In the Vernacular

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 12

In the Vernacular

| 1 SAW IN-MY DREAM, by Frank Sargeson; John Lehmann. English price, 10/6.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

most a legend. A new book of his is an important event; it must lead to a.revaluing of the ‘reputation, a reassessment of the legend. Does this new book fit the Sargeson of the intellectuals, hailed by an English reviewer as the successor |of Katherine Mansfield (a writer he does not resemble), the flattener of all sorts of bourgeois ninepins, the vindi- | eator of nature against the distortions" of respectability? Has he still the vitality of A Man and His Wite? Yes, he has. But this novel cannot leave his reputation quite where"it used to be. Sargeson has achieved something immensely difficult. He has captured the authentic idiom of his fellow country'men. They speak for better or worse as New Zealanders, often for worse. The exact and sensitive ear he has brought ito this task is something we should value and praise highly. In this novel, whose scene is set vaguely in the 1920s, he uses expressions I haven’t heard for years-others I’ve never heard at all. But I believe in them. But I also believe that both the idiom he creates and his atmosphere emphasise provincial differenées as much as they establish a national synthesis. This is Auckland first, then New Zealand. The novel has a structural defect, a broken back. It begins with our old : S ARGESON is a reputation, al-

friend When the Wind Blows reprinted; but in the second edition Henry has become Dave and has changed his nature with his name. Too much has happened in the supposed but never defined interval between parts one and two. Henry is an innocent gull; Dave is experienced and sophisticated. Henry quite literally wishes he‘had never been born; Daveis an acceptor of things as they are, whether it is the beery good fellowship of the Poruas, the corrosive vulgarity of Mrs. Anderson’s friends, or the dreary confidences of the dim-wit farmhand, Johnny. Hero 1 and hero 2 are not adequately joined. — Sargeson would scarcely mind my saying that he does not give a balanced picture of New Zea-

jana society, for that 1S not his object. This small town with its terrible respectability, this country district- with its morons and dunderheads, is Sargeson’s. dream world, a world in exploring which he occasionally gets his wires crossed with the Kinsey report, a world as grotesque, as unreal, as a Walt Disney cartoon, and in its way just as amusing. Weshould avoid falling into the error of thinking that, because Sargeson’s idiom is realistic, because the fabric of incident in this book, as in his others, is also brilliantly rea- | listic, and because his characters are people, therefore his general pur- | pose is realism. It seems to be some- | thing quite different, an attempt to | purge some inner necessity of a nature by no means simple. How far he. has /moved away from realism into fantasy Lis shown by the creation of Cedric, the | lunatic youth who haunts the fringes of the book and the bush, and Cedric’s | cave. ) The strongest technical interest of | Sargeson’s work is that the whole of it lis subjective. If it is not direct speech, | it is reported speech, and both are interrupted by an inner monologue more articulate but by’ no means any more clearly steered to a visible end. If anything, Sargeson has increased in literary power in this book. He has strength if not sweethess. But why conjure up our country so magnificently and then make it the field of battle for a dream war that must remain private for nearly all of us? The artist is not an entertainer, but he is more of one than he realises. An "integrity" hag-ridden by its own crotchets may be just as unrewarding to the beholder as a "surrender" to a supposed popular taste. But let us rejoice in the shining brilliance of some of the pieces of this mosaic and cease to worry whether the general picture is a fish or a bowl of flowers.