2. The desire to have all the answers. If he can disparage another man’s ideas, the intellectual can think his philosophy is superior – but he seldom has any. He cultivates a scepticism inconsistent and eclectic – criticizing different systems from inconsistent angles. In this he is just as determined as the man in the bar to sneer off uncomfortable or challenging ideas. He loves to discover a disreputable motive that will explain and explain away another man’s ideas: if he can say, ‘Of course Thackeray never cut his mother’s apron-strings’, he implies that Thackeray’s novels aren’t worth reading. He is always looking for an excuse not to read what he feels he should have if he is to be any authority. His intellectual coterie is a closed shop and he resents intruders: he is grateful that the gate-crashers from the college lit. clubs fawn on him, but he never acknowledges them. Anna Kavan noticed the exclusiveness: ‘What happens when a stranger enters what’s called intellectual circles? Do the sturdy Colonial intellectuals care if Einstein or the Cham of Tartary is in their midst? Brother, they do not care, they do not wish to hear from you, and unless you can speak louder than they can you’re as good as dumb … ‘ Every reader will smile and say, ‘Evidently she was annoyed that no one would listen to her.’ But that proves my point: we love to look for a hidden motive that will dismiss challenge. Or someone will say he knew Anna Kavan and she was an unusual woman. But that is like the argument of the man who tells you, when you are discussing the Labour Party, that he lives next door to Walter Nash and sometimes he doesn’t even come home for his dinner and you can’t tell him anything about Labour.
3. The idea of education as obstacle race occurs in the idea that wisdom can be attained by a reading-list. Too often the intellectual says, ‘Oh, but have you read Lenau?’ – or Camus, or Jean Genet. Too often an intellectual discussion becomes a sparring-match fought with book-titles. The intellectual is snobbish in his attitude to books and writers as other New Zealanders are to many things, notable to returned soldiers – whether they had been ‘coconut bombers’ in the Pacific or had been ‘really overseas’ to Africa, whether a man was Second Echelon or Thirteenth Reinforcement, etc.
4. The desire to be an authority in all fields. The intellectual wants talking knowledge of art, architecture, education, politics, religion, literature, psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. His philosophy is an old rag-bag of tags from Marx, Jung, Freud, Frazer, Toynbee, Frank Lloyd Wright and possibly Mr Holcroft. It is of course impossible to be an expert in all these subjects: one might hold some fundamental principles which could be applied to them. The New Zealand intellectual seldom has these, yet he like to have the last word. His judgments are often shallow, ill-informed and traceable to the text of a hastily-read Penguin. Is the popularity among New Zealand intellectuals of Time and The New Yorker a result of their shallow clever pontifical attitude which flatters the vanity of their readers? The most objectionable part of the intellectual’s attitude is the readiness to cheat, take short cuts to knowledge (in the same way as the frustrated money-hunter takes to the black market), the interest in knowledge not for its discipline or its application, but as a weapon to impress other intellectuals or a means to the private satisfaction of knowing better.
5. The enjoyment of being different. Since the community holds that being different is snobbery, being different becomes snobbery. The intellectual feels socially superior just because he discriminates and disagrees. His cultivated sighs and languishments at vulgarity and commerce are the luxury of one who is grateful that they exist because they are the condition of his superiority. He may pretend to be an exile in a hostile country: he knows it is better to stay home as a big frog in a little pool than go abroad and be humble.
6. Often his clique meets at a beer party. Book-titles apart, his party is not so different from the Saturday night boozeroo in the Sydenham side-street with the keg in the kitchen-sink. Harry the poet is just as liable to swing on the lampshade, irrigate the piano or urinate in the hydrangeas as Tom the welder.
7. The only habit the intellectual has which the common man has not is scepticism, but scepticism is a dangerous and destructive habit of though and it leads, for example, to the contemporary impotence of American intellectuals. A generation of sceptic intellectuals opens the way for the burning of the books. La Trahison des clercs is suicide.
There is nothing new in this. I have said nothing that any intellectual I have mentioned these complaints to in private has not agreed with. It is time they were brought into the open. Again, I want to make clear that I am not siding with the philistines of city newspapers, stock and station agencies, and Parliament House. An English friend tells me that all these things are true of London literary cliques. This weakens my claim that the attitudes are home-grown, which is, I admit, a tenuous claim. There is a difference, however, that in London honest men can, and usually do, avoid or escape from the society of impostors. In New Zealand many an honest man has been soured, emasculated or turned showman because he cannot get away from the poky little minds that milch and destroy him. And the New Zealand hypocrisies are cruder and more patent.
IX
Of course this is to concentrate on the worst and forget the virtues. These intellectuals and writers have in the last twenty-five years created something that wasn’t there before, the beginnings of an articulate national culture. I am not blind to the achievement. What I want to say is that if continue to alienate ourselves from the people we live amongst we will etiolate our art. It is a matter of balance, and no one can lay down a programme. If we capitulate too easily to the narrowness and the puritanism we can’t write honestly. If we flatter ourselves we are above it, we may be just as dishonest. If we do nothing but fight it, we put ourselves in a position just as narrow as that of our opponents.
The intellectual usually assumes that the worst enemy is puritanism: disinfect the snuffy tin-roof-chapel conscience, he says, and our way of life will flower. But this is questionable. The puritanism of Littledene is not all debit. With the concern for our neighbours’ morals goes a concern for their welfare. The gossips are at least interested in other people, they help them in sickness, help with another’s ploughing and shearing and harvesting. But when the puritan shell is cast there is nothing to replace it except perhaps a dimly expectant hedonism inspired by radio-serials and films. And the intellectual has nothing to offer either except a tepid and equally prim hedonism which he calls ‘the good life’ – conscientious and enlightened self-indulgence. When puritanism goes the New Zealander is left with that ugly ‘reality’: he begins to look after number one and connives at his neighbour’s devotion each to his own pleasure and security. Already in the North Island there are attitudes emerging which haven’t yet shown in Littledene – shallow and sneering hedonism, the disavowal of responsibility to and for one’s neighbour, less restraint in antipathies to minorities like Maoris, Catholics and especially Jews, priority given to the pursuit of money and pleasure – generally a slicker and more hard-boiled attitude. It is possible for a South Islander in Auckland to feel uprooted in the indifference and hostility of the people.
Puritanism runs in a spiral: first its religious context is lost and with it the justification of the restrictions on enjoyment of the senses, it hardens into habit: second, a younger generation rebels and seeks what was forbidden, the thrill of the chase spike with a sense of guilt. What they hunt is symbolized in the sex act: but since the pleasure, if isolated, is momentary and the more it’s sought the less it can be found, they are tracking down a mirage, and they end in and out of the lupins with this girl and the next one, and have to remind themselves that they did get what they were looking for. When they marry, the men and women of this generation transmit their dissatisfaction to their children, or the children sense it and grow up with a cynical, street-corner dog-like attitude to sex: everyone is after it but there’s nothing in it. A new austere Puritanism grows which is a contempt for love, a sour spit, a denial of life itself: the puritanism of Graham Greene and George Orwell (e.g. Pinkie in Brighton Rock, Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, and the official attitude to love in 1984). We in New Zealand are somewhere early in the second stage. Intellectuals who talk of getting rid of the nonconformist conscience should take care that they are not allying themselves with Hollywood, the ZB stations, the gutter press and the American-style comics that our children and jockeys read, in ushering in a period of decadence. The breakdown of puritanism is the dissolution of one of the cementing elements of our society: when every man co-operates only so far as he has to earn money and in his leisure pursues his sensual pleasure, society is due to break down. Because we are then, in working hours, a community of convenience; in leisure we are, in Coventry Patmore’s image, like the sheep’s carcass that looked alive from a distance but only because it was a mass of maggots busy battening on the corpse. The process would probably have to take its course if it were to be left to itself. But it is likely to be interrupted by the political upheavals occurring all over the world. If, for example, the American generals and financiers succeed in their plans for a third war New Zealand is due to suffer as it has never before suffered, and out of that bitter experience will come the themes of later poets. By then, puritanism as we know it will be a thing of history and all I have said about the New Zealand character will no longer be true.