Terry Dibble in Bayswater, New Zealand

 

'TERRY DIBBLE

May the hungry be fed and the

well fed have a hunger for justice'
 

Relaxing near our hotel in Bayswater on our final day in New Zealand before the long haul flights back to the UK, we were reading books on this bench when it occurred to me that Terry Dibble might be worth Googling. He was.

  

The bench in Quinton Park a short distance from the Baywater–Auckland ferry is relatively new: Father Dibble, a fervent campaigner for social justice, died in Auckland at the age of 78 in 2011. In 1981 he played an active part in the anti-Springbok tour, being one of the invaders of the pitch in Hamilton; he was a staunch supporter of independence in East Timor; and he spent a lifetime working for the recognition of Māori rights.

And this, in the distance, is the view of Auckland Harbour Bridge from Terry Dibble's memorial bench in Quinton Park, Baywater.

Writers' Homes in Devonport and Stanley Bay, New Zealand

'A. R. D. FAIRBURN

 

1904–1957        POET

 

Author, Journalist, Critic, Artist,
University Lecturer.
Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn
lived here from 1946 to 1957.

 

7 King Edward P[ara]de'

 

The booklet North Shore Literary Walks: North Shore City Heritage Trails notes that Rex Fairburn's house was a 'gathering place for writers, artists [and] musicians', and among those writers were Denis Glover, Sarah Campion, Anthony Alpers, Maurice Duggan and Frank Sargeson. Famously, though, Fairburn fell out with Sargeson: he didn't believe in state grants for writing, and he didn't like gays either.

I took this shot just across the road from the house, and it shows the truth of that line of Fairburn's (punning on Rose Fyleman's line) about his proximity to the Devonport–Auckland boat: 'There are ferries at the bottom of my garden'.

Short story writer and novelist Tina Shaw (1961–) lived at 40 Church Street from 1991 to 1995.

Her second address in Devonport was 4 Kerr Street, where she lived in 1996 and 1997.

'MAURICE DUGGAN

 

1922–1974 SHORT STORY WRITER

 

Burns Fellow and Advertising

Copywriter, Maurice Duggan lived

here 1924 to 1935

 

46 Albert Road'

 

Ian Richards's PhD thesis on Duggan is available online.

'JAMES BERTRAM

 

1910–1993 AUTHOR

 

Academic, Rhodes Scholar, War

Correspondent and Japanese

POW, born and lived in this house,

formerly the Presbyterian Manse,

from 1910 to 1914.

 

47 Vauxhall Road'

8 Domain Street, Devonport. Kevin Ireland (1933–), poet, novelist, and short story writer.

26 William Bond Street, Stanley Bay. John Graham (1922–), playwright, screenwriter and memoirist, now on Great Barrier Island.

98 Calliope Road, Stanley Bay. Dorothy Butler (1925–), educator and children's book writer.

10 Spring Street, Stanley Bay. Shonagh Koea, novelist and short story writer, lived here from 1997 to 2000.

Frederick Edward Maning in Auckland, New Zealand

In Symonds Street Cemetery:

 

 

'IN MEMORY OF

FREDERICK EDWARD MANING

KNOWN TO COLONIAL FAME

AS THE AUTHOR OF

OLD NEW ZEALAND.

HE CAME TO THIS LAND IN HIS YOUTH

HE LIVED IN IT TO THE VERGE OF OLD AGE

IN NEW ZEALAND'S FIRST NATIVE WAR.

HE SERVED HIS COUNTRY WELL IN THE FIELD.

IN LATER LIFE A JUDGE OF HER LAND COURT

HE DID THE STATE GOOD SERVICE ON THE BENCH'

 

'WHEN FULL OF YEARS YET FULL OF STRENGTH
STRICKEN WITH A PAINFUL MALADY
HE SOUGHT RELIEF IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY
WHERE HE DIED ON THE 25^TH JULY 1883
AGED 72 YEARS.'
–––––––
HIS LAST WORDS WERE
LET ME BE BURIED IN THE FAR OFF LAND
I LOVE SO WELL
–––––––

'HERE THEREFORE LOVING FRIENDS INTERRED HIM
IN HIS LAST RESTING PLACE
IN THE LAND OF HIS ADOPTION
AND HAVE RAISED THIS MEMORIAL
TO ONE OF NEW ZEALAND'S EARLIEST COLONISTS
AND MOST FAITHFUL SONS.'

Robert Sullivan in Auckland, New Zealand

'KAWE REO / VOICES CARRY

 

'VOICE CARRIES US FROM THE FOOT OF RANIPUKE / SKY HILL / ALBERT PARK TO THE WAI HOROTIU STREAM CLUCKING DOWN QUEEN STREET

 

'CARRYING A HII-HAA-HII STORY — FROM PRAMS AND SEATS WITH NAMES AND RHYMES, WORDS FROM BOOKS AND KITCHEN TABLES.

 

'NOW WE LAUGH AGAIN IN THE ST JAMES STALLS, IN THE BOOKSTORES, SEDDON TECH, PATERSON'S STABLES, ODD FELLOWS HALL, ART GALLERIES

 

'AND OUR GREAT LIBRARY GIFTED BY OUR PEOPLE WHO SAVED THE WORDS OF OUR ANCESTORS FOR ONE AND ALL...

'ROBERT SULLIVAN'

 

Poet Robert Sullivan was a librarian at Auckland Central City Library. His poem here on the steps of the library in Lorne Street is designed to 'celebrate[...] the relationship between Auckland Libraries, the city and its people'. Sullivan says 'I wrote the poem with echoes of nursery rhyme and waiata and used historical information about the library’s place near Horotiu Stream and Lorne Street.'

 

There are also three stone seats at the side, each one with a letter spelling out 'R', 'E', and 'O', indicating 'language' and with the translation of the poem in Māori round the seats; unfortunately, people were sitting on them, making it impossible for me to take a good photo.

Frank Sargeson in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand

'FRANK SARGESON (1903–1982)

lived at this address from

1931 until his death. Here

he wrote all his best

known short stories and

novels, grew vegetables

and entertained friends

and fellow-writers. Here

a truly New Zealand

literature had its

beginnings'

 

The original bach here, at 14 Esmonde Road (now 14A), was bought by Sargeson's (Davy) family in 1923 as a holiday home where they spent their Christmas summers. It was no more than a primitive one-room, creosoted shed. Sargeson came to live permanently here from May 1931, after leaving his uncle Oakley Sargeson's farm.

 

The new fibrolite dwelling above was built in 1948 by George Hadyn – Vernon Brown drew up the original plans, but the construction would have cost too much and Sargeson objected to the idea of a 'boogeois' (as he called it) terrazzo sinkbench. 

 

The home Hadyn built had a living room-cum-kitchen at the front and a bedroom and bathroom with toilet at the back. This photo shows the original entrance, which was at the back and opened onto the bedroom. The wall on the right of the photo is part of the later extension – see below for more details. Bottom right is approximately the site of the destroyed ex-army hut.

 

The later entrance, with deck at the side of the original bedroom and additional bedroom to the back, was built in the late 1960s: Sargeson had inherited some money from his aunt Diana Runciman, who died in November 1966, and Sargeson's partner Harry Doyle – formerly frequently moving around – was living permanently with him now that he was becoming too ill for any more wandering.

 

Nigel Cook, who at one time had worked on Oakley's farm, was a practising architect living in Auckland, and he designed the extension. The top shelf of the bookcase holds numerous issues of the literary magazine Landfall. Sargeson used to have perishable food stored in the Tremains' fridge next door, but his aunt's death meant he could claim her old fridge for his dairy produce and cat food, etc.

 

The living room, with fitted bookcases, desk...

 

 ...and couch bed. Sargeson didn't like all the windows as it meant that he had to supply curtains for them.

 

On the other side of the living room is the kitchen, where Sargeson prepared his home-grown vegetables (although his garden shrank somewhat with the new property.)

 

Bob Gilbert (who as G. R. Gilbert had a brief writing life and was now working as a lighthouse keeper) built Sargeson a radio. He was delighted to listen to classical music on it, although it brought complaints from his neighbours.

 

The famous Lemora, an 18 per cent fortified grapefruit and lemon wine that Sargeson loved, and which he frequently shared with his friends. This was invented by the Russian immigrant Alexis Migounoff on his farm in Matakana and production went on for sixty years. In 2003, however, the government introduced a tax hike which would have meant an untenable increase on a flagon from $12 to $25. The New Zealand Herald (13 June 2003) reported that one angry Lemora drinker imagined Frank Sargeson rolling in his grave: this is doubly impossible, as he was cremated.

 

 

In 1950 Cristina Droescher (daughter of Greville Texidor) and her partner Keith Patterson (also known as Spud) were leaving for England and left Sargeson with Spud's paintings to brighten up his home.

 

Several other images hang on the walls: Sargeson and Harry Doyle.

 

On the porch bench Sargeson's hand rests on the black cat that walked into his life very shortly after Doyle left it, in 1971. With some hyperbole, he compared Robin Morrison's photo to an early Manet.

 

This delightful shot shows Janet Frame (1924–2004) tap-dancing in Sargeson's living room in 2000. It was taken by Michael King (1945–2004), both Sargeson's and Frame's biographer.

 

In 'The House That Jack Built', George Haydn's contribution to An Affair of the Heart: A Celebration of Frank Sargeson's Centenary (Devonport, NZ: Cape Catley, 2003), Hadyn speaks about the brief row he had with Sargeson over the shower room: Sargeson accused him of profiteering by skimping on materials, whereas Hadyn was in fact making a loss. (OK, I should have used flash.)

 

Hadyn also notes that Sargeson had an obsession with toilet pans: he held that high pans are 'completely unsuitable for natural crapping'.

 

 The first bedroom, with the back door that was the entrance.

 

Sargeson's ashes, according to his wishes, were scattered under a loquat tree. Kevin Ireland marked the occasion by reading 'Ash Tuesday'.

 

'FRANK SARGESON

SCULPTURED BY

ANTHONY STONES

PRESENTED BY THE PEOPLE

TO THE

TAKAPUNA LIBRARY'

 

And in Auckland Central City Library is another likeness of Sargeson, this time by Alison Duff, 1965.

 

Many thanks to Vanessa Seymour of Takapuna Library for a very enlightening and fascinating tour of the Frank Sargeson house – and for mentioning this sculpture to us.

 

Link to another Sargeson post:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Michael King: Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)

Michael King: Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)

The first quarter of Michael King's Frank Sargeson: A Life is called 'Norris Davey', and the rest 'Frank Sargeson' because the writer, born Norris Frank Davey, changed his name at the beginning of the 1930s – when he was in his late twenties – soon after receiving a suspended sentence in Wellington for indecent assault: this had been a single consenting act of mutual homosexual masturbation, although his older casual pick-up Leonard Hollobin – considered a 'corrupter of youth' by the police – received a long prison sentence with hard labour.

Michael King is convinced that this incident is a vital turning point in Sargeson's biography: not only did it lead to Sargeson changing his name, but it lost him his job (and therefore destroyed his professional career as a solicitor), and led him into a kind of denial, a retreat from his past. He had learned one lesson: that the homosexual subculture he'd discovered in London couldn't with impunity be as freely indulged in back home in New Zealand.

Nevertheless, and although there is no mention of the court case in Sargeson's three-part autobiography, homosexuality is used in his stories as a encrypted emblem of difference, the reader is often introduced to a world in which the male body is celebrated, and where marriage is often a source of considerable discord. The codes Sargeson uses remind me – no matter how different it may be – of the work of his British contemporary Rhys Davies, the homosexual writer who left his native Wales for London, where he was free from the asphyxiation of the chapel mentality.

Frank Sargeson, born in Hamilton, was certainly asphyxiated by the religious constraints of his puritanical, strict Methodist parents, and his life – decades of poverty during which he forsook the trap of comfort and security in exchange for devotion to reading and writing – was very much a rebellion against his parents' conformist ethos, and by extension conformity to social norms themselves: against the easy, automatic responses of the people he was surrounded by.

If Michael King's biography frequently depicts an almost monk-like ascetic figure, this is in no way a hagiography, and Sargeson's self-denial – almost self-effacement – sometimes gives way to jealousy, prickliness and senseless bitchiness, mockery, neo-Luddism, a grumpy old man mentality (even before he grew old). He nevertheless comes shining through the negatives: generally, he is without hypocrisy (as an anti-monarchist, he admirably refuses the OBE), he gives a voice to the outsider, he is religiously devoted to his craft, and abundantly generous both materially and psychologically.

Sargeson's famous bach at 14 Esmonde Road, Takapuna, Auckland (now a museum preserving his memory), is perhaps best known for its old army hut at the back (now gone), where Janet Frame (also an innocent victim, but of victim of psychiatry) stayed and wrote her first novel Owls Do Cry (1957), although it also temporarily housed, for instance, 'Peter' (Edith Pudsey Dawson), Kevin Ireland, and Renate Prince, an architectural student.

The bach, in its three incarnations (the last one a one-room extension of the first), was also – on and off – a home for over forty years to the itinerant horse-obsessed Harry Doyle, Sargeson's (typically) older and working-class friend and lover.

More importantly – at least for literary history – 14 Esmonde Road is where Sargeson tended his words with the same love and attention as he gave to his vegetables or Harry Doyle, where – initially influenced by, for example, Hemingway and Saroyan – he hewed his literary creations into a spare style, the spartan, vernacular reportage of the narrators blending seamlessly with the reported speech (which was unreported by inverted commas). It is where Frank Sargeson self-consciously (but with a whisper) heralded the birth of the new voice of New Zealand literature: a new world that refused to look back to the motherland, that at last refused to mimic the style of writers who lived on the other side of the world. And, entranced by the innovation, many other New Zealand writers followed him, many of whom had previously been personally encouraged by him.

Tucked inside my secondhand book (which was not easy to find, not even in New Zealand, and has remainder marks on the bottom edge) is an cut-out review of Frank Sargeson: A Life by Tim Upperton in the New Zealand Herald (24 February 1996, s.7, p.9) Upperton is quite right to praise this scholarly work that is Michael King's 478-page biography of Sargeson, and quite right to argue against anyone suggesting that the writer is now a little old-fashioned. Yes, Sargeson was right too in not toeing any political party line, right in having his narrator in 'Conversation with My Uncle' ask how many bananas the bowler-hatted walking dead man would take from the social picnic.

The question is even more urgent now, when politicians incessantly turn the screws on the poor rather than the rich, and the electorate is merely expected to shrug its shoulders and accept rather than rebel, to agree with what it is told and not to question the status quo. Frank Sargeson wasn't frightened to question the status quo. As opposed to what (Australia's) Patrick White said when he called Sargeson's writing 'Not for export', it is for export and for the whole world, although it is most unfortunate that his name is scarcely known outside New Zealand: we desperately need more voices against conformity. We need Frank Sargeson.

Link to another Sargeson post:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Frank Sargeson in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand

Alfred Lord Tennyson in Auckland, New Zealand

What better way to spend a few minutes at an airport than make a blog post? Interesting to see this quotation from Tennyson at Auckland Airport by the check-in, on this, our final day in New Zealand, where the weather has been superb. I believe it's far less than superb in the UK. Ah well, briefly on for overnight in Singapore first though.

 

The quotation:

 

'For I dipt in to the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce,

Argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight,

dropping down with

costly bales'

 

'From "Locksley Hall

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1860'

C. K. Stead: All Visitors Ashore (1984)

In 1955 Janet Frame went to live in an old army hut in the garden of Frank Sargeson's bach in Esmonde Road, Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand. Karl Stead (who publishes as C. K. Stead) and his wife Kay were frequent visitors there. Thirty years later Stead, an academic and a creative writer, wrote All Visitors Ashore, which is a fictionalized account of some of the characters and events that took place in that social circle at the time.

 

But Stead sets the novel in 1951, a crucial year in the politics of New Zealand, when the waterfront dispute was dominating the news. This forms the backcloth to the story, whose main character is the young academic writer Curl Skidmore (similar to C. K. Stead, whose first and last initals he shares), who goes to see the fiftyish artist Melior Farbro, who is gay, grows vegetables, has a limp, and is very fond of Ken Clayburn who likes the horses (similar to the writer Frank Sargeson, who had a longtime friend Harry Doyle who used to train horses), and Cecilia Skywards, who is living in Frank's hut in the garden and used to live in a convent but not really as it was a mental hospital, and is writing a novel called Memoirs of a Railway Siding (similar to Janet Frame, whose father was a railway worker, although the novel was Owls Do Cry).

 

Often, the style the novel is written in is what can be described as modernist (Stead's PhD was on modernism) in that the breathless, very long and often sparsely punctuated sentences are internal monologues revealing a person's thoughts. Characters are frequently addressed as 'you', and the modernism often tips into postmodernism by the way the book selfconsciously sees itself being written, or the way the narrator, for instance in the post-abortion scene on the beach, has a conversation with Curl as he goes to get rid of the embryo remains in a jerry borrowed from his neighbour Nathan.

 

The book is funny and serious, farcical and tragic, ostentatiously clever but never infuriating. It's pretentious, sure, but what's wrong with that: some of the world's greatest writers are pretentious. Stead may not be among the greatest writers, but he's very good all the same.

 

Cecilia doesn't exactly come across in an wonderful light, but then Stead seems to have nurtured a mild twenty-year grudge against Frame for her short story 'The Triumph of Poetry', published in The Reservoir in 1964. Frame claimed that in this story (which concerns a prematurely balding academic whose life is in some respects similar to Stead's) she took her former Otago University teacher Gregor Cameron and the (invented) poet Karl Waikato for her inspiration, but the Steads found it too close to home for comfort. Frame had no complaints about the delayed retaliation.