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. He will not even sing as he feels: he either assumes a mocking rhetorical tone (to let listeners know he does not take his voice seriously) or he consciously imitates the star who popularised the song – Dinah Shore or Tex Morton, down to the last catch in the throat: he is not singing so much as performing a tepid act of devotion to someone else’s performance which is public property and must not be violated. Again, there are in the conversation of New Zealanders many stock fake situations which serve to cover real social relations: think of the uncalled-for occasions on which a fictional ‘Oxford accent’ is introduced to be made fun of, or cowboy-film American, or phoney Lancashire which makes do for the ‘pommie accent’: each expresses a recurrent sentiment – the ‘Oxford accent’ a militant sense of colonial inferiority, American the sneer at the skite, Lancashire the justification of colonial independence. These preoccupations obscure real relations with other people: the New Zealander does not see things as they are, he has too many foregone conclusions: so in his actions he defends himself against misinterpretation by certain mechanisms – singing with false gusto, writing in arch journalistic clichés, long discarded – if ever used – in British journalism. (After the stark spurts of news in the paper-rationed London 11/2d. dailies, I found the Christchurch Star-Sun’s accounts of 1950 floods and the Canterbury Centennial procession unreadable: you lost your way in the piled-up syntax – piles of participial phrases and clauses beginning with ‘while’. The writer couldn’t let the report speak for itself, he wanted to rub it into the reader that these were impressive events needing long words and redounding phrases. It was like reading those school essays we used to write, before Professor Gordon, in which every noun had to have at least one ‘expressive’ adjective, in which a bush fire was a fierce holocaust raging down stately corridors of ancient rimus.)
V
There are worse mortifications of self, as severe as a Jesuit’s, the denial of real sensibilities and emotions for the sake of the almighty norm. An old man working on a gold dredge, who had lived in this part of the Grey Valley all his life, pointed out to me an unusual colour effect of sun on bush on the hills. The foreman overheard him: ‘Garn! What’s wrong with you.’ Even two people alone have seldom the confidence to admit their relations: two friends parting will affect insensibility to each other’s loss: intimacy a New Zealander can hardly bear and often innocently reacts against it, does penance for it, by arraigning his confidant before the public bar: intimacy is disloyalty to the rest of the gang. Even lovers tend to shirk sensitive contact: in the small town when it’s known that Tom Peters and Daisy Hill are going together, they have a role to play and they play it in public and concentrate on the practical arrangements for the wedding. In town and country lovers strike poses before each other; they have no precedent for intimate contact apart from deceptive American films and True Romances. Their married relations are often clumsy and vegetable: paradoxically their intimacies are often performed in front of friends: when a wife says, before her husband, ‘When I was ill he had to do the housework. Course he moaned like anything. But I never take any notice of him,’ she is caressing him. Feeling lively they may indulge in half-hearted bedroom pursuit and tackle; enjoying it will call each other ‘mad’ and they will not talk of it between themselves. Their private lives and loves develop best in shared suffering – illness, loss of job, eviction, death of a child: so far as they have private joys they live them with a faint sense of guilt, of disloyalty to friends and neighbours. The New Zealander more often grins than smiles.
His most common facial expression is a sneer. He has made the grade by doing violence to himself, by sneering at his impulses and sensibilities, so he can’t help keeping that sneer always at hand ready for emergency. From his experience he senses all the pitfalls that threaten the youngster patterning himself after the almighty norm, so he is ready to warn other comers. ‘Don’t go that way, mate.’ What is that way? Perhaps he said something about a sunset or the Alps – that way is effeminacy: perhaps he said something about peace – that way is ‘being Bolshy’: perhaps he took offence too readily at an imagine slight – that way is being ‘anti-social’. The sneer is the protection of the ideal, the superego – or should one say, the infra-ego? – of the average chap. Let me describe him. He is manly – that is he is tough and not too talkative. He seldom shows emotion except anger and resentment: he drinks his beer fast but prides himself that, even full of beer, his reserve won’t change. He can spend a rewarding evening drinking after hours, talking football and racehorse: he can’t tell you why he drinks – for the company, he’ll say; but why does he drink so fast? For fear of being thought slow to pay his round. Why then does he show no pleasure in drinking? Because his principle is moderation, not in the amount he drinks, but in his reaction to it. Before the 1948 referendum on drinking hours, a Dominion Breweries advertisement neatly expressed it: ‘A good citizen is moderate in his thinking and in his actions … be moderate.’ Why have I settled on his drinking habits and stuck there? Because it is in the pub – and in his football club and on the racecourse – that an important part of his life is lived. His private life, at home, is in the vegetable garden and the workshop. For the rest, his home life is a perpetual requisition of jobs to be done, of watching what he says in front of the children: he has to go to the public house to have privacy. It is one place where his doings don’t become the property of his wife’s woman friends. It isn’t only wowserism that keeps women out of the bars: when a woman enters a bar (except on the West Coast at Christmas) the men stop in their talk like surprised culprits. The bar is their stronghold and they want a place where they can swear loudly and boast without being held to their word.
Think of the unreality of our conduct before women and children. It is improper to used certain words in front of women: among youths if you don’t use those words you a ‘a bit wet’, but if a woman comes near, unknown to you, and you still use any of them, the youths snigger, the men get prim and you blush and the woman – well, they say if she’s a lady, she’ll pretend not to hear, but she won’t forget and she’ll think the less of you for it. It is a funny country where the propriety of occasion for uttering a few sounds which have commonly lost all meaning can cause so much casuistry, guilt and apology. (Footnote 6) In front of children we may not even mention beer: we morass ourselves in all sorts of subterfuges to pass the thought over the kids’ heads. In the country, people in public positions, like parsons, teachers and senior civil servants have to sneak away to drink, to the scandal of the womenfolk, and the welcome of the men in the bar who are reassured by this deference of respectability to the pricks of the palate. The youth leering off to his first booze-up drinks as if he has been initiated into the mysteries of manhood. But some fathers can’t be bothered with this hypocrisy: they swear and drink at home and their children grow up knowing the hypocrisy of others who are models before their children and only relax in the bar. These children come to see everything that comes from a parson or teacher, from a public platform or editorial column as hypocrisy: anything ‘educational’ is a hypocrisy pardonable as a means to social or economic climbing: religion they see as an organized racket. So they close their minds to all ideas of tolerance, justice, charity, consideration for others. They may in practice live according to these ideas, so far as social behaviour already observes them; but, except from the immunizing distance of a pulpit or platform, the articulation of these ideas irritates them. Anything that threatens instruction or ‘improvement’, selfconsciousness, imaginative effort, resolution or self-control – it may the New Testament or Marx, Shakespeare or John Gilpin, symphonic music, a foreign film, an Anzac Day speech or a verse in an autograph-book – they know it’s ‘all bull-shit’. Both to these children brought up swearing and seeing the old man drink and to those who know he does on the sly, reality boils down to a narrow materialism. There is one security in life – money, and the man who denies that he will not at least consider using any means to successfully chasing it is a hypocrite. For the young the purpose of money is to minister to physical sensations like the exultation of a fight, the sex act, or the passage of Monteith’s down the uvula. Experience not a means to these ends is a waste of time. Of course young men grow out of these desires, but when they have so narrowed their ideas of valid conduct, what lies ahead but the New Zealand way of life, dumb and numb, null and dull, labouring out their days with irritating responsibilities to the newer and ultimate realities – wife and family and house and back garden, and the nagging unrecognised dissatisfactions that a Saturday afternoon in the pub after the football might yet appease? We retire early in New Zealand, settle down before we are thirty to a long quiet family life as uneventful as we can make it. We have our brief flutter among the bottles and in the dance-halls in our late teens and early twenties, and though the old women click their tongues, we know it is our right. A mother seldom lets her daughter marry her first boy friend, no matter how deeply they love, because ‘she’s only young once and she ought to have her fling. Time enough later to think of settling down.’ Because once she settle down she isn’t supposed to enjoy herself any more.