Smiling assassins.

Williams, Mark

Review of Great Sporting Moments, edited by Damien Wilkins (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006).

I used to be a Landfall editor. Nearly everyone was for a period in the late-1980s. My stint started in Christchurch in 1985 when I guest-edited a number while David Dowling was away. Hugh Lauder looked after the four guest editors that year and he and Michael Harlow and I used to go to a Hungarian restaurant near the Square and eat goulash while Hugh spoke earthily about Marxism and poetry and Michael affected a Yeatsian sublimity as he expounded the path of Jung. That was when I decided to pretend to become a Catholic again. It's a fine religion for amusing oneself among the believers.

The mid '80s were an undistinguished year for the country's oldest literary journal, still trailing the dull legacy of the 1970s when Landfall was boycotted after Robin Dudding's exit under pressure. Publishing in Landfall was no longer akin to scabbing, but neither was it embraced enthusiastically. I recall Wystan Curnow observing that it was where you went when you couldn't get into the Listener. It had even acquired the unflattering moniker Landfill. Yet it did sometimes sputter into life, and it was a place to publish work in a literary scene with too few outlets. Islands, And, Rambling Jack and Parallax had all flickered and expired by 1988. That paucity of alternatives coupled with state sponsorship and the support of the long-suffering Caxton Press kept the old journal reasonably serene. Then Sport arrived.

Damien Wilkins's account of the birth of Sport in his brief introduction to Great Sporting Moments coveys the threat that Sport posed to Landfall in 1988. Wilkins, Fergus Barrowman, Elizabeth Knox and Nigel Cox weren't just the new kids on the block, full of cocky self-confidence and pitiless contempt for the arthritic, elderly opposition. They were lethal. Barbara Anderson's phrase 'baby-faced killers' is precisely accurate: here was a literary putsch which aimed to bury Landfall, or what Landfall had become. Sport was taking on Landfalls traditional strengths--readable fiction, poetry and essays rather than its current weaknesses--academic articles, postcolonial theory and avant-garde writing--and it was better at the task than Landfall had been since Dudding's departure in 1971. Moreover, Sport's prime movers grinning on the back of issue one had a sense of common purpose Landfall lacked. Landfalls editors were responsible for discrete areas-fiction, poetry, reviews; Sport worked as a tight, confident and energetically malicious unit. Sport was young, disdainful, up with the play, and it had access to the growing body of exciting new writing issuing from Bill Manhire's creative writing class at Victoria. In the language of a year when economics was the dominant concern in New Zealand, Landfall was an over-valued company with scattered operations, run-down plant, declining profits, a lack of managerial cohesion, and a falling market-share; Sport was four youngsters (Cox a relatively elderly one) in a garage putting together a new IT venture.

Nearly two decades later Sport is in the position of market leader; Landfall has revived by modelling itself on its chief opposition so that it now publishes much the same range of writers that appear in Sport, having abandoned the coterie writing of the early 1990s. And what a reliable and consistent product Sport has been. Hence the unshakeable confidence of this anthology, which even the tongue-in-cheek title cannot deflate. Wilkins's selection of what he deems the best of Sport reflects no self-doubts and few worries about the unfairness of selection, the cruelty of culling. His introduction records no changes of direction, editorial differences, or earnest self-interrogation about the responsibilities of magazines to appropriately reflect literary or cultural difference (although he records Fergus Barrowman's concern in the early days of Sport that the manliness of the name was putting women writers off).

The crucial point of difference about Sport when it appeared was that it combined a magisterial belief in literary judgement with a subversive sense of humour, an instinct for the really new, and a love of the playfully idiosyncratic. Above all, it welcomed writing that was demanding without being obscure or wilfully difficult and engaging without letting the reader sink into the literary equivalent of what Roger Horrocks memorably compared to a 'warm bath'. Those included in Sport and now in Great Sporting Moments have survived what Dennis McEldowney calls 'an editor's limits of taste and tolerance' reflecting those values. The limits are tolerant enough to allow for vertiginous shifts of style and subject: Carl Shuker's account of three JET teachers wandering through Shibuya in a night of mushrooms and alcohol that recalls Malcolm Lowry's psychotropic Oaxaca; Bill Pearson's pale memories of his conscience-driven young manhood; Elizabeth Knox's atheist's interest in the flawed but splendid fictions of Christianity; and David Burton's gastronomic travels through Egypt. But the limits of that tolerance are also exhilaratingly savage in a literary culture afraid of the dramatic gesture. Among those not included are Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Patricia Grace, Robert Sullivan, Albert Wendt, Anne French, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott--it's a wickedly assured list.

These are big name writers of the period and one would expect the editor of an anthology that lives, as Wilkins reminds us, 'in the currents of its time' to be keen to represent them. There's a safety about names, and they help sell copies. But there is also a danger in taking work too easily from notable writers: if they don't fear the editor's judgement they don't send their best work. One of the strengths of Sport was the determination to judge the work rather than the prospective by-line and here one feels Wilkins's delight in discovering work by writers--Annora Gollop, Emma Lew, et al.--to whom he had paid insufficient attention. I guess the list of absences also indicates, apart from those cases where work was not submitted to the journal, a lack of interest in established kinds of literary performance over the period--biculturalism, AUP postmodernism, and the novel of experience.

Who's in, then? There are the names one would expect because they have become indissolubly associated with VUP: Bomholdt, Brown, Chidgey, Knox, Manhire, Wilkins, Camp, Anderson, Corballis, Cox. But most of these were not luminary when they first appeared in Sport. And some of the names in this collection are still sufficiently unknown that I needed to consult the bios at the end. Edmund Cake, I discovered, is a musician; Graham Bishop a retired geologist. Alongside pieces by Curnow, O'Sullivan and Stead, then, are works by those who write but don't necessarily think of themselves as 'writers' and those just starting out. No-one is here by virtue of reputation.

What, then, do the inclusions tell us about Wilkins's (and Sport's) editorial tolerance? Firstly, they display variety in spite of the charge of sameness levelled at VUP. There are different kinds of writing: biography, life writing, essays, poetry, fiction, and writing in which the kinds alternate or dissolve altogether. And within these slippery categories there are utterly discrete kinds of performance. What they have in common is chiefly an attention to ordinary language made to operate just outside its normal rules or codes of behaviour. And there is a very particular editorial preference: Wilkins favours writing, especially fiction, which resolves generalities into narrative situations that unsettle the reader by their often perverse particularity. He doesn't want us to reach back comfortably to our expectation that in such and such a situation people will respond in a given way. He doesn't admire stories that generate solutions to the problems of representation students are asked to address in essay topics for NZ Lit II. He dislikes the rhetoric of political writing that explains behaviours by reference to abstractions and he doesn't favour narrative manoeuvres that resolve into some easy recognition. In 'True tales from the fiction workshop,' an essay responding to Patrick Evans's criticisms of the Manhire 'School', he recounts advising a Maori woman writer, struggling to fictionalise a hikoi she had attended, to start with her observation that the women were expected to do the cooking: something particular and vivid that concentrated the contradictions in a heated political moment.

If this anthology were a museum it would correspond more closely to the interactive design consciousness of Te Papa than the Auckland Museum of my youth with its authoritative arrangements of exemplary artefacts and cultures each in their glass case. Utterly different verbal artefacts--Cliff Fell's weirdly funny tales of sexuality, Rhian Gallagher's wide-eyed child's narrative--are here placed side by side democratically and we are expected to negotiate our passages between them. Yet the analogy is not quite exact: Te Papa is both populist in that it makes minimal intellectual demands on its visitors and pompous in that it regards its cultural purposes with dreadful solemnity; Great Sporting Moments deftly deflates all pomposity and makes no discernible 'cultural' claims on us, but the interactions with the works offered to the reader are mined with difficulty; even James Brown's poems that mock the 'poetic' do so in terms that are cheekily literate. If one wants a just analogy perhaps the lino cutouts of Simon Ogden, a Christchurch artist Wilkins likes, will serve: they make use of a material of daily life so mundane we never notice it and they place it in a new context; yet they do so not randomly but with deliberate and exacting craft. Ogden wants to please his viewers but also make them work, and he expects knowledge of the traditions he works in and against. Wilkins seems to be after this capacity to surprise with the unsurprising and to make us suddenly focus on the particular and momentary arrangements of the everyday that refuse to be translated into wise truths or uplifting messages--nothing from the bargain basement here.

Does this collection work? It does to the extent that it isn't setting itself up as a national anthology. It doesn't make grand announcements about where New Zealand writing is heading. It reflects the taste of the journal it draws on and its no longer baby-faced editors. It is open to the world, including excellent pieces by Inga Clendinnen, August Kleinzahler, Les Murray and Fay Zwicky. In particular, it reflects over a decade and half of selecting writing to go in Sport and Wilkins's reselecting for this book. As such, Great Sporting Moments, without trying to be canonical, inevitably represents a considered position on contemporary writing and a cumulative body of judgements that have become identifiable as a school or style. I don't wish to take sides with Patrick Evans here, merely to observe that when people talk about VUP writing they have a clear sense of certain kinds of performance, linguistic habits, editorial preferences. They expect a difference in style from, say, Michele Leggott or Paula Green, and this expectation is generally confirmed. At this point, inevitably, Great Sporting Moments finds itself on a higher and perhaps more vulnerable rung on the generational chain than that occupied insouciantly by the not-yet-spectacular babies of 1988. How will Great Sporting Moments look to today's equivalent of the smiling assassins on the back cover of Sport 1, those with a caustic eye for the established, looking for the underlying paradigm shaping the specific performances of this celebrated achievement of NZ lit, alert to the sets of conventions operating in the poems and stories that get published in Sport, the points of predictability in any polished act that induce boredom?

In evaluating the process of judging that has produced this anthology I have to admit that it is stronger and more self-assured--more collected--than we managed at Landfall in the time I was associated with the journal. Even that eviscerator of local literary talent in Landfall's review columns, Iain Sharp, became unaccountably tolerant and kindly as soon as he became fiction editor. I recall Leigh Davis, just before my fateful year in Christchurch, making a series of statements about the established New Zealand writing of the day that employed startling metaphors of museums and technology (he claimed that Michael Harlow's poetry was marketing the wireless). And I recall a test of literary value applied at that time against name writers like Lauris Edmond which caused great offence: boredom.

How much of what is collected here might induce boredom in historically savvy young writers? In casting aside the lyric voice of the bohemian-romantic poet, the railings of Baxterian prophecy, the neat summation of the one-page Lauris Edmond special, has Sport generated a counter set of predictable performances? Overall, I found little sign of predictability, in the main because the collection is so biased towards writing that misbehaves cleverly rather than to that which behaves according to some established pattern. However, not all the work appealed equally. Glenn Colquhoun is obviously a poet that Wilkins values. He made the front cover of Sport and is generously represented here. I see why: he unpacks the tricks of literature, he avoids literariness, he has a direct and engaging voice, he insistently brings his reader back to the familiar. But once one has grasped the exercise there seems nowhere else to go. Compared to the poems here by Andrew Johnston or Manhire, Colquhoun seems like a brilliant over-explainer. There's a reservation in the poetry of the latter, an inaccessibility of the poet who seems so agreeably to be speaking to us, but isn't. That inviting voice that seems designed to put you at ease in their poems is also studied, removed, enigmatic precisely at the point of disclosure.

I also liked the inclusion of work by writers I don't identify as closely with VUP as, say, Knox, Wilkins or Bomholdt, because they come from other publishers or remain somehow vaguely unassimilated, writers like Bernadette Hall, Greg O'Brien, Fiona Farrell and Chris Orsman. I loved the bullying helpfulness of Rachel Bush's narrator in 'What People Want' that suggests negatively a list of narrative imperatives for the would-be writer. These offer distinct kinds of performance, and they also extend and complicate the total performance of Great Sporting Moments.

Geoff Cochrane is, for me, the least boring writer here. He's certainly not palatable or pleasing; his dissections of bodily functions and failings are so fastidiously exact that one flinches. But no-one is better at insinuating the lyrical into the charnel-house of the self-ruined body, sly beauty into corruption. The book is full of these small windows into excellence one wants to follow up: Tusiata Avia's 'Pa'u-stina', the erotically charged interior monologue of an outcast girl griping against the hypocrisy of the good citizens; Brian Turner's lovely turning of ecstatic landscape description to cattle 'grunting/as if trying to shove the mountains aside'; Chris Orsman's surreal play on philately; William Brandt's unhinged monologuist.