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.

Rangitoto Island, New Zealand

I don't have a literary example to give here, but then I don't need one as the photo is eloquent enough. All the same, the volcanic island of Rangitoto, in the Hauraki Gulf, forms the backdrop of many New Zealand literary canvases. I took this from Takapuna beach, which looks deserted, although in reality it was lunchtime and there were a number of people sunbathing and eating and drinking around us, but I just found a moment when no one was walking along the sand.

Frank Sargeson in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand

'FRANK SARGESON (1903–1982)

lived at this address from

1931 until his death. Here

he wrote all his best

known short stories and

novels, grew vegetables

and entertained friends

and fellow-writers. Here

a truly New Zealand

literature had its

beginnings'

 

The original bach here, at 14 Esmonde Road (now 14A), was bought by Sargeson's (Davy) family in 1923 as a holiday home where they spent their Christmas summers. It was no more than a primitive one-room, creosoted shed. Sargeson came to live permanently here from May 1931, after leaving his uncle Oakley Sargeson's farm.

 

The new fibrolite dwelling above was built in 1948 by George Hadyn – Vernon Brown drew up the original plans, but the construction would have cost too much and Sargeson objected to the idea of a 'boogeois' (as he called it) terrazzo sinkbench. 

 

The home Hadyn built had a living room-cum-kitchen at the front and a bedroom and bathroom with toilet at the back. This photo shows the original entrance, which was at the back and opened onto the bedroom. The wall on the right of the photo is part of the later extension – see below for more details. Bottom right is approximately the site of the destroyed ex-army hut.

 

The later entrance, with deck at the side of the original bedroom and additional bedroom to the back, was built in the late 1960s: Sargeson had inherited some money from his aunt Diana Runciman, who died in November 1966, and Sargeson's partner Harry Doyle – formerly frequently moving around – was living permanently with him now that he was becoming too ill for any more wandering.

 

Nigel Cook, who at one time had worked on Oakley's farm, was a practising architect living in Auckland, and he designed the extension. The top shelf of the bookcase holds numerous issues of the literary magazine Landfall. Sargeson used to have perishable food stored in the Tremains' fridge next door, but his aunt's death meant he could claim her old fridge for his dairy produce and cat food, etc.

 

The living room, with fitted bookcases, desk...

 

 ...and couch bed. Sargeson didn't like all the windows as it meant that he had to supply curtains for them.

 

On the other side of the living room is the kitchen, where Sargeson prepared his home-grown vegetables (although his garden shrank somewhat with the new property.)

 

Bob Gilbert (who as G. R. Gilbert had a brief writing life and was now working as a lighthouse keeper) built Sargeson a radio. He was delighted to listen to classical music on it, although it brought complaints from his neighbours.

 

The famous Lemora, an 18 per cent fortified grapefruit and lemon wine that Sargeson loved, and which he frequently shared with his friends. This was invented by the Russian immigrant Alexis Migounoff on his farm in Matakana and production went on for sixty years. In 2003, however, the government introduced a tax hike which would have meant an untenable increase on a flagon from $12 to $25. The New Zealand Herald (13 June 2003) reported that one angry Lemora drinker imagined Frank Sargeson rolling in his grave: this is doubly impossible, as he was cremated.

 

 

In 1950 Cristina Droescher (daughter of Greville Texidor) and her partner Keith Patterson (also known as Spud) were leaving for England and left Sargeson with Spud's paintings to brighten up his home.

 

Several other images hang on the walls: Sargeson and Harry Doyle.

 

On the porch bench Sargeson's hand rests on the black cat that walked into his life very shortly after Doyle left it, in 1971. With some hyperbole, he compared Robin Morrison's photo to an early Manet.

 

This delightful shot shows Janet Frame (1924–2004) tap-dancing in Sargeson's living room in 2000. It was taken by Michael King (1945–2004), both Sargeson's and Frame's biographer.

 

In 'The House That Jack Built', George Haydn's contribution to An Affair of the Heart: A Celebration of Frank Sargeson's Centenary (Devonport, NZ: Cape Catley, 2003), Hadyn speaks about the brief row he had with Sargeson over the shower room: Sargeson accused him of profiteering by skimping on materials, whereas Hadyn was in fact making a loss. (OK, I should have used flash.)

 

Hadyn also notes that Sargeson had an obsession with toilet pans: he held that high pans are 'completely unsuitable for natural crapping'.

 

 The first bedroom, with the back door that was the entrance.

 

Sargeson's ashes, according to his wishes, were scattered under a loquat tree. Kevin Ireland marked the occasion by reading 'Ash Tuesday'.

 

'FRANK SARGESON

SCULPTURED BY

ANTHONY STONES

PRESENTED BY THE PEOPLE

TO THE

TAKAPUNA LIBRARY'

 

And in Auckland Central City Library is another likeness of Sargeson, this time by Alison Duff, 1965.

 

Many thanks to Vanessa Seymour of Takapuna Library for a very enlightening and fascinating tour of the Frank Sargeson house – and for mentioning this sculpture to us.

 

Link to another Sargeson post:

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Michael King: Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)

Richard O'Brien in Hamilton, New Zealand

 

'RIFF RAFF

IT'S ASTOUNDING!

WHERE WE STAND IS THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.

ON THIS SITE STOOD THE EMBASSY THEATRE, THE HOME OF HAMILTON'S
LATE NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE SHOW, AND THE BARBER SHOP WHERE
RICHARD O'BRIEN CUT HAIR AND DAYDREAMED FROM 1959 TO 1964

THE PERRY FOUNDATION HAMILTON CITY COUNCIL

WETA WORKSHOP THE RIFF RAFF PUBLIC ARTS TRUST' 'EMBASSY THEATRE

––––––––––––––

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW IS AN INTERNATIONAL,
INTERACTIVE PHENOMENON THAT IS TRULY A 'CULT CLASSIC'. SINCE
1975, RICHARD O'BRIEN'S COCKTAIL OF COMEDY, CABARET AND CROSS-
DRESSING HAS SEEN AUDIENCES IN FISHNET TIGHTS DO THE TIME
WARP AGAIN AND AGAIN.

O'BRIEN MOVED TO HAMILTON IN 1957 AND WORKED IN A BARBER-SHOP
IN THE EMBASSY THEATRE WHICH STOOD ON THIS SITE. HE CREDITS
THE MANY B-GRADE, LATE NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE MOVIES HE
WATCHED HERE AS MUCH OF THE INSPIRATION FOR ROCKY HORROR.

THE EMBASSY THEATRE WAS OPENED IN 1915 AS THE THEATRE ROYAL,
AND WAS USED AS A MAJOR VENUE FOR STAGE SHOWS, CONCERTS AND
POLITICAL RALLIES UNTIL THE 1960'S. THE STAGE THEN CLOSED, BUT
THE EMBASSY REMAINED AS A PICTURE THEATRE,
AFFECTIONATELY KNOWN AS THE "FLEA-PIT" UNTIL
ITS CLOSURE IN 1989. DESPITE PROTEST, THE
THEATRE WAS DEMOLISHED IN 1991.

THIS STATUE CELEBRATES THE INTER-
NATIONAL SUCCESS OF HAMILTONIAN
RICHARD O'BRIEN, AND A PIECE OF
HAMILTON'S CINEMATIC HISTORY.'

Nigel Ogle's Tawhiti Museum, Hawera, New Zealand

Nigel and Teresa Ogle bought a seventy-year-old cheese factory here in 1975, and built a museum out of it. Using moulds of actual people – friends, relatives and locals – life-size models of characters are created.

 

The flour mill at Tawhiti was built in 1881 but closed down in 1886. 

 

It was bought and re-opened by the miller George Ogle, who had emigrated with his wife Mary Ann, their first children, and brother William from Nottinghamshire, England in 1884 and bought the mill in 1887 after a short time at a mill in Auckland.

 

The Ogle Brothers' store in Hawera.

 

Other exhibits:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Predicament (1974)

Predicament was the third Ronald Hugh Morrieson novel to be published, although it was a posthumous publication: in a minor way, his comment to Maurice Shadbolt, that he feared he would be 'one of these poor buggers who get discovered when they're dead', had come true.

Morrieson has been mentioned by some reviewers as a writer of Taranaki Gothic. Shadbolt writes a six-page Introduction to this edition, in which he speaks of his first-hand knowledge of Morrieson and speaks about the occasion that he asked Shadbolt what Southern Gothic is, as a 'professor bloke' representing Australian Broadcasting had asked him if he was influenced by it, and Morrieson merely pretended that he knew what it is. Shadbolt mentioned William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and Calder Willingham in his reply, although I'd have thought that Erskine Caldwell definitely deserves a mention as a comparison, but it seems that Morrieson hadn't read any of these authors.

Significantly, Morrieson asks if these writers make the reader smile, as he can't bear the idea of reading books that don't do so. Here we probably have a strong indication of Morrieson's aesthetic as a writer, as Predicament has a similar quality to The Scarecrow and Came a Hot Friday in that it is a blend of the serious and the amusing, giving it a kind of cartoon quality.

Predicament has a teenage protagonist like The Scarecrow, although he is not the narrator. Fifteen-year-old Cedric Williamson meets Mervyn Toebeck, who almost certainly has just killed his abusive meths addict father, and, as he meets Mervyn's friend the Spook, the respectable, bookish schoolboy will be led into a number of predicaments.

Cedric, like Mervyn, is an outsider, which is one of the reasons why he relates to Mervyn, but his home life is very different: he lives with his loving grandmother and his father Martin, whose mental balance has been upset as a result of a fall, and who for years has been building a strange tall wooden tower in front of his house, much to the annoyance of neighbours.

Rather reluctantly, Cedric gets drawn into blackmail with Mervyn and the Spook, although their victim Blair Bramwell (who is carrying out a secret affair with his young step-mother Margot) decapitates the intruding Spook. And Cedric is in a predicament.

All this sounds rather gruesome and sordid, but it is Morrieson's usual light ways of handling the subject matter that take the seriousness out of it. Perhaps a comparison with the Coen Brothers's treatment of the balance between the violent and the comical isn't irrelevant here, especially as Morrieson's influences seem as much (if not more) indebted to celluloid as opposed to print.

On the back cover of this Penguin New Zealand edition is a one-sentence quotation from the book: 'On the Sunday afternoon, Mervyn Toebeck gate-crashed his life', which is an image that is repeated later in the book, and for me this is a key to understanding it. Throughout the book, other people intrude on each other and 'gate-crash' either physically or mentally (or very often both) into other people's lives, although it is perhaps particularly the mental gate-crashing that we witness. And that gate-crashing can be active or passive, because Morrieson depicts an environment in which people are very strongly affected by the very presence of others.

A very interesting article about Morrieson's novels, with particular (and detailed) reference to Predicament (especially to that novel seen as social satire) is here: Ian Richards's Predicament in Context.

My other blog posts on Morrieson's work:

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Ronald Hugh Morrieson in Hawera, Taranaki, New Zealand
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Came a Hot Friday (1964)
Ronald hugh Morrieson: The Scarecrow (1963)
Julia Millen: Ronald Hugh Morrieson: A Biography (1996)

Michael King: Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)

The first quarter of Michael King's Frank Sargeson: A Life is called 'Norris Davey', and the rest 'Frank Sargeson' because the writer, born Norris Frank Davey, changed his name at the beginning of the 1930s – when he was in his late twenties – soon after receiving a suspended sentence in Wellington for indecent assault: this had been a single consenting act of mutual homosexual masturbation, although his older casual pick-up Leonard Hollobin – considered a 'corrupter of youth' by the police – received a long prison sentence with hard labour.

Michael King is convinced that this incident is a vital turning point in Sargeson's biography: not only did it lead to Sargeson changing his name, but it lost him his job (and therefore destroyed his professional career as a solicitor), and led him into a kind of denial, a retreat from his past. He had learned one lesson: that the homosexual subculture he'd discovered in London couldn't with impunity be as freely indulged in back home in New Zealand.

Nevertheless, and although there is no mention of the court case in Sargeson's three-part autobiography, homosexuality is used in his stories as a encrypted emblem of difference, the reader is often introduced to a world in which the male body is celebrated, and where marriage is often a source of considerable discord. The codes Sargeson uses remind me – no matter how different it may be – of the work of his British contemporary Rhys Davies, the homosexual writer who left his native Wales for London, where he was free from the asphyxiation of the chapel mentality.

Frank Sargeson, born in Hamilton, was certainly asphyxiated by the religious constraints of his puritanical, strict Methodist parents, and his life – decades of poverty during which he forsook the trap of comfort and security in exchange for devotion to reading and writing – was very much a rebellion against his parents' conformist ethos, and by extension conformity to social norms themselves: against the easy, automatic responses of the people he was surrounded by.

If Michael King's biography frequently depicts an almost monk-like ascetic figure, this is in no way a hagiography, and Sargeson's self-denial – almost self-effacement – sometimes gives way to jealousy, prickliness and senseless bitchiness, mockery, neo-Luddism, a grumpy old man mentality (even before he grew old). He nevertheless comes shining through the negatives: generally, he is without hypocrisy (as an anti-monarchist, he admirably refuses the OBE), he gives a voice to the outsider, he is religiously devoted to his craft, and abundantly generous both materially and psychologically.

Sargeson's famous bach at 14 Esmonde Road, Takapuna, Auckland (now a museum preserving his memory), is perhaps best known for its old army hut at the back (now gone), where Janet Frame (also an innocent victim, but of victim of psychiatry) stayed and wrote her first novel Owls Do Cry (1957), although it also temporarily housed, for instance, 'Peter' (Edith Pudsey Dawson), Kevin Ireland, and Renate Prince, an architectural student.

The bach, in its three incarnations (the last one a one-room extension of the first), was also – on and off – a home for over forty years to the itinerant horse-obsessed Harry Doyle, Sargeson's (typically) older and working-class friend and lover.

More importantly – at least for literary history – 14 Esmonde Road is where Sargeson tended his words with the same love and attention as he gave to his vegetables or Harry Doyle, where – initially influenced by, for example, Hemingway and Saroyan – he hewed his literary creations into a spare style, the spartan, vernacular reportage of the narrators blending seamlessly with the reported speech (which was unreported by inverted commas). It is where Frank Sargeson self-consciously (but with a whisper) heralded the birth of the new voice of New Zealand literature: a new world that refused to look back to the motherland, that at last refused to mimic the style of writers who lived on the other side of the world. And, entranced by the innovation, many other New Zealand writers followed him, many of whom had previously been personally encouraged by him.

Tucked inside my secondhand book (which was not easy to find, not even in New Zealand, and has remainder marks on the bottom edge) is an cut-out review of Frank Sargeson: A Life by Tim Upperton in the New Zealand Herald (24 February 1996, s.7, p.9) Upperton is quite right to praise this scholarly work that is Michael King's 478-page biography of Sargeson, and quite right to argue against anyone suggesting that the writer is now a little old-fashioned. Yes, Sargeson was right too in not toeing any political party line, right in having his narrator in 'Conversation with My Uncle' ask how many bananas the bowler-hatted walking dead man would take from the social picnic.

The question is even more urgent now, when politicians incessantly turn the screws on the poor rather than the rich, and the electorate is merely expected to shrug its shoulders and accept rather than rebel, to agree with what it is told and not to question the status quo. Frank Sargeson wasn't frightened to question the status quo. As opposed to what (Australia's) Patrick White said when he called Sargeson's writing 'Not for export', it is for export and for the whole world, although it is most unfortunate that his name is scarcely known outside New Zealand: we desperately need more voices against conformity. We need Frank Sargeson.

Link to another Sargeson post:

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Frank Sargeson in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand

The Grave of Robert Goodacre (1777–1835)

Another chance discovery in Nottingham General Cemetery:

 

'IN MEMORY OF

ROBERT GOODACRE OF STANDARD HILL, WHO DIED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 25TH 1835, AGED 58.'
Robert Goodacre (1777–1835) was born in Long Clawson, Leicestershire, and was the eldest son of a tailor. He began his working life as a journeyman tailor, and it was after working as assistant to a schoolmaster in Mansfield that he established Robert Goodacre's Academy in Lower Parliament Street, Nottingham at the age of twenty.

Goodacre had a particularly strong interest in mathematics and astronomy, and the mathematician- and physicist-to-be George Green (1793–1841) became pupil number 255 at the academy in 1801 at the age of eight, to leave the following year after four terms, by which time he had probably absorbed all that Goodacre had to offer.

A few years after Green left the academy, Goodacre bought an area of land on Standard Hill from the Duke of Newcastle, and built his three-story Standard Hill Academy (with an observatory at the top) on it. In the early 1820s he left the academy and spent five years lecturing (mainly on astronomy) in the USA, where he visited twenty-four towns and cities.

He returned to the UK in 1828 to continue lecturing, and it was during a tour that he died in Scotland.

His various publications include:

An Essay on the Education of Youth (1808)

A Treatise on Book-keeping (1811)

A glossary: or, Explanation of the principal terms used in the sciences of astronomy and geography (1828).

Much of my information about Goodacre came from D. M. Cannell's George Green: Mathematician and Physicist 1793-1841: The Background to His Life and Work (London: The Athone Press, 1993; repr. Philadelphia, PA: The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2001).

Writers and literary associations in Nottingham General Cemetery:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ruth Bryan (1805–1860)

Sarah Ann Agnes Turk (1859–1927)
Annie Matheson (1853–1924)
Josiah Gilbert (1814–1892)
Anthony Hervey (c. 1796–1850)
Charles Bell Taylor (1829–1909)
James Prior's Parents
Ann Taylor (1782–1866)
Robert Millhouse (1788-1839)
Henry Hogg (1831-74)

Ronald Hugh Morrieson: The Scarecrow (1963)

Famously – insofar as you can use the word 'famously' about Ronald Hugh Morrieson – The Scarecrow begins with the sentence 'The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat slit,'^* and the blurb on the back cover of the New Zealand Penguin edition calls it '[t]he greatest first sentence in New Zealand literature'. This is praise indeed, although the narrator modestly explains that the model for this beginning is in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: 'The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his deadlights', which is in fact the second sentence of the eleventh chapter.

The blurb speaks of Morrieson's novel as a 'hilarious Gothic melodrama', and more than once I've come across the expression 'Taranaki Gothic' in relation to it. Certainly there's a strange juxtaposition of the relatively inconsequential (fowls being stolen) to the horrific (a bloody murder), and placing such a sentence right at the beginning of the story almost guarantees that the reader will continue reading this very strange novel.

But the first sentence is so arresting that the reader will probably look at it again: it's in two halves, and the first half seems to be in a conversational, matter-of-fact tone, but then we're pulled up sharp when the weird stuff starts. And the way Morrieson performs this trick is fascinating, all the more so by the way that he improves on Stevenson's sentence: not only does the musically educated Morrieson give the two halves an identical set of syllables (eight), but he changes the active voice into the passive voice – twice – and in so doing creates an immediate distancing effect.

Distance is important in The Scarecrow, whose background protagonist Hubert Salter is an alcoholic serial killer whose main interest in life is having sex with dead women's bodies. You can't get much more distanced from society than that, and yet it's interesting to think about that forename: 'Hubert' sounds so cosy and yet it belongs to a horrific monster. Morrieson's character, like Morrieson's language in general, is distinctly contradicting itself.

Salter's bowtie is surely a major image that emphasises the bizarre effect Morrieson is creating: we have a man who looks like a scarecrow, a hideous filthy tramp, and yet he wears a highly conspicuous symbol of respectability – a tie, and not just any tie, but a bowtie: of all the items of clothing that simultaneously (and self-consciously) convey elegance and coldness of distance, the tie is surely at the top of the table, and the bowtie is surely at the top of the tie table for elegance and ridiculousness. Morrieson is playing games with the reader, glibly (but astutely) introducing images of lightness and heaviness, horror and amusement, mixing an intangible, contradictory literary brew. He's a kind of gaudy, verbal cartoonist.

This is an amazing novel.

^*The cinema is a more immediate medium of course, and the movie poster of The Scarecrow changes 'week' to 'day'.

My other blog posts on Morrieson's work:

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Ronald Hugh Morrieson in Hawera, Taranaki, New Zealand
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Came a Hot Friday (1964)
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Predicament (1974)
Julia Millen: Ronald Hugh Morrieson: A Biography (1996)

James Cowan and Kimble Bent in Hawera, Taranaki, New Zealand

Kimble Bent in 1903, aged 66

 

James Cowan (1870–1943) was a writer of non-fiction who was born in Pakuranga, Auckland, and who became a great admirer of Māori culture. He spoke fluent Māori and wrote a great number of books, perhaps the most well known of which is The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period (1922–23).

 

First published as a series of articles in the New Zealand Times called The White Slave in 1906, Cowan's book The Adventures of Kimble Bent: A Story of Wild Life in the New Zealand Bush (1911) is a study of one of New Zealand's frontier figures whom he had interviewed extensively and photographed.

Bent (1837–1916) was an American serving with the British army and had been posted to New Zealand in 1861. He was regularly disobedient and drunk, and had been imprisoned in Wellington and flogged in front of his company. In 1865, while with the army in Taranaki a little south of Hawera, he deserted. He was found by Tito te Hanataua, chief of the Ngāti Ruanui, and lived with Māori for thirteen years, avoiding contact with Pākehā (or people of European descent).

 

Maurice Shadbolt partly fictionalized Bent's story in Monday's Warriors (1990).

 

In Tawhiti Museum there are several representations of Bent's story. Here, he is surrendering to Tito te Hanataua.

Tito te Hanataua leads Bent into Orangai Pa, where he is made to do heavy manual work. He slowly earns the trust of the Māori.

 

In Orangai Pa Bent (now Ringiringi) came to follow the Pai Mārire faith established by the prophet Te Ua Haumene. Above, a march around the niu, or sacred pole that the prophet had the people erect.

During an attack by the soldiers, Ringringi guides the old and the women and children to safety.

An online edition of the book is linked below:

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James Cowan: The Adventures of Kimble Bent