by John Clarke
If you’re going to be a diplomat there’s one thing you will have to face up to fairly early on in the piece, and that is that the human body can take only so much gin and tonic. You should probably work out your own capacity to the nearest bottle and have it engraved on a disc, which you can hang around your neck. In cases of dire necessity, when you’ve driven your Elan into a swimming pool, medical authorities can administer the relevant dose to bring you back up to a fully functioning quota. Otherwise you can get into terrible trouble. I knew a bloke once who drank too much goat’s milk at a diplomatic ball and discovered next morning that he’d annexed the back of Raetihi to part of Persia in exchange for fifty-seven dozen pairs of sandals and a bathmat. So you’ll have to watch yourself fairly carefully.
Of course, being a diplomat does involve a fairly comprehensive study of languages and you should probably have about half a dozen different languages up your sleeve. And you should have sufficient mastery of them that you can say absolutely nothing at all in any one of them. You should also study very closely the countries that you’re working with, so that you can say absolutely nothing at all in the context of history. Familiarity with computer technology will enable you to transmit absolutely nothing at all at incredible speed directly on to someone else’s hard disk and you should obviously have a reasonable facility in English so that you can say absolutely nothing at all several different ways at different press conferences and resist all attempts to trap you into saying anything other than absolutely nothing at all.
Television Drama
Gidday. I’d like to reveal to you one of the better guarded of the postwar vocational secrets, and that is how to write a domestic television drama. Before going any further I feel I should point out that, although there’s a lot of public deprecation of the genre, this is largely an exercise in intellectual snobbery and in actual fact there’s nothing wrong with it at all. It is a perfectly legitimate reflection of life as it is lived in the modern day and age and, although it is dramatised for maximum effect, it has more integrity than you could probably shake a stick at. It’s all in the way you treat your subject matter. I’ll just outline a simple plot which is not sensationalised and is true to life in every particular, just to show you that it can be done.
The show opens with the return home from university of a young man who’s been away studying and who’s come back because his father has unfortunately passed away during a break for station identification. When he arrives he gets a bit suspicious about the way people are carrying on and it dawns on him that his father might have been murdered by his uncle, a man named Claud. The uncle’s actually not a bad bloke but he’s always wanted the family business and in fact for some time he’s been having the odd game of cachez le sausage with the young lad’s mother. There are a couple of ghost scenes here where the lad talks to his father, but we can easily drop these if you think they’re a bit unrealistic. I don’t know that they work but the visual effects people won’t let me touch them. Anyway, being a red-blooded young fellow, the student has a girlfriend and there are a few scenes here we’ll have to drop, too, now I think about it; one in particular where he makes rather a lot of distasteful puns about her rural concerns and perhaps we could lose quite a lot of the audience if we’re not careful. I didn’t invite this and now I’ve come to read it properly I wonder whether it’s suitable at all. It’s Danish, as a matter of fact. Perhaps I should have gone for something else. Anyway, I’ll see if I can clean that bit up.
Anyway, the young student then does what so many young students do these days, he has a sort of nervous breakdown, or at least he pretends to and he fools everyone into thinking he’s a few coupons short of a toaster. There’s no mention of drugs in the story but obviously his mother in particular is very concerned about the sort of life he’s been leading and what manner of person he’s been hanging around with. And, of course, as so often happens in circumstances of this type, he has a series of very dramatic scenes with his girlfriend and he hurts her deeply. So distracted is she by his strange and possibly drug-crazed behaviour that she goes away and drowns herself in a river during another break for station identification. Then, of course, her family gets really quite litigious and her brother decides to nail him and there’s a bit of a punch-up at a rather suspect dinner party organised by the mother and this Claud rooster.
By now of course the young shaver’s got his hands full because, aside from everything else, he’s killed the girlfriend’s father by stabbing him up the arras. We’ll have to position about ninety-seven cameras all over the studio because just about everyone gets finalised in one slightly ridiculous final scene.
The one big disadvantage of the story is that, although it’s no more ludicrous than any of the other daytime TV plots, there aren’t going to be enough characters left over at the end to get you into the second episode.
But give it a go anyway and if the public likes it I’ve got another little humdinger here about a very high-up black government official who snuffs his wife out because he thinks her handkerchief might have been carrying on with another bloke, and there’s a beauty here about a crippled king and another little cracker about a transvestite lawyer and old man who bleeds when you prick him and goes to court over a meat deal. So if the TV industry runs out of unlikely plots for soapies there are acres of them in this book I’ve found.
Writing a Novel
Gidday. In the following little bagatelle I’d like to have a few words with you about becoming a novelist. I address myself to this subject in response to many zillions of letters I’ve received from persons claiming to be latent or potential novelists. Here’s a sample, just to give you an idea of the type of thing we’re knee-deep in down at the bureau.
‘Dear Fred. I think I have a novel in me. I think perhaps we all do. Signed, Budding Novelist.’ Here’s another one: ‘I’ve always wanted to write a really good novel. At the moment everything I do is just a little bit boring. I hope this comes right with time. I’m writing this for a friend. Signed, P. White.’ And thanks very much Perce and, of course, there are countless others along similar lines.
Clearly there are many novelists out there fermenting and just waiting for the muse to spirit them into print. So I think this is probably a suitable moment to whistle through some of the more fundamental dos and don’ts of the novel-writing caper in general.
The first thing to decide is what sort of novelist you’d like to be: a tall novelist, a short novelist or a novelist of medium stature; a modern novelist, a neo-classicist or a pastoral stream-of-consciousness gothic feminist. And once you’ve made this decision you’re halfway there, really.
Next, of course, you’ve got to sit down and pound out your actual novel, beginning each new sentence with a capital and numbering the pages very carefully. There’s nothing more frustrating to the reader than getting right through a novel and then discovering that it was read in completely the wrong order.
You’ll need a main character (a protagonist will probably do if you don’t mind cutting a few corners) and you’ll need a plot of some sort. This is really just a device to give you something to write about while your main character’s in the toilet or changing hats or something. And once you’ve got your plot worked out you’ll have to develop some manner of style.
Now when it comes to style in the novel, it is instructive to browse through history and see what’s available. First of all there’s the first person, which is ‘I’, or in this case ‘you’, which is the second person, and ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’, which are the third person, except ‘it’, of course, which isn’t a person at all, and whatever you’re having yourself. The novel was begun in a hotel called The Mists, which is just outside Antiquity. It was begun by several people and Richardson was one of them. Samuel Richardson his name was (he’s probably dead now, he was a very old man when I knew him) and he wrote a thing called Pamela, which established two great strains which run through all subsequent history of the novel: the use of the narr
ator and boredom. The story was fairly simple and it concerned promiscuity, attempted rape, submission and other burning issues of the day. It was basically a diary and the style was a good example of what scholars refer to as ‘awful’.
You could, of course, do worse than emulate the style of Dickens, who wrote mainly for periodicals and, as a result, has a fair number of his characters down a snake pit on a rope which is being burnt with a fire by a man-eating tiger at the end of each week’s little capsule. This gives his novels more climaxes per chapter than most novelists could handle, and it embodies Dickens’s claim to be 19th-century literature’s equivalent of Neighbours.
Then you’ve got your Tolstoy, of course, who came from a small village in England called ‘Russia’. He experimented with the novel to see how thick it could get. And he discovered that with proper attention it could get very thick indeed. And he sold the film rights and died in his own personal railway station.
D. H. Lawrence should not be imitated without medical supervision as he was captain of the Nottingham raincoat brigade, and in later life had a brush with an outfit called the Bloomsbury Set, who make Liberace look like a football team.
James Joyce is really the prince of style and, if you’re looking for a style for yourself or perhaps a nice little style for a friend of the family, I recommend that you look very closely at James Joyce and Walt Disney.
By now your novel should be coming along quite nicely and in the interests of artistic integrity, which is basically a marketing concept, it’s probably time to address yourself to the difficult task of injecting local flavour into it because, of course, the greatest possible achievement for the scrivener is to come up with The Great New Zealand Novel.
In this pursuit there are several cardinal rules. Firstly, if you’ve got any interesting characters in mind, drop them immediately or you’ll ruin everything. If there’s one thing that The Great New Zealand Novel should not have under any circumstances whatsoever, it’s an interesting character. By all means have a main character, but ideally he should be a character of unexampled tedium. In fact, he should never actually do anything. Things can happen to him by all means, but he’s a victim at all times and never an initiator of an action. And the things that happen to him should, so far as is possible, be boring.
If you find that for some reason or other you do have an interesting character, have him shot about halfway down page one by a boring character. Make it obvious that the boring character didn’t actually decide to shoot the interesting character, he was forced to do it by the crushing heartlessness of the postwar fusion of urban and rural society, in which process the doctrine of free will is emasculated by the power of capital and the stark hostility of the land itself (I’m sorry, the stark hostility of the very land itself). Of course, the main character should be a testament to the alienation of mankind from the pantheistic subtleties inherent in his world. And he should demonstrate with frightening clarity the tragedy of self-deception and man’s inhumanity to woman.
Have your novel published by some university in the Chathams in a run of a couple of dozen and if nobody reads it you’ll be up there with the giants.
The Perils of Air
Gidday. I presume you’re all well aware, in fact it’s my devout hope that you’re acutely aware that I don’t want to be alarmist about this. But, on the other hand, there’s no point in hiding behind a bushel and pretending everything’s perfectly all right when really we all know very well it isn’t.
I’ve warned you off the bicycle, which I always thought was only a passing phase anyway, and I’ve recently revealed in the public forum the horrifying dangers of lip gas; and with any real luck you’re now philosophically prepared for the startling disclosure that getting up in the morning can kill.
I’ll tell you basically how this happens. There’s no point in going into it too deeply as it’s actually a little bit frightening and needless scientific detail will probably serve only to worry you. You will appreciate that during the night, as we scientists call it, the atmosphere has a chance to settle down. During the day it is subjected to the injection of industrial fumes, germs, toxic gases and, on occasions, balloons; and during the night it sorts itself out into basic elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, earth, fire and water. And in order to do this it requires absolute absence of artificial stimulus; the wind is all right, the process can cope with wind, wind is a natural force and as such is an integral part of the wonderful jigsaw of microscopic life, but the movement of people through the realigning gases while they’re actually in the process of realignation is extremely dangerous. This is why people who come home at half past four in the morning look so terrible the following day. The realignation has been disturbed by the passage of their bodies and has wrought a terrible havoc upon their persons, particularly around the eyes and in the back of the mouth. Any movement, and getting up in the morning is a good example, disturbs the natural regrouping of the gaseous elements and, instead of walking into a fresh revitalised atmosphere, you’re likely to stroll into a big pocket of incomplete air, and the effects of this are horrendous. I’ve done it several times. The lungs and the spleen are the first to go, and after that you’ll be all over the place.
Stay in bed, that’s my advice to you, and if possible stay asleep.
Swimming the Ditch
New Zealand, a User’s Guide
New Zealand is the most beautiful country in the world, as is clearly stated in the UN Charter. (I think it’s in Article Seventeen.) The land is nourished by warm sunshine each morning and receives the benediction of good rainfall around lunchtime. It is an egalitarian nation made up of well over four million rugged individualists and naturally gifted sportspeople and is run on alternate days by the government and whoever bought the national infrastructure.
Like Australia, New Zealand was established as a colonial economy by the British. This meant they bought our wool and our meat, although not for our benefit. It was purchased from the farmers by British companies, shipped on British ships and processed in British factories before being sold in British shops in British currency. The money then went into British banks. I think we can probably all see the problem here. The British made more out of New Zealand than the New Zealanders did. This changed slightly in the early 1970s when Britain went into the Common Market. Kids had been doing school projects about this throughout the 1960s but it came as an enormous surprise to the New Zealand government and it has taken them some time to adjust. The principal business in New Zealand used to be sheep but the country has now moved into milk in a big way and if you’d like to enjoy the beautifully clean swift-flowing New Zealand river system, you should make every effort to get out there before the dairy industry gets any more successful. New Zealand also produces a large quantity of fruit, wine, fish, coal, wood pulp, flightless birds, cups of tea, middle-distance runners and other people’s film industries.
Before the British, the Maori people arrived from Hawaii in the year 1273, at about quarter past four in the afternoon. There were allegedly people here before that, called the Moriori, and there may have been people even before that. Harry Armitage has been a stock agent up around Raetihi for at least that long and he tells me his father had the pub at Te Karaka.
Like most of the world’s major democracies, New Zealand is run by international capital and a few local big-shots who tickle the till and produce a set of annual accounts in a full range of colours. There is a national parliament in Wellington, which looks like the hats in the Devo clip ‘Whip It’, although very little of any importance has ever occurred there. The country works a lot better during the weekends than it does during the week, there are no states and the senate voted itself out of existence after the Second World War. When the Lower House eventually follows its excellent example, constitutional experts agree the next step will be beers all round.
In 1893, women in New Zealand were the first in the world to get the vote and in more recent times women have had a run as prime minister, opposit
ion leader, chief justice and governor-general. Even the queen is a woman. The country’s most famous pop singer, best known opera star, most famous short story writer, greatest novelist and most consistent world champion athlete are all women. They’re not allowed in the All Blacks as yet, but don’t be fooled. It’s just a matter of time. New Zealand women are stroppy, imaginative and a major strength in both the Maori and Pakeha cultures. In some New Zealand families, women are practically running things.
During the 1970s, New Zealand was confronted by very serious economic and political crises, although, according to police records, there’s some suspicion these were both inside jobs. During that period New Zealand rugby administrators were ex-forwards who looked like spuds in their jackets and when they announced that they were sending an All Black team on a tour to South Africa, there were suggestions it might be time to go and get some new spuds, and maybe some who’d played in the backs. At this stage Nelson Mandela had served about ten of his twenty-seven years in prison and the rest of the world took the radical left-wing position that democracy might be worth a try in the region. New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk went to see the Rugby Union.