Table Talk – Opinions, stories, and a play
by C.K. Stead
Karl Stead doesn’t use many sports metaphors in his writing, but as it’s a good summer read, we could call him an ‘all-rounder’ in his latest book. He writes that it is intended for book people, especially groups (not cricket teams), but there is non-fiction and short fiction here; and he is the veteran who remains ‘not out’, when so many of his contemporaries have left the crease for good.
Many New Zealand book people will be familiar with his approach, but in this book he goes right back to the 1950s, to complete his novice version of a play called Andromache; he also seems to have written another version as a short story, innocuously titled ‘A Family Man’, for this book. Are we looking at a compendium of his favoured themes over the intervening years, or a miscellany?
Part 1 includes short essays, reviews, book launch speeches, reader reports, and also blog posts, which are easy to read and involve a variety of interesting subjects. These cover all sorts of writers, including some almost forgotten poets, like Hubert Witheford and Pat Wilson, who both ended up in England. But beyond the literary figures, and technicalities of poetry writing, we find interesting essays on the artist Louise Henderson, and Stead’s extraordinary encounters with the legend of Barry Humphries and a number of his wives. There is also a lot of depth on the generation of male professors who dominated the humanities at Auckland University, and some more on their wives.
For those of us interested in humanities, and especially political history, Stead’s blog posts on the ‘Sinclair Cohort’ and the ‘1922 Brigade’, or the three K.S.s, are fascinating. The other two K.S.s are Keith Sinclair (History) and Kendrick Smithyman (English); while Bob Chapman (Politics) and the writer Maurice Duggan also feature. Helen Clark makes a fleeting appearance, as a badminton playing partner, and in the coterie around Chapman (which also includes the MP Roger Douglas). So there is certainly an intellectual milieu at work here, and one which was enormously influential in Labour Party machinations at the time, if not well-versed in socialist history, apart from Smithyman.
It is also worth mentioning the essay written for this volume, ‘Borges and Me’. A strange title, especially since it is about an American academic, Jay Parini, who wrote Borges and Me, about his time driving the poet Borges around Scotland while a PhD student. Stead had read Borges’ work in the late 1960s, and had also driven a poet around Scotland, Edwin Muir, but that was ten years prior. The connection seems to be that Parini was a draft-dodger, during the Vietnam War, and that period has been an obsession for Stead, culminating in his writing Smith’s Dream. While it was filmed as Sleeping Dogs, he views it as a literary failure (despite being a commercial success).
Stead’s short fiction often seems to include an ex-patriate New Zealand man, usually an academic, encountering great public figures in Europe. Indeed, in ‘Vladimir’, the character enjoys a car journey with Putin before arriving at a function attended by the English playwright Tom Stoppard, who was actually from Czechia. In Stead’s story ‘Philosopher’s Kiss’, his Kiwi academic has an encounter with the renowned Cambridge philosopher Wittgenstein, not long before his death, but it doesn’t seem very convincing. In ‘A Short History of New Zealand’ he has an ex-pat Kiwi journalist interview a younger female author about a book with that title, which is actually fiction. And the fictional text is quoted at length as part of the story. It seems unlikely that this text, about a Pakeha policeman pursuing a Maori thief in a rural settlement, would have been published under that title and with all the expletives added, especially by a female author. Not now anyway, or perhaps that is the point?
But, of course, we can forgive C.K. Stead for some idiosyncratic fiction writing, and a fixation on his experiences in 1960s Britain, as he remains the last standing ‘Man of Letters’ from that period.
by C.K. Stead
Karl Stead doesn’t use many sports metaphors in his writing, but as it’s a good summer read, we could call him an ‘all-rounder’ in his latest book. He writes that it is intended for book people, especially groups (not cricket teams), but there is non-fiction and short fiction here; and he is the veteran who remains ‘not out’, when so many of his contemporaries have left the crease for good.
Many New Zealand book people will be familiar with his approach, but in this book he goes right back to the 1950s, to complete his novice version of a play called Andromache; he also seems to have written another version as a short story, innocuously titled ‘A Family Man’, for this book. Are we looking at a compendium of his favoured themes over the intervening years, or a miscellany?
Part 1 includes short essays, reviews, book launch speeches, reader reports, and also blog posts, which are easy to read and involve a variety of interesting subjects. These cover all sorts of writers, including some almost forgotten poets, like Hubert Witheford and Pat Wilson, who both ended up in England. But beyond the literary figures, and technicalities of poetry writing, we find interesting essays on the artist Louise Henderson, and Stead’s extraordinary encounters with the legend of Barry Humphries and a number of his wives. There is also a lot of depth on the generation of male professors who dominated the humanities at Auckland University, and some more on their wives.
For those of us interested in humanities, and especially political history, Stead’s blog posts on the ‘Sinclair Cohort’ and the ‘1922 Brigade’, or the three K.S.s, are fascinating. The other two K.S.s are Keith Sinclair (History) and Kendrick Smithyman (English); while Bob Chapman (Politics) and the writer Maurice Duggan also feature. Helen Clark makes a fleeting appearance, as a badminton playing partner, and in the coterie around Chapman (which also includes the MP Roger Douglas). So there is certainly an intellectual milieu at work here, and one which was enormously influential in Labour Party machinations at the time, if not well-versed in socialist history, apart from Smithyman.
It is also worth mentioning the essay written for this volume, ‘Borges and Me’. A strange title, especially since it is about an American academic, Jay Parini, who wrote Borges and Me, about his time driving the poet Borges around Scotland while a PhD student. Stead had read Borges’ work in the late 1960s, and had also driven a poet around Scotland, Edwin Muir, but that was ten years prior. The connection seems to be that Parini was a draft-dodger, during the Vietnam War, and that period has been an obsession for Stead, culminating in his writing Smith’s Dream. While it was filmed as Sleeping Dogs, he views it as a literary failure (despite being a commercial success).
Stead’s short fiction often seems to include an ex-patriate New Zealand man, usually an academic, encountering great public figures in Europe. Indeed, in ‘Vladimir’, the character enjoys a car journey with Putin before arriving at a function attended by the English playwright Tom Stoppard, who was actually from Czechia. In Stead’s story ‘Philosopher’s Kiss’, his Kiwi academic has an encounter with the renowned Cambridge philosopher Wittgenstein, not long before his death, but it doesn’t seem very convincing. In ‘A Short History of New Zealand’ he has an ex-pat Kiwi journalist interview a younger female author about a book with that title, which is actually fiction. And the fictional text is quoted at length as part of the story. It seems unlikely that this text, about a Pakeha policeman pursuing a Maori thief in a rural settlement, would have been published under that title and with all the expletives added, especially by a female author. Not now anyway, or perhaps that is the point?
But, of course, we can forgive C.K. Stead for some idiosyncratic fiction writing, and a fixation on his experiences in 1960s Britain, as he remains the last standing ‘Man of Letters’ from that period.
Review by S A Boyce
Title: Table Talk – Opinions, stories, and a play
Author: C.K. Stead
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781991103307
RRP: $45.00
Available: bookshops
Author: C.K. Stead
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781991103307
RRP: $45.00
Available: bookshops
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