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Books

The grand old man

Frank Sargeson at 75 (Islands 21)

Edited by Robin Dudding

". . . she'd let me take her hand and I'd run my finger round the seams of her glove." Frank Sargeson wrote that in 1937 a story called "An Attempt at an Explanation". It was one of the first thing things he ever had published. In this collection of reminiscences of people who have known Sargeson at various stages of his life, favourite pieces of his work and critical tributes, the phrase comes up more than any other.

Sargeson was recognised from the start (admittedly it was a late start, for he was in his thirties when the story came out) as a writer who knew how to use his craft in the service of an exquisite image. And it has been his genius since then to forge that image in the most casual of surroundings.

The value of this present collection is twofold: we are introduced to the man who has had perhaps the single biggest influence on New Zealand literature, and even more than this we are given a rare insight to New Zealand writers and their work, individually and as a whole.

Sargeson himself comes through as a charming and erudite host, a "terrific" conversationalist (the word was a favourite of his at one time) whose eternal subject is books, an excellent vegetable gardener and cook, and a source of great strength to an enormous number of aspiring and established writers.

He lived for a long time in an army hut at the back of a section which fronted the road with a large concealing hedge, with books piled from floor to ceiling and scattered everywhere else, then shifted into a house he had built at the front of the same property. On his door was tacked a sign saying, "Frank Sargeson works in the mornings. Do you?" A kind of ascetic hedonist I suppose, dedicated to his work. How different to the lonesome protagonists who people his stories!

The contributors are a varied bunch: old friends from way back like Roderick Findlayson and Denis Glover, proteges like Phillip Wilson and David Ballantyne, admirers from afar, publishers, critics, assistants and even the younger generation in the almost requisite form of Ian Wedde. All are affectionate without ever being naive, all full of praise without a trace of pompous platitudes. There are some notable absences, like Janet Frame, but that is unavoidable.

The book is not a critical study, but it does contain some pieces of straight criticism (including reviews of recent work) and many hints which lead one down a variety of speculative paths.

John Graham (play, film and short story writer) says of the story "Tooth-ache": "Sargeson has told you the fact of her (the Granma who is surprisingly revealed as the subject of the story in the last few lines) existence and you have met her her". This ability to tell the "fact", directly or by circumspection stands at the heart of Sargeson's genius.

The bleakness of the stories doesn't mean that the "fact" is anything like a Beckettian paradoxical emptiness. Sargeson is never given to despair, he remains able to analyse it while not getting lost in it. He does use the device of a revelatory ending, but even while we are surprised we recognise how much of a logical extension of the whole story it is. The sudden twist, used so widely by other short story writers is rarely so effective.

Bruce Mason takes a different tack, [unclear: suiming] up a popular view of New Zealand and its literature: "That he is 75 and still working is a creative miracle in a country determined of its nature, character and essence to eschew miracle, epiphany and portent". The implication is that Sargeson (and a host of other writers in this country) are freakish, that the odds argue against their existence. Perhaps I put the case a little strongly, but it cannot be denied that Mason's attitude approaches the cynical and produces work which is in reaction to the nature of the country.

Yet Sargeson's writing is directly a part of New Zealand, it is drawn from New Zealand life to an extent that reaction could never encompass. His contribution is not to expose the brutality of our society, but to examine its particular makeup, and that includes brutality and beauty, progress and reaction, promise and despair, just like anywhere else. The difference of approach is immensely significant. Who wouldn't deride New Zealand on occasion for arrogance, hostility or philistinism? But no writer worth his/her salt is going to call that its major feature, or in Graham's term the "fact".

For those who have been troubled by the open sexism in much of Sargeson's work there is a marvellous piece by Jean Bartlett, a poet who has helped Sargeson proof read his books. She reproduces a parody written in 1940 on one of his early stones, "Conversation with my Uncle", in which she sends up his conservative approach to women in the same mode he had chosen to criticise the conservative business ethic.

Ian Wedde attempts something approaching a description of literature as art: ". . . the way in which the contradictions are, at certain vital moments, held in a lucid suspension of calm and simplicity . . . the: final such moment . . . has a clear focus, a reconciling and accepting focus of the real. . . . ". Dialectics to the rescue, one might almost say.

Bernard Gadd (teacher and writer) quotes Sargeson once writing of a "real risk that, in the process of according recognition of minority variants of English and their cultural freight, Shakespeare was being rapidly turned into another Chaucer so that his words would become inaccessible to the ordinary person." This seems remarkable from a man who has devoted his life to helping people gain access to their own "minority variants".

Possibly it is only by understanding the living nature of one's own language that one can appreciate fully an archaic one as it used to live, but this does not seem to be how Sargeson is arguing. Like so much else in this book, the remark leads the reader back to the question of New Zealand literature. What does it mean when the person who is so widely credited with forming the New Zealand idiom in print attaches so much importance to the outdated froms of the mother language?

Dan Davin's contribution is largely devoted to a discussion he once had with Sargeson on the relative merits of their styles of working and their respective choices to leave and stay in New Zealand. Davin writes in voluminous spells, preferring to revise whole drafts at a time, while Sargeson will not usually do more than one or two handwritten pages every day. Davin belives a writer should have many styles, Sargeson argues for a life long disciplined development of just one.

Davin suggests that there may be a "certain timidity, an obliqueness, an excessive reliance on the subtly inexplicit . . . due to his (Sargeson) being hemmed in by too small, too provincial, a neighbourhood". Again, is this a trait in our writing generally, and if so is it caused by the environment?

One of the more tantalising things about this book is its splattering of political references. To my knowledge no one has written an informed account of the political beliefs of New Zealand writers (collectively or as individual subjects) who were working through the 1930's and 40's.

A minor point perhaps, but considering the welter of political sentiment present in the actual literature of that time, and the ease with which we can now obtain books on British, European and American writers' politics, the need for such works is growing. The relationship between politics and art has a long history of critical underdevelopment in this country. Dudding's collection offers a few leads, starts a few balls rolling. It intends to do no more, but the mere fact that this has happened quite coincidentally is, I can't help thinking, significant.

Interspersed through the book is a selection of Sargeson's work. They serve as a fine reminder whenever you begin to develop the idea that the life of our literati is the most important thing, or that academic questions are at the heart of the matter, that there is more. The collection is an excellent introduction to Sargeson and a justified plea to read his work.

The final piece (apart from reviews of recent books on and by Sargeson) is an excerpt from a work in progress, entitled "En Route." It is possibly the most valuable thing in the whole book. Wedde's dialectic is there, but the subjects are age and raunchiness, gentility and courseness, sketched out with a combination of psychological tracings and deceptively simple observations of nature. Sargeson has the last word as the book has presistently had us believe he could and would, without itself telling us how or even knowing.

If you are at all interested in New Zealand literature, spend an hour or two with this book.

Simon Wilson