Graeme Holder

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 280, 3 November 1944, Page 5

Graeme Holder

HE death a few days ago of Graeme Holder robbed New Zealand of a talent for which the only single-word description is unique. He was not the only New Zealander who lived by his pen. Every journalist does that. Nor was he our only fulltime writer whose imagination fed and clothed him. We have at least one author in that category still, and have had two or three. But we have never had a writer whose task every day and every week was to produce fiction in dramatic form, to produce it week by week as it was required, who did produce it, and who lived on the result. This Graeme Holder did for several years, to the entire satisfaction of his chief patron, the National Broadcasting Service, and to the great delight of listeners in many other parts of the Englishspeaking world, since his radio plays were in demand in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Britain, as well as in his own Dominion. That would have been a remarkable performance for a man trained to writing from schooldays, endowed with leisure, and helped by a wide and _ liberal education. But Graeme Holder would have described himself as almost entirely un-educated, which though it would have been far from the truth, would have been true formally. When others of his age were at school or university he was at sea, with about the same chance of educating himself as a tram-conductor has on continuous relief duty. He was seeing life, of course, different places and different kinds of men, but even when he escaped from the sea it was to carry on the economic struggle in a new setting. Liberty and leisure never came to him at all, but freedom to choose his own way came when he dredged it out of his imagination, and then he kept on dredging almost to the day of his untimely death. It is impossible not to wonder what would have happened if he had lived another 25 years.