Nuggety little gem explores feelings
Hard Frost is essentially a history of feeling, buried by academia and fashion, writes Andrew Paul Wood.
John Newton’s Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New
Zealand Literature 1908-1945 isa nuggety little ripper, the first of a proposed trilogy, that gets straight to the heart of New Zealand’s modernist literature and reminds us what we take for granted can still throw up surprises. I love an intelligent book. The title comes from Charles Brasch’s quote about the modern voice coming like a hard frost and killing off the weak growth so the strong might flourish.
Newton proposes a daring revision of the present tendency to dismiss the period for its hackneyed, Ma¯ori- and women-ignoring, patriarchal attitudes. From this side of the culture wars, no one is going to be surprised that the Caxton Press/Landfall Bloomsbury South and the hairy James K Baxter generation that followed, were pretty much a boys’ club navigating national (mostly Pa¯keha¯) identity and international modernism. What we don’t tend to acknowledge, however, is that it was a sentimental subculture in its own right, mixing romanticism with mountaineering and pottering after moa bones.
Newton tackles a question few have thought to ask – why did those two generations of writers, including the women, completely fail to respond meaningfully to our greatest literary export, Katherine Mansfield? Newton suggests it wasn’t entirely her gender – even Sargeson, gay, not fitting the typical masculine mould, perfectly capable of identifying the genius of Janet Frame, was cagey about her as a literary model. Mansfield is also difficult because she’s more part of Europe than Aotearoa, which chafed against nationalist agendas, and her rich, deep psychological symbolism spooked them.
Gender plays a huge, if largely untold, role in the development of that national literature that the hip young things are so scornful of (at least as they are taught). Ursula Bethell is an obvious one, but Newton also brings in forgotten Blanche Baughan (1870-1958), whose poem A Bush
Section Allen Curnow said was ‘‘the best New Zealand poem before [RAK] Mason’’. Curnow as arbiter of taste and loader of canons threads through the book. The cult of manliness fostered by Fairburn and Glover gets teased apart, as is Robin Hyde’s complex sexuality.
Sargeson simulates the masculinist culture even as he peppers his stories with coded references to his homosexuality.
I suppose if I did have a cavil, a minor one, it’s that as a straight, white man, I wonder if he is the best teller of the story, but if not him, now, then who? Newton does the valuable service of reminding us that one of the most important parts of literature is feeling, and Hard Frost is essentially a history of feeling, buried by academia and fashion.