Exit Ghost...

Every bend I drove round, the road ahead was empty.

Exit Ghost is a late novel by Philip Roth. I’ve just been listening to it on audiobook as I drove back to Napier. It was late afternoon, and after overtaking some stragglers I managed to get into that ideal space - a vast landscape with no traffic ahead or behind. Every bend I drove round, the road ahead was empty. This for me is the most perfect space within which to think. And Exit Ghost is a speculative work of fiction.

The novel muses on aging, on love, on lust. 

In it Roth’s alter-character, an aging novelist, a womaniser, is now so old he has had his prostrate removed and he wears incontinence pads. He no longer achieves erection. He has lived in isolation but on returning to a post 9/11 New York, he falls in love - in lust - with a young Texan beauty. She’s in her late twenties. 

Roth very cleverly writes a semi-sexual affair which only happens in the writer’s head. This gets round the yuk factor. But wrapped within the novel, to ensure that the novel is not read autobiographically, is an almost splenetic dialogue about biographers who seek to read fiction in the most simplistic  biographical terms. 

A cri de couer from a man who had once been highly sexual.

I chuckled to myself as I listened to him describing biography as a kind of rancid theft. But I also mused that the novelist was almost desperately trying to ensure that the reader did not identify the lead character with Philip Roth. On the other hand, the entire novel seemed a deeply felt personal cri de couer from a man who had once been highly sexually active, but who was now mourning his passing into a life of shade, of darkness. 

I didn't care too much who survived.

The theme of aging is probably going to emerge as a huge one for the current baby boom generation. (Roth of course precedes my own generation by twenty, thirty years.) But we are all living longer and all around me I see people living into an unthought of older age. I include myself in this. As a young man in my twenties, I confidently expected the world to undergo some kind of apocalypse. I didn’t care too much who survived. Confidently, I assumed neither my own survival nor my death. 

Instead, with noteable exceptions of Aids, cancer and suicide, most people have survived. I even had the extraordinary experience of finding an early lover, from the 1970s, alive. (He was interviewed in Nine to Noon. He is English. A Londoner. I had tried to contact him in the early 1990s. I could not find his name in any telephone book. I assumed, unwillingly, that he had died. Aids was unknown when we were sexually active.) 

...the urgency of desire in a body which is no longer protected by the armour of youth.

So now we face something different from what any of us had imagined.

A longer life, and perhaps something else - the urgency of desire in a body which is no longer protected by the armour of youth.

I compare Roth’s careful, artful fiction with Edmund White’s much more straight forward, almost confessional nonfiction. Which is better? Which tells the story of the plaint better? Gide said that each age has its own gifts - and it is true, when I was actually young, I wasted time by diffidence, uncertainty and an almost tidal wave of neurotic anxiety. I was Totally Fucked Up. At the same time I appeared probably very driven, over-confident, assertive - I always thought I knew where I was going.

One always wants what one doesn't have.

At the moment I am writing, or trying to write nonfiction. Yet as always, one wants what one doesn’t have. Suddenly I feel the impulse of fiction again....it seems so fascinatingly tangential and protective. With someone like Roth it becomes an intricately layered narrative. Edmund White, on the other hand, almost prosaically, tells the story of his loss of looks, his abnegation of self, the men he hires for sex, his liking for masochism. He evades the mask, hiding only behind the assertiveness of a seemingly limitless truth. I saw this described in the NYer perjoratively as a gabby gay man’s talkativeness, telling things that nobody wants to know. 

The young are beautiful and stupid. 

Really both men are talking about the urgency of desire in a body which no longer evokes desire. The young are beautiful and stupid. The young think they know it all but really they know almost nothing of what lies ahead of them. Their careless beauty has about it a kind of terror. A vulnerability which ensures their protection (in some circumstances it opens them to exploitation and destruction.) I don’t have children to observe and love endlessly. But looking at the students I had for six weeks I ended by identifying that seemingly hard carapace they all had - a jaunty defiance against the odds, an assumption that somehow they’d all survive. I recognised its blindness - its almost animal dumbness - from my own youth. Does this sound harsh? Judgmental? Well, I include myself in this. 

What do you learn as you age?  

Different terrors and uncertainties. But there’s also those nuggets of knowledge, hard gained. 

But like most people, I would abandon those nuggets in a second if I could go back into the body of youth for a day, even an hour....

But would I go back to the confusions of that age? The very real not knowing?  

Yes.

It’s very hard to learn what Van Vogh wrote.

‘One must seize the reality of one’s fate and that’s that.’ 

Myself at 23....lost time...

This photo was taken by Philip Peacocke in approximately 1974. It was taken in the tearooms of the Auckland railway station. It was the time of Bertolucci's remarkable evocations of the 1930s. It was a time of conscious decadence. I am wearing a magnificent set of fox furs - rouge.

My nails were probably painted black. I would be smoking Sobranie. My friend Sally who was the arbiter of the fashionable subculture had supplied me with some pills. They sort of zoned me out. 

I sat down at the table, beside this elderly working man, eating alone. He did not look at me or speak. 

Now I am so much older myself I look at this photo and feel a kind of grief. I recognise that

young man, his extremities, his urgencies, his beautiful madness. But I also empathise with the old man, who maintained his dignity throughout. 

We would be passing through. He would die. In time, I myself would have to face the ogres of ageing. I would put aside the fox furs, the make-up, the elegant Sobranie.

The mirror would stare hard back at me.

But this moment, captured so beautifully by Philip Peacocke in 1974, captures a lost time....the kind of carelessness which is part and parcel of being young....

Red is the colour....

I’m now back home in Napier after an exhausting six weeks trying to teach creative nonfiction at a summer writing school at the University of Waikato. Boy, do I value my aimless days now that I don’t have to turn up for classes. While in Hamilton, aka Hamilhole, aka Tron, the city of the future, a friend sent me these images of graves in the old Napier cemetery. 

The red is from an Australian gum tree. I love the intensity of the colour. The fact is whenever I return to Napier I go for a wander in the old cemetery. This is when I feel I am back home. I feel centred. Everything else appears transitory and noisesome. I try and reach peace. 

These photos were taken by Jenny Horne. She is the daughter of Eric Lee-Johnson and I think she shares his remarkable photographic eye. Thanks, Jenny.

The Changing Room

At the moment I’m away from home and I’m going to two gyms. One is at a university and one is an old fashioned YMCA. The rules of the changing rooms fascinate me. Perhaps because I grew up a sissy I always visit masculinity as one visits a foreign land. I observe the customs, try to learn not to be offensive and quietly chuckle to myself at what seems funny. 

The university has a ‘recreation centre’. It is a kind of temple. You walk along a long corridor. On one side are offices for the trainers. On the walls opposite are framed jerseys of notable sports personalities. There is also a long - a very long - board which names various sportsmen and women of note. Not a name rings a bell with me.

I am heading to the weights room.

To myself I am beautifully incredulous. As a young sissy of twelve or thirteen nothing could have been more out-of-character. At grammar school, the weight room became a kind of heightened homo-erotic zone which I knew not to enter because it was enemy turf. (I would be called names, probably physically man-handled in a way which was somewhere between a brutal caress and a pummelling act of denigration.)

But today, as an aged mortal freed from so many obsessions, I brazenly walk into the weights room and begin my isoteric stretching exercises. Around me are a collection of what were once called ‘young bucks’.

These are young men in their early twenties. Their bodies can be sculptured to an ideal. They spend hours here, sharpening profiles, gazing at themselves not even covertly in the mirrors. Packs of young men help each other, admiring - never the physique of the young man lifting weights - but the prowess in the amount of weights that can be lifted. 

These are the young men, I think to myself, who are snatched away in wars. They are easily killed, come home, if lucky, wounded physically rather than psychologically. They have a simple splendour about them, an ease of movement, even vision.

In your early twenties, it probably appears straight forward. Or is it that the gym actually opens up one of the few uncomplicated testing grounds for young males?

But what fascinates me is the code of the dressing room. Of course as someone homosexual, I find the act of undressing in public among other males a coded  act. But here, at the university, nobody undresses in front of anyone. There is no nakedness, not even any near nakedness. In fact the accepted code is that you arrive at the gym dressed to exercise and you leave wearing the same clothes, only drenched in ennobling sweat.

What is unsaid here fascinates me.

I compare this with the YMCA where I also exercise. It is just down the road from where I am renting, so it has ease of access. The room is large, battered and not particularly clean. Compared to the almost unanimously trim young men at the university, there is a wide variety of body shapes and ages. Old suburban woman sit on rowing machines. There are Maori here who look like they have tough lives elsewhere: but here they sculpt, attain, and work to a definite principle. 

But it’s scuzzy. The television plays what seems like terminally 80s and 90s rock videos. Even the colour is faded. There are men with pot bellies. There are also extremely masculine men of a sort not found at the university gym. 

By this I mean men who wear their masculinity easily, but as a form of armour.

But what really fascinates me is the YMCA changing room. There are some lockers but by and large they are not used. The men come in, undress untidily and leave their pants, underpants and shoes in the sort of pile, by inference, a dutiful wife will pick up. Men also undress until they are completely naked. More than this, they stand around naked. 

The showers are a long run of nozzles in a completely open shoe-box space. There is no room for modesty, even false modesty. 

Hence in the changing room you see the ordinary damage of time on the male body. You see the usual range of penis-size. Some men glance at themselves in the tiny mirror square, to adjust their hair before leaving. But it is the changing room as an old fashioned male space.

My father who was born in 1910 and died twenty two years ago would have recognised it.

What fascinates me is the difference in codes. The YMCA changing room infers that nobody is homosexual. Everybody is assumed to be heterosexual, therefore there is no problem. At university, everybody, by contrast, is assumed to be homosexual. Everybody is assumed to be obsessed with watching, with ‘harassing’ by glance if not touch. Everyone refutes nakedness as an explosive idea - but one which, above all, must remain unspoken. There is a falseness to the modesty. An inhibition.

One - the old idea of communal nakedness - comes from a starkly homophobic time - but one which, ironically, allowed greater access to homosexual pleasures. The other, more acceptably ‘neutral’, seems to underline a kind of homosexual panic or fear. 

It doesn’t worry me. It doesn’t phase me. I’m not about to picket the recreation centre with a placard reading ‘I want to see more cocks!’ But it does amuse me: the changing rooms at the recreation centre are as tiny and covert as a lady chapel to the side of the great cathedral of narcissism, which is - the weights room - where male beauties sculpt themselves into doubles which they watch carefully in the mirror. 

I sometimes wonder about these duplicate beings. Are they making themselves splendid so that when they undress their girlfriends have a frisson of utter delight at their physical perfection? Or is it so their mates can admire the amount of weights they can lift? Or is it that this is the form of 21st century male armour: musculature, without which one leaves home feeling - dangerously - naked?

Judy Bailey’s Turning Chinese.

I was sitting in the nearest thing to a barbershop today. It was for women too, but it was the sort of place you queued for a hairdresser. I had felt a little self conscious when I put the Australian Women’s Weekly down, marvelling at Judy Bailey’s latest facelift: and how people gradually become less and less recognisable as they pursue the possibility of arresting a known look. She was half way to turning Chinese. 

Perhaps the fact I had a kiwi male sitting beside me made me self conscious. I had sized him up. Probably a grandfather and, I hesitate to add this, but probably a man who still had sex with his wife (or with someone...) He was grizzled and as full of testosterone as an old wine is full of matured grapes. 

My hairdresser was Russian: she looked worried and had an explosive kind of haircut. I wondered about her past - probably very varied but I decided not to expend any extra energy on talking. 

I surrendered to the haircut.

But gradually I became aware of the grizzled man and his barber talking. It was about the Welsh rugby captain who had revealed he was gay.

The barber offered the opinion that for a gay man to be in a rugby changing room was equivalent, in arousal, of a straight man being in a woman’s changing room. He called this ‘a dream’. The man in the chair agreed enthusiastically. It just wasn’t right. I started listening carefully. 

The conversation was still going when I left. It seemed to offer an almost subliminal sense of excitment to the two men. It had obviously entered their imaginations and they had both gone with it. I reflected on the way both seemed to suppose that only men who were gay looked at other men’s bodies. I grant that gay men look with a special erotic regard. But straight men in showers etc often check each other’s genitalia out. After all the size of the male penis is a pretty big thing in the male psyche. (‘Big swinging dicks’ was the name given to leading stockbrokers during the last financial hysteria.) In gyms males often stand around looking at their own and other male’s physiques.

Perhaps the Welsh rugby captain had pierced through a line between homosocial - the general preference men have to be with men - with homosexual - the preference of some men to have sex with other men. It worried them as much as it excited them. As I walked out, one of the men said something about how being a half back would obviously be a really exciting thing for a gay man. 

I have to confess I had to turn to Wikipedia to find out that this meant being in a scrum. 

It’s a rather hard fact for rugby fanatics to accept but rugby pretty much basically came about as a way to deter boys from buggering each other at a posh school. It threw them out of bed and into the mud and cold. So probably it’s not incidental that rugby has so many positions which mimic male sexual positions. 

A standard sight for a defeated rugby team is for the ‘gladiators’ to lie on the field, their rear end up, their heads buried in their hands. Basically they offer an image of a male awaiting anal penetration. 

Sorry to tell you this.

But back to my story.

I wondered why these men were so excited. They did a breif detour through the zone known as: I don’t mind when it’s obvious they’re gay. (I think they meant a man who is obviously effeminate.) What really worried them was a man who was, well, obviously a man. A man full of testosterone. I wonder if they thought of being raped, and whether this was the source of their worried excitment. Or was it the fact ‘they couldn’t tell’ made life so very confusing for them. Either of the two men talking to each other could in fact then be gay.

The Welsh captain’s crime, it seemed, was to pierce through the thin membrane which seperates the homosocial from the homosexual. But the blatant fact that men generally prefer to be with men, just as women generally prefer to be with women - (watch any two middle aged couples out on an evening stroll, two men together and two women together) - makes the tension so much higher if this preference has a sexual component. 

It seemed, that morning, to offer all sorts of possibilies - excitment, fear, dreams, condemnation. 

Neither talked of course what it might mean for young gay men and boys to find out that a leading rugby captain was gay. How it might encourage those who were brilliant at sport but who couldn’t put up with the homophobic climate to give it another chance. I should know. When I was thirteen I was a champion sprinter at Mt Albert Grammar. But the sport world seemed so foreign, so hostile I decided to give it all away. 

Now I look back and feel I cheated myself of a possibility. 

But that’s how it was.

And that’s how it still is, at least in a barbers shop in Hamilton, in January 2010.

After being knocked down by Susanna Mailolo, the Holy Father wakes up....

In a shock annoucement today Pope Benedict XVI said that he wished to change the meaning of Christmas. In a global message he said next year’s Christmas would be a celebration of the single person. The time-honoured version of Christmas celebrating the family had revealed itself to be bankrupt. Christmas has basically devolved, he said, into a pagan festival in which the worship of consumer items and the search of alcohol-driven oblivion had taken over from any religious meaning. 

He acknowledged for the first time that Christmas was simply a replacement of the more ancient Roman ceremony known as Saturnalia and that the idea that 25 December marked the birth of Jesus was a tidy fiction completely unrelated to fact. Nobody knew when or where Jesus was born, he now admitted. The twentyfirst century called for some degree of honesty, he said, even in such a time-worn institution as the Catholic Church.

 

As for the popular belief that Christmas, in the end, was all about children, The Holy Father acknowledged that Christmas has simply become a means of training children in the way of greed. It also became a form of purchasing love. Christmas had become, he said, a way of grooming children for capitalism. It was an exploitation of innocence. Children had become the worst victims of Christmas. The Church, he said, would consider forms of compensation. Perhaps even the entire body of the Church, its Swiss accounts, land holdings, art and antiques, might be liquidated and donated to the poor children of the world. This was entirely possible, he said.

The old idea that Christmas was all about family had also proved to be a fallacy. In fact every year the festival was dictated by guilt, fears of loneliness and the need for shaky economies to spur on consumer spending. He acknowledged the festival of Christmas was a complete sham. People who were related to each other simply by birth spent time together reliving ancient traumas. It was not healthy for the human race. It was time to take a break.

It was time, he said, to appreciate the radical role of the single person. Without the single person overpopulation, a form of global pollution, would be crippling. The future of the world, of humans, depended on the single person. In such a radical step against orthodox Catholic doctrine, which believed that women should breed as much as possible, to produce more Catholics and also remain in their proper subervient state, he said he had looked into his heart and found he must speak out for the rare value and beauty of the single individual. Those who did not breed deserved the highest praise. 

An entire festival would occur next 25 December in which the single individual would be highly praised. Those in families would fast for the entire month of December, to acknowledge their guilt in placing undue demands on the earth’s slender resources. On the 25 December, it was the role of families to locate single persons in their community and worship them. This did not involve gifts or alcohol, carols outside their windows or invitations to ‘parties’. It involved silence. 25 December would become, for the first time in history, a real day of contemplation. Silence would be enjoyed around the world. Humans would listen to the sound of birds, the loveliness of a blade of grass slowly growing. It would be as it was, in the beginning. It was a beautiful idea, he said, whose time had come.

When asked by a journalist how he was feeling after being knocked down by 25 year old Susanna Maiolo, he shocked his audience by saying it was this which had brought him to his senses. She was a single person, just as he, in his heart, was a single man. He wished people to understand that the information that she had ‘psychological problems’ was a way of diminishing the real import of her action. She had been a bearer of the word. And the word had reached him. And now he understood. 

He proposed that Susanna Mailolo join Australia’s Mary McKillop as the Catholic Church’s newest saint. ‘What we once believed to be heretic turned out to be simply the bearer of the Truth’.

The new book goes fishing...

I’ve been trying to put my thoughts in order about The Troweena Sea. You see, I even resent writing the title as I feel this only adds publicity to a best-selling book. Yet I’m equally unwilling to use Witi Ihimaera’s name, as this appears to ‘make it personal’. My urge to make sense of the situation comes from the fact this book, which was going to be withdrawn, when the plagiarism allegations first came out has not been withdrawn at all. It is now the best selling fiction book by a New Zealander, within New Zealand.

My question is: what does this say about us? First of all, there is the cynicism of the publishing company. Penguin have obviously decided it is better to make money rather than adhere to its announced principles that it would seek to withdraw the book. Similarly the author himself made a great deal of the fact he himself would be personally paying for the stock of the book which remained in the warehouse. One could ask now: has this actually happened? Or did the author collude with the publisher in cynically allowing more books out into the shops?

Or is this incorrect thinking? Perhaps the publisher just decided to leave those books already out in stock, in bookshops., to remain there. Perhaps booksellers pleaded with the publishers to allow the book to remain in stock.

Ihimaera has long been one of New Zealand’s best selling literary authors. The fuss apparently has not stopped people buying the book. Indeed there is every evidence that the fuss has aided the sale of the book.

These thoughts were partly prompted by two friends who had bought the book.

One is an archivist, the other an arts administrator. Both are women. And both reported that the book was not a plagiarised text but a fantastic read. This  appalled me. I have heard of people buying the book on the belief that it will become a collector’s item. (Unfortunately already too many have been sold.) But I would have expected people who were knowledgeable about the arts would have understood the issues.

What are the issues? I believe they are complicated by contemporary art’s use of sampling, of copyng, of ‘appropriating’. This is widespread through the visual arts (‘quotation’) and through the musical arts (‘sampling’.) Why should the literary arts be any different? Or does the difference go to the heart of the way in which writing differs from other art forms. Writing can use quotes, but in books of any quality, these quotations are sourced. It is a way of honouring the work other people have done before you. Not to do so is to appropriate someone else’s work. Cultural appropriation, by pakeha people, of Maori subject matters is a very hot area.

What do we have then when a Maori kaumatua, for Ihimaera is such, is found out appropriating by and large pakeha sources without any acknowledgement? We have the strange kind of muffled crisis we have experienced. Maori have been singularly silent on the situation. They are used to seeing their own people constantly attacked. It does not do to attack your own kind. But pakeha writers, with some notable exceptions, have also been discretely silent. The problem is partly personal. Most writers know Witi Ihimaera. He is capable of great charm. But I would not be the first person to say he is also capable of considerable malice. He’s a rounded character, after all - not the demi-plaster saint he was in risk of becoming after the popular success of the film ‘The Whale Rider’.

Witi Ihimaera’s role of cultural ambassador is something worth looking at in more detail. Ever since his first, stunningly simple and eloquent stories emerged he has had what can only be called a very good ride. He became a diplomat, that most carefully judged of silver tongued careers. Latterly, when the hard work of gay liberation had been done, he came out as gay. He also became more vocal about Maori rights once the hard work of Maori radicalism had been done. In one way New Zealand has needed a man like Ihimaera - charming, personable, bicultural. Adaptable. He has been heaped with richnesses. A man who has not got a particularly illustrious academic record is a professor at a leading university where he himself teaches writing. Only this year he was given a laureateship - perhaps the final poisoned gift to a man heaped with honours, aroha and mana.

Has this crisis changed anything? Not according to the people who have rushed out to buy the book. I have heard one author say that the book was unreadable, lurching from style to style awkwardly. But Ihimaera’s writing style is not the point. People buy his books to hear from a bicultural ambassador, a charming man who knows ‘how to tell a good story’. And pakeha people like hearing Maori stories. And after all, telling stories is what authors do. Or rather writing them. This is where we get into difficulties. Unacknowledged appropriating is really just theft. It appears to have been a careless, unthought out act, by someone who presumably assumed he was untouchable in New Zealand culture. There was a huge demand for another book. He gave in. It’s not the end of the world, but it tends to dent the charisma, the mana of the man. It’s not a good look. Every book he produces from now on will be tainted by suspicions of intellectual theft.

People say, of course, Shakespeare borrowed. Recently Ian McEwan, a writer of real talent and originality, has been accused of plagiarism at least twice. But I don’t think in either case we are talking of actually taking literal chunks out of someone else’s research and writing, then plastering them over into the main body of the work. Or have we, as Ihimaera himself suggested, just arrived at a postmodern moment when intellectual theft is a chic form of experimentation? Would Maori think the same thing if, for example, I simply took something oral and ancestral, then put it into the main text of my work, as if I had originated it? I don’t think so.

Is it a case of double standards - the cultural double standards that bedevil New Zealand life. (Hone Harawira, loathing white people, but needing to go to the centre of white culture, Paris....) 

In the end this cultural event says alot about contemporary New Zealand: Ihimaera’s outing as a plagiarist by someone who lives overseas (who within New Zealand would have dared dent the mana of the plaster saint?) Ihimaera’s misjudging of the severity of the crisis by appearing in public receiving a large sum of money even after the plagiarism was public knowledge: surely the diplomat within him would have dictated a discrete professorial holiday at some welcoming overseas university (Hawaii comes to mind)...a public statement that he would not accept the laureateship this year...a little modesty in the situation would have been a sign of atonement.  The university which so desperately needed a bicultural ambassador - what was once called a friendly Maori - that they would accept plagiarism as something intellectually acceptable and even negligible - surely a nadir in the annals of universities becoming thinly disguised moneyshops. The book still stays in the bookshops. People are buying it probably at this very moment for a Christmas present. Some people believe, like money in Hanover Finance, it will be a good investment. Other people just like a good story. Shame that significant parts of it were written by other people - who remain unacknowledged. But that’s not a problem, is it? 

Is it?

Of course Witi Ihimaera will be reborn. The phoenix which has lived through such staggering social political racial and sexual change, always morphing at an appropriate moment, will, I am sure, re-emerge in an emotion-drenched scene some time in the future. He is one of the characters of twentieth-century New Zealand. When a friend of mine, who had a history of heroin addiction in his twenties, but then went on to become one of the leading ad men in New Zealand - before being found with heroin again - said blithely: it only adds to the story. The adman knew something. Witi’s story is not finished. We can perhaps expect a few tears on Mark Sainsbury, or whoever is around at prime time when Witi, like Coco Chanel, makes his inevitably dramatic tear-wrenching re-entrance. The crowd will weep. Then, barely stopping to mop up their tears, this largely pakeha audience will feel that twitch in their being which indicates: it is all over.  Their fingers will be blindly feeling for their eftpost and credit cards before they line up obediently to buy the new book.

The new book goes fishing....again.