Modernism or Exile? E.H. McCormick and Letters and Art in New Zealand

Upon its publication in 1940 E.H. McCormick’s Letters and Art in New Zealand immediately became a landmark in his country’s cultural landscape. Indeed, the book remains one of the most significant ever written in New Zealand. This “lucid and invaluable”1 text garnered only one negative review for over thirty years and remained in print for half a century, establishing the author as the first professional critic of New Zealand literature. McCormick’s work provided a basis for both literary and cultural reflection on New Zealand, and has the added significance of being the chief accomplishment of the 1940 Centennial Celebrations. Written in a period of both local and global upheaval, and with governmental backing, Letters and Art contains a surfeit of information for literary historians interested in the institutional and aesthetic origins of New Zealand identity. Revealingly, the key to understanding the book lies in the author’s exploration of what he believed was an ambiguous and troubling relationship between New Zealand and the outside world. Caught between the heady critical world of modernist Europe and exile in the South Pacific, McCormick posited that his situation was analogous to that of New Zealand culture generally. In doing so, he advanced a thesis that has yet to be resolved. Perhaps surprisingly given his background, Eric McCormick found himself thrust into the centre of the European melting pot in 1931 when he moved to England to attend Cambridge University. The decade to follow would witness unprecedented social, economic and political turmoil: a global economic depression; the rise in Marxist and Socialist ideology on the Left and Fascist tendencies on the Right; civil war in Modernism or Exile?