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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Big Season

The Big Season

Sir: It seems to me that your reviewer, R.A. Copland, has made a very real blunder in his destructive review of Maurice Gee’s first novel, The Big Season. Mr Copland flagellates Mr Gee for a ‘sophisticated liberalism’ that ‘turns for its values to bone-headed delinquency’. I have read Mr Gee’s novel with great interest and enjoyment and I find no evidence whatever that he approves ignorance or crime. The point about Mr Gee’s burglar is that he is a very real, honest, sensitive, humane person in his dealings with others – his burgling is an obsession which he himself compares with booze or drugs. What Mr Gee exposes is the blindness of a New Zealand small-town community to the fact that they have a good man living among them. I don’t think he is suggesting that all burglars are good men, or that all footballers are bad ones. But the experience of maturing through which the adolescent hero passes as if through a furnace is (a) a recognition that the communal social judgment is erroneous, and (b) a recognition that the community and his own family regard him as a traitor for forming a different judgment from theirs and acting on it. This may not be the experience of every young New Zealander. It is certainly the experience of a great many young New Zealanders who are socially adventurous and who do not possess closed minds. I don’t think Mr Gee over-emphasises its importance. I don’t think it can be over-emphasised. It was the respectable family-centred German citizen who allowed the Nazi crime of genocide by just closing his eyes to it. In Mr Gee’s book the respectable New Zealand citizen closes his eyes to the sadism of policemen and prefers to watch a football match. Mr Gee makes a clear, passionate, yet essentially moderate criticism of the unconscious cruelty and hypocrisy of the conformist New Zealander.

The family of the adolescent hero tried to ‘buy’ him back to their own camp by offering him praise and social status. Has Mr Copland no knowledge that this is precisely what happens to any New Zealand artist who tries to developpage 601 a view of life based on his own experience rather than the social norms? I fear that Mr Copland’s review has made me angry. There are clumsinesses in Mr Gee’s handling of the structure of his novel; but I have not yet read a New Zealand novel which is more true to life. The choice presented in Mr Gee’s book is literally a choice between psychological life and death – between an open and a closed mind, between learning from experience and losing the capacity for experience – and from the tone of Mr Copland’s view it seems that he veers to the latter choice.

1963 (288)