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)

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

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.

C. K. Stead: All Visitors Ashore (1984)

In 1955 Janet Frame went to live in an old army hut in the garden of Frank Sargeson's bach in Esmonde Road, Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand. Karl Stead (who publishes as C. K. Stead) and his wife Kay were frequent visitors there. Thirty years later Stead, an academic and a creative writer, wrote All Visitors Ashore, which is a fictionalized account of some of the characters and events that took place in that social circle at the time.

 

But Stead sets the novel in 1951, a crucial year in the politics of New Zealand, when the waterfront dispute was dominating the news. This forms the backcloth to the story, whose main character is the young academic writer Curl Skidmore (similar to C. K. Stead, whose first and last initals he shares), who goes to see the fiftyish artist Melior Farbro, who is gay, grows vegetables, has a limp, and is very fond of Ken Clayburn who likes the horses (similar to the writer Frank Sargeson, who had a longtime friend Harry Doyle who used to train horses), and Cecilia Skywards, who is living in Frank's hut in the garden and used to live in a convent but not really as it was a mental hospital, and is writing a novel called Memoirs of a Railway Siding (similar to Janet Frame, whose father was a railway worker, although the novel was Owls Do Cry).

 

Often, the style the novel is written in is what can be described as modernist (Stead's PhD was on modernism) in that the breathless, very long and often sparsely punctuated sentences are internal monologues revealing a person's thoughts. Characters are frequently addressed as 'you', and the modernism often tips into postmodernism by the way the book selfconsciously sees itself being written, or the way the narrator, for instance in the post-abortion scene on the beach, has a conversation with Curl as he goes to get rid of the embryo remains in a jerry borrowed from his neighbour Nathan.

 

The book is funny and serious, farcical and tragic, ostentatiously clever but never infuriating. It's pretentious, sure, but what's wrong with that: some of the world's greatest writers are pretentious. Stead may not be among the greatest writers, but he's very good all the same.

 

Cecilia doesn't exactly come across in an wonderful light, but then Stead seems to have nurtured a mild twenty-year grudge against Frame for her short story 'The Triumph of Poetry', published in The Reservoir in 1964. Frame claimed that in this story (which concerns a prematurely balding academic whose life is in some respects similar to Stead's) she took her former Otago University teacher Gregor Cameron and the (invented) poet Karl Waikato for her inspiration, but the Steads found it too close to home for comfort. Frame had no complaints about the delayed retaliation.

Michael King: Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (2000)

Michael King's Wrestling with the Angel is an authorised biography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1924–2004), and, according to her wishes, it is not a critical one. Not only does King leave his opinions out of the book, but he remains firmly in the background and seems to go out of his way to refer to himself in the third rather than the first person. That is a remarkably modest achievement in a 522-page book which is a no small achievement.¹

 

Janet Frame is a major international writer, although she achieved this status in spite of a great number of difficulties: the daughter of a railway worker, extremely shy, she spent several years in psychiatric hospitals where she was diagonosed as a schizophrenic and underwent unmodified electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions; she only just escaped the chilling 'normalizing' effect of a prefrontal lobotomy. It was some (often anxiety-ridden) years before Frame learned that the diagnoses had been hopelessly incorrect, and she was therefore then able to take full cognizance of the mental and physical abuse she had undergone.

 

The first important step on the road to Frame's halting recovery from that abuse was in 1955, when the writer Frank Sargeson (1903–82) – well aware of her potential as a writer – invited her to live in an old army hut behind his bach in Takapuna on the north shore of Auckland. At the time both of them thought she had a mental illness. She accepted the offer, which was a crucial move in boosting her confidence and developing her intellectual awareness: there, for instance, she would regularly meet several writer friends of Sargeson's, such as C. K. Stead and his wife. And she also wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), in the hut.²

 

The dust jacket shows, on the left, two cropped shots from the same photo taken in 1932: above, the wooden washhouse wall on Eden Street, Oamaru, and below, Janet with her sister Myrtle's arm around her; the panel on the right shows Frame in Willemstad, Curaçao in 1956, after she had left Takapuna for an extended stay in England.³

 

During her time in England, Frame underwent an existential crisis and admitted herself to Maudsley Hospital, London, where she was to have a great number of sessions with the psychiatrist Robert Cawley (who called them 'conversations'), a person who was to prove a revelation to Frame: she was to dedicate several of her books to him. It was from Cawley – a highly intelligent man not initially trained in his profession and who no doubt very quickly realized that Frame too was highly intelligent – that Frame finally learned not only that she wasn't suffering from schizophrenia (which she'd been told before), but that she had not suffered from a mental illness (in the formal sense) in her life. Cawley of course recognised, though, that she had an exquisite sensitivity, and although he had in a very real sense saved her, no 'cure' could be automatic: along with the psychological effects of the abuse that would obviously live with her all her life, Frame's difference would guarantee many difficulties. She kept in touch with Cawley as a friend until very shortly before his death in 1999.

 

I could continue to write a great deal more about this fascinating book about this fascinating woman, but I'll leave it there, partly because Frame's meeting with Cawley is a crucial turning point. Frame would write many more books and (very reluctantly) become a national treasure back in New Zealand, where she eventually decided to spend the rest of her life. She is probably most noted both nationally and globally (no doubt greatly aided by Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table (1990)) for her autobiography, which was originally published as a trilogy: To the Is-Land (1882), An Angel at My Table (1884), and The Envoy From Mirror City. Frame had adapted the title An Angel at My Table from a line in 'Les Vergers', a French poem by Rilke.

King also wrote a biography on Frank Sargeson, and one of the things that strikes me about this book on finishing it is the number of writers mentioned in it – many of whom had key roles in Frame's life, others who had bit parts, some none at all – who are scarcely known outside the antipodes. Frame of course is well known, the Booker winner Keri Hulme is remembered, as are the expatriate Katherine Mansfield and the semi-expatriate detective story writer Ngaio Marsh, but that is perhaps all. Other writers mentioned, apart from Sargeson, Stead and Brasch, and Frame's great female friend E. P. ('Peter') Dawson (who didn't actually publish much), are James K. Baxter, Dennis McEldowney, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Maurice Duggan, Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Greville Texidor, and others who don't immediately spring to mind. Not all of these are from New Zealand, but clearly the literature of this country is well worth looking into.

 

¹King was born in 1945 and died in 2004 with his wife in a car crash just two months after Frame died.

 

²Her first published book was The Lagoon and Other Stories (Christchurch: Caxton Press [1951]), although between 1946 and 1955 she had had a number of short stories and poems published in several organs, notably Charles Brasch's literary magazine Landfall, and New Zealand Listener.

 

³The family lived for some years at 56 Eden Street, Oamaru, South Island, now preserved as a museum. Myrtle died swimming at the age of sixteen – far from being the only major misfortune to strike the Frame family. (I thought it would have been neater if Allan Phillips – the physicist she went ashore with on the return journey – had taken the Curaçao shot, but the photo caption says it was taken on the outward journey, although not by whom).

 

Below are related links to other blog posts of mine:

 

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Janet Frame: An Angel at My Table (1982–85)

Janet Frame in Oamaru, New Zealand