We conclude our week-long examination of a new edition of John Mulgan's classic novel Man Alone with a critical assessment by John Newton
John Mulgan’s single novel is almost too famous for its own good. The problems, of course, begin with the title. Man Alone (the phrase was not Mulgan’s choice) has metasticised into one of our hoariest cultural clichés. Today the title stands for a monument more than a text – specifcally, a monument to that easiest of critical targets, mid-century masculinity. The author’s biographical legend – his glowing career at Oxford, his war time heroics in Greece, his suicide in a Cairo hotel room at the age of 34 – none of this helps. Back in the literary nationalist era the legend compounded the novel’s mystique. These days it seems to confirm Mulgan’s status as the ultimate dead white male, with the war medals to prove it.
Small wonder that Peter Whiteford, editor of what is now the novel’s fifth edition, treads cautiously around phrases like "landmark", "iconic work" and "classic of New Zealand literature". For all that, however, the novel remains a formidable literary artefact. Readers who prefer to meet ‘relatable’ characters should probably look elsewhere: the novel’s detached mid-century stoicism doesn’t make for easy identification. But for anyone curious about the back-story of New Zealand writing, this is one novel you really can’t go past.
The plot, for those who don’t know it, could hardly be simpler. The protagonist, an Englishman known only as Johnson, recounts his story to the unnamed narrator in Brittany in 1937. It’s a story of what he calls "the bit in between", beginning at the close of World War I and ending with the civil war in Spain. Demobilised in 1919, Johnson comes to New Zealand "because men he had met in France talked of it as a pleasant and well-to-do country". In the boom years of the 1920s he finds it more-or-less as promised, knocking round the upper North Island, alone or with his mate Scottie, working on farms or as a deckhand on a coastal scow. There’s plenty of casual work, as well as the vague but never-quite-realised plan of getting one’s own piece of farmland. But 1930 marks "the last of the good years". Forced into Auckland by lack of work, Johnson experiences the depression-era labour camps and the 1932 Queen St riots (as had Mulgan himself, though in his case on the other side of the barricades as a special constable).
A gloomy sexual liaison develops (the passive hero seduced by the Māori femme fatale)...Karl Stead has noted the blank space where his sexuality ought to be
After assaulting a policeman he is obliged to leave Auckland and finds himself on a farm with the taciturn Stenning and his wife Rua. A gloomy sexual liaison develops (the passive hero seduced by the Māori femme fatale); Stenning turns mean and in the inevitable confrontation is killed with his own shotgun. It’s at this point that Johnson takes to the bush and in the novel’s most famous sequence makes his solo trek through the wintry Kaimanawas. Rescued by Crawley, a kindly recluse, he is smuggled out of the country on a Greek oil tanker with the help of his former skipper, Petersen.
Here, at the 60,000 word mark, Mulgan’s original manuscript ended. The London publisher Selwyn and Blount, to whom he offered the novel in 1937, was enthusiastic, but asked for two changes. First, it was too short. Could Mulgan not add another 20,000 words drawing on what the publisher assumed to have been his experience in Spain? (Mulgan, in fact, spent the Spanish war years, and wrote the novel, while working as an editor at the Oxford University Press.) Secondly, the publisher didn’t like the title. Mulgan had called it Talking of War. The commissioning editor suggested Escape from Death, Living Space or A Man Alone.
The material that Mulgan added – the novel’s ‘Part Two’ – came to little more 5000 words, but it was enough. Johnson returns to England where he works quietly as a rural labourer. But the reader becomes aware of a new discontent, a vague desire for company and for something more like collective action. A friendship that develops with an IRA veteran called Jack O’Reilly leads Johnson to enlist and join the fight against Franco. And this is how we last see him, heading off to Spain, "going somewhere with people [he] liked, doing something together. It’s a fine feeling. Most of the time a man a spends too much alone." This brief final sequence re-orients the novel, applying a sociable corrective to the solo heroics of the main narrative.
The revised title came out of Hemingway: "No matter how a man alone aint got no bloody chance," says the dying Harry Morgan near the end of To Have and Have Not. Hemingway at this stage was Mulgan’s favourite novelist and the inspiration for his crisp, minimalist prose style. So the title suggestion was sympathetic, and what it ought to have done is to underline that shift in the final sequence: ‘man aloneness’, in other words, is no answer to anything.
But this didn’t factor in the way that the text would be taken up in New Zealand – particularly after its first republication in 1949. It was a book that the nationalist movement needed: the accuracy of Mulgan’s prose and the lean, vernacular precision of the dialogue, combined with the unflinchingly critical view of the dominion’s ‘farm of the Empire’ complacencies, all serve to mark it as the definitive novel of the high-nationalist moment. The movement was light on novelists. Sargeson, for instance, wrote camp variations on this bare realist template, but never a boilerplate fiction like this one; in fact he struggled to produce any kind of full-length novel before Memoirs of a Peon (completed in 1960, published in 1965).
Mulgan would probably have been surprised that the novel has enjoyed any kind of afterlife at all
So Man Alone occupied a vacancy in the nationalist canon, but at the cost of being interpreted in a one-sided fashion. Johnson’s immigrant arc was viewed through the lens of national identity formation (the making of a New Zealander), while the novel’s core was invariably located in his lonely struggle with the bush. Not that such a reading was groundless. Mulgan himself was always an ambivalent socialist; his strongest commitment was to individual ‘freedom’, and his youthful experience in the North Island bush meant a lot to him. But Johnson is a victim of the capitalist machine, and his stoic isolation is a problem to remedied rather than inflated into a national myth.
Mulgan would surely have been surprised by that treatment. In fact he would probably have been surprised that the novel has enjoyed any kind of afterlife at all. Published just as war broke out, it sank almost unnoticed (not helped by most of the unsold stock being destroyed in the Blitz). As for his own remarks about it, they are almost entirely dismissive: "Hell of a book really. I was looking at it again the other day, quite honest but very bitter and flat and rather dull. Only half of life really, like beer without the alcohol." A casual remark in a letter, perhaps, but consistent with other downbeat comments he makes elsewhere. And it raises the question of the other half might look like. As Robin Hyde’s star has continued to rise, many readers have come to prefer the baggy inclusiveness of Nor the Years Condemn (written almost at the same time, and covering the same tranche of inter-war history). That’s one missing dimension, then – an effect of the novel’s focus on a single male protagonist. But there’s something missing even within Johnson himself, apparent not just in his oft-noted passivity, but in his extraordinary flatness.
Karl Stead, referring to the interlude with Rua, has noted the blank space where his sexuality ought to be. And the point can taken further. In fact Johnson barely exists in any dimension of thinking or feeling. He is almost entirely without interiority. Here he is working on Stenning’s farm:
The two men grew to respect each other . . . Johnson could not like Stenning, he was too sullen and unattractive a man, but he liked working with him. He admired his great forearms and his skill with an axe, and the way that he drove at the work in a fury of accomplishment. He was good towards Johnson and treated him equally and fairly. When they first went out in the bad days of rain and snow he made it so that Johnson seemed to come of his own accord because he could not leave Stenning to work alone. They worked without talking except sometimes as they ate, and then little; they would work sometimes half a mile apart and not meet all day until Johnson would hear Stenning call and look up and see him leading the horses over for the home ride.
On good days, when the sun shone and the ground perhaps was hard and sharp with frost, it seemed the best life in the world. Then they could light a fire for lunch and heat up the black tea, and grill chops on sticks over the fire. Then Ruapehu would shine in the sun so that the black rocks and the hummocks in the ice were plain to see and the green on the glaciers, and below the bush would be a blue haze. Johnson would sit, his back against a log, rolling a cigarette after lunch, and watch the mountain, fascinated by its whiteness.
Evocative, elegant writing for sure. But how could this seem "the best life in the world"? A world without women, to point out the obvious, but equally a world composed entirely of actions and things. What does Johnson think about all day as he leads this silent half-life? Not just here, but throughout the novel, he scarcely has a thought in his head.
This flatness spreads out in several directions. First of all it’s worth pointing out how carefully the effect is managed. It’s hard to think of another novel (perhaps not even in Hemingway) where the narrative is channelled through a single protagonist and yet by the story’s end we know so little about him. There’s a discipline here tailored perfectly to Mulgan’s purpose. It’s flattens Johnson’s ‘character’ until he’s little more than a cipher, or an everyman, a Kilroy figure, whose function (like Kilroy’s) is simply to be there while behind him the novel projects its not-quite-Marxist history of the 1920s and 30s.
Then there’s question of the personal fit, the way that the narrative expresses something in the author himself. Or fails to express it, just as Mulgan himself was reckoned by his friends to be good company but extraordinarily hard to read. "Reticence defined him," writes his biographer Vincent O’Sullivan. James Bertram described him as having "an almost Icelandic flair for understatement." It’s a strange thing to realise that this emotionally barren novel was written at the precise time that Mulgan was courting his wife.
By this account the book’s voice is partly symptomatic; it speaks in the tones of someone who keeps his feelings to himself. But this symptomatic (or even pathological) register isn’t simply personal – it isn’t just Mulgan’s: above all, it’s historical. What Man Alone refines to its most perfect expression in fiction is that masculine structure of feeling that gives birth to literary nationalism. Johnson’s is the voice of a long mid-century in which everyone was trying to write a kind of half-literature – beer without alcohol – a ‘prohibition era’ whose characteristic feeling is a fear of feeling too much. Sargeson, Curnow, Glover, Fairburn: all deal in versions of that anti-expressive carapace which in Man Alone is realised so seamlessly. Their achievement in forging a modernist literary nationalism was remarkable. But it came at a cost. To turn from the outer world of Mulgan back to the interior world of Mansfield is to grasp how much nuance and complexity was shed in the process.
None of which is meant to take anything from Man Alone, or from Mulgan’s precocious achievement. It is simply to try to clarify what, for an historically-minded reader, remains its enduring fascination. For all its bare and lucid surface, the novel is complexly over-determined. Its drills down, as we like to say, in half a dozen directions at once: into nationalist masculinity, modernist minimalism, the shifting political moods of New Zealand between the wars; into Oxford leftism (and Mulgan’s own ambivalence about it); into his feelings about his father, about women, and men; and ultimately, one has to say – with whatever trepidation, but the evidence is hard to dispute – into something in what used to be called, adventurously, the ‘New Zealand psyche’. As with any classic novel (did I just use that word?) not all these implications are in the author’s control. But 80 years on it’s a work that still resonates like nothing in our fiction between Mansfield and Frame.
Man Alone by John Mulgan, edited by Peter Whiteford (Victoria University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
