literature

Rootful Cosmopolitans

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Lucy Sussex

The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand writers and the colonial world by Helen Bones (Otago University Press, 2018), 248pp., $35

In New Zealand it is common to talk about ‘OE’: Overseas Experience. Living in what is termed the antipodes, far from the centres of finance, population and power, fosters an attitude where travel is a rite of passage for the young. For those working in the arts it has been presented as imperative: how else would the aspiring find an audience and sufficient remuneration to survive while pursuing their calling? The siren call of London, Paris etc. began with white settlement, and it has persisted ever since. [Read more…]

Our Polyglot Contemporary

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Janet M. Wilson

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 754 pp., £175; Volume 4, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including miscellaneous works, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 500 pp., £175

These two handsome volumes are successors to the collected fiction, volumes 1 and 2 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, co-edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, who, in making available all Mansfield’s creative work, aimed at a remapping that would show her ‘rare originality’. The variety of short stories, sketches, vignettes and dialogues displayed in the collected fiction is amply complemented by the range of nonfiction presented in these volumes: Mansfield’s poetry and critical writings in volume 3, and her diaries and miscellaneous works in volume 4. Most of Mansfield’s non-fictional writings have been published in various editions since her death, many poorly edited by John Middleton Murry. The new volumes feature much newly discovered work presented with up-to-date scholarship and ample textual annotation. Volume 4 publishes Mansfield’s diaries in a chronological order, by contrast to Margaret Scott’s 1997 The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. By bringing together the non-fiction as a greatly expanded corpus, the editors display as never before Mansfield’s multiple talents as diarist and journal writer, translator, poet, reviewer and essayist, and producer of parodies, pastiches and aphorisms.

The gargantuan, 750-page volume 3 consists of almost all the nonfiction that Mansfield ever wrote (apart from her personal writing), and opens with 179 poems, almost double the number collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1988 edition. Many new poems are recent discoveries made by Kimber in the Alexander Turnbull Library, including 19 poems in a notebook titled ‘Little Fronds’, written when Mansfield was at Queen’s College, London, dedicated to ‘Ake, Ake Aroha’ and signed ‘Kathleen M. Beauchamp’. Volume 4 contains Kimber’s most recent discovery, made in the Newberry Library – too late to be included in volume 3 – of the treasure trove of poems entitled ‘The Earth Child’ (1910), a cycle of 35 poems that Mansfield hoped would be published in 1910, which shows her, the editors claim, ‘at the height of her poetic powers’. Only nine of the poems have been previously published, and the entire sequence is reproduced in the section ‘Miscellany’. Despite the slightness and unevenness of this apprentice work, mostly written before Mansfield left for London in 1908, it offers glimpses of what was to come. [Read more…]

Edge-of-the-Ledge Reading

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Shaun Barnett

To the Mountains: A collection of New Zealand alpine writing selected by Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey (Otago University Press, 2018), 372 pp., $45

New Zealand is a mountainous land, so it’s hardly surprising that landscape often shapes our literature. Think of Mulgan’s protagonist Johnson, a fugitive traipsing through the Kaimanawa Ranges in Man Alone. But what of those who deliberately choose to go to the mountains: for exploration, for challenge, for rejuvenation?

Otago-based writers Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey have carefully selected material for To the Mountains, the only anthology of New Zealand alpine writing to appear in over three decades. Like the threads of a climbing rope, they blend historic writing with modern, vivid accounts of epic climbs with thoughtful contemplation, and the voices of men with women, Māori with Pākehā, children with adults. This is no random collection, but a considered compilation structured into four themes – ‘Approach’, ‘Climb’, ‘Epic’ and ‘Reflection’ – which mimic a mountaineer’s journey. [Read more…]

Mobile Weather

February 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95

In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter of a millionaire businessman ‘would leverage [her] stock to the maximum’. Wellington with its ‘ridgy, clasped terrain, its mobile weather’, and the ‘frontier’ experiences that shaped the girl Kathleen, were – in a different metaphor – ‘the seedbed, the blood and bone fertiliser of everything that came later’. Wellington-born himself, and growing up in Karori, Yska is well qualified to describe the streets walked by the writer in her time, the atmosphere she sensed, the world she knew. [Read more…]

A Language of Subterfuge

December 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Nicholas Reid

Hard Frost: Structures of feeling in New Zealand literature, 1908–1945 by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2017), 368 pp., $40

After Stuart Murray’s Never a Soul at Home (VUP 1998), Lawrence Jones’ Picking Up the Traces (VUP 2003) and numerous other texts of literary revisionism, it is hard to imagine that anything new can be said about New Zealand’s mid-century literary nationalism. Another book covering this territory must have at least a new angle of vision. Fortunately John Newton’s Hard Frost does have such an angle, although many of Newton’s observations inevitably overlap with those of previous literary historians.

Hard Frost is the first volume of a proposed trilogy, which will eventually take Newton up to the 1970s. Its ‘Afterword’ is like a preview of coming attractions as it fades out on Charles Brasch and Denis Glover setting up Landfall in 1947 and looks forward to a new sort of New Zealand literary production in the 1950s. [Read more…]