No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson by Paul Millar
(Auckland University Press $59.99, out Monday)
Ezra Pound once remarked that a poet only has to write six great lines to be remembered forever. One great novel (Wuthering Heights?, Invisible Man?) might also do the trick.
Bill Pearson has two claims to be so remembered, at least within New Zealand: his 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers and
his 1963 novel, Coal Flat. Subtitled "A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist", Fretful Sleepers is a trenchant study of the drive to conformity in New Zealand.
Written in London (where Pearson was studying for a doctorate), it was affected by the quasi-fascist (in his eyes) emergency regulations introduced by the National Government of the day during the 1951 waterfront strike.
At the same time, also in London, Pearson was writing Coal Flat, embedding within it the social analysis informing Fretful Sleepers, but focusing on characters and events in a small West Coast coal mining town (based on Blackball where Pearson had briefly taught school and worked in a mine). It was more than a decade before the novel was published, partly because of its great length - at over 400 pages it was the longest novel written in this country at that time - and partly because of Pearson's struggle with the plot. Paul Millar reveals that initially the novel dealt with a homosexual teacher called Paul Rogers wrongly arrested and tried for interfering sexually with a pupil, but through successive revisions Pearson removed the homosexual theme, making Paul Rogers unconvincingly heterosexual (the "love" story is the weakest element in the book).
Pearson, a deeply closeted homosexual, feared that in its original form the novel would have exposed his own sexuality. As Millar shows, Fretful Sleepers, too, was driven by Pearson's dislike of the deeply homophobic society he was born into. Indeed, fear of exposure as homosexual was the guiding motive of Pearson's behaviour throughout his life. Only with the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill in 1986 did Pearson timidly and tentatively begin to come out of the closet, but by then it was too late to revive his thwarted creativity. After Coal Flat he never wrote any more fiction.
When I heard that Millar was working on this book I had doubts that one fine novel and one strong essay (plus a scattering of other useful non-fictional writing - on Henry Lawson, Frank Sargeson and the literature concerning Maori and the Pacific) was sufficient to justify a full-scale biography. Also, I knew Pearson as a highly likeable, morally courageous, but reticent and retiring person whose life story, I thought, could hardly make riveting reading. These concerns proved to be completely wrong. Millar has written an outstanding and absorbing biography at the heart of which is the best analysis yet written (along with Peter Wells' memoir Long Loop Home) of the tragedy - I use the term advisedly - of the homosexual artist in the New Zealand of the last century.
Pearson knew from childhood that he was "different". He much preferred playing with girls than boys (retaining a talent for close friendship with women throughout his life), and in primary school he wrote several unguarded declarations of love to boys in his class. Later, at training college, university and in the army (he served in Egypt, Italy and Japan but never saw armed conflict), he learned to disguise his feelings behind a facade of mateyness. He became a life-long drinker, finding in the easy sociability of the public bar some outlet for his repressed feelings. In London he cruised the streets and bars to achieve occasional sexual relief, but it wasn't until his last decades that he formed a satisfactory relationship with a man.
At the University of Auckland, where he returned from London to teach in the English Department in 1954, Pearson got most satisfaction from falling in with the tiny group of Maori students (then only 35 out of a student role of over 3000) who befriended him and whom he advised and supported financially (Pita Sharples being one who benefited most from "Doc's" patronage).
In later years even this source of succour disappeared as a younger, more radical generation of Maori students spurned the attentions of a non Maori-speaking Pakeha, however well-intentioned. Similarly the rise of radical feminism and theory-driven approaches to literature made his last years of teaching a misery.
Bill Pearson's life story proves to be extraordinarily revealing of our society through the second half of the 20th century, but it required a biographer of exceptional skill to realise the possibilities in this seemingly unlikely subject. Paul Millar proves to be just the man for the job.
Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer and founding director of the Holloway Press.
