"Love is an open wound"

—Charles Brasch.

There isn't a great deal of New Zealand writing we can fairly call literature; and what there is of it isn't especially marked by violence, either in manner or content. I suspect it would be rather better as literature, if it were more violent. And it wouldn't be difficult to argue that New Zealand writing has become progressively more violent, more frank and brutal and uncompromising, as it has matured. One could easily illustrate this by tracing a line, say, from Lady Barker through Jane Mander and Katherine Mansfield to Janet Frame; or from Alfred Domett through Arthur Adams to R.A.K. Mdson, Alistair Campbell, and James K Baxter. These earlier writers don't often shock us, the later ones sometimes do. And the power to shock is surely one of the marks of an adult and living literature.

There are two main snags, however, about this historical, "evolutionary" approach. First, it tends to assume that creative writing, like social development, is not merely continuous (which it is) hut also some kind of steady progress and advance (which it isn't). Second, the whole modern age since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars has been a pretty violent one — a tract of time crammed with private anguish and public slaughter on a scale hard to match in the long annals of man's inhumanity to man. Literature, like the other arts, has had to reflect and keep pace with all this: so that modern literature almost by definition is a literature of violence. The veneer of civilisation has worn pretty thin; we are all aware of the destructive forces it covers.

To find words for modern life is as brave an act as that of the cave artist who drew the slender figures of primitive men confronting the most powerful of predators. In the cave drawings the monster is faithfully observed, the artist's technique assured. Our modern monsters aren't as easily brought to view, and we are still struggling to find the techniques to present them.

I am not a philosopher, still less a theologian; so I shan't venture into any discussion of the age-old problems of evil, violence, and human suffering. Even in the most hopeful of religious schemes, the Judaeo-Christian, man has fallen from grace before he's got fairly started and the first mortal birth is the birth of a murderer. To account for the presence of an Adversary, tor the force of evil in the heart of man, we have to presuppose a revolt of angels and war in heaven-in a word, primordial conflict, suffering and doom. Other religions, whether or not they share the hope of man's ultimate redemption, agree in recognising the chief facts of the human condition: for good or ill, we all inherit conflict, suffering and mortality. As Beckett's Hamm puts it. You're on earth, there's no cure for that."

Now this whole business of painful or tragic conflict between man and his predicament, between man and his fellow men, has always been the stuff of great literature. There is no drama in Eden till the serpent enters it. The death of Abel is the first tragedy. The Old Testament, in sum, is a fairly blood-stained record of the fortunes of the chosen people, and it reaches its greatest eloquence in the warnings and lamentations of the prophets. Homer's Iliad is one of the most violent books ever written, and one of the greatest. Goethe's Faust shrinks in comparison with Dante's Commedia, we might claim, not because Goethe was a less gifted poet, but because his enlightened scepticism couldn't face the full horror of human depravity that Dante (fortified by Aquinas) took in his stride. And since Goethe, the characteristic mark of modern literature has been "to exact a full look at the Worst."

What I am trying to suggest is not that great literature must be violent in tone, or must approach the special effects of Greek tragedy; but that it must somehow accommodate violence, at least dip if not plunge into the tragic flux of human suffering, whether in Naxon or in Nelson If violence alone made great literature, Seneca would be greater than Sophocles, and he isn't. Polite novelists like Jane Austen or Henry James can convince us by a mere tremor, by the slightest of vibrations in the crystal, that they are just as responsive to the agonizing pressures of their time as more flamboyant writers like Stendhal or Dostoievsky. One of the most violent novels ever written is that exquisitely polished exchange of letters in French high society. Les Liasons Dangereuses.

May we agree then (ducking a number of nice problems in aesthetics) on one general working assumption? In all times and places, but especially in our own time and to some degree in our own place, good imaginative writing must always, like Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, show the two contrary states of the human soul. I think this is as true for a short lyric as it is for the longest and most elaborate work of fiction. "Without Contraries is no progression", whether we name the contraries as Love and Hate, Reason and Energy, Good and Evil, Faith and Unfaith. And without contraries there is no art.

It isn't the artist's task to resolve the contraries though of course we all recognise some supreme works of art(like Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, and Dante's Commedia, and Shakespeare's final plays, and Rilke's Duino Elegies) which seem to have achieved this miracle. But he must somehow include them—the Tiger along with the Lamb, the Satanic mills along with the beams of Love—if he is to convince us that he is a man speaking to men, that his work is rooted in life as we know it.

If we turn, then, from the company of masterpieces to what has been written in or about our own islands, the same general values should still apply. How fully, or how adequately, have our best writers managed to accommodate violence? I am too ignorant of traditional Maori chant and song to bring it into the picture-though it is obvious that in the celebration of heroic myth, and in the bawdy humour of satirical exposure, Maori poetry has resources nearer to those of Homer and Aristophanes than pallid modern English words can easily compass. Nor can I fairly bring in probably the finest verses ever composed in this country, the doom-laden and prophetic poems in exile of the German-Jewish refugee, Karl Wolf-skehl.

Quite arbitrarily, I want to suggest a few broad categories with their own convenient labels. These might be: Cosmic Violence ("Man against the gods"); Natural Violence ("Man against nature"); Social Violence (organised and in some sense licensed conflict of bodies of men, as in wartime or periods of class struggle), and finally the very elastic compartment I can only call Human Violence—the shocking things men and women do to themselves and to one another, with whatever motive, and too often gratuitously.

Cosmic Violence

(Here we most miss some reference the oldest Maori poetry.) The first example I would [unclear: c] of a new Zealand writer who has found words for [unclear: wh] Keats called "the giant agony of the world" is the [unclear: po] R.A.K Mason. Mason, these days, is something of [unclear: a] forgotten man. Of course he's in all the anthologies, [unclear: a] few of his best poems are so familiar they've been [unclear: wo] smooth as pebbles. It is somehow typical of latter-[unclear: day] attitudes to Mason that the lines of his most [unclear: frequent] quoted should be the sestet of his "Sonnet of Brother hood":

. . . then what
of these beleagured victims this our race
betrayed alike by Fate's gigantic plot
here in this far-pitched perilous hostile place
this solitary hard-assaulted spot fixed
at the friendless outer edge of space.

The assumption is commonly made that the poet is [unclear: he] speaking of New Zealand, as a sort of Tristan da [unclear: Cunh] snoring in the night on the remote fringes of [unclear: southern] oceans. But of course he is speaking of men isolated [unclear: o] earth, on the outer fringe of a hostile or indifferent universe; to read the poem otherwise is to diminish [unclear: it], to reduce a vision which, through narrow, reaches at least as far as Galileo's telescope.

This isn't, of course to claim that Mason is our first truly philosphical poet, or that his youthful attitude [unclear: of] almost total revolt is a satisfactory one. There had [unclear: been] philosophers haunting our shores before him one [unclear: think] of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or the chunks of [unclear: undigest] German metaphysics in Domett's Ranolf and Mohia; [unclear: o] one recalls the work of other poets who project more easily acceptable views, such as Ursula Bethell, Eileen Duggan. J.R. Hervey, M.K. Joseph, J.E. Weir. What [unclear: ma]ters in poetry is not philosophical validity but urgency of apprehension, controlled intensity of expression. Mason is the one New Zealand poet who could write with utter conviction:

All the selves that have been slain
have so drenched this place with pain
how can any soul endure
where the whole ground is impure
with its own dead?. . .

Before our poetry could come of age, before it could learn any deeper resonance, one poet at least had to be crucified: and Mason was that poet. I think that for this I would honour him more than any other of our literary ancestors.

There is one other example I should like to cite of [unclear: "cos] attitudes, and it comes from an even more neglected poet, Ruth Dallas. Her Letter to a Chinese Poet, published a dozen years ago in Landfall, still seems to me [unclear: o] of the most impressive imaginative achievements in our verse reaching out from these islands across the [unclear: centurie] to pay tribute to a Chinese poet of the T'ang dynasy, [unclear: P] Chu-i, and easily assimilating Taoist or Buddhist [unclear: notions] of flux and recurrence, of a continuity that need not [unclear: be] baleful.

Katherine Mansfield

Charles Brasch

James K. Baxter

Warming a set of new bones
In the old fire of the sun, in the fashion
Of all men, and lions, and blackbirds.
Finding myself upon the planet earth,
Abroad on a short journey Equipped with heart and lungs to last
Not as long as a house, or a peony rose,
Travelling in the midst of a multitude
Of soft and breathing creatures
In skins or various colours, feathers, fur,
A tender population
For a hard ball spinning
Indifferently through light and dark,
I turn to an old poem,
Fresh as this morning's rose.
Though a thousand summers have shed their blooms
Since the bones that guided brush or pen
Were dust upon the wind.

So men turned to a carved stick
That held the lonely history of the tribe.

Round the sun and round the sun and round.
We have left the tree and waterhole
For a wilderness of stars. . .
Round the sun and round the sun and round.

[unclear: th] Dallas ends this section of her poem with a tribute [unclear: the] makers, to all those who by the power of art have [unclear: eft] the earth richer than when they came."

[unclear: ive] chosen these two poets to illustrate two extremes. [unclear: olt] and acceptance, among possible attitudes to the [unclear: -old] human predicament. Art, like life, needs both [unclear: rebels] and its reconcilers. And those deceptively simple [unclear: s] of Ruth Dallas.

A tender population
For a hard ball spinning
Indifferently through light and dark—

[unclear: m] to me to "Accommodate violence" with a serenity [unclear: rthy] of the old Chinese master she is saluting.

[unclear: y] I add a word about two prose-writers, to comple[unclear: nt] the two poets already mentioned? These are, in my [unclear: w], the two most gifted writers of fiction New Zealand [unclear: claim], and both are women: Katherine Mansfield and [unclear: et] Frame.

Because she was a supreme artist in words, and because she could sometimes write directly out of her own joy in the visible world, Katherine Mansfield has left us some of the most perfectly achieved lyrical stories of this century. But a shadow falls across the sunny lawn of The Garden Party; the sea At the Bay grows chill and numbing; in Bliss, Prelude and the rest we are seldom unaware of the snail under the nasturtium leaf. If this is an art in miniature, like Jane Austen's, it is still one that comprehends the full range of existential tensions, however delicately pointed. And in one tiny story, The Fly, though it may be directly referred to the time of the first World War and a single useless death, she has expanded a metaphor from King Lear into a haunting parable of the human condition—tortured, struggling, but doomed.

Janet Frame, most obviously the heir of Katherine Mansfield in her early stories of New Zealand childhood, in her equally acute sensibility and her comparable mastery of verbal texture, offers us a view of life infinitely sadder and more anguished than Katherine Mansfield's. The reasons for this have been acutely analysed by Professor Joan Stevens in a remarkable radio talk given earlier this year. For Janet Frame " life is a terrifying brilliance from which most of us must hide"; mortals are all in a state of siege; any apparent security we try to construct is illusion. Hers is a true art of crisis; but because she has made herself technically into a very fine social and satirical novelist, with an assured control over a much broader canvas than the short story can offer, she is able to map her own universe of pain and human isolation in a number of moving explorations of men and women who grope and collide and rarely find happiness: but in whom we can, indeed, recognise ourselves.

It has often been remarked that New Zealand lacks any major work of fiction—as large in scope or theme, say, as Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahony, or the later novels of Patrick White, which can establish for us a really representative slice of life Katherine Mansfield was moving towards this in her assembled sketches of the Burnell family; Robin Hyde tried it fragmentary, and under pressure in The God wits Fly; Sargeson made his most ambitious attempt in I saw in my Dream. But Janet Frame came closest to bringing it off, I believe, in Owls Do Cry—that distressing saga of a doomed family in Waimaru—and if her later and increasingly sophisticated novels are considered together, they add up to an analysis in depth—in terrifying depth, and pitched in an unremitting tenor of violence—of the quality of life as it is very often lived in these islands.

Natura' Violence

On my second category of "Natural Violence" I propose to say very little. A comparison with Australia might again be fruitful. Because of the physical nature of that continent, the extremes of climate, the harshness of its desert interior, and the great privations suffered by the first explorers, the struggle of man against nature has been a recurring theme for painters and writers. Such legends as those of Burke and Wills haunt the Australian imagination. A novel like Patrick White's Voss makes brilliant use of this rich heritage. We have nothing comparable; and the best passages about human endurance and determination in the face of natural hazards are to be found in the plain factual accounts of some of our early explorers and pioneers.

Yet three obvious challenges remain: the sea, the bush, and the mountains. They are still the proving-ground for many young New Zealanders, and there must be a few of us who have not lost friends who came to grief in confronting them. The mark of these three permanent features of our environment is heavily scored in our fiction as a continual counterpart to the easy comfort of suburban and small town living. Not too far from the lighted window panes are always the bare peaks, the lonely bush, and some of the stormiest waters in the world. We must all remember scattered episodes that point up this particular confrontation: the lonely bush farm in John Mulgan's Man Alone, and Johnson's battle for survival in the dripping forests of the Kaimana was; or Forbush's ordeal among the skuas and penguins in the isolation of his Antarctic hut. The novelist who has concentrated on this theme of natural hazards is Ruth France, in two convincing stories of man against sea and flood The Race, and Ice Cold River which hold their suspense with no hint of strain or exaggeration. But the field remains underworked: for example, the high drama of mountain climbing in New Zealand that one might have expected long before this, is still to be written.

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.

Human Violence

Now I must try to sketch a few head notes for my final category of human violence, before suggesting a few tentative conclusions.

I begin again with our earliest indubitably first-rank literary artist. Katherine Mansfield. There is one vein she opened up, in a few early stories not widely published until after death, which is quite uncharacteristic of her later work. This is the deliberately tough genre-study of life-in-the-raw we meet in The Woman at the Store and Ole Underwood. No one who has read these stories can forget the idiot-child who maliciously betrays her mother's sordid crime, or the crazy old derelict who briefly assuages his own lonely anguish by Hinging the little cat down the sewer drain. Sooner or later someone was bound to take this kind of thing further.

The Woman at the Store is clearly the prototype for Jean Devanny's The Butcher Shop; and the little cat, victim of human frustration, is even more grotesquely martyred in Sargeson's Sale Day. when it is thrust by a disgruntled farmhand into the open range undery the frying chops And the difference between these two later treatments is, of course, the difference between back blocks melodrama pretty crudely handled, and the masterly use of violence as a deliberate effect of art the telling stroke that points up unbearable strain.

Janet Frame

Maurice Shadbolt

Bill Pearson

Violence in Frank Sargeson—and there is plenty of it, between the delayed charge of A Great Day' page 11 and the positively Jacobean piling up of corpses at the climax of 'The Hangover' is almost always the result of deprivation, of the warping of human instincts by the cramping environment of a joyless, repressive, still fundamentally puritan society. The Hangover is a particularly telling instance, because the spectacular homicidal outbreak that stains its final pages with gore comes from an apparently model youth who is the special pride of his hardworking respectable mother—and who has taken the precaution of wearing for the occasion a number of lightweight plastic raincoats, so that he can strip these off one by one as he proceeds to each encounter with his chain of victims. The symbolism here is almost too neat, the whole fiction perhaps too near a casebook study of the era that produced Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; but the point is made, in the novelist's own terms, with a stylised and sinister elegance.

Sargeson's art is his own. : I wish I had time to discuss it. Nor would it be difficult to cite examples from other writer's of the fifties and sixties—from the "three Maurices" Duggan and Gee and Shadbolt, from Sylvia Ashton-Wamer and Ian Cross and O.E. Middleton—of a similar, if generally less subtle, exploitation of the violent outbreak to point up or explode emotional and social tensions. Two sisters have been especially adroit in their handling of near-psychotic conditions: Fleur Adcock in her poetry, and Marilyn Duckworth in a series of brittle but closely-observed novels of human disorientation. Fleur Adcock has written some notable hate-poems, and has also been able to suggest, in verse-fables that mix the language of dream and fairytale, something of the nightmare encounters in which we all become involved, whether in domestic relationships or in such public disasters as the Vietnam War.

Can I, in any meaningful way, attempt a summing-up? The literary historian, I think, would by this time admit that we have something however patchy and unevenly developed—we can call New Zealand literature. It can show some significant achievements in poetry and the short story, with at least two novelists—Sargeson and Janet Frame of striking and abrasive quality. Drama—the most open form of all internationally, these days—remains pretty thin, though at least more New Zealand plays are being written and performed than ever before.

In general, our literature is modest in scope and intention, restrained in statement, low-keyed, avoiding extremes of passion or rhetoric. And this in a country with an early history of singular boldness and imaginative sweep, with a native tradition of fierce myth and bawdy humour that has remained untapped almost' to our own day. Perhaps at last we are beginning to tap it: we must be especially grateful for such a poet as Hone Tuwhare, who reaches for some of his rhythms and images into these deep ancestral wells.

In a setting of sea and hills that remains beautiful but harsh, we have evolved our own comfortable, materialistic, egalitarian society—that is also conformist, intolerant, and too often small minded. Does our literature exactly reflect us? Are we, as a people, meagre, strained, and lacking in generosity;

Out of Ireland have we come;
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start....

Yeats wrote of his own country. If the lines were modified to fit New Zealand, they might read:

Great rancour, little joy
Maimed us from the start.

That is why Frank Sargeson is, in a precise sense, our first truly national writer: because he has shown us to ourselves from within, shown us the narrowness of our own hearts.

May I take the parallel with Ireland just a little further, to make my last point? For in this parallel we may find,

I think, both a warning and a challenge.

Ireland at the turn of this century, in the bitter crisis of her struggle for national identity following the fall of Parnell, most needed two writers of a very special kind: Yeats and Synge. Yeats, who had first tuned his own exquisite instrument to sing nostalgically of the misty past, found new modes and a new compass when he faced the realities of his own time: he made himself into the great violent poet we all know, holding suspended in deathless verse the extremes of savage passion and formal, balanced control. Synge, a gentle, lonely, compassionate man, wrote violent humorous plays that flayed his own countrymen as mercilessly, and as surgically, as Apollo flayed the faun. Without the work of Yeats and Synge, would the splendid flowering of literature from this one small Atlantic island have been possible?

New Zealand's social crisis, in our time, came between the two world wars. We have no Yeats—though I have always felt that Mason, with better luck, might have become one. Yet the influence of Yeats, beyond that of any other modern poet, helped to inject energy and urgency into our own post-war poetry. If there are two New Zealand poets who have, since then, produced a substantial body of work that follows a similar trajectory to his, I would suggest they are Charles Brasch and James K. Baxter. In the later poetry of these writers of two generations—more surly in Brasch than in Baxter—there is a readiness to accept the full complexity of most of our modern dilemmas, and meet them in terse, colloquial, unstrained but arresting language. I am sure that the real stature of Brasch as poet is insufficiently recognised: Baxter is perhaps a little over-valued, especially by the young. But for his unreserved immersion in the destructive element, his passionate commitment to the cause of the derelicts and drop-outs of our too-complacent society, I have nothing but admiration.

Love the Sole Vocation

Have we a Synge? I suppose Sargeson comes nearest, especially in such a story as An International Occasion, which appeared in Landfall last year. This is a brilliant little portrait of our fragmented social condition, in which the mixed, isolated lodgers in a decayed boardinghouse are brought together through the missionary zeal of a Swedish sea-cook, share an uncomfortable Sunday communal meal, and retire, variously affronted, to their private occasions until flushed out, or trapped and burnt in their rooms, a fire started by the shadowboxing Chris. Chris is the unassimilable element—a simple Kiwi workingman who is paying off old scores for what the welfare state has done to him. Duggan and Gee, too, in their best stories, have a hard cutting edge, a tough satirical twist, we stand badly in need of.

Well, there it is. Perhaps we have had better writers than we deserve, though, on the whole, our public attitude towards them has almost as unappreciative as the Irish attitude towards Synge and O'Casey, Joyce and Beckett. It's my own feeling, that they have to hit us quite a bit harder, before we really sit up and begin to notice them.

Twenty years ago, Denis Glover used his mouthpiece Harry to outline the poet's task:

Sing all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.

How often since then the lines have been quoted as merely lyrical and picturesque, in the manner of paintings in a Kelliher Art Competition! But these mountains that beckon can kill; these waves that enchant can drown, suddenly and savagely. Over the years since Glover announced his "Themes", it is the harshness rather than the sweetness in our way of life that has nourished our art, and prompted its most searching insights.

Today the art that begins in joy is rare indeed. As for the "Cry against corruption" "the air is full of our cries".

I end with some lines from Charles Brasch's Not Far Off. which seem to me to catch the tone of these last years better than most:

To see your neighbour as yourself
His heart stripped self-naked
Is to confess in every heart
The hateful and the crooked
Beneath its lies and boasting.
And at the roots of hate
The trivial and vapid

To shun your neighbour as yourself
Maddened with self-knowledge.
The vapid and the trivial
That bear no human message —
Destructiveness, forgiveness
Work to the one issue :
Let hatred wreak its outrage.

That comes from Chantecler, the mask of the foiled, frustrated human lover, who cries again:

Where I love I hate
And cannot Love where I hate
But, blind in the net
Turn and burn and
Curse the foiled heart.

Whether indeed we live now in a cold ante-purgatory, or in some kind of refining fire, the strain on the creative Imagination is all too clear. Again, perhaps Brasch has found the best words for it:

Loving your fellow men
Never ask to be loved.
Loving your given and chosen land
Do not look for its love in return.

Love is first and last confession
And sole vocation,
Love that gives itself
Into men's unjust hands
Love that will not be healed
Love is an open wound.

Maurice Gee

Guthrie Wilson