THE ART OF MARY GURNEY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 4 June 1938, Page 4

THE ART OF MARY GURNEY

By C. R. Allen

“ Why did they call me Mary? ’ demands the author of that powerful study, “ Old Mortality,” to be found in “Tales by New Zealanders.” There is a tragic significance in this story written by one whose death was caused by a kick from a horse. Mary Gurney was a born horsewoman as she was a born poet. This sketch does not pretend to comprehensiveness. It is a reaction to a fleeting acquaintance with, and a superficial study of, Mary Gurney’s literary work. It is hoped that in the main the author will speak for herself. As far as : the acquaintance was concerned one can only recall her characteristic greeting to an old collie dog, whese death by accident almo,:t coincided with her own. One gathers of Mary Gurney that she was a child of New Zealand. She was one of the least bookish of our authors, drawing, as she did, her inspiration directly from life as it presented itself to her, and life presented itself in no gentle guise. She was accompanied by no familiar as Gloria Rawlinson appears to be. Her feeling for her native land was not obscured or softened, or transmuted, as you will, by any note of so-called mysticism. She wrote of what she saw and felt. Sometimes she felt bitterly, and she did not hesitate to express that bitterness. Withal one feels that she was most exquldtely alive. She looked unflinchingly on Nature, whether red in tooth and claw or in a gentler mood, such as is portrayed in “ Caravan.” When she writes of animals, the author whom she recalls most readily is Jack London. She does not indulge in /Esopean metamorphosis, as Kipling was wont to do—in “ The Maltese Cat,” for instance. Nevertheless, one feels as one reads her short story, “ Old Mortality,” that she has entered into the very being of that old Ishmael of a pedigree bull. With all its savagery, there is something clean in this story, which first appeared in the Sydney Bulletin We may turn from it with relief to'some of Mary Gurney’s verse. The following are culled frem the New Zealand Mercury, to which she was a contributor during the brief but not inglorious career of that periodical. They do not represent our writer at her best, but they are all that are available at the moment: I think that when you bent, in agony, to kiss The cross you traced In your own blood You called on God; Saw gold And Ataualpha’s face. Not ever shall you see the face of God, Nor rest beneath the shadow of His Cross. The Cross you traced upon the darkening floor Casteth no shadow. Now Or ever more.

“ The Way of Love ” written for the song section of the New Zealand Mercury must be considered as a lyric written with a view to musical setting Its extreme simplicity would otherwise give a false idea of the writer’s mentality. Here it is:—

In a grove By a stream, I met love. We did dream ’Neath the willows In the spring. Green our pillows. We did sing Love’s old song. Now round his bed Grass grows long For his head Wreaths of willow (Poor dead love!) Earth his pillow In the grovel Lastly there is proffered “Caravan,” from the prose section of the same periodical:

In fancy he was back in the rank tangle of the old garden, lying flat on his back in the sun. luxurious as a cat, while his horses tore at the strong cocksfoot and the tall fescue, and juicy green sow-thistles. There were the shadows of the bid poplar* dappling their backs, and the wild scent of spring in the air; daffodils and narcissi, flowering bravely in the matted undergrowth of_ the hedges; sweet perfume of the violets that old Mrs Spinifax had planted about the poplars. Faint sweetness of half a hundred purple lilacs; magic of the flowering cherries splashed in pink and silver against the glory of the distant blue. Or it was summer, and the neglected roses, sickeningly sweet in the great heat, were twining at will in many bnght-hued wreaths about the intense blue of delphiniums. The grass was yellowing, and the dense foliage of the poplars a deeper green. Autumn, and the poplars’ gold, and the sumacs ablaze; sunlight mellow and misty and radiant. And Reuben was there, and Hyacinth, and old Mrs Spinifax, cutting flowers—tiny purple asters, stunted dahlias, and chrysanthemums, yellow-petalled, velvet-hearted gaillardias, great sprays of the mauve Michaelmas daisies and red montbretias that had taken possession everywhere; and the air was heavy with the bitterness of autumn flowers.

Mary Gurney won the prize offered by Art in New Zealand for a short story on one occasion. She had some success in Australia. Of her it may be truly said that she was a New Zealand writer. She belonged to a period in which some have discerned the formation of a New Zealand idiomnot entirely dominated by the Anglo-New Zealand idea. She was one from whom good work might have been expected with justification, as it is expected from Eve Langley—to name but one of her contemporaries. Though Mary Gurney may have lacked the Grecian afflatus that is Eve Langley’s, and was not given to trading in the exotic, she has left her impression as she saw life without illusion, and yet was able to render back what she saw in many an appealing phrase.