THE LITERARY SINK.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 447, 16 January 1948, Page 5

THE LITERARY SINK.

Sir-I ‘thank Ralph Unger for his brilliant satire on \the pattern of certain present-day writing. It should put the lid on some of the inadequate Zolaesque work that has been appearing in recent printings. A good deal of it is a pose. Frank Sargeson describes the filling up of a hole, recently dug, and alleges that the soil was rammed so tight that very little was left over when the filling was completed. Any navvy knows that. you cannot fill a hole with what you took out of it, not to mention ramming. An article or an essay by reason of its subject matter may lend itself to arid meticulosity,; but may some kindly god defend the short story from becoming a cross section of humdrum domestic life without beginning, end, or right to be at all. Dean Swift states somewhere that "When it is going to rain you find the sink strike your offended* sense with double stink." I quote from memory. This is a fruity tip to housewives with a heavy wash in prospect, but surely the short story, perhaps the most delightful of all literary prose forms, is not the vehicle to convey it. Let the war and its aftermath be left to the specialists. We don’t need horror

stories. We know the wicked prosper, that most dogs are under-dogs, that in life happy endings are more the result of sweat and tears than a happy fortuity of events, that Russian writers can mirror weeks of the protracted agonies of a horse, old, diseased, and denied the mercy of a knock on the head. Why revel with the Russians? Sursum corda, Back to the nursery for a spot of makehelieve.

E. A. W.

SMITH

(Christchurch),