GEESE AND SWANS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 265, 21 July 1944, Page 11

GEESE AND SWANS

LITERATURE AND AUTHORSHIP IN NEW ZEALAND. By Alan Mulgan. P.E.N. Books. Allen & Unwin Ltd., through Progressive Publishing Society, Wellington. e [tT is difficult to write a book about New Zealand literature. without writing too much. Mr. Mulgan has not written too much, but he has written about far too many people. Into his 57 pages of text he has dragged well over 100 authors, and that is perilously like cataloguing instead of interpretation. He is, of course, right in refusing to draw a line between literature and journalism; and if he regarded it as his task to show how many people in New Zealand have expressed themselves in print, what kind of people they are or have been, and what their contemporaries have thought about them, he has done his work well. But it is a dangerous pastime in literature as well as in politics to convert geese into swans. We have had perhaps a dozen writers so far whose ‘work will survive through our second century, Another dozen could be named whom it is not waste time to re-read. But it is not easy to think of a justification for resuscitating an additional eight or 10 dozen. They have no significance in New Zealand itself, and it

is putting us wrong with the rest of the world to point to them as interpreters of our life. Mr. Mulgan may, of course, reply that he wrote not to disinter the dead, or to secure decent burial for those about to die, but to show how writers fare in New Zealand; whether authorship is or is not a way of living here; and whether we are beginning to find a voice of our own. If he does, it will be a good reply, but not an answer to the complaint that geese and swans are different birds and better kept apart. SOMETHING, BUT HOW MUCH? SOMETHING TO TELL. Short Stories by Isobel Andrews. Progressive Publishing Society, Wellington. T was a good, if slightly bold, idea to give this collection the title of its last story. Mrs. Andrews not only has something to tell: she knows how to tell it. In this kind of thing--situations that depend on characterisation but not on extraordinary people-she works so easily and so surely that there is seldom any more to be said. A gushing, foolish woman floundering about in a conversation about books; a girl whose life : (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (continued from previous page)

begins and ends with the next dance; a youth capturing one girl by paying attention to another; a solemn husband with a butterfly wife; a scene in a hospital or a day on the beach; a skit on radio, or a grin at the Yanks-she does it all so neatly that you do not ask whether it is worth doing. Not at the time. You enjoy yourself as you read, and if you are aware of any other emotion than the pleasure her competence gives you it is your satisfaction in feeling that most of her scenes are authentic New Zealand. Then an hour or two or a day or two later you begin to wonder why she trades in such small beer. Is this her measure, or has she something else to say that her smartness prevents her from saying? If she is the victim of her own slickness, will she one day realise that and break free? Or has she just a clear, small voice, a little thin, and a little metallic? The mere asking of such questions is the tribute one pays to her unmistakable talent, but she alone can supply the answer, Will she? SOUTH SEAS STRANGE STORIES FROM THE SOUTH SEAS. By Eric Ramsden, A. H. & A. W, Reed, Wellington. R. RAMSDEN says quite frankly that he culled these stories. from "rare books and manuscripts, early newspapers and official files" in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The culling has perhaps been well done, but the reconstruction is romantic and often foolish, It is also irritating that he is not content to write English, or even journalese, but seizes every opportunity to drag in a Polynesian word whether it adds meaning or a pointless obscurity. He does, however, cover a wide field-earthly and unearthly-and throws in an excellent photographic section which his printers haye handled admirably.