Michelle Elvy
First Things by Harry Ricketts (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 240pp, $35
This first instalment of Harry Ricketts’ memoir includes, as the title suggests, memories of many ‘firsts’—a neat frame for gathering the detail from his first 29 years. He is an acute observer in writing about self and place—or, rather, the experience of self and place.
Ricketts begins with the first memory of his father, and from this moment we are aware that this is not merely a book of firsts but also of perceptions. The opening paragraph sets up uncertainty when, after describing the memory of his father painting a door, he adds: ‘At least, I always think of that as my first memory.’ More early moments are recalled, and then: ‘I can’t make much out of these snapshots.’ He often notes his flawed memory—‘Until I looked it up in my diary, I could have sworn …’—and his memory of feeling as opposed to precise detail of an event, such as Winston Churchill’s funeral: ‘I remember sitting in our tutor’s flat, staring at the box and feeling suitably sombre and moved.’
Ricketts casts doubt on anyone who would claim exactitude in recollection (he calls out Robert Graves, for instance). While he relies on his diary for much of the school days, he often comments on his comments. Of a sexual encounter with another boy at age 15, he notes: ‘the act was enjoyable, but it didn’t feel like some momentous rite of passage. (My diary does, however, obliquely record the event with an almost Ortonesque “Tony!”, a rare moment of interiority.)’ A view of self, and a view on the view of self.
Doubt and uncertainty are layered throughout. Ricketts notes what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’, moving between memories to great effect. He returns with his second wife Belinda back to Malaysia, for example, where he spent his early childhood with his parents, and in the later visit he overlays memory and story onto the topography of the now. He asks: ‘what about the episodes which we know happened but which we can’t remember?’ He tries to recall specific details from childhood (an incident with a monkey, a toy rabbit, some early words), but instead the photo of him and Belinda in front of the building where he and his parents resided yields no new information of that boyhood place: ‘But nothing produced a spasm of recall. Gone, like the white rabbit.’
This is not a chronology of what happened when but a subjective romp through the memory of a life, which is, of course, what the best memoirs offer. With a characteristic eye for detail and a wry humour, Ricketts takes us through: ‘Fag-end of Empire Kid 1950–1963’; ‘Sons of Heroes 1963–1968’; The Oxford Effect 1969–1974’; and, ‘Not So Much the Heat, More the Humidity 1974–1979’. We see how early struggles inform who the man becomes; take, for example, young Harry contemplating faith after confirmation, age 15, watching the chaplain and noting the arrival of doubt (while also quoting Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘In Church’, where a similar thing occurs). We view, from a distance, this place where life was lived intensely, and we come to see how the boarding school experience is both engrained and perhaps alienating—Ricketts refers to Salman Rushdie’s ‘arresting phrase, “imaginary homelands”.’
We hear of the first film he saw (age six; Davy Crockett and the River Pilots), the first long book he read (age seven; Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck), and the first play he took part in (age 11; The Batsman’s Bride); we see his first sexual encounter with a boy named Kay, his first kiss, and his first time dropping acid. In each instance, memory is evocative and imperfect—always only perceptions, as with the story of his first film:
All I really remember about the film is a sequence early on in which Davy Crockett, to win a shooting contest, fires a musket ball round a room and then triumphantly produces it out of his mouth.
‘That was amazing,’ I said to my mother.
‘Darling, it was just a trick,’ she replied.
Ricketts then writes:
In its way, our exchange encapsulated much of what—in my order of preference—novels, plays and movies have to offer: delighted belief, while knowing at some level it is an illusion.
Already in the early pages we see a boy who is equal parts confidence and uncertainty: he knows his mind, but his heart and body are always something other—close but ‘foreign’—a central theme of the book that underlies Ricketts’ coming-of-age story.
We are introduced to a boy with a military father and devoted mother, sent to boarding school at age six, growing up with a supportive family but nevertheless forced to find his own way through the labyrinth of social expectations while also being sheltered and given the benefits of a privileged education, which included prep school in Kent, Wellington College in Berkshire, Trinity College and Oxford. But even with the most privileged trajectory, youth can be confusing and anxiety-producing. Prep school seemed idyllic, he notes, but the young Harry felt abandoned by his parents, and especially his mother: ‘a feeling I never entirely lost’. Indeed, his relationship with his mother is complicated; she was loving but capable of cruelty, which he notes several times. Of the conversation with his mother after the Davy Crockett film, he writes: ‘It also encapsulates many exchanges with my mother, who adored me but was prone to deflating, disillusioning comments.’ And when he had to start wearing glasses as a teen, she told him, ‘Darling … you’ll just have to get used to not being good-looking.’
For the most part, young Harry follows rules but sometimes gets into trouble—once even caned for smoking (or leading another younger boy astray, perhaps). Ricketts writes of his good moments—cricket, always cricket; by age 11, ‘I was totally addicted’—and less admirable ones (being a bad sport). He shares his embarrassment at the hands of other boys or teachers and his ‘first serious academic comeuppance’ when, on his ‘rhapsodic’ discussion of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, he received the comment: ‘This is meaningless mind expansion, Harry. Don’t do it again!’. There are other more serious moments, too: encounters with the law and sexual violence and rumours of rape at institutions of higher learning; all are delivered with candour and a steady telling.
We also learn about the class structures of mid-20th-century England: this is shared not as a tutorial on history and economics but through the view of a young boy, adolescent and young adult. The lens of distance helps—life could be bewildering for young Harry, and he does not shy away from acknowledging the things he did not know or understand. In the Oxford years, there is more evaluation, more understanding, of how privilege has played a part in his character formation. This is a memoir, then, of a specific time and place as much as of an individual. The early years are sprinkled with boarding-school vernacular, from the derogatory terms ‘mountebank’ and ‘Sassenach’ to ‘Holy Swipes’ (Holy Communion). We learn of small moments that matter: sexual encounters that began with ‘rubbing up’ and ‘ball fights’ with prep school boys and first interest in girls (first kiss—a slobbery affair), and other physical encounters. We see themes emerge that are clearly important for the writer—and I found myself thinking they are relevant for today, too, most notably, the gender continuum, the generational gap, the class divide, the haves and have-nots.
Moments from reading and writing matter as much as anything else—how could they not? Early encounters shine through the sometimes murky layers of personal history: the first experience of writing poetic lines, for example, after memorising poems like ‘The Highwayman’. With humour, Ricketts reveals what he calls doggerel—literally, about his dog Shot, rhyming with ‘tot’. Then, in a significant moment from 1961, we see young Harry’s admiration for his classmate’s poem. We are shown the young boy-poet really tuning in, and this listening to another’s words is as important as any other first:
His poem was a description of the local countryside and contained the phrase ‘curly kale’. In that phrase—simple, visual, exact—he had caught something, and I dimly realised that I wanted to be able to catch that, too. I had no idea then that the phrase ‘curly kale’ simply referred to a particular variety of kale, sometimes also called curled or Scotch kale, in which according to the OED the leaves are curled or crimped like parsley. They are still a lovely pair of words.
He is equally generous with his praise of tutors who guided his learning and opened his mind. Of Mr Curtis, short, pudgy and eccentric, with a croaky voice, he says: ‘as teacher he was a revelation’.
There is dual curiosity and fondness when he encounters writers on the page who become a part of young Harry’s life as much as real people: Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Emily Brontë. He returns time and again to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, which he first read at age 16, and we see, with each reading, the evolution of perspective: an early view, a changing mind, a growing heart. He learns to consider a book not for what it tells but for what it is about (thanks to a conversation with his friend, James), and each time he reads Forster’s novel, there is new illumination. The reader gets the sense that the relationship with such stories is beyond intellectual: a bond is formed; the experience is deeply moving, visceral. These close moments with literature are meeting points of mind and heart and body; it’s perhaps where alienation ceases. King Lear made him weep (and he says it remains the greatest play ever written); Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ was remarkable on first listening (when his teacher read it to the class); The Lord of the Rings warranted reading more than 20 times, and then more as he shared this special reading experience with his children.
Ricketts examines the important books from his young years and from his ever-changing mind-heart perspective. These books include male authors who dominated cultural conversations and whose work he has come to reevaluate over time and with each reading: Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Herman Hesse, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles. Here, too, we gain a sense that this is a story of both the individual and the times. These were the same male writers I grew up reading, albeit in a different decade and on a different continent: they are writers we read with a sense of profound discovery, then learned to look at with more distance and perhaps better understanding. I was delighted to find John Barth in Ricketts’ stories—a familiar and favourite from my home waters of the Chesapeake, one who has been vastly influential for me as well and whose books warrant reading over and over.
The footnotes become lively in the middle sections as young Harry encounters various interpretations of novelists, poets and playwrights. His wide-ranging interests are significant, and as his experience and knowledge increase over the years, he shares his discoveries generously with the reader—from thoughts about the German writer Alfred Andersch, who survived the Nazi years, to reflections on George von Zedlitz in Wellington and the Somes Island internments, to friendships with novelists and playwrights and musicians.
Poetry is cited throughout the book, drawing from the poet’s many volumes and adding to the pace and flavour. With poems, memories are heightened through lines of pleasure and pain, through immediate embrace, and through distanced understanding. When Ricketts considers the relationship between parents and children, he offers us his ‘Footnote to Larkin’—a continuation of Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’. In lieu of a lecture on generational difference and individual responsibility, an effectively short set of lines drills to the heart of the matter. As he grows up, there are girlfriends and travel, more reading and writing. There are important character-building exchanges around John Fowles’ The Magus and E.M. Forster’s Howards End.
But there is also a playful sense of language centred on poetry. Just as young Harry loved the wordplay around curly kale, so he also examines an affair with Clare and their tramp together around Greece in the poem ‘That Summer: A Tritina’, in which he weaves ‘wound’ and ‘roam’ in a playful reflection on—what else—‘summer’. Then, a few pages later, he shares a triolet. The 1970s are set against the backdrop of the peace moments (make love, not war) and sexual freedoms exemplified by the sexually ambiguous rock stars Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Lou Reed. There is more humour, too—especially when it comes to John Barth’s novel Giles Goat-Boy—while the Oxford days section ends with a reflection on Oxford and irony. Ricketts goes to his first poetry reading in Hong Kong, mid-twenties; and here, we enjoy another comic aside when he shares the review describing the atmosphere as one of ‘morbid mutual respect’ and ‘unnecessarily sombre’—and then admits that his shirt was purple and hideous. I chuckled out loud when I came to the poem mentioning a single feather floating down and Ricketts’ acerbic note about ‘Richard Bach’s enormously popular and spiritually vacuous novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull’.
With his teaching years in Hong Kong, we are witness to the last days of empire and the mood of a British administration that has now lost its verve, its confidence. He perceives the shift in atmosphere and describes it: ‘I wrote in my diary: “Suddenly to be not Harry but just a foreigner—a Britisher in an alien world—a representative of an exploiting dominant power.”’ This time of reckoning is filled with malaise, confusion and disappointment: ‘I had hoped I might reconnect with some part of the idyllic Hong Kong I remembered from childhood. That fantasy had evaporated with the first few days.’ Also, there are questions around purpose: ‘I often wondered what on earth I was doing in Hong Kong. Why was I trying to teach English literature here? This was a conundrum I never satisfactorily resolved.’ It was a period of bizarre events (surreal confrontations and Crazy Agnes among them), teaching frustrations (humorously delivered, with Fawlty Towers’ Basil compared to Twelfth Night’s Malvolio) and realisations of ‘colonial truisms’ (following Kipling and Conrad). But we also see the young man furthering his sense of Self, deepening his views as a critical reader and writer—he even has a falling out through a disagreement over Bob Dylan (a story delivered with dry wit). It’s notable that, while the novel he wanted to write was eventually abandoned, Ricketts’ first book came from his Hong Kong years, a story collection set against this background and drawn from personal experiences.
Deeply embedded in the story of his life are cultural stories drawn not only from books but also from films and music and so on. There’s America’s west coast counterculture and New York’s Greenwich Village, films ranging from Westerns High Noon and Shane to Woody Allen and Easy Rider. There’s Richard Brautigan and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Music spills over the second half of the book: The Rolling Stones, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams. When he writes about Tom Petty, it reads like a review: ‘Petty’s songs often sound simple on the surface, but show unexpected depths on intensive listening.’ Music weaves in with memory, of course, and we get an amusing account of time in a French chateau centred around the Stones’ ‘Play with Fire’ and a girl called Sue. And then there’s Bob Dylan and another first: ‘I first heard Dylan through other voices,’ Ricketts tells us—Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds. Songwriters were, not surprisingly, as important to him as poets:
I took lines in songs quite as seriously as I took lines in poems; lyrics from the Who, Pink Floyd and Dylan bore equal weight with lines by Sylvia Plath, John Donne and Edward Thomas … Lines from the songs I loved became (in Keats’ phrase) my ‘true voice of feeling’, or at least the voice of the feelings I wished I was having.
And later, when contemplating Dylan further, Ricketts notes the many volumes written about the songwriter, the links to T.S. Eliot, the critical analysis. He examines structures and lines, pronouns and meaning—the way I and you end up becoming we in ‘Idiot Wind’, for example—and Dylan’s voice, bringing emotional range and depth to the lyrics.
By the end of First Things, Ricketts has returned to his feelings about his early childhood: peripatetic and unsettled; it established a pattern for his life. He writes of his ‘arrested adolescence’ and of his need to break the pattern by resigning his position and leaving Hong Kong. His return to England marks the beginning of a new chapter. He describes meeting Rita and her two children, marrying her and seeing the birth of their son, Will—the moment he felt that ‘real life had begun’. The book closes with this intimate portrait of a new family, followed by ‘Nothing to declare’, a poem about marriage, which, remarkably, ties together the motifs of the book: joy and uncertainty; language and curiosity; promise and betrayal; vistas and cliffs. Here in this poem, Ricketts invites us to consider the fascination of the marriage relationship, its commitments and its discoveries—a narrative sure to be played out in the twists and turns of volume two of his memoir:
yes marriage is
such a foreign country
the whole world changes
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MICHELLE ELVY is a writer, editor and teacher of creative writing in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her books include, most recently, the anthologies A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha, edited with Witi Ihimaera (Massey University Press, 2023), and Perch, a poetry collection celebrating 10 years of Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature (At the Bay | I te Kokoru, 2024).
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