Moonshine Eggs

By Russell Haley

Moonshine Eggs is the third novel in a trilogy of works based around the whimsical and comedic character of Harry Rejekt. Inseparable from his dog and his inherited crumbling farmhouse, Harry dreams of worldly travel whilst rarely venturing out from the Waikato country town where he lives. Adventure and love, gypsy friends, a Japanese backpacker, and various eccentrics find him though, pottering about and nurturing the small plot of land he calls home.

 

"Haley uses his often very funny sentences to traverse and transgress the borders between the real and the imaginary. Moonshine Eggs deploys the best of Haley's highly original qualities." — Ian Wedde

 

"I love the way his fiction presents us with a different New Zealand." — Roger Horrocks

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Oct 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441950

Book preview

Moonshine_Eggs.jpg

Moonshine Eggs

Russell Haley

ISBN: 978-1-877441-95-0

©The Estate of Russell Haley 2017, 2020

This publication is copyright.

Any unauthorised act may incur criminal prosecution.

No resemblance to any person or persons living or dead is intended.

Cover design by Barry Read

1416 Kaiaua Road, Mangatangi

New Zealand

www.titus.co.nz

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

Contents

Introduction: ‘The Wild Swans at Karapiro’

ONE

A Painted Box Filled with Symbols

Wrestling with a Wardrobe

Vegetarian Sins

Long Legs in Autumn

Preparing for Takeoff

Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come

Marienbad

Lacunae

Coat of Confidence

Water Works

TWO

Orange Again

Falling Day

MANIA

Two Primary Colours Make Green

Dreams of a Hot Pool Surrounded by Bush

Harry has a Thin Day

Wingroad Childbirth

White Wood, Red Flowers

Convoluted Journeys

Harry’s Favourite Jersey

Lentil Loaf

Introduction: ‘The Wild Swans at Karapiro’

Harry pulled his polished manuka staff from the frozen soil

—Moonshine Eggs

when I awake some day/To find they have flown away

—W.B.Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’

Harry Rejekt, in Moonshine Eggs, looks out on at least fifty black swans in the shallows of Lake Karapiro and recalls an ancient belief that when a good poet died his or her soul was allowed to enter a living swan. Harry is not a poet, but he dreams of being one, and we can imagine him writing the antipodean version of W.B.Yeats’ poem ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ – ‘The Black Swans at Karapiro.’ A little later Harry is gazing from the roof of his cottage, which overlooks Karapiro, while engaged in trying to mend the guttering, and wonders whether Yeats ever made mistakes and forgot things. He visualizes the venerable Irish poet trotting down to the local village shop at Innisfree to replenish his supply of flat-head nails. Harry’s dreaming is a prelude to disaster. I won’t give the game away by saying what happens; the point is that things go wrong for Harry. Catastrophes, large and small, are the springboards for further imaginings and for resilient recoveries as we discover Harry eccentrically expanding his mental universe from a limited and restricted base in the physical one.

Russell Haley first created Harry Rejekt in the story sequence ‘A Spider-web Season’ (Hazard Press, 2000) that was published in a single volume with the re-issue of an earlier story sequence The Transfer Station (Nagare Press, 1989). The second Harry Rejekt book, Tomorrow Tastes Better (Harper Collins, 2001) was distinctly a novel and liberated Harry into the world of longer fiction. This new novel, Moonshine Eggs, is the third of the Harry Rejekt sagas; and it must be the last because, in July 2016, Russell died at his home in Whangarei, from a brain tumour. In the front of my copy of Tomorrow Tastes Better Russell hand-wrote: You begin/By imagining yourself (actually a quotation from my poem ‘The Word Go’). As a character, Harry is an imaginary cousin of his author. To an extent, he is Russell’s self-imagining. His initials, HR, are a deliberate inversion of Russell Haley’s own, RH. So, Harry is also the reverse of his author. Whereas Harry dreams of being a poet, Russell was a poet. Before he was a poet, he was a dramatist. And after he was a poet, he was a fiction writer. The character of Harry emerges from this lineage of drama, then poetry, then fiction (there were, of course, overlaps in this literary genealogy) as the embodiment of Russell Haley’s mature work, a comical, insightful, puzzled, tentative, curious, insignificant, imaginative being, whose whimsicality is oddly grounded by an improbable sanity.

Samuel Beckett was an important influence on Haley’s work, a writer he returned to again and again. Beckett began pottering in poetry, moved into fiction, then found fame and final fortune as a dramatist, almost a reversal of Haley’s pattern. And Harry Rejekt, as a character, is much less in extremis than one of Beckett’s broken tramps, trapped women or crawling cripples. Harry is firmly located in a society, in time and place, the south Waikato in Horahora, between Cambridge and Tirau. We can pretty much say that Moonshine Eggs is set in 2001, because Harry’s 2.5 TC Triumph, a 1976 model, is 25 years old. On the cover of Tomorrow Tastes Better the publishers ran the byline: Not since Barry Crump’s Sam Cash has there been a New Zealand character as enjoyable as Harry Rejekt. Harry is truly of the soil, a local lad who, in his 54 or 55 years, has never been outside his own country. Yet there is something about Harry that doesn’t quite fit; he’s off-key and out-of-kilter. I don’t know if Russell was a reader of Chekhov. Chekhov’s plays remind me of how Beckett’s might have been if the society had not been sucked out of them. There is something Chekhovian about the comedy, the happiness and the sadness, of Moonshine Eggs: the quiet rural backwater setting; the eccentric local population, affectionately, yet ruthlessly portrayed; the awkward relationships between men and women; also the way that the two halves of the novel are set respectively in autumn and spring, the seasons of ‘mood’ and change; and above all, the way the ‘story,’ such as it is, is driven by character, not by plot.

Haley’s fiction often mined the territory between the short story and the novel, not so much in terms of length, as in the way that short sections were linked together into sequences and unified by narrative viewpoint. The cover of The Sauna Bath Mysteries (Mandrake Root, 1978) draws attention to the mind of the obsessional narrator, and Real Illusions (New Directions/Victoria University Press, 1984) describes the stories in that book as a discontinuous narrative which seeks at every point for continuities and The Transfer Station announces a series of stories, linked by a common theme. Before these, the two poetry books, The Walled Garden (Mandrake Root, 1972) and On the Fault Line (Hawk Press, 1977) were each titled from the sequences of poems that they contained. The sequence, the linked series, the whole composed of thematically integrated parts or pieces held together by the mind of the narrator – all these intermediate forms were characteristic of Haley’s work. They allowed for a formal tension between the ‘moment’ of the short story or poem and the longer narrative of a novel or play (in which different ‘acts’ are placed one after another). And the three Harry Rejekt books enact this formal relationship amongst each other. This formal tension is evident in Moonshine Eggs. Harry’s faltering attempts to create a narrative of his life are broken by moments – of despair, of hope, of reversal of fortune, of wild planning, and also the sublime: Harry knew this was one of those special moments in life. You could sense your own invisible antenna have locked on some soundless harmonic chord whose waves are pulsing out of the universe itself.

Harry’s problem – and it’s something many of us might recognize as our own – is how to make these moments link up into a meaningful sequence or series or narrative. And Harry is often captured by the realization that the narrative making that he performs (that each of us does), is full of nothing but absurdity – and that alongside us there are creatures (dogs, swans, birds, hedgehogs, possums, whales), who are our living companions, and who are living without story, narrative or meaningful sequence, and are simply creatures of being and nothing else. Harry’s constant companion, Sako, the dog he rescued from the roadside as a puppy, is there to remind Harry of this other world. Harry longs to see himself in his own narrative, because he is aware that you never actually knew how you looked, when you weren’t staring into a shaving mirror. Harry dreams of a Heath Robinson offset mirror device – a selfoscope as he calls it – that would allow one to see oneself. He cogitates on Robert Burns’ line To see oursels as others see us. Of course one way of achieving this ‘seeing’ is to write; writing can function as an existential mirror for humans to see themselves. The constant presence of writers in Moonshine Eggs is one of the book’s strategies. A woman comes into Joseph Bartleby’s second-hand shop, when Harry is working there, and wants to buy the Katherine Mansfield book. We don’t need to know that one of Mansfield’s plans, just before she died, was to write a kind of serial novel; nevertheless we can’t help being aware that writers are engaged in a desperate, yet slapstick pursuit of existence. The writing itself, in Moonshine Eggs, comes to be an allegory of Harry’s existence.

Harry has many dreams, but his most challenging one is to find a woman companion with whom he can share his love of poetry. At the beginning of Moonshine Eggs, Harry is hopeful that Shelly Nairne, who has named her house in Te Aroha ‘Ozymandias’ after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, will be the one. Shelly Nairne first appears at the end of Tomorrow Tastes Better, so the two books are closely linked in time. Shelley was the English Romantic poet who wrote tracts promoting vegetarianism (caring about that non-narrative world in which animals live) as well as poems attacking the iniquities of the establishment. Though Harry is, in some ways, the classic isolate Kiwi Male, yet his love of poetry, and the way that language (Shelly and Shelley) runs his life, place him apart from this cultural type. But getting Shelly together with Shelley proves to be fanciful and unrealistic for Harry. Wiktionary defines the phrase ‘eggs in moonshine’ as any ‘fanciful notion’ or ‘unrealistic concept.’ So Moonshine Eggs, as a title, refers to the gap between Harry’s mind and the world it engages with. The delight, the comedy, and the pathos of this short novel, are derived from the many incidents that happen in that gap.

And ‘Moonshine Eggs’ also refers to an actual recipe. It is first found in a sixteenth century cookbook, A Proper Newe Book of Cokerye, and proposes boiling rosewater and sugar and then immersing eight or nine fresh egg yolks in this liquid until they harden a little, at which point they may be served with sprinklings of sugar and cinnamon. This is what Harry’s gypsy friend Roman Snezka cooks up for him in the camping ground in Te Aroha. Harry himself has Roma ancestry, via great-grandmother Saskia Rejekt from Havlickuv in what would then have been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic. The classic Kiwi Male turns out to have an exotic lineage.

Russell Haley began working on Moonshine Eggs in 2009. He returned to it regularly over the next few years. The last changes he made were in December 2015. The writing is full of care and attention, the world it evokes is brought to life with love and affection. And often our attention is drawn to the perilous state of that world, because of the way that humans have treated it. Russell cared passionately about these iniquities. Yet a sense of comedy and the absurd was never far from his way of looking and seeing. It was not for nothing that Ian Wedde described Russell as the funniest man he had ever known at the gathering in Whangarei to celebrate Russell’s life, after he had died. Comedy, absurdity, and serious social action were wont to form into an entertaining recipe in his life. In 1985 I was in Russell’s car and we were driving on a Saturday morning from Auckland to Whangarei. We were heading for a protest outside a rugby game, a protest aimed at stopping the planned 1985 All Black tour of South Africa (which was cancelled not long after). As we drove through Dome Valley, Russell pointed to the large satellite dish up the valley to our right. In a moment worthy of one of Harry Rejekt’s moonshine-egg plans (though Harry had not been invented yet), Russell said, If we had a .303 rifle we could stop and shoot out the centre of the transmitting dish and they wouldn’t be able to broadcast the game this afternoon. I was just thinking, I hope he doesn’t have a rifle in the boot, when we heard a siren behind us and saw, in the rear-vision, a plain-clothes cop car signaling us to stop. The cops knew very well where we were headed and why. We had to get out and open the boot. They rummaged around, but failed to come up with a gun. We were clearly a disappointment to them. That moment gave me a sense of what it might be like to be Harry. After all, we were only trying to do our duty as concerned citizens and they didn’t seem pleased at all.

Harry has a polished manuka staff which he uses when he walks around his small plot of land, his little Isle of Innisfree. These manuka staffs or sticks make an appearance in The Transfer Station (one of the hardest and most enduring walking sticks you can get), where a whole chapter (‘Lupins’) is devoted to them; then in ‘A Spider-web Season’ such a stick is described as intensely pleasing and is said to carry with it an aura; and in Tomorrow Tastes Better, Harry instructs himself to take a walking stick made from manuka when he dreams of making his ever-deferred trip to Machu Picchu. What is the significance of these manuka staffs, which inhabit all these works? I suggest that they mark a kind of belonging, to the place, to the land, to the lake and the air and the clouds and the animals and birds and the rain and the plants and trees: simple, straight, polished, enduring, intensely pleasing, with an aura, belonging to this place, but also to use for wandering the whole earth. And I suggest that the writing in Moonshine Eggs has this same mix of characteristics and qualities.

—Murray Edmond, October 2016

ONE

A Painted Box Filled with Symbols

Harry Rejekt listened to his friend but he found it hard to pay proper attention to Joseph. Somehow he couldn’t get a clear focus on what Bartleby was saying. Harry’s mind drifted. Look at his mouth, he thought. Try to lip-read. But it was too difficult. Joseph’s lips hardly moved at all. He was a habitual mumbler. It was a little like being at a party where you only catch every other word of the person you are with because another nearby guest is saying something completely fascinating. You feel your ears stretching up like a hare’s. They’re talking about the origins of the universe. Or they’ve just returned from Machu Picchu that Pablo Neruda always spelt with double ‘c’s in both words and they’re wearing a thick, colourful hand-woven alpaca-wool cape and a green bowler hat. Except there was no party – just the two of them, Harry and Joseph, in the back room of Bartleby’s shop, the Antique and Opportunity Store in Tirau, New Zealand. Well, three if you counted Harry’s dog. And Sako was fast asleep in his favourite corduroy chair.

‘You haven’t heard a thing I’ve been saying.’ Joseph Bartleby scowled fiercely at Harry Rejekt. ‘Go on! Did one single word penetrate?’

‘Ah,’ Harry murmured. ‘Sorry, I was ....’

‘I know, I know.’ Bartleby drank his tea noisily. ‘Away with the fabulous fairies as usual.’

The trouble was – Harry had just recalled a vivid dream from last night. Saskia Rejekt, Harry’s Gypsy great-grandmother, sat astride Tsigan, her horse, outside his bedroom window up there on his small block of land above Lake Karapiro. She gazed at Harry very oddly, as though she were trying to work out who this strange man could be. And he saw himself lying flat on his back, fully clothed in a shabby black suit. He was asleep on his own bed with his eyes slitted open like a dreaming dog’s. Then the mare breathed out through her soft nostrils and the glass panes completely fogged over. Saskia and Tsigan disappeared. So did Harry.

Now what could something like that mean? Horses often represented the instincts, powerful unconscious forces. Sigmund Freud’s pet starling could have told you that if he’d had one. But surely Harry’s great-grandmother wasn’t standing in for anything or anyone other than herself. Was she?

‘I know – you’re thinking about this new girlfriend of yours, eh? What’s her name?’

‘Shelly,’ Harry said. ‘Shelly Nairne. No penultimate ‘e’ on her first name. Nor on her surname for that matter.’

Bartleby sighed elaborately and stared at Harry’s nose.

‘But I wouldn’t say she’s a girlfriend. I mean we’re not ... and you can’t call a mature woman a girl.’

Was there something wrong with his proboscis? A bogey perched on the tip perhaps. Harry drew the palm of his hand all the way down his face from his forehead. Nothing untoward there.

Joseph groaned for no apparent reason at all and sucked at his hot tea.

‘All right,’ Bartleby said carefully. ‘Lady ... woman ... sheila. But go on – she’s got to you hasn’t she? Befuddled by a spunky redhead from Te Aroha. Whenever you think about this Shelly with no second to last ‘e’, Ms Meringue Pie, your eyes go foggy and you look as though you’re going to dribble.’

Harry shook his head. He hated the word ‘spunky’. How on earth could a grey and blobby adolescent word like that have got into common usage? Harry pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and pretended to blow his nose – his second line of defence against embarrassing blebs of snot. And he furtively dabbed at his lips just in case they were a bit ... what? Well, if they were moist it was only because he was drinking his cup of tea.

‘And you reckon you’re not engaging in erotic contortions yet?’

‘We’ve avoided rushing into anything,’ Harry said. ‘We’re definitely not being precipitous.’

The truth was – he and Shelly had only met twice. The first time in a pub in Thames on Saint Patrick’s day and they had gone to the movies once in Hamilton. But they had exchanged a number of notes. And, yes, they’d talked on the telephone when he looked after the shop on a Thursday or Friday afternoon. But he was being careful not to let Joseph know more than was necessary about his private and personal life. His friend was a merciless teaser.

Bartleby breathed heavily in disbelief and eased his massive haunches away from the sofa’s leather covering. The springs were definitely under strain and the upholstery made deeply suspicious noises.

‘They’re the same as Spanish women, though. All that whirling around, skirts flying, hammering their heels on the dance floor. Everyone knows what that means.’

‘Who?’ Harry had lost the thread. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Carrot tops. Scarlet-haired women. Ginger nuts.’ Bartleby yawned. ‘Have you ever read Simenon? The French