Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

“LE COUSIN PONS” by Honore de Balzac (first published 1847)

            You can have literary idols who often disappoint you, yet you do keep coming back to them, for all their faults.

            This, over the years, has been my relationship with Honore de Balzac. Time was I thought him The Greatest Novelist Who Ever Lived, before I got over the silly phase of nominating anybody for that role. I loved the broadness of his social panorama, the fun of chasing the same characters through the connected-but-separate novels and novellas of La Comedie Humaine, the general lack of sentiment and the relative frankness about sexual matters, so different from the approach of contemporaneous British novelists.

            I was fascinated by what his novels revealed about France and the French. I loved the extremely clever plot-spinning in novels like La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep). I thought Balzac was at least as good as Dickens at painting grotesque supporting roles. He could sometimes be tender, though usually in a regretful way when goodness was crushed by expediency and human nastiness (as in his provincial domestic tragedy Eugenie Grandet).

            And yet I often got impatient with him too. So much so that I read only four or five of his novels in the original French before resorting to good English translations (especially the Penguin Classics ones) for the rest of his opus. I wanted to rush through them without being bothered by his longueurs.

            For the faults of Balzac are as glaring as his many great virtues. There is that fixation on hard cash, where his realism about economics turns into mere accounting. (If you want a really boring book about business – and one that would completely put you off Balzac if you knew nothing else of his – look no further than Cesar Birotteau, where the cash is scrupulously counted up in each chapter as the author chronicles a series of business deals.) There is the frequently banged-together nature of the plots, often (as with Dickens) the result of writing at speed and sometimes for serial publication. There are pages of flashy, theatrical melodrama, including the attempts to turn his villains into titanic supermen. And there is the constant sense that virtue is weak, and can survive only if unscrupulous people give it a hand.

            Of course you know that in Balzacland the naïve young man who goes to Paris (in Les Illusions Perdues/ Lost Illusions) to make a name for himself will be destroyed by more unscrupulous people. Balzac did write tracts about good people, such as Le Cure de Village (The Country Priest) and Le Medecin de Campagne (The Country Doctor). But where his real novels are concerned, I think Ursule Mirouet is the only one in which morally-good people also prove to be people with enough back-bone to look after their own interests. For the rest, the virtuous have to lean on the sharpers for their salvation.

            And yet Balzac was a literary giant – the man who could write the whole of one of his best novels, La Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette), in the space of six weeks – and a man of endless invention. When he roused himself he could also be a man of powerful perception. His greatest short story, Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) is a strong meditation on the real difference between art and the criticism of art. And when he disciplined himself, he could devise tight plots with the force of classical tragedy.

            This is the case with Le Cousin Pons, a mature work which was almost his last completed novel.

            While it has a relatively large cast of characters, its focus is tight.

            Sylvain Pons is the “poor relation” of a wealthy family. (Balzac paired this novel with La Cousine Bette as a story of “poor relations”). He is a middle-aged bachelor, formerly a minor composer, who earns a meagre living conducting a theatre orchestra. Despised by his relations, Pons has only one friend in the world, the inoffensive German pianist Wilhelm Schmucke who shares his modest apartment. But Pons has an interesting hobby. He collects art. In fact, though his disdainful relatives don’t know it, he has gradually built up a priceless collection even though he himself has never reckoned up its cash value.

            Much of the first half of the novel shows Pons being patronised by his wealthy relatives, the Camusot de Marville family, and trying to make some return to them for the dinners to which they, purely for the sake of propriety, have invited him. Pons believes he can gain the family’s esteem by being match-maker and arranging an advantageous marriage for a young member of the family. But his scheme goes horribly wrong and the family finally cast him out. He will never receive a dinner invitation again.

            Heart-broken, Pons’ health goes into decline. He is confined to bed in his apartment, with only the faithful Schmucke to attend him. And it is at this point that the real intrigue begins, for the true value of Pons’ art collection begins to become known. Suddenly people are falling over themselves to befriend Pons, praise him, get some advantage out of him. Eventually the novel turns into a most unedifying tussle over a will as rival branches of the venal family and assorted hangers-on lay claim to Pons’ estate.

            There are many things here that are typical of Balzac. Tussles over inheritances fuel the plots of a number of his novels (La Rabouilleuse, Eugenie Grandet and Ursule Mirouet among them). There are the  famous “recurring characters”; that is, characters who appear in novel after novel of La Comedie Humaine and help to bind the series together. In Le Cousin Pons there is the theatrical entrepreneur – and one of the novel’s more sympathetic characters  - Gaudissart, who is the leading character of some of Balzac’s other stories. There is the broad social survey. This story of King Louis Philippe’s Paris of the 1840s moves from seedy boarding houses in run-down suburbs to the mansions of the arriviste middle classes.

            Yet, as well as the tightness of its plot, there is something special about this novel.

            Balzac’s characters never divide into the good and the bad, but rather into the strong-willed (or cunning) and the weak-willed (or artless), and that is indeed the case in Le Cousin Pons too. But while recognizing that virtue rarely gains a material reward in this world, it seems to me that Balzac’s outlook is not as harsh and bitter in Le Cousin Pons as it is in most of his novels. For all the absurdities of Pons himself, and the absurdities of Schmucke with his dreamy poetic German soul and his stage German accent, Balzac for once succeeds in making virtuous characters attractive and something more than “honest dimwits”. Quite simply, Pons and Schmucke are loveable and they give the novel a soul, for all the chronicle of worldly greed and vice that goes on around them. In material terms they go down to defeat, but we still like them.

            Bracing as a narrative, the other “poor relations” novel La Cousine Bette centres on an impoverished bitter and twisted spinster who gets revenge on the family who scorn her by exploiting their weaknesses. Le Cousin Pons is not a novel of revenge. It has an odd serenity about it. In strong contrast to his rushed composition of La Cousine Bette, Balzac pondered over Le Cousin Pons for many months and wrote and re-wrote it carefully and thoughtfully. In this respect, in stands in relation to much of his work as the carefully plotted Great Expectations does to Dickens more capacious and rambling novels.

            It is the well-wrought moral fable with a strong sense of compassion.

            Balzac’s Pons and Dickens’ Pip are very different characters in many respects. But they both eventually reach a mature middle-aged sense of acceptance and rueful wisdom about the way of the world.

            To me Le Cousin Pons is Balzac’s most ‘finished’ novel, and therefore my personal favourite of all his novels.

Something Thoughtful

AN INVITATION

            Earlier this year, I had the privilege of proposing a public toast in Auckland’s Central City Library to Charles Dickens, on the occasion of his 200^th birthday.

            This year does not mark as clear an anniversary in relation to Honore de Balzac, but it is 170 years since he wrote his famous preface to La Comedie Humaine, in which he explained the master-plan for his great work.

            For this reason, at 6pm on Wednesday 29 August in Auckland’s Central City Library, I will be proposing a public toast to Honore de Balzac in an illustrated talk. I will be assisted by my good friend Iain Sharp.

            You are most welcome. 

Something New

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

“CONVICTS – New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past” by Matthew Wright (Penguin, $NZ39:99)

           

            Vigorously throwing aside and ignoring completely unhistorical trash, I always divide history books into two sorts:

            (A.) Academic history books – detailed, closely researched, aware of the complexities of the subject under review and relying more on primary sources than on secondary sources.

            (B.) Pop history books – they can be reasonably researched, but they are more determined to tell a good yarn than to really illuminate a topic, and they tend to rely far more on secondary sources than primary ones. In other words, the bulk of their research is not original.

            There are, of course, academic historians who can write in a lively style without making heavy weather of their formidable research. And there are pop historians whose stodgy style defeats their attempts to spin a yarn. The two categories are not to be confused with the issue of readability.

            Matthew Wright’s Convicts definitely comes into the category of pop history, as an examination of its bibliography confirms. On the whole it spins a good series of yarns and is easy reading. But when it tries to indulge in broad sociological comments it falls over its feet.

            As the subtitle, New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past, should warn us, there’s an element of publishers’ hype in the presentation. A few generations ago, there might have been some naïve New Zealanders who imagined that all early Pakeha arrivals in New Zealand were the salt of the Earth, and that early Pakeha New Zealand had nothing in common with the criminal colonies of Australia. Those were the days, I guess, when Wakefield was still being honoured as a colonising genius.

            But those days are long gone, and in the past forty-odd years, many historians have covered the louche side of early nineteenth century New Zealand. There is, frankly, nothing “hidden” about it, and most of the stories that Wright tells have appeared in print many times. I must add, too, that Wright’s book had the misfortune to appear too soon to make use of Vincent O’Malley’s excellent The Meeting Place (Auckland University Press), which gives a very detailed and scholarly account of all early contacts between Maori and Pakeha, including criminal Pakeha.

            Having said all this, though, we still have in Convicts the yarns – of escaped convicts from the Australian colonies who made it to New Zealand; of whalers and sealers who sometimes acted like criminals; of “outlaws” whose actions didn’t merit the romantic mythology that was sometimes built around them. Matthew Wright is undoubtedly correct in his introduction when he notes that not all crimes in early New Zealand were committed by convicts. Many of his stories are about people who committed inhumanities without ever being brought to justice.

            The dramatic story of the ship Venus, taken over and sailed by convicts into New Zealand waters, is recounted in the first chapter. In the second, we are reminded that:

            “Convicts did not just arrive in New Zealand as unwelcome stowaways. Many of the sealers who reached early nineteenth century New Zealand were, themselves, former convicts. And the behaviour patterns of those who arrived even with unblemished record was often as poor as that expected of the convicts, a rough, blokish world of hard drinking, hard gambling, hard knocks, hard language and discipline enforced with ropes’ ends.” (Pg.42)

            Wright soon shifts his focus, however, to “bolters” (convicts escaped from the Australian colonies) with the story of the ship Wellington, taken over by convicts and re-taken after a pitched battle in New Zealand waters with two whaling ships, the captains of which had to be persuaded to help enforce the law. There follows a  chapter on cannibalism and Jacky Marmon,  the opportunistic cannibal Pakeha.

            A pause for breath is Chapter Four, where it is explained that many “convicts” in New Zealand from the 1820s on were people who had served their time in Australia, gained their certificate of freedom and were now striving to live respectably. But we then plunge into the tales of whalers, and the extent to which their stories overlapped with those of convicts.

            Wright has a chapter called “The Should-Have-Beens” about those villains who should have been convicts if the law had caught up with them, but who were never prosecuted. He has three chief exhibits. There is Captain Stewart of the brig Elizabeth, who captured a Ngai Tahu chief for Te Rauparaha to torture; and who later transported Te Rauparaha down to the South Island to carry out slaughter of Ngai Tahu. There is Robert Lambert, using armed force to coerce innocent and unarmed Maori. And there is Captain Harewood, transporting Ngati Mutunga to the Chathams where they proceeded to wipe out the Moriori.

            Another pause for breath comes in a chapter on how Pakeha settlers, after the Treaty of Waitangi, vigorously resisted any attempts to have New Zealand made a dumping ground for British criminals or delinquents. Therefore there was an outcry when a draft of English juvenile delinquents, the “Parkhurst boys”, were sent here.

            The narrative part of the book fades out on the oft-told tale of the American army deserter Kimble Bent and his relationship with Titokowaru in the late nineteenth century. The presence of Kimble Bent in this book stretches Wright’s chronological focus a bit, but Bent is presented as “the last of the outlaws” and the last New Zealand link with an earlier convict past.

            Much of this is very enjoyable as a series of anecdotes and yarns, and in this respect Convicts amply fulfils the role of entertaining popular history.

            Where it goes wrong is where Wright attempts to provide some context on English nineteenth century attitudes to criminality and the incidence of crime. Here, regrettably, he indulges in many windy generalizations, drawing on at least some polemics (such as the writing of John Ralston Saul) which he mistakes for history. Some of his attempts at respectable sociology come close to being padding.

            I also note an odd tendency to ascribe values to the early nineteenth century, and then to assume that they were unique to that age.

            Take the following three examples:

            “Convicts who eventually gained their certificate of Freedom – the ticket that told others they had expiated their sins of the soul and had become fit to join honest society – were still on the wrong side of the world. In any case, neither paperwork nor the privations they had gone through as convicts served, in the popular mind, to erase fundamental character. Criminals were apparently born that way, and they could never change, however much they were flogged, however much ardent churchgoers prayed for their redemption.” (Pg.18)

             “But period prejudices – that people chose to steal as a career option; that the poor were lazy; and that misfortune was a goal – amplified fear.” (Pg.32)

            “Period belief in the indelible nature of criminal tendencies extended the sense that most convicts had of being punished for existing.” (Pg.103)

            In all three cases, Wright is implicitly contrasting the condemnatory early nineteenth-century attitude towards the “criminal classes” with our modern and enlightened awareness of the social determinants of crime; and of prisons as places for rehabilitation rather than punishment.

            The trouble is, our age cannot so easily rebuke the past. The early nineteenth century also contained Christians (and in Britain especially Evangelicals) with a strong belief in life-changing conversion experiences, and hence with a strong belief that criminals were capable of changing their ways for the better. Conversely, in our own age there is a rising tide of reaction against humane criminology; a barking chorus that says criminals are to be punished, will never change, and there’s nothing that can be done about it except to lock ‘em up.

            When I read Wright’s version of nineteenth century attitudes, I at once thought of the popular columnist who shrieks about “ferals”, and the number of modish people who now deny free will and see us all as being morally determined and hence incapable of moral change. This is only a whisker away from the view that “criminals were apparently born that way, and they could never change.”

            The landscape of nineteenth century thought doesn’t deserve Wright’s simplifications . His sociologising is a hoot. But this is still a very entertaining book of stories.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

 

“THE HOUNDSDITCH MURDERS AND THE SIEGE OF SIDNEY STREET” by Donald Rumbelow (first published 1973; extensively revised 1988)

            One book which presents old crimes entertainingly makes me think of another. If Matthew Wright’s Convicts attempts to set its criminal stories in a sociological context, Donald Rumbelow’s The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street succeeds in analysing a particular notorious case so that it reveals a whole society.

            The so-called “Siege” of Sidney Street” (sometimes as fancifully called the “Battle” of Stepney) is one of those affairs that usually appears as a footnote or passing comment in general histories of early 20^th century Britain. The tendency now is to present it as a trivial matter which was sensationalised for a British public primed to believe the worst of “aliens”. I have even read (inaccurate) accounts which claim that only one death resulted from the whole affair.

            In the East End of London in 1909-11, there were many anarchist and left-wing groups, mainly émigrés or refugees from Tsarist Russia. Frequently the press, cued by popular images of hairy bomb-throwing anarchists, saw them as a menace. England had not seen any of the assassinations and acts of terrorism that anarchists had carried out on continental Europe. But popular fiction and early spy-novels were ready to suggest that, with an influx of working-class foreigners, it was only a matter of time before such an outrage happened on English soil.

            Even high-brow literature worked this field. It was only three years before the Houndsditch Murders that one of Joseph Conrad’s best novels, The Secret Agent, was published in 1907, with its story of an alien anarchist conspiracy to blow up the Greenwich observatory. A year later, in 1908, G.K.Chesterton offered a typically more whimsical view of anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday. But the fear of anarchists – which Chesterton humorously exorcised - was the topical element of that one too.

            Given this, some later commentators have brushed off contemporary newspaper accounts of the “Siege” of Sidney Street as largely works of the imagination, mainly xenophobic, and certainly exaggerated. But in The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street Donald Rumblelow, a policeman by profession, takes a blow-by-blow forensic approach. In doing so he shows there really was a train of events that justified general alarm, for all the sensationalism of the journalists.

            The book chronicles three linked sets of events.

            In the so-called “Tottenham Outrage” in 1909, two anarchists attempted to steal a payroll at gunpoint, were thwarted  and for two hours were chased across six miles of London. The pair shot at all who pursued them, killing a couple of people until (separately) cornered and shooting themselves. This made excellent copy for the mass circulation illustrated newspapers, especially as the fleeing anarchists had commandeered a tram at gunpoint during their flight.

            Next year were the Houndsditch Murders in December 1910, where anarchists, associates of the two involved in the foiled payroll robbery, attempted to burgle a jewellery store. They were surprised and opened fire, killing three (unarmed) policemen who had been summoned to the scene. As they escaped, one of the anarchists was also shot dead. The three policemen received what amounted to a “state funeral” at St Paul’s cathedral. The story was now front-page news and the police began a massive enquiry and manhunt to find the survivors of the gang who had done the shooting.

            This resulted in the Siege of Sidney Street in January 1911, where two remaining members of the gang were trapped in an East End house, and decided to shoot it out with police. This was many decades before there were such things as specialist anti-terrorist squads. When police with revolvers proved ineffective, the army was called in, the East End street filled with soldiers (and crowds of gaping onlookers, captured in early newsreels of the event) and thousands of rounds of ammunition were fired before the anarchists themselves set fire to the building. One was burnt to death in the blaze. The other had already been killed by the gunfire. (Subsequent accounts of the affair – including one broadcast on British television about a decade ago – suggest that the house might have been set on fire by army bullets hitting internal gas-pipes.)

            This was the only major “anarchist outrage” perpetrated in Britain, but “anarchist” is really a misnomer.

            Rumbelow makes it quite plain that while the word “anarchist” was most commonly used at the time, the gang were in fact Bolsheviks from Latvia and Russia. Before the First World War and the Russian Revolution, most English hadn’t even heard of Bolsheviks, so “anarchist” was the default term for any suspicious foreigner bent on politically-motivated violence.

            It seems quite certain that many of these events were organized by Jacob Peters, a Bolshevik then resident in London. Payroll robberies and burglaries of jewellery stores were typical of the “expropriations” by which Bolsheviks tended to finance themselves. (Most of Joseph Stalin’s early career was a series of bank robberies.) They were not the usual modus operandi of real anarchists.

             Jacob Peters was later one of the leaders of the Cheka (the early Soviet secret police). He rose to great power under Lenin, but was purged and killed by Stalin in the late 1930s as so many of the “Old” Bolsheviks were.

            Along with seven or eight others, Peters was arrested by the London police in connection with both the murders and the siege. But the prosecution failed to make a strong case against any of them. The defendants were able to blame everything on the gang-members who were already dead. Hence not one single person was convicted as a result of these three incidents and the (most probable) organizer and leader of the gang went free, doubtless confirmed in his views on the weakness of bourgeois democracies.

            There are two interesting footnotes to these events which Rumbelow explores.

            First, the name “Peter the Painter’ has been associated with these events in some fanciful versions. In fact a number of anarchists were identified by this same sobriquet; and none of them was in the house in Sidney Street.

            Second, there was the flashy public role of the young Winston Churchill. He was working at the Home Office when he heard about the big shoot-out going on in Sidney Street, and decided to go down to the East End to see the army in action. He later admitted that, although he was the most senior government person there, and although many assumed he was in charge of the army operation, he had really arrived as a tourist because it found it so “interesting”. Local Cockneys booed him when he turned up, because he had opposed an Immigration Bill that would have limited the number of East Europeans settling in England. Newsreels and press photographs show him in a top hat, waving a cane about as he asks policemen and soldiers what is going on. For his recklessness he was criticised in the House.           

            There was a very ham-fisted and inaccurate British movie The Siege of Sidney Street in 1960. Alfred Hitchcock exploited the popular idea of the siege when he staged a similar East End shoot-out in his 1932 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much. (A couple of years later he made a movie version of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, calling it Sabotage). Such fictitious versions have lingered longer in the popular imagination than the historical events themselves.

            Donald Rumbelow’s book properly contextualises the events and in the process examines the type of East End community which surrounded the “anarchists” and were their largely unwilling hosts. 

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

WHO’S THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN?

            Maybe I belong to the last generation that can conjure up a memory like this.

            It is just going six o’clock.

            Dinner has been served. We are seated at the table and the radio is on to catch the news.

            There is a lot of crackle and hiss. The New Zealand broadcasting service has recorded the bulletin earlier off short-wave, because this is the real news we are about to hear.

            The BBC News.

            It begins, through the crackle and hiss and whistlings on the global ether, with a military march, which I have subsequently learnt is called Echoes of Empire.

            It then (crackle, hiss, whistle) goes on with the perfect radio enunciation of an educated middle-class Englishman reading (crackle, hiss, whistle) the bulletin.

            Occasionally, through the crackle-hiss-whistle, there is the brief jab of another voice butting in from somewhere between Auckland and London – an inevitable hazard given  the imperfections of the short-wave and recording systems.

            But how vast it makes the world seem! How far separated we are from the source of the voice. We are on the edge of the human universe.

            We listen in respectful silence.

            My family aren’t Anglicans, so we are not primed to believe God lives in London. We are not ardent royalists, so we are quite off-handed about the British monarchy and the silliness of some of its traditions. My parents are both second-generation New Zealanders and they certainly never refer to, or think of, Britain as “Home”.

            Even so, when six o’clock comes, and the crackle and whistle and military march and carefully-enunciated English male voice, we know we are listening to something important and authoritative and removed from out trivial everyday perceptions.

            This scene was often played out in the late 1950s, when I was seven or eight or nine years old. So it would have been some years before Marshall McLuhan (in 1964) coined his famous phrase “The medium is the message”. But it is a perfect illustration of McLuhan’s concept.

            It was the distance, the quality of the voice, and the fuzziness of the recording – in other words, the medium – that gave the old BBC radio news bulletins their authority. It reinforced the mindset that we were people of small account on the far side of the world, far distant from the centre of things and the source of real news.

            In those days, there was another force that told us how small we were.

            Our heroes were mythic beings, twelve feet tall and sometimes even bigger.

             Sometimes, indeed, their faces alone filled up a whole wall.

            That is because we saw them every Saturday afternoon at the picture theatre, dancing and singing or flying off the decks of aircraft-carriers to shoot down Japanese ‘planes or (especially) shooting it out on the streets of Laramie or circling the wagons to fight off savages.

            They mainly spoke with American accents.

            If authority was British, then mythology (which means popular and visceral religion) was definitely American.

            In the distance we heard rumours of a thing called television.

            Apparently it brought this mythology into your very home. Apparently you could enjoy it at the flick of a switch.

            We were so impatient for television to arrive, especially as we were beginning to twig that some of the things we were given on radio were really soundtracks of American TV shows, including bits of visual business that you couldn’t understand on radio. We were all singing Stan Freberg’s Tele-vishun before we had ever seen one, and we didn’t realize that his funny sketch about a bubble machine and a guy who said “Wun’erful! Wun’erful!” was a parody of a TV show.

            So television comes along.

            The heroes are now a few inches tall. Their power fades. They become part of the noise. They are a babble.

            Sometimes an old movie from the Saturday matinees turns up on TV. The actors turn out to be just actors, not titans. Did I really believe that James Stewart was a mythic being? Surely it’s not just because I am now older. The world is made smaller – but not in the way that tele-communications people say it is.

            The ritual of listening to the recorded BBC news disappears. The recorded BBC news is no longer broadcast in New Zealand anyway.

            Now dinner coincides with the NZBC television news, read by New Zealand males trying hard to sound like the BBC version.

            Late in the 1960s, I happen to hear a BBC radio news bulletin. A direct broadcast without hiss, crackle or whistling. The reader could be in the next room.

            I reflect “It’s just a man in a studio.”

            I reflect “It’s just a news bulletin.”

            The mystique has gone. The authority has gone.

            Goodbye to authority. Goodbye to mythology.

            Welcome the adolescent scepticism about everything – which is also known as postmodernism.

            Toto has twitched the curtain.

Something New

THE NZ POST BOOK AWARDS FOR 2012

            For the second year, I had the pleasure of attending the annual New Zealand Post Book Awards evening, this time held in Auckland on 1 August. It was good to speak to critic X and publisher Y and author Z and renew acquaintances and above all hear literature praised publicly.

            Having as yet read none of the three finalists in the Poetry section (Dinah Hawken’s The Leaf Ride, Rhian Gallagher’s Shift and Anna Jackson’s Thicket ), I am in no position to pass any cogent comment on them, apart from congratulating Rhian Gallagher on her win.

            I am this year under-informed when it comes the Illustrated Non-Fiction section. This section is as much about book production and design and illustration as it is about the contents of the book. There were five Illustrated Non-Fiction finalists: Gregory O’Brien’s A Micronaut in the Wide World - The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy ; Pivac, Stark and McDonald’s New Zealand Film – An Illustrated History; Dawson and Lucas’s New Zealand Native Trees ; Lange and Newby’s Playing With Fire – Auckland Studio Potters Society Turns Fifty and Awhina Tamarapa’s Whatu Kakahu / Maori Cloaks.

             Of these five, the only one I had read and reviewed was Pivac, Stark and McDonald’s film book, a handsome collection of essays by a variety of authors, following through the development of New Zealand film in thematic terms rather than strictly chronological ones. Reviewing it for the Sunday Star-Times (3 July 2011), I compared it with the three or four earlier attempts to cover the same territory and judged it “the best single overview of New Zealand cinema that we have”. In the event, however, it was John Dawson and Rob Lucas’s New Zealand Native Trees which won the award, so once again, in my ignorance of the book, I congratulate the authors and publishers. It was a pleasure to hear John Dawson express his sincere and inveterate love of his field of study in his speech when the book also won the Book of the Year Award.

            As a New Zealand book reviewer and blogger, I regard it as my duty to support the local publishing industry. However I must confess that this year, one of what I regard as the two major awards – Fiction and General Non-Fiction – gave me some pause for troubled thought.

            As it happens, I had read and reviewed all five finalists in the General Non-Fiction category, and I regard them all as books of high quality, any one of which could reasonably have won the award.

            Three of them I have examined on this blog, and you can check out my comments on the index at right: Anne Salmond’s Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas, a very detailed and scholarly telling of the well-known story; Fiona Farrell’s reflections on the Christchurch earthquakes The Broken Book; and Peter Wells’ idiosyncratic mixture of biography, speculation and personal psycho-drama The Hungry Heart – Journeys with William Colenso.

            I reviewed Peter Graham’s So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World for the Sunday Star-Times (16 October 2011), where I found it a workmanlike and conscientiously-researched account of that particular crime, and suggested it could well be the definitive version.

            My review of the fifth General Non-Fiction finalist and the winner of the category award - Joan Druett’s Tupaia- the Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator -  appeared in Landfall #223 (May 2012). I commended the author for her even-handed anthropology, where she did not subject either Pacific peoples or eighteenth century European intruders to cultural stereotyping; but I did note the difficulties of writing a “biography” of somebody from a pre-literate society, and hence the author’s need for more speculation than is the case in most biographies. However Tupaia was and is a stimulating and interesting story. I am only guessing, but I wonder if the judges gave it the gong partly because of its sheer originality? After all, the Bligh, Colenso and Parker/Hulme stories have all been the subjects of other books (or movies) already; and even Christchurch earthquakes have found other coverage.

            I repeat, though, that all five General Non-Fiction finalists were excellent choices and Tupaia a deserved win.

            Which brings me to the award category which troubles me somewhat. In the Fiction section, the judges named only three books as finalists - Paula Morris’s Rangatira; Sue Orr’s From Under the Overcoat; and Fiona Kidman’s The Trouble with Fire.

            I won’t beat about the bush here. I have neither read nor reviewed the Kidman offering, so I won’t and can’t comment on it.

            I am over the moon that the award went to Paula Morris’s excellent historical novel Rangatira. When I reviewed it for New Zealand Books (Autumn 2012 issue) I rated it as “an extraordinary literary achievement and probably the best of recent New Zealand historical novels”; and as a novel which “creates a complex, convincing central character and places him in a credible historical environment.” Having already picked this as a really outstanding work, I’m delighted that the NZ Post Book Award judges seem to concur with my view. For me, Rangatira is a great rebuke to the type of sloppy cut-and-paste “historical” novels in which period characters just happen to spout the attitudes and opinions that appeal to people here and now. Rangatira has a real feel for the period in which it is set and a sense of personal engagement on the part of the author. Brilliant.

            So having just said that a great book won the Fiction award, why am I disconcerted about the Fiction section? Partly because of the company Rangatira had to keep. And partly because of the new niggardliness in naming fiction finalists. Only three.

            Last year produced such superior New Zealand novels as Charlotte Randall’s quirky and original Hokitika Town; Sarah Quigley’s careful reconstruction of an era  The Conductor; and Owen Marshall’s view of Victorian Dunedinites The Lanarchs. They all deserved a nod. Instead, the excellent novel which won the award was paired with Sue Orr’s serviceable collection of stories From Under the Overcoat. (You can find my NZ Listener review of it – from 19 February 2011 – on the Listener’s web-site). Frankly, I can only wonder at the thought processes that led the judges to overlook far more worthy candidates.

            So that is my mixed report on this year’s NZ Post Book Awards. Two outstanding winners in the two key awards, but an underlying sense that the criteria for choosing finalists in the fiction section are way out of whack. And, if there can be five non-fiction and illustrated non-fiction works as finalists, then in a good year like the one just past, there should also be five fiction finalists.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

 

“TRILBY” by George du Maurier (first published 1894)

            There’s something about book awards that always makes me want to hold forth about the transience of taste, and the fact that this year’s award winner could possibly be completely forgotten next decade. But the fate of one age’s best-sellers more neatly illustrates the theme, so an antiquated best-seller is what I pick up as this week’s “Something Old”.

            Some novels are better known for one small episode than for their totality. Readers can be deceived into assuming that the whole novel is in the spirit of that one small episode.

            Those who sit down to read Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor are hoping for the scene in which a bride, driven mad, stabs her husband on her wedding night. That’s because this wild episode was highlighted in Donizetti’s famous opera Lucia di Lammermoor. But pick up the original novel and you find yourself trudging through pages of Scott’s wearisome, pompous, Latinate prose and plot-spinning before you get to the episode in question – and even then, it is knocked off most undramatically in a couple of pages.

            Something the same is true of George du Maurier’s Trilby. A huge best-seller of 1894, Trilby is best known for the relationship of Trilby O’Ferrall, the artless “artist’s model”, and the demonic and manipulative Svengali.

            Svengali turns the tone-deaf Trilby into a great concert singer by hypnotising her. This image is so persuasive that the term “Svengali” has come to be used for any showbiz entrepreneur who controls completely the life of one of his performers. (“Brian Epstein tried to be Svengali to the Beatles” etc. etc.). I’ve come across reprints of Trilby which re-title it Svengali, playing up to this well-known episode.

            But, sad to say, the Trilby-Svengali episodes are only a small part of the novel. I wish they were more central. I wish the novel were more like the bravura, semi-Gothic 1932 movie version (titled Svengali, of course,  and starring manic John Barrymore) which I’ve watched a number of times on DVD. But it isn’t. In an early episode in the novel, Svengali uses hypnosis to cure one of Trilby’s headaches, but then he virtually disappears from the novel until its last seventy or eighty pages. Most of Trilby is taken up with other matters, and it’s those other matters that now interest me.

            I’ll start with a prejudice. Trilby is basically trash.  It’s a very good example of yesterday’s best-seller which reflects yesterday’s tastes and prejudices so completely that it would now be forgotten were it not for the fact that the Svengali legend has taken on a life of its own.

            An Englishman of French descent, George du Maurier (1834-96 ) was best known as an artist and comic illustrator in Punch. Only in the last few years of his life, when his eyesight was going and he couldn’t draw so well, did he turn to writing novels. Of the three he wrote, Trilby was the one that most caught the public’s fancy and was most designed to do so. (As a sign of its success, the trilby hat is named after the one worn by the novel’s eponymous character.) There’s the irony that the populist, vulgarian du Maurier was friends with the fastidious and super-literary Henry James, whose own novels never became best-sellers on the scale that Trilby did. David Lodge’s novel Author! Author! (2004) amusingly dramatises Henry James desperately trying, and failing, to win the same sort of public applause that his friend won.

            Trilby is mainly concerned with the idealised Bohemian life of three young British artists in Paris in the 1850s – the Laird, Taffy and Little Billee who falls hopelessly in love with Trilby O’Ferrall. All three of them are described in terms of caricature, the better to suit the illustrations that (despite his fading eyesight) du Maurier himself drew for the first edition. As du Maurier was himself a young artist in Paris in the 1850s, he was clearly indulging some nostalgia here, but he was also filtering out the really louche stuff so as not to alienate his magazine and lending-library audience.

            I would describe the novel’s prose style as debased Thackeray (appropriate inasmuch as Thackeray was another talented artist who illustrated his own novels). It is all man-of-the-world chitter-chatter which would go down well with coffee, brandy and cigars, although perhaps the ladies would be able to stay and listen as late-Victorian euphemism is used liberally and nothing really unseemly is said. Let’s not beat about the bush. This is the world of Punch.

            We are told that Trilby O’Ferrall has posed nude for many artists. It is delicately suggested that she might have given her sexual favours around. Du Maurier even indulges in a few naughty pages in which he says nudism might be a tonic for the world. But the proprieties are observed. The Laird, Taffy and Little Billee experience Trilby only as a picturesque waif in the over-sized coat and striped skirt that went down so well in the illustrations. There is no acknowledgement that in 1850s Paris, most artists’ models were also part-time prostitutes.

            When Little Billee proposes to Trilby, she accepts, but then she rapidly backs down after Little Billee’s mother and his (vicar) uncle persuade her that she is not the right sort for a respectable young man. Of course a fallen woman accepts this reasoning. Of course, too, the fallen woman goes off and conveniently dies at the end of the novel so that (like the heroine of Camille and La Traviata) she can be a sweet romantic memory to the young middle-class man without actually encumbering him in real life.

            The bowdlerised Bohemia of the novel, then, pretends to defy convention, but actually buys into it. And isn’t that what best-sellers always do? There is similar  shadow-boxing when Little Billee has ten pages of “doubts” about organized religion. How daring! How advanced! And how totally predictable for a novel written in the 1890s.

            So in the end, the interest of reading Trilby is only the interest of discovering what another age’s prejudices were. Always, du Maurier would have us believe that fine art and la vie de Boheme are appropriate for adventurous youths sowing their wild oats, and maybe for funny foreigners; but that in the end mature men prefer the roast beef of old England. By novel’s end all three young Britishers are packing up their easels to leave their Parisian garret forever, and two of them are respectably married to nice English gels.

            Speaking of another age’s prejudices, there is also the fact that Trilby has a minor strain of anti-semitism.  Svengali is a German-speaking Polish Jew. We are often told that he is slovenly and physically dirty. There are comic episodes about his amusement that Englishmen like to take a bath every day. He has a big fleshy nose which is tweaked by Taffy in another comic episode. He is sadistic in his dealings with Trilby and devious in his money dealings. Dirty, grotesque, sadistic, devious – yet a brilliant musician with a flashy technique and hypnotic powers.

            What is this but a caricature of those clever, artistic European Jews? In du Maurier’s world view, Svengali is yet another reason why la vie de Boheme isn’t for true Englishmen – or even Franco-Englishmen like du Maurier himself, who was happier with comic-satiric drawings in Punch than with high art.

            Does any of this defunct world-view have anything to do with us? Only this, I hope. Reading novels like Trilby should help us better to understand that huge best-sellers always say the things that the mass audience of their time wants them to say. If we now find the assumptions of Trilby either quaint or grotesque, it is because in our own time the mass reading audience wants to be told other lies. And of course our own best-sellers will look quaint or grotesque one hundred years hence. 

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

BUZZ-THOUGHTS ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA

            Buzzwords are really annoying things. They are words in common currency because they have been repeated so often, to the point where they are being used unthinkingly by most people who use them.

            But if buzzwords are annoying, they are not half as annoying as what should be called buzz-thoughts.

            I mean ideas that are repeated without analysis and become the mantras of the unthinking.

            One of the most annoying current buzz-thoughts is the idea that [electronic] “social media” are a huge boon in bringing the world together and facilitating social communication. Tweet or use your Facebook, and you immediately have dozens of “friends”, share ideas and make the world a more humane community.

            The facility of social media to undercut oppressive government has been cited, especially if we extend the definition of social media to include things captured on mobile phone or shared by e-mail. Immediately we think of brave cell-phone owners posting images of Libyan or Syrian government atrocities on the net; or we think of the way the current Chinese government has erected its famous Great Firewall of China specifically to block the free flow of [electronic] information and ideas.

            So we have the boosting of social media as an aspect of humanization, undercutting unjust censorship.

            But there’s a catch to this, as there is to all innovations in communication.

            The very speed and ease of electronic communication make it easier for the superficial, the glib and the un-thought-through to gain massive currency.

            Each day, when I log in to Facebook, I find much harmless and routine material. Birthday greetings or holiday snaps and baby photos being shared. Notification of events. Worthwhile published articles being drawn to people’s attention.

            But I also find a great flow of the kind of time-filling comments that seem to be there only because it’s possible to post them on Facebook. “Hello, I’ve just baked a cake.” “Gee I hope it tastes good.” etc. etc. And also a ‘sharing’ of unfunny jokes and slogans. On Facebook, discussion (such as it is) has the tendency to become glib sloganeering. Don’t go on Facebook if you really want to nut out ideas on economics, politics, philosophy, religion, culture, art etc. In other words, don’t go on Facebook if you want a real exchange of ideas. Instead, you will find an exchange of sitcom-like one-liners and smart-arseries. As you will if you are a Tweeting twit.

            I am reminded of the fate of CB (Citizen Band) radio a generation or two back. Mooted as early as 1940s, CB became a craze in America especially from the late 1960s and through the 1970s. At first it was suggested that it would be a great medium for free expression and the exchange of ideas, unhindered by the commercial imperatives of network radio. Instead, within the decade, it had become the medium in which truckers swore at each other and a handful of enthusiasts spoke in a code they’d picked up from the movies. You don’t really expect a considered discussion of the defects of liberalism or Plato’s idealism on CB now, do you, good buddy?

            Again, I think of the fate of talkback radio. When it was introduced into New Zealand 30 or 40-odd years ago, its promoters said this would be the voice of the thinking community. Instead, it rapidly became Radio Mogadon, the voice of people with nothing better to do in the middle of the night – a cheap way for radio stations to fill air-time (you don’t have to pay people who call in) and a forum for shared prejudices. Callers to talkback are the bees-in-their-bonnet non-literate equivalent of obsessive writers of letters to the press.

            I know I’m vulnerable to some logical criticisms here.

            Any enhanced form of communication gets debased, in the cultural analogue of Gresham’s Law. I might as well be rebuking the printing press because we both know that the great mass of what is printed is trash.

            Besides, here I am using electronic technology to disseminate my book reviews and comments and general bitching. Aren’t I being a little hypocritical decrying electronic social media? Aren’t I like that famous anecdote of the late medieval scribe who wrote a treatise against the crudity of printed books -  and then had it printed so that it could get a wider audience? Don’t I every day check Facebook to see what comments there are, and then possibly add some of my own?

            True, true, true. But I am no more decrying the existence of electronic and social media than I am decrying the existence of print. I am simply pointing out that many of the claims made for them are inflated.

            Like CB and talkback radio, this speeded-up form of communication is, of itself, not enhancing people’s ability to debate, discuss, think rationally or look at things with considered depth. It can be a signalling system, pointing in the direction of worthwhile material (those postings that suggest a worthwhile article to read). Otherwise, it is a time-filler, and if you spend more than a few minutes on it each day, you have too much time to fill.

            By the way, if you have two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six “friends” on Facebook, do you know what it really means?

            It means you don’t have a friend in the world.