Something New

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

     “EVENINGS AND WEEKENDS” by Oisin McKenna (published by 4^th Estate; marketed in New Zealand by Harper-Collins NZ, $NZ34.99); “THE FINAL DIAGNOSIS” by Cynric Temple-Camp (HarperCollins $NZ39.99)

            Here is a gathering of – mainly youngish – Londoners. Ed Seymour is about thirty. His girlfriend Maggie is pregnant. He’s not sure that he wants a child and he doesn’t earn much as a courier; but Maggie is more positive about her condition. The problem is that the best shelter they can afford in London is a damp, cramped apartment. Maybe a baby will mean they’ll have to move out of inner London and go into some far suburb. Maggie’s brothers Phil and Callum are very different from each other. There’s a rumour that Callum is a drug dealer, which is not unlikely given that these characters are of an age to pop party drugs and go to sweaty raves as often as they can. Ed Seymour and Maggie and her brothers grew up in homes just across the road from each other. Now the slightly-crazed mother of Ed is the only one in her house. She often drags her chairs onto the pavement to shout at passers-by. But Maggie’s mother Rosaleen is made of sturdier stuff. She’s Irish. When she was young she became tired with all the restrictions of puritanic Ireland and she headed for London. But she faced some prejudice from English Londoners. Now she sometimes wants to go back to Ireland to see if it is as she remembered it. Trouble is, she’s being eaten away with cancer.

            Curiously, there’s a great whale that has stranded itself in the Thames. It becomes a sensation, with people wondering how it got there and how it could be returned to the open sea. Every so often we are reminded of the whale and the sensation it has caused with the media.

            There now. I’ve given you the apparent backbone of this tale. A sort of families tale, which in the end manages to contrive a happy wedding scene, though it isn’t Ed and Maggie. But I have missed telling you what the real backbone of the story is. The fact is that the blurb doesn’t immediately say what is most important in Evenings and Weekends. And I noticed that some of the British book-reviewers tip-toed carefully around the novel’s chief preoccupation. I read the review in the English newspaper the Independent, and their reviewer basically told us that the novel was about London today (the novel is set in 2019), and how very difficult for younger working-class people it is to own a house in London. Younger people were forced to live elsewhere. It could, the reviewer said, be likened to the novels of Zadie Smith [such as Smith’s N-W, reviewed years ago on this blog and her Swing Time which I reviewed elsewhere] which were really about the status of London in its poorer parts and how people spend their time.

            Nonsense. Evenings and Weekends is dominantly about gay men, sexuality, gay love and cheating. To put it simply – Ed Seymour might have a girlfriend called Maggie, but Maggie’s brother Phil has seen Ed soliciting men in a public toilet, and Phil also knows much of Ed’s background. In fact, even when Ed and Phil both went to high-school they were sexually attracted to each other. Ed’s worst betrayal was joining with thuggish schoolboys and beating up Phil for being “queer”. Phil spends much of the novel wondering if he should tell Maggie that Ed is homosexual and really not a man she should marry. Then we have the long agony of Phil himself worried that his lover Keith is going to leave him for another guy. Other gays enter the story which, surprisingly, all takes place in a mere two days.

            What may be difficult for many readers is not the fact of gay love and inevitable jealousies, but the very many explicit sexual encounters there are – what often seem to be gross biological intrusions. There are a couple of episodes dealing with male rape and prolonged fellatio. Let’s just say that this will be an alien – and alienating – world for many readers.

            Evenings and Weekends is told throughout in the present tense and Oisin McKenna deserves credit for his clarity and precise prose. As you might have understood, McKenna is Irish by birth and is acutely aware of the Irish status in London, referring to racial bigotry against the Irish. When Rosaleen finally goes on her last visit to Ireland, it is like an epiphany, affirming her true Irishness.

            And what of that whale in the river? I can only guess that it is some sort of symbol, but I’m not sure what it symbolises. If you read the novel, you will have to work it out for yourself.

 

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

The Final Diagnosis is the absolute opposite of Evenings and Weekends. It is non-fiction built on a series of anecdotes in New Zealand. Cynric Temple-Camp, born and raised in Southern Africa, has for years lived in New Zealand. He is a pathologist – that is, a doctor who deals with the dead, often having to determine how or why somebody died.  This can mean simply affirming how somebody died naturally; but it can often mean having to assist the police when it is possible that a murder has taken place. Inevitably, as he takes us through some of his cases, he has to give us very specific details on how the body works and he often has to use specialist words, which (for the non-specialist) can be a little confusing. However, Cynric Temple-Camp has a breezy style on the whole.  The Final Diagnosis is his third collection of real-life stories.

Let’s look at how he organises his tales.

Part One is called “Dangerous Days”. Cynric Temple-Camp tells us about a smash-up which killed a driver – but Temple-Camp, in examining the body, works out the odd circumstances that caused the crash. It had nothing to do with suicide as was first expected. A really bizarre tale follows of a mentally-impaired man who, with his delusions, pestered hospital staff about having to have injections. This was one for the psychiatrists rather that the pathologist. Then there was a woman who had cancer but the cancer was fiendishly difficult to find – and this is where he has to use many specialist terms to explain her case. Then a tale of a young woman who seemed to need psychological help… but her problem was purely physical. It was the fault of a tumour in one of her ovary.

Part Two, being headed “Chance and Circumstance”, deals with the unexpected. First the sad story of the small passenger plane that crashed against a hill in the fog. Most passengers survived, but three died by bad luck – a steward who was not protected by a seat belt; and two men who, though buckled up, had their seats unhinged and hence were thrown forward at high speed. Temple-Camp was the pathologist who had to examine the corpses and worked out exactly why these three were killed while others in the plane came through with barely a scratch. Pure chance. There follows the story of a woman who died when she was just about to give birth. In this case Temple-Camp is cautious, never quite sure why the woman had died but suggesting it was probably an embolism. Followed by the story of a woman who almost killed herself by eating too many peanuts – over indulgence of peanuts can be toxic. And of course gross obesity can also be a killer as told in the next story. Temple-Camp deals with what happened when Covid came along, where there was much misinformation but also the hell of there not being adequate medication to combat the plague.

Finally, we come to “Murder Most Foul”. Temple-Camp was often merely peripheral to the stories told in this part, such as the sordid tale of the death of Plumley-Walker partly at the hands of a dominatrix. He is very sceptical about the legal outcome of the “Sounds Murders” when Olivia Hope and Ben Smart disappeared, presumably murdered. But he fully agrees with the legal outcome of Mark Lundy who quite clearly murdered his wife and daughter. He rounds thing off with warning that old people are often erratic when they forget to take the necessary medication; with the traps of false diagnoses and – bizarrely – he includes a section about how he thinks the artist Vincent Van Gogh died, not by suicide but by murder.

Read one after the other, this is an engaging collection though it might disturb some readers to consider that what they are enjoying has to do with other people’s tragedies. Temple-Camp closes every chapter with part of a well-known poem, though sometimes they seem to have nothing to do with the case that has just been examined. Entertaining certainly, but sometimes using medical terms that are beyond the understanding of most readers.

 

     

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.

     “ THE DISENCHANTED” by Budd Schulberg (first published in 1950)

            

 Budd Schulberg? Now there’s a name not to conjure with. If you’re fifty or younger, you’ve probably never heard of him, but in the 1940s and 1950s he was a major literary and cultural figure in the U.S.A.; and much to my surprise, when I’d read his novel The Disenchanted, I discovered that his work still has a large band of admirers in America. Budd Schulberg (1914-2009) - full name Seymour Wilson Schulberg – was more-or-less born in Hollywood. His father B.P. Schulberg was a producer of films working mainly in the Paramount studio. Budd worked his way in writing stories and scenarios for studios before he launched out into writing novels. He knew Hollywood inside-out. Probably his best-known novel is still What Makes Sammy Run?, a scathing account of a pushy young Hollywood exec trying to get ahead in the Dream Factory. Because this obnoxious character was Jewish, some critics accused Budd Schulberg, who was Jewish, of being a self-loathing Jew. But this accusation didn’t amount to much. For moviegoers, in the 1950s Budd Schulberg was best known for writing the screenplay of the much admired film On the Waterfront. But in 1950, his novel The Disenchanted was published. Some pundits call it Schulberg’s masterpiece. The late Anthony Burgess included it in his list of the 99 Best Novels Written in the 20^th Century.

 

 

                                       A respectable bookcover for "The Disenchanted"

 

 

            A quick synopsis : In the late 1930s, the Hollywood studio boss Victor Milgrim assigns his callow young minion Stearns – usually nicknamed “Shep” – to look after the author Manley Halliday and supervise him as he writes the synopsis for a romantic commercial movie called Love on Ice. Manley is demeaned by having to write such rubbish, but he desperately needs the money. In the 1920s he was a greatly celebrated author, the man of the Jazz Age, eagerly read and paid huge fees for his short-stories and novels. But now he is largely a wash-out and an alcoholic who has created only one novel on the early 1930s. His mistress Ann Loeb has almost coaxed him out of drinking… but not quite. Shep finds it almost impossible to get Halliday writing the synopsis because Halliday keeps drifting off into fugues about how things used to be and he keeps asking for a drink. Victor Milgrim keeps asking how the scenario is getting on and he is repeatedly fobbed off. Milgrim orders Shep to take Halliday over from California to the East Coast, to scout out locations that would be right for the snow-laden film Love on Ice. Milgrim has another agenda. Like so many studio bosses, he wants to gain cultural prestige by being seen as a truly creative artist. He hopes that he can get an honorary doctorate from the Ivy League university that was Manley Halliday’s alma mater, and he plans to present Halliday as his greatest inspiration. But things go badly wrong. Flying to the East Coast, Halliday begins to take up very heavy drinking again. Shep can’t control him. The boozing becomes titanic. Halliday often drinks himself into a stupor. Halliday drunkenly picks fights with waiters and bar-tenders. Halliday gratuitously insults important people. And yet, amazingly and through his alcoholic mist, Halliday can still whip up plausible scenarios from thin air. Once or twice, Halliday (and Shep) present scenarios ad lib that almost enchant Milgrim. But it ends in disaster. Drunk, staggering, dishevelled, unshaven and barely coherent, Halliday appears before the academics and students of the university and is immediately a laughing stock. Worse, in the winter carnival related to the university,  Halliday makes a public fool of himself as he flops about in the snow. Milgrim fires Halliday and Shep and sends them both packing. Halliday has spent so much time in snow and ice that his feet become gangrenous and his persistent alcoholism is leading him to total physical collapse. As he lies in hospital,  he summons Jere, the wife he had divorced but whom he still thinks of as his romantic ideal… but when she arrives he can’t recognise her. She is not the glamourous young woman he once knew. Then he dies. But after Halliday’s death, Shep reads three chapters of a novel that Halliday hadn’t finished and realises that it could have become Halliday’s masterpiece.

            Now what have we got here? A famous American author who was the best-selling idol of the early 1920s but who, by the 1930s, was almost a has-been. A man who embraced the Jazz Age and then discovered those partying days were over. An author who, to make some money, unwillingly took up writing scenarios and dialogue in Hollywood. A man who left behind an unfinished novel which some people thought could have become a masterpiece. An alcoholic who died before his time. Who could this possibly be? The battered old Penguin copy of The Disenchanted that I have on my shelf says coyly in the blurb “Many people have seen in this the story of the final years of one of America’s finest novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Frankly, that is putting it mildly. The Disenchanted is saturated with Fitzgerald, and Budd Schulberg was the man to write it as he had known Fitzgerald personally. In 1939, the year before Fitzgerald died, the studio Schulberg worked for directed him to collaborate with Fitzgerald on a frivolous screenplay called Winter Carnival (obviously the novel’s Love on Ice). It was a catastrophe. It is easy to pick out which characters were based on which real people, but Schulberg was careful not to write until Fitzgerald was dead (in 1940) and Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was dead (in 1948). Schulberg wrote in 1949-50. Of course Schulberg changes some details to cover himself. Halliday’s mistress in his last years Ann Loeb is obviously Fitzgerald’s mistress in his last years the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham who, to her credit, did actually try to wean Fitzgerald off the drink, although Schulberg makes this character more of an intellectual than Sheilah Graham ever was. The wife Halliday divorced, Jere, is clearly Zelda, although Fitzgerald and Zelda never divorced. The Fitzgeralds had a little girl they called “Scotty”. Schulberg gives Halliday and Jere a boy called Douglas. Schulberg knew that Zelda aspired to excel in the arts. She tried, without success, to be a ballerina, although she did write one palatable novel. Schulberg makes Jere trying to excel by translating French poetry, especially Rimbaud. And of course he does have Jere / Zelda psychologically damaged. As for the people who ran Hollywood, they could be any number of real people, and there are some very minor characters drawn from reality. There are suggestions of the casual affairs Fitzgerald and Zelda (Halliday and Jere) had, and Schulberg refers to a silent-movie star called Mona Moray who had an affair with Halliday. (Fitzgerald had an affair with a silent film star called Lois Moran – which is a bit on the nose).

 

 

                                    A sensationised paperback cover for "The Disenchanted"

            But to see The Disenchanted only in terms of Hollywood gossip would be to grossly underrate what Schulberg is up to. His novel is mainly concerned not with how Hollywood works, but how society changes and the decades gather their own styles. What was fashionable, stylish and modern quickly becomes outdated, passe and slightly ridiculous. Schulberg interrupts his sequential narrative a number of times with what he calls “Old Business” – that is, reveries and memories in Halliday’s mind as he recalls his past, sometimes speaking out loud to Shep – meeting Jere in Paris after the [First World] War had finished; the hedonistic, heavy-drinking lives they lived in the early 1920s; their failed attempts to clean themselves up by going to Mexico in search of sobriety; their break up and Jere’s declining mental health. Looking back, most of Halliday’s memories become negatives.

            In Chapter 9 Schulberg  has Halliday looking back on the 1920s “They seemed always to be having so much fun. Yet looking back it was the casualties, the tragedies that stuck up in his mind like telephone poles stretching across the desolate landscape of the past; once the good times had run glistening and taut and wire-fine from pole to pole, but ill winds and the ravages of time had torn them down. Now only the poles remained, giant uncrossed crosses marking the route he had taken.”

            In the third “Old Business” section, Halliday remembers his domestic life with Jere in the 1920s thus : “It was all moonlight and champagne at first, like being on a long date, or like those slick stories of gay crossings and Riviera nights. I wrote some of them myself, God help me. When we were good we were very very peaches-and-creamy head-in-the-clouds castle-in-the-sky good the way our public believed us and wanted us to be. And when we were bad we were horrid to each other, though that was our secret for a long time. Whenever we were out we were those amusing Hallidays; they’re so charming, so witty, so perfect together, that they adore each other like a couple of kids, and after all their Success – we must ask them for dinner, for the week-end, for the winter…”

            In the fifth “Old Business”, Halliday remembers how it all soured in the late 1920s “Alcohol had always loosened his wits and his sense of festival, but now it only dragged him down into despondency and evil temper. For the first time in his life he was thrown out of a speak[easy] for insulting a guest; another time when he started a fight he would have been booked for disorderly conduct if [a friend] hadn’t come to his rescue and pulled some strings.”

            Repeatedly, Halliday sees his past as time lost in trivia. And in the 1930s, where most of the novel is set, the world is so different from the 1920s, with the Depression having hit and then with another major war looming. The age of flappers, parties, booze and general selfish hedonism is a bad memory. Early in the novel, twenty-something Shep frets over the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, while forty-ish Halliday is still dealing with the past. Shep has a very ambiguous attitude towards the esteemed writers of the 1920s, thinking in  Chapter 5 “What a jolly, irresponsible year 1925 must have been, with stocks going up, gin going down, and nothing more serious to worry about than this morning’s hangover. And yet, as Halliday had pointed out, it wasn’t all glitter, jitter, and right-off -the boat. There was that serious work, damned hard work, and damned good work; strange how the decade that had made a virtue of irresponsibility, produced more responsible artists than an American decade before and since. The big writers had been producing in those days, with books appearing regularly in healthy flow. There was nothing like it now.” [Then Shep lists T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos… and Halliday – but of course not Fitzgerald]. A “decade that had made a virtue of irresponsibility” is Shep’s real verdict on Halliday / Fitzgerald’s era.

            And yet there is – for me at any rate – a very good coda. In Chapter 15, Shep reads Halliday’s unfinished novel: “He hurried on through the second chapter into the third, amazed by the sharpness of the imagery, the fresh impact of the words. But the best Halliday had always been that. This had something more, Shep was beginning to see. A maturity, a wisdom about people and the fabric of their lives. A capacity not merely for feeling pain but for interpreting pain. Even the best of old Halliday had been marred at times by a certain callowness, a naivete that seemed to confuse misbehaviour with sophistication, a blurring of perspective. But this was the work of a sure hand, with the insight of the rare author who can appraise what he loves and love what he condemns.”

            Yes! Precisely! If you have read on this blog my The Definitive Judgment on F. Scott Fitzgerald, you would have noted that one of the things I dislike about Fitzgerald’s work is his callow, romantic naivete, especially with regard to women, and the pseudo-sophistication of his humour. So does Budd Schulberg - and he gently debunks the yearning for the past that fills so many of Fitzgerald’s tales, especially in the form of unattainable young women. By having Shep read Halliday’s unfinished novel, Schulberg is obviously referring to Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. Halliday was at last maturing, just as Fitzgerald was… but he died without finishing what could have been his best novel.

            Two last footnotes: It is extraordinary to see in this novel that in the 1930s, the 1920s are seen as ancient history, even if they are only a few years past. Public attitudes really are fickle.

            And that title The Disenchanted – doesn’t it refer not only to Halliday and the people he lets down, but also us having our ideas of the exciting “Roaring” Twenties destroyed?

Footnote: I apologise for giving you yet another book about F. Scott Fitzgerald after I had  promised not to write another piece about him, but i couldn't pass over this 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. 

                                                WHY CATULLUS IS NOT FOR ME 

 

I’m very sorry to say this, but I never warmed to the poetry of Catullus. At secondary school I was a good little boy and I studied Latin among other things – and of course we did not study, in class, any erotic Roman poetry. In my last year I won the prize for Latin, which might sound impressive… except that I was the only boy in the senior year to study Latin. The language was being faded out and of course it is now extinct in New Zealand schools. I think I was given the prize out of pity. The very tarnished cup awarded me still sits on my shelf. The fact is, my Latin was (and is) terrible and very, very limited; but I was still intrigued by ancient Latin poetry and prose. So every so often over the years I have settled down to read the works of  both the Golden Age and the Silver Age of Roman poetry. Remember, I was to read them only with the help of cribs, especially Loeb and other bilingual editions.

I ended up deciding that the two poets I most admired were Vergil (or if you prefer Virgil) and Juvenal. They were complete opposites.

Here is Vergil in the very first years of the Caesars with his idyllic Eclogues and Georgics, really creating a fantasy land for farmers and toilers; and then there is his Aeneid, a genuine epic. Forget the carp-ers who say he was just toadying up to the Emperor Augustus in writing such a patriotic origin-story of Rome. On the evidence only of Book 2 of the Aeneid [the taking of Troy]; Book 4 [Aeneas’s affair with Queen Dido] ; and Book 6  [Aeneas in the underworld] we have a great work, even if the latter half of the Aeneid is rather duller. And please remember, despite the Iliad and Odyssey, it is from the Aeneid that we get the story of the wooden horse.

As for Juvenal, coming many decades after Vergil and in a different context, we have a genuine satirist who has the skill to throw darts in every direction. Yes, some of his satires are now disgusting to many – his satire against women is the height of misogyny – but when he’s on the right path  he really hits the spot – his satire about the horrors of living in a filthy city like Rome; his satire against idiots who think they are important because their ancestors were aristocrats; his pessimistic – but truthful – vanity of human wishes; his disgust at lavish parties thrown by the decadent. Juvenal is an angry man, but with good reason like a Rabelais or a Swift. Doing your block is cathartic.

And what of the other Roman poets? Ovid is necessary for  embellishments of folklore. Horace (pompous old fellow) has his moments in his Epodes and Odes. Sextus Propertius – forget it.

Which at last brings me to Catullus. He is often praised as the best and most lyrical of Roman poets. There is some [limited] truth to this. The two poems about Lesbia’s sparrow are charming and vaguely erotic, in a teasing sort of way. There is his delightful poem about the joys of coming home to his house in Sirmio. His Epithalamium for a friend’s wedding is one of the best. There are other good things too. But Catullus’s achievement is undercut by the bum-bum and poo-poo semi-porno insult quips he throws out to his enemies. For sure Odi et amo comes when he lets rip in describing Lesbia as a whore when she’s out of favour, and he is always ready to find some amusing way to belittle former friends, regarding the size of his enemy’s penis and ridiculing the impotent. This is basically Fifth Form humour which would work best daubed on a dunny door. Okay, Martial was even worse at this game (one scholar referred to Martial as “the pornographer for the idle”) but Catullus has somehow become a cult. Oh how clever of him to make his naughty barbs!! And oh how puerile. Catullus’s work was lost for almost a thousand years. One wonders sometimes if some of his smutty stuff was not meant to be presented to the public at all.

Let me nastily point out another problem for those who idolise Catullus. How many (like me) are not fluent in the Latin language? And this being the case, how many of Catullus’s modern admirers cannot really appreciate the man’s poetry? To get the full blast of a poem, you have to feel the sounds, the metres, the language itself. Remember, if you are reading a poem translated from a foreign language, then you are not reading the original poem. At best, I suggest many admirers of Catullus are faking it. A bit like me. Fie upon the fellow.

Something New

 

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

“STILL IS” by Vincent O’Sullivan (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30); “IN THE HALF LIGHT OF A DYING DAY”   by C. K. Stead (Auckland University Press $NZ29:99); “MEANTIME” by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press $NZ30); “TAROT” by Jake Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ25)

 

            Not by design but by happenstance, three collections on this posting refer to death – Vincent O’Sullivan’s death; the death of C.K.Stead’s wife Kay; and Magella Cullinane’s loss of her mother… and even Jake Arthur’s “Tarot” does sometimes refer to death, albeit cryptically.

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

 

 

            New Zealand was deprived of a great poet when Vincent O’Sullivan died, aged 86, in April of this year. (My tribute to him, Remembering VincentO’Sullivan, can be found on this blog). O’Sullivan was prolific in his poetry when he wasn’t writing short-stories, novels and non-fiction biographies. Fortunately, there was one last collection of poetry to be released posthumously, Still Is. It contains ninety poems, perhaps because O’Sullivan aspired to reach that age. As always in his collections of poetry, O’Sullivan does not organise his poems as a series of themes. His poems are presented in no particular order, and he often makes the title of a poem part of the poem itself. Given his age, there are naturally reflections on ageing, and therefore there are also poems calling back the past, including childhood and adolescence. The first three poems of Still Is consider vague remembrances of making love (old age recalled); a blind man who can find his way around (overcoming infirmity); and a refection on gates as they once were.

            Reading this collection, I can’t help noticing some predominant themes and ideas.

            First there is remembrance itself, tied to the idea of time and of our tendency to misremember events. The ticking of time is seen in terms of art in the poem “Randomly so, in a gallery” where “Lightens. Dark comes in. Their grace we go along with, / clocks edging season to season. / Painters as ever insisting their one belief: / the leaning of great slabbed light, dark slanting in.” The poem  “Last time” begins “It was so different last time… / There were thrushes. I remember it rained / in buckets. The tarseal on the drive / crinkled in the torrent. I remember that…” and there is the persistent idea of how apparently small and apparently insignificant things can nevertheless be the most remembered things. In remembrance there is occasionally a reaching back to how forebears were presented to him when O’Sullivan was young. “Slaint” is one of the few poems that deals with O’Sullivan’s Irish ancestors while “Uninvited twin” also broods on the fortunes of the Irish who crossed the Atlantic. Inevitably, too, there are childhood memories with “Grey Lynn Noir” (just avoiding being beaten up by the local thug), “Bastards, down from the hills” (a very rough boys’ game), “Seven, yes” (little boy first understanding that “bum” is a rude word… though grown-ups use it often) and a poem or two referring to attending convent school. As for early adulthood (when O’Sullivan would have been in his twenties), the prose poem “To be fair to the Sixties” is about hippie-ish druggie-ness in the 1960s and suggesting how it was mainly pointless if not destructive.

            As for old age, there are inevitably reflections on decay. “He comes to mind” considers meeting a solitary old man and how his stoicism sustains him. “Any weekday’s likely” basically tells us that all things decay. And there is a more ironic take on decay with “Catching Lenin’s ear”, about how the dictator’s preserved body is falling apart.

            Speaking of extreme states of mind, we are presented in a number of poems with how the brain works. The poem “extras” is halfway between theatre and halfway a dream when under dental anaesthetic. “Premonition” combines mental fantasy with suburban unease [it’s in part about spiders];

while “As few may tell you” is an ironic account of ghosts and how people do or do not deal with them. Though O’Sullivan was ambiguous about religion, with regard to his Catholic upbringing he could be amused. He uses the title “This business of lost belief” not to tell a tale of losing religion, but to tell of missing his chances with a girl whom he admired when he was a young teenager.

            His sometime quirky-ness is found in “Either isn’t or is” and “Dreamwork” both of which take cats to be arbiters of life and death – after all, silent cats do appear to be watching and judging us don’t they? In contrast “Ciao, Norman” is a brisk but heartfelt elegy for a dog that had to be put down.

            These are just some of the ideas that O’Sullivan dealt with in his last collection.

            His style is various. He could build vivid, if daunting, scenes, as in “A good place to buy” viz. “The winds hug at the house till the ribs crack. / The guttering swings loose as a shot arm. / The sound of shrieking’s in the splitting wood. / The violence you have to accept before spring / breaks perfect.” He could be jocular as in “Easy does it, easy” which I take to be an elderly man accepting that many things which once seemed precious or important but which now can now be shucked off. I quote it in full: “Dogs on beaches. / Books on shelves. / A single mirror / For a dozen shelves. / A toy Ned Kelly / A theorem,s proof / A spinning dolphin / On a garden’s roof. / A wall of photos / Tell a hundred years, / A funeral’s laughter / A wedding tears. / A life of veerings / You make out was straight. / Nicely polished granite / And a final date. / Like hell, we say, / Let’s start again. / The sermon’s over. / The day shines through rain.”

            Then of course there is O’Sullivan’s ability as a critic. “Confessional as it gets” politely answers a reviewer who suggested he was out of steam. He confesses: “At times – yes, I need to say it - / between the sighs of the living and the vanished / departed, I’ve written jaunty numbers, / turned the wry erotic lyric, / half a dozen times I’ve persisted, / tasteless even, after dusk…” But then aren’t such poems necessary to prevent poets from becoming too solemn about their work? “A gift for drama” notes how much of human interaction as play-acting… we are like squealing mice. “No choice much, any longer” suggests there are so many writers now that the same themes are being overworked (all too true). “So at least we know” sees the broadcast evening news as usurping communal prayer as “The News an atheist’s variant / on prayer: for what the day has achieved, / forgive us; from what tomorrow intends, / preserve us; out of creation’s wreckage, / rise again.” “Life on air, for example” is a half-jocular, half-mocking of New Zealand radio.

            At a certain point though, O’Sullivan accepts that though we are a special species, we are still animals. I quote in full his poem “To accept being human” thus “I give thanks we were cradled in branches, / that we moved on so surely to hands daubed in caves. / I give thanks to the dragged knuckles / and the penetrating gaze. I’d be so proud / were Silverback an ancestral name. / I watch viewers at the rail of the ape enclosure. / I’m at one with ordure accurately flung.” And he is clearly jocular about the approach of death in “Nothing too serious, mind you” and “For the obituarist”. These must surely have been written when O’Sullivan’s was aware that he was dying.

            My apologies for naming and quoting so many of O’Sullivan’s poems but, believe me, I have quoted less than a third of the ninety. Certainly a man of many interests. As for the title “Still Is”, I can only see the defiance of a man who accepts that the world is as it is. There is often a bluntness in O’Sullivan’s poetry, but it is refreshing when put up against the preciosity of many poets, too eager to show off their erudition.

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            In a preface to In the Half Light of a Dying Day, Karl Stead, now in his 92^nd year, reminds us that he had written poems inspired by Catullus in earlier collections, one being “The Clodian Songbook”. In the age of Julius Caesar, Catullus wrote many love poems – or poems of rebuke and annoyance – to a woman whom he called Lesbia. This woman is now generally understood by Latinists to have been Clodia Metelli, wife of a powerful general and official. Avoiding the name Lesbia, Stead uses the name Clodia for the alluring and fickle woman of many moods. However, in these poems Stead himself takes the role of Catullus. Catullus is a means of talking about the present as much as the past. In the second part of this collection, Stead creates a new character called Kezia, a name used in some of Katherine Mansfield’s stories.  If Catullus is Karl Stead, then Kezia is Kay, Stead’s wife of seventy years, who died in July of last year. While the first part of In the Half Light of a Dying Day deals with many different ideas, the second part is focused on the drawn-out illness and final death of Kay, becoming a long and moving elegy. All these poems were written in 2023.

            Part One is “The Clodian Songbook [Continued]” which begins with a general invocation, then turns to “History”, an account of the precarious times in which Catullus lived, invited to a banquet with Julius Caesar when he had written smutty poems about Caesar’s circle and could have been killed for it. But while others were killed for mocking, and Caesar himself was killed, Catullus’s main punishment was to be unknown for centuries. Catullus died when he was thirty, and only the “silence of the grave / and with the passage of so many centuries / your words and your wit would / find their way home.” With “The Farm” Stead injects New Zealand images and “Moreporks” into a story of Stead /Catullus as a boy. Kevin Ireland is addressed as the Roman poet Licinius in a “shape poem” that welcomes him as a comrade. But in another “shape poem” Stead takes a crack at James K. Baxter as “Hemi / shaggy and barefoot / he was your Diogenes / full of contempt for your wants and your wages / and with a wisdom not all his own - / traditional, Catholic / not entirely to be sneezed at / but for Catullus / retrograde / masculist / at once flashy and necromantic / belonging to a past / best left behind.” He concludes “Catullus envied your fluency / Jim / but thought you might have put it / to better use.” There are poems that seem to be aimed at an in-crowd which would not be understood by us outsiders. “Creative writing class?” appears to be about a rupture between poets, but who were they? “Uncertainty” has young Stead/Catullus at a bohemian gathering trying to guess “who among us is fucking whom”. There is an apocalyptic piece about the “World’s End”, though without being hysterical and “The good man in love” wherein Catullus pleads with the gods that he be shorn of any love for Clodia given that she was untruthful, unfaithful to him… and yet he still can’t break away from her. Now that is a theme that is brushed earlier in a version of Catullus’s famous epigram “Odi et Amo” – “I hate and I love”  - still attracted to Lesbia [Clodia] but still appalled by her. [For the record, and standing outside Stead’s poetry, I note that in full Catullus’s epigram reads “Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requires? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior”. The best translation I have ever seen is in James Michie’s translation of all Catullus’s work, thus “I hate and I love. If you ask me to explain / The contradiction, / I can’t, but I can feel it, and the pain / Is crucifixion.” ] How much do Stead’s Catullus poems refer to his love life? I’m in no position to know.

            Part Two “Catullus and Kezia” is very personal in its presentation and therefore difficult for an outsider to discuss fairly. Stead opens with “Home”, in which old man and old woman are no longer travelling “no more travel for them…/…old age has taught them / to love what they have / this green enclave where flowers and fruit flourish / where tui and blackbird, / pigeon, sparrow and thrush / build / and teach their young to fly”. Perhaps this is an idealised version of the Steads’ Parnell home, but it leads into happy memories when husband and wife were young. “Language again” gives a [possibly] idealised version of their first love-making. But the sickness of Kay is looming.

“Modern Miracles” is an ironic title as the poem concerns the way modern airlines could whisk the Stead’s younger daughter back from London when Kay’s health was declining. Starting with the poem “Free will”, the couple do some intense thinking about their lives. Karl’s wife of seventy years says she chose to stay with him, despite all their ups and downs… They consider photos of themselves when they were young… and how her absence from public places is now being noticed by friends… and the importance of her reading. But the physical decay is relentless. The poem “Pain” considers “the gods” who are silent while Catullus / Karl tries  to ease the pain of Keyzia / Kay by rubbing her back “she panting, shivering, sweating / seeming so small so shrunken and depleted / and still so loved.”… And finally in “Sorry”, the tragic moment comes when Kay dies beside Karl in their bed. “You  kissed her cheek / Catullus / and told her you were sorry / and wept. / She would have wept to see you weeping / but could not / did not know they were your tears / falling on her face / did not know anything / anymore / who had known so much.”

            There is the long aftermath. In “The science” he longs for, but cannot embrace, the idea that there is something after death. Then there are reveries: In “Gallia” he remembers the pleasure of being together with Kay in southern France; and Paris. There are briefer poems almost nearing the epigrams of [the real] Catullus - “The plum tree”, about life still going on when he is still alive  (and now wearing a Medic Alert). With “A Beginning” he remembers when they had their first child, in the early 1960s. The poem “Now more than ever seems it rich” picks up on John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. Keats continues “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,  / To cease upon the midnight with no pain,  / While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad /  In such an ecstasy!  / Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—  / To thy high requiem become a sod.” Catullus recalls Kezia calling for this poem and weeping at the beauty of it… but Keats’ harsh word “sod” suggests immediately the finality of death. “The wound” appears to refer to the poet’s love life and his wife’s reaction to it. Kezia says that Catullus’s poems about Clodia “had to be written / because of your deplorable / romantic ego / and the wound it had sustained”. Of course there are other interests that intrigue – “The Story?” suggests that high culture as we know it is collapsing ; “The puzzle” has him recalling his childhood and how very different Auckland then was; “Catullus demonstrates a vulgar taste” when he watches on his own, and thoroughly enjoys, the old song-and-dance movie “Singing in the Rain” (and so he should, dammit). And inevitably “After death” is the closing poem. The final words are “in the half light of a dying day”.

            I have to close with the most obvious words – the “Catullus and Kezia” sequence of this collection is by far the more engaging, and I would also suggest the more heartfelt, of the two sequences. It is a genuine elegy and it would have taken great devotion to write it.

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            Back in 2018, I had the great pleasure of reviewing Majella Cullinane’s debut poetry collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing (reviewed - all too briefly – on this blog ). Irish-born and raised but now New Zealander, Cullinane’s style was described by me thus: “It combines a romantic sensibility with a modernist sharpness.” Cullinane dealt with Irish old times and emigration and her own Irishness, all with an excellent sense of time, place and perspective. In Meantime, she has a much more testing perspective to deal with. I take the collection’s title to have a double meaning – “meantime” usually means filling in time; but here the time really is mean. When Covid 19 was shutting New Zealand down, and travel was restricted, Cullinane’s mother, far away in Ireland, was succumbing to dementia. Even by long-distance phone calls, Cullinane had great difficulty talking to her mother who became more incoherent as her dementia increased.

            Cullinane charts this trying and tragic situations in three parts.

            Part One “Am I still here?” begins with the poem “This is not my room” – the poet’s mother refusing to stay in the hospital that is caring for her and already confused as to whether she is still at home. The mother is also very much aware of a world beyond this earthly world – a mixture of Christianity and folklore. In “The believer” she shows her awareness of the dead [as told by the daughter]: “They’ve been calling you more of late. They, who can’t be seen or verified. / For a believer, it’s hard to ignore the dead, or that other world / most can scarcely reckon with, the one you’re so certain of.”  In various poems, the mother imagines noises in the hospital. She thinks of supernatural beings. She is sure a French angel is visiting her… and she has forgotten her wedding day. But we are aware that we are seeing all this through the eyes of the daughter, far away in New Zealand. It is the daughter [the poet] who has to imagine her mother’s reactions in “If the walls could speak.” And then we come to the definitive point, “The long goodbye”:  “They call what’s happening the long goodbye - /  the disease that each day snatches parts of you / and scatters them about, until you can’t find them, / until you don’t remember losing them.” This is the painful process which every carer knows – the time when it is clear, in the patient’s loss of memory and inability to do routine things, that dementia is irreversible.

            Part Two “Meantime” has the daughter coping with her mother’s death and also her sense of guilt that she has not been able to attend her mother’s funeral. When the mother has lost communication, the daughter delves back to childhood and the family’s rituals. The poem “The wedding ring” reads in full “My sister removed your grandmother’s wedding ring, gripped / your calloused palm, took your cold hand in hers, / the same hands that held us, the arthritic fingers / that once kneaded bread, the long fingers that never glided / across a piano keyboard, never strummed the strings of a guitar.” “Virtual funeral” forces the daughter having to guess what her mother’s funeral was like, as she is torn by her absence on the other side of the world: “On the morning of your burial, it’s late evening here. / Everyone’s in bed, the house is quiet. / I’m in the sitting room, lying on the couch / waiting for the call from my sister. / She tells me she feels better now that you are safe.” In

“Meantime” she still has a sense of guilt for her absence “I would compress seas and oceans, turn hemispheres upside down / to believe what has happened has not happened…. /… I try not to think of you in the spring-churned earth, far away so cold in there      so cold.” She creates poetry inspired by Dante, especially “Make no sound” has her questioning “why are we in purgatory? Wasn’t her mind purged enough?”. She experiences the  huge sense of loss as she sees momentarily a woman looking like her deceased mother.

            Part Three “Nowhere to be” finally brings some sorts of closure. There is in this last section, the long-term regret, remembering mother (and father in the poem “Widower”) and their Irish home… even if the poet is triggered by things she sees in New Zealand. She has many dreams of her mother, now seen in her mind as younger than she was in the end. The daughter remembers in detail some of her mother’s skills, such as making bread. The poem “All Souls” is halfway to belief in the traditional All Souls (remembrance of the dead); and “Something to say” has the poet, who rejected her mother’s beliefs and religion, now understanding their power more. “Stay here” has her calmed by nature, by walks… and all the time wishing her mother was with her: “Could I tell you the cat followed me to the shops / but I didn’t notice until I met her on the train tracks / as I was coming home? You would have laughed. / Could I tell you I wish you could see this sky? / We could sit on the deck. / Ignore the overgrown clematis – I’m not much of a gardener. / I wish I could speak to you / but I don’t understand the language of the dead.” In a sort of coda, she visits the Old Country and says goodbye to her mother’s grave.

            I apologise for this half-baked excuse for a review. As you will have noticed, all I have done is to give you an account of Majella Cullinane’s ordeal, presented in three segments – mother’s infirmity and mental decline ; mother’s collapse and death ; daughter’s regrets and conciliation with memories and the present. What I have not dwelt on is the clarity of Majella Cullinane’s style. Regrettably, clarity is a rare virtue in much current poetry. Cullinane’s style is lyrical when it has to be, straightforward when it has to be, and always fully aware that there are many different but valid ways of embracing this world and what might be beyond it. Meantime hangs together as one coherent statement and proves Cullinane’s outstanding skill as a poet.

 

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            Last year (2023) Jake Arthur produced a brilliant debut with a collection of poetry called A Lack of GoodSons (reviewed on this blog). It dealt with many psychological states, often referring to chronic mental discomfort. Though mainly written in the first person, it was not necessarily confessional. Arthur’s new collection Tarot often deals with some of these same ideas, but the approach is very different. The opening quotes Hamlet: “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” - which is virtually a cry of despair, a man’s horror at the state of things and the crushing littleness of the self.

            This time, the conceit (presented in the opening poem “Querent 1”) is that a Tarot reader is reading the cards to a callow listener who is apparently male. Given the Tarot cards, there is in what follows much symbolism, the imagery sometimes tending to the medieval. The title of every poem is connected to a Tarot image - “Knight of Swords”, “Seven of Cups”, “The Wand” etc. I do not know how seriously Jake Arthur takes the Tarot, but it is at least a framework in which conditions and states of mind can be examined. And one idea that is examined frequently is the nature of the sexes, and the friction between male and female. Male and female both speak through the cards. “The Spell” appears to be concerned with ambiguity about sex or gender. “His Mien” begins “No accounting her taste / For hangdog men, weak / of chin and short of smiles, / Not so much brooding as broken, / And if he’s good in the bedroom / No one wants to imagine it.” This is at least a sad perspective on ageing, but it introduces the idea of women as domineering. “Rest and Recreation” has a dominant woman sexually using a man and having somewhat patronising ideas about him. In “Play-time” a distraught woman appears to be planning arson.

            Is this misogyny?  Probably not, for these poems could also be read legitimately as a young male groping to understand the nature of women. And there are some poems, such as “Mater familias”, in which a mother is celebrated, even if in a wry way. “Her Caller” and “Salt” appear to be childhood memories.

            As for the male, there is much admiration. “Lost bantam”, the longest poem in the collection, begins as a story of being shipwrecked and washed ashore on a desert island, but morphs into a tale of gay desire. “Goose” is the most overtly gay poem in the collection, while “Tagus”, a poem about Alexander the Great, suggests masculine comradeship which is much more than just virile.

            It’s important to note that while Jake Arthur is concerned with the sexes, he also has many other interests. “Life Hack”, pessimistic in the face of  ecological collapse, he suggests it might be best for us to get used to it and again lived simply as our mediaeval peasant ancestors did. “Re-gifted” is perhaps the most desperate poem, about an over-intelligent kid who grows up to find his intelligence means nothing. Grown up, the kid says “I was one of those children / That keeps the word precocious alive, / Smart but with a maturity disorder. / I was one of those children / That thinks factoids as good as cash / At the bank of adult approval.” “Lessons” deals in a jaded way with those awkward evenings where teacher meets parents – but the scene it paints is very accurate. And then there is his most self-examining poem “Palanquin” which declares: “I am one unlikely receptacle / making space for desire… /… All mornings I wake / To the despotic myth called me… /… I’m my secret favourite, / I am in love with my agency the most, / My desire the most, my smoke the most, / Most my myth, most my inward boom.” Is this about a young man growing up or simply narcissistic? Is it a fantasy? At the very least it is about growing into oneself, even if it often means “crawling between earth and heaven”.

            The closing poem “Querent 2” has the Tarot card reader saying she has misread her reading. She also says “I’m not making fun. Read right and / You will kill your mother’s voice. / You will make love to your father’s / Memory, and so be very happy.” Interpret this as you will but note that, like the Greek Sibyl, what the card reader says could be at best ambiguous and at worst false. It appears to be allowing the young man to reject women and feminine ways. A rather Freudian conclusion.

            There is an ongoing puzzle in this collection. Who exactly is being interrogated or speaking in the cards? One person or many? I admit that I find some poems in this collection to be cryptic and often difficult to decode. Not that this deflates Arthur’s achievement.