On Returning to Dunedin

To return to the place you grew up in can be a bewildering, or even a painful experience. In my own case, when I was granted the Robert Burns Fellowship for 1966, and came down from Wellington with my family to live for a year in Dunedin, it was not quite a return to my original home base.

I had grown up at Brighton, twelve miles out of Dunedin. More than half of the images that recur in my poems are connected with early memories of the Brighton township, river, hills and sea-coast – especially the sea-coast. Sitting down to write in a room in Wellington, again and again my mind would make an imaginary journey over the neck of the Big Rock, across the mouth of the Brighton River, and wander round the domain, or up to the boat-house, or along the sandhills, or out to the fishing rocks where the swells come straight in without interruption all the way from Peru. And my company would be the living and the dead – the living whom I had known while I was growing up, or the dead whom I had very often not known yet relied on for a sense of continuity and spiritual support.

Of course, as one grows older, more and more of the living join the dead, till at last a large part of one’s love extends into and beyond the grave – a situation which I find particularly acceptable, as a believing Catholic, who is encouraged not to fear and avoid the thought of the dead, but to make them gifts of love. Thus my many poems about death are also in a very real sense poems of love and friendship.

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But Dunedin was a different place. It was the town I ventured into when I first came of age. It was the place where (as all people have to) I broke away from my first family and began the somewhat agonising search for a tribe of my own, that search which secretly obsesses and dominates the imagination of modern Western man in his state of spiritual dispossession and crystalline intellectual solitude.

Nowadays I see the same youths and girls at the street corners of Dunedin as were there when I came of age, dressed a little differently perhaps, using a slightly different jargon, but undoubtedly engaged in the same search. Conditions may have improved a little. They have flats and coffee bars and dance halls to meet in, where we had flats and dance halls and pubs. The great wall of mutual hostility and ignorance between the sexes which is perhaps the strongest single negative factor in our society has been broken down a little. At least a few bricks have been removed, leaving a gap through which the wisest can look and recognise each other as human beings.

But the hardest thing for me when I returned to Dunedin, not just for a few days’ visit, but for a year, was to encounter, understand, sometimes forgive, and finally exorcise the ghosts of those who had been young with me when I was young. Now there are no more ghosts in this town; not for me. It was a necessary labour, and perhaps in its final meaning a labour of love.

The possession of the Fellowship itself presented some problems. Writers have to stand on their own feet. There is always a real danger, when a writer accepts financial support from some person or institution that he will unconsciously modify his beliefs, his intuitions, or at least the expression of them, in order to fit in with what he feels the benefactor expects from him. This tendency will in turn create mental blockages, lack of vigour and sterility in one’s creative work. It is necessary to do more than hope that these things won’t happen. One has to take the initiative, move out from time to time into the bullring, express direct opinions on controversial issues.

I have some strong opinions about various political and social problems; and I have made a particular point of expressing them publicly during the course of this year, to make sure beyond all doubt that I did not slide unconsciously into the habit of cutting my coat to suit some vaguely-imagined cloth. Thus, recently I went down for the day to a Vietnam teach-in in Invercargill to speak for half an hour on the morality or immorality of Communism, economic liberalism, modern war and the employment of torture as a regular method of interrogation. If this direct expression of opinion happened to be incongruous with the view which this person or that might have of the way a Burns Fellow should conduct himself, so much the better. In part, I was doing what I would have done in any case; I was also ensuring that I had in no way allowed myself to be bought.

And earlier, having been invited to give the opening address at the Universities Arts Festival in Palmerston North, I was careful to prepare and page 99 deliver a script which gave my own unvarnished opinions about the state of our jails and mental hospitals, the peculiarities of our foreign policy, and the defects of our society in the crucial matter of a good relationship between the sexes – relating these topics, naturally enough, to the growth or impoverishment of the arts in New Zealand.

I was particularly careful not to modify my opinion that our educational system often does more harm than good to those who suffer under it. The Mayor of Palmerston North and the Chancellor of the newly-formed University of Manawatu, who were present on the platform with me, were plainly not entirely comfortable about the matter of my address. I regretted this; but the reaction of a large student audience made it equally plain that my talk had been of some help to them. One of my aims had been to break the death trance which so commonly takes hold of cultural gatherings; another was to ensure that I had in no way been bought.

I may seem to labour this point, but I think it is an essential one for any writer who takes advantage of a large public or private grant to take into consideration. He should not be misled by sentiments of courtesy or gratitude into any modification of his own opinions or the expression of them.

Over a number of years I have come to think that we live in a society materially affluent but in some ways less communally helpful to its members than, let us say, a tribe of African bush pygmies. The causes of this misfortune seem to me partly theological (through a strong Calvinist bias unconsciously received by us from our forefathers, the early settlers) and partly sociological and domestic, through the breakdown of earlier tribal and village communities to make way for the small fortified modern family unit. A sense of distress on this account is often present behind my poems, even those which may seem only to deal with external natural happenings.

Thus, in the poem, ‘Arriving in Dunedin’, I imply perhaps that a wiser but lessaffluent society might not have allowed halfof Saddle Hill tobe cut away – a symbolic amputation of one of the breasts of the earth mother:

We ride south on a Wednesday
Into the clearer weather,

Gently packed like foetuses in the dead
Belly of the thunderbird,

Down to the city of our youth (My
wife and I) – it’s a quiet place;

But the pattern shifts a little. Those houses on Lookout Point
(Skull-grey as something painted by Utrillo)

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Ambiguously glitter. We notice now
That a quarry like a cancer

Has cut away half of the smaller breast
Of Saddle Hill. And I remember

How in these parts the dead sleep
Under rough clay, who will rise up

In rage and hope at the Judgment Day,
Denying the quiet town, the quiet clouds,

Their hard, sod-cutting hands, so like our own,
Bent in the cramp of lifelong separate pain. (‘Travelling to Dunedin’, CP 366)

The view is undoubtedly a primitive one; but artists tend to build their works out of primitive observations and intuitions, and sometimes they may be able to supply their fellow citizens with those parts of the jigsaw which have unfortunately fallen under the table.

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