Michael King: New and Collected Writings

By DENNIS McELDOWNEY*

Published photographs of Michael King have become more and more benevolent over the years, until he has begun to look like a bearded Cheeryble brother.

The cover of this book, however, shows him in profile, eyes hidden by spectacles, hand reflectively stroking the beard. The signal is clear. This is a collection of think pieces.

Many of the articles and addresses are about the process of writing biography and history, how it is done, how it should or should not be done. This may sound demanding, but it is not. You can't suppress a raconteur, nor the nose for a good story of one originally trained as a journalist. They pop up even in sections addressed to the most academic of audiences.

There are also leavening chapters about people: the controversial sexologist John Money; the brilliant public servant who became paranoid, Reuel Lochore; the doctor who vanished, John Williams. And an afternoon with the Queen Mum.

The title, freely adapted from W.B. Yeats, sounds like a plea, perhaps to a reviewer, to be gentle with him. What he means is something different. It refers to the choice a biographer may have to make between truth and compassion, especially when writing about living people or people with living relatives.

It says a lot about King that he should find this something to worry about. The world of biography has hardened. Compassion is out of fashion - the sensational and demeaning are invented if they can't be found.

King believes in "compassionate truth". But he is no soft touch; for him the emphasis is on truth. If something possibly hurtful is essential to the overall picture, and the evidence is compelling, he can almost ruthlessly override objections. Less crucial matters he may leave out.

He can also be a formidable controversialist. He provoked some of the audience to walk out when he questioned the credentials of a book "scandalously supported ... by the Ministry of Education [and] Creative New Zealand", which was supposedly based on the teachings of the "Elders of the Ancient Nation of Waitaha". (This chapter is called "A Fraction Too Much Fiction"; by a serendipitous misprint the running heads call it "A Fraction Too Much Friction".) He adheres to the term Pakeha because it is a Maori word and therefore could not have arisen anywhere else in the world. But he insists that Pakeha culture is as valid here as Maori culture, and that the macrocarpa has become as natural a part of the New Zealand landscape as the manuka.

Throughout his career he has interpreted Maori culture to Pakeha, beginning before it was fashionable to do so, but in several books he has exposed the enslavement of Chatham Islands Moriori by invading Taranaki Maori. Fealty to truth and the evidence underlies all this, but he also worries that some of it may give comfort to rednecks.

All these concerns of King's are well known. Some of the chapters, directed at different audiences on different occasions, overlap and repeat others. But even the most dedicated follower of Michael King will have read only some of them, and they all gain strength by being collected.

Cape Catley

$34.95

* Dennis McEldowney is an Auckland writer and former publisher.