New Zealand has a puritan culture which has emerged out of a colonial world. Pervading that culture is the belief that sparing the rod spoils the child. As we well know this belief can quickly become child abuse. It’s there in the middle, in the upper-middle and in the lower classes – and please do not tell me class does not exist in New Zealand.
The more unequal a society is, the more violent it is. The gap between the rich and the poor is a reliable indicator of the level of, for instance, child abuse. In New Zealand, when the gap between the rich and the poor widens, so does the incidence of child abuse increase. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer should concern us all, even the rich who are getting richer. As sure as God made little green apples that violence will, in due course, reach the rich who are getting richer. But surely the class system is an abuse in itself. Most of us, one way or another, connive at its preservation. How can we, the well fed and well educated, lecture the oppressed who are badly educated and hungry. We ourselves are abusers and controllers but we are better at it than the guy who punches his wife and goes to prison. Scandinavian countries have the most equal societies and of course the lowest levels of violence. New Zealand is up there, or down there, with Mexico and America.
So that’s my take on what child abuse is. But to get back to the seminar and whether or not high chairs cause physiological damage. If high chairs do cause some physiological damage then I think this is, nevertheless, an inward-looking middle-class concern. When children are treated with casual violence and brutality in our own country, it becomes a bizarre thing to emphasise. My paintings are clearly joyous and the way that they are painted is celebratory. Their controversial subject matter has got in the way of their value as actual paintings. This often happens with figurative painting, as if it doesn’t matter what language it is done in. How the story is told is irrelevant. (This certainly wouldn’t apply to literature, and particularly the short story. The way the story is presented and the way it is told is more important than anything else.) The paint language, the way that I threw the paint on, was to suggest the energy and power of those little children. My brush almost never touched the surface of the board. I expect I was not the first person to do this, in fact, I know I wasn’t, but my insight came from myself, not from looking at someone else’s work. I felt and saw it like that. Lying the boards on the floor was the best way I could achieve that vigorous result. The high chair paintings were ones that Juliet Peter and Rita Angus loved just for their paint language.
Back at Kingseat, the local community complained about being in peril from dangerous lunatics. In my experience, the reverse was the case. It was the patients who were in danger, from drunken licentious peasants exercising their sadistic proclivities. The matron was upset that young local thugs could drive through the hospital on open days and abduct my vulnerable students. Afterwards the girls would be dumped back at the gates possibly with a venereal disease and certainly a lowered self-esteem. Sometimes, for weeks or even months, a girl would go walkabout, returning sick and seriously disoriented. The problem was in the community. You can’t make people well in a sick community.
The surrounding farming neighbourhood had been through bad times until, some years before our arrival, a trace element in the soil was discovered to be missing – once it was added, the countryside flourished. People drove bigger cars and built palatial new brick farmhouses. However, deeply suspicious natures were not so easily transformed. This was a district that had been known for its bizarre murders and while we were at Kingseat the Crewes were murdered. This massively upset the district and, according to the gossips, also involved the hospital: a file from the office had disappeared. Only staff had access to the files and of course many of the staff were from the district. The mystery file supposedly contained information about one of the suspects in the murders. This led to wild speculation at hospital parties.
While all this was going on in the hospital, I became ever more deeply involved with my darling Samoyed, Lily. Lily was pregnant when she came to me, having run away from a horrible farmer. The wife of the horrible farmer had run away a few months before. How could she have left Lily with that ogre? How could she? The local gossips had it that the brutal farmer intended to shoot Lily because she was pregnant. At huge cost, we bought Lily from him. Quite soon afterwards he shot himself.
I had first met Lily while walking, very early on late summer mornings, on the east side of the garden bordering the paddocks. There were apple trees and someone kept an old horse there and a horse trough leaked away. Rabbits flourished there, too, quite special black and white ones. The last superintendent had fancied them; now, so it seemed, did Lily. She had dug a bolt hole under the pigeons’ house and she was eating very well. When I went down to the paddocks she would shadow me. She might let me catch a glimpse of her gliding behind a tree, turning a corner on the path in front of me and then, one morning, she asked if she might move in – that is, officially.
Lily on a summer morning – birds were singing so loud they woke me up. I looked out our bedroom window and saw her. She was going first, like the colonel leading his troops. Her five pups were in single file, following, perfectly spaced, beautifully disciplined. They were heading for the estuary. Lily had had her first pups under the pigeon house. In due course, I moved them to the alleyway between the kitchen and the garage which was closed off at one end.
While she breastfed the pups, this suited her very well but when they moved onto solids she made it clear that I must now butt out. This was Samoyed business and the real world. In her opinion, I knew nothing about this world. She stashed them in a temporary home further down the garden, under a hydrangea bush. Before she took them on hunting trips, she started them out on live baby rabbits. She was quite right, I couldn’t hack her sort of real life.
With Lily it was love at first sight. It was that knowing look so full of meaning when I first glimpsed her. Total complicity, such a bonding made in paradise. Her wild generous spirit, pure to her very essence, like no one else I have ever known. She knew how to teach her pups how to survive in Samoyed reality. I should have taught her how to survive in human reality. But I didn’t. I so loved her for who she was, herself. I knew she was inhabiting a parallel world. I did not protect her in my realm: which I should have done. And in my stupidity I betrayed her.
After Emily was born, my old urge to walk had taken hold. Did I inherit this urge from my father? Or perhaps from my mother’s father. They were both equally obsessed with circling the township, covering the waterfront every evening. Well, wherever it comes from, I would take off in the evenings with Emily slung over a hip. Lily would lead me down through the garden, through the clustering plum trees, down to the estuary and across the bridge thrown over the inlet. She would then follow the path into the mangrove swamps. Stay on the path, they said, or you could get sucked down by greedy sinking sands that lurked like evil spirits among the mangroves. Stay on the path. Lily didn’t stay on the path at all. She went flying lightly over the swamp, hardly touching down, after anything that moved.
At that time though she didn’t bring her pups into the mangroves. She would instead swim them in single file right behind her down the inlet, out of sight and eventually to where that inlet met the sea. But I didn’t know that then. Lily and I went on in our self-made paradise. She had two more glorious bunches of pups and she was queen of all she surveyed. And greatest of all, I had entry into Lily’s Camelot.
My enlightenment came on a summer morning. The girls were at Te Hihi Primary School and Fraser was at a meeting in town. Two local farmers came to see me. They took their boots off at the door and padded into the living room in their stocking feet, their manners almost ceremonial. They placed their hats carefully at their feet when they were seated.
Lily’s life up the inlet was revealed to me. She was worrying sheep. That’s what she was doing in the reality of my visitors: worrying sheep. In Lily’s reality, she was teaching her pups ancient skills of sur
vival. These farmers knew that. They also knew I was an unknowing bohemian, a sort of city nïif. They were sorry for me and were kind but firm. Their deal was on the table: I must put Lily and her pups down, and in future I could only have one dog at a time. What made any protest hopeless was their obvious liking for Lily. She had greeted them warmly when they came to shoot her out in the paddock. They realised she was innocent of any crime.
After that awful encounter, I can’t remember anything else. The consternation in the family? I know that the despair and the grief are still with me. Lily’s tragedy was the final loss that propelled me into painting. Her death closed off my entrance into her parallel world. Without that alternative reality, I was driven back to the hard work of attempting to see for myself. I understood life was intolerable without some kind of interpretation. For everyone, I mean, not just myself. I was lucky to have some skills to hand and the eyes to see with, to find a fitting rendering. Rita’s death, my father’s death and then Lily’s saga forced me to find some transformation through the art of looking – some illumination on what Hieronymus Bosch called the nightmare of humanity.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Life of the Artist as Wife and Mother
I am pretty sure it was in the summer of 1966 that I first met Eric McCormick. It must have been summer because I remember that I was wearing some very elegant leather sandals and that I had painted my toenails a truly sparking scarlet. I was all into visual impact at the time because I wasn’t painting. We had been at Kingseat for about a year and were drinking gin with Naida and Ted Middleton. Naida was a pharmacist at the hospital and Ted was a writer. Eric was a distinguished writer and scholar of whom Keith Sinclair said, ‘more than any other person in matters of archives, editing, publishing, writing and scholarship, Eric has contributed enormously to our understanding of ourselves and our past’.
Ted had tunnel vision and that’s important to this story because we were making jokes about it, that his affliction was a metaphor for his commitment to the short story. Everything else was peripheral to his own vision of reality, like a draughthorse with blinkers on. The conversation was infused with excitement and belief. We all believed that Auckland would become the Athens of the South Pacific, that the new enlightenment was glowing on the horizon, that socialism was only common decency, that if somebody had more than they needed then they had something that belonged to someone else, that the earth was not anybody’s to trade and sell.
I only remember the past in brightly illuminated pictures. I am in the picture with everyone else but there is another self who is looking at the picture and sees it all clearly. I can, for instance, see Naida, her blonde hair plaited around her head. This was a very popular hairstyle at the time among women in some way connected with bohemia. Ted is there, of course, vaguely amused with the conversation but thinking about something else. As was our way in those days, Fraser and I are performing like a couple of seals: presenting ourselves, making ourselves up as we go along. And Eric and his sister Myra, what are they doing? They are sitting with their backs to the French doors that open onto a paddock, and then more and more paddocks away to the horizon.
From the first time I met him, Eric was very familiar to me. There was an unusual intimacy in my regard for him, a recognition of his appearance, his proud but elusive manner, the long shoulders and neck, the fine hands. I did not immediately understand why this was; it took years and my father’s death. The occasion was an opening at the John Leech Gallery. It was a moment just glimpsed, Eric turning away from a fashionable doctor who paraded an interest in the arts. Eric’s manner was courteous, his expression enigmatic; but I recognised it as the same expression my father adopted when he had good reason to entertain disdain for someone. It was then that I realised what a strong resemblance Eric had to my father. I expect it was their shared Irish heritage. There were differences of course – Dad was not as tall as Eric, his eyes were dark brown and his nature more savage, more volatile – but, nevertheless, the general appearance, the manner was the same.
The basic premise of their lives, however, was quite different. In his nature, Eric was always hopeful; he had faith in man’s eventual, if agnostic, salvation. My father, coming from a minority group, had the corrosive wit of the outsider. Maybe that is why it took one of Eric’s rare expressions of rejection for me to see my father in him.
On that afternoon when I first met Eric, as we talked about tunnel vision and its metaphorical overtones, it became clearer to me how peripheral my own part was in the world of Kingseat Hospital. The signs all said that I should not put off my personal and working development any longer. Eric, from our first meeting, reinforced that instinct. He treated me as a painter; he made me want to live up to that expectation of myself. We must have also talked about the Irish backgrounds we had in common because the next day he sent me Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. Oh, how well he understood me: the naughty girl in the convent, the demented romantic trembling on the edge of the bottomless pit of perdition. From then on, Eric always influenced what I read. At intervals he sent me reading lists.
All this is not to say that I saw a great deal of Eric at this time. On the contrary. We entertained sharp, smart people from the city and went to drunken and exhausting dinner parties that I feared Eric would find unseemly. If anything, I avoided him. I feared his condemnation.
During that period, ’60s philosophy was in its final blossom. James K. Baxter called in on his way to Jerusalem to deliver a convoy of drug addicts. His hair was wild, his feet bare and his logic impeccable, a logic that could cover a multitude of sins, his own and other people’s. Hone Tuwhare drank gin with us and introduced his new partner. I liked her very much indeed. I knew Jacquie Baxter in Wellington; I had met Jean Tuwhare in Auckland. I saw those women as victims of the self-absorption of the poets. Hone owed Jean big time, I knew that. She gifted him with a political structure and, when he was young and vulnerable, she gave him security and courage. Jean’s father was one of the founders of the New Zealand Communist Party. Like so many guys saving the world, Jean’s father displayed lots of compassion for the masses but remarkably little for his own family. But come, just like Marx himself.
Baxter suffered this same flaw in his logic. There is a parallel between Baxter and James Joyce. Joyce borrowed his wife Nora’s language and stories from Galway as the substance for a lot of his writing. Baxter, for his part, used his wife’s discovery of her Maori roots as the energising power for his last burst of creativity. What was hers was really his, but what was his was not hers. But then, what was it Oscar Wilde said? The fact of a man being a poisoner does not affect his prose.
Fame and the temptations that accompany fame do not create a very healthy environment for wives. We had other visiting couples who illustrated this hazardous situation, but these examples cover it for now. The message I took was that I must not allow my personhood to be damaged by other people’s perceptions of me. To survive I must keep the vital juices of my own creativity pumping.
Earlier I explained that after my father’s death I was gripped by an urgent pull. I understood my immediate life was my inspiration. The mess on the table, the dishes, the unmade bed, all took on an aura of profound meaning. My mother visiting, the gardener working outside, the children eating, drinking, thinking. When these paintings were exhibited, I was called a domestic painter – but domestic painters in the past had tidied up their houses first or, I assumed, their wives had. I was making the mess visually lovely, taking the gentility out of the genre. I worked on these paintings during our last two years at Kingseat and our first year at Carrington. Paul Olds had been at art school in Christchurch with me and when he heard I was working again, he asked me to exhibit in Wellington. He was a fine arts lecturer at Victoria University. The show would then travel to the University of Canterbury.
I took the paintings in to be framed at the John Leech Gallery, where Mr Swinton starred. But he didn’t just want to frame them: he asked me to show in his gal
lery. He said that on very few occasions he found a painter that he wished personally to promote and that he would like to promote me. I, of course, said that I would be only too happy to be promoted by him. So it was to be.
By the time I had this first show in Auckland and we had moved to Carrington Hospital, the euphoria of the ’60s was dissipating.
While I was recently sorting old books under the house, I found Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness. This book was published in the early ’70s and I had altogether forgotten about it. Reading bits of it again, I understand how much both Fraser and I were the children of a certain generation. I expect that generation was ten years younger than we were, but then, don’t forget, we were immature. I don’t think now that Fraser and I were so much influenced by Illich, rather that we all came from a similar background – I mean the Catholic Church. It followed that we developed very similar ideas.
But then Illich could never have flourished if it were not for Pope John XXIII. The cardinals at the Vatican, when they elected John as pope, believed they could predict the future; you would have thought that they might understand the future is purely random. They put an old geezer in to fill the gap, a short-term gap, while they worked out who the real pope should be. The old boy couldn’t last long, what with his indulgence in good food and red wine. A sweet-natured but inert old guy, a man of the people, a peasant in fact. Perfect for his prescribed, short-term role. So they thought. What of their consternation when he was revealed to them as a spiritual dynamo!
Even those manipulative cardinals perceived his shining decency in a world of corruption. Into the bargain, he was innocent of this genius. He threw his shining bridge of hope across Voltaire’s Abyss and serenely trotted across. He was watched with jealous rage by the cardinals. What was God thinking? Young men from New Zealand, who had studied for the priesthood in Rome, communicated this to New Zealand. After Rome, these young men were sent to study and work in South America, where Pope John had given his support to the flourishing liberation theology, and dispatched home publications about it. This was to Fraser and myself so hopeful.
Before I Forget Page 6
