Something Old

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

SELECTED SHORT STORIES by Honore de Balzac (all published originally between 1830 and 1840). (edited by A.W.Raitt, Clarendon Press, 1964)

Twice on this blog I have pointed out that we are misjudging Guy de Maupassant if we see him only as a writer of short stories, great as he was in that genre (look up the postings on Pierre et Jean and Fort Comme La Mort). Guy de Maupassant was also a novelist. Four times on this blog, I have dealt with some of the best novels of Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), viz. Le Pere Goriot, LaRabouilleuse, La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons. But here I must perform the manoeuvre in reverse. Great as Balzac was as a novelist, he was also an accomplished writer of short stories. So as with Guy de Maupassant, we can appreciate him in both genres.

As a signed-up Balzacian, I must, however, issue a warning. Not all of Balzac’s shorter fiction is of a piece or is of equal merit. Once he had conceived of his interlocking series of novels La Comedie Humaine, he often wrote short pieces simply to connect characters in one novel with characters in another. Indeed he often worked-over short stories he had already written, adding incidental details and names to fit them into this grand scheme. It is hard even for me to read these as stand-alone pieces. They are best read as adjuncts to specific Comedie Humaine novels. There is also the fact that his concept of the short story was a very loose one. Some of his shorter fictions are of the length of novellas, like his story of the money-lender Gobseck (1830) or his sad tale, one of his best, of the returned Napoleonic soldier Le Colonel Chabert (1832).

To find my way through Balzac’s real short fiction (that is, stories all of which are no longer than 40 pages) I turned to a very good selection, published by Clarendon Press back in 1964 and edited by A.W.Raitt, who also supplied (in English, of course) detailed and helpful notes to the French texts of the ten stories he had chosen. It does not bother me in the least that this publication was obviously prepared for students. All of the stories were written between 1830 and 1840, and most have a simple anecdote wrapped inside them. Balzac is able to observe character well, though the plots are often melodramatic.

What I found is as follows:

Un Episode sous la Terreur. During the most violent and anti-clerical phase of the French Revolution, a small group of Catholic worshippers in Paris meet to celebrate mass in secret. They are joined by a man whom they do not know and whose motives seem suspect. Is he a police spy? The denouement is that he was the executioner of the king, who is somehow now doing penance for his crime. While the structure smells of sensation, the story is still excellently evocative in its sense of terror, oppression and fear.

Le Requisitionnaire (=”conscript”) is more of an ingenious anecdote, even if it too has a specific historical setting. It has to do with a woman having an ESP experience about the death of her son who is fighting for the Chouans (the Catholic peasantry in rebellion against the new secular republic) at the time of the revolution.

Far and away the greatest story in this selection, and one of Balzac’s real masterpieces, is Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece). It is set in the seventeenth century, and has as one of its subordinate characters the historical painter Nicolas Poussin. A brilliant art critic is able to explain cogently and in detail why an artist’s painting is mediocre. He himself has been working for years on a great work of art. Finally the time comes when others are able to look at his great work of art. It turns out to be an incoherent daub, which obviously began as something interesting, but which he has worked and re-worked over so often that he has killed whatever inspiration it originally had. This is a story about the difference between criticism and art; and between inspiration and rationality. It is also about the truth that a certain point comes when the artist must abandon his work of art for fear of killing it. In his own commentary, and through his characters, Balzac gets to express some other important ideas about the arts, such as   “Il ne suffit pas pour etre un grand poete de savoir a fond la syntaxe et de ne pas faire de fautes de langue.” (“To be a great poet, there’s more to it than knowing grammar well and not slipping up in your language”). There is his famous aphorism “La mission de l’art n’est pas de copier la nature, mais de l’exprimer.” (“The mission of art is not to copy nature but to express it.”) And there is his analysis of the despairing artist: “Il a profondement medite sur les couleurs, sur la verite absolue de la ligne; mais, a force de recherches, il est arrive a douter de l’objet meme de ses recherches. Dans ses moments de desespoir, il pretend que le dessin n’existe et qu’on ne peut rendre avec des traits que des figures geometriques.” (“He had thought deeply about the colours and the absolute truth of the line; but because of all his research, he ended up doubting the very purpose of his research. In his moments of despair, he claimed that no general design existed and that all an artist could create by sketching was geometric shapes.”)

Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu is generally regarded as one of the great short stories in the French language. At a film festival in the early 1990s, I recall seeing Jacques Rivette’s modernised version of some elements from the story, La Belle Noiseuse (1991 – the title is the name, in the original Balzac story, of the painting the artist is trying to create). For what it’s worth, Wikipedia tells me that Picasso was a great admirer of Balzac’s tale

Le Message. After a fellow passenger dies in a coaching accident, a man has to carry a message of love to the dead man’s married mistress. The focus of the story is the way in which the married woman receives the news. Though clearly choking with emotion, she retains her dignity by not showing this in front of her husband.

Something of the same womanly stoicism is found in the story that follows.

La Grande Breteche (the title refers to a place) is basically a brilliant melodrama, which begins by setting up the mystery of why a certain noble provincial house is in such a dilapidated state. It turns out that the wife of a nobleman was having an affair with a Spanish prisoner of war who was out on parole. Then the prisoner escaped. But hearing noises in the closet, the husband suspected that the Spaniard had not really escaped but was being hidden by his wife. Husband got wife to swear a solemn oath that there was nobody in the closet. She swore the oath. Then he had the closet bricked up. And after the husband died, years later, the wife insisted that the property be left exactly as it was. Hence its dilapidation. The story is told by three successive narrators, and manages to come to a brilliant punchline ending with husband and wife both hearing a noise from the bricked-up closet and the husband blandly saying “But you swore on the cross that there was nobody there.” This is one that could have been written by E.T.A.Hoffmann if he had had Balzac’s psychological insight. Or Edgar Allan Poe if he had been able to restrain his pompous polysyllabic prolixity.

Un Drame au bord de la mer. For me, as a native English-speaker, this was the most difficult story to read because of all its description of the maritime country and its provincial words. Basically it is about a peasant father who does penance as a hermit in a grotto in recompense for killing his good-for-nothing son in a rage when the two of them were arguing.

La Messe de l’athee is, I judge, the most disappointing story in the book and the least persuasive as character study. A convinced atheist and rationalist, who scorns religion, is seen regularly attending mass and lighting candles at a shrine. Why? Because, it turns out, he is honouring the memory of the impoverished and devoutly Catholic water-carrier who encouraged him and materially helped him when he himself was an impoverished medical student. While I do not think this story adds up to much, it does make one pungent comment on transience: “La Gloire des chirurgiens ressemble a celle des acteurs, qui n’existent que de leur vivant et dont le talent n’est plus appreciable des qu’ils ont disparu.” (“The Glory of surgeons is like that of actors – it exists only when they are alive and nobody can appreciate their talents once they are dead.”) Obviously Balzac was writing long before cinema was invented!

Facino Cane. The first-person narrator sees a clearly intelligent, and blind, Italian musician playing in a group of three blind musicians at a wedding in a really poor quarter of Paris. Asking him about his life, he discovers he was formerly a wealthy nobleman who was ruined in youth by an inopportune love affair and then became obsessed with gold and still has mad plan to recover a hidden cache of gold in his native Venice. In other words, he is Balzac’s monomaniacal obsessives, like Goriot and Gobseck. The set-up is more interesting than this pay-off.

Finally, Pierre Grassou, which is one of the best in the volume because of its light touch. It is the funny and touching portrait of an absolutely mediocre painter who is able to parlay his lack-of-talent into a lucrative career as a portrait painter among the bourgeoisie, who have as little artistic taste as he does. In his portraits “tout denotait la vie meticuleuse des petits esprits” (“everything suggested the meticulous lives of small minds”). Like Le Chef-d-oeuvre inconnu, this allows Balzac to give a lot of his ideas on art, especially on the way real artists do not prosper materially. The story partly has Pierre Grassou slavishly copying old masters, for which copies he receives only modest payment from the art dealer Elias Magus – and he later discovers that Elias Magus has on-sold his mediocre copies for exorbitant sums as if they were the genuine article.

From this volume you can get a taste of the range of Balzac’s style. Certainly there is melodrama here and sensationalism – the type of things that lead fastidious critics to damn Balzac. But there is also real wit, real human insight, a tour de force of studied nastiness in La Grande Breteche; a palpable sense of menace in Un Episode sous la Terreur ; and in both Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and Pierre Grassou, some of the best ideas that a prose writer ever put on paper about the arts. Balzac deserves to be seen as a master of the short-story form.

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.  

POEMS FOR SEASONS

            For no urgent reason, I present to you as this week’s “Something Thoughtful” two poems that appear in my forthcoming collection Mirror World (Steele Roberts, 2016). Winter is now with us, and even though I write this after a blissfully sunny and clear Auckland day, I can feel the chill in the air. So I have decided to present you with two poems dealing with the seasons. “The Pear Tree” will (I hope) resonate with anyone who has admired the blossoms in spring, but has simultaneously sniffled through pollen-charged allergies. As for “Winter Trio”, I hope it (and King Lear) are self-explanatory.

THE PEAR TREE

The lesson never learnt, in seems and is,

taught each year when she stands

with witches’ claws against the winter skies

beside the supple, living evergreen,

declaring that she’s ready for the axe.

Then spring, uncalled-for, buds. Always

the unexpected putting-on of gear,

a bridal gown of petals, white

this week and papering the earth

before birds stab her fruit.

An easy lesson, then, in seems and is,

the seasoned allegory, life from death

in cycles of renewal. The dead wood

was hibernating only, waiting for

the vernal equinox and nudge of sun.

But seems and is lack seasons, come

in frost or warmth. She’s living for her kind.

Her springtime brideship has a price

in pollen-spray and spores. For the unkind

her living beauty carries plague.

A fevered, heavy head, wet nose

and sneezes from her blossom

freezing thought and stoking allergy.

She doesn’t die in winter, doesn’t give

her beauty freely; is a tree that answers back

WINTER TRIO

Autumn went out; winter came in. The cat

hid from the night rain under the platform

outside our front door, its green wood dripping,

protesting loud at her rout from behind

warm armchair or under mysterious desk.

We lay in the dark, hearing her trundling

over the tiles, miaowing at the window

when we switched on a light in the small hours.

Her fur was wet, dawn eyes large when we let

her in. “Poor Tom’s a cold!” Our soul outside.

A small blackbird landed in the guttering,

and slipped and was trapped, its leg caught in rust,

fidgeting and crying beyond our grasp.

The cat reached the bird, bit its head and batted,

making its last flight dead-weight and gravity.

We scraped the maimed carcass from the concrete,

feather, bones and muck, a cat’s unwanted sport,

and made a shallow grave in sodden soil.

It rained and dripped. The cat sniffed flowers and weeds

as we worked, indifferent to little death.

Then the rats, or mice. Something scampering

behind the scrim at least in the darkness

when it was raining, sheltering like we,

an alien domestic beast, resented

in our dreams of unsavoury rodents.

The cat, the rat, the bird, a winter trio

driven by foul weather to our closed coat

of wood and tile. We are no benign king

of mercy-madness, wrapping a wet Fool,

but the fourth part of forced winter shelter.

Something New

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

“KA NGARO TE REO – Maori Language Under Siege in the Nineteenth Century” by Paul Moon (Otago University Press, $NZ39:95)

            In his latest foray into the interface of Maori and Pakeha in the nineteenth century, Paul Moon takes on the matter of the relatively rapid decline of the Maori language under the impact of British colonisation. Ka Ngaro Te Reo - Maori Language Under Siege in the Nineteenth Century is a densely referenced book, with its 220 pages of text followed by over a hundred pages of endnotes, bibliography, glossary and index.

It sets out some of its main theses in the Introduction.

With Pakeha as a small minority until the 1840s, Moon writes:

“…Surely no one in the 1830s could have anticipated either the rapidity or the extent of the decline of te reo as the country’s main language over the rest of the century. Yes, there remained stubborn pockets of resistance – linguistic outcrops of te reo where isolation gave the impression of being impregnable. These increasingly became the exception that proved the rule of the power of English to assert its dominance and to advance into what were sometimes former strongholds of te reo with impunity. And as the tide of colonisation rose, Maori found themselves fleeing ever deeper into the cultural hinterland in often desperate efforts to maintain a cultural, linguistic and social space that they could claim as their own.” (Introduction p.8)

Further, argues Moon, not only did the English language make huge inroads into Maori society, but the language of the Maori itself came in some sense to be shaped by European innovations, such as writing and the printing press:

“….it was the introduction of text to Maori society that was to lead to the biggest revolution in te reo. Writing was the medium of the coloniser, and it initially filtered and then reconfigured elements of the Maori language and culture in ways that had momentous effects on the retention and transmission of te reo, especially once it started to appear widely in written form. There was also the trend towards the greater standardisation of te reo in text, and although the process never reached the point of absolute uniformity, some of the more pronounced dialectical variants across the country were eventually narrowed down – in written form at least – in the process.” (Introduction, p.12)

Chapter by chapter, Ka Ngaro Te Reo takes a chronological approach to this topic.

Moon begins (Chapter 1) by attempting to reconstruct what the language of the Maori would have been like in 1800, when there had as yet been virtually no external impact upon it. His emphasis is upon the nuance and degrees of meaning that were embedded in a purely oral form of communication. With a degree of unverifiable speculation (and perhaps idealisation), he argues that the spoken language of a wholly oral culture would have been more formalised than the spoken language of a literate culture, and he expands at length upon the roles of tohunga, kaumatua and rangatira; and the importance of formal oratory and the recital of whakapapa:

“… all these forms of whakapapa…. were the framework on which Maori society was built. Without them, the society would not have existed or survived in the form that it did. With them, Maori culture was imbued with a sophisticated system of politics, history, diplomacy, religion, economics and ecology that was a stabilising influence on the society yet allowed social and cultural evolution and innovation to occur.” (Chapter 1, p.30)

He is aware, however, that a language which had developed in isolation for hundreds of years was particularly vulnerable to change once outside influences reached it:

“….te reo’s evolution in complete isolation from the rest of the world had left it ill equipped to handle the approaching encounter with the English language and its colonising protagonists.” (Chapter 1, p.34)

Moon then moves on (Chapter 2) to the period up to 1815, when Maori were making their very first contacts with very small groups of whalers, traders, runaway convicts and the like. Despite a tiny handful of Pakeha engaging with the Maori world, Moon depicts Pakeha as being largely contemptuous of Maori “barbarism” and prone to describing Maori in demeaning terms. When the two languages met, it was mainly Maori who took the trouble to learn some English, rather than the other way about. Maori understood the advantages of trade with some of the newcomers, whereas the newcomers were inclined to learn only the most rudimentary of Maori terms as they grabbed local resources and ran. At this stage, the great majority of Maori had not yet encountered the English language and te reo seemed secure in its dominance of the land.

A real shift in the relationship of the languages began with the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1815. With only very small groups of Pakeha in the land, Maori remained the dominant language. Even so, from 1815 to the 1830s (Chapter 3) te reo underwent a metamorphosis mainly under the impact of the missionaries. Most notably, thanks to the labours of Thomas Kendall, Professor Samuel Lee and others, it ceased to be an oral language only, and became also a written and printed language as missionaries sought to evangelise Maori. The first widely-distributed printed texts in Maori were all passages of Scripture, catechisms and religious tracts. In the process of their production, however, the Pakeha who first committed Maori to print smoothed out the very many dialectical variants of Maori and in effect created the standardised language that is regarded as the Maori language today. There were some anomalies in this Pakeha creation, as it seems clear that in transcribing te reo, British linguists and lexicographers suppressed or ignored certain sounds. (Moon dwells at some length on the apparent disappearance of the “sh” sound from the Maori language, which had been noted by early British listeners.) However, it was the fact of standardisation that was most important:

“Printed texts…. could mass-produce information without changing the form of that information in the slightest. This was also the commencement of a new notion about the vocabulary, idiom, pronunciation and grammar of te reo: that all the shades of variety in these areas of language could be boiled down to a single, standardised and supposedly ‘correct’ version. It was an approach to te reo that was fortified by the fact that representatives of the colonising power, with all its implicit authority, were behind this drive to uniformity.” (Chapter 3, p.74)

As very many historians before Moon have noted, literacy had a huge impact upon Maori who, in this early missionary period, took eagerly to reading and writing. Mission-printed books were spread through the land by Maori themselves, so that religious publications were having an impact upon Maori belief systems often without any Pakeha having visited a given area.

Between the 1830s and 1850 (Chapter 4) formal British colonisation occurred and for the first time there was now a clear and present threat to te reo as the country’s dominant language. At first, te reo was almost the only printed language that Maori saw as literacy among Maori continued to advance. Maori themselves often controlled the spread of the printed form of their language, and literacy was so highly prized that Maori were occasionally surprised to find that there were some illiterate Pakeha (sailors etc.). Even those Pakeha who sought to exploit and/or despoil Maori understood that they had to make at lest some concessions to te reo when they were bargaining. Moon depicts the Wakefield Company (pp.117-119) as land sharks who merely mimicked the humanitarian impulse of the missionaries when they framed deeds of title in both Maori and English. (Moon adds further that the Maori text of deeds drawn up by the Wakefield people was an execrable form of Maori, clearly put together by English-speakers who hardly knew the language.)

Moon gives only a perfunctory account (pp. 123-124) of the exact moment of formal colonisation – the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 – about which he has written extensively elsewhere. His contention is that, even as literacy among Maori was advancing, Maori culture was still primarily an oral culture, and for the chiefs who signed the treaty, the spoken bargaining that surrounded the document was as binding as the document itself.

Be this as it may, the very fact of formal colonisation now put more pressure upon te reo. In 1847 – at which time Pakeha were still a minority in an overwhelmingly Maori country – Governor George Grey’s Education Ordinance said that English had henceforth to be part of all formal instruction for Maori. (Hitherto, mission schools had conducted instruction in Maori). Paul Moon thus fingers the late 1840s as the time that Maori began to lose its linguistic dominance in Niu Tirani. Assimilationist education was beginning even though te reo was still the everyday form of communication amongst Maori. Immigration was beginning to swamp the indigenous race. At the beginning of the 1840s there had been only 2,000 or so Pakeha in New Zealand. By the end of the decade there were over 20,000. There were now appearing, in the Maori language, some newspapers owned and controlled by Pakeha and very much reflecting the colonial interest – in other words, there were sites in which the language was preserved but was made to speak in alien strains; and it was naturally te reo as it had been standardised by Pakeha. Such newspapers were very much opposed by the Wakefieldians, who now preached that Maori could be “civilised” only if they abandoned te reo and learnt English. Moon quotes an opinion piece from an 1845 Wellington publication:

“One of the first measures indispensible to any successful attempt to bring the natives within the pale of civilisation, is to teach them our language, and so far as we can, to cause them to forget their own.” (quoted p.142)

Now for the first time, prematurely assuming that Maori would lose out in a grand cultural struggle, Pakeha began to sentimentalise the Maori past. Theories were devised, many of them laughably fallacious (see pp.134 ff.), about the “Aryan” origins of Maori. This permitted the assumption that English was a more “advanced” form of an “Aryan” language and that therefore it should inevitably supersede the inferior specimen. There was a nascent Social Darwinism in this assumption.

By the late 1850s (Chapter 5), there was for the first time a Pakeha majority in New Zealand. Dealing with these years, Moon very much casts George Grey as a villain in at once collecting (and often distorting) Maori mythology AND discouraging the use of te reo as a medium of formal instruction. Government-controlled “native” schools were to conduct instruction in English. However, as the conditions grew that would produce the wars of the 1860s, the Kingitanga movement showed the resilience of te reo as the Kingites resisted the secular (non-missionary) schools and produced their own Maori-language publications which were able to argue their own case cogently in opposition to government newspapers. After the wars, however, and as part of the new secularisation of education, there was a renewed initiative to fully secularise schools for Maori and totally eliminate the remaining missionary influence. Moon sums up the period thus:

“The cumulative effects of declining missionary involvement in offering schooling to Maori in te reo; legislation that discriminated heavily in favour of English in most areas of the government’s operation; and a steadily congealing attitude towards te reo among settlers all connived to expel the language from the country’s social landscape. And if te reo held on in a number of remote rural outposts then, like its ageing and declining numbers of speakers, it would remain as little more than a cultural relic….” (p.175)

There were now a handful of Maori members of parliament, but they quickly understood that if they were to be listened to, they had to speak in English.

So (Chapter 6) to the final phase with which this book deals. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, with the drastic decline in Maori population, there was the growing conviction among Pakeha that the Maori were a dying race, that “native” schools should now educate exclusively in English, and that Maori culture was basically just a picturesque decoration from a past age, which could add a little colour to New Zealand (“Maoriland”) for tourist and publicity purposes. Maori political movements (Kingitanga, Te Kotahitanga) were given short shrift in parliamentary legislation, and by 1900 Maori MPs spoke exclusively in English in the House. Te reo remained the sacred language in church liturgy for Maori. But when a new generation of Maori leadership was being nurtured at Te Aute College, they were taught that they would advance politically and socially only if they made the English language their own.

And it is at this juncture that Paul Moon concludes his melancholy history, with a brief summary (Chapter 7) of the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. Te reo had effectively been beaten down by colonialism, the Pakeha majority and legislation. But Moon indicates that this situation was not as permanent as it seemed and there would be some revival of the language in the twentieth century. Even so, Maori is now the first language of only a small minority in New Zealand.

I make no apologies for presenting this review largely in the form of a long summary. My aim has been to convey accurately what Ka Ngaro Te Reo says. It is an interesting story and it is well-documented. But I do have some criticisms to make.

In terms of style, Paul Moon does have the habit of saying the same thing more than once, and some of the rhetoric of this book comes close to padding. Twice the author uses “denouncement” (p.79 and p.175) when he clearly means “denunciation”, and he does have the habit of using “reverend” as a noun rather than as the honorific it is. These are not major criticisms, but I do find some of the rhetoric to be extreme. Take this quotation [with my emphases added] from a point where Moon is narrating the first inroads of English into te reo:

 “It was as though English possessed a viral quality that allowed it to infect other languages, almost imperceptibly at first, as a precursor to inflicting much wider damage…” (Chapter 2, p.43) His metaphors are intended to present the English language as a nasty disease. Shortly thereafter, noting that missionaries could find no Maori word for “orphan”, and further noting that parentless children always found carers in a Maori tribe, Moon remarks:

“As English – the most nomadic of the world’s languages – migrated to New Zealand, it brought with it the means for the coloniser to encode and then reproduce the sorts of unequal relationships that were embedded in English and that had previously been used to coerce other populations.” (Chapter 2, p.44) Here, the intention is to suggest that the English language itself presents a distorted view of human relationships, which the Maori language does not. Both these statements are demeaning and generalised. It is ironical that Moon deploys them at the very point where he has just been deploring demeaning Pakeha attitudes to Maori.

I note too that Moon fails to make one very obvious comparison, especially when he is writing of the 1840s at one point in his narrative. Remarking on how Pakeha began to sentimentalise Maori culture and language as “quaint” once they perceived them to be “dying” and no longer a threat, he comments:

“…. The language was well on its way to being seen as a dusty artefact of a primeval and fading culture. The Druids of England had undergone a similar sort of treatment, and now it was the turn of the Maori to have their culture rendered archaic and nostalgic in a picturesque and poetic sense….. The portrayal of te reo was shifting from being the language of the savages and barbarians to something exotic, antique, Arcadian – and tamed.” (p.144) What I find strange here is that Moon does not make the more obvious comparison with the decline and near death of the indigenous Irish language which (at the time of the 1840s famine) was then occurring. It is well documented that at least some English opinion-makers rejoiced that the speakers of Irish were dying out and being replaced by those who spoke English. And then, in a few short years, the Irish would become the standard figures of comic relief or sentimental tales in the English repertoire, just as Maori would in the Pakeha repertoire.

Or perhaps Paul Moon has no particular sympathy for the Irish and prefers not to mention them?

For whatever reason I know not, but Paul Moon apparently has a bee in his bonnet about Catholicism. On those occasions when the subject of Catholics comes up in his books, he tends to make a demeaning or negative remark. Emphatically at the end of Chapter 3, [p.104], when he is discussing demeaning statements and assumptions which Pakeha made about Maori, he takes a relatively innocuous (for its day and age) comment made by the Catholic Bishop Pompallier about a discussion which the bishop had had with Maori. Moon trumpets this as if it were the epitome of “contemptuous” attitudes towards Maori. I am sure that Catholic missionaries at various times said things about Maori that were as insensitive as things said by other missionaries. Oddly, Moon’s own book proves how mild the bishop’s statement was when one compares it with the real vituperation against Maori that is later shown (p.122) by an Anglican missionary.

It seems odd that this sectarian card is played in a book which otherwise, apart from some of its excessive rhetoric, is an interesting and informative guide to the stresses that were placed upon te reo.

Something Old

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

“WALT DISNEY – HOLLYWOOD’S DARK PRINCE” by Marc Eliot  (first published 1993)

As I have said before on this blog, I believe there are times when hatchet jobs are absolutely necessary. By “hatchet jobs” I mean biographies which deliberately concentrate on the negative side of somebody, and do their best to destroy that person’s reputation. For me, Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (published in 1955) is the gold standard of the hatchet job. Until Aldington wrote it, nearly all books about T.E. Lawrence had been sanitised and airbrushed, presenting Lawrence as the perfect warrior and ignoring the small scale of his exploits, their very limited effect on the progress of the First World War in the Middle East, Lawrence’s decidedly odd sexual proclivities (I do not mean his homosexuality – I mean his taste for flagellation) and the fact that he largely manufactured his legend in his own not-entirely-truthful works.

So in this instance a hatchet job was, at the time, a necessary and robust corrective.

But, seen in the context of later and better biographies of Lawrence, the limits of Aldington’s work are also evident. For having lined Lawrence up in his sights, Aldington proceeded to deny the man any good points, and put the most negative possible construction on even the most innocent things. And, of course, there were some factual errors (as there are in any biography I have ever read), upon which Aldington’s critics readily pounced. This is the trouble with hatchet jobs. They are always in danger of overstating their case and toppling into unwarranted vituperation.

For a really crass example of this, see War of theWindsors, which, as I noted in my post, has the worthy cause of exposing the flaws of the British royal family, but ends up as a series of tabloid “scandals” and innuendo. Just dirt without substance.

Of course a good hatchet job on Walt Disney would still be an excellent thing. The Disney Corporation has done great cultural harm by spearheading the move to extend copyright cover from 50 years after a creator’s death to 75 years and further, to protect their rights to cartoon characters whose creators are long dead. This is in the interests of a corporation, not in the interests of any legitimate heirs to the creators of the cartoons, all of whom have already reaped great financial rewards. There is also the fact that the Disney Corporation routinely sponsors very sanitised depictions of old Walt. One of the most recent was the 2013 film Saving Mr Banks – a very entertaining film, by the way – in which Disney (played by Tom Hanks) was depicted as a wise and compassionate fellow helping Pamela Travers (played by Emma Thompson), the creator of Mary Poppins, to come to terms with her past and see the error of her ways in objecting to his film version of her story. At least where the depiction of Disney was concerned, this was pure hagiography.

So bring on the hatchet jobs on Disney, because the sponsored hagiographies too often have their way.

Which brings me to Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney – Hollywood’s Dark Prince.

When it was first published in 1993, it caused predictable outrage from Disney’s family. Some admirers of Disney’s work and achievements have also subsequently condemned the book. The case has become muddied since the book was published, too, because since then fundamentalist churches have condemned some of the Disney Corporation’s more recent output, so even people who might see the error of some of Walt Disney’s ways don’t now want to say so, lest they be bracketed with people who claim to see insidious sexual messages in The Little Mermaid or The Lion King. (Given that Walt Disney died in 1966, what the company with his name has been doing for the last fifty years is, of course, none of his responsibility.)

Let’s consider the book itself, without donning such retrospective glasses.

Walt Disney – Hollywood’s Dark Prince is not entirely a hatchet job. Eliot  admires much of the work of the Disney studio (only some of which was Disney’s own work) and gives due praise to Walt Disney’s innovative cartoons in the 1930s and the big gambles he took in producing very expensive feature-length cartoons in the late 1930s and 1940s. Eliot is very good and detailed on the technical aspects of producing animated cartoons. Eliot also corrects punctiliously some urban legends about Disney, such as the one which claimed that his corpse was cryogenically frozen with a view to later being revived, should science develop the ability to do such things. In fact, as Eliot notes, Disney was cremated within a week of his death.

Nevertheless, Eliot scores some palpable hits against the man. Yes, Disney, as the only Gentile controlling a studio in Hollywood, really was mildly anti-Semitic and made casual racial slurs in his conversation, although he got on well with Sam Goldwyn and was in 1955 made “Man of the Year” by the esteemed Jewish service organization B’nai B’rith. He was not an anti-Semitic extremist in the same league as Henry Ford. Despite the image of the clean-living fellow that he liked to project, Disney was also a heavy drinker, even if he hated being photographed with a glass in his hand.

More seriously, Disney’s views were very right-wing (his defenders claim he was merely a political naïf) and therefore extremely anti-union. Disney did deals with gangster muscle (like the mobster Willie Bioff) to break up strikes in his studio, especially one which took place early in 1941, before the USA was involved directly in the world war. To the strikers’ outrage, the strike took place at the same time as the release of the Disney feature The Reluctant Dragon, which had live-action sequences depicting cheerful employees of the Disney studio as “one big happy family”. This was the standard propaganda image of the studio that Disney wished to sell to the world.

Marc Eliot claims that Disney was a long-term informant for the FBI and instrumental in bringing the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) to Hollywood in the McCarthy years. He says Disney therefore helped J. Edgar Hoover finger people as actual or potential Communists and helped Roy Brewer operate the blacklist, which kept such fingered people out of work. Eliot is able to produce transcripts of Disney denouncing some of his former employees as Communists, although critics have said that Eliot exaggerates Disney’s involvement in this grubby business.

On the personal level, Eliot shows that Disney was often mean-minded towards some of his creative partners and denied them public acknowledgement and screen credit. Obviously all the comic books that bore his name were drawn by other people. But it was Disney’s early partner, the oddly-named Ub Iwerks, who was especially ill-treated. Iwerks did as much to create the character of Mickey Mouse (Disney’s first really profitable venture) as Disney did. Mickey Mouse came about by modifying the features of an earlier cartoon character, Oswald the Rabbit, over which Disney and Iwerks had lost copyright control. Interestingly, Eliot also shows in detail how the character of Mickey Mouse and other early Disney cartoon characters (before the more berserk Donald Duck was invented) were based on the benign side of Charlie Chaplin, especially as seen in Chaplin’s The Kid, which Disney loved and viewed frequently. 

And yet in the matter of Iwerks, I begin to question Eliot’s characterisation.

After all, even if Iwerks did part acrimoniously from Disney, and did spend five years trying unsuccessfully to develop his own company, he was welcomed back to the Disney studios and worked there for 30 years as head of the technical division, perfecting multi-plane animation. This isn’t exactly an indictable case of victimisation.

And now my criticisms begin to mount up.

Like so many other hatchet jobs, this one begins to put negative constructions on many innocent things. Eliot’s long suggestive passages about Disney’s supposed impotence and sexual inadequacy seem to be based on unreliably sourced gossip. The side issue on whether Disney was illegitimate and of Spanish descent is pure fantasy. Most offputting for one who believes that creative people should be judged by what they create, Eliot would deny Disney much of the credit for his film successes, but the record (which Eliot himself produces) shows how much Disney was intimately involved with the films his studio produced. Eliot delights in telling us of one cartoon which Disney took out of his technicians’ hands and directed himself, The Golden Touch. Apparently it was a rather preachy version of the King Midas story and it was such a flop that Disney withdrew it permanently from circulation. Again, this failure doesn’t seem to be something on which you can base a condemnation of the man’s whole career.

Worst is Eliot’s attempt to give Freudian interpretations to the classic Disney cartoons and cartoon features, as if their traditional plots were revelatory of Disney’s autobiography and his strained relationship with his harsh, disciplinarian father. Eliot writes such things as:

“Disney’s insistence upon creating perfect worlds in his films for children reflected nothing so much as what [some named people] suspected was his own nightmarish childhood. While his filmed fairy tales may have appeared at first glance to be light and dreamlike, upon closer examination they seemed more nightmares of deconstructed reality in a league with the era’s leading neo-Freudian Modernists.” (Chapter 10)

At which point I can only say “What complete tosh.”

I am sure that many of the negative things Eliot says about Disney are perfectly true. They will come as a surprise only to naïve people who imagine that a studio producing films for children must be run by someone with child-like innocence. Disney was obviously a hard bastard at times, right-wing, certainly anti-union and concerned primarily with making a profit. But in all this, how can one say he was any different from all the other studio bosses of Hollywood’s golden age?

Compare him with the likes of Louis B.Mayer or Harry Cohn, and singling him out as Tinsel Town’s “dark prince” seems quite unwarranted.