The editor of the first collection of John Mulgan’s correspondence explains why it is revealing but only up to a point.
Mulgan in Greece 1944
Published in 1939, Man Alone is a novel that genuinely merits that overused term “iconic”; a novel that is taught in New Zealand schools and universities; a novel that in September gave rise to a two-day conference at Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.
For Mulgan himself, however, Man Alone “wasn’t very good I fear”. In a 1940 letter to his parents, Alan and Marguerita Mulgan, he wrote:
I’m afraid the point of view that it expresses rather crudely is fairly deep in me when it comes to characterising these last twenty years, a lost, waste land sort of period between two wars with so much folly and so much wasted effort to account for. It may be that I read Housman too much when I was younger or it may be just an easy way of re-acting to so much of the false optimism with which we have been surrounded.
After Mulgan’s friend James Bertram sent him a copy of his review of Man Alone in the literary journal Tomorrow, Mulgan wrote of it in another letter to his parents, dismissing the review as “over-enthusiastic” and saying the novel “was not as good as he said, even in the Bloomsbury-like view of Tomorrow – I think, looking back to it, it was honest but dull and unfinished”.
Both letters are included in A Good Mail: Letters of John Mulgan, the first collection of Mulgan’s correspondence, which is being published next month along with Journey to Oxford, an unfinished and previously unreleased memoir that begins with Mulgan’s 1933 departure from New Zealand, never to return. The books augment Vincent O’Sullivan’s 2003 biography, Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan, with O’Sullivan encouraging both.
They have been edited by Peter Whiteford, an associate professor of English at Victoria, whose painstaking scholarship was so evident in last year’s restoration of Mulgan’s Report on Experience (first published, posthumously and in an expurgated form, in 1947) and before that in his Vibrant with Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell (2005).
The releases mark the centenary of Mulgan’s birth on December 31, 1911. He died in 1945, aged 33, overdosing on morphine in a puzzling suicide in Cairo, after a war serving with British forces in Northern Ireland, in El Alamein and behind enemy lines with partisans in Axis-occupied Greece. He left a widow, Gabrielle, and a five-year-old son, Richard.
A Good Mail is composed of letters to Gabrielle and Richard, and to Alan and Marguerita; Whiteford has chosen to restrict his selection to the family correspondence that represents by far the bulk of Mulgan’s letters held by the Alexander Turnbull Library.
What makes the letters valuable, he says, alongside the writing we already have about and by Mulgan, is they’re not only in his own words but also “contemporary with the events he is experiencing rather than recollected in tranquillity, as it were, or subject to the kind of filtration that goes on when you write a memoir or autobiography much later in life. There is so much immediacy to them.”
Mulgan is an astute commentator on New Zealand and English society and politics (“Excuse this leading article,” he apologises in one letter), bringing, in effect, given his time away from New Zealand, an outsider’s eye to both. Evident throughout is a fluid and fluent intellect; a liberal socialist, Mulgan had no illusions about the fascism and communism stalking Europe and the accommodations being made towards them.
But Whiteford warns about overestimating Mulgan’s shrewdness: “I remember thinking at one stage that he predicts what happens next in the war and when it was going to happen, and there was a whole sequence he went through where he seemed to get every one of them wrong. I sat there thinking, ‘He’s terrible!’”
For many, the letters will be of most interest for how they trace the various conflicts at the heart of Mulgan, as he wrestles with the rival attractions of journalism and academic publishing for Oxford University’s Clarendon Press, where he worked, and with whether he is now an Englishman or still a New Zealander, conceding in 1943 that he “had better stay now a man with two countries liking a part of both of them” (but clearly finding that an unsatisfactory solution).
This last conflict is in many ways a timeless and universal one for New Zealanders abroad, but also very specific to being a New Zealander in the 1930s and 40s and to being John Mulgan in particular – son of Alan Mulgan, a leading literary figure renowned for his genuflection before the mother country in a period when younger writers were marking out fresh territory for New Zealand literature.
A sense of that generation gap can be found in some of the letters from son to father, including, on arriving in England, John declaring to the author of the reverent travelogue Home: A Colonial’s Adventure that London is “a foreign land”, St Paul’s Cathedral is “rather a nasty bit of work”, and the South Downs are “rather fine, although not high enough for my taste”.
More direct are his critiques of the novel Spur of Morning Alan sends him to submit to publishers and with which John is overenthusiastic with his editor’s blue pencil (“I can feel your sincerity when you write but as a modern I would say that it isn’t true as a description of life,” he writes, along with blunter comments). Later, he steers Alan away from writing more fiction. “Not another novel, please!” says Whiteford, laughing. “That’s true, that’s very true.”
One non-fiction book is accused of giving “the impression of New Zealand as labouring under a cultural inferiority complex”. Of another, John says: “I am very pleased with the book the more I read it through. Your work always improves on acquaintance.” A backhanded compliment if ever there were one. But Whiteford thinks too much has been made of the differences between father and son, pointing to the books John actively encouraged Alan to write.
“I think he’s more responsive to his father’s writing than has been generally admitted. And certainly he’s got a great affection for his father. Reading through those letters, there’s a strong sense that he admires his father’s liberal mind and liberal attitudes.
“The phrase ‘Your work always improves on acquaintance’ can be taken as ‘Gosh, the first time I read this I thought it was rubbish’, but equally there is somebody who is prepared to reread, perhaps two or three times, and to acknowledge, ‘I can see strengths in this more.’ So I think we can overstate the sense in which he’s rejecting his father’s literary style and literary achievement.”
In his introduction, Whiteford quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson saying letters constitute a “full and genuine journal” of a life. But although they complement the biographies written about him, Mulgan’s letters don’t do that, writes Whiteford.
Indeed they don’t. Because the rug is pulled from under any sense of revelation the letters suggest by the deception in the final letter Whiteford includes as a postscript. It was effectively Mulgan’s suicide note, sent to his commanding officer and foreshadowed by nothing he had written previously to his family, who had been told he was looking forward to reuniting with them in New Zealand.
Presented in the collection without commentary, it is one of the most moving letters you might read, with Mulgan saying he has discovered he has cancer of the throat; that he hasn’t “any desire to prolong my life for a few months or a year or two as an invalid. I have enjoyed life too much to want it in a reduced or a second-rate form”; and asking his commanding officer to tell Gabrielle and Richard he “died suddenly of a fever or took an overdose of morphine by mistake”, since he would prefer Richard “to grow up without any shadow from his father to perplex him”.
However, as O’Sullivan writes in his biography, there is no evidence Mulgan either had or thought he had cancer. The “cover story” he asks for was a lie on top of another lie. There are also suggestions of two possible mistresses.
“I’ve read the letter numerous times and keep changing what I think about it,” says Whiteford. “But I completely agree it does make you go back and think how much of this is a very carefully considered position, how much of it is honest revelation? You always feel there’s a kind of guardedness. There are very few letters where you sense he had completely poured out his heart. He just seems to avoid that.
“I share Vince’s view that we can’t really know about the suicide. It’s awkward to speculate and probably fruitless in a way … The positions he adopts in the letter – if the war had gone on he would have ended his life in some other way and asking for a cover story to be invented – the layers that are going on there are quite suggestive of a terribly complicated mind that got itself into all sorts of difficulties.”
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). Both books will be released on December 9.