It is one of the tragedies – if not the central tragedy – of John Mulgan's life that he never discovered where "home" was.
John Mulgan was a serious young man who got a great deal of fun out of life but was invariably at pains not to tell you about it. He was also a legend in his lifetime and in my view, after Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame, one of the two or three literary figures in this country who matter.
Mulgan, who died in 1945, is remembered for two books: the seminal novel Man Alone, which has come to define a type of New Zealander; and a war memoir, Report on Experience, which contains in its opening pages one of the most evocative prose descriptions of this land – “a peculiar memory of scent and light and sound” – and its people that has ever been written.
Now we have, lovingly excavated and meticulously edited by Peter Whiteford, a major collection of Mulgan’s letters and a small previously unpublished memoir, Journey to Oxford. Taken together, they constitute a fistful of work that encourages us to confront the enigma that was Mulgan, at least between the lines, almost as if we were reading an autobiography.
Mulgan left New Zealand for England in 1933, aged 21, and never returned. At Oxford, he distinguished himself as a scholar and publisher, married a young Englishwoman, Gabrielle Wanklyn, and was subsequently decorated for his war exploits as a saboteur fighting for the British in German-occupied Greece. In 1944, he wrote to Gabrielle, by then in New Zealand with their infant son, Richard: “My life seems to have been spent in separation from people I liked and cared about” and closes, “I shall be with you as soon as I can.” In one of his last letters to her, dated April 1, 1945, uncertain of a postwar future, he wrote: “I would really – deep down – prefer to live in NZ.” Three and a half weeks later, on April 25, 1945, only days before the peace, he took his life in a Cairo hotel.
These two publications mark the centenary of Mulgan’s birth in Christchurch in 1911. The letters, written almost exclusively to Mulgan’s parents and to Gabrielle, cover the early years in New Zealand, Oxford – Merton College and the Clarendon Press – and the war years. They tell the story of a young man’s journey into life, marked initially by energy and wit, and the tonic of Oxford – “I felt I hadn’t been properly alive before,” he told his sister after a couple of months in residence – then become, as the unrest of the 1930s is darkened by war, clamant in their loneliness and frustration and longing to return “home”. Yet they are always tempered by tenderness.
It is one of the tragedies – if not the central tragedy – of Mulgan’s life that he never discovered, although he wrote about it constantly, where “home” was. “Am I an Englishman?” he wrote ambiguously in his last letter to Gabrielle, and answered: “Near enough I guess.”
Mulgan’s death is commonly accepted as an insoluble mystery. “There can be no conclusive judgment on the reason for his death,” his son writes in a new edition of Report on Experience, published in 2010. Republication of this war memoir, again thanks to Whiteford, restores passages expunged from earlier editions, which reflect Mulgan’s attitude to the English officer class (namely its incompetence) and bear witness in their polite savagery as one of the staging posts in Mulgan’s long journey towards a final disillusionment, depression and death. It is in this context that Journey to Oxford, although incomplete, is particularly interesting.
Abandoned in 1935, when Mulgan was 24, it is part-essay and part-memoir; hovers between travelogue and satire; is written in the laconic, deceptively simple style that is Mulgan’s trademark; and introduces anecdotally a returned serviceman named Johnson, who will reappear as the central character in Man Alone. This is the disillusioned Johnson who in the novel talks of the peace between the wars as “the bit in between”.
One can read Journey to Oxford as a miniature morality tale, as disguised autobiography, as a companion piece to Man Alone, or indeed to Report on Experience, which in atmosphere it closely resembles. Or as all of these things. Just as Report on Experience echoes the working title for Man Alone (“Talking of War”), so the fragmentary Journey to Oxford, in its capricious and numbing analysis of the people he meets in England, looks forward to the haunting pessimism of the later war memoir.
Mulgan has been well served by a circle of loving friends and critics, among them Geoffrey Cox, James Bertram, Charles Brasch, Ian Milner, Jack Bennett, Dan Davin and his two biographers, Paul Day and Vincent O’Sullivan. Those who knew him at Oxford confess that, while delighting in his company, they ultimately ran up against an impenetrable wall of reserve. This may help to explain why almost everyone who has written about him has tiptoed around the matter of his suicide, as if to attempt to explain it were an impertinence. The exception is Bertram, who speaks of a young man, older than his years, who willed his own death in the TE Lawrence manner and who, having “reached the point of ‘victory’”, saw through it and found it meaningless. z
A GOOD MAIL: LETTERS OF JOHN MULGAN, selected and edited by Peter Whiteford (VUP, $50); JOURNEY TO OXFORD, by John Mulgan, edited by Peter Whiteford (VUP, $30).
Click here for our November 2011 interview with Peter Whiteford.
James McNeish is author of Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-tung and the
forthcoming memoir Touchstones.