1950s: Sons of Sargeson

March 1, 2020

By AHNZ

Human communities seem to require one man to be a bolt of lightning at least one time to coalesce their latent primordial brilliance around. Some leader who, if nothing else, models for others how to take themselves seriously.

“Critics began to use this term ‘Sons of Sargeson.’ They were referring of course to this series of writers who became confident about being writers and achived publication in part as a result of Frank’s intervention in their life.” – Michael King; Perfectly Frank – The Life of a New Zealand Writer (1998); NZ on Screen

Split Enz had Phil Judd

Aerosmith had Steve Tyler

Pink Floyd had Syd Barrett

Here we have Karl Stead attributing this role to Frank Sargeson…

“He [Sargeson] powerfully influenced everybody, all the writers, particularly younger writers, in the attitude to writing how serious a business it was. And how it was, properly, really a full-time carer that nothing else should really be allowed to get in the way of it.

“And a genuine New Zealand literature was in the making. And that we were fortunate because there had been a Colonial phase and we had lived beyond that. And there was that sense with the Curnow Generation of poets and with Sargeson’s fiction writers that this was *a* New Zealand literature that we didn’t have to be ashamed of or apologise for.” – CK Stead; Kaleidoscope (1986); NZ on Screen

Unfortunately, as usual, our literary figures and their ‘Sarge’ were cursed with Leftism which, as always, metastasized into Statism.

As the above interview shows, Stead struggled like Curnow’s Pheonix Generation did too and that is connected with their greatness. Now a state programme, our literature has become weak, Politically Correct, stale, and State-Worshipping.

How can you give birth to a dancing star in the pay of what J.K.Baxter called The State: “The lion-headed incubus?” Can the same book be written in a State-sponsored ‘writers cabin’ on a New Zealand Post-sponsored scholarship as could be written in Sargeson’s private back-yard cottage? Only if you’re content with the fact that someone like Tim Wilson is one of our great writers!

If New Zealand literature has any future then it’s Anarchist.

—

Frank Sargeson died on 1 March, 1982

Image ref. Portrait of Frank Sargeson (fipped hz);Clifton Firth; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

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