Renée on her life with her nose in a book
There was the grand dame of Ōtaki, writer Renée, 92 not out, in sparkling form alongside Fiona Kidman and Linda Burgess on a writers' panel at the Verb literary festival in Wellington on Sunday, and there she will be in public again, on Wednesday evening, at the National Library, giving the 2021 New Zealand book council (a quango now called Read NZ) lecture, or pānui, which is also being streamed live. This kind of industry puts writers a third of her age to shame. "Yes, well," she said when I phoned her on Monday, "I'm still here. What can I do about it?"
I visited Renée a couple of years ago. Nothing has changed. She is a lively, funny, chatty, thoroughly adorable person. (Her own precis of herself: "A feminist lesbian with working-class ideals.") She's the author of plays, also poems, crime novels, an outstanding memoir (These Two Hands); primarily, like all writers, she is a reader, and her lecture is titled If you don’t get your head out of a book, my girl, you’ll end up on Queer Street, about how reading has shaped her life. Her speech is full of very good sentences: "My father shot himself in 1934, the year Ngaio Marsh’s first crime novel A Man Lay Dead was published." There's this about a book she read when young: "One of my all-time favourite novels, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, was published when I was eleven, and although I didn’t fully understand it then, I got the main theme, which was about the fact that when a woman got married she gave up any hope of a career and became subservient to her husband – bearing his children, being a good mother and baking for church socials." And then this, about writing she read when awakened: "In the ‘80s when I did the twentieth-century women’s literature paper with lecturer Aorewa McLeod, she took me right into the heart of what was happening in women’s writing. I was introduced to the American poet Adrienne Rich. The first poem of hers I ever read began ‘A wild patience has taken me this far’ and I thought, ka pai, Adrienne, ka pai. She was a lesbian feminist, poet, essayist."
Much of her speech is about the books and magazines and authors she read when younger - Te Ao Hou, a magazine that published Māori writers such as JK Sturm and Rowley Habib, Broadsheet ("I loved it and waited impatiently for each new issue"), Germaine Greer, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Fiona Kidman. When I called her, I asked, "Yes, but what is a 92-year-old reading?"
She said, "Well, lately, you'll be disgusted to know I've been reading a bit of Georgette Heyer."
I said I was far too lofty and athletic to have ever read a word of Heyer, an insanely prolific English author of historical romances, widely considered by ignorant snoots such as myself to be trash, junk, feminine.
"I just love her," she said. "She has a line in one of her books: 'I don’t want to be unkind about your mother but she is the most merciless shallow woman I have ever met.' I love her cynical point of view. Until recently, the literary establishment has despised her. But there have been approving essays about her by AS Byatt, and another one by – oh – what's his name, very funny guy, he's on TV panel shows. Stephen someone?"
Stephen Fry?
"Yes. He wrote about her in the Guardian. He pointed out her marvellous research. In one of the novels, she wrote about the Light Brigade, and military strategists say she's just about the only author who has understood the military thinking of Wellington and Napoleon. I always read her when I'm kind of winding up to write something, and right now I have something I'm about to write, which of course I don't want to talk about. But me and Georgette go back a long way. She was 18 when she wrote her first novel, and she published God knows how many in the setting of the Regency period. It's light-hearted, it's formulaic. Good dialogue – I'm a fan of authors who write good dialogue. Her characters only say a few words and there's a whole paragraph underneath that's left unsaid. And no one beats her for structure."
I remarked that Graham Greene always read detective novels while he was writing his more serious novels; it was a form of mental exercise, but without risk of the tyranny of influence.
"Right. I just want my brain to float along and not be distracted by reality when I'm about write a book. Her books always have a love affair between a handsome Lord and a Lady; it's truly classist. All these aristocrats!"
I asked if there were sex scenes.
"No. Oh, no. Oh, no. They kiss, but that’s it."
I asked what she thought of sex scenes in books.
"When I've taught creative writing, I used to always include a lesson on writing a violent scene, and writing a sex scene. Every student I ever met far more wanted to write a brutally violent scene than a sex scene. But I made them write two sex scenes so they knew they could at least do it if they ever had had to. I don't write very detailed sexual technique scenes but I'm not frightened of writing a sex scene if it works."
Why is writing about beating someone to death easier than writing about sex?
"It's – I suppose you feel in a way that you're giving something away. I think it's, 'Oh no, what will people say?' But if you let yourself worry about what people say you'll never write anything. And there are ways of writing about it that do the job but don't have to be like a sexual manual."
Who writes a good sex scene?
"Catherine Robertson," she said quickly, of the Wellington author of best-selling novels. "I like her work very much. She has written one of the best scenes of a guy revealing that he's a homosexual that I've read in NZ literature. And I took the liberty of sending her an email to say how much I appreciated it. I've heard loads of those stories in person. And it's the most difficult and awkward predicament for a lot of guys, and she does it beautifully. I admired that very much indeed."
I said to her that for me the most thrilling moment in her pānui was when she kind of interrupts her speech about books and authors in a wide, general sense, and arrives at that one specific line by Adrienne Rich – "A wild patience has taken me this far" – which she first read, as a revelation, not long after she left her husband for a woman.
She said, "When I read it, I was 51, and it just – I thought, 'It has. A wild patience has taken me this far, too. It's taken me 51 years to get to this point.' And that's the power of language, isn't it? When it speaks for you."
Renée will deliver her Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui (formerly the Book Council Lecture) at the National Library auditorium in Wellington on November 10 at 6pm. The event will be live streamed.
