I come now to what I feel to be the basic problem of the poet in New Zealand, and no doubt elsewhere—that of social criticism. In what degree should a poet be the entertainer, in what degree the physician of his society? Plainly, a physician who has no bedside manner will get the sack. Again, a poet may feel no necessity to communicate a social philosophy: he may be content to state as adequately as possible his intuitions concerning personal relationships and natural events. But I feel that the protest of the socially minded critic is justified. We are (I speak of the human family, not only of Western civilisation) in the midst of great calamity, physical and spiritual. The poet or prose writer who turns his eyes from the fact of human suffering is involved in self-betrayal. We have greater need of prophets than we have of mechanics. Yet to submit one’s mind to an inadequate doctrine of morals and politics is equally maiming.
In this country we are in a peculiar situation. New Zealand is now an island in more than geographical terms. Our standard of living is high, while that of the peoples of Asia and Europe is appallingly low. We are removed from the immediate scene of war and starvation. It is possible without obvious absurdity for our politicians to call our country a Happy Island, in some degree a just one. But poets are different from politicians; their value depends solely on their insight. If they do not speak the truth, they may live unmolested—but their work will perish. I believe that our island is in fact an unjust, unhappy one, where human activity is becoming progressively more meaningless. The mere statement of this observation has a salutary effect. The pioneering dream was of a Just City. If we suppose that this dream has been realised we condemn ourselves to the ultimate nonentity of false prophets. If we state the truth (that we now live in an Unjust City) we thus purge ourselves of a lie commonly held to be truth and begin to speak meaningfully.
There is another image besides that of the City, an image of peculiar cogency for New Zealand poets—that of the Wilderness. In the work of poets such as Curnow, and many others, it is the Sea, the marine desert which surrounds our island City. The actual purgation which comes from the Wilderness is borne out by the often unconscious testimony of sailors and mountaineers. For the poet, whose besetting sin is usually pride, it provides a situation where he is inevitably humbled by the grandeur of natural law, and can lose the itch for flattery; also, a sojourn in the Wilderness means a period of enforced temperance. And from this situation the City is seen in its true light, as the world of triviality and injustice. Were the City a just one, the significance of the Wilderness would still remain, as the mirror and symbol of the power of God which cannot be contained in human thought or human society. I hope I may be forgiven for quoting from my own work—in this case ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’—
Sky’s purity, the altar cloth of snow
On deathly summits laid; or avalanche
That shakes the rough morraine with giant laughter;
Snowplume and whirlwind—what are these
But his flawed mirror who gave the mountain strength
And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness?
Therefore we turn, hiding our souls’ dullness
From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle
Dark of our human daydream, child and wife,
Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city
Where man may live, and no wild trepass
Of what’s eternal shake his grave of time.
I do not advocate that we should all put on sackcloth and ashes. But I think it reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth, and that every poet should be a prophet according to his lights. In our time there has been a dangerous split between the moral and aesthetic factors in art—on one side doctrinaire expression, on the other side so-called pure art. The position of the Romantic poet inclines to that of the pure artist. His social aim, if expressed, is that every City should become a Wilderness. The aim of the doctrinaire artist, Christian or Communist, is that every Wilderness should be contained in the Just City. My sympathy is with the former, as I consider conformity a great deal more dangerous than non-conformity. But while Romantics refuse to speak in terms of any relationship but the sexual one, we must take our lead from the doctrinaire philosophers.
The typical dilemma of the modern poet is one of divided aims. A man who is working as a schoolteacher, a tradesman, or a government official in a society which he knows to be unjust, cannot dare to think clearly on moral issues; for the society is part of his physical and even psychological security. If he breaks with the society and departs into the Wilderness in customary Romantic style, then he loses brotherhood with all but similar outcasts. What Justice demands is something more difficult—that he should remain as a cell of good living in a corrupt society, and in this situation by writing and example attempt to change it. He will thus and only thus escape the isolation of the Romantic.
A bad convention, stemming from the last century, has accustomed writers to a purely aesthetic role. There is no reason why a poet should not earn his living as a rabbiter or as a University lecturer, so long as he does not develop a split personality. But there is reason why he should not join the propaganda department of the Government, fountainhead of dullness and half-truths. It may become increasingly difficult to remain intellectually independent: the thick fog of irresponsible journalism which issues from newspapers and broadcasting stations is hard to withstand; and American humanism has weakened our educational system and even our churches. But some of the puritan virtues are still with us. New Zealanders will, I think, take notice even of a bad preacher: so a good prophet, if one should arise, might gain a hearing.
The impetus and mood of the movement of the thirties, here and in England, came from a new concept of social justice; and with this concept to guide them, poets were able to write emphatically and with some measure of optimism of the necessity for a just society. But the slow death of enthusiasm has left them only the most personal values. The best poets have turned from society to the wilderness. Glover, who has to my mind written poetry of greater formal perfection and emotional depth than that of any other New Zealander, has summed up the situation in a recent poem—
While all around us ancient ills
Devour like blackberry the hills,
On every product of the time
Let fall a poisoned rain of rhyme,
Sings Harry.
But praise St Francis feeding crumbs
Into the empty mouths of guns.
What shall I sing? sings Harry.
Sing all things sweet and harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.
I have no blueprint which may help to lead New Zealand writers further than the bad alternatives of sentimentality or nihilism. But I believe that recent events in New Zealand literature indicate that men and women of goodwill greater than mine may yet speak prophetically and sanely to a wide audience.
(1951)
Late Romantics
Bruce Mason, from The End of the Golden Weather
I invite you to join me in a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood. Consider, if you will, Te Parenga. A beach, three-quarters of a mile long, a hundred yards wide at low water. Rocks at either end: on the east, chunky and rounded, a squat promontory. The ‘king’ and ‘queen’ stand a few yards out from the shore: two squashed rock pillars with steps cut into their sides for diving in the summer. At high water, the sea will cover more than half of them. The rocks on the west are shallow, spreading into a terraced reef, shelving far out to sea. Here there is no smoothness. The surface of these rock shelves is jagged, cutting and tearing at the bare foot, fretted away by the corrosive sea. The receding tide leaves deep pools here where sea anemones with fronts of red and black jelly wave coloured strings to entice the shrimps, and sometimes a lone starfish lies marooned, diminishing in the sun. Ahead, across a narrow channe
l, central to vision and imagination, Rangitoto, enormous, majestic, spread-eagled on the skyline like a sleeping whale, declining from a central cone to the water in two huge flanges, meeting the sea in a haze of blue and green. It guards Te Parenga from wind and tempest: it has a brooding splendour.
The beach is fringed with pohutukawa trees, single and stunted in the gardens, spreading and noble on the cliffs, and in the empty spaces by the foreshore. Tiny red coronets prick through the grey-green leaves. Bark, flower and leaf seem overlaid by smoke. The red is of a dying fire at dusk, the green faded and drab. Pain and age are in these gnarled forms, in bare roots, clutching at the earth, knotting on the cliff-face, in tortured branches, dark against the washed sky.
Beside this majesty, the houses of Te Parenga have a skimped look. A low ridge curls upwards from the beach, flattening to accept the concrete ribbon of the main road north, an intermittent rash of shops on its margins, then the ridge rolls on and down to the mud-flats and mangroves of the upper harbour. The houses of Te Parenga face the sea, unlovely bungalows of wood and tin, painted red and brown to thwart the rodent air. At the end of the beach, before the main road north leaves it for ever a clot of buildings: shops, banks, the Council Chambers, the Anglican Church in wooden Gothic, cheek by jowl with the cinema—built to last—in brick.
It’s only a hundred years since men dressed as chimneys, in top hats and black stove-pipes, women dressed as great bells, tiny feet as clappers, stepped ashore at Te Parenga from a broad-bellied, wind-billowed ship. They brought with them grain and root, tilling and harvest; timber trees, fruit trees, flowers, shrubs, grass; sheep, cows, horses, deer, pigs, rabbits, fish, bees; language, law, custom, clocks and coinage; Queen Victoria and her views on Heaven and Earth; The Trinity; Santa Claus and the imagery of snow where no snow will ever fall at Christmas; a thousand years of history, a shoal of shibboleths, taboos and prohibitions and the memory of a six-months’ voyage. They threw them all together in a heap and stepped ashore to slash the bush, banish the natives and pray silently far into the night. They left some of the pohutukawas, and Rangitoto was beyond their reach.
This is Te Parenga: my heritage, my world.
Sunday at Te Parenga
Sunday is the best day at Te Parenga. I am always up early on Sundays, run down the path that snakes round the karaka tree and the flax bushes, jump down the steps on to the beach. The sand is a cold grey powder, slow-seeping between the toes. At this hour before the sun is up, the beach is bathed in a cold glow, lucid, but dead. This early Sunday half-world is the territory of the ‘characters’, who come from hiding to spread their strangeness like plumage on the hospitable, silver air. There, kicking a stone before him, is the Reverend Thirle, mumbling his sermon. Mumbling, he kicks the flat pebble before him, stalking it intently, as if it were a tiring mouse. His aim is often wild and the stone shoots into the sea, lapped around by a lacy spume; he dances on the edge like a heron, clerical-black arms flapping, so I rush down and pick it out, wipe it on my pants, and hand it back to him.
‘Ah. Thank you, my boy,’ he says in his northern voice. ‘Lose that, and I’m sunk.’
‘Are you? Why?’
He looks at it reflectively, affectionately.
‘It’s a talisman. Had it for years. Helps me to think! Kick this along. I’m all right. My thoughts flow.’
He gives me a bland, quizzical look.
‘I call it Peter. Do you know why?’
Peter? I shake my head.
He swells and strikes a pose, his fist upraised.
‘Because the Church is built on a rock called Peter!’
‘Oh,’ I say doubtfully, ‘is it?’
‘Here. That’s a joke. You’re meant to laugh.’
I titter, dutifully, feebly.
‘Well, thank you for the applause! Here, I must be off. Know your catechism?’
A swirl of archaic English floods into my head.
‘Nearly,’ I tell him, bravely.
‘Good lad. See you later, won’t I?’
He won’t, but I don’t tell him this. He throws the stone called Peter before him and hops off after it, roaring at the assembled elements of earth, air, and water: ‘I tell ye, ye’re like lost sheep!’ The voice fades, and he is gone.
Over there, by our steps, Miss Effie Brett has waddled on to the beach. She is supposed to weigh more than twenty stone. Barefooted, huge and rock-faced, dressed in a long calico shift untethered at the waist, she looks as if she is about to be baptised in some outlandish cult. Her hair hangs long and straight over her shoulders, and her eyes have a stony calm. She walks to the water’s edge, letting the sea-froth play over her feet, raises her arms above her head and locks her hands. One leg, as solid and shapeless as a jetty pile, slowly rises, as if she were a gigantic ballerina, limbering up. Then she sees me and runs towards me on her toes, suddenly curiously dainty and finicky, stops and stares at me.
‘Nice day,’ she shouts in my face.
‘Yes, Miss Effie,’ I say nervously, not daring to look at her.
‘How’s your mother?’ she roars, peering at me through the loose hanks of hair.
‘She’s very well, thank you, Miss Effie.’
I know what’s coming.
‘Drunk again?’ she screams, with a leer of satisfaction. Yes, that was it: always the same.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Miss Effie.’
‘Ask Sybil: she knows! Ask Sybil!’
Miss Effie and her sister Miss Sybil Brett, live in Massey Street just behind us. One day, when my mother was going to the shops, Miss Effie leaned out of the window and screamed: ‘She drinks, that woman: she drinks!’ Then Miss Sybil appeared briefly, wrenched Miss Effie away, the sound of a sharp slap and fierce yelling. My mother was shocked and upset, but it never happened again; Miss Sybil, a fiercely withdrawn, gaunt little woman, watched over her sister like a gaoler. But once a week, early on Sunday mornings, she was set at liberty and roamed huge and untamed on the beach until a long blast on a whistle called her home. It came now, shrill and piercing.
The great body shivers; the head rears up like some alarmed and cornered animal.
‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ she shouts and gallops off like a fastidious buffalo, whacking her flank as if she were her own jockey. I shiver. Miss Effie belongs to a different and terrifying race.
Along by the rocks on the east end, a figure crouches in the smooth wet sand digging for pipis. This is Firpo, the butt of the beach, thin as a spoon, with unshaven flaccid cheeks and bulging fear-strewn eyes, dressed in dirty jeans and the top half of a tattered woollen bathing suit, button gone on the shoulder so that one strap hangs loose, exposing the bony rib-cage. I go up to him. He sees my legs, looks up, his face all feverish animation.
‘Gidday, boy! Early birds, aren’t we? How’s tricks?’
‘All right, Firpo.’
‘Want to help get Firpo’s breakfast?’
He always talks like this, as if he were someone else.
I kneel down beside him. The pipis hide in the shining wet strip where the sea runs up and back; little bubbles escape from their lairs, flawing and pocking the sand. We scoop out the handfuls of sodden grit and there, dully gleaming, are the pipis, tiny yellow tongues slowly retracting, as if their alarm at approaching dissolution were slight. Firpo’s flax basket is almost full.
‘How’s the training, Firpo?’ I ask him, at length.
Firpo starts, his eyes blink, jumps up and beats his chest.
‘Fit! Fit! Fit as a fighting tomcat, Firpo is!’
He begins a strenuous full-knees bend, arms outstretched, palms up, tottering and precarious, shouting at me to admire his skill. Suddenly, he pauses, arrested in mid-bend, stands up, rigid, and I follow his gaze. Bouncing towards us over the sand is Jesse Cabot, heavyweight wrestling champion of the British Empire, a Canadian who has come for the season to Te Parenga. He stumps along, a huge chubby baby in white shorts; a gaudy bath-robe flares out behind him, sustained in the light morni
ng breeze. In each great hand he holds a rock, bearing them before him like offerings to the gods, their weight bulging and distending his huge biceps; ropes of knotted veins course down his neck like swollen underground streams. He looks straight ahead, olympian and majestic, his heels deeply indenting the sand in a widely spaced, double track. Firpo looks suddenly strained and old, and his bulging eyes water.
‘Gotta get along, eh,’ he mutters enigmatically and walks off, hunched and tormented.
The sun comes up over the cliff, a bland unwinking disc—heralding a bright, explicit world. The characters have melted away, as though the full light were not their element. The beach is deserted. My brother calls me from the steps. Breakfast.
By ten o’clock, the people of Te Parenga are abroad, liberated for a day from their caged bondage in buildings or at sinks. The beach is spattered with their clots of colour and spurting with their talk. The sea rolls on and up the sand, frothing near the grey powder by the gates and Te Parenga settles into its Sunday ravishment by sun and sea.
Promptly at eleven, Sergeant Robinson appears on the beach. He has been Te Parenga’s sergeant of police for over thirty years. Small, fierce-eyed, round and gnarled as a nut, he strides along with a nuggety grandeur, clean white Sunday shirt blazing, no tie, helmet set just a trifle askew to show that he is not on duty, striped braces straining like hawsers over his shoulders, bowing, saluting, regally acknowledging salvoes of greetings from all over the beach.
A new fashion has recently reached Te Parenga. For the first time, men have begun to appear on the beach in shorts and are no longer encased from neck to upper thigh. This offends Robbie’s deeply Victorian sense of propriety. Again and again I recall scenes like this:
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 59