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Landfall L59 Editor: Dauid Dow,LingPoetry Eclitor: Hugh l-audcrGuest Editor: Gary BoireEditorial Assista nt: Ju<lith &tker

VOLUME FORTY NUMBER THREE SEPTEIvIBER 1986

Editorial, Gary Boire

storiesConcerning Alban Ashtree, C.K. SreadMiddle \ilUatch, Stuart Cr.ggMy Uncle Frank , Mark WilliamsJumbo, Mick Roberm

poemsScreen Plays l/2/3, Kendrick SmithymanMy Father in New Zealand,, George &ru'eringFour Poems, Mike DoyleTwo Poems, Marilyn BoweringThree Poems, Robert Bringhurst'Words, Perhaps, for Music, Douglas BarbourSpending the Morning on the Beach, Roberr KroerchFour Poems, Vincent O'SulliuanFour Poems, Anne FrenchOf Austen's England, Hugh Stec/ensOn The Mantelpiece, Dauid EggletonThree Poems, Keuin lreland

com.mentary & criticismYeats's Glove: An Of[hand View of Nationalism, Mike DoyleA Deckchair of Words, Reginald BerryLegends , Timothy FindlelMaking the Paths Straight: Gaile McGregor's Voice in rhe Wilderness,

Mark WilliamsProblems of Originality: or, Beware of Pakeha baring Guilts, Jonathan l-amb

reviewsCast Two Shadows, Joan Rosier-Jones, Su<ann OlssonHeart Attack and Other Stories, Joy Cowley, David HillBones, Brian Turner, Iain SharpThe Globe Tapes, Robin Henl.ey

Book Notes

Correspondence

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297364376382

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Z8Z310327

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390392394398

402

404

407Contributors

artCover: Three Masks courresy of U.B.C. Museum of Anthropology,Vancouver, Canada.Front: Mask by Haida artist Rokrert Davidson. This mask, named 'AfterHe Has Seen the Spirit'was inspired by the 1980 celebration'A Tributeto the Living Haida', in Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C. Material:wood, paint, feathers, operculum shell. Height74.7cm, width 21.1cm,depth 1 1.5cm.BaLk (above): Kwagiutl Tsonoqua Mask. Pursed lips are typical ofTsonoqua, a female giantess who roams the forest, crying'hu, hu'.She is searching for children, whom she carries away in the basketon her back. This is a powerful carving; the artist has made full useof the grain of the wood to emphasize the planes of the cheeks. HeightL2',(below,): Kwagiutl Mask. This is a'sneezer'mask, attributed to George'!7alkus, from a now deserted village on Smith lnlet. The mourh ismovable and the dancer tickled the nose with a bunch of cedar barkto provoke the sneeze. Material: wood and cedar bark. Height 36cm,width 23.5cm.

'The Art Class, l', ink sketches, Patricia Fry

lllustrations, Crr.g O' Brien

359

377

I-andfalt acknowledges the generous assistance of the Canadian High Commission(Wellington) in compiling the N.Z.-Canadian secrion of this issue.

PRINTED & PUBLISHED BY THE CAXTON PRESS,CHRISTCHURCH

SUBSCRIPTIONSI-cmcllull is l.trhlishetl in March, Junc, Sepremher,n.l Decenrber. Thesul-rscril-rtiorr nrtcs firr 1gtt7 (firrrr issr-rcs) urc: Posted within Ncn,Zc.aland $J0.00(1-''lus l(l'1', ( j.S.T. ) - $13.00; Posrctl ()\,crscas $15.00.Sirl-rscril'rtions should hc scnt [(r Lrnil|til| Box 25-t]$E, Llhristc-hurch, New.Zcalarr.l.Singlc co1'rics rn.i hirck nunrhers ure u,u'ailahle at $9.00 per c()tr)y (1-rlus lO'li,G.S.T. I $9.r)C.

SUBMISSIONSIandfalt publishes storiesr poems, extracts from work in progress, reviews,commentaries, articles on aspects of related arts, work by photographers andartists.!7ork must be typed. Contributions CANNOT BE RETURNED UNLESSACCOMPANIED BY A STAMPED, ADDRESSED ENVELOPE.Address contributions to: The Ediror/Landfall,, Box 25-088, Christchurch,New Zealand.Deadline for each issue is two months before publication. Advertising iswelcome, and rates are available on request.Iandfall is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand LiteraryFund.

rssN 002l-7910

LANDEALL L59 September 1986

A IVEW ZEALAND OI.]A RTE RL Y

GARY BOIRE

Llear & Their: Editorial

\7e a[ live in the same world's sea. 'We cannot tell a story that leavesus ()utside, and when I say we, I include you. But in order to includeyou, t feel that I cannot spend these pages saying I to a second person.Therefore let us say He, and stand together looking at them.

George Bowering's sly, self-conscious invitation from his novel,Burniig Water, off.rr a convenient signature for this New Zealand-Canadian issue of Landfall.. On one hand it suggests, tongue-in-cheekily, the cliches editors of comparative exercises feelcompelled to invoke. 'The global village', 'a distant mirror', 'ourneig[rbours across the sea'-the catch-phrases argue that bylooking at 'them' we can discover something worthwhile about'us'. As early as 1938, for example, this kind of trans-Pacificinrerest sparked the Canadian novelist, Morley Callaghan, toreview C. R. Allen's now almost forgotten Tales o/New Zealanders.Callaghan rightly panned the book, but felt Canadians ought toread it anyway: 'From a Canadian point of view this collectionof New Zealand stories has a special interest. It can hardly besaid that the short story flourishes in Canada...so one hasconsiderable curiosity to see if the New Zealanders are doing anybetter. Are they still writing colonial literature, or have they gotsomething of their own?' Twenty-five years later, and in a widercontext, Allen Curnow continued in the same vein; musing onthe similarities between New Zealand writers and theirCommonwealth counterparts, he mentioned 'the impulse that weand they feel to distinguish our own literature within a commontradition, combined with a strong (if not overwhelming) senseof community within that tradition.'

The hesitant sense of a shared community felt specificallyberween pakeha New Zealanders and white English-Canadians(and, more painfully, between Maori and Canadian NativePeoples) has developed substantially since 1963. To lift a linefrom Mike Doyle, 'radio, television, and satellites, world travel,

275

etc.' have prompted even closer comparison. Not to mentionCommonwealth Scholarships, Toronto Harbourfront Readings,\t/ellington Arts Festivals, Canada Council or Literary Fund tavelGrants, unemployment-prompted migration, or the Canadiangtlvernment's Faculty Enrichment Award for Australasianacademics. An entire range of demographic factors has begunto corroborate the growing acceptance that similarity does, infact, exist within difference (and vice versa as Mark 'Williamsargues herein). Despite a grotesque discrepancy in size, Canadaand New Zealand are both ex-colonies struggling to resist neo-colonizing neighbours; both countries enjoy and brood upon thedelicate balance of heterogeneous 'regions' within a homogeneousstate; both cultures share the burden of historical settler-guiltmollified by liberal democratic ideology. $Tithin the narrowconfines of academic and /or literary circles (a distinction which,in both places, seems itself questionable) there is a fascinationwith each others' various 'cultures'. In Canada, the literature ofNerv Zealand and the Commonwealth is taught throughout the[Jniversity circuit (often nostalgically by expatriates); in NewZealand and Australia there is a burgeoning Association forCanadian Studies. In this issue alone most of the contributorshave had, in varying ways and in varying forms, familial,educational, literary, political, economic, or professionalconnections with both countries. Partly on these grounds, then,Land'fall here aims tc-r give a glimpse of 'them' looking at 'us'and, perhaps slightly more acerbically,'us'returning theinterpretive gaze.

But to return to Bowering's invitation. Like much of BurningWater, it raises a number of those readerly and writerly questionsnow dominating the discourse(s) of post-colonial, post-modern,or what Northrop Frye playfully calls post-everything literature.In superb ludic fashion it probes our received ideas of wriringand reading, our very notions of 'story' itself. As Bowering's bookproceedt (incidentally, it's about George Vancouver who exploredhoth Canada and New Zealand!), we encounter a vast array ofproblematic knots: colonization, the myth of originriity,nationalism, identity, memory, in-jokes, cultural angst, culturalpranks, what-have-you. Or, in this case, what-you-have in thiscollection of poems, stories, essays, and reviews. Most of thecontributions were solicited under the general rubric, 'a NewZealand-Canadian issue.' Though hardly convergent in any strictsense of the word, each of the submissions (unexpectedly,interestingly, of its own accord) enters into dialogue with ehchof the others. In their own wry, each touches on the very aspects

276

underpinning Bowering's invitation and novel. Each, in its ownway, centres on what have become, to mix a metaphor or two,crucial elements in the cultural mosaic of the same world's sea.

This issue has received much support (moral and financial)from a variety of individuals and institutions. I want toacknowledge especially David Dowling and Hugh Lauder wholiked and encouraged the initial proposal; Sheila Morris and theCanadian High Commission for a grant-in-aid; C. J. Millar andthe University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropologyfor permission to use their photographs for our covers; and, aboveall, to the authors themselves: Merci beaucoup.

Editorial Policy.From December l-andfall will be managed by an editorial boardcomprising David Dowling (fiction), Linda Hardy (prose, articles),Hugh Lauder (poetry), Mark !7i11iams (reviews), withJudith Bakeras Mr.rrging Edito.. An Editorial about this development willfollow in the next issue.

KENDRICK SMITHYMANScreen Plays L/Z/3

For Timothy Findl"ey ¤d WiLLiam Whitehead.

'Weekends Tiff's parents took them all(brothers, sisters) out to the flying field.Tiff's father would have liked to fly,he said it was his sons' wishto shift out of town, only a little, briefly.barnstorming over boulevards gettinga new sense of perspective.Am l, Tiff, over-Americanising thisso Ontario experiencel lt could

happen, any dry. There, Tiff thought/wtrs thinking

lf onlv ifUncle Frank and Aunt hadthen been able in a biplane, instead ofwhich they took off in a snowstorm in a cutter(the horses' hoofbeats muffled like town drums

277

counting for retriburion distantly)romantic

ally eloping until they ranout of money. This ishow they came to touch down in Minneapolis, Minn-how else? This is how

the mid- and further 'West was won, by arduouspursuit:

a.cutrer whacl.ilg through a fallingsnow, an irate father slidingbehind, skids whispering like gossip,that's local history. They were heading off intoterritory of the James boys and the Daltons?Ah, but they came to restin Minnesota's Minneapolis, he wasMaestro Francisco von Buehl, and she wasequally improbable. God save us, factwas as they fled he sped behindin falling snow, his pistol blaringwhile they launchedoff from the piano factory, shot fromthe not so very probable (it's rrue!) intothe not so very likely,

living happilyever afterl

All men are brotherssometimes. And all wives?Frank,/Francisco taught the wives to sing.

How, was the West won unlessby gunplay? It was

SThen the posse furtherwest by south snaked belly-down fashiontowards the shack they were pressingthe point, so many (not so many) windowsmean so many points of fire, so theywatched the windowS, for a flickerlike a soprano running scale working up toa trill while you wonder lVillshe make it or \)7ill she blast for it rightout of the window, huhl and thenthe blast

278

from underneath the sill not whereexpected, like inthi Lincoln County 'War? Or when they triedto take the Mad Trapper of Rat River?That's your folklore, family style.

Maybe while Tiff was out at the airfieldthinking I was thinking about this which I cameon in True Detectiq/e foremost, laterI came on it local, later stillin Rudy 'Wiebe,

the subplot soustexteunderpl"y, getting a whisper ofDon't go for the light flipping up offthe glass, watchfor the covert operation. That's what makeslocal history, ns well as family.It's about how to touch down, going to earth.This is Natioil, we're part of it.And Tradition.

The things that I've readabout participantly, surrogate.Or heard about.

Simon saysDo this . . we all underread our occasions.Comes to mind, reading of attackon the 1860s pa, Regiment and Militia workingforward, bullets singing up- and down-scale,the pekerangi obvious, not sounder the palisades' flax coat or sapling screenthe riflemen's pits. Like, under the sill.They were got at, at ground level.

In Ontario they never did something same?Families are like that,

not by Loqre alone. not bY l'ove' man'

Ir's a madition, sort of . You haqreto Learn

the colonial experience.

Nick's granddad as he tells it279

cllme out from Greece where they have a lotof tradition. They call it family.Perhaps he tried for a goldfield. He didn't make ir,he ended up on a gumfield, digging into set up family, kept his srore.

He ran foulof rr local. This was somewhere outsideDargaville. One said, the orher said . .

word passed to showdown. Nick's granddad calledthe tune. He made his house ready.He cut slots under the shanty windows.Anyone could see them.

He harnessed his horse.He stoked his fire and the chimney answered.Then he eased off his verandah,crawled under the house where he'd scoopeda gunpit, and waited.He didn't leave town, he set up showdown.

Afterwards, he sent for his wife?Or, he stepped out and hunted a wife?He sent for her back home like a mail order

'Find me a missus.'When she arrived she was suitable.She wasn't told what to expect.

He insisted on his rights, she had ro learnhow to handle the lever acrion 30-30which slept under the counrer of the store.In those days not only bank clerks carriedor the Constabulary. Even the Salvation Armypreacher riding his rounds packed a pistolalong with his good news. 'Whatever became of us,did we disappear in fog or drizzle,falling timbers cracking like shots?'We think we know how it wenr: escapade, flight,pursuit, up on the screen a flickering story,down in the pit a piano player switchingmotifs. After the show was overwho stood up, stretched, stepped away darklycalling back, 'I guess I'll see younext Saturday' as though

it all made sense.

280

GEORGE BOVTERIIVG

My Father in New Zealand

Everyone agrees,when you visit New Zealandyou are back in the Fifties.

The Fifties! My father is still alive!I looked around for him on the long main street of 'Wellington.I kept turning on Cuba Street to see if he was behind me.I listened for his quiet voice in the Auckland airport.I lifted brims of bent sheepmen's hats, looking for his face.

He was there somewhere, I had no rightto wander both islands without talking with him.

I rued the hours I spent in the wrong places,the Vibrations disco in Christchurch, the Maori bars,the poetry reading at the library. Hewould never show up in such a place, and my timewas running out.

Every time I watched a flashing leginstead of seeking his dear old frameI was suffused with guilt, a true Canadian abroad.

f)ear Ewart, if they are right you are there somewhere,& I have twenty years to find youbefore you are gone again, maybe to some other country.

But how many years do I have left, whose framelooks so much like yours? Can I wait twenty years,hoping you move to a closer country?

Are you in New Zealand, looking for me too?I mm a lot older now, I look more like you.Call me by the secret name we had when I was a child,the name we never spoke. I'll hear you if I can get there.

281

MIKE DOYLE,

Yeats's Glove: An Offhand View ofNationalism

At a We[ington Teachers' College assembly, one sunny Thursdnymorning more than thirty years &go, To.y Vogt unexpectedlyand generously presented a poem of mine called 'DisplacedPersons'. Never mind now that it was a mediocre poem, the eventseemed to confirm a feeling of acceptance I'd built up duringthree years of living in New Zealand. Yet that same year in anunconsidered brief essay for Poetry Yearbook I coined the uglyterm 'anational' to characterise what a 'true poet' ought to be!Already I'd fallen into the trap of posing as 'overseas expert';this, despite the fact that having grown up virtually without acountry (in England, of Irish family) I'd made up my mind tobe a Kiwi. I didn't realise then that, culturally, I'd started outon the long road of being a displaced person.

For more than a decade from the mid- 1950s on I was involvedin the 'national/international' literary squabble lan \Weddementions in the Introduction to his recent Penguin poetryanthology. A crucial issue elsewhere (in the United States, forexampl.), as far as I can tell this squabble came to the forefrontin New Zealand after the Second 'World 'War. By contrast, inCanada the sense of a similar dichotomy goes back at least acentury, to W.D. Lighthall's Songs of the Great Dominion (1889).Significantly, Lighthall finds a positive place for both 'native' and'universal'poetry. More than fifty years later the same line wastaken by A.J.M. Smith, the dean of modern Canadian anthologists.Distrusting nationalism, it was a line Smith continued to takefor the rest of his career, and is the first major difference betweenNew Zealand and Canadian approaches.

To return to 'Wedde. He opens the Penguin anthology witha quote from my Earth Mediwrions which, h. says, focused ()nthe national-international dichotomy 'as late as 197 l' . The bookwas published that year in Toronto, but the passage was writtenin August L967, oD Grindstone Island in the St Lawrence River.Holidaying there with my family, from research leave at Yale,I spent the time agonizing whether to return to live in New Zealand.A prime cause of my not doing so was the literary nationalismspearheaded by Allen Curnow. During the 60s Adcock, Bland,

782

Johnson and others also left New Zealand. The dating is importanras it was before the 'new wave' of poets and beflore O'Sullivan's1970 Oxford anthology. As to Earth Meditarions, it is both an'international' and a New Zealand poem. Pieces of it could havefitted snugly in .Wedde, who later in his Introducrion (p.45)expresses regret for omitting various poets, including Bland andmyself, and explains that he includes Brunton, Adcock and Irelandbecause of their 'continued connection' with New Zealand. Thisis very odd. Between 197 0 and 1985 I published books on rwoNew Zealand writers (Mason and Baxter), essays on others, andtwo substandal collections of my own poetry in New Zealand(1976, I98Z), In 1985 I co-edited the New Zealand number ofthe quarterly Ariel. Continued connections?

Behind Wedde's apparent evenhandedness seems to be theunspoken decision that the only real New Zealander is anindigenous one. This 'mystique' is an extension of Curnow and,most extraordinarily, seems to be shared by Fleur Adcock inher rather scrappy anthology Contemporary Neq, Zeal.and, Poetry(l9BZ), where from a distance of thirteen thousand miles andan absence of twenty years she proscribes inclusion of 'Americansand Englishmen' (Adcock lived in New Zealand from t945 ro1963). 'Wedde's commitment to the indigenous prompted himto the bold step of including a large amount of Maori verse withEnglish translations, though some of these are bad poetry. Upto that moment, the work had been virtually invisible ro thegeneral reader, and it is moot whether this is good cause forinclusion or omission. But why leave out Peter Bland, some ofwhose work in the 50s and 60s was excellent? Such omissionmay justifiably be seen as'revisionist'. At least it raises animportant question: is an anthology as broadly based as Wedde'sPenguin an historical record or a piece of propaganda? I'm notsaying it's one or t'other, but the anthologist ought to be awareof the question, and the answer.

When Curnow introduced A Book of Neq.u Zealand Verse inthe 1940s, he believed that the role of a New Zealand poet required'a vital relation to experience', which was somehow co-existentwith the country's becoming 'a point of departure for theimagination'. Emergent themes, as he saw it, all centred on therelation between individual and location: arrival and departure,seashore-haunting, interloping on a hostile scene. In othei words,the pakeha struggle to adapt and to shape his environment. Here,admittedly oversimplified, are the rerms in which Curnowenvisioned the growth of nationhood. Both in this anthology andthe 1960 Penguin his batteries of epigraphs clearly r.'u.rl that

ZB3

a nation is what preoccupies him, and always (despite his manyremarks about 'reality') in terms appropriate to nineteenth-centuryRomanticism. One epigraph, from Yeats, reads in part: 'One canonly reach out to the universe with a gloved hand-that gloveis one's nation, the only thing one knows even a little of'. Somuch for Yeats's cosmol.gy, the Order of the Golden Dawn,etc., not to mention radio, then television and satellites, worldtravel, etc. But Yeats's glove is Curnow's vision of 'this vitaldiscovery of self in country and country in self'. Since 1945some fine writers-one could start the list with Baxter, Curnow,Frame, Ashton-'V7arner, Stead, Maurice Gee-have in a varietyof ways l.ocated their country. To date, the acutest acts of self-perception seem to occur in the best of Baxter's poetry and inMaurice Gee's beautifully distilled novel Plumb, which compressesso much about the fabric of New Zealand life and the roots ofthe New Zealand psyche.

So long as we regard the pakeha experience as 'the New Zealandthing' we are dealing with near-homogeneity-a clear single trackto nationhood. 'Wedde's featuring of the Maoris introducesanother factor and complicates the issue, the apparent implicationbeing that provided Maori and pakeha can somehow assimilateeach other all will be well. So, in fact, the struggle for what Curnowcalls 'true vision' continues and with it, in some as yet not fullyresolved sense (at least so it seems from outside), a need to ejectimpurities and the hovering shadows of 'garrisons pent up ina little fort'.

When I came to Canada in 1968, nt least on superficialinspection nationalism didn't seem to be the issue. But I waswrong again. Two years later occurred the separatist events inQuebec. Here, though, I'd befter digress to admit that VancouverIsland is highly untypical of Canada. It feels about equidistantfrom Auckland-'Wellington and Toronto-Montreal. Having grownup on the Atlantic, I've spent two-thirds of my life as a Pacificperson. Not long nBo, I told the students in my poetry class,'If Vancouver Island were a republic, I'd be a patriot.'

The first and most obvious thing which makes Canadiannationhood difficult is the double ffansplant, French and English.( Among poetry anthologists, only Smith is determinedlybilingual.) Second, is the enormous distance between VancouverIsland and Newfoundland. Third is the Canadian 'mosaic' (*tcontrasted with the American 'melting-pot'). All these are virtuallytruisms. And I've not even mentioned the First People.

Tb confess, when I came to live here I had not thought muchabout Canada. I found that there have, &t times, been phases

284

of nationalism. 'When I came I simply wanted somewhere to liveand write and find a place. At thirty-nine, I'd been enoughinfluenced by Curnow's views to feel that I was too old to beassimilated. Yet the wave of nationalism which surged up almostas soon as I got here did prove to be uncomfortable. One immediateimpact was that a reading I was scheduled to give in a B.C.university around L97 L-72 was cancelled because a local poetthreatened to organize a boycott on the grounds of my beingnon-Canadian. On the other hand, with the Canada Council andother groups I have experienced only acceptance and generosity.As I write, the most recent nationalist wave seems to have recededsomewhat. As always, the pluralism of the situation seems tomake it unresolvable. French and English Canada continue largelyin cultural separation. However, Canadian Studies seems to havebecome a big item in various European countries and, at leastto some extent, in Australia and New Zealand. A few years agoa Scotsman won the Canadian Governor-General's Award forpoetry. Some poets who formerly held direct allegiance to theAmerican Black Mountain school are now prominent among theEnglish-Canada nationalists. For a while a few years ago George'Woodcock and I explored the possibility of making an anthologyof immigrant poetry, but the feeling we met was that there wasno need for it and would be no interest in it.

T. go back to Lighthall, a century ago-he began his anthologywith a flourish:

The poets whose songs fill this book are voices cheerfulwith the consciousness of young might, public wealth, andheroism. Through them, taken all together, you may catchsomething of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushingwith foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the mooseand caribou, the lament of vanishing races singing their death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion, the ruralsounds of Arcadias just rescued from surrounding wildernessesby the axe .

Lighthall's sense of 'manifest destiny' may owe something of itstone to 'Whitman. He is obtuse in some directions and takesmuch for granted, but he is also sweet-natured and (towards theFrench) diplomatic. He feels able to boast of Canada as 'the full-grown of the family' of Empire. Perhaps due parrly ro largegeographical magnificence, Canada's writers have always in somesense been easier than New Zealand's about their nationhood.Or might it be truer to say that it hasn't meant as much to

285

them? A.J.M. Smith, Curnow's contemporary as anthologist,wrote in The Book of Cana"dian Poetry (1943) that 'some of thepoers have concentrated on what is unique and individual inCanadian life; others, upon what it has in common with lifeeverywhere'. Smith points to a retreat from what he calls 'thesomewhat blatant nationalism of the 1900s' (period of Carman,Service and Charles G.D. Roberts).

Smith's anthology, though contemporary with Curnow'sCaxton, in scope is more like Curnow's 1960 Penguin.Comparable in historical coverage, it has a first section oftranslations from native Indian and Quebecois poetry. Inpresenting his poets, Smith is more pragmatic and broadmindedthan Curnow. 'Were this only a personal matter, it would beof little significance, but it is important because Smith'smagnanimity and judicious good nature seem to have set thecontext and tone for the best of the later anthologies.

English Canada has a somewhat longer history than NewZealand. lt is also a larger and more complex country. Thesefacts may account for the number and variety of recent Canadianpoetry anthologies, for the fact, for example, that the most recentedition of Ralph Gustafson's Paryuin Book of Canadian Verse( 1 984 ) contains current poets not mentioned in MargaretAtwood's OxfordBook of CanadianVerse (in English) ( 1982). Fromthe point of view of nationalism the most intriguing (though byno means the best) recent piece of anthology-making is DennisLee's The Neq, Canadian Poets rgTo-85, the very title of whichseems to echo Donald M. Allen's landmark American anthologyof a quarter of a century ago. Lee, a founder of the publishingHouse of Anansi and often thought of as a 'guardian' of Canadianculture, hasn't hesitated to include a whole bundle of poets bornin California or elsewhere in the United States, or to includeseveral poets who came to Canada in their late twenties, or evenseveral who came and went again, one within a period of sevenyears, and another who came (off and on) for thirteen years andwho has links as a poet with two other countries. None of thismatters if your aim is simply to make an anthology of good poems(in Lee's case, the evidence for that is not definitive). But doesn'tthe label 'Canadian' mean a little more than this?

To backtrack; reviewing Smith's The Elc,ok of Canadian Poetryin 1943, Northrop Frye said 'poetry is not a citizen of the world:it is conditioned by language, and flourishes best within a nationalunit' (this, from The Bush Gardcrr p. 132, anticipates !7edde); butlater (1956) Frye said,'it is not a nation but an environmentthat makes an impact on poets' (BG, p.l 64). By L965 he was

286

saying, 'The writers of the last decade, 3t least, have begun towrite in a world which is post-Canadian, as it is post-American,post-British and post everything except the world itself' (BG,p.249).

The current long-time insistence that 'the local is the onlyuniversal' (Dewey, to Williams, and on) canted the situation infavour of versions of regionalism and/or nationalism, but it isno longer necessary to accept these as the only versions of anysituation. As to Canada, her most successful literary propagandist,Margaret Atwood, in closing the introduction to her Oxfordanthology, makes a number of interesting remarks. On the onehand she says 'So far as I can see, Canadian poetry is now neithermore nor less "international" than the poetries of other countries'.I take this to mean that Canadian poetry is its own 'uniqueorganism' without reference to any measure anywhere else. It'sjust that a sufficient quantity of the naturally eclectic poetry writtenin Canada today is 'spiky, tough, flexible, various, and vital'.

As a reader I ftnd a good number of likeable, satisfying poersin both countries. As both writer and reader, I still like the old-fashioned notion of 'the republic of letters'. In my life at leastthere's an important sense in which it is bigger than any nation.

MIKE DOYLE,

Out for a WalkSkinny from diabetesblind with cataractmy old dog does not follow

shuffling through fallen leavesI'm out walking by myselfunder cloud-swaddled sky

enveloped in moonlessness.Soon an unknown dog in the darknessnudges along at my heels

sniffing his way, side-trackinghere & there, not knowingwherever he must be going

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any more than I know myself,though I know I can't help going.At least he has someone to follow.

ShutterbugI'm the methodical one. For fifteenyears, I've had on file thisundevelopedpoem, from photographsin successive issues of a Praguenewspaper:

A crowd in a city square.Front-centre, flankedby , bemedalled general& white-haired elder statesman,Dubcek, smiling slightlyinto the Prague spring& fixed behind him-broadersmiles, kissed bables, camera nuts.

Next edition: samepale sky, but the buildingshuddle together, closer.The crowd seems to have dwindledyet those who remainare captured in the sameinstant of time,-the generalholding tight to hisproud-chested salute,the elder statesman's hairwind-wispy.

It's as if the brick wallsgone from behind themhad never been there.No one has moved an arm, a [eg, an eyelidto register President Dubcek'sdisappearance.

(Twenty-five years earlier2BB

my cockney workmate, Ted,whose fur-coated wife starved himon beetroot sandwiches & in bed,in Alexandra Palace Gardens

lay asleepin pond water a foot deep. )

On my ontological darkroomI peer at my pictures of absence.Tinged red, at my elbowin its white shallow dishfloats my developing fluid.

A faint ripple disturbs the surface.

Three Rooms

like a nest of boxesthe first

containing the secondcontaining

the last (if there's nothing in it)

contained in the one

in the first'rhe que'::::ned

which if any

& the last

is really the room (is the realroom?) which one or none

is the apparition?Already it seems

if the innermostcould contain the second and first

somehow all threewould persist as one

through infinitybut if

the outer one were an apparition& the middle one, too, the.

lnnermostZ89

would be in theresecure in reality.

And ifinner & middle

were apparitionsthe outer room

is solid enoughto contain such mysteries.

But what if onlythe middle one

is real?If you were inside

how could you find your wayout through the apparition

of the the 'inner room'?If you were outside

how could you get inor even discover

the outer spectral gloom?A further question is

where to begin to speakthe word of the room?

Surprise Package(from a linguistics textbook)

You can say: I was surprised that Ifell. I was surprised to havefallen. But you can't really sayI was surprised to fall.

'We were surprised that we agreed with him.'We were surprised to have agreed with him.But we wouldn't quite agreethat we were surprised to agree with him.

She was surprised to get the prize.(Not too well put, that. )She was awed by the applause for the award.(Not quite the same thing

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& that's not it exactly, either. )She went into a coma when they gave her the diploma.I was surprised to see her hair standing on end.It seemed to me that she was more than a little surprised.

But no! She said: That's no surprise to me,though I've certainly had a surfeitof surveys, certificates, cerebralsermons & surly civil servants.

I was surprised to come in,though that's not the way you'd express it.I was surprised to come in on it.I was surprised to come in on the prize.

I was surprised to see her there.I was surprised to come in& look around & see her hair.I was surprised when I came in

& there she was, hair standing on endetcetera.I was surprised to feela breath of wind, or was it scandal?

I was surprised to be informedthe ceremony was cancelled.I was surprised that shewas furry all over & circular.

You'd be surprised.You surprise me,I said to her, in my head.I'm surprised at you.

The world's full of surprises,she said to me, through her shock of hairI said to her, baldly,Nothing surprises me any more.

29r

C.K. STEAD

Concernirrg Alban Ashtree

On the bus this evening I thought 'Anything can look like amovie of itself-i.e. unreal'. Can I recover the buoyancy of thatthought? I was leaving the Quinton campus for my apartmentacross the river. There was snow on the fir trees and on thesteps of the Faculty Club, the lawns and gardens were buriedunder it, it bulged on the houseroofs, it was banked thick overeverything except the brown ragged-edged strip of roadway keptclear by snow-ploughs, and the tracks d.rg from sidewalks todoors by householders, and the icy sidewalks themselves overwhich I and the students skittered to the bus-stop.

I will call them'my apartment','my office'-I have them onloan, one, the office, looking over snow-bound fir-trees downto the frozen river, the other, the apartment, looking from thecity down to the river and up to the university. If I could occupyboth at once I could wave out to myself, and would do it torelieve the loneliness. I am a Distinguished Visitor for just a fewmonths, introduced to everyone, forgetting all their names,avoiding them all because avoidance is my habit, and hungryfor company.

A Distinguished Visitor is worth quite a lot of money-ora lot by his own modest standards. This morning an accountopened in my name to receive $4,800. Age? the young lady asked,establishing details for future identification. Forty-eight, I honestlyreplied (one year for each hundred dollars). Height? 6 feet. 'Weight?

7 0 kilos. Colour of eyes? Blue. Colour of hair?-and before Ihad replied she looked up and wrote'gr.y'.'Grey at the edges,'I wanted to protest. But on the other hand there's not a lotmore than edges left; and in any case I was wearing my leatherpeaked cap in the style of Helmet Schmidt.'What was the movie I seemed to see myself cast in as I cameout of the Hubert Harrison-Jones Memorial Building on to theHarriet Harrison-Jones Memorial Drive to catch my bus intoQuinton? It was of course a North American campus movie. Astudent-a girl student-with pink fingers searching for her buspass ought to have accidentally spilled the contents of her btgon my lrp. Apologies. She's flustered. The bus starts. She fallsback half into the seat beside De, half on my l"p among thebooks. More apologies while her things are gathered up andreturned to her bng. '!7e talk about the weather. She discovers

797

I am a visitor. Not the Distinguished Visitor, Helmet Schmidt?I admit it's so. She's so pleased she tells me at once about herboyfriend. He was supposed to meet her this evening. Didn'tshow up. Unreliable. She agrees to have dinner with me. Laterin the week (to condense this tedious and trivial narrative) wego skiing together and finish up in a chalet naked in a barrelof hot water soaping each other's nipples

No student fell into my ["p this evening, none spoke to meor recognized me as the Distinguished Visitor Helmet Schmidt.I don't complain of this nor believe it ought to have been otherwise.I note only that it is these little divergences that make the realityof the movie, or (as this evening) the reality of reality (y.r, takeyour choice according to mood, circumstance, and that buoyancyI spoke of) unreal.

Now it's night and out there the northern prairies weathermeans business. It's minus 27" celsius, the scraped sidewalks hardwith ice, and you fight your way along inside a big old Germantweed coat which adds kilos ro rhat figure of 70 so lightly offeredthis morning, and looking like a big old German. But it's nolonger the Helmet Schmidt cute cap in wapiti leather peaked overyour northern blue eyes and grey-edged hair but a red blue andwhite skiing toque tight down over brow and ears, your scarfover your chin, and the breath between faintly holding the coldat bay from that chiselled (or chisel) nose. Yet in empty ArchibaldSquare you hear 'Les Bicycleftes de Belsizes' piped to the icyskies and a scrape-scraping to its rhythm. Surely not?-but yes,two hardy teenagers in the half-light and togged to the eyebrowsare skating on its flooded-and-frozen centre. The weighty Germantweed is doing its winter work but the frightful chill is gerringinto the toque and through the shoes, your trousers at and belowthe knee feel as if they've gone over to the enemy, and you pushdesperately into the little Chinese restaurant at the door of whichyou hesitated last evening and turned away because then as nowthere were no customers-not one. But the dish when it comesis huge and cheap and, with no frills, distinctly and edibly Chinese.'Warm and replete you're ready for the short battle homeward.There is, you reflect, something to be said for a climate thatmakes simply setting forth an adventure-never mind setting forthfor what. Your apartment is on the 1Zth floor and you will soonbe drifting to sleep with the curtains open, looking at the lightsof the city and the snow falling on to your balcony. Contrarily,these past days, through all the invasions of melancholy, loneliness,disorientation, has come the old absurd ebullience, the unreas-onable sense that life is its own reward.

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This war between vanity and convenience, the cap and the toque,has led me to inspect my ears in the mirror. I conceived of them,if at all, as small and neat. In fact they appear rather large andsprout a few untoward and random hairs; but they lie flat againstmy head. At 8.30 this morning on Chann eI 4 which gives constantprint-outs of the weather I watched the temperature droppingand rising between minus 29 and minus 30. Two hours laterit was up to minus ZZ. Celsius. In between I had walked, capped,two blocks to the Hudson Bay Company for supplies. The earsburned and froze and stung and ached. Two flaps of flesh onehas scarcely acknowledged as existing in their own right are biddingto become determinants of behaviour.

This morning too I did my balcony experiment-a dish of waterthere, and one in the deep freeze. As expected, Nature won. Therewas a skin of ice on the balcony dish in the time it took towalk across the room and back. Minutes later the Kelvinatordish hadn't begun to freeze. So, you darlings in the South Pacific,to whom I wrote that stepping out here is like stepping intoa cool store-revise it, please. And remember the air in this deeperfreeze moves. It's what they call a wind-chill factor and it's whyGod designed you flap-eared-so you would have fair warning.\Uhen some oil-rich Sheikdom invites me to its university asa Distinguished Visitor and provides me with a handsomeapartment I will of course fry an egg on the balcony rail andanother in a pan on the stove, and again, no doubt, Nature willtriumph.

But it's Sunday afternoon I've a need to record. I was takento the home of the chairman of Quinton's Department of CompLit (..ty host Department) to meet the chairman and his familyand some of the members of his staff. Chairman Hyde is big,sandy-haired and slow-spoken. His wife is small, quick, pretty,still youthful, shy at first, but soon the confidence appears, andwith it the pride, and the impatience. She's almost certainly clevererthan her chairman, and has recently completed her PhD. Shetells how someone 'phoned recently and asked 'Could I speakto Dr Hyde' to which she replied ''Which of them do you want?'

Across the street the neighbours are shovelling snow off theroof. Paths have been d.rg to the sidewalk. More members ofthe Department arrive. There is one, Eugene Fish, who has athin moustache and the look of a band leader of the 1920s. Hiswife is plump and must once have been pretty. She's sdll pretty,but plump. Her dress has a design of tiny shoes that run aroundit in circles. She's one of those faculty wives who causeembarrassment by offering perfectly ordinary and sensible

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domestic observations and reminiscences. She's shy and neverraises her voice much or moves her lips, but it's obvious she'sa compulsive talker once set in motion through a gap in theconversation, and Eugene Fish covers for her with quick loudquips, like a back-up gun in a 'Western movie.

There is also a big man, an American, Hank Judder, who arriveson skis wearing mukluks and a large Indian fur-lined coat witha hood. He's a poet and lives in the woods out of town withhis wife who weaves and does Indian craft work. Judder hasn'tsat down before he's wanting me to agree that the 18th centuryis the sanest century. I feel he's checking me out before decidingto stay. I say'The sanest is the most insane', at which he looksdoubtful, and probablv disappointed; but he accepts a drink fromchairman Hyde and sits down chewing on my reply.

Faculty talk goes oo, making considerable use of numerals.It's like that story abut the monks who've lived so long togetherthey've reduced all their jokes to numbers. 'Fourteen' one monksays, after a long silence, and they all laugh. 'Twenty-two' saysanother, capping the first, and they fall about slapping their sides.ln Faculty talk the numbers are courses-3 .307 the Literatureof Silence; 2.903 Comparative Semiotics ; 4.7 47 FrontierFeminism; 3.208 the Literature of Sexual Harassment. So it goes.''We need to take another look at 1.425.' 'I've got to get through2.901 before I can begin to think about that.' 'But that won'tbe until the next session.''The chairman's setting up a committeeanyway, to look into all the 3s.' 'Did that student in 4,301 gethold of you?' 'someone told me your Z.ZZZ lectures have beenbrilliant this semester.'

Out there a squirrel is rippling along a bough, and I rememberI've read somewhere that the word 'squirrel' comes from theGreek and means 'shadow tail'. The youngest Hyde describesto me the animal's regular path-over the woodshed at the back,along the fence, across the roof, down the elm bough . . . Heasks me about animals in New Zealand. I tell him about the 'possumI feed. He tells me about the skunk that got under their porch.ln a minute the numbers are dropped, everyone is exchanginganimal stories. A moose has been seen this year down on thefrozen river. The lady with the little coloured shoes walking incircles around her dress tells how she got up in the night andsaw 'a nice dog' in the moonlight on the snow. 'And then itput its head back and They all laugh. Junior Hyde explainsto me that the 'nice dog' was a coyote. Hank Judder explainshis problems with bats which maybe ought to be killed becausethey're said to carry rabies but which at close cluarters have

295

appealing faces. There's a story about bears one summer on theshores of one of the lakes . . '

Numberless, we seem more relaxed. The animals havehumanized us. The drinks may have something to do with itas well. Outside there is the scraping of shovels on paths andsidewalks. I resolve inwardly, solemnly, never to write about thesepeople. Cross my heart and hope to die. Chairman Hyde asksme whether I'm finding Ashtree's office comfortable.

Already Ashtree has taken my fancy. There's that shelf ofhandbooks on writing in his office-The Pracacal Srylist, OnWriting Well., Sryles and Structures, The Writer's Control of Tone,A Handbook of English , The Canadian Writer's Handbook, TheComplete Srylisr. Why should a distinguished Canadian poet keepall that stuff on his shelves? I suppose all it means is that heteaches one of those courses designed to turn sow's ears intosilk purses (I imagine a text called The Soqr's Ear's Handbook)-but on the other hand, could it be that all this armoury is designedto make a better writer of Ashtree? Or to get something specialinto shape? For the purposes of tenure perhaps?

I tell Chairman Hyde the office is comfortable, the view fine.It's a room, of course, hermetically sealed. The windows can'tbe opened and you must take the weather sent to you throughpipes. I'm told that on the other side of the building thecombination of piped weather and natural sunshine turns theoffices into something like a sauna parlour. tVith snowdriftsheaped up against the unopenable double panes, and great icicleshanging from the eaves, they sit sweating and trying to coolthemselves with electric fans. I have no such problem. But doesAshtree mind my occupancy while he's away on leave? \il7as therea problem of some kind?

My question produces what I think might be a moment ofawkwardness. Is Chairman Hyde embarrassed? Quick as a prettyferret his lady, Dr Hyde II, says if the Distinguished Visitor iscornfortable then there's no problem. And she offers to refillhis glass. I'm reeling as it is, not used to drinking in the afternoon.Maybe that's why I persist. I mention the letter I've had fromAshtree. 'Dear Professor Blow,' it began. 'I have just been informedthat you, as Distinguished Visitor to Quinton campus, have beenassigned to my office for your personal use throughout theduration of your stay.' I think some of those handbooks mighth:rve been profitably brought to bear on that sentence, but Ashtreewas writing under pressure. He went on to explain that therehad been 'no consultation'. He had no prior warning that someonewould be 'poking about' in his office, which (h. continued) like

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everyone's, he supposed contained papers which were 'personaland private'. ln particular he would be grateful if,'instantly uponarrival', I would turn the k"y in the top of the filing cabinetand hand it (I assumed he meant the k.y, not the cabinet) toMrs Merrill at the Departmental office for safe keeping. The topk.y, I would find, locked all four drawers at once.

I responded to this as to an electric prodder. Already whenhis letter reached me I had been in occupation three days. Itwas too late for action'instantly upon arrival'. But in those threedays I hadn't so much as looked at his filing cabinet. I don'tbelieve I noticed it was there. Now I sprang into action-outof the chair in which I was reading his letter, across the room,turning the k.y at once that was sticking out of the top of thecabinet, guiltily locking its contents away from my own pryinggaze and taking the k.y directly to the imperturbable Mrs Merrillwho said it would go straight into the Departmental safe.

I convey something-a little-of all this to the Sundayafternooh, but there's no response. If there's anything odd aboutAshtree they're covering well for him. 'I should have warnedthe poor Buy,' Chairman Hyde admits. 'I thought I did warnhim. There's so damned much to remember these days.'

After the others have gone I'm retained, along with HankJudder,for dinner with the family. There's a dispute about whether it'strue the bathwater goes down differently in the northern andsouthern hemispheres-clockwise in one, anti- in the other. Itry to use my wine glass as a globe to show that a clockwisespin is anti-clockwise when looked at from below. I spill mywine. The children insist the difference between hemispheres isreal, and they have a name for the phenomenon. Hank Judderasks me about my tastes in music. His are classical, mine romantic,and my voice vanishes inside itself as I lumber into an honestadmission of what 'Wagner does to me.

The days are going by. I clamber into toque (the Helmet Schmidtlook has admitted defeat) scarf coat gloves and go out to br.rythe few things I need. I sit staring at the long green hair of thecarpet in my apartment and at the snow falling in the streets,thinking of nothing. Quinton seems unreal, so does New Zealand.I'm tired, sleep too long and wake tired. I force myself out ofdoors into the bracing air, crunching over the ice, to wake myself.Sun shines on the snow, the huge icicles hanging at the cornersof the Faculty Club glisten, the skiers glide by among the trees,the brief dry is dazzling and beautiful but the cold drives meindoors again. I write letters home but there's little to report.

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In the afternoons I sit in Ashtree's office watching the shadowcast by this slope climb the other beyond the river towards thebase of my apartment tower. Down river there are factorychimneys casting white smoke into the icy blue which seems edgedwith green at sundown. In the far distance there's a single gasflare. It's hard to imagine the river, a quarter of a mile or morewide, is still flowing down there under its ice.

Somewhere under the faces people in the Department presentto me I sense warring factions. I try not to identify them, notto guess where I belong in them or for whom my invitation mayhave been a triumph and for whom a defeat. The long-tailedmagpies dart about in the empty trees and I wonder what theyfind to eat. Melancholy loves me dearly and wants to h.rg meto her heart.

Ms Valtraute, on the other hand, is probablv not interested.She presents a paper on the poetry of Alban Ashtree to theGraduate Seminar on Canadian Literature. Being a feminist, shetakes a strong line with certain aspects of Ashcree's work. His'Muse obsession', for example. His 'Snow-'White Goddess', shecalls it. She admires him for his independence-especially hisindependence as a Canadian (lucrative offers from US campuseshave been rejected). She loves his sense of 'the divine in thederelict'. She approves of the way he has shifted the cenrral imageof Canada away from open spaces to the urban scene, yet withoutlosing all sense that 'the cold wastes are sdll there, challengingthe imagination'. But in human relationships he is 'cockeyed'-and she means it (she adds fiercely) quite litirally.

I've always been drawn to strong, intelligent, verbal, not tosay literary women, as some men are drawn to rock-climbing,or hang-gliding, or canoeing down rapids. And Ms Valtraute istall with a beautiful freckled nose, a perfect mouth, keen clearobserving eyes and thick red-gold hair. She plans to write herthesis on sexual politics in selected poets of the Commonwealthand I'm wondering where in her life sexual politics, as she callsit, ceases to be politics and is permitted to re-inhabit its longsocial and biological history.

This afternoon is Friday and today the sun has failed to shine.Cloud presses down on the tall buildings across the river, snowis falling, and cars crossing the bridge have their lights on. Anawful silence has descended over the Department, signalling theonset of a weekend in which I have nothing to d., no one rotalk to. My eye goes around and around the room. A studentfrom Bangladesh knocks and asks to borrow a stapler. I findone in Ashtree's desk. The student uses it, thanks me and vanishes

29B

into the silence. My eye, going around again, falls on drawerthree (counti.,g from the top) of Ashtree's cabinet. It seems tobe protruding a few millimetres. I pull at it idly and it opens.I slam it but it won't shut. The bolts, closing downward fromthe top, have left drawer three unlocked. I rush out for MrsMerrill. She's gone, as is everyone else. It seems I'm to spenda weekend with that naked lady, the filing cabinet of AlbanAshtree, baring her bosom or her belly at me.

My thoughts return-I return them there myself, under strictinstruction-to Ms Valtraute. Her first name is Libby. A fewnights ago she sat three rows in front of me at (2trinton's NationalFilm theatre. She was wearing a coat with a fur-lined collar andin the half light it reminded me of something out of my past-or was it out of the forbidden filing cabinet? (already I'muncertain). I was in Denmark in late autumn, a little snow wasfalling and I was standing outside a discotheque called Locomotionwith a lady whose name was Bodil. 'We had been dancing inthe discotheque-God knows why. Bodil was a respectablebourgeois Danish lady with a husband in banking and twodelightful children. But I had been a visitor (Distinguished?-yes, I think so) and she had been entertaining me. First dinner(teaching me how that Danish table with its apparently randomofferings is to be approached in the proper order) and Danishbeer, then wine because I had wanted it, and finally, by no veryclear progression, Locomotion, where Bodil feared she might beseen by some shop assistant or bank clerk who would recognizeher, but where she danced like a demon. And now we were standingin the flurries of light snow, outside the discotheque and downthe road from my hotel, and Bodil was drawing the pale furcollar around her throat and declining to kiss me. 'I am veryhotblooded,' she explained, as i{ it were a deficiency. 'If I kissyou I get excited.' She was about to get into her car. I tookhold of her-it was just a big friendly h.rg in the snow flurries,my mouth somewhere between the collar and the throat, touchingboth. I felt her resist and then relax. She sighed 'Goodnight MrDancer', she said. And she got into her big German Ford, waveda small gloved hand, and drove away.

I enjoy shoppi.g, and b.ry more than I need. It's the standardform of stimulation, isn't it, for people who live inside a systemof protective cocoons. But I've neglected to b.ry soap powder.I decide to manufacture some out of the airline toilet soaps I'vecollected along the way. I choose I.JTA and it takes almost halfan hour sitting at a table with the bread knife turning the little

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bar of soap into fine lux-style flakes. I've done that and themachine's already into its second rinse before I remember thatthis apartment block has a shop which is open on Sundays.

Some kind of tussle goes on in me about whether I shouldgo to my office this afternoon-to Ashtree's office. There's nothingelse to d., it's true. And yesterday for the first time I provedto myself it's possible to go there on foot. I bought one of thoseknitted hats which conceal a face mask you can pull down toyour chin, with gaps for eyes and mouth. Crossing the long bridgeover the river I had to pull down the mask against the wind.Inside my trousers I was wearing pyjamas and inside my shoestwo pairs of socks. My heavy German tweed coat with its woollenlining was doing its heavy German work. I was cold at theextremities but I made it in three-quarters of an hour, and nofrost bite. So it can be done-that's not the problem. It's onlythat I wonder should one go to the office every dny, weekendsincluded? Or rather, should one want to? What's the attraction?I'm suspicious of that voluptuous filing cabinet, with its see-through drawer, its key-hole opening upon the Snow 'WhiteGoddess. Have I ever been to Denmark? Did I ever know abourgeois lady called Bodil who danced like a demon and refusedto kiss me in the snow? 'Was it part of something dreamed lastnight (when I woke and couldn't remember the geography ofmy apartment) o. am I right in recalling someone telling me thatAshtree's itinerary will take him to Scandinavia?

Strange things happen in strange lands. One of the movies Ishared inadvertently with Ms Libby Valtraure was by Pasolini.It was called Theorem. A beautiful young man comes into a middle-class household-mother father son daughter and maid. Beautifulyoung man is Christ-or at least I think that's the intention.Each member of the household becomes obsessed with him, andthey all respond to him sexually because (I'r.r guessing at whatMaestro Pasolini intended) that's the only way we, the moderndecadent bourgeoisie, have of responding to anything. And isn'rit true? Ms Valtraute's fur collar in the half hght of the moviehouse has set me thinking of Danish Bodil whom I hugged (o.was it Ashtree hugged her?) in the snow, and who might havesaid to Jesus Christ disguised as a beautiful young man 'I amvery hot blooded. If I kiss you I will get excited.' Then a b.ywith an angel face (continuing Pasolini's movie) runs in flappinghis arms and bearing a telegram calling the beautiful young manaway. The young man goes. The whole family is bereft and eachgoes mad in a different way. The most successful is the maidbecause she sdlI has the vehicle of primitive Catholicism. She

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returns to the village, sits out of doors, refuses all food but boilednettles (*hy boil them-I mean why not go the whole hog?),cures a sick boy, levitates above the rooftops (a good lob thereby the special effects team), and finally has herself buried aliveon a muddy building site at dawn.

At the interval I watch Ms Valtraute's fur collar but it sitsfacing forward and doesn't move. It's possible (anything ispossible) she has vacated it. Round two is a French movie byResnais, Mon Oncl.e Americain. I saw it in London two years agobut I was suffering jet lrg and fell asleep. It portrays three liveswhich intersect, and the narrative, documentary style, is cut intoby . 'scientific' account of human behaviour in terms which mixSkinnerian behaviourism and Freudian psychology. It seems tome afrectionate, tolerant ('It is Tone that makes Music'used tobe the motto of my old school) but on some point of sexualpolitics Resnais may well have erred. 'When the lights go up MsValtraute and her fur collar are nowhere to be seen.

Back in my apartment I'm getting ready for my big empty bedwhen the fire alarm sounds. I remain very calm, reading theinstructions on the back of the door. They tell me I should remainvery calm. I should inch the door open. If there's flame out thereI should close it again. Go for the balcony. (I'* on the LZthfloor- 12 out of 34-and I remember someone saying the longestladders would only go up 1 1 floors. ) If there are no flames andnot too much smoke I should proceed groundward by the stairway.Don't use the lift. I put on shoes, take my big coat and scarf,toque-but Do, why not die in style? I put on the Helmet Schmidtcap and make my way to the stairs. There are no flames, Dosmoke, just the clanging of bells, deafeni.g, impossible to ignore,and a lot of people, increasing in number as I work my waydown. lValking to the university in daylight on a Sunday it seemedQuinton had been vacated of its population-all but two or threeof us, unwitting survivors, who had missed news of the evacuationor survived the neutron bomb. But why should anyone comeout? Outside of working hours a North American city in winteris a lot of people watching television. Here they come now, downthe stairs, wearing anything from nightdress to battledress. 'We

gather in the foyer. The firetruck arrives. Someone on the 8thhas set a kitchen alight. It's soon out, but down in the foyerwe're getting to know one another. Beer cans arrive, and morebeer cans. Someone has a tape deck, a regular ghetto-blaster upon the railing of the mezzanine, and soon we're all drinking anddancing, the flashing red and orange lights of the firetruck turningthe lobby into a disco. This is Locomotion again. Oh hot-blooded

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Bodill Oh chilly Ms Valtraute! 'Where are your furry collars?'Where are your sexual politics? Lonely and tearful, hrppy tobe clasped to Melancholy's incomparable bosom, the Distin-guished Visitor dances solo among the beer cans in the flashinglights of Quinton's largest fireftuck.

Seen from the outside the Hubert Harrison-Jones MemorialBuilding in which Ashtree's office is situated is anonymous, dullbrown, executing a quarter turn to imitate a bend in the river,so all its rooms along one side look down that wooded slopeto the ice. Inside, it's all white stucco, glass and open spaces,with cloth banners in orange, green and gold hanging down throughtwo and three floors of a central open area and catching theafternoon sunlight.

I sit at Alban Ashtree's desk reading a poem sequence by AlbanAshtree. Maybe he sat here writing it. It's about Death and theSnow Maiden. He longs for Death. He longs for the Snow Maiden.I keep looking up from the poem and down through the treesbelow the window. The shadows appear curiously blue acrossthe clean white surface. Through the trees comes a tall shapelyfigure. She pauses at the top of the slope to regain breath, pullingoff her toque and shaking out a shower of red-gold hemp. Shelooks up at this window and I wave nervously down to her.She smiles a sort of inward acknowledgemsnt-not exactly arebuff, but there's no return of my wave, and in a moment she'sskimming away out of sight, around toward the main entrance.

I turn to the poems submitted for tonight's Creative 'VTriting

Session. It occurs to me that some of them contain Snow Maidensand others Divine Derelicts. Or is it just my imagination? DoesAshtree cast a long shadow? The sun's still shining and I go outtrying to find a trail that's firmly trodden down to the river.After Z0 minutes I'm on the bank, the ice stretching away up-river and down, with drifts of snow heaped on it. I want towalk on it, never having walked on water, and I'm sure it wouldbe safe. There are ski-ffacks across it; and someone has toldme the ice is two or three feet thick. But there's no one about,I've seen that trail of thaw where warm water spills from thepower station up-river, I know my optimism where water isconcerned often leads me into error (is Ms Valtraute anAquarian?), and I can imagine how quickly the heavy Germantweed would go down. One Distinguished Visitor, vanishedwithout trace. So I content myself with a long look and twophotographs. By the time I've found my way back up the slopemy legs feel deeply chilled and my face is burning.

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The 'phone rings. It's Dan Dugan wanting to talk about thesubmissions for tonight's Creative 'Writing Class, and warningme to go easy on Ms Hanratty who's under sedation for an unhappyaffair. I promise all due care and caution with Ms Hanratty. Myeyes go around the room while we talk over the poems submitted,and I notice drawer number three with its few millimetres overlap.I wonder about calling Mrs Merrill in to unlock the cabinet andrelock it with drawer three in place, but that nervous urgencyhas gone from the thought and I decide 'Not yet.'

ln my apartment this weekend, devising diversions and exercisesfor myself, I did some jogging. The apartment is large, but notlarge enough. I ran I think it was 50 times from the entranceto the sliding doors that open on to the balcony, then past thetelevision set into the bedroom, around and across the doublebed, back through the living room to the door again. Then Igot more adventurous and extended my run out of the apartmentinto the vestibule, or lobby, or whatever that space out there'scalled. The building is circular, you understand, with elevatorsrunning up the middle. 'V7hen you step out of an elevator you'reat the sdll centre, with green carpet (green on this floor-differentcolours for different floors)-longer haired, but matching theapartment in colour, and running off the floors and up the walls,I suppose for insulation against noise. Encircling this central spaceruns the corridor off which the apartments open. So I listenedout for the bells that would warn me if the lift was stoppingat my floor and included that circular corridor in my run. Itmade for some fine turns of speed and a little excitement.

And in the Library on Saturday afternoon I found a copy ofa New Zealand literary magazine. It was called l-andslide, of course(or was it Eyefull) and there was a story about two young menon motorbikes riding through the long green-haired countrysidesouth of Auckland. An Eary Rider kind of story-one of thoseup-to-the-minute fictions by writers who deny themselves (o.is it just that they don't see theml) every little gem of coincidenceor connexion turned over in the path of their wandering furrow.The two young men on motorbikes are returning home to a farmin the Bry of Plenty where a girl, who is sister of one and theformer lover of the other, is expecting them. She, however, isnow engaged to marry another man. In a pub along the waythey're goaded by . bully into a fight and one of the two smashesa bottle over the head of their tormentor. They vanish into thenight and ride away on their powerful bikes leaving they don'tknow what, but maybe a corpse, behind. And of course that's

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all about that. There's no connexion with what happens next,no thread to be taken up later, because this is [ife, man. A sliceof life. No phony plot. No circular corridor bringing you backwhere you started.

Reading it I translated it into a Western movie. Tivo cowboysride into a town on their way home after a long absence. Ina saloon someone picks a fight with them and our hero-formerlover of the waiting girl-is called. He's reluctant, of course, butfast (y"p), and when the bad guy draws he shoots him dead.They sink their whiskies and ride on out of town. They returnto the beautiful girl on the ranch, and soon she's falling in loveagain with our hero, whose presence makes her recognize shehasn't ever loved the man she's engaged to marry. But then comesthe word that her ftance has been shot dead in a saloon gunftghtand that the killer and his friend rode away into the night.

Now write on . . .

My first public lecture as Distinguished Visitor is called 'DoingJustice to Auden: \Uhy is it so Difficult?' Everyone likes the title.I don't tell them I've delivered the same lecture in London andEdinburgh, but it gives me a certain confidence. But in the courseof delivering it I stray away from Auden on to the subject ofAshtree's poems. My argument is that whereas Auden backedoff from modernism in his later poetry, and went all-out forthe well-made anthology piece, Ashtree has opened his later poetryout wide. Opened it to whar, though? To Life? Death? Sex? TheSnow Maiden? I haven't sorted the ideas out in my mind, andit's a mistake to drift away from a prepared script if you don'tknow where you're going. How do you get back to it? I recall(still unscripted) a television interview in which an elderly Audenexpressed infinite gratitude for having been born into the Englishmiddle class at a time when certain things 'simply weren't done'.I can't imagine Ashtree engaging in such (even if unconscious)self-congratulation. But then I remember that I'm talking to peoplewho know Ashtree. Still, there must be things about him theydon't know-and I wind up my lecture with a quotation fromone of his notebooks: 'To be perfectly lucid is to deprive yourselfof mystery and your reader of that sense of effort and discoverynecessary to high art.'

Chairman Hyde is silent as we walk away from the lecturetheatre. 'We're joined by Dan Dugan, Eugene Fish, and one ortwo others. The talk is desultory and general. Have I causedoffence? 'We drink coffee in the Faculty Club, and Eugene Fishtells a story about a homosexual tourist who goes on a world

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cruise. He finishes up at the Vatican watching the Pope officiatingat some ceremony or public mass, swinging a smoky censer, 'Ilove his drag,' the tourist says to the lady standing next to him;'but I think his handbag's on fire.'

Back in my office I take down Ashtree's poems again and readhere and there, trying to remember what I said about them andto guess where in my remarks I went wrong. And then a smallfist knocks at the door and it's a fur collar standing theresurrounding the beautiful freckled blue-eyed face of Ms Valtraute.Has she come to say something nice about my lecture? Not exactly.But she asks could we talk some time about sexual politics inCommonwealth poets. She thinks I may be able to help her makeher selection. I pretend to consult a crowded timetable beforesuggesting tomorrow at 4 p.m. 'Let's go for a beer,' she says,'so it will be business and pleasure.' 'I look forward to it,' Isay truthfully.

A minute later there's another knock. Bob 'Wilcox, who hasthe office next to mine, is inviting me to eat pLZZas with himand his teenage daughter and his daughter's friend who is fromMexico. I throw Ashtree into my brg and follow Bob down tothe carpark. At the plzza place the two girls talk Spanish andplay records while Bob and I talk about Australia (we've bothtaught there), and Canada, and Margaret Tiudeau having sex ina car with Jack Nicholson, and Commonwealth Literature, andfinally about Alban Ashtree. Bob wasn't there to hear my lecture,so I explain how I drifted off Auden and on to the subject ofAshtree's poetry, and then felt uncertain what people thoughtof the'lecture. ''Well I guess they know Auden's poetry,' Bob'Wilcox says, 'but they don't know Ashtree's.' 'Don't know it?'I repeat. 'Only the Can Lit people would have read him, andthey don't like him.' 'You mean his work? They don't admireit?' 'Oh I guess his work's OK.' Bob 'V7ilcox says. 'It's him theydon't like.'

On the way back from the ptzza place Bob gives some friendsa lift. Daughter Monica climbs on my knee to make room forthem, and for a few minutes I have hair in my face and myarms around a teenage daughter.

Other casual entries in Ashtree's notebooks read: 'I am too muchgiven to doing my duty'; and ''Writing is a poor substitute forSex. But so is everything except Sex.'

It seems clear that the moment Bodil refused Ashtree's requestto let him kiss her in the street outside the disco, she regrettedit. Next dry they met by chance in the city Art Gallery and,

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being an honest and direct Scandinavian lady, she told him ofthe fact. He suggested he kiss her at once, behind a large pieceof sculpture, but she had something more thorough-going in mind.'What's not clear is why they didn't use Ashtree's hotel room.Of course it may have been some btzzare preference. But Ashtree'srecord seems plain enough. That night the big German Ford wasparked on the edge of a ploughed field outside the town withits windows up, its seats down, its engine running and its heaterworking. And while snow drifted down, Ashtree discovered (hisnotes are graphically particular) what a respectable Danishbourgeois lady had meant when she said 'If I kiss you I get excited'.

And another aphorism from the cabinet: 'The generation of writersbefore mine suffered the pain of going unread because they wereCanadian. Mine lives with the indignity of being read only forthat reason.'

And a postscript: 'Most of the bastards live with it withoutdiscomfort.'

The forecasters have been predicting that some high-level meetingof contrary streams of air somewhere over the Rockies will 'sendthe temperatures soaring toward zero', but I've seen no sign ofit. The bus strike, long threatened, has begun, and I walk toQuinton University across the high-level bridg. wearing pyjamasand extra socks under my trousers and on my head the toques,the one with the mask under the other. Where is the HelmetSchmidt look? The little cap of wapiti suede lies crushed anddefeated at the bottom of my brg. Below the bridge I can seethe skiers on the trails through the trees that cover the slopesdown to the river. In a school playground the children rocketdown an ice-slide into a bank of snow. A hot air balloon floatsover the city. A bookshop has a display of the work of a Canadianwoman poet who killed herself in Quinton three or four daysago. (If they'd had the display last week, would she sdll be alive?)

In Ashffee's office I discuss the novels of Iris Murdoch witha PhD student who is writing a thesis on them. He's a Kurdfrom [rak, and he plans, before returning home, to b.ry anapartment in Vienna where he will spend his summers listeningto European music. I read the poems offered me by a sessionalfrom Bombay. They are full of fine old flourishes, as if the Englishlanguage had been set aside these past 70 years, and taken upfresh out of the cooler. I take a class on 'The 'Waste Land' forwhich I receive a round of applause. At 4 p.m. I keep myappointment with Ms Valtraute. 'We drink beer under the drab

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rafters of the Graduates Club, and talk about Henry Miller,Norman Mailer, and her childhood on a farm in Saskatchewan.The farmhouse had no electricity and no central heating. It washeated by a furnace in the kitchen. In Libby'r bedroom upstairsicicles hung from nails in the wall, frost formed on the insidepanes of her windows, and the water in the glass by her bedwas frozen over by morning. [Jntil she was Z0 she never sawa tree taller than eight feet. She was 23 when she first saw thesea-the age (I tell her) at which I first saw snow. I don't tellher how far life has taken me into my forties before showingme my first frozen river.

As for Miller and Mailer-she may be more relaxed over herbeer but she's not prepared to sign an armistice in the war ofthe sexes, or even discuss the possibility of a SALf treaty. Milleris a sexist for whom women are objects. Mailer has a machohangup. I tell her Miller seems to me to love women above allelse in life. 'He loves to fuck them,' she says, with wintrySaskatchewan candour.''Women undifferentiated.' She's beautifulwhen angry, but I don't provoke her further by suggesting thatthe woman who is Miller's obsession throughout the Rosicru-cifixion trilogy seems to me very clearly 'differentiated.' Instead,I suggest we have dinner together. 'We call a cab and cross theriver to the town side, a Japanese restaurant where a Japanesecook in a tall white hat prepares a meal for a dozen people groupedaround a table which adjoins his large electric hot-plate. It's acurious combination of East and 'West, like those western-stylepopular songs sung in Japanese and intended to be orientallyoccidental but better described (it's my little joke for LibbvValtraute) ,r accidentally disorientated. 'W'e get a lucky numberwith our meal and Libby's wins third prize, a little Japanese vase,mine no prize, but I'm given a pair of chop-sticks.

The meal has been large, enjoyable if unremarkable, and thesaki has loosened us a little. I suggest coffee at my apartmentwhich is only a couple of blocks away, and I notice the predictablepattern of all this, and the fact that, feminism or not, I'm permittedto pay the bill. The coffee is instant-all I have; but we turnthe lights down low (*y green-haired apartment has of coursea dimmer-switch) and look out at the city towers glittering inthe icy air, and the broad white wandering ice-path of the riverunder the moonlight. I sit beside Libby on the same couch, andnow and then our knees touch. 'When she says she should maybecall a cab I suggest another cup of coffee and she agrees so readily,I'm almost disappointed. 'Won't her feminism assert itself? Hasshe no principles? Or is this just a big Man Tirp leading to the

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Saskatchewan fist in my Pacific mouth the moment I make thefirst move? When, close to one a.m. she says again she mustcall a cab, I don't object. She lifts the instrument, begins punchingthe numbers with her beautiful strong prairie index, then stops.'This is silly,'she says. 'I want to go to bed with you.'

The spirit of Mailer, macho man, takes a dive ofr the balcony,0 floors on to the icy pavement, and dies, The ghost of Milleris already in the next room, not so much turning back the coversas performing the dance of the seven veils with them. Is thisfeminism? \7hv resist the flow of history, especially when it offersto irrigate the desert? \il/hat starry-eyed realist was it went toStalinist Russia and reported back 'I have seen the future, andit works.' An embarrassing half hour later I've learned that itdoesn't work for me.

My second public lecture, a week after the first, is called 'EzraPound: Two 'Ways with the Cantos', and it goes much betterthan the first because I stick to my script and resist the temptationto get on to the question of what Alban Ashtree may or maynot have learned from Pound's example. At question time anelderly academic expresses doubts about whether there can bean art of fragments. 'Fragments are fragments,' he says. 'Andart is art.' My reply includes reference to Picasso and Braque,Kandinsky and Klee, Stravinsky and Berg, and of course somethingabout the flow of history, and the pointlessness of setting yourface against it. As I say this my eyes wander over the audiencetowards Libby Valtraute who is inconspicuously placed at theback near the door. I haven't see her today, though I've beenconscious of her in bed with me during the night. She has inthe past few days taken possession of the spare k.y to my apartmentand she comes and goes according to whim, or some scheduleof her own, often creeping in after I've gone to sleep and leavingearly before I wake. Only her fat-free yoghurt in the refrigerator,her lemon-and-honey soap in the bath, and her red-gold hempenhair around the plug hole, reassure me that she's not a figmentor an invention. But though I'm certain of her reality and ofher occasional presence in my bed, I can't be sure whether it'san accurate memory or a deluding dream I carry about with ffie,of waking in the middle of the night to find her cradling myhead against her naked breasts and weeping silently into my hair,murmuring a word I can't catch, but which puts vaguely intomy sleep-fuddled brain the thought of a breakfast cereal.

Two hours after it's over I come into the Faculty club andhalf a dozen of the Comp Lit Department are discussing my lecture.

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There's an awkward silence until Eugene Fish explains to methat they've been talking about my resemblance to Alban Ashtree.They've remarked on it before, and on the coincidence that Ishould be occupying his room. And today I've done somethingwith my glasses while answering a question which was, they assureffie, 'pure Alban'. Eugene does an imitation of it. But that darkpart of my brain is listening to Ashtree's forename, Alban, &sthey pronounce it. And that breakfast cereal thought of in thenight-wasn't it All Bran? Is it possible that what I've wokento hear Libby Valtraute whimpering as she wept into my hairwas Ashtree's name?

The high-level meeting of air-streams with its consequent thawcomes and goes too rapidly to change anything. For half a drythe icy snow turns to slush in the streets and begins to run awayinto gutters, but that night it all turns to ice again and in themorning fresh snow has fallen. Bob 'Wilcox has the afternoonoff and finds gear for me so we can go cross-country skiing.'We take a ftail down to the river and cross the ice to followanother trail along the river bank for an hour or more until itbrings us to a lodge where there's a fire and hot drinks. It's latewhen we get back and in the Faculty Club there's a tenseatmosphere. Eugene Fish tries tct say something but stutters toa halt. Chairman Hyde assumes the mantle of his office and deliversit straight. The Department has had a telegram this afternoon.lt's about Ashtree. Not good news. Bad in fact. The worst. Yes,he's afraid so. A grievous loss. Ashtree died in an avalancheyesterday, climbing somewhere in the Austrian Alps.

I lie awake in my overheated apartment wondering what it wouldbe like to die under an avalanche of snow. It seems gentle softstuff and I'm so unfamiliar with its ways I can't imagine it asa violent death. I'm drifting towards and away from sleep, askingmyself could anyone be called Alban Ashtree and die so alliterativea death-in an avalanche in the Austrian Alpsl Are there Alpsin Austria? Or, on the other hand, if it's all real and true, couldit really be accidental? Has Ashtree designed a picturesque endfor himself?

I get up and 'phone Libby Valtraute irgain but there's still noanswer. I slide back both panes of the little half window thertopens from my bedroom on to the balcony, and for a few momentsthe cold blast is refreshi.g, but soon it's toc-r cold and I closeone pane leaving the other half open. Out there the moon isshining on the snow that has heaped and frozen in layers on

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the unused balcony. I wonder where Libby has been since thenews came of Ashtree's death. I have his latest book of poemsby *y bed and I open it and read the lines

Idea of a river was harder thanthe river itself while the wingedmercury fell through the floorsthrough ice throughlayers of sleep that were a kind ofdeath

His reputation has been growing in recent years-everyoneseems agreed on that, and Chairman Hyde has said that therewill be Canada Council money for whoever gets the job of editinghis collected works.

I pull the sheet over me and turn off the light. From this anglethe big white moon appears balanced on the balcony rail. Myeyes flicker towards sleep again and the moon's face is the faceof Libby Valtraute. 'Alban,' she weeps. 'Alban.'

My Snow Maiden! My Snow'White Goddess!

This srory u,as lirsr published in London Magazine Dec. ,glij lJun. ,g84.

REGINALD BERRY

A Deckchair of Words

Post-co Lonialism, Pos t-mod.srnism, anclrhe Notel of Self-projection in Canad"a and. Neqr., Zealand

Given the nature of self-projection I discuss here, it is appropriateto assume that the person who is referred to as 'I' is not thesame as the author of the followi.g, so that wherever I say 'l'you should be reading'he'. I can begin, therefore, by saying thatalthough I distrust the use of epigraphs there are two which havesome bearing on the argument. The first is from Dryden's 'Preface'to his translation of Virgil's Pastorals ( 1697):'Be pleased to lookinto almost any of those writers and you shall meet everywherethat eternal Moi Homer can never be enough admired for

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this one so particular quality, that he never speaks of himself. . . .' The second is from Robert Kroetsch's Adq.,ice to My Friends( 1985), no. 8:

Actually, everyone is dancing. George(which George?) is dancing, with Gertrude SteinAll of Victoria, later, expresses embarrassment,but the dance, the dance is full of marvels.

The self-effacement Dryden speaks of in 1697 is the same asthat practised in modernist fiction, in which there is an attemptto formulate a fictional world which is realistic (descriptively,historically, psychologically) but also to deny its origins orrelationship to any real prior existence. Those contradictorymotives produce the first lie that many modernist novelspronounce. Back of the title-p&Be, in among the facts of printingand the Library of Congress cataloguing information (which tellme that I'm holding a book, not a world) is a statement likethis: 'The characters and events in this novel are fictitious. A.yresemblance they have to people and events in life is purelycoincidental.' I may accept the first statement, but unless theauthor has been living on another planet, and even if the libellaws demand that it be there, the second statement is untenable.How can fiction about life on this planet have only a coincidentalresemblance to people and events on it?

Aside from the ontological difficulties raised by that kind ofdenial, there is the pragmatic one of real knowledge that somereaders bring to the text. In Jack Hodgins's The Barclay FamilyTheaue (1981), as with his earlier Resurrection of Joseph Bourne(1979), there is a similar denial: 'This is a work of fiction. Thecharacters are products of imagination and do not represent actualpersons, living or dead.' Yet a number of informed readers,especially Canadian academic readers, might object that in thestory 'lnvasions '79' there is a very strong resemblance (physicallyand biographically) between the fiaionalJames Robson, a specialistin medieval literature who teaches at the University of Ottawa,and an actual. person who teaches the same thing at the sameuniversity. Australian readers, perhaps with good reason afterFrank Moorhouse's 197 6 novel Conference-Ville, have apparentlyapplied the same kind of identification to characters in his Talesof MysterJ and, Romance (1977), as Moorhouse complains in hispreface: 'Following speculation surrounding some of the storieswhen they first appeared, the author states that no identificationis intended with living people. The events, characterization, and

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locations are used fictionally and to seek identification wouldbe unjustified and a disservice to the book.'In New Zealand,even Janet Frame has ingenuously pronounced her amazementat critics who think that fiction, including hers, can have anautobiographical basis. I

These objections and denials are understandable but not enrirelyjustifiable. 'What is problematic is not the response of readers butthe signals from the texts themselves. Readers who make realidentifications for fictional characters are doing merely whatmodernist realist fictions by their nature encourage them to do:read what is written realistically as what is real. Such readerseither forget, or ignore, or apply their special knowledge of thecircumstances and characters of a specific fiction to get aroundthe fact that it is all done with fictional mirrors.

The area of fictional discourse I want to open here is centraltc-r the making of (and reading o0 fiction but has been avoided,for its obvious critical traps: it is the barrier between real selfand fictional self. In modernist realist fiction, the writer's realself is effaced and inscribed in a fictional other, usually (ar inRoland Barthes' concept of zero degree writing) without overtreference to the real writing self. In post-modern fiction, the realwriting self transparently becomes the fictional self which is writingitself back into existence. 'What I think follows from thatunderstanding when the context is taken to be a post-colonialliterary culture is that this deconstruction of the most centrally-held convention of modernist writing signals the advent of a truepost-modernism. Of course the mere existence of works withthe post-modern feel does not guarantee that post-modernismhas arrived. Leonard Cohen's Beaudful Losers, for example, waspublished in L966, two decades before Canada's currenr self-congratulatory post-modern phase. However, when a post-colonialliterary culture begins to see the publication of fictions whichconscientiously (and consciously) go about dismantling the centralnotion of modernist fiction, that is, when the non-existence ofthe writing self in the text is replaced by the performing self , thenpost-modernism has really arrived, fictionally, in that culture./

Richard Poirier's early and definitive statement of theperfcrrming self-'any self-discoveri.g, self-watching, finally self-pleasuring response' to the pressures of identity, politics, morality,the past-is in essence historical: 'performance in literature, life,or politics is allusive, and therefore historical.'r So that whenthe performing-or writing-self is ostentatiously situated in themidst of-and in control of-a 'real historical fiction'a ( *yemphasis), then the dismantling of the old effaced writing self

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should be doubly visible, and maybe even duplicitously visible,given the playful nature of post-modern fiction. Tivo writers whosituate themselves in control of real historical fictions are theCanadian, George Boweri.g, in Burning Water (1980), and theNew Zealander, C.K. Stead, in All Visirors Ashore ( 1984).s BothStead (born in 1,932) and Bowering (born in 1935, 1936, L937(twice) and 1939, depending on which source you consult6) areof an &ge , both profess English, both began their careers as poets,both have since published fictionat worksT while continuing topublish poetry and literary criticism, and most importantly bothcome directly out of the solid ground of modernism. Stead'smodernism is that of the Yeats, Eliot, Pound allegiance (see his1964 study, The Neq, Poetic), while Bowering originally workedfrom the Williamsite-Olsonite imagist perspective whichinfluences American modernist style so strongly.

The modernist movement has functioned in the homogenizingmanner that the convergence theory of industrialization describes:as (literary) cultures urbanize, the subjects and technologiesbecome more alike. This is true of particulars, such as 'character'in the modernist realist novel, where 'the relationship betweencharacter and setting was of paramount importance in the tellingof meaning.'Since place is one of the two essential aspects ofsetting (time is the other), when this is inscribed in the fictionof an emerging post-colonial culture, the usual outcome is eithera determined regionalism or an over-determined nationalism, bothof which, for the writer, amount to the tyranny of having towrite about Canada (or New Zealand, or Australia). For the homereader there is the dual seduction of identifying with his ownplace and with the representative home character: 'the modernistreader expected to be identifying with character, or at leastempathizing. Feeling himself complete and singular, he looks foranother himself in his reading.'8 But such a reader was not expectedto look back from the character to the author, because as thelie goes, the resemblance is coincidental. If it were intentional,the illusion would be broken and the author would be charged-crime of fictional crimes-with solipsism. Under the modernistdispensation in fiction, self may not be known through self, butonly through other. This rule of self-effacement surely accounts,for example, for Keri Hulme's persistent contention in interviewsthat Kerewin Holmes in the bone people has no connection toher, despite the obvious similarity in name and attributes.

Stead's All Vrsitors Ashore and Bowering's RurningWater indicatethat by the 1980s the old prohibition against the wrirer's self( as self) in fiction and the tyranny of having to write about home

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have been overthrown (even if many writers still prefer to obey).If, as Hayden $7hite suggests, 'significant literary changes . . .

can only take place at times when the audiences are so constitutedas to render banal or unintelligible the messages and modes ofcontact of those precedi.g,'n then we have here two writers(representative of their literary cultures, I would suggest) whocan assume that their post-colonial national literary cultures havebecome post-modern. In part at least, this change can be effectedthrough a writer's previous works, particularly (i.r the post-colonial context) in shorter fiction where more experimentationis easier to accept. Although not post-modern, Stead's earlierstories in Five for the Symbol all manipulate the self as narrator(who is frequently a writer) in terms of 'real'events. Two specificprecursors to ALL Visitors Ashore are Stead's early journalisticfiction 'Out of London: This Year in Auckland' in The Neqr.,Statesman (16 December 1966) and the story 'Concerning AlbanAshtree' in the London MagaTine (January 1984). The latter work,Ireprinted in this issue-rd.f, anticipates both the post-moderntechniques and the play with a 'real historical fiction' whichcharacterize the novel. Bowering's fiction has had strong post-modern leanings since the mid sixties; a representative story whichdeconstructs the barrier between the real self and the fictionalnarrator is 'A Short Story' ( 1980)."t Through that kind ofpreparation and perhaps from reading in other national literatures,at least part of their audience has become sufficiently self-consciousabout their linguistic habits of reading to accept the new subjectsof these novels, the 'real' writing self which the writer projectsinto the real historical milieu.

For Stead, the milieu is Auckland and the beach suburb ofTakapuna during the violent l95I confrontation between thewatersiders' union and the Government; but history getsbackgrounded through the eyes and mouth of Stead's writingself in the novel, Curl Skidmore, now thirty years older: 'History,'says Skidmore, 'is always written as if the doings of ordinarynameless faceless persons . . were a grey and ill-definedbackground to the stage on which the politicians strut and strikeattitudes and make decisions and laws, but of course history isnot reality, it is merely fiction badly written, and in reality itis the other way about, the politicians are the grey backgroundto ordinary lives.' (AVA, p. 1ZB) For Bowering the historical milieuis the 179l-94 navigational voyage of H.M.S. Discoq/uJ, the Britishship under the command of George Vancouver; the greater portionof the novel deals with the exploration and mapping of the north-east Pacific coast. At one point, just after an account of Vancouver

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on Captain Cook's earlier (1772) voyage in the Resolution,Bowering has his narrator (variously 'George' as in the Prologueand 'he') remark, ''Well, then was then and now was now. [Andnow is now, but we're forgetting that for the moment.]' (BUtr,p.Zl).Not only does this statement (one of a multitude of suchvariations) imply that history is a provisional construct whichresembles fiction, as the statement from Stead's novel also implies,but it also automatically foregrounds the writing self in a dialoguewith history, which is a central technique in both works.

That dialogue with history is the constructive feature for thewhole dialogic process overtly displayed in both novels. In thewords oi Mikhail Bakhtin (or rather his translator), when novelsinsert a 'semantic direction into the word which is diametricallyopposed to its original direction . . the word becomes the arenaof conflict between two voices.'rr This happens in two significantways in the novels. The first, typical of post-modern fiction, isthe parodic play with opposing styles and with techniques ofnarration. In Stead's novel, for example, immediately after thepassage on history quoted above, the narrator (the 51-year-oldCurl Skidmore) speaks first as a cinematic voice-over ('So letus put SuperSid, together with Sullivan and Holyoake, with whomhe is discussing the possibility of an early election, firmly intothe haze of their own cigar smoke . . and focus instead thisevening on the gangplank of the Auckland ferrywharf and uponthe young people coming down it. .'), and then as a meticulouscataloguer of realist details ('h. tall, slim, clean-cut, close-shaven,with neatly brushed fair hair and woven tie . . she with luxuriantlywavy and glossy black hair in her two-piece suit'[p. 117]).Thewhole of Chapter Two carries the dialogic nature of the novelto an extreme as it juxtaposes a wide range of the possible typesof narrator and of narrative discourse. A comparative exampleis in Chapter 15 of Burning Water, where the reader is movedfrom eating with the present d"y narrator in a Tiieste trattoriato an historical account of breakfast on board the Discoq/ ffJ, tothe language of a flashback concerning the theft of an ivory-handledtable knife early in the voyage, oD through an obsessively fullrealist account of how the knife was lost, which is interruptedby anachronistic descriptive discourse ('But one evening, just whenthe orange and red sun was falling into the edge of the oceanlike a polychrome postcard. . .'), to an observation about theme('thar earing theme') which connects it ultimately to the discourseof thematic criticism (pp.66-69). These heteroglossic shifts areoccurring continuously and overtly in both novels, and theyforeground the fictionality of the historical accounts.

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And so it is with the dialogic play across the self: the realGeorge Bowering lists his acknowledgemenrs and dedicates thenovel ('I would hke to dedicate this book, if he does not mind,to George 'Whalley'); the narrator George (Boweri.tg) shares thename of the King and Captain Vancouver and then is made intoa he: ''We cannot tell a story that leaves us outside, and whenI say we, I include you. But in order to include you, I feel Icannot spend these pages saying I to a second person. Thereforelet us say He, and stand together looking at them'(p. 10). Thereis also Able Seaman George Delsing (pp.Lzg, 162-63), whichis Bowering's nom-d"e-texte from Mirror on the Floor and many ofthe_ early stories, here making a hilarious appearance prerendingto be the Ancient Mariner. This looks like a series of privatejokes, and Boweri.g, like Stead, is never averse ro implying those,but there is a serious fictional purpose to this dialogic play ofselves, as a crucial early episode in ALL Visirors Ashore demonstrates.The two main characters, twenty-year-old Curl Skidmore andPatagonia de Thierry Aorewa Bennett, have prepared their roomfor love-making by angling two mirrors so as to observe themselvesin 'the Game':

Her eyes you would say were shut but he knows they areslits and from that angle [..t the bed] she can see her mirror,the one on the wardrobe door propped open to suit her, andthat when he is in position he will be able to see his mirror,the one over the chest of drawers. So he plays his part now,tiptoeing into the room and finding her asleep, someone hehas never seen before whose name (for all he knows) mightbe Patagonia or Aorewa or de Thierry or Bennett and whosewavy black hair is spread over the white pillow and whoseancestry might be Maori or French or ( m it is in fact if thefact were only known to this unknown intruder skirting thebed's edge loosening his belt) somerhing of both. (pp.7-8)

LIp to this point in the text, except for the opening words 'Ler'sbegin with the tea towel'(surely one of the great opening linesin the history of the novel) we have nothing as readers ro tellus we are reading anything other than a realistic narrative. Butit's all done with mirrors, of course. In this passage, except forthose mirrors, which do their mimet tc/ re{lecrive duty for thefiction that the two characters are themselves creating but whichalso emblematize the fictionality of the whole episode in a fictionalwork, we have otherwise a piece of standard realist discourse.But when we are given the following section of the narrative,in which the fifty-one-year-old Curl Skidmore reveals that he

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is q.uriting this, we realize how many fictional frames we as readersare caught inside or outside. ln this passage the 'yo,r' could be'we' (m readers), but here she is watching him watching her inthe infinitely recessive series of mirror reflections, which in turnis being watched by the adult Curl Skidmore, who in turn isbeing watched by us as he watches this infinitely recessive seriesof mirror images into which we too are drawn. Not to mentionthat there are also the additional reflective fictions of the theatre('So he plays his part now. . .') and of the framed painting ('Pat'spainting of them, him and her, cubed into the angles of the seawall but unmistakeably and sexually spliced together';) which ishanging on the wall.

The point of Stead's virtuoso display here is to disturbpermanently our convention-bound attempts to read this asmodernist realist mimetic fiction (there are too many mirrorsfor art to imitate life) bv destabilizing the unity of consciousnessin character and reader which the modernist novel typicallyinscribes. It is doubtless from this reasoning that Bowering goesto Tiieste to write about the Pacific, just as Joyce went to thesame city in 1904 to write exclusively about Dublin. Thedistinction between the two is between modernism and post-modernism, as Bowering plays up the fictionality of the text whileJoyce submerges it in the consciousness of the characters. Onthe same terms, they depart in the practice of distinguishing thereal writer from the writing self projected into the text. In someaspects the first section o{ Rurning Water (two Indians discussinga vision on June 10, l79Z) reads like a parody of the first sectionof L/lysses (Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan conversing inthe Martello tower on June 16, L904). It is clear that both Steadand Bowering wish to stress the essential fictionality of thenarrative by simultaneously encouraging and denying theconnection between the real-life writer and the one who isprojected into the fiction, even when the names are the sameor similar. Bowering does this immediately in the rext, with a'Prologue' which provides the reader with special informationabout the apparently real George Boweri.g, the writer. But as'current history and self are bound together, from the beginning'so is older history and self, and soon there are four Georges,George Boweri.g, George the Sixth, George Vancouver, andGeorge the Third, four signifieds sharing one signifier. The'Prologue' establishes the arbitrary nature of naming and, byextension, the impossibility of making anything, even a person,real by naming it. Later in the novel when Bowering introduces'real' names with reference outside the text (nr, for example, the

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reference to his real daughter, Thea, here seen as'Thia,'daughterof the Nootka chief Maquinna (p. 17 5) or when the linguistBenjamin Lee 'Whorf gets reconstructed as 'Benjamin 'Wharf'(p. 1 43), that is, as a wooden structure), the text simply absorbsthese references into itself because it is defined everywhere asfiction. Such references, although they originate in the real world,are there to remind us of the fictionality of the fiction.

To be trapped by the fixity of naming is the disability thatBowering makes Vancouver, fls the representative eighteenth-century empiricist, labour and voyage under: 'he wanted to bea famous story very much. . . he wanted his name . . . to bea part of the world . . + . So he wrote all over the globe. Helaid the names of his officers on mountains at north 50o andsouth 40" . . He put the names of his sisters on New Albion.He inscribed the names of every offtcer he had ever respectedor needed up and down the coast . . I . He never wrote downon his charts any names that were there before he got there'(pp .62-63). The Discoq/ery thus becomes a 'fact factory': 'whateverthe edge of the world was made of, this craft was turning it duyby day into facts' (p.186) ('craft' could easily be emphasized there).Vancouver's arbitrary fixity of naming has its enemy in theimagination, variously represented in the novel by the appearanceof \fi/illiam Blake (pp .24-25), by the visions of the Irtdians, andby the character of the Spanish admiral Quadra, who embodiesthe imagination.lz For Vancouver, to name is to make real, whichis precisely what the realist writer attempts to do irr fiction, &sBowering has remarked in 'The Painted'Window':

Voice, speech, is a means of bonding or asking; it is whatconnects people with one another & with the world, or reachingfrom the post-modern world, with the universe. ,\dam spokethe names of the animals to make a place for himself in thenew world. He was reaching with words. The t)ost-modernnovel reaches too. The modernist novel charted the world wefound ourselves in; now the new fiction tries to make contactwith creatures living here. (p. 126)

It is worth noting that the two Indians in the novel who actas a kind of 'chorus' and represent the native civilization arenot given names in the fiction, unless their names happen to be'First' and 'second', which seems unlikely.

Stead's novel shows how the fixity of naming is an arbitraryact and also how identity (and identification from the 'real' tothe fictional) is always provisional and shifting. Each of the fourmain characters is known by several names. The Janet Frame-

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like woman, Cecilia Skyways, who is called Cece by at least oneother person, is originally Dawn Clegg. Melior Farbro, the FrankSargeson-like character who bears a name derived from Eliot'scompliment to Pound in the Waste Land, ('i1 miglior fabbro'),is often Mel, and began life as Melvin Heap. Patagonia de ThierryAorewa Bennett is variously Aorewa, de Thierry, Patagonia,Patricia or plain Pat Bennett, depending on what aspect of hercharacter she herself or others wish to stress. And Curl Skidmore,the writing self, is variously Curl, Curly, Curlyboy, Early,Earlybird, 'Gurr-l,' Scamper, Skinflint, Skillsaw, or Ambrosia.His original, 'real' name is [Jrlich Ambrose Skidmore (p.31).

It is not surprising that Stead arranged for AIL Visirors Ashoreto be published and reviewed first in Britain, given the probableNew Zealand response. In a neighbourhood literary culture likeNew Zealand'r, almost all readers have some real special knowledgeto bring to a text like this, and when the novel was eventuallypublished and reviewed in New Zealand the obvious connectionswere made between real people and events and those in the novel.Certainly in one sense the text encourages those connections,at least for New Zealand readers. Curl clearly resembles Karl Stead,and Melior Farbro is pretty obviously based on Frank Sargeson;both were together at T[kapuna in 1954-55 (not l95l as in thenovel) when Stead and his wife were living in the glassed-inverandah of a house at the beach, according to both Stead's letterto Sargeson on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthdayr3 andJanet Frame's memoir in An Angel at My Tabl.e. One can evenfind evidence of part of the original rnodel for Patagonia Bennett(probably an amalgam of the daughter of the Auckland painterLouise Henderson and Stead's own wife, Kry) in Stead's poem'Remuera', published in l-andfall 39 (September 1956). Mostof the lesser characters of the novel also appear to have real-life analogues: the violinist Nathan Stockman, whose fictionalwife is the concupiscent singer Felice, is possibly related to FelixMiller, the original leader of the New Zealand SymphonyOrchestra. And then there are real people as characters in thenovel, including R.A.K. Mason,'A.R.D. Fairburn, and James K.Baxter (see p.49); the technique is a familiar one in the novelsof E.L. Doctorow, for example.

To play this parlour-game of connections between real andfictional worlds, however natural it may be for New Zealandreaders, is ultimately to radically under-read the novel. A usefulcomparison is provideci by Stead's story 'Concerning AlbanAshtree', written after Stead's sojourn as Distinguished Visitorto the University of Alberta. Here the parlour game is simply

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'ble to New Zealand readers or even to most Canadiannot accesslreaders; even though an informed reader could make possibleconnections between real people and characters in the story, thiswould be to ignore the foregrounded fictionality of the tale. 'Inote only that it is these little divergences that make the realityof the movie, or . . . the reality of reality (yor., take your choiceaccording to mood, circumstance, and that buoyancy I spokeof) unreal,'Stead has his narrator sxy, which are words especiallyappropriate to a story based on the shifting of identity. Reality,as Bowering has it, is only 'in the I of the beholder.'l4 Likewisein ALL Visirors Ashore I would suggest that Stead allows thoseconnections to the real to be inferred by the reader in orderfor them to be denied by the essential fictionality of the workhe has made. Curl Skidmore's real name in the novel is urlich,which etymologically combines 'ur' and 'lich,' meaning 'like theoriginal form.' Like the original Karl Stead? Possibly, but Steadis also on record (or tape, at the \il/ellington International Festivalof the Arts, March 1986) as saying that he is drawn towards'both the realist tradition and also the independence of the novelas a verbal structure, distinct from external reality,'and that'euerycharacter in a novel is yourself.' These statements explain howCurl Skidmore (old and young) can share his initials with bothC. (K. ) Stead and Cecilia Skyways, and also how Curl Skidmore'sname can refer to the real eighteenth-century pirate publisher,Edmund Curll, who skids into a pile of his own shit in AlexanderPope's Dunciad (17 4Z): 'Obscene with filth the miscreant liesbewray'd,/Fal'n in the plash his wickedness had laid.' (IL69-77)The Dunciad is also a fictional work in which real identities canbe sighted. Those statements explain how Stead can parody BruceMason's solo performance piece The End of the Goldcn Weatherwhich, like the novel, is also a fictionalized account of eventsat Takapuna beach. And thus can Stead rewrite in the novel JanetFrame's account of events concerning a young couple rather likeCurl and Patagonia (o. the real Stead and his lover?) who arelooking for an abortionist. It is worth comparing Frame's 'TheTiiumph of Poetry' (i., The Resero,oir and other Stories, 1966) andthis novel, where Cecilia Skyways blames 'Pat, who has madeeverything go wrong. One dry she will write a story about it. I ., (p.117).

The principle that emerges from these details, and from thewhole of both novels, is that when the writing self is projectedinto a text in which the arbitrariness of naming is foregroundedby the continual changing of names (when a bundle of signifiersis tied to a single signified), then the writing self must clearly

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be read as fictional-it is not 'fixed' to any external reality. Infact, secondly, the text itself and othcr fictional texts are absorbingthe referential functiohs,r5 so that the only access to the realis from the reader to the text and not from the text to the reader;this is fiction which is not ambitextrous. Essentially what I'vebeen pointing out in these two novels is the surrendering of the'I'-centred role of the author in writing, to the language itself.As Roland Barthes has asserted, it is language, not the writer,that speaks to the reader. 'When writers in a post-colonial literaryculture can confidently assume that there are readers who willunderstand that they are reading the language of fiction and notlistening to the author, then the post-colonial has shifted overinto the post-modern. The existence of novels such as AII VisitorsAshore and Burning Water, which play directly with and decentrethe 'I' that is the writing self, are a significant marker of thisshift; they indicate that fiction can no longer be considered anexercise in historicity, sociology, or nationalism, even where thereis cultural pressure for it to be so, or to be read so. Of course,such an assumption does not mean that readers stop reading inthe conventional manner. Stead's novel was crushed into theJoycean rack by one New Zealand reviewer who called it 'A Portraitof the Artist as an Awful Young Dick,' and another reviewerclaimed the novel was written to settle some old scores.l6Bowering's novel was attacked by a naval historian who (quiterightly) claimed that it didn't really happen that way, and criticizedafter it won the 1980 Governor General's Award for Fictionas a novel 'which constitutes a clever idea in technique, . . whichends in ahistorical violence, . . . which is marred by the crudeanachronisms and deliberate contrivance, and none of which istherefore transformed beyond cleverness into literature.'l7

Simply put, the ball (or text) is now in the reader's court.The optimistic view of the 'new' reader is put twice by Boweringhimself, first in 'The Painted Window':

The reader, perhaps, reads of something done by some word-beings, & calls to mind his own fictional experiences. If hehappens to know the author personally, he may think of him,& as he does he is imagining a fictional character. One usedto be a reader looking to see what an author is looking tosee what a narrator is looking to see what a character is lookingat . . Now they may all be joined, not by a shared 'trueto lifeness,' but in self-admitted fictionality. (pp. LL6-17)

And also in Burning Water: 'as the voyage grew longer and thebook got thicker he felt himself resting more and more on his

32t

faith in the readers: would they carry him, keep him afloat? Hethought so. The B-7 47, filled to capacity with people and baggage,touched the earth like a giant bird touching down on the sea'(p. 173). And since I haven't explained the subtitle of the paper,let's leave the pragmatic view of the reader, and writer and textto Stead, in an early poem from Wheclter the WiLl is Free (L964),called 'Mind Your Fingers':

''Write of yourself' you say,And I do-am notThose thoughts you knew me byBut today's heat,

Tomorrow's windSailboat and swimmer.Am this impertinentPersistent summer.

A deckchair of words at homeIs what I mean-Yours to arrange if you can,But if you fail, not mine.

\7hich is, amongst other things, a neat warning to the readerabout getting trapped while settinB up, between reality and fiction,an exact closure.

NOTESI An Angel ar My Table (New York: George Braziller, 1984), p.148.I lUith the exception c-rf a few indivicluals, including Wystan Curnow, lan Wedde,

and Russell Haley, New Zealand wrrt,-'rs have generally continued to prefer themodernist realist approach rather than the metafictive and post-modern. See alsoMichael Morrissey, ed., Thc Neu, Ficrion (1985). ln Canadian writing, some writerswho have gone about dismantling the barrier between fictic-rnal self and real selfare Audrey Thomas, Robert Kroetsch,, Michael Ondaatje, David McFadden, andDavid Young.

i Thc Performing Self; Compo.sitions and Decompositions in the Ltrngwlges ctf ContemprtraryLife (London: Chatto & Windus, 197t), pp.xiii-xiv.

a ThephraseisGeorgeBowering'sintheprologuetoBurningWater(1980; rpt.Toronto:General Publishing (new press Canadian Classics edition), 1983), p.10. The novelis hereafter cited as BW.

5 Cl.K. Stead, Att Visirors Ashore (London: Harvill Press; Auckland and Sydney: Collins,19114), hereafter cited as AVA.

,' See my article, 'George Bowering: Line Drives from Both Sides,' Span, no. 19 (October1984), p.2, and Bowering's Autobiology (1972; rpt in The Catch [Toronto: McClellandand Srewarr, 1976]), chap. 16:'Since then I have decided to say where it wasI was born many times in different places.'

7 Strme of Stead's stories have been ct-rllected in Fiue For the Symbol (1981); his earliernovel, Smirh's Dream, first appeared in 197t. Bowering's published fiction fromthe beginning has shown post-modern leanings and has gradually moved completely()ver into metafictive fiction. The early novel is Mirror on the Floor (Torontc-r:

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McClelland and Stewart, L967 ); three collections of stories have appeared: Flycatcherancl Othev Srories: (Ottawa: Oberon, 1974),, Protectiue Fooru,ear (Toronto: McClellandand Stewart, 1977 ) and A Place to Die (Ottawa: Oberon, 1983). Bowering's mostradical post-modern work, A Short Sad Boolc, appeared in 1977 (Vancouver:Talc-rnhooks ).

8 (ieorge Bowering, The Mask in Plrce: Essays on Fiction in North America ($Tinnipeg:Turnstone, 1982), p. l17. The two quotations derive from the essay 'The Painted'Window: Notes on Post-Realist Fiction,' hereafter called PW.

u'The ProLrlem of Change in Literary History,'NLH, 7 (1975), 108.It'ln Ficrion of Contemporary Canada, ed. Bowering (Toronto: Coach House, 1980).tt Prctblems of Dostoeusky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis

Press, 1973), p.106. See also Bakhtin's'Discourse in the Novel,'in The DialogicImugination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. MichaelHolquist (Austin: [Jniversity of Texas Press, 1981),p.263, where'the social diversityof speech types' or 'raTnarecie' is used to define 'the dialogization' of the novelas a genre.

rr See also BW, p.154, when the Spanish captain Dionisio Galiano says to Vancouver:'Facts are a fine basis upon which to gauge the amc-runt of cabbage to stuff intoyour hold, but you must not take too lightly the experienced and successful sailor'sother great friend, his imagination.' Although Vancouver, in response, tries todistinguish 'id[e fancy' from imagination as the enemy of fact, it is made clearthat he does not follow the distinction. Note that Vancouver also disallows boththe phatic and vatic functions of language in his remarks to Menzies the botanist:'A language that is neither spoken nor writ is language neither heard nor read,and therefore a failure at the principal task of any language, that is to communicateinfcrrmation from one person to another' (p.42).

rilA Letter to Frank Sargeson,' Islands, ho. Zl (March 1978), pp.213-15: 'You havebeen such a large part of my literary life any thought I have about what mightbe suitable soon grows into a piece of autobiography, a memoir, a bookThere is a whole book, a novel perhaps, to be made out of just one year, 1.955,when Kay and I lived in a glassed-in veranda right on Thkapuna beach, Janet Framewas writing Owls Do Cry in the hut behind your house, and you were workingon your plays.'This important piece gives much basic information about Stead'sapproach to 'reality.' See also Stead's review of Sargeson's Conqrersacioru in a Trainand Other Critical Writing, in TLS, 12 April 1985, p.403: 'as he got older Sargesongrew less and less content with the notion that literature is primarily a representationof reality.'

ra See'Delsing and Me,' tn Craft Slices (Ottawa: Oberon, 1985), p.28.15 On the author as protagonist, see E.D. Blodgett,'After Pierre Berton, !7hat? ln

Search of a Canadian Literature,' Essays in Cana^dian Literature| no. 30 ('Winter1984-85 ), pp.60-80. Blodgett discusses the 'discursive space' of the author in relationto Andr¤: Belleau's Le Romancier fictif: Essay Sur la Rbpresantation de l'bcrivain dansle roman Quebecois (Qu6bec: Presses de I'Universite du Quebec, 1980). See alsoSteven G. Kellman, 'The Fiction of Self-Begetting,' MLN, 91 ( 1976), 1243-56.

16 See lan Cross, 'Salad Days,'New Zealand Listener, 10 November 1984, p.45, andDavid Young, 'Tenants of Fiction,' Listener, 13 October 1984. It is also worthnoting the public reaction to Antony Alpers' assertion in his review of DenysTiussell's Fairburn biography, (Listener, 1 June 1985) that Sargeson sometimes actedas a go-between in the arranging of abortions. See the letters of Sir Keith Sinclairand G.R. Gilbert, in which, unsurprisingly, it is claimed that 'the only evidencesupporting Alpers' statement seems to be a passage in a recent high-spirited novelwhich contains numerous fictions as well as truths' (Lisrensr, Z0 Jrly 1985).

r7 W.H. New,'Thke Your Order. .?',inCana"dianLiterdntre, no.89 (Summer 1981),p.Z.

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A4ARILYN BOUTERING

The Kiss (I)

How I loved youwhen my eyes escapedto the horizon.

The broken mirror of seais all there is,

is this

brokenkiss.

The Kiss (II)

A man sits under ansteady as a bee: he is

apple treefocussed

on the blossoming of the sea below him.

Each breath the tree takessends his heart humming. He grasps his stickas if he is climbing.

Buzz. The tree moves but does not speak.Neither does the man speak.He moistens his lipsand bends forward to meet the lips of a girlsleeping in the grass beside him.

He kisses the sea.

No bird has come to him,no fish, curious.Nothing.

Only a girl runs down the path towards him.324

A season passes.

A line travels from the sea to the apple tree;it runs across the continent.

The sea is glass. The girl is a black dotheading inland.

The man lifts his hand,and its shadow flows across the fieldsand engulfs her.

This is what the kiss was for.

ROBERT BRINGHTJRST

Three Poems from The Lyell Isl"andVariations

\l The starlight is gettirrg steadily dimrrer

Miesiac iak kr6lik w'srod obloklw hyca-Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz

The moon sneaks like a rabbit from cloudto cloud.In the darkness you can't see the funerals.The light-no matter how little or muchwe are given-spills down our cheeks,though a portion is eaten each dryby our eyes, to feed the inediblefruits of our voices.

Nevertheless, that moon up therescares me. It's priestly. I think it mayvisit me someday, &oy dry, shapedlike a boy.

The gods and the stars are all flying away.Does anyone still think anything reallyremains here? You're leaving too, I guess,are you? Already?

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Listen in simple wordsto what I say. I know I sometimesspeak it-like an educatedforeigner-a little tooclearly. Even so, it isyour own tongue: which no oneanywhere may ever speak to you again.

VI The long and the short of itParfois l'air se contracte I Jusc4u'a prendre figure-Jules Supervielle

Ravenous giraffes, youstar-lickers, steersseeking the infinite ina movement of the grass,

greyhounds out to catch iton the run, rootswho know that it ishidden in there somewhere:

what has it turned intoin me now that I am no morethan alive and all my handholdsare transparent sand?

The air contracts like somethingtaking form, but there is nothingone can't kill if one is willingto keep moving. Earthly

recollections, tell mehclw to speakwith trees, with sea-wavesbreaking, with a sleeping child. This

is what I wanted: justto pacify my longfacedmemory, to tell ita more patient story.

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VII Riddle

debo reanudar mis huesos en tu reino- Pablo Neruda

A man with no hands is still singing.A bird with no hands is asking the world,and the world is answering every day:earth is the only flesh of the song.

A man with no wings is crossingthe sky's black rapids on his hands.His mother's bones lie slumpedby the stumps of the cedars.

I carry my own bones in my handsinto your country,and there are no kings; it is not a kingdom;and there is no legend; it is the landand a woman's body, and these are my bones.What do I owe to these strangers my brothers?

TIMOTHY FI}VDLEY

Legends

My encounters with legends have been relatively few. I have shareda stage with Alec Guinness; I have shared a bottle of Ouzo withThornton Wilder and breakfast, sitting on the floor, with HarryBelafonte. Colleen f)ewhurst has dined at my kitchen table andonce, I had a letter from John Cheever.

If the above has the look of someone's love affair with greatnrrmes, I suppose that's precisely what it is. But also, it's anindication of the way my life has played itself-so far. Chance,not will, has put me in the path of such encounters. I have spentmy life in equal parts as an actor and a writer. .When such isthe case! a person is more apt to find himself looking up intoKatherine Hepburn's face-and curtsying-than if he had chosento study the wildlife of the Kalahari. (That curtsy just mentioned

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really did happen. Miss Hepburn came backstage when the curtainhad fallen on a play I was in, and my surprise, alarm and wonderat seeing her caused me to lose all sense of who I was-even

:"i,1ffi , ::xlT J ff : l' 3il' *;::'"1,?s,T: "Y;::,T:*.:iyoung man. No need for ceremony.') These opening words aretr deliberate introduction to my theme: chance encounters withlegendary figures-on two of whom I mean to concentrate whatfollows: Janet Frame and Patrick \il/hite.

Janet Frame and Patrick $7hite have always seemed, to me,to be a great way off-in another world. Because I am Canadian,New Zealand and Australia are about as far away from homeas one can get. They lie in the double extremes of distance-below the Equator and beyond the International Dateline. Con-sequently, Janet Frame and Patrick White have been walkingupside down in my dreams for years. ln March of 1986, however,I left those dreams and went where Janet Frame and Patrick \iThiteare real-and walk like mortals, rightside up. Perhaps I shouldsay 'almost like mortals', because they seem to possess, betweenthem, magic enough to appear and disappear at will. ''We11, hereI am,' says Janet Frame. 'Goodbye...'.

Now you see her, now you don't.In the case of Patrick White, all you get is'now you don't'.My encounter with Mister \il/hite took place in Sydney on

a Sunday evening in March. My companion, Bill 'Whitehead, andI h:rd come to Australia in order that I might read at variousuniversities, meet with critics and other writers and-notincidentally-publicize my latest novel, Nor Wanted. OnTheVoyage.

Our tour had begun with twin disasters: first, we heard ofthe death, by assassination, of Sweden's Prime Minister, OlafPalme-a man whose politics and courage I had much admired.Secondly, due to personal probleffis, my reading at the AdelaideFestival had to be cancelled. The only good thing about thiscirncellation was that it left time open for the organizers of theFestival to present a memorial tribute to the late Swedish Premier.

Having fulfilled my other commitments in Adelaide, I left thatcity feeling as if the world had fallen on top of me. The transitionfrom there to Sydney was equally marred by the fact that, asthings turned out, I need not have gone to Sydney until thefolkrwing week and, thus, could have given my reading at Adelaideafier all-three days later than originally scheduled. Truth to tell,I was beginning to suspect my relationship with the southernhemisphere was doomed to failure.

It did not take long, however, fcrr the wonders of Sydney tcr

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lift my spirits and reassert my sense of excitement and pleasureat being in another world.

Our unofficial hosts there were Mark Mcleod, an academic,and the Australian writer Thomas Shapcott, whom I had metin Canada. I think, because of Mark Mcleod, there is not a squareinch of Sydney with which Bill Whitehead and I are not nowon fairly intimate terms. He revealed a city to which we instantlyswore we would return. But it was Shapcg!! who drew mycompanion and me into the sphere of Patrick White.

A dinner party had been arranged at the home of Australia'spre-eminent literary critic, Elizabeth Riddell. Tom himself wouldbe there-and David Malouf. The evening began with a taxi rideto Coronation Park-a name that conjured legends of anotherkind. The air was warm, the atmosphere was humid-the streetswere lined with trees and with rows of brightly painted houses,blue and orange and red and green. A11 the balconies were fencedwith elaborate wrought iron railings I had come to know as 'sydneyLace' and the people strolling through the district were dressedalmost exclusively in white: perhaps an omen.

It is necessary here to say the obvious. Patrick White ispassionately private-and something of what is politely calledhis 'questionable temper' is also mentioned whenever his namecomes up. I tend to ignore such warnings because I have alwaysbelieved that people of genius have a right to whatever questionabletemper they may require to keep them alive and functioning.Questionable temper is only boring when those who flourish itdo so in behalf of their eBo, rather than in behalf of their talent.Nonetheless, Mister White's notorious desire to be left aloneand his equally notorious temperament were like magnets. I hadwritten him, before leaving Canada, requesting a meeting-andwas refused. I accepted this, though with great disappointment.I knew he was aging and ill and harried. Nevertheless, I still hadsecret hopes of glimpsing him-perhaps with his dog in the park-perhaps beyond a window.

Elizabeth Riddell is one of Patrick White's oldest and dearestfriends-one of the few who still retains the privilege of marchingthrough his open door. Her charming house is on the oppositeside of Coronation Park to that of his-and our evening therein her company was little short of magical. She proved to bea superb companion, spilling over with laughter and welcomeand generosity. This to say nothing of the presence of DavidMalouf and Tom Shapcott-and all their names imply of storytelling. It was, as my journal for that dry reveals, a memorableevening.

329

Round and round the conversation went-but it always cameback to Patrick 'White. Malouf had spent a great deal of timein ltaly: in fact-for years he had a house there where muchof his writing had been done. 'Tell me about it,' I said. 'I beganthe libretto there,' David said. Of course, h. was referring tothe opera of Voss....

Half-an-hour later, we tried something else. Bill 'Whiteheadasked Shapcott to tell us something about the founding of Sydney.This led, almost at once, to the early encounters betweenEuropeans and Aborigines and three sentences later we were intoA Fringe of Leaues....

Half-an-hour after that, we launched into a conversation aboutthe Rainbow, Warrior incident-because it was known that Billand I were departing for New Zealand in two or three days. Andthe Rainbow Warrior led to talk of Greenpeace and its aims andElizabeth Riddell said: 'yor., did sign Patrick's nuclear petition,didn't you...?'

So it went. He might as well have sat with us at table.Very [ate, when it was over-we all went out into Elizabeth

Riddell's courtyard and through her gate to the street and lookedup into the sky. lt had rained and the air was cool and refreshedand the smell of grass and trees and flowers was almost pungent.Now-above us, there was not a single cloud, but only stars.David Malouf put his hand on my shoulder, pointed to the skyand said: 'the Southern Cross'. My first sighting.

Then-as if on cue-we all turned and looked at the greatwrought iron fence that cut its shape across the road in the starlight,holding us at bry from entering the great park beyond whichlived the great man. He was there, in that very moment-morethan likely retiring to his bed. Every one of us standing thereon the sidewalk, separated from him by the fence, the trees, theexpanse of the parklands, had some good reason to honour andrespect Patrick \Uhite: not just because he was a legend in himsel f -but because of what he had given all of us as writers, critics,readers. Far more than words-and more than ideas: he had giver-rus a map into the past and insight into the future. Most of all,he had given us people to travel with in either directioo, whoselives and character were unforgettable. And there, in thatmoment-with all of us leaning towards him in our minds-I had a true encounter with him. Call it what you will; for me,he was there just as surely as I was. ln fact, I saw nothing ofthe kind-but it seemed I saw the lights of his house, dimmingone by one as he retired. And so I said:'goodnight, Mister \7hite'.And we all went home.

330

As for Janet Frame, hy encounter with her-though tangible-was no less ethereal.

It occurred when Bill \Thitehead and I had got so far as'Wellington on our tour. Here, Elizabeth Alley was our host andI was to read and take part in panel discussions at Writers' 'Week

of the newly inaugurated \Wellington Festival of the Arts. Elizabeth,a critic and broadcaster dedicated to literature, had come to Canadasometime earlier and completed several interviews with Canadianwriters, myself included. Her presence in \Wellington to greet uswas welcome in the extreme.

Once she had given us our schedule and taken us to our hotel,we all wandered into the bar for a much needed drink. (I amnor-ro put it mildly-fond of flying, and there had been a lotof it over the past few days. Because of the tensions created byflight, hotel bars are among the most welcome sights in the world,so far as I am concerned. They signal the fact that flight hasresulted in survival.) There, in that particular bar, sat anotherwelcome sight in the person of David Malouf, who was also toappear at \i7ellington's'VTriters' 'Week. 'With him was Terry Sturm,an energetic, outgoing and instantly likeable academic fromAuckland.

After the opening pleasantries and gossip had been given theirdue, Malouf said: 'of course, you're going to see Janet Frametonight...?'

This was something of a bombshell.Janet Frame does not give readings. She does not appear in

public and, judging from everything I had heard about her, shewas not unlike Patrick White in one respect: namely, that hardlyanyone had ever met her face to face. I thought, immediately:but, of course, the reading willbe cancelled at the Last momzrrl EhzabethAlley indicated that this, in fact, had happened in the past. Notbecause Miss Frame employs the role of prima donna: but simplybecause she is shy of public appearances.

Duly, at eight o'clock that evening, Bill and I and David Maloufand Terry Sturm and Elizabeth Alley and virtually hundreds ofothers took our seats in the designated auditorium and crossedour fingers and said a few'prayers'. \Uhen the moderator roseto speak, I was certain she would tell us that-'alas, Miss Framehas nc-rt been able to join Lrs'.

But no such words were spoken-and no such thing occurred.ln my journal, I recorded-in letters inches high: JANET FRAMEREAD! MAGIC!

And magic it was.A tiny, seemingly unprep()ssessing womlln of middle age stepped

33r

forward-exuding a kind of psycho[ogical energy impossible rodescribe. Her face was beautiful-and her u.iC. the voice ofsomeone who is only aware that a voice comes up from somewheremysterious: a voice that surprised herself as much as it surprisedthose of us who sat before her in the dark. On occasio.,, anactress will produce such a voice-unaffected, emotionallycharged, almost uninflected-an absolute communicant.

She read from a work I had not been aware of-nowdisgracefully and astonishingly out of print-call ed Intensiq/e Care.There is nothing more to be said of this, except that Janet Frame'sreading from this work was virtually devastating. I could not move:I could not speak. I have not-nor do I wish-to recover fromthe experience; ever.

$7hen th-. reading was over, I approached her-bearing booksto be signed.'Hello,'she said. I nodded; mute. I thrust the booksat her and handed her a pen and did manage: 'please?' She madeher autograph with care-but sparingly: Jaiet Frn*"-best qrishes.And as she wrote, I watched. I knew I was in the presence ofsomeone more than merely extraordinary. The power to move-so potent in her novels and stories-is also potent in her person.

But I have learned, over time, that you cannot and must notintrude upon the space around such people. You simply haveto let them go. 'Hello, I'm Janet Frame. Goodby....'.

!7ell. Much else happened in New Zealand and Ausrralia: morewriters met-more vistas seen-more magnets set in place to drawBill Whitehead and myself back and back again. But I knowI shall never really see Patrick \fi/hite in the flesh-and I senseI shall never see Janet Frame again. But the journey ro be intheir presence was worth it; every second.

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DOIJGLAS BARBOT/R

Wordr, Perheps, for Music

'Homolinguistic translation' is linguistic transfer from one code to another withinthe same l^onguage. Modes of transfer range from closed, formal systems, which allowlittle if any leeway to the translator, to wide-open, free-association processes, whichallow the translator almost unlimited free-play. The method used here is fairly closed,in that the translator must choose a single word from each line, as those lines appearin the original text (W.8. Yeats's ''W'ords for Music Perhaps'). Still, there is somefreedom of choice, which allows the translator to point, to deconstruct, even tosubvert, aspects of the original. ln this case, following Marjorie Perloffs terminologyin The Poetics of Indeterminacy,l would say that I consciously tried to shift the textfrom the Symbolist tradition into that 'other tradition' of indeterminacy.

Bring midnight in curlesdead was man

when banishedtomb as book cried coxcomb

God like safe{black hunch stood solid

virginity bids allwanders under other man

Z

the thunder-stones storm heavengreat lover fol

elaborate adorningdelicate jointsheart roaring rol

Love unsatisfiedtake body Jane

take meI scold certainly

3

333

Naked my hidden black Janecan love be but said

meet boneleave love but dark

lonely come love's bodyleap in

left emptyghost headnight dead

lover came wentI come remain

Banners men-at-&f rrrs horsesbattle in God

their childhooduninhabited suddenly to all

wild like menbody sings all

6I said breasts veinslive in

fair needsfriends denied bodily pride

proud love in excrementnothing has

7

image chosen woundscream bodily under love

she said strike fate hate334

+

5

love

die bothwhat limbsdance love

B

I sing fancy whocame that upright criedwas everything young old

9

change a heartstill rage beat

throw glances bravelyfade crone before

that heart knelt all offendedpardon

10beauty awaits lovebest lesser prove

lovers breath touchtouch love lie

t1love wrote of wrongs enough undyingheart hardknow rock desolate leaps

t2Old kindred ever stoodthat blood throws thinwhat thorn has torn

13dreamed fathomlessmy love's but the night burning

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T4Plato's set Eternity unwoundand loves take threadbreak threadbargain all

t5give bone all pleasure of bone

women sang bonebody gave bone

think bone when rightful did bone

16Beloved you wereParis golden dawnsuch wild beingleap and runas upon holyaccomplished Leda protecring

r7speech estranged under nightagain Art is ignorant

1B

shutter foul mindsknow everything mad

there belowpage years unlettered mist

makes me shudderthat and snow

comebody in

r9gone that stonethe moon

sing what pleasure gavesleeping undersun moon

336

thought uponman leansuntil maid carry moon

ZO

Ireland and time come dancealone in manall stately is time night

Ireland and time come dancefiddlers accursed drumsand the malicious time

Ireland and time come dance

trumpets

ZIproclaiming men perfectwindy sang that cloud Proclaiming

ZZsang under changesight turned pureand Holy'Wenching singsomething blinked in mancock stands in faith

Z3plain rhyme:.soul EternityTime world

Z4perfection swellingfail fantastic

stormy winding-sheet

Z5Behold seasbeckons Golden blood scatteredthrough there

thereLove

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MARK WILLIAMS

Making the Paths Straighc GaileMcGregor's Voice in the Wilderness and theProblems of English-Language Comparative

Studies

Gaile McGregor's Voice in the Wilderness: Comparatiq,)e CultureSrudies is a projected series of four books focussing, as McGregorherself puts it,'on the four grossly similar (i.r Langu&ge, inderivation, in geohistorical terms) 'frontier' cultures of the UnitedStates, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand'. I The WacoustaSyndrome: Explorations in the Canadian l-angscape (sic) is the firstto be published, although by McGregor's own account it is logicallysecond after a book which develops the method by looking arAmerican culture.Z One wonders if the Canadian publishing houseis cautiously testing the home market before letting loose onAustralians and Americans who are notorious for having fixedideas about their own cultures a Canadian with an irrepressiblenationalist bias. The series is a massive project and if the wholething comes off it is bound to be seminal if only by virtue ofthe importance of the prohlems it addresses: cultural construction,change and comparison. In this review I want to look at someof the difficulties in treating the various 'traditions' within theEnglish-speaking world comparatively before rurning to a specificdiscussion of The Wacou.sra Syn drome.

A Canadian poet touring this country recently began a readingat the University of VTaikato by observing that Canadian poetrywas about fifteen years ahead of the local sruff, chiefly on thegrounds that Canada had more lesbian poets than New Zealand(his other chief ground was that Canadian poerry was more upto date with 'open form'). He argued that lesbian poers aregenerally more advanced than men when working in anexperimental mode because their gender politics oblige them todispatch the centred male ego that bedevils the pr.-postmodernpt-retics so prominently displayed in this counrry. He himself,he noted, was one of the first male poets in Canada to beprcrfoundly influenced formally by women poets like DeniseLevertov and Adrienne Rich.

I do not intend here to try either to refure or to confirm his

338

hieh claims for contemporary Canadian poetry (*e gathered itwas as advanced as any in the world at the moment). I aminterested, firstly, in the urge to make such unabashedly normativecomparisons. They seem to appear with depressing frequengywhenever writers in Canada, Australia or New Zealand (the old'white commonwealth') look at their post-colonial siblings to seewho's growing up fastest. Here is 'Wystan Curnow in a 1973essay on New Zealand culture:

I recall Irving Layton explaining what he saw as theexrraordinary quality of [Canadian] poetry-he believed it tob., on average, the best in the English-speaking world!-interms of his country's peculiar combination of proximity toand detachment from the United States. I also recall him sayingthat Canadian culture 'would have been a disaster withoutthe United States. 'We would have become like Australia orNew Zealand, Good Heavens!'And at that time I wanted toretort that Canada's culture was a disaster, albeit a disastervery different from the one New Zealanders had to cope with.3

Curnow's remarks are unusual only in that they generously damnboth cultures being compared.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, I am interested in theassumptions about what it means to be up to date that are implicitin the Canadian's statement. 'What exactly does it mean to saythat Canadian poetry-or Australian or Peruvian-is fifteen yearsahead of or befrind New Zealand poetry? Where does one finda vanrage point sufficiently removed from the endless squabblingsof poetry- producers and readers from which to make such anempyrean judgement? 'What observer can lry claim to such anextensive view?

It is true, of course, that there are 'broad tides' in poetic stylesand that, as C. K. Stead puts it in an essay on recent New Zealandpoerry, ir was not a good idea, though perfectly possible, to startwriting couplets in the manner of Pope after 1790.4 How foolishit would be as a poetry producing nation to throw up great barriersagainst those tides. Even if sometimes some resolute liter?ryClnute is able, for a space, to stand against a turned tide (afterall, not atl English writers in the romantic period wrote asRomantics), the general force of the argument is irresistable: weare part of the English-speaking world and open to its variousinfluences; if we turn inwards collectively, away from thoseinfluences, we necessarily impoverish our creative sources.

Poems and novels do not grow out of the soil like hardyindigenous plants. They are stitched together out of scraps and

339

shards and flotsam and jetsam of l,tterature that has been washedup on our shores from everywhere imaginable. 'When a reviewerin the Listensr rapturously received tlrc bone peopl.e with ahorticultural metaphor ('I have been waiting for this novel,watching the earth, knowing it would come. \7e all knew it. Somedry there would be a flowering of talent which had not beentransplanted from the northern hemisphere...which would grow-seed, shoot and all-from the breast of Papa') one gathered thata trumpet was being sounded to chuck the exotics out of thehome garden.5 'We have to resist this kind of literary nationalism,if only for the sake of Keri Hulme's novel in which a nor-too-erudite reader may find Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and Sufi poetsand Virginia 'Woolf and Lawrence Durrell and Edward Lear andYeats and Joyce. There is plenty of Maoritanga also, but it doesn'tcrowd out all the other kinds of writing in Hulme's vast Melvilleanragout.

But, if there is a danger that literary nationalism may lead usto lose all sense of proportion about our own producdons, thereis also the danger that an overly dogmatic internationalism maylead us to distort the local scene by making it conform to borrowedterms and definitions without allowing for their peculiar currencyhere. Stead's 'broad tides' do not flow uninterruptedlv from onecountry to another. There are inevitably snags and eddies, notto mention treacherous undercurrents, set up by their movementacross even. roughly similar national cultures. A new formalorientation in poetry does not manifest itself in London, NewYork, Vancouver and Auckland at precisely the same momentas the obvious and only way of writing poetry now. First it mustinfiltrate and win over the literary scene in each particular place.This means that one needs to have an intimate and detailedknowledge of each culture in its actual complexity before hazardingany general comparisons.

The only yardstick that can claim to judge accurately whereNew Zealand poetry stands in relation to, say, Canadian is onewhich, consciously or unconsciously, adopts as a standard themeasure of some third country. The comparer assumes that thereis still some place in poetry as in weights and measures wherethe original yardstick is kept in some imperishable metal lockedup in a glass case. 'When the Canadian poet said that New Zealandpoetry was fifteen years behind Canadian poetry, one guessesthat he meant behind American poetry with which, according toCanadian postmodernists, the important line in Canada since the1960s is parallel. George Boweri.g, one of Canada's bestpractitioners in this line, puts the case thus:

340

By now it is apparent that the mainstream of today's Canadianpoetry (in English) flows in the same river system as the chiefAmerican one-that one (to change figures of speech in mid-stream) nurtured firsthand or secondhand by followers of \il/.C. Williams and Ezra Pound. The Contau people in Torontoof the fifties, and the Tish people in Vancouver of the sixtiesare in the middle of what has been happening in Canadianpoetry, mid wars.6

One can readily find New Zealand equivalents to this statement,referring the poetry scene here to that 'river system' which flowsfrom Williams and Pound through Olson and Creeley to thepresent. But the local differences in tone, timing and reverberationare more important than the similarities in content.

In his 1979 essay, 'From Wystan to Carlos: Modern andModernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry', Stead set out to locatethe strong lines in local poetry in terrns of a tradition that hedescribes, seemingly loosely, &s 'modernist' or 'open form':

The line of development out of early Modernism occurs inAmerica. In his 1960 anthology TheNeqr AmericanPoets DonaldM. Allen was able to trace four post-war poetic movements,the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the San FranciscoRenaissance, and the New York Group, together with a fifthnameless and heterogeneous group, all back to a common pointof origin in Pound and Carlos \7i11iams. This is a very broadand variable stre&ffi, but the poets have enough fundamentallyin common for it to be regarded as a single stream.T

This statement by n major New Zealand critic and poet realigningNew Zealand poetry away from the British literary scene (whereas he notes modernism has had no significant impact since the1920s) towards the American one constitutes a considerable shifttowards the postmodern line advanced by Bowering. Yet it isdoubtful that Boweri.tg would allow Stead's understanding of'open form' to have much in common with his own. Stead'sdefinition of the term neatly sidesteps Olson ( whose followersin this country have consistently assailed Stead's 'modernist'conservatism) and tacks by way of the arguments about truth-telling versus modernist form in 1930s English poetry back toWilliams and Pound. The essay's cunning footwork has earnedStead much opprobrium from both left and right on the localpoetry scene. He has been condemned by anti-modernists likeFleur Adcock for his doctrinaire espousal of a prescriptive 'theory'

34t

and by postmodernists like Roger Horrocks for his cautious (andto Horrocks inaccurate) version of 'open form'.8

Horrocks has pointed out that Stead's appropriation ofpostmodernist terms like 'field' and 'open form' for the purposesof his essentially modernist poetics reflecrc a widespread confusionabout the terms in New Zealand writing which, however sincerelybased, 'crowd[r] out alternatives'.e Now it is true that Steadconveniently conflates terms which one would expect such aprecise literary historian to keep apart. It is true also that hiseffort to shift the local literary scene in the direction of 'openform' amounts to a curiously equivocal assault on local criticalassumptions. Stead does not, in spite of Adcock's charg¤, advocateany thoroughgoing 'theory' as the base for a discussion aboutpoetry.r0 Some of his positions recall the overtly anti-theoreticalones of Allen Curnow, though in a modified form. Stead is carefulto distance himself from what he sees as the excesses of 'surrealism'which attacks the referential function of poetic language moreviolently than he has stomach for. He is equally careful not todistance himself too forcefully from the essentially realist positionfrom which Curnow has refused to budge. Stead wants topropagandize a version of 'open form' broad enough to includeCurnow, who is undoubtedly the major poet practising in NewZealand at the moment. In fact, Stead has obliged the literarymainstream he defines to flow through those he considers themajor practitioners in recent years (Curnow, Smithyman, !7edde)rather than defined a fixed theoretical position and judged thepractising poets in those terms.

All this means that Stead's reading of the major trends in poeticformal development in this century is complicated when it comesto applying that reading to the situation here by his very trenchantsense of poetic force. If excellence is not being produced wherethe'mainstream', narrowly construed, ought by rights to beflowing just now, very well, the stream must be broadened totake in those who incorrigibly refuse to swim in it. To thosefor whom the rubrics 'modernism', 'open form', 'postmodernism'and 'composition by field' are the precise markers in a single,central 'mainstream' of the history of poetic forms in this century,vital to distinguishing the central impulse from its varioustributaries and dead ends, Stead's attention to the oddities ofnational differentiation is a serious impediment to the developmentof the scene here. Such formalism is intolerant of local lags inkeeping up with the international play. Yet Stead's definitions,however idiosyncratic, are deft and astute: they are sufficientlybroad to allow for the exigencies of the local scene. The problem

342

for those in what Horrocks calls 'the fast lanes' of New Zealandpoetry is that they have consistently failed to take into accountlocal limits of tolerance for what may be 'really new' elsewhere.rrStead's effort is directed at shifting the scene by relocating itsmost active forces from Curnow to lan VTedde within a veryflexible reading of the literary swim and its shifting currents. Thatis a very different matter from setting out to bring the poetryscene here into line with the North American 'river system' atthe present stage of its flow by main force.

If older formal styles have persisted into the present alongside,and in many cases mixed up with, the postmodernist tendency,that does not mean that New Zealand poetry is in any preciselymeasurable sense behind Canadian poetry. It merely means thatpoets like Curnow, Stead and Murray E{mo"d- (who in l97Zwas sounding very like Bowering by calling for 'a sense ofinternationalism originally and most firmly founded by Americanpoets thru the first half of this century and culminating in thepoetic holocaust of the fifties' yet by 1983 was decrying 'theinternationalist hegemony') have made their own adjustments tothe scene here.rl Edmond, like Stead, has managed to remain,with whatever equivocations, 'internationalist in [his] sources,forms and allegiances' yet alert to the peculiarly local shapes ofthose influensss-their bearing here. rl

In other words, the reception of 'open form' in New Zealandhas been marked as one might expect by local and particularhesitations, ambivalences, resistances. Prior attitudes to form haveremainded as provincial anachronisms, like Morris Oxfords whichwere produced in India long after they went out of productionin their country of origin. But they also reflect the stubbornpriorities of the local. AII this needs to be taken minutely intoaccount when comparing the scene here and its typical examples,excellent or otherwise, with those in any other English-speakingcountry. At the very least, if one wishes to make comparisonsbetween the poetry scenes in New Zealand and Canada, one needsro allow at the outset for some very fundamental differencesbetween the two cultures.

Gaile McGregor's Voice in the WiLderness series sets out to showthat there are fundamental differences among the white settlercultures in the English-speaking world. Her method is roughlythat of the cultural anthropologist using a relatively small numberof cultural practices-paintings and novels here standing in forinitiation rituals-to chart a cultural system as an integrated whole.She treats the novels and paintings as 'marker ftaits', expressiveof the ways in which the cultural system generates meaning.

343

Her chief problem in The Wacousta Syndrome is that theparticular culture so analysed continually eludes her efforts todemonstrate its autonomy. The characteristic formal propertieswhich she discovers in her k.y texts also occur elsewher.. It ispossible, she acknowledges, to explicate the work of Canadianwriters and artists 'almost solely in terms of internationalmovements'. In other words, cultural exchange has become sorapid and pervasive that it is difficult to ascribe distinctivelynational characteristics to local art and literary movements. Howcan the schools and coteries in a relatively small art scene suchas Canada's resist the 'authority' of art fashions emanating fromNew York?

McGregor is no 'geographical determinist': she doesn't assumethat the landscape rather than the forms of art generate paintings.14Hence she must find a space for a Canadian uniqueness in thelittle gap between the conflicdng claims of an irresistible inter-nationalism and an irrepressible nationalism. She concedes thatinfluence from without is inevitable, but asserts that it doesn'tsimply blow through Canadian art like wind through an aeolianharp. [n a crucial, precariously balanced, sentence she allows thatCanadian artists, whether deliberately or inadvertently, turn formodels to Europe or the United States, only to add that 'becauseCanadians stress primarily those aspects of imported fashionswhich are particularly congenial to their own preconditionedbiases, their borrowings not only tend to take on a new emphasisand implication here, but to change in the direction of greaterconsonance with patterned responses already built into the culturalmix'.

This sounds very like my earlier assertion that one needs toattend to the local hesitations in the reception in New Zealandof a term like'open form'. Yet I think there is an importantdifference between the two positions. !7hi1e allowing that theapparent confusion in this country about the terms ofpostmodernist poetics reflect stubbornly local priorities, I do normean that they proceed from any fixed national character.lnfluences arrive in New Zealand from abroad belatedly, frequentlyin a garbled fashion, are adopted at different paces by variouscliques and interests, and are accepted or rejected according tothe internal dynamics of the scene as a whole. McGregor's 'culturalmix', however, has a function very like that of innate characterin developmental theory: it somehow exists prior to externalinfluence and is able to choose what emphasis to place on particularstimuli. This amounts to an irreducible Canadian identity whichis, within given limits, self determining.

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The trouble with The Wacousta Syndrome is that McGregor isso determined to wrest a uniqueness for Canada from the welterof borrowings out of which, like all settler cultures, it has beenconstituted, that she keeps forgetting that her merhod is supposedto be scientific and impartial. At the heart of the book is thequestion: what does it mean to be Canadian rather than American?Perhaps if we had to hand the 'prior' volume on American culturalformation: The Noble Sauage in the New World Garden NoresTowards a Synraoics of Place, McGregor's claim that hercomparisons among cultures are not normative would be moreconvincing, but I suspect not. In spite of the plethora of footnotereferences to currently fashionable theoretiCal schools, McGre-gor's method of analysis in practice is a straightforward andtraditional one that lends itself to nationalist assertion. McGregorholds that literary texts and paintings are produced by whrt Jh.calls an 'historico-cultural ambiencet. This resolves itself into therag-bag of conventional attitudes towards nature which the settlersbrought to the new world and which have remained ever sincea kind of prison-house of cliches that shape and entrap theconsciousness of individual Americans and Canadians. This'structural' method is oddly like Thine's notion that literary textsare produced by race, environment and epoch and it serves asimilarly nationalist purpose.

The difference in attitudes towards nature between Americansand Canadians is used as a wedge which McGregor drives betweenthe two adjacent and 'grossly similar' culiures. Americans,McGregor tells us, construe nature as a garden, a source ofinspiration and wisdom, because the vocabulary they broughtwith them as colonists taught them to do so. The problern IotCanadians, however, was that 'the simplistic Shnft.sbury-\ilTordsworthian image of nature which had come to dominatecultural expectations by the time English Canadians wereattempting to come to terms with the wilderness was inadequatefor comprehending the Canadian situation'. Canadian nature wassimply awful rather than awesoffie, with the result that Canadiansrecoiled from nature and *the man,/nature relation in Canadabecame...a conceptual impossibility'.

In McGregor's reading this Canadian reticence before natureturns out to be the decisive componenr of a national identitycapable, by a curious paradox, of being asssrted. against the'aggressive'and'egocentric'American response to nature.Canadians, according to McGregor, are polite

-before nature and

their prefer.gd images of nature are sexually reticent, comparedto the masculine bravado of the favoured American perspeitives

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on and penetrations of scenery. In fact, Canadians are adept atsexual reversals and inversions while Americans are habituallymacho. (McGregor demonstrates this dubious generalization byjumping illusffatively from Hemingway to Aritha Van Herk asif,""gft the intervening half century of cultural attitudes towardssex ioles were irrelevant: cultures are frozen around givenpropaedeutic structures for McGregor and elements of the culturalsysrem must always be treated synchronically.) The Canadianpsychology, according to McGregor, is typically feminine as isiuid..,..d by the heroines of the national literature. Still, whilelacking the tasteless Yankee sexual bravado, Canadians are notsexlesi 'Sex is a fairly noticeable ingredient of modern throughcontemporary Canadian literature', as McGregor notes. TheCanadian unconscious, then, is feminist, while the imposedAmerican consciousness is macho..We

begin to see the cunning of McGregor's method of handlingcultural [.n.rrlizations. McGregor actually goes out of her wayto reinfoice the conventional views of Canadians and their culture.Canadians, she allows, hate nature. They identify with victimsand losers. They are'a bunch of sissies'. Their characteristic artforms display the national confusion over identity by telling onething and disclosing another. Yet by a cheeky act of inversionreminiscent of the 'Black is Beautiful' catch-cry of the 1960s,she goes on to redeem these stereotypes from the approb.jq*long- casr on them by the dominant American culture and bythe A*.rican component of consciousness imposed ctn Canadiansby their rumbustious southern neighbour.

The Canadian instinct for compromise, the Canadian un-willingness to assert self, become negative virtues that are thekeys i. planetary survival. The Canadian preoccupation withvictims offers a positive alternative to the American tendencyrg relate imaginaiively ro the human aggressor rather than hisprey. Canadiins, in fact, identify with animals as prey. They envyih" murilared. They discover in the native lndian not othernessbut a profoundly self-confirming image. ln Canada the passivemode is typical.

All this offers an exemplary solution to the old Canadianproblem of discovering an acceptable self-im?ge between moreitrcrngly defined opposing poles: Europe and the United States.There is inevitably the risk of disappearing in such a process:too conservative and one becomes English, too assertive and onebecomes American. McGregor tackles the problem head on byinvesting rhe conventional views of Canadians with nery positivemeaning-. Because Canadians recognize themselves in the native

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Indians, they justifiably lack communal guilt. Because they areunable to conceptualize nature they have avoided the Americantendency to fluctuate compulsively between raping and reveringthe landscape.

McGregor's Canadians are improbably virtuous. They don'rsuffer from the American fetish of dangerous heroes. They aren'tguilty of 'killing Indians'. Their reticence in the face of naturehas left both the land and the 'natives' available for literaturewithout the need to resort to the 'noble savage' or 'garden'conventions. Their idiosyncratic ways of seeing (marginal ratherthan definite, centred, or hegemonic) have become trans-culturaldesiderata. The very Canadian uncertainty about identity becomesin McGregor's reading a willed refusal to adopt a fixed identity.Hence it is 'not only a potentially positive psychological develop-ment but also very much in the mainstream of twentieth-centuryintellectual trends'. Canadians, it turns out, were existentialistsbefore the fact and the 'fear and loathing' McGregor uncoversbeneath the Canadian's 'cheerful 'Wordsworrhian diction ormuscular Christian outdoorsiness...is equivalent to the "nausea"experienced by Sartre as a result of his constant and unavoidableawareness of the pointlessness, the total formlessness of life'.

The Wacousta Syndroffie, then, is not without its faults. Thebook is as often exasperating as it is illuminating. McGregor ishabitually long-winded and addicted to obfuscating jargon ('Prob-ably because of the confusions inherent in the shifting valuesof meso- and macrocosmic realities, vertical relationships seemto suggest mainly disturbing possibilities' is a represenrativelyinfuriating sentence). Her writing is overly reliant on secondarysources and she cannot resist packing every paragraph withborrowed ore. Consequently, her book reads much "f in. dmelike a terrifically digressive and appallingly prolix dissertarion bysome overweening graduate student.

Yet the book is so ambitious in its scope, so unafraid to tacklethe really fundamental problems of cultural analysis and corrr-parison, that one ends by admiring it. One admires McGregorabove all for setting out to develop a theoretically groundedmethod for making comparisons among the various national'literatures' of the English-speaking world, a method that reliesL)n detailed knowledge of those literatures and the cultures fromwhich they proceed. This is precisely the sorr of thing that Englishstudies need most desperately at the moment. The Wac6ustaSyndrome comes at a time when the competing rubrics which haveserved over the last two decades to rope together the disintegratingchunks of the English-speaking world are announcing their

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bankruptcy. The term 'commonwealth literature' was alwaysdependent on the ability of that spurious political entity, throwntogether out of the leavings of empire, to survive the residualresentments of empire. Now that the term can no longer evenget black and white athletes together on the same field, how canit continue to hold together journals, associations and conferences,not to mention literary texts, that have nothing in common apartfrom the legacy of English colonialism? The term 'post-colonial'is scarcely more satisfactory, being little more than a politicallyconscious version of 'commonwealth'. ''World literature inEnglish' is not only unwieldy but also redolent of the Americanpredilection for thinking globally. 'New literatures in English' isso bland as to signify nothing much at all. And here is GaileMcGregor exploring four English-language cultures, charting theirpeculiar constitutions as cultures, laying the groundwork forsubsequent comparative efforts.

In 1963 Allen Curnow wrote that the New Zealand case mightbe compared 'realistically with the recent ones' of our BritishCommonwealth associates: by the impulse that we and they feelro distinguish our own literature within a common traditioh,combined with a strong (if not overwhelming) sense of communitywithin that tradition'.r5 The case for such comparison has becomemuch stronger since 1963, so McGregor's book is especiallywelcome. It offers a starting point. What is needed now is closeand detailed study of the specific differences of those culturesas they are in their actual complexity.

NL)TESI tlaile McCiregclr, 'Anthor's Nclte', The: W'ac:rtusta Syndronre: Explorarions in rhc

C)dnLLLliLnr Lcrngscape (Tclronto: L-lniversity of Tcrronto Press, 1985), p.474.r Llaile Mc(lregor, Prospectus for Vriice in rhe Wildernas.s: C.-ornparcttiq,,e Oulcure Sruclic.s

to he prublished as four br-roks by Thc University c-rf Torcntr-r Press.1 'Wystan C)urnow', 'High C-ulture in ir Small Prc-rvinc:c', it-t Essays on Netl Zealrmrl

Litcruturc, ed. \iTystan Curnow' (Ar-rckland: Heinemann, 197 7 ), p. 156.+ L'. K. Stead,'From'$Tystun to flarkrs: Modern and Morlernisn-r in Recent Ncr','

Zcalrrncl Poetry', rept., in In The Glass L-ase: E.ssr.rys oI1 Nec{'Zaulund Literuturt',hy O. K. Stearl (Auckland: L)xfirrd Llniversity Press, 1981), p. 145.

- J.ry L)ow,ley, re!r. of the honc peopb, by Keri Hulmc, New'Zt'ltlanrl Ltsttrrtv, 1L

lv{ly l9lt4, p.60." Lleorge Bowering, A Wary u,irh Wrrcls (Ottaw,a: L)heron, 1982 ), p.2 3.; Stcrrtl, 1-r. 141.' Fleur Adcock, lntrr-rduction, The Oxlind Book of- tlonr.rnrfrttrcrr] Neu' Zculantl \/er.rc

(Atrc-klantl: L)xfortl, l98i), p. xxi." Rogcr Horroc-ks, 'L)ff the Map' , I'urullax 1, ntt. j (Wintt-:r 1983 ), p.Z5 1.

I' Roger Horrocks makes this 1-roint in 'No Theory Pcrmittcd on thesc Prcntiscs',Arr..l,'Z ( Fe bruary 19t14 ), pp. I ZIJ-g.

1r Herrgc-ks, 'L)ff the Map', 1-''.248; T. S. Eliot, 'Trirdition rrnd The Indivirlual Talcnt',T .\. Eliot: Sclc:crccl Essays (Lontlon: Faber & Fat,er, 1972), p.15.

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ri Murray Edmond, Polemical Preface, Freed/-; (.,.d.), n.p.; 'Creating a Potent Image:Ntrtes on the Magazine The Worcl is Freecl', Span, Nos. 16/17 (April/October1983 ;, p'r.64.

I j Edmond, 'Creating a Potent lmage', p.64.r'r Francis Pound, Frames on the l-and: Early lttndscupe Painting in Neu., Zealand(Auckland: Collins, 1983 ), p. 1 1.I) Allen Curnow, 'New Zealand Literature: The Case for a Working Definirion',in Essrrys, ed. Wystan Curnow, p.143.

[NOTE: Gaile McGregor will reply to Mark William's review in the December issueof landfaLl.l

ROBERT KROETSCH

spending the Morning on the Beachfour related lyrics

''We all live in the same world's sea. We cannot tell a story that leaves us outside,and when I say we, I include you. But in order to include you, I feel that I cannotspend these pages saying I to a second person. Therefore let us say He, and standtogether looking at them.'

George Bowerin g, Burning 'Water

I cirn no l.nger keep a journal. My life erases everything I write.

Wellington, New Zealand

Realizing he is done with poetry, h. goes to a museum to seea reconstruction of an extinct New Zealand bird, a bird that wasflightiess, huBe,_possibly the largest bird (height to LZ feet) thatever lived, the Giant Moa. Now how's that foi self-pity?

The poem as quotation:

Merino Sheep: The oldest and most numerous breed in theworld. Originated .in Spain or North Africa. First sheep inryZ. Captain Cook brought four in 1,773, they did nor survive.'Wool: fine fibre, used in quality woollen and worsred fabrics.Feel free to stroke Lindale's srock through the fence.Murray Grey Cattle: This breed came about by accident when

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in L}OZ a Shorthorn cow was crossed with a black Angusbull, the result a grey calf, a Mulberry. This unwanted cowsurvived ro produie lZ Mulberries. The name change camein the 1960s. Very adaptable, the breed has prospered in NZconditionsSheep and cattle may nibble for nuts but will not bite.

The poem as evasion'The poem as resignation.The poem as a netthat drowns fish.The poem as a postcardsent directly to the sun.The poem as POET TREE.

Rotorua

Realizing that poetry is a hospital for the sane, he watchesthe Maoris building their replica village.

The thermal reserve, \Thakarewarewa. A volcano's dream of a

poem. Pohutu Geyser, as unpredictable as love. The mudpoolr bubble and pop, undei the twisting steam' The foresttries to untie itself.

He cannot take the tight in his hands. Pumice and sulfur.If the volcano's crater becomes a lake. If the beachitself is beached, high and d.y.

Orpheus, nothing, says the parakeet.

Orifice.

If the carved boat floats in the sheltered pool, and theiconic face bites its defiant tongue, then we have cometo see the picture.

North of Auckland, ParrY Kauri Park

They are in the park. The sign at the gate ?ays -,hg parkwill t. l,r.ked "i S pm. It is 5:05. The park is locked.

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The larger of the rw,o kauri rrees is eight centuries old.The second tree, only 25 feet in girth, is younger by twocenturies. The flock of rosellas inhabits the crown ofthe older tree.

Or are those birds, more exactly, red-crowned parakeets?He lifts the lenses of his glasses against the drifi ofrain. The rain lifts the coastline into these hills.

He and Steve climb our of the half-ton just as the oldwoman appe_ars from her cottage door, makes a smart rightturn, begins her approach.

(Iq was earlier in the morning. The paddock was all steephillside. Steve ordered the dog to bring in the cattle.The dog in one easy leap cleared the high fence. )

You didn't read the sign, did you? the old woman says, 3tonce patient and yet a bit testy.

It looks that way, he tells her. I realize thar.

The Hibiscus Coast

Realizing the poem is a cruising shark, he curls his toesin the mud.

The horses train softly on the hard sand. He drops hiscamera into a mangrove swamp. He believes it was an accident.The man in the shed by the mangroves is building a boat.

There are sharks in these waters, the Maori farmer says,but not so many as on land. His wife goes into the paddockto feed her horses and latches the gate.

Hibiscus. Herbs, shrubs or small trees of the mallow family.\Uith dentate leaves and large showy flowers. They grow aroundthe gas stations, even. And in the parking lots.

Sighting tw-o dolphins, jusr out from shore, rising andgracefully divi.g, he hurries into the water.

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JONATHAN LAMB

Problems of Originality: or, Beware ofPakeha baring Guiltsl

Original,. John Berger gives a succinct account of the ambiguityof the word: 'Original has two meanings: it means a return tothe origin, the firi which engendered everythi"g that followed;and it -means that which hai never occurred before.'z In thecriticism I shall be mentioning the word sways towards bothmeanings, never quite striking ; clear univocal note. lan \Wedde

is gest,rii.rg at the first sort of *.r.i.g wien, in his_introductionro'the .t.*i' Penguin Book of Neur Zealand Vcrse, he talks of writingin English in New Zealand having developed 'to the point where,r. .ri feel ourselves to be its original poets, its consummators.'3And the word is being used *or. in its second sense when KarlStead, for example, .rllr \Wedde 'a splendid and original poet.'4No matter what p.rip.se or meaning i1 serves, however, the yo.ioriginal is tro,rbi.ro..r. in a New Tealand context; of,- indeed,in any context where colonisation has made the dating of culturaland historical starting points problematical. lt conjures up twodisturbing and .orrtr"di.to.y r..rrr.ios: that of an origin slippingaway into the patterns of an imperial (and therefore alien) history;and that of an origin suddenly announced and violentlyappropriated at the &p..r" of indigenous continuities. In thenitlr.,rtion of these t*o scenarios there is plenty of original sinto be found, but not much innocence.

Recently the problem of Pakeha beginnings was aired fromthe M"ori side tv Atareta Poananga and Peter Tapsell, to ttt.consrernarion of ; public not as familiar as its poets with thedemons of origin. \Yh.., Ms Poananga pointed out that the firstwhite settler, -*"r. riffraff, and when Mr Tapsell (in which helater claimed was a joke) asserted that they were landless peasalts,there were complri.ra, ,o the Race Relations Conciliator and astern Rodney [iryr.rt refusing ro see the fynny side when heinterviewed taprell on the television. Yet tt. gesture of bitterretrospecrion i; frequent enough in cultural and literary corrl-mentaries to have supplied ro.* responsive echo to the chargesin the bosoms of thl^ well-read. The gesture is first formed inthe struggle with feelings of isolatioo, unreality and imminentdistracti"i-'that dreadTul doubt as to my own identity...the

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feeling that my power of collecting myself was beginning to beimpaired.'5 Later the doubts harden under the influence of self-questioning that turns the problem of place back upon the personwho occupies it: ''What right have I to claim turangawaewae inthis country?'u Tlken either way-as the miseries of lonelinessor the guilts of usurpation-the origin is the site of variousriffrafferies, both figurative and literal. A sense of them all isfused into the irony of the opening question of Allen Curnow's'House and Land', a poem about the ancient Miss'S7ilson, dyingon her 'Waiau station amidst the faded mementoes of her Europeanpast: ''Wasn't this the site, asked the historian,/Of the originalhomestead?' The tyranny of an origin at once spurious, obscure,guilt-ridden and unjust is manifested variously among Pakehawriters and critics as problems of self, of morality, of belonging,of history, and of language. The outcomes of the struggles tofree themselves from that tyranny tend the same way as themeanings of the word: either towards a recognition of the pastas a complex source of largely unwelcome inheritances, or towardsa declaration of independence from the past: a recurrence to theorigin, or an act of originality. Although the outcomes aredifferent-apparently radically different-they rely on sets ofidentical assumptions, especially assumptions about language.

The briefest way to characterise these assumptions is as endlesspairings of binary opposites, such as home/exile, original/translation, authen ttctty /falsehood, innocence,/guilt, prope rty /theft, realism /fantasy, song/silence, orality/writing. A11 the goodand pure things stand opposed to the compromised and fallenthings, sometimes not in such extreme forms (demotic/hieratic,for example, in 'Wedde's introducdon to the Penguin Book), butall expressive of a lost original innocence that is still yearnedfor. The Pakeha, naturally enough, range themselves along thenegative side of the divide to begin with, aiming clearly to specifythe foulness of their pseudo-origin. In the land of settlers thereis never a soul at home; at best the poet decocts poetry fromVictorian spillings, only to acknowledge its irrelevance to alandscape 'repellent and terrifying.' Commenting on KatherineMansfield's reference to 'the taint of the pioneer in my blood,'Allen Curnow implicates us all in'the New Zealand sadness (alwaysthere, however deeply buried in the mind) because life here seemsa makeshift and reality (still sadder illusion!) is lodged somewhere"overseas" ' ( Penguin Br,ok, L960, p. 40). That opposition of realand i[usory reality is echoed bv Bill Pearson: 'The importationof our culture has always meant an accompanying unreality.' Thatsentence is quoted by Michael Neill in his thoughtful article of

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last year 'Coming Home: Teaching the Post-Colonial Novel' wherehe investigates 'the anxiety of displacement, with its attendantsense of the missing real world.'7 In New Zealand verse thesymptoms of lost reality have been heard in the unconsciousburlesques resulting from inappropriate imitations of Tennysonand Burns (see Curnow, p. Z7), all synthesised in Butler's wildlycomic image of Handel playing a vast organ in the Southern Alps.The coda is Curnow's comparison between James K. Baxter and'an oracle without a cave, delivering loud answers without waitingfor the questions' (p. 62). These oppositions between realitiesand illusions, originals and copies, are subordinate to the arch-binarism of song and silence. Construed either as the mutenessof the land or the deafness of its invaders, the sheer absenceof noise is the torment of the earlier poets: 'A11 still, all silent,'tis a songless land,' sings Edward tegear; and Charles Braschis renowned for the lines, 'The plains are nameless and the citiescry for meaning, / The unproved heart still seeks a vein of speech.'

There is a certain comfort to be had from binary oppositions,however. Although the negative part may be your portion now,somewhere or sometime the positive part is available. If Tennysonis inauthentic here, he must sound right in London; if there issilence now, there must be singing shortly; if I am guilty, nhinnocence must exist in terms of which my guilt is defined; andso on. Although Edward Tregear characterised New Zealand interms of what it lacked ('No music of the nightingale-No soundof waters falling-No whisper in the grass, so wan, and grey andpale') h. knew where these things were and what he had to doto obtain them: He had literally to go home or to come homefiguratively. One way or another he had to find himself at thecentre rather than the edge. 'Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrockshave recently worked out an alternative development of thescenario of silence-the dumb insolence of the land is transformedinto the wordless allure of a woman waiting-but the self-centringstrategy is the common theme.s However, in its first declensionit is possible to see colonial unease as comprising two relatedtypes of misprision: that of land, and that of literary language.Proper ty / propriety inheres in neither appropriation, and bothland and song are silenced by an act of fundamental improprietyat the place where the origin ought to have been. Nothing trulybelongs so everyone and everything shuts up.

Tiaditionally the way out of the deafening hush and towardssome modicum of authenticity has been realism; the sternavoidance of fantasies and fantods in the pursuit of what canaccurately be seen and uttered. It is the literary equivalent of

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temperance. From Curnow onwards realism is insisted upon. lnhis anthology he records 'an adventure, or series of adventures,in search of reality,' a 'reality local and special at the point wherewe pick up the traces' (p. l7). If we want to know where westand, ''We have to face up to history,'says Bill Pearson. AndMichael Neill: 'If we really mean to be at home here, then weneed to examine the grounds of our claim' (p. 48). In this w&y,to go back to Curnow, we find somewhere to start from, a'discovery of self in country and country in self.' 'We stop being'husks without a past or a posterity.'In short, we discover howto speak in our own voice on the new land.

Modernism and postmodernism have seemed to offer radicalalternatives to New Zealand realism, but once acclimatised, theyhave endorsed it. Karl Stead's influential essay 'From 'Wystanto Carlos' stops short of applauding language which loses itsreferent: 'To seek deliberately to detach the mind and the poemfrom its physical and social environment is I think a self-defeatinggame for a poet to play.' It is to follow'a mystique of languagefor its own sake,' to study a'doctrine of abstraction.'e You canhear the echoes of Curnow's disapproval of the colonial 'recoilof imagination from realities' (p. Z0) in this piece explicitlyaddressed to a revision of Curnow's emphasis on truth and reality.For his part Ian 'Wedde is keen to dispense with the who, withthe need for a sense of personal identity; but he reaffirms theimportance of whsre and of 'the refreshment of language thatis alert to its situatioh, to relation, to l.ocation' (Paryuin Book,1985, p.30).tVhether the encounter with the real is deliberate,or whether it is a more casual mimesis resulting from life livedand expressed within what Stead calls the 'incoherent actual',it promotes the movement toward.s that sense of cultural locationin space and time which Wedde (perhaps unconsciously drawingon the metaphor of the land as female body) calls 'the corr-summation of a sense of relation' (p. 26\ 'When this occurs,originality is regained; an interior has been entered; a system ofinternally familiar relations has been discovered 'where languageis original' (p. Z5). It is to arrive at a centre, 'the point wherewe can feel ourselves to be its original poets, its consummators,'where there can be no doubting in the best instances 'the originalityof the poetry' (pp. 25, 29, 28).'What does \Uedde mean by originality? \il7ell, in a rathertortuous metaphor he calls it 'the reclamation of the languagewe now "stand in" ' (p. 43), implying a kind of value addedto the language of location. But elsewhere he has said this: 'Asa poet I love my language...and I am not going to stop going

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back to its origins to hear it in'Wyatt, Ralegh, Shakespeare...butas I hear that language, I am going also to be hearing the presentecho of another.'r" Can one original echo another without thehurlesque of Handel's Alpine organ music? Can the ambiguitiesof originality he so perfectly superimposed? Has \fedde not simplycompleted the process of misprision that was temporarily impededby the silence at the pseudo-origin? \When he specifies the effectsof original language, $7edde says things like this: 'The poem isthe subject...it enacts the integration of our literary history' (pp.28,, 40). This is straight from the New Critics-from Leavis whopraised 'the liveliness of enactment,' the 'mimetic flexibility' ofDonne's verse; and from Ransom and Williams, quoted by Steadat the end of his essay, who declare, 'No ideas but in things'and who demand 'things in their thinginess.' This is the veryoriginality spoiled, in Stead's opinion, when Black Mountaintypographical tricks are ofrered as substitutes for it (p. 155).

Poetry which performs its subject and enacts its referent, whichrenders the thing itself, is all voice, and big voice too. It hasachieved the kind of purity Geoffrey Hartman writes about: 'Thestrength of pure poetry resides, then, like all poetry, in the impureelements it cuts out, elides, covers up, negates, represses...dependson.' Here is originality once more as a sort of compromised punon the absence and presence of an impure history. To that warning,Hartman adds another: 'The extreme result of ideas of purityin language is glottophagia or swallowing one's tongue.'11 Dom-esticated, the paradox would work something like this: Tiy totranscend the silence at the pseudo-origin by the big voice ofa genuine originality, and you'il fall back into silence. The paradoxmakes its way into Wedde's introduction (and into its companionpiece in Span) when he mentions Maori poetry; but it isn't histongue which gets swailowed.

Although Wedde sees his language operating between the polesof an origin and an originality that are distinctly Anglo-American,he wishes to make gesture towards an indigenous originality thathas always subsisted to one side of the complex evolution ofthe other. It has all the hallmarks of binary innocence in beingoral, ageless, demotic, as opposed to the hieratic, history-boundwriting \Wedde has had to naturalise. Maori poetry has 'a resonancetapping into tradition which English cannot reproduce: even thevery hest translations must serve rather than equal their originals'(p. 45). The difference between the two traditions is that theMaori, unlike the Pakeha, has no need to accommodate thehouseless spontaneity of c-rriginality's other sense; but the ideal-isation of Maori poetry serves merely as an excuse to offer it

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in translation. In other words, the purity of its originality obligesit to be presented as a copy. 'Moving a largely oral and usuallysung or performed poetry to the passive and literary context ofan anthology,' 'Wedde reported, 'seemed potentially absurd' (Span,p. 52). Nevertheless he accomplished it, but not without loss:'lnevitably there were compositions too deeply imbedded in theirlocation and in their oral or dramatic context to survive the damageof translation' (Introductioh, p. 47). The grim alternative facingindigenous originality is to sufter reproduction in English in printor to be silenced altogether. Here is a sliding scale of silence,where originality is in a direct ratio to muteness. For Wedde'shieratic audience, the larger part of which will not be able rcrrerrd the Maori originals, the indigenous poetry becomes theimperfect other of 'the upwelling vigour of original language'-English language, that is, which has won its location, its ground,and can sing on it. What a clever way to make the authenticconnive in the authentication of originally inauthenticl and alldone by having the purest intentions! Here is a fable to makethe point, a true one. At a meeting of the Auckland Peace Squadronjust before the arrival of Rainbow, Warrior the issue of marketingPeace Squadron sweatshirts was brought up for discussion. Themeeting having decided that the difference between the genuinegarment (to be worn only by those who hard risked life and crafton the harbour) and the marketed copy should be clearly evident,it was suggested that the copy be identical with the original exceptfor the arddition of the legend'New Zealand.'Then a discussionbegan as to whether 'New Zealand' ought not to be Aotectroa-in short it was being urged that the mirrk of inauthenticity onthe garment should he the authenric name of the counrry.

Terry Sturm identifies these contradictions in Wedde's in-troduction when he p-roints out that for all its privileging of thedemotic, it is an intensely exclusive, hieratic exercise which silencesvast chunks of popular culture. Not for nothing are Maori andfolk poetry associated ideas in Wedde's mind. Sturm ends hisreview of the Penguin Book with a question l'[1 broach once more:'What exactly does it mean tct celebrate the naturalisation ofEnglish in New Zealirnd poetry, the growth of the coloniser'slanguage "into its location" l'l] Perhirps there was always anunfcrrtunate, unconscious immodesty in the history of Pakehaguilt. lt was, after all, a narrative history with beginnings andenrls; and if it started with the bad binary twins it was destinedto end up with the good ones. Perhaps an essay as sensitive tr-rthe silencing of Maori history and culture as Neill's 'ComingHome' is still overambitious in framing a future in which Mirori

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and Pakeha writers will 'give us back our past, make a languagefor that history' (p. 53). Perhaps we-Pakeha at least-have nobusiness to be looking for such plenitude and for such com-prehensiveness of tongue; and perhaps our liberal concern forMaori culture and language comes into the scope of Derrida'sparadox of the ethnologist: ''Whether he wants to or not-andthis does not depend on a decision on his part-the ethnologistaccepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at thevery moment he denounces them.'I3 Perhaps when Europeans,Americans and Canadians are learning to love displacement,decentering and discontinuity it is time for Aotearoans to sit inthe cultural seawrack at the margin of the world grateful for thefragments they behold, and to put by the project of self-collection.The thirties poets seem much clearer-headed about this: ''Whatyour bewilderment gave you/ That is your knowledge. Take andbear it.' Perhaps when Atareta Poananga calls us riffraff she hasentered a discourse about origins which serves our purposes morethan hers. Finally, perhaps there is, or ought to b., a Maoriproverb: Beware of Pakeha baring guilts.

NOTESI This paper was given at a seminar in the Department of Sociology, University

of Auckland, in 1985. lt reappears here as part of a deLrate about cultural originswhich must be relevant in some way to the thoughts of Canadians about theirprast and its relation to their present. To embark on a consideration of one'snirtional history in these days of post-Nietzschean deconstructions is a trickybusiness from the theoretical point of view; and even trickier if the false beginningwere false also from the moral angle. It is this problem of doubly false originsI try to address.

I John Berger, And our faces, rny hcart, brief as phoros (London: \O7riters and Readers,191t4), p. 98.I lan VTedde and Harvey McQueen, erJs., The Penguin Book o/ Neu, Zealand Vevse(Auckland: Penguin Books, 1985 ), p. 29.{ In rhe Glass Case (Auckland: AUP/OUB 1981), p. 157.

5 Samuel Butler ,Ereu,hon, quoted bv Allen Curnc-rw ,The Penguin Book of Neu, ZeaLun<lVcrse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), p.24.

" Bill Pearson , Fretful Sleepers (Auckland: Heinemann , 1974), p. 161.i lslands 35 (April, 1985), pp. 38, 45." [)apers given at the Stout Seminar, 'The Land and The People' (1985): 'VTystan

Curnow, 'Landscape in NZ Art and Literature I'; Roger Horrocks, 'Landscapein NZ Art and Literature, ll'.

" Ir1 rhe Glass Case, pp. 154, 159.rr' 'The Penguin's Texts and Contexts', Span, no. 19 (October, 1984), p. 55.rlPurification and f)anger 1: American Pr-retry', in (--riricism in the Wilclerness (Yale

University Press, 1980), pp. 121, 143.1r Listeaer, J.rly 1J, 19U5, p. 51.I t Jircques Derrida, Writing tmd Diffusncc, trans. Alrrn Bass (University of Chic-ago

Press, 1978), p. 282.

358

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'The Art Class, I', Patricia Fry

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VINCENT O'STJLLIVAN

VisitirrgAn afternoon-or one hour of an afternoon-spent talking to a woman who is dying.So we didn't say anything about that.\Who shall certainly not be here in a month's timewhen I come back from the trip we have talked ofwhen I shall have played by the harbourwith pines on the hills behind itand timed with my new watchthe tunnels we've passed through, and sat awakeuntil the mountains stood up in the nightand the train wailed at their footand the moon varnished the miles and the miles between

She said 'You must tell me when you're back.'It was a room green with the light from treesoutside it, with three stacks of gladioluslike the spires of some odd-ball Spanish cathedral(as I say now, but not then, and so disbelieve it).The flowers were things she grew with great pride.Her stare was firm as two coinswhile she watched their bloom, while she raised a slowravaged arm merely to touch, to touch them.

Late RornanticThe moon mightn't be so fat if it wasn't for what we fed it.The parked car on the lip of a hillside,the river down there like a spoon raising light. . . e

The expanse of January paddocks shaved as a monk,the expectations of Easter rising and rising,the Parthenon on a postcard like the skeletons of ten

dogs. . .

It slips down the sides of houses easy as a brush.It pours so a lover on a veranda in Horowhenua

360

breathes Chrisr! bathed solely in such election.

First time we hold a child while its eyes glitterwith its first puffed moon, we begin to tell it stories. . .

Someone says 'Aegean' and we fancy night varnished yellow

Yet raise your hand or both hands so the moon is covered,so the shape of your hands is edged in pale gloves. . . .

darkness pours to fill its absence as though filling a bowl.

Darkness thus becomes a moon we know by touch.Moon's braille seeps in at our fingers,our blood sparkles as its lake.

\7hich is saying once see it, you see it still.A million after a million after a million see it.Our adjectives maggot at moonlight till the old bone seethes

Pact'Of course,

Of course it is lovelyin its way for you to say so-to talk of going downin the earth together

earth that is alwayshome beneath the karaka berriesand the roots of the poplars, the gripof elms as much as kahikateabecause earth is so symbolicwe'[ never tease it out

and time is hardly , problemwhen you're there, deep, where timetakes it bearings.

I know all that.I know you mean it when you say it.And do I think it's silly?

Just because you're profound?Really, some of the loveliest poemsare tc-r spirit away such queasyfeelings as strike us

when we think dou,n there/ Me?

36r

I'm the first to concedehow the band tires at even the best partiesthe river is no longer a pictureafter a month of non-stop rain

a salmon can stun itselfquite badly, apparently, with leapingup bridal-frothy stairways for too [ong.Every procession grounds its banners, love.Has to. It's logic.Yet funnily enough I don't mind-this is what I'm getting at-I meanI can quite put up for a bit longerwith the quoddian stacked dullas a pile of Kentucky Fried cartons even.Mind my saying that?Imago, then: I'd trade in5 or 6 owls clotted in yew treesfor a couple of randy sparrowsquick and nasty as you likeright here, on the front and dusty lawn.No one's saying that's profound.Big things poetry-wise'll never

come from that.I mean of course your notion was lovelyboth of us

hand in hand

I know how seeing " .fPing dimension etc'

can make rove ffi*"J:ffff'Llx?:.,,

does have its own buzz, sure.But for the moment, I'm saying-let the light razzl,e on the rim

of some splintery old jarfor a bit yet, shall we?'Watch how those sparrowsget on with their commercial.About life. About wanting it more

abundantly.Anywhere.Always.'

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For MiraWhy should it please me so muchthat the word you tell me for poems in yourown language, is so close to the same wordin what might have been mine?

You have given me a book that saysour shared word speaks, in fact, your name-'deity of earth and water and allthe creatures within'. Your name's

emblem is a line like this AAAA mountain chain. A saw's edge.The zlg-zagthat won't serve badlyas a sign for my life, nor for yours.

It abounds, says the book, rn dainas.So it is hearing a new song,meeting you. Standing on a beachwith a fresh horizon. See, earth and water.

There are maps of Europe with theirscholarly arrows, their linguistic lines,that suppose at one time our Iron Ag.mothers may have moved not too far distant

in their chill caves; may have scratchedthe same lines on their flickering walls.As this year in August, sailingthe grey Baltic, I was closer

than we knew. As if already, I heldamber. As if Laima was settingthe movements of her fir-trees. As ifwe asked Auseklis for the favour of stars.

363

STLJART GREGG

Middle Watch

In his r,l,heelchair, elbows astride his typewriter, clasped handssLrpp()rting his chin he wlts no longer thinking, he was dozing.A hahit. It grew out of rr disciprline he had practised of dismissingthought, vacating the mind to induce sleep, in those days yel-rrsago, whcn he first got out of- hospital. It worked too. But sometimesit came unsummoned, like n()w. Surgery had done its j.rb andthey had taught him compensating skills. The rest was psychol,rgy.This w'as p-rart of their restorrrtion too, but his mind rejected theirprof-essional detachment, their impassive objectivity when he\\Iantecl to yell and to throw' something. Out of custody he hndtriecl to do all the things they had taught him, but it was toomur-h too soon and he failed. His rages robbed of response, welled,and he thought he would go demented. He flooded his weakbocly with booze till he fcll rrsleep in confused clelirium, wakingpallid and shaking in reirlity, until at length it revolted him anc]he rebelled. As his strength grew the drills he had learnecl inhosprital irnd practised w'ith clumsy effort began to refincthen-rselves. This heltr-,e'd his mind too, w'here the hattle wastotrgher. Self reliance was won. L)ut of his .Jarkness he cameto [ife.

His elbows began to slipr like insecure sheer legs on a heavingdeck. His head loweretl then came up with, jerk as ir delinquenrmind regerined control. He shook his head an.J sat upright, swc)remildly rrnd looked at his watch, and then out tc-r the hills. Nerrrdark firr crissake and a hlank sheet still. All he needed was rlfew lines.

He userl to look sor-rth to the sea for beginnings but he founclthirt this led too often to recall when what he really w,anted \\,asto w'rrlk again in a ne\.\, mincl. So nowirclays he inclined to thehills, their p-rerp-retual prescnce, even in the night, esprecially inthe night, irnd thev w'ere never invisible even in the mists thatdriftcd in from the harbour, Lrsually, before str-rring. He had bc-rughttl snrall canvas of the hills. The painter hacl w,orked like ir stclrytellcr, intuitively, but vu'ithout a story teller's license to discar,-ltrlaper. Hc imagined that this 1-xrinter had workerl first, not becauseof t-hatrge of light or anything,but hecause vu,hrrt he ha.l seenha.l l-recn sccn imperfec-tly, r-rncl he could not trLlst his memory

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of the image. \)7hen he got to know the painting better he wouldget it framed.

Hell, he had to type something. It really didn't matter what.It \\,'irs w,hat was later throw,n out that made the thing good. Scrhe begirn.'lt was night in the hills. The watcher could not recallseeing a light up there hefr)re. This was a single light and moving.'That's got the start, s() we''ll leave it now, have a few drinks,dine out, sleep well, and tomorrow we'll find out what it's allabout, ()r what it's not about. He left the sheet in and put thecover ()n. But he sat there for a moment loc-rking to the hills.There was a powdering of snow on the heights, and the firebreakscars wnt:re clear. He remembered the scars when they were newand rl raw disfiguring, but their hurt had healed and the scarshad acquired the honour of weather lines. Always thinking inmetaphor, h. told himself, but mused oD, until his eyes werecalled to fcrcus.

There u crs a light up there by god. At the beginning c;f a firebreak.C)f L-ourse, a trail bike, maybe several, kids playing around,carooming up at full throttle, as far as the angle and power wouldallow, a couple of hundred metres. The skill was to make theturn jr-rst before the stall, then race a bumpy descent. Fun, probablyillegal, but fun. He had seen this now and then. But wait. Notat this firebreak. There was no cleared approach to it. And itwas stL'eL)er than the others, a zig zag course right to the top.And there was only c)ne hike and rider. He wondered how therider hacl got his machine up the... Qr",ite a job manhauling it.

Ritlcr, machine and light suddenly dipped into a hollow anddisap',1-,errred, ?t the end of the first stretch. There was dangeruLr there where a slipprery surface or a rut wobble could spilla ricler. l,rjured and alone, all night maybe, and survival in thisteml-rerature would be ocJcls ()n against. Still no sign of the rider.Prohahly adjusting himself fcrr the return. C)r maybe, just maybe,he was considering taking another stretch of the break. In winterlAt nightl A kid might, a crary kid.

Ah, the light beam. Then machine and rider emerge. And stop.The light heam would swing left for the return. Whv, Holmes?Bec-ause, my dear 'V7atson, righthanded people usually turn leftand most 1-reople are righthanded. Yc-ru see'Watson, ()ne can deducemuc-h from the study of simple habits.

The beam swung right. So he's lefthanded. $7ell you can't win'em all Watsc-rn. But w,ait. All action had stopped again. The beamhad stol-rped its swing to focus straight up the second stretch,an incline back south. Then it began to m()ve again. Crazy kid,he saicl, and felt a light thrill of youth. He wheeled to the window,

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u,here on the sill he kept his field glasses. No opera glasses these,they \\'ere the best of their d.y, gently acquired from a deadenemy ()n a heach, and respectfully kept. He put his elbows onthe sill and the glasses to his eyes, adjusting the focus to whererider, beam and machine \ /ere twisting their way. He could readthe ricler's actions nowr. His machine laboured, his feet touchingthe track here and there fcrr balance, hard steering, the light beamdipping now and then, then emerging to the sky and loweringto the track again. An occasional quickening too in smoothpatches, giving throttle. Cold air would be nipping at exposuresof krw,er face and numbing the ja*, breath steaming, man andn-rachine at one like horse and rider, taking a rightful challenge,risking nothing but themselves.

He timed this stretch. Three minutes. Stopped again. 'What

nc)w,l The view below? But the watcher was beginning to knowthe rider now. 'When the rider looked back, that would be it,he r,r,,ould turn and descend. But the watcher thought that therider would not look back, not yet. He had dismounted andhe w,ould be calculating that he had achieved a quarter of thedisttrnce to the top. The next stretch was the longest, zaggingto the left. The rider stooped to the engine, then straightenedto adjust helmet and gloves. He remounted suddenly in decisionand his watcher, knowing that he would go c)n, drew a sharpintake c-rf breath, exhaling slowly.

He pur his glasses on the sill again and leaned back in hischair, elbow on the arm rest and his right hand stroking hischin. It looked a straight run to the half. But what was the terrain?The light beam was erratic but he could still make out the rider,now up in the stirrups taking the bumps on his feet and noton the rump, and taking them on the shoulders too, arms straightgiving weight to the handlebars. Steady for a while. But nowthe speed slowed and the beam swung wildly. Perhaps the inclinehad sreepened. The light had vanished. It was a longer wait thisrime. The watcher grew edgy. He concentrated directly on thespot, lowered his eyes to rest, then back again. An old sea watchdevice. Nights at sea play all kinds of tricks on the eyes, yousee anything looking for signs of a periscope, or the trailing washof a torpedo. Thousands of eyes had seen thousands of periscopes,but none he knew of had ever been confirmed. Torpedo wash,yes. The trick was to look directly at the object, then right awayfrom it to clear the vision, then back again. If that didn't worktry the same thing to the left. And so on all bloody night ifyou like. He remembered seeing a mermaid once.

He had committed the first sin of watching. He had lost

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conc-entration. That's why in those days they made watchesshorter, and changed positions frequently. LJp glasses. The lighthad come back, faintly and partly obscured, but moving. He wasnot sLlre for a moment, then he was, but it was moving veryslou,ly. He wondered ahout wind. There was a fair wind fromthe south down here and it would be sftonger up there, butit rn,ould not he so much an impediment as adding to the cold.The light dipped again. He clocked it now. Reading the luminousdial of his watch he recalled reading the compass in the binnacle,huddling against the wind on the open bridge, cheating on thenumber of times he needed to duck down into the shelter ofthe chart room. A deliberate two minutes then back to the glasses,staying with them and willing the light beam until it appeared.His eyes watered and he cleared them on his sleeve. The riderdismounted again. He was trying to push his machine, one handbehind the saddle and the other on the handlebars. Had themachine failed? No. Otherwise why should he be pushing it upthe hilll The rider stopped and lowered the machine on its side.Back to the wind he looked as if he was trying to light a cigarette,or mrlybe he was just blowing on his fingers.

It was almost dark now and the watcher switched his glassesto night vision. How far was it the manual said the glow of acigarette end could be seen at sea? Iv1iles, he had forgotten howmany. The crow's nest watch had reported what he thought wassuch a light on the starboard point of the convoy. They couldnot break radio silence, but he on the bridge logged the time.The relief corvette with a hundred or so depth charges aft, boilersand powder magazine, was an ideally stacked target. She wentup twenty minutes later. Most of the watch on deck saw theflash but heard nothing. The storm of several days which hadreduced speed to about six knots had abated, but there was stilla strong wind and a heavy swell. And the cold. Ice flows driftingsouth. There was little trace, some debris, and the asdic registerednothing. They had to keep moving of course, irregularly, andthey searched for about half an hour but found nothing of whathad been life. !7hich was a rel.ief.

The rider was preparing to mount. The watcher was now certainthat he was going for the top. But this was a realization of idiocy,it was rather that he had come to know the rider. Inclining souththis stretch looked a kinder gradient. He was riding easy. Hehad earned this, it was the going that was good, like a gooddrink or sex. The watcher grinned and was caught in reminiscence,his watch neglected. He was rebuked for the rider veered to hisright and vanished. But he reappeared almost immediately, giving

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throttle to a sharp rise which sobered his ease to a more cautiousw,orking pace, bumping in the saddle and weaving a little.

The three quarter mark would be at the top of a roundedplateau. Beyond that the break appeared to dip into a heavy bushgrow,th that spread from both sides of the break. 'When the trailemerged again it would be the beginning of the final assault.Assault? No. Assault was a cliche of journalism, of those whcrmade metaphor of the hill or mountain as enemy to be conquered.Not so. The hills were inviolate. VIan could level them but thatw,AS the mere accomplishment of technology. The climber wouldnever desecrare his hill. That the hill was there and had to beclimbed, as the mountain man said, was right, that it had tobe climbed at whatever risk was man at his most civilised, askingfrrr the utmosr intimacy of his hill and willing to die for it. Hewils nr-rt Ahab seeking revenge upon nature for what he imaginedto he nature's infliction upon him. No, Ahab was paranoic. Theclimber would blame nothing.

The rider had made the plateau. He dismounted. He had somethinking to do. But it was dangerous for him to wait too long,exposed as he now was. At that height the snow was more thanjust powder.

That convoy had been the worst. Mid winter, the most northernroute, speed cut to what the storm would allow the slowest ship,The pack accounted for nineteen. One dry an hour hefore duskthey took aboard survivors from a tanker. Going west she waswithc-rut cargo. She had been fished amidships and was fillingslowly to the stern. She and the two lifeboats were navigationalhazards and they had to be sunk. They kept moving whilst thegun crews readied, light armament merely to exercise, the realdeed was to be done by the four inch, or depth charges if necessary.A hotchkiss on the bridge opened up with a rattle, pepperingthe water before it caught the metal of one of the lifeboats, atw,hich the gunner in glee gave a loud yippee. The tanker's crewstirnding in the well deck were taken by surprise and their headsjerked sharply to the bridge. Their captain clutching 1.g andconfidential brg said softly, you sonofabitch. Our captain saidquietly to the gunner, see me later. Running port side to, thefour inch opened up. The holes she made at the water line werenot much and they would be ineffective for a long time.

Moving his glasses up ahead of the rider the watcher consideredthe lrrst prart of the climb. lt gctt steeper and it narrowed forthe most part, to about the length of the machine. A fall oneirher side and a police helicopter would have to do the restw'hen, rrfter the cold night, time would have ceased to be a factctr.

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Psrt and starboard thnrw,ers were made ready. They circledan.l L-rln-re round again, slorving as much as the captain dared.Pc-rrt th rswers were fired irbreast and one charge actually hltamidshipr, the other falling just short. Their setting was for thelowcsr depth. The bridge rang for increased speed and turneda few, clegrees starboard to get a wider circle, then port again.They *"i. astern of her when the charges reached their primeddepth. The explosions rattled their keel. The tanker shuddered.\)7hen they came abreast agirin she was filling fast both fore andaft. They circled irregularly for ahout the half hour it took, everyeye on itr. krokout, but also on the ship, A, length her backgroaned, her framework cracked. Finally her keel twisted andi-lo*,ly her back broke. She died hard. Her forward part slippedbelow directly. Her after part turned completely showing rudderand screws. [n such indignity and at last hght she went belovu'.No man's eyes sought those of another man. A course was settledonce more to catch r.rp with the convoy.

The rider's time was going. He had two choices. Hit miss orbusr,, r,rsing all the power c-rf his small machine and his skill. Or,to inch hii way up- In either option power was crucial ttl sustainspeed or an agonising labour. Movement at last. The rider \\Iasreaclying.

Rider and machine tr-rr-rised at the dip for a second then wentdow,n but not entirely ir.,t of sight and they did not make muchspeed. They came up slow,and steady, holding _a straight course,making the top of the dip, but struggling and it looked as thoughthe ..i., *h.el was skidding. The rider dismounted again, lefthis machine and went forwrrrd a few paces, then down a bit tcrwaist level. So there was another dip. He came back. He. Themind's image shimmied in focus.

He? The mind blanked and asked for a refocus.Godalmighty.The watcher readjusted his glasses, switched to day vision then

back again. That wtas a feminine emphasis tct the hips _wasn'tit? He rhe only witness, he who shared the climb, h. who thoughthe had come to know the rider, he had never thought of this.The unconscious assumptions one can make, yes even me'Watson,caught in unwary mind egad. He gripped the glasses harder as

thoigh ro force a clearer vision. Her? The rider might removea gl.we, the helmet. The gestures, if he coulcl see them clearly,would be distinctly of gender. Or are those gestures just outof clate,

.Watson? 'We see, but often we do not perceive, 'Watson.

S9 what? f)oes it make any difference to the story? Damn rightit does. WhV? lt changes the whole outlook, it's the difference

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betv'u'ecn citmaraderie and a lclve story. WhV not both? No, I haveto he Llnequivocal. I htrve an acute sensitivity in this. It comes"f ftrtving the appearance of sexual ambiguity I suppose, a mind1n.1 _a. [)irraplc-gic body apprearing to be ai odds. f[ii plagues meftrr I know it tct be the thought of every woman who sees me.I fcel set apart, a pers()n pending. And I am not. I wish to hellthat thc favoured feu' \r,/()men who know this could advertiseit.

So let's hegin again. Love unconsummated. In fact love justottt of the poetry of unfleshed love and on the thrilling vergetrf H.uilty lust, and not knowing which is which. Our yourh, -henall fantasy is realisable, ()r rep-rlaceable, when calamity and deathare ()n ly f iction.- She ungloves one hand and breathes warmth on it. Purelyfenrinir-re. Nervous gestures during a last consideration. She'sinclulging an unserious thought of a full tilt, knowing that sheis too light firr the grade, that her front wheel would probablyIose contact rtncl she'cl be ilrse over tip.Besides a full tilt wouldbe setting little ()n her L-()mmon sense and less on her skill. Theforeseetrhle future is that she tirkes the dip at speed to add power,but not so mr-rch that she krses weight up front at the befinningof the c-limb. She must alr.r'ays retain control. There's ; shghihump rrt the end of the .lip that could spell trouble, so sh.'11have to itvoid it and it rvill take something of her speed, butthere'll still be a lot left. Then it looks not too bad.- The endof the firreseeable is a hr-rmp and she'll have ro go round that.An.l thrrt's as far as she can see, from then on she plays it byear.

The other option. Call it off. She's gone higher than anyoneelse, in fact she is the only ()ne to mount this break, so the goalis u'hatever she sets it at. Like hell it is. She has nor even lookedback down the valley, and will not do so. Till the rop.

She regloves the exposed hand. Then she pats the sides ofher helmet as she would a newly coiffeured head. There's a charmto this. She lowers her visor, flexes her hands and she is ready,accoutred for the joust.

She mounts and switches on. A spluftered start. The enginehas t-ooled and she kicks three or four times before it.nt.h.r.She w':rits till the machine regains its strengrh. The wind hasfreshened. It chafes the jaw and the watcher feels the ache ofcolc.l ar()und shctulders ancl hands, but maybe that's his age. Shehas .leltryed tor-r long. She takes a look up ahead and he thrillsa hit. She takes a firm grip and throttles the machine to theedgc of thc dip, then throttles back as the head lowers and the

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machine makes irs own speed down. The dip is longer and steeperthan she thought and rh. thrills out of control as she daren'tuse throttle oi brake to the end of the descent and the abruptchange to ascent. The sudden change confounds gravity pushingher back into the saddle. On the climb she regains charge andgives threttle as the machine asks for it, testing it, then as a[1i*p-,r. ahead shows a more gradual incline than expected she

[iu.r it plenty, then full, eyes moving up ,ld down, brain racingiir cal.rrlarion, the mind trying to keep full control and leavenothing tct instinct-a conflict between age q.td youth, for yt-ruthtrusts its instincts because it can react to them, sc) youth wins,the track is smooth and her balance is good, age thrills in spiteof itself, gaining confidence in youth.

She *iit n rk. the hump easily as she throttles back becauseshe can'r see the ground immediately beyond it, but right at itthere's an increas. of steepness and she surges, her front wheelthreatening ro rise, but rh. makes it. A slight_ levelli.g, ,.1,t..lengths ar most but enough to give vision ahead. There will be,,o it.-,pping now, for if *-.-.ntum is lost that's it. She hr9 onlya s*ail ^p.*., option to play with. And the firebreak is losingdefinition, there being a lessening of growth and she will haveto weave here and there on a narrowing edge one length of themachine, with a drop on either side a conclusion. She has seenthe top, just glimpsed it.

It ii bey.r.rd tire danger of the ridge, for jus.t short of it isa table twice the width of the break and of little incline. Gainffie, it says, and the rest is a breeze, a few seconds on the wingsof victory and the summit is made. And that's the catch of course,the temptation to rush the last of the ridge.

So she'll keep her head down. Picking her way, judging h.Ispeed just nbor. a stall, over loose stone, ducking rocks anda boulder head that would buckle a wheel. The pace is neverconstant for more than a second, the front wheel is as light as

a ballc-ron, so she rises in the stirrups and leans forward whenshe can, then slumps back in the saddle one foot then the othertaking weight on the ground. She slides to the v_erge, one {ootand a'rear *heel almoit in space and she panics throttle, callingon Jesus Christ, lurching over the handlebars to give front weight.Noi enough, and she *ids, her rear wheel still over th. 9dg.,trailing, b"t trying to increase its hold on the edge. The frontwheef lt fortyfive d.gr..s, the last of her power roaring bu_t goingro die any second. Left foot down and pushing with the lastof her srrength, half draggi.g, half pushing the machine she-gainsthe ridge ,g*in. But the" rh. is caught in power released and

37r

shc ulmost ctvershoots. E is at odds for a second butOn the other edge. She fightsthe r,r,heels are miracLlklr-rsly

to keetr-l the wheels straight, urging them aw,ay from the drop.It takes a wo to gnrin the centre and it concentratesher attention

hbling irgew'onderfull y. She is caught ir-r a sr-rdden hump. Her

mirchine reelrs, the frclnt r.l,heel loses touch with reality and goescrazy" She would ha.ze gone back head over arse, but the reitru'heel, olcl faithful, does the real work, retains its sanity, hitsthe buml-,, and slams the front delinquent down. This, while shefights nraclly, not know,ing right from sheer bloody lunacy,expectir-rg tc-r be taken by unseen forces in a thrilling delirium.

Her release comes in a dizzying calm. She is suddenly in focus,all struggle ceasecl and she is in easy pace on that grear highwayin t['re sky-which is just Lrp ahead. The machine has done itsjoh,,. un.l never exlrectetJ to ,-Lr otherwise, for like a ship it hasnot hcen rrt oclcJs with its elenrc'nt. It is going well. She is humbled.Scl she .loes nctt roar to the top one hand on the throttle andthe other aloft in triumph. She does not rise in the stirrups forit[)[)lar-tse. No, she tnnes the throttle lovingly. She is taken.C}rnsummatecl.

He hatl not used the glasses frrr the final ascent. But now heraiscrl them to his eyes. He cor,rld fcrcus the tableau of rider andn-urchine only dimly. But he knew her face n()w, every nuanceof expression. She wor-rl.l be looking back at last, down into thevallcy, seeing it from \t'here'no other had seen it. Then she wouldIook east ancl what she wor-rlc] see was the unencroached, anothervalley, Another firebreak, tit''cending and ascending to anotherrange, irnd the mountains beyclnd, that he c-ould see too. Sheu,otrltl be calculating, as far as she coulcJ, a way to the sea. It\\/ils the only way to get there by land. He had been there bysea, ir-r the days hefrrrc he became a good sailor. It was his firsttimc l.ey,rnd the heacls. He had heen caught in a failing lightan.J a rising west wind. Ferrr taught him common sense and thelin-ritatiot-rs of his seamanship-r, so he beached, securecJ his bc-rat,n-ra.le a fire and slept till the calmer dawn.

Hc knew'she was not ec1r-rip-rped fcrr the cold-elementary,Wrtson-anrJ he waitecl firr her to begin the return descent. Sherlirl tl-ris after a few minutes. lUhat she had done had been impulse,an it-rtuition, like the start of a story. She w,ould go back uptl-rere to finish it now that it had begun.

Shc hegan her descent into cloud that was coming in fromtl-rt' scit :rnd s()()n she an.l her machine would merge with theIort'cr ,-larkness of the hills. He put his glasses back in the case

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and left it on the sill rrnd wheeled back to his desk. He hadhis beginning and he hacl to get it down.

The beginning was an inrage of her, and that's itll it wtls. Hetypred something or other. Then he said, C)hrist ho, and bangetlrh; roller lever three times and began again. 'ln the hills an.lin the sea nature hacl its own pattern of mr-rrtality.' WhV witshe always tempted into stilrting with a sermonl He banged thelever again, machine-grlnnerl that sentence rvith the stop k.y, thenri1-rprecl the sheet out an.l .liscarded it. He put in another., carefullyaligne.l the sheet and strt there looking at it. Fatirl. This led ttrsleetr-r.

So he shook his heatl to clear it of the temp-rtation and w''entro w,ork. She cirme into fircus slowly but firrnly ancl he kner,'u'

he rvould come tc-r see her clearly. He worked steadily until thein-rage wils secured. It was hard to stop nc)w' hut he hrrd to. Hewrls tired and fatigue L-()Lrld .listort the image.

He wondered what she w,oulcl he like as he prut the cc)ver onthe typrewriter. Sometimes he wished he wt-ts better than tt t\.\'(rfinger artist, wished thrrt he had the speecl to keep-r up with thest()ry ()t-rce it htr.1 begLln.

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373

ANNE FRE}VCH

WritingI could have written, 'l leftyou standing in the street;it was dawn; the northwest archpromised wind off the mountains'

-but this is hindsight. or Icould describe it, how the lightfell on the land, and the land layunder it, beautiful and meaningless.

But in fact I staredout of the window most of the timeand tried to write. Five hundredand ten miles an hour is a good

clean quick way to exit in anyone'slanguage. The writing on the wingsaid REVERSE THRUST LEVER but I can'tsee anyone getting out there at that speed.

All Cretans are LiarsConsider the lie as self-reflexive, leadingto an infinite regress. 'Do you do this oftenl'sincerely asked is easy to denyease being all or most of it, and Icompliant and complicit most easily. One lielaid to rest then facts resemble baitand thus were readily taken-picture it,they say, the Backs, those green lawns, rowingfor your college , the sonorous echo of boys' voicei.e. a fly or finger to land a small fishout of a backwater. That lapse or faultwas simply a failure of imaginarion. After alla little water clears us of this actand the truth is just a small and wrinkled thing.

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O quarn gloriosumIn the absence of anything more than this, a figurein a blue shirt crossing a street in sunlightwhom I may wave to in passing, who maYsmile and draw no attention by itI fill the house with Victorfx-(O quamgloriossp'-those delicious cadences. Listen:this waiting is a silence filled with musicmere absence is an antiphon, an O floweringinto a melisma. ( ((No" is easy, "yas"more difficult,' you said, allowing the wordto hang suspended. So will you anticipate release;the month will end, absence be filled, the sus-pension will resolve. In that hard answer, yes,do wanting and circumstance most gloriously concord

This could have been another poern

This could have been another poemin which the moon rose, not quite fullbut golden through a scattering of cloudto the Adagio from Brahms's secondand the lovers rushed into something-well,bigger and deserving of any numberof moons or symphonies. That impetuousnessis not usually rewarded by a soft landing scarcelyseemed to matter to them, cliffs and umbrellasnot being what they are. They did notprevaricate, weigh, misunderstand. No onehedged or quibbled, admissions were not madeof a calculated nature; there were no regrets,no difficult silences. It was another poem;in it they defied gainsaying and gravityjoined hands and leapt rashly into the still cool airand rose like an impossible unmelted lcarus.

375

MARK WILLIAMS

My uncle Frank

lvly lJnt-le Frrrnk had a red Skoda. He used to drive it roundto visit rny parents and he and my father wcluld sit on the verandahan.l ilrgLre in ir friendly fashion irbout whether Skodars were betterthrrn lt4orrises. lvly father worke'd for Dominion Motors in thosedays, s() naturally he used to defend Morrises. I guess my fatheran.l my ttncle were both biasecl and I'll never know which wasreally the best crtr.

I once overheard my f,rther telling my mother thar Uncle Frankwtts a hit of rl communist. In those drrys it wasn't so unheardctf i-rs it is now to have rr c()rnmunist uncle, but it was still fairlyttnusual. lt had the effect of making my uncle Frank seeminteresting and different, rr sort of romantic figure. \il7hen myfather saicl that [Jncle Frank had been blacklisted since '51 frrrheing a men-Iber clf the Communist Party, I felt r-r sL.cret, delicioussense of importance.

I u'rts thinking about my uncle Frank the other night whenI r,t'ent to see Rocky IV at the Regent. It's not the sort of filmI usually see. But living in Hamilton there isn't much choice andl'cl alreacly seen The Grtonics and Shrr/<er Run. Uncle Frank wouldn'thave thought much of Rr.,cky IV, that's for sure. I still rememberhor,l' r,r,clrked up he use.l to get about the war comics I likedto rertrl u'hen I was a boy. It was no use me telling him I onlyread the English ones (my fhther wouldn't let me read the American()nes, httt of course I did ). Ivly LJncle Frank woultl starnd by themantelpiece in our living r(x)m drumming his fingers irgainst thedusty \\'ax-paper globe w'ith its vast blush showing the BritishEn-rpire in the old days.

-Thcy'll rot y()ur brain, s()n, he used to s:ry.My Llncle Frank reckone,-l too many war comics r,vould turn

me int() a psycho case. Br-rt I guess they didn't.Actually,, I reckon he.]i.Jn't hrrve much to w()rry about as

frrr as I'm c()ncerned. I silw, right through Roc/<ry IV just like Iuse.l to see through thosc olcl war comics. Thcy \.\,ere fun torelr.l ar-r.l the pictures werL'exciting, but they.licln't make me\\'ant trl race nrund killing peoprle.

I t'njoye.l the movie too. Yolr've got to hand it to the Yanks,they know how to nrakc an action movie. They're really slick.Br-rt the nlessage left nlt: stone co[d. You sce there's this part

376

S Regeat Ihe etre SEWWs$i5oB

of me that's very like my Uncle Frank and I reckon that's *hyI wasn't going to be taken in by a slick Yank movie like RockyIV. They were trying to make the communists out tct be Nazisjust like the Nazis in the war comics I usecl to read. There wasthis huge blond communist with a jr* like a bulldozer scoopwho was supposed to be some kind of superman and all thecommunists were hung up on being superirlr to everyone elselike those old Nazis used to be in the comics. Then this super-tough Yank c()mes along irnd puts the communist superman inhis tr-,lace.

'Well, I certainly wrirsn't buying any of thirt garbage.I couldn't help thinking that my LJncle Frank was ir communisr

:rncl lte w'asn't:rnything like the ones in the film. I gr-rt to thinkingabout how he used to r()w me out in his clinker-built dinghyto fish tirr snapper in the rlays before the Jirps grabbed all thefish rtnrl we'd stop at the reef at low tide ancl Uncle Frank wcluldset ntc.lor,r,n to collcct rnussc'ls for brrit. Then he'd roll hisafternoon's supply of smokcs and we'd settle cJown to fish, himnot saying much, but y()Lr c()Lrldn't wish frrr a r-ricer bloke to.lrtrtr-, x line w'ith.

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1

The only trouhle with my Uncle Frank from my point of viewwrls that he clidn't think too much of my intelligence. Blokeslike LJr-rcle Frank alw,:rys think they know, w,hat's best for blokeslike me. As though a few, war comics were going to turn meinto it raving nutter. I always say it's your nature that countsnot w,hrrt y()u read. I worked in the Freezing Works one seasona while back and I remember seeing this bloke, Lr butcher onthe chain, and he wils sitting in this outflow, dltch with bloodand r-rflnl swilling round his white gumboots. All the while hewas reircling a war comic. You c-ould tell that's what it was becausehe was gripping the sides of the cc-rmic like they were the joystickof a plane and making spitfire noises. Nou, I don't suppose myuncle Frank would have thought too much of a bloke like that.\Uell, I got to know thirt hkrke, and l'll tell you he was a beaut.'We bec-rrme good mates for a while, that bloke and me. He \,Iasright up my alley.

I reckon all in all I turned out quite a bit different from whatmy LJncle Frank would've expected, cc-rnsidering his feelingsconcerning those comics. Tirke that film Rocky IV. Seeing it hadthe oprl-rosite effect on me from what my [Jncle Frank had inmind. lt set me thinking irbout a notion I've had lately and Ireckon uncle Frank would've thought it clid me credit. You seeI've c()me round to the vic'w that New Zealand ought tct gct c)verto the Soviet union. I elon't mean we shoulcl g() the whole hc-rg

and become communist like Albania,, s.1!, ()r Cuba. I just meanw,e shoulcl try tcl cultivitte a special relationshipr with the Russitrnslike \\re hacJ with the Poms in the 1950s.'$7e're not really suitedto the Yanks. They're too slick and underneath they generallyaren't very bright. Take this President Rerrgan. lt seems to mL'he thinks he's in one of those American war comics my fatherwoulcln't let me read but I dicl. Let the Aussies have the Yanks.They're tr-rractically the same anyway.

You see the Russians are very like the Poms userJ to be hackin the. '50s. They make straightfcrrward sorts of citrs for ordinirrypeople. \7e don't see the flash ones here, of course. I shoul.Jthink the big limos y()u see Communist Party officials in Russiudrivirrg round in are their versions of Rovers or Rolls Royce's.AncJ the Russians aren't finic-ky abc-rut what they feed their peoprlelike the Yanks and the Jn1-rs are. You're always reading in thepapers irhclut how theJaprs hirvc'gone and dumtr-,e.I a w'hole shiplcta.lof kiw,ifruit or whatever just because there w'as a rat or twct ir-r

thr' l'rol.-l r)r Lr few bugs ()r s()mething.Now,the Russians clon't cr-rrry ()n like that. I'll het they'd be

keen as nrustard to shovcl lamh and butter intrl their prectp.le

378

by the ton and no questions asked if the price was right. Youmight even talk them into putting miles of Axminster into theirofficial buildings. I imagine they have plenty of those. And inreturn they'd send us tractors and winches and lirthes and machinetools-the sort of thing that hasn't changed much since lastcentury. It would be just like the'50s all over agirin.

Anyway, I was thinking along these lines as I came out ofthe foyer of the Regent and strolled along Victoria Street pastthe video arcade and the hamburger bar where that bloke gotstabbed a while back by some crazy Freezing Wcrrker. I supposeI had the feeling that I had solved all New Zealand's problemsonce and for all and that lJncle Frank would've had to changehis opinion of me if he'd heen around. I was feeling pretty pleasedwith myself I can tell you. So I wasn't in the right frame ofmind to find that my car had been done over, especially as itwasn't the first time .ither.

I'd better confess that I own a Lada. It's not that I'm a communistlike my LJncle Frank was. Nothing like that. I got the car chenp,

:1i:: J"l .l' bxiil'ti"fll,T #l * u fffi ,* ilT,tkitfJr il i

379

spray-painting them abor-rt how they were ma.le with slave labour.So this one was a sterrl. lt only had one owner too, some oldlady w,ho'ci used it just to drive to Comn-runist Party meetings()n Sundays. [t's true. The dealer gave me her number and toldme to ring her up. I didn't, but he wouldn't hrrve given me hernumher if he'd been lying, wor-rld he?

Anyway, some bugger had scratched a line right.lown the [eft-han.J side of the car and spray prainted STALIN \)7AGON onthe dcrtrr.

It's n() Lrse trying to be philosophical in a situirtion like thatand sayi.g, oh well, thert's ir risk Lada owners run trnd you mightas well accept it. I suppose my LJncle Frank would hirve sat downand hrrcl a good ponder rrbout the reasotr-s why any bloke wclultldo such a lousy thing to another bloke. He'd prrobably havereckoned it was the litrlt of war comics or Yank movies ()rsomething like that. And then he'd have shrugged and pulledopen the door where it stuck and driven hctme.

Me, I saw red. I was sc) steamed up I couldn't think streright.I rec-kon l'd've droppe.l w'hoever did it in an ()pen fire arnd n()regrets if I'd had the c-hance. I'm able to lor-rk after myself ['lltell yoLr that. ln fact, I've got some pretty imprressive musclesr)n my upper torso.

Anyr.,,,ay, I jumped in the Lada and drove round the blockhopring to liry eyes on w,hoever had done it. Not very likely IsLlpl)()se y()u'll say but I w,asn't in a reasonable n-rt-rod at the time.I drove slowly past the massage parlour and the disco on Hoor1Street. There were lots of Maori kids hanging round, proppingup walls rrnd sharing smokes, but they didn't seem to be upto much else. So I turned intc-r Anglesea Street rrnd cruised alongkeeping my e)'es peeled.

Well, blow me if I didn't strike it lucky, though it didn't turnout s() lr.rcky in the krng run. There was a vacant lot not flrrfrom the c()rner and I coukl just make out two dark figures witha sprny can eirch giving the treatn-rent tct s()me ur]vertisement ()rother ()n the brick wall.

I.klr-r't supp()se I meant to hr,rrt them really, jtrst scllre theshit out of the'buggers. I huried the boot and shot straight towitr.Jsthen-r. I reckon it's a goorl joh they got clear jr-rst in time, thoughir's a pity I totalled the Lada and no insurrrncc. Anrl it'll trrkea fair w'hile to get my upper torso out of plaster.

The funny thing is I reckon I went fbr the w'r()ng gllys. I w'entr()Lrr-r.l an.l hrr.l ir good scluiz at the wall ont-e I got ctut of hclspittrl.The stuff they were writing there wasn't 1-olitical at all jr,rst themeaningless sort clf clrivel prunks scribble ()n 'ut'rtlls. MY EYES

380

SLICE LIKE FIRE and stuff like that. Honestly, it makes youw'onder itbout the minds of blokes who think up that sort o[thing.

The Lirda hadn't made as much impression on the wall as thewall l-racl made on it, that's for sure. It had jr-rst scraped the paintttff s()n-Ie old coca-cola ad going way back to the '5Os I',J say.And underneath you could just make out an older ad that musrhave heen there since befrrre the war. I recognized the ad becausemy father had one just like it he used to keep in the shed whenI was a kid. It showed three smiling blaik African babies,1-riccaninnies my father used to call them, trying to scrub themselvesw'hite w,ith sunlight soap.

Nou' I u'onder what my Uncle Frank would have reckonedabr-rlrt th itt.

09 cx

Co 11,

381

MICK ROBERTS

J.rmbo

Children cried the dny Jumbo closed for a magic had left theirlives. Only Jumbo knew how to cook the Limpopo River Fishthat surpassed shark-meat, or make a Pink Gorilla Ftzz besidewhich thi.k-rhakes thinned. Only Jumbo wrote the menu on anelephant's head that became a place-Irlat, and then a mask. Jumbobrought a taste of adventure to their evening meals.

W[rV did Jumbo close? 'Was he grieving for Kamalah? Theyhad never been publicly linked, but when there are i.rt! twoelephants in one town people talk. It was after she died thathis^ grip slipped on the business and the jungle b.g-".t to fra-y,Perh'aps hei

^death had changed the aura of the elephant worldfor children. lnstead of rides round the alligator pool there werespeeches from the mayor, and instead of ice-blocks in the sunshinethere were fund-raisings in the wind. In the hollow elephant housefrogs stared from thi wall at the dirty straw that now lry.r.,Jirturbed. IfJumbo mourned it was in private, but the restauranttook on despair.

The decline was slow to begin with. There was still chickencurry and Steinlager for parents, but the Kenyan coffee becameinstant. The families drifted away to the cardboard hamburgerhouse and the upwardly-mobite moved in. Jumbo stood on thesraircase with a bandage around his tail and they took his worldaparr. They removed ih. dendritic ferns and distort.{- Ral.t s to.nak. way

'for round tables covered in white linen. They madea clearing for a horse-shoe bar and took down the bamboo screensto make a srage. They covered the murals of smiling elephantsand swinging gorillas with a pale biscuit satin-finish. The lightsdimmed. tt-tE Cr.rr.rnbert fried. Champagne cocktails were mixedand srrains of Stephane Grappelli filIed the spaces between theglass-stems.u

Jumbo moved down-country and trl&ss-Irlarket. He plked hisstiiped landrover in a pub near the Dunedin Hospital and hisrt.rff.d tiger jumped o.rt. \7ith paint and bamboo he tried torecreat. tf,. jungle, but the success of others lingered in his trunk,fil}ing the sinusEs, distorting the vision. So he raised a gigl, bars,restaurant, accommodation, wholesale liquor, waterbed suiteavailable. He changed his name to match the new tone, ZougaBallanryne, in letteis one metre high and lit at night. But as he

382

stands on the roof triumphantly trumpeting his defiance ro theworld, does he ever think of Kamalah and the children in masks,and does he remember the Limpopo River Fish and the PinkGorill a Ftzz.

HT/GH STEVENS

Of Austen's England

\)fhile Fanny Price scrubs the 1ooEdmund addresses the d.gin no respectable terms.The hamster rages intemperate in its cage,rubs its rump against the iron barsand dribbles profusely.The prurient sparrows cruiseamong the breadcrumbs and their droppings;and the lascivious entrails of oakspread fibrous, distendedagainst a hoary, corrupted sky.These lusts but barely coveredby the page: the bodily corollariesof so much talk of name, estate and dowry.

383

DAVID EGGLETON

On The Mantelpiece

A twenty years snowdrift of small town Centennial Histories,a landslicle of uninsured language,a tr-rrrent of ink,a native ftrrest of feeling.Enre.ring and leaving Fiordland as one of four charactersin search of an author.Looking for the real,akrng the coast and low-lying Tasman-that talisman against the outside world.The srory of a journey through the Kiwi psyche:A Strange Duy In The lvlangawekas(as the horizon bleeds a crapulous blue).The Bodgie And Others-a classic New Zealand adolescence in the Fiftiesby . little known car mechanic from'Whangamomona'An unreconstructed forestry block novelist'stale of native flora and fauna anthropomorphised.Impressionist kiwifruit orchards, expressionist mussel farms.Ladies bathe in a mock Grecian setting,a sw,imming hole by n broken down barbed wire fence.As the wriier of several neo-brutalist pieces readseach iron kiwiman clanks aPProvaland fires applause from his gun turret.A purist poet, swigging distilled tap water,his wavy coiffure that 1-lf an after dinner choccllate,,Jeclaims, Naruralism Is The Curse Of The Writing-Classes.'K stc-rod there for some time assessing these given factsfrrr significant clues. He had a colonialist's rectitudein the face of pomp and circumstance and wa_s happiesteither out in the shed fiddling with the innards.J. milking machine or elseLunting up small game in the scrub.'The writer irying to take you into his confidence,the self-sharpening edges of razor thin volumes,ornamental io.*i on the mantelpiece gathering dust,deserted avenues of books.\)7hat immortal phrase chiselled in Oamaru stone?

384

KEVIN IRELAND

The English Connection

LJnbutton the Sunday best, the one gc-rod blouse,the starched collars; unhook the dress,the sailor suits, and watch the North of England poverty

sprill out. Smell vinegar, tripe, naphthaand the rancid damp. You can pick up the stinkof misfortune just from the photograph-

alsr-r catch the way the times measure a managainst prosperity. Natural dignity was abolished herea century before. The loss is illustrated.

yet, six children fed, b.ushed and lined upand you can't deny they clung to respectability.It glazes the lens with its thin nose-drippings.

And no amount of practice at the pose can wipe awaythe old man's sparrow-hawk gaze, mum's turkey droop,the chicken-run fixity of the kids-heads cocked as if alert to the knockof the lid on the pollard tub.So much for the camera's obvious exposure,

the rest we read in a huge and invisible bubblehooked to their lips: 'This is how we arein our last Yorkshire days. And now we're off.

\7e waited long enough for work to comebanging at our door, jingling like a tambourinewith shillings. 'We did not flinch to witness

Christ the Socialist, but what you cannot seeis the foreman's finger pointing down thestreet,the sideways wobble of the grocer's jowls,

the butcher's bloody palms upraised,the misery of the last sixpence

385

strctching its shadow to make half-a-crown.'

Life hatl fhvoured them-s() they recounted-a thotrslrn.-l years, but n()w it sent persecution:thc oltl n-ran p,acked firr a week's journeying,

the trtrtlge frcm scarboror-rgh before sunrise, Mondoy,to nren.l a sash in or)e village', a hinge in the next,flx nt:w runners to a drilwer, repair a gate,

then r-ircle home at nightfall six clays laterto 1-rlay the violin ancl sing hefore the firerun.l find redemption in his mnsic.

'Wrrr-rlcl the dozens of carving chisels,the tir-ry s1-,okcshaves i-rncl the rebate planese\/er again fashion their pc'rfec-t craft?

The rrrtist lifi his treasurcs of best timberfirr rr sniff, to rerrcl their messages, dc-rg-like,befirrc l-rc 1-rut them to thc srru'l

The choices were whittled avv/ayr,rntil the answer hacl hec()me : cut the losses,\\'mp the tools, start again in the South Seas.

A ner,,' beginning. It ha.l the ring of Christian hc-rpe,So they firrgot the hoast of Trafalgar, the mad claimof .lirec-t descent frcm rrn entry in f)r-rmesday Book-

poverty had a better pecligree than that.Thcy firrgot, itlso, the next Advent in the North.Thcy had herrr.J the Social Laborirtory would admit

luny()ne w,ith a ()ne-\,\'ay ticket to the fr-rture.Tirmorr()w hegins ()n the firr side of the Dateline.So they ttrc-ke.l the photogral-',h r-rt the bottom of a box

an.l littlc w()ncler it never again ftrund spaceon thc nrantelpiece: it w,as a moment fixed in ruin,sonrething prrevions, en.lerl, 1-,erhaps unlucky,

Not Rccl,rired on Voytlgc, a page tr-rrn from an album.An.l thc seLlrrell The kitls nurtle rxrt all right.

3B(,

Mum died. Ancl the old man eventually bec-ame Adviser

to the Lirbour Government. His letters prr-rved it.Each wirs acknowledgecl by an official Thank Ycrrrfrulm ir Secretary to a Ir4inister.

An.l us he grew to r-rlcl ilge and my remembrancetl-re hard truth did not fircle: a man's self-respectmcant at all cost to keepr the ()ne clerrr ainr-mallet to c-hisel-knob, anrl tlrive it akrng each timew'ith the prec-ise tapl. Ancl L'ven on the pensiclnhe ke1-,t ns guessing; journeying out each morning

()n ir w,orkers' weekly tic-ket, with tocllbagan.l lunch. Only by chance ()ne d^y we spiecl hinrin a hicle-out, in the slrn, hy the wharves,

pcnning his ti1-rs to Boh Semp,lc ar-rd Walter Nash,Iooking Llp from time to time tcl hlink in amtrzementllcr()ss his golden harhrlr-rr r-rn.l toss c-rusts to the gulls.

A Writer In His Residency

Well, not so much a Residency-lawns to the sea-shore, tropical palms,flr,rnkies with iced drinks on silver rrays,

rielicate, Colonial lirdies in lacewith verses cradled in their arms-m()re irn isolation cell

where, in bookish, scllitary confinement,I conduct debriefi.tg sessions with myself,r-r()ss-question echoes

exanrine derelictions,interrogate a lack of motive,frisk shadowS,

387

dissect exactly how I came to bringno secrets back, spied nothingI wouldn't have seen in Taihape or Bluff.

Especially Bluff.And, since these scrutinies are scaledto a system of cross-references

to fractions of obscurities( for sometimes at the intersectionof irrelevant details the one possible fragment

of critical information is located),I sit here composing tortured interjectionsto labyrinthine answers,

while my Control, yawning after coffee,watching idly from my window as workmenadd more body to the battlements,

only half-listening to the croak of my excuses,considers whether the time has comefor plastic surgery to repair my cover,

or perhaps a few more forged documentsto protect my true identity,my past decontaminated from alien influence,

no longer compromised by *y exposureto the other side, my loyalties no more a problemto my own security.

The art of writing in a Residencyis to survive special enquiriesbefore slipping back into the crowd.

388

Dawn Discoveries

A nature trail across a bedroom floor:a flower, a tangled blouse,a skirt of fallen leaves,an ivory bird which last night sanf,point the path from the door.

Your earrings have turned tc-t stone.Yesterdry they dribbled fire.I watched you burnbefore you scooped them safelyto the table by the telephone.

Yc-rur silken, dewy webs which trappeda million, love-made butterfliesand bulged with wings,lie empty on a chair,unhooked and gapped.

That scent of ever-fresh,never-satisfied, all-devouring needis spent. A succulenceof jasmine, oil and muskchokes on sleeping flesh.

At dawn this new undresshides someone I have never met.You sprawl acrossa wilderness of bed,vanish in nakedness.

POETRY AUSTRALIAPoetry Australia are to publish a New Zealand issue in the secondhalf of 1987. Please send previously unpublished poems forconsideration to:

Rob JackamanGuest Editor , Poetry AustraliaEnglish Department, lJniversity of CanterburyP.B., Christchurch, New Zealand.

389

Book Reviews

CAST T\7O SHADO\7S, Joan Rosier-Jones (Hodder andStoughton, 1985 ), 256 pp.

Combining social and psychological realism, Casr Two Shadoqrsis a study of the victimization of Emffia, the central character.At the start of the novel Emma's peripheral concern for the 1978Bastion Point Land Protests becomes a catalyst to examining theunresolved conflicts of her own Maori/Yugoslav ancestry andher middle-class pakeha marriage. Through a series of docu-mentary-like flashbacks, the use of a present tense narrativesuggests the continuing immediacy of the social and emotionaldeprivations underlying Emma's identity crisis. One of Emma'searliest memories is of living with her maternal grandparents.The 'ice-cream grandmother with the cr.azy eyes' who alternatesbetween spoiling Emma and locking her in an outside dunny,suggesG the contradictions of the pakeha security for which Emmaat one point trades her son. Conversely 'the brown grandfather'who rescues and de-nits Emma prefigures her ultimate resolutionthrough the rediscovery of her taha Maori. The first three partsof the novel that lead to this resolution trace Emma's victimizationby all segments of society, from her Maori mother and Chinesestepfather to her foster parents, relatives and pakeha lovers.Physical and emotional neglect, the all too brief 'good dmes' thatdissolve in threatened incest, rape, sexual betrayal, soloparenthood, abortions, these are just some of the events whichdemand our unquestioning sympathy for Emma. Only an unre-deemable cynic might note that Emma's history could conformto a publisher's checklist of ingredients for commerical success.

Although Emma's story seems designed to gain our sympathy,her characterization is more troublesome. In the first half of thenovel the depiction of the child Emma combines pathos andhumour with an ironic perspective on Emma's egocentricity but,disappointingly, the author seems not to sustain irony whendealing with the adult Emma in the second half of the book.At the same time the characters who impinge on Emma's adultlife become straw figures, swamped by Emma's sense of iniuryand by her self-justifications. This process is particularly evidentin Emma's relationship with David. Emma acknowledges thatDavid is the first of her lovers to teach her ro delight in herown body, and in the pursuit of that delight Emma has her four-year old son Geoffrey adopted and undergoes subsequent abor-

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tions. Soon she refuses further abortions and marries David whensix months pregnant. However, after her second daughter is born,Emma impLcirly punishes David for the lost children by with-drawing from sex, accepti.g, she tells us later, that he will seekaffairs elsewhere. Eventually David becomes an unbearable op-pressor whom she must be rid of. 'When he comments on herbbr.sion with her own past, for instance, he is dismissed asan unsympathetic pakeha, and when he suggests that she takea j.b now that thl girls are teenagers, she is indignant at hisapparent chauvinistic undervaluing of her work in the home. Sheth..r uses his current affair to gain a divorce and the custodyof the girls. Underlying this rejection of David is her convictionthat he forced her to abandon her son. Even when Christopher,the voice of youthful wisdom (appropriately marginalized as a

homosexual), points out that Emma made the choice herself tohave Geoffrey- adopted, she continues to blame David, viewingChristopher as a temporary traitor. Yet despite Emma's self-deceptions and blindness, her responses are depicted as the basisfor her emerging independence and holistic identity!

In many ways Casr Two Shadoqls is a provocative and oftenmoving novel, but my unease about the book arises, I think,from the feeling that Rosier-Jones expects the reader to acceptand endorse Emma's resolutions. In my view these resolutionsinvolve an unadmitted separatism and a naive approach tomarginality. Rosier-Jones seems to suggest that the solution tomulii-cultural conflicts lies in a rejection of pakeha values forthose of alternative cultures, whether this be Emma's 'discovery'of her taha Maori, or her half-sister Lily's Chinese life style.Moreover the novel, perhaps unwittingly, does a disservice tothe very areas of marginalization from which it seeks to drawstrength. At the end of the novel Emma may dress only to suitherself, but she shows little awareness of how the social corl-struction of gender identities reinscribes female marginalizationin all androcentric cultures. Even more problematic is Emma'sdiscovery of Maoritanga. The magic transformation of her Maorirelatives, who had rejected her as a 'Pakeha bastard', is explainedby allocating blame to the previous generation of Uncle 'VThetu

and Aunry Nit, who, presumably, were lacking in aroha. Similarly,Emma's involvement in things Maori suggests that Maoritangacan be acquired instantly by attending language lectures or byvisits to the kohanga reo to see the children learning Maori at'the mother's bre"ri. In this context it is scarcely surprising thatEmma's response to the call of taha Maori in her ancestral land,and her re-enactment of the ceremonial burial of afterbirth through

39r

the child-Emma doll, may seem to this reader to be a form ofnaive romanticism.

Suzann Olsson

HEART ATTACK AND L)THER STORIES, J,,y Cowley (Hodder& Stoughton, 1985;, 174 L)Lr, csd $22.95, pr $ 16 .95.

Tl're flrst rear-tion to this selection r-rf 14 stories is surprise: surpriserrt realisir-rg that it's Joy Lirrvley's first publishecl selection from25 ycrlrs'$'ork an.J acl-rievemc'nt in the form. Later reactions arelikely to inc-lude gratitutle that the author and /ctr circumstanceshirvc .-ause.J such restraint. Heurt Attack is a distillation frommost of that qurtrter-century of writing, and it offers the unusualeXpl'pience of reading a 'first volume' u,hich hardly ever strikes11 strirlcnt, r-rackecl or w,rlu,ering note. Technic-al maturity is therefrorrr the earliest story 'Thc Kite' ( 1963). Structure, viewpoint,langturge level and diak;gLrc are handled with the c()mpetence whichlcrl Kirsty C}rchrane to rlcscrihe Cowley the novelist as 'assuredin [-rer tone and unfirlterir-rg in her handling of narrative andirrcirlt-:nt' (Luntlfoll I2I, p. 98 ). Like Maurice Clee, Joy Cowleycan slrggest the shape of a r-harrrcter in the rhythms of one spokense n tcncc. 'C-on viction' ,, 'a uthcntir-ity' , 'authrlrity' are the w,ordsr,r'hich keep', insisting all tl-rrsggh my notes firr this review; asthe narrator in'All Ahor,rt Love'says,'That's the thing withtrtrth. It is instantly tirrniliar.' The cc-rnvic-tion c()mes particularlyfrom her characters. Hcr chil.-Jren are unhlinkered, Lrnsentimentalan.l unsprlrir-rg; the parallel layers of self-interest which form 'RuralDelivery' result from thc very efTective use of such a protagonist.Her olrl 1-,eo1-rle carry extrrericnrtr but aren't sent staggering acrossthe 1)ages under kilos of u,is.lom or bitterness. It's a feature clfLlou,'l.y's scptLrrrgenarians rrn.l their seniors that they're vulnerableto lctrrnir-rg: 'The Kite', 'f)istances' and 'Going to the Mountain'all huiltl tor,l,ards such m()r-ncnts.

Thcrr"s rln eirgerness ahout these stories w'hich manifests itselfpartly' in the range of lrlur-r's, preople and purfx)ses they contain.L.on'le y, in her rather p,rolix prologue implies thirt the clnly commonthrcatls through them rlre ()nes clf authorshil-, and the fact that'they c()ntain truths'. Elsew'hcre she writes, not terribly helpfully,tl-rat'strlries must begin r,,u,ith the heart'. As w,ell as being thetitlc of the selc'cticln antl ()nt: of its stories, the 'heArt' metaphclris rl rccurring ()ne, anrl it's true to say that these 14 all dealw'itlr s()mr] praintul or prleasurahle jolt to the emotions. Eagernessluntl cnlotions are whlrt a1-l1-eul through much of the selection.

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The stories are full of disc,rveries by and about 1-',eop-rle an.l things.A sn-rall bsy flying his first kite,, a religious zerrk-rt chattinf tr1-r

a heme grrrden.., i. old man w,ho dreams of mountains: therr'

all ipterest Cgwley. She's interested in the externals t-lf perrl-',le

trnd of 1-,lirc-es, from 'the Avenicla 16 de Julio (where)_the buildingswelrr the slrme film of light like a membranc'tr)'the back-yar.lof ()ur frrmily home irt 32 LJnion Street, Foxttln.' Her stories,inc-ltrding those which seen-r s() irutohiogratr-',hir-al, rlerive an adde.lenergy from being so non-eg()centric. Cow'lqy fin.ls other peol-,le's.,.r"[r far mrlre interesting than her ()wn, and her nltrrlttives benefitaccgrdingly. She writes as if she's huoyed u1-r rather than weighetl.lor.,u,n; her eagerness lea.ls he r into being ()nc tlf the mostmischievons of our storytellers. 'C]rld Loves Yor-t, I\4iss Rosewater',,w,ith its rcvelarion of the trinmp-rh of (slightly Lrnw'irshed) fleshover the spirit is one exrlml-rlc. Another is 'A1-rplt' Wine' wit]rits separat; revelation ,rf the triun-rprh of fernrcntc'tl dessert irtldcooking varieties ()ver soc-itrl prtll-,rieties.

E,rgei.,ess rllso leads her into the two main weitknesses of thesest()ries. Sometimes, especially in thc' title w'ork, thc clirectnessof cmotional content ancJ thc ltcL-essibility trf stylc ser-rtl eventsr,,ccring t()\\,ards sentimentality. Sometimcs (lon'ley _throw's literllryrestrair-rt to the wincls an.J scts ctff in sustlrine.l pttrsuit tlf ll

metupher. In'The Moth'r)ne furry firol flutters irt s()me lcngth,,r'.rr-,.] ll c-llnclle, wtrtchetl tty l-t humirn c()tltlterpart tvhtl's tryingt11 gct u\\,,ay from his ()\\'n ol.l fltrme.J.ry (lort'lgy,is y()ur flightr"riiy ncccssrlry? Sonretinres it is. Therc llre other im:rges suchirs tlrc little beckonir-rg figurc irt the en.] of 'The Silk'()r'thep.,errk of perfect whiteness' in'Cloing to the l\4ottntltin'that aret: ssentia I anrl ne:rrly flaw'lcss '

I.krn't \,\,,ant to suggest thatJoy Cowley is s()ntc sort tlf exuherantnlttprlrl w,ho plr-rgs in her [y,1-rg11'riter an.J lets it all p()Llr out. Thevcrslrility of

-her writing r,r,it[rin rrr-r.l outside t]-rc s[-r()rt st()ry fornr

show,s that she r-An turn hcr hrrnd tr-l milny things, but it lrlstlsholvs that ()nL-e turnerl, thc har-r.l then .kres a gtrtl.l deal ctf fin.'tgning. [t's significant th at, us with Sargcson any lrttemptet]sgn-rr-nury ()r synoplsis of he r narrtttivc's L-itn tln ly strttn.l dull; it'shcr ahility t6 ir-rvest then-r,ul,ith c()nvicticln rrn.l cnrotitlnal lruthority(tftgsg o,,rr.], again ) that nrrtk.' them satisfl,'it-tg. lt's signific-trntIrlso that hcr trc'atment of internlrl lives short,'s sr-rch restrirint.Vfhcn Hc.lrr Attcrck c()nlrs to thc heurts of its c-haraettrs, it anrtlyses[-rut scl.krm judges.'Housc With ir Viel,n" ltnrl.'The'Wt>miln Ncxtt)oor', lvhcre the auth()r's ()\\'n hiirs fitr ()r ltgainst t-hllracte rs isrvi,-lcnt, lrre less sLlcccsstul as ll resttlt. I\4ort't1'1-ric-ltl are thcanrt-',,i,r,ulcnce and reservc nrrrintrrine.l in'Thc (.tlltlnel and Stltrth

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An'rericrt' or 'The Machinery of Dreams'. These and other storiesare reminders that good fiction mlly linger partly because of whatit dclesn't say

Dauicl HiU

BONES, Brian Turner (John Mclndoe, 1985), 60 pp, $9.95.

Brian Turner's collections have such stark elemental titles-IAcl'ders of Rain, Ancesrors, Listening fo the Riuer, and now Bones-that one might expect the poems themselves ro be bleak andterse. But with Bones what one encounters instead is a joculartctne, loose and slangy syntax, and a pervasive sense of fun.Unfortunately, there are places where Tirrner's writing is not justrelaxed, but simply lax.

The volume ends with a piece called 'Lyric for Those OneLoves' which reads like a statement of aestheric intent. Tirrneravers, 'The Lync/ had a lot going for it/ before it got mugged/and booted into a corner.' He goes on:

. The lyric is

bloody-minded enough to insisr uponcoming back. It says

intimacy is what we fumble towards,happiness is what we crave

Evidently Tirrner sees himself as just the right bloody-mindedbard to help the lyric back on its feet, bringing to the greatRomantic tradition a tough Kiwi pracricality and mocking humourwhile retaining a fine appreciation of natural beauty and theprimacy of emotion. His poetic programme is not too far removedfrom Fairburn's and Glover's.

Tirrner does, indeed, come up with some startling comicdeflations. Thke, for example, this description of cloudi: 'Theyhump in full vtew / and piss on all who ogle.' But in my opinionListening to the Riq/ff evidenced a considerable lessening of hislyric gift and Bones continues the diminution. Revi.*..r ofT[rner's earlier poetry singled out for particular praise hisprecisioil, clarity, economy, and sharp observation. I think theywere right, and I can only express my disappointment that theseare the very qualities which Bones lacks. Turner's lines nowmeander as carelessly as the most casual bar-room conversation.A movement such as this is typical:

394

Many of their mates,whose namesare scrubbed by rainand bleached and burntby sun and windon stone memorialsin every small townthroughout the land,remained where they'd rather nothave been.

tVith the best of Turner's earlier work one felt that everystatement had been filtered through a shrewd, uncompromisingmind. Now he peddles a third-rate brand of proverbial philosophy,such as:

. . . there's no escaping

where we lie and what welive in, and what

lives in us

and:

a child who noticeshis shadow's grown longeris no longer a child

and:

a long lifedoesn't guaranteereflectionand make usany the wiser

He lapses too into sentimentality, resorting to such easyformulae for poignancy as the 'Blind Child and the Moon' andthis steal from the soap operas about child-raising:

They might want to thank uswhen we're through. $7e

do not want their gratitude.\7e could use their love.

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At his worst he serves up drab re-hashes of Shelley:

The lark, so high it's but a speckin the blue, sings a song to rememberwhen you feel despair.

I have no doubt that Tirrner's reverence for the great outdoorsis as sincere as his Romantic mentors', but he lacks their tacticalfinesse. 'Wordsworth, for example, lets us in on the meditativeprocess whereby he comes to regard nature as a repository ofvalue. He guides us carefully up to the moment of epiphany wheneither we perceive with him 'something far more deeply interfused'or else we shake our heads and part company. But in Turnereverything is settled in advance. The natural world is immutablywise, and that's that. The proposition's not open to negotiation.He makes no effort to coax or convince those of us *f,o leantowards Camus-like notions of an absurdist universe or whoharbour apocalypdc fears or who just worry about the effectsof soil ...iiot. lio, the sun is 'invincible', 'rhe trees display theirerudition', 'the mountains know/ where they have come from/and where they are going/ and what will happen when we aregone', 'the world/ is infallible as we are not,/ so lean on theworld, / it will not budge'.

The quoted lines raise another difficulty with Turner's verse-its excessive reliance on pathetic fallacies. Not that I'm opposedto the occasional judicious use of personification. I ..,foy thewhimsy of earthworms protesting:

It's easier for you if you saywe all look the same,that's what you sayabout Japanese and Chinese

But as the book proceeds blackbirds, blowflies, srars, clouds,stones, bones, ashes, mountains, trees, the wind, the moon,potatoes, and radishes are also anthropomorphised, and I soonweary of the cuteness of the Disneyland technique. It's ratherlike sitting through a long succession of t.v. advertisements inwhich chimpanzees, chocolate bars, cheese crackers, jars of coffee,and tubs of peanut butter all chatter away cheerily and con-fidentially.

I have trouble with Tilrner's metaphors too. In the past heshowed a flair for unusual similes which make us look at theworld afresh. I recall, for example, the 'portcullis of rain' and

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the 'clouds,/ like a tumble of pandas' from Ancesrors. But thetropes in the current volume seem too often to function merelyas garnishings or decorations. Turner isn't particular either aboutmixing and tangling them. These lines come from 'In the NorthernCemetery':

Row on row

of grey headstonescrowd and challengethe air where it cutsin and out between

the docile stones.

Which stones are challenging here and which are docile? Halfand half? Is it possible to crowd anything (even the air) whileremaining in tidy formation? How appropriate is this rugbyimagery anyway in a poem which is aiming for an elegaic mood?

Continuing with the lapidary theme, here is the conclusionof 'Cemetery':

The moon's whimpering white lightdrapes these headstoneswhich shine like skullson the beach at Gallipoli.

Draped bv light? A light which whimpers? Draped and shining?How luminous are skulls anyhow?

Odder sdll is this image from 'Photograph at the CaledonianGames':

his crash helmetlike a string ofblack pudding tightaround his head

My maternal grandfather and two of my uncles were butchers.I used to ride a motorcycle. I'm not speaking out of ignorancewhen I say there's no readily discernible resemblance betweena black pudding and a crash helmet. 'What's more, the mentalpicture of the poet's father with sausage wrapped round his headso tickles me in its bizarrerie that I'm unable to concentrate onthe remainder of the poem.

3e7

There are many similar distractions throughout the book.Turner's metaphors attempt such strange and arbitrary coo-nections that they pull away from their contexts and assume adadaist life of their own. Light 'genuflects,/ upon the nearby hills'.Clouds 'bruise the atmosphere'. Streams 'flash wickedly'. Hills'are tanned and blistered beneath the sun'.'The earth gasps likea villain/ caught with his pants down.'Tiousers'drop,/ like astarting flag'. Shoes 'smirk at the thought/ of no recriminations'.Later they 'wink in the soft light/ and look like trowels,/ peepingout from under the cuffs'. A forehead 'shines like light on theriver'. Fingerbones move 'like hit men' and flutter 'like moths'.Ashes complain that the wind 'raps' their 'knuckles'. Wild flowersare like 'love letters,,/ unaddressed and cast upon the hillsides'.Memories 'spill unencumbered to shine like chestnuts/ polishedon a mantelpiece'. The author wishes for legs 'with golden hairs/that whirred and twirled'. The impulse towards surreal slapstickand lexical caprice tugs against Tirrner's chosen role as bucolicmoralist and writer of country lyrics in the tradition of Burns,'Wordsworth, Clare, Hardy, R.S. Thomas, Seamus Heaney, andCharles Brasch.

The news isn't all bad. The personality behind these poemsis, as ever, frank, witty, generous-spirited, and imbued with therare courage to admit to vulnerabilities. 'snowstorm' seems tome an admirably tender expression of mature love, even if 'girl'is rather an unwise choice of endearment in the eighties. Butsuch successes are comparatively few. The verse generally needstightening. On the whole, I'm afraid, I think Bones is slapdashwork.

Iain Sharp

THE GLOBE TAPES, ed. Rosemary Menzies, Mike Johnson,Michael Morrissey (Auckland: Hard Echo, 1985 ),2, + Z cassettes.

The Globe Tapes is a package of poetry comprising two cassettetapes and two volumes in which a selection of poems from forty-two writers is presented. The poems were all performed duringweekly readings at Auckland's Globe Thvern, and what a goodidea it is to put poetry in the context of the amiable warmthand domestic feel of a good pub. Poetry ought to be associatedwith pleasure; all too often it is only associated with omniscientteacher-led analysis, and the Globe has clearly given young writersas well as established ones an opportunity to try things, toexperiment, to take some risks. Good fcr the pub too, I should

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think; it gives a visit some performance content other than localpop bands.

There are some problems, though, in going public on tape.Many of the voices sound unrehearsed and some are rather flatand slow. There is often, I suspect, an assumption among literaryperformers that the text is all and that an undirected and largelyunconsidered reading is enough. The difficulty with that is thatwe live in a period when well-shaped, rehearsed and tapedperformances are a commonplace and poor readings can makevery good work sound so amateur. Just to illustrate the pointlisten again to what Laurie Anderson does with words and soundand timing on her 'Big Science' recording. It isn't really a faircomparison because the work has sophisticated recordingtechniques at the producer's disposal but Anderson's work doesoccupy poetic territory and listening to it does point up theimmense difference thinking out and orchestrating performancemakes. Though not in this producdon league, I must say, infairness, that some voices on Th e Globe Tape.s command attention;in this context it is a mix of confidence, skill, a listenable voiceand (usually) , good poem that does it. So, some of these voiceswalked poems about as comfortably as soft leather shoes in vividcolours, but to get to those the listener does have to work throughthe occasionally gauche, the muddy, the vaguely cranky and thecallow.

Predictably, there's a strong urban slant in many of the poems.Iain Sharp's 'The Nevertheless Incredibly Hrppy poem' is talky,buttonholing, incessant, all done at speed and very firmlyAuckland: 'As I was traversing Albert Park after a few litres ofcognac with the/Earl of Seaclifr . .' He goes on in 'Jiving withCharles Brasch' to belabour poor peacefully dead, romanticallyalone (poetically) C.B. with a fusillade of urban decay imageryfrom glue to the hideously familiar ghetto blaster and a sort ofpersistent needling that the poor old devil missed out on thingslike b.p and painted underwear: 'You'll love it Mr Brasch. It'llbuzz you/Quit fretting . ./Let's climb lamp posts./ Yeehal Mindif I call you Charliel Suits you.'I enjoyed the energy and theposturing in the poem; I read it first in the printed text and wassurprised at the pale drawl of the performance-I'd heard itdifferently in my head. Michael Morrissey's 'Advice on Auckland'surveys the same real estate but with a heavier press of wordsthat clogged at points compared with Sharp's swift light touch.David Eggleton must be the fastest image gun in the North:'Body talk' is quicklv away on its toes, the immediate influencesseeming to be the sound of cash registers, breakdancing and the

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voice of the race commentator. Eggleton performed recently inPalmerston North and students, particularly, enjoyed his richattack with images. All three poets celebrate Auckland's paceand violent variety and I felt somewhere behind them was thatperformance tradition of writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (whoonce made an unforgettable recording of 'Dog' and 'Underwear'),Allen GinsberB, Gregory Corso and the wry, warm, lively workof Frank O'Hara. .What an enviable certainty about voice, slang,pausation and the current language the Americans had and have.I detected too, I thought, trace elements of some of the Brits;Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough come to mind ascontributors to this tradition of quick fire, hip, funny-subversive,instant, listenable verse.

Bruce Bissett is in the performance mode of Sam Hunt (I mustsay that the absence of Sam Hunt from this collection seemedunaccountable) and clearly much influenced by him. Bissett beginsin the bar room story mode-'Some of you have probablv heardthis one but never mind.' He has a kind of hard nosed, knowingstyle with none of Hunt's vulnerability, intoning loudly in a centralNorth Island rural twang, snatching a breath between segments.His work is in the line of 'road' poems; there is, predictably,a Mangaweka piece: 'They took the fucking viaduct away'. Hedoes have an innuendo-laden way with his audience who clearlyenjoy the work, particularly a piece about a bit of stray-marriedhanky panky called 'an estranged love affair' which goes somethinglike this:

we held each othercaptive elusive secretlyin the kitcheni ran my hand up soft then hard . .

He is one of the very few performers who had audible exchangeswith his audience-it is an informality that seemed to work.

There are some poems that rehearse current issues: the bomb,nuclear $,aste, the European impact on the Pacific. This kindof content has been a staple of readings but most of the poemswith this kind of direction lumber about heavily amongstsimplifications and clich,l. The most successful poems in thecollection are simply good poems, Bob Orr's 'Black Tiawler',for example, that has the precision of fine drawn water colour,and his extraordinarily vivid 'Child', both of which survive anindifferent reading. Mike Johnson also works in sharp focus fromwhich he's cropped all inessentials. I liked his sense of speakingvoice on the page and especially so when I heard it. Listen tothis:

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I'm stuckwith what I getpretty much

pretty much stuckwith what I get

too late for the niceties

just raw unturned thoughtthat cannot sleep

I kept going back to that. Can you imagine Laurie Andersonperforming it? On the page, it was her voice I heard. MurrayEdmond's pieces are longer but just as concise. I like the weightand movement of 'shack' and the word comes out in his poemclean and sftong and real:

i ; Jkl::l ft:,I"# il';t. o,washed myself clean with it,let its pure language force pour down over meand give me back the smellof salt and earth and ironand the sweet wood smell burned grey by the sun.

He reads well, particularly 'A Patching Together' which is warmand alive; the words have had life breathed into rhem.

I've left Lauris Edmond's set undl last because there is suchrichness in the four poems. She reads with a close up intimacy,the sort of voice you hear, put things down and go and listento, as it is with a very different voice, Sonja Davies reading herbook Rread and Roses on radio. Lauris Edmond has a wonderfulsense of timing when she reads, like very rare, very finely tunedconversation. She has a sense of the dramatic moments in a poemthat she exercises very subtly. There is also her sensuous touchwith language, the images seeming to flower from within. 'LovePoem' is particularly magical:

'We do not speak of ourselves, but aswe walk down the stairs snow falls,coming to lay soft stars on the darktweed of our hearts. !7e brush away foreach other the little messages of death.

I can't leave without mentioning Elizabeth Smither's 'Brutal

40r

Pruning of A Camellia Tiee' which prompted expectancy in a

firmly orchestrated poem. I did enjoy the final seftling of thoselong withheld last words. The best poems have this distinctivevoiie and shape, brevity and focus, and when they're well read,as some of them are, they lodge in the memory, as some of themhave'

Robin Healey

Book Notes(icrrrge C,-hance: Photographs (t)unedin Public Art Gallery, 1986), 103 pp,40 plates.

This catalogue has been published to accompany the first solo showing of GeorgeChance ( 1885-1963), a pictorial photographer of major importance in the canonof NZ art. The foreword outlines the complexity of producing such a large touringshow and goes on to say that 'The present catalogue is intended to be of lastinginreresr,, augmenring the history of Art Photographs in New Zealand.'However despitethe capital letters, the reproductic-rn of the photographs is patchy, with uneven toneneticeable in quite a few of the plates. Limited space does not hamper lTilliam Main'scsncise and informative review of the photographer's art and career. His discussionof Chance's talent and motivation might, in this book, do the most to 'stimulatemore creative fighting' or at least argument about the relative worth of the techniquesand achievements of the Pictorialists and successive 'movements'. Coupled with thebrief notes on technique and expression, often from Chance himself, this short chaptercaters equally well for aficionado and newcomer alike.

f)espite some reservations about quality of reproduction, it is good to see Chancein print as well as on the wall; this book will make a welcome addition to librariesand a useful accompaniment to the exhibition.

Roberr Cross

Wednesdat ro Come, Renee (Victoria University Press, 1985), 50 pp, $4.95'A friend who saw the premibre production at Downstage in August 1984 thoughtboth the play and this rendition of it 'splendid and quite gripping'. lt is the firstef a trilc-rgy (the second, Pass It On, is on stage at the time of writing) about women'sexperiences in surviving traumatic crises in New Zealand's recent history, affirmingthe value of their roles and their points of view, the history the books leave out.

This piece about living through the Thirties Depression is dedicated to her mother,ancl to L.r*" extenr reflects her own family's experience of it (like Ben in the playher father killed himself). The household has women of four generations, from thewandery great-grandmother whose disconcerting remarkings punctuate the dialogue('Monday roday. Tuesday to come') to the thirteen-year oldJeannie; but increasinglyit is lris the mother who takes the dominant role. It is for her to work out a responset6l the bringing home of her dead husband from the relief camp ('You see, whatyou don't understand is that we all have harnesses. And most of us survive somehow'But nor you-you couldn't take it . . .'); and for her to make decisions about responsesto the passing thrc-rugh the town of the unemployed marchers, on their way to anunpredictable confrontarion in Wellington. And she makes them, with an outgoing

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toughness and courage. The interactions are tight and tense, displaying a considerableskill in developing a complex and potent action, in writing live dialogue, and ingiving everyday objects (scones, a mouth-organ) a rich symbolic reverberation.

/.c.R.

z7 poem.s, Kim Eggleston (Strc-rngJohn Press, 1985),30 pp, $10.95.'Come up This Valley' vividly evokes a West Coast pioneer homestead 'where thefrost may sit all dry'; 'Cave-in for Dali' is a surreal celebration of the same terrain.Kim Eggleston's poetry hovers uneasily between fact and fancy, 2S the form too strainsbetween ballad metre and Ginsberg rap. She is at her best, I think, when she toucheswith cc-rol clarity on the personal, as in 'The Back Road Back' about a dispossessedmother: 'It's only the/ crying makes,/ the violets blue.'

On the Line, Lindsay Rabbit with drawings by Jane Poultney (Voice Press, 1985),JZ pp, $9.00.Another elegantly designed volume by Alan Loney, the minimal poems and linedrawings 'move all ways', as Tony Beyer says, in a contemporary dialogue aboutpresence and absence, traces and transcendence. There's a kind of narrative fromemptiness to plenitude, to the discovery of the body not as object named and possessed,rather as space and light. 'It's you/ that inhabits/ my content,' puns the poet, asslippery words of love and former self-consciousness ('a scatter of animals') areabandoned in favour of the unnameable otherness of wonderful presence. The volumeis, as its allusion to Manhire's 'taking off their clothes' suggests, a coolly deconstructedinvitation to romance.

Poerns, Evan Woodspear,/Dean Farran (Hornby, 1985 ),,64 pp, $2.98.There is a robust tradition in NZ c-rf literary sporrs and spoofs, and this volumeis an admirable addition. West Coaster Woodspear, native of 'that narrow strip ofsoggy soil', was an early modernist who worked in a Leemouth ironmongery andwhose works were discovered in a derelict house. The introductions are hilariousin their pedantry and parody-one Yvonne Lacton, so-called neo-imagist fromSpreyclon, is featured. Carelton Brizel, once requester of Berg and Schreker on 3ZRCreymouth in the thirties, now resident of Lugano-Seville, offers a learned analysisof the verse, noting possible influences of Sitwell and Pound. The poems themselvesare admirably awful.

D.D.

Gilmore's Dairy, Lloyd Jones (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985 ), Zl2 pp, $17.95.Lloyd Jones' first novel takes up the farniliar motif of a passage to adulthood. Mc-rssTolley is a sensitive youth living in a small North lsland rown. His formative yearsare spent around the dairy of the book's title. The dairy on Fellon Street provideshis first friendship (with Raymond Gilmore), his first love (Deirdre Gilmore) andan apprenticeship in capitalist lore from the tireless enrrepreneur Gilmore. OstensiblyGilmore's Dairy is simply another narrative of these rites of passage. With a humourand sympathy reminiscent c-lf Morrieson, Jones takes the sensitive Moss through stockadolescent situations. This is not to deny the author's fresh approach, the humourof Moss discovering masturbation or the poignancy of Moss the rejected lovercomposing letters home to Gilmore. The novel ends with a powerful epiphany asMoss returns frclm 'Wellington and university to confront his former self. But Jones

403

foregrounds a broader, social dimension. It emerges in ways both revealing (the rawcapitalist spirit of Gilmore comes to mind) and predictable. Gilmore's Dairy falterswhen it descends into stereotype, such as the university scene. The impulse towardssrxial generalisation is never reconciled with the need to particularise Moss' de-velopment. As a result the central character remains somewhat amorphous, neverquite central.

P.D.

Cirizen O/ No Mean City, John LJ'Connor (Concept, Christchurch, 1985), 88 pp.

In'On the Evidence of his Recent Verse', John O'Connor writes:'Curnow! thoushouldst be living at this hour-lSc-rme claim you are, though God knows how!'The analogy might be flattering to O'Connor, but there is a sense in which Citizeno/ No Mean City embraces both the sort of poetry Curnow writes, and that whichappears in the guise of Whim Wham. Part One of this, O'Connor's second volumec-rf poetry, contains Poems and lrnitations. The tone is contemplative, revealing a

strong consciousness c-lf a poetic inheritance in use c-lf form as well as in explicitreferences to other poets ('John Clare','scribis'). Well-known material is adapted,often cursorily: hence'XX'('And this is Dante greeting his love'), or titles like'HighCountry Wether'and'Arawata Bills'. When the poems are grounded in particulars('XXXVIII (after Ruth Dallas)', 'School,/Series (Haiku)') or location ('The Bay'),they attain an imagistic strength. Too often, however, a self-conscious literarinessgets in the way. The trait is more suited to the Nonsense and Verse of Part Two.The poet's undoubted facility with word-play and verse forms enlivens these topicalpieces. Parodies of Pound and Stead accompany political satire carried off with witand sensitivity. An eclectic collection, which should find a varied readership.

P.D.

Correspondence

StR, 'lt is impossible to define a masculine practice of writing, and this is an impossibilitythat will remain, for this practice can never be theorised, enclosed, coded-whichdoesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulatesthe vaginocentric,/cliterocentric system. . . .' (See lindfa\ L57, p. 55) David Dowlingaccuses me ( ibid, p. 121) of being 'muddled' abc-rut the writing of women. I reverseHelene Cixctus's statement to show what a philosophical and sexist muddle is like.Tb re-state my case: male writers are more concerned with formal experimentationbecause it was a male belief that traditional (male) forms in literature had beenexhausred. Women writers on the other hand-at least those who are 'politicised'-are m()re concerned with the politics of being female, with detecting sexual chauvinismin male 'characters' or patriarchal modes of thought and literary expression.

Dowling is right ro query my use of the word 'high' in 'high formalists'; I meantby it'highlight'or'foreground'nothing more. Hence his counterpointing the'low'mimeticism of Frame is his invention not my argument. Nowhere in my introductionare the 'Neo-Framians' described as 'low'. And as the bias of his own commentsreveals, the women writers who have concerned themselves more with experimentalmera- or postmodern fiction are largely critics such as the extremely muddlecJ Ms.Llixous.

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'Cobbled together' sounds like academic condescension-almost an industry inthis cc-runtry (trit Patrick Evirns's scabrc-rus review of Thc Nett' Fi*ion in the NZ ListenerFt-.b 15).My essay was not'c:obbled together'but evolved out of my reading t-rverthe last decade. My principle concerns were to attack the traditional narrow varietyof realism that has dominated NZ fiction (largely a male variety I might add); pointor.rr that we had gone overboirrd for postmodern poetry and poetics but seeminglyncglected prose; and discuss the 'death of the novel' issue-both its effects andin'r1-rlications for writers in New Zealand. So far as I was aware nc)ne of these topic-shad ever received critical attention in New Zealand pric-rr to my introduction. Myideas-oddly enough quite a few were my own-were girthered from a much widervariery than L)owling's list of three would indicate. This hrings me to our Frenchfriends. 'French theorists...do n()t Lls readily p-rrovide new ways of writing.' quotesf)owling. The relevant quotirtion in full reads: 'French theorists, while suggestingne\\, w,ilys of reading, do not as readily provide new ways of writing. It is the Americ-ansrirther than the French who have provided new ways of writing.' t)emonstration:f)o Lone:y and \Uedde write like Barthes or t)erridal f)o Haley or Else write likeKristevir or Foucaultl No-the models are Olson, Pound, Creeley, Ammons, Williams,Coover, Borges, Poe, Beckett etc.-largely American n-rodels.Critics beget critics irndcreators beget creations.

Mir:hcrel Morrisscl

StR, C. K. Stead as critic is always lucid, interesting, and formidable. Havingacknowledged that, I wish to challenge a number of his assertions and assumptionsin his recent review of the latest Penguin anthology, ''Wedde's Inclusions' (l-andfall155). Firstly, his'favourite'anecdote about Maurice Duggan. It is true that Englishis 'the language that went to the moon' but it got there by abiliry and willingnessro transform conventional modes of thinking. The anecdote quoted exemplifies thekind of 'monocultural oppression' complained of in the graffito that Stead, in turn,complains of. As a literary exercise, try retelling the anecdote from another pointof view. 'A large pakeha with a loud voice, considerably the worse for drink, washolding forth' etc. Maori readers get rather tired of being described in terms suchas 'a large Maori' as if it were they who deviate from the norm. 'He placed hiswhite hand on the bar and gazed at me out of the alien depths of his pale eyes'would be a less usual but equally valid perception in a New Zealand context.(lncidentally, there is a similar episode in Horse, but Baxter, with humour and humaniry,turns the joke around on to his youthful hero. )

While rhinking of Maurice DugBatr, it is interesting to note that Stead has revealedhis blind spot concerning things Maori in his introduction to Maurice Duggan's CollectedScories (1980) 'Maurice Duggan: Language is Humanity', republished in In the GlzssCase (1981). When discussing'Along Rideout Road Last Summer'he dwells onthe silence, dumbness, and inarticulacy of the Hohepa household and concludes thatBuster O'Leary was justified in abandoning it, regardless of the results of his adventuresinvolving Fanny Hohepa's bra and related matters. But he overlooks the parts ofDuggan's story that belie this impression, e.g.

I walked into the shed. Fanny and her daddy were deep in conversationChrist knows what they were saying to each other. For one thing they were speakingin their own language; for another I couldn't hear even that, above the blatherand splatter of the bloody cows and the racket of the single cylinder diesel

Stead is too ready to take Buster at his own valuation, overlooking these unconsciousself-revelations which Duggan cleverly manipulates. Buster's real need to leave is that

405

he has been fooling both himself and the Hohepas, using the Maori characrers asthe easy alternative to facing up to his own problems. It is no accident that Duggangave the girl the name Fanny, for that is about as far as Buster's benighted visiontakes him. The 'bookish lad' is just as much at fault in the communicaton gap asthe Hohepas, if blame is to be apportioned. A.y number of literary allusions donot make a dialogue if they are familiar only to an imagined audience.

All this might seem irrelevant to a discussion of the Penguin anthology exceprthat Stead appears to share Buster's deafness to and unawareness of articulation 'intheir own language'. Keri Hulme in her companion review to Stead's graphicallyconveys the experience of such communication and even anticipates his 'huge yawn'at the new 'good-boyism' that he complains of. At least he does nor defend 'old-boyism', but he doesn't appear to offer much of an alternative except bad-boyism.

Stcirt-l ofters some examples of English translations from the Maori chosen firrtheir banality, presumably the w,orst he coulci find. Take the second one, the firstverse of Bill Kerekere's mihi to Queen Elizabeth. Kerekere is a gifted elder, useclto perfirrming with a grouLr behind him, and a prrofessional in his field. Consideralso the English Poet Laureate's ode tc-r Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother r-rn here-ightieth birthday. Was it n-ruch superior to thisl The one was the original, the otherir trrrnslated remnant ()f a sung anc] choreographed performance.

Now consider the verse by Hera Katene Horvath: 'In the days gone by, Whateverhirl-rtr-rened was Maori.' This is the cry of the colonised, nostalgic for their ancientglory. Apparently it is okay to explore Yeats's Celtic twilight p-,hase, and to marvelu'hen Dylan Thomas weeps u'hik' listening to the fblk poerry of his fellow Welshvillttgers; but not okay to share the lore of our own indigenes, our tuakana, thespiritual guardians of our land before T.\sman, and those to whom many of us aretied by blood. For Stead to chr>ose this particular stanza as an cxample of the p-rointlrc is n-raking displays a remarkable insensitivity to the mood of many Neu, Zealanderstoday.

From a purely poetic point of view, there is much to defend in the taha Maoriof the anthology. For example, Te Aomuhurangi Te Maaka's poem and her translation'Go down, O Sun, out from the Motu river' have the particular sense of place typicalof traditional Maori poetry; it has drama, imagery, detail, and the characteristicallyMaori symbolism of the day's ending suggesting sorrow for life's end. There is nothingbanal, redundant, or discursive here. Similar claims could be made for KaterinaMataira's Restoring the arrcestral house. Surely any literate New Zealander can handlewords like tukutuku, tekoteko, and whariki, as they surely could Ranginui and Tangaroain the poem above. English has always flaunted its capacity to borrow; its strongtide has flowed into many small waterways and there has usually been some backwash,most often of a lexical nature. (Even Stead slips a few Maori terms into his vocabularyto show he's not totally without it.) This poem and others such as Peter Sharples's'Te mihini atea' and Arapera Blank's 'He koingo' move into modern subjects, bilinguallyexpressed. lt is a pity that the two versions could not have been printed on facingpages as was done, for example, with Shattuck's Apollinaire anthologyt; it is a specialdelight to compare them: Arapera, for instance, is quoting from the old haka whenshe says 'from darkness into light!' (eat that, Buster O'Leary); and one iooks twicewhen realizing that the Maori version of her 'magic bringer' was 'taniwha'. It seemscounterproductive to want to deny New Zealanders this sort of pleasure in theirown anthology, while it is still possible.

With the work of writers likc Rowley Habib, Keri Huln-rc anrl Api Taylor, \\,,cilre w'orking closer itgain to the r:entre of the c:ontinuun'r that is Ncw, Zeirlirncl societytorlay. These are tht' messengcrs of the intermecliary zonL.s, the grey areas w,hcrethc solutions to ()ur spriritr,ral problems are going to be firund, if they ilrc to [-rcfirund at all. Sincc the time the New, Zealancl education systcm ontlaw,ecl the speakingof Maori in its schools irnd stiflcd the natural u1-,we[ing exprcssion of its intliger-ror-rs

406

pe()ple, Maori or part-Maori writers who express themselvc-s mostly in English havea special c-laim to be heard; in making themselves whole again through their workthey heal us all. lt is right that they are included in our new anthology.

Trixie Te Arama Menries

I Selecred Writings o/ GuilLaume Apol|ind.ire, Translated with a Critical Introductionby Roger Shattuck (New Directic-rns 1971).

ContributorsDouglns Barbour lives in Edmonton where he teaches at the University of Alberta.He has been co-chairman of the League of Canadian poets and is currently editorialadvisor to NeWest Press. His books of poetry include Visioru of My Crrandfather(1976), The harbingers ( 1984), and Visible Visioru ( 1984). He has recently performedhis sound poetry in Australia and New Zealand.

Reginald Mry was born once upon a time in Toronto, and now, in real life, livesin Christchurch, where he divides his time between eighteenth-century Britain andposr-modern Canada at the University of Canterbury. Not only is he the authorof numerous afticles on subjects from Beovrulf to Bowering and editor of Regionalismand Narionalldentity (1985), h" is also quite tall.G.rry Boire was born in Montreal, Canada and came to New Zealand in 1979. Nowa dual citizen of both countries, he resides in Auckland and teaches eighteenth-centuryEnglish literature and Canadian fiction at the University.George Bowering teaches at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and is the authorof over forty books, including Selecred Poems (1980), A Place to Die (1983), andThe Kenisdale Elegiu ( 1985). His novel, Buraing Watu, won the Governor-General'sAward for Fiction in 1980. He visited New Zealand in 1983.Marilyn Bouering has recently published her seventh book of poetry, The SuniayBefore Winteri she is the author of a poetic drama, C-rrandfather was a Soldicr, as wellas an anthologist of contemporary Canadian lndian poetry. ln 1985 she toured Australiaand New Zealand, reading from her current work-in-progress, Marilyn Monroe: AnyoneCan See I Loue You.

Robert Bringhur.st lives on Bowen lsland, west of Vancouver. He has published ninebooks in the past twelve years, has been instrumental in Native Peoples 'WritinglTorkshops, and is active in Greenpeace. He visited New Zealand and Australia inI 985.Mike Doyle. See l-andfaL 1,52.

Dauid Eggleton See l-andfall 158.

Timothy Findley has been, at various times, an actor, dancer, Hollywood hack, script-writer, dramatist, and novelist. His work has earned many awards, notably theGovernor-General's Award fcr Fiction in 1977 for The Wars.In 1986 he was investedas an Officer in the Order of Canada. He visited Australia and New Zealand thisyear for the Wellington Arts Festival and plans to return to Christchurch in l9B7-88.

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AnneFrench. Born in Wellington, 1956. Currently Managing Editor, Oxford UniversityPress, Auckland. First book due from Auckland Universiry Press early in 1987.Suarr G.gg. Born in Invercargill, 1,92A. B.A.(Hons), Dip.Ed., Post Graduate Cert.of Education, Universiry of London. RNZNVR and RAF l94O-19+4. Between 1945and 1968 held various teaching positions in New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Zambia.Senior Tutor and foundation staff member Technical Institute's Tutor Tiaining Unitfrom L973 until his death in 1982. Short stories publishedinl-andfall and Climare.Kec/in lreland. His most recent collection of poems is Practice Night in the Drill HaLL(OUP). He has been living in England and Ireland for a number of years, but nowresides in Auckland. He was 'Writer-in-Residence at Canterbury (Jniversity for thefirst half of this year.

Robet Kroersch is one of Canada's leading post-modern writers. His books includeFlr"ilands (1975),What the Crou Said (1978), and his most recent collection of poems,Advice ro My Friends (1984).He visited Australia and New Zealand in 1986.

Jonathan l-amb teaches at the University of Auckland in a variety of areas, mostnotably literary theory and eighteenth-century English literature. He has publishedin such journals as ECS, CL, An{ and l-andfall.Kendrick Smirhyman has recently won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry forSrories About Wooden Keyboards.

Hugh Sreuens. Born at Te Kopuru, 1963. Auckland University 1981-2. Travelled inEurope 1983-4. Third year B.A. 1985. In September is taking up a Semester Scholarshipin Munich.C.K. Stead. See Landfall 158.

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