Fish of the Week: Selected Columns

By Steve Braunias

A collection of New Zealand's most celebrated journalist's works, this lascivious selection of Steve Braunias's columns addresses a variety of topics, including the current state of New Zealand steak, the beauty of mangroves, the lunacy of film festivals, the attractions of small towns, the charms of Cambridge University, and the strange habits of the English. With a satirical voice and keenly astute observations on society, these best of columns shed light on the surprisingly vulnerable life of a writer and the love-struck nature of being a father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Awa Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781877551741

Steve Braunias

Steve Braunias is a well-known writer who works for the New Zealand Herald, serves as books editor at Newsroom, and is life president of the Hamilton Press Club. He has won over 50 national writing awards and is the author of 10 books, including Civilisation (winner of the 2013 NZ Post award for best book of non-fiction), and The Scene of the Crime, published by HarperCollins in 2015. His 2021 book, Missing Persons, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction.

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To Emily

He [the writer] will not show off his small defects, his preferences or his belongings, his cat, his pipe, his carpet slippers, bad memory, clumsiness with machinery, absent-mindedness, propensity for losing things, or his ignorance of business and of everything which might make the reader think he wrote for money. There will be no whimsy, no allusiveness, archaism, pedantic usages, false colloquialisms or sham lyrical outbursts … none of those dodges.

Cyril Connolly,

Enemies of Promise

Introduction

The back story to this selection of columns from 2005 to 2008 is Eastbourne, that soft and watery village near Wellington where I lived in 2004, and worked for a magazine I disliked so much that I stopped reading it long before I quit at the end of the year. I got a job offer. It meant moving to Auckland. I arrived in summer. Auckland was loud, dumb, ungoverned, ill-mannered, full of itself, out for a good time, and all over the place. Setting these attractions aside, I found it hard to settle. I moved into an apartment building governed by baffling body corporate laws. I attended rigorous, searching and fast-paced editorial meetings at the newspaper I joined, and had no idea what the hell they were talking about. Of course, so many outsiders loathe Auckland. It exposes yokels and amateurs.

But these and other exquisite sensitivities were never allowed to develop. I had brought company when I moved north—a strange, restless, provocative, nagging, chattering, phantom presence, a kind of child, more idiot than savant, which demanded my time and attention. It’s become more familiar than my reflection in the mirror. I have lived with it since 1999. It has pushed me around, kept me awake at nights, taken possession of whatever soul I used to possess. Writing a column for ten years isn’t second nature: it’s equal first.

The column I wrote for one national publication from 1999 to 2004 became the column I have written for another publication, the Sunday Star-Times’ magazine Sunday, since then: same form, same strange, restless etc. presence in my life. ‘The heavy bear who goes with me … Clumsy and lumbering here and there … Moves where I move, distorting my gesture / A caricature, a swollen shadow / A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,’ Delmore Schwartz wrote in a great poem. He had something even more clumsy and lumbering than a weekly column on his mind, and it’s true that the stupid clown in my life has its merits.

In ordinary circumstances, I am a mild, inoffensive fellow who has no opinions about anything. The column persuades me to engage. It strongly suggests I take an interest in a range of subjects. It twists my arm and demands that I satirise some of New Zealand’s leading buffoons. It has no conscience; if it breaks something, like defamation law, I am left to pick up the pieces, and accept a sound thrashing from employers who pick up the cheque. The column just smiles, and waits to satirise the next buffoon. Maybe I should sue the column. I might win for a change.

People say: Oh, it must be a grind. But it isn’t a grind. It’s much lighter than that; in fact, it’s weightless, because writing a weekly column is an elusive pursuit. I take the view that I’m only as good as my next column, or the one after that.

People say: Oh, I suppose sometimes you just bash them out. I wish that were true. It would save time and an awful lot of bother. But I’ve never been able to find a short cut to the exit sign, possibly because I’m still not exactly or even generally sure what sort of column I write. We are all familiar with columnists who square up for an argument week after bare-knuckled week, who lead with their jaw, who dare the reader to get in the ring. God save us from such combatants. There is the even more wretched band of columnists who are doomed to labour under the dread headline HUMOUR.

Still, at least you know where you are with those kinds of columnists. I don’t know where I am from one week to the next. I leave the column to its own devices, to whistle its merry or doleful tunes. Looking back at the columns in this selection, though, I have to admit they don’t move around much. They know their place as small and imperfectly formed entertainments, sometimes as satire, sometimes as evocation, sometimes as introspection, other times as history or ornithology, probably far too many times as surveys of New Zealand steak.

Why were they written in the first place? Does that question even have to be asked? Apparently yes. In his introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays, American writer Joseph Epstein asks: ‘Where, the question is, does the personal essayist acquire the effrontery to believe—and, more astonishing still, to act on the belief—that his or her interests, concerns, quirks, passions matter to anyone else in the world? If you happen to write personal essays, it’s rather an embarrassing question.’ What nonsense. For all his elegance and precision of thought, Epstein can be a terrible old bore. Although all columns are a cry for attention, possibly even a cry for help, the real question at stake is how to approach interests, concerns, quirks and passions that matter to the writer.

Fool’s Paradise, a selection of columns I published in 2001, I windily pronounced: ‘I have always intended the columns as a kind of report on New Zealand.’ The emphasis ought to be on the ‘kind of ’. Reports are things that have tables, graphs and population studies, and make acknowledgement of consultations with local iwi. Columns are things that involve some fact and more feeling. But the central subject of Fool’s Paradise was life and living in New Zealand, and the central subject of Fish of the Week is life and living in New Zealand. I wouldn’t say I’m the kind of rooster who loves life, but I’m certainly partial to it, and of all the emotions that New Zealand inspires—fear, loathing, distrust, scorn, pity, a boredom that closely resembles despair—what I most feel is affection.

I like it here very much. It has sensational birds in it. It has succulent mangroves in it. It does a beautiful autumn. In summer, the skies from sea to shining sea are filled with the smoke signals of barbecues. Best of all, and I suspect this has been noted by others, New Zealand is a good place to raise a family.

My favourite review of Fool’s Paradise came from some critic writing in a Kapiti Coast newspaper. He hated my book, and dismissed it as the thoughts of ‘a cosmopolitan layabout’. Those were the days. I am now more of a suburban layabout, and the years marked in Fish of the Week lead towards a happy ending— or beginning. They tell a simple story of an ordinary experience that is extraordinary only to the approximately 100 billion people who have also experienced it. I fell in love and had a baby. Well, Emily had the baby, to be precise. And then I fell in love again— with the baby, introduced in these pages before she was born, as ‘the happiness waiting to fill our spare bedroom’. She fills it now, a fat owl hooting new words, her silly little body folded into highchairs and car seats, her unexpected and amazing presence in my life making every day father’s day.

Sometimes I think I’d like to write about her every week. The impulse soon passes, thank god. Of all the traps a columnist can fall into, probably the very worst is taking the people in your life hostage. Emptying and then carefully stacking the contents of my heart in a column is something that does occur from time to time, but there are always other merry or doleful tunes to whistle, other areas of concern, interest, etc. And so every week, the column gets me out of the house—down the steps of the back porch and into a really quite spacious two-room garden shed with a desk, a bookcase and an ashtray. (I long ago moved out of the apartment with its body corporate dictates.) This is where I sit and sulk and stew every Monday, which has always been the day I write the column. Ten years of Mondays: I should be used to it. I never get used to it. I know the statistics—a column is slightly less than 900 words, takes about twelve hours to write, and perhaps five minutes to read. I know the symptoms—cold feet, an urge to emigrate to an obscure corner of the globe. I know the subject— two or three ideas muck around in my head during the week until one draws the short straw.

All else is not knowing. How to stick one word in front of another, how to tell a story and then sometimes have that story step outside for a breather and then come back in again, how to win or at least not surrender the war against cliché, how to manoeuvre poetic sentiment among the facts, how to allow sentences to run on far longer than they should: how to, in short, write.

Writing is an activity that passes the time in a disagreeable manner, and any satisfactions are few and fleeting. It’s long, hard, dour work. But I plug on, and get there in the end, usually at midnight or later, when I look back on the day and think: That wasn’t so bad. And: On reflection, I kind of enjoyed it. Also: I wish it was next Monday already so I could get back to writing.

A Visitor from Ghana

A reader recently forwarded me an email, and added, ‘Thought this might amuse.’ It did, very much, in the manner of someone reminding you of a joke you had heard before, but which made you feel good to hear again. It was one of those scam emails from Africa. I had begun to think that particular operation, or hobby, was a thing of the past. I imagined the perpetrators sulking over their plates of stewed goat and rice that the game was up, that everyone was wise to it, that no one gave it the time of day any longer. But old habits die hard, and the latest scam email was the familiar narrative of buried treasure told in the usual fetchingly confused grammar.

‘Dear friend,’ it began. ‘I am the only child of my mother who is the 6th wife to my father the former President of Kenya … $US76m in cash is kept for safekeeping in two trunk boxes in Europe … Nobody knows That it is money that is in the box. I count on your integrity and honesty to be able to Handle this Business … We need a trust worthy and experience person that will help us to Invest this money in your country and take us as one family and will also Buy A house for us over there where we can live safely.’

The author of this hopeless fantasy was Victor Arap Moi; he wrote from Ghana, ‘where my sick mother being attended to by a heart specialist’. One detail about the scam struck me as new: Victor had enclosed his phone number. In the past, correspondents had relied merely on their email address, allowing me numerous opportunities to indulge in my own fictions. I wrote back to many of these rascals. I would offer to meet them next Tuesday at 3 p.m. sharp on the thirty-ninth stair of the Eiffel Tower. I would ask for a token of good faith by requesting they send me a handsome set of elephant tusks. In reply to one woman, I scanned in a photograph of Act MP Rodney Hide and asked for her hand in marriage. I pestered another wretch by saying I could not trust him until he told me about his daily routines, so he sent four or five frankly boring emails about the meals he ate and the relatives he visited (‘I watched TV today with my cousin Samuel, but Friend when are you going to send me your bank account details you promised, the TV is old the Picture is bad for our eyes,’ etc).

Victor’s phone number provided me with another form of mischief. I rang him up. It wasn’t a very long conversation. After a few rings, a sleepy voice answered with a deep groan: ‘Uh?’ I replied, ‘Is that Victor?’ He yawned, and said, ‘Is Victor, yes.’ I asked, ‘Are you asleep, you rascal?’ Once more, he groaned: ‘Uh?’ I hollered down the line, ‘Get out of bed, Victor! There’s money to be made! What are you waiting for?’ He repeated the one word that brought him to life: ‘Money?’ I hung up and called international directory—the time in Ghana was 2.30 a.m. Excellent. Mission accomplished, amusement achieved.

I should have known it would come at a cost. My phone rang that night. Now it was my sleepy voice answering with a deep groan: ‘Uh?’ The caller boomed: ‘Is Victor!’ I thought of asking how the hell he got my number, but I merely said two words to him and hung up. I looked at the clock. It was 3.17 a.m. I went back to bed, and he immediately redialled. I ignored it. The phone rang again at about 7.30 a.m. Again, I ignored it—but he now knew my name because he had listened to my answer message.

Victor has kept up his calls, at various times of day and night, and his greeting is so warm and enthusiastic that I almost feel as though he has become a friend: ‘Is Victor here, Steve!’ Nothing seems to faze him. I usually respond with a brief torrent of foul abuse, and slam the phone down. But then he calls again, and his voice is even merrier: ‘Your friend Victor from Ghana here!’ A day passes, two days, three days—and then the phone rings at some ungodly hour, and I am hearing the triumphant sound of those awful syllables: ‘Is Victor!’ Once, I put him on call waiting because someone else rang—five minutes later he was still there: ‘Is Victor!’ I have told him I work for the police, for the FBI, for the offices of Rodney Hide, and three days will pass, four days, five days—suddenly, there he is again: ‘Is Victor!’

I picture him and his ailing mother showing up at my door, barging in, taking up residence, complimenting me on the good picture quality of my TV, sending me up to the butcher for what Africans laughingly refer to as ‘bush meat’. I am bringing home the goat. I am forced outside to sleep on the porch. I am threatened, terrorised, sent out to work two jobs to provide for the comfort and safety of Victor (‘Your friend from Ghana!’) and his mother, all because one idle afternoon I dialled 00233244279703.

[February 25, 2005]

Dunedin Gothic

A horse called Bering Sea, aged twenty-three, dropped dead in a paddock in Dunedin late last year. I called his owner, Duncan Adams, aged seventy-nine, and passed on my commiserations. ‘How kind of you,’ he said. ‘Hell of a nice horse. Wouldn’t put up with riff-raff, mind you. Bit and kicked them. He was very intelligent.’ Adams buried Bering Sea in the horse cemetery—‘I’ve always loved horses. I couldn’t run fast, so I needed a horse, you know what I mean?’—on his property. ‘I hired a digger. Had to drag him to the cemetery and dig the hole … Oh, god. That was a bit miserable.’

Yes. An animal’s death is an intensely personal affair, but the stroke that killed Bering Sea leads to another, blazingly public story: it brought to an end New Zealand’s curious link with a sensational murder, sex scandal and triple suicide in America, involving the Duchess of Windsor, Andy Warhol, Dominick Dunne, Truman Capote and a very short tramp.

All columnists adore correspondence—P.O. Box 1409, Auckland—but I was between cities, houses, jobs and all the rest of it when Adams wrote to me in December about Bering Sea and his ‘interesting ancestry and story’. I only got around to reading it properly last week. Bering Sea, Adams wrote, was the grandson of a famous US thoroughbred called Nashua. He attached a clipping from the October 22, 1956 issue of Time magazine. It was about Nashua’s retirement from a racing career that had seen him win record earnings of US$1,288,565—‘The richest horse that ever lived.’ The story also made a fleeting reference to Nashua’s former owner, Bill Woodward; Adams had marked it with a pencilled arrow, and an exclamation mark. It read: ‘Woodward was accidentally shot and killed by his wife.’

Further reading was required. I soon realised that I already knew the story. It was a cause célèbre, one of those lurid American tales of wealth, sex and death that sooner or later get made into a bad novel and a bad TV miniseries. I had read the bad novel, watched the bad miniseries. It goes like this.

Billy Woodward was the son of William and Elsie Woodward. William was a millionaire banker with Chase Manhattan and JPMorgan; Elsie was a grand society hostess. William had a brief affair with a young actress, Ann Eden, whose real name was Angeline Crowell. He introduced her to his son. Billy and Ann married, and had two children. Billy’s mother hated her, regarded her as a gold-digger, and white trash—Ann once appeared in public wearing red shoes and a blue dress. She was ostracised from Elsie’s crowd, the Vanderbilts and the Astors, but became friends with Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Ann had affairs; Billy was rumoured to be bisexual. Ann said to her husband, ‘Why don’t you just bring a man into our bed! That’s what you want anyway!’

Well anyway, and then she shot him dead. The couple were asleep in separate beds when Ann was woken by the sound of someone creeping through the house. She armed herself with a double-barrelled shotgun, saw a shadowy figure, and fired. It was Billy. The bullets blew his brains out. Police apprehended a short homeless man who admitted he had been trying to burgle the house that night, and so Ann was released, but the scandal raged on. Elsie, it was rumoured, wrote out cheques of $400,000 to stop the investigation.

The story continues. Elsie became friends with Andy Warhol, who introduced her to Truman Capote. Capote became obsessed with the Woodward story. It became the central theme to his massive novel in progress, Answered Prayers. He believed that Ann had deliberately killed Billy to get her hands on the Woodward millions. He sold a chapter to Esquire magazine. On the eve of its publication, Ann took a fatal dose of cyanide. A few years later, her son Jimmy—a drug addict and alcoholic who had a brief affair with prostitute turned appalling author of The Happy Hooker, Xaviera Hollander—also committed suicide, by jumping out of a hotel window. In 1999 her first son, Woody, killed himself in the same manner. ‘It’s a sad end to a doomed family,’ intoned Dominick Dunne, the vaguely loathsome creature who writes for Vanity Fair, and who published his own Woodward novel, The Two Mrs Grenvilles, later adapted into a miniseries starring Ann-Margret.

This narrative overlooks one small fact: before his death, Billy Woodward was the proud owner of Belair, the premier stable in America. Belair’s star racehorse was Nashua. Nashua bred Beaufort Sea, brought to New Zealand by Dave Clarkson, remembered as the first race commentator to work himself up to a crescendo at the end of calling a race. Beaufort Sea bred Bering Sea, passed on ten years ago by Brenda Harland to medical researcher Duncan Adams … and so the New Zealand connection to a miserable American tragedy, peopled with a cast of rich, grasping creeps, ends on a six-acre property in the lovely Dunedin suburb of Saint Clair.

‘A terrible wind had come up,’ said Adams, ‘and Bering Sea jumped over a creek and galloped across the paddock to get out of the wind. That’s when he dropped dead. He was with his girlfriend. It was a wonderful way to go.’

[March 6]

Diane Arbus Days

A friend asked the other night, ‘Do you ever have Diane Arbus days?’ It was one of those remarks that snaps above your head like a light bulb. There was a flash of recognition, an instant understanding of a truth revealed—in the best tradition of wise men, my friend had illuminated something that was already common knowledge. Whether we like it or not, we all have Diane Arbus days.

Arbus, the great, doomed portrait photographer, raised by wealthy store-owners in New York, dead by her own hand in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, trained her camera, her artistry and her existential anguish on … by all means call them people who are different; Arbus preferred to call them freaks. Famously, she wrote, ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot … There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.