The Risen Bird: Phoenix Magazine, 1932-19331

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 30, 1 January 1997, Page 37

Stephen Hamilton

The Risen Bird: Phoenix Magazine, 1932-1933 1

Without benefit of hindsight no event could be described as a beginning. Every gesture required a future, looked back on, for significance. 2

Literary movements, as James Bertram observed, ‘are seldom organised in this country - the accidental grouping of a few writers in one place may produce a spurt of activity, then the group breaks up, and the impulse ceases. What is left behind - if the impulse has been strong enough - is the published record, and a few new literary reputations.’ In New Zealand this ‘published record’ has most often appeared between the covers of periodicals, literary or otherwise. In such a small market, magazines have assumed great importance as outlets, not just for innovative writing, but for the most conventional types of poetry and short fiction. Likewise, until very recently literary criticism has been largely practised and developed through the periodical. Little magazines, devoted as they usually are to the support of new and experimental writing, frequently carry the most concentrated expression of Bertram’s literary ‘impulse’. For the cultural historian they constitute valuable artefacts from the earliest phases of new movements within the literature, movements which are often closely linked to the development of national identity.

From the late nineteenth century, most locally-published magazines encouraged creative work which described the New Zealand landscape and way of life. Until well into the

present century, with a few notable exceptions, New Zealand writers were content to render a fanciful and largely mythical ‘Maoriland’, a New Zealand populated by courageous settlers and alternately savage and guileless Maori, together inhabiting a spectacular landscape of tuis and manuka blossom. For many of the young writers who emerged in the early 19305, Kowhai Gold (1930), Quentin Pope’s anthology of this material, seemed thoroughly representative of a late colonial literary nationalism in dire of need of revitalisation. University-educated and politically idealistic, these writers were strongly influenced by contemporary British and American poetics. As one of their number put it, they were ‘hungry for the words that shall show us these islands and ourselves; that shall give us a home in thought.’ 4 The objective of taking ‘literary possession’ of New Zealand remained the same: the method and language through which this would be done was to change almost beyond recognition.

The first significant utterance of this new literary movement came in early 1932 when there appeared at Auckland University College a little magazine which was to have an influence on the development of New Zealand literature out of all proportion to the quality or range of its contents. The four issues of Phoenix were the result of a remarkable confluence of personalities whose collective talent, critical acumen, and publishing enterprise came to dominate local literary culture until well beyond mid-century. Over the next decade and a half, through the slow recovery from the Depression, through the years of rising international tension followed by World War 11, the ambitions and ideas first embodied in Phoenix bore fruit in a more or less continuous succession of magazines, culminating in the appearance in March 1947 of the inaugural issue of Landfall. This article begins by documenting the production history of Phoenix and providing an account of contemporary responses to the magazine before discussing key aspects of its contents and assessing its long-term significance to New Zealand’s literary culture.

‘Two ems and a non-pareil Bertram, Mason, Lowry Robert Lowry, or ‘Caxton Lowry’ as he styled himself during the early thirties, eighteen years of age and enrolled as a scholarship student at Auckland University College, began his professional career as a printer and typographer with Phoenix . 5 In mid-1929 Lowry had managed to purchase a Golding hand-platen press with, as he put it to Denis Glover, ‘a font of 9 pt Hadlow Roman oldface medium newspaper type’, for a total cost of £2 10s. 6 In early 1931, after some experimental attempts at printing with linotype, he approached the Literary Subcommittee of the Auckland University College Dramatic Club with an offer to print a club magazine. This was to be little more than an in-house journal, detailing the activities of the club, including, as Lowry reported to Glover, transcripts of papers delivered to club meetings, critiques of these papers, as well as ‘minor papers for which we haven’t time at next [sic] meeting: selected passages from the works of authors to be next

discussed, illustrating special characteristics: and general [sic].’ In the same letter, Lowry adds, ‘ln addition to this to defray expenses of linotype (for I am too experienced to be caught handsetting) we shall sell the mag at a “good and sufficient price” and undertake printing for the other clubs’ (3 May 1931). Two months later he was ambitiously speculating on producing far more than simply a club magazine.

I really think my true vocation would be encouraging literature in N.Z. There are at least half a dozen men at A.U.C. capable of turning out excellent steady work. Genius is a little harder to come by... I think that we’d need more than one magazine to fit the bill: one for litterateurs and dilettantes as you [Glover] suggest: another after the style of Argosy to consist of the better class of short stories: and possibly even an inexpensive publication for the masses of a humorous type - rather more healthily humorous than Aussie or Humour. (15 July 1931)

The offer to print a magazine was ‘gratefully accepted’ by a combined meeting of the Literary and Dramatic Subcommittees on 20 November 1931. Lowry was duly elected Business Manager for the new enterprise and immediately allotted £2 for the purchase of type. At the same meeting a committee was elected to oversee the production of the magazine. James Bertram was elected editor, with a committee consisting of Rilda Gorrie, Rona Munro, Jean Allison, Hector Monro, Allen Cumow and Blackwood Paul. 7 By January 1932 plans had consolidated around the idea of a single magazine, to be called Farrago , ‘a sort of junior edition’ of Middleton Murry's New Adelphi, ‘but not so blasted highbrow’ (11 January 1932). The title Phoenix was eventually selected and a note in the first number of the magazine explains its derivation, and that of the cover page device and motto.

The device on the title page is adapted from a signet-ring given by D.H. Lawrence to Middleton Murry at Christmas 1923, when the latter was engaged in establishing the New Adelphi. It was sent with this accompanying note: ‘To the old raven, in the act of becoming a new phoenix’.

With its critical allegiances thus declared, the first issue appeared towards the end of March 1932, a triumph over limited typographical and technical facilities and considerable geographical separation between editor and printer. Lowry spent most of the summer break at his parents’ home near Paeroa, while Bertram travelled to the South Island. In Paeroa Lowry allied himself to a local printer, with whom he exchanged labour for ‘the use of type (and presses when they’re not in use)’. Progress was slow, partly due to a lack of copy - ‘the blasted

editor simply will not send the stuff in decently’ - and partly due to the state of the printery, which was ‘in an absolutely filthy condition’, with (prefiguring Lowry’s own career) ‘the owner bound to have to close down in a few days’. Bertram visited Paeroa to check on progress and Lowry set out to impress his editor. I’ve got a picturesquely Italian black sateen working shirt that I scrambled into for his benefit and timbered around doing technical things to the presses, things I’d only learnt a day or two before, as if all this sort of thing was catsmeat to me ever since childhood. (25 Lebruary 1932)

As it happened, the nominated deadline for publication of 7 March, the first day of term for 1932, was well past before the printing of Phoenix was finished. Lowry’s valiant efforts in Paeroa and Auckland were frustrated by persistently late copy. On 9 March he wrote an exasperated letter to Glover from the College Library, complaining, ‘Bertram sent me a 20 page review to Paeroa on Saturday sth inst, finished his four-page editorial last night, gave me Cresswell’s stuff yesterday and is trying to get R.A.K. Mason to concoct him a short story’ (9 March 1932). The only event to offset Lowry’s frustration was the arrival of some long-awaited type, although not in time to influence the appearance of the issue. This was so typographically dishevelled that Lowry insisted on the inclusion of the following note, printed on a slip of pale green paper.

Many Readers will no doubt have remarked the somewhat bedraggled appearance of the Phoenix in this first stage of its flight. It may perhaps be worth pointing out that certain pages of this number cannot be considered at all representative of the standard of typography to be maintained in future issues. The bulk of the letterpress was produced (as is explained elsewhere) under conditions of extraordinary difficulty unlikely to occur again. At the earnest request of what may be styled (with rather undue impressiveness) the Printing Department, this notice is inserted by

The Editors

In his opening editorial, ‘The cause of it all’ (the same title had been used by Murry for his first NewAdelphi editorial), Bertram apologised for ‘typographical flaws and inconsistencies’.

If the critical reader can only envisage the peculiarly trying conditions under which the greater part of the present issue was prepared, with the

Editor seldom separated by less than five hundred miles from his Printer-Manager, and often inaccessible to communication, perhaps he will be a little forgiving. There were no proof-sheets; for the supply of type only ran to a page at a time. The whole magazine, therefore, was hand-set and printed by one heroic individual, and in several different places at that.

The apology was generally deemed unnecessary, although John Mulgan (editor of Craccum for 1932) couldn’t resist a slight squib in the student newspaper (‘the phoenix out monday: only a limited supply of capitals available’) above a review of the issue by John Dumble. Dumble in fact applauded the ‘excellence of its form’. In printing, design, arrangement and general layout, it is so singularly appropriate that there is no exaggeration in describing it as a work of art reflecting the greatest credit on the taste and discrimination of those responsible; and the flaws and inconsistencies to which the editorial draws attention are not important enough greatly to detract from the general impression which one receives. 8

However, regarding the contents, Dumble felt that Phoenix had fallen short of its avowed aim of contributing to the development of New Zealand literature. If the Phoenix is to be any use to New Zealand literature at all, primarily it must collect and publish original literary work - work that is the delineation, the interpretation in the finest possible artistic form of the life that we are living - work that gathers, blends, moulds, and communicates experience in ways that will construct new meanings for us - meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment, and instrumental for further consummatory experience. If there is no such work there is no reason for the Phoenix to exist - if there is print it.

Dumble was in part responding to the high expectations set by Bertram in his editorial, where he declared an intention ‘to launch out beyond the confines of this college, and to try to establish something of dominion significance’. While such aspirations were applauded by commentators in Craccum and elsewhere, Dumble considered that the new periodical failed to meet its target, largely because ‘in fifty-two pages of print there are only seven pages of what can truly be described as original literary work’. This criticism was to dog the periodical throughout its short life, intensifying in 1933 with R.A.K. Mason’s editorship. Despite his conservative estimate of what constituted ‘original literary work’, Dumble was supportive of the new venture and acknowledged the promise shown by the first issue.

I would like to end this review with an appeal for recognition of the very real and valuable energy and enthusiasm which have gone into the production of the Phoenix. It may be that some readers, exasperated by the ungainly antics and various cries of the bird, are inclined to wring its neck. Yet even a phoenix, new-risen from the fire, may without

dishonour admit to a little huskiness of the throat and some stiffness of the joints. It is a beautiful bird and perhaps in the future it will leam to sing and soar. For a year at least, or until we are sure it will do neither, I think it deserves our support.

Elsewhere in the same and subsequent issues of Craccum, Mulgan and other writers were often less charitable, mocking Phoenix in satirical articles on ‘free verse’ or otherwise deriding its political and literary radicalism, including an amusing attack on Bertram’s predilection for foreign and Latin phrases. 9 The first issue also received notice in the New Zealand Herald, where the reviewer saw the ‘gaily clad little publication ... as a safety valve for the ebullient opinions of youth’. 10 Disapproving of the magazine’s ‘lavish shower of famous literary names of the moment’, the only item specifically referred to by the reviewer was a story by Rilda Gorrie, ‘ Crade Likeness ’, preferred for ‘ its unacademic air’. The review concluded with the following words of encouragement.

It may be that at present the contributors are running over a shade too much with intellect, but as long as the Phoenix holds to its present policy of keeping its pulse sensitive to modem trends of thought, while not being unmindful that tradition has its value too, one can hold out a welcoming hand and predict for it a useful future.

While the first issue was acknowledged, albeit briefly, as far afield as the Times of London, the distribution of Phoenix cannot easily be assessed. The Times notice was reproduced in the second issue, accompanied by a cartoon depicting the measuring of the periodical, its dimensions being one of the few points noted in the short acknowledgment. Allen Cumow recalled in 1992 that ‘the print-run for Vol. 1, no. 1 was 250 - one or other of the next two issues was 500 - there were 750 of the last, some of which were sold (quite quickly, I was told) on Queen Street’. 11 Copies were also forwarded to the other three university colleges where, by the third number, subscription representatives had been appointed. Late in 1932 Lowry offered Denis Glover the role of Phoenix representative at Canterbury College, a role eventually taken by Jean Stevenson (later Jean Bertram). In keeping with the ‘dominion wide’ brief of the magazine, review copies were also sent to the editors of key periodicals and newspapers throughout New Zealand, as evidenced by the reviews which subsequently appeared. Production of the second issue in mid-1932 was somewhat more efficient than that of the first, partly because Lowry was better equipped with machinery and type. As he gleefully (if a little inaccurately) reported to Glover in June 1932,

£ll for a motor to operate same complete with rheostat to run the outfit at any speed from dead slow to 2000 impressions/hour. The chief beauty of the scheme is that not only have I got them to procure me this little gewgaw and a large and comprehensive supply of good type and falldedals to play around with, but they are actually going to pay me for playing with it. The terms are 25% of all profits go to me, the remainder going into a special fund which I can call upon at any time for further supplies of type and other materials. In short, the egg of a N.Z. Univ. Press has been fertilised and all that now remains to do is watch it grow. (26 June [1932])

While this was a considerably smaller investment than that originally suggested to the Executive by Lowry - a proposal which involved, among other items, the purchase of a new printing press - it was nevertheless sufficient to allow him to set up a printery in the basement of the Choral Hall on Symonds Street and press forward with his plan to set up a properly equipped university press. The colophon to the second issue of Phoenix (reproduced) states that it was printed and published by Lowry for the Literary Club ‘At The University Press’. This claim raised the ire of

the Registry, and Lowry was called before Sir George Fowlds, President of the College, to explain this use of ‘a name which is reserved for the official press of an institution and has a very definite signification’. Having gained their attention, the following month (September) and again in November 1932 Lowry approached the University authorities with a scheme for the purchase of a new cylinder printing press valued at £285 and capable of 3,600 impressions per hour. The scheme was rejected outright by the University College Council. 12 Meanwhile, James Bertram had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University and, before leaving Auckland for a pilgrimage south to Waitaki and Dunedin, edited the contents of the second issue of Phoenix , dated July 1932 but not published until mid-August. Lowry’s aspirations to become editor in place of Bertram were dashed by the election of R.A.K. Mason to the position, but his disappointment was tempered by his enthusiasm for the printery. In a letter to Glover (signed ‘Caxton II’) written just prior to the publication of the second issue, he declared confidently that ‘Phoenix is going to be a pretty good thing this time, from the typographical viewpoint at least. The matter is not bad. Much more “original creative” stuff than was... in the first number. Though there is a (somewhat subdued) Bertramish flavour about the thing still’ (24 July [1932]).

Improvements between the first and second issues are attributed by Ron Holloway to the involvement of architecture student L.D. Morrison and ‘a professional printer’ called Markham. 13 Holloway was working alongside Lowry on the Students’ Association Press from mid-1932 and is identified in the colophon to the third number as co-printer of the issue with Lowry. Morrison contributed a number of linocuts to this and subsequent issues, as well as having a hand in the design of the magazine. In May 1933 Morrison was appointed to assist G.B. Bertram (brother of James) in a belated attempt to bring some order to the financial management of Phoenix. 14 Writing in Craccum , John Mulgan reviewed the second issue himself, for the most part favourably, concluding with the comment that ‘On the whole this is a production still worth the shilling which its publishers demand’. 13 In two letters in the same issue Lowry first unleashed a vitriolic riposte to several attacks on Phoenix published in previous numbers of Craccum u ' and then gave a humorous response to some uncertainty over his elected position as ‘honorary typographical adviser and printer’. 1 The definitions are worth quoting:

A ‘printer’, as defined by the Royal College of Surgeons, is a person whose consumption of liquor is so large that his eyes fail to line up by two ems and a non-pareil. His conversation is always in 72 points heavy face, set solid, with a shriek four picas away in the other direction. A typographer in terms of the Orchards Inspection Act of 09 is a spindly son of a gun with long hair, long finger nails, and a long bill at

the tobacconists. His nose is same shade as blue laid ledger, quad crowned seventy, his top margin is a little thin and his gutters all to glory, but otherwise he dummies to perfection. 18 If the two issues of 1932 were coloured by the social and political circumstances of the period, Charles Brasch considered such events to be less influential on editorial policy than, as he put it,

the stimulus of English writers who had not yet been recognised in this country, acting upon the self-awareness of the literary and social consciousness of a few young New Zealanders. [Phoenix' s] begetters were D.EI. Lawrence (from whom the title and the emblem were taken), John Middleton Murry (with Katherine Mansfield behind him), and T.S. Eliot; it invoked Murry’s journal the Adelphi as its mentor. Brasch gave the following account of the preparation of the first issue of Phoenix : At the end of January 1932 James [Bertram], lan [Milner], and I spent a week-end at the Milners’ bach at Waianakarua, where we wrote a good deal of that first number of the Phoenix ... I seem to remember that the weekend was damp and rather chilly, that we sat up late at night writing and talking, and got up late in the morning. l9

That Brasch was so involved (at least in his own account) with the production of this first number is appropriate considering the connections between Phoenix and Landfall, founded by Brasch in 1947. Phoenix can be considered a sort of protoLandfall, its publication motivated by many of the same aspirations as those which Brasch and his associates entertained for the later periodical. As with Landfall, Phoenix deliberately claimed an English progenitor while attempting to differentiate itself from local and contemporary publications. By openly associating itself with Middleton Murry’s New Adelphi (subscribed to by the Literary Club of the Auckland University College from 1931 until early 1934), Phoenix both elevated its nascent literary status and asserted its up-to-the-minute modernity. In a note on the imprint page of the first number we learn that ‘the watchword of this paper is “ Disinterested Enthusiasm for an Ideal”' , echoing the Amoldian sentiments of the New Adelphi. The editorial which follows takes its title, ‘The cause of it all’, from the opening editorial of that English journal. The ‘ideal’ pursued was:

the integration of national consciousness, the focusing of contemporary opinion on local needs, the creation of cultural antennae, the communication of definite standards of taste, the ‘redeeming of the times’ ...

The Phoenix aims at giving intelligent people a place where they can write about things that matter... The background of Phoenix is literary; its policy aesthetic ... [amounting to a] belief in the potency of culture as a spiritualising agency. Furthermore, Bertram added, ‘its interests do not stop with literature. In any modem paper with pretensions to seriousness ... some political reflections must take place’. It was this political reflection which was to colour the periodical ‘ramping red’ 20 when Mason took over as editor. On a deeper level there was, to quote E.H. McCormick, implicit in the undertaking ... a conviction that things of the mind and spirit were worth considering, worth writing about, indeed worth suffering for. Phoenix was a challenge to New Zealand complacency and to the supremacy of material standards. More than this, it was a challenge to the attitude of timid provincialism which had characterised New Zealand writing in the earlier years of the century. 21

While James Bertram subsequently asserted that the original Phoenix group was fairly representative of the early thirties, this is clearly debatable. The students responsible for the first two issues were for the most part members of a privileged class, well-educated and, although geographically isolated from the intellectual mainstream of modernist thought, closely attuned to it through books and periodicals similar to the one they were intent on creating. Though they may have been young, idealistic and acutely aware of social conditions beyond the college gates, the editorial group, with the notable exception of Robert Lowry, were largely insulated from poverty and unemployment. Among those associated with Phoenix during the two years of its publication, only Ron Mason, Rex Fairbum and to a lesser extent Lowry, were to any obvious degree motivated by actual personal suffering under the exigencies of the Depression, and their responses were more than coloured by fierce, if divergent, political awareness and commitment. Ron Mason’s election to the editorship of Phoenix was mooted as early as July 1932, prior to the publication of Bertram’s last number. Some years later Mason recollected that it was in fact James Bertram who first suggested to him that he take over the editorship. Mason agreed to do so only on condition that he have total editorial control, subject only to general supervision from the editorial committee. With this confirmed, Mason was officially elected to the Phoenix editorial committee on 21 October 1932, along with Allen Cumow, Robert Lowry, Hector Monro, Blackwood Paul, Jack Bennett and several others. The immediate result of the autonomy invested in Mason was that few of the committee were prepared to cooperate with him and editorial meetings were sparsely attended, despite his being

assured of the full confidence of the committee as late as May 1933. Consequently, among other things, the financial management of the magazine was neglected and it was this factor, combined with Lowry’s lifelong lack of interest (if not ineptitude) in business matters, which contributed to the demise of Phoenix.

Lowry predicted a turbulent future for the magazine under Mason’s editorship: ‘He’s a crack-brained socialist, with some literary ability: and he’s certain sure to land Phoenix into a rough-house with the College authorities. But that doesn’t worry me ... so long as ... Ikeepmypress’ (24 July [1932]). As it happened, itwas Lowry’s own activities as printer, rather than Mason ’ s as editor, which initially upset both the university authorities and the Students’ Association Executive. Having already been censured by the Registry for the improper use of the term ‘University Press’ in the colophon to the second issue, Lowry’s less than straightforward activities as a printer rapidly alienated him from the individual most responsible for the financial aspects of the press, A.P. Postlewaite, Business Manager for the Students’ Association. Postlewaite made an ‘unofficial statement’ on the matter of the press to the Students’ Executive in late December 1932," the first of several concerning Lowry’s failure to uphold his side of his contract with the Association. Lowry had strong support both within the Association and on its Executive Committee, with the result that he was able more or less to ignore Postlewaite’s complaints. In fact, at a meeting of the Executive in early March 1933, Lowry succeeded in having his share of the profits from the press increased from the twenty-five per cent agreed to in June 1932 to fifty per cent. Following Lowry’s hasty departure from Auckland in September 1933, Postlewaite was to have the final exasperated word on the matter in his ‘Report of the Student Printing Press’ presented to the Students’ Executive in November 1933. Here Postlewaite tries to make some sense of the extremely muddled state of Lowry ’ s management of the press, in the process painting a picture of apparently wilful incompetence leading to debts amounting to some £342. Postlewaite tempers his condemnation of Lowry with the following statement: ‘I should like to say this in Mr Lowry’s favour, that his ability as a printer, or to be more polite, a typographer, is unquestioned. The quality of his work was excellent and he was a splendid worker.

By early 1933 Mason’s appointment as editor and his reputation for unrestrained polemicism had also prompted several concerned responses, even though his first issue of the magazine had still to appear. At a meeting of the Literary Club Committee on 17 February 193 3 John Mulgan and Hector Monro moved that a meeting be called immediately after publication of the next issue of the magazine in order to clarify the Club’s future policy regarding Phoenix. Their concerns were partly based on the increasing politicisation of the campus which had become more and more polarised, first by the role of students as special constables in the Auckland unemployed riots of April 1932, and subsequently by the controversy which had erupted around J.C. Beaglehole, erstwhile lecturer in history dismissed, in essence, for opposing the curtailment of free speech by the university authorities. Mason, an avowed and

articulate Marxist, was increasingly seen to be an inappropriate choice for the editorship of a student periodical. Mason’s first number, (v 01.2 no.l, dated March 1933) appeared in early April after a dispute between the editor and the Students’ Association Executive, centred on the deletion from the magazine of an article by Eric Cook entitled ‘Groundswell’. Lowry had the issue ready for publication in late March. With several copies already bound, the President of the Students’ Association, Martin Sullivan, an active member of the Literary Club (newly ordained and later to become Dean of St Paul’s, London), read the article by Canterbury College student Eric Cook and vetoed its inclusion. The article has been described as ‘a peculiar and dense amalgam of economics, sociology and sexual psychology’. 24 Sullivan called an emergency meeting of his Executive and the article was declared unsuitable for publication. Mason resisted this interference as best he could and a second meeting was called in early April when John Mulgan moved that ‘the article be deleted or the whole publication suppressed’. 25 A compromise was reached wherein Mason obtained approval for a note to be inserted explaining the deletion. He then proceeded to sell the offending two pages as a broadsheet. The controversy ensured sales of both magazine and broadsheet were brisk. However, even with the offending article deleted, Phoenix still incurred the censure of the Professorial Board. Citing in particular Rex Fairbum’s poem ‘Deserted Farmyard’, the Board expressed its ‘disapproval of those portions of Phoenix which offend against the canons of decency and good taste’. 26

As a whole the third number of Phoenix is remarkable both as a significant moment in Lowry’s developing capacity for design and for its more politically radical content. Craccum' s response (11 May 1933, p. 5) primarily took the form of a review by Hector Monro, a member of the Phoenix editorial committee ostensibly elected to assist Mason in the production of the magazine. Monro, who co-edited Kiwi with Blackwood Paul in 1932, used his review (‘ Phoenix , a paper with punch’) as an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with Mason’s editorial autonomy. He criticised the tone of left wing political evangelicalism adopted by the new editor and his contributors, commenting, ‘it is surprising that they should have been given a pulpit by the literary club, which has, after all, other work to do’. He did, however, concede that the apparent co-opting of a literary periodical by purveyors of the new political faith was due in part at least to a lack of literary contributions ‘of a sufficiently high standard’, echoing a comment by Mason in his editorial notes to the issue. Monro’s judgement of such literary material as was published in Phoenix was grudging: ‘The poems in this issue, if they are not superlatively good, are at least not particularly bad. The one short story is pleasant, if not particularly exciting.’

Other reviewers were equally concerned with the further swing to the political left apparent in the issue. The Auckland Star (13 May 1933, Magazine section, p.2) complained that Phoenix had become little more than a ‘Communist’s soapbox’,

warning that if the editors

wish to make the j oumal a vehicle for Communist propaganda, they will not only alienate the support which their first efforts promised to enlist, but they will destroy the interest of their own members. For whole pages of this number are as dull as ditchwater.

The reviewer in Art in New Zealand , ‘Prester John’ (Charles Marris), saw very little to praise in this third number. Its ‘dullness’ was relieved by only two poems, Fairbum’s ‘Straw’ and Charles Brasch’s ‘Mountain Storm’. Even Mason’s ‘ln Manus Tuas, Domine’ did not impress Marris, who felt that Mason had ‘done more original and finished work’. 27 Mason was in fact to slightly rewrite this poem before including it in his 1934 collection No New Thing. More colourfully, the weekly tabloid N. Z. Truth on 31 May 1933 launched a front page attack on Phoenix , under the headline ‘N.Z. Universities Hotbeds of Revolution. Red Hot Gospels of Highbrows’. Truth attacked both Mason’s Phoenix and Glover’s equally controversial Oriflamme , produced at Canterbury University College in April of the same year. Its writer considered them to be

packed with the most rabid revolutionary ravings. Page after page is devoted to furthering the destruction of everything the community has and holds today, and to loud and long praises of everything that happens in the Soviet republic ... The Phoenix brands critics ‘morons’... if they utter a protest against the sneers, jeers, bellicose blasphemies, red rantings and sex-saturated sophistries of young men and women who are graduating to become the leaders of the community tomorrow.

The University authorities were predictably displeased with such negative attention, as apparently were the majority of the student body. For its part, Craccum (19 June 1933, p.l) defended its readers against Truth's accusations, stating that ‘the ravings of two per cent of our students in Phoenix do not represent the opinion of the great mass of students at this college’. The fourth and final published number of Phoenix appeared in early June 1933. In the months following the third issue Mason’s position as editor had come under increasing pressure, in particular with regard to his status as a bona fide student. Lowry’s less than competent management of the Students’ Association Press had also drawn severe criticism. Responses to this fourth issue of Phoenix were again for the most part censorious, although by now reviewers apparently knew what to expect and so were less damning in their complaints against Mason’s politicisation of the periodical. This time the Auckland Star reviewer (8 June 1933, Magazine section, p.2) focused on its typographical quality, commenting that ‘A glance through its pages is a joy to the eye’.

In Craccum (12 July 1933, pp. 4-5) the response was less restrained. Flippant intone, the reviewer refused to take seriously either Mason’s political rhetoric or any other aspect of the issue. In an article ‘ Reality’ on page 12 of the issue of Kiwi for that year, ‘I.W.L.’ criticised what they perceived to be the obscure ‘realism’ of the poetry in Phoenix, especially its ‘grim poetic lucubrations about bones and blood’, a clear reference to Allen Cumow’s poems ‘Arcady’ and ‘Apocalyptic’. ‘I.W.L.’ called for a return to a more romantic bias in verse, asking

are we not, in the form of realism which we present to the world through Phoenix merely following a fashion in literature, and blinding ourselves to the fact that a reality of a far less obvious and a far more beautiful kind can exist in a world quite apart from materialism?

Following the appearance of the fourth issue the Students’ Association Executive wrote to the Literary Club querying Mason’s appropriateness as editor, on the grounds that he was not an enrolled student and therefore ineligible to hold office on a student committee. 28 In response, a meeting of the Phoenix committee on 3 July resolved to ‘pay the Students’ Association fee on behalf of the Editor’. At the same meeting several key members of the committee resigned, including G.B. Bertram as Business Manager, Evan Harrowed as Treasurer, and Jean Allison as Secretary. 29 The following day the Literary Club committee failed to ratify the payment of Mason’s fees, further indication of the deep division in the club over his editorship. Martin Sullivan, lobbying in Mason’s defence, moved that responsibility for the publication of the magazine be transferred to ‘an affiliated society’, a change which would presumably place it beyond the control of the Students ’ Association Executive. This motion was defeated and in its place John Mulgan and Robert Lowry successfully moved that ‘no editorial be published, that ad articles be signed, that the literary matter be not less than half of the contents, and that political articles be written to show differing points of view’. 30 Mason’s response to this attempt to rein in his editorial policy is not recorded. It is known that, in the face of the Students’ Executive insistence that the bona fide rule be enforced, Mason considered moving Phoenix off campus. 31

This did not, however, eventuate and, while the periodical was not in fact suppressed, mounting financial and student political problems ensured its demise. The final blow was the sudden departure of Lowry from Auckland, in debt to the Students’ Association and soon to be effectively declared persona non grata on all campuses of the University of New Zealand. Fellow students Blackwood Paul, Sam Leatham and Evan Harrowed rallied in Lowry’s defence, soliciting donations and loans from a variety of supporters and successfully negotiating with creditors to reduce the debt against both Lowry as an individual and Phoenix itself. Lowry’s personal debt of more than £BS was largely offset by a loan of £SO from Blackwood Paul. The balance and the debt against Phoenix were both successfully defrayed by discounts obtained from creditors, the sale of type, and smaller donations from supporters including Allen Cumow, G.B. Bertram, Evan Harrowed, R.P. Anschutz, Sam Leatham, and Rona Munro, plus £lO from Lowry’s parents. 32 Mason recalled the end of Phoenix in the following terms.

Ultimately, partly as a result of an abortive affair with one of the girls connected with Phoenix, partly owing to his [Lowry’s] general capacity for getting his business to an unsupportable state, he departed suddenly. He came to me and said, rather shamefacedly, that he was leaving. I pointed out that the fifth issue was already in galley form, that, if we could get that out, we might have a chance, the way public

support was going, to establish the journal independently of the University. However, he said he could not face up to things. 33

The proposed issue had to be abandoned completely. Galley proofs preserved among the Mason Papers include sections of articles by Jean Devanny (on her 1931 visit to the Soviet Union) and G.E. Fairbum, art and music critic and brother of Rex. Other papers in the collection indicate that, while the issue would have continued the trend towards the increasing politicisation of Phoenix initiated by Mason, it would also have sustained a concern with literature and the arts. Mason noted later that with the fifth issue Phoenix would have begun a shift away from an international socialist focus ‘towards more emphasis on local matters - reviews of plays, concerts, etc., starting, as was inevitable, with Auckland’. This was in part an attempt to widen the readership of the magazine, in preparation for its proposed removal from the college campus. Mason was probably not overstating the situation when he remarked, ‘we had a definite place in the community by this time, and could probably have continued for some time independently, but for the debacle mentioned above’.

As part of that shift towards a broader cultural focus, Hector Monro had contributed a review ofNelle Scanlan’s Tides of Youth (1933) and an article entitled ‘Auckland and the drama’, while G.E. Fairbum submitted an article on the regional celebrations for the 1933 Brahms Centenary. Other contributors were to include J.C. Beaglehole, who offered several poems and ‘a little inoffensive essay in Marxian interpretation’; Noel Pharazyn, later a prolific contributor to early volumes of Tomorrow, and Alfred Katz, one of the instigators of the Victoria University College radical magazine Student (itself suppressed after three issues), from whom Mason solicited reviews of John Dos Passos’s novel 1919 and cartoonist David Low’s Russian Sketch-Book. It is unclear from the archival record to what extent Mason himself was to contribute to the issue, although he did prepare a review of de Montalk’s Snobbery With Violence: A Poet in Gaol (1933) and would almost certainly have continued his controversial ‘Notes’.

During Mason’s tenure as editor Phoenix was transformed from a literary and aesthetic little magazine into a journal of left-wing political commitment. Denis Glover captured this metamorphosis in the following terms: ‘Under Bertram it certainly smelt slightly scholarly: it was serious in a literary way. Under Mason it went ramping red. Marxism was the caper. Dogma and manifestoes [sic] peppered its pages.’ 34 Mason sought controversy and found it. In his first editorial he declared that Phoenix was ‘a place for sparks to fly in’: ‘This is a forum, a battle-ground, an arena - but only for good gladiators. If any argument is sufficiently active, vigorous, and stimulating, then as far as we can we shall give it to the world. ’ While Mason did concede that ‘Some, indeed, may feel that this issue discriminates unfairly against our University contributors’, he also pointed out that it ‘was prepared under great difficulties in haste at a time when most University men were hard to find, or, if

found, too tired to respond’. It would seem that there was little love lost between Mason and his co-workers on the magazine. Mason refers to volume 2 number 1 as ‘our first regular issue’, dissociating his enterprise from the earlier and more amateur efforts of students and other dabblers in literature and politics. This is no time to be studying the tonal value of the minor works of T.E. Brown. It is the greatest hour in history. Now as never before there is interest to be found in the life about us. And now as never before we must try to see things coolly and steadily, unhampered by hope or fear. This is no time for optimism, no time for pessimism: the hour for realism is at hand.

Dismissive of the concerns Bertram and his fellow aesthetes, and corrupting Arnold into the jargon of the popular front, Mason had little patience with literature which did not further the political cause of Marxism. As Jean Allison recalled, when Mason addressed his first committee meeting as editor, ‘he made it clear that our former literary gods were ‘out’ - D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, and Katherine Mansfield... The new hero was another K.M. - Karl Marx; and capitalism and the bourgeoisie were the enemy.’ 35 If Mason shook up the student literati he did not have things entirely his own way. He complained in a letter to John Stewart: Yes, I am still father to the Phoenix - or, at any rate, am responsible for the juicy bits in it. There is a committee that cramps my style most horribly, or otherwise I should make things really move. As it is, I do all I can in the face of the Students’ Association, the Literary Club, the Phoenix Committee, the College Council, the Prof. Board, the University Senate, public opinion, King George, Rex Fairbum, and Jehovah ... 36

Mason attempted to establish an open forum for the discussion of‘the major conflicts of the here and now’ in order to ‘give fair expression to their ideological aspects’. He warned ‘ There is no room here for the spinsterish monasticism of the newspapers ’, foreshadowing Kennaway Henderson’s brief for Tomorrow. Reviewing Mason’s first number of Phoenix in Craccum (11 May 1933, p. 5), Hector Monro, while disapproving of the turn towards ‘the New Faith’ of Marxism, did defend Mason against accusations that he had co-opted Phoenix for purely political ends, suggesting that ‘Students who feel that the Club’s magazine has become unduly political in trend ... should write for it themselves. At present the evangelists seem to be the only people with sufficient energy to keep Phoenix going. ’ However, with Mason’s editorship and the move towards more radical comment and discussion, Phoenix became too extreme for the University College to tolerate.

Pressure was put on the Literary Club to rein in its publication, which had by the fourth number become all but autonomous, with little reference to the student body from which it had originally emerged.

Learning ‘to sing and soar ’

As the preceding discussion has implied, the majority of items published in the four issues of Phoenix were non-literary, most frequently articles of political or social commentary, especially during Mason’s editorship. However, it should also be stressed that the literary content of the magazine was not as uniform as might be expected by those familiar with the traditional view of Phoenix as the product of a distinct and cohesive avant-garde. While many contributors expressed allegiance to a select group of contemporary English writers (Eliot, Murry, Lawrence, and others), poets with more diverse backgrounds are to be found in its pages. Mason himself was a writer whose sources were somewhat wider than the majority of contributors to Phoenix. His poetic forebears range from the Roman poets, through the Romantics and the late Victorians to A.E. Housman. It is in part Mason’s depth of influence that lent his poetry the weight admired by many of his more junior contemporaries. The inclusion of work by a poet of acknowledged talent was of obvious value to the ambitious founding editorial committee. Mason had been published alongside T.S. Eliot by Harold Monro and had been acknowledged as a poet of stature in articles published locally. 37 Allen Curnow first came across Mason in the pages of Monro’s Twentieth Century Poetry (1929) and only later discovered, to his surprise, that Mason was in fact a New Zealander resident in Auckland. 3S

For many of the literary participants in the Phoenix enterprise Mason took the role of elder poet, alongside the more eccentric figure of D’Arcy Cresswell. Mason had self-published two volumes of poetry prior to 1932, The Beggar (1924) and Penny Broadsheet (1925), both of which were more or less ignored by reviewers and the public. It is reputed that Mason threw two hundred copies of The Beggar into the Auckland harbour in disgust at a lack of sales. 39 Whether this story is apocryphal or not, the disappointment Mason felt at the reception to his work prior to 1930 was real, though ameliorated by Harold Monro’s selection of two poems from The Beggar for his Chapbook anthology where they appeared alongside what Allen Curnow has described as ‘some of the newest and most original poets then writing in England: ... Anna Wickham, Sacheverell Sitwell, Padraic Colum, Harold Monro, John Gould Fletcher, and T.S. Eliot’. 40 In his article in the New Zealand Artists ’Annual for 1929, Rex Fairbum sketched the Mason of those early years, lamenting the neglect of The Beggar by the New Zealand public and declaring:

It is a tragic thing that a book of this sort should find its way into the hands of only a scattering of people in all Australasia ... There seems

to be very little hope of establishing a native literature in New Zealand as long as the people of that country continue to ignore the claims of talent of this sort 41

Prior to 1930 and his appearance in Pope’s Kowhai Gold anthology, Mason had seen only a few of his poems published in the New Zealand periodical press. Articles by Fairbum and literary journalist lan Donnelly on Mason’s poetry had raised his profile and this recognition was further consolidated through Mason’s contact with the somewhat younger poets associated with Phoenix and the Auckland University College annual, Kiwi. It was the sustained support of writers and critics such as Allen Cumow, James Bertram, Fairbum and others that secured Mason’s critical reputation, despite some influential dissent on the part of E.H. McCormick.

As the thirties progressed, growing political unrest and the centennial hunger for an acceptably representative New Zealand literature prejudiced many against the classically influenced poet and committed Marxist that Mason showed himself to be. In what was for many years the only comprehensive study of New

Zealand literature, McCormick criticised what he termed the ‘social content’ of Mason’s work, regarding the title poem of The Beggar as ‘patently manufactured - a shallow idea decked out with worn and betraying phrases’. McCormick was also critical of Mason’s preoccupation with classical figures at the expense of‘his fellowmortals’. 42 However, several of Mason’s fellow poets at the University College provided him with what was ultimately a more sustained and critically approving judgement of his poetry. In the introduction to his 1945 anthology New Zealand

Verse, Allen Cumow applauded the ‘movement and energy’ he perceived in Mason’s language, 4 ’ which he felt contrasted markedly with what he had earlier termed the ‘quasi-dead’ language of most poets working in the twenties and early thirties. 44 Certainly, Mason’s lines have a vigour lacking in the sort of verse encouraged into print by editors and anthologists such as Charles Marris and Quentin Pope. By the time Mason began contributing to the Auckland University magazines his poetry had attained what many critics regard as its best manifestation, 46 represented by the contents of No New Thing (1934), his third collection of poetry. The poems for this volume had been completed by 1929, although they were to wait a further five years before full publication. Between 1931 and 1933 a total of five poems from this collection appeared in Kiwi and Phoenix.

To the first issue of Phoenix Mason contributed one of the strongest poems from the No New Thing manuscript, ‘Stoic Overthrow’. It appeared on the verso of a colourful epistle of support and encouragement to Phoenix from D’Arcy Cresswell, the two respected ‘elder poets’ appropriately placed immediately after Bertram’s introductory editorial. Cresswell takes as his subject what he tenns ‘our dawning manhood’, the necessary and impending transition from cultural puberty to cultural maturity which he believes New Zealand faces, and which he argues must be acquired by local effort and not through the mere importation of culture. He regards Phoenix as having the potential to be a venue for such a transition, of far greater value to the process than subscriptions to English magazines of like object. In disparaging the ‘signs of [New Zealand’s cultural] puberty’ which he perceives in the ‘wanton poets’ of Kowhai Gold, Cresswell makes an early foray in the literary feud which developed during the thirties between editors such as Quentin Pope and those writers and poets associated directly or indirectly with Phoenix.

‘Stoic Overthrow’ links in subject to the second poem contributed by Mason to Phoenix, an early version of‘ln Manus Tuas Domine’, published in the first issue of volume two. Revised, this became the concluding poem of No New Thing (Poem XXV), before being taken into the Collected Poems (1962). The scenario of impending and radical social and political change evident in ‘Stoic Overthrow’ becomes even more clear in this ‘mythic-revolutionary poem’, an intensification which seems appropriate in the light of Phoenix's political refurbishment. Both poems ruefully predict the impending destruction of societies which to large degree are themselves formed out of the wreckage of previous cultures. The final poem by Mason in Phoenix further extends this political subtext. A love poem translated from Ovid, ‘Amores Vl’, later retitled ‘Be Swift O Sun’, 46 seems initially out of place in what was indeed a very propagandist issue. 47 However, the poem’s brooding sense of the imminence of death links it tonally with his earlier poems in Phoenix, all of which look towards some breach in the prevailing order, not dissimilar to that predicted by Mason elsewhere in the magazine for New Zealand’s social and political structures.

In addition to these poems and a substantial amount of editorial comment and other pieces of non-fiction, Mason also contributed a short story to the second number of Phoenix, apparently solicited by James Bertram (Lowry to Glover, 9 March 1932) and entitled ‘His End Was Peace’.

Mason’s involvement with Phoenix was pivotal to his career. Although four poems and a single short story do not make up a large body of creative work, their publication in the Auckland University College magazine contributed to him being recognised as one of the most important New Zealand poets of the period. This was due to two factors. Firstly, other poets came into personal contact with Mason as a direct result of his involvement with Phoenix. Several of these were later to become influential in their own right. Allen Cumow, Charles Brasch, and James Bertram all rose to positions of considerable critical authority and all championed Mason’s literary if not his political cause throughout their careers. Their self-confessed ‘eager[ness] to claim [Mason] as a fellow-countryman and elder poet’ 4 * led to what James K. Baxter was later to describe as Mason’s ‘literary canonisation’. 40

Secondly, without the ongoing support of those associated with Phoenix, Mason would have probably continued to have great difficulty publishing further volumes of his poetry. As it was, Robert Lowry’s attempt to print and publish Mason’s No New Thing was almost entirely disastrous, largely due to circumstances surrounding Lowry himself which were very similar to those which had earlier been a factor in the closure of Phoenix. The printing of No New Thing was eventually completed in 1934 by Ron Holloway and as such constitutes the real beginning of Holloway’s long career as a fine printer. This very tangible support for Mason culminated several decades later in Allen Cumow’s editing of Mason’s Collected Poems , the first edition of which was published in 1962.

With regard to Cumow, his youthful participation in the editing of Phoenix , his interaction particularly with Mason, and the outlet the journal provided for his early poems, were all factors in his development. Interviewed in 1973, he made the following comment on such poems as those published in Phoenix : ‘I think Wallace Stevens put it pretty well when he said that looking back on these earlier things rather gave one the creeps, and the creeps is perhaps what I suffer from.’ 50 Considering the large body of work produced by Cumow over the past fifty years, it is perhaps correct to follow the poet’s own lead and not place too much emphasis on the work published during the early thirties. However, as with Mason, Cumow’s involvement in the Auckland University College Literary Society and his contact with other young men and women seriously interested in modem poetry had a great impact on the course of his career.

In all, Cumow contributed six poems to Phoenix. Three of these, ‘The Spirit Shall Return’, ‘Arcady’, and ‘Apocalyptic’, were gathered into Valley of Decision , published as a Phoenix Miscellany in September 1933. Of these, ‘The Spirit Shall Return’ and ‘Apocalyptic’ were selected for inclusion in the Collected Poems 1933-

1973. Of the three poems that saw their sole appearance in Phoenix, ‘Egotism [As the Hebrew Poets Wrote]’ and ‘Drawing Room Window’ can be linked both thematically and in certain aspects of their form with those that went on to subsequent publication. In his only other poem in Phoenix, ‘Calm’, Cumow departs from the religious themes which dominate his other contributions to consider the emotional aftermath of carnal love. All six Phoenix poems and all those found in Valley of Decision were written during what Cumow later termed ‘some crisis or change from faith to scepticism’ 51 experienced while he was a student of theology at St John’s College, Auckland. This study involved two years (1931-32) as a fulltime student at Auckland University College, bringing him into contact with men and women who, like himself, were to have leading roles in the development of New Zealand writing for the next generation at least. Most of Cumow’s contributions to Phoenix mirror the poet’s troubled mind as he stmggles to resolve the crisis of faith which culminated in his decision to abandon his theological studies, though for a more comprehensive rendering of his struggle the reader must turn to Valley of Decision. Driven by a ‘mostly personal lyric impulse’, 52 a phrase Cumow used in 1948 to describe the stimulus which lay behind verse written in the early thirties by poets as various as Rex Fairbum, Robin Hyde, and Charles Brasch, his six verse contributions to Phoenix show his developing skill in his chosen art form.

As noted above, Charles Brasch was closely involved in the writing of the first issue of Phoenix, working with lan Milner and James Bertram during three days spent by the trio in the Milner’s family holiday home at Waianakarua north of Dunedin. It may have been there that he wrote all or most of his four contributions to the issue. Close involvement by Brasch in the actual production of the periodical was never a real possibility, partly because Brasch was never enrolled as a student at Auckland, and partly owing to his departure for London early in 1932, prior to the publication of the first issue. However, although Brasch remained abroad until 1938, he followed the progress of Phoenix closely, corresponding regularly with James Bertram prior to the latter ’ s own departure for England. Brasch eventually contributed material to all but the final issue of Phoenix. As might be expected, his most considerable contribution to the magazine was to the first number, consisting of two poems, an article on D’ Arcy Cresswell, and a political piece entitled ‘The challenge of Russia’. The poems are typical of Brasch’s early work. ‘Cape Wanbrow’ is a lament for ‘those deep hours’ now gone and is addressed to Brasch’s close friend, lan Milner. ‘Cold Music’ affirms the constancy of‘The archetypal form / Of branch, bud, leaf,... cast in mould within me’. Both poems have been extensively republished.

For his part, Rex Fairbum contributed two poems to the third number of Phoenix : ‘Deserted Farmyard’ and ‘Straw’. Both poems were written in England in 1930 and reflect Fairbum’s growing disillusionment with Western capitalism. The disapproving reaction of the college’s Professorial Board to the former poem has already been noted. It was subsequently included in Fairburn’s Collected Poems . 53 While in

England Fairbum had met Major Douglas, the founder of Douglas Social Credit, and continued to correspond with Douglas on his return to New Zealand. As a result of this association Fairbum’s relationship with the Marxist Mason was somewhat fraught, culminating in the pages of Phoenix in his only other contribution to the periodical, an ironic letter to the editor to which Mason gave the title ‘Marx is the bunk’. Fairbum was responding to a long article by Mason in the previous issue, signed ‘J.P.’, attacking the Social Credit movement via a review of the local Douglasite journal, New Zealand Plain Talk. Fairburn complains that Mason makes an erroneous association between Douglas Social Credit and European Fascism, a charge increasingly levelled at Douglas’s movement during the thirties.

Several other less well-remembered poets and short story writers also contributed work to Phoenix. One of these was C.R. Allen, a popular novelist and poet active throughout the first half of this century and as unlikely a contributor to the pages of Phoenix as one could imagine. Of decidedly Georgian taste and conservative politics, Allen was later described by Charles Brasch as ‘remaining fixed in the pre-war [i.e. pre-World War I] time of his growth’. 54 However, as a prolific contributor to periodicals from 1903 until the 19505, Allen was always happy to encourage new literary enterprises. His contributions to Phoenix consist of two poems, ‘The Swan’ and ‘Burnham Beeches’. The second of these was published in the final number and is very much at odds with that issue’s overall tone of radicalism. A review of Alan Mulgan’s Golden Wedding (1932), ‘Thoughts on the functions of poetry’, completes Allen’s contributions to Phoenix. He uses this review as an opportunity to give expression to his own conservative poetic.

Apart from C.R. Allen, other contributors included J.C. Beaglehole, lan Milner, Hector Monro, Rona Munro, John Gifford Male, Jack Bennett, Clifton Firth, Robert Lowry, Eric Cook, D’Arcy Cresswell, Blackwood Paul, W.N. Pharazyn, Carl Straubel, Martin Sullivan, and F.R. Robertson. Beaglehole’s sole contribution to Phoenix was his poem ‘Decline of the West’, a grim and somewhat laborious lament for the modem world which, although apparently out of tune with the predominant, Marxist-driven poetic in the issue, was doubtless selected for publication because it accorded with Mason’s own dark vision of a world in need of some salutary political curative. Beaglehole had become something of a cause celebre with the students associated with Phoenix because of his central role in the freedom of speech controversy which preoccupied the University of New Zealand during the early thirties. lan Milner, involved with the Phoenix project from its earliest moments, made an initial contribution on the art of Katherine Mansfield in the first number and then reappeared with two poems and a short story in volume two.

Conclusion

The effects of Phoenix' s appearance on the Auckland University College campus were to become increasingly apparent over the following two decades, largely through the adoption by its major contributors of various roles in what became New Zealand’s literary establishment. James Bertram’s appointment as a lecturer in English at Victoria University College following his return from Asia and Europe, Charles Brasch’s founding of Landfall following his own return to New Zealand, and Allen Cumow’s role of poetry anthologist and critical arbiter, are merely some of the more visible examples of the shift made by the contributors to Phoenix from roles as aspiring leaders of a literary avant-garde into positions of considerable cultural authority. Ron Mason’s subsequent career, committed as it was to more directly political activities, was a less obvious manifestation of this process, although as noted above he continued to retain the role of exemplary elder poet for many of his younger brethren. Phoenix' s other major influence was on the development of printing and typographical design in New Zealand. Dennis McEldowney noted the astonishing progress made by Lowry himself during the life of Phoenix :

Physically the first issue was an octavo printed one page at a time in a variety of undistinguished types though with an obvious typographical flair. By the second issue Lowry had got hold of a good Monotype face (Imprint) and was rapidly learning how to use it, though the effect was still tentative ... [By 1933] Lowry the typographer has struck form to produce substantial quartos with large margins, large (12-point) type, heavy headings and page folios in the still comparatively new Gill sans serif, bold linocuts on buff paper, some in two colours, most with political or industrial themes. 55

The outcome of this rapid development by Lowry into a printer and typographer of rare talent can be seen in innumerable samples of his work published throughout the following thirty years or so, and also in his influence on Denis Glover, Ron Holloway and several other fine printer-typographers. In what is perhaps one of the most explicit examples of the sort of myth-making which has surrounded Phoenix since its demise, Charles Brasch summed up what he perceived to be the literary and cultural significance of the periodical in the following terms, while at the same time emphasising the degree of continuity between Phoenix and its effective successor, Landfall.

It [ Phoenix ] had more than served its purpose. It announced the birth of a new literature. It struck the first notes of informed, adult inquiry and

criticism in a hitherto complacent, uncritical, incurious society: criticism which was independent of the economic situation, based on a perception of values drawn from literature. At once it brought New Zealand, which was usually a generation behind the times in cultural matters, into the post-war world. That great advance must not be abandoned, and from the time Phoenix died, James [Bertram], lan [Milner], Jack Bennett, other friends and I began talking about another journal to succeed it. 56 In fact, Phoenix' s immediate successor, a politically radical periodical also open to new and innovative writing, was Tomorrow, founded by Kennaway Henderson in Christchurch in 1934.

Turnbull Library Record 30 (1997), 37-64

the Student [sic] Association have shelled out to the tune of £SO for a power press size f cap folio (about 10" xls ") and etceteras and a further

References 1 This article is based on chapter 2of my doctoral thesis, New Zealand English language periodicals of literary interest active 19205-19605, University of Auckland, 1996. Readers are referred to the author index to Phoenix published in volume 2, pp. 705-710, of that thesis. 2 Maurice Duggan, ‘O’Leary’s Orchard’, in his Collected Stones, ed. C.K. Stead, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1981, p. 242. 3 James Bertram, ‘Literary periodicals at Victoria,’ in Flight of the Phoenix: Critical Notes on New Zealand Writers, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1985, p. 60. 4 Eric Cook, Canta, 9 May 1932. 5 For a full account of the early career of Robert Lowry see Peter Hughes, “‘Sneers, jeers ... and red rantings”: Bob Lowry’s early printing at Auckland University College’, Turnbull Library Record v 01.22 no.l, May 1989, pp.s-31. 6 Robert Lowry to Denis Glover, 2 May 1929, in Denis Glover, Papers, 1928-1970, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-0418, Folders 1,3, 5. Subsequent quotations from this collection are dated in the text. 7 Auckland University College Literary Club Minute Book, University of Auckland Library, MSS & Archives, E-5, Folder 1. 8 John Dumble, ‘Our young contemporaries - some unkind thoughts on the Phoenix' , Craccum, 10 May 1932, pp. B-10. 9 ‘The impressions and opinions of an English-speaking student (guaranteed all English, as now written)’, Craccum, 10 May 1932, p. 12. 10 ‘University periodical: promising publication’, New Zealand Herald, 23 April 1932, Magazine Supplement, p.B. 11 Allen Cumow, letter to S. Hamilton, 23 October 1992. 12 University Registrar to Lowry, 22 August 1932; Lowry to the Professorial Board, 12 September 1932; Lowry to the University Finance Committee, 14 November 1932; L.G. Hughton (Alex. Cowan & Sons Ltd) to the Registrar, 8 September 1932; Acting Registrar to Lowry, 22 November 1932, in University of Auckland, Registrar’s Section Archives, General Correspondence 19271936, Box 51.

13 Holloway, interview with Jean Bartlett, October 1976, quoted in Hughes, “‘Sneers, Jeers’”, p. 12. 14 Phoenix Committee Minutes, 6 May 1933, in Janet Paul, Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library MS-Papers-5523-12. (Hereafter ‘Paul Papers’) 15 John Mulgan (‘J.M.’), ‘The Phoenix no.2’, Craccum, 22 September 1932, p. 6. 16 Robert Lowry (‘Caxton Lowry’), ‘Every Student a Printer’, Craccum 22 September 1932, p.B. 17 Annual General Meeting of the Literary Club, 8 September 1932, in Dramatic Club Minute Book, University of Auckland Library, MSS & Archives, E-22: 61. 18 Robert Lowry (‘Garamond’), ‘More on printing’, Craccum, 22 September 1933, pp. B-9. 19 Charles Brasch, Indirections, Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1980, pp. 185-187. Possibly because neither Brasch nor Milner were enrolled at Auckland University College, their names do not appear on the list of Editorial Committee members published in Phoenix. 20 Denis Glover, Hot Water Sailor, Reed, Wellington, 1962, p. 84. 21 McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand, Dept. Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1940, p.l 70. 22 Students’ Executive Minutebook, 1929-1933, 23 December 1932, in Auckland University Students’ Association Archive. 23 Postlewaite, ‘The President and Executive Committee of the Auckland University College Students’ Association: Report of the Student Printing Press’, in University of Auckland, Registrar’s Section Archives, General Correspondence 1927-1936, Box 54. 24 Weir, R.A.K. Mason, Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1977, p. 33. 25 Haslam, letter to Lowry, 5 April 1933, in Auckland University College Students’ Executive Correspondence File, 1933, quoted in Hughes, “‘Sneers, Jeers’”, p. 17. 26 University College of Auckland, Professorial Board Minutes, 15 May 1933, University of Auckland, Registrar’s Section Archives. 27 Charles Marris (‘Prester John’), ‘Reviews’, Art in New Zealand, v 01.5 no. 19, 1933, p. 233. 28 Auckland University College Students’ Executive Correspondence File, 30 June 1933, in Auckland University Students’ Association Archive. Mason had been enrolled for a bachelor’s degree majoring in Latin at the College from 1926 until 1930. 29 Phoenix Committee minutes, 6 May 1933, in Paul Papers, Folder 12. 30 Literary Club Minute Book, 4 July 1933, University of Auckland Library, MSS & Archives E-5, Folder 1.

31 Undated typewritten notes entitled ‘ Phoenix' in R.A.K. Mason, Papers, University of Otago, Hocken Library, MS 5928. (Hereafter ‘Mason Papers’) 32 Paul Papers, Folder 10. 33 ‘ Phoenix' , Mason Papers. 34 Glover, Hot Water Sailor, p. 84. 35 Jean Allison, Landfall, n 0.99, 1971, p. 226. 36 Mason, letter to John Stewart, [1933], Mason Papers. 37 Harold Monro, Twentieth Century Poetry: An Anthology Chosen by Harold Monro, Chatto, London, 1929, lan Donnelly, ‘OfN.Z. poets: some notes and comments; N 0.3: Mr R.A.K. Mason’, Sun (Auckland), 21 December 1928, p. 14; A.R.D. Fairburn, ‘A New Zealand poet ', New Zealand Artists’ Annual, vol.l n 0.4, 1929, p. 69. 38 MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Conversation with Allen Cumow’, Islands, n 0.4, 1973, p. 144. 39 Fairburn, ‘A New Zealand Poet’, p. 69. 40 Allen Cumow, ‘lntroduction’, in R.A.K. Mason, Collected Poems, ed. Allen Cumow, Christchurch, Pegasus, 1962, p.l 1. 41 Fairburn, ‘A New Zealand Poet’, p. 69. 42 McCormick, New Zealand Literature: A Survey, Oxford University Press, London, 1959, p. 115. 43 Allen Curnow, ‘lntroduction’, A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, Caxton, Christchurch, 1945, reprinted in his Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984, ed. Peter Simpson, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1987, p. 55.

44 Allen Curnow, Poetry and Language, reprinted in Look Back Harder, p. 5. 45 See, for example, C.K. Stead, ‘R.A.K. Mason’s poetry: some random observations’, Comment, n 0.16, 1963, p. 36. 46 Mason, Collected Poems, p. 78. 47 Weir, R.A.K. Mason, p. 32. 48 Curnow, Introduction, in Mason, Collected Poems, p. 12. 49 James K. Baxter, Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand, Caxton, Christchurch, 1967, p. 13. 50 MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Conversation with Allen Curnow’, Islands, n 0.4, 1973, p. 145. 51 Curnow, Valley of Decision, p.xii. 52 Allen Curnow, review of Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, by James K. Baxter, Landfall, n 0.7, 1948, p. 232. 53 Fairburn, Collected Poems, Pegasus, Christchurch, 1966, p.BB. 54 Brasch, Indirections, p. 299. 55 Dennis McEldowney, ‘Publishing, patronage, literary magazines’ in Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1991, pp. 559-560. 56 Brasch, Indirections, p. 187.