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Monday, March 11, 2024

Something New

 

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SLEEPERS AWAKE” by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet, $28.53); “SPINDRIFT – New and selected poems” by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, $NZ40); “SOME BIRD” by Gail Ingram (Sudden Valley Press, $NZ30) ; "RESIDUAL GLEAM - Selected Poems & Translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “TIGERS OF THE MIND” by Michael Morrissey (Aries Press, $NZ25)

Bristol-born but now resident of Glasgow and teacher at the University of St Andrews, 38-year-old Oliver (“Oli”) Hazzard made his name as a poet with Between Two Windows (2012) and Blotter (2018). Hazzard is decidedly on the avant-garde side of poetry, his verse often being cryptic or opaque and in many cases requiring great scrutiny of the reader before it is understood. Only rarely does the transparent break through, but when it does it has much to say. Hazzard’s new collection Sleepers Awake is as much concerned with sound as with meaning, with a propensity for alliteration – indeed much of it would play best as live performance rather than as words on the page. Sound is crucial.


 

The first section of Sleepers Awake is the 70-pages-long “Progress Real and Imagined” which is best understood as a quest for personal identity but which is also concerned with the value of poetry itself. There are moments of odd verbal connections, such as “ ‘Morning plaza’ / wet grass / glass / recycling / overflow.” There are retreats into popular infantilism, such as “Reading Peppa Pig / upside down / difficulty bludgeons / me as memorable / my own performance / of exhaustion / memorable”. There are hip sparks of fatalism when  accidents and poetry / descend directly from the air”. Occasionally, too, there are moments when the poet comes near to being disgusted by his own metier, speaking of  Poetry without and ideas in it / brimming with a real stupidity”. And is he referring to poetry or philosophy when he speaks of “Something so complicated you’ll never be able to understand even the basic terms involved / Something so simple you understood it a long time ago, without even noticing.”? At times in this 70-page sequence, he appears to give up on his self-analysis as “sometimes I will simply list basic queries / about the nature of my personality / in order to allow for the possibility that it exists

For much of this section, Hazzard prefers to present his poetry on the page in the form of slim, scattered verses, but as he nears his goal he turns to blocks of prose. He finally embraces a mental coalition with reality, even if reality is both complex and annoying.  

The second section of Sleepers Awake is a collection of individual poems which begin with “Postpositivity in Spring”, again a quest for identity while dealing with mundane physical reality. The poem “Living etc.” is a bravura example of Hazzard’s hard-blocked connection with sound first. Take on the poem’s staccato alliteration thus: “Luke Luck flocks back to the joke tent or perhaps  palace / pacing the loud loneliness, suddenly intimate, / intricate with internal noise… / clerihew cares.” Many of Hazzard’s poems are presented as puzzles, conundrum in the context of clashing sound. Also, Hazzard is not an activist in the current sense of somebody promoting a particular cause.  Far from being an ideological call to arms of some sort, the title poem “Sleepers Awake” (the title taken from a Lutheran hymn) is literally an account of waking up on a snowy winter day in Glasgow and taking in the changing moods as the snow slowly retreats and the sun begins to dominate. Sleepers awake to the day.

In similar style is the poem “May Face”, which certainly depicts a physical scene. I quote it here in full:

This fact of maximum resistance
looking into people’s houses in the evening, early summer
the steeply receding strata of the rooms which have

 factored us in already though unaware, out in the mesh of analytical errata
except as a gnome Q-team listlessly
plugging in and out of public sockets: suck it up
the cold force of certain tags, cabinets, pets, melodies
or suck it up, the Clyde turning turtle
in its inlet, in blue and pink and brown turning
pink and brown and blue.

In this case however, “May Face” is a Clyde-side scene at a certain time of day, but it does become lost in recherche vocabulary (“analytical errata” etc.) and makes allusions difficult for the reader to de-code. Standing as he does on a verbal tight-rope, Hazzard is often weighed down by sound. His “Composed at Erdberg” relates melancholy to moods to music.

The third and final section of Sleepers Awake is a 16-part sequence called “Incunabulum”, printed sideways to accommodate the long lines (I would almost call them Alexandrines ) which is as much concerned with self-analysis as with the fading impact of classical literature.

I would advise readers that, for all its quirky merits, Sleepers Awake is a very challenging piece of work, not for the faint-hearted or those who do not have the patience to unravel its meaning.

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In terms of prosody and approach, Bob Orr is the antithesis of the avant-garde, cryptic Oli Hazzard. Orr’s poems are lucid, usually straightforward in their presentation and setting no traps for the unwary. They also show a delight in people and clearly-presented urban scenes, landscapes and especially seascapes. Spindrift is subtitled New and Selected Poems for good reason. Spindrift selects from the ten collections that Orr has had published since the 1970s, and ends with 36 poems hitherto unpublished. In effect, it is a summary of all Orr’s best work.

Most of Orr’s poems are brief. Only occasionally does he expand into longer developed poems such as bohemian youth that is recalled in “Fairfield Bridge” and “Roads to Reinga”; or in “River”, one of his longer poems, which combines a grand view if the Earth’s tectonics with the suffering of being inside in a hospital; or in his nod to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with his discursive poem “Hapuakohe”.

The typical Orr poem sits stark and lean on the page. To take an example from Orr’s early work “The old road” reads in toto “When you wake / in the deadly calm / of somewhere around 3 a.m. / the dreams will quickly leave you. / The street is like a road / across the moon. You hear lions / begin to roar in Auckland Zoo. / Across your bedroom wall / a tropical plant / has cast / the huge shadow of a continent.” Later in his career, he could strip things right down, as in “Orkney poet” which reads in full “Your meagre / hard-won harvest / from stony sea-girt acres / barely put food on the table - / bequeathed a banquet to the world.” And nearer the present time there is this pithy account of a marriage called “Harold and Gladys” thus “He made it / back / from a war / that left no tree unsplintered / to marry / his sweetheart / in Morrinsville / her with / acorn / coloured / hair.”

            Brief, direct statements are Orr’s forte. In this respect he has the skill of an artist who knows how to leave  unnecessary things out. Often his work reads like slightly-expanded haiku, and real haiku turn up in the later sequences “Buddha chopping wood”  and “Buddha burning firewood”. Orr’s sharp eye scans not only the sea but the lives of workers; Auckland in terms of  Freeman’s Bay, Ponsonby, the Chelsea sugar works and the more shady streets; elegies for, or allusions to, poets like Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and others. Only occasionally does he go for satire as in “When Muldoon was king” although there are oodles of irony in his poem “Neal Cassady’s car”. Pohutukawa are frequently used as a motif ; there are poems about ancestry and in his more recent poetry more awareness of Maori lore and language. But more than anything there is the sea – inevitable given that for many years Orr was a fisherman and sailor. There are many poems about walking on the shore and imagining sea vistas; much about the fisher folk and their boats; comparisons of the sea around New Zealand with classical voyages in [Greek] mythology and much else.

            Breath in the salty sea breezes! This is a very accessible collection which a wide circle of poetry readers will enjoy.

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Men and boys have often denigrated or belittled women and girls by calling them  insulting names. Often these insults are related to ornithology, as in “bird”, “chick” etc. Gail Ingram’s Some Bird is, among other things, a work of feminism and she is intent on pushing back against such flippant insults. Her work is divided into five sections, each section reflecting an age in a woman’s growing life, with each stage also being labelled with a bird name, thus “shining cuckoo” [childhood], “chicky babe” [puberty], “lovebird” [teenager and early adult], “house sparrow” [married with offspring] and “crow” [maturity and old age]. In her poem “Language lesson for young girls 1979” she presents the way female stereotypes are reinforced by casual language from the classroom onwards : “hey chick / let the little lamb play with the dolly / she’s a tom-boy plays rugby / so butch, a lezo (behind hands) / come on, show us a little skirt, love / but don’t wear that dress – what a floozy / words you know for whore? / slut / tart / hussy / hooker oh-la-la / bit o’ crumpet on the side psst…” and so on with other insults such as “bitch”, “spinster”, “old maid”, “sex-kitten”, “battle axe”, “old biddy”, “bag”, “old hag” etc. etc. Her opening poem “Me Too” makes a similar statement.

Some Bird traces the life of a woman with a very clear narrative.

Shining cuckoo” A woman goes through the pains of childbirth but her baby is immediately taken from her. This is because she’s unmarried, it’s 1965, unmarried mothers are frowned upon, and her baby is given up for adoption. The biological mother is cut out of the story. The baby is adopted because another [married] woman, who already has children, has just had a miscarriage and the adopted baby is her consolation. Gail Ingram suggests the sorrow involved it this – the little girl growing up and understanding that she is adopted, that she is somehow different from her siblings, that she will never know her biological mother and that she is in effect the “cuckoo” in the nest… and the poet is enraged that it is the [adoptive] father whose family name appears on the girl’s birth certificate.

Chicky baby” deals with the girl’s experience in puberty and teenagerhood, where, in pairing up, girls have to conform to boy’s expectations – so the years of having to put on makeup, smooching with little real pleasure, being taken on dangerous joy-rides with boys trying to show off in their cars… and when the time comes for her to be sent to a university hall of residence, the only advice her [adopted] father can give her is “Don’t get pregnant.” So to the days when she’s harassed or unwillingly fondled by boys of her age in residence or in public transport.

Love bird” has her falling in love with a guy, and getting married… though the poem “Love-match”, about the wedding, has a sardonic undertone. And a baby is born, which changes everything.

House sparrow” is subtitled “in which the sparrow fluffs up and becomes a mother”. Her motherhood has moments of worry and fright, as in the poem “Take care of Stu” where she panics when her child seems to have disappeared. She is always under scrutiny with judgements about how “good” she is as a mother and how well she is bringing up her children. More than anything, though, there is the fact that she has to do all the caring of the children. The two poems “The Provider” and “That thing between us” are most acute about this – the husband takes it for granted that he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of child-care. … and the marriage can’t last, even if the breakup is a long time coming. Indeed they are almost up to middle-age. The poem “Family Trust meeting” says a firm goodbye to the way she, in younger years, admired flashy young men playing rock music. She’s her own person…

Not that older age (“Crow”) is necessarily easy. The poem “Menopause XIII” suggests why. She broods on the way older independent women were once tortured or burnt as witches. She’s not entirely happy with the way feminism has gone since the 1970s (see the poem “Your natural mother marched in 1973”). In short, she is aware that nothing can be certain in the interactions of women and men.

I am guessing that some of the narrative presented here is drawn from the poet’s personal experience, but that is only a guess and I have no way of verifying it. Besides, the point of the poetry is what is on the page, not in extraneous guesses. Even more to the point, Gail Ingram is not addressing only the matter of a woman’s life. Some Bird has poems focused elsewhere. “Pakeha parent” is a Maori woman worried by the loss of Maori culture. “The Wading Bird” looks at the degradation of the natural environment. And “I am Pakeha” is half protest against colonisation but also half awareness of being pakeha.

Nevertheless, it is the feminist strain that dominates, presented clearly and forcefully. It’s bracing to read something as clearly articulated.

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            Roger Hickins’s Residual Gleam – Selected poems & Translations gives us first Hickin’s own experiences and observations, and then, in the Translations section, his translations from the Spanish of poems written by nine South American poets.

First, then, there come his poems recalling his childhood (in “Invercargill 1950”) with memories in a “Workshop Song” and the acute lines “The south wind / blew its cold salty breath in my face. / The south wind sings wild hymns / in the macrocarpas”. Then his observation of an ageing bird “Killing the Rooster” where “Once he was the boss, / with jaunty patriarchal strut, / his raucous sickle voice reaped stars at dawn. / Now he’s just the extra rooster / ousted by his son”… and how well Hickin observes the old rooster before he gets the inevitable chop. [Brilliant are those lines that I’ve underlined!] Following are acute poems recalling Hickin’s late-teenager and early-twenties self as he charts the hitchhiking he did, the people he met on the roads, and later the boozing in the pubs and eccentric or colourful boozers. He also has the good taste to salute the Jazz greats Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk. Memories can also be for those who are lost. Hickin’s “A beach poem for my mother” does not literally address his mother until the last stanza, which has a particularly haunting effect. It reads “The godwits have left for Alaska / Flax flowers darken beyond the dunes / Boats on the estuary / are pitching in the tidal rip / It’s late – you hear your mother / calling you home.” In a number of poems Hickin addresses Spain, which he has visited, and make references to Russian literature. The most engaging poem here is “After Pushkin” which declares “Happiness of course is / unattainable, but in the search / for peace and freedom you might / just head for somewhere else / a long way from gossip / debt, frivolity / track down / a heavenly shack where you  / can breath and work and slurp / good mussel soup.” Wise words for the thoughtful hermit. And there are further salutes to other literary or artistic people he has known.

And what of the poems translated from the Spanish? I do not speak Spanish, so in writing of the 15 poems by 9 South American poets I have to consider them as Hickin’s versions of the original poems and accept them that way. They certainly speak of other countries’ preoccupations  - A hungry pion house. Jesus on the cross and pain. Cockroaches. The confusion of being in distant country and not really understanding the accepted mores there.  A man ineptly trying to woo a woman in a bar. Occasionally back-handed nods to religion. The translations are capped with a long poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Nostalgia for Venice”, which is literally about that as he recalls his visits to Venice as it was decades ago.

This collection is varied, interesting, very readable, and deftly moving among many different moods.

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I tiptoed carefully into Michael Morrissey’s latest collection Tigers of the Mind. Morrissey is now over 80 years old and is well-known to New Zealand readers of poetry. His output is prolific and Tigers of the Mind is his 14th collection. His poetry is often bizarre, making huge imaginative leaps. Morrissey has told his public that he has periodically suffered from psychiatric disorders. Taming the Tiger, published in 2011, was his very candid autobiographic account of a severe bi-polar condition which led him to spend time in a psychiatric ward. Yet the experience has fuelled some of his best later work.

In Tigers of the Mind, one of the stand-out poems is “Defiant View from the Fifth Level of a Psychiatric Ward”, wherein he presents himself looking out the window at an Auckland vista. The view is “defiant” because the viewer, aware of his disordered condition, nevertheless sees the validity of the images his fevered mind is conjuring up, giving strangely impressive, almost psychedelic, views of “Trees, acacia-like, stripped of lion blood, / incapable of movements as toeless monkeys… Erudite moon, flawlessly memorious, / slings aside a sheeny leopard with pitchy alphabets….” Later, in the poem “Falling in Love, Quite Easily” he remarks “Like the romantics, I fell in love / with melancholia. Depression was / at arm’s length, poetry permitted, / a different way of life, feasible.”

It is hard to avoid such terms as Surrealist or even Dadaist in reading some of Morrissey’s work, conjuring up images that might have been created by Salvador Dali. “Quintessence of Green” gives an apocalyptic view of the Earth ruined while cockroaches prevail. A sequence dedicated to the moon plays with all the power, mystery and fear of the moon. [And was the poet consciously recalling that luna is related to lunatic?]. And then there are poems dedicated to aliens and strange beasts, with the impressive “Poem for a Large Rodent” becoming a conversation between a biologist and a giant rat living in a volcano. But while we sometimes reach into the depths of Dada, we are also sometimes given admissions of cold reality. The poem “Rebirth of Wonder” is the prize of this train of thought. Two guys think that dropping acid will make them enlightened and say something momentous while their girlfriends scribble down their words. Result? Nothing amazing. They haven’t said anything coherent.

Morrissey has his moments of reportage, including his very sad memories of his upbringing in straitened circumstances in Camp Bunn (a shelter for those without adequate housing after the Second World War). He implies that his mother went mad and his father took to drink. And in the gathering labelled “Drunken Impulse”, the whole idea of the uncertainty of life is mooted. There is an oddly deadpan account of the famous painting “Mona Lisa with a Moko”. With the moko added to da Vinci’s work, it is in its own way another modification of the Mona Lisa like the ones the Dadaists and surrealists had fun with.

One wonderfully lucid poem “Making Breakfast” reads in full thus “Through the thin wall I hear my wife chopping fruit / as rhythmically as the piston on the steam ferry. / Each sound has its own precision / delicate but unwavering / surgical as a lobotomist’s knife. / Her kitchen blade slices apple / cuts through pineapple / fillets watermelon / deals painless death to passionfruit. / A banana stands no chance. / It may sound like fruit is being cut / but really it’s the sound of love.” He follows this with a brace of  descriptive poems about Auckland weather, and then deals with  “Coronavirus” and “That Time Again”, both presented in melancholy form as a deserted playground represents the empty streets when the pandemic was doing its worst.

As you can see, it is a very diverse collection of poems, and very engaging to read.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART THREE

In my last two postings, I dealt with Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy comprising Maori Girl, Power of Joy, Maori Woman and The Glory and the Dream. My task now is to write about the one other novel he wrote, his short stories, and one remarkably naïve work of non-fiction – which might as well be regarded as fiction.

A Night at Green River was published in 1969, between the two halves of the tetralogy. It is in effect a very schematised parable. Two farmers live side by side in the far north of Northland. One is Maori, Tiwha Morris. The other is Pakeha, Clyde Hastings. Clyde Hastings wants to pay a gang to bring in his hay before the rain sets in. Tiwha Morris agrees to help him out by rounding up such a gang. But when Clyde leaves, Tiwha gets to thinking how much he hates the Pakeha cash nexus which reduces everything to money. So instead of helping Clyde out, he stays at home with his mates and they party and share warm fellowship. Meanwhile the rains do set in, Clyde’s hay is ruined and Clyde fumes and rages about how those lazy Maori have let him down… but then both Tiwha and Clyde have a good think. Tiwha thinks about the limitations of Pakeha culture. Clyde thinks about his frigid wife Edith [Warning ! Referring to women as “frigid” is now regarded as a male invention… but it is here in this novel.]  Clyde also thinks of a sordid sex episode in which some of his drinking companions gang-raped the wife of an invalid. Up to this point, the novel’s values are very much weighted against Pakeha. But a new element is introduced in the person of Tiwha’s friend Tu Nelson, who openly mistreats his very pregnant wife Martha. In the rain, Martha runs away from Tu and takes shelter with Clyde and his wife. The Hastings are beginning to look after Martha when a very drunk Tu bursts in with a rifle to reclaim her. Tu and Clyde fight violently and Tu is finally knocked-out. Clyde somehow feels revivified by this… at which point Martha’s baby begins to come… So Clyde and his wife Edith take Martha down to Tiwha’s house where, in the novel’s climax, the baby is delivered by Tiwha. The umbilical cord is cut by Tiwha in the traditional Maori way, with a pipi shell. And in the accepting atmosphere of life and family, Edith and Clyde begin to reshape their lives and values in terms of neighbourliness and acceptance. And Tu accepts his responsibility as a father.

Even more than the tetralogy (which this novel interrupted) this is very much a parable for Pakeha. Though Tiwha Morris is forced to realise that he has unjustly underrated the neighbouring Pakeha farmer and his willingness to help, the novel is weighted towards telling us that Pakeha are indeed cash-obsessed, class-conscious, sexually repressed (Clyde has never seen his wife naked) and patronising, and therefore much more in need of being taught a lesson than Maori are. At the same time, with the exception of belligerent Tu, the way the warm, familial life of Maori as presented here borders on caricature. In fact, given its first publication date, there’s something oddly retro in its depiction of the rural scene. Television is mentioned, so the story is obviously set in the 1960s, but Tu’s, Clyde’s and Tiwha’s most vivid memories are of serving in the Second World War (which ultimately makes a bond among them). There seems some self-conscious attempt at “balance” in the depiction of the races – we have Tu’s domestic violence balanced with Clyde’s memory of a sordid sexual episode. BUT Hilliard would have us to believe that a man who gets drunk, slaps his pregnant wife about and eventually chases after her with a rifle is going to blossom into a loving father once the child is born. Indeed Hilliard even has Clyde reflect that Tu’s violence towards his wife is a sign of how much he cares for her. Sheesh! The birth of a child, heralding the birth of a new understanding between Maori and Pakeha, is the kind of heavy symbolism in which Hilliard so often indulges. (And the names? Given that Tu is the god of war and Nelson was a warrior on the sea, the name Tu Nelson at once means somebody who fights.) The first half of the novel is more a static situation than a story, again heavily weighted with interior monologue and with Hilliard rarely failing to point a moral.

            One traumatic event and two cultures are suddenly bound in fellowship. Well, it would be nice to think that could happen.

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            Hilliard’s first collection of short-stories A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches was published in 1963. It is trite to say the obvious – that any collection of short stories will be a mixed bag, possibly ranging from the very good to the indifferent. Thus for A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. Many of its tales were previously published in magazines and journals, and the intended audience was apparently broad. Hilliard acknowledges that some stories were written for the old School Journal, which was read in the junior school classes. These are the last ten stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. They are headed “Bubby and Paikia” and concern two Maori kids living in a rural area and the various scrapes they get into or (more frequently) what they are taught by their elders or when they are taken on outings to places that they enjoy [and that Hillard presents somewhat idyllically]. They would surely make good reading for youngsters.

            The 14 stories that precede these, however, are more hard-headed and more clearly adult.

Of course to the fore are stories about tensions between Maori and Pakeha. The title story “A Piece of Land” has Maori landowners cheated out of owning some acres by complex Pakeha laws. “Young Gent, Quiet, Refined” has a young man turned away when he wants to rent a flat in the city, because he’s Maori. “Man on a Road”, which seems to be autobiographical, has the Pakeha narrator and his Maori wife Kiriwai meeting an old Maori man near the sea who gives a monologue about being dispossessed of his land by Pakeha farmers and holiday-makers building baches. “Erua” concerns a  Maori kid at primary school who admires a Pakeha teacher, but who becomes disillusioned when the teacher turns out to have many flaws. “Doing Pretty Well” is about a branch of the Samuel family (the family that the Maori Girl comes from) in which Kepa Samuel has done well in the Pakeha world as a farmer with a Pakeha wife, so he is embarrassed when his working-class brother Mutu visits him. Is Halliard suggesting that there is a loss of solidarity when Maori adopt Pakeha ways? Perhaps emphasising the ignorance of many Pakeha when it comes to country ways, Hilliard includes two stories about two Pakeha nitwits called Frank and Barry, “Looking the Part” and “Every Man to his Trade”, in which the boys get badly out of their depth. They read something like the “Me and Gus” stories from way-back-when.

Hilliard includes in this collection a number of light anecdotes about family habits when he was a child, or sketches of an old soldier or mean tricks played on a none-too-bright layabout. But the two stories that are most allied with his socialist views both have to do with the 1951 lockdown, that was still a raw memory when these stories were published. One was “New Unionist” about one of the “scabs” [non-unionised workers] who took over work on the wharves when the union workers were locked out. As Hilliard tells it, the soldiers who protect these “new unionists” really despised them. The story is, to say the least, didactic. [This was the story that Dennis McEldowney damned in Landfall as so bad it was “embarrassing”]. The other story, “Friday Nights are Best” has a unionist who has been thrown out of work in the lockdown and has to take up work is a rural area. At first he likes it as a break, but he soon can’t help wanting to go back to the city. It is interesting that Hilliard doesn’t address party-political factions in these two lockdown stories. Perhaps by this stage, while still being left-wing, he had become disenchanted with union politics and he had long since left behind him his two years as a member of the Communist Party.

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            Published in 1976, Hilliard’s second short-story collection Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches has some of the same preoccupations as A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches but there are some major differences. In the 25 stories, concern with Maori matters and racial prejudice is still there, but there is a much franker approach to the matter of sex. Perhaps what could be printed had moved on since 1963.

            On the interest in Maori situations, the story “Absconder” is a first-person monologue by a teenage Maori girl in which she makes it clear that she has been mistreated in Welfare custody. “The Girl from Kaeo” shows the gulf of misunderstanding between the official version of a Maori teenager’s delinquency and her own view of the same matters. “The Tree” demonstrates how a small Maori village removes a tree in the proper, traditional and ceremonial way to make way for some necessary Ministry of Works project. [Thinks – is this a reply to Roderick Finlayson’s better-known story “The Totara Tree”, wherein Maori block “progress”?] “Nothing But the Facts” has a Maori boy in a boarding school having to defend himself from potential blackmail. “Matilda” has a Maori girl falling foul of Pakeha ideas of ownership. “Puti Wants Beer” has Maori women sitting in a kitchen talking about their useless menfolk and contraception, but when the men return they realise how much they need them. “Wendy” has a Pakeha woman telling a teacher that she does not like her daughter playing with a Maori kid… not realising that the teacher is the Maori kid’s mother.

            These are all very familiar tropes from Hilliard’s earlier stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches, but what about the frank sex now found in Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches? “Corrective Training” has two girls in borstal who, it is implied, have a lesbian attraction. [Hilliard’s point  isn’t clear here. He seems to suggest that incarceration is the cause of homosexuality.] The brief sketch “Anita’s Eyes” is a description of a prostitute’s eyes. The title story “Send Somebody Nice” concerns a young prostitute who doesn’t know how not to be too affectionate with her clients… and in the end she escapes to Australia with one of her customers. “The Telegram” has a homosexual businessman sending a telegram to a soldier he has exploited and thinks of blackmailing him. “Girl in a Corner” shows a girl having an affair with a sailor and hovering on the edge of becoming a prostitute. In “At Angelo’s”, after a prostitute approaches a group of men in a late night diner, the men talk about how tacky whores are but also come to understand that prostitutes are exploited; and male customers are as much exploitative as the prostitutes’ pimps are. Far and away the most awkward and badly organised story in the collection is “Initiation” wherein a boy feels “unclean” when he goes through a rough boarding-school ritual after he has been with a prostitute.

            There are two stories that directly address ideology. “Street Meeting” concerns two Communist speakers on a Wellington street who are being heckled by various people including a drunk; and they are being watched by two policemen who, however, do not intervene. There is something very dispiriting about this story, as if the Communist orators are themselves beginning to lose heart in their cause, aware that most people are indifferent to their words as they go about their ordinary business. [Be it noted that by 1978, when the story was published, the New Zealand CP had diminished to a tiny membership, and had suffered a schism with some allying with Russia and some allying with China – which is referenced in the story.] The other story is the almost unbearably sentimental tale called “The Paper Sellers” – on one side of a Wellington street, a Communist is selling “The People’s Voice”. On the other side of a street a Catholic activist is selling “The Catholic Worker”… but despite their clashing beliefs, the Communist hawker comes to like the Catholic hawker, especially when he gets sick and dies. The Communist admits to himself that the other guy was just another decent human being and ideology isn’t everything. Okay – it’s a humane story and, as so often, Hilliard is on the side of the angels. But it’s as unlikely as the last-minute reformation of Tu at the end of A Night at Green River.

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And so to Hilliard’s “remarkably naïve work of non-fiction” which I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. This is Mahitahi – Work Together: Some Peoples of the Soviet Union, published in 1989 by Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Noel Hilliard and his wife Kiriwai went on a six-week tour through regions such as Uzbekistan, Moldavia and Byelorussia and other outlying parts of the U.S.S.R. Their aim was to see how well-treated the minority ethnicities in the Soviet state were. And - lo and behold – they discovered that everything was absolutely wonderful in the U.S.S.R. My goodness! How well it compared with all the anti-Maori prejudice there was in New Zealand!! …   Except that everything they were told was told by official guides who of course said that everything was wonderful. The Hilliards swallowed it. True, there are one or two negative things that Hilliard mentions. A Siberian physicist mentions the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and how Siberia got some of the fallout. And students are amazed that New Zealanders eat more meat that Russians can afford.

For naivete, consider this when Halliard speaks in a Russian newspaper editorial room. He tells the Russian journalists that in New Zealand “our newspaper are privately owned and have no obligations to the public, only to their shareholders.” Writing of the Russian journalists’ response he says they asked “How can such things be? they wanted to know. What kind of a newspaper is it that opposes your government and also the wishes of the people? Is it not their task to reflect the way your people think?      No, I said, their task is to return profits to the shareholder.” [To which they replied] “And who are these people who set themselves up in opposition to the majority of the people?” Yes folks, a one-party state with much gagging of independent thought will always tell the truth more that those filthy capitalist newspapers. And I believe the moon is made of green cheese.

Later, in Uzbekistan, Hilliard reports “I mentioned the Human Rights Commission in New Zealand and its Race Relations Office which looks into complaints about discrimination in housing and jobs and has power to prosecute offenders. ‘Do you have such a thing here?’    ‘No, we don’t have national chauvinism,’ said the professor. ‘We have national boasting and other such harmless forms. But we have no need of an institution such as you describe.” Actually this answer confirms what I thought of the U.S.S.R. It had no concept of Human Rights.

It is interesting that nowhere in this book is the name of Stalin mentioned as at this time his memory was out of favour. If Stalin had been mentioned, then one would have to admit that under his regime, hundreds of thousand [in fact probably millions] of non-Russian ethnicity were forcibly uprooted from their homelands and sent to distant – and usually impoverished – areas. Many such ethnicities whom Hilliard (briefly) visited were only where they were because Stalin had banished them there. You can verify this if you read Robert Conquest’s Stalin Breaker of Nations or any other reliable history book on the subject.

I could say more on this matter but I am beginning to rant. Suffice it to say that, ironically, the U.S.S.R. was on the brink of collapsing when Hilliard visited it. And once it collapsed there were wars in which various ethnicities broke away from Russian rule. So much for such happy folk under the Soviet regime whom Hilliard reported. Interesting to note that Hilliard was news chief of the Wellington Evening Post when he wrote this book. How he must have suffered under those shareholding private owners.

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            By this time you are probably thinking that I have just systematically trashed the work of Noel Hilliard. Not so. In his days and time he was a compassionate man who took seriously the matter of Pakeha discrimination against Maori and who wrote about it. He may have – like many of his vintage – for a while embraced the delusion that Communism was the cure, but [even if he wrote one silly book about Russia late in his life] he broke with that delusion even while remaining a committed socialist.

            The main problem now is that he has become a back-number. His frames of reference belong to another era. Maori are no longer a rural people rarely seen in cities. Maori no longer leave other people – non-Maori – to write about their experience. There are now many skilled Maori writers who can speak for themselves; and what they write is very different from what Hilliard used to write about them. Hilliard’s work is often seen now as patronising or perpetuating old stereotypes. When I wrote about Roderick Finlayson, I quoted the old quip “No good deed goes unpunished”, remembering how Finlayson, as sympathetic of Maori as Hilliard was, was criticised by the Maori author Patricia Grace for not depicting Maori life accurately. Hillard has fallen into the same category, not helped by his frequent tendency to write sentimentally about Nature, his often awkward prose, and his eagerness to point out morals.

            He is of another age. He belongs to history.

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                              SOMETHING THOUGHTFUL

                                           THE COURTESY OF TRUCKIES    

Only occasionally on this blog have I made comments about how New Zealanders drive their cars. [See the posting Suburban Dodgems.]  But recently I’ve become more and more annoyed – even angered – by the way some irresponsible people drive.

On very many journeys, I have driven around most of the North Island and a good deal of the South Island. On the open highways, most drivers drive fairly well. There is the odd road hog who wants to overtake as many cars as possible, regardless of how dangerous some overtaking at speed can be. There is also the odd very slow driver who inconveniences the traffic behind him by refusing to move over to the many passing lanes that are provided. Yes, statistics show that there have been many fatal crashes on the open roads, but personally I have witnessed only one or two in my years of driving.

For me, the problem comes when we are dealing with the multi-lane motorways. Most motorways give the speed-limit as 100kph (though some, like the Hamilton Freeway, give it as 110kph). Some people take this to mean that they have to drive at 100kph, as if it is an obligatory speed. But the fact is that the very existence of multi-lanes means one can move over and drive in the outer lanes… which is what I tend to do, happily cruising at about 80kph unless it is absolutely necessary to speed up a little more. And as I drive I see cars zipping along past me – mostly safely. But I also see frequently certifiable fools weaving their way at top speed through traffic, dodging in and out between other cars that are already going at top speed. What is the purpose of this? It’s possible that a few (a very few) have a legitimate reason for speeding. Maybe they have an urgent appointment to meet. Maybe they have some domestic crisis to deal with. But the odds are that the dangerous dodgers and weavers are just speeding for the fun of it, showing off how they can overtake others. The most dangerous drivers – the ones most likely to crash – are young men between teenager-age and mid-twenties. Again, this is shown in statistics. And young men are prone to showing off in their cars. Apart from fining more severely those who exceed the speed limit, I can see no solution to this problem. The last government we had suggested that all speed-limits should be lowered, but the incoming government has scrapped the very idea of this. So dangerous driving and many crashes will persist.

Which brings me to truckies. In my experience, truck-drivers are more courteous on the roads than most drivers are. I have never seen a truck-driver NOT using the passing lane when his truck is trundling up a hill. Truck-drivers are not road hogs. They are aware that they are carrying cargo that has to be protected and brought safely to its destination.  Truckies manoeuvre carefully, wave cars on when they have to move over, and do not speed any more than they really have to. In spite of all the stereotypes of truckies, they are better and more skilled than menaces who want to speed just for the hell of it.

 

Monday, February 26, 2024

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MY BRILLIANT SISTER” by Amy Brown (Scribner, $NZ 37.99); “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph, $NZ42 ); “THE VANISHING POINT” by Andrea Hotere (Ultimo Press $NZ38)


            Amy Brown, New Zealander now resident in Melbourne, has published poetry and stories for children over the last decade or so. My Brilliant Sister is her first novel for adults and it is a formidable, complex piece of work. The novel comprises three separate stories about three separate women, but linked with the same themes: how difficult, if not impossible, is it for women to sustain a career, or be creative, if they have to do all the domestic work and raise children? Or conversely, how easily can women sustain friendships (or love) when they are focussed on a career?  This is clearly a feminist novel, often referring to the fact that women usually have to do all the heavy-lifting of cleaning and raising children while their male spouses or partners can simply stand back and pursue their interests. Each of the three women tells her story in the first person.

            Ida (the first third of the novel) is a New Zealander living in Melbourne. She is not married formally, though we are told that she and her man had a jokey “celebration” in Wellington when they decided to live together. They have a four-year-old daughter called Aster. Ida feels thwarted. Her partner is an academic university lecturer who hides himself in his study and absorbs himself in his writing, getting ahead with his career. Ida believes she too could have had an academic career as she did well at university; but she wasn’t awarded scholarships and instead teaches at high-school. Ida has to look after Aster, take her to and from care places, make breakfast, lunch and dinner, do the cleaning… and teach high-school. Like her partner she wants to write, but where is the time? In the background of this story is the Covid pandemic. At high-school Ida gets 17-year-old girls to read the classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career,  published in 1901, written by Stella Miles Franklin [full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, but published under the name Miles Franklin, as in 1901 it was still believed by some publishers that books would sell better if they appeared under masculine-sounding names]. Stella Miles Franklin was a free-wheeling, unconventional woman who turned down a proposal of marriage, never married, and got on with her writing… under many different pseudonyms.  Struck down with pneumonia, Ida, bed-ridden, reads all she can about Stella Miles Franklin, and learns that Stella had a younger sister, Linda, who married when Stella did not, had a baby and died when she was only 25. Linda lived a conventional life, did all the household chores, but also sometimes showed a desire to produce works of her own. She frequently wrote to Stella. This leads Ada to consider what it would be like for women who have literary or other artistic aspirations but are never able to achieve them… which could be her own fate.        

The second section of the novel is therefore told by Linda Franklin, in rural Australia in the 1890s and very early 1900s, round about the time when Australian women won the franchise. In the first person, Linda writes letters to her older sister or addresses Stella directly in a free-flowing monologue. Linda remembers Stella’s boisterous adolescence, her tendency to dominate Linda, and the way she brushed aside both an offer of marriage and the stories Linda tried to tell when Stella was concocting her own plots. Linda marries, is domesticated and has a child, but there is a tension in her thoughts. She likes her husband, she loves her child (who dies young), but she still feels she has not been given the chance to fully express herself in writing, about which she dreams. Stella Miles Franklin becomes famous when she is only 21 and her My Brilliant Career is first published. For Linda, Stella becomes “my brilliant sister”. She envies her sister and she dislikes the way Stella often belittles as trivia things that are important to Linda. And, of course, Linda dies too young to show what she could have achieved.

While this second section reinforces the theme Amy Brown began with, the third section of My Brilliant Sister is more ambiguous. The time is the [almost] present. Another Stella is a very successful rock star in New Zealand, a singer-songwriter and guitarist who attracts large audiences to her gigs. Her stage name is Stella Miles Franklin. Stella sees no point in marriage.  Stella has fallen in lesbian love with another musician, but apparently her love is not returned. She often leans on her mother for conversation but, at the age of 36, she’s beginning to wonder if her musical days are fading away. Has she reached her peak? She talks with Linda, a friend since schooldays, who is married and has three children; but much as she likes her friend, she knows that is not the life she wants. As a celebrity, she is invited to speak at her old high school but, as she narrates it, what she says is barely coherent. She ends up fantasising about having the double or sister she never had – somebody she could relate closely with.

There are many ideas crammed into this section of the novel, but surely one of them is that having a “brilliant career” does not necessarily mean either happiness or fulfilment. There is always competition. There is always the possibility that focusing on achieving something can make it difficult to foster intimate relationships with others. The achiever can morph into a loner and loneliness will reign. Read as I have read it, this third part of the novel is more dour and depressing even than the experiences of Ada and Linda Franklin… or perhaps Amy Brown is signalling that being truly creative is always a hard road.

Taken as a whole, My Brilliant Sister is a complex and thoughtful account of the relationship of the sexes, as well as the difficulty of finding room for creativity. For this reader at any rate, the most persuasive of the novel’s three sections is the opening one, the one that sounds most authentic. Brown charts carefully, moment by moment, the small things that stack up, forcing Ida to see herself as almost trapped and unable to fulfil herself. I can’t help wondering if it is at least in part based on the author’s own experience. [The very unfashionable three-letter name Ida might chime with the author’s three-letter name Amy.] The second section, set in the New South Wales of the 1890s, is almost as persuasive. Brown has certainly done her research. The social classes of the time, the poverty that the Franklin family fall into when they lose their farm, the sharp difference between Linda’s home experience and Stella’s boarding-school experience, the snobbery of some of the horsey-riding clan – it is all readable and all real. I would only fault (me being a nit-picking person) a few moments when narrating Linda, recalling what she said as a ten-year-old, seems to use a vocabulary far beyond her age.

This is an important novel, though I would understand if some readers saw it as very depressing.

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It’s been calculated that about 300 books concerning Thomas Edward Lawrence “of Arabia” have been published, and they keep coming. Readers of this blog may be aware that some time back I wrote a detailed critique of Lawrence’s autobiography of his years in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom ,highly praised in its day but now subject of much criticism. And I found much in it to criticise. I also reviewed Richard Aldington’s Lawrence ofArabia – A Biographical Enquiry, published in the 1950s and the first detailed attempt to debunk the Lawrence legend. Aldington was shouted down at the time, but later research has proven that much of what he wrote has turned out to be accurate. The problem was that Aldington tended to be dogmatic and refused to see any good in Lawrence. I could see that, even if Lawrence did not achieve as much as he claimed to have done, there was something extraordinary in a short-sized English officer being able to gain the trust of Arabs and become one of their leaders – especially as Lawrence was only in his twenties at the time. So you can see I’m undecided about Lawrence. He was partly charismatic leader of the Arab tribes and partly self-aggrandising charlatan.

            Ranulph Fiennes’ Lawrence of Arabia is the latest attempt to crack the Lawrence enigma. Fiennes has written many non-fictions, usually polishing up the tales of British heroes like Captain Scott and Shackleton. Fiennes has also done much travelling. The blurb tells me that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Fiennes is “the world’s greatest living explorer”. Most pertinent, however, is the fact the Fiennes has been a soldier and commander of men in situations of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. In the 1960s he fought for the Sultan of Omar in putting down the Dhofar Rebellion. This was in a desert country and Fiennes sees himself as having acted very much as Lawrence did in a similar environment.

            In his introduction, Fiennes describes Lawrence’s work in Arabia as “one of the most awe-inspiring stories of all time… a young British officer set the desert on fire and emblazoned his name in the pages of history.” Against this hyperbole, all I can say is “Strewth!” Fiennes identifies himself with Lawrence. Every so often, Fiennes breaks off his narrative of Lawrence of Arabia to interpolate tales of his days in Oman. When he tells the well-known story of Lawrence shooting an Arab to prevent a blood feud, he tells us that he himself knew how unpleasant he felt when he had to shoot a man. When we are told of some successful strategy Lawrence used,  Fiennes tells us of something similar he did. I can see easily how this might annoy some readers.

            Having read other texts about Lawrence, I question at least some of the statements Fiennes makes. He presents the taking of port of Wejh as one of Lawrence’s great triumphs when others have reported that Wejh was taken mainly by the Royal Navy, with Lawrence turning up after most of the action was over. More questionably, Fiennes says that Lawrence knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement – the plan to divide up Arabia between the English and the French - until the very last moment and only then did he become disillusioned with his hope to free the Arabs. The hard fact is that Lawrence was fully aware of this secret pact almost as soon as it was hatched.

            In fairness, though, I have to admit that, despite the interpolations about himself, Fiennes tells a good story and makes the campaigns of Lawrence understandable. As Lawrence told of them in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they were often confusing and complex. Fiennes turns them into a good yarn. Also, note that he takes on board some of the things that Aldington was abused for noting in the 1950s – among other things that Lawrence was essentially homosexual with a tendency for sadomasochism. Fiennes admits that Lawrence had his flaws, and that his supposed aim to create a unified Arab country never came to fruition. Indeed what Lawrence left behind him was a mess of rival Arab tribes vying for dominance. In the end his achievement was very little. In spite of which, as told by Fiennes, Lawrence of Arabia bounces along with its skirmish scenes, de-railing of trains and other matters of derring-do which will give great pleasure to those who like the genre of outdoor muscular adventure – truthful or otherwise.

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I have to admit that I took some time getting around to reading Andrea Hotere’s The Vanishing Point, which was published last year. My holidays drew me off to other interests.

 The Vanishing Point is centred on a very famous work of art. Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting), painted in Madrid in 1656, has been examined, quarrelled over by experts, admired by art critics, inspired other painters (Picasso et al) and widely loved by the general public more than nearly any other painting except perhaps the Mona Lisa. I admit to standing gazing at it for a long time while visiting the Prado a few years back. It does cast a certain spell. What gets you is the way Velasquez, painting a group of the royal Spanish court, presents them in unexpected places, including himself staring at us from his easel as if he is painting us, the viewers, and not the royal gathering. There is also the unexpected cluster around the little princess, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, with not only two ladies-in-waiting about her, but the two dwarves and the mastiff and more dimly-depicted people behind them. And why are the king (Philip IV) and the queen shown only in a small painting on the far wall… or is it a mirror showing part of what Velasquez is painting? And, at the painting’s vanishing point, who is that man going out the far door?

It is, I believe, the complexity of this work of art and Velasquez’s daring in breaking with tradition that make Las Meninas the masterpiece it is. He defied the standard convention of presenting royalty in stiff, lined-up poses. We admire Las Meninas and ponder over it for purely aesthetic reasons.

            But Andrea Hotere is not really focused on aesthetics. She is focused on a conspiracy. Basic plot: in the late 20th century two young woman, interested in art, try to unravel the “secret” behind Las Meninas and what is hidden in it.  There is a “curse” hanging over King Philip IV and his offspring, and apparently a scandal involving the king himself … and it transpires that there’s a sinister group, something like the Spanish version of the fabled  “Illuminati”, that tries fanatically to cover things up. Hotere’s narrative moves between 17th century Spain and late 20th century London and Spain. And apparently in the 20th century there are still people trying to eliminate those who get too near to unravelling the hidden codes of Velasquez’s masterwork.

            Let’s make some fair points: Andrea Hotere has done a great deal a research, knows much of the reality of 17th century Spain, and conveys it to us, usually in the form of conversations between characters to enlighten us... which can sometimes sound artificial. She is also aware that the “curse” that fell upon the whole Hapsburg dynasty was not some supernatural spell or demonic damnation. It was simply genetic. The Hapsburgs were very in-bred, leading among other things to the notorious and unsightly “Hapsburg Jaw”; and the king who followed Philip IV was the pitiful King Carlos who was virtually a drivelling idiot. [Years ago I read on this subject a book called Carlos the Bewitched, which is what the poor fellow was nicknamed at the time.] Yet it is not really this “curse” that is Andrea Hotere’s main interest. She is more concerned with that man going out the door of the “vanishing point” and all he might have done with regard to the scandal involving the king.

            The Vanishing Point is an easy read, though for all the author’s genuine erudition it does seem to be following the likes of The Girl with a Pearl Earing. However, given that Hotere is genuinely very well informed about 17th century Spain, she is miles ahead of the type of unhistorical drivel Dan Brown produced with his The Da Vinci CodeThe Vanishing Point is a great read if you like conspiracy theories.