JOHN MULGAN ALONE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 477, 13 August 1948, Page 13

JOHN MULGAN ALONE

REPORT ON EXPERIENCE. By John Mulgan. Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, London.

(Reviewed by

M. H.

Holcroft

OHN MULGAN described this book as "only the draft and outline of a book Id like to write." Although there are passages where it is necessary to remember that the author was given no time for expansion or revision, the book as a whole is so good that it can stand without alteration as the testament of a writer who died too young, and perhaps of a generation of New Zealanders who grew up in a time of troubles. It is in the first chapter that. we feel most severely the loss of an original mind. Mulgan had been away from his own country long enough to be able to see it clearly, and ‘to understand the difficulties of mind and spirit which attend the transplanting of .a culture. "The country," he wrote, "is, in fact, so old in itself that none of us have dared to touch it; we have only just begun to live there. The Maoris who came before us moved among the dark heavy trees like ghosts and could have sailed away at any time and never left a mark. We could leave it ourselves now. In a few years the red-roofed wooden bungalows would rot with borer and crumble into earth. Fern would . cover the grassland and, after fern, small trees would come and in time the dark, rich, matted bush again. Other men might come in a hundred years and nothing that we had left would worry them, but they could draw strength as we have done from, the sharp, fierce lines of the hills and the streams always running and the wide sea on every side." These thoughts are sometimes fejected by plain men who say that they feel no strangeness in their environment; but they come increasingly. to poets and writers, and they are being drawn into a body of beliefs that is fundamental in our young culture. Perhaps they come most easily to men who have gone abroad and who, whether they return or not, are better able to see the gap between a physical and spiritual ’ occupation of a new country, Mulgan put down his ideas without any attempt to follow them to reasoned conclusions; they were intuitions which needed a later elaboration. He wrote enough, however, to show that we have lost a major contribution to native thinking. Even as it stands, the chapter on New Zealand must have its place in the ‘argument that is helping us to find our sense of direction in the arts. ET this book is most of all the story of an individual. Mulgan was influenced by his’ physical background, but he was also influenced by things that happened to the people with whome he lived in an anxious period between two world wars. He was right in believing that we did not behave very well during the economic depression; "It was a source of grief to many New Zealanders to find their spiritual resources in quality well.below their sun-

burnt and muscular bodies. Homebrewed beer and pamphlets on Douglas Credit were standard panaceas in the sombre winter of 1932. The search for a short cut, the easy road home, the quick cure, the patent medicine, was feverish, bitter and unsuccessful." He did not suffer directly from the depression; but he saw what was happening to others, and he shared with the intellectuals of his generation the impulse to find a political. formula which could show the way back to a lost security. War and depression, and the threat of war to come, brought an almost religious fervour to political attitudes. The Marxism to which he and his companions turned hopefully "had, like all religions, the defects of rigidity and dogma." And when he followed it in England he thought it became too much of a "parlour game." It is evident, too, that he disliked the changes of policy and the impersonal treatment of individuals. But it was among the mountains of Thessaly that he found the darker side of Communism. The coldblooded use of terrorism as a_ political weapon convinced him that a system which relies on naked power, and which can find no room for the dissenting individual, will not bring light to the nations. ‘Men who are strong and unscrupulous," he wrote, "have learned a new and formidable technique of government. Propaganda and newspapers are small things. The common ‘sense of ordinary, decent men will break them down. ... But behind this lies the second element of hard, physical power which can break an individual because it is organised and has discipline and knows no moral limits and has only one objective, to take power and keep it." OHN MULGAN was a New Zealander, bred to a liberal tradition; and itis interesting to notice the way in which the innate beliefs were brought out and fortified by hard experience. Like most of his countrymen, he was bewildered (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (Cont’d,)

(continued from previous page) by the ineptitude of the pre-war Government in England. He could not see much good in the officer caste in the British Army, and it is clear that he felt the "young gentlemen" to be out of place in the modern world. Throughout these pages the New Zealander emerges clearly and steadily; a man who likes to see things done quickly and without fuss, who respects tradition only while it does not impede action, who is willing to make allowance for mistakes and prejudices, but who believes that the individual must not be pushed about, or sacrificed to the interests of class or State. There are passages in the book which describe action in the desert and reSistance in the mountains of Greece. Some of Mulgan’s best writing is in his account of experiences among. the Greeks, although he has passed ‘lightly over events in which he was deeply engaged as a soldier. It is not always easy to remember that he was parachuted into Greece to plan and carry out guerrilla operations by mixed forces against the Germans. Little is said of activities which, in the words of the citation for his Military Cross, made him an "inspiring example of courage, patience, and conscientious devotion to duty." In every chapter he remembers and judges simultaneously: the experience is distilled into opinion. The opinions are more direct, and more firmly based, when he takes them from what he saw and heard among the realities of wartime situations, In England he was baffled by social complexity, and sometimes he judged too quickly, with a colonial impatiencethough also with tolerant after-thoughts ‘which illustrated his liberalism. But in Greece he saw life and death in a closer view;. and danger and_ responsibility brought clarity to his thinking. Experience sharpened what was there to begin with: the character of the man found its ultimate strength and balance. It was’ a preparation for work which now, alas, cannot be done. Yet what was done was the work of a strong intellect and a mind enriched by living and thinking, and New Zealanders will find something of themselves and of their country in the clean and robust writing. Report on Experience may seem now to be only a fragment; but there is in it a goodness and truth and an artistic unity which may keep it alive when morer ambitious books are forgotten.