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 MIRROR OF THE SEA” by Joseph Conrad (first published 1906; author’s note added 1919 for a collected edition of his works)

On this blog, I have discussed a number of times England’s Polish literary genius Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). You can look up posts on Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Victory. With the possible exception of Victory, all these are among his best-known works.  But in this posting I am examining one of his least-read texts, The Mirror of the Sea, which is not a work of fiction. The Mirror of the Sea was written and published in 1906, during Conrad’s most fruitful period as a novelist. It came between what are regarded as two of his masterpieces, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.

For those who have never read his works, Conrad is reputed to be simply a writer of the sea – and of course he was sometimes that, in novels like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and The Shadow Line; and in novellas like Typhoon and Youth. But the sea was not the setting for most of his novels and the sea is not the main subject of any of the five novels I have so far discussed on this blog, although the sea is a small part of the narrative of some of them. Conrad was a professional seaman for twenty years, between the ages of 16 and 36, working his way up first in the French, then in the English, merchant marine from sailor to Master. He left the sea at 36 and settled down to a literary career, with his first novel appearing when he was 39. It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty that he wrote The Mirror of the Sea, a reflection on his days under sail.

The Mirror of the Sea is and is not an autobiography. It is drawn from Conrad’s memories, certainly, but it is not a chronological account of his life, says nothing about his childhood, family or background, and does not even give the names of fellow-seamen who were his colleagues. (They are disguised discreetly as ‘Captain C-‘, ‘Boatswain B’ – etc.) In the author’s note, which he added for the book’s 1919 reprint, Conrad remarks that some critics were taken aback by this and expected him to reveal more of himself. But Conrad says that what he attempts here is “to lay bare, with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession, the terms of my relation with the sea”. Only in the last quarter of his book does it become more autobiographical in the conventional sense, and at this point it is worth noting that the last three of the book’s 48 shortish chapters are a big diappointment. They end The Mirror of the Sea with the clunk of bathos, for Chapters 46, 47 and 48 are patriotic British bombast about the glories of the Royal Navy and Lord Nelson. Conrad is cosmopolitan enough to tell us that the French and Spanish captains at Trafalgar were jolly decent chaps too. But for the sake of his literary reputation, I hope that Conrad wrote tongue-in-cheek, and as a sop to his British readership, this dreadful conclusion to an otherwise thoughtful book. I will say no more about it.

The Mirror of the Sea is a book about the sea, about how young Conrad reacted to the moods of the sea, and how he fared in different ships. As for the title, the phrase “mirror of the sea” recurs a number of times in the text. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea”, says Conrad in Chapter 7. He speaks of one swift sailing ship, saying “her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea” in Chapter 12. And in Chapter 26 there is the “blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness, reflected in the mirror of the sea, embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails.” There are other places in the text where the phrase is used. They all picture the sea as the literal mirror that it is. But there is a subtext here – for a seaman, the sea is the mirror of himself, reflecting his character in the way he reacts to the sea in calm or (more particularly) in storm. For as a professional seaman, Conrad knows that the sea tests every sailor. Each finds out who he really is. This becomes one of the book’s dominant themes.

In his opening ten or so chapters, Conrad moves methodically through maritime matters in what are, in effect, a series of essays – the importance of departures and landfalls; the varying qualities of captains he has known; and the proper use of nautical terms. Sometimes he chastises landlubbers, as when he remarks “Your journalist almost invariably ‘casts’ his anchor. Now an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime” (Chapter 4). An anchor is properly “let go”, not “cast”. He tells us of “the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable to a seaman” (Chapter 5) i.e. a sailor should not be cocksure, as the sea is so variable in its moods; hence a sailor should always be prepared for the worst. With proper contempt as a professional mariner, Conrad looks down on yachting, saying: “Yacht racing is an organised pastime, a function of social idleness ministering to the vanity of certain wealthy inhabitants of [England] nearly as much as to their inborn love of the sea” (Chapter 7) But he relents and admits that yachting requires sailing skill and the art of managing a crew. “To deal with men is as fine an art as to deal with ships - both men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful influences, and want to have their merits understood rather than their faults found out.” (Chapter 7). More than once he refers to the sea as “the unstable element”, and as readers of Lord Jim will know, Conrad frequently used this term as a metaphor for the instability of human affairs.

He moves on to some of the perils of seamanship, considering the horror of newspapers’ “Shipping Intelligence”, which tell anxious wives and relatives of seamen about ships first “Overdue” and then “Missing”, which most often means “sunk” (Chapter 16). We learn that in polar seas, even a small ice-floe can be enough to sink a ship (Chapter 17); and we learn what a misery it is for a ship to be stranded on a submerged sandbank (Chapters 20 and 21).

As Conrad always expresses it, ships are feminine and to be loved as such. In Chapter 15 he tells us: “Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge. You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with forces wherein defeat is no shame.” Ships are in their glory when they are on the high seas. When a ship is tied up at docks “you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage” (Chapter 32). Stevedores and others are “trampling unconcerned, brutal and hodnailed upon her helpless body” (Chapter 33). Ships “can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make of our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.” (Chapter 35). The obvious inplication here is that ships are like women who have to be protected by men, cherished by men and loved by men – and whose whims have to be considered. I can’t help wondering, too, if there is not another impulse for this anthropomorphising of ships. As the safe body in which men live as they sail across the unstable sea, isn’t a ship a little like an enfolding womb? Truly feminine.

By contrast, neither the winds nor the sea itself are feminised. From Chapter 23 to Chapter 29, Conrad dwells on the influence of prevailing winds. In these chapters he is at his most rhetorical . He personifies the West Wind as the King of the oceans, treating human beings as his petty subjects and playthings; while the East Wind is a conniving villain, who rushes upon ships when they are unprepared. As for the sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown.” (Chapter 36) In this same chapter, Conrad says he really became an adult when, as a very junior officer, he understood for the first time the complete indifference of the sea to human life. He was a part of a crew who rowed from a merchantman to rescue nine Danish seamen. The Danes were clinging to a waterlogged ship, almost completely submerged and on the point of dragging them down as it sank. It was, of course, the pitiless sea that had brought them to this state, and that threatened the rescuers with being dragged down too.

Writing in 1906, Conrad is aware that the era of sailing-ships – the era he knew as a sailor in the 1870s and 1880s – is almost over. He is writing of a time now past. “Stevedoring,” he tells us,“which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a labour without the skill. The modern steamship with her many holds is not loaded within the sailorlike meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve winches or so…” (Chapter 13). He is clearly still unfamiliar with modern hoisting machinery to load cargo. And the future looms in modern London docks with “here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil storage tanks, low and round with slightly domed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.” (Chapter 31) He has a low opinion of those who look after wharves, docks and loading – he refers to them as “renegades” (Chapter 33) in that he sees them as failed sailors.

Along with this goes his near contempt for steamships that are killing the true seamanship of sailing ships. He dwells on the majesty of sail, pushed along simply by the forces of nature (Chapter 10). “Of all ships disabled at sea,” he declares, “a steamship who has lost her propeller is the most helpless. And as she drifts into an unpopulated part of the ocean she may soon become overdue.” (Chapter 18). One of his most pitiful stories is of a steamship which lost its propeller on the run between New Zealand and Cape Horn and which, until being rescued by a whaler, drifted helplessly in places where a sailing ship could have taken advantage of the winds. He says “The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.” (Chapter 22) The existence of steam power lessens that existential struggle between man, wind and sea that Conrad relishes. And, on a less important note, he regrets the loss of the old figureheads that used to adorn sailing ships (Chapter 35).

As for the future of navigation, Conrad strikes a prophetic note imagining the type of steel warship, capable of immense destructiveness, that will be developed. (Remember, this was written eight years before the First World War). When inventors have made this come to pass, he says “the bodies of the inventors should [be] blown to pieces by means of their own perfected explosives and improved weapons with extreme publicity as the commonest prudence dictated.” (Chapter 37) This nostrum for ending war has been suggested by many others in the years since then.

As a practitioner of irony, Conrad sometimes displays the art of understatement. Describing a ferocious storm at sea, he writes “I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste” (Chapter 9). Personally, I would be absolutely terrified – and I suspect Conrad or any other sane human being would too. He also describes with deep irony the sinking of a leaking ship thus: “The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam.” (Chapter 39) Along with the irony, there are some euphemisms which I assume cover the effing and blinding of sailors in distress, typical of literature in Conrad’s times. As a violent sea-storm is going on, a captain and his first mate are arguing, and there is “a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion, and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence” (Chapter 10).

In contrast with the irony and euphemisms, there are the grand apostrophes for which Conrad is sometimes criticised, but which can be very grand indeed. Consider this evocation of the primal nature of the sea: “It seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could declare that he ever saw the sea looking young as the world looks in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it old, as if the immemorial ages have been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old… If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The greyness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam , tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.” (Chapter 22)

Although, as I have argued, this is not a conventional autobiography, there are in The Mirror of the Sea vivid personal anecdotes, in Conrad’s reminiscences of the wool-ships that went to and fro between England and Australia (Chapter 33) and one vivid and unexpected chapter on the night young Conrad had to spend being a ship’s night-watchman when the ship was anchored at Sydney’s Circular Quay. He saw from the deck the sights and sounds of young rough Sydneysiders having organised fistfights and other traditional Aussie pastimes.

When he passes to his considerations of the Mediterranean Sea, he at first spends three chapters on the Mediterranean as the cradle of navigation, and the ancient and more modern sea battles that took place there (Chapter 37-39). But the subject of the Mediterranean launches him into the most straightforwardly autobiographical parts of the book – six chapters (Chapters 40 to 45), almost amounting to a novella, on his membership of a syndicate of four young men (the other three were an American, a Corsican and an Englishman) gunrunning for the ultra-conservative pretenders to the Spanish throne, the Carlists. Their venture was on the leaky, unreliable little ship Tremolino and it came to a sticky end. Conrad tells the story with the relaxed irony of an older man looking back at the follies of his youth; and yet at the same time regretting the passing of those days of naïve and idealistic youthfulness. As the whole venture comes to a pathetic end, Conrad reflects bitterly on the older people who fired up these young men to undertake the venture in the first place:  “The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I reckoned. And they appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.” (Chapter 44) Scholars of Conrad will know that much later, when his literary career was fading, he worked this episode into a novel, The Arrow of Gold, which, as repute tells me (I have never read it), is one of his weakest efforts. And, just to confuse matters, other scholars (such as John Stape in his biography The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, which sits on my selves) argue that the whole story of gunrunning is a fiction.

And then – clunk! – we come to those awful jingoisitc last three chapters of The Mirror of the Sea, which would almost have sunk this ship if what precedes them had not been such an interesting, ruminative set of reflections.

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.

GREAT BIG MELTING POT

 

I recently read and reviewed on this blog Gregory O’Brien’s enjoyable Always Song in the Water, a reflection on New Zealand’s status as an oceanic continent. Of no major significance in the book, and certainly not reflecting O’Brien’s humane views, I found in the text a phrase that is rarely used nowadays. In passing, O’Brien mentions “the cultural melting pot of Aotearoa New Zealand over the past few decades”(p.173).

“Melting pot”. Now there’s a phrase you hardly hear anymore – and when it is used, it is heavily criticised for committing the sin of “assimilationism”. Current wisdom says that if you speak of diverse ethnicities in a particular country blending together in a “melting pot”, then you are denying each ethnicity its own uniqueness and culture. You are assuming that they will all abandon their inherited customs and be absorbed into one homogenous cultural norm. And usually, goes this argument, the norm will be a white European norm. Ergo assimilation is racist and the more acceptable buzz-word now is “diversity”.

I can see some merit in this argument, although I can also see ways in which it is blind to reality.

A little research (thank you, Wikipedia) tells me that the phrase “melting pot”, as related to culture and ethnicity, was first used by “nativists” in mid-19^th century America. They were those English-speaking Americans who resented the influx of Irish, Italian, Jewish and other non-English-speaking immigrants. They claimed that everybody should be just “American” rather than “Irish-American”, “Italian-American” etc. But clearly by “American”, the “nativists” meant WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) like the Founding Fathers. The message was clear. To be a true Amertican, you should conform culturally to US and abandon YOUR inherited ways. (In the original argument African-Americans were not considered because at the time they were not regarded as full citizens.)

Sometimes this argument could be made with benign intent by immigrants themselves. I was already aware that the phrase “melting pot” really took off in 1908 when the Russian-Jewish American Israel Zangwill wrote his successful play The Melting Pot. It argued that America was a tolerant and open society accepting all cultures and religions, quite unlike the old Imperial Russia which Zangwill’s family had escaped, where pogroms were still common. Zangwill’s conception of the “melting pot”  was a society of mutual acceptance in which the best elements of  different cultures would ultimately blend together on equal terms. But more often, the “melting pot” meant conformity to Anglo-American norms. Notoriously, Henry Ford (a rabid anti-Semite among other things) made all new immigrant employees at his main plants go through a ceremony in which they pledged allegiance to the flag and announced that they were no longer Italian, Greek etc. but just “American”. He even employed “social workers” to examine the families of his immigrant employees and ensure that they were not lapsing back into their traditional ethnic ways.

The “melting pot” concept was very durable. From when I was a teenager, I remember a nauseating song that was often heard on the radio. Even at the time I found it rather smug, although I would not have been able to articulate why. It was called “Melting Pot” and not only did it mention “yellow Chinkees”, but its main verse went:

“What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all its got

And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.”

I think it was that “coffee-coloured people” bit that really turned me off, with its implication that people should not be happy to be black, white, yellow or any other skin tone. It was a call to conformity. I had assumed that the song was American, because it sounded like the equally bland Disney “It’s a small world after all” song. Coming out in 1969, it was in fact the work of an English pop group “Blue Mink”, written by two of its members Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. It probably had the good intention of opposing racism, but its cure for racism was to pretend that various and separate cultures couldn’t and shouldn’t endure. Its “melting pot” meant we would all be the same.

But now, as I have to, I come to the other side of the argument. Isn’t the current catch-cry of “diversity” also an illusion? To limit my reflection to New Zealand, we no longer have simply Maori and Pakeha, but we now have many thousands of New Zealanders who are Samoan, Tongan, Chinese, Indian, Korean, African and other ethnicities. Yet all these peoples now live under one law, make use of the same technologies, deal with the same institutions and [in the main] go through the same education system. I would also point out that, though there are now available in New Zealand broadcasts, pod-casts and tele-casts in other languages, the overwhleming language of popular culture is English. And, while there are efforts to build up the number of speakers of Maori, English remains the country’s only universally-understood language.

Recognising these facts is not to accept a “melting pot” mentality. It is simply to point out that even as diverse ethnicities are accepted, even as there are an increasing number of public celebrations of different cultures (the indian Diwali; the Chinese lantern festival and New Year etc.), there are also strong forces that hold us together. In other words, a certain degree of assimilation is inevitable. It is not enough to say that this is “common humanity” or “decency”. It is the fact that a society has to live by some accepted norms, or it will rapdly fall apart, and then we head into the fractious politics of sectionalism, where all things are referred to in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc. instead of in terms of our shared citizenship.

You might have noticed that nowhere in this argument have I used the term “multiculturalism”. There is a reason for this (and it is NOT the argument given by some Maori polemicists that multiculturalism is merely a Pakeha trick to blot out what they think should be New Zealand’s bi-culturalism). “Mutlculturalism” assumes that separate cultures will endure complete and unaffected by other cultures – a kind of eternal patchwork of identities. But it never works that way. When different ethnic cultures exist side-by-side, they gradually modify one another. This is not a restatement of the “melting pot” idea. It is a recognition of change – and one in which each group retains a distinct identity, but also has much in common with other groups and accepts those distinctions.

Something New

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

“ALWAYS SONG IN THE WATER” by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, $NZ 45); “SINGING THE TRAIL” by John McCrystal (Allen and Unwin, $NZ59:99)

The subtitle of Gregory O’Brien’s diverse, informative and very engaging book Always Song in the Water is “An Oceanic Sketchbook”. This seems to me far too modest a description.

Always Song in the Water is a large, handsome book [over 250 pages] of art works and essays. The art works (drawings, sketches, paintings and photographs) are by a number of credited artists, including O’Brien himself, who is artist, essayist and curator as much as poet. The text is all by O’Brien. The topic is essentially New Zealand’s connection with, and isolation in, the Pacific Ocean, with many reflections upon this condition. But much of the text digs deeply into O’Brien’s background and influences as both artist and poet. So inevitably much of it is highly autobiographical. Explained very late in book, the title Always Song in the Water refers to the songs of our mammalian cousins, whales, which at some point become a measure of our identity with the ocean that enfolds us.

So why do I say that the subtitle “An Oceanic Sketchbook” is far too modest?

Because “sketchbook” implies something done on the run, faits divers rather than a structured whole, and Always Song in the Water does have a definite structure and backbone. The term “bricolage” – a single work of art made out of many and varied things - has sometimes been applied to O’Brien’s work, and it is certainly applicable here. Always Song in the Water runs through many anecdotes and many topics, but O’Brien is not bundling them together at random. They move in a certain direction and add up to a coherent whole. I’d propose substituting as subtitle “An Oceanic Bricolage”.

In his Introduction, O’Brien admits that he is not a great seaman, although clearly he has made a number of voyages. But his concept of New Zealand and its relationship with the ocean altered for him in his 2011 trip to the Kermadecs. O’Brien has responded to this trip before (see Beauties of the Octagonal Pool, his poetry collection reviewed on this blog in 2012). In 2011, he was one of nine visual artists who, together with the minister of conservation, conservation workers and one broadcaster, were passengers on HMNZS Otago in a sponsored trip to Raoul Island, one of the five Kermadec islands which used to be called Sunday Island. New Zealand territory, the Kermadecs are the uplifted parts of a submarine volcanic ridge stretching from New Zealand to Tonga. O’Brien was forcefully reminded that New Zealand ranges far beyond Cape Reinga – indeed, New Zealand’s territorial waters extend 200 nautical miles north of Raoul Island. This fired in O’Brien’s mind an expanded sense of the oceanic nature of New Zealand as a fluid, moving continent. In the early sections of Always Song in the Water, O’Brien uses the overgrown dinghy in his front yard as a symbol of New Zealand, movable but anchored in sea.

Always Song in the Water divides into two parts.

Part One is billed as “Coasting – a Northland Road Trip”. In 2014, O’Brien drove north from Auckland to Whangarei with his artist friend, the non-driving Noel McKenna, who remarked, correctly, that it’s better to be the passenger on such journeys as you have the leisure to look around rather than having your eyes fixed on the road. They meet an ex-Trappist friend of O’Brien’s and visit his meditation room. In Dargaville, O’Brien recalls that he began his career as a journalist on the town’s daily Northland Times, where he first took an interest in typefaces. He recalls his own youthful experiences of surfing and renders surfies as metaphors for poets. The rituals of drinking tea are discussed. There are encounters with abandoned cars and topiary work and all the unleashed dogs in Northland and the sighting an (imaginary?) wolf. Caravans as places of residence are discussed and there are a couple of bizarre tales, one about the nursing career of O’Brien’s mother and the other about riding pillion on a motorbike while gripping the oars of the dinghy.

All this might indeed sound like random observations until you see how the emphasis on literature and (more expansively) art builds up. O’Brien remarks: “Periodically, my family criticises me for my inabiity to drive anywhere in New Zealand without continually citing not only McCahon, but also Baxter and Frame.” (p.105) When he encounters a second-hand bookstall in the middle of nowhere, he is surprised to find among the dross some classy books (Coleridge, Heraclitus etc.). Dargaville, with its muddy river and second-hand shops, calls to mind Jane Mander and her piano on the riverbank, which in turn segues into the idea of New Zealand  literature and art being adaptations of European norms, such as pianos. There is much reference to Clare Cavanagh’s concept of playing “Schubert on a barrel organ”, which seems a rather contorted way of referring to New Zealand writers and artists playing variations on European-sourced models.

Ultimately the visual artists get more space than the writers, though. We are told that Colin McCahon fled north to re-find himself and later he wept when he saw Ahipara. O’Brien discusses the influence of a Michael Smither sketch he was given by his parents; and Ralph Hotere’s collaboration with Bill Manhire in an art-and-text publication. The surreal films of Florian Habicht are referenced a number of times, because in O’Brien’s interpretation they give a psychic survey of what we are… and later Habicht is found to have been influenced by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, another denizen of Northland.

What Part One has revealed gradually then, is not reminiscence so much as, through writers and artists, the imaginative interpretation of Northland. And more important, this first half of the book is heading northwards like a long run up to the long-jump. The long-jump is Part Two where O’Brien launches into the sea itself. Running on Ninety Mile Beach leads him to say “the real northernmost tundra of Aotearoa New Zealand is the  Pacific Ocean itself, at once inviting and inhospitable, bracing and mind-boggling.” (p.99)

So we are in the ocean in Part Two, billed as “We Went Ashore One Morning”. This begins with the 2011 voyage to Raoul Island “the remotest part of New Zealand, an active volcano located on an earthquake fault line, it has the air of an island that wants to be left alone.” (p.131) The shaky island has been rendered pest-free, so it teems with birds and indigenous wildlife, as well as flourishing foliage. O’Brien and his companions are there for 48 hours and it is endearing to learn that he reads the poetry of Edith Sitwell while on Raoul Island “because here nature itself seems eccentric, excessive and at times implausible”. (p.136)  Here is the key to the whole book, when O’Brien says that after leaving the island its image stayed with him and it altered his sense of the shape of New Zealand: “A different profile of the nation came to assert itself – an archipelagic concept which has been, and continues to be, an invigorating and creatively sustaining proposition…” (p.140) It also heightened his awareness of New Zealand as “a gyrating, quivering nation-machine… a nation that is geologically and seismically in a state of ongoing upheaval and adjustment.” (p.142).

Once again, some sections of Part Two could seem random observations or simply interesting anecdotes, as when O’Brien decribes the traditional tying of ropes by the naval crew or traditional naval slang or the crew’s traditional over-the-side swim, in mid-ocean, when they cross the Tropic of Capricorn. But ultimately artistic interpretation is what dominates and the ocean is related to artistic endeavour. Off the Wellington coast, the ashes of the artist John Drawbridge are dispersed into the sea. The South Pacific, we are told, might better be called Oceania, in line with Pasifika writers such as Epeli Hau’ofa, who interpret the ocean as their whole world. Repeatedly O’Brien reflects on artists who have imagined submarine seascapes and there are reveries about the sinking of the SS Mikhail Lermontov in Marlborough Sounds in 1986.

Alongside this, there is inevitably a strong conservationist tone. In somewhat opaque prose, the section titled “The Questioning Sea” gives a mystic view of sea as nurturer. But fouling this are the huge numbers of containers now floating in the seas and the dangers they create, such as sinking ships or washing toxically ashore. Elsewhere O’Brien notes the great, slow migrations of crayfish across the seabed when careless human beings have over-harvested them in one area – and he also notes the anxiety with which surveys of whales are now conducted. Of the very many images reproduced in this book, one of the most arresting is O’Brien’s own rendering of a whale survey conducted at Raoul Island. Near book’s end, there is a plea for the revival of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill, which stalled after being introduced in 2016 and has yet to be written into law.

So, anecdotes and asides and light moments and all, this book creeps up on you, with copious images and with two long poems by O’Brien,  “For Rebecca Priestley in Antarctica” and “Ode to the Kermadec Trench.” For all the pieces of which it is composed, it makes a strong central impression. Not bric-a-brac but excellent bricolage.

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

Totally different in purpose and structure, there is another new publication that helps us see New Zealand in a new light. If Gregory O’Brien’s Always Song in the Water makes us consider New Zealand as an oceanic continent, John McCrystal’s carefully-researched Singing the Trail shows us how New Zealand came to be mapped in the first place, and how we gained what is now our indelible mental image of these islands. Subtitled “The Story of Mapping Aotearoa New Zealand”, Singing the Trail is a sturdy hardback of over 250 wide pages, showing us the most significant maps of New Zealand and of the Pacific since, a bit over 400 years ago, Europeans first began to guess what might be in this part of the ocean. There was so much pure guessing and speculation that “the first European maps of Aotearoa were works of science fiction” says McCrystal. (p.8)

McCrystal provides a very detailed introduction to each section of the book, as well as substantial notes on each of the many maps that are reproduced. Text talks to image.

In his general Introduction, McCrystal tells us that his own fascination with maps began with his “boatie” father, who knew how to read maritime charts and navigate by them, as well as recognising and steering by landmarks. McCrystal picked up the mapping bug. But he adds that some form of mapping is inherent in us, as it is in some other animals such as birds, bees and dogs. They have mental systems enabling them to remember routes, hence they can travel to desired destinations. As for earlier human beings in oral cultures, their first “maps” were spoken stories, designed to help voyagers remember what to look out for on a particular route. McCrystal explains that the first real, non-speculative maps of New Zealand made by Europeans were obviously confined to the coast and focused on finding safe harbours and anchorages. Then came maps pointing out places where exploitable resources could be found (seals, flax, timber). Then maps related to Pakeha settlements. Then military maps during wars between Maori and Pakeha (ordinance maps, military routes, plans of pas and redoubts); then the latest survey maps using technologies unknown to the earliest explorers. In his choice of maps to go along with his text, McCrystal admits that he has chosen ones that are “aesthetically pleasing”, as well as telling a story.

The text is divided into three long sections.

Part One, called “Coast”, is about first discoveries and the first mapping of the shape of New Zealand. This section deals in detail with Polynesian navigation and the use of ancestral stories of gods and perils as mnemonics guiding voyagers to landmarks in the vast ocean. The European system of drawing a chart, and the Polynesian system of memorising a route, met in the person of Tupaia. He was taken on board by James Cook, and questioned about islands in the Pacific. English cartographers made a drawing of what he explained. Fittingly, a rendering of Tupaia’s conception of the Pacific is the first map in the book. As McCrystal explains, there are fantastical theories that peoples before the Maori first “discovered” Aotearoa – or even that Europeans other than the Dutchman Abel Tasman were the first to see New Zealand. These theories (which usually imply racist ideologies) are easily disproven on archaeological grounds, and also by the nature of European maps before Tasman. The text moves on to European maps made after Tasman’s 1642 voyage, with much guesswork still on display; maps made after Cook’s voyages in the 1770s, and maps made by French explorers. Many an early map is an itinerarium (concerned with getting from A to B) rather than scientific cartography. This is particularly true of maps prepared by whalers and sealers in search of prey. The last map in this section was printed in 1858, by which stage the (coastal) shape of New Zealand was (almost) fully known.

Part Two, called “Inland”, deals with 19^th century maps as Pakeha now began to explore the interior of the country and lay out areas for settlement. It is interesting to note that just before the Treaty of Waitangi, and just before mass Pakeha settlement began, Europeans were still ignorant of much that lay between the coasts. Wyld’s chart of 1839 gets the shape of New Zealand more or less right (with a few gross mistakes) but is entirely ignorant of the existence of Lake Taupo and has only the vaguest notion of where mountain ranges lie. After 1840, there are maps of localities prepared by missionary societies or by Wakefield’s New Zealand Company. There are neat grids of roads laid out for Wanganui, Wellington, Dunedin and other major settlements, including Felton Matthew’s conception of what Auckland should be, with its impossible concentric ring roads. Later, during the wars of the 1860s, there come the ordinance maps and military routes and – on an even more melancholy note – maps showing lands that had been confiscated from iwi by the New Zealand government after the wars were over.

Part Three, called “Changing Views”, contains maps from the late nineteenth century to the early 21^st century. They are mainly specialised maps, made after accurate renderings of the shape and topographical features of New Zealand had been determined. Each is interested in some particular aspect of New Zealand. Thus, from the early twentieth century, there is a map showing New Zealand’s place in the British Empire, and there are maps showing places overseas where New Zealanders fought and died in the First World War (Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in 1915; Le Quesnoy in 1917; and grids of military cemeteries). Maps show New Zealand’s dependencies in the Pacific and in Antarctica, and New Zealand’s economic fishing zones. And so on to maps giving the locations of New Zealand’s lighthouses; maps indicating where most shipwrecks have occurred; guide maps of railway, steamer and coach routes; and promotional material aimed at tourists. These include a colourful rendition of the Raurimu Spiral prepared in 1929 for New Zealand Railways; and a “fun” map made in 1960 for New Zealand’s old domestic airline NAC, giving a cartoonish version of the country’s major tourist attractions. From Hochstetter in the nineteenth century to the satellite image of New Zealand that ends the book, one constant is the way techniques of topographical survey improved.

In my tiresome bibliographical way, I have told you accurately what this book contains. McCrystal’s text is accessible and very readable – my only reservation is that occasionally his style can get a little facetious, with strained puns. (Does a section on the mapping of New Zealand’s rich natural resources really have to be called “Scrutiny on the Bounty”?). What I have not made clear, however, is the sheer fascination of the maps themselves. After all the real and informative material this book delivers, and after all the explanations of individual maps, Singing the Trail is in the end a great site for wool-gathering. As we look at the earlier maps made by Europeans, we may at first smirk at how wrong they got things. But then we realise what an exacting – and often dangerous – thing it was to make a chart of a newly-discovered country, and we understand what an extraordinary thing it is that we have maps at all.

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.

“WISE BLOOD” by Flannery O’Connor (first published 1952); “THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY” by Flannery O’Connor (first published 1960)

            Some weeks back on this blog, looking at Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, I referred briefly to other writers of the American South who, like McCarthy, have or had some sort of religious preoccupation. Chief among them was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), whose two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away are drenched in the fervor and wildness of the South’s poor white Protestants (as are many of her short stories for which, among many readers, she is better-known) . Having made this mention, I spent some evenings re-reading O’Connor’s work and once again tasting that strange mixture of sordor and religious fervor.

            Wise Blood, first published in 1952, is the better known of the two novels. In passing only, I note it was made into a very good film by John Huston in 1979, unusual among literary adaptations in that it stuck very closely to the original novel.

Wise Blood is essentially a very simple fable. A man spends his life trying to run away from something, but ends up embracing it. More specifically, a man who spends his life cursing and denying God is finally overwhelmed by God. This is a “hound of heaven” fable.

Having its genesis in a number of separate short-stories O’Connor had written, Wise Blood, though a very short work, is very episodic. Implicitly set just after the Second World War, the novel concerns Hazel Motes, a discharged and embittered serviceman. We are early made aware that, grandson of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, he had a very hard childhood, frequently being chastised and beaten, constantly being told he should be grateful for being redeemed in the Blood of Jesus, and constantly resenting the fact. Finding his post-war home abandoned and his family gone, he heads for a (fictitous) Southern city on a personal mission of enlightenment. He aims to condemn religion as he knows it. But, being Bible-bred and in the South, the only religion he knows is That Old Time Religion. So it is as a “prophet” that he condemns Jesus, on street corners and usually mounted on the bonnet of the broken-down old car he has bought.

Hazel Motes is not an articulate or well-educated man. We piece together his anti-religious creed from statements scattered through the novel. When in the army, he was jeered by soldiers who told him he had no soul; and he “took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw the opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil.” (Chapter 1) The burden of sin weighs so heavily on him that he wants to get rid of it and of any notion of the soul. He wants his world-view to be completely materialist. He believes the idea of sin simply corrupts people, and in one argument he declares “there’s no person a whoremonger who wasn’t something worse first. That’s not the sin, not blasphemy. The sin came before them.” (Chapter 4) In other words, he rejects the notions of Original Sin and of a primal flaw in human beings even while acknowledging them. Speaking of sin simply corrupts people. And if sin doesn’t exist, there’s no need for redemption. The notion of sin itself makes us feel dirty.  “I AM clean. If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean.” (Chapter 5) Also “Jesus is a trick on niggers” (Chapter 4), as religion is only for the gullible. So he tells the crowd on street corners “I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.” (Chapter 6)

Even to corral together these statements is to make this impulsive, bitter and very determined Hazel Motes sound more rational and articulate than he is. Remember, the Bible seems to be the only book he has ever read, and though he denies it, it is the “blood” (i.e. inspiration, impulse, fervor) that drives him. The novel has him developing not by reasoning with others, but in separate interactions with people. You can see how it began as separate short stories.

Hazel wants to violate the codes he was brought up in. He wants to sin as much as he can, and he begins by cohabiting with a prostitute (Mrs Leora Watts) and soaking himself in sex. But, implicitly, this is to accept the very category of sin that he denies. He wants to argue with a blind and disfigured preacher called Asa Hawks, who “blinded himself for Jesus”, but he finds himself more involved with the preacher’s daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks, a scrawny teenager who is hungry for sex and wants to seduce him – and if he is at all attracted to her it is only because he wants to violate her virginity, another blow against the notion of sinfulness. He is sometimes pursued and pestered by a naïve, randy18-year-old called Enoch Emery, who is desperate for friendship and easily latches on to Hazel’s notion of there being nothing but materiality. Indeed, Enoch tries to prove the point to Hazel by gifting him a shrunken human body he has stolen from a museum – a body without a soul. (Another point made in passing – though the novels are very different, Hazel’s connection with naïve 18-year-old Enoch is very like Suttree’s connection with naïve 18-year-old Gene Harrogate in Suttree, and I can’t help feeling that Cormac McCarthy must have read Wise Blood at some time.)

As I read Wise Blood, I often feel I am marching through a minefield of symbols. I could tabulate some of them facilely thus:

Hazel wears a black hat which makes people repeatedly assume that he is a conventional preacher. This points to the fact that he cannot run away from his connection with the religion he denies. Hazel puts a lot of faith in a broken-down, unreliable second-hand car he has bought, and at one stage says that a man with a good car doesn’t need redemption. This suggests a shallow faith in technology and “progress” and their insufficiency as a substitute for religious belief. The shrunken human body Enoch brings to Hazel (and a separate episode concerning a fake ape) suggest what a human being without a soul would look like – merely a material thing. There’s the possibility that Hazel Motes’ name has symbolic significance. He walks in a “haze” of doubt or despair; and he could be one who, as the New Testament says, sees the “mote” in somebody else’s eyes while missing the “beam” in his own. As for the bright white cloud that hangs over Hazel and Sabbath Lily Hawks when she strives to seduce him, and the “tiny point of light” into which Hazel is transformed in the very last sentence of the novel – they are so pregnant with meaning that you can give each a couple of dozen symbolic interpretations.

In the midst of all this, though, Hazel Motes is obsessed, but is also distinguished by his integrity. He is trying to spread the truth as he understands it. His articulated creed is a totally materialist and empirical view of life, a soulless life, but he is honest enough with himself to know that this means “nothing” – nihilism – and a life without meaning. He is not a saint. Indeed (I will not go into the plot details) he becomes a murderer. But he has integrity. He is genuinely outraged by those who pretend to be what they are not – in other words, those who violate the idea of truth. He himself wants something absolute, concrete and clearly-defined. He is disgusted that the blind preacher Asa Hawks refuses to debate with him. In fact he taunts Hawks by saying that if Hawks were a real preacher he would try to convert him. His contempt grows when he discovers Asa Hawks is a fake anyway. Perhaps worse, there is the huckster Onnie Jay Holy, who presumes to offer Hazel tips on how to draw the crowds and who advises “If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.” (Chapter 9) Onnie Jay Holy sets up his own fake mission on the streets, rejoicing in the amount of money he is able to make. This is the temptation of commercialised religion, forebear of televangelists and other such horrors. It disgusts Hazel even more than real religion does because it is so obviously hypocritical – things said by people who don’t really believe them.

Where does all this lead in the arc of the story? Through various disillusionments with his own rebellious creed, it leads Hazel back to the very things he set out to reject. Mortification of the flesh (in the most extreme ways); a quiet and contemplative life which absolutely rejects materialism; an awareness that his life is not his own and is guided by something much bigger than himself; and, of course, to inevitable death.

Have I destroyed this novel for you by so neatly slicing-and-dicing its main ideas? I hope not. It was only when I read the novel’s last chapter (about Hazel’s dealing with his last landlady Mrs Flood) that I saw all the strands of its story being pulled together and a clear pattern emerging. For after my philosophical and religious breakdown of it, its chief effect as you actually read it is of the oddness of it; the Southernness of it; the bizarre, eccentric strangeness of it. In that respect it is “Southern Gothic”.

But for those who don’t see its religious pattern, the story is merely about a psychopathic, self-destructive loner. Years back, coming out of a Film Festival screening of John Huston’s very good film of the novel, I heard one viewer’s intepretation of it as being “just about a psycho.” Yes, you could see it as that if you interpret Hazel Motes as a psychiatric “case”. But it would be to miss the whole point that Flannery O’Connor was making.

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

 

In 1960, just a few years before her premature death from a congenital disease,

 there appeared Flannery O’Connor’s second, and last, novel The Violent Bear It Away. The geographical setting and the theological issues are simlar to those of Wise Blood, but the focus is quite different. While Wise Blood concerns a man trying fruitlessly to run away from God, The Violent Bear It Away stages a clash between fanatical religion and insufficient secularism – a clash resolved only by the grace of God.

As an infant, Francis Marion Tarwater (known simply as Tarwater in most of the novel) has been kidnapped by his crazed and fanatical great-uncle Mason Tarwater, a preacher and “prophet” who has spent time in a psychiatric hospital. They live in an an isolated shack in the backblocks, where Mason keeps Tarwater from any formal schooling, trains him to be a “prophet”, and tells him that his mission is to baptise the mentally-retarded son of his cousin, the heathen (i.e. agnostic) schoolteacher Rayber.  Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Tarwater comes to hate the religion in which he has been raised, and sees its promised rewards as a paltry thing:

 “In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life. Had the bush flamed for Moses, the sun stood still for Joshua, the lions turned aside before Daniel only to prophesy the bread of life? Jesus? He felt a terrible disappointment in that conclusion, a dread that it was true.” (Chapter 1)

And yet unschooled Tarwater is still saturated in that religion. Its hopes and fears are the only categories in which he can think, even as he rationally rejects them.

Tarwater is only fourteen years old when Mason dies. After disposing of his great-uncle’s corpse in a most un-Christian way, Tarwater heads out of the backblocks and into the city, looking to live with Rayber who is the only relative he knows. And here begins the novel’s battle of wills. Tarwater spits and blasphemes against the fundamentalist religion he has been taught, and Rayber clearly thinks he will be a good specimen for “conversion” to his own secular humanism. But Tarwater resists Rayber’s teachings as just another form of indoctrination which, the author implies, they really are. More bafflingly for Rayber, he himself sometimes feels the pull of religion – as in a scene where he finds himself at a pentecostal gathering, is rationally disgusted by the spectacle of a child having been trained to preach, and yet is drawn into what she preaches anyway.

Rayber’s assumption is that his calm reason will easily win over Tarwater, but Tarwater, 14-years-old, inarticulate and only semi-literate, intuits much that is wrong with Rayber’s views and is able to bat them away with uncouth but pithy arguments of his own.

The real catalyst in the novel is Rayber’s mentally-retarded son Bishop. To the utilitarian rationalist Rayber, Bishop serves no purpose. His logic says that the afflicted boy is just a thing, incapable of rational thought and therefore not really human. Indeed he is a disposable thing. Tarwater also resents Bishop because he has been given the “mission” of baptising him, which he refuses to do. Yet every time the adult Rayber and the adolescent Tarwater fiercely despise Bishop, they are thwarted by a totally irrational sense of responsbility and love. This violates Rayber’s anti-religious code of strict rationality: “If , without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him – powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.” (Chapter 4)

What Flannery O’Connor is dramatising is the irrational inbreaking of God’s grace. You are held in the hand of God whether you like it or not. The more you kick and protest, like an angry adolescent rebelling against a parent, the more firmly you are held. This has repercussions in what eventually happens with Tarwater’s “mission” to baptise the boy, and with Tarwater himself when his time with Rayber is over.

All brief synopses tidy up and simplify what a good novel is about. This is what I have done here. Once again, as with Wise Blood, this novel presents us with an impoverished and underdeveloped South, where the white characters routinely refer to blacks as “niggers” and where That Old Time Religion has a fearful hold. There are also moments of physical violence – old Mason Tarwater shoots at the welfare people who have come to get the boy he has kidnapped; there are two attempts in the novel to kill a child; and there is an (implied) rape.

Only one part of this novel originally appeared as a short story. Perhaps because of this genesis, The Violent Bear It Away seems to me a far more “finished” novel than Wise Blood. It certainly has a less episodic and more focused plot; one that winds back upon itself so that Flannery O’Connor can introduce anterior events credibly in characters’ thoughts. Like Wise Blood, it does expect readers to pick up its symbols, but there are not as many of them as there are in the earlier novel. In this case, we note that the rationalist Rayber wears a hearing aid, which he can turn off to total silence – which is what he does whenever the word of God challenges him (maybe an analogue for the “invincible ignorance” that Saint Paul mentioned). The voice that speaks in Tarwater’s mind could be the voice of secular rationalism – or of the Devil. Along with all the watery references to baptism, there is also a literal burning bush in the novel’s conclusion.

We have to wrestle with the novel’s title. Its epigraph is “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away.” This is a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 11:12) as rendered in the old Douay (Catholic) translation of the Bible. Among other things, this points to one very obvious fact which will probably already be known to most readers of this blog. Though writing about the Protestant fundamentalists who surrounded her, the Southerner Flannery O’Connor was, lifelong, a devout Catholic, and her tales take extreme forms of Protestant fundamentalism and interpret them in very Catholic ways, especially in the way grace is handled. As for the epigraph itself, it could be interpreted in many ways. Personally, I read it as saying that the “violent” are those who would wish to destroy the kingdom of God, and they are equally religious fanatics who distort the Christian message, and rational secularists who try to suppress the religious impulse even while feeling its reality.

As I said at the head of this review, Flannery O’Connor is better known by some readers for her short stories rather than for her two novels. They appear in two collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, which were posthumously gathered together as her Collected Stories, together with some stories she had discarded because she had already woven them into her novels. Now that I am renewing my acquaintance with her work, I may deal with her short stories in a later blog posting.