EXPERIMENTS OF WRITERS

Southland Times, Issue 23310, 21 September 1937, Page 2

EXPERIMENTS OF WRITERS

MODERN PLAYS AND VICTORIANS APPARENT ORIGINALITY The weekly meeting of the literature class of the Workers’ Educational Association was held last evening. One-act plays of English and New Zealand authors were read. Mr S. G. August said that in the modern world of progress every art had to move forward and keep abreast of the times. There was a demand for new treatment in fiction, poetry and the drama. This led to experiment on the part of writers, but it took some time before an experimental book could be tried out Even if the critics accepted the innovation, the public would not always follow quickly enough to bring the writer success, that was financial success. But the main question with its supporters would be: Will the new method stay? The new group would be opposed by the traditionalists, the men who stuck to the old manner, and followed in the footsteps of Elizabethans and Victorians. No doubt, the traditional writers were on safe ground, but still practically every subject they touched had been previously handled by men with great names, which was a handicap to those who followed them. But the new novelists held that the Victorians had missed a great deal out, in short, thev gave merely a skeleton story. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and the others could be rewritten arouna phases of the lives of the characters which had been entirely omitted by the original novelists. The Victorian world, they argued, was decidedly a “one-eyed” world, but today in a twoeyed” world there was far more to be seen. Also today in a world of psychoanalysis there should be greater depth. “If you take a modern play,” Mr August continued, “you will often find it startling as compared with a Victorian play, or even a pre-war one. But on close examination there will be nothing actually new about it, yet it will still seem to be entirely novel and original.. This is caused by the angle at which the author sketches his characters. While a pre-war playwright looked at them from the outside, each one dressed in his part-Victorian clothes, the new playwright sees them from the inside, and he does not bother much about their dress. It would seem that while the past was involved in material values, the present, on the other hand, is more interested in spiritual values. The latter, of course, tends to severe honesty and to realism; or rather reality; but often displays unwarranted obscurity. The new author has not time to consider the outer manners of everyday life and the mere polish, because he is so intensely interested in the soul of his characters, and the deeper he goes the more he is likely to become less sure of his ground, and probably will lose much in clarity. If his subject is the arrest and reform of a thief, when he introduced the policeman he is merely beginning the play and not finishing it. T. S. ELIOT’S WRITING “This is also the great difficulty with modern poetry, and poetic drama, a difficulty not only to the reader but to the poets themselves. They cannot al ways get down to brass tacks, and their meanings must be simply relative. Indeed they may often be suggestive only. With them Horatius does not only stand on the bridge. That is after all, the mere fact, but the whole life-his-tory which brought him to that heroic position is what is important Such a writer as T. S. Eliot, for instance, although many years before the British public and now no longer a new poet, is still not read to any considerable extent in this country. He has become solely a subject for highbrow discussion, and that is what no writer wishes to be. W. H. Auden, a new man in every sense, is popular with the advanced London group, though some of his poems are written in so popular a manner as to be suitable for recitations. Both these writers have an unusual angle of vision, and a remarkably new way of expressing themselves. They have to some extent broken away from tradition.”

In fiction, a new model was introduced by James Joyce, the Irish novelist with the famous but not widely circulated novel, Ulysses, said Mr August. No novel had had more influence on the younger school, but Joyce himself, in following his own methods to a logical conclusion had become strangely obscure in his later works. Nevertheless, Ulysses” was a great novel of life in Dublin during a day of the year 1900, and had had a remarkable influence on the novelists of today, some more than others. It was an epochmaking book. “One thing generally conceded is that a novel, a poem, or a play can be flat like an oil-painting presenting merely figures talking, but taking no significant steps towards surrounding spiritual influence,” said Mr August. “Characters in a play discuss a certain point, but as they talk a world of thought passes through their minds. The audience hears the dialogue, but a far more important but unheard discussion goes on inside the characters. To give the audience an opportunity of hearing the hidden discussion, a new chorus has been introduced by the new playwright. The chorus expresses audibly the other unspoken thoughts of the characters. This, of course, is not new. It is as old as drama itself. But there is something entirely new in its use in modern drama. If this kind of chorus was added to well-known plays, the plays would not only be doubled in length, but two- totally new plays would result, because the second chorus-play would tend to modify the original one out of recognition. It has been said that speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts, so while the players talk conventionally the chorus has its honest word, and is actually beyond all convention. This is really where the modern school departs from the old traditional one.”