‘In moments of depression, perhaps at the end of a long struggle with a virus,” wrote a former editor of the Listener, the great Monte Holcroft, “the stranger aspects of our civilisation make us wonder if life itself has not become a sort of illness.”
Holcroft did not say what virus he was referring to, but the editorial was published on October 12, 1962, a month after the Sabin polio vaccine was rolled out to New Zealand adults, completing population coverage and effectively ending the epidemic that had washed back seven times in the previous half century. It had indeed been a long struggle. We have been through a much shorter struggle with a virus and we might look around now and also perceive “a sort of illness” in “the stranger aspects of our civilisation”.
The new malaise of which Holcroft complained was a contemporary culture in which, he believed, music, drama and the visual arts had swung so hard towards experiment and abstraction that they had lost touch with their basic jobs.
He ventured that the triumph of scientific method, which had “reduced the world to elements that can be combined ingeniously to supply us with drugs and materials”, had been mirrored in the arts. Not to worry, he concluded, the “search for coherence and wholeness” that was the very essence of life would return soon enough.
Holcroft’s editorials are collected into two books, The Eye of the Lizard (1949-59) and Graceless Islanders (1959-67), and they are from different countries. The former is distinctly post-war: quirky little think pieces take their cue from events in the homeland, the threat of the “hydrogen bomb” lingers like a stalled cloud and New Zealand’s blinds are drawn. As the 60s dawn over Graceless Islanders, the blinds are thrown back and Holcroft settles into his rhythm as a kindly, liberal steward to our changing understandings of race, sex, identity and public freedoms.
More than anything, Holcroft wrote on the assumption that the overall arc of our story would bend upwards. Progress might invite some irritations, tuneless tunes and the decline of handwriting among them, but it would happen and we would find our level. The kids, he would invariably conclude, are all right.
A new government has arrived with an avowed commitment to reversing change, even arguing that it doesn’t need regulatory impact statements from Treasury because it is simply putting things back how they were – even if that means how they were before the 1980s’ fourth Labour government and its works in empowering the Waitangi Tribunal, establishing te reo Māori as an official language and formulating Treaty of Waitangi principles at the prompting of the Court of Appeal.
Holcroft was never obliged to confront climate change but he would have been a fan of the 15-minute city. More than 60 years ago, he lamented the way “the motor car extends its influence across a modern city” and hoped that, “Some day, when the nightmare at last is over, pedestrians may once again be able to walk slowly from one place to another, even in the city itself, their senses no longer diverted from their true function – the enjoyment of the world – by the need to protect themselves from the noise and lethal movement of traffic.”
Some day, the angry culture wars over roads and race and gender will dissipate, just as songs returned to melody and plays had stories again. We’ll discover what really remains true, even as the world changes and we change ourselves. We might be set for a few years of conflict about understandings of both of those: what the world is and who we all are. But, as the editor wrote, the search for coherence and wholeness will surely resume.
