KEY POINTS:
Rambunctious and rollicking are suitable adjectives for Hamish Keith's memoir. There is a palpable delight in story-telling, one almost might say fable-making.
From his alleged conception on the night of Labour's first victory to his recently bankrupt father sending little Hamish off to a toff's school, Christ's College, right through to Keith's reinvention as an artist, then a critic, it is a sort of charming, likeable rogue's progress through life.
Keith tells it well. He summons up the past with a painterly, lightly satirical brush. Born in Christchurch, that most confining of corsets, Keith seemed destined for an ordinary lad's life. But there was a brightness always in his glance.
And it is in the looking that Keith came into his own. He hit Auckland mid-stride in the early 1960s. It was the finest time to be in Auckland, when it was the unchallenged centre of the arts, an exciting brave new world. He almost naturally settled into its epicentre - became a friend of the great painter Colin McCahon, Barry Brickell and others. His record of the times at Auckland Art Gallery is exciting.
A bunch of amateurs, inspired and eager to change the world, invented exhibitions, pushed forward the boundaries even as they did things like empty ashtrays and sweep the floors. Being at the right place at the right time is, of itself, an art.
When Keith was offered a scholarship to go to the United States, it timed perfectly with "the summer of love". Probably the world changed more swiftly in those months than at any other time post-war. Keith found himself shacked up at the love hotel, California (a very nice address).
Keith has always been what is described as Auckland's "boulevardier". Probably "Lothario" is another description. But this memoir is probably nowhere more disappointing than his tasteful refusal to "kiss and tell". He writes a comparatively tight-lipped "I was not the most faithful of husbands". End of story.
This memoir could never be accused of painful introspection. Instead, this is a lively, outward tale of a mover-and-groover. In some ways there is something slightly awkward in that Keith has to so persistently blow his own trumpet. He is not short on achievements. He was a key figure in the professionalisation of art. He critiqued, created, hustled and hassled. He made intelligent television. He was politically active.
In many ways he stands very tall as one of the creators of the modern moment in New Zealand. Without Keith there would be fewer designers, artists, film-makers: he was one of the constructors of an entirely novel form of New Zealandness: arty, informal, informed, very contem-porary.
The antithesis of provincial. Michael King always said New Zealand culture was a sandcastle culture. By this he meant that people created things which, only too quickly, were washed away by time and someone else had to come along to do the hard work, all over again.
Pakeha culture is especially bad for this, not having the memory banks of Maori culture, an oral history which knew if achievements were not told and retold, the memory was lost.
Pakeha culture risks losing its memory, not valuing it. So if Hamish Keith has to shove in the memory cells, in detail, so much the better. His anti-Wellington bias is a tic we can all forgive (or approve.) The book draws to a close with his current partner, costume designer Ngila Dickson and Keith shedding a sentimental tear at the Oscars, that most unreal of ceremonies.
For a boy from the back suburbs of Christchurch, he sure did good. But one should forsake cynicism here. Keith's passion for painting and art is just what New Zealand needed at a certain point. It must have been one of the triumphs of his life to have made a popular arts programme on television about New Zealand art.
He may have been ambushed by those tone-deaf dullards, the programmers at TVNZ - but the liveliness of this extremely readable book is a kind of sweet revenge. An enterprising individual will triumph and this almost swashbuckling adventure is written, like a wine, to be sampled and maybe even gulped.
Native Wit
By Hamish Keith (Random House $44.95)
* Peter Wells is a Hawkes Bay writer and film-maker.
