NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 115, 5 September 1941, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

Sir-I have been working too hard for my living lately to be able to get up enough enthusiasm to answer Mr. Alexander’s letter-digging and aesthetics not being always harmonious. But reading the able reply of Mr. Walsh has given me energy. To leave Tolstoy, Shelley, and the others to their homes and tombs, let us remark the New Zealand literary scene. For a small and new country, we have produced a number of writers. But these, practically without exception until the appearance of Sargeson, Vogt, Curnow and a few others, wrote like tourists, as though they had no roots-they referred to Home -and the natural surroundings of New Zealand were exotic to them. In writing about New Zealand, they failed utterly: others writing to-day are finding the same cul-de-sac. The writing has been of New Zealand, the country, not New Zealand, the people. To be able to write concerning New Zealand, the people, one must be of them. If that is so, and one has travelled, then it will be found that New Zea-

landers in all main points are identical with French, English, Germans, and Eskimos, and that the differences will be Of culture, heritage and environment. The trouble has been with New Zealand writers that they did not feel themselves to be New Zealanders, rather they were the exiled English. They will have to feel themselves of the New Zealand race, equipped with a background of New Zealand experience before being able to write sincerely of New Zealand, the people. And as long as the roots of our native writers wave in the air or wriggle into the foreign caves of English or American literarv tradition. we will get no writing

worthy of the ‘name "great."

G. R.

GILBERT

(Auckland).