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Sport 34: Winter 2006

Nigel Cox interviewed by Damien Wilkins

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Nigel Cox interviewed by Damien Wilkins

Nigel has been a friend for almost twenty years. He is also married to my favourite cousin. Their daughter and our elder daughter have grown up together. Naturally this all suggests immense good taste—in friends, cousins, daughters. In books too. I first met Nigel behind the counter of Unity Books, where his verdicts carried the necessary balance of sense and mischief. Who can forget that portrait of Alan Preston, his boss at Unity, with his 'trouser-coloured trousers'? We're so used to the winding, casual speech of Nigel's prose that we sometimes overlook the compressed poetry of certain phrases, and the craft. The indelible opening of Tarzan Presley should be taught in rhetoric classes. It's one of the prettiest pieces of persuasion in our literature:

He's human, he's born, so we have to agree that somewhere back in there he had a mother. Tarzan always wanted to have a mother, it was a big thing with him. Somewhere back there he was fed by a mother. Breast-fed. I can see him, and I think the picture is a reasonable one, lying along his mother's arm, with her nipple in his mouth. Now that is a very intimate moment of contact and I think every human likes to think they had it, once, even if no one can remember it. Whenever I've seen babies at the breast they always look extraordinarily contented, gazing up at the elements of colour and light above them, immense shapes, a great statue's face seen from below—but the statue is warm, it breathes. The rising cliff of brow, and the cloud of hair which frames the face, with the blue sky behind, and real clouds going past. The face of an angel against the sky. I suspect that Tarzan's mother may have had black hair.

I always laugh when I read that 'reasonable'. And I'm always surprised at how this paragraph swells and ripens in front of us, just as—well, yes—just as the breast grows from the nipple to the warm, breathing page 4statue of the body to which it belongs and out to the sky and the clouds. Wonderfully, the reader's eye is drawn up at the same rate as the baby's until we're looking at this angel above us too. Whatever's kitschy and hammy—Tarzan's mother?—is not forgotten in this lifting but rather accepted and given a curiously affecting life. This is talk raised to the level of art.

The talk that comes from Nigel's mouth is similarly addictive, generous and surprising.

This interview, perhaps more than most, is a sort of pretend occasion. I mean friends don't normally arrange their conversations into such a pattern: 'Tell me about your childhood.' However, I'm very glad we did pretend since Nigel's replies suggested areas of experience that our friendship hadn't traversed—and might never have but for this formal setting. I learned a lot of stuff. I should add that at no point did Nigel 'submit' to the process. He was keen to do it. He was ready to talk. He has little of the writer's wariness at being prodded and poked. At a certain point in his life he decided to say 'yes'—a big yes, I think. Yes to this interview. Yes to the requests to be a public person. But also a more private yes. Yes to a set of desires that at first blush seemed a bit risky, which appeared even antithetical to the idea of the Important New Zealand Writer. Yes to aliens, to Elvis, to thrillers and westerns, to fable and fantasy. The extract from his novel-in-progress, which follows here, is about cowboys. Of course. This has become Nigel Cox territory. His imagination now throws a long lasso. And there's never any special pleading on behalf of neglected forms, nothing of the cultural theorist's remote interest or the satirist's queasy attention. His work is whole-hearted and meant and it lives in these places because he lives there. The fictions come with naturalness, the fan's infectious relish, but also—because this writer knows his Saul Bellow as well as his Charles Willeford—with canniness and calculation and a palpable pleasure in their own making. The books that have flowed from such a vivid embrace are singular and essential works in our writing.

On the night of the interview in late January, I arrived at the Cox household—a rented beachfront cottage in Seatoun—at the agreed time. Nigel wasn't home. He arrived shortly after, wearing slippers and pyjamas—he'd been down the road at his GP's. More consultation,page 5 more drugs. He changed into clothes for our session, mainly because I'd bought along a digital camera to record proceedings. There's a DVD copy of the interview, where the evening light fades as we talk. The film is the truest account of our 90-minute conversation. One day copies might float up somewhere.

In the face of Nigel's pitiless illness, this was an amazing performance. Barbara Anderson said to me recently that she got furious when people suggested there was no such thing as heroism. Yes.

The text published here has been fiddled with a little, to eliminate repetition and re-gather the occasional lost thought. Nigel has declared himself happy enough with it, though he wonders whether anyone will be particularly interested in the level of detail. He said to me, 'Won't they go, "Who is this guy?"' I think they will say that, since Nigel's work, despite recent success, remains a little invisible. It's Nigel's argument—a rare moment of despair—that books don't matter in our culture any more. My feeling is that anyone reading what follows will be prompted to prove him wrong. After all, Nigel's own resilience, courage and imaginative daring are themselves the strongest arguments in favour of preserving what he loves most and what, with good reason, he fears we don't love enough.

DW:

Let's start with the writer's idyllic childhood in Lower Hutt. Do you have a theory about Lower Hutt, and particularly Hutt Valley High, producing writers? We know the list: you, Lloyd Jones, Jenny Bornholdt, me. In the original Author's Note to Dirty Work you seem to be making a point about this—seeking revenge maybe? It says 'not educated' at Hutt Valley High.

NC:

That's true, but it was meant to be a bit of a joke. However, in the way Bob Ross, the publisher, wrote it up it came out as a flat joke. I wanted him just to say Nigel Cox was born here, and lived here and was not educated at Hutt Valley High School and he turned it into, 'He claims he was not educated', but I didn't see that until the book came out. I didn't have a happy time at Hutt High. At that time the school was very, very authoritarian and wrapped up in rugby and those sorts of things. For example,page 6 the rugby team got beaten every week which was a shame to the whole school and nation and the headmaster would sternly read out the results, but I was in the hockey team and we won every week but this would not get read out in assembly because it was a poofter's game and so there was that, and there was a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, not that I think I am a great intellectual, but there was a lack of interest in the arts generally and anything like that. It was a sort of sausage factory school.

DW:

So you think at that stage you were heading towards the arts, even then?

NC:

I was completely interested in all that. The only idea I ever had to do with myself was to be a writer. It wasn't an idea that was very intelligently held. I didn't know how to be a writer and I didn't set about learning how to be a writer either.

DW:

Where do you think that idea came from? In your 'Boys on Islands' essay (Sport 3) you talk of getting obsessed with adventure stories—The Coral Island, Peter Pan. Were you connecting with those books purely in terms of story and escape or as a kind of appealing literary life? Were you the boy in the story or the writer of the story?

NC:

There are two things. It was story and escape and adventure and I've always been interested in escapism. I think if there's a theme in all my books it's escapism and the problematic side of that is that it has to be a serious escape or a real escape and I keep causing problems for the escape but I do think that if there's a theme in the books that's what they are about—escapism. You could argue that that is all about wanting to get away from rural New Zealand, or wanting to get away from my family, or wanting to get away from the Hutt Valley or something, but that's there. I also had an idea of the glamorous writer's life, and the first writer I really knew about was Hemingway. My parents had a very good library, as a lot of parents did, of school prize books. They are little books, perhaps six inches tall, and we had those. I read them all. Moby Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Black Beauty, Treasure Island page 7 and so forth—all of what I would call the light classics. I read all of those as a kid but there was nothing about an author in there. Then Dad gave me, when I was about 11, The Old Man and the Sea in that classic edition with the woodcuts in it and I read that, and then he gave me, not long after, For Whom the Bell Tolls. That was a real book. The first real modern adult book I read was Lord of the Flies—but the Hemingway book, I could see there was a kind of myth in there and it attracted me. Even though I was only a kid I felt there was a connection between Robert Jordan who is the hero of the novel and Hemingway who is the writer of the novel. You were supposed to get that. I knew that then and he was a figure I thought it would be good to be. This guy who is wealthy and famous and is out there living on the edge. Secondly I suppose I thought I could do it, be a writer. I had this idea I could do it.

DW:

Were you writing at this stage? Were you more attached to language than other kids?

NC:

I guess. For example I was much more interested in the words of pop songs than other kids I knew. We all liked pop songs but I was interested in the words. Also I had, when I was younger, seven or eight or nine, told people I was going to be a writer. I don't exactly know why I had told them. I had this in my mind's eye and it wasn't until a bit later on that I started figuring out what that might mean, but it was an idea.

DW:

That connection you saw between the author Hemingway and the character—which suggests the book is somehow always about the writer—is quite a sophisticated take for a young reader. But I was wondering how that works with your theme of escapism? You're suggesting the book is a means or a tool for getting out of your life, but that it's also a tool for reflecting on your life?

NC:

That's the problem I was talking about. I think that as a young guy growing up I had a very, very negative self-image, like many others, and I never ever thought I was going to do anything. The whole thing of being a writer was at one remove. It was an page 8escape, it was a fantasy, it was something that would happen to another person, or another version of me, and when I actually sat down—I think I was about 16—and started to write a novel I was shocked that I was doing it.

DW:

Was it a dirty secret or was it an open secret? Did you tell your mother?

NC:

The family knew because it was a loud old typewriter, with a ding at the end of the line. But I didn't tell kids at school and that is partly because I had a couple of experiences that warned me off it. One was much later, but one was earlier on. We had a very good teacher when I was in Standard 3 and 4, Mr Parkin, English, and he really tried to teach us and I can remember a lot of specific things he taught us but at one point he did this strange exercise. He said, you know boys and girls you are all going to grow up one day and so you should be thinking about what you are going to be. And he started in the far corner of the class and everyone said what they were going to be. One boy was going to be a jockey, one girl was going to be an actress, and all that sort of stuff and he gave a little smirk every now and then when some who were not such bright stars decided they were going to be something great. I was quite near the end of the class and I was quite self-conscious about this moment coming up but I knew exactly what I was going to say, and I was proud of it too. He came round to me and he said 'Cox', and I said I'm going to be an author, and it was the only negative reaction—an actual 'No'—that he gave in the whole class. He said, 'Don't be silly Cox, people can't be authors, you have to be something proper.' These words are carved in my mind and I said, 'All right I'll be a teacher then', because my father was a teacher and I had vaguely thought about that but it seemed potentially boring. There was another incident when I was about 20 and I was playing for the Northern United Hockey Club and we had played a game. In the changing rooms afterwards the captain, who was a bit of a jerk, suddenly said, 'Hey you guys, did you know Nigel Cox writes books!', and to this day I don't know how he could have found out. I must have told someone who told someone—this page 9was long before I had written a book that anyone might have published—but there was that around and I was aware that it wasn't something you walked around with a banner saying, 'I'm a writer', the way people might today.

DW:

You mention the hockey, which you played through college and beyond to representative level, and there is that suspicion that good with words is sometimes a synonym for bad at sports—that the two things—athleticism and bookishness—are separate forever, but this wasn't the case with you. You weren't with the rugby crowd but you were this good hockey player, you played tennis, you were a physical guy. Tall and athletic…

NC:

Up to a point. Skinny. It's true, I was sporty, absolutely…

DW:

So you weren't the kind of nerdy weed who—

NC:

Oh, I was nerdy. I was very nerdy. I was a sort of bedroom obsessive, and what I was obsessed about were things like writing, and pop music especially. I was very wrapped up in the magic of the world of pop music. It was like magic, it was the right season for it, we're talking about 1967 when pop music really believed it was something but I was like that and I had arty aspirations, except that I didn't know how to have an arty aspiration.

DW:

Did you have friends who were into the same things?

NC:

I had friends but I didn't have friends who were obsessed with the inner life of pop music. I didn't know anybody who was really interested in that although I had a girlfriend and she was interested in that and we used to talk about it a lot but there were a couple of interesting people at Hutt High: Cathy Wylie, who was dux, and Malcolm McAlister, and they edited a magazine called something like Puke, something quite offensive and they were only allowed to publish two editions and the school stopped them, and then they wrote a play together called Drop. Later I realised it was about dropping acid—whether they had actually dropped acid I wouldn't know but that was put on as the school play one year. I used to talk to them a bit but there wasn't really page 10an arty crowd at Hutt High at that time and if there was I don't know if I would have been part of it.

DW:

When I was growing up in the Hutt in the 70s, there wasn't a lot going on. You caught the train into town, into Wellington, and suddenly the world just opened out. I imagine it would be the same for you?

NC:

No, it wasn't actually the same because there was a whole lot of pop activity in the Hutt. The Lower Hutt Town Hall ran dances called Dancelands and people from Wellington would come out to see The Lost Souls and Bari and the Breakaways and a whole lot of early pop groups and I would go along. And it was so strange on a Sunday afternoon because it was dark in the hall and you'd go in from the light and there would be girls dancing round their handbags on the floor, and wallflowers like me standing watching the band. Then there was a nightclub called The Kryptos which was under a church in Lower Hutt and they had quite good people there and my band played there once. There was a little scene in the Hutt. There were a couple of good groups based in the Hutt, one called the Soul Sect and also the Roadrunners which had a guitar player called Chaz Burke-Kennedy who went to Hutt High and he was later in the Underdogs and was a real musician. It was only when I got to be 18 or 19 when I started coming into town to go to the psychedelic places because in the Hutt it had always been pop music, pure-as pop whereas the next thing was people with long hair and the druggie culture.

DW:

What was the story with your band? You've jumped from this kid in his bedroom listening to pop music by himself to being in a band.

NC:

That was very strange. There was a series of events in my life when I kind of went, 'Pinch me, I'm doing this.' That was one of them. The guy who ran the school band approached me. It was a trumpet playing band, a Herb Alpert sort of band, and he was a musician, Mark Hornibrook, and later on he played in Blerta and then with Rodger Fox and he approached me and page 11said would I like to sing some songs. So I got up, amazed to find myself there because I was a super out of tune singer, and sang 'Bonnie and Clyde' and a few things like that. I don't know why he approached me but one of the things that happened within the Herb Alpert band, there was a good guitar player, a guy called Mark Te One, and he and I decided to form a sort of pop group, a splinter group to the school band, and we became for a while the Hutt Valley High School band and played at school dances. We played Yardbirds songs and Rolling Stones songs. I was the singer, a terrible singer. Then we played a couple of little gigs at other places. We practised in my garage and it was one of those events when I found out I had crossed over from dreaming about it, to doing it, even though I knew I wasn't doing it well.

DW:

Did your life change? Did you pull chicks and all that sort of stuff?

NC:

Unfortunately not. That was the plan of course! Actually at that point I did have a girlfriend. I was also a singer who sang and I didn't know how to be a pop person who danced, who had a style. The other pop people who sang were culture stars.

DW:

Were you writing your own material?

NC:

I wrote some songs. We never played them but I did write some songs. There was a guy called Clinton Brown who was in a little band called Society which was a big Hutt Valley group and then went on to be in Rocking Horse and then the Warratahs, and I went round to his place a couple of times with my little songs and he played the guitar and suddenly it all sounded good.

DW:

Your father was working in the Education Department at this stage, the Head of the Curriculum Development Unit, and from what I know of him he was very much a person who believed in advancement through education. He'd taken you off to the States to further his own education. Now that wasn't the path you chose. For someone who is interested in language, interested in books, arts, etc—you would think the obvious place to go would be to university, especially in that period?

page 12
1969: Hockey player (back row, second from left) and singer in the band

1969: Hockey player (back row, second from left) and singer in the band

page 13 NC:

What happened was I spent three years in the 6th form. I was a reasonably intelligent sort of student, and I did okay in School C, but by the time I got through that I was so fantastically distracted from trying to do any work at school because of the music and the sport and everything else. I was a rather obsessive teenager and still am but at that time I was completely obsessed about trying to be a really good hockey player and trying to become a pop musician, just starting to work at trying to be a writer, and all the things that interested me, reading and so forth, and school just didn't interest me. I was completely disconnected, and so I spent three years in the 6th form, which was a humiliation and a school record (probably a world record). People who had been a year below me were now a year ahead of me. Finally they gave me UE to get me out of the school, I think.

DW:

What did your father make of this?

NC:

He had pushed me very hard and I know he felt regretful about this afterwards. He had pushed me very hard into the subjects he was interested in so I finished up in the first year in the 6th form doing mathematics and a whole lot of technical subjects which were absolutely not my forte so what happened was, I was near top of the class in English and bottom of the class in everything else. Then he said all right, that was a failure, so the next year he said you have done it once so you must get it right this year, so I did it all again and failed again. That caused a revolution in our house. He had to face it that this just wasn't working and so for the final year I did a completely new set of subjects and the teacher adviser said to me, 'Don't you think you should stick to the subjects you have done for two years now, you must have learned something?' But I did history and art and other things and finally I did pass. I had had enough of failure at school and I didn't want to go to university in case it all happened again, which was a childish thought. I was very suggestible at that time and, just off-hand, the person who was head of the art department asked me what I was going to do and said he thought I would be good in advertising—and that was it! Advertising, which at that time seemed glamorous and pop page 14and I suddenly thought fantastic, wonderful, I'm going to go into advertising! And I did. That put the whole university thing right out of the picture, which was a massive mistake. Then I was taking home $29 a week, working full-time. I started out as a junior and that was really dog's-body work but they picked up that I was interested in writing so I did a bit of copywriting and I was also what's called a junior executive and I worked a bit in the production side too. I assisted in the making of some TV commercials. It wasn't clear in the agency where I was headed and I didn't know either but it was obvious that I probably was headed somewhere and that was good because after all this failure I was succeeding at something.

DW:

I feel a moral crisis approaching.

NC:

Pretty much. The truth was, I was a fish out of water in advertising—a Values voter surrounded by card-carrying National Party stalwarts. So I decided OE was the next thing for me—I quit and got a job putting vinyl roofs (remember them?) on Cortinas and Falcons on the assembly line at Ford, out in Seaview. Off to England—then you get that string of jobs listed on the back of my books: deckhand, coalman, driver, door-to-door turkey salesman, bookshop assistant… I was briefly married to an English woman, Harriet Hudson. We came back to New Zealand but it didn't last. And suddenly there I was, home again. I had of course planned to return as the conquering author—dreams are free. But I had actually finished two novels: Willowsong, which was a sort of hippy romance, terrible stuff, and The Wall, which was dime-store Kafka. Amazingly an English agent had actually taken them seriously enough to submit them to a few publishers. Who were kind and encouraging. Which was all I needed. Ever since the time in the States—maybe even earlier—all I'd really wanted to do was be a novelist, and somehow I'd got started.

DW:

Can we backtrack a bit to the period you had in the States as a boy? Your father took the family to California on a Fulbright Exchange Teaching Fellowship.

page 15 NC:

Right, that was early 60s. We were there when the Beatles first came to America and we were there when Kennedy was shot. That was a remarkable thing because in New Zealand before that year I had never seen television. I don't think we even had television in New Zealand, and Masterton, where we were living, was a very small and isolated town, probably 20,000 people, and we went to the movies on Saturday afternoon and saw things like Kissing Cousins with Elvis in it. So to go to the place where that culture all came from was extraordinary. I remember being immensely excited, not just about America but California and it was the most immense cultural shock. I met my 6th form English teacher quite some years afterwards and she said you were still in shock four years later and I thought that too. It was overwhelming.

DW:

Was it overwhelming being there or when you came back to New Zealand and thought about what you had seen?

NC:

Both. It was like living on the set of Grease. I'd been in short pants at school and here were these kids with duck's arses and guys who really did have a comb in their pocket and spent the whole day stroking their hair and girls with Beehives and a whole sort of teen culture that was articulated in a way I had only ever seen in the movies. And yet it was nothing like the movies. It was much more real and of course also the whole unbelievable alienation of it all. You know people really did say things like—well I remember going into the history class and a girl called Cindy Garten said to the teacher, 'Make him say hello to me', so I just said hello, and they said to me things like, 'So have you killed a lot of lions?', and you thought, lions, you must know they are Asia and Africa. What's with you people?

DW:

You've said about your novel Tarzan Presley that it picks up on a lot of those reactions. So that the Tarzan figure, when he goes to America, is a bit like Nigel in America?

NC:

No question. In fact people have always accused me of writing autobiographical books and of course we all know that's a lie but Tarzan Presley, I think, is the most autobiographical book page 16I've written. It is actually set, apart from the piece in Graceland where I never got to, it's all set in places where I have been. Every single one of them. The scene where Tarzan first appears in public in the bowling hall—some of the dialogue there is drawn from that first day at school: 'Make him say hello to me.'

DW:

There's a gap of more than thirty years between the experience in America and using it in your fiction. Had that material been bothering you? Had you tried to use it before?

NC:

I had. When I was a Katherine Mansfield fellow I made a special and very complicated and expensive detour to go back to Novato, where I had lived, because I felt there was some material there. And I did. There was a 13-year period when I didn't publish a novel. One of the things I tried to write was a memoir of being in America. It didn't work. Someone said to me, 'Aren't you a bit young to be writing your memoirs' etc, but I did try to write down what happened there but I couldn't get an angle on it. I knew that it was a big thing and I was aware I was going to have to try to get something out of it somehow.

DW:

When you were working on Tarzan Presley—we're leaping ahead again—was that part of the strategy? Did you think—Tarzan… and he's going to become Elvis and he's going to go to America, which fits with my life. Was it all calculated in that way?

NC:

No. It was a survival strategy. The whole of Tarzan Presley was a massive effort to cope with the concept of the book. The book was too big for me really, and I still think there are things wrong with the novel because it I struggled to cope with it. I relied hugely on places I had been to and experiences I have really had to ground the book because I was terrified the whole time of it turning either into a satire, which is what I didn't want, or else collapsing. It felt much more grounded to put it in those places, and I also thought—when I was in the States it was 1962/63 and what we call the 60s hadn't really started and Elvis was in America in 55/56 so that is not such a terribly long stretch,page 17 probably the mood in America wasn't so hugely different and so I drew on that and that gave me a bit of confidence so that I could write about it.

DW:

Don't you think though that novel writing is a survival strategy all along? Is that how you feel? The books start off with a great idea or even a daft idea and then you keep going and you get it up and running and then you're just hanging on?

NC:

Absolutely. In fact, on the other hand I think that is one of the things that make writing exciting for me, but it is absolutely, at every minute, you are desperately trying to find things that are authentic and real for this ghastly trouble you have got yourself into.

DW:

There's that great thing Annie Dillard says that every book has an impossibility at its heart. An obstacle which is just impossible. The writing of the book is the going around the obstacle or in some way disguising that obstacle from the reader. The books you write you know where the obstacles are. Is this true for you? Do you know where the problems are?

NC:

No question. Look at Skylark Lounge. The idiocy of trying to write a serious book about aliens. It was standing there a dumb fact in the middle of the room. I knew that from the first minute I started work on that book the whole problem, of dealing with the nitwit alien culture that's around on the one hand and on the other actually sort of thinking, Yeah but you are at some point going to have to write a real encounter with some real aliens if this book is going to work. That was hugely in my mind. It was making me sweat every minute of the day. Tarzan Presley was the same. At every moment of that book I was thinking, how are you going to deal with this, how are you going to do it? How?

DW:

So that terror, that's what keeps you going?

NC:

I love it and there's nothing like standing up from the machine and thinking, I did it. Never mind tomorrow, today I solved that problem.

page 18 DW:

Or maybe you deferred it? For now the problem is gone but tomorrow, a new one?

NC:

Yes! Skylark Lounge I kept pushing it away. Tarzan Presley, once I got it going, it was written in a hot fever of I'm doing this! I was very excited about it.

DW:

I remember you saying to me when you were working on Skylark Lounge that it was an unfashionable subject, that you yourself were unfashionable, that no one was going to like it, but who cares? As it turned out the people who read it, loved it. And it turned up in lots of people's favourite novels of the year lists, so it was a success.

NC:

That book was really written out of desperation because I had 13 years when I hadn't managed to come up with anything I thought was good enough to publish and I'd drifted into that bad habit a writer can get into of just kind of writing, starting another novel and writing for a bit and saying, this is writing, I am writing something and all the time thinking, this is crap. I had got so far away from writing for publication that I wasn't able to bite down hard and not be afraid of the results and to really throw myself into it. With Skylark Lounge I decided I am going to show this to a publisher, before I even started on it. I am going to write this book and I am going to show it. I am going to do it because if I don't do it now I'll never do it again. So it was written in a kind of fear that I was going to have to show this alien novel to someone and on the other hand that did give me the drive and lift to get it there.

DW:

Were you surprised at people's response, or did you just feel relief?

NC:

I knew it was good. I think it's my best novel and when I finished it I knew I had done it.

DW:

Why do you think it is your best novel? Because it's the most complete, because it's the most successful in what it does?

NC:

It's the most successful at what it does. It gets the most out of its material and I think it's original. I think that Tarzan Presley page 19 is the biggest novel but that's a different quality. I think Skylark Lounge is a small novel that packs a very good punch. And I suppose I also think that everyone I wanted to like it liked it and that's very important.

DW:

One of those people of course was Bill Manhire and there's that word that he's used about your most recent books: wisdom. He's called them wise books. But it's not the wisdom of vast intellectual heft, where the reader learns great facts about the world, is it? I think one of the things that's crucial to our sense of those novels' wisdom is the voice they're told in and I wonder whether you have a way of characterising how you came about that voice which Skylark Lounge does beautifully and Tarzan Presley does beautifully and Responsibility does as well. That first-person voice which is confiding, slightly self-deprecating but not overly so… but a guy who is sifting through the material. The voice speaks to you as it thinks itself through the material of the novel. A mind in action almost.

NC:

What happened was, way back a friend said to me I wish you'd write the way you talk. And that is actually not a simple thing to do. That got me into thinking about writing in the first person, and so that started Dirty Work off. That book has its good points and its bad but then a lot of water went under the bridge and I think the thing that really shocked me was the whole business of getting cancer in 1996 and for the first time an oncologist talked to me about how this cancer I think will probably kill you in the end and similar things. I had never thought about this before and the whole of Skylark Lounge was written in the kind of shock of mortal knowledge. I wouldn't exactly call that wisdom. I suppose the other thing that happened was that I got my confidence up in life. I had had a very long and I think successful period at Unity Books, where I knew what I was doing and I tried some things out and they worked and we made money. I had had a very good experience at Te Papa where I made a good contribution and then later on the whole business of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This all worked and I came out of it with a kind of self-belief. I got loose enough to find a way page 20to make this New Zealand blokey talk. That was what I wanted and I think one of the most interesting things about fiction is this whole business about how intelligent is the guy, how educated he is on the one hand, and how much does he know on the other. There are these books that seduce you because the characters are so fantastically intelligent, but actually I am not fantastically intelligent. I just sort of go along through life like anyone else and I wanted to find a way to find a voice that showed that. I do think that male culture in this country mostly consists of quite interesting people who have their enthusiasms and their specialities and their weaknesses and their drives and so forth and I really felt that in Skylark Lounge I managed to find a little bit of it, a voice that managed to catch that mood or something.

DW:

Can we pick up a thread there. You started at Te Papa as a writer—you were Senior Writer, I think—but then what happened? Did they recognise that you had other skills? What is it you've ended up doing in museums?

NC:
These days I'm a senior manager—my title is Director (visitor) Experience—and I just manage like every other manager, following your nose and trying not to be an Important Jerk. It's hard to say, from the inside, why my original role expanded, but it did. I guess there were some occasions when I solved a few problems that were not strictly to do with writing and I became this problem-solving guy. Then it turned out I was okay at talking to people and so I was asked to facilitate some big talk sessions where we addressed things that weren't working. Then I had a hand in making some exhibitions and at one point it was entirely unclear what I actually did, except that I was flat out. Then I was asked to go with Ken Gorbey to Berlin to work on the Jewish Museum Berlin and all of a sudden I was an international museums consultant, being hugely wise in Bremen and Bonn and then Ottawa and Liverpool, as well as directing, with Ken, the development of the JMB. Which was an extraordinary success, achieved under massive time pressure and, you know, all the attendant cultural dislocation. I was given page 21
1971 1974, Greece 1977, Tinakori Road

1971
1974, Greece
1977, Tinakori Road

page 22 a chance to learn a huge amount in Germany and in some ways it really was the making of me, professionally. I sort of feel, after that, anything's possible. And of course I wrote two and a half novels while I was there—Skylark Lounge was finished before I left New Zealand—so I came home with a grin on my face.

Yeah, and what do I do in museums? That is so hard, if you mean really do. I'm tempted to say, apply common sense, which is not a million miles from the truth. The thought-out answer is probably closer to something like, try to find a way to make a huge, complex organisation find a way to engagingly communicate its expertise to very broad audiences who don't necessarily have too much specialist knowledge as a base to build on.

I guess being not so well educated myself, and having a feel for pop culture, which has to engage or die, has been a help. The communication skills learned at the advertising agency, the commercial realism I learned running the bookshops, the thinking that went into and came out of the novels—all helps. I'm always thinking, at the museum, of the ordinary person I try to write about, who is usually not well educated, but not stupid, is interested but to a degree, who knows more than is apparent but not yet enough… I guess that's where the two connect, if at all.

DW:

Berlin was a great personal success of course. You might have stayed on there.

NC:

I've been lucky. Somehow I've fitted in the museum world. One of the happy days of my life was when, after four and half years at the JMB, one of my senior colleagues said at lunch, 'Nigel, I just can't imagine the JMB without you—I want you to consider taking a permanent contract here.' And the other guy who we were lunching with, who early on had fought with me, said, 'You are the only one who can get us all to work together.' But it was time to come home.

DW:

You once said that you thought fiction writing came from the dumbest part of your brain, and it was almost as if the lesson page 23there was that caution was the enemy. If you became too self-aware or too self-conscious about the kind of noises you were making, the note would be false. There's a conundrum here though, right? Because when you're writing, everything is self-conscious. You're conscious about sentence-making. You're conscious about structure. You're conscious about consequence. What's the consequence of having that happen to the character at that point and so on. So you're suggesting an impossibility, aren't you? Or you're suggesting a way of tricking yourself into the belief that really you're involved in quite a casual act—writing. And I think that is where a good deal of the charm and even the wisdom of your books lies—the pretence that this is a kind of casual act and the stuff unfolds in a rather kind of loose way but if you look at the books there is a structure, there are controlling ideas, there's craft. What do you think of that business of the balance between control and letting loose?

NC:

I'm very determined to try the hardest I can to be a skilful writer and that means thinking very much about the chapters, the pacing, the character development, everything you just talked about—I think that's underrated. That's what I call the professionalism of writing. I think there is a huge number of very colourful writers and expressive writers and imaginative writers but in my judgement a lot of writers haven't really slaved away at the whole business of getting to be a professional, which means the pacing is right, scenes are the right length, that jokes come off and all that sort of stuff. You've got that side of it but then you talked about that thing of being dumb. Somehow you have to let yourself loose. I had an awful experience where I once planned a novel and this was going to be chapter 1 and this was going to be chapter 2. It was like homework and I hated it and the book was dead, dead, dead. So now I write the complete opposite of that, thinking all the time where's this taking me, where's this taking me—in terms of structure and so forth—but being prepared to write practically anything for a sentence to see where it goes to in an effort to make it actually come alive. I do think that I have got more interested in this—you can see page 24it beautifully managed in Saul Bellow where he manages to be what one of my colleagues in Germany called associatif—he manages to move back and forth between different ideas with immense fluidity. You can see it in Bill's poetry too. The focal length changes very quickly and ideas are connected by the most strange connections sometimes but somehow it moves across a territory in a very nicely worked way where you finish up thinking crikey we covered a lot of ground there. I've really tried to learn a little bit about how to do that. I've read a lot of Bellow, trying to think what's the secret and perhaps learnt a little bit of that.

DW:

You mentioned the failed novel there and one of the features of your writing career is your ruthlessness in dispatching unwanted projects. How do you feel about the books which are abandoned? They do exist still, don't they? You don't burn them, so they exist as a kind of marker or something. What is your attitude towards them, is it a fondness or contempt or what?

NC:

Contempt. There are three novels I didn't publish before Waiting for Einstein, and Waiting for Einstein is also a book I am fairly contemptuous about.

DW:

You've said that Waiting for Einstein isn't a book you've been able to read all the way through. Presumably you read it once! I guess one of the things that publishing a first book does, even though you feel contemptuous about it, is clear the deck, make other things suddenly possible?

NC:

That was the case with that book. What happened there was I was really trying to re-write a novel which unfortunately was a bad novel of Hemingway's called Islands in the Stream. Especially in the beginning of Waiting for Einstein, you can see it's just about lifted from Islands in the Stream. The whole idea that the hero of the book is a painter and he is this kind of romantic figure and he's living alone. I suppose the whole experience of writing that book got me over Hemingway. I realised that was a complete dead end and there's nothing there for you and forget about all that because I had been very interested in him and read page 25him very closely, and of course again this was still part of this identification I made with him early on as a heroic writer figure. Also because he was actually a pop star. He was one of the most famous men in the world. My great aspirations of being a pop star were sort of all connected to that. Waiting for Einstein got that over with, got it out of me, and the next book—I had actually started Dirty Work before Waiting for Einstein was finished and that was a completely different kind of book. So I do connect Dirty Work to the books that have come later. Waiting for Einstein is sitting there all on its own.

DW:

VUP is reissuing Dirty Work. How does that make you feel?

NC:

Very strange. I wrote a little author note to go at the back of it and it says 'Reading your old stuff is like coming upon a wardrobe of clothes you used to wear—everything looks so quaint and, pooh, that musty smell.' It is like that. On the other hand I always had affection for the book and I still do. People liked it, and I liked it. It was my first book that was the sort of book I had in mind. God knows if anyone will take the slightest notice of it being reissued, I suspect not, but personally I am very pleased to see it being done. Such a nice edition has been made of it because I thought the early edition wasn't a nice object. This is going to be quite a nice object, I think. Fundamentally I am just chuffed to see it come out.

DW:

It occupies a funny position though, doesn't it, because it's the book that stopped things, or it's the book at which things stopped for those thirteen years.

NC:

What happened was that I had in my mind that I was going to be this writer person and it was simply a matter of time. Dirty Work was quite a good success in its own way. Waiting for Einstein had done all right too. The reviews had been mixed but on the whole generous. It got me going but actually Dirty Work was a success. The reviews were very good and more than anything else the book had been noticed. And talked about. It was short-listed for the prizes and so forth and then when I had finished it I remember thinking, so that's a success? So you made about page 26four and a half thousand dollars so that's success? What are you going to live on? That really threw me into a tailspin. I started thinking about—well maybe you could write a thriller, or some kind of big-selling genre thing and that led into a quagmire.

DW:

You can't have been innocent of the economic realities, surely? Working in the book trade must have armed you with all that knowledge.

NC:

Exactly right. I was the complete opposite of innocent because I was, as you say, working in the book trade. I knew more about the realities of numbers and figures than anybody. It was that the whole thing had essentially been a fantasy. Now the reality hit me. It was one of those moments where you had to just face the facts even though you already knew them.

DW:

I want to pick up something there in your description of the sort of attention your first two novels received and it relates also to some things you've been saying recently about the drift of our national culture. You recently gave the keynote address at the Going West Festival where you suggested that things might be heading back to the dark days of the 50s with fewer and fewer outlets for serious criticism and conversation. Your argument is that at the time of publishing those two books, in the 1980s, there was more supporting literary culture than there is now. And that this shrinkage is happening at a time of an explosive growth in publishing. Are you saying that books just come out and disappear?

NC:

I don't think the books matter much any more. That is the thing that is really shocking. The reviews for Waiting for Einstein and Dirty Work were, if anything, longer, much longer, and there were a lot more of them. My last three books have had a fantastically good run with the reviewers. I have no complaints about that. But by and large it is in a book culture that seems hermetically sealed or of no great interest to anybody. There's a time come upon the book culture, I think, which means that a book is a sensation or nothing. Ninety-nine per cent of good books are not sensations. They're good books. And then there's a whole lot of page 27bad books of course. Most good books are not sensations, they are just good books. Every now and then there's a sensation. That's a terrible book culture. I think that within five years there will be no book reviews in newspapers. I think they're already on the way out—relegated to supplements or bright coloured little boxes. The whole business of novel writing, which was once the most commercial part of literature, is probably going to finish up where poetry is now. Which is in some ways wonderful because it's written for pure reasons, there's no money in it. But on the other hand the whole business of what that means for the working writer is pretty worrying. Even perhaps more seriously for the culture. Books don't really matter.

DW:

In a way you could argue that it's part of the health of the culture, that we don't depend so much on so little, that we are not focused all of us on the same three things per week. That the culture has got more various and so we can now pick and choose our enthusiasms. Isn't there a sense in which it is maybe better to be free of a kind of weird focus on the novel or what the latest Maurice Gee novel means to us?

NC:

I think you're right in one way in that when Waiting for Einstein came out, I have to guess, but I wouldn't be amazed if maybe eight novels came out that year. Now there are probably 60 or something. I think that's extremely good and that's part of what you are saying and also there's been an immense rise in all other products, you know DVDs, and pop music that is really worth listening to and so forth from this country and that's all great. It has reduced something which I was bored by which was the heaviness of the great cultural book, you know, all that crap about the Great New Zealand novel. Thank god we are all over that. But on the other hand I think it has produced a tone in books which very often is playful and frivolous and not much else because that's their place in the culture—to be pure entertainment. And I guess that's all right. I always want anything I'm writing to be very entertaining. I mean very entertaining and lively and fun to read, but actually I want it to be more than that too. It's almost as though the culture is going—oh no page 28we just don't want that other bit. I mean if I was to turn into a tedious old bore it is shocking to me how the whole thing of market values is what rules everything in this country now. And everybody is prepared to use that as the one way to measure the value of anything is the market value. I know I sound like an old fart but it's pretty shocking to me.

DW:

Did you notice that more when you came back from Germany?

NC:

I did. There are many tedious things about German culture but when it comes to the arts there's something you just don't get here—a formal consideration in tandem with a personal questioning of, What does this work say about us and what does it say about me and what am I to it? And this has very little to do with money, with success culture. Now someone might say, Nigel, you just want your work to matter more, a bigger place in the sun, and, you know: could be. But when you go to the Berlin Philharmonic there's a kind of release from material culture happening in that hall that I don't see so frequently here. There's a sense in Germany of the arts being part of me, of the thing that I am, not as something I'm going to have to talk about at dinner parties or cafés, but as something that is part of my inner person, that affects who I am. I just wonder how far we are moving away from that here.

DW:

One of the striking things about, say, that keynote address, and your willingness to go on TV, or to talk to people about larger public issues, is that maybe having the job at Te Papa first and then having the job in the German Jewish museum in Berlin—you talked about the confidence that gave you—but there's also that feeling that because museums intersect with the public life of the society, you became drawn into this sphere. I mean, every day a museum asks who are we, where are we going, where have we been, all that sort of stuff. And I couldn't really imagine the Nigel I knew in 1990 being so prepared to say those things.

NC:

Two things—one was that in Germany I got interviewed to death. I got interviewed a bit about being a writer, but at the museum when they wanted someone to speak English, and we page 29 had journalists from Spain or Italy or South Korea so English would be the lingua franca, I was always rolled out. After a certain point I got fantastically used to being interviewed. It would happen at least once a week and often more often. Once a TV crew turned up and the museum PR person said we want you to talk to this TV crew and I turned up and the director said now what we are going to do, we are going to be about three or four hours and you are going to walk through the museum and talk while you walk and I thought, you are out of your mind! You want me to talk and walk? But then I thought, Okay, it's not my programme, so I just did it. I got very used to that, I got used to talking publicly about things and being a public spokesperson. So I was very much in practice. The other thing was—and it was quite deliberate and I was conscious of seeing it that way—I knew I would be something of a nine-day wonder when I came back to New Zealand and I decided to go for it. When people say, 'Be on TV', I'll be on TV. When people say, 'Give an address', I'll give an address. I knew it would last about six months and absolutely to the day it did. Then the phone stopped ringing and it was great. I got a call from breakfast television and they said we'd like you to come and talk about charity fatigue. I said charity fatigue? I'd never heard the expression before! I said, 'But I know nothing about that', and they said, 'But you're a good talker', and I said, 'Oh well.' And I'm always keen to go on TV to practise my skills because I'm horrible at it so I went along and did it and they said that was great. And a week later the TV woman rang me again and said, 'Would you like to comment on the upcoming election?' and I thought, no I don't want to do this, and she rang twice more and then the phone stopped ringing. I suddenly thought I don't want to be this kind of pundit. But I was happy to raise my profile—no question.

DW:

You were away five years in Berlin. One of the established paths for New Zealand writers, of course, is to get out of the country and then look back, reflect on New Zealand. Was that the case? Did you have time to think about us?

page 30
1978 (above), and a Dirty Work publicity shot from 1987

1978 (above), and a Dirty Work publicity shot from 1987

page 31 NC:

The first novel I wrote there was Tarzan Presley, which at its launch, you, Damien, described as a sort of love letter to New Zealand. And I think that was the state I was in—in love with a country I wasn't in, more every day. The main New Zealand part of the novel is set in the part of New Zealand I love best, in the coastal bush at Mataikona, twelve miles north of Castlepoint on the Wairarapa Coast—my family have had baches there forever. The openness of the New Zealand sky, the general sense of possibility in this country, the sense that a great deal is still to happen.

On the other hand… You do see what a real city is like to live in, that we don't actually have any cities in New Zealand. And what it's like to live somewhere that culture rather than the money economy is what matters. I mean, I'd lived overseas before. But working at the JMB took me into the heart of European history and what I got was a sort of crash course in that. In some ways it was the education I'd never had and I just drank it up. On the other hand I talked about New Zealand every day—drove my colleagues mad. I can remember long lunches where I explained who Hone Tuwhare was and our James Brown and Blam Blam Blam and why Hicksville was so great—they were very patient. And all the time you're thinking, They'll never hear of these people. One day I walked down the corridor and asked the first twenty people I met, Have you heard of the All Blacks? Crowded House? The Americas Cup? Colin McCahon? All negative. But they had seen and loved An Angel At My Table and, some of them, The Piano and Once Were Warriors. The movies break through. Lord of the Rings, of course. When I sang 'Four Seasons In One Day' they said, Oh, they play that before the weather on TV. Kiri Te Kawana, yes. But that was about it. So you had this sense of being invisible. And maybe that made me feel free? Certainly in some of the New Zealand scenes in Tarzan Presley I felt free to play with our culture in a way that might have been hard at home. Maybe I was trying to write a bigger book that might find a place in this bigger world? But that's only half true. I was in love with the idea of Tarzan and Presley. It was a love song to everything I cared about and I just happened to write it there.

page 32 DW:

You talk in the 'Boys on Islands' essay, written in the late 80s, about being uninterested in New Zealand things and New Zealand books and in fact of wanting to get away from all that local stuff. You speak of this task you imagined you had as a writer of bringing the 'over there world of fiction' into the immediate present of New Zealand everyday reality. I want to ask about that interest in New Zealand because when I interviewed Geoff Cochrane (Sport 31) he had a similar ambivalence about his inheritance. Well, it was hardly ambivalence. For Geoff it was an unqualified disaster to be born in New Zealand! I wonder if that is actually a defining New Zealand thing, to feel like escaping? Is it one part of us that feels a little bit unlucky?

NC:

I agree with that. I think that I'm infinitely happier to be a New Zealander now than I used to be. I think what is happening in this country is interesting and positive, and I also think we are very lucky. The tension of being in Europe was palpable compared to being here. It's a very easy life. I think that is a kind of curse too. It is too easy and everyone takes it easy. Anyway, I do think it is a curse to be a New Zealand writer but that is a fact of life. In many ways one of the defining things about your writing is place. The number of times you are going to get English readers interested in New Zealand is once a decade. One book once a decade. And American readers one book every thirty years. Therefore the big markets are closed to you. I am talking about survival and commercialism. The idea that you are going to make a standard living as a novelist when you have this handicap—it's hard. So what we do is we all go off and write about being in England but on the other hand we are struggling desperately to keep up so I think it is a curse but I have also always thought that New Zealanders are very romantic and there is a romance about writing here because there's no money in it. And that I like. When I was growing up I thought there was a paucity of event and a paucity of interest here. I'm not sure if that's true any more. I don't think it is. It is probably just naiveté that I thought that then.

page 33 DW:

I wanted to ask you about the way you use public places in your books. Whereas a lot of fiction writers would use the family as their locus, the place as the starting point of their book, often you use a space, like a hotel, or a pool hall or a museum. Responsibility is a more domestic book than the others, but even there you've got the museum. These are quite impersonal public places which often become characters in the books. Is that a conscious decision, a wish to move things away from family?

NC:

I do like to have an arena for the action to take place in but I think that is a comparatively simple thing. I think much more difficult and important—the best fiction in my opinion is reduced to a little phrase—is what happens between people. It is the hardest thing to write about. So there are books about shipwrecks and there are books about aliens and there are books about Tarzan's great career and all that stuff but what actually happens between people is the hardest thing to write about. The best writers, like Alice Munro, write about that brilliantly and that is why we think she is the greatest living writer of prose in English. In many ways what happens between people in families is the ultimate subject. I hardly ever read any great family books but a great family book is a really great book. But I find it very very hard to get away from my own family when writing about families. So I tend to focus on those neutral spaces so I don't fall into that because I find it too scary.

DW:

People in your novels often find substitute families. Strangers bump into one another, and suddenly they start to function as parents to each other or siblings. There is quite a lot of that, isn't there?

NC:

I guess. Basically it's because I don't feel I have permission to write about my parents or my sister. I did start recently to write a book from the point of view of my sister, who is a religious obsessive. It came out something like Flannery O'Connor, very powerful, and I was amazed at how much more sympathetic towards her view of the world I was once I'd made myself go inside that, instead of being outside where I am personally very page 34unsympathetic. I couldn't go on. It was like an experiment. I had to stop after about twenty pages but it had a roaring life in it that I was actually afraid of. I knew if I wrote any more I wouldn't be able to stop. I felt it was unfair to write about her. She never asked to be written about and she wouldn't like it.

DW:

But isn't a writer an opportunistic user of other people's lives?

NC:

Is that true? Maybe that's a limitation in me as a writer. It's fabulous material, your own family. It's so intimate and so much the real stuff and it's never in films and so forth—you see crap in films about it—there are exceptions but it is just not an easy subject and yet it's the subject. It's where we all live.

DW:

So you think the sensitivities of family, of people who are alive, outweigh any kind of aesthetic kick you can get? You write a brilliant novel but you'd censor it if there was the chance it was going to hurt someone?

NC:

I suppose I think I could be cruel enough to write about someone who wasn't in my family because I don't have that intimate knowledge of them. There's a trust about being in a family, not a trust that's asked for or negotiated, there just is and people don't want you to do that to them. You can't write about them without judging them. They don't invite you to. I think that's that.

DW:

Responsibility though came closest to the autobiographical use of fiction, didn't it?

NC:

Oh, yes it did!

DW:

And that was a book that almost prodded the reader to make all those assumptions. It wasn't a subtle performance. It was as if you were saying, 'You want my life, I'll give you my life', or at least a facsimile or a shadow portrait or something.

NC:

Someone called it a personal satire and I did quite like that. I sort of fell into that book by accident. At first I didn't even take it seriously as a novel. What happened was that I had two or three projects that I was mucking around with. I had written Tarzanpage 35 Presley, which was this sort of big effort and so I wasn't even conscious that this might be a novel and every day I used to work on whatever I was working on. I was also trying to rewrite kind of seriously a long novel version of the story Rapunzel because that's a story with immense pressure in it, the weirdest of events and strangest things. Grimm's version covers years in half a sentence so I decided to expand it all and make it like a realist novel. I was quite enjoying that and I was doing some other thing as well. Every day I would work and I'd send whatever I'd done to the Jewish Museum by e-mail and then at work I would look over what I had done, a couple of pages or a paragraph, make some fiddles and send it back home. Because Susanna was in Germany and she was bored, she used to read them and one day she said to me, 'You know that Rapunzel, that's just shit. But you know that novel about the guy who comes in and he's wet and he sits on the couch, that's great.' And I thought, Really? And so I started taking it seriously as a novel. And then I started to think, Hang on, this New Zealander that's in Berlin, like no one is not going to believe that's me. And suddenly one day I thought I don't care. I'm just going to take whatever's to hand and what fits fits, and I'll go back now to this whole professional thing of a story that's told at the right speed, with chapters and characters and implications and the fact that it's quite close to my family I don't care. And so I just let it happen that time and several people have said to me I wonder what your wife thinks of this book. But she's never really complained. I don't think I'd do it again.

DW:

Earlier you mentioned the success you had as a bookseller at Unity Books, first in Wellington and then setting up the Auckland shop with Jo Harris (now McColl). And one of the tendencies is to romanticise bookselling, to think if you like books that is what you want to do, work with them. My guess is a lot of people start in a bookshop and leave rather quickly because they realise it's all about—

NC:

Being a grocer.

page 36 DW:

Right, being a grocer. But Unity Books was very special because it got very close to the romantic notion of a bookshop. If you imagine a bookshop in the idealised way, as a place where you could not only find books but also have a conversation about them—that was how you ran it. Is that why you stayed ten years?

NC:

Yes that's right but what was interesting was what preceded those ten years. I had done roughly ten years in other bookshops in England and New Zealand so I knew what bookselling was all about. I knew what it was all about. And then I fell into this marvellous little bookshop, Unity Books at 42 Willis Street. All the other Unity Books since then have disappointed me. That little bookshop had that romance and it was small enough to manage easily and big enough to be big, and it had this wonderful window that I always thought of as a TV screen that broadcast to the footpath. We were successful enough to be able to do unusual things and secondly I think it coincided luckily when something was happening in New Zealand books, which was exemplified by the bone people's success, but there were a lot of other things too. Bill was publishing marvellous books at that point, Ian Wedde was published quite strongly, there were a whole bunch of great new writers being published—Barbara Anderson and so forth. And Fergus Barrowman was at VUP. There was a sense of something happening. Because I was passionately interested and also because I was trying to write and be in it, and because I knew how to be a good bookseller, it all came together. The final element was the weird philanthropic generosity of Alan Preston, who allowed us to do strange things with his foot both on the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

DW:

Was he ghosting around behind the scenes? What was his role?

NC:

He was in every single day and he was astonishing in the way he gave us a free hand, and he was a shrewder businessman than a lot of people gave him credit for. I used to run the wilder ideas past him and he would look at the ceiling and then say, 'Do you page 37think so? Well if you think so', and he'd kind of leave it on you and sometimes we got it wrong but he was very forgiving, and I think a great deal of the romance came from him.

DW:

You also liked the idea that writers were coming in. It was a writers' kind of shop, wasn't it? It was a readers' shop as well of course but writers came and they didn't have to buy a book, they could just talk about what they were doing.

NC:

I found that very exciting. I set out really to attract writers. For example we were the first bookshop to give a discount to writers. We did various things like that. This was the beginning of something that was very strongly articulated later and which I think is fantastic, which I would suggest is something called the Wellington writing community. It was just gathering—of course there had been earlier Wellington writing communities centred around Baxter and Louis Johnson and so on. Anyway this was a new one and it was in certain ways I suppose centred around Bill. And VUP, that was sort of the centre of it. And we were its shop window. I can remember doing a window with a great big Lands & Survey map of Wellington and then I cut letters saying 'Wellington Poets' and putting all the Wellington poets in it, one book each, and then right down the front because he had just published a book that day, a book by Tony Beyer called Brute Music, right at the front of the window. It went in on a Friday, late night in those days, and Tony happened to come along the street with his family. They stopped outside the shop and there it was, a centrepiece in the middle of Wellington poets. He was quite cool and he gave me the thumbs-up from outside and they walked on. On Monday he came in to see me and he said, 'I can't tell you what that was like. Walking along the footpath and my books have never really sold, I'm with my family and suddenly I see this whole window lit up with this bright light with my book in the middle of it, Wellington poets!' He said, 'Man, that was one of the big moments of my life.' You know there was a whole sense of being able to actually do that. That was what was amazing. It was free to be done. I had a ball.

page 38 DW:

One of the dreams of the character in Responsibility is to open a poetry bookshop and that sounded like you.

NC:

It is a little dream of mine because I have been a commercial bookseller and I've been successful. I've done it, I know I can do it and I am bored with it. The idea of opening a poetry bookshop, which I've had for some time, is so stupid and so quixotic and impossible that I really would like to have a go. It's like really setting yourself a hard challenge. I'd love to do it.

DW:

You've written a few poems yourself of course.

NC:

A couple. I published one not long after Kate, our first child, was born called 'Our Apples'. It was published in Metro and then there were a couple of others. I have written some poems but I am not a poet. I am clear about that, but I would like to be. I don't read a lot of poetry but I get a lot of pleasure from it and I think I have learnt a lot too. There was a period when I read Bill and Ian really intensely. Over and over again, trying to think what that might mean in prose. I can't write poetry, unfortunately.

DW:

Speaking of difficult fits, I wanted to ask about music and how to get it into fiction. Musical enthusiasms are not a great fit with fiction usually. It's really hard to communicate what is so good and interesting about music in words, isn't it?

NC:

In fact it is impossible. I have never read a decent rock 'n' roll novel. There have been quite a few and they're all crap. It's kind of like the impossibility of making a museum about sports. They're boring too. Music is just music and you don't need to write a novel about it. I can't help writing about it because I'm so involved in it. I've tried to find ways to bring some of the charm of the music and what I like about it across into books knowing you can't really write about it. The first successful moment in doing that is in Skylark Lounge when the aliens talk to Jack Grout in the voice of Dusty Springfield. I suddenly thought, Yeah, got it! Now I've got the pop music in there in a way that works for the book.

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With Kate, Wellington, 1998; outside the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2000; Susanna, Andrew-Jack and Frank, Berlin, 2003

With Kate, Wellington, 1998; outside the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2000; Susanna, Andrew-Jack and Frank, Berlin, 2003

page 40 DW:

So there might be a kind of off-hand comment in the novel that the character listened to, say, Ray Charles all morning. You do it as fast as you can, you check the name and you check the mood and you're out of there, rather than stay and try to develop a kind of argument about why Ray Charles was important to that character.

NC:

Totally. I think Maurice Gee is a very great writer but what I sometimes think is missing from Maurice's writing is some stupid phrase like the solace of art, or the whole way that culture and especially in my case pop culture is actually around you. Something happens to you and a little tune happens in your head. Or you're driving along and the weather is just so and the car is just so and everything and then the right song comes on the radio and you go aha. I think that is very very important to the ordinary people I like to write about. They don't read novels actually, they don't go to conceptual art shows, actually what they love and what they passionately care about is pop culture and they have it in their heads, it's floating about in there like big hunks of cloudy furniture and I want to sort of catch that. Yet you don't want a big kind of critics' discussion about it, like why Ray Charles?

DW:

Do you mean that the characters in Maurice's books are written in such a way that they're not allowed to put their heads up? They're caught in the problems of the book? A circumscribed life or something?

NC:

That's true but I also think that Maurice—he is an artist and a great artist…

DW:

He thinks it would be bad manners…

NC:

Yes. He doesn't grant the parallel even at a much lower level to everyone else and I think it is there.

DW:

The way you're describing it is that it is a formal problem. How to get the crappiness, the messiness we all experience in the world, into this made thing we call a novel?

NC:

It is a formal problem. And you can't go on about it. It doesn't make it better to have pages of it or a Greil Marcus-type analysis.page 41 That's hopeless. It's little things that happen in the back of your head all the time.

DW:

You've written the last few books while holding down rather high-powered full-time jobs. You've been getting up early in the mornings to write these books and from a distance it is astonishingly productive. We all say, how does he do it? But you said once it probably affected the kind of books you were writing. There was a certain kind of novel you could write at six in the morning before everyone got up, which you could leave behind for the day, then pick up again the following morning. Maybe that kind of book came easier under those conditions.

NC:

I hope, taken collectively, there is something distinctive about my books, but one of the things that is a weakness about them is that you would never call them meditative. And I suppose I have in my mind that I would really like to write a quieter book about what happens between people in a family, and I don't feel that I have the mental space and the writing time with the life I've worked with in the past few years to write that type of book. It may be that I am not good enough to write that type of book. I've got in mind something that's better than Chekhov, of course. I have a sense of a book I could write but I don't have the mental space to write that book.

DW:

That brings us to the space you are in at the moment which probably doesn't allow you to do much of anything because of your illness. I came across a line recently from Saul Bellow's novel Mr Sammler's Planet where it's said that Sammler has 'the luxury of non-intimidation by doom'. You don't have that luxury do you? You are intimidated by doom at the moment.

NC:

Yes, I am.

DW:

Physically it probably means you are not writing because you get uncomfortable and things like that. In one sense, when you were first diagnosed it was the best thing that happened to you for writing. You actually started writing. When the cancer came back did you feel the same kind of impetus or did you think 'Fuck it'?

page 42 NC:

No it was completely different. The first time, I never felt cancer-sick at any point. I had some treatment that made me feel sick but I never felt sick. At that time they couldn't find the primary site and so effectively there was no cancer. There was the secondary in my shoulder that they took out. People said very serious things to me, and the weight of those words hit me like a freight train. 'Your cancer'—when someone said that to me the first time I really got a shock. The oncologist said this will probably kill you and a few other things. But that wasn't what I was living. This time it is very different. They've found a big cancer in a vital organ and it doesn't sound all that recoverable from, and I don't feel well. It's been much more sobering. In fact it has taken up my imaginative space. I think that is the biggest problem for writing at the moment. I am physically discomfited but I think I can get over that because I have always got over that, the kids are always shouting in the next room, there's always something. But it instantly rendered the book I was working on trivial. You don't want to be writing a gloomy book but it just took me away from the whole mood I had been in and I haven't found my way back there.

DW:

That was the amazing thing about Skylark Lounge, that it wasn't an expected book from someone who had got that diagnosis, but nevertheless it was a book that in disguise talked about a lot of that stuff, didn't it? It was a brilliant, lovely roundabout way of dealing with it. I guess behind the first question was whether you grieved for yourself at that point and then wrote this wonderful book which somehow negated all that, set it apart a bit. It was a wonderful solution to that, wasn't it?

NC:

It was. It was a way of asserting being alive. I also thought it was a piece of skill and cunning on my part to have been able to deal with that material in that way. I think that is what is good about those last three books—Skylark Lounge, Tarzan Presley and Responsibility. They have found cunning solutions to those sort of problems. This problem right now is bigger.

DW:

Unlike a lot of writers you don't seem to have a great capacity for envy or for self-pity, which often goes with envy. Those are page 43feelings which, of course, can penetrate a writer and distort his work. You know, the conviction that you're better than the other guy, so why him and not you? Or, I hate that guy for getting that film deal. You don't seem prone to that sort of thinking and I wonder if you're aware of that yourself. It's a silly question, are you aware of being a saint?—but do you wonder why you don't feel that way?

NC:

I think it's about dignity. I think it is all disgustingly undignified to think like that really. I'm not a saint. I do every now and then think, oh they won the prize and my book was better. I think it is disgusting though to express it. And it's really disgusting to feel it. Fundamentally I am unbelievably grateful to be a writer. It was what I wanted and I got it. And that's enough. Recognition and so forth is very nice but it is not what matters. My books matter immensely to me. I am ambitious for a big audience but the other thing, that they matter to me, is much more important.

DW:

At your father's funeral last year, when you spoke about his life and what sort of man he was, there was that amazing thing you said where I think you'd observed your father when he didn't know you were seeing him—he was sitting at a piano—and I remember you said that you thought he was a happy man. It was a lovely observation. It wasn't a social moment. You didn't summon your father in a scene of, say, swinging you round in his arms when you were a boy, or anything like that. What you saw was a private contentment.

NC:

It was the inner person.

DW:

Yes, and I remember you saying to us afterwards that that was the hardest thing you had done, to talk about your father in that setting. Was it hard for the obvious reason that it was at your father's funeral? Or was it hard to find the right things to say, the right tone?

NC:

The right tone. I wanted desperately to avoid standing there saying he was the greatest dad on earth. 'He was a wonderful man.' That is horseshit. He was but you can't say that. The hard page 44thing was to try and find a way to do him justice and to talk about him personally. I talked earlier about how I think that the life of the family is so important and I was the person from our family. My mother couldn't speak for obvious reasons; my sister is not a person who speaks, so it was me. I am used to speaking. I have now talked on various public occasions many times and I had that to fall back on. Most of all I just wanted to get it right. That was the terrifying thing. It is so easy to fall into sentimentality. To not find the right words. I knew I was really speaking for my mother and for my family and that someone had to say what it was like to be around him. That's the hardest thing and yet it is what really matters.

DW:

In some ways was it a literary task?

NC:

No. I had a little piece of paper and I had written on it one opening sentence so that I could get off to a decent start and I had something I wanted to put at the end. I wanted to just talk and that was the most frightening thing to do.

DW:

I think of you as happy in that way too. As a happy person. Do you feel that about yourself?

NC:

Yes I do feel that. I was an unhappy young man and I suppose in a certain way it wouldn't be true to say I studied happiness but that I worked away at it. I worked away at my writing and I have worked away at trying to enjoy who I am. As you get older you start to know yourself a bit and you realise you are not like that, you'll never be able to do that. You'll never be the lead guitarist, you just haven't got it, so relax. On the other hand I have had a little bit of public success. It's been enough for me. Maybe I am not a very ambitious person. It's been enough and I have just got happier as I've got older. I get immense pleasure from my family and underlying all that I am just in a pinch-me situation that I am a writer. I wanted to be one and it seemed impossible but then gradually it became more possible and then I got better at it. It has been an immense source of satisfaction and pleasure to me.

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