Something Old

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

FRANK SARGESON’S STORIES Edited and Introduced by Janet Wilson (first published 2010)

            A couple of times on this blog, I have made obiter dicta comments on Frank Sargeson (1903-1982) as a person (see the review of Margot Schwass’s book about Greville Texidor All the Juicy Pastures; and the review of Sarah Schieff’s Letters of Frank Sargeson). But I have never written a critique of Sargeson’s work itself, despite having read most of it. One day I might put a review of I Saw in My Dream or Joy of the Worm or Memoirs of a Peon or another of his novels into this “Something Old” spot.  Meanwhile, the only time I’ve written a public comment about Sargeson’s work was a review of his short stories when they came out in a new (and probably definitive) edition in 2010, edited by Janet Wilson. The review appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 21 November 2010. Being written for a newspaper it was inevitably brief and without much nuance, although those who are not used to the demands for brevity, upon which newspapers insist, will probably be surprised to be told that this is a longer review than most which newspapers carry. Anyway what follows is, unaltered from its appearance in 2010, the review as I wrote it.

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Frank Sargeson's collected short stories were first published in hardback in the 1960s. They were republished by Penguin, with additional stories, in 1982, the year of Sargeson's death. Now they're back in print in a third edition, which adds 13 hitherto uncollected pieces.

When I was sent this book to review, my first impulse was to do it the easy way. Like anyone who has taken a few courses in NZ Lit, I had read all Sargeson's published stories a number of times. So I was going to take the stories as read, give a quick squizz to Janet Wilson's scholarly introduction, check out the new stuff and pass a judgement. But I decided to do it the harder way, and I conscientiously re-read the lot.

The earlier, shorter, more cryptic stories, from the 1930s and 1940s, are still the ones on which Sargeson's reputation rests. Once again, I find myself admiring their style without particularly liking the stories themselves. Style isn't everything, after all. Sure, Sargeson says a lot in few words, but the tone is often sour and superior. Those simple Depression-era jokers and sheilas are ironically cut down to size. I know not to confuse Sargeson with his various first-person narrators (and if I don't know it, every academic commentator is there to tell me). But I still weary of the sardonic, laconic Kiwi tone. It's a drawn-out sneer, like meeting a string of Tui ads all saying "Yeah, right".

Much depends on Sargeson, the middle-class writer, knowing and perceiving more than the various working-class or hobo characters he invents to tell his tales. This technique is pushed as far as it can go in the longest story (really a novella), That Summer, where, by story's end, we really have to believe that the invented narrator has been extraordinarily thick, and has not seen what's under his nose. Such a relief to meet a story where the irony is more self-referential and, as a result, more self-critical, such as the masterly Gods Live in Woods. Of course the obliqueness, the less-is-more technique, had its uses as a means of evasion. Biographical data, now well in the public domain, can let us judge how much all the mateship stuff in the earlier stories is coded gayness.

Was Sargeson essentially misogynist? Frankly, I think not as there are positive women characters in some of his stories – including the wrenchingly sad one in An Affair of the Heart. But women-as-controlling-bitches is one recurrent motif. And with this goes what more cliché-prone critics call a critique of New Zealand "puritanism". Sargeson, the little boy who wants to keep playing with his mates, squirms as his mummy makes him tidy up and put on a clean shirt.

The later, and less often anthologised, short stories from the 1950s on, have a remarkably different tone. Sargeson drops the working-class narrators and becomes more middle-class and suburban. The characters are often seedy people keeping up appearances. The author reaches back to an older narrative style, based on character quirks and eccentricities, sometimes with neat and well-made endings. Oddly, these stories seem old-fashioned even by 1950s' standards.

So much for my overview of Sargeson's stories. This might cause a few gnashed teeth among those who want to tell me that Sargeson is the founder of real New Zealand literature. My answer would have to be: "Maybe so, but you can't help noting how dated and limiting much of his approach now is."

And what of this new edition? I'd have to say it's definitive, unless something really unexpected turns up in Sargeson's unpublished papers. Janet Wilson's introduction gives an intelligent run through both Sargeson's story-writing career, and the changes in critical fashion that have greeted him. The 13 previously uncollected pieces divide mainly between those published in Tomorrow in the 1930s and those published in the Listener in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the former are instantly recognisable as Sargeson's. Most of the latter are fairly anonymous. One or two are makeweights (you can see why they were never reprinted). But there is a treat for scholars in the story Three Women, which can now be compared to its reworked version, Three Men, which appears in the main collection. Some nice additions in the reminiscences of friends and editor at the end.

Admire him or quiz him, this is a handsome edition of Sargeson's shorter stuff and a must-buy for those collecting the essential things in our literary history.

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So that is my review of Sargeson’s shorter fiction as I saw it nine years ago. Had I the space, I would have elaborated on the implicit tone of condescension in so much of Sargeson, and I am sorry that back in 2010, I had not yet encountered Patrick Evans’ curt and accurate summary of so many Sargeson-inspired stories: “Someone not very bright is going to tell us about somewhere not very nice.” Sargeson’s stories might have been a necessary corrective to the rosy, sentimental views of too many New Zealand short stories before he entered the scene. But most of them lack any real sense of empathy with others.  They are stylistic exercises from a dead heart.