We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
It’s a basic principle in book-reviewing that books have
to be judged according to their genre. Pointless to discuss a children’s book
as if it aimed to be A La Recherche du
Temps Perdu, or a learned academic discourse on the assumption that it
should be a popular vulgarisation.
I say this very clearly from the outset because it would
be easy to mistake James McNeish’s Touchstones
for a full autobiography. And if it were judged as such, then it would have to
be considered very selective. “Why has
McNeish left all these important details out?” a hostile critic might ask.
Instead, as McNeish considerately and specifically explains a number of times, Touchstones is what its subtitle calls
it - a Memoir, not an attempt at
comprehensive autobiography. The title page adds the words “Memories of People and Place”. About
two-thirds of the way through the text (on Pg.210), the 80-year-old McNeish
further admits that he has a faulty memory, a “writer’s memory”, and that some of his reminiscences may be
embroidered.
What we are getting, then, are the parts of his life that
McNeish regards as most significant in his development as a writer.
After a kind of prologue, Touchstones begins in the 1950s, when McNeish was in his late
twenties, and fades out in the 1980s – this being less than half the writer’s
life. Interspersed with extracts from his old diaries and commonplace books,
the first half is called “People” and concentrates on nine people who had a big influence on him.
When McNeish was a young journalist, a night editor on the New Zealand Herald fired his imagination
with the prospect of visiting Europe (being a budding writer, young McNeish was
taken particularly by the chap’s mention of “purple cauliflower” in Sicily). So at the age of 26, McNeish took off from Auckland as a
deckhand on Norwegian Freighter.
In England, he spent a few months as a stagehand and
“electrician” at the left-wing director Joan
Littlewood’s tumbledown Theatre Royal. McNeish endorses the obituarist’s
description of Littlewood as the “The Mother Courage of English Theatre” and
gives an admiring portrait of her as an erratic, impulsive genius. But he also
tells the story of being asked by Littlewood to read a play submitted by an
unknown teenager, and judging it to be immature “schoolgirl stuff”. He says the play was extensively re-written by
Joan Littlewood before it was ever produced. It was Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. (The naughty side of me notes that Shelagh
Delaney died late last year, so she won’t contradict McNeish’s story – but on
the other hand it’s highly plausible as Joan Littlewood is widely considered to
have also extensively re-written Brendan Behan’s plays before they ever saw the
light of day.)
Getting a commission to record and make radio programmes
about European folk-songs, McNeish found himself in Sicily. Here he met three
remarkable people. The first was the anti-Mafia crusader Danilo Dolci who, like Gandhi, used hunger-strikes as a means of
drawing attention to social injustice. McNeish ended up writing his biography, Fire Under the Ashes, and has
subsequently revisited Sicily in his later fiction. The second was Toto, a man of the people with a
fatalistic peasant’s wisdom, who found McNeish a place to live and taught him
ways of fitting in with the local culture. Most intriguingly, the third was Santu, a very decent Sicilian man who
believed implicitly in the code of omerta,
the sense of discretion and loyalty to friends and “family” regardless of wider
moral considerations, much deployed by the Mafia. To find such opinions coming
from the mouth of such an obviously upright man was for McNeish a sharp lesson
in how the sincere pieties of one culture are not necessarily those of another.
Back in London, as McNeish learnt how to write and read
radio scripts, he was hugely influenced by the BBC producer Jack Dillon, who taught him how to use
the microphone to effect. When he speaks of his time with the BBC, McNeish
inevitably drops some illustrious literary names, but he also evokes powerfully
that lost world of intelligent radio features that were produced as works of
art for discerning audiences.
So far, this may sound like a catalogue of separate
events and encounters. There are, however, some consistent themes. One is the
way McNeish felt torn between a desire to return to New Zealand and an
awareness that New Zealand was (and is) a very small intellectual pool
providing a very limited market for literary works. In fact McNeish returned
briefly to New Zealand a couple of times, sounding the place out, before
deciding to re-settle here permanently. He makes it clear that he has never
regarded himself as “limited to” New Zealand in the subject-matter he chooses
for his novels and non-fiction; and he has some pungent things to say on the
way New Zealanders can be very negative in their judgements on local literary
talents who decide to make their lives overseas.
On one visit back, he recorded a typically tanked-up Denis Glover reading his own poetry
while Glover’s common-law wife Khura hovered in the background. (I heard
McNeish retailing comic detail of this same encounter in a radio broadcast some
years back.) On another journey back to New Zealand, McNeish found himself the
unofficial “minder” of the flamboyant Sheila
Chichester, wife of the round-the-world yachtsman Francis Chichester.
These are eight of the people McNeish sees as influencing
him. The ninth was far more important – his wife Helen, whom he met in London. Their courtship took some years to
reach the point of marriage, overcoming a lot of cultural differences,
differences of temperament and the fact that both of them had been married
before.
If these nine people provide McNeish with chapter
headings, then with the exception of his wife they were not necessarily always
the most influential people in his
life. McNeish’s ancestors and parents hover in the background of much of this
memoir. His father was (in McNeish’s term) a
“quarter-caste” Maori
descended from a nineteenth century Scottish “Pakeha-Maori” who had married
into a tribe. McNeish considers that his father looked a lot less Maori than
his Aunt Jean, whom he calls his “Maori aunt”. One motif in young McNeish’s
life was the way his father (whom he seems to have loved more than his mother)
clearly expected him to give up this writing nonsense and move on to a “real”
job. After his father’s death, McNeish is therefore shocked to discover
evidence that the old man himself was thwarted author.
When it reaches the halfway point, Part Two of this
memoir kicks in. It is called “Place” and recounts how McNeish came to settle
at remote Te Maika (near Kawhia) and write in earnest – this being the time
when he produced his first considerable piece of fiction, the novel Mackenzie.
McNeish tells us that he found the view, and the economic
necessity of writing pieces for the Listener, distracted him from real
writing. He learnt how to concentrate. But at Te Maika he also learnt gradually
about his family’s back-story, the background to the house he inhabited and the
dodgy land deals that had gone into its acquisition. “I am not superstitious”, he declares on Pg.180, but his narrative
runs to a prophetic dream and the sense of a “presence” at Te Maika that makes
it right for him to be there.
Strong in its descriptive sense, this second part also
has its comic vignettes, not least his account of eventually marrying Helen in a hasty ceremony
conducted at the local post-office. Although called “Place” most of this second
part is about becoming used to the company of local Maori, finally finding
himself able to identify with bits of their culture and untangling a
complicated story his “Maori” aunt had told him about how the land was acquired.
This is one of those cases where I hope I have been able
to fire your interest simply by a giving a (very selective) account of the
book’s contents. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs, Touchstones is a little under 300 pages
of amiable chat by an experienced author.
I could pick out a couple of minuses. The opening dialogue with his
father, in 1967, is far too neatly self-expository to be credible and seems
designed to sketch in some background quickly for us. There is also something
painfully arch in the way McNeish attempts to pique our interest by telling us
as one stage that his wife had “fallen in
love with” somebody else (the somebody turns out to be Katherine Mansfield,
in whom Helen became very interested).
The pluses outweigh the few minuses, however.
McNeish has the honesty to mention things that might be
painful or embarrassing for him to recall publicly. When he refers to his first
wife Felicity, he quotes Graham Greene’s “chip
of ice that lurks in a writer’s heart” to explain how a determined writer
can become estranged from a wife. But he then notes that “Felicity went back to London, then wrote accusing me of infidelity and
saying she was returning to New Zealand with our child. The accusation was
just, her outburst well-merited.” (pg.73). He admits (at pp.115-116) his
almost complete ignorance of New Zealand Literature until he was nearly 30.
When learning some lessons about morality in Sicily, he also refers to New
Zealand prejudices thus:
“I had grown up
with stereotypes. I had left New Zealand fiercely prejudiced, and Anglophile.
Britain was best. The wogs began on the other side of the channel. Rome was the
enemy: ‘Whatever you do, Jamie’, my father said, ‘don’t marry a Catholic.’ If
it wasn’t the Catholics it was the Jews (my mother railed against the Jews,
ignoring the fact that most of the artists and musicians she admired, not to
mention the conductor of the Auckland String Players which she led, and whom
she worshipped, were Jewish.) I inherited these prejudices uncritically. As for
Sicilians, all I knew about them, chiefly from B-grade action movies, [was
that they were] small, dark and sinister.
They all wore cloaks and carried knives.” (pp.83-84)
McNeish doesn’t generally aim for one-liners. He likes to
chew things over. But when he does one-liners he does them well. I loved the way he summarises the reaction of
publishers who were disappointed that he was he writing novel and not a
biography of Mackenzie - “They wanted a
photograph, not a painting” (Pg.189).
Touchstones is
a delightful book which reads easily.
I have to end with a little paradox. Discussing his time
at the BBC, McNeish remarks “Radio is
only a glorified form of journalism, after all; the spoken word is not the
printed word, and is often anathema to it.” (Pg.100). Yet my own view of
this book is that an edited version would work very well as a series of radio
talks.
I’m sure National Radio will decide the same in due
course.
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