ISLAND STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 531, 26 August 1949, Page 16

ISLAND STORY

MAN ALONE, by John Mulgan; Paul’s Book Arcade, Litd., Hamilton; 10/6.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

HIS novel of New Zealand between the wars was first published in England ten years ago. Not many copies of the first edition had, reached this country before 1940, when the plates and remaining stocks of Man Alone were destroyed in London by enemy action. On every count, then, this new edition is welcome: it reflects credit on the Literary Fund Committee for its supporting grant, on the publisher for his faith in the book, and on the printers for the good clean job they have made of the reprint. How does Man Alone stand up as a novel, ten years after it was written? John Mulgan’s place’ in New Zealand letters is already secured by certain unforgettable passages in his Report on Experience, that fragmentary but classical record of war years in the desert and amid the mountains of Thessaly. The man himself, to those who knew him, will always be remembered as someone gentler and more enigmatic than the books he has left behind, but in the long run, it is probably upon this first novel that his literary teputation in his own, country will rest. For the stories live on when the war books are forgotten. Man Alone is the story of Johnson, a demobilised English infantryman who comes out to Auckland at the end of the first world war. He finds work on a dairy farm in the Waikato, has a go at share-farming, turns it in, and moves north to become a deckhand on a coastal scow. These are the "easy years" before the slump; in the bad years that follow, Johnson drifts from casual railway labouring into an unemployment relief camp. He gets mixed up in the Auckland riots of 1932, resists arrest, and escapes to a lonely bush farm in the King Country where he works for a sour, fanatical boss with a bored and mischievous half-caste Maori wife. In the inevitable intrigue that follows the jealous husband gets shot; Johnson takes to the hills to avoid the man-hunt. After a desperate struggle through the long winter he succeeds in crossing the backbone of the North Island, finds friends to help smuggle him out of the country to England. This a bare outline of the narrative, and its lack of balance is immediately apparent. The early years ate lightly treated; the depression arrives as casually.as a polio epidemic: and the first "big scene," the Queen Street riots, is deliberately played down. With a shift to ‘Stenning’s lonely farm the narrative suddenly stiffens into one of those musclebound farm triangles-as self-contained as an Arctic expedition*-of which dominions fiction has been so prolific in the past. The gathering intensity of this situation is shattered by the death of Stenning: there follows the interlude, again complete in itself, of Johnson’s — trek

across the Kaimanawas. It is these chapters that contain the most carefully‘written descriptive passages about the hills, the desert and the bush; though this is still our own country, parts of it seem right off the map-as remote and timeless as Robinson Crusoe or the travels of. Marco Polo. When Johnson comes out on the other side, we are back with the easy male camaraderie of the earlier chapters. The tension has relaxed (though Johnson’s final escape is skilfully enough contrived) and it does not gather again before the book’s carefully unheroic; epilogue. LEARLY there is enough material here for half-a-dozen novels, with a range of twenty yegrs and_ historical, points of reference as significant as the Great War, the great depression, and the International Brigade in Spain. Man Alone is a short book, but even in its 200-odd pages it manages to suggest at least four distinct approaches to its subject: the picaresque-reported narrative, the realistic earthy farm-drama, the outlaw’s struggle for survival, and a snatch of twentieth-century thriller in the American manner. The character of the’ protagonist is not very interest-ing-Johnson is homme moyen sensuel with few distinguishing marks and absolutely no graces; we never know how his mind works, or what books he reads at night. in his bunk. And yet-the book is a whole as go other New Zealand novel that I know is a whole. It is mature, poised, humanely objective; and leaves a total impression of verisimilitude and strong feeling well under control. One reason, perhaps, is that it is so little derivative. Style and treatment, on the surface, owe much to Heming-way-more, beneath this, to a familiarity with Greek, with Old. English poetry, and with the ‘Icelandic sagas. But all the toughness, matter-of-fact-hess, and vironic understatement are pretty completely assimilated into a manner that, before long, is recognisably Mulgan’s own. It is a manner that is much less self-conscious than the word-patterns of Katherine Mansfield

or Frank Sargeson, or the rhetorical in-verted-romanticism of Dan Davin. The nearest thing I know to it in New Zealand writing is the ordinary manner of Sir Howard Kippenberger, or Archibald Baxter’s We Will Not Cease. But the strongest unifying factor of all, of course, is the writer’s own point of view. Man Alone is a political novel, a monument to the generation that came of age in the ’thirties-the generation, in New Zealand, of To-morrow and the Left Book Club; the generation, internationally, of violerit and generous partisanship in China and Abyssinia and Spain, John Mulgan, it is true, had often something of an ironical detachment from the political enthusiasms of his contemporaries, and his belief in fraternal revolutionary activity was later to be modified by war experiences in Greece. But he was enough a man of his time to conceive his story of Johnson in political tetms, and enough of an artist to avoid obvious propaganda, O Man Alone became both a social documentary and a manifesto, The choice of hero (a common working man, not one of those sensitive intellectuals whose painful childhoods and adolescences have proved so irresistible to so many New Zealand writers before and since) followed naturally from such a conception. Johnson in the novel is never so important at any given time for what he is (his one positive instinct is self-preservation; for the rest he is as selfish and amoral as the average Hemingway hero) as for what he be-comes-the tested, reliable revolutionary fighter in Spain. The framework of the Spanish civil war in which the New Zealand story is, a little clumsily, enclosed, may be regarded as the macrocosm which gives point and significance to the microcosm-the clash of social forces in this country, and the uncomprehending part that Johnson plays in it. Johnson, who never seems very remarkable to us as we read about him, yet impresses everyone he meets with a sense of his potential human value, The moral of the book (clearly indicated in the title borrowed from Hemingway) is that this potential can only be fully realised in collective and purposeful revolutionary activity-in Spain, Greece or wherever men come together, to fight for the future against the past. It is characteristic of Mulgan’s honesty and clear-sightedness that he never over-simplifies .the issues, draws no fairly-tale pattern of the Left being always right. Johnson finally gets to |’ Spain through a muddled process of pressure, drift and decision: he is no political ideologue, but he knows which side he is on, And the last glimpse we have of him, sitting in a tunnel by the Spanish frontier under air attack after the cause he fought for has gone down to defeat, is the firmest and most purposeful stroke in the whole book. MAN ALONE is not a good novel, but it is a novel with elements of greatness; and it is social history of enduring value. For it has perspective. This, the reader who comes to it fresh may know instinctively, is what New Zealand really was like between the wars. This is North Island farming as the ex-servicemen so often knew it; this is what the Auckland riots of 1932 really were, not what they may be heightened into by the historian with an axe to grind. And the power of the book, over

and above any accurate reporting or observation, is due to its affirmation of faith in men working together, if not in man alone, Two things about this bare antipodean tale would have pleased Matthew Arnold: it is a criticism of life, and it animates. The criticism of some of our most cherished beliefs (notably, of our belief in’ our own abiding national tradition of kindliness and tolerance) is as valid to-day as when it was written. But the rarer quality of the book, I believe, is its call to action. Not necessarily the sort of action that took Griff Maclaurin to Madrid: nor even necessarily the sort of action that John Mulgan 2 (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) and so many of his contemporaries were to know on battlefields half a world away. But at least, a readiness to challenge injustice wherever it is met, a refusal to accept anything that wars against human dignity. This. was.a familiar attitude to John Mulgan’s generation, and much in his own life was based on.it. André Malraux has written that attitude into European literature, and it is not likely to be lost: this book is a continuing reminder, to New Zealanders, of its value. ‘