JEAN DEVANNY STARTLES CULTURAL SYDNEY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 761, 6 September 1929, Page 14

JEAN DEVANNY STARTLES CULTURAL SYDNEY

N.Z. WRITER AS LECTURER (Written for THE SUN) TEAN DEVANNY, authoress of r ' “The Butcher Shop,” has certainly given Sydney something to think of. Somehow, I think Sydney is going to take the New Zealand writer seriously. With her severe Eton crop, and her long, gracefully full frock in simple Grecian lines, Mrs. Devanny made a striking figure, as she told her audience of the horrors of censorship, a subject that she has particularly at heart. Did not New Zealand ban her own “The Butcher Shop?” Jean Devanny Is a forceful speaker. Censorship, even when it might seem to be justified, she declared, was futile. No ban had ever been imposed upon any object but it liad had the effect of bringing it more prominently before the public. In almost every case the wrong books came beneath the axe. Vicious types of literature written solely for the prurient passed freely into circulation. Serious, sincere efforts at reform, through the only method possible. that of understanding and analysis, were suppressed. “And all this because men who are not fitted for the job of censorship will not undertake the degrading task of keeping themselves on the track of the indecent,” Mrs. Devanny, very frankly, told Sydney. “Consequently, they must be recruited from among those who are unfitted for the job.” Appealing for an understanding of the fact that literature and every other art form must reflect the character of the community, Mrs. Devauny said that writers could only reflect social conditions as they were. Therefore, If we wanted a better literature the tone of society must be raised. Much of what the writer said in relation to contemporary judgment might perhaps have been applied to herself, or rather to her first work, for Jean Devanny has now published three novels. All are selling well in Sydney, as they have done iu Britain and iu the United States. “Instead of the great thinkers of the past (and to some extent of today) being exalted by contemporaries they have almost universally been hated and scorned for their originality, and supremely honoured only by succeeding generations. Because, since the masses of the people are creatures of their conditions they cannot understand new thought until the working out of material conditions has demonstrated its nature.” Today, however, this condition was gradually being abolished by the speeding-up of processes of modern civilisation, which was gathering such, pace that new truths had hardly time to be fully enunciated before material conditions demonstrated their nature.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Mrs. Devanny—and there were those in her audience who did both —one cannot ignore her. One of Sydney's leading intellectuals and the former editor of a magazine as well known in New Zealand as it was in Australia, told me It was the most stimulating address he had heard in years. Dora Wilcox, leader of New Zealand’s little literary colony in Sydney, was the first to offer the hand of fellowship to her country-woman. Mrs. Devanny will be the guest of honour at the next meeting of the Society of Woman Writers. “Syd-

ney is not Australia, though to he sure it is even more wonderful and beautiful than I imagined,” Mrs. Devanny told me, “and I want to see something of the real Australia.” When the New Zealander has accomplished her ambition in this respect she will visit England. ’ Sydney, however, will be her home in the future. ERIC RAMSDEN. Sydney, August 29.