Well, I’d better tidy up, I thought, feeling a little foolish; and the first thing I saw was the sleeve of the old coat, the rest was hidden round the corner of a doorway. That’s funny, I thought, as I stooped to pick it up, I’m sure I kicked it down the other end of the passage. As my hand touched the rough material I experienced a thrill like a bad electric shock. The thing was alive, horribly alive. I stared, fascinated and over whelmed with despair as the dark folds moved and heaved and rapidly rose up before me in the doorway to take on a fearful shape that menaced me with superhuman power. It was the very embodiment of anything I had ever known that was mean and cruel and maliciously destructive. I felt the kitchen knife in my hand that I had brandished so bravely and so wildly a short time ago, and knew it for what it really was, the thin blade of domesticity that will turn or snap against any obstacle it meets.
So this was the final hoax, to be tricked and trapped by my self-confidence, and worn out like Don Quixote with slashing at shadows, so that the real encounter at the end found me weak and quite defenceless. For even my anger (an old shield and better than nothing) had all been squandered in shouting at echoes outside empty rooms.
(1954)
New Zealand and its Discontents
M.K. Joseph, ‘Secular Litany’
That we may never lack two Sundays in a week
One to rest and one to play
That we may worship in the liturgical drone
Of the race-commentator and the radio raconteur
That we may avoid distinction and exception
Worship the mean, cultivate the mediocre
Live in a state house, raise forcibly-educated children
Receive family benefits, and standard wages and a pension
And rest in peace in a state crematorium
Saint Allblack
Saint Monday Raceday
Saint Stablisation
Pray for us.
From all foreigners, with their unintelligible cooking
From the vicious habit of public enjoyment
From kermesse and carnival, high day and festival
From pubs cafés bullfights and barbecues
From Virgil and vintages, fountains and fresco-painting
From afterthought and apperception
From tragedy, from comedy
And from the arrow of God
Saint Anniversaryday
Saint Arborday
Saint Labourday
Defend us.
When the bottles are empty
And the keg runs sour
And the cinema is shut and darkened
And the radio gone up in smoke
And the sports-ground flooded
When the tote goes broke
And the favourite scratches
And the brass bands are silenced
And the car is rusted by the roadside
Saint Fathersday
Saint Mothersday
Saint Happybirthday
Have mercy on us.
And for your petitioner, poor little Jim,
Saint Hocus
Saint Focus
Saint Bogus
And Saint Billy Bungstarter
Have mercy on him.
(1950)
Bill Pearson, from ‘Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist’
There is no place in normal New Zealand society for the man who is different. The boy whose misfortune it is to be sent to a snob school like Christ’s College or Wanganui Collegiate where a special dialect is taught, is immunised for life from contact with working men. He will always shy from them because he will sense their contempt for his speech. Even if by effort he makes permanent friendship with any of them he will always be apologised for: ‘Course he talks la-di-da, but he’s a real white joker once you get to know him.’ It is not only difference suggesting social superiority the New Zealander fears, it is any variation from the norm. The man with a cleft palate, with a stutter, with short sight, will suffer. There will always be jokes behind his back; he will find it hard to make honest contact with other men because once he has been isolated, most men will talk to him only with tongue in cheek, humouring him at best, saving up a report for the boys in the bar. Even educated people feel they have to shout when they talk to foreigners, a habit as insulting as anticipating a stammerer. An Italian has trucked in a West Coast mine for twenty years: he is still alone, no girl would marry him, the fear of his broken English and the contempt for his pleading eyes have been handed down from his first workmates, so that ropeboys just starting can feel cocky pride in shouting: ‘Good day, you fucking rotten Skypoo bastard!’ When I was a lad in Greymouth there was an inefficient teacher with holes in his socks, he hadn’t much control over his class; the word got around and soon not only children but parents would point him out and laugh at him. There was a policeman, too, who had come off the worse in an argument with some local roughs: it seems he was hesitant, and he had a horse face. Soon the whole town was lusting after the chase, every few days there was a latest anecdote of indignity provoked by young bloods who had set out to ambush him and whet their wits on his helplessness. He couldn’t go on his beat but someone whistled ‘Horsey, keep your tail up’. In a month or two they shifted him and the day he left someone rang up the railway station and ordered a horsebox. You can gain a reputation in New Zealand in a few hackroom mumbles; you don’t lose it in a lifetime.
The boycott is not always malicious: the tormentors need not know they hurt. The motive force is usually fear. It’s not a pleasant thought; but it is true how afraid we all are of ‘public opinion’, ‘what people will say’. Because always censoring and supervising our every act is the jury in the bar, the jury over the teacups, the jury in the editorial column. The jury makes weaklings of us all: we may kick against it, challenge it like D’Arcy Cresswell; if so we finish preoccupied with our act of defiance. Most of us give in, play the coward, and knowing it we become the puny little men leaning over the bar, pontificating in new juries, in the same way as this year’s pullets pecked by old hens grow into next year’s hens to peck the new batch of pullets.
[…]
Now when most men in a community distrust their personal feelings there is a paucity of common experience. This is something the artist feels. There is no richness, no confidence any of us can fertilise our creations with. Beneath the life of the community we sense the sour, dumb struggling drive, we sense (like Colin McCahon) a strength in that drive the stronger for its being so innocently pent. It is doubtful if we can have a sensuous poet who does not develop his lushness by alienating himself from common men who would wound or coarsen it: he would tend to become esoteric and religious, or more intelligible but more austere; but the drive could be harnessed to an austere tragedy of the Greek pattern. Besides the deeper drive for security, for love, for happiness that is in all communities, there is a shallower drive for a common referential experience. To this need one can impute the gossip of the small town, the endless interest in things that bore the intellectual moored there. Whose paddock is this? Whose is that new car? Who lives in this house since Tom Dwyer went away, and how much did he sell it for? Accidents of circumstance in the comings and goings of people, those people themselves, become constants, universals, in a common framework of experience. The man who has left his home town loses contact with this experience: the stay-at-home is at a loss when he meets someone who doesn’t know where Tom Dwyer lived. The search for common pegs on which to hang social intercourse takes strange forms among youths. Imported comic recordings become shapers of popular culture, of an influence unknown in the country they come from: think of the phrases and jokes that become social passwords—from Sandy Powell, George Formby, Harry Tate, Danny Kaye, the peculiar call of The Woodpecker Song. […] In 1941 there was something mysteriously comradely among artillerymen at Wingatui in greeting one another Whacko! Girls caught on, and the cry became faintly suggestive of sexual expectation. It is a strange
country where two girls and two soldiers could introduce themselves by the invocation of a meaningless word, then laugh with flushed embarrassment and end up going to a dance together. Yet all this conversational small change is seized to fill a need in New Zealand—the need for a common experience to talk from, and the need for conventions to account for and place emotions unrecognised in the threadbare constitution of social behaviour.
So there is an aching need for art in our country. Of course there is creation—in thousands of vegetable gardens and at carpentry benches in back sheds; the creative urge always goes to make something immediately useful or money-saving. But we need an art to expose ourselves to ourselves, explain ourselves to ourselves, see ourselves in a perspective of place and time. But the New Zealander would shy from it because he is afraid to recognise himself. The youngster seizing on current song-hits, comic recordings and films and not-so-comic books—or the youngster of cults that build model aeroplanes, listen to hot jazz, or receive and transmit by short wave—is seizing a ready made and fake social binder out of fear of having to face the creation of one that belongs. A play that presented without sentimentality the patterns of New Zealand life would possibly bore an English audience: a New Zealand small town would ‘tsk-tsk’ it off the stage. Of course we are a cultural colony of Europe and always will be: the importation of our culture has always meant an accompanying unreality. The expectation of unreality has been confirmed by popular fiction, films and one-act plays. No artist can work without an audience willing to co-operate: if he is to be honest his audience must be honest; they must be prepared to speculate about themselves. This is something New Zealanders will not do.
For besides the unreality foreign and commercial, there has always been a leaning to dishonesty in local art. Take the verse of Hughie Smith, the Bard of Inangahua. He was really a bard, an entertainer in an isolated society in the days before wireless and cinema. He was in demand at smoke-concerts, reunions, hallowe’ens and Masonic meetings where he gave his compositions their first airings. Now most of his verse reads like Burns, respectable and in dotage: grannie’s hieland hame rosy in an exile’s memory, West Coast landscapes self-consciously adopted by a man who had known better. The sentiments of the verse are prudent and public—’14–’18 jingoism, boozy West Coast camaraderie, watery tributes to bonnie lassies; even the lusty heyday of the ragtowns with their brothels and casinos and boatloads of dancing-girls from Sydney is diluted into a nostalgic wink at the waywardness of the boys. A better early Coast poet, Con O’Regan, is just as sentimental in his hankering for the gold-rush days. Perhaps this falsification is the result of the idea that what we say amongst ourselves we mustn’t say in front of our daughters. But often Hughie Smith’s audience was men only, hard-headed roughs too. Yet they expected the sentimentality: perhaps it was their only safety against feeling cast out from the Ireland or Scotland they could remember only from childhood. But more likely the reason was that the men were assembled to drink and be happy, and the bard’s job was to give them thoughts compatible with beery well-being. Unreality is in every local amateur effort at written expression. Think of the ‘Over the Teacups’ page of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, or the local reporter’s write-up, in any paper, of some amusing local incident: the writer tries to be humorous at all costs, but the humour is so tortuous and self-conscious, every slang word is in inverted commas, the point of the story is rubbed in with a bludgeon. […] It all boils down to a paralysing self-consciousness, a fear to appear in public without fulfilling every expectation of the audience, a craving for protective camouflage.
The camouflage in the New Zealand character takes various forms. The rule may be summed up, do in private as you would in public. This is of course a wholesome principle: to deny it is to encourage hypocrisy. Again I want to make clear that I am not pleading that romantic individualism which is so often the reaction of the sensitive undergraduate. I don’t hold with ‘self- expression’ or ‘the claims of the spirit’ or other heart-warming slogans of the college lit. club. What I say is that each man has talent he could offer to the community; the vigour, direction and refinement of his emotions could enrich the life he and his neighbours live: there could be greater depth, more joy, heavier sorrow—all contained in, supported by, a confident purpose. There is a dimension of experience the New Zealander does not know. Because he is afraid of that accursed self of his that might get off-side of his norm-ridden society.
(1952)
Greville Texidor, from Goodbye Forever
And to make it worse Lili had her hair up in curls, on top a perm, a rather bad perm she had got in London just before she sailed. And then she had arrived without any money because it was so awfully crowded in the third and she and Tessie, an Australian girl, a very pretty blonde she had made friends with on the boat, had decided they just couldn’t go on sleeping six in a cabin so they went and spoke to the purser Mr Weever you know, and he asked them to tea. Lili had nudged Tessie and then started: Are you married Mr Weever? Mr Weever said, no he was not married, then Tessie (very silly) spoilt it, she said: Oh Mr Weever aren’t you really? You look just the type of someone who would be. And then she said: Why are you kicking me Lili? So it was spoilt and Mr Weever said they would have to pay three pound extra each to share a cabin on B. deck, so they talked it over and decided they would. Refugee or no refugee it was terrible six in a cabin round the equator and they wouldn’t be spending money on the ship. But they spent a pound on cigarettes and things so when they landed they both had only a pound left.
The ship docked the Thursday before Easter and Mr Groz of the refugee committee had left a message that he had been called away on business (most likely with his girl friend) but Lili was booked in at the Auckland hotel. Then Tessie who couldn’t get a room anywhere came back to the hotel and they persuaded them to cram another bed into the awful room and the two girls ate all the meals at the hotel, they couldn’t go anywhere else without any money. So they sat round the hotel with all the awful people who stared because Tessie was very pretty and Lili very smart in Viennese style and wearing a bright green hat on top of the curls. It rained all the time and they couldn’t go anywhere so on Sunday they enquired where the churches were (Tessie was a Catholic) and went to the mass. But Sunday was the worst day, it was fine on Monday and they went out walking to see the view from Mt Eden. A man was following them all the way in his car but as they never looked at him and walked on proudly he didn’t dare. Lili had seen him in the lounge and said to Tessie: He’s a refugee I’m sure. I don’t like his face.
On Tuesday Mr Groz came back and Lili said: I think it was too bad to go off like that and let me arrive alone in a strange country. Mr Groz said: Well now you can go on to your guarantor in the King Country. Here is the train fare, three pounds ten. Lili said: I think I prefer to stay and find work in town. And Mr Groz said: It is nothing to do with you. Mrs Kinnaird guaranteed you over here and you are going to work for her. Here is the fare, get on the train tomorrow. Mr Groz never spoke to her for years after that.
Tessie said: This is an awful place, you’d better come to Australia. You can come and stay with me any time you like. Tessie left the next day and Lili found out from the man who had followed them, he was a refugee, a business man, that the Goldings were there. She found she had known their cousin in Vienna. Fritz, who went round saying things like: It would take a fortnight to sleep with Lili. After that of course it was finished with him and she didn’t like him. Mr Golding was working in a factory and Mrs Golding let rooms to other refugees there and cooked all the meals. They lent her three pounds but couldn’t do any more could they, so after a few days she thought she would go to the King Country.
Mrs Kinnaird came to meet her at the station and though Lili had dressed very simply and was wearing no lipstick, hardly any, Mrs Kinnaird just looked and said: You are much younger than I thought you would be. She just looked. From your description on the passport I thought you would be quite different. She could see at
once that it was the wrong person. But she just looked and said sadly: Oh dear!
Mrs Kinnaird was a very good woman. She got up at five every morning and never called Lili till the breakfast was on the table. She looked at her with sad mild interest without speaking, as if she had been a new plant in the garden. Mrs Kinnaird loved flowers. She took her to afternoon tea with the farmers’ wives. This young lady is from Vienna, she said, and the farmers’ wives said: Vienna, fancy. She let Lili sew for her and for the neighbours so that she made a pound a week as well as her keep. But when they went down to the settlement to shop Lili sat in the car she felt so awkward, everybody staring at her though she was so simply dressed in sports clothes and no lipstick, hardly any, and her hair—her hair was up on top in the curls still because she was too unhappy to think about it. And back at the farm there was a boy called George who never said anything and outside the windows there was nothing for miles and miles, there was really nothing and Lili thought all New Zealand was like that.
There was trouble in the family. Mr Kinnaird was never there in the evenings, he was out from seven after the evening tea. But after Lili had been there nearly the three months she had come for on trial Mrs Kinnaird said: Do you really think you’d be happier in town dear? And Lili said she thought she might be. Mrs Kinnaird understood she was very sorry. I’d hoped to get somebody permanently, she said.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 57