Something New

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

“TONY FOMISON – Life of the Artist” by Mark Forman  (Auckland University Press, hardback, $NZ59.99 )

I deliberately begin my review of Mark Forman’s biography of Tony Fomison with a clear judgment. Mark Forman has done an heroic piece of work. He was diligent in chasing down facts about the painter’s life. It’s a matter of no stone being left unturned. He has interviewed as many relevant people as possible – friends or relations of Tony Fomison, painters who did or did not get on with him, critics who wrote about him positively or negatively, odd people who at some time lived with him, women who sometimes looked after him or who got sick of him, people of different ethnicities who got to know him. Mark Forman scoured archives for letters from friends or painters or family members who knew him; or comments about him that had been written by journalists in newspapers about the arts world. In short Forman has been as thorough as humanly possible. This can only be called the definitive life and work of Fomison and it is highly unlikely that any other biographer of Fomison will be able to top it . BUT there is the big problem of overload when we are given too much information. I am reminded of once setting out to read the full version of  Boswell’s biography of Johnson and finding it so overloaded that I gave up on it. I did not give up on Tony Fomison – Life of the Artist, but sometimes its precise-ness becomes a bit of a chore to read.

            There is one major merit of this biography – when speaking of art and painting, Mark Forman does not talk down to his readership. Too many art critics and art chroniclers use a refined [and largely redundant] recherche vocabulary when interpreting or explaining works of art. I have long believed that [like most post-modernist criticism] the main aim is to show how clever the art critic is and how superior the critic is to us inferior readers. None of that nonsense for Forman. He writes clearly about how art changed in New Zealand in Fomison’s life-time and the different phases of Fomison’s work. When he analyses a painting by Fomison, he says clearly what he believes Fomison was aiming at, he takes us through the techniques Fomison used to create effects in a painting, and what effect the painting had on the general public. BUT one major problem mars this biography. Tony Fomison – Life of the Artist is filled with photos of Fomison, his friends and family – but there are no images of Fomison’s work itself. On Pages 404-to-407, Forman explains that Fomison’s family did not allow any of Fomison’s paintings to be reproduced. The result is that the reader [unless he or she has an archive of Fomison’s work] cannot really visualise what the artist was producing. It is as if this fascinating book has been sabotaged.

            Thus for my general review, but you would be very annoyed if I left it at that. so let’s get to the main things Forman says about Fomison’s life and work.

The life of Tony Fomison (born 1939; died 1990) was often erratic, sometimes sordid and taking a long time before he really became engaged with painting. He was born and raised in a working-class suburb of Christchurch. Life-long he boasted about his working-class origins and he was always ready to rant about the bourgeoisie – a common affectation among painters and poets when they want to boost their prestige with their mates. Young Tony Fomison was a sickly child, asthmatic and extremely self-conscious about his lean and spindly legs. At school he was very much a loner, finding it hard to make friends. Years later, says Mark Forman, Tony Fomison claimed that he never wanted to socialise. He didn’t do well at school, but he loved drawing and read voraciously. In his two years at art school, he always got C-minus grades.

Surprisingly, as a teenager, Fomison began to take a great interest in the Maori rock carvings which could be found in South Canterbury. He studied them on his own, cycling to distant sites and drawing his impressions of the carvings. He became, in effect, an “amateur archaeologist”… but his interest went further than that. He was later to write and have published articles, in reputable journals, papers about the rock formations. There was even the possibility that he could become a full-time archaeologist, but in his early 20’s he turned to more interest in painting with a side-interest in sculpture. A few of his paintings were sold. More important, he was awarded a scholarship to study art in London and Paris. Knowing that expressionism has run its course, he was first interested in modernist works like those of Francis Bacon with his contorted images of people in some sort of agony. These had a profound influence on Fomison’s later work, but even more influencing him were the paintings he saw by Goya, Caravaggio and other masters of the late Renaissance. In that situation, though he was never a Christian, he became very interested in the image of Jesus and he was later to paint many images of Christ, though most often as Christ either dead or in agony. Some critics have carped over the fact that Fomison was so influenced by classic European art. There was [and in some quarters still is] a prejudice that New Zealand painters should paint only New Zealand themes.

All this so far makes it sound as if Fomison was on a steady course as an artist. But this was far from the case. From the time he had left his parents’ home, he had tended to live in various places of squalor. It was when he was in London and Paris that he became addicted to hard drugs, moving from amphetamines to heroin and trying to make a living as a dishwasher. In Paris he was jailed for three weeks for vagrancy and by the time he returned to London, he was deeply depressed and seriously considered suicide. He had abandoned painting. His sister Julia, who was a nurse, managed to get him put in the Banstead psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for three months. He dried out a little, although the destructive drug culture remained with him and he was still able to access drugs.

Now in his late 20’s he returned to New Zealand, hooked up with another drug-using painter Philip Clairmont, and tried to adjust once again to conservative Christchurch. He went back to his parents home until his father kicked him out. He had a hard time getting back to painting, painted versions of Christ but also painting distorted images of people gurning [making grotesque faces]. Mark Forman makes it clear that, despite his bohemian way of life and his general slovenly presentation, he was capable of dressing himself respectably when he needed to – especially when he resumed his interest in the Maori stone carvings and dealt with museums and experts in the field. By the early 1970’s, the drug LSD was banned in New Zealand. Fomison had used the drug, so he now ran on opioids  - as well as heroin. In 1972 he tried to get off opioids and took the methadone treatment. Many younger painters of his generation claimed that hard drugs inspired their work.  Police raided the house where he lived and he spent six weeks in prison – but there he was given the opportunity to paint. Being allowed to paint five hours a day got him back to painting regularly. The first real exhibition of his work made him better known. Mark Forman explains carefully how Fomison’s styles and techniques in painting had changed. He now often painted on hessian and, with much difficulty, he had mastered the art of working with oil paints – something that had previously daunted him. Fomison’s paintings were often dark, and his images of Christ were mainly of the corpse of Christ.

It is only when we are about half-way through Tony Fomison – Life of the Artist that Mark Forman deals with Fomison’s sexuality. In mid-career Fomison fell in love with the very middle-class painter Marc Way. Marc was gay but, much as he admired some of Fomison’s work, he was not interested in having any sexual relationship with him. In fact, Marc Way was repelled by Fomison’s messy and disorderly life. Fomison tried to become part of the gay community but he never got further than going to some dances organised by gays and he never had a real gay friend.  He remained what he had been when he was a teenager – a loner. Gay or not, the hard fact is that, in domestic matters, the people who tried most to help him were women. For three years Diane Perham propped him up, made sure he was fed, tried to keep his house orderly, until the moody painter became intolerable. It is a hard fact that many creative people are often self-obsessed and ignorant of other people’s needs. Thus with Fomison. Later Daphne and then Emily Karaka helped him out for a while, but it always ended with them being repelled by him.

Fomison made the decision to move to Auckland where he, at different times, lived in Grafton, Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, usually renting old and in some cases nearly decrepit houses. Only later in his life, when he was in his 40’s, did he get a mortgage for a house of his own – and then he aimed for what would look more like respectability.

Fomison painted some images based on Maori culture, but at least one Maori pundit objected to a Pakeha dabbling in Maori beliefs and legends [more recently – after Fomison’s death – it has become necessary for Pakeha to apologise should they deal with Maori lore]. However, living in Ponsonby, which had not yet become the gentrified and expensive Auckland suburb that it now is,  there were many Pasifika people, especially Samoans. Some were Fomison’s neighbours and he soon found comradeship with them. This was in the era when the conservative Prime Minister Robert Muldoon was encouraging the police to carry out “dawn raids” to round up “over-stayers” - Pasifika people who had overrun the time they were given visas to work in New Zealand. [More level-headed people pointed out that there were far more British and Australian “over-stayers” in New Zealand, but Muldoon ignored that.] In that climate Fomison sided with the Samoans and became more interested in their culture. This led to something that is still controversial. Undergoing much pain, Fomison submitted to having the traditional Samoan  tatau – the sacred tattoo that elite Samoan male adolescents were given – carved upon his body. It was a long and painful process – and unfortunately there were complications and his blood was poisoned. Much medical help was needed to cure him… and there were some Samoans who believed that Fomison did not have the right to have the tatau. And when Fomison eventually visited Samoa – together with a film-crew led by Geoff Stevens – he discovered that he really didn’t fit into Samoan culture at all. Nevertheless he had painted the mural the “Ponsonby Madonna” for the Catholic boys’ school St. Paul, where most of the teenaged boys were Samoan. The Blessed Virgin Mary was depicted as a Samoan woman and Jesus, also depicted as Samoan, was presented as a teenager, not a baby in his mother’s arms.

Mark Forman has perforce to tell us much about the art galleries Fomison had to deal with and the people who ran those [public or commercial] galleries – fixing the prices for paintings that were there to be sold, organising an artist’s exhibition, sending out invitations to art critics etc. The art critics could be positive or negative about Fomison’s achievement. Forman makes it clear that there had been many “schools” of painting about which the critics could quarrel. Very much influenced by Toss Woollaston (who mainly painted landscapes) and even more influenced by Colin McCahon, Fomison early agreed that some sort of human figure should be important in a painting – a representation of human conundrums. One critic claimed that Fomison had become New Zealand leading painter. By contrast, the critic Francis Pound still clung to the merit of abstract art [mainly influenced by American trends] and saw little merit in Fomison’s work.

By the mid 1980’s, it was clear to many of his friends that Fomison was “losing it”. He did wildly eccentric things, forgot people’s names, or couldn’t remember basic things. It is easy to believe that his huge intake of illicit drugs hadn’t helped his brain [not that Mark Forman dwells on this]. But by this stage he was more hooked on alcohol than on drugs. Nevertheless, he was given a residency in the Rita Angus Cottage in Wellington… though he didn’t much like it and thought it was inadequate for a place where he could paint. Later he went to Coromandel and spent some time with the influential potter Barry Brickell, who had strong ideas about using nature as the way to express ones ideas. Fomison liked Brickell but their relationship was brief.

As 1990 approached, it was clear that many of Fomison’s fellow painters were dropping out of sight or dying. Philip Claremont had hanged himself. It was also clear that Fomison was turning back to more traditional inspirations. The problem of trying to identify himself with other ethnicities led him, in his final days, to paint a number of paintings based on characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Overwhelmed by his consumption of alcohol, his system gradually broke down. In 1990, he went to Waitangi on Waitangi Day, but his body gave in, he fell and was injured, was rushed to the Whangarei hospital, and died on 7th February 1990. He was 50 years old. Mark Forman notes that Fomison’s funeral was directed by a churchman who spoke of Fomison as if he were a saint… even though Fomison was not a religious person. Many friends and fellow art people and Fomison’s mother and some members of his family were present.

There is no doubt that Tony Fomison was an important and influential New Zealand painter. But, as Forman makes clear, he was not always a person you would not want to deal with. Often he could be completely aggressive, deliberately provoking or insulting people. He would turn up when invited to parties and would then abuse his host. His behaviour towards the women who helped him was often appalling. Emily Karaka left him after an event [not entirely Fomison’s fault] when she was injured in his house. He had a violent fight with his estranged brother Michael. And there were many petulant public displays. The most notorious was when he had designed some posters for a play production of Kafka’s  Metamophosis. Invited to sit in the front row, Fomison spent the whole play heckling the actors and making his own rude comments on what he thought of the play. The audience tried to shut him up to no avail. When the play was over, the play’s director [Raymond Hawthorne] confronted Fomison and said “How would you like it if I came to one of your exhibitions and wrote shit over your paintings?’ (Quoted pg. 279)… not as if Fomison would have been phased by being chastised. Why did Fomison so often behave this way? It’s easy to speculate. All the drugs and booze would have broken down his inhibitions. There was his sense of being an outsider and not having many real friends – an attitude he had had since childhood. His uncertain attitude to sex and his experience of not being fully accepted by the gay community. His shame about the shape of his body etc. etc. etc. These are mere guesses on my part and – of course – I could be completely wrong. But there was something that made him too often unable to deal reasonably with other people.

Enough of this speculation! The fact is, many great painters were eccentric, misanthropic, misogynist, sadistic or whatever, doing cruel things to other people . Caravaggio probably committed murder and had an unhealthy interest in teenaged boys. Eric Gill had incestuous relations with is daughters. Both Rodin and Picasso sexually abused the women who posed for them… and so on. Not that Fomison had ever done anything as bad as that, but it remains true that many creative people are so absorbed in their work and ideas that they regard other people as less important than they are, and therefore not to be considered. If we pass some sort of judgment on artists, we should first and foremost be interested in what the painter has created and leave the biography behind.  Like the person or not, Fomison was a major figure in New Zealand art, sometimes daring, sometimes provocative, sometimes very earnest and willing to change styles when he knew one sets of inspiration had been exhausted. Mark Forman knows this and has correctly saluted Fomison.
 

Pompous Footnote: I was so annoyed that this book lacked images of Fomison’s paintings, that I went to some art galleries and found a few of Fomison’s works… whereupon I, with my very limited pocket camera, took some [amateurish and slightly cockeyed] photos. Here they are.

            At the Auckland Art Gallery, I took a snap of Fomison’s Skull Face, a frightful image of a face decaying.

            Also at the Auckland Art Gallery I snapped Fomison’s Not Just a Picnic, a little didactic but apparently being an allegory of human life – woman, infant, young man, adult man.

 

            And recently while visiting the Dunedin Art Gallery, I took a shot of Fomison’s Dying Beggar By Ceruti, an example of his making use of Renaissance works. In my view, this painting might as well be one of Formison’s paintings of the dead or dying Christ.

 

            However I do acknowledge that if you look up Fomison on line, you will be able to see many of his works

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 year or two ago.  

“LA CONDITION HUMAINE” by ANDRE MALRAUX  (published in the original French in 1933; published in English in various translations as “Man’s Fate” or “Man’s Estate’”)

 

            Sitting on my shelf is an old French paperback edition of Andre Malraux’s La Condition Humaine. On its back cover is a list of all the French critics telling me that the novel is one of the greatest works of all time. I really must be a peasant because I disagree. I first read the novel years ago when I was a student and I found it hard going, but I assumed it must be an important book because so many people said so. Recently I re-read it and again found it hard-going in places, but this time I saw many flaws in it, not the least being the contorted prose style that Malraux uses so often. I admit that sometimes I resorted to an English translation of the novel, but even in English, Malraux’s ideas were muddled, obscure and sometimes downright foolish. And yet there are passages of greatness. How annoying.

A quick synopsis. La Condition Humaine is set in China in 1927. The downtrodden mass of Chinese workers in Shanghai are ready for revolt. They are exploited, forced to work around the clock in unsanitary conditions, underpaid and living on starvation wages. Chinese Communist groups become their leaders. They manage to organise the proletariat, gather many caches of firearms, and are ready for a major uprising. Victory seems possible. But the Kuomintang (the Nationalist ruling party), with the approval of the European companies that dominate the city’s economy, proceed to crush the uprising. The Kuomintang is lead by Chiang Kai-shek, a seasoned soldier who is in effect a dictator. Chiang Kai-shek has a whole army behind him. Through March and April, the uprising is quelled with brutality. Many thousands of the insurgents are killed in the fighting, many are jailed, tortured by Chiang Kai-shek’s police, and executed. It amounts to a huge massacre.

The novel is told hour-by-our of the unfolding of events. Pages are headed with the times and days. The workers are depicted as heroic but doomed. The most vivid moments in the novel are of such things as the storming and burning down of the Communist headquarters, with much machine-gun firing; the attempts of trapped people to find shelter; the very few moments when small victories seem at hand.

Of course it is a tragedy. But it is also a story of betrayal. Home-grown Chinese were one thing. But the Soviet Comintern, under Stalin’s orders, was another. Some Communists had been accepted into the Kuomintang. Stalin, who had sold munitions to Chiang Kai-shek, wanted Communists to gradually infiltrate the Kuomintang and take it over. That was his long-term strategy and he did not want an uprising – so he sent the word that the insurgents should be disarmed. Many handed over their rifles before the shooting began, so their chances were even bleaker than they could have been. And when the fighting was over, Chiang Kai-shek proceeded to weed out and execute those few Communists who were in the Kuomintang.

But while the novel is about the proletariat’s defeat, nearly all the novel’s main characters are either middle-class Chinese or foreigners. The Chinese workers are anonymous masses. Perhaps Malraux was admitting that he was seeing this true history though occidental eyes.

To prove the point, here are the major characters. There is Kyo who is half-Japanese and has absorbed the Japanese culture of dying heroically. He wants the uprising to be orderly and well-planned. In contrast there is the Chen, who is Chinese. He is a hothead, regarded by other Communists as a “terrorist”. The novel’s famous opening has him murdering a trader who deals in arms [It is done in darkness, like an old film noir.] Once Chen was brought up as a Christian. Now his main aim is to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. As it happens, both Kyo and Chen finally end up dead in horrible ways. Gisors, who is of mixed race, is Kyo’s father. He has been an academic and a writer, but now he spends much of his time smoking opium and offering, through his opium fumes, philosophic advice. He consorts with both Left and Right, revolutionaries and capitalists. So we have a strategist, a fanatic and a non-committed. Of the Europeans there is Katow , the Russian Communist who follows Stalin’s orders and urges the proletariat to hand over their  rifles. Hemmalrich is a Belgian, on the side of the insurgents and offering a safe place for Communists to gather, but he is as much concerned with protecting the poor woman and her sick son who live upstairs. Konig is Chiang Kai-shek’s sadistic German chief of police. In the later section of the novel, he interrogates and has tortured Communists who have been rounded-up, including long sequences of the horrors of prison. Yet Malraux gives some reason for the way perverse Konig behaves. Konig has fought on the side of the Whites against the Reds in Russia’s long civil war. He had been captured by the Bolsheviks and severely tortured by them. For Konig, Communists are the very devil.

From very early in the novel, Malraux has shown us how decadent were many wealthy Europeans in Shanghai. There were brothels galore (shoddy ones or exclusive ones), perversity of all tastes, whores on every corner, wild parties, massive cash thown away in gambling and casinos … all of which is a true account of rich foreigners in Shanghai in the 1920s. Malraux chooses two Frenchmen to prove the case. Ferral is an entrepreneur, investor  banker and in Shanghai President of the French Chamber of Commerce, always looking to see how the stock-market is going. He is very good at his job and he often consults Gisors. He has style. But when his mistress Valerie jilts him, he takes an elaborate revenge on her - the sort of thing that only a man with more money than sense could do. Much worse is the Baron Clappique who, after having lost badly at gambling, goes on a rampage picking up as many cheap whores as he can.

Speaking of women, Malraux was notorious for having difficulty in depicting women in his novels. His first two novels Les Conquerants and La Voie Royale are bereft of women, the latter of which has a character who rants viciously against women. The author has sometimes been seen as a misogynist. There are women in La Condition Humaine but their roles are minor – the woman with the sick child; Ferral’s mistress Valerie; and Kyo’s wife May who, late in the story, decides to leave him, even if she is seeking to do something heroic.

Though the novel focuses on people other than the toiling workers, it does represent a panorama of believable “types”, even if  there is a tinge of cynicism [or scepticism] in the final chapters. Most of the swine are able to get away from the city’s chaos and go back to their original country, like the Baron Clappique who by devious means stows away on a ship. In a gathering of capitalists in Paris, Ferral is able to expound his ideas on how capital should be spread so that all banks may prosper in China. Mind you, Malraux comes near to admiring Ferral who, after all, is a very competent banker who has built his own company. Malraux admired that sort of  hero…

But if near-misogyny and some cynicism are a real minus in this novel, there is something much worse. Even more than in his second novel La Voie Royale, Malraux unleashes long, redundant, pseudo-philosophic passages, usually presented as the ideas passing through the minds of some of his characters. They are about the inevitability of death [is this the Condition of Man - La Condition Humaine?]; the necessity to be ready for pain and suffering; the need for strength; the importance of “force” and heroes etc. all of which may be important ideas but which are bathed in a vocabulary that is almost impenetrable .  The English-language crib I resorted to contained at the end an “Appreciation” by the critic David Price-Jones. He criticised Malraux’s vocabulary here noting that  “one of the more lasting French literary traditions is a metaphysics  of grandeur based primarily on the writer’s style” He was right. In these pseudo-philosophic passages, Malraux says thing that could be said more concisely, more honestly, more readable than his messing with redundant overblown style.

Is La Condition Humaine really a classic? Apart from the moments of intellectual verbal soup and shallow ideas of Nietzschian power, it does have much going for it - the vivid episodes of the uprising and its being strangled; the intense discussions about strategies among the Communists; the decadence of the wealthy and their opportunism. But there falls the reality that this is a story from a century ago, and much of it reads as a period book. Though mainly reporting accurately about China, that was then and this is now. The Second World War, the invasion by Japan that had to be fought, the take-over by Mao Tsi-Tung and the massive famines he brought, the purely destructive “Red Guards” in the 1960s and finally [so far] under the name of still being Communist, China became basically a capitalist marketing state – even if it is still ruled by one totalitarian system. And amazingly, when Communist China for years had reviled Chiang Kai-shek as a monster and slayer of the workers, in Communist China he has recently been rehabilitated as a great soldier and brave fighter against the Japanese invasion. [Or is this a ruse to satisfy those in Taiwan – which Communist China wants to take-over?]

 

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.  

                                                A MATTER OF PAIN    

How much do you enjoy having dentistry performed on you? Never really fun is it? Sitting in the dentist’s chair is hardly one of your favourite pastimes. I remember how, as a primary-school kid, I had to walk from school to a dental nurse. I would have the discomfort of a tooth or two being drilled as a nurse pumped a treadle with its disconcerting whining  sound. Very uncomfortable, especially as there was sometimes a nurse who was only just learning her craft. No anaesthetics were used, but then only little teeth were being dealt with. And of course we littlies would refer to a nurse’s room as “the murder house.”

Becoming a teenager, by which stage in my life anaesthetics were used, I almost became used to the nasty needle being pushed into my gums, and with them coming a nasty taste on my palate. For the rest of the day your lips seemed to swell as if you were a blob and for the rest of the day you tried to speak but you voice could only mumble. Those were the days when anaesthetics than were not so precise. Once jabbed in the gums and half of your mouth was benumbed.

Later in my teenagerhood, my mother said that I should have my wisdom teeth taken out before they appeared with pain. [So many people had told her that wisdom teeth gave one great pain as they slowly - over months – fully emerged]. So I was taken to a specialist. In this case I was there but I was not there, because one jab through the palate and I was completely knocked out for an hour as the specialist dug through my gums and pulled out the four culprits. I woke up groaning, my mouth filled with blood. My mother drove me home, me groggy and in a semi-coma. I fell into a deep sleep at home and woke three or four hours later, still dopy and with blood all over my pyjama top. Oh well, the real pain was no longer there.

And so the years went by. I have had root-canal work done. I’ve had some extractions done. Some bridges [connecting two teeth] have been made. I’ve experienced the years when amalgam began to be shunned by dentists because of mercury toxicity. Perhaps most important, I’ve experienced the new types of anaesthetics where a jab in the gums can deaden a single tooth only and you no longer get that sense of your whole mouth being blown up like a balloon. As I got older, I began to wonder that in my life so far, I might have had much dental work done partly because I had had braces put on my teeth when I was young… and I now think that orthodontists merely force teeth into the wrong places, creating more dental problems than they realised.

Regardless of what I have written about many unpleasant dental events, given my age I do not think my experience in the field  is much different from that of  the average New Zealander.

So why am I writing on this dismal topic?

Because this last week I had three upper front teeth taken out of my mouth. Yes, the dentist (a young Chinese woman) was excellent and knew her job thoroughly and yes the anaesthetics were up-to-date and did not hurt much even though the needle was pushed into gums and palate six times [I felt each jab, dammit]. But you can’t mask the awful c-c-c-errr -RACK as each of the three teeth was wrenched out. Then came the horror of having a plate – with artificial teeth – being pushed into the cavity where the real teeth had been. The plate rubbed against my gums, causing a little discomfort, and the plate was too tight. When I tried to pull it out again, it hurt like hell … so this week I had to go back later to have it adjusted.

Many years ago – long before I was born – it was common for people to have all their teeth taken out and then to wear false teeth. This was on the premise that it would save one from having to pay a fortune in dentistry. Maybe it made sense back then.

Well, have you been entertained with my dull story? When it comes to the matter of pain, I would agree that incidents involving a dentist are trivial compared with people dying of cancer or uncurable diseases, people dying or being injured in wars, horrible accidents on the roads etc. etc. But when you’re in a little pain, your sense of proportion vanishes and you think the world is collapsing. So in a moody state I scribbled out this piece of self-pity.  

Someting New

 

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

“over under fed” by Amy Marguerite (Auckland University Press, $24.99); “Makeshift Seasons” by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “Clay Eaters” by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, $29.99); “The Intimacy Bus” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, $30)

                     

            There’s a strong possibility that I will be chastised by some if I point out that the feverish, overloaded and yet brilliant imagery and metaphor in Amy Marguerite’s debut collection over under fed is similar to the wildness and fervour of the teenaged genius Rimbaud. Yes, she does use the current affectation of writing “I” as “i”. Yes she does write everything in lower case. Yes she does sometimes run sentences together. But her work is compelling, her images hold attention and in the end we get a whole life’s story. She dedicates her opus “For the quietly immoderate” and much immoderation there is. Amy Marguerite is an adult woman, but her narrative – such as it is – is focused on her adolescence. To put it simply, she was plagued by anorexia nervosa, a condition that is most often connected with teenage girls, and she spent time in hospital wards. Every so often, we are given poems headed “discharge notes”. Over under fed is divided into four sections - “terms and conditions” “love language” “ward 25” and “hollowing full” and in a way they do move us towards a sort of conclusion – apparently a final escape from her anorexia nervosa condition. She is now apparently over being under fed - hence the book’s title. But as the four sections often overlap, I will read the work as one ongoing narrative.

A febrile, fragile psyche is suggested at once in the opening poem “far too blue” which sets the pace with “I have grown appendages of contempt / for many things. I believe in god because people / are too digestible. I am terrible at staying / in touch unless they are exceptionally interesting…/… I give up at once on anything I cannot immediately be / brilliant at…” And the following poem “reuptake inhibitor” declares “it seems / a cliff is only dangerous / after you jump of  / of it and I am so tired / of jumping”. [A statement which she refutes much later in this collection]. This signals deep depression. Sequential poems tell us that love is sadness, that she is out of the beat when it comes to music, and in the “july poem” “I feel like a hairdresser / turning away / the kids with headlice…”.   There is evidence of disorderly eating as a teenager. Much later in the collection there is the poem “when my body was Amorphophallus titanium” again with a lack of confidence as a teenager and listing all the things she was not able to do with ease.

There is also the problem of limerence [a term created by a psychiatrist in the 1960s] which means having obsessive love for somebody else, but without reciprocation [I confess I had to look this up]. Amy Marguerite writes a poem called “limerence” which asks “why do I obsess over people / who understand me?” I take a wild guess here and wonder if this refers to people who have tried to help her… or maybe not. It’s common for teenagers to have crushes on people who do not respond. She writes in the poem “stalling” that “I keep thinking / about apologising / for not holding your left hand / when my right one / was stupidly clammy” There is that sense of being inferior, as if one were bowing down to a goddess. And “I’m too busy wondering what now / we would be in / it I had let my wine- / dry lips scutter / crabwise down your cheek. But wondering is / brutally futile…”. The poem “love language” steps up the limerence with “don’t you / want to waste / your entire lunch / break wondering / how? / without any kissing / at all” There are many connections with women, but mostly they seem girlish dreams. Like most young people who want to have a hidden life [like getting away from parents, for example] she writes in “discharge notes (iii)” that “When diaries get gritty you put them / in a shoe box call them gone. call them / one less segment of yourself to mourn / something like that. i keep so many secrets / from myself.” Growing older, into maturity, she turns to men but in the poem “raisins” she declares she f**king hated men but she f**ked them and she dieted on raisins to remain slim for them and “i kept hating and f**king”. Make of this what you will, but some sort of desperation is signalled.

As for the parts about the anorexia nervosa wards, they can be quite graphic. While “fortisip” recalls her petulant behaviour as a kid when she was being taken to hospital by her parents, “discharge notes (iv)” gives us the buzz on other girls in her ward and learning their tricks on “how to get away with water loading / before my five a.m. weigh-in ha ha. / I was really good at being sick it felt good. / to be good at something. bad to be good.” Despite having grown past her affliction, she still to the very end has a very negative view of the nurses in the hospital.

At which point I could raise some ideas about the poet’s gender or sexual identity. Most of her attraction was to girls but she seems to have settled down with a guy whom she calls “my darling partner Blair”. Not that it matters I suppose and none of my business anyway. I’m also interested by the many passing references to her grandmother throughout this collection. But this is all by the way. What is important is that Amy Marguerite has produced a vital and lively work – angst-fill inevitably, but honest in its confessionalism and filled with energy. As a debut, it’s brilliant.

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By now an accomplished poet with a many collections to her credit, Kate Camp has moved on in her focus. Once, when I reviewed one of her earlier books, I said her work was “usually housebound anecdotes”. While this might have been true for the earlier book, it is certainly not true for her latest collection Makeshift Seasons [the title comes from the last words in the book]. Yes, there are some poems about home and her surroundings, but they are only a small part on her palette. As was the case in her previous work, she tends to write in the first person - in fact in nearly all 36 poems in Makeshift Seasons. So obviously there is a sense of either confessionalism or autobiography. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she does not use free verse [well… she does not usually]. Her prosody is largely traditional, with stanzas neatly separated. Her poem “Entropy” is a sort of sonnet – at least it divides into octave and sestet even if it doesn’t rhyme – and with an analysis of first a consulting a doctor and then having the odd reaction once she was outside. Her “Epiphany” is also a sort of sonnet – in this case first an event [octave] and then an unexpected outcome [sestet].

Yet let me admit that I was intimidated by the opening two poems in the book. “Kryptonite” picks up tropes about Superman and uses it to consider how we are both strong and fragile. “Trajectory” is apparently about the pain and coldness of the seasons, but after reading it many times over I could not decode what it was really saying. Its imagery is so cryptic as to be opaque… but thank goodness she moves on to clarity in all the following poems.

Like most poets, Camp deals with favourite interests. She comes back a number of times to a favoured spot in Wellington, thus the poem “Island Bay” being a neat little vignette of politeness by the water. Later there is “Island Bay again” with darker images on the same shore; and later still there is “Island Bay Beach” about swimming there where “I appreciate the smaller space / at high tide, soft, soaked sand / cleared of footprints…” - though she also paints here images of discomfort. After all, no place is really idyllic. “Freyberg Carpark” is a clear and thoughtful poem, depicting a place and time and a mood struck by two very different women meeting. I found this the most engaging poem in the collection.

Speaking of which, there is a sensibility about places in poems about overseas travelling. “Driving in France” is a straightforward memory of a journey near Mont-Saint Michel . But “Wittenberg” reveals the truth that often, when we tourists go to see something of historical or cultural interest, we find we are more distracted by small and perhaps trivial things that have amused us. There are domestic poems - “Equinox” is about the house they live in and how it was when they first entered it. “Autumn” is a relatively straightforward [and therefor readable]  account of the effect of that season “It’s a beautiful morning. That’s what we call a morning / with a red tugboat at a distance, long white / landscape of fog against the hills, sun gold / on buildings.”… and then she shifts into modish reveries of being in a bar in Berlin.

As well as place, home and season, there is much interest in health; or rather ill health. Kate Camp, now in her 50’s, is aware of the way the body begins to take some knocks.  “Inpatient versus outpatient”, like some others of her poems, indicates going through pain of one sort or another – not fatal or severe but irritating and uncomfortable. “Here is the church” also signals bodily discomfort, considering what it would be like being an old woman: “How will I grieve these hands / when they no longer interlock / the tiny mountain ranges of a zipper / or seal with their perfectly-fitted pads / my nostrils, mouth and chin / as I cover my face with them / in cold, in curiosity, in comfort / or just because I can / because this body / is still mine / and I can hide it / whenever I want to.” The most uncomfortable of poems about ill health must be “summary of our mini-survey on regret” which seems to signal things she does not want to talk about in detail. Something similar is “In the bathroom rubbish bin.” And “Grease”, a kind of fantasia of what adolescence was, also has a sense of awkwardness which is very aligned to pain.

If favoured spots, travel, home and ill health dominate this collection, there are many other interests. “Towards a working definition of global warming is an acute account of the nature of light in the night with “one lightbulb-shaped lightbulb / burning always in the neighbour’s hallway for their children / I suppose, if they were , still. Plus general light reflecting / off clouds but I mean it has to come from somewhere.” “Halley’s Comet” is discursive and a sort of resignation to living within a small area, even after having travelled much of the world – and there is consolation that Halley’s comet may soar through the universe, but it is only a hunk of rock after all. “I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t” is really two poems somehow joined together – the first six stanzas about a plumber coming and fixing a problem ; the last two stanzas addressing different matters in her life. An interesting structure.

            What does all this add up to? A collection of poetry well worth reading, and a work of maturity.

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Gregory Kan is not new to poetry. Far from it. This Singapore-Chinese, with much knowledge of Malaysia, is a New Zealand resident who has twice been reviewed on this blog. When I reviewed his debut collection This Paper Boat  I noted that “I was impressed by Kan’s ability to link past with present in poems that acknowledged the deadness of the past, while at the same time showing the ongoing influence of the past. Kan often referenced, and was in conversation with, earlier authors.” When his second collection came out Under Glass  I said that he “weaves together in this diverse book childhood memories, stories told by his forebears and extended family, stories of his parents’ courtship and early marriage, stories of his own adjustment to New Zealand and memories of his compulsory military service in Singapore.”

The fact is that in his latest collection Clay Eaters, he deals with many of the very same issues – the past, memories, having to do military service, his family, etc . But this is far from just repeating himself.

Certainly a tone of nostalgia, and mixed feelings about it, is in an early part of his latest collection, as in this expanded metaphor where looking back means almost drowning: “Memory will not be / Still / Trying to touch the bottom / Of the deep lake / And return to the surface / Clutching god knows what / Blinking in the sudden light / Lucky to be alive.” And towards that end of this collection there is “To wander / Looking for what we have lost / On that other side of silence / A surface that lets us write so many things into it / Knowing the little that we know / In the few ways we know how”. And there is “It’s not just that I always wanted to forget / Or that I always wanted to remember / It’s just easy to get lost / In that garden / Where the wind doesn’t seem / To move on / To another place…”

Kan happily mixes poetry with prose, including many references to “Uncle Boon’s blog” and to jottings he himself made from his own experience. Timescales jump between memories of an island off Singapore, coming back to it years later, life in New Zealand, the times when his parents worked in Wellington, some of his older siblings who had gone to the U.S.A. and finally references to his partner, a woman he calls T. There are some almost eccentric comments, as in telling us that they once had cat called Gilgamesh “part-god he ruled / From a wooden post of our unfinished deck”.

But the most interesting poems have to do with that island off Singapore, Tekong, which carried a rain-forest and which had a military camp where Singapore men had to do their compulsory military service. [The camp was shut down in 1989.] When Kan re-visits the island, he experiences the muggy rain forest but he also notes “it’s small / I’ve been around it many times” He tells us of its fauna, such as “Belukar” meaning “for secondary jungle or forest that grows on previously cleared or cultivated land”. And he notes he had a role in the army’s Combat Intelligence School but “I was glad not to end up as an infantry officer / I wasn’t good at it / Never liked yelling / And the constant hammering of weapons / At things in the trees we couldn’t see.” Yet he did become expert in teaching camouflage.

More profoundly there are his comments on the nature of a humid island and its foliage: “Look closely at the photograph / Swim a bit further out / Unlock the back gate / Separate the seeds from the flesh / Part the branches / Open the letter / Watch the clearing beside the stream / Play the video / Go deeper into the mangroves / Run your fingers between the threads / pray to a god you do not believe in anymore / Try to remember whether you ever made it to the reservoir.” There is much reference to red clay earth and to “Mangroves on either side as far as I could see / Their pale folded roots / Spidering above the muddy, lapping water / A sea of faces in the furrows / Moths open / Trembling with their own ripeness / Fatal softening of surfaces.”

Although he says he does not believe in God he is aware of religious traditions such as burning offerings in vessels to the gods so that the gods will care for those who go to sea. Inter-tangled are Chinese and Malay religions and there are passages about a wise woman sometimes meeting and confronting trainee soldiers at shrines and others. He makes a form of secular religion among the young soldiers, as in “Whether religious or not / Most of us weren’t ignorant / But we had all become superstitious / Our lives were rituals / In heavy gloves / Steel-soled boots / And thermal imaging devices / Tactics were rites / Strategies were prayers / The ways in which we learnt / To rearrange ourselves / Without words / Between the trees.”

Incidentally, he brings in a very Aotearoa comment with his awareness of the similarities of Malay and Maori languages [he gives a list of 22 essential shared words].

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Janet Charman has always been a feminist as she has shown in her earlier collections such as At the White Coast, Ren / Surrender (reviewed on this blog ) and Pistils (also reviewed on this blog). Charman always writes in free verse and she refuses to write the word “I” as she says it is too phallocentric. Instead she writes it as “i”. When I reviewed The Pistils I noted that her poems are “sometimes a little cryptic in expression [and] laud the female body, its gestation, its resilience”. Such is the case with her tenth collection The Intimacy Bus.

What is “the intimacy bus”? The poem “the gender buffet” begins “knocked about / we alight / female and male / rumpled up / from a nine-month trip / in the intimacy bus”– in other words, we spend nine months in our mother’s womb, whereupon she proceeds to tell us of her views of the sexes and her ambiguities about herself. One has to assume that her poems are based on her personal experiences and are in effect autobiography. In the 38 poems that make up this collection, there are some major themes, viz. Age, discomfort and death; Sex, gender and the behaviour of men; and how she is influenced by television and the media.

Consider first age and death. Born in 1954, Charman is apparently obsessed with now being in her late 60s. There are many references to her cat and how messy her house is. Her two daughters occasionally drop in but it seems she spends much time in bed and/or watching television. The poem “in absentia” is a gruelling tale of loss : the painful lamentations after the death of somebody near – it could be her husband who died some years earlier or it could be an infant, but the tone is ambiguous and the imagery is severe, suggesting an extremeness in feeling as in the metaphor “to keep my guts in lockdown / the surgeon stitched in an internal mesh / she’s seen to it my phantom pain / is wished away…” There is pain as the body ages.

With regard to sex, gender and the (mis-)behaviour of men and misogyny, the poem “coming out at 68”  says that she is now “heterosexual lesbian” which suggests she is still working out her gender. She notes that her daughters are sceptical about her claim to be lesbian. Regarding men’s rough behaviour in bed and their boorishness, the poem  “consensual” rebukes “and those who / from a reservoir / entitlement / perceive consent as / their having / free access / to her submission” followed by imagery of masculine thuggery. Likewise the poem “all those excuses we make” tells us how crude the earlier generations were in the way they made excuses for men who dealt brutally with women, pregnant or otherwise. “kabedon” is also about male abuse. With regard to the domestic scene, there is “surveillance” about a woman and man ruined by alcohol. Many verses in her poems tell us of physical problems that are more extreme for women than for men, as in “take two Panadol” with its notice “how many women / I wonder / take two Panadol / for front pain / prior to having a breast screen / or sex”

As for how she is influenced by television and the media “my liberation notes” is apparently a reaction to watching violent images… or is it the fear of misogyny? Likewise “bereavement counselling”, about her reaction to Korean soap operas; “eternal summer 1 & 2” is also concerned with movies – how actors age or don’t age on screen; and “for my viewing pleasure”. Are these statements apologising for watching Asian television clichés or is she finding great meaning in them? I’m not sure.   

Charman does tend to ramble in her longer poems. The fact is, I found her most readable works were her collections of either aphorisms or haiku thus “79 Fragments”, being brief statements moving her from childhood to rebellious adolescence to the annoyances of old age, finishing with the killer statement “Unpublished creative writing course graduates / served your sentence / now do the crime”. Wise words. Likewise “18 sex treats” is made of fragments, though in this case focused on male-female sexual relationships, consistently jaded; and “27 episodes from modern life” once again represents discomfort with men. “house lot – everything must go” is again fragments. They can clearly tell uncomfortable truths, viz. “daughters with housekeys / let themselves in / and surprise their mother the old new lesbian / in bed – this rainy afternoon / with her television.” The sequence “your backstory” is the biography of an artist who was mistreated and under-rated at school but managed to get through. “Work in progress” has such brevities as “of that time of childhood / I remember most distinctly / the tedium / the suburban paralysis.”

How can a reviewer pass judgment on somebody else’s life experience? Reading carefully, I get the impression that Janet Charman’s life has been a hard one. Even so, I do wonder why she is so upset by old age. I suggest that some readers will find her work hard reading. But I rejoice that in her “Mother Ship” collection she does tell one truth about the collapse of former New Zealand English Departments “The Humanities / out of Time / work under a flag of convenience / by a skeleton crew.” Quite so.

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 year or two ago.

“LA VOIE ROYALE” by ANDRE MALRAUX  (published in the original French in 1930; published in English as “The Way of Kings”)

            Why, within the first few chapters of reading La Voie Royale, did I think “This is Joseph Conrad territory!”?  You will see what I mean a few paragraphs on.

            A synopsis: La Voie Royale was Andre Malraux’s second novel, published in 1930. It gained in France a larger audience than his first novel Les Conquerants, perhaps because it was a sort of adventure story albeit a rather perverse one.

            Claude Vannec, a young Frenchman 25-years old, is an architect. He has decided to make money by going into the depths of the South-East Asian forests and sawing off neglected statues from temples. He could then make much money by selling this ancient art-work to wealthy connoisseurs. On the long voyage to what was then known as French Indo-China, Claude meets a fellow passenger, Perken, an older, rough, brutal, experienced Danish explorer, who knows very well the Asian jungles. Indeed he knows how to get through the tangled, half-hidden jungle “la voie royale“ [“the royal way” or “the way of kings”] which is the best route to the hidden temples. He also knows the Khmer Road. Perken agrees to join Claude as guide and comrade on this quest and they discuss money; and techniques for bringing statues down; and how they could get these treasures back to Europe. But Perken has an agenda of his own. He is hunting for a murderous criminal called Grabot who has disappeared into the rain forest. Grabot is somewhere between Laos, Cambodia and Thailand [French colonies at that time]. Perken is apparently trying to buy machine-guns and may intend to set himself up as ruler of a local tribe…

At which point I smell the influence of Joseph Conrad. A European’s quest to find a missing man in the jungle? Think of Marlow going up the river to find the missing Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A man setting himself up as ruler of a tribe? Think Conrad’s Lord Jim. I’m not saying that Malraux’s work is plagiarism, because La Voie Royale is very different from Conrad’s work. But I’d be surprised if Malraux hadn’t read Conrad as one of his inspirations.

Anyway, reaching Saigon [then France’s capital in Indo-China], Claude Vannec is told by an official, the director of the French Institute, that he is permitted to examine the temples hidden by foliage in the jungle, but the statues have to stay in situ. Claude sees this order as unnecessary bureaucratic nonsense and ignores it. So he and Perken set off with saws and tools and other implements and provisions. They buy carts to carry back their loot. And of course they hire porters with bullocks to haul the carts through the dense, sweltering-hot, stifling rain-forests. One of their guides is unreliable. They are infected my nasty spiders, hordes of aggressive ants, viscous large leaves that stick to their clothes and other major discomforts. On the border between Cambodia and Siam [as it then was called], they find what they were looking for. They saw their way through solid-rock statues of gods and dancing girls, load them on their carts, and then want to turn for home…

… But, what with the very heavy load they have stolen, going back is harder than it was when going into the forests. When Claude and Perken are sleeping in a primitive Moi village, their carts are stolen and hidden from them. Most of their porters have deserted them.  This means they have to go to another village to get help and brawn to retrieve their loaded carts… and in doing so, they have to go through areas where the criminal Grabot may be hiding. So they are in what Malraux calls “cette dissidence a demi sauvage” [“this mix half savage rebels”] at which point I can’t help thinking that using the  term “savages” often means simply people who won’t buckle down to colonial power. When they reach another village, they meet a far more savage tribe then the Moi – the Stieng. And there they find the notorious criminal Grabot. The Stieng have captured him, blinded him, tortured him, and tied him up, prolonging his agony before they kill him. Claude and Perken are besieged in a hut, waiting to be killed along with Grabot. Perken tries to bargain with the chief. He and Claude fear that in being tortured they might be castrated. Perken uses a diplomatic stratagem. He tells the tribal chief that if his strong men can help them continue their journey, he will be able to give the chief many “jars” [in other words an endless supply of alcohol]. The chief agrees and Claude and Perken continue on their journey – taking the blind and mutilated Grabot with them.

But Grabot dies, proudly. And Perken, an old man, knows that his knee has become contaminated ( by suppurated arthritis poisoning his body). He is sure he does not have long to live. As they pass through new territory, they can hear machine-guns shooting and a French militia moving into the forest. And then they can hear workers building a new railway line. Is this a sign of “civilisation” moving in? Or does it mean the crushing of a different society? It can be read either way. And in the midst of this, old Perken dies. So the last pages focus on the death of Perken and his defiance of the world and humankind. And Claude goes back to “civilisation” without having made a fortune.

 

This is a simplified account of the novel, leaving much ambiguity. Is it about the failure of a grandiose idea – a foolish scheme which achieved nothing and hence an example of “the vanity of human wishes”? Or is it a critique of colonialism? After all, there are a few stabs at the French empire. Early in the novel Claude, annoyed at one moment by an old French bureaucrat, says very presciently “Dans trente ans, son Institut ser-t-il encore la, et les Francais en Indochine?” [“Will he still be here in thirty years, and will the French still be in Indochina?”] Yet there is really little focus on colonialism and Malraux spends more time showing us the barbarous behaviour of the rain-forest tribes. So this novel is not really an anti-colonial, protest novel. Or – as many of Malraux’s French seemed to have first read La Voie Royale – is it simply an adventure story with its jungle and wild people and violence?

I don’t think any of these descriptions really fit the bill when you consider the novel as a whole. As I see it, more than anything La Voie Royale it is a tale built on ideas out of Nietzsche – the superior man who is able to act in a way that inferior people cannot [the superman]; the contempt for the weak; the assumption that laws are for cowards; the admiration of the strong; the idea that women are a nuisance; the cult of death, along with a belief that life is meaningless anyway; and all that matters is the assertion of the self. Such ideas are scattered through La Voie Royale. For the record, in her memoirs [which I will examine later on this blog] Malraux’s first wife Clara says that when they were young they mostly admired law-breaking loners and advocates of violence in fact and fiction, such as  “Raskolnikov, Nietzsche, Julien Sorel, the other Sorel, and Rastignac”. Immature rebellious teenagers often think that way.

When Claude and Perken first meet on the ship going to Asia, Perken lectures Claude on his large experience in all the brothels he has visited and suggests that women are things to be discarded once used. Perken wants to carry out his [maniacal?] plan to gather together colonials and natives under a dominion ruled by himself. He sees himself as an autocratic king. When later Claude says that dying is dreadful,  Perken says  “Viellir, c’est tellement plus grave… Accepter son destin, sa fonction, la niche a chien elevee sur sa vie unique… On ne sait pas ce qu’est la mort quand on est jeune…”  [“Decay is the real death… Ageing is much worse than death! Accepting your fate, your function, the dog-house you’re forced to live in… you don’t know what death is when you’re young.”] Claude picks up this idea later and concludes  “L’absence de finalite donne a la vie devenue une condition de I’action.” [“The absence of finality [possibly meaning there is no afterlife], that in itself has become a condition of action.”] And much later, considering the criminal Grabot they are chasing, Perken pontificates “Vous savez aussi bien que moi que la vie n’a aucun sens; a vivre seul on n’echappe guere a la preoccupation de son destin… La mort est la, comprenez-vous, comme… comme l’irrefutable preuve de l’absurdiee de la vie…”  [“You know as well as I do that life has no meaning; even if you live, you can’t really escape from worrying about your fate… Death is always there, you understand, as…as irrefutable evidence of the absurdity of life…”] Ultimately nihilism, mes amis.

This novel has much bravo and machismo, though I don’t think (as some have suggested) that Claude and Perken are homosexual, even if Perken does tutor Claude in misogyny. Their mutual attraction is Platonic. While Claude is the main character in the first part of the novel, the second part is dominated by Perken. Perken’s whole philosophy, such as it is, is built on the idea of defiance in the face of death by showing how you can put up with excruciating pain. Only then are you truly a man. This is why Perken admires the mutilated Grabot who dies without whining about it.

… Or could it be that I am missing the point? After all, both Perken and Grabot fail in what they try to achieve. But then life is absurd…

It is not only the ideas that alienate me from this novel. Far more irritating is Malraux’s prose style. His first novel Les Conquerants was very much a political story and impersonal; but its prose was clear, precise and very readable.  Unfortunately the first half of La Voie Royale is overwhelmed by descriptions of the foliage of the rain forests. Of course there has to be some description of the rain-forests – they are essential to the narrative. But Malraux too often turns his descriptions into tortured, baroque metaphors which are totally irrelevant to the real situation. Worse, there are fugues of vaguely philosphical conversation amounting to sophomoric chatter about the pointless of life, how only the strong are to be admired, and we're all going to die anyway.

 

Essential footnote: La Voie Royale was partly based on a real event. In the early 1920s, Malraux decided to make some money by looting Asian temples and selling statues to the rich. With a team (including his wife Clara) he trudged through the jungles in Cambodia and other French territories. But even so, he wasn’t able to cut down the statues made of solid rock. For all the negative things the French colonial government did, they at least sometimes tried to protect ancient Asian art, although there was much hypocrisy, as the Frrench colonial govermant also often turned a blind eye to such looting.… but as soon as Malraux got back to Saigon, the police charged him for trying to mutilate these treasures, not helped by the fact that Malraux had been aggressifly rude to some colonial officials. He was sent to jail on a sentence for three years.  But he was in the clink only for a few months [and he spent his time in a nice hotel]… because back in France, Clara was able to set up a petition for French intellectuals and authors to plead the importance of this up-coming young writer. It worked and Malraux got back to France.  For the record, Clara was angry that Malraux had written a novel that didn’t mention her part in her husband’s illegal venture. And of course Claude, Perken and Grabot were all completely fictious characters.