WRITERS AT WORK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 11

WRITERS AT WORK

Sir-Mr Chas J. Cutler in a letter about the late Rex Fairburn says that Rex was "not perhaps as casual an amateur as Vogt would think, but certainly not a professional with half an eye on style and one and a half eyes on boiling up the financial pot." The italics are my own. The inference seems to be that no professional writer has any pride in kis work, that integrity is sacrificed for box office and that to be interested in box office is not done by the best people. No editor worth his job is without a keen eye*for the phony. No script lacking style, standards, or craftsmanship can get past that eye. Therefore, if a professional writer wishes to keep his place in his own chosen and highly competitive

field, he cannot afford to ignore ‘style and all that it implies. Apart from this admittedly practical view, the professional writer is usually such because he wants to write. Or teels he has to. No labour of love or compulsion is ever undertaken merely because of money. By the very nature of his calling, the professional writer is, with a few exceptions, continuously preoccupied with the perfecting of his craft, for its own sake, as well as for his own, I think it a pity that more New Zealand writers do not acknowledge the necessity for a harder, cooler, more professional assessment of their work. If they did so we would have fewer desultory dabblings, fewer practising dilettanti, and a greater volume of solid, indigenous work than we have at the

present time.

ISOBEL

ANDREWS

(Whangarei).