Monday, 7 September 2015
Symmes Roll
In breaks at work these last weeks I've been dipping in and out of James McGonigal and John Coyle's fine and generous selection of Edwin Morgan's letters. They're a treat.
A lovely surprise, this Friday last, stumbling across an account of Morgan reading Ian Wedde's masterpiece Symmes Hole. The Scottish Pacific rises up again! The contact was via - who else? - Alan Riach.
Morgan takes a while to warm up to the novel, writing to Riach in April 1987:
“Well I finished that extraordinary Symmes book and have now passed it on to Dr McCarey from whom you will doubtless receive a ‘second opinion’. I must admit I skipped here and there, finding the ubiquitous triple dotting … extrememly irritating …. And the disconnectedness that might be a virtue in poetry … somewhat worrying in a prose story. I think I was also a mite disappointed that the title promised more than ever appeared; perhaps I was misled by Verne/Poe/ERBurroughs expectations; the hole, in fact, seemed to be fairly peripheral as holes go. Like your father, I enjoyed the ‘sea’ parts of it best, especially such longish passages as escaped the plague of dots. The great virtue of the book is in what it brings together; you’re forced to think and rethink. Its weakness, no it’s not exactly a weakness, its problem for most readers I imagine is simply its density, and the very difficult of perceiving a goal. Anyhow I’m very grateful to you for shooting it across my bow.”
He continues to other subjects, before finishing:
“Dan Sweigert, of Batavia (Illinois, not Indonesia) is busy setting my ‘Message Clear’ to piano roll music (for player pianos). Letters become holes in rolls. Symmes Roll, and a vicus of recirculation from the northern periphery –“
* * *
Saturday, 18 April 2015
ANZAC: they'll remember it for us wholesale
I hadn’t expected the shift from
pomposity to kitsch to be so sudden, or so vertiginous. Gesturing at its own
hyperreality the opening this morning of Pukeahu National War Memorial Park – a
bipartisan project of nationalist reaction planted in the middle of Wellington –
things moved from the physical to the digital, from actors marching in front of
us to footage of history as consumer spectacle on the big screen. The same
performers, the same script, the move seamless. A woman in red prancing about
the tower until, above us, the War Memorial threw out billows of the same
fabric, the same symbol. Blood? Memory? Poppies? Intoxication, certainly. It
was Leni Riefenstahl meeting the Feebles.
“in face of the massive realities of present-day social existence,
individuals do not actually experience events. Because history itself is the
spectre haunting modern society, pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every
level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen time that presently holds sway could not be preserved.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thesis
200)
Who better to package and present our
pseudo-history than Peter Jackson, kitsch master and union-buster of the
Wellington ‘creative’ class? There’s an obvious – and essential – political point
to make about memory and forgetting, the traces suppressed (dissent, sedition,
resistance, revolt) in the recording of this particular story. But this morning
something deeper seemed at work – full fantasy, full consumption, ANZAC as
video game and branding exercise and empty spectacle. Join #theshadowbattalion,
care of your local bank! Keep your memories fresh in the crisper over
the ditch at Woolies!
A "new depthlessness...a whole new
culture of the image or the simulacrum." A “society bereft of all
historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty
spectacles." (Who else? Jameson back in 1984, and still making the case today.)
This is New Zealand nationalism, however,
a different package to the brasher and more direct boosterism of the rather
more ambitious political culture across the Tasman. The volume’s down low; the
emphasis is on commemoration, compassion, tributes. The tone is sober. The
message is the same nonetheless; gathering for our protest this morning we had
a plain-clothes police officer waiting to try and intimidate us and to threaten
our right to assembly. Dissent gets stifled in low key ways in this country
perhaps, but it gets stifled all the same.
And that red! The price of nationhood,
some polite voice on Nine to Noon called it earlier in the week. Workers’
blood, wasted invading Turkey a century ago. What relevance has that to now,
and what forces are served in this aestheticization of politics? The resonances were somewhere between Marvel comics and European fascism.
That, of course, isn’t a question you’re
supposed to ask. They died for our freedoms, so make sure you don’t try and use
those freedoms. Debord again: “The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous
positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute.” Or, as the man said to me this
morning, there’s a time and a place for everything: the Prime Minister might be
there, but no politics at this war ceremony please.
I’m glad we did a little to disrupt the spectacle,
and I’m dreading the coming years in this
carnival of reaction. But I wonder this morning too if ‘peak brANZAC’ might be
on its way. They can remember it for us wholesale. Capitalism can commodify everything – even memories – but there’s a
risk in that for our rulers. Video games sometimes give you the controls.
[Images: the photographs of our protest I took, and the others are from the twitter feed of the British High Commissioner, who declares himself 'moved' by this tribute to sacrifice.]
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Jottings from Marxism in Melbourne
Back yesterday from a week in Melbourne,
and four days at Marxism 2015.
I’ve been travelling across, on and off, to Marxism for a dozen years now;
I think this year’s conference was the best and most rewarding I’ve been to
yet.
The stand-out sessions, for me, were talks
by Marjorie Thorpe and Noel C Tovey AM. Both I’m sure I’ll be telling my
children about many years from now, as moments I was near enough to History to
feel it shivering. Thorpe, in sharing stories of her family’s times in Fitzroy,
managed to recreate a whole social world of Aboriginal resistance, survival,
struggle and celebration. A revelation. Noel C Tovey AM is one of Australia’s
most celebrated Aboriginal dancers, actors, directors and performers. I hadn’t,
to my shame, heard of him or his achievement before the conference – sitting
through the excerpts he performed for us of Little
Black Bastard, the story of the suffering early years, was one of the most
moving theatrical experiences I’ve had in years. How often do you listen to the
memories of a man who was at the Stonewall Riots, and has performed on some of
the most distinguished stages of the world? He was Young, Black, and Gay in 1950s Australia and he has survived to teach us all. A mind-bending life. Liz Ross’s
interview with him in Red
Flag gives just a little sampling of a richer feast.
What else? Khury Petersen-Smith was eloquent and wise on
the struggles against racist state murder in the United States and the
#BlackLivesMatter movement; a series of talks on philosophy and theory (on Lise
Vogel; on Spinoza; on Hegel’s Phenomenology);
an eye-opening and absorbing account by ETU militant Strawbs Hayes on
organizing FIFO workers. This last talk was as much a cultural experience as a
political one for me – who knew unionists in the Northern Territory can hold
meetings under the shade of the gum tree?
The organization
I’m a member of was able to host Nadia Abu-Shanab, from Auckland Action
Against Poverty, as one of the speakers over the weekend. There are connections
to be made.
***
My own talk on the poets in World War One
went well, I think, although the stage is usually the worst place to judge
those kinds of things.
It was a particular pleasure to be able to
do the Australian launch of Writing the
1926 General Strike as a part of the conference, and so nice to have a dear friend and comrade James Plested do the launching. Thanks to the organisers
for making this possible.
***
And the books! My budget, as usual, blown:
Bryan Palmer’s biography of James P. Cannon; Cannon’s own Notebooks of an Agitator; a collection of essays by Alan M. Wald on
Writing from the Left.
Stutje’s biography of
Ernest Mandel.
(I've learnt more from Mandel than a love of what Americans call "sweater vests", but I won't pretend that isn't part of the education too.)
Otto Braun’s account of being A Comintern Agent in China, covering his
time journey with Mao and the Party through the Long March and after. This I
picked up for $1 on the sale bin, and am not sure what to expect: the
introduction mentions that Braun “suffered from the disadvantage of being
ignorant of the Chinese language, culture, and history.” Let’s see.
There are lots of new friends met each time
I go over for the conference, and that youth and energy are inspiring. But
important for me too are the old faces – people I met a decade ago who are
active still and in a range of different campaigns and questions. We’re
building something real.
[The conference photographs I've taken from the Marxism Conference tumblr and Facebook pages -- both accessible via www.marxismconference.org]
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open
Teach the
free man how to praise. What is there to say about the writers who settle in
and become part of your everyday life, co-habiting in ear and mind? Most of the
time, as a critic and teacher, the texts that set me writing are the ones I can’t
fully assent to, books that lodge themselves in my memory in ways that can feel
stuck or misplaced; texts to worry to and with. Other writers, other poems,
sink so deeply in the mind I reach for them all the time, but wouldn’t know how
to say why. Auden, Bishop, Glover: their lines, learnt in adolescence, I’ve
detached from poems and worked in to personal vocabulary.
Seamus Heaney was one of these writers for me. His poems are a continuing
source of joy and sustenance, to be sure, but many of them feel so familiar –
and so right – the brilliance of
their achievement threatens to end up obscured. Isn’t that how I’ve always described
such things, even if “that last / gh”
isn’t mine at all? There hasn’t been a week, in the sixteen years since I first
discovered him in sixth form, I haven’t
read or remembered or gone back to a Heaney poem, all the time thinking that somewhere
or other his own voice has been going on and new works were still to come. A companion,
and part of an introduction to poetry, as with the names evoked in Auden’s ‘Thanksgiving.’
The first Heaney I bought, the inscription reminds me, was his New Selected Poems on my seventeenth
birthday. ‘The squat pen’ and the showily terse equivalence of writing and ‘digging’
in the early poems were what drew me in, that gorgeously physical imagery – of peat
and field, a ‘straining rump’ labouring ‘among the flowerbeds’ – and those
terse full rhymes feeling like a kind of anti-poetry, an assertion of the place
of labour and community and commitment against abstraction. History was there,
too, and resistance: ‘And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.’ The
words were what they talked about.
How my adolescent reading combined this ‘phenomenalisation
of language’ with Heaney’s supererogatory word choices and reach in
vocabulary I can’t remember; I suspect I skimmed over the more thrawn lines in
search of further sensuous particulars. There were plenty of those. The poems
sustain that kind of naive reading – and Heaney, in his critical writing
allowed himself the occasional anti-Theory jibe – but only to let you settle in
and then ask from you more. These are poems that, eventually, teach pleasure in
dictionaries, and I’m grateful for that.
The Spirit
Level was a gift, later that year, fraught with the usual teenage baggage of
unequal, unrequited exchange, and still means more to me, I imagine, than it
ever did to the giver, if only in a kind of residually self-pitying and maudlin
bitter way: ‘A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend. / At this stage only foul
play cleans the slate.’ (The ‘Invocation’ to MacDiarmid’s ‘far-out, blathering genius’
would have meant nothing to me then; ‘endure / At an embraced distance’ feels
right now.)
Some lines I memorised on first encounter for their sound and feel as if I’m
only now learning how to grow into. All those very Irish punning terms for good
conduct (‘govern your tongue!’) helped, and Heaney’s clear-sighted risk-taking
in registering particular kinds of sadness without giving in self-indulgence or
‘expressiveness’:
When I went
to the gents
There was a
skewered heart
And a
legend of love. Let me
Sleep on
your breast to the airport.
Living in Tokyo, and travelling a split shift between teaching jobs, I’d
often stop at the Oshima Book Store, picking up cheap copies of Heaney second
hand. Station Island; Wintering Out; Seeing Things; Sweeney Astray
– I re-discovered these either down the road in Ochanomizu, reading Heaney
while drinking vodka and eating borscht at Russia Tei, or on the train home.
‘They
seem hundreds of years away,’ those days, but re-reading the lines now brings
an almost physical sense of the joy and personal help the encounters brought.
Coping with the poems’ intellect and range and formal loveliness better now,
and not in such a hurry to force them into adolescent patterns, there were new
delights.
The refusals of Heaney’s poems from the 1970s, the way the poems turn
eloquently in on themselves, marking false phrases off in quotation and
worrying through, feel to me like his best work. ‘Whatever you say say nothing’
still astonishes:
Is there
life before death? That’s chalked up
In
Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent
miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our
little destiny again.
Poems make good companions. I bought District
and Circle and Human Chain around
about this time last year, in Dunedin for
the funeral of a dearly-loved friend. They were good, helpful choices:
It was your
first leave,
A stranger
arrived
In a house
with no upstairs,
But heaven
enough
To be going
on with.
The whole of you a-patter, ‘alive and ticking like an electric fence’: that’s
the Heaney sensation, and I wish there could be more of it still. But this is
no bad word-hoard at all.
I drink to
you
in smoke-mirled,
blue-black,
polished
sloes, bitter
and
dependable.
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
I think I'd give a kingdom
A realization, reasonably early in life,
and so far a useful one: I’m a provincial. No point pretending to any
sophistication, and less point still in trying to adopt the pose that you’re
not one of the tourists. It’s straight to the gift shop with me, along with
everybody else. (Last weekend to get to the Gift Shop at the Museum of
Contemporary Art I had to walk past Guan Wei’s angry and beautiful mural ‘Journey
to Australia,’ particularly timely given the latest racist disgrace
perpetuated by the ALP).
And what we small town people still get to
wonder at is that giddying rush the metropolis offers:
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself,
To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Living amid the same perpetual whirl
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end--
Oppression, under which even highest minds
Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.
The bits Wordsworth hated – ‘anarchy and din’! – I
love about the big city, and can love only because I don’t live in one. All the
alienations of crowding, bustling trains, stress are felt, visiting, as the
promise of another life.
So this wide-eyed provincial adores Sydney. It’s a city unlike anywhere
else in Australasia – older patterns of European settlement are reflected in
the twisting chaos of the inner city.
Sydney’s contradictions – ones that make it a very
difficult place to live for working people – fascinate me, too. It is marked by
an open kind of violence and, from street brawling to the menacing style the
cops cultivate, this is a rough place and has always been. I feel an aggression
in the atmosphere of the official city. They – the powerful - are used to
getting their own way, and seem less concerned about being seen to force their
way through. The poverty and harassed status of Aboriginal people on the
streets still shocks me, and I remember the story of Juanita Neilsen murdered
by the agents of developers in the 70s for her campaigning.
Wandering around the streets on your own too gives you
a chance to think of all the struggles and stories of the workers’ movement in
NSW, though, from the revolts around Lang to the New Left to the Green Bans.
I was in town for a conference last week. Gould’s Book Arcade doesn’t feel the
same anymore after the death of its founder. Bob
Gould was a veteran Trotskyist and campaigner on the Sydney Left. He didn’t
know me at all but, whenever I went into his store and he heard my accent,
would shout questions at me about New Zealand labour history and politics from
all corners of the store. He was irascible and irrepressible. I came out of
those arguments still convinced in my own positions, but more confident in it
for the books I’d bought at the store. It’s just a bookstore now, but an
extraordinary treasure of one. You need hours, and a budget prepared. (This
visit’s purchases: two Simon Leys’ collections on China; Rothstein’s When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia;
Turner’s Sydney’s Burning).
Just before I left on the Sunday I was able to join a
rally condemning the ALP’s PNG ‘solution’ to the non-problem of refugees. It
was a relief to be able to join a public condemnation of the policy, after
spending a weekend becoming the more appalled the more I read in the paper. It
was nice being able to march with old comrades and friends.
[My friend and comrade Alma, who was one of the chairs of the rally]
[John Percy has been a socialist activist in Sydney for over forty years]
* *
A note on the text: It’s been almost five months since
I posted anything up here. I had a plan, reasonable enough I thought at the
start of the year, to blog more regularly and more in-depth; keep up my work at
Overland; finish my General Strike
book; play more of a role in editing and writing for Socialist Review…. Somewhere between March and now I realised this
wasn’t going to work.
I’m going to keep this blog running, but will be
writing in it more informally and loosely, more for jottings I’d like to put
down and personal responses than for the longer essays I worked on last year.
Reviving an even longer-dormant project, I’ve put up
some photos of Sydney food here.
Monday, 11 March 2013
Till I was angry, said I was pleased
Rob
Gilchrist I never knew personally, or never any more than as a familiar
face at protests, a figure at meetings, someone amongst the eccentric pattern
of the Wellington left. I disliked him in passing, certainly, but that’s hardly
significant given the number of people one ends up irritating or being
irritated by in the course of a political campaign and, besides – given what
I’ve learnt since about his foully misogynistic behaviour – this was the right enmity
for quite the wrong reasons. A whole anarchist social-political sub-culture in
Wellington in the early to mid 2000s cultivated an air of hostility and
righteous snobbery. Being told one time too many by a group of identikit vegan
anarchos dressed all in black that my political philosophy was conformist and
authoritarian produced certain automatic responses, none all that helpful or edifying.
So the revelations, when they came, were both very surprising and unpleasantly affecting. The years-long betrayals of trust, the
entrapment, the personal abuse, the carefully-organised poisonous
interventions; this was state-funded wrecking on a significant scale, and
damaged individuals’ lives as well as social movements.
People are right to be angry, and anger and outrage feel like essential
starting points and registers; the supposedly hard-headed retort that things
like this happen all the time, and that it’s to be expected that the state will
spy on dissent is really little more than a capitulation to the ways of the
world, a resignation parading as worldliness. I’m not ready just yet to check
into Grand Hotel Abyss. But more systematic answers are harder to formulate.
Plenty of responses come to mind, naturally, almost all of them bad.
Spy-baiting is the most natural, and the worst of all. This kind of undercover
surveillance and provocation – a global trend, as Eveline Lubber’s new book
from Pluto documents in worrying
detail – succeeds as much in the atmosphere it creates as in the specific
details it gleans. The movements Gilchrist floated within were, after all, legitimate
and established parts of the democratic culture we’ve won, no much how much
those in power may dislike this achieved legitimacy. The sense of suspicion,
and of motives questioned, however, creates its own fears: a movement torn by
‘accidents and incidents, hints and allegations’ comes apart as we all start to
undermine each other. Political action relies, in the social movements, on
voluntary work, constructed solidarities, negotiated areas for trust. Suspicion
destroys all of that. The outed spy, in some senses, achieves as much for the
police as the active agent.
But ‘nothing can be sole or whole’…learning isn’t often pleasant. A
now-known spy in Australia I worked with closely for a brief
period, and he never aroused the slightest concerns for me. Charming, attentive,
calm, I liked this agent, and realise now that some of the flattery involved in
that kind of political exchange was what made me so open. We talked about
family, friends, pasts, and all the usual beginnings of an intimacy. The
discovery of his betrayal means I won’t ever be as open again.
Sometimes there’s a place between secrecy and openness, the space in which
the old joke about the fact you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get
you has real and practical uses. For the first months of the war in Iraq a
number of protest organisers were routinely followed by police from
demonstrations, and accompanied, at a few metres’ distance, through protests.
Nothing much came of this, and it stopped after a while, but the intended
intimidation was clear. The best way of coping was to recognise the attempt
and, consciously, to remain in the public and democratic spaces the movement
created – it ought to be a source of pride and satisfaction that you were on
anti-war demonstrations in 2003 (as Tony Blair himself half-admitted recently),
and anything that encourages an attitude of secretiveness and
counter-surveillance works against the chances of that kind of feeling being
shared and spread.
[SIS agents collected notes on the young Keith Locke attending public meetings.]
Spies are well-trained in what targets to aim for, and it’s here that the
reasons for upset become more complicated. The COINTELPRO case in the
United States makes for fascinating reading
now; for decades the FBI infiltrated and disrupted the US Socialist Workers
Party, fomenting splits, encouraging damaging behaviour, working to undermine
the party. Their methods weren’t particularly complicated, but they recognised
the weaknesses of the left perfectly. Agents would either start rumours about
other members’ racist and sexist behaviour, or behave in racist and sexist ways
themselves, and it was the Party members’ responses to this that then prompted
further conflict. The FBI didn’t always create
the conflict so much as foster and develop contradictions already existing, and
hone in on the weaknesses and hypocrisies of personal politics. That all this
was an assault on the most basic democratic rights to organise should go
without saying. What might offer itself for current reflection, however, are
the ways in which the assault targeted and intensified weaknesses. If the left
organisational cultures we have created are hospitable to bullying and sexism
there is bound to be wide spaces there for provocateurs to operate within.
Gilchrist worked in much the same manner, it seems, although with less
subtlety and with a approach fitting his own status as a fantasist possessing
rather poorer human qualities. The tragedy in the United States is on an
altogether greater scale, too; Black Panthers died as a result of covert work
within their ranks. Still, this is the kind of moral company Gilchrist finds
himself amongst.
Informants and spies have been employed for as long as working people and
the oppressed have organised to challenge the existing order, so it is possible
to draw some themes and lessons from diverse experiences of betrayal. Victor
Serge’s What Everyone
Should Know About State Repression retains a queasy contemporary
relevance. And openness, across everything I’ve read and seen, returns as a
keyword. Growing up in Dunedin, this makes sense; down there, even on the
coldest winter mornings, you need to open your windows. Mould grows in rooms
that are not aired, and in people like Gilchrist we find a human equivalent of
that process.
Openness, to me, means above all occupying the democratic spaces we’ve
created; for all the many problems with the liberal discourse of rights, it
remains true that if enough people believe and act as if a right is theirs they
can make it a reality. Organisation, activity, demonstration, protests; no
matter how much the police may want to make this dissent impossible, it
persists. This sense of openness as a necessary condition for the possibility
of action is why I see the wearing of masks – in a country like New Zealand,
certainly – as at best pretension and at worst wrecking. Does anyone really
believe, given what we know of police surveillance, that masks grant anonymity
from the state forces? Of course not. What they do grant, dangerously, is
anonymity from each other, and from the communities we work and protest within.
That freedom from others removes the kind of face-to-face communication, and
challenge, occasionally, out of which real solidarity can be built. Anonymity
online functions in much the same way (although I’ve no time for chest-beating
about ‘cowardice’, and do wish some commentators could learn the difference
between pseudonymous and anonymous) – the longer we can attach names to
arguments, and the longer we can keep dissent normal and public, the stronger
we are. Campaigning in Wellington I often meet public servants who tell me they
are not allowed to sign petitions, a clear nonsense. But this is a nonsense
which comes from somewhere.
The hardest openness, though, is the most essential – a openness in the
cultural and political sphere, and a corresponding generosity towards others’
views and stance. An example: George Fraser worked for the Police and SIS in
the 1950s in Wellington, infiltrating the Communist Party and campaign groups
around Wellington and the Hutt Valley. A fervent Christian, Fraser believed the
Cold War mythology of the time and sincerely hoped to combat Communism. His
experience of the Wellington Left was disillusioning in two ways. The first,
most prosaically, was that he got bored; a life of meetings, paper sales,
discussions, and more meetings made for dull reading for his SIS managers, so he
started making things up. The wilder his stories, and the more sinister his
scenarios, the happier his managers were to receive them. The reality,
naturally, was rather plainer, but better for that:
In the days
that followed, Dave Patterson gave instructions on picking up communist reading
material at subsequent meetings, on making myself known to kerbside sellers of
the People’s Voice – the official party
newspaper – and on delving into the bookshelves of Modern Books Ltd in mid-city
Manners Street, which was run by the Wellington Co-Operative Book Society, but
where manager Ray Nunes (later to become the CP’s district secretary) held
sway.
Although
the Special Branch referred to the premises as the ‘Communist bookshop,’ I soon
realised that such a label was an assumption only and had never been
investigated. I found that Ray Nunes was the only person connected to the shop
who had any Communist Party connections. It could more accurately have been
called an alternative bookshop, as it imported books not only from communist
countries but most countries of the world and on subjects that covered most
religions and dogmas of the world. The shop belonged to the book society, which
had about 3000 members until it folded in 1967.
Fraser’s real undoing – and here he reveals himself as rather better human
material than Gilchrist – came after contact to openness of another kind. He
was invited to share the house of Conrad Bollinger, a leftist in the English
Department at Victoria and well-connected with Communist circles around
Wellington. The strain tells, in Fraser’s memoirs, as he accepts Bollinger’s
hospitality and sorts through his mail, enjoys nights on the town on Friday and
then reports the proceedings to SIS on Monday. Drink plays a more and more
central role. The silly puritanism of the Communist circles (they won’t let
Fraser sing jazz, and drown him out with ‘Green Grow the Rushes O’) is deflated
by Bollinger’s rather surer grasp of cultural life, and then diligently fed back
to Special Branch minders.
It becomes an impossible situation. Fraser, concluding that the SIS were
‘not worth a cracker’ to New Zealand, sees his life begin to break apart. He leaves
for the United States, promised various vague new lives by the security services.
Upon arrival there is no one to meet him at the airport. He’s served his uses
for power, and so now is just so much waste. The memoirs, unsure whether
they’re aiming at comedy or bitter exposure, rattle in their prose, unsure and
drifting much as their author must have been in the last decades of his life.
Gilchrist’s self-pitying confessions in recent stories have a similar quality. Deception
hurts, obviously, and it can’t be easy being a moral wreck. He’s a symptom, and
a not particularly interesting one, of a wider anti-democratic course, and of
what goes on in a society like ours all the time. This is what they would like
to see happen to dissent.
But it hasn’t happened, has it? We’re still here.
Source
George Fraser’s memoir Seeing Red:
Undercover in 1950s New Zealand was published by Dunmore in 1995.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)