Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  [March 6]

  Diane Arbus Days

  A friend asked the other night, ‘Do you ever have Diane Arbus days?’ It was one of those remarks that snaps above your head like a light bulb. There was a flash of recognition, an instant understanding of a truth revealed—in the best tradition of wise men, my friend had illuminated something that was already common knowledge. Whether we like it or not, we all have Diane Arbus days.

  Arbus, the great, doomed portrait photographer, raised by wealthy store-owners in New York, dead by her own hand in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, trained her camera, her artistry and her existential anguish on … by all means call them people who are different; Arbus preferred to call them freaks. Famously, she wrote, ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot … There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.’

  This is uplifting, serious talk, and there is no shortage of curators and other art bores who will talk further about the compelling and mysterious qualities of Arbus’s photographs. But the fact remains that her subjects were freaks. She photographed midgets, giants, twins, triplets, transvestites, various and assorted deviants; the bored rich, the damaged poor, the feeble old, the warped young; she travelled to lunatic asylums, nudist camps, and that other guaranteed public gathering of freaks, political rallies. Her subjects looked sad and lonely and lost. They looked disconnected from reality. They looked awkward, dysfunctional, possibly noble, even magnificent. They looked like people we see every day—sometimes in vast numbers.

  And this is what my friend lit upon in his remark. There are days when the streets teem with the wretched and the pitiful. These are our Diane Arbus days. You don’t go looking for a Diane Arbus day; a Diane Arbus day comes to you. Such an infinite variety of human appearance crosses your path on a Diane Arbus day that you may not know whether to laugh or cry. You may want to see even more. You may want to rush home and close the curtains. Your personality, your character, your heart will be put to a very severe test on a Diane Arbus day.

  You know the range of people I mean: the deformed, the gibbering, the frankly moronic, the afflicted, the maimed, the feral, the very nearly monstrous. There are nicer terms. Freaks is not one of them. But there they are, these people who are different, almost seeming to congregate on a Diane Arbus day. One misfit after another, hobbling, wheezing, foaming, perhaps asking for nothing more than decency and respect, or perhaps sprawled on the footpath and asking for money.

  The phenomenon is not strictly urban. A stranger lingering in an otherwise ordinary and unremarkable small town might find they have stumbled on to a Diane Arbus day; there is no statistic that says a village can accommodate only one village idiot. But the chances of a Diane Arbus day are obviously highest in our four main centres. Each city has its own particular quality and quantity of the deformed, the gibbering, etc. Auckland scores high in all manner of wretchedness; Wellington, too, is infested; Christchurch, typically, is discreet about it; Dunedin —well, Dunedin may well be the most harrowing, the most saddening city of the lot. I speak from personal experience and from the testimony of numerous witnesses.

  I cannot speak for our other, smaller cities—Tauranga, Hamilton, Rotorua, Napier, Wanganui, New Plymouth, Nelson, Timaru, Invercargill—in this matter. Readers in any of these necks of the woods are welcome to share their experiences, even if their Diane Arbus days are set in such typical cages of the wretched and the pitiful as bus stations, supermarkets and rugby stadiums.

  But wherever Diane Arbus days occur, there is a stock response. Such days have the swirl and randomness of nightmare. (‘Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.’) We are awestruck, caught in the middle of a strange parade, a Mardi Gras, without cheering music or any form of advertisement—the world has suddenly turned inside out. In a sense, the world has taken off its disguise and showed its face.

  So much of life passes without comment. There is a woman with a pram, there is a man up a ladder. We don’t look at them twice. Most of us are bland, nothing special, just content to go about our business. Even the beautiful are forgotten within a few seconds. But life is turned vivid on a Diane Arbus day. The balance is tipped towards sickness, accident, the genetic lottery; as we constantly collide with the compelling and the mysterious, we are reminded of what it is to be truly human.

  ‘For me,’ wrote Arbus, ‘the subject of the pictures is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.’ With any luck, there is a Diane Arbus day coming to your town soon.

  [March 20]

  Eminent Bastard

  Good luck to the Vatican as it prepares to elect its new pontiff, and sympathies to mourners for their recent loss, but news of the death of Pope John Paul II had me on the run. I needed to escape the great outpouring of media treacle: the TV presenters piously telling us that the pontiff ’s body, as it lay in state, was dressed in crimson robes and his famous hat; the feature writers droning from Rome with prose like this: ‘Then he died, the announcement came over the loudspeakers, and the silence was total. It was broken by a round of applause. And it was at that moment that the tension was broken. He had been released. His sufferings were at an end—and ours, too, on his behalf.’

  I ran to my bookcase. I really ought to put my books in some kind of order. It took a while to find what I was looking for. It wasn’t any of my approximately 117 football books. It certainly wasn’t Rose Boyt’s terrifying novel Sexual Intercourse. It nearly was, on second thoughts, The Lawless Roads, or The End of the Affair, or The Power and the Glory, all by that appalling Catholic monster, Graham Greene. But then I found it: Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey.

  Weird, etiolated Strachey, who fancied Katherine Mansfield because she looked like a Japanese doll, who proposed to Virginia Woolf and then hurriedly talked her out of it (‘I was in terror lest she should kiss me’), who once indulged in an erotic staging of a crucifixion with his lover Roger Senhouse, remains thoroughly modern. True individuals, classic outsiders, possess a quality of determination that places them beyond their own lifetimes. It’s easy to imagine Strachey (1888–1932) loping along London’s streets today, an amused, scornful figure, pulling at his beard and considering his own response to the death of that ailing gentleman in Rome.

  It would not likely be a pretty portrait. It might rather more resemble one of the four brief biographies collected in Eminent Victorians, Strachey’s 1918 masterpiece. What an astonishing read this still is. It’s the perfected art of literary assassination; patiently, remorselessly, hilariously, Strachey kills off fond Victorian notions of military endeavour (by writing about General Gordon), education (Dr Arnold), charity (Florence Nightingale) and religion (Cardinal Manning). In his preface, Strachey argues that his book has serious purpose—‘to lay bare the facts as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions’. In 1912, when he began incubating the idea for his biographies, he wrote somewhat more directly to Woolf: ‘Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites.’

  And so he sets about destroying the headmaster Arnold, and General Charles Gordon (‘a little off his head’). As for dear old Florence Nightingale, he fair stoves in the head of the lady with the lamp, drawing her as a ruthless, warring harridan. But the worst, or best, of his black high spirits is reserved for Cardinal Manning. There is nothing dispassionate or impartial in his ninety-six-page biography of England’s Catholic ruler. He cooks Manning’s goose, then plucks the feathers one by one.

  In a wider sense, the attack is on religious power. Strachey describes Rome’s ‘daily spectacle of coloured pomp and antique solemnity, which—so long as the sun was shining, at any rate —daz
zled the onlooker into a happy forgetfulness of … the nauseating filth of the highways, the cattle stabled in the palaces of the great, and the fever flitting through the ghastly tenements of the poor.’

  But this is a fairly standard rage about the inequality of wealth. Strachey is far more interested in making his attack personal. Manning is the favoured target; Manning is the intended victim. Again, there is something resolutely modern going on. It reads like the very beginning of that popular branch of journalism called profile writing—and the very end, too, because it really has not been bettered.

  Did he splutter with laughter through his beard as he wrote his profile on Manning? I expect so, because he writes as though as he has fallen head over heels in love with words. The frank deliciousness of his prose is almost overwhelming. This, on Manning’s appearance: ‘The spare and stately form, the head, massive, emaciated, terrible, with the great nose, the glittering eyes, and the mouth drawn back and compressed into the grim rigidities of age, self-mortification, and authority…’ And this, on Manning’s burning of his letters and diaries: ‘He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers drop unknown mysteries into the flames.’

  What a malicious, unfair, satirical bastard he was, and what a genius. Strachey’s biography of Manning never lets up, never releases him from the hook, not even at his death, or in his crypt. Reading it today, there is such particular resonance in these lines: ‘He who descends into the crypt … will observe … that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy—the Hat.’

  [April 17]

  Three Steaks

  A Monday in autumn, the whisper of softly falling leaves, the moon cut in half in a blue sky, the light of day turning gold at the edges, that entirely autumnal feeling of stillness, of sadness, of silence—except the temperatures soared to twenty-four degrees, and roared one word into my burning ears: steak. There were three steaks mooing in my fridge on that lovely autumn Monday. They wanted out. They wanted some fresh air. The day demanded they make their way to a barbecue.

  With all that roaring and mooing, I could barely hear myself think. Work could wait. I fled the house, trotted to a nearby park to scavenge a sack of pine cones, and on the way home I bought a two-kilogram pack of Speedy Heat hot-burning hardwood charcoal and twenty-one slices of Tip Top Family Fresh Super Soft White Sandwich bread. Sorted, equipped, all my needs met, I put my feet up and waited for a respectable hour to light the fuse.

  Food was actually the least of my considerations. I have three talents; setting fire to things is one of them. Thus, the controlled arson of a barbecue. I own a portable Weber charcoal burner—in fact, it was the first Christmas present my future wife ever bought me. She obviously knew the way to my heart was through fire.

  But a great New Zealand tradition is under serious threat. We have gone soft on the fire and brimstones of a proper barbecue. We now prefer rigging up our back porches with gas barbecues. Gas is clean, gas is efficient, gas is worse than boring; gas is joyless, gas is tepid, gas is gay. The gas barbecue is a symbol of moral rot, possibly.

  In calmer moments, I am willing to accept that the popularity of gas barbecues is partly a product of the good manners that are required in city living. No smoke, no disturbance of the confined personal air space of others.

  As such, I had been too timid to get to grips with the grill since January, when I moved into my new multi-unit residential development with high urban design standards, which is also known as an apartment. The development is ruled with an iron fist by a body corporate: no laundry after 11 p.m.; keep a zealous watch for signs of mould at all times; watch that your pet does not ‘bother any other resident with their noise, droppings or other nuisance’. What other nuisance? With these kinds of house arrests, I thought I’d be pushing it by daring to offend delicate sensibilities with thick clouds of charcoal smoke.

  Until that lovely autumn Monday. I work from home, and rarely see the other residents in the daytime. On the stroke of 4 p.m. I arranged a petite stack of pine cones on top of a careful arrangement of pages from The Sunday Star-Times, and lit the match. How satisfying it was to inspect a black oil ooze itself out of the burning cones. What pleasure it was to gaze at a radiant flame in the autumn light. How tempting it was to accidentally turn the entire new multi-unit residential development with high urban design standards into a towering inferno, but I doused the flames at the exact right time with a pile of charcoal, and sat back to study the sensual curl and twist of a great deal of smoke.

  I lit a cigarette. I brought out a bottle of beer and a bottle of sauce. I watched the smoke pour out of my porch and across the yard and on to the street, and thought of its fingers reaching over the nearby bay, going out to the harbour and then the sea, all the way in a straight latitudinal line to the coast of Chile, to the seaport of Valparaiso—wafting over the Plaza Sotomayor, calling in at Pablo Neruda’s house at La Sebastiana…

  It was time to put on the three patient steaks. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word ‘barbecue’ back to Haiti; other scholars claim it is a derivative of the West Indian term ‘barbacoa’, which denotes a method of slow-cooking meat over hot coals. Either way, I was aware that my autumn cook-out placed me in the great international brotherhood of barbecuers. It takes no notice of race or nation. It asks only for fire, and for meat. I thought of the Mongolian barbecue, the Japanese barbecue, the American barbecue—I recently read that actor Johnny Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the self-styled barbecue capital of the world, even though its restaurants specialise in mutton.

  With the lid on my Weber, the three steaks took a mere ten minutes. I wolfed them with six slices of white bread and a generous helping of sauce. To make sure I was eating a balanced diet, I wrapped up four potatoes in tinfoil, with salt, pepper and a lot of butter, and placed them in the embers. I walked to the park. The light was thin and pale over the bay. The street lights came on at the stroke of six. The sun set over the ranges in a shriek of orange and yellow and red, the colour of flame.

  [May 1]

  News, 1954

  This just in from England. ‘Dazed, and wearing only a coat over underwear and slippers, Thomas Harvey Hillier, fifty, was found in Sunbury Road, Hampton, Middlesex, early yesterday. He had walked three miles in his sleep from his home in Vicarage Road.’

  Poor old Mr Hillier is probably enjoying a very long rest six feet under these days, because that report is from an edition of the London Daily Mirror dated Monday, March 22, 1954. I suppose you could say I’ve been a bit slow in catching up on the news. In fact, I bought the paper only the other day. A feature of our past colonial life is that a week’s worth of the Mirror used to be bound in a yellow wrapper and shipped out to Commonwealth nations Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia and New Zealand. Every now and then, copies resurface in secondhand bookstores. I swoop on them every chance I get.

  News is only ever news when it’s fresh, but it’s a curious fact that newspapers are only ever truly fascinating years after they’re published. We’ve all experienced that peculiar sensation when we come across dry, yellowing pages of a newspaper at the back of a garage, in a basement, or lining the bottom of a kitchen drawer of an old house. We check the date: perhaps it was before we were born, or when we were some other, disappeared version of ourself. The older it is the better. We can relax at whatever alarm is raised by its front-page calamity. An old newspaper is perfectly harmless, the scattered notes of some ancient civilisation, a kind of fossil—an old newspaper is a book of the dead.

  What were they like, the dead? What were their concerns, what biscuits and hair tonics were they sold, what rubbish did they sit down to watch on TV? Bores like to tell us that newspapers are the first draft of history. By all means consult the front-page calamity of an old newspaper to check on a significant event, but th
e real interest is in tracking the wanderings and activities of ordinary people, of the unknown dead.

  Even now, everybody knows that the best stories in the daily paper can be found in that usually thin column headlined IN BRIEF. These two-or three-paragraph despatches from around the world seldom fail to astonish—a rogue elephant run amok in India, an amusing divorce claim brought by a South American dwarf, a human head found next to a jar of mayonnaise and half a dozen eggs in a fridge in Germany. Day after day, the hits keep coming, the wanderings and activities of the ordinary living. And then we turn the page, and forget everything in a few minutes.

  But that 1954 bound edition of the Daily Mirror—Thursday, March 18 to Wednesday, March 24—is a permanent record. To the IN BRIEF columns: ‘Delicate as a child, Mrs Letitia Enright has died, aged 101, at Palmers Green, London.’ And: ‘Ten blind men challenged ten deaf men at chess in Bristol. The blind players won by seven games to three.’ Also: ‘A man was charged at Arbour Square police station, Stepney, last night, with being in unlawful possession of a cat.’

  Close scrutiny is kept on Germany. Friday, March 19: ‘A violin has been made by a German from 8,000 matches.’ Sunday, March 21: ‘A woman won a contest to keep a cigar alight longest at Burghausen, Bavaria.’

  The wretched will always be with us. ‘Mrs Tillay van-Gelder, 26, of Ilford, fell in front of a train at Gants Hill Station yesterday and was killed.’ But there is good fortune, too. ‘A van hit eight month-old John Taylor’s pram as his mother wheeled him over a zebra crossing outside the Elephant and Castle in Southwark yesterday. John was thrown up in the air and landed back in the pram again, suffering only slight injuries and shock.’ Where are you now, John Taylor? Are you sure you’re all right?

  While the Mirror’s front pages fret over political scandals and the threat of Soviet spies, the IN BRIEF column answers the important questions. What did the dead eat? ‘Until a year ago, the Food Ministry stated that the definition of a pork sausage must be 65 percent meat, mostly pork. But during the past year there have been luxury 95-percent pork sausages, and cut-price sausages, of which the meat content was anybody’s guess. Manufacturers have asked the Ministry to lay down a minimum meat content. The Ministry says it will begin a new round of sausage analysis.’