We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“THEN IT WAS NOW AGAIN – Selected Critical
Writing” by Murray Edmond (Atuanui Press, $NZ44)
I know this from
personal experience.
About two years
ago on this blog, I reviewed Stafford and Williams’ heavyweight blockbuster The
Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature [look under
“T” for “The” to check out the review on the index at right]. Like many
other critics, I lamented the number of important writers – especially poets –
who had been overlooked, and questioned whether the anthology was as
comprehensive as it claimed to be. In a very short time Murray Edmond posted a comment [which you can read at the bottom
of that earlier review] pointing out that Stafford and Williams had
blundered in an even more fundamental way. They had included virtually no
examples at all of New Zealand writing for the stage. In this, they were at one
with earlier “histories” of New Zealand literature, which pretended that New
Zealand playwrights didn’t exist. Rather chastened, I at once admitted that
Murray Edmond was dead right in this observation.
Then It Was Now Again is a
substantial (300-odd pages) collection of Murray Edmond’s critical writings
over the last forty years, beginning in the early 1970s when he was a young
firebrand and propagandist for a more engaged and authentically experimental
New Zealand theatre; and ending in 2013, when he is Associate Professor of
Drama at the University of Auckland and with some – but not all – of his views
mellowed a bit. The 24 pieces chosen range from brief statements to extensive
and searching exegesis and, given that Edmond is as much poet as
man-of-the-theatre, they concern themselves as much with poetry as with drama.
Edmond’s preface notes that “the phrase
‘Then It Was Now again’, is Janet Frame’s, from ‘Intensive Care’, that
intransigent novel about the terror of trying to perfect the world.” (p.iv)
He introduces the volume as “largely
taken up with a critique of culture mostly within the spheres of poetry and
drama and theatre.” Following Edmond’s preface is Scott Hamilton’s introduction
which, perceptively, notes “Edmond’s
career as a poet, critic, teacher and activist for theatre has been made in the
shadow of the failure of the utopian project of the sixties and early seventies.”
(p.2) Hamilton calls the book’s final piece “elegiac”. For reasons which might become apparent in this review, I
agree with that judgment.
As I read Murray
Edmond’s preface itself, I found it profoundly half-right, which
To which I am
impelled to reply that one can argue this only if one is particularly slippery
in the use of the term “revolution”, and perhaps Edmond is romanticising the
New Left notion of “revolution” in the late 1960s, which never amounted to a
revolution in any real sense [an overturning of society] in the first place. Too
much Marcuse muddles mind and memory. Perhaps, too, all Edmond’s preface really
shows is how brilliant capitalism is at buying out and subverting and turning into
either commodity or chic any artistic or cultural movement, no matter how
destabilising it may at first appear to be. [And Jackson Pollocks are now
traded by investors for huge sums. And dear old Johnny Rotten now says he never
really disliked the queen anyway…] Say all you will about the power of art, academic
revolutionary, and I will say you are evading the practical impotence of most
art, especially when it addresses only a small group anyway. Yet after all this
intemperate rant of mine, I concede that Edmond may have a point when he says
that “de-centred cultural politics may be
the way out of the dilemma that confronted the Left when faced with the
Revolution of the Right.” (p.viii)
In a way, this
really says “a bas la revolution!”
So, after such
beginnings, how does one fairly assess a large collection of diverse writings?
I am forced into
generalisations.
Of course Murray
Edmond has some constant themes. His workmanlike 2013 introduction to the volume
Twenty New Zealand Playwrights again
reminds readers of playwrights’ exclusion from literary anthologies.
Of course Murray
Edmond can do excellent general exposition of other writers’ work. His 1988 Landfall piece “Divagations: Kendrick
Smithyman’s Poetry” is a model of this sort of thing as he sets about
interpreting Smithyman as a Modernist, and hence rebukes Charles Brasch for
being such a Romanticist that he failed to “get” Smithyman. Likewise Edmond’s
2007 piece from Australasian Drama
Studies on Hone Kouka’s trilogy of plays is detailed and methodical
exposition and contextualisation, setting the playwright in his cultural and
historical setting.
And (sorry to
say this one) of course I find – as I do with nearly every collection of
critical writings I’ve ever read – that a few pieces seem makeweights, which
needn’t have been included. A 1980 Islands
review of a volume by Kendrick Smithyman is just good jobbing reviewing. A brief
editorial for the “Listener” is simply a topical piece about funding. A letter
to the editor of New Zealand Books is
merely Murray Edmond stamping his foot at Jane Stafford’s review of one of his
books. An interview with Harry Ricketts (from 1986) has the two of them
cracking wise and being palsy-walsy, but was the exchange really worth
preserving or re-serving? It’s from an anthology of such exchanges between
editor and poets and has the same awkwardness and show-offy-ness of all such
“private” communications which the authors know damned well are really meant
for public consumption
So much for the
generalisations. What of the more considerable pieces of which this volume is
largely made?
Edmond in his
younger years is certainly more dogmatic and sure of himself than Edmond in his
fifties and sixties, so I’ll reshuffle the contents of this book and place the
earlier pieces first.
Much of the
early essay “The Idea of the Poet” (1973 – written when Edmond was 24) is windy
rhetoric (okay – so the guy was a kid). Yet its attitude is incredibly ambiguous.
Young Edmond reacts against the idea of the poet as a commodified performer and
as part of the entertainment circuit (he makes some pungent – and still valid –
comments on the young Sam Hunt). He wants to promote the idea of the poet as
one who writes “poetry”. He wants to connect poetry with musicality and with an
ongoing interrogation of language. And yet he is most concerned with public
presentation. He writes:
“A poet is, as Wordsworth said, ‘a man
speaking among men’. But round this simple essence a vast fungus has grown –
the connotative additions to the word have finally obscured it from view. Poets
no longer speak to men. They now speak to themselves or to a void. Driven in on
itself poetry is useless, mute. The poet must change or accept silence like
other men.” (p.15)
This morphs into
an extraordinary trope of praising (the recently dead) James K. Baxter for
substituting the community at Jerusalem for poetry. This is what philosophers
would call a category mistake, surely? Poetry as retreat into silence, which
isn’t poetry any more that “revolution” is revolution.
There is a lordly
arrogance to the 32-year-old Edmond when, in a 1981 Islands review, he deals with Alistair Paterson’s anthology of 15
contemporary New Zealand poets, which he calls “so dead so dreary and dead; it is all presented to us as the great new
orthodoxy, as a way we all ought to be doing it.” (p.58) He accuses
Paterson of filing and classifying poets, and therefore denying the uniqueness
of each. And yet (dammit and FFS), isn’t this what nearly all academic
criticism of poetry does, including Edmond’s? For in the latter parts of the
critique Edmond does filing and classifying of his own and is certainly
concerned with how “we all ought to be
doing it.”[Admission of personal interest
– I know Alistair Paterson – who is decades older than me – as a friend and
mentor, so I’m biased on his behalf in reading this outburst. But then, dear
New Zealand literati, please let’s
none of us pretend that the NZ literary pool is so big that such connections
aren’t inevitable when we come to reviewing.]
A 1986 Landfall article on the poetry of
Michael Harlow begins by rebuking other critics for being moralistic about
Harlow; but then after extensive exegesis of one volume, itself ends up damning
Harlow with faint praise.
Edmond’s 1983
article “Notes on the Magazine ‘The Word is Freed’ ” was written a decade after
the demise of the short-lived (1969-72) magazine, in which Edmond was one of
the leading lights. It is an attempt to “set the record straight” about how the
magazine came into being. It does go all proprietorial in working out who was
the founding genius and at first reads like a game of “I started the revolution” “No, I started the revolution”, “No, I started the revolution.” Edmond declares:
“Essentially the internationalist versus
regionalist debate was one which ‘Freed’ eschewed as meaningless, or at best,
superficial. Freed was a local insurrection against the power structure of New
Zealand literature. So it was a complex of things – nationalist in its
concerns, intensely local in its focus, and internationalist in its sources,
forms and allegiances….” (p.157)
While this is
undoubtedly true in terms of the publication’s intentions, it does at once
present a paradox. NOTHING is truly “internationalist
in its sources, forms and allegiances”. There is always a dominant culture,
which merely appears to be an “international” voice. (Hegemony - thanks
Gramsci). I submit that the poetics of ‘Freed’ were essentially American, and
that therefore it was a (minor) manifestation of the refocused cultural
colonialism that was, at the time, turning New Zealand from a British to an
American cultural dependence.
With Edmond in
his forties at the time of writing it, the 1991 piece (from Australasian Drama Studies) “Lighting Out for Paradise” reads now
like nostalgia. After first positing a division between Erudita (scripted
professional) and dell’Arte (street or small experimental and/or combo)
theatre, he then proceeds to give what amount to a series of reviews of what he
conceives of as the latter – the Topp Twins, Inside Out, the Front Lawn etc.
Again, having once turned on my old television and seen “Camp Mother” and “Camp
Leader” correlating for the commercial masses, I again hear the brave new world
disappearing up the embracing fundament of the mainstream.
I am being so
picky in this rambling and formless review that I may not have made clear one
of Edmond’s virtues, even as I rudely scrap with him. He does write clearly.
Even if you disagree, there is little of the self-important, bombastic and
convoluted gobbledegook that used to pass for criticism among postmodernists.
I hope I won’t
sound patronising if I say some pieces have great historical value in their
recall of old literary battles. Enjoy Murray Edmond’s 1997 article “Re-a-prizing
the Oxford Anthology” on the Montana Award-winning An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. It is a bitterly
amusing chronicle of, and attack on, how that particular anthology came into
being. It is interesting that nowhere does Edmond choose to mention the names
of the anthologists [Jenny Bortholdt, Gregory O’Brien, Mark Williams]. His 2010
piece in Ka Mate Ka Ora, “Trade and
True” wittily shows how poetry anthologies in New Zealand in the 2000s follow
the same pattern as “trade” anthologies in Britain in the 1920s, but then does
go on to talk up Edmond’s own favourites among the anthologies. The 1991 Landfall piece on Alan Brunton is really
a long talking-up of his radical-theatre-days colleague and co-conspirator,
interspersed with fierce resentment directed at Arts Council funding of
mainstream and commercial theatre as it was in 1991.
So much for the
young (or young-ish) Murray Edmond.
What about Murray
Edmond now?
What I find in
his essays and pieces from the first years of the 21st century is a
greater sense of cultural history – perhaps the result of more accumulated
experience – and a less dogmatic take on things.
Published in Landfall in 2005 “The Terror and the Pity of 1984” is a brilliant contextualisation
of Mervyn Thompson’s “Coaltown Blues” and of the eventual controversy in which
Thompson was engulfed. Of all the pieces in this volume, this is the one where
I found myself becoming most engaged, maybe because here Edmond himself is
engaging with a specific and apprehensible work rather than setting up criteria
of appreciation. There are some sadly funny moments is this piece, as when
Murray speaks of attending a conference on the arts, and specifically on theatre-funding,
in 1984. He writes:
“It began with an address from a ‘Man from
Treasury’. What he said outlined the New Right policies of the next fifteen
years with precision and enthusiasm. I remembered we all chuckled at the silly
Man from Treasury. What was he trying to do – terrify us? Where had he found
this story he had to tell? Even as we disagreed rabidly amongst ourselves as
theatre people, as least we were united in being absolutely sure that this
bottom-line, sponsorship-based, business approach to the arts, in which the
marketing is the product and the product is the marketing, would never happen
to us.” (p.37)
Pardon me if I
almost cry at this one, because of course Edmond is recalling a time when
people in the arts in New Zealand blithely assumed that neoliberalism could never
happen here.
Edmond then
narrates how Mervyn Thompson’s Coaltown
Blues ran headlong into the radical feminist movement and its accusations
that Thomson is a rapist.
The point here is that there was no longer
unity on the “left” in New Zealand – a left-wing playwright of working class
origin was attacked by feminists who claimed to be part of a liberation process.
Referring to the plethora of plays about child abuse, and claims by radical feminists
(Renee et al) that domestic violence was the norm in the nuclear family, Edmond
makes comparisons with the moralism of the New Right itself :
“So the search for signs of evil and
corruption inside the almost sanctified, normal, stable Kiwi family can be seen
as an aspect of a wider pattern of moral panic and hysteria in the face of
change. This is not to suggest that the Kiwi family was not in need of
searching scrutiny, nor to suggest that there were not many good outcomes in
terms of improving the position of women in society or in protecting children
from abuse. But a certain level of fervour and exaggeration looks like the
self-terrorisation by a society in crisis. It is easy for us now to look back
with indulgent mockery at the 1954 Mazengarb Report on the danger teenagers
posed to the moral fabric of society. However it is more sobering to consider
whether this might be an earlier version of a similar societal
self-terrorisation.” (p.47)
Translation
– Renee and co were having a moral panic attack.
I
like the bruising punch of this. Men have been tied to trees for saying less.
In his 2004
piece from Australasian Drama Studies “How
Gothic is S/he? Three New Zealand Dramas”, Edmond seems to be flexing his
academic cleverness in discovering the shared “gothic” nature of three plays
with New Zealand connections. Or is the whole purpose in fact covert satire in
pointing out how “gothic” (i.e. theatrical and mannered) Renee’s supposedly
social realist Wednesday to Come
really is?
For
straightforward cultural history, the 2000 Australasian
Drama Studies piece “The ‘Original’ Downstage and the Theatre of its
History” is also both informative and provocative. Edmond tells the story of
Wellington’s Downstage as something that began radical and ended up centralised
and settled. Hence, in its origins, it was not like other regional theatres
(Mercury, Fortune etc.). What had been “anarchic,
radical, experimental” was suborned to being the template for other professional
playhouses as envisaged by the Arts Council. This is a rattling good yarn, but
as in other pieces in this collection, I am amazed that, in his cultural
surveys, Edmond virtually never refers to the mass medium of television, which
came to New Zealand at exactly the same time that “professional” live theatre
was trying to establish itself here (and experimental theatre was jumping about
and hoping it could be an alternative). Downstage began in 1964. In one
grudging sentence Edmond notes that “Television
had already been broadcast for four years” (p.137). The fate of live theatre
here (including the eventual closure of some of the professional theatres) was
always linked intimately to the fact that much of the potential audience now
had the option of staying at home.
The review of Michelanne
Forster’s Always My Sister from
Landfall-Review-on-Line this year, treats the play in as much detail as a brief
review can, but the review ends up as a lament for the University of Auckland’s
withdrawal of support for the Holloway Press.
How would I
compare Murray Edmond youngish and Murray Edmond aged?
I would place
side-by-side these two pieces:
23-year-old
Edmond’s piece on “Group Theatre” (Islands
1972) is a time capsule
50-year-old
Edmond’s “A Look at Generation X” (Booknotes
1999) has the oldtimer getting upset when a youngster (Mark Pirie) comes along
and suggests that Edmond’s generation of poets are intellectually obscure.
Edmond’s heavy-handed sarcasm flies thick and fast as he tries to slap the
whippersnapper down.
Getting older is
a bugger, innit?
And now, dear
reader, I want to make a dreadful admission: It is when I come to literary
theory that I, as an (I think) reasonably literate person, always find myself
floundering and yelping for help. So I took a deep breath – a very deep breath –
before carefully reading the last three selections of this book, which are
grouped together under the heading “Theory”. I’m happy to say the deep breath
wasn’t really needed. As always, Edmond’s clarity is admirable and the last
three pieces turn out not to be literary theory anyway.
The preface to The New Poets (1987), which Murray
Edmond edited with Mary Paul, turns upon classifying new poets according to i.
language as commodity (wordplay); ii. poet as seer bearing witness; iii. Maori
consciousness; iii. Feminist
consciousness; iv. Self-publication and using other media. These are matters of
sociological classification as much a literary theory. In the preface Edmond
writes:
“…there is no longer any consensus, any clear
overview about what poetry is and who should have the power to say so. This
possibly reflects the general breakdown in the homogeneous New Zealand society
which has been going on for the last ten or fifteen years. The majority of
poets in this anthology have responded to this breakdown of consensus, this
loss of literary homogeneity and traditional control of literary genealogy,
with welcoming enthusiasm. Certainly as editors we have taken this as our
leaping-off point and have gone on to construct a book which celebrates the
disparate, the various, the diverse, the contradictory, in short, the
subcultural width which we have discovered as a happy characteristic of New
Zealand poetry.” (p.245)
Now I’d like to
applaud this aspiration on the part of the anthologists, but I know I can’t
because all anthologies set up criteria by the simple act of selection.
“Poetics of the
Impossible”, the introduction to Big Smoke, the 2000 anthology of New Zealand
poems from 1960-75,is really more a straightforward history lesson than an
exercise in theory. It is a surprisingly opaque account of New Zealand poetry
with some of its roots in the Beats.
And finally the
eponymous beast “Then It Was Now Again: New Zealand Poetries and their Colonial
Histories” (published in 2000). Here Edmond sees a colonialist continuum from
the 1940s to the present and a recolonisation in neoliberalism and hence a
marginalisation of the Maori view. But this depends more upon his raiding of
some familiar history books [Belich et al] than on any element of poetry and
one notes superciliously that it means Edmond, willy-nilly, is entering into a
“nationalist” debate of the sort that was eschewed by the younger poets of the
1970s, Edmond himself included.
How can I conclude
this monstrous excuse for a review, in which I have name-checked diligently every
one of the pieces in this volume? I have “filed and classified”. I have committed
the sin of Alistair Paterson. So I will now commit hara kiri with a blunt
taiaha. But first I’ll point across the classroom at that noisy boy Murray
Edmond and say “He was doing it too,
miss, and he’s older than me so he should know better!” Or at least know
better than to kick away the ladder he is standing on.
And then I will
ask you to buy and read the book for yourself because it is provocative and
much of it is good cultural history and it is readable.
For
Ubu and Ubu, Amen.