Comment [an Obituary for R.A.K. Mason]

To know a writer’s work is not usually the same as knowing the man. I knew Mason through his work, for many years, as a revered fellow poet, and seed-planter of ideas in this country, before I knew him at all as a man. We first met later in his life when he was Burns Fellow in Dunedin.

I came up to his flat, magnetised by the usual kind of curiosity one has for an unknown fellow writer, and found a man I will not forget. A wholly radical honesty was the impression I had of him. The honesty of worn sacking. The honesty of sand or rock or water rising from a hole in the ground. We did not talk about literature. We talked about people we knew who had been ill-treated by the police. He made, thank God, the worst coffee I have ever tasted, with coarse grains floating on lukewarm water. It was a most appropriate Sacrament.

As all good writing has to, his writing came from his life. Each poem belonged to the life, like dark threads pulled away from the frayed sleeve of an old coat. I call that quality authenticity.

I think I loved the man as soon as I met him. He seemed to me a very good man and a very sad man. The two qualities were deeply connected. His sadness was like Maori sadness. It came perhaps from a sense of complete identification with the wounded and the dispossessed.

He knew quite well that our civilisation is a graveyard of broken communities. I doubt if his certainty that the ideal community – for him, the Marxist one – could be created was ever as complete as his certainty that we live in a social graveyard. He was undoubtedly a religious man in the sense page 373 that he desired very deeply to see life as a whole. His hominist philosophy gave some ground for that desire to stand on, but it did not in itself satisfy the desire, since it depended on a future harmony not yet realised.

He had, then, a hope of the future and a profound present sadness. This sadness was creative. His verse came from it like blood from a wound. It was also the source of a beneficent anger. Mason was not an abstract thinker. I think his anger rose from his love for his fellow men, and violated sense of justice because our industrial power structure was constantly turning them into arse-licking zombies.

I believe that here in New Zealand, though he was loved by some as a man and respected by many as a poet, he suffered a lifelong frustration in the sphere of social action. One may conjecture, though unprofitably, what France might have done for him, if he had been born a Frenchman. Life, art and social action are not inevitably disjointed in the European world. As a French Marxist he might have had three million behind him. As a New Zealand Marxist he may have found three hundred who appreciated his social insights. Much as we need a social revolution, it is the common fate of New Zealand revolutionaries to fall into an intellectual ghetto and be regarded by nearly all their fellow country-men as dangerous eccentrics. I think his sadness came in part from the knowledge that the evils he could see so clearly were strangely invisible to others. His deepest self rested, like a stone under water, down in the roots of our society, where men are being robbed of their voices and perhaps their very souls. Now Mason is dead. A portion of our conscience is going into the ground. May God supply the lack. He was a good poet and an undeviating humanist. We did not deserve him and now we have to do without him.

1971 (657)