NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

Sir,-Some weeks ago now a reply by Alan Mulgan to a letter of mine was printed in your paper, and I am only writing this to agree with what Mr. Mulgan had to say. What I tried to say, and what Mr, Mulgan has said more clearly, is that to write about anything, that thing has to be felt deeply by the writer, and in writing about people or places all that the writer has to orient himiself is his race. All writers must write of the same things, but a Russian writer will always write as a Russian: Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in Mexico; it would have made no difference; the Mexican garb he may have dressed the novel in would have been "quite incidental." The important things were that Tolstoy was a,Russian and he wrote of the whole world of people in a Russian manner, feeling deeply in the way a Russian would experience such things. , All this means that New Zealand writers should feel their race-not the English, or the Maori, but the New Zealand race-so deeply, with such pride, that they will colour their writing with the feeling

felt as New Zealanders. But they would always write as New Zealanders, even in Peru. That is the trouble; so far New Zealand writers have never felt deeply as New Zealanders; they have. no anchor and no content except that local colour which is always "quite incidental."

G. R.

GILBERT

(Auckland).