Social Violence

I turn now to more fertile ground: the literature of war, and of social violence. Considering our relatively brief history, and our relatively small population, New Zealanders have had a pretty fair dose of this. And most of it has been of our own choosing. For New Zealanders Maori and Pakeha alike are a pretty aggressive lot. Whatever they may profess publicly, they really like fighting, they're quite good at it, and if there's a war going on anywhere, they can't bear to be out of it. Just why this should be so whether it's due to historic conditioning, "The stain of blood that writes an island story", or to the pioneer spirit, or to Rugby football, or to eating too much meat. I must leave to the social historian or the psychiatrist to determine. But the facts seem to be beyond dispute.

Well, of course there's a very considerable literature-both documentary and imaginative about New Zealanders at war. It's only quite recently that we've begun to get the Maori Wars into perspective; but there are two fictional treatments. William Satchell's The Greenstone Door, and Errol Brathwaite's impressive recent trilogy The Flying Fish, The Needle's Eye, The Evil Day, that are well informed, sober, and mature. And such a poetic sequence as Alistair Campbell's Sanctury of Spirits—a splendid evocation of the blood-boltered ghosts of Kapiti, is a good deal more successful than anything before it in suggesting the explosive, obsessive violence of Maori warfare in the old feuding days.

If the First World War has left for us a single literary memorial worthy of its trench-locked, grinding destruction it is Katherine Mansfield's short story The Fly. But there are three other books I should like to mention, documentary rather than fictional. These are Robin Hyde's tour-de-force of imaginative reporting, Passport to Hell—a book so rare nowadays that very few have read it, but totally convincing in its raw presentation of vicarious war experience.

Frank Sargeson

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Dan Davin

And two others that exactly complement each other, like two caryatids framing an arch (though hardly an arch of triumph). First, We will not Cease, the testament of the pacifist Archibald Baxter who with a group of like-minded conscientious objectors was forcibly shipped overseas, sent into the front lines, and given field punishment lashed to a post under enemy fire. And second, Alexander Ait ken's Gallipoli to the Somme, a classically objective account of infantry soldiering at the Dardanelles and in Flanders.

So Aitken shifted his own position, and lived to tell his tale. From Archie Baxter I cannot quote except at length; instead, here is his son's poetic tribute, from Pig Island Letters, to his father's experience.

When I was only semen in a gland
Or less than that, my lather hung
From a torture post at Mud Farm
Because he would not kill. The guards
Fried sausages, and as the snow came darkly
1 feared a death by cold in the cold groin
And plotted revolution. His black and swollen thumbs
Explained the brotherhood of man. . . .

These events occurred early in our century: we have had fifty years to recollect them, if not exactly in tranquility. The characteristic attitude of those directly involved in the First World War was one of traumatic shock, of stunned disbelief that such things could happen. When it all began happening over again some twenty years later, the mood was very different. Any comparison of the literature of these two wars will show that combatants and civilians in the second, unlike combatants in the first, could no longer be shocked by anything one by either side.

The writer who most strikingly links the grim tensions of the depression years, the political passions of the Spanish Civil War, and the looming shadow of a greater conflict, is John Mulgan. That he was able to do this so well in a couple of short books hastily written in the very short time allowed him, is one of the minor miracles of our literary history The content of these two books, Man Alone and Report on Experience, is limited; but the selection of detail is so sure, and the writing so clean and forceful, that an astonishing amount of the coming-of-age of his own generation is packed into them. Above all, Mulgan succeeded in achieving a new stance and temperstoical, ironical, laconic, with deeper feelings firmly under control—that for the first time seemed adequate to the presentation of class conflict, war policy, and the peculiar savagery and reprisals of partisan warfare.

Mulgan's special strength is his lucidity, his power to strip down his bare narrative to the significant episode only.

Dan Davin's For the Rest of our Lives— much the most ambitious war novel attempted by a New Zealander is work of a very different kind: wide-ranging, richly loaded with detail, full of bravura set pieces and baroque flourishes. I'm very fond of this book myself, for it's one of the few that suggests that some New Zealanders at least could see war—in that ancient Mediterranean theatre—as history, could think and discuss ideas even in the front line, or when having a bash amid the fleshpots of Cairo. To suggest the quality of the writing, of Davin's brooding response to the tangled motives and questionable credits of wartime, I should like to quote one passage from an early chapter. Here Frank, an intelligence officer in Cairo, is interrogating a New Zealand soldier who has been decorated for a brilliant solo escape from German captivity in Greece-an escape achieved by an unsuspected talent for the quiet strangling of a series of guards and sentries.

"By the way, sir," the soldier ends. "That strangling business. There was nothing else I could do, was there?

I mean, a man had to get away, didn't he?"

"Of course you had to get away. Serve them bloody well right."

"Still, it's not like shooting a bloke."

"Forget it. You improved their characters. Made good Germans of them." They shook hands.

Somehow the R.S.A. and the New Zealand public generally, have never taken Davin's war fiction to their hearts. They much prefer Guthrie Wilson, whose Brave Company came out some four years later, and with the vivid actuality of its combat scenes in Italy, its concentration on the fate of a single small unit in a single phase of action, has many claims to being the typical novel of New Zealanders at war. This is an authentic picture of the close fraternity of fighting men, appreciative of each other and of the enemy, resentful only of politicians and bludgers at base and the women at home who sometimes let them down. That is the old Anzac stereotype, really; and though Wilson can be quite thoughful about the ethos of war, and even try to ram home a few moral truths about it, the strength of his book lies in the stimulus of its action and dialogue, rather than in the banality of its reflections. Basically. I think, Wilson is a conventional Kiwi with a strong liking for the rough stuff, which he can handle with real power.

But there is one later book of his, The feared and the [unclear: fear] of 1954, which calls for mention — if only because it is perhaps the most violent novel New Zealand has yet produced.

This is a genuine Gothic 'horror tale", with a central figure—"II Brutto", a New Zealand infantry officer whose giant form and distinctive skull would make him appear a sort of mindless monster spawned by war itself — that is quite unforgettable. Brutto is a superb natural fighter and leader of partisans, a kind of Colin Meads of the Abruzzi. But he is so determined to keep his independent command that he is implacably ready to kill off friend and foe, man and woman, with utter lack of scruple. Of course he is mad, and it is the war-wound that has made him mad. But the uncanny logic of his own hunter's instinct for survival, and the special skills in destruction that war has given him, make him for the time being irresistible. The first part of this book, the whole Italian section, with its not too improbable love interest, and with Brutto at last gunned down by his closest friend and most loyal lieutenant, seems to me masterly in its kind: a completely self-sufficient and deeply imaginative parable of war. Unfortunately, by carrying his story back to New Zealand, and by turning Brutto into victim as well as hero, a Christ of the battlefields keeping his rendezvous with God on the slopes of the Tararuas, Guthrie Wilson ruined what might, I feel, have been his finest work.

There are other war books that deserve mention — among them Errol Brathwaite's beautifully written study of a Japanese officer in the Pacific islands, An Affair of Men, which (along with Laurens van der Post's A Bar of Shadow seems to me one of the few really perceptive treatments in English of Japanese war psychology.