We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“KARL WOLFSKEHL – A POET IN EXILE”
by Friedrich Voit (Cold Hub Press, $NZ40); “A COMMUNIST IN THE FAMILY –
Searching for Rewi Alley” by Elspeth Sandys (Otago University Press, $NZ40)
Reading Karl Wolfskehl – A Poet in Exile, I am
like a blind man feeling his way around an unfamiliar room. This may be a
rather coarse image to attach to the biography of a poet who went blind. But I
want to emphasise that, having only a smattering of German, and being
unfamiliar with the (mostly untranslated) poetry of Wolfskehl, I was in very
alien territory reading this book.
Of course I
knew part of the public reputation of Wolfskehl, that will be known to many literate New
Zealanders. He was the eminent German-Jewish poet who, fleeing Nazi persecution,
settled in New Zealand in 1938 and remained here until his death in 1948, not
long before his 80th birthday. Like another exile, the Austrian
philosopher Karl Popper, he represented European high culture in a New Zealand
that was starved of such influences; and he connected with many local literary
figures of the time. When I was much younger, I knew two of these figures, as I
will note later in this review.
Friedrich
Voit, Associate-Professor of German at the University of Auckland, and
co-translator (into English) of works by Wolfskehl, has written a biography
which deliberately focuses on Wolfskehl’s years of exile from his native
(south) Germany. Wolfskehl was born in 1869. His forebears had lived in Germany
for centuries and, while they were proud of their Jewish heritage, they
regarded themselves as completely assimilated. Wolfskehl had a respectful
attitude to the Christian religion, but ultimately adhered to the Torah and
regarded Jesus as a fellow Jew, not as a messiah. He was sympathetic to
Zionism, but he never fully embraced it and, though ployglot, he did not know
the Hebrew language. He did, however, take great interest in German-Jewish
poets of earlier centuries, and was involved in translations of their work.
But the most
important influence on him was the lyric poet Stefan George. In the 1890s and
early 1900s he was a key member of George’s “circle”, embracing his symbolism
(this was the era of Mallarme), his transcendentalism and his somewhat elitist
ideas of national regeneration be means of poetically-inspired intellectuals. George’s
ideas (at least as reflected in this book) could lead his followers to adopt a
broad, literary humanism, or to adopt an exalted form of nationalism. Perhaps
it is not surprising that, unlike Wolfskehl, at least some of George’s (German,
non-Jewish) followers adopted an extreme form of nationalism that ultimately led
them to accept Nazism. German transcendentalism could seduce well-meaning
people away from hard social realities.
As for
Wolfskehl himself, he remained a patriotic German right through the First World
War, but then began to see things heading in a sinister direction in the 1920s.
He fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. It will surprise some
readers (although not those who know their history) that for his first five
years of exile, Wolfskehl, and many other German-Jewish refugees, lived happily
and unmolested in Fascist Italy – a Mediterranean culture which he greatly
enjoyed. For most of Mussolini’s dictatorship, anti-semitism was not part of
Fascist ideology. It was only in 1938 that Il Duce, aping his new ally Der
Fuhrer, adopted anti-Jewish laws – at which point Wolfskehl fled Italy and,
after a brief sojourn in Australia, settled in New Zealand, which was not only
as far as possible from troubled Europe, but which he had been told was a
tolerant, non-racist society.
Understandably,
Friedrich Voit devotes only his first two chapters to Wolfskehl’s life before
1938. The following five chapters are about his time in New Zealand. Wolfskehl
had deserted his wife Hanna (from whom he was never divorced) and his two
children in the 1920s when, already in his fifties, he took up with Margot
Ruben, who was 30 years his junior. When he reached New Zealand he was nearly
70. Conforming to the propriety of the time, he had to pretend that Margot was
his niece. Inevitably, Voit spends quite some time detailing Wolfskehl’s trials
as he had to move from one Auckland address to another, either when he could no
longer afford the rent, or when he found his rented quarters uncongenial.
Having come from a wealthy family and having never had to pursue a paying
career, Wolfskehl was dependent on remittances from friends overseas, or from
whatever Margot Ruben could earn as a teacher. Gradually becoming completely blind,
he was very dependent on Margot as amanuensis and secretary, so her necessary outside
work caused some tension.
At first
Wolfskehl found Auckland physically congenial, but was starved of the
sophisticated, cosmopolitan literary society to which he was accustomed. On
brief trips to Dunedin (where there were more German-speaking refugees) and
Christchurch, he found more of the cultural life he craved. But gradually
Auckland literati and artists gathered around him. His first real contacts were
the Auckland craft printer Ronald Holloway and his formidable wife Kay
(Kathleen). Ronald shared his interest in artistic typefaces and rare books; and
Kay, though not speaking the German language, volunteered to turn literal
translations if his poetry into acceptable English-language verse. Later he was
befriended by Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. (Rex) Fairburn and R.A.K. Mason. All these
people were attracted to Wolfkehl by his congeniality, his willingness to
discuss literature, including the New Zealand literature he was just getting to
know, and, of course, the fact that he was a fund of knowledge on Europe’s
humanistic literary traditions. Remember, Wolfskehl was somebody who knew
personally, or had known, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Buber, Thomas
Mann, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl – and Stefan George.
This is all
the “external” story of Wolfskehl as told by Voit. But, being first and
foremost a literary biographer, Voit is as much concerned with the poetry
Wolfskehl was writing during his exile – and it his here that I admit to a
difficulty in reading Karl Wolfskehl – A
Poet in Exile, because I am not conversant with the poetry being discussed.
Wolfskehl had apparently given up writing poetry before the end of the First
World War, but exile and the rise of Nazism fired him to return to poetry. His
poems were never, however, direct political commentary or satire. Following
Stefan George’s symbolist example, and as far as I can make out from this book,
Wolfskehl preferred to write in an allegorical form when he condemned the new
barbarism. I have Voit’s word for it that it was in his New Zealand exile that
he either produced, or gave final form to, some of his most enduring work – to
give their English titles “The Voice Speaks”, “To the Germans” and “Job or the
Four Mirrors”. Analysing these poems is as much Voit’s concern as chronicling
the externals of Wolfskehl’s life.
I do find
one interesting theme in this book. It is clear that Wolfskehl was an amiable
man who loved conversing with fellow poets and artists. But while many New
Zealand writers liked and admired him, in a way they also found his influence
burdensome and a distraction from their own interests. For a couple of years,
Frank Sargeson and A.R.D.Fairburn were his most constant visitors and
supporters, avid for his conversation. But both abruptly deserted him. Voit
comments “the weight of Wolfskehl’s
literary background, his experience and erudition impressed, but it belonged to
a Central European tradition and a past generation that had ceased to be a model
for the younger New Zealand writers and intellectuals” (p.128)
One suspects
that even Wolfskehl often had doubts about both his spiritual aestheticism and
its relevance to the modern world for “no
event made him more aware of the discrepancy between the early twentieth-century
elitist Georgean [i.e. related to Stefan George] utopia of high culture and aesthetic spirituality, which he still
upheld as an ultimate humanistic ideal, and the socio-political reality of the
present than the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”
(p144). And yet even after this he had “his
continued devotion to the Georgean ethos and the circle’s utopia based on an idealised
classical Mediterranean culture and pholosophy.” (p.153)
Reading Karl Wolfskehl – A Poet in Exile, I
often felt that Wolfskehl was not only a man from another country and culture,
but a man from another age, as if the likes of Joris-Karl Huysmans or Algernon
Swinburne had somehow landed in 1940s Auckland. It is for specialists to assess
how apt Friedrich Voit’s analyses of Wolfskehl’s poetry are.
Personal Note: As I said
in the above review, at least two of Wolfskehl’s New Zealand supporters, both
many years older than me, were personal friends of mine. These were Ron and Kay
Holloway, my next-door neighbours for the first 22 years of my life, and people
whom I thereafter visited frequently until their respective deaths. I am
pleased that at pp.138-139, Friedrich Voit quotes from Kay Holloway’s memoirs
(Volume 2 Meet Me at the Press) but,
perhaps tactfully, he leaves out Kay’s characterisation of Margot Ruben as “very possessive and [resentful of] anyone else, especially anyone neither
German nor Jewish, having any influence on [Wolfskehl].” He also omits
Kay’s expressed annoyance with Margot for losing her (Kay’s) translations of
some of Wolfkehr’s poems. Very occasionally I heard Ron speak affectionately of
Wolfskehl, and he did tell one amusing story. Apparently the Holloways
encouraged their eldest son Patrick, then a little boy, to make an illustrated
calendar as a gift to Wolfskehl – but when the time came to give it to the
great poet, the little boy burst into tears and couldn’t bring himself to hand
over what he had spent so long making. Of course Wolfkehl accepted the situation
with a good grace.
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Fourteeen
years ago, in July 2005 to be precise, I had a very interesting experience
which told me much about the mindset of people who admire totalitarian regimes.
The biographer Jung Chang, former Communist and Red Guard during the “Cultural
Revolution”, was in Auckland to promote her iconoclastic biography of Mao
Zedong, Mao – The Unknown Story,
which denounced Mao for his genocidal policies and hypocrisy. Her hefty and
detailed book dispelled many of the heroic myths that well-meaning, but naïve,
Westerners had about the birth and nature of China’s Communist regime. Mao – The Unknown Story was criticised
in some quarters for elements of its historical research. If you have access to
such things, you can read a particularly detailed take-down of the book by
Andrew Nathan in the 17 November 2005 issue of The London Review of Books. Nevertheless, it was a necessary
corrective to idealistic daydreams about the “People’s” Republic as a benign, progressive state, stamping out feudalism and the corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-Shek and bringing uplift to "the people".
I toddled
along to the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna to hear Jung Chang speak. She was
part of a panel discussing her book. Present was a journalist, a great
admirer of Rewi Alley, who was clearly very discomforted by much that Jung
Chang said. He wanted to cling to the idealistic daydream. The really telling
moment came when Jung Chang spoke of the tens of thousands who were tortured
and/or killed during the “Cultural Revolution”, and the millions – possibly as
many as 55 million – who died of famine during the collectivisation of the
“Great Leap Forward”. At which point the journalist blurted out in protest “But China’s a big country!” The
implication was clear. Who cares if many millions died as a direct result of
the regime’s policy? China had many more millions to spare. Besides, they were
expendable so long as the journalist’s daydreams of a socialist utopia could be
maintained. And, of course, the journalist could admire the totalitarian regime
from the comfort of distant New Zealand, where he enjoyed all the liberal
freedoms and didn’t have to endure the faraway regime’s rules.
I could go
off at a tangent and note the implicit racism in much worship of distant
oppressive regimes – in this case, the mindset which suggests that “liberal democracy doesn’t suit the Chinese”
or “the Chinese aren’t ready for
democracy”, masks for the fundamental racism which assumes that the Chinese
do not have reasoning powers, do not have the ability to work as a democracy
and are not aware of alternatives to the regime that has been imposed upon
them.
However, my
business is to review Elspeth Sandys’ (largely admiring) book about Rewi Alley,
so I will break with further polemic.
Novelist,
short-story writer and memoirist, Elspeth Sandys is also a cousin of Rewi Alley.
A Communist in the Family (Searching for
Rewi Alley) was written in part because, in 2017, she took a guided tour in
China with a group celebrating the 90th anniversary of Rewi Alley’s
arrival in China in 1927. Its chapters alternate between accounts of her trip
and her reconstructions of Alley’s life in China.
When she
writes of Rewi Alley, her focus is on the humanitarian that he appears to have
been in his early years in China – the years of the Kuomintang (KMT = “Nationalist”)
government, its fitful civil war with the Communists (CP), foreign
“concessions” in seaports like Shanghai, and the Japanese invasion and Second
World War. We hear of how, after coming to China in 1927 with no particular
agenda, Alley became a fireman, then an important factory inspector in Shanghai
at a time when most factories were dominated by foreign interests. He was appalled
by child labour and the cruel exploitation of children. He came to sympathise
with the Communists. Later, in the Second World War, he founded and in part
organised the “Gung Ho” movement which moved China’s industries away from the
cities and coasts where they were vulnerable to Japanese attack. Later still,
he set up a school for Chinese boys in the north of the country. In all this,
Sandys is very anxious to tell us that, despite rumours, Rewi Alley wasn’t gay
(see p.46).
Sandys appears
to accept, unquestioningly, heroic myths of the genesis of the Communist
“People’s” Republic of China, as in her account of the “Long March” (in Chapter
27). Perhaps, to counter this idealised narrative, she should have read A Foreign Missionary on the Long March,
memoirs edited and introduced by Anne-Marie Brady, which reveals that the CP
forces of the “Long March” were as predatory upon peasants as any other army at
the time, and were not embraced by “the people” any more than warlord or KMT
forces were. But this book doesn’t appear in Sandys’ bibliography. Her comments
on “Gung Ho” (Chapter 13) are equally uncritical, not noting the movement’s
many and severe shortcomings. I make it clear that in saying all this, I am not
whitewashing the regime that preceded the Communist takeover. I am fully aware
that, under Chiang Kaishek (Sandys’ preferred spelling) the KMT had Fascistic
tendencies (although Stalin supported it for many years), was very corrupt, had
a bullying secret police and a reputation for cruelty. But writing negative
comments should not be a matter of either/or. It should be a matter of
both/and. To condemn the KMT and give an easier ride to the CP in the 1930s and
1940s is like condemning the Tsar and praising Stalin. For me, alarm bells ring
when Sandys acknowledges Geoff Chapple as a major source (on p.31) and
describes Chapple’s hagiographic 1980 biography Rewi Alley of China (personally approved by Alley) as “my bible” (on p. 383).
In her account
of her 2017 guided tour of China, there are pages of what I can only call
studied naïvete. We are told (pp.73 ff.) that the tour party’s amiable Chinese
guide Ben tells stories of what the “Cultural Revolution” was to him – a
rewarding experience. Sandys knows this cannot be the whole story, and says
that the tourists tried to question Ben about thorny issues like free speech;
but that he steered away from political questions. But in the end “I couldn’t help admiring Ben. He’d succeeded
in declawing us. Nothing we asked seemed to faze him. He had an answer for
everything.” (p.77) Is this statement to be taken at face value? Does she
really believe Ben had a (legitimate) answer for everything? Or is she
admitting that tour guides in the “People’s” Republic are well versed in
presenting smooth versions of the official line? Elsewhere she says she asks a question on
religious freedom and “…at least I know I
can ask it. No one would deny that censorship exists in China, as it does in
one form or another in every country, but I’ve been able to talk openly of
the Cultural Revolution and even the Tienanmen Square protest, so perhaps the
clampdown on freedom of speech is not as severe as I’d imagined.” (p.171) Reading
this statement, I almost fell off my chair laughing. OF COURSE a tourist,
separated from unsupervised Chinese listeners, can ask whatever he or she likes.
I already knew this from my own incredibly brief (two nights stopover) visit to
Shanghai, where I asked cheeky questions of the official guides (see my posting
Confessions of a Heartless Capitalist Exploiter). But censorship in China means the Chinese masses are not
allowed to know even the basics of their own history and current events, and
are certainly not allowed to express dissenting opinions. And note how Sandys
sneaks in the phrase that censorship exists in China “as it does in one form or another in every country”, as if the
one-party regime’s censorship is little different from censorship in a
pluralistic democracy, where dissent is free to flourish.
Without
being accused of dismissiveness, I am allowed to note that much of this book is
fiction. Sandys tells us so herself, for her Author’s Note says: “In the
interests of creating a dramatic narrative I have taken some liberties
in my depiction of Rewi’s relationships with friends and family. At times,
based on what I know of the facts, I have imagined meetings and
conversations, but I have been careful not to stray from the written
record.… I hope readers will forgive any mistakes made in daring to imagine
Rewi Alley’s life in a country so far from his birthplace, and mine.” (p.7) Often, in “reconstructing” scenes of
Alley’s life and conversations he is supposed to have had, she will begin with
a phrase like “I imagine…” and then
produce pages that read like a simplistic didactic novel, with dialogue neatly
explaining things.
I do note that
Elspeth Sandys is aware both of Alley’s complicity in Maoist propaganda and in
his eventual contempt for Mao – although he expressed that contempt very
ambiguously: Rewi blamed the destructive upheaval of the “Cultural Revolution”
on the “Gang of Four” rather than on Mao himself, but this pretext “failed
to stem the slow drip of a much wider disillusionment. By the end of the 1970s
Rewi’s faith in Mao has gone…”(p.118). Sandys also makes it clear that
Alley wrote many of his encomia on the Communist regime under duress. (pp.148-49).
Nevertheless, this should signal to us that, whether he wrote voluntarily or
otherwise, most of what he wrote under CP rule was worthless as commentary or
historical record. Relatively little of Sandys’ 350-page text deals with
Alley’s years as propaganda “asset” – even though these 39 years (from the CP
takeover in 1949 to Alley’s death in 1987) were far longer than his earlier 22
years in China. In fairness I note that Sandys herself does use the term “mouthpiece” when dealing with Alley’s
reaction to the “Cultural Revolution” (p.273); and she is clearly very upset
that Alley wrote two propaganda books in support of collectivisation during the
mass famines triggered by the “Great Leap Forward” (p.148 and p.329). Speaking
of the KMT era, and Japanese occupation, Sandys says that Alley was willing to
look at, and condemn, the evils that were happening, because “Rewi, unlike most of his contemporaries, was
constitutionally unable to look away.” (p.155) But “looking away” was
exactly what Alley did between 1949 and 1987. Of his reticence, Sandys
tactfully says “Rewi didn’t write lies
during these dark years but he didn’t write the truth either.” (p.97).
I am amused
that Sandys says, of New Zealand’s failure to honour Alley with his
image on a banknote, that “The virus of
anti-communism – and its country cousin, racism – still infects the land.” (p.190).
I know that there are extreme right-wing racist nutters, but since when did
being anti-communist of itself make one racist? And why should such a statement be
provoked by such a trivial matter?
There is one
big elephant in this room which A
Communist in the Family largely bypasses. That is the fact that Alley’s
reputation has – justifiably – been tarnished in recent years. Sandys never
engages with the arguments in Anne-Marie
Brady’s necessary debunking book Friend
of China: the Myth of Rewi Alley (published in 2003). Sandys confines herself
to a dismissive comment (p.47) and to quoting Tom Newnham’s overwrought
statement that Anne-Marie Brady was intentionally “crucifying” Alley. (p.191) Brady’s major – and really irrefutable –
argument was that Alley was used as other “friends of China” have always been
used by the CP regime: as a “respectable” figure to present a positive image of
the “People’s” Republic to other countries. A sort of diplomatic puppet. It is
only because of his usefulness to the regime that his myth has been fostered,
statues to him have been raised, and tour parties have been invited to
celebrate his memory. If Alley is supposedly the reason why New Zealand has "favoured nation" status in China, it is simply because invoking his name can allow the Chinese government to trot out some cliches about him when it comes to striking trade deals.
I
finished this very unsatisfactory book with two complex reactions.
First, I understand that Sandys deplores genocide practised by
Mao’s regime, and is saddened that Rewi Alley was often a propagandist for that
regime. But she also deplores the fact that China, while still officially
Communist, is now running a competitive, market-driven entrepreneurial economy,
with a widening gap between rich and poor. What she longs for are the simpler
times when it could still be believed that, in supporting the Communists, Rewi Alley was supporting a movement that
would create a fair and just society. This ignores the fact that the CP was
never heading in that direction, was always totalitarian in intention, and was
nothing like the glamourised myth of its rise. But it is the myth to which she
clings.
Second, I can’t help noticing that this book appears at the
very time when Anne-Marie Brady is being harrassed for her heretical views, and
when the “People’s” Republic – the republic for which Rewi Alley was so often a
cheerleader – is vigorously attempting to stamp out what remains of democracy
in the autonomous territory of Hong Kong. The people who are trying to defend
Hong Kong’s democracy are, of course, also Chinese. But I’ll probably be called
a racist for pointing this out.
Frank Sargeson's collected short stories were first
published in hardback in the 1960s. They were republished by Penguin, with
additional stories, in 1982, the year of Sargeson's death. Now they're back in
print in a third edition, which adds 13 hitherto uncollected pieces.
The later, and less often anthologised, short stories
from the 1950s on, have a remarkably different tone. Sargeson drops the
working-class narrators and becomes more middle-class and suburban. The
characters are often seedy people keeping up appearances. The author reaches
back to an older narrative style, based on character quirks and eccentricities,
sometimes with neat and well-made endings. Oddly, these stories seem
old-fashioned even by 1950s' standards.
