Something Old

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

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

 

[Last posting I dealt with the first two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy, Maori Girl and Power of Joy. This posting I deal with the concluding two novels of the tetralogy. ]

Maori Woman (first published in 1974) brings Netta Samuel together with Paul Bennett. Once again, Hilliard presents his novel in four parts. And once again he begins each part with a Biblical quotation.

Part One : Netta Samuel now works as a machinist in a Wellington clothing factory. She was devastated when she had to give up her baby Victoria (“Vicki”) for adoption to a Pakeha couple. She is now living with Jason Pine, a Maori labourer who has spent time in jail for his violent criminal activities including rape. Jason has had a life of dodging or coping with Pakeha prejudices. He also has a strong sexual appetite and (unknown by Netta) he is cheating on Netta with a Pakeha girl. Paul Bennett, as he determined at the end of Power of Joy, has approached Netta and had tea with her after first accosting her at the railway station. He has asked her to phone him - but she will not give him her name. At the clothing factory, Netta’s boss is the Pakeha Henry Rushbury. He has decided views on the disruptive powers of attractive young Maori. They are a distraction for the male workers. He also seems to be bored with his own marriage.  Part One ends with Paul Bennett lifted out of his gloom when Neta does phone him.

Part Two: Netta’s Pakeha boss Henry Rushbury takes more than a passing interest in Netta… indeed he daydreams about her while at a symphony concert [Hilliard presents classical music as something for snobs who only attend to boost their own prestige.] Netta meanwhile accepts at the factory the friendship of a rather neurotic English girl called Sharon Burt, who claims she’s going to marry a Maori called Richard. Only later do we learn that Sharon is in fact the Pakeha girl with whom Jason Pine is cheating. The friendship of Paul and Netta develops. They meet a number of times and exchange stories of their childhood, but she does not as yet trust him with her address or the details of her life. Finally, balancing up Jason and Paul in her mind, she decides to commit herself to Paul. At about the same time, Jason is gathering together all the rage and resentment he feels about Pakeha society. This culminates when he sexually humiliates Sharon at a Pakeha party they attend. He knows trouble will soon find him and he decides to leave town. This is the same night that Netta and Paul decide to live together.

Part Three : Travelling back to the country, Paul meets Jason, fresh out of prison, who berates him for his Pakeha ignorance of Maori ways. Aggressively he attacks Paul’s patronising attitude. Netta returns to her family, wrenched by the fact that she is not able to tell them about the mokopuna she has given up for adoption. Her father (without speaking out loud) laments the poor living he is able to scratch out of his farm than the Pakeha have taken away the best land. And yet in prayer and celebration, Netta’s is a warm homecoming to a real family. In contrast, Paul’s is a solitary homecoming. Isolated, he wanders among the trees, alienated, looking at the way industry has wrecked the countryside. Visiting the overgrown, run-down marae he wonders how this could be the centre of a social life. As for Jason’s homecoming, he is completely alienated from the old ways… and later he defaces a sign that prohibits the taking of shellfish. He despises his family for clinging to tradition and determines to go back to the city. And back in the Wellington factory, the boss Henry Rushbury is having lustful thoughts about Netta, especially as his wife keeps nagging him about how he should be more assertive with his employees. Netta tells her family that she is going to marry the Pakeha Paul. There is some consternation about this, but her family generally accepts her decision. In contrast, when Paul tells his parents that he's going to marry a Maori woman, there is barely-suppressed racism. Paul’s mother is tight-lipped and his father gives a full-on racist lecture. Paul consults an Anglican vicar about his family’s attitude. The vicar is understanding and says it is Paul’s family that must change; but Paul comes away feeling that he should not have attempted to rely on a church he no longer believes in. He tries, without great success, to make peace with his mother. Netta visits the neighbours of the Matiti area and once again sees how run-down and backward the area is. In a way, she has become more acclimatised to the city than she realises… yet, even though she now finds be inadequate and limited the house she grew up, she is bullied by her father to agree she will stay there. Part Three closes with Paul reading a letter sent by the vicar saying Paul shouldn’t have any fear in marrying with the church’s support.

Part Four : When Netta returns to her factory job, Henry Rushbury plans to seduce her. He has erotic fantasies in which he controls Netta. Meanwhile the unhappy English girl Sharon Burt tells Netta how she has been slapped around by her boyfriend Richard and how she is now pregnant – and Netta knows that she is really talking about Jason Pine. Meanwhile, as Paul sleeps with Netta, he becomes curious and jealous about the man she still lives with; and she explains how this unnamed man is in trouble and needs her. Not too much later however, Netta tells Jason that she is leaving him for a Pakeha man. In return, Jason lectures her on how she will lose all her Maoriness. Finally Paul comes to Netta’s place while Jason is there – and he recognises the man with whom he had an argument in the country some weeks earlier. In a rage, Jason stabs Netta… and the novel ends with Henry Rushbury reading a newspaper report of Netta’s critical condition. He says “Thank God!”, which is presumably his sense of relief that he just missed getting involved with her.

At which point you are very annoyed with me because all I have given you of Maori Woman is an over-long synopsis. So let me give a little critique. This third novel in the tetralogy – the one in which Netta and Paul are brought together – is the most schematic and didactic of the series. Like Power of Joy, it is weighted down with interior monologue – though this time from many different characters – which tends to explain themes rather than dramatizing them. There is often the sense, too, that the thoughts of all the main characters (Netta, Paul, Jason and Henry) are too self-aware and too articulate. For the same reason, much of the dialogue has a stilted theatrical feel. Hilliard is clearly exploring racial attitudes, condemning Pakeha prejudice and (in the character of Jason Pine) showing how resentment at such prejudice can lead some Maori to criminality. Hilliard overtly criticises Pakeha stereotyped ideas of Maori life; but sometimes Hilliard comes close to repeating such stereotypes – Maori with a strong sense of community, spirituality and family in spite of poverty. Meanwhile Pakeha are individualistic, alienated, materialistic and sexually repressed. This is most obvious in the contrast between Netta’s homecoming and Paul’s homecoming when they tell their respective families that they are going to marry. The novel’s admonitory, fable-like quality surfaces again when Jason’s frustration and anger with Netta results in criminal violence… whereas Henry Rushbury’s perverse thoughts die in respectable silence. What other agenda is there here? Hilliard has of course written a socially-aware novel, and in the factory scenes he introduces comments about materials, about piece-work and bonuses and capitalist exploitation. He also arraigns European “high culture” in Henry Rushbury’s thoughts while listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with Hilliard suggesting that it is not really relevant to New Zealand… a bit like Paul having to cast aside his Wordsworthian-ism in Power of Joy. The church, however, in the figure of the vicar, is presented more-or-less positively.

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            The last book of the tetralogy The Glory and the Dream was first published in 1978.  Like all books of the tetralogy, The Glory and the Dream is divided into four parts.

Part One opens when Netta and Paul have been married for about a year and they have moved out of the city and into the country. They have a baby daughter called Huia and Paul is working at a paper mill. This first part is framed by a picnic they go on, where Paul thinks back to how his parents ignored them after their registry office wedding, but how Netta’s family welcomed them even though her father still harped on the unfairness of Pakeha taking Maori land. Paul also remembers going on a fishing expedition with Netta’s brother Mutu. Heavy symbolism appears everywhere. In the opening pages Paul and Netta, in their vegetable garden, are deliberately nurturing new plant life… and travelling on a boat to the picnic with Netta and baby Huia, there’s the symbolism of a fragile craft adrift in new waters… like the marriage of Maori and Pakeha. Paul remembers Christmas celebrations and the meal with Netta’s family the previous year, and how he, unused to such food, threw up at the rotten corn. He remembers the New Year’s hangi and the rain… And how Netta showed him her former home and its ways and how he is not fully centred there. Part One ends with him, after the picnic, having sunburn so easily because he has a different sort of skin from his wife… more symbolism and certainly much inner monologue.

In Part Two small matters of adjustment in their marriage are outlined. They collectively become a great matter. She doesn’t see the value of reading books. He does. She has a different attitude to money from his. She goes to church. He doesn’t. She is horrified that he still won’t introduce her to his family, as she believes a marriage should be two families coming together. He criticises her standard of tidiness in housekeeping. There is a grisly incident when he introduces her to a snobbish Pakeha couple who pick apart her name as a problem in linguistics. They go to the funeral of somebody in the same firm as Paul, and she is appalled at how empty of feeling a Pakeha funeral is. They talk about her feelings considering God, and in a long-night conversation she talks about the Maori heritage their children will have. Often he proposes to her the idea that they are a couple above race; but she says such an idea is a delusion. Paul feels how different he is from her relatives when they come to call and he feeds himself while they continue to drink beer until they get some fish and chips. They discuss a pornographic comic Paul brings home from his work, and at her insistence he burns it. They argue about his patronising Pakeha friends trying to change her Maori ways, and about how she doesn’t value money or savings. They have another major disagreement over how Huia is to be brought up – Maori values or Pakeha ones – and she tries to define her morality and concepts of moral good. She tells him about her sense of God – and about something she is missing. She has not told him of the child she adopted out – she claims that her first child died. She is indifferent to politics. He doesn’t believe in in omens. She does.

Part Three: The weather changes. Paul feels sick and irritable being on the night shift at the paper mill. There is a long description here of conditions at the paper mill and the discontent of the workers with the owners. Paul and Netta have long conversations about the merits of classical music and about the pressures placed on him at work. He wonders why she has no ambition and never suggests he should go further than his boring job. He begins to imagine that she is cheating on him because he does the night-shift when anybody could be entering their home… and to escape these negative thoughts, he reverts to adolescence and tries to immerse himself in nature once again. But when he returns home his suspicions are renewed. When Netta is out one morning, he rifles through her belongings looking for evidence of her infidelity. He finds a letter from her adopted-out daughter but does not understand its significance and imagines it’s only from a niece in her extended family. However he finds a paperback that used to belong to a ship’s library. His mind goes back to his days in Wellington and he wonders in raging jealousy if Netta was once a “ship girl”. He suffers what almost amounts to a nervous breakdown, with thoughts of revenge on Netta and her supposed lover… and finally Netta reveals the existence of her adopted-out daughter Vicki… and Paul at last realises what her behaviour has meant over all these years and he is filled with shame. He has simply not understood what a burden she has carried in having to keep some of her past secret.

Part Four. This part opens with two-and-a-half pages of Nature-coming-to-life imagery. Paul has adjusted to his life with Netta – he is resigned to it. Netta gives him as a present The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with its advice of not becoming obsessed with the foolish and the ignorant… and on the next page Paul’s parents at last visit them. There is mutual awkwardness, but Paul’s father now offers Paul his farm and says it’s what he went to war for… after all, any farmer wants to pass on his farm to his son. After his parents have gone, Paul begins to accept his father’s offer… and the novel ends with life burgeoning as Netta says she is pregnant again.

Okay. Okay. I’m not responsible for the fairy-tale ending and I have delivered you another over-long synopsis. But bear with me in a sort of critique. Hilliard’s fatal weaknesses are at their worst in The Glory and the Dream. Hilliard constantly tells us without showing us. On page after page he rushes in to point a moral rather than dramatising events. Once again, a good deal of the text is taken up with interior monologue and rumination, nearly always Paul’s and very rarely Netta’s. We are, even more than in the preceding three novels, getting the Pakeha male’s view of cultural clash and race relations. This would be unexceptional except that there are long sections where Paul’s conversations with Netta seem to be little more than his asking questions about her values and beliefs – a stark and really undramatised contrast of Maori and Pakeha values. Worse, the symbolic imagery (or pathetic fallacy) gets out of hand, with Nature ready to tell us about life regenerating etc. etc.

Is there a trace in this novel of the Marxism that at one stage Hilliard embraced? In the choice of subject and social attitudes, there may be some moments of socialist inspiration, especially when we have Paul in the paper mill considering the alienation of the workers. Also (in a timber-milling town) there is some imagery about the rape of nature.  But little of this is really seen in a socialist perspective.  Attitudes to work and ideas of alienation are more the sins of Western civilisation than specifically the fault of capitalism. In one sense, then, this novel takes race to be a more determinant factor than class.

To go back to what I said in introducing Hilliard’s work, I believe he wrote with “the best of intentions”. He really did seek a more equitable New Zealand and he certainly wanted greater respect for the Maori people. He did have not only a Maori wife, but also many admiring Maori friends. These are things to be applauded. But, good intentions apart, what he offered sometimes were themselves stereotypes and much of what he wrote now seems oddly patronising. Certainly (and this is not his fault) his depiction of Maori is not as raw and knowing as the work of the many Maori writers who have appeared in the last 40 or 50 years.

And then there are all the problems with his prose style. I was able to access some of the original reviews in “Landfall” of Hilliard’s work, and the reviews were often negative. In “Landfall 57 – March 1961” Paul Day blasted Maori Girl as “not a satisfactory novel because of the thinness of its characters’ emotional life… Mr. Hilliard… has fallen between two stools of reporting and imaginative creation…” In “Landfall 129 March 1979”  Patricia Glensor ripped The Glory and the Dream apart, attacking the whole of Hilliard’s tetralogy as a cliché-ridden unrealistic novel written too often in sub-Wordsworthian prose and perpetuating the very racist concepts Hilliard set out to demolish. She says he creates the “happy-go-lucky Hori and the neurotic, nit-picking Pakeha”. And between these reviews, Dennis McEldowney in 1963 damned one of Hilliard’s short stories as so bad it was “embarrassing”; and R.A. Copland, in 1969, biffed at Hilliard’s A Night at Green River [the novel that interrupted the tetralogy] as sheer didacticism. In “Landfall 113 March 1975”, H.Winston Rhodes praised Hilliard’s social realism in Maori Woman but had to admit the “inadequacy” of Hilliard’s narrative technique.

Not that critics are always right, of course (not even the one you are now reading). But it does seem that Noel Hilliard had a hard ride even in his heyday, and his stock has fallen even further now

 [Two novels by Hilliard, his short stories and one odd book will conclude my examination of Hilliard’s work in my next posting]