A Question of Values

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 10

A Question of Values

T the end of her article on literary prizes, printed on pages 8 and 9, Miss Joan Stevens pleads for acclamation when awards are announced. The information she collected shows that prizes in New Zealand, although still very modest, are not contemptible. Apart from money, they bring recognition and prestige -not only to the individual writer, but to writing as an art. There is so far little evidence that this is understood outside writing circles. Newspapers do not seem to regard literary achievement as a matter of public interest. When a prize is announced, the news is buried, usually at the bottom of a column. Reports of the Literary ‘Fund Award of Merit to Ruth France were published obscurely in some papers, and ignored by others. The Press of Christchurch, in spite of its own literary tradition, printed the item on the women’s page, apparently on the assumption that since the prize had been won by a woman writer, the news was of interest exclusively to women. If the prizes were worth £10,000, instead of a mere £100, the reception would no doubt be different. Persons who win lotteries are treated with admiration and respect, though they have done nothing except buy tickets. It is a commentary on the confusion of values in New Zealand that luck is rated more highly than talent. This attitude contrasts oddly with our general eagerness to be approved. We are sensitive about our shortcomings, when visitors politely reveal them to us, and are unable to understand that our preoccupation with material wellbeing may seem too narrow and intense to cultivated people. It would not matter so much if we had nothing to show and discuss; but we are in fact in a stage of cultural development which can _ bear examination. True, there-is now a more general acknowledgment of what is being done in music, opera, drama and ballet-in all the arts, significantly, which are practised before an audience, in productions that can be transferred without alteration from one part of the world to another. Interest becomes

weaker when music and drama are written in New Zealand. Literature has the universal appeal of music or ballet; but it also has the native flavour, and only its great works can survive translation. The strongest public support is reserved for performance rather than for creation, and always will be; but there could be no performance without the man who works silently and alone, and in other countries: this fact is understood, and the man is honoured. New Zealand writers feel themselves too often to. be tolerated instead of welcomed. There is no systematic or even. conscious denigration; but we are slow to reach the attitudes which are taken for granted elsewhere-the deep respect for letters in France, the assumption in England that writers may sometimes deserve high places in an Honours List, the American-and more recently the Australian-belief that literary prizes are important. It may be said in reply that New Zealand writers receive the attention they deserve, Their best work is not comparable with the best writing in England and America. If their achievements are modest, they should be modestly noticed. But who is to judge these matters? Critical standards are not formed in five minutes or in five years; we may have to wait a generation to see what will survive of contemporary writing. In the meantime, if a writer receives an award, it is because judges of wide experience have thought his work worthy of public tribute. Literature is bigger than the men and women who serve it; but these people, frustrated and difficult though they may be, are helping to create something for an ampler future than any that we shall know. New Zealand already has writers who have given us much for small rewards; and in a country where the rewards must continue to be small, they have an additional claim to public notice and encouragement. It is at least time they were allowed to displace the lottery winners in the

headlines.

M. H.

H.