"THE PAST HAS ANOTHER PATTERN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 553, 27 January 1950, Page 5

"THE PAST HAS ANOTHER PATTERN"

»ir,-Under this unfortunately untrue statement by T. S. Eliot, Alan Mulgan in The Listener of December 30 reviews New Zealand’s present against its past, and makes many statements, which,’ in my opinion, are also wide of the mark. I quote two examples. Of our "horse and buggy" years he says, "The whole tempo of life was lower. Wants were »fewer and life more leisurely." I wonder what pioneer women would belieye that! Writing of the years before thé Great War, he claims that "very few New Zealanders wrote books and very few read them." This may be true of people living. in the backblocks of the North Island, but it is certainly not correct about ‘the people living in the mining and farming: settlements of Here it seemed to be a general rule right back to the ’Sixties that as soon as any community life sprang up in a place a local library, was brought into existence. The books selected by the early library committees were generally of a very high standard, but as the years passed reading habits must have declined both in volume and taste. Where libraries did survive, the later purchases of books by the local committees show that western stories and detective fiction had secured popular favour. The "yellow back" and "Deadwood Dick," by altering their covers, had sectred a position on the parlour shelf instead "of being hidden under pillows. New Zealanders did write books in the pre-war period,

and good- ones, too. Pember Reeves, Robert McNab, Guthrie Smith, Frederick Maning, Vincent Pike, and even Katherine Mansfield all belong to the pre-Gallipoli days which Alan Mulgan, by some strange reasoning, claims to be New. Zealand’s birthday.

JOSEPH

STEPHENS

(Mosgiel).