Hugh yelled out to me, ‘You can’t take it. I thought you were different. I thought you could take it.’
‘How different? You mean like dead different? Is that the sort of different you want, Hugh?’ I said.
But there was something in me that admired Madge. She stayed with him. She knew in male terms he had the divine fire. I wanted to make love to him too, but I was afraid. I knew the whole island thing had been his way of wooing me and I didn’t know how to respond.
When at last I got back to my studio Ann was distraught. There had been no sleep for her from about midnight on. The only clue the mummies and daddies had about their daughters’ whereabouts was our address. From about four o’clock on the police turned up. Ann was questioned as if she were the mastermind for a white slave racket. Luckily, about eight o’clock, somebody got some information about a party on an island and they all headed off over the Port Hills.
If Ann felt pretty resentful about the whole night, Sydney Thompson’s sister next door was flaming mad. She was already starting procedures to get us out of there, and this sealed it.
When I woke up the next morning, I too had made a decision. Men, as far as I was concerned, were completely over and done with. I would finish my degree and then I would get out of Christchurch.
Later in the week I heard Hugh was in hospital. Not long after I had got out of the truck he wrapped it around a telephone pole. He broke an arm? Hit his head? Madge, naturally, was just fine. But us guys in the back? I expect we would have been killed.
New Zealand is a very small place. Otto Richards, who farmed outside Timaru, was Hugh’s uncle. Otto was married to my good friend Sally, and he had that same debonair sex appeal as Hugh had. You don’t come across that very often in one lifetime. Up behind the homestead Hugh and his brother had made an ice-skating rink. Hugh said it wasn’t big enough. Dick and some of his mates decided they needed to dynamite some rock around the periphery. They set it up, pressed the button and then they waited. Hugh, impatient, went up to check it out, and then it blew. It blew Hugh into the void, that place that he seemed to be taking such an interest in anyway. After that Madge went to England and so, the next year, did Julie.
Julie and I had sometimes gone together up into the back country to Hugh Richards’ place and we had had such good times. Dick got engaged to a really nice girl and everyone else either got married or went back to where they came from. That’s where I went too – back to where I came from. The party was most definitely over.
How much that night on the island changed our lives. If I’d had a tendency to act out the wild party girl, this had given me the lead role as the woman who is a very bad influence on the young. I think I know when to quit, and I recognised that the time had come. I just didn’t want to read for the part of the wicked woman, and I hated the whole script anyway. The idea was that I would now find salvation in my painting. And the important thing is that I actually started to do that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Looking for Colin McCahon
A wind always blew on landscape days at art school, and nor’westers blew the hardest of all. We were just about the last generation versed in landscape painting. With our landscape easels strapped on to our backs, we bicycled off to our assignation with nature. The canvas was clamped into the easel and acted like a sail. We flew dangerously along like windsurfers. The heavy paint box tied on to the back of the bike acted as ballast. Just like Victorian ladies, we searched for the picturesque view.
Halfway through the morning, with furtive nods and glances, senior lecturer in painting Bill Sutton and his disciples sidled off to the pub, and I would say something about how we weren’t asked and why not? The lived creative process was just for the boys not for us girls, was that the message? We were not to be part of Bill’s upward glance – that glance that took possession of the nor’west arch – as he stepped out of the pub at midday. That was when Bill’s eyes were opened and he could see his new paintings taking shape, but we women – girls? – were not part of it. There is no suggestion here that Bill was in any way neglecting his duties, because he still had plenty of time to get around all the students. He could do that in the first half of the morning. The point is that you could get through a whole lot of stuff in a morning in those days. It didn’t matter at all that Bill got a bit squiffy in the pub and Julie and I were idling in the sun and the wind. It didn’t even matter that we felt a bit left out of the serious talk about art that was happening in the pub. We weren’t ever into criticising Bill’s behaviour seriously.
We assume that we have made progress about attitudes to other people’s behaviour, but I very much doubt it. This is a censorious age we now live in. A lecturer boozing in the pub with students in university time? Now he would be viewed as a corruptor of youth, when that was the last thing we thought of.
For landscape both Bill and Russell Clark would take us to their favourite places of inspiration. A year later, our landscape sites would turn up as the theme of their latest paintings – for Bill the brooding graveyard, for Russell the fog on the Avon River. Russell never got to London or won the Slade Prize like Bill did, but he did get to the war in the Pacific. However, their being away from New Zealand for a long time produced in both of them a very similar response: a post-colonial mindset. These days the cast in our eye is implanted by American imperialism, but in those days it was still cast by the British Empire. Bill and Russell taught us to look at where we lived, to make strenuous effort to see what was really there, rather than what we had been taught to see or what we expected to see. Both, I believe, are grossly underestimated for their contribution to New Zealand painting.
I can’t nevertheless dismiss the darling Kellys. They were products of the London School of Art and of English art history. I remember one of them murmuring in my ear, ‘Remember, my dear, every stroke a thought.’ That stopped my showing off. Both those Kellys were inspired, conscientious and virtuous. Still, the time had come for the shades to be removed and the startling light of Aotearoa to be absorbed and then translated. That was Bill’s mission.
Bill’s and Russell’s inspiration came through their visual intelligence, from looking at where they were. Their mentality was republican – Russell’s very consciously so. He told me he had some Maori ancestry, and an awareness of this certainly informed many of his paintings. But it was his socialism that was the most powerful force in his life, and his narrative painting needs to be seen in the context of that generous socialism that so many artists in the forties and fifties gained sustenance from. Russell’s landscape classes were very different from Bill’s. He was committed to teaching us good work habits, like getting there on time and no talking. When I was possessed by a bacchic, disruptive spirit, Russell expelled me, ordered me out. I think this happened twice, yet these dramas did not put a dent in my faith in Russell. I understood that he was demanding my concentration, that he was determined I must take my work seriously.
One summer day, around noon, in my last year at art school, Julie and I packed up early and took off down the path by the river. We were looking for Colin McCahon. As chairman of the Sketch Club it was my responsibility to invite Colin McCahon to address us. It seems odd that we had not heard of him before, but I obviously had enough wit not to ask Russell or Bill how to contact him. Although I protested afterwards that the invitation was not intended to provoke, I was behaving with a degree of caution. Surely that implied that I was not entirely innocent, that I was aware of a problem. That Colin McCahon’s presence in the art school could be disturbing to Bill and Russell’s ego.
It was Madge McIntyre who steered me in the right direction. That was the same party-loving Madge who was involved in the fiasco on Quail Island. A Vile Bodies person, no less. The good news was that Madge knew and got on with Eunoie Stammers Smith. Now Eunoie Stammers Smith was a woman of the world, but a divorced woman of the world, and she belonged more rightly in the thirties. Tall, red-haired and thin, she was modelled on Katharine Hepburn
but with a more despairing streak. According to Madge, Eunoie played patron to Colin in a warehouse down the river. Was she stocking up on antiques there or making frames? It’s all rather blurred now, I simply can’t remember. Anyway, it was an ideal place for Colin to paint and I imagine he paid his way by helping out.
But there was a snag. Eunoie did not like me. She did not like me one little bit. A year before I had attended a wild party. Eunoie’s current boyfriend, a fighter pilot from the war, was stirring things around. Somehow John Dolman, another man around town, and Eunoie’s boyfriend ended up in my flat, which turned out to be a frightful muddle of a thing. The boyfriend gave me a cheque for a self-portrait I had painted that year. He had the intention of collecting the painting later in the week. Like a fool, I cashed the cheque, just as he announced that Eunoie did not want my portrait in their house. It was all rather excruciating and I intended to avoid those two scrupulously in the future. Anyway, Madge said that Eunoie was never at the warehouse on Fridays, so Friday it was that Julie and I left Russell’s landscape class early and cycled along the riverbank to find the warehouse.
Colin emerged out of the shadows like my tomcat does. You never see that cat coming; he just appears. We were, all three of us, really shy and awkward but it was all arranged. He really wanted to come and talk to us.
In my memory, the talk itself is very confused. I remember the paintings – Colin’s biblical Canterbury paintings – but I don’t remember what he talked about. I suspect he talked about the paintings. I also expect that I was pretty distracted by Bill and Russell lurking around the door at the entrance. I had to understand that they were upset. I had gone too far. Russell and Bill insisted afterwards that I should have talked to them first, but that had not been our practice in the past. I think they would have been better to suggest simply that it was odd of me not to have mentioned the invitation to Colin. After all, by that time we were pretty friendly and I often accompanied both of them to student parties.
I’m trying to remember how I reacted to Colin’s paintings. I understood Colin was sensing a damaged landscape. That a Christian fundamentalist mentality that informed the lives of New Zealand colonists didn’t just punish the people, it also punished the land – hence the stark and tragic beauty of the paintings.
At the time I was not aware of Colin’s background. His parents (and James K. Baxter’s parents) were ardent supporters of the Irish Republican movement, ardent supporters of the theology of change and revolution. In those days, the Irish Republican movement was not sectarian. The principles of socialist reform did not allow for that. I didn’t know then, but I rather suspected that these paintings were not about religion as such. I would most certainly have been surprised at the way neo-Christians in the art world are now interpreting those paintings.
It’s strange that I remember what I thought, but not the response of the other students. I recently rang Julie and asked her what she could remember. She recalled a great deal about the landscape class on the banks of the Avon. She remembered a lovely band rotunda across the river. She remembered the name of the street at the end of the curve of the Avon, and our bicycling off down the path by the river. But then we seemed to remember differently. Julie didn’t recall any warehouse, just a shop of some sort. She thought they were mostly framing pictures. And she didn’t know why we went looking for Colin McCahon or anything about his lecture. However, she did remember something that was important. She remembered that in 1948 Bill Sutton had painted Colin McCahon’s portrait as a member of The Group. The painting, Homage to Frances Hodgkins, featured Hodgkins’s painting The Pleasure Garden. This was Bill’s protest against the city council – an indictment of their stupidity in turning down the opportunity to buy a painting like this. But the point is that Bill and Russell must have known Colin very well, yet Bill and Russell did not promote Colin’s painting to us students.
But what did my fellow students make of Colin’s talk and his paintings? I believe they were simply confused. The truth is we were a conventional lot, and it would not have taken much to confuse that student body. I think that’s why it was so hard for me to remember: there was nothing specific about their response. It has just occurred to me. Were Russell and Bill protecting Colin from us students? We were not, as a group, directed towards any profound reading. Forget art history – a great deal of that was dull and not particularly helpful. I don’t think this was any fault of Russell’s or Bill’s. I think it simply reflected the society that most of the students came from. I remember Russell Clark making a valiant effort to promote the painting and thinking of Max Beckman. There were sniggers and sly looks. This guy Beckman had to be a queer and for God’s sake he has to be a communist. Who wanted to know what went on in his corrupt head? None of them, believe me.
When I saw Colin McCahon again it was 1959. I had been invited to Auckland to demonstrate oil painting at the Auckland City Gallery. Four or five other women were also invited, and pretty quickly I had to understand that it was the men in the gallery who were demonstrating painting. We women were the fall guys. We played intellectual groupies to their already achieved status. I was attempting to paint a bush outside a window. Colin explained to me that I saw only a bush but he saw a cylinder, he saw a … But at that point I stopped listening. I felt my womb revolve, and in an illuminating moment knew that I was pregnant. It was rage that gave me that illuminating moment. I was indignant at being told what I saw. However, with the knowledge that I was pregnant, I lost all interest in what Colin saw and what, supposedly, I didn’t see. That night I rang Fraser. I told him the good news and I also asked him to send me a telegram saying that I was needed urgently at home. I left the following evening.
There were many other things that happened in the university and the art school that had an impact on me both at the time and later. John Pocock was a senior student and a member of the Canterbury Players. Suggestive of a young Orson Welles, he was respected, impressive – and quite out of place, at least in Russell Clark’s life class, because anyone who wasn’t either the model, Russell or a student was out of place in Russell’s sanctum. John Pocock loomed up behind the easels like an elephant in his own plantation, quite at ease. Russell was dumbfounded; we all were. Then John announced that he had come to collect Jacqueline Fahey to do the sets for the play he was about to direct – The Axe by Allen Curnow. What a nice man Russell Clark was. He immediately saw this as an opportunity for me, and I had instant permission to leave the life class and accompany John to the library.
I can’t imagine why John should have asked me to do this work, as I didn’t really know what a stage set was. I also have no idea how good or bad my set was. I saw it some years later reproduced in an art magazine and, yes, it was impressive, but I obviously had no idea about space. I was, however, indignant. A guy who shall remain nameless was credited with the creation of the set. He did act in the play, but he had nothing to do with the set. I suppose he must have thought it was pretty good.
Re-reading Allen Curnow’s writings in Peter Simpson’s Look Back Harder, I realise that issues of where an artist locates his or her creativity, how one interprets a sense of difference, were not solved entirely by my own thinking. Allen Curnow had to have been a major influence. I was, after all, mixing with the Canterbury Players at the time. I must have absorbed some of their mentality, and that mentality was influenced by Curnow. However, the people I remember more clearly as influences were taking a different and, I think, more radical and emotional swerve in their thinking. There was Russell Clark my teacher, Jacky Flower, chairman of the Board of Governors of Canterbury College, James K. Baxter who I sometimes had coffee with at StudAss. I am a slow learner. It took another ten years for my thinking to coalesce into a consistent state of mind. That’s why it’s so important for me to describe my compulsion to explore the mindsets of my contemporaries. Their tribal habits, their rites of passage. The effect on me of my association with John Pocock and Allen Curnow went underground in the face of tha
t compulsion. My first necessity was to locate myself.
In my last year at university Jacky Flower broke through that evasiveness. That is a good way to describe it, because I was evading my eventual fate. Jacky Flower took a special interest in me. He always called me Jackie Two and he was Jacky One – the only occasion when I didn’t mind being called Jackie. Whenever I exhibited a work he would come along. He did walkabouts in the city gallery, lecturing me – but more on morality in politics and philosophy than art. He was upfront with what he expected from me, and everything he put forward for my attention was absorbing. How early explorers had such high hopes for a union between Maori and Pakeha. How we had betrayed their perception of that union. How we had abused the trust so many Maori had held sacred. With respect, with understanding, he insisted, we could yet make New Zealand something new and different, not a dreary replica of England.
He died at the end of my last year, at Christmas time. But then I am sure that he knew he was dying and was determined to make one last effort – planting hopeful, creative thoughts in the minds of receptive students. I like to imagine I was his only protégée, but there must have been others. His teaching was a stand against the despair he must often have felt amidst the bourgeois complacency of Christchurch.
At that time I imagined myself as more sensitive than most young women around. I now realise I was nothing of the sort. Baxter always wore an army greatcoat, grey trousers and sandals. Swagger’s clothes, a tramp’s clothes, clothes later to be worn by characters in his play The Band Rotunda. It was a hot nor’wester day, and just before exam time, a luscious late-spring distraction. The ducks and their babies were out on the Avon and all the students were falling in love. In StudAss I was going on about Baxter’s overcoat: ‘For God’s sake, Jim, it’s sweltering. Take your coat off,’ and then, ‘You make me hot just looking at you. Take it off! Take it off!’ My friend Julie was silent and stiffly embarrassed. Jim, making an excuse, got up and left, and Julie said, ‘I thought you would never stop. Don’t you realise he hasn’t got anything on under that coat?’
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