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A Discussion on the New Zealand Short Story (3)

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A Discussion on the New Zealand Short Story (3) A Discussion on the New Zealand Short Story (3) 江 澤 恭 子＊ A Discussion on the New Zealand Short Story (3) Kyoko EZAWA The second short story is another of Sargeson’s narratives, entitled Cow-Pats. This too is a very short story, one page and a half, written in an easy, simple style. In spite of its shortness, as far as I know, it characterises New Zealand. In the cold morning of winter, one of“my” brothers working on the dairy farm‘found out a good way of warming his feet up. He stuck them －gum-boots－ into a cow-pat that had just been dropped,1 ） and he said it made his feet feel bosker and warm .... So we’d watch out, and whenever a cow dropped a nice big pat we’d race for it, and the one who got there first wouldn’t let the others put their feet in.’ One early cold morning, at the hotel,“I” －the youngest boy－ saw:‘Just as the porter was finishing －cleaning－ the steps an old man came along the street and asked if he could warm his hands up in the bucket of water ... so he kept them there until they were warm.’‘Well, that was something I understood without having to ask any questions.’ Thus the boy realised, through strange and rare experiences, what living is. The next-to-last work in this series of essays is Vincent O’Sullivan’s Grove. Grove is a plotless story. It begins in a very simple manner with an external explanation of Grove’s face without any preliminary knowledge of him. Grove’s face wasn’t injured, as you could tell, but it curved in on one side, so that his left temple and jaw were at least an inch further out than his left cheek. Whether he talked or smiled, his lips on that side stayed straight and together, and the right side of his face moved by itself. And there were two deep lines that ran from beside his nostrils almost to the end of his chin. Grove, the protagonist, seems to us a strange, even grotesque character from the above. But he is not ‘hideous or funny.’ And the most characteristic feature, above all, is‘his head like a dented kettle,’ which is very important in this story. Mary and a disembodied narrator,“I”, speak of him: he is described varyingly as ‘delicate,’‘clean,’ ‘punctual,’ ‘solemn,’ and a trombone player for a band. ＊Kyoko EZAWA 国際学科（Department of International Studies） 43 東京成徳大学研究紀要 ―人文学部・国際学部・応用心理学部― 第28号（2021） “What else is there?” “What else should there be?” “If there’s nothing else why do we think there is?” He is an object of everybody’s great concern. He never cares that he is always called“Grove” in spite of his real name being“Graham.” Why does he read? “There’s reasons for books ... I mean the reasons are always interesting ... The reasons why they write them.” O’Sullivan shows us on the one hand that Grove is a purposeless man, but on the other hand that he is a great figure, immovable like a grove. He also implies that he is really living with a guiding principle, telling that he is‘put on some committee.’ His statements are, as a whole, very subtle, minute, and of thoughtful consideration. But his way to explain sexual love is very humourous, minute, unique, and realistic, but not vulgar nor overly revealing, as might be expected of a great poet. T. Reeves points out:‘His work achieves, in its best moments, a certain charm and uniqueness of observation within its context of minutely recorded incidents.’2） He states it on one occasion from the character’s own perspective but on another occasion in a detached way. We’d been lying on my bed talking about him －Grove－ and I began unbuttoning her blouse. We always seemed to have our eye on the clock. With only the street light from up the road her breasts were like two pale bowls. Then Mary surprised me for the second time that night, and more than the first. She had gripped my arm tightly then thrown the blankets back and her tongue was working over my chest and down to my stomach. From the above, we can surmise that J. C. Reid’s interpretation which follows is not appropriate as far as O’Sullivan’s works are concerned:‘the rarity with which love, sex and marriage are treated with insight and sensitivity in our fiction, the grave absence of joy in man-woman relationships, is a measure of the still markedly provincial character of our writing’ or‘When sex is not ignored, romanticized, or homosexual, ... it is often abnormal,’ although such distrust of normal sex is‘a reflex from New Zealand’s primary Puritan or colonial attitudes ....’3） Grove’s naivety is revealed through actions such as when he‘touched very lightly the hair that curled above her pink collar. It was a shy sort of touch, as though he were brushing the skin of a baby’ and as even sings for‘his naked woman’ when Grove is in the bed with Ruth,‘ten years older than he.’ In the following, his naïveness is bound together with something erotic. It amazed me that Grove just didn’t see what was obvious as the day. I mean, she only had to hitch at her bra strap through her blouse, or uncross her legs so that she could ease down the heel of one 44 A Discussion on the New Zealand Short Story (3) shoe with the toe of the other, for you to tell what a bag she was. You didn’t need to get as far as her teeth or her gritty hair or the ladder that began in a small hole behind the crossed knee and disappeared somewhere in the lump of her thigh. However, the author revisits the imagery of the protagonist’s head and face over and over again till the end as if it were a central theme or the vital point of his story. He had his hollow side towards me and I thought for a minute is he having me on? ... Ruth’s dyed hair brushing his dented side as though the hollow was there deliberately for her to nuzzle into. ... At first I took it for granted that he must have died of head injuries. It seemed the obvious way for him to die, as only his head ever occurred to you when you thought of him. ... And Grove there silent and polite and his head caught too in the red flare and then in the darkness ... Grove dies replying to St. John’s parson’s question about whether he wants anyone to witness his death:‘no, it’ll be all right thank you.’ He dies as a man alone, just as Billy Budd4） is executed: naïve and pure, without knowledge of human evil. But who is a real man alone on earth?“I” is now left alone as a result of Grove’s death and Mary’s departure for England. Finally“I” is completely exiled when“I” becomes privy to the fact that Ruth‘didn’t have’ her husband. It was only“I”, not Grove, Ruth nor Mary who was really isolated at the end. It is just as Captain Vere, who convicted Budd to death, and the narrator were much more lonely and solitary than Budd executed. Lastly, I must refer to a Maori writer and his work. Witi Ihimaera is the first and the greatest Maori writer in English. He once said that he had felt compelled to write after he had read B. Pearson’s essay in 1969 which lamented that there had still been no Maori writers in New Zealand. Since he began writing, he has penned many stories of high quality. In all of them we see his distinctive view of rural Maori life. They deal with sadness and happiness in life. They are usually infused with love and anger, particularly with the hope that the values of the Maori will never be lost. Let me discuss The Whale as a case in point. This is one of his most famous, reputable and artistically accepted works. The theme is consistent with those found in all his stories about the Maori. Ihimaera says,‘I read in a newspaper about a whale being found stranded on a beach. When it was towed out to sea, it only returned to the beach again ... That’s how this story created itself.’5） We come, in fact, across a‘whale’ twice in this story. But it means nothing in itself. He wishes to show Maori people what has been lost from their once noble family, which they have lost, land or spirit, or what is happening to them. Therefore, the story itself is a metaphor just as the‘whale’ is a symbol. Throughout the book, his style is simple and unpretentious. It reminds us of that of F. Sargeson, but it seems to me more poetic in part than Sargeson’s. One of the reasons is, I suspect, that the Maori language is elaborately used on some occasions, which imparts a poetic tone through its vowel effect, and is bound together 45 東京成徳大学研究紀要 ―人文学部・国際学部・応用心理学部― 第28号（2021） with English words. It opens with no external exposition of characters or settings: He sits, this old kaumatua, in the darkness of the meeting house. He has come to this place because it is the only thing remaining in his dying world.
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