NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 117, 19 September 1941, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

* Sir,-Several writers to The Listener, and professor Sewell’s talks over 1YA have done much recently to stimulate interest in New Zealard’s literary future. Many of the ideas expressed by G. R. Gilbert in a recent letter strike the essence of the New Zealand writer's problem. It is good that we should assimilate the best in European literature, but to imitate it, as most of our writers have done, is essentially futile. The result can only be an ‘art out-of-date. Too many New Zealand authors and poets think of our art as exiled. In "New Zealand Art" Eileen Duggan, writes: "We are the wheat self-sown Beyond the hem of the paddock Banned by the wind from the furrows." She sees New Zealand as culturally outlawed by great oceans from the source of her genius. Such an outlook has been the most pernicious influence on New Zealand literature. When Mr. Gilbert speaks of New Zealand writers as without roots, I think he only partly sees the truth: Many of our native writers, intensely in touch with our life, have had roots, despite themselves. Obsessed with the myth of "home," they have failed to recognise their true genius. In other words, nearly all of our writers have been following "false lights,’ possibly through blindly accepting the tradition of our early and exotic poet, Bracken, G. R. Gilbert mentions Sargeson, Vogt, and Curnow as the fore-runners of New Zealand literature-to-be. But he does not do justice to our past. For example, in "Persephone in Winter,’ Robin Hyde wrote a few poems which breathe the very air of our land. And Katherine Mansfield in a few storiesin particular I think of "The Woman at the Store" in Something Childish-"finds" our national home. Perhaps Mr. Gilbert only half-sees the problem when he says that our writers must write about New Zealand people and not our country. The difficulty of every poet who has tried to write on New Zealand nature has been insuperable. No native

poet has been sensitive enough or great enough to express New Zealand naturé as only we see it, and so begin a native tradition. So our poets have written in the English tradition on the "rose" ard the "nightingale" and merely substituted "kowhai" and "tui." Unless native writers strive to express a land through a people for poets to attempt to follow their example is to set up another "false light" in the already much befooced atmosnhere of New 7Zea-

land aesthetics.-

KEITH

SINCLAIR

(Auckland).