Book Review: Revenge, a dish best served cold

NZ poet / writer Bill Manhire. Photo / Ed Swinden

It must be torture, being married to a poet. Bill Manhire, one of our leading poets and New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate, knows something about this. He once wrote a short story called The Poet's Wife, which appears in his new collection, The Stories of Bill Manhire.

It's a handsome hardback book, with a beautiful drawing on the cover by Peter Campbell of a plump sleeping baby. Inside, though, there's the Manhire sliver of menace cutting through, the occasional flash of psychotic violence which is all the more shocking because the writer exudes such a benign persona. But don't cross Bill Manhire. The Poet's Wife, he says, laughing, is pure vengeance.

In the story, the poet has earned royalties, in one year, of $43.75. He is working away on his opera libretto, Carnage on the Roads, and blames his melting inspiration on his wife. "Don't hover!" he tells her. "It's just that it's extremely difficult with you hovering like that. I had something really good coming and I lost it."

He is a POET. His car number plate, POET 7, says so (six Dunedin poets have had the same number plate idea - "The Dunedin school."). Eventually, exhausted by his pretentious twaddle, "the poet's wife joins a support group for poets' wives. There are hundreds of members in the larger organisation, with branch offices all over the country."
If such a support group really existed, and it obviously should, would Manhire's wife, journalist Marion McLeod, be a member? "Ha ha ha, no!" he insists, on the phone from Wellington. "But I wrote that because when she was working for the Listener, one of her colleagues started writing an article for a magazine about poets' wives and started asking her questions. So I thought, 'I'll take revenge on this bastard.' That's why I wrote it. They are such self-important people, the ones who call themselves poets but aren't very good at writing poetry."

Manhire, 68, retired as director of the International Insitute of Modern Letters and lecturing in English and creative writing at Victoria University in 2013. Earlier this year he spent a few months at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, whose alumni include Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Anne Enright, working as Unesco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.

"I am completely pleased to be away from the world of university administration," he says, adding that he is still doing "a bit of writing" and has lately been writing songs and touring with jazz pianist-composer Norman Meehan and singer Hannah Griffin.

Victoria University Press publisher Fergus Barrowman "very much pushed" him into bringing The Stories of Bill Manhire into the world, with most of the stories previously published in the 1980s and 90s. "It was mostly a gathering of things that have been in print for a long time and the thing I was surprised about was how much I liked reading them again, especially the ones from The New Land [1990]," he says. "Those were from a historical moment, me being very much troubled by the sesquicentennial [150th] celebrations and the kind of non-authenticity of the New Zealand that was being set up for us to celebrate and admire. Even though the stories have that historical feel, they still feel true to something that's going on now ... I think the official discourse has been captured by people who want to talk about NZ Inc as if the whole country is some sort of corporate entity and that's all that matters."

Earlier stories in the collection, like Highlights, are quietly reflective, whereas in Siena and The Days of Sail, a lamb and a sheep separately meet a grisly end. "Ha ha, oh dear me, that is sheepist," he laughs. "Sheepism in New Zealand literature, there's a thesis in that."

After a sombre story like Ponies, which mirrors one of his poems about the fate of the dogs on an early Antarctic expedition, or surrealist flights of fantasy in The Death of Robert Louis Stevenson and Cannibals, it's light relief to turn to Manhire's 63-page The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, a 50-stage game where the reader gets the option at the end of each section to try their luck and proceed or turn back - or forward - to another section. Illustrated by Greg O'Brien, it's pure mischief, including two images portraying C.K. Stead as a Nazi brain surgeon - "I want to say that has nothing to do with me!" protests Manhire - and a collection of jars containing the brains of various Catherines. The biggest brain belongs to Catherine the Great, whereas the smallest, alas, comes from Catherine Cookson.

"It was great fun to write but those choose-your-own-adventure books were all over the place in the 1980s, back in the pre-digital world, I guess," says Manhire. "Comics and Enid Blyton were my favourite reading."

Reading during his childhood was vital, "like a parallel universe for me". The final chapter of the collection, Under The Influence, helps you understand why. It's a long essay reflecting on his childhood growing up in pubs in Otago and Southland, originally published in 2003 in the Four Winds Press series set up by Lloyd Jones. It turns out that Manhire's father Jack, a publican, was "a man who liked a drink".

Manhire's mother Maisie, who grew up in Edinburgh, came from a working class family but through scholarships, did a science degree and became a school teacher. Then she met Jack Manhire, a New Zealand sailor, during the war and emigrated here where she became a publican's wife in Invercargill and Jack embarked enthusiastically on his drinking career.

The family moved from pub to pub, and Bill Manhire's education in the New Zealand booze culture - heavy drinking, after-hours drinking, drink-driving - of the 1950s and 60s began.

"None of the people who drank in pubs back then, and maybe it's true now, would have regarded themselves as alcoholics," he says. "They were just sociable men having a drink but mostly they were drinking far too much."

As Manhire junior grew into his teens, his observations of his father, whose mantra was "doing the decent thing", became colder. "[Jack's] desire to do the decent thing was hardly separable from a need to be liked," he writes. "In practice, the decent thing meant an extravagant generosity directed at everyone except his own family."

When Bill was about 13 or 14, one of his father's drinking circle, whom he names in the essay, "made a sly sexual overture to me". When he complained to his parents, his father took his mate's side and told his son "not to be silly". Looking back, Manhire wonders if that was the trigger for the time he stopped speaking to his father for months.
"That was very upsetting," he recalls. "It was as if I had done something embarrassing. I'm not even sure that when I stopped talking to him, that that was cause and effect there. There was certainly a phase when I wouldn't talk to him. When I say, 'I knew I could outlast him', I don't admire myself for that but it's true."

Manhire says the memoir was "difficult to write in a way but from another point of view it was quite exhilarating".

"I had this experience of remembering one particular detail from my childhood and each detail would bring another five details with it that weren't in my head at all. And each of those hid another five behind them. The act of trying to remember became enormously rich in terms of recovery of experience. On the one hand I was dealing with dark, difficult feelings but on the other hand I was recreating my childhood. I think that when I was having that childhood I was living a very weird, strange life and that every other child was living a normal life and here I was living in pubs. But looking back at it, in order to write about it, I think I discovered it was a very rich life and one that I am pretty grateful for."

The Manhire family's last orders took place at the Crown Hotel in Dunedin, where the face on its flagon bottle said, "Drinking again, eh? PRESSURE BEER from CROWN HOTEL DUNEDIN."

The face, featuring "a lopsided moustache, large ears, and a spectacularly red nose separating a double set of bloodshot eyes ... never bothered anyone", he writes, "... alcoholics were other people."

But towards the end, Jack Manhire was drinking about two bottles of whisky a day, and by mid-afternoon, his son noted, "Jack has that well-oiled, late-in-the-day expression - glazed eyes and a silly smile."

In 1974, Jack dropped dead from a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 63. His funeral, writes Manhire, was "inept ... I put the whole event out of mind as I went along, I tried not to pay attention".

"I was upset, of course, really distressed," he says. "If it had been a good funeral I might have been on the floor weeping but because it was so awful, it was not so hard to detach myself."

Under the Influence also gave Manhire the opportunity to ponder the fate of the older boys who bullied him on the bus when he was 12 and he had started school in Balclutha. They used to slap the legs of the third formers hard during the 50-minute journey. "You sat there and endured it, slap, because if you fought back or cried or complained to a teacher, much worse would happen," he writes. "Slap."

"Yes," he says. "I wish I could remember their names and take revenge in print."

The Stories of Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press $40) is out now.