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.

“THE POISONWOOD BIBLE” by Barbara Kingsolver (first published 1998)

I’ve already mentioned on this blog (see the posting on Stranger in a Strange Land) the perils of reading a book because somebody has recommended it to you enthusiastically. The fact is, often your good friend’s tastes can be quite different from your own. But occasionally a friend’s recommendation can lead you to strike gold. For me, this was the case with The Poisonwood Bible, the novel for which the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (born 1955) is still best-known. When it was first published in 1998, The Poisonwood Bible was both a critical success and a big bestseller. In fact, the copy I bought at a second-hand bookshop has the stamp-of-approval of “Oprah’s Book Club”, which would usually lead me to avoid a book like the plague.

I’ll say straight off that I engaged with this book, enjoyed it, found most of what the author had to say both realistic and humane, and was glad that my friend had recommended it to me. But (as a reviewer “but” is one of my favourite words) I also have some misgivings about it. Of which more later.

To orient you simply, this longish novel (600 pages in the 1999 Faber and Faber edition I read) concerns an American Protestant evangelical missionary Nathan Price – from the state of Georgia – who drags his family off to the Congo, in 1959, to convert the heathen on behalf of the Southern Baptist Mission. His family are his wife Orleanna and four daughters, Rachel the eldest (aged 15 at the novel’s opening), the twins Adah and Leah (aged 14) and the little sister Ruth May (aged 5).

The story is told in the first person by Orleanna and her daughters. Orleanna introduces most of the novel’s seven parts with sad, long-term reminiscences from years later, and most of the novel’s seven parts are ironically given Biblical titles – “Genesis”, “Judges”, “Exodus” etc. But the bulk of the story is told, in turns, by the four daughters. The Reverend Nathan Price himself tells none of the story – this novel is strictly from the women’s point of view and en route it makes many (implicit, explicit and occasionally ranty and dead obvious) comments on the oppressiveness of male power. Most of the action spans the years from 1959 to the late-1960s, with the last 100 pages or so taking us to the 1980s.

Barbara Kingsolver has apparently created, in the four girls or young women who tell the story, archetypes (or stereotypes).

The eldest daughter Rachel is the materialistic airhead, constantly complaining about the discomforts of Africa and wishing she were back in the USA, where she could have ice-cream and watch TV and be ogled by boys in high school. Kingsolver stresses her self-confident stupidity by having her often utter malapropisms, sometimes with unintentional humorous effect. Inevitably she is a narcissist, seeing herself as the natural centre of attention. She remarks of the Congolese village of Kilanga where they settle: “Of course everybody kept staring at me, as they always do here. I am the most extreme blonde imaginable. I have sapphire-blue eyes, white eyelashes, and platinum blonde hair that falls to my waist.” (p.55 – all pages numbers according to the 1999 Faber paperback)

The twins Leah and Adah represent two different models of rationality.

Leah is at first her father’s best student, an industrious young Christian who learns by heart all the Bible lessons he prescribes. She truly believes in the mission, and through her Kingsolver suggests the idealism Christianity can inspire. But Leah, a very intelligent girl, is not unobservant, and the arc of the story has her gradually coming to see the limitations of her father’s world view and finally rebelling against it.

Before the tragedy that eventually breaks up the family, Leah’s twin Adah is set up to be the novel’s unorthodox visionary. Because of trauma in childbirth (hemiplegia), Adah is lame and she can hardly speak. As she explains : “My right side drags. I was born with half my brain dried up like a prune, deprived of blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap.” (p.39) She is every bit Leah’s equal as an intellectual and reads many challenging books surreptitiously, but she is more intuitive, more offbeat in her reasoning, and far more sceptical of her father’s mission from the very start. It is notable that she frequently refers to her father as “Our Father”, suggesting either that she thinks the Reverend Nathan Price believes himself to be God, or that she sees the concept of God to be too bound up with a father’s power. Just as Rachel is characterised by foolish malapropisms, so Adah is characterised by ingenious palindromes, which often reveal the truth of things – such as “The ‘Amen enema’, as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.” (p.80)

As for Ruth May, she is, incarnated (and – dare I say – very idealised) the essential innocence, shrewness in observation, trustingness and spontaneity of childhood. She easily makes friends with the African children of the village, plays with them the game of “Mother May I?” (the American equivalent of “Simon Says”) and is venturesome at times when older people would be more cautious.

Most obviously this is a story of cultural clash and mutual incomprehension between cultures, with an American family, affluent by the standards of most of the world, attempting to live in an African environment far from their familiar comforts. The time in which the story is set is also important. In the years from 1959 to the mid-1960s, the Belgians withdrew from their long (mis)rule of the Congo, independence was gained, but the nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba was widely suspected by America of being a Communist, and therefore the CIA and European financial interests engineered his overthrow (and murder), thus ushering in the long dictatorship of Joseph-Desire Mobutu (later styled Mobutu Sese Seko).

There was much violence in the Congo in this period, and as I set out reading The Poisonwood Bible, I assumed confidently that such mass violence that would eventually engulf the Price family. I was wrong. To Barbara Kingsolver’s great credit, the novel does not exploit the violence of new independence for sensationalism or to make plot points, and it is quite a different tragedy (about which I will not provide a “spoiler”) which breaks the family apart.

The naïvete of some Americans about the political situation in the Congo is a major element of the novel. In one episode, Leah accompanies her father to Leopoldville for the independence celebrations as Lumumba becomes PM. She is more perceptive than her father about the way Lumumba does not respond favourably to Belgian comments on the past. When little Ruth May injures her arm, she is tended by a Belgian doctor. Ruth May notes:  “Without looking up from my arm, the doctor said, ‘We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amens.” (p.137) This sort of talk is intolerable to her father, who cannot see how his Christian mission is related to the general political situation. Nor can he understand that European or American intervention breaks down the traditional structural authority of the village, without building any real new community as an alternative.

It is the Reverend Nathan Price’s incomprehension of local customs, and his refusal to see their importance, that particularly damns him. He begins his residence in Kilanga by condemning vehemently the nakedness of the Africans. Mama Tataba, an African housekeeper, points out that “poisonwood” is the English equivalent of the Congolese name for a tree with toxic sap. The Congolese name is bangala. But pronounced differently, bangala also means something wonderful. Perceptive Adah points out how Nathan mispronounces this word and thus gives the novel its name: “  ‘Tata Jesus is bangala!’ declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear.  But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business.” (p.312) So, for the Africans who listen to him, Nathan’s Bible is the Poisonwood Bible.

Nathan, a Baptist who believes baptism requires total immersion, fails to understand that the locals regard the prospect of baptism in their river as an invitation to be eaten by crocodiles. They also think it is absurd for a great man, like the missionary, to have only one wife. (At one point in the novel, the polygamous village headman Tata Ndu offers to help the Price family financially by marrying Rachel.) The African village teacher Anatole Ngemba tries to enlighten Nathan by informing him that the villagers think of Jesus as just one more god to add to the pantheon, and less important than the local gods who control fertility. Later in the novel the chief Tata Ndu gets the village to vote on whether they accept Jesus as their saviour (“Jesus Christ lost eleven to fifty-six,” remarks the narrator.)

Barbara Kingsolver is careful to note that not all Christians, and indeed not all Christian missionaries, have the same wilful cultural blindness as Nathan Price. Others, such as “Brother Fowles”, the missionary who preceded Nathan in Kilanga, have adjusted to the local culture and understand that Christianity is not synonymous with current American norms. They have “inculturated” in ways Nathan cannot. At a late point in the novel, one of the Price daughters takes refuge with a convent of Catholic nuns – a community that would be anathema to a Southern Baptist of that era, who would regard Catholics as superstitious “papists”. Evidently Nathan’s version of Christianity is not the only version.

There is something admirable in Nathan’s dedication to his mission. Unlike other Americans and Europeans, he refuses to be evacuated with his family out of the Congo as the political situation becomes more violent. Even so, the blinkered authority he wields over his family constitutes the novel’s most sustained attack on what feminists would call patriarchy. This matter of gender is one of the things that leads Leah, who had initially been his most faithful aolyte among his daughters, to begin questioning both his authority and his version of religion. Leah asks herself : “But where is the place for girls in the Kingdom? The rules don’t quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl’s bravery or righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square…” (p.274)

The intellectual awakening of Leah and Adah naturally follows their repudiation of their father’s values. Their destiny is at first plotted out for them as marriage and domesticity in America.  All the Price girls have “hope chests” (what would be called “glory boxes” in other parts of the English-speaking world) in which they can store things that will be useful for them when they become wives. But Adah, already sceptical, moves further away from her father’s moral authority when she befriends the teacher Anatole Ngemba and accepts the fact that he is politically engaged. Similarly Leah is still the good missionary’s daughter who wishes to be “saved” when she befriends the African boy Pascal and begins to see his perspective. Leah has already begun to question Western norms of child-rearing, and the way white kids are often cossetted and left out of group discussions : “I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia.” (pp.130-131)

The Poisonwood Bible is a novel which presents a very comprehensive view of a particular cultural environment, questions American (and, by implication, all Western) assumptions about African society, looks at male leadership in a family, and scores a lot of political points. Most satisfyingly, it has an inventiveness in terms of incidents and (filtered through the voices of the four girls) a variety of description that make it akin to some of the better nineteenth century novels.

But now come those misgivings I signalled earlier.

            Is this too “patterned” a novel – too carefully arranged to neatly make the author’s points?

So often, in The Poisonwood Bible, characters do and say things that seem determined by the author’s ideological agenda. The novel takes characters exactly where the author destined them to go from the first – airhead materialistic Rachel to material wealth but complete amorality; Leah to a life of solidarity with local culture; Adah to an intellectually-challenging career in America; Orleanna to the worthy cause of civil rights in the United States. This is all very neat, just as is the one-dimensional zealotry of Nathan.

Its neatness is accompanied by some heavy-handed symbolism. The Price family bring to Africa seeds to plant for a model garden – but the seeds do not flourish in African soil, just like their missionary endeavour. When, in the village of Kilanga, there is an apocalyptic infestation of voracious ants marching in their millions, and the residents have to flee, it is her mirror which Rachel chooses to save, a clear symbol of her narcissism. Orleanna has a beloved decorative dinner plate, which to her is a nostalgic reminder of everything she valued in her life in the United States. At one point, in his anger, Nathan smashes the plate, and from this moment we know the marriage is disintegrating. In Africa, the Price family inherit a pet parrot called Methuselah, who can mimic human voices, including scraps of scripture and obscenities, thus providing a mocking chorus to the Reverend Price’s strenuous pieties. When Methuselah is finally freed from his cage, he still lingers wistfully near the house, expecting to be fed – thus the psychological conditioning of domestication.

There are some problems with the narrative voices. As an account of an American family’s experiences in Africa, it is skewed by the absence of the father’s voice, but I accept that this is Barbara Kingsolver’s deliberate choice to emphasise the growing women’s interpretations of things. It does become awkward, though, when it is Orleanna, in one of her long-term reminiscences, who has to explain the traumatic experiences in the Second World War which might have made Nathan the authoritarian zealot he is. Likewise, I accept the convention of the four girls’ narration – including the convention (to keep the narrative moving) that they find out things that would, in probability, be very hard for them to discover. The problem is, though, they they frequently show an improbable degree of self-awareness, and an improbable ability to analyse and articulate both their mental condition and what they have learned from experience. Perhaps the intellectuals Leah and Adah could do some of these things, but vacuous Rachel becomes the novelist’s puppet when she gets to enunciate one of the novelist’s major ideas: “You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.” (p.584)

Even if I were to accept the narrative voices and what they say as a novelistic convention, I am still left with moments of crude exposition and the placarding of messages. In Book Three, there is a long passage where Anatole explains to one of the girls, but purely for the reader’s benefit, the Katanga secession and the problems Patrice Lumumba faces. Most improbably, a South African mercenary called Eeben Axelroot (I have not outlined his role in the novel) tells the teenaged Rachel about the CIA plan to murder Lumumba – again for the benefit of the reader.

As for the placarding of messages, take these two examples.

Considering her marriage and what she has had to sacrifice for her husband’s sake, Orleanna says: “It took me a long time to understand the awful price I’d paid, and that even God has to admit the worth of freedom. How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain? By then, I was lodged in the heart of darkness, so thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage I could hardly see any other way to stand. Like Methuselah [their pet parrot] I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found like Methuselah, I had no wings.”   (p.228) So there’s the Patriarchy and Domestication neatly skewered for those of us who were too dumb to pick it up from what was already implicit in the story. Note, by the way, Orleanna’s use of “price” – which helps to explains why her husband’s name is Price – and note the clear allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Kingsolver lists in her bibliography of books that helped her in writing this novel.

Then there is Leah’s neat summing up, which tells us that the mother is the more powerful figure when a girl is becoming a woman : “I hadn’t yet considered the loss of my father. I’d walked in his footsteps my whole life, and now without warning my body had fallen in line behind my mother. A woman whose flank and jaw glinted hard as salt when she knelt around a fire with other women; whose pale eyes were fixed on a distance where he couldn’t follow. Father wouldn’t leave his post to come after us, that much was certain. He wasn’t capable of any action that might be seen as cowardice by his God. And no God, in any heart on this earth, was ever more on the lookout for human failing.” (pp.445-446) By this stage in the story, Nathan has stayed behind conducting his (futile?) mission on his own, while, neatly and according to the author’s schema, the women have gone where no man has gone before.

So overt symbolism, aspects of the narrative voices and the clear spelling-out of themes are flaws in this novel. It would also be fair to point out that some informed Christian critics (no, I’m not talking about unlettered fundamentalists) have noted, correctly I think, the distortions of Christian teaching that the novel places in Nathan Price’s mouth, and the simplified way it presents a Christian mission.

Why, then, near the beginning of this notice, did I say I’d struck gold when I finally read this book? Because its variety of incident, ability to convey dramatically for us many important matters, and sense of creating a real world all held my attention. Just that.

Footnote: A great advantage to the appeal of this novel is that, in the nearly twenty years since it was published, it has not been made into a film. Thank God.

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.

YOU CAN”T READ EVERYTHING

 
I am posting these comments for early February, but I am writing them at the end of December, and I am coping with an awful phenomenon that occurs at about this time of year.

You see, books-page editors (they used, somewhat more pompously, to be called “literary editors”) on national magazines, newspapers and various websites at this time of year face earlier-than-usual deadlines. So they have to fill up their columns well in advance of the time that they will appear. Everybody wants time off for the summer holidays, after all. One tried-and-true way of doing this is not to run more reviews, but to fill up pages with lists of the “Year’s Best”, which can be compiled in the month or so before deadline. So from the Listener to The Spinoff to the local rag I am assailed by lists of the Year’s Best Books.

Once upon a time, I used to feel daunted by such lists. I would scan them and discover that I had read only a few of the books listed. “Was I getting out of touch with the literary culture?” I would anxiously ask myself. “Was I falling behind on all the really worthwhile things I should be reading?”

Then it occurred to me that I was already reading as hard and as much as I could reasonably read. I have a house stuffed with books, old and new. I make it my business to read old books almost as often as I read new ones, in order to get some perspective on what is now being produced. This, I believe, is an asset for anyone who regularly comments on books. On top of this, I am a frequent reviewer: to give my stats for 2017 – I penned 13 reviews for the NZ Listener, 13 for the Sunday Star-Times and its affiliates and 5 for Landfall-Review-on-Line. On top of which I do weekly (now fortnightly) postings of reviews of new books on this blog. I estimate I read about fifty new books a year (approx. one a week) and about half that number of old books. (The “Something Old” section of this blog is sustained by my continued reading of older books, but also by my resort to reading diaries which I have kept for years.) I further note that I do not include collections of poetry in this count.

So having acknowledged all this, I come to the stunning conclusion: YOU CAN’T READ EVERYTHING.  Nobody can. The best anyone can do is to read as much and as widely as you can to remain in touch with the literary culture. None of the reviewers or editors who compile “Ten Best” lists of books have themselves read everything worthwhile that is available, after all. Their lists are simply lists of books that have come into their ken (or, for those who are not so scrupulous, books of which they have read other people’s reviews).

Another thought that occurs to me is this – experience tells me that many books which are highly praised, and make it onto “Year’s Best” lists, are books whose reputation does not endure. Perhaps you could go to an archive and pull out of a back-room a dusty copy of a national journal from ten or twenty years ago. Look up their lists of “10 Best Books of the Year”, and see how many are now either unreadable or preoccupied with things that already mark them as period pieces. Sheer novelty (or topicality) is at least one of the reasons many books make it onto such lists. [UPDATE: I have just seen the "long list" of ten books up for the Ockham Book Awards. Oh woe! Oh misery! I have read only five of them. Mind you, none was a masterpiece, so my "Look-at-it-again-in-ten-years" rule kicks in.]

While I am blathering on about the reception of books like this, there is another matter that currently bemuses me.

Have you noticed the sheer anxiety about the reading of books that is often expressed on Facebook and the internet in general?

I doubt that a day goes by without my seeing yet another posting on the internet on the value of reading books, on the advantages that the regular reading of books gives to children, on how important it is to encourage children to read, on how good it is to give books as gifts, on how surveys show that regular book-readers are better informed than other members of society etc. etc. etc.?

I am not disgreeing with any of these propositions – quite the contrary – but to me it signals a great anxiety about the survival of books, as we know them, in the face of other forms of distraction, enlightenment and entertainment, including the internet itself, of course.

The more people shout on line about the value of books, the more anxiety they are displaying about the survival of books.

Something New

  REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY, BUT IT WILL NOW TAKE A HOLIDAY BREAK. THE NEXT POSTING WILL APPEAR ON MONDAY 5 FEBRUARY.

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

 

“ALLEN CURNOW – SIMPLY BY SAILING IN A NEW DIRECTION: A BIOGRAPHY” by Terry Sturm (Edited by Linda Cassells) (Auckland University Press, $59:99)

In 2004, when I was living in Wellington for a year, I happened to meet Professor Terry Sturm who was doing some research in the National Library. He told me he was writing the biography of Allen Curnow (Thomas Allen Munro Curnow, 1911-2001) and said he was always on the lookout for any interesting anecdotes and memories of the man. I went home and typed out a little Curnow anecdote, something fairly trivial and amusing from the early 1970s, when I was an undergradute in Auckland and Curnow was one of my lecturers. I delivered it to Terry Sturm the following day and he received it with a cheerful laugh. As it happens, the anecdote hasn’t made its way into Allen Curnow – Simply by Sailing in a New Direction: A Biography, but then I’m aware that a huge part of Sturm’s research material could not be used without swelling this biography to an unmanageable length. Terry Sturm (1941-2009) died before Simply by Sailing in a New Direction had taken its final shape. Rumour has it (and I am willing to be corrected on this point) that what Sturm left was over twice the length of the nearly 700 pages of closely-printed text that we now have. The task of editing it scrupulously was undertaken by Linda Cassells, and was apparently quite a job. Hence the eight years between Sturm’s death and the book’s appearance.

I’ll say at once the things that publishers like to reproduce on blurbs, but that in this case are completely true. Simply by Sailing in a New Direction is a great piece of scholarship and quite unlikely to be superseded as the standard life of Curnow. All future Curnow scholars or biographers will have to refer to it. It is primarily a “literary biography”. Curnow’s life is displayed chronologically, from Anglican vicar’s infant son to nonagenarian poet loaded with honours. But the focus is on the man’s work, so the chronicle of the life is kept in harness with a close analysis of the poems and plays. Not yet having a copy of the new Collected Poems of Allen Curnow (edited by Terry Sturm and Elizabeth Caffin), I read Simply by Sailing in a New Direction with my copies of Curnow’s Early Days Yet, Four Plays and various anthologies within easy reach so that I could check Sturm’s analyses against Curnow’s texts. Making one want to re-read admired work is one of the main things “literary biographies” are supposed to do. This one does.

Sturm (or his editor?) is very good in showing how Curnow’s poetic preoccupations, indeed how his “poetics”, developed over the years. He notes that,  as a young man in the mid-1930s, “Curnow… makes numerous comments that might be read… as the beginnings of a poetics which remained with him for the rest of his life: that poems are first and foremost acts of self-exploration, aimed at ‘digging deep’ into personal experience to discover a substratum of ‘common human need’ which links the poet (and the poems, if they are good enough) to his fellow beings.” (p.89) He deals intelligently with Curnow’s gradual rejection, in the mid-1940s, of poems that made over-arching comments on time and history and his embrace of poems which encoded landscape or recalled sensual experience and childhood in philosophical terms. Towards the end of his life, says Sturm, there was “Curnow’s epistemological scepticism, hinting throughout at the partial, contingent, speculative character of all knowledge of the past.” (pp.602-603)

Many of the analyses of individual poems are illuminating. I was delighted to find Sturm preaching the essentiality of the sonnet “Sailing or Drowning” to Curnow’s earlier work (p.165) – its idea of the uncertainty of “causality” in history is one with which I have frequently confronted classes. The analysis of “A Small Room with Large Windows” (pp.316-319) led me to read the poem more closely than I had previously done, and find things I had not expected. I could create a very long list of other interesting textual exegeses available here.

Another great merit of Sturm’s approach is to consider carefully Curnow’s alter ego Whim Wham, the satirical newspaper rhymster. As he first took up this role in the 1930s, young Curnow wrote : “I now enjoy a sort of nightmare local notoriety as a writer of funny verse: seem to have inherited the family curse of triviality in serious matters & great profundity in the trivial. Perhaps I shouldn’t blame my ancestry – it’s a very common Anglican trait.” (p.133)  For over five decades (1937 to 1988, to be precise), Whim Wham verses appeared first in the Christchurch Press and later in Auckland’s New Zealand Herald. Curnow could be very prickly with researchers and interviewers who asked him about Whim Wham, preferring to be discussed in terms of his “serious” poetry. But as Sturm appears to realise, the Whim Wham verses are often a better guide than the “serious” poems are, to how Curnow felt about topical and political issues at the time they arose.

Some other major matters in Curnow’s biography were news to me.

Despite the later memoir of one fellow student (Elsie Locke) at Auckland University College,  the young Curnow “was wholly serious in preparing himself for the prospect of a church career during [a] full-time year at [the Anglican seminary] St John’s.” (p.69) The view is given in Chapter 4 of this biography that it was the social complacency of the church during the Depression, rather than theological doubts over doctrine, that forced young Curnow to write a pseudonymous article attacking the church. Indeed, after he wrote the article, he returned to Christchurch still fully expecting to become a deacon. Some commentators assumed that Curnow’s shift to agnosticism came earlier in part because, for a much later edition of his earliest published poems, Curnow re-worded some of what he had originally written.

The fifteen-or-so years that Curnow supported himself as a journalist were also news to me. Beginning with a post-school job as a copyholder on a Christchurch newspaper, he worked after 1934 (when he had given up on being a clergyman) on the Press as cables editor and, in effect, arranger of foreign news. (Sturm gives an intriguing sidelight on how, during the Second World War,  New Zealand newspaper “cable” news was often manufactured out of short-wave BBC broadcasts.) It is also interesting to discover how stifled Curnow eventually came to feel in the parochial air of Christchurch. By the late 1940s, says Sturm, there was  “his increasing sense of frustration and entrapment in a Christchurch cultural scene in which everyone knew everyone else, and in which conversation, debate, tastes had become entirely predictable.” (pp.229-230) Hence his greater willingness to shift to Auckland. Perhaps this reflects the late 1940s disintegration of the Bloomsbury South (reviewed on this blog) about which Peter Simpson wrote.

Have I so far made it clear that this is a book with much to commend it?

Very well.

Now I’m afraid we hit some problems.

It is interesting to build a narrative of the poet’s life around the poems upon which he was working at any given time. But there is a problem in reconstructing elements of his childhood out of the poems he wrote many years later. As Sturm remarks, in the 1980s the much-older Curnow increasingly took “an interest in the possibilities of a new kind of autobiographical lyric: memory-based, reaching back to formative childhood and familial experiences, revisiting history not through large-scale abstractions but through densely textured small-scale, locally-focused observations of the social, political, geographical and domestic contexts in which it occurred.” (p.572) [Dare one say this comes close to an old man babbling o’ green fields?] But these were poems in which an old man reflected – and doubtless often distorted – things that had happened to him in his vicarage childhood and then his adolescence in Lyttelton. Simply by Sailing in a New Direction is sometimes in danger of treating these reconstructions as documentary facts.

One would also have to note that this is a very partisan book. The author is biased in favour of his subject – understandably – and therefore often puts the best possible construction on Curnow’s demeanour or behaviour, and takes his side in any public dispute (usually on literary matters) in which he was involved.

Sturm notes that in an argument with an elderly critic in the mid-1930s, young Curnow showed “his delight in tenacious disputation on matters of small detail.” (p.108). He later remarks that in the same decade “although Curnow enjoyed the social world in which [he] moved, his detachment, usually masked by well-lubricated talk and argumentativeness at social gatherings, was often interpreted as arrogance.” (p.158) The harder fact is that many people were rubbed up the wrong way by Curnow and saw him casting himself as the visionary who understood New Zealand more clearly than anybody else. The arrogance was real. There was also the mandarin  attitude towards the perceived philistines. In Chapter 11, Sturm tells us that Curnow feared he had condescended to “popular comprehensibility” in his collaboration with Douglas Lilburn, the performance poetry cycle “Landfall in Unknown Seas”. (Is comprehensibility really something to sniff at?). Chapter 20 provides a long defence of Curnow’s never-published play “Moon Section”, attributing its failure to hostile newspaper reviews. The reality appears to be that it flopped even with discerning audiences.

With regard to New Zealand “literary nationalism” of the 1930s and 1940s, with which Curnow is often identified, Sturm avoids the revisionist criticisms of the movement that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed he is rather anxious to refute the notion that Curnow embraced any sort of nationalism at all. He sometimes takes to scolding readers for not interpreting poems correctly. Sturm writes of Curnow’s much-anthlogised sonnet  “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”: “Commentators on this poem have almost invariably read it as Curnow’s definitive statement about New Zealand identity in the 1940s. It isn’t…” (p.182) Of Curnow’s introduction to his 1940s Caxton anthology of New Zealand poetry, Sturm writes: “Although the introduction was later read as a manifesto of literary nationalism, offering prescriptions for how New Zealand poetry should be written, it was considerably more subtle than that, though – perhaps more than anything Curnow had written up to this time – it claimed to identify distinctive imaginative preoccupations emerging in New Zealand poetry, which made it different from poetry written up to this time.” (p.195) This seems to be a concession to the fact that there was a “nationalist” preoccupation for young and early-middle-aged Curnow. Inevitably Sturm takes Curnow’s side in the pseudo-controversy in the 1950s about his supposed “South Island myth”.

On the matter of Curnow’s “nationalism”, I find myself agreeing with C.K.Stead’s comment on the earlier Curnow “It is hard to look at the work of that period from this distance and not see in it the ghostly face of the colonial child weeping for Mother England” (quoted from Stead’s “Allen Curnow – ‘Poet Laureate’?” in Shelf Life [reviewed on this blog], AUP 2016 pp.385-386). In effect, Stead is saying that Curnow’s impulses were those of a displaced “colonial” whose background and upbringing still made him think of England as “Home”. Something I note about Simply by Sailing in a New Direction is the intense name-dropping in the sections where Sturm chronicles Curnow’s travels overseas, and Curnow’s boyish delight in seeing the English things he had so often dreamed of. The colonial had come Home. By the final chapters we are aware of the great pleasure he took in overseas recognition, New Zealand being too small for him. The last chapter of the book is crammed with overseas festivals and conferences attended, trips taken, awards given, fellow poets met, which is all dutiful and comme il faut but makes for the dullest chapters in the biography.

On other matters Sturm champions Curnow’s version of things, such as his relationship with Dylan Thomas. The biography’s own account (pp.255-259) shows that, while Thomas and Curnow got on very well with each other, their acquaintance was brief – Curnow stayed in Wales with the Thomases for four days and also encountered Thomas a few times in the USA. But after Thomas’s death by booze, Curnow was determined to refute the view of the Welsh poet as a drunken, fornicating, bohemian boyo, and was particularly anxious to refute John Malcolm Brinnin’s (admittedly somewhat sensationalised) book Dylan Thomas in America. Curnow made comments that implied a longer acquaintance with Thomas than he had actually had, such as “He [Thomas] was kind, and thoughtful for friends. I always found him so.” (quoted p.262) Alas, the boozing bard really was a truer image of Thomas than Curnow’s courteous version. [I make this claim based on Paul Ferris’s biography of Thomas, Caitlin Thomas’s two books Leftover Life to Kill and A Warring Absence, and other Thomas-ania sitting on my shelves within reach as I write this review.]

Of course Sturm sees Curnow as the innocent victim of other poets’ carping in the (late 1950s) hold-ups to the publication of Curnow’s Penguin anthology of New Zealand poetry. Louis Johnson, James K. Baxter and Alistair Campbell made objections to Curnow’s proposed anthology, and threatened to refuse permission for their poems to be included in it. This had much to do with rivalries between Auckland and Wellington poets, generational differences and other matters that have been discussed in numerous literary articles. Sturm remarks of Curnow “he seems to have been entirely unaware of the personal animus that some poets felt towards him, and it was at this time that the myth of Curnow as eminence grise, a malign behind-the-scenes controller of poetic reputations, had its origins.” (p.334) Sturm does quote from the review Baxter wrote of the anthology, “The Kiwi and Mr Curnow”. But I think readers of this biography would get a more balanced view of this spat if they read the whole of Baxter’s review – which makes many good points. It can be found in Volume 1 (pp.438-442) of Baxter’s Complete Prose (reviewed on this blog). On the same controversy even better (and funnier) is Baxter’s (never previously published) “A Vegetable Bouquet to Mr Curnow” (Vol.1 pp.459-466 Complete Prose), in which Baxter quotes specific paragraphs from Curnow’s introduction to the Penguin anthology and notes, with heavy irony, what a distorted view of New Zealand they give. This does not prove that Baxter was right on every point – and, in public utterances, Curnow was certainly a more temperate writer than Baxter often was. Even so, this matter involved more real issues than Sturm’s biography suggests.

Then we come to the matter of Curnow’s controversial poem “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. Frankly Sturm’s diplomatic account of it fudges the controversy. Sturm says Curnow “anticipated that some amongst those local readers who recognised [M.K.] Joseph’s novel behind the poem’s savage reduction of its narrator’s ‘literariness’ to the crude and violent obscenity of the events themselves might read it as an unfair and gratuitous insult to a colleague widely respected as a gentle, humane scholar…. However, he did not identify either the novel or its author in the poem… it enabled him to explore ‘the aspect of homicidal violence as entertainment’.”  (pp.526-527). [Emphasis added.] One immediately has to ask whether Curnow really expected readers to be so stupid as not to identify the novel and its author. Also one can reasonably ask why Curnow couldn’t criticise “homicidal violence as entertainment” by using any one of the thousands of literary (and cinematic) examples that were available to him. Long story short, this vindictive poem really is an “unfair and gratuitous” attack on a colleague, despite ingenious academic attempts (yes, I’ve read many of them) to justify it as consonant with a volume considering the “incorrigible music” of human violence in history. (For my own take on this poem, you may find on this blog Dichtung und Selbstbefriedigung, which is almost as bilious as Curnow’s version.)

So much for Sturm’s partisanship and diplomacy. I am bound to add that in one matter, his tact is fully justified. This is the matter of the disintegration of Curnow’s first marriage. Curnow married Betty Le Cren (with his vicar father officiating) in 1936. By the mid-1940s, it was clear that the marriage was already in trouble. In 1944 “Despite the pleasure he took in his children, his anxieties about his capacity to support his enlarged family, and about his imagined inadequacies as a father, clearly emerge in Curnow’s correspondence during the course of the year.” (p.197) Sturm tactfully suggests (without spelling it out) that Curnow might have had an affair with another woman (Vie Lee) when he was visiting Britain in 1949-50. In 1955, Curnow left his wife of 19 years, the mother of his three children, for the much younger Jenifer Tole (he was 43, she was 23), but he was still officially married to Betty until they were divorced in the early 1960s. Curnow’s uncharacteristically heavy drinking at this time is noted. (p.365)  He did not marry Jenifer Tole until 1965. Sturm shows awareness of the strains placed on the three (teenage) children at the time the divorce was pending, when Curnow chose not to contact any of them until a legal settlement had been made (p.390); but he does note that all Curnow’s offspring (perhaps especially his academic son Wystan) got on well with their father in later life. Sturm is usually diligent in connecting the events of Curnow’s life to his works, but in this matter his tact spreads to his textual analysis. Nowhere does he mention how Curnow’s play The Duke’s Miracle (analysed at pp.413-415) could legitimately be related to Curnow’s marital issues at the time.

Just as a side issue, there are four generous sections of photos in this big biography, and both of Curnow’s wives are properly represented. But I was a little disappointed that Rita Angus’s iconic portrait of Betty (Le Cren) Curnow was not used [even if, at p.158, Sturm reports that Rita Angus herself became annoyed by this painting’s popularity].

Spending days reading this long book brought many issues to my mind. I couldn’t help reflecting how small and interconnected New Zealand’s literary community was at the time of Curnow’s birth (he was a cousin of Arnold Wall and a distant cousin of A.R.D.Fairburn).  I thought much how more limited than now opportunities to travel were for New Zealanders in the early 20^th century – Curnow was 19 before first ventured outside his home province of Canterbury (and came to Auckland to study theology); he was 38 before he first went overseas (to England and America) and was in his 60s before went to continental Europe. I wondered if Curnow’s first verse play The Axe would ever get off the ground now, its dramatis personae all being Polynesian characters who were all played (in its first production in 1948) by Pakeha actors. Nowadays it would be condemned smartly for its “cultural appropriation”. I was also interested (and in a way heartened) by the rhythm of Curnow’s poetic production. After a creative burst between 1940 and 1943, Curnow went three years without writing a poem. Sturm says “his poetic career had always been marked by sudden bursts of activity followed by longish periods in which little or nothing was published.” (pp.433-434)

If I seem to have carped at some of the things Curnow did and wrote, I would also like to note the many occasions in reading this book when I heartily approved of his utterances. Curnow was quite right to complain, when he returned to New Zealand in 1950, of the over-interest international publishing showed in  “new volumes of criticism and interpretation”, noting “there were dangers as well as advantages to poetry in having many teachers, many critics, and not enough readers.” (p.288) Exactly so. Curnow seems to have assessed correctly the character and temperament of Frank Sargeson, being aware of Sargeson’s “mischievous delight in conspiracy theories”. Curnow and Sargeson disliked each other, possibly in part because Sargeson resented Curnow’s becoming an academic. (p.297) Curnow was no homophobe, however  - Bill Pearson was one of his closest confidants in his years as an academic in Auckland. Pearson was also best man at his second wedding. Curnow’s long and enduring friendships with Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn and Douglas Lilburn show a man with a strong sense of loyalty, even if it must have sometimes been put under strain by Glover’s boozing (a matter upon which Sturm never touches). It was refreshing to read, in Chapter 22, of Curnow’s intelligent refutation of C.P.Snow’s once-popular “two cultures” argument. It was doubly refreshing to read, in Chapter 30, of how he stood against “open form” poetry. He is much to be admired for his stand (in the 1980s and 1990s) against “theory” as prescriptive for poetry, when (like any real poet) he understood that all theory is ex post facto. I applaud, too, his rejection of the postmodern “death of the author” and “lack of agency” of the author fantasies proposed by Derrida and the gang. (p.622)

I am being very complimentary here, aren’t I?

Now I’m going to ruin it, and possibly invite snarls, by commenting on one final aspect of Curnow.

Agnostic humanist or not, many of Curnow’s instincts remained, lifelong, Anglican ones, from his strong and affectionate connection with his Anglican vicar father Tremayne Curnow to the Biblical and religious allusions and implied Christian frame of reference in Island and Time (p.144) to his final instructions on how he should be buried, despite not having been a worshipper in a church for decades. “Curnow had long let it be known that his preference was for the ritual of a formal Anglican funeral service (using the Authorised Version of the Bible) rather than the sometimes awkward and disorganised informalities of various secular services he had encountered….” (p.670) Hence his funeral service in Auckland’s Anglican cathedral. While he was preparing a “Collected Poems” (in 1973), Curnow said he was “the same animal gnawing at the same bone” as the young man who had written his first poems (quoted p.468). The same went for his feelings about religion, regardless of what his brain was saying.

Part and parcel of the Anglican heritage in New Zealand is an annoyance with, or haughty contempt for, Catholics. (It dates from 1838 when the arrival of Catholic missionaries sent Anglican and Wesleyan missionaries into a panic about papists intruding on “their” missionary territory.) Am I going beyond reasonable speculation to note that some of Curnow’s worst contentions were with Catholics?

When, in the mid-1940s, he applied for a lectureship in English at Auckland University College, he was “overlooked in favour of [the Catholic] M.K.Joseph”. (p.204) Curnow had many grudges about his rank in the pecking order of the Auckland English department. Even when he was near retirement in 1975, he was still irritated at not having a full professorship (p.500). I can’t help but see “Dichtung und Wahrheit” as related to a long-standing animus towards Joseph.

When he put together both his Caxton and his Penguin anthologies of New Zealand poetry, Curnow was at odds with the Catholic poet Eileen Duggan, who thought he had written slightingly of her work and wouldn’t give him permission to include her poetry. Curnow had a hard time getting a travel grant in the late 1940s. Sturm comments “there was still a degree of residual hostility and resentment towards Curnow for his critical treatment of the older literary establishment, especially figures like Eileen Duggan – and difficult to escape the conclusion that a politically well-connected, Catholic-based, Wellington literary mafia deeply resented Curnow as an outsider.” (p.241) [Emphasis added.]

Curnow had almost completed the compilation of his first Caxton anthology when he discovered the work of the teenage poet James K.Baxter, was very enthusiastic about it, and included Baxter in his anthology. Later, his opinion of Baxter became much more negative. There were many reasons for this. (An analysis of Curnow’s “A Refusal to Read Poems of James K.Baxter at a Performance to Honour his Memory in Cranmer Square, Christchurch” is given by Sturm at pp.473-474.) But at least one must have been his annoyance that Baxter had decided to convert to Catholicism. (Mind you, he wasn’t as forthright in stating this publicly as his friend Denis Glover, who spoke of Baxter’s “innate devious jesuitry”.)

Curnow and his wife Jeny, in their later years, enjoyed holidaying in Italy. Like many non-Catholic poets before him (Robert Browning et al.), Curnow loved Italian art and culture but wasn’t so happy about the Catholic church. Of course he hated the sight of St Peter’s basilica (see p.488). Hence his poetry sequence “In the Duomo” which puts historical violence in the context of Catholic ritual. His poem “Magnificat”, about a large statue of the Virgin Mary, (analysed at pp.449-450 and pp.456-457), reads as more quizzical than contemptuous, though one does wonder what persuaded Curnow to take on the topic at all.

Having said all this, I balance it against the fact that Curnow’s second wife came from a Catholic family and (at least as far as Sturm’s biography says), he seems to have got on well with his Catholic in-laws. Also, according to three brief references, his relationship with one of his Catholic colleagues at the University of Auckland was cordial. This was (my father) J.C.Reid. Sturm refers to Reid as “a trusted friend” of Curnow, acting as an intermediary in trying to get Eileen Duggan to allow her poems to appear in Curnow’s Penguin anthology. (p.323). I’m not sure that “trusted friend” is quite the term here. “Trusted colleague” might be better.

By this stage you are appalled at my lack of balance in devoting seven paragraphs to this matter – but I do think it was an essential part of who Curnow was. Anglican ordinand with some religious doubts growing into sceptical agnostic humanist, but maintaining a lot of the same habits of thought.

I think this compendious biography has told me (nearly) all I need know about the life of Allen Curnow. It remains only for me to plunge back into reading all his poetry. I must get hold of that new Collected Poems.