LITERATURE IN A NEW LAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 321, 17 August 1945, Page 10

LITERATURE IN A NEW LAND

Ts talk by Dr. H. S. Canby, formerly Professor of English at Yale University and Editor of "The Saturday Review of Literature,’ was recorded by the NBS during his recent visit to New Zealand and was heard from 2YA a few days ago.

FLEW out to this region of the globe from New York in March with the invitation to talk at many universities about national culture. It was the slow development of the National American literature thfough three centuries which ‘was my theme, but I have not been able to talk about American literature even in Australia or New Zealand without thinking also of Australia and New Zealand. In many respects your problems, in becoming articulate for yourselves, are the same as ours. You will inevitably create a different literature from ours and from England’s, but you can learn a good deal, whether you are readers or writers, and particularly from our successes and our failures, in making the ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition fit and express the way of life in a new land. Some people think that books consist of facts, or what the author thinks are facts. Well, they do. But some people think that what makes a book good is the story or the idea or the emotional wallop it contains. That is true also so far as it goes. But what makes a book part of a national culture, and especially a new national culture, is the extent to which it expresses the new way of life in the new country. Differences Subtle and Sharp I have not been here very long, but I can see already that the way of life differs subtly from the way of life in Australia, where I have been much longer. I can see that it differs sharply from our way of life and from the English way of life, which I also know. That in many other respects it iss much more like the English way of life than is ours, and in some respects it is much more like our way of life than it is like the English, Now when it comes to literature the way of life of the people expresses itself in language, and the language a New Zealander uses is different from an Australian’s or an American’s, or an Englishman’s, in more ways than one. It differs as anyone can hear in accent, and in some of the words used, but it differs still more in the rhythms of speech, its rise and fall, its pitch of voice, its tempo. All are different much | more than is realised, unless you set yourself to analyse and to listen. In Australia I can pick out at least two different speeches. A slow, drawling talk full of short "a’s" from the big back beyond of the Australian country. I call it a sheep accent, and the quick, shrill accent, full "i’s" and shooting up the end of each sentence which was to be heard in the great cities. But more than aceent and the use of words, it is rhythm that makes a characteristic style, and until the New Zealander gets his characteristic rhythms into fire-rate prose and poetry, his work will never be truly New Zealand literature. It may be about ae Zealand, but will not be New Zea-

Everyone has been telling me how like New Zealand is to this or that, to the Alps or Yellowstone Park or to Devonshire or to Scotland. I don’t see it. New Zealand is like itself. The more I look at it from Dunedin to Auckland the more it looks like its own land with colour and beauty and particularly forms of landscape-they are intensely individual. The narrow gorge through the bush and under the tree ferns which winds down to Lake Tarawera is like. no place on earth I have ever seen. Canterbury Plain with the headlands and the black beaches in front of it and the big mountains behind, is like no place I know. The big mountains do not look like the Alps; they look more like our

Rockies. But if you painted them that way you would be wrong. They have their own characteristic shape and colour. The misty, towering bluffs beyond Wellington Harbour as you fly past them remind me of Dorset, and only make me see how much they are not at all like Dorset, but your own brand — great scenery. The new and excellent schools of landscape paintings both here and in Australia have found that out. The paintings of these men have an entirely different colour scheme, a different sense of form from the earlier paintings of your landscape people, I see in the galleries. They do not look like them, they do truly look like New Zealand. I envy artists and creative writers in a new land, They have plenty of trouble. They have to hold on to a great European cultural tradition which must not be lost, but in addition to the novelty which is always appearing in human life they have real new materials to work with, new scenes that have never been sharply looked at, new behaviour, in a nhew environment which has never been rightly interpreted, and different skies and weather, new kinds of thinking and feeling conditioned by a new environment. It is a great chance, even if it is hard to grasp.