HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 349, 1 March 1946, Page 6

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

Confession of a Brain About to Export Itself

(Written for "The Listener" by

RONALD

L. MEEK

© ’M going to Cambridge in a few months’ time. And at the moment I don’t feel like coming back to New Zealand when they’ve fitted me out with my Degree. I’m going to Cambridge because I’ve got a scholarship that will help to keep me there, and because I should like to be a competent and qualified economist. But I’m going there mainly because I want to get to England, where I think I will find certain things which are of importance to me in the kind of life I want to lead, and which I have been unable to find in New Zealand. No man could be absolutely sure of himself in a matter like this. It’s hard enough to evaluate any complex personal emotion with the impartiality of a surgeon, let alone an emotion which is as intimate as the feeling of a mother for her child. I have lived in New Zealand for the twenty-eight years of my life, and I respect so many things and peopie in this country, and hate so many other things and people, that I will never be quite certain that my judgments on the subject are true for anyone but myself. But I’m going to lay what I think is a pretty safe bet on the degree of detachment I hope I have achieved. Six years ago I left this country for Cambridge. I was glad to go, because my then attitude towards New Zealand was coloured by the personal disappointments and microcosmic tragedies common to all young men in their very early twenties, and Cambridge seemed like Samarkand. When the war broke out, and I had to return to New Zealand from Panama, I was as bitter as a child deprived of a plaything. And when the ship sailed back into Auckland Harbour, and I looked dejectedly at the land, I saw my own failures rather than the country in which I had grown up. I think I understand that attitude now, and I’m rather ashamed of it. But I still feel to-day, as strongly as I feel anything, that exile will be worth while. x * * . He never could recapture first fine careless rapture. HAVE waited now for six years. When I close my eyes, I can see the gateway of my College quite clearly, with its big Tudor rose and its carved daisies, and the absurd spotted antelopes prancing .on their hind legs, to support the Royal Arms. I have, seen many. curious ‘Cambridges in, dreams, and, the already fine division between sleeping ard waking life has become so blurred that it

will be hard for me to believe that I am really there when I actually see the odd little city. I shall dine in the Great Hall; I shall hear the bells of Great St. Mary’s; I shall listen to the Madrigal Society’s singing "Draw on, Sweet Night," as its members drift down the Cam in punts on an evening in May Week. But I. think it will be the opportunity of hearing men like Keynes, and talking to men like. Maurice Dobb, that I will value more than anything elseeven more than the architecture of King’s Chapel and the other lovely things I have seen in books and on picture-post-cards. And if that remark sounds patronising, remember that there are the six lost years of the war to be made up. There will be wonderful things to be seén there, of course. "Say, is there Beauty yet to find, and Certainty, and Quiet kind?" asked Rupert Brooke, sitting in a Berlin cafe in the mad days of 1912 and pining for Grantchester. At the time when God and love and Shelley were coming upon me like great lights, I cherished a splendid ambition to punt along the Cam at Grantchester, reading Rupert Brooke and listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone. I should still like to go to Grantchester in a punt, and shall certainly do so; but my attachment to Rupert Brooke is now on about the same plane as my rather morbid fondness for old letters and pressed flowers, and I think I might now prefer Bach to Beethoven as a punting partner. And there will also be the knowledge that so many of the darlings of history have walked and studied in those same sheltered places. It would be merely silly to try to ward off the perfectly valid emotions which that knowledge must bring forth.

But there hath passed away a glory from the earth. I can no longer feel anything but embarrassment in the company of revelling undergraduates, because a hard kernel of condescension has grown in my attitude towards them. In the same way, the incredible beauties of Cambridge, in which no one is ever disappointed, will be more a frame for the picture than the picture itself, * * # Far brighter than the gaudy melon-flower. HY do I want to leave a well-paid and congenial job, in a comfortable well-fed country where it is easy to gain a certain notoriety, and go to a dangerous and hungry land where I am a complete stranger? My friends often ask me that, jocularly, because most of them know that there are more valuable things in life ‘than food or fame. But I often ask it of myself, and with perfect sincerity. Why does this desire to escape from New Zealand, despite its mountains and its brave social legislation, sometimes rock sensitive people like a wind? This desire to escape is, I am suro, due only partly to the knowledge that New Zealand must of necessity do as best it can with a largely second-hand culture, and that this. culture is usually worn as some women wear little dogs. I haven't seen, and wouldn’t be likely to see in New Zealand for a long time, the ballet Petrouchka. But I have an excellent set of records of Stravinsky’s music for the ballet, and books which describe it minutely, and I don’t think that when I see it in England I shall learn much more about it than I know at present. I can hear the best English orchestras on my radio-gramophone; I can read books that are published in England a few weeks after they appear; and I can study Mr, Bevin’s speéches on foreign affaira

almost as soon as the people of England. There are, of course, many things from which I would learn much in Eng-land-for example. a performance of one of Sean O’Casey’s early plays in the Abbey Theatre, and a conversation with O’Casey himself. But, speaking very generally, modern communications and modern science have made mincemeat of the argument that to live fully one must necessarily live near a source of values. And, after all, perhaps, it is better for the soul to be forced to seek those values, to carve them out of the rough rock, rather than to find them nicely factory-fashioned for you and offered for sale at cut rates. And I think that the usual argument of the newspaper correspondent-abour the difficulty of finding a good job in New. Zealand which will enable you to live well and work usefully-is in large measure a clumsy rationalisation. If it is so terribly important to a young man that he should make £1,000 a year rather than £500, or that his name should appear in a world Who’s Who instead of a local edition, then to hell with that young man and all his works. It may ultimately be of greater impor:ance to build a community centre at Nae Nae than to become Economic Adviser to His Majesty’s Government. There’s not really much difference betweeu the vital jobs that need doing is London, in Wellington, or in Littledene. I shouid like to be a good economist, and help to do these jobs in that way, but it won’t break my heart if I'm forced to assist in some less spectacular manner. No, these things are only the externals. In the case of the young men for whom I am setting myself up as an apologist, the desire to escape springs from another source. I think it springs most urgently from the loneliness of those who, in a little country, find themselves in one way or another unable to conform. I understand fully what this thesis implies. It simply means that people who want to escape from New Zealand are cowards in the worst sense of the word. They are seeking "safety in numbers, even for faith,"’ as D. H. Lawrence put it. But Lawrence was walled in by sex and classes, and not by the boundaries of a little country, and it was easy for him to sneer. There are some things which a man, however steel-minded he may be at most times, finds it difficult to bear, and which in a decent society he should not be asked to bear alone. There is scorn, for one thing, and indifference, which is more hurtful than scorn. And even worse than these is the knowledge that in a little country things tend to be more important than people or ideas; that visitors come to New Zealand to fish our rivers and to gape at the geysers and the largest wooden building in the world, rather than to meet our poets and our painters ani our composer. To those holding strange faiths and despising men who run yapping after martyrdom, to those who have shed like a skin the doctrines of their fathers and their rulers, these things are Teal and not phantasmal, and far more : yaad than fhe petty physical persecuons which shadow them wherever they go. The Enemy’s answer to all this is only too easy, and unfortunately it is also perfectly true. He says: "If this little country is a Land of Things, and you think it ought to be something else, why don’t you stay here and do something