Isinglass

We left Prime Hills at about 10.30 am, heading south, in moderately heavy traffic. The day was cloudy but not cold and the haziness of the air accentuated the colours that predominate here: pale green, pale ochre, pinkish red, aqua, grey blue apartment buildings passed either side of the elevated highway, none of them exactly the same but none really standing out either. We stopped along the way to pick up supplies at a super market which featured a sculpture court outside with imagery that seemed mostly derived from the moon and stars. Here, as in other markets, you will often find someone standing beside the fish or the meat counter spruiking their wares: gravel voiced old men or women with the heads and faces muffled by scarves and hats. Everything is already packaged and at the check-out each item, after the cashier rings it up, is individually wrapped again by an assistant. I’m always interested in the liquor displays: the red wines typically come from California, Chile or Argentina but you do find the odd Australian red as well, good quality, reasonably priced, indeed not much more than you would pay in Sydney. I bought a bottle of Penfolds Max’s, 2019, which I have hopes for.

Further south we turned off the main highway and wound our way through outer suburbs where rice fields, sometimes tiny, are interspersed between the houses laid out in grid patterns in the valleys. Ahead were pale blue hills and it soon became clear we were heading for a river valley that led upwards into the heights. There’s hardly any building on the hills and those there are are extremely discreet – unless they are temple or shrines, which you might see poking above the treeline near the summit. The towns are constructed in narrow valleys along the banks of the river, often in gorges; sometimes you pass the imposing gates of what may be mansions or castles, I don’t know. Suspension bridges lead off the road to establishments on the other bank. On the outskirts of one of these towns we became part of a slow crawl of traffic which threatened to continue all the way to our destination; so peeled off, crossed the river and went to a hotel for lunch.

It was a Chinese restaurant and the food was good. Afterwards we explored the lobby, the shop and environs: you could take a lift down to the river bank to watch the water pouring over stones in the rocky gorge. I became fascinated by the hotel decor: the generous proportions, the elegant furniture, the subtle decorative touches. There was a stand of dolls set up in celebration of Girls’ Week and Mayu reminded me of the sequence in the Kurosawa film Dreams in which the dolls all come to life. Outside a screen full of coloured whirligigs had been set up in front of the banks of the hotel air conditioning machines, masking their severe utilitarian appearance while also spinning gaily in the air they pump out.

The Prince Hotel is high up in the mountains. Outside our room there is a golf course. There is a lake, Ashinoko, nearby, and in postcards in the courtesy shop there are images of Mt Fuji on the other side of the water. Maybe we will see it tomorrow. The hotel’s façade approximates that of a castle from an indeterminate period of time, perhaps from the era of the Wars of the Roses. However the attempt to recall past eras is neither insistent nor over-bearing. You are just asked to acknowledge the possibility when you come inside, and once inside the only reminders of that legacy are found in the stained glass, which is pre-Raphaelite or Art Nouveau rather than Tudor; though who knows what Tudor glass looks like anyway? The hotel where we had lunch was Deco, I guess, but again there was no insistence upon the style in any of the detail or the proportions, which both seemed wholly Japanese.

We had an onsen after we arrived. We ate dinner in our room. Now we are all getting ready for bed, all four of us laid out in a row in the communal space. There’s an animal crying outside, we don’t know what it is: Monkey? Fox? Badger? Or may a Yokai peculiar to this place.

24.02.23

Today we walked over to Shibuya to try to get my phone connected to a Japanese provider. We went with Yoshie, who took us the way she usually goes – down the other side of the hill, past the main gates to the shrine, into the railway station then down a lift to the street. That’s the one we usually walk along but about two thirds of the way along, just after the Cheese Stand, she veered off and went another way.

We passed the vast studios of NKTV, the public broadcasters, and then went through a district where there seemed to be several recording studios and speciality record shops, including one called Manhattan Records – which wasn’t open because it was too early in the day, only about 11 am. And a place called Noah Studios over the road. As you near the main drag the ambient noise in the street gets louder, with the sound of pop music broadcast from giant screens predominating over the smaller TV sets in windows advertising anything from shoes to showtime. Yoshie knew we wanted to go book shopping so she took us into her favourite department store, where there is a branch of the book chain Kinokuniya. Their English language section was minuscule but I did see there a couple of books I bought later at their HQ in Shinjuku.

At the mobile phone shop the earnest young man who tried to enrol us in a plan on Tuesday but could not, because we did not have the right documentation with us, made another attempt. He advised that I, as a foreigner, could not sign up but that Mayu could do so for me. We went through all of the steps until it came time to pay – at which point he said that payment via debit card was not an option. A shame, because that was all she had. I have a couple of credit cards but the account wasn’t going to be in my name so that was irrelevant. Then he went away, saying that another provider might accept a debit card; but when he returned to say they would indeed accept a debit card, he also brought with him the news that they they still wouldn’t allow Mayu to open an account, because her resident’s permit was dated May, 2022 and they only accepted account holders whose permits were less that three months old. His company preferred younger permits too but it was not a sine qua non as it was for the other lot. We went on our way.

Mioko met us at the eastern entrance to Yoyogi Station and we went up the road a way to an oyster bar she was keen to try out. It was a tiny place up a set of narrow stairs, with views of the railway station where, every few minutes, we could watch a train go by. There were only four tables, all of which were occupied, plus a dozen or so seats at the bar. Mioko ordered oysters, one each of three different kinds and Mayu an entree of cabbage and anchovies, which we shared. My main was a waygu beef pie with a creamy mashed potato topping and a side of Harissa sauce; Mayu had oysters in a fish curry based on South Indian cuisine; and Mioko ordered pasta, spaghetti, but I’m not sure what the sauce was. She enjoyed the Harissa so much she took home a small jar of it for later. All of the food was delicious and the total cost including drinks (‘oyster stout’) was just under 10,000 yen which is about a hundred dollars Australian.

At Kino, in a shining nine storey building which sells much more than just books, on the sixth floor I bought three works of fiction by Turgenev, who I want to read more of following my Chekhov binge last year; a history of Japan, an anthology of Japanese literature up until the mid-19th century and the Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. The firm which became Kinokuniya originally dealt in lumber and charcoal in Yotsuya. After the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, the business moved westward to Shinjuku, where it was refashioned into a book store, opening with a staff of five in January 1927. The name means Bookstore of Kii Province because the founder, Moichi Tanabe, had ancestral links there. The original building, which had an art gallery on the second floor, burnt down in May 1945 during an air raid but re-opened in December of that year. Now they have shops all over the world. After we’d done our dinner shopping, we caught a taxi back to Prime Hills. On the way I took a photograph of my socks and shoes.

23.02.23

In an open space somewhere undetermined, I met 2022 Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. She was carrying a stack of books, which I understood to be the components of her latest, major work, about ten volumes long. I too was carrying some books, but in my case they were all the same, copies of a collection of my essays, published as small hardbacks, in form like the green Loeb Classics editions except with red covers. Her books had red covers too but they were larger and flatter than mine. She asked me where I was going and I said, to the lift. I am doing a reading tonight, she said, why don’t you come along?

Hosts and guests were gathered in a place resembling the function room in a tourist centre. There was great excitement over the presence of a laureate among us and when we embarked, by vehicle, for the hall where the reading would take place, our hosts decided to bring us there via the scenic route. We set out in a convoy of four-wheel drives, which soon became bogged or else lost their way completely. The one I was in came to a dead end, in native bush, at the edge of a cliff, in a landscape that resembled the hilly country on the eastern shores of Taupo. I could see the waters of the lake glinting below.

The enthusiastic locals who had led us into this predicament seemed non-plussed. They did not know what to do. We reversed and tried another way but ended up in a swamp, without traction, unable to go either forward or backward. We got out of the vehicle and tried to walk across the quagmire: Annie Ernaux and I, waist-deep in dirty water, with our books held in our hands above our heads to prevent them from getting wet. We knew there would be no reading that night, we were just trying to find a way out of there. The locals had all disappeared.

This is a fashionable neighbourhood, with designer apartment buildings outside of which expensive and often idiosyncratic cars are parked. It’s quiet and civilised, with quite a lot of foot traffic and many people going by on bicycles. There’s a train line at the bottom of the hill and the entrance to another line, underground, about five minutes away. We are on the ridge of a small rise and at one end of the street there’s a knoll upon which an ancient shrine stands. We went there this morning, in brilliantly cold and clear weather, so Mayu could pay her respects and I could donate some of the ubiquitous small change I’ve gathered to the Shinto deities. While we were there she bought me a little book where you can accumulate stamps, one for each shrine you visit. She already had hers and wanted me to have one too. Then we each bought a small slip of paper with our respective fortunes written upon it. Hers said ‘very good luck’ so she kept it; mine just said ‘good luck’ so I tied it to a line, where many others fluttered, in order to augment that good luck. On the other side it said that there is more to life than food and clothes and that that more should include a dedication to living a peaceful life, both for yourself and for others. It said I should keep working and wait patiently for whatever rewards there may be.

Hachimangu shrine is old, dating back to 1212 in the Kamakura period (1192-1333), when it was dedicated to the war god, Hachiman. Just past where these inscribed stones are set up, there is a circular depression in the ground upon which a large round house has been constructed, built in a pit, with a framework of branches and sticks, thatched with silvery dried grass, and with a low dark entrance below and a kind of chimney at the top. This is a replica of the houses built by the people living around here c 4500 years ago, during the Jomon period. When the area was excavated in the 1950s, the remains of several such houses were found, along with the bones of deer and of boar. As we were leaving Mayu took me down a dark shady way to another shrine, this time to the fox deity, Inari. The mossy edges of the sunken path were home to many carved stone fox figurines and the altar itself crowded with tiny pale foxes sitting on their haunches, perhaps bought here by worshipers. We left some more small change and Mayu taught me how to perform the required ritual, which is very simple and very pleasing to do.

In Yoyogi Park, on the other side of a busy road, runners were running, cyclists cycling and dog owners walking their dogs. We saw some that had two-wheeled contraptions attached behind their bodies so that they could run and wheel along at the same time. This seemed to be an innovation designed to aid dogs with weak spines or back legs, which some of their carers cheerily confirmed to Mayu when she asked them. Further along we came to a stand of kawazu-zakura, winter cherry trees, flowering. There were many people there, some with their little girls dressed in elaborate costumes, some with their dogs, also costumed, who were being photographed next to the blossoming trees by professional photographers. There were several couples like the one above, with the woman in white and the man in black, under the canopy, photographing her in extreme close up next to the cherry blossoms.

At one of the ponds we came across a cohort of black crows bathing in the pale green water. They would stand in the shallows and duck their heads and flap their wings, again and again. There was one in particular which seemed especially fond of this activity. They look jet black from a distance but in the sunlight their glossy feathers show iridescent highlights of purple and green and blue. They have large, slightly blunt beaks and crests on their heads which make them look raffish and a little comical too. Later we saw some digging in the ground with their beaks for something, insects perhaps, or roots. They are common around here, with their lugubrious, even melancholy cry; but they seem sociable too and, if not exactly friendly, certainly tolerant. On the ground they can both hop and walk, and sometimes they do both together, emphasising their comical appearance.

On our way back we found a much smaller and less populated grove of plum trees, both white and red blossoming, with their buds just coming into flower. This one, with its black branches, looked so like the famous van Gogh image that it seemed an anachronism, weirdly out of time. A bit further on there is a community of homeless people who live in tents and other improvised structures stretched along a narrow ridge and extending into the valley below. Some of these people, who are mostly men, make a living out of collecting and recycling bottles and cans and other things: not just an economic activity but a social one too, showing their usefulness to the community at large. I think there have been attempts to move them along but they haven’t worked and the community now seems more stable than it did when I was last here, pre-pandemic, in February 2019.

22.02.23

This is a post about tomorrow, which is still to come . . .

In Tokyo even the street people wear masks. Even the homeless. There’s a ragged guy, I’ve seen him three times now, he has a dirty one that hangs just below his nose. The smarter the people, the smarter the mask. I saw one young fellow today, defiantly not wearing one. It’s very unusual however. I find they make me feel breathless and claustrophobic and they irritate the skin of my face. So I’m always taking them off and then putting them back on again. There is very little Covid here however.

This morning dedicated to finding an adaptor or a lead to make it possible to re-charge this laptop. We ending up buying both, at two different shops, but only the lead works. On the other hand, I only need one of them to function. Then I wandered back here while Mayu went to meet the Ratana woman for lunch. She’s only just got back so I haven’t heard what happened yet.

Not speaking the language leads to a kind of weariness I haven’t experienced before. A distraction, an anomie. A disengagement while I wait for others to sort out whatever is to happen, or solve whatever the problem is. When there are just the four of us here it is easier, because Mioko speaks a bit of English and even when Mayu and she and Yoshie are speaking Japanese, I can usually figure out what is being said. But when it’s technical stuff about leads – forget it.

Novel Arms isn’t a bar with a groovy name or a trendy nightclub either, but a place that sells sophisticated weaponry, especially telescopic sights and other visual aids used in hunting or in the military; but including pistols, rifles and shotguns.

21.02.23

Left Woodland Street at three in the afternoon of a hot Saturday in February. We were already packed up and ready to go when Liamh and Maddy started moving their things into the house. I was impressed with the amount, and the variety, of liquor they had with them; but then Mayu pointed out that was characteristic of people who don’t drink very much. True. Reiko arrived on the dot and managed to fit all of our luggage, and us, into her white Honda Jazz – the same model as Mayu’s yellow one, but a manual. I still feel guilty about ripping the e-tag off the windscreen of the yellow Jazz, breaking its hard plastic holder.

A night at Rydge’s Airport Hotel, in sight of the tarmac. There was a huge rainbow arch over the entrance door and all the bar staff wore rainbow t shirts. Even the woman who bought us our food was wearing rainbow braces. We ordered room service and left the curtains open all night long. With our trolleys in the room beside us, as if we were already in the terminal. Watched The Orator / O Le Tulafale‘ directed by Tusi Tamasese, the Samoan film that Leon shot, released in 2011. Very still, very beautiful compositions, slow yet building to a dramatic climax at the end. It was easy bumping and rolling our luggage the 181 steps to the terminal. I was scanned for traces of explosives then patted down for concealed weapons but that was only because of the metal clips on my own braces.

The flight ‘uneventful’. A geography lesson – I had a window seat. We flew over Moree. And Townsville. The names of the rivers – Meteor Creek on the Comet River. The Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. The New Guinea Highlands, including the Sepik River. The Orange River. Then the blue Pacific. The wing of the plane out the window with its red disc. I dimmed the lights and watched See How They Run, a riff on The Mousetrap – mildly entertaining, clever but soulless – and The Barber Mukoda, a lovely, soulful film about ageing small town people and their errant and in some cases prodigal young. A gangster film called Red Sea is made in the town during the story and that double vision is beautifully registered in the frame film.

Disembarked at Haneda without drama and were waved, vociferously and populously through Customs, Immigration etc. Bus into town then two taxis here. Woke to light on the bedroom wall. Today Mayu and I walked into town where she spent some time getting a new phone organised and I wandered around Shibuya. The hooded man with the Lamborghini. The Marching Girls. The four pairs of Italian sox I bought to go with the sneakers Mioko gave me. My red cashmere sweater from Yoshie. The fish in the tanks, and their carers, at the Don Quijote mall. The way I feel weirdly hostile towards other gaijin. We walked back again, with a stop for a pasta lunch on the way. Photo of wine bar doors.

Feb. 18 -20 2023

for Kitsune

I

We came near the end of winter

snow lay drifted upon the ground

& golden light faded between the trees

as night began to fall.

In the early dawn spokes of yellow sun

picked out the prints a fox had made

crossing a field, where the warmth

of growing things caused small holes

to melt in the snow. We did not

know why we were there nor how

long we would have to stay. That night

snow fell again, drifting silent

& cold past the window panes

freezing a film of ice upon the glass.

II

After the snow plough had been & gone

a heavy black car drove slowly down

the narrow road & stopped outside

the little house in the woods.

I had not yet shovelled a path from

the door to the road. Behind tinted

windows whoever it was paused

as if unsure what to do next. Then

the passenger door opened & a man

wearing hat, coat, gloves & rubber boots

trudged to the letter box, brushed

the snow away, pushed something through

the aperture then trudged back to the car. Its white

exhaust followed it away like a departing soul.

III

It was a manila envelope. I took it

back down the path I’d cleared

into the house, which was warm

& full of the smell of breakfast cooking

tore open the envelope, extracted

a piece of paper & read what was written upon it

aloud to my companion. She paused in her work

to listen. It was a summary of

the route we were to take when we drove

north & west to the sea; & an account

of what we were to do once we arrived

at the Old Port. Where we would stay

& who we were to see. There was nothing

said about the nature of our mission.

IV

We were to remain in the mountains

for some days yet. After it snowed

I cleared the path to the road & wiped

the residue from the car. If the weather

was fine we went out walking, making sure

we had bear bells on our belts, though

they were most likely all in hibernation still.

Once we saw the fox whose prints

appeared sometimes near the house. It stopped

among the bear bamboo & looked back

at us in such a way as to suggest it knew

not just more than we did but more

than we would ever know. Then it walked

away into the snow-laden trees.

V

My companion said that night it came to her

in a dream. A wise fox, with many tails

perhaps as many as nine. What did it say

I asked but she said nothing. It just

looked the way the one we saw in the woods

looked at us. We were both wondering

if we were doing the right thing, following

the instructions we had been given.

We were both afraid of what might

happen if we did not. I wanted her to ask

the wise old fox what we should do

but she said you do not ask such things

in case it is a trickster. You must wait

until the fox is ready to talk to you.

VI

It was time for us to leave. The fox

had not spoken & so we thought

now it never would. We loaded up the car

with our possessions, cleaned & secured

the house, warmed the engine then drove

away. As we were passing by the entrance

to the People’s Woods we saw

on the path that led between the trees

a fox. It was not the nine-tailed one

of the dream, it had just one, bushy, tail

& did not offer any oracular advice. Instead

it turned & trotted up the path

& away into the woods. We knew then

we were on our own; as we had always been.

VII

The journey to the sea took the best part

of a day. There was little traffic. As we came

down from the mountains we saw new

growth on the trees. Spring was coming.

Then we drove north along the coast until

we arrived, at dusk, in the Old Port. Our hotel

was near the docks, in a quiet street

of unfrequented bars & restaurants. We ate

at one of these then returned to the hotel.

The old woman at reception said we had

had a caller. He left a note for us.

It gave us a time & a place to meet with him

next day & requested that we tell no-one

where we were going. Signed: The Fox.

VIII

He did not seem like a fox. More of a bear.

Big & muffled up in an overcoat

even though it was not cold. Or not to us.

We sat at a table outside a small café

where fishermen drank. We were couriers, he said

& did not need to know what we were carrying.

Only its destination, which was in another city

further up the coast, in a labyrinth of ponds

nearer to the mainland, over the narrow sea.

Were we in danger my companion asked.

Only if you say where you are going

or tell anyone what you are taking there.

And afterwards, I asked. Afterwards

we do not care where you go or what you do.

IX

We did not investigate the contents

of the package he gave us. Contraband

perhaps. Or documents. Plans, maps, blueprints.

After all there was a war on. In the City

of Lagoons we met a young woman who wore

a mask over her face the whole time

we were with her; which was not long.

She said her fiancé had been killed

in the fighting at Mir. She cursed the war

before she limped away. With the money

she gave us we bought a place to live.

It was the house in the mountains

where we stayed the time we met the fox.

We laid the deposit down in cash.

X

We half expected to find the fox

sitting by the doorstep waiting for us

when we returned to take possession

but it was not so. We did not see

another one for months & then it was

a vixen, with cubs. My companion

said if you go looking for a fox

he will not show himself. Or she, as

the case may be. Sometimes bears

come down from the mountain. Badgers

eat the scraps we throw on the ground

behind the house. Not everything I have


written is untrue but nor is it

the whole story. We are living here still.

F/B has started sending me memories again. I never asked for them before and didn’t mind when they stopped; now they’re back again. They’re pretty random (I think they’re date-based) but they do remind me of other summers and what I was obsessing about then (2017-18 Ancient Egypt) (2016-17 Joseph Conrad) (2015-16 Joseph Lycett). They also tell me I used to write an annual report – a grizzle about the year just passed, what worked out, what did not.

They are only mildly interesting to me now so probably even duller for others. It’s poignant that a proportion of the comments preserved below each post are from people who have died. The odd thing about that is I still hear their voices, loud and clear. Anyway I am going to attempt a brief summation of the year, mostly so that it can return to me later as a F/B memory – unless of course I’m dead too; and maybe even then.

I don’t think I wrote anything much this year that was new – a few essays and reviews perhaps – but I did revise two old texts. One is called Marlow’s Dream and subtitled Joseph Conrad in Antipodean Ports. It was drafted about five years ago and I spent quite a bit of time in the first part of the year trying to rescue it from the disaster it had become. I thought I’d succeeded but the dozen or so publishers who read and rejected the ms didn’t agree.

Or perhaps they did. The ms got a lot of praise but every encomium ended with the doom ― we can’t sell it. The reason, I think, is that it’s too literary. Whereas my main criticism of the work is that it’s not literary enough. There’s still a couple of fugitive possibilities left for it but I don’t care any more. I don’t mean I don’t care about the book. I just can’t be bothered with the shenanigans of people who profess to love a book they will not publish.

And in the old country, too, I tried to place a collection of essays with a couple of reputable houses, both of which said oh wow, great, no, we’re full, local product etc. Again I don’t care. I was an assessor for Creative NZ lately and that was an eye opener. Of course I’m sworn to secrecy and can’t tell much about anything; suffice to say it was like attending a community meeting where half the people were dog owners and the other half, pet-haters. There were a few dogs there too but they mostly just barked.

The commission that came my way from over there is the other text I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this year. I have been diligent and engaged and even, at times, inspired. The result is a third draft, which I finished a couple of days ago and which I’m happy with. There is a publisher for that so it’s all good. Won’t come out until 2024 but will be illustrated so there’s plenty of time to get that side of things right. I’m drawing a line under that one (actually under both), striking another match and starting anew.

I don’t know yet with what. I just received, in the post, my holiday reading – Aesopic Conversations, by Leslie Kurke, with the portrait of the old story teller, by Velasquez, on the cover. Happy to be spending the summer with Aesop; and then in February we’re going to Japan for a year. Our base will be Kurohime but we might travel around a bit. I’m not imagining anything. I’m not anticipating anything. I might keep a journal, I might not. I won’t be ‘writing a book’. I’ve drawn a line under that too.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The other night C K Stead came to me in a dream. Or perhaps I should say I came to him. He was a ninety year old man, with pale blue eyes that were slightly rheumy but he was still tall and straight and, so far as I could tell, compos mentis. It was some sort of gathering, a party or a launch or something of that sort. I went up to talk to him because I wanted to tell him I’d just read two of his books. Oh, he said, immediately interested. And which books were those? And I could not remember their titles. Nor could I, when it came to the point, say enough about either of them for him to recognise which ones they were. This absurd conversation went on, without rancour, for some time and then I woke up.

I don’t usually dream about C K Stead. In fact, this was probably the first time. He isn’t much in my thoughts either ― but as it happened I had just read a book of his, and a single chapter of another. The book was Talking about O’Dwyer (1999) and the chapter the first of the third volume of his memoirs What You Made Of It (2021), which for some reason is online. It deals with the matter of the novel in some detail and so constitutes a kind of a gloss upon it. Dan Davin, Oxford, the Māori Battalion, Crete, Croatia, Henderson in West Auckland, Up North, all get a look in.

I don’t usually read C K Stead either; but a friend had asked me to write something about the Hall of Memories at Waitaki College, of which he is an old boy, and along with several books about the school, he lent me Talking about O’Dwyer. We’d been yarning off and on about the war and he’d previously given me to read a self-published memoir his uncle wrote which included a personal narrative of the advance, in 1944 and 45, of the New Zealanders up the Italian Peninsula to Trieste. So I guess he was offering me the novel in order to continue the conversation.

Stead is nothing if not readable, the book is not long and I got through it in a weekend. It is a highly accomplished piece of work, both in terms of the quality of the writing and the excellence of the story-telling ― so much so that after a while I began to think it resembled a supremely engineered piece of machinery, which had been taken apart and oiled and put back together several times and now purred immaculately towards its destination without once missing a beat. At the same time, and especially after I finished reading it, that destination seemed somehow nugatory and the whole enterprise as heartless, or perhaps I mean as soulless, as, say, a Jaguar engine. Of course for some people a car engine does have a soul but I’m not one of them.

I did have a couple of other thoughts about the book, neither of which I would have been able to say to Stead if I were in conversation with him, which I’m not. Indeed I’ve only met Karl on one occasion, over the weekend of a literary festival in Hastings a decade or more ago now and he was perfectly charming company. Urbane, witty, sharp, generous and expansive. His one fault, so far as I am concerned, was that he hit on my girlfriend on every single occasion she appeared before him, with the insouciance and the enthusiasm and the over-weening vanity of a seventeen year old boy who thinks he is the goods. She was flattered I guess but also just as bemused as I was.

Anyway, back to the book. The first thing about it is that the hero, Mike Newell, a retired or retiring academic, is clearly a version of Stead himself. Nothing wrong with that of course; except that it means, on a certain level, he is indulged by his author. In other words he can do no wrong. A philosopher and Wittgenstein scholar, he remembers easily outwitting his now estranged wife when it came to questions of metaphysics and the existence of God ― she is a Christian whereas he is Zen, if you can be Zen without practising Zen, which you probably can’t.

Mike also has an eye for the ladies and, naturally, they do for him too. He has a delectable affair as a very young man with his best friend’s cousin and though his friend’s sudden death queers that pitch, the lovers meet up again, many years later, as mature adults, and have mature and adult (and celibate) conversations about the past, the present and the future. There’s another mature and very adult affair, not celibate, in Croatia which, mercifully, isn’t described in the sort of lubricious detail that the young love is.

Both of these ― or perhaps all three, if you include the marriage ― relationships are seen more or less exclusively from the male point of view and that point of view is so close to the author’s that you end up feeling that what you’re really reading is, if not sexual boasting, then a peculiar kind of wish fulfillment. On the other hand, I’m quite sure that Stead would be able to provide an account of each relationship ‘in real life’, showing how and where and when it happened exactly as he’s telling it, with just a few changes here and there for the sake of economy or to protect the unwitting.

The exegesis of the sources of the novel in the chapter of the memoir is, in its own way, an extraordinary piece of exculpatory prose. Just as Stead can’t bear to give his hero any negative or even ambiguous character traits, so he can’t admit to any form of error or wrong-doing or dereliction of duty in his use of sources ― which include the notebook of the father of a friend of his, which he deploys without the friend’s permission (it’s in an archive) and in such a way that they ultimately stop being friends. Then he delivers a few low blows to his former friend, making the appropriation of his friend’s father’s story seem even creepier. Various other people are also despatched in the course of Stead’s exegesis. He just can’t be wrong about anything.

However, even if I’d been able to speak in the dream, I wouldn’t have said any of this to him either. I might, however, have been tempted to say something about what I found most offensive in the book: its use of other people’s lives, particularly those of certain individuals from the 28th (Māori) Battalion. One of these people is Humphrey Dwyer, an officer. Another is Parata Heta Thompson, an NCO, to whom Stead dedicates the book: a man he never knew and, so far as I can tell, he never bothered to get to know his family either. To say these characters are caricatures is unnecessary. Like the hero, they are seen only from the author’s point of view, that is, of an unreconstructed retired Pakeha academic in his declining years.

At the heart of the plot is a curse which has been placed upon the eponymous O’Dwyer by the family of the man he killed. There is no mention of a source for this device in the exegesis; it may have been, clunky as it is, an invention. The knock in the diff of the engineering of the plot perhaps. What I did want to say to Karl was this: these were real people who you turned into ciphers in the service of a story that fed, ultimately, your own vanity. And also: he who invents curses upon others will himself in time be cursed. In the event, in the dream, I could only stammer out a few fragments of sentences that did not cohere.

It doesn’t matter. C K Stead probably doesn’t believe in curses and even if he did, would never consider himself to be cursed, would he? Or would he? I actually think he is cursed, but not in the way you might think. I think he’s cursed to mediocrity and obscurity. I think, alas, for all of his vaulting ambition, his eloquent self-justifications, and his genuine achievements, he will not be remembered in the way he so earnestly and even painfully wishes to be. But what would be the point of telling an old man that?

links:

The real O’Dwyer:

Humphrey Goring Dwyer

The Exegesis:

What You Made Of It

Damien Wilkins:

The Self Loathing of a Stead Novel

image:

Stead with cigarettes c 1960

 

Saturday evening, just as I was settling in to watch the cricket, there came a knock upon the door. It was a friend of M’s who’d come round to drop off some books for their book club. They were in a brown paper bag. She had her daughter with her, about six year’s old, and the little girl held in both hands a small cardboard box, like a shoe box, with a towel draped over the top. They said in it was a baby bulbul that had fallen out of the nest, which they’d found while going for a walk in Gough Whitlam Park down by the Cook’s River. I asked if I could have a look, the little girl pulled back a corner of the towel and I saw stripy black and grey feathers over a body that was too large to be that of a baby bulbul. Maybe it’s a cuckoo? I said but they both shook their heads. No, it’s got a crest. Also, because it was a bulbul, WIRES (Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service) wouldn’t take it because they only take natives. By this time M was out talking to her friend, who didn’t want to come in for a cup of tea or anything. She wanted to go home.

I went back to the cricket. I don’t usually watch games of 20-20 but this was New Zealand vs Australia and the Black Caps were creaming it. At some point the little girl said she wanted to go to the toilet and I showed her the way to the bathroom. It was the break between innings. I went into the kitchen to start making dinner. Chopping up onions, garlic, green peppers, chilli bacon and pancetta to simmer in a tomato sauce. After a while I thought: that little girl is taking a long time in the bathroom and began to listen up. (Bathroom and kitchen adjoin, with a wall of cupboards in between.) I heard a few indeterminate sounds but nothing definite. I wondered what she could be doing. I know some people take a long time in the bathroom but children are not usually among them. A little while after that I heard a brief, gentle, hesitant knocking on the bathroom door and went to see what had happened. She was locked in.

I knew the lock was dodgy but hadn’t done anything about it because we never use it. It was one of those bubble locks, inside the handle, with a button you turn from horizontal to vertical to activate and deactivate. The button still turned but the tongue of the lock would not retract. The two mechanisms had somehow become disconnected from one another. I knew that no key would make any difference, even if we could find the key. I went and told the girl’s mother she was locked in and M went to look for a key anyway. She found a whole bunch of them but we didn’t know which was the right one and, besides, none of them worked. We tried sliding the end of a screwdriver and then the blade of a knife between door and jamb to force the tongue to retract but that didn’t work either. I said this is a job for a locksmith and M went to ring one. He said he’d be there in half an hour.

The little girl didn’t freak out. She was admirably calm. Her mother sat on the floor outside the door with M’s copy of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, in Japanese, reading it to her daughter. She’s bi-lingual so would read the Japanese text and then translate the words into English. Somehow they conspired to share the pictures too, I don’t know how. Under the door perhaps. I went on cooking and M sat on the sofa with the box with the baby bird in it on her knees. She was afraid that if she put it down it would get cold and maybe even die. She looked like something out of an old tale herself. After the girl’s mother finished reading the story, she rang the girl’s father, who was at home, to tell him what had happened and to discuss dinner. There was talk of pizza.

I was still monitoring the cricket but it had turned out to be one of those games which are over almost before they begin. About forty-five minutes had passed when the locksmith called and asked if he could park outside our house. There was a spot and I waited beside it until he arrived. I was quite surprised when a little white car, a rental from No Birds, turned into the street and made a U-turn in front of our place. He was a young man, handsome and lithe, probably Brazilian. He had an aura about him. I said there was a little girl locked in the bathroom and he said he rescues little girls from bathrooms all the time. Which he then proceeded to do.

While he was thus engaged I had another look at the bird in the box and realised it was actually a baby crested pigeon, a native as it happens, and common around here. I showed the girl’s mother a picture from our bird book and, when the little girl came out, showed her too. The mother straightaway called WIRES and gave them their address. Meanwhile the little girl explored the house and ended up at M’s dressing table in the front bedroom, trying out looks in the mirror. M gave her a jewelled hairband and a shiny necklace before she and her mother went off home, perhaps to have pizza.

The Brazilian put a new lock on the bathroom door (not that we’ll ever use it) and drove off to star in some other fairy-tale rescue. I had a look at the Maurice Sendak book, which I used to read to my sons when they were little, improvising chants for the pics for which there are no words, the ones when all they’re doing is dancing. I can still remember one of the chants I used to sing, and tried it out again. A variation perhaps upon what Bob Marley sings in ‘Buffalo Soldier’: Woe yoy yoy, woe yoy yoy yoy / Woe yoy yoy yo, yoy yoy yoy yo. It sounded alright. 

Later on that night we heard that WIRES didn’t come around after all and the baby pigeon was loose on their balcony in Ashfield, happy enough but not eating the birdseed we’d given them. Next day, which was Sunday, WIRES did come and took the little bird and said it will be cared for, with some others of its kind, until it’s strong enough and then released, near where they found it, back into the wild. Woe yoy yoy yo, yoy yoy yoy yo.