Still feuding after all these years
Now in his 80s, C K Stead has earned his opinions, love them or loathe them, says David Herkt of Stead’s latest book.
C K Stead is a controversialist. He has animated the New Zealand literary scene for half a century.
He has suggested that Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme’s Maori was ‘‘boned up’’. In Stead’s novel All Visitors Ashore, one possible basis for the character Celia Skyways and her book Memoirs of a Railway Siding, was Janet Frame.
‘‘Chintzy upholstered tone’’ and ‘‘shamelessly implausible’’ were two of his review comments on Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.
Stead’s feuds have become the stuff of local legend. ‘‘There’s something about the man,’’ Nigel Cox wrote in a provoking piece in 1994, ‘‘that instantly makes everyone go ballistic.’’
Sixteen years later, after Cox’s death from cancer, it was implied that Stead had used a thinlydisguised Cox in a sharp, short story of revenge which, to add insult to injury, immediately won Stead a $53,000 British short story award. He denied the connection.
Shelf Life: Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences gathers together Stead’s recent occasional writing. It includes reflections, lectures, blog posts, and interviews. It is generally a mellow-toned book, though controversy lurks in the fine print.
Stead, for example, remains suspicious of David Bain and presumes his likely guilt. He thinks there is more benefit to a writer by reading literature than enrolling in the current plethora of creative writing classes.
He still queries Hulme’s ability to claim a prize for writing by a Maori on the basis of one of eight great-grandparents.
Continuing a lifetime investigation of Katherine Mansfield, the collection includes an illuminating display of just how hard it is to read her handwriting.
Stead argues with Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murray, who thought that Mansfield wrote better when she was with him than apart, and provides crucial evidence of dates, places, and her lover at the time. He quarrels with contemporary assessments of Mansfield’s lesbianism, seeing it more as a schoolgirl crush than adult propensity.
This is a book written largely for an engaged literary reader, someone who can appreciate the jokes, get the references, and know the barbs.
Stead, however, more accessibly continues to reveal himself as a meditative travel writer, a witty interviewee, and a man, now in his 80s, whose experience of New Zealand life more than justifies his opinions, love them or hate them.
Stead has never had any problems with his ambitions. When asked why he uses initials for his public name, he points to the internationally prominent English-language poets when he was young, like W H Auden, T S Eliot, and W B Yeats.
He resisted later attempts to convert him to a plain Karl Stead or a Christian Karlson Stead because it would ‘‘create problems for librarians and bibliographers’’.
It has always been clear that Stead’s aims have been global and Shelf Life is another testimony to that fact.