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.  

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART THREE

In my last two postings, I dealt with Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy comprising Maori Girl, Power of Joy, Maori Woman and The Glory and the Dream. My task now is to write about the one other novel he wrote, his short stories, and one remarkably naïve work of non-fiction – which might as well be regarded as fiction.

A Night at Green River was published in 1969, between the two halves of the tetralogy. It is in effect a very schematised parable. Two farmers live side by side in the far north of Northland. One is Maori, Tiwha Morris. The other is Pakeha, Clyde Hastings. Clyde Hastings wants to pay a gang to bring in his hay before the rain sets in. Tiwha Morris agrees to help him out by rounding up such a gang. But when Clyde leaves, Tiwha gets to thinking how much he hates the Pakeha cash nexus which reduces everything to money. So instead of helping Clyde out, he stays at home with his mates and they party and share warm fellowship. Meanwhile the rains do set in, Clyde’s hay is ruined and Clyde fumes and rages about how those lazy Maori have let him down… but then both Tiwha and Clyde have a good think. Tiwha thinks about the limitations of Pakeha culture. Clyde thinks about his frigid wife Edith [Warning ! Referring to women as “frigid” is now regarded as a male invention… but it is here in this novel.]  Clyde also thinks of a sordid sex episode in which some of his drinking companions gang-raped the wife of an invalid. Up to this point, the novel’s values are very much weighted against Pakeha. But a new element is introduced in the person of Tiwha’s friend Tu Nelson, who openly mistreats his very pregnant wife Martha. In the rain, Martha runs away from Tu and takes shelter with Clyde and his wife. The Hastings are beginning to look after Martha when a very drunk Tu bursts in with a rifle to reclaim her. Tu and Clyde fight violently and Tu is finally knocked-out. Clyde somehow feels revivified by this… at which point Martha’s baby begins to come… So Clyde and his wife Edith take Martha down to Tiwha’s house where, in the novel’s climax, the baby is delivered by Tiwha. The umbilical cord is cut by Tiwha in the traditional Maori way, with a pipi shell. And in the accepting atmosphere of life and family, Edith and Clyde begin to reshape their lives and values in terms of neighbourliness and acceptance. And Tu accepts his responsibility as a father.

Even more than the tetralogy (which this novel interrupted) this is very much a parable for Pakeha. Though Tiwha Morris is forced to realise that he has unjustly underrated the neighbouring Pakeha farmer and his willingness to help, the novel is weighted towards telling us that Pakeha are indeed cash-obsessed, class-conscious, sexually repressed (Clyde has never seen his wife naked) and patronising, and therefore much more in need of being taught a lesson than Maori are. At the same time, with the exception of belligerent Tu, the way the warm, familial life of Maori as presented here borders on caricature. In fact, given its first publication date, there’s something oddly retro in its depiction of the rural scene. Television is mentioned, so the story is obviously set in the 1960s, but Tu’s, Clyde’s and Tiwha’s most vivid memories are of serving in the Second World War (which ultimately makes a bond among them). There seems some self-conscious attempt at “balance” in the depiction of the races – we have Tu’s domestic violence balanced with Clyde’s memory of a sordid sexual episode. BUT Hilliard would have us to believe that a man who gets drunk, slaps his pregnant wife about and eventually chases after her with a rifle is going to blossom into a loving father once the child is born. Indeed Hilliard even has Clyde reflect that Tu’s violence towards his wife is a sign of how much he cares for her. Sheesh! The birth of a child, heralding the birth of a new understanding between Maori and Pakeha, is the kind of heavy symbolism in which Hilliard so often indulges. (And the names? Given that Tu is the god of war and Nelson was a warrior on the sea, the name Tu Nelson at once means somebody who fights.) The first half of the novel is more a static situation than a story, again heavily weighted with interior monologue and with Hilliard rarely failing to point a moral.

            One traumatic event and two cultures are suddenly bound in fellowship. Well, it would be nice to think that could happen.

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            Hilliard’s first collection of short-stories A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches was published in 1963. It is trite to say the obvious – that any collection of short stories will be a mixed bag, possibly ranging from the very good to the indifferent. Thus for A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. Many of its tales were previously published in magazines and journals, and the intended audience was apparently broad. Hilliard acknowledges that some stories were written for the old School Journal, which was read in the junior school classes. These are the last ten stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. They are headed “Bubby and Paikia” and concern two Maori kids living in a rural area and the various scrapes they get into or (more frequently) what they are taught by their elders or when they are taken on outings to places that they enjoy [and that Hillard presents somewhat idyllically]. They would surely make good reading for youngsters.

            The 14 stories that precede these, however, are more hard-headed and more clearly adult.

Of course to the fore are stories about tensions between Maori and Pakeha. The title story “A Piece of Land” has Maori landowners cheated out of owning some acres by complex Pakeha laws. “Young Gent, Quiet, Refined” has a young man turned away when he wants to rent a flat in the city, because he’s Maori. “Man on a Road”, which seems to be autobiographical, has the Pakeha narrator and his Maori wife Kiriwai meeting an old Maori man near the sea who gives a monologue about being dispossessed of his land by Pakeha farmers and holiday-makers building baches. “Erua” concerns a  Maori kid at primary school who admires a Pakeha teacher, but who becomes disillusioned when the teacher turns out to have many flaws. “Doing Pretty Well” is about a branch of the Samuel family (the family that the Maori Girl comes from) in which Kepa Samuel has done well in the Pakeha world as a farmer with a Pakeha wife, so he is embarrassed when his working-class brother Mutu visits him. Is Halliard suggesting that there is a loss of solidarity when Maori adopt Pakeha ways? Perhaps emphasising the ignorance of many Pakeha when it comes to country ways, Hilliard includes two stories about two Pakeha nitwits called Frank and Barry, “Looking the Part” and “Every Man to his Trade”, in which the boys get badly out of their depth. They read something like the “Me and Gus” stories from way-back-when.

Hilliard includes in this collection a number of light anecdotes about family habits when he was a child, or sketches of an old soldier or mean tricks played on a none-too-bright layabout. But the two stories that are most allied with his socialist views both have to do with the 1951 lockdown, that was still a raw memory when these stories were published. One was “New Unionist” about one of the “scabs” [non-unionised workers] who took over work on the wharves when the union workers were locked out. As Hilliard tells it, the soldiers who protect these “new unionists” really despised them. The story is, to say the least, didactic. [This was the story that Dennis McEldowney damned in Landfall as so bad it was “embarrassing”]. The other story, “Friday Nights are Best” has a unionist who has been thrown out of work in the lockdown and has to take up work is a rural area. At first he likes it as a break, but he soon can’t help wanting to go back to the city. It is interesting that Hilliard doesn’t address party-political factions in these two lockdown stories. Perhaps by this stage, while still being left-wing, he had become disenchanted with union politics and he had long since left behind him his two years as a member of the Communist Party.

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            Published in 1976, Hilliard’s second short-story collection Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches has some of the same preoccupations as A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches but there are some major differences. In the 25 stories, concern with Maori matters and racial prejudice is still there, but there is a much franker approach to the matter of sex. Perhaps what could be printed had moved on since 1963.

            On the interest in Maori situations, the story “Absconder” is a first-person monologue by a teenage Maori girl in which she makes it clear that she has been mistreated in Welfare custody. “The Girl from Kaeo” shows the gulf of misunderstanding between the official version of a Maori teenager’s delinquency and her own view of the same matters. “The Tree” demonstrates how a small Maori village removes a tree in the proper, traditional and ceremonial way to make way for some necessary Ministry of Works project. [Thinks – is this a reply to Roderick Finlayson’s better-known story “The Totara Tree”, wherein Maori block “progress”?] “Nothing But the Facts” has a Maori boy in a boarding school having to defend himself from potential blackmail. “Matilda” has a Maori girl falling foul of Pakeha ideas of ownership. “Puti Wants Beer” has Maori women sitting in a kitchen talking about their useless menfolk and contraception, but when the men return they realise how much they need them. “Wendy” has a Pakeha woman telling a teacher that she does not like her daughter playing with a Maori kid… not realising that the teacher is the Maori kid’s mother.

            These are all very familiar tropes from Hilliard’s earlier stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches, but what about the frank sex now found in Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches? “Corrective Training” has two girls in borstal who, it is implied, have a lesbian attraction. [Hilliard’s point  isn’t clear here. He seems to suggest that incarceration is the cause of homosexuality.] The brief sketch “Anita’s Eyes” is a description of a prostitute’s eyes. The title story “Send Somebody Nice” concerns a young prostitute who doesn’t know how not to be too affectionate with her clients… and in the end she escapes to Australia with one of her customers. “The Telegram” has a homosexual businessman sending a telegram to a soldier he has exploited and thinks of blackmailing him. “Girl in a Corner” shows a girl having an affair with a sailor and hovering on the edge of becoming a prostitute. In “At Angelo’s”, after a prostitute approaches a group of men in a late night diner, the men talk about how tacky whores are but also come to understand that prostitutes are exploited; and male customers are as much exploitative as the prostitutes’ pimps are. Far and away the most awkward and badly organised story in the collection is “Initiation” wherein a boy feels “unclean” when he goes through a rough boarding-school ritual after he has been with a prostitute.

            There are two stories that directly address ideology. “Street Meeting” concerns two Communist speakers on a Wellington street who are being heckled by various people including a drunk; and they are being watched by two policemen who, however, do not intervene. There is something very dispiriting about this story, as if the Communist orators are themselves beginning to lose heart in their cause, aware that most people are indifferent to their words as they go about their ordinary business. [Be it noted that by 1978, when the story was published, the New Zealand CP had diminished to a tiny membership, and had suffered a schism with some allying with Russia and some allying with China – which is referenced in the story.] The other story is the almost unbearably sentimental tale called “The Paper Sellers” – on one side of a Wellington street, a Communist is selling “The People’s Voice”. On the other side of a street a Catholic activist is selling “The Catholic Worker”… but despite their clashing beliefs, the Communist hawker comes to like the Catholic hawker, especially when he gets sick and dies. The Communist admits to himself that the other guy was just another decent human being and ideology isn’t everything. Okay – it’s a humane story and, as so often, Hilliard is on the side of the angels. But it’s as unlikely as the last-minute reformation of Tu at the end of A Night at Green River.

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And so to Hilliard’s “remarkably naïve work of non-fiction” which I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. This is Mahitahi – Work Together: Some Peoples of the Soviet Union, published in 1989 by Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Noel Hilliard and his wife Kiriwai went on a six-week tour through regions such as Uzbekistan, Moldavia and Byelorussia and other outlying parts of the U.S.S.R. Their aim was to see how well-treated the minority ethnicities in the Soviet state were. And - lo and behold – they discovered that everything was absolutely wonderful in the U.S.S.R. My goodness! How well it compared with all the anti-Maori prejudice there was in New Zealand!! …   Except that everything they were told was told by official guides who of course said that everything was wonderful. The Hilliards swallowed it. True, there are one or two negative things that Hilliard mentions. A Siberian physicist mentions the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and how Siberia got some of the fallout. And students are amazed that New Zealanders eat more meat that Russians can afford.

For naivete, consider this when Halliard speaks in a Russian newspaper editorial room. He tells the Russian journalists that in New Zealand “our newspaper are privately owned and have no obligations to the public, only to their shareholders.” Writing of the Russian journalists’ response he says they asked “How can such things be? they wanted to know. What kind of a newspaper is it that opposes your government and also the wishes of the people? Is it not their task to reflect the way your people think?      No, I said, their task is to return profits to the shareholder.” [To which they replied] “And who are these people who set themselves up in opposition to the majority of the people?” Yes folks, a one-party state with much gagging of independent thought will always tell the truth more that those filthy capitalist newspapers. And I believe the moon is made of green cheese.

Later, in Uzbekistan, Hilliard reports “I mentioned the Human Rights Commission in New Zealand and its Race Relations Office which looks into complaints about discrimination in housing and jobs and has power to prosecute offenders. ‘Do you have such a thing here?’    ‘No, we don’t have national chauvinism,’ said the professor. ‘We have national boasting and other such harmless forms. But we have no need of an institution such as you describe.” Actually this answer confirms what I thought of the U.S.S.R. It had no concept of Human Rights.

It is interesting that nowhere in this book is the name of Stalin mentioned as at this time his memory was out of favour. If Stalin had been mentioned, then one would have to admit that under his regime, hundreds of thousand [in fact probably millions] of non-Russian ethnicity were forcibly uprooted from their homelands and sent to distant – and usually impoverished – areas. Many such ethnicities whom Hilliard (briefly) visited were only where they were because Stalin had banished them there. You can verify this if you read Robert Conquest’s Stalin Breaker of Nations or any other reliable history book on the subject.

I could say more on this matter but I am beginning to rant. Suffice it to say that, ironically, the U.S.S.R. was on the brink of collapsing when Hilliard visited it. And once it collapsed there were wars in which various ethnicities broke away from Russian rule. So much for such happy folk under the Soviet regime whom Hilliard reported. Interesting to note that Hilliard was news chief of the Wellington Evening Post when he wrote this book. How he must have suffered under those shareholding private owners.

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            By this time you are probably thinking that I have just systematically trashed the work of Noel Hilliard. Not so. In his days and time he was a compassionate man who took seriously the matter of Pakeha discrimination against Maori and who wrote about it. He may have – like many of his vintage – for a while embraced the delusion that Communism was the cure, but [even if he wrote one silly book about Russia late in his life] he broke with that delusion even while remaining a committed socialist.

            The main problem now is that he has become a back-number. His frames of reference belong to another era. Maori are no longer a rural people rarely seen in cities. Maori no longer leave other people – non-Maori – to write about their experience. There are now many skilled Maori writers who can speak for themselves; and what they write is very different from what Hilliard used to write about them. Hilliard’s work is often seen now as patronising or perpetuating old stereotypes. When I wrote about Roderick Finlayson, I quoted the old quip “No good deed goes unpunished”, remembering how Finlayson, as sympathetic of Maori as Hilliard was, was criticised by the Maori author Patricia Grace for not depicting Maori life accurately. Hillard has fallen into the same category, not helped by his frequent tendency to write sentimentally about Nature, his often awkward prose, and his eagerness to point out morals.

            He is of another age. He belongs to history.

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.

                                              SOMETHING THOUGHTFUL

                                           THE COURTESY OF TRUCKIES    

Only occasionally on this blog have I made comments about how New Zealanders drive their cars. [See the posting Suburban Dodgems.]  But recently I’ve become more and more annoyed – even angered – by the way some irresponsible people drive.

On very many journeys, I have driven around most of the North Island and a good deal of the South Island. On the open highways, most drivers drive fairly well. There is the odd road hog who wants to overtake as many cars as possible, regardless of how dangerous some overtaking at speed can be. There is also the odd very slow driver who inconveniences the traffic behind him by refusing to move over to the many passing lanes that are provided. Yes, statistics show that there have been many fatal crashes on the open roads, but personally I have witnessed only one or two in my years of driving.

For me, the problem comes when we are dealing with the multi-lane motorways. Most motorways give the speed-limit as 100kph (though some, like the Hamilton Freeway, give it as 110kph). Some people take this to mean that they have to drive at 100kph, as if it is an obligatory speed. But the fact is that the very existence of multi-lanes means one can move over and drive in the outer lanes… which is what I tend to do, happily cruising at about 80kph unless it is absolutely necessary to speed up a little more. And as I drive I see cars zipping along past me – mostly safely. But I also see frequently certifiable fools weaving their way at top speed through traffic, dodging in and out between other cars that are already going at top speed. What is the purpose of this? It’s possible that a few (a very few) have a legitimate reason for speeding. Maybe they have an urgent appointment to meet. Maybe they have some domestic crisis to deal with. But the odds are that the dangerous dodgers and weavers are just speeding for the fun of it, showing off how they can overtake others. The most dangerous drivers – the ones most likely to crash – are young men between teenager-age and mid-twenties. Again, this is shown in statistics. And young men are prone to showing off in their cars. Apart from fining more severely those who exceed the speed limit, I can see no solution to this problem. The last government we had suggested that all speed-limits should be lowered, but the incoming government has scrapped the very idea of this. So dangerous driving and many crashes will persist.

Which brings me to truckies. In my experience, truck-drivers are more courteous on the roads than most drivers are. I have never seen a truck-driver NOT using the passing lane when his truck is trundling up a hill. Truck-drivers are not road hogs. They are aware that they are carrying cargo that has to be protected and brought safely to its destination.  Truckies manoeuvre carefully, wave cars on when they have to move over, and do not speed any more than they really have to. In spite of all the stereotypes of truckies, they are better and more skilled than menaces who want to speed just for the hell of it.

 

Something New

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

“MY BRILLIANT SISTER” by Amy Brown (Scribner, $NZ 37.99); “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph, $NZ42 ); “THE VANISHING POINT” by Andrea Hotere (Ultimo Press $NZ38)

            Amy Brown, New Zealander now resident in Melbourne, has published poetry and stories for children over the last decade or so. My Brilliant Sister is her first novel for adults and it is a formidable, complex piece of work. The novel comprises three separate stories about three separate women, but linked with the same themes: how difficult, if not impossible, is it for women to sustain a career, or be creative, if they have to do all the domestic work and raise children? Or conversely, how easily can women sustain friendships (or love) when they are focussed on a career?  This is clearly a feminist novel, often referring to the fact that women usually have to do all the heavy-lifting of cleaning and raising children while their male spouses or partners can simply stand back and pursue their interests. Each of the three women tells her story in the first person.

            Ida (the first third of the novel) is a New Zealander living in Melbourne. She is not married formally, though we are told that she and her man had a jokey “celebration” in Wellington when they decided to live together. They have a four-year-old daughter called Aster. Ida feels thwarted. Her partner is an academic university lecturer who hides himself in his study and absorbs himself in his writing, getting ahead with his career. Ida believes she too could have had an academic career as she did well at university; but she wasn’t awarded scholarships and instead teaches at high-school. Ida has to look after Aster, take her to and from care places, make breakfast, lunch and dinner, do the cleaning… and teach high-school. Like her partner she wants to write, but where is the time? In the background of this story is the Covid pandemic. At high-school Ida gets 17-year-old girls to read the classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career,  published in 1901, written by Stella Miles Franklin [full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, but published under the name Miles Franklin, as in 1901 it was still believed by some publishers that books would sell better if they appeared under masculine-sounding names]. Stella Miles Franklin was a free-wheeling, unconventional woman who turned down a proposal of marriage, never married, and got on with her writing… under many different pseudonyms.  Struck down with pneumonia, Ida, bed-ridden, reads all she can about Stella Miles Franklin, and learns that Stella had a younger sister, Linda, who married when Stella did not, had a baby and died when she was only 25. Linda lived a conventional life, did all the household chores, but also sometimes showed a desire to produce works of her own. She frequently wrote to Stella. This leads Ada to consider what it would be like for women who have literary or other artistic aspirations but are never able to achieve them… which could be her own fate.        

The second section of the novel is therefore told by Linda Franklin, in rural Australia in the 1890s and very early 1900s, round about the time when Australian women won the franchise. In the first person, Linda writes letters to her older sister or addresses Stella directly in a free-flowing monologue. Linda remembers Stella’s boisterous adolescence, her tendency to dominate Linda, and the way she brushed aside both an offer of marriage and the stories Linda tried to tell when Stella was concocting her own plots. Linda marries, is domesticated and has a child, but there is a tension in her thoughts. She likes her husband, she loves her child (who dies young), but she still feels she has not been given the chance to fully express herself in writing, about which she dreams. Stella Miles Franklin becomes famous when she is only 21 and her My Brilliant Career is first published. For Linda, Stella becomes “my brilliant sister”. She envies her sister and she dislikes the way Stella often belittles as trivia things that are important to Linda. And, of course, Linda dies too young to show what she could have achieved.

While this second section reinforces the theme Amy Brown began with, the third section of My Brilliant Sister is more ambiguous. The time is the [almost] present. Another Stella is a very successful rock star in New Zealand, a singer-songwriter and guitarist who attracts large audiences to her gigs. Her stage name is Stella Miles Franklin. Stella sees no point in marriage.  Stella has fallen in lesbian love with another musician, but apparently her love is not returned. She often leans on her mother for conversation but, at the age of 36, she’s beginning to wonder if her musical days are fading away. Has she reached her peak? She talks with Linda, a friend since schooldays, who is married and has three children; but much as she likes her friend, she knows that is not the life she wants. As a celebrity, she is invited to speak at her old high school but, as she narrates it, what she says is barely coherent. She ends up fantasising about having the double or sister she never had – somebody she could relate closely with.

There are many ideas crammed into this section of the novel, but surely one of them is that having a “brilliant career” does not necessarily mean either happiness or fulfilment. There is always competition. There is always the possibility that focusing on achieving something can make it difficult to foster intimate relationships with others. The achiever can morph into a loner and loneliness will reign. Read as I have read it, this third part of the novel is more dour and depressing even than the experiences of Ada and Linda Franklin… or perhaps Amy Brown is signalling that being truly creative is always a hard road.

Taken as a whole, My Brilliant Sister is a complex and thoughtful account of the relationship of the sexes, as well as the difficulty of finding room for creativity. For this reader at any rate, the most persuasive of the novel’s three sections is the opening one, the one that sounds most authentic. Brown charts carefully, moment by moment, the small things that stack up, forcing Ida to see herself as almost trapped and unable to fulfil herself. I can’t help wondering if it is at least in part based on the author’s own experience. [The very unfashionable three-letter name Ida might chime with the author’s three-letter name Amy.] The second section, set in the New South Wales of the 1890s, is almost as persuasive. Brown has certainly done her research. The social classes of the time, the poverty that the Franklin family fall into when they lose their farm, the sharp difference between Linda’s home experience and Stella’s boarding-school experience, the snobbery of some of the horsey-riding clan – it is all readable and all real. I would only fault (me being a nit-picking person) a few moments when narrating Linda, recalling what she said as a ten-year-old, seems to use a vocabulary far beyond her age.

This is an important novel, though I would understand if some readers saw it as very depressing.

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It’s been calculated that about 300 books concerning Thomas Edward Lawrence “of Arabia” have been published, and they keep coming. Readers of this blog may be aware that some time back I wrote a detailed critique of Lawrence’s autobiography of his years in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom ,highly praised in its day but now subject of much criticism. And I found much in it to criticise. I also reviewed Richard Aldington’s Lawrence ofArabia – A Biographical Enquiry, published in the 1950s and the first detailed attempt to debunk the Lawrence legend. Aldington was shouted down at the time, but later research has proven that much of what he wrote has turned out to be accurate. The problem was that Aldington tended to be dogmatic and refused to see any good in Lawrence. I could see that, even if Lawrence did not achieve as much as he claimed to have done, there was something extraordinary in a short-sized English officer being able to gain the trust of Arabs and become one of their leaders – especially as Lawrence was only in his twenties at the time. So you can see I’m undecided about Lawrence. He was partly charismatic leader of the Arab tribes and partly self-aggrandising charlatan.

            Ranulph Fiennes’ Lawrence of Arabia is the latest attempt to crack the Lawrence enigma. Fiennes has written many non-fictions, usually polishing up the tales of British heroes like Captain Scott and Shackleton. Fiennes has also done much travelling. The blurb tells me that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Fiennes is “the world’s greatest living explorer”. Most pertinent, however, is the fact the Fiennes has been a soldier and commander of men in situations of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. In the 1960s he fought for the Sultan of Omar in putting down the Dhofar Rebellion. This was in a desert country and Fiennes sees himself as having acted very much as Lawrence did in a similar environment.

            In his introduction, Fiennes describes Lawrence’s work in Arabia as “one of the most awe-inspiring stories of all time… a young British officer set the desert on fire and emblazoned his name in the pages of history.” Against this hyperbole, all I can say is “Strewth!” Fiennes identifies himself with Lawrence. Every so often, Fiennes breaks off his narrative of Lawrence of Arabia to interpolate tales of his days in Oman. When he tells the well-known story of Lawrence shooting an Arab to prevent a blood feud, he tells us that he himself knew how unpleasant he felt when he had to shoot a man. When we are told of some successful strategy Lawrence used,  Fiennes tells us of something similar he did. I can see easily how this might annoy some readers.

            Having read other texts about Lawrence, I question at least some of the statements Fiennes makes. He presents the taking of port of Wejh as one of Lawrence’s great triumphs when others have reported that Wejh was taken mainly by the Royal Navy, with Lawrence turning up after most of the action was over. More questionably, Fiennes says that Lawrence knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement – the plan to divide up Arabia between the English and the French - until the very last moment and only then did he become disillusioned with his hope to free the Arabs. The hard fact is that Lawrence was fully aware of this secret pact almost as soon as it was hatched.

            In fairness, though, I have to admit that, despite the interpolations about himself, Fiennes tells a good story and makes the campaigns of Lawrence understandable. As Lawrence told of them in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they were often confusing and complex. Fiennes turns them into a good yarn. Also, note that he takes on board some of the things that Aldington was abused for noting in the 1950s – among other things that Lawrence was essentially homosexual with a tendency for sadomasochism. Fiennes admits that Lawrence had his flaws, and that his supposed aim to create a unified Arab country never came to fruition. Indeed what Lawrence left behind him was a mess of rival Arab tribes vying for dominance. In the end his achievement was very little. In spite of which, as told by Fiennes, Lawrence of Arabia bounces along with its skirmish scenes, de-railing of trains and other matters of derring-do which will give great pleasure to those who like the genre of outdoor muscular adventure – truthful or otherwise.

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I have to admit that I took some time getting around to reading Andrea Hotere’s The Vanishing Point, which was published last year. My holidays drew me off to other interests.

 The Vanishing Point is centred on a very famous work of art. Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting), painted in Madrid in 1656, has been examined, quarrelled over by experts, admired by art critics, inspired other painters (Picasso et al) and widely loved by the general public more than nearly any other painting except perhaps the Mona Lisa. I admit to standing gazing at it for a long time while visiting the Prado a few years back. It does cast a certain spell. What gets you is the way Velasquez, painting a group of the royal Spanish court, presents them in unexpected places, including himself staring at us from his easel as if he is painting us, the viewers, and not the royal gathering. There is also the unexpected cluster around the little princess, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, with not only two ladies-in-waiting about her, but the two dwarves and the mastiff and more dimly-depicted people behind them. And why are the king (Philip IV) and the queen shown only in a small painting on the far wall… or is it a mirror showing part of what Velasquez is painting? And, at the painting’s vanishing point, who is that man going out the far door?

It is, I believe, the complexity of this work of art and Velasquez’s daring in breaking with tradition that make Las Meninas the masterpiece it is. He defied the standard convention of presenting royalty in stiff, lined-up poses. We admire Las Meninas and ponder over it for purely aesthetic reasons.

            But Andrea Hotere is not really focused on aesthetics. She is focused on a conspiracy. Basic plot: in the late 20^th century two young woman, interested in art, try to unravel the “secret” behind Las Meninas and what is hidden in it.  There is a “curse” hanging over King Philip IV and his offspring, and apparently a scandal involving the king himself … and it transpires that there’s a sinister group, something like the Spanish version of the fabled  “Illuminati”, that tries fanatically to cover things up. Hotere’s narrative moves between 17^th century Spain and late 20^th century London and Spain. And apparently in the 20^th century there are still people trying to eliminate those who get too near to unravelling the hidden codes of Velasquez’s masterwork.

            Let’s make some fair points: Andrea Hotere has done a great deal a research, knows much of the reality of 17^th century Spain, and conveys it to us, usually in the form of conversations between characters to enlighten us... which can sometimes sound artificial. She is also aware that the “curse” that fell upon the whole Hapsburg dynasty was not some supernatural spell or demonic damnation. It was simply genetic. The Hapsburgs were very in-bred, leading among other things to the notorious and unsightly “Hapsburg Jaw”; and the king who followed Philip IV was the pitiful King Carlos who was virtually a drivelling idiot. [Years ago I read on this subject a book called Carlos the Bewitched, which is what the poor fellow was nicknamed at the time.] Yet it is not really this “curse” that is Andrea Hotere’s main interest. She is more concerned with that man going out the door of the “vanishing point” and all he might have done with regard to the scandal involving the king.

            The Vanishing Point is an easy read, though for all the author’s genuine erudition it does seem to be following the likes of The Girl with a Pearl Earing. However, given that Hotere is genuinely very well informed about 17th century Spain, she is miles ahead of the type of unhistorical drivel Dan Brown produced with his The Da Vinci Code.  The Vanishing Point is a great read if you like conspiracy theories. 

 

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.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART TWO

 

[Last posting I dealt with the first two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy, Maori Girl and Power of Joy. This posting I deal with the concluding two novels of the tetralogy. ]

Maori Woman (first published in 1974) brings Netta Samuel together with Paul Bennett. Once again, Hilliard presents his novel in four parts. And once again he begins each part with a Biblical quotation.

Part One : Netta Samuel now works as a machinist in a Wellington clothing factory. She was devastated when she had to give up her baby Victoria (“Vicki”) for adoption to a Pakeha couple. She is now living with Jason Pine, a Maori labourer who has spent time in jail for his violent criminal activities including rape. Jason has had a life of dodging or coping with Pakeha prejudices. He also has a strong sexual appetite and (unknown by Netta) he is cheating on Netta with a Pakeha girl. Paul Bennett, as he determined at the end of Power of Joy, has approached Netta and had tea with her after first accosting her at the railway station. He has asked her to phone him - but she will not give him her name. At the clothing factory, Netta’s boss is the Pakeha Henry Rushbury. He has decided views on the disruptive powers of attractive young Maori. They are a distraction for the male workers. He also seems to be bored with his own marriage.  Part One ends with Paul Bennett lifted out of his gloom when Neta does phone him.

Part Two: Netta’s Pakeha boss Henry Rushbury takes more than a passing interest in Netta… indeed he daydreams about her while at a symphony concert [Hilliard presents classical music as something for snobs who only attend to boost their own prestige.] Netta meanwhile accepts at the factory the friendship of a rather neurotic English girl called Sharon Burt, who claims she’s going to marry a Maori called Richard. Only later do we learn that Sharon is in fact the Pakeha girl with whom Jason Pine is cheating. The friendship of Paul and Netta develops. They meet a number of times and exchange stories of their childhood, but she does not as yet trust him with her address or the details of her life. Finally, balancing up Jason and Paul in her mind, she decides to commit herself to Paul. At about the same time, Jason is gathering together all the rage and resentment he feels about Pakeha society. This culminates when he sexually humiliates Sharon at a Pakeha party they attend. He knows trouble will soon find him and he decides to leave town. This is the same night that Netta and Paul decide to live together.

Part Three : Travelling back to the country, Paul meets Jason, fresh out of prison, who berates him for his Pakeha ignorance of Maori ways. Aggressively he attacks Paul’s patronising attitude. Netta returns to her family, wrenched by the fact that she is not able to tell them about the mokopuna she has given up for adoption. Her father (without speaking out loud) laments the poor living he is able to scratch out of his farm than the Pakeha have taken away the best land. And yet in prayer and celebration, Netta’s is a warm homecoming to a real family. In contrast, Paul’s is a solitary homecoming. Isolated, he wanders among the trees, alienated, looking at the way industry has wrecked the countryside. Visiting the overgrown, run-down marae he wonders how this could be the centre of a social life. As for Jason’s homecoming, he is completely alienated from the old ways… and later he defaces a sign that prohibits the taking of shellfish. He despises his family for clinging to tradition and determines to go back to the city. And back in the Wellington factory, the boss Henry Rushbury is having lustful thoughts about Netta, especially as his wife keeps nagging him about how he should be more assertive with his employees. Netta tells her family that she is going to marry the Pakeha Paul. There is some consternation about this, but her family generally accepts her decision. In contrast, when Paul tells his parents that he's going to marry a Maori woman, there is barely-suppressed racism. Paul’s mother is tight-lipped and his father gives a full-on racist lecture. Paul consults an Anglican vicar about his family’s attitude. The vicar is understanding and says it is Paul’s family that must change; but Paul comes away feeling that he should not have attempted to rely on a church he no longer believes in. He tries, without great success, to make peace with his mother. Netta visits the neighbours of the Matiti area and once again sees how run-down and backward the area is. In a way, she has become more acclimatised to the city than she realises… yet, even though she now finds be inadequate and limited the house she grew up, she is bullied by her father to agree she will stay there. Part Three closes with Paul reading a letter sent by the vicar saying Paul shouldn’t have any fear in marrying with the church’s support.

Part Four : When Netta returns to her factory job, Henry Rushbury plans to seduce her. He has erotic fantasies in which he controls Netta. Meanwhile the unhappy English girl Sharon Burt tells Netta how she has been slapped around by her boyfriend Richard and how she is now pregnant – and Netta knows that she is really talking about Jason Pine. Meanwhile, as Paul sleeps with Netta, he becomes curious and jealous about the man she still lives with; and she explains how this unnamed man is in trouble and needs her. Not too much later however, Netta tells Jason that she is leaving him for a Pakeha man. In return, Jason lectures her on how she will lose all her Maoriness. Finally Paul comes to Netta’s place while Jason is there – and he recognises the man with whom he had an argument in the country some weeks earlier. In a rage, Jason stabs Netta… and the novel ends with Henry Rushbury reading a newspaper report of Netta’s critical condition. He says “Thank God!”, which is presumably his sense of relief that he just missed getting involved with her.

At which point you are very annoyed with me because all I have given you of Maori Woman is an over-long synopsis. So let me give a little critique. This third novel in the tetralogy – the one in which Netta and Paul are brought together – is the most schematic and didactic of the series. Like Power of Joy, it is weighted down with interior monologue – though this time from many different characters – which tends to explain themes rather than dramatizing them. There is often the sense, too, that the thoughts of all the main characters (Netta, Paul, Jason and Henry) are too self-aware and too articulate. For the same reason, much of the dialogue has a stilted theatrical feel. Hilliard is clearly exploring racial attitudes, condemning Pakeha prejudice and (in the character of Jason Pine) showing how resentment at such prejudice can lead some Maori to criminality. Hilliard overtly criticises Pakeha stereotyped ideas of Maori life; but sometimes Hilliard comes close to repeating such stereotypes – Maori with a strong sense of community, spirituality and family in spite of poverty. Meanwhile Pakeha are individualistic, alienated, materialistic and sexually repressed. This is most obvious in the contrast between Netta’s homecoming and Paul’s homecoming when they tell their respective families that they are going to marry. The novel’s admonitory, fable-like quality surfaces again when Jason’s frustration and anger with Netta results in criminal violence… whereas Henry Rushbury’s perverse thoughts die in respectable silence. What other agenda is there here? Hilliard has of course written a socially-aware novel, and in the factory scenes he introduces comments about materials, about piece-work and bonuses and capitalist exploitation. He also arraigns European “high culture” in Henry Rushbury’s thoughts while listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with Hilliard suggesting that it is not really relevant to New Zealand… a bit like Paul having to cast aside his Wordsworthian-ism in Power of Joy. The church, however, in the figure of the vicar, is presented more-or-less positively.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

            The last book of the tetralogy The Glory and the Dream was first published in 1978.  Like all books of the tetralogy, The Glory and the Dream is divided into four parts.

Part One opens when Netta and Paul have been married for about a year and they have moved out of the city and into the country. They have a baby daughter called Huia and Paul is working at a paper mill. This first part is framed by a picnic they go on, where Paul thinks back to how his parents ignored them after their registry office wedding, but how Netta’s family welcomed them even though her father still harped on the unfairness of Pakeha taking Maori land. Paul also remembers going on a fishing expedition with Netta’s brother Mutu. Heavy symbolism appears everywhere. In the opening pages Paul and Netta, in their vegetable garden, are deliberately nurturing new plant life… and travelling on a boat to the picnic with Netta and baby Huia, there’s the symbolism of a fragile craft adrift in new waters… like the marriage of Maori and Pakeha. Paul remembers Christmas celebrations and the meal with Netta’s family the previous year, and how he, unused to such food, threw up at the rotten corn. He remembers the New Year’s hangi and the rain… And how Netta showed him her former home and its ways and how he is not fully centred there. Part One ends with him, after the picnic, having sunburn so easily because he has a different sort of skin from his wife… more symbolism and certainly much inner monologue.

In Part Two small matters of adjustment in their marriage are outlined. They collectively become a great matter. She doesn’t see the value of reading books. He does. She has a different attitude to money from his. She goes to church. He doesn’t. She is horrified that he still won’t introduce her to his family, as she believes a marriage should be two families coming together. He criticises her standard of tidiness in housekeeping. There is a grisly incident when he introduces her to a snobbish Pakeha couple who pick apart her name as a problem in linguistics. They go to the funeral of somebody in the same firm as Paul, and she is appalled at how empty of feeling a Pakeha funeral is. They talk about her feelings considering God, and in a long-night conversation she talks about the Maori heritage their children will have. Often he proposes to her the idea that they are a couple above race; but she says such an idea is a delusion. Paul feels how different he is from her relatives when they come to call and he feeds himself while they continue to drink beer until they get some fish and chips. They discuss a pornographic comic Paul brings home from his work, and at her insistence he burns it. They argue about his patronising Pakeha friends trying to change her Maori ways, and about how she doesn’t value money or savings. They have another major disagreement over how Huia is to be brought up – Maori values or Pakeha ones – and she tries to define her morality and concepts of moral good. She tells him about her sense of God – and about something she is missing. She has not told him of the child she adopted out – she claims that her first child died. She is indifferent to politics. He doesn’t believe in in omens. She does.

Part Three: The weather changes. Paul feels sick and irritable being on the night shift at the paper mill. There is a long description here of conditions at the paper mill and the discontent of the workers with the owners. Paul and Netta have long conversations about the merits of classical music and about the pressures placed on him at work. He wonders why she has no ambition and never suggests he should go further than his boring job. He begins to imagine that she is cheating on him because he does the night-shift when anybody could be entering their home… and to escape these negative thoughts, he reverts to adolescence and tries to immerse himself in nature once again. But when he returns home his suspicions are renewed. When Netta is out one morning, he rifles through her belongings looking for evidence of her infidelity. He finds a letter from her adopted-out daughter but does not understand its significance and imagines it’s only from a niece in her extended family. However he finds a paperback that used to belong to a ship’s library. His mind goes back to his days in Wellington and he wonders in raging jealousy if Netta was once a “ship girl”. He suffers what almost amounts to a nervous breakdown, with thoughts of revenge on Netta and her supposed lover… and finally Netta reveals the existence of her adopted-out daughter Vicki… and Paul at last realises what her behaviour has meant over all these years and he is filled with shame. He has simply not understood what a burden she has carried in having to keep some of her past secret.

Part Four. This part opens with two-and-a-half pages of Nature-coming-to-life imagery. Paul has adjusted to his life with Netta – he is resigned to it. Netta gives him as a present The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with its advice of not becoming obsessed with the foolish and the ignorant… and on the next page Paul’s parents at last visit them. There is mutual awkwardness, but Paul’s father now offers Paul his farm and says it’s what he went to war for… after all, any farmer wants to pass on his farm to his son. After his parents have gone, Paul begins to accept his father’s offer… and the novel ends with life burgeoning as Netta says she is pregnant again.

Okay. Okay. I’m not responsible for the fairy-tale ending and I have delivered you another over-long synopsis. But bear with me in a sort of critique. Hilliard’s fatal weaknesses are at their worst in The Glory and the Dream. Hilliard constantly tells us without showing us. On page after page he rushes in to point a moral rather than dramatising events. Once again, a good deal of the text is taken up with interior monologue and rumination, nearly always Paul’s and very rarely Netta’s. We are, even more than in the preceding three novels, getting the Pakeha male’s view of cultural clash and race relations. This would be unexceptional except that there are long sections where Paul’s conversations with Netta seem to be little more than his asking questions about her values and beliefs – a stark and really undramatised contrast of Maori and Pakeha values. Worse, the symbolic imagery (or pathetic fallacy) gets out of hand, with Nature ready to tell us about life regenerating etc. etc.

Is there a trace in this novel of the Marxism that at one stage Hilliard embraced? In the choice of subject and social attitudes, there may be some moments of socialist inspiration, especially when we have Paul in the paper mill considering the alienation of the workers. Also (in a timber-milling town) there is some imagery about the rape of nature.  But little of this is really seen in a socialist perspective.  Attitudes to work and ideas of alienation are more the sins of Western civilisation than specifically the fault of capitalism. In one sense, then, this novel takes race to be a more determinant factor than class.

To go back to what I said in introducing Hilliard’s work, I believe he wrote with “the best of intentions”. He really did seek a more equitable New Zealand and he certainly wanted greater respect for the Maori people. He did have not only a Maori wife, but also many admiring Maori friends. These are things to be applauded. But, good intentions apart, what he offered sometimes were themselves stereotypes and much of what he wrote now seems oddly patronising. Certainly (and this is not his fault) his depiction of Maori is not as raw and knowing as the work of the many Maori writers who have appeared in the last 40 or 50 years.

And then there are all the problems with his prose style. I was able to access some of the original reviews in “Landfall” of Hilliard’s work, and the reviews were often negative. In “Landfall 57 – March 1961” Paul Day blasted Maori Girl as “not a satisfactory novel because of the thinness of its characters’ emotional life… Mr. Hilliard… has fallen between two stools of reporting and imaginative creation…” In “Landfall 129 March 1979”  Patricia Glensor ripped The Glory and the Dream apart, attacking the whole of Hilliard’s tetralogy as a cliché-ridden unrealistic novel written too often in sub-Wordsworthian prose and perpetuating the very racist concepts Hilliard set out to demolish. She says he creates the “happy-go-lucky Hori and the neurotic, nit-picking Pakeha”. And between these reviews, Dennis McEldowney in 1963 damned one of Hilliard’s short stories as so bad it was “embarrassing”; and R.A. Copland, in 1969, biffed at Hilliard’s A Night at Green River [the novel that interrupted the tetralogy] as sheer didacticism. In “Landfall 113 March 1975”, H.Winston Rhodes praised Hilliard’s social realism in Maori Woman but had to admit the “inadequacy” of Hilliard’s narrative technique.

Not that critics are always right, of course (not even the one you are now reading). But it does seem that Noel Hilliard had a hard ride even in his heyday, and his stock has fallen even further now

 [Two novels by Hilliard, his short stories and one odd book will conclude my examination of Hilliard’s work in my next posting]

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.  

                               PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER

It was almost a ritual in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was a little kiddie slightly on my way to teenager-dom. Dad would turn on the radio in our living room at the appropriate time and we’d listen to My Word. What a witty BBC programme it was. Two women (most often Nancy Spain and Anne Scott-James) would answer questions about the meaning of obscure words. Then they were asked to say where certain chosen literary quotations came from. After this, the witty script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden would take over. (Muir and Norden had become well-known for scripting the 1950s comedy show Take It From Here with “The Glums” and other broad jokery). They would be asked to concoct outlandish stories about how these quotations came about. What they came up with were long, funny anecdotes, always ending with outrageous puns. Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes were the highlight of the show and the thing most quoted and laughed about when each episode was remembered.

                                           Muir and Norden in their prime
 

I remember my father puffing on his pipe and congratulating himself on the number of literary quotations he was able to identify before the panel on the radio had identified them. This seemed to little me the epitome of sophisticated wit. My Word [I have this from Wikipedia] was broadcast from 1956 to 1967, and was then continued in a modified form from 1967 to 1988, but by that time television had invaded New Zealand and we no longer listened regularly to the show or to much spoken radio in general. I treasured my vague memories of My Word (which was followed by the rather more tepid My Music) and continued to think it was sophisticated highbrow entertainment.

Then, beginning last year, disaster struck. The BBC allowed recordings of My Word to be played on line. I sat down at my computer, found the right programme, and waited for a deluge of witticism. Alas, it didn’t happen. I discovered that, as often as not, the show’s moderator Jack Longland had to help out the panel when it came to defining recherche words or identifying literary quotations. They were not so erudite after all. Worse, I found Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes to be over-long and ending with such contorted puns that they barely made sense, or barely fitted the quotation they were guying [There’s a word you don’t hear often now!]. There was the occasional funny quip, the occasional pun that hit the spot, but it now seemed awfully twee, dated and a little too cosy – middle-class English people patting themselves on the back. I regret to say I had also heard rumours [true or untrue I know not] that in fact Muir’s and Norden’s punning anecdotes were scripted and rehearsed well before the live-show went on air. Perhaps they were not spontaneous.

I feel caddish about writing all this, but it was another proof that certain types of humour don’t fully weather the test of time. I think back to other BBC radio comedies we enjoyed when I was a kid. There was Beyond Our Ken (broadcast from 1958 to 1964) and its successor Round the Horne (1965 to 1968) wherein the unflappable, strait, avuncular and congenial Kenneth Horne dealt with the likes of loud-voiced Betty Marsden and the multi-voiced Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who could mimic many characters but who were best known for their camp performance as Julian and Sandy. When I got to university, I often heard fellow-students saying they despised the Julian and Sandy characters, because they were a cruel stereotype of homosexual men at a time when gay guys were often discriminated against. But the reality was that, in real life, both Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were homosexual, they enjoyed playing their camp roles, and they are now often cited as pioneers in putting gayness to the fore on the media and making the wider public aware of the cant Polare language. Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne were good fun at the time but, when now heard [also available on line], they are repetitive and very dated.

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams laugh uproariously, encouraging Kenneth Horne and Betty Marsden in Round the Horne.
 

And the same is true of another 1960s BBC radio comedy I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which was slightly more aligned to a younger audience. Its cast mainly came from Cambridge university, including Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graeme Garden, David Hatch, Jo Kendall (the only woman in the show and much under-used) and Bill Oddie. Funny that at the time it seemed a sparkling new sort of comedy with all its university wit – my brother and I listened to it devotedly – and yet now it seems just another collection of funny voices, old-fashioned puns, predictable stereotypes and jokes that came from Joe Miller.

The clever kids from Cambridge, Tim Brooke-Taylor, David Hatch, Jo Kendall, Bill Oddie and the towering John Cleese.
 

Oh dear! What a sour puss I am. But the hard reality is that comedy does date and can date badly.  Some time ago on this blog, I made a similar case in a piece called The Flies Crawled Up the Window. There is much comedy that has survived through long ages. There is some patter that is still funny [check the best of the Marx Brothers – though they too had their duds]. Sometimes I’m inclined to think the most enduring comedy is pure slapstick as practised by silent comics such as Max Linder, Keaton [the very best of them], Chaplin and Lloyd. But the thing is that, on the whole, their comedy wasn’t topical and therefore could remain jocular.

But where old BBC radio comedy shows are involved truly, as Bill Shakespeare said in Twelfth Night present mirth hath present laughter… but only in the present.