The Psychopathic God (2016)

Landfall 231 (Autumn 2016)

The Psychopathic God

Tim Corballis. R.H.I. ISBN 978-086473-982-7. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015. 208 pp. RRP $NZ 30.00.

Tim Corballis: R.H.I. (2015)

It reminded me of the idea of a language game that the philosopher Wittgenstein used to talk about, not really meaning that language games were things that happened but that language is like a game, and that we play games with who we are and with our language, not real games but that it’s all make believe, even if it’s not. (pp.22-23)

In many ways it’s easier to say what Tim Corballis’s new book isn’t than what it is. It certainly doesn’t constitute a conventional novel, even by the most liberal definition. Nor, really, do its two discrete sections operate as independent (or even co-dependent) novellas. They’re much stranger and more fragmentary than that.

The author claims to detect in his own work “a history of the twentieth century,” – albeit an “incomplete” one, “produced by accident” – but working out precisely what he means by that is almost as complex as trying to make sense of the stories themselves (if they really are stories, sustained pieces of make believe, that is).

Having started I had to carry on. Doing what? … I had to admit that I was here mostly for a warm place to sit.

How true that is of so much research, particularly in those strange repositories of obsolete intellectual endeavour called archives. Corballis has clearly caught the archival bug with a vengeance, but the larger significance of the bits and pieces of information he unearthed in Berlin and London, and (later) back home in New Zealand, seems mostly to have emerged in retrospect.

There’s a revealing remark near the beginning of the second novella, “H”:

Did the sense of a PRESENCE simply grow out of my research? It should be clear that I absolutely do not believe in ghosts, or in any kind of special paranormal sensitivity on my part—these documents are the products of an ordinary person, and at times seem like simple diaries, at others like works of fiction, and at others still like the rough notes of a historian or biographer.

I share Corballis’s fascination with the early history of the psychoanalytical movement, and the curious texture of his prose – the almost Janet-and-John-like simplicity of alternating questions and answers – does have the effect of recreating something of the rather uncanny atmosphere surrounding these pioneers in the unmapped regions of the unconscious.

It’s hard, then, to believe that he means this disavowal of the reality of the “floating agents” (as he calls them: though he also refers to them as “ghosts”) to be taken entirely at face value. The idea that a too-vehement negation of any proposition is a clue that its author secretly suspects the opposite is one of the most familiar truisms in the Freudian lexicon, and it’s probably also the one that operates best as a rule of thumb in everyday life.

I take with a considerable grain of salt our author’s claim to be “an ordinary person”. I don’t think we would bother with these notes if they were purely the product of random gleanings in the archives. A considerable amount of shaping intelligence has been devoted to these twin stories, or assemblages, or collages, or whatever you want to call them.

Part One, “R,” about Joan R (or Joan Riviere) and her various experiences before and after the First World War, is probably the more approachable of the two. The territory it investigates is familiar enough from such works as Pat Barker’s Regeneration, or (to go back a bit further) D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel.

Naming these precedents does have the effect of isolating some of the oddness in Corballis’s method, however. The tales these two earlier authors tell are still, recognisably, novels: fictional recreations of the past – the compositions of true believers in the value of make-believe.

It’s hard to believe that Corballis is simply failing to carry out a similarly seamless act of retrieval and reconstruction. It seems far more probable to me that these roughnesses and jump-cuts and refusals to round off his narrative strands are due to a loss of faith in what Lallans poet Hugh MacDiarmid once referred to as “the haill clanjamfrie”.

And, if one accepts this hypothesis, the structure of his book begins at once to make more sense. Part Two, “H,” about the German architect Hermann Henselmann, takes us straight into the aftermath of another war, amid the ruins of post-war Berlin.

After the proclamation of the death of God by Nietzsche in the 1880s (whether you attribute the act itself to him, to Darwinism, or to Scientific Method itself), the two principal belief systems which have dominated the modern age are undoubtedly Marxism, the idea of history as a shaping force, interpreted by its own priesthood the Communist Party; and Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, the shaping force behind the seemingly irrational and inexplicable acts that dominate human lives.

•

Joan R’s failed analysis with Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, and his first English disciple, dramatises her own conflict with the absolute faith required of adherents to the psychoanalytic cause (studded, like most dogmatic systems, with great heresies and expulsions from the pure stream of belief: Adler, Jung, Otto Rank …).

One of the most amusing strands in Hermann H’s story is his own series of on-again, off-again attempts to flee to West Berlin. He talks his girlfriend, Anita R, into coming with him, only to be swayed into staying by her counter-arguments, only to find that she’s now decided to go, leading him to decide to accompany her, only to find that she’s now been persuaded by his own misgivings to stay, and so on and so forth, the whole accompanied by ironic interpolations by Bertolt Brecht.

Faith, once again, is at the root of it all. As H makes his little compromises, deciding to go along with the purging of a colleague, to accept the (considerable) leg-up it offers him, we observe first hand his attempts to keep alive the flame of the new Utopia that might rise from these ruins: the architectural solution it might offer to the problem of man’s inhumanity to man.

There’s nothing here (except by implication) about the Stasi, no attempt to dramatise – as in Gunter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising – the irony of Brecht’s staging a play about proletarian revolt while the workers are literally fighting and dying in the streets outside his theatre. This is not that sort of story.

It’s hard, at times, to avoid a snort of contemptuous disbelief as the characters in Corballis’s story attribute the continuing disunity of Germany to the West’s callous refusal to accept Stalin’s grand proposal for re-unification. And yet that very scepticism is, I suppose, the point.

There’s nothing easier than to write po-faced books of “warnings from the past” like Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread. Harder, much harder, is to recreate that atmosphere of the true (albeit, at times, wavering) believer. Corballlis’s virtue is his refusal to editorialise, to put facts in their “true perspective”, to supply the party line on what we now “know” to be true.

What he’s created is, I suppose, a kind of anti-narrative: not so much a Freudian case-study, in which the details are all eventually supposed to cohere into a larger reading, or even a Marxist analysis of the economic and class relationships of the various “floating agents” whom we are forced by narrative convention (perhaps F. R. Leavis might provide a third member of his trinity, to set beside Freud and Marx) to regard as fictional “characters.”

Psychoanalysis took its emphasis from the devastation of the First World War. What was, before, an intellectual movement confined to the analysis of the neuroses of certain wealthy members of the middle classes in Mitteleuropa spread to England and America largely as an antidote to the shell-shock and despair of the lost generation.

The inability of psychoanalysts to diagnose Europe’s ills sufficiently to prevent yet another war, did rather put paid to that particular system of faith: What huge imago made / A psychopathic god, as W. H. Auden presciently asks in his poem “September 1, 1939”.

Marxism is treated in a rather more allusive way in Corballlis’s second section: partly, I suppose, due to its far greater longevity (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism” is a statement that dates back to the Communist Manifesto of 1848). Also, perhaps, because it needs less fleshing out – and refutation – for contemporary readers.

Corballis’s book, then, part fiction, part history, part archival research, part imaginative projection is (at any rate in this reading) an attempt to analyse all these losses of faith: faith in ideologies that probably never deserved it in the first place, but which nevertheless started off as attempts to taxonomise and interpret the realities around us, only to end up as codified sets of dogmas, valuable only as control mechanisms for the masses.

It’s hard, too, to argue too vigorously with Corballis’s loss of faith in fiction itself. What is left, after all, of all those Leavisite claims about the English Department as the “natural centre of a university” – of the function of literature to promote alert, enquring minds within healthy, organic communities? Little enough, I fear.

“By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the Gospel of Matthew, of Jesus’s followers. I’m afraid that Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire put paid to any naïve notions we might have that the warring communities of the early church showed any greater charity to one another than was meted out to them by Emperors such as Commodus or Domitian.

“Great Marxist Humanitarians” – that was one of Kingsley Amis’s suggestions for world’s shortest book. I guess one could add "The Tolerance of Dissent within the Psychoanalytic Movement" and "Lives of the Saintly Literature Professors" as alternative candidates.

But even if these systems of faith now seem less compelling than absurd, what is one left with once they’re gone? The pen may still be moving across the paper in Corballis’s increasingly bleak and Beckettian universe, but one can’t help but wonder for how long?

And yet, is his dilemma so very different from that of Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach”?

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Corballis has reminded us just how dark and inhospitable those “naked shingles of the world” can be, but also how fascinating and various. There’s always been something a bit unconvincing about the resolution of Arnold’s poem: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another.” The despair in his poem speaks louder.

Corballis, a hundred years on, may have more ruins to survey, but his solution – to delve and to taxonomise – remains, I have to admit, the best we have.

(22-27/1/16)

Landfall 231 (2016): 182-85.

[1844 wds]


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The Disestablishment of Paradise (2014)

Landfall 227 (May 2014)

Green Movement

Phillip Mann. The Disestablishment of Paradise: A Novel in Five Parts plus Documents. ISBN 978 0 575 13262 7. London: Gollancz, 2013. [x] + 516 pp.

Phillip Mann: The Disestablishment of Paradise (2013)

‘I try to avoid simple anthropomorphic parallels.’

‘Then Shapiro was more radical than you. In the essay entitled “Dark Angel” he speaks about the history of the idea that a planet can react to the presence of humans. He cites works of fiction, Solaris, Death World, The Burning Forest, to name but three. Works of fiction, though.’

‘New ideas often manifest themselves first in fiction.’

‘But Science, Dr Melhuish, if it is to have any validity, must deal in facts. ...’ [pp. 63-64]

I have to say it was with a certain satisfaction that I read this passage, near the beginning of Phillip Mann’s epic new novel The Disestablishment of Paradise. First of all (of course), because it’s so nice to have a new Mann novel to read, seventeen years after the fourth and final part of his A Land Fit for Heroes series appeared. His fans are breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Secondly, because of the rather self-referential nature of the list he gives of “works of fiction” dealing with “the idea that a planet can react to the presence of humans”. The last of the three, The Burning Forest, is by Mann himself, and is in fact the fourth volume of the tetralogy I mentioned above.

The second, Death World, is presumably a reference to Harry Harrison’s classic Deathworld trilogy, first published in the 1960s, which introduced to hardcore SF writers the notion of a planet completely inimical to humans, which can nevertheless be inhabited under very specialized circumstances.

The first, Solaris, is probably best known through Tarkovsky’s poetic film adaptation of 1972 (rather than – hopefully – Steven Soderbergh’s excruciatingly poor 2002 remake). Stanislaw Lem’s original 1961 novel is a very different kettle of fish from either. In essence, it’s a satire on Academia: with chapter after chapter devoted to a summary of the various competing theories that go up to make up “Solaristics” – the study of the presumed-to-be-sentient ocean occupying the whole of the planet Solaris. It’s also a very complex meditation on the nature of “real” and “simulated” life, in the form of Kris Kelvin’s dead wife Rheya (“Hari” in the Tarkovsky film), who returns to him in the form of a visitor created by the ocean from information encoded in his brain.

The “Shapiro” mentioned in the quotation above, Professor Israel Shapiro, the PhD supervisor (and former lover) of Dr Hera Melhuish, the protagonist of Mann’s novel, was a kind of visionary who saw in these fictional avatars possible models for the changeable behavior of their own rogue planet, Paradise – discovered over a century before by 19-year-old explorer Estelle Richter, then mined for fifty years by a somewhat secretive corporation, then settled and farmed for another fifty, and finally handed over for Scientific study for another couple of decades.

Like Stanislaw Lem’s sentient ocean (also a little like the Queen in Mann’s first novel, The Eye of the Queen (1982)), the planet Paradise appears to be one large living entity which has gradually become aware of these interlopers on its surface only after repeated massacres of huge mobile plant entities such as the Dendrons, now presumed extinct, along with the sinister Michelangelo Reapers, prone to make their nests in the middle of maze-like constructions of other plants.

The plot of Mann’s novel concerns the official decision to withdraw from Paradise, and the last-minute efforts of Hera Melhuish to prevent this, or (at least) to get to know the planet a little better in her last days on its surface.

Like Mann’s earlier Wulfsyarn, the process through which her story is told is in itself an important part of the narrative. Melhuish has chosen a well-known children’s author to reduce her impressions to some kind of novelistic sense, and the book is therefore composed as a dialogue between the two of them, with an appendix of stories and documents from the long, vexed, human history of Paradise to flesh out particular parts of it.

In this way, perhaps, one could say that Mann seems more comfortable with the cerebral metafictional gymnastics of a Stanislaw Lem than the slambang pulp poetics of Harry Harrison (most famous, perhaps, for his creation of the eponymous Stainless Steel Rat, as well as various other hardbitten heroes of the spaceways).

The whole book, in fact, seems to be begging to be read allegorically – Paradise, the planet’s name; the Paradise plum, its most famous export (nowhere is it stated in the Bible that the fruit that Adam and Eve ate was an apple); the Reapers; the immense, Mastodon-like Dendron. But an allegory for precisely what?

Well, that’s the question, really. What is Hera’s story all about? If she knew (as she confesses to her ghost writer) she would write it herself. What does it all mean? In her last months on the surface of Paradise she found true love for the first time, then lost it again when her lover Mac was swallowed up by one of the reapers (thus joining the planet itself rather like the linguist Marius Thorndyke does in The Eye of the Queen). She and Mac are also, however, able to assist the last of the Dendrons in its act of parturition, sawing it in half (its form of giving birth) and thus – possibly – enabling the species’ future survival.

Of course it goes without saying that this is an eco-fable, but it’s nothing as simple and straightforward as (for instance) Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972), written back when the green movement was new, at the end of the 1960s. The eco-poetry of our own times has, it appears, grown darker and stranger – and thus more akin to the dark mechanistic visions of that Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem, writing at the height of the cold war.

Paradise is clearly, in one sense, a “fresh, green breast of the new world” (as Scott Fitzgerald puts it in The Great Gatsby) like all those new European colonies in the Age of Exploration – like Yorkshire-born Mann’s own adoptive New Zealand, in fact.

Is it time for the interlopers to cut their losses and get out? So the Economic Subcommittee of the Space Council has determined, but it’s hard to see this decision as being sustained exactly by the complex balance of profit and loss in Mann’s story. It’s time, certainly, to change the ways in which we have hitherto exploited the land so questionably acquired – but just how, exactly?

Mac and Hera’s cutting apart of the Dendron by chainsaw (a little like Mike Smith’s impromptu demolition job on the lone pine on One Tree Hill?) may not – in itself – guarantee the perpetuation of the species, but at least there’s now the faintest glimmer of hope where there was none before.

Our two heroes’ relations with the Reaper are somewhat more complex. Mac is, in a sense, adopted by it in order to become a kind of spokesman for the land, a Pākehā Māori adapted to this plant-based, single-consciousness world. As in Fred Hoyle’s 1957 novel The Black Cloud, the burden is too much for his individual identity, which is annihilated by the experience, but not before he is able to convey some idea of the planet’s plight to Hera herself.

I suppose, parenthetically, a good deal of the pleasure to be found in The Disestablishment of Paradise comes from its affectionate referencing and sampling from the immense corpus of twentieth-century Science Fiction: Lem, Harrison, Le Guin, Clarke (whose Rama series also seems to offer interesting parallels), and all the others woven into his text.

As in Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), though, the question of what all this suffering was actually for must finally be faced. In Lessing’s book, it results in the creation of an entity capable of almost perfect empathy with another’s pain. In Mann’s, I suspect, nothing so resounding can be expected: the questions are put up, examined from as many angles as possible, debated, weighed, analysed, and then thrown back upon his readers in the hope that they will now be able to make up their own minds.

Matters to do with the planet are, after all, the province of all of us, not just our brave pioneers of Speculative Fiction:

‘New ideas often manifest themselves first in fiction.’

‘But Science, Dr Melhuish, if it is to have any validity, must deal in facts. ...’

Just so. Mann has tried to give us the facts. That he’s done so in the form of a very readable (though undeniably weighty) work of fiction is just the icing on the cake.

(17/12/13-6/1/14)

Landfall 227 – Vital Signs (2014): 183-85.

[1458 wds]


Landfall 227 (2014)


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Never Get Taken to the Second Location (2013)

Landfall 225 (May 2013)

Never Get Taken to the Second Location

The Second Location. Stories by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-1-877441-45-5. Auckland: Titus Books, 2011. RRP $NZ 30.00.

Bronwyn Lloyd: The Second Location (2011)

One of the points of genesis for this book of short stories, Bronwyn Lloyd’s first published collection (though she’s written numerous catalogue essays and contributed chapters to various Art History publications) was the Rita Angus Symposium at Te Papa in September 2008.

It was one of those rare occasions when one can almost feel a paradigm shift occurring. On the one side, there was an Academic establishment view which privileges analysis of surface forms and effects over the Original Sin of biographical research (the so-called “intentional fallacy” attributing agency and motivation to artists), on the other, a form of imaginative projection, fleshed out by careful contextual and archival research, which tries to reconstruct the inner world of a painter.

Bronwyn’s paper on the strange symbolic world inhabited by Rita Angus and her lover Douglas Lilburn, as revealed in the thirty years of letters she wrote him (bequeathed by him before his death to the Turnbull Library), seemed to move and fascinate the symposium audience. It definitely enraged some of the Art Historians. This was black magic! Worse: this was double heresy: Narrative and Symbolism in painting!

For a fuller account of the dispute that ensued, you can go to the blogpost I wrote about it at the time [http://mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz/2008/09/rita-angus-symposium.html]; for further information about the precise nature of Bronwyn’s claims about the folie à deux imaginative constructs built up by Rita and Douglas in the late 1940s, you can look at the online version of her PhD thesis Daemons & Dream Children: The Secret Lives of Rita Angus’s Symbolic Portraits (University of Auckland, 2010) [http://ritaland.blogspot.co.nz/].

This book of short stories, then, is more than it seems. While the foreword to her book admits that “the collection shows how the investigation of another person’s life has repercussions in your own,” the precise interplay of Bronwyn’s stories and the “creative research” required of anyone attempting to reconstruct the inner workings of another, dead person’s life, will not really become clear until one realises the extent of the identification.

The collection was, in fact, she tells me, at one time intended to alternate non-fictional chapters from the thesis with the stories, text fragments – even one poem and one short play – which she had composed over the course of writing it.

That would have been a much longer book: a book rather like Christa Wolf’s classic Cassandra, perhaps – where four lectures about the mythological implications of this character from Greek Legend are capped with a short novella.

While it’s possible to regret some of the cross-relations and complexities that could have been built up in such a book, it would almost certainly have been a far less readable and accessible text. And I think that the essence of Bronwyn’s work is precisely that: by focussing on the human dimensions of these very complex characters, Rita and Douglas, the degree to which they constructed themselves in a private world of literary and historical references (however garbled these sometimes were), she shows us the inevitable leakage between art and life.

Bronwyn’s break-up, divorce, difficult family relationships past and present are all on display in The Second Location. They have to be. As she herself has said to me, one can’t strip bare other people’s lives without being willing to do it to oneself. The distance and objectivity demanded of the critic or the historian is, finally, an illusion: we look for lessons in other people’s lives because we feel so direly in need of them ourselves.

In our turn, we must in our turn become exemplary: Look how that turned out, says Bronwyn’s books (at least by implication). She recreates the lessons experience has taught her: the perplexities and inconclusive endings that are often all we have to show for years of our lives.

The title for Bronwyn’s book comes from an old Oprah Winfrey Show episode about abduction: “Never get taken to the second location,” was the lesson that Oprah dinned into her audience’s head, as the tragic litany of interviews went on. Sage advice. But how do you prevent yourself ending up in that “second location” – the slippery pit in Silence of the Lambs, the plastic cocoon of Dexter’s basement?

However desirable it might be simply to get away, run clear, avoid entanglements, a “second location” lies in wait for most of us, at least. Those of us who’ve been through heartbreak, job loss, bankruptcy, relationship break-ups, that is … Are you one of us? Or do you still reside squarely in that illusory world of the first location, out in the light with nothing to hide?

My eldest brother, when he first read Bronwyn’s book, was amused by the portraits it painted of various members of our family. “But you must never do that to me,” he added in a fervent postscript. I guess that it is a little painful to catch aspects of oneself in print – and the exhortation to write one’s own story in revenge is not always a particularly practical one.

I think the thing to remember about a collection of this type, then, is that every aspect of it is dangerous. A friend of mine who co-edited a collection of Australian women’s poetry, told me that there was really only one subject for most of the writers who contributed work: their mothers. The book in fact ended up being titled Motherlode.

If you write down what you think about your mother, chances are she’ll never speak to you again. Sometimes it has to be done anyway. In Sylvia Plath’s case it seems to have been her father (not to mention that father-projection with a “Meinkampf look / And a love of the rack and the screw”: her husband Ted Hughes) who got most of the flack. But maybe that was the problem all along: the appalling difficulties she had with her beyond-domineering mother could never quite find expression in that saccharine series of family missives called Letters Home.

Bronwyn’s own mother’s experience of having an illegitimate child, subsequently offered for adoption, in the New Zealand of the late 1950s, is contrasted with Rita’s and her own miscarriages in the complex, interwoven story “The Shared Lunch.” Does the material become less painful through the alternating of paragraphs, the formal patterning of the piece? Probably not. But there is a sense in which it does make the events more manipulable, controllable. By writing them down, one can in some sense defuse them: temporarily, at least.

A similar distancing technique is applied in the story/poem “The Dismemberment of Austin Brown,” where a stylish red coat symbolises all that goes wrong with her parents’ relationship over the years. The children’s picturebook style in which the story is told seems somehow, again, if not to cauterise the wound, at any rate to aggravate it less.

There’s a lot of rage in this book. There’s also a lot of love. The one, I now firmly believe, could not exist without the other.

It’s dangerous to rock our complacent academic establishment by suggesting new ways of reading our artistic heritage. It sets up seismic shock waves through our idées reçues – damping things down again at once is all that many of us can think of at such times. What Bronwyn’s Second Location reveals is that probing your own life in similar ways is every bit as perilous. Can it be equally rewarding too? It’s a matter of opinion.

For myself, I believe this paradigm shift is here to stay. Any return to what Lincoln called “the dogmas of the quiet past” is doomed to failure. For better or worse, we must learn once again to life down in what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

You’ll gather that this review, too, has been written in the spirit of the new paradigm. Bronwyn Lloyd is my wife; I’m in the book, along with various members of my family. I can’t really, then, write a falsely objective assessment of it as a text. Instead, I would say that it appears to have struck many chords with many readers. The fictional shaping of real events is a genre as old as writing itself – perhaps we’ve forgotten, in our over-specialised present, just how powerful and effective it can be.

(13-14/2/13)

Landfall 225 - My Auckland (2013): 186-89.

[1394 wds]


Landfall 225 (2013)


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Questions of Structure (2011)

Landfall 221 (2011)


Questions of Structure

David Eggleton, Time of the Icebergs. ISBN 978-1-877578-02-1. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010. 88 pp. RRP $NZ25.

McQueen, Cilla. The Radio Room. ISBN 978-1-877578-03-8. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010. 77 pp. RRP $NZ30.

Newton, John. Lives of the Poets. ISBN 978-0-864736-28-4. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010. 86 pp. RRP $NZ25.

John Newton: Lives of the Poets (2010)

You could hardly find three more different poets – or three more diverse books of poems. As I kept on reading them, though, I started to wonder about the construction of each book. They are so very distinct, and yet you can see in each case how much time and thought has gone into questions of structure, the ones that tend to be ignored when a reviewer just pulls out individual pieces for discussion.

Take John Newton’s Lives of the Poets. We begin with the nostalgic – and, presumably, semi-autobiographical – verse narrative which gives its name to the book as a whole. Then there’s a section of longish lyrics which seem to constitute a bridge between his first book, Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado (1985), and this one (“Trout-fishing and Sport in Maoriland”, “Gothic, “Black Stump” are a few of the giveaway titles here). Then there’s a section of more recent poems (exactly six of them, matching the six in section two). Then there’s a final section of unrhymed sonnets, “Stations”, hymning various culture heroes of the not-too-distant past (Anna Akhmatova, Malcolm Lowry, Sylvia Plath) in a manner reminiscent of Robert Lowell’s later, post-Notebook poems. There are, predictably, fourteen of these fourteen-line poems, echoing the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

It’s hard to say how tongue-in-cheek this somewhat excessive scaffolding is. Clearly Newton has been inspired by Lowell in more than just the form of his sonnets. The last poem here references “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” from Life Studies (1959). Is it a coincidence that Lowell’s book – similarly self-conscious in structure – predates Newton’s by almost exactly fifty years? If the latter’s great poetic dilemma (as he remarks in the blurb) is the fact that “the Romantic inheritance may be poison, but it’s all we have”, then what better guide to “fossicking beyond the high-tide mark of expressivism” than Lowell and his friends, the somewhat motley crew assembled along Newton’s own Via Dolorosa?

I guess it’s obvious how pleasing I find this kind of thing: the twenty poems in Newton’s verse novella echo the 14 + 6 + 6 poems of the rest of the book, adding up to 46 (4 + 6 = 10 / 1 + 0 = 1), each of the four parts a skewed reflection of one of the others. The arrangement of Cilla McQueen’s new book could hardly resemble it less. The Radio Room includes 35 poems and 11 drawings and designs. There are some recurrent patterns within it: 4 “Elements” poems, various reminiscences for the poet’s friends Joanna Paul and Hone Tuwhare. There are also a number of blank pages which serve to punctuate the book. I count seven of these, but I’m not really certain how they operate as divisions, if they are divisions at all: more like pauses, perhaps.

Cilla McQueen: The Radio Room (2010)

If Newton’s book aspires to the solidity of monumental architecture, McQueen’s might be seen as a verbal labyrinth. We begin with her evocation of a vanished journal:

Damp sea-fog lay like a sheep on my journal
outside all night on the table,
turned radiant blue ink to turquoise wash
through which the permanent horizons stared

(“About the Fog”)

This is also what we return to at the end of the book:

The pen was missing too –
they’ll be together somewhere in the house or outside
on the table, last night stargazing, too cold, morning fog, O my
dear written pages washed-out turquoise mush –

Peel apart damp translucent skins fragile very old person
…
vanished intimacies

(“Wash”)

It’s clear enough that this image of the washed-out pages, “Of vanished thoughts here / and there word-slivers, blots in the gutter, bled edges; / some legible sentences in ballpoint”, is a way of seeing her own book, woven as it is out of landscape notes, stray memories, laments for the fallen:

I wanted to write about the Kotuku,
lost in the strait four years ago.
Every year at mutton-bird time
I remember the texture of my friend’s long hair.

That’s not all there is to this journal, though. “About the Fog” is not the first poem in the book, nor is “Wash” the last. In the former, the fog is described as lying “like a sheep on my journal”. The book actually begins with a poem called “A Ghostly Beast” (“We scared ourselves white in the bothy”), then moves on to a short piece called “Our Cow”. “Like a sheep” therefore means quite a bit more than it might seem to, in this larger context.

The image might also lead us outside the compass of the book itself, to her celebrated poem “Living Here” (from Homing In, 1982):

Well you have to remember this place
is just one big city with 3 million people with
a little flock of sheep each so we’re all sort of
shepherds

This, I think, shows us just how she intends to gesture to the whole body of her past work, with its constant themes of ecology, indigeneity (variously defined), the interface between human and environment. Cilla McQueen, like John Newton, has large issues to address, and they’re addressed as much by the studiedly-casual, allusive form of her book as by the individual poems and sketches it contains.

David Eggleton: Time of the Icebergs (2010)

What about David Eggleton? Well, at first sight one might be forgiven for thinking that Time of the Icebergs had no clear structure at all. It functions as a series of discrete lyrical pieces, from varying standpoints and geographical locations (Devonport and Dunedin are two he mentions specifically in his notes – Sydney and Suva figure also, though). It is, after all, as a coiner of strange metaphors and arresting phrases that Eggleton is most famed. Who else could have come up with “Glossolalia of the Undie 500 clown cars” or “solitude of rain gangs up on all / gathered at Queen Tuatara’s funeral”?

This automatically classic quality of so many of his lines can have the effect of masking the larger concerns within his work. Just as in performance it takes Eggleton some time to warm up into that high-pitched neighing note which only he can reach, so his book revs faster and faster as it goes along. That apocalyptic sci-fi title, Time of the Icebergs, seems the clearest clue to what he has in mind. Eggleton’s book may be, indeed, be the most didactic and message-driven of the three. Make no mistake, Eggleton is no gentle celebrant of Kiwiana, no bland bush-ballad bard from beyond the black stump. These are lines meant to lash and hurt:

homeless in a Middle Earth
being prepared for strip-mines by Orcs.

His true Penelope is more Swift than Flaubert – savage indignation at the state of the planet lacerating his breast as he’s forced to watch “fascist playthings / sculpt muscles at Les Mills to a triumph / of the will”.

Reading these three books in terms of their interior architecture has been extremely revealing to me. What these poets have in common turns out to be more striking than what divides them: a careful sense of craft, honed over years and through constant practice; a fierce determination to have their say, to ram home their message subliminally as well as directly. What each of them has to say to us (these books imply) does matter, it really is important. We may not have any more time to waste.

(20-21/2/11)

Landfall 221 - Outside In (2011): 184-87.

[1287 wds]


Landfall 221 (2011)


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The Sleep of Reason (2010)

Bill Direen, ed. Landfall 219 (May 2010)

The Sleep of Reason

David Lyndon Brown. Skin Hunger. ISBN 978-1-877441-08-0. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009. RRP $NZ22.95.

Bernadette Hall. The Lustre Jug. ISBN 978-0-864736-08-6. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. RRP $NZ25.

Kevin Ireland. Table Talk: New Poems. ISBN 978-1-877340-24-6. Auckland: Cape Catley, 2009. RRP $NZ25.99.

Jessica Le Bas. Walking to Africa. ISBN 978-1-86940-446-8. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009. RRP $NZ24.99.

Frankie McMillan. Dressing for the Cannibals. ISBN 978-0-9864529-0-1. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 2009. RRP $NZ25.

Brian Turner. Just This: Poems. ISBN 978-0-864735-91-1. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. RRP $NZ25.

Richard von Sturmer. On the Eve of Never Departing. ISBN 978-1-877441-09-7. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009. RRP $NZ29.95.

[Jessica Le Bas: Walking to Africa (2009)]

Jessica Le Bas’s new collection of poems about her daughter’s dreadful descent into depression and the labyrinthine processes of the Mental Health system, Walking to Africa, is similarly hard to diagnose. It’s an odd decision, to say the least, to make someone else’s suffering the subject of such a set of confessional poems.

What one is forced to admire about Le Bas, though, is her honesty about her own reactions. She portrays herself (by turns) as snooty to the various counsellors and diagnosticians in the hospital system, irritated by her daughter’s repeated relapses and refusals to get well, and quite simply not up to the challenge of making sense of it all. The conclusion to her book, where she suggests that poetry might provide some solace if not a cure for the whole conundrum, is almost Rupert Brooke-like in its crazed optimism (“A body of England’s / Breathing English Air …”):

There is poetry

Little mouthfuls of life
freeze flowing and condensed
a chocolate spoon full
One each day. [84]

But it’s honest. That’s what gets me about it. She’s not saintly, not all-knowing, wise, patient – she’s human, flawed, peevish. Maybe that’s worth saying at such length. And maybe not. Who knows? In any case, it’s one possible set of reactions to the sleep of reason. That’s how I read it, at any rate.

[David Lyndon Brown: Skin Hunger (2009)]

Another reaction to the sheer pain and meaninglessness of things, a more Romantic though certainly no less honest one, can be found in David Lyndon Brown’s intense, uncompromising début collection Skin Hunger. His own way of transcending the quotidian is through sex and friendship (and possibly a bit of substance abuse) and yet none of it ever seems quite enough:

and what of that incendiary LOVE
ABJECTION?
OBEISANCE?
ABSOLUTION?

And yet and still and yet and still

IT
IS
BEAUTIFUL

[84-85]

[Kevin Ireland: Table Talk (2009)]

And then there are the strange stumbling noises, the throat-clearings and hesitations modulating into still semi-polished crooning (rather like a late Dennis Potter screenplay) of Kevin Ireland’s eighteenth (no less) collection of poems Table Talk. You’d think after last year’s How to Survive the Morning and the year before’s Airports and Other Wasted Days that there would be little to add to the chronicle of physical infirmity and gradual loss of friends which seems the inevitable accompaniment of his old age, but Ireland seems determined to keep on talking. As long as Cape Catley keeps on publishing them, one feels, there will be more books of this sort from Ireland. Why? Well, in “The Poem that wrote itself”, he explains:

This is the poem that I have been waiting to write.
I have no idea where it is going, there is just
this desire, which grips and shakes the bars of its words,
to break free, eat fire and sip salt spray on the wind. [72]

“I have no idea where it is going,” he admits, but concludes “I must acquire a new word-list / to live with you forever in flames and spindrift.”

It’s taken a long time for Kevin Ireland to get to this stage of raging against the dying of the light, this late Yeatsian refusal to be respectable and roll over. The sheer clumsiness of some of these poems constitutes their strength, for me. Like Brown and Le Bas, the subject he is measuring himself against is darkness and chaos. Of course he’s not up to the task, but then who could be? Keeping on going is in itself a kind of heroism, here.

[Brian Turner: Just This (2009)]

There are good moments and bad moments in Brian Turner’s rather more curmudgeonly new collection Just This. Just this, eh? A lot of wandering around the high country, a lot of whinging about city-folk and their failure to understand same, a lot of the mixture-as-before, was ( I have to admit) my immediate reaction. Perhaps the worst example is the set of Helen-bashing verses “A PM in the High Country: “Here’s there’s no political mileage / in point-scoring, in tantrums … / Is it / too late for her to be de-bugged?” Self-parody, really.

But this is a collection that continues to surprise and test its reader the more it is scrutinized:

the whole family singing of taking high roads
or low roads to the very same place in the end,
Mum with tears in her eyes
for reasons I never
fully understood and never will. [109]

If you don’t get that then there’s no point in persevering, really. And I’m not talking about “fully understanding” Turner’s lines – rather about seeing what he’s getting at, that understatement is not so much a device as a necessity for a generation as soul-calloused as ours.

[Richard von Sturmer: On the Eve of Never Departing (2009)]

Richard von Sturmer is more officially concerned with soul-searching, one might say. He is, after all, a Zen Buddhist, with an impressive and original list of meditative poetic and prose-poetic books to his credit. On the Eve of Never Departing brings together the underlying surrealist with the sedulously cultivated monk. At times the non-violence of it all almost overwhelms one: the spiritual pilgrimage through the turbulent modernist of industrializing China, like a blind John Clare; the weird colloquies with monkeys in the Auckland Zoo, or eels off the wharf in Lake Pupuke ... I’m not sure if the collection ever becomes more than a collection, to be honest: it remains an assemblage of disparate pieces from disparate times. He is finally, it seems, not up to the challenge of his subject matter.

Given the nature of that subject matter, though – subsuming the turbulence of a deeply-wounded psyche under the unruffled surface of his own Buddha nature, providing instruction to an embattled world in how to do the same – failure is a foregone conclusion. He isn’t Christ, after all – or Prince Gautama for that matter. But he is an honest man and an honest writer, and – frustrating though it can be at times – his honesty and sheer goodness shine out in this as in his other books.

[Bernadette Hall: The Lustre Jug (2009)]

And Bernadette Hall? What of The Lustre Jug? Top o’ the morning to you, begorrah. Is it yourself that’s there? A certain recrudescence of stage Irishry seems to be an expected corollary of receipt of the Rathcoola Fellowship. As with Fiona Farrell’s Pop-Up Book of Invasions the year before last, Hall has obliged with a number of evocations of the Republic:

Michael Collins was killed in an ambush not far from here,
parts of Cork city were razed by the Black and Tans,
all of which gets me thinking that sometimes
I’m the daughter of a laughing Irishman,
sometimes of his assassin. [43]

The superficiality of it all is feigned, of course. The act, the “laughing Irishman”, is just one more way of dealing with the inassimilable – the appalling, unspeakable tragedy of Ireland’s bloody last century: forget about the famine, now it’s the treaty, the troubles, the civil war, the cultural ravages of the tiger economy. The Irish section of Hall’s book concludes tellingly with the poem “Guilt,” where she transposes the impossibility of dealing non-perfunctorily with such suffering – for other people – with the simple death of a fox:

Maybe she died of starvation.
Being a vegetarian, I could have left
a bowl of porridge out in the garden.
I did think about it but it seemed ridiculous. [47]

Now that really is admirable – and honest – writing: subtle, effective, and to the point.

[Frankie McMillan: Dressing for the Cannibals (2009)]

So, last but not least, let’s come to Frankie McMillan’s’ first collection Dressing for the Cannibals. She understands “how the inherent associational fluency of words can be arranged to wonder about how it is that ‘we are so mysterious to ourselves and to the world’,” apparently, or so says Michael Harlow on the cover. Appearing thus under Harlow’s aegis does give some clues to her overall direction. Much of her prose poetry is clearly influenced by him – “the piano learns to swim” is, in fact, a kind of sequel to the older poet’s “This is the Piano’s Birthday.” What’s here that’s hers, then? I guess an empathy and understatement with suffering. In “I meant those kids no harm,” for instance, the witch from Hansel and Gretel concludes:

they wanted adventure, a hut in the words
a candle of their own to burn

See how you like it, I told them, see what it is
this wide cold world [57]

That’s nice, but still a little facile, perhaps. Not so the poem “Miss”:

In cities all over the world
missing girls
rise to pull on their cotton socks
and run for the no 6 bus

The whimsy here seems far from arbitrary – a mask, rather, for the unspeakable: the sleep of reason that comes with the fall of night:

Sometimes a miss
will join with a mister
and in evening picnics in the woods
they find each other pleasing [59]

There’s a lot to make sense of in this (or, for that matter, any other) world. Worlds of brutal fact, of cosmetic cleanliness and order; worlds of madness, or the imagination. Poetry can be a way of disciplining one’s primeval shrieks and grunts into something more ordered, if not – in the final analysis – necessarily more meaningful. Goya died, a deaf and misanthropic recluse, in a house which it turned out he’d covered almost entirely with strange dark frescoes.

[Francisco Goya: Preliminary Sketch for The Sleep of Reason (1797)]

Why did he bother? Well, why not? I’m glad he did. Those paintings (I feel) can somehow help when one feels most miserable. Somebody else understands. Someone is prepared to own up, to bear witness to the sufferings of war, of intolerance and ignorant cruelty: the Inquisition. I’m afraid that you can’t persuade me that it’s all five-finger exercises, pointless vanity, a waste of time.

[Francisco Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children (c.1819-21)]

I’m glad, too, that these seven poets bothered. I don’t care where they perch in artistic pecking order – I’m not interested in sorting them into some kind of honour roll of merit. I understand – I think I understand – what they’re facing up to, why they made some of the choices they did. I’ve learnt a lot by reading them, lessons for my own blind progress. Hopefully none of them will make anyone’s life any worse.

The biggest risk-taker there would have to be Jessica Le Bas. Does she really have the right to write so about her own daughter? I don’t know. That’s a question for the two of them to resolve, not me. I do believe in the purity of her motives, the honesty of her self-scrutiny – the fact that she believes that it might help others in similar trials. Telling them it’s okay not to be a saint. Who knows, it might even make some of us feel a bit better.

What more can one really hope of any poem?

[Francisco Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)]

(8-24/12/09)

Landfall 219 - On Music (2010): 185-89.

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Landfall 219 (2010)


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Landfall 214 – Open House : Editorial (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

Editorial:
Rules of Engagement

Amy Brown: The Propaganda Poster Girl (2008)

I thought it might be as well if I opened by describing the criteria I applied in guest-editing “Open House,” the first non-themed Landfall for a while. I’ve put together quite a few issues of literary magazines in my time (twenty, by the last count), and have made a few observations along the way:

• First, editors (by and large) love themed issues. It means you can impose a shape on the material that comes in to you, and give yourself the sense of constructing a single unified piece out of other people’s inspirations. It’s rather like anthology editing, in fact – the closest most of us can get to the editor-as-hero.
• Second, writers (by and large) detest themed issues. It means that unless you were specifically invited to submit something to the issue, that you have to contort whatever you happen to be working on to fit – however loosely – that particular theme. Or else you write something else entirely, something designed for the occasion, which may or may not end up going in. If it doesn’t, you’re stuck with an eccentric piece which may never find a home elsewhere. It’s fun every once in a while, but tiresome when it becomes the exception rather than the rule.
• Third, readers (by and large) are indifferent whether journals have themes or not. Mostly, I suspect (I’m generalising here even more wildly than usual), they read magazines to follow the fortunes of specific writers who interest them.

So whose interests should prevail? It’s a little like the American political machine, I think: that delicate balance between the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. What’s needed to keep our literary magazines lively and relevant is a system of checks and balances between the three interest groups. After all, most of us straddle all three categories at different times, so it’s hard to conclude that either editors, writers or readers should be deprived of their own special brand of amusement.

“Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn,” as the good book puts it (Deut 25: iv). It’s a lot of work to put together an issue, so editors (the executive) do have to reserve themselves a few private satisfactions. When that turns out to be at the expense of writers (Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”), though, we have a problem. Hence the need, in most cases, for some kind of ratio of themed to non-themes. In the end, of course, it’s you readers (the judiciary), who decide what qualifies as entertaining and instructive and what doesn’t.

•

I tried to read, accordingly, through the – very many – contributions for this issue with as much objectivity as I could muster. Anything, in theory, was grist to my mill. In the end, though, I do have my own views. I have invited certain authors to contribute pieces who might otherwise not have thought to do so. I’ve also tried consciously to introduce new faces, which has led me, in some cases, to put in only one or two pieces each for poets (in particular) who would really merit a more comprehensive selection.

Do the results sound piecemeal, fragmented? Up to you to judge, but I feel that there’s a spirit in much of the writing I’m encountering nowadays which does succeed in giving unity to this disparate-by-design assemblage of pieces.

Many of our younger writers wear emotional extremism as a kind of badge of honour. The best of them seem intensely aware of contemporary literary theory and linguistic philosophy – the heartbeat of postmodernism – but they’ve gone beyond it into a world of private concerns and fragilities.

Take Amy Brown (“Siamang”), for instance, who sees a captive monkey in a zoo as “tailor-made to comfort / someone as sorry as me.” It isn’t that she’s unaware that the monkey is suffering more than she is – it’s because of that he can serve as her ambiguous double.

Then there’s Thérèse Lloyd, whose Levin kids:

… drag race
their souped-up Ford Escorts
leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings.

Both Brown and Lloyd are recent graduates of Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters Masters programme in Creative writing, but their work shows little of the ironic distance generally seen as characteristic of the Wellington school.

Actually I’d say that the strength of writing programmes such as the Manhire school can be seen in the fact that these two writers, fresh from its workshops, do not sound at all homogenised or smoothed out – rather, individualised in a way which fits larger trends in New Zealand writing.

It’s easy to mock the tendency of every editor to detect new trends and incipient literary movements. “Jack says that if you’re depressed, over-educated, self-absorbed, and anxious to go on about all three then you’re on the right path …” It’s not as simple as that.

My selections for this magazine may well have ended up privileging a personal impression of what is most pointed and relevant in contemporary writing. But some of the poems and stories included in this issue move me in quite a new way. I feel intensely curious to read what these new poets and fiction writers will produce next. If any of this excitement communicates itself to you, the whole venture has been richly worthwhile.

(8/07)

Landfall 214 – Open House. ISBN 978 1 877372 93 3. (2007): 5-6.
[Available at: The Imaginary Museum]

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Landfall 214 (2007)


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The Need to Gather Stones (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

The Need to Gather Stones

Geoff Cochrane, 84-484. Wellington: VUP, 2007. ISBN 9780 86473 5584, 87 pages, RRP $25.

Fiona Farrell, The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 388 1, 104 pages, RRP $25.

Fiona Farrell: The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (2007)

‘Four things are required by every work of art: a Place, and a Time, an Author, and a Cause of Invention.’ – The Speckled Book

And he’s feeling teetery and predisposed, and he feels it in the air like a fuzzy pastel buzz: the need to gather tools and summon energies, the need to try to start a new book. The need to gather stones and start again.

The first quote is from Fiona Farrell’s new book The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, written while she held the inaugural Rathcoola Writers’ Residency in County Cork, Ireland, in 2006. The second comes from Geoff Cochrane’s new poetry collection, 84-484, written (to all appearances) as he wandered around his old haunts in Wellington and, especially, Island Bay.

The two books are very different. So different, in fact, that it’s staggering that two writers of roughly the same generation could have such diverse outlooks and personae. “Pain distilled” was the description applied to Cochrane’s work in the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature. Farrell, on the other hand, paints herself here as a relaxed, somewhat garrulous travel companion, effortlessly at home with the craic, the pleasant meanderings of Irish life and culture.

Home & Abroad, then – pain / pleasure – male / female. A set of facile dichotomies could easily be established between these two poets’ latest projects, but I’m not sure that they would get us much nearer to understanding the essence of either book. It would be easy to argue that they were mutually exclusive. I prefer to see them as complementary: each supplying something the other lacks.

Let’s begin with Fiona Farrell. The most immediately striking thing about her book is the extensive body of notes included at the back. Farrell comments engagingly (and a little disingenuously?):

Poems should stand for themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe.

Most of the time, I’d have to say that I couldn’t agree less. When I go to readings I like people to get to the point, read out the poem straight away, leave out all the lengthy explications altogether. So, as you can imagine, I came to these notes full of incipient disapproval. Only to be won over totally. The little comment about the “marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe” is a case in point.

In her introduction Farrell expounds on her choice of title, talking of the original Book of Invasions, “a compilation of eleven manuscripts describing the discovery of Ireland following the Creation and the Flood.”

The book is written in vellum by several hands, notably by a scribe called Muirges MacPaidin who grumbles in the margins that the light he is working in is bad or that he has lost the piece of pumice he uses to smooth the vellum or that the ruler he has been given to line the page is too thin. He died, probably of irritation, in 1543.

A more determined and driven author might have had no space for Muirges MacPaidin. But he would be quite a loss, I’d have to say. Especially as he’s clearly a model for Farrell herself in her marginal musings on so many evocatively (and somewhat absurdly) named texts: The Book of the Dun Cow, The Speckled Book, The Battler, The Yellow Book, The Black Book, even the Book of Kells …

But do the poems suffer from our growing need to turn to the back, check out the commentary before one can come to terms with the text itself? In some cases, I’d have to say, the back of the book does begin to overshadow the front. “The Way of the Dishes,” for instance, meant little to me until I’d read the notes. After which it fell perfectly into place.

And yet so many of the poems do stand so perfectly, so definitively, “for themselves,” that I’d prefer to see this as an outline rather than a critique of her method. The idea of a book which combines to form a complex whole, like a tessellated pavement or Byzantine mosaic, surely deserves ungrudging admiration.

Which poems would I single out as freestanding compositions? Well, somewhat surprisingly, given the author’s own reservations (mainly over her lack of Irish), I think her translation of “The Lament of the Nun of Beare” an absolute delight:

Bony my hands now
that once touched
splendid men.
Too bony to rise over
sweet boys again!

There’s a strange, syncopated energy in these irregular stanzas:

I was wanton in youth
and I’m glad I was bold!
If I’d been more cautious
I’d still sit here: old

in my ancient cloak –
when the bare hills’ covering
is the fine icy cloak
flung down by the King.

In her own voice, too, there are some triumphant pieces here: “Genealogy,” for example, which cries out to be quoted in full, flowing as it does from the two dismissive quotes about the Irish at the poem’s head: “a ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’ (Carlyle); “ a tribe of squalid apes” (Froude):

Vermin begat Squalor
who married the fourth son of
Hunger who fathered the Pig-
child and the Rat-daughter who
mothered Filth who bore
Raggy Mary who wed an
Empty Glass who was the
son of not-enough-land whose
wife was Dull Superstition …

There’s a certain kind of verse which arises from one more residency in one more evocative spot. This is not it. Farrell’s immigration has clearly been pricked and energised by her six months away from Otanerito, where the previous owners “spelled out ‘Long Bay’ in daffodils across the steep hillside. The flowers come up every spring, growing more blurred and chaotic by the year as the plants multiply.”

What more perfect image for this whole iconography of assimilation and invasion? Like the daffodils, when one closes Farrell’s book one’s abiding impression is of a whole rather than a collection of disparate pieces: “It’s hard to make out the individual letters now.”

Geoff Cochrane: 84-484 (2007)

Geoff Cochrane’s 84-484, one has to say, lacks the unity and focus of The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. It also lacks Farrell’s light tone and engaging delivery. Cochrane’s is a grimmer, more existential enterprise – part of an ongoing project running through his last few books of poems from VUP.

In fact, if one wanted an international analogue for the demands Cochrane makes of his reader, one would have to look to a poet like grim old Peter Reading: the sudden shifts of register, the refusal to explicate a pattern once it’s been formed.

I have been to Wellington, and to Island Bay (to Ireland, for that matter – even to County Cork); reading Geoff Cochrane, though, I begin to wonder if I’ve ever been to me … The central title piece of the book, “84-484,” begins in an offhand manner by recalling that “84-484 was my grandparents’ telephone number in the 1950s. Absent from my head for donkey’s years, it made its return last night as I was watching Antiques Roadshow.”

My parents and myself
lived with my father’s parents.

Oh, no, I thought – not another genealogy poem ...

I remember Eileen’s sewing patterns,
Percy’s pink Free Lances,
the marzipan mice and Napoleon cake
of my fifth or sixth birthday.

Wait a minute, though – as the finely judged details of a Lowell-esque life-study begin to appear:

If and when it suits me,
I can also recall breaking a window,
poohing wickedly on the wicker chair in the shed,
slicing my finger open with a razor blade.
(The neat white tick of the scar
is still quite visible.)

Now the true form of the poem comes into focus, the inimitable lines of a Cochrane original – “poohing wickedly on the wicker chair …” – the almost compulsive honesty of shameful recollections most of us would be happy to suppress.

And so it goes on. Because, like Farrell, Cochrane too is a novelist. In a very different vein, admittedly, but with the same finely-honed skills of pacing and cumulative detail. We learn more about his grandparents; then, as his grandfather Percy drops out of the picture, more and more about the “troubled and troubling and troublesome” Eileen: “An ageing Ophelia determined to remain dismayed by sex.”

Percy had been dead for seven or eight years, but he woke me up one night by trying to strangle me …

Eileen had ceased to sleep,. but we rubbed along together like a couple of shrewd old crooks. I’d come home boozed in the wee hours and she’d let me in without protest. …

Odours of dripping and gas. A stove of Transylvanian blackness. Stubby flames of turquoise and cerise.

“In the end, of course, the cops took an interest.” But even that wasn’t quite the end, one more scene remains, from journey’s end, the old people’s home Day Room:

Eileen waits until her daughter is talking to a nurse, then turns to me and winks. “The next time you visit, bring a little car and I’ll come away with you!”

But I have no home to take her to. No car, no flat, no money. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say. While smiling a bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile.

It’s a lacerating journey, this one, through distant hells of memory. Cochrane spares himself nothing – one reason why we forgive him such harsh, accurate judgements on others. But how is this different from any other slice-of-life realistic short story? Cochrane’s unerring sense of language illuminates the whole with strange flashes of manic, electric brilliance: that “bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile,” the white-haired heads that “tip and loll.”

In one sense, then, Cochrane’s poetic has got looser, more inclusive over the years. His sense of form has enlarged to include short stories, “Worksheet” poems, haiku-like images in the same kaleidoscopic mix. His sense of style has got ever more acute and deadly, though. He’s a risk-taker, noting anything and everything which might contribute to a poem, then leaving us questioning what the poem actually was.

The ambiguous hero of “How it Begins:” Ray Green, 48, “the unembarrassed author of four rectangular novels of modest thickness,” is a little younger than his creator, the – hopefully proud, rather than simply “unembarrassed” – author of two novels, two books of short stories and ten poetry collections , but he appears to have a similar philosophy of life: “All you can do is tend your own patch, order and illuminate your own little corner of the world.”

We used to use amphetamines ourselves, back in the seventies, but with this difference: we didn’t know we were meant to get tooled-up and riot, raid banks and slay pizza-delivery boys.

Cochrane’s is a poetry of survival – a report on the human condition from one of its furthest outposts, bulletins from the barricades of the inner-city.

It is, admittedly, a far harsher voice than Farrell’s, with fewer solutions and more hard questions. And yet what I admire about both is the ability to include the violence and disorder of our past and present without being choked into silence.

Farrell talks of the potato famine and its aftermath, the Irish hegira, with the grace of a distant descendant. Yet she’s well aware of the dangers of pure evocation:

Then the poet comes and / sees in the flop of failure / the outlines of some old / hero whom another poet / made from grunt and stab / on some muddy hill.

Cochrane puts it more simply: “The need to gather stones and start again.”

(29-30/8/07)

Landfall 214 (2007): 175-79.

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At the Revival Meeting (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

At the Revival Meeting

Martin Edmond, Waimarino County and Other Excursions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 391, 240 pages, RRP $40.

Martin Edmond: Waimarino County (2007)

I first met Martin Edmond in Devonport, on the night of Alan Brunton’s memorial concert in December 2002. A group of us were booked to do a cabaret-style performance at a café as part of the Massey Gothic Conference (also on that weekend). We were planning to speed on over the bridge afterwards to catch the dying minutes of the concert. As it turned out, the venue we’d been booked to perform in had – quite unexpectedly – gone out of business, so we ended up being able to attend the whole of that baroque, extraordinary, farewell celebration.

From the moment we met, I felt as if I’d known Martin for years. It’s true that we’d been corresponding for a while – over his contributions to brief magazine, which I was then editing, and also various matters to do with Brunton’s Bumper Books, the publishing arm of Red Mole. Meeting people you feel you know through letters is not always entirely satisfactory, though. All sorts of things you hardly notice on paper can suddenly rear up when print converts to flesh.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying that we got on well, and have continued to get on well. What’s more, the manner of our meeting was a characteristic serendipity. I’ve never had a conversation with Martin Edmond which hasn’t involved him filling me in on some piece of arcane lore about a little-known writer, or place, or iconic event.

In one sense, then, I’m the ideal reader for Martin’s collection of essays, Waimarino County & Other Excursions. Leafing through it is a lot like the experience of meeting the man himself. Witty, urbane, well-informed – but not in the distant, old-world way that those words would appear to imply. No, Martin’s writing never eschews emotional involvement with the matters he is describing. There’s hardly an essay here which sounds as if it was constructed to order. The subject matter is always close to his heart.

I guess, for me, the most striking example is “The Hallelujah Chorus.” At the centre of this essay there’s a terrifying account of his visit to a revival meeting:

And as these sinners declared themselves, the chanting in the theatre rose in pitch and fervour and intensity until there came above the thunderous chorus a weird, high ululation from the stalls on the front left-hand side. I had never heard people speaking in tongues before. Glossolalia sounds like someone yodelling so hard their uvula goes into spasm. It reminded me of a time I heard a flock of sheep mustering at dusk on a Lands and Survey block out the back of Stratford ... [20]

I was there! Not at that particular meeting, of course, but many similar ones (Billy Graham, the Church of Christ, the Assembly of God). The only difference is that I would have been part of that flock yodelling strangely as the spirit of Pentecost came down on us …

Praise the Lord the Holy Ghost has descended upon us in Tongues of Flame! the Preacher screeched above the clamour of the Believers, doubling and redoubling their efforts. Then he began to call particular people out of the crowd. Suddenly I heard him say: There is a young man of sixteen or seventeen years (I had just turned seventeen) and he is sitting on the right-hand side of the cinema (I was) two thirds of the way towards the back (exactly!) and be is wondering whether to come forward now and give his soul to Jesus (I wasn’t, but, hell …). Let us all now raise our voices to the heavens and ask the Lord to give strength to this young man so that be may come and join us...

That’s precisely it. He’s put his finger on the mastery of it, the curious effectiveness of those techniques of mass persuasion. How many times have I sat fidgeting in the middle row, sure that I was the one who was being singled out for attention, sure that this was it, that tonight was the only chance I would ever have to escape perdition?

And I did feel a powerful force calling me. I was young and uncertain and the exorcism of possible demons from the chaos of my awakening mind did for a moment seem desirable, even seductive. Surely there was no harm in it? It was certainly impressive to see old people getting out of their wheelchairs and tottering forward to lean on the edge of the stage.

An opportune bit of squabbling saves Martin in the nick of time – “Any chance I would go forward to be saved blew away in that poor kid’s outraged, helpless sobbing” [21]. What impresses me, though, is that he is prepared to admit that the opportunity was there, that he might have given in.

Mind you, I doubt it would have taken. Martin Edmond was born to be a flâneur, a Baudelairean dandy exploring the byways of the metropolis (whether it be Auckland, Wellington or Sydney). There’s another part of him that is in deadly earnest, though. The strength of his writing is that he is able to give equal weight to both sides.

Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde named the two warring impulses within his hero after the two dominant intellectual influences of that time, the late nineteenth century: on the one hand, the amoral aestheticism of Walter Pater, on the other, the moral earnestness of John Ruskin. In Martin’s case I’d be tempted to call the two Ohakune and Alan Brunton.

Does that sound frivolous? It isn’t meant to. The Martin Edmond of Autobiography of My Father, of the childhood portions of Chronicle of the Unsung, of the “Autobiographies” section of the book we’re examining here, is a man profoundly, wistfully in love with his own past – with the complex intensities of youth and adolescence in that little town on the Grand Trunk Line. He’s the poet of that region, in fact – more alert to its contradictions and diversities even than that near neighbour of his, the Gothic novelist Ronald Hugh Morriesson.

And yet there’s also the Martin who ran away – almost literally – to join the circus, who followed the mercurial Alan Brunton on tour with Red Mole, abandoning the academic gravy train of Victoria University to do so. This is the Martin who writes so lovingly about Cavafy and Pessoa, who understands the attraction of that shifting signifier of international modernism, the heteronym.

Why are Martin’s books so challenging in form? Why does he resist easy genre identification, that secure place in the bookshop racks? It’s cost him, that’s for sure. Anyone straddling the uneasy frontiers of fiction and non-fiction, whose work might equally well be shelved under autobiography, travel writing or cultural commentary is liable to the suspicion of lazy readers. Praise, yes – there’s been a lot of praise of the originality of Martin’s work, but it’s usually (paradoxically) coupled with the name of some other writer whose example he is implied to be imitating: W. G. Sebald is the most obvious example, but recently Thomas de Quincey has been cited as a strong precedent (this despite the fact that Martin assures me that he has only the most tangential familiarity even with the original Opium Eater essays).

It’s hard for me to imagine any reader not finding something to their liking in the four sections of this book: ‘Autobiographies’; ‘Meditations’ (on subjects ranging from the Rosetta Stone to Alan Brunton); ‘Illusions’ (prose poems and dreams, mostly from his online blog); and ‘Voices’, published previously under the title Ghost Who Writes in Lloyd Jones’s excellent little Montana essay Series. Nor do I think I’m unique in finding virtually all of it to my liking. In fact, I can’t think of a book which has beguiled me as much since I first picked up Borges’ Labyrinths when I was a teenager.

The idea of the blog, the online diary, is another important component of Martin’s collection. He began (as I understand it) with the idea of starting a new blog for each new book project, but they appear to have evolved into a more complex symmetry.

There’s Luca Antara (“... who knows what other travellers might not have set out with a wild surmise for these shores? Looking perhaps for Luca Antara; perhaps just for the day after tomorrow”), described as being the work of a “schizoid antipodean.” That one has been running since 2004.

Then there’s dérives (started in 2005), which began with prose poems and reflections, but has now settled down to a portrait of the seedier side of cab driving in Sydney.

White City (begun in 2006), now a compendium of dreams and dream essays, was presumably intended to accompany Martin’s Ern Malley memoir / novel (accessible, so far, only in extracts such as the one included in this issue of Landfall).

No doubt Martin foresees a date at which he can move over to the new blog, Fetchers (started in July 2007) At present it’s confined to the single optimistic statement: “It’s a happy day today,” but there’s no doubt a lot more to come.

Raw material for the books? Undoubtedly. But the mere fact of being able to make your random jottings available online within minutes of writing them has an inevitable influence of the nature of that writing. It’s hard to see how writers can continue to ignore the possibilities of instantaneous communication – the barrage of comments and cross-references possible through hypertext.

In the present case, it’s fascinating to see how they’ve stolen into the texture of Martin’s book, along with more considered pieces from the nzepc, brief, and various other anthologies and projects, to give us the closest thing to an anatomy of the life of a twenty-first century writer I can readily imagine.

So I guess the reason I’d really advise to buy this book is not simply as an entry pass to the world of Martin Edmond, but also as a cartography of where we are, right now, at the bottom of the world, in the complex of world culture.

(13-17/8/07)

Landfall 214 (2007): 187-90.

[1703 wds]

Landfall 214 (2007)


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