Philip Matthews assesses CK Stead's version of the controversial writer CK Stead
Looking back over his long life and his important body of work from the towering heights of his Collected Poems, 1951-2006, CK Stead could not help but admire what he saw, and what the book meant, both to the world and to him. He saw that it was good. “The collection was so there, so big, so full of so much — not of me but of me-and-the-world, our interaction, our joint life,” he recalls vividly, in the third and final volume of his memoirs, What You Made of It: A Memoir 1987-2020. The collected poems was a large and handsome volume, as is the new book, which is another substantial record, full of so much. But there are two other reasons that book launch mattered to him.
First, it was a personal boost after the “absurdity” of the New Zealand Book Awards, which have sometimes recognised Stead and sometimes not, although on this occasion, the “absurdity” wasn’t about being overlooked but about the collection somehow being honoured in the Reference and Anthology category. Second, in the year after the Auckland University Press’ magnificent production of his collected poems, the British poetry publisher Carcanet brought them out in “a beautiful big paperback”. This was, he says, “a UK confirmation of the NZ fact”.
By the time you reach the end of What You Made of It, which means you have got through 1154 pages since you started South-west of Eden: A Memoir 1932-1956, you may have long ago concluded that for Stead a memoir is mostly a record of achievements, packed with the praise he received and outlining the arguments he won. There is little room for self-doubt, or any kind of doubt. Of course his achievements have been substantial but when Stead tells us that he delivered a talk on post-colonial literature in Croatia, for instance, he insists on adding that his notebook reports he delivered the talk “with extraordinary fluency, even, possibly, eloquence”. Someone should have persuaded him to remove a few of these examples of his greatness. It is not as though he is unaware of what other people think about this compulsion. “I have been chastised for quoting favourable reviews but they are part of the story and there are sometimes lessons to be learned,” he writes, before quoting from five of the favourable reviews of his novel The Secret History of Modernism (“a minor miracle of a novel,” according to Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times) and none of the unfavourable ones.
But what can you do? It’s just Stead being Stead. Most writers are neurotic in some way about reviews. Some claim to never read them or to be above all that. It’s probably much more honest to scrutinise every word, commit them to memory and argue with the negative ones. As he says, reviews are part of the story, if the story is the creation of a literary self in the world and its maintenance over seven decades. There is the work and then there is the dialogue about the work. Indeed, Stead made his name as a tough reviewer before he even published a book of poetry, short stories or a novel. In the second volume, You Have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir 1956-1986, he appears to wince just a little when he remembers the “ruthlessly analytical” and “unkind” reviews he wrote in the 1950s of poet Alistair Campbell and others. You could say he has always been conscious of how and why reviews matter, and what they mean for reputations and posterity.
The anecdote about launching the Collected Poems is illustrative in another way. It’s in that bit about the UK confirmation of the NZ fact. It says that New Zealand is never enough. There is a kind of origin myth of Stead, which is about choosing to be here not there, New Zealand not Britain. Frank Sargeson advised Stead to make a life back here and help forge a local literature, and he did, but you can see that the decision has preoccupied him since the 1950s. Near the end of volume three he confesses to his daughter Margaret, who lives in London and works in publishing, that “I really think I would have had a bigger, fuller life if I had not come back”.
But then, as volume three amply shows, in a way he never really did come back. Has any New Zealand-based writer been out of the country as much as Stead? At the end of the second memoir, he has taken early retirement from the University of Auckland to write full time. As the third book opens, he is in Oxford then France. Later he will be in California, Croatia and South America. A residency here, a lecture there, and a sprinkling of names encountered at lunches and launches: Craig Raine, Karl Miller, Stephen Spender, Peter Porter, AS Byatt, Barry Humphries. He is frequently mistaken for Michael Frayn (to be fair, the likeness is remarkable). These international sections, the relaxed travel stories of a globetrotting intellectual, are intimate and quite touching, and while Stead, now 88, wrote this final book to beat the inevitable deadline, it doesn’t read as though he rushed it.
Here he is in France, his favourite country: “But walking in those Uzes woods past mill-house and chateau; or swimming in that river with its still green depths under sun and shadow; or eating French food and drinking French wine in that classic Place aux herbes with its ancient arcades and its starlings squabbling raucously at evening; or sitting out of doors in the village while its summer swallows conduct their Battle of Britain with invisible enemies before sundown and the moment when the bats and Hegel’s ‘owl of Minerva’ take over; these are locations and states of being that make one reflect on the human spirit …”
And so on. It’s as though Stead is somehow an expat who lives in Auckland. Civilisation is elsewhere. But this dual life has had some unintended consequences. Stead is a distinguished and important New Zealand writer who isn’t really appreciated at home and when we do think about him, we probably think about his knack for controversy before we think about his fiction or poetry. Or we know him as the precognitive author of Smith’s Dream. Of course that says something about the audience for literature in New Zealand.
Stead is very conscious of this gap in local reception. He recalls that in 2012 the UK English Association, of which he is an honorary fellow, nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature (“There can be few men or women alive today who have contributed more to the international community of letters over so long a period than this New Zealander”), but while he appreciated the gesture, he knew that a nomination without support from New Zealand would get nowhere, “and I had not detected any such inclination in my favour in New Zealand”. He was right. A Nobel win for Stead would probably have been greeted at home with shrugs and bewildered expressions or even open disbelief, rather than the kind of warm nationalist triumph that would have followed a win by, say, Janet Frame or Maurice Gee or Patricia Grace.
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Another revealing story in the memoir is based on the contrast between here and there. It involves Stead’s contract with Faber in the UK to edit a collection of South Pacific stories in the early 1990s. Stead asked himself if he was the right man for the job. Perhaps Albert Wendt would be better, but Wendt “still tended to anger and resentment when dealing with Pākehā New Zealand”, so Stead opted in. And then a bunch of important New Zealand writers opted out. Wendt was gone, and so were Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera. It would be hard to defend a South Pacific collection that lacked such key Māori and Pasifika authors. Stead attributed their sudden withdrawals, which left blank spaces in the book, to a fiendish plot by Wellington writer Vincent O’Sullivan.
He writes: “As I observed the way Vincent O’Sullivan operated in New Zealand’s literary undergrowth I thought of him as Duke Vincentio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure who manages the state in secret and in disguise, and is referred to as ‘the old fantastical Duke of dark corners’.”
This is strong stuff, perhaps even a little paranoid, but then it was, as we say now, the golden age of New Zealand literary feuds. Were these high-profile stoushes and fallings-out, with their gossipy factions and their letters to the Listener, genuinely hurtful or was it all just sport and posturing? Stead seems to have been genuinely hurt on at least a couple of occasions: once when Michael King accused him of starting the “ethnic cleansing” of New Zealand literature and once when Frame satirised Stead and his wife Kay in a short story. Of course, Stead has hurt plenty of others too.
Anyway, the collection was launched in Wellington by Robert McCrum from Faber; Stead remembers it as “an extremely embarrassing occasion” with “a dark brooding atmosphere”. McCrum said something about thinking that Stead was “the big cheese” in this part of the world, and realising he was mistaken.
The painful event was central to Nigel Cox’s notorious takedown of Stead in Quote Unquote magazine in 1994. Cox wrote that McCrum’s apology “was clearly unsettling for Stead, who for the first time in anyone’s memory spoke hesitantly. He managed to get in a couple of well-aimed blows at Faber, suggesting they had been less than courageous, and defended the book. Then to everyone’s astonishment he suggested that perhaps he ‘was out of touch with New Zealand’.”
He was definitely swimming against the tide. The Faber incident was just one of a series of moments when Stead seemed to be increasingly at odds with New Zealand literary culture and its overt embrace, from the 1980s on, of biculturalism and political correctness. He stopped being a dogmatic follower of the left somewhere between the 1981 Springbok tour, when he was arrested on the field in Hamilton, and the Mervyn Thompson attack in 1984. Most of this stuff fell within the scope of the second memoir, in which he wrote that “I was a combative person, and the air of the 1980s was full of outrage”. It sure was. King’s “ethnic cleansing” bit came up after Stead attacked an anthology that included Māori poems, which he thought were either bad poems or bad translations. He gave Hulme and Ihimaera tough reviews in international papers. There started to be a feeling that Stead was “anti-Māori”, and probably “anti-women” as well.
This is all old news now, but it sets up the Stead of volume three, the elder statesman of New Zealand letters who feels more at home in France than Wellington. As well as the Faber business, there was the London flat business. This story concerned Stead’s close links to a plan by Michael Bassett, then Arts Minister in the Lange/Douglas government, to buy a flat for use by New Zealand writers. Stead says he was involved because he was “the New Zealand-based writer who knew London best”. The flat was bought, then sold by the National government and Stead was publicly at war with Fiona Kidman and Lauris Edmond, who had opposed the scheme, and somehow O’Sullivan was implicated as well.
Stead was everywhere, winding people up. He even found himself on a TV special about the Treaty of Waitangi in 1990, arguing that the Treaty had no place in modern New Zealand and dismissing historian Claudia Orange and other experts as “propagandists”. While his views on the issue have shifted since, a recent rewatch reassures him that he was “reasonable, firm and clear” in his opposition.
Stead’s recounting of these and other disputes 30 years later has a strong sense of him having the last word as he produces documents that he believes supports him, whether it’s quoting emails from Ihimaera to show they get along these days or a message from Nigel Cox’s widow after the ugly public argument about whether or not he was taking revenge on the long-dead Cox in a prize-winning short story called Last Season’s Man. Once again, Stead is sure he was right all along, as the controversial story “still strikes me as full of charm and cleverness and humour … there was no malice”. In the memoir, he claims that he was thinking more of the TV journalist Ross Stevens who died of cancer and happened to have fronted a couple of current affairs specials that were critical of Stead in the 1990s, rather than Cox. When some writers do that kind of metafiction, they make it seem playful. It seldom feels that way with Stead.
Stead often gets to have the last word simply by outliving everyone. As well as the lunches and the launches, there are the funerals. He notes that Allen Curnow’s widow Jeny had been protective of Curnow’s reputation and their image as a happy couple, and then he ignores her wishes and reads a poem that she thought was unflattering to Allen. You almost have to admire Stead’s audacity as he justifies his decision.
“His ego, his arrogance, had to be there in the record, in my record, or it would not be the man I had known,” he writes.
Even some of Stead’s friends grow tired of his need to win arguments, the need to be right and to show others that he’s right. Another story has Stead and AS Byatt going to a lecture about Balzac. Stead pipes up during question time, “not rudely, but emphatically”, although he sensed later that Byatt was unhappy about the way he spoke.
“She said she didn’t like male competitiveness.
“But it was nothing to do with competition, I told her. It was about some things being unconvincing, utterly implausible, wrong.
“She was silent for a while, and said finally, ‘You see very clearly, Karl, but sometimes there are things you don’t see’.
“‘What I don’t see,’ I said, ‘is usually the Emperor’s clothes.’”
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There is an interesting bit in Charlotte Grimshaw’s recent The Mirror Book in which she writes about getting “smooth, patronising emails” from Stead, her father, that read like they might have been directed at the world as much as her, as though he was always conscious of the greater audience and posterity, conscious that his emails may be archived for use by some future biographer.
It is again a kind of performance of a self. This self was created at some point in the 1950s, when Stead was in his twenties. The first of the three books, South-west of Eden, is a memoir of an ordinary Auckland childhood in the 1930s and 1940s. Stead struggles to make his story interesting until he discovers that he is a writer, around two-thirds of the way in, and then he has something to work with. There is suddenly a confidence in the storytelling. The memoir had been dry and emotionless until that moment.
Grimshaw’s book challenged an image Stead and Kay created of themselves, an image of their family and his genius, or a sense that the family was a structure designed to support and assist his genius. After that explosive book, the facade of Stead is still standing but the foundations have been dangerously hollowed out.
Regardless of what you think about who was right and who was wrong, and whether Grimshaw should even have told the story she told, it is now impossible to read What You Made of It without having The Mirror Book in your mind. The best example of this problem involves the two young women from Croatia.
Stead met Ljiljana and Jadranka, who translated his work into Croatian and took him on a road trip around their country. He talks of their “three-way fondness” but it is a fondness that seems merely platonic or maybe just mildly flirtatious, between an older man and two much younger, starstruck women. But Grimshaw told a different, less innocent story.
In this version, Stead was visiting Grimshaw and her husband on his way back from Croatia: “He showed us photos and revealed, not quite expressly but clearly, that he’d had an affair with at least one of them. For me this wasn’t shocking, it was fairly standard; by that time, it seemed each new novel told the story of a new covert relationship.”
They were in London, but Kay was back in Auckland and she rang at that exact moment to say she had broken into Stead’s padlocked trunk and discovered love letters from other affairs. The bizarre coincidence of the timing, and the contrast between Stead’s dreamy, placid state and Kay’s agitation, means the scene plays like fiction but we assume it happened just as Grimshaw remembers it.
On one hand, this is none of our business. It’s between Stead, Kay and at least one of the Croatians. But it is also a striking illustration of how Grimshaw has undermined Stead, or even sabotaged his great project that was designed to wrap up a long and fulfilling literary life. He has given us a smooth, orderly picture and Grimshaw has dragged a trail of pain through it. If emotion is largely missing from Stead’s trilogy, it overflows almost uncontrollably in Grimshaw’s book. And in these times, when there is as much outrage in the air as there was in the 1980s, The Mirror Book is also a political statement. It is about the unheard being heard. It is like pulling down a statue. It is like a cancellation.
The simmering tension between Stead and Grimshaw that would explode in The Mirror Book is mentioned briefly and dismissed in What You Made of It, when Stead covers the family celebration as he was made Poet Laureate. Grimshaw wrote about the event, too. "She described me as a ‘control freak’, but the tone was fond and affectionate,” he writes.
It’s reminiscent of the phrase in the second Stead memoir that so irritated Grimshaw. That was Stead’s description of family life as “a minimum of piety ... and endless jokes”. If you took everything too seriously, seriously enough to be hurt or upset, then the problem was yours. Lighten up. Stop being so pious.
There are other ways to deflate criticism and they are often gendered. Grimshaw says that her father dismissed her as a fantasist, who had lost “a clear sense of reality and its boundaries”. Similar language comes up in the second of Stead’s memoirs when he talks about Janet Frame, with whom he was competitive and who was temperamentally his opposite. She was never insane, he writes, she was just “adroit at creating anxiety and commanding everyone’s attention”. He talks about her “burning, child-like envy” and promotes the theory that Frame was secretly in love with him.
Who knows. Perhaps that’s a true picture of Frame. And perhaps he is right about Grimshaw and her “fantasies”. Perhaps he was also right about the Emperor’s clothes in front of AS Byatt. Perhaps he was right about the dark plots of Vincent O’Sullivan. And perhaps he was right about Allen Curnow and Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera and Robin Dudding and Marti Friedlander and JM Coetzee and the flat in London and more besides. Perhaps he’s always been right about everything.
What You Made Of It: 1987-2020 by CK Stead (Auckland University Press, $49.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
