BooksApril 4, 2017

A memoir by Brian Turner: part 2 in our week-long series on Greymouth writer Peter Hooper

Guest writer

All week this week we look at the life and writing of Greymouth writer and conservationist Peter Hooper (1919-91). Today: a memoir by Hooper’s longtime friend and editor Brian Turner, taken from his speech at the launch in the weekend of Pat White’s biography.

Peter Hooper is a name that is seldom mentioned when NZ Lit is discussed today, which is surprising and regrettable, given the depth, variety, and range of his work. He wrote and published novels, stories, poetry and essays. He also wrote a few plays.

I first met Peter in the late 1960s when one of my tasks as an employee of Oxford University Press’s NZ branch in Wellington was to call on and try to sell OUP’s and Faber and Faber’s publications to bookshops and schools in the lower half of the North Island, and the entire South Island. It’s no wonder I’ve an extensive library of my own. Some of the books could be regarded as distinctly arcane.

Peter was teaching English at Westland High in Hokitika. He was highly respected, conscientious and very good at his job. He lived in Paroa, a few kilometres south of Greymouth, on a small holding he named Long Acres. He didn’t have a view of the Tasman Sea but it could often be heard, soughing and surging up the stony beach a few hundred metres away.

(Above: Peter Hooper’s house at Paparoa: “his only company the sound of rain on the corrugated iron roof”, writes Pat White in his biography.)

Peter had opened a small bookshop in Greymouth and named it Walden Books. He, and I, as I found out, were drawn to so-called ‘nature’ writers, hence the reference to the by then fabled Henry David Thoreau and his classic account of living and reflecting alongside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. (Peter became, as I learned later, a life member of the Concord Thoreau Society.) Thoreau, famously, wrote that he “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”. In many ways Peter aspired to do much the same. A laudable aim, as I saw it, but how one brings that about I’m damned if I know. In time I saw that Peter made a better fist of it than most of us, by far.

Hooper was brought up on a town supply dairy farm inland from Greymouth and had an uneasy relationship with his father who seems to have been taciturn and less than warm towards him. Life on the farm was hard and often harsh by today’s standards. He had a sister and a brother – he died tragically – and that, and his upbringing generally, shaped him in numerous ways. I hesitate to say scarred, so let’s just say it affected him deeply. Lucky are those who can confidently say they had a settled, as well as rewarding, upbringing and childhood. Does one envy such? I say Yes, and no.

Recently, prompted by reading Pat White’s touching and humanising biography Notes from the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper, I’ve realised the extent to which reading, writing and publishing has taken up the major proportion of my working life. In the mid-1970s, after I’d moved back to my hometown Dunedin, John McIndoe invited me to join the printing and publishing company that he and his brother Bill ran. John was, and still is, a remarkable, cultivated, mostly unsung patron of the arts in the south. Then came the gifted and charming Barbara Larson who, later, with associates Lynsey Ferrari, Jenny Cooper and Paula Boock, founded Longacre Press. What varied, tasteful and successful publishing they did. We, John McIndoe, Barbara and I, all had a hand in publishing Peter Hooper’s poetry and prose.

Barbara remembers Peter as a “kind man who gave a lot to his students and friends – and people in general.” She was struck by his “depth of feeling for people and places” and thought that culturally the West Coast “must have been a hard place to live in” for a man like him.

John McIndoe, bless him, virtually gave me a free hand to publish whatever and whoever we wanted; for example, historians (Erik Olssen and Steven Eldred-Grigg among them); poets aplenty including Bill Sewell, Elizabeth Smither, Cilla McQueen, Leonard Lambert, Vincent O’Sullivan and so on; fiction writers Noel Hilliard, Roderick Finlayson, Michael Henderson, O.E. Middleton, Owen Marshall… Then there were cartoonists, in particular A K Grant and Tom Scott. Grant’s I Rode with the Epigrams and Tom Scott’s Life and Times were bestsellers.

Peter Hooper’s best-known work is, or was, a trilogy of novels starting with A Song in the Forest (1979), then People of the Long Water (1985), and Time and the Forest (1986). People of the Long Water won the 1986 NZ Book Award for Fiction.

Eric Beardsley, writing in the Listener, was fulsome in his praise of A Song in the Forest, and acclaimed it was “a strikingly original New Zealand novel”, one with “an extraordinarily real and telling perspective, a magical sense of feeling for our rough islands”. He went on to say, “One of the tests of a classic… is that on re-reading it you do not see more in the book than before – you see more in yourself than before.” Another reviewer, Naylor Hillary, in The Press, said Hooper “credits his readers with… the capacity to dream.” He said the book “adds up to a major achievement in New Zealand fiction.”

Further down the Coast, at Okarito, was another, soon to be better-known writer, Keri Hulme, who was to win the Booker Prize for her novel The Bone People. Hulme reviewed both People of the Long Water and Time and the Forest in the Listener. After sitting on Time and the Forest for eight months she finally deigned to file a review. She was less than kind to the novel, panned it. Too harsh was what I and others thought. Over time Hulme’s output and contributions to NZ Lit and society generally, when compared with Hooper’s, have proven to be slight. Hulme and Hooper were chalk and cheese.

McIndoe also published other work by Hooper, including his Selected Poems, a lengthy essay Our Forests, Ourselves (he was a founding and very active member of the Native Forest Action group), and a collection of shortish fiction The Goat Paddock and other Stories. But his work these days is, overall, off the radar.

Ruminating over Beardsley’s view that Hooper conveyed “a magical sense of feeling for our rough islands” I find myself thinking that Peter would be saddened to know that we’re still governed mostly by people who won’t accept there are limits to what is termed “growth” and refuse to see what Margaret Atwood and others keep pointing out, “Nature is calling in her debt.”

From left, Margaret and David Waddington, Brian Turner, publisher Michael Harlow, and author Pat White, in Fairlie, at Saturday’s book launch of the Peter Hooper biography. Photo: Robyn McFarlane.

Or as Ronald Wright’s Massey Lectures (2002/3) – called, ironically, A Short History of Progress – put it, “If civilisation is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.” He went on to say that trends clearly show we’re on “the road to bankruptcy”.

It’s become clearer, as David Attenborough said some time back – and as more of us are inclined to accept – that as a species we’re “a plague upon the planet”.

In NZ we have various acts – including our RMA – which imply that just about everything we know and use, often with impunity, is a “resource”. To be specific, think trees, fish, water and so on… One can easily see why Peter Hooper admired, as I did, the work of the American ecologist Aldo Leopold who in the 1940s wrote, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” As I see it most of those who govern us, who we elect, still view the natural world as a suite of commodities. So we’re continuing, often, to defile and trash the place.

Reading Pat White’s account of Peter Hooper’s life and times made me reflect, once more, on the breadth of Hooper’s work and influence on the people lucky enough to know him. As it happened, just before I received Notes from the Margins I’d been reading some of the essays in a 1995 collection by Linda Hogan called Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Hogan says we’ve a “broken connection… not only in language and myth but it also appears in our philosophies of life. There is a separation that has taken place between us and nature.”

She wrote that one Indian elder said that “there are laws beyond our human laws, and ways above ours. We have no words for this within our language, or for even our experience of being there. Ours is a language of commerce and trade, of laws that can be bent in order that treaties might be broken, land wounded beyond healing.”

No wonder, I thought, that so much that we do and say is graceless, and that so much is uncouth and brutalised, on and off the fields of play.

Remember that Peter Hooper by 1995 – when Linda Hogan published Dwellings – had been dead four years, and may not have read anything of Hogan’s work. I read her as pointing out – as many are today – that we are, in essence, guests here for a short time between eternities, but too often behave like brutish marauders. Hooper knew that, as his writing and actions showed.

Peter listened to the – as James K. Baxter put it of Brighton and the south coast of Otago – “always talking sea”. Listened to the wind and the bird-song in the West Coast forests, to the waters rushing towards the Tasman Sea, to the breakers rattling stones, to the gulls… and it often pained him to witness the ways insensitivity and ignorance drove our behaviour towards the natural world that we shared with the people we live among.

But I didn’t see Peter as embittered, or soured in despair. He gave a great deal, often unstintingly. There were, and are, still, too few like him. Pat White’s brought him back to life. I hope considerable numbers of people will appreciate and thank him for that.

Notes from the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper by Pat White (Frontiers Press, $40) is available at Unity Books.

Keep going!

BooksApril 3, 2017

A stranger in a strange land: Part 1 in our week-long series on Greymouth writer Peter Hooper

Pat White

Guest writer

All week this week we look at the life and writing of Peter Hooper (1919-91), a Greymouth author who won the national book award in 1986 for a profound, exciting novel set on the West Coast after an apocalypse. He’s now a largely forgotten name in New Zealand letters, but a new biography provides a vivid reminder of Hooper’s talents and achievement.

Today we feature an excerpt from Pat White’s biography. Hooper taught him in the third form; the two became friends, and provided each other with rare literary company on the remote Coast. What was it like to live there, alone, a bachelor till the end, away from the wine and cheese and chit-chat of literary life in the cities, stuck out in the sticks?

A theme in Peter’s interviews and private papers is feeling an outsider among West Coasters. But many on the Coast took him to their hearts, and not just his students. I think the aloneness was more a case of Peter isolating himself by being what he was, a natural outsider; it really had little to do with the character or aesthetic sensibilities of the West Coasters as he perceived them. He felt apart from all of us, and even perhaps a little superior in some ways, but his actions showed him sociably taking part in our lives and often enough enjoying that participation wholeheartedly.

When Jane Westaway interviewed him when he’d become a successful novelist, his feelings of a self apart were still there: “I don’t feel like a native Coaster. There are people who liked me as a teacher, then suddenly I was criticising them for cutting trees down. I’ve been on protest marches in Greymouth: 1960 – No Maoris, no tour; the Vietnam War – I was totally opposed to that. And the ’81 tour…Yes I do feel like an outsider. I feel like I’ve never found my own people.”

And, later, in the same interview: “There is no one here I can go to with my work.”

An Elspeth Collier photograph, Wellington waterfront c1987

Yet he often showed his work to other people throughout his writing life, even though writers seldom have more than a very few with whom they trust partially formed ideas or manuscripts. Peter also shared his poetry with a number of West Coasters including, at one stage in the 1960s, Toss Woollaston. These examples are not isolated ones, and they do not indicate the extent to which Brian Turner read Peter’s work outside his editorial role at John McIndoe Publishers in Dunedin. Nor do they provide full evidence of the relationships Peter formed with members of the national writing community.

During his tenure at Wellington Teachers’ Training College in the mid-1960s, Barry Mitcalfe began a cheaply printed quarterly titled simply Poetry, which he envisaged as a means of bringing the work of children and teachers to a wider audience in the school system. His second issue introduced Peter Hooper, “widely known as a teacher and a writer [who] introduces poetry from thirty-eight students, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen … Mr Hooper’s introductory essay, ‘Poetry in the Classroom’, should be read by all teachers interested in children’s writing. The poetry he presents fully vindicates the methods he expounds.”

Mitcalfe’s use of the words “widely known” is significant because in other contexts Peter continued to record regret for his isolation and his perceived lack of recognition of his work. The romance of isolation was an obvious preoccupation for Peter from time to time. Writing is indeed a solitary craft, and a writer can feel just as much an outsider in a city as anywhere in ‘the sticks’ or isolated rural areas. But Peter had obviously made significant contact with Barry Mitcalfe and, by association, other Wellington writers. Even if we allow for hyperbole in Mitcalfe’s introduction to Poetry issue Number 2, we can see that Peter was securing a foothold, becoming a known voice in poetry circles as far away as Wellington, as well as on the West Coast.

Many ex-students could offer memory of similar experiences of encouragement and support. An introduction to Thoreau’s Walden is a recurring theme that spanned the decades of Peter’s teaching career. He willingly shared his enthusiasm for literature and the natural world. Ron Pankhurst is just one such former student who has acknowledged his debt to that influential time: “It was Peter who first inspired me to read ‘Walden & Civil Disobedience’. We later talked in detail about the book & its meaning to us in the new world. I still have my autobiography which we had to write in the 6th form along with Peter’s very sincere comments. I also blame my obsession with books to Peter – I now have fairly near 8000 in total.”

From left, at Saturday’s book launch in Fairlie: Lowell Thomas, Kylie Murphy, Robyn McFarlane, and Alison Thomas. Photo: Catherine Day.

Peter committed himself fully to those activities he saw as important, developing a way of life that tended to be separated from mainstream social intercourse in New Zealand. If one did not go to the pub, watch rugby matches or use the TAB, but instead enjoyed evenings where people read their poetry to one another or held discussions probing the merits of native over immigrant flora or explored the philosophy of transcendentalists, then social interactions might be limited. Of course, what time-wasting consists of happens to be a matter of personal opinion, and Peter made his choices. Naturally enough they tended to set him outside the mainstream, but not alone.

When schoolboys sought Peter out because they were at a loose end, he welcomed them in all their gauche naivety and lack of worldliness. Because he lived alone and enjoyed their company, it appeared easy for him to share time with them – exploring the goldmine tailings and shafts, looking for coloured bottles, dragging native seedlings back to plant on his property. And of course he could listen while they talked among themselves because – regardless of all else their company gave him – the material they offered for his fiction was invaluable.

His jottings at times contained details that Peter could not write about publicly. Weekend visits from boys, such as my brothers, meant he found out more than most in the vicinity knew about the family lives of these young men. Among his papers are drafts of many writing ideas that express his struggle in coming to terms with living where he did and the people he encountered there.

In his short story “Boys and Girls Come out to Play”, he used his knowledge of student gossip to fictionalise the story of an end of year party, set within the complex world of teenage “growing pains”. In a 1985 Greymouth Evening Star interview with Steve Braunias, Peter, commenting on characters in his writing, and in this instance probably those in “Boys and Girls”, said, “I can pinpoint those characters now; they were from Grey High.”

Notes From the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper by Pat White (Frontiers Press, $40) is available at Unity Books.