N.Z. IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 169, 7 October 1927, Page 12

N.Z. IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR.

(Written for Tho Sun.J I ONCE heard Walter de la Mare remark that It vaa a mistake to think that catastrophe produces great literature. The: influenza epi demic brought forth no epic. The Great War killed a number of pcets; bur. we have no evidence that it made any. I have been wondering what process of time or Nature will produce thei New Zealand national author. This speculation has been promoted by the fact that journalists and others have been considering the whole subject ol New Zealand authorship, in view ot the Australi in and New Zealand authors’ wee!:. I cannot hope to approach the subject in any scientific spirit. That is the business of the professional librarian. 1 take the conventional view of authorship, and eliminate the scientific historians and treatise-writers. English authorship, for present purposes, connotes Shakespeare, Dickens, and Keats, not Stubbs, Marshall, and Graen. This is a test we may apply to any author who may be regarded as having a claim to be considered national: would his writings justify a pilgrimage from the other side of the world, as we may make a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, Rochester, or Hampstead, where Keats sat under a tree and wrote his ode to the night-

Ingale? There is so one of whom I can think who stands In the same relation to New Zealand as Olive Schreiner to South Africa. Katherine Mansfield might have written a complete novel comparable to "Life on an African Farm," had she lived. She is one of two writers who might conceivably inspire a pilgrimage to New Zealand. The other is Samuel Butler, whose "Erewhon” might have challenged some late Victorian to shake the dust of Kensington off his shoes, and seek out the Utopia of the foothills. Katherine Mansfield’s pilgrim would probably be an American, as her vegue in that country was greater than in England. Those of her stories that have a New Zealand setting are national, in that they present life as It is in New Zealand to-day. The child may already be born who will some day hear a tui sing as Keats heard the nightingale, and write in the name of thousands who have listened. He will draw people to the spot, despite the fact that the tui has been cor scripted by every writer who has endeavoured to express the thoughts that arise in him at the mention of New Zealand. We have much good poetry, but, if we apply the test of the pilgrimage again, there Is no one of whom we can think. William Pember Reeves in "The Passing of the Forest,” came as near to being justly considered "our poet" as any. New Zealand drama is still in Its infancy, and it is quite certain that there is no dramatist in New Zealand whose local habitation would be regarded as a Mecca by my aforementioned pilgrim. Such an one may arise, but while we await his coming we may consider one or two writers whose books came under notice in Authors’ Week. Rosemary Rees has w rit ten half a dozen novels with a New Zealand setting, and they are Increasing in popularity. They are all straightforward tales of the type that is l'requeaily given a Canadian or American setting. Jane Mander is not like the former writer, "out to please.” She- is now completely out of touch with life in New Zealand. She thinks atid speaks like an American, and it is to America that she has turned of late years for inspiration. Still, she is a writer ot whom anything may be expected, and some day homing thoughts may produce a really noteworthy book. There yet remains to be written that novel ot New Zealand life which will set folk ringing their bells.

Some day such a book will be written, though whether It will be the outcome of some great disturbance in te Pacific or whether It will come out of everyday life as Katherine Mansfield’s stories emerged, remains to be seen. One would like to quote other writers, but this is, it seems, an attempt to prove that we have not found our author, and every name one adds sounds like a reproach. Miss Edith Howes occupies an assured place in New Zealand literature. She is fortunate in being both local and universal in her appeal. Some day she may write a novel or possibly a children’s book which will prompt just such a pilgrimage as I once paid to Mossmtn’s Bay. then the home of Ethel Turner. X confess to having shirked perusal of "The Butcher’s Shop.” Is it possible that here is the book that posterity will acclaim as the work of our national writer?

There is one book which, though not written of New Zealand, has in it matter that is more germane to the genius of this country flan any apostrophe to tussock or bell bird. That is Major 'Waite's History of the Anzacs of Gallipoli. It suffers from the fact that it is an official publication. V/e are all familiar with the unpleasant habit of designating propaganda beI'v£gh covers as "literature.’* Such a

book as the Gallipoli volume might so oe regarded by one who had not read it; but it happens that Major Waite’s book is literature in the truest sense. He is another writer from whom one is justified in hoping for something that may encourage us farther in our quest for an author. C. R. ALLEN. Wellington. “NIGGER HEAVEN” (Written for THE SUN.) Carl Van Vechten's “Nigger Heaven” may not be of the orthodox white imagining, but it is none the less interesting . Mr. Van Vechten has that rare capacity, a flair for using exactly the right word, and none other. His flair, however, is not confined merely to tile individual word. He goes further and displays the rarer capacity of finding exactly the right scene, and none other, for the expression of some particular phase. This quality, flashing throughout the entire book, gives it an atmosphere and brilliancy of its own. Mr. Van Vechten does in prose what the American imagic poets, banded together by Amy Lowell, so passionately devoted themselves to achieving in verse. Mr. Van Vechten has a solidity of selective thought which clothes itself in intense realism touched with that quick-silver of imagination without which nothing can be called great. Crude amours, depicted with an -undodging frankness as remote from the sensualities of Mr. Huxley and Mr. Lawrence and the would-be naughtiness of Mr. Arlen as a wayside puddle from a fresh-water lake, mirror the Harlem, of New York In a lookingglass. The pattern is bold and occasionally painful, and executed with tremendous insight into the mind of the negro. The psiinting-in is done with sweeps of harsh and violent colour—the only possible medium for the savage and primitive emotions with which the book deals. The brush strokes are strong and dark, merging into fine nervous lines of sensitiveness when artistry demands, and there are occasional delicate nuances in powerful contrast to the predominating crudity. This book has a fierce vitality and a tanging sincerity which Mr. Van Vechten endeavours to hide beneath a sophisticated cynicism. There is nothing weak or hesitating about this man. His work is positive, assured, shrewd and sympathetic without emotional sloppiness, though one cannot help wishing he would give more of the sanity and clear fasticity of Mary and a little less of the muddled helplessness of Byron, who can end in no other way but in a cloud of utter futility. The note of seriousness underlying; "Nigger Heaven” crops out unmistakably. Mr. Van Vechten gets to the crux of the matter when he speaks through Byron and Mary in this illuminating little example:— Byron: I don’t know so much about

our people that is different. I told you that. We are born and we eat and we make love and we die. I suppose we’re just like the others. Mary: X suppose we are, only we don’t eat where we want to, or die where we want to. . . . All through the book one cannot help feeling that, but for the grace of God, here goes the white race. According to Mr. Huxley and Mr. Arlen, modern white society revolves much on the same lines; as the civilisation of Harlem. Both revolve, but neither seem to evolve. The negro variety is more sensual and emotional, and a good deal more terrible in its hot intensity, but that is all. The same feverish quest for excitement “distinguishes” both, and neither appears to have reached the stage where it has the common sense to realise that happiness is not a thing of the outside, but the reverse. Conservative English scholars will not find the stereotyped Carl Van Vechten’s work. He entirely justifies this unconventionalism. There is no contusion whatever. A reviewer of “Firecrackers,” another Van Vechteu book, says:— And then he writes so well—crisp and shining paragraphs that please the eye as well as the mind. So lucid and carefully easy is his every sentence that he can entirely omit the use of inverted commas. . . . He writes so well. But let prospective readers be warned. This is no Sunday-school text-book. Mr. Van Vechten does not avoid the nude in life. His book is a book of extreme frankness and brutal realism. It will be branded sensual and morbid In the world of negro civilisation it opens up. To quote Mr. Beverly Nichols, however, it also opens up “the spiritual world of the negro, a world as dark and glamorous as a tropical swamp.” It shows us the souls of negroes, their tragedies, the r sufferings (not always charming or respectable), their loves, their lives. “Nigger Heaven” may not be a great book. It ends in a revulsion of ugliness, but at least it is interesting. And that, In these days, is something. UNA CURRIE.