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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE PENGUIN
BOOK OF NEW ZEALAND WAR WRITING” Edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean
(Penguin-Random House, $NZ65)
“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not
having been a soldier, or not having been at sea,” Samuel Johnson remarked
famously about 250 years ago.
The
remark has been rebutted or deplored numerous times by those who wish to
emphasise the ways of peace, and those who regard dreams of soldiership as a
sign of barbarism. Nevertheless, I think Dr Johnson was onto something. There
is, somewhere in the psyche of most males, a respect for warriors and a vague
dream of being a soldier, even if it goes no deeper than memories of childhood
games about leading the charge or capturing the pillbox single-handedly.
And New Zealand,
for all its social liberalism, is one of the countries where the dream most
persists, especially as for New Zealanders, wars are adventures that take place
overseas. In New Zealand itself there has been no war, in any real sense of the
word, for about 150 years. Given that Anzac Day is our most respected holiday,
given that the All Blacks are national heroes for playing a game that is ritualised
warfare, given that memorials to war-dead appear prominently in every New
Zealand town and city, it is harder to get away from martial imagery in New
Zealand than it is to get away from the sea.
I’m reviewing a
very good anthology, The Penguin Book of
New Zealand War Writing, and I have taken over a month picking my way
through it and considering it. That’s because all the time I’m measuring it
against my own knowledge of wars in which New Zealanders have been involved,
and of people I know who have been to war or have at least been in the forces.
I am a most unwarlike person – bespectacled, over-weight, addicted to sedentary
pleasures and to reading far too many books. Not soldier material and over-age
anyway. The family I come from is not notably martial either. But my father was
in uniform in the Second World War, like thousands of other New Zealand conscripts;
one of my elder brothers did a 20-year hitch in the RNZAF, and another was a
career soldier who became part of the top brass [see the posting Goodbye Soldier]. As I said, it’s hard
to get away from this military stuff in New Zealand, even if the only shot I
ever fired was when I was a teenager and my soldier brother took it into his
head, one afternoon, to teach me to shoot. One fierce recoil of his rifle,
bruising my shoulder, was enough to persuade him of my incompetence and to
abandon his lesson.
Like most New
Zealand males, then, I am no soldier, but I am still very interested in the
stuff soldiers do.
The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing was edited by Gavin McLean, senior historian at the Ministry of
Culture and Heritage, and Harry Ricketts, Professor of English, poet and editor
(whose father was, I believe, a career soldier). In his introduction, Harry
Ricketts quite rightly points out the persistence of the myth of the New
Zealand soldier as a laconic, modest, resourceful, practical joker. Ricketts
notes that, before the great OE became possible for most people, being a New
Zealand soldier, engaged in foreign wars, always had an element of tourism
attached to it. He is sceptical of the “chauvinistic”
(p.10) glorification of Kiwi nationalism expressed in Maurice Shadbolt’s play Once on Chunuk Bair. But he does endorse
the more temperate version of Kiwi nationalism, which Ormond Burton attached to
Gallipoli. In short, Ricketts establishes quickly both his respect for soldiers
and his distaste for exaggerated versions of their exploits. Regarding the
editorial process, Rickett’s introduction tells us “ ‘Material of sufficient quality’ has throughout been the guiding
principle for our selection (though personal taste and ignorance inevitably
play their part.” This, he declares, means the book is an anthology of “ ‘war writing’ and the emphasis is quite as
much on ‘writing’ as on ‘war’ ”. (p.13) In prose, poetry, playscript and
news story, as much space is given to the home-front reflections of
non-combatants and to general reactions to war as to combat zone reportage and
fictions.
Sensibly, the
anthology runs chronologically, not according to when things were written but
according to which wars and conflicts the writing references. Contemporary
reports rub shoulders with much later fictional or historical accounts of the
same events. Doubtless there were many armed conflicts in New Zealand before Pakeha
touched the country, but there was nobody to write anything down about them.
Therefore, stretching the meaning of “war” somewhat, the first selections in The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing are
three separate versions of Abel Tasman’s lethal encounter with Maori in 1642
and James Cook’s ditto in 1769. Nearly 500 big pages later, and before a
closing section of general “Reflections” on war, the last conflicts referenced
are in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a selection from Marianne Elliott’s Zen Under Fire [see posting thereupon].
Between lie sections on nineteenth century wars between Maori and Pakeha;
“imperial” wars, meaning the Boer War and the First World War (subdivided into
Home Front, Gallipoli and Western Front); the Second World War (subdivided many
ways); and “The Cold War and After” – meaning Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Some of the
selections are familiar acquaintances – they are the type of thing that could
not decently be left out of an anthology like this. Thus, from the First World
War, Archibald Baxter’s wrenching account of “Field Punishment Number One” from
his pacifist classic We Will Not Cease,
and a generous selection from Robyn Hyde’s first “Starkie” book Passport to Hell and that delightful
passage about rats gnawing corpses from John A. Lee’s Civilian Into Soldier. Or from the Second World War, Jim Henderson’s
account, from Gunner Inglorious, of
being treated surprisingly well by German doctors and medics after he was shot
up; and a selection from Dan Davin’s rather chaotic novel For the Rest of Our Lives; and John Mulgan describing German
reprisals against Greek partisans in Report
on Experience. A generous slice of Vincent O’Sullivan’s Shuriken is reproduced, as well as
Rowley Habib’s tough, coarse and effective poem on the Maori Battalion “The Raw
Men”, and (pre-Second World War) dispatches from Robin Hyde in war-torn China
and Geoffrey Cox at the siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.
There are some
selections that might be said to reinforce the received view of the New Zealand
soldier, such a Jock Phillips’ account, from A Man’s Country, of Kiwi soldiers in the Boer War building their
own legend of hardiness and refusing to be subservient to those snooty Pommy
officers. There are others which are purely heroic in tone. In the whole
anthology, the selection which reports heroics most admiringly and uncritically
must be Alan Mitchell’s (1945) account of 23-year-old James Ward winning his VC
by crawling out on the wing of a bomber in flight to put out a dangerous fire.
If there are
many things that are familiar here, there are also more obscure things that the
anthologists have done well to resurrect – among the best, Donald Lea’s First
World War squib “Gold Stripe”, which as poetry might be dated barrack-room
stuff, but which is much more honest about the nagging pettiness of a soldier’s
life than later and more stridently “anti-war” poetry ever was. Another “find”
is Alice Webb’s short-story “The Patriot” (written in 1925), with its vivid
account of a young man setting off for war with naïve enthusiasm.
As a general
comment, it has to be said that the selected writers’ attitudes towards war
become darker and more critical the nearer the anthology approaches our own
times. The selections referencing the Korean War, for example, begin with three
anti-war poems: Hone Tuwhare’s “No Ordinary Sun” and Keith Sinclair’s “The Bomb
is Made”, both protesting against nuclear weapons, and James K. Baxter’s rude
(but bloody funny) “Harry Fat and Uncle Sam”, protesting New Zealand’s being
embraced by the United States. Nobody is gung-ho writing about the Vietnam War,
and many of the passages about the Home Front in the Second World War are
dispiriting and drab – Frank Sargeson’s typically misogynistic story “The Hole
That Jack Dug”, Greville Texidor’s sad tale “Anyone Home?” about the
impossibility of a returned serviceman easily resuming domestic life, and the
memories of a conscientious objector Walter Lawry. (On the other hand, Kevin Ireland’s Home
Front piece is a boisterous and comic childhood memory of adult lunacy in
Devonport.)
The best feature
of the anthology’s arrangement is the way it lets us compare different versions
of the same events, by looking at passages that sit side by side. This often
leads to side-thoughts on the way history judges events that once seemed above
reproach. For example, I find James Cowan’s (1911) account of the death of Von
Tempsky in the New Zealand Wars to be a far from vivid piece of writing than
Maurice Shadbolt’s fictionalised version of the same event written nearly
eighty years later. And, coming back to what is referenced pointedly in the
Introduction, Shadbolt’s romanticised version of Gallipoli in Once on Chunuk Bair sits beside Ormond
Burton’s sober account of the campaign in The
Silent Division. The anthologists say that Shadbolt “perfectly met the nation-building needs of the 1980s [but his] mythologising patently required a
considerable amount of historical distortion, omission, and plain wish
fulfilment…[which]… has recently
started to come under sharper scrutiny.” (p.147)
By contrast,
Ormond’s account gives us [in Ormond’s words] “Scorching heat, swarms of venomous flies, hosts of never-ending lice,
thirst, the pervading stench of the unburied dead, and then a new experience –
the frightful monotony of war. A dangerous life is not necessarily an exciting
one.” An unheroic, matter-of-fact endurance rather than a nationalistic
hurrah.
I assume this is
enough to convince you that this is a capacious and worthwhile anthology.
Now for a few
niggles – and they are only niggles. Why is R. A. K. Mason’s “Sonnet to
MacArthur’s Eyes” slotted into the Second World War Home Front section? I can
only assume that this was some sort of mistake, as the poem is a protest poem
about the Korean War. I am further surprised that the “musket wars” of the
1810s and 1820s are hardly represented. Granted that there may not be much
contemporaneous writing about them, they have nevertheless been raked over by
many historians and I believe they produced at least some quotable passages. I
am aware that Guthrie Wilson is no longer highly regarded, but I still find it
odd that his Second World War novel Brave
Company (concerning New Zealanders fighting in Italy) goes unrepresented.
In its day (the early 1950s) it was very highly regarded – I pull my battered
old Corgi paperback copy off the shelf and find the blurb has novelist Eric
Linklater declaring it superior to All Quiet on the Western Front,
forsooth. I am pleased to see the selection from Jack Elworthy’s book Greece Crete Stalag Dachau [see post
thereupon], but think it a pity that it is not one of his very unheroic
passages about the retreat through Greece. Finally, I believe M.K.Joseph’s I’ll Soldier No More [unrepresented]
says more about military life than his admittedly intriguing A Soldier’s Tale, and I wonder if the
latter was chosen to justify reproducing “Dichtung und Wahrheit”, Allen
Curnow’s petulant and vindictive poem about it. [My own view on this matter –
if Curnow didn’t like Joseph’s novel, he could have trotted the few paces down
to his colleague’s office and had a friendly chat about it, rather than
spilling his guts in print – Mike Joseph wasn’t the sort of guy who would have
belted him one.]
But you see what
I am doing, don’t you? I’m now telling what I would have chosen if I had been
the anthologist. Not a very nice game. A few years back, when a large but very imperfect
anthology of New Zealand writing was produced, many reviewers chipped in to
point out all the writers who should have been included. One of the anthologists
retorted that they were producing an anthology, not a telephone directory. A
fair enough retort I suppose, even if defensive. So I will desist with my
niggles at this point and reaffirm that The
Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing delivers the promised goods.
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