More Pus and Decadence

Nothing Like the Sun is as an autobiography of William Shakespeare, framed as a lecture given by Anthony Burgess (who is the author of the book). And the prose is just as you would expect from a collaboration between Shakespeare and Burgess:dense, witty, powerful, oozing with pus and legs and decadent prose. The easiest way into the book is through the plot, which tells the story of WS's rise to prominence and the loves and troubles he comes across along the way.

There is, firstly, his early gift and thrill with words. “’Water hath a trick of drowning and, at best, is a wetter.’ And then the jingle ruled him, already a word-boy. ‘Water wetter water wetter water wetter.’” Then, his unusual appetite for love, or at least his unusual skill in rendering it. “He heard above the beating of his blood the rustling of linen, a gentle panting at the restraining fingers of tapes and laces that yielded all too slowly...” This is the young domesticated WS, writing a youthful sonnet in the middle of a house-hold night, the slops and greasy broth and father calling for work, a bickering sister.

“And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.”

His father is sympathetic. “I have somewhere a piece of fine parchment. Copy the poem fair.” But the dark women is all bundled up with someone else. WS runs on fire from the happy rogering may-pole pagans, their “buttocks moon-besilvered,” and gets well drunk on sixpence of beer and the brimming talk of country rogues. A gap in the memory, a naked surprise in the morning, an accidental child and an accidental wife.

How doth WS the married man? Well, “he had but half of that bed now, and the familiar rest he sought, in so great need, so worn, was less than one quarter what it had formerly been.” WS the married man goes not very well at all, and with not much hope of getting better. “For one line of verse,” he says to his new wife, “I would trade thirty such scolds as you.”

Off he goes to teach words to little boys, and is fired for making lewd advances on his students. He leaves with his future all broken up, but his word-sense in tact, as ever. “I am going,” said WS. “I feel defiled.” (A good phrase, he saw that: a field defiled.)’ Back to the railing wife and her belly double-pumped with babies.

Things really get going, the WS we know starts to really take over the plot, when he falls in with the Queens Men, who arrive in Stratford just as an old herbalist, “cat-queen, cartomancer”, is driven up the street by a mad cruel mob with their heads full of witchy jeers. There is more madness and cruelty in the book, of nature and of humans; but more on that later.

In WS's adult career there are, on Burgess's account, a few key turning points. One is WS’s response to an attack from a fellow actor, an attack upon his talent and good-will. He is conceited, he is told, an upstart; indeed, he is an “upstart crow.” WS will not stand for this. He has always fancied words. With something to prove, fancy hardens into ambition. He will not sniffle along as a mediocrity, a “play-botcher, an excitor of groundlings, a poor stumbling actor. The time was come to show he was a poet.”

Titus Andronichus is another key, because it starts a friendship that shapes the life and mind of WS. The play piques an audience of nobles, who call the playwright to dine. Wits parry, eyes discover. WS is commissioned by Essex to write a poem, Southhampton quips and glitters. WS is beguiled, and he knows this in a way you might expect, through speech: “the triple chime of his name’s homonym from that lordly and desirable mouth…the lip’s pout, the red tounge’s lifting lazily.” It is a short step to the beginning of a lush, difficult friendship, one that moves from infatuation to love, teacher to equal, affection to tension to bitterness and split. The career of the friendship helps to define the course of the book and of WS's creative life. WS goes passive and old as his boy-lord grows grows restless and clever, setting one eye on advancement and another on treason. And this is the friendship that inspires the bulk of WS's sonnets: the marriage sonnets come first; later, when the clever Southhampton sees through them, the sonnets of the revival of love; the sonnets of ill-fated lust, when WS's lust turns ill-fated.

There is another turning point when Southhampton takes WS to the public execution of three Spaniards. Here is blood and slaughter in the middle of cushions and fair coaches, and WS is shocked, especially by the response of his noble friend, who is callous and smiling. The hangman’s knife going straight from heart to groin, the fat on the heart, the small girl who leaps and claps when the entrails come out. It is the start of WSs separation from Southampton, but also of his tiredness, his growing age.

Age, however, does not enfeeble his appetites for too long. “Let me take a breath, let me take a swig, for, my heart, she is coming”: separation from Harry coincides with the arrival of a new intimacy, a glittering Negro who revives a “boyhood’s timid lust for the wealth of endragoned seas and spice-islands.” It is a rich union, lush and violent, more so when her infidelity is found out. “To her to rail, beat, near-kill. I rip her bodice, tear, wrench, gnash, chew.” After this, WS goes despondent, withdraws into verse.

We do not hear a whole lot about the writing of WSs great works, or the playing of them; we get the context instead, their worldly inspiration and deployment. WS wooes S with his Venus and Adonis. The young nobles “swoon at its rich conceits,” as they do with The Rape of Lucrece. This is sweet Master Shakespeare at his sugary best, and the Inns of the toffs, and the University darlings, lick it up and go dizzy with epithets – “oh, the commodious conceits, the mellifluous facetiousness.” We see the intrigue behind the marriage sonnets the scenes of filth behind Troilus and Cressida. We witness a short sketching-out of a “warring family play”, with a Montague coming into it, and the next we know of Romeo and Juliet is as a finished play, “ravishing the inns.” Here is boss Dick Burbage saying a play is needed for a wedding in three weeks, here is a stanza from Chaucer, here a name (“And then came the name Bottom…”), and a title forked straight out of real life: “Yet with my fire made up I sweated as midsummer, and lo I got my title.” We witness WS turning away from the poems that ravished his noble patrons. They are something, but not enough. He cannot go on “living in a filigree cage, fed on marchpane, turning out jewelled stanzas for the delectation of lords, a very superior glover.” His sees “verse of a very different order.”

Up goes the Globe Theatre, and up goes the rod again of WS, and away he goes again on a lusty marathon. The narrator recounts one particular night with his black beauty. In the plot of the book, more things go on after this event: WS goes into decline, breaking out into pussy gruesomeness and weary sores; he speaks his dying words, he dies. But on this particular night he goes out into the London night and walks along with his dark friend, and as he does so the grim city turns, on an edge of love and fancy, into a lovely place where lovers walk. This transmuting act, played out in dirt and filth for the sake of love or art or some other high thing, has the feel of a climax. The beggars are heroes, the kites are cleansers:

“London, the defiled city, became a sweet bower for their love’s wandering, even in the August heat. The kites that hovered or, perched, picked at the flesh of traitor’s skulls became good cleansing birds, bright of eye and feather, part of the bestiary of the myth that enthralled them as they made it. The torn and screaming bears and dogs and apes in the pits of Paris Garden were martyrs who rose at once into gold heraldic zoomorphs to support the scutcheon of their static and sempiternal love. The wretches that lolled in chains on the lapping edge of the Thames, third tide washed over, noseless, lipless, eye-eaten, joined the swinging hanged at Tyburn and the rotting in the jails to be made heros of a classical hell that, turned into music by Vergil, was sweet and pretty schoolday innocence.”

*****

Themes? There is a lot of madness and a lot of cruelty, of nature and of people. The witch-hunters, the plague and all it caused, the sunny horror of a public execution, prison-riots and money-riots, cracking heads and sticky blood in the afternoon, pus-bulging syphilis, the rats in the tower. Shit heaves. Rats run.

“The flesher shooes flies off with both hands before chopping his stinking beef.”

“The city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the at-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus.”

More than once WS sees the city as himself.

“In my delirium the City was mine own body – fighting broke out in ulcers on left thigh, both armpits, in the spongy and corrupt groin…the image of the falling city, pre-figured in the prodigies of a night, was drawn from my own body – the bloody holes, the burning hand.”

Some of the best descriptions of physical filth are used as reports of other kinds of corruption:

“Limping about Bread Street and Milk Streer, inhaling Fleet Ditch, I was drawn to searching out my fellows in disease, gloating on a nose-sore like a raspberry, a lip glistening soft, wet, huge, coal-shiny, a naked arm that was yellow streaks and rose pustules, a stone mined with worms. Then I reeled at my discovery of what I should have long known – that the fistulas and imposthumes, bent bones, swellings, corrupt sores, fetor were of no different order that the venality and treachery and injustice and cold laughing murder of the Court. And yet none of these leprous and stinking wretches had willed their rottenness. The foul wrong lay then beyond man’s own purposing; there was somewhere, outside time’s very beginning, an infinite well of putridity from which body and mind alike were driven, by some force unseen and uncontrollable, to drink...the fruitful triangle of stealing friend, stolen mistress, WS. Well, what was the agitation in the city of mine own soul but that? A finger-dip into butter-smooth pleasure and the armies and rioters trample through my veins, crying Kill kill.”

Kites are omnipresent. They wheel above the story like page-numbers, marking time and happenings. They signal the arrival of the plague, “announced in tender swelling buboes.” They share in the slaughter at Tyburn, where three Spaniards, shackled for treason, are rope-dangled, stretched, and opened up by a hangman’s axe. They hang around the rise of WS, around the soft and witty lords in their gold float; and around the decline of WS, his flesh-eating ruin. They are connected to WS's wife, whose name they screech as WS travels home to find said wife with child; they are part of the dark romance in the later pages; as mentioned, they are cleaners in WS's romantic vision of London.

The book is full of bodies, and human fleshiness gives rise to the most lovely notions and the most appalling. It is full of sweet and golden love, spicetrees and fresh thighs; but it is full of ugliness too. This is Shakespeare’s time, when people lived close to their bodies and to the bodies of others, to dirt and sun and indelicate nature. There are no planes but there are kites. There are no buses or fridges or self-cleaning toilets. Nature is the opposite of whiteware. It is profuse and lusty and runs away in the distance, changing out of sight, and thereby it fits perfectly the prose of WS. At the end of the book there is a sense of massive sickness and massive termination, a mad ending that is too sick and violent for reason; it makes reason soft and naïve and senseless, and leaves poetry as the only sane thing, because poetry is madly full of words and it rows over the horrible mess and casts it on a clean mirror. “Die in dust but live in filth. Well, if we are to live with it we must somehow ennoble it.”

Nothing Like The Sun: Pus and Decadence

The next post was meant to be a review of Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun, but really it is just an excuse to quote Anthony Burgess as he imitates Shakespeare. Here are some of the juicy bits, unspoiled by my ramblings:

Was it, he wondered then, to be the way of the adventurer, mythical raker of carbuncles and diamonds from beneath the spicetrees, but first and last the hold’s stink and the foul water after the weeviled biscuit, men rent and filthy and reechy like their shirts of the hogo of earwax, the hap of wrack and piracy or, at best, spewing among rude and rough rascals made roaring lustful with salt beef and, a mere week at sea, cursing and raging in their fights over the ravaging of the soft white body of a boy, a boy refined and gentled with snippets of Ovid and maxims out of Seneca. A dark excitement came that guilt once pounced on in a rearing wave to wash away. Yet the names fired: America, Selenetide, Zanzibar, Terra Florida, Canaria, Palme Forro…

Reechy! Hogo! Selenetide, Canaria! Mounched! (Mounched?) Frotting, spirochaete! Croshabell, oaklings, footsticks, cinques, moxibustion, dittany!

He sat at the table on a three-legged stool, moving a greasy wash-clout from it first; the cheesy smell of curds rose at him like a small grey spirit. She mounched away at nothing, bringing cards. He knew these cards, though not the manner of telling them. Cartomancy. He thrilled at the word. These were not for an innocent game of trump or ruff; they were antique pictures, of towers crumbling to brick in a lightening-flash; of pope and empress; the moon all blood; Adam and Eve; the rising of the dead, sleepy and naked, at doomsday’s trumpet.

Sail-trimmers at their work on the waist between poop and forecastle, where too were stowed pinnance and skiff. The gravel-ballast and cable tiers; the outboard-thrusting beakhead that cracked the seas as the ship plunged. The hold below the orlop where the rotten beer and crawling cheese were stored. Foresail and foretop sail on the foremast; square course and topsail on the mainmast; the mizen mast with its lanteen or mizen yard; the bonaventure mizen; drabler and bonnet. Calivers and arquebuses, the gunner with his linstock, the aft and forward slueing of the carriage, the quoin.

Drink, then. Down it among the titbrained molligolliards of country copulatives, of a beastly sort, all, their browned pickers a-clutch of their spilliwilly potkins, filthy from the handling of spade and harrow, cheesy from udder new-milked, slashed mouths agape at some merry tale from that rogue with rat-skins around his middle, coneyskin cap on’s sconce. Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic. Swill thou among them, O London Will-to-be, gentleman-in-waiting, scrike thine ale’s laughter with Hodge and Tom and Dick and Blakc Jack the outlander from Long Compton…Hast a privy for a god, then, with the shit in’t. Sayest? Not one fart do I give, nay, for all thy great tally. Wouldst test it, then? Thou wouldst not, for thou art but a hulking snivelling codardo. I have been in the wars and do speak the tongues of the Low Countries. Ik om England soldado. U gif me to trinken. Who saith a liar? I will make his gnashers be all bloody. I will give him a fair crack, aye. You are but country cledge, all, that have seen naught of this world, and this one here, who is but new-wiped, he is a dizard. Thou yearling, thou, had I my hanger I would deal thee a great flankard. But I have my nief and I will mash thy fleering bubbibubkin lips withal…

It was no wise congrued with her lying near-bare against him nor with that horrible steaming-out, some few minutes past, of a mouthful apter for a growling leching collier pumping his foul water into some giggling alley-mort up by the darkling wall of a stinking alehouse privy.

Martin Amis, "The Information"

Here's the first page of The Information, by Martin Amis.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “what is it?” And the men say, “Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”

Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, trained in first-aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swifts Juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.

Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.

“Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams.”

Forget the mild, straight-faced sexism, or the fact that women cry at night as well (let's not argue about all that) or the imprecise unhappiness that runs through the whole novel, and gets tiresome after while; forget the references to the outer universe, the frailty of a novelist who ventures into the details of phsyics, and the foolhardiness of anyone who does so with the aim of asking the tired question of “what are we in the eyes of the universe?”

Forget the forgettable bits. But remember the bits that get stuck in the mind because they are strung with hooks of great prose. “Swing low on your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob-probes, and you will mark.” That line would look good, I think, at the start of a poem, let alone a novel. And the “distant seaguls falling through his lungs.” Where does this come from, and how does this strange image do its meaning-work? I don't know, but it works all right: empty sea, emptying sky. The striding Christ is superfluous, isn't it, as far as meaning goes? If anything it goes too far and upsets the solemnity of the occasion. But it doesn't matter, because it is a boastful, playful flourish, full of the joy of writing.

For hunters of metaphors, Amis is a teeming plain.

“Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in their sleep, and reef-knotted in their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libido – there are neutral eagles on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.”

“Now came the boys – in what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle...by the time he rounded the final half-landing the front door was opening – was closing – and with a whip of its tail the flurry of their life was gone.”

But perhaps there is more to analysing a book than listing metaphors. Well.... perhaps. In a limited sense, on some days. I have to admit that there's a plot in The Information, something about sex and a well-read hitman and literary jealousy. There are themes as well. Ageing, the vastness of the physical universe, the power of art and the pushiness of life, sons and fathers, the search for the “universal.”

But I'ld say that these galvanising agents do not do as much to unite the novel as does the mood of the thing. The book has a sad, tired mood, bitter but impotent. This is the mood of the main character, who is the emotional centre of the book. We see the others through the smog of Richard's unhappiness. In this atmosphere, Gwyn's bright visions of a better earth, laid out peacefully in his best-selling novel, are depressingly fake. Richard's wife is an obsession he fails to satisfy, and her coldness towards his art is another example of her distance, the obscurity of her “private cosmogony.” America is a deafening mystery that Richard can observe but not absorb. He returns to England to the safety of its past, the place where students spend “three years in twelfth century universities with Paradise Lost on their knees.” But the past of England is also absent. England is an old baron, comically senile; a shambling mansion; the success of fake novelists; dead children on the muddy paths of Dogshit Park.

If we wanted to sum up Richard in one word, the word would be “isolation.” In the fog he hears his sons play in the park, but he cannot see them and he cannot understand their sounds. His best friend is a man he despises. His wife is part of the flurry of life, and Richard is standing on the stairs. To the men in the local pub he is a knowledge-freak, an impressive man but an outsider. Arguably, the person with whom he is most intimate is Scozzy, the well-read hitman. And Scozzy, arguably the most confident character in the book, is an irreversible misanthrope.

The Information was written in 1995, in a pre-internet age (the writer predicts that postmen will be superseded by the fax). This may be related to the fact that, in this book, “information” is not treated as a false thing, mere data, something to be contrasted with “knowledge” or “understanding.” For Richard, information is desirable, something contrasted favourably with the silence or gibberish of family members, and with the short platitudes, endlessly repeated, of publicists and sham novelists. Richard has a radio interview that is meant to be twenty minutes long but ends up at two minutes. He is determined not to label himself with a slogan, but he ends up saying nothing about his writing:

“But what is it saying?”
“It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it in any other way.”
“Richard Tull? Thank you very much.”

Richard wants to be incompressible but ends up being invisible. Perhaps the problem of his wife is similar: in wanting to say everything he ends up saying nothing. Certainly this is a problem at other times. Extraordinarily, Richard gives a passionate speech (“You don't think that's extraordinary? Oh, but it is”). Predictably, he loses a job. Richard may want information, but not everyone does.

Is there any success or salvation in this book, any productive exchange of information, any victories of expression that are not just a retreats into obscure art or private clarity? We'll see. In the meantime, mark the prose. I can open the book at random and reliably come across a piece of writing that matches the rhythm and vividness of the first page. Perhaps it would take a long time and groping to get the message of the whole book: at that level, information is not easy to come by. But the transmission of mood and speech and image, at the level of sentence and paragraph, is as clear and informative as you could want. Does that constitute an overall message? Look for meaning in the fridge or the Friday morning, not in the stars? Look for pixels, not pictures? Whether it is or not, I think it works well as a novelists' mantra, this anti-message message. But this is too broad: if Amis has something to say here, it must be more specific than that. And whether he has anything to say or not, he has a lot to give to anyone who reads authors for their verbal gifts, their non-prosaic prose.

Listening Closely to Small Sounds

Big ups to writers who describe highly dramatic events in a highly un-dramatic manner.

Here is a passage from Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist.

Suddenly, Roberta cried out, and was sitting on the pavement, cradling a bloody mess that, Alice reasoned, could only be Faye. Yes, she could see an arm, white, pretty, whole, with a tangle of coloured bandages on the wrist.

Faye is one of the novel’s key characters, and the bomb blast that kills her is the climax of the novel. What a temptation it must have been to write this event as a climax, to puff it up with paragraphs of lush description. And what a joy it is for the reader to read it as a climax, to witness this narrative blast without seeing the author strain towards it with unnecessary words. (Words that would give a false account of the event anyway, since they would swell an abrupt experience into a slow-motion contemplation.)

Here are some other passages in the same style:

Faye lay on her back. Propped slightly up on embroidered and frilled cushions, ghastly pale, her mouth slightly open, and her cut wrists rested on her thighs. Blood soaked everything.
Alice stood screaming.

The smell on this floor was strong. It came from upstairs. More slowly they went up generously wide stairs, and confronted a stench which made Jasper briefly retch. Alice’s face was stern and proud. She flung open a door on to a scene of plastic buckets, topped with shit. But this room had been deemed sufficiently full, and the one next to it had started. Ten or so red, yellow and orange buckets stood in a group, waiting.

Here it is not the revelation itself but the events surrounding it that give force to the former. Drama is indicated by its effects, like the smell of shit diffusing through the house.

Gigantic Consumption of Empty Whimsies

Below, a future historian looks back on the popular culture of (presumably) the early-mid twentieth century. (From The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse, first published 1943)

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather “chatted” about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly those manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of “writer,” but a great many of them seemed to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore titles such as “Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashion of 1870,” or “the Composer Rossini’s Favourite Dishes,” or “the Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of the Great Courtisans,” and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as “The Dream of Casting Gold Through the Centuries,” or “Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather,” and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been such people who devoured such chit-chat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and decent education should have helped to “service” this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, “service” was the expression used; it was also the word donating the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

I wonder what Herman Hesse would have thought of blogging.

Interestingly, the titles quoted in the passage look a lot like the articles published by the scholarly elite of the historian’s time (which is supposedly a apex of intellectual skill and purity). Eg. “The Pronunciation of Latin in the Universities of southern Italy toward the End of the Twelfth Century”.

Loose Relation

“The poems stand in some such loose relation as a ring of flushed girls who have just stopped dancing and let go hands.”

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. More over here.

Joe Bennett's "Land of Two Halves": Metaphors

By “metaphor” I don’t mean just metaphor, but any kind of inventive and striking comparison. Joe Bennett is a prolific manufacturer of metaphors. His writings, including “A Land of Two Halves,” are jumping with them. Most of the time they are good: they are vivid, original, funny, and suiting the rest of his prose in being compact, deft, unlaboured, more witty than eloquent. Even when they are not so good they are worth reading. Here is a selection from “Two Halves.”


Landscapes

Away to the West lie the purple foothills of the Southern Alps, a range of mountains like a dog’s back teeth that form the spine of the island.

..the sky stretches out, as delicately blue as a thrushes’ egg.

…where the land is carpeted in tussock the colour of a lion’s pelt.

Below us in the last of the afternoon sun the lake is crinkled like kitchen foil. A paddle-steamer chugs across it like a toy in a bath. Mountains climb straight out of the water…their jagged tops like the crest on a tuatara’s spine.

Fed further up the valley by waterfalls like straight white pencils, the water gathers here in swirling pools of green translucency, like thick stained glass slowly on the move.

The landscape was green as an ad.

When the whale rose, it rose like an island, a grey-brown hugeness.

I’m standing in shadow but the sky holds tufts of clouds like fading vapour-trails lit pinky-orange from below. The sinking sun has turned the highlands to the north the colour of ginger biscuits, slashed by the deep black shadows of the gulley. Waterfowl of all kinds are swinging across the sky to roost, like packs of slow arrows. The plaintive calling of a pair of paradise ducks carries forever across the stillness. The lake’s a mirror. Ducks tow rippled vee’s across it. And on the far side of the water the lights come on in Te Anau and the town seems dwarfed, puny. Eye-candy comes no sweeter.

A plane offers a view that we probably shouldn’t have, a view we can’t live in. It presents the land like a brochure.


…billiard table bush…

…knitting needle bush…

The spur-winged plover, a sort of lap-wing, with jowls as yellow as lemon-peel…and they take off into the night making a noise like train brakes.

It’s crown is an asymmetric mess, like an inverted root system. I lean against it, give it a slap. It’s like slapping a building.

A pair of ostriches with necks like vacuum cleaner hoses.

…feta, goats cheese in brine, huge waxed bowling balls of Gouda, Parmesan that crumbles like weather-worn sandstone.

I can understand the appeal of a steamtrain rattling along beside a lake…the gleaming beams of steel that link the wheels to the engine and circle like elbows.

Weather

The West side of each marquee is concave. The east side balloons like a pregnancy. Any unsecured corner of the canvas slaps like staccato applause. Guy-ropes thrum like the strings on a double bass.

Sudden full-blooded rain sweeps in from the Tasman sea, hitting the roof like flung gravel.

People

Unmatching Formica tables, unemptied ashtrays, a carpet like a disease, a drunk woman with three kids in need of a slap…

Their stereos thrum with bass, like heartbeats heard through a stethoscope.

His every movement is laboured and deliberate. He chews as if making a series of conscious, disconnected decisions to move his jaws.

They lean like a picket fence, their backs to the bar, their elbows on it, watching a Super 12 game between the Wellington hurricanes and an Australian team.

As he runs the whole pub stands on tiptoes and purses, tenses, clenches fists as if trying to hold back an orgasm.

The crows groans and oohs and cheers as one and surges like a school of fish.

His van looks like he’s deliberately pelted it with rocks.

Unkind

A lone woman strides the bank in three-quarter leisure-wear, power walking to the next cappuccino, and fiercely swinging her arms as if into the balls of an assailant.

She’s got the arse of a shire horse, a mighty thing ballooning on either side of the chair like two taught bags of cement.

Grim

The beach is stark. Waves the colour of dishwater pound the sand, receding to leave a scum of soiled froth that gasps and subsides like a spent fish.

Walking its streets feels like touring a cemetery that is not quite historic enough to be interesting. [Greymouth]

[motel rooms] resembled temporary porn studios, and probably some of them were – though rarely while I was in them.

A ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker’s tooth. Every guest has left a molecule of self…The air is like gravy.

Clouds weigh down like a press.

Most of the pokie players are over forty. Their faces are the faces of cattle in the rain.

Amusing

Sleek as bullets, they [pukekos] step high over the wetlands on their huge splayed feet as if studiously avoiding dogshit.

The penguins waddled along, like waiters with piles.

…and a lot more convincing than the concrete moa, which looks at first glance to have been surprised by a proctologist. And at the second glance, it still does.

In fifth-form Physics I learned that if you filled a matchbox with nuclei and then dropped it, it would sink thirty feet into the ground. New Zealand pies are similar.

By far the most vigorous thing on show is a fibreglass salmon, thirty feet tall and sculpted in the act of leaping, perhaps because of the telegaph pole stuck up its arse.

Each mussel is the size of a dighy..and has a frilly fringe of flesh attached to it, like a pensioners gumline.

Unexpected

Pukeko corpses are a common sight on the verge…their sleekness gone, like wrecked umbrellas.

Clouds mass out to sea like grey-black cauliflowers.

The foresters drop me in sunshine that feels brittle, like elderly sellotape.

Queenstown squats beneath the mountains like a whore in a palace. But she’s a rich whore, and a pretty one. The prices in the real-estate windows have strings of zeros in them like the wheels on the Kingston Flier.

Two Halves: Hitching Excerpts

Joe Bennett’s book A Land of Two Halves is about hitchhiking around New Zealand, and it is such a good read that one day I may even get around to reviewing it. In the mean time, here are some of Bennett’s remarks about hitchhiking, extracted from the book.

There’s a book to be written about the psychology of hitch-hiking, and this may turn out to be it, but for now let me observe only that the business is a matter of demeanour and that a large part of that demeanor is expressed in the thumb. It is possible to proffer a thumb demandingly, imploringly, jauntily, shyly, limply, apologetically or listlessly. My thumb is limp and embarrassed. (8-9)

The driver of the first car gestures that he’s turning off to the right. He probably isn’t, but that acknowledgement that I am here, that I exist and am doing what I am doing, brings a gust of what I want from this trip, a sense of being solitary, free, and somehow small. It’s a feeling I remember from my youth. I like it. (9)

And it [the feeling of being solitary etc.] comes with an abundance of random detail and the time to absorb it. (9)

Now that it’s over, the lift from Rick gives me a tingle of retrospective pleasure. I’ve no desire to meet Rick again, but I liked him and enjoyed his honesty and felt sorry for him. He also provided the sort of thing that makes hitching what it is. It let me step briefly into the mess of his life. And it did us both good. I must have been the first person he’d spoken to since the bitterness of his row that morning. Before he picked me up he must have been stewing, grinding his teeth, clenching the wheel. My presence let him unburden himself of some of that. And I relished the details vicariously. They reminded me that the world is wide and full of differences. And then I was able to step back out of that life, unwounded, uninvolved, almost untouched. (are page numbers really necessary?)

The propaganda against hitching has grown in recent times and you see fewer and fewer people doing it. But it’s not as dangerous as the propagandists make out. Never once have I been physically threatened by a driver. I’ve met nutters but they’ve been harmless nutters. And on the two occasions when I have been propositioned, both the propositioners, though big men and spectacularly ugly ones, were oblique in their propositioning, and they accepted the rebuff without demur.

Indeed my experiences of hitching have affirmed human nature far more often than they have damned it. For one thing, every lift begins with an act of generosity. And once inside the vehicle I have met infinitely more vulnerability and honesty than I have met aggression, perhaps because the fleeting nature of a lift invites intimacy. Both parties are staring ahead through the windscreen, so that words can be spoken as if to air. The best lifts are like confessionals on wheels, like psychiatric couches barrelling through the landscape. Hundreds of drivers have told me things that they have never told their partners, their parents or their children. I like all that. Indeed hitching is the only form of travel that makes the actual shifting of one’s flesh from one place to another something of interest, rather than a chore to be endured for the reward of arrival. Furthermore, the intimacy is temporary and carries none of the consequences of intimacy, which suits me just fine. Never once, anywhere, have I met any of my drivers a second time. So when Rick drives out of the main street of Geraldine he is driving out of my life for good. (no, I don't think they are)

Twenty-five years ago I got a lift from Dieppe to Rouen with a middle-aged English couple in a big Rover. The husband asked me if I was married. I said no.
‘Take my advice, son,’ he said, ‘and stay that way.’
I could think of nothing to say. I didn’t have to. The man had tapped a pent seam of his own venom and discharged it in a stream of invective against married life about traps and womanhood and money and handcuffs that took us half way to Rouen. His wife sat with a map on her lap and said nothing at all. (what a relief)

…And then, just as I was about to put my thumb out, I chose not to. The car slowed a little. It would have stopped. But I looked away and let it pass. Why? Why was simple. It was the sky and the land and the bubbling sense of little me as a speck upon it, tiny, trivial but utterly free. That’s all. Big sky, little man, the essential human comedy. As if for a moment I was suspended above myself, looking down and seeing this vain and self-preoccupied figure all alone on this big white land. That’s all. Call it perspective, if you like, call it Zen, call it a pound of parsnips and eat it with butter for all I care. It felt exhilarating.

Three backpackers are struggling along the main street against the wind. Each is toting both a backpack and a front-pack. A sniper would despair of wounding them fatally. One even carries a third bag in her hand, from which protrudes the corner of a kitchen sink. Time was when you could just push backpackers over and watch them writhe like flipped beetles. Today you have to trip them at the top of an incline so that they roll unstoppably down it in their casing of possessions. Or else you can do as I do now, and give an ironic middle-aged tut before passing by on the other side of the road.

The mist is thinning. Buildings have ghosted out of it and become solid. Over the course of an hour I watch the ironed sheet of a lake appear, shifting by imperceptible gradations from grey to black, from clack to steel, from steel to pine green. Folded mountains emerge as hints of themselves, then gather bulk. Above the sharply defined tree-line, some low vegetation, then what looks to be tussock, then bare rock and slides of scree and pockets of snow and then snow, all of it sharp in the sun. It is good to watch it happen. And there is no other form of travelling in which one would watch it happen. Hitching enforces immobility.

‘That the lion’s share of happiness is found by couples,’ wrote [the poet Philip] Larkin, sheer inaccuracy as far as I’m concerned’ – and as far as I’m concerned, too, at least when travelling. I have tried travelling in company and it has rarely worked. I once went down to France with a University friend. By the time we reached the Spanish border I thought I hated him. I didn’t. What I hated was having to compromise, to discuss, to reach decisions together, to agree on the next move. But more significantly I hated showing my timidity on the road, exposing so much of my weakness.

Frank Sargeson's "More Than Enough": Review

Frank Sargeson’s prose style is efficient, direct and self-effacing, and it is well-suited to the man. I have gleaned this from the second book in his autobiographical writings, which is called “More Then Enough”, was written between 1971 and 1973, and chronicles his life and work from the early 30s to the 1970s (or thereabouts), during which time he worked and lived primarily at his borrowed bach on the Auckland’s North Shore. Having approached this book after a sustained bout of Dickens reading, I was particularly struck by the plainness of Sargeson’s style. He tends to avoid punctuation, sometimes in a manner that would invite disapproval from English teachers, and as well as being long his sentences are swift and unmannered, like this one:

It is perhaps remarkable that despite the stream of rejection slips I became accustomed to, and despite my applying a rigorous self-scrutiny to every page of the stories I wrote and finding all of them without any exception falling short of the standards I had set for myself, I never over at least four years doubted that if I would if I persisted at last succeed in writing something which would be clearly marked by a quality special to myself.

If Dickens were to express the same information in a single sentence, it would probably run something more like this:

It is perhaps remarkable, that despite the stream of rejection slips I had become accustomed to; and despite my applying a rigorous self-scrutiny to every page of the stories I wrote; and despite finding that all of those pages, without any exception, fell short of the standards I set myself: I never at once doubted, over at least four years, that if I persisted I would at last succeed in writing something, which would be clearly marked by a quality that was special to myself.

To say that Sargeson’s writing is swift and unmannered is not to say, of course, that it is careless and crude. I imagine that it is pretty hard to find a writing style that allows one to write a hundred and fifty pages of narrative prose without boring or irritating the reader: it would need, for a start, to be even without being monotonous, and varied without being erratic. And to my admittedly untrained ear, it looks as if Sargeson’s style achieves both of those goals while at the same time causing the reader to concentrate rather on the things that he writes than the way in which he writes them. His rhythm, like other distinctive rhythms, is such that after spending a reasonable amount of time in its company the reader starts to discover that rhythm in other writing she reads, whether it be in letters to the editor or other novels: it is as if the reading faculty has been so clearly impressed by this particular mood and pace and style that the imprint has struck down into a deeper tissue than usual, and so that mood and pace and style is still present and active when one goes and reads something else, in a kind of literary after-image. And so in that sense it is a striking style of writing; but for some reason this does not make it an intrusive style. Rather the reverse is true: something in the swiftness of Sargeson’s prose means that he is able to convey a lot of matter clearly and directly and without any interference from the manner of its presentation. At one point Sargeson hints that this directness was an ideal to which he consciously aimed. He writes about one particular afternoon that is very heavily impressed on his memory, for the reason that it brought him a kind of epiphany of style, a discovery that one particular style, which appeared seemingly by accident in a prose piece he was writing that afternoon, was the one for him:

For the time being I was done with elaboration and complexity, with involved and decorated prose which I had hoped would express what I had to say, and by its very complication prove to the reader that what I had to say was valuable. What especially delighted me was that despite the simplicity of my sentences, they could in a page-long sketch achieve an unexpected totality not to be compared with the meagre sum of parts. I remember exactly my day of discovery, a Saturday afternoon when, with speed and sureness never before known to me I wrote the five hundred or so words required for ‘Conversation with my Uncle.’ (51)

Of course it was not quite as easy and immediate as all that. It looks as if Sargeson continued to ask and answer questions about the proper style to adopt well into his writing career, as I suppose most writers do, and it seems like it was a long time before this perfectionist settled upon a style that he could comfortably regard, if not as perfect, at least as satisfactory.

Was language merely the tool the novelist worked with, or was it part of the raw material of life he worked upon? Or was it a complex and difficult combination of both? If language was only a tool then the less attention it attracted to itself the better, and all fine writing and delight in words for their own sake had better be done without. But things of that kind might very well be permitted if language was part of the raw material…And there was no end to the number of questions, all so difficult and complicated I felt I must collapse under their burden. (94)

And other, more specific questions were also in need of answers, one related to the questions about place and identity that Sargeson (as anyone, I am sure) was interested in, and which I want to write about later on: “It made me uncomfortable to remember that I had myself aimed at a kind of Galsworthian prose style. [Does anyone know Galsworth?] So the question became inevitable: whether their might not be an appropriate language to deal with the material of New Zealand life?” (93)

The style that Sargeson finally settled upon (at least as it appears in this book) is distinctive not only for the structure of his sentences; and perhaps his unerring directness might be more easily traced to his language rather than his syntax. Sargeson repeatedly mentions his great admiration for poets, and his even greater admiration for Poets, and considers that, in light of the relative lack of renown enjoyed by this fine species, it might be a good idea if prose writers put more poetry into their writing, so that society in general was properly imbued with their subtle and fragrant art. If he takes up is own advice, however, he does so with enough subtlety that it is hard to find passages that are poetic in any obvious way. His diction is spare, as his use of the more recognisable poetic devices. As far as I can tell this is not, however, a fault, and the absence of any “delight in words for the sake of it”, or metaphor for the sake of it, means both that the “raw material” of his writing comes more directly to the reader, and that the poetic passages are more striking and effective when they do arrive. On the seventeenth page of the book he writes about his response to the news that he most probably should leave his uncle’s farm, saying that he “experienced a kind of shattering.” The figure would be innocuous and uninteresting if it were not that the previous seventeen pages had been written without aid from such devices: his discipline generates a poetry of its own.

The discipline of the prose has its counterpart in the discipline of the man, who had not only to bear the trials that face anyone who wishes to write fiction books prolifically and well, but also the various extra hardships that face an ill person who wished to pursue that vocation in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Only a person who has made a sustained attempt to write good novels will know what are the difficulties involved in such a task, but Sargeson does well to convey them to the normal reader.

This is the true core and essence of the matter: nothing on the paper to begin with, and within a couple of hours, or three or four…there must be words made into sentences, everything scrawled, corrected, deleted, interlined, word kites flying in the margins; yet all with life breathed in, with the heat of energy manifest as wit and humour, pain and tragedy, comedy and laughter, maybe just plain narrative line – all hanging together, fitted to the pattern of what has already appeared upon a hundred pages of two hundred yesterdays, and will appear upon another hundred of many more tomorrows. (77)

…but I knew well that the sort of writing I was attempting could be achieved only by the exercise of a rigorous discipline; that there must be the daily facing up to a blank sheet of paper, on which after so many hours there would be words and sentences – which any intelligent person of good-will might find interesting to read. (31)

Writing too was a mighty consumer of energy, besides a task one often went to with reluctance-not solely on account of its difficulty, but because every problem had to be wrestled with in solitude. (22)

To keep all of this up day after day required not only a great love for literature and a strong hope of eventually succeeding artistically and perhaps also critically, but also a great resolve. Even Sargeson, successful though he eventually became, had times when his interest in writing and his self-belief became frayed, and needed either outside help or mulish resolve to stop them from falling apart altogether. He was told at one point by Denis Glover (New Zealand poet, printer and soldier) that he and his writing were “pre-war”, and that accordingly he should forget about ever getting anything decent published (113); he was, as any writer must be, dismayed and overawed by the genius of past artists (95), and despaired of ever achieving what they had; his work was frequently rejected by his London publishers. And Sargeson’s need to work hard was heightened, at least in his own eyes, by his perceived lack of any great natural talent. He affirms quite blandly and openly that he really was not overly gifted at all, and hence that “everything over many years had to be learned.” And learning meant forcing oneself to learn, especially when disillusion or hardship made learning an unnatural process: at such times “there could be no room for excuses, for any elasticity of discipline, and even a touch of brutality might well be an advantage.” (131) Success requires hard work: somehow I think that has been said before, but it is worth repeating, and Sargesons’ case is interesting not only for the resistance he received from his human limitations (however large they really were), but from the environment in which he lived.

Sargeson’s environment was New Zealand in the middle years of the twentieth century. His relationship with this environment is complex and interesting, and the various shades and changes of that relationship may be regarded as one of the main themes of the book, as I expect they are a theme of Sargeson’s fiction. At its best, Sargeson’s connection with the New Zealand of his time is deep and innate, an aspect of the relationship that is clearest in his devotion to his uncle and his work on a farm somewhere in New Zealand (I don’t think a place-name is given). He writes feelingly about life on the land:

…it was a profound satisfaction to be exhausted at the end of a long day: the work had been its own sufficient reward, and I am sure it was the same with my uncle quite regardless of repetition year after year. Nothing, I told myself, could be more attractive than full stretch of wits and body followed by rest renewal repetition – in other words the prolongation of human life from day to day at a level which kept one right in touch with the commonest elements of human history and experiences. (14)

He writes just as feelingly of his uncle, who like Sargeson lives a life devoted to doing the kind of work in which “every problem encountered had to be wrestled with in solitude” (22), and who was to Sargeson a man of such fine quality that he (Sargeson) hesitated to represent him in fiction, afraid that his art could not do justice to the original.

Unfortunately, and despite this love for the land and for some of the people on it, Sargeson discovered many fellow citizens who were much more likely to fail in doing justice to Sargeson’s art, rather than the other way around. This is not to say that the locals were hostile or indifferent to Sargeson’s particular kind of literature, and that Sargeson resented their criticism; rather, that they were either hostile or indifferent to any kind of literature at all. He is not infrequently nagged by his parents to go and do something useful (law, for example, in which Sargeosn had a qualification and professional experience), instead of “wasting his time” with his literary work. He fields many suggestions, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, sometimes amiable and sometimes not, that his literary work is not really work at all, but a rather frivolous kind of holiday. He is very grateful for the company of Rex Fairburn, partly because the poet and lobbyist was a genuinely witty and learned person, and he gave “conversation which could be as fruitful as it was various as it was always possible”; but also because this intellectual vitality was, in Sargeson’s experience, “a rare kind of thing to encounter in my own country.” (49) When the German poet and scholar Karl Wolfskehl (I do not know this person) arrived in New Zealand, venerable in body and mind, and apparently named by Thomas Mann as “the last European man” (105), Sargeson often found cause to feel pained and embarrassed by how the Auckland response to his presence compared so unflatteringly to the response, say, of Venice; and at such times he “blushed for my country and its inhabitants.” (107) Even Rex Fairburn sometimes dismays Sargeson by setting his clumsy antipodean boot among the subtleties of European cultural life. And, overcome by his “momentous literary discovery” on that unforgettable Saturday afternoon, Sargeson did not expect that the significance of the event would be appreciated by his living companion, a “moderately literate” former sailor who responds to Sargesons’ excitement (“I had just discovered a new way of writing”) by clearing his throat and rustling his paper and doing not much else: and Sargeson writes resignedly that this man was “as good an index as any to the public reception I must expect from the environment I inhabited.” (51) Sargeson’s position is mirrored in that of another of his literary companions, Walter D’Arcy Cresswell; who, despite giving radio talks and readings that Sargeson describes as unsurpassed in New Zealand broadcasting, is deeply in debt with the green-grocer and is frequently in a state of uncertainty (more so than Sargeson) as to the source of his next meal. Meanwhile, Sargeson relies for the material for his weekly radio commentaries on snatches of broadcasts that he overhears while standing in shops or loitering in the evenings outside other people’s homes. (83)

So Sargeson found his own country a source of difficulty and doubt, especially when he compared its cultural achievements with those of England and Europe. But he also doubted his own capacities for the same reason. In the presence of Wolfskehl he is sometimes “weighed down by all that civilisation,” as he was when he walked the streets of England and the continent. For Sargeson, however, this awkwardness is as much an affirmation of his identity as it is a criticism, a reminder that he had in Europe “discovered myself to be truly a New Zealander, with my most truly spiritual place my uncle’s farm.” (111) It is worth looking at two more instances in the book in which Sargeson shows himself to be “truly a New Zealander,” before this essay comes to its belated conclusion: firstly, his garden; next, a man called Harry. These are interesting for their New-Zealandness, but also for other reasons.

For a long time Sargeson’s garden is for him not only a healthy-minded pastime but also one of his primary sources of physical nourishment. Wolfskehl regards this as a mark of his nationality: not only is this fellow able to write books, but he can also “grow his cabbage with his own hand.” (109) Sargeson’s garden is one of the more reticent characters in the book, but it is also one of the most important. As mentioned, it is a continuation of the earthy labour that he carried out at his uncle’s farm. And, as a very time-consuming task that is necessitated partly by his lack of money, it is a symbol of the lowly status in their own society of literary people, and the extra discipline that was required to sustain a writer’s life. But it is representative of the writing process itself, and although Sargeson does not make explicit the resemblance between his writing and his gardening (his style is too spare), the two activities make good companions. They both require some sort of raw matter before their important products can spring into growth. One of the things that I find astounding about anyone who writes fiction prolifically, is where they get their ideas from. To be sure, their material is the thoughts and doings of human beings, and those thoughts and doings are all around us; but one needs so many thoughts and doings to fill up a novel, and many more to fill up a life of novels, and surely such an abundance of output makes the amount of readily available input seem small and inadequate to the task. By way of comparison, arguments are all around us in the same way that thoughts and doings are: but how much more argumentation one must need, how much raw material one must have to collect, before one can write a book on philosophy, and how much more to fill up a lifetime of philosophising. Sargeson’s case is especially interesting, because he seems to have lived in such an isolated manner, detached from the thoughts and doings that he would seem to need in order to form a good base for literature. At times he had qualms about this sort of thing: he reports at one point becoming distressed by the “monstrous” need to question himself about “what exactly was this material of life.” (94)

Most of the time, however, Sargeson seems to have been quite well equipped with this raw stuff, the compost of literature, and perhaps he gained possession of it in much the same way he gained possession of the dead leaves, vegetable waste and manure (left by the horses and carts on his street) that he used as a base for his garden, a necessary grounding and a useful stimulant for the rich and varied produce that, like writing, comes forth in its best and fullest form only after years and years of “arduous and exacting compost-making.” (70) And, as with his compost, so with his writing: the trick, if you want to get enough raw stuff to spawn a novel or a garden, is to pick up the stuff that other people ignore or dislike or miss through the lack of effort. Sargeson loitered out on the road in the hope of some passing horse-shit much as he loitered outside other people’s houses so that (as well as getting his weekly radio broadcasts) he could gather up the manners and habits and phrases and symbols which those people let drop without knowing, and which they would not want to know about even if they could. A collector of other people’s waste does not look like a very salubrious individual: there is something eccentric and anti-social about collecting other people’s horse-shit, and there is the same unhealthy look about someone who makes living out of collecting other people’s habits and vices. But the other trick, to writing as to gardening, is to discover what is rich and healthy and pungent in the dropped waste of others, and to let those virtues feed a growth that will in the end be more palatable and enriching to the people who would not have the mind or the time to discover the same qualities in the original matter: and so Sargeson takes a conversation with an uncle and turns it into a symbol or a lesson, a parable of some kind; and so also writes about the “conforming people” who were “more or less the rule in my environment,” but does so in such a way as to bring forth what is healthy about their way of life, to “show them in their common humanity despite their occupational and household trappings.” (132)

One who benefits from Sargeson’s diligent collection and application of manure, is a man called Harry. Harry has a great fondness for horses, but he has through an underhand manoeuvre from the authorities been banned from the racecourse, and is left to find other work for himself where he can. He lives at Sargeson’s bach for a good thirty years, impressing the writer with a devotion to reading the racing pages that is as steady and unflinching as Sargeson’s devotion to writing his pages of fiction. Sargeson admires Harry for a number of reasons, but most relevant here is his affinity with horses, an affinity that recalls the close link between Sargeson’s uncle and his farm. He writes:

When however I for the first time saw him on the horse, my revision of all previous notions about possible relationships between human beings and horseflesh was instant. I think I reacted much as the American Indians are said to have when they first saw a mounted Spaniard, and supposed that man and beast were blended into a non-divisible entity never before known to him. (66)

Harry’s horse dies, unfortunately, and because of the horseman’s reticence Sargeson is left to imagine how things transpired, an activity that of course was, along with his discipline and his constant collecting of local detail, a vital part of his novel-writing process: a writer, like a gardener, has not only to collect more raw matter than the normal person, but also to work on that matter with a special skill and intensity, so that as much as possible of its natural richness is used to the advantage of its products, and Sargeson’s evocative gifts ensured that he drew as much life as he could out of the seeds he was given: “Great areas of his life and character remained inscrutable to me, but for that very reason he was constantly stimulating my imagination. (71)” And of course there was also his profound interest in the lives of human beings, his “insatiable curiosity about every manifestation of natural life which has never in a life-time deserted me.” (57)

Harry was not a deeply learned German poet, but Sargeson found him both personally attractive and imaginatively fertile; and perhaps this is a sign of his fondness for his own country, and his willingness to call it his own. Of his relationship with Harry Sargeson writes:

Never when I had found myself moved by sympathy and compassion for the universal individual universally caught in the universal fate had I become involved to the point of saturation: that is to say some part of myself remained detached, resting in a state of reticence and reserve. Now I was to know what it was to be totally committed to another person.

Perhaps More Than Enough can be regarded as the story of Sargeson developing a broader commitment of a similar kind, a commitment to his own country. If not, it may without injustice be regarded as the story of his growing commitment to writing; and in that story one can find an account of the universal writer universally caught in the universal fate. One can find his struggles with his work, not only in his search for the right style and the right material, but also in his occasional questioning of his very desire to spend his life writing a page of creative literature a day, and of his ability to succeed at such an undertaking. And in the hostility and indifference of many of the people around him one can find the struggles that occurred between his chosen work and his environment, an environment which he did not choose but which he came to an intimate relation with, in fiction and in life.

Frank Sargeson's "More Than Enough": Excerpts

Here are some excerpts from Frank Sargeson's autobiographical work, More Than Enough. First, here are some of his thoughts on the activity of writing.

I had discarded, and I thought finally, all my notions of ‘copying’ which had long tended to hamper me. In the past I had as it were taken a backward look, trying to show on paper what the lives of people I knew had formerly been (perhaps as some explanation for their present appearances). And I thought the more facts I knew about people the better. Now I told myself I wanted only the hint which would trigger off the evoking imagination. Let the evocative words be got down on paper one day, and let them the next be revised and re-arranged with many fresh and lively touches of invention. Let there be patience, but also let there be discipline whereby one thing could be shown to lead inevitably to another. And let it all be done hour by hour and day upon day until there at last was the job well done, a story, a book, a work of the imagination. (32)

My writing activities were often described as a hobby, but greatly encouraged by Cresswell’s example despite my troubling doubts whenever I turned to the poetry he had so far written, I never thought of my dealings with literature in that sense: for me, too, what I had set out to do must be the central aim and purpose of my life: like the child with the mud-pie I had an engagement with my own particular brand of creation, and everything else must be secondary. I re-affirmed that I must continue to live as I could, paying attention to the daily necessities only when much pressed by their urgency. After all, the shifts I would always be put to would enrich my experience of living, hence the work I was engaged on. After a decade of trial and error I felt that my life would be stripped bare of meaning if I abandoned my writing. (96)

I am prompted to question the reader, Is this sort of thing Life or Living?
I don’t pretend to know the reader’s answer, but in these late years I think I know my own. For me there is no contradiction. Life and work are one. To live has been to write. And I have lived besides in the work of other writers, and more especially the poets. (77)

Sometimes I have thought that without a good deal of ‘natural’ ability nobody should attempt to write. And I had myself no such ability and everything over many years had to be learned. Then again, hearing stage people speak sometimes of an actor as “natural” I have felt depressed. I have felt no better about writers the same way described: often their fluency (actual, not an illusion designed to serve the purposes of a work of art), has appalled me: it has made them even more unrewarding than they might have been if they had lacked any writing talent whatsoever. I discovered in time my own remedies for lack of natural ability; and perhaps I may be excused if I often suppose there is no talent so deceiving and dangerous as fluency. (75)

…novelists would often hesitate to draw from certain people they knew out of fear of falling short: novelists might often be conceited about their abilities, but a good novelist would always recognise his own limitations, and know he might perhaps have to live and learn a long time before he understood there could be people in the world of too big a quality to handle. After all, it was the novelist’s business to enhance and heighten, to make much out of real-life merely suggested: and to be confronted by rarities who in real-life were already of a superb stature in the way of quality-well, it could be a dismaying experience. (139)

It had never occurred to me and I don’t know why, but I felt an acute need for a suitable hero: at the same time I found myself wishing to avoid any suggestion that the author was himself the hero. (95)

And while I wondered whether my doubts about a hero were a shortcoming of my own, or a thinness in the material of New Zealand life which I was so determined to deal with, I found myself asking another unsuspected question. What was the European doing in this faraway Pacific ocean country anyway? Had he the right to be here? What were the ideas and ways of life he had brought with him and how had they developed? Was a community being built which could continue to flourish, or was the European occupation a kind of tenancy which would eventually be terminated? Did I personally agree with the prevailing sentiments about these matters? (95)

On working as a reviewer:

I can think of nothing more damaging to a writer who has his own work to do, more likely to efface even a semblance of integrity, than that he should be required to drudge out comments upon books which he would never of his own volition have chosen to read: and all his work worry and doubt be rooted in the knowledge that no matter how good his intentions, neither he nor anybody can ever be sure about the justice of a pretence to judge contemporary work. (125)

On other writers:

…what was I to say for myself when I read Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; or rather should I say re-rea? For as a younger man I had read the novel when egotism and frustration had blinded me to its wonderful genius. (95)

I had discovered much in the Russian novelists: I was indebted to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mark Rutherford and George Gissing; for a time I was much devoted to Edward Carpenter. (53)

On society:

From the time of adolescent awakening I had been much aware of the general misery of the human condition. I remember it had occurred to me that some such notion was surely at the root of Marx’s work: I remember too that I had understood and been greatly moved by Wilde’s wit and perception when he said that for anyone who knows the facts human brotherhood is no poet’s dream, a hopeless ideal; instead a depressing and humiliating reality. (53)

I was confirmed once again in my belief that no man who functions within the framework of the social order can expect to be ‘free’ except upon the condition of being very, very rich or extremely poor; and everything in between is at best constriction, at worst, slavery. (117)

Philosophy: The Examined Life is Worth Writing About

How does one write an introduction to the topic of Philosophy? It is not too hard to do the same thing for travel, or for creative writing or for metaphor, because those topics are both narrower than Philosophy, and occur at a lower level. By the first of those properties I mean that they are smaller in scope than Philosophy, that they take in less of the world, in much the same way that the topic of “tennis” takes in less than the topic of “sport.” By the second of those properties I mean something that is a little harder to describe. Perhaps I can get at this hard-to-describe thing by saying that Philosophy not only has something to say about the content of those other topics, but also about the form in which that content must appear. It is three-quarters plausible to say that, if we wish to say anything seriously true or interesting about travel or metaphor, and even (perhaps) about creative writing, we not only must say something that adds to Philosophical knowledge; we also must arrive at the things we say in a Philosophical manner, using the methods of Philosophy.

It is a commonplace that Philosophy is not really a collection of doctrines, but a collection of methods; or perhaps a collection of doctrines about methods. I do not just want to repeat that commonplace here (though I think I am in danger of doing so). I want to add to this commonplace the thought that the methods peculiar to Philosophy are not really peculiar to Philosophy: though Philosophy gives them greater emphasis than they are given by other fields of interest, these methods are present in any field of study that is worthy of the name. It is not too hard to elucidate and justify the activity of metaphor, or the activity of travel or of History. But how should we go about elucidating and justifying the activity of Philosophy, when Philosophy is the thing that is meant to disclose what it means to elucidate or justify something? One could just apply Philosophy to Philosophy, I suppose, but that means that the account turns in on itself in a wholly unsatisfying fashion. In elucidating and justifying an activity, one wants to get back from it somehow, to get a good outside view.

So instead of waffling on in this semi-comprehensible way about the difficult nature of describing the nature of Philosophy, I am going to do what any human blogger is bound to do every now and then do, and post an old essay of mine. The essay is a response to the question: If, as Socrates declared, the unexamined life is not worth living, what are the implications for the modern day? Strictly speaking, this essay does not really follow the method of inquiry that Philosophers, or at least one large group of the current species, would probably not regard as real Philosophy. There is just too little sustained and detailed argument here, and too many cute metaphors. This is the sort of essay that you submit for competitions that are put out collaboratively by the English and Philosophy departments; not the sort of essay you would use as the basis for a talk at the annual Philosophy conference. Nevertheless, I am confident that it captures something of the Philosophical spirit (with a bit of History thrown in as well), even if it does not give a very exact imitation of its method.

No worthwhile activity generates freedoms without admitting constraints of some kind, and the most worthwhile activities make use of their constraints to give their freedoms their most rich and liberating form. These ideas are easy to state, but they are hard to fully understand. Socrates, as he appears in the works of Plato, presents one way of understanding them, one system of thought and action that applies its constraints to the advantage of its freedoms, and his understanding is in most respects as relevant to modern times as it was to his own. Socrates advises us to recognise that freedoms and constraints will always pull and push upon eachother; it is not worth trying to escape this interplay, and to have one without the other, but there is great worth in trying to bring this interplay into a more satisfactory form, to let it proceed less in the manner of two fighters, who drag eachother out in a series of fierce and increasingly reluctant attacks, and more in the manner of two dancers, who each achieve, through their contact with one another, a lasting harmony and energy that they could not achieve on their own.

To say, as Socrates said, that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” is to recommend a particular system of freedoms and constraints. Socrates articulated that system in his action and conversation, and through it he recommended a number of qualities, such as humility, honesty, courage, mildness of manner, clarity of speech, a measured scepticism, and a sense of humour. These are all important Socratic virtues, and a full account of the “examined life” would consider all of them, but here it will suffice to consider just three of the defining qualities of the Socratic life: universality, independence, and unity. This account is rendered incomplete by the absence of those minor qualities listed above; and it is also slightly warped, as any account of Socrates is bound to be, by the brilliant heat of Plato. But these effects should not be too misleading, and an account of the three qualities just mentioned is enough to bring into the current century the ideals of a man who lived four hundred years before Christ. This is a long way to move a collection of ideals, and some of them have worn out on the way, or become unrecognisable. But they are a very carefully crafted set of ideals, designed to endure long journeys and changes of climate. Most of them can be easily applied to modern life, both as warnings and as sources of inspiration, and where some of their parts have worn away it is easy to find new parts to fit into the old place. And Socrates gives us every chance of making whatever repairs are needed: the central part of this collection of ideas, the most carefully crafted part, is the part that tells us how to craft our own, and how to do it carefully and well.

To begin with, Socrates tells us that in order to craft ideas with any success, it is necessary to achieve some measure of universality. Although Socrates was a distinctively practical philosopher, a man of the court and the party and the marketplace, he was also a distinctively abstracted philosopher, one who wished in some sense to get above the world of particulars, of courts and parties and marketplaces, and contemplate the world at a level of greater generality. For Plato, and for most philosophers who have come after him, this means not only that he spent his time working with highly general concepts, like justice, knowledge and beauty, but also that he wished to have an awareness of those concepts that was universally valid, an awareness that was free from the peculiar illusions and contingencies of his own condition, or of anyone else’s condition.

The idea that such universality is possible, and that it can be achieved through rational inquiry, has of course been challenged. Those who are fond of discovering portentous correspondences between science and culture will note that one of the most famous scientific theories of our century was called the “Theory of Relativity”, suggestive of the “alterity” present in the modern world, the “decline of centres”, the “eclipse of the grand narratives”, and other ideas that are associated with “postmodernism.” And it is hard to deny that the postmodernist thinkers have responded sensitively to real features of the world (even if they deny that such a thing exists). That is, it is hard to deny that the world is larger, more diverse, and (justifiably) less willing to prostrate itself before the shrine of Western rationality, than some people once thought. Truth, moral legitimacy, correct modes of reasoning: all of these can seem, by virtue of our new sensitivity to this largeness and diverseness, to be relative to each person’s and each culture’s peculiar “way of seeing things.” But it does not follow from our current inability to discern any constancy in the flux, that no such constancy exists. Perhaps it just means that we are currently a little confused about things, or that our theory needs to take more things into account. Socrates would remind us that Einstein’s preferred name for his theory was the “Theory of Invariance”, and that if this theory has something to say to the modern world, it is this: the fact of variety and fragmentation is no good reason to abandon the search from some new constant that can draw the fragments together.

It is easy to feel that this search for universality is just a kind of abstract game, one that satisfies a narrow intellectual need rather than anything more moral or humane. Some might even sympathise with those who claim that the outside world is just our invention, and that the “rationality” of those people who strain towards universals is just one more invention, one more “discourse.” Hence there is no truth, falsity, or even any clear meaning, in the statement “I am wearing a white shirt”, nor in the statement “three hundred people died in a massacre yesterday.” The first statement, however, suggests that the theory is bizarre. The second statement suggests not only that the theory is bizarre but also that it is inhuman and immoral, because it shows how the theory turns the most brutal crimes into trivialities. The theorist has no reason to do anything about the place where three hundred people were atrociously killed, because noone was really atrociously killed: they were murdered in our discourse, and nothing more. Extreme relativism lends great support to universal apathy, and to seek out those constraints on belief and action which are universally compelling is not only to satisfy an intellectual desire, but also to satisfy a human need.

This is not to deny that the search for universality can be harmful if it is carried out in the wrong way. Indeed, one lesson that our times teach those people who hope to fit everyone into the same framework, is that there is a danger of crushing a lot of people in the process. Hence, for example, the New Zealand historian Margaret Orbell writes about the mistake that Western observers make of trying to explain Maori myths in Western terms, and especially of those who try to match Maori myths up to historical fact, and who in doing so ignore some of the richer and more relevant meanings of those myths. Orbell understands those myths in what we would call a more “tolerant” or “sympathetic” or “culturally sensitive” manner, and in doing so she avoids what she calls a “rationalisation”[1] of those myths. Orbell’s understanding of the myths seems correct, but it is misleading to call hers an “unrational” understanding, as long as that suggests that there is something futile and misguided at trying to fit these mythical creations into Western patterns of thought. Orbell’s new understanding is not achieved by abandoning rational thought, but by applying it with greater rigour and sensitivity, and it is just the reasonableness of her thought that convinces the reader that her account of Maori myths is better than the former, narrowminded account. There is no harm in trying to find a fit between our conceptual framework and others, provided we are rational and reasonable enough to fit our framework around them.

Socrates also saw that it was difficult to craft anything of universal value unless one achieved some sort of independence, a critical detachment from the things that everyone else does and believes. This attitude gains a very clear expression in the Crito, a dialogue in which Socrates considers whether it is better for him to escape from jail, or to stay there and accept his death sentence. Eventually he decides upon the latter course, and in doing so it is necessary for him to distance himself from the pleadings of his friends and from his knowledge that any normal person would probably choose to escape. He wishes to constrain his actions to his understanding of what is really right, and in order to do so he must free himself from the constraints of instinct and expectation.

The Crito is of course the ultimate expression of Socrates’ devotion to the philosophical ideal: he was willing to die in order to live an examined life. It is not necessary for modern people to go quite so far; but there is just as much reason now, as there was in ancient times, for people to get outside the jails of common practices and commonly held beliefs. This does not mean adopting an attitude of complete scepticism, or of responding to all forms of authority in a spirit of mindless rebellion. Complete scepticism is little better than complete relativism, and mindless rebellion is adopted so often that it is itself a convention, and one to be challenged as much as any other. What it does mean is that one should be sceptical insofar as scepticism is justified by good reasons, and that one should rebel against anything that is mindless, as one should rebel against anything that is brutal, petty or inhuman.

This advice is not very original, perhaps no more original than mindlessness and brutality are original. To give it more force, it is worth considering one element of modern life that is not only distinctive of our times, but which may also be regarded as a modern equivalent of elements of ancient Greek life that Plato wished to challenge. There were no billboards in ancient Greece, but there were advertisements and advertisers, and they came in the form of rhetoric and rhetoricians, two features of his times that Socrates set himself squarely against. The rhetorician was successful largely because he appealed to the unexamined instincts of the people. In terms of the metaphor that Socrates carries right through the dialogue Gorgias, the rhetorician fed the people on rich and charming foods, foods that caress the palate and disable the brain. Modern advertisers do much the same thing. For example, one current television advertisement exhorts viewers to “Make the most of now”, advice that is sumptuously preceded by a sparkling story of sunsets and mayflies and set to an appropriately languid soundtrack, all of which is meant to invite people into some brand or other of cellular paradise. This colourful rhetoric also invites some interesting questions. Where is this “now” that is so seductive to mayflies? Is it this one, or this one, or some other one that I have not reached yet? And what about all the other “nows”: surely I should make something of them as well? And why should I believe that humans are the same as mayflies? Perhaps some people are inclined to think like mayflies, but am I obliged to do the same? These questions, of course, are beside the point: the point is to dull the mind by ravishing the senses. Hence to live an examined life is not just to set oneself apart from the instinctive beliefs and activities of the day, but also to set oneself apart from one’s own instinctive beliefs and activities, to become freer from the constraints of self as from the constraints of society. This does not mean becoming free from all constraints; it means making oneself free to recognise, and act upon, the constraints that are imposed by reason.

This prescription does not sound very appetising. It is easier to digest when one has read Plato’s writings, because he shows his independence not only in his ability to detach himself from instinct and expectation, but also in the courage and eloquence and passion with which articulates a new ideal. To be sure, it is hard to imagine Socrates lending his eloquence to an ideal that was not fully supported by sound reasoning; but it is also hard to imagine the writings of Plato without recalling the eloquence of the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the halo of shining imagery that surrounds his arguments. There is rhetoric in these writings, but it is not the rhetoric of the sophist or the political orator: it is the kind that springs not from a base or fleeting desire to impose oneself on others, or from some unreflective passion, but from a deep and sincere feeling for the worth of his peculiar enthusiasms, a feeling that has been constrained as far as possible by the results of rational inquiry. This suggests a lesson, one which Socrates might not entirely approve of, but which makes his ideas easier to swallow: it is well worth letting one’s actions be guided by rational inquiry, but rational inquiry can only guide us so far towards illuminating the activities that make individual lives most rich and fulfilling; to take us further we sometimes need to fall back on other guides, such as the sincere feeling that comes from long and meaningful devotion to an art or a cause or a mental or physical discipline. It is tempting to say, in response to Socrates, that the unlived life is not worth examining. This is too strong, but it does point towards an important truth: the question of what is worthwhile is most fully answered by living a life out, and not merely by thinking it through.

Another enthusiasm that comes out in Plato’s writings, and in the actions of Socrates, is his desire to achieve unity. He tries, firstly, to bring unity to belief. At the most elementary level, this means bringing into view the beliefs of his interlocutors that are incompatible with eachother, and suggesting (sometimes) a way of removing the incompatibility. On a higher level, it means that Socrates tries to draw together all the diverse and unruly elements of human thought and action, and set them down into a clear and simple pattern. Even if we do not agree with his results, we can admire the grandeur of his ambition and the value of the project. And we can value it all the more, and share his ambitions, when we contemplate (or read other people’s contemplations of) the narrowness and specialisation of the modern career, the proliferation of books that are filled with disconnected trivia of the snappiest and least satisfying sort[2], and the admirable but ultimately depressing books that try to discover profound correspondences between ancient Vedic texts and quantum physics. The kind of unity that Socrates sought needs to be rationally warranted to have any worth. It also needs to be something more than a bland homogenisation, a commitment to reducing everything to the confusion of a single idea, to saying that “all is discourse”, or “all is power” or “everything is metaphor”; and it would need to be more than a commitment to “blurring the boundaries” between as many things as possible, a commitment to “fusion”, whether it be of food or music or intellectual pursuits. It would unite different elements not by conflating them but by connecting them, by placing them in clear relations to one another.

Perhaps this ambition is too grand to ever be reached. Nevertheless, it is always possible to make more modest advances in the direction of that ambition, and one way in which such an advance could benefit the modern world, is if it helped to connect technological brilliance more closely with ethical reflection. If those two qualities are not set into a proper relation, there is always a danger that any new scientific triumph will be turned by some passing idiocy into an instrument of vice or brutality. Hence the internet is not only a vast and intricate product of scientific and mathematical craftsmanship, but a heaven for pornographers; the machinery of war, a splendid tribute to the skill of many good people, is a hell for many others. A cellphone, whose speed and sophistication is unfathomable to most of its users, can just as easily be used as a purveyor of threats or unsavoury images, or as rather feeble medium for a generic, impersonal sort of information delivery, as it can be used for speeding up and smoothing out the services that make real improvements in peoples’ lives. The Republic reminds us that mere quickness of mind is not enough to guarantee wisdom: the people who dwell in the cave are very quick and clever in their apprehension of the shadows. Scientific expertise offers the modern world many advantages, many powers of prediction and organisation, but these can easily become disadvantages if they are not constrained by the advice that is given out by other kinds of reflection.

Socrates also tried to unite thought and action, to bring the products of intellection to the problems of everyday life. For Socrates, to think was to act, because his thinking took the form of conversations, sincere concrete engagements with other human beings that arose naturally in the course of his day, springing up vividly at the party, the courthouse, the prison, the river on a summers day, the marketplace. It is easy to feel that the modern world is hostile to this sort of unity, encouraging people as it does to devote their mental energies to problems of a technical and specialised kind, and leave free their parties and summer days for more palatable amusements. It is also easy to press the current state of universities to the service of this point, and in particular to mention the creeping transformation of some universities, from places in which to contemplate the more human parts of human affairs, into training centres for technical disciplines such as accounting and engineering: and surely it is not too fanciful to see this condition as the institutional expression of a disunity that exists in the lives of individuals. But the actuality of this condition does not make it necessary, any more than the condition of Athens made it necessary for Socrates to live a confined and ordinary life, and to resign himself to the indifference or obstinacy of his interlocutors.

Plato’s most elementary effect is to set in the reader’s mind the image of a great upwards sweep, a climbing arc. At the bottom there is dirt and confusion and darkness, and at the top there is light and order. The way up is slow and difficult, and perhaps one never gets to the top at all; but any progress towards the apex is an improvement, and brings its rewards. It is a simple image, and by now it is perhaps a little trite. It is also simple, and a little trite, to talk about universality, independence and unity. But Plato’s images are saved from triteness and from simple-mindedness by the consistency of his vision, and his abstractions are saved from the same fate by the skill and eagerness and honesty with which he makes them concrete. The most concrete expression of those values is Socrates, and Plato uses the concreteness of Socrates to show the worth, the pressing, human worth, of finding something universal among particulars, of being independent of others and of oneself, and of looking for unity, even if the only available unity is the blending of thought and action. Living an examined life in Socrates’ day meant putting reason to the service of these pursuits. In the modern day it means much the same thing, with a nod towards cultural diversity and a wince towards advertising, self-help books, Jacques Derrida, narrow specialisation, and blind science. It means moving away from easy freedoms and towards better ones, and making a more liberating choice of constraints. It means doing as Socrates asks, which is not that we accept his beliefs without question and then live them out, but that we examine them carefully and act on the results.

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[1] Margaret Orbell, Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition, Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 1991
[2] J. Peder Zane, www.newsobserver.com/1051/story/470380.html

All references to Plato's works are drawn from:
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (ed.), Princeton, 1989