The Bloomsbury of the south
Peter Simpson’s new book reveals the extraordinary lives of Christchurch artists, painters and patrons between 1933 and 1953. He tells David Herkt about the people and their passions.
Every country has its vortex, a moment when people come together in a time and place and everything is changed afterwards.
Paris had its Picasso years. London had its Bloomsbury set in the 1920s and 1930s. Later New York had Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. In a new book, Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953, Peter Simpson reveals New Zealand’s own moment of cultural influence.
In those 20 years in Christchurch, a group of extraordinary men and women remade New Zealand art. They were, as Simpson describes, ‘‘a very tight little knot of people who were intricately involved with each other as people and artists and friends’’.
Amongst them was the internationally-famous detective writer, Ngaio Marsh, wearing trousers and driving a sports car, who would reshape Christchurch Theatre with her productions of Shakespeare, including a Hamlet in modern dress.
A young, angelic-faced poet James K Baxter would visit the painter, Colin McCahon, in his studio, a small converted washhouse in Merivale, where the canvas of Takaka: Night and Day, his largest to date, had to be bent around the corner of the room to fit.
Then there were the flats at 97 Cambridge Terrace, where painter Rita Angus, printer and painter Leo Bensemann, and the academic Lawrence Baignent lived in an arrangement of some complexity.
‘‘Rita was drawn to the sensitive, intellectual Baigent… while Baigent desired Bensemann and Bensemann was fascinated by Rita.’’ Composer Douglas Lilburn, homosexual in later life, also had a brief liaison with Rita Angus, which led to a pregnancy and miscarriage.
Simpson chronicles the personalities, The Group art shows, the musical performances, and the events which made Christchurch the liveliest of New Zealand’s cities at the time. Awarded the $100,000 Michael King Award in 2012 to complete Bloomsbury South, he remarks that he ‘‘wanted to repay this generosity by giving it my best shot. To write a book that won’t easily be ignored or forgotten, I guess.’’
Simpson grew up in Takaka, at the northern end of the South Island amid the views and vistas that feature in many of New Zealand’s greatest paintings.
His parents were farmers, running dairy on a river flat and sheep on the hills. ‘‘It was basically subsistence farming. We lived on the Old East Road about 15 kilometres south of the Takaka township, where I went to primary school, walking half a mile to catch the bus on the main road each day. It was a family of seven kids of which I was number six.
‘‘There weren’t many books at home, but I was a kid who loved reading and read everything I could get my hands on: comics, animal stories, westerns. I knew none of the classic English children’s books.’’
An old family story told of Simpson’s grandfather, snowed-in on Mt Arthur, keeping himself alive by tramping around all night, reciting Shakespeare. ‘‘So before I was five, an older sister forced me to learn screeds of Shakespeare off by heart. As a teenager, I had a nightly ritual of quoting off long poems: Keat’s Odes, Kublai Khan, Hopkins…’’
A teacher at high school introduced him to the British Modernist poets and the New Zealanders James K Baxter and Dennis Glover. Then Simpson attended the University of Canterbury in a cityscape filled with the echoes and after-effects of the artistic world that he would eventually describe in Bloomsbury South.
He became, as he says, ‘‘increasingly aware that, in previous decades, there had been a golden age in Christchurch art and culture, which by the 1960s had mysteriously faded. ’’I’ve spent half my life trying to work out what went right and what went wrong with Christchurch.’’
After the 1930s Depression, Christchurch became a magnet to young people. The city’s wellestablished strength, conservatism, and coherence, Simpson argues, meant that ‘‘reaction and innovation were, arguably, all the stronger.’’
Ursula Bethell, the poet and gardener, moved from her cottage in the Cashmere Hills down into Christchurch after the death of her friend and probable lover, Effie Pollen. There she nurtured a group of young people, including the poet Allan Curnow and painter Toss Woollaston.
Bethell was also friends with Charles Brasch, a gay man backed with family money from Hallenstein’s and DIC. Brasch’s generosity, often delivered in secret, bankrolled many of the artists of the time. He also founded Landfall, New Zealand’s premier literary magazine which is still in publication today.
‘‘Did a rich man ever make better use of his fortune?’’ Simpson asks.
Christchurch also housed the Caxton Press, formed by a group of investors, including the poet Dennis Glover, whose ‘‘selfdestruction as a genius’’, as Simpson describes, would create problems for both himself and the Press. Glover’s erratic decisions and increased drinking ultimately would delay Caxton’s publication schedule.
The Caxton Press books are benchmarks in New Zealand graphic design. ‘‘I think the essence of it is classic restraint, cleanness, unfussy, beautiful placement, and good sense of spatial relationships,’’ Simpson comments. ’’I think Glover was a genius in that respect.’’
There was also the ‘Pleasure Garden Affair’, where the forces of Christchurch’s conservatism would be opposed by the city’s younger artists and supporters. Paintings by the expatriate New Zealand artist, Frances Hodgkins, were offered to the city gallery, which refused them. A scandal ensued, played out in the press. A private collection raised enough money for the purchase, but the paintings were still rejected by the board.
‘‘It was important to those people. They were up against it. They were living in a philistine city with wretched standards in the arts, trying to make headway in their own and achieve something new in their own work.‘‘
Simpson’s career included a three-year period as the MP for Lyttelton, in the Fourth Labour Government. ‘‘I’m not a very political animal, but I hated Muldoon. I felt a personal sense of grievance about what he was doing to the country: the dawn raids on Pacific Islanders, the bullying of journalists, the Colin Moyle affair…
‘‘The timing was appalling. I’d been in Parliament for three months when the 1987 crash happened, then Lange and Douglas fell out… And what can a back-bencher do? You can’t do anything. It cost me a lot – careerwise, financially – but I don’t regret a minute of it.’’
He became head of English at Auckland University and retired in 2008. He has written about McCahon’s years in Titirangi, Bensemann’s life in Fantastica, and has just completed editing two volumes of Brasch’s diaries. Bloomsbury South brings many of these strands together in a copiously illustrated book.
‘‘A book like this you can read in three ways. You can look at the pictures, and read the captions and get a version of the story by doing so. Or you can read the text, and get another version. Or you do the whole shebang … I cut my teeth on my earlier books where the images were just important as important as the text. It is just the same with Bloomsbury South.
‘‘The last thing I wanted this book to be was to be parochial and parish-pump,’’ he says. ‘‘I didn’t want it to be confined to a local story. I didn’t really know why it had happened when I started and it was the reason I wrote the book.’’