Home again, after an absence of 20 years almost to the day when I left the Listener, in a rare career instance of an employer not throwing me out. They were probably getting around to it. I don’t think I endeared myself to management by taking a petty complaint all the way to an Employment Court hearing. It was a waste of my time and their money. “I loved every moment of working here for five years,” I said in my speech at the farewell morning tea. “Unfortunately, I worked here for six years.”
My farewell gift was a steak knife. I used it to hack and stab at journalism for newspapers, websites and other magazines over the next 20 years but I always entertained the sentimental notion that one day I would go back home – as I continued to think of the Listener. It was where I dreamed up sentences while sleeping on the red velvet couch in my office, it was where I stapled comic strips and vintage Playboy centrefolds on the walls, it was where I smoked and drank and, just as heavily, wrote. I was a barbarian inside the gate of a cultural institution that I revered and yet strangely wanted to set on fire.
Writing as a columnist allowed me my first taste of budget fame and nothing resembling an actual fortune. The best anyone ought to hope for in New Zealand journalism is a steady income and a good sub but I got more than I expected as a Listener columnist, 1999-2005. Readers got it into their heads to write stacks and stacks of letters, in the main saying very nice things, although I placed a higher value on correspondents who replied in CAPITAL LETTERS WITH AN ANGRY BLACK FELT TIP. I had a thick manila folder of letters each year, which gradually grew thinner as email replaced paper. The emails averaged 30,000 words each year. These correspondents were writing almost as much as I did for a living and a lot of it was better.
A publisher got in touch. My first book was a selection of Listener columns. Fool’s Paradise (Random House, 2001) was judged best first book of non-fiction at the national book awards, but that night was memorable for more than just the launch, held at Auckland literary watering hole Alhambra on the evening of September 11. “Something’s happened in New York,” said the taxi driver at 3am. I said that I had just launched my first book! He said, “Planes.” I said that I had just launched my first book! He said, “No, listen.” He turned up the radio news.
I was a barbarian inside the gate of a cultural institution that I revered and yet wanted to set on fire.
Twelve books later, father of a teenage daughter and in perfect health, at least physically, I return to where I started, a Listener columnist redux, older and not wiser, less barbaric and more problematic, excited and anxious at the prospect of once again writing things in front of New Zealand’s most intelligent audience.
I’m excited that it might be a total flop and anxious it won’t. I love a comeback ‒ the complications and the possibilities, the potential for some late-stage creative revival and the reality of it being exposed as a bad idea – but really, it’s just work. One of these days I’ll stop writing, and I think a lot about what that will feel like, and marvel at the silence that I’ll inhabit, liberated from the racket of thinking and typing. Hack no more. But not yet. Not this year. I have a fortnightly appointment with a Listener column. I have responsibilities. I have come home.
