Susan Pearce's Blog

Love drives.

Towards the end of last year I went hunting for some replacement in the NZ poetry shelves of Arty Bees.  An acquaintance who’d borrowed the beautiful, second-hand Curnow I’d found there had cheerfully denied any knowledge of it when we met on the corner of Wakefield and Tory, so I hoped to chance on more of his poetry. Curnow was absent that day, but this turned up instead.

University of Otago Bibliography Room imprint of Jerusalem Sonnets

It seems likely, given the ‘NZ Room’ sticker on the spine, and the barcode inside the cover, that this copy of Jerusalem Sonnets by James K. Baxter was purchased by Arty Bees from one of Wellington City Libraries’ regular book sales.  Probably no-one had taken it out in a while: ‘STACK’ is written in red biro on the library’s shelving sticker.

Maybe it was a City librarian who affixed the sticky plastic to the brown and straw-gold loose cover, catching a few air bubbles.  (The cover is a brighter, less muddy gold than in the photo.)

Before the City library owned it, it belonged to the Lower Hutt Library of Sacred Heart College. The collection seems so little handled – the pages  barely marked,  foxed or dog-eared – that I wonder if it was hidden permanently under the librarian’s desk, Baxter’s references to sex and pot and crabs deemed too explicit for impressionable minds. I should probably store it somewhere darker than in the leaning row under the windowsill on my desk, but I like to have it close at hand.

I imagine a conscientious and literature-loving Sacred Heart librarian who, having heard that Baxter wrote the sonnets while living at Hiruharama / Jerusalem, the settlement on the Whanganui River where Suzanne Aubert founded the Sisters of Compassion, decided that this Catholic son’s work must be included in the school’s collection. She must have been onto it, to get one of the first 500 copies. But after all, one of Sacred Heart’s six houses is named for Aubert. On receiving the collection, our librarian reads it (with some pleasure, we hope), and then slips it straight into a drawer, so as not to raise controversy amongst parents and disquieting giggles between the girls. I hope she pulls it out from time to time to revisit the poems.

I’ve never had the inclination to be a first-edition fiend. I just don’t see the point of collecting them for their own sake.  (This past weekend at a neighbour’s garage sale, I recognised the local man who, two years ago, responded to my Freecycle ad and picked up my mother’s brittle and browned Coronation newspapers. Having failed to provoke interest either on Trade Me or at Arty Bees, the papers were headed for the recycling bin. I was glad they still had a life in someone’s mind.)

Nonetheless, the fact that this is the first edition of Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets is part of why I love it. I love its air of contingency: here is an object produced with care and attention, but likely to perish within a few years unless protected in library stacks or a bibliophile’s careful shelves. It’s made of A4 paper and light card, fastened with staples. It’s a zine-like production. It feels both personal, and professional.

By contrast, my great-aunt’s self-published volume of ‘verse’, in which swaying multitudes of flowers sigh, wander, cluster, gaze and glimmer, sports a durable blue cloth-and-board cover with a textured, watery effect. I never met her. She was told she had a nervous disposition, and died before I was born.

The Jerusalem Sonnets paper is of a sufficient, serious weight.  (Colin Durning, to whom the poems are addressed,  paid for their first imprint at the University of Otago Bibliography Room.)  The poems are typo-free, impeccably type-set, and well-placed on the page. The sinuous line drawing on the cover, reminiscent of a topographical map’s channel or ridge, is by Ralph Hotere. Since 2001 the drawing has found a preserved, if miniaturised, life on the cover of the annual online collection Best New Zealand Poems. (You can also see the drawing here, but as in my photo above, the whole image seems horizontally squashed. What is it with photos on the web?)

I also love the evidence of past ownership, particularly the school’s marks: the embossed stamp in the top right-hand corner inside the cover, in which the words ‘Congregation of Our Lady of the Missions’ surround a robed, haloed figure. Some librarian’s old-fashioned handwriting, looking like a great-aunt’s: ’820 Bax’. The whited out top line of the address: ‘Convent of Our Lady of the Mission’, and the school’s badge-stamp. And I love reading the poems. I like their colloquial, personal and narrative qualities, their energy and movement and specificity, and the questions they ask.

Many months ago I wrote a guest post on poet Helen Heath’s blog about how much I enjoy my Kindle. There wasn’t room in that post to discuss a Kindle’s drawbacks. One of the most obvious is that on a Kindle, you can’t flick through the pages. It’s laborious to find the passage that you’re thinking of. As others have observed, when you read a paper book, often you haven’t marked that passage: you simply know that it’s somewhere towards the bottom of a left-hand page, and, oh, it comes after this bit, but before that bit (and meanwhile you’re finding other sections you liked, and which are relevant to your line of thinking).

On a Kindle, the equivalent of ‘flicking’ is unrewarding and dull, involving much back-and-forth on screens which lack any of the interest of the text’s actual pages. When reading a non-chronological, unconventional novel like Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, the difficulty with flicking became a downright problem, preventing me (not the most retentive of readers) from figuring out who was who. If I had been more committed to the book, I would have made notes: on paper, of course.

But conversely, I think that if I’d read Visitation in a more easily manipulated three-dimensional form, my commitment to it would have been greater. I imagine that reading Egan’s wonderful Visit from the Goon Squad on a Kindle might have been similarly frustrating, but thankfully I bought a proper copy of that. And while I need to keep every book I read, I do want paper copies of the books I adore. (On my list for regular searches at Arty Bees is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.)

It wasn’t long after my post on Helen’s blog that I found this Baxter. Contemplating my love for it, I began to imagine a future in which paper books are the exception. I do believe that small runs like this 1970 edition of the Jerusalem Sonnets (500 copies) will survive, for the same reasons that the zine scene is flourishing. However, in a world in which a poet can tweet and Facebook her way to thousands of readers, maybe it’ll be a brave writer who publishes only on paper. I find it moving to look at these pages knowing that this edition marks the first time that a mass of New Zealand readers encountered these sonnets.

I also imagined a future in which hard-copy books might only be produced as souvenir editions, or because they will ‘find a market’ among nostalgic fetishists who resist the onward march of technology. The prospect saddened me. One  reason this book means something is that you know, looking at the typeset poems on the pages, that the circle of passionate response to Baxter’s poems had yet to spread far. (Not that it took long: as the site The Black Art – very much worth a visit – tells us, 2000 more copies were published within 18 months of this edition.) People cared about this publication and made it happen not because of market forces, but for reasons to do with life force, and love, and art, and concentrated effort.

The title of this post is taken from Poem for Colin (6) from the Jerusalem Sonnets:

The moon is a glittering disc above the poplars

And one cloud travelling low down

Moves above the house – but the empty house beyond,

Above me, over the hill’s edge,

Knotted in bramble is what I fear,

Te whare kehua – love drives, yet I draw back

From going step by step in solitude

To the middle of the Maori night

Where dreams gather – those hard steps taken one by one

Lead out of all protection, and even a crucifix

Held in the palm of the hand will not fend off

Precisely that hour when the moon is a spirit

And the wounds of the soul open – to be is to die

The death of others, having loosened the safe coat of becoming.

James K. Baxter

Swimming with Books went visiting…

over at the blog of my lovely publisher, Victoria University Press. It's about the writing process. And things.

Where do ideas come from?

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) is of the opinion that ideas and creativity circle the world like gulfstreams, looking for 'portals', and if you're not open to them, they'll go and find someone who is. I get the impression that she means actual gulfstreams of ideas, just as she seems to mean actual angels when she talks about angels.

I too entertain some unverifiable ideas, though I don't have Gilbert's ability to believe in discrete, human-like supernatural entities. But for writing purposes, I've found that pretending to believe can be useful. Our imaginations believe and act on what we tell them.

Back when I was writing the first draft of Acts of Love, I tussled with the character who eventually turned out to be Stella. At that point she had a different name, and having written a few chapters, I couldn't figure out anything further about her or what she might do. Stuck stuck stuck. One day I got myself into a bit of a makebelieve trance and told her I'd 'interview' her. My agreement with myself was that she temporarily existed outside the world of the book. She was to talk to me, the writer, about the way I was writing her, and about what might happen to her in the novel. Then I wrote non-stop in my notebook in 'her' voice for about forty-five minutes. Amongst a load of twaddle, she said something which changed the direction of her character: 'I'm not as angry as you're making me out to be.'

That was a surprise. At the time I couldn't see any way for her not to be fundamentally furious. But over the following months she changed shape (and name) into a less whiny, more active person. I'm not suggesting that I actually communed with her 'spirit'. I knew, at the time, that I was fooling myself. And I understood that something in me knew more about her character than I consciously knew at the time.

In the same Radiolab podcast that I linked to above, Gilbert also talks about finding the title for her bestseller Eat Pray Love. Essentially, this consisted of gently asking the manuscript to reveal its name to her. It sounds less kooky when she talks about it. Or maybe more kooky.

Anyway, historically I've been bad with titles. (I still haven't officially graduated my MA – ten years this year – because I've been too embarrassed by my collection's title to lodge it in the university library. I really must get onto that.) Recently I needed to find the title for a story and having just listened to the podcast, thought I'd trick my imagination into setting up a quick link into my conscious mind. There's a fairly left-field body-mind thing that I do, so I did that, and asked the story for its title, and ta-da, there it was. Not perfect, not particularly memorable ('Everything That Rises Must Converge') but good enough for a deadline and a lot better than any of my previous attempts.

This idea that so much of what we write comes out of the non-cognitive parts of our minds does fascinate me. In the Guardian Weekly, (11.02.11) John Gray wrote in the The Hunt for Immortality that  H. G. Wells, having absorbed Darwinism, was convinced that humanity would become extinct unless right-thinking people seized control of evolution. He thought the Bolsheviks would do a great job of creating a higher species, and found Lenin 'very refreshing'. He wrote that if the Soviet state killed people in their thousands, 'it did on the whole kill for a reason and for an end'. Chilling.

However, Gray points out,

His scientific romances tell a very different story. When the time traveller journeys into the future, in The Time Machine, he finds a world built on cannibalism, with the delicate Eloi seemingly content to be farmed as food for the brutish morlocks, and travelling on into the far future finds a darkening Earth where the only life is green slime. In The Island of Dr Moreau the visionary vivisectionist performs vile experiments on animals with the aim of remaking them as humans. The result is the ugly, tormeted "best-folk" – a travesty of humanity.

Wells's fables were a kind of automatic writing – messages from his subliminal self that his conscious mind dismissed. They teach a lesson starkly at odds with the one he spent his life preaching: the advance of knowledge cannot deliver humans from themselves, and if they use science to direct the course of evolution the result will be monsters. This was Wells's true vision, always inwardly denied, and for much of his life expressed only in his scientific romances."

He suggests that despite what Wells thought he believed about the construction of a 'higher species', Wells's subconscious knew better: that it was wiser, closer to the truth, and more far-seeing. (Though 'closer to the truth' just shows my own biases.)

How can we know ourselves well enough so that, maybe, we can write the strongest stuff in us without it having to trickle down through the convoluted pathways and firewalls we may have set up between our dreamworld and our conscious minds? The best way I've found, so far, is just to write, and write some more. More on that another time.

Franzen: Correction

Back in February, I  commented that I had felt 'consumed by' Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and enjoyed the experience less than reading Patrick Evan's excellent Gifted (a pointless comparison). I used the phrase 'Franzen's obvious manipulation of his readers'.

Who was I kidding? I love obsessing about characters, lying awake imagining myself living their lives, replaying scenes in my head, and I don't at all mind being manipulated by a master storyteller.

I love the enormous scope of The Corrections and of Freedom. I love the richness of Franzen's characters. I admire his facility with structure. I love his sentences.

One of my reading friends thinks several of Freedom's characters are caricatures.  I can't comment because my critical faculties were switched off while I read.  It doesn't take much to flick that switch: a good enough story, an authoritative hand, compelling characters.

If I had been honest with myself back in February, I would have said that I regretted reading Freedom so fast; that I wish, when reading novels that make me voraciously curious about their characters, I didn't fly over the paragraphs in a hectic race to find out what happens.  I felt grumpy while reading Freedom: couldn't focus on anything practical, neglecting domestic duties and writing. The grumpiness had to do with feeling out of control, and being reminded of an earlier period of my life when I only read to escape. Also, I hadn't given myself permission to rush.  In my reading plan, Freedom wasn't a holiday distraction. I wanted to learn from it. But at the time, my desire to relieve the tension of not knowing what happened to the characters was greater.

Right now my husband is reading the final chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to our son, and on wandering downstairs to make a cup of tea, I hear details that I either missed completely or registered in some less conscious zone so as to be able to speed onwards. (My son, on the other hand, gets the business with the wands – who had which wand at what point – and is going to explain it to me over dinner.)  It makes me a little sad, knowing that I didn't savour the full resonance of every detail and missed out on some of the connections with the previous six books.  But I'm addicted to pay-off. That's why a novel like Patrick Evan's Gifted comes as a relief. The more reflective, slower-paced tone helps me to read more gently. (Which is not to say that I had any less interest in the novel's outcome.)

I'm thinking about this because to me the intensity of one's reading is obviously connected to how engaged one is with the world; with each experience.  And I think that to some extent, that determines the strength of one's writing.

Rich reading, and reasons to write

This morning, in time set aside to write, I slunk away from my desk for half an hour and started Hamish Clayton's Wulf (Penguin Books, 2011: you can read an informative review here). I found myself wanting to read aloud so as to live the words and see the images:

Every word spoken, sent like a raft of smoke onto the air of that strange country, smelled like the blood riding the breath of their great chief..

The prose is mesmerising and there's promise of a compelling story. I also love the occasional prose-poetry that marks off segments in the first chapter, and Clayton's hypnotic use of repetition. (Made a mental note to mention him in writing classes as an example of a writer who breaks that not-particularly-hard-&-fast rule beautifully. Beginner writers often unconsciously repeat words from sentence to sentence.) This'll probably turn out to be one of those books that will live on my bookshelves all my life: no trade-in at Arty Bees.

I did write, finding my way in the dark as usual. I love those sparking moments when a new aspect of a character whom you barely know enough to narrate, yet, reveals itself. Kept my leg tied to the chair.

I've also recently read Their Faces Were Shining (Tim Wilson, VUP), and August (Bernard Beckett, Text Publishing), but won't write about those novels here as am reviewing them for New Zealand Books. However, I'll say it was no hardship to have to reread them while preparing the review, and anyone who wants to be happily submerged in fiction over the Easter weekend could look to these two  New Zealand writers.

A significant cohort of the boys at Tobias Wolff's Old School (set, I think, in the 1950s) want to be writers. Of course, there's no mention of the Internet, or America's Next Top Model, or MTV. This atmosphere of dedicated literacy reminded me of reading old copies of Life magazine in Wellington Central Library while researching early 1960s US culture, and being startled by the elegance, lyricism and complexity of their current affairs writing – politics aside.

The school believes itself to be an egalitarian meritocracy, blind to class or financial distinctions. However, Wolff's protagonist, hiding his Jewishness because he has the 'tremor of apprehension' that the school somehow sets apart those identifying as Jewish, speculates on the motivation of the aspiring writers:

Maybe it seemed to them, as it did to me, that to be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy.

Does anyone out there want to comment on why they write? Elizabeth Knox included her essay 'Why I Write' in her  collection, The Love School (more on that another time). Elizabeth seems to me like someone who has always worked in interesting ways towards being conscious of what's going on in her mind (although she's also said that she's not the type of writer who's solely curious about her psychological workings, but instead naturally turns to making up stories, which tendency is pretty clear from the novels she's written). This extract is a lovely example of the consciousness, though:

In the dedication at the beginning of R. L. Stevenson's novel The Master of Ballantrae, the writer talks as if to to the father, who, addled by strokes, is no longer able to follow his work. Stevenson says what I'd like to say in dedicating my next book to my dead father (to the man his family all but lost years before he died). Stevenson says it perfectly, but I'd like to add this – that you don't just walk away from any of the people from whom you write. You notice them missing. You stop and go back and try to coax and help. You stand still and wait for them to be themselves again. Perhaps you get mad with them. But you wait, you wait. Then finally you walk off and leave them behind. And you find that, while you've waited, a dark wood has sprung up around you…

(A friend recently returned my copy of The Love School. I had mourned it, unable to remember whom I'd lent it to and thinking it lost, but it was on her bedside table the whole time, one of a pile of books lent over a year ago during a post-op recovery period. She's very good about – eventually – returning books, so I needn't have worried. These days I write down every book that leaves the house in a notebook kept on the bookshelves for the purpose. No more lost books! Who has my copy of Maurice Gee's The Big Season, or Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes? Huh?)

If we narrate our lives through our thoughts and dreams, first, and then through incidental conversations at work or the bus stop or on the pillow or in the car, that has never felt like enough for me. When I haven't been writing, I feel like I don't know myself. Even if everything other element in life is running along perfectly, it all feels skewiff. Conversely, dust can accumulate, letters can go unanswered, my attempts at cooking dinner can be mediocre, and it's all OK if I've written, even if the writing is unusable. And there's something about joining in with the song, the continued murmur, that long-lasting overseeing conversation and the talk that goes beyond our daily experience and is also tied to it.

Michael Chabon on writing

After enjoying CK Stead's memoir I was in the mood for more writing memoir, so was pleased to find Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs on the biography shelves of Cummings Park Library. I took it to WOMAD where (because of its title, I guess) it was twice mistaken for the reading matter of the sole male in our group.

Chabon is a marvellous, energetic writer, lively and hyper-engaged with the world and his own mind.  He's quick with metaphor, often cramming several into the same sentence, and seems as intent on entertaining us as a circus ringmaster.

I think the book deserves a slower, more considered reading than I gave it – I was after some easy distraction – but part of my tendency to skimread in the latter half of the book did arise from a heretical feeling that I was reading something not completely unrelated, in tone, to an Oprah magazine. If you've read more than one copy of that magazine, you may be aware that from every experience must come a lesson: something to take away with you that will inform the rest of your life. (You may also suspect, as I do, that the magazine is copy-edited by an automated cheerleader: I haven't sat down and analysed the style but the tone never differs from article to article.) Maybe it's just that he's a huge personality, whose writing has an overwhelming flavour, and I probably did do the book a disservice by reading the essays fast, all at once. But I got a little bit fed up with him, towards the end.

But Chabon's essays are often very moving, and I wanted to read large chunks of the book to friends with children who fiddle with Lego and lack wilderness to play in, or who make mistakes.  He's brilliant, and incidentally provides more evidence towards my (fairly obvious) thesis that if you want to be a writer, it helps to be an optimist (about writing, at any rate).  In 'XO9′, he makes it sound rather desirable to possess a dollop of OCD-inclined DNA:

When I consider the problem-solving nature of writing fiction – how whatever book I happen to be working on is always broken, stuck, incomplete, a Yale lock that won't open, a subroutine that won't execute, yet day after day I return to it knowing that if I just keep at it, I will pop the thing loose – it begins to seem to me that writing may be in part a disorder: sheer, unfettered XO9.

Yes, in part, perhaps, the ability to keep on going when there is no rational reason to do so: pretty much the opposite of any guarantee that the story will work, that it'll succeed, that it'll demonstrate that your mind is not repeating itself, that it'll help pay the mortgage. Knowing that if I keep at it, I will pop the thing loose.

Chabon also comments on his difficulty with writing women. He resents this difficulty from a feminist perspective: why should it be so hard, seeming 'to endorse the view that there is some mystic membrane separating male and female consciousness'? I appreciate that he notes that he does have difficulty, that he doesn't necessarily get it all right when he seeks to 'create in my fiction living, fiery female characters to match the life and fire of various real women I have known'.  Obviously, I can't imagine Nabokov or Flaubert making that last statement.

Why is Lolita so often misunderstood?

Humbert H's narrative is mindbending. He's writing Lolita (so he claims)  from jail before execution, and he's writing it because 'I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted'. (He's describing her at 17, pregnant and well past the age at which he usually stops finding girls attractive.)

But that declaration comes close to the end, and given given his  lyrical raptures over Dolores Haze's beauty, and the beauty of the nine to fourteen year old 'nymphets', a reader can't help but to try to figure out whether he's repentant, or is recommending paedophilia. Nabokov keeps us guessing while he plays plenty of word games: '…breakfast in the township of Soda, pop 1001'.

Many readers (including Martin Amis, if my edition's blurb is anything to go by – though I assume he was quoted out of context) do take it as the latter, an enconium to sex with young girls.

You'd have to read the book more than once to pick up all of Nabokov's games (for example, what's the significance of the amnesiac who turns up one morning in the hotel room of Humbert and his third wife Rita?). I'm too drenched with Nabokovness to return to it any time soon.

From the start Humbert comes off as a manipulative, self-indulgent, unbelievable narrator. For example, we're given to believe that due to his unresolved grief for childhood love Annabel, he has no choice but to fall for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze.

For most of the book I felt we could not know the 'real' Dolores at all, such was his bias. By his description, she's whiny, shallow and materialistic, has 'vacant eyes', an 'eerie vulgarity', and a 'nymphean evil breathing through [her] every pore'. (In his afterword, Nabokov himself refers to 'nymphets'.)

After her camp experience she is 'hopelessly depraved', with 'not a trace of modesty'. She has 'the body of some immortal daemon disguised as a female child'. (The cover of this edition upholds the idea that she was a precociously experienced and willing child. Sensationalist marketing, anyone?)

But Humbert / Nabokov also gives us plenty of evidence to stack against his claims. Again and again, Humbert describes his violence against Dolores, and her misery and reluctance ('…her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep'). Relatively early in the book, after he first rapes her, he begins to develop a conscience: 'an opressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed'. In perhaps the saddest scene, he makes it clear that she only goes with him because 'she had absolutely nowhere else to go'.

As the book continues, Humbert often does not weave into the narrative retrospective regret for his actions and intentions. (Nabokov would never want to make it easy for us.) Therefore (for example) the not-too-discerning reader may believe that the narrator Humbert holds the same values as the earlier Humbert, who considered the virtue of marrying Dolores so she could produce another girl child for him, even resulting in a third-generation Lolita to play around with, or that the narrator Humbert thinks its fine that his earlier self forced a feverish Dolores to have sex with him, and had her masturbate him in her classroom while he ogled a schoolmate. (She must have had a very unobservant teacher.)

After the balance of power changes a little, his references to his conscience increase: 'I…hurt her rather badly for which I hope my heart may rot…'. Towards the end of the book he is explicit about his regret:

Unless it can be proven to me…that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven…I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

I believe him, I think.

This book reminds me of seeing Toni Morrison on Oprah a few years ago. Oprah said to Morrison that she loves her books but sometimes has  to go back and reread a paragraph to figure it out. Morrison leaned forward and said 'Oprah, that's called reading'.  Nabokov's sentences are pretty straightforward, but the contorted layers of consciousness in his narrative have consumed me for the last week. Reading as extreme sport.

C K Stead’s memoir

South-West of Eden: A Memoir, 1932-1956 by C.K. Stead

I finished this memoir of Stead’s first 24 years and  wished that he would immediately publish a second volume. He won’t, though, because the events he’d need to describe (and his opinions of the people involved) would certainly provoke a stream of letters to the Listener.

I delighted in his sensibilities and insights, and  in his elegant sentences. Having been in general lazy about reading poetry, I am now keen to read his. And the breadth of his reading and literary knowledge has impelled me to further discipline my own reading (including, if I’m really brave and determined, my Arty Bees copy of The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot). I was touched by Stead’s reflective tone and his generosity to the reader regarding his love for Kay, his wife.

This book made me feel (in a small way) like part of the stream of writing, and of NZ literature. Describing the hen house of his childhood garden, Stead says ‘Being essentially an ear person, I was quick to learn the hen’s language…’. This made me think of being not an ‘ear’ person, but a feelings person, always wandering around making up stories about the psychological states of the people I see.

The poet Vincent O’Sullivan reviews Dear Charles Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence in the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent New Zealand Books (subscribe if you care about NZ having an independent literary culture). In the review, he quotes Frame as writing,

I’m afraid I breathe metaphors…it is the obsession with images which prompts me to write.

O’Sullivan goes on to say,

Thus she puts her finger on the kind of fabulist she is. The metaphoric is what allows her to change ground, to take herself and her reader from there, where you, they, and the rest of the world, are so in command, to here, where the writer alone rules, imposes, calls the shots. Metaphor to Frame is what logic is to the logician. It is how power is defined, and how it is achieved.

I am fascinated by how different writers’ minds operate, and how a writer’s mind can help or hinder writing.

The hens (in the garden of his early childhood) also feature in Stead’s recurring ‘writing dream’:

“In this dream I am seized with the terrible realisation that it is my job to see the hens fed and given water, and that I have neglected them for many years, so long they must surely be dead…[But he sees them running towards him, 'alive and well, their feathers glossy in the sun'.]…Twice that dream has been followed by the breaking of a drought in my writing…”

For years I dreamt occasionally of being in a very large old home, with long dark corridors that would sometimes break into enormous halls or dining rooms, and with back staircases that led into hidden stone bedrooms. It is (clearly to me) Tirley Garth, the stately home where I lived with my parents and many other people for about a year and a half in early childhood, even though the interiors in my dreams were even larger and weirder, as though several large hotels had been joined with several ancient monasteries.

Eventually I realised (again clear only to me) that the dreams of exploring these corridors and rooms (equally terrifying and fascinating) were about my need to write. Stead and I must not be the only writers with ‘writing dreams’ but his chicken dream is the only other one I’ve heard of.

(I dreamt last night that Damien Wilkins overheard me say this and mentioned a famous writer who has explored the writing dream idea. In the dream I had a moment of ‘canon inadequacy’, you know, all those important writers you haven’t read. This morning I can’t remember the writer’s name.)

Stead briefly discusses Moral Re-Armament, the group my parents (and maternal grandparents) were involved with,  and that his parents considered for some weeks before deciding against it on the grounds that the MRA plays, which they had been attending in Karangahape Road, were too boring to put up with any more.  Stead suggests that his father, who was a committed socialist, saw MRA as perhaps promising a kind of ‘middle way’:  individual change for the greater good, in a group that seemed to transcend ordinary religion.

I’m fascinated by this connection with my background , and that Stead missed out on an MRA upbringing despite his parents’ idealism, thanks to his mother’s instinct against bad art. My parents were (my father still is) idealists to their fingertips, but the passion for reading that ran through my father’s family skipped him: neither of my parents read fiction.

My step-mother, who is Stead’s contemporary and who is involved with the group (now called Initiatives for Change), agrees with Stead’s mother about the plays.

I was not so much in sympathy with Stead’s comment about his strapping for talking out of turn in class being equivalent to his Maori contemporaries being strapped for speaking their own language in class. To point out the obvious, he was strapped for speaking when he was meant to be silent, whereas speakers of Maori were strapped for using their own, banned-by-legislation language. And it was banned because their people were deemed by those in authority to be dying out. This is one of several comments Stead makes about Maori, or about Maori-Pakeha relations. Another is about a statue of a Maori on Queen Street, which Stead says, has something odd-looking on its shoulder which a friend has suggested ‘may be a chip’. This attitude seems like something of a blind spot in an otherwise extraordinary intelligence.

I was also intrigued by Stead’s closing comment on the story of a fellow pupil, a brilliant girl who was removed early from school by her Closed Brethren parents. He names her, and at the end of the half-page description, he says that he has written her story into the book ‘to record the waste, and to lay the blame’.

Of course, he’s opinionated, but strong opinion and imagination are not mutually exclusive, and that latter clause seems to me like a failure of imagination. Surely it’s clear that the parents were responsible for the decision that wasted their daughter’s potential, without having to spell out their fault in the matter. Stead apparently closes off his own imagining of the parents’ situations and psychology, which doesn’t seem like good practice for a fiction writer.

I enjoyed seeing that Stead and I have ‘met’  over his opinion, in regard to his character of Cecilia Skyways in his brilliant All Visitors Ashore, of whether it’s OK to fictionalise Janet Frame:

The wonderful thing about fiction is that you are not shackled to facts. To truth, yes – but only a general truth, a truth your readers will recognise as humanly possible, even likely, at least credible. In All Visitors Ashore that was the truth I served. Cecilia Skyways is Janet Frame idealised. But who is to say that the fiction is not a better, truer, deeper recall of the ‘real’, the interior, the magical Janet Frame?

Best to end with the master writer’s words. I hope he does write a second volume of memoir. After all, a lot of the controversy is already in the public domain.

C K Stead's memoir

South-West of Eden: A Memoir, 1932-1956 by C.K. Stead

I finished this memoir of Stead's first 24 years and  wished that he would immediately publish a second volume. He won't, though, because the events he'd need to describe (and his opinions of the people involved) would certainly provoke a stream of letters to the Listener.

I delighted in his sensibilities and insights, and  in his elegant sentences. Having been in general lazy about reading poetry, I am now keen to read his. And the breadth of his reading and literary knowledge has impelled me to further discipline my own reading (including, if I'm really brave and determined, my Arty Bees copy of The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot). I was touched by Stead's reflective tone and his generosity to the reader regarding his love for Kay, his wife.

This book made me feel (in a small way) like part of the stream of writing, and of NZ literature. Describing the hen house of his childhood garden, Stead says 'Being essentially an ear person, I was quick to learn the hen's language…'. This made me think of being not an 'ear' person, but a feelings person, always wandering around making up stories about the psychological states of the people I see.

The poet Vincent O'Sullivan reviews Dear Charles Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence in the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent New Zealand Books (subscribe if you care about NZ having an independent literary culture). In the review, he quotes Frame as writing,

I'm afraid I breathe metaphors…it is the obsession with images which prompts me to write.

O'Sullivan goes on to say,

Thus she puts her finger on the kind of fabulist she is. The metaphoric is what allows her to change ground, to take herself and her reader from there, where you, they, and the rest of the world, are so in command, to here, where the writer alone rules, imposes, calls the shots. Metaphor to Frame is what logic is to the logician. It is how power is defined, and how it is achieved.

I am fascinated by how different writers' minds operate, and how a writer's mind can help or hinder writing.

The hens (in the garden of his early childhood) also feature in Stead's recurring 'writing dream':

"In this dream I am seized with the terrible realisation that it is my job to see the hens fed and given water, and that I have neglected them for many years, so long they must surely be dead…[But he sees them running towards him, 'alive and well, their feathers glossy in the sun'.]…Twice that dream has been followed by the breaking of a drought in my writing…"

For years I dreamt occasionally of being in a very large old home, with long dark corridors that would sometimes break into enormous halls or dining rooms, and with back staircases that led into hidden stone bedrooms. It is (clearly to me) Tirley Garth, the stately home where I lived with my parents and many other people for about a year and a half in early childhood, even though the interiors in my dreams were even larger and weirder, as though several large hotels had been joined with several ancient monasteries.

Eventually I realised (again clear only to me) that the dreams of exploring these corridors and rooms (equally terrifying and fascinating) were about my need to write. Stead and I must not be the only writers with 'writing dreams' but his chicken dream is the only other one I've heard of.

(I dreamt last night that Damien Wilkins overheard me say this and mentioned a famous writer who has explored the writing dream idea. In the dream I had a moment of 'canon inadequacy', you know, all those important writers you haven't read. This morning I can't remember the writer's name.)

Stead briefly discusses Moral Re-Armament, the group my parents (and maternal grandparents) were involved with,  and that his parents considered for some weeks before deciding against it on the grounds that the MRA plays, which they had been attending in Karangahape Road, were too boring to put up with any more.  Stead suggests that his father, who was a committed socialist, saw MRA as perhaps promising a kind of 'middle way':  individual change for the greater good, in a group that seemed to transcend ordinary religion.

I'm fascinated by this connection with my background , and that Stead missed out on an MRA upbringing despite his parents' idealism, thanks to his mother's instinct against bad art. My parents were (my father still is) idealists to their fingertips, but the passion for reading that ran through my father's family skipped him: neither of my parents read fiction.

My step-mother, who is Stead's contemporary and who is involved with the group (now called Initiatives for Change), agrees with Stead's mother about the plays.

I was not so much in sympathy with Stead's comment about his strapping for talking out of turn in class being equivalent to his Maori contemporaries being strapped for speaking their own language in class. To point out the obvious, he was strapped for speaking when he was meant to be silent, whereas speakers of Maori were strapped for using their own, banned-by-legislation language. And it was banned because their people were deemed by those in authority to be dying out. This is one of several comments Stead makes about Maori, or about Maori-Pakeha relations. Another is about a statue of a Maori on Queen Street, which Stead says, has something odd-looking on its shoulder which a friend has suggested 'may be a chip'. This attitude seems like something of a blind spot in an otherwise extraordinary intelligence.

I was also intrigued by Stead's closing comment on the story of a fellow pupil, a brilliant girl who was removed early from school by her Closed Brethren parents. He names her, and at the end of the half-page description, he says that he has written her story into the book 'to record the waste, and to lay the blame'.

Of course, he's opinionated, but strong opinion and imagination are not mutually exclusive, and that latter clause seems to me like a failure of imagination. Surely it's clear that the parents were responsible for the decision that wasted their daughter's potential, without having to spell out their fault in the matter. Stead apparently closes off his own imagining of the parents' situations and psychology, which doesn't seem like good practice for a fiction writer.

I enjoyed seeing that Stead and I have 'met'  over his opinion, in regard to his character of Cecilia Skyways in his brilliant All Visitors Ashore, of whether it's OK to fictionalise Janet Frame:

The wonderful thing about fiction is that you are not shackled to facts. To truth, yes – but only a general truth, a truth your readers will recognise as humanly possible, even likely, at least credible. In All Visitors Ashore that was the truth I served. Cecilia Skyways is Janet Frame idealised. But who is to say that the fiction is not a better, truer, deeper recall of the 'real', the interior, the magical Janet Frame?

Best to end with the master writer's words. I hope he does write a second volume of memoir. After all, a lot of the controversy is already in the public domain.

Emma Bovary: a false character

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is a false story, featuring false characters. Flaubert's genius for description and imagery, for the specific, concrete detail, for evoking the material world and for building a scene, does not make up for his chronically limited and inflexible vision. ('His mother remarked…that the pursuit of the perfect phrase had dessicated his heart' – from the intro.) Therefore the novel is more of a literary artefact than a text that still has the power to move a reader, unless the reader is an embittered misogynist.

Reading Madame Bovary, I was constantly reminded of the warning Charles Baxter gives in his excellent book Burning Down the House about not 'overdetermining and overparenting' one's characters. From beginning to end of the novel, there's no doubt that Flaubert knows exactly what sort of character he was creating in Emma: she must never have surprised him. On virtually every page, he manipulates her, and tries to manipulate us. For example, when he unexpectedly turns to Charles's point of view after the terrible amputation scene, it's only so that we judge Emma the more harshly a few pages later.

Of course, someone like Emma could exist. This book enraged me not because Emma died, or because she was meant to be ashamed (though I don't believe she was: she was, instead, terrified of humiliation and of oblivion, and most of all, furious that she hadn't got the perfect life she lusted after). I dislike Flaubert because Emma is a false character, meant to illustrate a point. She is a lie, and so the whole book is a lie. And she stands for all the women who have been used to make a point.

It is Flaubert's insistence on her nature, and his determination that she be consigned to hell, and the clunky techniques he uses to try to persuade us of the rightness of his vision, that make her unbelievable. Emma is never anything other than sentimental, sensual, selfish, self-indulgent, hypocritical, and deceptive. She is consistently and continually deluded about her own nature and her entitlement to happiness, and she has almost no rational intelligence. She is terribly unkind to her daughter, though it's questionable how much Flaubert meant that to be a sign of cruelty, given his general attitude to women in this book. 'Where could she have learned such corruption…?' Flaubert endowed her with it: she has no free will.

Once Flaubert has set Emma up, there's very little further character development. She's merely on a predictable trajectory, ready to fall. Flaubert gets her there with marvellously rich writing, but that doesn't take away from the sour taste.

As she begins her descent, Flaubert seems to suggest that Emma might find redemption in religion, but even then she's shown to be insincere: '…she thought herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that ever an ethereal soul could conceive of…'; '…she called upon her Lord in the same sweet words she had once murmured to her lover, in the raptures of adultery.'

In the introduction, Geoffrey Wall says that Emma 'dies in a pain that is exactly adjusted to the intensity of our preceding identification'. That's not true. I was deeply sorry for her in her pain; but I did not identify with her at all. I did not even believe in her. It was Flaubert who visited that pain upon her, and to an intensity matched by his desire that she should suffer. It's interesting that he repeatedly vomited while writing the scene. I can't imagine it's because he identified with her.

Geoffrey Wall also suggests that the characters speak in clichés; that Flaubert set out to perpetuate stereotypes. I don't think this is true of Emma: Flaubert tried his hardest to persuade us of her reality.

Again, as she's dying, Flaubert seems to offer her redemption through the sacrament. For a moment there's 'an expression of serenity on her face, as though the sacrament had cured her', but then she gives an 'atrocious, frantic, desperate laugh, at the imagined sight of the beggar's hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness': I think Flaubert meant us to understand that she's off to hell. He hates her to the very last.

Charles is the more ambiguous, interesting character (I love the moment when Flaubert writes of his meeting with Rodolphe: 'He so wanted to have been this other man') and I'm annoyed that Flaubert already wrote his ending. He deserves (and in my imagination does have) a more interesting fate than falling off a bench, dead, having gone insane. But by Flaubert's metaphysical rules, Charles does not enjoy full self-determination: 'She was corrupting him from beyond the grave'. What a load of rubbish.