TALKING ABOUT BOOKS
Sir,-What would Mr. O. E. Middleton like for criticism?.My dictionary, to start at the bottom, says criticism is the "judging of merit of works of art." Personally, I enjoyed Mr. Reid’s talks and did not find it difficult to jot down the names and authors of a few of these books which I have since read. Unfortunately, we have no journal exactly equivalent to the BBC Listener which coula reprint such talks for study at leisure. Radio talks on "vast and important" subjects always suffer from the fact that they cannot be studied, but that is not a good reason for not having them. To expect Mr. Reid to mention the number of books he did and include all those outstanding ones known to Mr. Middleton is to expect too much. It is difficult to understand why Mr. Middleton is aware that the NZBS "places a high value on volubility," since he makes no attempt to prove it. He does go on to say that more than volubility is required; true, but in my view we were given more than that, even if it was limited by the number of the talks. Mr. Reid, according to Mr. Middleton, cannot resist making moral judg-ments-as though this is a tremendous trap for any critic to fall into. I can see no reason why a critic should confine himself to the pure technicalities of the novel. Mr. Reid believes that a book can suffer from a false approach to some problem and he says so. What is wrong with that? We come nearer to the point when Mr. Middleton suggests that these talks were a waste of time and should have been used for some purely creative work -such as good New Zealand stories. If he means by this more slices of life, then let Mr. Reid’s series be rebroadcast. Good stories about New Zealand are rare because, at least in the Maugham, Kipling, Hemingway, etc., understanding of the word "story," few of them exist. What many of our writers -in the style Mr. Middleton suggests to me-give us, is not a story but an incident; and these, I consider, would have to be superlative to broadcast well, since they depend on the evoking of an atmosphere and not on a plot.
M.F.
McI.
(Gisborne),
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570308.2.19.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 11
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385TALKING ABOUT BOOKS New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 11
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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