If others do it, it is right; yet we spend half our energy disapproving the conduct of others. There is no emotion we feel so at home in as moral indignation. There is nothing unites us so much as having someone else to condemn; in fact we feel we are being sociable, doing our neighbour a good turn when we agree with him in condemning a third party. The talk of the housewife watching and reporting the conduct of her neighbours is an obverse assertion of her own virtue, a projection of the guilt she feels at having in herself motives to the conduct she condemns, a constant vigil over, and scratching of, her own emotions. If it is argued that villagers in every country are gossips I say they are not always malicious. There is not the same readiness to defame or ascribe disreputable motives. I know a Tyneside village where people talk small-talk about other people but their interest is kindly; as a New Zealander I found this unusual. So from fear of disapproval we don’t want to do anything we couldn’t freely admit to our friends. There is no emotion or sentiment we will allow ourselves unless it has sanction and precedent. When the man-in-the-pub speaks of his feelings he reduces them to a common denominator; he avoids distinction and definition in expression; tragedy is ‘tough luck’, disappointment ‘a bit of a bastard’; another person’s anger is usually falsified in some whimsical phrase, perhaps borrowed from another community – ‘took a dim view’, ‘did his scone’, ‘molte dispiace’, ‘went of the beam’, ‘off the deep end’. We fear precision and definition in most activities except engineering, sport and military drill. Even educated people fear to speak French with correct attention to nasals and fine vowels: they usually compromise with a ‘near-enough-for-me’ jargon unintelligible either to Frenchman or New Zealander, a compromise that contains its own apology: the man who does speak it correctly is though to be ‘putting on side’. For the writer who tries to follow faithfully the contours of New Zealand thought this means Mr Sargeson’s tortuous account of the feelings of the little man, apologetic that he has feelings at all since they move him and emotion that takes him from identity with the crowd is something he distrusts. The New Zealander is afraid of voicing any confident though or unsanctioned emotion. It is a common experience among youths presented with an unusual incident, when one, surer than the others, says ‘I thought it was like … ‘ and with glad surprise the others declare, ‘That’s what I thought too!’ Each would have kept his thought to himself, distrusting it, but is reassured to find that after all he is more like the others than he thought. The New Zealander suspects anyone who is sure with words, he thinks it is either glibness or showing off. (Could we take kindly to a Christopher Fry?) Once in a hotel lavatory an art student and I were talking of Peter MacIntryre’s drawings when a little man piped up that he was a returned man from the first war and he knew that we knew what we were talking about but there was no need to let the whole lavatory know it. We explained that the place had been empty when we entered, we hadn’t seen him come in, as we left with his blessing. I can’t speak for others: I know I hate talking anything but gossip in a bus or train or in the pictures: otherwise you sense the rest of the bus listening united in one unspoken sneer at half-cock. The New Zealander fears ideas that don’t result in increased crop-yield or money or home comforts. The wise man never mentions his learning, after the same pattern as the popular ideal of the returned soldier who never mentions his battles.
IV
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 fertilize 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. Three years ago there were records first played fifteen years before, still played and still demanded: you can mimic the quips in new situations at a gathering of youngsters and the reference will be recognized. Another device among youngsters is the passing craze for foolish colloquy: sixteen years ago one of these went: ‘Knock! Knock!’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Tom.’ ‘Tom who?’ ‘Tom you were home in bed.’ Another was the farewell: ‘Abyssinia’ – ‘Abyssinia Samoa’. Others are the reproductions of comic question-and-reply from current films featuring Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, or Abbott and Costello. There was the rash of ‘gopher-birds’ that erupted all over our railway stations in 1946, the questions of Chad, the trail of Kilroy: all these fictions came from communities of men suddenly thrown together without any special social tradition outside King’s Regulations or their American equivalent – Chad from the R.A.F., Kilroy from the U.S. army, the ‘gopher-bird’ from our army. 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 recognize himself. The youngster seizing on current song-hits, comic recordings and films and no-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 readymade 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 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 isolate 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. (Footnote 5) 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 wellbeing. 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. In Gilbert Ward’s booklets the wisecracking is self-conscious and defensive. Or take Hamilton Grieve’s Something in the Country Air: you hear the voice of the infant mistress with a tongue that is the terror of children and headmaster and inspectors alike, expanding to tell an arch tale of a country courting, with acid nudges at ‘romance’ and the younger generation. Odd breaths of the countryside get through, but the characters are obscured by the defences – the pose of knowing all the answers, anticipation of the reader’s prejudices, as in the enjoyment of a villainess’s disappointment, evasive phrases like ‘terra firma’. 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.