Roy Colbert reviews Women of the Catlins: Life In The Deep South

Women have always done it hard in the Catlins, a, I was going to say a remote and difficult area on the South Island’s south-east coast, but the people who live there would have none of that. For townies, it would be remote, harsh, unrelentingly demanding and insufferably wet, raining two days out of three, but in Women of the Catlins, Diana Noonan, who lives there, has found 26 women who talk of surviving, coping and, much more than that, enjoying life immensely. But still doing it hard. The Owaka Museum has stories from a century before, the men away farming and sawmilling for weeks at a time, coming home to their wives drunk and exhausted. The museum says the women were extremely hospitable and produced huge flocks of children.

This is a remarkable book. It is remarkable because it isn’t what you think it will be. These are not fifth-generation Catlins women who have only been to Dunedin twice in their lives, these women come from all over New Zealand, from London and Leeds, from Norway, from the Philippines. Shearer Judy Walker is a Catlins lifer, but in the off season, her and her husband work in Germany. Many of these women have seen much of what the world has to offer and they have chosen to live in tiny population pockets, many far distant from their memories and influences. Sure it is very beautiful, so much green, the beaches, the birds, the waterfalls, but it’s not easy in an area where there are no jobs and your annual petrol bill for having your daughter play netball is ten grand. There is always a journey: Balclutha is The Big Smoke, Dunedin a forest fire.

There are so many glorious quintessential one-liners in this book. They should pick 52 and turn them into a souvenir pack of playing cards at the museum shop. I counted at least seven that were cardable in the opening chapter, Christine Mitchell, and you would be hard put to find a better one-liner in non-fiction anywhere than Judy Walker on page 59 – “I don’t let being the wool ganger go to my head.” Or Bronwyn Shute, who perhaps sums up the Catlins woman best when she says – “I’ve never thought of myself as a successful person, but I know I could do anything if I put my mind to it.”

It is very hard to make money down there. Even farming is tough, nowhere near as many sheep now. Like the rain forest and the bush, a substantial percentage has been cut down. So the women have had to find a way. And from the necessity of a twin income, or even just the necessity of staying energised, more than just coping has emerged. Gina Gardner started making jackets from blankets, it was the only material she had. Now she makes all sorts of stuff and can hardly keep up with the orders. Kerri Stronach opened a fish and chip caravan and then decided to add an ice-cream machine. She struggled to keep up too : on the first day she sold 87 ice-creams and burst into tears when she got home from the stress and the workload.

Other women who feature in the book are qualified teachers, librarians, pharmacists, doctors, netball referees and physiotherapists, and as things close down, they have had to take their skills and driving distances even further. Carol Geissler, who claims she couldn’t change a light-bulb before she came to the Catlins, now does absolutely everything for everybody. Holly McPhee is a wonderful folk singer, now turning heads and ears in Dunedin. Her mother Anabel, from a south-east coast on the other side of the world, has become a school librarian. Rachael Landreth competes seriously in Ultimate Frisbee.

Women of the Catlins has the appeal of Country Calendar, an endless stream of exceptional smiling New Zealanders making miraculous stuff from a sow’s ear. And like Country Calendar, this book will be even finer reading in years to come. You mean, people did all this with their bare hands? Without robots? In spite of, of, of, living in a, a PADDOCK? And they were HAPPY?

Yes they did and yes they were. Kim Hill writes in the foreword that this is a book about the way New Zealand used to be, and also about the way New Zealand could yet be. Yes to the first, hmmm to the second. Will we be that kind, that smart, to our environment?

Women of the Catlins: Life In The Deep South (Otago University Press, $49.95) by Diana Noonan and Cris Antona is available at Unity Books.

Peter Wells reviews Our Young Man by Edmund White.

Can an author write too much? A glance down the inside page of Edmund White’s new novel discloses either a staggering productivity (13 novels, six works of nonfiction, three biographies and four memoirs) or an author’s unstoppable urge to create. His seminal A Boy’s Own Story virtually created the new category of gay fiction in 1982. He went on to enlarge the genre with a series of books that surveyed the landscape of homoerotic desire – literally when he co-authored The Joys of Gay Sex (1977), journalistically when he toured America just as gay desire lit up the boogie nights in States of Desire (1980). Then, seizing the historic moment, he helped limn in the stark landscape of death and desire as AIDS entered the picture – The Farewell Symphony (1997.)

White is at least as good a nonfiction writer as a fiction writer. His biography on Genet is scholarly and readable, an elusive mix for so many nonfiction pedants. But then the best part of White has always been his sharp wit, his propensity for bon mots and his astute, savvy take on American mores, American lust, American pathos. He understands the power of gossip or dish as he might call it and easily the best part of his thirteenth novel is the way the entire plot is underwritten by a life time’s observation of humans at play – more specifically gay men at play, at rest, in rut, in moments of melancholy.

He chooses a very clever ploy, making the most of the decades he spent in France by taking as his lead character a French male model of impeccable, almost Dorian Grey like beauty who makes it big in New York. This allows White to have a lot of fun with differing cultural mores – the earnestness of Americans as against the rather narrow “high culture” that the French believe gives them a special dispensation to grimace at the barbarism of everyone around them.

Henry James explored this as well as the great comic writer Nancy Mitford. In her case it was the dreariness of the English as against the sparkling wit and treachery of the French. She used one to critique the other, making up books that weren’t quite farces but had the delicacy of a soufflé laced with cyanide. White’s wit is different, more laconic, more louche. He also has the inside track on the logistics or mechanics of man on man sex. This might be more than some people want to know, or it may be exactly what some people want to know.

Our Young Man is a book about the evanescence of physical beauty, the heartlessness of fashion, the importance – or irrelevance – of love – the abject nature of sex yet its utter necessity – all served with a side dish of commentary on how humans function, deceive one another and themselves, often at the same time.

The story is paper thin (but then so were Nancy Mitford’s books.) Guy, pronounced in the French style to rhyme with key, comes from a poor family in Clermont Ferrand but manages to get to Paris where his entirely covetable beauty is snapped up by a worldly wise, seen-it-all-before merchant of human souls. This could be seen as a salute to Balzac and his famous coupling of handsome provincial Eugene de Rastignac with the worldly homosexual Vautrin in nineteenth century Paris. Or it could be seen as a nod to what happens in every metropolitan centre – raw beauty is harvested and brought into production, not so much prostituted as put to work. If you are lucky as a commodity, you are rewarded handsomely for being that moment’s object of desire.

This would have been a different book entirely if Guy had been picked up and put down rather the worse for wear, which is the tale of most young beauties past their sell-by date. But White is an unabashed snob like Capote, like Proust. He always wants to sit at the top table, not because he thinks it’s where the wit or intelligence or even beauty lies – but it is where you see the machine roiling in all its harsh ugliness – beauties being picked up and put down – money made, money lost – but all in the most glamorous, if slightly sticky, surroundings. There are elements of the fairy story in Guy’s ascension to the top ranks of male models just as there is something unreal in the way his looks never change. (He can pass for 25 when he is close to 40 – some achievement.) But somehow Guy’s interior always remains slightly bland, as if he lacks some key human ingredient, even the ability to feel hurt, or be warmed by love. His beauty remains his invincible armour, and he conserves his beauty with the careful attention of a concierge locked in a sunless box by the doors which open to a graceful, sun dappled mansion. The discrepancy between the two provides the engine of this novel.

Guy has travelled far from the tiny dirty rooms in which he was born, in which his mother wears a cardigan, his father is a drunken sot who rapes his mother every so often and his brother is a homophobic car mechanic. Guy did have a grandmother with plucked eyebrows who got to Paris and served on a till in a café. From her he receives the news that he must make his way to the metropolis or wither and die.

Guy’s contemporary world is the weird one of fashion wherein reality is anorexic and illusion is fatter than a pasha on a terminal eat-till-you-die bender. So Guy has to wade through a world of high class illusion which is full of expensive silliness. This gives the novel the feeling of a journey through a world we don’t know – but then voyeurism has always been an attractive aspect of the novel.

Age, as in gay life, increasingly as in heterosexual life, is the eternal enemy as well as the implacable god who is always poised to take revenge. Edmund White is the concierge of this painful rite of transition. He himself started off as a pudgy boy giving blowjobs to tricks in the southern states while his businessman father stayed in his hotel room and moodily sank another Scotch. Then White lost weight, got politics and changed into a young male beauty who fucked with the queer top end – Bruce Chatwin and Robert Mapplethorpe – and a hundred thousand other men, if White’s tales are true. What is true and what is dish is always an ambiguous territory with White and part of his deliciousness. When I last met him he had ballooned into a late Orson Welles but he was still being pursued – in this case by chubby chasers and daddy chasers – he had a hot date that evening with a skinny Asian boy of Auckland town. White’s continuum is the exploration of desire itself, how it runs like a thread through our lives, doesn’t alter that much even when our bodies alter. Its imperative is stark, eternal, coruscatingly harsh – by the flare of that light, so we see the realities of the world.

It’s this view that lights up the entire novel. You could say the novel has elements of Fellini overstatement, or satire. Guy’s problem as the central character in the novel is his stasis. This gives him special privileges in that he is always desirable to everyone right to the last page. Nobody ever glances at him and looks away. But I feel it gives the novel a certain problem. His glacial beauty protects him but also seals him in the tomb of his looks. It gives him the distanced view of a light house keeper viewing the shipwreck of other people’s lives. White counteracts this by creating a novel with an over vivacious story line, which tracts Guy’s sexual entanglements even while it reveals his emotional pallor.

First of all a repulsive Belgian baron falls for him but Guy’s manager, with the soul of a vendeuse, tells him the best way to maintain attraction is never to give in. Eventually the baron, believing Guy to be a beautiful unattainable youth at least a decade younger than his real age, gives him a house in Manhattan. In return Guy understands he has to perform sexually for the baron who enjoys voyeurism. Eventually the baron installs a glory hole in his exquisitely decorated Manhattan apartment so Guy delivers his cock to the baron in the manner of someone dropping off a long distance letter in the slot of a letterbox.

White’s enjoyment of louche mis en scene takes another step towards the comic grotesque when the baron requests Guy’s attendance at a S&M orgy. The baron, always the most epicene of creatures in his public life, functions as a toilet in private. “He was wearing a strange leather full-length coat, open to expose his chest, belly, and pitiful little erection.” This is followed by one of White’s witty asides – “The coat was very Wehrmacht. Guy hoped the liquid [of the piss] wouldn’t cause a short in his hearing aids.”

It’s hard not to laugh. The next grotesque to fall for Guy – and let’s be honest, beauty has the ability to make ordinary human looks seem defective – is one of the great tragedies of the age-obsessed gay world. This is the man who comes out too late. Fred is a Jewish Hollywood producer with two adult sons and three grandchildren. He’s a schmuck but a kind hearted tragedy on two skinny legs. He of course falls for the eternally youthful unapproachable Guy and his seduction technique, like the baron, is to bestow expensive real estate. This time it is a vast house on Fire Island. The night they spend together in the house, Guy realizes at long last he has to put out. “Guy had swilled three Rusty Nails over shaved ice and then willingly, drunkenly presented Fred with his asshole, with a full-sized replica of David in the corner, apparently carved out of soap, its penis no more erect than Fred’s.”

When I read this sentence, I had to look at it twice, even as I snickered. David Eggers is on the cover blurbing Edmund White as “one of the most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language”. And it’s true no less a master than Nabokov praised White’s supple and exquisite use of English. That was a long time ago. At times with this novel I felt a coarsening of his grip on language. In the above scenario, he has gone with gusto, maybe even the opera buffo of the situation – but the two “withs” in close proximity provide one of those momentary hesitations. This book is not a delicately shaped satire of a novel. At times it is quite blunt. One or two times I even noticed redundant descriptions which careful proofreading could have removed. This goes to the heart of the question: can an author over produce? At what point does the elegant automobile lurch to a halt, the wheels running round on the same spot, but this time only emitting huge spurts of smoke?

What I can say about this novel is it is an entirely entertaining read. I read it while I was recovering from a painful dental operation and it did the trick better than any opiate. What is the novel but an entertainment in its most basic form? Of course we ask far more of it – that it offers perceptions on how we live, make sense of the conundrum of our lives – what the world feels like, looks like, even how the human world pretends to be. Edmund White is now 76 and this novel, for me, is to be read on two levels – one is the roller coaster of narrative incident which goes back to the first novel of Pamela escaping the pursuit of a randy lecher – but it also offers a life-time’s wisdom about the tragi-comedy which is sex. We all know it sooner or later. Nothing is more capable of delivering pleasure and pain. White’s knowledge is grounded in a gay man’s experience – it may be a narrow view but the view has the depth of a life lived to the full, with the lens wide open.

Read it for the pithy asides, if nothing else. One could do far worse than spending a few afternoons or evenings, laughing appreciatively at Edmund White’s bon mots, his astute stare right into the absurdity of social and sexual relations, as well as enjoy a sightseers tour of the dirty linen life of the upper gratin.

Our Young Man (Bloomsbury, $29.99) by Edmund White is available at Unity Books