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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Classic Review: The Reservoir and Other Stories by Janet Frame

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James Bertram
This month’s ‘out of the archives’ review is of Janet Frame’s 1966 novel The Reservoir and Other Stories, by Rhodes scholar and journalist James Bertram.

The Reservoir and other stories, by Janet Frame (Pegasus, 1966). 22s. 6d.

This is the first collection of short stories by Janet Frame to become generally available in this country since The Lagoon in 1951: in the light of her remarkable achievement as a novelist of steadily increasing power and range, it is a literary event of some importance. Thirty prose pieces have been chosen (with the help of Dr Margaret Dalziel) from two volumes published three years ago in New York; the stories are not dated, but it seems clear from the chronological sketch outlined by the writer in ‘Beginnings’ (Landfall, March 1965) that most of them belong to the London years which saw the completion of that ‘transitional’ novel The Edge of the Alphabet, and preceded the more disciplined, structured, and completely professional accomplishment of Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man. It is not surprising, then, that this collection should produce a somewhat uneven effect, as if these were the by-products of a talent fiercely concentrated on larger designs.

I find it hard to write of Janet Frame with any detachment, for she cannot put words on a page without generating the kind of magnetic attraction that seizes and locks the reader’s sensibility. But any brief description of The Reservoir would have to note that these stories vary considerably in length and manner, that they explore extremes of realism and of fantasy, that while some are precisely located (in the ‘Waimaru’ countryside or suburban London), others are parables or poetic fables for our time written with the burning urgency of a Blake or a Dostoievsky. The experience of reading this book is rather like bathing in a thermal lake: we move from slices of life in the earlier manner of The Lagoon, familiar and reassuring even if sad, to chilling intimations of a private or general doom. And doom is sometimes as capricious and arbitrary as the ending of a fairy tale.
Perhaps the total effect of all this is rather like the quality of modern life, where the bogies, heaven knows, are real enough. Perhaps dreams more often terrify than console. If so, this book has more unity of vision, and even of theme, than at first appears. But I must admit my own preference for the stories which attempt to say limited and particular things by the conventional means of fiction, to those pieces which try, by shock tactics, to say too much.
The first third of this book is made up of short fables, mostly minatory, grouped around two longer fairy tales, one pleasant, one distinctly unpleasant. All are written with great skill and a stylized compression of language which barely controls the force of protest behind them: this voice is carefully’ modulated, that it may not break. It would not help to transpose these parables into the specific terms of contemporary politics, or even of perennial morality: these are ‘illuminations’, private intuitions with universal application. We may recognize the calligraphy, but we must spell out the content for ourselves. The best of these pieces, I think, is ‘Two Sheep’, which is more Tolstoyan than Kafkaesque, and seems to me a small masterpiece in its own kind.
The central group of ‘Waimaru’ stories begins with ‘The Reservoir’, and brings us back within hailing distance of The Lagoon. This is the remembered world of childhood, of children seen with adult understanding and of fumbling adults seen with a child’s clear unsentimental gaze. Here Janet Frame can hardly put a foot wrong: she is of the country, and she is of the country of words. The Reservoir’, ‘Royal Icing’, ‘The Bull Calf’, are stories complete in themselves where a sense of place and atmosphere is fully achieved, stories we may learn to know New Zealand by. Others in this group – ‘Prizes’, ‘Stink-pat’, ‘A Sense of Proportion’ – are more inward and disturbing; they tell secrets, without shame. The narrative line is sometimes harsh but still clear; we do not need the occasional final sentence, or paragraph, to draw the moral. Technically, these New Zealand stories are assured, straightforward, and refreshingly direct. I do not know if Miss Frame feels they are too easy for her to write, too like Katherine Mansfield; but for my part, I wish there were more of them.
In the last section of the book, we meet work which seems to me much more obviously experimental, studio studies by a writer who is extending her range of subject matter and making herself into a novelist. ‘The Teacup’ is a grim genre-study of lodging-house life in London, faithful in detail but dull and dispiriting as the people who inhabit it. ‘Burial in Sand’ twists the knife in the old, still-bleeding wound of the artistic expatriate; ‘The Triumph of Poetry’ does the same thing, less surely, with the fate of the artist on the home front. (Why, one faintly protests, are all academics in our fiction condemned to early desiccation? No doubt it is an occupational hazard; but Miss Frame has less reason to take this unkindly view than some of our poets, or Mr Patrick White.) The remaining stories are variations on the theme of human loneliness or frustration in the desert of modern cities; one may admire the honesty with which they are presented, without granting them more than a measure of success in their own right. An exception must be made of one admirable piece of social comedy, ‘A Relative of the Famous’,
where people are allowed to be amusingly, not horrifyingly absurd.
                  Dostoievsky once claimed that all the best of Russian fiction in his own time had come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’. In New Zealand writing, it would have to be ‘The Garden Party’ – that period piece, remote now as an Edwardian album, where the shadow first fell suddenly across the sunny colonial lawn. An awareness of the fragility of life, of the nearness of death, has been with Janet Frame from the time when she made that first story which she still considers her best: ‘Once upon a time there was a bird. One day a hawk came out of the sky and ate the bird. The next day a big bogie came out from behind the hill and ate up the hawk for eating up the bird.’ The hawk and the bogie still haunt her pages, but she has learnt how to keep them at bay with the magic spell of words. For the patterned words, and all the talent and courage behind them, we can only be grateful.

The Orange Tree, from Landfall 45, 1958

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Paul Day
The Orange Tree, by Helen Shaw, The Pelorus Press, 1957, 80 pp., 7s. 6d.


In this collection of eleven stories (attractively produced by the Pelorus Press – though an unfortunate misprint spoils the Contents page) of which none are long, and some so short as to be sketches only, Helen Shaw has steadfastly kept her sights on a limited target; but she has achieved by doing so a notable series of bull’s-eyes. The least successful are those pieces in which she has engaged a target at longer range, but even here she rarely scores worse than inners.
Her subject is the day before yesterday, or rather, the fragments of it that persist around us today, in the shape of old houses and old people. In her descriptions of these she is brilliantly successful; she has captured by suggestion a whole chapter of New Zealand’s social history. Economically, reasonably, but with real power, Helen Shaw has evoked the flavour of a material world familiar in its heyday to all those who grew up in this country; and familiar now in its ghostly decline, to all those whose eyes are sharp enough to spy, as they roll past, the bleached woodwork and the shuffling figure through the luxuriant leafage of the overgrown garden. Yet on the whole the portraits of people, penetrating as they are, do not come up to the loving rebuilding in words of those gaunt and fretted dwelling houses which are everywhere to be seen in our older suburbs. In a sedate style which suggests lace curtains and clean doormats, yet with the occasional bizarre flourish of words like the extravagantly carved eaves under the tin roof, Helen Shaw has transfixed verbally, as Lee-Johnson has done pictorially, the essence of this slice of our history.

The setting of ‘The Blind’, the longest of the stories, is a good example. The coloured glass verandah windows, the frilled pillows, the coal range, plush furniture, varnished dados, dark wallpaper – all the details are there of the house which has been a lifelong home to the dying mother and her two ageing daughters; and they are introduced so unobtrusively and yet so firmly in the course of the narrative that the suggestion and atmosphere are mesmeric in their power.
From this point of view the stories are beautifully worked: it is when we look closely at the figures who emerge from this background that a certain uneasiness becomes apparent. The people are not so confidently presented nor so independently observed as the houses. To say this is not to detract from He1en Shaw’s achievement: she has chosen to work in a small compass. Outcrops of stylization which appear here and there could be due to the compression which is so powerful an aid to the story teller. But in a sketch like ‘Mrs O’Connor, I Said’, which depends entirely on the vitality of an old woman’s talk, a certain thinness does show itself: the sketch is a brilliant piece of reporting and a brilliant re-setting of that ever-bright jewel, an old person’s courage; but it is not marked by imaginative insight. ‘The Three Strange Miss Vinings’, on the other hand, is so marked. Established as a fantasy in a dream setting (‘a pale, haunted facade of lace-edged verandahs and balconies’) this story is rich in undertones and suggestions of conflict and of grotesque endeavour. But when faced, as in ‘Cassie’, with the problem of portraying a normal little girl’s bewildered reaction to a widely varied set of new emotional experiences, Helen Shaw has managed only a pastiche of Katherine Mansfield.
It almost seems that this author reacts best to the stimulus of a particular situation: characters individual in their vitality (which is usually misdirected) placed in a setting decayed and marked by the hand of time. Nelly Mathias, remembering her girlhood in the house where she is now an old woman, Mr Valentine facing the angry bull across his garden border, old Miss Barclay shouting abuse at young Wilson who has bought her land: they are all human creatures proclaiming their uniqueness from among their mouldering habitations, asserting their existence before they are claimed by the everlasting silence.
No author could achieve such depths as this without considerable writing skill. Terse and coherent in form and rhythm, this author has a fine ear for epithet and a fine eye for images. Consider a sentence like this from the title story – ‘Slowly Mrs Kingi lowered herself into the springless sofa’s bobble-trimmed plush and sat counting birds skimming over bushy native mangroves that grew on a fan of tidal mud ending in a swamp not far from her boundary.’ This is narrative, yet how diversified in suggestion, how powerful in visual compulsion! Incidentally ‘The Orange Tree’ is the only story with Maori characters: the unsentimental comment it pronounces on the differences between the Maori and the pakeha outlook seems to show that Helen Shaw could well explore the theme more exhaustively.
It is pleasant to find such assured talent: and pleasant too to hope that its cultivation will yield further valuable fruits.

Classic Review: The Origins of the Maori Wars

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Gerald Hensley
This month’s classic review is from Landfall 47, September 1958.


The Origins of the Maori Wars, by Keith Sinclair (New Zealand University Press, 1957), 26s. 6d.


‘THE WAR’, said Wetini Taiporutu, ‘is not merely a contention for the land at New Plymouth, but for the chieftainship of New Zealand.’ With this declaration the old chief began a controversy that has continued until today.

           The cause of the struggle which began in Taranaki in 1860 and which went on for ten years to rack the North Island, cripple the government and nearly split the colony, could never again be so simply defined. The argument broke out as soon as the war itself, and at times raged a good deal more fiercely. It was praised as a war of civilization and condemned as a war of greed. Some thought it a protest against injustice and others a wilful rebellion; the government was alternately attacked for having started it and denounced for not getting on with it. The extremists on both sides hoped it would be a war of extermination. It was all very confusing, and unfortunately the confusion was in no way checked by the end of hostilities. Ever since, the causes and origins of the Maori wars – the greatest disaster in the country’s short lifetime – have been pored over with a morbid fascination; in pamphlet and in newspaper, in a bulky collection of polemic literature which began in 1861 and ended (if indeed it has ended) as recently as 1947. They have been subjected to searching scrutinies by Select Committees, Royal Commissions, judges and journalists, even by an ex-Minister of France. About the only thing this important historical problem had not received, indeed, is investigation by a good historian.

          Fortunately this omission has now been rectified. Dr Sinclair, in what may very possibly be the best monograph yet written on New Zealand history, grapples firmly with the massive controversy. He emerges with an answer which is at once more complicated and considerably less comforting than Wetini’s. The wars may have become indirectly a fight for sovereignty between King (Maori) and Queen (Victoria), but they began unromantically enough in a clash over land – the invariable point of friction between colonizing Europeans and aboriginal inhabitants. Land and sovereignty, Dr Sinclair argues, were inextricably connected. A situation where the settlers had the sovereignty and the Maoris had the land was bound to be dangerous: the former would be constantly tempted to use their political and military power to despoil the latter.
          To do the British Government justice, it recognized the difficulty. Anxious to protect the Maoris from a fate which seemed to be overtaking the natives in all other European settlements, it hoped to solve the problem by confiding the sovereignty, not to untrustworthy colonists, but to a Governor who could stand above and between, reconciling the interests of both races. For twenty years after the signing of the treaty of Waitangi the Governor, and theoretically the Governor alone, controlled native policy. The result was not encouraging. When it rose above mere temporizing – for inevitably Governors tended to be satisfied simply with preventing any fighting – the native policy of these years was confined to good intentions. Promising plans for a gradual integration of the races were almost nullified by imperfect execution the result of lack of money, lack of understanding, lack of staff, and lack of interest.
          Dr Sinclair, however, avoids the pitfall of supposing that this mattered much. The succession of schemes and policies, Native Councils and Native Courts, had surprisingly little bearing on whether a clash could be avoided or not. The political origins of the war can be overstressed; the main causes lay beyond the reach of government. The numerical inferiority of the settlers, and the disorganisation of the Maoris in the face of a European influx, contributed more to the uneasy peace of the early years than all the policy-making of successive Governors. The colony was not necessarily wise because its head was Grey. As growing settlement threw them into increasing contact, as the pressure for land swelled, and as settlers and Maoris found themselves in economic rivalry farming for the goldfields market in Australia, the first signs of resentment and discontent began to appear on both sides. Then the rather self-conscious humanitarianism of British Governors could prevail little. Perhaps Dr Sinclair is stretching his evidence somewhat when he quotes the crudest anti-native propaganda which appeared in the most violent newspapers, and then describes it as ‘the views of the majority of Europeans’. It may be so, but it is impossible to prove. Nor is it safe to discount the views of ‘thinking men’ who, he tells us, read such papers with disgust, for it was precisely these thinking men who had most influence in the government. But there can be no questioning Dr Sinclair’s main point that innumerable frictions, squabbles, and misunderstandings of each other’s ways built up in the minds of either race a stock concept of the other-the shiftless savage and the, greedy settler, the sort of stereotypes over which people will fight. ‘The war began in the minds of many men of both races long before it occurred in the fields and bush.’
          Was war therefore inevitable? Dr Sinclair seems to think so, and he is in good company. Sir Frederic Rogers of the Colonial Office (Dr Sinclair follows the illustrious but rather lonely example of Earl Granville in persistently calling him Sir Frederick) turned his thoughts again in later life to New Zealand. In the light of experience he concluded sadly that native races in temperate climates were always doomed to extinction by Anglo-Saxon settlers, and drew some comfort from the thought that the Maoris had had History as well as a considerable array of generals against them. But a claim of inevitability, though consoling, is too easy. Whatever might have happened in the long run, there was nothing inevitable about the clash which occurred in 1860. War broke out in that year for an exceedingly simple reason: because the Governor who was supposed to mediate and intercede between the races, instead allied himself and the Imperial troops he commanded with the land-desperate settlers of Taranaki. For the first time it made a war for land physically possible.
          The conduct of those who were responsible for this disastrous situation is carefully examined by Dr Sinclair in some of his best passages. He seems chiefly to censure the Governor, Sir Thomas Gore Browne (whose character is revealed with unhappy clarity in an accompanying photograph), for assuming control of native affairs in 1855 when he was in fact quite incompetent to do so. Gore Browne’s reservation of native policy may have been unfortunate, however, but it was not his fault. The Imperial Government made it abundantly clear at this time that while it bore the burden of defending the colony it could never yield control of native policy – so closely affecting defence – to colonial ministers. The error in the Imperial reasoning lay in assuming too readily that this control would be safer with the Governor. Dr Sinclair is more charitable about Gore Browne’s consent to the Waitara purchase (the immediate cause of war in Taranaki), holding justifiably that the Governor’s main fault was misunderstanding, a very humanitarian combination of good intentions and ignorance. Donald McLean is less easily exonerated from moral blame. Perhaps Dr Sinclair underestimates the good faith of the land purchase negotiations; there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that so disorganised had the Atiawa tribe become that the existence of a chiefly authority to forbid land sales was seriously in doubt, and had in fact never been recognized by either Fitzroy or Grey. Nevertheless, this still leaves McLean in a rather ambiguous position, manoeuvring obscurely between a trustful Governor and an equally trustful Ministry.
          In the course of his account Dr Sinclair manages to lay some vigorous old ghosts. They have almost all been laid before at one time or another, but this time they will very probably remain so. The Land League, that mythical Maori trade union, disappears (it is to be hoped forever) from New Zealand historiography. And he makes it painfully clear that the ‘purchase’ of the Waitara block from the Maoris can no longer be regarded, even hopefully, as just. He is right; it is time this was said, and in such firm and incontrovertible tones. Only his final chapters on the extension of the war to the Waikato seem inconclusive and somewhat anti-climactic; they either repeat what has already been said, or raise entirely new questions which have to be left unanswered; they might have been better omitted.
          Yet every chapter shows its author’s distinctive virtues: the alertly-argued style, the balanced judgment, the clarity of exposition, the flashes of a slightly sardonic wit. Indeed the only traces of the book’s doctoral origins are to be found in the accuracy of its documentation. Dr Sinclair has now strayed off to more enticing pastures later in the century, but it is impossible not to regret that he has not given in a second volume a discussion of the wars as good as his analysis of their origins. With this book the writing of New Zealand history emerges a little further from its anecdotage: for the first time a large and difficult problem is dissected by one who mixes industry and insight in proportions as rare today among historians as they are among anyone else. It is all the more pity, therefore, that the printing and binding should be unworthy of so important a book.

On O.E Middleton & Maurice Shadbolt

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R.A. Copland
This month’s out of the archive post is a review if the short stories of O.E Middleton and Maurice Shadbolt by R.A. Copland from Landfall 56 (1960).


The New Zealanders, by Maurice Shadbolt (Gollancz, 1959), 18s. The Stone and Other Stories, by O.E. Middleton (The Pilgrim Press, 1959), 12S. 6d.

 
These stories of Maurice Shadbolt’s are so good in so many ways that it is a delight to read them. One is struck almost at once with the range of the author’s sympathies and understanding; for Mr Shadbolt is mercifully determined to be the author, not the subject, of his stories. In his first story, told in the first person, he presents the situation of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, groping towards love; and in another he has convincingly explored the plight of an aging man grasping back at love from the grave’s brink. There are women growing frantic as youth fades, boys who are blundering or brutal, Maoris and farmers, artists, poets, working men and business men. They are nearly all contemporary New Zealanders, and they behave and speak not merely in character, but to the point of the story.
          Each of these stories has a planned meaning and direction. To illustrate this we may consider the shortest of them all, ‘Thank you Goodbye’. An episode is related with ease and the conversation and gestures are almost idly supplied, so that the ‘design’ (to employ a useful ambiguity), is tactfully involved in the detail. Yet it is the achievement of the story to get something painful and indeed tragic said about the present predicament of humanity in general, at the very moment when it is being most faithful to the particular crisis. It is this relevance of Mr Shadbolt’s stories which, when successfully managed, constitutes their distinction. He sees and shows us the wider allusion in the situations he has chosen. Actually I suspect that he sometimes proceeds the other way round, and from the wider idea works down to a representative case. It is clear, in any event, that he looks upon this country with an educated intelligence and with an awareness of its history as strongly developed as his observation of its forms and manners.

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Classic Review from 1960, by Ruth Dallas

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Ruth Dallas
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 56, published in 1960 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. The review is by Ruth Dallas, who discusses Australian short-stories.


Coast to Coast, Australian Stories 1957-58. Selected by Dal Stivens. Angus and Robertson. 21S. West Coast Stories, edited by H. Drake-Brockman. Angus and Robertson. 20S.

If a New Zealand reader had no other Australian book on his shelves than these two collections of short stories, he would still be face to face with the abundance, freedom and assurance of the Australian short story, in comparison with the scarcity and nervousness of our own. The more Australian short stories I read, the more I am impressed by the relaxed and unselfconscious manner of the Australian short-story writer, when he is at his best. I should go so far as to say that if a New Zealand short-story writer were to neglect the study of the Australian story, it would be equivalent to neglecting the study of our own; it might even be more serious; for across the Tasman they are bringing in a fine harvest from land that with us is still being cleared. This is not meant to imply that good work has not been done here, as it has, of course, and is still being done; nothing could replace our own; but there is not very much of it; the Australian work is at once a rich addition and a challenge. These collections give an isolated, but very fair illustration of the kind of story Australian writers are winning from situation and character similar to our own (so like, and yet so unlike), and the use that is being made of the language of city and bush. Most of the stories are about ordinary folk, working men and women, coal-miners, gold-miners, farmers, new Australians, fishermen, housewives, mill-workers, teachers. The reader becomes aware of heat, fine-weather, space, and, most of all, of life lived out-of-doors. There is no story with sufficient poetic depth to amaze the reader or to wake a change in his mind, with the power of great art; but the Australian story is in a very healthy state; it is from this kind of abundance and ease that great writing at last emerges.
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Classic Review from 1961, by R.A. Copland

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R. A. Copland
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 57, published in March 1961 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. It is by R.A. Copland, then lecturing in English at the University of Canterbury.

Some are Lucky, Phillip Wilson. Denis Glover. 14s. 6d.
 
These are stories of New Zealand men who in the middle of the twentieth century are still ‘living on their lonesome’. The condition is mainly psychological, and though ‘Some Are Lucky’ – that is, some have come to terms, however uneasy, with themselves and with their lot – many remain as aliens in their own land. This emotional cloud hovers over the central clearing of each story in which the characters’ movements are carefully reported and the detail of their various trades faithfully documented. Since there is a vast amount of detail, topographical, botanical, social and occupational, which is peculiar to this country, Mr Wilson’s stories have a strongly indigenous quality; and even if one feels that he occasionally leans far out to seize the local name or the local object there can be no denying the toughness and solidity of his surfaces.
Mr Wilson’s accuracy in observation is of the ear as well as of the eye, and he catches the sound of our speech, sometimes with extraordinary precision. This is more notable in the narrative prose than in the dialogue itself. For example, the narrative prose of ‘Too Many Sheep’ is as delicately attuned to New Zealand intonations as anything ever written in this country. Consider the words ‘just’ and ‘hop’ in the following:
Got a temper like a child of six, the kind that is just uncontrollable. Dad was leaning   
against the rail of the yards, and when he saw Andrews hop out of the car he      
straightened up and stared at him.
And this sentence:
Well, Andrews installed his tribe and soon all the barbed wire fences for miles 
 around seemed to be hung out with washing and babies’ naps.

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