‘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.”

DECODING THE DRAMA

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.”