Two Books on Returning to New Zealand: Kirsty Gunn and Paula Morris
“Is it the end of things, really, to come home?”
Two books caught my eye recently, both published by Bridget Williams Books (BWB) in 2014. Both are short; both are published by expatriate New Zealand writers; and both deal with a return to New Zealand. For those aware of my own recent return to New Zealand, the attraction these books immediately had will be entirely unsurprising.
Who was it who said that “Should I stay or should I go” is New Zealand’s unofficial national song? If our literature all stems in some way or another from Katherine Mansfield, then this isn’t too surprising: her youthful clamour to return to London from Wellington is an essential part of her Hero’s Journey, as is her late longing (and failure) to return to Wellington from Europe. From even before Mansfield, pakeha New Zealand’s dilemma has always been a kind of ‘grass is greener’ syndrome. And it’s this syndrome, though never directly named, that both these books end up dealing with most deeply.
Kirsty Gunn’s Thorndon: Wellington and Home: My Katherine Mansfield Project picks up on Mansfield directly, drawing parallels between hers and the authors’ lives. A return to Wellington for the first time since childhood is the premise of the book, enacting a kind of hypothetical: what would have happened had Mansfield managed to return? Paula Morris’ On Coming Home, on the other hand, is a kind of anthology of writing about the return. From Mulgan and Mansfields’ lifelong longings to return, to Rilke and Rushdies’ exiles, New Zealanders’ arrivals and departures are made significant.
Gunn’s book wears its problems on its cover, with that double-colon title. Hypothetically a book about Thorndon, Wellington, returning to New Zealand and Katherine Mansfield, the book touches on all of these subjects but never quite gets to the heart of them in its 120 pages. Throughout, you can see the books begun and left unfinished, hurriedly stitched together with often-awkward segues (Gunn calls the book a “sketchbook,” implying the real work lies in the future). But despite this, there are lyrical and poignant moments throughout, as when Gunn meets an English broadcaster who has been in Wellington for many years:
“He looked out the window and said that the thing about Wellington was that you couldn’t really leave, the geography of the place forbade it. Oh I know there’s a road, he’d said, two roads to take you north, and the airport… But none of that really counts. The place itself is designed to keep you in.”
Or when she muses on the unregarded significance of domestic life:
“Why should it be, I wonder, that other dramas are deemed more important? Why matters of church and state must eclipse the family, and over and over again fiction that takes as its subject the domestic should be sidelined and trivialised? For houses are like theatres. They give light and atmosphere. Every day the curtains at the window are opened and closed to drama and play and scene setting and the endless rich interplay of language and human affairs that’s the everyday, every day. Where we live is surely who we are.”
Passages like these, and others dotted throughout the book, add up to make a memorable chapter in Wellington’s literature and New Zealand’s literature of return.
I wish Morris’ book, on the other hand, had been longer—and it should have been titled The BWB Anthology of Returns to New Zealand. I wanted more throughout! Morris’ deep and cross-cultural reading on the psychology and literature of return adds up to a wonderfully rich, but all too short, compilation of quotations.
“‘It is dangerous to abandon one’s own country,’ James Joyce wrote to Italo Stevo, ‘but it is more dangerous still to return to it, for then your fellow countrymen, if they can, will drive a knife into your heart.'”
“In New Zealand, writes James McNeish, ‘there exists a curious state of tension with the rest of the world, in part because we do not like our sons and daughters to go away… We boast of our infantry going to fight abroad but not our artists and intellectuals whose fight for recognition, out of the great loneliness of being a New Zealander, may be rather more difficult.'”
And Morris’ own lines add up to some of those to be quoted in the Anthology of Returns to New Zealand, whenever that does eventually come out:
“Coming home was the thing; it made you a real New Zealander. You only went away to splash yourself with the heavy cologne of Old Culture before suffocating in it: that’s when you turned back to the bracing fresh air of home.”
Suffocate in that cologne of Old Culture I did: sometimes after a day of reading at the Bodleian my hands and pores would be coated with the thick orange grease of disintegrating leather, from mouldy book bindings. And now that I’m back, I’m still rather enjoying the bracing fresh air of home. Some tell me it will wear off soon, but I wonder if things have changed; as when I sit here at Devonport Library, surrounded by young people from England, Germany, Sweden and the US, tapping on their keyboards and reading books about NZ. The dilemma of “should I stay or should I go” is theirs to deal with now, not mine.
Anyway, does anyone still wear cologne? And maybe the bracing fresh air of the Hauraki Gulf or the Cook Strait is what the world needs these days.