Public Address | Great New Zealand Argument

Bill Pearson's Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist has had a kind of academic cult status ever since its original publication in Landfall in 1952. In his introduction to the 1974 collection Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays, from which this version of the title essay has been retyped, Pearson notes that it had been "clandestinely photocopied" for teaching use. It provides a sometimes stinging insight into both contemporary and enduring elements of New Zealand's collective identity.

The essay is published with the permission of Donald Stenhouse. It is preceded by a biographical note by Paul Millar, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, who is currently researching and writing a biography of Bill Pearson, assisted by an award from Copyright Licensing Limited.

William Harrison (Bill) Pearson was born on 18 January 1922 in Greymouth, where his father was the Stationmaster. He attended Greymouth Main School and Greymouth Technical High School. In a society dominated by the New Zealand working man it wasn't an easy childhood or adolescence for a boy who was unusually sensitive and preferred intellectual pursuits to sports. His mother died when he was sixteen, but with his father's support he went on to study at Canterbury University College (1939), Dunedin Training College and the University of Otago (1940-1941). February to July 1942 was a particularly crucial six-month period during which he was a Probationary Assistant teacher at Blackball School, Grey Valley. This experience later provided the setting and many of the characters for his acclaimed social realist novel Coal Flat (1963).

When he was called up to fight in the Second World War, his pacifist beliefs saw him serving initially as an assistant in the New Zealand Dental Corps. Eventually he decided that it was 'less hypocritical to go off to war and be killed than fix other men's teeth so they could be killed'. Accordingly, in 1945, he accepted a posting to the Infantry's 15th Reinforcement, bound for Egypt. He arrived in Egypt to find the war ended, and so volunteered to join the British Commonwealth Occupation 'J Force' in Japan. Demobilised in July 1946, he returned to Canterbury University College, graduating M.A. in English in 1948. In 1949, under a scholarship scheme for returned servicemen, he enrolled as a doctoral candidate at Kings College, University of London, receiving his PhD in 1952.

This brief sketch of Bill Pearson's background is helpful in fully appreciating the impulse behind the writing of 'Fretful Sleepers'. While Pearson's brief note at the essay's conclusion locates him in 'London, 1952', this is only an accurate guide to the point at which the essay was ready for publication. In fact 'Fretful Sleepers' was begun, and largely completed, during the captivating summer of the preceding year—1951. Pearson, then aged 29, and in his second year of Doctoral studies was, for the first time in his life, free of all sustained contact with other New Zealanders. It was a liberation of sorts that provided space for him to think about his relationship with his home-land and its people. The essay is a recognition of the fact that for the first time in his life the option of 'escaping' New Zealand seemed both viable and desirable. As Pearson explained it:

And yet he did return home, in 1954, to a successful academic career at the University of Auckland, from where he retired in 1986 as an Associate Professor. Why was this, when 1950s London appeared so attractive to an individual of artistic and intellectual inclinations? It was a problem, Pearson explained, that 'drove me to look into myself and analyse what was different in my personal experience of New Zealanders and the English and in my own outlook and habits of thought from those of the English, and so I wrote 'Fretful Sleepers', at the end of which I knew that I would go back to New Zealand' ('Beginnings and Endings').

'Fretful Sleepers' is not, as it has been so often read, an attack on New Zealand as a nation of philistines. Certainly there are elements of that, just as there are aspects of the essay that now seem dated. Yet the substance of the essay's criticism of New Zealanders represents Pearson's own, often brutal, self-awareness, and many of his conclusions and observations are remarkable for their political and social relevance in present-day New Zealand. Pearson recalls that he began writing the essay,

It is in this context that 'Fretful Sleepers' needs to be understood: as Pearson's active engagement with his own feelings about his country, backed up by a commitment to return there and make a meaningful contribution to it.

Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist

Bill Pearson
This essay was first published in Landfall, September 1952; reprinted with corrections in Landfall Country, ed. Charles Brasch (Caxton Press, 1960); and further revised for Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Heinemann Educational Books, 1974)

In this article I have to steer between two dangers, each represented by previous assessments of 'the New Zealand character'. The first is to use the first person plural as in Oliver Duff's New Zealand Now. When I read it my impression was that I'd been listening to a rotarian, the two of us puffing pipes by the fire, picking our noses, having a man-to-man talk over the whisky fumes. Like a conversation I overheard at New Zealand House: two middle-aged women: 'Everybody like the New Zealanders. Oh yes, wherever you go, we're very popular.' The other said, six times at three-second intervals: 'Ye-es', then, 'M'm, I suppose we are, when you come to think of it … Yes.' Mr Fairburn in We New Zealanders tickled and teased us in odd places without anyone feeling the worse for it. The other danger is to use a deadly or hostile third person plural as if we were the object of an anthropologist's research, as D'Arcy Cresswell did. Anna Kavan ('New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry', Horizon, September 1943) tried hard to understand us; she was penetrating but she saw us from the outside looking on and a slight hysteria blinded her too. In this article I shall veer, saying we when I praise, they when I blame. The real difficulty, though, is to distinguish between what accidental or temporary adaptations, whether these are general, whether they belong to the West Coast where I grew up, whether I am only projecting my own faults. If I do this I am sticking my neck out and will take the consequences. Again I shall have to keep clear class backgrounds – whether I am talking of miners, clerks or businessmen. But since New Zealand is as homogenous in its patterns of conduct as (I think) any other country, this is less important. By the time anyone has read this article, he will have objected a dozen times that I am not talking of New Zealanders but of men: these virtues and failings you will find the whole world over. That is true, but I am trying to sketch a character faithful in its emphases. To abstract what might be peculiar to New Zealanders would be to talk of a fiction.

It is a funny place to start – but writing away from New Zealand, I have no check on far-fetched deductions but a subjective one: what it felt like to grow up at home. When I was seven my mother told me if I was ever playing on the hill or in the paddocks at the bottom I was to watch out for miners' shafts hidden under long grass and blackberries. I was awed, partly at the prospect of disappearing, as it seemed, without hope of recovery, twelve feet into the earth, but as well at the blandness with which a responsible adult could tolerate the continuance of such dangers. I felt they should have done something about it. Who is they? It could be argued that to me as a child they simply meant adults; and at that time I did impute infallibility to adults. But it is not only in me: they crops up again and again unnoticed in the talk of New Zealanders, a convenient fiction that covers a gap in their thought or illustrates a dimly-felt need – for what? Whenever you pin down the they, you will find it is in one case the borough council, in another 'the government', in another the drainage board; but the speaker will have to think before he can identify them: he will probably say 'the authorities' or 'the powers that be'. They is the symbol for authority, protective an unquestioned and only noticed when something goes wrong.

The New Zealander delegates authority, then forgets it. He has shrugged off responsibility and wants to be left alone. There is no one more docile in the face of authority. He pleads rationalizations, 'doesn't want to make a fuss' or 'make a fool of himself', but generally he does what he is told, partly because everyone else is doing it, partly because he wants to be sociable and co-operate in a wishfully untroubled world. Only when things go visibly wrong does he recall his right to question the authority and change it. When he complains half his bitterness is that he has been made to complain because he hates complaint and can't complain with dignity. Anyone who questions too often is a 'moaner', yet in new Zealand the moaner is common. Things never run so smoothly as the New Zealander pretends. So he is suspicious of politics – the anti-conscription campaign and the Stockholm peace petition were suspect not out of fear of communism but because the man who tries to stop the drive to war is reminding everyone of the moral responsibility he gave away with his vote.

This is closely connected with another implication of my awe at my mother's warning: a middle-class conception of a universe well-plumbed and shockproof, where there aren't shafts for boys to fall into. That is at bottom of the ideal world of the New Zealander, one that 'runs by clockwork'. You get up at a regular hour, go to work, you marry and have a family, a house and a garden, and you live on an even keel till you draw a pension and they bury you decently. The New Zealand way of life is ordained, but who ordains it?

God? But few New Zealanders care about him: they don't doubt he is there, he must be; a New Zealander who never says 'Christ' except unconsciously as an expletive will jump to confute an atheist. God is at the controls but he doesn't need the New Zealander's recognition. God disposes, man reposes. The universe is well-oiled and if you stick to your tracks you'll have a good journey in this life. After that? Well, if you've lived a respectable New Zealand life, what sort of God would he be to complain? We'll mostly end up in heaven, seemingly in one endless family reunion talking over old times. Of course this is a bourgeois eschatology: it is more explicit in the attitude of elderly, comfortable suburban womenfolk. But I think it applies to the public assumptions of more New Zealanders than go to church. Now when the well-oiled universe grinds, there wells a vague resentment: when life turns up a vigorous uncomfortable side, there is rebellion. The New Zealand woman feels disgust at seeing an epileptic fit: she talks of cancer as if it was, like v.d. or the illnesses of Erewhon, a reprehensible disease. Why? Because there isn't the corresponding balance of a known cure. It looks as if the Creator forgot something. The patient isn't to blame; has God played fair? So again of violent or tragic death. Someone must be to blame; these things don't happen without purpose … : someone left a switch on, the driver had 'had drink'; and if not, then it shouldn't have been allowed – God is to blame. Under trial the New Zealand church-going woman is huffy: 'You're not the sort of God I was brought up to believe in.' She probably stops going to church, just to show him.

But, failing God, when the wrong affects more than one the solution is 'the government.' Even the champions of private enterprise expect government compensation when the crops fail. No people is easier material for governing. Though 'Hitler' and 'dictator' are common as terms of abuse (usually applied to a foreman who puts production before sociability) there is a lurking respect for the dictator because he has all the authority and gets things done without argument and compromise. When the Upper House went no one cared. It was only workers of the big unions, and the watersiders themselves, who were concerned at Mr Holland's emergency regulations, and a few intellectuals. Fascism has long been a danger potential in New Zealand. Of course fascism doesn't just occur: it is a deliberate strategy used by money-makers threatened with social discontent. But in countries nominally democratic, fascists have first to prepare the ground. In New Zealand the ground is already prepared, in these conditions: a docile sleepy electorate, veneration of war-heroes, willingness to persecute those who don't conform, gullibility in the face of headlines and radio peptalks. (Footnote 1)

New Zealanders may well wake up one day to find a military dictator riding them and wonder how he got there. If the National Party was more astute it would have a V.C. as its party leader. You can't inherit freedom; yet most of our institutions are inherited and there is no common understanding that they were born of struggle. Even if the Upper House answered no need in New Zealand conditions, it is a check to power removed. Again there is a popular respect for summary justice. In Auckland during the war there were rumours that American soldiers sentenced to death by court-martial were taken to sea on launches, shot and dropped overboard. Whether the rumours were true or not, I don't know: what disturbs is the undertone of admiration with which they were repeated. The Yanks, one was told, didn't fuck around. There was a very real danger that the emergency organization of volunteers willing to assist police and provide scab labour in the 1951 dispute might have turned into a minor local Ku Klux Klan.

Not that New Zealanders would long tolerate a one-man government that hurt. I say that so long as the autocrat, like Peron, manipulated the sentiments of the people and governed broadly in the interests of the most powerful class, few would raise moral questions about the principle of dictatorship. Mr Holland, governing by radio, without a parliament, seems to have emerged from the waterfront dispute more popular than ever. The reason why the New Zealander is willing to invest his responsibility in a strong, benevolent ruler is that he himself is afraid of responsibility. He especially fears any position that raises him above 'the boys'. How many of us refused stripes in the army, just out of that fear. In the war, an airman turned police constable explained to me that he only joined the force to get out of going overseas and anyway he was indulgent to servicemen, looked after them when they were drunk rather than run them in. You may object, well he did join the force rather than risk his life. What I mean is that he felt no shame in owning to cowardice, but had to apologize for taking a job of potential hostility to his mates. Infantrymen who joined the Provost Corps would explain that really it was a good thing if chaps like them were M.P.'s because they would be easier on the boys than 'some other bastards' would be. They had to explain their decision as being in the interests of the boys they felt they had deserted. Possibly the boys aren't convinced and don't co-operate: the n.c.o. or provost becomes guilty and bitter and all the harder on them. Of course in civilian life there are other inducements to raising oneself – money, the demands of wife and family: these are accepted by society in its contrary idea that a man has to get ahead, look after himself. But the man who has raised himself, say from miner to deputy, or hand to foreman, is faintly haunted so long as he works with the men once equal to him. Off duty he probably takes care to drink with them; at work he will establish himself by confiding in the older hands who knew him before he rose, and being tough on the newer ones, who no doubt are 'a different stamp of material altogether, don't know what work is, most of them'.

Now the New Zealander, especially of the middle class, has a two-faced attitude to social climbing. We all dimly hope to rise, yet we are afraid of rising above the common level. We become righteously indignant when anyone tries to impose on us by reason of money or birth. 'who does he think he is, Lord Muck?' Think of the sneers we have for the clipped polite speech of the English middle class – which we confuse with the speech of aristocracy – or for the visiting English aristocrat, the giggles of young girls at his manner, the cold shoulder of the worker. We can only stand it when he speaks from a platform: we fear direct human contact; he is the occasion of Rotarian oratory, a column in the press, be we are awkward in his presence as if our weaknesses were exposed. Because our vaunted pride is being as good as he is, is in fact a sense of inferiority. That is why so many New Zealanders, when they come to England, try to get to a royal garden party and conduct themselves like teen-agers in the presence of a film-star. Being middle-class we fear and sneer at royalty and aristocracy, yet we hanker after them because an aristocrat's goodwill confers security on our self-esteem. But on the other hand we feel superior to some workers, especially those of the strong left-wing unions – miners, watersiders and freezing workers; and, as tourists, to foreign menials, workers and peasants we adopt attitudes we wouldn't dare at home. I have heard New Zealanders in London say 'Cockney' and 'Irishman' in the same tone of voice as adults in my boyhood used to say 'night-man'. Generally the sense of inferiority makes us all the more determined to enforce the level: it is fear of social climbing that brings the dread conformity all artists in New Zealand have to contend with. This too is at back of our two-faced attitude to England. It is a boast to be going to England; but not to come back is desertion, like crashing your way into another class. We like to be told we are the Dominion most like England, yet an English educated accent makes us feel we are being imposed on. If it crops up in someone's talk that he has been to England his listener will at once suspect that he only raised the subject as an occasion of mentioning his travels. We sneer at English customs, yet from every visiting Englishman we exact words of praise and are offended if he criticizes us. We crave for commendation from those we feel inferior to. Remember how flattered we used to be to read those digest articles about New Zealand the Social Laboratory, the experiment watched by the whole world?

Most readers will remember the time they left their home towns to go to university, how when they went back in vacations (if they didn't fall prey to the temptation and feel superior) they looked double-hard at everyone they passed to avoid unconsciously snubbing anyone they knew. The word would get around, X is conceited, thinks himself someone just because he's at university – 'Why, I can remember in the slump he didn't have shoes on his feet.' The home-town folk look for this and are disappointed if you don't give them the chance to condemn you because you are already different: you are at university. 'Being different' in New Zealand means 'trying to be superior'. I know of no other country where this is so. A friend of min working as a builder's hand got along well with his workmates till the secret came out that he'd had a year at university. Defensive sneers met him after that, whenever he disagreed on anything: 'Don't think that just because you've been to 'varsity … ' I worked a fortnight at a garage: the foreman couldn't resist telling the men I had an M.A. in English and dared me to 'improve their English.' (Footnote 2) (He was a militant atheist and took pleasure at the offence given – to whom? – by their habitual swearing.) He wasn't serious, but a sprayer took me aside and solemnly warned me that if I had any ideas like that I was due to come a big thud.

There is no place in normal New Zealand society for the man who is different. The boy whose misfortune it is to be sent to a snob school like Christ's College or Wanganui Collegiate where a special dialect is taught, is immunized for life from contact with working men. He will always shy from them because he will sense their contempt for his speech. Even if by effort he makes permanent friendship with any of them he will always be apologized for: 'Course he talks la-di-da, but he's a real white joker once you get to know him.' It is not only difference suggesting social superiority the New Zealander fears, it is any variation from the norm. The man with a cleft palate, with a stutter, with short sight, will suffer. There will always be jokes behind his back; he will find it hard to make honest contact with other men because once he has been isolated, most men will talk to him only with tongue in cheek, humouring him at best, saving up a report for the boys in the bar. Even educated people feel they have to should when they talk to foreigners, a habit as insulting as anticipating a stammerer. An Italian has trucked in a West Coast mine for twenty years: he is still alone, no girl would marry him, the fear of his broken English and the contempt for his pleading eyes have been handed down from his first workmates, so that ropeboys just starting can feel cocky pride in shouting: 'Good day, you fucking rotten Skypoo bastard!' When I was a lad in Greymouth there was an inefficient teacher with holes in his socks, he hadn't much control over his class; the word got around and soon not only children but parents would point him out and laugh at him. There was a policeman, too, who had come off the worse in an argument with some local roughs: it seems he was hesitant, and he had a horse face. Soon the whole town was lusting after the chase, every few days there was a latest anecdote of indignity provoked by young bloods who had set out to ambush him and whet their wits on his helplessness. He couldn't go on his beat but someone whistled 'Horsey, keep your tail up'. In a month or two they shifted him, and the day he left someone rang up the railway station and ordered a horsebox. You can gain a reputation in New Zealand in a few backroom mumbles; you don't lose it in a lifetime.

The boycott is not always malicious: the tormentors need not know they hurt. The motive force is usually fear. It's not a pleasant thought; but it is true how afraid we all are of 'public opinion', 'what people will say'. Because always censoring and supervising our every act is the jury in the bar, the jury over the teacups, the jury in the editorial column. The jury makes weaklings of us all: we may kick against it, challenge it like D'Arcy Cresswell; if so we finish preoccupied with our act of defiance. Most of us give in, play the coward, and knowing it we become the puny little men leaning over the bar, pontificating in new juries, in the same way as this year's pullets pecked by old hens grow into next year's hens to peck the new batch of pullets. (Footnote 3)

Some papers and organizations seem to exist for no other purpose than to enforce conformity: think of the Auckland Observer, some (though certainly not all) of the editorial policies of Truth, the public pronouncements of the executive of the R.S.A., the observations on public morals from the Women's Institute. Now that the Sedition Bill is law, it is an open question whether the jury habit will prove too strong for Mr Holland by criticizing the government in spite of the law, or whether (as I fear is more likely) it will co-operate with the law by making advance judgments on those people likely to be the victims of this law.

III

In public morality the New Zealander's guiding principle is: Do others do it? I doubt if a New Zealander has any other moral referee than public opinion: crimes he has been in youth educated against he will lose distaste for as soon as the wind changes. This is noticeable when a lot of New Zealanders go to another country of people with inferior standards of material comfort, as in a war. With our troops the home-grown moral standards are valid only among themselves: Egyptians and Italians were fair butt for a cruel, predatory and jocularly cynical approach. There is a legend, true I think, that when a Kiwi was beaten up in a brothel area, every Kiwi in Cairo assembled to riot his way through the Sharia-el-Birkeh and there wasn't a piece of furniture left whole in the district. Soldiers in search of more innocent sport would throw chairs at the orchestra in cheap cabarets; the sport of the A.S.C. was to up-end fruit-stalls with the tails of their trucks. The black market was, in Italy in Japan, accepted as a normal means of living without drawing on one;s paybook. Of course British troops did these things and Australians, I believe, were worse, and of course such conduct is as old as the Vikings and older. Yet there is a special quality in the ease with which the New Zealander violates his home-town respectability, and admits it to be an expedient for getting by without trouble. A less violent example illustrates this: March 1950, in St Stephen's Hall in the Houses of Parliament, Westminster. Three old ladies from Dunedin waiting to be admitted to the gallery, because they wanted to hear Mr Churchill. A Swedish woman was the first to get a pass: she had been there before them, but they hadn't seen her. 'A foreigner! A foreigner getting into the British House of Commons before a British subject! A British policeman putting a foreigner before the British! Mr Churchill would give a lot to know about this!' 'She probably greased his palm or something.' "Some of them are so low they'd stoop to anything.' The one who had said this called the policeman and tried to slip him, unobtrusively, a florin, 'just to get yourself some cigarettes or something'. The policeman protested loudly that it wasn't necessary, she flushed and prattled about cigarettes, possibly telling herself that of course she wouldn't stoop to foreign policy, and in the end he took the money, and they got in no sooner. The suspicion that a rival or enemy had done something she claimed to disapprove of was a challenge to do the same thing, to beat the rival at her own game. This is a dangerous mental habit and will help Mr Holland tremendously in his campaign to convince us that if you don't kill communists they will kill you.

We boast when under alcoholic liberation we violate our professed code of morals. This of the animal comeback in the remark, common among New Zealand troops, usually said with a touch of flattery: 'He's a nice chap, he'd shit anywhere.' When a well-bred girl greets a man friend: 'Don't you speak to me!' she seems to imply that they both know that he's a rake and it's a secret to be proud of: of course, he isn't, but the idea is that the best people are rogues at heart, or rather, secret rogues are the nicest people to know. Among young people greetings like 'Hophead', 'Ram', 'Burglar', 'Sheik', 'Stopout', are accepted as flattery: 'burglar' I heard only in the army. We are in other ways as hypocritical. We claim to be social democrats at heart – or did two years ago – but we have a great respect for the man who can get away with it. In public we condemn the profiteer, in private we connive and rather admire him and envy him his opportunities. It is because we know our public sentiments are recognized to be subject to private reservation that we don't hesitate to do what we have condemned when we get the chance. So in public we always say the right thing, to which we are not committed. Any platform statement in New Zealand is suspect: the orator is only emptying his lungs to fill an occasion. When the Prime Minister spoke from the B.B.C. in January 1951, all he could produce was a tissue of naïve clichés which here seemed odd because they weren't the British clichés. He was on his best behaviour, like a soldier sending home greetings on a Sunday-morning broadcast. (In fact Mr Holland did end with a message to all at some address or other.) Politicians and editors say one thing without expecting to be taken at their word: Mr Holland was reported in the London evening Star as saying: 'Britain will get all the meat we can send, even if we have to give it away, though that of course has never been suggested and is in fact quite out of the question.' He was simply saying the decent thing, only he corrected himself in case he should be taken at his word. So with us all: we profess decent neighbourly democratic ideas, but in practice we undermine them. And we feel no hypocrisy because we know everyone else does the same. It is usually the man who tries to live up to his word who is called a hypocrite.

An English schoolmistress left New Zealand in 1948: she told reporters she was disgusted at the lack of morality in New Zealanders. Since we usually see morality as a restraint on lust, most of us wondered what she meant. I think it was this: that few of us have the guts, at the challenge, to uphold any moral principle (except in sexual conduct) when it is flouted by a party of a greater number than ourselves. Think how easily the Rugby Union capitulated when the South Africans refused to have Maoris. (Though we pride ourselves that of course we have no colour bar, no one protested at first except some trade unions which were, most people assumed, just being trouble-makers; but when General Kippenberger spoke up, everyone sat up and listened because he was a war hero.) We proclaim the sanctity of property, yet we enjoy small thefts (say raiding a hotel meat-safe outside a country dance-hall): what group of New Zealanders could resist broaching and unguarded keg? We legislate to protect our forests and birds: we raid the bush for ponga fronds and lycopodium to decorate dance-halls, we know down pigeons with stones and forestall protest with a sneer. We are the most puritan country in the world, yet we love a dirty story. (Footnote 4)

If others do it, it is right; yet we spend half our energy disapproving the conduct of others. There is no emotion we feel so at home in as moral indignation. There is nothing unites us so much as having someone else to condemn; in fact we feel we are being sociable, doing our neighbour a good turn when we agree with him in condemning a third party. The talk of the housewife watching and reporting the conduct of her neighbours is an obverse assertion of her own virtue, a projection of the guilt she feels at having in herself motives to the conduct she condemns, a constant vigil over, and scratching of, her own emotions. If it is argued that villagers in every country are gossips I say they are not always malicious. There is not the same readiness to defame or ascribe disreputable motives. I know a Tyneside village where people talk small-talk about other people but their interest is kindly; as a New Zealander I found this unusual. So from fear of disapproval we don't want to do anything we couldn't freely admit to our friends. There is no emotion or sentiment we will allow ourselves unless it has sanction and precedent. When the man-in-the-pub speaks of his feelings he reduces them to a common denominator; he avoids distinction and definition in expression; tragedy is 'tough luck', disappointment 'a bit of a bastard'; another person's anger is usually falsified in some whimsical phrase, perhaps borrowed from another community – 'took a dim view', 'did his scone', 'molte dispiace', 'went of the beam', 'off the deep end'. We fear precision and definition in most activities except engineering, sport and military drill. Even educated people fear to speak French with correct attention to nasals and fine vowels: they usually compromise with a 'near-enough-for-me' jargon unintelligible either to Frenchman or New Zealander, a compromise that contains its own apology: the man who does speak it correctly is though to be 'putting on side'. For the writer who tries to follow faithfully the contours of New Zealand thought this means Mr Sargeson's tortuous account of the feelings of the little man, apologetic that he has feelings at all since they move him and emotion that takes him from identity with the crowd is something he distrusts. The New Zealander is afraid of voicing any confident though or unsanctioned emotion. It is a common experience among youths presented with an unusual incident, when one, surer than the others, says 'I thought it was like … ' and with glad surprise the others declare, 'That's what I thought too!' Each would have kept his thought to himself, distrusting it, but is reassured to find that after all he is more like the others than he thought. The New Zealander suspects anyone who is sure with words, he thinks it is either glibness or showing off. (Could we take kindly to a Christopher Fry?) Once in a hotel lavatory an art student and I were talking of Peter MacIntryre's drawings when a little man piped up that he was a returned man from the first war and he knew that we knew what we were talking about but there was no need to let the whole lavatory know it. We explained that the place had been empty when we entered, we hadn't seen him come in, as we left with his blessing. I can't speak for others: I know I hate talking anything but gossip in a bus or train or in the pictures: otherwise you sense the rest of the bus listening united in one unspoken sneer at half-cock. The New Zealander fears ideas that don't result in increased crop-yield or money or home comforts. The wise man never mentions his learning, after the same pattern as the popular ideal of the returned soldier who never mentions his battles.

Now when most men in a community distrust their personal feelings there is a paucity of common experience. This is something the artist feels. There is no richness, no confidence any of us can fertilize our creations with. Beneath the life of the community we sense the sour, dumb struggling drive, we sense (like Colin McCahon) a strength in that drive the stronger for its being so innocently pent. It is doubtful if we can have a sensuous poet who does not develop his lushness by alienating himself from common men who would wound or coarsen it: he would tend to become esoteric and religious, or more intelligible but more austere; but the drive could be harnessed to an austere tragedy of the Greek pattern. Besides the deeper drive for security, for love, for happiness that is in all communities, there is a shallower drive for a common referential experience. To this need one can impute the gossip of the small town, the endless interest in things that bore the intellectual moored there. Whose paddock is this? Whose is that new car? Who lives in this house since Tom Dwyer went away, and how much did he sell it for? Accidents of circumstance in the comings and goings of people, those people themselves, become constants, universals, in a common framework of experience. The man who has left his home town loses contact with this experience: the stay-at-home is at a loss when he meets someone who doesn't know where Tom Dwyer lived. The search for common pegs on which to hang social intercourse takes strange forms among youths. Imported comic recordings become shapers of popular culture, of an influence unknown in the country they come from: think of the phrases and jokes that become social passwords – from Sandy Powell, George Formby, Harry Tate, Danny Kaye, the peculiar call of The Woodpecker Song. Three years ago there were records first played fifteen years before, still played and still demanded: you can mimic the quips in new situations at a gathering of youngsters and the reference will be recognized. Another device among youngsters is the passing craze for foolish colloquy: sixteen years ago one of these went: 'Knock! Knock!' 'Who's there?' 'Tom.' 'Tom who?' 'Tom you were home in bed.' Another was the farewell: 'Abyssinia' – 'Abyssinia Samoa'. Others are the reproductions of comic question-and-reply from current films featuring Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, or Abbott and Costello. There was the rash of 'gopher-birds' that erupted all over our railway stations in 1946, the questions of Chad, the trail of Kilroy: all these fictions came from communities of men suddenly thrown together without any special social tradition outside King's Regulations or their American equivalent – Chad from the R.A.F., Kilroy from the U.S. army, the 'gopher-bird' from our army. In 1941 there was something mysteriously comradely among artillerymen at Wingatui in greeting one another Whacko! Girls caught on, and the cry became faintly suggestive of sexual expectation. It is a strange country where two girls and two soldiers could introduce themselves by the invocation of a meaningless word, then laugh with flushed embarrassment and end up going to a dance together. Yet all this conversational small-change is seized to fill a need in New Zealand – the need for a common experience to talk from, and the need for conventions to account for and place emotions unrecognised in the threadbare constitution of social behaviour.

So there is an aching need for art in our country. Of course there is creation – in thousands of vegetable gardens and at carpentry benches in back sheds; the creative urge always goes to make something immediately useful or money-saving. But we need an art to expose ourselves to ourselves, explain ourselves to ourselves, see ourselves in a perspective of place and time. But the New Zealander would shy from it because he is afraid to recognize himself. The youngster seizing on current song-hits, comic recordings and films and no-so-comic books – or the youngster of cults that build model aeroplanes, listen to hot jazz, or receive and transmit by short wave – is seizing a readymade and fake social binder out of fear of having to face the creation of one that belongs. A play that presented without sentimentality the patterns of New Zealand life would possibly bore an English audience: a New Zealand town would 'tsk-tsk' it off the stage. Of course we are a cultural colony of Europe and always will be: the importation of our culture has always meant an accompanying unreality. The expectation of unreality has been confirmed by popular fiction, films and one-act plays. No artist can work without an audience willing to co-operate: if he is to be honest his audience must be honest; they must be prepared to speculate about themselves. This is something New Zealanders will not do.

For besides the unreality foreign and commercial, there has always been a leaning to dishonesty in local art. Take the verse of Hughie Smith, the Bard of Inangahua. He was really a bard, an entertainer in an isolate society in the days before wireless and cinema. He was in demand at smoke-concerts, reunions, hallowe'ens and Masonic meetings where he gave his compositions their first airings. Now most of his verse reads like Burns respectable and in dotage: grannie's hieland hame rosy in an exile's memory, West Coast landscapes self-consciously adopted by a man who had known better. The sentiments of the verse are prudent and public – '14-'18 jingoism, boozy West Coast camaraderie, watery tributes to bonnie lassies; even the lusty heyday of the ragtowns with their brothels and casinos and boatloads of dancing-girls from Sydney is diluted into a nostalgic wink at the waywardness of the boys. A better early Coast poet, Con O'Regan, is just as sentimental in his hankering for the gold-rush days. Perhaps this falsification is the result of the idea that what we say amongst ourselves we mustn't say in front of our daughters. But often Hughie Smith's audience was men only, hard-headed roughs too. Yet they expected the sentimentality: perhaps it was their only safety against feeling cast out from the Ireland or Scotland they could remember only from childhood. (Footnote 5) But more likely the reason was that the men were assembled to drink and be happy, and the bard's job was to give them thoughts compatible with beery wellbeing. Unreality is in every local amateur effort at written expression. Think of the 'Over the Teacups' page of the New Zealand Woman's Weekly, or the local reporter's write-up, in any paper, of some amusing local incident: the writer tries to be humorous at all costs, but the humour is so tortuous and self-conscious, every slang word is in inverted commas, the point of the story is rubbed in with a bludgeon. In Gilbert Ward's booklets the wisecracking is self-conscious and defensive. Or take Hamilton Grieve's Something in the Country Air: you hear the voice of the infant mistress with a tongue that is the terror of children and headmaster and inspectors alike, expanding to tell an arch tale of a country courting, with acid nudges at 'romance' and the younger generation. Odd breaths of the countryside get through, but the characters are obscured by the defences – the pose of knowing all the answers, anticipation of the reader's prejudices, as in the enjoyment of a villainess's disappointment, evasive phrases like 'terra firma'. It all boils down to a paralysing self-consciousness, a fear to appear in public without fulfilling every expectation of the audience, a craving for protective camouflage.

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.)

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.

In the New Zealand metaphysic reality is something unpleasant and ugly and though we protect our women and children from it, we know in the long run it is unavoidable. We talk with prim shame of 'the facts of life': the Creator has been indecent. We disapprove of the profit motive since it takes men from identity with the crowd, but we think it can't be avoided. Young men have envied returned soldiers because they 'saw life in the raw'. It is significant that the weekly that features the uglier side of the news, calls itself Truth. (I know the name came from John Norton's Sydney Truth and that there are papers of the same name all over the world, but most of them are out to preach the 'truth' of a political sect.) People condemned the novels of John A. Lee out of Puritanism but they did not doubt that he was lifting the screen from the indecent truth. The New Zealander suspects the idealist because he is giving a hopeful glamour to 'reality'. The only philosophy one could logically base on the New Zealand premise is a tempered cynicism, often called 'realism'.

The New Zealander's fear of experience not immediate and not contributing to the accumulation of money or the satisfaction of blunted appetites, occurs daily when he reads the newspaper: he glances across the headlines of foreign news and it would have to be a declaration of war before he would pause. 'As usual, nothing in it,' he says and reads the Local and General and the sports page. In a small town his wife will go through the classified ads. to detect, from the phone number, who it is that's wanting to sell that sewing-machine or take a boarder. Yet we all read the paper, in order to be in touch with what everyone else reads. If a New Zealander goes to an exhibition or a museum he withholds his interest, grudgingly stumps around every stand for fear of missing something, but comes away saying with relief, 'There's fuck-all to see.' It was with a great sense of concession to duty that many solders went once to the pyramids or gaped around the Vatican Museum, hardly pausing and went away, a duty done: 'Well now I can say I've seen it' and repaired to their beer.

(For writers an interesting corollary to a New Zealander's 'realism' is his response to the forceful use of words. I said he suspected clever, confident or intellectual use of words; but he admires a vigorous phraseology that caresses the rawness of 'reality' and its underlying oddity or sneer. A mechanic talking of a man baching while his wife was away, said: 'Oh, that's the cunt we found wrastlin his way out o' the jam tins.' Another, caught by a knock on his door while he was changing, his trousers round his ankles, his shirt over his head, said: 'You had me hobbled and blindfolded at the same time.' Osman Middleton knows how to exploit this vigour of language, even if he does give it an American twist.)

Now the reason for the New Zealander's fear of hypocrisy and his tempered cynicism is that he fear that if he professes to be, know, feel, or understand more than his neighbour, he is guilty of pretensions to social climbing. He is out to be no better than the next man. Thus a Catholic in New Zealand will resent even the most deferential discussion, in a public place, of his faith. He is trained to a loyalty higher than the almighty norm, yet he is loyal out of a stubbornness in the face of his own guilt at belonging to what he feels is in some ways an underground movement. Calling for his beer after Sunday mass he will not say where he has been and it is bad taste if you mention it. On the other hand the perpetual undercurrent, among Protestants and other unbelievers, of slanders and rumour of a Catholic conspiracy to catch all Protestant young men by marriage, comes from a fear of an institution whose doctrines are not readily inspectable and impeachable, in terms of 'reality', at the bar. The preoccupation with social climbing betrays a personal insecurity. How much of the gossip of New Zealanders is concerned solely with real or imagined slights given by their neighbours: 'sensitive' in New Zealand mean susceptible to personal offence.

Somewhere at the back of the outlook of the New Zealander is a dream, a dream of security in equality. Everybody acts the same, receives the same amount of the world's goods, everyone moves in the same direction. Everyone has simple tastes, explainable desires which can be satisfied with proportionately simple effort. No one has any grievance and accidents don't happen. It is a version of a human dream, which I believe one half of the world is on the right road to bringing off as nearly as can be under the conditions of existence. The special quality of the New Zealander's version is that the evil is to disagree or be different. The chaos of existence is to be legislated into shape; the varieties of human quality and personality are to be levelled into conformity with the legislation. It is the development of individual talent that destroys the conformity: some men are left resenting their lack of another man's talent, so he must not use it, it is an unfair advantage. If life is (as the New Zealander assumes) a race, it is to be run by handicap. If nature can't be controlled then man must be: social boycott must keep the talented man in his place. Now I am bound to be told that this is part of the socialist dream, but I don't see it. It is as different from socialist equality as fascism is from communism. I see it as the human dream of security perverted by the fears of the middle class hiving off from the threats of communism, the coloured races and the bland terror of infinite space; trying to give their customs a universal validity flouted by life, time and the multiplicity of planets. They huddle to reassure themselves that their habits are beyond question, and difference and unconformity question them. It is a dream, too, of the middle class wanting to compensate for the daily routine of competition: life is cruel, business forces you to shoddy tricks, but in our dream let us relax and be jolly good fellows. The New Zealander enacts his dream in certain social functions – the few drinks with the boys, the Masonic meeting, the smoke concert, the stage party. The fake solidarity and bonhomie, the boozy brotherliness and slobbery back-slapping are part of the dream: each man knows he has in some way sinned against society: this is his devotion, he is proving that at heart he's a decent chap. The more money he has the more likely he is to be vulgar, just to show that he really is no better than anyone else. In the army some officers used to pride themselves on taking off their pips and drinking with the other ranks. Christmas Eve is the occasion of a ritual. Everyone is out to show how nice he can be when he is drunk: don't they say a chap's real nature comes out when he's drunk? It is a festival of holy conformity, of sameness and glozing over differences. Thus in certain men's clubs, the Orphans' and Savage Clubs and Buffalo Lodges, religion and politics are taboo: they are unfortunate things that cause differences. You find people in New Zealand who make it a principle never to discuss them, and few can without embarrassment when there is likelihood of difference. When I was at Dunedin Training College the principal temporarily banned debates on sex, religion and politics: he said he had a duty to the students' parents to see that they left the college without any disturbance to the beliefs they entered with.

The goal of the dream seems to be, like a Dickens happy ending, a kind of inertia. Think of the week-end torpor of the suburbs. Where is everyone? Well, we know they are at football, at the races, on the beaches, or in back gardens. Yet these activities are half-hearted. The farmer brooding against a gate, having his Sunday afternoon snooze on the front verandah, the soldier or airman on fatigues downing tools as soon as the corporal has gone, the mechanic having a smoke while the foreman is away, are expressing a common reluctance to spend labour to a purpose not evident. Paradoxically the farmer's wife with her continuous day of hard work can't enjoy a sit-down when she gets one; she has to pick up some knitting or darning: work has become a drug to her as lassitude is a drug for most New Zealanders. Why? Why this desire to 'pass time'? Time passes you. If you want to fill in time you must be waiting for something and sometimes I wonder if it isn't death the New Zealander waits for. But being human we are afraid of death. At least it shows a craving for narcosis, a dissatisfaction with life, with one's own resources, to want to pass time as if it was a football, or the buck that gets passed in government offices. If death is too decisive there's sleep: how many servicemen off duty put in hours on their bunks? Somebody may again impute this laziness to socialist pampering: 'Now when I was a lad … ' I can hear the platitudes Professor Algie thinks up from the comfort of his seat on the night express. But the local inertia is not a fear of work, it is an idea that each of us should do no more work than the next man, and in doubt it's better to do a little less than a little more. This idea is capitalist. Dr Lauwerys of Unesco in 1946 warned us we'd never get success from socialist legislation so long as every man's private ambition was to be a little rentier – to make enough money to employ someone else to do his share in work that would profit him. The ambition is a coveting of other men's riches without the will to work for them, a willingness to get the same by a short cut like the black market or an art union: the mentality of the running-board of the middle class; and there is no bigger Tory than a spiv. But even the New Zealander who is turning over money fast is only passing time. The New Zealander's ideal state is half-consciousness; his idea activity is reunion, physically expressed in the old boys' reunion or the football dinner, spiritually it is immersion in an inert blubbery Oversoul like Mr Holcroft's collective mind.

VII

But that is the dream, and the dream never comes off. The New Zealander does not always blame God or nature or human nature: he generally imputes the evil to 'some chaps'. Men are in two classes, the 'white jokers' and the 'bastards'. When it's all boiled down there aren't many in the world you can trust. The untrustworthy are the people one doesn't have direct contact with – the watersiders, for example, seen through the polemic of Mr Holland's radio turns and the daily press – or foreigners: a foreign tongue sets a New Zealander's nerves on edge, he feels the speaker is deliberately taunting his incomprehension. Even people who speak English with an accent are watched, like yanks and 'pongos'. The New Zealander lost among strangers is as trusting as a provincial asking his way in a big city, yet of people he doesn't see or speak to, or of minorities, he is as suspicious as anyone in the world. Wilfrid Meynell mentions a New Zealand major of World War I who told him that British statesmen of the nineteenth century were far too trusting when it cam to dealing with foreigners. (Wilfred Meynell, Who Goes There, London, 1916). At the fall of France an aunt of min said, 'It only goes to show you can't trust foreigners.' So there's no one satisfies a New Zealander but a New Zealander. The New Zealand way of life is unquestionable and what is not like it is 'mad'. Europe is backward and uncivilized in his eyes, they haven't the same comforts and their art and architecture is of course 'antique' and 'educational' but it's out-of-date. On a 3ZB radio quiz one man, asked his opinion on the Greek treatment of women, said, 'Well, that was in the olden days. The Greeks weren't civilized.' Asia is worse than Europe. There are only two countries in the world we may emulate – the U.S. and Britain, and perhaps the 'white' Dominions. The attitude is not only provincial, it is bourgeois. It is the arrogance of the American labelling other people 'gooks' and 'wops': the New Zealand soldier had his 'Wogs' and 'Ites' and 'Teds', at home there are the 'Chinks' and 'Ikes' and 'Dallies' and even the 'Horis'. It is the smallness of the mind of the man brought up to believe his own customs infallible and people who don't observe them worthless.

But middle class attitudes don't play so hard on the worker as they do on farmers and small tradesmen and clerks and civil servants. The worker has questioned the assumption that each man is his own economic responsibility, though he will hold no brief for the 'cadger'; but he has no other measurement of success than material comfort. Now I'm not pleading 'spiritual needs': I accept the right of men to material goods. What is wrong is the closing of mind to everything not tangible or immediate. The worker's object for his son is to see he gets a good job: what doesn't lead to it is a waste of effort. (So he often doesn't approve of higher education for his daughters.) To have a trade or a training for a profession is the aim of 'schooling': a humanist concept of the bringing out of innate abilities is beyond him, so is a socialist concept of the developing one's capacities with the aim of serving society or any concept of converting matter and energy for the benefit of his grandchildren. The world is the world: his world is Ashburton or Waimihia, he wants to set his boy right in the system he knows: he has no wish either to change the system or to make his boy bigger than the place Waimihia will allow him. Life is a race: education (as the editor of this journal said) is an obstacle race; the modest aim is to be in the running, and the decent thing is to slow down the pace. The competition is not so fierce that all energy should minister to it: if you're in the running you're in the good company of the majority, the think is not to be left behind. The worker does not resent the businessman's devotion to his bank-balance, only that he should perform it without decent moderation.

So the New Zealander's idea of social reality is the way things are. 'Times' change, but that is a matter of fashions of clothing, architecture and popular music. Any talk of changing the status quo meets with resistance. The government can do it by quiet legislation without anyone noticing the implications of a new law, because the government is part of the status quo and bigger than anyone who may object. It is when an individual talks of change the New Zealander resents and resists the discomfort of being forced to think up reasons for defending the existing order. Any man who thinks or reads beyond the immediate requirements of getting a good job is a fool – 'wet', 'gormless', 'dilberry', etc. Baiting him is the good sport of the enterprising wag: in New Zealand (but not so much overseas) little minds in the army used to whet themselves on men who read books with big words, to the entertainment of the hut. A method (used even among training college students) is to pick up another man's book, to read aloud a sentence without attempt at comprehension as if to demonstrate that the words meant nothing but were the mutually flattering cult-lingo of a class of intellectuals pretending to be better than the ordinary chap. It is common for some people to accuse people who go to symphonic concerts of not understanding the music and going out of snobbery. They have some ground for their idea because the idea has produced the habit: an aunt of min went to the Old Vic plays in 1948, to see the films stars, but confessed the plays were 'awfully dry' – she didn't know what they were about, but that was only to be expected because they were 'educational'. For good-humoured baiting recall the attacks on anti-conscription speakers in Nelson in 1949: most spectators would describe this as a 'bit of fun'.

VIII

Now the New Zealand child is not noticeably different from children of other countries – he tends to be impulsive, rough, afraid to be seen crying or in need of affection, and among his mates he prides himself on defying authority. Yet if we honestly compare our childhood and maturity we know we have lost something – life was full and rich, we never asked if it had a purpose, that was self-evident, we were confident and happy and there was always something to look forward to, and our homes were the centres of our world; in maturity we are bored, doubtful, dissatisfied and afraid. For between his boyhood and maturity the New Zealanders asserts his manhood by losing it. He becomes a coward with a ready sneer, an ugly little man with a routine bar-side guffaw. The change occurs in adolescence. The road forks here, so that the ordinary chap goes one way, the future intellectual another. Adolescence involves a widening of prospect of future experience. For the New Zealand adolescent the emphasis is on the possibilities of forbidden sensual enjoyment. He begins to hang about street corners in small gangs, watching the world. They do little these gangs, except drink milk shakes, swear profusely, whistle at girls, chaff one another and engage in the unnatural fiction that every man's target, secret or acknowledged, is the vulva. It causes a strained and furtive attitude of mind; out of fear of being though 'soft' or 'wet' the youth reads double meanings into the most harmless of quips on radio and film, keeps a store of dirty yarns, most of them without wit or fun. He is impatient to be a man, to be manly, he lives in fear of being called a 'drip': he affects to be callous and blasé when at heart he is afraid and innocent, and alone with a girl may be clumsily tender. But he will jump to scorn any attitude that is not callous.

The sensitive and intelligent youth takes another way. Adolescence presents him with more distant possibilities. He becomes 'dreamy' and idealistic. If he goes to university his philosophy is widened. For a while at least he proceeds by widening his knowledge and developing himself in ways denied in his home town (in drama, debate and talk), where his former classmate proceeds by narrowing his aims and denying the many inchoate sensibilities and doubts and enthusiasms of adolescence. This lad prides himself on being 'hard as nails'. He takes to smoking and enjoys a surreptitious drink. His first 'piss-up' is a landmark in his life: he relishes the sensation of following an impulse without check, the sense of expansion and dissolution, his next-morning wonder at the foolish things he did, his eager response to the attention he has drawn to himself in the chaff of his mates: he has begun to discover himself. But the student discovers himself by alienating himself. He is unlikely to go back to his former classmates who are mechanics, apprentices, clerks and counter-jumpers in his home town. He will probably pass his exams, marry and settle in a comfortable suburb, forget his student pranks and vegetate as a political conservative whose counter to every argument is, 'That's all very well, but … ' He will have retired, for life, from thinking. But a few students don't retire, they keep their romantic dreams of self-fulfilment, their hopes of creative writing, their interest in ideas. They are destined to grow into an artificial and alienated class living a threadbare life not so different from that of the English colony in an outpost of empire. They have grown to fear the philistinism of businessmen and clerks and 'retired' professional men, the narrow range of interests of the worker, and the vigour with which they all will sneer at what interests intellectuals. Because they are few they become a kind of cult with no devotion but a sense of emancipation. What they do not realize is the number of attitudes they have carried over from the community they feel emancipated from.

1. There is their interest in people they know rather than ideas. They tend to gossip about one another, each to assert himself by criticizing an absent member in front of others.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

The solution for us is to look to the here and now, and, in spite of Mrs Meynell, to concentrate on the very things she might have called provincial and vulgar, and develop them to the point where they mean something to people outside New Zealand, to make a meaning out of the drives and behaviour of common people. 'A writer must want to think – think through and with his people. If they will not think, how can he use them?' Sean O'Faolain said of the Irish (The Month, December 1949). But our people have tongues, glands, nerves and minds and souls: they cannot help thinking and feeling, however torpidly. Our job is to penetrate the torpor and out of meaninglessness make a pattern that means something. I hope no one thinks I suggest a rush to the proletariat – the self-conscious patronizing discovery of the worker of some documentary writers of the thirties, talking down to him and writing him up, slumming on the wharves and in factories and shearing-shed. Rapportage in New Zealand is dull twice over because the New Zealander keeps his motives out of his talk. I mean living not only among but as one of the people and feeling your way into their problems, their hopes, their gripes and their gropings, without like them trying to sleep them off. For us who are trained in a sophisticated self-conscious tradition of art it is very difficult because the audience we would like to reach will never read us even if we were to start back with folk-tales, and because the problems that obsess us are problems Littledene has hardly heard of. But there is no other way if we hope to create anything that is not like so much else in New Zealand a makeshift but something our grandsons will thank us for. Some sense of isolation is inevitable, some detachment and discrimination, but that is the occupational hazard of every artists and especially of the novelist who must always be, so long as there are conflicts within his society, something of a spy in enemy territory. The thing to avoid is developing one's isolation because that way lies desiccation, etiolation, clique-writing that will get yellow in manuscript and deserve to. Emigration is no solution, even for the novelist or dramatist to whom ideas are more important than sense-impressions. There is stimulation at first, a sense of expansion – but in England the artist's loneliness that we have known longer is beginning to be felt, and publishing, because of rearmament and American stockpiling of paper, is getting costly and difficult, and liberties of thought are slipping away too. But after the stimulation you will dry up: you can neither feel completely at home in your adopted country, not enough to write deeply of it, nor can you write of your own country except through a mist of nostalgia and unappeased resentments. We New Zealanders have far less in common with the English middle classes than we may think (Footnote 7) and at best they will patronize us and emasculate us. We could no more lose our national habits if we were to try, than we could, if we wanted to, disguise our kiwi twang. Our accent stands out a mile and the time will come when so does the accent of our literature, but not before we have a social system that makes possible the meaningful liberation of the talents and energies of the common people. Until then there is hard work to be done, there are quiet mortifications to be suffered, humiliations and misunderstandings to be put up with, and yet one will meet a lot of cheerfulness to ease the effort.

Since I first wrote this last June, the Police Offences Amendment Bill has become law, and there are fantastically terrifying bills in preparation – the Coroners' Bill, and the Official Secrets Bill. So we can expect worse discomforts – smear campaigns, imprisonment, continual impounding of one's writing equipment, closing of printing-presses. For these reasons it is our job to take a lead in awakening New Zealanders from their fretful sleep.

Fretful Sleepers

BILL PEARSON, Landfall, 1952 | Nov 05, 2004 11:10

Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist

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