Lindsay Pope
How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging, Pat White (Victoria University Press, 2010) 239 pp., $35.00
The eye, the ear,
The mind in action,
these I value.
– Heraclitus, from Fragments
In 2009, as a member of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters Writing for the Page group, I had the privilege of previewing many of the initial drafts of the essays which form the substance of White’s How the Land Lies. A year later it’s a pleasure to see these collected to form a cohesive record of a man’s personal journey, offering the opportunity to immerse oneself in another’s fascinating mindscape.
While each of these seventeen essays has a central topic – from music, to dam building, to fishing, to heroes — it is its echoes of family history, of a dislocated childhood, and of growth into self-aware maturity, that unify this work and the consciousness it displays. You are introduced to White’s world-view as it is now, which then leads back into the formative years: his recollection of childhood experiences on the South Island’s West Coast with all their anxieties and turbulence. But White is not so much concerned here with memoir, rather with attempts to get to the nucleus of the forces that have influenced and shaped him, and to locate the nub of things, a centre. He reflects on parents, on siblings, on communities, on relationships, on both Pakeha and Maori ways of telling stories of place. He comments on the many places he has lived, on his various means of employment, and on his personal struggles with physical health and psychological well-being.
White’s eye for detail is penetrating and his feel for language is evident on every page. On a walk along the banks of the Ruamahanga River on a fishing excursion, he seems sensitive to every aspect of the scene:
Dropping out of the branches forming the wide canopy above me were willow bugs.
These tiny creatures caused dark red callouses in most of the leaves above me, and
they were now releasing themselves from the willow dropping in their hundreds to
the river below. In my tackle bag I had flies tied to simulate this hatch, tiny
feathered objects with a yellow bead as a head, designed for use at precisely this
time of year.
These tiny creatures caused dark red callouses in most of the leaves above me, and
they were now releasing themselves from the willow dropping in their hundreds to
the river below. In my tackle bag I had flies tied to simulate this hatch, tiny
feathered objects with a yellow bead as a head, designed for use at precisely this
time of year.
Always there are pointed anecdotes: for example, as a young boy, after his parents had argued, he watched his father sit in the dark, polishing his rifle for what seemed hours; and then there’s his telling of how he discovered at fifty that his great-uncle Jack was killed at Chunuk Bair three days after being court-martialled for falling asleep on sentry duty. In documenting and exploring these memories, White is the classic essayist, both recalling and putting into a kind of perspective the events — and the words — that have shaped him.
As the reader traverses the sealed highways and the gravel roads of this wayfarer’s life, he constantly appreciates just how keenly White’s eye is focused on those exterior landscapes, and just how sharply White’s ear is attuned to his interior responses to them. White’s meditative reflections are informed by wide reading, and it is a feature of his writing that you frequently encounter quotations that have been, in some sense, signposts along the way. Edward Casey offers: ‘To live is to live locally, and [to] know is first of all to know the place one is in.’ Additional milestones, as he balances the outer and the inner, are received and retold stories of family and familial ghosts; these serve to mark and measure White’s journey to his arrival at his current destination with his partner Catherine.
Just as the harrier hawk drifts and glides in the thermals over White’s home acreage at Gladstone, in the Wairarapa, so his writing is a circling and soaring flight, a kind of mimicry. Yet, never pedantic but always honest, both accessible and instructive, he is able to embrace his surroundings, to demonstrably savour a given landscape, and to be satisfied with exploring the physicality of what a particular location might offer — before lifting off, prose-wise, into a more philosophical and rarefied realm. So, although White’s writing demonstrates a sweeping trajectory, the arc of his language is always grounded on a bedrock humanism from which all traces of artifice and pretence have drained away.
When White writes:
Without touching the earth, we do not truly know the place on which we stand. Place
is more than a story of people and events, the past preserved in our minds; it is also
sensory, to be felt through feet and hands as much as seen through eyes …
his words resonate with a direct and simple veracity. Then, within a few sentences, he has moved to the transcendental: ‘There is no morning exactly the same as yesterday to wake to. The “place” is never quite the same place, but where it is is where I am, a place to stand.’ This is a blended echo of Heraclitean fragments: ‘The sun is new each day’, and, ‘The river where you set your foot now is gone – those waters giving way to this, now this.’
is more than a story of people and events, the past preserved in our minds; it is also
sensory, to be felt through feet and hands as much as seen through eyes …
his words resonate with a direct and simple veracity. Then, within a few sentences, he has moved to the transcendental: ‘There is no morning exactly the same as yesterday to wake to. The “place” is never quite the same place, but where it is is where I am, a place to stand.’ This is a blended echo of Heraclitean fragments: ‘The sun is new each day’, and, ‘The river where you set your foot now is gone – those waters giving way to this, now this.’
How the Land Lies contains a substantial bibliography, for which I am grateful. However, the many illustrative plates — or perhaps it is the placement of them within the text — I found to be a distraction from the quality of the writing. These might have been better assembled and published on photographic paper as a central insert.
My impression is that White has settled naturally in a geographical locale and amongst a community of writers to both of which he intimately belongs. Undoubtedly the mystic yearning that dwells in this compassionate and illuminating writer will continue to provide much fuel for further essays.
LINDSAY POPE lives in Nelson and in 2009 completed an MA in creative writing at IIML.
Great review, Lindsay. I enjoyed Pat’s book and there is much of it I still think about. Echoing the importance of having your feet actually touch the ground, I think of his comment that once upon a time farmers took pride in being able to WALK the perimeter of their property, something they do no longer. I think what I liked most of all about the book was Pat’s voice: always measured, grounded, observant, and always taking its time to say what has to be said. A treasure of a book.