THE BOOKS THEY WROTE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 8

THE BOOKS THEY WROTE

(From FADING FOOTMARKS, or Who Passed This Way? a study of abortive nationalism in early literature, by ‘‘Severus,"’ 2054 A.D.) ~- "HE New Zealand of mid-20th Century, ten or fifteen years after the celebration of the first Centennial-an event made the occasion for a series of historical publications instinct with the national mystique-produced literature of an agonising self-consciousness, Each writer was a crusader for "New Zealandness," feverishly endeavouring to establish in his dialogue (if he wrote stories) or in his diction (if he wrote verse) the authentic idiom of his countrymen. Now that Free English is the universal language in a united world, and national boundaries and peculiarities quite meaningless, this desire to

create a literary myth on a national basis-the very concept "nationality" is imaginatively very difficult for us to grasp-can only be regarded today as a quaint and wistful attempt to make time stand still,.a survival of that refusal to grow up which was further evidenced in the fact that so much of the literature of that era was built upon the study of childhood. These writers found in the world of. the child a sort of mirror of their own impotence and incompleteness. New Zealand literature in the nine-teen-fifties was not, however, cut off from overseas influences. Indeed, these influences were so strong that the great majority of library borrowings were of imported books, books written and printed in Britain or the United States. Books by New Zealanders-and this contributed to the stridency of their authors — remained substantially unread. A difficulty, of course, was that New Zealanders who wrote books belonged to a curious special stratum of society which owed something of its character to the early associations of university life and much more to a keen sense of isolation and differentness in a fundamentally materialist community. What New Zealand literature lacked, as we can see now, being wise after the event, was a Kipling or a Maugham. While Dan Davin or Guthrie Wilson might at one time have seemed able to supply this need for a great popular writer, neither in fact did so. It was left to that curious person who for so long hid "his" identity under the sobriquet Ignotus to bridge this gap between the literati and the common man. "He" was, strangely enough, the first writer in the world to invoke deliberately the new techniques of gland surgery to change "his" sex in order to see life from the point of view botht of a man and of a woman, a sacrifice to art which only a handful of others have cared to

thane,

David

Hall