Terry Sturm - Simply by Sailing in a New Direction

Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.
Landfall in Unknown Seas

ALLEN CURNOW (19112001) is widely recognised as one of the most distinguished poets writing in English in the twentieth century. For seventy years, from Valley of Decision (1933) to The Bells of Saint Babels (2001), Curnows poetry was always on the move, exploring such universal themes as identity, memory and mortality, and striving to make it new. Through literary criticism and anthologies such as the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse he helped identify the distinctive imaginative preoccupations that made New Zealands writing and culture different from elsewhere. By the time of his death at the age of ninety, he had completed a body of work unique in this country and increasingly recognised internationally. This major literary biography introduces readers to Allen Curnows life and work: from a childhood in a Christchurch vicarage, through theological training, journalism and university life, marriages and children, and on to an international career as a writer of poetry, plays and criticism. The book lucidly identifies the shifting textures of Curnows writing and unravels the connections between life and words. The result of several decades research and writing, Simply by Sailing in a New Direction offers deep insight into the development of New Zealands finest poet.

A Biography

Terry Sturm

Edited by Linda Cassells

for Terry

I owe a great deal to Allen Curnow, too. It was Allen who said that a poem must be visceral. You can tell if its alive by poking it with a stick.

Elizabeth Smither

Allen Curnow (19112001) was one of New Zealands most eminent and influential writers and among the finest English language poets of his generation worldwide. Curnow was largely responsible for defining our literary nationalism in the 1940s, in an attempt to break away from the colonial dependence on English culture, and it was he who introduced modernist agendas into New Zealand writing.

During his seventy years of publishing, he dominated the New Zealand literary landscape at almost every stage, and from the 1960s onwards enjoyed an international reputation for his poetry. In 1989 he was awarded the prestigious Queens Gold Medal for Poetry. His work has been published in translation, and continues to be widely anthologised.

By the time of his death at the age of ninety, he had completed a body of work which is unique in this country and increasingly recognised as significant in international terms. Remarkably, there has as yet been no full-length study of Curnows work, taking into account the ways in which it makes sense of New Zealands cultural history in the twentieth century. It is this significant lacuna that this project seeks to address.

These words, written by Terry Sturm, are drawn from his application for a Marsden Fund grant to research and write a literary biography of Allen Curnow. The subsequent Marsden endorsement of the project signalled it as a work of great significance to New Zealands cultural history, and the panels appraisal of Terry Sturm as researcher and writer was rated as outstanding. This book is the fruit of his research and writing, which spanned more than seven years.

The idea for this biography took firm shape over a dinner conversation at the French Caf in Auckland in 2001 shortly after Allen Curnows death. Curnows widow, Jeny, had recognised the need for a literary biography of the poets life, and Terry Sturm had the scholarly credentials and integrity befitting the task. He had long harboured an ambition to write such a book, and widow and writer quickly reached an understanding. Access would of course be granted to the Curnow archives. However, the route to publication was to be long and circuitous much more so than any of us could have imagined that evening.

The ease and speed of their understanding rested on Terrys long-standing relationship with the Curnows and the trust and respect they had for each other. Terrys interest in Allen Curnows writing stemmed from his student years as an undergraduate at the University of Auckland he had studied Curnows poetry, and it soon would form part of his doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds on problems of cultural dependence. In 1973, while a lecturer at the University of Sydney, he began researching a book on Curnows work as part of Twaynes World Authors Series, initiating a correspondence with Curnow and interviewing him at that time about his life and work. The project was aborted by the publishers for economic reasons, but Terrys notes and correspondence formed the basis of what was later to become an extensive archive on Curnows life and writing, reflecting the many further years of painstaking research underpinning this biography.

Noted for his scrupulous research, Terry Sturm was uniquely qualified to write this literary biography, and it is a mark of his commitment to the subject that he continued to work on the manuscript throughout his final illness. When he died in 2009 he left a full first draft of the manuscript of some 460,000 words. He had known for many months that his time was limited, and had suggested a path for completion which in the first instance would involve stringent structural editing. It would be a mammoth task for whoever was to undertake it, and the responsibility eventually fell to me, literary executor but also, as chance would have it, an editor and publisher by profession. The work required to bring the book to publication extended well beyond structural editing, however, and was far more expansive than I could have imagined when I first committed to ensuring the book would be published. The bibliographic notes had to be sourced and checked, copyright holders traced and permissions cleared, outstanding text queries resolved, photographs selected and captions written. While I have been actively involved in all these stages of preparation for publication, the work could not have been completed without the generous guidance of several Curnow scholars and publishing professionals.

The option, suggested by some after Terrys death, of publishing the first draft of the manuscript in two volumes was never seriously considered. Terrys modus operandi, which I had the privilege of observing at close hand with several of his previous publications, was to prepare an exhaustive first draft, and then to revise, cull and rework the material. Terry and I had detailed discussions during his last months as to how the draft biography could be cut and managed, weighing up the valuable feedback from key Curnow family members as well as scholarly colleagues who had read all or parts of the first draft.

The task of structural editing thus proceeded on carefully considered principles that had been agreed with Terry. For instance, multiple long quotations on a particular aspect of the narrative would be reduced to a single shortened one; plot summaries of the plays would be further condensed; direct quotations from the poems and long textual analyses would be contained and reserved for a range of key poems; the coverage given to Curnows popular persona Whim Wham would be reduced because of the recently published edition of Whim Whams poems, and, more obviously, the inevitable repetitions of a first draft would be eliminated and a seamless narrative flow would need to be achieved.