Something New

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

“GIVE YOUR THOUGHTS LIFE–William Colenso’s Letters to the Editor ”, compiled and edited by Ian St George (Otago University Press, $65)

It’s a rare thing to find myself, two weeks in succession, dealing with books about the same man, but such is the case now.

Last week I featured Peter Wells’ The Hungry Heart, his idiosyncratic book (not really a full biography) of reflections and interpretations of the life of William Colenso. It is driven very much by Wells’ own interests and it centres on psycho-sexual matters relating to the disintegration of Colenso’s marriage and the nature (at least as Peter Wells sees it) of Colenso’s private life.

This week, by coincidence, I find myself reviewing a capacious collection of William Colenso’s letters to the press. I have taken some weeks to read this big book. It is 500 large and closely-printed pages of nineteenth-century controversial prose. Its 51-year span is from letters written in 1847, when Colenso was 36, to letters written in 1898, one year before Colenso’s  death at the age of 88. The letters are arranged into five sections, roughly corresponding to each decade of Colenso’s public letter-writing. Each section is preceded by a bare chronology of Colenso’s life omitting, I can’t help noting, the private matters that so concern Peter Wells. Collectively, these letters create a very different impression of the man from the one given by Peter Wells.

In Give Your Thoughts Life we see the public figure, the man communicating with his community, and not Colenso in his boudoir being analysed by an amateur Freud.

The title Give Your Thoughts Life comes from a letter Colenso wrote to the Hawke’s Bay Herald in 1859, urging readers to contribute more to the correspondence columns. He certainly followed his own advice. As Ian St George’s handy introduction says, Colenso wrote regularly to the New Zealand Herald in Auckland, and to Wellington and Taranaki newspapers. But living in Napier for most of the late nineteenth century, he contributed more to the Hawke’s Bay Herald  than to any other journal. Ian St George estimates that in the second half of his life, Colenso would have written three long letters per day to newspapers and friends. Many of them are now lost, and St.George admits that he was confined to collecting those accessible in the “Papers Past” search-engine.

He categorises Colenso as typical of the “white, middle-aged, well-educated upper-middle-class man who was an avid reader, lived in the country and had strongly liberal political views”.

In those days, newspapers were eager for copy and imposed almost no length-limitations upon correspondents. They were just made for an autodidact polymath maverick like Colenso, who was always ready with an opinion, argument or observation on current affairs. Newspapers were then the chief means of community discussion. Nowadays virtually none of Colenso’s letters would see the light of print, in an age when newspapers want letters 300 words or fewer, maximum.

If the letters were expansive, however, the community they addressed was not. St. George notes that Napier had a total population of 900 when its chief newspaper began publication. The letters it ran (including most of Colenso’s) would have originally been read by an audience of a few hundred at most. Ploughing through this collection, the very personal note of many of Colenso’s letters, and the frequent references to specific individuals in the small settler community, made me feel as if I were eavesdropping on a family conversation.

I hope I do not have to spell out that a collection of this sort is a treasure trove for historians, who want to see what the concerns and opinions of an articulate person in another age were. But this does not necessarily make it a treasure trove for the general reader. I must admit I found myself nodding when Colenso’s letters discourse at length on desirable drainage and roading for Napier. Most readers will have a hard time wading through the 1858 series of letters which Colenso jocularly calls “Tracts for the Times” and in which he discusses the status of Hawke’s Bay as a province, whether it should separate from Wellington, how it needs more Pakeha population and so forth.

Colenso was himself involved in local, provincial and national politics, at various times being an MP (in the then capital, Auckland), an MPC (Member of the Provincial Council), and Hawke’s Bay’s Inspector of Schools. So among his letters there are many fulsome addresses around election times to “electors” – meaning that tiny handful of Pakeha males who were then permitted to vote. In the 1850s, he spends a lot of time in the letters columns arguing about local politics with a jackanapes called Robert Pharazyn. In 1863, there is a heated and unseemly correspondence about whether Colenso had or had not insulted the Scottish race in a speech he made on the hustings. So often we are faced with pompous declarations of principles and the impression that the issues being discussed are world-shattering. We can cure ourselves of this delusion by remembering that much of Colenso’s ink was expended on very small-scale local enterprises. How seriously they took themselves in those days, when they had a sense of Destiny opening up a new country to them!

Much more interesting to me than political matters are some of Colenso’s more enduring concerns.

One is his interest in botany. He is frequently offering advice on how to best care for plants. An early letter offers 18 numbered steps on how best to plant and care for fruit trees. Another expands on the best varieties of apple tree for local acclimatisation. He discusses the Maori names for varieties of olive. Late in the volume there are a number of his letters passing on advice from Dr Hooker of Kew Gardens, about strange insects and destructive fungi he has spotted.

Another of Colenso’s concerns is race relations in New Zealand. St.George calls him “philo-Maori”, and on the whole this is true. Colenso usually offers a remarkably conciliatory attitude towards Maori who have been accused of crime or of special violence in provincial wars.  Written in 1847, the very first letter in this collection has him defending Maori against charges of stealing from a ship. Very occasionally in the early years he writes in Maori (signing himself “Koroneho”). In the press he defends the former HauHau Kereopa for his part in the murder of the Reverend Volkner. Regrettably, this volume does not reproduce the whole of his pamphlet about Kereopa – a footnote tells us that it will appear later in a collection of Colenso’s other writings. On 28 February 1883, Colenso writes a long and detailed letter supporting an amnesty for Te Kooti – a very brave thing to do in Hawke’s Bay at the time when Pakeha still feared Te Kooti as the marauder and  raider of outlying farms.

Colenso obviously made many enemies for his attitudes. From 1874  right through the 1880s, he often has to respond to carping criticisms that he is taking too long to compile a promised Maori lexicon, which had been generously funded out of the public purse. It’s a reasonable inference that some of these criticisms were payback for his pro-Maori views.

Yet there are times when Colenso’s Pakeha perspective asserts itself. He wants justice for Maori, but he never doubts that British settlement and laws will and should prevail, that Maori should be assimilated to them, and that any attempts to hold up Pakeha settlement must be resisted. In his letter of 22 October 1859 he bemoans at length the existence of Maori land-leagues, which are attempting to block sale of tribal lands to Pakeha.

           

One major area of Colenso’s correspondence that interests me is his involvement in religious controversy. Sometimes he is apparently very broad-minded for his age, preaching the subordination of denomination to general Christian principle. In his letter of 7 June 1880, responding to the Protestant push for Bible readings in the newly-established secular state schools (the “Bible-in-Schools” movement), he very sensibly comments that Bible readings alone mean nothing without some exposition. In a series of letters in 1896, he opposes the Prohibition movement by supporting true and voluntary Temperance.

Yet you do also encounter in Colenso the ingrained prejudices (sometimes approaching bigotry) of the old Anglican Evangelical. In 1879, he whines about “the wretched Ritualistic clique” – meaning those “Anglo-Catholic” Anglicans who were attempting to make their drab church more colourful by imitating the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. On 23 April 1891, he severely rebukes two young men for daring to go hunting on the Sabbath day. On 7 April 1892 he wades in to the Seventh Day Adventist sect thus: “those wretched men the Adventists, one of the lowest and worst sects of falsely-called ‘Christians’ known to me, who… unsettle and lead astray the simple, the quiet and the unwary”.

As an Evangelical, his chief antagonism is towards the Catholic Church. In August 1884, he imprudently challenges the Catholic priest Le Menant Des Chenais over some facts the priest cited in a speech. A few letters later he has to grumpily apologise. It was Colenso who got his facts wrong. In his letter of 4 June 1895, he responds to ideas of ultimate church union with a warning against “the sophistries and blandishments, the music and fair speeches of erring meretricious Rome.” Interestingly, most such prejudiced letters come late in the collection, suggesting that Colenso’s spiritual arteries were hardening in old age.

Apart from letters on politics, Maori matters, botany and religion, there are some letters that startle by their sheer quirkiness. I was intrigued by the letter of 13 May 1864 in which Colenso questions whether it was really the historian Macaulay who initiated the familiar, oft-quoted thought about a future age in which a “New Zealander” (i.e. Maori) would sketch the ruins of St Paul’s from the broken arch of London Bridge. Then there’s a series of letters to the Otago Witness in which Colenso sets them straight on the history of printing in New Zealand.

Colenso can sometimes be an opinionated old fool. His letters are certainly verbose and he is always ready to pep them up with literary or classical quotation, to show that he is an English gentleman with the appropriate intellectual credentials. He is not good at taking criticism. As an example of having your cake and eating it, or pretending to turn the other cheek without really turning it, take this uncharacteristically brief letter of 19 January 1861:

“Sir,

Reading on Saturday last the letter signed ‘George Worgan’ in your paper of that date, I had nearly made up my mind to answer it fully in your next issue, but, having been led to think on him this day while using these words – “That it may please Thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors and slanderers, and to turn their hearts” – I feel it now to be a duty not to notice the sad letter of the poor unhappy old man.

I am etc.

Yours Truly

William Colenso”

The historical value of this book is high. But in the end I have to say that Colenso was no particular stylist, and many of these letters are nit-picking, peevish and egotistical. He often burbles on for far longer than he really need and he gives the impression of someone desperate to nail down topics and have the last word. A bit like today’s talkback hosts. Or, for that matter, the runners of book blogs.

Something Old

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

“MARIUS THE EPICUREAN” Walter Pater (written 1881-1884; first published 1885)

Reading William Colenso’s letters-to-the-editor on nineteenth-century religious controversies leads me into a piece of sheer self-indulgence.

I am about to examine and praise a book which has a very dubious reputation and is filled with faults. It is also a book whose religious outlook represents nearly everything Colenso hated. If William Colenso was at heart an Evangelical – a man who referred every religious argument to the Bible and who hated religious ritual – then Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean is a book that pushes love of ritual to sheer aestheticism. The Bible and Christian precept vanish in a puff of incense.

Walter Pater (1839-94) was a discreet and retiring Oxford don, an historian and aesthetician whose writings inspired a couple of generations of British “Decadents”, Oscar Wilde being their flashiest exponent. Pater lived quietly and died a virgin. (One slightly rude reference I saw declared that he was “probably innocent of any sexual experience with another human being”.) Nevertheless, the tone he set was deeply homo-erotic – a world of gaily dressed young men burning incense on their rooms as they read the “pagan” poetry of Algernon Swinburne to each other, and wondered if they should become High Church Anglicans or Catholics or merely swan off to the south of France together and write bad poetry.

A world of camp, in other words.

For many such young men, Marius the Epicrean was the Bible, at least it was if they hadn’t yet got around to reading the more interesting French works of Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Plot? There isn’t one.

Marius the Epicurean is essentially a set of reflections tied together by the merest wisp of narrative. (A joker once characterised the book with reference to Keats’ great line as a character “alone and palely loitering”).

In the Rome of the pagan philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the late 2^nd century AD, young Marius tastes and tries the truth of a series of philosophies. The action, such as it is, is all inward and mental, creating a sense of passivity in the main character. There are some passages on the Christian widow Cecilia, and on the concept of motherhood, but Marius’ strongest attachments are to males – with the young man Flavian, who dies of the plague, and with a chap called Cornelius, who expresses vigour and youth. This squares very much with the mindset of the timid bachelor don who wrote the book and who died, unmarried, in the house of his sisters.

Passivity and lack of strong sexual attachment define the delicate sensibility of Marius as he tentatively fingers the surface of life, having never taken the radical plunge into commitment, let alone marriage and procreation. In short, he is a spectator of life’s most essential dramas. Though Marius dies in early middle age, and though Walter Pater was in his forties when he wrote this book, I read it as the sensibility of a sensitive, and as-yet-untried, adolescent.

So much for playing psychologist to a mind finer than my own.

What of the conscious subject-matter of the book?

Essentially, the Epicureanism of Marius is the method against which various available philosophies are tried. – first the traditional pagan “religion of Numa” for those who still believe in the ancient pagan gods; then dinner-table aestheticism; and finally Stoicism and early Christianity.

Epicureanism says that ultimate answers are unknowable (is there a God or afterlife etc.?). Therefore, value in life has to be found in the lived experience of the senses. But, fully aware that this could become a formula for mindless hedonism, Pater says that value means what is true to human experience; what is morally right; what we feel happy with when we survey our memories. In other words, forswearing traditional religious answers, he gives moral gravity to the concept of living well. Or at least he tries to. In practice it means that all philosophical systems are subjected to judgement by aesthetic criteria. How true are they to human feeling; to a sense of wellbeing; to the creation of beauty?

For all its attractions, the old pagan religion is rejected by Marius/Pater as it does not account adequately for tragedy in human life. Marius ceases to be a worshipper of the old gods when plague carries off his friend Flavian.

Stoicism is immensely attractive in the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius and in the personal goodness of the (Christian-hating) emperor himself. But it ends creating a profound melancholy in Marius. After all, if we endure pain and suffering as Stoics do, by seeing them as mere unreal shadows that will pass, then we are also saying that the joys and goodness of life are mere shadows. Life is drained of reality and meaning. Stoicism stands back from the physical world, undervalues it and contemplates it passively. It simply does not account for human passions. (I wonder how much Pater was aware that this rejection could apply equally to the arguments of Schopenhauer in his own lifetime?)

So, in the novel’s final sections, Marius gives his qualified approval to (civilised, urban, Roman) Christianity. This is not on the basis of any Christian doctrine (doctrines are never examined) but on the strength of Christianity’s aesthetic appeal as a religion whose rituals feast the human senses without ignoring essential human feeling. Dying on the last page, Marius receives the Christian sacrament, but there is no sense that he has ceased to be an Epicurean. He has simply found a congenial home for his worldview.

I can see how for Pater and others this could lead straight into the type of smell-and-bells Catholicism that luxuriates in the rituals of (pre-Vatican II) Catholicism without taking on board any of the church’s teachings.

More significantly, though, I am struck by the similarity of the Aesthetic answer of Pater to the popular Existentialism of a later age. Both deny the validity of received values, traditional religion and absolute answers. In essence both say the individual has to create his/her own values – by moral choice, according to the Existentialist, or by fine receptivity, according to the Aesthete. I wonder if both systems cannot in fact be read as nostalgia for faith and ultimate value in an age where reason denies such ultimates? Significantly Marius the Epicurean is set in an era when traditional (pagan) religion is decaying – like our own post-Enlightenment world?

A few words about the novel as a piece of prose. Often on this blog, I’ve expressed a taste for those 19^th century novels where the narrative breaks off for self-contained essays. Paradoxically, though, when I come to a novel that is all essay, I find it very hard going. Pater has an elaborate prose style – long sentences with numerous qualifying and subordinate clauses and a deliberate gravitas of meditation. More challenging is the fact that this is a novel which attempts to make sensual experience itself its philosophic point. It is easier to read of the clash of philosophic ideas than of the fine gradations of the senses. Frequently, as I read Marius the Epicurean, I was reminded of the more obtuse passages of Henry James. You read a whole page, stop, and wonder if the page was about anything at all.

In the very first chapter, Pater describes young Marius’s mind thus:

“Some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees.”

Even as I luxuriated in parts of it, I wondered if this couldn’t be the epigraph for the whole novel. But at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that William Colenso would have hated it.

Something Thoughtful

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

WHERE HAVE ALL THE LETTER-WRITERS GONE?

The collected letters to the press of William Colenso put some thoughts about letter-writing in my mind.

I have a number of collections of illustrious people’s letters on my shelves – the letters of Keats, the letters of Shelley, the letters of Samuel Beckett and of John Gielgud among others. New Zealand university presses have recently published collected or selected editions of the letters of John Mulgan and of Frank Sargeson. Doubtless there are many more collected letters of other deceased people (and particularly literary people) yet to be published.

Literary people are a special case. Writing is their business and producing long letters is something in which many of them still indulge. The letters of literary people tend to be as much a part of their literary production as their novels, short stories and so forth – with one eye on posterity, and written as much for public consumption as for private communication. The same probably goes for the letters of the more literate actors, whose business is being public show-offs.

But what about letters by scientists, military people, politicians, sports stars and others? Once upon a time, there would have been a respectable number of published collections of their letters, too. But I doubt if that will be the case for much longer, and once the crop of recently-deceased has been dealt with.

It all has to do with the decline in letter-writing in general.

Paradoxically, it was just when enough people in Western societies were becoming sufficiently literate to write letters regularly, that the habit of frequent letter-writing began to decline.

Think about it.

In countries of Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand etc., universal literacy was produced in the late nineteenth century by universal and compulsory elementary education. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the telephone became commonplace, and for many people the need to scribble off daily notes and messages vanished.

Of course literate people still wrote letters, but less for reasons of immediate need than for reflection, general news etc.

Now things have gone further. We phone. We take part in social media like Facebook. We send e-mails. Some people (I’m not one of them) Tweet. Speed and ease of communication are increased. If we can establish a conversation via e-mail with somebody, we can e-mail off a paragraph or two and expect a paragraph or two in reply within hours. But no more than that. Since e-mail allows such conversations to be fairly rapid to-and-fro, there is no need for the expansive, long, expository letter.

I’m aware that e-mails can be stored and, if so desired, printed off. But somehow I do not think that one hundred years from now there will be collections of great e-mails, Tweets or Facebook interventions being published. (Even if we interpret publishing to include things become accessible via computer.)

Brevity now rules in our substitutes for old-fashioned letters and the real art of letter-writing has probably died.

Something New

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

“THE HUNGRY HEART – Journeys with William Colenso” by Peter Wells (Vintage Press/ Random House, $49:99)

To the point of being irritated by it, you now know one of my favourite mottos. If a book is really worthwhile then it is worth arguing with. Only worthless books don’t deserve serious criticism.

Peter Wells’ The Hungry Heart – Journeys with William Colenso is more than worthwhile. It is outstandingly good. Vivid, stylish and quizzical, it is the product of much research and much personal engagement by the author. It brings to life a figure who was for a long time in danger of being forgotten. It puts its finger on the pulse of many things that have shaped New Zealand. It reflects on many things in our nineteenth century history that some might prefer to forget.

Because it’s so good, I’m going to take issue with it, but before I do so, allow me to say what it’s all about.

This book is judiciously titled and subtitled. It is Journeys with William Colenso. It does not claim to be a comprehensive biography of William Colenso, marching from forebears to birth to achievements to public life to private life to death and reputation, all in chronological order and copiously footnoted. No. This is the type of “biography” that has sometimes carelessly been labelled postmodern. Peter Wells himself looms as large in the book as William Colenso does. Whole chapters are given to Wells’ personal experiences of places associated with Colenso. Wells goes to Paihia, to Waimate North, to Waitangi near Napier, taking photographs [reproduced with the text], reflecting on tourists and on heritage site-markers and generally pushing himself into the foreground. He tells us of his encounters with archivists, with descendants of Colenso, with possible descendants of Colenso and so forth. Much of the text is arranged as reflections on specific aspects of Colenso’s life rather than proceeding chronologically. In effect, this is a book about the author’s consciousness of William Colenso as much as it is a book about William Colenso. It is a book which overtly traces the stages of the author’s research and the impact they had on him.

It is also (and this should be stated up front) an excellent piece of book production. 400-plus pages of text exist in a sturdy hardback, fully illustrated with archival photos of people and places and texts, as well as with Wells’ own tourist shots of the places he visited.

What attracted Peter Wells to William Colenso, apart from Wells’ own Napier connections and his awareness of Colenso as someone in the historical background of his hometown?

Colenso, Anglican missionary, printer, explorer, collector, polymath and indefatigable writer of letters to the press, is clearly seen by Wells as a maverick and a misfit, a man who couldn’t help being an outsider. As Wells says [p.163] “He was not politic nor was he an assiduous networker. He was, by nature, heretical and challenging. He seemed to delight in – or be oblivious about – rubbing people up the wrong way. If anything his awkwardness only confirmed the uniqueness and verity of his beliefs – to himself.” 

Wells approves of some of these qualities, and finds evidence that Colenso’s maverick tendencies sometimes gave him greater insight than his contemporaries possessed. Colenso was the man who, having helped to prepare the Treaty of Waitangi and print it up, nevertheless had the wit to question whether the Maori chiefs really understood what they were doing in signing it. Over twenty years later, Colenso was the man who knew that land was being grabbed unjustly from Hawke’s Bay and Central North Island Maori, and who offended settler attitudes by publicly expressing his views. He also wrote a pamphlet in defence of the captured warrior Kereopa when the local Pakeha community bayed (successfully) for Kereopa’s blood.

Wells perceives Colenso as a man on the receiving end of the class system. Of humble Cornish background, the printer was regarded as a mere “mechanical” and snubbed by the Oxbridge-educated circle of Bishop Selwyn. Hence Colenso’s ordination was delayed and his initial ambitions to be a missionary were thwarted. There are some awkward passages where Wells is obliged to show how, in later years, Colenso himself sometimes took the side of settlers in approving of land-grabbing war on Hawke’s Bay Maori, and also became a prosperous bourgeois, chumming up with arch-land-grabber Donald McLean and living on a comfy estate overlooking the growing town of Napier, between the swamp and the sea.

For all that, Wells is predisposed to see much good in Colenso as an intellectual outsider and a victim of snobbery.

However, having noted this, Wells’ main interest in Colenso is sexual and psychological. The book’s main title, The Hungry Heart (presumably with a nod to the Bruce Springsteen song) signals this fact. The title is elucidated on p.376 where Colenso in old age in old age is described as  “Alone, without a family, without a partner of any sort, this intellectual dynamo was yet an ordinary human being – a man with a hungry heart.”

The centrepiece of the book, its heart and soul, is the painful story of the collapse of Colenso’s marriage, which caused scandal, made him a pariah and had him thrust out of the Anglican church for some years. Briefly, Colenso was married to the strong-willed Elizabeth Fairburn, who shared his hardships in moving to a mission-station in frontier territory, who had to give birth in particularly painful circumstances, and who then discovered that, during their marriage, her husband had a long affair with the Maori “servant” Ripeka Meretene and fathered a bastard son, Wiremu.

Peter Wells becomes deeply engaged in this domestic and sexual situation. He gives us probably as much intimate detail as there is to give. He does not whitewash Colenso, understanding both the nature of his betrayal of Elizabeth and how limited Elizabeth’s options were. He quotes in full the letter which Elizabeth wrote after the rupture, at last pouring out her magisterial scorn on the man who had promised to love her. Wells also gives us his own poem about Elizabeth. Like the book as a whole, this is as much imaginative and intuitive reconstruction as it is verifiable history.

But (and here my criticisms begin to kick in) there are some real difficulties with this book. I think Peter Wells is right on the money when he associates evangelical Protestantism with the Romantic movement, and connects the evangelicals’ sense of salvation and damnation with their emotional highs and lows. Yet – I infer – Wells is not particularly sympathetic to the whole Christian missionary enterprise anyway and the book has more than a few belittling shafts designed to suggest that missionaries as a whole were deluded or were wasting their time. This can’t help but put him out of synch with some of Colenso’s main concerns.

Because of Wells’ selectivity (openly admitted by him) some major aspects of Colenso’s life are underplayed. I am no Colenso expert, but I do know that exploration was one of his main claims to fame, and the only other book about Colenso I’ve read (Bagnell and Petersen’s 1948 biography) lays much stress on Colenso as explorer. Of this specific aspect of Colenso’s life, Peter Wells gives us one page, with the suggestion that Colenso was the spiritual father of all Pakeha trampers. He then adds a poem of his own devising. True, we do later get much detail on the botanical specimens Colenso collected and kept, and the Kew Garden botanists with whom he corresponded, but clearly exploration per se doesn’t interest Wells.

More troubling to historians, there’s the matter of evidence and inference. Often, when he draws conclusions about Colenso’s (and Elizabeth’s) intimate life, Wells admits that he is speculating. I think some of the inferences he draws are reasonable ones and there are some (such as the suggestion that Elizabeth might have been incestuously mishandled by her father) which he raises only to bat away fairly promptly. But there are pieces of historical re-construction where he blurs the distinction between speculation and proof, and proceeds to write as if he has proven something which he has only inferred, or guessed.

Colenso’s missionary station burned down. Wells finds a very, very vague and inconclusive suggestion that it might have been deliberately torched by people who disliked Colenso. He proceeds to assume this vague suggestion is a proven fact and analyse it as such.

In the course of his researches, an old auctioneer tells Wells that there might once have existed a diary showing that Colenso had sexual relations with Maori boys. Wells admits that he has found no trace of any such diary (if it ever existed) and also admits that the auctioneer’s rumour greatly surprises him. All the real evidence that he has suggests that, if anything, Colenso was a hyper-active heterosexual, not only fathering one illegitimate child but possibly fathering many others as well (Wells meets many Maori who claim to be Colenso’s descendants, and often calls Colenso “randy”). But Wells cannot let the auctioneer’s story drop. As he reminds us a number of times, he himself is known as a “gay writer”, much as he finds that term a bit of a burden. He has something invested emotionally in the idea that Colenso might have been homosexual, so he devotes a whole chapter to chewing it over, even though he has no evidence.

Then there’s what I can only call the camp element to the book – the moments where Wells teases readers with unsubtle puns or tries bits of naughty-boy shock.

On p.92, speaking of early Anglican missionaries, he says  “The vast families both Williams brothers sired can be put down to a religious desire to ‘people the earth’. Another view is that the two men enjoyed fucking and, in the absence of reliable prophylactics, the women had to accept an endless roundelay of pregnancies”. I assume “another view” here means Wells’ view.

On p.311, when two men are discussing how large Colenso’s property is, Wells tells us that this illustrates “the quintessential male problem – how to talk about size.” (Tee-hee, snigger snigger). On the following page, he sums up Colenso’s views as being that Bishop Williams “in brief, was a shit and a liar.”

We also have rather dodgy generalizations. On p.254, as he discusses why Elizabeth stayed with William for so long, he remarks “There is an erotic element of enslavement and mastery in most relationships”. Gosh, is there really?

Perhaps part of what I am saying is that Wells often superimposes modern assumptions, and his own particular interests, on people of the 19^th century. Yet I’m not criticising him for this, as I would if this were an historical novel and he were attributing such attitudes to his historical characters. Wells is openly speculating and openly allowing his own character to be one of the main features of the book.

In the end, The Hungry Heart has to be read as a personal encounter as much as a biography of Colenso. I could end lamely by saying that it is only part of the story of William Colenso. But then we should know that all biographies are partial and incomplete.

Something Old

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

“THE FOX BOY” by Peter Walker (first published 2001)

A factual book on somebody from New Zealand’s past, into which the author inserts himself as a main character. Peter Wells’ The Hungry Heart is not the first biography to adopt this strategy.

Peter Walker’s The Fox Boy, subtitled The Story of an Abducted Child, is about somebody more obscure than William Colenso, but it also illuminates episodes of the nineteenth century interface of Maori and Pakeha, and forces us into some painful soul-searching.

           

This is a work of historical reconstruction. Walker (a London-based New Zealander) follows the history of Ngatau Omahuru, kidnapped at the age of six after the Taranaki wars of the 1860s and handed over to Sir William Fox to be brought up and civilised as “the Fox boy”. Being about a Maori kid forced into a Pakeha mould, it’s a classic tale of cultural dislocation and also a work of intense Pakeha guilt.

Walker is forced to acknowledge that the historical record grows dim at times. Frankly not an awful lot of traces of “the Fox boy” survive. Walker has to fill in the gaps with imaginative speculation. But it winds up at Parihaka where Ngatau Omahuru had taken refuge, and where Te Whiti’s pacifism was brushed aside by an armed land grab supported by the government.

Peter Walker’s thesis is that Omahuru, trained to be an English gentleman, decided to return to his own Taranaki people and thus angered Sir William Fox, the former premier and one of the commission that decided on land confiscations. Sir William had much at stake emotionally. He felt aggrieved that his offer of an upbringing in a superior civilisation had been rejected by a Maori kid. In consequence, speculates Peter Walker, Sir William played a far more vindictive role over Parihaka than he might otherwise have done, approving the eradication of the community. He was settling a personal score as well as a racial one, by getting even with the boy who wilfully rejected the blessings of Englishness.

Yet all this is only what the book is ostensibly about – the pretext, shall we say, for Walker to nudge unquiet ghosts of Pakeha identity and examine his own childhood as a provincial New Zealander. He tries to penetrate and decode such Maori oral culture as he was kindly given and to interrogate his own cultural landscape. Pages tell us about Walker’s own schooling and upbringing, his youthful ignorance of Maoritanga etc.

Is this satisfactory as “history”?

Not entirely. As in Peter Wells’ The Hungry Heart there is much speculation, much guesswork, much foregrounding of the author’s own sensibility  and many times when readers might suspect that too much has been made of a meagre documentary record. Can all this really be inferred legitimately from a few inconclusive surviving written records? Like The Hungry Heart, then, The Fox Boy situates itself halfway between biography and imaginative essay. Parts of it could readily be blown to smithereens by historians with a firm understanding of the legitimate uses of evidence.

Even so, as an essay on Pakeha cultural dislocation, The Fox Boy is very interesting. And there is the chance that Peter Walker’s speculations are true.

Something Thoughtful

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

ON BEING POSTMODERN BEFORE THERE WAS ANYTHING TO BE POSTMODERN ABOUT

There’s nothing new under the sun, says the old proverb, and often things that are hailed as new turn out to be fairly well-established.

Take postmodernism. The term has been around for only the last half-century or so.

One of the literary characteristics of postmodernism is supposed to be a self-referential awareness of form. Writers address readers in the full awareness that all literary genres are artificial constructs, and readers are sophisticated enough to pick up the writers’ awareness. Therefore, in writing history or biographies, postmodernists allow the seams to show. Writers push themselves to the forefront of their own books, explaining to readers what they are doing, how they did their research and so on.

Often cited as the grand-daddy of this sort of book is The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A.Symons’ account of researching the life of the minor novelist and charlatan Frederick Rolfe. It was first published in 1934.

The two examples I’ve given are Peter Wells’ The Hungry Heart and Peter Walker’s The Fox Boy, both of which, written in the last decade, could reasonably be called postmodern.

But is this literary style really so modern – let alone postmodern?

After all, how different is it from Victorian novelists interrupting their narratives to directly address their readers with the “Dear Reader” passages of Thackeray or the long self-contained essays of George Eliot? Weren’t Victorian readers of such prose fully aware that they were reading something artificial and constructed? Indeed don’t we, in a postmodern age, spend far too much time patting ourselves on the back for perceptions that were fully accessible to our ancestors?

Let me take a more extreme case.

Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was first published, bit by bit, in the 1760s. At various times in the last two-and-a-half centuries, it’s been called a freakish novel, a “sport”, an expression of eccentricity, and a precursor of surrealism. Its narrator purports to tell the story of his life, but keeps getting so sidetracked by digressions that as the novel ends he is just being born. This is the ultimate shaggy-dog story, and a vigorous nose-thumbing at the whole convention of novel-writing.

In 2005 appeared Michael Winterbottom’s desperate attempt to film the unfilmable entitled Tristram Shandy – A Cock and Bull Story. Starring the cut-ups Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the film (like the original novel) constantly cuts back and forth between story and ironic comment on story and then even more ironic comment on the whole artificiality of the concept of story. The film is about a film crew trying to film Tristram Shandy but constantly getting side-tracked and never quite finishing the job.

The 2005 film has Steve Coogan calling Laurence Sterne’s novel “a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about.” The phrase was used in the film’s advertising.

Which kind of gives the game away. This slogan really tells us how some attitudes and techniques attributed to postmodernism – such as consciously fooling with the nature of text – have been around for centuries. I suppose there are some current insights that really do belong to postmodernism. But this isn’t one of them.

Something New

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

“THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY – An Introduction” by Ralph Lattimore and Shamubeel Eaqub (Auckland University Press, $34:99)

I took this on as a kind of experiment. I asked if I could review a simple primer on New Zealand’s economy, The New Zealand Economy by Professor Ralph Lattimore and economics consultant Shamubeel Eaqub .

           

I was consciously stepping out of my comfort zone.

My ignorance of Economics is such as would make a Year 11 or 12 Accounting student blush. I know that a country which spends more than it earns is in trouble while a country which earns more than it spends is probably doing well. I can tell primary products (raw resources and agricultural output) from secondary products (processed or manufactured goods), and I know what is meant by tertiary industries (services – everything from education and health to tourism and prostitution). I have some grasp of the interaction between the private and the public sectors and an awareness of how global forces have an impact on national and local economies. And then I begin to run out of puff and wonder how these things work in concert. A severe drop-off in demand, leading to a drop-off in production and employment, is about as far as I get when I try to understand what causes recessions and depressions. I know this understanding is woefully inadequate. In any real discussion on economics, I’d be lost in a matter of moments.

So here was my experiment, perhaps appropriate for a blog posting which appears on Waitangi Day. I was going to see if I could understand an elementary text on how New Zealand’s economy works. At least I know that the economy is one of the key things in defining a nation.

Let me make it clear that The New Zealand Economy is intended as a text-book. Its preface suggests a readership of junior university students and perhaps senior high-school students (with a bit of teacher guidance). Its trim 140 pages, heavily freighted with graphs and diagrams, work methodically through nine chapters. A general introduction to the New Zealand economy is followed by an account of New Zealand’s long-term economic performance and how New Zealand is integrated into the global economy. The authors then give two chapters to showing that economic activity is never an autonomous thing. Government policy has a huge impact on both industrial development and the control of labour markets. After this are three chapters on financial aspects – capital flows, capital markets and government’s fiscal policies. And finally a chapter on the worth and perils of macroeconomic forecasting.

I must make it clear that many of these terms I understand only because I had this little book to define them for me. Lattimore and Eaqub are considerate guides, providing running glosses and usually referring to their graphics in making their definitions. They are also clearly optimists with much faith in the world economic process, declaring on Page 34 that “Globalisation has transformed the global distribution of income, lifting large numbers of people out of poverty, especially in China and India.” As they interpret it, New Zealand’s economy is inevitably tied to the world’s. Protectionism – tariffs, quotas and subsidies for exports – should be shunned as they “usually result in economic inefficiency because they inhibit choices for firms and consumers around the world.” Economic nationalism is not an option. New Zealand has generally run a deficit since the 1950s, but New Zealand ’s Gross Domestic Product has gradually risen since the 1970s, thanks to market reforms and to the rise of Asia.

The authors are economists rather than social commentators, but the economic data they compile on New Zealand does tells a social story.

I look at a graph on Page 75 defining employment rates by ethnicity, and I see that in New Zealand 5% of the Pakeha workforce were unemployed in 2009, while for both the Maori and the Pacific Island workforce the percentage was 15%. There is a huge social story behind this which can be read in the newspapers and seen on the TV news any day of the week.

On Pages 84 and 85, I look at both the graphs showing New Zealand’s major imports and exports and the authors’ explanation that “wool exports are too small to warrant their own category in the graph”. I know that behind this there is a huge historical story.

The graph on Page 87, showing our major trading partners, reveals that Australia, China and the USA, in that order, are the countries that now buy most of what we produce, with a clutch of Asian nations following them. Britain now takes only 4% of our output. Another huge historical story lies behind this (and, for me, another valid argument for a New Zealand republic and an indigenous head of state). We are now many, many decades away from being Britain’s offshore farm. Meat and dairy produce may still be our top exports, but they are now a minority of all our exports and do not dominate the field.

I appreciate Lattimore’s and Eaqub’s awareness that economics is not an exact science and their frank admission, in introducing their last chapter, that “forecasting the future of the economy is a mixture of science and art”. Nevertheless, they do make a prediction – that New Zealand’s economy will continue to grow in 2012, but that the rate of growth will slow.

In the end, did my experiment work? As a non-economist, did I become more enlightened about our economy by reading this text?

In terms of New Zealand’s general economic situation, certainly. Lattimore and Eaqub make it perfectly clear that New Zealand’s economy is inextricably tied to the world’s, has to be competitive to make any sort of impact, and is really always in some sort of peril. Nevertheless, I am not sure that I am any wiser about the causes of major economic depressions, although the authors do gamely explain recessions in terms of international pressures, labour productivity and available finance.

I found it easier to read the two case studies with which the text concludes than to read the body of the text itself. Gary Steele discusses the impact of technology on New Zealand’s economy, giving the example of refrigeration. Philip McCann explains economic geography by studying Auckland and showing why and how it dominates the national economy (although he cautions that, to benefit the whole country, there should be more “connectivity” between Auckland and the rest of New Zealand.)

Perhaps all this means is that it would take more than even one careful reading to master all the specialised vocabulary involved in this book. Indeed, it would probably take a year’s academic study of Economics, for which The New Zealand Economy would make an admirable basic text.

           

Something Old

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

“NO LEFT TURN – The Distortion of New Zealand’s History by Greed, Bigotry and Right-Wing Politics” by Chris Trotter (first published 2007)

Being sent for review a primer on New Zealand’s economy stimulated me to at last get off my shelf Chris Trotter’s No Left Turn. It is very much a political take on the way New Zealand’s economy has been conducted.

Published five years ago, No Left Turn was bought by me at a sale a year ago. Until last week it remained one of the things I was going to “get around to” reading. I’ve now got around to it, and very stimulating and enjoyable I found it too.

Chris Trotter is well-known as a centre-left commentator and journalist, and his 367-page survey of New Zealand history is an excellent example of polemical mythology. I have to be very careful about the words I use here. A few years ago, another author got very angry with me and wrote a letter to the press when I referred in a review to some elements of his history book as “mythology”. He assumed that I was accusing him of telling a pack of lies. In fact, I meant no such thing. I certainly don’t mean any such thing in referring to Chris Trotter’s No Left Turn as mythology.

By “mythology”, I mean the way an historian or other such commentator selects and arranges facts and material in order to support a particular world-view. In and of itself, history is a flux of forces and events without interpretation. As soon as interpretation is imposed, a mythology is created, simply by fitting some forces and events into that interpretation while ignoring others. A mythology also involves the set of assumptions an author makes.

Sorry to be so long-winded about it, but I do want to nail this one down clearly. Trotter has a very strong set of opinions and in No Left Turn a selection of historical facts is used to support them. This is signalled clearly by his subtitle “The Distortion of New Zealand’s History by Greed, Bigotry and Right-Wing Politics”. After seeing that on the cover, you don’t really expect to read a supposedly “impartial” work of history, do you? And you certainly don’t expect No Left Turn to be right-wing. This is a work of intentional partisanship. The fact that I agree with many of the things Trotter says does not prevent me from recognising this as polemical mythology. The fact that I am (or try to be) an historian means that I sometimes notice where Trotter omits awkward things, or stretches his point, even when I am generally agreeing with him.

Trotter’s mythology is straightforward and is declared early on. As he discusses Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s “wicked dream” of colonising New Zealand in a way that would have replicated the worst of the English class-system, Trotter notes that Wakefield bequeathed “a legacy of private capitalist speculation underwritten by public resources and state power – the same poisonous nexus of rapacious businessmen and ambitious politicians that was to plague New Zealand for the next 166 years.”

The battle-lines are clearly drawn. Humble Britons come to New Zealand seeking a better life. Nasty Britons come seeking to make money by exploiting others. On the one side are idealistic ordinary New Zealanders, who want to build a good, just and egalitarian society. On the other are speculators, capitalists and sinister right-wing intriguers, thwarting such idealism at every turn.

The idealistic New Zealanders gradually become socialists in self-defence and are the best of, successively, the Liberal and Labour parties, trade unions and such centre-left groups as have existed outside them. The right-wing plotters are behind successively the Reform and National and ACT parties, the mass of whose members aren’t always aware of their real controllers’ machinations. They control Treasury. They do secret deals with nefarious overseas business interests, but without consulting New Zealanders’ elected parliamentary representatives.

So New Zealand history is an ongoing battle between those who want welfare, food, housing, education, health and employment for all; and those whose self-interest and greed lead them to find excuses to withhold these things. It is a Left-versus-Right, goodies-versus-baddies, Manichaean view of New Zealand history.

Trotter’s dramatic journalistic technique is to select vivid moments of New Zealand class conflict to open each chapter, and then to work back from each to explain how New Zealand reached this parlous state. We have chapters beginning with evil land-grabbers running guns to those renegade Maori tribes who could help them take over Maori land; Fred Evans getting murdered in the Waihi miners’ strike of 1912; soldiers dying for Empire and commercial profit at Gallipoli; Scrim’s broadcasts getting jammed in the Depression, and so on.

On very many issues I find myself nodding in vigorous agreement with Trotter. He’s absolutely right to note how often self-interest and commercial profiteering have hidden behind high rhetoric about the freedom of business and the British tradition. He does find real examples of special interests perverting the democratic will. He has a special distaste for sharpers like the early 20^th century publicist Albert Ernest Davy, who knew how to build up and knock down political parties in support of his own dividends.

Yet some of Trotter’s roll-call of villains is surprising. Take it as read that he detests the Farmers’ Union of the Massey years or the Business Round Table. It’s only to be expected that he describes Sid Holland’s National Party government in the 1950s as “the crudest, most ignorant and bigoted collection of far-right reactionaries by which New Zealand ever had the misfortune to be governed.” But he is particularly harsh on those who, as he sees it, ruined the chances of the Left by over-stating their case, and refusing to make the necessary compromises with business that would have ensured the welfare state’s permanence.

Thus he comes down very hard on John A. Lee for inventing the fiction of his own real socialism being thwarted by the first Labour government of Savage, Fraser and Nash. Instead (says Trotter) Savage, Fraser and Nash were doing the hard work of finding ways to finance the welfare state without putting capital to flight; while Lee was simply stirring up demagogic, and often xenophobic, sentiment. Trotter comes close to calling Lee a Hitler-in-waiting. Even more surprising, while Trotter inevitably presents an heroic proletarian version of the events of 1951, he sees Jock Barnes and his cronies as failing to understand the grand unionist strategy of Fintan Patrick Walsh. 1951, according to Trotter, may have been heroic but it merely gave the National government a big propaganda stick with which to beat unions. The odd offhand remark here and there also shows that Trotter has no time for Communists and the real Hard Left. [In this connection, I am amused to find one hard-core Marxist website accusing Trotter of the heresy of “reformism.”]

While recognising and accepting that this is a polemic which uses the techniques of a polemic, I do have some criticisms of No Left Turn.

I think, very occasionally, Trotter falls into the language of conspiracy theory to explain why noble left-wing parties didn’t behave the way he thinks they should have. He devotes one lyrical chapter to describing how wonderful gridlocked Auckland could have been if only National governments had accepted the rational socialist town-planning that was on offer at the end of the Second World War . But this, like all counter-factual history, is really fantasy and begs a whole lot of questions.

It is interesting that, after Trotter gives an angry account of how Maori land was expropriated in the nineteenth century, he allows Maori to become invisible for most of the book. They re-emerge only when Trotter gets to discuss the renewed force given to the Treaty of Waitangi at the end of the twentieth century. Maybe this allows Trotter to avoid facing the awkward fact that many otherwise noble working-class Pakeha were not on the side of Maori interests. I also find some of Trotter’s own rhetoric a little over-the-top. He presents New Zealanders in the 1950s as drugged by the materialism of suburbia and therefore not taking up the great struggle on behalf of an increased welfare state. But isn’t this just a way of saying that people tend to be content when times are prosperous?

It is very clear that it becomes less easy for Trotter to maintain his Manichaean view the nearer he gets to his own time, when he recounts in detail what happened in New Zealand politics between the 1980s and 2007. The further past often looks much more clear-cut than it was, and Trotter’s eyewitness accounts of manoeuvrings in the Lange and Clark governments should have reminded him of this. Often the democratic and parliamentary Left wasn’t undermined by Right-wing intrigue. It was doing a very good job of shooting itself in the foot.

I could add many more criticisms, but I think this will do because, in an odd sort of way, I find myself agreeing with Trotter’s viewpoint. There’s a lot of generous anger here. Trotter is really annoyed at those, from Wakefield to Monetarists and the New Right, who have worked against the common good.

Fair enough.

As I said at the beginning, I really enjoyed reading this book. There is much with which academic historians would disagree, many generalizations built out of too little evidence, and some speculation given as fact. But its heart is in the right place and we would be impoverished if we didn’t sometimes have books written by people doing their block.

I only wonder if, five years later and under the impact of the present National government, Trotter wouldn’t want to revise his conclusion. All political commentary is perishable and time-specific, even when it tries to taker the long view as No Left Turn does.

Something Thoughtful

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

ADVICE FROM A BOOKWORM

My Dear Theophilus,

As you know, I spend a good part of every week reading and commenting on books. Sometimes, this leads people to ask me if I don’t ever get sick of reading. The simplest answer is – yes, of course I do. And I don’t read all the time any more than I eat all the time. But both reading and eating are necessary to me.

Years ago, I used to be a film-reviewer, going out to see two or three new movies, in preview, each week. I’d get a similar question -  “Don’t you get sick of seeing all those films?” Defensively, I would point out that most people watched far more hours of television each week than I spent watching movies. But really, my answer about books was the correct one for movies too. Of course I got tired of much of the dross I saw, and I was often happy to take a break from it.

It really is possible to read too much, and to end up interpreting the world in terms of print rather than print in terms of the world.

To illustrate this point, allow me to draw your attention to four writers who all, I think, limited their range as authors by tying themselves up with too much reading.

Take warning from them.

Specimen One – the Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933). A very clever, sardonic chap. Originally a disciple of Zola. Capable of writing solid realist novels like A Drama in Muslin and A Mummer’s Wife and his best-known Esther Waters. Capable of a witty three-part autobiography of Irish literary life, called Ave, Salve and Vale. Capable of a surprising symbolist novel like The Lake. But he took to reading too much and stuck to his flat in London and read and read some more – and by the end all he was able to do was to revise and revise his own earlier published novels, searching vainly for the perfect literary style. Reading killed him and killed his experience.

Specimen Two – Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). A well-known name of course, if only for Brave New World. A genuine wit. Most of what he wrote is worth reading. But his own reading killed him too. This was the man who used to take volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on holiday with him, to increase his knowledge of the real world, which he wasn’t experiencing more directly. He was “cerebrotonic” says one of his biographers – meaning someone bound by his brain rather than his senses. And gradually the characters in his work become walking ideas and abstractions rather than real people. Too much reading, obviously. It limited him rather than enlarging him.

Specimen Three – Cyril Connolly (1903-1974). A bit unfair, this one, as the chap made his living as a literary critic and was one of those people who could make or break reputations. Reading was his life. But it killed him. He wrote only one (mediocre) novel The Rock Pool, and one whiney book Enemies of Promise explaining why he couldn’t write fiction. For the rest it was reading, reading, reading and reviewing, reviewing, reviewing. It is recorded that he often used to loll in bed in a self-pitying stupor, surrounded by books to review, muttering “Poor Cyril! Poor Cyril!” Twit.

Specimen Four – Clive James. Born 1939. Now struggling with cancer. On that score he has my best wishes. Clive James really is the man who has read everything. He is a very good critic. In slim collections of essays like Even As We Speak, and hefty tomes like Cultural Amnesia he shows the breadth of his reading. Bravo. He is a pleasure to read, even though sometimes afflicted with an arse-licking attitude towards English royalty. I love the way he buffets equally totalitarianism of the Left and of the Right, and defends pluralistic democracy. Again bravo. But when he tries to write his own imaginative stuff? Clunk. Outside his jocular autobiography (Unreliable Memoirs etc.) and overtly satirical verse, his novels are bad journalism (The Re-Make) and his poetry uninventive. Having read too much, he cannot spread his wings and rise above being a critic.

            So take heed, dear Theophilus.

If you read too much you not only lose the enjoyment of life, but lose the ability to write with originality and freshness of vision, regardless of the great talents you may have begun with.

I close with a selection from one of my favourite poems in Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie. The poem is called The Bookworm and includes the following:-

            “‘I’m tired – Oh, tired of books,’ said Jack,

            ‘I long for meadows green,

            And woods where shadowy violets

            Nod their cool heads between….

            .. Something has gone, and ink and print

            Will never bring it back;

            I long for the green fields again,

            I’m tired of books,’ said Jack.”

My sentiments exactly sometimes,

Best regards

BOOKWORM