Back to the Desert

I am what I am and I am what I am . . .
I’m Popeye the sailor man.

In first considering the work of Frank Sargeson it is well for us to forget for a while that he is a New Zealander. Many critics in this country overestimate the influence of regional tradition and habit on New Zealand authors. There has even grown up a cult among our intellectuals which traces our cultural deficiencies from an unspecified separateness from English and Europeanpage 217 values – a kind of Original Sin seen in an historical setting and sucking the marrow from our creative impulses. I would be the last person to deny that we lack many of the conditions necessary for the best writing – a large responsive audience, the community of kindred minds, a background of solid peasant industry. But we lack also the unreal adulation of artists by camp followers who do more harm than good, and the smothering cosmopolitan sentimentality of American tradition. The fertilising influence of the work of contemporary writers abroad touches us here as strongly as, say, in South Africa; our geographical isolation may make for a certain kind of writing or music or poetry; but the problems of an imaginative prose writer like Sargeson are the same here as elsewhere – to impose aesthetic order on that world of flux in which he lives.

I have found two levels in most of Sargeson’s work. The first, social; the second what I will call for want of a better word existential. The social trend of Sargeson’s thought is clear enough – it has endeared him greatly to Leftist reformers. Superficially at least, his short sketch ‘In the Department’ is a criticism of the waste and muddle of a Government department. The story could have been written by G.R. Gilbert, but a bitter tang marks it with Sargeson’s private stamp. In ‘An Attempt at an Explanation’ Sargeson tackles a much more subtle and ambitious theme. A church-going family, mother and son, are on the brink of starvation. They try unsuccessfully to pawn the family Bible; and, still hungry, sit down to rest upon a park bench. The minister of their church walks by looking at flowers, and greets them politely. That is all. The story is told through the mouth of the boy. Here Sargeson is the social moralist; and the bite of his sermon is heightened by his carefully casual idiom. The fault of the story lies in the fact that as in all propaganda, the dice are loaded. He leads one to expect a revelation of the human heart and leaves one with a moral text. At such times his characters become puppets, and no amount of fascinating and pawky conversation can bring them to life. A sermon is valuable in its own place; it is when it is dressed up as a story that one must object. In a sketch such as the title piece of his first book ‘Conversation with My Uncle’ the moralising intention is so obvious that one is not offended.

Yet Sargeson, being a creative artist as well as a moralist, is concerned with people more than with ideas. On an existential level his view is sourly compassionate, and at times perhaps he probes deeper than he knows. That superb and tender story ‘An Affair of the Heart’ leaves no room for anger or judgment. Mrs Crawley’s love for her son, though it eventually destroys her sanity, carries its own terrible justification. Truly it is an affair of the heart.

For a proper evaluation of the significance of Sargeson’s work, one must consider it in the light of contemporary conduct and belief. We are too close to the writing of our own century to see its strangeness, the peculiar warp which is in us also. Writers in the past could assume in their audience a common acceptance of their own scheme of values. From Shakespeare’spage 218 Othello to Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, characters in fiction could be regarded as independent beings, capable of choice (and hence of their own destruction), in the main controlling their own destiny. Their actions mattered. In the background stood always the yet unbroken structure of Christian faith and ethics. But science and humanism, impelled first by the Renaissance, have since undermined it. By science I mean the liberal philosophy which applies the theory of evolution to moral growth also, regarding this growth not as a matter of individual faith and conflict but as the inevitable concomitant of change. In this country the prevalent philosophy is an amalgam of liberalism and broken-down Protestantism. Ethics remain with us though faith has departed. Condemnation is laid on the more obvious sensual vices, while spiritual pride and complacency have an open field

Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star. . . .

Between the idea
And the reality . . .
Falls the Shadow

Idealist Eros replaces the fact of Agape. The Platonic Form replaces the Mass.

The instinct of writers has drawn them to concrete experience, the mystery of fact rather than concept. It is interesting to observe that Sargeson reserves his big guns for the Protestant clergy. One may be sure that in a Sargeson story a minister will be ineffectual, hypocritical, or homosexual. To Roman Catholics he is much more kindly. The Orange grandfather of ‘Two Worlds’ is an ugly bigot, the old priest a most attractive character. In ‘They Gave Her a Rise’ the Roman Catholic narrator is momentarily shocked by the hysterical and informal prayer of his landlady. Above all, Terry, the consumptive barman in Sargeson’s masterpiece That Summer, is a Roman Catholic:

So I doubled his pillow up and used my own as well then I got him undressed, and I’d never noticed it before, but there was a string round his neck with a medal-thing at the end of the loop. I had a look and it said I AM A CATHOLIC. IN CASE OF ACCIDENT, SEND FOR A PRIEST.

If Sargeson’s effects were ever accidental, this passage could be regarded as part of the accidental scenery. But in the grim spiritual desert of That Summer it stands out like the hieroglyphic of another language – that of meaning and reconciliation.

It is probable, however, that Sargeson’s kindness to Roman Catholics springs mainly from a shallower source. Since their theology banishes thepage 219 nonconformist dualism of flesh and spirit, Roman Catholics seem to find a more keen and carefree pleasure in drinking, racegoing, and even fornication – those bugbears of the rigid righteous. True, Dan Davin has told us, and admirably, of the sticky side of Irish Catholicism. But to Sargeson they might seem closer to the insouciant nature of his dream, at home in the world, free of his clinging shadow. He often writes of childhood as a lost Eden. In the shorter sketches, ‘Boy’, ‘A Hen and Some Chickens’, ‘Cowpats’, and also in longer stories like ‘The Old Man’s Story’, he draws on a reservoir of childhood experience, seen in retrospect as the happiest time of life. His principal adult characters are invariably sexually and socially frustrated; hence they have no sense of belonging to a tribe which can replace the dependence of a child on its parents. In an environment mainly industrial and unwelcoming, they look back to a country childhood, nostalgically and even sentimentally:

Life was pretty quiet there, the old man said, there wasn’t any hurry and bustle, it was just real old-fashioned country life. Now and then there’d be a picnic in the school grounds, where the trees were very thick and shady, or perhaps they’d hold a dance in the school itself but that was about all. You couldn’t have found a nicer place, the old man said. His uncle’s house was an old place just about buried in a tangle of honeysuckle and rambler roses, not the sort of farmhouse it’s so easy to find nowadays. The railway ran alongside but it was a branch line; there weren’t many trains and they’d run at any old times. Why, the old man said, he could remember one time when the driver stopped the train to get off and buy a watermelon from his uncle. But nobody worried, because people took life differently in those days.

The scenery is dwelt upon lovingly and precisely. Though the actual conversation in a Sargeson story is close to the Hemingway patter, much of his description verges on prose poetry. In that macabre sketch ‘A Great Day’, the description of the calm sea and dinghy riding the tide makes up for a plot a trifle too loud. And the New Zealand idiom itself is as carefully and consciously handled as the language of any poem.

One must remember that since Elizabethan times there has been a progressive devaluation of words.

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy upon us!

In 1593 when Thomas Nashe wrote the lines quoted above, what a man saw and heard and what he felt could be completely welded in words. Deathpage 220 meant the corpse carried through the streets. Hell meant, if not a flaming cavern, at least the dreadful nadir of a known supernatural hierarchy. The executioner was a masked man with rope, axe, and torturer’s tongs, familiar as a post-master. Hence Nashe’s poem could be appreciated by the Elizabethan reader on a concrete existential level, while it is for us mainly conceptual. In our society death happens behind the screens of a hospital ward; men are executed in a closed cell; and a hellish state remains with us though the terminology which could make it intelligible has gone out of fashion. The newspaper headline reduces all events to a common conceptual greyness. Against this loss of meaning in thought and action a writer must continually strive, with (as Eliot says) continually deteriorating equipment. There are two main paths in modern writing by which this has been done. The first, a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, most popular with poets, by which meaning is exposed in the image and intuitions of the mind off-guard; the second, most fully developed by Hemingway, a stripping from events of their conceptual setting, leaving them bare as a child’s story. But in contrast with mere reporting, the significance of the event is obliquely indicated by careful selection of apparently trivial conversational detail. At this Hemingway is a past master. Sargeson achieves a parallel success with New Zealand idiom:

I’d look at him lying there.
Terry, I’d say.
What is it, boy? he’d say.
Nothing. I’d say.
And then I’d say, Terry.
And instead of answering he’d just have a sort of faint grin on his face.

Though this kind of writing can become irritatingly monotonous, it has at its best a considerable liturgical power. Its value lies far less in an accurate reproduction of common speech than in the creation of a new art form.

While Sargeson may be compared stylistically with Hemingway his view of the world and human nature is subtly different. Hemingway’s characters lust, kill and die with bravado; they rarely show sympathy with the objects of their aggression; and among them a true I-Thou relationship is inconceivable. Sargeson’s characters are more introspective and capable of considerable compassion. The truth is that Sargeson, never far from being a moralist, has not rejected the nonconformist scale of values. He has merely inverted them, and perhaps improved upon them. His tolerance extends to all lost men, cranks and sexual perverts. It is the self-righteous whom he most condemns. Ethically the view is near to that of orthodox Christianity. He expresses it explicitly in a good sermon and half-made story, ‘The Good Samaritan’. The narrator’s friend finds a ship’s fireman dead drunk and retching near thepage 221 wharves. He does not help him; and the story is simply a conversation in which he speaks of his sense of guilt at not doing so.

The ubiquitous ‘I’ of Sargeson’s stories comes fully into the light in his powerful novelette That Summer. I leave aside When the Wind Blows, for I feel that Sargeson has not shown that he can write a full-length novel. In spite of fine and moving passages this novel is undeveloped, the ostensible theme too mechanical, the deeper currents too vaguely indicated. It is rather the raw material which could be worked into a number of excellent short stories. That Summer on the other hand, brings to full stature a form which he has mastered. Before discussing the place and value of this story in Sargeson’s work, it is necessary to make some comment on his treatment of sexual themes.

Some of his second-rate work is obviously designed to shock a conventional audience. And yet a conventional reader is unlikely even to begin a book by Sargeson; while the semi-illiterate would consider him highbrow. ‘Sale Day’, ‘I’ve Lost My Pal’, and perhaps ‘A Man and His Wife’, all show a crude and sneering insistence on sexual abnormality. He has nowhere a convincing and coherent picture of married life. Even his greatest story is saved only by the intensity of its realism from becoming a bad homosexual joke. But behind the sneer lies a deep and genuine valuation of that kind of friendship which merges imperceptibly into homosexual love. The centre in time round which his stories move lies in the Depression days of the late Twenties and early Thirties. At this time the always existing group of drifting job-hunters, homeless and classless men, was swelled by an influx from above as businesses crashed or pruned their staffs to a minimum. In this melting pot the virtues of tolerance and group loyalty crystallised; a powerful though inarticulate Leftist movement emerged, which was eventually to bring about a change of Government; and the keen friendship of ‘cobbers’ was the strongest tie. Sargeson can evoke as no other New Zealand writer has done the atmosphere of tension and the sense of freedom from all conventional obligations which this period stimulated.

In That Summer the myth of the lost man who has no place in society and scarcely desires it is fully developed. One is struck immediately by the similarity of the world-view implied in this story and that which French existentialists have given a philosophical context and some French novelists a voice. (It is surely no accident that Sargeson’s book was lately translated into French.) If it rested on philosophical distinctions, the comparison would be at fault. For Sargeson, as I have attempted to show, has many of the characteristics of a Christian moralist. But existentialism has a lyrical rather than an intellectual basis. By it the criminal who lives in continual fore-knowledge and acceptance of his death is exalted to heroic stature. The plot of Camus’ The Outsider is simple enough. A man attends his mother’s funeral without grief; picks up a girl the same day and beginspage 222 with her a liaison; commits manslaughter in a blundering manner; is tried and condemned, ostensibly for murder, in fact for his self-dissociation from all social, conventional and religious ties. Camus spoils his case by making the verdict (though not perhaps the condemnation) unjust; for the man is executed for what amounts to constitutional coldness. But the mood of the book (essentially romantic, one is reminded of Henley’s ‘Invictus’) ensures its success. Camus’ Algerian hero is invigorated by the dark wind blowing towards him from his death. In its graveyard philosophy the existentialist movement shares some of the negative facets of orthodox Christianity; indeed it has grown in the shadow of European Catholicism and scholasticism. A belief that one will surely die can purge much false optimism.

Sargeson too lays strong emphasis on spiritual isolation. His hero indulges less in cerebration than does the Outsider, and consequently the sincerity of mood is evident. But despite similarity of mood, the great difference between That Summer and The Outsider lies in the fact that while the Outsider does not achieve an I-Thou relationship with any person and remains imprisoned in his death-conscious self, Sargeson’s Bill does indeed, however inadequately, love his consumptive ‘cobber’. That Summer is a love story.

In keeping with Sargeson’s careful elimination of any way of escape from the razor-edge of existential awareness, Bill disowns his brief moments of altruism:

I’ll meet you at the Dally’s at twelve o’clock for dinner, I said, and I gave him half a dollar. And I went off whistling and feeling life was good when a man had a cobber like Terry to kick around with, and maybe I was feeling good because I was thinking what a hell of a good joker I was. Though if I was I was kidding myself, because when all’s said and done I was only doing what I was to please myself, though it might have been a roundabout way of doing it.

The story within a story of the sailor’s ‘wife’ who turns out to be his catamite seems to have no bearing on the main theme. Perhaps Sargeson intends an illuminating parallel between the physical relationship of the Popeye couple and the subtle emotional relationship of Bill and Terry. Or perhaps he is playing a joke on the earnest reader. The jail scenes are certainly sensitive recording, and one would be loath to part with them. The insistence on detail in all of Sargeson’s stories is characteristic of writing that verges on existentialism. The detail is a web stretched over an appalling inner void; at times it wears thin and one can see the blackness underneath:

I couldn’t decide what to do to fill in the time, and I couldn’t keep my mind off thinking about a job. I tried reading my True Story but it was no good. I’d just lie on my bed but that was no good either, and I’d have to keep getting up to walk up and down. I’d stop in the middle of the floor to roll a cigarette and listen to them downstairs. I’d think, my God I’ve got to have someone to talk to, but even after I’d turned out the light and had my handpage 223 on the door knob I’d go back and just flop on the bed. But the last time I flopped I must have dozed off, because I woke up lying in my clothes, and I wondered where the hell I was. I’d been dreaming, and I still seemed to be in the dream, because there wasn’t one sound I could hear no matter how hard I listened.

A critic has compared That Summer to washing hung on a line. The comparison is apt – the succeeding sketches are the clothes (some of them could be called dirty linen) and the line is the ironic, scarcely articulate love story moving inexorably to its tragic ending. Among the sketches one finds some of Sargeson’s tenderest and best. The story of Fanny and the money tree has a gentle humour not paralleled elsewhere. In another section Bill, whose money has been stolen by a man and his girl-friend lately met and befriended, shows an astonishing yet quite convincing degree of charity. Sargeson walks securely the delicate tightrope between sentimentality and mock-toughness.

At the beginning of this article I said that for a full appreciation of his work one must forget that Sargeson is a New Zealander. Having indicated the wider context of his writing, I partially withdraw that assertion. Speaking more personally than perhaps I have a right to, I can say that my own poetry has been warped and coloured by the unique quality of New Zealand landscape and New Zealand customs. I regard myself as being willy-nilly a New Zealander. The conformist morality of this country which has given Sargeson’s prose its impetus and direction is different from similar mores elsewhere, since more blanketing and deadly. Our community is too small for rebels (and artists are of necessity disloyal to their community) to form an ingroup. The first flush of enthusiasm past, they are glad to retreat into conformity and disown their tentative recreation of perishing values. I am not crying out against the live nerve of religious existence which gave for instance to the Scottish Presbyterian immigrants their peculiar tenacity and sombre realism. It is Piety, that morbid growth on religion, and Grundyism without source or aim, which leads to the emasculation of art. In Roads from Home Dan Davin elucidates an older and richer tradition of suppression and rebellion. One could come to terms with this and lose no great part of one’s freedom of mood. But that stream which once fertilised the poems of Burns, Hogg’s Confessions of a Self-Justified Sinner, and even the hymns of Charles Wesley, has here run dry. It is natural that both poets and prose-writers should look to the cow cockie or the West Coast bushwhacker for a new power. The trend is evident in much New Zealand painting. But in fact we find only a different kind of desert. Sargeson in That Summer has pointed a negative path – a self-mortification, accepting no virtue but compassion, a life in the loneliest part of the desert, where the bare facts of existence may teach us the ABC of self-knowledge.

A fruitful comparison can be made between Sargeson’s stories and the poetry of R.A.K. Mason. Mason also leads us to the desert and a bare altar. In his poem ‘On the Swag’ one can see the genesis of a half-sentimental socialpage 224 view, a charity without the focus of dogma. From this rather than from any intellectual simplification of existence in economic terms, comes the power behind the best Leftist propaganda:

Bring him in cook
from the grey level sleet
put silk on his body
slippers on his feet . . .

Let . . . the wine be spiced
in the old cove’s night-cap:
for this is Christ.

Sargeson, however, despite the fact that much of his writing shows the justified resentment of the underdog, has no illusions about the motives and lack of direction of this resentment in others; and he can turn his satirical guns against the revolutionary idealist:

Wait, he said, yes, wait till the guns go off. You wait, boy, he said, you’ll find out you were born just at the right time.

But, knocking around, I’d heard all that sort of talk.

From this detachment Sargeson draws much of his strength. His disillusionment with liberal society is shown clearly enough in a story like ‘White Man’s Burden’; his disillusionment with any expectation of change flickers in a passage like that quoted above. He retains a nostalgic feeling for land work and the wider horizon of childhood. If even this support were denied him, he might make the step Camus has made from The Outsider to The Plague – a virtual denial of the philosophy of Natural Man and a return to belief in Original Sin, with an accompanying depth of treatment. But in Sargeson the change seems improbable; for though he is a highly self- conscious stylist his awareness of the context of existential writing is limited. One observes that the mood induced by an awareness of Original Sin may remain when the actual dogma has been rejected. In Davin’s war novel For the Rest of Our Lives the mood is primarily determinist and stoical; but in Roads from Home his characters possess freedom of choice and recognise their common imperfection. Childhood experience is not sentimentalised. And Ned’s relationship with his mother allows for tenderness and some degree of mutual detachment. David makes a truce with the Church through acceptance of the clan. Employing a device similar to that used by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, Sargeson frequently uses the child or eccentric as a scale by which to measure our own deficiencies. In When the Wind Blows the child hero comes upon his father crouching motionless in the garden and staringpage 225 through the bedroom window at his Aunt Clara. Here the edge of satire is whetted by the child’s lack of comprehension. In ‘A Man of Good Will’ the eccentric tomato grower, when a fallen market has made his fruit unsaleable, piles them in a huge symmetrical heap and leaves them to rot. This theme is close to a kind of irony of action; and again a boy looks on with incomplete understanding. ‘The Hole that Jack Dug’ is perhaps the purest and wittiest. A man digs a hole with prodigious labour, only to fill it in again. And all the time the aeroplanes fly overhead, training for war.

Rarely do we read a Sargeson story entirely without acrid comment. This saves even the weakest from becoming magazine stuff. ‘Gods Live in Woods’ might have been taken from the Argosy. But the contrast between the free- thinking nephew and dour farmer uncle reclaims it as Sargeson’s. Unqualified realism seems to be his natural vein – with the touch of caricature which makes it a landscape and not a photograph. Perhaps his nearest rival in his own field is A.P. Gaskell, whose book of short stories The Big Game shows him to be capable of pressing on the nerve of contemporary life and manners. Sargeson’s age here stands him in good stead; for the world of the Depression years, bridging two eras, is better suited for near-great writing than the less seedy but more disastrous one which we now live in. Roderick Finlayson in Sweet Beulah Land takes his notebook to the Maori tangi. But his characters unlike Sargeson’s have not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They remain gentle, humorous, and decorative – like a Goldie drawing. G.R. Gilbert would be in the running if his habit of flippancy, inherited from Saroyan, had not invaded and sterilised his serious writing.

Sargeson, despite his obvious weaknesses, stands head and shoulders above all his New Zealand contemporaries except Davin. And Davin is primarily a novelist. The short stories of The Gorse Blooms Pale have those faults which can become virtues in a novel – longwindedness, excessive introspection, formlessness. They read like rough drafts for chapters. The stories of Graham Greene are very similar. Sargeson, on the other hand, writes with a diamond on glass. Where Davin is lush he is spare. But a good novel requires not dry comment but staying power, a virtue that Sargeson (perhaps for constitutional reasons) appears to lack.

Some may quarrel with Sargeson for his insistence upon the spiritual dryness of our lives and culture. To my way of thinking he is accurate though limited. For his limits are our limits; he is truly a New Zealander. He does not, like Shakespeare, hold up a mirror to fallen nature – but to fallen nature which has forgotten its fall. I have seen the setting of a good Sargeson story fully intact in a hotel bar on a Sunday morning. The morbid lucidity of hangover, the empty raw morning sky looking between curtains. Along the bar the derelicts, overblown pansies, lost men, going through the ritual of a church of negativism, their thoughts crawling sluggishly like a hive of smoked bees. They are unaware of the existentialist philosophy or the ‘dark wind’ ofpage 226 Camus – but Sargeson is not. He knows as well as Kafka the landscape of hysteria; and has explored the frozen underside of our well-lighted world of fried steak and football queues, hoping (I believe) to find the backstairs to Heaven. As we forgive Dante for his smell of singeing, we must also forgive Sargeson the icicles on his moustache.

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