A Sponge of Vinegar

The milieu of Mr Duggan’s stories is in the main middle class New Zealand Irish. One hardly notices it, because neither nationality nor class obtrude. Mr Duggan is more than an accomplished writer. He achieves the minor miracle of winning a reader’s acceptance that this, after all, is what life is like – a series of acrid compromises which deform the natural man (or woman) for the sake of a doubtful gentility.

There are several stories which show no more than this – ‘The Deposition’, ‘The Departure’, and possibly ‘For the Love of Rupert’ – but Mr Duggan’s sense of the primitive community opens an escape hatch. That carefully worked story, ‘Chapter’, demonstrates like a theorem that a Maori without money may possess time and the earth from which her own gentility excludes the pakeha schoolteacher. An example of mosaic art, it is probably the best story Mr Duggan has ever written. One would have to look back to Katherine Mansfield to find a similarly perfect interweaving of narrative, quotation, conversation, and pastoral detail. Yet I prefer the wild monologue of ‘Along Rideout Road That Summer’, in which Mr Duggan, through an adolescent narrator, implies that the primitive idyll can be contemplated, even loved, but not achieved.

As a poet (and Mr Duggan is nothing if not our finest poet writing in prose) he offers us a voyage without beginning or destination, unless death can be called a destination. The meaning lies in the pain of lack, the tormenting cycle of the natural world from which man the observer is excluded. It could become monotonous. But the force of his social satire breaks the ice. In ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’ the ageing music teacher requires most aptly a little human warmth. She does not receive it, and her final laughter – the comment of the victim being buried alive by the shovels of gentility – is more piercing than a shout of revolt.

In Mr Duggan’s stories, not the meek, but the vigorously and conventionally stupid inherit the earth. The possibility of any supernatural deliverance is not discussed – with good reason, since in Mr Duggan’s not-so-private country the ecclesiastical and tribal chains are indistinguishable, and religion can very readily be seen as the opium of sleep, the great enemy of the living intellect and the natural man, which would conceal rather than heal despair. Mrpage 721 Duggan is wise enough to offer his compatriots a sponge of vinegar and no solutions. The action is wholly his own.

1965 (350)