C. K. Stead - You have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir, 1956–1986

For Kay with love

The path is narrow

the tide is beginning to run

and the sun

makes light of it.

Also by C. K. Stead

Poetry

Whether the Will is Free

Crossing the Bar

Quesada

Walking Westward

Geographies

Poems of a Decade

Paris

Between

Voices

Straw into Gold

The Right Thing

Dog

The Red Tram

The Black River

Collected Poems 19512006

The Yellow Buoy: Poems 20072012

In the Mirror, and Dancing

That Derrida Whom I Derided Died

Fiction

Smiths Dream

Five for the Symbol (stories)

All Visitors Ashore

The Death of the Body

Sister Hollywood

The End of the Century at the End of the World

The Singing Whakapapa

Villa Vittoria

The Blind Blonde with Candles in her Hair (stories)

Talking about ODwyer

The Secret History of Modernism

Mansfield

My Name was Judas

Risk

The Name on the Door is Not Mine (stories)

The Necessary Angel

Memoir

South-West of Eden: A Memoir 19321956

Criticism

The New Poetic

In the Glass Case

Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement

Answering to the Language

The Writer at Work

Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers

Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic

Shelf Life: Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences

Edited

Oxford New Zealand Short Stories (2nd series)

Measure for Measure, a Casebook

Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield

Collected Stories of Maurice Duggan

Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories

Werner Formans New Zealand

First published 2020

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.press.auckland.ac.nz

C. K. Stead, 2020

ISBN 9781776710577

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design by Carolyn Lewis

Cover images: Front Karl, Mansfield Menton Fellow, heading for the Villa Isola Bella, 1972; Back Karl addressing an anti-Vietnam War rally in Myers Park, Auckland, 1968; both photographed by Marti Friedlander, courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust

Printed in China through Asia Pacific Offset

This is an account of myself from the end of South-West of Eden, when I first left New Zealand at the age of twenty-three, to my leaving the University of Auckland to become a full-time writer at the age of fifty-three. During all of those thirty years I had been writing and that work and the responses to it figure here. But there was always in my mind the hope I would reach a position sufficiently secure to allow me to be a writer only, with employment obligations to no one but myself. So these are my years as graduate student, teacher, professor, but equally as poet, critic, and fiction writer. In part it is the record of one struggling to get out but out of no bad place, and managing pretty well right where he was. If there was conflict between the writer and the academic, and between a commitment to New Zealand and temptations to be somewhere else, these seem not to have been destructive. They were just my life even an expression of my temperament but also in some ways illustrative of New Zealand and its place in the world during those years.

This is a literary biography a story of books and how they come about, of teaching and learning, of writers and how they interact with one another. It is a truthful account of my experience of those thirty years; nothing is deliberately misrepresented. But I have left things out, most often in the interests of economy, but sometimes for reasons of discretion, or privacy. There are significant people in my life who dont figure in these pages. I claim to be a truthful recorder, not a comprehensive one.

After the end of my university employment there is another thirty years of my writing life, a further story which may have to tell itself, and perhaps has largely done so in my books published since 1986.

At the beginning of 1956, aged twenty-three, one year married and with a first-class honours MA from the University of Auckland, I was appointed to my first academic job, a temporary lectureship in English at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, New South Wales. The salary was 1,200 p.a., so at a stroke I had become what my father called a thousand-a-year man his measure of something distinctly better than merely a working wage, and which he had possibly never achieved himself. UNE had been established in 1938 as a college of the University of Sydney, but in 1954 it had been granted autonomy on condition that it undertook all the extramural teaching for the state of New South Wales, and a large part of my work would be dealing with students at a distance, setting and marking exercises, occasionally visiting outlying areas to hold weekend schools.

So Kay and I packed all our belongings, as you did then, said our goodbyes, and a sad farewell to our little 3-a-week glassed-in flat on Takapuna Beach, and set sail for a three-day journey from Auckland to Sydney on the P&O liner Orsova. It would be my first experience of Overseas.

I thought of Australia, as everyone who didnt know it well did (and perhaps does), as unstratified, democratic, egalitarian. In fact it was rife with divisions, rankings and snobberies Catholic and Protestant especially in those days, which meant roughly Irish stock and English stock, poorer and richer, lower and upper castes.

The university too seemed to be divided especially between before 1954 and after 1954, the before being appointments made when UNE was only a college of Sydney, lecturers now considered rather shop-soiled and out-of-date; the after, younger staff, better qualified academically. In the September before my appointment H. W. Piper, the universitys Foundation Professor of English, had opened his inaugural (public) lecture: I have today the duty and the honour of delivering the second inaugural lecture to be given in this University and the first from the Faculty of Arts. Previously, as a college of Sydney, Armidale had no professorial chairs and consequently lacked the status that went with them.