Henry Feltham is back with a thought-provoking muse (stroke chin here) about puritanism in NZ reviewing and writing, prompted by a copy of a venerable literary magazine which is, like so many others, now lost in the annals of history.
NZ's literary heritage is extraordinary - anyone who saw the Greg O'Brien and Jenny Bornholdt exhibition Main Trunk Lines in Wellington a couple of years ago will no doubt remember being staggered by the quality of early forays in the lit-mag direction by the likes of Charles Brasch and Denis Glover. Anyone who knows owt about the series that Henry owns bits of, please let us know - I've combed the web and found zip. Some constructive bookish commenting would be lovely! Go Henry:
I've had the first issue of Islands on my shelf for almost a year, and a copy of Dick Seddon's Great Dive – the issue devoted to Ian Wedde's novella – for longer than that. I love the solid, foundational feeling that comes from having them in my possession. In fact, there was a time when I had almost all of them, acquired in bulk from a thrift store in Whakatane. What happened to this treasure, I'm not sure, but at least three times in my life I've felt the need to cull my library, and I suppose the box of Islands back issues fell victim to this perceived overweightedness. The two issues which remain are a sort of forensic exemplar of their breed.
I know very little about the fate of the magazine itself, though I can hazard a guess (no pun intended). When a journal is raised into the agora by a stable of notable writers – names usually associated with a particular tradition – then even the best intentions of its editors can leave it, as the years shudder by, at a loss for direction. This kind of publication endures only so long as its principal contributors' careers, or the spirit of their movement lasts. The more deliberate the vision, the shorter the span. Which is no great insight, I know, but leaves me faintly mournful all the same – for the fate of all journals, as if their doom was inherent to their conception.
Islands published Curnow, O'Sullivan, Wedde, Baxter, Brasch, Glover, Stead, etc. – perhaps even our greatest pre-millenial author, though I haven't seen him in there yet ... To say that these are very different writers is about as meaningful as saying that they are somehow similar, but I do see these guys as evincing a streak of our country's literary heritage that is chasmically deep, if not oceanically wide. A weight of stunning prose and poetry dwells there, our literary back catalogue, and its influence is felt today: strongly in the case of Tim Corballis's strange formality, and more subtley in the lonely visions of writers like Nigel Cox ... and in my own writing, no doubt ... Islands is, though, a product of a time and place – a flutter through the contents shows no women contributors, except possibly in the review section, but a closer look revealed that the reviewer J. E. P. Thompson was not utilising the Initial Convention for Obscuring Sex, at all; he was simply a man proud of his initials. While trying to resolve this fairly meagre mystery, I became intrigued by these venerable reviews.
I have a theory that reviews, across the arts at any given time, have a certain family resemblance. There are, after all, conventions in criticism, just as much as in the criticised, but what really grabbed me was the way in which, more than anything I've read in Landfall or Sport or JAAM recently, one review in particular captured in miniature a strand of New Zealand's literary heritage. The reviewer was Jim Williamson, and the book was In My Father's Den by Maurice Gee.
Williamson ends with the observation that In My Father's Den 'ought to be the definitive novel of New Zealand puritanism', a subject that always marauds at the edge of Gee's adult fiction. It is the story of a man returned home, not to clutch but fend away the Calvinist roots from which he has separated himself, 'a [New Zealand] tradition sophisticated enough to have its own cliches'. By referencing a pedigree that so many of the writers above have drawn on, alluding to these tropes of New Zealand writing and, moreover, showing sympathy with them, 'it indicates not the maturity but the senescence of a certain kind of novel. It shows that the novel which has so far dealt with puritanism is itself puritan in its responses.' This is a slightly confused point, I feel, but an absolutely essential one.
At one level, well, yeah, of course the form of the thing recapitulates its content – Gee is writing about the beast from, if not the belly, then the spleen. He is invoking a tradition, just as much as he is questioning it. If there is a flaw in the novel, it is a necessary one – the author's and the protaganist's voices merge, so no ultimate criticism of the culture appears. It is still, though, as the reviewer says in his final line, 'a beautifully true book'. But what grabbed me while reading this review is the extent to which Williamson himself falls prey to 'the puritan strain [that] has a way of returning to surprise us in unsuspected places.' I agree that a disposition can express itself in insidious ways, but this review strikes me as blemished by a subdural puritanism itself, in its ultimate distraction with form. It is as though, after writing a review that engages itself thoroughly with a discussion of the puritanical man-alone tradition, Williamson expects Gee to be writing in some other, more ironic, more distanced tradition. His expectation that the novelist should be able to maintain a slightly bloodless distance from his characters across the entire novel betrays the puritanical streak in the reviewer.
I see a connection to the modern American focus on craft (rising, arguably, out of another puritanical tradition), which gives rise to a breed of story that fails to ever fully vivify. The beauty of execution, the formal symmetry, etc. carries them through, but there is a distance, a telling lack of empathy between narrator and narrative, which in this style of writing borders on dishonesty. In one way, Williamson is aware of this – he acknowledges the basic truth of Gee's book – but he is not, I think, aware of the streak of New Zealand puritanism that he evinces in his review, and which, in the end, points to the pointlessness of his criticism. If Gee's perspective has collapsed into that of his character by the novel's end, I'm comfortable with that, because it means he is able to write such gross and wonderful sentences as this:
'She wrote poetry that I thought rather good of its kind: earth-motherish. It was an increasing density in the poems, a kind of urgent obliqueness that made me suspect she was trying to get pregnant.'
This is, in a sense, a rehearsal of my basic distaste for bloodless writing – I am prepared to forgive a huge amount of formal failure if a writer manages to hook into a vein of truth or genuine emotion. In fact, I think it's our late modern obsession with form that makes words like 'true' difficult to use. I'm tempted here, to start talking about rhizomes, but I won't. This blog is getting out of control. I wanted to write more about surprise, and subtlety, and how I think it should relate to artistic purpose, but that's too hard right now. What started out as a peon to Islands has once again turned into a mildly self-justifying rant about vital prose.
Sorry.
[The picture, top, is of course a still from the movie of 'In My Father's Den' – Ed.]
02 Apr 08 | Filed by Kathy | Add your comment (13 so far)
If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email.
Comment by maggie ~ April 2, 2008 8:23 AM
Go Henry! Great to see such a thoughtful and impassioned blog. I did have to read it twice to fully comprehend... and wondered why you hadn't given more "examples" of what you perceive as bloodless writing and form over truth?
But, I'm engaged - delighted - Leafsalon's party isn't over yet. I do hope we get some interesting responses to this.
It seguages nicely for me - as my book club just finished reading 'The Godwits Fly' and most of them felt it wasn't a novel (form) and that the characters were not fully formed - whereas two of us absolutely loved the novel and we decided it was a kind of poetry - truthful poetry.
Interesting that Robin Hyde was rather overlooked for the very reasons that Henry writes of.
And I wait now for someone much more informed than I, to add weight, or counterweight to this interesting discussion.
Comment by Chris Else ~ April 2, 2008 9:25 AM
Islands was edited by Robin Dudding, one of the unsung heroes of NZ Lit. Dudding was editor of an Auckland -based magazine called Mate and took over from Charles Brasch as editor of Landfall in 1967. In 1972 he had some falling out with Caxton Press, Landfall's publisher and was fired. I can't remember the details but I recall a number of us being suitably outraged on his behalf at the time.
Islands was more or less a self-conscious replacement or alternative to Landfall. The title is at once a tribute to its roots in the older magazine and a claim to a new editorial stance. (The word 'Landfall' smacks of the old colonial experience. 'Islands' in contrast suggests isolation and independence.)
Islands began by publishing a mixture of people who were then well established, like Curnow, and others, like Haley and Wedde, who were part of a new wave of writers clamouring to be heard. It continued until June 1981, when Dudding ran out of money and overspent on his Lit Fund grant, was revived in 1984 and finally subsided in 1987. Sport started up a year later.
Comment by Pat Lawlor ~ April 3, 2008 2:19 PM
It is good to see someone remember Islands, which was certainly the home of the best New Zealand writing of the 1970s. I feel you do it a disservice, though, by making some glib, inaccurate points then wandering off on a theoretical tangent about criticism.
'Islands' was of its time and place, sure, just as Freed, Antic and And were. Any successful journal should be. But compared to Islands, those other 70s magazines seem as dated as a tie-dye shirt. Flamboyant, improvisational, cutting-edge, okay: but mostly of interest as curiosities.
Islands achieved a lot more: its creative writing and reviews are timeless, credible and without contemporary cant. You concentrate on the male writers it featured, but all had already achieved recognition elsewhere. Baxter was in the first issue, as were other Landfall-friendly giants such as Curnow, Stead and Brasch. This is because Islands was launched by Robin Dudding after his brief tenure as Brasch’s hand-picked successor as Landfall editor came to a sudden end courtesy of the publishers, Caxton Press. Significantly, Brasch was supportive of Dudding’s plans, and intended offering financial help, only to die before he could write a cheque.
Of the writers you mention, Ian Wedde is the youngest, and got the biggest leg-up from Islands when it published the novella Dick Seddon’s Great Dive as a complete issue. But Islands – or Dudding – also gave many New Zealand writers their first prominent outlet, among them Bill Manhire, Russell Haley and Michael Morrissey. Also, contrary to chauvinist inference in the Leaf Salon piece, Islands championed women writers, among them Patricia Grace, Lauris Edmond, Jan Kemp, Rachel McAlpine, Elizabeth Smither and Yvonne Du Fresne.
In an on-line interview with Iain Sharp, Manhire said that being published (as a 21-year-old) by Dudding in Landfall in 1968 was a hugely symbolic moment: “I owe this great rite of passage to Robin Dudding, who replaced Brasch as Landfall’s editor ... I think he’s just a brilliant editor. It’s a pity he’s not still doing it. I think it was partly that he had time to shape an issue. He wouldn’t lumber it with a great thematic idea; he just let it slip into place as an arrangement of parts with somehow its own shape and logic, which wasn’t an obvious logic. I think every issue he did of Landfall and Islands had a centre to it. You felt like you were reading a book rather than just a gathering of things that had come to hand over the last three months.
“But you do need a lot of time for that to happen. I guess that’s why Islands slowly subsided twice. But, yes, I think Robin Dudding is a very important figure in New Zealand writing, and at some stage someone will have to sit down and try to work out just what his presence consists of, apart from the considerable beard.”
Islands was no 1970s flash-in-the-pan, like pet rocks and fondues. It ran for 15 years, from 1972 to 1987, although that includes a three-year break from 1981. It is significant that Great Sporting Moments, the anthology of writing from Sport – which really took up the baton left by Islands, when Landfall seemed in incoherent freefall – is dedicated to Dudding. No anthology of Islands is necessary: its contents already dominate anthologies of the period.
And finally, this month, Dudding is to be awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by the University of Auckland. On Shakespeare’s birthday, no less.
Comment by Henry Ep. ~ April 4, 2008 9:07 AM
Wow. Thank you Pat for that. I really wish I'd had the time to track you down before I wrote that fairly fustian piece. You're right that it sounds glib, and I actually cut out an apology line that went something like 'I really hope this doesn't sound glib, but journals that raise ...'. Point taken that these were establiswhed writers, by and large, and I'm sure that Islands also supported female writers, but I was still just a little nonplussed by the absolute absence of any women from the founding issue. You make another good point, which I didn't manage to work into my diatribe, which is that Islands feels coherent and unified in a way that more modern, more catholic publications (like Sport) don't. I'm very interrested to hear whether anyone thinks this is a cultural fact - a result of tradition spreading wider and wider, divericating in the modern mileu - which would go towards questions of the role of the journal in modern literature - or some other fact, perhaps to do with ... ?
Comment by maggie ~ April 6, 2008 9:14 PM
Oh come on Fergus... please...
This site has so much potential, but all the real players stay out of the action. Like Henry, I enjoyed Pat's response. It's great when informed people add their views - isn't that what this site used to be about?
C'mon...
I'm fascinated, because I feel a sort of elitist snobbery is at work (people peek) but they don't speak.
They leave it to the likes of (well, now it looks like me and Henry or should it be Henry and I and now Pat) - but there's so many of you, so well informed, with so many opinions.
Please! We don't want sniping, but we do love informed discussion - don't we?
It's like being a mature student at a tutorial and the lecturer wants some input, and only the middle-aged women who have just completed Lit.101 dare to comment (ignorance, or just uncluttered joy at being there)... Hmmmm... and all the time there's a room full of smart young things who are just to clever to comment!
Comment by Islander ~ April 8, 2008 5:06 PM
There have been SO many lit. mags....Don Long was involved with one(?"Edge"), and then there was that interesting but very short-lived one that came out under the auspices (I think) of UC (I have the whole set -3, again I think...) You see, a lot of the NZ lit stuff I have is in storage, until I decide what to do with my life next, and until I can get it all tidy...
There is another matter: most llit. stuff is bees-in-the-brain of (mainly) one person - Dudding, as aforementioned, for 'Islands' (I do have a complete run, and letters from Robin (one of my short stories turned up there.) And then there's the alternative material...Frinstance - how many of you know about the long & ongoing history of Maori media publishing Maori writers? From the 'official' organ "Te Ao Hou" (and many early non-official Maori print media) to Rore Hapipi/Rowley Habib publishing some of my stuff in the PEN gazette (because that was the only way they got published...)'Broadsheet' also was a wonderful well, broadsheet! for women writers in the 1970s
O, and as a tiny retort to some know-nothing who posted in another thread:
Writing is not always or in anyway just writing for publication. Writing is exploration of self & the world. Writing is playing, with words & feelings & experiences(because playing is better than making war or dominating others.)Writing is (for me anyway) a way to try and make sense of life, the world, and death.
And I really hope you discover this Steve et al-
Comment by Steve et al ~ April 8, 2008 5:31 PM
Exactly my point, Islander / Kerry. My question is why do you have to dominate every thread on this site? You've been the death of every thread on the forum.
Comment by Islander ~ April 8, 2008 5:50 PM
Dear Stevey baby - these are my last comments to you:
a) you are anonymous
b)yourare not well-informed
c)I I dont dominate fora (check out other threads)
d)frequently, fruitful discussions result in threads I have contributed to
e)I actually contributted a LOT of info to this one - now, howsabout rearranging yourself as some kind of adult? Writer even?
f)byebye
Comment by steve et al ~ April 8, 2008 6:37 PM
Kerry Baby
How about rearranging your books into something readable?
Comment by thebonedpeople ~ April 8, 2008 8:02 PM
ME-OW!
Comment by fergus ~ April 8, 2008 10:07 PM
Steven, that is not flaming, that is just nasty. Please reveal yourself so we can all shun you in future.
One thing that’s always impressed me about Robin Dudding is how wholeheartedly he embraces his enthusiasms. I remember when he discovered Margaret Mahy – about 1989 perhaps, so belatedly – he told everyone who would listen that he’d just discovered New Zealand’s greatest storyteller. That was much more important than covering up for the embarrassing fact that he’d failed to read her earlier because she was “only” a children’s writer. Conversely, I have no memory and can find no record of his trashing anybody. I could only hope to speculate about his dislikes through deduction.
I’ve recently, coincidentally, spent a day turning the pages of and selectively rereading the full run of Islands. I know what Henry means about it feeling “coherent and unified”, but I don’t think that does justice to Robin’s restless appetites; there are determined efforts to include spiky experimental writing (starting with Michael Henderson in issue one), and quite a lot of politically-committed realism – socialist realism almost – perhaps that is Robin’s final, undeclared taste? There are more women than I remember – Pat Lawlor writing from beyond the grave is right about that. And there are the loyal mistakes! We admire those; any editor who doesn’t make her/his share of mistakes is playing it too safe.
I think a key thing that makes Islands so good is the care Robin took in planning and constructing his quarterly issues: balancing thematic groupings with the ongoing life of the magazine. Magazines that publish less frequently than quarterly, I have learnt the hard way, decline into occasional anthologies. Islands was the place in which the conversation of New Zealand literature took place. It never pretended to be the mouthpiece of the final word.
As for whether Islands is more coherent and unified than Sport, I’m happy to let time make that judgement. But it seems to me already clear that a group of writers who were “new” in the early issues of Sport have become the mainstream. Maybe that’s been obscured by our constantly drawing in new writers, but give it another 20 years…
One thing that interests me is the way that in the desktop and Internet era the “SO many lit. mags” Islander refers to have been replaced by a much more diverse and ill-mapped environment. One of the privileges of being an editor is reading work before it’s been tidied up for publication, and work that will never be tidied up enough to be published – so much more revealing of a writer’s inner demons; and en masse (as the “collective minor” in Ian Wedde’s phrase) so much more revealing of the times we live in. Now that pleasure is open to everybody.
Comment by Kathy ~ April 9, 2008 1:24 AM
A brief aside before more juicy literary comments: after having been doused with cold water by Steve in the middle of this fine run, we've taken the unheard-of step of blacklisting the dear boy. Bollocks to PC lack of censorship - there's a new law for the new LeafSalon. More than three spiteful, unimaginative snipes in close succession, especially when interrupting the flow of some historically important, fascinating chat, will force us to get out the ice-pick. Steve, if you're reading this, you'll be doing it in someone else's name, because you can't even SEE LeafSalon any more. You gone, baby.
Oh, the power.
Carry on ...
Comment by Henry Ep. ~ April 11, 2008 9:28 AM
Just a note. I reaaally didn't mean to set up any kind of quality distinction by calling Islands 'coherent' . Contemporary mags like Sport walk an exigent line, at a time when NZ Literature is a more of a Hydra than a mere Cerberus. I didn't want to be doing that halcyon goshwheneverythingwasgreatandcomprehendableinitsentirety bit either, because I think we've gained so much over the last thirty years. And here comes the. But, there really was something (which I think Fergus picked up on) in Islands that made me long for the unselfconscious talk of the 'NZ tradition.' If there's anything I wanted people to pick up on, its that the review I was reviewing (god, how po-mo) represents, for me, the cusp of NZ moving into modern writing ... Gee beginning that long argument of literature with itself ... And here we are, now, on Leafsalon.
Also, I think I'm glad Steve's vanished. His Islander points are waaay off. She is a technicolour prescence here, and even when I disagree with her, it's still a pleasure to do so.
ISSN #1176-4465. LeafSalon is licensed under a 
