"CREATIVE WRITING"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 17

"CREATIVE WRITING"

Sir,-Your item of September 27, "Writing is difficult," should read a. little oddly to M. H. Holcroft and his admirers. So! Sinclair Lewis says "writing is just work," and men like Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway operate to a schedule like any clerk or navvy. They don’t seem to be aware of what, Mr, Holcroft tells us with such delightful certainty: "The fundamental fact in authorship is the necessity, operating with a biological rhythm, which makes men and women express themselves in words," (Emphasis mine). They fail to mention the "pervasive daemonism," "supra-sensual experience" and "periodic visitations" and other phenomena that make the author "an instrument rather than a creator" following an arbitrary rhythm imposed by supernatural powers, Yet all this, and more, is contained, not in the Sunday tract you found beneath your door, but in the amazing last chapter of Encircling Seas (which E. H. McCormick recently reviewed so favourably in The Listener),

There is sensible comment scattered ‘through Mr. Holcroft’s books, but those who rate him as the unassailable mentor of our literature should try the mental exercise of examining his ideas without, as it were, their garments of impressive prose. Why this romantic over-em-phasis on our geography, almost to the exclusion of other influences? Is the human invader really the odd-man-out in these islands, cringing beneath "the primeval shadow" and awed by forests in which he is "not really at home?" Have we no customs, habits and ideas with vitality? Are the features of our life which deserve analysis confined to those in which we don’t show up very well? His sins of omission and his otherworldliness set Mr, Holcroft apart in a haze of mysticism. And how humourless it all is! A few grains of salt and pepper-the sense of humour and the sense of proportion-are surely needed with a dish of M. H. Holcroft.

ELSIE LOCKE

(Christchurch).