Settler Mythology: Colonial paladins in John Mulgan and Denis Glover

Monday, 18 February 2013

Settler Mythology: Colonial paladins in John Mulgan and Denis Glover

Susan L. Kinnear's paper on Settler Mythology: Colonial paladins in John Mulgar and Denis Glover was a fascinating read for me and shook my NZ surveying, gold and coal mining roots. For those like me who revere Denis Glover, it comes as a shock to get another sobering perspective on a writer and poet,' two men alone.' I won't say more, but I hope you will enjoy.

Susan L Kinnear, June 2011

There has always seemed to me something basically wrong

with young men who grow up in comfortable circumstances and

cheerfully accept the conservatism of an older generation.^{^[1]}

John Mulgan

Schoolboys at Auckland Grammar in the late 1920’s, John Mulgan and Denis Glover shared a passion for rugby, the sea and a joint goal of creating what they perceived to be a distinct literature for an increasingly independent New Zealand. Mulgan’s Man Alone and Glover’s poem sequences Sings Harry and Arawata Bill helped to ‘install as the dominant discourse of New Zealand fiction’ a narrative that was laconic, terse, white and almost exclusively male, rejecting both older writers and women novelists as irrelevant in the New Zealand context. ^{^[2]}

This chapter will explore the representation of the ‘man alone’ in the work of both Mulgan and Glover; arguing that rather than creating a unique voice for New Zealand, the settler stereotype of the old prospector who saves Johnson in Man Alone, and Glover’s ore panning Arawata Bill, evidence not a rejection of colonial literature, but a ubiquitous continuum of the colonial settler myth. Their definition in opposition to the land, desire to exploit and obliviousness to the presence of the Maori does not carve a new identity for the New Zealand male; it continues one started a century earlier with the controversial Treaty of Waitangi.^{^[3]} The paper will further demonstrate how both the inclusion and subversion of the pastoral idyll by both writers, while recognising the ambivalent relationship between the working man and his environment, demonstrates the Pakeha’s continuing colonial dominance over both nature and native in this ‘new’ national literature.

Both Mulgan and Glover disparaged the ‘old poets’ of New Zealand; the writers, publishers and men of letters in early 20th century New Zealand that Hilliard terms ‘the bookmen.’^{^[4]} While Mulgan criticised his own father for the pastoral romanticism of his novel A Pilgrim’s Way in New Zealand,^{^[5]} which Mulgan viewed as derivative of colonial sentimentality, Glover dismissed all women’s writing as ‘feminine-mimsy’^{^[6]} by ‘’girlie-poets’^{^[7]} with staid Victorian values. In his 1937 poem The Arraignment of Paris, which lampoons New Zealand’s women writers and the men who published their work, he writes:

Alas New Zealand Literature distills

an atmosphere of petticoats and frills

(or shall we say, to shock the dear old vicars,

an atmosphere or brassieres and knickers?)^{^[8]}

The one topic that characterised the new, muscular literature of the 1930’s above all others was the ‘man alone.’ Jensen argues that while Mulgan’s novel supplied the name ‘... the man alone was said to manifest himself in the drifting men of Sargeson’s stories [and] the solitary male figures in Glover’s poem sequences Sings Harry and Arawata Bill...’^{^[9]} This motif is characterised not simply by the chief protagonist of Mulgan’s novel or the voice of Harry in Glover’s Sings Harry sequence, but by the colonial archetypes each writer uses to exemplify what is good and missing in modern society. It is the frontier settler that initially saves Johnson from near death in Man Alone, and Arawata Bill whose heart and soul are full of the gold he seeks in the mountains. This argument is further exemplified by the second paladin of the old sea dog, battling alone against nature and the wrath of the sea, and rejecting the comfort and companionship of home and hearth for a life of salt spray and adventure. In Man Alone this old captain is the complementary trope of the prospector, who shows Johnson a type of honourable trust, selflessness and kindness that is missing from the younger generation in the novel.

As such, each author reveres aspects of the colonial society they purport to oppose, demonstrating Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence.^{^[10]} Theirs is a triumph not of content, but of form; not a new ‘poetry,’ but a new ‘style.’ Their supremacy as ‘strong poets’ is a phenomenon witnessed across centuries by Bloom, where an emerging poet struggles to free himself from the influence of his forebears, but here, ultimately fails to separate himself from the continuum of the colonial paladin that links him to the older generation.^{^[11]} Their triumph was, instead, to stylistically instill an essentially working class, ‘harsh, laconic, bitten-off masculine dialect’ into cultural consciousness as the new literary identify of New Zealand.^{^[12]}

Arguably, Mulgan and Glover were ‘strong poets‘ in every sense. University educated first-class scholars, competitive, accomplished sportsmen, both men had attended the workers riots of 1932 as special constables, only to find themselves ‘facing the wrong way’ when they reached the barricades.^{^[13]} Campaigners for social equality through literature and commentary, both subscribed to the political left and romanticised the worker as the emblem of human dignity. Both volunteered for military service during the Second World War where Glover was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for saving hundreds of drowning marines during the D-Day landings, and was recognised with a Soviet Veterans Medal for running suicide missions against the Nazi’s to supply Murmansk.^{^[14]} Mulgan fought his way through North Africa where most of his battalion was cut down, then parachuted into occupied Greece to run partisan resistance operations against the Axis forces. He became a national hero for the mountain peasants, who came out of their villages to adorn his mule with garlands of flowers as he shadowed the retreating Nazi’s. He was awarded the Military Cross and made a Lieutenant Colonel, before committing suicide in Cairo, and became the inspiration for the New Zealand intelligence officer in Louis de Bernière’s Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Their distinguished service records, argues Jensen, gave additional credence to their role as warrior writers and ‘... added a special weight of masculine authority to the new literature.... Glover and Mulgan... seemed close to that ideal combination of literature and manliness, the whole man.’^{^[15]} It is perhaps, not surprising, therefore that they were able to stylistically supersede their literary forebears who they regarded as ‘precious, flowery, sentimental, socially naive and out of date.’^{^[16]} Indeed Pat Lawlor, a poet, journalist, and novelist of the ‘old guard,’ as well as founding member of New Zealand’s PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) society in 1934, criticised the modernist, and in Mulgan’s case realist, writing style published in the nation’s premier literary journal at the New Zealand Writers Conference in 1951, complaining that:

Landfall has little or no regard for spiritual values or for interest in home or family life. As both are intimately concerned with art and literature... such regard is, to me, incomprehensible... we are reaping a whirlwind of trouble from the disordered writing of the days we live in... Admittedly the old writer has been squeamish, fearing to look at a strong word or a woman’s stocking, but the modernist goes to the other extreme and has thrown open his awful closet of profanities and obscenities.^{^[17]}

New Zealand’s ‘new’ modern writers therefore, like their predecessors, were interested in literary traditions emanating from Great Britain; indeed Hilliard observes that poets such as Glover’s friend Allen Curnow were ‘just as concerned with Britain as the author of Home: A Colonial’s Adventure.’^{^[18]} In debating the value of New Zealand’s new ‘modern’ literature therefore, Glover and his contemporaries demonstrated their own colonial lineage from imperial Great Britain, where the identity of the periphery aped the dominant culture of the centre. Indeed, Hilliard argues that ‘... it would be simplistic to regard the bookmen as die hard anglophiles and their challengers as nationalists. Many of the younger generation were attuned to British literary trends from TS Elliot to the left leaning poets of the 1930s such as Auden and Spender.’^{^[19]} Indeed Mulgan edited Auden and Yeats at the Oxford University Press and Ogilvie argues that almost all of Glover’s entire output could been seen as mediated by Spender.^{^[20]}

The stylistic triumph of Mulgan and Glover, in some ways, is not a story specific to New Zealand and echoes contemporary cultural debate in Britain; as Hilliard notes: ‘... a younger generation questions moral orthodoxies, writes more frankly, and their elders think they are peddling smut; young people mindful of the avant-garde write ‘free verse’ that their seniors see as yet another sign of modern degeneracy...’^{^[21]} What is unique about New Zealand’s ‘strong poets’ is that, even with their supposed new voice, their narrative replicates colonial myths; the pioneer, the prospector, the adventurer, the sea captain. They aggressively rebuff any validity for New Zealand women writers, portraying women in their own work as degenerate or vacuous, such as Rua and Mabel in Man Alone, and fail to incorporate any but the most derogatory Maori representations. Indeed, New Zealand novelist Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson) complained of being bullied for her writing style by Curnow and Glover before committing suicide in 1939, and Hilliard notes that an entire generation of women writers in New Zealand were effectively silenced by the hegemony of Glover and Curnow in literary circles. As such their arguments over the direction of poetry are conducted in ‘highly gendered terms’^{^[22]} that specifically exclude the ‘other’ which figures ‘only by its representational absence.’^{^[23]}

Jensen attributes this overt aggression to the engendering of war as a rite of passage in New Zealand men. He claims that ‘... soldiering is an activity which our writers present as integral to New Zealand masculinity, starting in childhood when the topic of war seizes boys imagination.’^{^[24]} Mulgan reflects on this in Report on Experience where he describes the First World War with almost mythical reverence:

We had never, in fact, outgrown the shadow of that earlier war, which our fathers had fought. It brooded over our thoughts and emotions. Old wars take on dignity and grandeur. As children we had heard men’s stories, coming home, had stood silent in parades of remembrance, knew the names of old battles and heroes as part of our lives. We felt the tragic waste and splendour of this first Great War, and grew up in the waste land it had produced.^{^[25]}

The troubled isolation of the old veteran of both war and life is a motif that both Mulgan and Glover turn to repeatedly. Such a man is inexpressive and distrustful of articulacy, and as Allen Curnow notes, ‘... in every New Zealand poet, almost, there is a streak of the “Kiwi” - our word for patriotic common man - who disapproves, distrusts, or despises the personal voice.’^{^[26]} This flat, male voice is evident in both Glover’s Harry and Mulgan’s Johnson as inflexible and unemotional, even in the face of extreme violence. For example when Johnson kills Stenning his response to Rua is entirely consistent with that of a work-hardened, care-worn ‘cow-cocky’^{^[27]}:

‘My God,’ she said, her voice rising, ‘you’ve killed him.’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ Johnson said, without emotion. ‘He tried to kill me.’

She gasped, looking fearfully at the dead body of her husband.

‘God,’ she said, her voice dropping again to a whisper. ‘God, and he’s dead now.’

Her hands were clenched and her eyes were staring at Johnson. He moved uneasily.

‘He’s dead all right.’ Johnson said. ‘We can’t help that now.’^{^[28]}

For New Zealand male intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century, Jensen argues, such scenes of death and violence are of particular interest for their masculine connotations. ‘Literature that focussed on these topics would always be able to present itself as a serious business, the work of ‘responsible adult New Zealanders.’’^{^[29]} This tone of voice and ‘serious’ subject matter was in direct contrast to the miniature and myth of Mansfield and Hyde and, as Hilliard notes ‘... a national literature that had Sargeson and John Mulgan with their realism and their concern with the culture of men, as its exemplary fiction writers, had little place for the ‘fantasy’ of some of Hyde’s novels.’^{^[30]}

This culture of men is exemplified by the archetypal pioneers Glover and Mulgan portray as bastions of decency in an otherwise degenerate society. For Glover these men, Harry, the rural labourer and Arawata Bill, the eponymous fossicker, embody ‘qualities which Glover clearly finds very attractive,’ who survive by their own efforts and choose ‘... to stand apart from their fellows, needing nothing, but giving nothing either.’ ^{^[31]} Harry and Arawata Bill demonstrate qualities that, Thomson argues, ‘... acquisitive urban man was likely to have lost sight of.’^{^[32]} They had achieved a liberated condition of existence that was at least valuable, and perhaps even ‘ennobling.’^{^[33]} The poems Songs in the Sings Harry sequence open with a small boy, a ‘pupil’, learning all he can from the vast manifestations of nature around him:

From the cliff-top a boy

Felt that great motion,

And pupil to the horizon’s eye

Grew wide with vision.

Sings Harry in the wind-break

Rather than being a new literature for New Zealand and for the twentieth, rather than nineteenth century, it is an almost direct correlation to Wordsworth’s Prelude. The boy is soon broken by civilisation and ‘grew to own fences barbed.’ Confronted with all the wonders of the Pacific, the boy, when a man, chooses instead the menial life of urban settlement:

Who once would gather all Pacific

In a net wide as his heart

Soon is content to watch the traffic

Or lake waves breaking short,

Sings Harry in the wind-break

To further highlight the colonial sentiment behind the poem, the imagery throughout is of adventure, chase and capture. The boy could chose to trawl the pacific with the net of his heart, capturing the North Islands ‘like stars/in the blue water’ or wrestle with ‘old Tasman, the boar’ who ‘Slashes and tears’; nature will respond with ‘Mountainous anger’ to this grand colonial endeavor. Or, he can sit ‘fat as a barrel’ behind his own urban fence and leave the sea ‘never disturbed’ as ‘nothing to do with me’^{^[34]} while other men conquer the Pacific. This conquest of land and sea is a recurrent them in the Sings Harry sequences, where Harry ‘rode a whole island for my horse’ and hears the morning ‘sound of the axe’ and ‘bush-buried shot at mountain deer.’^{^[35]} Religion accompanies the the settlers and all must learn that ‘only Christ, not Cortes/Can land upon the beach.’^{^[36]} Land acquisition, bush clearance, hunting and aggressive Christianity are all present as emblems of the colonial settler’s impact on New Zealand.

Thomson eulogises such verse as ‘... fixing an imaginative interpretation of the land;’^{^[37]} if so, such an interpretation is anchored by white settler mythology and the exploitation of New Zealand’s natural resources for profit, as Harry illustrates in The Casual Man:

Come, mint me up the golden gorse,

Mine me the yellow clay

- There’s no money in my purse

For a rainy day

Sings Harry^{^[38]}

However, while Harry is a fictional character, Arawata Bill is based on the historical figure of William O’Leary, a prospector and ruby miner from Otago. His was a solitary, self-contained, life-long quest for gems and ore, illustrated by Glover through brightly coloured adjectives and sparkling verse:

But where is the amethyst sky and the high

Mountains of pure gold?^{^[39]}

As Glover wrote in 1953, he saw old Bill as perpetually searching ‘... for something intangible round the next bend’ and the poems are riddled with the imagery of anticipated acquisition.^{^[40]} But Bill is unlucky:

Dreams don’t pay;

There’s no gold the easy way^{^[41]}

He is left instead with shingle, and starts to question if the real gold of New Zealand is actually the solitary mountain life it offers:

But the mountains on the rim of the day

Have nothing to say.

Am I stealing their gold

As a gipsy steals a child,

Am I frisking their petticoats

Camping in the wild?^{^[42]}

The sequence itself, argues Thomson, is a quest where ‘... more has been found than was sought...’^{^[43]} and while Glover strives to appreciate the beauty of New Zealand and it’s oceans in his poetry ‘... it is nearly always the activity of man which has endowed the landscape with significance.’^{^[44]} Nature is seen not as valuable in its own right, but valuable for what it offers Bill. Conversely in Man Alone, the land is portrayed as raw and mean for its refusal to yield up sufficient crops on Stenning’s farm.

Mulgan’s colonial archetypes are more both more generous and more sociable than Glover’s. Bill Crawley, the frontier settler and some-time gold panner, and the old whaling captain Petersen both represent a better age in Man Alone; an age apart from New Zealand’s financial disasters in the 1890’s and 1930’s. While Billy Crawley doesn’t like strangers disturbing his bush hut and Petersen prefers to smoke than talk, they are timeless characters who live in harmony with their surroundings and exhibit a heroic and selfless generosity that ultimately saves Johnson in his hour of need.

Petersen is a ‘giant of a man with a drooping moustache.’^{^[45]} Johnson works for him for a pound a week on a coastal scow, loading and unloading packing cases around the Bay of Islands, but it is Petersen’s ‘half-cast Maori cook’ who does Johnson’s share of the sailing duties.^{^[46]} Like all good wily old sea dogs he has journeyed far and had his fair share of women. A colonial adventurer, he has some tales to tell, but he is a moral, uncomplicated man who knows how to look after himself and doesn’t care much for conversation. The extremely short sentences mirror his matter-of-fact ‘manly’ speech patterns as he grunts and swears his way through their dialogue:

Petersen had travelled. He was a Swede, born in Nova Scotia. He had worked on a whaler and round the islands. He had been married twice, once in San Francisco and once in Singapore: the first wife had died and the second had disappeared. He was sixty years old. He talked about men he had met and places he had seen sometimes, but not very often. He was a simple man. He cared a lot for the old Sea-Spray, which was his life’s savings.

He tries to warn Johnson of the dangers of itinerancy, but Johnson disregards this advice, saying:

‘I don’t worry about not having a ship of my own, Pete. I don’t worry about that any more than I worried about not having a farm. There isn’t any better country than this, not where a man can go about and get work, and stop when he wants to, and make money when he needs it, and take a holiday when he feels ready for one.’

Petersen acknowledges that this is ‘... the way all sailors live’ but calls Johnson a ‘bloody fool’ nonetheless and to some extent, the remainder of the novel proves Petersen’s warning right. Johnson doesn’t take the advice of this old colonial trope; he doesn’t save, his work dries up in the depression, he gambles and drinks, and is reduced to a life of squalor on a farm so indebted to the bank that it makes insufficient money for even basic standards of living. In the end, harried by the police and facing a life term in jail, it is Peterson, the old hero of the colonial era, that Johnson turns to for shelter and escape. Having been rescued from near death in the bush by the old settler, Bill Crawley, he is spirited away from danger by the old sea dog, Petersen. Like Bill Crawley, who has lived in the bush for decades, Petersen is a constant feature of his environment with ‘grizzled eye-brows and blue eyes sunk deep,’ and ‘had not changed in any of the time Johnson knew him.’^{^[47]} Despite this affinity with his environment, he demonstrates predictably colonial and derogatory attitudes towards the Maori, describing the the Maori of the Bay of Islands as ‘lazy bastards’^{^[48]} and Rua as a ‘whore.’^{^[49]}

Eventually, Petersen retires from the sea to build himself ‘... a trim little white painted two-roomed cottage’ on the beachhead of a deserted bay with ‘... a neat garden and paths paved with shells.’^{^[50]} Tucked away from civilisation he plans, like Bill Crawley, Arawata Bill and Harry, to live out his days in the wilderness. Thomson argues that, in Glovers poems, this retreat to the frontier masks a deeper anxiety:

A life in the country or the mountains certainly seems to be the form of existence most desired by Harry and Arawata Bill... [b]ut do they really feel the country is their natural home? Is it not a means of escape from an even more unsatisfactory alternative... one which proves in its turn to be incapable of salving the ache in the heart... or of providing that mystical grail...?^{^[51]}

For Glover, theres is an anxiety of seeking a ‘gold’ outside of themselves that lies instead within, but from a postcolonial perspective, this is also the anxiety of possession; a crisis of belonging not to the land they have usurped, but the oppressive civilisation they have escaped.

Likewise, Huggan and Tiffin note that Allen Curnow’s ‘... ironic ballad House and Land (1941) is frequently taken to be an exemplary study of postcolonial white settler anxiety of the crisis of belonging that accompanies split cultural allegiance, this historical awareness of expropriated territory, and suppressed knowledge that the legal fiction of entitlement does not necessarily bring with it the emotional attachment that turns “house and land” into “home.”’^{^[52]} This is evident in the cupidity Johnson experiences in Man Alone in the mechanised farm of the Blakeways and in his sterile relationship with Mabel where Mabel’s father has ideas about buying a farm:

‘You don’t want to go on taking wages from that red-faced bastard all your life,’ he said. ‘You want to keep your eye out for a bit of land...’

‘You get a good team of horses and hire them out and work around with them. You make money that way. You want to get half-cleared land and bush land and clear it...’

Mabel’s father was back in the old days, the pioneer days, when you had to bake bread if you wanted to eat bread, no groceries coming in three times a week on the cream lorry. Mabel’s grandfather had shot Maoris for his bit of land. Mabel had ideas about farms, but they ran on Scotty’s lines with a small deposit and the government scheme; and Johnson listened desultorily, having no ambition.^{^[53]}

Mabel’s father preaches the morality of land acquired through hard work, but holds his own entitlement through his father, who stole the land from the Maori through murder, and from nature through bush burning and tree felling. Gurnah argues that no civilised, rational argument can be put forward for dispossessing the native of land and freedom in such a manner, ‘... but since the native can be represented as a metonymy of the wilderness - therefore in need or ordering and “taming” - then to that extent he can be made subject to colonial understanding.’^{^[54]} If we accept this we can argue that the Maori, like the African ‘is both part of the landscape, one and the same with it, eternally signifying that which Western discourse has banished through progress, and is also dangerous and disturbing, preferably represented as absent.’^{^[55]}

This is evidenced by Man Alone; banished by Mabel’s grandfather, the Maori are indeed absent from Blakeway’s land, apart from as the pejorative ‘... little Maori car driver.’^{^[56]} This is an established, profitable farm run on a European farming model with modern equipment where milking ‘was as much like working in a factory as anything else’ and where the farm hands are white.^{^[57]} It is a different environment to Stenning’s farm in the King Country, where, having confiscated Maori land later than in other parts of New Zealand after resistance from the Kingite movement of Tamihana Te Rauparaha, the white settlers further exploit the dispossessed Maori as workers on unprofitable, inhospitable land that, by the end of the 1930‘s, was left desolate and abandoned.^{^[58]} This further evidences Gurnah’s argument that:

If we accept Harold Bloom’s suggestion that a trope is a defence against literal meaning in discourse, then it is possible to conceive the exotic as at once irretrievable essence and alien other. So the landscape and what it signifies are simultaneously an exiled self whose spirit modernity crushes and a nameless ‘other’ that must be controlled or expelled.^{^[59]}

Both these elements are evidenced by the representation of land in Man Alone, where working on the mechanised Waikato farm is a dehumanising experience that leaves Johnson ‘desultorily,’ while at Stenning’s farm, the Maori are the nameless ‘other’ excluded from their entitlement and exploited for profit by the white man. To some extent this is a subversion of the traditional notion of the pastoral; the ‘simple’ farmer who leads a ‘worthy’ life in tune with nature, far away from the ‘immorality’ of the city or civilisation. However, it continues to demonstrate the colonial view of land as there to be ‘taken’ by the adventurer; wrested from both nature and native and converted into a pastoral pastiche of Europe, in this case into New Zealand as ‘the Empire’s Dairy.’^{^[60]}

This process demonstrates what Huggan and Tiffin define as ‘... the legitimation of highly codified relations between socially differentiated peoples: relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal cultural attitudes towards land.’^{^[61]} These pastoral ideologies work towards the stabilization of land by the dominant order, through both land management’ and the exclusion or ‘silencing’ of less privileged social groups.^{^[62]} To complete the process, familiar colonial buildings are erected, native fauna is burnt back and non-indigenous pines and grasses planted to create a Utopian Arcadia:

Going down to the farm by service car was seeing a new country open out... It had a green, rich, unfinished look. The road ran out into loose metal and ruts through low hills half cleared, and farm houses, wooden, unpainted. Where the land was cleared as it was for miles at a time with fences and no hedges, the grass grew springing with life.

‘Top-dressing,’ said Sam, the little Maori car-driver, smoking green Three Castle and driving with one hand.

‘They spread it like butter hereabouts.’

Johnson got to the farm in the slack period after lunch. It was a large farm with a great iron milking shed as big as a village hall, the farm-house half a mile in from the road surrounded by dark pines. They dairy flats ran in from the banks of the dark Waikato. They stretched for miles with only cows and odd sheds and pine trees to break them, as flat and dull as the back of your hand.^{^[63]}

Described as such, the Waikato is denuded to resemble the post-enclosure English countryside, while the traditionally idealised life of the herder is subtly undermined through the use of ‘flat and dull’ at the end of the passage. Huggan and Tiffin, however, argue that the pastoral is ‘... predominantly European in sensibility and form. The stylistic conventions of pastoral are not easily mapped onto non-European landscapes that often appear to be in direct opposition with them, and their value-system likewise.’^{^[64]} This is also evidenced by Glover’s The Magpies where his protagonists live a simple life, but are ultimately broken by the value systems of the ‘Mortgage corporations’ that do not match their pastoral vision of ownership through effort. Throughout, the distinctive caw of the Australian magpie signals consistency in a nature unchanged by colonial effort or corporate greed.

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm

The bracken made their bed,