The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  ‘In every country that has not spoken as yet, and as surely as sunlight follows morning. You have seen the beginnings of it. Have faith. There is such a little time to wait.’

  Once more Truth was forgetting the limitations of man’s life, and I did not care to remind her. I was thinking of the future, and the voices of all those shadows who had told me their tales. The more I meditated, the more magnificent did the prospect appear.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ said Truth. ‘The banks and the loans again?’

  ‘No. I’m thinking,’ I responded loftily, for Truth was only a woman, and could not be expected to understand these things, ‘of the Future of Colonial Literature!’

  ‘What?’ said Truth, with a touch of scorn in her voice.

  I repeated the words, emphasising the capitals.

  ‘Oh, hear him!’ she cried, lifting up her face to the fern-wreathed rocks around. ‘One short-lived son of Adam, who may die to-morrow, splitting his tiny world into classes, and labelling them, like dead butterflies. What do you mean’—she looked me in the face—‘by Colonial Literature?’

  ‘Oh—er—stuff written in the colonies, and all that sort of thing, y’know.’ I couldn’t understand why Truth was so angry. The loom thundered under my feet till the sand by the pool shook.

  ‘Isn’t the stuff, as you call it, written by men and women? Do the Weavers down below there at the loom make anything else but men and women? And, until you step off this world can you expect anything more than stories of the lives of men and women written by men and women? What manner of monsters live in your part of the world,’ she concluded, ‘that you speak so blindly?’

  ‘Fools,’ I said, penitently. ‘Just fools, Truth. I’m one of ’em, and you’re right. It’s only men and women that we have to think of all the world over. But,’ I added, remembering another country across the seas, ‘these people will be quite as foolish as myself when their time comes, won’t they?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Truth, with a smile, ‘they will be only men and women.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said triumphantly, ‘they will talk rubbish about a Distinctively Colonial Literature, a Freer Air, Larger Horizons, and so forth. They’ll vex ’emselves with unholy comparisons between their work and other people’s work. They’ll flatter each other and write of the Oamaru Shakespeare, and the Timaru Tennyson, and the Dunedin Dryden, and the Thursday Island Thackeray, won’t they?’

  ‘They will,’ said Truth. ‘(When did you leave America, by the way?) Some of the people here will do all those things, and more also. What else can you expect? They are only men and women, but those who make the noise will not be the people who tell the stories.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. The banks can look after themselves. You are sure that the tales will come?’

  ‘I have said so, and you have heard. Good-bye!’

  Truth nodded and disappeared under the water. I watched the ripples stupidly, and not till they died away did I remember that I had a hundred questions to ask. Only the wild duck at the far end of the pool did not look as if it could answer them.

  *

  That same afternoon, riding in the buggy with Sam the Maori, across a new land teeming with new stories to which, alas, I had neither clue nor key, it occurred to me that I had largely discounted the future. But when I came to the sea coast and found a ten-thousand-soul town up to its tree-ferns in debt for a quarter-million pound harbour, the sand faithfully following each pile of the futile breakwater, and a sixty-thousand-soul town with municipal offices that might have served Manchester or Liverpool, I perceived that I was in good company.

  You see, New Zealand is bound to pay her unwritten debt. Truth said so, and I have seen the assets. They are sufficient securities.

  The other things are not of the slightest importance.

  (1892)

  Between the Wars

  One way of looking at the period from 1918 to 1940 is to see it as shaped by the memory of one European war and the expectation of another—from the ‘beautiful cemeteries’ observed in Katherine Mansfield’s loosely fictionalised version of her trip to the French Front Line to Robin Hyde’s record of the Japanese invasion of China, the preliminary act of the war in the Pacific.

  This is not a single coherent period but one divided into two opposing literary cultures: on one side, dealt with in this section, there is the world of popular authors, literary women and journalists, grouped around a lively newspaper and magazine culture, and often associated with Quentin Pope’s 1929 anthology Kowhai Gold. On the other side, there is the project of making a national culture, centred on Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Denis Glover and Frank Sargeson. The latter is certainly more purposive and concentrated, and is treated separately in the ‘Cultural Nationalism’ section of this anthology; but this separation does not indicate that the other side lacks literary or cultural value, or that concerns or modes of writing were not sometimes shared by both groups.

  Between the wars was a period of increasing literary attention to life in New Zealand, without the earnest self-justification of the colonial period or the high seriousness of cultural nationalism. In this section we see a turning away from romantic versions of local history. The ecology of settlement is seen with a more sombre eye, as a sense of the loss of the Māori past is coupled with an awareness of the landscape’s degradation. There is a shift from Maoriland’s interest in Māori as source of myth and legend to an anthropological interest, as well as, and in keeping with the popular orientation of many of these authors, a ‘humorous’ mockery of contemporary Māori speech and character.

  Many of these writers engage with international and political concerns, particularly those which relate to the aftermath of the First World War and the impending Second. Writers inhabit a complex world of expatriates and voyagers, moving among worlds both local and international, Māori, Asian, familial, amatory, and those of the scattered ‘godwits’. The ensuing issues are viewed not in an abstract or ideological sense, but with an eye to how individuals, and specifically New Zealand subjects, as observers and moral interpreters, can properly and profitably place themselves within this new and unstable world.

  Few of these authors are interested in the construction of a distinct national literary culture. The more sophisticated see the condition of being suspended between worlds rather than fixed in a specific social pattern as enabling; the more popular revert to the romance modes of the colonial period, albeit now with a sharpened and intermittently pessimistic sense of a local and an everyday reality.

  Beautiful Cemeteries

  Katherine Mansfield, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’

  She is like St Anne. Yes, the concierge is the image of St Anne, with that black cloth over her head, the wisps of grey hair hanging, and the tiny smoking lamp in her hand. Really very beautiful, I thought, smiling at St Anne, who said severely: ‘Six o’clock. You have only just got time. There is a bowl of milk on the writing table.’ I jumped out of my pyjamas and into a basin of cold water like any English lady in any French novel. The concierge, persuaded that I was on my way to prison cells and death by bayonets, opened the shutters and the cold clear light came through. A little steamer hooted on the river; a cart with two horses at a gallop flung past. The rapid swirling water; the tall black trees on the far side, grouped together like negroes conversing. Sinister, very, I thought, as I buttoned on my age-old Burberry. (That Burberry was very significant. It did not belong to me. I had borrowed it from a friend. My eye lighted upon it hanging in her little dark hall. The very thing! The perfect and adequate disguise—an old Burberry. Lions have been faced in a Burberry. Ladies have been rescued from open boats in mountainous seas wrapped in nothing else. An old Burberry seems to me the sign and the token of the undisputed venerable traveller, I decided, leaving my purple peg-top with the real seal collar and cuffs in exchange.)

  ‘You will never get there,’ said the concierge, watching me turn up the collar. ‘Never! Never!’ I ran down
the echoing stairs—strange they sounded, like a piano flicked by a sleepy housemaid—and on to the Quai. ‘Why so fast, ma mignonne?’ said a lovely little boy in coloured socks, dancing in front of the electric lotus buds that curve over the entrance to the Métro. Alas! there was not even time to blow him a kiss. When I arrived at the big station I had only four minutes to spare, and the platform entrance was crowded and packed with soldiers, their yellow papers in one hand and big untidy bundles. The Commissaire of Police stood on one side, a Nameless Official on the other. Will he let me pass? Will he? He was an old man with a fat swollen face covered with big warts. Horn-rimmed spectacles squatted on his nose. Trembling, I made an effort. I conjured up my sweetest early-morning smile and handed it with the papers. But the delicate thing fluttered against the horn spectacles and fell. Nevertheless, he let me pass, and I ran, ran in and out among the soldiers and up the high steps into the yellow-painted carriage.

  ‘Does one go direct to X?’ I asked the collector who dug at my ticket with a pair of forceps and handed it back again. ‘No, Mademoiselle, you must change at X.Y.Z.’

  ‘At—?’

  ‘X.Y.Z.’

  Again I had not heard. ‘At what time do we arrive there if you please?’

  ‘One o’clock.’ But that was no good to me. I hadn’t a watch. Oh, well—later.

  Ah! the train had begun to move. The train was on my side. It swung out of the station, and soon we were passing the vegetable gardens, passing the tall blind houses to let, passing the servants beating carpets. Up already and walking in the fields, rosy from the rivers and the red-fringed pools, the sun lighted upon the swinging train and stroked my muff and told me to take off that Burberry. I was not alone in the carriage. An old woman sat opposite, her skirt turned back over her knees, a bonnet of black lace on her head. In her fat hands, adorned with a wedding and two mourning rings, she held a letter. Slowly, slowly she sipped a sentence, and then looked up and out of the window, her lips trembling a little, and then another sentence, and again the old face turned to the light, tasting it. … Two soldiers leaned out of the window, their heads nearly touching—one of them was whistling, the other had his coat fastened with some rusty safety-pins. And now there were soldiers everywhere working on the railway line, leaning against trucks or standing hands on hips, eyes fixed on the train as though they expected at least one camera at every window. And now we were passing big wooden sheds like rigged-up dancing halls or seaside pavilions, each flying a flag. In and out of them walked the Red Cross men; the wounded sat against the walls sunning themselves. At all the bridges, the crossings, the stations, a petit soldat, all boots and bayonet. Forlorn and desolate he looked,—like a little comic picture waiting for the joke to be written underneath. Is there really such a thing as war? Are all these laughing voices really going to the war? These dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white stems of the birch and the ash—these watery fields with the big birds flying over—these rivers green and blue in the light—have battles been fought in places like these?

  What beautiful cemeteries we are passing! They flash gay in the sun. They seem to be full of cornflowers and poppies and daisies. How can there be so many flowers at this time of the year? But they are not flowers at all. They are bunches of ribbons tied on to the soldiers’ graves.

  I glanced up and caught the old woman’s eye. She smiled and folded the letter. ‘It is from my son—the first we have had since October. I am taking it to my daughter-in-law.’

  ‘…?’

  ‘Yes, very good,’ said the old woman, shaking down her skirt and putting her arm through the handle of her basket. ‘He wants me to send him some handkerchieves and a piece of stout string.’

  What is the name of the station where I have to change? Perhaps I shall never know. I got up and leaned my arms across the window rail, my feet crossed. One cheek burned as in infancy on the way to the seaside. When the war is over I shall have a barge and drift along these rivers with a white cat and a pot of mignonette to bear me company.

  Down the side of the hill filed the troops, winking red and blue in the light. Far away, but plainly to be seen, some more flew by on bicycles. But really, ma France adorée, this uniform is ridiculous. Your soldiers are stamped upon your bosom like bright irreverent transfers.

  The train slowed down, stopped …. Everybody was getting out except me. A big boy, his sabots tied to his back with a piece of string, the inside of his tin wine cup stained a lovely impossible pink, looked very friendly. Does one change here perhaps for X? Another whose képi had come out of a wet paper cracker swung my suit-case to earth. What darlings soldiers are! ‘Merci bien, Monsieur, vous êtes tout à fait aimable ….’ ‘Not this way,’ said a bayonet. ‘Nor this,’ said another. So I followed the crowd. ‘Your passport, Mademoiselle ….’ ‘We, Sir Edward Grey ….’ I ran through the muddy square and into the buffet.

  A green room with a stove jutting out and tables on each side. On the counter, beautiful with coloured bottles, a woman leans, her breasts in her folded arms. Through an open door I can see a kitchen, and the cook in a white coat breaking eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into a corner. The blue and red coats of the men who are eating hang upon the walls. Their short swords and belts are piled upon chairs. Heavens! what a noise. The sunny air seemed all broken up and trembling with it. A little boy, very pale, swung from table to table, taking the orders, and poured me out a glass of purple coffee. Ssssh, came from the eggs. They were in a pan. The woman rushed from behind the counter and began to help the boy. Toute de suite, tout’ suite! she chirruped to the loud impatient voices. There came a clatter of plates and the pop-pop of corks being drawn.

  Suddenly in the doorway I saw someone with a pail of fish—brown speckled fish, like the fish one sees in a glass case, swimming through forests of beautiful pressed sea-weed. He was an old man in a tattered jacket, standing humbly, waiting for someone to attend to him. A thin beard fell over his chest, his eyes under the tufted eyebrows were bent on the pail he carried. He looked as though he had escaped from some holy picture, and was entreating the soldiers’ pardon for being there at all ….

  But what could I have done? I could not arrive at X with two fishes hanging on a straw; and I am sure it is a penal offence in France to throw fish out of railway-carriage windows, I thought, miserably climbing into a smaller, shabbier train. Perhaps I might have taken them to—ah, mon Dieu—I had forgotten the name of my uncle and aunt again! Buffard, Buffon—what was it? Again I read the unfamiliar letter in the familiar handwriting.

  ‘My dear niece,

  ‘Now that the weather is more settled, your uncle and I would be charmed if you would pay us a little visit. Telegraph me when you are coming. I shall meet you outside the station if I am free. Otherwise our good friend, Madame Grinçon, who lives in the little toll-house by the bridge, juste en face de la gare, will conduct you to our home. Je vous embrasse bien tendrement, JULIE BOIFFARD.’

  A visiting card was enclosed: M. Paul Boiffard.

  Boiffard—of course that was the name. Ma tante Julie et mon oncle Paul—suddenly they were there with me, more real, more solid than any relations I had ever known. I saw tante Julie bridling, with the soup-tureen in her hands, and oncle Paul sitting at the table, with a red and white napkin tied round his neck. Boiffard—Boiffard—I must remember the name. Supposing the Commissaire Militaire should ask me who the relations were I was going to and I muddled the name—Oh, how fatal! Buffard—no, Boiffard. And then for the first time, folding Aunt Julie’s letter, I saw scrawled in a corner of the empty back page: Venez vite, vite. Strange impulsive woman! My heart began to beat ….

  ‘Ah, we are not far off now,’ said the lady opposite. ‘You are going to X, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Oui, Madame.’

  ‘I also …. You have been there before?’

  ‘No, Madame. This is the first time.’

  ‘Really, it is a strange time for a visit.’

  I smiled faintly, and
tried to keep my eyes off her hat. She was quite an ordinary little woman, but she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking sea-gull camped on the very top of it. Its round eyes, fixed on me so inquiringly, were almost too much to bear. I had a dreadful impulse to shoo it away, or to lean forward and inform her of its presence ….

  ‘Excusez-moi, madame, but perhaps you have not remarked there is an espèce de sea-gull couché sur votre chapeau.’

  Could the bird be there on purpose? I must not laugh … I must not laugh. Had she ever looked at herself in a glass with that bird on her head?

  ‘It is very difficult to get into X at present, to pass the station,’ she said, and she shook her head with the sea-gull at me. ‘Ah, such an affair. One must sign one’s name and state one’s business.’

  ‘Really, is it as bad as all that?’

  ‘But naturally. You see the whole place is in the hands of the military, and’—she shrugged—‘they have to be strict. Many people do not get beyond the station at all. They arrive. They are put in the waiting-room, and there they remain.’

  Did I or did I not detect in her voice a strange, insulting relish?

  ‘I suppose such strictness is absolutely necessary,’ I said coldly, stroking my muff.

  ‘Necessary,’ she cried. ‘I should think so. Why, mademoiselle, you cannot imagine what it would be like otherwise! You know what women are like about soldiers’—she raised a final hand—‘mad, completely mad. But—’ and she gave a little laugh of triumph—‘they could not get into X. Mon Dieu, no! There is no question about that.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they even try,’ said I.

  ‘Don’t you?’ said the sea-gull.

  Madame said nothing for a moment. ‘Of course the authorities are very hard on the men. It means instant imprisonment, and then—off to the firing-line without a word.’

  ‘What are you going to X for?’ said the sea-gull. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’