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

“CLOSING TIMES” by Dan Davin (published in 1975)

Call me a completist if you will, but sometimes, when I have read most of the works of a particular writer, I feel I have to finish the job and read the lot. On this blog I have dealt with all the short stories of the New Zealand expatriate Dan Davin (1913-1990) as presented in the scholarly edition of Janet Wilson under the titles The Gorse Blooms Pale –Dan Davin’s Southland Stories and The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories. And I have dealt with all of his novels under my confronting and arrogant, but nevertheless accurate, headings Everything You Need to KnowAbout the Novels of Dan Davin – Part One and  EverythingYou Need to Know About the Novels of Dan Davin – Part Two. Admittedly I have not read (and will probably never read) Dan Davin’s official war history of the Battle of Crete, but I thought I had covered nearly all of the man’s literary output. Which left only his book of reminiscences Closing Times.

So here I am noticing it.

When it was first published, Closing Times was well-accepted by critics, who perhaps enjoyed these essays as at least respectable literary pieces after Davin’s limp final novels Not Here, Not Now and Brides of Price.  Closing Times consists of seven portraits of literary or cultural friends of Dan Davin. Most of these portraits had originally appeared as profiles in small magazines. The title immediately tells us that Davin knew some of the figures he profiled in the convivial context of the pub, though the title also suggests the chimes at midnight. There is a regrettably pompous and verbose eleven-page introduction which attempts to explain the nature of these profiles, how they are memoirs and not biographies and how the art of memoir is the art of selective anecdote… all of which is quite unnecessary as it is evident in what follows.

            Four of the seven profiles seem to me of less interest to the modern reader, even if one of them is about an important literary figure. Perhaps these were the four who did not engage Davin’s sympathies as highly as the other three did.

First  comes Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), the dandyish behemian writer, social snob and boozer, who was always on the brink of writing something great but who never quite achieved it. Davin finally says that Maclaren-Ross was a “major talent of minor accomplishment”, which seems just. Maclaren-Ross’s life reminds Davin of Sam Johnson’s memoir of the lively, promising, but distinctly minor poet Richard Savage. Perhaps Maclaren-Ross simply lacked the talent to write the novel he was always promising to write. After some much-admired short stories and one admired novella in the 1940s, he gradually sank into formulaic junk. Yet of course Davin recalls him as a convivial bar-friend, conversationalist, wit… and sponger, relying always on other people’s charity.

Even more minor is W.R. Rodgers (1909-69), a former Prebyterian minister and Northen Irish poet, who was another good drinking pal, if more abstemious and less garrulous than most such. Though told with good humour, most of Davin’s account of him concerns Rodgers’ failure to deliver an article for a book on Ireland which Davin, as Oxford publisher, had commissioned. As a result the book was never published.

Surprisingly, Davin’s next profile is on a major literary figure but it is neither very enlightening nor very entertaining. Louis MacNeice (1907-63) was one quarter of the “MacSpauday” poets, and probably the most significant quarter of that group after Auden. Davin speaks at some length of MacNeice’s discursive cycle of poems Autumn Journal that interested him in the 1930s and of MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel written in the 1950s, which referenced people whom Davin knew. Davin presents MacNeice as a taciturn man who was stand-offish and had to be coaxed into friendship, but who  eventually became another good pub pal. There is much talk of MacNeice’s love-hate relationship with the (Northern) Ireland where he was born. Regrettably, much of this profile is taken up once again with the story of the never-published book on Ireland, to which MacNeice was to be a contributor – the tale that is already told in Davin’s profile of W.R.Rodgers. As a profile it is surprisingly dull.

Enid Starkie (1897-1970), the subject of Davin’s next profile, is a figure now largely
forgotten. She was a scholar of French literature who wrote works on Baudelaire, Flaubert and perhaps most famously Rimbaud. But now her works have been superseded, as, eventually, most works of literary history and criticism are (for dissension from her views on Rimbaud, see on this blog the posting about Charles Nicholl’s Rimbaud book SomebodyElse). In Davin’s telling, Enid Starkie was a punctilious and diligent worker who always honoured deadlines and who was, in a way, heroic in keeping working and planning new projects even when ill and near death. She was definitely not an habituee of pubs, living a seemly and scholarly life. But she was apparently domineering in conversations and, Davin implies, she always had to be humoured as her fragile ego meant she was easily offended. Like Davin she was a lapsed Catholic, but from upper-class Irish stock (“Castle Catholics”) quite unlike Davin’s working-class background. Davin sees her as the archetypal “spinster” who still had an Edwardian outlook on life.

Thus for the four less interesting profiles, even if one of them (on MacNeice) deals with a major literary figure.

The most interesting profiles, and the ones with which Davin seems to have been most engaged, are the remaining three. Two are on well-known figures and one on somebody who will be totally unknown to most readers.

Itzik Manger (1901-1969) had been well-known in his own world, but that world had vanished even before Davin wrote about him. Itzik Manger was an East-European Jew, who had been famous as a Yiddish-language playwright and poet. But most of his world (and his relatives) had been destroyed by the Holocaust, and the Yiddish language was increasingly seen as inferior to the Hebrew that was now the dominant language in Israel. Here, then, was a man of great literary skill, but with a diminished, and dying, audience. Davin met him by chance at a literary conference, and the two of them struck up a friendship when they both escaped from the tiresome introductory sessions that go with such conferences. They headed for a pub and whisky; and they remained good friends thereafter. Davin tells many anecdotes of Itzik Manger’s happy interaction with Davin’s family and his children. Manger’s stories were often fantastical fables, and it is clear that part of the bond between the two men came as Davin saw a resemblance between Yiddish fantastical fables and the Irish fantastical fables that were part of his own ancestry. Minor and unknown figure or not, the profile of Itzik Manger is one of the best in this book.

            The remaining two profiles are of writers who were very well-known in their lifetime, but only one of whom now seems much read.

This is of course Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Most of what Davin says about Thomas reinforces what we already knew – Thomas worked hard at his poetry but earned little and was easily distracted by booze. Were the distractions and the pub convivialty substitutes for writing when Thomas’s inspiration ran out? Or were they necessary relief when he had been too absorbed in his muse? Of course Davin notes Thomas’s unreliablility, failure to meet apppointments or deadlines, and his constant sponging off others. Thomas would readily steal things from people who had given him a bed for the night, including Davin. Thomas would especially steal clothes when his own shabby, unwashed clothes were no longer wearable. Davin sees in Thomas a touch of the little boy who never grew up. He also records the deep resentment that Thomas’s wife Caitlin had at the sight of Dylan’s pub cronies (including Davin). These were people who had regular jobs and better incomes than the Thomases, as the Thomases lived hand-to-mouth. But at the same time Caitlin saw them as people who were distracting Dylan from his real work as an inspired bard. In spite of all the obstacles, Davin sees Dylan Thomas as a great poet, and often tries to reconstruct Thomas’s ability to light up and enliven any pub conversation once he had a mug in his hand. To me, this is in a way like saying “You had to be there” when you try to explain how funny or uplifting somebody was. It is interesting that, to express the essence of Dylan Thomas’s effect upon others, Davin quotes at length from sections of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel that clearly reference Thomas without specifically naming him. (For other ideas on Thomas, see the posting Dylan Thomas A Tribute.)

            The other important figure is the novelist Joyce Cary (1888-1957). I cannot help feeling that this is the most admiring of all Davin’s pen portraits. The Ulsterman Cary had chosen England as his lifelong domicile and regarded himself as English. He was a prolific novelist but did not find fame until we has in his fifties, when he wrote the trilogy Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and (still his best-known novel) The Horse’s Mouth. Davin depicts him as methodical, carefully planning and editing everything he wrote; stoical in the face of adversity (the death of his wife ); convivial but not a gossip. In many respects he was a reserved, orderly man, honouring family traditions (one always went to the pantomime at Christmas) and – delightfully – never reading reviews of his own work and declaring that he never read new novels because he chose to read “only masterpieces”. He had a family of offspring who were all – as he was – well-trained in music; but he himself believed that all the other art forms (music, sculpture, painting, dance) were essentially sensuous and had no real moral content, whereas the novel was, and should be, essentially moral. This is how he conceived of his own novels. Cary was definitely not one of Davin’s pub mates. Davin knew him in the context of family gatherings and parties; and Cary was apparently adored by Davin’s three young daughters, to whom Cary told long tales. I add only that while Cary was seen as a major literary figure in his lifetime, he now appears to have faded out of the canon. I remember that The Horse’s Mouth was one of the set-texts for first-year undergraduates when I began studying Eng. Lit. at the University of Auckland in 1970. But I doubt that Joyce Cary would appear on many ‘varsity reading lists now.

            As it says goodbye and goodnight to so many people, Closing Times is a fitting end to Davin’s writing career. Davin writes epitaphs on old friendships. Parts of it do entertain, and it is now obviously one source books for various literary biographies.

Something New

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

“THE GORSE BLOOMS PALE – DAN DAVIN’s Southland Stories” Edited by Janet Wilson (Otago University Press,  $NZ45); “THE GENERAL AND THE NIGHTINGALE – DAN DAVIN’s War Stories” Edited by Janet Wilson (Otago University Press,  $NZ45)

Here’s a problem for me. Should I be including these two collections of short stories in the “Something New” section of this blog? After all, the great majority of the stories presented here have long been available in print, and their author died thirty years ago. What’s more, the first of these two books, The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories, edited by Janet Wilson, was first published in 2007 and has now (in 2020) been reprinted. The second book The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories, also edited by Janet Wilson, has now (in 2020) been published for the first time.

            Yet there is value in seeing these two collections as new books rather than old. There is the new form of their presentation – the long scholarly introduction that Janet Wilson gives to each volume and her detailed apparatus criticus. In both volumes, Wilson has arranged the stories in a different order from their appearance in earlier collections. For example, only some of the stories from Davin’s collection The Gorse Blooms Pale (published in 1947) are in The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories, the rest being now placed in The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories. Wilson’s editions also include some previously uncollected stories as well as one or two that were never published even in magazines. So let’s consider these as two new books and worthy of close reading, especially as together they comprise all Dan Davin’s short fiction.

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            First, The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories. It includes a selection of stories from The Gorse Blooms Pale (1947), a selection of stories from Davin’s next collection Breathing Spaces (1975) and six previously uncollected stories.

            Janet Wilson’s long (26-page) introduction  gives a detailed biographical account of Dan Davin (1913-1990), son of Irish-Catholic parents, who grew up in a large family in Southland (mainly Invercargill) in the 1920s and early 1930s. His father was a railwayman who also tended a small farm. In his first collection of stories, Davin fictionalised his family as the Connolly family and himself as young Mick Connolly. Later Davin attended a school in Auckland for one year, studied at the University of Otago in Dunedin, won a scholarship to Oxford, excelled as a scholar in Classics, had extensive military experience in the Second World War, but spent the rest of his life in England as an academic publisher and (apart from a few brief visits) never return to New Zealand. He had left New Zealand in 1936 when he was 23. It is interesting to reflect that nearly all his Southland stories were written when he was far away from New Zealand, on the other side of the world. Janet Wilson repeatedly tells us that he is part of “diasporic” writing. Like James Joyce, he wrote obsessively about the country where he was born, but hardly ever wrote about the country where he spent most of his life.

Wilson’s style of editing is very fastidious. Every story has many end-notes, sometimes advising us of the meaning of now-dated slang or Irish words, but for the Southland ones more commonly connecting every road, address, hill, farm, stream, school or public business to their originals in Gore, Invercargill or Dunedin. She thus more firmly advises us how much of Davin’s short fiction is really thinly-disguised autobiography based on observation of real places and people. I should add that it might be better to read the introduction after reading the stories themselves, as Janet Wilson does analyse many of them and in the process imposes an interpretation on some of them.

So to the stories. After all, they the main reason that I have – with much appreciation – read my way through these two volumes, sometimes remembering stories I read years ago in earlier editions, but just as often coming across stories that were new to me.

First, The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories. They are very much depictions of a lost world and part of their interest is their documentary details. We are in a very different society from the present when, coming from the family’s milking shed, a little boy has to deliver milk in cans to neighbours on a cold, windy night; and it is made clear that the customers he visits come from different social classes and some look down on him and his family (“Milk Round”). We are frequently made aware of chronic poverty in the semi-rural setting,  as in a story focusing on a poor old woman who comes regularly to the Connolly home to wheedle and cadge for food (“The Basket”). Many stories remind us of the social divide between (often working-class) Irish Catholics and their (sometimes middle-class) Protestant neighbours.

However, Davin is not only documenting a way of life. The stories about Mick Connolly also chart a pattern of growing-up and maturation. The young Mick early feels a form of alienation when he is annoyed with his family and has typical death-bed fantasies (in “The Vigil”). He learns about death and the grimmer side of farm life when he and his brothers discover baby rabbits dead in the snow (“Late Snow”). He also witnesses his father killing a new-born bull, of no use to dairying (“Growing Up”). Cruelty, an awareness of death and a sense of personal betrayal combine in one of the better-known stories “Death of a Dog”, where Mick’s father kills the boys’ favourite dog Jack, on the pretext that the dog has taken to biting people.

There is a considerable change of tone in a story of Dunedin university-student life, where a student feels both triumph and apprehension at losing his virginity, and finds a that Presbyterian professor’s interpretation of the poet Catullus is at odds with his own erotic impulses (“That Golden Time”). Indeed, there is a different stylistic approach in the later stories from the original The Gorse Blooms Pale. The earlier stories are spare and not over-written (although I did detect a nudge of purple prose in the description of a vegetable garden in “The Basket”). But in the later  stories there is a tendency to overstate a moral or to add a twist ending. “A Happy New Year” contrasts convincingly two separate celebrations going on simultaneously – the refined party in the house and the rough rouseabouts’ booze-up out the back. With its complex cast of characters and clear indication of class tensions, this could have been one of Davin’s greatest stories – but it comes down with the clunk of a twist ending that seems to have strayed from another story. So too in “A Meeting Halfway”, which sets up the credible situation of a refined wife at odds with her coarser-grained husband, and then crunches melodramatically into a shock ending

The childhood stories from Davin’s later collection Breathing Spaces (1975) are less clearly focused. With just a slight tweak, some of them would resemble the type of country yarns found in Frank S. Antony’s Me and Gus. Little Mick Connolly (i.e. Dan Davin) and his brothers play at parachuting off the roof in “Roof of the World”. Two gangs of kids play at war and stage fights in “Goosey’s Gallic War” -  but, dammit, the story is stymied by a cutesie punchline about reconciling with your enemies. Mick and his brother cut down a tree their father didn’t want them to cut down (“The Tree”). You see the potential these stories had for pure knockabout? But then Davin always has a sort of moral undertone and often implicit social commentary. “Presents” seems a careless anecdote but implies the family’s poverty. On the whole, these stories from Breathing Spaces suggest an author much further removed from his childhood than he was when he wrote The Gorse Blooms Pale and now more prone to categorising his youthful experience and drawing neat lessons from it. Nevertheless, one story of adolescence remains one of Davin’s best. “The Quiet One” presents a teenager who tags along with two more experienced youths, looking for girls on a Saturday night in Invercargill. He feels mainly a sense of inadequacy until, on his own, he encounters a loner whose own erotic adventure has come to a grisly end.  This really is a story about growing-up.

“A Return” and “First Flight”, both written in first person, read like straight autobiography or reportage of Davin’s brief return to Invercargill in 1948.

Of the six previously uncollected stories included in The Gorse Blooms Pale – Dan Davin’s Southland Stories, one is an early piece Davin wrote as a student (“Prometheus”) but four were first publshed in the NZ Listener and another New Zealand magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. All are written in the first-person and all, regrettably, are prone to preaching an obvious moral with the use of simple symbolism. A damaged fighter pilot nurses a damaged bird in “The Albatross” and likens his solitariness to the bird’s. In “Black Diamond”, Davin pairs the black diamond insignia of the New Zealand Division in the Western Desert with the black diamond coal that the boys stole from a railway yard when he was a kid. “Gardens of Exile”, concerning racial prejudice against Chinese market gardeners in old Southland,  morphs into a homily on tolerance and good race relations. Wilson’s introduction says of these hitherto unpublished stories that “Distance from his homeland becomes a cipher for a more universal sense of alienation.” (p.34). Possibly so, but I am more aware of distance and the passing years making the older expatriate writer simplify and schematise the society he had earlier depicted more vividly.

There is one aspect of Davin’s outlook that deserves special mention. As Janet Wilson notes, Davin left behind his Catholic upbringing in early manhood, and was a confirmed agnostic. She says “In these stories Davin charts the development of an essentially secular outlook predicated on harsh moral realism.” (p.19) But there is no strident anti-religion polemic in these stories. It is more an assumed undertone. In the opening story of this collection “The Apostate”, little Mick Connolly becomes  disillusioned with God because he can’t get his lost pencil back even though he prayed for it. In “First Flight”, recounting his brief return journey to New Zealand in 1948, Davin gives his father a polite excuse for not going to mass, which his old father accepts agreeably enough. The story “Saturday Night”  does suggest puritanical hypocrisy when a friend of Mrs Connolly deplores a saucy film which she has obviously enjoyed, but this seems to reflect the general puritanism of society at that time. The story which most directly protests at the behaviour of religious figures is the never-previously-published one that closes this collection, “Failed Exorcism”, and even this is a relatively mild account of a Marist Brother humiliating young Davin and his brothers in front of a class. Davin’s dislike of church and dogma is often implied, but it is rarely as dramatised in detail as it is in some of Davin's novels.

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Now turning to the second of these two books, published this year for the first time in this format, The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories.  Once again Janet Wilson’s endnotes to each story are both copious and scrupulous. This time, however, she does not deal with slang so much as with showing non-military people where and when during the Second World War each story takes place, and how each story draws closely on the diaries Davin kept while on service. As in the earlier volume, this shows us how most of Davin’s short fiction is lightly disguised autobiography. Wilson calls the stories “fictionalised accounts rather than imaginative fiction” (p.17) She also notes that while other New Zealanders who have served as soldiers have written fictional versions of their experiences after the war is over (John A. Lee for example, or M.K.Joseph), Davin was unique is writing some of his stories when the war was still in progress. There is a very extensive glossary, originally devised by Davin himself and now enlarged, explaining place names, designations of military units and, of course, Kiwi soldiers’ slang. Though it is not discussed in this edition, I find it interesting that the title story “The General and the Nightingale” was obviously one of Davin’s own favourites. At any rate, it was one of his two stories (the other one was “Saturday Night”) which he chose to include in the much-reprinted Oxford University Press anthology New Zealand Short Stories which Davin edited in 1953.

This time, before it discusses indivdual stories, Wilson’s introduction focuses on Davin’s life just before and during the Second World War. At Oxford, he had won a First in Greats (Classics) in 1939 and might have looked forward to an academic career; but in 1940 he volunteered for officer training with a British regiment. He had himself transferred to the New Zealand Division (the “Div” or  2NZEF), with which he stayed for the rest of the war, first as a platoon commander. He saw action in the retreat through Greece and then in Crete. He was wounded and evacuated to convalesce in Cairo. Then he was transferred to Military Intelligence (as many intelligent Oxbridge-educated chaps were) where he served with Paddy Costello, Angus Ross, Geoffrey Cox and others who, like Davin himself, feature under fictionalised names in some of his stories. This group of Intelligence officers were always in close contact with their general Bernard Freyberg, who also features in stories, though usually just as “the General”. Davin was not a man to idolise people, but he liked Freyberg and the title story is really a celebration of the chief officer’s sang froid under fire. It is clear that Davin, who had been away from New Zealand for four years before his war service, was glad to find himself from 1940 to 1944 in the company of New Zealanders whom he respected and admired.

All of the stories in this new edition have been published before, some in Davin’s original The Gorse Blooms Pale (1947), some in Breathing Spaces (1975), and nearly all of them in a compendium of his war stories which Davin called The Salamander and the Fire (1986). However, the stories are not presented here in the order in which they were first published. They are presented in the order of the historical events they recall. Thus the first of the 20 stories, “Below the Heavens”, takes place in April 1941, during the retreat through Greece, when Davin was first under fire. The last story, “Not Substantial Things”, is set in Italy in June 1944 when the shooting war in Europe is nearly over for New Zealanders and the author is reflecting on what the post-war will be like. In between we go through nearly every phase of the war that Davin experienced.

Janet Wilson remarks that the stories Davin wrote during the war are often terse and brief, whereas those he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s tend to be longer, more detailed and more analytic. As a generalisation this is true. Certainly the very first war stories Davin had published (in magazines early in the war) are both impressionistic sketches – “Under the Bridge” about terrified Cretan civilians trying to find shelter during a bombing raid; and “Danger’s Flower” about Kiwi soldiers in Crete going through the same sort of torment. But apart from style, I think there is another distinction between the war stories Davin wrote in the 1940s and those he wrote in later years.

The later stories tend to be a little more critical of officers and a little more ready to note the shortcomings of some New Zealand soldiers.

Take this sequence of four stories, all first published in the 1970s and 1980s and all dealing with the Italian campaign – mainly the battles around Monte Cassino. “North of the Sangro” has an overconfident young intelligence officer thinking he can encourage Germans to desert after he had interrogated just one prisoner – but his plan ends in farce. “Psychological Warfare at Cassino” is one of Davin’s very best stories, at once sad and funny and with a carefully layered sense of what “psychological wafare” means. It ridicules mercilessly an American OSS officer who has a foolish plan to demoralise the determined German troops they are facing. But, while it is told with good humour, we are also made aware of the jockeying for favour among the New Zealand intelligence officers. “Cassino Casualty” is a study in “battle fatigue”, or PTSD as we would now say, showing how a competent and brave New Zealand soldier is on the point of burning himself out and mentally destroying himself. “When Mum Died” is a less succesful story, told in the first-person by a batman who had just received the news that his mother has died. Davin has this working-class narrator speak in what seems a forced and stylised slang which does not quite convince. Even so, the batman’s understated grief is compared with an officer mourning the death of a dog.  I’m aware that Davin was sensitive about dogs, as in his Southland story “Death of a Dog”; and elsewhere in The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories there is the story “The Dog and the Dead”, set just after the second battle of El Alamein, which has a soldier deciding to shoot a dog howling for its dead master. Even so, in “When Mum Died” the death of a dog is clearly a small thing compared with the death of a mother.

Other stories written in the 1970s and 1980s have a negative tone about some officers and men.”The Persian’s Grave” (Athens, May 1941) has a soldier, left behind after the British evacuation of Greece, getting drunk and accidentally giving away the Greek family who are hiding him from the Germans – although he does redeem himself a little at the end. “East is West” (the chaotic retreat to Egypt late in 1941) has an arrogant officer foolishly forcing his driver to go through a minefield. “Coming and Going” (the Western Desert 1942) presents a commander committing suicide after he has deserted his troops in battle. And while it is mainly a semi-humorous sketch of an awkward situation, “Finders and Losers’ touches on the matter of soldiers’ infidelity to their wives faraway in New Zealand, and wives’ infidelity to to their faraway soldier husbands.

None of this is to suggest that Davin was squeamish in the war stories he wrote in the 1940s. “Bourbons”, first published in 1945, is a very unflattering portrait of complacent and snobbish British officers. “Unwrung Withers” has a British orator in Palestine ostensibly expressing solidarity with the Jewish people and their aspirations while in private revealing his casual anti-semitism. “In Transit” shows a generous Maori soldier in Italy feeling pity for poor ragged Italian children who are refugees, and giving them anything he can to help… while at the same time American MPs beat with batons Italians who linger around railway station and exploit impoverished Italian women for sex. But note that the main targets of Davin’s scorn in these earlier stories are mainly British and American, not New Zealanders.

The only story, written in the 1940s, that dramatises something reprehensible about New Zealand soldiers is “Liberation”. A pregnant and starving young Italian woman offers her body in exchange for food. At first the Kiwis give her food generously, without understanding what her offer is. But when they do understand what she is offering, some take her up on it. Possibly, but only possibly, there is also a tiny undertone of disapproval in the closing story, “Not Substantial Things” (published in 1947), where three Kiwis “liberate” a small Italian town long after the Germans have retreated, get drunk on vino, and one of them (based on Davin himself) makes a bombastic speech to the gathered populace. But, apart from its very elegaic ending, most of this a represented as uproarious nonsense.

Even if he was an uncommon soldier in some ways (how many other soldiers would while away their time during the second batlle of El Alamein by reading the Aeneid in the original Latin?), Davin was obviously at home with his fellow New Zealanders. To read these stories in one collection is to sense that for four years, the “Div” was a substitute for the Irish-Catholic family whom he had left behind in New Zealand and whom he only very rarely ever saw again. He had left his religion in New Zealand too. In The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories, there are only two stories that address his staunch agnosticism. One, “Jaundiced”, is simply the sketch of a Catholic chaplain whom  Davin didn’t like, presented as a fellow who spouts useless cliches. The sketch contains one paragraph questioning the role of all military chaplains. The other, a much more nuanced story, is “Mortal”, which questions and rejects a Catholic chaplain’s assumption that men will always turn to God in the face of crisis and death. There is an interesting ambiguity to this story. The chaplain is dedicated to his task and no fool, even if Davin rejects what he is offering. More interesting, the fictitious chaplain is based on the real Catholc priest Father “Ted” Forsman, who remained a lifelong friend of Davin’s and had been through the same North African campaigns as Davin. Perhaps it was part of Davin’s bonding with his own “tribe” even if he had no use for its received ideas.

Oops. I’m slipping into cheap psychological analysis here. Maybe Davin just liked this particular bloke.

I hope in all this long assessment that I have made it clear what an enriching experience it was to read, over a couple of weeks, all of Dan Davin’s short fiction in these two handsomely-produced volumes. The definitive edition I would say.

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.

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

“A FIELD OFFICER’S NOTEBOOK – Selected Poems” by Dan Davin, edited with an introduction by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ29:95); “THE QUEST” by Yannis Kyrlis (English language translation by Maria Georgala) (Austen Macauley Publishers, no price given); “WALKING TO JUTLAND STREET” by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, $NZ 27:50); “THE FACTS” by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “ARE FRIENDS ELECTRIC?” by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “WINTER EYES” by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); "WHISPER OF A CROW'S WING" by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50)

 

Dan Davin (1913-1990) was best known as a novelist, short-story writer and academic publisher. He had only a few poems published in his lifetime and was not primarily known as a poet. Nevertheless, he did fill notebooks with poems and ideas for poems, none of which have hitherto been made public. Robert McLean has selected, edited and written a very informative introduction to A Field Officer’s Notebook, presenting what he sees as the best of Davin’s published and unpublished poems. The title was one which Davin himself considered for such a collection.

As McLean’s introduction explains, Davin wrote poetry in three periods of his life only, marked in this collection by the headings “Before”, “During” and “After”. The “Before” was in the late 1930s, when Davin was a young man in England, remembering New Zealand and considering a career. The “During” was the Second World War, probably the pivotal period of Davin’s life, when he served with the New Zealand Division in Crete, North Africa and Italy. The “After” was years later, in old age in the 1980s and in retirement from the world of publishing.

McLean speaks of Davin’s “inescapable minor key” in that so many of these poems are wistful, lamenting, accepting of death without eternal rewards and only occasionally finding pleasure in nostalgic, fragmented memories of childhood. In McLean’s view the poems written during the war are Davin’s best.  McLean characterises the poets of the First World War as moving from “idealism to cynicism”, whereas the poets of the Second World War moved from “cynicism to nihilism”. This, he says, was Davin’s course. Though inflected with classical allusions, the poems Davin wrote in North Africa are ironic and raw. They are, says McLean “insistently negative”. He contrasts Davin’s war poems with those of New Zealand’s two best-known servicemen poets of the Second World War, M.K. Joseph and Denis Glover. Davin, he notes, wrote his best wartime poems while the conflict was still in progress. The other two poets wrote in postwar recollection.

This is all the framework of A Field Officer’s Notebook, but what of the poems themselves? We cannot escape the fact that they are poems of their time. Many of the later poems are free-form – perhaps in an “unfinished” state – while the earlier ones tend to be in stricter traditional metres. It is impossible to ignore the dated diction that the younger  man often favours (“ponder” “chide” etc.)

The poems of the “Before” section present a young man’s anxieties, not just in having left comfortable childhood behind, but in the sense of having so far achieved nothing in his life (see especially the poem “In what diversity of sterile tasks”). Perhaps there is a touch of envy at those who got ahead of him academically, as in “Had I constrained my spirit then”,  written in 1937, where Davin claims to spurn Academe in favour of Bohemia. In its entirety, it goes thus:

Had I constrained my spirit then


To put on learning’s gown


I might have scorned the life of men

And walked with the scholar’s frown.

Well-informed I should have strode

Lettered and erudite


Subscribing to a college code


And mouthing maxims trite.

I might have lost humanity

And withered to a don


But I preferred profanity

Love and demijohn.

Well, perhaps Davin preferred cussing, shagging and drinking to scholarship, but the preference clearly wasn’t unmixed.

The general tone of the “During” section is less defensive. When Davin writes of the dead under snow, he sees no consolation. His poem “Haunted by mysteries, life, time, and death” does not accept the concept (so much a focus for Wallace Stevens) that living joys and sensuality are made more precious and wonderful by the prospect of annihilation in death. Davin won’t accept even that apologia for death, because death haunts and pollutes the joys of life, as in the lines “Wolves exiled from the light / Their jealousies prowl still / About the brief campfires of our love, / Living a ghoulish life / within the echoes of our laughter”. Davin cannot write a poem about soldiers enjoying an evening boozing and having a knees-up. Instead his poem “Morning Fatigue in the Canteen” depicts the morning-after clean up of cigarette butts and slops.

The most finished poems of Davin’s wartime experience are, it seems to me, three of the most confronting. “Egyptian Madonna” is a poem of disgust as the poet describes in horrible detail the sight of an undernourished child being suckled by an impoverished mother. “Cairo Cleopatra” is just as explicit in its view of a prostitute – or at least of a prostitute’s body being used by many soldiers. As for “Grave near Sirte”, the harshest poem in the book, it concerns the complete anonymity of death and the way we inevitably forget the dead, regardless of what the monuments say.

The imagery of some of the poems in the “After” section clearly sets them in the London of the 1980s. Some, dare I say it, are trite aphorisms. There are memories of Davin’s Irish-New Zealand childhood, and he babbles of the green fields, perhaps covered in gorse, of Gore and Invercargill. Yet he is still frequently referencing and re-imagining the war, with fragments of a poem about El Alamein, and quoted snatches of an ironic song about Ravenstein (the German general who was captured in North Africa by a detachment of New Zealanders). His envoi to the war is “Why not be dead?” which goes thus: “Why not be dead? / 
The old dead soldier said.
/ It’s really far less trouble
 / And there are no orders, no jankers, here, /  To be carried out at the double.”

This is the best epitaph the unhappy ex-soldier poet could write for himself.

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It is flattering when a man on the other side of the world writes and asks me if I could review on my blog his collection of short stories. When the Greek writer Yannis Kyrlis wrote from Athens to ask if I would review The Quest, I readily said I would. This slim volume (138 pages) consists of twelve short stories, many of them very brief. The longest is the title-story “The Quest” at 32 pages, followed by “Just Don’t Forget the Way” at 30 pages.

Most [but not all] of the collection’s shorter stories are written in the detached third-person voice and most take the form of fables, parables or visions – more extended image than sequential narrative. The settings are often unreal – I hesistate to say surreal – being both everywhere and nowhere. In “The Threat” a man defends his house from men who want to destroy it – or do they? “The Sceptre” has lovers quarrelling near a rubbish dump, where a walking cane becomes a symbol for antiquated patriarchal authority. “Some Black Birds” is a simple shocker while “Confessions in a Café” presents a rather convoluted discussion in a café between older and younger people of artistic pretensions, ending with a reconciliation between the generations. Symbolism – or extended metaphor – hangs heavily over some stories. “The Stranger” presents a literal foot race as the epitome of the urban rat race. “The Painter of St George” shows a painter’s confidence ruined by a hostile review. “Before the Dawn” is a soul journey story set among street people. “The Little Girl with Cloth Legs” plays with very heavy symbolism indeed as an alluring childhood memory is exorcised by a Witch (or is that Fate?). “The Course of a Crisis” is most definitely a parable, about our need for enemies in order to sharpen our thoughts.

            Thus I have name-checked my way through nearly all of this volume’s shorter offerings. They sound at least a little like the shorter pieces of Kafka in their arbitrary conclusions and not-quite-diagnosed sense of menace. I would advise that they be read carefully, one at a time, or their simlarity of style could become oppressive.

Far more interesting, I think, are the two longer pieces, both written in the first person and therefore perhaps signalling a greater engagement on the author’s part. Oddly, one is a dreamlike, almost surreal piece, while the other is strictly realistic.

“The Quest” is the surreal one, of the Alice-in-Wonderland variety with its abrupt transitions. The narrator has literally lost his heart and is fishing for it in murky water. People incite him to suicide. He is set before a sort of tribunal, convened in a tavern, which accuses him of wilfully losing his heart. His friend and protector is called “the Illustrator”. At one point his heart is a leaf hanging on a tree. At another he is confronted by a powerful female figure who accuses him of throwing his heart away on her. It is hard to read “The Quest” without plucking out symbols – the dead tree, the tower, and perhaps “the Illustrator”, symbolising conscience or art – something that can put the narrator’s experiences into words and can rationalise them. But as to what it means…. like most surrealism, it simply is not reducable to a formula. Kafka’s K. really would be at home in its atmosphere of meaningless menace – a nightmare in images.

Personal taste leads me to relate much more favourably to “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, a realistic presentation of the childhood memories of a man who lived in an impoverished village – not that the poverty is played up by the narrator, who would have been too young to diagnose such things. Poverty is implied by the fact that the narrator’s father has had to leave for Germany to find work and it is implied by the bitter quarrels housewives have over nothing – that nothing being the meagre rations they have to feed their families. At one point, the narrator’s gang of kids find the corpse of  a man who has committed suicide, presumably from despair. This is a robust and straightforward child’s narrative, and it gives a kid’s eye-view of (Greek) political events that the kid does not understand. Only towards the end do we realise that it is set just after the Colonels have staged their coup.

But there is one snag in this story. It has to do with the uncertain nature of the translation from Greek into English. The matter is not as evident in the volume’s more surreal stories, where unrealistic flourishes of language are part of the territory.  But in a realistic story like “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, it is jarring to find a kid saying “he will bestow me his bicycle” or “a new kid who came lately to our neighbourhood”, or for one quarrelling woman to use the word “foolish” as a form of address, as in “What can you tell me, foolish?” rather than something like “you fool”. To me, this unidiomatic English suggests that English is not the translator’s first language.

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            I have to provide a collective apology to the five poets whose work I cover very briefly in what follows. On this blog, I try to consider collections of poetry in detail, but given that I am now posting only fortnightly, this is becoming harder to do, so – not for the first time – I am here providing “notices” rather full-length critiques. I hope this is satisfactory. 

This may be a brash thing to say, but Michael Steven’s debut volume Walking to Jutland Street fills me with an odd sort of nostalgia. It situations itself in a well-established New Zealand tradition – as the blurb says, it’s partly under the influence of New Zealand poets Olds, Orr, Johnson and (maybe) Baxter. This is the realist poetry of blokes in hard circumstances, in the workshop or in the grotty Dunedin student flat, sometimes among bums, beats, hopheads [cor! listen to my dated slang!] – in a word Bohemians, trying to find some sort of karmic truth. I like the plain statement of all this and I note there’s another layer of nostagia here in that Steven himself is clearly looking back on his life as it was and not as it is. The excellent descriptive title poem “Walking Jutland Street” says as much, especially in its closing line “I am writing these lines from another life.” In saying it’s realist, I’m not dismissing this very arresting collection as a series of literalist snapshots. Steven peppers his verse with unexpected jabs of telling imagery, and he has a wicked ironic wit. Check out one of his best, “Educating SR-3781”, which uses a funny-sad story to point up the difference between machine and human being. In an odd sort of way, Steven moralises, too. The opening poem might be a wild childhood cavort with an excited tone of whoop-de-do, and later ones have rich descriptions of travel in Asia – but as for the Bohemian ones, Steven often admits that there was a destructive side to the Bohemian life.

Therese Lloyd’s The Facts is a book of withdrawal, of unhappiness, of a desperate attempt to find something positive in life. A number of her poems are [to use a word she herself uses in her notes] ekphrastic – that is, they are comments on existing works of art or images, and there is a section which plays variations on the poetry of Mallarme. I think I am justified in saying that some of them are fairly opaque. Central to the collection, however, is the sense of aging and, apparently, an account of a marriage that didn’t work. So the tone is often very confessional. I found myself most absorbed in two poems. The first is the prose poem “On Looking at Photographs in High School Yearbooks”, which negotiates cleverly the task of being at once dismissive of, and nostalgic for, what is now dead and gone. The second is the eponymous nine-page poem “The Facts”, a consciously candid view of a failing marriage written more in lucid dissection than in anger. Its imagery is both complex and engaging, but also often bleak. I have to agree with Hera Lindsay Bird’s comment (quoted in the blurb) that this book “won’t make you feel better”.

I am going to begin by admitting a prejudice. I am prejudiced in favour of the poetry of Helen Heath. When I reviewed her first collection Graft on this blog in 2012, I praised her for her humane clear-headedness and her engagement with science. I find these same qualities in her new collection Are Friends Electric?, although this is a volume that heads in some new directions. The first section (also called “Are Friends Electric?”) is heavily footnoted as it contains many “found poems” and many allusions to, or quotations from, other people’s texts. Often I find the concept of “found poems” offputting. Too often they become exercises in isolating, and implicitly being ironical or mocking about, what somebody else has written. But this is not Helen Heath’s style. What she finds she transforms. The sequence about “Strandbeests” really does become an engrossing reflection on human-made concepts and imagined evolutionary processes. Even more arresting, the prose poem “The Anthropocene” connects us human beings with bird-calls in a most unexpected and refreshing way. If I do not connect as whole-heartedly with the poems, in this first section, on love and relationships, it may simply be that they reflect the mores of a generation different from my own. The second long section, called “Reprogramming the Heart” is more confessional. Most of its poems are in the first person, dealing with pregnancy, birth, motherhood and (apparently) widowhood among other things. The matter of technology and science is not forgotten, however, for Heath has a consistent train of images linking us [human beings] to the cyber world and to artificial intelligence. Once again, her style is polished and her expression is clear.

I can take Winter Eyes only to mean the eyes of somebody who is heading into winter – that is, getting nearer to old age. In Harry Ricketts’ latest collection, the words come from the last line of the poem “Sansibar oder der letzte Grund”, which asserts “Things look different through winter eyes”. These poems are indeed elegaic and backward looking in the main. Many appear to reach back to mildly-raffish student years (listening to rock music and taking hols on the Continent) and the years of being an aspiring academic. There are a number of anecdotes concerning well-known literary identities either met or talked about, and of course there are references to canonical literature.  Some poems seem to allude to a youthful love (or do they?) and some are certainly about a lost relationship with a stepson. Not that this is maudlin. The tone is more often jocular , knowing and perhaps resigned. I am not sure that Harry Ricketts would necessarily appreciate the comparison, but I read this collection with the same sort of pleasure I get from reading the chattier, more relaxed poems of W.H.Auden’s mellow years. They are urbane and often witty.

Majella Cullinane’s Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is an extraordinary book and unexpected in the sense that it is a type of poetry rarely published in New Zealand now. Suggesting a strong awareness of earlier forms, the collection’s epigraph is, fittingly, a quotation from Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”. An Irish expatriate now resident in New Zealand, Majella Cullinane combines a romantic sensibility with a modernist sharpness. Her poetry has much very Irish (Catholic) imagery together with specifically New Zealand imagery. (The blurb tells me it is being published simultaneously in New Zealand and Ireland). There is much reference to a deep past. The whole section “The Hours” links the traditional monastic canonical hours with present day urban life. Much of the final section “Cut Away the Masts” (including the surging and terrifying poem “A Woman Was Seen”) is based on materials drawn from letters written in the nineteenth century. In the poem “Displaced”, it is as if Cullinane has inserted herself into the spirit of an immigrant from earlier centuries. Nature is numinous in the world depicted here.  And it is easily anthropomorphised. There is “a gust throwing the eucalyptus on the hill into a quandary” in the poem “First Light”. Crows are portents of death in the collection’s title poem; or they are linked to the human skill of literacy, as in “the black letters on this page / as they move across the white space, which remind me / of crows stalking frozen trees” (in “Finale to the Season”). I do not wish to be reductive, but the general tone of this collection is a sense of longing. Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is fey in the original and non-pejorative sense of the word – it senses the presence of things not quite seen (see the poem“Seeing Things”). There is much mist, much fog, much sea-coast. Am I resorting to racial stereotypes if I say it is very Celtic? Yet it is also confessional. The whole section “As Good As” appears to refer to a miscarriage in mythological terms and includes the wrenching line “I would fashion the smallest gap you could sneak through” . I’m impressed.