Fathers and Sons

Do I regret being old. No! The regret is in the infirmity that accompanies my particular old age. I'll use one example to illustrate my strong statement.

While I was a student at Christchurch Boys’s High I mowed three lawns (two shillings and sixpence each) on Saturday to get pocket money. The history master suggested we read a Russian novel when we studied19th century Russia. I read Dostevsky’s 'Crime and Punishment' – translated of course - and was hooked. I spent my pocket money buying and exploring his other novels. The tumultuous torrent of his prose swept me along. Nothing in my experience fitted his world. Years later when I reread them, especially 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot' I still found the mystery and strange extremes of emotion and ideas excitingly compelling. That literary love affair led me naturally on to Tolstoy and the great panoramic sweeps of 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Kareinna'.

In the year I trained to be a secondary school teacher as a history graduate I was placed in the Social Studies group. We were urged to do further university study. I asked to do Russian. My tutor reacted scornfully. “What for?” My reply was honest. “I want to read Russian writers in the original.” Their response was understandable. I was going to teach New Zealand secondary students. “You have no geography in your degree. You need some. We’re enrolling you for Geography 1.” So much for the romantic longings of a late adolescent.

When I started teaching I could afford to buy more books. Reputedly, Turgenev was the third great 19th century Russian novelist so I bought a couple. But he didn’t grab me as the other two had. Too gentlemanly, too reserved, nothing much seemed to happen, everything seemed to be an understatement, love seemed destined to fail. Strange! I admired the novels of Dostovesky - a religious fanatic and nationalistic bigot - ahead of the novels of the cultured liberal and strong opponent of serfdom. There was a famous quarrel between the two writers where Dostoevsky suggested the Turgenev would see Russia better if he got a telescope.

The foreword to Turgenev’s 'Fathers and Sons' had a quotation from a lecture given by Turgenev which helps explain the difference between the two writers. He said everyman was either Don Quixote - certain of their beliefs and acting without fear of consequence – or Hamlet - contemplative, sceptical and ironic. Now, I realise both are two male fictitious, fantasy figures but as a young man I found the division intriguing. Of course, it’s rarely one extreme or the other, most of us are somewhere along a continuum. Further, it’s a moveable feast. But at that stage of my life I firmly believed I was a Hamlet. I spent hours looking at my existence through that lens - a waste of time.

Turgenev’s division into these two extremes is more singularly Russian than British colonial. My development and temperament steered me towards a more practical, pragmatic existence. Turgenev might be like Hamlet in that he was an equivocater. My farming upbringing while it didn’t stop me day-dreaming did give me habits of persistence, punctuality, and reliability. As a teacher there were lessons to prepare, homework to be marked, university texts to be swotted, and sports teams to be coached. Marriage added another set of responsibilities, garden to be dug, hedge to be cut, car to be washed, mortgage to be paid though undoubtedly, the bookish side of my character puts me more on the Hamlet side of the spectrum.

Last summer I reread 'Fathers and Sons' with much more enjoyment and satisfaction. When I first read it, while I found concepts of liberalism and Slavic nationalism credible – even so I didn’t really understand them - I found that of nihilism just unrealistic. Now I realise it was a stepping stone towrds modern existentialism. The hero s wilful denial of his feelings seemed stupid as did his denial of the power of art or poetry. I enjoyed rereading it much more when older. It captures that sense of living on the edge of an abyss – Turgenev’s word - that is elusive but always there. It was more Russian than I’d realised, but also more universal.

When that young man first read that novel he knew death was certain but the odds were that it was some way far ahead. Now as my own gets closer I find myself understanding more the 19th century preoccupation with it. And the horror and fear without faith. The novel’s farcical duel was not as I first thought romantic twaddle, it was a form of dicing with death, Russian roulette involving two people. The hero’s succumbing to typhus at the end of the novel is par for the course. How can a nihilistic atheist think of death as anything but random, a terrible and stupid waste? Heroic death was not an option in this instance. I realised my stoicism rather than his despair was my buttress.

My country childhood days were punctuated with births, weddings and funerals. Mortality was seen as part of a cycle. Every now and then in the city a funeral cortege would go past. Men would doff their hats, traffic would stop and there was silence to respect the dead. Those days are long gone. Death has always bothered humanity. Medieval theologians wrote treatises about it, there were manuals on how to die properly. Then, young, mature, the old, all were vulnerable. Plagues lurked and pounced on individuals and civilisations. Modern civilization with its gadgetry tries to ignore death. And therefore aging because it is an unfortunate reminder of that certain inevitability. We have moved a long way from Alexander Pope’s 'this long disease, my life'.

Debt blowouts and private schools

The media has been on the warpath about the family debt blowout over the last four years. It’s the latest beat-up. Whipping boy or stalking horse – take your pick. I’m a depression baby, so I’ve always been canny about expenditure. If I can’t afford something I don’t buy it and I know about delaying gratification. But I suspect younger generations have grown up with a different mind-set. Saving for a rainy day is now a lesser part of the psyche, national or individual. There’s an intriguing double-standard here.

There was a recent talk on the radio about happiness. The speaker claimed there was less today. It’s hard to quantify such feelings. But from my vintage it seems to me that for years the advertising industry has worked hard to leave us feeling dissatisfied and therefore want to buy products to ease that feeling. Collectively we’ve bought that message. Wrinkles on your face – that’s the end, sexually. Your car doesn’t corner well - buy ours, it will. It takes time to cook a meal on your own – buy ours, it’ll make you instantly part of the group. Do you believe your cat is happy with its present food – content your kitten with this scientific balanced diet. You deserve a better home. And exciting holidays. And so on.

Possession does not guarantee happiness. I accept that poverty makes it difficult, indeed in instances renders it impossible. With that fear lurking the dissatisfaction industry has the seedbed to render its claims credible. Happiness like astonishment does not come in league tables. It is not a competitive game.

At a different but relevant tangent I’ve learnt that with no press fanfare or critical comment the Government has set aside $2.6 million to enable Year 9, 10 and 11 students to attend private schools. State aid for private schools! Is the Government saying state schools aren’t good enough? There is this myth that private schools are better. Again it is a target of the dissatisfaction industry. Public health bad! Private health good! Public schools bad! Private Schools good! Scholarships for smart students; a rerun of the 19th century.

The belief underlining the policy is that the state school system is no good. Where’s the evidence that private schools are better? Where is value addition at its greatest. When I was in the secondary inspectorate I visited private schools; a few were excellent, some were good, a handful mediocre and one or two of a standard of which we were very critical. State schools had the same range. The belief is an American import. Their system cannot be compared with ours, it’s comparing oranges with bananas they are so dissimilar.

The policy will mean some of their best students will leave state schools as they reach the higher levels depriving them of leadership, scholarship and sporting skills. It denies the concept of neighbourhood schools? It devalues the work of thousands of hard-working teachers.

Schools reflect the socio-economic background of their students. To increase the intellectual grunt at the higher levels of the private schools will inflate their examination results. This in turn will become self-perpetuating.

I rarely use this word for policy. I do for this one. Humbug!

Bernadette Hall

I’ve been dipping into poet Bernardette Hall’s ‘The Lustre Jug’ another Christmas present. I had greatly enjoyed her previous volume ‘The Ponies’ with poems about her visit to Antarctica. This one has poems from her six months on the Rathcoola Fellowship in southern Ireland. Fiona Farrell had a similar stay. The poetry from her experience tended to stress the historical aspect. Hall’s poems inhabit the same place – especially the 19th century potato famine - but they somehow experience the space with a sense of intimacy; it’s where ‘foxgloves are heliotrope thimbles’ and ‘raindrops slide down strings of sunlight’.

The second section of the book begins with poems set in Australia, the brightness of bougainvillea and jacaranda contrasting with the rain-washed green of Ireland. There are pelicans in the land shaped like an angelfish. And then moves to her homeland - crisp, complex, colourful poems full of life. Hall's good at celebrating love as the title poem illustrates. Here is a love poem of hers from an earlier collection which I have always liked ever since I first read it.

LOVE

the best way yet of testing
it is to put you on a list
e.g. of Akaroa roses:

'solfaterre' a creamy noisette
climbing Napoleon's willow
grown from a slip from St Helena

'souvenir de malmaison'
a true bourbon flowering more
than once a year

'antonia d'ormois'
a blush-white pretty flower
with clear green shoots

'banksia' cascading double white
from Lombardy poplars

'alberic barbier'
yellow buds opening to creamy
white with the fragrance
of green apples

'charles de mills'
tough dark-green leaves
drooping from the mid-rib

'celine forestier'
quartered with flat incurved petals
instead of stamens, a button eye
& the fragrance of spiced tea

Ponting's Photograph

Eight Commonwealth women have sledged to the South Pole. A century ago that feat had never been achieved. During my childhood I read every account I could find about Scott’s ill-fated expedition. Ponting’s photographs assisted the words. Part of the fascination was the knowledge that five of the party would die on their return trek from the South Pole.

So it was with interest several years ago I read Spufford’s fascinating book ‘I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination.’ It had Ponting’s most famous photograph. Taken from the frozen sea-ice at the foot of a glacier, the camera was stationed far enough back to register the glacier top on the plate, along with a slender slice of night sky. It shows the whole height of the ice cliff, a chasmed surface.

At the bottom, some way out from the glacier foot, there is a man hitched to a sledge. He is tiny. Closer examination proves he is not real, but a silhouette inked onto the print, posed there to give an indication of scale, like the small coin placed next to a champion pumpkin, his six feet giving the measure for the glacier’s hundreds.

The glacier’s imperturbable grandeur contrasts this emblematic man’s smallness. The picture dramatises the struggle, which will be based upon the difference of size between men and landscape. It sets the men up, of course, for the start of what was at that stage planned to be a successful journey. Ponting took the photograph before they began. It’s an iconic image - the sublime glacier’s indifference to human efforts.

Fig-Basket

Three entrees before the main course.

a) Yesterday, New Year’s Day, Anne cooked sauerbraten for dinner – very tasty. She’d made a batch of gingerbread so a few pieces added to the flavour of the sauce. It was an appropriate meal – our German friends Ulrike and Matthias rang early from Berlin – it was great to hear from them.

b) This day last year I had my worse fall. It was not a good start to the year for I sprained the tendon that links hip to spine. It took over a month for the pain to subside. The odds are with my condition I’ll have another fall this year though I try to take good care to avoid one.

c) There are two things that irritate me about this blog. First, the dating – it’s American time. Second, lines of poetry always move to the left, which means free verse does not appear as I have typed it.

d) My New Year’s Eve blog talked about Cleopatra. In my salad days I wrote a poem questioning the legend. Here it is.

FIG BASKET

The fuss is beyond me –
the bitch is dead,
tomorrow we return to Rome.

Years since I’ve seen the kids
and the missus. One night
stands seldom satisfy –

be good to be back.
Bleak here, sand and wind;
Octavius is right – bloody savages.

When she tried her wiles on him
(didn’t waste her time on likes
of me) he told her, poison or

in chains to Rome and furthermore
he didn’t want her – even as his
whore. That stung her. He just

walked out while she screamed
at him. Later, showed her true
colours: insisted on full regalia.

We munched figs – raided from
the palace courtyard – while we
waited. Even with the maids

dead about her feet, still she
tarried. We forced the potion
down her throat. From her wrist

I nicked two pearls – no further
use to her. Now they talk
of a snake in a fig basket.

Gooseberry Pie

For New Year's Eve Anne made one of my favourite desserts - gooseberry pie. With cream. I finished it off for lunch today. I love the bitter sweet clash - it's a combination Chinese cuisine discovered centuries ago. It's the end of the season but a damn good way to finish 2009.

January 1 1998

It's interesting to look back. On I January 1998 I began a diary. I stopped writing it when I was hospitalised on Anzac Day 2007. Here's that first day eleven years ago.

Having reached 63 and a quarter years and thereby becoming a superannuant and having just retired from my full-time job as executive director of the New Zealand Council for Teacher Education I have decided to keep a diary. The only definite thing about the forthcoming year is that it will be different. Off to the office at eight and returning just before six is over. So is having a PA to do all the mundane tasks. If I get contract work I will continue to buy books. If I don’t I will be reduced to reading those we already possess. Either way a win/win situation.

What else does the new year hold? Abroad the meltdown of the Asian markets will have long-term consequences. At home racial tension looks like intensifying. Politically, will Jenny Shipley last? Will I?

We are in Auckland, staying at Rosemary Stagg’s lovely sun-drenched Browns Bay pole house, surrounded by native trees, which help keep it cool and frame the view of the sea. The only fly in the ointment is a tui. Usually they are melodious but this one must have learnt its call from the mynahs - the most ugly squawk you’ve ever heard. When we arrived and Rosemary said she could wring its neck we were both a little shocked. Now we understand as it scolds in the morning.

Rosemary left mid-morning to go a bach down the Coromadel. A beautiful hot day, every window and door open and the two cats Scooter and Buttercup seeking the shade. I wonder how our two, Dorothy and William (named after the Wordsworths, she’s plump and placid and he whines a lot), are surviving the Wadestown cattery. We only left on Monday and today is Thursday.

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s 'Alias Grace' – a powerful book. Women’s lot in the 19th century left a lot to be desired. And the class system. Usually after a book that grips me I seek something lighter so I picked up one of Rosemary’s 'Under the Tuscan Sun' by Frances Mayes. Three months in Tuscany, the rest of the time at San Francisco University. Suppose it is part of the class-system of our global society. The only thing I ask of academics is that they realise what a fortunate life they lead. The book brought back memories of our own stay in Italy in 1989.

Anne went off to take her mother for a drive and then brought her back, very frail and tottery. We amused her with colourful cookery books - Rosemary has the best library of these in New Zealand and is a superlative cook as well – until Anne’s sister Susan rang to say they were back from their Wenderholme picnic. We drove round picking up Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way. Mrs Matthews tires very quickly so we took her home at about 8 30 to a lovely sunset and us on to Browns Bay and a night-time read of Italian living. For me a lazy beginning for 1998.