Departures, Refurbishings, and Arrivals

The house of fiction in New Zealand, neither a large not crowded dwelling at the best of times, has emptied somewhat dismayingly over the past year or two with the deaths in rapid succession of four highly respected long-term tenants: Ngaio Marsh, John A. Lee, Frank Sargeson, and M.K. Joseph, the first three of whom have been in residence for almost fifty years. Though Ngaio Marsh never left New Zealand permanently she was a kind of mental expatriate, and her crime novels (even those few with New Zealand settings) belong to an essentially English tradition. She had nothing to do with the attempts to establish an indigenous fiction tradition in the thirties to which both Lee and Sargeson made important contributions. Lee’s trilogy of autobiographical novels, Children of the Poor (1934), The Hunted (1936), and Civilian Into Soldier (1937) were provoked by the depression and based on his own under-privileged upbringing. Written when Lee was a prominent member of the first Labour Government, they were among the first New Zealand novels to challenge the complacent colonial myths of ‘God’s Own Country’ and ‘The Working Man’s Paradise’. Sargeson occupies a position in New Zealand fiction similar to that which Henry Lawson (whom Sargeson greatly admired) occupies in Australia, as the founder of a native style and backbone of the national tradition. Though his early stories were his most influential works, Sargeson was most prolific in his final years, producing halfa dozen novels and a trilogy of autobiographical works in his last fifteen years. He died just after the release of a one-volume edition of his autobiographies (Sargeson, Penguin, 1981) and a new edition of The Stories of Frank Sargeson (Penguin, 1981). New Zealand fiction without Sargeson is like China without Mao. M.K. Joseph was a versatile and accomplished writer who wrote poetry and criticism in addition to five diverse novels which ranged from war stories to science fiction. A Soldier’s Tale (1976) was probably his best book and provoked some lively controversy as to the degree of the author’s implication in the bloody events it depicts. Ever since Sargeson’s first book Conversation With My Uncle (1936), and partly no doubt because of his immense authority and influence, the short story has had a more copious and vigorous history in New Zealand than the novel. This remains true in the 1980s; new novels of real merit have been fairly scarce, but there has been a host of story collections, several by new writers of considerable promise and achievement. Certainly the most impressive collection of the past few years is Maurice Duggan’s superb Collected Stories, edited by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 1981). Duggan died in 1974 and the thirty stories collected here took him thirty years to write. ‘I look in vain for big books, the decent output’, he once wrote. What he lacked in quantity, though, he made up for in quality; he was a painstaking craftsman who published nothing that had not been worked over and brought as close to perfection as he was capable. Only Mansfield and Sargeson among New Zealand writers of short fiction have written as well as Duggan. Duggan began writing in the 1940s when Sargeson’s influence was at its height and most New Zealand writers were using a flat, colloquial, barely articulate idiom such as was deemed appropriate for the presentation of New Zealand life. In this context Duggan was like a peacock in a pen of kiwis because he was both highly articulate and flamboyantly extravagant in style. Subsequently he reacted against his rhetorical excesses and forced himself to write plainly and simply in his stories of the Lenihan family, an unhappy Irish Catholic household (Immanuel’s Land, 1956). Having stripped his prose bare, however, Duggan proceeded to dress it up again, able now to achieve complexity without loss of force or truth. His later stories are increasingly longer and more elaborate, culminating in the baroque splendours of ‘O’Leary’s Orchard’ and ‘Riley’s Handbook’, two strikingly contrasted stories of novella length concerning ageing loners challenged in their withdrawal from human complexity by the demands of relationship. One story is tender, lyrical, comic, benign; the other is a frighteningly intense tirade of nihilistic hatred and despair. Duggan is not well known outside New Zealand; he deserves a wider audience. Beside the intensity and verbal ingenuity of Duggan the stories of Dan Davin, who also began writing in the 1940s, seem somewhat tame. Nevertheless his Selected Stories (Victoria University Press, 1981) is welcome for making available again his early stories (which also derive from an Irish Catholic background) in addition to later less distinctive work. For the past forty years the central tradition of the New Zealand short story is a mode that was fathered by (or perhaps fathered on would be a more accurate expression) Frank Sargeson. Primarily realistic in manner and colloquial in idiom, the typical New Zealand short story sets the individual against the group; in Vincent O’Sullivan’s words, ‘that robust tradition of the “man alone”, stories of men in a society which often is hostile and crude’. While under challenge from a variety of directions, this tradition is vigorously continued and to some extent extended in the stories of Owen Marshall, Peter Hooper, and Vincent O’Sullivan. The description of Marshall’s The Master of Big Jingles (McIndoe, 1982) in a review by Elizabeth Caffin in the New Zealand Listener could be applied in many of its details to Hooper’s The Goat Paddock (McIndoe, 1981) and O’Sullivan’s Dandy Edison for Lunch (McIndoe, 1981): Again the world of the isolated, the eccentric, the misunderstood, saints reviled and artists damned, again the world of small towns, hard landscapes, cities cramped and confined, of the fellowship of men and the alienation of women, of youth awakening and sudden violent death, that world which has become the New Zealand of fiction. Hooper and Marshall conform to the conventions of this tradition with apparent unconsciousness, whereas O’Sullivan manipulates them self-consciously. The major alternative to this tradition has come from women writers who prefer a more inward presentation of reality and can look to Katherine Mansfield as a model and precursor. Patricia Grace’s The Dream Sleepers (Longman Paul, 1981) also draws on her Māori heritage to challenge the stereotypes of male, Pakeha (white) fiction. Her stories are never strident but through a unique blend of comedy and lyricism they articulate a total ethos which speaks with the voice of ‘we’ not ‘I’. Grace is a leading figure in the exciting upsurge of fiction by Māori writers in the past decade. This movement is substantially documented in the anthology Into the World of Light, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Don Long (Heinemann, 1982) which includes stories by Ihimaera, Rowley Habib, Keri Hulme, and Bruce Stewart, as well as Grace. Fiona Kidman in Mrs Dixon and Friend (Hodder and Stoughton, 1982) writes from a female perspective but in technique and pattern her stories closely resemble the male tradition of critical realism. The other main challenge to the Sargeson tradition comes from a group of mostly younger writers who are attempting to modify and even subvert the conventions of provincial realism (to attach a label to the phenomenon) partly in response to recent developments in fiction overseas. C.K. Stead’s Five for the Symbol (Longman Paul, 1981) is unified thematically by a concern with New Zealand identity, but each story is consciously written in a different mode ranging from realism (‘A New Zealand Elegy’) to satirical fantasy (‘A Fitting Tribute’). Likewise Ian Wedde, also a poet primarily, experiments in The Shirt Factory (Victoria University Press, 1981) with a variety of fictional modes and techniques while unifying the collection with recurrent concerns and motifs; this book also includes his award-winning short novel, ‘Dick Seddon’s Great Dive’. Chris Else in Dreams of Pythagoras (Voice Press, 1981) and Michael Morrissey in The Fat Lady & The Astronomer (Sword Press, 1982) exhibit a familiarity with postmodern experimentalism from Borges to Barthelme to Beckett and eschew anything which smacks of ‘realism’ completely. Michael Gifkins in After the Revolution (Longman Paul, 1982), on the other hand, creates the illusion of realism in his stories, only to subject it to subtle subversion. The most comprehensive assaults on the conventions of realism in New Zealand fiction have come from Janet Frame indisputably the leading prose writer now that Sargeson has departed. After publishing eight novels in a decade Frame has only added a new novel since 1972, Living in the Maniototo (The Women’s Press, 1981 – originally published in the United States in 1979), which is set partly in the United States and partly in New Zealand, and is a fascinating demonstration of novelistic prestidigitation. Frame’s most recent book, just published, is autobiographical. Several novelists in mid-career have made interesting attempts in their most recent books to modify their established style. Maurice Shadbolt’s The Lovelock Version (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980) won a Book Award for its enterprising and entertaining assault (liberally mixed with fantasy) on New Zealand history, a welcome return to form from a writer whose recent novels have been somewhat self-indulgent. David Ballantyne’s The Penfriend (Dunmore, 1980) is an excursion into the domain of the thriller, but with philosophical and meta-fictional overtones. Philip Temple’s Beak of the Moon (Collins, 1981) is an exercise in Watership Down-type animal fantasy, the hero being a kea, the New Zealand mountain parrot, whose habitat is threatened by the encroachment of pastoralism. James McNeish’s Joy (Hodder and Stoughton, 1982) is a satirical comedy about a small New Zealand town, with wider implications which are realised with only partial success. The novelist who has most successfully extended his range in recent times has undoubtedly been Maurice Gee, whose Plumb trilogy has elevated him into the first rank of New Zealand writers. The first volume, Plumb (Faber, 1978) was showered with awards, and is based on the life of Gee’s grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who became a rationalist and was jailed for subversion during World War I. The novel focuses on the tension between his ideals and the demands of his large family. The second volume, Meg (Penguin, 1981) examines the lives of Plumb’s children, and the third volume, Sole Survivor (Penguin, 1983), which I have not yet seen, apparently focusses on Raymond, son of meg, grandson of Plumb, and deals with social and political events in contemporary New Zealand. The trilogy is bound to become a landmark in the country’s fiction. Ray Grover’s Cork of War (McIndoe, 1982) is a curious hybrid, part historical monograph, part novel. Cast in the form of an historical fiction, it succeeds in organising a vast mass of freshly researched information about race relations in early New Zealand into a compelling narrative. Most of the new novelists to appear so far in the 1980s have been women. Fiona Kidman has written two novels in quick succession, A Breed of Women (Heinemann, 1980) and Mandarin Summer (Heinemann, 1981), which lack finesse but have plenty of rough vigour and narrative momentum. Sandi Hall’s The Grandmothers (The Women press, 1982) uses the medium of science fiction to express her feminist vision. Yvonne du Fresne’s The Book of Ester (Longman Paul, 1982) is set amongst the Danish Huguenot community in Manawatu and incorporates the long history of these people since their expulsion from France in the seventeenth century into the complex thought processes of its contemporary heroine; an ambitious, intense, and demanding work. Sue McCauley’s Other Halves (Hodder and Stoughton, 1982) is a taut and resonant example of the ‘well-made novel’ that is refreshingly original in content. It deals with an unlikely liaison between a middle-class white woman in her thirties and a seventeen-year-old unemployed Māori street-kid. The relationship is made sufficiently plausible to sustain the wealth of racial, sexual, class, and generational insights which their interaction generates. It is serious but not solemn, dense but not cluttered, pointed but not preachy. With so many long-time tenants having moved out it is good to have such lively newcomers taking up residence and revitalising the place.

Peter Simpson

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