R.A. Copland
This month’s out of the archive post is a review if the short stories of O.E Middleton and Maurice Shadbolt by R.A. Copland from Landfall 56 (1960).
The New Zealanders, by Maurice Shadbolt (Gollancz, 1959), 18s. The Stone and Other Stories, by O.E. Middleton (The Pilgrim Press, 1959), 12S. 6d.
These stories of Maurice Shadbolt’s are so good in so many ways that it is a delight to read them. One is struck almost at once with the range of the author’s sympathies and understanding; for Mr Shadbolt is mercifully determined to be the author, not the subject, of his stories. In his first story, told in the first person, he presents the situation of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, groping towards love; and in another he has convincingly explored the plight of an aging man grasping back at love from the grave’s brink. There are women growing frantic as youth fades, boys who are blundering or brutal, Maoris and farmers, artists, poets, working men and business men. They are nearly all contemporary New Zealanders, and they behave and speak not merely in character, but to the point of the story.
Each of these stories has a planned meaning and direction. To illustrate this we may consider the shortest of them all, ‘Thank you Goodbye’. An episode is related with ease and the conversation and gestures are almost idly supplied, so that the ‘design’ (to employ a useful ambiguity), is tactfully involved in the detail. Yet it is the achievement of the story to get something painful and indeed tragic said about the present predicament of humanity in general, at the very moment when it is being most faithful to the particular crisis. It is this relevance of Mr Shadbolt’s stories which, when successfully managed, constitutes their distinction. He sees and shows us the wider allusion in the situations he has chosen. Actually I suspect that he sometimes proceeds the other way round, and from the wider idea works down to a representative case. It is clear, in any event, that he looks upon this country with an educated intelligence and with an awareness of its history as strongly developed as his observation of its forms and manners.
Each of these stories has a planned meaning and direction. To illustrate this we may consider the shortest of them all, ‘Thank you Goodbye’. An episode is related with ease and the conversation and gestures are almost idly supplied, so that the ‘design’ (to employ a useful ambiguity), is tactfully involved in the detail. Yet it is the achievement of the story to get something painful and indeed tragic said about the present predicament of humanity in general, at the very moment when it is being most faithful to the particular crisis. It is this relevance of Mr Shadbolt’s stories which, when successfully managed, constitutes their distinction. He sees and shows us the wider allusion in the situations he has chosen. Actually I suspect that he sometimes proceeds the other way round, and from the wider idea works down to a representative case. It is clear, in any event, that he looks upon this country with an educated intelligence and with an awareness of its history as strongly developed as his observation of its forms and manners.
In almost every story the characters come in trailing their past, and it is the problem or the pang of coping with the altered present that produces the crisis. In such cases what I have called the relevance of the stories (which are particular) arises from this reference to a past which is common to us all. These people have been affected by catastrophes which in this century have befallen the whole world. Thus in one story after another the situation is at once social and personal. ‘After the Depression’, for example, is as socially connotative as it is personally precise.
This leads me to remark on the dangers implicit in this sort of bi-focal examination of the human scene, dangers which Mr Shadbolt does not always escape. Sometimes the author is reluctant to allow the story itself to suggest its relevance. For example, ‘Knock On Yesterday’s Door’ hardly survives as a pure story at all. Somewhere within the period context there struggle a pair of private lives; but the human actuality hardly scrambles into recognition above the social ciphering. If it does so it is by the strength of the author’s exposition rather than by any force generated in the characters. Another story, ‘Play the Fife Lowly’, is far more successful; for here the characters grow up strongly in the present and take over the situation. Their pasts are related only, it seems, because they have led to this evening of crisis. And just as in ‘Thank you Goodbye’ the words of the waiter randomly falling explode into crucial meaning, so the song in this story magnificently establishes the whole idea. The strengths and weaknesses of this collection are best studied in ‘The Woman’s Story’. We begin with the ‘idea’ – an idea which alone would justify the general title: the escape from a childhood, tied to the apron strings of the Mother Country, into a young adulthood of our own. The growing up of the heroine is the growing up of our country. The myth is admirably conceived. But the transforming of the myth into story has sometimes proved awkward, and at times we are unpleasantly aware of the ambivalence. The high school boy who is so expert with the cricket ball becomes by a jarringly commonplace forward reflection the thrower of a grenade which will ‘blow off his hands and most of his head on some Middle Eastern battlefield’. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Douglas Social Credit, the Spanish Civil War and Munich are names scattered through the growing local story. They set the time by the outer world’s clock. But then suddenly the private story grows imperative. There is a dazzling and energetic description of a midnight picnic full of private desperations. Here, in the hectic beach party and the sexual fulfilment of the heroine we seem to have entered another mood and mode of story altogether. The actuality is so strongly and feelingly realized that the mythic quality is violated. We have lost the displaced English girl, not for a New Zealand girl, but for a homosexual girl. The earlier perplexities change their nature in the retrospect. They are not symbolized but replaced by an entirely private dilemma and by the very ecstasy of the self-discovery. These stories are almost all in the same key: they are stories of frustration and bewilderment, of people meeting and parting without understanding. The endings are usually mellifluous and melancholy:
But there was only the rain; the rain needling the glass, bleeding the bright image of the night city.
Or
The wind grieved through overhead wires; it slapped and rustled, nipping them with cold … ‘No’, Helen whispered. ‘Don’t say anything at all.’
The New Zealanders is the work of a gifted writer. Mr Shadbolt is entranced by life and by language and brings a critical intelligence to both. There is already sufficient complexity in his characterization (e.g. in ‘Maria’ and ‘The Waters of the Moon’) to suggest that the prevailing moods of his future stories will become more and more subtly distinguished.
The Stone and Other Stories, by O.E. Middleton, belong to a quite different tradition from those of Mr Shadbolt. The writer’s interest centres not on the complexity and variety of the human mind or of human motivation but upon the simple impulses and the nearly inarticulate emotions of uncultivated people. The writer is at pains in this type of story to reduce his own stature, to approach his unpretentious subjects on their own level. The language of narration is carefully matched to the subjects and the settings:
One wag reckoned he had a girl up there.
… a crumb slipped down the wrong way and made him choke and he had to drink a big swallow of milk ….
The method involves a close fidelity to idiom and to topography. Mr Middleton’s use of vulgar speech is as authentic as a taperecording made while sheilas were just within hearing:
You better get some shut-eye fleeco. These boys will be rearing to go in the morning…. There’ll be wool for bloody miles …. He said he wouldn’t get any sheep dagged sitting there drinking piss.
Alongside the sentences quoted earlier, drawn from Mr Shadbolt’s stories, these extracts exemplify the strong differences between the two approaches to fiction. The first seeks to enrich and interpret. The second seeks to reduce and record. Mr Middleton’s prose is built out of Maori borrowings, occupational slang and native plant-names into a necessarily disinfected vernacular which asserts on every page the Kiwi provenance of these stories.
Yet his real quest is for the gleam of the human spirit where it breaks out (sometimes improbably) above the crude creature movements. Among the shearers the hero of ‘The Stone’ comes upon Dan who ‘would drive staples into the tough honeysuckle and talk about Plato and Nietzsche and Goethe’. In ‘First Adventure’ the little boy hero has a mute sensibility unshared by his coarser-grained brother: ‘There was no mystery in it, no injustice, for Don …. But Billy brooded over what they had said … .’ The hero of ‘The Corporal’s Story’ knows the poems of Matthew Arnold, reads learned works in the recreation hut, and plays chess with the padre (whom he rebukes for saying ‘By Jove’). And in ‘A Married Man’ we are told, of the men working in a cooperage, that ‘underlying all their knowing laughter and bawdy stories, and belying them, was their serious concern for children.’ Sometimes this quest of Mr Middleton’s leads to smugness, sometimes to sentimentality. But in ‘A Bit of Bad Luck’ there is a dumb pathos which, if unremarkable, is strictly ‘on the level’. And indeed the best of Mr Middleton’s insights occur when the primitive response is the pure and true one. Here he is not awkwardly placed above the material he works with, trying to write down to it. To perceive, as one character does, that one shouldn’t put meat in one’s mouth unless one is prepared to kill the beast with one’s hands is to perceive a radically simple truth. To acknowledge death and assuage grief by burying one’s own lost child is a purer response than more sophisticated people could manage. The instinctive respect of the boy (in ‘First Adventure’) for a bundle of discovered Maori bones is another example of this primitive insight. And reading ‘A Married Man’ one can forgive the author his imposed limitations of style and his oppressive fidelity to scene and speech when one feels the sympathy and sincerity which pulse through the last of these five stories.
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 56, published in 1960 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. It is by R.A. COPLAND, then lecturing in English at the University of Canterbury.
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