Anna Kavan explained our ways as due to dependence: we hadn’t she said, cut the umbilical cord, we were still obsessed with the mother country. But, tropes apart, do any of us think of England as a mother? It is true that we are culturally and economically dependent. But that very dependence has given us until recently a disproportionate independence, the independence we used to pride ourselves on as a national characteristic, and especially in international conduct. We have always said ‘we’ in a war as if we were a strong nation: we have always shouted loud from behind someone else’s coat-tails, as when Me Doidge branded China aggressor. And now that Britain is weak Mr Holland has, by his speech of January 23, 1951, chosen the United States as our protector. If we were independent we would be far more humble in international affairs. But dependence is not at the root of our behaviour. The reason for our odd ways is something deeper, something creeping up on the whole western world. We haven’t any sense of purpose. We don’t know what it’s all about, and we are frightened to find out. Other nations have lost their sense of purpose; we, a colony, never found one – we had been living on their capital. And caught between the mountains and the sea, never far from the silence of the bush and the stars, we are in the bland frightening witness of the infinite, and we haven’t created a social convention strong enough to reassure us. We live, as Anna Kavan said, ‘like reluctant campers, too far from home’. And, as Mr Fairburn said, we treat our land like campers: cheer up, mate, we’re not here for long, make the most of it while you can, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years; the land is not for farming but mining and if in the end we ruin it, well, we'll be under the sod before that happens. So we sneer at our own countryside: we think it effeminate to admire it, we pride ourselves often on not knowing the names of hills and rivers. We only venture into the wilds when we have a utilitarian purpose – pigshooting, deerstalking, or tramping and even then we aim to cover a certain mileage in a certain time, and seldom pause to look. A bus-load left Greymouth one Sunday to go to Lake Brunner. At Mitchells everyone got out. On one hand there was the lake – true, its shores were flax-swamp, but no one looked at it. A few climbed with that sense of concession to duty, to look at some falls. But most went into the bar where someone turned on 3ZR’s request programme, the chaps drank and nurses danced in pairs on the polished floor. But the hostility is not in the landscape: our countryside is as admirable and loveable as any in the world. It is we who are hostile, because we haven’t made up our minds whether we have accepted it, whether we mean to stay, why we are here anyway, or what life is all about. Though, this is not quite true: rather, we know we are staying, we can’t get away and would be afraid to now if we had the chance, but we still haven’t faced the question of whether we accept it or not. We haven’t made friends with the land. We use it as a convenience, an expedient: no farmer that I know draws breath with a change of light on the foothills, sieves the earth through friendly fingers. If he did he wouldn’t let it run wild with gorse and blackberries, then cruelly put a match to them regardless of soil erosion. His ambition is to retire to a seaside or suburban house like anyone else’s where his wife can buy cakes instead of baking them, and he can grow a patch of beans instead of a paddock of wheat. His attitude is not so different from that of the publican who takes a country pub with the hope of making big money in three years, then retiring and buying a racehorse. We are afraid to relax and settle, and we are afraid to look into the future: do we plan to get the most out of the land for ourselves, or to develop it for our grandchildren? We won’t face immediate questions let alone ultimate.
So we huddle together under our threadbare conventions but the cold blows through. We try to iron out our inarticulate doubts in a self-evident self-propelling system of habits. Variety and innovation, except where they feed an illusion of progress which is a substitute for purpose, frighten us because they raise the ultimate questions. When we lose faith in the conventions we behave by, we grope and despair: our writers become obsessed with exposing the rot and the hollow. They concentrate, we concentrate, as Mr Woods said in Landfall (March 1949), on the seamy side; we are haunted by the bitterness of disillusion: life is hoax, a dirty trick played by an unknown power. But our disillusion is phoney and shallow: how can we lose faith in life when we haven’t let ourselves live? Such a writer aims at exposure, muck-raking: but the muck is only muck to little puritan minds – away from Littledene it is a handful of dust. And anyway New Zealanders will not listen because they want to cover up: it’s cold outside. In our talk and our habits we put off the ultimate questions. Walk into a Saturday-afternoon bar and hear the noise: do you get the impression of stalling? The tobacco-smoke is dense with small-talk: a huddle of urgent men proofing the void with the saga of Highland Prince, greasing the unknown with a bookie’s pencil. We were face with the brave challenge of ordering our society to the end of security and happiness and justice: we hoped Labour socialism would do it, but we stopped half-way with second thoughts because there were too many questions implicit: perhaps the old coat would make do. We funked, and we are still funking in the light of history and in the light of eternity; here we are, in mid-ocean, adrift and alone, confused and talking loud, wondering where to go next. In the meantime perhaps, we hope to sleep it off. But our next cue comes from a people we have to learn not to despise. The people of Asia, especially China, will decide the destinies of our grandsons and after them the Africans. They have the vigour, where is ours? It is a coloured man’s world we are moving into and a communist one, and if we are to have any estimable place in it, we will have, in our own phrase, to jack up our ideas. And that means waking up, accepting our responsibilities and using the initiative and confidence that lies buried within us, and learning to live with a purpose. If I have said little about the virtues and strengths of New Zealanders, their loyalty, their strength, their unwillingness to promise more than they know they can do, their belief in action in the face of challenge (once they recognize the challenge), their humility before material things and physical laws, their practicality, their modesty, their kindness to neighbours, the thousands of lettuces that cross back fences daily in the summer, their alertness and freshness which show up best overseas – most of these virtues, in fact, show up when they are in minorities abroad, so that as that woman said, everyone likes them – it is not because those qualities aren’t there. It is because as a New Zealander I find it difficult to praise anyone to his face without embarrassment, and because it is bad for New Zealanders to read praise: it lulls us when we need to be made alert. New Zealanders have far more virtues than intellectuals give them credit for and if artists can tap those virtues their work will take strength and, if they have as well the confidence of their intuitions, fertility.
XI
As I see it that is the only solution to the so-often-talked-about plight of the New Zealand artist. There are two facts we can’t escape: first, that we are a cultural colony of Europe, and second, that the culture of the west is dying. A paragraph Alice Meynell wrote in 1891 is so apt that I need not apologize for the length of the quotation:
The difficulty of dealing – in the course of any critical duty – with decivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity … he defends himself against the charge of barbarism. Especially from new soil – transatlantic, colonial – he faces you, bronzed, with a half-conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilizing. American fancy played long this pattering part of youth. The New Englander hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and feathers, that it become doubly difficult to communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-had dress coat … Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin – to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained refinement and can save from decivilization. (‘Decivilized’, Merry England, October 1891. Reprinted in Essays (1941).)
But refinement and armchair cultivation won’t help us, and Mrs Maynell doesn’t mention what happens when the parent culture becomes decadent or vulgar. For a truer historical precedent is not the New England school or the American regional novelists of the nineteenth century, but Latin writers in Carthage and Gaul and Spain in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It would be inevitable that such writers would look to the classics for their models, that they would be alienated from their neighbours and exiled from their cultural centre, and that their work would yet have a colonial ring. I cannot pursue this analogy since I have little knowledge of these writers, but I believe the increasing social dissolution made them look backwards and away, and that is why they are forgotten today.