The Expatriate Myth by Helen Bones

Author:Helen Bones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press
Published: 2018-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘The whole thing’s been a farce’: New Zealand writers in London and overseas

Newly arrived in London in 1929, hopeful novelist Monte Holcroft had come from New Zealand to ‘try for a foothold’ among the literary greats. It was not to be a simple undertaking, however. One can only imagine how disheartening it was for him to hear from Jane Mander, soon after stepping off the boat, that he ought to go immediately back to New Zealand while he still had the money to buy himself a ticket.1 Life in literary London was not easy, and Holcroft soon learned that being there would not necessarily increase his chances of becoming a best-selling author. He found the cold of the London winter ‘demoralising’:

after the peace of Lourdes and the excitements of Paris the big city seemed damp, cold and indifferent. I had found it easier to write in Lourdes and looked now for a place in the country which would give me similar quietness and perhaps a touch of human warmth.2

This interlude did not last long; fearing that he would be ‘overtaken at last by grinding poverty’, Holcroft returned home to Christchurch after receiving a ticket from a concerned family friend. He was in part reluctant to leave, but also attracted by the idea of returning to the ‘haven’ ‘in my own country and among my own people, in a city not far from mountains, with everywhere a feeling of space and freedom’.3 If writers left New Zealand expecting their luck to change suddenly then they were inevitably disappointed.

Rather than coming to the realisation that being in London was not a guarantee of success, as they could already do most things from home, Holcroft and other New Zealand writers tended to blame their frustrated suppositions on the fact that they were New Zealanders. Partly to justify their own decisions to go to Britain, they sometimes assumed that success required becoming an ‘exile’ and rescinding all ties to New Zealand. This was in part because of expectations resulting from the trope of the writer as ‘exile’ that strengthened with the growth of the modernist movement (and ‘deliberate’ exiles are discussed more fully in Chapter Five). The mistaken belief that they were disadvantaged in New Zealand gave some writers unrealistic expectations of success in Britain. Meg Tasker describes a similar misplaced belief among Australian writers: that London, as the ‘centre of literary culture’, was ‘the best place in which to exercise their talents and ambitions’.4 Initial enthusiasm more often than not turned to disillusionment as they discovered that the London literary scene and London life in general were more challenging and less glamorous than they expected. Instead of acknowledging their unrealistic expectations or even their own failure to produce quality work, they tended to blame the attitude of the British to ‘outsiders’. Some even came to the conclusion that the only two options were remaining as ‘outsiders’ and failing, or losing their individuality and resigning themselves to overseas exile.

When writers did leave New Zealand, they most often went to London.

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