Isinglass

In the house where I grew up — an old wooden villa beside a dirt road on the outskirts of a small King Country town with a river at the back — my mother hung a number of framed art prints on the walls. I remember two van Goghs, a landscape near Arles (The Harvest) and one of the sunflower paintings; a Degas of young ballerinas in foaming, diaphanous tutus; Manet’s portrait of Berthe Morisot wearing a black bonnet and holding a bunch of violets. They were displayed alongside what I found out later were two originals: a children’s painting by Colin and Anne McCahon, given to my eldest sister at birth, and a range of denuded, purple-green hills by Ivy Fife. There were also two small Paul Gauguin prints. They were my favourites, probably because they were so colourful. I have them still. They are from his first Tahitian period: Te matete (Nous n’irons pas au marché aujourd’hui) and Le paysage aux paons (La mort).

There are mysteries associated with both of these works. Te matete’s sub-title ‘We shall not go to the market today’, is odd because the five women sitting side by side on a bench are already at the market; which is what ‘te matete’ means. Later I learned that the pieces of paper two of them are holding like fans in their hands are health permits, issued by the French authorities, allowing them to continue to practice their trade — prostitution; and that the subtitle means, not they aren’t going to the market but that they are not going to sell themselves that day. Later still I heard a speculation, unconfirmed, that the five on the bench, one of whom is smoking a cigarette, are not women but māhū. Mahu (= middle) are a third gender, found in all Polynesian societies, typically born male but growing up female; although the designation is not restricted to such people. Gauguin, because of his long hair and extravagant clothes, was thought to be mahu — or perhaps ta’ata vahine, a man-woman — when he first came ashore at Papeete in 1891.

Landscape with Peacocks is mysterious for a different reason. To the right of the picture, in the middle ground, a man wielding an axe stands next to a smoking fire; behind him is a pink thatched hut and two figures walking away down a green path; in the foreground, a peacock and hen are crossing the picture plane from left to right. The mystery lies in the Tahitian word inscribed in black on bright yellow lower right: ‘Matamoe’. I used to think it was the name of the landscape depicted. The original title of the work, it means, literally, ‘eyes sleeping’. That word has been variously interpreted. It could indeed be a place name; it could mean death; it could refer to wanderers or strangers (the peacocks; or Gauguin himself); it has even been translated as ‘the olden days’ (properly ‘matamua’). ‘La mort’ is Gauguin’s subtitle, given the work when he offered it for sale in Paris in 1893. No one knows why he called it that; unless he was referring to the death of his old self and the birth of a new.

It is characteristic of the oeuvre that mysteries found within it are seldom resolved. Russian scholar Alexey Petukhov, for instance, believed the figure of the young man with the axe is derived from a frieze on the Parthenon in Athens, postcards of which Gauguin had with him in Tahiti. Bengt Danielsson, who sailed with Thor Heyerdahl on the Kon Tiki and afterwards spent many years in Polynesia, identified the model for the young man as Gaston Pia, the caretaker at the primary school near where Gauguin lived at the time and a personal friend of the artist. They could both be right. There is less controversy over the origin of the five figures on the bench in Te matete: the composition is based upon an Egyptian tomb painting from 18th dynasty Thebes, of which the artist owned a black and white reproduction, probably another postcard.

It would be idle to pretend I knew any of this when I was growing up in the Burns Street house in the 1950s; though I might have intuited that there was something Egyptian about Te matete. I liked the picture for other reasons. The colours of the women’s dresses — dark blue, green, pale blue, orange, golden yellow — for instance; the two boys bent over carrying fish in the background; the enigmatic figure right foreground, in profile, looking askance at the women on the bench. S/he is the best candidate in the picture for a mahu; while those sitting talking and laughing on the bench, with their permits and their cigarettes held elegantly, nonchalantly in their hands, reminded me of Tut and Pet, two young Māori women, one a primary school teacher, the other a psychiatric nurse, who lived, intermittently, next door to us and looked after me sometimes.

My attraction to Landscape with Peacocks was simpler. It resembled a more brightly coloured version of our own garden. That garden was temperate not tropical; lush nevertheless, with a honeysuckle hedge, camellias, a bower of ferns, nectarine, peach, quince, plum and apple trees, gooseberry, red and black current bushes and what I once thought was an almond but was more likely a walnut. There wasn’t a coconut palm but there was a big old cabbage tree, called tī kōuka, sometimes titi palm, in te reo Māori, at one end of the lawn and a venerable beech, towai, which flowered pink and fruited red, at the other. We didn’t have peacocks but we had bantam hens; and up the back, across the river, as in the Gauguin painting, there was a mountain. In other words, both paintings, in different ways, represented aspects of the world I lived in then.

Neither of these works was in the exhibition, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, which closed in October last year at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Te matete is in Switzerland; there were works from the Kunstmuseum Basel in the show so its omission was probably a curatorial or else a logistical decision. Le paysage aux paons is held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, along with more than a dozen other paintings; there are a nearly equal number at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Unfortunately, for the last hundred years, it has been difficult if not impossible to show the thirty-odd Russian-based Gauguins in the West. After the revolution they were confiscated (= stolen) by the Bolshevik government; the ever-alert descendants of the Kreb, Morozov and Shchukin families, who are their rightful owners, will certainly sue for the return of their property if ever they appear physically in a local jurisdiction.

Henri Loyrette, curator of the NGA show, did open negotiations with Russian museums to try to arrange loans of some of these pictures; the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 put an end to that initiative. It remains the case that a comprehensive exhibition of what Gauguin achieved as a painter remains out of reach; and even those publications which try to see him whole, using illustrations, usually fail, for the same reason: not everything is, or can be made, available. This is part of a larger phenomenon: of all the major artists of his generation, Gauguin is the one who has proved unassimilable to orthodox art historical narratives — and even to the unorthodox. He remains an outsider and there have been, in recent years, attempts to cancel him altogether: for his alleged paedophilia, his sexual adventurism, his putative syphilis, his complicity in colonial strategies; most of all, perhaps, for his refusal or inability to create a coherent oeuvre. This last charge is of course the most interesting.  

Loyrette, in his catalogue essay, like many commentators on Gauguin, begins at the end, with his death on 8 May 1903 in La Maison de Jouir, his house at Atuona on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, now part of French Polynesia. He uses naval surgeon, writer, photographer and explorer Victor Segalen as his proxy. It was Segalen who, in August of that year, in an official capacity, picked up Gauguin’s remaining possessions from Atuona and took them to Papeete to be auctioned. He left an evocative account of the studio, with its dusty harmonium, its harp and its mandolin hanging on the wall, its detritus; and became the first reader of Gauguin’s manuscript of his book, Noa Noa,as well as the purchaser of a number of works, twenty-four in all, including the carved wooden boards with which the artist had decorated the entrance to the top floor of his two storey house. Segalen, who wrote a short, incisive and eccentric study of Rimbaud, became a Sinophile and a pioneering photographer in remote parts of China; until his early (and mysterious death) in 1919, he was an active proponent of the view of Gauguin as ‘un sauvage’ as well as, after Rimbaud, ‘un autre’.  

Loyrette, very loosely, structures his essay as a triptych. Part one uses Segalen as a medium through which to explore Gauguin’s house as home and museum; a location for the artist’s embodied and disembodied consciousness, from which he or his ghost might view his and other people’s extensions in space and time. A Degas expert and a former director of the Louvre, Loyrette draws an explicit parallel between Degas’ museum of the mind and the one Gauguin took with him — his ‘little friends’ — and reconstructed in Tahiti and the Marquesas. His second panel is built around an analysis of the fifteen or so self-portraits Gauguin painted over his lifetime, treating them as another kind of home, in this case for an identity which is, paradoxically, both mutable and elemental, fluid yet stable. The self-portraits are way stations on the journey to the final resting place at Atuona; and the last self-portrait is also, Loyrette believes (contra Segalen, who thought it was Breton village in snow), the last painting.

The third part of the triptych is made up of Gauguin’s writings. Gauguin was a prolific writer, especially towards the end of his life, when physical debility made painting difficult. His texts, anecdotal, autobiographical, philosophic and polemical, are best approached as a series of vignettes which might be compared to drawings or sketches that sometimes, not always, attain the status of finished compositions. You cannot derive from them consistent arguments and there are no fully achieved book length works; though you can find in them any number of fruitful provocations. Nor can you reconstruct a persuasive biography or autobiography; most stories exist in multiple, conflicting or ambiguous versions. There isn’t a theory of painting to be found amongst them either, although there are many pertinent observations upon his own practice; and (mostly acidulous) remarks upon the practices of others.

The chameleon nature of Gauguin’s achievement, the way he changed and kept on changing, is thus present in the writings. Loyrette identifies this as characteristic of the oeuvre as a whole and concludes his essay with some sonorous phrases which don’t offer much of substance. The first part of his essay title — ‘Into the far distance and into the self: the view from Gauguin’s window in the Marquesas’ — quotes Stéphane Mallarmé’s summation of his friend’s trajectory when, in 1891, he left for the first time for Tahiti. It sounds good: but what does it mean? That for Gauguin distance from the metropolis meant intimacy with the self? Perhaps. In some ways he never left Paris at all. It was where he sent his pictures and from whence his money came; where his closest friends and most active correspondents lived; as France was the source of the tinned food, the wine, the brandy and the absinthe he consumed. Or is it a way of talking about Gauguin the symbolist, in whose works everything signifies something else but no-one, not even the artist, can say precisely what that something else is? Loyrette’s essay doesn’t mount an argument for the coherence of the oeuvre, let alone that of his own exhibition; no matter how magnificent the works (and many of them are) he gathered for it.

His long essay is followed by four shorter ones. Nicholas Thomas’s ‘The painting of modern Polynesian life’, with its Baudelairean echo in the title, is a precis of some of the arguments in his recent Gauguin and Polynesia, discussed below. Vaiana Giraud’s ‘Gauguin the writer: Noa Noa and other prose’ is a precise and accurate summary of the voluminous writings the artist produced, including the journalism he wrote during his second stay on Tahiti; but doesn’t go much beyond a description of their extent, with a nod or two towards their content. Norma Broude, in her ‘Paul Gauguin and his art in the era of cancel culture’ offers a boiled down version of a longer essay which explores connections between Flora Tristan, Gauguin’s feminist and socialist maternal grandmother, and his own credentials as a supporter of, and an activist for, women’s rights. The fourth essay, as perfunctory in its way as the others, is also the most poignant.

Miriama Bono’s ‘Imagining reconciliation beyond myth and polemics’ anatomises the absence of Gauguin and his works from Tahiti and the Marquesas; and consequently from the consciousness of most if not all present day inhabitants of French Polynesia. She also gestures towards contemporary practitioners like the artist Kanaky (Philippe Lallut), who in works such as C’est fini avec Gauguin, tries to come to terms with the Frenchman’s legacy in the place he and other Pacific Islanders call home. Bono quotes Jean-Marc Pabrum: ‘Until Polynesian artists have asserted their own identity and paid homage to their people or culture, at least until they are at peace with themselves, the notion of passionately devoting themselves to a foreigner cannot help but seem futile and incongruous’. In this connection it is worth mentioning Samoan-Japanese artist Yuki Kihara’s series Paradise Camp, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2022, which restages Gauguin’s compositions with fa’afafine (the Samoan equivalent of mahu) as models and photographs the results. Kihara, too, had heard that some of the people in Gauguin’s paintings may have been mahu.

The essays are followed by an illustrated chronology prepared by Jane Messenger. This takes up more than half the book and functions both as a biography and a catalogue of works; although those which appear elsewhere in the volume (logically, I suppose, but confusingly) are omitted from it. The chronology is informative, mostly accurate and includes a commentary which is sometimes illuminating, but usually only in terms of currently fashionable or unfashionable attitudes to the man and his work. I found its inclusion perplexing; I would have preferred a catalogue of works, with commentary focussed upon particular paintings, rather than upon biographical matters which deserve, and require, much fuller consideration than can be given in a chronology. Fortunately, two book length biographies of Gauguin were also published in 2024: Nicholas Thomas’s aforementioned Gauguin and Polynesia, and Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux.

In many respects the books are complementary. Thomas’s is scholarly, Prideaux’s (as the title indicates) popular. Thomas, a Sydney-sider, first travelled to the Marquesas in 1984 as a young anthropologist to do field work on ‘Ua Pou, one of the six inhabited islands in the group. He has been back to French Polynesia, and to a lot of other places in the Pacific, many times since and is as well-informed and knowledgeable a commentator on Pacific cultures, past and present, as we have. He has also actively participated in the careers of contemporary artists like Niuean John Pule and the late Jim Vivieaere, a Cook Island Māori, to whose memory his book is dedicated. Fluent in French, he is well placed to access those sources for a Gauguin biography which have not yet been translated into English. While his book is even-handed and measured in tone, it isn’t difficult to intuit behind the prose a sense of exasperation with the persistent misunderstandings of Polynesian cultures by Western observers — from Louis Antoine de Bougainville until now. These misunderstandings, he believes, have also led to mis-readings of Gauguin’s work; hence his book.

Sue Prideaux, an Anglo-Norwegian with a French name, is a professional biographer who has published lives of Edvard Munch (2005), August Strindberg (2012) and Friedrich Nietzsche (2018); all three of these works won prestigious literary awards in Great Britain. Prideaux’s godmother was painted by Munch; Strindberg and Munch were friends; Nietzsche and Strindberg didn’t meet but corresponded briefly and fiercely with one another in the late 1880s, just before the former’s descent into madness; while Gauguin and Strindberg got to know each other in Paris during the period in the 1890s between the painter’s two sojourns in Tahiti. Prideaux’s biography therefore grows out of her previous inquiries and reflects an interest in the European dramatic, literary, painterly and philosophic circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She has a sophisticated understanding of this milieu and of Gauguin’s interactions within it and her writing about these associations and intersections is the best part of her book. 

Curiously, however, the further her investigations take her from Europe, the less convincing she becomes. In place of solid research she adopts novelistic strategies, as in her description of Gauguin in Auckland in 1895, en route to Papeete for the second time: ‘He was miserable. It was mid-winter, the hotel was unheated, and he couldn’t talk to anyone on account of his execrable English. Bored and cold, he disliked the city for its inauthenticity. Life was so dull he went out spending money for something to do’. In her account it is this boredom and misery which led him to the Auckland Institute and Museum where he found, in Thomas’s words, ‘the richest collection of Oceanic art [he] ever saw’. In fact Gauguin went both to the Museum and the Auckland City Art Gallery, which also held a collection of Māori artefacts, and filled a sketchbook with drawings of what he saw there. I find it hard to believe it was not curiosity and enthusiasm, rather than misery and boredom, which led him to those places.

Thomas goes into the detail of what Gauguin saw in Auckland and makes the point that, as in Tahiti, he was not encountering the remains of some ancient authentic tradition which had died out but contemporary art by Māori and other Polynesians which existed in relation to, and in reaction against, European colonisation; and, crucially, that Gauguin knew this was what he was seeing. In Polynesia proper, Prideaux falls prey to another of the misunderstandings which Thomas tries so hard to correct: the myth of the granny frock aka the Mother Hubbard. Prideaux repeats, several times, a trope common among recent writers on the Pacific, which deplores the long dresses women wear, ubiquitous in the islands today, as an imposition forced upon them by the missionaries, in order to cover up their hitherto freely exposed bodies — the same naked bodies which were such a magnet (this train of thought somewhat contradictorily asserts) for the prurient gaze of white colonising males like Gauguin.

Thomas takes issue with this view, pointing out that, at contact, all Polynesian societies placed a high value on locally manufactured tapa cloth and used it as an often extravagant covering for both the female and the male body on prestige, ceremonial or memorial occasions. They were, concomitantly, interested in the varieties of cloth offered to them in trade with Europeans, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. When the Russo-German explorer Adam Krusenstern was cruising off the coast of Hawai’i in mid-1804, for instance, desperate to obtain provisions, especially pigs, from the locals, he found that a kind of Russian red cloth was the only thing the Hawai’ians would exchange them for and, because he did not have it, or rather did not have enough of it, his people had to go without fresh meat. A decade later Otto Kotzebue, as Thomas records, had the same experience. Tahitian women, he says, welcomed the opportunity to make themselves clothes out of a rich variety of fabrics they had not encountered before.

Both biographies re-tell the story of how Gauguin painted one of his early Tahitian portraits, Vahine no te tiare (‘Woman with a gardenia’) but they do so quite differently. A neighbour visited and showed some interest in Gauguin’s portable museum. He began to sketch her but, when she saw what he was doing, she made some exclamation and left. An hour or so later she returned, perfumed, dressed in a blue gown, with a flower behind her ear. For Thomas, ‘her dress is beautiful’; for Prideaux, it is just another Mother Hubbard. Thomas sees her return as an act of agency, a decision to have herself represented the way she wanted to be seen; Prideaux thinks she is trying to mimic a European ideal. She repeats some mildly suggestive banter between the woman and Gauguin during which he says, in answer to her question, that, yes, the woman in Manet’s Olympia, a reproduction of which was pinned to the wall, is his wife. We have only Gauguin’s account of this conversation — if indeed it occurred. Its tone is impossible to gauge now, but I imagine amused scepticism on the woman’s side and an unconvincing, faux bravado on his; rather than the active flirtation Prideaux suggests.

The biographers differ, too, in their assessment of the painting. Prideaux sees a profound sadness in the woman’s countenance and suggests Gauguin is painting ‘the melancholy he saw in the vanished paradise of her race’. For Thomas, she is contemporary, unphased, ‘utterly confident in herself’. He points out that she is wearing what appears to be a wedding ring, albeit on her right hand, and remarks that ‘it is highly unlikely that the artist would have ventured to seek intimacy with a woman he found at least a little daunting, whose self-possession he certainly did not doubt’. In other words, he sees the subject of the painting, and her power relation with her portraitist, in a diametrically opposite way to Prideaux. For me the biggest problem with Prideaux’s book is here, in her reading of the paintings. This is, of course, a matter of opinion; but I hardly ever found myself in agreement with her descriptions of what the works show, let alone her interpretations of them. Thomas, as befits his training, is more circumspect and, to my mind, more accurate; and, when it comes to matters Polynesian, more knowledgeable as well.    

Prideaux, too, begins her tale at the end, with the death of the artist at Atuona. Then, with a flourish, she goes on to tell the story of Gauguin’s teeth. During the clearing, in 2002, of the site where his house had once stood (so that a replica could be built) a well was uncovered. This was the place he used to cool his drinks as well as draw his water. From its depths, among other things, a jar containing four decayed human teeth was retrieved. How they got there isn’t known; but, following DNA analysis, they were determined to have belonged to Gauguin. Further analysis showed that the tooth enamel was free of traces of cadmium, mercury or arsenic: standard treatments for syphilis in the nineteenth century, which would certainly have left their mark behind had they been used. Ergo, Prideaux concludes, Gauguin may not have had the disease after all: ‘If the story of the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas is not true, what other myths might we be holding on to?’ Subsequently she writes as if his syphilis were indeed a myth.

Thomas doesn’t address the issue in the body of his text but does mention it in a footnote, observing that ‘there appears to be no technical or scientific publication of the analysis that clarifies the implications of the finding’. He goes on to say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: if Gauguin was not treated for syphilis, that does not mean he did not have it, only that he was not dosed with heavy metals as a consequence. On balance, he thinks it likely that he did suffer from the disease but is not prepared to go further than that. He does, however, pose the question: if he did have it, where and when might he have contracted it?

By his own account, Gauguin had his first sexual experience, aged fifteen, presumably with a prostitute, just before he embarked at Le Havre on his first voyage in the Merchant Marine. He went in the Luzitano to Rio de Janeiro, where a friend had given him the address of a woman with whom he spent time ashore on this and on his second voyage, in the same ship, to Brazil. She was an actress, a native of Bordeaux, who called herself Madame Aimée; she had other lovers, including a Russian naval officer who was, Gauguin claimed, an heir to the Tsarist throne. Subsequently he sailed, in the Chile, to ports on the Pacific coast of South America (but not, as both Messenger and Prideaux allege, to India or Japan). It is thus entirely possible that he picked up the disease in his teens when he was a sailor; it’s also possible that he didn’t know he had it until much later in life, when tertiary symptoms began to manifest. There is no evidence that his Danish wife, Mette-Sophie Gad, nor any of their five children, were infected.

The allegation that he had syphilis is contentious because of the possibility that, knowingly or unknowingly, he passed it on to the women who were his lovers in Tahiti and in the Marquesas; affairs which are also controversial because the women were so young. Records are unreliable but it seems that the two who lived with him for extended periods of time during his two sojourns on Tahiti — Teha’amana and Pau’ura, respectively — were in their early teens when the liaisons began. It is this circumstance which has led to accusations that Gauguin was a paedophile. Thomas investigates these relationships in some detail and shows that they were consensual, that the young women’s families knew of and approved them, and that the women were free to leave at any time. It is also the case that he was not doing anything illegal: the age of consent in France and her territories at the time was thirteen; and, in both Tahiti and the Marquesas, boys and girls became sexually active as soon as they were physically mature.

Instead of focussing upon the unknown consequences of these and other liaisons, it is more interesting to speculate upon the nature of Gauguin’s own sexuality. He must have encountered homosexuality on board the ships in which he sailed; but there is no suggestion that he himself was inclined towards sex with men; apart, that is, from a brief, equivocal passage in Noa Noa, from which Prideaux quotes in her book. Gauguin and a young Tahitian, Jotepha (Joseph) have gone inland to seek wood from which to make carvings. Jotepha knows of a rosewood tree which, he says, doesn’t belong to anyone. As they are walking along, one behind the other, Gauguin following, he becomes fixated upon Jotepha’s ‘lithe animal body [with] graceful contours’. He wants to ravish him but is aware that his desire is ‘the awakening of evil’; and then, suddenly, is overcome with ‘the weariness of the male role, having always to be strong, protective; broad shoulders may be a heavy load. To be for a minute the weak being who loves and obeys’. It seems that, rather than ravishing Jotepha, he wants to be ravished by him.

At this point they have to cross a stream; as they do so, Jotepha remarks that the water is cold and the spell is broken. They carry on, cut down the tree — in Gauguin’s account an orgy of repressed sexual violence — and take the wood back to the studio for carving. ‘I was definitely at peace from then on. I gave not a single blow of the chisel to that piece of wood without having memories of sweet quietude, a fragrance, a victory, a rejuvenation’. Prideaux, who reads the episode in terms of the story of the Garden of Eden and, superfluously, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as well, suggests the encounter ‘released Gauguin from the role of the sexually predatory white male’. This may be so; but surely it also liberated him into a consciousness of his female side, albeit conceived in atavistic, nineteenth century terms: ‘the weak being who loves and obeys’?

Here the figure of the mahu becomes pertinent again. Gauguin wrote that, among Tahitians and Marquesans, women and men were more like one another, physically and psychologically, than they were in Western societies and that meant relations between the sexes were more equal, more tender and more free. He doesn’t seem to have made any overt comment upon the middle sex but there are many figures in his pictures who could be either male or female — or both. And there is one at least where his depiction is unequivocal. In the painting Nave Nave Moe, in the right middle ground, sits a figure with its head turned to the side and one knee drawn up, upon which s/he rests a left hand. Along the thigh of the other, extended leg lies an impressively large penis; its presence compels a re-examination of the naked breasts of the figure, which turn out to be as characteristic of a fleshy male body as they would be of a small-breasted woman.   

Nave Nave Moe (‘Sacred spring’ or ‘Sweet dreams’) is one of the works held in Russia, at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I have read half a dozen commentaries upon it, all of which identify the figure in question as a woman, perhaps because it is shown in the same pose as that of the central image in the much more famous Aha oe feii (‘What! Are you jealous?’). Or perhaps as an example of deliberate or inadvertent censorship. It is a significant omission. Nave Nave Moe was painted in Paris in 1894 and exhibited there along with the equally famous Mana’o tupapa’u (‘Spirit of the dead watching’), the work which, more than any other, has led to accusations that Gauguin was a pornographer. But what if the naked figure lying face down on the bed is not a girl but a mahu; or even, as Stephen Eisenman suggests in Gauguin’s Skirt, an hermaphrodite, like the one in Bernini’s famous sculpture (a copy of a lost Greek original), whose pose Gauguin quotes in his picture? What are we to say about the male gaze when it is directed at a figure whose sex is ambivalent?

In the story about Jotepha Gauguin does in fact characterise the young man as an hermaphrodite but also says he was ‘unaware’. This lack of awareness is not ignorance but innocence and he contrasts it with his own fallen nature: ‘I alone carried the burden of an evil thought, a whole civilization had been before me in evil and had educated me’. This is probably the most accurate, and the most sympathetic, way of understanding Gauguin’s (admittedly tiresome) reiteration that he was, or rather wanted to be, ‘un sauvage’ — a word which, as Thomas points out, in French means something more like ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ than ‘primitive’ or ‘barbaric’. Gauguin, whose first language was Spanish and whose early years were spent in Lima, may have wanted to return to the state of innocence he had known as a boy in Peru. Just as his search for tropical locales to paint may have been a quest to recover the lost colours of his childhood.

The other charge against Gauguin is that he was complicit with the French colonial enterprise in Tahiti and the Marquesas. At the most basic level, this is true: how could he not have been? Merely by being there, a white man in a settler society, he was implicated. Politically, however, Gauguin always opposed what he saw as the abuses of the colonial system. During his first sojourn, when he was beholden to the French government, he expressed himself privately (and eloquently); during his second, he became an activist. He contributed critical and satirical letters to the periodical Les Guêpes (‘The Wasps’) and accepted a paid position as its editor. Les Guêpes was the organ of the Catholic party and in his articles Gauguin tended to promote the interests of settlers against the colonial government. His own newsletter, Le Sourire (‘The Smile’) took a similar stance; one that was not necessarily, or always, sympathetic to the Tahitian people but was consistently hostile, in an anarchic and scattergun fashion, to the colonial government. He became a popular public figure among the disaffected and was known affectionately about town as Koké — the local pronunciation of his surname. 

Things were different in the Marquesas, where both periodicals were read and where, when Gauguin arrived there in 1901, Koké was already a hero. In Atuona he found a smaller society in which he could make a real difference to people’s lives. By reading the relevant legislation, for example, he was able to inform local families that the hated compulsory education of their teenaged children at segregated Catholic schools in town only applied to those who lived within a certain distance (4.5 kilometres) of these institutions. Families who didn’t want their boys and girls indoctrinated promptly moved outside the limit and withdrew them, legally, from the schools. He also refused to pay his taxes — in what was still a virtually cashless society — and advised others not to do so either.

Another intervention focussed upon the method of policing used at Atuona. The gendarmerie regularly arrested people for crimes such as drunkenness or fornication; when a magistrate from Papeete made his brief, six monthly visit, he heard only the arresting officer’s testimony, invariably entered a conviction and then levied a fine — a proportion of which went into the gendarme’s pocket. Gauguin wasn’t able to get this iniquitous practice abolished entirely but did succeed in lowering the amount of the kickback. His reward was a conviction of his own, for libel, a fine and a prison sentence. He was preparing to appeal this conviction when he died.

Of course there is another sense in which Gauguin was implicated in the colonial project: his use of models and, by extension, the imposition of his gaze upon those he painted, whether they were teenage girls, mature women, mahu, men and boys or old people of both sexes. This brings us back to the work. Gauguin was someone who could not paint without models. His search for new subjects took him from Paris to Brittany, to Martinique in the Caribbean, to Tahiti and finally to the Marquesas; but his use of them wasn’t straightforward. One of the arguments he had with van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles was about what he called ‘abstraction’. For van Gogh, the model was an opportunity to make a true representation of the soul of the person they were; for Gauguin, it was a leaping off point; he was looking to augment, alter, even reify, his model into something else. He was frequently vague about what this something else was but still knew what it was he was trying to do. ‘Emotion first — understanding after,’ he wrote in July, 1901.

A characteristic of Gauguin’s work, from the very beginning, is his use of decorative patterning in his backgrounds as well as in the fabrics he so often painted. Indeed, like Matisse, he carried with him a collection of favourite pieces of cloth which appear again and again in his work. In the Tahitian and Marquesan paintings, you can see this love of patterning expressed in the way he renders the clothes people wear and the fabrics they have about them, as much as in the walls they sit before or the landscapes they inhabit. These passages of pure painting are unanalysable in rational terms yet they are, in some respects, the ‘meaning’ of the works. In an interview with journalist Eugène Tardieu, published in L’Echo de Paris in 1895, Gauguin made this explicit:

‘It matters little whether blue shadows do or do not exist. If a painter tomorrow decides that shadows are pink, or violet, there is no reason why he should have to defend his decision, assuming his work is harmonious and thought-provoking.’

‘Then your red dogs and pink skies are deliberate?’ asked Tardieu.

‘Absolutely deliberate,’ Gauguin replied. ‘They are necessary, every feature of my paintings is carefully considered and calculated in advance. Just as in a musical composition, if you like. My simple object, which I take from daily life or from nature, is merely a pretext, which helps me by means of a definite arrangement of lines and colours to create symphonies and harmonies. They have no counterparts at all in reality, in the vulgar sense of that word; they do not give direct expression to an idea, their only purpose being to stimulate the imagination — just as music does without the aid of ideas or pictures — simply by that mysterious affinity which exists between certain arrangements of colours and lines and our minds.’

This doesn’t answer the charge that he was exploiting his Marquesan and Tahitian models, nor that his view of them was sexualised, predatory or demeaning; but it does shift the ground. Besides, however apposite the accusations may be, they do not change the paintings and it is to them we must look for answers. In my view the people who appear in his works, particularly those from the last dozen years of his life, are fully present before us in a manner both enigmatic and uncanny — in the same way that those decorative backgrounds and passages of paint in the cloth or in the landscape are fully present and, equally, enigmatic if not necessarily uncanny. While Gauguin’s Polynesian faces may seem generic, to anyone who has lived amongst Māori they are familiar; and their characteristic expressions are those I remember on the faces of the boys and girls, the men and women, I knew when I was growing up in Aotearoa.

That is not all: one of the peculiarities of Gauguin’s oeuvre is the way the face of his mother, Aline, appears, throughout. Another is the manner in which he conjured up visages like those seen in the sculptural works of Cycladic art from the Greek Mediterranean (3500-1500 BCE); or, even more anciently, in the Venus of Brassempouy (c. 25,000 BCE), with her slanted eyes, triangular chin and feline look. These faces appear, usually in the background, in works from Brittany, Arles, Tahiti and the Marquesas. I don’t mean to endorse Gauguin’s identification with an authentic lost past of human kind, re-discoverable only by self-styled savages like himself, nor to promote pan-racial stereotypes: but there is something about the archaic faces in these paintings which does make you wonder. They seem to come from the beyond to which he had exiled himself.

The synoptic works of the late 1890s are best seen, Bronwyn Nicholsen suggests, as religious paintings: ‘images that cannot represent a real Tahiti but that suggest the mysterious connectedness of peoples and cultures at some deep level. He places them in a setting made up of multiple planes of partly intersecting, partly disparate realities, that draw on numerous traditions — European, Asian, Polynesian — not out of a desire for mere exoticism but through a restless probing of the conjunctions and disjunctions between cultures’. The landscapes from Atuona, which are plainer, exist, incongruously, beside a number of other, almost documentary works, some of which Thomas reproduces, which show priests and nuns going dutifully about their pastoral activities amongst their Marquesan hosts. Gauguin was catholic in more ways than one.

So much criticism of his work focusses upon what he was trying to say; but the paintings ask different questions: what do you see? How does it make you feel? What think? That is, they are not about the painter but the viewer; or rather ‘that mysterious affinity which exists between certain arrangements of colours and lines and our minds’. In this connection it is worth recalling that, in his later years, when Gauguin was often ill and sometimes in extreme pain (he broke his ankle during a street brawl in Brittany and the compound fracture never really healed), his sufferings do not enter his works: the result both of a formidable discipline and an unwavering commitment to a certain kind of vision; of what may still be called, howsoever fallen its creator or its inhabitants may be, a paradise.

An artist I interviewed once, New Zealander Philip Trusttum, told me: ‘Painters don’t have very much subject matter.’ He meant that motifs, howsoever discovered, may be explored indefinitely, without necessarily generating narrative coherence. Gauguin, speaking of Marquesan art, said something similar: ‘One is astonished to find a face where one thought there was nothing but a strange geometric figure. Always the same thing, yet never the same thing’. Bach’s fugues come to mind. But he wasn’t really of that persuasion: repetition didn’t interest him so much as novelty. Or perhaps that should read novelty in repetition. Gauguin at Atuona had, you might say, pace Henri Loyrette, come home to his native land, which was a place of repetition but also one of novelty. A Tahitian woman reclining in the pose of Manet’s Olympia, for instance, with a fan behind her head; Marquesans riding horses on a pink beach after a composition by Degas; a Polynesian Eve in a garden of coconut palms and breadfruit trees, presided over by a Buddha whose figure is derived from one in a temple at Borobudur in Java; five prostitutes sitting on a bench at a market in an arrangement first depicted in a 3500-year-old frieze from Ancient Egypt.

His mentor and first teacher, Lucien Pissarro, when he saw the early Tahitian works, expostulated: ‘This was the art of a sailor, a bit taken from everywhere. He is always poaching on someone’s ground; now he is pillaging the savages of Oceania’. It’s true that Gauguin’s work is mixed, impure, with elements taken from many different cultures, including his own, and assembled in ways that make sense pictorially but not necessarily anthropologically, historically or intellectually; but this does not make them inauthentic. Idiosyncratic, rather. Nicholas Thomas prefers to leave the question open. Of his own study he writes: ‘this book is partial. It stops short of judging: must this artist be condemned or rehabilitated? To the contrary, it tries to define quite why it is, and will remain, impossible to reach any settled conclusion about what Gauguin did, who he was and how finally his work should be valued’.

Gauguin’s repetitions were also those of a sailor: abroad on the high seas then home to port to celebrate and recuperate; then to go, for an indeterminate period, elsewhere again. His elsewheres included Peru, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, Brittany, Panama, Martinique, Brittany again, Tahiti, twice, and finally Atuona in the Marquesas — and always, not incidentally, the sea. He went on his first ocean voyage before he was two years old; and as a young man was a sailor, first in the Merchant Marine and then, after war with Germany was declared in 1870, an officer in the French Navy, patrolling Baltic ports and the North Sea. And, as any sailor does, he must have spent long hours gazing out over what Matthew Arnold called ‘the unplumb’d salt estranging sea’. He probably also, though he never admitted to it, like many sailors, drew.

By the same token his later paintings — especially those from Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti and the Marquesas — show a curving line of white, blue or pink in the background: the waves of the sea, with upcast foamy ornaments like flowers, seen through trees and past sandy beaches, where groups of people engage in their scrutable or inscrutable activities. He was, or became, a classic example of that nineteenth century type, the beachcomber. The word was first used by Richard Dana in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) to describe the lives of those ‘adrift along the coasts of the Pacific and its islands’. An 1889 dictionary expanded the definition: ‘A seafaring man generally, of vagrant and drunken habits, who idles about the wharves of seaports; used most frequently in countries bordering on the Pacific Ocean’.

However beachcomber can also mean ‘a long, rolling wave’. If sound can be a part of a mute and static art like painting — and Gauguin was or claimed to be synaesthetic — then we may say that the reverberation of those long rolling waves breaking upon the shore, roaring and hissing up the beach then, with a high bright diminuendo, receding, always accompany our viewing of his pictures too.

Works consulted:

Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2024

Gauguin and Polynesia Nicholas Thomas, Apollo/Bloomsbury, London, 2024

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux, Faber & Faber, London, 2024

Gauguin’s Skirt Stephen F Eisenman, Thames & Hudson, London, 1997

Gauguin and Māori Art Bronwyn Nicholson, Godwit/Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, 1995

Paul Gauguin in Russian Museums Anna Barskaya & Marina Bessonova, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1988

Paintings in order of appearance:

Te matete (Nous n’irons pas au marché aujourd’hui) (1892)

Le paysage aux paons (La mort) (1892)

Self portrait (1903)

Vahine no te tiare (1892)

Mana’o tupapa’u (1892)

Nave nave moe (1894)

Te avea no Marie (1899)

Cavaliers sur la plage (II) (1902)

I

A fox sat on its haunches out the front

of the house. I could see its two

pricked up ears against the snow &

the yellowy green of the cedar trees

on the other side of the road. Dusk.

The equinox. The thaw beginning after

a long cold winter, our second here

& much more taxing than the first.

The other day in the woods I saw

another kitsune, or the same one, pause

on the trail then bound away ahead.

This one waited until it was sure

I’d seen it then loped off; its brush

a pale fawn colour, like honey.

II

We had been feeding wild animals

with scraps from our table — tanuki

I thought, raccoon dog, but sometimes saw

fox prints in the snow upon the road &

on the path leading from the carport

up to the house. Fox prints are precise while

tanuki drag their hairy feet. That night

I left four fat oysters in a chipped bowl

out near the trunk of the momiji tree

growing beside the path. Next morning

they were gone but the footprints of those

who’d eaten them were indistinct. Kitsune

are messengers of Inari, the kami of rice,

tea, saké & fertility. They bring good luck.

III

The next day mist drifted down from

the mountain & voices echoed in the air

voices that were not there although

they sounded upon the ear as if they were

& spoke we knew not what: when you live

in a place like this you often hear voices

like these but do not know exactly

what they are saying. In the same way

kitsune does not tell you why it comes

nor what message it is bringing

beyond the obvious desire for food &

the less obvious hope for something

like an exchange of views between

equal aliens or maybe alien equals.

IV

One evening, by mistake, I dropped

a piece of food meant for the animals

close by the steps up to the small deck

outside our two front doors. Next morning

that morsel had been returned & placed

delicately, deliberately, I am sure, upon

the wicker mat before the sliding door.

A line had been drawn between

our world & that of our animal

companions. At its simplest it said

food lying near the house

was ours and food further away, theirs.

This was both a gift & a gift returned

& a protocol I have since maintained.

V

Last autumn, again at dusk, we saw

a bear and her four cubs beside the road.

I stopped the car & let the window down.

She paused at the tree-line & looked

balefully back at me while her cubs

gambolled around her. Her look said:

who are you, what do you want, don’t you

dare. A few days later a robust oblong wire

bear trap was placed outside a nearby house

& baited with rice husks & molasses.

Any animal, entering, would depress

a plate in the floor which then released

sliding gates at either end of the trap.

The only animal caught there was a badger.

VI

I went down next day to have a look at it:

passive, mournful, obscurely ashamed

the anakuma, hole bear, looked mutely up

at me looking down & murmuring to it.

I think (I hope) whoever set the trap let it go.

As for the actual bear, said to have been

raiding farmers’ crops, it was clearly

too smart to fall for such an obvious

subterfuge. Kuma are black bears,

not large but dangerous withal.

Our neighbour tells us she has eaten bear.

I have seen it on restaurant menus

& just the other day at a local shop

I saw cans of boar and bear meat for sale.

VII

We do not eat foxes and they do not

eat us — or only if we happen to become

carrion. Tanuki, ditto. Anakuma

are omnivores too & subsist on earth

worms, berries, beetles & persimmons.

Feeding wild animals is not advised

by experts on the subject & yet we do:

last night I left out the remains of a purple

sweet made of bean paste given to us

by the woman at the shop which sells

canned bear meat. Like the oysters

it was gone by morning; & again

I do not know which animal — anakuma,

kitsune, tanuki or another — ate it for dessert.

VIII

Someone said I should set up a secret

camera & film our nocturnal visitors

but I said I’d never do that: it would

break the unspoken compact I think

I have with these creatures, who don’t

I’m sure, wish to observe me when

I think I’m unobserved. Why would they

& more to the point why do we?

No-one I know of has ever made

a pet out of a raccoon dog; nor of a

hole bear; & those who have adopted

foxes soon learn their wildness cannot

be tamed. It is enough for me that they

let us live & give us space to do so.

IX

That is of course a fiction: no permission

was either asked or given, we just came

& bought & settled in. The bears, the dogs

the badgers, the deer, the boars, the foxes

make room for us only because they have

no choice in the matter. Our giving

of food from our table could then be seen

as payment of a kind of rent. Or is it

rather an index of our guilt. Or

something else entirely. Once we were

familiar with those we came amongst the way

our kin the monkeys living here still are:

is this why we yearn to fabricate

relationships where none in fact exist?

X

Food is love a friend used to say &

I believed her although I never knew

exactly what she meant. Now I think it’s love

because it’s life that’s being fed

whether that life belongs to anakuma

kitsune, tanuki or whoever else eats

the scraps that fall from our table.

I do not think kitsune is supernal or

a mythic being but I know it knows

who I am & that I give it food. I also know

we came from elsewhere & elsewhere

will return; while the fox & its descendants

remain — the same way I know that when

one season ends another one begins.

Image: The moon on Musashi Plain by Yoshitoshi 

We picked Trane up at Kurohime Station a bit after eleven on a Saturday morning and, with me driving and Mayu navigating, set off on an hour and a half journey north to Izumozaki, a small town in Niigata Prefecture on the shores of the Sea of Japan. Izumozaki is the birthplace of Zen poet Taigu Ryokan (‘Ryokan, the Great Fool’) and we were going there to seek traces of his life and work. Mayu and I had been to Izumozaki before, in 2023, but on that occasion we were on the trail of two other poets, Matsuo Basho and Kasai Sora, who passed through in 1690 in the latter stages of their great walk, described in the Oku no Hoshomichi. Ryokan was born seventy odd years later, in 1758, making him a near contemporary of our local poet, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828); like Issa he was a Buddhist and a profound believer in the sanctity of all forms of life, howsoever humble.

Given the birth name Eizo Yamamoto, he was the eldest son of merchant and village headman Inan Yamamoto and his wife Hideko, who was from Sado Island. A dreamy child, when he was eight years old he was scolded by his father for spending too much time inside reading books. Whenever he was told off, Eizo responded with a silent upwards staring look; and on this occasion his exasperated father told him if he kept on looking like that he would turn into a flounder. Later that day the boy was found to be missing; the whole village went out looking for him and he was eventually discovered down by the sea, sitting on a rock, waiting, he said, to turn into a fish and swim away. Another, more drastic, formative experience was witnessing an execution which his father, as headman, was required to attend. Because of the mines on Sado, the bullion port of Izumozaki was under the direct control of the shogunate in Edo; decapitation was their preferred method of execution.

Upon reaching his majority, at the age of eighteen, Eizo announced that he would not be inheriting his father’s position as headman but entering the priesthood instead. He left home and went to live at the local temple, Kosho-ji, where he studied Soto Zen; then, when Zen master Kokusen visited the temple, Eizo received permission to become his pupil. Kokusen gave him the name Ryokan and the two travelled together to Entsu-ji temple at Tamashima in Okayama Prefecture, where Ryokan studied for the next decade. The year before his master died he attained satori; and afterwards set out on another decade long pilgrimage through the archipelago, visiting other temples and studying with other Zen masters.

When his own father, aged sixty, died in mysterious circumstances in Kyoto, Ryokan went there to oversee his obsequies. Some accounts say his father, who was also a poet, drowned himself in one of the canals in the city; others that he was murdered by the shogun’s secret police because he was agitating for the return of real political power to the emperor. Following his father’s funeral Ryokan, in 1799, returned to his home country and took up residence in a small hut he called Gogo-an on Mount Kugami; here he lived as a hermit for most of the rest of his life. Four years before his own death, because of increasing frailty, he went to live in the house of one his patrons, Kimura Motoemon, in Shimazaki and was cared for there by a young nun called Teishin. They became extravagantly fond of one another and used to exchange haiku; she was with him when he died, aged 73, in 1831.

We took the Joetsu-Takada expressway north from Kurohime and then, at the interchange, the Hokuriku towards Niigata. Past the nuclear power station at Kashiwazaki we turned off onto a prefectural road and headed towards the coast. Flocks of white geese grazed amongst snow melt in the muddy fields, pausing on their spring migration to Hokkaido. Even though we were further north, there was less snow here, probably because we were nearer to the sea. Izumozaki is a small dark town built between the ocean and the low cliffs behind; it subsists mostly from fishing and tourism these days and the buildings, with their gleaming tiled roofs, are made of wood treated with Japan Black, which ages to beautiful shades of slate, soft grey and bronze.

We had lunch in a crowded restaurant on the second floor of the building that housed the Tenryo Izumozaki Historical Museum, which includes the Petroleum Museum. It specializes in exhibits commemorating Izumozaki as a port for ships bringing gold and silver from the mines on Sado Island; they were unloaded here and the precious metals taken by caravan to Edo. These caravans could be four or five hundred strong and most of the bullion was carried on the backs of porters; although horses, too, were sometimes used. Magistrates, other officials, soldiers, musicians and dancers, were included in the long line which progressed, in single file, to the sound of bells and drums, down Highway 18 to the capital. We could see Sado, a long pale blue line on the horizon, between the paler blue of the sea and the darker blue of the cloudy sky, from our table in the restaurant.

Then we went up to the Ryokan Memorial Hall, an elegant, architect designed museum set in a traditional Japanese garden on a hill behind the town. Ryokan, the poet, was a renowned calligrapher with a unique, fluid style and among the exhibits in glass cases were scrolls bearing examples of his writing, along with homages from fellow poets, painters and calligraphers. A replica of his hut, Gogo-an, stood in the garden; inside there was another, tiny model of it with an image of the poet / monk seated on an altar within. Halfway down the narrow room lined with glass cases stood a small bronze statue of him, with staff and begging bowl, robe and sandals, and his characteristic quizzical expression. On one of the end walls was a set of shelves, floor to ceiling, containing an extensive library of books by, and about, Ryokan; who may have been a kind of holy fool but was nevertheless knowledgeable, especially about classical Chinese poets and those among his Japanese forebears who had imitated them. Han Shan, for reasons which are obvious, was a favourite of his.

Afterwards I bought Ryokan-sama by Soma Gyofu (translated into English by his grand-daughter) from the gift shop and then we climbed a small hill next to the museum where there was another statue of Ryokan, this time larger than life size and in the company of two small children. He has a ball in his lap and is pointing to the sky; one of the children, sitting, holds a staff in his hand; the other, a girl, standing, is pointing out to sea. The group gave forth a vivid sense of a conversation in progress; though the ball in Ryokan’s lap looked more like a rugby football than a kamifusen, the traditional hand-made paper balloon native to the town, often used in children’s games. Alternatively, it could have been a temari ball, made not of old kimono cloth but of fiddlehead ferns wound together. Ryokan, who loved playing with children, always carried a temari with him.

Our ryokan (same word, different pronunciation, different meaning) stood on the main road, with a car park in front of it and a view out over the sea to Sado. It was old, perhaps as old as the Edo Period, and heritage listed: its chandeliers, its ceilings of woven bamboo. Our room was large and spacious and on the first floor; twenty-eight tatami mats and a moveable partition which opened it up to an equally generous room behind. Trane’s room, next to ours, was large too and also looked out over the sea. He and Mayu went for a walk through the old town while I sat by the window drinking a bottle of Kirin beer which one of the ryokan staff brought me. I had a slight head-ache, probably from the driving, which the beer soon cured. After they returned we went downstairs to eat an eleven course meal, consisting mostly of fish dishes, all local species, locally caught. The delicious butterbur relish and the salted plums were made by one of the women who ran the ryokan.

In the morning the day before’s cloudy haze had cleared and I could see the snow-capped peaks on the Osado and Kosado ranges on Sado. The island consists of two parallel mountain ranges with the Kakakura plain in between; in its northern reaches there is a saline lake where oysters are cultivated; and near that a sanctuary where crested ibis, once on the verge of extinction, are raised and nurtured until they are able to be released into the wild. Osado, the northern range, is higher and more rugged and on its seaward slopes the seams of gold and silver ore were found. While I was gazing out the window, I saw a flock of white geese flying north in a sinuous line which coiled and uncoiled yet kept the same basic shape in the air. Breakfast was less elaborate but just as delicious as dinner had been; and featured fish dishes along with miso soup and green tea; with strong coffee to follow. Then we set off to explore some more.

The temple where Ryokan went to live, aged eighteen, was, like the museum, built on the low cliffs at the back of the town. We walked up and found it apparently closed and deserted. Trees out the front were covered in fat buds about to burst into leaf and flower. Down one side was a shrine to Inari, the fox god, with two stone foxes facing one another at the beginning of the path to a tiny wooden building; the head of one of them had fallen off. Trane investigated the house built beside the temple, saw a sign inviting visitors to knock, and raised a man I assume was a monk. He was about sixty, portly, bald, hatless and wearing glasses. He said we were welcome to go into the temple and came through an inside passage to open the door for us. To the right of the main altar was a shrine to Ryokan with several statues and two rather good paintings of the poet, one of him among bamboos. He had once cut a hole in his veranda roof so that a bamboo shoot could grow through it unimpeded; this painting commemorated that act.

Here, too, there was a glass case full of books; above the unordered shelves were a large number of what looked like paper manuscripts jammed willy-nilly together. I wondered, not for the first time, how so much of Ryokan’s writing has survived. He was notoriously careless, or rather unconcerned, about the fate of his works, many of which we have only because other people remembered or preserved them. His fame as a calligrapher meant that anything he wrote down was considered valuable, even precious, and there are many stories in which people try to persuade him to write something for them. He usually refused such requests but did, on occasion, fall victim to various subterfuges; when he was outsmarted he conceded gracefully, even if what he wrote down were only numerals or letters of the alphabet.

We visited the execution ground next, where hundreds of tiny buddhas, gathered before tombstones or inside small wooden sheds, commemorate the anonymous dead. The Tokugawa were indiscriminate in their choice of victims; if the people of a village declined to co-operate with the shogunate, or otherwise offended, the headman and his wife, for example, might be executed in lieu of whoever the refractory person or persons might have been. We had been there before and I was, once again, curious as to where the actual decapitations had taken place; but there was no clue to this and, seemingly, no way of finding out where that blood-soaked ground had been. My favourite statue was a small buddha which, like the fox at the Inari shrine, had lost its head; someone had substituted a flat oval stone for the missing head, giving the buddha an unusual, oddly contemplative, personality.

After that we drove out of town to the north and turned inland. I didn’t know what our next destination was; it had been decided by Mayu and Trane in cahoots with each other and I hadn’t inquired as to what it was. Sometimes I like not knowing where I’m going; it’s more interesting that way. Trane was talking about metal-working and tool-making and I gathered the city we were headed for, Tsubame, was known for its copper ware, for the production of kiseru, Japanese smoking pipes, and for its cutlery and knife ware. It is an industrial town built on the banks of the Shinano River. We drove down low old rusty streets looking, without success, for the information centre; the place google maps took us to turned out to be a day care centre. We went on, looking for somewhere to eat and found a restaurant across the road from a factory called Airman, where they made different kinds of air compressor engines. It was packed with workers, the cook and the waitresses were cheerful and the food excellent.

The second Ryokan museum was on the outskirts of town near the railway line and not far from the river. Rice fields spread across the flats into the distance. Major irrigation works were underway. The museum contained Ryokan exhibits much like those in the first one; of limited use to me since I can’t read Japanese; though I can (and do) use my phone to translate captions. And I always look at the paintings. I was interested in two ancillary exhibits: one of high quality, expressionist wood cuts; the other of historical photographs and artefacts. The photographs demonstrated a very Japanese preoccupation with natural disasters, in this case mostly floods; and documenting milestones like the arrival of the railway and, somewhat later, of the first mechanical snow ploughs in the early 1960s. After we had looked at the exhibits, a weary-looking older man showed Mayu, on an annotated map, how to get to Mount Kugami, where Ryokan had his hermit’s dwelling.

We found our way there without difficulty and took the winding road up the mountain until we arrived at a long narrow car park with a row of buildings along one side. There was a looped path which included a shrine, a temple, a well, a swing bridge and Ryokan’s hut. At the first shrine you gave money and asked the jizo presiding for relief from cancer and dementia. We all contributed. The temple was next, up a short, steep rise. Banks of snow lay here and there on the ground and Trane was briefly distracted by Dashido Hall in which there is a statue of Kobo Daishi, the Great Master of Matchmaking. Here you request good fortune in love; at the ryokan Trane had mentioned a desire to begin dating again. The temple itself, called Kokujo-ji, is the oldest Buddhist temple in Niigata prefecture and is said to have been founded in 709 CE.

As I approached down the path between snow drifts I saw bright splashes of colour amongst the venerable grey wooden walls of the Hondo. They are a suite of paintings by Ryoko Kimura, a contemporary Japanese artist who specializes in erotic paintings of men. Her innovation was to bring together a number of figures associated with the temple into manga-style paintings in which they are depicted as contemporaries enjoying themselves at various pursuits, including music-making, massage and bathing. They are Amida Nyorai, the Buddha of Limitless Light; Uesugi Kenshin, a powerful lord of the sixteenth century; Shuten-doji, a red, horned, mythical demon; Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a military commander during the Heike War of the twelfth century; Benkei, the warrior monk who was his sworn companion; and, somewhat incongruously, Ryokan himself, accompanied by a white cat with multiple snake-headed tails.

Ryoko Kimura, born 1971, works in the style of Nihongo painting, using mineral pigments and ink, together with other organic pigments, on silk or paper; but her paintings here were in acrylics on wood. Her subject matter is the traditional Bijin-ga or beautiful person picture; but instead of depicting women she paints the male figures from, in her own words, ‘the sexual gaze of the heterosexual female’. Her ikemen or good looking men are inspired, at least in part, by her fascination with Johnny’s Boys, the famous Japanese male entertainment and talent agency. I thought at first I was looking at images from The Journey to the West, the story of how the Buddhist scriptures came to China; and it turns out she has illustrated that narrative too.

The paintings, while they are well-executed, I found lurid rather erotic; but then I am not their target audience. When asked why he would allow this material to be displayed on such a sacred site, the temple’s head priest, Kotetsu Yamada, said it was to attract more attention from young people, crucial to the survival of heritage sites like Kokujo-ji. And it is true that the murals are known all over Japan and internationally too and have become a site of pilgrimage for those who love manga and associated arts. Reports from the early 2020s said the paintings were going to be taken down, for conservation, but that either never happened or else they have been restored and put back up again. They looked to me to be in excellent condition.  

Past the temple was the Hojo Lecture or Guest Hall, built in 1737 and the home of a Thousand-Armed Kannon, a sacred deity worshipped by the afore-mentioned Sengoku warlord Uesugi Kenshin; it was closed. Across a piece of muddy snowy waste land, dozens of yellow quinces lay rotting upon the ground beneath the bare tree they had grown upon. Further on was a well where you went to pray if you wanted to end or to escape from a bad relationship; there was a gory story associated with it, about the sacrifice within of a handsome but faithless man. You were not supposed to look into the well because, if you saw your own reflection, you might share his fate; I looked in it before I knew the story and saw only grass and moss growing over rubble.

Gogo-an, Ryokan’s hut, was just down the hill from the wishing well. It was off the path, on a small shelf of land that looked north over the plains to distant mountains. Tiny, wooden, its thatched roof green with lichen and moss. Just a single room; and it was locked. There was a sliding panel at the back, just above ground level, which you could pull back and look in; Trane said he saw an enclave where you might place a vase of flowers. The sun had come out. I sat on the veranda at the front and closed my eyes. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my eyelids; the peace that passes understanding came over me. It must have been cold here in winter; Ryokan used to gather leaves and twigs to burn on his fire and boil the rice he begged in the villages and towns of the plain below. He was always abstemious: a gogo is half a sho, the amount of rice considered necessary for a working man to eat in a day. The word ‘an’ means hermitage. Hence his name for his hut.

We crossed a magnificent red suspension bridge which led to a small garden below the carpark, where there was another statue of Ryokan playing with children; his gaunt figure, sunken cheeks and large nose were familiar to us now, like someone we had known in life. It was getting late; Trane’s train back to Nagano was leaving Kurohime at a quarter to six and he had work — teaching — next day and some preparation to do before that. I quite like having an excuse to drive fast and, unless there’s been an accident, you almost never see police on Japanese highways. Sometime before we joined the expressway I saw in a field on our left what I am almost sure was a toki, a crested ibis. Some of those released into the wild on Sado have established communities on the mainland and this must have been one of those. I saw its red head bent dipping into the water while two smaller blue herons walked along the bank of the creek.

Later, when we were nearing home and brightness began to fall from the air, we saw a strings of lights cascading down the side of the mountains where the ski-lifts and ski fields are, looking sweet and lonely in the immensity of the snowy wilderness. Trane caught his train with a few minutes to spare and then we went back to our own little house in the hills. I never know what to say when I pray at a temple or a shrine, but as we drove up the road past the athletics field and the shed where the burnables go, I remembered words that had come unbidden into my head while praying at Kokujo-ji: ‘Let my mind be like a bowl of clear cold water’.

Last time we came back from Australia, at the end of January, at a bookstore in Haneda Airport I bought a copy of ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’ by Junichi Saga. Saga was a doctor who served a community at Tsuchiura, north of Tokyo, on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura; his father had been a doctor too and they both came to know the people they looked after intimately. At some point Susumu Saga retired in order to devote himself to painting and Junichi took over the practice. Around the same time he realised many of the people he moved among were the repository of extraordinary stories of tradition, resilience and change; and began to write them down. His habit was to seek permission to visit his patients at home, after hours, and record them using a portable tape recorder.

One day a man called Shozo Ijichi turned up for a consultation at his rooms. He was a big, dignified fellow in his early seventies; when Saga got him to strip for an examination, he saw the dragon and peony tattoo on his back, with a pretty woman in the heart of the flower the dragon was in the act of swallowing; and realised he was a yakuza or gangster. He was suffering from liver disease as well as complications from diabetes; but he did not want to go to hospital for a course of treatment. He told Saga that he had always done whatever he wanted to and that he didn’t mind dying. He just wanted some relief from the pain in his legs and the discomfit in his abdomen.

He started coming to the clinic for shots twice a week; and then, after the two had got to know each other better, and the illness didn’t progress as fast as it seemed at first that it would, the gangster invited the doctor to visit him at home. Saga would take his tape recorder and the two would sit together, eating mandarins, while an unseen woman played the shamisen elsewhere in the house; and Ijichi told him his life story. The result is an absolutely fascinating account which begins when Ijichi was fifteen, in 1912, and ends with his death and funeral in 1978.

He was a softly spoken, level-headed, modest man who told his story without the need for grandiosity or excessive elaboration; while the doctor, for his part, put this account together unobtrusively, almost delicately, with a maximum of tact and a minimum of editorial commentary. The improbably happy ending to the tale comes out of nowhere and is a perfect example of a truth that is stranger than fiction. Illustrated with miniature black and white paintings by Saga’s father, this really is a superb book and I’d recommend it to anyone.

As you do when you find a writer whose work you admire, I went looking for other books by Dr Saga. There are quite a few but the only one I’ve been able to get hold of so far is ‘Memories of Silk and Straw – a self-portrait of a small-town Japan’, which is an oral history of Tsuchiura consisting of more than fifty short narratives told by people of the town, ranging across all of the different professions and occupations, some of which no longer exist. Everyone is there, from the geisha to the executioner, the reed thatcher to the horsemeat butcher. Shozo Ijichi turns up as well but in a much briefer appearance; the book is also illustrated, exquisitely, by Susumu Saga; and includes a number of priceless period photographs.

‘Memories of Silk and Straw’ turned up yesterday and while I was looking at it last night something started tugging at the edges of my mind. Hadn’t one of the many accusations of plagiarism aimed at Bob Dylan included the charge that he lifted lines from an obscure book about a Japanese gangster? I went online to check and, sure enough, it was Dr Saga’s ‘Confessions’ he had used; a number of things Shozo Ijichi said turned up more or less verbatim in songs on Dylan’s 2001 release ‘Love & Theft’. Dylan, when asked in 2012 about this and other borrowings said: ‘wussies and pussies complain about that stuff’; and pointed out that some of those he quoted would have remained unknown to the larger world had he not used their words. He also said he was adding to, and widening, the tradition, the way folk and blues artists have always done.

Someone also tracked down Dr Saga and told him what had happened. ‘Who is Bob Dylan?’ he asked. But then he went to the trouble of listening to the CD and said: ‘I like this album. His lines flow from one image to the next and don’t always make sense, but they have a great atmosphere.’ He said he would have liked his book acknowledged but when asked if he wanted royalties shook his head. He was honoured to have been able to help, he explained, and that for a person to ask for money for something that had made so many people happy would be a poor thing to do. Subsequent sales of his book in the West were estimated at around 25,000 copies; so there might have been a few extra royalties there.

Two other books by Dr Saga I’m keen to read are ‘Memories of Wind and Waves: a self-portrait of lakeside Japan’, which recounts interviews with thirty-three elderly men and women who spent their lives working on or around Lake Kasumigaura; and ‘Susumu’s Saga: A Boy’s Journey from Rural Japan to Manchuria and Revolutionary Russia’, the story of Juichi’s father’s odyssey as a young boy into Manchuria and then Siberia – as far as Lake Baikal. Both of these books exist in English translation but so far I’ve only been able to find an extremely expensive hard back copy of ‘Wind and Waves’; and a Kindle edition of ‘Susumu’s Saga’; but I’ll keep on looking.

Nigel is selling

the house at

1 Clare Street

Rozelle

where he’s lived

(boy how he’s lived)

for forty years

& moving to

Canberra to be

with his daughters

who’ll look

after him

& incidentally

no longer have

to live in what

he describes as

‘hippie squalor’

Nigel says

grandiloquently

before his bookshelves

‘take anything

that you want’

I’ve been here

many times

& often looked

into these shelves

but never before

(or perhaps always)

acquisitively

There are lots

of poetry books

multiple copies

of his own

anthologies in which

he appears

Battarbee &

Namatjira

alongside dozens

of music books

eg Blue Smoke

which I gave him

years ago

because I thought

that it was more

him than me

Alas I can’t see

anything

I really want

not even The Collected

Interviews of

Bob Dylan

Nigel points to

Collected Poems

of Ted Hughes

& says ‘take that’

but I can’t read

Ted anymore

& (it turns out)

neither can he

Next to Ted’s

is Philip Larkin’s

Collected Poems

& I say

‘I’ll take that’

recalling how

I missed out on

my mother’s copy

at her wake

in the year 2000

but Nigel says

‘not that one’

surprising me

(though on reflection

not so much)

We progress to

his CDs

a collection vast

& intimidating

the whole history

of jazz in its

Balmain years

Rough & Rowdy Ways

is there — I say

‘I listened to that

a couple of times

but not again’

he says ‘me too’

Time Out Of Mind

which I have heard

a thousand times

I own already

‘Why don’t you

choose something

for me?’ I say

& out from those

delirious shelves

he extracts

the 1964

Limelight

recording of

Roland Kirk’s

I Talk With The Spirits

(‘I have two

of these’ he says)

& gives me one

Concrete whispers while you are walking the footpaths of Crows Nest. We are made from the sands at Tinda Creek, they say, out along the Putty Road. Our lime is from Kandos on the far side of the Blue Mountains. The matrix we came from decayed a long time ago into the fragments you now intuit. From the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales the sandstone hacked from the quarries of Pyrmont and Maroubra murmur their exile. Paradise, Purgatory, Hellhole. And their blocky survivals. At Warrnambool there is an impress of ancient buttocks on a cliff that looks south, over the Southern Ocean, to Antarctica. For which we lack an Aboriginal name; though Polynesians and Terra Fuegians, cousins of the Tasmanians, went there before white people ever did. Walking past the bloodied statue of James Cook, outside the Australian Museum, you hear the song of Moruya granite groaning upwards, lamenting its enforced servitude to an eidolon made of alien bronze. Though no stones, nor minerals either, are strangers to this earth. Nor are we whose constituent parts, some say, were forged in the furnaces of the still burning stars. I wish for the speech of stones to inform our longing; the stones concur; but I am, alas, their only speech. Says the ventriloquist of stones.

image: Sandstone in Pirrama Road, Pyrmont, Sydney
courtesy Powerhouse Museum

1

A few days before Christmas we started seeing ants exploring the surface of the table where we eat; at the other end of which Mayu works. They were medium sized, with a red thorax and extremely adhesive claws — hooked like velcro — so I took to calling them the velcro ants. Not a trace of formic acid and they seemed uninterested in any food that might have been around; but drank up any water they found. A metre of snow outside and why were they not hibernating? Our house is warm and dry and maybe that had woken them up. Maybe their nest was inside the front wall. Numbers increased day by day until we decided we’d have to do something. We spread powdered cloves over their preferred paths and, overnight, they vanished. But only for a little while. When they came back they came in numbers. Cloves were no longer a disincentive. Nor paprika either; nor tiger balm, smeared on the wood above the curtain rail near where they were getting in. They must have found chemical solutions to our prophylactics. Nothing worked  anymore — until Mayu found a small can of the aerosol spray we used against mosquitoes in summer and squirted some of that in the vicinity of the ant stream. The effect was immediate. The ants began to curl up and die and fall in numbers onto the table, the window sills and the floor. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Far more than we suspected had been there. Maybe the whole nest; though I haven’t seen a Queen. I vacuumed up the dead bodies and emptied the vacuum cleaner. Out of its grey detritus a spider the colour of dust crawled. I remember I tried to free it last time; it was bigger now; and escaped again, this time into the plastic bag of burnables full of ant bodies I’ll take to the depot tomorrow.

2

The Myrmidons were the troops who accompanied Achilles to Troy; in some accounts, there were fifty ships of them, each with fifty soldiers aboard. 2500 men, fanatically loyal to their general. The word entered the English language to describe the henchmen of a gang boss, say, or a criminal sheriff. Myrmidon, a King of Thessaly, was their eponymous ancestor; he was a child of Zeus who had seduced his mother, Eurymedusa, in the form of an ant (how do you seduce someone as an ant?). Other accounts say he impersonated her mortal husband, Myrmix, and that is the origin on the name. In another version, told by Ovid, Hera exterminated the human population of the island of Aegina because it was named after one of Zeus’ many lovers. A son of Zeus, Aeacus, one of the escaped targets of Hera’s persecution, prayed to his father, asking him to repopulate the island. Zeus saw that the local ants, a tough breed, had survived whatever plague or poison Hera had sent, and transformed them into men. They were as fierce and hardy as ants, and intensely loyal to their leader. They wore shiny brown armour, the colour of the insects they had once been. When Aeacus exiled his son Peleus to Thessaly, his Myrmidons accompanied him; Peleus was the father of Achilles.

3

Somewhere in the vast commentary on Homer’s Iliad a scholar remarks that the Trojans lacked healers and had to rely upon the gods in order to recover from their battle wounds; whereas the Greeks had several healers amongst them, including Achilles and his companion Patroclus. Achilles, the wrathful, blood-soaked warrior, seems an unlikely candidate for a healer; but he could also play the lyre and recite poetry and learned to heal under the tutelage of Chiron the centaur. Chiron studied the healing arts, music, and prophecy with Apollo, while Apollo’s twin sister Artemis taught him archery and hunting. When, in The Iliad, Eurypylus, leader of the Thessalians, is wounded by a shaft loosed from the bow of Paris, he calls to Patroclus: ‘I want you to cut out this arrow from my thigh, wash off the blood with warm water and spread soothing ointment on the wound. They say you have some excellent prescriptions that you learnt from Achilles, who was taught by Chiron’. Among the herbs Achilles took with him to the Plains of Ilium was the common yarrow, whose botanical name is Achillea millefolium, and which has been used since ancient times to heal wounds and stop bleeding. It also has a mild laxative effect.

4

Another, more ancient origin for the Myrmidons is posited by Alan Brunton in his book Ecstasy (2001). He describes an encounter which took place somewhere in France 50,000 years ago between beings who might have been aliens and ‘those cold homos in their catacombs’. After that meeting, described as ‘the birth of the sacred’, and involving the ingestion of psylocibin, ‘weird old ant men / spread out across Europe’. The poet goes on to claim that, c. 1987, ‘members of the cult contacted me personally . . . come with us for another night of mushrooms’. All the indications are that he went.

5

We did not mean to exterminate the velcro ants, only repel them, but it now seems likely that is what we have done. After I vacuumed up the shrivelled corpses, we went away for twenty-four hours and upon our return found many more had fallen onto the table and the floor. I cleaned them up again; and while doing so found one live one, seemingly bewildered, crawling over the drawing of a Dogu Mayu was in the process of making. This morning, only a few more had fallen. Collateral damage, which we do not regret, were half a dozen kamemushi, brown marmorated stink bugs; these appear in plague proportions in autumn and as winter comes on, seek warm dry places to hibernate before breeding, prolifically, in spring. We suspected we had a few in the house but weren’t sure; we hope there are now no more. Of course we will also have to come to karmic terms with what we have done both to the myrmidons and the kamemushi.

image : Dogu (unfinished) by Mayu Kanamori; with ant

1. Folk Tale

He had ridden all day

& he was hungry

He went to cut

a slice of meat

from a beast hanging

up on the veranda

Paulita Maxwell

16 years old

already pregnant

was waiting for him

in the bed that they

shared together

Pete Maxwell

her abusive

older brother

was there too

July 14, 1881

after midnight

at the twenty room

Maxwell mansion

the renovated adobe

officer’s quarters

at Fort Sumner

New Mexico

a town of

two hundred people

One version has

Billy walking

unexpectedly

into the bedroom

where Pat Garrett was

‘interviewing’ Pete

having climbed in

through his window

Another has Pat

climbing in

Paulita’s window

tying her up

& waiting for Billy

in the bed

she lay bound beneath

with his gun drawn

Whichever room

it was he knew

that there was

something wrong: 

¿Quién es?

Garrett said

he knew it was him

by the way he breathed

breathily

through his mouth

& shot him dead.

2. Old Timer’s Tale

John Meadows, 1931

There was an old Indian woman

who stayed there with Maxwell

I think they called her Pabla

at any rate, it was this woman

The Kid put his horse

under a shed

& tied it &

come around

& went to this room

where the Indian woman was

(the Maxwells raised her)

& he said ‘Haven’t you got

something to eat?’

She says ‘There is

some coffee there

but not hot & there is

some tortillas

but there is

a sheep or a goat

hanging on the porch

go get you some

of that & cook it’

The Kid went out

& cut off

a piece of meat

come back in the door

facing West

the door was in the East

There was a window

over there

& as he looked through the window

three men passed

He said to the woman —

asked who the men were

She said ‘I don’t know’

He has a butcher knife

& kept it in his hand

got rid of the meat

pulled his gun

went out the front door

come down around

the side of the house

& when he got about

the middle of the house

— the moon was up —

he’s seen some men

sitting in the shadow

& he stepped out

& said ‘Quién es?’

& Kip McKinney

could talk Mexican too

& he answered back

‘It is nobody that

wants anything to

do with you, you go tend

to your own business’

Kip & Poe both

told me that same thing

The Kid came on back

to ask Pete Maxwell

what he knew about it

Maxwell was in his room

& Pat Garrett was sitting

on the bed talking

to Pete Maxwell

& trying to work

a way to get through

this door to the East

& jump on the Kid

& capture him

The Kid was in

his sock feet

he had pulled his boots off

when he came in the house

He said, ‘Pete, quién es?’

& then saw someone

sitting on the bed

& Garrett pulled his gun

before the Kid came in

Pete said to Garrett

‘I believe it’s him’

Garrett jerked his gun

& then just about that time

Billy drew his gun

about six inches from him

& Pat shot

he leant to one side

shot & hit the Kid

right in the heart

the Kid fell on the floor

& in the moonshine that was

shining through a window

the people on the outside

heard one shot

everybody said

just one shot

Well Pat & Pete

& Pete in particular

said there were two shots

he said the Kid did shoot

Let’s see how

this worked out

Somebody may go

to Fort Sumner

& I’ll tell you where

you can find his bullet

it went right out under

the windowsill.

3. Paulita Remembers

1925

Fort Sumner was a gay little place

the weekly dance was an event

& pretty girls from Santa Rosa

Puerto de Luna, Anton Chico

& from towns & ranches

fifty miles away drove in to attend

Billy cut a gallant figure

at those affairs

He was not handsome but

he had a certain sort of

boyish good looks

He was always smiling

good-natured & polite

& danced remarkably well

& the little Mexican beauties

made eyes at him

from behind their fans

& used all their coquetries

to capture him

& were very vain

of his attentions

in every placita on the Pecos

some little señorita was proud

to be known as his querida

An old story that identifies

me as Billy’s sweetheart

has been doing the rounds

for many years now

Perhaps it honours me

perhaps not — but I was not

Billy the Kid’s sweetheart

I liked him very much — oh, yes

but I did not love him

He was a nice boy, at least to me

courteous, gallant, always respectful

I used to meet him at dances

he was often at our house

but he & I had

no thoughts of marriage

If I had loved the Kid

& he had loved me

I would not have

hesitated to marry him

& follow him through danger

poverty or hardship

to the ends of the earth

in spite of anything he’d done

or what the world might have

been pleased to think of me

That is the way of Spanish girls

when they are in love

There was a story that Billy & I

laid plans to elope

to old Mexico

there was another tale that we

proposed to elope

riding double on one horse

Neither story was true &

the one about eloping

on one horse was a joke

Pete Maxwell, my brother

had more horses than

he knew what to do with

& if Billy & I’d wanted

to set off for the Rio Grande

by the light of the moon

you may depend upon it we would

have had separate mounts

I did not need

to put my arms around

any man’s waist

to keep from falling

off a horse. Not I — I was

brought up in the saddle

& plumed myself

on my horsemanship.

images : the sole verified shot of Billy the Kid, a daguerreotype; detail of an alleged pic of the Kid playing croquet (he is the fellow on the left) ; Paulita, provenance unknown, but said to have been taken when she was young; full image of the croquet game

McKinney & Poe were Pat Garrett’s deputies

Revisiting those AI generated titles last week and revamping the descriptions of their might-have-been books made me remember my actual might-have-beens. I mean the manuscripts I completed but which, for one reason or another, have not become books. They are like lost children; or, to use a term from evolutionary biology, hopeful monsters. They began and increased and almost became – and then fell back. There are seven I still think about. Listed here, with brief notes I made a few years ago, attached:

Lion & Virgin (mid-1990s)

An account of a ménage à trois which ends with the suicide of the narrator: ‘diaristic hysteria and should never be published – rather destroyed (however I have not destroyed it).’

Terminus Motel (2003)

A screenwriter returns to his old home town to write a film set there in the past. At the motel where he stays, he becomes involved with a mother and daughter, two heroin addicts fleeing an abusive relationship. In the first version of this lurid tale the screenplay is included in the narrative; a later version, without the film script, was accepted by a publisher until his business partner nixed it because, he said, there was too much sex in it. I seem to remember the narrator of this one died too, probably murdered: ‘missed its moment – fuck those puritans at T****. It’s alright but nothing special.’

White City (2008)

I had the crazy idea of writing the autobiography of Ern Malley and persisted with it right through until the end. It has its moments, I guess, and manages to quote plenty of lines from The Darkening Ecliptic; but founders upon the rock of verisimilitude. I don’t think I ever tried to publish it. A friend I showed it to did not comment, out of kindness I suppose: ‘too studied to convince anyone of its veracity, even metaphorically.’

You Must Remember This (2012)

An account of my parents’ courtship and marriage during World War Two. I did quite a bit of research for this and the first three parts I still like; but I never found a way to finish the fourth. The ms exists in two versions, each with a different ending, neither one of which works. The other day I found a note towards a third ending, which I suppose I might try sometime before I die; however: ‘as one of my sisters said, not unkindly, it’s really not your story to tell.’

Mortal Things (2016)

A life of convict artist Joseph Lycett. This too I still like and at the time several publishers showed interest. The problem was how to find the money ($10,000 in those days) with which to illustrate it and that remained unresolved. Lycett was transported for forging banknotes and there are parallels between this activity and his work as a landscape and water colour artist. I sometimes think it could work as an unillustrated text; but that would require extensive revision, which I’m not sure I want to do now: ‘As one publisher said, it lacks the materials out of which biographies are made. Though that lack was also the premise of the writing.’

Living in the Everywhen / Of Doubt and Wonder (c. 2020)

A collection of essays, mostly unpublished, written in the second decade of this century. Exists in two versions, one about a third longer than the other; this includes the exegesis of my DCA thesis Battarbee & Namatjira. I offered it to two university presses in New Zealand, both of which passed without reading it. Unsaleable was I think their verdict, whatever other virtues it might have had and may still have. An Australian publisher to whom I sent the shorter version did not bother to respond: ‘Still publishable but when, where, how?’

Labassa (2024)

My lock down project, which I completed only recently, having been stalled upon it since we were set free from house arrest – whenever that was. The premise: my schizophrenic uncle has died and left me a suitcase full of books and papers. This is an inventory of the contents of that suitcase plus an account of the circumstances of his life and death. The title comes from the mansion cum boarding house in Melbourne, where (allegedly) my uncle Dorian once lived; and where, in Kenneth Slessor’s telling, fifty years earlier, Joe Lynch did too. No-one yet has read it, not even me. It could be alright.

Summation

I was given grants to write 2,3,4 & 5 on that list; and feel residual guilt because I never delivered an ‘outcome’. Probably doesn’t bother anyone now but me; and what can I do about it? The other thing I’ve done is review my history of published works: for thirty titles I have had nineteen publishers; the most any one publisher has done is six and that was AUP early on, before Elizabeth Caffin retired. Eleven publishers did just one book each. Some of these (both books and publishers) were of course ephemeral; and I remain grateful to everyone who thought a book of mine was worth printing.

The Further

Now I’m thinking about the recently finished, On the Highway of the Stories of the Gods, which has been rejected, unnecessarily rudely I thought, by one Australian publisher and ignored by two others; but is being assessed, critically I hope, by one in New Zealand. And another I’ve almost completed a first draft of entitled, grandiloquently, A Circumnavigation of the World. And, most of all, the one I want to write next: Tales of Dust and Wind.

The title is from an Alan Brunton poem, in Oh Ravachol (1978): ‘The restoration of lost works / or unfinished / matters to the constant man / with two suitcases / moving against a concrete wall // time to go to the water’

Creek Water Journal (1977)

This contains poems I wrote about rivers and lakes I swam in as a boy. In Ohakune and environs, the rivers were the Mangawhero, the Mangateitei, the Manga-nui-a-te-ao but not the Whangaehu; where we used to go to collect sand for the sandpit from its sulphurous banks. We also went to Taupo, especially in the summer, and swam in the crystal clear waters at Motuoapa and Motutere and sometimes at Acacia Bay. In the Wairarapa, we swam in the Ruamahanga, the Waiohine, the Waipoua, and at Lake Ferry. In the Waikato we canoed upon the river but never swam in it, because of the taniwha rau; but did sometimes bathe in the lakes: Hakanoa, Waahi, Ohinewai, Rotongaro and Waikare. In Upper Hutt we used to go up the Akatarawa valley and swim in the deep green pools of the Akatarawa River. You can’t swim in most of those places anymore; but you can still swim in Taupo.

Brimstone (1977-1981)

A poetry journal recounting my experiences with theatre group Red Mole and band Red Alert as we travelled from Wellington to Auckland to Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York; thence to London, with a side trip to Amsterdam; then back to New York and across the continent to Los Angeles; the third part concerns rock ‘n’ roll in New Zealand in the summer of 1980-81. The three sections are entitled: ‘Stations’; ‘Some Wheres in the West’; and ‘Waitemata’. This was a primary source for my prose account, Bus Stops on the Moon (2020), of the same time period, but is a different work with its own voice and its own preoccupations.

Cross Words (1987)

Six essays about political developments in New Zealand and Australia in the early 1980s dealing with, in New Zealand, the Springbok Tour of 1981; the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in July 1984; and the election of the Lange Government in that same month and year, followed by its disastrous embrace of neo-liberalism as taught to left wing academics at the Chicago School. And in Australia with the minerals boom of 1981, during the last years of the Fraser government; the election in 1983 of the Hawke-Keating government; and the Lionel Murphy imbroglio and other corruption scandals surrounding the Wran Labor government in New South Wales. This was not an exercise in idealism nor indeed of optimism; but an attempt to chart the pernicious influence of international (and frequently criminal) politics upon our (relatively speaking) innocent and essentially good-willed democracies, with results that are still causing harm today.

The Inward Sun (1996)

A study of Antipodean literature focussed upon works by Janet Frame (Owls Do Cry), Maurice Duggan (Along the Ridout Road that Summer), Ronald Hugh Morrieson (The Scarecrow) and Ruth Park (Pink Flannel aka Dear Hearts & Gentle People). The intention was to look at these four works, which all came early in their author’s careers, in terms of that old dialectic, identified but not invented by William Blake, between innocence and experience. It’s short book, about 40,000 words, but a favourite of mine because of my continuing admiration for the works I wrote about. One (the Duggan) was adapted for the screen but was never made into a film.

The Fantail’s Feathers (2003)

A memoir of the women of my maternal line, from my great grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother and to my eldest sister, who was in some respects a reincarnation of our great grandmother. She was the wife of a butcher turned farmer, a drunkard, and bore him twelve children before she died, worn out, aged fifty years, at the turn of the twentieth century. Our grandmother was one of those twelve children and, like her sisters, most likely sexually abused by her father. She became a primary school teacher who married a painter / decorator and had four children, of whom my mother was the second. The foregoing events all occurred in Hawkes Bay or in the East Coast area, around Gisborne and Wairoa. My mother became a well-known poet and writer; my eldest sister was her first born; another teacher, she travelled widely, especially in Africa and the Middle East, before returning to New Zealand and re-training as a psychotherapist. She and our mother did not get on. The suspicion of reincarnation arose because of her physical resemblance (as seen in the photographs) to her great grandmother.

Masked Days (2008)

An autobiographical account of the year 2004, which I spent mostly in Auckland (= Rain City) writing Luca Antara (2006); based on the diary I kept as literary fellow at Auckland University. I started out staying in the Ponsonby house of an old friend but there wasn’t really room for me in that ménage. I was myself undergoing a break-up and mired in various disputes, some of them bordering on the violent, with art world people consequent upon the book I’d published five years earlier about the painter Philip Clairmont. Later on I moved into a bedsit in Mt Eden beneath the house of a rare books dealer who was just establishing himself in the auction market. He and his wife, in their different ways (not sexually) tried to seduce me. Neither succeeded. In September I flew to Kuala Lumpur and then took a bus to Malacca; and after that, by taxi, bus and ferry, visited Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores — before landing back in Australia, in Darwin, with a debilitating ear infection; from which I have since recovered. I ended the year living where I had begun, at Pearl Beach on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Zigzag Street (2012)

A prose memoir of literary life in the Antipodes 2005-2011, which includes accounts of a series of gatherings of poets and writers from Australia and New Zealand, all of which, apart from the first, I attended: Fugacity 05 (Christchurch 2005); Bluff 06 (Bluff and Rakiura, 2006); Home & Away (Sydney and Auckland, 2010); periphery / to carry around (Melbourne 2011). The moving spirit of those gatherings was Michele Leggott; this book is in praise of her; and includes a log of our interactions in the wake of the deaths of Alan Brunton (2002) and David Mitchell (2010), both of which led to the publication of their selected poems. A farewell to a generation, by two of its inheritors.

Hokitika Town (2019)

Essays on four nineteenth century New Zealand interferers — Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Andreas Reischek, Walter Buller and George Grey; with interludes on the painters Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer. They focus upon these men’s accommodations with Māori, their (variable) fluency in te reo, and how their abilities in those areas led inexorably to betrayal; and especially the betrayals of that old meddler, George Grey, in the words of lawyer Thomas Tancred ‘a terrible and fatal man’. The intent is identify Grey and his Victorian cohort as progenitors of the Tory tradition in New Zealand, which is now (2024) undergoing a resurgence; its values are wealth, derived from landlordism; the theft of the land of the indigenous people; their consequent oppression; elimination of the public service and other agents who might impede extraction of resources; and the continuing immiseration of the poor; in the name of policy objectives that are always opaque — but by means of which they and their friends are to be enriched.