SURROUNDED BY AESTHETES
Sir,-There may be rather more in Dr Roderick’s comment about aesthetes and New Zealand writing than is conceded in your penetrating editorial. The "Oxford" defines an aesthete as "one who professes a superior appreciation of what is beautiful and endeavours to carry out his ideas in practice." You give a secondary meaning, a person who "pretends" to appreciate. I suggest a third, a person whose conceptions of beauty and sympathies with life are limited. This recalls the hostility to Kipling, a vulgar fellow who comes between the wind and comfortable living. So "aesthete" or "aesthetic" becomes akin to "academic" in the derogatory sense of that word, an outlook narrowed by study. I believe we have such a school of critics. They have set views of what a novel should be, It should be analytical and deal with the more sombre sides of life. Joy of living is frowned upon, and popularity highly suspect. One may cite the ignoring in certain quarters of the work of Nelle Scanlan, the first New Zealand novelist to be widely read in her own country, John Brodie, and Mary Scott, who is selling so well. Even the New Statesman has cast an appreciative eye on Angela Thirkell. In England a disposition to inculcate distaste rather than
taste, a critical attitude rather than enthusiasm, is causing some concern. Is it absent here? It is quite likely that, as you suggest, the energy put into poetry has cramped other writing. It may have affected judgment on novels. The Australian is less reverent than the New Zealander towards arbiters of taste. So I can imagine a novelist looking over his shoulder and muttering: "What’s So-and-So going to say about this? Must I try to write like Katherine Mansfield? .. . Damn K.M.!" I have heard this story of a New Zealand novelist (name forgotten) who has won some success in England. When someone spoke to her of "the integrity of the novelist," she replied: "I don’t know anything about that. I just write." Need I point the moral?
VICTORIAN
(Wellington).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 11
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343SURROUNDED BY AESTHETES New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 11
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