed to evolve its own literature along its own lines and not borrow from old or alien sources. After all vitality should be the most important thing in literature not the deliberate stirring up of midden heaps; and though we know the/ midden heaps to bo there no real purpose will be served by gloating over them unless we have a means of destroying them. Why not believe that power and truth and beauty can well be expressed in a book where ideals are still regarded as of/some value as a guide to living? Where an evil creeps like a cancer in the heart of the public weal let it bo ruthlessly exposed; but there is no need to let it be assumed that the cancer has taken corrupt possession of the entire social body, and there is nothing to be done about it. This is, under the name of realism, only a distortion of the truth which, like those amusing "magic mirrors" builds on an actual foundation but eccentrically exaggerates salient features out of all proportion to the roal-