Dialogue: Hands up for a bit of literary passion

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I'm worried this week that the slide-rule Visigoths may again triumph over the preservation of symbols of our history and culture.

At risk this time is the house at 14 Esmonde Rd, just north of the harbour bridge, in which Frank Sargeson wrote his tonally perfect, enduring short stories, and in which a number of younger writers talked over their work or actually worked for long periods: Janet Frame, Karl Stead, Kevin Ireland and many more.

The Visigoths want to widen the road for our civilisation to flourish. To them it's a matter of lovely concrete vistas, conduits for evenly flowing lines of cars. To their masters, the councillors and resource consent commissioners, it's about power and money.

What I guess will happen is a compromise. The front of the section will fall to the slide-rules. The house will be preserved but some of Frank will go too. And history will be short-changed because, as anyone who has visited it (and thousands have) will tell you, this is not only a literary shrine, it's a monument to the social history of its time.

Actually, the word house dignifies what is essentially a Fibrolite bach in which Sargeson lived a notch or two above subsistence level and held court over his succession of aspiring writers.

Let me tell you why I'm personally seriously pissed off about this.

My father belonged to the generation that first had a sense of New Zealand as home - born here in the first two years of the 20th century to a mother who was born in Dunedin but was taught to look yearningly northwards, and an immigrant father who'd arrived as a young man, an indentured carpenter, whose culture remained firmly Scottish.

He was a reader, my dad, of the eclectic sort, consuming newspapers (he was a newspaperman), magazines, poetry (he knew great wodges of Burns, Walter Scott and bits and pieces of Shakespeare by heart), and novels including those by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dorothy Sayers and hundreds more, not a few of them what he called "your mother's rubbish", light romantic novels.

In the 1920s and especially the 1930s, poetry and novels that did not just sound like dull echoes of the work of British writers began to be published here and this excited my dad. He knew Thomas Bracken's Not Understood and Dunedin from the Bay by heart, even though he joked that Bracken was a bargain-basement Burns; but what thrilled him was the work of John A. Lee, Robin Hyde, Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn and Denis Glover, but particularly Sargeson.

He got me Hyde's The Godwits Fly from the library, the first novel I read by a New Zealander, about places and things I knew intimately. Wow! But what impressed him most and eventually me as well, was Sargeson's short stories. The whole landscape of That Summer, the first one I read, was familiar, from the unstrained language to the easy-going, drifting man and the lonely sandhills at the beach.

For many of my generation his stories, much more than Katherine Mansfield's, were a source of the emotional strength and pride that gave New Zealanders great confidence in the years following the war.

Some years after Frank died in 1982, a group of Buddle Findlay Sargeson Trustees spread his ashes in the garden beside and in front of his house from which he had for so long wrung an existence. The garden is behind a fringe of old trees that form a hedge against the road. A hole in the hedge was the gate hundreds of writers passed through. That hedge must go, say the Visigoths, in the interests of beautiful traffic.

When Frank moved in, the area was as quiet as a country lane; but now morning traffic hoicks along the open throat of Esmonde Rd from the easy breathing suburbs into the commercial spittoon of downtown; and back again at night. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this.

Unless ... What if that ground held Maori spiritual memories and remains? That would have made the Visigoths quake in their boots and sensible councillors and commissioners quail before the pointed finger of cultural insensitivity.

But Pakeha have no treaty to wave in their faces, and somehow our cultural heritage is always compromised. In some countries, Ireland and France come immediately to mind, you could imagine at least some of the councillors whacking the table and refusing to budge, saying loudly: No, dammit, this is our essence we are talking about here. This is us, a block of the Kiwi DNA. We'll fight any compromise and insist this house and its environs remain as is.

Wouldn't it be nice if a couple of our guys put up their hands for the spiritual wellbeing of our future?

But no, our blokes, our slide-rule Visigoths, our councillors and commissioners, will be proud of the common sense of their compromise which will have avoided the necessity for unseemly passion; and no one will remember their names to vilify in a generation or two when Kiwis lament what they have lost.

People then will, of course, still remember the name of the funny, cranky, mischievous man who spent half a century in that house hacking out a Kiwi identity in words.

* I read this laugh-aloud line in a book review in the Guardian: Robert Beaumont writes with a fondness for cliche that may be unsurpassed until the cows come home.

The next night, I heard Simon Dallow introduce the biggest news story of the year so far with: The death of the Queen Mother is the end of an era. The cows are back in the TVNZ home paddock.