Philip Matthews talks to Michael King about winning a big prize and how to write a history of New Zealand.
In his new book, The Penguin History of New Zealand, author Michael King includes a scene in which Frank Sargeson embarks on a journey that most New Zealanders of his time would have considered foolhardy and irresponsible: to earn a living as a fulltime writer. King’s landmark biography of Sargeson appeared in 1995, yet the appearance of this scene seems significant for another reason – it looks like a moment in which the walls of history thin a little and some autobiography shines through.
“Very much so,” King says. Yes, he certainly identifies with Sargeson’s ambition and the financial difficulties he experienced. Which makes King’s windfall this week – he was one of three writers to receive $60,000 in the inaugural Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement – feel like a vindication. In the early 70s, when King began writing, to call oneself a “writer” made about as much sense as looking up “dreamer” in the Situations Vacant.
But it’s also more than a vindication. It’s a relief. “I’m in my late fifties. There are problems in being what is euphemistically called a senior writer. It’s mainly young writers that the network of fellowships and grants is designed to support to get launched. And it’s absolutely appropriate. But you reach a point where you’ve had everything you’re eligible for. Your income from books is usually not increasing. The Janet Frame book was probably an exception for me. You end up in middle age without any kind of superannuation fund or any kind of backing. To get this award at that age is a huge boost and relieves you of a considerable amount of anxiety.”
He’s slightly ashamed to confess that he has nothing extravagant planned for the money: he and his wife Maria may take a small holiday – “somewhere like the Bay of Islands or the Hokianga” — and sensibly invest the rest for “the lean years that may be ahead”. This money-anxiety is the motor of King’s incredible productivity – he estimates that the Penguin
History is the 34th book that he has written or edited since 1972. Is there a downside to this productivity? Only a sneering that he detects from some in the academic community. To be a popular writer carries a stigma. “I’ve often thought it was odd that I could earn $10,000 a year from my books and some people would say that was greedy, but if I went to do a university course and taught my books, I could earn $80,000 and no one would blink.”
As he says, the Frame biography – Wrestling with the Angel, published in 2000 – did well for him, at least in New Zealand and, to a degree, Australia. It was poorly promoted in both the UK and the US, he believes, and in each place sold only 3000-4000 copies, not reaching beyond Frame fans. He partly puts that down to a change of commissioning editor at Macmillan, the book’s UK publisher, where the reception went from enthusiastic to indifferent. Of course, had Frame won the Nobel Prize for Literature this month, the book would have taken on a whole new life, but that was always a long shot, despite the efforts of some local media to talk her chances up. King took those calls – speaking publicly for Frame is in his portfolio of scholarly and journalistic roles.
King’s new book has exquisite timing, arriving in the same week as his prime ministerial award. The book is a successor to the general history that Keith Sinclair published with Penguin in 1959. One of the themes of the new book is conformism and non-conformism, which move in a kind of dance: one leads, then the other. For both Sargeson and Frame, conformism was a force that threatened to crush them.
The book’s middle section, “Consolidation”, stretches from 1850 to 1950, the period in which a nation was formed by putting aside individual difference for absorption in a larger body: all Europeans became Pakeha, disparate tribes became Maori. It’s a theme that isn’t simply abstract for King: recently, he learnt that a great uncle, Maurice Belgrave, was actually a Jew who posed as Scottish Presbyterian, and then converted to Catholicism not long after settling in Hamilton in 1908. He kept his true origins secret even from his family. It’s a tragic story: he died days after he was discovered weeping over early radio reports of the Nazi extermination camps. His story is told in King’s At the Edge of Memory, published last year.
King can completely understand that Belgrave might have thought that life in Hamilton in those years would have been easier were he not Jewish, although: “I don’t think New Zealanders were so much anti-Semitic as xenophobic. Anyone who wasn’t British was highly suspect.”
The notion of conformism and non-conformism can present posers, though. Ed Hillary is hailed by King as a manifestation of the values that New Zealand most appreciates, but is Hillary a conformist or a non-conformist? “That’s interesting. He’s both, in a way. He’s a conformist in the sense that he represents some of the values that we hold dear,
particularly giving it a go, taking on the natural world, being extremely modest. But he’s also aligned himself with some of the less popular, anti-authoritarian social movements – United Nations groups when they weren’t especially popular, the Race Relations Council. People who have a liberal or humanitarian cause in New Zealand have usually been able to go to Ed Hillary and find they had his support.”
He’s a very accessible figure. “I remember as a 12-year-old kid bowling round to his house in Remuera Rd, knocking on his door and asking for his autograph. And him smiling and giving it.
“He does exemplify what we most admire and there’s a huge consensus about that. When he goes, I can’t think of one New Zealander who will step into his shoes.”
Every general history also has a diligent conformism to it – this government then that government, the Depression, then the war – but you can extract the individual or idiosyncratic traces. In the Penguin History, there is a warm and surprising description of Sue Kedgley – King hails her “striking good looks and gypsy outfits” – but that’s detail. In broader terms, the book includes more Maori history than any comparable volume. It is a truly bicultural narrative. There is a new emphasis on environmental history, particularly the early tendency, shared by Maori and Pakeha, to repeatedly risk exhausting natural resources and ravaging the land.
Sargeson appears in the narrative on several occasions. He illustrates the perilous lives of gay men in the old New Zealand. He also provides a neat juxtaposition that illustrates a greater point about race relations and Pakeha values in the early 21st century. While we fretted over whether a taniwha lurked near Mercer, holding up changes to State Highway 1, the North Shore City Council announced plans to widen Esmonde Rd in Takapuna, shaving off some of the front section of the historic Sargeson house, including the spot in the garden where his ashes were interred (after some wrangling, the council took less of the land).
The spiritual values of Maori are enshrined, but the secular values of Pakeha are still inchoate. The danger of pursuing this argument too far is that it may offer ammunition to the casually racist talkback host, whereas King stresses that “we should acknow-ledge values on both sides of the frontier”. Yet, he cannot see a time when Pakeha values are acknowledged to precisely the same degree “because there won’t be the sharp focal point of consensus among Pakeha about what’s important to them as there is for Maori”.
King is a dyed-in-the-wool cultural nationalist. Those who sparked his love of local history – his father Lewis King, his teacher (later a journalist) Spiro Zavos and Victoria University history professor Peter Munz – are the new book’s dedicatees. When Sargeson on his OE, in a key anecdote from both the biography and the new book, sits in the British Museum in London, feeling oppressed by all that history and realising that he is a New Zealander, it mirrors King’s feeling, as a postgraduate, that to study abroad would amount to cultural cringe. Some contemporaries did go overseas. King stayed and pursued journalism. “Nobody who’s been a journalist sits and stares at a blank page for three days,” he says. “You just sit down and start writing. You also write with an audience in mind, which an awful lot of academics don’t do.” After some years as a journalist, he got his doctorate in his early thirties.
He lives in Opoutere, near Whangamata, on the Coromandel Peninsula. And, actually, it seems that the Coromandel features quite often in the new book. “You’ve got your big themes and your major characters, but you also like to do little cameos. There’s a bit about this harbour. I talk about the Paritu community, which is up the road in Wharekawa. That’s describing the place as it was in the early 1900s, when it was basically a Maori-speaking Ringatu community that didn’t have a cash economy at all, just lived off the land, growing their own fruit and vegetables, and taking fish out of the estuary and out of the sea.”
His description of that era’s Opoutere – “a safe and satisfying place to grow up” – is fond indeed. There are resonances: the position of being on an estuary facing the sea, King says, is akin to Paremata, which was still rural when he grew up there in the 1950s. At Opoutere, he lives among regenerating New Zealand bush and native birds. Looking towards the sea, he can see fortified pa at each side of the harbour. The view offers a vivid sense of history’s proximity.
Michael King
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Philip Matthews talks to Michael King about winning a big prize and how to write a history of New Zealand.
In his new book, The Penguin History of New Zealand, author Michael King includes a scene in which Frank Sargeson embarks on a journey that most New Zealanders of his time would have considered foolhardy and irresponsible: to earn a living as a fulltime writer. King’s landmark biography of Sargeson appeared in 1995, yet the appearance of this scene seems significant for another reason – it looks like a moment in which the walls of history thin a little and some autobiography shines through.
“Very much so,” King says. Yes, he certainly identifies with Sargeson’s ambition and the financial difficulties he experienced. Which makes King’s windfall this week – he was one of three writers to receive $60,000 in the inaugural Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement – feel like a vindication. In the early 70s, when King began writing, to call oneself a “writer” made about as much sense as looking up “dreamer” in the Situations Vacant.
But it’s also more than a vindication. It’s a relief. “I’m in my late fifties. There are problems in being what is euphemistically called a senior writer. It’s mainly young writers that the network of fellowships and grants is designed to support to get launched. And it’s absolutely appropriate. But you reach a point where you’ve had everything you’re eligible for. Your income from books is usually not increasing. The Janet Frame book was probably an exception for me. You end up in middle age without any kind of superannuation fund or any kind of backing. To get this award at that age is a huge boost and relieves you of a considerable amount of anxiety.”
He’s slightly ashamed to confess that he has nothing extravagant planned for the money: he and his wife Maria may take a small holiday – “somewhere like the Bay of Islands or the Hokianga” — and sensibly invest the rest for “the lean years that may be ahead”. This money-anxiety is the motor of King’s incredible productivity – he estimates that the Penguin
History is the 34th book that he has written or edited since 1972. Is there a downside to this productivity? Only a sneering that he detects from some in the academic community. To be a popular writer carries a stigma. “I’ve often thought it was odd that I could earn $10,000 a year from my books and some people would say that was greedy, but if I went to do a university course and taught my books, I could earn $80,000 and no one would blink.”
As he says, the Frame biography – Wrestling with the Angel, published in 2000 – did well for him, at least in New Zealand and, to a degree, Australia. It was poorly promoted in both the UK and the US, he believes, and in each place sold only 3000-4000 copies, not reaching beyond Frame fans. He partly puts that down to a change of commissioning editor at Macmillan, the book’s UK publisher, where the reception went from enthusiastic to indifferent. Of course, had Frame won the Nobel Prize for Literature this month, the book would have taken on a whole new life, but that was always a long shot, despite the efforts of some local media to talk her chances up. King took those calls – speaking publicly for Frame is in his portfolio of scholarly and journalistic roles.
King’s new book has exquisite timing, arriving in the same week as his prime ministerial award. The book is a successor to the general history that Keith Sinclair published with Penguin in 1959. One of the themes of the new book is conformism and non-conformism, which move in a kind of dance: one leads, then the other. For both Sargeson and Frame, conformism was a force that threatened to crush them.
The book’s middle section, “Consolidation”, stretches from 1850 to 1950, the period in which a nation was formed by putting aside individual difference for absorption in a larger body: all Europeans became Pakeha, disparate tribes became Maori. It’s a theme that isn’t simply abstract for King: recently, he learnt that a great uncle, Maurice Belgrave, was actually a Jew who posed as Scottish Presbyterian, and then converted to Catholicism not long after settling in Hamilton in 1908. He kept his true origins secret even from his family. It’s a tragic story: he died days after he was discovered weeping over early radio reports of the Nazi extermination camps. His story is told in King’s At the Edge of Memory, published last year.
King can completely understand that Belgrave might have thought that life in Hamilton in those years would have been easier were he not Jewish, although: “I don’t think New Zealanders were so much anti-Semitic as xenophobic. Anyone who wasn’t British was highly suspect.”
The notion of conformism and non-conformism can present posers, though. Ed Hillary is hailed by King as a manifestation of the values that New Zealand most appreciates, but is Hillary a conformist or a non-conformist? “That’s interesting. He’s both, in a way. He’s a conformist in the sense that he represents some of the values that we hold dear,
particularly giving it a go, taking on the natural world, being extremely modest. But he’s also aligned himself with some of the less popular, anti-authoritarian social movements – United Nations groups when they weren’t especially popular, the Race Relations Council. People who have a liberal or humanitarian cause in New Zealand have usually been able to go to Ed Hillary and find they had his support.”
He’s a very accessible figure. “I remember as a 12-year-old kid bowling round to his house in Remuera Rd, knocking on his door and asking for his autograph. And him smiling and giving it.
“He does exemplify what we most admire and there’s a huge consensus about that. When he goes, I can’t think of one New Zealander who will step into his shoes.”
Every general history also has a diligent conformism to it – this government then that government, the Depression, then the war – but you can extract the individual or idiosyncratic traces. In the Penguin History, there is a warm and surprising description of Sue Kedgley – King hails her “striking good looks and gypsy outfits” – but that’s detail. In broader terms, the book includes more Maori history than any comparable volume. It is a truly bicultural narrative. There is a new emphasis on environmental history, particularly the early tendency, shared by Maori and Pakeha, to repeatedly risk exhausting natural resources and ravaging the land.
Sargeson appears in the narrative on several occasions. He illustrates the perilous lives of gay men in the old New Zealand. He also provides a neat juxtaposition that illustrates a greater point about race relations and Pakeha values in the early 21st century. While we fretted over whether a taniwha lurked near Mercer, holding up changes to State Highway 1, the North Shore City Council announced plans to widen Esmonde Rd in Takapuna, shaving off some of the front section of the historic Sargeson house, including the spot in the garden where his ashes were interred (after some wrangling, the council took less of the land).
The spiritual values of Maori are enshrined, but the secular values of Pakeha are still inchoate. The danger of pursuing this argument too far is that it may offer ammunition to the casually racist talkback host, whereas King stresses that “we should acknow-ledge values on both sides of the frontier”. Yet, he cannot see a time when Pakeha values are acknowledged to precisely the same degree “because there won’t be the sharp focal point of consensus among Pakeha about what’s important to them as there is for Maori”.
King is a dyed-in-the-wool cultural nationalist. Those who sparked his love of local history – his father Lewis King, his teacher (later a journalist) Spiro Zavos and Victoria University history professor Peter Munz – are the new book’s dedicatees. When Sargeson on his OE, in a key anecdote from both the biography and the new book, sits in the British Museum in London, feeling oppressed by all that history and realising that he is a New Zealander, it mirrors King’s feeling, as a postgraduate, that to study abroad would amount to cultural cringe. Some contemporaries did go overseas. King stayed and pursued journalism. “Nobody who’s been a journalist sits and stares at a blank page for three days,” he says. “You just sit down and start writing. You also write with an audience in mind, which an awful lot of academics don’t do.” After some years as a journalist, he got his doctorate in his early thirties.
He lives in Opoutere, near Whangamata, on the Coromandel Peninsula. And, actually, it seems that the Coromandel features quite often in the new book. “You’ve got your big themes and your major characters, but you also like to do little cameos. There’s a bit about this harbour. I talk about the Paritu community, which is up the road in Wharekawa. That’s describing the place as it was in the early 1900s, when it was basically a Maori-speaking Ringatu community that didn’t have a cash economy at all, just lived off the land, growing their own fruit and vegetables, and taking fish out of the estuary and out of the sea.”
His description of that era’s Opoutere – “a safe and satisfying place to grow up” – is fond indeed. There are resonances: the position of being on an estuary facing the sea, King says, is akin to Paremata, which was still rural when he grew up there in the 1950s. At Opoutere, he lives among regenerating New Zealand bush and native birds. Looking towards the sea, he can see fortified pa at each side of the harbour. The view offers a vivid sense of history’s proximity.