Something New

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

WE WHO WRESTLE WITH GOD  by JORDAN B. PETERSON (Published by Penguin-Random House. Price in New Zealand $35) 

 

Even to mention the name of Jordan Peterson is to raise some people’s hackles. To tell you what you probably already know, he has a wide readership, often lectures, is frequently interviewed on television and other platforms, and has written about the way people should be able to grow up, take responsibility and mature. A Canadian, he was for years a professor of psychology and taught in many universities. So why did he become a person wrapped in controversy? It began when he ran up against the transgender movement. Peterson loudly protested against “compelled speech”  - that is, people had to accept and use the new transgender movement’s jargon or be sanctioned. Later, under pressure, the society of Canadian psychologists ordered him to be sanctioned… but they had to admit that it had nothing to do with what he had taught or what he had done as a therapist. They were basically saying that he was lowering the standard of psychology by writing and giving talks in theatres in a popular way. One can’t help thinking that there was much envy about his success and (as is also true) that he earned a great amount by his writing and appearances. After going through his “punishment” he decamped from Canada and he now lives in the U. S. A .

Peterson has not yet declared that he is a Christian, but he appears to be well on his way to becoming one. He believes that many ancient texts are still relevant to us and worthwhile when it comes to matters of ethics and morality. It is foolish to assume  - as too many modernists do -  that only texts of the modern age are worth considering. To regard only what is currently fashionable is to miss out what is essential in the making of human beings. He begins quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Carrion Comfort” which suggests how difficult it is to deal with God, but how ultimately the struggle is rewarding. Hence the title We Who Wrestle With God, with the added words Perceptions of the Divine. His preface called “Foreshadowing: The Still, Small Voice” tells in detail the story of Elijah wherein the still small voice [of God] leads to consciousness and an awareness of a moral order. It is “what is the appropriate hierarchy of value through which the world most productively, generously and sustainably reveals itself”. He also asserts in his preface that “The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”

To make his case, what follows is presented to us over about 500 pages. We Who Wrestle With God is what is best called a commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah – the Law), but also referring to some later Hebrew texts; and every so often Peterson quotes from the New Testament. He is exploring the importance of a universal ethical code. Tiresome though it is, to explain this long and detailed text the best thing I can do is to summarise each chapter. Thus…

1 In the Beginning

God passes to us consciousness and being aware of the goodness of nature around us. God gives us nurture and guides us. Man needs woman as woman needs man [Adam and Eve]. They complement each other. And “The world cannot survive if it is ruled by sex and power. Those forces degenerate into tyranny and chaos intertwined, intermingled and married when they are raised to the highest place. The world of the proper sovereign order is and must be ruled instead by the pattern of encounter with chaos, upward striving, truth, and voluntary sacrifice precisely in the manner that is most deeply and comprehensively encoded in the biblical corpus.” (p. 20) Further “Eve corresponds to Adam precisely as the Taoist yin does to yang. It is her job to bring to her partner’s attention all the concerns that Adam may have overlooked, involved as he is in his enterprise of responsible stewardship. He is called upon in that work to extend, expand, and update his naming and subduing in keeping with the new and even novel needs of the time, without too radically, pridefully, or presumptuously restructuring the entire tradition. Eve’s role is on keeping with the well-known personality differences between men and women, evident cross-culturally, and more pronounced in more egalitarian societies….” (pp. 23-24) Hear we have the idea that there is a core of behaviour, from primeval times, that is still relevant. Peterson makes a good case for God and the necessity of individuals needing society.

2 Adam, Eve, Pride, Self-Consciousness and the Fall

Here Peterson asks how much we can be ‘made in the image of God’. The Garden of Eden is the testing ground for humanity. Eve’s sin [the forbidden tree etc.] is hubris in thinking she embraces all peoples [as she carries all in her womb]. Adam’s hubris is to think that he is lord and master of all things as he surveys his world. As for the serpent, this is the temptation that leads to evil. Relating this to the present day, Peterson the psychologist says “The fact of the emergence of sophisticated self-realization with maturity implies that some of the fall is a mere consequence of growth. People abandon their childish naivete – not without pain – as they come to confront the bedrock realities of life: the harshness of the natural world; the tyranny of the social world; the sinful impulsive and hedonistic proclivities of the tempted individual. It is by no means obvious, in addition, that our descent into the cynicism that is so often the replacement for childhood trust and wonder is not an improvement, in some dark and necessary manner… the fall from childhood naivety is a prerequisite to maturity… To become self-conscious is to know nakedness, limitation, and mortality…” p.68

3 Cain, Abel and Sacrifice

From the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are therefore expelled and, hitting harsh reality, they have to toil. While Adam and Eve were made directly by God, their offspring are  made in part by human beings. The essence of rivalry and warfare is the desire to destroy what others have achieved, and this is the meaning of the story of Cain and Abel. Abel gives a real sacrifice to God, giving up something that was valuable to him. Cain does not give a real sacrifice, giving up something that was not valuable to him. Cain gives a mere token. This, says Peterson, betrays not only God but himself. As I see it, Peterson is now explaining how flawed human beings are and how there is a deep tendency in us to be tempted to harm others. Cain kills his brother… and thenceforth there are always those who are violent and destructive. This is often a struggle within us. Thus “humility and faith versus pride, despair and vengeful anger”. When referring to the legacy of Cain in us, Peterson often mentions Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the murderer in Crime and Punishment  who thinks that he is superior than other people and above the law. [ Dostoyevsky is clearly one of Peterson’s favourite writers – he often mentions him.]

4 Noah: God as the Call to Prepare

Cain’s spirit has come to rule the world. Resentment at higher groups leads to murder on a massive scale. There is “a pattern of degeneration” i.e. human behaviour gradually degenerates. Hence the Deluge and the saving of only the righteous few [in the Ark]. In case you read this as a ridiculous fable, Peterson reminds us that “ cultures who concentrate too much on what passes for present wisdom (“we can dispense with the superstitious foolishness of the past”) will lose the vertical traditional orientation that protects them against mere fads of consensus.” (Pg. 161) In other words, there is much wisdom in this passage.

5 The Tower of Babel: God Versus Tyranny

As Peterson says, before Babylon and prior to the Tower of Babel, there were many tales in the Middle East of gods punishing those who attempted to take over the role of heaven. The story of the Tower of Babel was not new, but it emphasises the human attempt to usurp God. What was more important was the Bible’s critique of the moral decline of Babylon. There is in scripture reference to a “brutish form”. Peterson relates it to the present day thus: “The ‘brutish form’ referred to is the true identity lurking behind the mask of shallow sexual attractiveness monetized in the present world as often, and in so many diverse forms – all produced, distributed, and purchased by the technological sons of Cain… This is certainly the technologically-mediated subjugation of the feminine to the hedonistic and narrowly economic and, more deeply, the alliance of the prostitute (or her virtual equivalents) with the terrible spirit of arrogant irresponsibility characterizing the builders of the eternal Babylon.” (pp 200 -201) On his way, considering the denigration of morals, he quotes Milton and Revelation, depicting Hell as the loss of morality on a larger scale with the dominance of elites scorning moral sense. When he discusses the tyrants in the Bible, he sees them made in the pattern of Cain. In the modern world, he sees in Cain narcissists who want to always be the centre of attention lacking all empathy, and authoritarian regimes (Fascist, Communist etc.) who revel in controlling whole nations.

6 Abraham: God as Spirited Call to Adventure

Abraham [formerly Abram] has many flaws [as we all have]. He is given a covenant with God and in effect he is being told to dare to go beyond the comforts he is used to. In this case, he dares to go on a long journey, with all its perils [including the challenging degeneration of Sodom and Gomorrah]. Peterson interprets this as an existential problem that is still with us – the big price you have to pay if you follow the necessary call and the problems you will meet. Thus “If the cost of reality is death, how might reality manifest itself, to justify that price? That is the ultimate question, with the paradisal dream providing the impossible answer. God provides an intimation, with the initial call. If the requirement to strive forward in the world is accepted, the reward is limitless: a life well-lived, the establishment of a genuine and stellar reputation, the founding of a nation, and a blessing on the entire world. Is that sufficient to pay for death? There is no a priori answer. That is the curse of the true existential dilemma. Is it worth it? You are fated to find out along the way.” (pp. 249 – 250)  And in this existential context, God tests us, which is where we struggle with God. God tests Abraham’s wife Sarah [previously Sarai] by making her barren when she wants a child. She prays and prays. Only when she is very old, she gives birth to Isaac. God has tested her faith. God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham prepares to do so. God stays his hand. Abraham’s faith was tested. [This story is often quoted by atheists as proof that God must be some sort of sadist toying with human beings. In fact this story says quite the opposite. God says that real sacrifice is a very hard thing.]

7 Moses 1: God as Dreadful Spirit of Freedom

 

Moses is the archetype of the child who was cast away [the baby in the bullrushes etc.] but who became a leader and liberator, both leading the Hebrews who were fleeing from Egypt and presenting them with a God-given ethical code. The burning bush was his moment of being confronted by God, the “dreadful spirit of freedom”. Peterson has in this section a heading called “The Commandments as Explicit Revelation of Custom” explaining how a good society has to be coherent. 

 

8 Moses 2: Hedonism and Infantile Temptation

 

As well as having coherence a society must have laws… but who makes the laws? Says Peterson, referring to our present age: “It is not at all that the Israelites are insisting, with the fervour of authoritarian believers that the God they worship must be the One True God; it is that the true followers of Yahweh – those who wrestle with God – are always those seeking to discover what constitutes the genuine highest and uniting principle and then you live in accordance with that revelation. This is very different than the power-mad insistence that a given ideology or principle of power must rule; it is instead submission to the divine order, accompanied by willingness to make the painful, genuine, and personally costly sacrifices that are the eternally valid markers of true belief.”….    “The legitimate followers of the God of Abraham do not create their own values, as the philosopher Nietzsche insisted so wrongly that we must do, in the aftermath of the hypothetical demise of the divine.” [pp.351 -352]…. And finally…

 

9: Jonah and the Eternal Abyss

 

Jonah was called by God to go to the people of Nineveh and preach against their wickedness. Jonah tried to avoid God’s summon and ran away. Through many events (the story of the big fish etc.) Jonah submitted to fulfil God’s call. Wrestling with God often means you know the call is right even if you are loath to do what you should do [to put it horribly simplified].

 

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In certain passages, while dealing with the concept of human beings “made in the image of God”, Peterson challenges the notion that human beings are made for no purpose but are merely the result of random procreation – the “selfish gene” idea popularised by Richard Dawkins.  “Even the biologists who should know better, are mainly onboard with this: the famous “selfish gene” cares for nothing, for example, but replication at any cost – or so goes the story. Could it not be possible, however and instead, that the interest of the individual, truly pursuing his or her great adventure, do and must align perfectly with the demands of procreation, all things considered and wisely understood? This would mean a harmony from instinct to heaven, so to speak, instead of any inevitable and necessary opposition between biological impulse, motivation or drive (all inadequate conceptualizations) and the social order – no Hobbesian war of all against all or Rousseauian antithesis of society and noble savage.” [p.270]

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Peterson’s Conclusion is eleven pages reiterating his main ideas, the greatest being first that the Bible is not a fairy tale but it holds much wisdom relevant to the present day; second, that life has a purpose – and that purpose will require us to face challenges in our life, hence the wrestling with either God or some other force or barrier; third, human behaviour is constant – we homo sapiens are essentially the same creatures now as our distant ancestors were in primeval times. Yes, we might have advanced with science, but there is still virtue, goodness, compassion AND as much anger, contempt, violence, jealousy, war, dishonesty etc.; fourth, societies crash when they are without real laws, and tyrants and determined idealogues [Fascists, Communists, Extreme Nationalists etc.] are always with us; five, there has to be a force [God] to remind us of what is essentially ethical and moral – the small voice; and six men and women are made what they are for a reason, so men cannot be women and women cannot be men. Men and women complement each other - not only theory but biology says so.

How do I assess We Who Wrestle With God ? In his prose, Peterson can be verbose. He often over-explains quotations from the Bible. On pp. 258-262 he tells us God knows that being human you have the capacity to take risks and therefore you can be an adventurer. He illustrates this by telling us the story of his sister. Some of his prose involves long and contorted sentences.

In spite of all this, whether you are agnostic, atheist, Christian, Jewish or any other religion, you will find much intelligence in this book, especially if you appreciate the value of wisdom coming from an ancient source. And if you don’t go along with everything Peterson writes, you can amuse yourself by picking holes in his reasoning… as I did when I read my way through Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

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 HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS” by George Douglas (First published in 1901)

 

            Imagine you are a young Scotsman who is very intelligent and has won a scholarship to the university of Oxford. He reads a lot, including current fiction set in Scotland. Imagine you have become sick of all the sweet little Scottish novels that are being churned out – about charming, picturesque small Scottish towns where people get on very well with one another, look after one another, occasionally have a harmless dram and make cheerful, harmless jokes about the dominie and the deacon as they watch the beautiful sun go down over the brae. They always have happy endings of course.  Imagine if the young man wants to hit back at this romanticised rubbish. He rebels. He decides to write a novel about what small Scottish towns are really like – the back-biting and nasty parochialism where poisonous gossip is the main currency and people are always scheming to take successful people down a peg.

So the young author writes his novel. It is called The House With the Green Shutters. When it is first published, it immediately becomes what we would now call a best-seller. George Douglas  [full name George Douglas Brown, born 1869 – died 1902] intended to write more novels. But he died relatively young (aged 33) in 1902, the year after his only novel came out. Douglas certainly depicted small Scottish towns as they often were over a century ago, and for some years The House With the Green Shutters was regarded as a minor classic. But few now see it that way. The hard fact is that, despite Douglas’s attempted reality, the novel goes over-the-top. In The House With the Green Shutters nearly every character is venal, underhanded, bullying or cowardly. Is this plausible, even in one small town? Worse, gradually what started out as a sort of reality turns into raw improbable melodrama.

 

                                George Douglas apparently with a very severe Scottish gaze

Synopsis as brief as I can make it: The setting is a small town in Ayrshire called Barbie. The time is the late 19^th century. John Gourlay is the most wealthy man in town. He is a big, bullying man. He intimidates his wife and daughter and he regards his one-and-only son John [sometimes called Jock] as a weakling and perhaps a simpleton – certainly not a worthy heir for aggressive John Gourlay, especially when the boy is so easily beaten up by other boys at the local school. Gourlay owns a large, dominating house, grander than other houses in the town and commonly referred to as “the house with the green shutters”. Much of his wealth comes from being a carter, with a string of underpaid employees who, in Gourlay’s many carts, deliver coal and various goods to the town and environs. Many people envy Gourlay’s wealth as well as hating his bullying ways. A group of men known as the “bodies” [only one of the hundreds of Scottish words when there is dialogue in this novel] gather around in the evening and gossip, always negatively and denigrating anybody who seems to be succeeding in any way. Provost and Deacon – who are supposed to be pillars of the council and the church – are part of the “bodies”. And of course they hate Gourlay. So they are delighted when a new entrepreneur comes to town, Wilson, who not only has acquired  a modern “emporium” [fancy old-fashion name for a store selling all sorts of goods] but who is also savvy enough to know that railways are now taking over carts for carrying goods. Gourlay begins to lose his customers. He makes less and less money until he begins -  without telling his wife -  that he bit by bit has mortgaged his house. His nemesis Wilson has a bright son and Wilson has the wealth to send his son to the University of Edinburgh. Foolishly, to keep up with what he thinks is his prestige, Gourlay also pays for his son to go to the University of Edinburgh. So more of his money drains away. He is humiliated when he discovers that, without knowing it, he has taken up some work by a company that is really run by Wilson. He is now openly ridiculed for all his bluster. There is only one moment in the novel when he says something positive to his son. Young Jock wins, at the university, a prize for an essay he has written. Gourlay congratulates him, but only because Wilson’s son hasn’t yet won any prize. What Gourlay doesn’t know is that Jock is hardly doing any study at Edinburgh. He has fallen in with a group of more wealthy students who can waste a lot of time carousing and drinking. Jock joins them, gradually takes to drinking whisky and bit by bit becomes an incurable alcoholic. He thinks he is being witty when he insults a professor… and he is expelled from the university. He comes home in disgrace… to the glee of all the town’s gossipers and to the wrath of Gourlay. Dear reader, let me simplify how it all wraps up. Gourlay shouts, intimidates and almost beats up his feeble son to the tears of his timid wife. His son runs away, drinks even more whisky and feels he can deal with his father. He goes back home and kills his father by bashing him with a fire-poker . His mother wants to shield her son from being hanged, so they clean things up to look it as if Gourlay fell. But Jock, by now plagued with delirium tremens and completely disoriented, commits suicide by drinking poison. Mother is now riddled with cancer. Mother and daughter now discover that the mortgage cannot be paid and they are going to be thrown out of their house. They have nowhere else to go. So, after reading a soothing chapter from the Bible, they both commit suicide by drinking such poison as Jock had left. The “bodies” and other gossipers think Gourlay got what he deserved. 

I do implore you not to blame me for this messy and in many ways ridiculous final melodrama. The House With the Green Shutters has many other faults. For those who do not understand Scottish dialects [and I am one of them] it is difficult to plough your way through some of the conversations on the page. Then there is George Douglas’s habit of describing characters physically in detail, but never making it clear why they behave the way they do. In other words, we do not really understand how they think, especially when it comes to the “bodies” and others. It is just taken for granted that they are malicious, just as we have to take it for granted that Gourlay is a violent bully without learning how he came to be that way. Boil the novel down and it’s essentially about the hubris and downfall of a tyrant in a small-minded town.

But this isn’t doing full justice to Douglas. First, there is obviously the truth that, in Scotland in the 19^th. century, technology was moving on and for the first time small towns were also moving on from horse-drawn carts to railways. That of course is part of Gourlay’s downfall, but it is dramatized clearly. Then there are some episodes that have a certain brilliance. In the early chapters, when young Jock is still an unhappy schoolboy, Douglas examines clearly how Jock thinks – intimidated by his father naturally, but he has his own perspective on the world. Jock is daunted by the thought of how huge the universe must be and how small and insignificant he must be. He escapes from his father by hiding in the loft and reading trash which he cannot follow. There are other high points in the novel, such as the vignette in which a pompous church-man, hearing that Jock has gained a prize for an essay, collars Jack and proceeds to try proving how erudite he is – which he clearly isn’t. There are other characters who stand out and – even if there are only one or two –they are compassionate and refuse to ridicule those who are down, such as the baker who calls out the “bodies” for their hypocrisy and their vicious gossip. 

Having said all this, though, The House With the Green Shutters fails to be a classic. There is little depth to it. Apparently, recently in Scotland there have been dramatized versions of the novel for the stage, but the novel is not likely to become a best-seller again.  

            Now for one of my awful confessions. I first read the novel by picking it off my father’s shelves when I was a young teenager, maybe aged about 14. I was intrigued by it, identified with the intimidated young boy [not that I had a father like Gourlay] and, at that age, shared some ideas about how vast the universe was and how daunting. As for the Scottish dialect words, I just put up with them. At that age I thought it was a great book. But that was then and this is now. I kept the book and it is the one that I now have on my shelves. It was published in 1933 by the old Collins Clear-Type Press. Included were five pictures by the artist Sidney Stanley, some of them almost surreal. The one that depicted Gourlay’s son overwhelmed by the “vast totality of things” still haunts me.

            Nasty Footnote: In 1932, the popular novelist A.J.Cronin wrote his first novel Hatter’s Castle. He went on to write such novels as The Citadel, The Stars Look Down, and The Keys To the Kingdom. All of them were turned into films, including Hatter’s Castle and very many others. He also invented the character of Doctor Findlay who became a British television favourite. But after Hatter’s Castle was published, some pointed out that it was very like George Douglas’s The House With the Green Shutters. I found on-line a letter that was published in The Spectator in the mid-1930s. It went thus: SIR,— No reviewer pointed out about “Hatter's Castle”… is nearly a replica of “The House With The Green Shutters”, the almost forgotten masterpiece of George Douglas….In both books a dour, avaricious Scot is the central figure—the hatter of Dr. Cronin's book is the alter ego of John Gourlay of The House With The Green Shutters—and the children of each are weaklings, with similar destinies. Whilst not suggesting plagiarism, I think that Dr. Cronin was sub-consciously influenced by the plan and general theme of the earlier novel.” Oh dear. How often writers steal ideas from other writers.

 

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.    

                                     HOW FAR SHOULD SURVEILLANCE GO? 

In nearly all cities and in many towns, cameras are watching people and filming day and night. In most supermarkets and shops there are cameras watching and filming customers day and night. Owners of some pubs, houses and [the entry of] buildings [banks, department blocks etc] the cameras are filming. This is a great help to the police. In a democratic country, it is all to the good. Police [in New Zealand] do not track down drunks wobbling down the street… unless they start a fight or are part of a brawl. They do not track down people who jay-walk… unless they have created a real commotion such as holding up the traffic. They do not track down the great majority of pedestrians and drivers… although, very occasionally, police can make use of film to identify a person who has been charged with murder, rape or other crimes. Finding where and when the accused was at certain times could help prove the accused innocent or guilty. Supermarkets and shops etc. can more easily identify shop-lifters although, regrettably, many criminals who want to break in and steal now wear masks or use other techniques to disguise themselves… and they use violence.

 So the use of public cameras can be very legitimate and justifiable.

But can public cameras butt into people’s private lives and effectively destroy them?  Journalists – newspapers, television etc. – sometimes chase people down to get sensationalised images of innocent people. Then there are people who are not doing anything criminal, but are doing something very questionable. A few weeks back there were widely shown images, made by a “Kiss Cam” in an American stadium during a rock concert. A man and a woman were canoodling and petting. They were shocked to realise they were being filmed and seen by a huge audience, because they were having an illegitimate liaison. The man was cheating on his wife. Quite funny in one sense but destructive in another.

Now all these things are happening in open and democratic societies.  But what happens in totalitarian countries? In the People’s Republic of China, the Sky-net now consists of 700 million closed-circuit TV cameras which can span nearly every citizen in seconds. Faces are identified and even a citizen’s gait can be identified. If this were the system of an open society, it would be helpful in catching real criminals. But the main purpose of the Chinese People’s Republic is to control society, identify and destroy dissidents and ensure that the totalitarian system will not be challenged. This is surveillance without any real ethics. The mass population is forced to live as the Communist Party dictates. Yes, the Chinese Sky-net is sometimes used to catch real criminals, but the system is really along the lines of Big Brother is Watching You. Naïve visitors entering China often say that the people are happy and peaceful, but then they have to look that way don’t they?

FOOTNOTE: After writing and posting this commentary, I saw a documentary about Singapore and it followed the way in Singapore there are endless cameras surveilling people. Criminals are traced via cameras... but so are people who jay-walk or who drop some small trivial piece of rubbish, for which they will be fined. This is why Singapore is always very tidy, but it makes for an authoritarian state. Yes, there are different political parties, but the same party has ruled since the 1960's, when Singapore ceased to be part of the British Empire. And while those who dissent are allowed to protest, they are only allowed to do so in limited places in parks, with police surveilling them. Street processions are banned.

 

Something New

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

“Tackling the hens” by Mary McCallum (Cuba Press, $25); “Terrier, Worrier” by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $24.99) ; “e  ko, no hea koe” by Matariki Bennett (Dead Bird Books, $35)

It’s ironical that the title poem of Mary McCallum’s “Tackling the hens” is in fact the last poem to be presented in her latest collection, but it could be seen as a summing-up of her view of human foibles. If read literally, the poem  “Tackling the hens” is simply about the ways of unruly hens when you their owners are trying to keep them in order. But, with a little anthropomorphism, it also suggests the eccentric ways human beings often behave. We are not always predicable. Mary McCallum his very interested in the way people act, from joy to uncertainty to sorrow, and her account of our species is a very humane one.

In joy, consider “The love story of the entomologist” a poem delicate and precise as a spider’s web drenched in morning dew. “To find it, you need to feel the trunk / with your fingers. It’s soft, a lump, mossy, / a door that you open with tweezers. / You lean your cheek on the bark, scan / the lump, insert the tweezers. Tug”… the entomologist’s technique when hunting for spiders… but the poem moves carefully to personal relationships and the joy of them.  “Daughter”, written in very free verse, dwells on the delights of being the mother of a growing adolescent daughter. This poem is complemented by “Boy”, wherein a woman is looking at a growing boy. “Bread” deals with the pleasure of seeing a young man making the bread. “Ursula” depicts the joy of ageing women chatting together. “Beloved of bees” centres  on an old woman who cultures very varied flowers… to the bees’ delight. “Just Grand” is a very rare thing – a prose poem about the everyday contentment of a couple who admire each other. Does this sound a little too Pollyanna? I hope not. Mary McCallum deals often with the positive but mundane things, such as “Compost” and the necessary smelly-ness of emptying rotting things. Perhaps the whole collection  could be called ‘the importance of the small and everyday things’ as in “Cauliflower” wherein a humble gift shows how important the simple gift is;  and “Pearls” shows the heroism of ordinary people.

Uncertainty is the tone of some poems. “Hunting for Cavafy” presents us with that awful moment when you can’t find a book when you were sure you knew where it was… but you were wrong. “Weightless” gives a strong sense of how, at a certain point, one understands that even apparently small things which happened in childhood can contribute to the way one thinks as an adult. Similarly “Mouth”, in its own unique way tries to recover in full adulthood the things that excited you when you were a younger person. Another uncertainly is in a clutch of poems about the different moods of Wellington. “Shines” - one of  McCallum’s best takes on life in a city – is about adjusting yourself as “Day calls you to attention, asks / you out the door to the hard jaw / of the city. Most mornings there’s / enough to gentle it: the woman  / in a frilled shirt, the laughing clutch / of builders, Moss making coffee / at the hissing machine – the wide / grin…”. This poem is like bricolage, depicting a city waking up… but also learning something [an end-note tells us that Shines was part of an account of Dante’s ]. There is a similar sense of bricolage in “Penny Lane” where various things are seen as two women walk around their neighbourhood. Nevertheless, Mary McCallum loves to give us a sense of place., as in “Southern Man” in which topography is conjoined with human habitations

And what of the mood of sorrow? Very much attuned to Wellington and environs, McCallum’s “Finding Mansfield” brings on the sorrow of nostalgia which recalls what has been lost. The poem wants to conjure up what exactly Days Bay might have been when Katherine Mansfield was around… but now such traces are lost and “The house where the Beauchamps / spent their summers – that family / waking to the sleepy sound of the sea, / streams falling into ferny basins. / Now it’s road upon road of houses, dogs, / bikes, kayaks. My friend has gone and / Kathleen’s house, so long vacant, has sold…”. Even more sorrowful is “Still Life” and McCallum is grieving the death of her mother “These / are the weeks my mother died and my children / lived all around me, when my father grieved / but my brothers kept him standing, when my hands / held nothing but then took to wearing her ring. / ten times a day, twenty, less and less now, / the hand with the ring reaches for the one without, / and it’s like my mother’s sitting beside me on / the couch and she’s putting down her knitting / to squeeze my hand and sit a while.”

It is a very wide spectrum of human behaviour that is presented in “Tackling the hens” and a careful touch is shown in dealing with people.

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While reviewing on this blog Anna Jackson’s collection Thicket  back in 2012, I noted that she was someone “who can go confessional and who sometimes speaks of personal and intimate matters. But Jackson is more overtly intellectual; more given to literary allusion; as often concerned with  classical ideas as with personal feelings.”

 Terrier, Worrier is certainly the work of an intellectual. Anna Jackson is not only a poet who has written many collections , but she is also the author of books about the nature of poetry and changing styles of poetry. While witty, positive and largely optimistic she always asks us to consider what a poem actually is, even as we are reading the poem. And perhaps it is her academic training that makes her give us seven pages of end-notes verifying her ideas by quoting what scientists, philosophers, novelists, psychologist and others have had their say on the type of  things Jackson discusses.  

 Terrier, Worrier is divided into five sections, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer again. Throughout her style is prose poetry, presented as brief thoughtful statements. Nearly every statement begins with “I” or “I thought”, implying that she is dreaming, thinking or speculating.

            Summer is “Terrier, Worrier”. There is first person confessional speech. She speaks of dreams and dreamt conversation or “perhaps it is more like  reading a poem, where the words, or the movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.” Does this mean inspiration? This leads into querying how poetry is created – automatically, writing things after you have consciously thought of things to write, or following given ideas? But there comes what could be called the protagonist in the important statement “This summer I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped. It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp. I thought, a terrier is a good symbol for the work of digging up something underground but still alive.” But terriers are also worriers and Jackson also takes the opportunity to wonder how animals think and how they dream.

            Autumn is “Lounge scale” and considers how trends have changed the way people now understand things - e.g. few people now read blogs; people now listen to podcasts ; fewer people keep diaries;  photography takes the place of holding memories or writing them up… and this suggests that the way we think has radically changed… so where is poetry?          

Winter is “Hilbert spaces”. Hilbert spaces [as in mathematics] deals with “the mathematical study of infinite dimensions within finite spaces”. She thinks about whether she had existed before she was conceived and whether “bears hibernating through the winter probably aren’t processing more knowledge than they had access to when the days were longer, or managing particularly troubled or repressed emotions that they had failed to process all summer.” How long is there consciousness in the body even when it has officially died? Then there is the old question - can one think without speaking? … and what of people who take drugs? How different are their dreams or are they just dreaming the drug? The problems of the brain and understanding are examined. And what is really the nature of language?

Spring is “Matchbox beetle” where we go into speculating how sounds and music are created and affect us… and quotes much Wittgenstein.

Summer is “Memory palace” which certainly touches on memory, but also brushes on issues related to how men can underrate women, proven by a number of statements about how early ornithologists – all men – thought that female birds couldn’t sing, until female ornithologists proved otherwise. Jackson notes “I remember a bird I sang a duet with a bird when I was a child, the two of us taking turns to sing the song I thought I had taught it. Years later, in another city, I heard it again, sung by a grey warbler.” Memory is prime in this last section of the book and “every body is a memory palace”. Hence there are short anecdotes of childhood memories.

As I often do, I have given you a very simplified account of Terrier, Worrier, for, as is always the case, when one is dealing with many poems one cannot examine all of them. As for the nature of this book, I will leave it to you to determine if it is poetry as it is generally understood to be; or if it is a series of interesting statements and speculation, perhaps more like a thesis. Either way, it has many provocative and interesting things to say.

     

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            I have to admit that I took a long time warming to what  Matariki Bennett was up to in “e  ko, no hea koe”. It is throughout written in the first person, which means that it is confessional and presumably based on the poet’s own experience. The early sections are focused on her life in Auckland, and her voice is that of a teenager’s patois. The poem “baked by denny’s” suggests the uncertainty of an adolescent “dreaming of a sun glowing out of my skin… I am sixteen blazing in god’s light” but with all this she is scared: “i’m scared too / i feel like my silence might be the best part of me” which becomes almost a catch phrase for much of the early part of the collection. In the poem “after siegfried, for manaia” she is driving through West Auckland, vaping, telling a girl of her headache and being soothed by her songs.  In the midst of this, one can’t help seeing much of what is said is drug-fuelled with admiration for hard rock performances. After a night and a lot of smoking there is an event where “after photosynthesis / we give him the aux / he plays me and your mama / and it becomes a feeling / space junk / red eyed in the stratosphere / we wait for the sun.” There is much about aching while coming up after a hard night. And “We’re too young to worry about forgetting / but forgetting seems to be the only thing we’re good at… it’s time to f… up”. And “we’re f…ed up in myers park sculling wine we can’t pronounce”.

Yet the same poem claims it is “an ode to the panthers to nga tamatoa to the land march to bastion point”. This is a turning point after the nihilistic ideas and pointless games for teenagers on the loose in a big city. For the first time, it’s made clear what is bugging her. She has not yet connected with the protests and the movements that should have enhanced the status of the Maori people. She says “we’ve forgotten the language of the sky under the choke of the cities lights  /  sometimes we forget where we’re from”. Yes, there are other moments when she depicts herself hanging about Queen Street at night and living in Avondale. But she finally remembers her grandmother and the lore she taught. At last in the poem “Bootleg Euphoria” she decides to leave Auckland and lists all the things she knew there that almost destroyed her. She wants dearly to re-connect with Maori culture and the Maori language. “koro” is one of the clearest poems, lamenting the loss of the Maori language by her parents’ generation. Finally one of her longest poems “Kareao” curses colonists at length. She has found a positive cause. It is only towards the end of the collection in standard speech and with some Maori proverbs and statements. She now knows who she fully is.

I am not suggesting that this is great poetry, but it is firm in its production and shows a real fervour for a worthwhile cause. That has to be admired. For the record, this collection includes images of eight paintings by Mahina Bennett and one by Jane Holland. 

 

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.    

“OLIVER TWIST” by Charles Dickens (First published as a serial 1837-1838; published in book form 1838)

 

Please do not reel back in consternation that I am now burdening you with a review about a book that does not need any explaining. Surely everybody knows the story of Oliver Twist? Didn’t you read it when you were a kid?  Or, more likely, didn’t you see a movie or TV version of it? But as always, I have a reason for writing about it. You see, I did read Oliver Twist [complete and unabridged] when I was a teenager, but I had never re-read it since then, even though as an adult I had read every novel by Dickens except one [Barnaby Rudge… which I believe is the least read of all Dickens’s novels]. Some months ago my wife and I took a long journey around the South Island, and as we drove, she and I taking turns at the wheel, we listened to podcasts, some good jazz and other things as we looked at the interesting scenery. Then we hit on one podcast – a complete and unabridged Oliver Twist, read by a man with an authentic Cockney accent. OK, he missed a few marks by saying “two penny” [as Americans mis-pronounce it] instead of the English “tuppeny” and also pronounced “gibbet” with a hard “g”. He also, when reading, stuck with the Cockney voice even when he was reading the words of clearly middle-class characters. But this is just me picking nits. It was a good and thorough reading that kept us on our way.

By this stage you are ready to tell me that you know the general story of Oliver Twist. Oliver is an orphan who does not know who his parents were. Oliver is put in a workhouse. The little boys put to work there are mistreated and underfed under the supervision of the pompous beadle Mr Bumble. Oliver asks for more. There is a commotion. Oliver is put out to work. He almost becomes a chimney-sweep, but instead he is apprenticed to an undertaker. He is horribly bullied by the young thug Noah Claypole. Little Oliver runs away, heading for a better life in London. En route he does meet some helpful people who are ready to look after him. But when he reaches London the first person he meets is the young pick-pocket nicknamed “The Artful Dodger” who introduces Oliver to the criminal Fagin. In his rookery, Fagin's forte is training boys to be thieves as well learning to commit other felonies. One of Fagin’s henchmen is the adult thug Bill Sykes. Also Fagin knows the prostitute Nancy [okay – she’s never called a prostitute in the novel, but grown-up readers will be aware that that is who she is]. There follow a number of complicated events. Oliver is rescued for a while by the benevolent Mr. Brownlow and looked after. He [by one of those miraculous chances that happen in some novels] gradually suspects that Oliver’s deceased mother was a relative he knew and Oliver might be worthy of a legacy… but Oliver is kidnapped back by the Fagin gang. Little Oliver is forced to take part in a burglary, in the midst of which he is almost killed. The gang run away. Meanwhile Nancy, her heart now changing, wants to protect Oliver. But because she has spoken to Mr Brownlow and told him what she knew of Oliver’s origins, she is beaten to death by Bill Sykes. The happy ending? Bill Sykes is now a murderer on the run. Cornered, he accidentally hangs himself. Fagin is in jail and waiting to be executed. The gang of boys is broken up [Dickens suggests that the best of then will end up as good farmers etc.] and Oliver, thanks in part to a lovely lady called Rose Maylie who looks after him, lives ever after. Yes, I’ve not mentioned many other things - such as the comlpcated dealing with a certain Mr. Monks -  but you didn’t want me to go into laborious specifics did you?

Now be honest. You all already knew all that, didn’t you?

Before I get into the serious stuff, allow me to say a few rude things. Naughty Charlie Dickens did insert a schoolboy-ish joke. One of “The Artful Dodger’s” mates is called Charlie Bates, but every so often Dickens just happens to call him Master Bates… and if you don’t get the joke you have a very pure mind. Then, though Mr. Bumble is an obnoxious character, he does utter one profound truth when he says “The law is a ass.” The situation is that his wife committed a felony, but the law in England in the early 19^th century said that a husband could be prosecuted for what a wife had done, even if the husband had nothing to do with it. In some ways, I can’t help believing that sometimes, for various reasons, the law could still be a ass.

So much for the synopsis.

What did I take away, while listening to the podcast, about things in Oliver Twist that I had not noticed when I first read the novel.

First, I noticed that little Oliver always spoke in a perfectly polite and middle-class voice, while all the other boys in the workhouse spoke raw cockney just as Fagan’s crew did. Reality would say that a real Oliver would speak just like the uncouth kids in the workhouse or with Fagin’s bunch. My guess is that Dickens wrote for a middle-class audience and understood that such an audience would therefore have more sympathy for a nicely-spoken little boy than for a roughly-spoken little boy.

Second, following the whole narrative again after so many years, I am more aware of Dickens’s severe irony, coming close to outright sarcasm, especially in the early chapters where he describes the sheer hypocrisy of the parochial system – lead by the likes of Bumble -  which lets underfed children almost starve in the workhouse while the official wardens eat heartily; and money intended for charitable works are squandered on thing that have nothing to do with the children. In some ways, Dickens was a radical in his days. It should also be made clear that, though he makes much use of comical characters, he is most often showing them up to be either sordid or disgusting. In fact, an atmosphere of sordor dominates much of the novel, in spite of the too-good-to-be-true characters who come to Oliver’s rescue.

Third, there is a real problem when you read this novel. Fagin is Jewish. Throughout the novel, Dickens most often calls him just “the Jew”. Fagin in the novel is depicted as crafty, heartless, a coward, a liar and a corrupter of children. In many ways, Dickens is giving us what could really be seen as a stereotypical anti-Semite rant. Some modern critics have also noticed that in the last chapter, Dickens almost gloats over Fagin’s impending execution as he sits in the jail, even though we are not told what exactly he is guilty of. Indeed some have said that Fagin is about to be lynched. After the novel was first published, a Jewish woman wrote to Dickens protesting that his character Fagin was a cruel caricature of Jewish men. Dickens was able to respond that the character of Fagin was based on a real person – a Jewish criminal who had been the leader of a boys’ gang working a decade or so before Dickens wrote his novel. But Dickens was essentially a humane and decent man [despite the fact that years later he deserted the wife who had given him ten children, and took up with a teenaged actress] and he was worried about his Fagin. Years later, in his novel “Our Mutual Friend”, he went out of his way to create a good and gentle Jewish character, Riah the generous money-lender. But Riah was only a small character in a long and complex novel; and  “Our Mutual Friend” is one of the least read of Dickens’s novels by the general public. But at least Dickens had a conscience.

So much for the critique. Among other things we have to salute Dickens for writing his first real novel when he was quite young, aged 26. (Coming before Oliver Twist was the very jolly The Pickwick Papers, but they were basically a series of sketches loosely put together in a picaresque way.) Note too that, though Dickens’s works are often said to be Victorian, most of Oliver Twist was written before Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1838.

And now for a melancholy fact. Nowadays, most people who claim to know about Oliver Twist are likely to have never read the novel itself but know the story only as they’ve seen it in movie or TV versions of it [which is of course also true of many illustrious books.] Oliver Twist has been turned into many films and TV adaptations, but only two of them are really worth consideration. 

 

                         Alec Guinness as the evil Fagin in "Oliver Twist"

The first: In 1946, the director David Lean and his crew scored a hit with a film version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which Alec Guinness had his film debut as the hero Pip’s friend Herbert Pocket. Having done so well, in 1948 David Lean directed his version of Oliver Twist. It is an outstanding work of cinematic art – in black and white, of course, using darkness like a film noir and suggesting the horrors of slummy London in the 1830’s. Naturally, as in the case of all films that adapt lengthy novels, this Oliver Twist leaves out some of the novel’s characters, and it made up the idea of having Bill Sykes running away with Oliver when Sykes is being chased by the police for murder. In the novel, Sykes is on his own when, with a crowd beneath him, he tries to use a rope to get to another building, putting the rope around his neck. He slips and accidentally strangles himself. In David Lean’s version, Bill Sykes dies like this, but Oliver is right next to him and he is rescued by good people who climb up and retrieve him. Also in this film, Alec Guinness did an excellent and frightening version of Fagin… but again there is this problem. Equipped with a large artificial nose, virtually signalling a stereotypical Jew, Fagin was a ruthless criminal. The film gained a large audience – but under pressure it was banned in New York and – given that the film was made shortly after the Second World War - the film was completely banned in Germany.

 

                                   Ron Moody as the jolly Fagin in "Oliver!"

The second: In 1969, Carol Reed directed  the film “Oliver!” Written by Lionel Bart [original name Lionel Begieter], “Oliver!” performed very well on stage. It played for years in London, did well in New York and became a hit in much of the rest of the world. [May I add that as a teenager, in a school performance, I played one of the starving boys singing “Food, Glorious Food”… not that I’ve ever been starving.] As a musical play, it included some catchy songs… but they made characters whom Dickens would not have recognised. Nancy [who gets to sing the torch-song “As Long As He Needs Me”] is a jolly good girl, apparently deeply in love with Bill Sykes [in the novel their connection is brief and fleeting].  The pick-pocket boys were presented as a jolly lot of happy lads, singing such ditties as “Consider Yourself Well In” and later [with Nancy] “I’d Do Anything [For You Dear Anything]”. Most important though, Fagin was presented as a jolly rogue, not a heartless criminal, who gets to sing such witty songs as “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” “Reviewing the Situation” and “Be Back Soon”… and of course all this ends with Bill Sykes dead, Oliver saved, and Fagin and the Artful Dodger walking away to a happy sunset. The film version of “Oliver” has a London which is bright and sunny in technicolor. It copies David Lean’s Oliver Twist by having Bill Sykes being with Oliver when Sykes hangs himself. As a film, “Oliver!”  is very entertaining, won Academy Awards and won a huge audience. - but if you see “Oliver!”  on either stage or on screen, you are not really seeing Dickens’s narrative at all. Many, many viewers of “Oliver!” believe “Oliver!” is “Oliver Twist”, which is why I say it is the second most important film based in “Oliver Twist”.

P.S. Lionel Bart was Jewish, which in part explains why he took most of the nastiness out of Fagin - as well as knowing that a musical play and film had to have cheerful things in it. 

Concerning Dickens note that on this blog you can see reviews of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit,   Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop and Dickens's collection of Chistmas Books.