Something New

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

“KNOWLEDGE IS A BLESSING ON YOUR MIND – Selected Writings, 1980-2020” by Anne Salmond (Auckland University Press, $NZ65)

Dame Anne Salmond, anthropologist and historian, is by now one of New Zealand’s most esteemed scholars, an expert in her fields and prolific in her research and writing. Quite apart from the very many papers and articles she has written, she has also produced seven authoritative books on Maori and Pasifika themes and on the interaction of Polynesians and Pakeha.

In gathering together a collection of her writings over forty years, she chose as a title Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind. The phrase came from one of her mentors, the erudite Maori elder Eruera Sterling, about whom Salmond wrote in her book Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder. It was from Eruera’s teaching that she began to see anthropology in a new light. She understood that “Eruera’s teachings come out of a chiefly tradition, centred on whakapapa and politics and shaped by the powers of the ancestors – mana, ihi, wehi and tapu. They have led me to reflect about knowledge in the European academic tradition and in the Maori world, and to look carefully at my chosen profession of anthropology.” (p.60)

 In 2013, she was interviewed at length by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka in which she articulated some of her main ideas: “For me it’s not so much learning about Maori life, it’s actually about learning from it. This is where I think that anthropology has to be heading. It can’t stay within the Western tradition for all of its key conceptions and insights.  If the post-colonial debates have taught us anything, it is that people from other societies don’t appreciate being objectified, turned into items of curiosity for detached inspection.” (p.47) And in the same interview she said “I see anthropology as a kind of comparative philosophy that helps us to bring to light our own unexamined assumptions – about the world and how best to inhabit it – and to generate new ideas and conceptions from this fundamental rethinking. The arrogance of the past – the presumption that the ‘West’ has a monopoly on ‘advanced’ ideas and knowledge….has rightly been attacked…” (p.51) This approach is affirmed in the very last item in the book, the brief comment headed “What is Anthropology?”

Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind comprises 500-plus large pages before end-notes and index. It is a formidable book which has to be read carefully. Between chapters Salmond gives detailed accounts of the marae, museums, universities, archives and seminars she has attended and the anthropologists and historians whom she has conferred with – in effect, she gives us a sort of academic autobiography.

In reading my way through this very impressive collection I found myself sorting out the most essential and informative essays; and the essays or commentary that are related to [once] topical matters, polemics and personal connections.

Of the latter, I include “Institutional Racism at the University of Auckland” (1983) which was originally published in the Auckland students paper Craccum, advocating the real need for a Maori marae on campus. “Antipodean Crab Antics” (1994) is Anne Salmond’s spirited response to the negative review of her book Two Worlds which had been written by the philosopher Peter Munz. “McDonald Among the Maori” (1990) deals with Salmond’s Scottish ancestry and how it was connected to New Zealand. It is mainly a tribute to James McDonald, her great-great grandfather, and how he became deeply immersed in Maori customs and arts, and was a pioneer in cinematography, capturing on film images of Maori life in the early 20^th century. Two articles are headed as “Of Women”. One is called “Women and Democracy”, a speech Salmond gave on how there was equity for Maori women and men, who had responsible positions in iwi in pre-colonial times. The other is a newspaper article she wrote in 2016, refuting the argument of Alan Duff (author of Once Were Warriors) that Maori domestic violence was the result of violent Maori traditions. All these articles are informative, expressed clearly and still well worth reading. There is only one article I found difficult to read. This is “Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge” (1982), basically about how metaphor is over-used in too many anthropologic texts. Some of its post-modern language was beyond me, and would have to be untangled for me by a linguistic specialist. In contrast “Pathways in Te Ao Maori” (1984), related to an exhibition and considering taonga that were hidden away in archives, was part of a catalogue, and hence written in a very accessible style as it gave a clear account of varieties of iwi whom Captain Cook encountered in his voyages around New Zealand.

While these texts are all interesting, informative and [with one exception] readable, they are not the most important texts. For an ignorant Pakeha like me, far more enlightening are the major and more detailed essays, which I will now tackle one by one.

Maori Epistemologies (1985) was, says Salmond, “ written as a riposte to metropolitan assumptions about the superiority of modernist knowledge, and was argued as cogently as I knew how.” (p.80) She sets out to show how complex and sophisticated traditional Maori thinking was, and she analyses in detail the traditional concepts viz. Matauranga, meaning reliable knowledge and how to communicate and preserve it ; Wananga, being the Maori conception of the universe, including the role of ancestral histories [which were taonga] ; and Tikanga, being the laws and schools preserving the laws; Korero, being discussion, debate and polemics among experts, for lore was passed down by experts - but such experts were aware that other iwi than their own could have a different idea of cosmology and different ideas of the origin stories. Also, Salmond notes, in pre-colonial times Maori understood Mataurenga and Wananga should be held as separate from mere fables, known as korero tara. Tales like those of Maui came into this category. In effect Salmond is proving in Maori Epistemologies that Maori had a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of both the cosmos and human origins, amounting to an advanced philosophy.

Ruatara’s Dying (1993) was originally the last chapter of Salmond’s Between Two Worlds, concentrating of the different perceptions of death as held by Maori and Pakeha.

The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, or, Why Did Captain Cook Die? (1996) is a very detailed article which later became the last chapter of Salmond’s book of the same name. Salmond makes convincingly the case that, progressively, Captain Cook became disillusioned in his three Pacific voyages. He moved from seeing the Polynesian peoples as welcoming and peaceful, to seeing their hostility, cannibalism (not in all Polynesian islands, but certainly in New Zealand) and aggression. As well as this, Cook’s crews became more discontented as they were taken to bleak destinations far from decent provisioning – such as Cook’s forays into the wild southern seas, as near as possible to Antarctica as an 18^th century wooden ship could go. Discontent became anger and Cook, who had generally been lenient in punishing malcontents, became more and more disciplinarian. It all spilled over when Cook reached Hawaii. There was a major clash between the Hawaiians and Cook’s crew when Hawaiian sacred protocols were violated, and in the ensuing fight Cook was killed. This is only one part of Salmond’s narrative, for the earlier pages of this account concern the radically different ways Polynesians and Europeans regarded dogs and other animals, especially when it came to the provision of food.

Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different (2004) examines European and Polynesian interactions, especially with regard to different concepts of navigation – and with the inevitable mutual misunderstandings and Europeans’ unawareness of the importance of ritual.

Possibly the most crucial work in Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind are the 114-long pages devoted to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which Salmond was commissioned (in 2010) to write for the Waitangi Tribunal. She makes minute scrutiny of the treaty, how it was understood, how Rangatira basically saw it as the Crown was offering protection but not as imposing British sovereignty, the process by which the treaty was written, and the two different languages in which it was devised. Then, in detail, Salmond gives a collection of the spoken or written reactions to the treaty made by Rangatira (and a few Pakeha) in the months following the signing at Waitangi, when the treaty was taken to different locations on the North Island to be ratified. As did Ruth Ross decades before, Salmond concludes that the English-language version of the treaty was merely a draft, and the only valid version of the treaty was the Maori-language one…but British authority gradually took the English-language version to be definitive. [On this blog you may see my review of Bain Atwood’s A Bloody Difficult Subject  which covers much of this territory.]

The last essays in this collection are categorised as “On Environmental Questions” . One deals with how different Maori and Pakeha conceptions of personhood are – this being in the context of “The Whanganui River Settlement” that deemed the river to be a living person.  The other has to do with the menace of climate change, which is causing the sea to rise and threatening Pacific island states.

As I hope this simplified and inept review of Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind has given you at least some sense of Anne Salmond’s achievements. While she does criticise many Pakeha misconceptions or misrepresentations of Maori life and lore; and while she faults many of the older texts written by Pakeha anthropologists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries; she does not blanketly dismiss with contempt all Pakeha pioneer attempts to reach some understanding about Maori customs, beliefs, rituals, and politics. Elsdon Best still has worthwhile things to say to us. And of course, as an anthropologist, Anne Salmond knows that there is no society or nation that is not flawed.

 

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 F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART ONE,  F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

            There is a canonical author who worried me for a long time. I had read a few of his works but had never read my way systematically through all his works, and I was therefore worried that I had perhaps misjudged him and had a superficial understanding of him. Complicating matters was the fact that his life story is as well-known as his literary work. Indeed many people think they know all there is to know about this writer because they have been told that he was at his peak in the so-called “roaring twenties”, that he invented the term “the Jazz Age”, that he had a spectacularly unstable marriage, eventually succumbed to alcoholism, declined as a writer, turned out much hack-work in his later years, and died when he was only in his early forties. The “legend” of the man has almost overshadowed his work.

I am of course referring to Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940), who signed himself F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Confession of my reading history: I had read his best-known novel The Great Gatsby when I was a teenager. Who hasn’t? It often appears as a set text in high schools. Oddly enough I had also read his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, but for a very pragmatic reason. I was a film reviewer in 1976 when the film version of The Last Tycoon came out, and I wanted to compare film with novel when I wrote my newspaper review. I’d also read some of Fitzgerald’s short-stories and essays (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” etc.). But that was my full acquaintance with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

So, in the last few months, I sat down and read my way through all five of Fitzgerald’s novels in sequence and followed this up by reading some of his shorter works. My findings are what I will torture you with in the next six or seven postings.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.   *.  *.  * 

Photo of F.Scott Fitzgerald when he was a fresher at Princeton
 

            I have rarely read a novel by an esteemed novelist that is as badly organised, disorderly, messy, repetitive, sophomoric and uncertain of style as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise. I am also still bemused that such a novel at once became a major bestseller and immediately made Fitzgerald a celebrity. I will get onto these matters later in this review.  But before I do, I will tell an anecdote which will at first seem totally irrelevant to you.

            When I was a teenager, I had to spend four terms (a year and a third) in a boarding school, because my parents had gone overseas and my siblings (all of them older than me) had already left home. I was not used to the boarding school ethos and didn’t particularly enjoy it. Up to that time I had been a proud “day boy”, cycling to and from school every day. In this alien environment, I sought out books that I could bury my head in, as a form of escapism. One “free” day, when we were allowed to go into Auckland Central, I discovered in a bookshop a big, fat paperback – about 700 pages in length - in which I became immersed. It was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, originally published in two parts in 1913 and 1914. It was a Bildungsroman, that is, the story of a young man growing through adolescence to adult maturity. In its day Sinister Street was regarded as scandalous because its protagonist, Michael Fane, and his sister were the illegitimate offspring of an aristocrat. Michael Fane studies at Oxford and revels in its “dreaming spires”. He falls in love with a young woman whom he tries to rescue from prostitution, but he fails. He goes through an intense religious experience and by the end of the novel he seems destined to become a Catholic priest. The language was often lush and romantic, idealistic, crammed with descriptions of place and mood, and just the sort of thing I could happily get lost in. I’m pretty sure that if I were to read it now I would find it melodramatic, overwrought, over-the-top, filled with purple prose and improbable dialogue, and altogether badly dated… but it served my purpose when I was a teenager.

            So what has all this to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel? Simple. Fitzgerald read and loved Sinister Street and in many ways his debut novel was inspired by it. Compton Mackenzie was one of his literary idols, and Fitzgerald followed his path by writing a Bildungsroman. The title This Side of Paradise came from a poem by Rupert Brooke, another of Fitzgerald’s literary idols. I know these things because I read This Side of Paradise in the very-annotated Cambridge Edition, which also gave me a detailed account of the gestation of the novel.

To put it briefly, it goes like this: Fitzgerald had been an indifferent student at Princeton, more involved in writing comedy shows for the university’s amateur performances than sticking to his study. He left the university without a degree. In 1917, when he was 21, he began writing the first version of what would later become This Side of Paradise, which he originally called The Romantic Egotist. It was written in the first-person. The publisher he chose, Scribner, turn it down but encouraged him to re-write it. In 1918 – during the First World War - he enlisted in the army, but never saw action overseas as the war ended before he could be involved. However at the military camp down South where he was trained, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, usually designated by critics as “a Southern belle”. They got engaged, but she broke the engagement fearing that he wasn’t wealthy enough to support her. He went back to his parents’ home (in St. Paul in the Middle-West) and diligently re-wrote his novel hoping that he would win literary fame and become more acceptable to Zelda. The novel was now told in the third-person. A second time Scribner turned it down, but Scribner’s best-known reader Maxwell Perkins was more encouraging and said the novel would be publishable if only Fitzgerald could come up with a satisfactory ending. As it stood, the novel seemed to go nowhere. Fitzgerald changed the novel’s ending a little and – third time lucky – Scribner published it and immediately it was the best-seller of 1920. Fitzgerald was 23. Buoyed by his success, Fitzgerald again proposed to Zelda. This time she accepted him and they married. He was now able to demand great sums from magazines for his short stories. His future seemed stable. He was feted as the spokesman for what would now be called youth culture.

 

          The first jacket illustration for This Side of Paradise. The woman and man were based on Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald... very loosely.

            This Side of Paradise is divided into two “Books”, Book One having what was the original name of the novel “The Romantic Egotist”. The chapter headings throughout tend to be pretentious (“Spires and Gargoyles”, “Narcissus Off Duty”, “Experiment in Convalescence”, “The Supercilious Sacrifice’ etc.).

Amory Blaine is the son of a wealthy family. His pretentious mother Beatrice coddles and protects him when he is a young child, and he quickly becomes arrogant with grandiose ideas about himself. : “He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in his school.” (Part One, Chapter 1) The family is Catholic and he is sent to a Catholic prep school, a boarding school, St. Regis, when he is fifteen. He is greatly influenced by an erudite senior priest, Monsignor Thayer Darcy, who becomes a life-long friend. When he gets to Princeton, with its mock-medieval architecture, he has exactly the same sort of romantic reaction that Michael Fane had when he first saw the “dreaming spires” of Oxford. Amory sees, in somewhat purply prose:  “The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and  out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and Amory, pausing by the sundial, stretched himself  full length on the damp grass…..” etc. etc. etc.   (Part One, Chapter 2)

Amory’s experience at Princeton is in large part made of making sure he is part of clubs, admiring football matches, trying – after his fresher year –  to ingratiate himself with more well-off sophomores, partying, flirting with girls from outside the university, and of course being involved in the light comedy performances that the students wrote. [All of which was true of Fitzgerald. The novel is very autobiographical in many places.] He also feels true love for the first time with a severely intellectual girl called Isabelle… but she ceases to be impressed with him when his conversation is so much taken up with himself… and his academic grades are too poor. He is no longer  one of the writers for the college’s newspaper the “Princetonian”.

Amory does, however, have a sort of intellectual life. Among other things he is always concerned about the difference between personality [the way one superficially presents oneself] and personage [having grown into a person with a guiding sense of morality]. This matter is occasionally raised in correspondence Amory has with Monsignor Darcy. Be it noted, too, that twice in the novel, Amory believes he is in the presence of the devil. Along with his relgious upbringing, he has a strong sense of evil as a real force. Discussing poetry with his friend Tom D’Invilliers, he declaims what his favourite type of poetry is after he has just recited Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”  “ ‘ I’ll never be a poet,’ said Amory as he finished. ‘I’m not enough of a sensualist really – there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle things like ‘silver snarling trumpets’. I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.’ ”  (Part One, Chapter 2) In short, he is a romantic whose beliefs are taking the place of the religion he is slowly disconnecting himself from. In the course of the novel he produces many poems – sometimes satirical but usually lushly romantic.

As some students do, Amory also has many intense discussions about the meaning of modern literature, philosophy and politics. In fact so many novels are quoted in This Side of Paradise that some critics have suggested Fitzgerald hadn’t read many of the texts his protagonist Amory ostensibly reads. As the First World War rumbles on, there are also student debates about the righteousness of waging war.  A pacifist and radical student Burne Holiday becomes a major topic of discussion – but when Amory discusses the matter with his friend Tom D’Invilliers, Amory reveals his essential enduring narcissism when he declares “I tell you… he’s the first contemporary I’ve ever met who I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity. ” (Part One, Chapter 4) Amory’s father dies but Amory has little reaction apart from examining his family’s wealth and noticing that much of it has gone. He goes partying in New York with other college boys, gets hopelessly drunk and disoriented, but still persuades himself that he is in control and his imaginative mind is still working. He almost falls in love with a charming young Catholic widow called Clara Page, who has two young children. Bored with lessons and lectures, Amory decides to enlist in the army.

At which point Fitzgerald suddenly skips over two years and we are into Book Two called “The Education of a Personage”, the Bildungsroman idea being that Amory is on the brink of becoming a fully-formed adult. Except that it isn’t true. Amory now falls madly, truly, deeply in love with Rosalind, a debutante from a very wealthy family. Fitzgerald characterises her thus: “She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them . Two types seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness – intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All other men are hers by natural prerogative.” … But also “She is by no means a model character. There are long periods where she cordially loathes her whole family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”  (Part Two, Chapter 1) “She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.” says Amory of Rosalind. (Part Two, Chapter 1). Fortunately for Amory, Rosalind has fallen in love with him too. This will be his greatest love. Except that the matter of money intervenes. Rosalind’s family want her to marry wealth, and so she dutifully prepares to do so because Amory, now out of college, earns only a small wage writing copy for an advertising firm [as Fitzgerald did at the time when Zelda Sayre had rejected him.]

Despair. Amory goes on a great bender. In his mental haze he resigns from the advertising company. He reads. He seems to lose all the religious feeling he used to have. He has a long discussion with his friend Tom D’Invilliers about the status of literature in the United States, damning most authors as frustrated young men so often do. He receives a letter from Monsignor Darcy offering him some consolation, but he finds it harder to connect with the priest. And he goes walking in the rural wilderness where, by chance, he meets a wild child, younger that he but very shrewd, Eleanor Ramilly. Could this be his true love? Nope, because she has some strange ideas that he can’t endorse. She is an atheist, an admirer of Nietzsche, a hedonist, immersed in the “decadent” authors. But after they have parted, she stays in his mind. He frames her in romantic terms: “For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.” (Part Two, Chapter 3) Beware beautiful women with odd ideas... and note Amory's persistent religious concepts, even if they are fading in hin. Amory reads that Rosalind is about to marry, and that Monsignor Darcy has died. The woman he loved most and the man who most compassionately guided him are gone. He goes to Monsignor Darcy’s elaborate funeral, admiring the clerical pageantry of it but now more alienated from the religion.   He becomes reckless, partying with rowdies who, to his surprise, have booked a room “for immoral purposes” with a woman. (Not that he himself loses his virginity.)  In a weird sort of repentance for his past actions, he is even prepared to take the responsibility for this unsavoury event, but luckily he isn’t charged for any felony.

He is now penniless in New York, both his parents now dead and their money gone, sceptical, loathing the smell of the proletariat when he rides in public transport. He gives up his earlier beliefs and now scorns many of the books he once admired. He understands that he will have to live by money – which he doesn’t have. Is this the maturity and a blossoming into adulthood that a standard Bildungsroman narrative requires? Obviously not. For this reader at any rate, in his last chapter Amory seems still like a peevish child whose romantic ideas have been punctured… or perhaps he could be likened to the type of students who suddenly realise that their university years don’t necessarily equip them for material success or prestigious positions. But there is another way of reading it. Perhaps Fitzgerald is deliberately defying the standard Bildungsroman ending, wherein the mature young man reaches fruitful maturity. After all, that is not the outcome for all young people in their early twenties, and some people don’t reach maturity until many years later… or not at all.

The closing words of the novel (Part Two, Chapter 5) are “There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory, the regret for his lost youth – yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But – oh, Rosalind! – Rosalind…. ‘I’m a poor substitute at best,’ he said sadly. And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed… He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself, he cried, ‘but that is all.’ ” 

 

As I have synopsised This Side of Paradise, I might have left the impression that it is a smoothly sequential narrative. In fact it is more like the novel that is as “badly organised, disorderly, messy, repetitive, sophomoric and uncertain of style” that I mentioned near the beginning of this review. There are sudden, glaring changes in style and many inconsistences in the way the narrative is presented. Perhaps as a modernist experiment, Fitzgerald presents the whole story of Amory falling in love with Rosalind (Book Two, Chapter 1, “The Debutante”) in the form of a play script, complete with stage directions. In Book One, Chapter 2 Amory is traumatised by the death of a fellow student in a car crash… yet avery short time later, we find Amory happily pursuing his first love Isabelle.  Fitzgerald has an “Interlude” between the novel’s two “Books” which, in five pages, jumps from 1917 to 1919 and therefore very briefly rushes over Amory’s military service… and surely military service would have had a major impact on how he developed mentally. The chapter concerning the pagan Eleanor (Book Two, Chapter 3, “Young Irony”), coming after Amory’s urban angst when losing Rosalind, is frankly a dive into pure romantic fantasy, with Eleanor discovered in a haystack, beautiful, often seen in moonlight, half characterised as witch or siren etc. etc. As for the last chapter in the book (Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Egotist Becomes a Personage”), it contains an incredibly improbable sequence wherein Amory, making his way back to Princeton, is given a ride in a millionaire’s car and he passes the time lecturing the millionaire on the benefits of [some sort of] Socialism… though again, Fitzgerald could be suggesting that the still-callow young man is now embracing a new sort of religion after having discarded an old one. Now that I’ve given you this rant, it’s only fair that I should note many of the novel’s first readers found Fitzgerald’s style daring, refreshing, revealing a new and interesting way to tell a story… but I stay with my view that stylistically the novel is a bit of a mess.

            All of this brings me to the major puzzle. Why did This Side of Paradise become so quickly a massive bestseller in 1920? Apparently, in 1920, it was seen as daring for a novel to have university students getting drunk, partying, having many girlfriends, driving around in cars with girls, messing with “immoral purposes”, being involved in three or four love affairs, not taking study all that seriously and on the whole not behaving as an earlier generation had done. This Side of Paradise was published only a couple of years after the [First World] War had finished and there was a sense of relief, an easing of mores… and the fact that Prohibition had been voted in 1919 only encouraged younger Americans to drink more alcohol than their parents did.  The behaviour of Amory and his student friends chimed with all this. In no time Fitzgerald’s novel was identified with flappers, vamps, “the Jazz Age”, the “speakeasy” etc. even if these things was only a very limited part of what he wrote about. Seen from a century later, the novel is far from being sensational. Of course there are no explicit sex scenes (they couldn’t be published in 1920 anyway), the nearest thing being the thwarted events that take place in a hotel in Part Two, Chapter 4. The behaviour of students in the novel now seems comparatively mild. Kissing isn’t an outrageous event. In short, as seen now, the novel reflects mores from long ago. They belong to the past. And even in 1920, most of the novel is not concerned with things that would then have seemed sinful.

            Footnote: I have found one very annoying thing about Fitzgerald’s novels. Many episodes are built on the author’s autobiography and some characters are based on real people. This means that there is now an industry among scholars working out which character is based on whom. It has been determined that a much admired Princeton football star had the name Amory, so that was the name Fitzgerald gave to his protagonist. Likewise the scornful Isabelle was Fitzgerald’s first real love Ginevra King. And his major heart’s desire Rosalind was, not surprisingly, his wife Zelda. Most interesting, however, is Amory’s advisor Monsignor Darcy, who was based on Fitzgerald’s advisor Monsignor Sigourney Fay. Not only does the monsignor appear in the novel, but he actually contributed to it. Part of the letters the fictitious Monsignor Darcy sends to Amory were letters that the real Monsignor Sigourney Fay sent to Fitzgerald. Likewise, in the novel’s “Interlude” the poem Mons. Darcy sends to Amory when he is about to go to war was written to Fitzgerald by Mons. Fay. I could say more about Fitzgerald’s connection with Catholicism. Apparently when he was a student at Princeton he regularly went to Mass. But whereas the hero of Compton Makenzie’s Sinister Street Michael Fane was gradually drawn closer to the Catholic Church,  Fitzgerald’s Amory and Fitzgerald himself were gradually drawn away from it.  Even so, there are many tropes and beliefs in This Side of Paradise that suggest a Catholic sensibility… even if they are not apparent to the uninitiated.

 

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                               ON SEEING THREE FILMS ABOUT NAZIS    

As much by chance as by choice, over the last year we have gone to see three movies about Nazis and the Holocaust. None of the three was the standard Hollywood “war film” about battles and eventual retribution for the Nazis. All three were more subtle than that, though of very different quality from one another.

First we saw the filmed transcription of the British National Theatre’s production of Good the play written by Cecil Philip Taylor and first staged back in 1981. Now revived, the play has a very bleak and very simple stage-set and a total cast of four (with one fifth actor appearing in the last moments of the play). David Tennant plays the central character of Professor Halder and we quickly accept a Scottish actor with a Scottish voice as a German. It’s the 1930s. Professor Halder is an esteemed academic at a prestigious German university. He regards himself as a liberal. His best friend is Jewish, and Hitler has only recently come to power. Halder tells his friend not to worry – Hitler is just making stupid speeches he doesn’t really believe in. He’s just playing up to the rabble. He won’t do any harm. Then Halder’s friend disappears, but Halder rationalises that it was probably for the best. Halder believes that he can live in the Nazi state by simply separating from society and living a private life. When books are publicly burned he is able to keep some and read them in private – just like a Nazi woman he knows who is able to enjoy in private forbidden non-Aryan Jazz music. He is flattered into joining the S.S. He’s actually comforted by wearing a uniform and sharing the comradeship. But don’t worry. He doesn’t intend to do anything wrong. He still regards himself as “good”… and so it goes on - the story of a man who step by step rationalises what he does and never really accepts that he is complicit in great evil. After all, he is “good”.  Thus can a self-centred liberal’s morality collapse.

The second film we saw was One Life, the true story of the British bureaucrat Nicholas Winton who, in 1938 and 1939, managed to save many Jewish children in occupied Czechoslovakia from being sent to death camps. (Winton was of German-Jewish descent, but he had become an Anglican.) Winton arranged for trains to carry the children away from Nazi-occupied territory but, life-long, he regretted that he was not able to save the last group he had arranged. The film cuts between the old Winton reminiscing (played by Anthony Hopkins) and the young Winton carrying out his deeds of mercy (played by Johnny Flynn). This film closes with the elderly Winton being applauded in a television studio by some of the many people who were saved by him.

The third film was The Zone of Interest. The first five minutes of the film are a blank, reddish screen and a soundtrack of unsettling, ominous noise, grinding, shaking, rumbling. Then it cuts to a picnic near a river. These are ordinary people. They are enjoying themselves. They have a nice spacious house. Dad is good to his kids. He reads them bedtime stories. Mum makes nice meals. They have a large hot-house for exotic plants. Mum is very proud of her expansive garden, which is right next to a very high wall. How very nice. Oh, and by the way, Dad is Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz. And over that high garden wall is where there are gas chambers, crematoria, forced slave labour, genocide. That is where all those rumblings and shaking come from, like the work of a huge factory, mixed occasionally with distant gunshots and screams, not to mention all the smoke that can be seen coming from tall chimneys. Where do the clothes and fur-coat Mum tries on come from? We don’t have to be told. Do the family ever get upset about where they are living? Well Mum does. She gets upset when Dad is posted elsewhere, and she fears that she will be moved from her beautiful garden and house. Filmed in Poland with a German cast The Zone of Interest is based in a novel by Martin Amis, but very much changed from Amis’s version. Among other things, Amis had given fictious names to the commandant and others, whereas the screenwriter and director Jonathan Glazer gave the characters their real names… such as Rudolf Hoss. Be it noted that the film’s camera never takes us over the wall into Auschwitz. In our minds, this makes what is behind the wall even more ominous.

How do I rate these films? The weakest of them is One Life . I do not belittle Nicholas Winton’s bravery and humaneness. He deserves to be remembered as a hero. But, like Schindler’s List, the film gives the audience a happy ending. The kids are saved. The hero is applauded. So, as in many formulaic films, we are allowed to think that there are more good people in the world to counter-balance bad people. But this simply wasn’t the truth about the Holocaust – or any other Genocide for that matter. The great majority of those targeted for extermination were actually murdered, often after torture and starvation. In focussing on the humane heroes, we are ignoring the horrible truth of history. Salute the compassionate heroes by all means, but always remember that they are the minority.

Far better, and equally more searching, are Good and The Zone of Interest. They are films for adults. Good makes it clear that a highly intelligent man can rationalise participating in what he would otherwise understand to be heinous. By deluding himself that he can stand aloof and live a private live, he is in effect allowing the worst to happen without resistance. The process that turns him into a Nazi is gradual, with him all the time assuming that he is “good”. The Zone of Influence concerns a man who knows exactly what he is doing and glories in it [Rudolf Hoss had been a committed Nazi as soon as the movement was created]. Yet he shadows the younger members of his family from it and in domestic matters he acts as if their life is perfectly normal. Again there is a cognitive dissonance here – a refusal to see that what he is doing is neither normal nor in the least moral. Creating mass murder does not go easily with ordinary domestic life. One major merit of these two films is that they do not try to persuade us of the genocidal horror by showing us gore and atrocities. Good stays in one set embracing three or four characters talking. The Zone of Interest never moves outside the house and garden, although there are nightmarish sequences where a young girl is seen searching through the grounds that prisoners have to work in. We, as adult viewers, understand that when Hoss looks at an imprisoned girl and then, in the next sequence, we see him washing his genitals, we know that he has committed rape. We understand the horror by knowing what we are not seeing

 

 Below is a photo of Rudolf Hoss's children enjoying their garden next to Auschwitz

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Something New

 

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

“SLEEPERS AWAKE” by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet, $28.53); “SPINDRIFT – New and selected poems” by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, $NZ40); “SOME BIRD” by Gail Ingram (Sudden Valley Press, $NZ30) ; "RESIDUAL GLEAM - Selected Poems & Translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “TIGERS OF THE MIND” by Michael Morrissey (Aries Press, $NZ25)

Bristol-born but now resident of Glasgow and teacher at the University of St Andrews, 38-year-old Oliver (“Oli”) Hazzard made his name as a poet with Between Two Windows (2012) and Blotter (2018). Hazzard is decidedly on the avant-garde side of poetry, his verse often being cryptic or opaque and in many cases requiring great scrutiny of the reader before it is understood. Only rarely does the transparent break through, but when it does it has much to say. Hazzard’s new collection Sleepers Awake is as much concerned with sound as with meaning, with a propensity for alliteration – indeed much of it would play best as live performance rather than as words on the page. Sound is crucial.

 

The first section of Sleepers Awake is the 70-pages-long “Progress Real and Imagined” which is best understood as a quest for personal identity but which is also concerned with the value of poetry itself. There are moments of odd verbal connections, such as “ ‘Morning plaza’ / wet grass / glass / recycling / overflow.” There are retreats into popular infantilism, such as “Reading Peppa Pig / upside down / difficulty bludgeons / me as memorable / my own performance / of exhaustion / memorable”. There are hip sparks of fatalism when  “accidents and poetry / descend directly from the air”. Occasionally, too, there are moments when the poet comes near to being disgusted by his own metier, speaking of  “Poetry without and ideas in it / brimming with a real stupidity”. And is he referring to poetry or philosophy when he speaks of “Something so complicated you’ll never be able to understand even the basic terms involved / Something so simple you understood it a long time ago, without even noticing.”? At times in this 70-page sequence, he appears to give up on his self-analysis as “sometimes I will simply list basic queries / about the nature of my personality / in order to allow for the possibility that it exists”

For much of this section, Hazzard prefers to present his poetry on the page in the form of slim, scattered verses, but as he nears his goal he turns to blocks of prose. He finally embraces a mental coalition with reality, even if reality is both complex and annoying.  

The second section of Sleepers Awake is a collection of individual poems which begin with “Postpositivity in Spring”, again a quest for identity while dealing with mundane physical reality. The poem “Living etc.” is a bravura example of Hazzard’s hard-blocked connection with sound first. Take on the poem’s staccato alliteration thus: “Luke Luck flocks back to the joke tent or perhaps  palace / pacing the loud loneliness, suddenly intimate, / intricate with internal noise… / clerihew cares.” Many of Hazzard’s poems are presented as puzzles, conundrum in the context of clashing sound. Also, Hazzard is not an activist in the current sense of somebody promoting a particular cause.  Far from being an ideological call to arms of some sort, the title poem “Sleepers Awake” (the title taken from a Lutheran hymn) is literally an account of waking up on a snowy winter day in Glasgow and taking in the changing moods as the snow slowly retreats and the sun begins to dominate. Sleepers awake to the day.

In similar style is the poem “May Face”, which certainly depicts a physical scene. I quote it here in full:

This fact of maximum resistance
looking into people’s houses in the evening, early summer
the steeply receding strata of the rooms which have

 factored us in already though unaware, out in the mesh of analytical errata
except as a gnome Q-team listlessly
plugging in and out of public sockets: suck it up
the cold force of certain tags, cabinets, pets, melodies
or suck it up, the Clyde turning turtle
in its inlet, in blue and pink and brown turning
pink and brown and blue.

In this case however, “May Face” is a Clyde-side scene at a certain time of day, but it does become lost in recherche vocabulary (“analytical errata” etc.) and makes allusions difficult for the reader to de-code. Standing as he does on a verbal tight-rope, Hazzard is often weighed down by sound. His “Composed at Erdberg” relates melancholy to moods to music.

The third and final section of Sleepers Awake is a 16-part sequence called “Incunabulum”, printed sideways to accommodate the long lines (I would almost call them Alexandrines ) which is as much concerned with self-analysis as with the fading impact of classical literature.

I would advise readers that, for all its quirky merits, Sleepers Awake is a very challenging piece of work, not for the faint-hearted or those who do not have the patience to unravel its meaning.

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In terms of prosody and approach, Bob Orr is the antithesis of the avant-garde, cryptic Oli Hazzard. Orr’s poems are lucid, usually straightforward in their presentation and setting no traps for the unwary. They also show a delight in people and clearly-presented urban scenes, landscapes and especially seascapes. Spindrift is subtitled New and Selected Poems for good reason. Spindrift selects from the ten collections that Orr has had published since the 1970s, and ends with 36 poems hitherto unpublished. In effect, it is a summary of all Orr’s best work.

Most of Orr’s poems are brief. Only occasionally does he expand into longer developed poems such as bohemian youth that is recalled in “Fairfield Bridge” and “Roads to Reinga”; or in “River”, one of his longer poems, which combines a grand view if the Earth’s tectonics with the suffering of being inside in a hospital; or in his nod to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with his discursive poem “Hapuakohe”.

The typical Orr poem sits stark and lean on the page. To take an example from Orr’s early work “The old road” reads in toto “When you wake / in the deadly calm / of somewhere around 3 a.m. / the dreams will quickly leave you. / The street is like a road / across the moon. You hear lions / begin to roar in Auckland Zoo. / Across your bedroom wall / a tropical plant / has cast / the huge shadow of a continent.” Later in his career, he could strip things right down, as in “Orkney poet” which reads in full “Your meagre / hard-won harvest / from stony sea-girt acres / barely put food on the table - / bequeathed a banquet to the world.” And nearer the present time there is this pithy account of a marriage called “Harold and Gladys” thus “He made it / back / from a war / that left no tree unsplintered / to marry / his sweetheart / in Morrinsville / her with / acorn / coloured / hair.”

            Brief, direct statements are Orr’s forte. In this respect he has the skill of an artist who knows how to leave  unnecessary things out. Often his work reads like slightly-expanded haiku, and real haiku turn up in the later sequences “Buddha chopping wood”  and “Buddha burning firewood”. Orr’s sharp eye scans not only the sea but the lives of workers; Auckland in terms of  Freeman’s Bay, Ponsonby, the Chelsea sugar works and the more shady streets; elegies for, or allusions to, poets like Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and others. Only occasionally does he go for satire as in “When Muldoon was king” although there are oodles of irony in his poem “Neal Cassady’s car”. Pohutukawa are frequently used as a motif ; there are poems about ancestry and in his more recent poetry more awareness of Maori lore and language. But more than anything there is the sea – inevitable given that for many years Orr was a fisherman and sailor. There are many poems about walking on the shore and imagining sea vistas; much about the fisher folk and their boats; comparisons of the sea around New Zealand with classical voyages in [Greek] mythology and much else.

            Breath in the salty sea breezes! This is a very accessible collection which a wide circle of poetry readers will enjoy.

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Men and boys have often denigrated or belittled women and girls by calling them  insulting names. Often these insults are related to ornithology, as in “bird”, “chick” etc. Gail Ingram’s Some Bird is, among other things, a work of feminism and she is intent on pushing back against such flippant insults. Her work is divided into five sections, each section reflecting an age in a woman’s growing life, with each stage also being labelled with a bird name, thus “shining cuckoo” [childhood], “chicky babe” [puberty], “lovebird” [teenager and early adult], “house sparrow” [married with offspring] and “crow” [maturity and old age]. In her poem “Language lesson for young girls 1979” she presents the way female stereotypes are reinforced by casual language from the classroom onwards : “hey chick / let the little lamb play with the dolly / she’s a tom-boy plays rugby / so butch, a lezo (behind hands) / come on, show us a little skirt, love / but don’t wear that dress – what a floozy / words you know for whore? / slut / tart / hussy / hooker oh-la-la / bit o’ crumpet on the side psst…” and so on with other insults such as “bitch”, “spinster”, “old maid”, “sex-kitten”, “battle axe”, “old biddy”, “bag”, “old hag” etc. etc. Her opening poem “Me Too” makes a similar statement.

Some Bird traces the life of a woman with a very clear narrative.

“Shining cuckoo” A woman goes through the pains of childbirth but her baby is immediately taken from her. This is because she’s unmarried, it’s 1965, unmarried mothers are frowned upon, and her baby is given up for adoption. The biological mother is cut out of the story. The baby is adopted because another [married] woman, who already has children, has just had a miscarriage and the adopted baby is her consolation. Gail Ingram suggests the sorrow involved it this – the little girl growing up and understanding that she is adopted, that she is somehow different from her siblings, that she will never know her biological mother and that she is in effect the “cuckoo” in the nest… and the poet is enraged that it is the [adoptive] father whose family name appears on the girl’s birth certificate.

“Chicky baby” deals with the girl’s experience in puberty and teenagerhood, where, in pairing up, girls have to conform to boy’s expectations – so the years of having to put on makeup, smooching with little real pleasure, being taken on dangerous joy-rides with boys trying to show off in their cars… and when the time comes for her to be sent to a university hall of residence, the only advice her [adopted] father can give her is “Don’t get pregnant.” So to the days when she’s harassed or unwillingly fondled by boys of her age in residence or in public transport.

“Love bird” has her falling in love with a guy, and getting married… though the poem “Love-match”, about the wedding, has a sardonic undertone. And a baby is born, which changes everything.

“House sparrow” is subtitled “in which the sparrow fluffs up and becomes a mother”. Her motherhood has moments of worry and fright, as in the poem “Take care of Stu” where she panics when her child seems to have disappeared. She is always under scrutiny with judgements about how “good” she is as a mother and how well she is bringing up her children. More than anything, though, there is the fact that she has to do all the caring of the children. The two poems “The Provider” and “That thing between us” are most acute about this – the husband takes it for granted that he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of child-care. … and the marriage can’t last, even if the breakup is a long time coming. Indeed they are almost up to middle-age. The poem “Family Trust meeting” says a firm goodbye to the way she, in younger years, admired flashy young men playing rock music. She’s her own person…

Not that older age (“Crow”) is necessarily easy. The poem “Menopause XIII” suggests why. She broods on the way older independent women were once tortured or burnt as witches. She’s not entirely happy with the way feminism has gone since the 1970s (see the poem “Your natural mother marched in 1973”). In short, she is aware that nothing can be certain in the interactions of women and men.

I am guessing that some of the narrative presented here is drawn from the poet’s personal experience, but that is only a guess and I have no way of verifying it. Besides, the point of the poetry is what is on the page, not in extraneous guesses. Even more to the point, Gail Ingram is not addressing only the matter of a woman’s life. Some Bird has poems focused elsewhere. “Pakeha parent” is a Maori woman worried by the loss of Maori culture. “The Wading Bird” looks at the degradation of the natural environment. And “I am Pakeha” is half protest against colonisation but also half awareness of being pakeha.

Nevertheless, it is the feminist strain that dominates, presented clearly and forcefully. It’s bracing to read something as clearly articulated.

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            Roger Hickins’s Residual Gleam – Selected poems & Translations gives us first Hickin’s own experiences and observations, and then, in the Translations section, his translations from the Spanish of poems written by nine South American poets.

First, then, there come his poems recalling his childhood (in “Invercargill 1950”) with memories in a “Workshop Song” and the acute lines “The south wind / blew its cold salty breath in my face. / The south wind sings wild hymns / in the macrocarpas”. Then his observation of an ageing bird “Killing the Rooster” where “Once he was the boss, / with jaunty patriarchal strut, / his raucous sickle voice reaped stars at dawn. / Now he’s just the extra rooster / ousted by his son”… and how well Hickin observes the old rooster before he gets the inevitable chop. [Brilliant are those lines that I’ve underlined!] Following are acute poems recalling Hickin’s late-teenager and early-twenties self as he charts the hitchhiking he did, the people he met on the roads, and later the boozing in the pubs and eccentric or colourful boozers. He also has the good taste to salute the Jazz greats Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk. Memories can also be for those who are lost. Hickin’s “A beach poem for my mother” does not literally address his mother until the last stanza, which has a particularly haunting effect. It reads “The godwits have left for Alaska / Flax flowers darken beyond the dunes / Boats on the estuary / are pitching in the tidal rip / It’s late – you hear your mother / calling you home.” In a number of poems Hickin addresses Spain, which he has visited, and make references to Russian literature. The most engaging poem here is “After Pushkin” which declares “Happiness of course is / unattainable, but in the search / for peace and freedom you might / just head for somewhere else / a long way from gossip / debt, frivolity / track down / a heavenly shack where you  / can breath and work and slurp / good mussel soup.” Wise words for the thoughtful hermit. And there are further salutes to other literary or artistic people he has known.

And what of the poems translated from the Spanish? I do not speak Spanish, so in writing of the 15 poems by 9 South American poets I have to consider them as Hickin’s versions of the original poems and accept them that way. They certainly speak of other countries’ preoccupations  - A hungry pion house. Jesus on the cross and pain. Cockroaches. The confusion of being in distant country and not really understanding the accepted mores there.  A man ineptly trying to woo a woman in a bar. Occasionally back-handed nods to religion. The translations are capped with a long poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Nostalgia for Venice”, which is literally about that as he recalls his visits to Venice as it was decades ago.

This collection is varied, interesting, very readable, and deftly moving among many different moods.

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I tiptoed carefully into Michael Morrissey’s latest collection Tigers of the Mind. Morrissey is now over 80 years old and is well-known to New Zealand readers of poetry. His output is prolific and Tigers of the Mind is his 14^th collection. His poetry is often bizarre, making huge imaginative leaps. Morrissey has told his public that he has periodically suffered from psychiatric disorders. Taming the Tiger, published in 2011, was his very candid autobiographic account of a severe bi-polar condition which led him to spend time in a psychiatric ward. Yet the experience has fuelled some of his best later work.

In Tigers of the Mind, one of the stand-out poems is “Defiant View from the Fifth Level of a Psychiatric Ward”, wherein he presents himself looking out the window at an Auckland vista. The view is “defiant” because the viewer, aware of his disordered condition, nevertheless sees the validity of the images his fevered mind is conjuring up, giving strangely impressive, almost psychedelic, views of “Trees, acacia-like, stripped of lion blood, / incapable of movements as toeless monkeys… Erudite moon, flawlessly memorious, / slings aside a sheeny leopard with pitchy alphabets….” Later, in the poem “Falling in Love, Quite Easily” he remarks “Like the romantics, I fell in love / with melancholia. Depression was / at arm’s length, poetry permitted, / a different way of life, feasible.”

It is hard to avoid such terms as Surrealist or even Dadaist in reading some of Morrissey’s work, conjuring up images that might have been created by Salvador Dali. “Quintessence of Green” gives an apocalyptic view of the Earth ruined while cockroaches prevail. A sequence dedicated to the moon plays with all the power, mystery and fear of the moon. [And was the poet consciously recalling that luna is related to lunatic?]. And then there are poems dedicated to aliens and strange beasts, with the impressive “Poem for a Large Rodent” becoming a conversation between a biologist and a giant rat living in a volcano. But while we sometimes reach into the depths of Dada, we are also sometimes given admissions of cold reality. The poem “Rebirth of Wonder” is the prize of this train of thought. Two guys think that dropping acid will make them enlightened and say something momentous while their girlfriends scribble down their words. Result? Nothing amazing. They haven’t said anything coherent.

Morrissey has his moments of reportage, including his very sad memories of his upbringing in straitened circumstances in Camp Bunn (a shelter for those without adequate housing after the Second World War). He implies that his mother went mad and his father took to drink. And in the gathering labelled “Drunken Impulse”, the whole idea of the uncertainty of life is mooted. There is an oddly deadpan account of the famous painting “Mona Lisa with a Moko”. With the moko added to da Vinci’s work, it is in its own way another modification of the Mona Lisa like the ones the Dadaists and surrealists had fun with.

One wonderfully lucid poem “Making Breakfast” reads in full thus “Through the thin wall I hear my wife chopping fruit / as rhythmically as the piston on the steam ferry. / Each sound has its own precision / delicate but unwavering / surgical as a lobotomist’s knife. / Her kitchen blade slices apple / cuts through pineapple / fillets watermelon / deals painless death to passionfruit. / A banana stands no chance. / It may sound like fruit is being cut / but really it’s the sound of love.” He follows this with a brace of  descriptive poems about Auckland weather, and then deals with  “Coronavirus” and “That Time Again”, both presented in melancholy form as a deserted playground represents the empty streets when the pandemic was doing its worst.

As you can see, it is a very diverse collection of poems, and very engaging to read.