‘Rough Architects’: New Zealand Literature and Its Institutions from Phoenix to Landfall

Abstract

In their preface to the first anthology of New Zealand poetry in 1906, W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie struck an apologetic note. The first and second generations of European New Zealanders had ‘comparatively little time for things not practical – the columns must be set up before we turn to moulding the entablature’. Currie and Alexander were not the first to suggest that a New Zealand literature was an element of nation building – and one that had to wait until the basics had been taken care of. In his poem ‘A Colonist in His Garden’, the former politician William Pember Reeves had dramatised an either-or choice between ‘culture’ and pioneering. Though the young colony might be bereft of art in the conventional sense, ‘Who serve an art more great / Than we, rough architects of State …?’ Both as a policy maker and as a theorist of state intervention in settler societies, Reeves was acutely conscious that the market and civil society could not be counted on to drive progress in a small colony. The failure of commercial publishers and periodicals to provide a basis for the development of New Zealand literature was one strand in the ‘cultural nationalist’ critique of the status quo in the 1930s and 1940s, and the prospect of government support for local writers was hotly debated. By the end of this period, a state literary fund was in place and local firms were publishing substantial amounts of new fiction and poetry. Even more significant for the literary history of this period were the institutions fashioned by writers, above all the run of literary magazines beginning with Phoenix in 1932 and culminating in 1947 with Landfall . This history of the institutions of New Zealand literature closely tracks the rise to prominence of the younger writers, most of them male, associated with Phoenix or the Caxton Press or both, and their displacement of what passed for a literary establishment, which was both resistant to modernism and receptive to writing by women. For many years, a narrative of the rise of literary nationalism was told more or less triumphantly, though some of those involved rejected the ‘nationalist’ tag; from the 1980s, critics and anthologists worked to question some of the exclusions entailed by this narrative and its attendant poetics. The nationalist narrative needs to be revised in another way as well.