Michael Morrissey
Speaking Frankly: The Frank Sargeson Memorial Lectures 2003-2010, edited by Sarah Shieff, (Cape Catley Ltd, 2011), 200 pp., $31.99.
The industrious Dr Sarah Shieff has recently added two books to the growing collection of Sargesoniana — the superbly selected and edited Letters (a book so solid it would stop a .22 bullet, and a tome I warmly recommend), plus this additional more modestly packaged collection of lectures. The list of writer-contributors includes many of Sargeson’s close associates and supporters.
In 1978, four years before Sargeson’s death in 1982 (when the youthful Shieff played the clarinet at his funeral), that never-less-than-scrupulous editor of the literary magazine Islands, Robin Dudding, edited an extensive, indeed exhaustive-seeming, selection of appreciative comments about our senior man of letters: at the time still perky at 75. The Dudding Islands assemblage featured some 38 contributors in a special section titled ‘Tributes, Memories & Commentaries’. Additional tributes were included under Reviews. If this was the resource from which Shieff might validly have drawn her lecturers she would have found that — at my approximate count — some 25 have now shuffled off this mortal coil.
The Shieff line-up has Lawrence Jones, Kevin Ireland, Graeme Lay — having in common the antecedent Dudding assembly — with Michael King, Peter Wells, Christine Cole Catley and the delightful Elizabeth Aitken Rose and Owen Marshall going to bat for the first time. Viewed with the wisdom of hindsight, Christine Cole Catley and Owen Marshall appear glaring omissions from the Dudding line-up of the Seventies. Equally, C.K. Stead is a significant absence from the Shieff octet, though he has written a generous endorsement on the back cover. One might also mention — in, as it were, dispatches from the literary frontline — Alistair Paterson, a frequent visitor to the Sargeson fibrolite bach in its hey-day, and now indisputably a pre-eminent person of letters.
As to why Stead is absent from Speaking Frankly, I am given to understand that he has recently donated much of the relevant material to the Turnbull library, and therefore what was once close to hand is no longer readily accessible. And as to my own absence, I bear no rancour (well, only a wee bit), as I only met Frank a few times, but can (along with many others) masochistically recall Lemora, that unfortunate concoction with which he plied visitors, as cheap and nasty a drop as ever excoriated the palate. But of course when Frank served it, it successfully masqueraded as the nectar of a more-than-minor god.
Michael King, an able and imaginative historian and an energetically capable biographer, but a trifle self-deluded as to his expert judgement on matters literary, also mentions the dreaded Lemora. King recalls for us that the Hamilton that the disgraced Norris Davey was to leave in the years before World War Two in order to become the respectable and literary Frank Sargeson was a closeted dairy town containing just 11,500 souls. Now, in 2012, it has a population of 143,000, plus a university! King also exhaustively name-checks an impressive roll-call of writers who were influenced by Sargeson. Too many, one has to say – his influence was surely too cripplingly pervasive, and it must be noted that the two who most successfully overthrew his influence turned out to be his finest protégés: namely Vincent O’Sullivan and Owen Marshall.
It was news to me that Sargeson had fallen — albeit unrequitedly — in love with a young woman, though hardly a surprise that he also fell in love with a young man, also unrequited. No wonder perhaps, that on the whole, Sargeson became a covert rather than an overt homosexual. To be unlucky with both sexes must have been hard to bear. Hence, a life given to friendship rather than eroticism. Friendship was one of the more attractive aspects of Sargeson’s character.
Some years ago I read that the indefatigable Lawrence Jones had read every New Zealand novel published — some 900 or so. A commendable effort in the name of thoroughness, but unlikely to advance the cause that is its presumed intention: to find one actually worth reading. Jones’ 2004 lecture’s title, ‘The Sons of Sargeson: Dan Davin and the Search for the Great New Zealand Novel 1943—1956’ is an example of a failed literary El Dorado, a futile quest for the gilded novel that we hoped to find lurking in the rainy undergrowth. Could it be Man Alone? You know the answer. While an iconic statement of the New Zealand outdoors, a great work of literature it is not. The Great New Zealand Novel, then, remains a virtual oxymoron, though it may be that the output of Charlotte Randall and Lloyd Jones thus far can give us all hope for a brighter novelistic future.
Ultimately, in my view, there are no great New Zealand novelists and no great New Zealand novels — either then or now. Jones’ ruminations about Sargeson’s list of potential greats — Maurice Duggan, G.R.Gilbert, A.P. Gaskell, plus a very youthful David Ballantyne — reads a little oddly today. Jones notes that, ironically, only the gifted Ballantyne actually went on to write a novel! So much for literary prediction. Dan Davin is also considered; regretfully, I haven’t read much Davin, but what little I have suggests that, like so many writers of those times, he has been venerated above his true worth when measured against international standards. This well-intended nationalism, resulting in a tendency to overrate our writers (and our painters), continues to flourish, and is now valorised, institutionalised and spiritualised by our schools and universities. So though the ‘text’ is nominally literature and art, the subtext is pride in New Zealand, that small nation somewhere below the continent of Australia that doggedly insists on punching above its cultural weight — an acquired postcolonial aggression which clearly has brought successful, even triumphal, results in sport, but not in literature or the arts, not really.
Those prolific North Shore writers Graeme Lay and Kevin Ireland remember Sargeson with great affection. As does the ever-loyal Christine Cole Catley. Ireland reminds us of how Sargeson remained ever fearful of the law after his 1929 arrest for ‘assault on a male’ and both Ireland and Lay make the point that Sargeson was a writer who happened to be homosexual rather than a homosexual writer. Unsurprisingly, Peter Wells identifies Sargeson as a gay writer. Lay sardonically observes, ‘ . . . Frank had little time for the Gay Rights movement, and he thought that the movement’s appropriation of the word “gay” was just silly.’ Are both points of view valid?
Those prolific North Shore writers Graeme Lay and Kevin Ireland remember Sargeson with great affection. As does the ever-loyal Christine Cole Catley. Ireland reminds us of how Sargeson remained ever fearful of the law after his 1929 arrest for ‘assault on a male’ and both Ireland and Lay make the point that Sargeson was a writer who happened to be homosexual rather than a homosexual writer. Unsurprisingly, Peter Wells identifies Sargeson as a gay writer. Lay sardonically observes, ‘ . . . Frank had little time for the Gay Rights movement, and he thought that the movement’s appropriation of the word “gay” was just silly.’ Are both points of view valid?
Politically, after years of discrimination and persecution, it’s inevitable that homosexuals should have made a stand and distanced themselves from the earlier— though in some cases quasi-affectionate — (British) terms of shirt lifter, nancy boy, queer, fruit, pansy, and the somewhat harsher American terms of fag, faggot and homo, to arrive at the considered term, gay. Ironically, most people who declare themselves gay seem anything but. Personally, I have always had a warmer affinity with the more ambiguous and now dated term ‘camp’, which was on occasion split into the challenging polarity of low and high camp. (I’m still not completely crystal on the terminological distinction, even after reading Susan Sontag’s brilliant and pioneering essay Notes on ‘Camp’.) A clue stumbled upon, recently — Noel Coward’s comedies are high camp and Batman is low camp. Well, that clears that up, but where does it place Frank?
Some days I miss the theatrical frivolity of camp. Camp Sargeson was not, and it seems a stretch to call him gay. Jean Genet is, in my view, the greatest blatant homosexual writer (curiously deemed camp by Sontag), while, by contrast, there is never more than obscure hints in Sargeson’s work. In any event, rather than leading a ‘gay’ life, Sargeson led one dedicated to friendship and literary encouragement, mainly with heterosexual writers.
That brings me to Elizabeth Aitken Rose, the unknown jewel in this collection. Casting a wider net, she examines the history and, intriguingly, the attendance statistics of the Ngaio Marsh House (200 visitors a year), the Janet Frame House (450 visitors) and the Katherine Mansfield House (7000!) Rose notes sardonically that the Historic Places Trust showed no interest in preserving Sargeson’s house in its early years, though later ‘conspicuously reversed’ their position. The visitor attendance for the Sargeson house is about 300 a year.
Boldly bringing up the rear (to borrow R.A.K. Mason’s expressive phrase), is New Zealand’s leading short story writer Owen Marshall, who was the honored recipient of Sargeson’s last letter, written poignantly when his memory had faded. Obviously, Marshall treasures the letter and goes on to brilliantly explore the notion of writer as dedicated reader — something which (as he notes) we now need to re-assert in this shallow age of talkback radio and endless short-attention-span media distractions.
What strikes me most powerfully, reading this heartfelt collection of lectures of praise for Sargeson, is how much love he seems to have given to other writers and how much love he received in return. This is the true and enduring subtext behind this collection of lectures. Sargeson seldom if ever turned anyone away.
For one who was virtually a full-time writer for many decades, Sargeson’s published oeuvre was modest. Perhaps he spent too much time in the garden (he preferred gardening to writing), and gave too much time to entertaining friends, fellow writers and hangers-on (yes, me too). But what price do we put on love?
Salutē Frank; I might even gingerly lift a toast of Lemora in a peanut-butter jar to your memory — then again, I might swig back a Stella Artois.
MICHAEL MORRISSEY is a novelist, short-story writer, poet and anthologist. He recently published a memoir entitled Taming the Tiger. He is the 2012 Writer-in-Residence at The University of Waikato, where he has completed two books due for publication this year: Memory Gene Pool (Cold Hub Press) and Tropic of Skorpeo (Steam Press).
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