Passant: A Journey to Elsewhere

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

Reviews:

Dan Davin / Alistair Paterson / Johanna Emeney

Alistair Paterson. Passant: A Journey to Elsewhere. ISBN 978-1-7862989-7-3. London: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2017. RRP £8.39. 302 pp.

Alistair Paterson: Passant: A Journey to Elsewhere (2017)

It’s interesting to follow a novelist’s book of poems with a prose memoir by one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. Alistair Paterson has clearly had a very interesting life: he served in the navy, rubbed shoulders with virtually every significant twentieth-century local poet, and went on in retirement to champion the young as the tireless editor of Poetry NZ for over two decades.

This book is about none of those things. Instead, it represents the working-out of a series of old traumas, childhood ghosts, family skeletons, and other ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’. The quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’ seems appropriate. This book does, after all, set out – like The Prelude – to chronicle the ‘growth of a poet’s mind’: the influences and (yes) neuroses that eventually added up to Paterson’s creative urge and artistic achievements.

I have to admit to a certain allergy to genealogy. It’s an unusual confession for someone of Scottish descent, as I have many relatives who like nothing better than to debate endlessly the ins and outs of the family tree and the various recurring names which make it virtually impossible to know which particular ‘Hugh Anton’ or ‘John Mackenzie’ is pictured in some obscure snapshot or other.

Paterson’s family history is far more complicated than mine – though also dependent on the nineteenth century Celtic diaspora for many of its details. It’s a rare poet who doesn’t know how to put in the telling detail, however, and Paterson is no exception:

At school we never spoke of our parents or grandparents, hoping no one would know of our situation and that we might be mistaken for ‘normal’.

Like so many other family histories, this tale contains its fair share of deaths in suspicious circumstances – which of course are never discussed by one’s ‘elders and betters’ – together with dysfunctional relationships made worse by the relentless power of snobbery.

Michele Leggott once described one of my reviews – of Alan Brunton’s posthumous epic Fq – as a ‘wrassle’. I guess this one is no exception. Just as I can see the glimmer of a deep lyric gift behind Dan Davin’s few scattered poems, to one side of the solid achievement of his many novels and other prose works, so with Alistair Paterson I am forced to admit that the fluent, casual grace of his poetry is not really equalled by the texture of his prose.

Fascinating though much of the material in this memoir is, there’s a relentless accumulation of detail which – while certainly valid in itself – makes it slow going for a reader at times. Christopher Moore in the Listener calls it ‘a beautifully written book inspired by the siren whispers of a beguiling past.’ Nicholas Reid in his review-blog Reid’s Reader gives a perhaps more accurate impression of it when he confesses:

I might have some misgivings about the way it concludes, and I do admit that it sometimes repeats points it has already made, but in its expansiveness (it runs to 300 substantial pages) it is lively, engaging and enlightening about the way things were in New Zealand eighty-odd years ago.

I would second that. Reid goes on to give an excellent summary of the various strands that go to make up Paterson’s long story: the childhood rivalry with his brother, the mysterious death of his grandfather, the gradual growth of interest in poetry and literature, and (perhaps most important of all) the mysterious illness and hospitalisation that dominated so much of his childhood. Reid concludes:

As for my misgivings about how it concludes – which I mentioned at the head of this review – I am referring to the way Alistair Paterson ends with much documentation, in the form of letters, of his great-grandfather’s mental condition. While this is in some ways the “key” to the anxieties that ran through his family, it still seems a clumsy way to close what is otherwise an engaging and sincere book.

I’m not sure that I agree with Reid on that last point. In terms of creating a well-paced, flowing memoir, I suppose he’s correct. The book would be better, in that and various other respects, if it had been edited by a competent professional writer of creative non-fiction.

But I think that Paterson’s faith in the raw testimony given by these lately discovered texts is perhaps truer to his own instincts as a writer. What can one trust except words on a page? And if those words bear with them the patina of the past, it would be a rare poet who could resist that challenge.

Paterson, to be frank, is not a born memoirist, nor is this an ideal memoir in the abstract. It is, however, his memoir – its faults (if faults they are) are his faults: an almost exaggerated respect for detail and precision, and a pronounced tendency to meander around to the same subjects again and again.

If it is, as Christopher Moore claims, ‘beautifully written’, that is because – not in spite of – its idiosyncrasies: the fact that there’s always more to uncover in its pages, the almost Victorian expansiveness and weight of factual information, the decision its author has taken to attempt to reconstitute rather than simply evoke the past.

It is, in short, a poet’s memoir: not in the usual sense of those words: lyrical, sparse, and to-the-point in its descriptions, but in an alternate, very Patersonian sense. Alistair Paterson is, after all, a poet of complications, of second thoughts. No-one would understand better than he the value of a ‘wrassle’ with a book one finds weighing insistently on one’s thoughts long after it’s been closed and put back on the shelf.

(12-13/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 307-10.

[953 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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