More troubling than the forgetting of Stoney is the way women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century, notably Robin Hyde, were sidelined by the masculine and high-culture perspective of cultural nationalism. In 1906 Alexander and Currie stress the range of occupations of their authors, from lawyers, civil servants and politicians to miners, shepherds and rabbiters, but concede that ‘the greater part are journalists, editors, reporters, free-lances’. As they also point out: ‘A fair proportion of these makers are women, as is only fitting in a land where one of the duties true chivalry owes is thought to be a lessening as far as may be of the disadvantages of sex.’* Denis Glover’s satire ‘The Arraignment of Paris’ exemplifies the patronising dismissal of such authors. In the 1990s Michele Leggott objects to ‘the literary oblivion of several New Zealand women poets’ and sees her own work as ‘looking for what was lost when we asserted that good poetry in this country was shaped exclusively by British-derived modernism of the 1930s and 1940s’.† When from the early 1970s women writers forcefully re-enter the writing scene, difficult adventures in search of the reality of the land give way to more sensuous, personal and familial kinds of exploration. They reclaim the ground that they had lost in the 1930s, although they might not be aware that they are thus recovering (and changing) a tradition.
It is the business of literary critics, not to mention anthologists, to explain, to impose a structure or a narrative on the multiplicity of the writing before them. There are dangers in this process. The English historian Norman Davies observes that ‘When a few events in the past are remembered pervasively, to the exclusion of equally deserving subjects, there is a need for determined explorers to stray from the beaten track and to recover some of the less fashionable memory sites.’* This applies, we feel, to literary history as well as to history proper.
This anthology demonstrates that much happened before, during and after the cultural nationalist movement that needs to be seen on its own terms, without the withering disapproval of Curnow’s anthology introductions or Glover’s satire. In the period between the two wars Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and Ursula Bethell are working out their own responses to modernity—political, social, personal and literary. In poems such as ‘The Beaches’ from the ‘Houses by the Sea’ sequence, unpublished in her lifetime, Hyde found a way of attending—as Mansfield did in ‘At the Bay’—to a New Zealand childhood that is shifting yet structured, drenched in dream and memory yet particular, lyrical yet precise. The preoccupations of these writers have at times been shoe-horned into the cultural nationalist frame. They are better seen as a part of a literary culture—Alexander and Currie’s ‘journalists, editors, reporters, free-lances’—more familiar to audiences at the time than were the slim, elegant volumes of the Caxton Press.
These writers had a journalistic focus, exploiting popular forms and audiences, but they also, often in an explanatory and educative manner, experimented with forms of literary modernism. They are notable for an engagement with the everyday—Bethell in her garden, Mansfield and Hyde with family, its rituals and its celebrations. The collision—or collusion—between literary language, whether it be that of realism or modernism, and the usual or the quotidian (especially the domestic), is one of the most salient features of this anthology, one which has been overlooked or marginalised by the cultural nationalist frame but is palpably present from Blanche Baughan to Eileen Duggan and Hyde, from Mary Stanley to Marilyn Duckworth and Jenny Bornholdt. This subject matter is not trivial, nor is it subjective and introverted. When Stanley observes that ‘A house designs/my day an artifact/of care’ she registers being in time, delineating relationships beyond the formulaic constructions of the adventure narrative or the romance genre. This writing is not without ideology: Bethell’s garden is a very Anglican one; Hyde’s travel writing is informed by her socialism; Duggan’s landscapes are seen from the position of her Irish Catholic background. But it is not programmatic: it is flexible and fluid, pitched where the uncertainty of modernism meets the multiplicity of experience.
*
New Zealand poetry in the colonial period seemed to Australian critics, who were captivated by a stronger literary nationalism and by a firmly established local demotic tradition, to be excessively English, formal and genteel. Yet in New Zealand, distinctly ungenteel traditions have always existed alongside ‘proper’ ones. Bill Manhire observes of Denis Glover’s ‘The Magpies’ (1941) that ‘It’s hardly surprising that New Zealand’s best-known line of poetry—Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle—should be so determinedly unpoetic.’* In this anthology we have mixed the canonical and the popular. Sometimes these opposites stand frostily apart; sometimes they sit comfortably alongside each other; sometimes they couple promiscuously. Charles Brasch is uniformly high cultural—serious, weighty, addressed to the educated—while Barry Crump plays to the popular with his uneducated blokes, relishing droll humour rather than seriousness. But Manhire and Brian Turner manage to be both at the same time, thus drawing attention to a line of writers who jumble the social registers, from the Victorians who wrote satirical squibs as well as high-minded poetry to the deliberately ‘unpoetic’ writing of the 1990s and 2000s, poems which find their words in racing columns, visitor’s books and commercial technology. Manhire’s poetry, for all its arch use of laconic irony and its ear for curious local usage, is highly and self-consciously wrought—deliberately formal. It moves from linguistic games, puzzles and codes to work which carries readers as deeply into mortality as do James K. Baxter’s ‘The Ikons’ (1971) or Curnow’s ‘You Will Know When You Get There’ (1982). In this anthology Premiers Alfred Domett and Julius Vogel are in the same room as rap advocates of tino rangatiratanga, and pub poets jostle with professors. At times opposing registers are contained within the same work, as with Bornholdt’s ‘The Jersey’, in which loss and grief are filtered through the domestic detritus of knitting patterns, swimming lessons and a tea towel featuring the ‘Horse Map of the World’.
In 1903 Jessie Mackay conceded that her friend the poet Mary Colborne-Veel had ‘the only approach to a salon in the South Island’.† Jean Watson’s Barry Crump-like character Arbungus, in Stand in the Rain (1965), as the narrator ruefully remarks, does not belong in living rooms, and this makes him both attractive and alarming. But both civility and wildness—or bad behaviour co-existing with seeming innocence—are certainly at work in Katherine Mansfield, Maurice Gee and Elizabeth Knox.
What is common throughout the periods surveyed here is not just that an engagement with place is always also an engagement with language but that the writer has the power to disrupt place by behaving badly—or at least unexpectedly—on the page. Jessie Mackay is certainly aware of the gap between colonial New Zealand and the poetic language of the English Victorians: she uses that disjunct for satiric purposes in ‘Poet and Farmer’ and ‘The Charge at Parihaka’. These examples of light and political verse from the 1880s, far from showing colonial dependency, register a distance between word and world that will also preoccupy modernist writers Janet Frame and Maurice Duggan. Finding a language that snugly fits place proves decidedly vexed, and that beneficial difficulty is deeply worked into all levels of literary New Zealand, from popular colonial songs of nationalistic purpose to their postcolonial reworkings. For Gregory O’Brien, as for Janet Frame, language, indeed, is place.
Much of this demotic energy has been channelled through humorous writers of masculine adventure like Frank S. Anthony or Barry Crump or latter-day parodic versions of the self-sufficient man-in-the-bush theme like Jenny Bornholdt’s ‘Make Sure’ (1989) or the section included here from Catherine Chidgey’s In a Fishbone Church (1998). It appears in a range of forms, from the popular songs of Peter Cape and John Clarke to the exhilarating style-shifting and code-switching of Keri Hulme’s ‘The Pluperfect Pā-wā’ (1988) and the lovely collisions of educated and demotic speech in Maurice Duggan’s ‘Along Rideout Road That Summer’ (1965).
Ian Wedde has memorabl
y argued that the language ‘grow[s] … into its location’.* If this means that the English language becomes somehow indigenous in an inward and exclusive sense, we are not so sure. Much of the word-stock New Zealanders take as distinctively Kiwi has come from elsewhere, and New Zealand English is continually pinching words, phrases and attitudes from American gangster talk, rap, manga comics and Aussie surfers. But Wedde’s phrase does, certainly, recognise the domestication of English. As the colonial effort to preserve ‘standard English’ declines over the latter half of the twentieth century, New Zealand literature registers the increasing easiness of Kiwi speech; the tones of our broadcasters become demotically and democratically Kiwi. In the 1930s and 1940s Frank Sargeson finds a means of making rural and working-class language—in particular, the speech of uneducated Kiwi men—not only literary but also rich in the sense that he evokes its undiscovered significance and even beauty. Denis Glover also works verbal richness into the vernacular of his outback wanderer, Harry. Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s fiction, as a linguist observes, presents a ‘striking contrast … between the most formal, standard English of the third-person … narrative style, and the highly colloquial speech and interior monologue that he writes for the majority of his characters’.†
Since the 1960s the Pākehā vernacular has been explored in the yarns of Barry Crump, the daggish humour of John Clarke and, with more literary resonance, the fiction of Maurice Gee. In the 1990s and 2000s it must compete with other demotics, such as the verbal delinquencies of Sia Figiel’s wayward Pasifika girls. But it remains present (if at times parodically), enlivening, for example, the polished fiction of Damien Wilkins or Barbara Anderson.
Above all, New Zealand literature in English and English in New Zealand literature have long interacted with te reo Māori. John Macalister’s 2005 Dictionary of Maori Words in New Zealand English demonstrates the range and magnitude of the Māori gift of words to New Zealand English,‡ and we note the changing ways in which those words have been accepted in literary practice, from the now stilted glossing of Noel Hilliard’s Maori Girl (1960) or the spiritually charged self-consciousness of Māori words in James K. Baxter’s late poetry to the everyday familiarity of Anne Kennedy’s 2003 poem ‘Whenua (1)’. In the literature of the first half of the twentieth century, Māori words are passive, detached from the living world they come from, and thus in need of glossing; in the twenty-first century they are available to be used as an active part of the lexicon of ordinary life.
Many of the words in Macalister’s book denote plants, and this seems a fitting metaphor for the way te reo Māori works its way into English and cohabits with words from elsewhere. Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira (1921) is not only an environmental text recording the processes of adaptation and adjustment between indigenous and introduced flora on his Hawke’s Bay farm but also a map of the mobile relations between Māori and rural English plant names.* The theme is taken up, linguistically as well as ethically, in Geoff Park’s Ngā Uruora—The Groves of Life (1995) and in Chris Orsman’s ‘Ornamental Gorse’ (1994). Thus a transition in consciousness is marked. The smug satisfaction of William Pember Reeves’s celebration, in ‘A Colonist in his Garden’ (1925), of colonial civilisation as figured by the successful transplantation of English plants and English values gives way to a climate in Kennedy’s poem where the word whenua—in Māori both land and afterbirth—is co-opted into the intimacies of family ceremonial that is local but not specifically either Māori or Pākehā.
*
Travelling through Australia and New Zealand in 1838–39, James Coutts Crawford records a visit to a Queen Charlotte’s Sound village:
we found the Maoris collected in groups round numerous fires, and very busy sending messages to each other on slates. The art of writing has just been introduced, and the Maoris seem to have acquired a furor for it. They wrote everywhere, on all occasions and on all substances, on slates, on paper, on leaves of flax, and with a good, firm, decided hand.†
A hundred and forty years later in Apirana Taylor’s iconic marker of cultural loss, ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’, the speaker Tu the freezing worker is made mute by his lack of Māori—both language and culture, te reo and tikanga. The same linguistic loss for Pākehā in not noticing New Zealand’s prior language of occupation is quietly registered in Manhire’s ‘Phar Lap’ (1991) where the speaker, contemplating the famous race horse’s preserved skeleton in a museum, hears ‘a woman sing/in another language/from the far side of Phar Lap’s ribcage’. In a poem concerned with names as unreliable signifiers of identity (including that of the nation), it is hard not to see the ‘other’ language issuing from an invisible singer as te reo Māori.
Alexander and Currie’s authors are resolutely Pākehā, although the editors recognised in their selection the significance of Māori subject matter, which they describe, with the standard proprietorial stance of the time, as the ‘treasure trove that belongs to the New Zealand poet by right of the soil’. In his 1953 Oxford anthology of New Zealand short stories, Dan Davin includes a ‘Maori’ story by Pākehā author A.A. Grace as ‘a rueful concession to the semi-mythical past’, but Davin regrets that ‘that gifted people has not yet given us imaginative writers in English’.* In his 1964 anthology A Book of New Zealand, J.C. Reid has a section entitled ‘The Maori’, ‘since no New Zealand compilation can pretend to even relative completeness without recognition of the special role played in our society by its Polynesian members’. But he includes only one Māori author, Apirana Ngata, represented by a small section of his 1892 poem ‘A Scene from the Past’. Since the 1960s New Zealand literature has been fundamentally made over by generations of Māori writers—Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Robert Sullivan. But that transformation must be seen against a history of representation in which Māori presence was filtered through Pākehā sensibilities and taste. In Alexander and Currie the Māori presence is found in the mythological source of poems (Jessie Mackay’s ‘The Noosing of the Sun God’), an elegiac tone (Dora Wilcox’s ‘Onawe’) or ethnographic adventure (Bracken’s ‘The March of Te Rauparaha’). In Quentin Pope’s (perhaps excessively) despised 1929 anthology Kowhai Gold that presence has become more attenuated.†
Curnow’s 1945 Caxton Book of New Zealand Verse excludes the sentimental figuring of the Māori past, but he also recognises the problems of priority, cultural tact and correct usage; hence his 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse begins with an essay, ‘New Zealand Verse and Maori Traditions’, and a selection of traditional Māori poetry translated by Margaret Orbell. Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen’s 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, following bicultural principle, has extensive selections in Māori and in translation from Māori as well as poetry by Māori writers in English. We have not included traditional Māori literature in this anthology or translation from the extensive nineteenth-century corpus of published work in Māori because this is an anthology grounded in and defined by the English language, its registers and conventions. That which requires translation belongs in another context. We do include a contemporary translation of a letter from Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipipi Te Waharoa which appeared in the Taranaki Herald in 1861 and another from Wiremu Te Rangikaheke which appeared in the Daily Southern Cross in 1867. In both these cases Māori oratory is conveyed by means of Victorian public rhetoric. We also observe the way in which Māori oral tradition, Māori language and Māori cultural and literary forms have become part of English literature, from Ngata’s ‘A Scene from the Past’ to the poetry of Hone Tuwhare, the work of Keri Hulme and the stories of Tina Makereti.
In the sections on the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s we reflect a deliberate and self-conscious Māori literary culture. The Māori renaissance, a movement which began in the early 1970s with stories of lyrical nostalgia for the old ways of Māori life, gathered sharper political focus in the 1980s, as described in Witi Ihimaera’s 1981 essay, ‘Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception’. By the 1990s the energies of the movement had foun
d new modes of expression; Māori cultural and political assertiveness had not lessened in intensity but there was a growing diversity in Māori writing. In fact, as our selections demonstrate, the impulses of that renaissance go back to Ngata and to the prophet movements of the nineteenth century, gathering momentum in the 1950s and 1960s with the magazine Te Ao Hou, then flowering in the 1970s and 1980s as the Māori renaissance. In the 1990s and 2000s the unifying political energy of the renaissance relaxes (as did Pākehā cultural nationalism from the 1960s), enabling more heterogeneous work. By 2008 Paula Morris baffles rigid categories of Māori—or New Zealand—authorship by writing not only about Māori subjects but also, as represented here, about ultra-fast, moneyed social life in New York City.
A hundred and fifty years before Morris’s expatriate fiction, self-described Pakeha Maori F.E. Maning, in Old New Zealand (1863), describes his Māori hosts with curiosity, pleasure, admiration and frank criticism. Like many early commentators he focuses on their beguiling and bewildering cultural differences. In the late 1930s John Mulgan writes as grim diagnostician of the settler condition during the period between the two wars in his novel Man Alone, often taken as the classic New Zealand novel although its concerns are not nationalistic at all. Māori life here is peripheral to the novelist’s left-wing gaze, and is filtered through his laconic narrator:
It was clear to Johnson, nevertheless, that she had advanced herself by marrying Stenning. Her friends and her family to whom she really belonged might laugh at Stenning. They probably despised him for marrying her, but Rua herself had gone up in the world. She had married a white man with a farm, and not a poor white either, who would one day come back and live in the pa with them, but a real white who worked and kept himself.
Here Māori are read in economic rather than the cultural terms that dominate both Maning’s account and those of the bicultural 1980s. A further half-century sees Witi Ihimaera in Bulibasha (1994) tracing advances in the Māori rural economy in magic-realist terms, as a character encounters a Mormon angel while ploughing and decides to start a shearing gang, enlisting the help of Apirana Ngata.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 3