New Zealand Literature

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 72, 8 November 1940, Page 5

New Zealand Literature

MY first conviction about New Zealand literature is that too much is claimed to be New Zealand literature which has no right to be included at all. I suppose it’s inevitable with a small nation. We Scots do the same. If a man is born in Glasgow and his father becomes head of a department in Whitehall and he is educated in a London school and finishes off at Cambridge and joins a staff of a Manchester paper and then writes a novel on the hoppickers of Kent, he will be hailed by the Aberdeen Free Press as a brilliant new Scots novelist. A New Zealand literature must be a New Zealand literature. For that reason I would exclude what I might call mere transients. Samuel Butler for example. How often in an article on the novel in New Zealand is "Erewhon" given a major portion of the space. Butler may have spent a year or two farming in the Canterbury Plains, he may have incorporated the scenery of the Southern Alps into the first chapters of "Erewhon," but he remains, in spite of the visit, an Englishman writing in the tradition of purely English literature. You might as well say that a Fiji Islander who spent a year in Canton and wrote @ novel on his experiences was a Chinese novelist.(Interview with Professor Ian Gordon on New Zealand Literature, 1Y A, October 21.)