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This is the first chapter of a projected longer work.

Did their project give off an air of too much grandeur? Among the New Zealand writers of the twentieth century who came from a settler background and who constituted the cultural nationalists, and then even among the counter-culture generation who came after, most had little or no local tradition to start from when they tried to produce original work. Or at least, whether it was true in the strictest sense or not that they had no one to follow, these twentieth-century writers in New Zealand certainly felt that they were engaged in creating a literature ex nihilo.(1) They also felt sure that such a literature had to be recognisably of its own place and time and yet of sufficient artistic merit to last, and they felt they were doing this for a sympathetic readership which, by and large, had yet to exist. Their project thus had a curiously reversed trajectory: creating a literature, a sensibility and then a readership. In the cultural realm, could anything be more artificial?

What was more, the cultural nationalist writers in New Zealand were in no way helped by the inherent snobbery of the literary system they were destined to adopt from overseas: Modernism. Despite a certain cultural lag, Modernism became the prevailing global trend early in the twentieth century, and because it appeared in New Zealand when the sense of a culturally nationalist literature was beginning to build up steam, say, from the 1930s, writers once again felt as if genuinely New Zealand writing was Modernist writing. Modernism was an urban, cerebral and largely formalist literary fashion created in Europe in the late nineteenth-century which was concerned above all with the means of presenting perception. The Modernists' true Penelope was Flaubert.(2) But by dint of being essentially an innovation of form, Modernism was surprisingly adaptable, a set of new bottles into which the wine of New Zealand content could be poured: oldish colonial wine at first, then younger wine as the twentieth-century project went on. Modernist writers in Europe also pointedly insisted on repudiating the works of the previous generation of writers, starting over without an obvious tradition behind them as if ex nihilo, while at the same time they occupied themselves with preserving better work from a more distant past, thus purifying the dialect of the tribe.(3) All this, they affirmed to each other however, was to be performed mostly for the benefit of a cognoscenti. For aspiring New Zealand writers from the 1930s onwards, coming under the influence of such a literary mode was the equivalent of what John Newton termed 'tough love', supportive in its emphasis on the use of form and in its concern with a fresh start, but short on details about how all this might be taken up.(4)

I alone create a product that society does not want.(5)

In any case, the very few serious colonial New Zealand writers who produced work under the aegis of the previous nineteenth-century sensibility had not benefited much from the literary high-Victorianism which was their inheritance. In comparison to Modernism, for New Zealand literary purposes the modes of high-Victorian literature seemed over-determining. That era's fascination with romantic fiction--exotic landscapes, noble savages and dusky damsels, wrapped in purple prose--and also with historical fiction--idealised events from the past which presaged the creation of a modern nation-state--had seemed, so far, to direct aspiring New Zealand authors mostly towards producing unrealistic nonsense. Thus, for New Zealand writers of the 1930s a repudiation of their country's past writing was not difficult. It meant that these 'new' New Zealand nationalist writers who felt they were serious about trying to get something Kiwi down on paper, who were determined to be highbrow, and who were acutely conscious of how much they wanted to discard the failed attempts of their nineteenth-century forebears, found they were trying to produce work that was about ordinary people, to be read by the people, and yet which would be timeless and not really for ordinary people. There were going to be problems with readership.

To compound this, the writers were striving in a climate that, even in comparison to the rough reception for Modernist art in Europe and America, was unremittingly hostile to their work and even to their very existence. That hostility came not just from the proud philistinism of 'ordinary' New Zealanders, with their reverence for practical skills, but also from the hauteur of the academic and social establishment, who preferred their culture British and regarded local writers as somehow aiming above their station. And so whatever there might have been of grandeur in their aspirations, for New Zealand cultural nationalist writers of the early twentieth century, and also for subsequent generations of New Zealand writers later in the twentieth century, failure of the most abject sort was intrinsic to their project. The Modernists liked to posture about every attempt at literature being 'a different kind of failure', and that they were 'wrong from the start'.(6) But the Kiwis weren't kidding.

New Zealand writers throughout the twentieth century were eccentrics by their very nature, oddballs, isolated from the mainstream community in the most extreme fashion. To want to be a writer was to choose to become a local eccentric. But even if these writers looked silly or pretentious to the community at large, and even if many of them achieved very little, their sheer bloody-mindedness was amazing--or more kindly put, their sense of mission was admirable. This book mostly concerns itself with some works by New Zealand novelists of the mid-twentieth century who deserve to have some sort of status in the literary canon. Of course, we are not really supposed to have canons these days; the word 'canon' carries with it connotations of privilege, a sense of the elitism around which people who write or read literary criticism, despite forming a self-proclaimed literary-minded set, are supposed to feel uncomfortable. But judgment occurs anyway, and a canon arises naturally, and changes naturally, precisely because it's the outcome of a loose consensus. If I were to comb through anthologies of New Zealand poetry, just such a consensus about the poets who should appear, and even about many of the poems, would soon become apparent. Critical surveys of New Zealand literature have a tendency to concentrate on poetry rather than prose, and in those surveys, too, the same names turn up. Again, were I to conduct my own survey among readers of New Zealand short fiction, asking them to name the half-dozen best short-story writers of the twentieth century, certain writers would likely be mentioned repeatedly. It's a group nicely epitomised by the authors selected for Bill Manhire's anthology Six By Six, published in 1989 and for a time much favoured on university courses: Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall.(7) It's not a controversial list. Thus an approximate canon has appeared, to be subject to later argument and adjustment.

But were I to consult readers of novels, asking them to name the best half-dozen New Zealand novelists of the twentieth century and their major works, no such easy consensus would eventuate. Granted, these days Janet Frame might appear on everyone's list--though not always the same book might be held up as her best or most representative--but thereafter I wager that such radical diversity of opinion would occur about other authors that any further consensus would be impossible.(8) So why has no clear canon for the New Zealand novel come about? The difficulty is not that there are no answers, but that there are too many.

One likely but unpalatable answer is that there has been so little achievement in the New Zealand novel, in comparison to poetry and short fiction, because not enough books of sufficient quality to last the test of time were written by New Zealand novelists in the twentieth century. Lydia Wevers makes a similar point when accounting for the failure of the nineteenth-century New Zealand novel to develop in comparison with the success of the novel in colonial Australia. As reasons for this nineteenth-century failure to produce good work she suggests our briefer history of settlement and smaller size in comparison to Australia, along with the sheer exhaustiveness of breaking in the New Zealand bush. Finally, there is our 'tight-lipped' national character, so that 'some of the things Australians don't like about New Zealanders--our genteel pretensions, sense of superiority about our origins, smugness--are also inhibiting to big acts of self-expression'.(9) She further makes the interesting observation that some of the early colonial novels by New Zealanders which are usually felt to be the best of the country's nineteenth-century works, and are based on nineteenth-century models--Edith Searle Grossman's The Heart of the Bush and William Satchell's The Greenstone Door, for instance--were in fact products of the very early twentieth century. The Heart of the Bush was published in 1910 and The Greenstone Door in 1914. They were being produced at a time when romantic and historical novels were already becoming obsolete on the literary scene. In any event, Wevers's reasons for the slow and unsatisfactory establishment of the novel in New Zealand are entirely plausible, and thus may help account for the lack of an obvious canonical consensus.

As an aside, I might hazard that a further possible reason for the slow development of the New Zealand novel is that the environment of nineteenth-century New Zealand leant itself all too easily to the pop-cultural romantic novel of the late Victorian era in a way that perhaps the environment of Australia did not. The very local elements of New Zealand that a nineteenth-century writer might choose to put into a popular novel, a white pioneer hero, a wild fertile landscape of woods and mountains, imposing indigenous savages who might be noble or ignoble as the mood took them, an exotic maiden to dally with, all of this fitted very easily into a standard late-Victorian romantic narrative, and furthermore a narrative in which any historical consciousness could be related mostly to events back 'home' in Europe or to a perceived future as an alternative Britain.(10) And all this is doubtless a reason why so many of the New Zealand novels of the colonial era which do exist now seem so mawkish. In contrast, the ingrained resistance of the Australian environment to the cultural stereotyping of the period may have helped produce better books. Talented writers of New Zealand prose who appeared later then tended to follow each other into the more opportune area of short fiction.

We're still using your imagination,
it was stronger than all ours.(11)

But be that as it may, a second answer to the question of why no clear canon for the New Zealand novel in the twentieth century seems to have come about is, I think, that while critical fashions and readers' preferences inevitably change, these changes of taste concerning the New Zealand novel over the course of the twentieth century have been so extreme as to prevent a consensus from stabilizing and thus a canon to form. Modernism in New Zealand short fiction arrived early with Mansfield, and then the short fiction of quality produced thereafter tended to cluster around that branch of Modernism which found its basis for mimesis in language rather than in plot or character, something that could comfortably be accommodated within a brief sketch. This provided for a certain useful flexibility that was, indeed, opportune. New Zealand writers of poetry and short fiction were thus able to produce some work of such undeniable quality that it has prevailed over later changes of fashion and taste, but the relatively weak output of New Zealand writers in the novel has not been able to manage this. The New Zealand Modernist novel, perhaps following too closely the prescription of Allen Curnow, arch-theorist of New Zealand cultural nationalism, that literature should pursue the 'local and special', settled into a critical form of social realism early and proved reluctant to leave it.(12) As Erin Mercer has convincingly argued, the change from early attempts in the 1930s at social realism to non-realistic writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, at least for the New Zealand novel, was a slow and often wrenching business, and it has been inclined to clear rather than consolidate the best writing on the literary scene.(13)

A final possible answer, and one which I will focus on at some length, is that the literary novel in New Zealand did not manage to create a readership sufficient to provide a consensus for evaluation. This, strangely, may in part be a matter of size. Firstly, the quantity of poems and short stories produced in New Zealand was much greater than was the case for the novel, so that more poems and short stories were read sooner. In addition, as mentioned, there appears to have been more acceptance of stylisation and experimentation in short fiction and also poetry; that is to say, readers did not always expect poems and short stories to be close to some sort of recognisable world around them in the way that novels were supposed to be. Finally, returning to size once more, the necessary size for a readership which evaluates poetry and short fiction seems to be smaller than that required for the novel: somehow the novel, by virtue of its very middle-class nature and origins, requires a broader readership to discern its finest works. The novel is, au fond, a more popular medium.(14) In any event, many of the problems with establishing a canon, or consensus of merit, for the New Zealand novel in the twentieth century centre on a failure of reading, rather than a failure of writing. It's no wonder, then, that Mark Williams should claim Allen Curnow felt that 'by hard imaginative effort on the part of readers as well as writers, [history] might yet become an instrument of making both a nation and a literature'.(15)

The Eccentrics is an eccentric book. It's in no way a survey or even a systematic study. It's not even a particularly well-focused book, but more of a ramble, or perhaps a simple collection of close readings. Furthermore, despite my saying that there is no clear canon for novels in New Zealand literature, there are certainly novelists who appear more often than others as subjects for literary criticism, and I have deliberately stayed away from many of the bigger names. Instead this book aims, mostly, to explore some deserving lesser known works and to offer a series of views that are provocative--taking the risk that those views may even in places be flat-out wrong--but I hope through the book to inject into New Zealand literary criticism some new ideas and areas for debate. For whether it be early pronouncements of colonial progress, or later of socio-economic progress, or more recently of progress in minority rights, New Zealand literary criticism has frequently been a one-note affair, and as long ago as 1979 K.K. Ruthven (making a plea for the application of French literary theory) was writing: 'it compels us to acknowledge that novels are important because they are some kind of verbal art, and not (as New Zealanders often assume) some kind of sociology'.(16)

Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:
I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary.(17)

The problem of the New Zealand novel canon is well illustrated by the case of the writer David Ballantyne. Ballantyne was known in his own lifetime for his social realist novel, The Cunninghams, which E.H. McCormick, in his pioneering study New Zealand Literature: A Survey, praised as 'a triumph of literary adaptation'.(18) But the novel has not managed to survive the shift of taste away from social realism and Ballantyne is now posthumously known, if at all, for a very different kind of work, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, a book often described as 'the great and unread New Zealand novel'.(19) It has been a common complaint amongst critics that Ballantyne hasn't received his critical due from an intelligent readership, and thus he has long been something of a lightning rod for grumbles about the state of New Zealand literary criticism as a whole. C.K. Stead, in 'David Ballantyne: Whimsical Losers', after offering a 'glum survey of responses to Ballantyne's books', declares that critics 'confronted with something local and new are, with a few obvious and honourable exceptions, mostly babes in the sacred wood'.(20) Likewise Patrick Evans, in 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Some Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction', announces that Ballantyne has suffered 'critical neglect' and then lays the blame on a larger 'critical uncertainty'.(21) He makes a similar point in 'David Ballantyne and the Art of Writing' where he diagnoses the sources of Ballantyne's neglect and suggests that 'the sparseness of his public style, his insistence on writing rather than being a writer, have cost him much of the attention that should have been his'.(22) Yet The Cunninghams, on the face of it, should have been an unqualified and lasting success.

The Cunninghams, the story of an unhappy family living in the ironically named town of Gladston, got off to an auspicious start when it was published in New York by The Vanguard Press in 1948. It's a novel that in many ways was written to fit into an existing mould. That pre-existing form was the proletarian novel (itself an outcrop of naturalism), which aimed at writing from within the working class for the working class and for the purposes of fermenting social change. In Ballantyne's case this was particularly exemplified for him by the novels of James T. Farrell. But in many ways the timing and location of The Cunninghams's appearance proved unpropitious. Because the book was published in America copies were not on sale in New Zealand stores until 1951 and, perhaps more importantly, by 1948 the economic depression of the 1930s had been over for some time; a period of sustained post-war growth was underway, and New Zealand's first Labour government, in power since 1935, had put in place the foundations for a comprehensive welfare state. No one was in the mood for a call to arms on behalf of the beleaguered poor. Nor were the local readers of overseas-published New Zealand literature much likely themselves to have been the beleaguered poor in any case. All this may help account for the book's reviews in New Zealand, which were quiet and sometimes less than happy. Oliver Duff in the New Zealand Listener decided that 'It is a picture of New Zealand by a New Zealander working with an American brush', and soon there was a lengthy and damning dissection by Robert Chapman in the June 1949 issue of Landfall, accusing the novel of being well written but offering no new addition to the body of New Zealand writing, 'a lesser work containing much truth but an untransformed truth, accuracy at the cost of art'.(23) Chapman busied himself with withering statements on the condition of New Zealand literature and the nature of the working-class novel, but also found space to complain that 'the lath-thin effect and the serial boredom of the Cunninghams' minds and lives infects the reading of the book'--so that the review seems to have soured Ballantyne's opinion of academic criticism for the rest of his life.(24) Certainly Chapman's review appears to have affected much academic criticism of the novel ever since, such as Joan Steven's comments in The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960 and also K.O. Arvidson's review in Landfall in 1965 of a reprint of the novel.(25) Arvidson affirms that Chapman's review was 'sound' and argues, with some merit, that Ballantyne 'fails because he tries to perform the functions of both analysis and universalization by means of a single instrument--style'.(26)

Ballantyne's biographer, Bryan Reid, states that a fortnight after reading James T. Farrell's novel Father and Son, Ballantyne began writing what would eventually become The Cunninghams, and Farrell's influence is clearly everywhere in Ballantyne's book.(27) But in addition, Lawrence Jones notes that Ballantyne had been reading Frank Sargeson's 'That Summer' in typescript three weeks prior to beginning his novel (and Sargeson's story includes a tubercular character who lies in bed out on the verandah of a hospital), so that, in other words, Sargeson lay behind Farrell.(28) Like The Cunninghams, Farrell's novel is the story of a large, dysfunctional family struggling under economic difficulties, with a dying father and a sensitive, intelligent son. The styles of both books are so unnervingly similar that, when reading passages of Father and Son and The Cunninghams alongside each other, there seems no difference. It's as though Ballantyne sat down and continued to write Farrell's novel. Both books employ short, unadorned narrative sentences, with simple, somewhat shallow patterns of thought presented by the characters, and with an emphasis on strings of naturalist conversation. The Cunninghams's extensive use of free indirect dialogue clearly resembles Farrell's work. In addition, both books are broken into small sections, each told from a single character's point of view, although that character, and therefore the perspective, may change from section to section. So much is Ballantyne enthralled by Farrell's approach that in The Cunninghams section breaks occur even when they really don't need to, as in Book 1 chapter 3 'Visitors', where the division into three parts ensures that the chapter reads like a series of vignettes or sketches rather than as a concatenated piece.(29)

Fortunately, however, Ballantyne is fundamentally too good a writer merely to produce a local copy of an overseas book, a sin which writers of his generation frequently accused earlier New Zealand authors of committing: although the ease with which The Cunninghams could be categorized as something out of Farrell probably assisted its publication in America. One reason for the novel's strong sense of being rooted in New Zealand, rather than being a copy of something from abroad, is that behind Farrell it is just possible to perceive other influences. These are never more than subtle--I wouldn't like to oversell them--and the most likely source of these influences is indeed Frank Sargeson. The small sections of The Cunninghams read remarkably like Sargeson stories (or at least like the New Zealand social realist writing exemplified by Sargeson's classic stories). More importantly, as in Sargeson, these vignettes often convey important information indirectly, in piecemeal fashion, unlike Farrell's mostly straightforward manner of exposition. There is a hint, for example, in Book 1 chapter 3 that Gil Cunningham is ill because he was invalided out of the army during the First World War with pleurisy and then took on work in the freezing chambers at the local freezing works. We are then made privy to Gil's wartime memories in Book 1 chapter 7, which include him being discharged from the army, but we don't actually learn that Gil has tuberculosis until Book 1 chapter 8 (section 3) at the end of the first part of the book, when Gil's wife, Helen, mentions the fact to her lover Fred Burgess. The exact nature of Gil's work in the freezing chambers remains unexplained until the opening of Book 2 chapter 16, and Gil's complete biography only appears after his death, as an obituary notice quoted at the start of the final chapter. Similarly, Father and Son opens with a page announcing the date of the story, 1918-1919, whereas Ballantyne establishes his timeframe through hints and mentions of near-contemporaneous events until it becomes clear that the novel takes place over 1936-7. The first hint is when Gil thinks that 'If Joy, his eldest, was born in 1923 she was thirteen now'[13], but the date is not made explicit until the title of Book 2 chapter 14: 'A 1937 Christmas'. This impressionism is largely absent from Father and Son, which relies at most on a fairly simple irony to convey its message. Nevertheless, Ballantyne goes to a great deal of trouble to have as many features in his book as possible reflect the novel's time and place. The touring Springboks played a combined Poverty Bay-Bay of Plenty-East Coast rugby team at Rugby Park in Gisborne on 20 September, 1937, and Ballantyne works this into Book 2 chapter 11. The songs on the radio in Book 2 chapter 15, 'The Old Spinning Wheel' and 'The Cross-Eyed Cowboy on the Cross-Eyed Horse', are hit songs of the period.(30) Thus Ballantyne's impressionism is at odds with The Cunninghams's straightforwardly naturalist aims, but it also mitigates usefully against any sense of over-simplification or propagandising.

It's curious, then, that Ballantyne has several non-realistic passages in his book, where the manner of the writing suddenly becomes almost self-consciously literary. A striking example of this is in Book 1 chapter 29, 'We're Only Human (RKO Radio)', which intersperses a brief summary of the plot of a film which Gilbert and his friend Barry Andrews are watching with Gilbert's thoughts in stream of conscious, all in the second person, concerning his early-adolescent obsession with Carole Plowman.(31) There seems no particular rationale for breaking from social realism and presenting the chapter in this non-realistic way, other than the possibility that it might have an effective impact on the reader. In fact it appears oddly out of sync with the bulk of book. The same is true for Book 2 chapter 12, 'Husband and Wife', presented as the alternating streams of consciousness of Helen and Gil as they sit together through a hospital visit, not actually talking and caught in a kind of social stasis.(32) This is followed by chapter 13, 'Twosomes', which consists almost entirely of ineffectual dialogue between Helen and her would-be lover Ernie Mulligan, and then Helen and her friend Flo Young, a chapter most likely owing something to James Joyce's depiction of social paralysis in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'.(33) Even Gil's mix of memory and hallucinations in Book 2 chapter 16 seems to break with the social realist manner. In contrast, Ballantyne seems quite comfortable with using the plain presentational mode of social realism in Book 1 chapter 31, 'The Opportunist', where George Simmons, the night watchman at the Gladston freezing works, sexually assaults Helen while Gil is in hospital. But then this is a chapter in which Ballantyne has a target, since he wishes to expose the hypocrisy of small-town moralism and highlight the vulnerability of women in such a society. In the more stylised chapters and passages, however, it's as if Ballantyne is rebelling against Farrell's relentless application of realism to criticize society and even offering a hint of the kind of writer he would one day like to become.

Finally, again under Sargeson's probable influence, Ballantyne is far more willing than Farrell to use vernacular expressions in his novel, notably in passages of free indirect dialogue. An early example in the book is Gil Cunningham musing while getting his hair cut: 'he did know that he was narked that the night watchman at Gladston freezing works should cut his hair, not that it would matter if Simmons were a garbage collector, but he was such a bloody loudmouth. So was his old woman. A beaut pair of gossips'[15]. Indeed, so closely attuned to its subject material is The Cunninghams that Robert Chapman, in his negative Landfall review, when complaining that Ballantyne had somehow failed to transform his material into art, went so far as to suggest that the novel had almost managed the magical feat of presenting New Zealand itself without the use of any intervening artist medium. Chapman claimed that The Cunninghams 'smacks loudly of a mobile recording unit, albeit a remarkably sensitive one'.(34) But the weakness in the novel lies not so much in a failure to transform its material than from, as Chapman also noted, a perceived sense of limiting sameness. Patrick Evans has similarly complained that The Cunningham, in presenting 'a scrupulous realism [...] that pointed up all too sharply the limitations of living [in New Zealand], threatened to yield a fiction that was boring'.(35)

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources(36)

This accusation of boredom certainly feels right, and yet The Cunninghams is a novel with no lack of violence and sex. In Book 2 chapter 15 Teddy Calcott casually cuts the head off the family cat. In Book 2 chapter 20 Gilbert has an erotic dream and worries about having suffered a nocturnal ejaculation. In Book 2 chapter 25 Gilbert recalls hearing his mother douching herself in the bathroom after coming home from nights with her latest lover. This was racy stuff for 1948. Thus at the heart of the sameness-and-boredom problem of the novel is not so much the material itself, which Ballantyne manages admirably, but another aspect, which both Chapman and Evans do hint at: the issue of character.(37)

Ballantyne's novel is told from several points of view: most especially those of young Gilbert Cunningham, his father Gil Cunningham and his mother Helen Cunningham--though at the end of Book 1 (chapter 32) Gilbert's brother Sydney's viewpoint also appears and late in the novel in Book 2 (chapters 20 and 23) his sister Joy's viewpoint appears. Nevertheless, the mindset of each of the characters whose consciousness is entered into in the novel is essentially the same, and by and large it's a mindset not of Farrell characters but rather more like that of Sargesonian characters, lifted from, and perhaps better suited to, short fiction. Farrell's characters reason in a simple manner, usually with their own individual predispositions, but they are not especially obtuse. Ballantyne's characters in The Cunninghams are all more or less obtuse narrators in the Sargesonian mould, and in the novel each of them repeatedly affects the same attitude of confused wonderment at the world. A typical example is Gilbert Cunningham in Mrs Morpeth's dairy near the opening of the book. The food in the dairy gives off 'a smell that was not in any other shop in town', and on buying a chocolate bar and leaving the store Gilbert ponders the smell 'the way he always did when he visited the dairy. It was like other mysteries coming into your life; you thought about them but never understood'[30].(38) But the young Gilbert is a regular customer and so presumably feels familiar with the shop. With a few coins in his pocket he might conceivably feel comfortable there and even master of his own fate, but instead Ballantyne has his character react in wonderment almost as a default position--and as a hesitant outsider rather than an insider. James Joyce might simply have Leopold Bloom register the uniqueness of the smell in passing in his stream of consciousness, but Ballantyne's approach seems heavy-handed. Obtuse narrators are fine in a sketch or short story, but they become wearisomely one-dimensional in a longer work. Ballantyne takes the time in Mrs Morpeth's dairy to list the foodstuffs available, 'milk, cream, ice cream, bread, scones, all sorts of sweets--chocolate, fudge, toffee, cinnamon bars, changing balls--and blocks of cake and tins of biscuits'[30], but it is not this cataloguing, which Joyce is also fond of, but Gilbert's almost inarticulate reaction to it which makes the book's tone monotonous.

The same reaction, expressed in the same language and in the same manner, is offered by Joy late in the novel when, on holiday, she sees a rock which she feels is shaped like her father's head.

Oh, gosh, she thought. She loved her father and she boasted about him but he was sick and she hated the smell of the hospital and that was why she didn't visit him very often. She wondered if this was one of those premonition things. It was queer, and the more she looked the more certain she became.[213]

Further examples are too numerous to bother with, but a near-perfect case is Gilbert musing at the barber's:

[H]e was nearly a grown-up and, by gee, he'd be glad when he was a grown-up. Because then he wouldn't be so puzzled about things; he'd understand Mum and Dad, and why he should have to go to Sunday school, and why he loved Carole Plowman, and why he wasn't smart like Ralph Coulter, and why Dad wasn't a working-man who came home every night and took off his boots and washed his face and hands and sat down to tea, and why he was embarrassed when he saw girls together, and why he hated reciting poetry in front of the class. And lots of other things. Gosh, he wondered whether many other kids were like him. [109-110]

The list of questions is plainly meant by Ballantyne to be ironic, with the implied answers rather obviously residing for us, the knowing readers, within Gilbert's murky adolescence. But a more psychologically concerned, and adept, writer might have offered us something other than Gilbert's dull ignorance, and stimulated us instead with the provisional answers that Gilbert himself had arrived at concerning these matters.

I must say, adding insult to injury, that a proletarian novel filled with obtuse narrators seems a rather bourgeois view of the working classes. Being uneducated is not the same thing as being obtuse, and ignorance is certainly not a universal quality among the lower classes, nor confined solely to them. K.O. Arvidson makes a similar point when he observes that The Cunninghams 'represents the rabble less than it does an attitude that assumes that's what they are'.(39) Given Ballantyne's own working-class origins, this is a somewhat odd criticism to make, but it's perhaps a further reflection of the influence on the novel of Sargeson, himself a child of the middle classes. And so it's something of a surprise, when reading Bryan Reid's biography of Ballantyne, to discover just how much of an autobiographical basis the characters in the Cunningham family have. Reid even claims 'In a sense, Gilbert Cunningham is David Ballantyne, and the story of The Cunninghams is, quite simply, the representation of a critical period in the life of the Ballantyne family rendered into art'.(40) The sense of surprise is all the greater because the characters appear, even at this early stage of the New Zealand novel, to be stock types, so much so that in New Zealand Literature: A Survey E.H. McCormick describes them as: 'that classical New Zealand tableau--the dominant, managing mother, flanked on one side by the diminished father, on the other by the sensitive, aspiring son'.(41) Leaving to one side the issue of just how accurate McCormick is in describing the mother and father, certainly the Gilbert Cunningham type of character, the sensitive and artistic child growing up precariously in a philistine New Zealand environment, is perhaps unsurprisingly a staple of New Zealand mid-twentieth-century fiction, with its autobiographical underpinnings for New Zealand writers appearing all too obvious.(42)

But if all the narrators of The Cunninghams are usually obtuse, then the question can be asked: what is it that they are ignorant of? What sort of platonic ideal of New Zealand reality are they not perceiving? Any answer, and this can be true for almost all New Zealand social realist literature of the period, would undoubtedly be framed in political and economic terms. At issue for New Zealand social realist writers was that ordinary people were sadly unaware of the way that their current established order prevented the arrival of a socialist, or perhaps communist, utopia in which they would all be happy. And yet behind this, for New Zealand writers, was the further complaint that ordinary, practically-minded Kiwis didn't approve of sensitive, creative people who criticised the established order and offered superior alternatives. George Orwell's Winston Smith may have decided that hope 'must lie in the proles', but to the New Zealand literary eccentric ordinary people seemed uncomfortably more like an extension of the problem than the source of any solution.(43) It's perhaps for this reason that Gilbert's brother Sydney, much more of a practical, good-bloke sort than Gilbert, so that 'There was something about Sydney that made people like him'[139], is only on one very brief and unreflective occasion the narrator in the novel, when collecting a letter for his father which he thinks will result in praise for himself. This occurs in Book 1 chapter 32, in which the postman brings a letter that, presumably, contains the good news that as a returned serviceman Gil will receive a souvenir program of King George VI's coronation. Sydney is delighted at the prospect of being praised for being the bearer of such news. However, it is Gilbert who later gives this letter to his father in Book 2 chapter 2, implying that Sydney no longer feels there's any benefit for himself in bothering with the delivery; and yet early in the novel Gil says of his sons: 'Gilbert's the brainy one, but [...] I think young Sydney, will put the others in the shade'[33]. Unreflective, easy-going and hoping to become a carpenter, Sydney is a type all too happily adapted to his rotten world. He may be the New Zealand type whom Kendrick Smithyman reluctantly termed 'final/ yet unrefined at all'.(44) And ultimately this points towards a contradiction inherent to the mentality of many New Zealand social realist writers: their politics lay on the left, but their sense of what a culture should be often lay much closer to the right.

Of course, Ballantyne's characters, as required by proletarian fiction, and again typically of the social realist period, are purposefully presented as helpless in the face of the social forces emanating from the established order. Or rather, under the influence of the apparent plain-dealing in the book's unadorned language, its lack of authorial presence, and its characters' several points of view given in free indirect dialogue, this sense of helplessness is a conclusion that we, as readers, are guided by the novel towards deducing for ourselves (in something of an elaborate, and ultimately sentimental, game between author and reader). The helplessness of ordinary people: this is the proletarian thrust of the novel.(45) Certainly it's this naturalistic conception of his characters as mere pawns which, as needs must, forces Ballantyne to make them obtuse, to make them representative types, to make them parts of a similar whole, and, worst of all, to make them unchanging. Thus Helen Cunningham replaces her lover Fred Burgess, a warehouseman and part-time bookmaker, with another lover, Ernie Mulligan, a radio repairman, because her fundamental need for escape remains constant. In a minor key, Gilbert replaces his fantasy girl Carole Plowman with Izzy Calcott because his sexual frustrations continue unabated.

Of all the characters in the novel, Helen is the one who fights hardest against her socio-economic fate. She certainly loves her children and always tries her best to look after them, but something of her double nature is shown in her attitude to animals in Book 2 chapter 15. She kicks the Calcott's dog away under the table because 'Animals in the house gave her the creeps'[192] but a moment later, when Teddy threatens to kill the cat, Helen 'told herself she didn't know how anybody could have the nerve to kill an animal, the very thought gave her the woollies'[192]. Still later, when Teddy does indeed kill the cat, she is frightened. At the heart of her inner tensions and unhappiness is her emotional isolation, exacerbated by Gil being away in hospital. This pushes her first into the solacing embrace of an older man, Fred Burgess (he is close to 50 and she is 33), and later the clutches of the louche Ernie Mulligan in her search for a refuge from loneliness and drudgery. Ballantyne makes it plain that Helen's marital infidelity is driven by emotional needs rather than hedonism or sexual desire. She blames 'her lonely damned life'[167]. 'I just want to live decently in comfort without being tormented all the time'[201] she says to Ernie Mulligan in a typical outburst, while rejecting his sexual advances. But then she gives in and sleeps with him shortly afterwards. Helen is an easy prey for seducers, though both Fred Burgess and Ernie Mulligan ultimately appear to abandon her. Ballantyne clearly doesn't want Helen to be judged harshly and in an early review of the novel John A. Lee declared her 'a good mother and a human woman, not a sterile nun'.(46) (Lee had already treated the sexual degradations brought on poverty sympathetically in his Children of the Poor.)

Without doubt in proletarian fiction it is the characters' social circumstances, and not the decisions of the characters themselves, that readers are supposed to judge. With our sympathy to the proletariat awakened, we are supposed to understand and pity the suffering and mistakes of the poor and downtrodden--arguably, none of their errors can ever really be moral failings anyway because their actions are socially directed. Helen's thinking about her troubles is linked by a strong implication to socialism at the end of the book: 'She didn't want much from life. All she wanted was a chance for herself and her children, freedom from creditors, freedom to have the pleasant things that were surely everybody's right'[231]. Her grief at Gil's death is unequivocally genuine--it's presented in Book 2 chapter 24 from Helen's own point of view--though Joy fundamentally misunderstands her mother's emotional privation and complains in the next chapter that her mother is a hypocrite. (Joy, however, is no stranger to hypocrisy herself, since in the previous chapter, Book 2 chapter 23, she has been out at the movies while her father is dying and has decided that 'far from being cruel and bitter, death could be very beautiful. Pictures were good that way'[227].) Helen can indeed be genuinely hypocritical on occasion--she complains of George Simmons and his wife that 'They've both been married half a dozen times. Awful, isn't it?'[134], although she herself considers running away with Fred Burgess--but even her hypocrisy is socially directed.

Having been bedridden for the past three years before the novel's start (and four and a half by the end), Gil takes little part in the story's action and yet he is very much the moral centre of the book. In Book 1 chapter 16, 'Reaction', set on Christmas eve, Sydney and Frank show the things they have 'found'[73] at Woolworth's to their mother and she does not react to their theft (though as if in partial mitigation Helen is shown asleep at the end of the section, too exhausted to have wrapped all the children's presents). However, when Sydney and Frank show the same things to their father immediately afterwards, he becomes furious with them for being thieves. In the same way, Gil refuses to allow his children to be dumped into a boarding school, although Helen, in conversation with Ernie Mulligan, clearly seems amenable to Ernie's insistence that 'boarding schools were made for women who find their kids too much to cope with'[182]. (Later when Gil is dead she changes her mind about sending her children away.) Gil disapproves of Helen spending time with the rowdy Calcott family and is concerned that his children should be attending Sunday school. He acts as the conscience of the family, but he is dying.

Just as John Needham describes Hamlet as a 'plot-free being', able to observe and comment on events while detached from them, so Gil is free to observe a range of matters from outside the action of the story.(47) He has been through the tempering experience of the First World War and the real suffering he saw in it has given him a kind of hard-won moral wisdom. He prefers the Labour Party to the 'fat, contented idiots'[87] of the Businessmen's Club. Brooding on Max Carson, the 'crazy young redfed'[127] who wants to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War, Gil concludes, 'Only a madman would go to a war unless he had to. These redfeds were always thinking about killing someone; if they'd seen as much killing as he had they'd think different'[128]. After listening to Carson recommend him the socialist book Jews Without Money, Gil grunts and thinks 'Jews were Jews [...] that sort of talk didn't belong in this county'[128]. Jews Without Money, by Michael Gold, published in New York in 1930, was an early proletarian novel, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up on the Lower East Side and a relentless indictment of poverty. But while Gil won't countenance the fashionable anti-Semitism of the 1930s, on the other hand he won't sentimentalise Jews or turn them into symbols either. At a time when Jewish people were at the nub of society's extremist views, Gil, like Hamlet, refuses to be drawn into action. (It should be noted that Ballantyne was writing in the 1940s, after the revelations of the Nazi death camps, so Gil's comments are clearly placed in the novel as a moral indicator.) Needham also notes that Hamlet's 'sense of futility springs not from events but from a crisis of self-hood', and much the same applies to Gil: a tragic character, albeit in his proletarian ordinariness lacking the grandeur of the classic tragic hero.(48)

Max Carson, the young proselytizer of Communism, makes his first appearance in The Cunninghams at the end of Book 1, in chapter 31, where he recommends Jews Without Money and then quotes from a famous prayer for the workers' revolution which ends that book.

O workers' Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

O Revolution that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.

O great Beginning

Gil's reaction is to scratch his leg. Instead, Gil concentrates on 'going home to be a proper father to his kids' and on being 'very considerate to Helen, too'[129], despite his knowledge of her affair, hinting that kindness of spirit rather than socio-political change may be Ballantyne's alternative solution for the problems of New Zealand society. For a novel of social protest, this is remarkably ambivalent, perhaps reflecting the ambivalence Ballantyne already felt about Stalinism and the Soviet Union by the time of the book's composition.(50)

The same ambivalence returns in greater force near the end of Book 2, at what should be the thematic climax of The Cunninghams, in the paired chapters 20 'On the Peninsula' and 21 'Street-Corner Radical'. In chapter 20 Gilbert observes his mother listening to an elderly Maori man who preaches the values of self-sufficiency and living in the moment. Helen has a curiously--and perhaps typically Pakeha--inconsistent attitude towards Maori people: she is part-Maori herself and twice claims that her 'Maori blood is the best blood'[25, 216] in her, although she also weighs the likelihood of her husband sleeping with 'Maori tarts'[180] and later decides that the relatives of the elderly Maori man speaking to her are 'very consumptive' and 'skinny and old-looking for their age'[218]. Nevertheless, she and the others present listen to the old man's speech and then ponder his words as a spiritual answer to the problems of life outlined in the novel.(51) Previously Maori characters have appeared only in the background of The Cunninghams as distant and exotic people, 'gathering on the river banks to talk and laugh and drink beer and eat fish and chips'[14], 'laughing in their own way'[67] or 'feeding on the river banks [...] singing cowboy songs and playing ukuleles'[172], but to Gilbert the old man seems 'a sage'[216 italics in original]. A Maori woman also present and listening refers to him both as a 'crackpot'[217] and a 'prophet'[217].

Having once reintroduced spirituality, Ballantyne then reintroduces Communism in chapter 21 when Gilbert encounters Max Carson on the street. Carson insists that Communism is 'the true Marxist philosophy'[221] and talks with prescience about the danger of Adolf Hitler. He declares that 'less than two percent of the population of this country makes around a fifth of the total private income. That means something'[221]. Nevertheless, there is nothing explicit in Carson's talk about how Marxism might reform the New Zealand socio-economic system, and Gilbert tells himself that 'you were too young to be able to turn his talk over in your mind'[220]. Besides, Carson also counsels Gilbert to avoid 'getting tangled up with women' and suggests 'auto-eroticism's better'[220], and Gilbert, echoing his father's view of Carson--and even that of the Maori woman's verdict on the old Maori man--prefaces his encounter with Carson with the thought that Carson 'was supposed to be nuts'[217]. Ballantyne clearly intends to close out his novel with two possible solutions for New Zealand's social ills, solutions which the reader can chose between without further authorial direction; but this seems awfully watered-down stuff for a novel of protest, and it does nothing to improve the novel's impact on the reader. Similarly, The Cunninghams has remarkably little to say about the causes of the poverty which afflict its characters. These factors contribute to the impression the book gives that it suffers from a lack of passion.

A novel with plenty of passion, and arguably the only real rival to The Cunninghams as an important New Zealand proletarian novel, is John A. Lee's Children of the Poor, which was published much earlier, in the midst of the Great Depression, in 1934. It was at once roundly condemned in the pages of the New Zealand Herald for being an 'overdrawn' and atypical portrayal of New Zealand poverty: a sure sign that the novel had touched a nerve.(52) But a glance at Lee's book helps illuminate the artistic difficulties that Ballantyne struggled with, and also the hard-won nature of Ballantyne's achievement. Children of the Poor makes its proletarian and didactic intentions clear from its opening sentence, 'This is the story of how I became a thief'[7]. However, it's as an adult reminiscence that the novel is told in the first person by its protagonist, Albany Porcello--it is, in fact, very close to a non-fictional memoir of Lee's own life--and the narrative soon begins to ramble. There is a long introduction about New Zealand and Dunedin, presumably for overseas readers, often in very patriotic and flattering terms for a book which intends to present a social critique, and after a section on growing up in poverty in Dunedin Albany soon moves as a child to live with relatives in the rural delights of Riverdale. This rural life is described in conventionally rapturous terms which perhaps lie behind Stuart Murray's comment that the book 'is charged with a socialism that is, in fact, nearly pure pastoralism'.(53) The lack of a clear novelistic structure means that, when Albany confesses in front of his grandmother to 'Stealing gooseberries'[71], it's impossible to know whether this is an example of literary foreshadowing of a descent into a life of crime or a mere coincidence.(54) The second mention of becoming a thief, in a section entitled 'The Making of a Criminal', occurs just over halfway through the book and comes almost as a surprise. Likewise, it's only at about a quarter of the way through the novel that Albany returns from the countryside to live with his mother and his older sister Rose in Dunedin, and the humiliations of poverty actually begin to matter.

Rose drifts into prostitution. When she 'was only ten or eleven' and Albany was 'about two years younger'[128]--the vagueness of the ages suggests the verisimilitude of memoir--Rose allows herself to be sexually used in return for money in 'an awful Chinese den which festered near the heart of the city'[127]. (Whatever the ultimate cause lying behind his feelings may have been, Lee reveals a dislike of the Chinese on several occasions in the book.) Later Rose comes under the control of a pimp who 'offered her only a meagre share of her earnings'[130]. At this point Lee strikes a distinctly determinist note (perhaps in part for personal reasons, since his own sister in fact suffered the same fate), insisting that 'Society is organized to victimize the very poor'[123]. However, while poverty is a powerfully determining factor in Rose's actions, Lee doesn't quite succeed in demonstrating that poverty must inevitably propel a young woman in Rose's situation into prostitution. Albany's mother, for example, is also poor but remains on the straight and narrow.

At the heart of this issue is that Rose is an individuated character who makes individual choices, rather than the more generalised character type appearing in The Cunninghams. After various ups and downs Albany succeeds in getting a good job in a printing company but loses it and becomes a thief because he refuses to repudiate his association with his prostitute sister--again, the act of an individual making a personal, albeit brave, choice rather than more a general character type at the mercy of social forces. Yet Lee tries hard to shape his story by insisting that both Albany and Rose are born to go bad.

Looking backward, how alike we were! We were each in the social rapids headed straight for destruction, and each of us had a loyalty to the other. Rose would have sold her soul for me, but not for anyone else attached to our home. And I would have committed any crime in the calendar to keep my money coming home, committed any crime to conceal from my mother the knowledge of my downfall.[217-8]

But what amounts here to an angry expression of individual passion is not the same as succumbing to the fate of one's class.(55) Paradoxically, Lee's very strength at characterisation works against his naturalistic intentions, although this does perhaps make for a more readable novel than The Cunninghams can ultimately be.

For despite the structural weaknesses and areas of slackness in Children of the Poor, Lee's ability to produce arresting set pieces is undeniable. In a section titled 'The Bum at The Throne of God' Albany attends a service performed by 'religious zealots'[114] and, when the congregation sits with eyes closed and is called on to raise a hand if anyone desires to 'commit his soul to Jesus'[115], Albany, with eyes shut, feels that everybody else must be raising their hands and that he must do so too. Normally, Albany notes, he would peep, but affected on this occasion by the preacher's voice, he 'shut out the light and left myself in darkness alone with my conscience' [115]. At last he does succumb to peer pressure, raises his hand and discovers that he alone 'had been an ass'[119]. It is the climax of a very effective, protracted passage, frequently rendered in short, quick sentences and phrases, where Albany's adolescent passions are shown coming to boiling point and where Albany's mistake, in fact, is to be sincere. As a depiction of passion if compares well with the flat, almost banal language used in The Cunninghams. Similarly Albany's description in the section titled 'My Evil Genius Discovers Another' of the sexual abuse he suffers at the hands of Mr Axeldeen, a paedophile chaplain, is a terrifying case study. It's not merely an indictment of society's hypocrisy but also a passage vividly portraying confusion and the betrayal of innocence from the youthful victim's point of view.(56)

When Lee does present a narrative set piece in Children of the Poor he often contains it within something like a contrasting frame. A good example concerns Rose's childhood drift into prostitution. Albany's reaction to this as a younger brother telling the story, a reaction repeated several times, is an avowal of envy that his sister can obtain money by selling her body when he, as a boy, cannot. Albany declares, 'All I knew about sex that was attractive was that a girl could temper poverty by selling herself and that I was condemned, as a boy, to be the one who paid'[132]. Thus Albany's own poverty so overwhelms him that it forces him to envy any other person's mode of escape from poverty. For Lee, this adds a further means of shocking the reader to his narrative, but this framing device also helps him avoid the trap of sentimentality, of telling a simple story about an awful moral fall. This device of a contrasting frame is a technique which Lee uses on several occasions. Another is the section titled 'The Holy Willies Throw a Party', where Albany attends Sunday school in order to eat some of the food made available for members at the gathering. To his scandalised young companions Albany frequently professes apostasy yet in secret he continuously remains a fervent believer. '"There is no God," I would say openly, silently praying to the God I denied'[139]. Although the section appears to show poverty and unfairness driving Albany out of his religious faith into cynicism, it's framed by Albany's private faith and secret sense of guilt.(57) This technique perhaps explains K.O. Arvidson's admiration for the book's 'anecdotes' which reveal 'a cast of mind that sees both sides of every issue, and generates a productive tension between them in the act of doing so', something which Arvidson rightly feels The Cunninghams fails to achieve.(58)

Novels of social protest, as opposed to novels which include social protest, can be surprisingly difficult to write well. James Baldwin explains in his essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel' that because of their simplistic morality--good versus bad--and their reduction of humans to the status of largely symbolic cyphers, protest novels are 'fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality'. He notes that the famous protest novel Uncle Tom's Cabin of necessity forces its characters into the good/bad, black/white binarism that the novel is protesting about, and he advances the unsettling thought that 'The "protest" novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting part of the American scene'.(59) Both Ballantyne and Lee avoid making their books too schematic, but only at the expense of dissipating their message. Moreover, one serious flaw that Ballantyne and Lee share is that because their novels feature a young protagonist who is intelligent and sensitive, who by the end of the novel seems ready to fly, Stephen Dedalus-like, past the social, economic and political nets cast to trap him, to go away in fact and write proletarian novels, then such a young man seems by example to disprove the central naturalist theme of the proletarian novel: that people are trapped within the current confines of the capitalist system and unable to escape until some form of outside agency changes that system. In contrast, Rohinton Mistry's 1995 novel A Fine Balance, set in India mostly between independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1977-79, presents characters who are irretrievably constrained and then destroyed by their place and times. After all, what really is so wrong with a socio-politico-economic system that can produce a Gilbert Cunningham, or an Albany Porcello, that a little more money in the system wouldn't solve?(60) And such a view is not new. It goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century when Balzac's talented but indigent Lucien Chardon hears a voice within him cry 'Money! Money!'.(61) Whether on purpose or by curious accident, this is echoed in Helen Cunningham's own cry of 'money, money, money!' at the close of Book 2 chapter 5. Unlike Michael Gold in Jews Without Money, there is nothing in the way New Zealand is governed, Ballantyne and Lee seem to imply, despite their protests, that couldn't be fixed by spreading around a bit more cash.(62)

However, it is not as a proletarian writer that Ballantyne seems to have made his lasting mark, but in a work published two decades later in 1968, Sydney Bridge Upside Down. It's a novel that locates the origins of evil not in any socio-politico-economic system as such but rather within the darkness of the human heart--albeit particularly when that heart is confined by New Zealand life. Any confused wonderment among the characters in Sydney Bridge Upside Down results from their denial of humanity's poorly suppressed viciousness, and the novel is nowadays often read as approaching the level of a New Zealand myth, as though it portrays 'some kind of terrible gap, a lack, a pitfall with the national psyche'.(63) Several characters in The Cunninghams mention the cruelty of killing animals at the freezing works, such as Gil's remembrance of 'the great blood pools reaching over the floor to the drains and [...] the throat-slashing of the dangling animals and [...] what a bugger of a job'[197], or Frank and Sydney, two of the least sensitive characters in The Cunninghams, saying 'how cruel it was of the men to kill the dumb animals'[205]. Sydney Bridge Upside Down moves this issue further into the foreground. Thus it's unsurprising that Ballantyne's works, and Sydney Bridge Upside Down in particular, form a significant part of Patrick Evans's essay on the brutal underside of the New Zealand version of pastoral, 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Some Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction', in which Evans notes that Sydney Bridge Upside Down 'provides something of a mythic structure for [Ballantyne's] proletarian fiction'.(64)

There are places, not always impressive, or even noticeable in themselves, which cannot be disturbed. Something so loathsome or so cruel has once happened here, that any disturbance will demand a repetition--we may call it a reparation, in human blood.(65)

Nevertheless, when Ballantyne's novel first appeared in 1968 its conspicuous lack of realism seemed only to confuse those who read it. Dennis McEldowney wondered in a New Zealand Listener review, 'is the line between realism and romance not to be drawn precisely where [Ballantyne] seems to draw it?'.(66) Perhaps because of this confusion the book was mostly ignored on its publication, something which is probably the worst fate that can befall a novel, or a novelist. Later critics tended to rediscover Sydney Bridge Upside Down by acknowledging its Gothic elements, as a book recounted through the lens of a young man's madness or trauma. Such critics have even seen the novel as something like a continuation of The Cunninghams but with the kaleidoscope of the social realist novel shaken to produce some new and troubling pattern, so that Erin Mercer has perceptively observed that 'the novel creates a version of New Zealand life that is both recognisably real and mythologised'.(67) Certainly, to the extent that the characters in The Cunninghams are stock types, they offer up useful material for an appearance later in Sydney Bridge Upside Down, and an almost spooky collection of cross-references between the books can be compiled.(68) So perhaps Sydney Bridge Upside Down can be read as Gilbert Cunningham's waking world retold at night, or something close to that, in the way that Joyce's Finnegans Wake might be considered the night version of Ulysses.

But no matter how critics have been inclined to read the book, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is fundamentally a confection, a ludic novel worked up by its author as an entertainment. Its composition appears to have been quick and pleasant: Bryan Reid claims that Ballantyne's wife heard her husband singing at the typewriter as he wrote it.(69) An undoubted factor in its success, as Reid comments, is that 'The language of Sydney Bridge Upside Down--flat, laconic, colloquial--is superficially the same as in The Cunninghams and The Last Pioneer, but here it is used with immense skill as a bland, deceptive surface layer under which feverish dramas are being played out'.(70) And yet the novel opens with its protagonist, a boy named Harry Baird, talking in what critics have called a 'fairy tale', 'sing-song' or 'folkloric' voice, an unsettlingly obsessive voice uncharacteristic of most of the rest of the book (although it does reappear from time to time).(71) In this voice at the opening of the book Harry announces two things: that terrible events happened one summer in his home town of Calliope Bay, and that a man named Sam Phelps and his horse Sydney Bridge Upside Down were 'always somewhere around'[5]. The reader's sense of unease increases drastically only a few paragraphs later when Harry accidently throws his friend Dibs Kelly off a cliff while wrestling with him, presumably to Dibs's death, and nothing further happens. Despite our expectations, there are no consequences: no gathering crowd, no ambulance, no police. Instead, Harry deliberately and playfully manipulates shifts in his story's timeframe to mention Dibs but not to show him in the narrative, so that even at the end of the chapter Harry's younger brother Cal is asking 'Where's Dibs?' and Harry replies 'Search me'[16].

Dibs reappears in chapter 2, when it gradually becomes clear that the arrival of a ship, the Emma Cranwell, is occurring in the novel after Dibs's fall over the cliff. Harry in his narration then ignores the fall as if it never happened, except for a brief parenthetical mention in chapter 3: '("He pushed me off the cliff!" said Dibs, but got no chance to say more)'[33]. Dibs's fall is by no means the only event in the novel which plays games with the reader's expectations. In chapter 2, for example, Harry, Dibs and Cal mention a pistol they have found in the killing room of the works, the abandoned abattoir where the boys like to play. But the pistol plays no significant role in the plot of the novel, almost as a rebuke to Anton Chekhov's famous dramatic principle that 'If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired'.(72) Rather it comes closer to Joseph Conrad's view that 'It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged'.(73) In its determination to frustrate the reader's expectations Michael Gifkins's story 'After the Revolution' is one of the few comparable works in New Zealand literature.(74)

There are other oddities. The size of the community at Calliope Bay is unconvincing. Harry counts only five houses in the remains of his town 'at the edge of the world'[5] and yet there is a school with a teacher, and also a butcher. The works has been closed for some time, and yet Sam Phelps is employed to 'haul the freight wagon along the railway line from the wharf to just outside the works'[18]. What is the purpose of his job? It soon becomes clear that in Sydney Bridge Upside Down Harry Baird is an extremely unreliable narrator, and Hamish Clayton has written at length on this feature of the novel.(75) As a narrator Harry acts somewhat like an author who is writing a first draft and doesn't rewrite as he goes along, killing off characters, bringing them back, and ignoring geographical changes and other inconsistencies just to keep his story moving. Early in the book Harry notes self-consciously in parenthesis: '(Dibs had two younger brothers and two younger sisters, but I won't mention them often, you can take it for granted they were always around. I ignored them mostly then and that's what I'll do now.)'[20]. They make no other significant appearance. Similarly, the geography of the bay is constantly referred to in very specific terms by Harry while, for the reader, these parts remain maddeningly vague and never seem to add up to a coherent geographical whole, as if they were appearing in a dreamscape. In addition, distant views are unusually frequent, in which Harry and his friends stare down from far away at arrangements of people, again as in a dreamscape. And as in a dream, time shifts are frequent and illogical, characters and objects appear and disappear suddenly, and people do not behave in a consistent fashion.

Commentators have certainly noticed the dreamlike quality of the narrative, but most have assumed that the novel is some sort of traumatic or hallucinatory reminiscence in which Harry is unhinged by his mother's betrayal of his father, specifically her marital infidelity with Harry's teacher, Mr Dalloway, and by her eventual abandonment of her family. This then results in the book being some sort of Gothic novel arising out of the soil of the provincial or social realist New Zealand fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. However, while reminiscence through trauma or general craziness is a tempting approach, I believe that reading the novel as organised by means of Sigmund Freud's theories of dreamwork, and in particular Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, can explain many of the obscurities in the story more satisfactorily. Harry's story can be read as one long dream.(76) Thus in especially anxious or excited moments during Harry's dream the paragraphing of the novel disappears and sentences are pushed together in something closer to a stream of consciousness. Sentences become shorter, with asides in brackets, as excitement mounts, and this rises to something like hysteria in particular in three remarkable chapters, chapters 6, 13 and 16, where the narrative's tense changes into a kind of breathless present.(77)

If the whole of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a dream, then deciphering what has happened in Harry's waking world--what it is that has prompted his dream--is an almost impossibly speculative task, one that makes even considerations of unreliable or lying narrators look easy by comparison. In a dreamwork reading of the novel it is not even possible, for example, to know how long ago the events in Harry's waking world that triggered the dream occurred. At the opening of the book Harry says vaguely that he is narrating 'the terrible happenings up the coast that summer'[5], and at the end of the novel Harry says that it was all 'a fair number of years ago', though he then includes a comparison to being 'a skinny scabby kid having your first randy nightmares'[219].(78) Nevertheless, while acknowledging the difficulties involved, a provisional reading of the novel as being entirely within the framework of an Oedipal dream might proceed on the assumption that the events which have set off that dream are as follows. At some time in the waking world young Harry has seen his parents having sex, and the spectacle of his mother's pleasure has been both disturbing and arousing for him. Simultaneously, he was intimidated by the sight and size of his father's erection. All this has set off a chain of Oedipal thoughts in Harry's subconscious--desiring his mother and wishing to eliminate his father--and this taboo has expressed itself in a dream in a complicated manner. The novel-as-dream that would that result from this, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, can therefore be read in the light of the dreamwork interpretation that follows here.

People from Harry's waking life are fragmented into several characters in his dream-story, and the status of each character is not always stable. Thus Harry censors his sexual desire for his mother by conveniently sending her to the city with a father-figure, the teacher Mr Dalloway. To his neighbour Mrs Kelly's question about whether he misses his mother, Harry replies 'Not much'[12], and claims that it's only his younger brother, Cal, who is missing her. Even so, psychologists argue that everything in a dream is an indication of the state of mind of the dreamer, and so when Cal whispers 'Mummy, Mummy'[193] at the close of chapter 13 this is one of several clues in the book that Harry is constantly wanting his mother to come back to him. But having removed his mother from the story, Harry then brings into his dream a beautiful cousin, Caroline Selby, as an object of displacement. Caroline may or may not be based on a person in Harry's waking world; there is no way of knowing. In any event it seems that Caroline is being sent by Harry's mother from the city: Harry says his mother wants the family to 'make her feel welcome'[23]. Later in the novel it appears that Harry feels Caroline has been sent instead of his mother, so that Harry wonders anxiously 'now that the holidays were nearly over, how much longer would Caroline stay with us? Maybe until my mother came home'[119], and a little later, thinking of his mother being too ill to travel home, 'I did not want her to be sick too long, but if it meant Caroline could stay I guessed I could do without a mother for a bit more'[119]. In fact Harry's mother, Janet Baird, barely ever appears in the book, and so in his dreamwork Harry is free harmlessly to transfer his Oedipal feelings for his mother onto Caroline. Caroline even seems to recall Mr Dalloway's name from 'longer ago than this afternoon'[42] in the city, which lets Ballantyne link Caroline with Harry's mother while at the same time cleverly raising suspicions about Mr Dalloway and Harry's mother's relationship.

Caroline replaces Harry's mother in his dream, and thus Caroline as a mother substitute is an object of intense desire but also, for Harry, ultimately unobtainable because taboo. From the start, Caroline is presented in the novel in an extremely sexualised way. When she first appears on the Emma Cranwell, the ship which brings her to Calliope Bay, Harry sees her kiss the captain and three sailors goodbye and then even kiss Sam Phelps as she steps ashore. Harry finds these liberally bestowed kisses, which he also receives, desirable and arousing. He confesses, 'I noticed the second time how very close she came when she kissed; her body was right up against you; it was as if she had to be sure that now she'd found your mouth she did not lose it'[34]. However, while there is something almost predatory about Caroline's highly sexual behaviour, Harry also feels that he must treat her with a respectful sense of distance in comparison to the adolescent lust he feels for Susan Prosser and other local girls. He comments, 'I felt sort of polite when I thought of anything to do with Caroline. I did not feel polite when I thought of Susan or of the girls who came to our school from back-country places'[35]. Since Caroline is a substitute for Harry's taboo mother, it is furthermore unsurprising that Harry's relationship with his beautiful cousin is always both sexually knowledgeable and curiously furtive. Sitting in the boys' cave with Caroline, Harry notes with excitement that she is not wearing any underwear--'only the dress, the shoes, the lipstick'[58]--yet only a few pages before he has been calmly watching her as, completely naked, she got dressed. Despite often seeing his cousin naked Harry is excited by the glimpse of a pubic 'curly hair'[65] which he notices protruding from Caroline's white swimsuit. Later for Harry the sight of Caroline in a semi-transparent petticoat makes him more excited 'than if she had been wearing nothing'[107], and while the erotic attractions of revealing clothes are well known, this does sit strangely with the frequency of Harry and Caroline's non-sexual naked running games. Perhaps the most wonderfully balanced example of this contradiction in the book is when Caroline notices Harry's erection in his swimming shorts and comments, 'Harry's naughty dingdong'[66]. This sort of comment is something a lover might say in jest to her beau but it's also something a mother might say to an infant child, and exactly which situation it arises from, in this case, is ambiguous.

The running game is an important instance of Caroline's desirability for Harry being combined with her unobtainability. Originally the game involved only Harry and Cal, but Caroline joins in from her first morning in the house. The three of them run around the house and chase each other naked and, conveniently, it is only Cal who thinks of it as 'a rude game'[48], so that Harry and Caroline are free to continue it without him. Psychologists tend to agree that a dream of being naked with another person, when feeling no shame or embarrassment, suggests a sense of openness and trust with that person, a willingness to appear vulnerable. A parallel with the prelapsarian Adam and Eve is possible, although Harry certainly does feel a certain frisson when taking part in the game. Later in the novel he reluctantly gives the game up 'because it made me too anxious'[159] and Caroline also seems less willing. The Oedipal conundrum for Harry of erotic attraction to a taboo object is no doubt behind his feverish mention of the running game's most overtly sexual instance (psychically managed with a little more safety as an event in recall): 'Do you want to grab my hand and do what you did when we were running the other morning? You know, when you held it down there between your legs and wouldn't let me take it away. I can't, dear Caroline, I can't, I can't'[86].

The other significant male children in the novel occupy positions in relation to Harry's sense of manliness. Thus Harry feels superior to, and thus protective of, his younger brother Cal. In chapter 8 he feels guilty that, distracted by thoughts of Caroline, he almost fails to save Cal from drowning. He insists several times that it's Cal who wants their mother to come home. Dibs Kelly, and later also Bruce Norman, however, are more or less Harry's masculine equals and so they must be 'bopped' occasionally and kept down. When Harry feels his masculinity is threatened by either of these characters he reacts swiftly, and this accounts for the famous scene at the start of the book where Harry throws Dibs off a cliff. Dibs gets the upper hand in a boyish tussle. He announces 'I'll dong you, boy!'[6] and then Harry sends him flying over the cliff in what may or may not be an accident. A dream reading also accounts for how, through dream-logic, Dibs survives and the incident is forgotten, or rather it is absorbed into the narrative until it disappears. Doubts about his masculinity lie behind Harry's erratic aggressiveness towards others throughout the book.

The adult male characters in the novel, as displaced versions of Harry's father, all openly desire Caroline, and Harry sees them as rivals. Therefore he is jealous of his cousin's interest in them and their attentions to her, and he is both possessive and protective of her. Of course, one of the men who desire Caroline is Harry's father, Frank Baird, whom Harry's dreamwork has purposefully reduced to an ineffectual figure, a one-legged man. The oddity of Harry's father's one-legged condition--he can somehow ride a bicycle and climb a ladder, and at the carnival his crutch doesn't stop him from 'moving as fast as the others'[134]--suggests that Harry's father's disability has been manufactured to reduce his potency within Harry's dream. Similarly, Harry's father has a whip, something that he has won in suitably masculine fashion 'at poker many years before from a drunken stockman'[7]; but on the one hand he uses it in a threatening manner to chase and discipline Harry, while on the other hand Harry claims that 'it was fair to let him catch me twice, since I had two good legs and could have got clean away if I tried'[7].(79) These contradictions help Harry's dream to deal with an additional problem, namely that Harry seems to like his father better than his mother. He refers to his father as 'Dad' throughout the book but to his mother only as 'my mother'. He describes his mother several times in the novel as 'crabby'[64, 90, 124, 188, 220]. Unlike Harry's apparently easy-going father, Harry's mother has a less happy emotional life separate from Harry which he does not understand but observes intently, a marriage in other words. This includes her crying sometimes 'in bed when she thinks everyone else is asleep'[220], occasionally belittling Harry's father, and her expressing a favourable view of Mr Dalloway's appearance, with Harry observing her saying: 'he would be a better teacher if he didn't have such a high opinion of his own good looks, then not seeming to mind at all after he'd called on her a few times to talk about our progress at school'[35].

Another person who desires Caroline is Mr Wiggins, 'a hairy, cheeky lady's man'[160]. He becomes a sexual rival serious enough for Harry to imagine Mr Wiggins stabbing Sydney Bridge Upside Down in a phallic manner 'until blood spouts everywhere', so that Harry reacts by shouting 'Caroline!'[86]. Mr Wiggins's interest in Caroline grows steadily more lurid, and Harry grows correspondingly more protective of her, until by chapter 12 this reaches a kind of crisis when Mr Wiggins comes to the house at night looking for Caroline. Fear and jealousy then cause Harry to lure Mr Wiggins to his death in the works, the empty slaughterhouse. A sense of guilt over despatching his rival seems to lie behind the subsequent catalogue of bad classroom behaviour Harry recalls his first teacher 'Miss Piggy-face'[178] rehearsing at the start of chapter 13, after which Harry fearfully attempts to get home across a swamp, pursued by Sam Phelps and Sydney Bridge Upside Down, and Harry notes 'my dingdong is frozen'[192]. Sam Phelps is certainly another rival for Caroline's affections--early in the book Harry claims that Caroline's interest in him 'made me think about him in a different way'[31]--and in class Harry talks to his new teacher, Mr Norman, about arranging a fatal accident for Sam Phelps as well, so that 'Mr. Phelps would be drowned and so would his horse'[136].

The works itself represents the location in Sydney Bridge Upside Down of the Freudian id, the monstrous site of base, uncensored feelings in the human unconscious. All the children are forbidden to play there because it is dangerous. It's a site of brutal acts, where 'powerful fellows', including Mr Wiggins, 'killed animals with sledgehammers'[16], where men have died in accidents and where a pistol is found 'in the killing-room'[19]. Above all it is where there is 'the interesting room'[82] which Harry, distancing himself from the action, imagines someone else peeping into and seeing first a body on a table being stabbed with a phallic knife and then a series of less directly sexualised events. This room, though, is the same 'special room' [206] in which later Harry spies on Buster and Caroline having sex. The works is a place where three men have died in accidents 'pulling down the roof'[154], and where during the book Susan Prosser and Mr Wiggins die; yet it is also a place of guilty enjoyment for Harry, and near the close of the novel when the slaughterhouse is due to be demolished he wonders, 'what fun would there be when they pulled down the works?'[202].

If the works are the id, then Susan Prosser, the girl next door, comes to represent the Freudian super-ego, the mind's centre of morality in the human consciousness. Susan Prosser is an only child who does her homework, and Harry exclaims to her, 'you don't like fun. So why would that make you better than us?'[94]. She is frequently censorious. Harry worries that she may find out about the naked running game, in which case she'd 'be so angry she would be bound to tell Dad'[66]. In fact she threatens to write a letter to Harry's mother about his behaviour and, in the logic of a dream, 'Suddenly she was waving a letter'[96]. She accuses both Dibbs and Harry of 'nasty habits'[70, 95]. When Harry accuses her of hypocrisy because she was once seen 'piddling'[101] behind a bush, she soon turns Harry's accusations around by asking him why he tells lies. Susan is given to mysterious solitary walks at night and, following her, Harry discovers that she goes to the works where she does nothing but sit 'in the moonlight on the works steps'[81], blocking the entrance. Approximately halfway through the novel Harry frees himself of Susan's complaints and threats by luring her inside the works, where she dies in a fall. Harry then rationalizes his actions by insisting Susan Prosser was such a 'fibber' that he 'did not feel sorry for her'[115]. However, Susan is soon replaced in the novel by another censorious super-ego figure, Fat Norman, the new teacher, who has 'a knack for sniffing out anybody doing wrong'[154]. Mr Norman disapproves strongly of Sam Phelps, partly on Harry's instigation, and in chapter 14, significantly, Mr Norman wanders past the works and then onward, oblivious to what is about to happen, only a little before Buster and Caroline have sex there.

Characters are often fluid in the book and, as in a dream, they can take on the role of another character. The neighbour Mrs Kelly, who is Dibs's mother, occasionally changes into someone much like Harry's mother. Sometimes she offers wise advice or tells stories and she 'knows everything'[81]. She can be judgemental, as when she gives Harry stern looks in the lorry in chapter 9 on the way to the carnival, so that at the carnival Harry comments Mrs Kelly 'was getting to be as crabby as my mother'[124]. Similarly, after Susan Prosser's death Harry seeks solace from Caroline and this culminates in her raising her sweater and letting him 'rest my damp cheek on her breasts'[100] in a surprisingly maternal manner. After Cal nearly drowns, Sam Phelps suddenly acts like an angry father when he orders Harry and the other boys to 'stay off the wharf'[112], particularly criticising Harry because, Dibs explains, 'you're the eldest'[112]. Mr Wiggins, in a false beard, is suddenly mistaken by Harry at the carnival for the mysterious Uncle Pember. Uncle Pember first appears in the book in Caroline's autobiography, which seems to function somewhat as a further dream within Harry's dream. Since Freudian dreams are always about the dreamer, a psychoanalyst might argue that Uncle Pember, whose speech is often reduced to a mumble, actually represents some deeply repressed infantile sexual arousal of Harry's: a man with a beard who picked the infant Harry up and sat him on his head, so that the man's whiskers stimulated the insides of Harry's legs. There are indeed other indications of early childhood traumas in the novel, such as Harry soiling his pants on a ship (chapter 2), Harry's accidental killing of Kingsley, the family's Muscovy duck (chapters 2 and 13) and even Dibs Kelly's nasty habit of urinating off the verandah (chapters 6 and 7), which could in fact be Harry's habit instead.

Sam Phelps and his horse Sydney Bridge Upside Down are mysteriously ubiquitous yet attractive characters at the start of the book but then they become more and more menacing as the novel progresses. One reason for these qualities--ubiquity, attractiveness, menace--is that, in Harry's dreamwork, the hollow in Sydney Bridge Upside Down's back begins to represent the site of sexual pleasure in the novel. At first it is only Sam Phelps in the book who strokes Sydney Bridge Upside Down's hollow, but next in the novel it's Caroline who strokes it and thereafter, in chapter 8, it is Harry. It's because of 'stroking Sydney Bridge Upside Down's hollow'[104] while waiting for Caroline that Harry almost failed to rescue his brother Cal from drowning. An early crisis in the book, at the end of chapter 5, when Caroline is the centre of male attention, focuses on her sitting on Sydney Bridge Upside Down in a white swimsuit and 'bouncing in the hollow'[76]. (At this same time, perhaps significantly, Harry has hurt his foot and hobbles in imitation of his ineffectual father.) Susan Prosser's dead body is carried across Sydney Bridge Upside Down's back 'sprawled across the hollow'[103] after her corpse's discovery at the opening of chapter 7, once she is vanquished as the book's super-ego. Near the close of chapter 6, while Sydney Bridge Upside Down is chasing Harry into the works, Harry says 'I look down and I see a rider somebody is in that mad horse's hollow somebody is forcing Sydney Bridge Upside Down to chase me'[86]. This association of sexual pleasure with the hollow in Sydney Bridge Upside Down's back seems to extend to how Harry sees both horse and owner in the novel's anxious passages in chapters 6 and 13, until Harry feels Sam Phelps is directly threatening him: 'he will lift me on to his horse and carry me off to the sea'[192]. Even at the close of chapter 16 Uncle Pember, at first mistaken by Harry for Mr Wiggins, appears riding on 'a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down'[223].

However, perhaps the most fluid character in Harry's dreamwork is the manly motorcyclist Buster Kelly, who seems to be Harry's special friend at the beginning of the book, as though Harry sees a lot of himself, or the self he would like to become, in Buster. Buster makes his long anticipated appearance in the novel on the way to the carnival, and at the sight of him Harry comments 'It was fun to see Buster again, he was a decent fellow'[121]. Buster gives Harry encouraging advice about boxing and building up his muscles. Significantly, Harry doesn't seem to object to Buster's attentions to Caroline; when he sees her riding on Buster's motorbike he reacts by saying 'Good old Buster! He was giving Caroline a ride'[158]. But by the climax of the novel, which is an erotic climax in the book's dream, Buster has become a father-figure who has sex with Caroline and whose sexual prowess Harry finds Oedipally overwhelming. Intimations of Harry's failing ability to attract Caroline precede the sex act--Caroline and Buster walk to the beach while she is wearing a bridal-coloured white dress, and Harry notes, 'No wonder I thought Buster looked right as he walked along with Caroline; it was because I knew I would look wrong if I walked with her'[202]--but the animal abandonment of the couple having sex, which Harry sees by peeping into the 'special room'[206] at the works, bewilders him. It's different from the rather ethereal form he had assumed sex would take: 'I had always imagined her lying still and soft, not kicking, not scratching, not yelling'[207-8]. Harry compares it to the killing of animals, but at the same time he realises from the sight of Buster's erection that he is defeated in the Freudian Oedipal battle for his mother.

How could she let such a huge thing go into her? No wonder she laughed at mine, no wonder she gave it a baby name. I was a baby. He was a man. I could do press-ups all day long, all week long, and never be like him.[208]

Vanquished in the Oedipal fight, Harry loses his mother. Only moments after watching Buster and Caroline together, Harry is told by his father that his mother is not coming back and will stay with Mr Dalloway. (Soon, too, the marriage of Buster and Caroline seems likely.) Thus Harry reacts by going in search of his mother into the unknown of the city, where he looks for some way to come to terms with her. In the penultimate chapter in the novel, a chapter characterised by its anxiety, Harry and an unnamed friend (presumably another version of Harry himself) engage in a minor manhood contest with 'a fellow in a long grey coat'[218] when trying to buy peanuts; but they soon lose out in a re-enactment of Harry's Oedipal contest with his father. Harry then says of his mother 'Now I can start looking again'[218], next recapping in disguised form an outline of his relationship with Caroline. He then describes his mother while continuing his search for her and says that she is with Mr Dalloway, who has locked her up in a little room where 'he makes her lie on the rug and he does things to her and makes her groan and scream'[221], once more reinterpreting the sex act that Harry has witnessed. Harry's shadow-friend is a 'hunter'[222], meaning that he wants to be sexually active, but Harry still only pretends to be interested in girls because, as he admits, 'Mine is a much older curiosity'[219]. Harry, being still young, is not yet quite free of the primordial Freudian Oedipal complex and so not yet able to commence a normal adult sexual interest in women.(80) This situation may change soon, however, since although the friend cryptically announces to Harry that 'You don't know what love is'[222] and that 'you live in nightmares'[222]--nightmares in which characters and places from Sydney Bridge Upside Down reappear--Harry feels that he will soon have to stop staying at his friend's place and move on. Harry's earliest sexual memory, the episode with Uncle Pember, remains to close out the chapter, but then Harry and his shadow-friend do in fact part. The final, very short chapter in the book looks forward to Harry becoming a man himself, like his father, when he will encounter Mr Dalloway on the fifteenth floor of a phallic tower.

From this reading it is clear that Sydney Bridge Upside Down is not strictly any kind of dream as Freud outlined dreams in his theory of the subconscious, but rather it seems that Ballantyne used Freud's techniques, and was inspired perhaps by his writings, to make a basis for the novel. Since the book is stocked with what Auden called 'the fauna of the night', to read Sydney Bridge Upside Down in relation to dreamwork is perhaps the only way in which the novel can be wrestled into making anything close to coherent sense, although the novel remains markedly peculiar.(81) Sydney Bridge Upside Down is often quite rightly labelled Gothic because of the disquieting impact it has on its readers, but its plot and characterisation do not in themselves really explain the sense of unease that the book engenders.(82) However, Freud maintains that the disturbing power of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet lies partly in the way they play out our most deeply repressed Oedipal desires in front of us (at least for men--and perhaps for the father issues of women in reverse). Maybe Freud's point accounts too for the distinctly unnerving power of Sydney Bridge Upside Down, a novel by an author who in his youth was a committed Rationalist.

The vanquished powers were glad

To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the silly sons who strayed into their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.(83)

Does Harry's mother actually have some kind of affair in the novel, perhaps with Mr Dalloway? It's impossible to know. The question is impossible to answer conclusively since we have only Harry's highly unreliable narration to inform us, and more particularly because, if the novel is Harry's dreamwork, then it's impossible to reconstruct what happened in Harry's waking state, outside the dreamwork, with any certainty. (My own reconstruction, as outlined previously, can be nothing more than provisional at best.) This is one of the disadvantages of reading the entire novel as disconnected from any waking 'reality'. Plainly a dreamwork reading of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is tidier if we assume that Harry's mother is not having an affair. However, even before Harry's father declares that Harry's mother is not coming back because she prefers Mr Dalloway, Harry includes some strong suggestions in his narrative that his mother and Mr Dalloway are sexually involved, notably in chapter 13 when Mr Dalloway and Harry's mother are in the house alone together and Harry returns to the house to find the back door locked at first and then his mother standing in her dressing gown. She claims that 'I'm having a shower while you kids are away'[188]. Of course, a dreamwork reading can argue that Mr Dalloway is Harry's father in a disguised form, and also that it would be unwise in Harry's dreamwork to take his suggestions about his mother's infidelity at face value when so much else in the dream merely indicates what has been repressed or transformed. Harry's mother's possible infidelity may amount to nothing more than an indication of Harry's Oedipal anxiety that she can be attracted to other men than himself and his father. Her promiscuousness can also be explained away in a dreamwork reading as Harry's Oedipal response to having witnessed his mother's noisy and willing enjoyment of the sex act with his father.

Certainly sexual pleasure is at the heart of Sydney Bridge Upside Down--Kate de Goldi notes that 'the sense of danger around sex permeates the novel'--though I believe it's not Harry's sexual pleasure which matters so much as his mother's.(84) But is this explanation satisfactory? To read Sydney Bridge Upside Down as dreamwork we are required to approach it like a psychoanalyst, with the problem being that, as in psychoanalysis, everything is capable of being manipulated to make sense. Such a reading, therefore, becomes as unreliable as Harry's narration. Can Caroline's autobiography, for example, which is full of early sexual experiences and fantasies, be explained as a buried version of Harry's own early fantasies? Is the reason why Harry several times observes Caroline's reluctance to do chores around the house because Harry in fact feels guilty about all the chores that his mother does and so he wishes to put Caroline on a pedestal? Is this behind what Harry means when he says that 'my mother, at any rate, got crabby if she had been doing much work, like making a big supply of ginger beer'[64]? Does Harry put himself in charge of sharing out the ginger beer, which he hands out reluctantly, because it is an unconscious symbol of his mother's affections? When Harry gets sexually excited early in the novel while naked in the toilet and imagining himself 'trapped if anybody called'[10], can this be explained away as something that occurred during sexual latency? In the frenzy of chapter 6, when Sydney Bridge Upside Down is chasing Harry into the works, could it be that a curious aside of sorts, beginning 'Now the noise of the hooves stops and there is another noise and the blind is rattling'[81], is an instance of Harry being disturbed from his dreams and almost waking up? And what of Harry's 'black times'[73], so clearly important to any reading of the story in which Harry is insane?(85) What, if any, do they have to do with a dreamwork analysis of the novel? Thus Sydney Bridge Upside Down is still, without doubt, fundamentally a confection; it remains stubbornly, even wonderfully, resistant to any single interpretative approach.(86)

Regardless of the novel's clearly non-realist aspects, it's quite possible to trace connections between Sydney Bridge Upside Down and The Cunninghams, and to see them both as the work of a single writer. Both books centre on young male protagonists, both are written in unadorned prose with a strong use of Kiwi vernacular, and both display a sense of characters having been chosen and presented as much for their typicality, in being New Zealand types, as for their specificity in being individuals of particular interest. This typicality rather than specificity of the characters may in part account for Robert Chapman's comment on The Cunninghams in his Landfall review that the book is 'a chunk of reality but it is not news', and certainly Patrick Evans has cannily observed of Sydney Bridge Upside Down that 'Not a single thing in the novel is original' because the book makes use of Kiwi tropes.(87) In addition, both novels are structured and arranged according to borrowed ideas and theories rather than from anything arising organically out of the text itself. Finally, as in The Cunninghams, Sydney Bridge Upside Down displays Ballantyne's remarkable penchant for supplying extraneous characters and details which seem to have strayed into the novel's background from some other book, making their presence felt in the story only marginally but hinting at the presence of other tales somewhere else, beyond the novel's boundaries.(88) When Mrs Kelly describes the troubling loneliness of Calliope Bay, she mentions 'The teacher, many years ago, who tied a child to a tree in the school grounds'[12]. Mrs Prosser, who lives next door to Harry, is a recluse, mostly seen only when 'she peeped through her bathroom window'[21], and she may or may not have a pet budgerigar since in chapter 8 she responds 'What budgie?'[115] to Harry's father's offer to look after it. Once in the past the children saw a body floating in the river because an 'old tramp had drowned'[36]. But above all there is Sam Phelps, who near the start of the novel shows hints of a back story which is unexplored--'he had once lived in a good house with his pretty daughter'[18]--and who, we are told at the end of the novel 'dropped' Mr Norman after the teacher tried to give him 'a rough time'[213], an event which also is unexplored. Sam Phelps appears to have a whole novel going on elsewhere about his life that we are never privy to. This sense of a further story, happening in another book behind the story on the page, subtly increases the novel's atmosphere of dreamlike mystery.

Thus on its appearance The Cunninghams was vilified when read as reality that was insufficiently transformed into art, and later Sydney Bridge Upside Down was ignored when read as art that was not sufficiently realistic. But while the relationship between fiction and reality is at the core of this problem, such difficulties with reading fiction in a new environment for literature can take even more convoluted forms. A case in point is what was, arguably, the most egregious misreading of a novel that has ever occurred in New Zealand: namely, the reception of Guthrie Wilson's Sweet White Wine. Published in 1956, Sweet White Wine was Wilson's fourth novel, the work of an established author. It's ostensibly the first-person memoir of a well-known 51-year-old New Zealand novelist, Simon Gregg, who recalls how his life becomes entwined with that of a school rival, Paul Mundy, a man who is politically ambitious. Simon marries a similarly ambitious young woman, Jean Lambert, and by the end of the book he realises that Jean's temperament makes her better suited to Paul than to himself. Since Paul's own wife has died, Simon arranges for a divorce that will free Jean to marry his rival. He explains to a friend, 'Jean and I don't suit. I don't want her'[206]. But despite its racy storyline the novel is notable chiefly because, on its appearance in 1956, an article about it in the Palmerston North newspaper the Manawatu Daily Times, headlined 'From Sour Grapes and Twisted Vine Comes Sweet White Wine', resulted in Wilson bringing a successful libel action against the newspaper.(89) (Much later, in a 2006 review of Wilson's biography, John McCrystal argued that Wilson will be remembered 'as legal precedent rather than lost literary treasure'.)(90) Wilson had been a teacher at Palmerston North Boys' High School and had applied unsuccessfully for the school's headmastership, and in its article on Sweet White Wine the Manawatu Daily Times claimed that Wilson had 'used his book as a vehicle to vent his spleen against the Palmerston North High Schools' Board of Governors for having the temerity to reject his services as Rector of the Boys' High School'.(91) The paper made this claim even though the novel contained no reference at all to the appointment of headmasters to schools. In fact, only the early parts of the novel, those which deal with Simon and Paul's childhood, are set in Palmerston North: chapters 1, 4 and 5, out of a total of 29.

Nevertheless, in the wake of the newspaper's article Sweet White Wine quickly became a local scandal. Wilson's biographer, Julia Millen, observed: 'Palmerston North was buzzing with the new novel; people identified streets and names like Paul Mundy and the Keely & Pratt Printing Company (similar to the firm named Keeling and Mundy)'.(92) In the novel Paul Mundy eventually becomes the mayor of Auckland, and the then real mayor of Auckland, J.H. Luxford, who had been born in Palmerston North, went so far as to write to Wilson and assure the author that he felt Paul Mundy 'is not meant to represent any living person'.(93) But in truth the newspaper did everything that could be done to inflame the situation. When Wilson's father wrote a private letter to the newspaper's editor expressing his anger at the paper's attack on his son, the editor then printed the letter without permission in the Times's correspondence pages.(94) So great was the rush of local readers wishing to be appalled that the local bookseller, G.H. Bennetts, quickly sold out all its copies of Sweet White Wine and had to order more.

At the heart of this issue lies the challenge that New Zealand readers of the mid-twentieth century had in reading what was, in effect, still early New Zealand fiction. It was a provincial difficulty that was acknowledged at the time. In 1961 M.H. Holcroft editorialised in the New Zealand Listener that 'Many readers want to discuss stories as if they were factual narratives'.(95) In her landmark work of criticism The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960, Joan Stevens opined: 'is it perhaps true that in Sweet White Wine Wilson drew on actual experience without adequately fusing it into a new creation'.(96) In fact, a major preoccupation of Stevens's criticism in The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960, often expressed almost with a sense of anxiety, is the success or failure of writers at transforming their local material. In this she echoes Chapman's concern that The Cunninghams offers an 'untransformed truth'.(97) But I feel that the difficulty New Zealanders of the mid-twentieth century faced in reading their own country's fiction was something a little more subtle than merely reading fiction as fact. For if the difficulties which mid-twentieth century New Zealand writers of a settler background faced meant that the process of writing provincial fiction was necessarily fraught--troubles with seeing their new country as it was and of expressing that reality within borrowed literary forms, while at the same time rejecting the cultural baggage inherent in such borrowed forms--then for New Zealand readers the process of reading such fiction was almost inevitably going to be problematic.(98) Perhaps all settler societies have had to face this. Certainly, literatures arising from an indigenous background have faced an entirely different set of issues.

In any case most New Zealand readers of the mid-twentieth century, when presented with a local novel, were unable to see the text as some kind transforming work of art. However, it was not just that they saw the text as merely factual; rather, in an altogether more subtle manner they could not distinguish clearly between reading it as fiction or as non-fiction. This is because in order for any New Zealand novel to be convincing for its readers, those readers have to be able to see it in relation to two things: to understand it in relation to their conception of New Zealand reality and also to understand it in relation to their conception of New Zealand literature. If readers have an unformed or thin view of either of these, then they cannot possibly manage such a task. And since New Zealanders, as a settler culture, famously could not fully grasp what the reality of New Zealand might be like, they could not fully comprehend how successfully or otherwise the reality presented in a local novel might deviate from their own surroundings. What is more, these readers had no strong conception of what a New Zealand novel might be like, and so they could not manage an aesthetic judgement of how successfully or otherwise the book in front of them might deviate from some ideal in their minds of a New Zealand novel. In practice, this boiled down to a simple misunderstanding of what might be a successful relation to fact but also what might be a successful rendering as fiction in any given book.

No artist can work without an audience willing to co-operate: if he is to be honest his audience must be honest; they must be prepared to speculate about themselves. This is something New Zealanders will not do.(99)

Fiction and non-fiction: for early New Zealand readers, at least of novels, the two categories became so jumbled as to be essentially meaningless. Hence a reaction like Joan Stevens's verdict on The Cunninghams: 'It offers us a small-town family, and because it apparently keeps to a transcript of fact, readers tend to bypass the literary question and, as they do with John Lee, Jean Devanny, John Mulgan, Frank Sargeson, to ask instead, "Is New Zealand life really like this?". Usually they then answer themselves, "No"'.(100) On the one hand early readers would express shock on recognising aspects of their own reality in fictional form (a reaction sometimes regarded as stemming from a sense of cultural inferiority termed the 'cultural cringe'), while on the other hand readers would criticise the slightest deviation in the same novel from the reality they felt it set out to depict. Objections were then often sublimated into priggish concerns, with much indignation about one of the most complex relations between art and reality: obscenity. (At the libel trial over Sweet White Wine the defence for the Manawatu Daily Times put a considerable amount of effort into attempting to prove, largely irrelevantly, that Wilson's book was both pornographic and blasphemous.) Hence Oliver Duff's fatally confused review of Ballantyne's The Cunninghams in the New Zealand Listener in 1949 when the novel first appeared:

Whether it is cruder than it had to be each reader must judge for himself, and he will of course look for the evidence of his own experience. He will not think it unduly crude if he grew up, as many New Zealanders do, ill-educated and poor, among people who have had to turn to gambling, drinking, and sex for excitement, who regard religion as organised humbug, and whose idea of morality is that it is a code you observe if you can but are something of a freak if you do. We may think the picture true and still coarse, coarser than art required, and feel that a greater artist would have retained the power and left much of the realism to the imagination.(101)

And so on. Duff, an intelligent reader, is floundering in his appraisal of the book not through an excess of moral zeal so much as an incomprehension both of the reality that is being transformed and of the art that is transforming it.

Despite this, I don't think the New Zealand readers of that early period need accept any special censure for being, after all, readers of their own time. For while it's a truism that landscapes do not begin to seem real to people until they have been painted by an artist, the same peculiar paradox may be true for the depiction of places and people in fiction. This is because each new work of local fiction adds to an accumulation of works, a store which, whether ultimately successful or not as aesthetic objects, gradually stimulates local readers into seeing their own local reality through, as it were, numerous previous lenses, so that each fresh work simultaneously enriches their view of their own world and habituates them to further depictions of it.

Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference--(102)

In other words, a tradition needs to be established for readers to operate in just as much as for writers. And certainly, such statements were often made in relation to New Zealand writing throughout the twentieth century, for example Janet Frame's comment in her Autobiography of how a New Zealand writer can 'be a mapmaker for those who will follow nourished by this generation's layers of the dead'.(103) If this is so, then nothing other than greater familiarity with works of New Zealand fiction could have helped early New Zealand readers in their approach to reading such fiction--more novels, more reading. The problem was unavoidable and only over time could it dissipate. Nevertheless, even in the early 1990s the appearance of Vivienne Jepsen's novel The House of Olaf Krull, which had won the Reed Fiction Award for 1992, was delayed when a member of her family, unhappy about the presentation of a family in the book, sought legal action to prevent publication from going ahead.(104) Jepsen published the novel with a disclaimer that the book was a work of fiction, and dedicated it to her parents.

All that having been said, Sweet White Wine is a dreadful novel, although Wilson felt it was his best work.(105) It is certainly a novel with aspirations. To make the book's central premise succeed--showing the merit in Simon's handing his wife over to the more ambitious Paul--would have required the sort of deep and surprising revelations of character that might have strained a budding Dostoevsky. Instead, much in the novel is forced so as to accommodate its impossible plot, although contemporary reviewers and critics seem to have mostly ignored this colossal failure at the book's core in order to praise peripheral matters such as its lack of literary pretensions and its 'chatty underplayed narrative style'.(106)

What is interesting in the book is its portrayal of the Palmerston North school friends and rivals, Simon and Paul. For the plot to succeed, their relationship must be stronger than the relationship between Simon and his wife Jean, and so the novel pivots on the issue of 'mateship', that intense bond between New Zealand men, originating in the pioneering world of men without women, which is allowed to be emotional and physical, but never sexual. Wilson's handling of this is clumsy. One strategy he employs is deliberately to reduce the sexual attraction between Simon and Jean to a minimum when they first get together, including a tryst in New Plymouth's Pukekura Park where Simon is unnerved by the degree to which his girlfriend frankly expresses her sexual desires.

I could have had Jean that night. I don't think I understood that then. If I did I didn't acknowledge it. If Jean really had wanted the final intimacy she would have needed to be the world's heavyweight champion at peak or she would have required half a dozen pals to help her, to such an extent was I determined to escape seduction. I had read about it. I had been warned about it by my father before I stepped aboard my first train to Wellington. And I was by nature cautious.[102]

On parting, Simon and Jean then agree to a more asexual relationship: staying in touch by writing to each other. But the problem for the novel with this approach is that although Simon and Jean's relationship heads quickly through conventional stages towards marriage over the course of the next chapter, it never seems to acquire any convincing mutual sexual attraction. The signs are ominous. Jean seems most of all concerned with discovering whether Simon has large goals in life, because she 'couldn't be happy with a man who had no ambition'[106]. Simon, who has still to show any real desire for Jean beyond the feeling that society requires him to marry, claims that 'no man would ever use the word "pretty" of Jean. Handsome, a more masculine word, fits her better although there was nothing in Jean's structure that was not wholly feminine'[105]. And when Simon writes to Paul that he intends to marry, Paul responds in a letter: 'I am surprised you have gone so far because I well remember your aversion to the other sex'[104]. (After Simon and Jean have agreed to write to each other it is, in fact, Paul and Simon's correspondence that the narrator, Simon, shares with us.)

At the same time, compounding all this, Simon's deep interest in Paul, which is so necessary for the plot, does seem to contain a certain hovering sexual element. When Simon sees the young Paul on the eve of Paul's departure for Australia he describes Paul's physique at some length, including how 'wide shoulders, narrow hips, straight legs, give the whole body the suggestion of physical power'[88]. And this is not enough. Simon continues:

I don't want to go on saying that he was handsome. He was (and is still) a little too perfect to set down on paper. To me--maybe it is only to me--he was the best endowed human animal to walk to the earth. [...] He was young Apollo, like Apollo, all male. If beauty means equipped with physical perfection then Paul Mundy was beautiful. But I can't go on describing him as beautiful because he will seem to be a pansy and he was never that.[88]

Of course we, who have become so accustomed to Freudian readings, know what all this means. And it's certainly not Paul who is the likely 'pansy' in this case, as Wilson makes clear when he has Simon recall a certain frisson which erupts between Paul and Jean when the two of them first meet and exchange a glance. 'But I knew that each had spent a second considering the prospect of togetherness, that the most intimate of associations had not been overlooked, and that each had decided the other would do, would more than merely do--would be the answer to the unslaked search that goes on between the sexes'.[122]

Thus it's not so difficult to read Sweet White Wine as a gay novel, or at least a novel in which an unreliable narrator, Simon, is repressing his homosexual interest in another man. This then begs the question, did Wilson intend his novel to be read in this way, or at least for it to contain this aspect in his protagonist's mental makeup? Unfortunately, it's impossible to know the intentions of an author with any sureness. Wilson may well have been playing a subtle game and have understood what he was doing. Could this be behind the response of Clare, an early girlfriend, to Simon, when he begins avoiding her at the university out of concern that she may harbour a secret contempt for him?

'You're keeping out of my way,' she said. She gazed into my face, her eyes, made larger, fixed on mine as she was speaking, and she looked the way she always looked but she wasn't sure of me, I knew.

I said something about work, about the approaching examinations. If I had denied her charge she would have been satisfied but I didn't.

She went white and touched my hand. 'No, Sim,' she said. 'It's not that.'[85]

How much irony, if any, are we supposed to read into this? Frank Sargeson, who was gay, quietly inserted a great deal of indirect gay material into his classic stories of mateship written in the 1930s and 1940s, stories that became the model for a lot of New Zealand writing that was to follow. But Wilson, who was not gay and who, on the evidence of his biography, seems to have been a relatively conservative man, may very well not have intended his novel to read as a tome about a successful writer, albeit a fictional one, who is repressing his homosexual desires. This leads to the rather exciting possibility that in seeking to write a novel about mateship the author, Wilson, found himself of necessity straying unconsciously into a gay narrative: that the form of the book was to some extent determining the book's own content. For in order to create a novel in which the relationship between two male characters is deeper than the relationship between the male and female characters (at least for the protagonist), it's perhaps inevitable that the author may risk pushing male attraction beyond the line of some kind of asexual mateship.

But remarkably, no one seems to have noticed the novel's gay innuendos. Reviewers did not notice it. A reviewer in the New Zealand Listener, G.C.A. Wall, described the novel's action as 'Rivalry, companionship, estrangement, reconciliation, and a final betrayal with Jean, Simon's wife. At 51 Simon can shrug the last breach away, ruefully and honestly'.(107) The New Zealand public did not notice the homosexual content in what it was reading, despite their ardent desire to be scandalized. And astoundingly, the members of the court that tried Sweet White Wine for libel noticed nothing, despite the defence's strenuous attempts to damn the book as pornography. Instead the defence counsel for the Manawatu Daily Times concentrated on trying to show that the use of the word 'fanny' in the novel was unacceptable smut.(108)

The brainsick words of sophists(109)

But then, it must be said that while some of Sargeson's contemporaries did notice the gay innuendoes in Sargeson's classic stories, most readers focused instead on the political themes of the stories and how the intense relationships between men were symptomatic of an economically and socially dysfunctional country. Thus the extent of the gay material was not made clear until much later, in critical essays, notably Simon During's 'Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits' which got his academic career off to a stellar start in 1983.(110) In and around the 1950s the reading public was only too willing to stay misinformed about this kind of thing.(111)

However, while the exigencies of Wilson's plot may have compelled him to write a novel that he did not really intend, it doesn't follow that a novel about mateship has by necessity to be a gay, or somewhat gay, novel. The format for writing about the asexual nature of mateship was already well established before Sweet White Wine. Indeed, there was almost something a little old-fashioned about such a theme in 1956, and so Wilson was without doubt working within a genre. But the structurally troublesome element in Sweet White Wine is the presence of Jean, which does require the intrusion of sex into Wilson's handling of mateship in his book. Sargeson seldom has female characters complicating his narratives--certainly not sexually attractive female characters--and so sex of any kind is seldom foregrounded. Barry Crump's debut novel, A Good Keen Man, which was roughly contemporaneous with Sweet White Wine, also largely avoids female characters and sex while celebrating mateship and even playing a part in the process, begun earlier with Sargeson and others, of mythologizing it.

On the other hand Crump's second novel, Hang on a Minute Mate, which was published in 1961, sees the protagonist Sam Cash leave his nagging wife of eight months to go back to a rural drifter's life with a new mate, Jack Lilburn, and sets up a dichotomy between the attractive rollicking lifestyle of male mates and the awful domesticity of life with women. Most of the episodes involving women--Tony Austin chain-sawing a wall to get into the house when locked out by his wife Shirl, Sam's bitter comments on females all through the chapter 'Women!'--would give a contemporary feminist reader the heebie-jeebies. Sam's rejection of Jack at the end of the book, a touching scene with Sam saying 'We're getting to depend on each other a bit too much', tidies up the narrative but also suggests that lurking beneath any misogyny in the novel lies a more general fear of intimacy, and how such a fear might relate to sexuality is perhaps best left to a psychiatrist.(112) Somewhat later, Jean Watson's Stand in the Rain, which was published in 1965, escapes the problem of mateship and sex quite adroitly by making the mate a woman.

Posterity is not as fair in its judgements as is usually maintained: there are passions, infatuations, and errors born of distance just as there are passions and errors born of proximity.(113)

In any event, it was certainly A Good Keen Man which rocketed bushman-turned-writer Barry Crump to tremendous literary success and, more arguably, kept him there. This was a book New Zealanders were happy to read in large numbers. Crump published it in 1960 with A.H. & A.W. Reed, New Zealand's main publishing company, a commercially savvy firm that liked to trumpet its commitment to New Zealand literature without doing very much to prove it. The plainly autobiographical story, about a 16-year-old young man named Barry who starts work in the backblocks as a government-employed deer culler, touched a nerve among New Zealand readers.(114) The literary magazine Mate claimed that by the end of 1961 Crump had sold 28,000 copies, a staggering number in a small country, and for better or worse Crump became a force on the local arts scene.(115) As Adam Dudding, son of Mate's editor Robin Dudding, later put it, 'Crump's sex life and finances were a source of constant fascination for the Auckland literary set, who'd taken in this rough-as-guts bloke from the backblocks, given him a few tips for polishing up his pub yarns and getting them on paper, then realised they had a best-selling celebrity in their midst'.(116)

But Crump was always a better writer than the arts world gave him credit for, and on the very first page of A Good Keen Man a major technical factor in the success of his writing is apparent. As a more experienced deer-shooter, Stan, explains the lay of the land thereabouts to the novice Barry by scratching with a stick on the ground, Barry observes: 'The landmarks might have been useful if I'd been able to remember what he said about their relation to the river, but the maps had me properly bluffed'[11]. The easy insertion of 'properly bluffed' is Crump's achievement, his comfortable integration of Kiwi vernacular into a simple, unfussy standard narrative. Terry Sturm has similarly noted the 'seemingly artless way' Crump's stories are told and how Crump's narrators 'speak a version of New Zealand male vernacular speech which is colloquial [...] but not excessively so'.(117) (Sturm also points out that, despite the novels' convincing verisimilitude, there is very little obscenity or swearing in these narratives.) In comparison the language in the classic stories by Frank Sargeson seems mannered. For example, 'Jack's a big specimen of a bloke, he's very powerfully developed and seeing he's worked in the quarry for years in just that rigout, he's browned a darker colour than you'd ever believe possible on a white man' is how Sargeson kicks off his description of Jack Parker in 'The Hole that Jack Dug'. Crump's much more relaxed blending of standard English and demotic language gives his prose a natural liveliness and also hugely extends his narrative range, allowing his work to open out, whereas Sargeson's language can often seem an exercise in style.

But the question remains: what was the source of A Good Keen Man's appeal for readers? It is always assumed that the appeal lies in the book's humour, but although the novel is amusing it's not especially funny. Crump's writing lacks the verbal panache of P.G. Wodehouse or even Clive James, and in any case comic writing in New Zealand such as Ronald Hugh Morrieson's Came a Hot Friday or even Maurice Duggan's 'Riley's Handbook', both of which were published at around the same time as A Good Keen Man, did not enjoy popular success. Crump can certainly manage, and did help to popularise, a type of drily understated wit often considered characteristic of New Zealand humour: the sort of humour of cool detachment which has its basis in the speaker's very masculine air of being so tough as to be the master of any given situation. An example is when Crump describes a character running away from being shot at: 'Dick passed us at a smooth velocity that Jack reckoned would see him in a warmer climate by daylight'[33], or when the remarkably taciturn Clarry refers to their laconic boss, Jim, as 'the talkin' bloke'[42].

Nevertheless, such displays of wit are comparatively rare in A Good Keen Man. Rather, the novel offers many of the pleasures that a light-hearted travel book does. By 1960 New Zealand was on the way to becoming a suburban nation and Crump's readers were mostly suburban people with their roots in the rural life of a generation before, or perhaps in a farming childhood. Sturm again notes that the popularity of Crump's novels lay 'in the power of the myth of maleness they constructed (or reinforced) in the fantasies of city-based male readers'.(118) Thus in many respects A Good Keen Man anticipates the appeal to nostalgia of the television commercials of the 1980s in which Crump's bushman character was a fixture. Crump in A Good Keen Man describes settings and situations in a fledgling bushman's world with all the detailed observation and sense of inclusiveness that we enjoy in travel narratives about exotic places, while, of course, we avoid experiencing the discomfort and frustrations that are part of such places' reality. Crump is also careful, again in the tradition of the travel narrative, to educate his readers in bushcraft as the story progresses. As early as the opening of the second chapter, 'Flynn Becomes a Pig-Dog', we learn how to cut a track and a few pages later we learn some of the finer points of pig-dogs. Even in the final chapter of the novel Barry expounds on the advantages of the Lee-Enfield rifle and offers information on how many deer government and private shooters are culling annually.

But women are absent. The sole exception is the chapter 'Trouser Trouble', in which Barry's mate Jock, whose trousers have deteriorated in the bush into a loose loincloth, encounters a group of female trampers and his semi-nakedness, which was hitherto unimportant in the bush, suddenly causes comic embarrassment. But the women are little more than a plot device, creatures brought into the narrative temporarily in order to generate the necessary level of shame, since male trepidation at the sight of Jock's trousers would not do. In fact at the end of the chapter a male taxi-driver's distaste at having Jock get into his car in a condition of undress is presented by Crump as a complaint about general dirtiness rather than about immodesty.

Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone.(119)

With his narrative structure thus simplified, Crump is free to concentrate on the series of good keen men who audition for the role of Barry's mate and who are always found wanting. Many are simply companions too awful for the lengthy close proximity of bush life, like the six grotesques who appear in quick succession in the early chapter 'Some Good Keen Men'. Later the lazy and good-for-nothing Legs leaves Barry exasperated until at last he declares 'my good keen mate had become so repulsive to me that every evening in camp was an ordeal'[95]. The arrogant and hopelessly impractical Wilmer drives Barry mad. Wilmer's comic pseudo-upper-class-British speech anticipates that of Wes Pennington in Morrieson's Came a Hot Friday with much the same comic effect. Even Mr Thorpe, the tiresomely loud cow cocky next to whom Barry is placed in a hospital bed in the chapter 'In For My Chop', is just further proof for Barry that, as for Jean-Paul Sartre, 'hell is other people'.(120) As well as these no-hopers, other men are good mates but ruined by a tragic flaw. Harry Trail has 'all the earmarks of a real good bloke'[56] but is unsatisfactory because of his manias of enthusiasm. When Harry returns in a later chapter Barry even describes him to the boss Jim as a 'good keen man!'[116], but only because Harry is about to get the sack for blowing up their hut. In the same manner Bert Struthers in the chapter 'I Hunt Without Bert' is a pleasant enough companion but is too accident-prone to be a deer-shooter. Other potential mates are cast aside by fate. In the early chapter 'That Healthy Outdoor Life' Jack seems to have good keen qualities but fails to qualify as a mate because of circumstances, since he and Barry are stuck in a camp hut together for weeks in bad weather and get completely on each other's nerves. Jock in 'Trouser Trouble' seems a good mate despite his clothing difficulties, but he leaves Barry and they never meet again. Finally, a potential mate may occupy the wrong social position. Barry thoroughly enjoys Jim's company in the chapter 'I Hunt the Cocky's Pigs with Jim', but Jim is the boss and so they cannot be equals.

The much repeated refrain 'a good keen man' becomes more and more freighted with irony as the novel progresses. By three-quarters of the way through the book Barry's reaction to being told that he'll get 'a good keen man for a mate this winter' is to exclaim 'Hell!'[157]. Even halfway through the book, with the departure of Legs, Barry says he 'settled down thankfully on my own'[96]; and at the end of the novel Barry fades out of the narrative, content at being alone with his faithful dog Flynn, while recalling of his hunting mates that 'A few were good, some were hopeless, and most were bloody awful'[189]. There is even a hint in the story that the faithfulness of dogs may make them the ideal kind of mate, because no matter how you treat them, 'they still reckon you're the best bloke in the whole world'[154]. But Crump never attempts to define what a good keen man is during the course of the novel, partly because he assumes that we readers already know and partly because he works by means of something like negative capability, showing us examples over and over again of what a mate is not. Finally, it is himself that Barry sets up in the book as an example of a good keen man. Jim twice tells Barry that he is putting him onto a hunting block because he is 'a good keen bloke'[157, 179], and despite Barry's frequent competitiveness about hunting tallies and his willingness to poach on other hunters' blocks there is no confession from him anywhere in the book that he might lack good-keen-man qualities.

And yet Barry doesn't have any mates, and in many ways A Good Keen Man is a novel about isolation.(121) Time is heavily compressed in the narrative and it comes as a surprise in the chapter 'Two Prize Heads' to learn that Barry, the new chum in chapter one, has now been hunting in the vast empty spaces of the bush for three and a half years. Loneliness is an issue. While working alone Barry mentions that a dim, moss-covered gorge is 'the kind of place that makes you feel small and lonely'[137] and after a parachute-drop of supplies he confesses that 'It's always a bit lonely when the plane's just gone'[152]. Even early in the novel, when Barry is partnered with the taciturn Clarry, he admits that he is 'busting for a decent yarn session'[45] and that a month of Clarry's unsociability has been 'harder on my nerves than the previous six weeks on my own'[44]. In a different kind of narrative written during this period in literature Barry might have been a man alone or an existential figure, but A Good Keen Man is a comic novel and Barry's concerns are always more pragmatic than philosophical.

Nevertheless, a novel in which the protagonist complains for 180 pages or so about how other people aren't good enough shouldn't be very attractive to read. But although, as mentioned earlier, Crump unquestionably presents Barry as a good keen man, Barry's narrative is freely confessional about his own occasional shortcomings, and his scrapes and adventures while hunting, and his humour is often self-deprecating. Barry admits to nervous 'buck-fever'[138] when about to take a shot at a prize specimen of a stag, for example. He confesses to tripping, falling and slashing himself with his own knife and being teased by others about 'their favourite remedies for cut backsides'[99]. He makes no bones about feeling out of place in a bank in the chapter 'I Go to Town' and about boyishly exaggerating his hunting prowess in public bars at the close of his first season, while his audience 'willingly drank my beer'[31]. Even so, Crump is a little inclined to let Barry have his cake and eat it too. In the opening chapter, 'I Become a Deer Culler', in which Barry is a new chum on the job, a chapter which does a great deal to cement our sympathetic feeling for Barry as a young man coming of age, Barry confesses his nervousness and his inexperience among the other deer cullers he is working with and yet it's also clear that, even at age 16, Barry already knows his way around in the bush and how to shoot. He adapts quickly to the life of a professional hunter and takes the reader along with him. Throughout A Good Keen Man Barry treats his reader, unlike his shooting partners, as an equal, and so ultimately it's the reader who becomes Barry's mate. The reader becomes a fellow good keen bloke who knows about pig-dogs and how to measure distances in the bush, who has learned bush wisdom such as 'A bloke could appreciate a warm, dry hut and a good feed when he'd been a bit wet and hungry for a while'[191] and above all how 'A week on the block usually separated the men from the boys'[189]. No wonder the novel was such a hit.

Jean Watson's Stand in the Rain, published in 1965, is novel which originally caused a fuss for being about its author's romantic relationship with Barry Crump, and the novel, perhaps predictably, was read as a roman-a-clef. Naturally, part of the fun of a roman-a-clef is speculating on who may be who in a small, closed world, even when such connections may be tenuous. Could Dell, Abungus's somewhat artistic wife, owe something perhaps to Fleur Adock, the well-known poet who was married to Barry Crump in 1962 for several unhappy months until Crump went back to Watson? Another part of the fun is to find one's own self in the book at hand and feel a delighted outrage. Robin Dudding, for example, decided that a minor character in Stand in the Rain, Rex Potter, was an 'accurate if unflattering portrait' of himself, and said so to his friends.(122) In any event Crump's charisma overshadowed Watson's novel, and it seems to have done so permanently. Susan Notely, reviewing the novel, wondered 'if this is only autobiographical or if it is writing of unusual literary quality'.(123) Joan Stevens, in an updated version of her book on the New Zealand novel, refers to Stand in the Rain as 'a feminine counterpart to Barry Crump's yarns'.(124) Even the book's blurb hints at its affinity to Crump: 'Here is the woman's side to the New Zealand legend. Here is the girl behind the good keen, deer-killing, possum-trapping, pig-hunting, rabbit-shooting, scrub-cutting, hard-case dinkum-type Kiwi'. Much later in 2016 Timothy Jones, giving the book a quick, feminist-influenced reading during a survey of the New Zealand novel, still could not resist the biographical fallacy: 'That Watson was married to Crump--who might very well be Abungus--underlines the authority of the novel's devalorisation of masculine delinquency'.(125)

All this is a pity because Stand in the Rain is nonetheless a fine work in its own right. It has always had its fans, notably Fiona Kidman and Jane Tolerton, who have both written of the book's power to move them, and Maurice Shadbolt, who claimed that the book was 'superior to anything that Crump ever published'; but Stand in the Rain certainly deserves a much wider readership than it has had and a more central place in New Zealand's literature.(126) It's the story of a romance between Sarah, a young student making her leisurely and easily distracted way through university studies in English and psychology (and who has briefly noted ambitions to write 'some day my great New Zealand novel'[18, 49]), and the curiously named Abungus Gill, a former bushman hunter who has appeared on the fringes of the arts scene. Abungus has been married for a short time to Dell, but not long after marrying her he met and fell secretly in love with Sarah. This, perhaps significantly, occurred when they all went possum-trapping together[32], since through much of the book possum-trapping in the South Island comes to epitomise the simple lifestyle that Abungus and Sarah dream of having as a couple, a nirvana that never quite eventuates. The novel begins when Sarah arrives in Auckland, having ridden up from Wellington on the back of her boyfriend Paul's motorbike, and Abungus offers them both a place to stay. But almost immediately Abungus and his wife quarrel and she leaves him, and within a few pages Abungus is passionately declaring his love for Sarah. His love then remains constant, and so does Sarah's. Indeed, part of the novel's appeal is its book-long depiction of a couple so in love that they find everything they do together is an adventure and a delight, and at its core Stand in the Rain is really a story about being in love.

That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such an amazing experience is common.(127)

The novel, which is told in the first person entirely from Sarah's point of view, drops numerous hints that, unlike Sarah, Abungus's wife Dell is fundamentally unsuited to him. Dell does not like the bush, unlike Sarah. Dell is 'very attached'[38] to her father's farm and would like Abungus to settle and work on it with her, but having grown up on a farm himself Abungus is determined never to milk another cow again. Abungus doesn't want to have children but rather to travel round a bit, yet Dell gets pregnant three months into their marriage and doesn't like being far from home, unlike Sarah. Abungus is 'straight out of the bush'[38] and Dell was the first person in the arty city crowd that he'd met, but, perhaps a little inconsistently, Dell now seems jealous of Abungus's growing interest in 'intellectual matters'[38]. Finally--and here also Sarah's account is somewhat inconsistent with Dell's farming origins--Dell is presented from the start as a little too grand for her husband, with a 'dignified righteous way her skirt would swish'[14]. When she leaves Abungus, Dell requires a man's help to load a trailer with her possessions: mostly bourgeois objects such as kitchen plates. She is materialistic, and Abungus notes how she often says 'my cups, my dishes, my soap', whereas Sarah says 'our'[41]. Dell is no independent bohemian, unlike Sarah.

Nevertheless, it's not Dell but Paul--Sarah's boyfriend and Abungus's pal--who makes the greatest claim on Abungus's affections at the beginning of the book. It's also Paul who seems most determined to thwart any likely development in the relationship between Abungus and Sarah. Such is the immense gravitational power of mateship. (One of the few moments in the novel when Abungus is not 'mentioned with favour'[59] by the other characters occurs after he abandons his scrub-cutting mates, Jerry Ormes and Tommy Sam, thus breaking the male bond, to shoot through to Wellington.) Paul announces that with Dell gone '[Abungus] and me can do things, go all over the place. We get on all right, us two. We clicked, just like that'[14]. Sarah's objections to this provoke a crudely sexist putdown from Paul ('how the hell would you know? You're a woman'[14]), a comment so blunt it would have seemed offensive to readers even in the 1960s. Paul's behaviour towards Sarah is plainly unreasonable, but can the same be said about his behaviour towards Abungus? In Sarah's eyes at least, Paul's pursuit of Abungus and his offer of an outdoor life together as mates, filled with manly activities, seems remarkably close in its intensity to the passion of a lover, so that when Abungus becomes the life and soul of a party she notes how Paul 'hovered possessively round his chair'[20]. Thus, in order to have Abungus, Sarah must win him not only from his wife but also from his would-be best mate, though fortunately Abungus also decides that Paul's behaviour towards him is excessive, and he says so to Sarah.

Abungus told me, 'I'm sick of Paul. He follows me everywhere, copies everything I do and agrees with everything I say, never thinks up any ideas or opinions of his own. He's a bit dozy on it.'

'He hates me, I can tell.'

'Jealous. Bit of a queer, old Paul.'

'Just an emotional one, I'd say.'

'I'll have to have a yarn with him.'[46-7]

But it's only by halfway through the book that Abungus and Sarah have managed to extricate themselves first from Paul and then, at last, completely from Dell; and it's the second half of Stand in the Rain that focuses on their attempts to make a life together.

The story opens with a strongly elegiac tone, 'Once Auckland seemed a long way from Wellington and a year seemed a long time'[13], and the first few pages then rapidly present a visit to Auckland and a sudden unplanned return trip to Wellington, which includes repairing a jalopy and staying with Cousin Johnny in Putaruru on the way. All this forms almost a mini-portrait of the restless activities of the New Zealand post-war baby-boomer generation in their youth. Aorewa McLeod notes as much when she observes of Stand in the Rain, 'It creates in those of us old enough to remember a nostalgia for the time when we used to travel up and down the main trunk line between Auckland and Wellington, when we could drop jobs or university and always find another job, when we felt free from the values of the generation before us and believed in a future stretching before us that we didn't have to plan for'.(128) This was a life with lots of impulsive travel, with a countrywide network of friends, and with a hunger for freedom and casual self-indulgence, all of which in fact tended to mask a dearth of real opportunities. And indeed the alternative, settling down, was not very appealing, as the book occasionally implies, since settling down offered very little material gain and an obvious spiritual loss. Paul Rogers suggests as much at the close of Coal Flat when, beaten into submission by his circumstances, he announces, 'I'll be a safe conforming suburban back-gardener [...] Boasting of beancrops over the back fence [...] I'll steer clear of ideas except as I need them for my job. I'll be just another suburban New Zealander, from Upper Riccarton or Shirley or further out on the outskirts, and I'll go for the job and the wife and family and the house and garden'.(129)

Perhaps this is why everyone in Stand in the Rain is always going somewhere else, or wishes to do so, because 'the destination takes the empty place in their mind which should be filled by "an aim in life"'[143]. Even near the start of the novel, when Sarah feels the discomforts of travelling on impulse, she consoles herself with 'we were going somewhere so that was all right'[18]. Going somewhere offers a satisfaction in itself. That's why Abungus's workmate, Tony, announces that 'Me and the missus'd take off smartly if it wasn't for the kids and the animals and the house and all that'[138]. It's why Abungus, the most downright impulsive traveller in the book, reacts to Rex Potter's mere mention of going to Wellington 'as a suggestion to go there and so they went right that minute on the motor-bike'[58]. It's why many of Sarah's friends make the biggest trip of all and head out of the country at last for Europe without any particular plans. She observes, 'A lot of the crowd have lived there since. Herb lives there now, with books on Socialism and long-playing records, in good taste, and a heap of unpublished poems in typescript'[32].

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.(130)

Stand in the Rain is recounted by Sarah in a fluently produced New Zealand idiom, so that the book's narrative and dialogue are almost seamlessly joined together, and dialogue advances the story as much as narrative does. It's easy enough to detect the influence of Barry Crump in Watson's relaxed, vernacular style, though the ultimate progenitor of this type of writing is Frank Sargeson. Watson frequently exhibits an ability to absorb and blend Sargeson's clipped style with touches of slang and lyrical language in a manner that gives her apparently simple writing a range even greater than Crump's.

The further south we went the colder it was. Sandra had given us another blanket and once the motor warmed up it wasn't so bad. Cold Taupo where we stopped for coffee, the tall black pine forests where the lights cut out on us again.[24]

Taking advantage of the interiority of her first person narrative, Watson has no difficulty moving from the vernacular to the lyrical and back again.

First thing I saw when I woke up the next morning was a red flower under a gorse bush by the fence. We were up in the hills somewhere...hills and gorges, rain-veiled patterns of varying greens, brown and grey and misty, and this one red flower under a wet gorse bush. I sat up in bed and my head touched a belly of water in the tent, then I noticed our feet were sopping wet.[141-2]

In some ways Stand in the Rain is a very Sargesonian novel, perhaps all the more remarkably so since Sargeson himself was never able to extend his classic Kiwi bloke stories into a successful novel-length work, and the range inherent in Watson's style does a lot to make this possible. In part Watson also succeeds because Sarah is a better educated character than the typical Sargeson protagonist and also because the story's nostalgic tone makes it easy for Sarah to narrate her tale in a tone of casual reminiscence. Indeed, much of the story's evocativeness derives from Sarah's confidential tone: she speaks as if sharing information with a reader who knows a lot about the story's time and place already. In this Watson owes something to the master realist Leo Tolstoy, a writer who, for example, might have a countess enter a ballroom and yet describe nothing of the room or of what the countess is wearing--such is Tolstoy's tremendous certainty that the reader will know what a Russian ballroom looks like and how a countess dresses--so that he can concentrate on sketching in a sofa on which sit a few people whom the countess has come to meet. Watson likewise assumes a great deal about her readers, and so she can pare her story down as if speaking to a friend. She mentions, 'There was that torn-apart Sunday when Dell, supported by Jack and his trailer, came and took everything of hers from the house'[13]. She speaks of Wellington as if her reader will know it well: 'At the corner of Willis and Ghuznee streets was where I was to meet Abungus. When I got there he was sitting on that low grey stone fence by the phone box'[30]. This shows a remarkable degree of confidence in the relationship between author and reader for a writer of this period. When Abungus, Sarah and Paul arrive at Cousin Johnny's house in Putaruru near the beginning of the book, they sleep in the kitchen 'in a row on the floor under a blanket'[19]. Nothing of the house is described, nor of the kitchen itself. Cousin Johnny's kitchen is assumed to unremarkable for the novel's readers and so the story can rapidly move on.

The Sarah who narrates the novel is inclined to suggest that her story's action happened long ago when she was much younger, but since Stand in the Rain was published in 1965 its descriptions of Wellington and Auckland with jazz music and coffee-houses cannot refer to a period all that far back in time. In many ways the book's sense of nostalgia has only become convincing because of the passing of the years since its publication. Sarah claims that 'Nothing can alter the "what-really-happened" of these experiences, however much I may make subtle alterations to my memories to put me in a more favourable light when telling friends. Sometimes I forget the actuality and remember only those little revisions of my own'[16], and this may help account for the pared-down nature of the novel: that its protagonist has reduced her telling to unadorned events which cannot easily be distorted by her own unreliable memory. Nevertheless, for all its specificity about its settings and events, the book is deliberately obscure about exactly when its story is set. No date is ever mentioned, and the novel is vague even about how long Sarah and Abungus have known each other. It comes as rather a surprise when Sarah reveals to a probation officer that she has been living with Abungus for as long as 'about a year'[102] and that she has been acquainted him for another year before that. The result is that, despite its realism, the novel's action seems to hang somewhere in an undetermined timeframe.

Early on in Stand in the Rain, when Abungus sings 'goodbye songs' after his separation from his wife, Sarah observes: 'in his grief, I recognized something of myself'[15]. A short while later, at Cousin Johnny's, Sarah once again 'watched Abungus a lot that night, and kept recognizing something of myself in him'[20]. It's their similarity that seems to attract Sarah to Abungus, and perhaps him to her as well. Abugnus claims to have fallen in love with Sarah when he saw her skilfully cross a river 'like a deer, different from the way other people cross rivers'[33]. Both characters are physically tough but emotionally somewhat frail: Abungus repeatedly shoots through to avoid confrontations and, facing a confrontation with Dell, Sarah speaks of 'the kind of thing that terrified me, a scene'[65]. In chapter 13 they are both shy about meeting the rabbit board inspector for the first time, although Sarah declares that she feels Abungus's 'unsureness, and so felt needed'[144]. Both enjoy the outdoor life and are at home in the bush, and their similarities, as laid out by Sarah, mean that in her account at least their relationship is one of equals. If at times she seems emotionally needy, so does he.

Sarah's character has occasionally been taken to task by critics for somehow aiding and abetting the patriarchy by her passiveness. Aorewa McLeod observes that Sarah 'goes along with Abungus's male chauvinism, and that of his mates' while noting that 'Sarah has been commented on as typical of the sixties Kerouac laid back hippie, and as a passive woman, not a good feminist role model'.(131) Anne Kennedy sniffs at 'an age of good keen boys' and Dale Christine Benson complains that Sarah 'cannot manage alone and is dependent on Abungus for most of the novel' and that Abungus does not teach Sarah to drive.(132) Many seize upon the passage in Stand in the Rain where Sarah says:

I have often noticed that men think an awful lot of women who go hunting and fishing with them and help them in their outdoor work. But I have also noticed that tough women who can do these things as good as a man are often objects of amusement. The same as women who don't mind men swearing are admired, but women who swear like men themselves are just joked about.[125]

Understandably, this sort of thing can make most feminists blanche nowadays, but it should be noted that a woman competing with a man as an ersatz bloke herself is only a shade different from her meeting him as a woman on equal terms. For Sarah is a strong woman. In the very next passage in the novel she skins a deer on her own initiative, so impressing Abungus, a professional hunter, that he offers to teach her how to do it next time. He then also offers to teach her how to shoot and skin possums, in spite of having already claimed that possum-trapping is so demanding it 'soon separates the men from the boys'[25].(133) Sarah's passiveness lies not in any real weakness but in her fatalism. She comments that 'life is just "things that happen"'[56] and that 'Before we are born, I suppose, it is all decided'[13], and this view of life influences her willingness to associate with a man like Abungus and to manage physical hardship. Abungus tells her 'I wouldn't mind taking you on'[23]; and beneath Sarah's loving account of him we can see a man whose toughness and bush skills make him ideally suited to the world he lives in but also make him potentially manipulative and domineering. Sarah's task is essentially to try to keep up with Abungus (which we see her literally engaged in during her final glimpse of him at the close of book, as he strides ahead through the manuka scrub), but throughout Stand in the Rain, until the very last moment, she can and does keep up. As a feminist role model Sarah may not meet the highest contemporary standards, but she is fine by the standards of her time, and fares much better than anyone in Crump's novels of the period.

Abungus is able to survive in a chancy and even dangerous world by becoming an expert at treating his rough, rural environment like a resource: a place for finding food, building shelter, and improvising to fulfil his scant needs. And it says something about New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century that such bush skills and physical hardiness can make him a superior figure in society. For while it was true that by 1965 the country had moved beyond its rural beginnings and had become a lot more suburban, the old rural world did still exist and practical skills were still in demand in New Zealand and claimed the greatest respect. Thus the elegiac tone of the novel is also partly an expression of nostalgia for a gradually disappearing rural lifestyle--this was the source of A Good Keen Man's appeal as well--a lifestyle which would be extended somewhat in the 1960s and 70s within the bohemian community and in the establishing of hippy communes. For certainly, despite the suburban life of 'drawn blinds'[150] which Sarah abhors, and of the 'trimmed lawn'[56] and sunporch of her parents' house, New Zealand in the novel can manage in its cities to have a youth-oriented, bohemian, artsy sub-culture in between the suburban and rural worlds, where 'Work and money seemed to be of secondary importance'[46], and in which Sarah lives. And Abungus also fits comfortably into this intermediary bohemian environment. He takes just 'his rifles, guitar, ammo, and a plastic chess set'[17] with him on a trip to Wellington. He is comfortable because, like the youthful bohemians he moves among, he treats cities and suburbs as yet another resource to be exploited, and his behaviour in Wellington and Auckland is frequently amoral. He has no qualms about stealing some fowls and vegetables from 'one of the rich houses on top of the cliff'[110-1] on his way home from the pub. Indeed, at times for both Abungus and Sarah their mode of life in the city can seem merely an extension of their hunting, foraging life in the bush. They lie to Mr Pittle[47] their landlord, in order to avoid paying rent. They borrow money from friends and scrounge favours with no thought of return and are always happy to drink someone else's beer. While each is capable of generosity, both take an essentially feral attitude toward life, in which toughness proves a necessity. Thus when Judy, the sister of Sarah's friend, visits the city from the countryside and heads off to as many dances as possible, and then appears at two in the morning looking tearful and bedraggled and claiming 'an Islander had tried to rape her'[94], Sarah's response is only to give her a tranquillizer and no more is said about the incident. In fact Sarah and Abungus's only absolute loyalty is to each other and, their sexual relationship notwithstanding, their partnership fulfils the requirements of mateship.

Sarah's cheerful acceptance of the discomforts of poverty in order to be with her man highlights the depth of her feelings for him and gives an appealing picture of a youthful period in life without money but inspired with the passions of love. However, since Sarah and Abungus are in love, both wish to put down roots into some more permanent arrangement together, though only on their own non-materialist, nomadic terms, not at all as a suburban couple. Within this desire for settled rootlessness lurks an inherent contradiction, epitomised by their talk of 'our future lives as gypsies, our future house with a creek through the grounds'[46]. It is a dilemma that neither of them can resolve. Sarah observes that this means 'only playing house'[147] with her 'pretending to be an ordinary person'[147]. Abungus complains that she is 'trying to make a husband out of him'[148]. In the end possum-trapping in the South Island doesn't happen. The bounty is taken off possum tokens.

In fiction, love stories that follow the complete course of a relationship usually finish in one of two ways: in heartbreak as the couple's love comes to an end, or in boredom as the couple stays together, often in marriage, until their love dissipates. But Stand in the Rain avoids both endings. Instead, the last we see of the couple together is Sarah's remembered glimpse of Abungus walking in front of her through the manuka scrub, calling her name: 'Come on, Sarah!'[148]. He calls for her to follow, even as he disappears. Then in the last pages of the book, despite being the novel's first-person protagonist, Sarah herself fades away into an indeterminate setting and time, still wandering through life, and only apparently doing so without Abungus. Thus at the close of her novel Watson manages something similar to the magical ending of happily-ever-after in fairy tales in which lovers simply vanish, a remarkable feat in a book which, until this point, has seemed so thoroughly grounded in realism. But we readers are satisfied that the novel's romance is not smashed up before us, turning Stand in the Rain into a book about falling out of love. And once the ending of the book is understood as being from a fairy tale, some other features of Stand in the Rain become clear. The beginning of the novel ('Once Auckland seemed a long way from Wellington and a year seemed a long time'[13]) is suddenly revealed as a fairy-tale opening. The name of the handsome prince, Abungus, does not seem so outlandish. Even having one character locked away in a prison until he is freed by the other in chapters 8 and 9 takes on a deeper resonance, along with Sarah's claim that she loves Abungus because of growing up hearing 'Stories about peddlers with charms and magic potions, tramps that tell adventure stories to children, hunters in the forests, wandering minstrels'[42].

Watson's ability to make her book both a convincingly realistic yarn and a haunting myth, a successful combining of the creative impulses behind both The Cunninghams and Sydney Bridge Upside Down, lies at the heart of her achievement, an achievement which has been overlooked because the novel has been read as being merely the tale of a female version of a Crump character. Reading, yet again, has let writing down, this time however not so much through a failure to understand a novel in relation to reality or to a conception of New Zealand literature, but rather, and unusually, through a failure to understand how two New Zealand books might be related to each other: Crump's novel being popular and Watson's more serious. Thus Stand in the Rain has not yet entered the canon of the New Zealand novel; and above all else this is because readers have not yet even managed to decide on one.

Notes

1. Lawrence Jones's landmark study of New Zealand literature in the 1930s, for example, was subtitled, without controversy, 'The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture'. Jones, Lawrence. Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture, 1932-1945. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2003.

2. Pound, Ezra. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', 1920.

3. Eliot, T.S.. 'Little Gidding' II, in 'Four Quartets', 1944.

4. Newton, John. Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908-1945. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2017: 20. Newton examines the use of Modernism by the literary nationalist New Zealand writers of the early twentieth century, especially in the section 'Nationalism and modernism' (ibid. 26-30). However, he considers New Zealand literary nationalism and Modernism to be antithetical ideologies and writes of the miraculous way New Zealand writers 'wrangled, manipulated, teased [them] into dialogue' (ibid. 29).

5. Mallarme, Stephane, quoted in Ross, Alex. 'Encrypted', The New Yorker, 4 April, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/stephane-mallarme-prophet-of-modernism

6. Eliot, T.S.. 'East Coker' V, in 'Four Quartets', 1944, and Pound, Ezra. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', 1920.

7. Six By Six: Short Stories by New Zealand's Best Writers (ed. Manhire, Bill). Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1989.

8. Many people choosing the best or most representative novel by Janet Frame, if asked, would likely select her first work, Owls Do Cry, and so it's worth taking a moment to make a few heretical comments about that particular book. The mythology surrounding the creation of Owls Do Cry is far more compelling than the novel itself. It's an apprentice novel and this shows. The book opens with two false starts--pretty writing that advances nothing beyond, perhaps, a mild homage to Faulkner--and doesn't really begin until chapter 3. Much of the pretty writing in the book is an indicator of Daphne's--and perhaps also a symptom of Frame's--tendency to use private metaphoric language to avoid any direct public statement that might seem either to confront or conform to the regimented manners of society. (Significantly, too, in the section of the book set in a mental asylum Daphne appears not only to speak but also to think and even act in terms of metaphor.) What follows over the remainder of Part One and covers the death of Francie, 'Talk of Treasure', is a terrific novella, an excellent expansion on Frame's stories in The Lagoon. However, Part Two is a disappointment, especially the 'Chicks' section where Frame's depiction of a nervous and status-bound housewife is leaden and unoriginal. The 'Toby' and 'Chicks' sections require a greater command of characterisation to succeed, and so at its worst the writing feels like padding. (Joan Stevens has some similar reservations in The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. A.H & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1961: 124-5. Lawrence Jones also mentions some reservations among the novel's early reviewers in 'Owls Do Cry After Fifty Years: The Novel in Context', in Owls Do Cry. Auckland, Vintage, 2001: 9-28.) In the 'Daphne' section the novel picks up again by offering what sometimes appear to be arresting short stories within the narrative. This is the case with chapter 38, in which the asylum patients are taken on a picnic; the chapter is even constructed like a Frame story, in two halves. Much the same can be said of chapter 39, the dance at the asylum. Thereafter Frame uses her strengths with language and imagery to try and present, and yet manage some distance from, her characters, but struggles to avoid sentimentality. The Epilogue, alas, is little more than melodramatic. Owls Do Cry is very much Daphne's novel and she seems at the centre of the book's values. But it is worth pointing out that Daphne is not really just a good (imaginative) person who is locked up and mistreated by other inferior and heartless (unimaginative) people for being different. Cherry Hankin rightly observes that, for Frame, truth 'is more likely to reside in the intuitive perceptions of the imaginative mind than in the conditioned response of those socially adjusted to the external world', but it appears that Daphne is fundamentally no more suited to life in what constitutes brute reality than are Toby and Chicks. [Hankin, Cherry. 'Language as Theme in Owls Do Cry' in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel (ed. Hankin, Cherry). Heinemann Educational Books, Auckland, 1976: 96.] For if Toby is too weak and Chicks too materialistic, then Daphne is too ethereal. In fact, none of the Withers children, including Daphne, is destined for any likely happiness in this world, and we have to ask whether this was really Frame's intention. Did she really intend to condemn all three approaches to life and offer nothing else, apart from Daphne's laments? It's a strategy which brings Owls Do Cry dangerously close to being the clever young woman's novel of revenge upon her own social background. Thus to describe Owls Do Cry as a great or even typical work by Frame is to do her a disservice. This is because it gives ammunition to a critic like C.K. Stead, someone who, quite possibly motivated by personal jealousy, has been inclined in recollections such as South-West of Eden to claim that Frame's writing lacks structure or shape and offers only 'flashes of genius'. [Stead, C.K.. South-West of Eden: A Memoir 1932-1956. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2010: 318.]

9. Wevers, Lydia. 'First, Build Your Hut' Griffith Review 43: Pacific Highways, 2014. https://griffithreview.com/articles/first-build-your-hut/

10. Alex Calder writes about this thoughtfully and in greater depth in his essay 'Unsettling Settlement: Poetry and Nationalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand', noting among other insights that 'Beautiful scenery and Maori people: the two go hand in hand, as it were, and are the very badge of congratulatory Pakeha nationalism even today'. https://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/misc/calder.asp

11. Murray, Les A.. 'The Last Hellos'. Suburban Redneck Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997: 74.

12. Curnow, Allen. 'Introduction' to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse in Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984 (ed. Simpson, Peter). Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1987: 133.

13. Mercer, Erin. Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2017.

14. Looking at the same phenomenon from the other end of the telescope, as it were, Alex Calder observes that New Zealand writers' affinity for the short story lies in short fiction being 'a genre in which aspiring writers are read by an audience of the same'. Calder, Alex. 'Defiance and Melodrama: Fiction in the Period of National "Invention", 1920--1950' in A History of New Zealand Literature (ed. Williams, Mark). Cambridge University Press, New York, 2016: 106.

15. Williams, Mark. 'Introduction' to A History of New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 1.

16. Ruthven, K.K. 'Joseph's Tale'. Islands 27, vol. 7 no. 5 (Nov. 1979): 530.

17. Byron, George Gordon. Don Juan. Fourth Canto, 1821.

18. McCormick, E.H.. New Zealand Literature: A Survey. Oxford University Press, London, 1959: 158.

19. Mercer, Erin, quoting Patrick Evans as quoted by Kate De Goldi (italics in original). Mercer, Erin. 'The Great Unread New Zealand Novel: David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 48, no.3 Sept. 2013: 343-401. Also Mercer, Erin, Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 151.

20. Stead, C.K.. 'David Ballantyne: Whimsical Losers' in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2002: 255, 257.

21. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction'. Islands 8.1 (March 1980): 84.

22. Evans, Patrick. 'David Ballantyne and the Art of Writing'. Islands 8.4/91 (June, 1981): 32.

23. Duff, Oliver. Quoted in Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2004: 109. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10, vol. 3, no. 2 (June, 1949): 182-5.

24. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 110-111.

25. Stevens complains of the book's flatness and lack of crises, though she also notes that The Cunninghams 'is not as well known as it deserves to be'. Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 73-4. Arvidson, K. O.. Landfall 73, vol. 19, no. 1 (March 1965): 69-73.

26. Arvidson, K. O.. Landfall 73. Op. cit.: 69, 71.

27. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 64.

28. Jones, Lawrence. 'The Novel' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Oxford University Press, Auckland: 171.

29. Concerning The Cunninghams Lawrence Jones also notes that 'The plot, made of a series of discreet scenes each of which worked as a revelatory "slice of life" story, moved through the natural interaction of character with character and with environment'. Jones, Lawrence. 'The Novel' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Op. cit.: 172.

30. 'The Old Spinning Wheel' played by Ray Noble and His Orchestra (1933) and 'The Cross-Eyed Cowboy on the Cross-Eyed Horse' played by Ted Fio Rito and His Orchestra (1937).

31. The film is a real movie, We're Only Human, released by RKO Radio Pictures in 1935, starring Preston Foster, Jane Wyatt and James Gleason.

32. Lawrence Jones describes this chapter as the most moving in the novel. Jones, Lawrence. 'The Novel' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Op. cit.: 172.

33. Joyce, James. 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'. Dubliners. 1914.

34. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10. Op. cit.: 182.

35. Evans, Patrick. The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. Penguin, Auckland, 1990: 190. Erin Mercer has echoed this as well, in Mercer, Erin, Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.:173.

36. Berryman, John. 'Dream Song 14'. The Dream Songs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1959: 16.

37. Joan Stevens also observes that 'No one in the book has any stronger compulsions than the outward discipline of social opinion'. Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 73-4.

38. Ballantyne even has Gilbert repeat this reaction in Book 1 chapter 22 when he enters the dairy again 'thinking right away of the mysterious smell inside, a smell you couldn't describe or remember much about'.[97]

39. Arvidson, K. O.. Landfall 73. Op. cit.: 72.

40. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 6.

41. McCormick, E.H.. New Zealand Literature: A Survey. Op. cit.: 157-8.

42. Robert Chapman refers to Gilbert Cunningham as 'the presiding genius of the New Zealand short story'. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10. Op. cit.: 184.

43. Orwell, George. 1984. 1949: One: VII.

44. Smithyman, Kendrick. 'Colville'. Selected Poems. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1989: 75.

45. Patrick Evans has already noted that the novel 'remorselessly depicts the forces that imprison human beings within an urban existence and slowly destroy them there'. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction.' Op. cit.: 83.

46. Lee, John A., quoted in Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 112. Even Robert Chapman concedes that Helen Cunningham 'is the first convincing woman I have met with in recent New Zealand writing and the first for whom one feels the writer had much sympathy'. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10. Op. cit.: 183.

47. Needham, John. The Departure Lounge: Travel and Literature in the Post-Modern World. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1999: 139, 142.

48. Needham, John. The Departure Lounge: Travel and Literature in the Post-Modern World. Op. cit.: 142.

49. Gold, Michael. Jews without Money. Horace Liveright, New York, 1930. Reprinted Caroll & Graf, New York, 1984: 309.

50. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 30-33.

51. Quite what makes someone a Maori is also inconsistent in The Cunninghams: Joe is a 'quarter-caste'[13] and is presented as a Maori, while Helen Cunningham is an eighth Maori (she says 'Mum's mother was a half-caste'[25]) and is presented as a Pakeha. Whether this reflects a benign matter of self-identification or something peculiar about the assignment of identification by society at large is not explored in the novel. But as recently as 2023 Ballantyne was being reassigned the role of 'Maori author' by critic Jordan Tricklebank on the basis of his one Maori great-grandmother. (https://www.newsroom.co.nz/readingroom/the-strange-case-of-the-first-maori-author)

52. The Herald harrumphed, 'the publisher's comment on the jacket would suggest that the author is giving the truth concerning the life of the poor in the Dominion. It is far from it, taking the poor by the large'. Quoted in McEldowney, Dennis. 'John A. Lee's Children of the Poor' in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel (ed. Hankin, Cherry). Heinemann Educational Books, Auckland, 1976: 38.

53. Murray, Stuart. Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1998: 39. Curiously, Patrick Evans argues that Children of the Poor is the exact opposite, that Lee's 'Porcellos belong to the slums of some nineteenth-century English city mysteriously transplanted to the South Pacific'. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction.' Op. cit.: 78.

54. Dennis McEldowney similarly observes, concerning Albany's move to Riverdale: 'The placing of the episode so that it breaks the thread of the Dunedin story may be artless; on the other hand it may be artful'. McEldowney, Dennis. 'John A. Lee's Children of the Poor' in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel (ed. Hankin, Cherry). Op. cit.: 25.

55. McEldowney makes a similar argument, noting perceptively that: 'The family have no companions in poverty [...] There is nothing approaching collective aggression towards society'. He also claims that 'Albany is not entirely determined [by heredity and environment]' and 'It may also strike the modern reader that Lee's environmental argument is too narrow. Most of the troubles that afflict Albany and Rose, and more besides, can afflict children where there is no material poverty'. McEldowney, Dennis. 'John A. Lee's Children of the Poor' in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel (ed. Hankin, Cherry). Op. cit.: 26, 30. Lawrence Jones helpfully points out that the target of the novel is not only economic forces but also puritanism. Jones, Lawrence. Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture, 1932-1945. Op. cit.: 261.

56. Presumably something similar lies behind an otherwise odd episode in Frank Sargeson's 'That Summer', where a parson refers the main character, Bill, to a wealthy man's house so that Bill might find work. The wealthy man is out, but Bill finds a house full of gym equipment and pictures on the walls from the Bible, and a wife who says that her husband is 'so good to all his boys'[212] but who is prepared to betray her husband's wishes and give Bill thirty Judas-like shillings if he will promise never to try contacting her husband again. [Sargeson, Frank. The Stories of Frank Sargeson. Penguin, Auckland, 1982: 145-227.]

57. This is not entirely different from Jimmy Sullivan's attitude to the divine in Ian Cross's The God Boy, for which Lee may be a source. In his memoir Cross mentions John A. Lee to his Harvard professor as an example of a New Zealand writer he had read, and later notes that Lee's work 'was far more important to New Zealand than Katherine Mansfield's'. [Cross, Ian. Such Absolute Beginners. David Ling, Auckland, 2007: 75, 90.] In addition, in Children of the Poor an early version of Jimmy Sullivan's famous mantra 'I don't care' appears twice: '"You will make mother cry." I don't care! I don't care! I don't care!"'[93]. '"I don't care. I don't care. I don't care." He repeated the phrase because he really did care, repeated it to conceal his despondency'[254]. Finally, Dennis McEldowney has written in some depth of 'the feud between Albany Porcello and God' and related this to John A. Lee's real-life feud with the New Zealand Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage. McEldowney, Dennis. 'John A. Lee's Children of the Poor' in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel (ed. Hankin, Cherry). Op. cit.: 27.

58. Arvidson, K.O.. Landfall 73. Op. cit.: 73.

59. Baldwin, James. 'Everybody's Protest Novel' in Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, Boston, 1955: 19.

60. Patrick Evans, it should be noted, is less sanguine about Gilbert Cunningham's chances. He declares that 'The adolescent boy who is at the centre of the book will become like the father whose name he shares, destroyed before he is old by battle and the diseases of the city'. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction.' Op. cit.: 83.

61. Balzac, Honore de. Lost Illusions. Part 2, chap 39, 'Skulduggery', 1837-43 (trans. Hunt, Herbert J., Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971).

62. The ambivalence of Ballantyne's book is mirrored in Noel Hilliard's Maori Girl, a well-conceived and popular social realist novel which appeared as late as 1960. Like Ballantyne, Hilliard has strong left-wing proletarian sympathies, but his novel is curiously reticent about what type of social change is necessary for his protagonist to find happiness. Racism and capitalism are the scourges that Netta Samuels has to face, but Hilliard, like Ballantyne, doesn't seem to suggest that the system is irretrievably at fault and should be swept away through social revolution. The nearest the story comes to an outright indictment of capitalism is one minor character's complaint: 'Why don't all the couples here get a house? You want to know why? Because they haven't got the money. And you want to know why they haven't got the money? Because they're not smart at rooking people. That's the only way you make any money. Being smart at taking someone else's share'. [Hilliard, Noel. Maori Girl. Heinemann, Auckland, 1970: 143]. Similarly, a sign in a pub, 'NATIVE WOMEN will not be served LIQUOR in this hotel', shocks Netta's former lover, Arthur Cochran, but the barman cheerfully undermines this by explaining 'You can see for yourself, nobody takes any notice of it anyway. The Maori welfare officer put it up. Don't ask me why. The white women are worse than the Maoris or the Islanders, what I see of it, and I see plenty'[253]. A society as it is but with less racism and better work and wages seems to be what is required. Readers are left not so much with a call to the barricades as with a wimbly-wambly suggestion that we should all be nicer to each other. Nevertheless, it might be more charitable to observe that the call for revolution on the one hand, and the desire for an improved status quo on the other, is a Scylla and Charybdis that politically-engaged leftist writers typically have to negotiate. The alternative to The Cunninghams and Maori Girl is probably Jean Devanny's The Butcher Shop, about which Alex Calder perceptively comments: 'no one is more defiant than Devanny but her imagination is crippled by revolutionary certitude'. [Calder, Alex. 'Defiance and Melodrama: Fiction in the Period of National "Invention", 1920--1950' in A History of New Zealand Literature (ed. Williams, Mark). Op.cit.: 102.]

63. Jones, Timothy. 'Against the Social Pattern: New Zealand Fiction, 1950--1970' in A History of New Zealand Literature, (ed. Williams, Mark). Op. cit.: 161. Hamish Clayton also claims that in Sydney Bridge Upside Down Ballantyne attempts to 'more boldly mythologise the local than anyone had before attempted'. Clayton, Hamish, quoted in Mercer, Erin. Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 153.

64. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction.' Op. cit.: 83.

65. Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Gate of Angels. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1990: 137.

66. McEldowney, Dennis, quoted in Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 166.

67. Mercer, Erin. Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 154. Similar arguments appear in: Evans, Patrick. The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 200; Jones, Lawrence. 'The Novel' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Op. cit.: 177-8; and Clayton, Hamish. 'Unreliable Narration and the Gothic Challenge to Social Realism in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 35.1 (2017): 62.

68. Consider the following quotations from The Cunningham, all of which relate to aspects of Sydney Bridge Upside Down: Gil worked up north where 'the Gladston agents of overseas meat interests like Vestey's had him first repair freezing works then pull them down'[11]; 'He guessed he loved his mother, but not like that article he read in the library the other day where a joker reckoned a boy, right from the time he was a baby, loved his mother because she was a female and boys naturally loved females'[98]; 'Dad was strict, and once he'd chased him with a whip, but he was a good-looking joker, and you felt proud having him for a father'[138]; 'Here's Teddy [Calcott], Mrs. Cunningham! He's got a motorbike now'[164, also 169, 209]; '[Life up the coast is now dead because] Everybody's drifted away since the freezing works closed down'[189]; 'Gilbert said he'd never ridden a horse. There was one up the coast that everybody rode, but he never did. He was too small'[205].

69. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 164.

70. Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 164.

71. Stead, C.K.. 'David Ballantyne: Whimsical Losers' in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers. Op. cit.: 256. De Goldi, Kate. 'Introduction: Sydney Bridge Redux' in Ballantyne, David, Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne, Text, 2010: xi. Clayton, Hamish. 'Unreliable Narration and the Gothic Challenge to Social Realism in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 35.1 (2017): 55.

72. Gurliand, Ilia. 'Reminiscences of A.P. Chekhov.' Teatr I Iskusstvo. No 28, 11 July, 1904: 521. At the end of chapter 7 Harry uses getting the pistol as an excuse to entice Susan Prosser into the works, but it remains rather incidental to the event.

73. Conrad, Joseph. Under Western Eyes. 1911: Part First, II.

74. Gifkins, Michael. 'After the Revolution.' After the Revolution and Other Stories. Longman Paul, Auckland, 1982.

75. Clayton, Hamish. 'Unreliable Narration and the Gothic Challenge to Social Realism in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 35.1 (2017): 50-66. Also, Clayton, Hamish. '"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017.

76. Clayton also briefly discusses the possibility that Harry 'narrates from a dream and that the memories he offers might, therefore, be traces of experiences rising to the surface of a troubled consciousness', and notes, correctly, that this possibility only increases Harry's unreliability as a narrator. Clayton, Hamish. '"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Op. cit.: 90-91.

77. This textual phenomenon of the disappearance of paragraphing and pushing together of short sentences is by no means confined to chapters 6, 13 and 16, however. Arguably, the first occurrence of this is in chapter 4, starting when Harry muses on his cousin Caroline while she is asleep, 'She likes being in bed'[45].

78. It's tempting to hear in the expression 'that summer', so near the start of the novel, a reference to other prominent works of New Zealand fiction. Sydney Bridge Upside Down was published in 1968, and Maurice Duggan's influential story 'Along Rideout Road That Summer' was published in Landfall in 1963, with the story's title itself, as Patrick Evans has suggested, perhaps a nod towards Frank Sargeson's earlier novella 'That Summer', published in That Summer: and Other Stories in 1946. [Evans, Patrick. 'Maurice Duggan and the Provincial Dilemma.' Landfall 142, vol. 36, no. 2 (June 1982): 228.] In addition, Harry twice mentions 'another summer storm' [76, 81] in the book, and 'A Summer Storm' was an early title for Ballantyne's first novel The Cunninghams (1948).

79. Although whipping children is considered scandalous today, it was routine in the past. See, for example, Thackeray's casual mention of George Osborne being horsewhipped as a child in chapter 24 of Vanity Fair. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair, 1848.

80. Patrick Evans notes something similar when he observes that Sydney Bridge Upside Down presents 'the boy-narrator's last stand against the adult sexuality that will draw him forever from the paradise of childhood into the dark satanic mills of adult life'. Evans, Patrick. 'Paradise or Slaughterhouse: Aspects of New Zealand Proletarian Fiction.' Op. cit.: 83.

81. Auden, W.H.. 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' in Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Faber and Faber, London, 1966: 167.

82. For a description of Sydney Bridge Upside Down as gothic, see: Mercer, Erin. Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature. Op. cit.: 152; De Goldi, Kate. 'Introduction: Sydney Bridge Redux' in Ballantyne, David, Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Op. cit.: ix; Clayton, Hamish. 'David Ballantyne: A Reputation Upside Down' in New Zealand Listener 11 Aug., 2012 www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/david-ballantyne-a-reputation-upside-down/. Ballantyne himself called his novel 'a Gothic joke' [Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 167] and Bryan Reid calls it 'a profoundly disturbing novel' [Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 164].

83. Auden, W.H.. 'Sonnets from China: X' in Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Op. cit.: 132.

84. De Goldi, Kate. 'Introduction: Sydney Bridge Redux' in Ballantyne, David, Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Op. cit.: xi.

85. Perhaps it's significant, however, that the only two occasions during the novel when one of Harry's black times seems about to appear are in chapter 5 at the picnic, when Harry feels abandoned by Caroline, and at the end of chapter 9, at the Bonnie Brae carnival, when Harry is worried that Caroline will maybe abandon him for other people.

86. Hamish Clayton observes that 'although the blending of conventions, styles and modes within Sydney Bridge has been noted by its few observers down the years, none thoroughly account for how or to what ends'. [Clayton, Hamish. 'Unreliable Narration and the Gothic Challenge to Social Realism in Sydney Bridge Upside Down.' Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 35.1 (2017): 60.] It is also certainly feasible to read the novel as a realist work about a serial killer, somewhat in the manner of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. There is even some evidence, admittedly scant, that Ballantyne himself may have seen Harry as a murderer. Lawrence Jones implies this when he discusses Ballantyne's plans for a future novel or novels about Harry Baird: 'as late as 1980, further notes towards a novel seem to relate some of these matters [about the literary life in Wellington] to Harry Baird, the protagonist of Sydney Bridge Upside Down, who has become a journalist in Wellington while continuing his underground career as a serial murderer'. But I wonder, perhaps, whether Harry in this projected novel simply fantasizes about killing his rivals? [Jones, Lawrence. The Wrong Bus: The 'Sons of Sargeson', Dan Davin, and the Search for the Great New Zealand Novel, 1943-56. The Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture 2004. Published by University of Waikato, Department of Humanities--English, Occasional Paper 3, Hamilton, 2005: 11.]

87. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10. Op. cit.: 185. (In the same review Chapman explicitly mentions that in The Cunninghams Ballantyne is 'creating types'.) Evans, Patrick. The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. Auckland, Penguin, 1990: 200.

88. This occurs in The Cunninghams too, but to a much more limited degree, such as the brief appearance of Trixie Sutherland, 'the imbecile girl whose father had been somebody important at the freezing works until he had a stroke and went blind'[100], or the brief but specific back story supplied for John Weaver, who visits Gil in hospital but who has a bodyguard because at 'the wow [...] one night at tea he grabbed a knife and reckoned he was going to chop the head off the first one to look up from his plate'[21]. Then perhaps there is the romance of Marjorie Young and her Maori husband, Joe, arguably the only happy relationship in the book, since they are described as 'a pair of lovebirds'[186]. And what does the school principal, Mr Shimmering, say to Carole Plowman that 'made her scared'[51], and who is Porkie St. John, the alcoholic remittance man in Book 1 chapter 14? I first became aware of this effect, which I think is rare, when reading Maurice Duggan's story 'Race Day' and contemplating the character called Mr Toms. Mr Toms, the next-door neighbour, is on crutches and blind after having suffered a bad fall. Apart from providing a parallel with the jockey who has an accident on the race track, and also helping to provide a sense of the spatial, telescopic structure of the story--the family jovial together, Mr and Mrs Lenihan's departure, Mr Toms in his garden, looking at the race track, the accident, looking at the race track, Mr Toms in his garden, Mr and Mrs Lenihan's arrival, the family jovial together--why was a man on crutches in the story? I had a sense, subjective and impossible to prove through usual critical practices, of another story happening somewhere just beyond the one being presented to me. A further hint of it appears, perhaps, in Mr Lenihan's closing comment that the judge is 'a blind man'. The implied narrator of the story is making an ironic comment on Margaret not wishing to acknowledge the accident and on the nature of life, but what does Mr Lenihan himself mean? He seems to be referring to events of the day which have happened in another story involving him, and not Margaret and her brother. Could this effect in a story be connected somehow to the Modernist tendency to show and not tell, keeping narrative presence to a minimum while leaving the focus on characters and on the story open? The effect certainly doesn't happen in a more tightly focused short work like 'A Small Story', but then it's peculiar to find it at all in 'Race Day', which is only 4 pages long. [Duggan, Maurice. Collected Stories (ed. Stead, C. K.). Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1981: 74-77.]

89. Manawatu Daily Times. 22 Sept. 1956: 8.

90. McCrystal, John. 'Old Novelists Never Die.' New Zealand Books 76, December, 2006. https://nzbooks.org.nz/2006/non-fiction/old-novelists-never-die-john-mccrystal/

91. Quoted in Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. First Edition Publishers, Wellington, 2006: 130-1.

92. Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 132.

93. Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 132.

94. Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 132.

95. Holcroft, M.H.. New Zealand Listener 13 Jan., 1961. Quoted in Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 10.

96. Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 97.

97. Chapman, Robert. Landfall 10. Op. cit.: 185.

98. For a provisional description of the difficulties New Zealand writers faced, see: Richards, Ian. Dark Sneaks In: Essays on the Short Fiction of Janet Frame. Lonely Arts Publishing, Wellington, 2004: 1-19.

99. Pearson, Bill. 'Fretful Sleepers: a Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist' in Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays. Heinemann Educational Books, Auckland, 1974: 12.

100. Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 73.

101. Duff, Oliver, quoted in Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 108-9.

102. Dickinson, Emily. 'The Poets light but Lamps.'

103. Frame, Janet. Janet Frame: The Complete Autobiography. The Women's Press, London, 1990: 415.

104. 'House Proud: Ruth Nicol Talks to Vivienne Jepsen.' Quote Unquote. (June 1994): 28.

105. Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 127.

106. Mason, Bruce. Quoted in Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 140. Stevens, Joan. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1960. Op. cit.: 96.

107. Quoted in Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 137. An overseas review in The Spectator, rather misreading the novel, claimed that 'Paul [...] outshining [Simon] in everything, ends by taking his wife away from him'. Unsigned Review. 'New Novels.' The Spectator. 3 Aug. 1956: 27.

108. Millen, Julia. Guthrie Wilson: writer, soldier, educator. Op. cit.: 145-6.

109. Joyce, James. 'Wandering Rocks' in Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1922.

110. During, Simon. 'Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits.' And 1, 1983: 75-92.

111. Sargeson himself may have commented on the difficulty that his contemporary readers had noticing the gay material in his stories through his novella, 'That Summer', one of the last of the 'classic' laconic-cobber stories that he published, although he started writing it as early as 1938. A considerable issue that early readers had with the novella--when they managed to notice the issue all--was how to integrate what appears to be a standard, ultra-realist Sargesonian yarn about mateship with the revelation, only hinted at near the story's end, that one minor character, Maggie, is a transvestite and thus in a gay relationship with her sailor partner. But then this is a novella that, at least on rereading, crackles with homosexual hints and undertones and mostly-unconsummated gay desires to which its first-person narrator, Bill, seems oblivious, much as the reader is likely to be on a first encounter with the story. As we now know, these subtexts were always present in such Sargesonian tales, although they are slightly, but only slightly, more foregrounded by Sargeson in 'That Summer'--so that occasionally they seem to erupt into the text of the novella as small disturbances for Bill and for the reader. An early example is when the cook buys Bill a bunch of flowers and then starts to cry when Bill leaves his job at the Dally's[178]. Others are Maggie's comment to Bill: 'Fancy meeting you without your boy-friend'[183] and the sounds of the beds in the prison that 'never left off creaking all night'[199] and thus keep Bill awake. Sargeson himself made it clear that the novella is a story about the feeling of love between men. [King, Michael. Frank Sargeson: A Life. Penguin, Auckland, 1995: 204.] Therefore, one way to work the rather bizarre revelation of Maggie's transvestism back into the fabric of the novella is to notice that although what seems like mateship between Bill and Terry, two lonely men during the slump who live much like men in prison, is transformed in the story into genuine love, the narrator Bill remains unaware of the nature of his feelings and entirely suppresses any emotional and physical urges he has--while the reader's experience tends to mimic this suppression. (Whether the other characters are ignorant of what is occurring between Bill and Terry is moot: Sargeson, for example, has Maggie change her testimony in court after threats by Terry to expose her real gender.) Thus the closing revelation about Maggie erupts to subvert the yarn-like storyline, disturbing Bill's thinking and also the reader's experience. As a realist work, the novella has its problems: why does the revelation of Maggie being a man not cause Bill thoroughly to re-evaluate his relationship with her or other men? Why does a heartbroken Bill, narrating his tale in recall, still fail to understand the depth and nature of his attraction to his cobber? How does Maggie manage to give evidence in court without revealing her real name and gender to the authorities? But for Sargeson it is not total verisimilitude but managing the reader's experience of the story that is paramount. The revelation about Maggie is an uncomfortable truth that forces its way into any reading of the tale, highlighting in a displaced form what is happening between Bill and Terry, even if it goes largely unremarked on in the novella itself. This gay eruption into the story is Sargeson's indication of how Bill is failing to 'read' his relationship with Terry, but it's also a comment on how readers have been failing to read Sargeson's text, and not just this particular novella but also previous Sargeson yarns about mateship--and perhaps, by further extension, what New Zealanders were choosing to ignore about their society as a whole. Dozing at Mrs Clegg's boarding house, Terry muses: 'I'd been dreaming, and I still seemed to be in the dream because there wasn't one sound I could hear no matter how hard I listened'[164]. [Sargeson, Frank. The Stories of Frank Sargeson. Penguin, Auckland, 1982: 145-227.] In a reading of 'That Summer' John Newton also mentions the 'common deafness' that is the bond between narrator and reader, but he comes to entirely different conclusions. [Newton, John. Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908-1945. Op. cit.: 296.] For an amusing account by David Ballantyne of his own realisation that Maggie is a transvestite, perhaps a typical realisation by a reader of Sargeson in the 1940s, see: Reid, Bryan. After the Fireworks: A Life of David Ballantyne. Op. cit.: 52.

112. Crump, Barry. Hang on a Minute Mate. A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1961: 170.

113. Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene de. Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, 1849-50 (trans. Baldrick, Robert). Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2014: 267.

114. To avoid confusion I'll refer to the protagonist of A Good Keen Man, Barry Crump, as 'Barry' to distinguish him from the author of the book, whom I'll refer to as 'Crump'.

115. Mate 8 (Dec. 1961): 47.

116. Dudding Adam. My Father's Island: A Memoir. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2016: 127. Robin Dudding was also later the editor of Islands.

117. Sturm, Terry. 'Popular Fiction' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Op. cit.: 610.

118. Sturm, Terry. 'Popular Fiction' in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (ed. Sturm, Terry, Second Edition). Op. cit.: 610.

119. Marvell, Andrew. 'The Garden.' 1681.

120. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Huis Clos [No Exit]. Paris, Gallimard. 1945.

121. Murray Edmond makes much the same point, that 'There's only one "relationship" in the book, Crump with his dog Flynn, and that is devoid of any development'. Edmond, Murray. Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s. Atuanui Press, Pokeno, 2012: 248.

122. Quoted in: Dudding, Adam. My Father's Island: A Memoir. Op. cit.: 128.

123. Notely, Susan. Landfall 78, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 1966): 201.

124. Stevens, Joan. Chapter 8 of The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965. https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-SteNove.html Heather Roberts also cites a New Zealand Herald review of Stand in the Rain (Oct. 9, 1965) which describes Watson's book as a female version of Barry Crump's novels. Roberts, Heather. 'Private and Public Realities: A Study of the Subjective Novel in New Zealand'. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, 1979: 208.

125. Jones, Timothy. 'Against the Social Pattern: New Zealand Fiction, 1950-1970.' A History of New Zealand Literature (ed. Williams, Mark). Op. cit.: 159.

126. Kidman, Fiona. At the End of Darwin Road: A Memoir. Vintage, Auckland, 2008. Tolerton, Jane. 'Girl Behind the Good Keen Man.' New Zealand Books 62, Winter, 2003. https://nzbooks.org.nz/2003/imprints-2/girl-behind-the-good-keen-man-jane-tolerton/ Shadbolt, Maurice. From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir. David Ling, Auckland, 1999: 79.

127. Shaw, George Bernard. Heartbreak House. Act 1.

128. McLeod, Aorewa. 'A Single Woman's Search.' New Zealand Books 13, Winter, 1994. https://nzbooks.org.nz/1994/literature/aorewa-mcleod-a-single-womans-search/

129. Pearson, Bill. Coal Flat. Heinemann Educational Books, Auckland, 1963 [this edition 1976]: 418.

130. Creeley, Robert. 'I Know a Man.' Poems 1950--1965. Calder and Boyars, London, 1966: 38.

131. McLeod, Aorewa. 'A Single Woman's Search.' New Zealand Books 13, Winter, 1994. Op. cit..

132. Kennedy, Anne. New Zealand Listener 21 June, 1986: 49. Benson, Dale Christine. 'A World Like This: Existentialism in New Zealand Literature.' Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2000: 240.

133. Murray Edmond has commented perceptively on gender relations in mid-twentieth-century New Zealand and the prevailing myth that 'everybody was happiest all crowded along to the masculine end of the gender spectrum--the admiration for Good Keen Women was such that being a feminine woman was almost as impossible as being an effeminate man'. Edmond, Murray. Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s. Op. cit.: xiv.

A Note on the Text.

Numbers appearing in square brackets after quotations refer to page numbers within the novels cited, specifically to the following editions:

Ballantyne, David. The Cunninghams. Whitcoulls, Christchurch, 1976.

Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Longman Paul, Auckland, 1968.

Crump, Barry. A Good Keen Man. Beckett Publishing, Auckland, 1987.

Lee, John. A.. Children of the Poor. T. Werner Laurie Ltd, London, 1939.

Watson, Jean. Stand in the Rain. Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1965.

Wilson, Guthrie. Sweet White Wine. Robert Hale, London, 1956.

Copyright Ian Richards, 2024.

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