R. A. Copland
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 57, published in March 1961 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. It is by R.A. Copland, then lecturing in English at the University of Canterbury.
Some are Lucky, Phillip Wilson. Denis Glover. 14s. 6d.
These are stories of New Zealand men who in the middle of the twentieth century are still ‘living on their lonesome’. The condition is mainly psychological, and though ‘Some Are Lucky’ – that is, some have come to terms, however uneasy, with themselves and with their lot – many remain as aliens in their own land. This emotional cloud hovers over the central clearing of each story in which the characters’ movements are carefully reported and the detail of their various trades faithfully documented. Since there is a vast amount of detail, topographical, botanical, social and occupational, which is peculiar to this country, Mr Wilson’s stories have a strongly indigenous quality; and even if one feels that he occasionally leans far out to seize the local name or the local object there can be no denying the toughness and solidity of his surfaces.
Mr Wilson’s accuracy in observation is of the ear as well as of the eye, and he catches the sound of our speech, sometimes with extraordinary precision. This is more notable in the narrative prose than in the dialogue itself. For example, the narrative prose of ‘Too Many Sheep’ is as delicately attuned to New Zealand intonations as anything ever written in this country. Consider the words ‘just’ and ‘hop’ in the following:
Got a temper like a child of six, the kind that is just uncontrollable. Dad was leaning
against the rail of the yards, and when he saw Andrews hop out of the car he
straightened up and stared at him.
straightened up and stared at him.
And this sentence:
Well, Andrews installed his tribe and soon all the barbed wire fences for miles
around seemed to be hung out with washing and babies’ naps.
around seemed to be hung out with washing and babies’ naps.
That Mr Wilson is true to his material is clear enough, and it is clear too that his own best work is achieved when only the simplest of human feelings are involved in a physical situation strongly realized (as in ‘Gum Fever’ and ‘A Change of Heart’). But because the success of his isolated stories seems always to depend for human content upon a state of displacement or loss and upon a tone of half-articulate plaintiveness, it is difficult for Mr Wilson to ‘collect’ well. The repetition of these light effects makes for tedium rather than weight. Even the general title Some Are Lucky becomes a sort of envious whimper, and the stories when collected emphasize the querulousness and fretful connotations of the word ‘lonesome’.
Mr Wilson’s heroes appear together as ineffectual fugitives from the city, to whom the country also is a spiritual desolation. Disconsolately they fish and shoot, or grub away at the tussocks of life. When they speak, their words are trimmed severely back, sometimes effectively matching their mood of loss, but sometimes throwing their Kiwi-ness too brashly up, and sometimes pressing too directly on the sore point of the story. The first story, ‘Hot December’, and the title story, will illustrate these weaknesses. But if the exigencies of the short story form may be blamed for these flaws (and some of Mr Wilson’s stories are very short), it is impossible to forgive the many lapses into a sort of morning-serial gaucherie in the dialogue. (‘The Breaking Point’ is a sorry example.) Not only in the dialogue, but also in the reflective passages which form so large a part of the narration, the exposition becomes altogether too explicit. A character’s thoughts will strike abruptly to the point of the story which it should be the business of the story itself to present; and thus the hint of whimpering ineffectuality becomes a positive pronouncement:
Those had been wonderful days, but it was different now.
There is something so artless about such passages that they set the story rocking. In ‘A Train Ride’ this effect is almost continuous; and in ‘Farm for Sale’ when the central character declares ‘You could have knocked me over with a feather’ the reader dazedly feels that the words have been taken out of his own mouth.
One piece of reflective explicitness may be noticed in passing:
The trouble was, he thought, none of them really knew much about women.
For all its triteness this is a truth so vivid that it might serve to illuminate a critical appraisal not only of this collection but of a great deal more on our fictional scene. Mr Wilson’s stories compel us to interpret the words ‘man alone’ in a sense not intended by Kendrick Smithyman who uses them in his notes on the cover of this book. In the story ‘End of the River’ this lurking signification breaks clearly into view.
This book is mainly valuable because Phillip Wilson knows his own country and can write about it in an idiom which must be captured in print again and again, as he has done it, if our future writers of fiction are to use it with vigour and confidence.
Reprinted with permission
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