*
A few months after I arrived in New Zealand, I went to a poetry reading by Fleur Adcock. She had then been living in London since the early 1960s, but made regular visits back to Wellington to see her mother and sister. I knew that some local writers considered her a renegade for remaining overseas. Apparently, it had been okay for Katherine Mansfield to stay away, but, after Frank Sargeson, the approved model changed, so that you had to do your OE in England or wherever and then come back home again. It wasn’t clear why an exception was made for Mansfield (because she was too good to expunge?) or whether those same local writers would have grumbled quite so much about Adcock if she had been less of a literary success in London.
Adcock’s reading was packed. The poem I remember most clearly was ‘Immigrant’. This recreates in miniature the experience of trying to adapt to living in London. The concluding lines read:
I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.
That last line doesn’t look much on the page, but when Adcock read it she turned the repeated triplet into a potted history of her own immigration. Each time she said, ‘St James’s Park’, her voice shifted: first, she gave the words a New Zealand inflection; then something intermediary; finally, her adopted English accent.
Naturally that is only one possible reaction to London, and it is the reaction of someone intending to live there and determined to fit in. When I first met the poet Bill Manhire in early 1981, he was in London on a year’s leave from the English Department at Victoria University of Wellington. Since I had just been offered a job in the same department and we were about to become colleagues, he kindly suggested a meeting. I was nervous and, in a fumbling attempt to start a conversation, asked him how he liked London. He said in a very even tone: ‘The great thing about London is that I could take off all my clothes and run naked down the street and nobody back in Wellington would hear anything about it. Not that I’m going to,’ he added, with a slight chuckle.
Not long after the Fleur Adcock reading, I took part in my own first poetry reading in Wellington. It was staged in the old Circa building, now long since pulled down. We read in front of an enormous blown-up photograph of James K. Baxter, one of the famous late ones in which he looks particularly bearded and messianic. Dwarfed by that daunting image, my quizzical poems about travel and marriage (‘Marriage is another foreign country / you needn’t go to, cannot only visit’) sounded somewhat out of place even to me. There was a similar moment a year or so later when I was invited to contribute to a weekend of readings in Christchurch. By then, I had written a few ‘New Zealand’ poems, but most of what I read still ended with lines like: ‘It is the knight moves you should have made;/spaces behind the words you say.’ During the party at the end of the weekend, the poet who had invited me down came over and said with evident disappointment: ‘I hadn’t realised how English your poems were.’ When I repeated the remark to the novelist Russell Haley, who had also originally come from England, he laughed. ‘They always say that,’ he said. ‘Just write what sounds right to you.’ Which was good advice.
Now, all these years later, Wellington feels as close to a home as I expect to find. I’m used to the wind; the shapes of the hills don’t look odd; and the seasons no longer seem upside down. I’ve come to appreciate every year that it is the immigrant plants which most visibly signal spring: the sharp smell of onion flowers; the acid yellow of gorse and the light purple of cape daisies on the hills; clumps of spur valerian holding out ice-cream cones of pink and red by the roadside; arum lilies, with creamy throats, sticking out their orange tongues.
I like visiting England, but I no longer think much about the roads not taken. I’m no longer haunted by the kind of double life Henry James portrays so dismayingly in ‘The Jolly Corner’. An American aesthete returns home after years in Europe. He persuades himself that the person he would have become is living in his old house. When he confronts this alternative self, he finds him appalling. I’ve lived here long enough now to have friends with whom there is a shared crust of memories and experiences. Though it drives some New Zealanders overseas to the anonymity of London, Paris or New York, I like the fact that the country is really a village with one and a half degrees of separation. Life here is lived on a human scale.
*
That evocative phrase ‘imaginary homelands’, used in connection with my prep school, is borrowed from Salman Rushdie. It’s the title of a collection of his essays and critical pieces. In the title essay, Rushdie explores some of the paradoxes confronting migrant writers. Much of what he says is an extended footnote to his novel Midnight’s Children, in which he vividly recreates the Bombay of his childhood. One paradox is that while migrants have only the broken mirrors of memory, ‘the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed’. This is because, being ‘remains’, the broken bits, however trivial in themselves, become charged with symbolic resonance. The shards are also a liberating reminder of ‘the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties’, of how partial any re-creation of past or present must be.
If prep school has become one of my imaginary homelands, another is Hong Kong. During my father’s posting there (1958–60), I used to fly out every holidays. Compared to boarding school, Hong Kong seemed entirely idyllic. We lived a few hundred metres from a club. I was allowed to walk there on my own and swim all day; and when I was hungry, I could sign a chit for hot dogs and Pepsis. The tuckshop at school only sold things like banana splits, gobstoppers and sherbet fountains with a licorice straw. These were fine for chewing and sucking on Sunday nights while the headmaster’s wife read us Prester John, Warrior Scarlet or The First Men in the Moon, but they were only sweets and couldn’t compare with the thrill of that first encounter with American junk food.
One of Rushdie’s shards of glass is ‘the mirror of nostalgia’. This is the mirror which always reflects those childhood holidays in Hong Kong. First, the slow flight, initially in a Britannia, later in a Comet: the constant stops for refuelling, the kindness of air hostesses and the blue bags of airsickness. Next, touching down at Kai Tak airport, stepping out into the stuffy heat and the reunion with my parents. Then picnics on beaches, trips to Macao or outlying islands, films (High Noon, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Old Yeller), seven-up floats, Tarzan comics. Finally, all too quickly, the flight back to England and boarding school. For years after my parents left Hong Kong I fantasised about returning there. But the thing about imaginary homelands is that—like books—though you can think about them, dream about them, write about them, you can’t actually live in them. Everybody knows this. But, years later after university, when I started to think about jobs, I still found myself applying for a position in the English Department at Hong Kong University.
*
Rushdie also writes memorably about the migrant imagination in his introduction to Günter Grass: On Writing & Politics 1967–1983. As he says, ‘exiles, refugees, migrants have carried many cities in their bedrolls in this century of wandering’. His examples are Kundera and Prague, Joyce and Dublin, Grass and Danzig. New Zealanders, thinking of ‘Prelude’, ‘The Doll’s House’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘At the Bay’, would automatically add Mansfield and Wellington. Rushdie suggests, convincingly enough, that ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century’. He then goes on to identify the ‘triple disruption’ experienced by the migrant: ‘he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and code is very unlike, and sometimes even offensive, to his own’. The loss of ‘roots, language and social norms’, says Rushdie, means that the migrant ‘is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human’.
Returning to Hong Kong in 1974 at the age of 24, did I find new ways of describing myself, ‘new ways of
being human’? Well, not exactly, though some of the events that happened in the next three years were strange enough, and the experience did change me. At the time, I secretly half-hoped to regain something of my lost childhood world. What I told various friends was that I was going to Hong Kong to test my survival equipment. This rather laughable idea seemed to make sense back then. My friends and I were, typically, obsessed with not ‘selling out’, a key phrase in the late 1960s and early ’70s. In principle, this involved either being an artistic genius or becoming a social worker. In practice, it involved getting a job you didn’t feel too guilty about. The idea of university teaching in Hong Kong seemed to more or less fit the bill: it was unquestionably exotic, possibly erotic, and potentially adventurous.
Where I didn’t fit Rushdie’s migrant model, of course, was that I was going as a quasi-colonist to what was then still a British colony. This meant I didn’t have to lose roots (those that I had) or language. In fact, it would have been hard to lose either even if I’d wanted to. English was the medium of instruction, and almost all the locals spoke better English than I could ever hope to speak Cantonese. Also I was lazy. I now feel similarly about my very limited Maori. I tell myself that I must learn it and perhaps I will. It is only half an excuse to say, ‘When will I use it?’
*
Ezra Pound rather romantically dubbed poets ‘the antennae of the race’. It was in Hong Kong that I first realised English people possess a complex set of social antennae. This develops more or less unconsciously as they grow up. The antennae check out all sorts of information—accent, dress, job, manners, body language, vocabulary—and an almost instant process of categorisation then assigns the person to a class and/or group. I suppose it’s to see whether the person is one of us or one of them.
In England, the antennae function with automatic efficiency: most people aren’t even aware they’re operating. But elsewhere the antennae can encounter problems. They pick up distorted signals or mistranslate the information, and also come into conflict with the social antennae of other cultures. In England (at least up to the 1970s—I’m not sure about now), accent mattered more than clothes, background more than cash. You could have long hair, wear jeans and flip-flops, but if you had the right accent, that was still what really counted. A modified public school accent was a sort of passport: not too posh, but not plebby. (At the same time, since the 1960s a strong regional accent could also confer authenticity: a working-class hero, as John Lennon had sung, was something to be.) It was complicated, but then so were the antennae.
In England, if you were middle class, it was vulgar, infra dig, non-U to flaunt your money. The signals of wealth and/or status had to be subtler: a self-deprecating anecdote perhaps or the casual appearance of a battered (but clearly genuine) silver tin in which you kept your tobacco for rolling cigarettes. Quite hopeless in Hong Kong. Among the Chinese, you gained face by not only being rich but by displaying your wealth: dressing expensively, looking well groomed, wearing lots of gold. Jeans (however expensive) cut little mustard. Besides, most Chinese looked down on Europeans. They called them gwai los (foreign devils), an insult the Europeans had characteristically neutralised by taking over the name for themselves. Among the gwai los, wearing jeans was also beyond the pale because you were thought to be letting the side down, being a touch too bohemian.
Later on, the social antennae didn’t work in New Zealand either, though for different and altogether more positive reasons. I quickly found you couldn’t assume anything on the basis of someone’s job. The plumber who came to fix the drain blocked by ngaio roots spoke fluent Mandarin and had a degree in Asian studies. Nor did accents help much. Many Southlanders still had a bit of a Scottish burr. There seemed to be a Hawke’s Bay and Christchurch older-money accent, used by those eager to inform a newcomer that their ancestors had been on the First Four Ships. And teenagers and those in their twenties often lifted their voice at the end of the sentence, as though any statement was after all only provisional and could be withdrawn if the other person turned out to disagree. Eventually I learnt the truth of ‘We and They’, Kipling’s witty poem about accepting difference rather than trying to put it in neatly labelled boxes:
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!
And, after a few years in New Zealand, the antennae just naturally switched off. Though I only have to be in England for a few weeks and I can almost hear the click as they come back on.
*
The thing about being an immigrant is that you will only ever fit in up to a point. But if the conditions and the people suit you, and you seem to suit them, that can be enough. Even after he became a British citizen in 1927, famously declared himself to be a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion, and was hailed as the leading modern poet writing in English, T.S. Eliot still apparently signed himself ‘metoikos’ (Greek for ‘resident alien’). His biographer Peter Ackroyd sees this as Eliot’s deliberate ploy to preserve and nourish a secret part of himself. And it may have been. It may also have been an honest acceptance that the immigrant, however accepted and accepting, can never quite belong.
My godmother, who eventually became an editor of Children’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, now lives as a resident alien in Massachusetts. I visited her there in 1992 in the course of writing a biography of Kipling. One evening we were talking about modern poetry, and she told me quite casually that she was an old friend of Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s second wife. Margaret had met Valerie shortly after the war when they both attended Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College. Had she met Eliot? I asked. Yes, once. It had been in the late 1950s on one of Margaret’s visits back to England. She had contacted her old friend and been invited to dinner. She had expected other guests but she was the only one. Valerie went off to see about the meal, leaving her alone with the great man. How was he going to entertain his young wife’s young friend? He took her to his study and explained how perfectly Valerie had arranged and decorated it for him. Then he asked Margaret to sit down, produced an advance copy of the LP of My Fair Lady, and they sat and listened in appreciative silence till called in to dinner.
*
The students at Hong Kong University (almost all Chinese, young and female) were polite, friendly, desperate to succeed. For most of them, a degree was a mealticket. They weren’t interested in class discussion; they wanted answers. They didn’t want to be asked what was funny about the opening of chapter 6 of Lucky Jim when Jim wakes up with a hangover:
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
Nor were they concerned about how seriously to take the argument of a metaphysical poem like Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (‘Had we but World enough, and Time,/This coyness Lady were no crime’). Nor whether one should feel sorry for Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Nor why Hamlet keeps putting off avenging his father’s murder.
It sometimes seemed to me as though I started every tutorial with my pockets full of secrets. If I’d emptied my pockets by the end of the class, the students thought the tutorial worthwhile. If not, not. In fact, I eventually came to realise that most of them didn’t find descriptions of hangovers remotely funny or deliberate syllogism engaging, and they couldn’t feel sorry for someone like Malvolio who so publicly lost face. As for Hamlet’s procrastination, some thought him simply unchristian because he seriously considered vengeance; others, more versed in traditional Chinese stories, couldn’t see the problem. If your father’s ghost suddenly appears and tells you to kill your uncle, you don’t start soul-searching
, you reach for your sword.
I met my first New Zealander in Hong Kong. His name was Mike, and he gave me a strange but not altogether misleading view of Kiwis. He was burly, good at sport, a talented musician and taught in another department in the university. He always had plans—plans to make money, plans to write books. It was said, I don’t know how accurately, that on his course outlines he used to list the titles of books and articles he intended to write. Perhaps he hoped listing the titles would have the effect of magically making the books appear. Everyone had their Mike story, often several. This one was told to me years later in England by an Australian, which should guarantee its provenance. True or not, it’s the story that still always occurs to me when I think about Hong Kong.
The story is called ‘The Fairy’s Merkin’, and all you need to know is that ‘merkin’ means ‘artificial pubic hair’. The Australian who told me the story one long evening in Leicester gave it the full works, voices and all, but I’ll stick to the cut-price version. Mike lived with an English girlfriend and, unbeknown to her but not to most of his friends, also had a regular Chinese bargirl in Wanchai, the red-light area. One weekend while the English girlfriend was away, Mike had the bargirl to stay. When the live-in girlfriend returned, she found a large black false eyelash in the bathroom. She confronted Mike with the eyelash and asked, ‘What the hell is this?’ To which, Mike is said to have replied, ‘Give me a minute and I’ll give you a good answer.’ And after a minute he said, ‘Would you believe it’s a fairy’s merkin?’
When I first heard the story, I thought it very funny in a cruel way. Now I think it sad. Hong Kong was like that: funny and cruel—and sad. Like Chinese Agnes, who used to ring me up. She claimed to have known the previous occupant of my flat and wanted me to be her friend. I wasn’t keen, particularly when she told me her grandmother was trying to poison her. During my first year, the phone calls became weirder and weirder and finally abusive, at which point I changed my number. Later I discovered I was just one of a long line of gwai los in Agnes’s phone-book.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 130