Something New

 

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

“HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY” by Nicholas Sheppard (Eunoia Publishing, $NZ35);  “OCTAVIAN’S LIGHT” by Don E McGregor (Stargull Publishing, $NZ39.99); “MAKTUB” by Paulo Coelho (Harper One publishing, $NZ35)                                         

            This posting, I am bombarding you with three books that have been around for a few months. 

                                       

I admit to a certain negligence when I come to Nicholas Sheppard’s How to Disappear Completely. It was published in September of last year – that is, a little over eight months ago – but for various reasons, too tiresome to report, I was not able to read it until very recently.

Nicholas Sheppard is American by birth and upbringing, but now resident in New Zealand. This novel (his second) is set in America and deals with a very American situation – the alienation of young men who turn to lethal violence.

For whatever reason (you can work it out for yourself) the main protagonist of How to Disappear Completely is not given a name until the very last page when we learn that his name is Jack, so Jack I will call him.  Jack’s father is largely absent, divorced from Jack’s mother. As the years go by Jack’s mother becomes more and more stricken with chronic fatigue syndrome. She requires much care. Jack feels he is stuck in her deadening home. As a youngster, Jack seems precocious in the way he speaks, but he answers questions in an off-beat way. At high-school he plays with other teenaged boys, but he is seen as a weakling and he is generally humiliated. He retreats into his home and as he gets older he hides in the basement sitting in front of his computer, listening to grunge or thrasher music, watching more and more lurid pornography, and reading the likes of Nietzsche. On come the ideas of natural dominance over “weaker” and redundant people and in no time he’s mentally siding with white supremacists and admiring Nazis. On top of that he has no luck in finding a girlfriend. He pines for a girl called Katie, but at very best she is polite to him. She has no other interest in him. So he’s a loner, he’s loaded with self-pity, he feels he’s unfairly victimised and after dropping out from college his angst gets worse. He gets a gun.

You can see where this is going.

There is, however, another protagonist, taking up almost as much space as Jack. This is the dedicated social worker Clayton who has a very large group of deprived or impoverished people to deal with. Taking us away from the main focus of the novel we are given in detail some of Clayton’s clients. Among them are an Hispanic girl who has been trafficked for sex and is trying to avoid sinking back into prostitution; some drug addicts; a lonely old woman who wants company; and Jack’s chronically sick mother. Clayton is Black. Jack shouts at Clayton and wants him out of the house. Clayton is the only character who intuits where Jack’s ideas are taking him, but Jack bars Clayton from giving him advice. Though the character of Clayton is credible, the detailed accounts of his clients often seem a distraction from the central idea of the novel. Perhaps, though, there is some merit in what we are told about Clayton’s domestic life. He is married to Harriett. She is upset that she has not been given a position in a company that she had aimed for. (It is not said that this was because she is Black, but it is implied.) Despite the difficult jobs Clayton and Harriett have to deal with, however, they stick together and the last we see of them in the novel is almost idyllic. Could  Nicholas Sheppard be suggesting that a couple who look after each other and stay with each other, in spite of hardships, is much healthier than the life of a loner who believes he is superior to everybody? Possibly.

Recently I read a review of a different novel, which the reviewer said relied too much on “didactic exposition”. Sheppard’s prose is generally clear, but I do think there is too much “didactic exposition” when he tells us about the nature of the “dark web”; and the places on- line that could lead young men to adopt destructive ideologies; and the statistics of suicide in America; and the feminism taught in college that enrages Jack; and in fact many things that are more journalism than the psychological case that is the novel’s core.

I appreciate Nicholas Sheppard’s aim in writing this novel – a warning of how lethal ideas can be hatched – but it does sometimes come near to preaching.

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

As I’ve said more than once on this blog, I have no prejudice against yarns when they are told well. A good yarn keeps readers turning the page and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are yarns and there are yarns, and a yarn can sometimes go off the track.

Don E McGregor’s Octavian’s Light is essentially an historical yarn, and a pretty long one – 477 large pages to be precise. The story spans from 56BC to 15AD, tracking the rise of Julius Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, who eventually becomes the Emperor Augustus. This is seen and reported to us by a Latinised Gaul called Riccar, with other voices sometimes taking over – mainly Riccar’s immediate family, but especially his wife Mischella. In one chapter (Chapter 67) Augustus himself narrates. The fictional Riccar is of course interested not only in the fortunes of Octavian-Augustus but also in the fortunes of his family – a lost mother, his wife, his children, and those servants he acquires. Yes, there is a sort of happy ending for him in the last pages, but not before some severe family tragedies. If you want basic Roman history and familiar set pieces, this might be for you. As expected in this genre of yarn, there are parades as victorious Roman soldiers march through Rome; a couple of circuses where wretched criminals or slaves are torn apart by wild animals; a Roman military camp being set up in a campaign; the slave market; battles etc. etc. It’s a very familiar mix.

But, for this reader at any rate, there are many problems with this novel.

First there is the implausible nature of the leading character, Riccar, who in the end comes across as a fantasy figure rather than as a real person from ancient days. Riccar, so the tale goes, is a guttersnipe who happens to be an artistic genius. He can remember things exactly and can draw them exactly, and when he does portraits he can virtually read the soul of the person being portrayed. Verily Don E McGregor presents him as if he were a painter from centuries later in the Renaissance. Octavian picks Riccar to be in his inner circle, believing Riccar can tell him things about his possible rivals simply by viewing them. He takes Riccar with him on his campaigns, so in effect Riccar becomes the equivalent of a modern certified journalist – or photographer. The real reason the author puts Riccar in Octavian’s inner circle, however, is the easy way to have a narrator who is able to observe all the budding manoeuvres of the growing Octavian. Many other authors of historical novels have used this technique. In fairness to the author, though, I note that the depiction of Octavian-Augustus in this novel is reasonably accurate. He is the young thug who uses violence as he pushes his way into power, but who then becomes relatively benign when he has disposed of most of his rivals and has supreme rule over an empire. Even so, the benevolence Octavian sprinkles over Riccar’s family seems over the top and unlikely.

Regrettably too, there are insinuated modern sentiments – that is, unlikely things that are supposedly said by people approximately 2000 years ago. This is a fatal trap for novelists who attempt to fictionalise the past. The historical facts (wars, famines, political manoeuvres) can be depicted credibly, but too many writers of historical novels then proceed to assume that people hundreds of hundreds of years ago thought just as we do – or, more often, historical novels will insert one major character who thinks just as we do. They fail to get into the soul of another era and how people then thought. Thus we have Riccar and his wife Mischella a number of times saying how bad colonisation is (i.e. the spread of the Roman Empire). They may be Gauls resenting the Roman capture of Gaul… but as for colonialism in general?? The characterisation is too pat, too flat.

Finally, there is what I can only call “History Lite” – the way we are neatly fed historical events, almost like bulletins. Most often it is the centurion Arman, a sort of bodyguard for Riccar and his family, who neatly gives us history lessons on Rome and its rulers; or he gives lessons on current affairs such as the assassination of Julius Caesar. Riccar himself is present at some momentous events involving Octavian, but the big historical events read like a fairly elementary history.

If you are not too well versed in Roman history, some of this long tale will be revealing and enjoyable – but watch out for the matter-of-fact prose.

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     Eight years ago on this blog, I tore apart Paulo Coelho’s novel The Spy, about Mata Hari. I saw it as a naïve novel pandering to current tastes. However, I knew that the Brazilian author has a huge number of fans around the world – so I thought it was only decent to take a look as his most recent book to prove if I had judged his work too harshly. Maybe there was something worthwhile in his work after all.

            As it happens, his most recent work to be published in the English language is Maktub … but it turns out to be a work that was first published in the Portuguese language thirty years ago, in 1994. More important, it is not a narrative  novel. It is a collection of brief anecdotes which originally appeared in a newspaper column. Coelho is in the business of being “inspirational”. Most of his (very) short anecdotes are conversations between a “master” and a “disciple”;  or they are tales told by a wise monk to a wavering believer. The imagery is very Catholic, with angels frequently appearing to set thing straight and proving that God is right, and many references to the Virgin Mary. Nearly all the anecdotes have a neat conclusion like an Aesop’s fable.

            I’m not hostile to religious tales, but in the inevitability of each story, Maktub does become repetitive. This little book does have wide margins, padding out the book. There is a market for this sort of thing, so I hope they enjoy it..

 

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 FIVE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

 

                                               F. Scott Fitzgerald in his last years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the best part of nine years toiling over his last completed novel Tender is the Night. It was eventually published in 1934. The 1930s were not a good time for Fitzgerald. It was harder for him to make money by dashing off short stories for popular magazines, he had to pay hefty bills to cover his wife Zelda’s care in psychiatric hospitals and he was, more than ever, mired in alcoholism. He bit the bullet and went to Hollywood, signing on as a writer which meant writing and re-writing film scenarios, and polishing up other writers’ dialogue, for more than one studio. Within a few years he understood fully how the Hollywood studio system worked.  This was the subject of his last, and incomplete, novel The Last Tycoon. Surprisingly, this time he wrote relatively quickly. Although he had discussed his proposed novel with friends for a couple of years, he began writing the novel in late 1939, but he died in December 1940 when he was only 44. The novel was far from finished. There were 17 "episodes" which had more-or-less been completed but had not yet been turned into chapters -  but Fitzgerald had scribbled notes planning a total of 31 "episodes". However, Fitzgerald left behind many notes on how the rest of the story was supposed to develop, and people he knew were able to recall what he told them about the shape the novel would take. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend the novelist and critic Edmund Wilson prepared the unfinished novel for publication, turning the 17 "episodes" into six chapters… and at the end of it, Wilson appended a number of pages giving an outline of how the novel was meant to develop and end. The Last Tycoon was published in that form in 1941 (in a kind of omnibus together with The Great Gatsby and some of Fitzgerald’s short stories). Years later, in 1993, the Fitzgerald scholar Matthew  J. Bruccoli criticsed a number of things about Wilson's version and produced a different edition of the unfinished novel, calling it The Love of the Last Tycoon - A Western, which had apparently been the name Fitzgerald had intended. [The "Western" referred to the West Coast - California - where the story took place.] But the name The Last Tycoon has stuck and Edmund Wilson's version is the one that is still widely read. [I consulted Bruccoli's Cambridge edition of the novel while preparing this review.]

                                    The unfinished novel as it was first presented to the public.
 

I’ll skip one of my laborious synopses, which by now are probably making you grit your teeth, and I will explain the bare basics of what The Last Tycoon is about. Monroe Stahr is the chief producer of a Hollywood studio, in charge of supervising and editing film scripts, judging the work of actors, accepting or not accepting talent, watching the rushes [the day’s filmed work] and deciding whether they will or not be used in the finished film. He is regarded as some sort of genius, especially as he is a relatively young man.  The boss of the studio is Pat Brady, an authoritarian man mainly interested in the bottom line. Gradually, in the novel as it now stands, tensions grow between Monroe Stahr and Pat Brady concerning industrial matters and how much they should let labour unions get involved in their studio. Pat Brady is also concerned that, for the reputation of the studio, Monroe Stahr sometimes produces “prestige” films that don’t make a profit. So there’s one major strand in the novel. But equally important is Monroe Stahr’s love-life… or attempted love life. Though Stahr is well into his thirties, Brady’s daughter Cecilia Brady, who is little more than a teenager, has a crush on Stahr and sometimes pesters him. Stahr is of course polite to her and admires her wit, but he is not attracted to her. He still pines for his deceased wife, the film star Minna Davis. Then, by chance, he sees a young woman who is the splitting of his late wife. She is Kathleen Moore, Irish-born, English raised. He is at once obsessed with her. He follows her. He woos her. He seduces her. He sees her as the love of his life. But there is a catch. She has cohabited with other men before, and she is committed to marrying somebody else.

And at once you can see the familiar trope that appears in most of Fitzgerald’s novels. Romantic man pines for unattainable woman – like all the young women in This Side of Paradise; like the damaged Carole in Tender is the Night; and most obviously like Daisy in The Great Gatsby.  Monroe Stahr wants to bring back someone [his wife] from the past, just as Gatsby wants to bring Daisy back from the past. It never works.

[ For the record, and stepping outside the uncompleted novel as it is, I note that Fitzgerald’s surviving notes, as curated by Edmund Wilson and Mathew J. Bruccoli, suggest that the rest of the novel was going to have Monroe Stahr resuming his affair with Kathleen Moore even though she is recently married. Pat Brady finds ways to blackmail Monroe Stahr and even hires mobsters to kill him. Hearing about this Stahr hires his own mobsters to kill Brady first. But then Stahr feels remorse and wants to call off his thugs. Unfortunately Stahr dies in a plane crash before he can send the word. So both Brady and Stahr die… and Fitzgerald intended to write a last chapter in which Hollywood stages, hypocritically, a grand funeral for Stahr with speakers saying what a wonderful man Stahr was, even though many of them hated his guts. Stahr was “the last tycoon” because he was that last producer to supervise nearly every craft in a movie studio. After he was gone, films were concocted by committees… at least that is the novel’s perspective. ]

 

                                                            Irving Thalberg in his prime

One very obvious thing about The Last Tycoon as we have it is that it is in part a roman a clef. Many characters are based on real people, and this was understood immediately by sophisticated readers when the novel was first published. Monroe Stahr was very obviously based on Irving Thalberg, the producer of many films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M.G.M.). He was sometimes called “the boy wonder” because he took on major positions in the studio in the early 1920s when he was only 21. He died in 1936 age 37, three years before Fitzgerald  wrote his novel. In the novel, once or twice Monroe Stahr is called “the boy wonder”. Similarly Pat Brady was based on the domineering boss of M.G.M. Louis B. Mayer. It is interesting that Fitzgerald gave this character an Irish name when Mayer, like Thalberg, was Jewish, as indeed were most of Hollywood’s executives. But Pat Brady could be seen as an amalgam of Mayer and Mayer's second-in-command, the Irish Eddie Mannix, who was notorious as M.G.M's "fixer" who was able to bribe police when he was covering up some scandal related to the studio. Some minor figures at M.G.M. were also used by Fitzgerald who knew his way around the studio. The English playwright Boxley seems based on Aldous Huxley and very occasionally there are, in passing, references to real people like the actress Claudette Colbert and the playwright Sidney Howard. It also seems certain that Kathleen Moore, coming from England, was inspired by the English gossip-columnist Sheilah Graham, who was Fitzgerald’s mistress in his last years.

Another clear thing is that even the chapters or "episodes" Fitzgerald completed are really still in draft form. Most obviously the novel begins with Cecilia Brady as the first-person narrator for all of Chapter 1. But Fitzgerald ignores her as a narrator for much of the novel which is presented in the third-person. Then there is an awkward moment in Chapter 5 where we are suddenly told “This is Cecilia taking up the narrative in person.” This is even more awkward than the narration of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, where he sometimes clearly hasn’t witnessed events he reports. I’m sure that Fitzgerald would have re-written this if he had lived to complete the novel.  As the truncated novel stands, too, there are often [in the Wilson version] over-long chapters, especially Chapter 5, which tries to cram in too much information.

  What do I take away from the novel as it is? First, it gives a very vivid and believable image of the old Hollywood studio system. It is especially in Chapters 3 and 4 that we see the ways Stahr proves his skill and finesse in dealing with people on the payroll. Under the stress of having to turn out one completed film every ten days, he has to show the hired English writer Boxley how to write a film script as opposed to the stage-plays that Boxley is used to writing; he has to give good cheer to an old vaudevillian who is way past his comic days; he has to calm down a neurotic leading man who fears that he has become impotent; he gets a director and script-writers to completely re-write and re-shoot a film that is nearly finished; and he is always aware of how he must stay in the bounds of the Hays Code (the self-censoring code for movie studios). This is all in one day, including the hours he spends reading and revising scenarios and scripts. Then he takes off one director from a project and brings in a new one; he advises electricians on how sets should be lighted; he has to sooth a husband-and-wife writing couple who are outraged that other writers are also working on the same story that they thought was uniquely theirs; and he boosts the ego of a film-star who was falsely reported as losing his sight. There is the jocular side of things, especially in Chapter 5 where Cecilia Brady believes she’s in love with Stahr, but consciously banters with a scriptwriter all the clichés about love that appear in the movies. And of course there is also the seedy side of the Hollywood of yore. Young Cecilia Brady bursts into her father’s office only to find that he is making use of a naked woman he has called in. Elsewhere there is mention of the casting couch. Harvey Weinstein did not invent the sexual harassment of women in the movie industry. There is also the sinister side of Hollywood. Racketeers look for their cut, and in Chapter 6 we have Monroe Stahr having to deal with Brimmer, a Communist union man who wants to have all the studio’s writers made part of a union, anathema to the whole studio system.

But what of the parallel love story? Some of it is handled quite delicately, when Kathleen Moore repeatedly pushes Stahr away as he makes his advances. But she gradually succumbs and this sometimes happens in the old romantic moonlit scenes that Fitzgerald too often used in his earlier novels – at the half-built beachside house he has built for himself. This is all very romantic, but it rather fudges the fact that Kathleen is, as the novel stands, committed to somebody else and it is hard to see why she remains so long with Stahr.

Taken as a whole, The Last Tycoon reads well and has less of the grandiose style that Fitzgerald too often used – lush description, purple prose, things that some sentimental American readers take for great writing. This time, the prose is mainly pared back, to the point and realistic – apart from the sticky romantic moments..

IF this novel had been completed and revised by Fitzgerald, it could have been a masterpiece alongside The Great Gatsby. Unfortunately it wasn’t and it isn’t.

Cinematic footnote: On Youtube I was able to watch in full the 1976 film version of The Last Tycoon, which I first saw years ago. It was written by Harold Pinter, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring a young and perky Robert de Niro as Monroe Stahr. Much of the cast was made up of old-timers from old Hollywood – Robert Mitchum as Pat Brady, Ray Milland as his main member of the board, Tony Curtis as a neurotic actor etc. etc. Kathleen Moore was played by a very pretty but not very persuasive actress, Ingrid Boulting, whose film career didn’t go far. On the whole, it was faithful to the novel, but it bombed for two reasons. First, the two-hour-long film stuck with the incomplete novel’s ending, leaving audiences up in the air. Second, like the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby, it moved at a snail’s pace as if the film-makers believed they had to deal reverently with a classic book. There were further complaints that, in an otherwise coloured film, the black-and-white films that Monroe Stahr is shown watching in his screening room looked nothing like the way real 1930s films looked. Apparently in 2017 there was a TV serial of The Last Tycoon, but it seems to have sensationalised and moved far away from Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel.

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.

                                                   AUSSIE CELEBRATION

 

                               Flinders Street Station when nobody is around

A month or so ago, we were holidaying in Australia. We stayed for nine days in Melbourne after escaping from five days in Sydney and, in a comfortable hotel, we became rather lazy. We woke up one morning in what we regard as late (about 8 a.m.), and we remembered that it was ANZAC Day. This was something of which we usually take little notice. But out of curiosity, we decided to see what was going on in the streets. We walked up Flinders Street in the direction of the great railway station. There seemed to be nobody at all on this major street – one of the essential arteries of the city. Trams were not running and there was almost complete silence – apart from the odd elevated train rumbling overhead. We wondered if all the action had gone on around the city’s large war memorial, far from Flinders Street, after some sort of dawn ceremony.

We kept walking in comparative silence… and soon discovered how wrong our guess had been. There were huge crowds on the pavements at the intersection between Flinders Street Station and the Anglican cathedral. The noise was top volume. To get a view above the heads of the crowd, we stood on the upper stairs of the railway station’s entry. The parade that followed took two hours to pass by – representing the armed forces - soldiers, sailors and airmen; ground control; shore watchers; women’s auxiliaries; nurses; representatives of allies – Gurkhas, Greeks, members of the French Resistance, Indians – and a handful of cars carrying very old men [they’d now be in their nineties at least], incapable of walking, who had actually fought in the Second World War.  Approximately every third group that passed by was accompanied by a band. But we couldn’t help noticing how many bands that passed represented schools – teenagers and other young people. In fact, far more young people were a part of the parade than the military. ANZAC Day has become a festival in what almost amounts to a sacred day. In both Australia and New Zealand there has, in recent years, been a resurgence of interest in ANZAC Day after years in which younger people were indifferent to the day or even cynical about it. I keep remembering the Aussie playwright Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year, written in the late 1950s, which was the first Aussie play to debunk the Gallipoli legend. A good play, it set the pace for negative views about ANZAC in general – but attitudes have changed since then.

While we were watching the parade, we kept hearing loud rowdy shouts and yells coming from the upper storey of a pub directly across the road from Flinders Street Station. I asked a woman in the crowd what that meant. Was it some sort of drunken riot or protest against the parade? She informed me that it was a game of two-up, the old Aussie soldiers’ gambling game, which is now illegal with one exception – it can be played on ANZAC Day. It’s there to mollify men who still remember the rough games soldiers used to play – a sort of tradition, but also an excuse for a booze-up.

All in all, the whole parade was very impressive, certainly larger than any Kiwi ANZAC parade I’ve ever seen – but then Melbourne alone has about the same number of people as all of New Zealand and the parade represented all Melburnians.

As I said elsewhere on this blog, I’ve never taken seriously the origins of ANZAC. The 1915 Gallipoli campaign itself was pointless, poorly conceived, led by an inept general and in its defeat giving Turkish forces their only major victory in the First World War. The notion that the campaign made New Zealand and Australia grown-up nations is nonsense – soldiers went off to war at the call of England and still thought of themselves as part of the British Empire first and foremost. It was other things that made Australia and New Zealand mature as nations.

If ANZAC Day was only about remembering a botched campaign from long ago, I would ignore it. But seeing ANZAC Day as doing honour to the dead in all wars is something that I can respect – a lament for all the fallen but also some pride in success in some wars.

 FOOTNOTE: After I posted this article, an  historian who spcialises in military history reminded me that the Turks won another major victory in the First World War, the Battle of Kut. My apologies for overlooking this.

Something New

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

“A DIFFERENT LIGHT – First Photographs of Aotearoa” Edited by Catherine Hammond and Shaun Higgins (Auckland University Press, NZ$60)

 

 

In the 21^st century, we take photographs for granted. Casually walking down the street, we whip out our pocket-sized phones when we see something interesting and in a split-second we take a shot. In fact in a few seconds we can take dozens of shots. It’s as easy as opening the fridge, starting the car, using the micro-wave or pressing the remote to watch something on television. But it wasn’t always like his. For nearly all of the nineteenth century, after the two French scientists Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre invented the first photographs, taking a photograph was largely a laborious affair. You had to have heavy equipment, difficult to take out of the studio. The shutter of your camera worked slowly, making it hard to capture moving objects without producing blurred images. You had to mix your own chemicals, necessary for fixing the image. In fact to be a photographer you had to be either a professional photographer or a very dedicated (and wealthy) amateur.

A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa charts and celebrates 19^th century photographers in New Zealand. As an aesthetic object, A Different Light is a beautiful piece of work – a sturdy hardback, its cover olive-coloured; a lavish selection of images in the essays; and pages dedicated to images alone, often mounted as if they are from somebody’s album, with the ancient images framed in black. If you first wander through the many images, you soon get used to the sepia colours of most photos until, in photos taken near the end of the 19th century, photos suddenly become sturdily black-and-white. There were also a few attempts at producing colour in the form of painting details over photographs. You also have that alluring oddity where, in outdoor photographs, the skies are blank and empty, like a white sheet – because cameras could not then register the blue of the sky or the lighter clouds.

A Different Light is based on photographs from the collections of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Alexander Turnbull Library (Wellington) and the Hocken Collections (Dunedin), with a preface from each of these establishments. Angela Wanhalla’s introduction “Photography and Settlers Colonialism” points out that, apparently, the first photos taken in New Zealand were in 1848, not too long after the Treaty of Waitangi… but those photos are now lost. She is also aware that commercial photography then was often “aligned with propaganda”, with photographers producing images of happy immigrants settled in New Zealand or attractive landscapes to lure more immigrants. Soldiers and surveyors often photographed Maori and it is possible that there were some Maori photographers. Some Maori liked portraits, especially with the aim to keep the memory of those who had died. But others shunned photography completely. Te Whiti and Tohu Kakahi, the prophets of Parihaka, saw photography as the theft of one’s image.

Shaun Higgins’ essay “Chasing Wonder – Photography in the Auckland Province” is very interested in the way photography developed technically. The daguerreotype was the “first widely used photographic technology” and in 1848 two photographers were advertising  their services in Auckland. In 1850 an itinerate photographer advertised “Daguerreotypes and Talbotypes” referring to the form of photography pioneered by the English chemist Fox Talbot. Gradually the daguerreotype was overtaken by the “ambertype”. More as a cheap sideshow novelty was the tintype. Collodian silver print made for much more precise images. Only much later, in the 1880s and 1890s, did fast-moving shutters bring about the snap-shot, allowing for clear images of movement. Shaun Higgins notes some pioneers in the Auckland region, such as the Anglican clergyman John Kinder who was one of the first in New Zealand to produce stereoscopes – two photos together giving the effect of 3-D perspective. Higgins also notes that “In both Pakeha and Maori societies, photographs embody a tangible trace and essence of subject that are as integral to their cultural meaning as that of photographs as status in Victorian society.” Maori gradually embraced photography.

Paul Diamond’s essay “Once Were Traders – Reading Images of Maori in the ‘Urquhart Album’ ” begins with a gathering of about 24 Maori photographed by William Temple in the bush near Pokino (or Pokeno) before the British invasion of Waikato in 1862. Diamond’s basic thesis is that, before the invasion, Maori were thriving entrepreneurs, cultivating lands and selling fruit and vegetables – in effect provisioning Pakeha Auckland. This is a case of an historical image verifying what has long been suspected.

Anna Petersen’s essay “The Give and Take of Photographs – Early Views of Dunedin and Otago” examines in detail those, such as the photographers William Meluish and Joseph Perry, who set up their businesses in the 1850s. As always, many of their images were used to encourage immigration. Idealising old Dunedin there is a fascinating panoramic photo of central Dunedin in 1860, and then the same image as rendered in lithograph by the Illustrated London News, and inevitably glamourising the original. Once the Otago gold rush was on, there were propagandist photos suggesting that gold was for the picking in Gabrial’s Gully and besides, there were few Maori in the region to worry about. Picturesque photographic images were required for the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865 and it was Joseph Perry who was the man to shoot beaches and mountains and especially romantic places like Wanaka… though some of his images of mountains are downright daunting. Surprisingly, Anna Petersen mentions only in passing the well-known Burton Brothers whose photographs have often been cited in history books – but she sees their fame as coming mainly from their astute advertising.

Natalie Marshall’s essay “Camera Fiends and Snapshooters – Early Amateur Photography in Aotearoa” brings us up to the 1890s when it became easier to obtain a camera and easier to use one. She focuses on three Wellington amateurs, James Coutts Cranford, Henry Charles Clarke Wright, and Robina Nicol. Moving away from studio depictions of people, Cranford photographed people out of doors as often as indoors, presenting a more natural way of seeing people. There is a photo of his wife’s crinoline being battered by the Wellington wind, causing her crinoline to appear in the photo as a blur. Cranford’s photos were often shot, realistically, around his house and suburb in Thorndon. Henry Charles Clarke Wright was a very questionable man to say the least. Four times married, twice divorced, and rigidly opposed to women’s suffrage, as well as very questionably photographing bare-breasted wahine, Wright was nevertheless a very skilled photographer, chronicling early Marama and Newton, as well as bird reserves. His images are sharp and clear – one of the greatest photos in this volume being his image of a bullock-cart being driven through what would later be a suburb. And then there is  the most prolific of the Wellington amateur photographers, Robina Nicol, who mostly photo’d women, children, church activities and scenes of Wellington, Whanganui and Rotorua. Marshall’s essay sees Nicol as a very domestic photographer who saw the little things in ordinary life that others overlooked, and who [intentionally or not] made clear the niceties of social class in those days.

By the time Robina Nicol was shooting her photos, Kodak had come along with small cameras which were advertised with the slogan “You press the button – we do the rest.” People no longer had to mix their own chemicals and go through most of the difficulties of producing a photo. This was also in the age [the 1890s] where there were now split-second shutters, meaning that photos could catch very swift movements. Gone were the sylvan scenes where a waterfall [there is one in this book] where the falling water looks like blurred candyfloss rather than water. This was also the age when there were “snapshooters” who could wander around at random clicking away with their Kodaks.

 

There is much discussion in A Different Light about the stiffness of early studio photograph portraits – sitters has to keep still in a pose as shutters were slow. There is much discussion on how photography was accepted. But in the end, one is drawn to the ancient  photographs themselves. Look at the various versions of the portrait of the Maori King Tawhiao. Look at Bruno Hamel’s [first ever] photos of the Pink and White Terraces and then look at later photos of the same area after Tarawera exploded. Consider the meaning of a British soldier changing clothes with a Maori “scout”. Look at small settlements emerging, at empty farmlands, at [for their day] grand buildings … and much more that the eye can take in.

FOOTNOTE: At the time of writing this review, an exhibition of images related to A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa is on display in the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The exhibition will then be taken to other parts of the country, especially Wellington and Dunedin. Well worth seeing.

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 FOUR, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

                                             F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s

When I was half-way through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last completed novel Tender is the Night, I decided that the novel was upside-down and should have been reorganised. As with his second novel The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald divided Tender is the Night into three separate “Books”, but they were not presented in chronological order. The first “Book” introduces many characters whose relationships are not made clear. In the second “Book” we are given a long flashback to earlier years and only then do we discover who is related to whom and why one character behaves in an unbalanced way. Surely “Book” Two should have opened the novel? I am, of course, not the first reader to think this. Fitzgerald laboured long and hard over this novel. He began writing it in 1925, shortly after he’d had published The Great Gatsby, but he did not complete Tender is the Night until nine years later. (His growing alcoholism and his wife’s mental problems slowed him down.)  Tender is the Night was first published in 1934 in serial form, and then in book form. Some critics complained, as I have, that it was presented in the wrong order. Fitzgerald was stung by this criticism and undertook to re-arrange the order of the three “Books”; and some years later it was published in this re-arranged form. But this version was soon rejected. Tender is the Night is now universally published in its original, more authentic, version. And that is the version I have read.

                                      First cover design for "Tender is the Night", 1934
 

To short-circuit my synopsis, Tender is the Night is essentially about a psychiatrist, Dick Diver, married to one of his patients, Nicole (nee Warren), and how their marriage gradually falls apart.

Book One is set on the Riviera where, in the mid-1920s, wealthy American ex-patriates lounge, laze and share gossip. Dick Diver and Nicole are wealthy. The Divers sometimes throw lavish parties in their palatial Villa Diana and it is very chic to be invited. Indeed, as he is first  presented, Dick is a little like Jay Gatsby, the genial rich host but with a certain mystery about him. We are told “… to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience; people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in it effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world….” (Book 1, Chapter 6) We are also told that the Divers are intellectual people, but like to keep up with the latest trends, which would then have been hot jazz, dancing, travelling, swimming and gossiping: “Although the Divers were honestly apathetic to organised fashion, they were nevertheless too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat – Dick’s parties were all concerned with excitements, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.” (Book 1, Chapter 18) There are many diversions, much talk about travel, and some odd sightseeing, as when Dick Diver’s friend Abe North takes them to view former battlegrounds. The [First] World War was still a very painful recent memory and Abe says many cutting things about the futility of the war. (Book 1, Chapter 13)

Two things interrupt the apparent idyll of lazing and enjoying the sun. Nicole has some sort of breakdown – not specifically described. There is nasty gossip about her and, with an absurd idea of defending her honour, the soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban challenges one of the gossipers to a duel… which ends in farce. Nevertheless Tom Barban is obviously a great admirer of Nicole, virtually in love with her.

The other disruption comes when Rosemary Hoyt, an 18-year-old film star, turns up on the Riviera – with her protective, twice married, mother Mrs. Speers. Rosemary is beautiful. Given her age, she is of course partly naïve and partly scheming, but she moves from admiring the mature man Dick Diver to falling in love with him. Rosemary persuades her mother, Dick, Nicole, Abe North and his wife Mary to come on an excursion to Paris. The film studio she works for is based there. They bury themselves in fashionable parties and restaurants, but Rosemary also gets them to watch the film in which she starred. The film is called Daddy’s Girl. Without saying so, Dick has a queasy reaction to the film, much as he already has a crush on Rosemary. He notes in one sequence of the film “happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality.”  (Book 1, Chapter 16). This reaction is one of those moments which makes sense only when we get into Book 2. Rosemary so idolises Dick that she says she’s going to arrange a screen-test for him – but he turns the offer down. He tells Rosemary that he loves her, but he still loves Nicole as well. Nevertheless, he finds himself wandering around Paris on his own looking out for Rosemary. Rosemary calls upon him when a dead Negro is found in her room in a Parisian hotel. To remove any whiff of scandal, which could destroy Rosemary’s career, Dick helps to remove the corpse and leave it in a hallway. This bonds them more closely. [Incidentally, this is one of those moments when Dick – or more properly Fitzgerald – displays the casual racism that was then the norm. He says to a distraught Rosemary “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this – it’s only some nigger scrap.” (Book 1, Chapter 25)]

You will notice that Nicole Diver does not take a major part in the more memorable moments of Book 1 – but that seems to have been Fitzgerald’s strategy in holding back Nicole’s troubling situation so that it comes as more of a shock in Book 2.

Book Two begins with a major flashback to 1917. Dick Diver, a doctor of medicine, has studied psychiatry in Zurich, during the war, under the illustrious Doctor Dohmler. As a psychiatrist, he has met the very troubled patient Nicole Warren. In practical matters, she is often supported by her [perfectly sane] sister Baby Warren. What was the matter with Nicole? It was Doctor Dohmler who first diagnosed Nicole’s problem. Her father Devereux Warren had first brought her to the clinic, claiming that she had suddenly ceased to be the happy young woman she used to be and she is severely erratic in her behaviour. After much interrogation of the father, he admits that he had sexually abused her when she was a child. This is what at last makes understandable Dick Diver’s comment on the film as having "a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality”. Doctor Dohmler concludes that this incest has pushed Nicole into schizophrenia… and Dick Diver becomes her therapist. Nicole Warren, when under therapy, writes frequently to Dick Diver, and in one letter she expresses the truth about herself when she writes “I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion. I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest. Here they lie in their bath tubs and sing Play in Your Own Backyard as if I had my backyard to play in or any hope which I can find by looking either backward or forward.” (Book 2, Chapter 2) She is aware of her irrational moods.

Yet, while caring for Nicole, Dick also has his own ambitions and articulates his own self-analysis “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” (Book 2, Chapter 4) He also wants money and status. His colleague Franz Gregorovius is also focused on money.

It is clear that Dick becomes more and more attracted to Nicole, and Franz connects Dick with Doctor Dohmler to work out the ethics of getting mentally too close to a psychiatric patient  - but despite all the cautions, Dick admits that he is in love with Nicole. Nicole has her artistic aspirations. Speaking to Dick she says “I hope you don’t think that I am only interested in ragtime. I practise every day  - the last few months I’ve been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times – music and drawing… I’d like to draw you just the way you are now.” (Book 2, Chapter 7)

Nicole’s wealthy family scrutinise him and think he is acceptable. Fitzgerald now moves forward a number of years. Dick and Nicole are married. We get (Book 2, Chapter 10) a fragmented account of how they travel around Europe on long, luxurious holidays. And Dick (Book 2, Chapter 12) reaches a moment when he understands how much he depends on his wife’s family for money, regardless of how well he is working as a psychiatrist. Is he venal? Has he married for money without admitting it to himself? His colleague Franz Gregorovius is certainly a materialist who tries to entice Dick into getting money from his wife’s family to set up their own clinic. Dick is now almost flippant in the way he addresses his patients when doing his rounds. (Book 2, Chapter 14)… and by this stage, the novel has brought us up to where we were at the end of Book 1.

Dick and Nicole now have two young children, charmlessly called Lanier and Topsy, but Nicole is still having her extreme moments. Once she drives the family car so dangerously that it is clear she is trying to kill herself and the rest of the family on board. The driver’s wheel has to be wrenched from her to prevent catastrophe. Dick is gradually more alienated from her, his mood being made more sombre when he has to go to America for his father’s funeral. Five years have gone by since he last met the film actress Rosemary. He meets her again and attempts to re-ignite their old flame. They even sleep together and do the deed. But Rosemary by now has been around and had other lovers, and clearly their brief love won’t last. Disillusioned, (Book 2, Chapter 22) Dick goes on a wild drunken bender in Rome, gets into a fight with a taxi-driver, is jailed and beaten by the police. He has to be rescued and bailed out by Nicole’s practical sister Baby Warren.

Book Three. Dick goes back to his psychiatric practice and again hears Fritz tell him how they could set up their own clinic to attract wealthy Americans. [And, in another thing which would not now be sanctioned, Dick is part of an attempt to  “cure” a young man of his homosexuality]. Nicole’s father appears to be on the brink of death, and sends a message begging to be able to talk to Nicole, presumably to ask her forgiveness for the incest that ruined her life… but he changes his mind and disappears back to the U.S.A. Things change radically for Dick after an altercation he has with an Australian client who complains that the sanatorium reeks of alcohol… and Dick has to admit that he’s well on the way to being an alcoholic. So, for a good price, he sells his practice and off he and his family go to the Riviera. And he drinks. And he and Nicole squabble and fight with a host for not bathing their children in clean water. They try to act in a romantic way with the moon shining - but the chivalrous Tom Barban comes back into their orbit and Nicole is drawn to him. More annoying for Nicole, Rosemary turns up again on the  Riviera beach, and Dick feels he has to show-off for her with water games and balancing acts even though his affair with Rosemary is obviously over. Nicole is further disgusted with Dick. But where can she turn? She is desperate at the thought that she is losing her looks [like Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned] “She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I’ll do – in fact I’ll do as well as anyone I know.” (Book 3, Chapter 8). Now she welcomes a liaison with Tom Barban. She sleeps with him. The deal is struck. She realises that she no longer needs Dick, she is no longer his patient, and she declares her freedom from Dick as  “… suddenly, in the space of two minutes, she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.” (Book 3, Chapter 9)

Thus the novel [interrupted by an irrelevant comical tale of Dick bailing some women out of jail] fizzles out in its contorted end. Dick and Nicole divorce and part amicably. She marries Tom Barban. He goes back to the U.S.A. and becomes a small-town doctor. He no longer has access to much money. He hasn’t made the great splash in the world he hoped to make. But he seems contented. Finis.

Many Americans see this novel as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, just as Fitzgerald himself did. I dissent. Though better than his first novel, it is not as coherent (in the sense of meaningfully hanging together) as the leaner, more polished The Great Gatsby, which will continue to be the author’s most-read novel. There are too many irrelevant side-issues. When I finished reading Tender is the Night, I remembered that Thackeray subtitled his Vanity Fair as “A Novel Without a Hero”. I would suggest that Tender is the Night is also a novel without a hero. Dick Diver might have had some idealism and might have been a good therapist in relieving some of Nicole’s neurosis, but he allowed her to fall into what is now called “idealised transference”, that is, letting his patient believe that he was her saviour and thus putting her in an inferior and dependant position. This did not make for a good or stable marriage – along with Dick’s cheating on her with Rosemary. There are also the dodgy ethics of marrying somebody who is already psychologically damaged. Further, there is a very strong undercurrent of opportunism in Dick’s behaviour with regard to money. And yet perhaps this was exactly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s point. Dick Diver overreached himself in trying to make an international name for himself in psycoanalysis. He wasn’t suited for such a role. Medicine in small-town America was probably where he was most suited, and that is where he ended. As for Nicole, there is in her a wide streak of narcissism although it can be forgiven what with her mental state. So no heroes here.

Stepping  back from the text itself, there is also the backstory of the novel. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was, after many therapeutic explorations, diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1930. Reference books [yes, I have dipped into many of them] tell me that some critics now claim Zelda was not schizophrenic but suffered a severe variety of bipolarism. Possibly this is true, but it does not alter the fact that her behaviour was often extreme and irrational. Her condition could also not have been helped by the three illegal abortions she had when married to Fitzgerald. Be that as it may, Zelda was a mentally-damaged woman and spent nearly all the rest of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Like Dick Diver, Fitzgerald continued to be an alcoholic, sinking further and further into drink and dying at the early age of 44. Obviously the two main characters of Tender is the Night are versions of Scott and Zelda. While Fitzgerald was toiling away at writing Tender is the Night, Zelda wrote a novel of her own called Save Me the Waltz, which managed to get published, in a very short print-run, before her husband’s book came out. Like her husband’s book, it gave as characters versions of her husband and herself. Fitzgerald was greatly annoyed. I can’t help feeling that Dick’s eventual divorce from Nicole was Fitzgerald’s wish-fulfilment version of getting free from Zelda… but he did pay her hospital bills and did visit her often.

As always in Fitzgerald’s novels, research tells me that many (probably most) of his characters and events were drawn from real life – the Fitzgeralds themselves to some degree of course, but Dick and Nicole in the beach-and-Riviera moments were also based on two wealthy Americans Gerald and Sarah Murphy. The minor film-star Lois Moran, with whom Fitzgerald had a brief affair, was the model for Rosemary Hoyt. Baby Warren, who offers Nicole sane advice, was based on Zelda's older sister. The soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban who falls for Nicole was at least partly based on a French aviator who was taken with Zelda years earlier than when the novel was written. Having Nicole attempting to crash a car and kill the occupants was based on the same thing that Zelda attempted. And it was Fitzgerald himself who, in a drunken stupor, got into a brawl and was thrown into an Italian jail.

FOOTNOTES

Puerile footnote: Why give the main character a name like Dick Diver which I’m sure, even in the early 1930s, would have been the butt of many crude and obscene jokes?

Informative Footnote: Yes, Fitzgerald was essentially a romantic (albeit a somewhat jaded one) and did take the title Tender is the Night from the very romantic poet John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. But please remember that a few lines later in the poem, Keats declares “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs / But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet…” In other words the poet says we are lost in darkness and manoeuvring in a difficult universe… just as the mentally-inflicted are lost. The novel’s title does not really suggest a dreamy, romantic tale.

Annoyed footnote. Speaking of dreamy, romantic mush, in order to see how Tender is the Night was treated by the movies, I sat down at my computer and found on Youtube the 1962 film version with Jason Robards as Dick Diver, a reasonably good actor, and the stone-faced Jennifer Jones as Nicole. Oh the things I do for you, dear readers! The film deeply bowdlerised the novel, missed out most of the more sordid details, ditched half the plot and basically turned the whole tale into a rather dull soap opera. How unimaginatively it was presented, with most sequences taking place in large rooms or balconies with people conversing. And there was Bernard Herrmann’s sound track, suggesting a sugary romance. Complete soporific tripe. Also on Youtube I found a one-hour-long black-and-white TV version of the novel, made in the 1950s. Dreadful. As always, to know Tender is the Night, you have to read the book.

                                          Flyer for an excrutiatingly bad film.