Steve Braunias reviews a collection of essays by an extraordinary writer
The sales pitch for Wellington writer John Summers' essay collection The Commercial Hotel – that is, the blurbological rumination on the inside jacket, and the yammering endorsements on the back cover - place the book as a kind of quizzical series of snapshots of provincial or small-town New Zealand life, and quite rightly so. There are chapters on freezing works, on tramping in the bush, on taking rubbish to the tip. It's a New Zealand everyone will recognise in their bones and the chapters cast a warm glow on our way of life. But this is just the surface appeal. There is something else going on which gives his book a special quality, a real and enduring depth. It’s all in the discreet little sentences. There is no other writer in New Zealand who can write so quietly; so much of The Commercial Hotel exists in the soft light of dawn, or twilight, due to the prose style and the tone it achieves.
He provides a clue to this state of grace in an early chapter set in the Wairarapa. I declare an interest: this is a story I commissioned him to write in 2017, with a headline already in mind – "Does literature exist in the Wairarapa?" The brief was to report on literary activity in the region. He put the brief aside, and wrote something much better. It was a reflection of his own writing and reading in the Wairarapa – he lived back then in Greytown – and included an evocation of going to spend weekends as a kid with his father "in a small town on the edge of wheat-fields blow-dried by nor'westers". That half-sentence was a thing of beauty but he followed it with something more beautiful: "There was a fire, and I spent hours in front of it, reading his books, feeling them more intently somehow, the quiet and the isolation creating blank space around each word."
The Commercial Hotel recreates that sensation. The sentences are unhurried, very little is asserted or declared, harsh facts are set aside – the sentences go in search for that lost childhood, in part, but more so they go in search of zones of silence in a New Zealand landscape. Or a Pacific landscape. One of the very best pieces begins the book as Summers reflects on two books about surviving as a castaway on Pacific islands. One is fiction, the other non-fiction, but he reveals both as fantasies. It ends with a wonderfully imaginative touch, based on the information of a reticent father wildly and expressively waving goodbye to his daughter as her ship leaves his island, "as if only with the ocean widening between them could he show his love."
I declare another interest. In his Acknowledgements, Summers writes, "I am thankful to the editors of all [the sites and magazines which published his work] but will single out Steve Braunias for his consistent encouragement." This is very gracious of him but I will add that I very seldom had any meaningful editorial advice on his work; I always read him as a fan, and marvelled at his quiet sentences and thoughtfulness. To read a collection of his pieces in The Commercial Hotel is a treat at the very least and at best, breath-taking.
The chapters follow a narrative arc, assembling along the way a collection of hauntings – of lost childhood, and of a lost New Zealand that no longer exists – that culminates in the final chapter with his essay on ghosts, first published in Newsroom. There are tour de forces, such as the piece on a man from Eketahuna killed in the Vietnam War. There are flops, such as the banal observations of Elvis impersonators at the Upper Hutt Cosmopolitan Club. A good prose style is nothing without subjects of substance and some chapters are without substance, fine sentences riding on nothing. There is a lot of reading of old books (in a nice touch, the book features a bibliography, which includes titles such as A Short History of Sheep in New Zealand), and names from the New Zealand past slide into view – Norman Kirk, Toss Woollaston, Ronald Hugh Morrieson.
He has a very easy way with introducing fiction into these non-fiction stories. The most spectacular example is his reimagining of the dynamic between a murderer and his victim in the Hutt Valley. He reads about the killing in a book called Famous N.Z. Murders "which I had picked up at a fair, amused by the economy of that 'N.Z.' and its lurid cover". (The beauty of that semi-sentence, "amused by the economy of that 'N.Z.'"). He makes shit up about the two men and doesn’t bother with giving the date of the killing – was it nineteenth century, or twentieth century? The question is too broad for Summers, who doesn't operate as any kind of historian. He has other things on his mind. The Commercial Hotel is a book of thinking.
That particular chapter is a meditation on loneliness. It's about as revealing as he gets of his personal life: "At the end of each day, the train returns me to the home I share with Alisa. We have lived together for years, loneliness banished. Only rarely do I remember it – teenage days with the blue glow of the TV for company. Even then, loneliness was only a theory, because I had yet to know the opposite. Since then the opposite is almost all I've known. Alisa and I met at university, and I have made my life about her as much as anything. I have moulded it to fit. The conversations I have during the day exist only so I can report back in the evenings and tell her about each small joy and gripe. We live in a small house in a small town. We don't know many people here and haven't tried very hard to change this, because there is no need: we have each other."
What a beautiful (yes, yes, that word again, with no apologies offered) passage, but otherwise he pretty much closes the door on what goes on inside that "small house in a small town". He has a son. He mentions a brother now and then, a sister once. His parents lived apart. This is just about the sum knowledge we learn of his immediate family, and it's rare that Summers reports on the affairs of his own heart. Nothing seems to be a struggle, or a torment, or even much of a worry. A few small self-deprecations aside, it's a bland self-portrait. There are times when the book can feel too discreet, too shy. It operates at least in part as a memoir but the author very often lurks in the shadows.
And yet he steps out with real feeling when he writes about his grandmother and grandfather, in separate chapters. The one on his grandfather is written in stealth; it's ostensibly about freezing works, and the nostalgia they inspire for a past he never experienced, but the point of the chapter is contained in these spare words: "It was him I missed. All I really knew of the [freezing] works is that he'd been there." He hears and relays a story about how after the Waingawa slaughterhouse closed down, one of the workers continued to leave his home at 6am, but drove out to the country "where he could sit in his car and read a book. He didn't want his neighbours to know he'd been made redundant." It's a poignant detail and one that most journalists would also have used in features about the closure of freezing works. But Summers does something else with that story. He has the sensitivity and imagination to find a meaning in it. He ends the chapter by describing his grandfather going to a rest home: "It was clear from the start he wouldn't be there long. He sat in his room, like that man in his car, waiting." The quiet place, the isolation of life in these vulnerable islands.
The Commercial Hotel by John Summers (Victoria University Press, $35) is available online from bookstores operating in lockdown level 3, and as of Wednesday, in lockdown level 2.
