Something New

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

“YOU HAVE A LOT TO LOSE, A MEMOIR, 1956-1986” by C. K. Stead (Auckland University Press,  $NZ49:99)

            With very few exceptions, all memoirs and autobiographies are exercises in self-justification (or, if you’re Maurice Shadbolt or James McNeish, exercises in self-mythologisation). Very, very few autobiographers adopt an apologetic tone, criticise themselves, highlight the mistakes they have made, or publicly regret foolish things they have said or written. After childhood years have been covered, successes, achievements and public approval are usually the focus. On the whole, all this is true of C.K. (Christian Karlson) Stead’s second volume of autobiography.

You Have a Lot to Lose, a Memoir follows on from Stead’s South-West of Eden, which covered the first 23 years of his life. In his opening “Note by Way of Introduction” (p.ix), Stead tells us that this book is  “a literary biography – a story of books and how they came about”, and he does indeed tell us in detail which events or people fed into which poem, short story or novel he has written. He also notes “I have left things out, most often in the interests of economy, but sometimes for reasons of discretion, or privacy… I claim to be a truthful recorder, not a comprehensive one” (p.xi) Fair enough. No autobiography can cover absolutely everything in a person’s life, and presumably the “discretion” and “privacy” elements are those that could refer to people still living. Now in his 88^th year, Stead has outlived many of his contemporaries, but not all of them. Stead’s statement does, however, warn us that (as in all autobiographies) what he covers will be selective.      

To give a clumsy “narrative” summary of You Have a Lot to Lose, it goes like this:- In 1956, 23-year-old Karl Stead, his wife Kay coming with him, takes up a position as junior lecturer at a New South Wales university, the climate and milieu of which he describes very vividly in some of this autobiography’s best pages. Later in the 1950s, he moves to England and works at the university in Bristol doing postgrad. research towards his doctoral thesis, which will eventually become his influential book on Modernist poets The New Poetic. In his time at Bristol he is under the supervision of  the Leavisite critic L.C.Knights. Many visitors and friends are mentioned, most being ticked off in a paragraph as if resurrected from diaries. He shifts to London, still working on The New Poetic and does the round of Kiwis living in London or near it (Dan Davin, Maurice Shadbolt, David Ballantyne). In 1961, he is back in New Zealand and takes on a lectureship in the University of Auckland’s English Department, where he begins his climb up the academic ladder. There are anecdotes of friends and colleagues (Barry Humphries, Maurice Duggan, Keith Sinclair, Robert Chapman, Kendrick Smithyman, Bill Pearson). The New Poetic is published to acclaim. In these years, three children are born to Kay and Karl. Always sympathetic to the Labour party, Stead becomes politically very active during the Vietnam War, opposing New Zealand’s involvement. His discontent with New Zealand’s apparent subservience to the USA feeds into his first novel Smith’s Dream, published in 1971. [But, as he notes on p.168, Stead is now a bit unhappy at the political ambiguity implicit in both the alternate endings he wrote for the novel.]

Stead wins what was then called the Winn-Manson Menton Fellowship, honouring Katherine Mansfield, which takes him and his family to the Cote d’Azur for the best part of a year. There is one traumatic event (a car crash), but all his family survive. This year is the prelude to many other visits to Paris and the rest of France. From Menton, Stead returns to New Zealand, resumes his academic position, and work on his Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals. Being an important member of  PEN, he had some fractious encounters with Fiona Kidman and Lauris Edmond over matters such as having PEN branches outside Wellington and over the nature of New Zealand book awards, which were then being set up. He goes back to London a number of times (anecdotes about Karl Miller and A.S.Byatt). By now he has advanced from lecturer to associate-professor to a full professorship. His second bout of intense political activism comes in 1981, when he joins those publicly opposing the Springbok tour from apartheid South Africa. He is part of the small group that occupies mid-field of the Hamilton grounds when the All Blacks are about to play the Springboks. He is arrested and locked up for a short time, which makes him think back to the oppressive state he imagined in Smith’s Dream. In the 1980s, he is involved in a number of literary and social controversies, sometimes leading to his being regarded as either anti-feminist or anti-Maori or both, charges which he refutes. He writes more poetry, he produces another major work on the poetic Modernists, and he works more on novels. He is awarded a CBE.  In 1986, at the age of 53, he takes early retirement from academic life to become a full-time writer. His career as an academic fits neatly the 30 years that this memoir covers.

This is a raw, crude and reductive summary of what You Have a Lot to Lose is “about’. In places this memoir reminds us of largely forgotten things. (Who now really knows – or cares – about the reaction against the “New Apocalyptic” and the emergence of the “Movement” in British poetry in the 1950s?) While reading the earlier chapters, I noted that Stead does not indulge in name-dropping for its own sake, as the people he mentions are either colleagues or friends - but as this is a sort of chronicle, it inevitably mentions many people who will mean nothing to most readers. In the later chapters, however, some pages are dizzying lists of names of luminaries met at literary conferences or readings. As another general comment I have to say too, that as a fellow Francophile, I understand Stead’s love of Paris and of France in general, but regrettably many of his observations on that country come across as  tourist jottings.

Some big names in New Zealand literature have been  important in Stead’s life. He liked some aspects of James K.Baxter, but was dead against others. He sums Baxter up thus: “I loved the poet in him and found the high-toned hypocritical moralist absurd, and at times almost intolerable.” (p.181)

Far more nuanced is his attitude to Janet Frame, whom he knew better than he knew Baxter. He often worried about her mental state, and gave this advice to an English doctor who wanted to examine her: “I said I thought she was entirely sane, but that it was as if she lacked one layer of protective skin – like an extremely sensitive and timid teenager.” (p.73) He mildly refutes (footnote p.74) Frame’s own idea that all her troubles sprang from an early misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Twice he was at odds with her. She apparently violated their friendship by writing a story that gave what was clearly a negative version of him (pp.119-121). He disliked the way she reacted to her own time in Menton and the (posthumously published) novel In the Memorial Room which she wrote about it (pp.222-224). Often Stead makes remarks about her “little girl” voice. It is interesting to learn that originally Stead’s second novel All Visitors Ashore was going to be written as a joint effort with Janet Frame.

Allen Curnow, as both academic colleague and neighbour, was a good friend for many years, although Stead acknowledges his crotchety side. Of Curnow’s ungracious poem on the death of Baxter, Stead says that it ended in a way that was “gratuitously cold and competitive.” (p.219). Surely, I thought, the same could be said of Curnow’s take-down of  M.K.Joseph, “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. With disapproval, Stead quotes Vincent O’Sullivan’s remark that “Dichtung und Wahrheit” was “a mean-spirited, grubby swipe” (p.254). Stead doesn’t agree, but on this one, I’m on O’Sullivan’s side. (I won’t go into detail about this – for further comments on “Dichtung und Wahrheit” see on this blog my review of Terry Sturm’s biography Allen Curnow: Simply By Sailing in a NewDirection.)

Then there was Frank Sargeson, with whom Stead’s relationship was usually very friendly, but occasionally strained. Notoriously Sargeson was suspicious of academics and this may have fed into the unpleasant moments. When Sargeson died, Stead recalls his sorrow at losing a friend.

When I attempt to assess You Have a Lot to Lose, I find myself drawing up lists of positives and negatives, which basically means all the points in which I agree with Stead’s views and those where I disagree.

First the many positives.

I think that as a young lecturer in Australia, Stead was right to detect a sort of crypto-fascism in Arnold Toynbee’s view of history (p.11).

He was also (always) right about judging literature by a close reading of the text itself; but he was aware that this could be taken to theoretical extremes. Thus he describes F.R.Leavis, a nothing-but-the-text man, as “famous as an acute and demanding critic, guardian of the highest literary standards, but known for dogmatism and a messianic temperament that seemed to require conformity from his disciples.” (p.27) Later, he describes a minor Leavisite as “the perfect Leavisite, very high and mighty about the sins of popular culture, the press, the BBC, the British Council, the publishing industry. He knew which few books were to be respected, and which few authors revered, and that the rest could be ignored or deplored.” (p.56) Nothing-but-the-text can lead to ignorance of context and literature’s relationship with the world in general. Also on general literary matters, I can only agree with Stead’s condemnation of the gobbledegook and redundant jargon that came with post-modernism: “I had watched literary fashions come and go, and had especially avoided the fashion for literary theory, preferring to write in intelligible English…” (p.338)

Stead is aware (pp.82-83) that the views about Maori which he and most Pakeha held in the 1950s were complacent and often based on ignorance. This he now regrets.

Of his encounters with Charles Brasch, he writes that Brasch was “very serious and very kind” and acknowledges his debts to him. But he remarks that Brasch was “also very precious. One felt he was almost certainly gay, but probably not happy about it…” I admit this was the image I had already formed of Brasch while plodding through Charles Brasch Journals 1938-1957 and Charles Brasch Journals 1959-1973 for review on this blog. A hesitant mandarin, clearly homosexual but sometimes agonising over whether he should get married (to a woman).

I can only agree when Stead laments that universities are not what they used to be. He misses a time “when we did not think of students as ‘customers’, or ‘clients’, sources of revenue, and were not reluctant to fail them if they didn’t come up to the standard we set.” (p.160) Later he regrets that he witnessed at Auckland “the gradual transformation of the university from a place in which learning and research were self-directing and self-justifying, to one in which education became a commodity, an item for sale and for profit, and in which the managers slowly but surely became more important than the educators.” (p.173)

Likewise, Stead is right about book awards. He was part of the setting up of the New Zealand Book Awards, but notes correctly “nothing in the matter of book prizes is ever quite pure, free or dependable – there is always an element of luck, of literary-lottery in who wins and who is overlooked”. But he goes on to suggest that the original NZ Book Awards were “ ‘purer’ than later, when they became entwined with the publishing industry and sponsorship, and took on a commercial aspect” (p.241). Stead has, however, some personal motives for writing this. He was obviously hurt when he didn’t receive an award he thought he deserved (pp.345-346). And, though he does not complain too much about it, he is a little annoyed that his novel All Visitors Ashore had to share an award with a novel by Marilyn Duckworth. He says “These things seem to matter at the time and leave afterwards only a sense of cynicism about book prizes and the people who administer them. They are distorters of the market, great if you win, a piss-off if you don’t, and in the years you don’t have an eligible book or an interest in one, a bore. They are commercial rather than literary-critical events…” (p.373)

Of the bone people, a book that did, surprisingly, win a major award (the Booker), I believe Stead is right to demur. His comments on the bone people, especially on the matter of violence against children, seem to me both robust and sound (pp.375-376)

All the last few paragraphs have done, of course, is to align my tastes and prejudices with Stead’s tastes and prejudices.

Now we come to the more problematic bits – in other words, where Stead’s tastes and prejudices are not aligned to mine.

Stead clings to his argument (as he did in his review of Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair) that Harold Stewart and James McAuley perpetrated “the hoax that rebounded on the hoaxers” when they undertook to create Ern Malley. This I do not believe. Fair and square, and fully conscious of what they were doing, and in no way “liberated” by the new form they were inventing (the very defensive argument used by Max Harris, supporters of “Angry Penguins” and many poseurs since), Stewart and McAuley showed how gullible some members of the avant-garde could be. Of course they did not demolish Modernism – it’s not as if the Ern Malley poems cancelled The Waste Land – but they did flush out those tag-alongs who claim to admire and appreciate something because it is currently fashionable. Stead half admits this when he writes, a propos Ern Malley, that “fashion is something which to a certain extent sets its own standards and imposes a degree of blindness” (pp.23-25). Sure thing.

Bringing back memories of, nearly fifty years ago, sitting as an Honours student in Stead’s tutorials, I also have a sinking feeling as he again declares his annoyance that W.H. Auden edited and revised his earlier published poems, taking out much of their naïve 1930s leftism (pp.132-133). My own view is that Auden (whom Stead describes as a “technician”) continued to produce great work to the end – not just a postscript to his younger self – and much of the contention arises from the belief that he was the sort of “lost leader” that Browning deplored and a traitor to various causes.

            Stead can be very snarky about people of whom he essentially disapproves. Of Maurice Shadbolt he writes “He was like an actor; he behaved the great writer, and with such confidence!” (p.206) He is fiercely ironical about the American poet Robert Creeley, who visited New Zealand, saying “Creeley was one of those cult poets who attract disciples to whom a taste for his work represents enlightenment… Creeley had been blessed by William Carlos Williams, and thus had in effect apostolic powers to pass the blessing on – and there were those eager here to receive it” (pp.247-248). Of young Margaret Atwood, whom he met at a literary beanfeast in Canada, he says “She looked like [Botticelli’s] Primavera and sounded like a frog.” (p.308)

Sometimes he dredges up academic bitcheries that would be totally unknown to the uninitiated. He says some pleasant things about one of Auckland’s History professors Nicholas Tarling, but he also damns him as a “dealer and academic tyrant” (p.289) in trying to block Stead’s (successful) application for a research position. Indeed (and this is not Stead’s fault), we are often made aware of how much sniping there was (and is) in both literary and academic circles in, for example, the reaction to Stead’s essay “From Wystan to Carlos” (Chapter 10) but also in the essay he wrote on John Mulgan, which suggested that back in the 1930s Mulgan failed to get a Rhodes scholarship simply because his grades weren’t good enough (pp.294-295). In his biography of Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border, Vincent O’Sullivan reacted suavely to this essay by simply ignoring it, but implicitly showed how flawed Stead’s idea was.

There is another matter that is perturbing in a number of ways. Stead remarks “In the years before 1963 it had been a reasonable assumption that one’s students who were not married were either virgins, or not engaged in sexual activity. After 1963 the opposite was the case… ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’; and though I was no longer quite young there were indeed to be moments that would seem ‘very heaven’ “ (p.128). He also informs us that “among the academics and writers who were our friends”  there were many extra-marital affairs and much bed-hopping. He likens the adultery in academe to events in Iris Murdoch’s novels  (p.145).

This leads up to the account he gives of his affair with the student (now deceased) Jenny North (pp.181-187 and passim). He first attempts to indemnify himself against possible criticism by saying “Looking back in the light and shadow of the ‘Me Too’ movement of 2018 it’s perhaps important to say there was nothing that could even remotely be called coercion or harassment; and it would be as wrong to say that I exploited age and status as that she exploited youth and beauty. We were two adults equally smitten, for a long time hesitating silent and embarrassed on the brink of saying so.” (pp.181-182) Well… maybe. Every description he gives of Jenny, who had been the family’s babysitter, suggests a naïve, flower-power hippie looking for a guru. Stead says that he told his wife Kay what the situation was, as he had done during an earlier infidelity, and there were “tears and anguish”, although he doesn’t elaborate upon them (p.187). There were resolutions not to go on on with the affair, but it did continue (pp.226-228).

What disturbs me about this? First, Stead’s blithe assumption that there was no power imbalance – rising academic nearing 40 will obviously make an impression on younger woman nearly 20 years his junior. Second, Stead tells us in detail of all the poetry (especially the sequence Quesada) and plot-points in his novels that the affair generated – Jenny, in effect, becomes good “copy”. Third, what a ruddy cliché it all is. Mature academic finding muse in younger chick. Perhaps I will be criticised for being moralistic or daring to pass judgement on somebody else’s love life, which isn’t any of my business. But by devoting these pages to them, the author makes them my – and any other reader’s – business. Besides, I am judging “the words on the page”, which is, after all, the only way to judge a text – right? There’s the possibility that Stead has reported it ineptly, and Jenny was a robustly mature person. But that is not what the text conveys.

Enough of this. I will await stoically the inevitable brickbats.

Stead does undertake some self-analysis in You Have a Lot to Lose and is aware that he often rubbed people up the wrong way. Of the late 1960s he says “These were the years when I discovered that I was radical politically and conservative academically, a division which felt quite comfortable and reasonable, but which at times made me the object of wrath from one side or the other and often from both” (p.165). Of the 1980s he says “From this distance I can see that I must have appeared to many like a hyperactive child, writing poetry, fiction, non-fiction, a professor and not-a-professor, opinionated and clamouring – in your face and a pain in the arse. Never mind the quality of the writing, who would want a prize to go to this remorselessly present person if there was any way it could be directed elsewhere?” (p.347) He discusses keeping a dual personality by working and publishing both in Britain and in New Zealand: “That way I would be able to remain a New Zealand writer based in Auckland, but with regular access to the other world where I felt less subject to the slings and arrows my presence and my personality (for whatever reason – and maybe the fault was all mine) seemed to provoke in my dear homeland.” (p.350) (Emphasis added).

I won’t be so crass as to suggest reasons why New Zealand literati and other interested people may have been negative about Stead; but I will point out the high quota of self-praise there is in this memoir. You have to have a very healthy ego to produce a text like this. Stead credits himself with the definitive interpretation of Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916”, giving a footnote (p.47) listing all the publications and collections of Yeats criticism in which his interpretation has been republished. The many footnotes regarding his own imaginative work always imply that these are important works of literature which we should all read. He tells us that after a recent re-reading of his own novel  “The Death of the Body still strikes me as exceptionally clever and entertaining” (p.369). There’s the possibility that other people will agree with this verdict – but isn’t it for them to say rather than the author?

As I have been at pains to show in this notice, there is much about Stead’s views that I applaud. But it may be the cocksure tone with which he has presented his views, rather than the views themselves, that has, in the past, alienated many of his peers.

Personal footnote

My review of You Have a Lot to Lose ends above, but I would be very amiss if I did not note a few personal matters. As I have indicated above, nearly half a century ago I was for two years a member of Stead’s tutorial class at the University of Auckland. He was, bar none, the best-prepared tutor I encountered at uni., always steering us towards making a close analysis of the text itself rather than indulging in vague generalisations about it. Subsequently, I have had a cordial nodding acquaintance with Stead, though he did rebuke me for some elements of my review on this blog of his That Derrida Whom I Derided Died.https://reidsreader.blogspot.com/2018/09/cillamcqueenpoetasomething-new.html Most important to this footnote, however, is that in advance of publication, he sent me a copy of the two pages in You Have a Lot to Lose concerning the death of my father (pp.201-202), perhaps to check that I didn’t find them offensive. I didn’t, although I would say some ripe things about Frank Sargeson’s response to my father’s death if I could be bothered. If you’re interested, see my review of Sarah Shieff’s excellent edition of Letters of FrankSargeson.