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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE DEEPENING
STREAM – A History of the New Zealand Literary Fund” by Elizabeth Caffin and
Andrew Mason (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)
Who hasn’t at
some time feared that state patronage of literature could open the way for an
officially “acceptable” sort of writing, the aesthetic corruption of authors
who vie for state grants, and the formation of influential literary cliques who
know which government administrators to flatter?
And yet which
literate New Zealander isn’t also aware that, without such state patronage, it
might for years have been impossible to have much worthwhile literature
published in New Zealand at all? Edmond’s Cookbook and Barry Crump, yes. Something
more challenging, no. I look at the “Creative New Zealand” logo in my first published
collection of poems and I know which side my bread is buttered on.
There had been much
discussion of the need for state patronage of literature in the 1930s, often
led by the writers’ “union” PEN and its spokesman Pat Lawlor. In the 1940s Joseph
Heenan, “an imaginative and creative
public servant” (p.30) in the Department of Internal Affairs, cleverly
extended the Centennial Branch (concerned with producing books related to the
1940 centenary of the Treaty of Waitangi) into an Historical Branch (which
would fund reprints of notable New Zealand history books). This was the first
step towards state patronage of literature. Heenan knew there was much pressure
for writers of imaginative fiction and poetry to receive grants, but he was
also aware of how contentious this could be. As he wrote truthfully “New
Zealand has so many intolerant cliques, each of which claims in all fields of
art to have the monopoly of knowledge and taste.” (quoted p.31)
At first the emphasis
was on grants to assist publication of completed works, not on grants to assist
writers. Finally the Literary Fund Advisory Committee (LFAC) was set up in
1947, but many writers feared the committee would go for “safe” publications
and be over-concerned with the “image” which any New Zealand work created for
overseas readers. And indeed in its early days, the committee did tend to
recommend grants for “respectable” history books. Given the very small pool of
New Zealand literary talent, there was the problem of members of the committee
who might themselves have benefitted from the fund. There were also too many sub-par
submissions. Elizabeth Caffin (or perhaps Andrew Mason) comments:
“The
applications were a motley lot. So were the applicants, who were aspiring authors,
friends and relations of authors, interested dignitaries as well as publishers.
In this situation the well-meaning committee coming across a halfway-decent
manuscript tended to bend over backwards to support it.” (p.54)
The committee
soon found that publishers were a poor “filter” when it came to presenting
worthwhile works for their consideration. The committee’s habit of “outsourcing” readers’ reports led to a number
of poor decisions so that gradually the LFAC themselves had to undertake the
reading of manuscripts, which proved too onerous for some committee members.
Gradually, by the
early 1960s, the committee’s focus had changed and there was as much direct
support for authors as for publication. There was also more emphasis on supporting
fiction and poetry. Many have noticed that at this time, thanks to grants from
the fund, a growing number of durable New Zealand writers were achieving their
first publication. In retrospect the fund did miss some important works
(neither Bill Pearson’s Coal Flat nor
Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water
received funding). But its list of “successes” was considerable.
Most literary
magazines failed to get grants for lack of quality and stability (i.e. many of
them lasted for a mere few issues). However, Landfall and Poetry Yearbook
benefitted from the fund, until a bad misjudgement ended support of the latter.
Later, many connected with “little magazines” resented the apparently
preferential treatment given to Landfall
and to Robin Dudding’s shorter-lived rival
Islands. An annual Award for Achievement was set up in 1956-57. But when the
long haul of a National Party government began in the 1960s, government support
for the arts became more grudging. (Elizabeth Caffin goes sarcastic, calling the
1960s Minister of Finance Robert Muldoon “kindly”
at p.142). However Alan Highet, the National Party Minister of Arts, proved
enlightened and supportive of the literary fund’s work.
By the 1970s, there
was the looming spectre of the literary fund being absorbed into, and made an adjunct
of, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. By this stage, the fund’s subsidisation
of reprints was declining. The writing of New Zealand history had become
professionalised, and professional historians, receiving full academic salaries,
were less likely to be eligible for grants. The funding of nonfiction works
therefore decreased and “the adequate
funding of serious and gifted writers of nonfiction who were not university
teachers remained a problem, and still does.” (p.171)
The whole
literary and publishing context was changing in the 1970s. The New Zealand Book
Council was set up in 1972. An Arts Council Act was passed in 1974. New Zealand
literature was now taught widely in schools and universities. The rising
profile of New Zealand literature in the 1980s was accompanied by the greater
visibility of women writers and Maori writers, signalled when Keri Hulme’s the bone people won the Booker Prize in
1985. This was also the era when the first New Zealand readers’ and writers’
weeks were being established.
Finally, in the
late 1980s, the Literary Fund was folded into the QEII Arts Council, which in
turn was restructured as “Creative New Zealand” in 1994. The whole system of
providing stage patronage for literature had changed.
Apart from a
final ten-page encomium, concentrating on the difficulties of the Literary Fund
Advisory Committee’s work, and on its major successes, this is where Elizabeth
Caffin ends her history. Before she does so, however, she remarks:
“While the entry into the Arts Council had
been positive and hopeful, the writers and publishers present at a meeting in
Auckland in 1996 were angry and exasperated at the way things had turned out,
at the shift of power away from practitioners into the hands of bureaucrats, at
an obscure and mystifying assessment process and at the use of a language
derived from management and showing none of the sensitivity to which writers were
by nature alert.” (p.227)
She closes with
a quotation from Ian Wedde expressing these concerns.
So this is a
bare outline of the LFAC’s existence.
What I have done
here, of course, is to strip The
Deepening Stream of much of its colour by not noting many of the personal
stories it relates. There was Professor Ian Gordon’s very long tenure as
chairman of the advisory committee (1951-74), which inevitably led to much
criticism of him, despite his generally efficient work. There was young David Ballantyne’s stoush, in
the early 1950s, with Pat Lawlor (secretary of the LFAC) over Ballantyne’s
novel The Cunninghams. Charles
Brasch, after first being very patrician and sniffy about the fund (inherited
family wealth had enabled him to set up Landfall)
became very prone to intervening and commenting on fund matters, clearly
casting himself as the godfather of New Zealand Literature. Erratic and
bohemian Auckland printer Bob Lowry was so tardy in publishing a book, for the
publication of which he had received a grant, that the LFAC brought in a new
regulation that grants would be conferred to publishers only upon publication
(p.124). Then there’s James K. Baxter’s classic one-line reader’s report to
Andrew Sharp on Hone Tuwhare’s debut volume “No Ordinary Son”: “Andy – I think these are good. Jim Baxter”
(p.126).
The points at
which the LFAC blundered are enlightening. I regard it as a blunder that short-story
writer John Reece Cole was given grant after he had published all the
fiction that he ever would publish (p.95). I also find it amusing that the poet
Hubert Witheford used a similar grant to abscond to England and never to return
(pp.103-104). In the early 1960s Allen Curnow who, like Charles Brasch, had
pretensions to be the dictator of New Zealand poetry, whined about the quality
of poems in the New Zealand Poetry
Yearbook. (“its open and inclusive
approach led to strong criticisms of its quality, especially by Curnow”
p.132) There was then a kerfuffle about the supposed “salacious” quality of
some poems and pressure was put on the LFAC to withhold further grants from New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, which it
did. Only in 1971 was Poetry New Zealand (“Frank
McKay’s resurrection of the old Poetry Yearbook” p.142) funded once again.
[Its not part of Caffin’s story, but Poetry
New Zealand continued for over 40 years as a twice-yearly publication,
mainly without any public funding and largely under the editorship of Alistair Paterson, and in 2014 reverted to
being a substantial Yearbook].
I have to note,
though, that most of the really colourful stuff is in the earlier part of the
book (from the 1940s to the 1960s). The book becomes more polite and
circumspect the nearer it approaches the present, perhaps because it is dealing
with people who are still alive. For example we are told that C. K. Stead, who briefly
chaired the LFAC (1974-76) had “strongly
disagreed with some of the decisions the committee had made” (p.157). But
we are not told what those disagreements were.
There may be
some undercurrents to The Deepening
Stream that are not explored as fully as they could have been.
Occasionally, we are reminded that there was often a tension between Wellingtonians,
nearer the source of government largesse, and others, who felt locked out and
unable to so easily influence grant-giving bureaucrats. There may be an echo of
this concern when Caffin writes of the Wellington literary magazine Sport that it was “a reliable stayer and a valuable conduit for students of Bill Manhire’s
classes in creative writing” (p.210). Is this statement intended
ironically?
Some glib and
rude comments before I finish. I do find the giving of “speculative” grants to
promising writers to be a dodgy procedure. More than once in (the earlier parts
of) this book, there are tales of writers who were given travels funds simply to
enlarge their views of the world, and with no specific writing project being a condition of the grant. I think it was this sort of thing that
provoked A. R. D. Fairburn’s witticism, with which I began this notice.
In this
matter at least, I agree with Fairburn.
I would also
have to admit that much of The Deepening
Stream seems curiously nostalgic to me. It recalls a different world, in
which there were no professional, career, arts administrators, and the language
of neo-liberalism was rarely spoken.
Dear dead days.