curnow / curnow^[1]

But seriously you people you’ve all got doubles, at least. There’s a good number of Robert Duncans in the Auckland phonebook, most of them with   collections to their name I’ll be bound. But what about those lonely people who have their names all to themselves. Spare them a moment’s thought. Is there, I ask you Bill [Slaughter], and everyone else who is listening [sic], is there another living Wystan out there (forget about the Curnow). So far as I know there’s only me. Help!                                                                       

the one and only Wystan
(Poetics List, Buffalo, 5 May 1995)[2]

Putting curnow on the map

What I have to say is not a straightforward matter. We speak out of a vestedness, mine, ours, theirs. Wystan’s a fellow writer and friend of some 20 years. Allen Curnow I much respect, almost as a matter of course. I want to examine the writing practices of father and son somewhat outside of the usual determinations of prudent literary discourse. In a sense this is to dispute the assumed integrity – uncrossable divide? – that exists between the respective Curnow practices. I want to lift and examine, if but for a short while, the unquestioned and for some, unquestionable, borders. Inevitably this is to put my own predilections as a writer and family person on the same map, to subject the interests of these two achieved writers to my own lesser preoccupations, my own family romance.

Usually we speak of family in terms of continuity, intimacy, mutual protection, of an interdependence among those who are related by blood, the mechanisms whereby generational blessings are bestowed and inheritance and its debts honoured. There is no reason to doubt that such are the terms by which the Curnow family has operated since the arrival of their forbears sometime last century. Yet the family space we in public idealise can in private be a vigorously disputed one. Despite the prevalent family-like tone of ‘belonging’ in much Aotearoan literary discourse, it shows no ready or comfortable way of dealing with practices that are discordant, let alone ones that are at once literary and familial, particularly when the participants happen to be father and son. Intimacies are involved to be sure, rivalries, even where there is an attempt to deal discretely with such matters. And if such an approach might seem to the reader unbecoming, I don’t necessarily want to exclude that either, for literature is full of it. I want to see if I can coax out of the Curnow practices differences and samenesses, to start to unprise some of the tightfitting protocols that local literary folk have long staked a claim to, in theory if not always in practice.

Putting succession on the map

The usual assumption is that the public individual and the writing individual are one, two facets of the same personality. We strive to integrate writing with our ideas of good existence. We have viewed the two as transposable, and this in turn forms a basis on which we have constructed our principle of exchange between selfhood and written achievement. Texts are taken to represent, to somehow embody, their writers – a view nowadays increasingly untenable. Meanwhile literature, for its part, exploits language as a resource that is full of associations and history that it freely assimilates but which it resists being assimilated by. And because literature encloses all within its own mediative brackets, it would be unwise, perhaps perilous, to regard the text as a readily interpretable, if sublimated, representation of the personal, social or moral aspects of the writer’s life. Literature bearing the mark Allen Curnow is not Allen Curnow, it is literature that bears that particular mark.^[3] Likewise Wystan. Authorial identity is at most a figure, constructed on the one hand out of the intentionality of the writer and on the other through the range of possibilities suggested by a text among other texts. Authorial psychology involves a constant remapping of the relation between the writer and reader(s), simultaneously causes and effects. The guise of literature as ameliorative, purposeful human relation is not reliable, especially when as practised it is not always kind or reconciliatory. I will argue that for the Curnows it includes – to some extent is driven by – an obsession with things that are not always (or otherwise) available and may in the end not be even desired.

Putting allen and wystan on the map

As I speak, Allen is in his mid-80s and regarded as our foremost poet, here and internationally. He is the country’s foremost literary anthologist, an outstanding literary theorist, a dominant presence over sixty-something years of publication. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991) lists 19 poetry titles, plus five for Whim Wham satiric verse (dating in the main from the 1940s), two for drama, two poetry anthologies (Caxton 1945/51 and Penguin 1960), as well as a collection of critical prose Look Back Harder (1987).

Wystan, now in his mid-50s, has over 30-something productive writing years remained much at the literary margins. He scarcely figures in the History (six page references to his father’s 71, excluding anthologies). His first book, Essays on New Zealand Literature (1973) – dedicated to his father, including an essay by his father, and another on his father – is an act of obeisance that suggests the shadow the son starts under. There is minimal representation of his poetry and fiction in mainstream magazines (Islands, Landfall, Sport),^[4] and he scarcely figures in the several anthologies that began to appear from the early 80s.^[5] His two poetry texts to date, Cancer Daybook(short-listed for the New Zealand Book Awards) and Back in the USA, effectively selfpublished, appear in 1989, Wystan’s fiftieth year. His prominence as an art critic and curator is longer-standing. He founded Art Space in Auckland, has co-authored three art books,⁶ producing as well several curatorial pieces.⁷ In addition, he continues to involve himself as a writer in collaboration with visual and performing artists.⁸ Over the years, in addition to appearances at a number of reading venues worldwide,⁹ he has been a fairly regular visitor and sometime-participant on the American poetry reading scene, is a friend of several Language poets, and a participant in the Poetics electronic discussion group. His inclination to write across and outside accepted genres and groupings helps to explain the difficulty people have had in including Wystan’s work in the literary mainstream.

Putting family on the map

I have suggested that literary Aotearoa shows no ready way of dealing with such intimacies as that between father and son, Curnow and Curnow. Indeed, there is a reticence that mutes any expected confrontation. In the critical writing, where opposed positions are taken, neither mentions the other. In other texts, there is a curious self-conscious quality that accompanies familial or personal references.

Statements made operate within a non-definitive, rhetorical space. They cannot be simply lifted outside their mediative context. For example, Allen’s 1935 proclamation

                         To each age its own experience. 
                         To each age its own language. 
                         To each age its own literature

squares poorly with a subsequent rejection of young writers who adopt a postmodern aesthetic. Ostensibly an invitation to open practice, the statement in fact celebrates the initiatives that Allen is taking at the time. Similarly, the alluring image found in the closing couplet of the sonnet ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’ is not what at first glance it appears to be. In a superb dissimulation, what appears to be extended as a prize to future generations, perhaps Wystan, is coveted in the act of offering:

                         Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,
                         Will learn the trick of standing upright here.  (1943)

It is Allen’s arrival and ‘standing upright’ that is signalled. Among In memoriam poems, especially those addressing his ‘farthest ancestor’ ‘R.L.M.G.’ and his father, as also tributes to Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens and others, the tone and sentiment is consummately literary. Even in ‘At Dead Low Water’, in which the young Allen accompanies his father on an early morning shoreside walk at Governor’s Bay – and by extension through the mythical death/rebirth cycle alluded to – the emphasis is on the literary rite-of-passage, and family relation subsists within that context.

If Allen constructs statements that maximise the literary spoil that is his pursuit, Wystan shows a literary self-regard equally keen if more indirect. The autobiographical piece ‘from D’Arcy Cresswell at Castor Bay’ (Splash/1) refers twice in passing to Allen, initially as ‘father’ (whose copy – ‘his name in it’ – of The Poet’s Progress ‘Wystan’ happens to be reading); and again a few pages later, this time more familiar sounding yet formally capitalised as ‘my Dad’. The second less/more familiar reference is ambivalent, hinting at a certain pomposity in Allen’s refusal to drink at Paddy Gleeson’s in Hobson Street because ‘there were fights, he said, brawls’ (28). A small detail, certainly; but in the super-conscious literary game – and knowing Wystan to be as particular as is his father in matters of syntax and idiom – signification occurs any and everywhere. Why should filial and writerly relationships inveigle one another so? Why, when Wystan speaks in ‘D’Arcy’ about the ‘BODY’ on which one writes, does D’Arcy appear more sympathetically as a kind of alter-ego or stand-in father-figure than Allen? D’Arcy, the dissolute, opportunistic homosexual, a figure antithetical to Allen in all respects except perhaps a common devotion to poetry, becomes an object of fond reproof for Wystan, who addresses the situation thus:

The point is D’Arcy did have ambition. And though he knew too many titled types, too many successful old farts for my liking, he knew too something about the odds he’d stacked against himself. The rank outsider – he’s the one with the real ambition. The outsider outdoors. Because there was no underground here. Never was. Never has been. The outsider outdoors, in a bach by the sea. Or, cruising the docks, eh, D’Arcy?  (20)

Is it D’Arcy’s disreputableness that especially appeals? The piece ends:

There were nights at Gleeson’s, or down on the docks, it was as if, like Whitman, he was taking a headlong dive into himself; his passions doing with him what they would. He’d miss the last ferry and the Stronach ladies’ kindling’d go uncut for days on end. Bob Lowry said that one of D’Arcy’s drinking cobbers who’d got a launch he lived on down St Mary’s Bay offerred [sic] D’Arcy the use of a bottom bunk. Trouble was this guy kept bringing his doxies back to the launch in the middle of the night and humping them like it was going out of style. On the top bunk. That was repulsive enough. But one night one of these Crazy Janes, she opened her great legs and this stream of steaming female piss came arching down onto the floor passing but inches from D’Arcy’s nose. He didn’t man no pumps, he’d had enough. Headed home to Castor Bay he did. To cool his cock in the Gulf and dream of reverberating arseholes.  (28)

Elsewhere, in a critical context, where Wystan addresses the quandary of including familiar names in literary writing, there is a difficulty beyond a mere pointing to the perplexity of an awkward doubling-up. In a review of Peter Tomory’s New Zealand Art series in Lf90, we again witness a mock-embarrassed way of dealing with being a member of a well-regarded artistic family who is invited to review a book involving other members.

I thought to myself then that I was the last person to do the job [as well as having a picture of his mother on the cover of a book that was his brother Tim’s ‘pet project’, he was also friendly with Hamish Keith, Don Binney and Bryan Drew, among others connected with the project]. Tim’s books and Mum on the cover?! But then I thought, I remembered: that’s what it’s like in New Zealand, everyone interested in the arts knows everyone interested in the arts.  (187)

It’s awkward. No one need envy any offspring the difficulties of occupying a position that one has had no choice but to occupy: family ties can feel so unnatural! More recently, in the art page ‘From the Wystan Curnow Collection’ (Lf177), Wystan lays (somewhat ambivalently) rightful claim to the name Curnow. Again seeming is only seeming: in drawing attention to itself as artifice, the art-framing device suggests an unresolved if reified claim more than it does an accommodation. Locked within such a frame, the narrative passage is further locked within an iteration of names derived from other places that wrap more and more tightly round the Wystan version of Curnow. Beyond distinguishing between the name of the father and the name of the son (something biblical), the framing convention courts self-occupancy, hubris.

Given this situation, where are we to locate the seriousness of the challenge that each constitutes to the other? What is it in the literary contest that renders it intractable, half-deflected, protective, wanting to prevail? Oops… I race ahead, best we back-track a little.

Putting succession on the map

James Baxter’s first volume Beyond the Palisade and Allen’s A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45 appear together at the end of the War, both from Caxton Press (the creation of Denis Glover, a close writing friend of Allen’s and the predominant literary publisher from the 1930s through 60s). Wystan, born six years earlier in 1939, while bearing the name of the father, cannot claim the literary inheritance: it is Baxter, just eighteen, who is identified as Allen’s poetic son (since Mason ‘no New Zealand poet has proved so early his power to say and his right to speak’).^[6] Unlike the socio-biological bond, poetic filiality proves as easily bestowable as it will prove readily retractable. By 1948, given Allen’s predisposition to paternalism and Baxter’s to profligacy, the paternal-filial chord shows early signs of fraying. Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness is reviewed by Allen in a mixed compliment that instigates a process of disinheritance when he remarks that ‘assertions about New Zealand… needed good poets for its beginning, as it has waited for a good poet to point towards a consummation’ (LBH 100). In the poetic family business, for menfolk, consummation risks a waning of interest, a loss of vigour. This is just the complaint Baxter subsequently has against Allen: that, while brilliant, his practice in effect constitutes repeated acts of co-option.

In ‘High Culture in a Small Province’ (1973) Wystan has himself argued for more specialisation, for a less personality-based cultural exchange. While rivalry among competing poetic interests is a commonplace, it is intensified in our culture because there is so little opportunity to turn elsewhere. But while the family-like quality of the literary scene is often remarked on, it continues to function as a descriptive metaphor rather than as a challenge to change or normalise the discourse – vested interests are legitimised through group affiliation. When people talk about Curnow in a generational context they do so usually in successional terms, linking Allen with Baxter, Allen with Stead, Stead with Wedde.^[7] Curnow/Curnow is one awkward permutation that people have tended to step around.

Not unexpectedly, in such an environment, approval gets bestowed on those whose practice reflects favourably on one’s own. In the days of Caxton and Landfall it was assumed that all artists shared a common set of values.^[8] Normal societal values were considered inimical to the arts, thus frustrating the process whereby society’s veniality might be transformed into art’s ideality. Even Wystan, in the Lf177 interview, when asked who locally best represents the avant-garde, nominates – doubtless tongue-in-cheek – himself. Literary endorsement tends to function reciprocally.^[9] Performers that we are, we have more than half an eye on our own success.

Loney, who founded Parallax (‘a quarterly journal of postmodern literature and art’) in 1982, complained that ‘In the early seventies we were trying to get in Islands and Landfall and being knocked back and back and back’ (And/1 58). Parallax would exclude the excluders. ‘There are a bunch of key actors’, he explains, ‘and they happen to be Wystan, Roger and Tony, and ah, Judy [sic] Stout’ (55). Wystan’s ‘PostModernism in Poetry and the Visual Arts’ heads the first issue. Starting at this point we witness an ongoing peer participation and joint editing of magazines through the early to mid-1980s: Parallax, And, Splash, Antic. Mainstream established writers like Allen and Stead aren’t invited; others, including Wedde, only grudgingly. This is Wystan country, differently peopled.^[10]

Putting contention on the map

Wystan’s ‘Post-Modernism’ essay and Allen’s Turnbull Winter Lecture happen at the same time. Each is an implicit rejection of the other. Allen – sensitive to and not unaffected by the new initiatives – derisively rejects postmodernism, its youthful Kiwi protagonists, and the figurehead Charles Olson as old hat: but not a word of Wystan.

Putting aesthetic contention (name-dropping) on the map

Irving Sandler, Leslie Fiedler, Mel Bochner, Fiedler’s, Sandler’s, Susan Sontag, Ed Dorn, David Antin, Fiedler, John Ashbery, Peter Schyeldahl, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, Frank O’Hara, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Paulson... Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Marcel Duchamp, Greenberg [5060+ further names] John Cage, Barnett Newman’s, Newman, Robert Smithson’s, Irwin, Buren, Asher, Apple, Rosenthal, Andre, Buren, Irwin, Nordman… [Rough individual tallies:] Olson 11, Creeley 11, O’Hara 8, Greenberg, Pollock, Dorn, Ginsberg 4. (‘Post-Modernism’)

Allen and Wystan have shared some modern-day material opportunities conducive to literary production. Through much of the 1970s they both held positions in the English Department at the University of Auckland, ensuring a continuity of employment, reasonable flexibility of privacy and time, and the stimulation of intellectual exchange.^[11]

Aesthetics – specifically poetics – concerns technical aspects of poetry and the life-literature relation. In a writing that insists on the non-resolvability that exists between language and meaning, biological and social relationships must surrender an otherwise assumed preeminence. The straightforward logical or societal value assigned to words becomes problematised as one further application of textuality. Literary texts, in this sense, are always already suspended, aestheticised, in their relationship with a wider world. There is something that refuses containment, that won’t be exhausted, doesn’t have decidable social application, in writing that continues to be identified as literary. This Allen once characterised as ‘unique’ and Wystan, more recently, as ‘torque’. The distinctions by which such uniqueness or torque accrues value is in the respective poetics: for both writers, poetics forms a significant part of their textual strategies. The critical and theoretical pronouncements of each, whilst in themselves rigorous and dealing with overlapping issues and shared predicaments, adopt opposing valuations which ultimately preclude mutual accommodation. There is a standoffishness, a mutual lack of articulation, a practiced ignoring of the other. The very contentiousness and whereby the

truth value eludes whatever aesthetics is proposed: as if truth cannot be truly contested. Allen is not mentioned in Wystan’s postmodernism piece, even though it comprises a first thoroughgoing critique of the form of modernism that the former is seen to champion. Modernism is characterised as outmoded, self-aggrandising, rightfully supplanted by postmodernism. In Wystan’s

WC: It’s compelling. But you know: Place isn’t something fixed or singular, to do with identity in that way.
AC: I mean... 
WC: Let me just say, it emerges in a context of arrivals and departures, or by way of figures for the margin, like borders, beaches, and so on.

a kind ofundisclosed deep-intentionality reserved for poets to distinguish. Modernists, he avers, take on the role of ‘Godkillers’, assuming a god-like authority and providing the imaginative cohesiveness that God’s departure is seen to have jeopardised. Postmodernism – continues Wystan – in its turn acknowledges a concomitancy in language, the impossibility of its being outside, or above, what it depicts; language is coterminous with that which is presented (Creeley: ‘Form is never more than an extension of content’), as such representing a moment-by-moment ‘total ecology

AC: You know beaches are really important to me, too. 
WC: Hmm. Your writing is full of shorelines and things that happen there.

one thing has an inherent organ authority. Immanence displaces transcendence. The names in attendance are unabashedly and singularly American. This shift in allegiance, of the received lineage, interestingly parallels his father’s  50-yearsearlier adoption of the modernist English poets. Yet neither the similarity nor the distinction is acknowledged.

Not that such an acknowledgment comes from Allen – for while Wystan is preparing his essay, Allen is busy preparing (whether fortuitously or not) a fervid rebuttal in the form of his Turnbull Winter

AC: You see, Strictly speaking, New Zealand doesn’t exist yet, though some possible New Zealands glimmer in some poems and on some canvasses. It remains to be created – should I say invented – by writers, musicians, artists, architects, publishers; even a politician might help.
WC: Politician! I’m saying, Modernists were god-killers who lived,  suffered and created in the shadow of their deeds.... The imagination represents the will to order and meaning rather than their accomplishment.

practice and thought that Olson claims as new and his own. Further, Allen insists, here as elsewhere, theory is a posteriori, thereby traceable and reducible: ‘the theory, any theory of poetry, is always a secondary manifestation: poetics follows poems, not the other way round’ (LBH 306). This reduction of theory to a temporal (implicitly outdated) accompaniment rather than progenitor of poems, thus privileging them in an extra-temporal (transcendent, paternal) position, is the very thing that Wystan wants to see re-temporalised, set back into time, democratised. For him, theory and practice are conjoint, they inform each other. Nonetheless, even for him literature retains a healing function, facilitating a special cohering of disparate things and enlarging what he terms a ‘holistic’ or ‘continuous universe’.

Any shift to a different or contrary position is presented in terms of a disrupting of continuity. Continuity and discontinuity function

AC: Are you saying, an artist can only suffer, and record his suffering; hoping to make others suffer with him the necessary pains of first self knowledge. 
WC: Maybe the idea of all thought and all objects of thought being present in language at one time and of writing as tapping into that.

future possibilities, but this is as untrue as it is true. Literature is that which ends up getting called literature. In terms of our national literature, a differential (and subservient) linkage to major in-English literatures means that it is so much a part of them that any claim to uniqueness or self-identity suggests a certain helplessness. The difficulty comes in using continuity, difference, discontinuity, interchangeably to explain the same phenomena. For all the claims to difference between a Curnow and a Curnow, something I do wish to draw attention to, there is a place where that difference is only a differentiating they share, a place where an insistence on exclusivity betrays a common pursuit or occupancy that neither cares to admit to. Silence, avoiding overt competition, is the adopted strategym. And in the end its not being addressed points to it like a finger. Two men, father and son, seek and compete over something – achievement, reality, posterity, prowess? – as if there is no overlap in their endeavours. Whether this involves imposition, as in Allen’s case, or serial deferral, as in Wystan’s, the drive (the lure) that is shared is by turns aggressive, possessive, disarming, denied, protective, relinquished, resumed.

Putting practice on the map

There are no art awards, far as I know, that apply to father and son poetry combos – Allen Curnow & Son. Interesting thought? Recognitions like the Queen’s Honours List and the Watties/Montana Book Awards perpetuate and embolden the attaching of achievement to our assigned individual proper names. The attention given to texts marked Curnow – or Curnow – is sharper because it simultaneously disavows the familial and makes of the family name the key marker. The texts of these two writers cannot be said finally to demonstrate what either writer might claim for his own or the other’s writing, because crucially the person who writes is not the one who can be held directly answerable to what the writer gets to say: we have termed this the autonomy of the author.

One of Wystan’s stated intentions is to deconstruct exactly such a gratuitous privileging of the text over reality. It’s one reason why, for our mainstream, he does not qualify as a poet or fiction writer proper. We have seen that, for Allen, poetry is the type of the arts. And while such a view may nowadays be considered outdated or elitist, Wystan’s wishful democratisation of the writing arts may well be thought to amount to much the same: ‘I want to hang onto the notion that really there is no criticism, poetry, fiction – only writing and its scenes. Venues, occasions, protocols and processes’ (Lf177 14). Earlier texts do adopt conventional-looking forms, but increasingly Wystan’s writing involves a discarding of traditional conventions both of signification and of genre.^[13] Traditionally, literature is defined in terms of its compliance to conventions of genre, structure, form, style, and its intrinsic capability to exceed these constraints by adding significance, variety. Wystan’s name, his body, his characteristic flatness of observation and droll locution, his smirky humour, the unexpected dropping in of names of family members and other writers or artists, appear often enough as if unmediated. He seems to be in his texts the same way he is in life. That’s his ploy.

Putting material on the map

Above I characterise the Curnows’ writing in terms of a sustained (to rephrase it) self-at-centre enterprise. In many respects it’s a boy thing. In using such a telltale genderising metaphor I want to take a slightly different approach to the qualities of intimacy(-denied) and unmentionability involved in a common literary practice that being both male and father or son seems to render especially delicate. Writing, in this context, comprises a pursuit that can be abandoned but whose lure is ever-deferrable, ever-deniable. Identifying a single object would be to reduce it to a nothing, to pop it like a bubble. We don’t want the party to end.

As I see it, the insistence of Allen on a ‘reality prior to the poem’ is the enabling trope. The sense of fidelity, the promise to be faithful, expresses perfectly Allen’s astuteness, his brilliance in dealing with the components of his poems: their referentiality, acute phrasing, captivating images. The trick is that the fidelity provides also a shield that deflects a getting slapped back, being ‘found out’. It amounts to a holding back in the push forward. Allen’s exercise of control, even over what he presents as out of control, urges itself to appear complete. This may help account for the atmosphere of unflinchingness and exactitude that readers report encountering in his work. Satisfaction comes – or doesn’t come – in the form of an impossibly stimulated appetite that won’t be satisfied, that remains bound to his attention. In this way he can be said to fuck with the facts. He refuses to give them the satisfaction that in effect he has them crave. That’s his ploy. The poems are not informational or about emotional states as such, but rather they are masterful entries into the unbridgeable and seemingly illicit space between word and thing, giving and taking, time and attention, space and attention, you and me. Take the acclaimed ‘A Dead Lamb’:

                         Never turn your back on the sea.
                         The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.

                         A billion billion broken waves deliver a 
                         coloured glass globe at your feet, intact.

                         You say it is a Japanese fisherman’s float. 
                         It is a Japanese fisherman’s float.

                         A king tide, a five o’clock low, is perfect for 
                         picking mussels, picking at your ankle-bones.

                         The wind snaps at the yellow-scummed sea-froth, so 
                         that an evanescence of irised bubbles occurs.

                         Simply, silvery the waves walk towards you. A 
                         ship has changed position on the horizon.

                         The dog lifts a leg against a grass-clump on a dune, 
                         for the count of three, wetting the sand.

                         There is standing room and much to be thankful for in 
                         the present. Look, a dead lamb on the beach.

The poem seems to invite exegesis, though that’s a further ploy. These are pieces in a pattern that won’t resolve. The poem includes directives, imperatives (Never turn, You say, It is, Look) that render the real world a verbal minefield. What strikes us is the incredible facility that has a Japanese fisherman’s float or a dog pissing seem so absolutely compelling and the (poem/poet’s) corresponding disinclination to account for the extreme extraordinariness of the effect that is created. The poem locks into this extraordinariness. Resembling meaning, it renders meaning a special kind of entrance-ment that suggests both a way in and a refusal of sure entry.

Now this playing with mastery over material is exactly what Wystan shows a disinclination to fool with. His use of materials may also constitute an appropriation (‘the moral impulse in my writing always seems to have something to do with possession’), however the repercussions are otherwise. Whereas Allen’s hold over his material feels unloosenable, Wystan’s has about it the feeling of being everywhere makeshift and provisional, teasingly non-committal. He’s out and about rummaging in other folks’ affairs. His ‘Appropriations’ (And/1)comprises sentences taken verbatim from the autobiographies of American astronauts – ‘for their weirdness’ (Lf177 8), he tells us. It is the contingency involved in textuality’s use of its sources (real or textual) that Wystan insists upon, that he seems to want to hold the hand of. Literary texts are co-extensive with any so-called reality, themselves as much a composite (‘made-up’) as it is.

In ‘Space Fiction No. 7’ (Lf96) various mundane facts of the writer’s life are interpolated with contemporaneous significant events of international space exploration. There’s as much intrinsic interest in the mundane facts of a ‘nobody’, a Wystan or Toby (Wystan’s son), as in the Americans’ and Russians’ space quests. It’s a game of articulation, an unfixed boyhood fascination. This placing side by side – whether sequentially as in ‘Space Fiction’ or in parallel-column fashion as in ‘Climbing Rangitoto/Descending the Guggenheim’ and the more recent quite tantalising ‘The Snips of Caster Bay’ and ‘GWTW’ (Lf177) – does not so much indicate an equivalence as it does a kind of an attentive ambivalence, a teasing. Outcomes aren’t the goal; instead we are presented with a kind of surreptitiousness (rapere: seize), a kind of double-take whereby, as in the case of ‘Appropriations’, the apparent naïveté and discordance in many of the sentences continues to romance as it undercuts the outlandish adventure of the American space mission. Similarly, in ‘Progress Never Came Without a Fight’, through means of a wrenching of the material slightly out of its comic book context, the cowboy lingo is even more heavily geared to the romantic context and history. One can’t be entirely sure what Wystan’s up to, where he’s at, where exactly his a/intentions are focused. And as much as it can be taken to represent a postmodernist practice, one I share and admire, in another way it can be taken to indicate an evasiveness which complements the invasiveness I take Allen’s practice to represent. ‘It was the problem of how to write about performance art’, Wystan tells, that ‘pushed me into a writing which was actively there, at one with its processes and procedures’ (Lf177 14) – and – ‘I have been drawn to the idea of all thought and all objects of thought being present in language at one time and of writing as tapping into that’ (9). The ultimate, for the vicarious: a ‘writing process per se unbound by genre’ (7). Hard to embrace this one.

Taking (re)possession of the map

Allen’s compelling power rests in his ability to render the material he uses pliable to his uses. Wystan performs (whether in collaboration or alone) art work based on an unresolved contingency in the materials employed. Sacerdotal parent, anecdotal offspring. Both play spinning games with their own (not to speak of the other’s) preoccupations. And while I have explored the case regarding a mutual non-accommodation, another can as persuasively be made (I have been nudging this way) concerning an unspoken protectiveness extended towards one another over an investment that is held in common. After all, Wystan’s postmodernist aesthetic is as susceptible to repudiation as Allen’s modernist one has been: an advocacy of ecological consciousness and a writing practice that exists beyond genre is as wishful as Allen’s endeavour to be creating magical New Zealand. The practice of literature simply does not guarantee any unifying premise. It doesn’t finally add up; and that, no doubt, helps account for our ongoing fascination. Literature may valorise a familial or any other societal norm, but ultimately it cares little either for family or for how humans care to get on. It seeks out nothing that it is not prepared to forego, follows no rule that it is not prepared to forsake. One cannot even presume that writing and language end up on the same team. The imputing of family value onto literature has been our ploy: it continues to occupy what Charles Brasch once termed Disputed Ground.

notes

[1] Original note: ‘I record my gratitude to Aichi-Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan for providing employment and the opportunity by which this paper could be prepared, and additional funds, which made possible my participation at the Curnow, Caxton and the Canon conference’.

[2] The map motif is taken from Wystan’s curatorial publication Putting the Land on the Map: Art and Cartography in New Zealand since 1840 (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Gallery, 1989).

[3] We see Allen disclaim the earlier pseudonymous ‘Jullian’ and ‘Whim Wham’ poems – poems which we know he had written. I acknowledge Terry Sturm’s exposition of this ownership/disownership feature in his Conference presentation.

[4] Wystan’s a prominent figure in the 1980s self-proclaimed marginal magazines, Parallax (1982-83), And (1983-85), Splash (1984-86), Antic (1986-90), in two of them as contributing editor. He also figures well in the Leggott Landfall (1991-93), coincidentally the last of the historical Caxton editorships and one which saw the magazine accused of catering overmuch to the margins. (In conversation, Leggott has said that there was no deliberate intention to feature Wystan’s work.)

[5] An exception is Michael Morrissey’s The New Fiction (Auckland: Lindon Publishing, 1985), a collection of purportedly postmodern, postrealist fictions, in which Wystan is well represented and proves pivotal in the introductory argument. He does not appear in the Wedde and McQueen The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985), has three pages in the Wedde-et al The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry

[6] See Allen Curnow, Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984, ed. and intro. Peter Simpson (Auckland: AUP, 1987), p. 73. Hereafter LBH.

[7]  Just as in ‘From Wystan to Carlos: Modern & Modernism in Recent N.Z. Poetry’ (Islands 27, Vol 7 No 5 (November 1979)) Stead distances himself from the influence of Allen, so Wedde in a 1985 interview distances himself from Stead’s take on high modernism by pointing out that Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos was ‘a closed thing’ and that ‘the whole distinction between open and closed form is one which should often be collapsed’ (Lf154, p. 165).

[8]  On the homogeneity of identity in the post-war literary community, see my ‘Landfall 1947-66: Foundation & a Supplement’, And/3 (1984).

[9]  This is as perplexing as it is understandable. Horrocks and Davis write enthusiastically about each other in And/1 and /2 respectively. In Splash/1 I review Leigh’s Willy’s Gazette. Leigh, Alex Calder and I are MA classmates who study under Roger and Wystan, fine mentors both. Wystan supervises my and Alex’s PhD theses. More recently I have written on books by Leggott and Loney, in Alan’s A Brief Description/3.

[10] It is interesting to note the recent announcement of the first electronic magazine of its type in Aotearoa, Current, edited by Tom Beard (http://www.comm-unity.co.nz/~current/). Electronic publication will surely reconstitute the rules of the literary family game.

[11] Allen was employed from February 1951 to January 1977, Wystan from March 1970.

[12] To be fair, I want to point out that Wystan’s more recent art writing shows an open-ended response to history and artistic influence. In ‘The Shining Cuckoo’ (included in Interpreting Contemporary Art, ed. Stephen Bann and William Allen, (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), in speaking of the uses made by other artists of McCahon’s work, Wystan argues that the freedom in art or literature is not simply bound to where it comes from, rather influence functions bi-directionally across the border that was formerly thought to clearly demarcate modernism and postmodernism, and he makes the case for ‘a flexible continuum’ by which they ‘may approach one another’ (30). As he puts it: ‘Ambiguity produces continuity and discontinuity in more or less equal proportions. Meaning accumulates on either side of what is neither one thing nor another but rather the conjunction, the border and gap, between one code and another, and reaches no conclusion’ (34).

[13]  As he moves further from the use of Olson and Creeley as models in the early 1980s towards Stein and the Silliman of The New Sentence, and Language writing practitioners more generally, the unit of composition in his texts becomes more distinctly the sentence and emphasis falls increasingly on temporal, spatial and structural disjunction (a punning) generated between sentences and their semantic componentry, something for which Silliman’s ‘torquing’ is cited. In conversation, Wystan has suggested that he now considers Language writers to represent postmodernism and earlier projectivists to represent a high modernism.