Books
Tales of the tribe
by Lawrence Jones
Maurice Shadbolt’s aim was “to ensure that a whisper or two of these antipodean lives … remained on human record”.
Maurice Shadbolt’s death in Taumarunui on October 10 brought to an end a long, varied, lively and distinguished literary career. Recent years were not kind to him, as, plagued with failing health and memory, he was taken over by Alzheimer’s, the disease he described in the coda of his last book, From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir, in 1999. However, in the years from the publication of his first story in the Listener in June 1955 until that final book he had a hugely productive writing career in which he published 10 novels, six books of short fiction, a play, two volumes of memoirs, and six volumes of miscellaneous non-fiction, as well as a number of uncollected short stories, essays and reviews. In the process he collected most of the awards and honours that New Zealand offers to writers: the Landfall Prose Award (1957), the Hubert Church Memorial Award (1959), the State Literary Scholarship (1960, 1970, 1982), the Robert Burns Fellowship (1963), the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award (1963, 1967, 1995), the Freda Buckland Award (1969), the James Wattie Award (1973, 1987), the New Zealand Book Award (1981), the State Literary Travel Bursary (1988), a CBE (1989), the University of Waikato Fellowship (1992), Honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Auckland (1997), the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1998) and the A W Reed Lifetime Achievement Award (2002).
Shadbolt was born in Auckland in 1932 and was educated at Te Kuiti High School (Te Kuiti is the “Te Ika” of his fiction), Avondale College and the University of Auckland. His upbringing in an eccentric and passionately left-wing family he later described in One of Ben’s: A New Zealand Medley. He worked as a journalist and as scriptwriter and director for documentary films and was part of the young bohemian literary community in Wellington from 1955 until he went to England in 1957, stopping in China, the USSR and Bulgaria on the way, a “last purging” of his inherited communist sympathies. By the time he returned to New Zealand in 1960 he had published his first book of short stories, The New Zealanders, and had begun to achieve a reputation as a new, post-Sargeson writer. He has said that he began “in antagonistic reaction” to the classic Sargeson story, determined to move away from New Zealand’s “puritan underside, and the Depression”, and deal with “the New Zealand in which [he] was living”. Many of the stories in that first volume and the collection that followed it, Summer Fires and Winter Country (1963), did focus primarily on contemporary New Zealand and New Zealanders (some of them expatriates), but the most successful ones such as “After the Depression”, “The Strangers”, “Ben’s Land” and “The People Before” dealt primarily with his father’s generation and established the pattern that was to continue throughout his career, for his best writing almost always dealt with his family’s and/or New Zealand’s history, viewed from some distance, with a mythic substructure into which the characters fit as historical types. However, until the 1980s he focused primarily on the rapidly changing society of the present, with the historical interest secondary.
Shadbolt’s books of 1965 to 1976 were attempts to deal with what he called the “Pacific sea-change which began to overtake the country in the 1960s” and the “stunning and perplexing … change of climate” of the 1970s. His focus in these works was primarily upon the artist, for, as he said in 1973, he thought New Zealand society was at a point where “the artistic sensibility not only stands for the national sensibility: in the absence of anything else coherent, it virtually is the national sensibility”. In his first novel, Among the Cinders (1965), although the central figure is an adolescent (a parody of such characters in earlier New Zealand fiction), the book shows the inability of the protagonist’s poet brother and various other New Zealand writers to tell the truth about his experience. The narrator in “The Presence of Music” (title story in a triptych of thematically linked novellas, 1967), Ben Blackwood in This Summer’s Dolphin (1969), Frank Firth in An Ear of the Dragon (1971), and Ian Freeman in Strangers and Journeys (1972) are all writers attempting to come to terms with New Zealand and the present, and the potter Paul Pike in A Touch of Clay (1974) is similar. The painter Mike in “The Voyagers” (1967), the pianist Linda East in “The Presence of Music”, and the painter Tim Livingstone in Strangers and Journeys are all artists who embody or have projected upon them by others some aspects of the “national sensibility”. Only in Danger Zone (1975), a novel about French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is the figure of the artist not central. In all of these novels and stories Shadbolt shows himself, as he has said, “obstinately engaged with 20th century New Zealand as decade succeeds decade … contributing to the contemporary record”.
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