MORE NOTABLES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 325, 14 September 1945, Page 12

MORE NOTABLES

NEW ZEALAND NOTABLES. By

R. M.

Burdon.

Second _ series. Caxton Press,

Christchurch:

R. BURDON’S first three notables were curiously assorted: a Church of England missionary, a whaler-farmer, and a Maori prophet. This time we have a group of five, just as oddly brought together, and a little harder to reconcile with the title: a medical reformer (Truby King), a land reformer (John McKenzie), a school reformer (Walter Empson), a pugilist who did all his fighting out of New Zealand, and a crazy pamphleteer whose eccentricities made him a character in one city perhaps, but certainly not a notable anywhere. It is all very well to argue, as Mr. Burdon does in his preface, that if the caricaturist is free to select a face with some conspicuous feature, the biographer may concentrate on persons not too closely modelled on the standard pattern. Of course he may: but he may not exalt his geese into swans. Nor may he, without great risk, telescope a bivgraphy into a study. The best sketch in

the book is that of John McKenzie, a. man whom Burdon thoroughly understands and really brings to life; but it is still a sketch and not a biography. Perhaps he was not worth a biography. Perhaps no one in the book was. But a biography is one thing and a study an~ other, and the author is never quite sure on which he is working. He jumps across too many ditches for a biographer, and he is in general too pedestrian for a writer of studies. There is nowhere the glow of the best pages of his own High Country, for example, or if that is unfair, ‘let one say simply that his interest in his subject nowhere gives distinction to his style. He is always readable, always intelligent-in the case of John McKenzie very much more than that; but he is not often luminous for more than a sentence or two at a time. He does, of course, throw light on our social and political history, and that is all he claims for his labours, It is easier, he says, to tell the story of an individual than of a group, "and, bearing this in mind, I am attempting in all humility to throw some light on the social and political history of a young nation still in its formative stage by writing a series of short biographies." That is a very modest claim indeed: far too modest in intention, and quite false as an estimate of the task ‘ (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) actually accomplished. No one would question the value of these studies in general: the point is that the author, by writing something that is neither history nor art, does not do himself justice, He tells us much that few of us knew or still remembered; tells it plainly and with sympathetic insight; but still inadequately. It is good when an author leaves his readers asking for more; but if the reason is/that he has aroused expectations and not met them, it is not ungracious to complain,