IN THE VERNACULAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 417, 20 June 1947, Page 22

IN THE VERNACULAR

THE BIG GAME, By A, P. Gaskell, The Caxton Press.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

much better case than the novel. Perhaps this is partly | due to the interesting fact that the short story does not "pay": a | periodical may print your story, | but no publisher will readily accept a volume of short stories for publication as a book. That is the situation in England and America. It need not worry us much here in New Zealand, but it does draw attention to the position of modern writers of stories. They are men and women of a sterner integrity, a firmer | artistic conscience, a greater sense of living sub specie aeternitatis, than the novelists, who, poor things, expect to keep themselves by their writing and study the market more closely than they do their own souls. The amateur is not necessarily more competent or more disinterested than the professional. But the writer of short stories, even if-like A. E. Coppard or V. S. Pritchett-he lives, at least in part, by his work, cannot ever expect to become a best-seller. His satisfaction must be that he belongs to a larger tradition. He marches with Tchekov, ‘with de Maupassant, with Katherine Mansfield, and his work has a greater chance of being remembered by posterity and of being taken seriously by his more discriminating contemporaries than have the novels which are $0 much more widely read and more loudly admired. For the short story is an exacting form of writing. No form punishes the hasty and the insincére so severely or exhibits — short story to-day is in

with such ruthless transparency the value of literary work. It is slighter than the novel, but oftsm much deeper in scope. It is a flexible and malleable form, freeing the writer from the mould of convention, presenting him with the most dangerous of all gifts, liberty. PS * i [N New Zealand, too, we may take our writers of short stories rather more seriously than our novelists. Frank Sargeson has set a standard. In The Big Game, A. P. Gaskell shows that he has the same courage, determination, and literary integrity. He has followed (but not imitated) Sargeson in reproducing the natural idiom of the New Zealander, of several different classes of New Zealanders, or perhaps I should say "types," as it is puzzling to-day in our egalitarian society to decide where one class begins and another ends, which is the high, the low, or the in between. Readers of The Listener already know something of Gaskell, as three of these Stories, including the title piece, first appeared in this journal. His special ability is to see life through the eyes of his characters and talk in their language. One moment he is a student suffering the agonies of suspense before a big football match; at another he is a sub-normal half-caste artlessly explaining the vanity that led to a crime. Again speaking in the first person singular, he is a very ordinary fellow at a party overshadowed by a sorrow everybody is conspiring to push into the background; or he is a prig strayed into the Army hating or pitying a lewd and irreligious sergeant. Some of these stories are master(continued on next page) — toile

(continued from previous page) pieces of social and emotional percipience. All show a mastery of character, the foretaste of maturity. I say "foretaste" advisedly because I feel that Gaskell, in spite of the power and. skill of most of these stories, has not yet reached the fullest self-realisa-tion. There are hints of incomplete development, for instance in the second story, You Can’t Go Three Days, where a dramatic twist in the plot succeeds as a surprise but not wholly as a convincing event. Thé change is handled too briskly, and the situation could with advantage have been treated with greater elaboration. % ot a PEOPLE dislike having duties marked out for them, and some may resent the excellently-intended exhortation wrapped round this book on a yellow streamer (a Ja Book Club Selection) which asserts that "no literate New Zealander will have any excuse for not reading this book." Even if you are not deeply concerned to vindicate your | literacy, you may well look to this book for real pleasure. No one but a New Zealander could have written it, and New Zealanders will get more out of it than any other branch of the Englishspeaking races. Here, in fact, is our native art, springing from our own bosoms and circumstances, spontaneous, robust, humorous. Not by taking thought may we add a.cubit to our culture. Not by holding authors’ weeks may we raise up authors. Writers fulfil an inner need of their nature in their work. Readers also satisfy a passion, a hunger for vicarious experience. Here is the experience of a New Zealander of our own time. It is our fault if he does not make us aware of ourselves, teach us to live with’ the intensity of art. As a piece of book production The Big Game keeps up the standards we expect from the Caxton Press, and Leo Bensemann’s dust cover is as elegant and attractive as the book itself. TS