by Gee, Maurice
I believe Rex owed as much to him as to Lila. Rex too worked with his tongue stuck out. That – or so it strikes me – is the classic way when one is matching part with part and working functions out and devising pressures and setting balance up. No one will deny that Rex’s verse is well made and startles frequently with new-found uses for old properties. There’s boldness too and daring and facing-up, left hook, right cross – and now and then, when everything seems lost, there’s a bull’s roar and a wild swing.
Let’s not leave the father out.
*
I see the Petleys in a kind of dance. Each one makes his or her steps perfectly. There’s a rightness in the measure even when hidings are dealt out. Rex found his meaningful pattern in family, in the interweaving of habit and acceptance and love. Even his father, violent and sentimental, fitted in; and things outside – my mother in the summer house for example – provided the necessary tension against. They made the dark the Petley light burned in. This simplifies and formalizes. But I read the poems and I know. I look at the boy, Rex, and I know. I have seen him come in dirty from the playground, or smelly from some piece of brutality on the creek – spearing an eel, beheading it, and hammer-throwing the body home through the paddock for the fowls (have I mentioned that the Petleys kept Black Orpingtons?) – come into the kitchen and hug his mother unselfconsciously and, almost like a lover, jerk the ribbon in her hair so the brown mass of it tumbled down. He made no pause between the parts of his life but passed in and out with no thought. Later on he saw them as parts and used them to describe himself. Others see his profile. I’m the one who knows enough to turn him face on.
Remember that piece, it’s in half a dozen anthologies, about the boy who sits his younger sister on his shoulders and runs with her across a swing-bridge? The steps must be kept in time with the bounce. The metaphor is easy to see. A small miscalculation, one wrong step, and over the wire, into the creek, out of life, they go. (He puts it better, I trail behind.) Have you wondered why, although they reach the other side and the girl-child howls with terror and delight, there’s a sense of foredoom, of grieving, in the poem? The children are not named; but I was there, I saw it happen, Rex and Joy. He never wrote about Joy’s death, which happened three years later. He wrote about the two of them on the bridge, that was as close as he could come, and it’s close enough. John Dobbie thinks the title ‘Joy’ stands for the emotion and it puzzles him why the poem is equivocal.
Too much dared: out of life go Joy and her cousin Bert. But there was also ‘the thing that cannot be allowed for’, as Rex puts it in another poem.
*
Joy was like Melva. We used to call that sort of girl a tomboy. Everything Bert could do she could do as well or even better. Although they spent most of their time together I do not think they liked each other much. He came to live with the Petleys in 1947. His father, Les’s brother, had died in the war and his mother married again. Bert and his stepfather … it’s an old story. So he came to Loomis and for two years competed hard with his age-mate, Joy.
Their rivalry helped kill them. It happened on the other creek, on the other side of Loomis, by the domain. It was late spring, 1949, two or three weeks after Lila and I had talked on the bridge. As they drowned a cricket match went on. I was not there, I played tennis not cricket, but Rex, with his quick eye, was fielding in the slips. The swimming hole lay in an elbow of the creek, a hundred yards away through old-man manuka. A dozen children and a few adults were swimming in the cold water, keeping near the bank, when Joy and Bert set out, like Les Petley at Cascade Park, to swim across and back underwater. She had bet him he would not make it. On the far side, under the bank, they tangled in a barbed-wire fence washed down in winter floods and although Bert thrashed up several times Joy never surfaced at all.
I wasn’t there but I can see parts of it very well: men in white running through the trees; Rex in sodden muddy whites unwrapping wire from his sister’s throat.
He never talked about it. He never wrote about it. And I won’t speculate. Look at his poems; all of them.
Notebook: 4
The try-scoring boy, the six-hitting boy, the boy top of the class, the boy who knows how to manage teachers. The savage boy, the solitary boy. The boy who dismounts from the train before it stops and doesn’t have the sensitivity to suspend that practice for a day or two when my father dies. The boy who gets off at New Lynn station and starts the long walk home along the track because he doesn’t feel like school that day. There are so many bits to choose from and no organizing principle I can find. Although his poetry points at his life, if you can recognize the finger, not all of his life points at the poetry.
It seems that way to me, but perhaps it’s only seeming. Do I know Rex well enough? It’s possible to suppose that if one tiny bit had worked out differently – let’s say his encounter with the girl whose name I forget, at Orewa beach – his poetry would have been different too.
I’m bound to tell that story, because it portrays a Rex who does have the sensitivity …
We went to Orewa for a week, over New Year, four of us, Loomis boys, Mt. Albert Grammar boys, with our tent and our groundsheets and our blankets, our baked beans and beer, our frenchies and our troubling virginity. I’m not going to write of attempts and failures and consummations, sex is private, and nothing would induce me to go into detail. All that I will write down is that I came away from the holiday no longer troubled in that way, and very pleased about it, and pleased to find in myself no need to boast -1 had thought I would be boastful – while Rex came away a virgin still. But he too had found something unexpected in himself and was satisfied with what he had achieved.
Les Petley dropped us off in his truck and drove away winking, and we pitched our tent on our allotted site on the other side of the toilets from the family part of the camp, and set out looking for adventure: Rex Petley, Jack Skeat, Tony Jameson, Mark Bunce. We thought ourselves interesting, manly, attractive; but I stand at a distance of forty years and realize how ordinary we were. We were not even especially noticeable. There were bands of young men more accomplished than us in noise and cheekiness all over Orewa that year; in the camp, on the beach, at the nightly dances. They outnumbered the girls three to one, and the girls were mostly with their families. One had to work in those days and have a lot of luck.
I won’t bother with the dances, they’ve been done many times. See, for example, Rex’s ‘Dancehall’, in Darkness and Delights or in the selected poems. It’s a naturalistic piece, it’s definitive: the saxophone, the sweaty palm, the young men at the door; and it only starts to labour when it turns to darkness at the end – but I’ll leave Lit. Crit. to someone else. He’s very good on the girls flocking like sheep, and how when you manage to separate one – you work like an eye dog, he says – she must find her way, quick-stepping, back to her friends or else she’s lost.
Tony Jameson was the first to succeed. He had the quickest tongue and the most attractive looks. His girl came back to the tent with him. We had to wait outside while they did it. That was far too public for me: I looked at her with horror when she came out. But she was off-hand with us and did not seem to know that she was lost, or used, or sluttish. She strolled away, yawning, with Tony in tow; but went off with another boy the following night. It set us all back.
Mark, poor Mark, never got a girl. Mark hardly even got a foxtrot. He drank a lot, down in the sand dunes, and spied on couples – but today he’s a big-family, rich, suburban man, the only one who made it. (Tony Jameson had boiling water poured on him by his wife. These are Rex’s friends. He kept in touch. Boiling water as a marital response gets into the poems twice.)
My girl and Rex’s – I’m suspicious of possessives – were Diocesan sixth formers and once they had opened their mouths Rex and I concealed our Loomis vowels. Sarah fell to me. She was a lively pug-faced girl. I fell to Sarah, and I’d like to hear the adjectives she would choose. Some relatively-pleasing-in-the-face word, I would guess, b
ut never lively. Rex danced with her then moved in on her friend, who had just refused a dance with me. They tipped us at each other, and that was our good luck, for later on, down in the sand dunes, although we didn’t do it exactly right, Sarah was just as pleased as 1. (It wasn’t quite her first time.) We walked on the beach afterwards, back and forth. She told me things about being a girl I had never suspected – that they were individual not collective, for a start. I made better sense of them after that.
I told Rex I had never known you could talk with girls. It was nearly dawn. We sat cross-legged on the flat-topped hedge. The lemon-squeezer tents lay all below us and the sea washed and gloomed beyond the dunes. My nightful of achievements was nothing to Rex. He shone, he twitched, with what had happened to him.
She, the lovely one – and she was lovely, I don’t remember her name but remember her face – had let him go nearly all the way. Some detail is called for after all. They peeled off from Sarah and me and found a place (the dunes accommodated dozens of couples), and there, for a long while, they kissed and stroked and fondled. I did not boast about my completed act but Rex did about his preliminaries. His assumption was plain that his girl counted while mine did not. She (the pretty one) let him put his hand there after a while – a good long while – and gasped and kissed and carried on and gave him all her signals to persist. He put his weapon (it’s not his word and isn’t really mine) in her hand and she raised her head to get a sight of it and ran her palm along and back as though the shape and size were much as she had expected. But when he tried to open her legs wider – ‘Jesus, Jack, she started to cry.’
There’s more, a good deal more, of no, please, don’t, and lots of tears, while she continued to hang on. It ended with Rex not persisting. He believed, or so he seemed to say, that he had shown compassion.
Very few men would be able to turn back from so close; and here was a boy of eighteen … But a man, I think, would have read it differently and known he was meant to carry on. She held on to him all the time and reached down and showed him how to work his finger. All this he told me, on top of the hedge – Rex large-eyed and shining at his triumph over self. He stopped kissing the girl, put off her hand, withdrew his own, and helped her pull her scanties (his word) up. No wonder she ran off and would not say good-night. He swam in the mouth of the estuary; detumesced; and now, hours later, was swollen up again, with moral pride. I listened to him tell it, and tell it again in better words; and I sat smiling to myself. I had words of my own, but no need to say them. I was contented.
I did not often do better than Rex. And let me add to that night at Orewa, Sarah’s refusal to make love a second time after our walk on the beach. I shrugged and smiled, was disappointed, then recognized her sense (which became my own) of enough. I was schooled in moderation, after all. We kissed each other kindly at her door.
Those girls went home next morning and we never saw them again. And I wonder if Rex remembered, when he wrote ‘Dancehall’ in his early thirties, that his girl, thanks to him, had not been ‘lost’. (And nor was Sarah!) It’s fair to use the word all the same. Later on, in the unsuccessful poems he was writing in his final years with Alice, ‘lost’ came close to being a stock response. ‘Lost’ was Joy, and all those things time and circumstance had robbed him of.
Notebook: 5
My hand wants to come down heavily and I can’t prevent it. I want to make sense; control by means of finding significance. I want to make moral assessments. That’s the source of my irritability, the itch in my mind that I scratch all the time.
I’ll resist. One method is to lay words flatly down, set memories out like plates on a table and make a neat three-sided box: knife, fork and spoon. But those are places set for someone else – a place for John Dobbie and the ones who come after him. It’s my table and the meal is mine. What I must do is serve plain food. For a start, I’ll avoid metaphors.
Rex went to university with a credit pass in Scholarship (I had one too). He worked in the freezing works at Westfield before term. Although my mother did not want me doing manual jobs I put in several weeks at the city markets, bagging grain, stacking crates, stuffing fowls into sacks as the slaughterman wrung their necks. It was 1949, the year of my book, the year Joy drowned. One of my poems is about the fowls. Their wings still moved and the sacks lunged and stumbled as I tied their mouths. Another is about my half hour on the auction table. I snapped the wires on the crates of fruit with a jemmy and levered back the lids for the buyers to see. The auctioneer sneered, Chinamen watched, as I bungled it. My jemmy speared a tomato. Rex said they were my two best poems. A pity though, he said, that I had spelled out meaning at the end. Description was meaning, why couldn’t I see that?
I still have a dream in which a blind sack flaps bonily, and I’m inside. I dream of tiered Chinamen slanting down. I asked Rex once if he dreamed about his poems and he said no, writing them got them out of his system, right out. I don’t believe him.
He wrote from the age of sixteen. Before that he could hardly spell his name. But I must avoid smartness. There are those who belittle Rex. I’m not one of them. Before the age of sixteen he showed no real ability with language. Then some sac of interest in him broke and carried him away on a flood of words. (So much for avoiding metaphors.) He began, quite simply, with describing; and he kept that up all his writing life. But there are ways and ways. If you want to find out some of them look at John Dobbie’s bibliography, which will refer you to articles in Landfall, Islands, London Magazine, World Literature in English, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, and a dozen others. Rex is taken seriously all right. But because he kept himself apart and shows few influences he’s not easy to pin down. He has never been a fashionable poet.
John Dobbie: ‘Petley’s hard core of independence remained impervious to influences. He refused to take sides in the celebrated Auckland/Wellington struggle of the fifties. He would not, as he put it, be “a Curnoid” or “part of the flatulence from the south”. All his life he remained innocent of theory, but was knowing to an almost encyclopaedic degree about the ways of practice, about the ways of words; and this I put down to the hard attention he paid physical things in his youth.’
The Elf is on to something here. Rex paid that hard attention, but in a natural way. He was never trying. Concentration, assimilation, were functions like breathing. Description began as a natural act. When we started writing verse I dealt with what I saw and how I felt about it, and what my feelings meant; Rex with what he saw and what he saw next. If he played a part it was usually to go away and leave things as they were. An example: in our first year at university we would meet in Albert Park and eat our cut lunches on the grass by the fountain. There were flower beds, Moreton Bay fig trees, and a statue of Queen Victoria enclosing us on three sides. Sunny hours after morning lectures; girl students all about in their summer frocks: we could not avoid writing about it. But I laboured at meanings – I made meanings up. The girls were moths in their season; their youth the flame they fluttered about; the spreading branches age and death; the queen our puritan history. Her marble eye put their fires out. It might have worked better but would never have worked well. Those half hours on the grass lose their nature in my meanings. Rex on the other hand… And it’s most unusual. Don’t boys and girls of that age want to know the reason, and don’t they want improvement passionately? I was puzzled by his freedom from ‘why’ and ‘where to’, and later on I resented it.
My poem is the last one in First Fruits. Rex never published his. He showed it to me and I complained that nothing happened. I kept on waiting for the telling blow – just one word – and it never came. For six months, in 1949, I was the poet. Rex stopped showing me his writing, but he was keeping on and I allowed myself to encourage him, and could not understand my fear that he would move past. My abilities were so much greater than his. Rex was not very clever at all.
But oh how he could integrate. That too came as naturally as breathing. The woman in the ki
tchen shifts the damper. The chimney roars. She pushes the stewpot to one side and lifts the ring and drops a lump of axe-split tea-tree in. Down in the orchard the child runs home. He has an eel-hook in the ball of his thumb. The woman turns her husband’s work socks on the drying rack. The child …
How do these few details come together and create a family; an inside place, an outside place, and, if I can use the phrase, a system of values? Without saying any of that? I would have said it. I’d have underlined; and the physical things in the poem would have lost their substance and faded away. These days I see Rex’s mind at work; I see connections made. He was more than just a piece of recording equipment. But even his subtlety and his balancing skill were a part of his gift. (Yes, I believe in gift, just as I believe in work, fifty-fifty.) The family gathers round and looks with horror (Rex doesn’t say horror, I say that) at the black hook in the child’s white hand. The father takes it by the haft and with a thrust completes the circle. The point and barb break out the other side. He gets his pliers; snips. Quick and delicate undraws the circle … it’s all there, the increase of pain for the cure of pain. Then the reversal and the hook without a barb. The welling out of blood. All the bits together. He makes them larger than their sum.
The simplicity of his poems made me angry. I felt he could do better than that. I believed that I was shining and Rex took some of my lustre off. It seemed a betrayal of mind not to look for meaning. I was, too, in something of a state about betterment. Rex had chosen Loomis and that was a shocking retreat from the world; from possibilities for useful work and self-enlargement. Yet I could see that some of his poems worked.
We both had a sense of other lives. We could both see and take in multiplicity. But he had a centre, I had not. While I strove to make mine (oh this second-hand language) he rested safe. Because of that safety he was able to roll particularities into a ball and then beat it flat and gaze at the variously-beautiful stretched-out surface. I did not have sufficient calmness for that. Yet later on – no, leave it. In 1949 he stopped showing me his poems because he saw it was a waste of time – and there was the waste in my spirit too, perhaps he saw that. Then came Joy’s death and he stopped writing for several years. When he started again ‘lost’ was the sub-text in his work, ‘lost’ was the flavour. But even that does not mean his centre was gone. His centre was darkened, that is all. He could not have written if that had been lost too.
