Isabella Banks: The Manchester Man (1976)

The Manchester Man (1876) is a triple-decker novel by 'Mrs. G. Linnæus Banks' according to the cover, although we probably prefer to call her Isabella Banks in a feminist age. This is a regional novel in that the author was born in Manchester and all of the events take place in Manchester or the surrounding area, and Banks self-consciously makes use of her considerable knowledge of local history throughout the novel. Several characters in the book also existed in the 'real' world: the radicals Henry 'Orator' Hunt (1773–1835) and Samuel Bamford (1788–72); the teacher Mrs Broadbent (a presence apparently strongly recognized by at least one ex-pupil); but above all Joshua Brookes (1754–1821), the eccentric clergyman Banks felt she couldn't exclude from this portrait of the Manchester of the early nineteenth century.

The book begins in 1799 with the saving of an orphan baby in the flooded River Irk by the tanner Simon Clegg, who brings him up as Jabez Clegg. Living in a deprived (but loving) environment, Jabez shows great promise and is granted a place at the Blue Coat School, but finds a lifelong enemy in privileged Laurence Aspinall from the neighbouring school, who calls Jabez a 'charity boy'. But within a little more than three decades Jabez – a person of 'lowly' birth who was expected to conform to the limitations of his caste (as class was then considered to be) – rises from an apprenticeship in Ashton's smallware business, through a respected position in the same firm, to a joint partnership with the large, thriving business of Ashton, Chadwick and Clegg: he is of course The Manchester Man. And he marries the two men's daughters: first Ellen Chadwick until she dies, and then (his lifelong love) Augusta Ashton.

What my above summary ignores is the dichotomy between Jabez Clegg and Laurence Aspinall: essentially, Jabez is a self-effacing angel, and Laurence is a juvenile frog-roaster who becomes an alcoholic, adulterous wife batterer. That perhaps sounds a little reductive, but in the first two volumes it is difficult for the reader to identify with the angelic Jabez: for instance, he refuses to identify Laurence as his (very violent) aggressor, and when he marries Ellen it is essentially because she will wilt away without him: only when we see the conflict within him during his first marriage does a more than cardboard version of him begin to emerge. There is, of course, never any question that Laurence will manifest any humanity, apart from by subterfuge.

The shadow of Dickens is very large here, and in some respects this book can be seen as a (weaker) northern version of some of Dickens's novels.

The local history in this book, especially that relating to literature, is interesting. In the 1896 edition of The Manchester Man, in a note in the Appendix about the Sun Inn, Banks states:

 

'I am not aware of any ancient record of this inn, either as a licensed house or a private abode. It was brought into prominence when Mr. William Earnshaw, a native of Colne, one of my father's old friends, and the father of one of my pupils, migrated from Cheetham to become the landlord, drew round him the literary men of the town, and inscribed the legend on the front, "Poets' Corner." This was in the early forties, when John Critchley Prince was in the ascendant and lived over the way. A glimpse of the inn may be seem through the College Gateway initial, and again, in the larger view of the Old Grammar School, comes a shoulder of antiquarian interest where a narrow strip of window marks the sometime "Poets' Fratorium."

 

Sadly, as far as I'm aware there is now no evidence of the pub's existence (for instance in the form of a plaque, etc) in this area.

The Grave of Photographer Samuel Bourne (1834–1912), General Cemetery, Nottingham

This is one I forgot about a few weeks ago when I was looking for (but didn't find) the Rev. Samuel Cox's grave. Samuel Bourne is most noted for the photographic work he did in India from 1863 to 1870. He married Mary Tolley in 1967 at George Street Baptist Church, Nottingham, where he later settled and where he died at their house on Clumber Road East.

 

 

'IN
LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL BOURNE;
DIED APRIL 24^TH 1912,

AGED 78 YEARS.

ALSO OF MARY
WIFE OF THE ABOVE,
DIED NOVEMBER 26^TH 1912,
AGED 68 YEARS.'

 

I believe this is the only online photo of his grave, but please don't email me to ask where it is as I don't remember: being unsure of the dates, I wasn't certain that I'd got the right Samuel Bourne! As usual, though, I have no objection to the non-commercial reproduction of my photos as long as they're attributed to me with a link to my blog or to this blog post.

L'Abbaye de Créteil, Val de Marne, France

In autumn 1906 a literary and artistic group moved into 37–39 rue du Moulin in Créteil, Val de Marne and christened it 'l'Abbaye de Créteil' after being inspired by the utopian Abbaye de Thélème in Rabelais's Gargantua. The experiment was the brainchild of the poet Charles Vildrac, although it only lasted until January 1908. In 2007 Créteil commemorated the centenary of the 'abbey' with a 47-page booklet, which of course is in French and the online link is below. The housing area Mont-Mesly a little to the south-east of the village – built some decades after the end of the experiment – remembers l'Abbaye de Créteil's brief inhabitants in a number of names of streets and buildings. When I return to the Paris area later this year I shall have more to add about this.

A plaque on the wall of number 37 reads:

'René ARCOS, Georges DUHAMEL,
Albert GLEIZES, Lucien LINARD, Henri MARTIN,
Alexandre MERCEREAU, Charles VILDRAC,
RÉALISANT LE RÊVE CHANTÉ
DANS SES POÈMES PAR L'UN D'EUX
FONDÈRENT DANS CETTE MAISON
EN 1906
L'ABBAYE DE CRÉTEIL
DE GRANDES ET BELLES ŒUVRES PRIRENT LEUR ENVOL ICI
ET FIRENT PAR LE MONDE MIEUX AIMER NOS LETTRES
ET NOS ARTS.'

Below are several related links, the second of which is a 42-minute video:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Le Centenaire de l'abbaye de Créteil
L'Unanisme et L'abbaye de Créteil: 2 L'Abbaye (1906 1908)
Abbaye de Créteil (Wikipédia in French)
Abbaye de Créteil (Wikipedia in English)

Isabella Banks and The Manchester Man

The above sketch is from a photo of Isabella Banks, a writer most noted for her triple-decker novel The Manchester Man (1876). She is also sometimes called – as a fusion of her birth name and her married name – Isabella Varley Banks, although here she self-effacingly calls herself Mrs G. Linnæus Banks. (Which incidentally is also the appellation used after a quotation from the same novel on Tony Wilson's headstone in Southern Cemetery, Chorlton-cum-Hardy – post to follow in due course.)

There's a bar and nightclub in Princess Street called the Joshua Brooks after a prominent character in The Manchester Man, although it's unfortunate that there's a slight orthographical difference – in the book his name is Brookes.^* Interestingly, this bar is almost next door to the Lass o' Gowrie, which is the name of a poem by Carolina Nairne, and that pub also has the poem written above what I assume used to be a corner door. (It's also very close to the Peveril of the Peak pub, which of course is the title of a novel by Sir Walter Scott.)

 

What's more, there is also another pub about a mile away, in Portsmouth Street, called the Jabez Clegg after the protagonist in The Manchester Man. I still have to take a photo of that place.

 

^*Banks bases the character on a real Rev. Joshua Brookes (1754–1821),  an eccentric – sketched below from a photograph – who also briefly appears in Richard Parkinson's novel The Old Church Clock (1843) as the Reverend Joseph Rivers.

 Below, a link to an online edition of the complete novel:

 

––––––––––––––––––––

Isabella Banks: The Manchester Man

Elizabeth Raffald in Manchester and Stockport

Elizabeth Raffald (née Whitaker) was born in Doncaster in 1733 and worked for fifteen years at Arley Hall, Cheshire, where she became housekeeper. She met her future husband John Raffald there. The couple moved to Manchester in the early 1760s, where John had a florist's and Elizabeth was involved in a number of business enterprises, although she is most noted for her highly successful book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), which she dedicated to her former employer Lady Elizabeth Warburton.

 

In Exchange Square, Manchester:

 

'ELIZABETH RAFFALD

1733–1781

Cookery book author and publisher of

the first Manchester trade directory

 

Established a cookery school, shop

and domestic service agency

near this site'

 

 

The Arden Arms in Millgate, Stockport, was rebuilt in 1815 by John and Elizabeth's nephew, George Raffald junior. It was on land originally used as a market garden and passed on from John to his brother George Raffald senior in 1760. Its interior is unusually well preserved.

 

Elizabeth Raffald was buried a few hundred yards from here, in the parish churchyard.

Thomas De Quincey connections in Manchester, UK

'Under this Stone lie the Remains
of M^rs Sarah Penſon Relict of the
Late Samuel Penſon of London
who died Jan^y 1790 aged 69 Years.
Alſo of Tho^s Quincey Merchant
who died July 18^th Aged 40 y^rs.

Alſo of Jane Quincey Daughter of
Tho^s & Eliz^th Quincey born Sep^r 8
1786 died March 18^th 1790.
Alſo of Elizabeth Quincey their
Daughter who died June 2^d 1792
Aged 9 Years.'

 

This tombstone stands close to St Ann's Church in St Ann Street, Manchester, where the writer Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) was born. His father Thomas Quincey (1753–93) was a successful textile merchant who married Elizabeth (née Penson (c. 1756–1846)) in 1780.

 

Thomas De Quincey was seven years old on the death of his sister, with whom he had a very strong bond: in 1845, in Suspiria de Profondis, he wrote about his intense emotions on seeing Elizabeth on her deathbed.

 

De Quincey is buried in St Cuthbert's churchyard, Edinburgh.

 

^*Thomas Quincey was a founder member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and author of Short Tour in the Midland Counties of England (1774).

Joseph Joffo: Un sac de billes (1973)

Joseph Joffo's Un sac de billes (A Bag of Marbles) was translated into eighteen languages and turned into a movie, and yet I can't help thinking that the book is still very little known, say, in the English-speaking world. And yet this autobiographical work gives a remarkable description of a subject that is not often spoken of elsewhere: the plight of the Jews in occupied France.

The book spans three years (1941 to 1944) and is narrated by ten-year-old Joseph whose father (himself a seven-year-old refugee from Russia when the tsar is seeking young 'emissaries') decides that the time is right to flee south to relative safety: as a barber in a Jewish area of Paris, he realizes that it is only a matter of time before his family will be sent to German 'work camps'. His decision comes when the compulsory wearing of the badge declaring 'juif' (Jew) on his sons' school jacket lapels (not on the front of their jackets as seen in the still from Jacques Doillon's film) results in them being repeatedly called 'Youpin' (Yid), and earns Joseph a cauliflower ear and his twelve-year-old brother Maurice a black eye.

A sac de billes describes a life of frequent flight, initially when the brothers join their two elder brothers in Menton via the metro to the Gare d'Austerlitz, then the train to Dax, the bus to Hagetmau, then clandestinely over the demarcation line, etc. They are never settled, and their stay in Menton is curtailed by the fear of them being forced to join the S. T. O. (Service de Travail Obligatoire), meaning that they might be sent to Germany into the lion's den (or la queule du loup as the narrator puts it) in order to, for instance, cut enemy hair.

In 'Dialogue avec mes lecteurs' – a twenty-page afterword – Joffo reveals that in spite of the very real dangers the boys faced, it was not until they underwent four-week interrogations at the Excelsior hotel (the Gestapo headquarters in Nice), towards the end of which they threaten to chop Joseph into pieces if Maurice doesn't provide them with written proof of their non-Jewishness (as opposed to their circumcision, indicating the contrary). Before the interrogations, Joseph had seen their enforced peregrinations as a kind of adventure, almost a real-life version of the films he loves so much.

In spite of the grim material, the book celebrates life, the simple joys of childhood (playing marbles, football, snobs), but above all the charity, the selfless generosity of the many people who help them, sometimes putting their own safety at risk in doing so.

In Joffo's afterword he answers several questions that readers have asked since publication, such as the identity of the final town the brothers lived in, where Joseph worked and lived in a librarie (a newsagent's-cum-bookshop) with an obsessive anti-semitic Pétainist proprietor: Mancelier. Joffo reveals that this was Romilly in Haute-Savoie.  After the publication of the book, not only was Joffo invited to the town and made a citoyen d'honneur, but (a wonderful irony) he gave a book-signing at the librarie Mancelier.

Un sac de billes (in part a reference to the exchange Joseph's non-Jewish friend Zérati made with him for his Jewish star) is in some respects a heart-warming testament to human love, to resourcefulness, to simple pleasures, and to the survival instinct in the face of institutionalized insanity. But the background is always present, the death camps always form the backcloth to the action, and the closing paragraphs inform us that Joseph's father was one of the victims of the Holocaust.

Joseph Rayner Stephens in Stamford Park, Stalybridge

 

 'JOSEPH RAYNER STEPHENS
BORN 1805 DIED 1879'

'SCATTER THE SEED! THE SEED OF TRUTH
BELIEVING IT WILL GROW.
LOOK ON THE WILDERNESS IN RUTH
IT WAS NOT ALWAYS SO.
A GARDEN ONCE, IT MAY AGAIN,
A LOVELY GARDEN BE.
IT WANTS THE SUN IT WANTS THE RAIN,
OF GODLIKE CHARITY.
WE WORK AND WAIT, WE TOIL AND TRUST,
SURE THAT THE END WILL COME
THIS WILDERNESS OF EVIL MUST, BE CLOTHED WITH HEAVENLY BLOOM.
             J.R.S.'

 

 'ERECTED
BY THE FACTORY WORKERS OF
LANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE,
IN THANKFUL REMEMBRANCE
OF A LONG LIFE SPENT
IN THEIR SERVICE
1888'  

 'AN EARNEST ADVOCATE
OF THE TEN HOURS BILL;
AN ABLE DEFENDER OF
TRADES UNIONS
AND DETERMINED OPPONENT OF
THE NEW POOR LAW.
––––––––
"THE ONLY TRUE FOUNDATION OF
SOCIETY IS THE SAFETY, THE SECURITY
AND THE HAPPINESS OF THE POOR, FROM
WHOM ALL THE OTHER ORDERS OF SOCIETY
ARISE."
DEFENCE AT CHESTER.'  

This, then, was erected 125 years before the present government (with the almost total approval of the 'opposition') gave what amounted to a state funeral for a former premier who undid most of the things that people such as Joseph Rayner Stephens had worked hard for. My disgust is inexpressible.

Jethro Tinker in Stamford Park, Stalybridge

'JETHRO TINKER
BORN
25TH SEPTEMBER 1788
DIED
10TH MARCH 1871.'
 

 'OUR LOCAL
LINNAEUS'  

 'FIELD NATURALIST
FROM
EARLY YOUTH
TO OLD AGE'

 

 'ERECTED BY THE FRIENDS
AND
ADMIRERS OF
NATURAL HISTORY
1874'

James Burgess and John Higson in Droylsden

In St Mary's churchyard, Droylsden, are two graves of writers side by side. This is James Burgess's.

'ERECTED
BY
HIS FRIENDS AS A
TOKEN
OF ESTEEM.'

 'IN MEMORY OF
JAMES BURGESS,
WHO DIED ON 11^TH OF AUGUST
1870, IN THE 64^THYEAR

OF HIS AGE.'

 

'HIS LABOURS ARE ENDED, LIFE'S
TROUBLES ARE O'ER,
AND HIS CALM THOUGHTFUL FACE,
WE SHALL NEVER SEE MORE,
HIS FRIENDS THEY WERE MANY, AND
WITH KINDLY REGARD,
WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER, THE OLD
DROYLSDEN BARD.'

 

 And this John Higson's:

'––––– THE LAST GREAT DAY ––––– HERE LIE THE BODIES OF
JOHN HIGSON,
DIED DECEMBER 13^TH 1871 AGED 46 YEARS
ELIZABETH CAROLINE HIGSON
HIS RELICT, AGED 86 YEARS
BOTH THE ABOVE DIED AT LEES
JAMES HAROLD HIGSON
DIED NOV 7^TH 1862 AGED 5 WEEKS & 5 DAYS
NOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH
WILLIAM HIGSON
of Lees
BROTHER & THIRD SON OF THE LATE
JOHN & ELIZABETH CAROLINE HIGSON
AGED 65 YEARS'

Isaac Newton in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire

 

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was born in Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire. His father (also named Isaac) was a wealthy farmer who died a few months before the birth of his only child, and three years later his mother Hannah married Rev. Barnabas Smith of the nearby village of North Witham. She left her parents James and Margery Ayscough to look after Isaac, although she returned to Woolsthorpe on her husband's death in 1653.

 

Unfortunately, photography is not allowed in the birthplace.

 

 'In this Manor House
SIR ISAAC NEWTON Kn^t
was born 25^th December A.D. 1642'

 

The back and side of the manor facing west.

 

The manor again, showing the courtyard with outbuildings.

 

The National Trust claims that this is the legendary apple tree that inspired Newton.  It's a Flower of Kent and blew down in a storm in 1820, the wood being used for snuff boxes and other novelties. Fortunately the root remained and the tree grew again.

 

Fritillaries were growing nearby.

Ammon Wrigley in Uppermill, Saddleworth

This is the impressive setting for Ammon Wrigley's statue in High Street, Uppermill, Saddleworth.^*

 

James Collins's bronze statue on a concrete pedestal was erected in Uppermill High Street in 1991. It shows the poet Ammon Wrigley in his noted flat cap and open coat on the moors he loved to walk. There were objections raised that the concrete base wasn't in keeping with local stone, and that the statue was a little removed from the remote country he loved; on the first issue, concrete was used as a secure base, and on the second, it is doubtful that many people would know of the existence of Ammon Wrigley today if his statue had been, say, in as obscure a spot as the Ammon Wrigley Memorial, which is near the Dinner Stone overlooking Castleshaw: Wrigley's ashes, according to his wishes, were scattered there.

I didn't attempt to find the memorial as yesterday (when we went to Uppermill) the weather was awful, although I found the book I was looking for in the tourist information office next to the car park at the side of the statue: With Ammon Wrigley in Saddleworth, by Sam Seville ([Saddleworth]: Saddleworth Historical Society, c. 1984). Seville was Wrigley's son-in-law, married to his daughter Amy. More posts on Ammon Wrigley will follow in due course.

 

'AMMON WRIGLEY

1861–1946

POET AND HISTORIAN'

 

^*Saddleworth is the name of a collection of villages and hamlets in the metropolitan borough of Oldham, of which Uppermill is the biggest.

Julia Millen: Ronald Hugh Morrieson: A Biography (1996)

In her biography of the New Zealand writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson (1922–72), Julia Millen mentions that his crime was 'being different', and this comes across strongly in the book. Born in the small, conservative Taranaki town of Hawera to a musical family in a house where he lived all his relatively short life, Morrieson rarely ventured further afield, and even his intended life as a student in Auckland only lasted a day or so before he felt forced to return homesick.

 

The house he lived in was built by his maternal grandfather Charles Bartley Johnson, who, when Ron was born, lived there with his wife Lucy, Ron's parents Hugh Morrieson and Eunice (née Johnson), and Charles and Lucy's other offspring, his unmarried uncle Roy and aunt Doris Johnson. Ron's father died when Ron was only eight, and in time there were just three in the house: Ron, and his mother and aunt, both of whom spoiled him to an enormous degree, and seemed largely in denial of his many demeanours.

 

At the age of ten Ron made parsnip wine and got a schoolfriend drunk in the lunch hour, and this was really just a foretaste of a lifelong love affair with drink. At eighteen he drove to a dance with some friends in Stratford, a nearby town, did some drinking, and on the way back knocked a girl over: he failed to stop, she was hospitalised, and he later gave himself up to the police, claiming that he hadn't noticed her: he was put on probation for two years, lost his licence, and was forbidden to be out at night after 8pm.

 

Morrieson played in bands locally until he was 37 and loved the camaraderie, the drinking lifestyle that was inevitably attached to it, and enjoyed the company of a number of female sexual partners. Horseplay is a drama by Ken Duncum that was first shown in 1994 and imagines James K. Baxter visiting Morrieson in Hawera near the end of their lives. In it, Wilma is Morrieson's girlfriend and complains about having to constantly get in and out of the window: before reading the biography I thought this must be some kind of symbol but it's real: Morrieson actually had a ladder leading up to his bedroom window so that his mother and aunt wouldn't have to see his girlfriends going upstairs with him. It's the kind of bizarre – almost unbelievable – detail that could have come from one of his books.

 

Maurice Shadbolt said that some of Morrieson's characters might well have come from his drinking friends in Hawera, and Millen greatly extends this observation by pointing out a large number of similarities between people or things in Morrieson's books, and those in his life: for instance, the tower in Predicament (a book that Morrieson once wanted to call 'The Tower') that leans (giving Cedric one of his nicknames – Pisa) recalls the leaning (and useless) water tower in Hawera; Cedric's father's eccentric behaviour is not unlike that of Morrieson's grandfather Charles Johnson's; there is obsessive and reckless gambling in illegal, out-of-town crown and anchor games in Comes a Hot Friday, such as Morrieson used to regularly attend in south Taranaki; Salter the Sensational (aka 'The Scarecrow') initially excited the drunks in the lock-in pub, as the magician Carter the Great excited Hawera schoolchildren; Pallet on the Floor involves events in and around a freezing plant: Morrieson worked in one in nearby Patea; and so on and so on.

 

At 37, Morrieson decided to devote himself to the world of letters, but kept himself afloat (mainly alcoholically) by giving private music lessons at home. The lessons weren't a great success, but they'd have been far less so (in fact, probably non-existent) if Morrieson's short story 'Cross My Heart and Cut My Throat' – with its hungover music teacher lusting after a thirteen-year-old pupil and (unbidden) sneaking a kiss on her lips and briefly touching her inner thigh – had been published while he was alive.

But then, after two novels Morrieson couldn't get anything published, he continued to drink to wild excess, his mother's death came in 1968 and left him a wreck, and four years later continued drinking led to the death he seemed resigned to. Like Morrieson's novels, this is a humorous book as well as a (quietly) violent one, but of course the protagonist brought the violence on himself. Unlike the novels, though, it is also intensely sad.

 

My other blog posts on Morrieson's work:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Came a Hot Friday (1964)
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: The Scarecrow (1963)
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Predicament (1974)
Ronald Hugh Morrieson in Hawera, Taranaki, New Zealand

Jennifer Sturm (ed.): Anna Kavan's New Zealand: A Pacific Interlude in a Turbulent Life (2009)

Anna Kavan (1901–1968) spent just twenty-two months in New Zealand, and from what she wrote for Cyril Connolly's Horizon in September 1943, in the first of a series of articles whimsically called 'Where Shall John Go?', readers might get the impression that Kavan viewed the country in a rather negative light. However, Jennifer Sturm's Anna Kavan's New Zealand, the fruit of eight years' work, is very much a revision of that idea.

Kavan lived in New Zealand with the pacifist Ian Hamilton, initially in Takapuna and then in Torbay. She arrived in February 1941 and left in November 1942, when it became clear to her that Hamilton would receive a prison sentence for conscientious objection.

Almost half of Sturm's book contains Kavan's stories, titled 'Five Months further or what I remember ab[out] NZ', in which she begins by saying that she would like to develop the quality of 'non-attachment' that exists in dreams. These stories are obviously richly autobiographical, containing details of characters she would either have known or heard of in Torbay, or 'Waitahanui'. Names and identities are often disguised.

The stories continue into the period when she took a sea journey back to England with an all-male crew via the Panama Canal and New York. Throughout, war is in the background, and it seems clear that Kavan's restless travelling is in part an attempt to escape from the madness of war, and also in part an attempt to escape from the madness inside her. Sturm believes that Kavan experienced a great calm in New Zealand, that she was clear of her heroin habit, and also that after her return to England she came to idealise the country that she unsuccessfully sought to return to.

Sturm makes a convincing case: much of Kavan's work, not only that written in New Zealand, but also much not in theory set in New Zealand, contain the memory of that country, even Ice. Also, as Katherine Mansfield went out of her way to avoid New Zealand-specific expressions, Kavan embraced them: for instance, she uses the word 'bach' instead of 'hut', and 'morepork' instead of 'owl', as if in defiance of the Anglocentric norm. She concludes, in full cogniscance that it might sound 'incongruous' or 'contentious', that there is more New Zealand in Kavan than in Mansfield.

There are some fascinating things in this book, not the least of which is that scholars have blithely ignored the significance of the NZ link. And it is interesting how biographies – Jeremy Reed's A Stranger from Earth (2006) and David Callard's The Case of Anna Kavan (1992) being full-length works – have simply run with generally accepted assumptions, for example that Kavan returned to England because of her son, which in fact is nonsense. Reed even attempts to construct an essentially lesbian Kavan. But it is shameful how insulting and how masculinist some writers could be, such as Denis Glover, who remarked that Kavan was one of those blondes who go round the world with their knees behind their ears. And this was a comment with which Frank Sargeson – that well-known fighter against the status quo – by no means entirely disagreed.

In the 54-minute video below from the Depot's Cultural Icons project, Dr Jennifer Sturm talks to Debbie Knowles about Anna Kavan. Also linked is my comment on Asylum Piece:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anna Kavan by Jennifer Sturm
Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece (1940)

Frederick Edward Maning in Auckland, New Zealand

In Symonds Street Cemetery:

 

 

'IN MEMORY OF

FREDERICK EDWARD MANING

KNOWN TO COLONIAL FAME

AS THE AUTHOR OF

OLD NEW ZEALAND.

HE CAME TO THIS LAND IN HIS YOUTH

HE LIVED IN IT TO THE VERGE OF OLD AGE

IN NEW ZEALAND'S FIRST NATIVE WAR.

HE SERVED HIS COUNTRY WELL IN THE FIELD.

IN LATER LIFE A JUDGE OF HER LAND COURT

HE DID THE STATE GOOD SERVICE ON THE BENCH'

 

'WHEN FULL OF YEARS YET FULL OF STRENGTH
STRICKEN WITH A PAINFUL MALADY
HE SOUGHT RELIEF IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY
WHERE HE DIED ON THE 25^TH JULY 1883
AGED 72 YEARS.'
–––––––
HIS LAST WORDS WERE
LET ME BE BURIED IN THE FAR OFF LAND
I LOVE SO WELL
–––––––

'HERE THEREFORE LOVING FRIENDS INTERRED HIM
IN HIS LAST RESTING PLACE
IN THE LAND OF HIS ADOPTION
AND HAVE RAISED THIS MEMORIAL
TO ONE OF NEW ZEALAND'S EARLIEST COLONISTS
AND MOST FAITHFUL SONS.'

Frankie McMillan:The Bag Lady's Picnic and Other Stories (2001)

Frankie McMillan is a graduate of Bill Manhire's MA writing course at Victoria University, Wellington, and her first published book was the first serious work of fiction in Shoal Bay Press's eighteen-year history. There are eighteen stories here.

One of them is called 'Truthful Lies'. All stories, of course, even 'truthful' ones, are lies. The narrators of these stories are often first person, and often unreliable, such as the thirty-year-old narrator of 'Swordfish' who is interviewed by her probation officer about an arson attack on her old school and wildly changes her story: the reader has the impression that she might well be guilty.

Unreliability seems to be everywhere. The first story, 'My First Husband', is not about a husband but a young schoolfriend. Irene's mother in 'Ships in the Night' changes her account of the clarinet played by Norman (who turns out to be a psycho) into a fiddle. Harry pretends to be an artist in 'Errant Buttons'. There's an interesting parallax view: in 'Six Snapshots of Rhona', Rhona says that boys use romantic language when they give lovebites, although much later Sara discovers she was 'lying', as they just say they're feeling horny. And it's not clear how seriously the reader is supposed to take Rhona when she speaks of putting her hand on the thighs of old men in a rest home: 'and whoopee, they get a hard on!'.

Owen Marshall (who is a noted short story writer) praises, among a number of other things, McMillan's 'offcentre' world, and inevitably we don't have to look far to find the influence (conscious or otherwise) of another short story writer: for example, the narrator of 'Swordfish' talks about men and watches, and of the power of watches to hypnotise, which recalls Frank Sargeson's 'A Piece of Yellow Soap', an object that the woman in the story uses to hypnotise the mikman.

I think the story I like most is 'Jumping the Broomstick', a highly original, highly amusing – yet oddly disturbing – story about a young female fire-eater which would not be at all out of place as a McSweeney's story.

Albert Wendt: Sons for the Return Home (1973)

 Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home is what I like to call an anonymous novel: not in that author has no name, but in that the characters have no names. In fact Wendt really goes out of his way to give no one a name here, which for me (at the beginning at least) made it less than easy to follow: in one example, is the narrator talking about the protagonist's grandfather or his father? Ah yes, he's speaks about his 'oldest son', and his father only has two sons, so it must be his grandfather. Mercifully, such initial confusions disappear, although we do seem to be in the realm of Oulipian constraints with this novel, but then that of course is all part of the alienation that is the central theme of this book.

 

It is divided into three parts, the first approximately half of the book, and the other two parts of about equal length. In Part I, we learn of the progress of a young Samoan student in New Zealand through an intense relationship with his paheka (or palagi) rich student girlfriend up to the point of her dilemma: she is pregnant by him, and has to decide if she wants to marry him or not. In Part II, in which the couple's problems are measured in relation to their parents' reactions, the girl leaves for Australia, has an abortion and decides to end the relationship. By chance, 'he' sees in a bar the man who humiliated him at a party he and the girl attended – and with whom the girl had her first relationship – and he follows him into the toilet, knocks him out, batters his face and (the reader assumes) castrates him. Part III sees his return, with his parents and brother, to Samoa, and from there his return alone to New Zealand after failing to find peace.

 

Early in Part I there are various flashbacks in which we learn of his parents' early desire to leave Samoa for New Zealand essentially in order to forge an educational future for him, their younger son. Throughout the novel, various forms of alienation are manifested, but particularly in relation to race: the school makes the boy feel ashamed of his parents as they don't speak good English, there are conflicts between 'his' reality and that of the girl's, between her parents and the boy, between the boy's parents and the girl, between their peer groups and their relationship, etc, etc.

 

One of the final ironies about the young man's twenty-year preparation in New Zealand for a highly prestigious position in Samoan society is that he (whose education has (no matter how indirectly) taught him to be an atheist) returns to a country where religion is of vital importance, and where 'he' feels an overwhelming sense of exile: this is a foreign country, and he is as a paheka/pagali in the Polynesian island of his birth.

Robert Sullivan in Auckland, New Zealand

'KAWE REO / VOICES CARRY

 

'VOICE CARRIES US FROM THE FOOT OF RANIPUKE / SKY HILL / ALBERT PARK TO THE WAI HOROTIU STREAM CLUCKING DOWN QUEEN STREET

 

'CARRYING A HII-HAA-HII STORY — FROM PRAMS AND SEATS WITH NAMES AND RHYMES, WORDS FROM BOOKS AND KITCHEN TABLES.

 

'NOW WE LAUGH AGAIN IN THE ST JAMES STALLS, IN THE BOOKSTORES, SEDDON TECH, PATERSON'S STABLES, ODD FELLOWS HALL, ART GALLERIES

 

'AND OUR GREAT LIBRARY GIFTED BY OUR PEOPLE WHO SAVED THE WORDS OF OUR ANCESTORS FOR ONE AND ALL...

'ROBERT SULLIVAN'

 

Poet Robert Sullivan was a librarian at Auckland Central City Library. His poem here on the steps of the library in Lorne Street is designed to 'celebrate[...] the relationship between Auckland Libraries, the city and its people'. Sullivan says 'I wrote the poem with echoes of nursery rhyme and waiata and used historical information about the library’s place near Horotiu Stream and Lorne Street.'

 

There are also three stone seats at the side, each one with a letter spelling out 'R', 'E', and 'O', indicating 'language' and with the translation of the poem in Māori round the seats; unfortunately, people were sitting on them, making it impossible for me to take a good photo.