Book of the Week: Paragraphs and Letters
Murray Edmond, Caxton Press, 1988
Scott Hamilton Talks with Murray Edmond about His Eighties Masterpiece
For five and a half decades Murray Edmonds has been one of Aotearoa's most innovative and interesting writers. This is part of an interview I did with the man during his recent visit to Warkworth/Puhinui. Murray had come north from his base in West Auckland to research legendary local botanist and environmentalist Lucy Moore. He's writing a book about female intellectuals and creatives in mid-twentieth century Aotearoa.
SH: Letters and Paragraphs is my favourite book of your poetry. It seems rooted in the 1980s, and yet at the same time contemporary. And I know you're not responsible for the cover.
ME: I am not responsible for the cover... Letters and Paragraphs was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards, actually. Here's a story: one of the judges—or the judge, I think there was only one—was Lauris Edmond.
SH: Your aunty.
ME: Right. And another of the finalists was Anne French, and I knew who would win when I heard that. However, Metro Magazine, which in 1987 was in its pomp, took an interest in the competition. Warwick Roger, in this gossipy Felicity Ferret column, asked what kind of corruption was going on in our literature. People are choosing their nephews! Nepotism! Whereas I knew the opposite was really true. I wouldn’t win.
SH: People assume nepotism operates in family, but you can have the Fred Goodall syndrome. You know how Fred Goodall, the umpire, another nineteen-eighties figure, like Warwick Roger, a very tough cricket umpire. Didn’t take any nonsense—but he was exceptionally harsh on his own side. I think because he wanted to prove his lack of bias. So he penalised the New Zealand cricket team, at times. He wouldn’t raise the finger to plum LBWs. He wanted to prove his neutrality, and he proved his neutrality by being biased.
ME: Maybe that was part of it. I recall Fred was not popular with Michael Holding and Colin Croft after he gave Geoff Howarth not out when he was out. Perhaps he wasn’t a very good umpire.
SH: Your aunty was Fred Goodall?
ME: Maybe. I’ve never thought of her as Fred Goodall, but maybe. And that cover…
SH: It’s very eighties too, like Fred Goodall’s moustache. But not in a good way.
ME: No. Not in a good way.
SH: I’ve checked carefully and no one is credited with the cover design. It’s interesting that over the years no one has come forward to claim credit. Perhaps this interview will motivate them to step up and enjoy their moment of glory...
ME: Perhaps.
SH: Do you think it was a rush job?
ME: I think it was a quick job. Caxton Press was the publisher. By the ‘80s they weren’t doing many poetry books. I think they probably asked an apprentice and the apprentice did the job. Quickly.
SH: By any means necessary...
ME: The poems in the book go from sort of nineteen 1982ish to 1986. I hadn’t thought about it ‘til you asked me to do this interview, but there’s a whole geography and timeline embedded in it. I lived in Wellington in 1982, but I worked running a company called Town and Country Players, which was a small traveling performing company doing two kinds of performance in schools, principally in primary schools. And also community shows from time to time in country halls. Dana Glen Denning, who was later a Green MP, and had a farm in the Southern Wairarapa, she came to me when I was unemployed, and there was this thing called TEP, Temporary Employment Programme, which had been set up under Muldoon. It was the first scheme of that kind that arts people were able to get onto.
SH: I’ve just been reading Richard Langston’s oral history of The Clean, I’m going to review it, it’s a fine piece of work, and it mentions that the same scheme employed David Kilgour for periods in the 1980s. Perhaps it was a lifeline for a few Kiwi creatives, a bit like FDR’s schemes for artists in Depression-era America?
ME: I signed on as a swimming pool attendant.
SH: Of course.
ME: That was the ruse. And as a swimming pool attendant, I became an artist in the house in Wellington, which was the base for all the artists employed as swimming pool attendants (because you couldn’t sign on as an artist, there was no such category of work). And so I started to set up this company. And at the beginning of 1980, we had five members of the company, four of them on TEP, and one whom we were earning a wage for. By the end of that year, we had four people were earning a wage for and one on temporary employment. And the next year, we were all earning a wage. So it was quite successful.
SH: So you're travelling around the country?
ME: Traveling around the bottom of the North Island and the top of the South Island. Not further. I made a rule. We go away for no more than three days. And we come home, and we run away from each other. Or we will go mad. So there are two poems in the book from our period travelling. One of the poems is for Jennifer Ward Leland. She was 19 when she came to work for us in 1982. And one is for Janet Elepans, which is one of the little sonnets, it’s called ‘Hickville’. That’s the old name for Napier. Janet was really our musical director. She wasn't so much an actor, but she could transpose. She could play many things. She was a trained opera singer, so she brought a lot of skills...
SH: So you were venturing out into the heartlands, leaving the city behind. Don McGlashlan was touring at roughly the same time with his first band, Blam Blam Blam, and he in an interview many years later he remembered that he and his bandmates found themselves out of their depth, outside the city. It was a different world. And some of his darker songs, like that magnificent piece of Kiwi gothic ‘White Valiant’, he linked to this experience…
ME: You know, we hit this different country, and it was this culture shock to go from a large urban centre and to have to be travelling the country. But Dana Glendenning, she encouraged us not to try to change our act. She said ‘Go and do what you do, and they'll have to cope with you’. She said ‘I don't care what you do, but what I'm really interested in is after the show, you're billeted with the farmers, and you're sitting on the couch drinking your fourth whiskey. What argument do you get into? That’s what interests me.’ So that was her advice. She was a very canny woman. She had her own photocopying machine on her farm in 1982. And she ran her organization called Rural Activists. So I suppose she was the far left of the rural world. But she, you know, she didn't go around advertising herself like that. So she set up that challenge. She said, do you think you could do it? We performed in rural schools in the daytime, sometimes we did workshops, and then, if we could arrange it, we performed for the community at night. That always took a lot of arranging. We made our own work. But, for schools, we worked quite closely with Joy Cowley for a couple of years, dramatizing some of her stories. And she wrote a couple of school shows for us.
SH: Did you have some good conversations after the shows?
ME: We did. There were some great conversations, some real exchanges.
SH: In his autobiography, I think, Bruce Mason talks about going around rural New Zealand, and he goes to one cow town. And there's a woman who want to go and see him, and she has to persuade her husband. It’s a one-man play.
ME: Must have been The End of the Golden Weather.
SH: And she has to persuade her husband, who's a cow cocky. And her husband says ‘I don’t want to go and see a bloke talking about himself for two hours’.
ME: He was probably performing with CAS—the Community Art Service. They sent him round the country in the early ‘60s.
SH: But the farmer goes, and he gets something out of the show. And Mason stays with him, and in the next morning helps milk his cows. So there’s an exchange—one type of labour for another. But Kai Jensen, in his book about masculinity in New Zealand literature, I think it’s called Real Men, he actually criticises Mason for presenting a sort of idealised encounter of intellectual and farm muscle, he suggests that the episode is about wish-fulfilment on Mason’s part. It’s to do with the insecurity of male Pākehā writers, their sense that they aren’t ‘real men’, that they dig with pens rather than spades, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney.
ME: I think we experienced some synchronicity—as well as confrontation. It was fun touring. We did make connections. I think old Kai is being a bit harsh.
SH: I think he’s right that there’s been a tendency to idealise rural life. Simon Pound in his posthumous book about nationalism in Pākehā art points out that for decades painters who actually lived in the city avoided urban subject matter. They painted rural landscapes when there were factories and train stations in front of them. But there’s another tendency, perhaps it’s just the flip side of the same coin, to assume that anything interesting has to come from the cities. That’s just as bad.
ME: I’m not saying everything was easy... We were touring in 1981, during the upheaval caused by the Springbok tour. Strong feelings. One of our team, Ralph, insisted on wearing his HART badges. That caused a bit of a stir. HART wasn’t that popular in some rural communities. There probably was a rural-urban split over the tour... I enjoyed performing with Ralph. He was strong. I could stand on his shoulders! He insisted on wearing his HART badge to show he was anti-tour, but he didn’t wear shoes. Never wore shoes. I’d urge him to put some shoes on when we were going into schools. He was anti-tour and he was anti-shoe. There was no badge for that.
SH: There might be one somewhere.
ME: I think Dana Glendinning had a more sophisticated idea of the country than Kai, really. She didn't think the rural sector was stupid. She thought it was quite complex and interesting. And same with the urban. And she felt we would find lots of contradictions and crossovers. Her view was that the cultural tax dollar wasn’t coming to the rural sector. Why shouldn’t the rural sector get to experience theatre and the other arts? But she also thought that the rural sector needed to hear and see and deal with what us artists had to show them.
SH: What happened to the group, to Town and Country?
ME: After I’d left and moved to Auckland, Town and Country segued into Te Ohu Whakaari, which was one of the small Māori groupings in Wellington that contributed to the Depot and the flourishing of Māori Theatre that began there in second half of the 1980s, when the Depot became Taki Rua in 1990. Rangimoana Taylor was in Town and Country players for a little while with me as an actor and he was one of the pivotal figures in that flourishing. That was an interesting cross-over at that time.
SH: There are a lot of poems in the book about cars and about travel, about moving. And seeing the landscape in a state of flux, as flux. And the sense of travelling time as well space, of finding places that are portals into the past.
ME: That’s the background to ‘A Letter about Cars’, the poem that's dedicated to the late Russell Haley.
SH: My favourite poem in the book is ‘Two Paragraphs’, which is phantasmagoric: there's this car moving through a landscape, a landscape that might be in the open air or underground, and the car itself is changing. The poem itself is continually changing, it is never stable. We're not even sure whether the car is a car or whether it's an animal or whether it's a person. Historical figures appear and disappear in the poem, and we’re not sure if we’re travelling backwards or forwards in time. The poem seems perched on the edge of collapse, but it somehow hangs together. It's like a painting which is on the edge between figuration and abstraction. When I read it, I got the feeling maybe this is something that just came out all at once. It reads like something made in a trance. Do you remember writing it?
ME: No.
SH: That’s a bit disappointing.
ME: I don't remember, actually. I suspect I wrote it in Auckland. But those historical colonial figures, Rochfort, Hochstetter and Te Kooti, were people I had been reading about during my Writer-in-residence year at Canterbury University. It had been wonderful to have access to a good university library, which I hadn’t had for years. It’s interesting, those two poems, ‘Letter About Cars’ and ‘Two Paragraphs’ were picked and anthologised by Ian Wedde, he put them in his Penguin Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry in 1987. So they resonated with someone at the time... And the eighties were a time of flux. Bombs going off. Rogernomics. The Springbok tour. History gets into poetry whether the poet intends it or not. But I probably did intend it. There are bomb blasts behind some of the poems in the book.
SH: Let’s talk about the chaos. Rogernomics, scorched earth capitalism, bombs.
ME: Here’s a story about Rogernomics. I had come back to Wellington from the year at Canterbury, but I hadn’t rejoined Town and Country Players. I reckoned I had done what I could there. In March 1984 there was a big hui called the Theatre Policy Conference. It was held in the old Todd Motors Building, where the Arts Council was on Courtney Place. And it was an all-day conference, and I was asked to present a paper about the ‘Small Touring Company.’ I was given a quarter an hour or twenty minutes or something. I think I presented before morning tea. The first person to speak, before I did, was a ‘Man from Treasury.’ He was nameless. Remember, this is March 1984, months before the fall of Muldoon and the election of the fourth Labour government. This man stood up, and he gave a complete summary of the neo-liberal future. Absolutely, accurately, completely without shame. And all arts people fell about laughing. This will never happen here—ha ha ha! I remember the cold chill I had listening to it. The very cold chill. And, of course, all he did was read his paper, pick it up and stuff it in his briefcase, and leave. I mean, he wasn't gonna stay for the day. It was an early morning assignment, and he'd done it, and that was it. I was next. So I talked about, you know, an idealistic, neoromantic view of running around the country, performing, bringing art to the people. The stuff we’d been doing. At the end, because I was on the dole by then, I said, “So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening, and I'm unemployed at the moment and this is my job application. If anyone can give me a job, thank you very much.” And Jonathan Hardy, the Director of the Mercury Theatre in Auckland, was standing at the back of the room, and he said, “I'll give you a job.” And I said, “Good. I'll take your job.” Right across the heads of everyone there. I came out of Todd Motors building at the end of the day, evening beginning, and it was quite close to where Taranaki Street comes to meet Courtena Place, and there were police cars everywhere, blue lights flashing. There was yellow tape around everything, streets closed off. Because earlier that day, Ernie Abbott had been blown to pieces.
SH: The Trades Hall bombing.
ME: This was bombing number three. We’d had the Neil Roberts bomb in 1982. He’d tried to blow up the police computer in Whanganui. Then there was the bombing of North Oxford bridge in 1983—one of the poems in the book, ‘Notes on 14th March ’83’, was response to that. And in 1985 we had the Rainbow Warrior blown up by the French.
SH: I hadn’t heard about the North Oxford bomb until I read your poem. When I checked the other day very little had been written about it. There were the newspaper reports, and there was your poem. I found a photo, and it shows the magnitude of the blast. Gelignite had been attached to the legs of a large railway bridge. It was not some spontaneous destructive act. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. And anarchist graffiti was found nearby. The bridge was in a remote area and had not been used for years. No one even knew the blast had occurred for some time. And no one has ever been arrested for the blast. It’s just one of numerous obscure acts of violence in our history.
ME: Roberts’s slogan, ‘We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’ is a translation from the Spanish of Pedro Domingo Murillo and his attack on the Spanish rulers in La Paz in Bolivia in 1809. I wrote about that connection in my book, Time to Make a Song and Dance.
SH: The historian Jared Davidson has been researching arson in this country. He published an article that shows that the burning of haystacks was widespread in the nineteenth century. It was often a way for disaffected rural workers to get back at a farmer. In your book Time to Make a Song and Dance, about the counterculture in 1960s Auckland, you give some space to the series of bombs that radical opponents of the Vietnam War let off around the city in 1969-70. Apart from you, almost no one has written about those blasts. It’s almost as though all this violence has been repressed. You’ve also written about the Trades Hall bombing, which like the North Oxford blast has never been pinned on anyone.
ME: Yeah, in that essay, ‘The Terror and the Pity of 1984’, I tried to get across the atmosphere of 1984. The widespread societal tension...that includes the tension between capital and labour. Muldoon fighting the unions, calling them enemies, subversives.
SH: It’s an aspect of the era people forget. From 1975 to 1983 there were more strikes proportionally than at any other time in our history. Not just strikes led by unions but wildcat strikes.
ME: That’s where the man from Treasury came in. The right was very well organised, very well prepared. The left had seemed to be making advances for years but a counterattack was being prepared. The right was waiting in the wings to steal all the wealth created by the much-derided welfare state. That counterattack was Rogernomics. The New Zealand Company had played the same role in early colonization. It took a lot of people on the left by surprise. It was shocking in its suddenness...
SH: And this is part of an international, what would you call it, counter-revolution. Thatcherism, Reaganomics. People today look back on the eighties and have the sense that the victory of neo-liberalism was assured. But both Thatcher and Reagan were very unpopular in their first couple of years in power. People resisted the privatisations, the cuts to the welfare state, the attack on unions.
ME: The Falklands War probably saved Thatcher. But my point is that even in March 1984 a lot of people in the arts community didn’t know what was coming. And beyond the arts community too. Labour did a trade off, they introduced some socially liberal policy and stuff like the ban on nuclear ships to appease the left, whilst implementing neo-liberalism. It disoriented a lot of people. Getting rid of Muldoon in 1984 was a triumph. We were ecstatic. It was like the election of Blair in the UK in 1997. The disappointment came later.
SH: I was ten in 1984. Even at that age I picked up the vibe. We had a rhyme at school, I think I heard adults saying it to, it went ‘God’s up there with the stars and the moon, we’re down here with Piggy Muldoon’. There was a perception of crisis and decline. I’m a big fan of the cartoonist Bromhead, I have been since I was a kid, and I remember what he drew after the 1984 election, in the Auckland Star. Muldoon and Lange were standing in a sewer, the name 'New Zealand' was written on a wall. Muldoon said to Lange ‘You can have it, mate’. The economic crisis, which had been brewing for a decade, ever since the oil shock and the end of the long postwar boom, was solved—but at the expense of the living standards of most of the population. And those small towns, the places where you were touring—they were decimated, weren’t they? Businesses closed, services like banks gone, post offices closed. Many haven’t recovered.
ME: When the Rainbow Warrior was bombed, we had a flat in Parnell, top floor of an old house, and I drove down with my son before school, he must have been only eight, to have a look. That one wasn’t a puzzle; it was obviously the French. It was logical in a way. But it was terrifying, because we hadn’t thought they’d go that far. Now I’ve come to feel that anything is possible.
SH: I recently read Dominic Hoey’s novel 1985, which I thought was a really well-constructed and quite poignant recreation of the sort of world Rogernomics swept away—pre-gentrification Ponsonby and Grey Lynn. Pre-yuppie Ponsonby, when it was full of poets and Pasifika families. The reason I mention the book is that it begins with the narrator’s family doing exactly what you did—driving into town to look at the bombed vessel. Perhaps just trying to convince themselves that the bombing had really happened.
ME: Yeah, it happened. So that was the fifth bombing. And although only one of the bombings is explicitly mentioned in the book they are all in the background. Just to round out the picture—Dominic was a mate of my son Jacob when they were at Western Springs together and they were both in the under 16s and under 18s Grafton Club cricket team, which was coached by none other than myself! I tried to be balanced in a non-Fred Goodall way when I was umpiring of a Saturday afternoon.
Two Paragraphs
1
The car moves through roots and crevices and passes,
dry nets of spiders dangle in caves of earth,
the moves like a blind mouse in the tunnels
of a megalopolis of sand, reaching through marram
and spinifex to the unknown thing generalized
in a word as ‘light’ or ‘death’ or ‘the unknown,’
the ‘unknown thing’ known simply as ‘the unknown,’
the car passes towns and trees and houses
inked into shapes of grass and concrete, the car
climbs like a tiny figure on stage climbs, dressed
in long white underwear, climbing through
the roads of Rochfort and Hochstetter and Te Kooti,
the car comes in three collapsible parts like a kitset
of ego and id and superego, the car carries all the goods
and worldly thoughts and conspiracies of dreams on its
royal road, all daft games of animal/vegetable/mineral—
a cloud, paint, a drumstick, a pinecone, a light bulb, ice—
scissors/paper/rock—the car aches with photographs
and indigenous subtropical rainforests and pure bone grief
it has swallowed in its great hunger to get where it is
going and cannot now cough up
2
Face east, face west, face north, face south—the four faces
of a geographic mandala which orient the moving object in space—
there is classic gold out of 1972 on the radio,
there is a day ahead planned for you at the beach,
surf life-saving competitions—life, surf, saving and competition—
words which willingly fall together like a recipe.
A sentence is a practical compromise to get
the thing done—light, flexible, full of feeling, muscular
yet elastic, with edge and a point where it tips
leading you into the next—the newspaper is yawning
at the precipice of a new economic era.
The car is driving past Hiruharama.
It is nineteen years since Baxter wrote
‘Summer 1967’ though in the antipodes it’s always ambiguous
which summer you mean when you supply one year only.
In his poem there are no cars
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