THE LITTLE WORLD:

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 428, 5 September 1947, Page 12

THE LITTLE WORLD:

Frank Sargeson’s New Zealand

THAT SUMMER AND OTHER STORIES. By Frank Sar geson. John Lehmann, London, 1946.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

Zealand writing who does not happen to be a Caxton collector and has failed to preserve back numbers of Penguin New Writing for 1944, should want to buy this book. He may not find it easy: a few advance copies sold rapidly and there havegbeen no reinforce-ments--I have only a borrowed copy for review. Clearly this is an unsatisfactory situation for writer and readers alike. Londoners may have their. collected Sargeson; even Parisians, who appreciate a new sensation, may buy Cet Eté-la from an avant-garde publisher; but the author, though not without honour, is* without royalties in his own country. It looks as though the State Literary Fund has just arrived in time. A interested in New * * * FRANK SARGESON’S stories first appeared in book form in this country, and early won recognition among the discerning. But it is surely significant that they should have been a first choice for the new London publishing firm of John Lehmann Ltd., with the perhaps inevitable blurb that "No writer of comparable gifts has come from the Dominion since Katherine Mansfield." For obviously John Lehmann, a gifted if not infallible literary impresario, considers Sargeson one of his major "finds," On the record, and with the support of a number of English critics, he is well entitled to think so. For the book itself: one might wish for a brighter format (in this respect, the Caxton Press wins hands down). This is an English austerity edition with lean margins and a drab cloth cover. And I cannot feel that John Minton has added much of realism or fantasy with his old-world dust-jacket on which a London costermonger wheels a rustic barrow down a white lane to what looks like Ilfracombe. But whatever the outside may be, inside is New Zealand. * * * [N addition to the short novel That Summer which forms its centrepiece, the book contains a choice (Mr. Sargeson’s? or Mr. Lehmann’s?) of 20 stories from Conversation with My Uncle (1936), A Man and his Wife (1940), and Speaking for Ourselves (1945). Keeping in mind the longer novel since published by the Caxton Press, this gives a representative view of ten years’ literary achievement-certainly enough by which to judge a serious writer. In bulk it ay not be much; and the stories hefe collected, though always technically interesting, will cause no revolution. Yet the book is qa landmark comparable with The Story of an African Farm or Capricornia, It is one of those books that help change directions and that-in their countries of origin, at least-can never again be forgotten. et

If Mr. Sargeson had written no more than these 200 pages, he would still be among the very small group of New Zealand creative writers who caunt for something. What, then, is the achievement that this book summarises?

In the first place, the perfecting of a deliberate and highly self-conscious craftsmanship, so finished and delicate in the shadings it gives to the most commonplace material that only Australasians, I suspect, can apvreciate its

full virtuosity. Where an Australian writer like Xavier Herbert handles Antipodean speech with bravura and gusto, Mr. Sargeson fingers his shabby idiom tenderly like a cpnnoisseur. The result is a surprising verbal subtlety, incapable of brief. illustration: the total effect of a good Sargeson story is very near to that of poetry. If he had been an English intellectual, one feels, he might have written rather like E; M. Forster or Virginia Woolf; being a New Zealander he writes like Frank Sargeson, and no one has ever done that before. Given the art or craft-and it is clear that so scrupulous an instrument can only have been won painfully from inner expérience-what does he do with it? On the surface, these stories are episodes and incidents and moods in the everyday life of a narrow and rather unattractive range of New Zealanders. Few of them have any obvious plot; when they have (as in A Great Day) they pay for it. That-Summer, more ambitious in construction than the rest and as brilliantly handled in some of its passages as anything Mr Sargeson has done, has a beginning and a middle: it can hardly be said to have an end, despite its haunting final cadence. Yet in its own way it is a condensed modern epic, and does for New Zealand in the Depression what The Waste Land did for Europe between two wars, (It has even, like Tiresias in The Waste Land, a bi-sexual central figure to act as pivot to the narrative, if not as chorus.) And Terry in his barrow-a sick man being wheeled away by his pal from a hospital to die-is a symbol more potent than many tistics, Mr. Sargeson is not a moralist; nor is he a consciously political writer of the social-documentary school, though he might easily have been either one of these. They Gave Her a Rise, a fiercely ironical story that turns around an industrial accident, levels its charge not against a system, but against human, weakness-if you like, against" human P nature. And the quality of Sargeson’s mind and art that is probably most remarkable (as it is certainly rarest, in the literature of a young country) is its universality. He has no heroes, for he has a single hero: man. By and large he doesn’t think much of him; but the indignant reader-and there will (continued on next page) ~

(continued from previous page) certainly be some-may be warned in advance about the rage of Caliban at beholding his own face in the glass. What about New Zealand, in all this? But that is just the point. Man is a Godwinian abstraction; the creative writer has to deal with men and women in a given setting of race, moment, milieu. And Sargeson at his best, writ_ing about men and women whom he knows-the city fringe, the struggling fruit-farmer, the innominate New Zealander provided he does not live too far away from Auckland-brings them before us with dingy and heart-breaking fidelity. It is a bleak little world, with mot much colour and warmth in it despite the Auckland sunshine: the sunshine, as in That Summer, merely heightens the human tragedy. It is not the whole truth, but what writer ever gave us that? Even a limited truth has value, if it is true to experience, The little world of Sargeson is aware of the sea, but ignores the mountains. Rather surprisingly, too, it ignores the . bush-for me at ledst the one exception in this volume, Gods Live in Woods, does not come off. But this little world and its people are real; and in their own clipped and graceless idiom ein | talk the language of the heart. (The language, by the way, belongs te Auckland: it has certainly more Americanisms than New Zealand speech in general.) In this world Frank Sargeson is at home. When he strays out of it-as in the one obviously imitative story in this collection, An Englishwoman Abroad — his writing becomes merely clever, like an early Katherine Mansfield sketch. That name a again! And some comparison, I suppose is as inevitable as the blurb. New Zealand has firmly claimed K.M.-though only after she had made her name abroad. Will it be the same with Sargeson, a writer who has chosen the more difficult task of staying and working in the country of his birth? Katherine Mansfield’s best stories on New-Zealand were written either out of love, or something very near hate; and love came only at the end. With love came happiness, and it was caught forever in those few last stories that may be an idealisation, but that dangle in time like crystals, clear without a flaw. Yet in herself she was obsessed by the flaws-by the snail beneath the nastur-tium-leaf-until finally that obsession stopped her writing, and she died. In Frank Sargeson’s world, the snail is there: indeed, he seems sometimes to spend a good deal of time turning over the leaves searching for it. Having found it, he looks at it steadily: the snail is still there, the sun is still shining, all may not be right with the world, but these are human beings and this is how they beMave. Better to write about it all straight without agonising, without becoming "a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of thought." And so we have these stories, where the slight nugatory gesture alone may speak of human feeling, where even children are not innocent: "They know things that men and women don’t know, but when they grow up thiey forget them." Whether you like them or not, these stories are a part of our life; and perhaps their greatest virtue is that "they speak directly to our lost condition."