Kin of Place: ESSAYS ON 20 NEW ZEALAND WRITERS

Kin of Place:
ESSAYS ON 20 NEW ZEALAND WRITERS

C. K. STEAD

Distinguished novelist and poet, C. K. Stead is also widely respected as a critic whose analytic sophistication is matched by a lively and engaging style. Here he combines most of the important essays from In the Glass Case (AUP, 1981), long out of print, and five from Answering to the Language (AUP, 1989) with nine new essays. These address most of the leading New Zealand literary figures of the last decades of the twentieth century including Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, Kendrick Smithyman, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame (two essays), Ian Wedde, Maurice Gee, and the talented younger writer Elizabeth Knox. Some of the new essays, such as that on Smithyman, have been written specifically for this book and will certainly provoke discussion and debate. As a whole the book represents an essential collection of perceptive, often brilliant, readable, opinionated, entertaining comment on a wide range of local writers and writing over a long period and shows in an interesting way the evolution of Stead's critical position. He has made minor revisions to several of the earlier essays and has also added an introduction.

Introduction to Kin of Place

Of the twenty-eight pieces in this collection, fourteen come from In the Glass Case (1981), five from Answering to the Language (1989), and nine are new, written during 2001, a year when fiction and poetry equally left me in discontented peace. Since the earliest piece here from In the Glass Case was written in 1959, the range is across forty years, except that much of my New Zealand critical writing from the 1990s has gone into a separate book, The Writer at Work (2000), a collection in which I tried to nudge literary criticism just slightly into the field of autobiography, allowing such personal anecdotes as seemed relevant to take their place in the account.

In the present collection, though I have not set about eliminating autobiographical elements (something that would be artificial, given my own involvement over so many years on the same public stage that my subjects occupy), I have reduced it to a minimum, not reprinting, for example, any of the third section of In the Glass Case, 'A Poet's View'. Personal knowledge of the writers enters some of the recent pieces -- my use of Sargeson's letters, for example, on the subject of his Memoirs of a Peon, and my exchanges with Allen Curnow about his last poem -- but these, I think, are critically useful rather than simply of human interest.

I have also kept the focus on writers, one at a time, rather than on literary movements / disputes / history; so in the case of the historical surveys, 'From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in New Zealand Poetry' (In the Glass Case), and 'The New Victorians' (Answering to the Language), a short extract from the first opens the piece on Ian Wedde, and one from the second opens the Lauris Edmond article, but the essays as a whole are not reprinted. This is not because I dislike, or feel dissatisfied with, my own attempts at literary history, but in order to make a unified book, one offering views of twenty New Zealand writers each of whose work has been, is, or may be expected to be, of some literary-historical significance.

I have been through all the reprinted essays making revisions here and there, especially to those written long ago -- partly because the formal conventions of those years (living writers referred to as Mr or Miss) would have seemed distractingly formal, and partly because I have preferred to weed out what I now see as examples of a youthful tendency towards the emphatic and the rhapsodic. The changes are not great and make no difference either to the questions I put to myself about the poems and fictions under discussion, nor to the answers given; but the outcome is stylistically more relaxed, in keeping with my present literary self. It is clear, for example, that I am writing about Curnow at two different stages in his career, and then post-mortem; that Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and David Ballantyne, and even R. A. K. Mason, were still alive when I wrote about them -- and so on. Equally, despite the minor revisions, the essays will probably still declare themselves as belonging to my own early, middle or later years -- and that is as it should be.

Re-reading has been an interesting and in some ways a surprising exercise, reminding me again of the fact that criticism never exists in a vacuum, but is a response to what has been said, or is being said -- or even to a silence in which it has become imperative that something be said. Context is all; and without some reference to, some indicators of, the larger dialogue to which the particular critical statement belongs, it loses a good deal of its point. Criticism, I have always argued, should seem to come, not from God, or a committee, but from a critic. It should have individuality, character, a personality, a voice. The opinions it engages with may on some occasions have been published, at others may be no more than a murmur from the marketplace. But there should be some sense of a conversation, a community of interest.

I began writing about Curnow when his seniors, and even his contemporaries, were reluctant to concede him any sort of priority among New Zealand poets, and when he was under concerted attack from a group of poets ten years younger who felt they had been insufficiently represented in his anthologies. It may well be that the younger group were right in their complaints; but what interested me was the quality of the poetry, and in that I felt Curnow's superiority was clear. It may seem obvious now -- no doubt it does; but there was a time when his 'obscurities' (that was one complaint) needed to be explained away, his verbal subtleties unfolded, his capacity at once to make and to hide the larger statement illustrated.

In Baxter's case there was never any such obstacle. He was from the start the 'marvellous boy', all generous ease and fluency, where Curnow was aloof and darkly effortful. I felt Baxter's power, and resisted it; but a criticism which could not accommodate these two kinds of poetry, so capacious and so different, would have been less than useful. They were our best poets; and while there could never be a 'double standard' (the question was sometimes raised) favouring local work, there is a sense in which, wherever you come from, the poetry of your own region speaks with a voice, an accent, and a quiver of references which make it special. To say this of Curnow and Baxter for New Zealand readers is no more significant than to say it of Yeats and Heaney for the Irish, Hardy and Larkin for the English, William Carlos Williams for Americans or Les Murray for Australians. Major poetry is international; but it usually has also a strong regional aspect, and it was regionalism which Curnow, putting together his anthologies and writing their extraordinary introductions, sometimes seemed to confuse with nationalism -- though it must be acknowledged that the two are difficult to disentangle.

However difficult the finer points of any such argument may be (and Curnow, as if cornered by his critics and unwilling to concede even half a point, teased them out in the direction of infinity), the importance of the local in literature is immense -- the more so if your region is only emerging, as ours has done over my lifetime, from a phase of colonialism in which the sense of what is 'real' has been in some degree compromised by an inherited literature and literary history which cannot deal at all with what is immediate to hand. As I wrote in my second essay on Baxter:

No poetry moved me in quite the same way, at so profound a level, as our own, not just because the sensuous world it recreated was the one I knew from day to day, but because the Eden we are all cast out from is that of the world fresh to our waking senses. For me one of the most important functions of poetry was to take us back there, and Baxter was one of the magicians who knew the way.

So was Fairburn, I would have said when I first read him; but by the time I came to write about him I had become less innocent, less uncritically open, in my responses to poetry; and at the same time Fairburn, having recently died, was receiving the only (and not inevitable) benefit death brings a writer -- a temporary respite from anything except praise. This is where the question of context becomes important. As I wrote in my introduction to In the Glass Case,

I had known Fairburn, he had admired some of my early poems, and as a student I had read his work with great pleasure.[. . .] There was -- and is -- a freshness in Fairburn, ease, vigour, a lucid apprehension of physical things, and especially of the Auckland isthmus, to which I could never be indifferent. But there was also provincial insecurity, uncertainty of tone, and sometimes sheer silliness, mixed in with the good qualities; and the time I reviewed his Collected Poems was the height of the post-mortem Fairburn adulation.

Fairburn's friends and admirers were not pleased, and a vigorous counter-statement, or counter-blast, 'Fairburn and Dr Stead', was offered by Ian Hamilton in Comment 32 (September 1967) -- since when, it seems (insofar as such things can be accurately gauged), the consensus has settled into acceptance that Fairburn was never quite the literary giant his contemporaries took him for.

Reactions of clamour, and equally of silence, to literary critical statements can each in its own way take the critic by surprise. That so many distinguished persons should have read what I had to say about John Mulgan, author of what is now, after all, a minor novel in the canon of New Zealand literature, was surprising; that they should have rushed into print, some to argue, some to add a fact, some even to agree, was astonishing. What it indicated, I suppose, was that our literary icons are not simply or exclusively literary; and that, at least for a time, value attaches to books for reasons other than their merit as works of art.

Then there was the contrary case of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, my advocacy producing no response at all, certainly no sign (or none apparent to me) of a revival of serious interest in her work -- a fact all the more puzzling when considered against the background of 1980s feminism and the determined search in universities for neglected women writers. Why should Ashton-Warner's reputation not have benefited from those same enthusiasms which swept much lesser writers into public notice? For the moment at least, it seems she continues to go unread; but since I tend toward the belief (or blind faith) that over time, as extra-literary factors recede into history, the actual quality of a work, its merits and deficiencies as writing and as art, become clearer, it is probably not naive to hope, though it would be unwise to predict, that her best books, and particularly her autobiography, I Passed This Way, will one day come back into print and receive the recognition they deserve.

A comparison of the cases of David Ballantyne and Ronald Hugh Morrieson is also interesting. Both were writers whose work deserved serious attention and had not had it. In the case of Morrieson it needed only the double assault Frank Sargeson and I made in Landfall 98 (June 1971) to turn everything around in his favour. Morrieson the man was a 'character'; his life story was picturesque; he was wild in his youth yet also frightened, home-bound, and soon a sad drunk; and his books were marvellously entertaining with flashes of genius. No threat to anyone, hugely talented but also manifestly flawed, he was, one might say unkindly, made for New Zealand, and has become (the more so because there is added piquancy in the recognition that it happened too late for the man himself to enjoy it) another of our literary icons.

Ballantyne also became a disappointed drunk, but one who kept up appearances, stayed employed as a journalist, and kept writing. No one (least of all Ballantyne himself) thought of his Maori grandmother as a 'feature' to be exploited. There was nothing to attract public attention except the novels themselves, whose only appeal was their peculiar honest homespun excellence -- like the ragamuffin poor kid who wins the sprints almost unnoticed because he doesn't have the gear and never behaves like a champion. Patrick Evans made a brave case for Ballantyne in Islands 31 -- 32, even arguing (beyond anything I would have claimed for him) that his contribution to New Zealand literature was 'at least the equal of Frame's'; and Peter Simpson, who also wrote enthusiastically about Morrieson, has argued for more attention to Ballantyne's work. But these appeals, it seems, have been ineffective, and the novels, unlike Morrieson's, at the present date (2001) are long since out of print. It is to be hoped that a biography currently being written by Bryan Reid may bring at least Sydney Bridge Upside Down out of retirement.

It was only under the Labour Government of 1935 -- 49 that our literature began to receive official recognition -- first in the setting up of the New Zealand Literary Fund, the awarding of some kind of state pension to Frank Sargeson, and the prizes and commissions associated with the centennial celebrations of 1940. But it was still a long time before it figured significantly in education, and it had little or no commercial aspect.

The changes over the period I have been writing have been immense, and mostly welcome, but there has also been the down-side which a loss of innocence necessarily implies. It is something Fairburn long ago warned of, a warning I was disinclined to take seriously but which has proved to be right: grants and prizes mean competition, and the forces at work in the awarding of these, when the sources are partly political, are bound in some degree to be political also. Politics is not much concerned with artistic merit, and these days demands its pound of flesh in the form of special protection for, and attention to, what are conceived of as minorities and the disadvantaged. Commerce, from its different perspective, is also relatively indifferent to actual merit, equating sales returns with quality.

The counterbalancing force in all this ought to be literary criticism; and the traditional place for it is university English Departments -- and has been up to a point. But those departments have themselves been in a state of conflict and confusion. Literary theory has assaulted the notion of a canon of excellence; and even the idea that there is any significantly objective element in critical analysis has been questioned. Everywhere in the world the division of literature into 'higher' and 'lower', the one deserving close attention, the other existing primarily as entertainment, has been undermined; and in New Zealand this process of democratization has been faster and more nearly absolute because of the small size of the market. We still have our literary critics and our scholars of New Zealand literature -- Mark Williams, Terry Sturm, Patrick Evans, Peter Simpson, Lawrence Jones and the rest; but they are none of them quite immune to extra-literary pressures; and in any case their opinions are less often listened to than the voices of commerce and the media. An opinion from Kim Hill -- the Aunt Daisy de nos jours -- carries more weight.

We are in an age when writers seem to attract more interest than books; when people flock to literary festivals to see and hear the authors of works which in many cases they will never read; and when a biography -- or, even better, an autobiography -- will sell many more copies than the books which determine that the author's life is of public interest. Huge kudos, it seems, still attaches to literature, though why this should be so is no longer clear. This is a strangeness too close to us, too much of the present moment, to be clearly understood or analysed; but it renews in me the conviction I have always had that criticism -- literary history, analysis and discrimination -- though a difficult, and for a writer at times even a dangerous, pursuit, is more than ever necessary. Some few must be demonstrating that all things are not equal, and that the recognition of difference, the discovery of excellence, and the understanding of where and how failure occurs, are the intelligent consciousness of literature itself, without which the book world is in danger of becoming only another branch of commerce, a brain-dead machine turning out objects for sale whose material just happens to be language.

About the author

C. K. Stead has written nine novels, two books of short stories and six of literary criticism. He was Professor of English at the University of Auckland for twenty years and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

For further information see the New Zealand Book Council's C. K. Stead page.