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.
London, January 1952
This version retyped and formatted by Fiona Rae, November 2004.
Recommended Additional Reading
Coal Flat. Auckland: Paul's Book Arcade, 1963.
Pearson’s major work of fiction, set in the West Coast mining town of Blackball and based on the brief time he spent there in the early 1940s as a trainee school teacher. Lawrence Jones, writing in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, comments that ‘the novel provides a sympathetic view of a cross-section of New Zealand society… The emphasis is on the strong communal pressures to conform and the difficulty of sustaining any different, non-conformist social position… The view of New Zealand society is consonant with Pearson’s analysis in his 1952 essay, ‘Fretful Sleepers.’
Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays. Auckland: Heinemann Education Books, 1974.
A collection of eighteen of Pearson’s major essays, led off by the revised version of ‘Fretful Sleepers’. Described as ‘an uncompromising assessment of our attempts—often faltering and without depth of purpose—to live meaningful lives on these islands. Spanning twenty years of writing, they range from a dogged expose of post-war parochialism to a concerned and sympathetic examination of the position of the Maori in a culture which seems determined to overwhelm him.’
'Beginnings and endings.' Sport 5: 3-21 Spring 1990.
Autobiographical essay, now on-line at http://www.nzetc.org/etexts/Ba05Spo/_div1-N10638.html
Calder, Alex. 'An interview with Bill Pearson.' Landfall 47: 51-77; April 1993.
Simpson, Peter. 'Bill Pearson's New Zealand then and now : testimony of an internal rapporteur.' Landfall 194: 203-222; Spring 1997.