Why Is Greville Texidor Part of the Canon?

Deep South v.3. n.1. (Autumn 1997)

How is it that Greville Texidor, a relatively unknown writer, has managed to join New Zealand's literary canon? A widely-travelled English woman, Texidor wasn't even a New Zealand citizen. She resided in this country from 1940 to 1948 and died in Australia in 1964. Yet based on Vincent O'Sullivan's definition of a New Zealand short story as `one by a born New Zealander, by someone who has chosen to live here, or by a writer who has written specifically from or on New Zealand experience',[1] Texidor definitely counts as a New Zealand writer: the majority of her narratives were written and published in New Zealand, and several of them reflect her cosmopolitan dissatisfaction with the provincial lifestyle she had to endure in Northland and Auckland.

That Texidor has written New Zealand stories, however, doesn't explain why she is part of the canon. Although she rates several mentions in The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature and The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English in their general descriptions of this country's short stories and novels, about how they were published and about the nature of the society they helped to represent, Texidor's work is not well known.[2] And even if it were, a large readership would not necessarily confirm her position in the canon. Essie Summers, whose romantic novels are set in New Zealand, is still one of my favourite Mills and Boon authors. She, too, is mentioned in the Oxford History.

Texidor's inclusion in the canon is best explained by the fact that although she only lived in New Zealand for eight years nearly fifty years ago, her work has been criticised, anthologised and collected by some of this country's most prestigious literary commentators. In 1992 one of her most widely published stories, `Home Front', was included in The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, right next to Frank Sargeson's `A Great Day' and `Old Man's Story'.[3] In the acknowledgements for the Oxford anthology the editor, Vincent O'Sullivan, notes Kendrick Smithyman's 1987 edition of published and previously unpublished works by Texidor entitled In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction. On the first page of Smithyman's selection there is an acknowledgement of a subsidy from the New Zealand Book Award for Book Production in 1985.[4] In 1984 two of Texidor's stories, ` Epilogue' and `Santa Cristina' were reprinted in Celebration: An Anthology of New Zealand Writing from the Penguin New Writing Series.[5] Unquestionably, Texidor is more widely published these days than she ever was during her lifetime.

Two of New Zealand's most famous fiction writers whose position in the literary canon is incontrovertible have acknowledged Texidor's skill and significance as an author. In her autobiography, Janet Frame says of Texidor's stories that she `had been impressed and quietly depressed by their assurance and sophistication'.[6] In his 1995 biography, Frank Sargeson: A Life, Michael King relates much objective information about Texidor as one of Frank Sargeson's proteges, but it is Sargeson himself who most clearly states the reason for her inclusion in the canon. In his autobiography Sargeson values Texidor's prose style highly and asserts the importance of his encouragement and criticism, without which `Greville Texidor would never have become a name to add to the list of distinguished literary people who have visited our country'.[7]

While answering the question I pose with the title of this article, `Why is Greville Texidor Part of the Canon?', I will discuss all of her fiction published in New Zealand while she was alive. There isn't much: only her short stories `Home Front', `An Annual Affair', `Anyone Home?' and `Elegy' and her novella These Dark Glasses. I will also describe Sargeson's favourable response to these narratives and relate how he helped Texidor into print. Finally, I will examine the mostly adverse criticism which These Dark Glasses received when it was first released by The Caxton Press. It is these favourable and unfavourable responses that define Texidor's significance to the canon.

Through her stories and novella Texidor introduced into New Zealand's literature a far more desolate vision of the human condition than was imagined by her contemporaries, many of whom still adhered to beliefs left over from New Zealand's Victorian tradition. Some like R. M. Burdon in An Outlaw's Progress: A Novel of New Zealand, Dan Davin in Cliffs of Fall and Guthrie Wilson in The Feared and the Fearless and Strip Jack Naked still tended to build their convention-driven narratives around protagonists who learned (or did not learn) how to survive and contribute to the prosperity of society as a whole.[8] Despite their exploration of atheistic existentialist themes, these writers employed their characters' failure to survive outside the bounds of society as examples to confirm the necessity of social interaction and restrictions.

Texidor's perception of the human condition is closer to that of the group of writers like Frank Sargeson and John Mulgan who deliberately sought to debunk aspects of the Myth of Progress, that is, they emphasised the Myth's inadequacies by dramatising situations in which those who worked hard and were virtuous did not prosper, making it plain that New Zealand could not become a Britain of the South Seas. Although Sargeson in That Summer and Mulgan in Man Alone had already moved away from the notion that individuals must belong to society in order to be happy and prosperous, they still caused their protagonists to realise the saving grace of mateship in a diminished world.[9] In Erik de Mauny's The Huntsman in His Career, however, the Myth of Progress is thoroughly debunked at the same time as learning to value fellowship within society or between individuals has little relevance to the resolution of the protagonist's problems.[10] Even so, in a novel owing much to De Mauny's reading of works by Jean-Paul Sartre,[11] the protagonist acquires the self-knowledge and the self-centred strength to enable him to manage, on his own, a more-or-less conventional learning journey towards a modified kind of self-determination.

Texidor's debunking of illusions, however, goes further than Sargeson's, Mulgan's or even de Mauny's. The human condition as she depicts it in her fiction is such that all human structures are fraudulent, not just those left over from Britain, and all human aspirations fail, no matter how valuable they are to society as a whole. Furthermore, Texidor's damaged characters are beyond learning or teaching. They merely struggle to survive without help or hope in an environment where the negative effects of atheistic existentialism are taken for granted.

`Home Front', her first story to appear in New Zealand, was published in 1942 in the first issue of New Zealand New Writing, a little journal produced by The Progressive Publishing Society of Wellington.[12] Even though it was a direct imitation of John Lehmann's British Penguin New Writing, New Zealand New Writing was `the most comprehensive collection of the writing of the time', according to Dennis McEldowney in his chapter about publishing for The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature.[13] And according to Michael King, nearly all the writers included in the first issue (M. H. Holcroft, Rex Fairburn, Allen Curnow, Anton Vogt, Ian A. Gordon, A. P. Gaskell, Anna Kavan, Greville Texidor and others) were proteges of Frank Sargeson, whose fiction was also represented.[14] Thus, Greville Texidor published her first New Zealand short story in good company among other writers who are generally considered part of New Zealand's literary canon.

`Home Front' also appeared in John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing in 1943, retitled as `Epilogue'. When I first read it there, Texidor's story reminded me of another story Lehmann had published in Penguin New Writing--Jean-Paul Sartre's `The Wall'.[15] Sartre's story opens with Pablo Ibbieta in prison, charged with aiding a Republican leader in the Spanish Civil War. In a story that assumes the arbitrary nature of life and death and suggests the meaninglessness of values, Ibbieta endures a mock trial after which he is inevitably condemned to be shot against the wall of the title. By an absurd piece of luck, however, his death is postponed.

Texidor doesn't nail her narratives onto a philosophical framework the way Sartre does, yet `Home Front' could be described as supporting similar conclusions as `The Wall': Texidor's protagonist realises that in a war both pacifists and combatants die, no matter what their values. Jim, an aid worker, is killed while trying to deliver a machine gun. When the protagonist later suggests to Jim's parents that Jim had died heroically while aiding the Republican combatants, they are horrified because they are Quakers and committed to non-violence. In the following excerpt the protagonist renders the idea of heroism even less meaningful when he reproaches himself for telling the wrong lie:

Why couldn't he have remembered? How easy it would have been to say that their son was killed bringing in a wounded comrade. He might have been killed any day bringing children away from Madrid. The idiocy of implying that Jim was a fighter. Even his death of a hero had been an accident.[16]

`An Annual Affair', Texidor's second story to appear in New Zealand, was also published in New Zealand New Writing in 1944.[17] That Frank Sargeson liked this story very much is evident in his description of it in his autobiography. Also plain is the seriousness with which he regarded his role as the encourager and advisor of one of his proteges:

I remember when she showed me the first draft of An Annual Affair, a story which now seems likely to be judged her most beautiful piece of New Zealand writing, it immediately stuck me as unfortunate that she had written in the first person .... It seemed to me that the various and difficult problems of first person narration had not been solved, hence much excellent material had not been fully realized .... But however all that might have been, it wasn't long before I was shown a third-person version of the story which I thought an excellent piece of work.

His ensuing remarks explain what it was that attracted him to Texidor's prose:

All was now clear, I thought: it had been Greville Texidor's intention to present her North Auckland environment as a kind of petty hell inhabited by faintly damned souls: and from this point of view the story was remarkably comprehensive: everything was there, sectarianism, undercover fun, boredom, gadgets, endless trivialities: but there was besides sympathy, and the reader could not help but be moved at the same time as he was amused and entertained. Also, as one soon came to expect of Greville Texidor's work, there was a visual quality of a very high order, an almost line by line wealth of detail, and all in itself a reward.[18]

Thus, Texidor's story surveys the same killjoy environment as Sargeson's own narratives. There is also that `visual quality of a very high order', which although representative of a style often more figurative than Sargeson's, is as precisely evocative as, say, the piece of yellow soap or the warming cowpats of his depression stories.

Perhaps another reason for Sargeson's favourable response to Texidor's narratives is the similarity between their existential world views. James K. Baxter specifically identifies in Sargeson's That Summer a strong resemblance to The Outsider, a French existentialist novel by Albert Camus. That some of the French were sympathetic to Sargeson's vision of the world is witnessed by the fact that his narrative was published in France as Cet Été là.[19] Baxter further comments that `the insistence on detail in all of Sargeson's stories is characteristic of writing that verges on existentialism', and `the detail is a web stretched over an appalling inner void; at times it wears thin and one can see the blackness underneath.'[20]

The same could be said of Texidor's fiction. In the following excerpt from `An Annual Affair' most of the details are filtered through the naive consciousness of a teenage girl named Joy. Like Bill, the fallible narrator of That Summer, she hardly understands the significance of what she sees:

Dad had found a pair of pink art silk panties that Mavis had had for Christmas. They had been in Mum's bag for Mavis to change to. Dad kept holding them up and squinting between the legs in a comical way. The Reverend Allum went right on about the settler who had stuck in the mud and they never found the body, but Joy felt hot all over. As if something awful might happen. She got up quietly and walked away to be out of sight of Dad and the lot of them. (p. 164)

`An Annual Affair' was reprinted in The World's Classics in 1953, which anthology was retitled New Zealand Short Stories I: The Making of a New Zealander when it was republished in 1976. Dan Davin, editor of the later edition, evidently considered Texidor a New Zealand writer because he included her among the authors he believed contributed to the geographical and historical picture which he wished to draw of New Zealanders. In his introduction Davin praises `An Annual Affair' as an example of sharp observation of the rural Auckland scene. He also uses it as an example of the mood of New Zealand's notable post-Depression writers. According to Davin, `the earlier optimism has gone'.[21]

`Anyone Home?', the third of Texidor's stories to be published in New Zealand, is definitely not optimistic about a Northland farming family's potential for happiness. Its plot revolves around Roy who was terribly wounded during World War II and has just returned to New Zealand with plans to marry his fiancee, Lily. Roy's physical wound may have healed, but the psychic wound will probably affect everything he does for the rest of his life. While in hospital Roy had struggled with the thought that his life was meaningless. Back in New Zealand, this struggle becomes the story's main conflict. Having survived a war where death is an arbitrary event, Roy is determined to exercise more control over his destiny. Like Lily and her family, however, he can't leap the gap between his expectations and the actualities they hide. Roy wants to be happy, yet everything he sees, hears or does reminds him of death.

The title of Texidor's story, `Anyone Home?', recalls Allen Curnow's poem `House and Land' which appeared in Island and Time, published by The Caxton Press in 1941. In his poem Curnow characterises New Zealand as a `land of settlers/ With never a soul at home'[22] and begins to prove this assertion in the first stanza. The cowman who speaks to the contemporary historian knows nothing of the history of the farm where he works: `I just live here,' he says. Curnow emphasises the alienation of Miss Wilson, the surviving daughter of an old settler family, just as ironically . Rather than trying to settle comfortably in what she perceives to be the ignorant and unpredictable present, Miss Wilson thinks back to the days when her father owned all the land `from Waiau to the mountains' and even further beyond that to an idealised English past.

Despite the similarity of setting, Texidor's story reveals a much bleaker outlook. It dramatises the even heavier sense of isolation and alienation felt by a returned soldier who cannot pretend to feel `at home' anywhere on earth. In other words, `Anyone Home?' surveys the same territory as many a twentieth century existentialist narrative. For example, when the omniscient narrator occupies Roy's point of view during a ghastly welcome home and engagement party, Roy silently questions the significance of the wartime reminiscences of an old family friend. To Roy, the memories are as hollow as everything around him in Lily's home:

What purpose? Roy wanted to ask. For what purpose? What meaningless ordeal? (While the talk goes on, rising and falling, while the light shrieks silently, while the eye strains, while the brain bleeds, to lend a semblance of purpose to the livid patterns on the dark walls, endless combinations of ships or tables or equally of coffins, valueless forms that rise and fall and regroup; bodiless problems holding no solution.) (p. 178)

Why do I consider Texidor's vision of the human condition to be more desolate than that of her New Zealand contemporaries? As is emphasised in the excerpt above, there can be no hope for Roy. By the end of the story he has failed, not surprisingly, to connect with any of the other characters. He breaks off his engagement to Lily because everything about her reminds him of meaninglessness and death.

Of all the Texidor stories Sargeson mentions specifically, he is most critical of `Anyone Home?'. As he says in a Landfall article, `the satirical intentions ... are here overprolonged, and also tend to misfire'.[23] Despite this reservation, Sargeson included `Anyone Home?' in Speaking for Ourselves, the 1945 anthology of New Zealand short stories he edited for The Caxton Press. According to Michael King, Sargeson's anthology contains work mostly by the `Sargeson group' of writers, that is, stories by Roderick Findlayson, A. P. Gaskell, G. R. Gilbert, D. W. Ballantyne, Maurice Duggan, John Reece Cole, Greville Texidor and E. P. Dawson. King adds that much of the anthology is `shaped in greater or smaller measure by the Sargeson short story model, and by the grooming which he had given individual drafts sent to him for appraisal'.[24] Thanks to Sargeson Texidor was published for the third time in New Zealand, again in the company of other of his proteges.

`Elegy', the fourth of Texidor's stories to appear in New Zealand, doesn't focus on its protagonist's desperation quite as intensely as `Anyone Home?', but it does satirise the rural Northland Texidor found so uncongenial. In the excerpt below, the protagonist's attitude towards the complacency and leftist pretensions of her hosts Jim and Jess wavers between ironic humour and annoyance:

Farming's a great life, they tell you, provided you don't let yourself go to seed. They have not gone to seed. Though they are up so early and on the go all day, and live so far out, they manage to run into the settlement for the Workers' Enlightenment lectures, leaving their child with the neighbours. With their new radio they can get Russia just as clear as if it were in the room. They have overseas magazines and belong to a book club. The friends who come for a nice rest at weekends are all interested in various things. But still those weekends are full of blank spaces. (p. 189)

That Texidor is aiming beyond satire, however, becomes evident when the protagonist describes the view shown off by her hosts:

There wasn't much I could say about the view. It was strictly neutral. There were the rich wet paddocks, there was the white water and the grey sky and the tin-roofed house that should have made the centre. It was worse since the tree had gone. Eyes wandered. There wasn't any place they wanted to rest. It might have been this that made these weekends so long. You could sleep, of course; but there wasn't any place you wanted to rest. (p. 190)

Vaguely disturbing rather than unnaturally heightened as in `Anyone Home', the scene above still implies an existentialist questioning of certainties: landscape that should have been beautiful or dramatic or even ugly was `strictly neutral'; the homestead was not centred; as the protagonist concluded wearily about a rural scene stripped of all meaning, `there wasn't any place you wanted to rest'. The story itself ends inconclusively.

The protagonist's exhaustion seems appropriate in a story published so near to the end of World War II: `Elegy' first appeared in Anvil in September of 1945. But because Texidor lived in New Zealand throughout the war, the mood of depletion in `Elegy' is more likely a hold over from the Spanish conflict of the mid 1930s when she was closely involved with the failing Republican cause.

Texidor's novella These Dark Glasses represents her even darker interpretation of that time. Published in 1949 by The Caxton Press, it concerns the last nine days of a young communist sympathiser who has realised that the Republican cause in Spain is hopeless.[25] Sargeson liked These Dark Glasses very much and went to considerable trouble to see that it was published. When Texidor had left New Zealand for Australia, he corresponded with her about her novella, checked the proofs and generally oversaw its publication by The Caxton Press. As Sargeson later explained in his autobiography, `Without a hint from the text that would in any way connect it with New Zealand, the book owed its publication to financial assistance arranged by ... Sir Joseph Heenan.' (Heenan was then the head of the Department of Internal Affairs.) As Sargeson put it, `thanks to Sir Joseph, These Dark Glasses, quite apart from the question of its literary merits, remains the oddest book ever to have been sponsored by a New Zealand Government.'[26]

Sargeson appreciated Texidor's novella, but These Dark Glasses wasn't well-received critically when it first appeared. Three of the reviews published soon after its release mention the nihilism of Texidor's story somewhat disapprovingly. As I explained earlier, writers like Davin or Wilson would sometimes use the plots of their stories to demonstrate their disapproval of the nihilistic behaviour which was popularly associated with existentialism. Judging from the tone they adopt, Texidor's story seems to have evoked a similar response from its early commentators.

Helen Shaw's review in Here and Now, for example, identifies Texidor's narrative with the futility of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. `Impression rather than novel', she asserts, `this is rootless cosmopolitan material sucked from prewar Europe's wasteland, and deliberately not a grain of philosophic worth appears.'[27]

Similarly, a review for the New Zealand Listener rather obviously expresses Philip Wilson's attitude towards These Dark Glasses with its title, `Despair in the Sun':[28]

These Dark Glasses is a tale of disillusionment set in the French Riviera, and from its pathological overtones it reads like the product of a sick mind. Yet it is written with such skill, and is so artfully contrived, that its literary merit cannot be ignored.

In a third contemporary book review, J. C. Reid identifies These Dark Glasses with prewar Europe when he discerns the influence of Cyril Connolly's short novel The Rock Pool.[29] In his review Reid accepts that Connolly's novel `is perfectly of its time, with atmosphere, period and character deftly blended'. Texidor's story, on the other hand, evokes a slightly later period, the Spanish Civil War. According to Reid, it lacks the utter appropriateness of The Rock Pool. When he describes the mood of These Dark Glasses as `Sartrean existentialist' and finds it `somewhat anachronistic and more appropriate to a later period, in which disillusionment can be rationalized in a form of retrospective cancellation', Reid is suggesting that Texidor has prematurely assigned to her protagonist the cosmic sort of disillusionment that became fashionable in Parisian cafes around World War II. I disagree. Like Ernest Hemingway who at least a decade earlier had portrayed World War I as contaminating every aspect of his characters' lives, Texidor has used the exhaustion and despair caused by armed conflict as a metaphor for the unhappy human condition. It may be that what Texidor's novel most lacks for a committed Catholic like Reid is no so much the aptness of a novel `perfectly of its time' as an implicit sense of moral value. Connolly's degraded protagonist reaches the end of The Rock Pool in a miserable condition, as much a victim of his own excesses as of the times. Texidor's protagonist, by contrast, is too knowing to consider herself a victim. The novella presents everything she has ever done as meaningless.

Briefly, These Dark Glasses is the story of Ruth Brown, a young English communist sympathiser who is helping the Republican cause in Spain. Since her friend Victor was killed in the Spanish Civil War, she has succumbed increasingly to depression. During the nine days of her holiday at a seaside resort Ruth keeps a journal which comprises the story's narrative. In the final entry she seems to be moving towards the location she had previously proposed as the site of her suicide, yet the reader is left unsure about her fate.

Beyond this summary of Ruth's dismal holiday journal, These Dark Glasses embodies a vast tragedy, and it is here that the earlier quoted reviewers have failed to appreciate either Texidor's intent or the irony she used to accomplish it. That the story is more than superficially depressing is signalled by Texidor's early and somewhat heavy-handed pun on Victor's name: his death confirms for Ruth that the Leftist cause in Spain is by no means VICTORious. This in turn signifies the insufficiency of Ruth's general political beliefs, which in turn signals the failure of every belief.

One of the passages in These Dark Glasses which Sargeson singled out for praise supports my conclusion that Texidor's place in the New Zealand canon can be defined by the favourable and unfavourable criticism her novella received:

The boat shrinks and stands stationary in space, with its cargo of seated dolls that shine like chocolate papers. Soon it is only the rim of a white nest enclosing coloured bonbons.

Now there is no boat but a dark dot, seaweed, seabird, or a trick of the light .... (p. 83)

Ruth's perception of the boat (and everything else) fades as if this really is her last living view.

By his own admission, Sargeson certainly encouraged the `visual quality of a very high order' and `the almost line by line wealth of detail' evident in the excerpt above by criticising Texidor's writing and by helping her into various publications. Judging by the disapproving tone of their comments, two of the three contemporary reviewers of These Dark Glasses failed to value the skilful writing behind the despair it evoked. The third, although he labelled Texidor's novella the product of `a sick mind', could not ignore its `literary merit'. Given New Zealand literature's Victorian heritage, it is perhaps not surprising that Texidor's depiction of life as a hopeless struggle went mostly unappreciated. With Sargeson's assistance, however, parts of Texidor's vision of the human condition were incorporated into New Zealand's emerging prose canon.

NOTES

[1] The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, ed. Vincent O'Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992), x.

[2] Patrick Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Penguin, 1990); The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[3] The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, pp.

[4] Greville Texidor, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction, ed. Kendrick Smithyman (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1987).

[5] Celebration: An Anthology of New Zealand Writing from the Penguin New Writing Series, ed. Anthony Stones (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), pp. 118-125; 133-141.

[6] Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table: An Autobiography, vol. 2 (Auckland: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 173.

[7] Frank Sargeson, Sargeson (Auckland: Penguin, 1981), p. 348.

[8] R. M. Burdon, Outlaw's Progress: A Novel of New Zealand (Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, 1943); Dan Davin, Cliffs of Fall (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945); Guthrie Wilson, The Feared and the Fearless (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1954); Strip Jack Naked (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1957).

[9] John Mulgan, Man Alone (Auckland: Longman Paul Limited, 1949, rpt. 1984); Frank Sargeson, `That Summer', Collected Stories, 1935-1963 (Auckland: Longman Paul Limited, 1964, rpt. 1969).

[10] Erik de Mauny, The Huntsman in His Career (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1949).

[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. Erik de Mauny (London: Secker and Warburg, Lindsay Drummond, 1948). De Mauny's novel borrows some of its atmosphere and background scenes from Sartre's play The Flies. Frank Sargeson in `Anxious Huntsman', a review of de Mauny's novel for the New Zealand Listener 21 no. 534 (16 September 1949), 12, criticises `a number of borrowings that the author has not fully assimilated into his own personal manner of feeling and thinking'.

[12] Greville Texidor, `Home Front', New Zealand New Writing 1 (December 1942), 62-71.

[13] `Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, p. 573.

[14] Michael King, Frank Sargeson: A Life (Auckland: Penguin, 1995), p. 220.

[15] Jean-Paul Sartre, `The Wall', trans. Phillis Duveen, Penguin New Writing 7 (June 1941), 19-41.

[16] This and all subsequent quotations of Texidor's fiction have been taken from In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction, ed. Kendrick Smithyman (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1987).

[17] Greville Texidor, `An Annual Affair', New Zealand New Writing 3 (June 1944), 39-52.

[18] Sargeson, pp. 349-350.

[19] Frank Sargeson, Cet Été là, trans. Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire (Paris: Editions du Bateau Ivre, 1946).

[20] James K. Baxter, `Back to the Desert', James K. Baxter as Critic: A Selection from His Literary Criticism, ed. Frank McKay (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), p. 173.

[21] New Zealand Short Stories 1: The Making of a New Zealander, ed. Dan Davin (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1976), v.

[22] Allen Curnow, `House and Land', An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, second edition, ed. Vincent O'Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 115-116.

[23] Frank Sargeson, `Greville Texidor: 1902-1964', Landfall 74 (June 1965), 136.

[24] Frank Sargeson: A Life, p. 252.

[25] Greville Texidor, These Dark Glasses (Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1949).

[26] Sargeson, Sargeson, pp. 351-352.

[27] Helen Shaw, Here and Now: An Independent Monthly Review 1:1 (October 1949), 32.

[28] Philip Wilson, `Despair in the Sun', New Zealand Listener 21, no. 536 (30 September 1949), 16.

[29] J. C. Reid, Landfall 3 (December 1949), 376-378.