THE WRITER AS OUTCAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 5

THE WRITER AS OUTCAST

Sir,-I find certain inconsistencies in Professor Gordon’s comments (Listener, March 14). He chooses "two quotations to illustrate a point of view;" but as I see it the two quotations represent quite different points of view. Baxter is moral and prophetic; Sargeson amoral and backward-looking, He criticises Sargeson for "wilful exclusiveness and deliberate restriction of his horizon," but (three columns later) praises Jane Austen for making "a whole world out of a few families in a small village." He suggests that Baxter "may find in a few years that an intellectual cell... is a very lonely place." Baxter’s quotation explicitly states that it is; not later on, merely, but now. He suggests that "a corrupt society (inhabiting . . . Main St., Suburbia)" may be "blithely unaware" of the poet, but if this is a direction to the poet rather than to society, then by implication he asks the poet to give up "the individual vision" which (three columns later) he asks him to "preserve, as something precious." He writes an amusing synopsis of a Myth for Writers; but in fact his myth is the Myth of Youth and Idealism, and equally applicable to the lover, the sportsman, the student and the artist. Dare any man scoff at this? Or should he keep his values uncontaminated, even when\ he is himself corrupted by failure or success? He says that a good writer is one "who brings to writing an individual vision or point of view, and who writes about something; and then suggests that autobiography translated into fic-, tion, and especially studies of childhood are... nothing? He scoffs at Sargeson’s When the Wind Blows, as childhood stuff, but forgets to tell us that it is part one of a book in three parts. He chooses to call a man who "by writing and example attempts to change society" guilty of "intellectual isolationism." * 4 He can "put aside for the moment... the Ezekiels and Blakes and Shelleys," by saying that they are "in the long run a very specialised type" (sic). Does he put aside Baxter, or is he still arguing about him? And if Sargeson is still on board, how does he (Sargeson) in fact compare with Virginia Woolf on Professor Gordon’s next demand: that writers should heve "lived in, and not on, the fringe of the society to which they belong"? | Professor Gordon thinks doing a job in society is important. to a writer, I tend to agree, but I also agree with Stephen Spender that a poet doesn't have to be burned in oil to know what. it feels like., Mere experience counts for less than sensibility. But allowing for Professor Gortdon’s argument, it is a matter of record that Sangeson and Baxter have done more iobs between them than Jane Austen, Trollope, Virginia Woolf and Joyce put together. So what? Finally, Professor Gordon savs, "Write about what vou know." T agree.

ANTON VOGT

(Wellington),