There’s a poignant scene in James McNeish’s new book about the flight of gifted New Zealanders from this country in the 1930s. We’re in the Oxford University rooms of John Mulgan – up a narrow staircase overlooking Mob Quad, one of the oldest parts of old Oxford. It’s 1937 and Mulgan stands before his fireplace with compatriots Jack Bennett and Ian Milner. In the grate burn the manuka leaves that he asked his father to send, and as the pungent smoke rises, writes McNeish, “Mulgan, Bennett and Milner stand side by side, inhaling the scent in brooding silence”.
Ah, the loneliness of the long-distance New Zealander. Men such as these three and Dan Davin had left New Zealand because, as Bennett once said, “there was nothing there”; but they were haunted by memories of their natal earth and still hoped to return one day. On another occasion Mulgan got two other fellow expatriates, James Bertram and Geoffrey Cox, to agree that “we must all end up back [in New Zealand] in a few years’ time, say 1940, prepared to do something”.
It was never to be. Bennett and Cox settled in Britain; Milner wound up in Czechoslovakia; Davin famously opted for Oxford, about as far from Southland as he could get; and Mulgan, the golden boy who seemed to embody so many dreams, died by his own hand in a Cairo hotel in 1945. Only Bertram came back; a broken man after four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he spent the rest of his life quietly in Lower Hutt.
Bertram, Cox, Davin, Milner, Mulgan: these five are the big birds in Dance of the Peacocks*, the book that McNeish has written about them and their turbulent youth (the subtitle is “New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-tung”). There are supporting roles for Bennett, Charles Brasch, Paddy Costello and others whose stars rose at the same time, but McNeish’s business is principally with the famous five. Four were Rhodes Scholars, three were accomplished writers, one was a great journalist; between them, as McNeish says, they experienced five wars and three revolutions; and each, in his own way, was a hero.
Bertram, after all, was the man who met and interviewed Mao in the Yenan caves after the Long March, who rode with the communist troops, who led convoys on horseback through war-torn China. Mulgan fought with Greek partisans, wrote Man Alone. Cox covered the Spanish Civil War, went on to virtually invent television news journalism in Britain. Milner stood up courageously for his left-wing views, withstood slander and charges of spying. Davin – well, we know more about him than the others, perhaps, thanks not least to Keith Ovenden’s great biography. He had a good war and a not-so-good peace.
Shall we see their like again? Probably not. The unique combination of circumstances in the 30s – depression, revolutions, rising fascism, looming world war – has locked them in their time as, along with Robin Hyde and James K Baxter, possibly the last and only intellectual heroes this country will ever allow itself to have. They were certainly the last generation to produce letters and journals in such abundance, leaving a paper trail so long that it took McNeish three years to follow it, and even now he feels he has barely scratched the surface of the subject. The decline of letter-writing makes future books of this sort unlikely. The Collected Emails of C K Stead? I don’t think so.
McNeish is suitably grateful for the literary legacy. “All these people were writers,” he says. “So not only did they write letters and establish these links that went on for three-quarters of a lifetime, they wrote wonderfully.
“Bertram was one of these people like Rex Fairburn who could not write an uninteresting sentence. Davin was the same; and Mulgan the same. Milner slightly less so, but to an extent they were all writers, and here was this extraordinary treasure trove.”
He makes even grander claims on their behalf, likening them to engagé European intellectuals such as Albert Camus. “What the New Zealand group has in common with Camus and with one another,” he reckons, “is a fierce intellectual honesty, presiding over an awareness of the crimes of their century, which led to engagement and an urge to fight fascism. This puts them in company with other European outsiders like Orwell, Milosz, Silone, Arendt, Koestler, and makes them un-usual in a New Zealand setting.”
MCNEISH’S 20TH BOOK germinated five years ago when Margaret Calder, chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, drew his attention to all the manuscripts available. The moment he saw the papers he saw the potential of a multi-biography, the link being the Rhodes Scholarship, which all except Mulgan won in the early 30s – and he would have collared one, too, but for his outspoken political views. Though it’s doubtful that all five men were ever in the same room at the same time (Mulgan and Davin certainly never met), McNeish sniffed a challenge.
“It’s a bit like conducting an orchestra,” he says, “in which you have a chimpanzee on the piccolo and an elephant on the drums – and you have to get the balance right. I suppose it was that sort of problem. On the other hand, what was appealing about it was that I recognised at the outset that it was going to be difficult.”
A $35,000 National Library fellowship smoothed the path of research, but a winter spent transcribing notes left him almost overwhelmed by the material, thinking there must be at least two, if not three books in it. He distilled and synthesised it all by pretending he was writing a novel.
This may be why Davin doesn’t appear till chapter 18, and why Milner hogs the opening chapters and then vanishes for 200 pages. Bertram is either everywhere or nowhere. But such is McNeish’s skill that the book hangs together with, yes, the shape of a novel and the grip of a thriller. Domestic details snuggle up to world-shaking events; this is history with cornflakes. In chapter 11, for instance, successive paragraphs begin “In 1936 Hitler marched into the Rhineland” and “Each morning John Mulgan, dressed in a dark suit, left Bainton Road for the Clarendon Press”. Cox, invited to dine at an Oxford college, finds himself sitting across the table from Einstein. He wore a hired dinner jacket and boiled shirt front. Cox, that is.
Great days. But disturbing days. These men left one home but never quite found another. Only Cox really settled. “We move in so many worlds,” wrote Bertram to Bennett, “and belong to none of them.” Cox, Davin and Mulgan thrived on the contact with fellow New Zealanders during the war, despite – or perhaps because of – the New Zealand Division resembling what Costello called a “peripatetic Invercargill”. So why didn’t they all just go home when the war was over?
Answering that question, McNeish stresses that they were not so much expatriates doing their OE as exiles to whom the philistine conformism of 1930s New Zealand was tantamount to a prison from which they had to escape or lose all self-respect. He cites, favourably, Davin’s theory about the centres of civilisation (read: Oxford) delaying decline by means of recruitment from the circumference – New Zealand being a place on the outer “where the soil was fertile in talent but not adequate to nourish that talent when fully matured”. As if Davin and the others, like rare orchids, could only flourish when transplanted.
“They all understood,” says McNeish, “that if you wanted to prove yourself, in those days, there was only one way – and that was to go to Europe.”
Well, maybe. Plenty of talented people stayed here in the 30s and did fulfilling work (see Lawrence Jones’s forthcoming book Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-45). But events overtook the orchids, or peacocks, or whatever they were, and at a certain point, says McNeish, “the only thing they had to look forward to was the war. The war got in the way. After that, nothing was ever the same.”
Have distance and death lent a romantic aura to these loquacious refugees from what McNeish calls a “land of ummers”? Probably; had Mulgan or Davin rejoined the local academic community, their lives, dare one say it, would seem a tad less glamorous. But we need our troubled heroes, and Mulgan in particular meets that need. McNeish senses a groundswell of interest in the era, and not just among academics. Inexplicably, Greek Fire – Dean Parker’s great play about Mulgan’s last days – remains unproduced, but the fire will be stoked when Vincent O’Sullivan’s Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan is published in November. Indeed, he and McNeish have been swapping notes like billy-o. “We had working lunches and did a lot of horse-trading,” says the latter.
O’Sullivan picks that McNeish will cop some flak for Dance of the Peacocks. “I can anticipate the academic resistance to this book,” he says. “They’ll say it’s romanticised and so on. I don’t think it is.
“I also remember a good phrase from [Irish critic] Denis Donoghue – his reservation about postcolonialism and post-colonial studies. He says they’re teaching students the culture of reprimand. We want to tick the past off all the time. (I’m talking about fashions in universities.) And the 30s will be part of this, too: we want to challenge everything they achieved, which is really I think another way of feeling sorry for them, that they’re not as smart as we are.”
Historian Michael King welcomes the fresh focus on the era, saying that New Zealanders successful as expatriates have tended to slip below the biographical horizon when they deserve to be far better known in their own country. To King, though, McNeish is a writer – “a very good writer” – rather than a scholar. “His primary function has always been that of a mythologiser rather than an analyst,” observes King, “and sometimes his myth-making rather stretches and moulds the evidence. But then again, that is the role he’s chosen, and it’s a legitimate one.”
NOW IN HIS EARLY seventies, McNeish has walked a lone trail in New Zealand writing for 45 years, never part of any group or school, rarely if ever seen on the literary circuit. In Mackenzie and Lovelock he has written two brilliant books that are quite the equal of any major New Zealand novel, but his habit of chopping between fiction and nonfiction has made it hard to pigeonhole him under N for novelist, or indeed to categorise him at all (“which infuriates my agent in London”, says McNeish cheerfully).
Lawrence Jones once called him the “wild card among New Zealand novelists, unpredictable and relatively unplaced”. Asked to expand on that now, Jones replies: “What I meant was that in each of his novels McNeish was following an interest of his own (often there in his non-fiction also), writing it his own way, with no apparent attention to current fads and trends in New Zealand fiction, so that each one is sui generis, difficult to relate to anything else in New Zealand fiction and forming no obvious surface pattern of his own career …
“My sense of the novels as novels is that none works entirely, that each is in a different way limited by its eccentricity, but that they are all interesting, a very idiosyncratic mind dealing with inherently interesting stuff.”
Mackenzie the sheep-stealer, Jack Lovelock, the David Bain case, the Sicilian Mafia, Israel, the Springbok tour, A R D Fairburn … all subjects of books by McNeish, and all inherently interesting all right. The young journalist who did six years on the New Zealand Herald in the 50s before becoming a fulltime writer in 1964 has travelled widely, carving out what you might call a McNeish market of his own, while remaining, as Sunday Star-Times books editor Iain Sharp remarks, “private, elusive, inviolable”.
Even now, perched in his eyrie overlooking Wellington Harbour – a cosy hillside hut where he can work alone – he tends to avoid being pinned down to an irretractable point of view. He frequently answers “I don’t know” or, more thoughtfully, “I don’t really know.” But that’s all right: the man, one feels, is still fundamentally a journalist – you just have to look at him to see that, his whole face points towards you, even his earlobes point towards you, he’s a questioner and a listener, not a teacher or preacher – and most journalists squirm when the questions they’re so fond of asking are turned back on them.
Just where is James McNeish coming from as a writer? – that question, for instance. “Perhaps I have always been an oddball,” he muses. “I don’t know why. Looking back on odd incidents that I can think of – I have friends but I’ve never been a group person, I’m not a joiner in that sense. I don’t know why. Mulgan wasn’t a joiner, either; perhaps I’m cast in the Mulgan mould. Politically, what am I? I’m a man of the left who is virulently anti-communist. What does that mean? I don’t know.”
Point taken. Or not, as the case may be. Asked to comment on how he finds New Zealand today, as opposed to the Muldoon era (which he once inveighed against), he even claims that he’s “not sufficiently in it [New Zealand] to be able to make a competent judgment”.
Fair enough. He likes being an outsider. He says it’s easier to speak his mind (at least in his books) that way. “If you’re sucked into a system, if you’re friendly with everybody, then it becomes very hard to speak your mind, because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. Maybe that’s why. I reserve the right to do what the good soldier Svejk does and, if I want to, condemn my superiors to hell.”
In many ways he remains detached from New Zealand; at any rate, he gives the impression of always seeing it as a visitor might.
“One of the problems about living and writing in New Zealand,” he says, “is that there’s no mystery here. Everybody knows everybody, everyone’s on first-name terms, and there is no mystery. I think one of the reasons I’ve always travelled and enjoyed writing about other societies is that there are layers upon layers, and you never get to the bottom.”
On the other hand, he admits, it could just be that he’s an ignoramus and that New Zealand is much more complex than he gives it credit for.
He moves, perhaps, in so many worlds and belongs to none of them. And was drawn to write about Bertram, Milner et al because, when taking on a book, “I think there has to be an element of recognition of something that’s happened to yourself. I mean, I lived outside New Zealand for 10 years … When I came back a second time I was to an extent living in a foreign country; and I think I’ve always been a kind of exile in my own place. And this was very true of them.”