An Hour with CK Stead

Written by Rachel Ogier

I hadn’t planned on spending an hour in the life of CK Stead. I was idly eavesdropping on someone’s conversation at book club when they mentioned how much they were looking forward to this event at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival; I checked my programme; I went along.

The room was smaller and the décor more low-key than the other events I saw. Two of the same, stackable chairs that the audience sat on were set out for the speakers on a slightly tatty felted rug. Nevertheless, the room was packed and I heard later that 37 people were turned away.

Stead and the chair, Mac Jackson, were old friends and colleagues, and it showed in their rapport. Stead had published forty-two books, said Jackson, and only began his memoir, South-West of Eden because he had no compelling ideas for a new novel after My Name Was Judas was published in 2006.

South-West of Eden describes Stead’s early life in Auckland. The narrative is pleasingly contained geographically. Despite a wealth of New Zealand literature, as was clearly displayed at the festival, many of the books are set elsewhere, a kind of lingering cultural-cringe.

South-West of Eden, said Stead, “is as truthful as I could possibly make it.” Yet all memoirs are filtered though fallible memories. Memories can be altered simply by remembering them, or as they morph from reminiscence into a polished anecdote.

Perhaps it’s this process as well as Stead’s considerable skill as a writer which makes South-West of Eden so delightful. The passage Stead read was filled with a marvellous orchard of passion fruit vines, cox orange apples, lemon trees, guava bushes, tree tomatoes, “beans covering the netting fence” and black Orpington chickens in the hen house (“Black Orpington chickens!” said Jackson. “We had White Leghorns!”).

Jackson noted that “lives are lived in a particular historical period,” and much of Stead’s boyhood overlapped with World War Two. Stead described reading about the bombing of Hiroshima in the paper (it was the first time he had heard the word “atomic”) and feeling trepidation at the end of the war. “War had come to be the norm” and as a child he struggled to imagine peace.

His early life had a clear influence on his writing. The Stead home was political and musical, but not literary. Both Stead’s mother and father were involved in the Labour Party and Stead joined at the tender age of seven. Stead credited politics and the outdoor lifestyle as some early training as a writer. Politics, plants and animals are all bigger than a single ego and discourage introspection. This, along with an innate shyness which he claims he still hasn’t completely shaken, allowed and encouraged Stead to observe others. “You’re born with the potential but of course you have to work at it,” said Stead. “Reading, reading, reading, is what writers have to do.”

Stead noted he was conscious of the art of the storyteller at an early age - and could tell the difference between good and bad prose. He told the audience about one particular chapter in The Wind in the Willows which he had always struggled through as a child and could see as an adult was an uncharacteristic lapse into poor writing. Stead maintained that there is an innate aesthetic response to good writing, distinct from any social conditioning.

I think it was Jackson who gave the example of a bad poem they had been read at school. He recited: “Up the airy mountains,” to a united intake of breath from the audience, who all joined in. “Down the rushy Glen, We dare not go a-hunting, For fear of little men.” Google tells me that this poem is called The Fairies by William Allingham. A quick read tells me why it is no longer taught in schools (CLICK TO READ). Stead spoke disdain for another one of Allingham’s poems, Four Ducks on a Pond: “Four ducks on a pond/ A grass-bank beyond/ A blue sky of spring…”

By the time he reached Mt Albert Grammar, Stead was writing both poetry and fiction. Despite being scarred by Allingham, Stead enjoyed reading Wordsworth and was also influenced by the teacher of class 6A who told history as a narrative.

Stead described an Auckland which has since disappeared. Mt Eden, in Stead’s reminiscences, fades out in “scrub and caves and pools,” instead of into suburb after endless suburb. Still, it is a recognisable portrait of a New Zealand childhood. “It was very much an outdoor life.” It was the freedom that this environment allowed, Stead suggested, which helped to define him as a New Zealand writer and find a unique voice.

South-West of Eden is more than a literary memoir - it’s the story of growing up in a time and place. It charts how much Auckland has changed over Stead’s lifetime, but it seems it is largely left to the reader to decide what has stayed the same. “There’s a terrible tendency as you get older to say that things are changing - and they’re not only changing, they’re getting worse. But of course,” he added, “everything is getting worse.”

For better or worse, South-West of Eden is a wonderful memory of Auckland, told with humour rather than Allingham’s cloying sentimentality. Four Ducks on a Pond closes with the lines: “What a little thing/ To remember for years- /To remember with tears!” It’s the avoidance of lines like that which made my hour with C. K. Stead so enjoyable.