C. K. Stead - What You Made of It: A Memoir, 1987–2020

To Kay Oliver, Charlotte and Margaret and to whnau (including my sister Frances) and friends everywhere

AROHANUI

The world as you found it Catullus

was neither

benign nor malign

but what you made 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

You Have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir 19561986

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 (second 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 2021

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

C. K. Stead, 2021

ebook ISBN 9781776710720

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

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.

Book design by Carolyn Lewis

Cover design by Spencer Levine

Cover images: Front Courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust Back Copyright NZ Herald/Brett Phibbs

Rounding off You Have a Lot to Lose, and believing I would not live to write an account of the years that followed my departure from the university in 1986, I wrote that, despite my endless perambulations between New Zealand and the out there world, I still thought of myself as a loyal Pkeh New Zealander with deep and abiding attachments to Tmaki Makaurau. In todays very generous Radio NZ review of that book Harry Ricketts described it as memoir rather than an autobiography autobiography, he suggested, being about oneself, memoir about oneself and other people. Somewhere in Le Rouge et le Noir Stendhal says a novel is like a mirror walking along a road. These which now become three memoirs are that kind of writing not fiction, but the report of one who consistently reflects, looking out rather than in and reporting what he sees. These are my encounters and engagements with the world of books and writers, and of teaching and writing about them. I am not interesting except insofar as I meet, engage with, and report upon, interesting people, places and events. The world reflected in my ambulant mirror is primarily literary, but behind it constantly is the broader image of politics and society.

What You Made of It completes the more than thirty years of my literary life after I left the shelter of the university to be a full-time writer; but the narrative this time is only roughly chronological, broken into chapters each of which centres on a scene or theme, and on related places and persons. As with the previous two I claim that this is as truthful to memory and to the written or printed record as I can make it; but it is not (and could not be) comprehensive. Some people who have been important in my life are absent, sometimes for reasons of privacy, discretion, accident, or simply for the convenience or the imperatives of narrative. Three of these oversights are given an Appendix but there could be many more. Even my family are mostly background to a literary life but to treat them otherwise always threatened to expand the memoir beyond reasonable limits.

Every book creates its own rules as it goes, and the writer, while acknowledging his part, indeed his responsibility for every word, is aware of a kind of helplessness, and will say, if only to himself, this is the best I could do, being the person I am and given the chances life and the gene pool threw my way. In these scary midwinter/Matariki nights, when coronary symptoms remind me of my dire prognosis, I think of the benign words of the bronze statue of the writer in Dubravkin Put at the end of my story Last Seasons Man: Old friend, you must know theres no Justice. That I am here and Tomislav is not is neither right nor wrong. The Universe is indifferent and does not love us. Everything is Chance.

C. K. S.

Tmaki Makaurau

23 June 2020

Dan Davin and etc.

I begin with Dan Davin and Oxford, not because the man or the location is more important than other persons or places that will figure in this book, but because they are a focal point for stories: there are lines out from the man and the place, interconnections with what is to follow. Dan was a writer, and Oxford a notable academic hub. My ambition had been to be a writer, full-time; and the academic world was the one I hoped to escape from, though without entirely turning my back on it. So to begin with Dans death will serve as a symbolic stepping-off point for the story of Stead, recently retired from his professorship at the University of Auckland and now well launched on his new freelance literary life.

In my copy of Dans book of memories of literary friends, Closing Times, there is a clipping of his death notice in The Times saying the funeral will be at 11.30 at the Oxford Crematorium, Headington, 1 October (1990). I have scribbled on it the train I would take, Paddington 9.50 10.40. I was in London and had just a day or so before farewelled Kay at Gatwick on a plane back to New Zealand, so would go to the funeral alone.

I remember Bruce Purchase as Master of Ceremonies. Bruce was a New Zealand actor we had got to know in London during my 1965 sabbatical leave, because his wife at that time, Elspeth Sandys (later to be Maurice Shadbolts penultimate), had been a student of mine. Bruce had been attached to my old friend of student years, Susan Davis; and we had seen him on the stage at the Old Vic. His contribution to the occasion was notable not just because he brought an actors voice and skill to his delivery but because his friendship with the Davins, both Dan and Winnie, in Dans last days and weeks, had been close. Bruce was the son of a soldier who had served in the NZ Div. in World War II, like Dan had been wounded and decorated, and had survived the war but not for as many years as Dan. These were facts which were of enormous importance to Dan and gave Bruce a special place.