Damien Wilkins gave a wonderful speech to launch the book, and Fergus Barrowman closed with a telegram from Mr Gee in Nelson. Thanks to Damien and Maurice for allowing us to publish their kind words here.
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| Damien Wilkins, Fergus Barrowman and Rachel Barrowman (photo credit: Jane Harris) |
It’s a real honour to launch this book. We’ve all been waiting for
it, looking forward to it, hassling Rachel about it, bugging her for Gee
gossip—what secrets did the great man tell her? What has she discovered through
her elegant and subtle and persistent sleuthing? So finally to have it in our
hands—and to weigh such a handsome hardback, feel its solidity and significance—I
imagine it not only as a terrific release and relief for Rachel but seriously
as a special and moving moment in our culture, and a gift to us.
I say it’s moving because Maurice Gee writes fiction. That’s what
he’s done with his life. And then for someone to come along, someone who was
born the year after Gee published his first novel, someone skilled as a cultural
historian but also beautifully responsive as a literary reader, and devote
almost ten years of her life to researching and thinking about and writing the
story of that fiction writer’s life—I find that powerful and affecting. 500-page
biographies of New Zealand writers belong to a rare species. And I can think of
no better photo opportunity for the Minister of Arts and Conservation, Maggie
Barry, than to be pictured cuddling this book before it’s released into the
wild. The Minister isn’t here so let me do a bit of cuddling.
There’s a great photo in this book of Maurice Gee in a white
singlet digging a hole for his septic tank. You don’t have to think for too
long before coming up with its symbolic appeal. Yes, this writer has been excavating
our waste systems for decades. What’s especially good about the photo is that
it captures the process at its dirtiest. I mean Maurice looks buggered,
straddling the hole, the sun beating down on his red face and neck, piles of
fresh dirt around, broken bits of concrete. It’s been awful out there on the
slope beneath the house but you’re going to feel good once it’s done and you
know you haven’t paid another man to do it for you.
It’s an image then we can savour not only for its tempting literary
meaningfulness but also for its suggestion of graft, labour, commitment and
self-reliance. We use the phrase ‘a work of art’ fairly loosely and
unthinkingly, hurrying to the created thing. One of the contributions high
quality literary biography can make is to remind us of how an art form such as
the novel is work—a matter of showing up each morning, putting in the hours,
being dissatisfied, getting it right—as right as it’ll come—and signing off on
it before moving on to the next job. You might even get paid. Luckily for his
readers, though not always easily for Maurice Gee, the job of novelist seems to
have been the only thing he was good at. Although I’m sure he did a fine job
with the septic tank.
Of course everyone is interested in money and writers are
interested in what other writers earn. So the question is: How do you go about constructing
your income stream if all you really want to do is make up stories? Read in one
way this book is a sort of instruction manual for anyone with an interest in
following suit or simply following how one writer did it. And I value intensely
Rachel’s dedication to such details. She’s down in that hole with Gee, getting
dirt on her shoes and working up a sweat. But of course the story is much more
than royalty statements, grant applications, the odd windfall, the many
setbacks . . .
For a start there are all those books to read and consider in the
light of the life being revealed. This biography is thoroughly engaged with Gee’s
fiction and Rachel’s expert delineation of the family tree, the family Gee, which
sets out how one book is connected to another, this is tremendously valuable. And
it’s never done in the niggardly way which aims to shrink everything to a neat
template of correspondences—here’s the real creek and here’s the invented one. When
Rachel tests the life against the work she wants to amplify and enrich and
suggest. And I especially like one aspect of Rachel’s account of the writing—that
is, she always leaves in place the author’s own avowals of ignorance (‘I don’t really
know what I’m doing’), of uncertainty (‘I tried to get close to that experience
but who knows’), of fear (‘I seem to have come to an end’). These are recurring
notes. Partly, of course, they’re a form of self-defence. The aw gee-shucks of Gee. But Rachel
understands too that these moments communicate something about writing itself;
that it always takes in the possibility of not writing, of not turning up for
work. Gee may present as an unpretentious carpenter—look at the cover shot,
sleeves rolled as if thinking how to tackle the skirting board—but his life
story is remarkably chancy and non-compliant, made from unlikely leaps as much
as from dogged toil. From the outside we discern steady progress, books written
as regularly as eggs laid, but finally we see inside the life and understand something
of its costs, its crises, its victories too. A small example: It’s amazing to
me that Gee struggled so much with Meg,
a novel I think of as kind of perfect. It’s amazing that Prowlers was originally called Papps.
Let me finish by saying one more thing about the scope of this
book. Anyone’s life becomes on closer inspection a group portrait and although
Maurice Gee’s career must do without creative writing courses, Rachel convincingly
recreates the friendships and relationships that in many ways mimic the kind of
support structure available now. There’s a lovely evolving set of insights into
how people such as Maurice Shadbolt, Kevin Ireland, Robin Dudding, Ray Grover,
Nigel Cook and others interacted with our man. Gee’s friends are Rachel’s
friends too and therefore ours, helping us see her subject from different
angles. When Gee was doing scriptwriting for television and earning better
money, Shadbolt reports back to Ireland that at the Gee house there are ‘hints
of prosperity’—‘hard booze in the cupboard now instead of home brew.’
I think Rachel’s feel
for the telling remark, the revelatory incident, from what must have been a
large archive of letters, interviews, essays, reviews, as well as the fiction
itself, lends her text not only its narrative drive but also its tone. The book
sounds like Maurice Gee without being his mouthpiece. It’s intimate but also
pitched at a crucial remove. This poise allows the book to be fundamentally
sympathetic to its subject without sacrificing loyalty to facts which emerge
that the hagiographer or even simply the fan might baulk at. I mentioned at the
start this business of secrets, new things about Gee’s life that will alter how
he’s read. I’m sorry but I’m not telling. Rachel’s biography needs to be
purchased to learn these things.
Obviously you’ll want to read it to know how
the Plumb trilogy came to be written. Or Prowlers.
Or Going West. That would be enough. But
such is Rachel’s achievement that gradually you feel something else going on. Through
scrupulously attending to this remarkable individual, the biography’s single
focus starts to do that wonderful thing: it expands, it blossoms, and somehow captures
the broad view of a society in motion; it lets us see not just how he lived but
how we lived too. That also feels fully in tune with the working art of Maurice
Gee.
–Damien Wilkins, 9 July 2015.
A note from Maurice Gee
Reading Rachel's book has been a
strange experience for me. Seeing my life unroll again, or play as though on a
screen, made me want to applaud myself for getting so much done, in work and
relationships, and at other times had me squirming with embarrassment at my
stupidities and shrinking with shame at cruelties and waste.
It's all in the book. This is the
biography I asked for when Rachel and I first spoke about it nine years ago.
'Put in whatever you can find,' I said, not quite understanding that she'd find
so much. But I don't like biographies with holes in them. This one has no holes
except for those Rachel has uncovered in her research and looked into with a
clear eye. The research has been thorough, unrelenting, illuminating -
illuminating even for me.
Did I really do those things? Yes, I did. And I had
those two larger than life grandfathers, that saintly grandmother, that
generous tough-guy father, that happy then sad, beautiful and gifted mother. I
lived that energetic childhood and misshappen adolescence and young manhood,
before coming to what I call my second life, with Margareta, my wonderful wife,
with our daughters and my son - the writing life that they made possible.
Rachel has knitted the parts
together with skill and patience. She has shown where the novels came from,
surprising me with her insights. She has written it clearly and with style. I'm
biased of course but I think this is a biography full of life, and a
wonderfully readable book.
Thank you for it, Rachel, and thank
you for giving me so much of your own writing life.
–Maurice Gee, July 2015
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| Rachel Barrowman signing for Ray Grover at Unity Books (photo credit: Jane Harris) |
Maurice Gee: Life and Work is on sale at all good bookstores now.
You can also purchase it at VUP's online bookstore here.
$60, h/b.
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