Karl Stead - Shelf Life

C. K. Stead was born in Auckland in 1932. From the late 1950s, he began to earn an international reputation as a poet and literary critic and, later, as a novelist. He has published more than 40 books and received numerous prizes and honours recognising his contribution to literature, including in 2009 the Prime Ministers Award for Fiction and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (Reference and Anthology) for his Collected Poems and in 2010 the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. He received our highest award, the Order of New Zealand, in 2007, and he is the New Zealand poet laureate for 20152017.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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

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

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

Autobiography

South-West of Eden

Edited

New Zealand Short Stories (2nd series)

Measure for Measure (a casebook)

The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection

Collected Stories of Maurice Duggan

Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories

Werner Formans New Zealand

Shelf Life

Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences

C. K. Stead

To my fellow poet-critics and friends of many years Craig Raine in Oxford and Mike Doyle in Victoria, BC

P utting together a collection of this kind makes me more aware than I usually am of the categories in which I have worked poetry, fiction, non-fiction and how the last of these has divided between academic publication and varieties of literary journalism. I had always been a writer first and anything else second; but thirty years ago, when I left the university to become the writer full-time, I was nervous that working alone and lacking the pressures of a timetable, busy colleagues and eager students, I might find myself sitting about doing nothing. I had a wife, Kay, still working at the university library. Now I had to earn my living in a new way. I gave myself a five-day working week, and kept office hours, though of course I could and did work overtime. My old friend and mentor, Frank Sargeson, used to require of himself a page a day handwritten, so possibly only 300 words. I was making up for lost time, and that would not have seemed enough. I worked very hard and consistently. I had worked hard as a university teacher too, but now it was at what I wanted to do rather than at what the timetable required.

My days began with a vigorous walk or a swim, and then the morning was devoted to the primary project of the moment fiction at first; but later, once I had proved to myself that I really was a working novelist, I would switch for a period to poetry mode. So there was soon an almost regular alternating pattern a novel followed by a collection of poems, and then fiction again. Sometimes this work continued after lunch; but on the whole I tried to reserve the afternoons for the other side of my professional life reviews, literary journalism, columns, occasional lectures, correspondence. For a time I reviewed fiction for the Sydney Morning Herald; at another period I wrote a column for Metro; for over fifteen years I wrote for Karl Millers London Review of Books. And I wrote randomly for a number of literary journals and newspapers both local and overseas. My academic life did not quite stop either. I was still known for work on the poetry of twentieth-century Modernism, and invitations came to lecture, visit, supervise. My life fell into a pattern of nine or ten months at home working in Auckland, and two or three (very occasionally more) overseas. No year passed when I didnt cross the equator at least once.

Monetary rewards varied; but, given that the New Zealand market is small, I had what I needed to keep afloat as a professional writer overseas publishers. Nothing of mine ever sold quite as well as my first critical book, The New Poetic, which was published on both sides of the Atlantic in a number of formats and editions, and has remained in print in Britain for half a century. I learned early that it is very important to be practical about money matters; but it is also true that the financial rewards seldom ran even approximately parallel with ones inner sense of achievement, and the inner sense was the one that mattered most. Money from advances, royalties, translation rights and movie options, local grants and awards, international prizes any or all of these were welcome if and when they sent down a small, usually unscheduled, shower of gold. So were the annual authors lending right payments for books in libraries, and grants from Creative New Zealand towards local publishers of poetry, and for travel to attend literary festivals. But the real rewards came when you knew, on your own internal scale of things, that you had written something not just good, but uniquely your own. A poem, a short story or chapter even a page of fiction; a witty review or an insightful paragraph of critical analysis: whatever it happened to be, if the internal monitor told you it was good, that was where true satisfaction, a sort of peace to the spirit, was to be found.

What ghost was being appeased? What wrong was being righted or sin atoned for? I didnt know. It was all, this writing business, and had been since it first began when I was still at school, mysterious, possibly even neurotic. I knew only that for a moment the world which out there seemed so imperfect, so fallen, so much less than the heart desired, in here had been called to order. Others might like what was pleasing me so much, or they might dislike, even deplore it; or (most probable) it would pass unnoticed but one had struck gold of another kind, the kind that gave meaning to the whole project. In a very real sense I was in the business to please myself. If I set out to please others (and particularly something conceived of as the Market) that was a recipe for inauthenticity and failure.