The Fuss about Numbers

Sir: A month ago I returned to New Zealand from India. After a limited experience of the vast social problems of the East, I saw New Zealand for a moment through rose-coloured glasses: a land of security and promise, her mountains and beaches inhabited by angels, her people free to pursue an approximation to the good life. On my first day in New Zealand I picked up the ninth issue of a literary magazine of which I happen to be co-editor, and read it from cover to cover with the greatest interest. Here was something worth waiting for: three short stories (one of them the best which had ever been published in Numbers), some first-rate poetry, a long essay on the work of George Barker, remarkable for the subtlety and maturity of its analysis, and several highly competent reviews. It was foolish of me to imagine that the leopard could change his spots, that the country which exhibited a stolid and hostile indifference to the works of Katherine Mansfield, which all but refused to honour Frances Hodgkins, could tolerate for a moment the presence of writers who had begun to handle real themes with courage and delicacy.

The word ‘delicacy’ in this context may surprise the blind sharpshooters of the Press, yet I have not read a more delicate exposition of a woman’s experience of love than that contained in the story ‘For the Novelty’, and Mr Packer’s sensitive delineation of adolescent conflicts and violence, though it may jar a little at a first reading, has not overstepped the boundaries of aesthetic prudence. Nor can I find in the third story, or the poems and article, the mark of the cloven hoof. How delightful it is to find that our journalists, after a century spent in airing the dirty linen of their neighbours, have put on the armour of Sir Galahad, forgetting (in their bottomless zeal for purity) his traditional chivalry towards women!

If the issue were merely one of local literary politics I would not ask the courtesy of your columns to reanimate a discussion which has lapsed. Your own moderate and judicious statement has heartened me, however, to expect that courtesy. The true issue is far more serious, and one which concernspage 385 intimately any New Zealand writer who values his vocation. Must he or she narrow their vision of life to the point where no published work can risk offending the susceptibilities of an unstable thirteen-year-old schoolgirl or an unlettered journalist? The issue has been fought out a thousand times in Europe and America, and each time the wisest counsel has eventually triumphed – that the freedom of the writer may vary according to the educational level and emotional maturity of his audience, and that one must tolerate lapses in discretion in order than no art should be garrotted and mature writing should have room to flourish.

I speak now not from the doubtful standpoint of a rebellious aesthete, claiming a total and irresponsible freedom, but from the old and solid ground of Catholic humanism. The shadow of Calvin rests still upon the hearts and minds of our countrymen, dividing grace from nature, and refusing our artists their legitimate entry to the garden of a mature vision of life. Let those critics who are Catholics open the works of Jacques Maritain, which they have never opened before, and consider his generous and brotherly praise of the experiments of the French surrealists. Let those who hold some other faith examine again that neglected homily, John Stuart Mill’s ‘Essay on Liberty’. Then let them reconsider, with a suitable humility, the works of legitimate freedom which they censure, attack, and so rarely understand.

1959 (188)