On the Margins? New Zealand Little Magazines from Freed to and (Part II: CRITICISM & C‪)‬

I propose to examine here the recent emergence in this country of an oppositional literary scene capable of mounting a sustained challenge to New Zealand's major literary institutions: Landfall and Islands. By 'institutions', I mean of course, not merely two journals but also the sets of attitudes and assumptions of which they are representative. I shall concentrate my discussion on two little magazines: The Word is Freed which ran through five numbers between 1969 and 1972, and And which ran through four numbers between August 1983 and October 1985. My contention is that in the years between 1972 and 1985 a change occurred in the relations between the major institutions and what C.K. Stead, in his review of Michael Morrissey's anthology The New Fiction in 1986, has called 'the margins'. (1) One indication of this change is found, I would suggest, in the differences in tone which Stead has adopted towards the literary stances and personnel associated with the two journals in question. From as early as 1972 Stead showed himself very receptive to at least some aspects of Freed, reviewing David Mitchell's Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby extremely favourably in the first number of Islands, (2) which came out around the time of the disappearance of Freed, and conferring his approval on Ian Wedde whom Stead has described as one of Freed's instigators. (3) By 1979 in 'From Wystan to Carlos' Stead was maintaining that the major line in contemporary New Zealand poetry, which he characterizes as 'open form', had entered chiefly by way of Freed. (4) What is interesting here is not Stead's contribution to the by now tedious squabble about 'moderns' versus 'modernists' (an argument which goes back under different names at least as far as Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise [1949]), (5) but rather Stead's determination to put at the centre of local literary history a movement which had deliberately situated itself on the margins, and had done so not out of resentment or even a sense of exclusion but because the 'mainstream' held no attractions. In effect, Stead in 'From Wystan to Carlos' was in the business of institutionalizing Freed: sorting out its major figures from its minor ones, deciding which Freed innovations were acceptable and which (chiefly what Stead called 'surrealism') were not, and connecting it historically with such canonical predecessors as Phoenix, which went through its own four numbers in Auckland in the 1930s. The whole exercise constituted a calculated process of revision by which a subversive literary movement was purged of its most dangerous excesses and resituated in the 'mainstream'.