Monday, July 6, 2020

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 ONE
           
            Yes, the heading of this “Something Old” posting is arrogant and egotistical. How dare I say that my posting will tell you “everything you need to know” about the novels of Dan Davin? Surely there have now been one biography of Davin  (Keith Ovenden's A Fighting Withdrawal) and numerous detailed articles and critiques in theses and in publish-or-perish academic journals, ready to tell you what to think about Dan Davin’s work??! Davin may not be the most prominent figure in New Zealand literature, but he features in all literary histories of this country. So there must be more to his novels than is revealed in what amount to the short reviews that make up this posting?
            To which I respond – no there isn’t. Everything that need be said about Davin’s novels can be said quite concisely if one’s aim is to direct readers towards either reading them or passing them by. My “reviews” here are enough to indicate the quality of Davin’s novels, and no more need be said about them, outside reading the novels themselves…
Recently I read and reviewed in this blog Janet Wilson’s scholarly edition of all Dan Davin’s short stories, published as TheGorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories and  The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories. I read them during the lock-down, and it occurred to me that I had five of Davin’s novels sitting on my shelves, only two of which I had ever read – and that was some years ago. So whistling up from the New Zealand Library Service the last two of Davin’s seven novels, I proceeded to read my way methodically through all seven of them, in order of their publication. Such things did one do to while away the time in lock-down. This posting and next posting I present you with my conclusions.

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            It is now hard to read with a straight face Dan Davin’s first novel, Cliffs of Fall (published in 1945). It is so over-written, so badly structured, and so callow in its conception that it is impossible to believe it was written by a mature 32-year-old man who had just gone through four years (1940-44) of war in the New Zealand Division, seeing battle, serving as an intelligence officer, and already having written a number of mature and forceful short stories. But in reality it was not written by such a man. Davin had begun writing the novel a couple of years before the war, while he was still a student at Oxford. Its title was originally going to be The Mills of God. He had really finished it before his miltary service began. But only in 1945 was it accepted by a publisher.
It reads like what it is – the novel of a student who has read much modernist fiction and is trying hard to show us so.
            Mark Burke, university student, is part of a Southland Catholic-Irish family (like Davin). He has got his girlfriend Marta pregnant. He says he is engaged to her, but he does not want a wife and children so soon as he thinks it will hold back his career. If he had his way, Marta would have an abortion, illegal though that then was – but she has already had an abortion after an earlier liaison and she now dearly wants to have his child. What is he to do? Of course he cannot tell all this to his pious and religious family when he goes back to their farm. So his mind boils and bubbles and he decides the only thing to do is to kill Marta. It ends, in highly melodramatic fashion, with both a murder and a suicide.
If written in a more credible style, this story might have passed muster. But, very self-consciously, the young author wants to impress us with his erudition. The novel’s title, and the titles of its four parts, are all quotations from a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is printed in full at the beginning. The vocabulary is recherche and the grammar contorted on page after page. Davin ends up producing stilted and incredible conversations between characters, sounding like formal debates rather than exchanges between real people. Mark converses with his Marxist friend Bob Mooney and neatly sorts out his idea that Marxism is just another form of religion. Mark converses with his puritanical brother Joe, and kills any idea of religion being any help. Mark converses with his bohemian musician friend Peter and understands the need to rebel from social norms while trying to avoid self pity.
And all the time there are the over-written, prolix, laboured thoughts of Mark himself as he justifies his decision to murder Marta, referring to his own intellectual superiority like an undergraduate Nietzsche or a cut-price Raskolnikov. Young Davin strives throughout for gravitas, but ends with bathos in a sequence of nightmarish phantasmagoria, quite out of character with the rest of the novel, in which Mark Burke’s conscience haunts him.
I have to add that, despite its relative brevity, much of Cliffs of Fall reads like padding.
Quite simply, it is a dreadful novel.

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Davin’s next novel, For the Rest of Our Lives (first published 1947) is a Great Leap Forward in comparison with the lamentable Cliffs of Fall. Despite the frequent and long ruminations of some of its main characters, its conversations are at least recognisable as real conversations and its style is a consistent grim realism, with fantasia popping up only briefly when the main character has bad dreams. Not that it is a masterpiece. I believe it is the longest novel Davin ever wrote (nearly 400 large pages of small print in the Nicholson and Watson first edition which I read) and it is certainly repetitious, with the same ideas being stated and restated in the main characters’ thoughts.
For the Rest of Our Lives is Davin’s war novel, and like nearly all his short stories (both the Southland ones and the war ones) it is lightly-disguised autobiography, most of its events being worked up from those parts of Davin’s copious diaries that were written in Cairo and North Africa when Davin was an intelligence officer with 2NZEF (New Zealand Division). The narrative covers the period between 1941 and late 1942, that is, from the siege of Tobruk through the successful second battle of El Alamein and ending when Rommel has been defeated and pursued to Tunisia.
All the main characters are reconstructions of Davin himself and his circle, with just a few fictitious characteristics added. Frank Fahey emerges as the protagonist, and it is not only his alliterative name that identifies him as Dan Davin. The fictitious Fahey comes from a New Zealand Irish-Catholic family, has rejected their religion, has studied Classics, has been through the retreat from Greece, has been wounded in Crete, convalesced in Egypt, is transferred to military intelligence work, and often feels an odd sort of guilt that he is not still in the front lines. All this is Davin, but unlike Davin the fictitious Fahey has also gone through a divorce. Other characters include Tony Brandon, who shares a flat with Fahey in Cairo. Apparently he has some characteristics of the intelligence officer and journalist Geoffrey Cox.
A third member of  Fahey’s circle is the intelligence officer Tom O’Dwyer, who has also rejected an Irish-Catholic upbringing and is now an ardent Communist, spreading the Marxist gospel whenever he can, to the mild bemusement of both Frank Fahey and Tony Brandon. One stand-alone chapter, true to Davin’s own confirmed agnosticism, has O’Dwyer out-arguing a Catholic chaplain (there’s also an amusing sequence where two soldiers toss coins on a bet as to whether God exists or not). Elements of Tom O’Dwyer, especially the Marxism, seem borrowed from Davin’s fellow intelligence officer Paddy Costello, though some things are pure fiction. Costello never fought in the Spanish Civil War as the fictitous Tom O’Dwyer did. It’s noteworthy that in For the Rest of Our Lives, most of the ordinary Kiwi soldiers (as opposed to the officers) are left-wing in their views, seeing Stalin and the Red Army as great heroes as they push back Nazi forces and fight the Battle of Stalingrad. Most of them are also particularly contemptuous of “pongos”, British officers and “base wallahs”, admire Rommel’s skill, and are painfully aware that, until late in the day, the Germans are better equipped, especially in the tank department.
A book could be written (and probably has) linking all the novels characters to their real-life originals, from “the General” (obviously Freyberg) to the homosexual officer who is court-martialed for his activities and commits suicide (based on somebody Davin knew). One deserves a special mention. Davin really disliked the English novelist Olivia Manning , whom he knew in Cairo. Many other people disliked her too. She was apparently a snob, very condescending, and prone to complaining about everything. She appears to be caricatured in the novel’s very minor character of Blanche Scott.  (The ghost of Olivia Manning may have the last laugh, however – her Fortunes of War series has been far more widely read and re-published than any of Davin’s works have).
            The events of For the Rest of Our Lives move between life in wartime Cairo and soldiers’ experiences in the desert. There is much drinking of whisky. There is much mess-room camaraderie and gossip. There are many sexual adventures for all three of the main characters, much rumination on women and on the nature of love, and an awareness that any relationships made in wartime will probably be temporary things, regardless of the passions that are spent. I won’t bore you by pointing out which women are paired with which officers.
            Given that it was published so soon after the war, this novel would surely have shocked at least some New Zealand readers. It is not only the sequence where a soldier, whose legs have been blown off, begs to be killed. It is not only the unvarnished and particularly nasty battle sequences, which have so many bloated and fragmented corpses, so much close-quarters fighting, and more bayoneting than I realised took place in the Second World War. It is also the unapologetic way soldiers’ everyday thoughts and experiences, away from the battlefield, are chronicled. There is much cynicism about the higher-ups’ war aims. Resort to brothels is frequent as is drunken brawling. Wives or sweethearts are lied to in letters home. There are particularly vicious episodes like the one where three Kiwi soldiers get drunk, all have sex with the same raddled old whore, and then one of them beats her up and takes back the money they have given her. To this you may add the very unflattering way Davin depicts the “Big Flap” (the panic among Allied officers when it was feared that Rommel would reach Cairo).
            In 1947, this would have upset many who were still thinking in terms of their returning heroes and their honoured dead. Davin has conveyed one important thing, however. For all their crudity and violence, the troops were still fighting a justifiable war, still risking their lives and still protecting complacent civilians who are all too often unaware of what they are up against. This is part of what makes his Frank Fahey still identify with the troops and regret that he is no longer with them but is now doing intelligence work back at base.
            In spite of all this, For the Rest of Our Lives does not stand up as a classic. Its characters are dragged along by historical events and do not develop in any meaningful way. Its ideas are too often repeated. There is a rawness to it that suggests it concerns things the author has not had time to fully digest. An end-note to the first edition says that it was written between September 1944 and November 1945, that is, mainly while the war was still bring waged, even if it was no longer in North Africa. The author, in effect, was still thinking as a participant in the war, and what he presents is reportage. The novel can be read, and still ought to be read, for its documentary details and its chronicling of a particular New Zealand experience. But that is all.
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            When I read Dan Davin’s third novel Roads from Home (first published in 1949), I felt that I had at last struck gold. This could very well be Davin’s best novel. Its setting is Southland and its characters are Irish-Catholic immigrants and their children, as in so many of Davin’s semi-autobiographical short stories. The Hogan family represent the same culture that the Davin family lived. There are some details that are autobiographical. The father Jack Hogan is a railwayman, as Davin’s father was, and the family live on the rural edge of Invercargill and attend mass at the Catholic basilica, as the Davin family did. However, many of the troubles the Hogan family face are purely fictitious.
            Older son John Hogan, who is also a railwayman, is married to Elsie, a girl from a Protestant family. (A brief scene, in which Elsie’s father objects to the marriage, shows that Southland Presbyterians clung to their tribal religion as fervently as Southland Catholics did). Elsie, however, seems to have had an affair with a rakish opportunist called Andy, and there are doubts about the paternity of Elsie’s and John’s infant son. The drawn-out tension in the marriage leads to tragedy.
            Meanwhile Jack and Norah Hogan’s younger son Ned has been nagged by his pious mother into training for the priesthood at the Mosgiel seminary. He has had a nervous breakdown and has come back home to think things over. It is his sensibility, and his growing doubts about his religious upbringing, that dominate much of the novel.
Set in about 1930, Roads from Home depicts a small community hit badly by the economic depression. Some characters are on poorly-paid relief work and some live in fear of becoming unemployed. There are other strictures on people’s lives. Apparently Invercargill was “dry” and, when they aren’t drinking at home, men maintain the booze culture by drinking furtively (“sly-grogging”) in a closed and shuttered hotel at night. Puritan customs are condemned; but the booze culture destroys some people. The Hogan family’s uncle Tim is clearly an alcoholic, often trying pathetic strategies to be given the price of a drink.
For Ned and John Hogan, however, the biggest stricture is their inherited Irish-Catholicism. Ceremonies are always being performed. The family rosary. Doing one’s “Easter duty” by first going to confession. Funerals. A special “mission” in which a Redemptorist priest instils guilt, preaching that the congregation’s sinfulness has wounded Christ. True to much Irish-Catholic culture the women – and especially Norah Hogan – are most fervent in their religion, while the men (who often think of the failings of the priest) are more sceptical, but conform for the sake of domestic peace.
Roads from Home has its flaws, not least the extremely melodramatic way in which John Hogan’s marriage is concluded (Davin is often accused of winding up otherwise plausible plots with melodrama). Neverthless, it depicts convincingly a whole social group, and this time we are able to share the thoughts of most of the major characters – Norah, Jack, John, Elsie and Ned; even if the little brother Paddy, who is clearly growing up indifferent to the things that trouble his brothers, is seen from the outside only. Even better, Davin deals in a very nuanced way with the family’s inherited culture. Ned (and by implication Davin) may be rejecting the family’s religion, but there are moments when he is also aware that it has sustained and strengthened his parents and his forebears during hard times in Ireland (see especially his thoughts at a funeral at Part 2, Chapter 6). And though his mother instils guilt in him for no longer wishing to be a priest, there are also times when he feels filial love for her and recognises her strength as a woman.
It is a very wrenching thing to find a road from home.

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Fully seven years passed between the publication of Roads From Home and the appeaance of Davin’s next novel The Sullen Bell, first published in 1956. In the interim, Davin was preoccupied with researching and writing the volume of New Zealand’s official war history concerning the Battle of Crete. The Sullen Bell is a competent novel with a (largely) credible narrative, but it is also probably Davin’s most dispiriting and depressing work. It concerns various New Zealanders living in post-war London in the early 1950s. London is still a city with bombed-out buildings, still suffering from rationing, with spivs on the make, elements of a black market, and much sordor, especially in the scenes set in Soho. The word “seedy” would come to mind, if Graham Greene hadn’t made it a cliché.
The overall tone of the novel is disillusion and regret after the hopes raised by the end of the war. It reads like a long hangover. Sally McGovern teaches in a London elementary school. She is still grieving for her fiancee Bill, who died in the war, and she still wears his ring. Former army officer Hugh Egan has never got over the fact that his depressive wife Alison committed suicide when he was with her, on leave in New Zealand. The lawyer Maurice Brace is a doctrinaire Marxist, so concerned with the Party and with his cases that he neglects his wife Clare, who wants a child and a real family. Maurice comes from “Anglican snob” Canterbury stock. Clare is an ex-Catholic. As in Cliffs of Fall and For the Rest of Our Lives, Davin gently suggests that Marxism is a new, dogmatic religion like the one he had rejected. There are many time-specific details. Maurice’s latest case is defending a man accused of giving away secrets relating to nuclear weapons (“atom spies” were big news in the late 1940s and early 1950s).
All these characters have lost something. All are New Zealanders who had hoped that London would be more than what it is. Occasionally some of them think back to life in New Zealand, but then recoil with the thought that going back home would be going somewhere small and parochial. They are ceasing to be New Zealanders, but they are not English either.
And there’s the shadow of the war and what it has done to people. A character called Gus is still ashamed of having been captured and becoming a POW. Bob remembers his wife’s infidelity when he was away fighting, and how she died of a septic abortion. The doctor Philip Hamilton got nowhere in his profession and is now an abortionist, dope-peddler and blackmailer. Looming larger than any of them is Dave Macnamara, Hugh Egan’s subordinate in the war. He is both a serial seducer of women, and a man of violence. The impulsiveness and physical courage that made him a good soldier also make him a delinquent in peacetime.
Inevitably, there is some Davin autobiography is this. Hugh Egan is researching and writing a history of the Battle of Crete, which kind of gives the game away, but which also allows Hugh Egan to have a conversation about the nature of history with another historian called Grogan. (Also, as in two or three of Davin’s short stories, there’s a flashback about the shooting of a farm dog in New Zealand).
The main problem with The Sullen Bell is that it ambles on for two-thirds of its length with many vignettes of its various characters (including quite a few I haven’t mentioned), but without much momentum. It is clogged with detail and seems to be going nowhere. Only in the last third does it gain some urgency with a murder, a marriage and two troubled people coming to a commonsensical solution regarding their situation. I wouldn’t exactly accuse this of being melodrama, but it is similar to the abrupt way John Hogan’s marriage is wrapped up in Roads From Home.

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Next posting, I will give you my views on Davin’s last three novels, No Remittance, Not Here Not Now and Brides of Price.

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