Something New

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

“ALL THE JUICY PASTURES – Greville Texidor and New Zealand” by Margot Schwass (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

When I finished reading Margot Schwass’s All the Juicy Pastures, my main thought was “Is this the study of an author or is it the study of a ‘case’?” The blurb tells us that Greville Texidor wrote “dazzling” stories, produced “a small but essential body of work” and is “an essential New Zealand writer.” Having read all Texidor’s published work (her short stories and her novella These Dark Glasses), I’m not sure that this description holds up. But I am sure that Texidor led an interesting life. And even if the biographer’s intention is to celebrate the work, it is the life that holds most attention in All the Juicy Pastures. A superficial reading might find this life adventurous and somehow exciting. A bit more attention reveals most of it to have been intensely unsettled and unhappy.

I’ll elucidate by summarising.

Margaret Greville Foster (who later had various noms de guerre) was born in 1902 to a wealthy middle-class English family. Her father was a solicitor, her mother had the leisure to be an amateur artist and the household employed servants. This privileged life meant Margaret got a private-school education, but she disliked it, resisted being taught and was, lifelong, a poor speller. In the 1920s, like many of her refined background, she became a real flapper, throwing herself into the hedonism of the era, partying, posing for artists (the Augustus John crowd), winning a beauty contest, playing a bit part in a film, and finally becoming a chorus girl, which led to some international touring. Any connections she might have had with literati or the Bloomsbury set were simply as a hanger-on. She also had numerous affairs, dabbled in drugs, and went through a period of being hooked on heroin. Tiring of London, she moved to Spain in the early 1930s, and continued to live the hedonistic life in the seaside town Tossa de Mar, although now, in her thirties, she was getting bored with it and wanted something more substantial in her life. She was briefly married to, and had a daughter with, the Spaniard Manolo Texidor, and ever afterwards styled herself Greville Texidor.

In Spain in 1933, she met (and later married) Werner Droescher, nine years her junior, and a refugee from Nazi Germany. With Droescher, Texidor became politicised… sort of. Droescher’s politics were anarchist. The couple were involved in anarchist causes, particularly with regard to education and welfare and including radical ideas on the rearing of children. Droescher was suspicious of (Stalinist) Communists and other dogmatic Marxists. But as the civil war began in Spain, Droescher also proved to be something of a political naif. He imagined – as did many others – that the Left would be united in fighting Franco (see p.66 and p.71). As it turned out, the disunity of the Left was one of the main causes of Franco’s victory. It lead to “the civil war within the civil war” in which well-organised Communists spent as much time taking over the Spanish Republican government, and putting down their non-Communist “allies”, as they did in fighting Franco.

At the outbreak of the war, the Droeschers enrolled, not in an anarchist militia but, as George Orwell did, in the POUM i.e. the militia of the anti-Stalin Marxists, which the Stalinists regarded as “Trotskyite”. The Droeschers did not see much direct fighting, but they were involved in at least one armed skirmish (pp.76-77). And then the Left started eating itself. Disillusion with the war now dominated Texidor’s thoughts. According to Margot Schwass, Texidor was later stressed not only by the failure of the Left and Franco’s victory, but also by the thought that she had ever taken up arms in the first place. She was evacuated to England as the civil war drew to a close, classified in England as an “enemy alien” and very briefly served time in Holloway prison. Then, with the help of Quakers, she and Droescher emigrated to New Zealand.

And here we come to what Margot Schwass intends to be the heart of the book. Note that All the Juicy Pastures is subtitled “Greville Texidor and New Zealand”. Of the 219 pages of text [after the Foreword], 82 pages concern her time in New Zealand, even though she spent only eight of her 62 years here, from 1940 to 1948.

Greville and Werner at first settled in the remote rural area Paparoa and tried to make a go of farming a small plot. This lasted only a year or so. The isolation increased Greville’s chronic depression and her views of rural New Zealanders, which influenced many of her stories, were unsympathetic. Werner then got a job in Auckland, and they relocated to Auckland’s North Shore. Approaching her mid-forties Greville had a second daughter.

 On the North Shore, Greville was closer to the (mainly male) group of writers that had Frank Sargeson as its nucleus and that approximated the “culture” which Greville missed in the backblocks. Margot Schwass admits, but I think underplays, Sargeson’s ingrained misogyny. Apparently Sargeson is to be forgiven because – as all his circle were aware – he was homosexual so, apparently, his anti-women bile was just protective “camouflage” that allowed him to fit into a dominantly macho world, where slagging off women was common pub talk (p.130). Even so, it was under Sargeson’s mentorship that Greville turned to writing and produced in New Zealand all her publishable work. This included a number of short stories set in New Zealand and taking a dim view of parochial, “puritan”, culture-less Kiwi philistinism – an attitude very similar to Sargeson’s own in the mainly sardonic stories he had been writing since the early 1930s. Some of these stories were, thanks to Sargeson’s championing of them, published in prestigious journals, and some have continued to appear in anthologies of New Zealand short stories. (Surveying the books on my shelves I note that one story by Greville Texidor appears in Dan Davin’s 1953 Oxford New Zealand Short Stories, and another appears in Owen Marshall’s 2002 Essential New Zealand Short Stories).

Texidor also worked on the novella These Dark Glasses, which drew on her experience in Spain. Set in 1938, it had as its central character a disillusioned Communist (specifically identified as such), reaching despair as she sees that the war in Spain is lost and realises she is now sinking back into the company of vain poseurs and wastrels whose political ideals are skin-deep. It ends (or by implication ends) in a suicide. The novella’s setting is a seaside town in France, though some of the characters are based on people Texidor knew (and came to despise) in London and in Tossa de Mar. These Dark Glasses was finished in 1944 but was not published until 1949. There is the awkward question of how far Sargeson’s mentorship of Texidor’s writing went. Margot Schwass quotes the testimony of Texidor’s daughter that “Sargeson sat literally at her mother’s shoulder as she wrote, ransacking her storehouse of pre-war European stories, coaxing them onto the page sentence by sentence.” (p.133) Later, though, Schwass tells us that Texidor sometimes ignored his advice.

Schwass analyses this novella (at pp.190-195) in terms of its modernism, its  existentialism and how much it is and is not autobiographical. Sargeson, of course, loved it, called it a “masterpiece” and claimed that it marked a turning point in New Zealand literature. But – with great understatement – Schloss notes that the print run was small (300 copies) and “Sargeson perhaps overstates the book’s impact on domestic readers” (p.195). It received tepid and largely negative reviews in New Zealand, including one detailed dissection in Landfall, to which both Sargeson and Texidor objected.  Meanwhile some of Texidor’s erstwhile English friends hated what they recognised as caricatures of themselves, and a few even bought up copies to destroy them. (p.198)

Before the novella was published, however, in 1948 the Droeschers had already relocated to Australia. Werner was following work and Greville was happy to go with him as by this stage she was bored with New Zealand. She found Queensland as dull and provincial as she found New Zealand. The Droeschers shifted to more cosmopolitan New South Wales, where they were sometimes in reach of the culturally-interesting city of Sydney. For a while they worked in a camp for “Displaced Persons” (refugees from post-war Europe). Greville tried to write longer works. She toiled over, and often re-wrote passages of, drafts of two novels, one about a militia woman in Spain and one about a DP camp. But neither was ever finished. She did write two radio plays that were broadcast, and she did attempt some journalism, but basically her writing career was over once she left New Zealand. In her Foreword, after telling us how much Texidor left unpublished, Schwass admits “most of the unpublished material is apprentice work… there are no unpublished masterpieces” (p.9).

In Australia, Texidor’s depression increased. Her first attempt at suicide was in 1953, when her mother died. Mrs Foster followed Greville on most of her travels, and is an unseen presence in much of this book. She seems to have been a force for some sort of quiet stability in her daughter’s erratic life. Finally bored with Australia, Greville relocated to Franco’s Spain in 1955, tried her hand at running a café for tourists, and attempted, without success, to recapture the vitality she had once experienced there. Werner Droescher finally separated from her in 1960 to take up lectureship in the University of Auckland’s German department. Still seeking an elusive peace of mind, Texidor returned to Australia in 1962. But she found no peace. She committed suicide in 1964.

Schwass sees many of the mental crises of Texidor’s later life as arising from what amounted to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after her experiences in Spain. She designates some of Texidor’s writing as “therapy”. There may be some truth to this, but it is clear that there was a strong strain of depression in her family. Her father committed suicide in 1919 when Texidor was a teenager. She was restless and found it difficult to settle to things before she ever saw Spain. She was constantly attempting to remake herself and frequently harboured the delusion that merely by shifting to a new place she would find a new self. I cannot help wondering, too, how much her early drug-use disoriented her. Clearly the isolation of Paparoa added to her distress and by the mid-1940s her fragile mental health led to injections to control her “delusions” (p.160). Her two early marriages and her many affairs were also destabilising. Before she married Manolo Texidor, there was apparently a very brief marriage to a “Mr Wilson” (p.52.) upon whom Schwass cannot find much information. Once married to Werner Droescher, says Schwass “the Droeschers had always considered their marriage an open one, reflecting the mores of the Catalan anarchist world of the 1930s in which it had begun.” (p.157) Okay, but the many affairs (including one with Maurice Duggan) were also destabilising and certainly didn’t make for enduring relationships or peace of mind.

In themselves, none of these mental conditions call into question Greville Texidor’s ability as a writer. (Compile a list of very good writers who had psychological problems, and you will be compiling a very long list). But considering how meaningful and important her writing is, is another matter.

            In both her Foreword and her coda, which she calls “The secret of her unsuccess?”, Margot Schwass discusses the issue some have raised about whether Greville Texidor was a really “New Zealand writer”, given that she lived here for only eight years and given that only some of her published writing is about New Zealand. Personally, like Schwass, I see this as a silly non-issue, redolent of the old adherence to “nationalism” in New Zealand literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s. The only significant things Texidor ever wrote were written in New Zealand and sometimes about New Zealand, so a New Zealand writer she is. As to how important a writer she was, that’s another question. At one point Schwass says her New Zealand stories “register moments when an insular New Zealand sensibility is disturbed by tremors from the world beyond.” (p.115) Perhaps she herself was one of those tremors and perhaps her exotic background was what made her interesting in 1940s New Zealand – stimulating because presenting another perspective.

But she was not able to build a literary career. As Schwass says: “What she lacked most was application, the discipline, perseverance and confidence that’s needed to keep going as a writer, regardless of the outcome.” (p.245) Schwass then argues that the length of a writer’s career does not not necessarily signal that writer’s worth. True enough, I suppose – but while I found this an interesting and well-researched book, I cannot endorse the claims for Texidor’s ongoing significance that are made in All the Juicy Pastures.

            Personal Coda: I have just given you a fair and balanced account of  Margot Schwass’s book of the sort I always try to give. But in this case I do have some skin in the game. I formed my own views of  Greville Texidor’s work about twelve years ago while researching an article on New Zealand writers who had left-wing persuasions. In my reseach, I read all her published work. First I read These Dark Glasses in its original 1949 edition. I see that in my reading diary, as well as extensively synopsising it, I regarded it as “episodic and hard to follow”. I also read all her stories (including These Dark Glasses) gathered together and edited by Kendrick Smithyman in 1987 under the title In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. Some were unfinished pieces that had never been published before. Most of them (whether set in Spain or New Zealand) were interesting, but I would be hard pressed to call any of them outstanding.

What I have not mentioned, of course, and what I slid past in the review above, is that it was my father J.C. Reid who wrote the long, critical Landfall review of These Dark Glasses to which both Sargeson and Texidor took exception. Margot Schwass covers the review on pp.196ff. and makes the extraordinary claim that “Reid’s review… helped confirm Greville’s exclusion from the New Zealand canon” (p.197) I find this hard to believe. Texidor was excluded from the “canon” because she was little read, except in the few stories that were anthologised, and did not make a great impact outside her immediate group of supporters.

Texidor replied to the review in a long letter in the next issue of Landfall. She ridiculed the review for comparing her novella (unfavourably) with the well-established formula, best known in Cyril Connolly’s 1936 novel The Rock Pool, of stories about people pretending to intellecualise while living rather pointless and trivial lives. Interestingly, Kendrick Smithyman (a friend and colleague of my father) agreed, in his introduction to In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot, that These Dark Glasses does have a touch of The Rock Pool. My father also said that this [mid-1940s] novella seemed to reflect a pre-war mood. Ruefully, Schwass has to admit that Texidor was aware this was true: “Despite her crisp demolition [really?] of J.C.Reid’s review, she could not help but agree that the novel was dated.” (p.200) Where I would fault my father’s review is that it is simply too long (the novella could have been analysed and evaluated at half the length) and it makes too many comparisons with other works.

Sargeson’s private reaction to the review, in letters to Texidor and others, was his usual venom, referring to “that Reid swine”, that “stinker” etc. etc. As I noted on this blog seven years ago, while reviewing Sarah Shieff’s excellent edition of Letters of Frank Sargeson, Sargeson liked to think of himself as the Grand Cham and arbiter of New Zealand literature, and resented a younger man challenging what he thought were now his firmly-canonised opinions. His bile against my father was extreme, sometimes to the point of hysteria.

One final comment. Schwass says “Few in Sargeson’s circle regarded [Reid] as a supporter of New Zealand literature…”(p.196). Later (p.241) she notes how much Texidor realised she had fallen behind Maurice Duggan when she saw a copy of his acclaimed short story collection Immanuel’s Land. This mention made me take off my shelves a copy of the original, 1956, Pilgrim Press edition of Immanuel’s Land. In praise of the collection, the blurb quotes, at length, only one local critic, J.C.Reid… but apparently he wasn’t a supporter on New Zealand literature.

Dear me. Ancient literary squabbles are fairly tedious, aren’t they? Especially ones seventy years old. But cantankerous men like Sargeson do still have to be called out, especially when they have been so often mythologised.