PROGRESS AND THE POET

Radio Record, 29 July 1938, Page 10

PROGRESS AND THE POET

Radio Man Who Turns His Back On The Present For The Riches Of The Past PooETs have always rebelled against things as they are all through history. One of their duties is to puncture the self-satisfaction of their fellows. In this instance Darcy Cresswell, New Zealand poet well known to radio listeners for his readings in Auckland and Wellington, has some acute comments to make before he leaves for England. YE are all so sure we are right these days about everything that it comes as a worldshattering shock to be told we are all wrong. English-speaking people, and especially New Zealanders, are quite agreed that democracy is right and Fascism is wrong. Germans and Italians are equally sure that Fascism is right and democracy is wrong. We can bear that, -The English and the New Zeulanders are so positive they are right that they can put up with the Fascists thinking they are right. Bor what.if they are both wrong, if neither democracy and Fascism is allowed to be right? If our whoie civilisation is wrong ... if our entire philosophy of life is based on false premises of reason? What if the earth doesn’t go round the sun? What if one and one don’t make two, but only appear to make two? . What if we had a sixth sense added to our other five that would show us that one and one don’t really make two? WIENTAL chaos!

| eile The sort of dark and dismal chaos in which Carlyle would have revelled. _ Yet Einstein has pointed to horizons of thought just like this. Hinstein says it is not true that two parallel straight lines will never meet. And when the atom has been split, particles have been known to move from one place fa another without any interval of

time elapsing between the moment they leff one place until the moment they arrived at another, {rt wus this sort of mental disturbance that 1 bad when I talked with Mr. Darcey Cresswell, New Zealand poet, in Wellington last week. He is well-known to radio listeners for his readings over the air from 1YA. And poets, like scientists, go straight to fundamentals. Mr. Cresswell believes that civilisation rests on false premises. It depends on reason, he says, it leaves the senses out of account. Machines and the machine age are the logical development of reason. He sees no hope for a civilisation based on reason, that leaves the senses out of account. He expects it to crash, The materialism of the present day will be replaced with a civilisation on a spiritual basis. The poets will be its priests. |

"THOUGH he talks over the air he is no advocate o: radio. "I think the cinema and the newspapers -not even excepting the ‘Radio Record’-and_ the radio, are the enemies of art," he says, "but we have ° men in the broadcasting service in New Zealand’ who are doing a lot against odds to give broadcasting a cultural value. "Let us hope they will,’ he said, "because the broadcasting of perfectly drivelling music, like sensational journalism and _= sillv

sensational films, lowers the taste of the public." HERE are two sides to art, he says: the creative and the appreciative. The creative side can never be. eradicated, no matter how hard people might try: "It is as stubborn as ragwort or blackberry. You can’t kill it with 9 grubber or a nloneh-thonch this:

i ee el has been tried in New Zealand. How? In this way: New Zealand tries to make its artists be farmers or do something useful." | But ov the side of appreciation, thinks Mr. Cresswell, the public can be misled. And they are being misled, he says, by the sort of entertainment and instruction that they get in the newspapers and the cinemas and too often over the air. HE made these remarks from the depths of an armchair in Wellington. When I asked him if he would elaborate them, he said he preferred to give them like that. "Half the charm of saying this,’ he said, "is te fling the words over your shoulder as you go," OME time ago he published "Poet’s Progress," an autobiography, in London, and he takes the second part of his work to London with him in (Continued on page 50.).

Interview For "The Record"’

By

WILL

GRAVE

‘Progress And The’ Poet’ FOLLOWING: HANNIBAL OVER ALPS ‘COontinned from page 10),

a few weeks’ time..’ While in. Wellington he has been giving. further reading and talks-from station 2¥A, and station 2ZB. Much of his life, since. he left school in New Zealand, has been. "ppent in’ Eingland and abroad. During this last visit to New Zealand, he says, he« hag been long enough in the country to: realise that New Zealand is: changing for the better as far as art is concerned, "THINGS are waking up," — he said. "There is an intellectual interest in new ideas. Art is beginning to have its patrons in men like Mr, J.:A, Lee and Mr Ormonde Wilson. The’.Government recently gave Hileen Duggan the O.B.H, "Then there are the new printing presses, Lowry’s press . in- Auckland, Denis Glover's Caxton press'in Christchurch, and the independent’ weekly, ‘Tomorrow.’ These signs are beginpine to make me hopeful for this counry. "AS far as my own affairs. ‘go I am setting off for England as quietly. and as quickly as possible. I do not want to emulate Robin Hyde; I have too much work on my hands. "E may travel in Europe, but I shan’t' go to Spain again as I did before-I am glad to have seen it, backward and imperfect as it was. I like better to think of it as a country of donkeys and low diet than of bombs and gasmasks." HIS time, Mr. Cresswell wishes to visit the Mediterranean and its shores. "After all, our civilisation began there," he said, "and when. it peters out, it will probably begin there again. I should like to go to Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt, the round tour, in fact. . "T have little desire .to.see . other countries outside this orbit. One has quite enough of novelty in being aA New Zealander, "T should like to ‘live in Wellington. It is just as smoky as London and just as dirty, but the wilderness-is near, I love the mountains, but whether I come back or not depends on the result of my work and how sure [ am that there is something for me here." He told me he had enjoyed ‘his broadeast readings and added: "T think the public has not resented my efforts

much." He hopes to broadcast in New Zealand again and in London. T one of his recent broadcasts, he read from the Latin poet Ovid, He loves reading from the past. He gets something out of the past that few ‘ other people @o in these days when most people look always to the future and what it will bring them.in money or motor-cars. He finds Ovid more exciting than aeroplanes. When I asked him why, he gave me this ex- * planation. . "Y live in the same world as other people," he told me, "but it seems I look for sustenance to a more remote time. ‘To live in the present is to be disillusioned and annoyed by most things which people value nowadays, put I think that people who cling to new and exciting things at the expense of the old and well-tried possessions of + the past lose far more than I do. "Such a preference for these things of the past may be a mark of eccentricity in New Zealand," said Mr. Cresswell, "but that it is so considered may be a sign of the lack of culture around us." . On his journeyings in the Mediterranean he will follow in the tracks of the giants of the past. He has the intention of going once again over the youte that Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, took when he crossed the river Rhone and made his amazing journey with African elephants in ice and terrible hardships over the Alps more than 2000 years ago. JRECENTLY Mr. Cresswell called on a New Zealand editor and told him that he would be making this Mediterranean journey and sending back some articles on it. Would the editor be interested? It depended, said the editor, entirely on what was happening in those places at the time. On what Mussolini would be doing, on topical affairs... Genily. the poet explained that he was not in the least interested in Mussolini so long as he was free to go where he wanted to go. He was going to southern France and Italy to see not what Mussolini was doing, but where Hannibal crossed the Rhone over 2000 years ago, and to follow on foot over his route through the Alps, The editor was astonished and intrigued. When you look at history like that it doesn’t seem to matter so much what is happening in these places at the present time.