Sport 13 Spring 1994
Owen Marshall — Recollections of MKD
Owen Marshall
Recollections of MKD
Trevor Laystall (b 1939), for over fifteen years a sub-editor with the Christchurch Press, was an exact contemporary of MKD Ash at Te Tarehi High School and kept in sporadic touch with the author until five or six years before the latter’s death. Laystall saw this year’s three-part television programme of Ash’s life and works (Phoenix from the Ashes), and considered it so little representative of the man he had known that he approached Ash’s official biographer, Professor Forbes Kendaell, who recorded this interview for Simulacre.
The interview took place at Mr Laystall’s home in Spreydon, suburb of Christchurch, on the evening of July 19th, 1994 and the transcript which appears here is a version modified slightly by subsequent correspondence.
FK | In utter predictability, which I will not pledge to maintain, I would like to begin by asking you when you first became aware of MKD. |
TL | We came from different primary schools, but on our very first third form day at Te Tarehi High we juniors had to stay behind in Hall after assembly to be sorted into classes. Old Bubber Greene, who was Head of Science, always used to do it. Anyway this day was wet, a typical drizzle from the sea, and Bubber couldn’t do it outside. There was only one absolutely hopeless new teacher to help Bubber, who was losing his rag in the confusion and noise. Anyway, this tall, calm boy, almost beautiful, went into the wrong line— |
FK | And this was MKD? |
TL | No. Ash was the small, ratty kid who got under Bubber’s feet when he charged forward to pull the tall boy out of line. That boy was Simon Oakes, the best winger the School ever produced. Should have been an All Black. |
FK | But MKD? |
TL | Bubber grabbed him and asked him his name and Ash said, ‘Mulvey Kannaith Desmond Ash,’ in that highfalutin voice he had and Bubber mockingly repeated it several times and shook him till the tears came. Everyone gave Ash hell after that. |
FK | So he was an extremely sensitive boy?page 6 |
TL | Never happy with his peers certainly. |
FK | In the course of my research for the biography—MKD: A Nation’s Delineator—I went into the schooldays. There was MKD’s own memoir of course, Fallow Education, the generally acknowledged autobiographical elements in the earlier novels, particularly No New Bethlehem and the eponymous short fiction of the collection Marcel Proust And I. I didn’t know then of your own friendship, but I talked with other MKD acquaintances of school days, including Dr Errol Williams and your fellow journalist Jye Lee. I met Mr Norman Johnson who had taught English there and retained very vivid and lively recollections of MKD. The picture that emerged in fact was that of something of an achiever. MKD himself in Fallow Education says that in his final year he would have been proxime accessit except that he refused to do any work in Biology dissection on creatures killed for that purpose. |
TL | It’s difficult to comment without appearing churlish, well, more disparaging perhaps. Snoz Johnson never even taught Ash and yet from that television programme you’d think that he had started it all, but was too modest to say. Errol Williams and Jye Lee were two of his chess club and photography club cobbers—anything to get out of sport. They were what the Americans now would call nerds. |
FK | What then drew you to MKD initially? How was it that the two of you became friends? Were you a ‘nerds’? |
TL | With due respect, I think you show just there that tendency to give Ash a retrospective significance: assuming that I was drawn to him rather than— |
FK | I’m sorry. |
TL | I realise that since those early days— |
FK | Point taken, but what then did you find admirable in him as a boy. You were more than just classmates and you kept in touch for many years afterwards. Why was that? |
TL | As to what I liked about him at first I’m rather hazy. I think more than anything else his willingness to entertain, his interest in your life because his own was so boring. He used to carry my first fifteen gear down to the lower ground and do his Goon Show impersonations as we went. About keeping in touch, I suppose because we were at the same university Hall and he used to come along to my room and slaughter all the flies with a rolled up Time magazine. He kept asking page 7 me when my sisters were coming to visit: he’d caught a glimpse of Rebecca at a school prizegiving. I think he was very lonely at the Hall and he knew there were often people in my room. I established an informal society called ‘Quaffers’. |
FK | Do you know if he was writing at this time? |
TL | At school, or university? |
FK | Both. |
TL | He always did have a knack with dirty limericks, I remember that. At Te Tarehi he wrote them on the wall of the Fives Court; at varsity he supplied the capping magazine. I don’t recall anything else then. One of his best was about the young lady from Calcutta. |
FK | I’m interested, surprised, that you didn’t see any writing. His nickname was Dickens wasn’t it: that’s well established. Surely there must have been some awareness that he was enthusiastic about literature; an aspiring author? |
TL | That was a sort of sarcastic pun, you see. An undergraduate joke. Ash wasn’t very well endowed and Dickens had an element of the diminu- tive as well. Simon Oakes gave him the name I think in the Hall and so of course it stuck. |
FK | If we move on somewhat. There’s the famous moral and intellectual crisis—the nether vortex, he calls it in Macrocarpa Bondsman—which always recalls for me Shelley’s line, ‘a hell of death o’er the white water’. And MKD was totally unable to take his Finals even though there was a general expectation that he’d get a First. There’s his tremendously powerful description of waking in a cirrus mid-afternoon to the realisation that the Restoration Drama exam is going on and he lies there cognisant of the vomit on the sheet and he sees on the wardrobe door the ivy league shirt that his mother bought him but could ill afford and from some other room he hears that Roy Orbison song. |
TL | I don’t think I know it. |
FK | It’s on the tip of my tongue. |
TL | No, I mean I haven’t read about his breakdown. I knew of course— |
FK | Oh God, an epiphany of self-loathing. I read it in Vancouver where I was doing my PhD. I wrote on the fly-leaf of the book—this has called me home! |
TL | I don’t remember his lead-up marks being that good actually. He could yap about anything, but I don’t remember his grades being wonderful. He failed Philosophy II for example.page 8 |
FK | A good many people recall him being very penetrative academically when he set his mind to it, though he could be dismissive about a proscribed course of study, about exams—in the way Housman was for instance. One of the Sociology lecturers told me that MKD would quote Schopenhauer and Spengler. |
TL | That sounds like him. You think that he really did have some sort of emotional crisis? |
FK | Absolutely pivotal. Certainly he saw it that way: a final confrontation with the expections that his father in particular had for him— Iapetus, MKD always called him, one of the Titans, but not to his face of course. He fought it out within himself when barely twenty-two, the age-old dilemma for the artist between vision and a securely conven- tional life, between his own imperatives and the family expectations, yet something more deeply and innately contradictory in his case. It liberated him to go on to be the greatest of our writers although at an immense psychic cost to MKD personally. We lost one more graduate; we gained The Toby Jug World, Cyclops’ Second Eye, Journals of the New Te Rauparaha. |
TL | At the time I thought he’d gone to pieces because of that involvement with the Rawleigh’s woman. Ash came round to my flat a few times and lay on the verandah sacks telling me about his sex life with this forty- seven-year-old woman. She’d been going round door to door. Insatia- ble he said. She had three children and drew blood with her bite. He was finding it impossible to get any work done. I think it was his first experience and he’d talk and talk about it. Not a pretty story and an unlikable trait to go on about it. I recognised a good deal of it again in that book he wrote about the guy working in a bank. |
FK | Cheque Me Out. |
TL | Right. |
FK | There is this whole issue of the MKD libido, isn’t there, and it’s been addressed best perhaps in John Cecil’s articles in Landfall and Sport. The rather strange essays on Zilpah for example. Did you feel that it was important to MKD? Do you feel so now? |
TL | Not as important as he would have liked it to be. I remember him as essentially parasitic in regard to getting to know women. |
FK | Parasitic? |
TL | Dickens—Ash—always depended on other people to give him the opportunities to meet women. He always had his ear open for a party, page 9 was always interested if a couple was breaking up, but he usually just made an ass of himself. When Simon Oakes had a party before going to Oxford to take up his Rhodes Scholarship, Ash accosted his (Oakes’s) girlfriend and got his face slapped. He spent the rest of the night drinking in the broom cupboard in case Simon had been told about it. |
FK | You kept in touch after both of you had left the university? |
TL | Susan and I married when I got a job at Hatherleys, which was a firm of printers down by the station. This would be 1963, or 1964 I suppose. We had a very small flat in Armargh Street; the whole building’s a Women’s Refuge Centre now. We have some laughs about that. |
FK | Yes. |
TL | We were very poor of course. Susan was still finishing her degree; I had no real idea what I wanted to do. |
FK | And MKD was a friend to you in those somewhat difficult years? |
TL | He was living in somebody’s garage by Wilding Park; within walking distance unfortunately. He had this habit of coming in just before tea- time on a Friday after he’d been to the pub. He cottoned on to the fact that I got paid on Thursdays and that we ate rather better on Fridays than most of the week. Sometimes we tried to sit him out, a few times I threw him out, but Susan felt sorry for him initially. |
FK | I imagine that for him these would have been the difficult years in which he was wrestling with No New Bethlehem and No Room Between Sea and Sky. Beckett’s praise of what he termed the deanthropo- morphisation of the artist, comes to mind [laughs]. |
TL | He certainly wasn’t wrestling with any paying job. A few times though, he brought a simple bunch of flowers, daffs, or— |
FK | The considerate aspect of his nature so often overlooked. |
TL | We thought it a nice touch, until our neighbour, Mrs Posswillow, burst in to complain that he’d stolen them from her garden on the way past. Ash pretended to be drunk of course, and was still not sufficiently shamed to leave. We were having beef for the first time that month: he had a nose for such things. |
FK | Did you see him in other circumstances during this period—an apprentice one for both of you perhaps? Did the two, or three, of you do things together? |
TL | Once or twice we walked into the park. Ash always took a collection of stones and he would pelt the ducks. He kept saying they were nature’s page 10 bounty. And he would go on about his own wretched life: I don’t recall him once asking about my job with Hatherleys. Later, when I was first with the Press he became very interested, but it was only because he hoped I could get his stuff into the paper somehow. When he realised I wasn’t able to do that he lost interest. |
FK | Yes, I want to talk about those years too, but your comment about him going on about his life, extemporising from what must have been in many ways a painful experience. Did he talk about his work? |
TL | Yes. He would still quote his smutty limericks from Te Tarehi and later, but he often talked about what he called his ‘freefall novel’ which he said would be the great Irish novel of New Zealand literature. |
FK | Hence the line many years later put into the mouth of Murphy Upshott—‘Amanuensis I to the almost totally blind.’ His exegetes were slow to recognise the debt that he acknowledged there so simply. |
TL | I was writing myself at the time—quite well received pieces about provincial rugby—and Simon Oakes was sending some poetry back from Oxford. Ash rarely made the pretence of interest, or attention. He had a very personal line of questioning which my wife found rather unpleasant. |
FK | Unpleasant? |
TL | I’d rather not go into it in detail. |
FK | You mean MKD intruded into your lives in search of material? |
TL | Well, one instance I remember clearly. In the height of summer and Ash had bludged a meal and then wandered out of the kitchen in case a tea-towel was thrust at him. I went through for something and found him standing in our bedroom. I remember the sun slanting across the room from the old sash windows on to his face and how his eyes were closed. When I asked him what the hell he was doing, he said he needed the smell of a married bedroom. |
FK | There’s that remarkable scene in No New Bethlehem, isn’t there, in which Lowell Knowell has returned from the maternity annex know- ing both wife and child are lost and he stands in the bedroom with sun stippling the unmade bed and he makes the first prayer of his life, yet aware during it of the residual physicality of the place. ‘Marmalade, musk, mildew, moth dust and Maya.’ Yes, an almost Orwellian concern with the olfactory. |
TL | He had a bit of pong about him himself. |
FK | Did you have any inkling then, when you were both young men and
page 11
trying to find a place in the world to stand, that MKD would go on to become the greatest of all antipodean writers—one, as Bungeyjump declared in a cover story, of the key figures perhaps this century? |
TL | I can’t say I did. |
FK | When did that perception occur to you? |
TL | When I read about it in Bungeyjump [laughs]. No, I suppose in the mid- eighties when there was the publicity when Bully For Me came under such critical attack and Dickens started popping up on radio and television. That was when I could see that his writing was popular with the gurus. |
FK | Were you still in contact with him at this time? |
TL | Not so much. In about 1969, or maybe 1970, he shifted away to Wellington. |
FK | April 1971, I believe. |
TL | Could well be. It’s fair to say that we didn’t part on the best of terms. |
FK | Would you like to talk about that? |
TL | Simon Oakes had just been killed in England. |
FK | The former companion of MKD and yourself? |
TL | My friend. Simon considered Ash very much a second-rate mind and inconsequential as an athlete as well. Did I mention that it was Simon who gave Ash the nick-name Dickens? Ash hated him for that. |
FK | I think so. |
TL | Simon died only a few weeks after receiving his PhD— |
FK | His DPhil. You did say Oxford. |
TL | What? Anyway, Simon was killed by the village of Dodder-Down when he was leading the Federation Invitation Marathon. The well known theatrical agent Hilton Folwlds had a heart attack and his Morgan V8 went out of control. Simon had no family here and his College sent all his papers to me. There were several boxes of his writing—a great deal of prose which surprised me, for Simon had only ever shown me his poetry. Susan and I couldn’t face reading it so soon after his death. We left the boxes virtually undisturbed and then on the Labour weekend when we had gone to Susan’s parents and left Ash in the flat because his garage had been flooded, all of Simon’s papers were stolen. Ash must have left the flat unlocked at some time, though you’d wonder who would bother to steal typescripts. They did take my Dave Brubeck records as well. |
FK | This was the cause of your rupture with MKD?page 12 |
TL | I was very angry with him; furious, and so angry with myself for letting Simon down. None of that stuff ever turned up. Ash kept away and then I heard that he’d gone to Wellington, owing rent even on his garage. |
FK | You did re-establish your friendship with him later, I understand, on his return from the Capital. How did that come about? |
TL | Actually, I did have a brief correspondence with him during his time in Wellington. He wrote asking if I would become a subscriber to a literary journal he was to start up there. He wanted me to find other subscribers in Canterbury as well—even sent me a list of people he considered possibilities. |
FK | Have you kept the list? It might shed interesting light on who MKD considered were people of literary sensibility at the time. |
TL | I didn’t I’m sorry. He also said that subscribers would receive what he termed ‘positive editorial inclination’, but although I sent three articles, none of them was published. Mind you the whole thing didn’t last long did it? |
FK | Mopsus had just the three issues, but is considered to have been prophetic of New Zealand literature as befits its title. |
TL | For years afterwards it kept sending out subscription forms. Ash must have found that a useful income. |
FK | We have passed over two questions that I would like to return to now, if that’s all right. The more recent concerns the picking up of your friendship with MKD after he returned here. |
TL | Well, we’re talking the late seventies now, aren’t we. Susan and I were living in Sumner. I’d left Hatherleys and after a stint in the Social Welfare department and then as a taxi driver, when I was writing a good deal, I got a job on the Press. Susan was teaching at Avonside Girls’ I think—no, Papanui High School still, yes. |
FK | And MKD? |
TL | He had been taken up by the unmarried Devinne sisters who still lived in the family home in Merivale. They’d both known Charles Brasch quite well. Ash had convinced them his genius was worthy of support. They were almost gaga of course. He would flirt and flatter to their faces and slander them at other times. He called them Gorgon and Gorgon- zola. |
FK | Did you ever meet Celia and Malisse Devinne? |
TL | Yes.page 13 |
FK | What were the circumstances? |
TL | There was a sleep-out by the shrubbery which was Ash’s, but it wasn’t big enough for his parties, so he persuaded the old dears to have a soirée in the big house from time to time. Gorgon and Gorgonzola were left tinkling at the piano while Ash and his friends boozed in the other rooms. It was quite sad really: he demeaned their friendship and mocked their infirmity. There were even things stolen from the house. I stopped going. |
FK | The suggestion is that MKD stole from his benefactors? |
TL | I never saw him take anything, but I saw others remove ornaments— there was a Devinne jade collection that suffered. Finally there was a legal intervention by members of the wider family and the sisters were taken into care and Ash ordered to vacate his sleep-out. I think in the end the whole place was bought by the Anglican Church and became a Diocesan Retreat. |
FK | Was it MKD’s practice to read work at these soirées? |
TL | Oh yes. He’d read on and on from what he termed ‘work in progress’ until he got too drunk and all his sycophantic friends would drink, chatter and applaud. By that time he had a sort of arty entourage of women with short black skirts and blue eyeliner, and guys with pony tails. |
FK | The other question I wanted to come back to was that relating to the approaches that you say were made by MKD when he knew you were working for the Press. You mentioned that your impression was that he cultivated you because he hoped for some advantage from that connec- tion. |
TL | He was very interested in who decided on where books went for review, who did profile features, things like that. Bill Zimmerman did all that at the Press at that time. I introduced them shortly after Ash came back from Wellington. Bill told me later that the very next day Ash called at his office, saying that I was one of his closest friends and that he had been Simon Oakes’s mentor in the year or so before his death. I had asked Bill to do a feature on Simon, but Ash persuaded him to concentrate on a living writer instead—Ash himself of course. I tackled Dickens about that and I remember him saying, ‘Let the dead bury the dead, Jinky old son. The inheritance is what matters.’ |
FK | You had, by this time, known him for nearly thirty years. You were familiar with his work.page 14 |
TL | Certainly I’d read No New Bethlehem, Marcel Proust and I and The Toby Jug World. |
FK | How did the consciousness you encountered there equate with the MKD you knew from day-to-day life? Could you hear Racine’s wolves from the page? |
TL | I’ve always been impressed by the intensity, by the absolute candidness, but it’s just all his own life isn’t it—or rather experience and observa- tion manipulated so that he has become the centre of it. It’s a sort of regurgitation, but with his own bile become dominant. In Bully For Me I think it is, he has seventeen pages about using the lavatory in the Lyttelton Domain. |
FK | ‘Sphincter Sphinx in crapt Crypt seated is the eye of I: retention is the name of the game, the pit and the sun’s pendulum through the creak crack of the swings outside and the follicles of the salt gulls’ cry.’ |
TL | It all goes on rather, for me. |
FK | I have the impression that in the eighties when MKD was increasingly gaining national attention, you and he were drifting apart. Would that be an accurate summation? |
TL | Yes. |
FK | In fact after the mid-eighties you lost contact? You didn’t see him at all in the last years of his life? |
TL | Susan and I had a sense that he couldn’t be bothered with us once his prospects improved and to be honest I may have been somewhat envious of his success. The very week that The Toby Jug World won the big Commonwealth prize, I heard from Zeon Press that they had rejected the collection of my articles. But basically I feel that Ash wanted to kick off his earlier acquaintances; anyone who’d known him before he was important. That way he could create himself over again. The way he afterwards wrote about Te Tarehi High in Fallow Educa- tion for example, and the accounts of his early years which became all excitement and bizarre experience and angst. I remember when he was in the garage behind Wilding Park he would spend hours catching blowflies with an old vacuum cleaner and he would stand in his duffle coat outside the window of Meehan’s Electrical watching television for most of an evening. |
FK | When was the very last time you saw MKD? |
TL | I remember that it was the year of the big Canterbury floods; must have been 85, or 86. Bill and Heather Zimmerman were with Susan and me page 15 at the Bush Inn and Ash and his crowd came all dressed up from some mayoral thing; made a big entrance with their loud, affected voices. Dickens had been a small, ratty guy and I remember thinking that he’d become a small, puffy guy, like the old Sinatra. They came past us as they were leaving and Susan said hello to him. He stopped and stared for a few seconds then said, ‘Bugger the proles,’ and laughed and went on out. I never saw him again. When he died, the editor asked me to attend the funeral on the paper’s behalf and write an article, but I couldn’t bring myself to do either. No one wanted to hear the truth about the man. |
FK | I did a small piece for the overseas papers, I recall. MKD had insisted on having a Brubeck number in the Cathedral and a march past of the Ferrymead Fusiliers Dancing Team outside. Irony was everything to him. A tropism to be found throughout his mature work. |
TL | Will his stuff last, do you think? Will people know Journals of the New Te Rauparaha and The Toby Jug World in fifty years? |
FK | Absolutely. |
TL | He wasn’t likeable you know. He used people, but all that’s being changed now. |
FK | How is it at the end of Gab’s drowning in Bully For Me?—‘The evolution of the strongest lies is always towards truth.’ |