Something New

 

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

     “NEW STORIES” by Owen Marshall (Penguin Books, $NZ38); “WHILE HEARTS COUNT OUR FOREVERS” by Hugh Major (Disjunct Books, $NZ32:99)

Among New Zealand writers, there is a long tradition of short stories. In fact New Zealand’s short stories are often more read than New Zealand’s novels.  Who is the most revered New Zealand writer? Katherine Mansfield, who stuck with short stories and never wrote a novel. Some of our best short-story-writers did also write novels – Frank Sargeson, Dan Davin, Janet Frame,  Patricia Grace etc. But since the recent death of Vincent O’Sullivan (poet, novelist and short-story writer), Owen Marshall reigns supreme as our most-read short-story writer (yes, he has also written some novels). His first collection was published in 1979, and since then he has always been lauded as one of our best and most perceptive writers. Owen Marshall is an unassuming writer. He does not condescend to his audience but [with very few exceptions] writes about ordinary people, mainly middle-class and Pakeha and only rarely involving us with academics or overt politics.

Marshall’s latest collection comprises 27 stories – some short, some long. Interestingly, only six of the stories are written in the first-person. One (Double Whammy) has a narrator telling us how difficult it is to deal with friends when they are about to get divorced. Swansong has a desperate narrator facing old people in a run-down apartment. The Hour of the Wolf  lets us hear the pompous voice of an ex-academic now depressed and hitting the bottle. Up at the Nancy is a strange story of a band of deer-hunters in the mountains who have to look after an odd intruder. Legacy is a sketch wherein the narrator’s memory reverts to childhood. And (opening the collection) there is a longer-than-usual story Fortune’s Whim, told by a young Kiwi who is doing his O.E. by picking up casual jobs around Europe and finds himself being a deck-hand on a millionaire’s pleasure yacht.  This is one in which we seem to be heading to a sting-in-the-tale, but Marshall has the nous to let us work out what has finally happened. In each of these cases, Marshall’s skill is his ability to adopt the exact sort of speech each narrator uses – we are listening to unique voices.

As for the other 21 third-person stories, Marshall rarely takes us outside New Zealand. Jasper Coursey presents a young Kiwi in Nice picking up some money by helping an old English historian around the ancient city… and oddly enough he comes to enjoy the experience. The Enemy Without a Tail is surprisingly about narcotics in Australia. One of Marshall’s finest (and longest) is the closing story Elsbeth and Lloyd George. Charming is its account of a New Zealander, with Welsh forebears, visiting Wales and enjoying the company of an English woman whom he meets. Marshall avoids the clichés that often go with romantic tales of meeting delightful strangers. This meeting is matter-of-fact and real in both its narrative and its denouement.  Dealing with almost “alien territory”, rarely used by Marshall, is Ghost Christmas, where a young man avoids having Christmas with his rowdy flat-mates and heads up to Auckland which he’s barely visited before. He finds some of the unexpected things young Aucklanders do. The fact is, in most of his writing, Marshall tends to stay in his own stamping grounds, far south of the Bombay Hills and usually on the South Island.

Some tales are brief anecdotes – Broderick and Riley, Free Fall, Cloud Drift, Marjorie’s Mushroom and others. One such is almost metaphysical, but I won’t spoil your reading by telling you which one.

At the risk of annoying you, I won’t give any sort of synopsis for all the other stories in this collection, great though so many of them are. But I will say that Marshall deals with very common domestic and public situations known in this country -  a retiree tasked with looking after a blind woman; two women coming to terms with their sexuality; how a man deals with visiting the factory where he once worked; a typical day of a young teenager just looking for harmless things to do; a woman who wants to break from a man who had once been her lover; engaging with people you’ve never met before; the cop who just happens to do the right thing when the wrong thing comes his way; the man who has the skill to move away from his boring job but finds, even with his skill, he can’t get any opening; the parents who are not sure how to deal with the situation when their son gets a girl pregnant; the young woman who is determined to meet the biological father whom she has never seen.

Mundane? Not at all. Marshall makes his characters live, behave like real people, show us what it is like to be a New Zealander and while he steers far from sentimentality he knows what compassion is.

Of course New Stories is a great collection. What else did you expect from Owen Marshall?

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

 

As well as being a skilled painter, Hugh Major is also a well-informed student of philosophy and spirituality, not identifying with any established religion but fighting a good fight against pure materialism. Twice before on this blog I have reviewed his work, first his Notes on the Mysterium Tremendum and later his From Monkey to Moth . I do not agree with everything he has written, but I am always stimulated by his earnest quest and his real insight.

In While Hearts Count Our Forevers, Major moves from speculation and pure philosophy to narrative and history. While Hearts Count Our Forevers comprises three novellas, all set in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and all based on historical fact… but of course in all three of these tales there is much discussion of philosophy and philosophers are among the main characters. 

First novella Zeitgeist – Weltgeist is set mainly near Jena University, with events taking place between 1798 and 1804 [this was, of course, long before Germany became one state]. Romanticism is in its high tide, and the man who calls himself Novalis is writing very romantic poems. Among philosophers there are many discussions on the nature of being and understanding. The aggressive philosopher Fichte believes that everything depends on the Self – we understand the world only through our own and single perception. But the philosopher Friedrich Schelling believes that two people can merge into having the same perception and in effect become one. Or could it be that Schelling believes this because he is in love with Caroline… who happens to be the wife of the philosopher Schlegel? Major deals with this carefully and it is the relationship of Schelling and Caroline that is the main focus. The novella is not only credible [it is based on fact] but it takes these matters seriously. Many characters appear (Hegel and Goethe himself have minor roles… and remember it was Goethe’s novella The Sorrows of Young Werther that was the epitome of romanticism). What is the denouement? Read and find out. Yes, it is a page turner.

Next novella A Material Girl has not quite so much angst, being the story of Margaret Cavendish (nee Lucas) but it does have some frustration for Margaret. Again based on fact, it is set in the years between 1644 and 1660 – that is, the years of the English Civil War and then the Restoration of the king (Charles II). Margaret is a royalist. She (and later her husband – who is 30 years older than her) take refuge in France while the civil war is raging. In Paris she gets to know a number of philosophers – Descartes, the master of rationalism; and Thomas Hobbes, a materialist who believes that everything is physical matter and who has little room for spirituality. Margaret believes there must be some immaterial force that feeds our intelligence. Major takes much interest in Margaret’s book The Blazing World, in which she presents her own radical ideas. What frustrates Margaret? That even the best philosophers tend not to take women seriously and do not really allow her to express her ideas. But she is able to square off with members of the Royal Society. In that respect, A Material Girl is a feminist story, but it is also a galloping tale of a particular era.

Finally comes Undoubtedly, really a spritely verbal duel between two very wilful people. It takes place in the years 1649-1650. Rene Descartes is feeling old, tired and in poor health [for the record, he died when he was 54]. The great philosopher has fled from France and Holland – where he had enemies – and has taken up the offer to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden. He is aged. She is 23. She swears effing and blinding. Hugh Major has researched and found for Queen Christina quaint ancient swear-words that are authentic but will no longer give offence. What is the verbal duel? Descartes believes that the only way we can understand things is by reason. The queen keeps testing him by confronting him with hard – and often foul - physical facts. Major does not use the terms, but this is a battle between rationalism and empiricism. Of course there is much more to it than that – the political manouevering around the queen; the question of who will succeed her; the queen’s sexuality [Major does not sensationalise this]; and Descartes’ memories and dreams.

In these three novellas, Major has not only researched carefully, but he has presented these distant centuries vividly. And believe it or not, given that he deals with such weighty matters as philosophical debates, he has managed to bring a light touch to his narratives. Quite a feat.

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 year or two ago.

     “HISTORY OF THE THIRTEEN” [“L’Histoire des Treize”] by Honore de Balzac (First published as three separate works; published together in 1834-35)

To the horror of some fastidious critics, the young Honore de Balzac was often happy to write cloak-and-dagger, blood-and-thunder shockers. Before he was a fully-fledged as an author, he wrote, under a pseudonym, many pot-boilers which he later disowned. In that respect, he was like the capable Alexandre Dumas and the (much worse) sensationalist Eugene Sue with their stories filled with conspiracies, cut-throats, dark hidden passages etc. etc. Yet even after he wrote his more respectable novels, Balzac still sometimes liked to deal with crime, with secret societies and with scandal in high places. L’Histoire des Treize is the epitome of this trend in Balzac’s work. It is presented as one novel, but in reality it is three novels, only loosely connected, and it is one of Balzac’s longest. Balzac also dedicates each of the three novels to a man in the arts whom he admired. The premise of L’Histoire des Treize is that there was a secret society in Restoration Paris (that is, Paris after the fall of Napoleon when Royalty was restored). This secret society is made of men totally devoted to each another’s well-being by fair means or foul. They have their own codes and ways of inserting themselves in the lives of people who threaten them; or people dear to them whom they want to protect.

Ferragus (dedicated to Hector Berlioz) is the first and weakest of the novels. It is very much a melodrama of mistaken identity. Maulincour, an aristocrat, is deeply upset when he sees a much admired and chaste wife in high society, Clemence, consorting with disreputable people in an unsavoury quarter of Paris. Shortly after he starts trying to follow Clemence and find out why she is behaving so strangely, nasty things begin to happen to him. He discovers that Clemence is frequently visiting the old criminal known as Ferragus. Maulincour continues to be terrorised. The knowledge that Clemence knows the criminal Ferragus compromises her. The blissful harmony of Clemence and her husband’s marriage is disrupted. Gentle reader. Let me not hold you in suspense. The upshot of this unnecessarily tangled plot [I have spared you much of the detail] is that the criminal Ferragus is in fact Clemence’s disreputable father!! Melodramatic drum-role here please.  There are a number of deaths. Maulincour is poisoned (by Ferragus of course). Clemence is driven to death by grief when her marriage falls apart. And [for reasons which I don’t wish to go into] Ferragus’s poor and mistreated mistress commits suicide. The “accidents” which befell Maulincour were naturally the work of the Treize of which Ferragus was the head. He was attempting to protect Clemence’s reputation in society.

Put together, Ferragus is frankly a wild and absurdly  melodramatic story. And yet Balzac still had the skill to bring alive many scenes of Paris high and low – observations of the shabbier parts of Paris; close examination of the behaviour of the nouveau-riche and the returned aristocrats in their salons; redolent thoughts of death in the elaborate funeral for Clemence; in contrast the bare funeral in the Pere Lachaise cemetery for Ferragus’s mistress. One wonders if it was the funerial atmosphere that made Balzac decide Hector Berlioz, with his famous Requiem, to be the appropriate man to be dedicated to this novel. Like so many of Balzac’s novels, in this novel and the two others there are characters who repeatedly appear in other of Balzac’s novels. There has also been much discussion that suggests Ferragus is really about the love of a father for his daughter. After all, Ferragus was trying to do his best for his daughter and to keep her from falling out of high society. This has been linked by some to Balzac’s masterpiece such as Le Pere Goriot, in which an old man gives much to his daughters expecting their love – but they end up scorning him. Father-daughter complications are in many of Balzac’s novels, such as Eugenie Grandet.

If much of Ferragus is outrageously melodramatic, then the second of these three novels La Duchesse de Langeais is both outrageously melodramatic and outrageously romantic.  Perhaps Balzac’s dedication to Franz Liszt was a nod to the composer’s romantic music.  La Duchesse de Langeais is also known as “Ne touchez-pas a la hache” – “don’t touch the axe” – which were supposedly the last words of King Charles 1^st just before he was beheaded. It suggests vengeance to come, and this novel is in part about the vengeance of a man who has been toyed with too often by a coquette-ish woman, and eventually the vengeance of cruel fate. Yet despite all its overt melodrama and romanticism, this novel has more nuance and sense of the relationships of men and women than you might expect. It begins with the French general Armand de Montriveau, fresh from wars in Spain, dropping in to a Spanish Carmelite convent, closed to the world on an island.  He recognises the music being played by an organist in the convent, recognises her voice in the choir and secures a chaperoned interview with her. In the convent she is called “Sister Theresa”, but General Armand calls her Antoinette or Duchesse. He tells her that her husband has recently died. They speak passionately. “Mother Theresa” confesses to the Carmelite superior of her relationship with Armand and her love for him. But she has sworn that she will stay in the convent. Armand departs, determined to somehow free her.

All this happens in 1823, but it is the prologue and back-story to what has happened previously in 1818.This takes up most of the rest of the narrative. In 1818, Antoinette de Navarreins, aged  24, marries for pure prestige with the Duc de Langeais. But, now known as the Duchesse de Langeais, she lives on her own in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain. She is a typical example of the irresponsible Restoration aristocracy, not without intelligence, wit and charm, but artificial, self-centred, coldly enjoying the admiration of young men in salons brought together with kindred spirits such as the Vicomtesse de Fontaine, the Duchesse de Maufeigneuse and the Comtesse de Serizey.  Armand de Montriveau, general of the Guards, a marquis who has served the both the Republic and then Napoleon, has led a hard and adventurous life. After Napoleon’s fall, he explored Africa, nearly perished in the desert, was enslaved and escaped. He is a man of fierce intelligence, impatient of frivolous high society, with a strong sense of rectitude and duty. But he is totally innocent about women. At a salon, the Duchesse de Langeais determines to make a conquest of Armand, whose exploits happen to be all the rage. She wants to make him a pendant for her own esteem. What follows is the story of a cruel  coquette who arouses in Armand passions neither he nor she really knew existed. So innocent is he that he does not recognise her studied wiles. She puts him off with various pretexts – first pleading that she is married (though she has no regard for, and no real connection with, her husband) and she does not want her reputation ruined. Then (with the assistance of her confessor l’Abbe Dongrond) she puts forth religious arguments on the immorality of loving somebody other than her husband. All of which simply arouses Armand’s love to fever pitch. But at last Armand understands the cruel nature of her coquetry. So he has her kidnapped from an evening salon [here the secret society the Treize enter, being friends with Armand, who assist in perpetrating this crime]. Now in his clutches, Armand denounces the Duchesse and her wiles. He even threatens to brand her with irons. But now the tables are turned. In this moment of extreme crisis, the Duchesse de Langeais realises that, while she was playing with him, she really was falling in love with Armand. Artificiality yields to passion. As if by magic, she is brought back to the salon [unbranded, of course!], but from this point on it is she who is hopelessly smitten with him. Armand still loves her, but he turns his back on her because she has so often played with him, and he withdraws from salon society. She tries to contact him. He does not reply. She deliberately has her carriage linger outside his bachelor residence, so that all Paris will think they are a couple. Whereupon a whole crowd of aristos and hangers-on [including her father] persuade her of the benefits of discretion – not that they object to adultery so long as it is kept quiet. Armand flees and the Duchesse attempts to contact him. Finally, discovering his whereabouts, she sends Armand a message saying that he will satisfy her love [okay, you know what that means] or she will retire to a convent. But by ill luck [shades of Romeo and Juliet] the message goes awry, Armand doesn’t get it, and the Duchesse goes into the convent.

Flash forward to 1823. Six months after his first visit to the Spanish convent, Armand returns there with some trusty members of the Treize planning to spring the Duchesse “Sister Theresa” from the convent. They secretly build a ladder to scale up the rocky side of the convent [Stewth! This really does sound like Alexandre Dumas or Eugene Sue]. In the dead of night, they get into the convent. But cruel fate!!! They hear the Mass for the Dead being said. At just the wrong moment “Sister Theresa” has died of grief – for her late father or for Armand? They take her body and bury her at sea. Armand’s dreams are over. One of his friends ends the story by telling Armand “After this, have passions; but as for love, a man ought to know how to please it wisely. It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man.” Take this “moral” (if it is one) for whatever you like.

Now please do not chastise me too much for giving you this long account of far-fetched romanticism, with its Spanish convents and blazing passions and big coincidences and a mysterious secret society. It is said to have been inspired by Balzac’s own unhappy experiences in loving an aristocratic grande dame who toyed with him. In the novel there are elements of male revenge fantasy – first masochism in the idea of love as self-abasement at the feet of the haughty lady; then the revenge of placing the haughty lady before the branding irons; then the lady’s moral humiliation as her sophisticated façade cracks and she too surrenders to passion. And the novel’s dedication to Franz Liszt seems most apt when Balzac has a long sentimental description of the majesty of organ music in the convent and the sublime splendour of the nuns’ choir and the religiosity of it all. Yet oddly enough, for all its melodrama La Duchesse de Langeais is a more thoughtful, and in places and more credible novel, than Ferragus. In its scenes set in Restoration Paris, which takes up most of the novel, Balzac gives a scathing account of the careless upper classes, their back-biting, pettiness, gossipy bitchery, and obsession with status and wealth. Balzac is far from romanticism when he reverts to hard reality in a 20-long-page- essay theorising about the factionalism and general stupidity of the aristocracy; their inability to see where their real interests lay; and their sad contrast when set beside the rising and more productive bourgeoisie. It is as if they have not learnt anything from the Revolution. Above all though, the power of his story lies in the long analysis of Antoinette’s relationship with Armand, which takes up over half the novel. It is almost an anatomy of coquette-ry. Compared with this, the rest of the novel is mere dressing. Given much of its romantic content, it is not surprising that La Duchesse de Langeais has often been filmed in France.

And so we come to the last of these three novels which purport to be about a secret society, the Treize, but in fact the secret society is only a very small part of any of these three novels. La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) – dedicated to Eugene Delacroix -  is for some prurient people Balzac’s most scandalous novel. It does have more sex than would have been the norm at the time it was written [apart from outright pornography which throve in the underworld such as England’s Fanny Hill and in France the work of the Marquis de Sade]. But La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or is less explicit than is now taken as the norm. I’ll give a brutally brief synopsis. Rakish young wealthy Henri de Massay sees, in a Parisian park, a beautiful young woman with golden eyes. He becomes obsessed with her. After many intrigues, he gets access to her boudoir and makes up to her with cuddles and kisses. She is exotic. Her name is Paquita Vales. She is technically a virgin but she knows a great deal about love-making. However, when they are canoodling, she insists that when Henri visits, he must wear a red cloak. This makes Henri think that she must have been using him and she must have another lover. He swears he will have revenge… though the next night he visits her again and is once again bewitched by her beauty. In the transport of passion [not said explicitly but presumable an orgasm] she calls out a woman’s name. Henri leaps away from her, ready to stab her for this outrage. But he is thrown out of the house by Paquita’s valet who always guards her when she goes walking. Therefore the next night, Henri (who just happens to be the leader of the Treize), accompanied by his bravos, breaks into her home… and finds that Paquita’s boudoir is splattered with blood, and over Paquita’s corpse, wielding a knife, stands Henri’s illegitimate sister Euphemie. She is almost a double of Henri, which explains why Paquita was ready to accept Henri as a sort of lover. Paquita was the daughter of a slave from the Middle East. Her body is easily disposed of, and to a naïve friend, Henri says that this beautiful young woman had died of consumption [tuberculosis]. Through the language of euphemism the “explanation” of this mystery appears to be that Euphemie bought Paquita as a slave for her lesbian pleasure. This explains why Paquita was skilled at love-making but was still a virgin. Euphemie murdered Paquita when she discovered that Paquita had made love to a man. Let’s admit that this is one of Balzac’s clumsiest works. Fully the first quarter of this story is taken up with another diatribe at the rich classes of Paris and their obsession with gold and other wealth and the cynicism of rakes. This hard-nosed sociological comment bears little relationship to the erotic melodrama that follows. The atmosphere of duennas, the closed house of a Spanish grandee, the secret passages and sound-proof rooms for love-making – are these what made Balzac dedicate this tale to the painter Eugene Delacroix, depicter of voluptuous half-naked slave girls and the wild Middle East? Probably. Yet in a way, Balzac redeems himself when he shows how depraved Henri is when he passes on his cynical ideas to a impressionable innocent provincial. And give the author credit for not making the denouement a total surprise. We know from the beginning that Henri has a sibling called Euphemie and, though one of them is legitimate, they are both the offspring of the English Lord Dudley – and of course every self-respecting French writer knows that English Lords are all hypocrites. For the record, La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or was filmed in France in 1961 at the time of the nouvelle vague. It updated the story to the present (1961) time. It was popular in its day, but has largely past out of memory and it now seems very tame.

Foot Note: These three works are sometimes called short stories – which they definitely are not – or novellas. La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or is relatively short, but Ferragus is a considerably longer than a novella and La Duchesse de Langeais is a very long 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.

                                                                  F**K

            F**k? Yes f**k. The most objectionable word in the English language beaten only by c**t, although the feisty feminist Germaine Greer has made a good case for legitimising c**t and honouring it. But you do notice how I am bowdlerising my own words, don’t you? I am deliberately not spelling both words in full lest readers might think I am simply trying to gain attention or be smutty. So f**k and c**t they remain.

            I’m not an expert in the origins of c**t as a word, but the use and misuse of f**k really intrigue me.

A little bit of backstory. The word f**k has been in use for at least 700 years… and perhaps more. It originated in Germanic and Scandinavian languages and was probably used in Early French. And bear in mind that the English language as we now know it is largely a mixture of Old German and French, with some Scandinavian and a little Celtic thrown in. Etymologists are very clear about this and they note that f**k, in its first form, probably meant sexual relationships but without any derogatory connotations. I am pointing this out clearly because every so often you might encounter some nitwit who wants to tell you that f**k means “Found Under Carnal Knowledge” or other such recently fabricated acronyms. Acronyms – making words out of separate letters - are often made up by people who don’t know anything about the history of words [etymology]. That is why you will also have nitwits who want to tell you that the word “posh” originated by the P. and O. steamship company that was reputed to have given the best berths to the wealthier travellers who were to get the best sunlight when going to India and then going back to England. Hence “Port Out Starboard Home”, viz “posh”. Again this is nonsense. The word “posh” was around long before there were such arrangements – if they really existed, which they probably didn’t – and “posh” seems to have arisen in Cockney slang meaning the showy wealthy classes.

But to get back to this word f**k. What is its status now? Over the centuries it has become a curse word (“f**k you”) a term of despair (“oh f**k it”), an aggressive way of dismissing somebody (“f**k off”), an all-purpose utterance when annoyed, especially when things have gone wrong (“f**k!”), an amusing way of addressing a friend (“how are things going you old f**ker”) and many other variations too tedious to catalogue. But of course f**k and f**king are most often used as crude and derogatory ways of referring to sexual intercourse.

 The word was always freely used  by what were once referred to as the “lower classes”. Fun fact - recently [silent] newsreel films, of British Tommys in the First World War, were handed over to a lip-reader, who was able to show that they effed and blinded to their hearts desire. F**k in all the trenches.  Until very recently however, the dreaded word would never be printed in a newspaper, uttered in a court of law unless somebody wanted to be fined for using such language, used in a stage-play or film, or found in a novel [apart from under-the-counter pornography]. But censorship gradually eased over the 20^th century. First came the novelists – with Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and others that followed -  with court cases that decided they could be published. Then in the early 1960’s, Hollywood, realising that television was now taking away much of its audience, began to allow the dreaded word into their movies. Then f**k became everyday speech in movies, American and elsewhere. Then f**k was frequently heard on television, it became mainstream, and even middle and upper classes began to casually use the word at need. And [I’m not a hypocrite] I have sometimes shouted f**k when I’m caught in a traffic jam or frustrated by the workings and codes of the systems of my desktop.

But there’s a problem here. Having hitherto been a scandalous word, a word that had some power, f**k has really lost its sting. It is all over the place. Once people would have been shocked by protesters bearing placards saying “F**K THE GOVERNMENT”. Now people just yawn and see this as passe. No wonder protesters now have to lie down in front of cars, or throw paint over revered paintings, to get attention.

There are two stories that come to my mind.

When Norman Mailer’s first novel was published [in 1948] The Naked and the Dead, his publishers insisted that he could not use f**k, even though the novel was about soldiers in wartime who, obviously, swore and cussed on nearly every page. So Mailer had to turn every f**k to fug. The jaded actress Tallulah Bankhead addressed him at a party saying “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell f**k.”

In 1962 the mainly comical English author David Lodge [I’ve written about him on this blog] wrote a novel called Ginger, You’re Barmy, about English squaddies doing their national service and often swearing a blue streak. He dutifully made every f**k a fug without having to be told. But two years later the novel was re-published, and without controversy, he was able to turn all the fugs into f**ks… But then even later, when the novel was getting a third publishing, Lodge changed his mind and decided that it was out of key to have a novel written in the early 1960s to be filled f**k – so back came all the fugs.

So see how f**k can still be contentious? We know it’s a foul word, yet we use it casually and then wish we didn’t. We worry that f**k  is losing its force because of over-use, yet we are aware that we are partly responsible for that loss. We know that the word is often used by people who do not have a very broad vocabulary, yet we don’t want to become patronising about this. Really it’s hard to know what to do with this word. F**kit.

 

Something New

 

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

    “LIAR, LIAR, LICK, SPIT” by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “BLUE HOUR” by Jo McNeice (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “HOTEL THERESA” by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28. 

 

The 85 poems of Emma Neale’s 7^th collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit has a title, drawn from an ancient chant, focusing us on the human capacity to lie, misinterpret or misunderstand reality, and sometimes suggesting that dreams can both beguile and confuse us.

The opening clutch of poems deals directly with lies. First there is a tragic situation. In  “False Confession”,  a dissenter in a tyrannical country is tortured until he gives a false confession – a case of the lie being forced. Then there are children’s lies. “Porky” has a little girl lying her first lie to mother ; then “The Quiet Type” has a little girl telling a lie to her teacher in primary school. Turning to more mature people, “Spare Change” displays the lie of a con artist. Perhaps God lies to us and is not fair – or at least this is implied in “Like girls were hot soft scones”. “Pandora First Gets Feminism, Age Ten” has the ten-year-old discovering her father’s stash of girly (or soft-porn) magazines – and then her father lies about it. “Threat” has a false bomb threat at a school – a malicious lie that scorches children’s minds for years after. “Androphopia”, a tale of a boy being physically mistreated by teacher, says “It begins when the child finds deceit / turns to truth if certain adults use it. / His tongue still curls at the grit of wrong, / like it did in the crumbs stuck to the sweets / from the man’s jacket pocket.” “Little Fibs” displays the small lies we all tell, as in  “Let us praise / the small evasions: / the missed call / the slight sore throat / the prior engagement…”. “Player” shows the capacity men have to spin untruthful yarns in casual conversations

So we learn of direct lies, forced lies, innocent lies, theological lies, foolish lies, well-intentioned lies – as in “white lies” – and malicious lies. Human beings are flawed, even the best of us. But what of the way we often lie to ourselves? Our false memories are a sort of lying. “Like the albums on rotate in your first year away from home” deals with the bric-a-brac of memories, of things left over and misunderstood.

But it would be quite misleading to suggest that Emma Neale is plucking only one note. There are tragedies, as in “Terribly Involved” wherein a new-born baby is cruelly being neglected in a hospital ward. There are sad let-downs – in “Wanted to believe in the butterfly event” a mother is aware that she wants to save the world… but her sons ask if that’s so, why did she have them? “Night-call” is essentially a lamentation for somebody who has died, but given to us in terms of multiple harsh or lowering images. In fact in this collection there are a number of poems that have the terror of night and dreams. “Sleepless” is literally nightmare-ish in its imagery, while “My Blank Camouflage”, also frightening, may or may not be read as a real event being told, or another nightmare. It appears to be related the fear of rape. In similar territory, “Scapegoat” has a woman who has a birthmark and who knows that her forebears once would have superstitious-ly regarded such a birthmark as the sign of a witch. One could also say “The Night Shift” is a fantasia. One poem, again nearing to dreams, is called in full “Dreams are the dark glasses and heatproof shell the mind wears when the truth is a hot, burning ball of plasma and at least sixty-seven known elements”

Emma Neale gives us a number of poems about 19^th century colonialism : “Tricks of Trade” suggests, in an almost jocular way, that white traders routinely cheated the Maori people; while the long poem “Genealogy” questions in detail how Pakeha genealogies gloss over things, especially forgetting the great help by iwi that had been given to white settlers. And in “Histology Report” there is an ambiguous memory of the poet’s family and its events in the past… perhaps another case of the mind telling untruths.

What is one to make of the poem “#notmetoothanks”? Is this poem based on a real meeting the poet had? At any rate, the first-person narrator refuses to honour a crass poet whom she once admired. There must be many cases like this in the poetry community. And what is one to make of “If you saw a miracle, would you speak of it?” It begins with the delight of seeing an unusual creature – but it turns into a call to leave creatures alone before that become categorised and examined. There is a strong conservationist idea here.

I have, of course, not mentioned every poem in this collection. It would take many pages if I did. Emma Neale has a very robust and sure way of expressing herself. This time, she encourages us to consider our own habitual ways of thinking, especially when we become complacent and assume that our lies and distortions of memory are the truth. Yes, we are flawed. But balancing a very questing collection, there is also Neale’s skill with the nightmare-ish, the dreams, and all the imagery that holds it up.

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When you first open Jo McNeice’s debut collection Blue Hour, you might think you are in for a romantic perspective on the world. Blue Hour begins with the poem “Aro Valley”, almost an idyll under the moonlight with delightful romanticism. And so too with the second poem “This Summer” with its “Millions of stars / in the emerald sky.” But this has simply lured us in. With great skill, with detailed images and metaphors, McNeice presents us with a tortured and generally unhappy world. One of the collection’s longer poem “An analysis of us as a film” begins with “Light & dark, / deception & betrayal…” and “Ordinary world, / conflict, / change / failure.” It goes on to tell us that drunkards never really reform and that there are “A swarm of killer bees & / a psychopath waiting in the woods.”… at which point the poem morphs into a movie of a discontented young man and his buddy, apparently having been dominated by his mother.

Many poems are presented in the first-person voice – not that this means the poet is necessarily giving us her autobiography. Some poems draw on images of the more sinister fairy tales, as in the nightmare setting of the poem “Wolf”. The macabre persists in “Not out of the woods yet” which is a distorted version of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Presented more in the present age is “Candles squint into the sun” wherein dead bodies lie on the street and “I walk the narrow road / between them / tiptoeing to avoid / the blood splatter / on the pavement.” Often we are presented with what amount to unhappy and despairing situations. Three “Mermaid singing” poems appear to refer to a young woman medicated and being dealt with by a psychiatrist. There is the image of the tide… and in the third “Mermaid” poem, the mermaids sings “we burn in this dark weather / & we drown in this dead weather”. “Laura” has a young woman with migraine and under a psychiatrist’s care… and yet in this case there is the redeeming factor of a wider perspective on nature in the background. Returning to the despairing, “Schizoaffective in spring” decides “You are just / molecules erasing / themselves, / a collection of / moments & dust, / a melted bullet, / an empty cartridge…”  The poem “Ghost Heart” appears to be dealing with bipolar disorder. “She’s feeling old” is not a poem of despair but of resignation to the fact that things change – in this case in terms of architecture inevitably changing. “Admission” begins “Admit nothing. / Your mind is a blizzard. / All the eyes of the creatures / from the bottom of the ocean / are on you. / You have planted rue & honesty / in a patch of black earth, / ingested doubt, like / a daily dose of arsenic.” And the poem ends “poison is the only cure for madness”. However, “Maybe” has the poet apparently unhappy in love or having lost love, but this time not despairing with the determination “I will wear an armour made / of misery & mania, / delusions & hallucinations, / fight my way out of this.”

I have, as I so often do, essentially given you a sort of synopsis, telling you of the contents of this collection. On the whole, these poems deal with moods; and the moods sometimes verge on the nihilistic – almost suggesting that life is not worth living or that life is only painful. But this does not negate the fact that Jo McNeice writes forcefully, presenting compelling images even in despair, and does, after all, understand what is the fate for many people.

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            The blurb tells us that Doc Drumheller’s Hotel Theresa is named after the New York hotel in Harlem which was frequented often by many famous jazz players and fighters, from Duke Ellington to Malcolm X. Drumheller has dual citizenship as American and New Zealander, and the famous hotel becomes eventually the cornerstone of all the countries he has visited.  He is very disciplined in this collection of 79 poems. All are written in seven couplets [with one exception] and all deal with place and local atmosphere. The poems are divided into nine sections, each having seven poems.

The seven poems of Psalms for a Broken City begin with ancient Maori concepts of how the Earth was formed, and then give us a part jocular and part lament for scenes in New Zealand – the end of a performance poet, the clogged city, a broken rural town and yet happy moments with rough mates.  The Treasured Places again begins with Maori lore but moves into almost idyllic images of New Zealand shores and parks. My Republic is more personal, dealing with how he prefers to raise carrots et al. [none of your chemicals please!], how he regards the Earth, and remembering both his mother and father in their gardening. The Swamp of My Childhood takes him more to his roots in America – the different flora and fauna like snapping turtles in the streams and the different mores with memories of old Dixie and also how his daddy used to speak. Hymns Behind the Iron Curtain do deal in part with his visits to countries that were once Communist, but not exclusively, and there is much irony in the way he deals with the different cultures he meets. And irony looms large in the next section called The Death of Irony, which deals more with sex and disgust at censorship. Learning Mandarin deals respectfully with the Chinese culture Drumheller has experienced, but he also writes ironically about Mao. The Oracles of Delphi moves from Greece and its antiquities to India with its great wealth and immense poverty. Viva La Vida is naturally about Mexico and leans towards its revolutionary side but with some jests as well. And finally the last collection of poems is Hotel Theresa itself. The mean streets looking for the remnants of the long-gone hip and beat days. The wild cactus centre of the U.S.A. A memoir for those killed in the Mosque massacre in Christchurch. And finally a peaceful poem reminding us that most people are our friends.

As I so often do, I have given you an account of this collection without examining the quality of the work. So I will be brief. I enjoyed this collection. I liked the way many of Doc Drumheller’s lines read like epigrams – straight forward, brief, sharp, accessible and very readable. And often enough there are some wild imagery and metaphors. A good sock on the jaw.

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 year or two ago.  

     “THE COUNTRY DOCTOR” [“Le Medecin de Compagne”] by Honore de Balzac (First published in 1833)

 

Honore de Balzac often prided himself on being able to write swiftly, and it is well-known that he often wrote through the whole night, fortified by gallons of coffee. But then, having written a whole text, and after the proofs had been sent to him by his publisher, he would virtually re-write the whole work. This was the case with Le Medecin de Compagne. Balzac said that he had written the whole novel in three days and three nights in August 1832, but it is probably true that it was extensively re-written before its publication in September 1833. For modern readers, Le Medecin de Compagne is hardly what we would now call a novel. It is more like a series of vignettes embodying a social and political idea, centred on the idealised portrait of a devoted country doctor. The “novel” divides into five sections, which I will attempt to summarise briefly.    

            First is called in English “The Countryside and the Man”. Doctor Benassis is the mayor of a small alpine village. Late in 1829 an officer called Genestas arrives wanting medical help from the doctor. The doctor puts him up in his guest-room, and cares for him during his convalescence. But the main substance of this section is Dr. Benassis explaining to his guest how he has rejuvenated the village by wise  economic and other social policies over the years – aided by the kindly priest Janvier, the Justice of the Peace Difau and the notary Tonnelet. Cretins are given a tidy refuge. Cottage industries are encouraged so that the village will be self-sufficient. A passable road has been made to reach the outside world and therefore trade is thriving to the prosperity of all. In effect, Benassis outlines the ideal programme for paternalistic village reform. The village now boasts its solid middle-class citizens, as well as thriving peasants.

            Then follows “A Doctor’s Round”, which shows us how Benassis’s benevolence works in practice. The healed Genestas accompanies the doctor on his rounds. The doctor is highly esteemed by all his patients and all the inhabitants of the village and environs. A visit to a house shows a middle-class family unprepared for the coming death of the family’s eldest man… but the doctor also visits a larger peasant family, higher-up in the mountains, where the family patriarch has just died. But the value of sturdy peasant tradition is shown when the mountain family’s widow immediately hands over family authority to the family’s oldest son and the new patriarch is fittingly respected. Other illustrative encounters are a fanatically loyal soldier in Napoleon’s army who now refuses to believe that the emperor is dead; a hardy old peasant called Moreau; and a brickmaker who now owns a village tile factory. A Mother Colas is mortally sick and has to be comforted by her 15-year old son.  The good doctor encourages a notorious poacher and smuggler to mend his ways. There is also some conversation on a 22-year-old girl who is being treated by the doctor for what we would now think of as a psychiatric problem – deep melancholy at least.         

So in part three “The Napoleon of the People”, after having heard Dr. Benassis’s theories and seen his practical work, we now hear his political agenda. At a dinner party, Benassis, Genestas, the priest Janvier, the Justice of the Peace and the notary discuss politics – which means Benassis holds forth. Basically he believes in a limited democracy. The franchise should be restricted, as those without property and talent are easily swayed by giddy orators; yet equality before the law should enable those of ability to rise. Authority must be respected or there will be no security in the state. The state should not be based on pre [French] -revolutionary privileges, but there should be a gulf between the rulers and the ruled. In providing a stable framework for society, the church has a valuable role to play. The talent of the individual entrepreneur will provide benefits to the whole community. Not all men are equally talented – indeed the mass of the population will always be dependent. Hence there is a need for strong men at the top. As if to illustrate the mentality of the [peasant?] mass of the population, the second half of this section has Benassis and Genestas visiting the old Napoleonic soldier who holds an audience spellbound with his tales of Napoleon’s conquests and military glory – embellished with folklore flourishes. It is so exciting that Genetas jumps down and embraces the old soldier, declaring that he marched in Napoleon’s legions too. Is this intended to illustrate for the reader the greatness of Napoleon in arousing among the peasants spirit and a sense of nobility and sacrifice? Or does it really reveal the credulity of the masses? Either way, this episode illustrates the gulf separating the masses and the “great men”.

 

Shifting the perspective considerably, and indeed moving into melodrama,  “The Country Doctor’s Confession” turns to telling us about how Dr. Benassis grew to be the man he is. His backstory, as Benassis tells Genestas, is that he came to this obscure village to practise benevolence because he had suffered tragedy in his life. As a young rake, he had seduced a woman who had his son but who then died. He looked after the boy as best as he could. Then he fell in love with another young woman, Evelina – but her strict Jansenist family refused to let her marry such an immoral man as Benassis . Then his little son died – and all happiness drained out of him. [This catastrophe befell when Benassis was 34 – which was the age Balzac was when he wrote this novel.] Benassis contemplated suicide, reading philosophers to justify himself. But a reading of the Gospels re-awakened his Christian senses. He decided to bury himself in a monastery, and visited the Grande Chartreuse… but monastic life suddenly seemed selfish. Instead, he came to this village to practice the Christian virtues in action. “For a wounded heart – shadow and silence” says Benassis (which Balzac makes an epigraph to this book.)

And in the final section, “Elegies”, Genestas also reveals his true identity and his motives. He too had suffered from the death of a wife; and her boy Adrien is mortally sick. Genestas had heard of the village doctor’s skill and his profound virtue. Genestas, having had dealt with his own medical problem, was also testing to see if Benassis would be worthy of tending young Adrien. Adrien is brought to the village. Benassis says the boy is not consumptive. He simply needs a healthy outdoor life, far from the unhealthy indoor school life in Paris which has ruined him. Benassis introduces the 16-year-old to La Fosseuse, whose profound charity for those suffering is revealed – the suggestion being that Adrien and La Fosseuse will grow together…. Eight months later, Genestas, who has gone back to the city,  gets a letter from Adrien in the mountain village saying that Benassis is dead. He was felled by the final shock of learning that Evaline, the woman he loved, has died. Genestas returns to the village. He sees the sorrow of the whole village at Benassis’s funeral. He finds his son Adrien is now in full health. A grassy mound is raised in Benassis’s honour. The final words of the novel suggest that Genastas will now settle in the village – and possibly the cycle of having a talented, benevolent man in charge will be repeated.

In many ways it is hard to criticise Le Medecin de Compagne as a novel. When  Benassis speaks it becomes a tract (or statement of faith) and anything that happens is really intended to illustrate a thesis – either by showing Bebassis in action, or by revealing the mentality of the people. It thus has no real “plot” as such. Nevertheless, there are vivid vignettes in the various portraits of the people of the village, the vigour of the old soldier’s narrative, and everywhere a very Romantic interpretation of alpine scenery. Le Medecin de Compagne is one of Balzac’s “scenes of country life”, depicting a man retiring after the struggle of city life – yet it was written before Balzac’s better novels about the urban battlefield. Indeed, despite the venerable nature of the novel’s main character, Le Medecin de Compagne is a relatively young man’s novel. Surely the notion of Benassis driven to benevolence by personal heart-break is a young man’s romantic concept? Would such motives sustain him through years of rational planning and toil? Would such a “sensitive plant” be finished by the news about Evelina? But there is a reason for this Romantic swing. The biographical facts are that 34-year-old Balzac wrote this novel after his break with one mistress, Madame de Castries, and after making the acquaintance of the Pole, Evelina Hanska, whose religious outlook was very similar to the novel’s fictitious Evelina.

Where Le Medecin de Compagne would now be most criticised is in its social outlook.  Balzac’s views are what we would now call paternalistic. Balzac, in this novel, sees no contradiction between the maintenance of hardy peasant virtues and the bringing of “progress” to the village. The question of the “lower orders” place in an industrialized society does not appear to exist for Balzac. Benassis (like Balzac) idealises an indefinite extension of the workshop and handicraft industries as means of bringing villages prosperity. He sees social happiness in the peasants trading their specialities with those of other villages. This is an essentially 18^th century concept from the era of “Philosophes”.  Certainly there is unintended irony in this novel when Benassis rejoices that the peasants are now so civilised that they no longer have to bake their own bread, but buy it, and a village bakery has been established. This strikes at the very roots of the self-sufficiency that elsewhere is eulogised. While Balzac may be right about the scarcity of real talent in the general population, he still puts an awful lot of faith in the individual entrepreneur. And, mes amis, how many entrepreneurs are more interested in growing their own wealth rather that serving the general public?

It's only fair to note that France was a little slower than Britain in industrialising, but by the time Balzac wrote, many large factories were appearing in France, railways were being built and France was ceasing to be largely rural. In a way, Le Medecin de Compagne is conjuring up a world that was already disappearing. And certainly, in the way Benassis is depicted, we are given somebody who amounts to a diligent squire to whom the peasants tug their forelocks. Even so, there is much to enjoy in the way the village is presented and the characters who have minor roles. Not one of Balzac’s best, and probably one of his least read, but still very readable.  

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.

                                                 SPEED AND IMBECILITY

            My wife and I are driving on a highway north of Auckland. I am at the wheel. We are enjoying the clear sky, the scenery and the cool jazz we’ve chosen to listen. A perfect ride. I am driving on the left lane at 80 per k. To our right on the inner lane there are cars buzzing past us at about 100 per k. This is now legal, so good luck to them, though I prefer 80 per k. and a slightly more leisurely pace. Suddenly my rear-vision mirror shows a car rushing up to us and then placing itself all of about two metres behind us. He obviously wants us to speed up. I say a few choice words to myself, wonder why somebody wants to sniff my bum like this, and I continue at the speed I am already driving. After some cars on our right have left open a gap, the road hog moves over, joining the 100 per k. group, and goes on his way… but in the distance ahead, we see him dodging and weaving between lanes, trying to get ahead of any car on the highway… and obviously going over 100 per k. Is it an emergency? Is his house burning down? Is his wife giving birth? Does he have to be on time for an important appointment? I suppose this is possible, but I doubt it. About five kilometres later the traffic has to slow down because of some event ahead of us. We find the road hog all of one car ahead of us. So what price all the speed anyway?

            I’m not a saint when it comes to driving. I have been known to use out-loud un-printable words when I’m trapped in a traffic-jam. But I do wonder why some people feel compelled to go as fast as they can when they don’t have to. At best, it appears to be a mania for teenaged boys… and teenaged boys [and some immature men in their twenties] are always way ahead in the statistics of death-by-car.

            Which brings me to a phenomenon that I have dealt with before on this blog. There is a prejudice claiming that “truckies” [drivers of large heavy-weight trucks] are boorish, thoughtless and careless about other traffic on the road. Quite the opposite is true. See a skilled truck-driver on the road, and you see somebody who knows how to load and handle goods without breaking them; who knows how to slow down when the road is twisty; who knows how to let cars pass when there is a slow-down lane; and who knows how to manoeuvre when having to reverse. See if you can back-up a large truck through a narrow gate. I have often seen this and I know it takes great skill. Of course trucks sometimes crash – usually on difficult roads far from the motorways – and when they do, they make headlines in newspapers and on the evening news. But every year, far more crashes are the result of thoughtless car-driving idiots who think their only purpose in driving is to go fast as possible, often to show-off with their mates or girlfriends. It happens on both motorways and rural back-roads.

            As for the legal 100 per k. speed on motorways and rural roads, as has often been said, 100 per k. is an option, not a target. Yes, you can be charged for deliberately going too slow and holding up the traffic; but the fact is there is no law compelling you to go at top legal speed.