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.  

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART ONE

Sometimes I feel like the curator of forgotten books. In the “Something Old” sections of  this blog you will find accounts of books that are genuine classics; books that once captured a highbrow audience but are now scorned; and books that were bestsellers in their day but are now forgotten. But sometimes it is interesting to look at such forgotten books for what they tell us about society as it once was and what readers then admired. In other words, forgotten books can be of great historical interest.

Which brings me to the books of Noel Hilliard (born 1929 – died 1996). Over my summer break just past, I took it on myself to read all of Hilliard’s novels and short stories. Hilliard’s heyday as an author was in the 1960s and 1970s. Born of a working-class family (his dad worked on the railways), Hilliard was very left-wing in his politics and was for a short time attracted to the Communist Party. But he was finally disillusioned with the CP and was officially a member for only two years. Still he had a vision of a more equitable New Zealand and he remained a convinced socialist. Hilliard’s greatest interest was in race relations in New Zealand. He was appalled by the way Pakeha New Zealanders flattered themselves in having “the best race relations in the world” when in fact there was much racial discrimination and a tendency of Pakeha to see Maori as their inferiors. In the era in which Hilliard wrote, there was a great migration of Maori from rural areas to cities, and many urban Pakeha were for the first time getting used to seeing Maori at close quarters. Hilliard himself, in book after book and in many of his short stories, focused on this situation. He himself had strong Maori connections. Brought up mainly in rural areas, he mingled easily with Maori. Two of the schools he went to as a child were Maori schools and his wife Kiriwai Mete was Maori. They married in 1954 and their marriage was a strong one, lasting until Kiriwai’s death in 1990. They had two sons and two daughters. Despite themselves being left-wing, Hilliard’s parents were often very condescending towards their son’s Maori in-laws, and Hilliard often had to deal (in life and in fiction) with the fact that a Maori way of life and mores often clashed with the general Pakeha way of life. [If you can look it up online, you will find a very good interview Hilliard gave about his family and circumstances, with Peter Beatson asking the questions.]

When it came to respect for the Maori people and strong advocacy for better race relations, Hilliard wrote with the best of intentions. But here’s the rub. As the years have gone by, Hilliard’s work has been seen as too simplistic and – like the work of Roderick Finlayson – his depiction of Maori life has been criticised by Maori as well as Pakeha. He is now a back-number.

Along with a career as a school-teacher and a journalist, Hilliard set about writing novels. Into which we now plunge.

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            Hilliard’s first novel, Maori Girl (first published in 1960) is probably still his most-often read work. It is now regarded as the first part of a tetralogy, but that was not the way it was first presented to the reading public. Maori Girl appeared to be a stand-alone novel about the trials of a young Maori woman when she leaves her family’s rural home and goes to Wellington.

            Netta Samuel is the youngest of a large Maori family in Taranaki. Her father is a not-very-successful dairy farmer, knowing that he has to work inferior land as, in the previous century, the more fruitful land was taken by Pakeha settlers. He takes some solace in alcohol and some solace is religion. Netta is born during the Great Depression of the 1930s and she has grown up in relative poverty. But, as Noel Hilliard makes clear, there are great cultural strengths holding the family together.  When Netta goes to school she is strapped for using the Maori language. Netta’s grandmother represents tribal traditions which, in the 1930s and 1940s, seem to be overtaken by the radio, the movies and European-style farming.

            By the immediate post-war years, Netta is becoming profoundly bored with small-town life and its deprivations. She decides to go to the big city once she has lost her virginity.

            In late-1940s Wellington, Netta at first finds shelter in a seedy boarding house. Clearly because of racial prejudice, she is turned down on her first job application. She moves into, and works at, a private hotel where she experiences exploitation by some of the residents and takes part in boozy drinking parties. Then she becomes involved in casual sex. A Pakeha called Eric Knight comes into her life. They cohabit. He uses her to sell lottery tickets for him and treats her as a sex-object. But he, as a Pakeha, is ashamed to be seen with her in public and he becomes jealous when she socializes with other Maori. Eventually he deserts her. When Netta tries to move into a better job and lodging, she again faces prejudice.

            Six months later [this novel has many leaps in time] Netta is working as a waitress and makes connection with more sympathetic working-class characters, Maori and Pakeha. She makes her lodging a very run-down and decrepit boarding-house, with the Pakeha wharfie Arthur Cochran. One of the Maori girls who works with Netta loses her job when it’s found that she is a “boat girl” – a prostitute who works incoming ships. Netta discovers she is pregnant. Arthur Cochran decently proposes marriage to her, but she rejects this, saying that they are already married enough. Then double tragedy strikes. Her landlord (who is also her boss) evicts them and she loses her job when Arthur Cochran and others get the health inspector to examine their substandard boarding-house…. And Arthur walks out on her when he checks the dates and decides that the child Netta is carrying cannot possibly be his.

            Another six months later, and Arthur is nursing his sorrow and sense of loss. He sees Netta with another man on the other side of a bar and can only speculate that she has adopted out her baby. He feels morally adrift. Later, he hears of a Maori woman who is imprisoned on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Quixotically, he attempts to bail the woman out, but without success. The very last words of the novel say “He walked out into the rain”. By ending the novel thus, we are given a Pakeha perspective and a sense of hopelessness. If read alone, this novel would suggest that Netta Samuel, the Maori Girl, is in the process of being destroyed by the pitiless big city, and she being far from her family.

            Noel Hilliard dedicated this novel to his wife Kiriwai Mete, but this does not mean that she had the same experiences as Netta Samuel. Each of the novel’s four parts begins with a Biblical quotation even if, in the novel, Netta loses her religious faith. Hilliard was himself agnostic, but [as he says in his interview with Peter Beatson] he respected religious ceremony and he saw merit in some Biblical teachings. In one sense, Maori Girl is a closely-observed realist novel which condemns racial discrimination and the callousness of many Pakeha in their relationship with Maori. Yet the novel is very ambiguous about Netta’s cultural background, which is sometimes depicted as backward and retrogressive. Netta is deracinated and the ending of the novel suggests she is lost. However, by ending with a Pakeha character desperate and guilt-ridden over her plight, Hilliard appears to be most concerned to point a moral for a Pakeha readership. In many ways, in this novel Netta never ceases to be a “case”. We observe her from outside and that is all we know of her.

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            When Noel Hilliard’s second novel Power of Joy was published in 1965, readers were presented with a very different cast of characters and saw it as having no connection with Maori Girl. The main character here is a young Pakeha called Paul Bennett and the novel traces his growth from childhood to young manhood.

            Part One (all of Hilliard’s major novels are divided into four parts) is called “Semper Fidelis”. Paul Bennett is a child in early 1930s New Zealand. He is a withdrawn only-child of labouring parents in the Great Depression. He is dreamy, puzzling over words, sometimes humiliated in the classroom when he goes to school. His father Stan is beaten down by the Depression, rails frequently against [the former Prime Minister] Gordon Coates and hopes for the election of the Labour Party. Sometimes Dan takes to drink and turns violently on his wife and little son. But, narrated in the “limited third-person” style, the emphasis is on the small boy’s growing consciousness and the deprivations he becomes aware of. There is a sad little episode in which children like Paul Bennett are given the tackiest Christmas presents because, in those hard times, their impoverished parents can afford nothing better.

            Part Two “A Sleep and a Forgetting”, opens with the election victory of Michael Joseph Savage (in 1935) and suddenly the family has at least a little wealth. Father is employed at a public works camp. But Paul’s parents grow apart. Mother becomes fretful. Father drinks too much with his mates. Meanwhile Paul finds himself a loner at school. The one responsibility he is given (cleaning the school toilets) is a failure. Paul enjoys pretending he is Huckleberry Finn or some other adventurous boy, daydreaming while his parents quarrel.  He hides in a treehouse to escape the monotony of home. But once, while watching the sun rising, he has an intense vision of the oneness of life of which he is a part. All of nature is one great thing. And capping such a revelation, Part Two ends with young Paul appreciating a sense of beauty and wholeness as he watches a Maori girl bathe naked… at which point, one has to note that Hilliard puts very complex and sophisticated thoughts into the mind of a boy who is barely an adolescent.

            Part Three. “These Things Shall Be”. Paul goes to Stonehurst boarding school, which appears to be an Anglican establishment. He now experiences even more strongly the divorce between his own developing sensitivity and the human society in which he lives. The school takes both Maori and Pakeha boys, but there are clear class distinctions between those from wealthy famiies, and those like Paul’s father who has been on the dole. On the one hand there is organized bullying – in one incident a boy is ritually beaten by senior boys after being made to “sing”, but Paul escapes this punishment because he sings a song in Maori and the Maori boys protect him. On the other hand, and despite the brutality of boys’ behaviour, he does have the freedom to wander and think. Though the teachers think he is withdrawn, strange and potentially insolent, he is generally left to himself. There is one sequence in which the headmaster interviews him about his eccentricities.  Once again, he finds a favourite tree where he can hide and brood, and he becomes obsessed with the problem of how one can capture a moment of joy in words. Of course he has sexual stirrings at the school dance (puberty has struck). But his sketchbook is ripped up and scattered by bullies and he is physically degraded and humiliated by them.

 Part Four. “By the Wind Grieved”. School days are over. Now a young man, Paul works in the city. He sees a beautiful young Maori woman on the other side of a barroom. She becomes his ideal. He tries – without success – to revive his joy in nature by means of memory of his childhood. He has a casual affair with a Pakeha girl – and gets a sexually-transmitted disease which takes some time to heal. He feels soiled and sullied. Again he catches sight of the Maori woman, who is now carrying a baby. He reflects on the development of his whole life – how he has hidden in trees and rocked with nature while not being engaged with the world of people. He revisits his old school. The tree in which he hid has been chopped down. It was rotten to the core. He no longer needs it. He no longer wants to be self-absorbed. He resolves to go back to the city and find the Maori woman and her baby. At which point the novel ends.

            Taking Power of Joy as a whole, you can’t help being aware of the heavy freight of internal monologue that drags the novel along. If Netta Samuel was a “case” in Maori Girl, Paul Bennett in Power of Joy is more a symbol than a real character: the thoughtful, idealistic boy who does not fit in. And the people he meets are even vaguer symbols – the quarrelling parents, the bullying schoolboys, the diseased Pakeha girl, the idealised Maori woman etc. Of course the rotten tree is a symbol – a worship of nature that stands in the way confronting the world as it is. Of all Hilliard’s novels, Power of Joy is the most nebulous, with only the barest of plot. I am not the first reader to note that Hilliard’s idealised adolescent view of nature is very Wordsworthian  - nature as an uplifting force for good. Hilliard even dares to include poetic lyricism in the poems teenaged Paul Bennett devises – but perhaps the author included these in an ironical mood.

            You will note that Power of Joy is essentially a Pakeha novel, with only a few moments of interaction with Maori. But you will also notice that Paul is in search of the Maori woman he has seen in the city. And alert readers will realise that this will lead us back to Netta Samuel.

[The last two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy will be tackled in my next posting]