Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writings

by Frank Sargeson

Overview

Frank Sargeson wrote fiction for over half a century as well as occasional criticism in many forms and on many topics. Writers considered include D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Lawson and Olive Schreiner besides fellow New Zealanders such as Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Dan Davin, James Courage, Bill Pearson, and Ronald Hugh Morrieson. He was particularly concerned with societies which grew on the nineteenth-century European colonial frontiers, and with the writers they produced. A comprehensive bibliography of Sargeson's non-fiction prose is included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781775580515
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	387 KB

About the Author

Frank Sargeson (1903–1982) was one of New Zealand’s most important and influential short fiction writers.

Read an Excerpt

Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing

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By Frank Sargeson, Kevin Cunningham

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 1983 Christine Cole Catley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-555-7

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CHAPTER 1

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Exporting printed paper from the United States of America must be really Big Business. You can tell from our bookstalls. I wish the bigwigs in this printed paper trade would get on to the idea that a country should export its best products. Then there wouldn't be the glut in cowboy and other untrue romances, the relative scarcity of faithful stories by writers of Sherwood Anderson's quality.

One of the things that Anderson understands is the value of repetition. He never explores the important incidents of a story at one hit. He will say enough to set your imagination working, and have you looking for the page where he will return to the incident and fill in the gaps that he has deliberately left you wondering over. I think he got the idea from some of the story-tellers of the Old Testament.

Anderson also exploits the short, suggestive sentence. What fascinates him about words is their enormous suggestive power, and he uses them to liberate the imagination; certainly not, as some writers do, to restrict and pin it down. The defect of the method is that page by page you get the impression that you are about to receive a new revelation of life, a revelation which never quite turns up. You may feel a little disappointed at the end, and conclude that there is a lot to be said for the restrictive qualities of words after all. Some writers demand little more of you than that you should read. But Anderson expects you to be susceptible to suggestion and implication, to eke out his imagination with your own.

Anderson's technical abilities are novel and arresting, but he has made his reputation primarily through his emotional power. His style is one that can be used to great advantage by an emotional writer. There is a parallel in music. Music, more exclusively than literature, is concerned with emotional expression, and there is enormous value in a short, arresting statement that will lend itself to repetition and development. The composer must, of course, be a man capable of experiencing something more than mere shabby emotion. That Anderson is such a man cannot be disputed. His stories are told in the commonplace words and phrases that you find in the Old Testament, but they have nothing of the flatness of life. In life the third dimension often appears to be missing. Anderson makes it his job to put it in.

There is no clever dialogue, there is very little dialogue at all. Anderson's method is the reverse of Ernest Hemingway's. The latter reports his characters' conversation, and from that you have to infer their emotions and everything else it is necessary for you to know. But Anderson makes you understand how his characters feel by placing himself inside their skins. It isn't necessary for you to know much about their conversation. That he appeals by his emotional power is proved by the interest he arouses in different classes of men. Erudite professors who guide the Young towards Literary Appreciation write him grave letters of approval. And the shop assistant who finds that he understands and expresses something of his experience cannot resist the impulse to write and tell him about it.

In late years Anderson has turned newspaper proprietor. His Virginian small-town weekly paper is a potty enough little affair, but it has a vast subscription list now that it is taken by all intending writers in the United States of America. From it Anderson has collected material into a volume entitled Hello Towns! In a sense I think he intends it as a counterblast to the Lewis of Main Street. It is a racy commentary on American small-town life. It is certainly one of the most American books published in English.

It is a pity that Sherwood Anderson's work is not better known in New Zealand. Anderson has lived his life in an environment similar to our own, raw, aesthetically hostile; yet by his courage and his sincerity he has become a first-rate artist. A few of the stones of this ungainly, sympathetic, Middle-Western ex-labourer and ex-businessman are as good as anything you will find in Maupassant, Chekhov, O. Henry, Maugham. But Anderson is more than a short story writer. He is a poet. It matters little that his poetry does not always shape itself into the more familiar poetical forms. How valuable his journalism is it is difficult to say. It is at any rate like nothing on earth.

CHAPTER 2

MR RHODES' HEROIC NOVELISTS

Concluding his 'Heroes In Fiction' Mr Rhodes makes his point. It was easy enough to guess that it was coming, but hardly in the way that it is put. For Mr Rhodes very nearly says that the true heroes of the novel are certain novelists living today. 'They are not merely observing and writing, they are experiencing and writing.' And it is clear that 'experiencing' means being tied to one or other of the anti-human jobs that mass production involves.

Now leaving aside that last sentence for the moment, I'd say that there are good novels of observation. Babbitt, for instance, is observed, it is written from the outside in, and it is a good novel. And it is so because of Mr Sinclair Lewis' superb capacity for observation. On the other hand you get bad novels of observation, ones like Mr Upton Sinclair's. And the same holds good of novels of experience, novels written from the inside out. You get the good and the bad, it depends on the capacity for experience of the novelist. And I'd go further and say that novels equally good about the same subject matter could be written from both the inside and the outside. They'd be very different in their treatment naturally, but they could both be good in the sense that they'd convince you of the soundness of their re-creation of life.

Mr Rhodes, however, does not admit anything like this. Dickens, for instance, was 'feeling, observing, remembering, not experiencing'. In other words he'd have done better if he'd stuck to his blacking factory. And this is what Mr Rhodes' novelist heroes do today. They work in mines and factories, and after knocking off, unless there's a political meeting on, or political work to do, they sit down and bang away at their typewriters and use up the energy that their fellow-workers let loose in being human in whatever way appeals to them most. They are the workers writing, the people being vocal, and the future of the novel is with them and their company.

Well, it's difficult to argue with anyone as romantic as Mr Rhodes, but I'll try.

The question boils down to this. Can a worker be a writer, and remain essentially a worker? I'd say no, for the reason that the bare fact of a worker's being moved to write marks him out as different from his fellow-workers; or, as Mr Rhodes would put it, as not a true proletarian who can live only by selling his labour in the industrial market; or, if you like, as not the stunted creature mentioned in Mr Rhodes' quotation from Engels. Moreover should he act on that impulse he immediately becomes a different sort of worker. He has, in fact, to learn a new job, that of working in words; a job so difficult, and demanding so much time, so much energy and so many qualities, that out of hundreds of millions of people only a handful are any good at it. It is surely obvious that workers who become writers are gifted individuals who have discovered and developed their gifts. And they make this discovery in an environment where all the chances are against them, a fact which further marks them out as being far from ordinary workers.

Furthermore it is a question whether the discovery of such a gift will turn out to be an advantage. Mr Ramsay MacDonald and Mr J. H. Thomas were workers who discovered their gifts for politics, but it would perhaps have been better for the people of England if they hadn't. And workers who become novelists run the same risks, though as the gift of an unusually thick skin isn't a gift that's of much use to novelists, the risks that they run aren't as a rule so serious. And, apart from deeper sympathies and beliefs, gratitude for a store of incident, vernacular and experience, may alone be sufficient to save them from being demoralized. That being so it is surely a bit too much to expect them to deny themselves certain advantages that the exercise of their talents may bring them, to expect them to limit themselves to the mean world of the spirit that mass production jobs necessarily involve. And in point of fact so-called proletarian novelists refuse to so deny and limit themselves. They sell their stories to Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post, they make the best bargains they can with their publishers, they sample the life of Greenwich village and Bloomsbury — things unimportant in themselves, but indicating a seeking after the larger world of the spirit. A seeking which should be open to all men, but which in this mechanical age is distorted where it isn't stamped out.

If Mr Rhodes had indicated that he is aware of this large world of the spirit, and the fact that men do seek after it, I wouldn't be arguing with him. He might have said, for instance, that the limitations of Haworth didn't prevent Emily Brontë from finding it and exploring it in a novel of extraordinary genius, and that one of his proletarian novelists might conceivably do the same thing among the tenements and meat works of Chicago. But WutheringHeights is a novel that Mr Rhodes doesn't mention for the very good reason that it does exhibit a vast world of the spirit that cannot be explained, let along explained away, by the use of Marxian principles.

And that is the only point in my argument that I really care about. Like Mr Rhodes I look forward to more and more novels of the type that he describes. Lord knows we need them badly enough, particularly in our own country. But the history of the novel alone will show that there are places in the human spirit where the Marxian word doesn't run.

CHAPTER 3

MR FAIRBURN AND THE MODERN WORLD

In his recent review of Mr Fairburn's poem, Dominion, A. C. touched on an important point. He says that Mr Fairburn has produced a 'synthesis'; but he does not enlarge his statement much beyond that. It would, however, appear to have been one of Mr Fairburn's purposes in writing the poem to produce this synthesis (for the purpose of my argument, I would rather call it 'form'); so it may be of some interest to readers if I make some enquiry (slight, I admit) as to whether a valid form has been produced.

This question of form is one which has very much engaged the attention of philosophers, particularly Thomist philosophers; but I don't want to go into all that, mainly for the reason that I know very little about it. I would say, however, that Thomist influence is evident in the poem, as these lines show:

      Our minds are molecules
    awaiting detonation: in that moment
    they shall become the pure act that, being,
    so ends itself.

It is more to my purpose to quote the following passages from Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville. Mr Mumford talks about postCivil War America being 'characterised by a single figure: the failure to achieve form....' 'the energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements: their only formal equivalent was money ...' 'Where there is form and culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where there is only energy without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and lost motion.'

That seems to me an extremely important statement.

Now a few years ago, Hart Crane, an American poet, in an extraordinary poem entitled 'The Bridge' (a poem unfortunately very little known or appreciated in New Zealand) set himself the colossal task of imposing this form that was lacking — the task, as it were, that Dante in his day succeeded in. Crane failed in his task but he probably failed because the material offered by the modern world, so unlike Dante's material, made his failure inevitable. And so much the worse, perhaps, for the modern world.

In one of his essays, however, Crane says: 'What is interesting and significant will emerge only under the conditions of our submission to, and examination of, the organic effects on us of these [he is talking about skyscrapers, steam whistles and other surface phenomena of our time — F. S.] and other fundamental factors of our experience.' And in reading his poem you feel that he really has submitted; but in his attempt to establish his form he has begun from his concrete experience of all the material of the modern world that he could possibly come in contact with.

But what is the position in Mr Fairburn's Dominion?

It seems to me that Mr Fairburn does not (at any rate in the beginning of his poem) take his materials 'raw'. 'Utopia', the first section, is a sort of newspaper world; men aren't digging potatoes or getting coal out of mines; they are abstractions moving about among the abstractions of big business, finance, journalism, etc. And by bringing his reactions into the description of it all Mr Fairburn converts it into the waste land. In other words he produces a picture of men and women and their creations that is an abstraction from an abstraction.

In the next section, 'Album Leaves', he is rather more concrete. One episode, 'Back Street', is a Chekhovian vignette that is perfectly done. In the main, however, it is still a paper world that he is dealing with.

Then comes 'Elements' — the sun, the soil, rivers, trees, flowers, fruits. The poet has thrown the abstract modern world overboard and men and women have been emptied out with it. He has arrived, as it were, at the point at which Crane begins his poem. But there are differences. Crane begins by 'accepting' (i.e., 'submitting' to) the modern world. Mr Fairburn begins by making a temporary 'acceptance' of a much more abstract version of it, and then making a complete 'rejection'. The elements he is left with are those of a latter-day garden of Eden; but the garden is untenanted owing to his eviction proceedings.

Now we come to the last two sections, 'Dialogue' and 'Struggle In A Mirror', and these sections are to me the most interesting of the poem. The poetry, particularly in its imagery, is the finest, I think, that Mr Fairburn has so far achieved, yet in every review that I have seen quotations have been taken from the earlier parts where he is more or less doing what we have for some years known he can do so well.

In 'Dialogue' we are back in the modern world again. Two men are discussing the present and the future, and it is the use that is made of Christian metaphor which suggests to me that Mr Fairburn has been somewhat arbitrary in rounding off the form that he is seeking to establish. In 'Utopia' he has described a nightmare world in which all that is implied by the Christian mythology means nothing at all; in 'Elements' he has given no hint of Christian elements; but here are some of the lines in 'Dialogue':

      .... to maintain
    faith unimpaired, the image of divinity
    within our restless hearts.

      For something is, my brother,
    that may not be destroyed: faith is its vessel....
    In us the Word endures, a seed in rock.

And in the final section after a powerful description of a world utterly wrecked and burnt up there is this conclusion:

        In the beginning was the Word:
        and in the beginning again shall be the Word:
        the seed shall spring in blackened earth
        and the Word be made flesh.

In view of the preceding sections of the poem how can Mr Fairburn justify this arbitrary use of the concept of the Word? His view of the modern world is (or I have endeavoured to show that it is) intensely abstract. I am not saying, however, that it is not valid. But surely the poem would require to be differently written to enable this final abstraction to be presented as a valid hope for the future.

As I said to begin with, I have no illusions about the adequacy of this brief enquiry. Nor do I feel competent to answer any question I may have raised. If I have stimulated readers to investigate for themselves a most important contribution to New Zealand letters I should be well satisfied.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing by Frank Sargeson, Kevin Cunningham. Copyright © 1983 Christine Cole Catley. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
A Note on the Text,
1 Sherwood Anderson,
2 Mr Rhodes' Heroic Novelists,
3 Mr Fairburn and the Modern World,
4 A. P. Gaskell: The Big Game,
5 Katherine Mansfield,
6 James Courage: The Fifth Child,
7 Dan Davin: Roads from Home,
8 Roderick Finlayson: Tidal Creek,
9 Rolf Boldrewood: Robbery Under Arms,
10 D. H. Lawrence,
11 Writing a Novel,
12 New Zealand Farm and Station Verse,
13 Janet Frame: The Lagoon,
14 Roderick Finlayson: The Schooner Came to Atia,
15 One Hundred Years of Story-Telling,
16 What is the Question?,
17 James Courage: The Young Have Secrets,
18 Can a New Zealand Writer Live by His Writing?,
19 Olive Schreiner,
20 Shakespeare and the Kiwi,
21 Henry Lawson: Some Notes After Re-Reading,
22 An Imaginary Conversation: William Yate and Samuel Butler,
23 Australian Fiction,
24 Conversation in a Train; or, What Happened to Michael's Boots,
25 Conversation with Frank Sargeson; an Interview with Michael Beveridge,
26 Two Novels by Ronald Hugh Morrieson: an Appreciation,
27 R. A. K. Mason,
28 Frank S. Anthony,
29 Roderick Finlayson: Tidal Creek,
30 Owen Marshall: Supper Waltz Wilson,
Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,