After the Holocaust

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 12

After the Holocaust

IT WAS SO LATE AND OTHER STORIES, by John Reece Cole; the Caxton Christchurch. Price, 10/6. YOUNG pilot winning his A wings, conversation at a teaparty for returned servicemen, two war-blinded Maoris in, a tram, or an American marine meeting his girl in an Auckland

hotel-these are the residue that memory retains after the holocaust. The actual fighting no longer seems important. It is the incidental encounters and situations that stand out-a flakhappy sergeant getting drunk in the mess, an aircraftsman’s .story of passion with a society woman told over a poker game, or a wandering expilot trying to escape from himself in the bush of the West. Coast. The stories in this volume are not about war, but war was the stimulus that pro-

duced them, and they underline the shifting rhythms of a society under war’s impact. They are told moreover by a born story-teller, with a smoothness and flow that are rare in the indigenous short story. There is no forcing or sense of strain in the best of them; they are not the brittle exercises in virtuosity of a young intellectual trying to be "literary," but real stories, with a beginning, middle and end. And the point when it comes (as it always does) is made with the subtle and precise timing of a skilled hand. For dramatic intensity and terseness of rendition Free Rides for Soldiers’ Brides is a classic example of the short story writer’s art. Yet craftsmanship is not sufficient in itself. There is an occasional flabbiness in the prose and lack of force in the dialogue, and the author’ has little sense of place. No local tradition is exploited, in the sense that the characters are not obviously New Zealanders. Does it matter much? These are simply not "regional" writings, nor are they satirical, sentimental, or tough in the manner of the American social realists. Rather they are intimate, lyrical stories of the inner man, in the tradition of Conrad or the Russians. And they are also, more than anything that has appeared here in years, in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield. A male K.M. certainly, with a man’s attitude to man‘ners and people, yet with a feminine skill for describing the subtler states of mind, and an almost feminine sense for the right shade of feeling or flavour of an atmosphere. : Nowhere is this better seen than in

the title story, a study of the reactions of a young returned airman at a tea party where he meets the family he had known as a child-they don’t recognise him-and realises that the decaying patterns of their lives, which had once seemed so important to him, are merely patterns in futility. And as he gradually realises this his mood is at’ first nostalgic, then ironically amused, then

angry; and finally he is sorry for these people and the futility of their existence. That is as far: as it goes, as far as one can legitimately go in a short story, but this sorrow for modern man-whether his distress was warcreated or nottranscends all the © other feelings the book arouses. Finally there is a maturity of tone, a sense of the fullness and richness of life. The . characters in these stories are people of more worldly sensibility than the incoherent colonial, crude in

‘ speech and thought-they are people of a certain sophistication and refinement. They may not think much, but they feela lot, and wandering in the sensuous worl of their emotions one realises that after two world wars New Zealanders are at last beginning to grow up.

P.J.

W.