Title: Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist

Author: Bill Pearson

In: Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays

Publication details: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974, Auckland

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Paul Millar

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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IV

Now when most men in a community distrust their personal feelings there is a paucity of common experience. This is something the artist feels. There is no richness, no confidence any of us can fertilize our creations with. Beneath the life of the community we sense the sour, dumb struggling drive, we sense (like Colin McCahon) a strength in that drive the stronger for its being so innocently pent. It is doubtful if we can have a sensuous poet who does not develop his lushness by alienating himself from common men who would wound or coarsen it: he would tend to become esoteric and religious, or more intelligible but more austere; but the drive could be harnessed to an austere tragedy of the Greek pattern. Besides the deeper drive for security, for love, for happiness that is in all communities, there is a shallower drive for a common referential experience. To this need one can impute the gossip of the small town, the endless interest in things that bore the intellectual moored there. Whose paddock is this? Whose is that new car? Who lives in this house since Tom Dwyer went away, and how much did he sell it for? Accidents of circumstance in the comings and goings of people, those people themselves, become constants, universals, in a common framework of experience. The man who has left his home town loses contact with this experience: the stay-at-home is at a loss when he meets someone who doesn't know where Tom Dwyer lived. The search for common pegs on which to hang social intercourse takes strange forms among youths. Imported comic recordings become shapers of popular culture, of an influence unknown in the country they come from: think of the phrases and jokes that become social passwords—from Sandy Powell, page 12 George Formby, Harry Tate, Danny Kaye, the peculiar call of The Woodpecker Song. Three years ago there were records first played fifteen years before, still played and still demanded: you can mimic the quips in new situations at a gathering of youngsters and the reference will be recognized. Another device among youngsters is the passing craze for foolish colloquy: sixteen years ago one of these went: 'Knock! Knock!' 'Who's there?' 'Tom.' 'Tom who?' 'Tom you were home in bed.' Another was the farewell: 'Abyssinia'—'Abyssinia Samoa'. Others are the reproductions of comic question-and-reply from current films featuring Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, or Abbott and Costello. There was the rash of 'gopher-birds' that erupted all over our railway stations in 1946, the questions of Chad, the trail of Kilroy: all these fictions came from communities of men suddenly thrown together without any special social tradition outside King's Regulations or their American equivalent— Chad from the R.A.F., Kilroy from the U.S. army, the 'gopher-bird' from our army. In 1941 there was something mysteriously comradely among artillerymen at Wingatui in greeting one another Whacko! Girls caught on, and the cry became faintly suggestive of sexual expectation. It is a strange country where two girls and two soldiers could introduce themselves by the invocation of a meaningless word, then laugh with flushed embarrassment and end up going to a dance together. Yet all this conversational small-change is seized to fill a need in New Zealand— the need for a common experience to talk from, and the need for conventions to account for and place emotions unrecognized in the threadbare constitution of social behaviour.

So there is an aching need for art in our country. Of course there is creation—in thousands of vegetable gardens and at carpentry benches in back sheds; the creative urge always goes to make something immediately useful or money-saving. But we need an art to expose ourselves to ourselves, explain ourselves to ourselves, see ourselves in a perspective of place and time. But the New Zealander would shy from it because he is afraid to recognize himself. The youngster seizing on current song-hits, comic recordings and films and not-so-comic books—or the youngster of cults that build model aeroplanes, listen to hot jazz, or receive and transmit by short wave—is seizing a readymade and fake social binder out of fear of having to face the creation of one that belongs. A play that presented without sentimentality the patterns of New Zealand life would possibly bore an English audience: a New Zealand small town would 'tsk-tsk' it off the stage. Of course we are a cultural colony of Europe and always will be: the importation of our culture has always meant an accompanying unreality. The expectation of unreality has been confirmed by popular fiction, films and one-act plays. No artist can work without an audience willing to co-operate: if he is to be honest his audience must be honest; they must be prepared to speculate about themselves. This is something New Zealanders will not do.

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For besides the unreality foreign and commercial, there has always been a leaning to dishonesty in local art. Take the verse of Hughie Smith, the Bard of Inangahua. He was really a bard, an entertainer in an isolated society in the days before wireless and cinema. He was in demand at smoke-concerts, reunions, hallowe'ens and Masonic meetings where he gave his compositions their first airings. Now most of his verse reads like Burns respectable and in dotage: grannie's hieland hame rosy in an exile's memory, West Coast landscapes self-consciously adopted by a man who had known better. The sentiments of the verse are prudent and public—'14-'18 jingoism, boozy West Coast cameraderie, watery tributes to bonnie lassies; even the lusty heyday of the ragtowns with their brothels and casinos and boatloads of dancing-girls from Sydney is diluted into a nostalgic wink at the waywardness of the boys. A better early Coast poet, Con O'Regan, is just as sentimental in his hankering for the gold-rush days. Perhaps this falsification is the result of the idea that what we say amongst ourselves we mustn't say in front of our daughters. But often Hughie Smith's audience was men only, hard-headed roughs too. Yet they expected the sentimentality: perhaps it was their only safety against feeling cast out from the Ireland or Scotland they could remember only from childhood.^* But more likely the reason was that the men were assembled to drink and be happy, and the bard's job was to give them thoughts compatible with beery wellbeing. Unreality is in every local amateur effort at written expression. Think of the 'Over the Teacups' page of the New Zealand Woman's Weekly, or the local reporter's write-up, in any paper, of some amusing local incident: the writer tries to be humorous at all costs, but the humour is so tortuous and self-conscious, every slang word is in inverted commas, the point of the story is rubbed in with a bludgeon. In Gilbert Ward's booklets the wisecracking is self-conscious and defensive. Or take Hamilton Grieve's Something in the Country Air: you hear the voice of the infant mistress with a tongue that is the terror of children and headmaster and inspectors alike, expanding to tell an arch tale of a country courting, with acid nudges at 'romance' and the younger generation. Odd breaths of the countryside get through, but the characters are obscured by the defences—the pose of knowing all the answers, anticipation of the reader's prejudices, as in the enjoyment of a villainess's disappointment, evasive phrases like 'terra firma'. It all boils down to a paralysing self-consciousness, a fear to appear in public without fulfilling every expectation of the audience, a craving for protective camouflage.

The camouflage in the New Zealand character takes various forms. The rule may be summed up, do in private as you would in public. This is of course a wholesome principle: to deny it is to encourage hypocrisy. page 14 Again I want to make clear that I am not pleading that romantic individualism which is so often the reaction of the sensitive undergraduate. I don't hold with 'self-expression' or 'the claims of the spirit' or other heart-warming slogans of the college lit. club. What I say is that each man has talent he could offer to the community; the vigour, direction and refinement of his emotions could enrich the life he and his neighbours live: there could be greater depth, more joy, heavier sorrow—all contained in, supported by a confident purpose. There is a dimension of experience the New Zealander does not know. Because he is afraid of that accursed self of his that might get off-side of his norm-ridden society. He will not even sing as he feels: he either assumes a mocking rhetorical tone (to let listeners know he does not take his voice seriously) or he consciously imitates the star who popularized the song—Dinah Shore or Tex Morton, down to the last catch in the throat: he is not singing so much as performing a tepid act of devotion to someone else's performance which is public property and must not be violated. Again, there are in the conversation of New Zealanders many stock fake situations which serve to cover real social relations: think of the uncalled-for occasions on which a fictional 'Oxford accent' is introduced to be made fun of, or cowboy-film American, or phoney Lancashire which makes do for the 'pommie accent': each expresses a recurrent sentiment—the 'Oxford accent' a militant sense of colonial inferiority, American the sneer at the skite, Lancashire the justification of colonial independence. These preoccupations obscure real relations with other people: the New Zealander does not see things as they are, he has too many foregone conclusions: so in his actions he defends himself against misinterpretation by certain mechanisms—singing with false gusto, writing in arch journalistic clichés, long discarded—if ever used—in British journalism. (After the stark spurts of news in the paper-rationed London 1 ½d. dailies, I found the Christchurch Star-Sun's accounts of 1950 floods and the Canterbury Centennial procession unreadable: you lost your way in the piled-up syntax—piles of participial phrases and clauses beginning with 'while'. The writer couldn't let the report speak for itself, he wanted to rub it into the reader that these were impressive events needing long words and redounding phrases. It was like reading those school essays we used to write, before Professor Gordon, in which every noun had to have at least one 'expressive' adjective, in which a bush fire was a fierce holocaust raging down stately corridors of ancient rimus.)