Paul Millar: No Fretful Sleeper

Written by Rachel Ogier

Paul Millar: No Fretful Sleeper Chaired by Peter Wells

One of the wonderful things about the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival (and Auckland Triennial and the public library, come to that) is the opportunity to learn about something new as well the opportunity to get to know a favourite writer a little better.

It was with this intention I attended Midcentury Gothic, chaired by Peter Wells.co-founder of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.  The discussion centres on Bill Pearson, an “almost forgotten son of Aotearoa”, who is celebrated in Paul Millar’s biography, No Fretful Sleeper.  I had never heard of either of them.

Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist is perhaps Pearson’s most famous work. The essay describes midcentury New Zealand’s conformity and what it meant for those who lived here then.

I quickly learned that Pearson wrote 1963’s Coal Flat, which was received as one of the most important novels of the time. (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-PeaCoal.html).  Coal Flat was written largely in London, but Pearson lived for most of his life in Auckland.  Despite Coal Flat being well received, Pearson never wrote any more fiction.

Pearson felt closeted by “society’s attitude to homosexuality”.  His sexuality was a “secret he guarded fiercely“.  In the 1950s, homosexuality was a crime, and homosexuals were “sinners destined for hell".  Being openly gay meant risking jail time, but most of all Pearson “feared exposure and humiliation before his peers”.  The result was a stifled creative mind, and New Zealand lost a wealth of potential literature.

But the talk wasn’t just about Bill Pearson, it was also about Paul Millar, the author of No Fretful Sleeper.

Pearson wrote Millar handwritten letters on good quality paper.  Their correspondence was rather literary and included discussions of James K Baxter.  When Pearson was told he had “a terminal prognosis“, Millar suggested a biography and Pearson agreed.  A face-to-face meeting followed, as did a series of fortnightly telephone interviews, supplemented by still more letters.  Pearson seemed to relish this chance to set the record straight, yet “there were certainly things he was coy about“.  The chair, Peter Wells, asked: “Were you reinventing him, or was he reinventing himself?”  Millar said that “I think Bill would have been both pleased and horrified with what I’ve turned up”.  He uncovered many of the real places and some of the real people which Pearson fictionalised in Coal Flat.

Millar confessed: “I thought Bill would be an easy leg into the biography world… But [the book] turned out so much more complex and interesting than I could have imagined”.

No Fretful Sleeper is about the “conflict of a man having to have two faces”; one which he can show in public, and one which must be kept hidden.  Pearson loved the homosociality of the army (he served in the Second World War), and worked hard to be able to pass as “heteronormal”.  If there were any “queer areas” in midcentury Auckland, Pearson avoided them.

Wells pointed out that despite living in Auckland for most of his life there was “something quintessentially South Island about Bill Pearson“.  Auckland, explained Millar, “was a refuge” from the family he had little contact with.  As his siblings partnered and married, Pearson felt there his bachelor status would raise suspicions.

Although Pearson was a political activist and decidedly left wing at the time, the left was not comfortable with homosexuality.  It was seen as a “sport of decadence” and “not a part of the worker’s struggle“ Wells pointed out.

No Fretful Sleeper is more than a biography: it is also a reminder that New Zealand was once, in the name of decency, a “puritan straitjacket” to the detriment of all New Zealanders.  The legacy of these attitudes means a poorer literary landscape than we might have otherwise enjoyed.