"WHO STEALS MY PURSE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 14

"WHO STEALS MY PURSE"

eir,- ihree Uumb Clucks" write that they do not see the point of the recent Listener story "Who Steals My Purse." I presume that A. P. Gaskell’s point would be found in the last line of the quotation used for title, "Who steals my honour steals my all’; but for me, the story would be more pointed if it ended with the untrusting wife calling her husband a fool-with forceful if inartistic adjectives-and never mind about the sly dig at the business men. What I would like to have explained to me, is why our New Zealand writers (not, of course, the bread-

and-butter writers of mystery and love stories) in this Age of the Common Man, must continually present him as a fool-spineless, whining, a misfit in life, without ideals, ethics, faith, or what-you-will. Who likes the miserable,, selfpitying stuff: the public or the publishers? There was no chorus of approval for a recent effort that appeared in The Listener about a starry-eyed young man too squeamish to kill vermin but oh, such a bold liar. There has however been some correspondence lately about the "smell" that hangs round Sargeson’s writings. His people are all humourless, dreary drifters-no wonder they smell!

The Listener's reviewer said recently that his "only qualm" about a "fine" story in the latest Landfall was "whether the situation need have been seen through the eyés of an old soak." I felt that all the characters might as well have been old soaks judging by thei sensibilities as shown by the author. What is happening? Are our writers shadowing forth a true picture of what we are ‘breeding in this warm, damp little country, untouched by war, pestilence, or famine, and blessed with compulsory education? Or perhaps our writers are studying the market and supplying what policy demands? If the Common Man is told often enough that he is pathetic, vulnerable, incapable, will he not come to believe it and feel no shame if he is managed-for his own , good of coursé-and pushed (gently, no doubt), in the way he should go? What I would like to know is who is to lead and where are we to be taken?

OLIVE SCOULAR

(Wanganui}