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Journal for the Dissatisfied

I would suggest that readers of ARACHNE subscribe to Here & Now, in spite of the exorbitant price, not so much for what the first issue has brought as for what future issues may possibly provide. New Zealand is badly in need of a Journal to hammer out its immediate problems. A vivid curiosity about what happens to the country and to the world is a requisite of a full national life. I therefore think that intelligent articles such as that about Mr. Holland in the first issue justify every encouragement. The variety of the journal is admirable for a first issue, and although some articles might have been fuller, others more penetrating, and a tightening up of permanent features seems required, the vestiges of a true periodical are there. Hard work can build it up and cut away the impurities.

I regret, of course, the absence of a point of view or any aim except to keep people thinking, and more especially to keep them 'hot' about a variety of things. The editors should study how much a paper like the New Statesman and Nation thinks about improvement and construction. The article of the waterfront, without its multifarious trimmings, would set an example here.

It is not miraculous that all these gentlemen in a very bad temper give only little attention to literature. Let me except Helen Shaw, whose reviews have a softer tone, but are, strictly, I think, works of the imagination. The short story was thoroughly casual. A definite literary event like the appearance of the poems of Hubert Witheford is met with insolence and stupidity. "His imagery is most effective when he turns to the physical world," says the critic. A delicate reader might ask whether many images arise from other than the physical world. The point seems here that those who do not understand a poet habitually say that they prefer him when he is 'concrete,' even when, like Hubert Witheford, he is hardly ever so. "Feeble signals to passing ideas" is another of the reviewer's phrases. Passing signals to the Constant Idea would be more to the point.

E.S.