My History, I Think

By Stevan Eldred-Grigg

‘I am, I suppose, a hoarder. I have carefully filed away all the pain, all the personal shame, that has failed to take written or printed shape and that forms the past. The past, which could break my heart ... ’ The year is 1994. A writer lives in a wide white house on a green riverbank. He is writing a book about the lives of rich people a century or so ago. At the same time, he seems to be writing his own story. Neither autobiography nor yet fiction, this fascinating book traces the workings inside the mind of a leading writer. It is part history, but it is also an intensely personal revelation as to the way a committed writer develops, and even why. The writer moves backwards and forwards between the present and the past, between last century and the century before last. The text twists in and out of the lines of certain stories and novels. We shift from one place to another — from Christchurch to Chicago, from Patagonia to the promenades of Noumea. ‘The interesting part of a story is always concealed,’ says Eldred-Grigg — who then proceeds to give us glimpses of just what his secrets might be.

Stevan Treleaven Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist and historian. He was born in the Grey Valley, New Zealand in 1952 and grew up in the small mining town of Blackball and the suburbs of Christchurch. He graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1975 with an MA in history before obtaining a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1978. He has lived in Canberra, Berlin, Whangarei, Mexico City, Wellington, Oaxaca, Singapore, Shanghai, Waiuku and Beijing.

List of his published novels: Oracles and Miracles (1987), The Siren Celia (1989), The Shining City (1991), Gardens of Fire (1993), Mum (1995), Blue Blood (1997), Kaput! (2000), Shanghai Boy (2006), Bangs (2013).

List of his published history books: A Southern Gentry (1980), A New History of Canterbury (1982), Pleasures of the Flesh (1984), New Zealand Working People (1990), The Rich (1996), Xin Xilan de Wenxue Lucheng (2004), Diggers, Hatters & Whores (2008), The Great Wrong War (2010), People, People, People (2011), White Ghosts, Yellow Peril (2014), Phoney Wars (2017).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piwaiwaka Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005146054

Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist and historian. He grew up in a big tumultuous household on the West Coast and in Canterbury before graduating with a doctorate in history from the Australian National University. He has lived in Blackball, Christchurch, Canberra, Whangarei, Wellington, Hamilton, Iowa City, Berlin, Mexico City, Shanghai, Singapore, Waiuku and Beijing. He now lives once more in Canterbury.Oracles and Miracles, a runaway bestseller, became the first major novel by a living New Zealand writer to be published in China. Shanghai Boy, published in 2006, explores a tortuous love affair between a New Zealander and a Chinese young man in the immense city of Shanghai. ‘Age, no problem! Gender, no problem. Constellation, no problem. Body, sex, race, all no fucking problem. Feeling, you know! Feeling! That is everything.’ Other novels include The Siren Celia, Gardens of Fire, Blue Blood and Kaput!Stevan Eldred-Grigg is also well known for his history books. Phoney Wars, published in 2017, probes social life in New Zealand during the murderous years of the Second World War. The book also asks whether there was any need for the country to go to war anyway. Phoney Wars is the companion volume to The Great Wrong War, which deals with New Zealand in the First World War. The sincerity and the malice, the stubbornness and the yearnings of warring New Zealanders are central to both books. Quick, vivid, democratic and questioning, the two war histories have polarised readers. ‘We have been put on trial and found wanting,’ says one reviewer. ‘Eldred-Grigg would have us believe that Germany bore virtually no responsibility,’ says another. Angry readers have gone so far as to claim that the book is a disloyal attack on the people of New Zealand. Other history books by the author include: White Ghosts, Yellow Peril, a history of New Zealand and China from 1790 to 1950; People, People, People, a very short history of New Zealand; Diggers, Hatters and Whores, a history of the gold rushes in colonial New Zealand.David Hill, novelist, New Zealand: ‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He’s unsettling as well as absorbing’.Xiang Wei, literary critic, Shanghai: ‘Stevan writes with beautiful simplicity. His narrative is down to earth, yet often funny and witty.’Robert Jones, editor, New York: ‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a wonderful writer.’

Book preview

MY HISTORY,

I THINK

Stevan Eldred-Grigg

https://eldred-grigg.weebly.com/

Piwaiwaka Press

copyright 2020 Stevan Eldred-Grigg

ISBN 9780463182666

My History, I Think was first published by

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Auckland, 1994

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Contents

Chapter One: Are you there?

Chapter Two: Passe, passe

Chapter Three: Names, scenes, screens

Chapter Four: The old country

Chapter Five: Nothing to know

Chapter Six: Statistics of inequality

Chapter Seven: Ceci, c’est le chemin a Yate?

Chapter Eight: Claro!

Chapter Nine: At Reinhardt’s party

Chapter Ten: The new country

Chapter Eleven: Brand or clone?

About Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Connect with Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Chapter One

ARE YOU THERE?

I open the glass door with a small key. ‘Made in Italy,’ the key tells me. It is one of a bunch of stainless steel keys I carry with me always when I leave the house. Keys for the two cars. Keys for the front door, the back doors, and for two of the French doors that open onto the courtyard. I walk into the calm of a white and glass kitchen. The keys are a burden.

I let them drop. I often use keys as symbols in my stories. They fall — the keys, I mean, not the stories — onto a smooth surface next to one of the telephones. Things fall fast. The telephone is white. I dislike telephones. Things fall so fast. The telephone is the property of Telecom, of course, and charges are levied for its service.

‘Introducing Familiar Voices, from Clear,’ says a glossy pamphlet beside the telephone. ‘Clear Communications offer you Familiar Voices.’

An advertisement for an alternative toll service. I glance at the gloss, and consider accepting the offer.

‘Most of us have family or close friends living around the country or overseas,’ the pamphlet assures me. ‘Until now you may have felt that staying in touch with them by telephone has been expensive so you probably haven’t called as often as you would like. Until now. Familiar Voices is our way of bringing your favourite people closer. No matter the distance, we’ll bring your favourite people closer to you for less.’

A little red light blips at me from the white carapace of an answerphone connected, by a cord, to the smooth white case of the receiver, I, not Telecom, own the answerphone. The red light signifies that a message has been recorded and stored inside the answerphone. Telephones were black when I was a child. Black, except in the interior scenes of certain films, films for which critics had a name.

‘White telephone movies,’ the critics called them.

I wrote a novel, once, in which a red light repeatedly flashes.

A pilot light, I called it.

The light, I mean, not the novel.

Names matter. Words are almost all we have. I decide not to play the recorded message until later in the day, by which time, with luck, it will prove to be redundant. My arms hurt. I am clenching the plastic grips of six supermarket bags. I dislike shopping at the supermarket and try to turn it into an adventure by carrying as many plastic bags as possible from the car to the kitchen. The keys I carry between my teeth. The system is simplicity itself. I advance up the driveway on my return from the supermarket, I roll the car past the waxen arms of a five finger in a white tub, then press the remote control. The steel door lifts silently. I park the car, turn off the ignition, and once more press the remote control. The steel door slams shut. I pull the keys from the ignition, step across to the glass door which connects the garage with the interior of the house, and unlock. I put the keys between my teeth, step back to the car, then struggle to gather up the plastic bags — all bulging with parcels and packets and bottles— my aim being to set a new personal record for the number of bags I process at one time.

The important thing, of course, is not to make too many trips back and forth across the black slated surfaces between the garage and the kitchen. The tedium of those trips. I am not fond of travel. Worse, I hate travel endlessly repeated.

Not that I can complain of many things, or perhaps anything, in my life.

‘You don’t know you’re alive!’ my mother tells me.

Half a week’s worth of groceries soon slouch in their white plastic bags all over the bone-toned surfaces of the kitchen. I start to distribute the individual items. First, the cold things for the refrigerator. The refrigerator is white. Whiteware. I dislike whiteware, but I dislike it even more when it is not white. Dishwasher. Microwave oven. Two convection ovens. This is a point of interest, it is noteworthy that I as an adult, as a mature man, now know that I need to call such an appliance a ‘convection’ oven, when was a child the only name I knew was simply ‘oven’.

Which leads me to think of notes of unpublished novels burning on a domestic hearth, and fires filling the interior of a department store, and incinerators at Auschwitz.

I stow Stilton and Camembert inside a small plastic chamber.

The important thing is not to leave the kitchen until the groceries are unpacked. Not to walk across the black slates into the gallery. Not to stride over those black slates, not to advance through the gallery, not to see the big glass doors, transparent but weighty, which open onto the pink tiles and limestone walls of the courtyard. My task is not to look at the cypresses and the cordyline albertii of the courtyard, those costly young trees in their big pots of terracotta imported expensively from Italy. My purpose, also, is not to step across the tiles to touch the pleached hedge of hawthorn. Nor to pad into the parkland that surrounds our house, to admire its placid disposition of lawns, greensward, pleasance. Its specimen trees, its beeches and lindens and weeping willows, dipping softly into the river. I feel fond of the park. The park around our house is the sort of sight I have seen all my life, all my life I have seen weeping willows and lawns of green, dipping down to quiet rivers, the Avon, the Heathcote, the Styx.

The reason not to walk away from the kitchen is unrelated to what waits outside the windows. The reason not to walk away is that at the end of the gallery, where we have hung the painting by Cordeaux, is a door that opens into an office. The office is my office. It is a neat space furnished with nice things and affording a handsome view to the river. Inside the office, imprinted on the C drive of a computer on a wide rimu desk, waits an unfinished work of history.

I want not to consider that history.

My history, I think.

I have, at present, no intention of attending to that. The sacks from the supermarket are to be unpacked. I unpack them. Oranges and lemons. Courgettes, capsicums. Topside, a whole hunk of it, bleeding into a styrofoam tray. Fillet pork. Lamb. A focaccia baked by Bardelli. My young sons are fond of focaccia, Interesting that focaccia has become one of the appurtenances of the upmarket table, when what is it, after all?

A crude bread. A baked dough. Nothing much.

‘Rough thing from the oven.’

That’s what it -means, more or less, translated from the Italian. A phrase that reminds me of another phrase, a title, the name of a volume of fiction, a collection of short stories published by a careful but dead Canterbury writer, a colonial predecessor of mine. Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven.

The source of those stories? Blanche Baughan.

I blanch things often, in my white and glass kitchen. History. The unfinished history. A history I have to finish.

Shampoo, bath soap. The soap and shampoo are scented, innocuous. They need to be taken to the bathrooms upstairs. I start for the stairs. I feel peaceful. My shoes of soft leather, bought in the West End of London, skim over the black slates.

I see, through an open door, my office.

The unfinished history.

The mind, on these occasions, seems to work with unwonted — unwanted — speed. Rationalisations arise as vivid as those dreams dreamed just before waking. At any rate, during the second of time in which I look through that doorway, I see my office with its papers squared tidily on my big rimu desk. My mind has wandered. Instinct has taken me unconsciously towards the downstairs bathroom instead of the upstairs bathrooms, and I have as a consequence been compelled to observe my office. I see, with an almost leisurely shock, that my desk drawers are shut perfectly tight, that the papers and letters have not been disturbed at all since I rose from them an hour earlier, when I ceased writing and decided it was necessary to buy groceries at the supermarket. I tell myself, with a jerk, what I need to know.

You always come back to this. Nobody can tell the story but you.

My mind resembles the answerphone. Messages can be wiped, if I wish, but new callers will continue to ring, unsolicited sentences will continue to be recorded on the diligent little microcassettes which wait silently inside.

‘A story?’ says a character in one of my fictions, ‘The story of your life?’

‘The story of nothing,’ responds a second character. ‘My life is the story of nothing,’

My task is to tell the story, the story that I need to tell. Nobody else will tell it. Where and when, though, should such a story start? The story seems to touch on so many disconnected places, so many disembodied pasts.

‘The story of nothing,’ says the character. ‘My life is the story of nothing.’

Readers respond to a character. Characters respond to a reader. Characters, once created, tend to talk themselves into false prominence. I find it pleasant and easy to take advantage of this simple law of literature, allowing my power as narrator to hide itself behind chatty mouthpieces, characters who solicit fondness while my fist — muffled in its velvet glove of verbs — turns pages for the reader. Velvet is perhaps not the word. My hands are wrapped, lapped, enveloped by thin latex gloves of the sort worn by dentists, by surgeons, who cut and drill and slice and sew, delving inside their patients like lovers sheathed in Durex, tenderly confident that they will not infect, will not in turn be infected. The metaphor falters when I consider my partners in love, my patients, the characters of my stories. Characters are scarcely sedated, not at all. They are much more animated than their author. They twitch, while I slyly probe. Slyness is necessary for a writer. Writers can hide very nicely behind their characters.

I have hidden myself all my life.

I like to hide.

Not that concealment is inappropriate to my present purpose. The story I am trying to tell with this text is not to be turned into a novel, it is not to be a fiction, nor an autobiography — it is not the story of my life! The story I am trying to tell is the story of other lives. It is not the story of nothing. It is the story of something. I am working on an article which I plan to offer, when completed, to the New Zealand Journal of History for publication in what I hope will be the near future. The article concerns wealth and class in late colonial society. It focuses, more specifically, on the lives of the rich.

I step into my office. I consider the computer.

I scroll a text onto the screen.

The season of 1880 set new records for production on the great wool and grain growing estates of the southern provinces. The number of sheep in the colonial flock rose to almost twelve million. The weight of wool shorn for export reached almost seventy million imperial pounds. This vast weight of soft, oily wool was the golden fleece of the south. It had been stripped for more than a generation from the sheep of the pastoral provinces. It had been pressed, baled, trundled in drays from the plains and high country down to the ports, humped across the wharves and sent off to the factories of Europe. It paid for the furs and jewellery, the carriages and race horses, the claret and madeira of the landowners. It was the economic and moral basis of the aristocratic life of the great southern estates.

What was the future of that life? What were its prospects? What was the significance of its past?

Few landowners troubled themselves to ask. The sun, as it set that season, sent warm shafts of light into the porticoes and verandahs, bay windows and turrets of two or three hundred country mansions. Servants inside the drawing rooms of these mansions started to heap up the fires, piling logs onto the brass dogs, causing the scent of manuka and eucalyptus to mingle with the soft fumes of china tea, lavender and pomade. Gold and ormolu clocks tocked in the big echoing rooms, the big echoing houses. Hooves could be heard on a gravel drive. Louder the hooves sounded, and louder, until with a sudden burst of laughter young women banged through a front door, their cheeks pink from riding, their limbs taut with leather. A servant scuffled towards them. The young women threw their riding crops, their stiffened hats, their gloves, down with a clatter and a flop on the tiles of the hallway. Then, while the servant stooped, the young women strode past family portraits and alabaster statues into a dim room, where three or four more richly dressed women sat at tea.

‘Miss Acland, Miss Acton-Adams, how do you do?’

‘Mrs Westenra, and Lady Wilson, and Mrs Wynn-Williams, good afternoon to you.’

The women seated at ease inside these big houses belonged to the richest cohort ever to have lived in New Zealand. A circle of a few hundred landowners, a ‘limited number of individuals’ as one Nelson newspaper observed, had ‘acquired estates rivalling many German principalities in extent’. The wealth of the largest colonial landowners made them rich beyond the riches of any twentieth century millionaire. The colony was divided, as one writer unhappily commented, into ‘more large estates than even in England.’ Colonial land yielded enough for southern landowners to equal in wealth some of the noblest dynasties of the homeland.

‘Just up from town, Miss Acton-Adams?’

‘Yes, Lady Wilson, just up.’

‘You must tell us all the news, my dear. We are positively rusticated here.’

Landowners who travelled to Christchurch spoke of travelling ‘down’ to town. Their phrase for the return trip was ‘up country’. Life, for most people of position, was passed in this back and forth motion. Estates were a source of capital. Christchurch was the social capital. Christchurch, a city of wealth and of cool pleasure, epitomised civilised living. The mansions of the gentry and the rich merchants, the ‘gothic beauties’ of colleges and churches, the colonnaded banks and italianate ‘temples of commerce,’ the avenues, parks, squares and drawing rooms of the ‘Mayfair of the South’ seemed the attainment of an order both balanced and accomplished. No other city in the colony was ornamented with so many big houses, so many carriages or liveried servants. Landaus, barouches and broughams rolled out regularly from Park Terrace, Cranmer Square and along the ‘splendid road’ to Merivale, carrying the elite of the province in cushioned comfort to afternoon or evening engagements in ‘beautiful residences’ or to such public places of display as the polo grounds in Hagley Park or the lawn of the racecourse at Riccarton.

Polo was important. Racing was de rigueur. Landowners and their families were a sporty set. The Canterbury Jockey Club was the most exclusive conclave of breeders in the colony, and the events run at Riccarton every spring were ‘the outstanding races of New Zealand.’

Two great men dominated the colonial turf. The more aristocratic was the landowner James Dupre Lance of Horsley Down. The more successful was the ‘brusque, rather dogmatic’ merchant, George Gatenby Stead. Stead during the 1880 season raced his crack stallion Le Loup. Le Loup in the previous year had won for him the Victoria Handicap in Melbourne and now loped home with the Canterbury Cup, the Christchurch Plate, and the Canterbury Handicap. The stallion ran under yellow and black. The true name of his owner, concealed by the nom de course of ‘Mr Fraser’, offered a chance for delicious speculation. The crowds on the lawn loved Le Loup. Who was his secret proprietor, the fortunate one who scooped all the silver under cover of that nonsensical name? Was it one of the Dampier-Crossley scions, as some said? Or was it, as others whispered, Lady Clifford?

‘No lady would race in her own name,’ was the opinion of a conclave of gentlemen at the Christchurch Club. ‘A false name signifies a lady.’

The code of correctness, the pattern of conduct with which life was ciphered for landed families, seemed certain. Here, but not there. These, yet not those.

Seasons passed.

Certainty proved spurious.

The outlines of life started to alter, as life and its forms will always alter, and most of the novelties to which landowners of the southern provinces were exposed in the

Reviews for My History, I Think

[Hel Inn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A thought provoking book. I liked the way Stevan approaches history and life.