New Zealand Post-World War II

New Zealand Post-World War II

Poetry

A Book of New Zealand Verse (1945; rev. ed. 1951), edited by Allen Curnow, is usually held to mark the advent of New Zealand literature’s “postcolonial” phase. It was Modernist, nationalist, and critically sophisticated, and Curnow’s long, elegant introduction set a new standard for the discussion of local writing. Curnow’s own poetry, though not immediately as well received as that of his contemporaries Denis Glover and A.R.D. Fairburn, had intensity, precision, and formal control that theirs, for all its lyric ease and vividness of local reference, could not match. Curnow eventually became, with James K. Baxter (a younger poet whose merit Curnow was quick to recognize), one of the country’s dominating poetic presences.

By the end of the 1950s—when his second and more comprehensive anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), was about to appear—Curnow was already a major figure on the literary landscape against whom younger poets felt the need to rebel. The decade of the 1960s, however, was dominated by Baxter’s poetry and charismatic presence. Baxter was a very public and prolific writer whose Collected Poems (1979), which appeared after his death (in 1972 at age 46), contained more than 600 pages; it was said that possibly three times as many additional poems remained in unpublished manuscript. He was effortless and natural in verse—a modern Byron—while Curnow was all conscious skill and contrivance. It was in the year of Baxter’s death that Curnow began publishing again, extending his reputation at home and, through the 1980s, establishing a reputation abroad. Curnow received many awards, culminating in the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a rare honour he shared with such poets as W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Ted Hughes.

Other poets whose work came to the fore during the 1950s and ’60s include Kendrick Smithyman, a poet almost as prolific as Baxter but whose poems are much more densely textured and oblique; Fleur Adcock, who emigrated to London and established herself among respected British poets; C.K. Stead, who, in addition to his role as poet, earned an international reputation as a literary critic with his book The New Poetic (1964); and Vincent O’Sullivan, who, like Stead, was an academic as well as a poet and a writer of plays and short stories.

Among the poets who became known in the 1970s and ’80s were several whose work showed, at least as a general tendency, a shift away from British and toward American models of Modernism and postmodernism. Two of the most talented were Ian Wedde, whose energy, formal inventiveness, and stylistic charm in the use of spoken language extended the range of New Zealand poetry, and Bill Manhire, a witty understater and unsettler of reality. Others also appearing then included Murray Edmond, a dour but resourceful pupil of the American school; Elizabeth Smither, whose poetic world was sharpened by her sense of ironies and contradictions; Anne French, who made gossip into high art; and Leigh Davis, a poet and literary theorist who gave up poetry for higher finance. Lauris Edmond, who began publishing in middle age, was an anomaly among these poets, riding high on the feminist tide of those two decades but writing in a more conventional poetic style that set her apart from her publishing contemporaries.

Gregory O’Brien was among the more notable poets who marked out a space for themselves in the 1990s. O’Brien, who was also a painter, sometimes illustrated his semi-surreal poems with matching iconography. Other poets were Jenny Bornholdt, a warmhearted, clever observer of the everyday; Andrew Johnston, also a witty poet, who gave language a degree of freedom to create its own alternative reality; and Michele Leggott, the most scholarly of this group and the one who took the most, and most directly, from American postmodernists such as Louis Zukofsky.

Fiction

In postwar fiction the central figure was Frank Sargeson. He had begun publishing stories in the 1930s, attempting to do for New Zealand what Mark Twain had done for America and Henry Lawson for Australia—find a language in fiction that represented the New Zealand voice and character. That Summer, and Other Stories (1946) gathered together the best of his early stories, and it was followed by the experimental novel I Saw in My Dream (1949). Although both these books were published in London, Sargeson was seen by New Zealand writers as something of an inspiration—a man committed to full-time writing and to the “life of literature” in New Zealand.

Among his most notable younger protégés were Maurice Duggan, whose stories brought a new level of sophistication into New Zealand fiction, and the novelist Janet Frame, whose fame was to outstrip that of her mentor. From her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), Frame’s work was internationally respected though never widely popular. However, with the publication of her three-volume autobiography (To the Is-Land [1982], An Angel at My Table [1984], and The Envoy from Mirror City [1985]) and its adaptation (written by Laura Jones; directed by Jane Campion) into the movie An Angel at My Table (1990), Frame’s work received much wider attention, attracting interest both because of that part of it that draws upon her younger years, when she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked away in mental hospitals, and because of its technical experimentation and linguistic inventiveness.

Sargeson himself continued to write throughout the postwar period. While respect for his historical importance, both as a short-story writer and as a mentor to younger writers, continued to grow, interest in his novels (such as Memoirs of a Peon [1965] and Joy of the Worm [1969]) had waned by the turn of the 21st century. His three-volume autobiography—Once Is Enough (1973), More Than Enough (1975), and Never Enough (1977)—is, however, a lively trilogy equal to Frame’s in interest and in the quality of the writing.

The 1960s saw the rise to prominence of two young novelists, Maurice Gee and Maurice Shadbolt, neither of them much interested in technical innovation, both writing traditional, solid, realistic novels giving New Zealanders a more comprehensive view of themselves and their society than fiction had previously offered. For a long time Gee’s best work was considered to be his Plumb trilogy—Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), and Sole Survivor (1983)—which tells the story of the Christian leftist George Plumb (based on Gee’s grandfather) and the subsequent fortunes of his children and grandchildren. His later novels, however—including Going West (1992), Crime Story (1994), and Live Bodies (1998)—show a further extension of his range and ease as a novelist, social historian, and moralist. Shadbolt’s background and interests were also of the political left. The typical central character in Shadbolt’s early work is a product of a working-class background who finds himself among writers and artists, is involved in love affairs and marriages, but is always concerned about politics, especially the politics of what it means to be a New Zealander. Strangers and Journeys (1972) gathers together and restates all the themes of his early work, after which Shadbolt found a new subject in 19th-century Maori-Pakeha relations (also explored by Stead in his novel The Singing Whakapapa [1994]). Shadbolt’s attention focused especially on the 1860s, the period of the New Zealand Wars, fought between European colonists and the Maori over control of land. His three novels on that subject—Season of the Jew (1986), Monday’s Warriors (1990), and The House of Strife (1993)—are possibly his best.

Other notable novelists of the postwar period include Bill Pearson, whose one novel, Coal Flat (1963), gives a sober, faithful, strongly written account of life in a small mining town on the West Coast of the South Island; David Ballantyne (Sydney Bridge Upside Down [1968] and The Talkback Man [1978]), the “lost man” of those decades whose work deserves more readers than it has had; and Ronald Hugh Morrieson, whose bizarre, semi-surreal, and rollicking stories of small-town life, The Scarecrow (1963) and Came a Hot Friday (1964), were largely ignored when they were published but have since been hailed as unique and valuable. Sylvia Ashton-Warner, by contrast, wrote an international best seller, Spinster (1958), a success unmatched by her later novels, but her fine autobiography, I Passed This Way (1979), is the personal record of a brilliant “natural” both as a writer and as a teacher.

Drama

In the 1960s Curnow, Baxter, and Sargeson had all written plays of literary interest but no great public success; the 1970s and ’80s, however, saw significant development in the writing and production of New Zealand plays. Bruce Mason, whose one-man show The End of the Golden Weather (published 1962) had been performed hundreds of times all over the country, continued to write and saw the best of his earlier plays with Maori themes—The Pohutukawa Tree (published 1960) and Awatea (published 1969)—given professional productions. Mervyn Thompson wrote expressionist plays mixing elements of autobiography with social and political comment (O! Temperance! and First Return [both published 1974]). Greg McGee probed the surface of New Zealand’s “national game,” rugby, in the hugely successful Foreskin’s Lament (published 1981). Roger Hall wrote clever comedies and satires of New Zealand middle-class life—Middle Age Spread (published 1978), which was produced in London’s West End, and Glide Time (published 1977). O’Sullivan’s Shuriken (published 1985) used a riot by Japanese soldiers in a New Zealand prison camp to illustrate how understanding and sympathy fail to cross cultural boundaries. Drama, the last of the major literary genres to get started in New Zealand, developed rapidly in the 1980s, and new playwrights (Stuart Hoar, Michael Lord, Hilary Beaton, Renée [original name Renée Taylor], and Stephen Sinclair, for example) were finding producers, casts, and audiences as never before.

The turn of the 21st century

The short story continued to be an important form for New Zealand writers through the last decades of the 20th century. One of its best modern exponents was Owen Marshall (The Lynx Hunter, and Other Stories [1987], The Divided World [1989]); O’Sullivan (Survivals and Other Stories [1985]) was another. O’Sullivan published both poetry and fiction (though Hyde and, to some extent, Frame, had done the same before), and this practice of writing across genres became a feature of the 1980s and ’90s. Two well-known novelists, Fiona Kidman (A Breed of Women [1979], Paddy’s Puzzle [1983], True Stars [1990], Ricochet Baby [1996]) and Marilyn Duckworth (Married Alive [1985], Rest for the Wicked [1986], Pulling Faces [1987], A Message from Harpo [1989], Unlawful Entry [1992], Leather Wings [1995]), also published collections of poems. Smither, best known as a poet, published several novels, including Brother-Love, Sister-Love (1986). Wedde extended his range from poetry to the novel with Symmes Hole (1986). Fiona Farrell, whose novels include The Skinny Louis Book (1992) and Six Clever Girls Who Became Famous Women (1996), moved back and forth between fiction and poetry. And Stead, whose political fantasy Smith’s Dream (1971) went through many reprints, continued to write both poetry and fiction in the 1980s and into the next century. Many of his novels were published simultaneously in New Zealand and Britain, including The Death of the Body (1986), The End of the Century at the End of the World (1992), Talking About O’Dwyer (1999), Mansfield (2004), and My Name Was Judas (2006).

Notable in the final decades of the 20th century was the number of literary biographies and autobiographies published, as if New Zealanders had become eager to record and to read about the creators of their national literature. There were full biographies published of Fairburn, Sargeson, Baxter, Duggan, Glover, and Frame, as well as of the novelist and short-story writer Dan Davin. In addition to the autobiographies of Duff, Frame, Sargeson, and Ashton-Warner, Shadbolt (2 vol.), Duckworth, Lauris Edmond (3 vol.), the poet Charles Brasch, and the poet and novelist Kevin Ireland also published accounts of their lives.

Also frequently remarked upon was the number of younger women novelists writing in, and largely about, New Zealand while finding a major publisher abroad. These include Elizabeth Knox, whose novel The Vintner’s Luck (1998) won international acclaim, as well as Catherine Chidgey, Charlotte Grimshaw, Emily Perkins, and Sarah Quigley.

A new element entered New Zealand literature in the writing of recent immigrants, particularly those from the Pacific Islands, as in the case of the Samoan novelist Albert Wendt (Sons for the Return Home [1973], Leaves of the Banyan Tree [1979], Black Rainbow [1992]). But also among these immigrants were some who came, or whose parents came, from places in Europe where the primary language was not English and the culture was not British or British-derived. Writers such as Renato Amato, Riemke Ensing, and Kapka Kassabova, born respectively in Italy, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria, drew inspiration from such places. Amelia Batistich wrote about immigrants from Croatia, and Yvonne du Fresne wrote about those from Denmark; though Batistich and du Fresne were born in New Zealand, both wrote about places where family connections remained strong.