Watching for the Wingbeat (2020)

Johanna Emeney, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 (March 2020)

Reviews:

Pat White

Pat White. Watching for the Wingbeat: New and Selected Poems. ISBN 978-0-473-44420-4. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 164 pp.

Pat White: Watching for the Wingbeat (2018)

Pat White’s new book of selected poems covers 40 years of his writing life, from Signposts in 1977 to Fracking & Hawk in 2015, together with some uncollected and unpublished work.

The first impression it gives is continuity. White’s preoccupations have, it seems, always been what they are now: landscape, love, history, the natural world.

A great deal of care has clearly gone into winnowing out the best pieces from this lifetime of work. It would be very hard to find a false note. It is nevertheless true that there’s an austerity about the earliest poems here which has been modulated and complicated by White’s experiments with the long line in more recent times. Take, for instance, an early poem such as ‘Paperbacks’:

That was the summer
when the paperbacks grew mould
from the damp
of the outhouse floor
. . .

when graduation took its leave
of student flats
with cheap editions
of expensive ideals . . .

This is a wonderful piece: spare, telling, making the single image of these ‘grubby books / that fed our empty heads’ stand for a whole world of adult responsibilities, leavened by a spine of humorous selfdeprecation.

And yet, when you contrast it with a more recent poem such as ‘Getting out of the car, Danseys Pass’, you can see how much these years of practice, of constant circling in on that central mystery of concise expression, have done for the strength and flexibility of his idiom:

A shingle road winding through mist on hills
tussock beside the cutting, silhouette against
a drop down to Maerewhenua Stream
cutting deeper than epiphany
through schist
and the other side of the road
in drizzling rain

This evocation of the joys — and complexities — of ‘following this road / in search of God knows what’ is on a different order of suggestiveness and complexity than the early poems, fine though they are.

There’s nothing ‘simple’ about the experiences presented here, and nothing casual about the musical skill with which the words are modulated, almost like one of Beethoven’s late quartets.

But what is Pat White about as a poet? Pastoral, once a byword for escapism and irrelevance, has become one of the central modes of our time: whether in the guise of dystopian ‘eco-poetry’ or utopian nostalgia. Is that why White seems suddenly so relevant? So armoured by integrity against the accusations of complacency and self-regard that can afflict other poets attempting so comprehensive a summing-up of their achievement?

I would argue that pastoral concerns have only ever been part of his worldview. In a poem such as ‘For my children’, for instance, he scores a rather dismal and unsought rhyme with some very topical concerns:

One year when things were tight
that old rifle was sold. It was no
accident, but contemplation of
cut throats, fascination
with destruction has marked
itself into the marrow
of too many generations.

Gun enthusiasts can’t understand why the rest of us show so little sympathy when they moan about the compulsory loss of their pretties. My father was a gun-nut, so I think I know a few things about the type. To him, an old rifle or musket was a miracle of applied engineering, a beautiful piece of craftmanship with only the most tenuous relationship to its original function. To me, it was an instrument of death which I could hardly bear to put my hands on. It reeked of blood.

White’s poem concludes:

If you visited me now, there
is a garden to sit in, a drink
to share, and talking to do.
Across the bay, a bluff
where rock crumbles, is
shaping trees’ stubborn growth.

There’s no heirloom to argue over.
There had to be a time to halt
the darkness of such bitter games.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be described as a propaganda poem, but it is, I suppose, polemical in these times of compulsory buybacks of firearms in the wake of the March 2019 Christchurch terror attack. But it makes its point so gently that it would be hard to reject the idyllic vision of those last few lines.

The point is that White knows. He knows why people love their guns. I don’t love them, but I did love my father, and I respect the sincerity of his attachment to the aesthetics of these ambassadors from a not-toodistant past. Those ‘bitter games’ at the end of the poem ring very true, also.

It’s a commonplace that Scottish families always fall out over wills and heirlooms (not that I suppose it’s a purely Scottish trait). I had an aunt who went mad when she wasn’t left the pieces of furniture she wanted in another of my ancestors’ wills.

Guns, bad blood — it’s all in the poem. That’s one of the many reasons why I love Pat White’s work, and find it a continuing source of inspiration. It feels very close to me.

I’ll conclude with some lines from another one of his great this-is-the- state-of-things-for-me-now poems, ‘Elemental’. Midway through, he evokes ‘a poet who wrote / hawk-like, no longer in need / of predatory advice, able to spiral / onto a stray word, sneak it from the set’. The words could apply just as easily to White himself.

Like that poet (T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes? — certain internal references to Four Quartets would suggest the first), he’s very definitely ‘not shovelling bullshit’:

It’s difficult to forget how much we know
and look at the site as if for the first time
to catch the flow but not the flood
nobody told me
it never got easier, this putting on the page.

If you are intending to read Pat White, this is the book to buy. If you’re not, I have to say that you’re missing a treat: a collection that brings together poems that are beautiful, unassuming and perfectly paced, all at the same time.

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 Booklaunch (10 March, 2020)

(30-31/7/19)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020. ISBN 978-0-9951229-3-2 (March 2020): 330-33.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020


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John Caselberg & Lawrence Jones (2005)

Janet Wilson, ed.: WLWE: World Literature Written in English 40 (2) (2004)

‘Asclepius’. Poet Triumphant: The Life and Writings of R. A. K. Mason (1905-1971). Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2004. ISBN 1-877228-79-6 / Lawrence Jones. Picking up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-864-73-455-7.

Asclepius: Poet Triumphant (2004)

‘This is no time to be studying the tonal values of the minor works of T. E. Brown [sic]’

So R. A. K. Mason, in the editorial notes to Phoenix 3 (March 1933). In true thirties style, he continued, “It is the greatest hour in history.” Obviously the ‘sic’ was not included in Mason’s original editorial. I’ve supplied it from p.30 of Lawrence Jones’s recent history of the growth of New Zealand literary nationalism, Picking up the Traces.

Interestingly (unsurprisingly), ‘Asclepius’ quotes from the same classic passage on p.136 of his biography of Mason, Poet Triumphant. Only, after the mention of T. E. Brown, he supplies the footnote: “T. E. Brown (1830-97), author of Fo’c’sle Yarns, etc.”

It’s not a matter of great moment in itself, but that ‘sic’ nags at me. Why is it there? A quick check of the index to Lawrence Jones’ book gives us the following: “Browne, T. E.: 30.” Did he confuse the Victorian poetaster with the more celebrated Sir Thomas Browne? Does that explain the inconsistency? Did he assume that Mason couldn’t spell? I’m none the wiser, I’m afraid. (The spelling T. E. Brown is, by the way, correct).

Jones and ‘Asclepius’ (a pseudonym which does little to mask the real author of this new Mason biography, the poet John Caselberg – clearly identified in the copyright notes on p.324) are, after all, traversing much of the same territory. Perhaps, then, this trivial-seeming disparity is not so trivial after all. Perhaps it may help us to understand the two books better – or, at any rate, their author’s intentions.

Professor Lawrence Jones’ book comes from darkest Academia. From the moment we pick it up, sampling the battery of name-dropping, literary side-references, and local literary allusions on the very first page, we know who it is meant for: readers with a considerable knowledge of New Zealand writing of the 30s and 40s, readers (what is more) well acquainted with the arguments of such predecessors as Stuart Murray (Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism in the 1930s), Rachel Barrowman (A Popular Vision: Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950), Kai Jensen (Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature), Bill Pearson’s ‘Fretful Sleepers’, not to mention the critical writings of Allen Curnow himself.

I could expand the list, but I think you get the idea. This is an attempt at a comprehensive synthesis of a lot of earlier critical work, mainly (in recent years) of a revisionist turn. Insofar as I can detect a consistent point of view in Jones, it is a conservative one. Curnow’s canon-building may have displaced a few emphases, which have been largely corrected by subsequent interventions from Feminist and Marxist critics, but what we are left with is a rich tradition to savour and celebrate:

This study has tried to demonstrate that the Phoenix-Caxton writers were at the centre of a coherent, conscious, revolutionary literary movement … While the movement was scarcely the beginning of New Zealand literature, as its makers were fond of proclaiming, it did bring a profound change … a change that, whatever the movement’s blind spots, was clearly a change for the better. [426]

“Whatever the movement’s blind spots” (clannishness? misogyny? politics? lack of politics? one has to go back to Jensen, Murray and their predecessors to get a clear sense of them), “… the literary results were not just therapeutic, not just a necessary adolescent revolt”. Jones concludes by listing some classic works by Curnow, Fairburn, Glover and Sargeson, along with John Mulgan’s Man Alone and Robin Hyde’s Nor the Years Condemn. “The creation of them is the movement’s most lasting legacy.” [429].

It’s not that I disagree with this conclusion. It seems a very sensible one, in fact. It’s just that it’s taken so long to get there, through such a hedge of references and side-references, that one can’t help but expect more. For instance, I wouldn’t mind more convincing evidence to support this idea of a “coherent, conscious, revolutionary literary movement.” Simply using the words “the movement” a lot, and pointing out that all the writers knew each other, published in the same magazines, and used Lowry and Glover as printers doesn’t get us anywhere new. We knew that going in (or if we didn’t, we’re not likely to find out from this rather confusingly presented mass of data).

Jones’s book is clearly a useful one for students of the period (though the ‘T. E. Brown” mistake, which he attempts to father on Mason, reminds us not to trust him too unquestioningly on particulars). It conspicuously fails to put a full stop to the ongoing spirit of revisionism in New Zealand literary studies. Perhaps I’m wrong to attribute such an intention to him, but this book does read to me like an attempt to drown us in detail and thus get the last word in an ongoing debate. I fear a lot more remains to be said about the thirties before that can be achieved.

John Caselberg’s book, by contrast, comes from a much stranger and (to my mind) much more interesting place. It would be hard to justify calling it a good book, let alone a good biography, but it has considerable virtues all the same. Even the publisher’s blurb calls it a text “which … may be read as a companion volume” to Rachel Barrowman’s Montana award-winning biography Mason (2003), so it’s clearly not intended to rival her more comprehensive, dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, Michael King-like performance.

Why read it at all, then? Well, for one thing, it’s interesting to see how much of Barrowman’s background research (in particular) came from her erstwhile collaborator, who laboured on the task for nearly thirty years. More to the point, though, Caselberg comes to praise Mason, not to bury him. The tone is unashamedly partisan throughout. What’s more, he means to prove his point – partly by eliding over or simply leaving out awkward biographical details of Mason’s mental illnesses, bouts of depression, and fits of pique, but also by a poet’s attention to precision, through close readings of his major texts.

At times this becomes tedious, it must be acknowledged. Caselberg goes through poem after poem explaining difficulties and spelling out references like the editor of a High School crib. He hits far more than he misses, though, and certainly succeeds in explaining some very familiar poems to me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

I suppose the best thing about this book for me is the fact that it’s been written according to a theory of biography. Caselberg has studied the history of the genre, from Plutarch and Doctor Johnson to Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann, and it’s clear that his sympathy is with the earlier approach – a book composed to rules, selectively choosing data to justify its points. What he has written, in fact, is closer to a biographical essay than the more common contemporary thick-as-a-brick biographical tombstone.

It’s a beautifully-presented book (it’s nice to hear that Caselberg was able to see an advance copy on his deathbed, after all those years of travail and disappointment). The fact that he chose as his pseudonym the Greek god of medicine and healing gives us another clue to his intentions: Mason, to him, is not “the damaged, courageous man who lost his gift” (Bill Manhire’s blurb for Rachel Barrowman’s book), but rather a hero to be admired: a man of vision and social conscience as well as poetic talent. His point is, I think – and who can dispute it? – that we too have more important things to think about right now than the minor works of T. E. Brown (or T. E. Lawrence or T. S. Eliot, for that matter). Our complacent, self-satisfied world of liberal values is crumbling around us, and, as in the thirties, it’s time to take a stand.

One can’t but agree with Asclepius / Caselberg that the choices and dilemmas of a man such as R. A. K. Mason have become, once again, of more than simply Academic interest.

Lawrence Jones: Picking Up The Traces (2003)

(2004)

WLWE: World Literature in English (UK) 40 (2) (2004): 144-47.

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WLWE: World Literature Written in English 40 (2) (2004)


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R. A. K. Mason & Maurice Duggan (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

R. A. K. Mason, Four Short Stories 1931-35. With an Afterword by Rachel Barrowman. Auckland: The Holloway Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9582313-4-6. 43 pp. RRP $75 / Maurice Duggan, A Voice for the Minotaur: Selected Poems. Edited by Ian Richards. Auckland: The Holloway Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9582313-1-1. 53 pp. RRP $100.

R. A. K. Mason: Four Short Stories 1931-35 (2003)

It seems entirely typical of the Holloway Press that it should have issued a collection of poems by a celebrated writer of short stories, and then have followed that with a collection of short stories by a celebrated poet. Both books include contextualising information by their (respective) authors’ biographers; both have a (detachable) photograph as frontispiece; both are (expensive) lovingly produced objets d’art …

And are the results worth all that time and trouble (and your money?) Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t think that either could be said to demand any substantial critical repositioning. Mason’s gifts were as clearly for poetry as Duggan’s were for prose. If one compares “Along Rideout Road that Summer” with, say, “Calypso” (“She sought in thronged sandals to match his stride” [14]), or “Dialogue after Midnight” (“She: But after this, what then? / After this night and springing day / What next?” … “He: No more of talk and tears, / I am sick of tears and talk.” [17]), one is still as struck by the intensely conventional sense of genre and language in the latter, as by the exuberant inventiveness of the former.

The same, unfortunately, proves to be true of Mason’s short stories. “The Meth Fiend” is a brilliant title, but the story reads more like pastiche Jack London than any kind of “tribute to Joyce.” “The Mountain of the Gods” is embarrassing doctrinaire tosh in the form of an Audenesque fable. “His End was Peace,” however, is a little more ambitious. Mason here has a coherent fictional objective: portraying a mind’s moment of breakdown. And, to be fair, he does it well. His prose is clear and expressive, the characterisation at least adequate. One might object that the same thing had been done better by Galsworthy in The Forsyte Saga (which is true), but that’s scarcely a criticism. The real problem is that the story’s too short – that it leads nowhere. It would make a good chapter in a novel, but by itself really has too little to say. Such a novel, if it existed, would (I suspect) resemble the work of H. G. Wells or Arnold Bennett more than that of Joyce or Conrad, but that’s probably no bad thing. The critical eclipse of the great Edwardian novelists has already endured far too long.

Mason’s fourth story, “Spring-time and the Sick-bed” is in many ways the best. In it, a man decides to go bush instead of staying to look after his invalid wife. It’s a simple idea (rather like Jack London’s classic “The Apostate,” in fact). Rachel Barrowman, in her short (but indispensable) Afterword, reveals that:

When he showed [it] to his friend Marie Gaudin …. she remarked, “I didn’t know you felt that way about your mother’, to which Mason replied, ‘I didn’t know you were so clever.’ [38]

It’s hard to believe that any great acuity was required. The story reminds me very strongly of the one written by an earnest henpecked creative writing student (played by Danny de Vito) in the Billy Crystal comedy Throw Momma from the Train. That story ran (from memory) something like:

He walked into the room. She was sitting at the table. The axe felt cold in his hand. He moved towards her. She looked up. The axe descended again and again and again and again …

‘There’s no suspense, no motivation … It’d be nice to at least know why he wants to kill her … It lacks pretty much everything that constitutes a story,” as Billy Crystal (playing the professor) remarks. Mason’s story is a bit more subtle than that, but not much – and that’s why I like it. I’d like to read more of the same sort, in fact: less ventroiloquising and more naked self-expression (it could scarcely be said to qualify as self-analysis).

It might be objected that it was a bad idea to interleaf the stories with facsimiles of various of Mason’s canonical poems (“On the Swag,” “Youth at the Dance,” and so on). It does have the effect of showing up the (comparative) clumsiness of the stories, but more importantly I think it shows the fundamental consistency of Mason’s work in both genres. If one had ever thought of Mason as any kind of a stylist or craftsman, this book has the effect of reminding us that it’s bitter honesty that actually constitutes his strength. The Throw Momma from the Train story is not likely to please many readers, or be commercially successful (or to be published, for that matter), but it is powerful, heartfelt writing. All those Mason poems about wanking and moaning and lusting after the unattainable were put together better than “Spring-time and the Sick-bed,” but not by much. He clearly had a knack for verse (and a more useful model, in A. E. Housman) which was stronger than his knack for prose, but I feel, nevertheless, that he could have become a novelist. All that rage and passion had to find an outlet somehow. I think he made the right choice in sticking to poetry, but this book does intimate an intriguing might-have-been: a New Zealand Jack London instead of our Kiwi Housman.

In conclusion, I guess this goes to show just how important it is to have the Holloway Press. Who else would have taken on these stories? Because, after all, they’re not all that good in a conventional sense. But that only serves to make them a better mirror of their creator’s mind. The Duggan book, it must be admitted, is both less revealing and requires less justification. Duggan’s poems are accomplished and (at times) moving. He clearly intended to issue them out in book form, which makes them far more guarded than Mason’s shadow-puppet stories. One can see the influence of Smithyman, in particular, in some of the more ambitious poems collected here: “Landscape with Figures” [12-13], say, or “In the Territory” [49], but the strongest are the simplest: the pain in his Sargeson poem “Calling on F. S. (1945)” [46] or the rather lovely “In Residence: Auckland 1974,” written as he lay dying in hospital:

We are an axis a pivot here
upon which the winds turn
boring up naked from the pole –
nor’easters peppery and moist. [46]

In short, they’re something of a gift.

Maurice Duggan: A Voice for the Minotaur (2001)

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 87-88

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brief 29 (2004)


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