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.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE  NOVELS OF DAN DAVIN - PART TWO

            Last “Something Old” posting, Everything You Need to Know About the Novels of Dan Davin Part One, I vented my views on the first four published novels of Dan Davin (1913-1990) viz. Cliffs of Fall (1945), For the Rest of Our Lives (1947), Roads From Home (1949) and The Sullen Bell (1956). I made it clear that I was reacting against much academic criticism, which tends to over-think and over-analyse texts. This is not a wholesale assault on academe – there are, after all, a few members of humanities departments who know what a valid assessment of a novel really entails. But it is an assault on the publish-or-perish culture which sees the scramble to produce redundant, sterile analytical critiques, written in the pursuit of tenure and published in small-circulation, subsidised academic journals. And so often such critiques express themselves in a mandarin vocabulary that renders them largely unreadable. I have given my view that the best critics are more concise, and lead readers back to reading the book in question… or wisely advise readers against wasting their time with a book. So, with my truthful blunt hammer approach, I continue with my opinionated views, in line with the arrogant heading I have given to this posting.

            Here are my views on Dan Davin’s last three novels.

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            First published in 1959, No Remittance is a departure for Davin in a number of ways. It is his first novel to be written in the first-person, being the memoirs of an old man looking back on over half a century of his life. In the process he ticks off, as background, the influence on New Zealand of such historical moments as the Boer War, the rivalry of the Liberal and Reform parties, the First World War, the “Spanish” influenza epidemic, the economic slump in the early 1920s, the Great Depression, the rise of the Labour Party and the Second World War. No Remittance is picaresque in what is now the generally-accepted sense: a series of events, very episodic and connected mainly by one character. But it is picaresque in the older sense, too – the main character is a “picaro”, or rogue, whose first-person narration often consists of very questionable self-justifications for the dodgy things he has done. The classic “unreliable narrator”. At least, that is how the novel begins, but the tone of voice is very inconsistent, for in some central sections the narrator makes many observations which (judging from all his other works) the author Dan Davin would have approved.

            As a young man in about 1900, the Englishman Richard Kane is kicked out of an architect’s firm in London after he has embezzled money. He is sent to New Zealand, and proceeds to try to seduce both the wife and the daughter of the Auckland architect who tries to mentor him. Again dismissed, he moves to Wellington and is once again discredited when he is involved in a shady political scheme. He scarpers to Dunedin, and puts his hopes on a company which crashes and deprives him of the little money he had. All the while, he blames his misfortunes solely on “bad luck” and on other people’s censorious decisions. And, well-coiffed and well-dressed he, as an Englishman, continues to regard himself as a notch above the uncouth colonials.

            About a quarter of the way through the novel, he meets the Irish-Catholic chambermaid Norah O’Connor, a forthright and practical young woman who nurses him when he is sick. They fall in love (even though Richard Kane is having an affair with another woman) and they plan to marry. Richard is a man of no particular religious beliefs but he vaguely identifies as Protestant, so he is very wary of Norah’s Catholicism. And Norah’s mother is very wary of him, seeing all Englishmen and Black Protestants as the enemy of the Irish race. Still, marry they do, and they take on a small and not very promising farm… and here we are again in the same territory as in Cliffs of Fall and Roads from Home – a version of the tight, Irish-Catholic community of Southland, near Invercargill. It is Dan Davin’s point of origin, although the novel is mainly set a generation or so before his time.

            Most of No Remittance chronicles Norah and Richard’s marriage over the best part of thirty years, and it is here that the tone of narration changes. Richard is a rather negligent farmer. He does go to the pub a little too often, he loafs sometimes and he has the occasional daydream about the great and important man he should have been. For his superior English ways, it is Norah who calls him “a remittance man without a remittance”. But for all his faults, he does nothing particularly rascally in the long central sections of the novel. Only very late in the text does he cheat (once) on his wife and become an angry and (sometimes) violent man when the booze really grips him.

It is in this middle section that the narrator often says things about New Zealand’s Irish-Catholic community which Davin would have endorsed – on the fervent religiosity of the women (not the men); on the gossip of the rural community and the way one is always being watched and judged; on the Catholic education that Norah insists on the children having; on the destructive side of the booze culture (personified in a character known as “Mad” Tim Mannion); and, perhaps especially, on the issue of birth control. As a Catholic, Norah will not countenance using it, while Richard chafes at the fact that they therefore have an increasing number of children to feed. Dan Davin may be waxing a tiny bit autobiographical when he gives the name Dan to a returned Irish-Catholic soldier who has given up on all this religious stuff.

And yet… and yet. Like Norah Hogan in Roads from Home, Norah O’Connor is a strong and resilient woman who (as we can see even through Richard’s obfuscating narrative) is the real force keeping the family together and doing all the hard work that needs to be done. The narrator dislikes all the keening and praying and lamentations that Irish-Catholics indulge in, in the face of misfortune or death. But (like Ned Hogan at the funeral in in Roads from Home) he comes to realize how this sustains the deprived and often impoverished community. He also notes how ready members of this tribe are to help one another. And in the end, Richard is resigned to being part of this community himself. In short, through this ambiguous narration, Davin also suggests what was positive in his own background.

The novel also satirises the pomposity of the self-deceiving Englishman who tells the story. Dan Davin might have rejected the tribe he came from, but he wasn’t going to have a snotty Pommie making fun of it. It’s the old story. I’m allowed to criticise my own family – but I’ll defend them if an outsider tries to do the same thing.

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In the fourteen years between 1945 and 1959, Dan Davin had produced five novels (even if the first one had been written years earlier), a volume of short stories and New Zealand’s official history of the Crete campaign. This was quite an impressive literary output, given that he was not a full-time writer but spent most of his working life as a publisher and editor for Oxford University Press. But after 1959, his literary output dried up. It was over a decade after No Remittance before his next novel Not Here, Not Now appeared in 1970, and most commentators see this, and the novel that was to follow, as a postscript to Davin’s best work.

Not Here, Not Now is a fictionalised version of Davin’s student years at the University of Otago in the mid-1930s. Martin Cody, Southlander, from an Irish-Catholic family, with a working-class Dad, is a bright, hard-working and prize-winning student who hopes to gain a Rhodes Scholarship. But obstacles stand in his way. He is sometimes distracted in his studies by his love life with various women, but mainly with Delia Egan who, at least in the earlier parts of the novel, is more sophisticated than he is. It takes him some time to realize how he must cultivate the right people – generally meaning people from a higher social class than he – if he is to win the big prize. Most damagingly, he is caught up in a scandal which derails his first nomination for the Rhodes. A neurotic young woman writes lurid things about him in her diary, and her mother has some influence with the university board. Only a year later, on his second nomination, does Martin win the award and the novel ends with him sailing off to Oxford. The title Not Here, Not Now has an obvious double meaning. The phrase is used more that once when Delia Egan is telling Martin that now is not the time to canoodle or make love; but it also refers to Martin’s first rebuff by the committee which chooses Rhodes scholars.

Dan Davin was an unsuccessful candidate for the Rhodes in 1934, but was successful in 1935. Like Martin Cody, his strong suit was Classics and his first shot at the Rhodes was blocked by scandalous gossip about him. It’s interesting to note, too, that as a student he wrote a short story called “Prometheus”, published in an Otago university magazine in 1935, which was partly about working on the wharves. (The story is republished in Janet Wilson’s edition of The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’sSouthland Stories.) In Not Here, Not Now, this same story is reworked in a late chapter where Martin Cody does holiday work on the wharves.

Like For the Rest of Our Lives and The Sullen Bell, this novel is a mine of documentary detail. It presents clearly an era when university students were under firm discipline. There is an official student censor to remove controversial items from the student magazine (Martin Cody is one of the editors, as Dan Davin was). This is just post-Depression, when there is still fear of “red” radicalism on campus. Professors do not hesitate to give students advice on morality and how they should live their lives. The love lives of students tend to be closely monitored and those students, like Martin Cody, who are determined to lose their virginity have a hard time finding out about the taboo subject of contraception. There is also a very strong sense of hierarchy and propriety – hence all the wealthier and more upper-middle-class members of society whom Martin has to smooth down in order to gain support for his Rhodes nomination. A specifically Dunedin aspect of the novel is the Presbyterian influence, with the theological students of Knox College having a strong presence. Martin’s own original tribe are the Catholic students and their social clubs, although he only goes through the motions of being religious. Near the end, there is a scene where conservative and left-wing students react differently to the 1935 election of the first Labour government.

Regrettably, the historically-interesting documentary detail does not, of itself, make for an interesting novel. The style of Not Here, Not Now is flat, plodding and self-expository. The text is padded out with redundant conversations.The novel has none of the sharp concision of Roads From Home or even No Remittance. It is as if Davin is determined to chronicle every detail of his student life, every idea that students discussed, every erotic impulse he felt (even if most came to nothing) and every rebuff he suffered. The blurb of Davin’s next (and final) novel Brides of Price says that Davin had been intending to write Not Here, Not Now, as part of a “trilogy”, since 1939. While this might possibly be true, Not Here, Not Now is a man in his late 50s settling the score over things that happened 35 years earlier. Davin had lived far from New Zealand for nearly all those 35 years, and it was clear that his set image of New Zealand belonged to an age that was long past.

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And so to Davin’s last novel, Brides of Price, published in 1972. It is the only novel Davin wrote that is largely set where he spent over half his life, Oxford University. Like No Remittance it is written in the first person. Adam Mahon is a professor of anthropology, in his late fifties (as Davin was at time of writing) and struggling to complete a book, but also trying to avoid being promoted to head of department. He does not want the burden of extra administrative duties. Some of the novel concerns academic manouevres about who will take the department over; and who backs which candidate. In this respect, it is the professor’s-eye-view of how a university works, as opposed to the student’s-eye-view chronicled in Not Here, Not Now.

But Adam Mahon spends most of his time thinking about other matters – meaning all the woman he has loved or bedded, he having been a very active Lothario. His marriage to the efficient and officious publisher Amy is breaking up, even if they are cordial about it and equally concerned for their grown daughter Isabel. He is having an ongoing affair with Ruth, a much younger academic. Often he thinks of Mary, now dead, whom he might have married in the long ago and sometimes considers wistfully to have been his one true love, even if he never agreed with her immature leftist ideas (yet again Davin takes a crack at Marxism as a substitute religion). And then, on a trip to Auckland, he meets an old flame called Daphne, and finds he is connected to her more than he realised.

How Davin knits all these characters together is both glib and convenient to his plot, with an incredibly neat conclusion in which children are reconciled, motives are explained, and there is a marriage. It reads like the wrap-up of a novel that has been meandering.

The first-person narration is a bit of a problem. As with No Remittance, we are unsure how much this narrator is meant to be interpreted as unreliable, and how much he is Davin’s mouthpiece. Making Adam Mahon an anthropologist allows him to comment on kinship systems and marriage customs and how they relate to his own messy love-life; and in the process, much of this comes across as pompous self-justification. Adam is also able to dissect Amy’s wealthy Australian family and Mary’s landed-gentry Scottish family in terms of their tribalism and traditions. How much does Davin know about anthropology? Perhaps not much, as he has Adam Mahon going to Australia to write a paper on Aborginies and then hopping over to New Zealand to write a paper on Maori, making the assumption that anthropologists base their conclusions on fleeting visits and superficial field-work. At other times, however, Adam Mahon’s “grumpy old man” persona seems aligned to Davin’s own views. He spends an awful lot of time in the pub mulling over what is wrong with the younger generation, in terms that (fifty years after the novel’s publication) now seem quaint. In fact, though Davin hadn’t yet hit 60, this reads very much like an old man’s book, sometimes musing on death.

As always with Davin there is an element of autobiography. Adam Mahon comes from Southland NZ and fought at Monte Cassino. How much Adam’s love-life echoes Davin’s, I do not know. Some years ago I read Keith Ovenden’s biography of Davin A Fighting Withdrawal, but I do not have it with me to check the details. What I do know is that Davin was happily married to Winifred (Winnie) Gonley from 1939 to his death in 1990 and they had three daughters; but during the war Davin also had an affair with Elizabeth Bernt, which produced another daughter. Winnie magnanimously accepted this other daughter into the family. Just possibly the child born out of wedlock inspired one major plot-point in Brides of Price. And just possibly Dan Davin had had as varied a sex life as Adam Mahon (or Martin Cody in Not Here, Not Now). But spend too long on such speculations and you reduce any novel to psychiatric notes about the author.

Judging Brides of Price itself, regardless of its inspiration, it is, like Not Here, Not Now, heavy-handed and too obviously expository in its prose. But at least it was Davin’s attempt to deal with an environment – Oxford – that was far from New Zealanders, even if there are some scenes set in Auckland and even if some nostalgia creeps in.

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And that, 18 years before he died, was the end of Davin’s career as novelist. In 1975, he did produce his memoir Closing Times, about literary figures he had known; and he did gather together a second collection of short stories, Breathing Spaces. But it is well documented that the last decade of his life, punctuated by the occasional short story, was consumed in depression and ill health.

Reviewing Keith Ovenden’s biography of Davin, Vincent O’Sullivan wrote of him (in New Zealand Books, Autumn 1996). “Once the war concluded, he believed himself obliged to play over and over the events of his New Zealand years, while his day-to-day life was vastly committed to other things, in other places. As time went by, he overvalued his ear for an increasingly distant vernacular, assumed nostalgia was perhaps closer to creativity than it is and surely restricted himself as a novelist as a consequence of that.” This seems a just estimate of Davin’s novels. Rather more dismissively, Lawrence Jones (in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature) took Davin as an example of “the inherent limitation of the expatriate drawing on a diminishing capital of youthful experience”. Although all Davin’s novels were written far from New Zealand, fully four of them (Cliffs of Fall, Roads From Home, No Remittance and Not Here, Not Now) are set in New Zealand and are increasingly detached from the New Zealand that actually existed at the time Davin was writing. Two others concern New Zealanders in other countries, at war (For the Rest of Our Lives) and in London (The Sullen Bell). Only one (Brides of Price) tries, clumsily, to break the mould.

In the end, how do I rate Davin’s novels? Cliffs of Fall is botched apprentice work. For the Rest of Our Lives and The Sullen Bell survive on their documentary detail. Of interest to historians, they tell us much about New Zealanders as they once were, but are clumsy as narratives. Not Here, Not Now and Brides of Price are the limp ending to Davin as novelist. The only two novels that still hold up very well stylistically and as narrative, are Roads From Home, Davin’s very best novel, and No Remittance, even if it repeats much of the material of Roads From Home. These two alone sustain Dan Davin’s reputation as novelist… but on balance I think he will continue to be remembered most for his short stories, many of which are among the best New Zealand has produced.