CREATIVE WRITING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 7

CREATIVE WRITING

Sir,-May I add a footnote to my letter published in your issue of November 1? In trying to compress many ideas into a small space I have omitted nearly all reference to the positive achievement of M. H. Holcroft, who has earned respect for grappling earnestly with a difficult complex of problems. The original writer has a harder task than his critics. However mistaken we may consider some of the theories in this trilogy to be, there are fine passages which have a value of their own. I imagine that Mr. Holcroft, who writes with sincerity, care and restraint, will recognise in criticism (even caustic criticism) a more constructive tribute than in the fulsome praise which obscures his own injunction to "hard thinking."

ELSIE

LOCKE

(Christchurch.)

Sir,-In a sceptical age it is a pleasure to turn to essays which disclose a transcendental outlook. I doubt if any of M. H. Holcroft’s admirers regard him as the "unassailable mentor of our literature" (Elsie Locke) inasmuch as his work invites us to use our critical intelligence. It is interesting and good that these essays should receive a challenge, but his critics seem to forget that this trilogy marks a promontory in our country’s literature. If it rises "judiciously" (Ian Hamilton) to mystical heights, and if at certain peaks the argument is obscured by the clouds of subjectivity, nevertheless the solid base and the general structure remains. Creative work differs with circumstance and temperament. It is not hard to discover in the field of art other men and women who have worked beneath the kind of compulsion Holcroft describes. In fact "Pervasive Daemonism" is supported through facts drawn from the lives of Katherine Mansfield, Shelley, and Dante. Also it would seem that of those authors mentioned in "Writing is Difficult," Somerset Maugham, sceptic though he is, would understand Mr. Holcroft’s thesis. Yes, I think we are odd men out in New Zealand. Our land has not been made over to our imagination as yet, and our customs have not yet been moulded from within. As to the importance of geography, it has found expression elsewhere and frequently: most notably in T. E. Lawrence’s writings. It would be unreasonable to suppose that human beings, so suggestible in every other way, were not radically moulded by the type of country and the latitude in which they developed. Our own reaction so far has been to cling to the safety of the time-honoured and humanised grooves of the European imagination rather than to cut the new ones our own: landscape suggests. Lastly, if there is qa better writer along these channels of thought in New Zealand, let his adversaries lead me to him.

J.

S.

(Hororata)

Sir,-Having just finished M. H. Holcroft’s Encircling Seas, and feeling that here at any rate was a refutation of the remarks periodically made by visitors to these shores; anent our lack of literary ability, our smugness and our deadly sameness, I was amazed to read Elsie Locke’s letter in a recent Listener. She criticises the paucity of humour and the involved mysticism of some of Mr. Holcroft’s essays, particularly his summing up in the last page. She compares his work of creative writing of man’s

innermost thoughts with fiction writing of such as Sinclair Lewis; admittedly she also adds such names as Thomas Mann’s and Ernest Hemingway’s; but they also are more noted for their fiction writing than for their essays. Mr. Holcroft has written fiction, which unfortunately I have not been able to read; but his essays as each looked-for volume. arrives have been well read and pondered over. A book such as Encircling Seas takes two or three years to write. Surely in even this small ill-educated community there are sufficient thinking people to appreciate the thoughts embedded in such tranquil prose, so rarely produced. Must we always be made to laugh? Must

we always be entertained in our reading? Must we always read fiction? Can we never afford to stop our hurrying from one place to another and back again to consider our inner life and thoughts? Such a letter makes me despair that we will ever grow up and become something more than a_ stalwart pioneer wresting a living from the soil or out of the office; that we will never produce a real civilisation where man gains more than bread. O New Zealand, amidst your encircling seas, your deepening streams and your waiting hills, can you not snatch a brief hour to consider your immor-

tality?

J.

WILLIAMS

(Lower Hutt).