"DIVIDING SEAS."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 443, 19 December 1947, Page 5

"DIVIDING SEAS."

Sir,-I am writing this letter not in an attempt to convert your correspondent, Rita Atkinson, or to criticise-one way or the other-Ngaio Marsh, Joyce West, and those others whom she upholds as models of New Zealand writers. Nor in an attempt to defend such New Zealand writers as Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, etc. They can do that adequately themselves, if they care to-which is unlikely. I am writing in order to say that New Zealand has produced writers and poets of the first rank who are held in high esteem overseas and whose work ranks as literature. These writers do not belong to what L. A. G. Strong, in his book, English for Pleasure describes as "entertainers" whose principal "aim is to make money ...+ to find what is popular and to supply it." They are the artists whose attitude to the public is "take it or leave it,’ though, being human, they hope the public will "take it" and like it. They are the artists who, having something to say, are determined to say it, who would prefer to work on the wharves to prostituting their art by playing up to public demand, and who write of the world as they know it, not as people would like to see it, with blue skies, green fields, and birds singing, and Cupid, fat and naked, hiding behind a tree; but as it is with its beauty and its ugliness, its drabness and its unexpected heroism. These men regard themselves as the interpreters of life as it is. As for the typical New Zealanderwho is he, or she? Surely there is no

one type but innumerable types which are produced by the many facets of life in this country. There is the farmer, the white-collar worker, the spiv, the watersider, the weakling, the smug, and "my uncle." Here he is: "It doesn’t interest him to listen to what you’ve got to say 2 +6 @ But he — to get going himself. He loves the Sound of his own voice and he’s all the time waiting for you to finish so that he can get going himself... he never reads a book... . he looks very serious, very responsible." As for the poets, most of them have their stuff published overseas-not for snobbish reasons, but for the simple reason that a man, even a poet, must live-and if you receive 7/6 for a poem

here and £5/5/- for the same poem overseas, well, you are a fool if you sell it here. And that’s largely why New Zealanders don’t know much about their poets. I have not touched upon the work of James Bertram, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, or the short stories of A. P. Gaskell, as well as the work of many others. But just listen to this by A. R. D. Fairburn. It is from "Town Hall Concert." He describes ra nae the mortal array; darkness, the usn. The wilderness around. And then the sudden rash of stars across the void, O bright stars breaking through mist, white-clustered flowers shining in the wintry forest of our night! I thought of him, that first adventurer, untaught, bleakly anonymous, who found the prism that broke the white light of silence and filled the trembling air with rainbow sound." Who will say after this that New Zealand has no poets? ‘They’re there all right (if they haven’t starved to death through New Zealand’s neglect) but you must go out and look for them, you must learn to appreciate them, for you cannot expect anything worth having without searching and working. Life does not as a rule lay its gifts on the front door step. ;

CONSTANCE

DUTHIE

(Remuera).