For the Love of Words /

English Literature is embedded in the bones of Joe Bennett

Since he finished 10 years of teaching at Christ’s College in 1997, Joe Bennett has morphed into an award-winning writer and prolific newspaper columnist. Joe’s passion for words flourished in his teenage years when a love of English Literature

burst into bloom. Today this literary world is embedded in his bones.

On a calm April morning I found myself perched on Joe Bennett’s kitchen stool at his home in Lyttelton. He is reeling out lines from King Lear and cleaning his fish tank.

‘I’ve got a helluva lot to do between now and when I go away,’ he says. He’s off to run a writing workshop at Matakana next week over five days. ‘You can’t teach writing,’ Joe insists. ‘I’ve never created a writer. You can teach people a few tricks, show them how language works, show them how good prose works, but in the end you have to teach yourself in this business.’

He goes through a bunch of writers, good and bad. ‘I’ve got some magnificently bad ones,’ he laughs. ‘I’ll ask for comments. For the good ones it’s, do you like this? If so, why? Can we do the same thing ourselves? How does Laurie Lee do it? Can you work out what Clive James is doing? I’ll show how he’s funny.’ He treats it like a mechanical exercise. Take it apart and see how it works.

He throws himself into these workshops with gusto; like he did in his classes at Christ’s College between 1987 and 1997. ‘They’re great fun.’

Nick Harvey recalls his 4th Form (Year 10) English teacher at Christ’s College as being ‘seriously engaging’. And

Year 10s are notoriously exuberant. ‘We were all over the place,’ Nick says. Until Joe sat them in a circle, regaled them with stories about life and his own youth, captured their imaginations and had these lads in their black and white striped ties put pen to paper about their own lives. They thought he was great.

‘Joe was super inclusive,’ shares Nick. ‘Everyone had a voice. Everyone had an opportunity in an open unstructured environment.’ And he smoked – which the boys thought ‘quite cool’.

When it came to reading, Joe tells me he generated enthusiasm in his junior classes by introducing them to

‘stuff that somehow sang to them’. Something that was well written, that engaged them with someone else’s view of the world and that would resonate with them. ‘Throw them Barry Crump, Call of the Wild, that sort of thing. Saki’s Srendi Vashtar; the kids loved it. Then I get them on adult literature as soon as I bloody can.’

With senior classes there was Shakespeare. ‘Owen Marshall went down well. Some kids would just go crazy for Larkin.

‘I taught them to read for pleasure and to see that the

written word had something to offer. The whole point of a novel is pleasure. It has to be presented in such a way it has to be a pleasure. If the kids see it as work, you’ve lost them.’

He hit the sweet spot for Guy Davidson who had Joe as his 7th Form (Year 13) English teacher. ‘Joe’s animated teaching style was from a place of passion. He challenged us to apply critical thought to the subject matter, got us to stop and think about what was being taught. He was very enlightening.’ Guy went on to do English at university.

So what was Joe like around age six and seven? ‘Boisterous, enthusiastic, keen, besotted with cricket, redheaded.’ His mother, a reader and teacher, got books from the library. ‘I was allowed to grow up and be myself,’ he says, ‘and found my way to books regardless,’ building up his own collection of books on cricket. ‘A lot of people wrote well about cricket. It’s the most literate of sports.’

The pieces are carefully crafted. He grabs our attention and holds it. We want more. Which is

why he’s one of our most popular columnists.

At age 16 he discovered King Lear, the Shakespeare play that he believes ‘gives you words that no one should die without hearing’.

‘It was fundamental. It was all true. It’s stunningly brilliant.’ Our conversation turns to his teenage years at Brighton Grammar School. ‘I enjoyed most subjects at school,’ he says, ‘but my bent was for languages.’ He studied Latin, French, Russian and later Spanish. But he became hooked on English Literature.

At 18, he’d left school, broken his leg, and was in bed for several months when his English teacher came around to see him, suggested he apply for Cambridge University, sit the exam, and read whatever he liked. ‘So, I lay on my bed for three months, smoked and read the whole of Thomas Hardy. I thought The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess were just stunning. And I read the whole of Shakespeare. The lot. It was the most

formal, forming period of my literary education. In those three months I’d become pretty well-read. And none of that had been taught to me.’

Joe then sat the entrance exam and went up for the interview, where ‘a fierce argument’ unfolded between young Joe and the interviewer, who happened to be the medievalist, scholar A.C. Spearing. Joe was fond of the poet Shelley at the time and Spearing said that this was ‘a fairly adolescent fondness’. ‘If that’s adolescence, let me never grow up,’ Joe retorted, and on it went…

‘I was only honest,’ he says now. ‘I spoke my mind.’ He’d reached his own opinions. Independently.

But Joe said he was very surprised when he got into Cambridge. He didn’t really care. However, off he went, did a ‘straight chronological bash’ of English Literature from 1340 – 1920 and wrote his mind. He didn’t attend many lectures by the sound of it, but read his books, wrote an essay a week, drank with friends and came out with a degree in English.

These days, Joe still writes his mind as the author of a number of newspaper and magazine columns. While there’s not another novel in the pipeline, I wonder if perhaps he has a memoir in mind.

As for his ongoing love of reading for pleasure, he finds he spends more time re-reading than reading nowadays. ‘I go back to Evelyn Waugh, probably the best prose stylist of the 20th century. I read most of his novels most years. I’ve just read Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It is so different to be reading it at 62, than at 22.’

He studied Latin, French, Russian and later Spanish. But he became hooked on English Literature.

I’ve been re-reading too. Joe Bennett. Travel books from the award-winner Where Underpants Come From, to Mustn’t Grumble and that boozy, bloke-trip book around New Zealand, A Land of Two Halves.

If you want a few hours of pleasure, put your feet up and dip into his columns. Easily discoverable at the library and online. He writes about life around him. His dogs feature often. There’s wit and wisdom and humour. He’s in control of the language: the words are strong, the ideas clean, the images original. They are carefully crafted pieces that grab our attention and hold it. You are left wanting more. Which is why he’s one of our most popular columnists.