Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART THREE

In my last two postings, I dealt with Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy comprising Maori Girl, Power of Joy, Maori Woman and The Glory and the Dream. My task now is to write about the one other novel he wrote, his short stories, and one remarkably naïve work of non-fiction – which might as well be regarded as fiction.

A Night at Green River was published in 1969, between the two halves of the tetralogy. It is in effect a very schematised parable. Two farmers live side by side in the far north of Northland. One is Maori, Tiwha Morris. The other is Pakeha, Clyde Hastings. Clyde Hastings wants to pay a gang to bring in his hay before the rain sets in. Tiwha Morris agrees to help him out by rounding up such a gang. But when Clyde leaves, Tiwha gets to thinking how much he hates the Pakeha cash nexus which reduces everything to money. So instead of helping Clyde out, he stays at home with his mates and they party and share warm fellowship. Meanwhile the rains do set in, Clyde’s hay is ruined and Clyde fumes and rages about how those lazy Maori have let him down… but then both Tiwha and Clyde have a good think. Tiwha thinks about the limitations of Pakeha culture. Clyde thinks about his frigid wife Edith [Warning ! Referring to women as “frigid” is now regarded as a male invention… but it is here in this novel.]  Clyde also thinks of a sordid sex episode in which some of his drinking companions gang-raped the wife of an invalid. Up to this point, the novel’s values are very much weighted against Pakeha. But a new element is introduced in the person of Tiwha’s friend Tu Nelson, who openly mistreats his very pregnant wife Martha. In the rain, Martha runs away from Tu and takes shelter with Clyde and his wife. The Hastings are beginning to look after Martha when a very drunk Tu bursts in with a rifle to reclaim her. Tu and Clyde fight violently and Tu is finally knocked-out. Clyde somehow feels revivified by this… at which point Martha’s baby begins to come… So Clyde and his wife Edith take Martha down to Tiwha’s house where, in the novel’s climax, the baby is delivered by Tiwha. The umbilical cord is cut by Tiwha in the traditional Maori way, with a pipi shell. And in the accepting atmosphere of life and family, Edith and Clyde begin to reshape their lives and values in terms of neighbourliness and acceptance. And Tu accepts his responsibility as a father.

Even more than the tetralogy (which this novel interrupted) this is very much a parable for Pakeha. Though Tiwha Morris is forced to realise that he has unjustly underrated the neighbouring Pakeha farmer and his willingness to help, the novel is weighted towards telling us that Pakeha are indeed cash-obsessed, class-conscious, sexually repressed (Clyde has never seen his wife naked) and patronising, and therefore much more in need of being taught a lesson than Maori are. At the same time, with the exception of belligerent Tu, the way the warm, familial life of Maori as presented here borders on caricature. In fact, given its first publication date, there’s something oddly retro in its depiction of the rural scene. Television is mentioned, so the story is obviously set in the 1960s, but Tu’s, Clyde’s and Tiwha’s most vivid memories are of serving in the Second World War (which ultimately makes a bond among them). There seems some self-conscious attempt at “balance” in the depiction of the races – we have Tu’s domestic violence balanced with Clyde’s memory of a sordid sexual episode. BUT Hilliard would have us to believe that a man who gets drunk, slaps his pregnant wife about and eventually chases after her with a rifle is going to blossom into a loving father once the child is born. Indeed Hilliard even has Clyde reflect that Tu’s violence towards his wife is a sign of how much he cares for her. Sheesh! The birth of a child, heralding the birth of a new understanding between Maori and Pakeha, is the kind of heavy symbolism in which Hilliard so often indulges. (And the names? Given that Tu is the god of war and Nelson was a warrior on the sea, the name Tu Nelson at once means somebody who fights.) The first half of the novel is more a static situation than a story, again heavily weighted with interior monologue and with Hilliard rarely failing to point a moral.

            One traumatic event and two cultures are suddenly bound in fellowship. Well, it would be nice to think that could happen.

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            Hilliard’s first collection of short-stories A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches was published in 1963. It is trite to say the obvious – that any collection of short stories will be a mixed bag, possibly ranging from the very good to the indifferent. Thus for A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. Many of its tales were previously published in magazines and journals, and the intended audience was apparently broad. Hilliard acknowledges that some stories were written for the old School Journal, which was read in the junior school classes. These are the last ten stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. They are headed “Bubby and Paikia” and concern two Maori kids living in a rural area and the various scrapes they get into or (more frequently) what they are taught by their elders or when they are taken on outings to places that they enjoy [and that Hillard presents somewhat idyllically]. They would surely make good reading for youngsters.

            The 14 stories that precede these, however, are more hard-headed and more clearly adult.

Of course to the fore are stories about tensions between Maori and Pakeha. The title story “A Piece of Land” has Maori landowners cheated out of owning some acres by complex Pakeha laws. “Young Gent, Quiet, Refined” has a young man turned away when he wants to rent a flat in the city, because he’s Maori. “Man on a Road”, which seems to be autobiographical, has the Pakeha narrator and his Maori wife Kiriwai meeting an old Maori man near the sea who gives a monologue about being dispossessed of his land by Pakeha farmers and holiday-makers building baches. “Erua” concerns a  Maori kid at primary school who admires a Pakeha teacher, but who becomes disillusioned when the teacher turns out to have many flaws. “Doing Pretty Well” is about a branch of the Samuel family (the family that the Maori Girl comes from) in which Kepa Samuel has done well in the Pakeha world as a farmer with a Pakeha wife, so he is embarrassed when his working-class brother Mutu visits him. Is Halliard suggesting that there is a loss of solidarity when Maori adopt Pakeha ways? Perhaps emphasising the ignorance of many Pakeha when it comes to country ways, Hilliard includes two stories about two Pakeha nitwits called Frank and Barry, “Looking the Part” and “Every Man to his Trade”, in which the boys get badly out of their depth. They read something like the “Me and Gus” stories from way-back-when.

Hilliard includes in this collection a number of light anecdotes about family habits when he was a child, or sketches of an old soldier or mean tricks played on a none-too-bright layabout. But the two stories that are most allied with his socialist views both have to do with the 1951 lockdown, that was still a raw memory when these stories were published. One was “New Unionist” about one of the “scabs” [non-unionised workers] who took over work on the wharves when the union workers were locked out. As Hilliard tells it, the soldiers who protect these “new unionists” really despised them. The story is, to say the least, didactic. [This was the story that Dennis McEldowney damned in Landfall as so bad it was “embarrassing”]. The other story, “Friday Nights are Best” has a unionist who has been thrown out of work in the lockdown and has to take up work is a rural area. At first he likes it as a break, but he soon can’t help wanting to go back to the city. It is interesting that Hilliard doesn’t address party-political factions in these two lockdown stories. Perhaps by this stage, while still being left-wing, he had become disenchanted with union politics and he had long since left behind him his two years as a member of the Communist Party.

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            Published in 1976, Hilliard’s second short-story collection Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches has some of the same preoccupations as A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches but there are some major differences. In the 25 stories, concern with Maori matters and racial prejudice is still there, but there is a much franker approach to the matter of sex. Perhaps what could be printed had moved on since 1963.

            On the interest in Maori situations, the story “Absconder” is a first-person monologue by a teenage Maori girl in which she makes it clear that she has been mistreated in Welfare custody. “The Girl from Kaeo” shows the gulf of misunderstanding between the official version of a Maori teenager’s delinquency and her own view of the same matters. “The Tree” demonstrates how a small Maori village removes a tree in the proper, traditional and ceremonial way to make way for some necessary Ministry of Works project. [Thinks – is this a reply to Roderick Finlayson’s better-known story “The Totara Tree”, wherein Maori block “progress”?] “Nothing But the Facts” has a Maori boy in a boarding school having to defend himself from potential blackmail. “Matilda” has a Maori girl falling foul of Pakeha ideas of ownership. “Puti Wants Beer” has Maori women sitting in a kitchen talking about their useless menfolk and contraception, but when the men return they realise how much they need them. “Wendy” has a Pakeha woman telling a teacher that she does not like her daughter playing with a Maori kid… not realising that the teacher is the Maori kid’s mother.

            These are all very familiar tropes from Hilliard’s earlier stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches, but what about the frank sex now found in Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches? “Corrective Training” has two girls in borstal who, it is implied, have a lesbian attraction. [Hilliard’s point  isn’t clear here. He seems to suggest that incarceration is the cause of homosexuality.] The brief sketch “Anita’s Eyes” is a description of a prostitute’s eyes. The title story “Send Somebody Nice” concerns a young prostitute who doesn’t know how not to be too affectionate with her clients… and in the end she escapes to Australia with one of her customers. “The Telegram” has a homosexual businessman sending a telegram to a soldier he has exploited and thinks of blackmailing him. “Girl in a Corner” shows a girl having an affair with a sailor and hovering on the edge of becoming a prostitute. In “At Angelo’s”, after a prostitute approaches a group of men in a late night diner, the men talk about how tacky whores are but also come to understand that prostitutes are exploited; and male customers are as much exploitative as the prostitutes’ pimps are. Far and away the most awkward and badly organised story in the collection is “Initiation” wherein a boy feels “unclean” when he goes through a rough boarding-school ritual after he has been with a prostitute.

            There are two stories that directly address ideology. “Street Meeting” concerns two Communist speakers on a Wellington street who are being heckled by various people including a drunk; and they are being watched by two policemen who, however, do not intervene. There is something very dispiriting about this story, as if the Communist orators are themselves beginning to lose heart in their cause, aware that most people are indifferent to their words as they go about their ordinary business. [Be it noted that by 1978, when the story was published, the New Zealand CP had diminished to a tiny membership, and had suffered a schism with some allying with Russia and some allying with China – which is referenced in the story.] The other story is the almost unbearably sentimental tale called “The Paper Sellers” – on one side of a Wellington street, a Communist is selling “The People’s Voice”. On the other side of a street a Catholic activist is selling “The Catholic Worker”… but despite their clashing beliefs, the Communist hawker comes to like the Catholic hawker, especially when he gets sick and dies. The Communist admits to himself that the other guy was just another decent human being and ideology isn’t everything. Okay – it’s a humane story and, as so often, Hilliard is on the side of the angels. But it’s as unlikely as the last-minute reformation of Tu at the end of A Night at Green River.

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And so to Hilliard’s “remarkably naïve work of non-fiction” which I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. This is Mahitahi – Work Together: Some Peoples of the Soviet Union, published in 1989 by Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Noel Hilliard and his wife Kiriwai went on a six-week tour through regions such as Uzbekistan, Moldavia and Byelorussia and other outlying parts of the U.S.S.R. Their aim was to see how well-treated the minority ethnicities in the Soviet state were. And - lo and behold – they discovered that everything was absolutely wonderful in the U.S.S.R. My goodness! How well it compared with all the anti-Maori prejudice there was in New Zealand!! …   Except that everything they were told was told by official guides who of course said that everything was wonderful. The Hilliards swallowed it. True, there are one or two negative things that Hilliard mentions. A Siberian physicist mentions the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and how Siberia got some of the fallout. And students are amazed that New Zealanders eat more meat that Russians can afford.

For naivete, consider this when Halliard speaks in a Russian newspaper editorial room. He tells the Russian journalists that in New Zealand “our newspaper are privately owned and have no obligations to the public, only to their shareholders.” Writing of the Russian journalists’ response he says they asked “How can such things be? they wanted to know. What kind of a newspaper is it that opposes your government and also the wishes of the people? Is it not their task to reflect the way your people think?      No, I said, their task is to return profits to the shareholder.” [To which they replied] “And who are these people who set themselves up in opposition to the majority of the people?” Yes folks, a one-party state with much gagging of independent thought will always tell the truth more that those filthy capitalist newspapers. And I believe the moon is made of green cheese.

Later, in Uzbekistan, Hilliard reports “I mentioned the Human Rights Commission in New Zealand and its Race Relations Office which looks into complaints about discrimination in housing and jobs and has power to prosecute offenders. ‘Do you have such a thing here?’    ‘No, we don’t have national chauvinism,’ said the professor. ‘We have national boasting and other such harmless forms. But we have no need of an institution such as you describe.” Actually this answer confirms what I thought of the U.S.S.R. It had no concept of Human Rights.

It is interesting that nowhere in this book is the name of Stalin mentioned as at this time his memory was out of favour. If Stalin had been mentioned, then one would have to admit that under his regime, hundreds of thousand [in fact probably millions] of non-Russian ethnicity were forcibly uprooted from their homelands and sent to distant – and usually impoverished – areas. Many such ethnicities whom Hilliard (briefly) visited were only where they were because Stalin had banished them there. You can verify this if you read Robert Conquest’s Stalin Breaker of Nations or any other reliable history book on the subject.

I could say more on this matter but I am beginning to rant. Suffice it to say that, ironically, the U.S.S.R. was on the brink of collapsing when Hilliard visited it. And once it collapsed there were wars in which various ethnicities broke away from Russian rule. So much for such happy folk under the Soviet regime whom Hilliard reported. Interesting to note that Hilliard was news chief of the Wellington Evening Post when he wrote this book. How he must have suffered under those shareholding private owners.

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            By this time you are probably thinking that I have just systematically trashed the work of Noel Hilliard. Not so. In his days and time he was a compassionate man who took seriously the matter of Pakeha discrimination against Maori and who wrote about it. He may have – like many of his vintage – for a while embraced the delusion that Communism was the cure, but [even if he wrote one silly book about Russia late in his life] he broke with that delusion even while remaining a committed socialist.

            The main problem now is that he has become a back-number. His frames of reference belong to another era. Maori are no longer a rural people rarely seen in cities. Maori no longer leave other people – non-Maori – to write about their experience. There are now many skilled Maori writers who can speak for themselves; and what they write is very different from what Hilliard used to write about them. Hilliard’s work is often seen now as patronising or perpetuating old stereotypes. When I wrote about Roderick Finlayson, I quoted the old quip “No good deed goes unpunished”, remembering how Finlayson, as sympathetic of Maori as Hilliard was, was criticised by the Maori author Patricia Grace for not depicting Maori life accurately. Hillard has fallen into the same category, not helped by his frequent tendency to write sentimentally about Nature, his often awkward prose, and his eagerness to point out morals.

            He is of another age. He belongs to history.

Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART TWO

 

[Last posting I dealt with the first two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy, Maori Girl and Power of Joy. This posting I deal with the concluding two novels of the tetralogy. ]

Maori Woman (first published in 1974) brings Netta Samuel together with Paul Bennett. Once again, Hilliard presents his novel in four parts. And once again he begins each part with a Biblical quotation.

Part One : Netta Samuel now works as a machinist in a Wellington clothing factory. She was devastated when she had to give up her baby Victoria (“Vicki”) for adoption to a Pakeha couple. She is now living with Jason Pine, a Maori labourer who has spent time in jail for his violent criminal activities including rape. Jason has had a life of dodging or coping with Pakeha prejudices. He also has a strong sexual appetite and (unknown by Netta) he is cheating on Netta with a Pakeha girl. Paul Bennett, as he determined at the end of Power of Joy, has approached Netta and had tea with her after first accosting her at the railway station. He has asked her to phone him - but she will not give him her name. At the clothing factory, Netta’s boss is the Pakeha Henry Rushbury. He has decided views on the disruptive powers of attractive young Maori. They are a distraction for the male workers. He also seems to be bored with his own marriage.  Part One ends with Paul Bennett lifted out of his gloom when Neta does phone him.

Part Two: Netta’s Pakeha boss Henry Rushbury takes more than a passing interest in Netta… indeed he daydreams about her while at a symphony concert [Hilliard presents classical music as something for snobs who only attend to boost their own prestige.] Netta meanwhile accepts at the factory the friendship of a rather neurotic English girl called Sharon Burt, who claims she’s going to marry a Maori called Richard. Only later do we learn that Sharon is in fact the Pakeha girl with whom Jason Pine is cheating. The friendship of Paul and Netta develops. They meet a number of times and exchange stories of their childhood, but she does not as yet trust him with her address or the details of her life. Finally, balancing up Jason and Paul in her mind, she decides to commit herself to Paul. At about the same time, Jason is gathering together all the rage and resentment he feels about Pakeha society. This culminates when he sexually humiliates Sharon at a Pakeha party they attend. He knows trouble will soon find him and he decides to leave town. This is the same night that Netta and Paul decide to live together.

Part Three : Travelling back to the country, Paul meets Jason, fresh out of prison, who berates him for his Pakeha ignorance of Maori ways. Aggressively he attacks Paul’s patronising attitude. Netta returns to her family, wrenched by the fact that she is not able to tell them about the mokopuna she has given up for adoption. Her father (without speaking out loud) laments the poor living he is able to scratch out of his farm than the Pakeha have taken away the best land. And yet in prayer and celebration, Netta’s is a warm homecoming to a real family. In contrast, Paul’s is a solitary homecoming. Isolated, he wanders among the trees, alienated, looking at the way industry has wrecked the countryside. Visiting the overgrown, run-down marae he wonders how this could be the centre of a social life. As for Jason’s homecoming, he is completely alienated from the old ways… and later he defaces a sign that prohibits the taking of shellfish. He despises his family for clinging to tradition and determines to go back to the city. And back in the Wellington factory, the boss Henry Rushbury is having lustful thoughts about Netta, especially as his wife keeps nagging him about how he should be more assertive with his employees. Netta tells her family that she is going to marry the Pakeha Paul. There is some consternation about this, but her family generally accepts her decision. In contrast, when Paul tells his parents that he's going to marry a Maori woman, there is barely-suppressed racism. Paul’s mother is tight-lipped and his father gives a full-on racist lecture. Paul consults an Anglican vicar about his family’s attitude. The vicar is understanding and says it is Paul’s family that must change; but Paul comes away feeling that he should not have attempted to rely on a church he no longer believes in. He tries, without great success, to make peace with his mother. Netta visits the neighbours of the Matiti area and once again sees how run-down and backward the area is. In a way, she has become more acclimatised to the city than she realises… yet, even though she now finds be inadequate and limited the house she grew up, she is bullied by her father to agree she will stay there. Part Three closes with Paul reading a letter sent by the vicar saying Paul shouldn’t have any fear in marrying with the church’s support.

Part Four : When Netta returns to her factory job, Henry Rushbury plans to seduce her. He has erotic fantasies in which he controls Netta. Meanwhile the unhappy English girl Sharon Burt tells Netta how she has been slapped around by her boyfriend Richard and how she is now pregnant – and Netta knows that she is really talking about Jason Pine. Meanwhile, as Paul sleeps with Netta, he becomes curious and jealous about the man she still lives with; and she explains how this unnamed man is in trouble and needs her. Not too much later however, Netta tells Jason that she is leaving him for a Pakeha man. In return, Jason lectures her on how she will lose all her Maoriness. Finally Paul comes to Netta’s place while Jason is there – and he recognises the man with whom he had an argument in the country some weeks earlier. In a rage, Jason stabs Netta… and the novel ends with Henry Rushbury reading a newspaper report of Netta’s critical condition. He says “Thank God!”, which is presumably his sense of relief that he just missed getting involved with her.

At which point you are very annoyed with me because all I have given you of Maori Woman is an over-long synopsis. So let me give a little critique. This third novel in the tetralogy – the one in which Netta and Paul are brought together – is the most schematic and didactic of the series. Like Power of Joy, it is weighted down with interior monologue – though this time from many different characters – which tends to explain themes rather than dramatizing them. There is often the sense, too, that the thoughts of all the main characters (Netta, Paul, Jason and Henry) are too self-aware and too articulate. For the same reason, much of the dialogue has a stilted theatrical feel. Hilliard is clearly exploring racial attitudes, condemning Pakeha prejudice and (in the character of Jason Pine) showing how resentment at such prejudice can lead some Maori to criminality. Hilliard overtly criticises Pakeha stereotyped ideas of Maori life; but sometimes Hilliard comes close to repeating such stereotypes – Maori with a strong sense of community, spirituality and family in spite of poverty. Meanwhile Pakeha are individualistic, alienated, materialistic and sexually repressed. This is most obvious in the contrast between Netta’s homecoming and Paul’s homecoming when they tell their respective families that they are going to marry. The novel’s admonitory, fable-like quality surfaces again when Jason’s frustration and anger with Netta results in criminal violence… whereas Henry Rushbury’s perverse thoughts die in respectable silence. What other agenda is there here? Hilliard has of course written a socially-aware novel, and in the factory scenes he introduces comments about materials, about piece-work and bonuses and capitalist exploitation. He also arraigns European “high culture” in Henry Rushbury’s thoughts while listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with Hilliard suggesting that it is not really relevant to New Zealand… a bit like Paul having to cast aside his Wordsworthian-ism in Power of Joy. The church, however, in the figure of the vicar, is presented more-or-less positively.

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            The last book of the tetralogy The Glory and the Dream was first published in 1978.  Like all books of the tetralogy, The Glory and the Dream is divided into four parts.

Part One opens when Netta and Paul have been married for about a year and they have moved out of the city and into the country. They have a baby daughter called Huia and Paul is working at a paper mill. This first part is framed by a picnic they go on, where Paul thinks back to how his parents ignored them after their registry office wedding, but how Netta’s family welcomed them even though her father still harped on the unfairness of Pakeha taking Maori land. Paul also remembers going on a fishing expedition with Netta’s brother Mutu. Heavy symbolism appears everywhere. In the opening pages Paul and Netta, in their vegetable garden, are deliberately nurturing new plant life… and travelling on a boat to the picnic with Netta and baby Huia, there’s the symbolism of a fragile craft adrift in new waters… like the marriage of Maori and Pakeha. Paul remembers Christmas celebrations and the meal with Netta’s family the previous year, and how he, unused to such food, threw up at the rotten corn. He remembers the New Year’s hangi and the rain… And how Netta showed him her former home and its ways and how he is not fully centred there. Part One ends with him, after the picnic, having sunburn so easily because he has a different sort of skin from his wife… more symbolism and certainly much inner monologue.

In Part Two small matters of adjustment in their marriage are outlined. They collectively become a great matter. She doesn’t see the value of reading books. He does. She has a different attitude to money from his. She goes to church. He doesn’t. She is horrified that he still won’t introduce her to his family, as she believes a marriage should be two families coming together. He criticises her standard of tidiness in housekeeping. There is a grisly incident when he introduces her to a snobbish Pakeha couple who pick apart her name as a problem in linguistics. They go to the funeral of somebody in the same firm as Paul, and she is appalled at how empty of feeling a Pakeha funeral is. They talk about her feelings considering God, and in a long-night conversation she talks about the Maori heritage their children will have. Often he proposes to her the idea that they are a couple above race; but she says such an idea is a delusion. Paul feels how different he is from her relatives when they come to call and he feeds himself while they continue to drink beer until they get some fish and chips. They discuss a pornographic comic Paul brings home from his work, and at her insistence he burns it. They argue about his patronising Pakeha friends trying to change her Maori ways, and about how she doesn’t value money or savings. They have another major disagreement over how Huia is to be brought up – Maori values or Pakeha ones – and she tries to define her morality and concepts of moral good. She tells him about her sense of God – and about something she is missing. She has not told him of the child she adopted out – she claims that her first child died. She is indifferent to politics. He doesn’t believe in in omens. She does.

Part Three: The weather changes. Paul feels sick and irritable being on the night shift at the paper mill. There is a long description here of conditions at the paper mill and the discontent of the workers with the owners. Paul and Netta have long conversations about the merits of classical music and about the pressures placed on him at work. He wonders why she has no ambition and never suggests he should go further than his boring job. He begins to imagine that she is cheating on him because he does the night-shift when anybody could be entering their home… and to escape these negative thoughts, he reverts to adolescence and tries to immerse himself in nature once again. But when he returns home his suspicions are renewed. When Netta is out one morning, he rifles through her belongings looking for evidence of her infidelity. He finds a letter from her adopted-out daughter but does not understand its significance and imagines it’s only from a niece in her extended family. However he finds a paperback that used to belong to a ship’s library. His mind goes back to his days in Wellington and he wonders in raging jealousy if Netta was once a “ship girl”. He suffers what almost amounts to a nervous breakdown, with thoughts of revenge on Netta and her supposed lover… and finally Netta reveals the existence of her adopted-out daughter Vicki… and Paul at last realises what her behaviour has meant over all these years and he is filled with shame. He has simply not understood what a burden she has carried in having to keep some of her past secret.

Part Four. This part opens with two-and-a-half pages of Nature-coming-to-life imagery. Paul has adjusted to his life with Netta – he is resigned to it. Netta gives him as a present The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with its advice of not becoming obsessed with the foolish and the ignorant… and on the next page Paul’s parents at last visit them. There is mutual awkwardness, but Paul’s father now offers Paul his farm and says it’s what he went to war for… after all, any farmer wants to pass on his farm to his son. After his parents have gone, Paul begins to accept his father’s offer… and the novel ends with life burgeoning as Netta says she is pregnant again.

Okay. Okay. I’m not responsible for the fairy-tale ending and I have delivered you another over-long synopsis. But bear with me in a sort of critique. Hilliard’s fatal weaknesses are at their worst in The Glory and the Dream. Hilliard constantly tells us without showing us. On page after page he rushes in to point a moral rather than dramatising events. Once again, a good deal of the text is taken up with interior monologue and rumination, nearly always Paul’s and very rarely Netta’s. We are, even more than in the preceding three novels, getting the Pakeha male’s view of cultural clash and race relations. This would be unexceptional except that there are long sections where Paul’s conversations with Netta seem to be little more than his asking questions about her values and beliefs – a stark and really undramatised contrast of Maori and Pakeha values. Worse, the symbolic imagery (or pathetic fallacy) gets out of hand, with Nature ready to tell us about life regenerating etc. etc.

Is there a trace in this novel of the Marxism that at one stage Hilliard embraced? In the choice of subject and social attitudes, there may be some moments of socialist inspiration, especially when we have Paul in the paper mill considering the alienation of the workers. Also (in a timber-milling town) there is some imagery about the rape of nature.  But little of this is really seen in a socialist perspective.  Attitudes to work and ideas of alienation are more the sins of Western civilisation than specifically the fault of capitalism. In one sense, then, this novel takes race to be a more determinant factor than class.

To go back to what I said in introducing Hilliard’s work, I believe he wrote with “the best of intentions”. He really did seek a more equitable New Zealand and he certainly wanted greater respect for the Maori people. He did have not only a Maori wife, but also many admiring Maori friends. These are things to be applauded. But, good intentions apart, what he offered sometimes were themselves stereotypes and much of what he wrote now seems oddly patronising. Certainly (and this is not his fault) his depiction of Maori is not as raw and knowing as the work of the many Maori writers who have appeared in the last 40 or 50 years.

And then there are all the problems with his prose style. I was able to access some of the original reviews in “Landfall” of Hilliard’s work, and the reviews were often negative. In “Landfall 57 – March 1961” Paul Day blasted Maori Girl as “not a satisfactory novel because of the thinness of its characters’ emotional life… Mr. Hilliard… has fallen between two stools of reporting and imaginative creation…” In “Landfall 129 March 1979”  Patricia Glensor ripped The Glory and the Dream apart, attacking the whole of Hilliard’s tetralogy as a cliché-ridden unrealistic novel written too often in sub-Wordsworthian prose and perpetuating the very racist concepts Hilliard set out to demolish. She says he creates the “happy-go-lucky Hori and the neurotic, nit-picking Pakeha”. And between these reviews, Dennis McEldowney in 1963 damned one of Hilliard’s short stories as so bad it was “embarrassing”; and R.A. Copland, in 1969, biffed at Hilliard’s A Night at Green River [the novel that interrupted the tetralogy] as sheer didacticism. In “Landfall 113 March 1975”, H.Winston Rhodes praised Hilliard’s social realism in Maori Woman but had to admit the “inadequacy” of Hilliard’s narrative technique.

Not that critics are always right, of course (not even the one you are now reading). But it does seem that Noel Hilliard had a hard ride even in his heyday, and his stock has fallen even further now

 [Two novels by Hilliard, his short stories and one odd book will conclude my examination of Hilliard’s work in my next posting]

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART ONE

Sometimes I feel like the curator of forgotten books. In the “Something Old” sections of  this blog you will find accounts of books that are genuine classics; books that once captured a highbrow audience but are now scorned; and books that were bestsellers in their day but are now forgotten. But sometimes it is interesting to look at such forgotten books for what they tell us about society as it once was and what readers then admired. In other words, forgotten books can be of great historical interest.

Which brings me to the books of Noel Hilliard (born 1929 – died 1996). Over my summer break just past, I took it on myself to read all of Hilliard’s novels and short stories. Hilliard’s heyday as an author was in the 1960s and 1970s. Born of a working-class family (his dad worked on the railways), Hilliard was very left-wing in his politics and was for a short time attracted to the Communist Party. But he was finally disillusioned with the CP and was officially a member for only two years. Still he had a vision of a more equitable New Zealand and he remained a convinced socialist. Hilliard’s greatest interest was in race relations in New Zealand. He was appalled by the way Pakeha New Zealanders flattered themselves in having “the best race relations in the world” when in fact there was much racial discrimination and a tendency of Pakeha to see Maori as their inferiors. In the era in which Hilliard wrote, there was a great migration of Maori from rural areas to cities, and many urban Pakeha were for the first time getting used to seeing Maori at close quarters. Hilliard himself, in book after book and in many of his short stories, focused on this situation. He himself had strong Maori connections. Brought up mainly in rural areas, he mingled easily with Maori. Two of the schools he went to as a child were Maori schools and his wife Kiriwai Mete was Maori. They married in 1954 and their marriage was a strong one, lasting until Kiriwai’s death in 1990. They had two sons and two daughters. Despite themselves being left-wing, Hilliard’s parents were often very condescending towards their son’s Maori in-laws, and Hilliard often had to deal (in life and in fiction) with the fact that a Maori way of life and mores often clashed with the general Pakeha way of life. [If you can look it up online, you will find a very good interview Hilliard gave about his family and circumstances, with Peter Beatson asking the questions.]

When it came to respect for the Maori people and strong advocacy for better race relations, Hilliard wrote with the best of intentions. But here’s the rub. As the years have gone by, Hilliard’s work has been seen as too simplistic and – like the work of Roderick Finlayson – his depiction of Maori life has been criticised by Maori as well as Pakeha. He is now a back-number.

Along with a career as a school-teacher and a journalist, Hilliard set about writing novels. Into which we now plunge.

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            Hilliard’s first novel, Maori Girl (first published in 1960) is probably still his most-often read work. It is now regarded as the first part of a tetralogy, but that was not the way it was first presented to the reading public. Maori Girl appeared to be a stand-alone novel about the trials of a young Maori woman when she leaves her family’s rural home and goes to Wellington.

            Netta Samuel is the youngest of a large Maori family in Taranaki. Her father is a not-very-successful dairy farmer, knowing that he has to work inferior land as, in the previous century, the more fruitful land was taken by Pakeha settlers. He takes some solace in alcohol and some solace is religion. Netta is born during the Great Depression of the 1930s and she has grown up in relative poverty. But, as Noel Hilliard makes clear, there are great cultural strengths holding the family together.  When Netta goes to school she is strapped for using the Maori language. Netta’s grandmother represents tribal traditions which, in the 1930s and 1940s, seem to be overtaken by the radio, the movies and European-style farming.

            By the immediate post-war years, Netta is becoming profoundly bored with small-town life and its deprivations. She decides to go to the big city once she has lost her virginity.

            In late-1940s Wellington, Netta at first finds shelter in a seedy boarding house. Clearly because of racial prejudice, she is turned down on her first job application. She moves into, and works at, a private hotel where she experiences exploitation by some of the residents and takes part in boozy drinking parties. Then she becomes involved in casual sex. A Pakeha called Eric Knight comes into her life. They cohabit. He uses her to sell lottery tickets for him and treats her as a sex-object. But he, as a Pakeha, is ashamed to be seen with her in public and he becomes jealous when she socializes with other Maori. Eventually he deserts her. When Netta tries to move into a better job and lodging, she again faces prejudice.

            Six months later [this novel has many leaps in time] Netta is working as a waitress and makes connection with more sympathetic working-class characters, Maori and Pakeha. She makes her lodging a very run-down and decrepit boarding-house, with the Pakeha wharfie Arthur Cochran. One of the Maori girls who works with Netta loses her job when it’s found that she is a “boat girl” – a prostitute who works incoming ships. Netta discovers she is pregnant. Arthur Cochran decently proposes marriage to her, but she rejects this, saying that they are already married enough. Then double tragedy strikes. Her landlord (who is also her boss) evicts them and she loses her job when Arthur Cochran and others get the health inspector to examine their substandard boarding-house…. And Arthur walks out on her when he checks the dates and decides that the child Netta is carrying cannot possibly be his.

            Another six months later, and Arthur is nursing his sorrow and sense of loss. He sees Netta with another man on the other side of a bar and can only speculate that she has adopted out her baby. He feels morally adrift. Later, he hears of a Maori woman who is imprisoned on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Quixotically, he attempts to bail the woman out, but without success. The very last words of the novel say “He walked out into the rain”. By ending the novel thus, we are given a Pakeha perspective and a sense of hopelessness. If read alone, this novel would suggest that Netta Samuel, the Maori Girl, is in the process of being destroyed by the pitiless big city, and she being far from her family.

            Noel Hilliard dedicated this novel to his wife Kiriwai Mete, but this does not mean that she had the same experiences as Netta Samuel. Each of the novel’s four parts begins with a Biblical quotation even if, in the novel, Netta loses her religious faith. Hilliard was himself agnostic, but [as he says in his interview with Peter Beatson] he respected religious ceremony and he saw merit in some Biblical teachings. In one sense, Maori Girl is a closely-observed realist novel which condemns racial discrimination and the callousness of many Pakeha in their relationship with Maori. Yet the novel is very ambiguous about Netta’s cultural background, which is sometimes depicted as backward and retrogressive. Netta is deracinated and the ending of the novel suggests she is lost. However, by ending with a Pakeha character desperate and guilt-ridden over her plight, Hilliard appears to be most concerned to point a moral for a Pakeha readership. In many ways, in this novel Netta never ceases to be a “case”. We observe her from outside and that is all we know of her.

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            When Noel Hilliard’s second novel Power of Joy was published in 1965, readers were presented with a very different cast of characters and saw it as having no connection with Maori Girl. The main character here is a young Pakeha called Paul Bennett and the novel traces his growth from childhood to young manhood.

            Part One (all of Hilliard’s major novels are divided into four parts) is called “Semper Fidelis”. Paul Bennett is a child in early 1930s New Zealand. He is a withdrawn only-child of labouring parents in the Great Depression. He is dreamy, puzzling over words, sometimes humiliated in the classroom when he goes to school. His father Stan is beaten down by the Depression, rails frequently against [the former Prime Minister] Gordon Coates and hopes for the election of the Labour Party. Sometimes Dan takes to drink and turns violently on his wife and little son. But, narrated in the “limited third-person” style, the emphasis is on the small boy’s growing consciousness and the deprivations he becomes aware of. There is a sad little episode in which children like Paul Bennett are given the tackiest Christmas presents because, in those hard times, their impoverished parents can afford nothing better.

            Part Two “A Sleep and a Forgetting”, opens with the election victory of Michael Joseph Savage (in 1935) and suddenly the family has at least a little wealth. Father is employed at a public works camp. But Paul’s parents grow apart. Mother becomes fretful. Father drinks too much with his mates. Meanwhile Paul finds himself a loner at school. The one responsibility he is given (cleaning the school toilets) is a failure. Paul enjoys pretending he is Huckleberry Finn or some other adventurous boy, daydreaming while his parents quarrel.  He hides in a treehouse to escape the monotony of home. But once, while watching the sun rising, he has an intense vision of the oneness of life of which he is a part. All of nature is one great thing. And capping such a revelation, Part Two ends with young Paul appreciating a sense of beauty and wholeness as he watches a Maori girl bathe naked… at which point, one has to note that Hilliard puts very complex and sophisticated thoughts into the mind of a boy who is barely an adolescent.

            Part Three. “These Things Shall Be”. Paul goes to Stonehurst boarding school, which appears to be an Anglican establishment. He now experiences even more strongly the divorce between his own developing sensitivity and the human society in which he lives. The school takes both Maori and Pakeha boys, but there are clear class distinctions between those from wealthy famiies, and those like Paul’s father who has been on the dole. On the one hand there is organized bullying – in one incident a boy is ritually beaten by senior boys after being made to “sing”, but Paul escapes this punishment because he sings a song in Maori and the Maori boys protect him. On the other hand, and despite the brutality of boys’ behaviour, he does have the freedom to wander and think. Though the teachers think he is withdrawn, strange and potentially insolent, he is generally left to himself. There is one sequence in which the headmaster interviews him about his eccentricities.  Once again, he finds a favourite tree where he can hide and brood, and he becomes obsessed with the problem of how one can capture a moment of joy in words. Of course he has sexual stirrings at the school dance (puberty has struck). But his sketchbook is ripped up and scattered by bullies and he is physically degraded and humiliated by them.

 Part Four. “By the Wind Grieved”. School days are over. Now a young man, Paul works in the city. He sees a beautiful young Maori woman on the other side of a barroom. She becomes his ideal. He tries – without success – to revive his joy in nature by means of memory of his childhood. He has a casual affair with a Pakeha girl – and gets a sexually-transmitted disease which takes some time to heal. He feels soiled and sullied. Again he catches sight of the Maori woman, who is now carrying a baby. He reflects on the development of his whole life – how he has hidden in trees and rocked with nature while not being engaged with the world of people. He revisits his old school. The tree in which he hid has been chopped down. It was rotten to the core. He no longer needs it. He no longer wants to be self-absorbed. He resolves to go back to the city and find the Maori woman and her baby. At which point the novel ends.

            Taking Power of Joy as a whole, you can’t help being aware of the heavy freight of internal monologue that drags the novel along. If Netta Samuel was a “case” in Maori Girl, Paul Bennett in Power of Joy is more a symbol than a real character: the thoughtful, idealistic boy who does not fit in. And the people he meets are even vaguer symbols – the quarrelling parents, the bullying schoolboys, the diseased Pakeha girl, the idealised Maori woman etc. Of course the rotten tree is a symbol – a worship of nature that stands in the way confronting the world as it is. Of all Hilliard’s novels, Power of Joy is the most nebulous, with only the barest of plot. I am not the first reader to note that Hilliard’s idealised adolescent view of nature is very Wordsworthian  - nature as an uplifting force for good. Hilliard even dares to include poetic lyricism in the poems teenaged Paul Bennett devises – but perhaps the author included these in an ironical mood.

            You will note that Power of Joy is essentially a Pakeha novel, with only a few moments of interaction with Maori. But you will also notice that Paul is in search of the Maori woman he has seen in the city. And alert readers will realise that this will lead us back to Netta Samuel.

[The last two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy will be tackled in my next posting]