John Gibb
Aucklanders by Murray Edmond (99% Press/Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 210pp, $35; Sandbank Sonnets: A memoir by Murray Edmond (Compound Press, 2022), 23pp, $15.
Mulling over fifty years of book publications brings to mind the long rhythms of a writer’s literary career. In considering Murray Edmond’s writing, it’s as if this reviewer was standing on a windswept beach and watching long glossy waves roll in from a restless grey swell, and a mood of contemplation grows in reflecting on what has developed between a first book appearing in the early 1970s and a work published last year.
Murray Edmond’s first book of poetry, Entering the Eye (1973), signalled to alert readers throughout the country to the arrival of an outstanding talent. Immediately apparent was a fondness for experimentation and for a variety of verse forms, ranging from touching lyric to experimental cosmopolitan modes, to fearless political satire. Also evident was a grounding in the physical, the earthy, and a sense ‘of man and woman / moving on the clay’, as a poem in that collection, ‘Anecdote’, puts it. Aucklanders, a vibrantly impressive collection of 15 short stories, reveals another facet of Edmond, now a well-established Auckland poet, writer, dramaturge, cultural historian and critic.
For all of us, as we get older, the idea of people going missing and of a ‘missing persons bureau’ resonates more strongly as we track a growing list of lost friends and family members who have vanished, including through death or migration abroad, and as we grapple with the related metaphysical mysteries. The image of such a bureau arises in the mind of Robin LeStrange, a character in ‘The Ballad of Rob LeStrange’, one of the longest and most complex stories in Aucklanders. Robin has become distant from her parents, her father, Aaron LeStrange, who died suddenly while she was boarding elsewhere: ‘And all her sadness was somewhere else, wrapped in a cloak of mystery, the missing persons bureau she carried about inside herself. Where were they? Where “on earth”, as we say, had they gone?’
The bureau reference not only suggests something of the size and anonymity of Auckland, and its layered urban and suburban history, but also resonates as an image representing our human response to the inevitability of loss. The story delivers an extraordinary summary of Rob’s life, from about the age of 15, when American sailors flocked into Auckland during World War II until she was 82 when she discovered how her family had covertly thwarted potential male suitors from her distant past.
Both John Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) and Samuel Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), praised Shakespeare for having ‘the largest and most comprehensive soul’. In Aucklanders we see what we might term Edmond’s ‘comprehensive soul’, his awareness of a wide range of people from all walks of life, as well as what his former academic colleague Lisa Samuels has termed the ‘hidden histories and suppressed alternatives’ of Auckland life. These stories include depictions of racial discrimination in US forces during World War II (‘The Ballad of Rob LeStrange’) and of damaging in-fighting amongst members of an artistic community during the recent Covid-19 lockdown (‘That Beautiful Boy’).
A back-cover note declares that ‘in the tradition of James Joyce’s Dubliners’, Aucklanders brings us stories that celebrate lives lived in New Zealand’s biggest city’. James Joyce wrote to his publisher that he had sought ‘to write a chapter of the moral history of my country’, choosing Dublin because it seemed ‘the centre of paralysis’. That blurb reference to Dubliners, which was published in 1914, is apt, for both books contain 15 stories and are otherwise comparable. Edmond’s stories are grouped into three sections, each of five stories and each of growing length and overall complexity (42 pages, 61 pages, 90 pages), thus generally echoing the proportionate shaping of the Joyce stories (29 pages, 41 pages, 89 pages, in The Essential James Joyce, edited by Harry Levin and published by Penguin Books in 1969). Likewise, short character portraits early in the respective collections usher in longer and more complex later pieces. In the last two Edmond stories, there is ‘a kind of possession’ of the living by lost figures from the past, while story content parallels are perhaps strongest between Joyce’s third story, ‘Araby’ in Dubliners, and Edmond’s sixth story in his book, ‘Her Name Like a Summons’.
The latter title references a young man’s unrequited love interest in ‘Mangan’s sister’. They had hardly spoken, but ‘her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood’. In both stories, a young man hopes to obtain a gift for a young woman from a Saturday night bazaar. In Edmond’s story, this action takes place at Luna Park fairground in Auckland, in the year that it opened, 1926. Both youths are delayed by an uncle but helped by an aunt, and both bazaars end badly, with the gift not bought (Joyce) or thrown away (Edmond). Edmond’s character Stan finds ‘the combined weight of self-pity and vanity is immeasurable’, while Joyce’s youth sees himself as ‘a creature driven and derided by vanity’.
Other Joycean echoes include a few story titles: Counterparts (Joyce’s ninth story title) and Counterpoints (Edmonds’ eleventh story title).
The final part of the fourteenth Edmond story is titled ‘PART THREE: THE DEAD’, echoing the title of the long and final story of Dubliners, while Edmond’s main character is Gabrielle, echoing the Joycean hero Gabriel. Few short stories in the English language can match the universal imaginative power and insight of Joyce’s extraordinary ‘The Dead’, but Edmond’s collection, overall, holds its own in its experimental intertextual links with the stories of James Joyce.
The Aucklanders stories constantly shimmer with wit, partly from deft verbal touches, like the brush strokes of a Zen master, often summarising complex matters in a few words. In ‘Counterpoints’, shortly before a crucial disciplinary hearing, the university music department’s Associate Professor Sophia Grimaldi reflects on a ‘strange young’ visitor who had ‘unravelled her skein of truths … and in and out, weaving among the images like racing cars on a wet and dangerous track’. In ‘Suit Yourself’, first-person narrator Richard Winters encounters a former fellow secondary school pupil, Gregor Pilich, who ‘never seems to have connected with the world’. These are often tales of the connected, unconnected or disconnected, and their sense of belonging, or lack thereof.
While Pilich, son of postwar Czechoslovakian immigrants, fails to find a good job, another character, Winters, finds his luck growing as the Fourth Labour Government ‘swept aside regulations and money began to slosh around like goldfish in an earthquake’—an effective image for economic and social change. In ‘No Offence’, in a self-empowering twist, a young woman drives away, abandoning a doomed relationship, after a self-sabotaging flatmate loses yet another job: ‘It’s amazing how much you can stuff into a Mazda 323 in an hour,’ she says. In ‘Her Name Like a Summons’, Stan receives some key messages via telegram from his absentee bridge-building engineer father overseas, also learning abruptly about an uncle’s death by tram: UNCLE HENRY SADLY DEAD STOP STRUCK BY TRAM YOURS DAD.
Through opening a kind of missing person bureau in his stories, Edmond finds and celebrates individual characters, including the odd irascible exile with plentiful eccentricities, while also capturing the complex nature of rapid social change. The exposition of the latter includes ironic elements of reverse sensitivity, whereby gentrifying newcomers object to the negative effects on their neighbourhood of those long already there. So, the filial narrator of ‘Cross-eyed Pirate’, his father being literally a one-eyed and sometimes pirate-like former Dutchman from Indonesia, recalls their street when he was growing up, as still having ‘those Polynesian families living there’, but this is changing fast. The son had been part of a half-Polynesian family and was now living in a sleep-out near his father: ‘We didn’t belong to either side of the great divide. Probably we were an example for both sides of the kind of disaster best avoided. I reckon that those who were in the process of moving in and “taking over”, so to speak, were pretty hopeful that Dad would soon be gone.’
Dubliners and Aucklanders capture not only the respective encounters and epiphanies of Dublin and Auckland but also deliver a strong sense of the cultural, historical, and spiritual milieu. There’s the paralysing, often gloomy, somewhat oppressive early twentieth-century Dublin, to be escaped through exile by the artist as a young man, while Auckland is presented in its subtle ethnic and demographic variety, and not without its chaos and tragedies, but also as a somewhat lighter and brighter place, not to be escaped from for somewhere more cosmopolitan, but to be lived in and celebrated.
Sandbank Sonnets: A memoir, published in 2022, marks the century since T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land was first published in 1922. The collection is dedicated to Kirikiriroa, or Hamilton, where Edmond was born and grew up. He attended Hamilton Boys’ High School before becoming a student at Auckland University. One translation of Kirikirioa is ‘long stretch of river alluvial soils’, and a back-cover apologia explains that the whole sandbank sonnet sequence is based on ‘shifting sand; which may also work as an image for memory’. These sonnets are deliberately provocative as if to demonstrate that satirical jangling and forced rhymes have the same claims to ‘art’ as more high-brow presentations. Some readers might initially feel a bit roughed-up, as if by an over-provocative Zen martial arts teacher, but later, it might dawn on them that they have learned something of unexpected value. Among the provocations is a back-cover comment by William Carlos Williams that ‘all sonnets say the same thing of no importance’.
The second of the 31 ‘sandbank’ sonnets is titled ‘1949’, the year of the poet’s birth, and cheerfully declares: ‘The sonnet form was dead and gone the year / that you were born.’ The sonnets are presented in five sections, the same number as in The Waste Land, and come with four pages of quirky and erudite notes, again as if to pay homage to the earlier poem. But Eliot, the master, does not escape unscathed on his poem’s anniversary:
Bowler hat with egg-stains on his cravat,
ain’t that dried-up old T.S. Eliot?
Don’t fall in love with him you idiot!
(‘Traffic Bridge Blues’)
Thirty-one sonnets would usually deliver 434 lines, one more than ‘the same number of lines’ as The Waste Land. Undaunted, the satirical poet simply names the last sonnet ‘One Line Short’, trims it to 13 lines and announces, ‘You can skip a line if you like’. In ‘Learning Japanese’, Edmond points out that the first two letters of his Christian name, MU, in Japanese means ‘nothing’. Another note describes ‘Mu’, meaning nothing, as linked to a koan, answered in Japan by Master Joshu when asked by a monk, ‘Does a dog have a Buddha nature?’ A koan is defined in the dictionary as ‘a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment’.
One thing we learn from this collection is that the sonnet, in satirical form, is a more flexible and effective literary device than might have been suspected and that some rollicking rhymes summon up lost school days and rote learning. They can also open a comic window into a real world, perhaps beyond the reach of more decorous verses, where, beyond the public gaze and perhaps in a holiday-work sorting area (as in the sonnet ‘Being A Best Boy’), unfortunate things sometimes happen to items with fragile labels.
JOHN GIBB is a Dunedin writer and former journalist whose third poetry collection, Surprised by Hope, was published by Cold Hub Press in 2022.
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