LISPING IN NUMBERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 5

LISPING IN NUMBERS

Sir.-Allow me to take up a few points in the editorial of July 16, in which the little review Numbers was flattered with so much attention. The main charge brought against Numbers seemed to be that it "strikes out blindly," with "undefined purposes." What substitutes, it was asked, do the iconoclasts offer? Merely by looking a little past the review’s editorial, the proposed "substitutes" should have been evident: the poems and stories in it. The policy of Numbers could be seen in what it printed. If its contents are ignared and the policy is considered in the abstract, how easy to call it a "cloudy generalisation." With similar unfairness the grammar of one sentence (about work by both new and well-known writers) and the meaning of another (about contributors who did not help to plan the review) were misinterpreted and quoted out of context. (But compare the mixed metaphor that ended The _ Listener’s editorial.) Only once was the editorial of Numbers quoted fairly, with the comment

*Suvenile nonsense" added without any reason given. This is not criticism. The passage quoted needs inclination rather than explanation. The values it implies, at least, are not as narrow as the Matthew Arnoldish "writing perceptively of life around one" suggested instead. Two final points. If a "coterie" in the thirties had not indulged in the "luxury" of "playing at publication," our "established" writers would still be unknown. Isnt the situation a little like that in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, where Solness fears "the younger generation at his door’? And wasn’t Hilda in that play right in saying gig fears were unworthy of him? The type of criticism of The Listener about Numbers is precisely what must be replaced by "hard thinking and good writing." Admittedly, it comes from a "clear voice," it is a fine, resonant yelp of disapproval. But it is time that criticism here should stop being either a favourable or unfavourable yelp, or else an academic exercise, and _ instead should use reasoning as precise as the nature of this subject admits.

PETER

DRONKE

(Wellington).

(It is a familiar and rather weak defence to argue that quotations are unfair ‘"‘out of context." The fuller the quotations can be, the better; but it is space, and not wicked design, which limits them. We cheerfully admit that the comment "juvenile nonsense’’ is less than critcism. Yet if, as our correspondent says, "the passage quoted needs inclination rather than explanation,’"’ we are obviously at levels of thought "where only a yelp can be intelligible.--Ed. )