Something Thoughtful

APPRECIATING MUSIC WITHOUT BEING AN EXPERT.

I am, I know, a musical barbarian. I cannot read music and I cannot play a musical instrument. When it comes to singing, I can get away with declaiming things parlando so long as I’m part of a larger group and the people around me are shouting loud enough to hide my voice. I have only a passing acquaintance with the technical terms of music, although having a music teacher for a wife, and having a brood of children who have all received some sort of musical education, I have over the years learnt to distinguish my andante from my prestissimo, and I am aware that crescendo means the rising note and not the final crash, as many people mistakenly think. Once I did plough my way through a book explaining the structure of the classical symphony, and I went a little cross-eyed. When my wife mentions a tonic triad, I think she’s talking about Chinese gangsters peddling drug-infused tonics.

I repeat, I am not a musician.

But here is a phenomenon which drives my musically-literate wife crazy. If (most often on a car journey) we turn on Radio NZ Concert halfway through a piece of what is miscalled “classical” music, I am able either to name the composer or to place the approximate date of the composition.

I hear the small orchestra and the short movements and the classical chiselling of it and I say “Hmmm – Haydn”. Or I hear the lush, overblown post-Wagnerian Late Romantic grandiosity and I say “Ah yes – Richard Strauss.” Or that curious, full-orchestrated bleakness, like ice dripping off trees, reveals Bela Bartok to me.

I’m not overplaying my accuracy. I do have my failures, and sometimes they are spectacular. When I first heard it (in a coming-in-halfway-through situation), I mistook Liszt’s spare “Prophet Bird” for a 20^th century composition, maybe by the likes of Erik Satie. I once confidently identified as Stravinsky’s something by a New Zealand composer. Oh woe! Still, I’m pretty good at this game, and it drives my wife spare.

“How do you do that?” she asks, when I’ve just accurately identified something.

“It just sounds different”, I say, in my complete ignorance of the technicalities. The orchestration alone (even if I can’t identify specifically how the instruments are deployed) will tell me if it’s Late Medieval or Renaissance or Baroque or Classic or Romantic or Late Romantic or Impressionist or Modernist, and it’s usually quite easy to attach the probable composer’s name once the era is identified.

There is another element to my untutored knowledge. I listen to a lot of classical music on CDs or RNZ Concert or (the best classical music station I know) “Radio Swiss Classic” which I listen to through iTunes on my computer. I love the gentle German-language voices which announce the recordings without any other commentary – although if I chose I could listen to the same play-list as “Radio Suisse Classique”, and hear the announcements in French. Inevitably over the years, I’ve got to know many pieces by ear, and so can easily slide in halfway through Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” or de Falla’s “Three-Cornered Hat” or Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony or Dvorak’s cello concerto or many others and know what’s cooking. And there are favourites. Of course Beethoven’s Eroica, 5^th and Pastoral are the three greatest symphonies ever written (this is simply an objective fact – not a matter for debate), just as Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Verdi’s Otello are the two greatest operas ever written. (Wagner? Pfui!). But I would make a case for the opening movement of Brahms’ 4^th as the greatest single movement of a symphony ever written – by which I mean, of course, that I love its “sea surge” effect like incoming waves.

So – as you know I can – I could witter on referring to many other beloved pieces (Oh! Elgar’s two completed symphonies and his violin concerto and his cello concerto! Ah! Vaughan William’s Symphonia Antartica!) But I am forced to one overwhelming question.

Is there any value to appreciating music in this uninformed way?

I would not dare entering into a conversation with trained musicians about music, as I know I would have nothing to contribute to it and would not be able to follow all the necessary technical terms. But I would guarantee that I, and people like me, are more representative of the symphony-concert-going audience than the musically-trained. I know there is an art to producing all those musical effects and colouration and emotional pulse. I do not have that art. But I can recognize music as original or derivative or pastiche or genius or talent. I can do this because I am familiar with it. I am the man who cannot paint but who can still appreciate art and feel uplifted or inspired (or bored out of his tree) by visiting art galleries.

I am loading my argument here, of course, and I know some musicians who would tell me that I cannot have a full appreciation of music without some training. Probably they are right. But I would reply that my head-on listener’s knowledge of music is a sort of training. And I have the advantage of a wife who can fill me in on the technical terms when I really need them. Besides which, even if only in an instinctive and experiential sense, I understand the structure of music and that is two thirds of the pleasure of listening.

Footnote: It is necessary to add that I could have written the above opinion piece with reference to jazz rather than to “classical” music. I spend as much time distinguishing my Jelly Roll Mortons from my Art Tatums as I do distinguishing my Scriabins from my Shostakoviches. But jazz, being largely unwritten, always consists of unique and individual performances; and when it come to identifying it “blind”, one is listening to the quality of the recording as much as to the performance. The monaural hiss of even the best Bix Beiderbecke recording is quite different from the multi-directional recording perfection of the best Wynton Marsalis. And if I want to get down off my pedestal, I must also admit that I spend quite a lot of time listening to Broadway show tunes and general “pop” as well as to “classical” or jazz – although it is the last two genres that are most musically nourishing.

Something New

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

 “THE BRIGHT SIDE OF MY CONDITION” by Charlotte Randall (Penguin, $NZ30)

            Charlotte Randall likes to have her novels narrated in the first-person. Sometimes, the style doesn’t work – or at least not for me. When I reviewed her The Crocus Hour  (New Zealand Books, Spring 2008), I admitted that I found the narrator insubstantial and a bit of a distraction from the more interesting stuff that was going on in that novel. On the other hand, when Randall creates interesting and substantial narrators, the first-person technique works brilliantly. When I reviewed Randall’s Hokitika Town (Metro, April 2011), I found its narrator “Halfie” to be one of its delights, with his lively chatter in a half English-half Maori lingo of the novelist’s devising. I also praised the novelist’s courage for daring to create such a character in an age when it is deemed indelicate to presume to speak on behalf of another ethnicity. Hokitika Town, with its vivid sense of the chaotic nature of a raw, pioneering township, is one of the best recent New Zealand historical novels.

            In The Bright Side of My Condition, Randall once again has first-person narration, but this time from a character every bit as interesting as “Halfie” and then some. Bloodworth is an English convict at odds with human society and in the end questioning the nature of Nature itself

The novel is based on a true story. In about 1820, four convicts, managed to escape from the British penal colony on Norfolk Island by stowing away on a sealing ship. When the captain discovered them, he offered them the choice of being returned to the penal colony or being set ashore on an uninhabited island, where they could work for him by clubbing seals and collecting their skins. The convicts chose to be set ashore, so the captain dumped them on cold, uninhabited Snares Island, about 200 kilometres south of the South Island. He promised to pick them up within a year. Instead, the four men were left on the island for over ten years.

Bypassing cheerful kiddie fantasies (The Coral Island, The Swiss Family Robinson etc.), any novel which strands a handful of human beings on a desert island immediately makes us think of either Robinson Crusoe (= solitary human endurance by ingenuity and faith in providence) or Lord of the Flies (= flawed human nature, and human evil, revealed when the restraints of civilization are removed). The title The Bright Side of My Condition comes from Robinson Crusoe, a sentence from which is quoted as the novel’s epigraph:

“I learn’d to look more upon the bright side of my condition and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoy’d rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts that I cannot express them.”

I can only assume that this upbeat epigraph is quoted ironically, for the tone of The Bright Side of My Condition is more dark than bright.

Once ashore, the four convicts (known exclusively by the nicknames they have acquired) do have to struggle with nature in order to survive. But the quest for food, warmth and shelter, while duly accounted for, is less central to the novel’s purpose than the differences between the men themselves. Slangam is the tough one who appoints himself boss, bullies the others and in effect becomes the island’s dictator - but he does know about the practical necessities of survival. Gargantua (also known as Fatty and Flonker) is the educated one, almost a gentleman, who has travelled and knows about Art and Literature, feels superior to the others, and isn’t all that keen on physical labour. Toper is an Irishman who longs for liquor. He is a good and ingenious cook with a sarcastic wit, but his strong religious beliefs mean he is always crossing himself or invoking God, much to the taunting and teasing of Slangam and Gargantua. Then there’s the narrator, Bloodworth.

I do not believe this novel is intended as an allegory, but the configuration of these characters does push it in the direction of fable. For as Bloodworth interprets the others to us, he comes to see them as embodying Law and the State (Slangam); Religion (Toper); and Art and Learning (Gargantua). In other words, although they are outcasts, in his three fellow castaways, Bloodworth sees being replicated on this island the values of the “civilised” states from which they are isolated. Late in the novel he refers to the other three as “Mr Sweat, Mr Pray and Mr Know-it-all” (p.227), and he constantly puzzles over why they have to bring to the island all that is wrong with the world at large, rather than taking the opportunity to create a more equitable society. When he is imprisoned by the others at one stage, and they begin to make “laws”, he reflects:

“But we do finish with a list of crimes matched to a list of punishments, nearly all about food and work and most a fucken nonsense. The nonsense is that free on our island we fashion ourselves a little replica of what we come from, a sad little copy of the big world that send us all to Norfolk.” (p.149)

Unfortunately, the flaws in human nature (or original sin) are portable, and things are going to end in tears. In this thematic respect at least, The Bright Side of My Condition has something in common with both The Lord of the Flies and Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, even if the specifics of its tale are quite different.

For Bloodworth, the very sound of his companions’ voices becomes irritating:

“I don’t answer. What cud I say? I don’t like to listen to yer’s more’n I have to. I don’t like the same old topics going round and round, and round again jes fer luck, and round again jes because yer made a rut of your thinking, and around a few more times because yer self is in a prison of your own making. Yer all jes like them speechifiers in The Gazetteer that band on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about the same old topics and call it news.” (p.177)

The novel often captures that fear of the unknown that a handful of people will experience in a totally unknown country, especially when their knowledge of the natural world is mixed with:

“Everyone go quiet and probably fall to thinking about his great fear. Is the noise of the hakawai really a screech owl or a moon snake or a night albatross or lava boiling under your feet? That’s the great trouble with fears and darkness, no daytime sense wipe out night-time’s nonsense, it grow and swirl and distort itself, it come out in a shape it dint go in at.” (p.76)

As in an epic, Randall begins her tale in medias res. Characters’ back-stories are only gradually revealed as the men fill in time by talking – Toper with his tales of “Slapsauce”, the French cook and con-man for whose pilfering he was transported; Slangam with his account of how he got to be imprisoned; Gangantua with his smuggling of art works from Persia; Bloodworth’s complex tale of love, insanity and transportation for stealing to feed his bastard child. We are eighty pages in before we learn in detail about their escape from Norfolk Island. Meanwhile the winds whistle up direct from the Antarctic (called “Incognita” by Bloodworth), there’s the toil of finding firewood and clubbing seals and making drying frames for their skins. And there’s the stink of the seals’ blood-and-guts and excrement on the beaches, and the screech and racket of the huge whiskered penguin colony on the other side of the island.

Central to the novel’s impact, however, is that first-person narration, bringing with it (as first-person narration always does these days) all those questions about the reliability of the narrator. For example, if I object that the Irishman Toper is almost a caricature of a “dumb Mick”, I have to remember that it is an uneducated and sometimes superstitious Englishman of nearly two centuries ago who is talking and expressing his prejudices. As in Hokitika Town, Charlotte Randall gives her narrator a patois more-or-less of her own devising. Bloodworth’s language is sometimes slangy, sometimes poetic, sometimes steeped in Biblical cadences, and often grammatically deficient but (with the odd lapse) credible as a language both ours and not ours, taking into account time and place and Bloodworth’s lack of education. But in this novel (unlike the earlier one) there are also odd moments where other characters comment on the narrator’s interior monologue as if they can hear his thoughts – or as if, in this lonely place, he is actually speaking his thoughts aloud.

Randall’s skill is found in the way Bloodworth’s voice changes in the course of the narrative. At first he seems placid in temperament, as when he runs out of tobacco and resigns himself to his loss, unlike another member of the group:

 “Even if I were eking out the tobacco, it’s all long gone. Like Toper who look at the berries to make gin from, I examine the blasted leafs and wonder if any can turn into a passable smoke. But I’m a lazy man and I know it. Toper drive himself mad trying to make his pleasure. I jes give mine up. I give up the smoking for the sitting.” (p.34)

He is ready to surrender any hope of rescue and see their life as a brief interlude before death, hardly different from the one they lived in wider society:

“Sometimes, though, when a cold wind blow from the land of ice and we’re all at each other’s throats, it seem to me such a situation aint much different from the life I used to live and wud go back to if the ship ever come. Just keeping alive and waiting to die, that’s what it boil down to, don’t it, if yer take off all the false hope, the hope of all them excitements and pleasures that hover and vanish like ghost ships.” (p.38)

Later, however, like a Herbert Spencer avant la lettre, Bloodworth’s observations on the mating and fighting and dying of seals and penguins and albatrosses, and his own participation in clubbing seals, make him see life as competition plus violence, or “survival of the fittest”. The tone is less accommodating. And thoughts on predation make him question God’s purposes in ways quite contrary to Robinson Crusoe’s reliance on providence.

It would be unfair to reveal how a newly-published novel ends, but I can say that the last forty pages of The Bright Side of My Condition give the novel’s title an even more ironical meaning. They also see Charlotte Randall facing, very ingeniously, the problem of having a first-person narrator record things he could not possibly have witnessed.

If Hokitika Town gave us the chaos and disorder of a pioneering New Zealand settlement, The Bright Side of My Condition gives us the earlier paradox of European settlement in the first place – the imposition of Europe and all its values on a wild landscape. Again, Charlotte Randall has thought her way into an essential aspect of New Zealand identity.

Pedantic footnote: This novel is very specifically set in the very early 19^th century. At one point, a character offers a toast to the Prince Regent and there are a number of references to Coleridge’s newly-published Rime of the Ancient Mariner. So when a character says “the business grow like topsy” (p.45), my pedantic anachronism-detector gets annoyed. The phrase “grow like topsy” surely wouldn’t have existed until after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. However, Charlotte Randall makes so few such slips that it’s hardly worth my mentioning, is it?

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 YOUNG HAVE SECRETS” by James Courage (first published 1954)

            60 years ago, in 1954, there were two significant cultural events related to Christchurch. One was when, in a Christchurch park, two deluded schoolgirls smashed in a woman’s head with a brick, and set off a small industry of comments on, justifications for, and dramatisations of the murder. The other was the publication of James Courage’s novel The Young Have Secrets, which has a Christchurch setting, even if the New Zealand-born author wrote it in faraway England.

            Have you ever had the experience of liking and sympathising with a novel, even if you can easily take out your little critical airgun and shoot holes in its many and obvious defects? That is how I feel about the very imperfect and yet very engaging novel that is The Young Have Secrets. For the moment, let me shun any comment on the novel’s background, and just tell you about the novel as I found it, before I looked up what the few commentaries had to say.

The Young Have Secrets is very specifically set in 1914, with war looming in distant Europe and actually breaking out about halfway through the novel. It is odd to consider that this was only 40 years before the time this 60-year-old novel was written. 1914 was still within living memory in 1954, even if it is ancient history to us.

10-year-old Walter Blakiston, son of a sheep-farming family, has been sent to board with the family of Mr Garnett, the principal of the small preparatory school that Walter attends in Christchurch. The Garnetts live in the seaside settlement of Sumner, so every school day Mr Garnett and young Walter ride the tram between Sumner and Christchurch, although they make sure they don’t sit together. In the Garnett household there lives, together with Mr and Mrs Garnett, their unmarried daughter Muriel. Just up the hill lives the Garnetts’ married daughter Hilda, whose husband is the young Scots architect Geoff Macaulay. But there is also talk of another unmarried daughter, Rose.

In part the novel concerns Walter’s time at the small preparatory school, where he plays schoolboy games, feels typically homesick and passes notes under the desk to chums, as he observes the dry-old-stick Mr Garnett at work. In part, it concerns his larking around with Jimmy Nelson, half-Maori son of the gossipy working-class Mrs Nelson, who lives near the more genteel middle-class Garnetts. But it mainly concerns what goes on in the Garnett household and how it affects young Walter.

It is clear that, when he was single, Geoff Macaulay was more in love with Rose Garnett than with Hilda Garnett, whom he married. It is clear that Muriel Garnett did something to halt Geoff’s original courtship of Rose. But (while Mr and Mrs Garnett are not aware of it), it is also clear that Geoff and Rose are still in love, even now that Hilda is pregnant with Geoff’s child. Unbeknown to her family, Rose has come back to Christchurch and Geoff has begun to see her. 10-year-old Walter, the boarder, is given confusing confidences about all this by various of the adult characters – notably Muriel, Geoff and Rose – but only dimly understands what is going on. He is frequently told not to tell other people what he has heard. He is often pumped for information (especially by the garrulous Mrs Nelson) and he is occasionally asked to carry messages.

I offer no spoilers here. We, as adult readers, pick all this up well before the novel’s midway point. But it is only about halfway through – before he takes a holiday with his grandparents – that comprehension of the situation begins to dawn on Walter.

So (as in a better-known New Zealand novel, Ian Cross’s The God Boy) the core of this novel is a child seeing, but not fully understanding, what passes between adults. It is an adult novel with an in-built quality of dramatic irony.  The Young Have Secrets is written in the third-person-limited voice, with Walter as its centre of consciousness. We see only what Walter sees. This means that some of the more melodramatic events of the novel’s latter half are kept offstage and reported only.

Reading this novel, I found much to like. There is the vivid, if overtly symbolic, opening, where the tram on which Walter and Mr Garnett are travelling hits and kills a dog. The man and the little boy react in completely different ways, foretasting their relationship throughout the novel. The accident also jolts Walter out of his escapist reading of an English school story, bringing him back to the world that is really around him. (The effect reminded me of the opening of the film Once Were Warriors, where the first image is a idealised tourist poster of New Zealand, from which the camera slowly pans to the slummy reality of South Auckland). Throughout the novel, slabs of Walter’s escapist reading are contrasted with the reality of his experiences. And – like Mr Garnett’s pedagogy – they are among the novel’s many reminders of the fervently Anglophile culture of New Zealand (and perhaps especially of Christchurch) a century ago. 

Related to this, I liked James Courage’s handling of period detail. There are some rather contrived passages like the following (from Part 1 Chapter 3, or pp.25-26 in the first edition I’ve been reading) where Mr Garnett mutters: “This colonial mutton… not like the English Southdown… it wants consistency…One would think in this land of sheep, the famers might breed sheep of a closer texture.” Obviously such words are designed to tell (perhaps English) readers some basic facts about colonial New Zealand. But in the main, Courage keeps his period detail relevant to dramatic situations - Geoff Macaulay literally lights the headlamps on his car. In prep school the assistant teacher Miss Threplow gets the class to recite Kipling’s description of New Zealand as “last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart”. There is a rusty penny-farthing bicycle, already out-dated, found in a shed and made a plaything by Walter Blakiston and Jimmy Nelson. And so on.

Among the most poignant period details are the boys’ school games. They swap the cards that come with chocolate bars. They love stamp collecting. They wonder why stamps still have Edward VII on them, when George V is king. And of course, once it starts, they make very little-boy-ish speculations on the war in Europe. The misery of a poor little boy trying to do his homework when he has a head cold (Part 1, Chapter 11) is painfully convincing.

The novelist shows an awareness of social class (even if Walter doesn’t). In the working class home, Mrs Nelson smokes and beer is drunk and Jimmy doesn’t have to go to Sunday school (the way Walter does). There are some nice points of subtlety, as when the dry old stick Mr Garnett, usually a schoolmasterly disciplinarian, is so caught up in his own nostalgia that he forgives Walter and Jimmy for taking and trying to ride his rusty, disused penny-farthing. The late introduction of the adult son of the Garnett family, the lighthouse-keeper Mark Garnett, is a little clumsy, but he is a welcome figure; and despite the intervening melodrama, the final fate of Geoff Macaulay is quite probable for the novel’s setting.

But it is at this point that I have to take out my little airgun of criticism and politely shoot some holes in The Young Have Secrets.

We are meant to see subtleties in dialogue that little Walter doesn’t see, or that he misinterprets.  This works up to a point, but the problem is that the dialogue between adults is too often both so arch and so specific that, in effect, it spells out things in a way that even a 10-year-old could readily grasp.

There is a fearful implausibility to many of the confidences Walter is given. Look, for example, at Part 3, Chapter 9 (pp.224-226) where Rose gives a totally improbable confession to Walter of what has just happened to Hilda. In Part 3, Chapter 10 (pp.230-231), Geoff Macaulay explains his problems to Walter thus:

“You wouldn’t know the tangle a decent educated man can get into over so simple a bunch of trouble as his own instincts…. Don’t ask the women – any woman – to accept you for what you are, with your own life – oh no, they shove you up on a pedestal, want you to be something like a god, a father, or even a brother. They’ll draw the soul out of you to satisfy some illusion of love that never existed” etc. etc.

Ask yourself if even a distressed man would blurt this out to a 10-year-old child. Regrettably, such passages are far from rare in the novel.

There are many inept attempts in the novel to justify the copious “adult” information Walter receives. They include episodes of lengthy eavesdropping and overhearing and moments where adults use phrases (familiar from old Hollywood films) such as “I don’t know why I’m telling you this” or “Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this” or Rose’s lament “And now I’ve told you, a child” at Part 1, Chapter 18  (p.141)

Aside from the implausibilities, much of dialogue is alarmingly self-expository. Part 1, Chapter 8 (p.48) opens thus:

“ ‘What I don’t understand, father dear’, said Hilda Macaulay, ‘is why you don’t sell the school and retire. Instead of which you go so far as to take on a boarder – this child, Walter – to add to your burdens. He even stayed here through last holidays….’ ”

Again, this sounds like the contrivance of an old Hollywood film.

If the novel often clumps along in terms of style, I might also suggest that sometimes the author, as well as dramatizing the prejudices of an earlier age, seems to share them. There is a slightly racist tone to the way Walter’s kindly grandparents talk about Maori when Walter visits them. This may be no more than accurate reportage of the (Pakeha) values of that time. But later in novel we are given what is virtually a racial caricature of the estranged Maori husband whom Mrs Nelson calls her “smooging randy savage” (Part 3, Chapter 6, p.205).

So I weighed up the pluses and minuses of The Young Have Secrets, and found myself nevertheless drawn into the child’s uncomfortable position and absorbed in reading the novel. I was also tempted to see myself as very clever. A child not exactly mistreated, but to a certain degree exploited by adults, as he becomes privy to illicit adult sexual behaviour? I knew what novel this immediately reminded me of, L.P.Hartley’s The Go-Between, which I read as a set text in my last year at secondary school. I also enjoyed the famous Joseph Losey film version (scripted by Harold Pinter) when it first came out in 1971. I knew nothing of the writing of The Young Have Secrets, but I did know that The Go-Between was first published in 1953, a year before The Young Have Secrets was published. Was (England-based) James Courage influenced by Hartley’s novel?

I now find that I wasn’t as clever as all that. Going on-line after reading the novel, I see that Victoria University of Wellington’s NZETC entry on The Young Have Secrets makes the connection not only with The Go-Between, but also with Henry James’ novel of a child at the centre of adult sexual conflict, What Maisie Knew. (And for good measure, the Vic entry also remarks on the improbability that “adults would so frequently confide their woes to childish ears”, much as I have commented here.)

There is also the other matter, which I knew before I read the novel but which I have left for the end.

James Courage (1903-1963) had a social background exactly the same as that of Walter Blakiston – sheep-farmer father, Christchurch prep school. He then went to Christ’s College in Christchurch and Oxford University, spending nearly all of the rest of his life in England. Like Walter, he would have been 10 in 1914, so his reconstruction of pre-First World War Christchurch is autobiographical. More important to some commentators is the fact that Courage was homosexual and is now part of the New Zealand gay canon. His 1959 novel A Way of Love, although discreet, tactful and with absolutely no sex scenes, is often hailed as the first openly gay novel by a New Zealand writer. (It was virtually banned in New Zealand on its first appearance.)

 So how much is Courage’s sexuality reflected in The Young Have Secrets, which has no overtly homosexual elements?

Knowing something of Courage’s life before I read the novel (the penalty of reading too many “surveys” of NZ Lit.), I did think that having a prepubescent child as his focus allowed Courage to look with an outsider’s eyes on heterosexual complications. (Note, by the way, that L.P.Hartley and - probably – Henry James were also discreet homosexuals.) I was alert to any comments that might have suggested a delicate subversion of sexual norms, as when (Part 1 Chapter 16, Pg.127) Walter asks innocently why a man can’t marry two women at one time. Very late in the novel, once he has been returned home, Walter’s mother says that his father wanted to send him away from her so that he was “not tied to my apron strings”; and there is the very, very subtle suggestion that Walter’s father does not consider Walter “manly” enough to be his son. Then there is the solitary, unmarried lighthouse keeper Mark Garnett, who has removed himself from the domestic and heterosexual battleground. Could all these things be the novelist’s technique for talking about himself without revealing too much? Possibly. I have now read an essay by Christopher Bourke, which analyses the novel exclusively in terms of its critique of the conventional nuclear family.

Or is this being too clever by half? Courage’s biography notwithstanding, the little boy at the centre of the story is prepubescent, and is still puzzling out why men and women are as they are, the way little boys who later develop into any orientation do. There may be intentional subtexts here. Knowing something about James Courage may add to our interpretation of the novel. But it was the representative child’s mystification by adults that most held me as a reader, despite the often clumsy way it is presented.

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.

  OH, IT’S YOU AGAIN

 Scene: The imaginary consulting rooms of an imaginary psychotherapist, as he deals with one of his more obtuse clients. The door opens and the client enters hesitantly. The psychotherapist, looks up, sighs, and motions the client towards his couch, where the client lies, deeply troubled.

SHRINK: Oh, so it’s you again.

ME: I’m very, very sorry to trouble you. It’s the old problem.

SHRINK: [sighs once again] Don’t worry. I’m here to help. Perhaps this time we might deal with it. You have been watching too many old films on Youtube once again, haven’t you?

ME: Yes. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.

SHRINK: No, no, don’t be sorry. In these cases, guilt is not a very helpful impulse.

ME: But I am sorry. I’m sorry I’m wasting so much time when I should be doing something more productive. And I’m sorry that I’m sitting in front of my computer screen watching these ancient images when I can hear wife and younger children moving about in the rest of the house and I should be joining them and…well… taking part in life. And I’m sorry that…[voice trails off]

SHRINK: You’re sorry that you keep boring the readers of your blog by writing long and redundant accounts of the films you’ve watched, in those “Something Thoughtful” sections. That’s a major part of the problem, now, isn’t it?

ME: [voice rising hysterically] Yes. Yes.

SHRINK: And you fear that nobody actually reads your long analyses of things like [he consults Reid’s Reader on the computer screen he has opened] Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby and Fritz Lang’s Fury – I see your blog index tells me you dealt with them under the headings ‘Time Stumps the Best Intentions’ and ‘Two Courses of Fury’. And above all you fear that you will end up looking rather stupid and making a public fool of yourself?

ME: [breaking down into sobs and moans] Oh yes. Oh God, yes.

SHRINK: [producing box of tissues] Wipe your eyes, now. I’m sure we can deal with this. Your condition isn’t unique, you know. I don’t think psychiatry has yet invented a name for the addiction to really old movies, but that is the condition you are suffering and I have dealt with other cases. I must admit, though, you do seem to have a rather extreme form of the ailment.

ME: [sniffling and gurgling inarticulately]

SHRINK: Perhaps it would help if I reviewed your case with you. I have your file here. I see you were a film reviewer for thirty years, from 1974, when you were still a university student, until you moved for a year out of Auckland in 2004. The biographical details you put on all your books say that you wrote “the first detailed analysis of the revived New Zealand film industry”.

ME: [residual pride momentarily overcoming hysteria] Yes. A Decade of New Zealand Film, John McIndoe publishers, Dunedin 1985.

SHRINK: Quite. Surely, then, your addiction to old movies on Youtube is easily explained. You haven’t been a film reviewer for the last ten years, so you are simply getting the equivalent of all those viewings to which you were accustomed for thirty years.

ME: [now controlling the odd sniffle] No. I’m sorry. That doesn’t cover it. You see, since I stopped film reviewing I haven’t missed it, and I only rarely go out to see a new film. I know finance has something to do with it. In all those film-reviewing years, seeing previews of two or three new movies a week, I floated on a sea of complimentary tickets and press screenings. I rarely paid a cent. When film festival time came around, I would get free passes for about thirty movies in the festival fortnight and go punch-drunk watching them all. So money is one reason I now pay to see only four or five new movies a year. But you must understand, since I ceased film reviewing, I don’t hunger to see all the latest releases. This… affliction concerns old films. And I mean it concerns really old films. Most of them made before I was born, and I am in my early sixties now.

SHRINK: I must stop you there. You seem to be obsessed with something from before your birth. Could it be…

ME: Oh please, please, don’t impose something Freudian on me.

SHRINK: Very well, then, please explain what you think the genesis of your condition is.

ME: I have thought about it. Of course I have. I think it started with the type of books that were lying around the house when I was a kid.

SHRINK: Books? Wouldn’t that fact make you an addict of books?

ME: Yes, it has done that too. But you see, among his many other activities my father was one of the committee directing the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies and he was also a film reviewer on a daily paper for some years, although not for as long as I eventually was. So a minority of the books on his shelves were illustrated books of film criticism – not to mention the copies of Films and Filming and Sight and Sound and Films in Review and even the Sovexport Illustrated Film Newsletter that came regularly into the house. And even before I could read very well, I would spend hours looking through the illustrations and stills in things like the Penguin Film Reviews from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now and Ernest Lindgren’s The Art of the Film and Roger Manvell’s Film and Film and the Public. I got to know those images so well that they still stay in my mind long after the texts of those books have been forgotten. I’m sorry to descend to clichés, I really am, but some of those images have become iconic to me. For example Jean Gabin walking the foggy street in Quai des brumes and Victor McLaglen clutching his shot gut in The Informer and that tilted camera-shot of the morning after in Un Carnet de Bal and….

SHRINK: Um, I think I get your point. I am sure you would be able to list a lot of “iconic” images for me. But remember our time is limited, and this doesn’t quite explain your addiction. All young children look at the pictures before they can read the text, but this doesn’t make them obsessive about something.

ME: [sighs] Yes, I agree, but perhaps I should elaborate on the context a little. Remember, this was pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-internet. To see a film, one was at the mercy of local film exhibitors and (once I moved into adolescence) whatever was scheduled on few-channel black-and-white television. I very quickly understood that I would never see many of those iconic ancient images in their moving form. They were, in a sense, unattainable. I gradually formed the impression that it was both a very great privilege and a rare treat to actually see those movies that were illustrated in the books and publications lying around the family home. Looking back on my adolescence and young manhood, I see I adopted some rather strange habits because of this.

SHRINK: Such as?

ME: Well there was a lavishly illustrated book – a pretentious and badly-written compilation I now think – called Classics of the Foreign Film, put together by the American critic Parker Tyler. At least in the 1962 edition that I still have, it’s a book that lists and gives very brief analyses of 70 non-American films the compiler considered “classics”, starting with Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919 and ending with Antonioni’s La Notte in 1961. I used to diligently tick off, on the table of contents, each film when I had got to see it, congratulating myself on having conquered each. But I was always dissatisfied. I always hungered for the films listed in the book that I hadn’t seen. By my late teens, I would make long journeys to out-of-the-way cinemas to catch up with them on the extremely rare occasions they were screened. And it upsets me that after all this time, I have still seen only 53 of the 70 movies Tyler listed.

SHRINK: You are being melodramatic. That doesn’t sound like an obsession to me. It sounds like a harmless hobby.

ME: Tell me then - do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat or screaming, because you never have managed to catch up with Poil de Carotte from 1933 or The Dybbuk from 1938?

SHRINK: No, that sort of reaction does sound a little abnormal.

ME: You understand the depths of my problem and my obsession, then. So when, by some miracle Youtube comes along, it fulfils my childhood fantasies of a machine upon which I could watch, privately or with one or two chosen companions, any film whenever I wanted to.

SHRINK: I understand. But aren’t there moves afoot to make it less easy to do that? Isn’t copyright nibbling away at your freedom of access to old films?

ME: [visibly jumping at the use of the word “copyright” and now breaking into a cold sweat] I know. I know. This is part of my problem. I’m desperate to see as much as I can before the curtain comes down. Why, in the last year alone I have caught up with films I last saw as a teenager when television still played old movies. I mean the likes of the Ealing comedies A Run for Your Money and The Maggie and Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle and the 1951 original version of The Browning Version.

SHRINK: Childhood nostalgia. Perfectly harmless

ME: And in the last year I’ve also seen John Farrow’s Alias Nick Beale and Carol Reed’s woefully unfunny Night Train to Munich and his pretty good Outcast of the Islands and Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and William Wellman’s Yellow Sky and Rouben Mamolian’s Golden Boy and James Whale’s wonderful The Old Dark House and his abysmal The Road Back …

SHRINK: I understand, I understand you have…

ME:….and G.W.Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (my God! It really is better than All Quiet on the

Western Front) and Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room and the primitive early talkie The Canary Murder Case with Louise Brooks’ voice obscenely dubbed by somebody else; and the surprisingly good 1935 Mystery of Edwin Drood with Claude Rains, and Paul Leni’s silent The Man Who Laughs with Conrad Veidt and Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and his The Suspect and his Christmas Holiday; and Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn

SHRINK: Please, you’ve made your point! You’ve made your point!

ME:…and Launder and Gilliat’s 1946 Waterloo Road and their 1946 Green for Danger and their 1948 London Belongs to Me, and Julien Duvivier’s Flesh and Fantasy, and Anthony Asquith’s silent Cottage on Dartmoor and Fritz Lang’s absolutely piffling Man Hunt and all

(yes all!) of Feuillade’s 1913 serial Fantomas and Franju’s clunky 1963 hommage to Feuillade, Judex and Edward G. Robinson in both The Red House and Night Has a Thousand Eyes and Germaine Deluc’s two silent pieces of surrealism La Riante Mme. Beant and La Coquille et le Clergyman and all those silent Hitchcock films I’ve never seen before such as The Pleasure Garden and Downhill and Champagne.

SHRINK: You’ve made your point. SHUT UP!!

ME: But don’t you understand? I’ve now seen every film Hitchcock directed!! Every one!!! (Well, apart from his Waltzes for Vienna, and at least I’ve caught clips of that on Youtube). And I’ve seen Jean Renoir’s Boudu Sauve des Eaux and that underrated Italian movie The Girl With a Suitcase and Michael Winner’s surprisingly good The System from 1963 and Joseph Losey’s The Damned from 1961…

SHRINK: STOP IT!!! Stop it or I will have you restrained!!!

ME: But please. [rising from the couch and now shouting] You don’t understand. I’ve seen all of these on Youtube in the last year. I’m obsessed. I cannot get over the magic and the miracle of seeing people walking and moving and sometimes talking in films that were made when our grandparents or even great-grandparents were young. And on such good, clean prints, too. Not like the chain-lined ones at which we used to peer at film society screenings where the projector would break down.

SHRINK: [gently guiding patient back to couch] Please. Calm down. Calm down. Tell me something that soothes you. Think pleasant thoughts.

ME: [sitting once again] Well, I did watch recently on Youtube two silent gems I thought I’d never see. There was Jacques Feyder’s 1920 Sahara desert epic L’Atlantide. What an

absurd story! How did anyone ever take its Queen-of-Atlantis idea seriously, especially when her kingdom looked like a rather conservative hotel? But such clear images, with the desert sweeping and mysterious and yet so less dishonestly glamourised than it was in such films as Lawrence of Arabia. And then – even more amazingly - Victor Sjostrom’s The Phantom Coach from 1920, the one that used to be called in English Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness. Brilliant. The coach of death taking away the drunkard. The sordor of the slum. The earnestness of the Salvation Army girl. Quite wonderful. Did you know Ingmar Bergman said he watched it over 100 times in his lifetime? And there I saw it on Youtube.

SHRINK: Perhaps we could break this addiction if you had something to look forward to?

ME: But I do! I do1 I’ve just discovered on Youtube a full and restored version of Maurice Stiller’s 1919 Sir Arne’s Treasure. I’ve always wanted to see that one…

SHRINK: I’m sorry. Time’s up. Do you feel you’re any nearer a cure?

ME: Not really.

SHRINK: Do you want to be cured? Really?

ME: Um, I’m not sure.

SHRINK: Do you want to see me again next month?

ME: I suppose so.

SHRINK: What will we talk about?

ME: What I’ve been watching, I suppose.

They shake hands. Client exits, relatively happy. Psychotherapist sighs loudly. Moves to bookshelf, takes down a volume on voyeurism. Reads for a short time then shakes his head emphatically. Again, sighs loudly and returns book to shelf. Psychotherapist moves backs to his desk, reactivates his computer, spends some time watching a documentary on the mating habits of ants. Finally he puts a call though to his secretary. “That last one,” he says, “Bill him double.”