Trendy But Casual

War & Peace: beginning

I read War & Peace when I was a teenager, but recall almost nothing of it. I dashed through it, finishing it in the waiting room of Accident and Emergency in Auckland Hospital. (I can’t remember why I was there – hand, foot, one of the many injuries in my accident-prone life. Now I’m re-reading it again, slowly. I’ve read the first hundred pages so far, and need three bookmarks: one for my place, one for the references at the end, and one for the cast list at the beginning.

When I started, I wrote a close reading of the first page, as an exercise and to make myself linger.

The novel begins in French, and with dialogue – someone is addressing a person of stature (mon prince), and talking politics. There’s mention of Genoa and Lucca, of the Bonaparte family, of the Antichrist – implicitly Napoleon. So we begin with talk of la guerre in the first paragraph. But the conversation is informal, among intimates. The first words of the novel are Eh bien – or ‘well now’ – and by the end of the paragraph the speaker is using Russian rather than French to wish the prince ‘good evening, good evening’, and asking him to ‘sit down’. This is talk of war rather than war itself, and the news is about places far away, in Italy rather than Russia. But a novel that has announced its interest in war in its own title has begun the way it means to go on.

This is drawing room talk, as we learn in the next paragraph. The speaker is Annette (Anna Pavlovna) Scherer, host of a soirée. The person to whom she’s speaking is the first guest to arrive, Prince Vassily. It’s July 1805, we’re told directly. So we know, from the perspective of history, that there’s still ten years of Napoleon ahead.

We also know that we’re hearing from members of the aristocracy. Characterisation of the two relates largely to status. Annette is ‘maid of honour and intimate of the empress’. She’s coughing because she has the grippe – ‘a new word then, used only by rare people.’ Not used rarely, but ‘by rare people’, again suggesting elite status. She’s invited guests by sending notes ‘with a red-liveried footman’. Red is a regal colour, an imperial colour; it’s bold and hard to miss. She employs footmen in livery, so she is wealthy. The notes only went out that morning, but there seems no doubt that guests will come. So she’s high-status enough to summon people like Prince Vassily. He is described in this paragraph as ‘important and high-ranking’.

We’re given the note she sent in full. It’s in French, the language of society people. The notes are to Monsieur le comte (or mon prince), only high-ranking people like Prince Vassily. It’s casual to the point of being disingenuous. Annette tells the guests to come if they have nothing better to do, and calls herself une pauvre malade – a poor sick woman, asking for their pity and indulgence.

The note tells is that the soirée is scheduled between seven and 10. I don’t know if that’s after dinner, or if guests are expected to come before or after their dinner. It’s July, so it’s summer and light outside. What time did ‘high-ranking’ people eat dinner or supper then?

I look at Tolstoy’s diaries online to see if I can get a clue, and I’m instantly distracted by lines like ‘Got up late. Turgenev is a bore’ and ‘Spent all evening chasing after wenches.’ It’s also confusing because dinner sounds as though it was a late lunch, followed by tea and supper. So maybe everyone has eaten their big meal of the day, and a tea or supper can be fitted in around a soirée.  Elsewhere in his diaries I read that Tolstoy goes out for supper at nine PM. On another day he says it’s 10 PM and he plans to have supper then go to bed.

Annette and Prince Vassily are invented characters, but the empress Maria Feodorovna is not. She is the former Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, second wife of Tsar Paul I. She married Paul the month before her 17^th birthday, chosen as his bride by her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Paul was still the crown prince then, and had only been a widower for six months. In July 1805 Maria Feodorovna is 44 years old and a dowager empress. Her husband, Tsar for only four years, was assassinated in 1801. Her son, Tsar Alexander I, is 27 years old, and she insists on taking precedence over his wife, so Maria Feodorovna is the most important and powerful woman in Russia.

Prince Vassily is unfazed by Annette’s welcoming diatribe. Dieu, quelle virulente sortie! he says. ‘God, what a violent outburst!’ For him we get no colours, just the most basic description. ‘He was wearing an embroidered court uniform, stockings, shoes and stars’. Are the stars medals? I’m guessing that the mention of stockings and shoes means Prince Vassily is wearing dress clothes rather than boots, or that those items are part of formal court attire. He’s come over in his work clothes, as it were, and perhaps he’s a man who never stops working, or working the room.

The status of the Prince is emphasised again: he is ‘a significant man who has grown old in society and at court’. We also learn a little of his character. He is ‘not ruffled in the least’ by Annette’s heated greeting. He speaks in ‘quiet, patronising intonations’, suggesting a superiority or arrogance of manner and attitude. And he speaks ‘refined French’ and the narrator tells us that this generation – ‘our grandparents’ – ‘not only spoke but thought’ in refined French. At this time, in this society, French is the status language, the natural language for people of power and influence. French culture is superior to Russian. What implications does this have for a country about to go to war with France? Are the Russian nobility clinging to the culture of pre-Revolutionary France, when aristocrats ruled – as they still do in Russia in 1805 – and the rise of a man like Napoleon would be unthinkable?

So, that’s my close reading of page one. Now I’ve read on, I’m interested to see how Tolstoy keeps expanding the circles, from these initial two people to the larger number that attend the soirée, and then to other locations – initially just in St Petersburg, the Imperial capital, then in Moscow, the old capital, and then in estates in the countryside. More and more people are drawn in, and distinctions are made between those Russians who speak French more fluently than their native language (like Prince Ippolit) and those who don’t understand French at all (his footman).

I’m also taken with the Russian aristocracy’s horrified discussions of the French revolution, a recent memory in 1805, because Tolstoy is writing this in the 1860s, just after the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II (and before Alexander’s assassination by a bomber in 1881). Russia’s own revolution, which will have much larger consequences for the world than the French revolution, is only 50 years away – closer to Tolstoy in time than the French Revolution.

He lived long enough to see the first attempt at revolution in Russia, in 1905 – a century after the setting of War and Peace’s opening chapter. But Tolstoy died in 1910, so he didn’t live to see the destruction of Imperial Russia, and of the world of ‘our grandparents’. By then he was a supporter of pacifist anarchist thought, an opponent of the Tsar’s regime, and determined to renounce his own inheritance of feudal privilege. A ‘landlord obsessed with Christ,’ Lenin said of him in 1908, because Tolstoy preferred peace to war.

 More on the novel as I read on.

 

 

 

 

On Māori writing

Below is the unedited version of my essay published on the Spinoff in July, with some additions written after its publication. It was commissioned as a review but – inspired by Witi Ihimaera’s discursive approach in his memoir, Māori Boy - I approached it as an essay in which I could continue the kōrero begun by Tina Makereti in her excellent Auckland Writers Festival lecture about what kind of house our literature inhabits, and by Kelly Ana Morey in her plaintive essay last month on being a Māori writer who defies expectations, and how you can never really go home - or leave home.

Nobody likes a Māori writer.

First of all, nobody knows who we are. Nobody knows the names of any writers, apart from the ones with movies [see: Frame, Ihimaera, Duff, Wendt]. This is really our fault. We have written books that no one has made into a movie.

Second: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names. Just look at Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, James George, Robert Sullivan, Kelly Ana Morey, Nic Low, David Geary. Some Pacific Island writers do this as well (Albert Wendt, Gina Cole, Victor Rodger). Some indigenous writers from Australia do it (Anita Heiss, Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe); so do some indigenous writers from North America (Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Drew Hayden Taylor). Nobody knows that surnames tend to be a colonial construct. Witi Ihimaera’s family name is Smiler, which is a transliteration of Ihimaera, which is a translation of Ishmael, as in the Biblical figure.

My nom de Pākehā is Paula Morris. Morris is my paternal great-grandfather’s name. He was a ship’s cook who spent about a decade in Auckland around the turn of the twentieth-century. He said he was from London. He married my great-grandmother, Sarah Annie Wyatt, had two sons with her, then seems to have left the country, never to be seen again. I wrote about this in an essay called “Greys Avenue” published in Thom Conroy’s Home anthology, and more recently in Metro magazine.

On the other side of my father’s family, my great-grandfather didn’t have a last name. He was Kiri, son of Rahui Te Kiri and Tenetahi, grandson of Ngāti Wai rangatira Te Kiri. By the 1890s, Kiri had adopted a surname: Paraone, a transliteration of Brown. So my grandmother was Heni Te Kiri Paraone, known to some people as Jane Brown, though my grandfather, Alf Morris, always called her Heni.

The important name in our family is Kiri. This was my late father’s first name, and the middle name of my aunt, brother and numerous cousins. I’m Paula Jane Kiri, named for my grandmother. She was the mātāmua (oldest child), and grew up in Rahui and Tenetahi’s house – now the site of our marae –  singing, playing the piano, riding horses. My father, her only son and the oldest boy of his generation, got special treatment on Christmas visits to Pākiri (where he was born), because of his name.

I’m telling you this because too many people in New Zealand still don’t understand that there’s much, much more to a writer’s name – stories, histories, alliances, whakapapa – than meets the eye. When these people read something we’ve published on the Internet (never in a book, because nobody reads these: see above), they roar with outrage.

Although they appear to have access to the Internet, they don’t know how to use a search engine. The last time I published an essay on the Spinoff, the first wave of roaring-with-outragers, I’m told, denounced me for being a Pākehā of unknown provenance and skills. If they had typed my name into a search engine, they would have seen my own web site, my bio on the University of Auckland site, my bio on the NZ Book Council site, and then my Wikipedia entry.

But nobody reads us, or reads about us. They do not waste time looking us up online. They do not buy our books unless we’ve been shortlisted for prizes overseas. Even then, they’d rather wait for the movie, or for the next flurry of self-righteous rage on social media. They would rather see us as Pākehā, because it’s easier – to read us, to misread us, to dismiss us.

*

It’s unsurprising that nobody likes us. We stake a claim in a country that prefers to believe that our history started in the nineteenth century, and that our literature began and ended with Katherine Mansfield. These days, our faces are too pale and our names are too Pākehā.

Kei Miller, the Jamaican-born poet and novelist, says that “racism’s most enduring success is widespread belief in a category called ‘race’.” This is true in New Zealand. To far too many people, being Māori isn’t about heritage and whakapapa. It’s about racial make-up: a half this, a quarter that, a percentage of ‘blood’. In the past in the US, terms were devised to express this blood mix: mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Percentages mattered, because they defined who was white or black under the law, and therefore who could use a certain water fountain or bus seat, who could marry a person of a different race.

When you denigrate us as “only an eighth Māori”, say, you strip away our history and family, a vast cultural inheritance unique to this country, and see us simply as diluted racial cocktails. We’re just not Māori enough to have any claim on our pasts, because you see the past as gone. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” It’s certainly not dead in traditional Māori culture, where the ancestors wait ahead of us, not just behind us.

This notion, by the way, informed the structure of my first novel, Queen of Beauty, in which the past and present speak to each other, sections out of chronological order juxtaposed to position ancestors ahead as well as behind the protagonist and the novel’s present action. No reviewer mentioned this. In New Zealand Books, David Cohen reviewed my long essay On Coming Home (BWB 2015) without once mentioning the word Māori or discussing the Māori heritage explored in the book. His only points of comparison for my work were white men, George Orwell and Martin Edmond. Although by 2015 I’d published four novels – one of which, Rangatira, won the fiction prizes at both the NZ Post Book Awards and the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards – and a collection of short stories, as well as four YA novels, Cohen had not read any of them.

Remember: nobody knows who we are.

Remember: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names.

Remember: they would rather see us as Pākeha, because it’s easier.

In 2008, in the same journal, Laura Kroestch – a Canadian who now directs the writers’ festival in Adelaide – reviewed Speaking for Themselves: Ex-pats Have Their Say, a book of interviews by Jan Morgan. She had this to say about Māori heritage:

“All of the writers talk about how New Zealand has changed, and one of the more interesting aspects of that change is the wish to be associated in some way with the tangata whenua, an association which represents a somehow more New Zealand way of being a New Zealander. For instance, I now know that Peter Gordon is 1/36 Maori, Paula Morris’ father was part-Maori, Rena Owen is half, and Alannah Currie had a Maori family next door. Teddy Tahu Rhodes sports a Maori tattoo because ‘Maori and Pacific Islander culture is so beautiful’, and Temuera Morrison is ‘brown white’ (part Irish/Scottish and part Maori), ‘but the Maori side gets Tem’s full attention.’

“Wanting to be Maori is great, but in the context of this book it seems yet another way to idealise a place that – unless I’ve missed a major cultural shift – is still busy trying to sort out its race relations.”

Where to begin with this? I know that 2008 is almost a decade ago, and maybe such derogatory comments wouldn’t be written – or published – now. But I remember reading it at the time and feeling horrified. By definition, tangata whenua are, indeed, the most ‘New Zealand’ of New Zealanders. Alannah Currie could learn from the Māori family next door the way I learned from the Dutch family across the road: it doesn’t mean we were aspiring to or idealising something we’re not. Teddy Tahu Rhodes can have a Māori tattoo without ‘wanting to be Māori’: maybe he just wants the design to be indigenous rather than imported.

I don’t call my father part-Māori, and I don’t call myself that either. Our heritage is Māori and English, with the persistent rumour of Portuguese in the whakapapa as well. We never talked percentages – just as the Queen, I imagine, doesn’t interrogate her own percentage of German ‘blood’ – because we don’t observe Blood Quantum policies in New Zealand or the UK.

Remember: “wanting to be Māori is great, but …”

Remember: we may not be Māori enough.

Implicit in Kroetsch’s review is the Pākehā reader. The playwright Victor Rodger has complained about this:

“I remember one of the first moments I put my hands on my hips was when I read a review of Witi Ihimaera’s book The Matriarch. The Pākehā reviewer was saying: ‘We lose so much because we don’t understand the language.’ And I was like: ‘Well, who is this we? This we does not include me. Who are you talking to?’”

Reviewers like Kroestch and Cohen would rather see us as Pākehā. The Māori stuff is a distraction. After reading my Spinoff essay, Cohen wrote this on social media: “The brief [of the review in New Zealand Books] was not to read your other work. Or indeed to focus on ethnicity as such. Everybody’s ‘ethnic,’ when you get down to it, and that wasn’t the over-riding theme of the essay of yours that I was invited to offer a few thoughts on.”

Everybody is ethnic. Or, who do you Māori think you are? 

In a further comment he added: “Perhaps if you weren’t so thin-skinned, you would see that the piece attempted to be fair. And perhaps if you hadn’t spent most of your adult life away from New Zealand--doing fine things, no doubt--you wouldn’t be so insistent on waving the identity flag around in order to establish your local bona fides.”

Waving the identity flag. Let that sink in for a moment.

Actually, I don’t need to ‘establish … local bona fides’. I was born and raised in Auckland. I whakapapa back to the Tainui and Moekaraka waka. I’m tangata whenua and this is my turangawaewae: I don’t need a flag of any kind.

Junot Diaz discusses attitudes like Cohen’s in a piece on his experience in an MFA workshop: “Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.” He talks about a “lack of awareness of the lens of race, the vast silence on these matters.”

Not a flag, but a lens. Not waving, seeing.

*

Some people read my Spinoff essay and were affronted. Affront is why the Internet was invented, but anyway: they countered that they loved Māori writers.

Do they?

Of course, this essay’s opening is both hyperbolic and facetious. (Trigger warning: this essay may contain irony.) But even many professed supporters of Māori writers only support certain kaupapa, certain mahi. I’ve been interviewed about my work with the not-Māori-enough books omitted from the conversation. The supporters of Māori writing are not always supportive of Māori writers themselves if they stray from approved subject matter.

An example: the review of Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds for the Landfall Review Online.

Ngā Hau e Wha is a short-story anthology edited by Huia founders Robyn and Brian Bargh and published in 2016. It featured work by contemporary Māori writers associated with the publisher, including some – like me – helped along the way by Huia’s anthologies. The book also featured work by Albert Wendt, an important figure in Huia history. Reviewer Vaughan Rapatahana writes that he “initially struggled to find an overarching thread to this compilation, given that the collection is of Huia-mandated tall-tale-tellers. There is a vast array of styles and content among these 20 anecdotes authored by 18 writers.”

I don’t know about the other writers, but I didn’t write an “anecdote” or a “tall tale”. I wrote a 3500-word short story. (It’s re-printed in my new collection of stories and essays, False River.) And in an anthology that brings together the four winds – i.e. writers of different backgrounds, experiences, styles – within contemporary Māori fiction, shouldn’t readers expect a “vast array”?

One of Rapatahana’s objections was about how far those winds seem to blow. “Many tales,” he wrote, “actually have little to do with te ao Māori anyway – indeed three are European fairy tales, as in being set in Europe: Tina Makereti’s ‘Frau Amsel’s Cupboard’, Paula Morris’s ‘Three Princesses’, and the more contemporary ‘Trust’ by Mark Sweet.”

While it’s true that these three stories are set in Europe, none of us wrote European fairy tales. My story’s protagonist is a Māori man who lives in Herne Bay and is on business in Estonia. The story-within-the-story is about a Māori traveller turning up – and turning heads – in medieval Estonia. Mark Sweet’s story ‘Trust’ begins with a Māori guy getting beaten up – and derided as a “Paki queer” – by police in Glasgow.

Tina Makereti’s story explores cross-cultural resonances when a compromised and desperate German woman in wartime encounters hidden treasures purloined from New Guinea in a museum. This work of fiction was written during, and responding to, Makereti’s 2012 residency in the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt.

Nothing “to do with te ao Māori”, I guess, in the sense of tikanga and te reo, but stories by Māori writers, who may or may not understand the finer points of tikanga or be fluent in te reo. We should have stayed home, apparently; we should have stuck to the tale or the anecdote or the yarn, forms that emerge from an oral tradition.

Later in the review Rapatahana praises two other stories because:

they are Māori in ethos; that is, they inculcate a specifically Māori Weltanschauung or Worldview – which, as noted earlier, is conspicuously lacking in several other stories. This last point is not a criticism, by the way. It is just that in a collection of work predominantly by Māori, one would think there would be he atu arotahi i runga i Māori ora, nē rā? [more focus on Māori lives, eh?]

Even stories like mine or Mark Sweet’s, with Māori protagonists, are not Māori enough: our Māori characters are not living ‘Māori lives’. And Tina Makereti’s subtle and moving story, in which a European woman experiences a moment of kinship with Melanesian women, gaining insight into how history and culture, the heritage of a family, sings in its household objects, is profoundly Māori in its take on whakapapa and taonga.

Not Māori enough for Pākehā, not Māori enough for Māori. This may be why writers like Kelly Ana Morey declares: “I can’t be the ‘Māori’ writer people want me to be, all I can be is myself. Mining the Māori world for material would somehow feel like an act of theft because my knowledge and connection feel so slight and arbitrary. This is why I don’t write from the Māori perspective all that often in my fiction, and if I do those characters tend to be quarter-cast who are like me a little disconnected. They operate as individuals rather than cultural representatives.”

We frighten away our own; we tell them they are “quarter-cast”, not a whole within any culture, any heritage. We accuse them of theft, as though they’re holding up a dairy. We’re at the sad point in New Zealand literature where a writer feels she has to apologise that her fictional characters “operate as individuals”.

*

Nobody likes a Māori writer with too pale a face and too culturally unrepresentative a book, but this didn’t stop Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti – defiant, insolent, gleeful? – waving a [black] identity flag, as some would see it, or maybe re-training the lens in a different direction.

Black Marks on the White Page is an “Oceanic” anthology: “the glorious, painful, sharp and funny stories of Māori and Pasifika writers from all over the world, and one guest Aboriginal writer whose presence asks us to rethink the boundaries we have set up between ourselves and our neighbours, literal and figurative”. In ‘Whakapapa of a Wallpaper’, Ihimaera’s ‘chimerical fiction’ about Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], he laments the colonisation and division of the Pacific, and the way colonisers “variously named our dismembered parts Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Austronesia.”

This new anthology is an act of re-assembly, and of re-orientation. Here Māori writers are not token ‘exotic’ inclusions in a NZ-lit book; nor are we shuffled together in a mainly Māori pack, to be scrutinised for sufficient levels of tikanga. In Black Marks we join the other Pacific pieces, the part this-and-thats, the colonised, the diasporic, the bearers of misleading names and addresses; we join the writers who explore mythic pasts, and those who voyage into the future, imagining new worlds. The Pacific is not a rim: it’s a continent fervid with creativity, a brilliant blue planet.

Ihimaera and Makereti contend that the work in Black Marks “embodies the disruptive act that Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape – still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression, of forcing others to see us in all our complexity and wonder.”

If you doubt that the page is still white, read the text of Makereti’s Auckland Writers Festival lecture and the statistics she cites on how few books by Māori and Pasifika writers are published.

Their introduction to Black Marks is a gauntlet thrown to the “Māori in ethos” crowd. There are too many preconceptions, the editors argue, about writers from the Pacific, as there are for writers of colour and Indigenous writers: who we should be and how we should write are too prescribed.

“Even though we sometimes bemoan the scarcity of an Oceanic fiction that looks like us, smells like us, walks like us and therefore must be us, none of us should be constrained by any sense of what we’re supposed to look or sound like. Creativity doesn’t live there. There must be no compulsion to write in any particular way about any particular topics, outside of the writer’s own creative project.”

Does this need to be said – here, now, in 2017? Yes, while we still have reviewers – and readers – who are only comfortable reading in one world, and can’t make the imaginative leap into other contexts and experiences. Reviewers who see a flag rather than a lens.

Ihimaera and Makereti present the anthology as a talanoa, which is a storytelling as well as a conversation. Its original kaupapa, as a collection of short fiction, broadened and transformed as work flowed in: there are novel excerpts here, published or in-progress, from Tusiata Avia, Alexis Wright, Sia Figiel, Déwé Gorodé, and Anya Ngawhare; an extract from Albert Wendt’s novel-in-verse The Adventures of Vela; a black-out poem from Selina Tusitala Marsh; and an essay of mine – on a trip to Mississippi, the death of Robert Johnson and the murder of Emmett Till – that poses as a story. The line-break marks on Courtney Sina Meredith’s winsome, sly story ‘The Coconut King’ suggests it could be read as a prose poem.

David Geary’s #WATCHLIST reflects his background as a dramatist: much of the piece would work as a play, with its other elements as visual counterpoint; Serie Barford’s ‘After the Tsunami’ also works as a short dramatic monologue. Readers seeking yarns, anecdotes or tall tales may be perplexed by formal experimentation like Geary’s, or Cassandra Barnett’s ‘Pitter, patter, Papatūānuku’.

Admirers of realism will swoon at the understated, elegant story telling of Patricia Grace (‘Matariki All-Stars) and Kelly Ana Morey (‘Poor Man’s Orange’); they may read Mary Rokonadravu’s ‘Famished Eels’ and ‘Sepia’ and wonder why her work is only available in journals and anthologies rather than her own collection – though ‘Famished Eels’, like Tina Makereti’s ‘Black Milk’, also included here, were both finalists in the Commonwealth Writers story prize. Some names – Grace, Ihimaera, Wendt – are well-known to New Zealand readers, but the selection here isn’t predictable, and includes new voices like Gina Cole, and newish ones like Nic Low.

Remember: nobody knows who we are.

Black Marks is handsome in hardback, dressed in the splendour of James Ormsby’s bold cover illustration (the symbolism explained on the inner sleeve), and features four-colour art by Pati Solomona Tyrell, Shane Hansen, Rosanna Raymond, Robert Jahnke, Cerisse Palalagi, Lisa Reihana and Yuki Kihara.

Despite the book’s flash production: it’s no glib marketing exercise. It’s an intelligent and lively anthology that explores the formal possibilities of story, its slippery nature, its nerve. “I am five the year my father tells me how to tell a story,” says the narrator of ‘Famished Eels’. “Always make room for uncertainty, he says. Don’t say someone said this or said that. Don’t ever be sure. Just walking from this kitchen to the backyard you will lose what I have just told you. Make room for that.”

Black Marks on a White Page is a roomy and discursive book, diverse in style and subject matter, big on ambition and scope. Maybe it’s the most subversive coffee table book of the year. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new way of framing and reading Māori writers, in a larger context that allows us to escape the confines of other people’s preconceptions and percentages.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” He vowed “to try to fly by those nets”. We should try as well.

*

I’ll finish with a plea – no, a challenge. I sit in lots of meetings where people – writers, students, lit-biz professionals, institutional reps, policy makers, hui organisers – lament the fact that so few Māori writers are published and that sales figures for Māori writers, like many New Zealand authors, are small.

My question: how many books by Māori writers have you bought this year? Did you buy Apirana Taylor’s novel? Did you buy Black Marks on the White Page? Did you buy Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds? Did you buy Sleeps Standing/Moētu by Witi Ihimaera with a superb side-by-side te reo translation by Hemi Kelly? Did you buy the new issue of the Māori literary journal Ora Nui? Did you buy the Te Kaihanga Māpere picture book by Sacha Cotter, translated by Kawata Teepa and illustrated by Josh Morgan, winner of Te Kura Pounamu Award at this year’s CYA Book Awards?

If you can’t afford to buy books, did you take one of these titles out of the library, or ask for it to be ordered? Would you ask someone to buy you a copy for Christmas? Would you ask someone to buy a copy and donate it to a school library?

If you’re a writer whose work was featured in one of the anthologies, did you attend one of the launches? Did you bring along friends and whanau to help celebrate the sheer force of will that goes into producing these books? Did you promote the book on social media or to your networks? Did you tell your local school about it so the book might be bought as a resource for students?

If you think of yourself as someone who likes Māori writers, will you buy one of these books at your local book shop and give it to someone else, to help develop new audiences?

Spread the word, spread the love, spread the like. As Tina Makereti said in her lecture, we get the House of Literature we deserve, the one we care enough to build.

 

Do New Zealand books need special treatment?

On Saturday night, at the first National Writers’ Forum (organised by the NZSA and held in Auckland), I was a speaker in the debate, arguing whether New Zealand books need special treatment. Te Radar was the moderator. Arguing for: Toby Manhire (Poldark lookalike) and Michele A’Court (funny, complicated name). Arguing against: me and Leilani Tamu (poet, woman of world). Leilani and I won, mainly because the room was loaded with my students, who are both loyal and loud.

Leilani and I had concentrated on one issue: the controversial ‘New Zealand table’ in book shops here. (Toby and Michele tried to make it much broader, so they could accuse us of being Trump acolytes, ACT party members, and/or the soft drink L&P, trying to take away everyone’s grants and fellowships, and destroying NZ lit. This played well with about half the room.)

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Catherine Robertson and I were being chastised online – which is the contemporary version of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with hypocrisy and manufactured outrage, except with ‘comments’ instead of bonfires – for daring to be women who ran focus groups of (mainly) women asking about their book-buying habits. We were sure, being women and all, to have done it wrong; we were sure to have had no experience running focus groups; we were sure to loaded the groups with women over 35, just because they buy books; we were sure to have asked leading questions, and goaded people into trashing Important New Zealand writers; we were sure to have excluded genre fiction, and tried to further our Industrial Literary Complex agenda; we were sure to have locked men out, and ignored library statistics, and to have kept the sample wilfully small, and proclaimed an end to all further research ever – even though our report explicitly addresses the next step, and that our key finding was about visibility rather than boringness, and so on.

Yawn. Catherine’s done a good job of responding.

So, back to that New Zealand table. Charlotte Grimshaw, top New Zealand authoress, emailed me on Monday with the following:

I see there've been a couple of articles about no one liking NZ novels, and booksellers having trouble selling them. My question re this is: Why do booksellers insist on having a separate NZ Fiction section in bookshops? 

In the same way, there used to be a Gay Fiction section, before Alan Hollinghurst, say, which suggested it was something other than just "fiction".

If booksellers struggle to sell NZ fiction, why do they segregate it from other fiction, often in a small, distant shelf, as if it is a different thing from International fiction? It seems to me this must only make it harder to sell, and there's no logical reason to do it. 

Do you think this is an issue? 

Indeed I do. Here is an abbreviated version of my debate speech.

New Zealand books DO NOT need special treatment – not because our books aren’t special, but because they’re not basket cases.

Consider the situation we have now. Consider our poor, poor New Zealand books. There they lie, on their own little table in shops around the nation, too weak to stand up, too sensitive to be placed alongside their genre peers on the regular shelves. No wonder so many people think our literature is lame. Our books need to lie down!

In some shops, even more care is taken to ensure that New Zealand books get the special treatment the poor, feeble things need. The shop staff gather New Zealand books together and hide them away at the very back of the shop, in some dark corner, so the sun won’t fade their covers and no oafish customer can sully their pristine pages with impertinent fingers.

At the moment, in fact, our books are SO special that many of them have been stowed away for safe-keeping in warehouses in Australia, too special even to order. Think of it as a spa retreat, maybe, or some kind of sanitorium, where our ailing, limp, delicate books must spend months on end, away from the harsh glare of public commerce.

They’re so special that a print-on-demand request has to be flown by carrier pigeon across the Tasman before one single copy will consider venturing forth from this sanctuary, and only then after weeks of deliberation, in the hope that the customer will have lost interest and cancelled the order. Really, our books may never recover from so much special treatment. I’ve even heard rumours that increasing numbers of mercy killings are occurring in these Australian facilities. Books have to be pulped, just to protect them from the cruel world with its ‘shops’ and ‘readers’.

Fellow writers, is this what we want for our contemporary national literature? Segregation? Seclusion? Closed wards? Assisted suicide? I know we’re all very busy, squabbling on Facebook and writing ill-judged angry blog posts called I Am Not Famous and it’s all Creative New Zealand’s Fault. But pause a minute, and ask yourself: is this special treatment really in our interests?

Sure, for some of us readers it’s convenient to have a New Zealand table in a book shop, especially if it’s prominently positioned. We are champions of our local literature, keenly interested in local new releases, eager to browse new titles of whatever genre – fiction, poetry, essays, history, cookbooks, art books, biographies, books about trees and birds and gruelling, fly-plagued walks through the South Island, academic books about Treaty reparations or the 1951 Waterfront strike, collections and anthologies and journals, pamphlets and tomes, and those nostalgic photo books with pictures of dairies or old caravans on the cover – whatever it is, we’ll want to browse through it, as long as it’s from New Zealand.

Appraently, we are readers of catholic tastes and deeply patriotic feelings. We’re also quite lazy, so everything on the one table is really ideal. We don’t actually need a book shop – a book stall will do. Kind of like a cake stall at a school gala, with a similar amount of profit.

So, anyway, those of us who make a beeline for the New Zealand table in a book shop: that’s about 20 of us nationwide.

The rest of us shop normally. You like crime novels? You look in the crime section. You like fantasy? You look in the fantasy section. I’ve discovered, through extensive research, that books tend to be organised in alphabetical order. If I wanted to look for Pat Grace’s latest novel, say, I should be able to find it quite easily on the general fiction shelves somewhere between Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. And this is the company, I feel, that Pat should be keeping.

Hear about a new book on the radio or read about it in the Listener? Book shops have a new releases section to make the book easy to find. Then, when the book is no longer quite so new, the book can be found alongside its kind on the regular shelves. Pretty straightforward, yes? Not so for our ‘special’ New Zealand books. At some point the poor New Zealand table will start groaning under the weight of the 95 genres it must include at any given time, and older books will be sent to spend their twilight years in the retirement village of the New Zealand shelves. These are generally either close to the ground, so you have to get down on hands and knees, or very close to the ceiling, so you’ll need a ladder.

But wait: lots of bookshops are quite small. Time Out in Auckland, for example, is the size of an olden-days pantry. You see their problem? These shops already have a New Zealand table. Now they have to have New Zealand shelves as well. So much New Zealand! SO much special treatment!

And this is the problem. Most of their shelves are taken up by books that don’t need special treatment, books that can stand upright and jostle each other, brazenly staring the reader down at eye-level, spines turned in haughty unison.

So what happens is this: a few of our ‘special books’ get stuck on some hard-to-reach shelf, and the rest get sent away to a rest home. The euphemistic term is ‘returns’ but we all know what it really means. There’s no returning back to the book shop. Like greedy adult children desperate to get their hands on the family home so they can renovate and flip it, book shops have already filled the space with new books. Bye bye, special books! We gave you your chance on the 95-genre table! If only you were strong enough to hack it on the regular shelves, but no. We can’t risk it. Off to the rest home with you!

Those of us who write books don’t want to be THAT special. If we’re going to be shuffled into categories, then make them work for us and for our existing and potential readers. Nicky Pellegrino, for example, writes books that are set in Italy, their stories revolving (according to her web site) around friendship and food, passion and family secrets. Some people might call it chick lit, or woman’s fiction, or entertainment or escapism. I don’t think Nicky would mind any of that.

But I suspect she would much rather have her new book, Under Italian Skies, sitting alongside other books of that ilk rather than next to something like Peter Godfrey: Father of New Zealand Choral Music or Striking Gold: New Zealand Hockey’s Remarkable Victory at the 1976 Olympics. These are both actual recent books, and I mean no disrespect to them.

But I’m sure that Nicky’s potential market would find her books more readily if they came across them alongside, say, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter or The Olive Tree by Lucinda Riley or The Italian Matchmaker by Santa Montefiore – rather than next to Moments of Truth: The New Zealand General Election of 2014.

Of course, it would be different if every book shop in the land could carry 20 copies of Nicky’s new book, and some could be shelved in general fiction, some in new releases, some in an end cap possibly dedicated to ‘women’s fiction’ or ‘great summer reading’, and some on the New Zealand books table. But most shops have taken a handful of copies. And they’re giving them the Special Treatment.

Special treatment, however well-intentioned, is killing us. Please, I beg you, hear our cry to stop this segregation, this separate-but-equal sham. We’re tired of cowering on the table. We’d like the chance to stand upright.

The New Zealand book table in a shop is not a tempting buffet table of local delicacies, but a bed in an extremely overcrowded hospital, piled with bodies. Don’t blame the customer if they suspect the bodies on the bed to be weak and pathetic.

It’s time we rejected this notion of specialness that condemns us to the isolation ward. Writers don’t need readers’ patriotic pity. Let us take our chances with the rest of our peers – and these peers are writers all over the world, dead and alive, writing now and in the past, writing in English and in translation. Salman Rushdie has talked about the ‘folly of trying to contain writers inside passports’ and here in New Zealand we take that folly one step further: we try to contain the vastness and diversity of our contemporary literature within one lumbering giant of a category, New Zealand books, and then cram it all onto one table.

Let us stand upright and clamber onto the shelves where we belong, alongside the other writers of the world. I know, I know – they’ll try to squeeze us out! They’ll jostle us for position. They’ll try to elbow us onto the floor. But to quote an Australian comedian, with apologies for his salty Australian language, it’s time to harden the fuck up, New Zealand. And if we truly care about the books we’re writing and publishing in this country, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’ll kick the special-table habit and join the fray with all the other writers. We will fight them on the book shelves. We will fight them on the end caps. We will never, ever surrender.

Elsewhere

It's a year since I moved back to New Zealand. People ask me, all the time, if I've come home for good. (I wrote a book about this, a long essay called On Coming Home.)

There are many good things about living in my home town, Auckland, again, after thirty years, especially being close to my family. My nephew drops off a piece of furniture for us and takes away another; my niece comes around to drink tea and watch something we've recorded for her; her flatmate arrives on Christmas Eve afternoon just to hang out while I cook for the evening. There's a constant flow of things - DVDs, wine, scarves, books, stuff each of us is trying to offload - between me and my sister. We find things in the supermarket to tempt my father, who isn't eating much these days (the key: must contain meat and gravy). My brother comes by to go to the movies with one of us, or to take a walk with us along Tamaki Drive. This is all ordinary life to many people, but I've never really had this kind of experience. I've always lived too far away.

I like Auckland as well, more and more. It's not half as cold and wet in the winter as other Aucklanders think; they should try a year or two in Glasgow. Because we live right in town, on the edge of Myers Park, we don't have to deal with traffic or parking; we walk to concerts and plays and movies. I walk to work, and because the hill up through Albert Park is very steep, it's officially deemed exercise. (This means my Olympic Dream is still alive, though a sitting-down sport remains my preference.) Last year I made a number of visits to Otahuhu Intermediate School over several months, to work with the students there on their writing. That school made me love Auckland, and feel both tremendous hope and despair, because of all the spark and potential there, and because of the increasingly divided city in which the kids are growing up.

Every six weeks or so we have a salon at the flat for writers and people in the writing/publishing world. We serve no food, in order to persuade people to leave at some point. This is the difference between New Zealanders and British people. New Zealanders will leave because they're hungry. Even if they hadn't eaten all day, the British wouldn't leave until all the alcohol was gone.

Much of my writing life has been consumed this past year by other demands, not surprising when a new job is involved, and even less surprising when that job includes supervising twelve fiction writers each working on a book. I've also been working on a new initiative, the Academy of New Zealand Literature, that will launch in April, and it's a massive undertaking.

So the ghost that's haunted me for much of the last year is my own work, and I try to appease that ghost whenever I can. Residencies are an escape for me, a chance to jar myself out of routines and duties, a chance to be surrounded by foreign languages and sights and ways of seeing. I like the feeling of an obligation to work, and new things around me that may open some windows in my head, or infect my subconscious. Sometimes I get lonely, but that's not a bad thing. ('I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so' - see William Carlos Williams.)

In the past year I've had two month-long residencies - the first in Ventspils, Latvia, and the second in Brussels. That's where I am now, writing in the soft grey light of late afternoon. (Actually, that's turned, with incredible speed, into just plain darkness, enlivened by drizzle and a whistling wind.) I've been quite lonely here - lonelier than I was in Latvia, where I had a room in a shared house of writers and translators. Though in Latvia I did have to spend some time in hospital, which was lonely, not to mention post-Soviet, in its own special way. I don't mind having long stretches alone, or eating by myself in cafes or restaurants. But sometimes my social nature rebels against all this imposed isolation, and I need to get out. Yesterday afternoon I went to some talks organised by the Bronte Society; tomorrow morning I teach a creative writing class for university students. On Thursday night the New Zealand ambassador has invited me to dinner. I've met quite a few friendly people here, from Belgium and other places; my dearest friend visited from Wales and we sampled numerous Belgian beers. So it's not exactly Siberia. It's not even that cold, though Aucklanders would be alarmed and despondent at these actual winter days.

The first pictures here are of the house in Ventspils where I stayed, then my room (where I slept and wrote), and then the name of the organisation that made my residency possible. The second group of pictures are of the building in Brussels where I've been given a flat for the month (owned by the writer David Van Reybrouck, whose book Congo I'm reading at the moment), then the room in which I write, then the organisation that offered me the residency.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm lucky to be lonely in such places.

In a week's time I'll be flying home, through Frankfurt and Shanghai, arriving just in time to start teaching. I need to keep writing as well, if I want to finish the stories I've started, and have my novel drafted by July, as I've planned. Perhaps I need to find a way to be lonely at home as well.

Not Real Life

On Friday night I attended an awards ceremony at the Stationers’ Hall in London. Earlier that day, I had a makeover at the NARS counter in John Lewis. I told the sales person that I wanted to look decent for the event that night. By “decent” I meant not like the red-faced harridan I’d seen reflected back at me in every shop window on Oxford Street.

“What kind of awards ceremony?” she asked me. Writing, I told her, and she said that her sister was “training” to become a writer; she’d just finished a creative writing degree in Winchester, and was planning to write fantasy novels. “Not real life,” the sales person said, meaning the novels, I think, rather than the ambition.

All day I felt sick with nerves, and ashamed of myself, too, for wanting to win a prize. The story, “False River,” is very dear to me, because I wrote it after Sarah Doerries died; I wrote it for her, and about her, and it has more personal resonance for me than much of my other work. And, of course, I wanted the money that the prize brought, so I could pay lots of people back, and buy Tom Moody a new phone. This was the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Awards, and the sponsors are extremely generous. Usually the only payment I get for a short story is a free copy of the journal in which it’s appeared, so the notion of winning £30,000 had turned my head. It’s much, much more than I earned the whole of last year, from teaching and royalties and all the bits of writing I do for other people. But all six of us on the shortlist would have liked the money, of course, and all six of us wrote good stories.

And awards for writing or any kind of art are not just about the money. They’re a moment in the sun for people who may feel they live an otherwise obscure and shadowy life. I’ve been working on a long personal essay called “On Coming Home,” and  came across this from Joseph Brodsky, in his speech “The Condition We Call Exile.” There are “too many writers around per reader,” said Brodsky. “And very few among those thousands [of writers] are … particularly good. But the public will read them, and not you, in spite of your halo, not because it is perverse or misguided but because statistically it is on the side of normalcy and trash. In other words, it wants to read about itself. On any street of any city in the world at any time of night or day there are more people who haven’t heard of you than those who have.”

 All of us – me, Elizabeth McCracken, Madeleine Thien, Scott O’Connor, Rebecca F. John and YiYun Li, who won the award on Friday night for her fantastic story “A Sheltered Woman” – had felt the peculiar exhilaration and queasiness of standing in the sun for the past few days, during two evenings of WordTheatre events at Foyles where well-known actors read our stories aloud. We sat together, twitching and grimacing when our own stories were read, dreading the moment when the story ended and we were summoned forward to hug the actor and blink, with embarrassed smiles, at the audience. True to authorial form, we knocked back free wine and grabbed so many free Sunday Times tote bags we could have set up a market stall. Then we went out together to drink more wine and gossip. The time spent in each other’s company, and listening to each other’s stories, was the great pleasure of the week. We were all outsiders in London: Rebecca had come down from Wales, and the rest of us from overseas – the US, Canada, New Zealand.

All week I’ve lurched from feeling outside to inside to outside again. It was hard sometimes not to feel like an interloper on the shortlist, with no London agent or editor at the readings, no books on the sales table. But at the awards dinner on Friday, I was flanked by Simon Prosser from Hamish Hamilton, who published my story in Five Dials, and my good friend Deborah Keyser. Also at our table: Lionel Shriver, and Gary Dourdan, the actor who’d performed my story at Foyles. I spent much of the mingling time abusing my on-the-shortlist status by accosting people I wanted to meet – Colin Thubron, Ian Hislop, Joanne Trollope, and Richard Eyre, among others. Just in case I was feeling too much of an insider, however, my name wasn’t read out when all the shortlisted authors were introduced. Lurch, lurch, lurch.

This is what C. S. Lewis talked about in ‘The Inner Ring,’ an address he gave in London in 1944. The desire to be an insider is toxic. Trying to be “inside the invisible line,” he said, is impossible, because there are always more lines. “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want … Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”

His advice was to “make the work your end,” and I try to remember this. The work is the thing, not the events or the awards or the dinners, not the rejections or the acceptances, not the reviews or the royalties. Sometimes I have a version of this discussion with students, or with people at dinner parties, who tell me that only fame and fortune count; anything less than public success renders you a hobbyist, a second-rate writer. Once, at a party during the Auckland Writers Festival, a British author asked me to confirm that another novelist at the party was “the most important writer in New Zealand.” He didn’t want to waste his time talking to writers who didn’t share his status. It was the inner ring or nothing.

Yesterday I didn’t feel disappointed about not winning. Mainly I felt hungover. But there’s another feeling there, awoken by listening to everyone else’s stories this week – and by listening to my own story being read by someone else. The feeling is the desire to get on with my work. I love writing fiction, and I haven’t had much time to do that lately – starting a new teaching job in Auckland, moving into a new place, working on the essay. I have the novel starting to take shape, and five stories towards a second collection, which perhaps no one will want to publish, but that’s OK: the work is the thing. That’s the feeling I’ll take home with me, to my real life, after the turbulence and unreality of the past few days. That, and a suitcase crammed with Sunday Times tote bags.

 

 

Et in Arcadia ego

It's a week since we were exiled from Bellagio: my residency ended, and a taxi drove up to the villa, in pouring rain, to carry us away. It felt like exile, sad and irrevocable. Autumn had turned into late autumn, as you can see by this before-and-after in the garden.

It was beyond brilliant as a residency, and I can't speak highly enough of the chance it offered both me and TM to get work done, as well as to meet and talk every day with a group of intelligent and stimulating people. We both felt depressed leaving, but profoundly grateful for the opportunity to live and work there. It's been a strange year, of terrible personal lows and then these weeks, in Svendborg and Bellagio, where I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

This was my studio in the Villa Maranese, where I worked on the novel and an essay:

TM has just explained to me that a picture is worth 1500 words, and one of his is worth at least double that, so I'm going to include a few of his photographs without further comment.

Up at the villa

I'm conscious that I haven't posted since my mother's funeral, that fracture in the year that couldn't be mended or ignored.

We're in Italy now, at my Bellagio residency - thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation - on the shores of Lake Como. It's our second full day here, and I'm writing this in my studio in the Villa Maranese, one of the various historic buildings on the grounds here. I need to work rather than write a blog post today, so I'm just going to post some pictures that Tom has taken. The yellow Villa Serbelloni is the main house, and twice a day we clamber up there, through the terraced gardens, for meals. (We have a picnic lunch down here, on a little table outside my studio.)

The rust-coloured house is Villa Maranese, where we're staying. Our neighbours are the novelist Aimee Phan and her lovely husband, the poet Matthew Shears.

Out in the grounds today the gardeners are harvesting olives and raking leaves. Tom has been down into the town with Matt, and brought me back a little cup of stracciatella gelato. In the evenings, before we go up to the villa to hear one of the other residents give a presentation, or after we've returned to the room after drinks and dinner, I send my father an email with pictures and news. Lots of pictures, not much news. My father sent me a reply yesterday saying the thing I think all the time: that my mother would have loved to read the emails, to see the pictures. When I got news of the residency, back in May when I was home in Auckland, she was so happy.

So here are some pictures, and not much news.

Spring 1938

We're halfway through this residency in Svendborg. Some days I wish we could stay here forever.

I've been trying my hand again at Brecht's poems - with the help of Doris Eikhof, much more useful a source on the German language than, say, the Internet.

Here's an attempt at Spring 1938, followed by a couple of recent pictures - a glimpse of the Brecht Hus, taken from the water, and a ship in the Sound, taken from our garden.

Spring 1938

I

Today, Easter Sunday morning,
A sudden snow storm crossed the island.
Snow lay between green hedgerows. My young son
Led me to the apricot tree leaning against the wall of our house,
Taking me away from verse I was writing, pointing the finger at those
Who’d brought the war, the war that might destroy
The continent, this island, my people, my family, me. Silently
My son and I placed a sack
Around the freezing tree.

II

Rain clouds darken the Sound, but the garden
Is still gilded by the sun. The pear trees
Have green leaves and still no blossoms. The cherry trees
Have blossoms but still no leaves. White umbels
Seem to sprout from arid branches.
A small boat with patched sails
Skims the ruffled water of the Sound.
Starlings are chirping, but I can also hear
Distant thunder:
On manoeuvre, the naval guns
Of the Third Reich.

III

Often, on these spring nights, a little owl calls
From the willows along the Sound.
There’s an old superstition around here,
That the owl is warning people
Who don’t have long to live. Me,
I know that I’ve spoken the truth
About the people in power.
The bird of death needs to do something,
Not just know.

Place of Refuge

We’ve been in Denmark for ten days so far, all but the first night spent staying at Brecht’s house in Svendborg, about 50 KM south of Odense. I have a residency here for a month. All I have to do is write in Brecht’s study, with its view of Svendborg Sound, and the islands on the other side.

Every day we remind each other how lucky we are to be in this place – this long, low house with its thatched roof, and endless doors and windows – especially now that I remember to duck when passing through any internal doorway. Yachts and ferries go by, birds chatter in the trees, flags twist and flap in the breeze. We keep the radio in the living room on all day, to a classical music station that startles us, once an hour, with the news in Danish. Max and Kirsten, who are on the Board that offered me the residency, live just along the shore and they drop by to help us with important things, like setting the channels on the new TV, so we can watch the World Cup.

Tom has study space of his own, on the shady side of the house overlooking the little yard where we dry our washing. There’s a studio there, for artists who need a larger space to work, where the house’s five bikes are stored, along with the badminton set Tom is determined to use. (Max jokingly refers to this as our "sporting program.")

Every day I’m drawn to my desk, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say, honestly, for much of the past year. Already I’ve finished the Rome book, completed an editing project, and started work on something else. Brecht tried to write a Rome book here as well, in 1938: it was about Julius Caesar, and how Ancient Rome, by preserving slavery, had made a slave of itself. Mine’s about teenagers trapped in contemporary Rome by an ash cloud, while high jinks ensue. Brecht would disapprove, I’m sure. There’s a bust of him on the study’s windowsill, and a photograph of him on the wall, cigar in hand. Elias Canetti said: “Under his gaze you felt like a worthless heirloom, and he, the pawnbroker with his piercing eyes, was appraising you.”

Brecht lived in this house from 1933 until 1939. He left Berlin in February of 1933, the day after the burning of the Reichstag. His (second) wife, the actress Helene Weigel, was Jewish, and he was a known anti-fascist. His books and plays were banned in Germany, and, in 1935, Brecht was stripped of his German citizenship – in absentia.

Brecht and Weigel fled first to Prague, and then to Vienna to borrow money from Weigel’s parents, trying to work out a way of living cheaply in France or Switzerland. Then he received an invitation from the novelist and journalist Karin Michaelis to stay in Denmark. They went first to Michaelis’ house on the island Thurø, very near Svendborg, and she helped them get the money together to buy this house. The price was something like 7000 DK. Brecht and Weigel had borrowed money from both their families, and Brecht had just received an advance to write a novel based on The Threepenny Opera.

This was an old farmhouse, and work had to be done so Brecht could live here with Weigel, their two children, and their maid, Mari Hold. Brecht’s study, where I’m typing this, was the old stable, remodelled so he could write here, and have a private – if primitive – toilet that needed to be emptied daily. This is the little room that now houses the washing machine.

He also got a supplementary stove, to keep the room warm, but the board of the Brecht House, wary of the thatched roof going up in flames, have removed any venue for open fires. The room also has a private door, so Brecht could receive visitors here directly without them walking through the house. One of these visitors, on almost a daily basis, was his long-time collaborator and mistress Margarete Steffin. I’ll write more about her, and Brecht’s other female collaborators, in another post.

We’re very close to Germany here, only 50 KM from the border. Kiel is the nearest German city, much closer to us here than Copenhagen. In a poem Brecht wrote here, he refers to a man who “quietly crosses the street.” He could hear the guns of warships, on exercise in German waters. In the poem ‘Concerning the Label Emigrant,’ he wrote: “Ach, die Stille der Sunde täuscht uns nicht! Wir hören die/Schreie/Aus ihren Lagern bis hierher.”

(“Oh, the stillness of the Sound doesn’t fool us! We hear the/Screams/From your camps over there.”)

Brecht wrote some of his most famous plays, like Mother Courage and Her Children, as well as many of his best, and best-known, poems here in Svendborg. In ‘To Those Born Later’ he talked about the life of exiles, “changing countries more often than our shoes.” Sometimes he called this place “Danish Siberia,” but during his six years here Brecht managed to travel to Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, New York and London for various projects. Many people visited him here, including his father, and his ex-wife Marianne (with their daughter, Hanne). Walter Benjamin, the Jewish critic and philosopher, made numerous long visits, and stayed nearby for the whole summer of 1938. After lunch every day, he and Brecht played chess under the fruit trees. (A pear tree in Brecht’s poem ‘To Walter Benjamin, Who Killed Himself Fleeing From Hitler.’)

Today we were eating a late breakfast when some German visitors tapped on our kitchen window. We’d been told that Germans, in particular, like to come by to see where Brecht lived. We invited them in, and showed them around. They were from Berlin, and had grown up in the old East Germany, they told us, learning Russian instead of English, but we managed to chat about Brecht and some of his many women – Weigel, Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Elisabeth Hauptmann.  

They took some photos in the study and, after they left, I realized that I’d forgotten to tell them something important. When Brecht lived here, painted on the rafter in this room was the phrase “Die Wahrheit ist konkret” (Truth is concrete). This is a Hegelian idea, picked up by Lenin, and adopted by Brecht.

Reading Hegel and Lenin on this subject reminds me of why I got a C+ – my worst ever mark – for the course “Marxism in Perspective” taken, in terrible error, my first year at the University of Auckland. Aside from a vague notion of what Proudhon was talking about (“property is theft”), I really had no grasp of the subject at all.

My stupidity persists to this day. Something about the word “dialectics” makes my brain glaze; also the words “idea” and “truth” and “system.” Perhaps the reason is my (numerous and glaring) blind spots about mathematics: I’m not fluent in the language; I can’t follow the logic. I exhort students of writing to focus on the concrete rather than the abstract, but that’s something else, I think, to lure them into the specifics of detail, the particularities of a time and a place and a character. (I would have been no use to Lenin, except perhaps to make his dinner.) Maybe it’s the same thing: against generalizations.

Earlier, after reading things and struggling to understand, I wandered into the living room to turn up the radio: one of the Songs from the Auvergne was playing, and I wanted to listen. Tom came in as well, and performed an impromptu interpretative dance, to distract and entertain. “Hegel is b------t,” he told me. “You can quote me on that.”

(And here I should thank Doris Eikhof for the German translation of “Truth is concrete,” and for pointing out that “truth” is a feminine noun in German.)

Something I did remember to tell the German visitors: I’ve read that Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife, didn’t share his bedroom here. She didn’t sleep in any of the bedrooms. Brecht slept downstairs; so did the two children, and the maid. But every night, Weigel tugged on a rope and pulled a ladder down from the ceiling. She slept in the attic.

When Max comes over to discuss our badminton net needs (part of one pole is missing), he says he’s not sure of the truth of this: the attic is unfinished, not suitable for habitation. I show him one of Brecht’s poems, Zufluchtsstätte, and we discuss the meaning of “Ein Ruder” in the first line. Literally it’s a rudder, but Max thinks it’s also something that horses pulled across fields to rake the soil flat; farmers used them to hold down thatched roofs, to protect them from the wind.

So here’s my attempt at a very, very loose – and free – translation, with apologies to Brecht, the German language, and metrical verse.

 

Place of Refuge

A farmer’s rudder holds down the roof, so wind

Can’t blow the straw away.

In the garden we’ve laid stakes

For a swing-set, for the children.

 

Post arrives twice a day at this place,

where letters are welcome.

Ferries come down the Sound.

The house has four doors, four ways to flee.

 

 

I’ve read interpretations of this poem that talk about the “four doors” as Brecht’s countries of exile – Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the US. But this poem was written here in Denmark, before Brecht had to flee anywhere else. And this is a house of many doors – four when Brecht was here, five now. (There's one at the end of the house, on the left, and French doors on the garden side.) Truth is concrete in this case, I suspect.

As well as the painted motto, Brecht’s studio also featured – back in the day – a nodding wooden donkey on the window ledge. It wore a little handwritten sign: “I, too, must understand it.” This was so Brecht could remember meaning, sense and clarity, I guess. (That would make Frank Conroy happy.)

Today I put down the German book, and we eat leftover sausages for lunch. Max drops by with a stake for the badminton set. In the Sound an old sailing ship heads for the harbour, and one of Max and Kirsten’s grandsons, wearing an orange life jacket, messes about in the shallows in a dinghy. I tell TM that I’m reading German books now, and translating poetry. “I’ve become an intellectual,” I warn him. “Let’s not get crazy,” he says.

 

 

 

 

Resolution

New year, new intentions. Or old intentions (get more work, do more work, earn more money) dressed up in optimistic spring shades, swishing their skirts. Plus some abandoned intentions from last year, of course. My short-story-a-day promise collided with my post-surgery indolence, and that was that. I managed to scrape to 236:

226: ‘Music in the Bone’ by Tomas Mac Siomoin
227: ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ by Robert Coover (2013)
228: ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’ by Georgina Hammick (1986)
229: ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (2011)
230: ‘Crazy in the Stir’ by Chester B. Himes (1934)
231: ‘Before the Breakup’ by Balla (2005)
232: ‘The End of the Party’ by Graham Greene (1929)
233: ‘When the Glasses are Lost’ by Zrko Kujundziski (2011)
234: ‘The Face’ by Dragan Radulovic (2007)
235: ‘Sugar Cane’ by Derek Palacio (2013)
236:  ‘Last Summer in Marienbad’ by Kirill Kobrin (2011)

Not quite the 365 I intended, but 236 new stories isn't too bad.

Maybe that was the story of 2013 for me: not quite, but not too bad. We got to travel to Hamburg and Berlin and Rome again, to Monterrey for my nephew's wedding, and to Spain for Tom's birthday. I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, courtesy of a Carnegie Grant, to research Jean Rhys for a play I want to write. In May I went home to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and we spent Christmas in Tom's hometown of St Louis. I attended the Man Booker Prize in London. We visited friends there, and in Wales, York, and the Cotswolds; we met up with my English cousins in Newcastle, Sheffield, York. With Tom's mother we went back to Whitby and to the Lake District. The Devlin sisters stayed with us (without parents) for the first time. Other firsts: Rievaulx Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Haddon Hall, Bakewell, the top of the Shard. We spent our anniversary in Liverpool, one of our favourite places.

In 2013 we flirted with insolvency; I flirted with cancer; we both got very cosy with the NHS. I escaped the worst colleague ever and a job that pushed me to the edge. We made the happy move to a new job in Sheffield and a flat in an old cutlery factory alongside a noisy little river. In Glasgow I hosted a baby shower for my friend Doris; in Auckland I co-hosted a bridal shower for Martha, now married to my nephew. At the University of Sheffield, Tom took (and survived) a CELTA course in a long, hot July, and I studied Spanish this autumn. We saw more plays than movies. We watched almost all of BREAKING BAD. (The last few episodes have been saved as a new year's treat.)

Two new books published: a YA novel and my first children's book. Two stories commissioned, and a few poems published. A little manuscript fixing and ghostwriting. Too many false starts, conference calls and proposals that went nowhere in particular. Rejections and acceptances. Literary festivals, school visits, and talks via Skype. Interviews with Donna Tartt (phone) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in person). Self-doubt, despair, bursts of enthusiasm. Stories and schemes jostling in my head.

Two sparkling friends no longer here: Sarah Mohl and Sarah Doerries. It still feels implausible and wrong to write those words. They're ahead of me now, with my cousin (and godfather) Laly Haddon, and my mother's dear friend Cron Crosby, two towering men who didn't see out 2013.

This year I wasn't planning to make any new resolutions, but today a name swirled into mind: Graham Greene. I'd like to read more of his work, and I'd like to try my hand at writing every day, as he did - though I won't stop mid-sentence when I've reached 500, his usual goal.

So that's my 2014 resolution: Graham Greene. It's all I can manage, given that ongoing resolution - write, work, earn - mentioned above.

Tom Moody and I ended 2013 by getting very dressed up in Mexico. We may not look so well-groomed in 2014, and I will almost certainly not be wearing false eyelashes again at any point. But we'll keep on being happy, and trying to make something of ourselves, in our own haphazard way.