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 five or more years ago. 

This week’s “Something Old” is written by a guest reviewer, the novelist KIRSTEN McDOUGALL, whose outstanding debut novel “The Invisible Rider” was reviewed on this blog in October 2012 (Look it up on the blog’s index at right). She has chosen to call this review “In Praise of the Imagination”

“MARCOVALDO” by Italo Calvino (first published in Italian 1963, English translation 1983). Reviewed by KIRSTEN McDOUGALL

When I write, I keep a touchstone book on my desk that I read to begin my writing day. It’s a way to ease myself into the quiet concentration that writing requires. These books get chosen, and sometimes obsessed over. Somehow they manage to outwit all the other books piled through the house with their odd forms, singular characters or prose rhythms. (A good prose sentence can be as catchy as a pop song.) These books, by the sheer charisma of their form, plotting, language and versions of dreaminess act as both a yardstick and encouragement to my own writing.

Marcovaldo by Italian novelist, Italo Calvino (best known for his short stories Cosmicomics and his novel If on a winter’s night, a traveller) was one book I kept on my desk for about three years as I tried to write my first book, The Invisible Rider. It is a book I fell for because of its inventive form, humour and surrealism. Having reread it to write this, I’m delighted to find I still love it.

Marcovaldo is a series of short fictions, surreal and hilarious adventures featuring the titular hero. The entire book is only 121 pages in total but marks five years – each chapter being one season. (Someone told me recently they hated books with seasons as chapter titles, but maybe they hadn’t read this one.) Marcovaldo himself is a factory worker in an industrial northern Italian city, a man who lives in a tiny basement flat with his wife, the long-suffering Domitilla and his six small children. Calvino writes in the foreword that we should imagine the early stories in a poor Italy ‘the Italy of neo-realistic movies’, while the last stories are set when ‘the illusions of an economic boom flourished.’ I mention this because economic realities and politics of the time are lightly apparent throughout the book, indeed they suffuse what Marcovaldo does and what is done to him. Whether it’s the harshness of recent post-war Italy, or the illusory economic ‘boom’ (rocks star economy, anyone?) that Calvino refers to, we see how economics, and the politics that govern them, have no sympathy for a man like him – a man who hasn’t the wits for commercial enterprise, although he is always enterprising in a screwy, unprofitable way. Calvino makes him a hero, albeit a clumsy, tactless, hopeless sort of hero. Despite his hard life Marcovaldo is, to quote Paul Simon, ‘soft in the middle’.

So while Marcovaldo has no choice in terms of his material life, (at one point he swaps his tin lunch box with its meagre sausage and ‘pale and shifty’ turnip contents for a wealthy boy’s equally disregarded lunch of fried brains) he lives in an imagination that’s as brilliant as a King’s treasure room. In ‘The Wrong Stop’ Marcovaldo steps out of the cinema – a Technicolor film set in the forests of India— and into a pea-soup fog of an evening. He wanders around unable to see a thing, lost in his own neighbourhood. The fog offers the ‘perfect situation for daydreaming, for projecting in front of himself, wherever he went, a never-ending film on a boundless screen.’

Perhaps we might read the whole book as a Technicolor dream –Wikipedia describes surrealism’s aim being to ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality’. Marcovaldo uses fog the way some people use drugs – to transform the unbearable dreariness of everyday. There is a delight and playfulness in the way Calvino serves up this escapism – he starts this chapter in fog, and by the end, Marcolvaldo having stumbled on a wine bar and gotten lost again, finds himself on a plane to Bombay. Perhaps this is part of the ‘illusion of the economic boom’ – international travel in all its exoticism and imagined luxury. Yet Marcovaldo’s trip abroad is just as delusional. The cinema of dreams and the fog coalesce, and yes, we will go along for the ride and let Marcovaldo believe he is on a plane to India. Somehow Calvino lets us laugh at his folly, and, watch him tenderly. Don’t we all sometimes wish we could immerse ourselves in the worlds of the films we love most?

The stories in Marcovaldo are small stories, little crazy plots. To give an example, here’s a summary of one chapter, ‘The Poisonous Rabbit.’ Marcovaldo steals a rabbit from hospital that has been used, unknowingly to him, for vaccine-testing. He likes this shy rabbit, hopes to keep it as a pet and fatten it up for a future roast. He loses it, then gets his suburb locked-down while authorities try to recapture the bio-risk, disease-ridden rabbit, which upon trying to escape across the apartment roofs, has been shot at by a neighbour with a gun.

‘The rabbit heard the shot all around, and one pellet pierced its ear. It understood: this was a declaration of war; at this point all relations with mankind were broken off. And in its contempt of humans, at what seemed

            to the rabbit, a base ingratitude, it decided to end it all.’  

The forlorn and suicidal rabbit tries to hop off the roof, but fails, landing in the hand of a gloved fireman; ‘foiled even in that extreme act of animal dignity’. 

‘A base ingratitude’ – this is one of the returning ideas in Marcovaldo – the ingratitude of human beings towards one another and towards nature. That sounds heavy-handed and sad, but Calvino always works these ideas with special brand of bittersweet humour. Marcovaldo is ungrateful to his wife (to be fair, she is a haranguing caricature), but he is ever filled with wonder towards nature and the peculiar modified forms of nature a city produces. The powers that be – Marcovaldo’s boss, his wife, and ‘the head of the Personnel Office’ – will never be grateful for a man like Marcovaldo, but there is something he has that is beyond their grasp – his own imagination. In Calvino, imagination is transformative and indefinable. It is the jack-hare followed by the wolf in the final paragraph of the book. The wolf follows the jack-hare’s paw prints in the snow but as soon as it catches up, the jack-hare disappears again, becomes invisible: ‘Only the expanse of snow could be seen, white as this page.’

At a Writers Week in Wellington in a few years ago I heard David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) insinuate that people who say they love Calvino are literary snobs. I wanted to stand up and shout him down (I didn’t because I’m a polite New Zealander) because he made Calvino sound ‘difficult’ and ‘worthy’, and I do not think Calvino is either of these things – although he is praise-worthy. Had Mitchell ever read Calvino? Because if he had, he’d know that at his best he’s one of the funniest, most absurd and kindest of writers around. He writes a nuanced, unsettling sentence (his translator was the late, great, William Weaver – also Umberto Eco’s translator). His paragraphs somehow start out plainly and end up in some strange, contradictory, animal point of view in the literary equivalent of quantum mechanics that says you can be in two places at once – one foot with the wolf, one foot with the disappeared jack-hare.

Afterword:

Here is a link to a fantastic Paris Review interview [ http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino] between Calvino and Weaver.

Something Thoughtful

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

VITA LONGA, TECHNOLOGIA BREVIS

This is a tale beginning with a perspective from my childhood, and I hope you will excuse it as such.

When I was a wee and tiny lad, there were two ways of listening to recorded music on demand, as opposed to listening to what other people had chosen for you on the radio. There were small black vinyl discs called 45s, which most often played pop songs or individual numbers of jazz or rock. And then there were big black vinyl discs called LPs (for Long Playing), which held much more audio information, spun at 33-and-a-third RPMs, and were capable of playing a whole symphony or all the numbers of a musical or a whole set of recordings by pop or rock or jazz artists. You could even have two or three LPs in a boxed set and hear a whole opera or a whole Shakespeare play. Mind you, you did still have to turn records over regularly, sometimes in mid-performance, and you did still have to drop a stylus or needle down onto their grooves, sometimes risking scratching the disc. And – yes – there was always much surface noise on even the best-maintained discs.

Now, as a child, I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the recording systems that had preceded 45s and LPs. For some reason my father had kept an old turntable in a flimsy varnished wooden casing which could play those heavy, thick, brittle, breakable shellac discs known as 78s. Indeed in the house there were a few of these quaint artefacts, and very occasionally we children would put one on the old turntable, but principally to snigger at how faint and bad and hissy its sound quality was – and how corny the music was. (Most of it 1930s or Second World War era, from when our parents were young.)

Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, 45s and LPs had existed from everlasting and would exist until everlasting. They were normality. You could of course supplement them, even in the 1950s, with cumbersome reel-to-reel tape-recorders; or from the late 1960s with little cassette recorders. Gosh, I remember the excitement in the 1960s when my teenaged brother and young teenage I were able to record a comedy programme off the radio on Saturday night and listen to it again on Sunday afternoon!!! Such freedom.

But everybody knew that these tapes were not the way to get the best sound quality, especially for music.

LPs and 45s ruled.

Then one day in the early 1980s, I found myself in a record store and I was amazed to find that all their LPs were being sold for absolutely knock-down prices. I don’t mean remaindered junk. I mean really classy, and new, recordings from the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and other such reputable firms. It suddenly dawned on me. The proprietor was unloading his stock as these new CD (compact disc) things, which I had merely heard about, were taking over the market. In no time at all, black-disc recordings vanished from the shops  - or at any rate from all shops bar those dedicated to eccentric collectors and specialists.

Now CDs ruled, without surface noise or scratching, and with entire symphonies imprinted on one side of the small silver (or rainbow-coloured) disc, so that you didn’t have to turn it over in mid-performance. You could even (as I did) buy a combined system with a turntable that allowed you to play five CDs in succession, so that you could, if you chose, listen to hours of music without interruption. Gosh, you could even programme the turntable so that it presented dozens of pieces of music from different CDs in the order you desired, or you could press a Random button and listen to them in no particular order at all. My combined system also allowed (and allows) me to listen to the radio, play cassettes and even put on old LPs – which of course I hardly ever do now, and then only for a few moments of nostalgia.

It took us some time to discover that CDs too were perishable objects and were not as impervious to damage as they were at first reputed to be. They could be scratched, as you might discover in mid-performance when suddenly you got the awful da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da effect, much worse than the clicking of a scratched old black disc.

For all that, though, CDs were now the new normality of recorded music, destined to last for everlasting. We bought them as easy Christmas and birthday presents and built up our stocks of them in neat towering disc-holders and wondered how we had ever listened to surface-hissing black discs. And we bought Walkmans so that we could stroll around the block listening to Berlioz through the headphones and we knew that this was absolutely it. What new device for sound-recordings could possibly be needed?

Except, of course, that technology, like rust, never sleeps. And along came the age of downloads from the home computer and of i-pods and of flash drives and of other forms of music storage, and of people younger than us implicitly telling us that we were out of touch because we hadn’t got the hang of these things. And CDs became the sign of being middle-aged rather than youthful. The CD section of Borders, where I used to browse for re-pressings of classic jazz and classic symphonic music, closed down. Now new devices, most still alien to me, were on display there.

I am fully aware that lamentations over the decay or loss of an old technology are indeed the sign of incipient Old Fart-dom. But the strange, eventful story I have told here does have a moral of sorts. No technology is permanent. It can always be improved upon – or in some cases changed for purely commercial reasons, but mainly because the market for an older technology has been exhausted. Things may appear to be “normality” to the youthful when they are in fact highly transient.

Looked at from a more mature perspective, I know that the age of the LP and 45 was in fact quite short. They were invented in the late 1940s, did not really become commercially available to most people until the early 1950s, and were being driven from the market by the early 1980s. In other words, they were the dominant form of recorded music for only about 30 years. I stifle the impulse to confess that a part of my mind still thinks of them as “normality” (which would take me into a completely different topic concerning the nature of memory). Instead, I move on to the fact that the dominance of the CD lasted only about 25 years. Wikipedia informs me that the CD format reached its peak of market penetration in 2000, and then sales and production of CDs gradually dropped off worldwide. In other words, the format was already declining less than 20 years after it first became available.

My mature reflection also realizes that earlier formats came and went before any of this happened. The very first sound recordings (in the late 19^th century) were on fragile cylinders. That lasted for about a decade or so. Then discs spinning at 78 RPM were invented for wind-up gramophones (or phonographs if you were American). At first they were pressed with grooves on one side only and the other side was blank. That lasted for just a few years. Then they had recorded matter on both sides. But the recording technique was purely mechanical and in fact capable of picking up a very limited range of sound. Electric recording (still on 78s which could hold only a few minutes of recording) was introduced in the mid-1920s, infuriating unprepared listeners who now found that their old gramophones / phonographs had to be replaced as they could not adequately play this new type of recording. Doubtless in about 1925 there were at least some young people amused that their elders could not keep up with the new technology. And when LPs and 45s ruled, there were innovations in multi-directional sound-recording and the big issue was whether you were listening to it in mono or stereo.

The nostalgic side of me thinks at once of all the people who tried to cling to what was passing away. I have heard tales of people, in the 1950s, who had built up really impressive collections of 78s and were unwilling to concede that they had been superseded; and so who for years kept trying to find new needles for their old discs, in order to validate all the money and time they had spent over the years in compiling their collections. Likewise, I know people who still have impressive numbers of videotapes which they never play as they were superseded by DVDs which, in their turn, are now being superseded by other formats. And I think of my own old, unplayed LPs.

Technology is transient, there is no permanence in sound-recording or any other technology and the latest device will soon be the sign of obsolescence.

I do, however, know one obvious thing. The rate of change is now faster than ever. Personally, one of the reasons I am disinclined to latch on to the latest sound-device is not because I am out-of-touch; not because I am not an affluent person and probably couldn’t afford it anyway; not even because I am a technologically-incompetent person who has to be tutored in most new technology by my children; but because I know that in a year or two it will in its turn be superseded. And then I will have the pleasurable Schadenfreude of laughing at the people who rushed to buy it and are now lusting after yet another doo-dad.

Something New

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

 “ABOVE THE CITY – A History of Otago Boys’ High School 1863-2013” by Rory Sweetman (Published for the OBHS Foundation); “WATRIAMA AND COMPANY – Further Pacific Island Portraits” by Hugh Laracy (Australian National University, E-Press)

            I have immense sympathy for historians who write official or institutional histories. They labour as long and hard over archival sources, secondary sources and oral history components in their research as do historians who are writing the biography of some illustrious national figure or an account of some major international crisis. They are aware that in the history of any long-lived institution there can be read immense social change. The institution can be seen as a microcosm of society at large.

And yet, diligent or perceptive though they may be, in the end institutional historians are doomed to address a very small audience. By its very nature, the institutional history has to account for many specific individuals who are of interest only to those who knew them. I often suspect that institutional histories are read most closely by other historians, looking for “raw” source material for broader-scope histories.

All of this is a long-winded and waffling way of saying that Rory Sweetman’s 150^th anniversary history of Otago Boys High School is a very well-written, closely-researched and insightful history. It could not be any other given that its author is an historian of some standing (probably still best known for Bishop in the Dock, his account of the sedition trial of Bishop James Michael Liston). But in the end Above the City is still a book for insiders, and there is much here (notes on specific teachers and school customs; mention of illustrious Old Boys like Sir Keith Park) that will be of interest only to those closely connected with OBHS.

The book’s title comes from an old OBHS school song; and the author’s “Introduction” tells us that, curiously, the school has never before had an official history written, although every so often it has produced chronicle-like “Registers”, which have been used as a major source. OBHS is one of those high-toned establishments, which prefers to call its principal the “rector”. Sweetman deals, chapter by chapter, with the tenure of each rector since 1863, although the last two chapters were written by the current rector and his immediate predecessor, given that it’s neither seemly nor appropriate for an historian to make judgments on the living.

I am not sure that this organization of material was the best option, since it locks Sweetman into giving a brief biography of each man, the circumstances of his appointment, what effect he had, and so on. Still, it makes for many lively anecdotes. The man who would have been first rector drowned before he could take up his position. In the 1860s, there was tension between the very Presbyterian town of old Dunedin and a series of Anglican-tinged rectors, who were seeking to build a copy of an English public school, complete with all the Anglican rituals. This was especially so when the second rector Frank Simmons had had his say. The third rector Stuart Hawthorne was hounded for his poor examination results. The fourth rector resigned in a huff after a major fight with the school board. All the while as I was reading this, I was aware that the 19^th century school being discussed had at most a few hundred students. By our standards it was a very small affair.

The whole school was rebuilt with new imposing buildings in the 1880s and the neighbouring lunatic asylum was cleared out, its inmates being moved to another location. It is interesting to note that until 1903, OBHS always had a struggle with a declining or marginal role. It was only in 1903 that secondary schooling became free. Before then, there was much resentment in the town over what seemed a mere luxury for the well-to-do. Having a junior school attached to OBHS (as a “feeder” to the secondary school) seemed to some to be sheer elitism on the part of people – sheep farmers; Dunedin’s wealthier merchants and professionals - who didn’t want their sons rubbing shoulders with plebs in the city’s elementary schools.

This sort of detail is part of the book’s value as social history. So is the inevitable mention of the impact of the Otago gold rushes soon after the school’s foundation, which changed the ethnic nature of hitherto very Scottish Dunedin, bringing in many feared or despised Irish papists. It was only in 1920, nearly sixty years after its foundation, that OBHS for the first time employed a Catholic teacher. Likewise it was only in 1934 that the school had a New Zealand-born rector rather than one imported from Britain.

Some things recorded here are so totally of their period that they now seem to belong to another world. There is, for example, the whole thing about military cadets; the enthusiastic send-off to the South African War in 1899 of “little band of heroes” led by an OBHS Old Boy officer (pp.156-157); and the school’s compulsory military drill after 1909. 1200 Old Boys volunteered for military service in the First World War. Over 200 were killed. The school’s reaction to the Second World War not quite as nakedly jingoistic, though over 2000 OBHS Old Boys served and again over 200 were killed.

There is a very questionable side to the history of any New Zealand boys’ school this old. That is the obsession some rectors had with sports. For OBHS, this often meant anxiety over whether or not they were beating Christ’s College at rugger or cricket. The socially elite nature of the school is most evident in this obsession. A particularly obnoxious period appears to have been under the rector Edward Aim in the 1950s and early ‘60s. He would actively interfere with the sports coaching of other teachers, should their teams suffer a loss, leading many teachers to resign in protest. This appears to be the main “hidden” story which Sweetman has unearthed  - the incredibly bad blood that developed between Aim and his staff, to the point where the board came within an inch of dismissing him after a closed hearing. However, Aim’s authoritarian bullying is counterpointed by the fact that some of the teachers who stood against him were enthusiastic caners.

We are reminded for some pages of the culture of physical violence that existed in most boys’ schools at the time – the canings, bullying and “manly” hazing games to which teachers turned a blind eye. Interestingly, one of the OBHS Old Boys who is awarded space to give his memories in an appendix at the back is a gay man who remembers the school in a spirit of complete alienation.

The only other “scandal” which Sweetman covers is the minor affair of an upright Presbyterian rector managing not to resign, even though it was known that he had had an affair with the school librarian.

Nostalgia inevitably played its part as the school got older – Old Boys agonized when, in the 1980s, the maintenance on 19^th century buildings became an issue and at last the old assembly hall was demolished and a new auditorium built. But things did have to change and, as this book presents it, most of the changes to the school’s traditional culture have been in the last thirty years.

In terms of physical presentation, one of the best aspects of this book is its generous collection of photographs. The best are the antique shots of changing grounds in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I’m not so sure, however, about the space given in one colour section to schoolboys’ “satirical” artwork from the 1950s, which looks fairly crude even by schoolboy standards of the day and therefore hardly worth preserving.

If I praise elements of Above the City, it is because it reads much better than most of the institutional histories I have had to wade through over the years. For all that, it is still an institutional history, with the limited general interest of such. And while that title may come from an old school song, it does pertinently suggest a rather self-satisfied school community seeing itself and its products as standing far above the rest of society.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Rory Sweetman writes about a single school. Professor Emeritus Hugh Laracy writes about a far vaster space – the whole Pacific Ocean.

Subtitled More Pacific Islands Portraits, Laracy’s Watriama and Co comprises 14 biographical essays about significant persons in the Pacific region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these essays have appeared in refereed journals of Australian, New Zealand and Pacific history in the last 25 years. In his preface, Laracy writes self-deprecatingly that the book is the product of “long-sustained, yet desultorily applied, personal curiosity” and that it is a “somewhat random and eclectic composition” which was motivated by “promiscuous inquisitiveness”.

I get the point about its being “eclectic” and “promiscuous”, because the people with whom Laracy deals are a very varied bunch.

At one end of the moral scale, there is the chapter on a saint - Pierre Chanel, a martyred Catholic missionary. Laracy is as interested in the process and motives for his canonization as he is in the man’s short life and early death. At the other end of the scale is the chapter on the long-lived Danish rogue and criminal Niels Peter Sorensen (1848-1935), who handily proves the adage that criminal lives often make livelier reading than those of the righteous. In Sorensen’s case there were long episodes of robbery and assault in various parts of the Pacific and grandiose schemes to exploit what he trumpeted as the untold mineral wealth of the Solomons. These schemes also made him a conman.

I confess to being less held by some of Laracy’s chapters than by others. I became somewhat confused by the genealogical details of the essay on “The Sinclairs of Pigeon Bay”; but its main purpose appeared to be to de-mythologize the backstory of a land-owning Hawaiian family, who made pretensions to more exalted origins than they actually had. The chapter on Cardinal Moran is interesting for the light it shines on sectarian tensions in the early colonial period, misreportings in the press, and the doggedness with which Moran attempted to “prove” that Spanish explorers had reached Australia before the British did. The chapter on the mariner John Strasburg celebrates him for the simple fact that he was a commercial seafarer who kept records and therefore made it possible for us to know better what trade was like in the Pacific one hundred years ago. As for the one on Beatrice Grimshaw, prolific author of romantic bestsellers, Laracy seems most interested in showing how her works can be mined for evidence of their racial and colonialist mentality. The novel’s concluding chapter is on the French (yes – French) historian of the Pacific, Patrick O’Reilly, whose labours helped to make Pacific Studies a respectable part of university History Department curricula.

For me, two chapters stood out.

That on William Jacob Watriama presents a fascinating paradox. When Australia still had a rigid colour bar, and the “White Australia” immigration policy, Watriama was one of the handful of black men to serve in the Australian armed forces in the First World War. He was a Melanesian from the Loyalty Islands, but long-time resident of Sydney. He had served in the Boer War and he agitated for Australian control of the Pacific. Thanks to much fantasizing, Watriama claimed to be of royal blood and claimed to be the rightful “king” of the Loyalty Islands, but his main significance was that he supported an Australian takeover of these French possessions, and he opposed Japanese and other Asian influence in Pacific. Hence the paradox of his life - he was a black man congenial to white imperialism, and regularly praised by such jingoistic white imperialist Australian publications as the old Bulletin and its offshoot the Lone Hand.

            It is understandable that Laracy focuses our attention on this character with the book’s title.

The story of George Bogese is, however, even more fascinating. Bogese was convicted of treason by colonial authorities after the Second World War because he had assisted the Japanese in their occupation of the Solomon Islands, acting as an interpreter and informing the Japanese of Allied and guerrilla positions. But even as he was on trial, he was defended by some prescient British people (such as an Anglican bishop) who realized that British colonial authority had not been all that beneficial to the islanders, and who therefore argued that it was not unreasonable for an islander like Bogese to assume that Asian rule might be preferable. Laracy pursues this theme by quoting later pronouncements by islanders who had supported the Allies but who, decades after, wondered if it had been worth it.

Other readers will make their own pick of these essays, but these two on indigenous people are the ones that present the book’s most dramatic material.

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 five or more years ago.

“A LONG LONG WAY” by Sebastian Barry (first published 2005); “THE PROMISE OF LIGHT” by Paul Watkins (first published 1992); “THE ULTRAS” by Eion McNamee (first published 2005); “THIS HUMAN SEASON” by Louise Dean (first published 2005)

Okay, this is the week of Saint Patrick’s Day, so as “Something Old” I have decided to comment relatively briefly on four novels I have read within the last decade, all of which situate themselves in times of stress in Ireland in the twentieth century. I regard all four of them as very good novels, although only two of them (Sebastian Barry’s and Eoin McNamee’s) would I judge outstanding. As it happens, three of them appeared in 2005, when I reviewed them for the Dominion-Post, and I draw upon my reviews for the comments I make here. I arrange them in the order of the events they recall, not by their dates of publication.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            First, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, it’s title ironically recalling the First World War soldiers’ song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. The novel faces a curious historical fact that competing mythologies have almost succeeded in burying. In both the First World War and the Second World War (despite the Irish Free State’s official neutrality in the latter), there were far more Irish Catholics serving in the British Army than Ulster Protestants. Ulster Unionists prefer not to admit this fact, because they have a strong self-image of themselves as the sole saviours of the British Empire. Irish nationalists prefer not to admit it, because they dislike the thought of all those Irish lads serving a “foreign” power at the very time of the independence struggle. So Irish soldiers’ experiences on the Western Front have tended not to find their way into Irish novels and other fiction.

Given a big help by the documentary sources he lists, Irish novelist Sebastian Barry clearly set out to correct this omission. His novel takes undersized Willie Dunne, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, from 1915 to 1918 on the Western Front. As historical reconstruction, with a strong sense of immediacy, it is impeccable. War is hell. The regiment panics and flees at the first nightmarish gas attack (graphically described). Men die and cannot be replaced. Men visit improvised brothels and find rough entertainment in boxing matches. Men see horrors and sometimes reluctantly participate in them. Men wonder what they are doing there, but grit their teeth and carry on anyway. After all, they are all volunteers. Because of protests, there was no conscription in Ireland, unlike in England.

Inevitably parts of A Long Long Way come across as a sort of Irish Le Feu or All Quiet on the Western Front, and some of Willie Dunne’s mates are very similar to the way Paul Baumer’s comrades were depicted. The big effing and blinding sergeant Christy Moran could almost change places with Baumer’s big buddy Kat. But the very Irish component is the regimental chaplain-priest Father Buckley, no plaster saint but a good tribal leader to the boys and remarkably forgiving of trivial sexual sins in the midst of the greater sin of war.

But there’s more to this novel that yet another reconstruction of the First World War, which has exercised so many novelists in the past few decades (Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks etc.) and is clearly going to exercise many, many more as we go through that war’s centenary, starting this year. Not for the first time, Sebastian Barry broaches a particular sort of Irish mentality, which has been ignored in noisier nationalist discourses. Willie’s dad, a Dublin policeman, is piously Catholic but also fiercely loyal to the British Empire, and even contrives to be a Freemason. In fact he is essentially the same as the main character in Barry’s famous play The Steward of Christendom (1995). His worldview is doomed by history and his son is what would now be called “conflicted” about many issues. But they serve to prove that there were more colours in Irish history than a simple division into Green and Orange.

I should note that both Willie and his dad are based on real forebears of Sebastian Barry’s.

In reading A Long Long Way, there were times when I regretted that young Willie was quite so thick. He has to have the most basic Irish politics explained to him, especially in the brief vignette we are given of the 1916 Easter Rising. But then, like most of the world’s soldiers, he is only a teenager and naivete is part of his condition.

Sebastian Barry’s style is occasionally poetic, but not in ways that break the novel’s sense of time and place and battlefield sordor.

Understandably, when this novel was first published, it was shortlisted for the Booker.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Paul Watkins’ The Promise of Light may be the slightest of the novels in this little collection. Strictly speaking it is not an Irish novel, because Watkins is a Welshman. But it is a good, brisk and efficient look at the “Tan” war, which is what Ireland copped after the First World War. In 1921 Ben Sheridan, a young Irish-American, discovers that the man he thought was his father is not his real father. He travels to Ireland to sort out his parentage. He gets caught up in the Anglo-Irish war as soon as he lands in Galway, quickly becoming integrated into an IRA column, although never showing any consciousness of what the issues are.

It takes quite some time for the first half of the novel to plunge us into the Irish scene. When we do get there, Watkins’ style is visually vivid although his tale does develop in a series of melodramatic jerks. Even so, most of the action is credible, and generally unglamourised. It may be hard to believe that somebody with absolutely no prior training would develop as rapidly into a guerrilla fighter as the protagonist (and narrator) does. But the sense of an outsider’s disorientation is compelling and this may be the essential “message” of the novel. At the very least The Promise of Light does convey the pure strangeness of guerrilla warfare in open country, especially when the issues are never fully clear to the narrator.

I have noticed that most critics of this novel approach it first and foremost as a straight adventure story. It is that, but it has more resonance than a pure thriller.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Moving on over half a century in setting, Eion McNamee’s The Ultras takes place in the six counties of  “Northern Ireland” in the 1970s, at the height of sectarian conflict.  It is based closely on real events and involves real characters, recreating the mysterious death or disappearance of British Special Forces operative Captain Robert Nairac. According to official versions, Nairac was captured and killed by the IRA, but his body was never found. If you Google his name, you will still find regimental memoirs presenting him as a sort of Lawrence of Arabia figure who “understood” those simple local Irish and died a heroic death.

Mcnamee’s novel tells a different story.

Paradoxically a Catholic, and the product of an English Catholic public school, Nairac was in effect the mentor of official assassins. The Ultras depicts British intelligence in Ulster running a brothel to blackmail lonely men into acts of violence, shooting people (regardless of their affiliations) who threaten to compromise their operations, and employing all the devices of that same terror they claimed to be combatting. In this context, it is worth remembering that at least half the deaths in Northern Ireland in the past forty years were the work of British forces or those “loyalist” militias they sometimes suborned.

Nowhere do Nairac’s colleagues discuss the political, social or religious state of the land they operate in. Their actions take place in a moral void as a sort of brutal game. This is really the point of this novel. It concerns the corrupting effects of irresponsible power. A truly lamentable tale.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

Set also in the 1970s, Louise Dean’s This Human Season suffers only by comparison with The Ultras. The fruit of the author’s diligent research, it is a compassionate attempt to see all sides of the conflict. Dean’s acknowledgments list all the families of internees, clergy, Sinn Feiners, British Army officers and others whom she interviewed as part of her research.

The novel cuts between the home life of a prison officer at the Maze (Long Kesh) and the home life of the mother of one of the IRA prisoners. The officer is English, not an Ulsterman, and thinks himself above the ideological conflict. But he is inevitably drawn into it by the hard-line Protestantism of some of his colleagues, and by his own weaknesses. The mother of the prisoner is piously Catholic, but somewhat at odds with her church over her own disorderly sexual life. They are rounded characters and the separate tragedies they suffer are equally credible.

The most effective passages of This Human Season are the ones that convey the regimented brutality – for both screws and prisoners – of the political prison, the squalor of the republican prisoners’ “dirty” protest and the desperation of people whose homes have been ransacked once too often by security forces. As documentary it is impeccable.

Something Thoughtful

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

RADICAL CHIC

I’ve touched on this topic before on this blog, but it is still one that interests me.

It’s that old problem of “radical chic”, or the fashionable admiration, by safely well-off people, of politically radical personalities and movements. I was forced to think about it again some months ago when I was reviewing a volume of poetry by a very good New Zealand poet. The volume included verses on Renato Curcio, one of the leaders of the “Red Brigades” which terrorised sections of Italy, for no good purpose whatsoever, back in the 1970s.

Why bother eulogising such people, I wondered?

Is it for the sake of a vicarious thrill?

When you don’t have to face the reality of misguided “revolutionary” violence, you can romanticise it as a challenge to the complacent bourgeoisie, or a deed which cuts through the pallid obfuscations of current academic philosophy. After all, you’re not the one being blown up or shot at, are you?

The paradigm of such romanticisation would have to be those idiot university students – by their very nature a privileged section of society – who some years ago would wander around with the famous posed image of Che Guevara on their t-shirts. Che Guevara? The nitwit who helped set up Castro’s kangaroo courts in Cuba and then died in an under-planned attempt to stir Bolivian peasants into revolution, even though the local Communist Party had disowned him? Ah yes – but didn’t he look so dishy with that beret and long hair and beard and cigar? So on he went to the t-shirts of people who would have been the first to suffer under the form of government he was promoting. Truly a proto-postmodern phenomenon, this adoption of an image detached from any physical reality.

“Radical chic” often has an undercurrent of contempt for social inferiors. I think of the eccentric English Mitford family in the 1930s – minor aristocrats in a position to look down on the middle classes, and therefore attracted to radicals attacking said middle classes from any direction. I grant you the Mitfords produced one amusing novelist (Nancy) and one fairly decent journalist (Jessica); but the family will be chiefly remembered for the sister who adored Hitler (Unity), the sister who married a Fascist party leader (Diana), and the sister who became a Communist (Jessica). Such fun to be part of the forces smashing those middle-class oinks.

The English “radical chic” of a later generation were the titled Redgrave acting family, a.k.a. the Mitfords of the 1970s, with brother and sister Corin and Vanessa Redgrave promoting the ludicrous “Workers Revolutionary Party”, to the complete indifference of the workers, when they weren’t attending luvvy theatrical events.

As you can see, I am in a rattling-off-of-lists mood and could continue this list or link it to the overlapping phenomenon of current American movie stars who misuse their visibility to promote fashionable causes. But I recently had the jolt of realizing that the “radical chic” phenomenon (first given that label by Tom Wolfe in 1970) is in fact much older than the 20^th century.

I re-read Stendhal’s 30-odd-page novella Vanina Vanini, published in the early nineteenth century. It concerns a young Roman noblewoman, who gets entangled romantically with a carbonaro (radical nationalist of an underground movement) in the 1820s. She is attracted by his dashing revolutionary commitment, but she ends up betraying all his revolutionary comrades because she imagines that he is in love with her and she wants him for her own. It is the classic story of a rich person desiring the glamour of radicalism and assuming some of the trappings without really understanding what it’s all about.

Truly the precursor of Mitfords, Redgraves, Che Guevara t-shirts, and poets who eulogise the Red Brigades.

 

Something New

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

 “THE MIGHTY TOTARA – The Life and Times of Norman Kirk” by David Grant (Random House, $NZ49:99)

As soon as I open a book about Norman Kirk, I remember how the man had a direct impact on me. In 1972, I was a 20-year-old university student. I had no desire to be swept into compulsory military service, but I was one of the unlucky ones who were caught by the ballot. I managed to get my military service deferred for one year, and hoped for the best. The Labour opposition said they were going to repeal the old Military Service Act of 1961 and abolish the ballot. I fervently hoped they would win the 1972 election – and they did. Norman Kirk kept his word and the act was repealed within his new government’s first parliamentary session. I never had to report for military service, and that is one reason I have always been grateful to Norman Kirk.

This is a very selfish reason, of course, so I had better expand on my feelings about Kirk. He still seems to me the last politician I could trust, and I became eligible to vote only in his time, which might indicate to you how difficult I’ve found it voting for anyone with a full heart in the last forty years. Kirk bumbled and made mistakes and, of course, died too young – less than two years into his premiership – with a lot left undone. But his combination of left-wing economic policies and conservative social policy is essentially where I myself still stand. Like him, I believe the common good should come before private profit. Like him, I believe in the sanctity of human life. Few politicians sign on for that combination nowadays.

I should add another personal point about “Big Norm”. He makes me feel nostalgic as hell, and it’s not just my amused memory of the BBC radio news speaking of the New Zealand frigate “O-TAY-go” entering the French exclusion zone near Mururoa.  Norman Kirk won the 1972 election some months after my father died. My parents were proud “floating voters” which, in the New Zealand of the time, meant they sometimes voted National and sometimes voted Labour, depending on what they thought of the candidates. I knew, however, that they had soured on the National Party by the late 1960s and my father particularly disliked the rising star of that party, Robert Muldoon. Before he died, Dad said Muldoon would be “New Zealand’s worst prime minister”. A prescient person, my Dad. So there my widowed mother and I both are, in front of the television screen on election night 1972, watching the results come in and getting more and more excited as one seat after another falls to Labour. And well before poor old Jack Marshall concedes, and well before the telly pundits have told us what to think, my Mum turns to me and says “You know what this is, don’t you? It’s a landslide!” Prescient woman, my Mum. And we were both jubilant. Like so much of the country, we really believed that Labour electioneering slogan “Time for a Change!”.

And then, less than two years later, we’re crying because Norm is dead. Only one other politician’s death has made me cry in my whole life – US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. And you can forgive me my sentimentality about him, because I was only a teenager and didn’t know a heck of a lot when Bobby got gunned down.

Okay, enough of my maudlin (if truthful) ramblings.

I have before me this very fine and very readable and well-researched and accessible book by David Grant The Mighty Totara, and it’s a crime that I’ve talked so much about my own thoughts on Norm before getting on to this book, because The Mighty Totara deserves better than that.

David Grant is concerned, before anything else, with Kirk’s political career and his impact on New Zealand. With 442 pages of text (before bibliography, endnotes and index), The Mighty Totara takes us briskly through Kirk’s childhood and young manhood. Growing up in Christchurch in the tough years of the Depression with upright working class and Salvation Army parents. Getting a railway apprenticeship. A self-taught man and a voracious reader. Already by Page 36 he’s twenty years old and married to Ruth. He can be a stroppy young man as in the invigorating anecdote of his taking a rifle to kill the rats in the rented accommodation he and his young family had to live in (pp.39-40). By the age of 30 he is elected mayor of Kaiapoi – at that time being New Zealand’s youngest-ever mayor. He makes his first forays into national politics, entering parliament for Lyttelton in 1957. By the mid-1960s, with Labour in the long doldrums of opposition, Kirk successfully challenges the past-it Arnold Nordmeyer for the party leadership, and wins it, becoming, at 43, Labour’s youngest leader up to that time.

You will note that we are only about one sixth of the way through the book when it’s the early 1960s and Kirk is already an MP protesting French nuclear testing in the Pacific. And we are less than halfway through the book (p.190 to be precise) when Kirk wins the 1972 election. This means the 442 pages of text are overwhelmingly devoted to the last ten of Kirk’s 51 years of life – and especially to the less than two years (November 1972 to August 1974) that he was prime minister.

Given that politics and national impact are David Grant’s major interests, there is nothing wrong with this, but I am sorry that The Mighty Totara consequently gives us so little of Kirk’s family life once we’ve locked into his parliamentary career. His wife Ruth is mentioned occasionally as his sturdy supporter and helpmeet with their five children; but, bar the odd mention, she basically vanishes from the story. It therefore comes as something of a shock when, literally five pages from the end, Grant mentions Kirk’s “despair at the state of his difficult marriage with Ruth, who was often cantankerous”(p.439) and then launches into an account of this flawed marriage (pp.440-443). He also gamely gives an account of the unedifying career of Norm’s MP son John Kirk (pp.420-423), a part of the Kirk story that some admirers might have preferred him to gloss over.

One or two of Grant’s characterizations may surprise readers. Of the man who preceded Nordmeyer as Labour’s leader, Grant writes:

“[Walter] Nash was a ponderous authoritarian scared of change and, particularly in caucus, intolerant of MPs who did not agree with his views. He procrastinated over decisions, became bogged down in detail and often refused to consult or confide in colleagues.” (p.57)

Some of the things he tells us about Kirk are also surprising. I didn’t know that the man with such an anti-militarist foreign policy was also the man who liked rabbit hunting and pigeon shooting and collected pistols.

In political matters, however, you can’t fault Grant’s punctiliousness. He dots his “I”s and crosses his “T”s. In the chapter (Chapter 8) on Kirk’s putting together a new parliamentary team after the 1969 defeat, Grant lists every single party spokesman and his ranking, with appropriate comments on his performance.

Of course there were times when reading this book made me acutely aware of the time that has elapsed since the events it records. This is not quite a nostalgic aspect so much as a sense of “autres temps, autres moeurs”. To give one obvious example, Labour lost two elections when Kirk was party leader (1966 and 1969). As I read of the 1969 defeat (Chapter 7), I couldn’t help reflecting that no political party now would keep on a leader after two successive electoral defeats. But Grant himself later suggests that there was a wisp of the same mentality, in 1971, when Kirk

“…was unnecessarily anxious, walking with an unsteady gait to the caucus room. He was conscious that a party in opposition too long could change its leader to invigorate itself, and Kirk had led his party through two unsuccessful election campaigns…. Kirk need not have worried; he retained the leadership unanimously.” (p.162)

This book reminded me of forgotten controversies such as the fuss (Chapter 10) when the National government in effect sacked the editor of The Listener. I also thought how different things were when I was reminded (p.222) that in 1973, Mat Rata was the first Maori to be Minister of Maori Affairs.

It has to be said that this is dominantly a work of admiration. From the adulatory title onwards, Grant wants us to like Kirk, and he succeeds.  There is a necessary sense of excitement over the 1972 election victory. The lead-up to that election was tense because the National government was at odds with the radical Auckland branch of the Seamen’s Union and therefore dusted off the usual propaganda line linking the Labour Party to wildcat strikes and union radicalism. But it didn’t wash because Kirk himself so clearly had little sympathy with the more radical unionists; and he and FOL boss Tom Skinner were able to appear as beacons of reasonableness. Besides, with the hesitant Jack Marshall having taken over from Holyoake as National prime minister, Kirk was able to dominate debate in the House. At the opening of the election campaign, Grant remarks:

 “Kirk was in top form at this Palmerston North address, raising and lowering his voice at appropriate moments, mastering the pause, gesticulating at the right instant, and confidently exchanging jibes with youthful hecklers, some of whom were farmers’ sons attending Massey University, not part of Labour’s traditional catchment” (p.185)

So Grant writes about the man who repealed the Military Service Act of 1961, wanted an independent foreign policy for New Zealand, recognized China, established an embassy in Beijing and reopened the embassy in Moscow, set up the Literary Fund remunerating authors for their works held in libraries, and took real risks. Kirk (Chapter 14) called off the 1973 Springbok tour of New Zealand, even though he knew it would cost Labour rural votes in the next election (and it did). As he had promised he would before the election, Kirk also sent a frigate (Chapter 15) into the French exclusion zone near the atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa.

Grant admires Kirk for all these things, but he makes it convincing in part because he steers smartly away from hagiography. Kirk’s negative side gets a fair mention and the portrait is a nuanced one. Kirk wouldn’t have got where he did without sometimes playing the political game, as when he sent birthday and wedding anniversary greetings to the wives of Labour MPs who could support his bid for the party leadership in the 1960s (p.80). There were times when he was not always gracious about Arnold Nordmeyer, the party leader he de-throned. (pp.87ff.). We are frequently told of his mistrust of “bloody intellectuals” and Labour people who did not have true working class credentials, and this affected some of his initial cabinet appointments once he was prime minister. It also affected his relationship with the Australian Labor leader Gough Whitlam whom Kirk judged guilty of “intellectualism”. We are told that, although he was opposed to New Zealand’s military engagement in Vietnam, Kirk “disingenuously” (p.158) failed to support mobilisation protests against the war, because he did not wish to alienate working class hawks. When Grant discusses a conference that was held to coordinate broadly left-wing opinion, ahead of the 1972 election, he speaks of  “the less attractive side of his personality, a paranoia towards groups and individuals not inside the party machine whom he thought, wrongly, might have been damaging to Labour” and also uses the word “intolerance” (p.207).

This same term crops up a number of times. It is clear that in his very last months, Kirk lost the support of many in his caucus, and Grant says there was a “paranoiac” (p.384) incident when Kirk became involved in an unseemly squabble on talkback radio. He also speaks of Kirk’s “paranoia” (p.392) regarding Bill Rowling’s attempts to overhaul the economy; and Kirk’s “paranoia” (p.394) about being spied on.

It is possible, too, that Grant implies an element of hubris at the beginning of Kirk’s premiership. In 1972, the Labour party defeated the National Party by a landslide – the biggest since 1935 – gaining 56 seats to National’s 31. Buoyant at this result, Kirk declared brashly at his first cabinet meeting as prime minister that “We’re here to govern for 25 years!” (p.227). Grant uses this phrase as a chapter title, probably aware that readers will remember the outcome. Kirk himself was dead in less than two years and the 3^rd Labour government lasted just one term.

If Grant tempers his admiration for Kirk with frank accounts of the man’s shortcomings, he is equally commendable is his even-handedness about Kirk’s parliamentary opponents. He admits that by the mid-1960s, National had a very effective parliamentary team and a buoyant economy, making it hard for Labour to dislodge them. Although he clearly has no liking for Robert Muldoon, he notes how the effective debating of Muldoon was one of the handicaps Labour suffered in the run-up to the 1969 election. He also notes generously that it was really Keith Holyoake (pp.294-295) who began New Zealand’s first effective official stance against nuclear weapons.

Grant can give many plausible reasons for the fact that the 3^rd’ Labour government lasted only one term.  The economy was collapsing under the impact of the oil shock and declining trade with Britain, as Britain entered the EEC. Inflation was running at 13% and there was a huge deficit (Chapter 16).

But there was also the physical failure of Norman Kirk himself.

Sounding throughout much of this book, like a solemn drumbeat, is the tale of Kirk’s declining health. Even in the chapter on the successful 1972 election campaign (Chapter 11), it is made clear that Kirk’s vigorous and successful performance placed a huge strain on his health. As prime minister, Kirk had a heart attack while visiting India. It was witnessed by his secretary Margaret Hayward, who was pledged to keep quiet about it (p.353). By late 1973, a new doctor declared that Kirk was diabetic and had to lose 6 stone if he was to live.

By then “even a modicum of physical activity was making Kirk breathe heavily and sweat profusely. By now he had a very clear view of his mortality. To close friends he was admitting that he ‘wouldn’t make old bones.’ ” (p.370). When he finally appeared at the Labour Party’s May 1974 conference, after a major operation “many gasped in shock at his gaunt, stooped appearance.” (p.376). He died of pulmonary embolism on 31 August 1974, aged only 51.

I might question a few of David Grant’s judgments. When he explains how Kirk was opposed to abortion, Grant feels bound to explain that Kirk was no misogynist or opponent of women’s rights, and how he set up a Committee on Women (pp.176-178). I naturally ask – how on earth does being opposed to abortion mean one is opposed to women’s rights?

It is not Grant’s fault that there is an ambiguity about who Kirk was. This is signalled in Grant’s preface, where he declares that Kirk “was New Zealand’s last working class prime minister…” (p.9) and notes of his premiership:

 “Although he moved quickly to stamp a new direction on an expending party, he retained an inbuilt social conservatism that saw him react against the more radical and self-indulgent aspects of the counter-culture that began to swirl around him in the late 1960s and early 1970s; in particular he opposed moves to liberalise the laws prohibiting abortion and homosexuality.” (Preface p.8)

He returns to this later when he surveys the party that Kirk led:

“By now the Labour Party was an amalgam of New Zealanders of different ages, backgrounds, beliefs and levels of education, gathered together to try to find a common ground at a time when the country was on the cusp of huge social change: every week malcontents were marching on the streets protesting apartheid, the Vietnam War, abortion law reform, homosexual legality, and a raft of industrial issues, to name just some. This expansive movement was so much different to the Labour Party of 1962, which was mostly male, elderly and trade union conservative.” (p.181)

            The use of the word “malcontents” is interesting here, but I get Grant’s drift. The old working class blokes’ party was really fading away, and Labour was early in the process of becoming the party of smarmy middle class smarties that it is now (very much like the one that faces it from the government benches). Kirk was as much a reminder of the old as a harbinger of the new. This expansive biography makes his role in history clear.