Books
The Fairburn problem
by Peter Simpson
Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn (1904-57), whose frame was as long as his moniker and who had an outsized personality to match, was one of the best-known New Zealanders of his generation. Primarily a poet, he effortlessly shone in radio and print (newspapers, pamphlets, books, magazines). He was an inveterate essayist and letter writer, renowned for the forceful expression of his opinions (on everything from compost to marching girls) and the ebullience of his wit. That overworked epithet “Renaissance Man” was often used of Fairburn – with some justice, because of the range of activities he turned his hand to – poetry, painting, fabric design, lecturing, journalism, editing, criticism, conservation, sport.
Produced to mark the centenary of his birth, this unusual book focuses on Fairburn’s great capacity for friendship. He was gregarious and outgoing, loquacious and funny, and known for his ability to get on with anyone and everyone (apart from some noteworthy exceptions) from casual pub acquaintances to the movers and shakers in many fields – literature, art, politics, law, medicine, education, business, the military, publishing, broadcasting, diplomacy, photography, theatre, wine-making.
In the nearly 30 chapters the focus is less on Fairburn himself than on his closest and better-known (and mostly male) friends. Many chapters are written by Fairburn’s admirable wife Jocelyn and their four offspring (one of whom, Dinah Holman, is co-editor), who encountered these luminaries in their childhood homes in Auckland’s New Lynn and Devonport. Except for poet Jean Bartlett and builder George Haydn, who are still around to write their own stories, Fairburn’s friends have themselves passed on, and are described here by friends or family. For example, Rupert Glover writes of his poet and printer father Denis, Janet Irwin of her father, the “backblocks doctor” G M Smith, Vanya Lowry of her printer father Bob, Jenny Buxton of her father the surgeon, Douglas Robb, and Elizabeth Lee-Johnson of her husband the painter and photographer, Eric. Among other subjects are businessmen Harold Innes and George Fraser, writers Frank Sargeson, R A K Mason, Sarah Campion and Maurice Duggan, architect Vernon Brown, photographer Clifton Firth, politicians Martin Finlay and Dove-Meyer Robinson, educators Phillip Smithells, Sydney Musgrove and Archie Fisher, and wine-makers Paul Groshek and Victor Zaremba – a virtual who’s who of Auckland’s intelligentsia in the postwar era.
As might be expected in such circumstances the general tone is intimate, affectionate and largely uncritical, and, since few of the authors are primarily writers, there is inevitable unevenness in quality. However, if anything, this adds to the charm and informality of the undertaking, though somewhat more stringent editing would not have gone astray.
Fairburn’s relatively early death at 53 obviously came as a tremendous shock to those who knew him. Back then his reputation as a writer was at its peak. For instance, in Allen Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) more pages were allocated to Fairburn than to anyone else. But with the posthumous publication of collections of Fairburn’s poems, essays and letters, from the mid-1960s a negative reaction set in. C K Stead, reacting against “post-mortem Fairburn adulation” in an influential review of his Collected Poems (1966), found the poems “wanting, and by a test they seem to invite”; as recently as 2002 Stead reiterated his view that “Fairburn was never quite the literary giant his contemporaries took him for”.
The publication of The Woman Problem and other prose in 1967 did further damage to his reputation. The title essay in particular, never published by Fairburn in his lifetime, became a by-word for sexism and anti-feminism in the 70s and 80s. Likewise, his letters, edited by Lauris Edmond in 1981, added more fuel to the flames. Given to flamboyant expression of his views, especially to like-minded friends like Glover, Fairburn fired off extravagant missives, which – often taken out of context – have been endlessly mined as evidence of his male chauvinism, homophobia, xenophobia and reactionary views about art and literature. His reference to women poets as “the menstrual school of poetry”, his paranoia about an international conspiracy of homosexual writers (the “Green International”), and his denunciation of Colin McCahon’s religious paintings as “pretentious hocus pocus”, are better known these days than, for instance, Dominion (his searching study of New Zealand in the Depression, our first long poem of note) or his eloquent love poem, “The Cave”:
We climbed down, and crossed over the sand,
and there were islands floating in the wind-whipped blue,
and clouds and islands trembling in your
eyes …
An underlying motive for this book is to attempt some rehabilitation of Fairburn’s tarnished reputation. Understandably, his children have wished to rescue their loved and admired father from the currently lopsided caricature of him as chauvinist, homophobe and reactionary. While not evading his occasional expression of illiberal and wrong-headed opinions, the book amply demonstrates that there was much more to Fairburn than sclerotic outbursts of prejudice, not least his capacity for attracting the best and brightest of his generation to the flame of his charismatic personality.
FAIRBURN AND FRIENDS, edited by Dinah Holman and Christine Cole Catley (Cape Catley, $39.99).
THIS THING IN THE MIRROR: Self Portraits by New Zealand Artists, by Claire Finlayson (Craig Potton Publishing, $49.95).
