Launch speech – The Stories of Bill Manhire

The Stories of Bill Manhire was launched at Unity Books recently. Damien Wilkins gave the launch speech below.

Bill Manhire signs at the Unity Books launch (photo courtesy of Matt Bialostocki)

Last year I was in Palmerston North for a reading and before it began I was approached by an older woman who said, ‘Hello Damien, you won’t remember me but I’m Noeline Arnott.’ And I said, ‘Well of course I do remember you, you won the Mobil Short Story Contest in 1989 when I was one of three finalists along with Barbara Anderson.’ And she said, ‘Yes that’s right.’ And she smiled shyly and then she said, ‘And in the 1986 American Express Short Story Award I beat Bill Manhire too!’ 

That anecdote doesn’t really have much to do with this wonderful book we’re celebrating except I re-read these stories in a kind of nostalgic delirium. 25 years ago the short story was obviously corporate clickbait – though we didn’t have that word then. Petroleum companies and credit card businesses believed – bless them – that acts of fiction were somehow sufficiently aligned with commerce to throw some fairly lavish parties and sizeable wads of cash at people who could write 3000 words about invented worlds. And Bill, like all of us, like our dear friend Barbara Anderson, was in like a robber’s dog. Sadly for Barbara and me and Bill, Noeline Arnott cleaned up. Still, heady days! I find it strangely powerful that Noeline’s winning entry when Bill came second was called ‘Relics from an ancient tomb.’ 

The problem, or better, the joy, was that Bill’s short stories never quite behaved like magazine fiction. They sailed close and sometimes pretended to be in the world where characters had epiphanies and life’s little ironies were revealed in slices as if falling from a sharp and sympathetic butcher’s knife. But really, no.  

I remember asking Bill about a line in one of his poems, why he’d done a certain thing or what he intended by it – this was in an MA class a few years ago, he was a guest writer – and he sort of looked surprised at the suggestion—almost as if he hadn’t written the poem and I had the wrong man—and then he just shrugged and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And later he said that if it were a toss-up between meaning and sound, he’d go with sound every time. He’d go with the music of a line.  

There’s an amazing moment in ‘Days of Sail’, one of the elusive and enchanting stories in this book when the narrator, who lives with his aunt—a woman who may or may not be involved in an assassination attempt on the Queen during her 1981 visit to Dunedin—reflects on their relationship, or his life, or his mode of being in the world, the line sort of erupts and then sinks again . . . here’s the sentence:  ‘She says that I am her beautiful boy but I am one of those songs in which the melody gives advice to the words. I sing the song of circumstance, I do as the tune tells me.’ 

I do as the tune tells me . . .  

It’s not a bad way to approach this book – to listen for the tune as much anything. Because while it’s true that these beguiling, discomforting stories take many strange and sudden turns, I was struck all over again by how hummable they are, how they stick to the ear and the mind. You walk across these pages with the sense that a great swallowing crevasse can take you down at any moment but the trick is that you end up, like come daft mountaineer, wanting the sensation of falling. You look forward to being that cartoon character who continues running even though he’s in mid-air, about to plummet. You want to hear the mad mournful music of that descent. 

These stories, the bulk of which come from that period I was talking about, the late 80s, early 90s, can look like a weird interruption to the glorious march of Bill’s poetry. A holiday, a detour—as if the writer was mugged or drugged and woke up to find himself living with a different tribe of cannibals—would he ever get home again? But the continuities are everywhere—for one thing there are lots of poets in these stories—none of whom come out of it very well—Bill relishes the opportunity fiction gives him to castigate, satirise, and generally beat the living daylights out of anyone who has the temerity to announce the poetic calling. I think fiction allows him to be off-duty about a thing that he values the most. And there are lots of poems, or snatches of verse in these stories. The repeating bell of song seques very nicely into Bill’s current musical adventures. More than this, any reader of Bill’s poems will notice in his fiction the pull of his generative material: Antarctica, the moon, country music, masturbation, Southland—maybe those are actually all the same thing! You’ll also be struck again by Bill’s peerless ability at phrase-making, so much a part of his poems; great-sounding lines leap up all the time: ‘. . . we live in the broad Pacific, meeting and parting shake us, meeting and parting shake us, it is always touch and go.’ I think that sounds like a much better slogan than Absolutely Positively whatever. Because these are also highly civic stories somehow, intensely concerned with how we name things, how power is distributed, how the world is divided up and what gets lost in that process. They take aim at the fatuous, the bland, the banal and the bully.  

These stories were my education when they first appeared. They taught me about timing and verve and recklessness. They were like hand grenades lobbed into NZ Lit which when they went off covered you in confetti. Re-reading them, it turns out nostalgia doesn’t really do it. Because these stories, no matter if characters in them play magnetic Scrabble on long-distance flights—remember that!—remain fresh acts of rebellion.

Finally there's a bit of a masterstroke in this book and I think we can thank Fergus for this. The last ‘story’ here is in fact Bill’s great essay about his childhood. And coming to that after the short stories delivers a body blow. It’s like going behind the curtain and catching the magician changing into his civvies. 






Let me say just one thing about how this works. We’re so used to these scraps of song in the fiction, many in a comic register, for example: 

It was down by the old Clutha River 

That river so famous in song 

That Colin fell in love with Maria 

But he didn’t make love to her long. 

We’re so used to that mode that that to meet a song again but this time one which belongs to Maisie – Bill’s Scottish mother – is extraordinary. The essay begins with these four lines: 

I left my baby lying here, 

Lying here, lying here; 

I left my baby lying here 

To go and gather blaeberries. 

We’re so used to voices – one of the stories here is ‘Ventriloquial’ – about throwing voices – it’s another level of delight and affect to learn that when Bill went to school he had his mother’s Scottish accent. I just find that so cool. For me these little connections made the whole book tremble a little – or I trembled a little.  

There's a dizzying, cosmic joke playing out here – to be born in this strange place New Zealand to a couple, one of whom was, well, under the influence most of the time and the other who spoke funny and had come 12,000 miles – and then to discover that somehow, among all the powerful forces of Southland, you’re attached to poetry, it’s not hard to imagine a fairly weighty inheritance of alienation.  

I think of these stories as ludic on the outside but ferocious in their hidden centres. They are full of jokes and japes about being a New Zealander, being in the South Pacific, being Hank Mushroom. But their engine is a furious melancholy. Or sometimes just fury. Here’s the narrator of ‘The Moon at the End of the Century’: ‘The thing is saving money. How to get enough. How to amass. And how to do this poetry job without yawning . . .’ and the narrator thinks of places to escape to . . . ‘Sydney would be a great place . . . But even Wellington would do. I’ve got to get off the South Island somehow. It’s full of missionaries. It slopes downwards. It’s so fucking cold at the bottom.’  


We're all so pleased Bill got off the South Island and settled among us. Here he is!

The Stories of Bill Manhire is available in good bookshops and through our online bookstore now. h/b, $40.
 

4 Questions for Brent Kininmont

Brent Kininmont's debut collection of poetry Thuds Underneath is released this month. Ahead of a trip back to New Zealand from his home in Japan we asked him some questions about his book.

Brent Kininmont (photo by Hana Kininmont)

Thuds Underneath travels all over the world, and one of its preoccupations is flight. The perspective is sometimes that of a nervous flier, sometimes that of someone curious about the act of flying and the world seen from 30 000 feet. Where does your interest in flight come from?

‘Flight’, in the sense of ‘running away’, seems to crop up throughout the collection, though it’s an interest shared by a lot of New Zealanders. Regarding a preoccupation with the other, more obvious sense: in my teens I went to sleep surrounded by pictures of aircraft Blu-Tacked to my wall, though daydreams of becoming an RNZAF pilot were eventually dispelled by my worsening eyesight and remarkably inept science results. That devotion to aircraft was quite superficial – I could name an awful lot of planes on sight, and I took out the same large library books over and over for the intricate cutaway diagrams inside, but I didn't feel compelled to learn the parts of planes or to study how they stayed in the air.

Much later the idea began to take hold that those hurtling metal objects sometimes fell out of the sky. It might have been when airline pilots started looking my age, and an image of them as guardians began to crumble. Although the book’s title can be interpreted several ways, it’s lifted from the opening poem in which the ‘thuds underneath’ are bags being loaded into an airliner’s hold, as heard from the passenger seats. Rather than those noises filling somebody with dread, they suggest order and reassurance. That my father was a baggage handler for three decades is not incidental to that poem and a handful of others in the collection.

The perspective of the speaker in many of these poems seems to be from in the skies – as if they’re hovering above physical places and events, rather than being located in any one place. Is this a consequence of you living away from NZ or is it part of the flight theme?

It’s probably linked to the theme of flight, though it may also have something to do with an outsider only skimming the surface of a culture and relationships. I wasn't conscious of how often poems in the collection look down from up high until I started thinking about how to order them. A god’s eye view from an airliner window seems to mesh with ideas in the book of how people relate to some kind of colossus ­– a dormant volcano, a typhoon, the Parthenon, a Hercules, and others. At one stage I considered calling the collection ‘The God Zones’ due to the recurring views from above, but also because the main settings in the book (the classical lands, the South Island, Japan) could be considered distinct god ‘zones’ where giants and temples appear now and then.

The frequency of that angle from above was also a reason for the Maurice Askew picture on the cover. It looks over a vibrant Colonial Williamsburg, but the straight roads, the cathedral, the hills at the back, and the windmill (read: airport) are strongly suggestive of Christchurch – the place from which I took ‘flight’, I suppose, quite a few years ago. The barren green spaces between buildings in the picture imply a town still being built. Or a post-quake landscape ­– after the broken structures have been swept away.

There is an occasional suggestion in the poems – and perhaps in the book’s title – of the Christchurch quake, though they are usually accidental because so many of the poems were written before the tragedy. Admittedly, those echoes became a lot less ‘accidental’ after I noticed them but chose not to silence them. The most obvious example is a line that compares a father’s glasshouse to a ‘chapel without a steeple’ – an allusion to the quake, except it was written before the spire and tower of the Anglican cathedral were toppled. I considered rewriting that line, out of a concern it might muddy the poem, but I caved to a sense it was meant to be there.

Some of the poems are about your mother’s death. Was it hard to find an angle from which to write about that?

Some poets are able to write very candidly about the serious illness of a parent – Sharon Olds in her book ‘The Father’ is an example of somebody who has done it well. The poems about a mother slipping away that appear in my collection weren’t composed in a straightforward manner; three of the four key poems weren’t even initially written with a mother or an illness in mind. (And the event in the fourth poem didn't actually happen – but poetry is very forgiving.) This includes the poem called ‘Morphine’, which was fully formed, and about a baby daughter drifting off, when I noticed something else in it. I changed the title and suddenly the words were about sitting at a very ill mother’s bedside. In another poem I’m cycling the long straights from Christchurch Airport to my girlfriend’s house in the middle of the city, but where that poem is positioned in the book, and because of the characters appearing in poems either side, the poem suggests a father racing home to his sick wife. Those three poems I mentioned are better, I believe, because of the new readings. Importantly, they are true to an experience of watching a parent fade away ­– something I didn't think I could achieve by walking through the front door into the subject. I also like that those poems retain a lot of their original meaning, even if I’m the only one who recognizes that.

You live in Japan – what’s the poetry scene like there? Do you follow publications in NZ or is your reading focused elsewhere? Does Japanese poetry influence your own writing?

I mostly pay attention to poetry written in English and coming out of New Zealand – the only place where I have submitted poems. I read a bit of what appears online, and I get back home once a year and visit the bookshops for the latest local poetry releases and for used editions. The shops in Tokyo, however, aren’t a total loss for New Zealand poetry. I once picked up a secondhand copy of Jenny Bornholdt’s terrific first collection, This Big Face, for 200 yen (about $2.40). It’s an out-of-print VUP title that I hadn’t been able to unearth at home. On my shelves I also have a hardback edition of James K. Baxter’s collected poems that I found at a used-book sale for 900 yen ($11)­. Probably I was the only person in that hall who would have recognized its worth, in both the literary and financial sense.

I don't know with any authority what the Japanese poetry scene is like. I get by in the local language, but poems written in even quite spare Japanese remain at arms length for me because the contextual differences are still profound. I can’t imagine writing poems in Japanese – it’s a struggle just to get the words right in English. There are expatriate writing groups in Tokyo that gather writers from all over, but I’m a little suspicious of feedback that isn’t grounded in a reliable sense of my home culture. I suspect quite a few of the poems in the collection would only resonate with New Zealanders, and a handful only with fellow readers of New Zealand poetry.

I used to be a newspaper sub-editor, and likely that has had more influence on my own somewhat spare poetic style. One of the biggest influences from Japan is how I go about rewriting. Thanks to a first-rate train system, I get a lot done using the Notes feature on my iPhone while zipping around. Probably every poem in the collection has been tweaked to some degree while riding on bullet trains or sitting elbow-to-elbow with commuters on the subway. 

Thuds Underneath is available at good bookshops and through our online bookstore.

$25, p/b.

You can read some of Brent's work online at Turbine, Best New Zealand Poems and Trout.

Six Questions for Bill Manhire

The Stories of Bill Manhire is published this week. The book collects previously published, uncollected and unpublished stories, as well as the choose-your-own-adventure novella The Brain of Katherine Mansfield and the memoir Under the Influence. Ahead of his launch on Thursday we asked Bill some questions.

Bill Manhire, photo by Ed Swindon

It’s hard to categorise the stories in the new collection – you seem to constantly play with a range of styles and forms. "Stories" seems useful as a description for a book title, but is there a way that you think of the work you write that isn’t poetry?

The stories point outwards a lot more than, say, my early poems did: they’re much less self-involved. So maybe the “work I write that isn’t poetry” could be called “work-that-points-at-the-world-around-me”. I agree, though, “stories” is a pretty loose term – especially as the book includes a choose-your-own-adventure tale illustrated by Greg O’Brien; plus the childhood memoir, Under the Influence, about growing up in pubs.

I don’t think of your stories as very New Zealandy stories, the sort that win the short story competitions in our country, where there’s the expected emotional arc – grief, the end of a relationship or innocence, that sort of thing. Is there a form or style you’re looking to write towards, or write away from?

There’s one fairly conventional one, I think: “Flights of Angels” – the one about the single mother with the precocious son. I worked hard to get the voice of the character right in that one – others will let me know whether or not I did that successfully. And part of me always wanted to write science fiction – hence “Siena”, a piece of future fiction in which tourist New Zealand has successfully theme-parked the whole country.

The first short story I ever published, in my early 20s when I was a postgrad student in London, was a sort of Ray Bradbury rip-off, “The Venus Bird”, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph colour magazine, attributed to someone called Bill Manshire. It produced a lot of weird correspondence – “I have written many times to Malcolm Muggeridge without response, and now turn to you in despair” – and a literary agent, a rather louche young man in an attic room in Bloomsbury, who used to place bets on horses over the phone while his beautiful young PA made coffee – after which he would turn to his latest author (i.e. me), with the advice that it was time to turn “that story” into a novel. Indeed, he was already working on the film rights. But I was too busy trying to be an Old Norse scholar.

But I agree, very few of the stories are interested in the business of narrative excitement or emotional arcs. They’re more like comic-strip frames. Slow-motion collage-work. Or maybe they’re stills from a very short movie, chosen rather randomly, and not always in perfect focus. 

One of the stories actually starts from a photograph of early Dunedin, which is reproduced as the book’s endpapers. That story – “The Days of Sail” – also describes the 1981 attempt to assassinate the Queen in Dunedin, which was very successfully hushed up at the time.

Maybe it helps if I say that my favourite short story writers are Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley. Plus Gogol and early Sargeson. Also Lydia Davis. Also Italo Calvino.

Humour is one thing that connects much of your work throughout the stories and in your poetry. Is this something that happens on purpose or by accident?

It’s not deliberate, but I’m pleased that it’s there – especially when it’s tinged with a bit of menace and melancholy. A big impulse in the “new land” stories is satirical. If you’re troubled by the way the tourist industry seems to define New Zealand, or the ridiculous self-importance that undermines the work of so many writers, or the way the government seems to have no real moral compass – everything is seen in terms of NZ Inc – then it probably makes more sense to mock what’s going on than to rant like King Lear out on the heath. The troubling thing is that the targets don’t date – they just grow fatter and more complacent.

Do you set out to write a story, as opposed to a poem, or does a poem sometimes turn into a story? 

I think I know the difference, most of the time. But I’m fond of the quasi prose poems that sit in between poetry and conventional short fiction. For instance, some of the prose things that are in Lifted – and perhaps, in a slightly different manner, the “My Early Life” piece that Steve Braunias ran in the new online mag The Spinoff. I wondered about including some of those in the book but decided they didn’t quite belong.

One story in the collection describes the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson. Are you a Stevenson fan? How did this story get its legs?

I’m a big Stevenson fan, but not a scholar. I think I was interested in exploring the impossibility for some authors of escaping celebrity, especially back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I think RLS is a terrific writer, who got a bit lost once Joyce and Woolf and co came on the scene. It’s only recently that he’s found his way out of the fug of modernist snobbery.

The RLS story fits with a broader Pacific motif that drifts through the book. I have a big collection of children’s books set in the South Pacific – hence the story called “Cannibals”.  There’s another story in which a rather sad young man travels to London to try and market a board game called South Pacific. And there’s reference to a novel called Banks, in which each of the ten chapters is written from the point of view of one of Joseph Banks’s servants. It’s one of those novels where the concept is more interesting than the likely reading experience. Plus my Twitter handle is @pacificraft.

You have an international reputation as a brilliant writer and teacher of creative writing. Tell us the secret to your success? Or at least, what you eat for breakfast?

These are questions I am frequently asked, and I have answered them all in a story called “Some Questions I am Frequently Asked”. Everything you could possibly want to know is there in that one story.

The Stories of Bill Manhire goes on sale 12 Nov. Available at bookshops worth their salt and through our online bookstore.
hardback, $40


The book will be launched this week at Unity Books in Wellington, Thursday 12 Nov, 6pm, all welcome.

Bernadette Hall –– Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, 2015.

Bernadette Hall kindly shared her acceptance speech given at the Grand Hall in Parliament last week for her Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. We would also like to congratulate Dame Joan Metge and Roger Hall on their Awards, both Dame Joan and Roger have published with Victoria University Press in the past.

Bernadette Hall

1. e hara i te mea, no naianei te aroha, no nga tupuna, tuki iho tuku iho

At a moment like this it feels good to start with love. Love passed down from generation to generation. And language, language is also passed down.

2.  We are great talkers in my family. My sisters and me. We can be raucous and outrageous when we get together. There’s a story: when I was about two and a half and living in Alexandra, there was a wall-paperer come in to do some work in the house. Finally he said to my dad that if I wasn’t removed from the room, he wouldn’t be able to keep on working because I just wouldn’t stop talking. My dad said, ‘Well, I’ll have to get another paperer then.’

3. There’s a story: my mother, one of the two most beautiful girls in Dunedin, so they say, working in the OK Café during the Depression. She didn’t have the chance of tertiary education. She and her friend Flo used to steal little slices of lemon cake, sliding them under an upturned cup on a saucer, taking the cup out the back, pretending they were going to do the washing. Mum and her family, the Nialls, had the tough, bracing, black humour my sisters and I call the black Irish humour.

I remember some of the sayings of the old aunts and uncles: a) if I’d done something that impressed them, they’d say ‘ why, you’re the girl your mother forgot to drown’.  b) if they heard us complaining or whining about things, they’d say, ‘we’re doin’ right alright in this little land we stole from the Maoris.’ I suspect that only Irish Catholics would ever talk like that.  c) If by accident you committed a rhyme when you were chatting away, Mum would cut in with ‘ she’s a poet and she doesn’t know it’. d) Dad died suddenly when I was fifteen. If my sisters and I were lazing around, not helping out enough, Mum would pull a face and full of mockery she’d quote Boxer, the draught-horse from Orwell’s Animal Farm: "I must work harder". We’d feel guilty even as we roared with laughter, galvanised into giving her a hand.

5.  Alongside this kind of muscular language, there were the gorgeous elaborations of Church Latin and the Classics, Greek and Latin, which formed such a major part of my education. The plays and the poetry.

6.   It took me a long time to entrust myself to my lady poetry:  in 1971 I met Joanna Margaret Paul, teaching at St Dominic’s College in Dunedin; in 1972 I attended a poetry class run by John Dickson in Dunedin; in 1985 I had a first poem published in ‘Untold’ a magazine edited by Simon Garrett from Canterbury University; in 1989 there was my first book, from Caxton Press, edited by Michael Harlow. A very slender volume made beautiful by Joanna’s drawings.  I thought I could hide behind them. 

6. The American poet Wallace Stevens writes of the “rarities that the poet (and here I’d say the poem) can offer us: 'rarities which might / reconcile us to ourselves in those / True reconcilings, dark, pacific words, / And the adroiter harmonies of their fall' ”. There are people in this room who offer words like this – words that expand us when we read or listen to them. Essential words.

7. Thank you to Creative New Zealand, to Fergus, to Kathryn Madill and to my sister-in-law Tina Reid who opened her heart and her home to me in the years I worked in Wellington. My thanks and love to John – who would want to live with a writer!   

I experience this award as an embrace and an invitation to go on …. working harder, as my mother would put it. I am truly thrilled and grateful.   

Interview: Patrick Evans

Patrick Evan's new novel The Back of His Head explores ideas about art and genius through the story of Raymond Lawrence, a true literary 'monster'. 

Lawrence is New Zealand's only Nobel Prize for Literature winner, and the novel traces his rise and decline, and the effects of his terrible behaviour on the trustees who are charged with memorialising him and his work. 

The Back of His Head is at once a satire, and a troubling exploration of what it means to make fiction.

Patrick Evans

The Back of His Head is a novel that really deeply questions what fiction is, and how it is made. It’s a game-playing novel right through to the final page; even the author’s Acknowledgements puts question marks around who created this thing. It’s a very effective way to steer the reader. Did you worry about accusations of manipulation while writing it? Or is that part of the point?

No; I expect readers to feel manipulated because that’s what novels do; they manipulate, and that’s something I wanted to show as I wrote – the ‘made-upness’ of fiction and how we buy into that aspect by ‘willingly suspending disbelief,’ and how fiction relies on our doing that, how writing/reading is a collaborative project. The ‘apparent’ authorship of The Back of His Head moves as you read it, from ‘me’ to ‘Peter Orr’ to ‘Thom Ham’ to ‘Patrick’ (whoever he is) to (possibly) the Master himself, in the text and knocking on the door of the Residence later on, when the tapes have been stolen (or is it just the police, called in to restore Order?). Above all, The Back of His Head is a reading experience in which the reader is moved around as s/he turns the pages.

          

Writing the novel, I had a strong sense of the authorship moving away from me and of myself just going along with that process: I don’t know who’s knocking at the door any more than the reader does, or where Peter and the boy with spina bifida are going near the end, but I know it’s someone important that’s knocking and somewhere important that they’re going. The authorship of the novel has dissolved at this point, and is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and the ‘tail’ of the book has simply become layers of text, none of them describing a ‘fixed,’ ‘real’ reality ‘back there’. Another way of saying this is that the novel has become ‘de-Oedipalized’ (cf. the bone people after the destruction of the tower two-thirds of the way through: everything changes after that).

             

An aspect of this recession of the idea of Authorship is the emergence of what I call in the novel ‘the oceanic processes of literature,’ in which the idea of the Author as Master is replaced by the notion of Writing as Master – in which (effectively) all writing is a form of plagiarism and nothing is absolutely new (a notion which itself is not new; cf. the Borges story in which a Frenchman decides to write Don Quixote). And of course you have to ask the obvious questions if you believe this: what use is any literary trust that exists to give permission to quote from writing that is taken from the Ocean of Literature? Who ‘owns’ a book once it’s written – a trustee more than anyone else who hasn’t written it?

Do you think that’s what literature – as opposed to ‘pulp fiction’ – is best at doing: asking questions? This assumes a certain degree of open-hearted and open-mindedness in its readers – do you agree? 

Literary fiction requires both those qualities in the reader, as well as a willingness to be taken somewhere new and strange; otherwise, why read it – why write it?

I think readers of literary fiction self-select to some degree, and therefore know what they’re getting themselves into and, at their best and in their Ideal Reader mode, are open to being shaken up and even (at the far end of the process) shocked and disgusted if they think that is a part of their own enlargement as human beings.

To open oneself up to such possibilities requires not only a willing suspension of disbelief by the reader but a refusal to judge, and, particularly – and above all – a putting-aside of notions of political correctness. This in turn requires an acceptance that a writer knows what s/he is doing and why s/he is taking you to certain places – in other words, that s/he isn’t just being grubby or self-indulgent. All this requires a sophisticated readership, one which (for example) can distinguish between the material being who has written the work and the work’s narrating author and characters, and can understand a creative work as being about certain ideas and not simply as yet one more attack on particular people in the material world.   

The book kicks western culture’s received idea of the author up its complacent backside. It is also a satire, on one level, of the prize-culture around books and writers. How possible do you think it is for a reader to get away from the hype, for a good book to be quietly discoverable?

The Back of His Head is about a Dead White Male Author (think Hemingway, White, Durrell, Lowry and many others of the twentieth century) who is now a dinosaur as a new era of writing evolves that is organized in new ways and for a completely different kind of readership from before. To some extent this involves the return of a colonial Repressed (think of the Master’s replacement in the bookshop’s advertising by the young former refugee/writer and his new bestseller). 

But this new era, it seems to me, involves new modes of hype, most obviously the prize system Raymond Lawrence turns away from after landing The Big One. That’s why he wants to blow up the creative writing school, and at this point I have to say I’m close to his way of thinking – not that I think we should blow up creative writing schools (after all, I’ve taught in one for ten years), but I do think we should become aware of what we’re getting into as literature becomes increasingly commodified by global capitalism. Maintaining locally-rooted literatures, supported by active small publishers, with alert, educated and open-minded local readerships and informed, intelligent critical structures and readerships are (I think) the way to resist the ‘post-colonial exotic’ and the hyper-real hollowing-out of ‘the product’ in a world of superficial display.

             

As to getting away from the hype: in my experience, the truth will out either way – that a ‘successful’ work isn’t really up to much, really, or a little-known work is. I have first-hand evidence that good books can be discovered, recognized and appreciated without getting a prize: David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) was completely ignored when it appeared and long after; now it is widely recognized as a masterpiece, not least by the second-year university students I recently taught it to. All that was needed was that we catch up to it (actually reading it helps). There are further, more recent examples of the way word-of-mouth can ‘get it right’ in the long term – to some extent the bone people began like that: I heard it was being written and was important in 1969, long before it was published.

Raymond Lawrence, the writer at the heart of the new novel, is a colossus of a writer, a man who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but who is an appalling human being. Other characters describe him as a monster, yet they indulge him throughout his life. They enable his monstrous qualities to some degree. Is the novel at least partly a comment on a society that looks the other way if an artist is at work?

I’ve always been fascinated by people who are appalling human beings but have a peculiar charm and magnetism that cause other people to love them and even lay down their lives for them, acolytes who – yes, I agree – enable them and without whom the psychopath in question would be nothing. Our belief creates and sustains them: they’re ‘our’ monsters – think of Hitler Youths shooting themselves after Hitler’s suicide, think of Stalin’s victims weeping when he died. 

Raymond Lawrence is just such a being, a man who has sucked the life out of everyone around him and yet is loved and cared for by them – even Thom the dimwitted weightlifter can see him as lovable late in the old man’s life, when Lawrence has been ravaged by Parkinson’s. Peter Orr has been all but destroyed as an individual, yet sits in the darkened Residence calling out to the dead Master, the man who has destroyed him.

The Back of His Head explores the notion that art can come from really unpleasant places, the relationship between art and pathology, and the well-known fact that many writers/artists are at best not very nice people and at worst in the grips of some kind of sickness. This is the sort of thing Joyce Cary wrote about with his potty artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth (1944), but in my novel it’s less cute – Jimson is your standard Corbyn-ish anti-capitalist/anti-bourgeois; what I’m writing about is someone who really might have tortured and murdered a young Arab boy in the desert – and worse. All in order to qualify as an artist, the Master says, all in order to find inspiration: a man who really does believe that a successful work of art should conceal a crime.

It might be fair to say that the plot of The Back of His Head doesn’t deliver a set ‘truth’ about what happens, but at the same time, the sense I got on finishing the novel was that a truth about the creation of fiction and an ethical statement had been made. What do you think?

This is a sharp insight into the novel and mirrors my own feeling as I wrote - it’s exactly the response I hoped for, a sensing of something that’s there but can’t be defined, leaving the reading experience itself as the most important part of the text.

Writing Gifted was easy but with The Back of His Head I really did wrestle with the angel; in writing both, though, I experienced a sense of increasing detachment as if I’d surrendered to the writing process in some way. In a review of David Hare’s recent autobiography The Blue Touch Paper the playwright is quoted as saying that, because his writing comes so independently from his subconscious, it is, “at the deepest level, out of my hands” (New Statesman, September 2015). 

This process is very familiar to me, in which the writing seems to begin to write itself and the writer becomes, quite genuinely, a reader of his own work as it is written, as puzzled and intrigued as anyone else by what is emerging in front of him. Starting from the basic situation of a famous artist-uncle and his nephew (a scenario that has been with me for forty years), I am as surprised as anyone by what has emerged. It leaves me not with a Message but with a trace, like a dream after waking (The Luminaries did this to me, too): in the case of The Back of His Head, something I can’t spell out but which has to do with the importance of life outside literature. I don’t know where the little boy in the wheelchair near the end came from, but it must be somewhere important; and look what happens to Peter, Marjorie and Robert when they fall under the spell of Literature. There is a right way to live your life, and the Master isn’t an example of that.

Your two novels are about literary writers who are, to borrow the title of your first novel, gifted. What has made you want to continue exploring the idea of genius?

Henry James (somewhere) said that no work of art was worthwhile if it didn’t say something about the form in which it was written, and since (like the Master) I have reservations about how much any novel can make the world change ‘out there,’ I agree that writing, to a very large extent, has to be inward-looking and aware of itself as a form – ‘in here’. The most interesting recent writer in New Zealand, for me, is Carl Shuker, each of whose novels and novellas challenges the reader to put all his/her assumptions to one side and learn to read it as something new in the world of writing.

As far as I’m concerned, when looking ‘in here,’ where better to start than at that curiosity of curiosities, the inspirational moment itself, the unanswerable question of ‘where it all comes from’? The Back of His Head was written as the third in a trilogy of novels begun by Gifted; no guarantee, of course, that I’ll be able to write the second, but if I do, the trilogy thus completed will be in honour of Janet Frame’s influence on my thinking as a writer and on my life, and in particular in her fascination with ‘where it comes from’ and the place of language in writerly ‘inspiration’. The Back of His Head is particularly influenced by Living in the Maniototo (1979), the novel some consider to be Frame’s master-work. She never leaves me.

Why do you think literary estates, like the one represented in your novel, are often such fraught organisations?

What comes immediately to mind here is Henry Kissinger’s suggestion that academic politics are as vicious as they are because the stakes are so low. There’s an aspect of the literary world that is the obverse of those soaring humanitarian ideals behind the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in The Back of His Head I’ve been fascinated to explore this kind of heroic pettiness – which isn’t particular simply to literary trusts but extends into reviewing and the awarding of prizes and writing residencies and even behaviour in public readings. By and large, the smaller and more isolated the literary culture, the more (I’m told) this nonsense goes on: issues of personal insecurity seem to be paramount as we all vie to be Top Bitch At Crufts.

I’ve always been interested in the a writer’s ‘corpus and corpse’ – what s/he writes, and then what happens to the Body of Writing and the Body of the Author afterwards – hence my fascination (after helping a friend with Parkinson’s for a few years) with the corruption and dissolution of both the writer’s body and his sense of Self – in this novel, of the Master’s Mastery: who is it who blows up the creative writing school? (And, anyway, is that really what happens?) And who inherits the Master’s Mastery after he’s gone? 

The posthumous ‘secularisation’ of a particular writer’s achievement after his/her death and the use of his/her status and power have always fascinated me, along with the question how a literary guardianship might qualify an author’s heritage and even be argued, in some cases, to have worked against the values espoused in the author’s work and the posthumous reputation of the writer. 

The Back of His Head is available in good bookshops and through our online bookstore now.
p/b, $30.

Poetry and Song

We are very excited to announce that the latest collaboration between Norman Meehan and Hannah Griffin is now available to order from our website: SmallHoles in the Silence (VUP Rattle) is a gorgeous album of settings of poems by Hone Tuwhare, Bill Manhire, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, David Mitchell, James K. Baxter and Eileen Duggan.

Hannah, Norman and Bill are taking their music on the road with five concerts in the Chamber Music New Zealand Buddhist Rain tour in October:

http://www.chambermusic.co.nz/whats-on/buddhist-rain

October 9: Wanaka

7.30pm, Lake Wanaka Centre, Ardmore St    

October 10: Cromwell

7.30pm, Cromwell Memorial Hall. Melmore Terrace

October 11: Gore

3.00pm, James Cumming Lecture Theatre, Ardwick Street

October 18: Warkworth

4.00pm, Old Masonic Lodge, 3 Baxter Street

October 20: Whangarei

7.00pm, Old Library Building, 7 Rust Ave

And concerts in Auckland in October and Wellington in November:

October 19: Auckland

Auckland Jazz Festival

7:30pm, 1885 Britomart, 27 Galway Street

http://www.aucklandjazzfestival.co.nz/events/2015/norman-meehan-hannah-griffin

November 13: Wellington

LitCrawl Small Holes in the Silence concert

7.30pm, St Andrews on the Terrace

http://www.eventfinda.co.nz/2015/small-holes-in-the-silence-album-launch-concert/wellington