Something New

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

“It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka Press, $NZ25); “No Good” by Sophie van Waatdenberg (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99); “The Venetian Blind Poems” by Paula Green (Cuba Press,  NZ$20)

In this sixth collection, Nick Ascroft continues to write ironically, often tongue-in -cheek, sometimes flippant, but usually making acute observations on the mores and habits of  us human beings – as well as sometimes writing autobiographically.  He dedicates this collection to “For all the dead”. Ascroft very occasionally writes in traditional forms, such as the poems “Dire Dairy” and “Pig Magnet”, with their neatly blocked stanzas; but his habitual style is a sort of free-poetry in which he sometimes writes either lists or questions. And once or twice he deliberately writes in doggerel.

There are some major things that preoccupy Ascroft – death and sorrow; the awareness that life is short; the gradual decay of the human body; how the human brain works; and the attractions and pitfalls of sex. Only one poem, “Pig Magnet”, could really be called heroic – a long poem about the difficulties of getting his son to school via bus and the different moods that were felt in the ride  – but even here there is much irony.

How are the pitfalls of love and sex represented in this collection? The poem “The Centaur for Women” is introduced as  “… a 1990s fillum / featuring Al Pacino / as a blind centaur. / Whenever his nostrils / fill with the stench / of Gabrielle he neighs / a wild: Hooh-ah! Hoo-ah…” (the title parodies the Al Pacino’s film “Scent of a Woman”). The idea is that men are predators, easily aroused like centaurs and wildly preying on women…. yet often their conquests leave them. And in the poem “Dire Diary” there is a sense of scepticism about sex and love with lines like “Love is for young people with its / self-deceit and cross purposes. A young man in /  love may make us feel a bit sick, but the crush of / a middle-aged man makes us wince.” Yet the same poem gives us a credible analysis of love is seen by somebody who has had troubles with love. And “Which 1990’s Pin-Up Is Our Future Husband?” mocks teenagers [girls] who used to make a cult of apparent heart-throbs.

Death and human decay are addressed in many ways. “It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” where, tired of this common cliché, Ascroft verbally riots with one-liners about the many ways one could be buried or cremated.  “Fair-Weather Friend” is a kind of elegy for a dear friend; and “Pastiche for Mum”, which Ascroft says he read at his mother’s funeral, is a fond collection of odd things she used to do, presented jocularly. As for “Poem for Your Funeral 5”, it is more than flippant, and it is deliberately presented as doggerel in full thus: “When this guy lived he was a pain. / But now he’s dead and down the drain. / He used to drone, each story long, / how he was never in the wrong. / But now he’s dead, the bucket kicked, / his eyes look like eggs Benedict. / His lips are still. He can’t be heard. / And so I get the final word.”

And what of the general human condition? We are, suggests a poem, the “Beast That Needs to Be Tamed”. Sometimes we know that our mentality may be confused. The poem “Do You Hear Yourself?” has the line “There is something / you are unaware of your unawareness.” The poem “Another Poem with a Feather” could be despairing; and “Another Poem With a Found Father” concludes with the line “Another poem as useless at music as a penny whistle.” But then the body is as trying as the mind and the body gradually decays as it ages. Remembering this, there is a brief comment called “Old Farts” which is literally about old people farting. “Do You Wish to Continue?”, a poem made up of 12 questions, contains such lines as “Do you wish to continue squirming like a mortal?” And as one would hope, Ascroft has sone straightforward satire, as in “Dress Code” and “Opulence” wherein pretentious people try to keep up with what is fashionable; and “Bad Cookbooks”, a collection of 44 one-liners, laughing at, or being disgusted by, revolting meals.

This is a very varied and very readable collection. And though the poems about death could be seen as disrespectful, they are clearly telling us that death is inevitable no matter how we try to ignore it.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  * 

 

No Good is Sophie van Waatdenberg’s debut collection of poetry, although many of her poems have featured in AUP’s New Poets in 2019. She lived and wrote for much of her lived in the U.S.A. and I believe [I could be wrong] that her parents came from the Netherlands. Her parents feature often in this collection. Waatdenberg’s style is in part almost classical. She writes in neat stanzas, preferring to produce either couplets or 14-liners which are almost sonnets. Her imagery sometimes borders on the surreal. More than anything, though, her No Good is a self-examination, or if you prefer, a psychological journey. Why did Waatdenberg call her collection No Good ? People who are depressed often feel, irrationally, that they are “no good” and much of this collection is built on that mood. Towards the end of the collection, we are given the poem that gives the title, “The Getting Away”. It reads in part “I’m moving out. Everyone does it. / Everyone turns their dining tables upside down/ to remove the legs.  Down the road, far from your life,/ opposite direction: I’m taking the nail scissors / and the best green leaves.   I’m ready for nothing, / smallhanded, tricked.  I’m rotten and roiled / and no good, truly – truly no good at all.”  Yes, there are moments of joy and desire, but the negative mood is always ready to jump out.

No Good is presented in three sections, and I’ll do my usual system of giving you a sort of synopsis.

First section Sophie van Waatdenberg opens with the “Poem in Which I am Good”, in which she asserts that she can be positive about her life, even if people she loved have died or disappeared and “Everybody I love will live forever”. Following this are poems about adolescent awkwardness; about childhood sharing a bedroom with a young man who “knew a lot / about philosophy, and he knew I thought philosophy was difficult / if not unnecessary…” and had eccentric and annoying attitudes.  There is uncertainty about her sexuality in “Hymn to Twee Possibility” as she considers a film about lesbians.  She and the people with whom she consorts are involved in raising crops and living simply where [in the poem “Propagate the ZZ Plant”] “you are doing such a good job for me / green monster of staying alive. All my friends / have left me to grow farms of their own…/…The rain is fat / like a grandmother’s kiss and we can’t go out / to be loved by anybody.”  As in so many of her poems, one has to ask if this is a metaphor for loneliness rather than a literal account of raising crops. Later she says “How can I spend life with myself…I do not want anyone to love me./ But then they don’t, why don’t they?” She seems to commit herself to being a lesbian, but even here she is ambiguous.

Second Section comprises 16 poems called “Cremation Sonnets” in which “my father was beautiful. His tipped chin / and factual smile, his elbow…”.  Her poems are not of rebellion against her parents, but chastises herself, telling us that she “took up swearing, walked home alone at night / with great cowardice” and also “How can it be my fault to get things wrong? / You died and I loved you, my life was over.”  In another context she asks “To where is your body going / and in what vessel?” This lament is not only for her father but perhaps also for others [it is not clear], but surely she is referring to her father when she writes “And every night and I mean every night / you’d tuck me in, grip the steel / of my wobbling bed and kiss me / how the Dutch do, thrice.”  There is much sense of guilt about family and perhaps of having lost their religion.

Third Section is made of ten poems of different moods. “Love Poem” is about her teenaged intimate love with another girl, presented as a happy memory. But also there are poems about being second best (the poem “Love Practice Weekend Four”); self-consciousness about eating (the poem “Doce”) and other showing how difficult it is to navigate personal relationships.

One can’t help admiring how candid her work is, but it is gruelling.

 *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

Written in two halves, Paula  Green explains in her Endnote that the first, “The Venetian Blind Poems” was inspired when she had to be in hospital going through therapy and medicine to right a rare form of blood cancer. The second, “The Open Window”, has to do with how she saw the world when she was once again at home.  Each of these many poems is brief, making a statement, falling into revery.

“The Venetian Blind Poems” get their name from being in hospital where “The grey harbour slips through Venetian slats” and “I invent a sweet soundtrack to match / the harbour stripes” and “the world arrives in skinny bands”. There is the pain of her situation; and the drowsiness and lack of focus that comes with infusions she has to have; and some foods she is given are not really palatable. But in all this she gradually comes to appreciate more language and literature and “Living the moment is my way / of inhabiting the serene Lake of Good Thoughts”. Among other things, she appreciates some of the nurses and staff who look after her. She listens to podcasts of children’s stories. She dreams of plants and flowers and other soothing things; but she does have a “morphine nightmare” and “some days the pain is so / intense, like a clinging dressing / gown..” Yet after much trauma, she can face the day and like it.

“The Open Window” is placed in a very different mood. Here we can “Look at the wildflowers in the long grass / Look at the blue umbrella dripping spring / Look at the green hills and the kereru in the cabbage tree.” We see more clearly what is worth looking at, feeling at, liking at things that make life worth living, especially when we were younger… indeed images of childhood…. Or is this mere a fantasy? There are ideas of climbing mountains and “The mountain sleeps / but soon it will whisper / me awake with comfort chants.” Perhaps this section is dealing with recovery and getting used to the normal, although this is as much revelling in small and even mundane things when “We bake bread and we eat / We breathe and we feel” and “I am thinking after a bone marrow transplant. / I measure the world differently / today I watered the garden for the first time.” Often she refers to New Zealand women she knows who are poets, as she is, and lands where there is “…the sweet Lake of Calm…the rock of Contemplation… the river of Self Awareness… the Ocean of Belonging…”

Could all this be called confessional poetry? Not really. Even though much of this collection deals with very personal things, it looks closely at moods and dreams that are universal and it works towards a sense of calmness, even overcoming prolonged  trauma.

 

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.     

     “THE PYRAMID” by William Golding (First published in 1967)

The Pyramid, William Golding’s 6^th novel, is a single novel written in the first person. Some have suggested that it is really three novellas, because it deals with three separate times in the narrator’s life and each could be read meaningfully on its own. But, read more carefully, you will understand that it is one coherent novel, even if it goes from the narrator’s adolescence to his middle-age. William Golding’s earlier novels dealt overtly with the problem of evil, or how we human-beings came to be very flawed and capable of murder, rape, dishonesty, jealousy, greed and all the other immoralities [or sins if you prefer]. His earlier novels were very much fables or allegories. The Pyramid is not written in that style. It is set in a small English rural town and its characters are not in any way allegoric. It is realistic. One reviewer disliked the novel because its setting – a small English rural town – was too quaint, the cosy sort of place where an Agatha Christie murder-mystery could take place. In fact, among other things, the novel drew on Golding’s memories of the rural town where he grew up, and it was by no means cosy. The same reviewer claimed that the novel was too old- fashioned for a novel published in 1967. But how can you narrate a novel ranging from the 1920’s to the 1950’s without mentioning and examining mores that are no longer with us? And again if you read carefully, Golding is also signalling how flawed we still can be.

FIRST SECTION: In the late 1920’s, in a rural town called Stilbourne, Oliver is aged 18. His parents are middle-class. His father is a pharmacist, who deals with pills and medicines. He is a quiet and thoughtful man but Oliver’s mother is very censorious. She often belittles uncouth people… meaning lower-classes. Oliver is preparing to go to Oxford where he will study chemistry and physics. As a hobby, he enjoys playing the piano. When he was younger he was taught violin by the eccentric Miss Dawlish before switching to piano. Miss Dawlish was wealthy and sees herself as upper-middle-class. But he has other things in mind. He thinks of love and, like any male teenager, he thinks of sex. He admires and dreams about a young woman called Imogen, but she is in her early twenties and is about to get married. As he lies in bed Oliver thinks about Imogen. For this reader at any rate, Oliver’s sexual frustration is one of the best depictions of male adolescence I have yet come upon. Across the road lives Robert Ewan, the same age as Oliver. Robert’s father has more local prestige than Oliver’s father because Robert’s father is a doctor of medicine. Robert has adopted the airs of the upper crust and acts as if he is Oliver’s superior. While Oliver is preparing to go to Oxford, Robert is about to join the R.A.F. at Cranwell.

Crisis comes when the local beauty Evie Babbacombe knocks on Oliver’s door one rainy night. She asks him to help Robert get a stolen car out of a bog in the woods. Oliver helps, but his frustration grows. Here is Robert with a beautiful girlfriend while Oliver has none. Robert goes off to Cranwell. Oliver often walks in the woods. Then news comes that  Robert has been badly hurt in a crash. He will be crippled for life. And Evie now starts walking in the woods. Oliver begins to walk with her. Then he cuddles her. Then he longs to swyve her. [ I only use this medieval term because I really mean f…]. She goes along with his petting and kissing and pawing in other walks. Finally, in the woods, she says “Get on with it” and he does. But then it dawns on him. She has also swyved with the absent, permanently damaged, Robert; and Oliver believes that Evie’s father has been spying on them, setting up Evie to catch another respectable middle-class adolescent boy to marry. And Evie makes it clear she is pregnant. “Thought you’d got something for nothing, didn’t you?” she says later to Oliver. Later still, Oliver sees Evie walking and talking with Doctor Ewan. Then she leaves town. Did she have an abortion (illegal in the 1920’s)? Or did she have a miscarriage and a still-born baby? [The name Golding gave to the novel’s town Stilbourne might possibly be a clue, but I could be wrong.] Or could Evie have never been pregnant at all? It is never made clear. But whatever the truth was, Oliver, as he grows up, understands that he had in effect raped Evie when he forced her to give in and open her legs. And he is more aware that there are different social classes, with Evie’s family being working class. The only prestige her father has is being the town crier dressed up in a costume which is widely regarded as a joke. The part of town where her family lives is almost a slum, even if Evie is cheerful, good-looking and gets on well with people.

Only some years later, when Oliver is studying at Oxford, he bumps into Evie in London. She is apparently as cheerful as usual and has had many men in her life; but when he talks about the “old times” she says “It all began when you raped me… Never stood a chance… I didn’t want you – I was only fifteen.” Oliver finally understands that he had forced her to swyve with him, and that he had in effect raped her, regardless if she was pregnant or not. Who said that small rural towns are cosy and sweet? Evil was here. Snobbery, contempt and lust were here. It has some of the things that Golding wrote about in his first five allegorical novels, concerned with how or why human beings became so flawed.

 

                                                              Goldiing in his prime

THE SECOND SECTION has often been passed over as a mere farce, and in many ways it is, but there is much more to it than only that. Coming home from university during an academic break, Oliver reluctantly agrees to perform in the local amateur “opera” company who are putting on a sugary Ruritanian Ivor Novello-ish operetta. He is annoyed by the fact that Imogen, the young woman for whom he had pined, has been given the leading female singing role. Her husband also has a leading role. Oliver now says to himself that he knows Evie was a better singer than Imogen ever was, and he is more aware that this amateur company is made up of twee, pretentious middle-class people who think of themselves as cultured and would therefore not welcome working-class singers into their caste. Of course, such thoughts could really only be Oliver’s adolescent sour-grapes when he so often sees Imogen with another man.  That apart, there is much real bitchery and back-stabbing among the actors and singers… but then aren’t most actors narcissistic? (And if you know Golding’s Pincher Martin, you will know that the main villain was once an actor.)  This is where the farce in the novel kicks in. Clothing not fitting, people not properly rehearsed, things falling etc. But there is one thing that is not funny. The director who has been called in to direct the operetta is Dr. Evelyn De Tracy. He is very prissy. He calls all the male actors “dear boy” and he flatters Oliver for his performance. Any male adolescent now would quickly understand that Evelyn De Tracy is probably “gay” or homosexual. But remember, in the 1920’s many male adolescents would never have learned about such people. Evelyn De Tracy invites Oliver to a drink during parts of the operetta in which Oliver is not on stage. He speaks vaguely to Oliver of how there are openings for a better place for Oliver. Oliver listens politely, not really understanding what De Tracy is saying. Then De Tracy tries to amuse Oliver by showing him some photos of men escorting men wearing women’s clothes. Oliver identifies one of the men dressed as women was De Tracy and he simply laughs. He clearly has never heard the term “drag”. At once De Tracy snatches the photos back, and very soon he makes himself scarce. Remember, in the 1920s, homosexuals could often be targeted by blackmailers… and innocent though Oliver was, even by talking about De Tracy’s funny photos, he could destroy De Tracy’s whole career.

THE THIRD SECTION is in some ways the saddest. In his 50’s Oliver returns to Stilbourne. He has done well at Oxford. He got through the Second World War working in a chemical plant. He has married and has children. He notices how many things have changed. Long gone are buggies and a smithy. In their place is a petrol station run by and owned by  Henry Williams, working-class, used to board at eccentric Miss Dawlish’s house, and in effect had become her servant. But Henry was an enterprising person, and gradually he knew how to make himself rich and he and his wife moved to another house. Miss Dawlish has long been dead. Henry has kept Miss Dawlish’s antique car – nicknamed “Bounce” – polished and shown outside his petrol station. Oliver goes to the church where there is a plaque for Miss Dawlish. He goes into a long flashback, remembering when he was a little boy and he used to go to her place for first violin and then piano lessons. She was a tyrant when teaching music, severely belittling him when he did something wrong. And when lessons were being taught, the little boy would often hear her verbally chastising her boarders. She acted as if she were a grande dame. Young Oliver hated her. … But later he learns the story of Miss Dawlish’s own childhood. Her father had tyrannised her, forcing her to play music and otherwise depriving her from having friends in the hope that she would become able to perform in public. He would run out into the street if he heard one of those new-fangled gramophones and he would smash it. So, on his own, old Miss Dawlish became more and more eccentric. In her old age, she wanted attention. She would deliberately drive her car into a ditch and then ring up the garage to come and help her. She would go for walks simply to show off her best coat to passers-by. Her mentality declined. Finally, she put on her best shoes and gloves and hat, and she walked off stark naked. She was sent off to a mental hospital and stayed there for some years. Knowing all this, the adult Oliver felts some pity for her… but then he decides he still hated her. No happy ending..

Now how could I say The Pyramid is one coherent novel, even if it is presented in three parts? In some sense it is a Bildungsroman, showing the growth of a young man from adolescence to maturity and in the process changing his attitudes as he grows. Remember that Golding was inspired by what he had learnt in the town where he originally lived. But Golding is also concerned with those primeval problems he examined, in a very different way, in his earlier novels. There is jealousy [Oliver is jealous of Robert as he has a girl-friend; and Oliver, in his mind, belittles Imogen because she is beyond his reach]. There is a lack of charity when Oliver’s mother and other people look down on the poorer working-classes. There is rape [whether or not Evie was pregnant, Oliver committed rape]. And there is hatred – even in manhood, Oliver still hates Miss Dawlish, even though he know how forces beyond her had made her what she is. The Pyramid stands up as one of Golding’s best novels.

Some random thoughts to finish with: Why are there two characters in this novel called Evie and Evelyn? I really don’t know but my guess is that both are meant to be seen as tempters, Evie with easy sex and Evelyn trying to tempt Oliver into his circle. Like Eve tempting Adam in Genesis….. And why did the first publishers of The Pyramid [Faber and Faber] had to have on the front cover an image of a naked old woman walking out? Okay, Miss Dawlish goes gaga and walks out naked, but that is an event in the very last pages. To me it seems a sort of titillation. 

 

 

 

 

 

Something Thoughful

 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 PROBLEM WITH ART GALLERIES 

                         

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold… by which I mean I have been in Europe enough to have visited many of the great art-galleries – the Louvre, the Prada, the Uffizi, the British National Gallery… and quite a few others. The all have their different protocols. I remember the severity in Amsterdam when I was censured  for taking photos of Van Gogh’s “Crows in a Cornfield”… so I waited until the busybody had moved on then went on photographing.  I did similar deviousness in the British National Gallery when I was told I could not shoot a Gainsborough.

So we come to Australia. We’ve popped a number of times over to Oz – Sydney of course but more often now to Melbourne because one of our daughters lives there now. We have just come back from a fortnight in Melbourne and in Adelaide (simply because we had never been to Adelaide before).

 

So here is a tale of two galleries.

In Melbourne the was an exhibition of French Impressionism from the late 19^th century. We eagerly paid to see this exhibition, which had been loaned by American galleries. In fact we booked for it in advance.

Oh Misery! Yes the paintings were wonderful. All  those works by Corot, Millet, Monet, Boudin, Sisley, Van Gough, Degas and others; but one had to push and jostle through the crowd. The fact was that there were so many people that one could barely stop to admire a painting before one was pushed along. It seemed apparent that the gallery had been grossly over-booked. Without being a snob, I believe that only a limited number of people should have been booked for each viewing… say, two hours for each group. One old man sat down in the midst of the crowd and said, lugubriously, but truthfully “This is not the way to see art.” To make matters worse, the whole time we were in the gallery there was a distressed woman who was pushing a pram with an even more distressed baby in it. The baby was not merely whimpering but was [literally] howling and screaming… for the whole hour-plus that we were in the gallery. I doubt if either mother or baby was enjoying the art work, but, being polite, nobody said that the baby should be put out.  Yes, great paintings but not a great experience.

 

There were no such problems when we, later, were in Adelaide  [very nice and tidy city-centre with many malls and green spaces]. Going to Adelaide’s main art-gallery there were no crowds because no special exhibition was on. Much space was given to selections of colonial 19^th century Australian landscapes and portraits, and much space of Aboriginal works, but as much space was given to classic work from Europe, mainly from the 17^th and 18^th centuries. But one tiny matter did irk me. In two of the galleries, rather than having under  each painting the name of the painter and the name of the painting, title and name were all placed together at the end of their two galleries. One had to puzzle out which painting was which.

I suppose all I have said here is trivial, but small things can ruin a viewing.