[In the following essay, the Joneses offer an account of expatriate New Zealand writing, focusing on such authors as Katherine Mansfield, Jane Manders, Shirley Maddock, Robin Hyde, and James Courage.]

It was not that either Katherine Mansfield or Frances Hodgkins totally lacked leisure, paper, pens and paint in New Zealand; on the contrary, each added to her impediments and poverty by going away. They did lack, however, an environment in which they could hope to work themselves to the full. They were conscious of great talents, and convinced that those talents would be stifled in a country that was still, in their eyes, raw, colonial and antagonistic. Whatever was the objective truth of their assessment of New Zealand society, their subjective accuracy cannot be questioned.

—W. H. Oliver, 1960

It was Jane Mander's generation, already adult before the Great War, who saw with bewildered dismay that the country now offered its young less than they themselves had had, and much less than they had imagined themselves working to provide.

—Dorothea Turner, 1976

Long before the phrase brain-drain had been coined, New Zealand was experiencing the phenomenon it described. The country is so much aware of long-continued expatriation that the entry “Expatriates” in the fine Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1966) runs to just over thirty pages, studded with snapshot biographies under thirteen categories which display pride mingled with regret. Explaining why the problem of expatriation is implicit in the New Zealand situation, the authors point out the isolation, small size, and surplus of certain kinds of talent in a yet-emergent land. “The attitudes of the early settlers,” moreover, are those of “many of their living descendants,”

… and this is particularly true of the arts and of pure scholarship: in a considerable number of New Zealand minds they are regarded as trimmings, fair enough as far as they go, but not to be compared with a hydro-electric dam or the manufacture, under license, of a new type of gentlemen's underwear. This is a perfectly natural point of view and the wonder of it is that there should be so many New Zealanders who hold to a different set of values.¹

Since the lists in this article are confined to living writers, some of the most prominent names are absent; they include Hector Bolitho (only minimally a writer of New Zealand fiction), James Courage, Daniel Davin (both of them important New Zealand novelists), Dorothy Eden (principally a writer of suspense novels), and Ruth Park (whose output has been divided between New Zealand and Australia). To these names must be added those of Katherine Mansfield (the earliest and generally best-known of all), Jane Mander, and Robin Hyde. Among notable literary expatriates, it can be seen from this, the women outnumber the men.

Katherine Mansfield, one of New Zealand's most accomplished self-exiles, grew up in Wellington as Kathleen Beauchamp in a home of more than average comfort and culture. In 1903-6 she was taken to London to complete her schooling, and became convinced—as did other writers both in New Zealand and Australia at the turn of the century—that the only avenue to artistic success lay through escape to Europe. Accordingly, after a short career of miscellaneous local publication, Kathleen Beauchamp migrated. In 1918, she married John Middleton Murry and in 1923, died of tuberculosis. Her stories are especially memorable for their intimate approach to the world of childhood. It is the late Victorian world of the 1890s, centered in Wellington with its parties, picnics, and trips across Cook Strait on the ferry, that such stories as “At the Bay,” “The Garden Party,” and “The Voyage” recall. In 1921, making plans for “my new book” which remained unfinished, she outlined a table of contents and indicated settings for nine stories; three of these were to take place in London and six in New Zealand, which was still her primary source and came more and more to be her lost Arcadia.

Her story materials, as Professor Ian Gordon reminds us, were “in the central tradition of the English novel, the affairs of everyday heightened by sensitivity and good writing.”² If a woman (in her fiction) is not alone in the world, she is likely to be joined to a man, husband or otherwise, by emotional ties that are fragile. Inevitably, where children are concerned (and she shows us how much more awareness they often have than we are disposed to imagine), they are affected; and in their relations with one another, as well as with adults, there lies a special realm of which Katherine Mansfield easily became the queen. Her very careful techniques of construction, allowing for quick and apparently effortless shifts in point of view but controlling rigidly the “sense of always being inside the character,”³ are matched with a natural but (partly because natural, perhaps) lyrical use of language. She “draws on the stratagems of poetry, notably an unobtrusive—but powerful—use of symbolism.”⁴ This did not happen immediately; her first book appeared in 1911, but it was not until the story “Prelude” (1916, published later in the Bliss volume, 1920) that her final mode of presentation was achieved. Her own comments on various stories reveal how much of herself she spent on her work:

“Prelude”—I try to make family life so gorgeous—not hatred and cold linoleum—but warmth and hydrangeas.

“The Canary”—I have just finished a story with a canary for the hero, and almost feel I have lived in a cage and picked a piece of chickweed myself.

“The Voyage”—One day I must write about Grandma at length, especially of her beauty in her bath—when she was about sixty. I remember now how lovely she seemed to me. And her fine linen, her scent. I have never really described her yet. Patience! the time will come.

“The Garden-Party”—I am sitting in my room thinking of Mother: I want to cry. But my thoughts are beautiful and full of gaiety. I think of our house, our garden, us children—the lawn, the gate, and Mother coming in. “Children! Children!”⁵

Apart from stories such as these, which are at the core of her best achievements, New Zealand gave her—through the “back-blocks”—three tales of violence, “The Woman at the Store,” “Ole Underwood,” and “Millie.” Of these, Antony Alpers says,

Superficially the three New Zealand tales are murder stories, with the deaths occurring outside the actual narrative. More essentially they are penetrating studies in the psychology of what isolation in a raw, unbroken country can do to human beings.

They do, however, “lack facility of dialogue.”⁶ It has been remarked also of the earliest stories (In a German Pension, 1911) that “Bavarian” as they purport to have been, they were “clearly an early attempt to handle the characters and scenes of ‘Prelude’ and other New Zealand stories.” For example,

The picture of Binzer peering with disgust into a “gully,” filled with empty tins and fennel, and, as a result, composing “a letter to the paper,” is one that fits with ease into the New Zealand landscape, though scarcely into the Bavarian.⁷

If expatriation was a tragic experience for Katherine Mansfield, contributing strongly to her illness and early death, quite the opposite should be said of Jane Mander, a woman eleven years older who left New Zealand at about the same time—not for London, but for New York, where in 1912 she entered Columbia University as one of the first students in the newly opened School of Journalism. She had already written one novel, “turned down with admirable promptitude by four [London] publishers,” she later stated with the verbal incisiveness that grew sharper with age and illness. She was already thirty-five (the age at which Katherine Mansfield died), but did exceptionally well in her academic work as well as in the employ of the Red Cross during World War I. Meanwhile, in 1914-16 she had written The Story of a New Zealand River, the title a conscious parallel to that of The Story of an African Farm (1883) by Olive Schreiner, whose work she greatly admired. She would have been glad to be considered the Olive Schreiner of New Zealand—as indeed she might have been if public acceptance there had not been so hostile.

In Europe from 1923 into the early Depression years, Jane Mander wrote and published in New York and London all six of her novels: The Story of a New Zealand River (1920), The Passionate Puritan (1921), The Strange Attraction (1922), Allen Adair (1925), The Besieging City (1926), and Pins and Pinnacles (1928). By this time she was over fifty; her aged father (to whom she was always much devoted) in New Zealand needed care, and she was no longer in robust health herself. She returned to New Zealand late in 1932, took up domestic duties, and though she wrote some newspaper articles and reviews, her career was virtually finished for the remaining years before her death in 1949.

The Story of a New Zealand River (not unlike Olive Schreiner's story) is much concerned with feminism, presented through the chief character, Alice Roland. Alice makes the transition from Victorian primness into a liberal outlook after moving to a timber-milling community on a northern river, actually the Otamatea, where the author's father owned kauri timber mills. About Jane Mander's orchestration of the complexities in such a situation, Dorothea Turner has written:

The setting of The River and the author's inside knowledge of bush-felling give it standing as a documentary, and her promotion of Alice and of the various emancipations she stands for suggests that sociological fervor was one of the spurs that drove her through the writing. Her beliefs, motives, and affections, however, combine in the creation of characters who transcend the immediate limits of time and region. The novel's stature and its permanent claim lie in the viability of Alice and Tom Roland, and to a lesser extent in Asia.⁸

Allen Adair, the book next in quality to her first, is set in the gum fields of the North Island (containing extensive deposits of resin from kauri trees), also used as a locale by William Satchell. The central figure is a young businessman who, longing to strike out on his own, becomes a successful storekeeper and trader in the gum-fields country. He marries an Auckland girl, feeling himself that the city “was all very well” for short periods but useful chiefly because “it gave him the sense of contrast and glorified the country in comparison.”⁹ The marriage erodes, and quickly; Allen “could never understand that women loved a row, loved argument, loved to be unhappy.”¹⁰ He also fails to see that his wife Marion wants to respond but doesn't know how. A subplot provides Allen some relief through the friendship of a solitary gum digger, Dick Rossiter, until Dick's self-assumed guilt in a murder case is cleared up by a deathbed confession—something of an old-style deus ex machina. Rossiter's return to England is part of the reason Allen consents to return to Auckland—anticlimax of a sort, but realism as well, seeing that the father's death has brought Allen a small fortune.

One more of Jane Mander's novels, The Besieging City (1926) will be discussed here. After it has been summarized, it will be compared with a novel appearing thirty-seven years later as an exercise in observing differences between early and near-contemporary fiction in our century: both novels are about New York City, and both narrate the experiences of a single woman from New Zealand in seeking work and adjusting to life in the metropolis. The Besieging City, which as the title suggests presents city life as multifarious and challenging, is a fictionalized account of Miss Mander's New York years. Christine (Chris) Mayne, English born but reared in Australia, has an eye for natural beauty as well as a knack for making friends, some of whose roles are important enough to extend beyond the city's boundaries. She works for the Red Cross during the war at financial sacrifice, but manages at the same time to break into the literary world with articles in a newly founded Weekly Critic and the publication of a novel. Bustling with change, the city both undergoes the scourge of influenza and celebrates the armistice and the end of the war. Chris is a liberated woman with an independently honest approach to living, including romance; in love with a successful architect, she declines marriage rather than relinquish her independence and solitude. Lavish parties, famous restaurants, beautiful people in beautiful clothes contrast with the personal problems and emotional strain that are the undercurrent of big-city life. The following short paragraph introduces a description of New York's response to the first (unofficial) report of an armistice and end of World War I:

At any moment New York is a mental powder magazine that a spark of drama may blow up. It is the home of spontaneous combustion. Somewhere above the city there hovers a puckish spirit with the secret of a magic gas that in one moment may bring inflammation of the brain upon the town from the man on the fifty-seventh story of the Woolworth tower to the remotest engineer in a sub-sub-basement fifty feet below the pavement. No way else may one explain the New York of that Thursday afternoon.¹¹

Shirley Maddock's With Gently Smiling Jaws (1963) is a simple tale of futile struggles in a tiny pocket of New York filled with the little people, the poor. Catherine Willis—interested in writing and acting, eager to break into television, determined to be independent and to diverge from the Willis family norm of settling for a husband and children—moves into a tiny apartment between a funeral parlor and a dry-cleaning shop. She makes friends easily in the multinational neighborhood; though people have difficulty in placing New Zealand, they do recognize her English background. She finds a job with Telepress, a television advertising venture being floated by an unscrupulous operator, Mr. Timperly, who somehow manages to spend only other people's money—even for the innumerable cups of tea he orders delivered. Her young man, Andrew, has a good position with the UN and would like to get married, but not until Telepress collapses and Catherine has had time to think things over in a short summer job in a Maine coastal resort, does she decide to accept him. Following is a brief slice of the New York City scene which Catherine knew:

It looked as though the street had been up for hours, for Saturday though not for work. Shouting children were playing hopscotch in front of the condemned block of buildings, housewives stood talking, their baskets over their arms, and Catherine had a curious feeling as she made her way towards the butcher's that she was invisible, that everyone was minding their own business and no one was the least concerned with hers. “Well, you ought to be pleased,” she told herself as she stowed a small steak and a parcel of lamb chops in her bag. “For years you've complained about the Willises minding your affairs, and now nobody does, so you should enjoy it.”¹²

Mander, it is already evident, deals with city life on a broad scale, introducing important events to which her heroine responds. Her position with the Red Cross is one of significance and responsibility. New York undergoes an epidemic as well as orgies of drinking, blending of sexes, and splashy new building programs. Coué-ism (autosuggestion for self-improvement, a French import) competes with the Peace Conference of Versailles. The heroine's social circle is made up of kind, intelligent, sensitive people—the sort, she feels, that the city gradually makes into New Yorkers. Two of her friends commit suicide, suggesting the tragic side of life that may overwhelm women with emotional problems. But somewhat masculine in her outlook perhaps, she welcomes the challenge of things. Maddock's account, on the other hand, is restricted almost entirely to personal problems with a limited view of “inside” business practices, the “gently smiling jaws” that come close to thuggery at times. By comparison, the life of the city is not broadly viewed or much developed. Is Catherine glad to leave New York? No, but she likes Maine too. New York is at least not put down, and presumably the couple will be returning to Andrew's UN job and domestic security. There is pathos in the book, at times, but hardly tragedy, together with a great deal of natural friendliness that would suggest a link with Mander. Catherine is considerably more of an extrovert than Chris and, in the end, more conventional; after her brief fling, with a fairly easy resolution of conflicts, she gives every indication of merging quietly into the social scene she has served as witness to. Back down under, in New Zealand, the Willises may breathe easily again. Chris, in what is a much larger, denser book, shows depth in numerous ways. At the end, though reluctant to leave her adopted city, she is bound overseas, ready for whatever else is new.

In the same decade with Jane Mander appeared Jean Devanny, who created a storm of public protest by describing in The Butcher Shop (1926) brutality and violence on a sheep station. She wrote no more New Zealand novels and soon left for Australia, where she continued publishing during the 1930s and 1940s.

Third among a trio of women expatriates was Robin Hyde (1906-1939) for whose problems the gesture of the ritual trip to London was not the solution. Born in South Africa as Iris G. Wilkinson, she was brought to Wellington, New Zealand, where she grew up. She worked on various newspapers for a period of ten years, chiefly as a woman's page editor, becoming progressively more dissatisfied and finally deciding to migrate. In 1938 she left for England via China (about which she wrote Dragon Rampant, published in 1939) and not long after her arrival died a suicide at age thirty-three. With the exception of her book on China, there is thus no part of her work not immediately the product of her New Zealand years. She was affected by cultural colonialism, however, equally as much as Katherine Mansfield and Jane Mander had been before her and like them felt forced to choose exile as her gesture of rebellion.

Critics agree that her first and last novels—Passport to Hell (1935) and The Godwits Fly (1939), both with titles symbolic of departure, of migration—are her best and that the three middle ones—Check to Your King (1936), Wednesday's Children (1937), and Nor the Years Condemn (1938)—are considerably below her best standards. Passport to Hell has as its central figure an outcast named Starkie—a man with, of all things, North American Indian blood in Maoriland. Of this novel, J. C. Reid has written:

Based upon the true story of Douglas Stark, an underprivileged youthful criminal who became a war hero of a kind, this tour de force vividly recreates the mood of soldiering and the character of battle. But its anger is directed not so much against war as against social injustice. And Starkie, son of a Red Indian father and Spanish mother, can hardly be taken as a typical Kiwi.¹³

It should be added that it is one of a very small number of war novels written by women, in New Zealand or elsewhere. Check to Your King is the fictionalized biography of an eccentric Frenchman, the Baron Charles de Thierry, who in the late 1830s set himself up as “Sovereign Chief of New Zealand,” claiming kingship over a territory of some forty thousand acres at Hokianga (North Island) which he intended to colonize. Wednesday's Children is a fantasy built around lottery winners, and Nor the Years Condemn is a sequel to Passport to Hell, but lacks the force of its original. The Godwits Fly deals with the Hannay family, centering on Eliza Hannay, the author's alter ego. The godwits—marsh birds that leave the northern tip of New Zealand for Siberia at the end of summer—seem symbolic of Eliza's friends fortunate enough to be off to England. Gloria Rawlinson, who has compared an earlier version of the novel with the one finally published, relates how Robin Hyde despairingly referred to the first version as “that pudding” and only after trial and error, and a hard decision to abandon a slow-moving, adult-centered, reminiscential manner of presentation, was able to produce the “brilliantly evocative style of The Godwits Fly as we know it.”¹⁴ The following passage, from a chapter about Eliza's stay in the hospital after breaking a leg, affords a glimpse into the internal and external worlds the heroine alternates between:

On the balcony she began writing a novel, an overgrown fairytale about a little boy who fell off the earth and went wandering through space. She could see thickets and campfires for him, but the plot tailed off, and writing against the iron cradle made her tired. Mostly she lay quiet, or clicked together the big wooden knitting needles Carly had brought her, with mauvepearl wool to make a wrap. The wrap never got done. … Days were much better than the nights, when the red light pricked through the windows, and always somebody came moaning or retching out from the anaesthetics, and it was impossible to get morphine, she had had far too much, and was better now. Biddy Kissin lay a white restless mountain in her bed, a tap dripped, a little piercing pinprick that went cleanly into the brain. She had dreams in which she was always running, taking high fences and rocks with great, easy leaps, Jack-the-Ripper leaps, which yet left a dream-feeling of dreadful effort. Then terror came in. Lions and tigers were after her, and she had to stop and persuade them, with long, plausible arguments, not to tear her to pieces. Sometimes she simply hid from them, once or twice she triumphed over them and they let her ride on their backs, but the feeling of effort and fear was never gone.¹⁵

The novels of James Courage (1905-1963), most of them set in Canterbury (South Island), are consistently rather gray performances, rendered so by the author's memories of his New Zealand years (he left as a young man, remaining in England after graduating from Oxford). Generalizing about Courage's achievement, R. A. Copland writes:

There is a pervading tone of seriousness if not of sadness deriving from a sombre acceptance of hereditary influences upon personality. Comedy breaks out on the edges of the novels though cheerfulness never breaks in. The setting is Canterbury rather than simply the back-country, for in Canterbury there linger most deeply those memories of England which Courage found in himself and out of season chose to record, borrowing overseas manners to record his personal truths.¹⁶

The Fifth Child (1948) and Desire without Content (1950) are set in suburban Christchurch in the 1940s; then Fires in the Distance (1952) moves both back in time to the early 1920s and into the Canterbury backcountry for its record of unhappy family affairs. In The Young Have Secrets (1954), the setting is a seaside town, the time 1914, and the plot an emotional tangle between Walter, a young boy, and the daughters of a schoolmaster. M. H. Holcroft, who analyzes this novel at some length, feels that Walter's desires—and intentions—to kill his tormentor Mrs. Nelson are to be taken seriously: “There's nothing puny or half-hearted in the boy's longing for violence and vengeance.” Moreover,

We're inclined to forget, as we grow older, how much naked and uncontrollable anger can set young nerves quivering, and how easy it is for strong feelings (whatever their source may be) to flare into violence. … We have seen it happen in recent years in cases which have ended in murder, shocking the nation and winning us a little notoriety overseas.¹⁷

In The Call Home (1956), an expatriate returns to New Zealand. Courage's two final novels, published in 1959 and 1961, are not set in New Zealand. Not very sympathetically, H. Winston Rhodes sums up the content of Courage's New Zealand novels as follows:

In his five New Zealand novels a neurotic mother, disappointed and bored with a too protective attitude to a son, a father coarsened by “colonial” farming, virile but frustrated, a sweet and understanding grandmother, a masculine girl, a feminine boy, a male given to bouts of drunkenness, a wife repelled by masculine sexuality, a precocious child, are the familiar ingredients of a plot which has clearly been contrived in order to provide a form of case-book entertainment. However deeply the writer may have felt involved in the situations described, he has remained not only detached but also withdrawn, so withdrawn that the reader experiences discomfort from a technical control that leaves him uncertain whether he is intended to accept mawkishness, sexual symbolism and artifice with wry amusement or sympathetic intelligence.¹⁸

Perhaps before Courage is judged finally, his work will need to be considered in the light of what the 1960s and 1970s produced, with the question asked, were his novels idiosyncratic, or did they anticipate the use of such “controversial” subjects by writers already beginning to loom over the horizon?

Finally, among expatriate writers, there is the work of Dan Davin, who like Courage left his ancestral home in the southern-most part of the South Island to attend Oxford before World War II (in which he served) and afterwards remained in England for a career in publishing. Since he is still active, and since all of his books were published after 1945, he is discussed in a later chapter; but we mention him here as the expatriate showing the least “dislocation syndrome” of any among those discussed. Personal temperament no doubt enters in, but it is probably also true that expatriation having now become largely a matter of choice rather than imagined compulsion, residence abroad for the writer is nothing that very much worries either the writer or the audience.

Notes

1. Encyclopedia of New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer, 1966), 1:573.

2. Ian Gordon, Katherine Mansfield, rev. ed. (London, 1971), pp. 18-19.

3. Ibid., p. 23.

4. Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Ian Gordon (London, 1974), p. xxi.

5. Ibid., pp. 30, 354, 231, 213.

6. Antony Alpers, Katherine Mansfield (London: Cape, 1954), pp. 192-93.

7. McCormick, Letters & Art in N.Z., p. 135.

8. Dorothea Turner, Jane Mander (New York, 1972), p. 38.

9. Jane Mander, Allen Adair, ed. Dorothea Turner (Auckland, 1971), p. 134.

10. Ibid., p. 94.

11. Jane Mander, The Besieging City (London, 1926), p. 95.

12. Shirley Maddock, With Gently Smiling Jaws (Auckland, 1963), p. 42.

13. John C. Reid, New Zealanders at War in Fiction (Auckland, 1966), p. 4.

14. Gloria Rawlinson, “Robin Hyde and The Godwits Fly,” in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel, ed. Cherry Hankin (Auckland, 1976), p. 42.

15. Iris G. Wilkinson [Robin Hyde], The Godwits Fly, ed. Gloria Rawlinson (Auckland, 1970), pp. 172-73. (First published 1938.)

16. R. A. Copland, “The New Zealand Novels of James Courage,” Landfall 18 (September 1964):249.

17. M. H. Holcroft, Islands of Innocence: The Childhood Theme in New Zealand Fiction (Wellington, 1964), p. 53.

18. H. Winston Rhodes, New Zealand Fiction Since 1945 (Dunedin, N.Z., 1968), p. 20.