DECODING THE DRAMA ‘A flame burning upwards’

Peter Wells, one of New Zealand’s most respected writers, talks to his friend David Herkt about his cancer treatment, mortality, social media, sexuality, and his new book: Dear Oliver.

When the good-looking doctor poked his head into a room on the sixth floor of Auckland Hospital, I stood up to leave. I was visiting Peter Wells, award-winning novelist and New Zealand historian. He galvanised the efforts which preserved Napier’s Art Deco buildings and saved the grandeur of Auckland’s Civic Theatre from demolition. With his then partner, Stewart Main, he co-directed the stylish feature film, Desperate Remedies, and a groundbreaking television drama,

A Death in the Family.

He has been my friend for more than 20 years. “No, no, you don’t have to go,” Peter said to me, gesturing back at the chair I had just vacated.

Peter has prostate cancer which has metastasised, invading other parts of his body. While in hospital, without any other writing implements, he began writing on his iPhone, posting frank – often lengthy – updates to his Facebook page.

“I was taken aback on the day I left hospital,” he later wrote, “when that smooth-faced young doctor mentioned to me the likelihood I would be having chemotherapy.”

I saw the doctor’s words impact on Peter’s face. It was only then that I realised I was seeing his very first reaction.

“This was a shock,” he continued. “I had understood it was a distant possibility. Now I saw the doors were wide open and they were in fact awaiting me. It was I who had to catch up.

“It was sort of an emergency form of communication,” was how he described his Facebook postings to me later. “It was the closest thing I had to hand, at a time when it seemed I had very startling news – news that was completely startling to me at any rate.”

His near-daily updates gathered scores of comments. They would soon be widely shared.

In effect, Peter was verbalising everyone’s experiences, everyone’s fears, and he was shaping them. As a writer, he was doing his job: to take raw experience and made it universally applicable. It was the transformative power of art in action.

Strangest of all, his updates bore a distinct relationship to his new book, Dear Oliver: Uncovering a Pākehā history. Peter’s social media postings were exactly the same as the handed-down letters and photographs of his parents and extended family that he had used as raw material for Dear Oliver.

“It’s like a personal travelogue into the past, via these really strange, often almost trivial letters, almost like a magic carpet to different times and places,” he told me. “It is as much about understanding myself as it is about understanding the past. And it is also about understanding New Zealand and in particular the Pākehā history of New Zealand.” Dear Oliver is a story framed by the decline and the death of Peter’s mother, Bess, a few days short of her 101st birthday in a Napier rest home. Written from the point of view of a loving son, it does not flinch from the truth of age and dementia.

“Well, it’s no wonder I haven’t had a letter from her lately,” Bess says, when she is told that the sister she has just inquired about had died 30 years previously. “I was just thinking the other day that a letter from her is definitely overdue.”

Peter writes that he couldn’t help laughing and Bess, “catching his lilt”, joins in. But there are darker places in the long process of dying.

“Inappropriate behaviours” with clothing mean that Bess is placed in a higher-security special-care unit, where her hair is cut brutally short and she is deprived of make-up and earrings.

“I didn’t feel I was being cruel when I was writing all that down,” Peter says. “It was like reportage of something that I was inextricably caught in and partially horrified by and partially completely accepting that this was what it was and that I needed to be there. And I thought, even with the terrible indignity of what happened, she still maintained some sort of incredible quality of character.

“When she returned to her character towards the very end and said things like, ‘You’ve got to go and do the things you need to do,’ and, ‘Look after yourself.’ It was an immensely moving directive for me.”

The “Oliver” of the book’s title is an 8-month-old child of two lesbian mothers, on a visit to New Zealand from the United States. The baby’s grandmother is Peter’s cousin.

Imagining things from the point of view of a grown-up Oliver, some time in the future, is the means by which Peter begins to the decode the long family drama.

He describes himself and his older brother, Russell, when their parents were out, taking every opportunity to go through cupboards, looking through the letters and photographs in boxes on high shelves.

“I don’t know whether or not my brother and I were just nosey little bastards, really, or whether it is something all children do. To all children, your parents are immensely mysterious.

“You’ve got the ever-presentness of them as authority figures and you’ve got this really strange sense of other possibilities they had in their lives. That is utterly fascinating when you are growing yourself. It just gives you a sense of the impermanence of time – and the way that character changes in people’s lives.”

Peter initially focuses on the period of World War II, when his father was fighting in Europe and his mother had the heady freedom of being a working and waged woman. There is a concealed pair of dog-tags from an American serviceman that reveals a romantic entanglement when her husband, a man she had barely time to know before his call-up, was at war.

“Why are you saying these things? These things should be kept in the family!” Peter said to me when he imagined his mother’s response to the various revelations of the book.

“Yet there is nothing peculiar about my family and my mother’s family. There are generalities and universalities there… There are angles of particular shame about incidents and things like that, but they connect with much larger issues which are really important to talk about.”

In Dear Oliver, he describes his family home as “a house of secrets” where “there are always further locked and barred rooms, rooms without exits, rooms sealed up, rooms that only the imprisoned individual knows and feels at home within.”

There is Peter’s own past, including his “coming out” letter to his parents where he explained his homosexuality. His older brother, Russell, also gay, died of Aids in 1987. His mother had a nervous breakdown as a consequence and was given shock treatment.

Going back in time there is his grandmother, Jessie Northe – “nobody’s fool” an “ace bridge player” – and regular letter writer with quick and acute observations of Napier society. Her letters are an angled glimpse of a gone provincial New Zealand filled with compressed anecdotes. “She had physiotherapy one day and she was dead the next morning,” Jessie writes.

Peter’s grandfather, Ern Northe, had been trapped by a quixotic will where his own father had decreed that all eight of his sons should work in the family business. They would all get exactly the same wage, no matter their position. It was a legacy which shaped Ern’s character, for good and for bad.

Dear Oliver is a book of fast stories, quick detail, and reconstructions of New Zealand lives that become ever more blurry and fragmentary as the effects of time work upon memory and records.

A relative, Sidney Northe, left Hawke’s Bay to fight in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa in 1900,

“It was sort of an emergency form of communication,” was how he described his Facebook postings to me later. “It was the closest thing I had to hand.”

becoming a small “media sensation” by writing about his adventures in New Zealand newspapers. The engaging Elizabeth Ereaux, in London, held the family together with her gossipy letters in 1848 and 1852, describing the social life of a Cheapside boarding-house owner, her cat, and the parrot she had taught to speak.

Then there is Australian convict, Samuel Northey. He is barely revealed in a stark report of a failed expedition driving cattle across the bleak and untracked wastes of Northern New South Wales.

“I wanted to address the fact that people in the future will find – in particular – Pākehā history, very, very difficult to understand, sympathise or empathise with,” he told me. “In particular I wanted to widen the lens a little bit and find out what went into that culture. There is that sense too, of this is where we come from, this is who we come from…

“There are two places in my life that are obsessively interesting to me,” he observed of himself in this context. “One of which is Point Chevalier and the other is Napier.”

Point Chevalier, in Auckland, was his childhood home. It is evoked in vivid detail in his novel, Boy Overboard, and in his memoir, Long Loop Home.

It was also the site of an early sexual awakening. “My natural development was stymied, like so many gay men of my era, by the illegality and stigmatisation of the time,” he recently wrote. “In my own case I had an extra bonus, you might call it… I was sexually abused as a boy by an ‘uncle’.

“There is the whole thing of ‘that happened to me, and I’m fucked up and that’s the reason, and that’s the rationale for all that’s wrong in my life’,” he told me. “I really don’t believe that at all, so I didn’t want to raise it as that kind of issue.

“But in a way I was really trying to state something that had become increasingly clear to me, as I got older, that this thing did have a major effect on my ease with sex or my lack of ease with sex. And that took me a long time to even understand, really.”

THE POWER OF WORDS

Everything was complicated by the fact Peter’s brother was sexually active with other males from an early age. As a schoolboy – furious, embarrassed, fascinated – Peter lived with the rumours.

“Why am I saying all this now? Well, it’s because I really do have this sense of absolute freedom. My mother’s dead and I have a sense of a deadline. There is not much point in mucking around.”

While Point Chevalier forms one lynchpin of his writing, Napier is the subject of his more formal histories. The city was the centre of The Hungry Heart, his book on the strange and complex life of the missionary, William Colenso. A Journey to a Hanging revealed Napier “as an almost theatrical setting for an intense drama about race in New Zealand” involving rebellion and cannibalism.

Dear Oliver is the third of his “Napier Trilogy”. Peter now divides his own time between the two cities. As he wrote in Long Loop Home, the estate of his brother Russell, a lawyer, treaty-negotiator, and art collector, gave him “what amounted to a private income”.

In Auckland’s Greenlane he lives in the architectdesigned modernity of the Simpson House, built in 1939, which belongs to Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, his partner of 26 years. Douglas is the former head of Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art-Gallery, a TV documentary host, and arts and culture writer, most recently of Beach Life: A Celebration of Kiwi Beach Culture, published in 2016.

In Napier, they live together in the “highly decorated” and “folly extravaganza” of Peter’s object-filled Finnis House, built in 1906. Once neglected and divided into flats, it now has been restored to its Edwardian glory.

Given historically resonant colour schemes, it contains a plethora of carefully chosen objects: a tiny bowl rescued from a sunken galleon in the Malay Straits, the pure lines of Constance Spry vases, and a Victorian painting of a steamship beneath a tumultuous sky.

Peter was a co-founder (with Stephanie Johnson) of the Auckland Writers Festival, and he has also initiated Same Same But Different, a festival dedicated to queer writers.

It was here, frail but determined after his first dose of chemotherapy in early February, that he stood at the podium and described the power of words.

He told his audience of being teased unmercifully as a “sissy” schoolboy at Mt Albert Grammar because of his quiet voice until one day he struck back with words “as sharp as spears”.

“In that second,” he said, “I understood the command of language was what would save me and the feeling was so extraordinary, so empowering that it was almost like that was where my life began, my life as a writer…

“I came into existence like a flame burning upwards and that flame has burnt onwards and kept me company right through to now where I stand before you and say that words are helping me even now when I am facing such a difficult time in my life.”

For Peter, a simple social media post has now become something much more.

“What could have been a fake voyage into self-love or narcissism became for me a very vital form of communication which helped me get through the chill of isolation, which is a very real danger during any illness.”

“I started, I guess, through words and writing, to ‘own’ the situation.”

Dear Oliver: Uncovering a Pākehā history, by Peter Wells, is published by Massey University Press, $40, and is available from Monday.

“In that second,” he said, “I understood the command of language was what would save me and the feeling was so extraordinary, so empowering that it was almost like that was where my life began, my life as a writer…”