WHAT YOU MADE OF IT WHAT Praise for You Have a Lot to Lose: A MEMOIR 1987–2020 ‘These are my encounters and engagements A Memoir, 1956–1986 with the world of books and writers, and of teaching and writing about them,’ ‘ . leaves the reader astonished at C. K. Stead writes in this third and final the energy, the determination, the volume of his memoirs. intellectual breadth and depth of the achievements of this, the most WHAT Having left the university to write full-time distinguished man-of-letters in New at the end of volume two, Stead throws Zealand working among us today.’ himself into his work. In novels like Sister —Rob Kidd, Otago Daily Times A MEMOIR Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, in poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead’s fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument – from The Bone YOU People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer’s flat. What was it like to be Allen Curnow’s 1987–2020 designated ‘Critic across the Crescent’; or alternatively to be labelled ‘the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit.’? How did poems C. K. Stead emerge from time and place, sometimes as naturally as ‘leaves to a tree’, sometimes C. K. STEAD is a distinguished, award- effortfully? And how did novels about winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist individual men and women retell stories of and emeritus professor of English at the war (World War II, Yugoslavia, Iraq) University of Auckland. He was the New and peace? Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–17, has won MADE the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the Covering Stead’s travels from Los Angeles highest honour possible in New Zealand. to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas C. K. Stead and Colombia, as New Zealand Poet Laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers – and all in Stead’s famously lucid ‘story- OF IT telling’ prose. Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 3 30/01/21 5:27 PM To Kay Oliver, Charlotte and Margaret and to wha- nau (including my sister Frances) and friends everywhere AROHANUI Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 4 30/01/21 5:27 PM The world as you found it Catullus was neither benign nor malign but what you made of it. Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 5 30/01/21 5:27 PM Contents By Way of Introduction x 1. Oxford and Consequences 1 2. France and French and the French 31 3. The Home Front 51 4. Identities 79 5. The Datson Story 107 6. Life and Death in Liguria 129 7. The Writer at Work – 1990s 155 8. Who Would You Trust? 179 9. The Pākehā Poet and the Tangata Whenua 195 10. The Curnow Factor – His Last Two Decades 219 11. Croatia, and ‘Last Season’s Man’ 247 12. Hitler and So On 279 13. High Octane 309 14. The Dark Angel and the Black River 333 15. The Trick of Standing Upright Here – and There 365 16. Nunc Dimittis 385 Appendix: Absent Friends 404 Acknowledgements 410 Index 413 Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 9 30/01/21 5:27 PM By Way of Introduction Rounding offYou 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 Pākehā New Zealander with deep and abiding attachments to Tāmaki Makaurau’. In today’s 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 Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 10 30/01/21 5:27 PM 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 Season’s Man’: ‘Old friend, you must know there’s 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. Ta - maki Makaurau 23 June 2020 xi Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 11 30/01/21 5:27 PM Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 12 30/01/21 5:27 PM 1. Oxford and Consequences 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 Dan’s 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 Dan’s 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. 1 Stead_What You Made of It_INT_FA.indd 1 30/01/21 5:27 PM 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 Shadbolt’s 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 actor’s voice and skill to his delivery but because his friendship with the Davins, both Dan and Winnie, in Dan’s 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. Fleur Adcock, another friend, delivered two poems, Dan’s ‘The gorse blooms pale’, and Donne’s ‘Death be not proud’, in her usual reading style which always sounded to me faintly admonitory. The New Zealand High Commissioner Bryce Harland spoke well – movingly – of Davin as the decorated soldier and author of the official New Zealand war history of the Battle of Crete.