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.  

     “ LET THE RIVER STAND” by Vincent O’Sullivan (published in 1993) 

 

  
                         Vincent O'Sullivan at the time his first novel was published

            Often I have examined the work of Vincent O’Sullivan, who died this year at the age of 86. [Look up my tribute to him Remembering Vincent O’Sullivan, in which I list all the works by O’Sullivan that I have examined on this blog.] But I was always reviewing new works when they were first published. Only now am I reading some of his earlier works that were published before I began reviewing on this blog. Apart from his academic work, his plays, biographies and short-stories, O’Sullivan was best known for his poetry. He was in his fifties before he produced his first full-length novel. This was Let the River Stand, published in 1993. It was widely acclaimed and it won the 1994 Montana Book Award, as our national book-awards were then called.

            So recently I set about reading Let the River Stand for the first time. Let me admit that, despite its many vivid episodes, I found this novel very hard reading. The novel is organised in five different parts, each of which moves us into a separate time-space, and each of which appears to be dealing with different characters. Ostensibly the novel deals with members and offspring of the MacLeod family, and only gradually do we understand how some characters are related to others. The novel is mainly written in the third person, but one part is written as a woman’s [first-person] confessional diary and there are, between the five long episodes, flash-forwards in which characters comment on events that have not yet been disclosed in the main narrative. Most [but not all] of the novel is set in Waikato between the 1920s and the 1940s, somewhere in the shadow of Pirongia and not too far from the town called Cambridge. To put it bluntly, this is a novel that requires concentration of the reader.

 

 

            This, in my messy synopsis way, is how the novel works.

            First Part: Old Alexander MacLeod, with his conservative and colonialist attitudes, buys a farm in Waikato. He marries Emily, who is much younger than he is. Old Alexander dies, by which stage his fortunes are falling apart. His wife looks after their only son, called Alex. Alex is tall, gawky, and the epitome of mediocrity. Nobody thinks he will amount to much. He’s a bit of a loner. The only person he really likes is Bet (Elizabeth), the freckle-faced girl from the farm next to the MacLeod’s farm, which is smaller than the farm old Alexander had. He’s teased a bit at school. But things change when a girl called Barbara Trevaskis turns up. She is non-conforming. She refuses to wear the school’s uniform. And there is much gossip about the old man with whom she lives in a run-down shack. Is he her uncle or guardian or something very questionable? Is he eccentric for raising pigs?  But Alex is taken with Barbara. She is taciturn. She says very little. But she deports herself in a stately way so that Alex sees her as a princess, and she gets “Princess” as her nick-name. Alex is the only person who talks with her and he protects her from typical school bullying. Yet her reactions are at best impassive…. And in all this we have an account of something very different. Dick Norwood, a cousin, has a mother who often leaves her husband for adulterous liaisons with another farmer… and she ultimately dies of shame because of it. As presented so far, the Waikato of the 1920s and early 1930s is gossipy, back-biting, filled with ill-will, often angry and with all sorts of tension as a Depression moves in.

            Second Part:  Now we hear, in the first person, the diary of Emily McLeod. These memoirs are mainly set shortly after the First World War… although, in her narrative, she often amends with afterthoughts what she thought years later. She came from what passed as the upper-class in New Zealand. Her Anglophile father fed her with stories of studying at the University of Cambridge in England, and a Mr. Wallace seems to have the same views. Emily’s father constantly rails against Harry Holland and the Red Feds. But Emily’s cousins, unlike Emily, have jobs and some of her Auckland cousins are already joining the Labour Party. There is an odd dichotomy about Emily’s diary. Emily has the polite vocabulary of a well-bred Anglophile colonial. But, unlike her father, she is adopting the reality of New Zealand politics, embracing the Left, and moving away from her father’s ideas. She has fallen from the wealthy home she once shared with her father and now lives in more modest means. Remember, she is young Alex’s mother, and much of what she says in her diary is anterior to what we have already heard about young Alex’s life.

            Third Part: And suddenly we are thrown into the life of somebody who appears to have nothing to do with the previous characters. Here is the story of a rough-house boxer (prize-fighter if you prefer) who calls himself Collins, although his father’s surname was Schwartz. Apparently his father was a bully who used to regularly beat up the boy and his mother – so young Schwartz discards the name and calls himself Collins. He lives in old, rickety, proletarian Ponsonby in Auckland, which was Vincent O’Sullivan’s own childhood stamping-ground, long decades before Ponsonby became gentrified and expensive. Collins is on the run. His trainer and backers are angry because he failed to understand that his big fight was planned to be rigged. Collins had taken it for real and so lost much money for his crooked backers. They would like to beat the hell out of him. Or worse. So, reverting to the name Schwartz, he scarpers to deep Waikato, picking up jobs here and there when he can and finally settling down with a woman called Jess who runs a store and with whom he often beds… and by the way, Jess has a daughter called Barbara. So at last we get the connection. Schwartz becomes the guy who later lives in the run-down shack with “Princess” Barbara.

            Fourth Part: Barbara appears briefly in this part. She is ridiculed by her fellow-workers for her high-hat ways, and Alex is ridiculed for standing up for her… just as it was in school days. In this part of the novel, we hear more details of unsavoury sexual behaviours of the wider MacLeod family. Meanwhile Alex has a cousin called Rory who is a red-hot socialist. It is now the late 1930s. Partly inspired by the pompous Mr. Wallace, who is by now a very-comfy middle-class Red, Rory is keen on going to Spain to fight in the civil war there. Rory and Alex are both teenagers. Rory persuades Alex to come with him. Alex is only 18. So off they go (via Australia) and end up in Spain… where Rory is killed and Alex comes back a little disillusioned but still kind-of Left. [Incidentally Vincent O’Sullivan throws in an in-joke when Rory and Alex in Spain briefly bump into a joker called Johnson who has run away from trouble in N.Z. … and if you don’t get that one you’d better do some basic N.Z. reading.]

            Fifth Part: It is now the mid-1940s, post-Second World War. Bet (Elizabeth) now runs an hotel, and she is married to Alex, who has fought in the recent World War. Bet had had a wild run cohabiting with a rough Irish man called Burke, decades older than her; but she cast him off for Alex. Bet is herself now more-or-less Communist in her beliefs and frequently expresses her views to anyone who will listen. Alex is more restrained about these things. He never was one to say much. In fact it is clear that Bet is very much in charge of things… but at least Alex has married the woman who was once the only real friend he had… before the “Princess” Barbara came along. Speaking of whom, we learn that Barbara died in a messy car crash which smashed into a river. And we learn that Barbara’s supposed guardian, Schwartz, committed suicide. We are not told directly why he killed himself, but it is possible that he had sexually interfered with Barbara. [ This is not stated in the novel. I am speculating as obviously there was something strange in the relationship of Barbara and Schwartz.]

            And there the novel ends.

 

            As a panorama of rural New Zealand long ago, Let the River Stand is persuasive with the loneliness of farming people, the furtive sex that will be gossiped about, and the withering away of those who regard themselves as superior to other toilers. Society changes and the “colonialists” who still thought of themselves as British are becoming obsolete. New political parties emerge, with some people allying themselves with the extreme. And yet there are still family ties running through this particular mix of people. In the character of Alex, there is also the whole issue of growing up and seeing the world in a more mature way. In reality, Alex is dominated by three people, Bet, Barbara and his cousin Rory. Barbara proves to be fantasy. Rory leads him to a lost cause. Bet in the end dominates him, but he is ready to resign to that in the end. This is what life is for some people – accepting second-best is a way to survive. We are told early in the novel that he is the epitome of mediocrity, but he is happy with that.

            While the novel teaches some hard lessons, there are still things that do not click. We are not told exactly how Schwartz was able to run away with Barbara from Jess, who had taken him in as a partner. What exactly happened to Jess? Or did I miss something? And after the great build-up of the character of “Princess” Barbara in the first section of the novel, why does she so quickly fade away in the latter parts of the novel? Or was this O’Sullivan’s intention – to show us that callow young men like Alex can over-rate young women whose apparent mystique adds up to little? Again, it could be suggesting that this is part of the process of maturing and adjusting to the world as it really is.

            The title Let the River Stand is important. There are many allusions to rivers and streams in this novel, including a river to be crossed in Spain, the river into which Barbara crashes, and many streams in Waikato. The metaphor seems to refer to the river of life, the process of growing and yet at the same time providing precise images. Often what images characters recall are somehow related to water, rivers and streams.

            In the end, though, I find myself thinking of this novel as a series of stories tentatively roped together, rather than a coherent novel. Event by event, it is very engaging, with moments such as young Alex confronting a wild rabid dog in the school playground; and Collins dashing through night-time sinister Ponsonby; and Rory suddenly roping Alex into his Quixotic crusade in Spain. I do not think I am the only reader who has become confused by which character is which in the narrative. Years later, O’Sullivan produced a much better novel All This By Chance [reviewed on this blog] which also had a profusion of characters, but which was able to make clear which person was related to whom – and with a more telling idea of what New Zealanders are.

Desperate footnote: I feel sure that I have missed some of the nuance of this novel because of the confusion between characters and the ambiguous ways they are presented. I might have even missed who was related to whom. I wouldn’t object if somebody could set me right about this.