Johnson Goes Bush: Geography and Fiction in Rod Orange

A Benevolent Astronomer: Further notes on L. J. Comrie Lindsay Rollo

Pop-Existentialism in New Zealand Dale Benson

Just after World War Two, when French existentialism was all the rage in Europe and North America, New Zealanders in New Zealand had relatively little opportunity to learn about existentialism or to read contemporary existentialist literature. While the following is by no means an exhaustive account of the books and magazine articles concerning existentialist ideas available in New Zealand during and after World War Two, it will nonetheless suggest that existentialist ideas evoked considerable popular interest in this country – particularly among the younger generation.

In 1941 an article from London entitled “” in Dunedin’s confirms a shortage of books in wartime Britain when it relates, “thirty-seven thousand catalogued books available for purchase two years ago are now unobtainable owing to production difficulties.” In 1943 another article in the expresses the shrinking volume of books in local terms: “In Dunedin an increasing demand has been brought about for second-hand books. War conditions have accentuated this.... The scarcity of good new literature has been very noticeable locally.”

From a clipping file held in the McNab Collection at the Dunedin Town Library, Dunedin, , 6 Dec. 1941; 14 Apr. 1943.

The New Zealand government’s stringent censorship of any literature that it felt might be injurious to the war effort also contributed to the shortage of imported books. According to Nancy M. Taylor in , booksellers were frustrated and their businesses suffered because they could not be sure why their ordered books did not arrive. Was it administrative error, shipping delays, loss at sea or because they were being held by the censor’s office? (2: 997) Taylor adds that because the Progressive bookshops in Auckland and Christchurch and Modern Books in Wellington “represented book demands which were in varying degrees leftist or intellectual” (that is, because their orders often included books the government deemed dangerous), they were hard hit by import restrictions (2: 1001). Taylor further reports how a customs warning against the importation of subversive literature caused to recommend that the nation’s libraries practise self-censorship. As a result, booksellers and librarians tended to order only “safe” books rather than risk money or their import licences on shipments that might be withheld (2: 1013).

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the lists of new acquisitions for New Zealand libraries are very short or non-existent during most of the 1940s. A survey of the between 1939 and 1955 reveals that even a decade after the war, libraries acquired few works by acknowledged existentialist writers or about the existentialist philosophy. It is not until March of 1950 that the records the acquisition of a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s for free issue. A translation of Sartre’s is listed in the November , with listed the following November. Of the American existentialist writers, Richard Wright’s is listed in the fiction list for June of 1954.

Held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

According to Max Charlesworth in , the British philosophical community regarded continental existentialism poorly, even at the height of its popularity in the 1940s and 50s (28). A survey of New Zealand university calendars between 1935 and 1965 indicates that although all of the constituent colleges (later to become universities in their own right) have offered courses in Western Philosophy, existentialism was not studied as a formal philosophy.

Held at the Central and Hocken libraries at the University of Otago, Dunedin.

Even now it is not often studied in Philosophy departments, an indication perhaps that existentialism has had as little credit among professional philosophers in New Zealand as it has in England.

In fact, more New Zealanders have been exposed to existentialism as literature than as a formal philosophy. In , Ngaio Marsh recalls that in the early 1940s the Drama Society at Canterbury College of New Zealand staged Sartre’s (264). Significantly, the production was in English, which would have made it accessible to a wider audience. Judging by a passage in Maurice Gee’s , Albert Camus’ was well known, at least among university students and young professionals during the early 1950s. As Ray Sole says over coffee:

“You see, ... the way I look at it is that we’ve got a longing in us for happiness but the world is silent, or else it gives us back this idiot chatter. We’ve got a deep desire, a deep nostalgia really, for unity and the world disappoints us. Now in the face of all this, all we can do is struggle. The only weapons we have are strength and pride. The only truth we have is in defiance. Meaning is defiance. If there’s any meaning. Ha! Another cup of coffee? Well anyway, that’s how I see it.”

Glenda Goodlad, one of Sole’s audience, does not hesitate to identify the source of his ideas: “That’s how Albert Camus sees it too.... Everyone I know is reading I wish they’d find another book” (92). Although in Frank Sargeson does not explicitly identify any existentialist texts, he does examine New Zealand’s provincial Puritanism against a background of existentialist ideas. Throughout the novella, Sargeson contrasts the puritanical values of his protagonist, Alan, with the vaguely held notions of a group of young beatniks and the rather more cynical world-view professed by Lennie Dick. Against Alan’s naive “of course”, “He would be an engineer -- like his father” ( 9), Sargeson’s narrative suggests that the future is not as predictable as Alan believes. After the unencumbered lifestyle of the beatniks disturbs the established verities of Alan’s engineering studies, Lennie Dick’s blandishments bring the protagonist’s existential uncertainties to a crisis: “as though all he had taken for granted in his life was dislocated” (131). The older man’s description in his journal of the cause and effect of this dislocation clearly reveals Sargeson’s knowledge of popular existentialist ideas. In the passage below, for example, Dick’s comparison of individuals to multi-layered onions recalls Sartre’s warnings about living in mauvais foi or bad faith, when one does not remain true to one’s convictions:

When the ego is so protectively wrapped up that it self-defeats all its endeavours to establish human relations, then it will try to find its own compensation by diffusing itself through the wrappings. But a stiff price will have to be paid -- in the thinning out of the egoistic core. Immediate aims may be achieved in the sense that nerve endings succeed in reaching to the surface, thus appearing to establish some kind of contact with the outside world. But this will be largely a delusion. The contact will be strictly nervous, hence consistently very painful. Urgent need for another protective layer will soon become manifest (147-48).

According to Dick, the onion “is a series of wrappings wrapping nothing.” His description of this central void foreshadows Alan’s behaviour as he peels off three of the four plastic raincoats he had donned to murder those whose empty beliefs and actions had drained his own sense of validity.

Although there were no courses offered in Existentialism in Philosophy departments, Canterbury University College did offer in 1951 and 1952 French 237 for Masters and Honours-level study of an approved subject from twentieth-century French literature or of an approved twentieth-century French author. It was not until the late 1950s and early 60s, however, that works by Camus and Sartre became required reading.

When Lauris Edmond began extramural study through the Massey University College of Manawatu in 1963 she recalls in the second volume of her autobiography, , “French had changed,” adding that

You had to speak the wretched language, not just recite verbs.... Plays were performed ... like Sartre’s ‘’. I was fascinated and appalled at the idea of hell being a cycle of constant small cruelties inflicted by one person on another and repeated through all eternity. This was part of another revolution in my mind and outlook, prompted … by my first encounter with one of the great intellectual and philosophical movements of the century -- existentialism (182).

Edmond’s reading of Sartre and Camus fed her incipient feminism and confirmed that she had given up for good “supposing that God (whatever I meant by that) awaited me in the Anglican service.” (185) She absorbed

a great deal about how [Sartre and Camus] arrived at their by then famous idea. ‘L’absurde’, I discovered, was a name for the anguish of modern man who wants to live forever but can no longer believe he will go to heaven when he dies. From there I followed them to ‘moi, c’est mon projet’: my life is my own, it is all I have; mine -- since God will no longer take it for me -- is the responsibility to find its meaning, to become (as they put it) ‘authentic’ (182-83).

Later Edmond would join women’s groups: “I gave talks about self-determination, harnessed my knowledge of existentialism, the philosophy of personal responsibility, I held forth.” (206). In 1968 she went to Wellington to attend the “Peace Power and Politics Conference,” wanting especially to see Sartre (who did not manage to attend). Later she would read “,” the paper Sartre was to have given (208).

Some readers came across literary existentialism less formally, outside the university. Rhondda Bosworth, in her contribution to the article “,” confirms Sargeson’s interest in existentialist literature. “With Frank’s encouragement,” she recalls, “I read Camus, Sartre” and found that “existentialism was intoxicating” (14).

Despite the wartime dearth of imported books, numerous reviews of New Zealand fiction suggest an awareness of existentialist ideas since well before the early 60s. In a 1949 piece on Erik de Mauny’s , for example, Sargeson compares that novel to by Dan Davin and notes that both authors unsuccessfully explore modern feelings of guilt and anxiety. Although Sargeson does not specifically use the word “existentialism” in his review, when he criticizes de Mauny for not sufficiently digesting a number of borrowed ideas he is probably referring to ideas borrowed from Sartre. (In 1948 de Mauny had published his translation of Sartre’s .) Sargeson’s description of the hunting of Milsom also suggests an idea borrowed from Sartre, from (Bancroft 22), “that in politics it is necessary to get one’s hands dirty”:

In the human world which [Villiers] belongs to, such things happen, he cannot escape from participating in them. But since he chooses not to consent, he is a man tormented by feelings of responsibility and guilt, anxiety and doubt (12-13).

In his 1950 review of , D. H. Munro does not use the word “existentialism” either. Yet when he summarizes the novel’s main idea, “that, since we are caught up in the network, we cannot help suffering and making others suffer: the important thing is to maintain one’s own integrity” (357) he, too, is probably referring to de Mauny’s Sartrean view of the human predicament.

As well as reviews, several magazines available in New Zealand published pieces that treat the topic of existentialism either implicitly or explicitly, in articles or in fiction. In 1945 and 1946 H. A. Mason contributed two articles to magazine: the first, “” criticizes Sartre’s and ; the second, “” criticizes both the original and the English translation of Camus’ . In 1945 A. J. Ayer published two critical studies of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy in a series of articles about novelist-philosophers in . In 1950 his “” appeared in the British . In 1946 a writer for the New Zealand questions, in “,” how long the new “-ism” would last:

Existentialism ... involves the theory that man must create his own essence by throwing himself into world affairs, suffering and battling for what he believes.... Above all, it is the theory that one cannot stand apart from life, but one must consciously take sides. (Kay 9)

In 1946 a New Zealand article reprinted from the , “” describes Sartre as “the prophet of a new philosophy known as Existentialism, which has already divided France into two camps and is also beginning to cause intellectuals in other countries to trip over the party lines” (23). In 1949 published “,” H. H. Rex’s inaugural lecture delivered at the Theological Hall, Knox College, Dunedin.

A detailed list of Rex’s existentialist reading and lectures on Sartre and Dostoyevsky is provided by Albert C. Mooreand Maurice E. Andrew in (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1980), 77n.

In his lecture Rex distinguishes between collectivism and individuality, Hegel and Kierkegaard, describing the latter as “an ‘existential’ thinker” (111-23). Also in 1949 Hilltop, a literary journal produced by the Victoria University College Literary Society, published “” by Lorna Clendon. “” depicts a girl’s fear that she is dying and ends with an existential question: “Now that she was living what would she do?” (4-5) ’s successor, , published Erik Schwimmer’s translation of “” from in 1950. (10-13) The same issue of includes another Rex article, “”:

The other day a young New Zealander touring at present the Continent, wrote to me, ‘For good or for ill the existentialist approach seems to have made its way into almost every branch of life and thought on the Continent. Such a philosophy of despair, crystallizing as it does, thoughts of futility which must be in the minds of many people in our age, seems to me an extremely negative and dangerous contribution!’ He was thinking of Sartrein particular. This is important to note, for existentialism covers a wide range of frequently contradictory views, ranging from militant atheism to orthodox Christianity and varying from an emphatic denial of the possibility of personal communion to an equally emphatic assertion of the reality of the ‘we’ (18).

In 1951 published Rex’s “”, which deals with Sartre’s “uncompromising assertion that man is free” (209).

, posted from Wellington by Roy Parsons between 1947 and 1955, confirms the relative scarcity of existentialist books in New Zealand during the 1940s and 50s. Notes on the inside of the front cover of the 1984 commemorative selection of pieces from explain that Parsons’ small periodical “was a means of bringing attention to books, bookish issues, and of course to the bookshop. There was, in New Zealand at that time, little other publishing of this kind.” A number of the selected articles specifically refer to existentialist publications. In his February 1948 review of Louis Ferdinand Céline’s John Reece Cole comments that “something about recent reading, the Existentialist hysteria and gloom, the disconsolate subjectivism of Davin’s recent war book [] prompted me to turn back to Céline, surely one of the most sardonic and enigmatic figures who interpreted World War I and the aftermath” (Cole 6). The “Books to Come” section of the October/November issue of 1948 foreshadows the publication by Hamish Hamilton of Stuart Gilbert’s translation of by Albert Camus and provides a short review of by Saul Bellow. In the February/March issue of 1949 there is a brief description of Camus in the “People” section and an unfavourable review by David Hall of . In the June/July issue of 1949 there is a reprint of a satirical article by Delamore Schwartz from the entitled “” In the same issue there is a brief description of Gabriel Marcel’s . The March/April issue of 1950 describes Marcel’s in “Books to Come,” characterizing the author as the leader of the French school of Christian Existentialism. Also briefly described under “Books to Come” is Gerard Hopkins’ translation of , the third instalment of Sartre’s . In the July/August issue of 1950 Parsons praises in “” an excellent Wellington production of Sartre’s , even as he scorns newspaper reviews of the play. The May issue of 1953 describes Camus’s in the “Books to Come” section, which book is reviewed in the January/February issue of 1954. In the July/September issue of 1955 David Hall reviews the French edition of by Simone de Beauvoir. In the last issue of October/December 1955, a brief description of Camus’ is listed under “New and Forthcoming Books.”

John Lehmann’s was also available to New Zealand readers,

For the most recent edition of the stories, see Anthony Stones

but its circulation was international. In an essay in charting the history of publishing, patronage and literary magazines in New Zealand, Dennis McEldowney attests to the success of the journal when he explains that “wartime emotion in Britain, both patriotic and vaguely socialist, turned it for a time into a best seller.” Printed on “flimsy grey paper” it published the work of a handful of New Zealand writers who “achieved a very large audience indeed” (Sturm 573).

In 1954 James K. Baxter links one of Sargeson’s stories with France’s literary existentialism:

In the myth of the lost man who has no place in society and scarcely desires it is fully developed. One is struck immediately by the similarity of the world-view implied in this story and that which French existentialists have given a philosophical context and some French novelists a voice. (It is surely no accident that Sargeson’s book was lately translated into French) (172).

Baxter’s reference is to , a translation of by Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire, published in Paris by Editions du Bateau-Ivre in 1946 (King 432).

Several stories from New Zealand have an existentialist flavour. Also by Sargeson: “”, when the scenery looks on indifferently as Fred abandons Ken to drown on a submerged reef; “”, a love story that makes no assumptions about the nature of love; “”, which suggests that the situation of the protagonist, Nick the Dalmatian, can never be fixed; and in which Henry realizes that his life is as random as the wind and he does not know anything. Three war stories, Dan Davin’s “” and Erik de Mauny’s “” and “,” concern characters who realize not only that they do not know anything, but also that they cannot know anything. Because they experience events in front of an indifferent natural backdrop, their problems and successes alike are without meaning. Greville Texidor contributed two short stories she had written in New Zealand: “” suggests that values are meaningless because war kills both pacifists and combatants, and “” shows that everything is subject to entropy.

Finally, Anna Kavan’s “” portrays through Lehmann’s journal one of the most compelling visions of twentieth-century anxiety to come out of New Zealand. The dogs are alien carnivores that conquer an unidentified country and devour its inhabitants. Although death is still inevitable, nothing else in the story behaves according to familiar rules. Compared to Ray Sole at the coffee house, Kavan’s monsters evoke horribly accelerated images of the shedding of significance. Yet both stories suggest that when French Existentialism was popular in Europe and North America it was also evident in New Zealand literature, reflecting the loss of God, the failure of science to ameliorate the human condition and the exhaustion caused by global warfare, when existentialism was “in the air.”

Frame Walks Out Mike Lloyd

Anna Kavan Meets a New Zealand Writer on His Special Day Jennifer Sturm

Anna Kavan, (1901-68) prolific English writer and painter, globetrotter extraordinaire, heroin addict, and friend of conscientious objector Ian Hamilton, lived on Auckland’s North Shore in 1941-42. Following an unhappy childhood and two failed marriages, she was a troubled woman, given to a prevailing sense of despair if not nihilism. Her fragile grip on sanity was sustained by her writing, ‘eliminating through ink’ as Cocteau has said.

Jean Cocteau. (1929). Translated by Margaret Crosland and Sinclair Road. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1957, p.139.

The author of five books by the time she met Hamilton, she went on to write a total of nineteen books, some published posthumously, and almost all autobiographically-based works of fiction. The couple forged a relationship in England in 1939, when Hamilton’s sister Margery began an affair with Kavan’s husband, Stuart Edmonds. They travelled together, initially to Norway, then New York and Mexico, finally stopping in La Jolla, California, where they spent some months before parting company, Hamilton journeying back to Aotearoa/ New Zealand and Kavan travelling with a new male companion to Indonesia. Several months later, by means of some convoluted global meandering through increasingly war-torn shipping routes Kavan found her way to Auckland where she set up house with Hamilton in Torbay, then the quasi-Bohemian and least inhabited of Auckland’s east coast bays.

Intrigued and delighted with her new environment Kavan observed and absorbed, writing every day, according to Hamilton.

Ian Hamilton, interview with Aorewa McLeod. Auckland, 1981. My thanks to Aorewa McLeod for making the audiotape of this interview available to me.

Her observations are recorded in an unpublished manuscript held in the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Kept in an archive which contains drafts and reviews of many of Kavan’s published works, and presumably of limited interest to researchers who have no connection with Aotearoa / New Zealand, the manuscript has gathered metaphorical dust in the sixty-two years since it was written. It may be regarded as either a factual memoir or an autobiographically oriented collection of short stories, there being little to distinguish between the two. Subtitled ‘.’ [sic] the narratives make fascinating reading, and form the basis of my doctoral thesis, which will explore an Aotearoa / New Zealand confluence in Kavan’s post-war writing.

The ms bears the title ‘’, covering a period of five months which relate to Kavan’s decision to leave New Zealand and her eventual arrival back in England. The time frame is September 1942 to January 1943.

Identification of the numerous personages mentioned by Kavan is proving to be a stimulating and often entertaining process.

Hamilton was an expatriate Englishman who had travelled back to his homeland hoping to achieve some success with his anti-war three-act play , prophetically written in 1936, winning the People’s Theatre award when it was performed in the Auckland Town Hall. His social group in Auckland included left-wing lawyer, Frank Haigh and his wife Honey, architect Vernon Brown, photographer Clifton Firth, exiled poet Karl Wolfskehl, and many writers. The group was extremely gregarious, meeting often for company and the exchange of ideas. Kavan’s identification of these people is less specific than the clue-laden portrayals she provides of her less-illustrious Torbay neighbours, indeed, in many cases, the residents of Torbay are actually named, and I have found that, in many cases, their descendants still live in the same houses.

In reading through the typewritten story ‘ my interest was piqued by the following text:

In Takapuna we saw a man whom we knew, a writer of New Zealand stories, walking along the street. H stopped the car at the edge of the footpath just beside the writer, who put his foot on the running board and began talking to us. Standing with his hands in his pockets and his foot on the running board, the writer began to tell us about an American publisher, who had written to him. He likes my stories, he said. He likes the New Zealand touch […] Then he began quoting this thing and that thing out of the letter, demonstrating to us the high esteem in which his stories were held by the publisher […]. The writer then went on to tell us what he intended to do when his contract was signed, how he would travel to New York and walk straight into the publisher’s office and rub shoulders with all the leading writers of the United States. After he had sampled the best that New York had to offer, the writer planned to cross over to England to inspect the literary scene there. And if they pull any superior stuff I’ll know the answer, he said. I’ll give them clearly to understand that I’m one of the conquerors viewing the ruins of Rome and not much impressed by them either […] We accepted all this […] It was probably a good thing we happened to drive through Takapuna just then. The writer got a chance to tell someone about the publisher’s letter and to build himself up a bit […] I knew he never would write a full size book […] so what difference did it make if he was too busy building himself up […] to take any interest in us […]? Finally the writer took his foot off the running board and said So long, and we said So long, and drove on, leaving the writer in Takapuna thinking perhaps that the publisher’s letter really was a talisman to success.’

Is it possible that the ‘New Zealand writer’ could be the same New Zealand writer who, according to Michael King, his biographer, took ‘afternoon strolls around the Takapuna shops’? The chronological information in Kavan’s memoir dates the meeting as having taken place in October 1942. King, in notes that in 1942 Sargeson sent a copy of ‘’ to ‘Lehmann in London […] and another to an agent in NewYork named Harold Ober’ [206]. King later reports that ‘the American copy had arrived safely but the agent was unable to place it.’ [217]

Sargeson had fostered a friendship with Hamilton, finding him to be ‘charming and stimulating company’. Apart from literary and political sympathies the two men shared an interest in the soil, spending time speaking of compost and organic gardening, an interest that was to consume much of Hamilton’s time following his release from prison in 1945. A socialist who was in effect a remittance man, he was well educated and from a wealthy English family. He amused the permanently impoverished Sargeson, who according to Michael King, ‘joked that […] cruising about the North Shore roads in a black sedan, cigarette holder projecting from the side of his mouth, [Hamilton] resembled nothing so much as a glamorous remittance man.’ Graeme Lay recalls Sargeson’s observation that Hamilton and Kavan looked alarmingly like ‘a Chicago mobster and his moll.’

Graeme Lay. Telephone interview with author. 27 Feb.2004.

In his autobiographical Sargeson records that ‘In 1946, despite paper shortages and bureaucratic controls, Mr John Lehmann published .’ Characteristically immodest, he continues, ‘Say I’m conceited if you like, but from somewhere about the time of I never much doubted my own ability.’ [355-6] I propose that, given the chronology, the proximity, and the social connection, the ‘New Zealand writer’ of whom Kavan speaks somewhat disparagingly was, indeed, Frank Sargeson.

Roads Around Home: Dan Davin Re-visited Denis Lenihan

‘And isn’t history art?’

‘An inferior form of fiction.’

Dan Davin: , p 112

In 1996, Oxford University Press published Keith Ovenden’s . It is a substantial work of nearly 500 pages, including five pages of acknowledgements and 52 pages of notes, and was nearly four years in the making.

In the preface, Ovenden makes the somewhat startling admission that ‘I believed I knew [Davin] well’ but after completing the research for the book ‘I discovered that I had not really known him at all, and that the figure whose life I can now document and describe in great detail remains baffingly remote’. In a separate piece, I hope to try and show why Ovendenfound Davin retreating into the distance. Here I am more concerned with the bricks and mortar rather than the finished structure.

Despite the considerable numbers of people to whom Ovenden spoke about Davin, and the wealth of written material from which he quotes, there is a good deal of evidence in the book that Ovenden has an imperfect grasp of many matters of fact, particularly about Davin’s early years until he left New Zealand for Oxford in 1936. The earliest of these is the detail of Davin’s birth. According to Ovenden, Davin ‘was born in his parents’ bed at Makarewa on Monday 1 September 1913’. Davin’s own entry in the 1956 records that he was born in Invercargill. Ovendencorrects himself in his subsequent entry on Davin in (vol 5, 2000).

The small Southland town of Makarewa continues to cause Ovenden difficulty. He places it ‘northwest of Invercargill’ but the map shows it to be due north. It figures largely in the Davin family history, as it was here that Davin’s mother’s family – the Sullivans – settled, and where his mother went to school. It was here too that his aunt Annie settled with her husband Harry Dooley, and where Davin’s parents lived immediately after they were married. The Sullivans and the Dooleys both lived in Flora Road, Makarewa, as did Davin’s uncle, Dan Sullivan (see Tom Hogan’s piece in , edited by Janet Wilson, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2000). Harry Dooley was the model for Richard Kane in Davin’s novel, , which is set in a place called Oteramika.

Ovenden refers to Dooleyas ‘Doley’, and he writes of Dooley’s ‘small farm at Oteramika’. Davinwas reluctant to use or identify real places in some of his novels: in he does not name either Invercargill or Dunedin, although it is plain from the detail given that they are the places described; and in , Otautau, the birthplace of his wife, Winnie, becomes Wairata. For those who have been to Makarewa, it is obvious that this is the model for Oteramika. There is (or was) a place called Oteramika, correctly identified in as near Woodlands. This town too causes Ovenden some trouble, as he puts it ‘twelve miles to the north of Invercargill’, whereas in fact it lies to the east, on the old railway line to Dunedin.

Railways in Southland are another source of confusion for Ovenden. For Davinto visit his grandparents at Makarewa, Ovenden writes, ‘meant a journey on the Wairo branch railway line’. There are two errors here. ‘Wairo’ should read Wairio, and the branch line to that place starts at Makarewa, going west to Thornbury and thence north through Otautau. The main line continued north from Makarewa to Kingston, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, and it was on this line that Davin’s maternal grandfather had worked. Near Otautau is Tuatapere, where Davin and his future wife, according to Ovenden, attempted to engineer a meeting at the races on New Year’s Day 1932. There were, however, no races (in the sense of horse races) at Tuatapere on New Year’s Day or any other day, as there is no racecourse there. What takes place – or perhaps took place – there on New Year’s Day is or was the Tuatapere Sports, where humans rather than horses competed.

Ovenden also has difficulty with Southland hotels. On page 20, writing of Davin’s father in ‘dry’ Invercargill in the 1920s, Ovenden that ‘prohibition was not in force in the surrounding county, and the White House [hotel] on Bay Road, just across the boundary, was close enough to the railway station and the goods yard to offer temptation’. While it is true that Bay Road was then just across the boundary, it had no hotel on it, the White House being some miles further out at what was then Wallacetown but is now called Lorneville.

According to a somewhat muffled explanation by A W Reed (:Wellington: AH & AW Reed 1975), what is now Lorneville was until 1930 called Wallace Junction by the Railways Department. The name was changed, on Reed’s account, because it created confusion with nearby Wallaceville, even though this was a road and not a railway junction. Lorneville took its name from nearby Lorne Farm. A further element in the confusion - not mentioned by Reed - is the presence nearby of Wallacetown, a little further away from Invercargill. It may be that explanations like this are partially responsible for what seems to be (to everyone except the natives) the impenetrable geography of Southland. A further example of the confusion - about the same small area, and from the same publisher - is James McNeish’s (Wellington: AH & AW Reed 1957), in which the White House is located at ‘Wallacetown Junction’ which was ‘just across the no-licence boundary’ when Invercargill was dry; two pages later, we read that the White House ‘was originally...built to serve the adjacent Lorneville stockyards’. For the record, the pub at Wallacetown is the Green Roofs.

There were two brewery depots just across the boundary on the corner of Bay Road and North Road, beyond the reach of the prohibitionists. The depots’ locations and activities are described in Monte Holcroft’s (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1976) which is listed as one of Ovenden’s sources.

Aspects of Davin’s life at the University of Otago are a fruitful source of errors. Thus the Dean of the Faculty of Law at Otago during Davin’s time, Aubrey Stephens, is repeatedly referred to as ‘Professor’. It was not a title Stephens ever claimed for himself. His entry in the 1956 shows that he was a barrister and solicitor, and only a part-time lecturer in law; even in 1956 there was no professor of law at Otago. Similarly, Ovenden describes Dr A C Aitken, formerly of Otago, as being ‘already Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University’ in 1931. The 1956 has Aitkenshowing himself as not ascending to the chair until 1946.

Ovenden’s description of the University of New Zealand and the University of Otago in the ‘thirties does not altogether correspond with the facts, either then or twenty or more years on, while the University of New Zealand lasted. It described itself as ‘a federal university’ and was concerned that expensive faculties were not unnecessarily duplicated by the constituent colleges.

While as Ovendennotes, Otago had in the ‘thirties the only schools of medicine, dentistry, mining, home science and commerce, he fails to note that Canterbury (established 1874) and Auckland (established 1882) also had special schools (a range of engineering courses in Christchurch; architecture, fine arts and some engineering in Auckland). Thus while students came to Otago from all over the country as Ovenden claims, this did not make it unique, as the same was true of Christchurch and Auckland. By the time Wellington got going in 1899, the special school prizes had all been awarded, but it too had students from all over the country, notably those who went to Wellington to progress in government service – like Davin’s elder brother Tom.

Ovenden’s claim that the existence of the special schools made Otago ‘qua university – in the full meaning of the term – the best place to go’ conveys the impression of students being on the same campus exchanging ideas. In fact the medical and dental schools, the two most populous, were some distance from the main campus in Union St. In the ‘thirties (the same was true in the ‘fifties), Davin would have had very little contact during the day with medical or dental students (apart from freshers doing pre-med science, who were at Union St), while at other times he would have come into contact only with the small minority of them who shared his interests – the more so as he did not live in a college.

Ovenden also confuses Davin’s Otago degrees, which were BA (majoring in English and Latin, completed in 1933), MA (in English, completed in 1934), Diploma of Honours in Arts (in Latin, completed in 1935) and Hon LitD (awarded in 1984). Ovendenhas Davin completing an MA in Latin in 1935 and being awarded an ‘hon D. Litt” in 1984.

Sadly, even Davin’s alma mater, the University of Otago, makes errors about him. It now publishes, mainly for alumni, the . The October 2002 issue contained a piece on Rhodes Scholarships which included a list of Otago winners. Davin’s entry read: BA (completed 1933), MA (1934), HonLitD (1984) - English Language and Literature (as field of study). When I queried the accuracy of the entry, back came the reply that despite three checking processes, the entry was wrong: there should have been a 1935 entry ‘Diploma of Honours in Arts (Latin)’, and the field of study should thus have read ‘English and Latin’.

Errors of omission as well as commission also abound. Thus in his discussions of the meetings of the Rhodes Scholarship Committees in 1934 (when Davinwas unsuccessful) and 1935 (when he succeeded), Ovenden nowhere mentions that J A Hanan, who took the leading role in blocking Davin’s candidacy in 1934, was also from Invercargill. The Hon Josiah Alfred Hanan (1868-1954) was Invercargill as well as New Zealand establishment. Lawyer and civic boy-wonder – councillor at 26, the first native-born, and youngest, mayor of Invercargill at 27, member of Parliament at 31, first Invercargill cabinet minister – his public career was in the end distinguished more by length than height. He remained the Liberal member for Invercargill until 1925, when he ascended to the Legislative Council where he remained until 1950, aged 82, the year the Council was abolished. He held various portfolios for a few months in 1912, and again in in the wartime coalition between 1915 and 1919, his main interest being education. In 1929 he was elected the first Pro-Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, having been on the Senate since 1917, and from 1935 to 1945 he was Chancellor.

With this background, Hanan may well have taken the view that (apart from the allegations which he used to get Davin ruled out in 1934) Rhodes Scholarships were not for the likes of Davin: Irish, Catholic, the son of a semi-literate railway worker. If that was Hanan’s view, many New Zealanders of his class and time would have shared it. Davin ‘was not the Rhodes Scholar type’in the view of his contemporary Ida Lawson ( p. 231)

As Ovenden notes, what tipped the scales in 1935 was the support of the Chief Justice who had other information from Dunedin concerning the allegations. Again, he might reasonably have mentioned relevant background, as Sir Michael Myers (1873-1950) was the converse case to Hanan. Born in Motueka on the West Coast of the South Island, the thirteenth child of a Jewish merchant, Myers – like Davin– ascended on merit, and became the first New Zealand-born Chief Justice. Again like Davin, he came from an ethnic and religious minority, and was born in a small town. The allegations apart, Myers may well have recognised Davinas a fellow-traveller.

The details of Hanan and Myers are taken from the entries about them in .

On page 280 of the biography, Ovenden mentions Dorothy Hodgkin ‘the brilliant biochemist’ whose son Luke married Davin’s daughter Anna in 1958. The only other mention of her is on page 385, when at the same time as Davin received his CBE (July 1987), she ‘was awarded the Order of Lenin’. This is very puzzling: why should Ovenden regard the award of this Order as worth mentioning, but not the fact that she was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964?

Ovenden also has the disconcerting habit of making bald statements, and subsequently contradicting them. Thus on page 20 Davin’s father, Patrick, ‘was never heard to swear’; but on page 68, in an somewhat repetitive sentence, Davin is ‘surprised, for the first time, to hear his father swear (which he had never heard before).’ On page 205, Davin‘might easily have...purchased a house...but he never sought to do this’; four pages on, however, he and his wife buy the house they had been renting for 23 years. On page 199, Davin does not ‘bother to apply for any of the medals to which he was entitled’; but on page 260 he does just that.

Regrettably, Ovenden is not the only commentator who gets lost on the roads around Davin’s home. Professor (of English at the University of Otago) Lawrence Jones edited a reissue of in 1976 (Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press), and it came equipped with the academic apparatus of an introduction, 11 pages of learned notes, and three maps. I leave the weightier matter of the introduction until another time.

The maps resemble Ovenden’s errors: in Invercargill, most streets crossing Tay St from north to south change their names, so that when Dee St reaches Tay St it does not, as the relevant map claims, keep its name, but becomes Clyde St where – ironically – Davin first attended the Marist Brothers school. The map gets the other end of Dee St wrong too: it has the North Road beginning at Spey St in the central business district, whereas in fact it begins further north where Dee St meets the Waihopai River (helpfully shown correctly on another map). Venus St is not mentioned in the novel, but is shown in capital letters on one map as the street in which the Hogans lived. While Venus St is near Morton St where the Davins lived, the point of this map reference is hard to discern.

Railways also lead Jones astray. When explaining the railway tablet system, Jonesrefers to it being ‘in operation on at least the Invercargill-Winton section of the express’s run by 1903’. The express went from Invercargill to Dunedin, and Jones’first map makes it clear that it did not go through Winton, which lies north of Invercargill, but initially east and then north east to Dunedin. The stop it made at Charlton, near Gore, was to enable punters to go to the Gore Racecourse, not the Gore ‘Race Track’, as Jones has it, introducing an Americanism. Or would they say ‘Racetrack’?

Real people cause Jones real problems. ‘The Most Reverend Daniel Mannix’ is described as being ‘Archbishop of Melbourne 1917-42’. In fact His Grace, to give him his proper style, occupied that see from 1917 until his death in 1963. The dates, and indeed the see, are of secondary importance, however, as the reason why the Davins honoured Mannixwas that he was a very public Irish nationalist, a fact not mentioned by Jones. Following the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 against the British, the Irish leaders were executed, an act which persuaded Mannix and others to support Sinn Fein, the organisation behind the Rising, including its wish for an independent Irish Republic. Together with his opposition to conscription in Australia during the First World War, these views made Mannix a controversial figure but one much loved by Irish Catholics in Australasia and elsewhere.

Mannix’s wit also endeared him to the same groups. In 1920 he set sail for Rome via the United States and Ireland. He was warmly welcomed in the United States, but as his ship approached Ireland, the British Government had him arrested on the high seas by the Royal Navy, barred him from entering Ireland and had him taken to Penzance. ‘Since the Battle of Jutland’ [in 1916], Mannix observed, ‘the British Navy has not scored a success comparable to the capture of the Archbishop of Melbourne without the loss of a single British sailor.’ Not only that, but ‘the Royal Navy has taken into custody the Chaplain-General of His Majesty’s Forces in Australia’.

For Mannix, see B A Santamaria: (Melbourne University Press 1984).

Professor Jones is equally inaccurate about Eamon de Valera, whom he describes as ‘President of the Irish Republic from 1919 to 1922’. There was neither republic nor president in those years. In fact de Valera held that office from 1959 to 1973. The earlier office was President of the Dail (the Irish Parliament), which although comprising duly elected MPs, was self-proclaimed. The MPs had been elected in 1918 (and again in 1921) to Westminster, but did not take their seats there. Instead those not in gaol or in hiding in 1919 assembled in Dublin to form the Dail, and after his release from gaol later that year de Valera, who was also the ranking survivor from the 1916 Rising, became the President of that body. Again, the offices held at the time were only marginally relevant to the Davinsand their kind: de Valera was the local and international face of Irish nationalism, and revered because of that – something else which Jonesfails to mention.

For de Valera, see the Earl of Longford and Thomas P O’Neill: (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd 1970).

Jones has trouble with other aspects of the Troubles, as the period covering the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War is known. Michael Collins was not, as Jones has him, ‘the leader of the Sinn Fein in guerilla warfare against the English, assassinated in 1922’, but rather Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander-in Chief of the pro-Treaty forces at the time he was killed in action in 1922 during the Civil War. Nor were the Black and Tans ‘the hated English auxiliaries used in the attempt to suppress the Irish revolt of 1920’; they were British ex-soldiers and sailors recruited into the Royal Irish Constabulary 1920-21 during the Anglo-Irish War, and ‘distinctly different’ from the Auxiliaries, who were British ex-army officers forming the Auxiliary Division of the Constabulary at that time.

See S J Connolly (ed) (Oxford University Press 1998).

Nineteenth century Irish history is also a source of errors. While ‘the peelers’ are policemen, as Jones notes, the origin of the term is not, as he has it, ‘the Irish constabulary founded in Ireland by Robert Peel, Minister for Ireland 1812-1818’. Peelwas in fact Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1812-1818 (where he was known as ‘Orange Peel’, because of his anti-Catholic attitude) during which time he established a ‘Peace Preservation Force’; the Irish County Constabulary was founded in 1822 by his successor; and the term ‘peeler’ (like ‘bobby’) probably derives from the London Metropolitan Police, established by Peelas Home Secretary in 1829, although the authorities seem to be divided on the last point.

Jones follows the account given of the origin of ‘peeler’ in Brewer’s (Cassell Publishers Ltd, various editions since 1870). More detailed and more scholarly accounts appear under the entries on ‘Peel’ and ‘police’ in and also in Juliet Gardiner (ed) (Penguin 2000).

Pre-nineteenth Irish history brings Jones further unhappiness. He describes ‘wild geese’ as ‘self-exiled Irishmen after the Treaty of Limerick (1691) and, by tradition, all Irishmen who lived in Europe rather than in an island ruled by England’. It is in fact a term applied to those who left Ireland to serve in foreign armies (some of which fought against England) during the 18th century. Davin’s reference to ‘the fleeing rebellious earls’ is explained by Jonesas ‘The Flight of the Earls, Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell... to France in 1607’. There was a third fleeing Earl: Cuconnacht Maguire. Brian Boru on Jones’ account was ‘high king of Ireland 962-1014’, but other scholars have him as King of Munster 976-1014.

See

The expression ‘per omnia saecula saeculorum’ is translated by Jonesas ‘to all eternity, for all the secular ages’. It might mean that literally, but to Catholics of Davin’s generation, and mine, it is better rendered as ‘for ever and ever’, this being the translation used in the Catholic prayers of the time.

Some of the language in the novel is intriguing, and even to modern ears mysterious, but Jonesfails to explain some words. While ‘a shicker’ means a drunk, as Jonesexplains, he does not comment on what ‘a bonzer’ is (a description used by Paddy of his ferret, Pompey), nor ‘dicken’ (in contemplating the disadvantages of marriage, Andy Saunders says to himself ‘Dicken on that for a joke’). , a magisterial work edited by H W Orsman (OUP Auckland 1997), supports Jones’ explanation of ‘a shicker’, and Davin’s use of ‘a bonzer’ (‘someone or something outstanding, fine...’) and ‘dicken on that’ (‘an exclamation or interjection of disbelief, disgust etc’ adding ‘now in infrequent use’). Curiously, the dictionary uses as a source for ‘dicken’ but not for the other two words (although it does use and as sources for ‘a shicker’).

I do not recall the noun form from my youth in Invercargill, but the verb form ‘shickered’ was common, although perhaps not in front of ladies. Not until years later in Australia did I discover that it is a Yiddish word (see also the chapter on Itzik Manger in ). ‘ Bonzer’ is not a word I recall from New Zealand (except in the Australian radio programme ‘Dad and Dave’), and my memory is that in Australia in the 1960s it was used only by older Australians and without the indefinite article (‘that’s bonzer’). It’s rare now. Similarly, ‘dicken’ was not a word I had heard before coming to Australia, and I have since heard it only rarely and only in South Australia. For those interested in such matters, some of the Australian authorities are interesting. In his (Fontana/Collins 1980), Professor (of English at the University of Sydney) G A Wilkes has the only noun form of ‘shicker’ as meaning liquor, not its consumer to excess. None of his examples of ‘bonzer’ matches Davin’s usage. He declares ‘bonzer’ to be obsolescent, and ‘dickon’, as he calls it, obsolete. The (1976) describes ‘shicker’ as ‘Australian slang’. ‘Bonzer’ is said to be obsolescent, but not ‘dicken’.

Does any of this really matter? So long as one knows that peelers are policemen, for example, does it matter what body of constabulary established by Sir Robert Peel gave rise to the term? Well, no and yes. Each error is in and of itself of little moment and might be ascribed to human error, bad editing and the like. It is the kind and quantity however which matter, from two aspects. The first is that, particularly in Ovenden’s case, the author’s credibility as an authority on Davin suffers from the death of a thousand cuts. Each cut, in and of itself, is a trifle, a scratch; but the cumulative effect can be fatal. And what about those myriad other assertions about Davin, the reader might ask, which are not so easily checked?

Secondly, the situation is like the parable in St Matthew’s Gospel (25.14-30) of the man on his way abroad who summoned his three servants and gave them a few talents, each in proportion to his ability. Their master eventually returned and called the three servants to account. The two who turned a profit were told that as they had shown they could be faithful in small things, they would be entrusted with greater, while the one who had buried his single talent in the ground and gave it back to his master when he returned was condemned as wicked and lazy. As Ovenden and Jones have shown a lack of care in small things about Davin, the suspicion arises that they will be careless with the larger issues about him. I hope to examine in a future piece whether this suspicion is well-founded.

Writers rush in where theologians fear to tread: the artistic problem in and Tim McKenzie

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?

(Rilke, I, trans. A.S. Kline)

... though what if earth Be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

(, V.574-576)

Q: What do you get if you cross a wine-loving supernatural being with a small village?

A: It depends. If you’re a contemporary New Zealand reader, your answer will probably be , Elizabeth Knox’s acclaimed novel about angelic visitations to a nineteenth century French village. However, seventy years ago, the same riddle might have been answered with reference to , a novel by T. F. Powys about the visit of a divine wine-merchant to a Devonshire village in the early twentieth century. In what follows, I do not wish to suggest that Powys had any direct influence on Knox. Instead, I consider what these novels suggest about the artistic problems that inevitably attach to any fictional exploration of Christian theology. While both and feature supernatural actors taken from the Christian story, their portrayal differs significantly from portrayals of the same characters in more orthodox narrations of the story. Ultimately, I wish to suggest that these variations are intrinsic to the way that these ambitious novels successfully meet the artistic problems of imaginative engagement with Christian theology.

Bringing supernatural characters from the traditional Christian narrative to the imaginative page is a difficult task. In many readers’ minds, a work as magisterial as has failed in the attempt. That failure has been remarked mostly in Milton’s portrayal of God, but there are also mutterings about the unfallen angels.

See Alastair Fowler’s Introduction to , 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1998) pp. 39-40.

One-dimensionalism and anthropomorphism are among the more regular charges. Yet, as the characters in and prove, supernatural figures need not be artistically uninteresting. Readers are invariably engaged by Knox’s sinuous and finely drawn Xas, the angelic protagonist in , while the wry and wistful caricatures of the divine Mr Weston and his assistant Michael in Powys’ novel are similarly attractive. In the case of , the interest of the novel depends on a vigorous rendering of Xas, because the story relies on extensive exchanges between him and his human friend, Sobran, such that, without a credible portrayal of Xas, it would inevitably fail. Yet the successful realisation of Xas comes as something of a surprise to readers of . In , the successful realisation of Satan and his fallen angels is generally considered to depend on the fact that they are fallen and therefore interesting, rather than perfect and therefore remote. While eventually reveals that Xas is one of the fallen angels, this revelation occurs some way into the story. Readers accept the novel’s angelology and grow fond of Xas before the disclosure of his fallen status. This is achieved by progressive revelation of fascinating information about angelic life: Xas’s friend in Damascus, his passion for flowers and wine, his enigmatic status as the subject of a Treaty between God and Lucifer. Together with the titbits of information he reveals about heaven, these details create an engaging portrait of an angelic character about whom the reader wishes to hear more, and about whose ontological status the reader makes several assumptions. In this manner, Knox succeeds in portraying an angel whose interest to her audience does not depend on his fallenness.

It is notable, however, that this interest comes through what is apparently, on the surface at least, a traditional Christian framework. The core elements of the Christian metaphysic are present, and they neither limit artistic licence nor hinder the novel’s achievement. Rather, they provide the essential parameters for the development of the narrative. God’s in his heaven,and Lucifer is in hell (or otherwise at large), working always to frustrate God’s designs. Christ features too, even if he is seen solely through Xas’s retrospective recollection of various events from Christ’s incarnation, including the harrowing of hell (123) and the temptation in the wilderness (238-239). Together, these characters and events mean that the novel is a work neither of entirely original fantasy nor of the untrammelled imagination, but that its narrative is developed within the received boundaries of the Christian story.

The same is true of . Although its allegorical form distinguishes it clearly from , it shares a similar core of key personnel from the Christian universe. God appears in the guise of Mr Weston, a wine merchant on a sales trip through the towns, villages, highways and by-ways of Southwest England. His assistant on this trip is the eager Michael, recognised through the novel’s allegorical lens as the archangel of the same name.

The novel also features hints to his identity: Michael once “by his strength and courage, quelled a mutiny that arose amongst the workers in Mr Weston’s bottling department” (17).

The devil has a smaller role than has Lucifer in the drama of , but he is still present. He features as a lion kept in the back of Mr Weston’s van, who brings havoc among Mr Weston’s adversaries, and is thus clearly recognisable as the “roaring lion” of 1 Peter 5:8, the lion who carries “Mrs Vosper to hell” (234), and, in Mr Grunter’s unforgettable words, claws “the wicked same as our cat do the wold ‘oman’s chair covers” (235).

Similar references are found at pages 223, 226-227, 229-230, and 239. The novel also hints that Satan may exist as a rival merchant to Mr Weston (“for I believe another dealer visits you” (218)).

Jesus has his place too, although as in , he is mentioned only in passing, mostly by reference to his unfortunate death (53).

Rendering these beings believable in a post-Christian age poses quite a different artistic task to that which faced Milton in the seventeenth century. Of course, it is, as Sidney might say, a natural part of the “vigour of his own invention” for the poet to translate other worlds into the lives of his readers. Yet this is uphill work for writers in a sceptical age, where most readers lack common awareness of the biblical story and so are naturally inclined to view its supernatural characters with incredulity. The reception history of may be a case in point: it is when society’s uncritical Christian belief wanes that Milton’s readers begin to doubt en masse the success of his theodicean enterprise. Since most contemporary readers hold assumptions very different from those shared by Milton’s first audience, the believability of God and Lucifer in both and becomes all the more impressive.

Kate De Goldi, ‘’, 197 (Autumn 1999), 127-129, p. 129.

In large part, the two novels achieve this believability by managing to bypass their readers’ expectations about religion. Readers of , for example, accept as they are told that hell can be reached from a salt dome in Turkey. They are similarly taken with the romance between the archangel Michael and the romantic human, Tamar Grobe, in . In both cases, the novelists stage-manage such displacement of disbelief by giving imaginative twists and energy to their religious frameworks. From the start of , Knox engages her reader by means of imaginative interpretation of the supernatural elements, as in the initial, very physical arrival of the angel Xas in “wing, pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers” (9), right through to the majestic realisation of Lucifer’s unexpected arrival to operate on Xas. Though Lucifer’s arrival is terrifying, his terror lies more in his splendour than in any evil he might represent. Such splendid imaginative representation of the angelic beings is matched by the delightful touches of irreverence with which Xas recollects various received events of religious narrative, irreverence that stops the reader from assigning the events to the theological rubbish bin. Xas’s memory of Christ’s preaching at the harrowing of hell, for example, portrays neither the unequivocal triumph of Christ nor the vanquished terror of the demons which Langland and Dunbar record when they deal with the same event.

Compare Dunbar’s ‘’ with its “campioun Chryst”, at whose presence the “divillis trymmillis with hiddous voce”; and Passus XVIII of the B text of Langland’s .

Instead, Xas’s ironic memory underplays the whole event: “We didn’t hide. We hung about like a lot of bold moths, as I recall. Christ was preaching to souls, not bodies. He didn’t say anything we hadn’t already heard” (123). The resultant picture is one of fallen angels exhibiting the casual half-interest of bodgies at a milkbar in a rock and roll spoof, listening to familiar tunes on the jukebox.

The gently irreverent characterisation of God as a forgetful wine-merchant in works to similar effect. Mr Weston’s immodest delight at his own authorial talents offers a faintly sardonic perspective on conservative doctrines of biblical inspiration, as does his tendency to correct the misappropriation of the bible by those who take it too seriously.

Eg: “...it is certainly strange that even those who should know my book the best have the poorest opinion of what we sell” (46). Compare Mr Weston’s pity for the poet Cowper (“I was always vastly sorry for him because he was so firm a believer in the Bible … [N]o poet should ever believe the words of another” (207)), and his wry dismissal of Dr Johnson’s conversion after reading William Law’s (212).

Similarly, Michael’s indispensable secretarial and public relations services to his somewhat absentminded master highlight the dangers that attend an anthropomorphic view of God. Thus, Michael acts as reader to cover for Mr Weston’s failing eyesight (35), fills the gaps in Mr Weston’s failing memory (46), and apologetically supplies politically correct amendments to his master’s rhetorical excesses:

[Mr Weston:] ‘... I will content myself by saying that, in all the careful process of the making of our wine ... no plan has been overlooked, no new and improved system left untried, no expense or labour spared, to perfect is qualities, so that our wine may be a suitable drink for all conditions of men.’

‘And women,’ murmured Michael. (46)

Humorous interpolations such as these are common to both novels, yet it is not their humour alone that engages readers. In both cases, the novels’ successful depiction of the major players in Christian theology depends on a degree of heterodoxy. The pantheistic death-wish that marks the allegory of is quite unlike the celebratory humanism of , yet despite their differences, both captivate their readers by departing from the dominant “received conceits of Christianity”,

De Goldi’s phrase (p. 128).

while retaining their apparently orthodox guise. Yet more than this, both must necessarily depart from theological orthodoxy in order to sustain their respective trajectories.

In both novels, the nature of God is crucial to this departure. begins in apparent orthodoxy, with a beautifully succinct description of the nature of God, a description of which St Paul might be proud:

‘All angels love God,’ the angel said, ‘and have no other. He is our north. Adrift on the dark waters still we face Him. He made us – but He is love, not law.’ (12)

The juxtaposition of love and law in this formula represents authentic Pauline theology; it is also very similar to expressions from the gospel.

eg: Galatians 5:18: “But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law”, or Matthew 22:36-7: “‘which is the greatest commandment in the law?’. Jesus said unto him: “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”.

Yet as the novel unfolds, elements emerge which separate the theological universe of from these roots. The most obvious of these is Xas’s Gnostic conviction that God did not make the world, the heresy for which Xas was apparently evicted from heaven (100). Yet this simply presents in its clearest form the view of God seen throughout the novel. De Goldi probably goes further than the evidence permits when describing the novel’s God as “an arrogant, obsessive ideologue, as venal in his emotions and responses as any human”.

De Goldi, p. 127.

Nonetheless, the picture of God which emerges is confusingly and deliberately contradictory. Early on, Xas repeats a series of expected pieties (“God is just and merciful” (36); being with God is consciousness of glory (49), God loves both the fallen angel and his human friend, Sobran (83)). Alongside these conventionalities is reference to God’s puzzling silence which suggests an inscrutable mixture of divine awe, terror, compassion and sadness: “He didn’t speak to me, just took me and held me in Heaven’s ice and – terrible – His sorrow“ (81). There is a positive edge to this inscrutability, but it sits simultaneously alongside the suggestion that God is “obtuse” (174); perhaps even capricious or impotent. “I don’t know what God intends”, says Xas on one occasion (34), while there are certainly suggestions of an indeterminate dualist competition between Lucifer and God, in which God is thwarted by the Loki-ish tricks of the perfectionist Lucifer. The suspicion remains that God demands obedience and gives no explanations (184) either because he is not all-good, or because there are no explanations, no plan. The characters are continually remarking on the evidence of his deliberate wastefulness, his lavish universe that appears to have fallen below his own expectations (239), and to be beyond his control (174). He may in fact be the ultimate plagiarist (100, 174), relying on human experience to create heaven’s perfection (151), for his jurisdiction seems not to extend beyond heaven (82), which may be boring in any case (50, 90).

All this differs greatly from traditional Christian assertions of an intrinsically loving and omnipotent God who created the universe out of nothing, and who is guiding it to its teleological conclusion, replacing him with a capricious and possibly localised deity, whose motives and imaginative power are both suspect. The effects of these changes for the novel are various. On one level, they attract reader fascination by departing from parroted religious formulae in startling ways. Yet the departures are also necessary to sustain the novel’s emphasis on the worth of carnal beauty. By presenting God as potentially unstable, perverse or boring, the concomitant portrayal of human vulnerability and frailty is rendered all the more attractive. God’s concentration on the distillation of souls for his disembodied heaven leaves him largely uninterested in the affairs of earth-bound men and women. Certainly, for the human reader, God seems unsympathetic when compared to Xas. Xas is fascinated with the ordinary details of Sobran’s life as “a soldier, a family man, a vintner” (99). There is a simple dignity to these roles which God apparently ignores, but Xas does not.

Compare also Xas’s relationships with Apharah and Niall.

As if to complete the picture of heaven’s disinterest in human affairs, God’s rule is somewhat arbitrary. His judgement on Xas’s rebellion certainly punishes the angel for what is essentially speculative curiosity (100). Overall, therefore, there is much in the novel’s portrayal of God to attract reader distaste.

The dominant arc of the novel therefore finds beauty in the ordinary, perishable things of life. Xas comments that the human soul is “made of losses” (49), and it is the fact that humans are touched by time (34) which renders their corporeal mortality attractive to him as an inviolate angel. He is interested in mutability and change, an interest seen both in his garden (“my communion with perishables”, as he calls it (146)), and in his interaction with humans. In this light, the forbidden relationship between Xas and Sobran is rooted in the motif of the doomed union between the mortal and the immortal, a motif which finds beauty in the fleeting and ecstatic moment where the timeless joins with time.

Of course, such an exaltation of mortal fallings and vanishings does not fit with an epistemology where God’s divine fullness - the antithesis of human ephemerality - is considered to be the limitless source of beauty. Instead, human experience is contrasted favourably with the dull perfections of the eternal realm. Angels, so Xas tells Sobran, are so wadded from mutable experience that they can be “block-headed” (34), “impervious ... durable, unchanging, placid” (146). Xas and his Syrian pupil Apharah suggest that anything positive in heaven derives from human experience and not divine plenitude. In a reversal of the Christian assertion that humans yearn for the perfection of heaven, heaven is rather fashioned by God from human aspirations for happiness (151, 238). Heaven is thus the work of a plagiaristic God, delving into human expectations in search of the raw materials for eternity. He refines human beings into their souls, and distils human yearnings into the condensed, but all too perfect matter of heaven (238, 151). In keeping with the novel’s approval of earthly experience, God is condemned here by his misunderstanding of the source of true beauty, for the things of true value in human experience are found in weaknesses and flaws. This indeed is the testament of Sobran’s slow ageing that the novel depicts. Against this, Xas’s accounts of heaven describe it like the illustration from a religious tract: devoid of imagination and human interest. Certainly, God’s distilled humans are, like most of their unfallen angelic counterparts, dull. When Xas visits heaven in search of lost friends – Sobran’s daughter Nicolette, and his friend Niall the Irish monk – he meets “blissful distillations”, unrecognisable as the people whom Xas loved (238).

In , God’s lack of creativity, his inability to perceive the beauty in frail things, and his lack of control over his universe lends weight to the novel’s challenge to the traditional concept of divine goodness. The morality of the good wineseller in is also open to challenge, although he dresses it up in more orthodox garb. This is particularly evident when Mr Weston stuns the company in the parlour of The Angel Inn with a ventriloquial pronouncement that shocks the assembled company: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I, the Lord, do all these things” (118). Though these words appear shocking, Mr Weston is of course quoting directly from the Bible, the self-penned masterwork of which he is possessively proud. In traditional theology, this same extract from Isaiah 45:7 is used to support the concept of the Deus absconditus, the hidden God of negative theology. It supports the concept of a God who would be unknowable but for his own self-revelation. In Mr Weston, however, the extract from Isaiah works in a manner closer to its literal meaning, confirming the mysterious, all-enveloping nature of God. Mr Weston admits ownership for the good and the evil; the light wine of love and the dark wine of death,

“‘My wine,’ said Mr Weston… ‘is as strong as death and as sweet as love’” (116); “I speak of a wine…that, though we do not advertise it as medicinal, yet, as you very well know, there is no trouble incident to the fretful and changing life of man that this particular wine will not cure for ever. … To taste this wine of ours that has never seen daylight is the desire of some of the most noble of our customers.’ (42): “the darkness and the light are both alike to me” (238).

thus offering apparently orthodox support for a less orthodox understanding of God. The lighter side of this understanding is reinforced through the presentation of a slightly bumbling Mr Weston, yet as the Isaiah quote indicates, there are darker sides to his character. On a few select occasions, Mr Weston acts in a way that reveals his dreadful solemnity. He plays the role of judge, for example, exhibiting his hatred of the evil worked by Mrs Vosper in leading the village maidens into the grasping clutches of the lascivious Mumby brothers. With all the tricks of an artful salesperson, and aided by the roaring lion he keeps in the back of his delivery van, he enacts judgement on the cruel machinations of Mrs Vosper and her willing henchmen. Yet while these actions show that he does not sanction the human evil seen in microcosm in the village of Folly Down, it is also clear that evil has its source in him, such that he cannot eliminate it completely. Consequently, he resigns himself sadly to the continual cycle of love and death, and to the inevitable corruption of the good. This resignation is in line with the limits on Mr Weston’s power hinted at throughout the novel. In his account of the eighth day of creation, for example, Mr Weston tells Mr Grunter how he attempted to rescue humans from their underlying sadness, but that his attempt to bring them comfort proved only the limits of his power and confirmed (something reminiscent of Knox’s novel) human autonomy (301). Faced with his own inability to restore humanity to happiness, the only gift Mr Weston can offer is the wine of death.

As in , this suggests a God who is neither omnipotent nor all-sufficient. Instead, the varied faces of Mr Weston serve as a cloak for a pantheistic deity, outside whom nothing lies, including the balance between good and evil. The ebb and flow of love and death represent the way the eternal and unchanging state of the world. On this count at least, Mr Weston is adamantly envious of humans, for they at least can escape from the cycle: “not a death happens in all the world”, he tells Mr Grunter, “but I wish it were mine own” (301). “I long to die”, he says, “I long to drink my own dark wine” (300). Thus while the novel suggests a universe full of mystery and wonder, typified in the mysterious light wine of love which Mr Weston likes to offer to the public as a wine which “can be drunk at all times without the chance of a headache’ (227), it simultaneously suggests a universe of “care and torment” in which Mr Weston sells his “strongest and oldest wine that brings to the buyer a lasting contentment, and eases his heart for ever” (56). The enigmatic figure of Mr Weston spans these extremes, responsible for the universe’s unexpected and dazzling joys, but ultimately also responsible for its sorrows, its sadness and its death.

The willingness of to lay final responsibility for suffering and death on God, coupled with its proposal that death involves a certain welcome release, set it most clearly apart from orthodox Christianity. Certainly, there is little suggestion in Mr Weston’s discursions that the universe has experienced any Fall from perfection, and no suggestion that Mr Weston has a redemptive plan for the cosmos. One of his few references to Christ, for example, includes no mention of redemption. Instead, it comes in response to Michael’s mention of the cross, and it is something of a sad rebuke:

... in our family we have long ago ceased to mention the Cross, or the dreadful end of Him who was hanged upon it (65).

Although, compare Mr Weston’s comment to Tamar Grobe: ‘...that is no reason why the book should be dull, for the life God lived when He came down amongst men was an extremely exciting one’ (181). Tamar, significantly, disagrees with this statement.

This unveils no commitment on Mr Weston’s part to the annihilation of evil as is found in orthodox Christianity, although as suggested above, this is attributable to impotence rather than malice. If Christ was at all linked with such a plan on Mr Weston’s behalf, it is clear that he failed to be anything other than an exemplar. Thus, at Michael’s recollection of Christ, Mr Weston sighs sadly that, “He was a great poet’ (65), but he does not contradict Mr Grobe’s limited belief in Christ as “a young man of fine parts”, who, though “as mortal as [all other humans], bore the most dreadful agony in the most praiseworthy manner” (65-66). There is no resurrection; no expectation of a world remade.

Yet the lack of any redemptive scheme in is unsurprising, for it is fundamental to the pathos underlying the novel that there can be no ultimate redemption. The novel proceeds on the basis that the universe has an inevitable and lasting sadness at its core, a sadness which validates the sorrow of human experience. Any hope of cosmic redemption would negate Mr Weston’s pronouncement that he would like to die, a pronouncement that attracts the reader with its elegiac nobility. By showing God to share the same still, sad music which humanity experiences, the novel excuses God from responsibility for suffering. Indeed if God is, like Mr Weston, sorrowful at the state of the world, unable to prevent its corruption, and locked into its fundamental tragedies, then God and humanity are joined on level terms. For readers inclined to Romantic holism, this sorrowful picture of God appeals more than the orthodox Christian picture of a God whose redemptive plan is still in process and who, though reputedly omnipotent, does not prevent the present reality of human pain. Mr Weston fits exactly within this view of the world, and his character depends on it.

As is evident from the discussion above, departs a long way from a traditional theology in which Christ is the unique incarnation of God. Though Christ may be a member of Mr Weston’s family, his failed death shows that he has little to do with the present state of the universe. Much the same is true of , where, though Christ has a larger role, he is essentially a sideline player in the novel’s main action. Essentially, the Christ of occupies what theologians would call a subordinationist position in relation to God, a view similar to that held in Arianism.

Subordinationism is the root of many heretical movements, including Arianism, Ebionism, Monarchianism and Socinianism. For details on the historical roots of subordinationism, see J.N.D. Kelly, , 5th edition (London: A & C Black, 1977), pp. 226-240 (Arianism), 139-140 (Ebionism), and 115-119 (“dynamic” Monarchianism).

There is no sense, that is, of Trinitarian equality between Christ and the being the novel refers to as “God”.

The orthodox position of Trinitarian equality between Father, Son and Spirit was most famously formulated by the Cappadocian Fathers — see Kelly, pp. 263-266.

Christ, though some sort of spiritual being, is not to be equated with God, who appears as the supreme, undifferentiated monad. There is no hint of the orthodox assertion that the being of God consists in a community of three equal persons. This is apparent at several points in the novel, all of them crucial to the novel’s metaphysic, and to its presentation of Xas. Twice, Xas reveals that his physical appearance is like Christ’s. Following the first disclosure, Sobran, in theological mood, suggests that this is because both are treaties: Christ the Word a treaty between God and humanity, and Xas a treaty between God and the Devil (123). Admittedly, there is some traditional support for this idea. In the Christian bible, Christ is seen as the mediator of the “new” or “better” covenant between God and humanity, replacing the covenant between God and Israel (Hebrews 8:6, 12:24). Yet by being placed on equal terms with Xas here, Christ appears caught between humanity and God, as Xas is caught between God and Lucifer. He is not the self-expression of God’s love, fully human and fully divine, but is rather an uncomfortable intermediary between opposed parties. This suggestion of subordinationism is confirmed at the novel’s end, where Xas recalls a conversation with God in which God describes how he made Xas as a copy of Christ before Christ was born (238). Christ is not, therefore, “eternally begotten of the Father”, as the Nicene creed has it. Instead, he is some sort of subordinate emanation from God, reaffirming God’s impassive inscrutability.

Several possible effects flow from this subordination. Most obviously, it assists in the elevation of Xas. From his key role in the cosmic drama, he has a unique perspective on the theological events he relates. As God’s decoy for throwing Lucifer off the trail and thus ensuring the success of the incarnation (238-239), Xas has a participant’s insight into the almost Manichean struggle between God and Lucifer. His vantage point makes him the object of attention from both God and Lucifer (166, 174). Surely, there can be no better situation around which to structure a novel of cosmic proportions.

A further effect of this subordination is its reinforcement of the distance between God and humanity, and so its celebration of earthly existence. Given that Xas is a copy of Christ, then they are presumably made of the same angelic stuff, which means that Christ’s incarnation does not involve the full assumption of human flesh. Traditionally, the incarnation is considered the means by which God knows and shares human pain, but if Christ has not become fully human, then this cannot be so. Christ in does not unite God and humanity in his one person, but appears only as a link in the chain between them, so detaching God further from human experience. Yet in the overall context of the novel and its portrayal of the divine character, this Arian Christology is a positive thing, rather than a tragedy. From Xas’s perspective, God’s actual involvement in human experience through incarnation would not be redemptive, but would involve unwelcome meddling in earthly affairs. Thus in the Treaty which divides Xas between Lucifer and God, for example, God appears either disinterested in or disapproving of Xas’s experience, certainly insofar as it involves what happens on earth. Under the Treaty, God shares Xas’s pains, as Lucifer shares Xas’s pleasures (36, 57), but God’s only interest in Xas’s experience on earth seems to be in punishing him. Thus God’s archangel wreaks revenge on Xas for his trespass into heaven (51, 81), and the strong suggestion remains that Xas’s wings are clipped as punishment for his sexual misdemeanours.

De Goldi considers that Lucifer performs this knackering of Xas on God’s instructions (127).

To be sure, God prevents Xas from self-mutilation (63), and warns him against becoming involved with Sobran (146). Yet given the novel’s implicit approval of the relationship between Xas and Sobran, God’s warning is not a welcome one.

Moreover, such disinterest in life on earth seems to explain most of God’s dealings with humanity. As indicated above, God deals with humans only to find the raw matter for his anodyne heaven, where there is scant interest in flesh and blood. Xas loathes God’s “copies and extractions” (239) for precisely this reason. Copies and extractions destroy the individual physicality and frailty that characterise humans, and for which, as Xas rightly insists, they are loveable. God’s heaven, in contrast, is painless, purified and disembodied (49, 238). Here again, features a subtle departure from theological orthodoxy. While Christianity customarily posits belief in a painless afterlife, that afterlife is not disembodied. Rather, the creeds assert the resurrection of the body; not just the after-death survival of distilled souls. St Paul similarly asserts in 1 Corinthians 15:52 that “the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible”, on the pattern established by Christ’s resurrection. It is notable that, with the exception of the harrowing of hell, there is no reference in to Christ’s resurrection. Admitting a physical resurrection occurring at God’s behest would threaten the careful opposition which the novel establishes between a disembodied heaven containing a procession of distilled souls, and the flawed but far more interesting physicality of earth. Despite its ostensible framework of orthodoxy, the novel in fact requires a choice on unorthodox terms between the novel’s frigidly austere God, uninterested in physical human life, and its warm angel, who observes, experiences and defends physicality. Faced with this choice, the reader’s decision to side with the being who is interested in the human condition, who enjoys “communion with perishables”, is virtually a fait accompli.

It would be possible to catalogue further instances at which and diverge from orthodoxy. Most instances would reinforce the conclusion that the divergences contribute necessarily to the structure and substance of both novels. By revelling in the forbidden relationship between Xas and Sobran, sets up an opposition between the remote impotence of heaven and the vibrant life on earth, an opposition that necessitates the twists given to the Christian framework. has God dispensing the vintages of love and death in a cyclical web of Romantic pantheism which directly challenges the redemptive teleology of the orthodox Christian narrative. Both novels, that is, redefine the main trajectories of Christian belief in ways suitable to their respective plotlines, and they do so to convincing effect. That they manage this is a considerable achievement in itself, for few writers in English since Milton have attempted to deal directly with the large counters of Christian belief, unless in heterodox fashion. Fearing perhaps, in Marvell’s phrase, that they would “ruin ... the sacred truths”,

Andrew Marvell, ‘, lines 7-8.

the few notable twentieth century novelists to engage with Christian orthodoxy have been altogether more oblique in their theological dealings. Thus the writings of such figures as Graham Greene, RC Hutchinson, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Evelyn Waugh shy away from direct confrontation with deities, preferring instead to focus on evil and love in human relationships, or to show faint glimpses of grace in moments of human decision. To do otherwise is to turn God into a cause among other causes, and so to invite failure of Miltonic proportions. By contrast, it is the unorthodoxy of and that allows these novels to present successfully the players on the field of cosmic history.

Reviewed by John Macalister

Edited by Janet Holmes

Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2000

RRP: $39.95

Our understanding of issues surrounding gender and language has come a long way since the early 1970s. Awareness of sexist language use has been heightened, and such use challenged, generally successfully. Gender-based boundaries have been broken down in many areas, so that the visibility of women in previously male-dominated domains is far greater than it was twenty-five or thirty years ago. Yet few would suggest that the goal of gender equity has been achieved. This book marks our progress along the road to that objective, and suggests ways of moving ahead.

In one sense the essays in this volume, which represent a selection of papers presented at New Zealand’s first-ever Language and Gender Symposium, held at Victoria University of Wellington in late 1999, are a celebration of the developments in language/gender studies over the last twenty-five years. This is particularly so in the first section, (The Gown Perspective), which presents the latest academic research into language/gender. Gender is now being viewed as a social construct rather than an essential sex-determined difference. The deficit model of women’s language behaviour is no longer dominant; women are seen to be driving linguistic innovation, as Anne Pauwels demonstrates in ‘’. Indeed, Margaret A. Maclagan’s analysis of New Zealand English speech data suggests that women, in New Zealand at least, have been leading language change for over a century.

Understandably, given the symposium’s venue, this volume is weighted towards research into New Zealand English. To an extent this is a tribute to the vigour and robustness of linguistic research in New Zealand today. However, the book does not focus on New Zealand English alone – British male speech provides the data for an absorbing discussion of men’s narratives, and Australian English is well-represented. Nor is the book restricted to varieties of English. Miriam Meyerhoff includes Malo, a Vanuatu language, in her discussion of apologies, and Andrew J. Barke looks at changes in second-person pronouns in Japanese. Uta Lenk examines the language of German job advertisements, in the process raising interesting questions about the use of gender-neutral terms in languages which employ grammatical genders.

While this volume is to a certain extent a celebration of the road so far travelled, a thread of pessimism and of warning does follow through several of the essays, beginning in the panel discussion section (Town Meets Gown) and picked up again in The Town Perspective, where ‘real world’ applications and implications of the academic research are considered.

This theme argues that, while research has come a long way in helping us understand language/gender differences, there is a very real danger that the research will be used to justify gender inequity in the workplace. This, it is claimed, is the view transmitted by popular writing in gender studies, by such books as . Stereotypical male features are deemed to be more effective in the work place, so that negative, disempowering connotations are ascribed to features considered female.

Of course, as the contribution from Victoria University of Wellington’s Language in the Workplace Project clearly indicates, it is naïve to claim that women do this and men do that. Linguistic behaviour exists along a continuum, and an individual’s repertoire contains both ‘male’ and ‘female’ features. Differences are of degree rather than absolute, which Ann Weatherall’s analysis of children’s speech well illustrates.

Inevitably, one or two of the contributions do carry a slight air of aux armes, citoyennes although the details of how further change is to be implemented are sometimes imprecise. It would be unreasonable, of course, to expect this volume to be sub-titled Gender Equity in 10 Easy Steps. There are no simple answers, and there exists a tension between the importance attached to individual actions and the case to be made for organisational change. Deborah Jones is a strong advocate of making ‘gender trouble’ and her essay links neatly with the preceding paper, from Su Olsson, who argues for the telling and valuing of women’s narratives in the workplace.

This, after all, is research that can change lives. Jennifer J. Peck, in her essay ‘’, illustrates the impact on women of bringing academic research into the workplace.

A major response of women in business to exposure to academic research on gender and language has been relief: they learn that they are not ‘deviant’, but that their linguistic behaviours are acknowledged as acceptable performances, sometimes indicative of a gendered socialised position.

Nor is it the lives of women alone that can be changed. The use of language as a tool of intervention, as a means of helping men with a history of violence against women to re-examine their behaviour in terms of gender/identity, is presented by one of the three male contributors to this collection, Damian O’Neill. While his findings are tentative rather conclusive, they are powerfully suggestive.

As with any multi-authored work, there is something for everyone in this volume. One or two of the contributions, such as Jennifer Coates’ discussion of male narrative, may incline you to discreetly recording friends’ conversations for later analysis. Others may heighten sensitivity towards language practices that discriminate, and some may trigger a resolve to address such practices. All of these are positive responses to the contents of this book. For anyone interested in issues of language/gender, then, this volume is an important survey of current thinking in this field.

Reviewed By Jenny Neale

(2nd ed)

Christine Cheyne, Mike O’Brien, and Michael Belgrave. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The first edition of this book came out in 1997 to meet the needs of both students and a wider audience. As the back cover blurb indicates, this second edition has been updated to address the changes in the past three years as social policy has continued to be ‘the focus of much debate and reform’. In eleven chapters the authors examine social policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in terms of history, philosophical underpinnings, legislative and political frameworks, and Treaty issues.

This is not a critique of specific social policies in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Rather it uses case studies in the areas of income support, social services and health policy to illustrate the theory and discuss them in a specific context. The authors contend that these three areas have been the focus of significant change and therefore provide good examples of the issues they are addressing.

Each chapter begins with an executive statement and concludes with a summary of key points and guide to further reading. In this latter aspect in particular the more recent work is obvious.

After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 looks at the history of making social policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand and its particularly distinctive features, European colonisation having the major impact since 1840. The authors suggest that there were four critical periods, 1840s, 1890s, 1930s and late 1980s/early 1990s when social policy reform had a major impact on subsequent decades. While early social policy was premised on a reaction against the British poor laws, an underlying theme has been endeavours to create an economic climate that achieved the social policy goals with only a partial reliance on welfare provision. This chapter is very much aimed at the New Zealand reader and provides them with a comprehensive background. For those reading this from outside New Zealand it could be more confusing as it assumes some knowledge of New Zealand’s institutional and more general history.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 look at the theoretical constructs for social policy. In Chapter 3 goals for well being are discussed. After introducing the general concept the ways in which different groups view their relative importance is outlined. A range of sources is used to contextualise what well being has meant in Aotearoa/NZ from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Royal Commission on Social Security 1972 to the (then) Prime Minister’s statement of February 1998. The philosophical arguments that have underpinned the political approaches to making policy to meet the goal of well being is looked at in Chapter 4. Shifts in the general direction of social policy since the 1980s are charted. As the authors indicate “(I)n addition to providing an explanation about why particular phenomenon exists, theory also enables us to explain the form that the phenomena takes” (p67). Liberalism, neo-liberalism, social democracy, Marxism and neo-Marxism are discussed leading into a more detailed discussion of feminist and anti-racist critiques of social policy in Chapter 5. On another level this chapter addresses arguments around inequality and the ways in which it is manifested.

Chapter 6 addresses policy analysis in the public sector and points to the recent structural changes that resulted in the creation of the Department of Work and Income, the Ministry of Social Policy, Department of Child Youth and Family Services and the dismantling of the former Department of Social Welfare. As the authors note, this reflected “…the reduction of the public sector’s role to that of safety-net services and policy advice (increasingly viewed as contestable)” (p135). Of course further changes are currently underway which accord with the current Government’s agenda and will no doubt add further to the discussion of change and emphasis in subsequent writing.

In Chapter 7 the recognition of Maori and their need for a collective rather than an individualistic approach to social policy is outlined. This chapter builds on arguments raised in Chapter 5 and while demonstrating that collectivity has been recognised in Government’s dealings with Maori in a broad policy perspective, specific issues of social policy are not canvassed.

Chapters 8-10 provide three examples of specific policy initiatives taken to address issues around well-being – income support, social services and health. Chapter 8 discusses the movement from defining poverty in absolute to relative terms and the more recent shift back towards absolute poverty. Alongside this sits changing approaches to income assistance and the ways in which income support is targeted. Chapter 9 concentrates on choice and diversity in the social services, and the public, private and not-for-profit sectors involvement. Chapter 10 uses health policy to show how changes in government and philosophies have gone the full circle moving away from and now back to a social democratic model for service delivery.

The final chapter looks at social policy for the 21st century based on the legacy of the 1990s. It concludes that the market forces imperative and targeting of benefits have reinforced the welfare dependency of some sectors of society - widening the gap between those reliant on the safety-net and the rest of the community.

This book provides a useful overview of the context and debates around social policy in Aotearoa/NZ. It will appeal to students and those working in the area of the social services and adds enhances the possibility of further well-informed policy debate.

. Reviewed by Peter Whiteford.

. Ed. Paul Millar. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001.

As the editor of this volume justly remarks, the poet James K. Baxter captured the imagination of his compatriots as no other New Zealand writer has done. When he died in 1972, Wellington’s daily newspaper, , announced the fact to its readers with a large billboard that simply declared him as ‘friend.’ Not all of those readers would have agreed, not in 1972, and certainly not in earlier years, when Baxter’s own agenda had more to do with being a strident critic of society – the self-appointed and self-proclaimed ‘sore thumb of the tribe’ – rather than a benevolent friend to all. Moreover, since his death, Baxter has remained a controversial figure, whose stature and influence as a poet continue to be the source of considerable debate and ongoing publication. makes an important contribution to that debate, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of Baxter’s formative thinking and growth as a poet. Indeed, the volume might well have been subtitled ‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.’

It is a striking feature of Baxter’s verse how many poems are constructed as letters – to Colin Durning, to John Weir, to Frank McKay, to Peter Olds, to Maurice Shadbolt, even to Piers Plowman, to Australia, and to the world; and to Noel Ginn. It might have been thought that the two verse letters to Ginn belonged with the others as evidence of Baxter’s fondness for a particular verse style, but, as Paul Millar remarks, these two poems represent a substantial private correspondence. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material in the Hocken Library, and the papers of the late Frank McKay, Baxter’s biographer (deposited in the Victoria University Library), Millar presents here a sequence of letters written by Baxter to his slightly older friend, Noel Ginn. The letters are accompanied by Ginn’s letters to Baxter, and by over 250 poems that Baxter wrote at the same time, many of which have not previously been published, poems that Baxter often sent to Ginn and discussed with him.

Millar’s lengthy introduction provides a wealth of background material – about Baxter, his brother Terence, their family, and of course about Noel Ginn. There is much here that richly complements McKay’s biography, and allows us a much fuller understanding of Baxter’s adolescence. At the same time, there is an equally fascinating story to be told about Ginn, and the pacifist movement in New Zealand during the Second World War. Both Noel Ginn and Terence Baxter were conscientious objectors, and both in due course were sent to the Hautu detention camp. In the course of their friendship, Terence noticed Ginn reading and writing poetry; he told him of his younger brother, Jim, who was also keen on writing poetry, and through Terence’s intervention, the two began to correspond.

The book begins with an astutely chosen quotation from a review Baxter wrote for the of the . In it, Baxter observed that we look to find in the letters of a poet something of the ‘circumstantial scaffolding’ of the poetry. The metaphor may be a little inaccurate, but we well appreciate what Baxter means; and so we look to his own letters (no others have yet been published) to find ways into the verse, to show us what was in the poet’s mind at the time, and even on occasions to have the benefit of the poet’s own gloss on his work. Hardened followers of Roland Barthes will no doubt disdain such access to authorial meaning, but most readers welcome the opportunity to consider a writer’s contemporaneous expressions as some indication of what may be found in a poem.

Beyond that, the introduction provides a detailed account of some of the major influences in Baxter’s childhood and adolescence, a scholarly overview of Baxter’s early manuscrip books, and then extended discussions of what Millar distinguishes as the three early phases of Baxter’s writing –juvenile, adolescent, and early adult. Millar concedes the difficulty of assigning terminal dates to any such concepts (and indeed, the adolescent phase seems remarkably short: one thinks of Baxter the man as having a rather extended adolescence) but nevertheless they are very useful markers of Baxter’s poetic development, and of his own reflection on that development.

For one of the clearest things to emerge from this book is the extraordinary sense of vocation with which Baxter began writing. Time after time, his letters show how conscious he is of what he is doing and what he is trying to do as a poet. Equally, they confirm the precocity that has always been associated with Baxter, right from the time Allen Curnow included some of Baxter’s early verse in his Caxton anthology.

The work is an exemplary piece of textual scholarship; the annotations are judicious and informative, the bibliography and indexing provide excellent guides to the reader, and the editing of the letters is done with consistent care. In addition, the publisher is to be congratulated for the appearance of the book; the inclusion of Baxter’s small sketches gives a delightful flavour to the whole.

No doubt James K Baxter will continue to hold a special place in New Zealand letters. His work is not universally admired – to some degree he is a victim of changing fashions (both literary fashions, and what might be called fashions of cultural politics) – but it continues to be read, and to feature as a kind of brooding presence in the landscape we call New Zealand poetry. This admirable work allows us to inspect more closely some of the influences that made that presence what it is.