Frank Sargeson [Norris Frank Davey], 1903–1982

Lawrence Jones

doi:10.26686/knznq.v7i2.672

Abstract

‘It is not often a writer can be said to have become a symbol in his own lifetime. It is this quality of your achievement that has prompted us to remember this present occasion’. So Frank Sargeson’s fellow New Zealand fiction-writers ended ‘A Letter to Frank Sargeson’, published in Landfall in March 1953 to mark his fiftieth birthday. They were affirming his status as the most significant writer of prose fiction to emerge from that generation that began in the 1930s to create a modern New Zealand Literature. They were celebrating him first as the creator of the New Zealand critical realist short story and short novel, the writer who provided the literary model with which most of those signing the letter had started. But they were also celebrating him as a symbol and a model not only for what he wrote but for where and how he wrote it. In the editorial ‘Notes’ to that same issue of Landfall Charles Brasch stated of Sargeson that ‘by his courage and his gifts he showed that it was possible to be a writer and contrive to live, somehow, in New Zealand, and all later writers are in his debt’. Not only did he show by his example that it was possible to be a serious New Zealand writer without becoming an expatriate, but as mentor and encourager he fostered the careers of a whole generation of fiction writers. At least two of those who signed the letter (Janet Frame and Maurice Duggan) had even lived or were to live in the army hut behind his cottage for a time when they needed the place of refuge and the encouragement, Duggan in 1950 and again in 1958, Frame in 1955-1956. By 1953, then, Sargeson had already become recognised as a central figure in New Zealand literary history.

Highlights

‘It is not often a writer can be said to have become a symbol in his own lifetime
I The person who was to become the writer Frank Sargeson was born as Norris Frank Davey in Hamilton, 23 March 1903, the second of four children
Trying to deal with these contradictions, he began to formulate a kind of inchoate personal mythology in which he associated Hamilton and the flat country around it with his parents’ puritanism and with their respectable social aspirations for him, while whenever he could he escaped to climb in the high country outside the plains of the Waikato which he associated with a different, freer way of life, ‘the pure life of the senses . . . a pure and shameless life that was suddenly and miraculously permitted me’, as he characterised it in Once is Enough

Summary

Introduction

‘It is not often a writer can be said to have become a symbol in his own lifetime. It is this quality of your achievement that has prompted us to remember this present occasion’. The Progressive Publishing Society planned a New Zealand edition of the work together with the short stories written since A Man and His Wife, but this project fell through because of the Society’s financial failure.

Results

Conclusion