The long goodbye
We thought Maurice Gee had stopped writing, but a new book has appeared. Philip Matthews finds out why.
Writer Maurice Gee went quiet about 10 years ago. There was a final novel, Access Road ,in 2009, and another he abandoned after getting about 10,000 or 15,000 words into it, believing it had died on him. There was a last summit at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2012, when he was joined onstage by friend and publisher Geoff Walker for an hour-long chat. It was the festival’s closing event; there was a standing ovation. It all seemed very final.
‘‘I have a sense of completion,’’ Gee told Walker. ‘‘The fiction is done as well as I can do it.’’ He added: ‘‘I’m absolutely at ease. I look back on the 30 or so novels and I think, that’s OK.’’
That was going to be that. Case closed, end of story. But now there is this. Nearly two years after a children’s fantasy, The Severed
Land, seemed to appear from nowhere, Gee has issued another book from the deep silence of Nelson. This time it is a memoir in three parts, titled Memory Pieces.
Gee fans knew of the existence of some of it. It was more than a rumour. Gee told Walker that he had ‘‘completed a short memoir of my own life up to my messy and tortured adolescence’’. Three years later, his biographer Rachel Barrowman explained that he had also written a memoir about his parents, for the wider family to read. There was no sense that the rest of us would see them.
But now we can. The first part of Memory
Pieces, ‘‘Double Unit’’, tells the story of his parents, focusing on the thwarted writing career of his mother, Lyndahl Chapple Gee. Part two, ‘‘Blind Road’’, is that story of a
‘‘Childhood is a barrel I can dip into and bring out whatever I want. There’s no trick. The thing I want is there to put my hand on.’’
messy and tortured adolescence. Part three, ‘‘Running on the Stairs’’ is the story of his wife, Margaretha Garden.
These are the days of his lives, recalled in plain light. The legendary author, now 87, has even made himself available for interview – albeit by email. There will also be a rare public appearance in Nelson in October to launch Memory Pieces within the Nelson Arts Festival, early on a Friday afternoon.
How is it done? How does Gee recover memories from 80 years ago, from a preWorld War II world in then rural west Auckland with its creeks and tracks, and make it so fresh? Most of us can barely remember last week. So, I ask, what is the trick for stepping into the past like this?
‘‘Childhood is a barrel I can dip into and bring out whatever I want,’’ he writes back. ‘‘There’s no trick. The thing I want is there to put my hand on.’’
There is a strong memory of walking with his mother and his two brothers by a creek and seeing a swagman washing in the water. His clothes were in a pile, he had a piece of yellow soap in his hand. This was the world of the 1930s.
‘‘I can see him in detail this moment, as I write,’’ he says. ‘‘And the creek itself – I can travel down it pool by pool for a couple of miles of its length. It runs through my fiction. It has a fixed place. My childhood is fixed. I remember it in detail and colour, something I can’t do with my middle years, or yesterday. Maybe it has something to do with the physiology of the brain, neurons firing better in the part that stores in the early memories.’’
He says that ‘‘Double Unit’’ had been lying around for seven or eight years. ‘‘I wanted especially to record my mother’s struggles, heroic struggles, to become a writer and to present some of her writing to family members who had little idea of her talents. Dad was in his way heroic too. His story had to be told along with hers.’’
His mother wrote poems, stories and even a novel for children. Some things were published and she clearly had some talent but the contrast between Gee’s ease and fluency and his mother’s hesitancy and inexperience is obvious. There is this quietly devastating sentence from Gee, suggestive of so much frustration: ‘‘She wanted a mental life but it would not arrive properly.’’
This makes ‘‘Double Unit’’ an exercise in writing as an act of love and remembrance as well as an assessment of his parents’ lives. In the end, there is no way to sum them up, he writes. ‘‘Their lives went this way and that, were happy and unhappy; joined with each other early and grew apart and joined again. They achieved some of what they had hoped for, and missed a lot more.’’
‘You don’t live alone’
When Gee talked with Geoff Walker at the Auckland Writers’ Festival, he talked about why he had resisted writing an autobiography. He called it ‘‘an imperialism’’ and said: ‘‘You don’t live alone. All sorts of people around you influence you.’’ Besides, he had ‘‘confessed almost everything’’ during long interviews like that one.
This word ‘‘imperialism’’. What did Gee mean by that?
‘‘I meant that you can’t barge in and grab other people’s lives, whether to illustrate your own or not,’’ he says. ‘‘They have privacies and things that belong to them alone. But I wanted to present my parents whole in ‘Double Unit’, so I told stories I would not have told if they had been alive. And they remain mysterious to me now that I’ve done it all. It’s never the complete picture.’’
Do we ever fully understand who our parents were? Another figure dominates in both ‘‘Double Unit’’ and ‘‘Blind Road’’, and that is Gee’s grandfather, James Chapple. He was a controversial Presbyterian minister, a renegade intellectual in early 20th century New Zealand, a preacher who backed striking miners, a pacifist in a time of war. ‘‘Trouble was to be the story of his professional life,’’ Gee writes in ‘‘Double Unit’’.
James Chapple had high standards and cast a long shadow. Life around him was not easy for others, which is what Gee’s classic 1978 novel Plumb was at least partly about. Gee’s George Plumb closely resembled the real-life Chapple. As you go through Memory
Pieces, you might detect an exasperation with the imperious Chapple and a preference for the more physical, less intellectual Len Gee, the author’s father. They seem like two poles, two distinct types.
‘‘My grandfather had what he would have called a life of the mind,’’ Gee says. ‘‘Dad didn’t go there. He grinned at it and took off the other way. He was a builder and had been a boxer. It was hugely important to me and my brothers that he knocked men out – and that he could make things. He made houses. We saw them go up. Yet he had strong feelings and could express them, and he was endlessly generous. They were poles apart, my father and grandfather, yet they and the way they looked at life seem equally important to me now.’’
Some say Plumb is the best novel Gee has written. Others go further and say it is the best novel anyone in New Zealand has written. When The Spinoff Review of Books quizzed experts to identify the top work from
the past 50 years of the New Zealand book awards, Plumb by Gee won (Janet Frame came second; Keri Hulme came third). It really is that good.
The Spinoff contacted Gee, through the Nelson Arts Festival, for comment. He emailed back: ‘‘I don’t think ‘top’ can be measured but it’s good to know that Plumb is remembered and that people enjoy it. Actually, I can be more enthusiastic than that: I’m chuffed.’’
He wrote four ‘‘apprentice novels’’ before he was ready to tackle Plumb, he said. He had his grandfather’s story, he had time on his hands. His two daughters were at school, and he was able to write full time at last ‘‘in our new town of Nelson, in a little room I had built under the house’’. He wrote novels and he also wrote TV shows – Close to Home, Mortimer’s Patch.
A year after Plumb he published Under
the Mountain, inspired by Alan Garner’s supernatural fiction for children and the ominousness of Auckland’s volcanic cones and a subterranean network he imagined. ‘‘I never did like Lake Pupuke,’’ the book’s New Zealand editor said, approvingly.
‘‘People don’t often mention my books to me but when they do it’s usually Under the
Mountain they want to talk about,’’ Gee says. ‘‘They read it as kids. They loved those slimy Wilberforces and Rangitoto exploding. Some of them don’t know that I wrote for adults too and they’ve never heard of Plumb.’’
Ashamed and horrified
When people asked Gee why his novels were so violent, he would reply: ‘‘I didn’t invent darkness and violence. You’ve only got to read the daily paper.’’
On one hand, there is plenty of darkness in the human heart and so on. On the other hand, violent acts simply make for great stories.
He didn’t invent shame and repression, either, but it found such perfect expression in his work. And it is not hard, as you go through Memory Pieces, to identify its sources. Just as certain childhood images are unforgettable, so are some childhood acts. They have appeared, barely disguised, in his fiction.
He was a sensitive middle brother and shame was acute at times. When he was 8, he and his older brother trashed a classroom in the Catholic school next door. Why? No idea. He was a bit older when he joined in the bullying of a boy they called Fatty Walker who was caught looking into the girls’ changing sheds at a swimming pool. He writes that he still pictures ‘‘hyenas snapping and biting round a wounded animal’’ and the reader shudders along with him.
‘‘I’m more than ashamed, I’m horrified at myself,’’ he explains. ‘‘There’s no forgiveness.’’
He says he tried to imagine the damage done when he put the bullying into his children’s novel The Fat Man but ‘‘it didn’t help much’’. He thinks about the Catholic school incident with sorrow and wonders ‘‘how the children and the teaching nuns must have felt when they walked in on the wreckage. There are quite a few characters in my books who can’t escape from things they’ve done.’’
But in the end, Memory Pieces is a love story. The penultimate paragraph of Rachel Barrowman’s biography of Gee said that: ‘‘It was more than 40 years since Margareta had bounded up the stairs and into his office at the Turnbull Library in 1966 and introduced herself. That was a meeting which changed his life.’’ So, naturally, the third part of
Memory Pieces is titled ‘‘Running on the Stairs’’ and starts: ‘‘It began with the clatter of footsteps on stairs.’’
Margaretha (she would drop the H) Garden was ‘‘a half-Swedish, half-Scottish girl with a divorced foreign mother, growing up in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s,’’ he says. She was moved from place to place and school to school, ‘‘yet she grew up happy and undamaged’’.
Sometimes things work out. He says: ‘‘Meeting Margareta changed my life, no doubt about it. I was 38 when we got together and was drifting and wasting my time and only pretending to be a writer. She brought stability of every kind into my life – and as I point out in ‘Running on the Stairs’, two novels and a handful of stories before meeting her, more than 30 novels since. I really enjoyed writing about her girlhood, which is interesting and entertaining in all sorts of ways.’’
Anything else he wants you to know is in the book, but a final question has to be asked: will there be any more novels?
‘‘I’ve announced twice before that I’ve finished writing novels, then brought out another one,’’ he replies. ‘‘I’ll say it again and hope it triggers something.’’