When I told my London-based son I was flying home to write a speech (the homework of Damocles), he immediately labelled it my “Merrie England” lecture. It was a reference to Kingsley Amis’s comic novel Lucky Jim. During a disastrous talk on Merrie England, Jim first derisively imitates his senior colleagues, then ridicules the subject, then begins to sound “like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning”. Eventually, he blacks out.
“Yes, it’ll be just like that,” I said.
While we were laughing, someone added, “The civil servants who would have come have all been laid off. They’re working over here now.”
In January, I was appointed President of Honour of the NZ Society of Authors. In Wellington on October 14, it’s my duty to deliver the 2025 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture. The event is framed as a state of the nation speech for New Zealand literature.
I will attempt to make my presentation merrie, despite the prevailing mood of wintry discontent. I will discuss adventures in fiction and memoir, and the serious issues facing our writers today.
It seems fitting that it will take place in the National Library. In February, I made a discovery in the library’s Turnbull Archive that shattered my illusions and left me stunned, almost lost for words.
In my lecture, I will discuss this and argue that my discovery in the archive is linked to issues all writers currently face. In this era of distortion and autocracy, where “rules are giving way to power”, authentic accounts and critical sensibilities are more important than ever.
Flying home, I went on reading the psychology book I’d started in Norway. It was so fascinating I stayed awake for 26 hours. With one eye on the flight map (on the hotbed of Middle East airspace), I puzzled over subtle and tragic human misalignments.
I’d never encountered the idea of violence expressed as an “attachment problem”. Take this notion (if I’ve understood it correctly): a person with antisocial personality disorder has a tendency for concrete thinking. Nothing can be implicit or simply “known”; everything must be expressed physically.
Such a person may be deeply attuned to hierarchy. If you threaten their position, their response must be physical, otherwise it lacks meaning. Concrete thinking arises from problems with attachment: no secure sense has developed of mind-to-mind connection being able to be implicit.
Another conundrum: in some people, the ability to read the mind of another (as much as that’s ever possible) is intact, but will vanish in limited instances. These people might be perfectly suave in most situations, but will lose competence when attachment is stressed. There’s a sudden experience of flying without the map.
It’s not that the other becomes a “projection screen” (where one’s own emotions are attributed to another); rather, their sense of the other’s mind disappears. Navigation is lost; nothing is implicit. Panic and anger ensue; it leads to disasters like loss of relationships. How can you not crash when you’re flying completely blind?
Such strange human complexities, explained as modern scientific theory, are deeply plausible and relatable. The more you try to understand them, the less culpable people seem. Everyone does their best with the hand they’re dealt.
And yet I think the opposite, too. We’re all culpable. People can change. The way to do better is to try to understand. Why did I crash and burn? Did I cause damage? How to improve? Exploration, discussion, writing is better than suppression and denial.
The Merrie New Zealand lecture will make a plea along these lines: for intellectual openness, for the writers’ spirit of humane inquiry to be valued above all.
