Ian Cross: The God Boy (1957)

Ian Cross's New Zealand classic The God Boy reads at first like a young adult novel, until you realise that this is interstitial literature narrated by a thirteen-year-old boy recalling his previous life, in particular the disturbing events which occurred when he was eleven: the truth is often between the lines, part of which others hide from him, part of which he hides in self-deception.

Jimmy Sullivan is the narrator, a New Zealander of Irish descent whose parents send him to a Roman Catholic school and in whose God he at first wholly believes, although strong doubts come into play towards the end of the book.

In the background to the story, the background to Jimmy's consciousness, are the fights Jimmy's parents have, although the background becomes the foreground and he's very much aware of some things, aware of the alcoholism of his father, of his frequent taunting of his wife which lead his mother to desperate measures.

It will be a while before Jimmy comes to realise that his mother's not in hospital but in jail for killing her husband. Obviously though, Jimmy himself is also a victim, mentally destroyed by his dysfunctional family.

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:

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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:

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

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.

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)

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

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)

John Mulgan: Man Alone (1939)

Man Alone is the only novel by John Mulgan, who killed himself (for not altogether clear reasons) on Anzac Day in 1945, in a hotel in Cairo, at the age of thirty-three.

 

 In 'John Mulgan: A Question of Identity', a thirty-five-page article originally published in Islands in 1979 and with a four-page postscript added in 1981 in In the Glass Case (and again in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (2002)), C. K. Stead draws attention to the writing of Alan Mulgan, John's father. Alan Mulgan is seen to represent New Zealand in a cosy, sentimental fashion as opposed to John Mulgan's more negative vision, and an analogy is drawn between England's 'Georgian' romanticism and the reaction of the pylon poets against it.

Stead also points out that there are two very different fictional elements in the novel – the 'economic history' in which the protagonist Johnson (who is given no forename) is a mere 'travelling object', seen from a kind of photographic perspective; and the second is where he becomes the subject, a symbolic representation of New Zealand man. Stead goes on to say that Mulgan is examining the identity of New Zealand, the social and the political weighed against the existential. The ten-page coda Part Two, which brings back the social element by showing Johnson going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was added by Mulgan after the publishers requested it.

Johnson, a young Englishman in New Zealand, is an aloof but (generally) sympathetic character, a kind of existential hero without the coldness of a Meursault, without the same egotism, who can join in socially if he chooses without drawing too much attention to his difference, but who also avoids emotional ties, travels light and is prepared to travel far. The story takes him through different farming jobs, through work on a scow, through New Zealand's depression when he is unemployed and sent to a pointless relief camp constructing a scenic road, through a kind of (inevitably fractured) comradeship in the Auckland unemployment riots in Queen Street in 1932.

And Johnson escapes from this life, train hops, and then finds more farm work for a year working for Stenning, who lives with his much younger Maori wife. There is the promise of Johnson getting his own farm in a few years, aided by Stenning, until the unbearable, mounting sexual tension literally explodes in his employer's face and he again flees from a situation that got out of control, but over which he had very little control.

And so it is this general guiltlessness which carries the reader's sympathy for him through the Kaimanawas, the unforgiving New Zealand bush in the centre of North Island, an endurance test in which his physical and mental courage is tried to its greatest extent. He survives, but must continue fleeing from the consequences of the death of Stenning.

Yes, there are two distinct but related parts, although I'm uncertain about the necessity for Part Two.

Graeme Lay: The Mentor (1978)

The Mentor is Graeme Lay's first novel, and was published by Cape Catley, the publishing company owned by Christine Cole Catley (1922–2011), who was encouraged to publish it by Frank Sargeson.

 

Lay's novel is told in a flashback sandwiched between a very brief beginning and very brief ending set (at the time of publication) fifteen years in the future, in 1993. It follows the development of New Zealander Paul Hopkins through university in Wellington and through three years in England as a(n unqualified) teacher, to a reluctant return to New Zealand.

The vast bulk of this relatively short book is concentrated on the time after this return, when Paul begins casual work in a restaurant but is developing a serious interest in writing. He has previously written articles about English life for the Kiwi magazine Libra, the editor of which is (the nice?) Guy Foreman, who would welcome a feature article from Paul on the elusive/reclusive writer James Paterson.

Graeme Lay bases Paul Hopkins on himself, and James Paterson on Frank Sargeson: Hopkins writes letters (including his short story attempts) to the well known author Paterson, who writes his criticisms back and makes suggestions for improvement. Eventually, Hopkins is invited to the rather isolated island where Paterson (unlike Sargeson) lives (but where he's surrounded by books, has an old radio, etc, much like Sargeson) and the two socially gel to the extent that Hopkins spends three nights there in the company of his genial host.

Whilst at Paterson's home, Hopkins discovers that Foreman, for whom he is ostensibly working, is using him as a stooge to pursue a personal vendetta against the writer. Hopkins then refuses to be led into Foreman's unscrupulous (and ultimately infernal) game. But he's already caught up in it.

This is a surprisingly arresting narrative about the teaching and the learning of the art of writing (and of life and integrity) which is frequently interrupted by stories within stories.

Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Came a Hot Friday (1964)

Ronald Hugh Morrieson's novel Came a Hot Friday (like his début The Scarecrow, which I shall review a little later after re-reading) is a strange mixture of thriller and comedy punctuated by speech very often in the New Zealand vernacular. It seems more intricately structured, though, with chapters seen from the points of view of different characters who will interweave with others.

 

The blurb on the back of this retro New Zealand Penguin edition seems doubtful about how to sum the book up, and I can understand the problem: it's about Morrie Shalapeski, who sets fire to premises he doesn't realize a man is sleeping in; and Wes Pennington and his chum Cyril Kiddman (incorrectly spelt in the blurb), who start a lucrative betting scam; and Don Jackson (perhaps an older version of The Scarecrow's Neddy Poindexter), who is out to lose his virginity; and Sel Bishop, the violent bookie who has no concern for anyone but himself and how much money he can make; and the absurd but highly sympathetic Te Whakinga Kid, who is a mock-Zorro who pretends so much that things become real.

 

They are all brought together in some way: the man Morrie (eventually) accidentally kills is Pop Simon, whom he knows and likes, and who is known by his boss's wife's friend; Don becomes the third partner in Wes and Cyril's betting scam; Morrie was paid for the arson by the evil Sel Bishop, who towards the end tries to burn Morrie, Wes, and his own girlfriend Claire (who is also Morrie's sister).

 

Oddly, perhaps, almost all of the characters (with the notable exceptions of the bookies Bishop and Cray) are seen in a sympahetic light, often as wounded victims of a life without mercy in which they have to feed their addictions – usually by getting as hopelessly drunk as possible as often as possible, or (to a lesser extent) by extreme gambling. The narrator is aware of the extent of the self-destruction (and seems particularly knowledgeable about the effects of alcohol) but appears to see this behaviour as natural, or at least unavoidable.

 

A special mention should go to the Te Wakinga Kid, the Māori who dresses as a cowboy and uses a cap gun. He is a fusion of a pretend bandit and a pretend sheriff, who – as deus ex machina – transforms himself (for the reader and for the characters he rescues from otherwise certain death) instantly into a real hero. Right at the end of the book though – leaving with the swag – he sees himself as a real bandit only and throws away his sheriff badge: he has grown up and overcome superstition.

 

But, as the last page seems to say, he's just a scared kid after all: he has been as self-deceived about his new role as he was about his former ones.

 

My other blog posts on Morrieson:

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Ronald Hugh Morrieson in Hawera, Taranaki, New Zealand
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: The Scarecrow (1963)

Ronald Hugh Morrieson: Predicament (1974)
Julia Millen: Ronald Hugh Morrieson: A Biography (1996)

Ngaio Marsh: Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography (1965)

 

Vy Elsom's sketch of Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) on the back cover of the dust jacket

 

This of course is not the revised 1981 edition of the autobiography but the first edition. Written in a fastidious and urbane style, this is in some ways a part-autobiography not in that it misses years out – indeed it takes us from Marsh's early childhood (not quite, but almost, in a conventional linear manner) virtually to the time of writing – but in that it almost misses Marsh's very public profession out. Overwhelmingly, the author concentrates on her less known work in the beginning as an actor, then later as a theatre director; but, a little like her (rather snobbish, it must be said) friends who wouldn't demean themselves by bringing up the subject, Marsh is almost silent about her popular crime novels (which amount to 32). In fact, the penultimate paragraph ends in a rare exclamation mark – 'How right I was!' – in summing up her decision to pursue her passion and direct ten Shakespeare plays rather than considerably increase her bank account funds by writing ten more novels.

 

Marsh also writes about her journeys by boat to England (very much her second home) and of her friends. We have to go to Joanne Drayton's Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime to discover the real name of the unstable Russian 'Sacha', who proposed to her and later killed himself (although not because of the rejection): he was Peter Tokareff. Much more important to Marsh's autobiography are the 'Lampreys', a family she spent some time with in England, and whose real name is Rhodes: the novel A Surfeit of Lampreys (a reference to the cause of Henry I's death) depicts a noted fictionalization of the Rhodes family.

 

Marsh does reveal that she took the Scottish name Roderick and the surname of the 17th century founder of Dulwich College – Edward Alleyne – to create the handsome, Eton-educated dectective that Marsh wanted to see as a departure from slightly eccentric detectives of other writers, who comforted their readership by churning out familiar verbal tics.

 

Marsh also reveals her childhood fear of poison here, and says she only uses it in her books 'on rare occasions', but although I'm only familiar with four of her novels, two of them do strongly feature poison as a murder weapon: The Nursing Home Murder (1935) and Death at the Bar (1940). I haven't yet encountered the acting profession in her work, although I'm aware that she's used it as a background to several novels.

 

In a word, Marsh's book inevitably (and a little disappointingly for many readers, it seems) tells the reader what she wants to tell them, although a broader picture can be seen from Drayton's biography, which – like Claire Tomalin's biography of Katherine Mansfield – I find slightly irritating because it refers to its subject throughout by her first name.

 

Ngaio Marsh's home in Cashmere, Christchurch, where (with the exception of visits to England) she lived for 77 years, fortunately survived earthquake damage and remains open to the public.

Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987)

Initial research for Claire Tomalin's biography of Katherine Mansfield was postponed partly because of Jeffrey Meyer's and Antony Alper's books in 1978 and 1980 respectively. Tomalin describes Alpers's biography as 'epic', representing (he believes) a generally misunderstood genius, and Meyers's as 'more cynical', showing a darker Mansfield. She feels that certain aspects of her life have not been dealt with sufficiently, 'in particular the chain of events leading from her first foray into sexual freedom in 1908, and the various long-term results of her association with Floryan Sobieniowski in 1909.' She investigates Mansfield's medical history and Sobieniowski's blackmail of her.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand the daughter of banker Harold Beauchamp, who became wealthy shortly after her birth and, like her mother Annie, was born in Australia. Family legend has it that Katherine wanted to become a writer on finding out about her father's cousin Elizabeth von Arnim's novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

Katherine was the outsider in an otherwise more or less conventional family, although (something she didn't know) the rebellious or transgressive gene seems to have existed in Harold's first cousin Fred, who had at least five unmarried children by a Māori.

On leaving New Zealand to settle permanently in England, Mansfield was entering a society that was changing, becoming more democratic, less male-dominated, with freer sexual habits, a country breaking away from the constraints of the Victorian ethos which had dominated for several decades. In a chapter titled 'London 1908: New Women', Tomalin writes about four women – Virginia Stephen (later Woolf, of course), Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett, and Frieda Weekley, all of whom rebelled against their backgrounds: all of whom came to know and love Mansfield, who had also broken free – from the colonial shackles she'd left at the other end of the world, one to which she would never return.

This compelling book, then, shows a woman eager to embrace different forms of liberation, as Mansfield indeed did, although her story is no exhilarating read, describing a (then) forbidden love followed by pregnancy and miscarriage, sexually transmitted disease followed by a disastrous operation, suffering and illness, an essential relationship that it was essential to keep escaping from, more suffering and illness, and early death. In between, Mansfield never managed to complete a novel but left a number of fine short stories. And she was the inspiration behind a number of fictional characters, of which these are a few examples:

Lawrence's depiction of Ursula Brangwen's distinctly lesbian relationship with the older Winifred Inger in the 'Shame' chapter of The Rainbow seems in part an imagining of Mansfield and her friend Edith Bendall; in Women in Love too, Lawrence based Ursula's sister Gudrun on Mansfield; J. R. Orage satirized her as 'Moira Foisacre' in a series in New Age; the uneasy colonial Louis in Woolf's The Waves has an Australian banker father like Mansfield; and she was posthumously satirized by Aldous Huxley in Those Barren Leaves.

I can't say I'm convinced that Sobianiowski's blackmail of Mansfield was on account of her 'plagiarizing' Chekhov's 'Spat' khochetsia' (translated as 'Sleepy' by Constance Garnett in 1927), and although her 'The-Child-Who-Was-Tired' may well have a similar basic story outline to Chekhov's it is far from being anything like a copy. But Tomalin goes out of her way to put her case for this tenuous blackmail construction, as well as including an Appendix containing several pages from the TLS letters pages for 1951, where several academics argue about the short story.

A few minor grouses:

Unlike Katherine's maternal grandfather Joseph Dyer, or her maternal grandmother Margaret Isabella Mansfield, or her paternal grandmother Elizabeth, nowhere in the text itself, only in the Index, is Katherine's paternal grandfather's name Arthur mentioned, although he is present in several sentences.

I find Tomalin is too eager to psychologize: for instance, regarding a photo of Mansfield aged about nine, the author sees 'a rebellious and inquisitive glimmer' in her eyes, whereas I, especially when bearing in mind the long exposures necessary at the time, merely see a suggestion of boredom.

And a 'Māori kit', as C. K. Stead points out in Kin of Place (originally published in the November 1987 issue of the London Review of Books as a review of Tomalin's biography), is not, as Tomalin seemed to think, something that Mansfield wore to show off in England, but is simply a basket.

 

My links to Katherine Mansfield's Birthplace and the place of her death are below:

 

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Katherine Mansfield in Wellington, New Zealand
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff in Avon, France

Newly Discovered Katherine Mansfield Story

This week's TLS (3 October 2012) has an article by PhD student Chris Mourant titled 'A Little Episode: An Unknown Story among the Forgotten Typescripts of Katherine Mansfield'. Mourant is researching ADAM International Review,¹ a literary magazine edited by Miron Grindea from 1929 to 1995.

The ADAM archive in King's College London has been little used, but in it Mouret found five boxes labelled 'Mansfield', and among them he discovered two very interesting typescripts: the short story 'A Little Episode' (1909), and fifty aphorisms written in 1911. Wary of the trap of confusing fiction with autobiography, Mouret nevertheless sees a number of parallels between the fictional world of 'A Little Episode' and that of Katherine Mansfield's life.

 

He finds the protagonist Yvonne 'clearly a self-portrait' of Mansfield herself, the pianist Jacques St Pierre similar to Mansfield's pianist lover Garnet Carrington Trowell² (by whom she became pregnant but later miscarried in Germany), and Geoffrey Mandeville is similar to Mansfield's first husband George Bowden. There are a number of other similarities.

 

According to Mouret Oscar Wilde's influence abounds in 'A Little Episode', and Mansfield followed Wilde by compiling the later aphorisms, which she significantly called 'Bites from the Apple'. Mansfield contracted gonnorrhea from Floryan Sobieniowky, whom she met in Bad Wörishofen, where her mother had taken her to avoid the social stigma of the pregnancy. Some of the aphorisms speak of love as a disease. The danger of love is common to Mansfield's stories, and I'm incidentally reminded once again of Reynolds Price's work.³

 

Unfortunately I don't think the article gives any indication of how long the story is.

 

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¹ The acronym stands for 'Arts, Drama, Architecture and Music'.

 

² Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987) has a rather unflattering double-page photo of Trowell playing the piano with a cigarette end determinedly clamped in his mouth, and an even more unflattering inset photo of him with spotted bow-tie at a slant and a goofy-toothed smile.

³ Price's 'Mayfield Trilogy' A Great Circle, which comprises The Surface of Earth (1965), The Source of Light (1981), and The Promise of Rest (1995) is a vast achievement covering ninety fictional years and frequently returns to the dangers of love – from death in childbirth at the beginning to death by AIDS at the end.

Maurice Gee: The Scornful Moon: A Moralist's Tale (2003)

At the end of The Scornful Moon the journalist narrator Sam Holloway announces that the moon has come up, and says that there are thousands of ways to describe the moon, such as Shelley's 'crystal paramour' or Milton's 'spotty globe', but doesn't mention 'the scornful moon', a title adapted from Robin Hyde's 'the scornful crystal moons' in Journalese (1934). In the same chapter, Hyde mentions D'Arcy Cresswell, who is also relevant to The Scornful Moon. Gee based some of the story of the novel on a 1920 court case in which the mayor of Wanganui in New Zealand, Charles E. Mackay, was imprisoned for 15 years for the attempted murder of D'Arcy Cresswell, a writer of poems of questionable merit who, by entrapment, had attempted to force Mackay to resign because he claimed he had 'discovered a certain digusting feature in [his] character', part of which involved Mackay showing him photos of naked women, followed by photos of naked men. In The Scornful Moon Gee changes the time to 1935, and the mayoral resignation to resignation from candidature for the general election.

 

This is Wellington in 1935, before the Labour Party had a huge victory over the coalition of the United Party and the Reform Party. Sam is a journalist, James Tinling a solicitor, and Eric Clifton a lunar scientist, and they are married to the sisters Rose, Vivian and May. James is also a former conservative cabinet minister who wants to get back into politics, but things are changing in New Zealand society and the Labour Party is set to gain power for the first time: James represents a dying order, and is known by many as 'Tinkling' (with money).

 

Within the novel there is an unnamed novel in progress – which is a kind of MacGuffin – that the narrator is writing with eleven other people, although after the young poet Owen Moody (the D'Arcy Cresswell figure) begins monopolizing the writing the group loses impetus, to disappear into nothing after Moody is shot by James's same-party rival Oliver Joll (the Mackay figure).

 

Throughout, Sam reminds us that he is writing the novel proper, which is full of his doubts about this process: 'These paragraphs are like a stone lobbed into a pool' and 'I must stop this [...] I had meant to start with Eric', 'I'm mixing my metaphors', etc. There are many literary references: the narrator speaks of his sister-in-law Vi as the Lady of Shalott, May can be 'Tolstoyan', Eric like Captain Ahab, etc. and the characters quote too: Eric quotes Shelley, Sam quotes Leigh Hunt and Charles Kingsley, etc.

 

At the beginning the characters seem easily hurt and reticent about speaking directly. They, along with Sam, talk a great deal in metaphors and similes. And the narrative is circumlocutory, searching for psychological significance behind a person's actions. I had the impression of a form of interstitial literature where the gaps are what matter, where the unsaid takes on a huge significance. Towards the end the narrator expresses a moral malaise:

 

'It's strange – it's more, it's frightening – how the mind works things out while keeping them unknown. What goes on in that territory? There's a moral failing somewhere.'

 

C. K. Stead's essay 'Maurice Gee, Moralist' in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (Auckland University Press, 2002) is a re-publication from the journal Landfall 202, November 2001, and is a review of Gee's previous novel Ellie and the Shadow Man. The essay title seems to underline the subtitle of the later novel.