Something New

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

“THE CALLING” by  NIKI HARRE ( Auckland University Press $NZ35:00)

Niki Harre is a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland. She is an atheist and was raised as such. In 2021 she undertook a project to see what it would be like to be a secular priest. This term might puzzle, as for some people the very word “priest” could immediately sound like “church” ; but Harre notes correctly that the term “priest” has been used for thousands of years in many cultures. Harre uses the term “secular” to mean the everyday world (though interestingly, in the Catholic church a “secular priest” means a priest who works in a church in contrast with a bishop or pope, who are also priests.) Harre also notes in her preface that only 32 per cent of New Zealanders now define themselves as Christians [according to the census]. So at first she hopes to become a secular priest who will be able to replace “faith, hope and charity” [and “poverty, celibacy and obedience”] with “simplicity, hospitality and  pause” [which I take to mean meditating or thinking carefully before you act]. As a secular priest she hopes to gather people in community and preach or discuss how people could live better lives, be more thoughtful, help others and deal with sorrow… but without religion. She also notes that many atheists like Ailain de Botton are too ready to lecture people, missing the point of community.

So she aims to be a priest without religion. But she also says [ Page xii ] “The peeling of religion, we secular-only type have lost access to religious ministers whose job is to help us navigates life’s difficulties and contribute, as best we can, to the common good. The daily, difficult task of living well together – a collective project that we all contribute to whether we like it or not - is somehow ignored or considered a ‘problem’ relegated to managers or consultants. And this, I think, has allowed us to drift into the vague sense of entitlement and aloneness that taints modern life. Despite our age of plenty, something is missing – as if we are not firing on all cylinders or dealing with the issues we face head-on. so in 2021 I set out to understand what we lost when we lost religion, and if any of it could, and should, be retrieved.” And on Pg.2 she admits that in being a priest as an atheist “I now suspect that the absence of God poses a serious challenge to the secular enterprise…”

So finally – with the permission of the Auckland Anglican cathedral -  she has her first service down-stairs. She gives a sermon based on Karen Armstrong who at first aimed to be a nun but who broke from that and wrote about the need for caring people, understanding their problems, helping them and [p64] “she advocates for developing habits, both individually and collective, then turn us toward the other. The golden rule is her touch stone: treat others as you would like to be treated. This involves understanding yourself – what is it that brings me pain”…. So Niki Harre begins her teaching as a secular priest. She goes on Good Friday to the Anglican Cathedral interested in the ceremony and she lights a candle but she says it is not for God but for those in need. And so, bit by bit, she gathers a small community over the year… but is remains very small. There is some singing, the songs mainly secular ones but sometimes there is what were originally Christian songs; and being a feminist, if a song says “He” she changes it to “She”. But there always seems to be something missing. What is it? Perhaps it is ceremony. A talk and some songs and some discussion is all very well, but there seems to be little gravitas. She says she did well in presiding a “naming ceremony” – in other words a sort of baptism without the baptism. Sometimes she thinks it is hard to really get around the concept of God. And sometimes she finds that her audiences sometimes have different views and are not exactly in harmony.

Harre does have considerable compassion and is willing to hear and discuss many different points of view. In the mid of her project she is hit by something within the university where she works. Of the university she says  [pp.139] “…the similarities between the Christian church and modern universities are striking. And, as I became friends with priests and other people of faith , it sometimes seemed as if we were separated only by an accident of birth. They were born into a community that talked of God and I was not. Perhaps if I had been raised Christian I would now talk of God too. I might even be a real priest  (probably taking time away from my parish to do a PhD).” But something hits the university. Seven professors wrote a letter, published in the Listener, saying of the Maori language immersion programme that matauranga [ Maori knowledge] was not real science… and within the university, there was a verbal fire storm. Harre says there was little consideration of what had really been said. Instead, within the university people took sides, usually showing no real thought about what had been said. She spends many pages on this and it made her try to understand what each group had to say, but many most wanted to shout others down. This was a case of little empathy, little reasoning, and a loss of community…. And, unrelated to what happened in the university, in her work as a secular priest she saw in her small community that not everyone was of the same opinion. One woman said too many people were being excluded when it came to having discussions; and some were concerned that everybody became political. In spite of everything, there was still deep down a longing for ritual and community.

            In the end, she admits that she would never try he “project” again. She says [Pgs.247-248] “In retrospect, the tragic flaw of my priestly aspiration was that I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to walk though the wardrobe but never drop my identity as an atheist and materialist. I wanted to use ritual that made sense in the contemporary secular context but for that ritual to resonate with the depth that can only come from centuries of passing through human institutions. I wanted to offer consolation and guidance akin to that offered by religion, without the support and restraint of an organisation that makes religion possible. And because I was playing a game without all the cards in my hand, I only had moments of feeling a priest…”

            Just some personal comments. Although she is an atheist, Niki Harre never ridicules or talks down to Christians. Far from it. Many of the texts she examines and applauds are Christian ones; and the desire for ceremony and gravitas are very much in her mind. Although she never uses the term, it is clear that “the God-shaped-hole” is still with us. There is a yearning for some power greater than we mere human beings. I must also add that, though only 32 per cent of New Zealanders now define themselves as Christians, this does not mean that the rest of the country are fervent atheists. Rather they are indifferent or uninterested, but perhaps with a vague nostalgia for the beliefs that their grandmothers and grandfathers had. Finally, I can’t help wondering whether some hard-core atheists will be annoyed that Niki Harre has been so positive about people with faith. Altogether, I think she has worked hard in her project and tried hard to put together a community. But in the end she could not be a priest.     

 

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. 

NOUVELLE HISTOIRE DE MOUCHETTE by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1937). Published in English in 1966 by J. C. Whitehouse.  The French title means New Story of Mouchette, but the English version  simply calls it Mouchette.

When I decide to review on this blog all the works of a novelist, I sometimes like to work methodically beginning with the novelist’s first novel and working my way to the novelist’s last novel. Thus I have done when I have written about George Orwell and F. Scott  Fitzgerald and others. But with Georges Bernanos’s Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette I make an exception. There is a reason for this. In his first novel Sous le Soleil de Satan, published in 1926, he introduced a character called Mouchette, a young woman who was driven to suicide, by her own hedonism. After Bernanos wrote Sous le Soleil de Satan he wrote a number of novels into the 1930’s; but the idea of a character called Mouchette stayed in his head. What exactly could have made a woman despair and kill herself?  Bernanos never assumes that only the wicked kill themselves. What had made her despair? So in 1936 he wrote Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette. But this is a very different Mouchette from the earlier one. She is a 14-year-old girl, and every so often there are sentences that suggest her world is in modern times. The earlier Mouchette was clearly set in the late 19^th century. The new Mouchette seems to be set somewhere in the 1920’s. Occasionally there are references to such things as movies, but they are very much in the background as [the new] Mouchette lives in a very rural place. And we soon understand that the 14-year-old girl’s life has been a very difficult one. Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette is short enough to be called a novella.

Mouchette’s parents are drunkards and her father is often violent. Their home is filthy and Mouchette’s clothes are tattered and/or grubby. She has to look after the baby because her mother is often too drunk to care. When Mouchette goes to school she is often mocked, not only by other girls [it is a girls school] but also by some of the teachers. She has a good singing voice but sometimes her voice breaks. The school-mistress tells her “You’re nothing but a savage… a proper savage. Even savages have their music – a savage one, of course, but still music…”  So she runs away from school, but rather than going down the road where the other girls walk home, she tries to get home through the forest. And the wind blows up. And it rains furiously. And she gets lost. Her clogs become wet and she falls into mud. She decides to stay under a tree and sleep there for the night, fearing what her parents will say to her. Her father would probably beat her. But she meets an old poacher called Arsene who happens to be epileptic, as well is a heavy drinker like her parents. He guides her to his shelter in the forest.. Mouchette is shrewd enough to see what sort of a man he is and sees him like the men she knows in her small town. “For years Mouchette had felt herself a stranger amongst the villagers, dark and hairy just like goats, whom she hated so much. Even when they were young they ran to unhealthy fat. Their nerves were poisoned  by the coffee they drank all day in their stinking cafes …”  Arsene is sober enough to tell his life story, but his story becomes nastier when he boast about nearly killing a man. Again, Mouchette is mature enough to see what he is. She had heard drunkards talking before. Suddenly there is a shot heard in the forest. Arsene goes outside to see what has happened. There are two more shots. When he returns he suggests that he has killed Mathieu, a warden who fines poachers. He drinks more. He falls down and goes into a sort of fugue… and when he comes to he starts fiddling with Mouchette – trying to seduce her. It is clear that he rapes her. She escapes from him and manages to get back home.

Her parents are both in their usual drunken state. She has to do all the chores, including looking after the baby. The house – basically a hovel - is as filthy as ever. The narrator says of her position “Those are lucky in whom the first sexual experience arouses remorse or at least some emotion violent enough to overcome the formless anguish and desperate nausea which Mouchette felt. She made a pathetic effort to think about her banal adventure, but managed only to accelerate the procession of wild images that flowed throught her brain. It was like one of those endless nightmares of uniform horror which, as a real alcoholic’s daughter, she often had to endure throughout a whole night and whose full memory only really came back much later…” Used to being beaten and misused, she understands that being raped was just another event that women and girls had to go through, just like being beaten. Her mother is now very sick, on the verge of dying.  Mouchette has to look after the baby more than ever, trying to feed the baby when there is no milk, when all the baby’s blankets are wet with urine, when the baby can’t stop crying. Her mother still calls for gin and howls and dies. She gets a little help from neighbours, but not much and sometime grouchily. In her mind she rebels. “The rebel beginning within her was a blind, dumb demon. Perhaps it did not deserve to be called a rebellion. It was rather an instantaneous, almost overwhelming feeling of her turning her back on the past and reaching the first decisive step towards her destiny.”

Because her mother has died, she is fed by some neighbours. She walks through the small town and meets Mathieu, the warden, and his wife. Mathieu laughs when Mouchette says he had been shot by Arsene. Had old Arsene shot twice only to let Mouchette think he was a great shooter and virile? [Or, as alert readers might think, was Arsene preparing to rape  Mouchette?] But Mouchette insists that Arsene is her “lover”. What other word has the girl got to explain what goes on between women and aggressive men?  Later an old woman helps to make a gown for Mouchette for when she goes to her mother’s funeral. The old woman at first speaks affably , but then she tells her own life story in detail. Mouchette listens but then she pushes the old lady away, not believing her stories and angered that she talk so much of death and the afterlife. After her experiences, she has come to the point where she does not have trust in anybody. Where can she go? She wants to be alone. She goes down to the river and thinks about dying. The last words of the novella read “Mouchette slid down the bank until she felt the gentle sting of the cold water on her leg and as far as the thigh. The sudden silence inside her seemed infinite, like the trapeze-artist reaches the top rung of the ladder. She will dissolved. She slid out into the water, pushing against the bank with one of her hands. She could hold herself up in the shallow water by the pressure  of one hand on the bottom. Then she felt the insidious flow of the water along her head and neck, filling her ears with its joyful sound. She knew that life was slipping away from her, and the smell of the grave itself rose to her nostrils.”

How is this tale connected with the other Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan? In that earlier novel, you might remember that Father Donissan did his best to get Mouchette buried in a decent way. Mouchette hated the Church and was destructively hedonistic, but nevertheless she had gone through many horrors that were not of her doing, and despair overtook her. In the new Mouchette, Bernanos gives us an even more extreme case. How can a fourteen-year-old girl survive when her parents don’t look after her, when she is often beaten, when she lives in filth, when alcohol rules the house, when she is ridiculed by other children and teachers and learns little at school and when she is raped? She is an alert and in her own way thoughtful, often seeing through other people’s negative behavior. But she has come to the point of trusting nobody – which leaves her on her own. She commits suicide. Once again, Bernanos shows us that we have no right to look down on people who have been through severe distress. 

Footnote: Before I had read any of the works of Bernanos, I had seen two films based on Bernanos’s novels. One was his most famous novel The Diary of a Country Priest and the other was Mouchette. Both films were directed by Robert Bresson who had often in his films dealt with Catholic ideas. Please note this was not propaganda. Other French film-directors like Francois Truffaut saw Bresson as one of France’s greatest directors. I saw the film Mouchette when I was a teenager. The film was released in 1967. As I remember it, the film Mouchette seemed to be set in modern times, but its story followed the novel very closely. The young actress in the leading role was Nadine Nortier. If the film had a flaw, it was that the young girl playing the lead seemed reasonably dressed; rather than the grubby ragamuffin in the novel. 

 

                               Nadine Nortier in the role of Mouchette 

 

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.   

                                             WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST

           How many of you like war?   Virtually none I would guess and neither do I.  If we think back to very ancient days, we could think about men fighting with spears or sling-shots, or men on horses, or knights in armour, or arrows or even the early use of gunpowder and artillery.   It almost seems romantic.  But of course that is just daydreaming.  Even in ancient times, soldiers were killed, slaughter covered the battle-grounds, survivors would be maimed and usually the battles had achieved little.  And don’t forget how non-combatants would often also suffer.  So we don’t like war.  And of course we now have even more lethal weapons, from the First World War to the Second World War to the present day we have had gas, long-range artillery, bombing, nuclear weapons, drones and missiles that can pick out exact places and destroy them.  Goodbye to towns, to cities, to homes.

          So, like you, I do not like war.  And over thousands of years, people have tried to find ways to stop wars.  The ancient Greek and Roman philosophers tried [without much success] to put together codes that would limit wars.  Jesus Christ said, in the sermon on the mount, “Blessed are the peace-makers”.   Hindus and Buddhists and Jains claimed that war was abominable.  Many of the so-called “Enlightenment” wrote about the evil of war.  I regret to say that while Islam has always claimed to be “the Religion of Peace” it’s founder Mohammed was himself a warrior who waged wars; but at least some of his followers have tried to find ways of bringing peace. Over the years there have been many honourable people who have written against war.  Tolstoy, the Quakers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Simon Weil, Archibald Baxter.  Recently the Pope has written about the need for peace – apparently annoying some Americans who think that their president knows better.  And over the years there have been poets who had come to abhor war, especially poets who had been soldiers themselves – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden who ended up writing a book about the pointlessness of war…but wait a minute, that was in the First World War and it was a very different kettle of fish in the Second World War. 

Which brings me to what I think are the flaws of Pacifism.

Isn’t it reasonable for a country to protect itself with force when it is likely to be invaded by a hostile country?  In fact, wouldn’t it be reasonable for a country to have an army [or navy etc.] ready?  I know that some countries put together large forces, claiming that they are just protecting themselves, when in fact they are simply getting ready to invade another country.  This is a story as old as time.  Empires were built on this pretence.  Thus were built the Chinese, the Indian, the Egyptian, the Muslim, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russian, the Zulu [and many other African countries] and as many other empires as you can think of. But even so, nations have the right to protect themselves.

         And isn’t it obvious that fully pacifist peoples are the first to be destroyed?  Look no further than New Zealand.  The Moriori people of the Chatham islands were absolutely pacifist. In the 19^th century, they were wiped out by more war-like Maori. [Footnote: I am aware that many Maori iwi were not belligerent, and we should all know about Parihaka.]

And I must point out that pacifism easily fades away when a real war comes along.          Item: In the 1920’s and 1930’s there was, in Europe, great disillusion with regard to war.  The First World War had exhausted them.  Cities and towns had been destroyed; millions of people had been killed; money had been wasted for no real reason; many maimed solders could be seen in the streets or were in hospitals because of “shell-shock”, and there were many novels written saying that war was an abomination [read All Quiet on the Western Front and keep reading].  In the 1930s Dick Sheppard put together the Peace Pledge, so that thousands of people in England signed on for his pledge, that we would never go to war again…and then along came the Spanish Civil War…and some pacifists changed their minds, and went off to fight Franco…and then Hitler invaded Poland and the country realised that they were now facing a real war.  I must add that many pacifists realised that they had to fight against tyranny.  Unfortunately, some pacifists took the easy way [like Aldous Huxley] and took off to the United States.  The hard fact is that many pacifists are pacifists only when they are not facing a war that could kill them.

I trust that what I have said is not facetious.  What I cling to is the Just War Theory. Before and after the Middle Ages, the theory was developed. The most influential two philosophers who wrote about war were Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.  What they both essentially said was that war can only be used for defence.  It was wrong for Kings and Emperors to go to war simply for personal glory.  But it was legitimate for a country to defend a community and protect allies. Personally, I would add that violent uprisings in wars of liberation are legitimate.

So I go back to saying that I am not a Pacifist but this does not mean that I am a war monger.  I would also have to point out that I have read many works by pacifists which I have found enlightening. They are very worth reading and I admire their idealism.

Somethiing New

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

THE INTERVIEW ROSE by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99); BLUE IS A CRACKED VASE IN MEMORY: POEMS 2000 – 2025 by Riemke Ensing (Cold Hub Press, $NZ33:00); THE GUM TREES OF KERIKERI by Lynn Jenner (Otago University Press, $NZ30); PEACE & QUIET by Dinah Hawken (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)

            It is an interesting fact that both Elizabeth Smither and Riemke Ensing, well known poets, are both now in their 80’s. But while their interests are very different,  they are both still producing some of the best poems New Zealand has. I start with Elizabeth Smither.

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To call Elizabeth Smither erudite would be an understatement. As well as writing six novels and six collections of short-stories, she has produced 19 collections of poetry. The Interview Rose is her 20^th collection. Reading widely, Smither’s knowledge of literature is connected to the fact that she has worked as a part-time librarian. The title poem of this collection The Interview Rose has her facing “The week of interviews, twenty minutes each / to face a panel for my disappearing job…” But she is buoyed by the bright rose-coloured hat she is wearing. Next to this poem, there is The Interview Confession, concerning the problems of having to deal with “a difficult borrower” complaining about a book. Six of her poems deal with women in novels by Jane Austen, not always seeing them as honourable people. And then, as often, there comes her interest in Catholicism. Thus there are such poems as The Travelling Reliquary of St. Teresa of Avila , A Room of Madonnas, The Angel of Death, and In the Sacred Heart College Library (where girls are praying). But if this intimidates you, Smither does not at all preach. She is interested in the aesthetic side of religious ceremonies, the colour, the style.

More important than all this, Smither’s poetry is compassionate. There is no anger. There is no asking us to join a cause. Instead there is an acute way of telling us about how important everyday things are. Take the poem De-Stringing Beans, a poem about the homely thing of taking pleasure in stringing and slicing runner beans. Is this a small thing? But surely every-day things can be an achievement.  And in the last poem of these 49 poems, there is Mark Doty: a footnote, about a well-known poet who showed that he could take as much pleasure in football as in poetry. Nothing snobbery there.

Compassion goes to animals and nature itself. Her opening poems in this collection has her considering a frog that is struggling, the death of a fish on the beach, and cows listening to music… and later daisies bearing up in the rain. But all is not tragedy. Elizabeth Smither is obviously an ailurophile as many poets have been [check your Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot etc.]. Thus we have her The Cat and the Wittgenstein Quotes, wherein we are given both an amusing tale and some hardy philosophy. Thus when the cat has “an hour in the sun and then a leap leaving /  some words scrunched. Where of one / cannot speak, there of one must be silent. / Such simplicity to a cat who will not leap / onto a chair and then the carpet until / something better offers…” Ah! the fickleness of cats. And right next to it there is the poem 100 Brushes of a Cat, showing how wonderful and luxuriant the coating of a well-kept cat is. Be it noted too that the poem Degas and the Dancers shows Smither’s interest in movement itself.

But after I have noticed all these fine poems, there is one that stands out for me. This is Love at the Gare de Nord. I mentioned the thread of compassion that runs through Smither’s work, but this poem caps them. The poet sees a messy couple, dirty and shunned, sitting on the steps, annoying… but when she sees them embrace and kiss, she understands  that they have the right to love and live too. Sentimental? Not at all. Read the poem and you will see what I mean.   

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            Riemke Ensing’s collection called Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025 is made up of four parts. The first three, called Storm Warning, O Lucky Man and If Only, were published in limited editions by a craft publisher and hence were not widely seen. They make up almost half of  Poems 2000 – 2025. However the fourth part Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory takes up more than half of the collection, so we now have all Ensing’s more recent work.

Over the years, whenever I read the poetry of Riemke Ensing, I immediately have in my mind an image of her as a woman walking along a beach – any long beach in New Zealand, like Muriwai – and looking out to sea, enjoying the view but also seeing a sort of magic and reading much in the sea and the sky. Perhaps she is thinking about how far she is from the Netherlands whence she came when she was a girl. There is, in some of her poems, a thread of loss. But note there is also, in the very first poem in this collection, a sense that there is a greater force than nature to guide us. Says her poem Muriwai “Wind brushed / water washed / the sand / grained with signatures of gulls / temporary as moments / flicking their feet into the sky / waiting for gusts/…../ spirits wail and leave in the sand / a watermark. At the water’s edge / gods breath the lifted wave into song.” Naturally, as one who is interested in nature, she also writes about places other than beaches, as in her Waitakere River Valley, or in her poem Lament looking at Lake Kawaupaku. In full it reads “Hills hunker down and slide / into the belly of lake cradling sites / ancient as wings finding no resting / place in the remembered past. / Silver slips into clouds / shivering through water, / stroking out landscapes / buried in sorrow and loss.” And she is also enchanted by trees.  Her Fourteen Ways of Looking at Pohutukawa is following Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

By the way, it is fair to say that some of her shorter poems are as crisp and short as haiku, but they are not haiku. Much later, for example, there is After Loss which reads in full “Storm windows / are put up / for winter. / The light / mourns / then finds itself / in the moon / touching / the lamp.” Or later there is Top of the Morning reading in full “A dress of bright flowers / almost flies across the street. / An instantly uplifting poem / quickly disappearing into the bustle of day. / Carpe diem.”

But what of sorrow and loss? She has two poems sitting side-by side called War- Childhood and War-Biography which apparently could have to do with her childhood in the Netherlands… or any other child who had to go through a war. In a different sort of sorrow there is Pretending to be in Paris without You.  And much better there is Birds, rain & plum, which opens with the stanza “ It is winter. Rain insinuates itself / in the damp corners of the house, / tries to get in covers of books / standing a little listless in the depressed grey / the sky has cast into the room” But the real sorrow comes in the next line which is  “It is many years since your death….”

 

Ensing does not usually deal with protesting, but she does record one example of miscarriage of justice, in “Out of Dark” where she recalls the incarceration of Ahmed Zaoui; and in “A Piece of Glass” she joins the protesters against the building of yet another jail.

 Having noted all that, two of Ensing’s greatest interests are painters and other poets. Very carefully, she writes poems about poets, from Baxter to Charles Brasch to Hone Tuwhare to many, many others; and from Tony Fomison and Don Binney and many, many other painters.

In writing all this, I have dealt with only a small part of Riemke Ensing’s Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025. I have read every poem, but if I were to examine in detail every poem, I would be filling many more pages.

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            Lynn Jenner lives in the Far North of New Zealand, now an old woman,  and she opens her 56 prose poems with these words: “The land I live on was a kauri forest for centuries; then in the late nineteenth century it was a kauri gumfield, then a mandarin orchard; part of a dairy farm in the 1950s, a tamarillo orchard in the 1970s, and a lavender farm in the 1980s: now it is a home for four people, lots of ornamental trees, a vegetable garden, two old plum trees, travellers from New Zealand and other countries….”  Immediately she is reminding us that land changes and people use and re-use the earth in many ways. She is in no way chastising our ancestors for doing so. At the same time, she is very concerned about nature. In another poem she writes of a farmer who has moved to planting trees. He no longer herds sheep because wool now does not make a profit. In another poem she identifies with the trees where she writes  “In spring the poplar trees in the Ness Road have soft new leaves; I stop walking and listen to them gossiping.” Surely every sensitive reader would respond in the same way. In yet another poem she sees leaves as fabric, thus: “Walking up through the Hongi Hika reserve from Kororipo Pa is peaceful and cool. Red and yellow gum leaves cover the path and I picture them as a fabric…”

            But while her interest in nature is important, she has many other interests as well. In various poems… She takes part in a “Free Palestine” protest. When in a line where the police are doing their breath-tester, she wonders about that blood-red tattoo which one of the police has. She meditates over her great-grandfather who came to New Zealand from Poland in the 19^th century, and as a result his legacy was about 420 descendants. She is clear in her feminism and she pleasures as women do, saying “Standing on the grass in my tee-shirt, I am part of a long chain of women drawn to the moon. I bathe in the cools silver light, my skin pleasure and my night wonder.” Twice she writes poems about paintings by Colin McCahon, in each time given her of interpretations  of his work. In this, one understands that she is an atheist, but she still has her beliefs. And she speaks of climate change when “ People talk about the degradation of the earth, but mostly they do not spell what they see coming so as not to scare the rest of us..” She hopes for peace, and looking at doves she says “And now, with the sun on my face, I think these six doves on the lawn in Kerikeri might be an omen of peace somewhere peace is needed. Sun and doves against monsters and tanks.” One always hopes. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful collection, touching on many interests.

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Peace & Quiet readily shows us that Dinah Hawken can produce very persuasive images, showing us the glory of sea and general nature while at the same time warning us that evil might come our way. Take for example one of best poems “Trembling” which reads in full “A spring morning and you can see the wind / has no bravado. Over the island / a winged cloud moves towards you / out of a truly sweet blue. / Surrounded by gentleness, the swoop of a tui, / the repressed threat of a warming world. / From the sidelines a leafiness arises / and it trembles. It’s like standing / under the outdoor shower / with the sound of a piano paying upon / your stiff, wingless body.” Notice how we move from “truly sweet blue” to “the repressed threat of a warming world”.

Peace & Quiet is divided into three sections.

Brief Scenes comes first. It presents us with an island [perhaps meaning us] is being overwhelmed  by the tide and the ocean, though it is still majestic. The poem The assessment asks “What if there is nothing wrong? / What if there is nothing wrong with you? / What if there is nothing wrong with me: /  I’m not even too quiet, / too old, too forgetful? / Just old, quiet and forgetful.” Is there a sense of desperation here? Yet there are some things that are positive. The poem Each side says “Care for the children, he said, / care for them with both hands, / one each side of each small head, / their trusting and trustworthy eyes / looking up at you.” Perhaps humanity will continue as suggested. But there is hanging a sense of menace. What is it?

Next comes Speaking of Peace. Dinah Hawken is a pacifist and she writes in detail of a possible war. Part of the poem Solar says “Dark clouds wipe out / the highest peak of the island. / The wings of tyranny and downpour / hover over the global landscape…” Who could she possibly be thinking about?  She quotes from Mozi (c. 470 – 391 BC) who said “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold,…  The rulers of the earth all recognise and yet when it comes to the greatest crime – waging war on another state – they praise it.” So in many poems she refers to Te Whiti and Parihaka  and she quotes Simone Weil and Siegfried Sassoon and Archibald Baxter and Gandhi and Rebecca Solnit and other worthies who opposed war.

Finally comes Brief Scenes where the poem October morning tells us “We are a slip of a country in a vast ocean. / The laws of war were a safeguard. / A lighthouse and its light.” How fragile we really are when it comes not only to the polluting of the sea, but also to the fact that New Zealand is a small country and one that cannot really save itself from the aggreson of other greaer nations.

In her final (and longest) poem she says “… there is singing / birds and breeze and laughter: and / even though we have weapons / of mass destruction    even though / we are filling the oceans with poisons and plastic / even though out long-held agreements are breaking up like sae ice / two hands play the cello    and / can you believe it        all is well:       / still we welcome / each newborn child into this rare world…”

            There is much idealism in these poems and much to be admired.    

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. 

“SOUS LE SOLEIL DE SATAN” by GEORGES BERNANOS (first published 1926). English version first published in 1940 as “STAR OF SATAN”, translated by Pamela Morris.

 

            There is a strong possibility that English-speaking readers have not come across the works of Georges Bernanos, so please forgive me if I give you a basic idea of who he was… and I’m partly writing this because I am determined to read all his novels and I will be reviewing them all on this blog. So watch out for the next four months.

Georges Bernanos (born 1888 – died 1948) was a devout Catholic. As a young man he fought in both Verdun and the Somme in the First World War. He was appalled by the carnage and like many others he knew the evil of war. He was a Royalist, meaning he was one of those extreme conservatives who wanted to restore the King and abolish the French Republic. In the 1920s he joined Charles Maurras’s Action Francaise, but he left it as soon as Pope XI criticised Action Francaise severely for being too extreme, too involved with politics, and ignoring charity. During the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos at first thought Franco was right in staging his coup and uprising. But Bernanos changed his views radically, especially when one of his sons – who was in Majorca – had seen members of the Falange shooting unarmed civilians. Bernanos looked deeply into the matter, read as much as he could, and concluded that Franco was allowing barbarism to take over. So in 1938 he produced a non-fiction book called Les Grands Cimetieres Sous La Lune [meaning something like Thousands are Buried in Cemeteries Under the Moon]. Only later was it published in English under the name A Diary of My Times. He was strictly opposed to both Fascism and  Naziism as well as Communism. Later he was to write essays on the necessity of both freedom and  democracy. But of course he was always a devout Catholic. In the late 1930’s, he was so concerned with the rise of Nazism, that he moved from France to Brazil with his whole family – wife, three daughters and three sons - and he lived there until returning to France in 1946 where he lived until he died in 1948. Two of his sons fought in the Second World War. By then, his novels were regarded by many in France as classics. And so to his first novel…. Sous le Soleil de Satan (Star of Satan… which has also been translated as Under the Sun of Satan). 

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            The novel is divided into three parts, quite distinct in tones.  The first is called The Story of Mouchette.  It is set in the mid-19^th century in Artois, and in a small town. Germaine Malorthy is 16 years old. She seems to be a loner, or at least her parents have not seen her being with other young people. “ Sometimes Madame Malorthy deplored the fact that their daughter had no friends, and seldom went outside the small garden with its dreary, clipped yews.” [Pg. 21] Her father, a brewer, is often an angry man. He discovers that Germaine is pregnant. She refuses to say who had impregnated her but her father guesses it was the wealthy, and raffish, Marquis le Cadignan, and he is right. So he confronts the Marquis saying that he should marry her. The Marquis admits that he had slept with her but it was common knowledge that she had had other bedfellows. The Marquis says he will pay him and surely it would be best for the girl to marry a boy nearer her age – and besides, the Marquis is of a higher class. It was the Marquis who had given Germaine the frivolous nick-name Mouchette. Raging, the father goes home and tells Germaine to stay in her room, for she really is Mouchette, looking for excitement and sex.

            But in the night Mouchette runs away, in her night clothes, and she too confronts the Marquis. They have a very long conversation. She does not ask him for pity and does not beg him to marry her, but she – a wild adolescent - does suggest he should give her enough money to go to Paris and set herself up there. With all manner of suave reasoning, the sophisticated Marquis fends her off, but she is remarkably loquacious. And she has at least a spark of honour and self-respect. There is a long tussle between the two. Finally she picks up one of the Marquis’s firearms and shoots him dead. So she is now a murderer. The narrator [Georges Bernanos] remarks “ He who fancies he can follow the capricious trail of passion – passion mightier and more elusive than lightning – and prides himself on his acute observation, often knows nothing of humankind beyond his own solitary contortions in a mirror.” [ Pg. 39] 

The night is still dark [where all angry ideas bubble up] and the light of the small town’s only doctor is still shining. Dr. Gallet is a sort of charlatan, claims to know more than he does. She wants his help. Where should she go? Who can help her? He is not much help. At one point the matter of abortion [not that that word is used; and besides, then abortion was both difficult and illegal] but it is not possible. The doctor begins to talk about psychology and asks about her moods and feelings. Mouchette says “ Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, all alone in my room, with that fat old fool snoring away a few yards off, and I get out of bed. Everybody condemns me, and I can’t say why, and I don’t care. I get up and listen, and feel strong and slim , and my breasts just fit into the palms of my hands. I go to the open window as if somebody was calling me from outside, I’m waiting and ready. And there isn’t just one there isn’t just one voice calling, you know. There are hundreds, thousands. Men are just babies, really, full of wickedness, but they are only babbies. You see, I feel the thing calling me – only I don’t know where it is  - but somewhere, in the rustling night, there’s another, there’s always another calling me… another enjoying me and feeding his vanity – man or beast. You think I’m mad! I am mad! Is it a man or a beast holding me, holding me tight, you horrible darling?”

After the doctor tells her she has a form of insanity “Terrific rage was beating in her breast, but she stifled it. The flames of her thwarted pride were consuming all that was left in her of wild and pitiless adolescence. In that instant she became aware of the indomitable hearts and cold calculating intelligence of a woman, the tragic counterpart of the child she had once been” [Pg.74] The doctor was able to speak with others, made it clear that Mouchette had committed murder, and because she was both a minor and unbalanced she was sent to a “nursing home”… and “A month later she came out completely cured, after  the premature birth of a stillborn child.” [Pg.79]

And that may seem a complete novel… but it’s nothing of the sort and only one third of the novel. The second part is called The Temptation of Despair and we are in a completely different environment. Two aging priests, Father Demange  and Father Menou-Segrais are discussing the problem about a young, fragile and naïve priest Father Donissan. He is just out of the seminary and he is not ready to deal with a small congregation, mainly simple people in a rural eria – in other words peasants. He is to be the Cure of Lumbres. Later, speaking to his superior Father Menou-Segrais, Father Donissan says that he is not cut out for “parochial work” declaring “it is beyond me altogether. My superior thought so, and so do you, I know. In a place like this I would do more harm than good. The lowest peasant in the parish would be ashamed of a priest like me, without experience or knowledge or dignity. However hard I try, how can I hope to make up for it?” [Pg. 97] Father Donissan mortifies himself [punishes himself]. He regularly whips himself, leaving blood all over his back. Father Menou-Segrais is appalled when he learns this, saying it is a barbarous thing to do. Father Donissan is humbled, saying he is not worthy of helping and careing people, but Father Menou-Segrais  says that he has real and worthy work ahead of him, God’s work. So Father Donissan becomes a hard working priest, doing his rounds in a spread-out area, visiting his mainly peasant congregation. Some of what should be his congregation are sceptical, but even they listen to him with respect. He comes to enjoy his work, even if it means trudging long distances. Yet there is an element of pride in his work. Is his pride a sort of sin?  The narrator [Bernanos] notes “Father Donissan  let fall by chance, many years later, which shows a strange light on this obscure period of his life. ‘When I was young’ he admitted, ‘ I did not know evil. I only learned to know it from sinners themselves.” [ Pg.114] At the same time he sees himself as a sinner, enjoying his work. And he thought “This causeless joy can only be illusory. Such a secret hope, suddenly born, in the deepest, most intimate part of his being – an indefinite joy without an object – it is all too like the presumption of pride. No! The stirrings or grace have none of this sensual attraction. This joy must be plucked out by the roots.”  [Pg. 123]. And he falls back to chastising himself. “ His mind , numbed as it were by the intensity of physical pains, had only one vague thought – to reach and destroy the very principle of evil in his own intolerable flesh.”  [Pg. 125]

The great crisis comes when he takes a very long walk, many miles, and then he realises that he will have to walk all the way back and he might be late when he should be saying Mass. He gets lost in the forest and the night is dark. Which road should he take? Suddenly an obliging horse-dealer joins him and tells him which is the right road. At first the  horse-dealer speaks with him in an amicable way, suggesting that he can find him bed and warmth in the dark night. But then the horse-dealer begins to ridicule both the Church and God… and the priest realises that the horse-dealer is in fact Satan…. And, dear reader, at this point you are probably thinking that this is a foolish fable. But there is a twist in it. For in one moment Satan presents himself as the Priest … and then he vanishes. Father Donissan realises that there is evil within us.

[And here I break off my synopsis to give an opinion. Bernanos is making it clear that in all of us there is the potential to do evil. This does not mean that we are all cursed and horrible sinners, but it does mean that we are all capable of hurting others, doing negative things, deluding ourselves about what we have done and frankly anything that can be called evil, from murder, rape, torture and genocide; to lying and cheating and things that might seem trivial but belittle other people. We are all the same species. I add that the works of William Golding [nearly all Golding’s novels I have reviewed on this blog] are essentially saying the same thing. We are all flawed – or what Christians would call Original Sin. But I digress… so back to the novel.]

As he continues his journey he meets a quarryman coming home from his work. An ordinary man, not pretentious, obviously one who does hard work. He talks with the priest, talks about his family, and guides the priest to the right road. Father Donissan thanks him and thinks for a moment that he has seen a miracle – the goodness of the ordinary man. But his journey is far from over… for at last he meets Germaine Malorthy, that is Mouchette. She is no longer an adolescent but a woman who has been worn out by her own hedonism and no longer has any purpose in life . Remember, the second part of this novel is called  The Temptation of Despair.  Father Donissan has gone through moments of despair but has come through them. Mouchette sees the priest and at once says “I hate you” and the priest  replies “Don’t be ashamed”. But she is always angry about her life, curses him in many ways,  and she says “You’d better pray that you may never have to travel the road I’ve been.” [ Pg. 188]. Mouchette has gone through sanitoriums and has faced doctors who want to analyse her, but she holds her bitter pride. So she passes the priest. She goes back to her parents home. And there she tries to commit suicide by slashing her throat. Complete despair. In a very long conversation, Father Menou-Segrais tries to understand the events that Father Donissan has gone through – his time of despair, his meeting Satan, being shown by the quarryman that there is good in the world, and the despair and pride that sent Mouchette to suicide. When Father Donissan hears of Mouchette’s attempted suicide he at once makes sure that her dying body be taken to the church, where she dies. Had he “saved” her? Maybe not. It is ambiguous. But of course in those days it was common to put those who had committed suicide in an obscure, distant part of a graveyard, ostracized. Mouchette was at least buried ceremoniously; and Father Donissan prays for her. The priest is ordered to enter a monastery for a while to pray and think things over. Five years later, now no longer filled with pride, he becomes the priest in charge of Lumbres.

So to Book Three The Saint of Lumbres. Over many years and up to old age, he has heard thousands of confessions. He knows what evil is. He knows what good is. He knows he is dealing with a mainly peasant congregation, not people who need complex theology. He has heard many voices in his confessional. The congregation regard him as a saint, but he does not see himself that way. Of the priest the narrator says “He knew what man is in reality; a big child full of boredom and violence. Was there anything new the old priest could learn? He who had lived a thousand lives – lives all alike. Nothing would surprise him again. He could die. There were brand new systems of morality, but sin can never be new!” [Pg.235] No. This does not mean despair. It means, once again, that we homo-sapiens-sapiens are flawed… and tragedy is inevitable. With another priest he has a long, complex conversation about the nature of God [very difficult for me to follow]. Sometimes his peasant congregation think he can perform miracles. He knows he cannot do that. Towards the end of his life, a distraught  woman has a very sick boy and sends for the old priest, expecting him to cure the boy with his touch. By the time the priest arrives, the boy is dead. The mother wants him to perform a miracle.  The priest soothe her a little saying “God will only yield to love.”

Father Donissan lives a very, very frugal life as an old man. A sceptic doctor describes the priest as “Hardly enough to eat, no exercise, a mildewed presbytery, a damp church, no light or air in the confessional, the sort of hygiene that was usual in the thirteenth century… apart from angina pectoris, it needs no more than that to finish off an already overworked constitution.”  [Pg. 293] Yet the priest keeps working, and when he is not praying, visiting his flock and hearing confessions, he is meditating in the church. Comes the day when an intellectual atheist comes to see why so many people worship the old man. [Bernanos creates the visitor as somebody like sceptical Emile Zola – an enemy of the Church.] Yet when the visitor enters the church he understands how soothing the quietness is. He also has time to think about the things he has done in his life, and all the wrong things he has done. Somehow it seems good for him, as if he has a sort of interest in evil and good. But he remains an atheist.  He wonders where the priest is. He goes over to the confessional, and discovers that the priest is sitting there, dead. And here the novel ends.

There is much, much more in this novel. As always, I have simplified. There is more of theology that I have not explained.

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Some Notes. (1) In France in 1987 a film of Sous le Soleil de Satan was made. It was directed by Maurice Pialat. Pialat was an atheist. He was asked why he chose to make a film which was so Catholic. He replied “I don’t believe in God but I do believe in Georges Bernanos”. I have not seen the film. It won many prizes in France… but I had misgivings when I saw photos which showed that the timid saintly priest was played by beefy Gerard Depardieu. Bad casting I think… but then I haven’t seen the film.

(2) The title Sous le Soleil de Satan can be interpreted in many ways. Under the Sun  of Satan is one title, and the most correct. Star of Satan is misleading. Of course the Sun is a star looking down on us, but let us remember that, according to the fable, Satan was the bright angel who rebelled against God. Bernanos pits the Goodness of the Sun against the Evil of Satan. Good and Evil are both temptations in us.

(3) Many people have suggested that the saintly priest Father Donissan was based on the life of Jean Vianney.