COLLECTING AUTHORS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 657, 8 February 1952, Page 8

COLLECTING AUTHORS

A Small Contribution to the Study

of N.Z. Literature

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DENIS

GLOVER

CONGLOMERATE of authors makes a collection ™ of which anyone should be proud, especially if you have ever been- interested in the publication of books. You don’t have to go out stalking them or anything like that: you just sit like a decoy duck and they descend singly or in mass thinking they are collecting you. No special equipment is needed except some sort of machine that will keep on making the same marks on sheets" of paper. For authors, like ambitious stamp-savers, need books and books and books. Authors have no scarcity value. Indeed, they tend to outnumber readers. They occur everywhere, and although there is no hibernating season they tend to swarm at certain times of the yearalways, that is, when the publisher and the printer are at their very busiest. Unwillingly sometimes, you have to be a down-the-noser to deal with them. So that the problem is not always that of collecting authors, of putting down bait or @mitting imitation bird-calls, but of laying snares and mantraps to keep them at a distance. MONG authors poeticus juvenalis is the most interesting species. He is always broke to the wide (though miraculously contriving always to smell of beer), and he has an energy and selfconfidence that is astonishing. He has written two or three, or two or three hundred, short poems which he is properly convinced everyone should read; and to ensure this desirable result he makes them so difficult that none but the initiate can emerge from them with anything but a numbing of the brain. He hates working in the bank, or finishing his degree, or milking the cows, and he intends to let the world know it. -___-_-_-_-e ssn ss eee Sse >

He is aware indeed that all accepted values are valueless; but he places a good deal of importance on love and this is a good thing in that it diverts him from self-pity, unless the wench is obdurate. He takes your own expenditure of blood and treasure as a necessary tribute to the arts, of which old-estab-lished firm he is the sole representative in the district, It is sometimes more than an exercise in diplomacy to persuade him that while his ,poems are not without merit, neveretcetera etcetera. The publisher knows that only his friends will take much interest, and they will all expect free signed copies. If the poems are not too obviously erotic and on the nose, elderly aunts are sometimes suitable recipients, | : Among his most avid readers he will also find his chief critics-others of the same genus who can rarely afford to buy the book but have much simple pleasure in tearing it to pieces, themselves waiting impatiently in the queue at the publisher’s door. Ah, the young poet with his fierce hopes and hates and his illusions of disillusionment! In middle age, surrounded by the children and a few rows of healthy suburban potatoes, he will look back wistfully to the fine free fancies of his youth. But he will get a great deal of satisfaction, and rather more tangible results, out of the children and the potatoes. ‘THE poetess, or she-poet as Dr, Johnson. called her, is a rather ' more variegated species, colouring very bright .to very drab. Unlike the male she hunts

singly, not in droves; and in age she tends to be.rather younger, much older, or very much older. She tends to outnumber the male in this fertile soil, but her poems are usually so near the heart that it is like undressing in public for her to .produce them. She shows a profound ignorance of verse-form. (One in my collection was furious at being placed only second in a poetry competition. With an economy really laudable she decided that her sonnet should consist of thirteen lines. Less laubably, all things considered, the judges opted for fourteen. ) The she-poet, little song-maker though she be, goes 1uthlessly about the task of getting into your collection..She wants a book, and she wants it at once, A vast public is waiting breathless. The poems

are very good. All her friends have said so, and have promised to buy a copy. In her insistence about this, she will often proceed to read all of them aloud on the spot. Despite this ruthlessness she is outwardly marked by a _ melting mistiness of the eyes and an extraordinary tendresse for Nature, more ' particularly trees, Fairies ‘are not as commonly evident as they used to be, or little Maori folk, but it is not unusual for an abstract spirit, mystic, wonderful, to haunt every fourth line; Of course there are others less emotional, more intellectual, more emancipated; and these you may safely offer a cigarette and a gin-sling while firmly putting their MS, into a drawer.

RATHER rare type of poet occurs sometimes’ in the back-country. He has always wanted to write, and he shows his great love of literature by never having read any-coming, as it were, undefiled from his pure mountain springs. He is not really hopeful of publication. His epic is as long as Milton’s locks, and in vile writing. What he wants is criticism, advice, encouragement, and certain corrections to elementary spelling. So much for the poets. Some are worth adding to your collection, some even become your friends, Others you may, promptly refer to any other publisher who has done you a_bad turn. HE prose-writer is somewhat rarer, because prose takes longer to write.

Commonest is the novelist, male or female. (The male is often modestly content with 60,000 words, but the female runs on and on like a government report.) Historical novels are a great faveurite, based largely on what grandmama told the author then a child at her knee. Grand-mama is of course the heroine, bravely following her man over the hills or rivers of scrub-country on her then shapely little feet. But in the end the grand-children all daft to the city and look at the result. Another profitable field is the author’s own childhood, covly disguised. %h, the swimming pool in the river! Ah, the dreadful awakening in the wood-shed! These writers certainly spare us the goldrush days or the beautiful Maori princess, but in the main they only demonstrate that we were all young once and what a pity it is we were allowed to grow .older, One female for whom I had no room in my collection I recommended .to a newspaper serial syndicate — and still treasure her letter of gratitude when it was accepted. One male invited me to contribute a war interest to a novel in which the first chaste kiss dtcurred on page 600. One, sent by post (without return postage, inevitably). described a King Country railway gang whose hero brightly remarked, "But,ho, lads, there’s the whistle-let’s back to work," NOVELS are,really, based on births, deaths and marriages. But’ not so for the young novelist. He is apt to have (continued on next page)

pa. ___________ ___._ ____+ (continued from previous page) * theories about life and worse still, theories about The Novel. This seems to involve a lot of non-narrative obscurity and no sense. of humour. You gotta be tough, Life in the raw and no sunburn lotion. The biographer, the, autobiographer, the historian--all are collector’s ,pieces, the autobiographer being the most voluminous. The biographer is often a suspicious species, snorting with fury when anyone else tackles a subject he has already "done." And the historian, in the spate of centennial splendours, peers with passionate perspicacity into the wranglings over the first main drain. But the best thing about collecting authors is that it’s so un-strenuous, They abound like pipis on the beach, and you take your. pick.