CUI BONO?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 315, 6 July 1945, Page 11

CUI BONO?

NEW ZEALAND NEW WRITING: No. 4. Edited by Ian A. Gordon. Progressive Publishing Society. T is not easy to say anything about this venture that is at once honest and kind. If one were quite sure of its purpose-and purpose is an unpleasant word in letters-it would be possible to ask whether it is or is not getting somewhere. If Professor Gordon were saying, for example, that these 14 pieces of prose and verse are the best writing done in New Zealand since No. 3 appeared, one could agree or disagree. But he does not say that: he says they are the best things in his judgment out of the hundreds sent to him, and it would be reckless to express any opinion about that unless some other publication were regularly printing better things. In fact, no other publication regularly prints anything nearly as good. Again if it is the claim of the publishers that without New Writing most of these authors would never have broken into print, the claim may be granted; but where does it take us? Certainly not into an admission that New Writing therefore is a service to literature. If these were our best efforts in a year-and with one or two silent exceptions they no doubt were-it would probably have been better not to exhibit any of them. For no one will say that there is one page of first-class writing in the whole collection. There is a vigorous essay by R. Seymour-a little careless, a little extravagant, with a point made that can’t be made too often, but no approach to literary distinction. There is a lively sketch by A. P. Gaskell -crude but not insensitive, and with the kind of truthfulness to life that comes of accurate superficial reporting. There are no doubt young men and young women in New Zealand, hundreds of them, who know of no better way of consoling a girl whose "boy" has been killed than keeping her continuously drunk; but not one person in the whole boozy party ‘was worth a line of serious writing. John Gifford Male writes a page and a-half of good prose about an experience in Italy; P. W. Robertson several pages, with flashes here and there, about an experience in Wellington Harbour. But if we except H. C. D. Somerset’s satirical sketch-and it is better sociology than literature-that is about as far as one can go in praising the prose, and anyone who can praise the verse is generous.