Simply by Sailing in a New Direction

Allen Curnow: A Biography

Terry Sturm, Linda Cassells

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781775588702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Allen Curnow (1911–2001) was at the time of his death regarded as one of the greatest of all poets writing in English. For seventy years, from Valley of Decision (1933) to The Bells of Saint Babel's (2001), Curnow's poetry was always on the move – from his early approaches to New Zealand identity and myth to later work concerned with the philosophical encounter between word and world. Curnow also played a major role in New Zealand life as editor, critic, commentator and anthologist, as well as a much-loved writer of light verse under the penname of Whim Wham. In his later years he acquired an impressive international reputation, winning the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Throughout his lifetime, Allen Curnow revised, selected and collected his poetry in various ways. For the first time, this collection brings together all of the poems that Curnow collected in his lifetime grouped in their original volumes. The notes reproduce Curnow's comments on individual poems and include relevant editorial guidance. This is the definitive collection of work by New Zealand's most distinguished poet.

PART I

Chapter One

Family Ancestries

We all grow up with allkinds of psychicpressure-points, & have more or less success at learning to live with them…. As with so many other more obvious things, the surest healing has to be self-healing.¹

Prologue: ‘Self-Portrait’

In October 1945, during a visit Allen Curnow made to his parents’ vicarage home in Kaiapoi, near Christchurch, his mother Jessie showed him some early childhood photographs which had come to light while she and her husband Tremayne were preparing to vacate the house and move to Auckland, where they planned to retire. One photograph in particular caught Curnow’s eye, of ‘myself when young (about 4 years old I think)’:

Surprised to see myself looking such a small creature, with a timid & imploring look – how I have covered over that surprised & timid little person, & never quite stopped feeling it. But forward one must go, however battered, & that child might have been a lot less lucky & happy.²

Curnow was born in 1911, so the photograph would have been taken in 1915, when the family was living in the vicarage at Belfast, a freezing-works township on the northern outskirts of Christchurch. The poem he wrote in 1945 about the photograph – a sonnet entitled ‘Self-Portrait’ – reflects on the moment of surprised self-awareness which the image of himself when young has given him:

The wistful camera caught this four-year-old

But could not stare him into wistfulness;

He holds the toy that he is given to hold:

A passionate failure or a staled success

Look back into their likeness while I look

With pity not self-pity at the plain

Mechanical image that I first mistook

For my own image; there, timid or vain,

Semblance of my own eyes my eyes discern

Casting on mine as I cast back on these

Regard not self-regard: till the toy turn

Into a lover clasped, into wide seas,

The salt or visionary wave, and the days heap

Sorrow upon sorrow for all he could not keep.

The image of the child which the poem constructs is more complex than Curnow’s initial reaction to the photograph might suggest. The look is not only ‘timid & imploring’, but possibly ‘vain’. There is a sense that the child is already learning to ‘cover over’ such feelings, as he clutches his toy, refuses to invite ‘wistfulness’, and ‘stares’ back obstinately at his older adult self. There is also a sense of self-containment about the child which masks resolute determination and desire as well as vulnerability, insecurity and self-protectiveness. It is as if the child-self is already aware that whatever personal or public failures and successes life holds in store for him, they will always carry with them dissatisfaction over what is not achieved and sorrow for what, inevitably, will be lost.

‘Self-Portrait’ was one of many poems which Curnow wrote from the mid-1940s onward – many of them appearing in the collections Jack without Magic (1946) and At Dead Low Water (1949) – in which, as he later put it, he ‘turned away from questions which present themselves as public and answerable, towards the questions which are always private and unanswerable’³. A number of these poems also turned directly to childhood and family memories for their occasions. Indeed, from this point on – right through to poems in his last volume, The Bells of Saint Babel’s (2001) – such memories provided one of the main sources of inspiration for many of his major poems. The poet’s family background and childhood thus constitute an unusually important part of his literary biography. The figures introduced in this and the following chapter might be seen as the dramatis personae of what Curnow came to call his ‘familial poems’, figures who provided the vicarage-based young child with his first bearings on the wider world and remained influential on the kind of poet he was to become.

Maternai grandparents: the Allens and Gamblings

Allen’s full name, Thomas Allen Monro Curnow, continued a strong family tradition of acknowledging forebears. Allen was the surname of a Norfolk-based English great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Thomas Allen, while Monro was a family name with long-standing New Zealand connections, going back on his father’s side through four generations to the 1830s. The Anglo–New Zealand heritage built into Curnow’s name was strongly reinforced in the dynamics of his immediate family life. The ‘tension’ between English and New Zealand loyalties that found its way into a number of his poems in the late 1930s and early 1940s was not, he insisted, based on some ‘South Island myth’ but very personally and immediately experienced in his own family life – as it was, he imagined, in the lives of many New Zealanders of his generation:

All the years of my childhood and youth, and pretty well until I was nineteen years old, our household consisted of my New Zealand father, my English-born mother and my English grandmother. All through those years a great share in my upbringing was taken by my grandmother…. Far from being ‘myth’, the actual tension was there under the very roof of every vicarage in which we lived between say 1913 and 1930. I grew up to my grandmother’s sadness – her feeling of exile and the way she cut herself off almost from all social living outside the vicarage ….⁴

The reasons for the immigration of Curnow’s grandmother with her young daughter to New Zealand are shrouded in mystery. Rose Letitia Maria Allen, the grandmother who was so much a part of his childhood, was born on 17 June 1854⁵ in Norfolk, in the small English village of Caistor St Edmund near Norwich, and was brought up close by at ‘Markshall’, quite a large Georgian-style house on the farming estate leased by her father, Thomas Allen, who also owned farms nearby at Buxton Lammas and Cantley.⁶ Rose was the oldest of six daughters and a son, and in the later 1870s married John Towler Gambling (born in 1855), one of numerous sons of a family living in the same area who owned a wherry fleet and a mill at Buxton Lammas.

Gambling became an accountant but otherwise very little is known about him. He was a great-grandnephew of the English rural clergyman poet George Crabbe (1754–1832), descended from Crabbe’s sister,⁷ and his and Rose’s only child, Jessamine (Jessie) Towler Gambling (Curnow’s mother), was born on 3 June 1880.

The marriage broke down in the 1880s and towards the end of that decade Rose left England with her young daughter and travelled to Australia, where for two or three years they were based in Sydney, before moving to Invercargill, New Zealand, in the early 1890s. In the mid-1890s Gambling himself moved to New Zealand, and the family was reunited in Invercargill for ten years,⁸ after which Rose moved with her daughter to Timaru.*

Among her accomplishments Rose had been trained as a singer, and during her shifts of residence she survived by giving singing lessons and taking in lodgers, assisted by Jessie. Rose is likely also to have been supported by her family back in England, and to have had some inheritance money when her father died in the early 1900s.

It was in Timaru that Jessie met Curnow’s father, Tremayne, who boarded with the family and from 1905 onwards was based in Timaru as assistant curate at St Mary’s Church after his ordination as deacon at the end of 1904. Jessie and Tremayne were married at St John’s Church, Invercargill, on 13 April 1909 and at this point both lived with Rose in Timaru.

Jessie’s father, whom Curnow never met, remained a mysterious figure in the family’s life. Speculation that the cause of John and Rose’s marriage breakdown was alcoholism is largely based on Jessie’s lifelong hostility to alcohol. However, there might have been some other reason, on which Curnow and his brothers later speculated: some kind of debility, illness or personality disorder. Curnow recalled that his grandmother continued to correspond with her husband, and on occasion referred to him as ‘Dad-dad’,⁹ but her daughter never spoke of him, and neither Curnow nor his brothers ever felt able to ask her about him. Almost certainly Jessie would have felt a sense of abandonment by her father. Although she and Rose kept photographs and keepsakes of their Norwich connections,^†10 there was no photograph of John Gambling.

In 1949, when Curnow visited England for the first time, he made contact with Willy Gambling, a younger brother of John, then living at Summer-Leyton (Fytton-de-Coy) on the Suffolk coast, but the conversation remained general and Willy volunteered no family stories. On the same trip Curnow did, however, seek information from one of Rose’s surviving sisters, Beatrice Goldingham, then a sprightly 89-year-old whom he visited in Edinburgh, but she too was unwilling to discuss what had happened, and died the following year. ‘It was very sad and a long time ago’, he recalled her as saying.‡¹¹ It was not at all unusual for such silences about potentially embarrassing matters to have been maintained in families during the time of Curnow’s childhood and youth, but for a child as observant and sensitive as he, the secrecy would surely have aroused his curiosity.

Curnow’s most moving account of the influence of his grandmother in shaping the imaginary England of his childhood is contained in a radio broadcast he wrote after visiting Norfolk in November 1949, encountering in the Allen tombstones at Caistor St Edmund and the old farm and home at Markshall, ‘places and people [who] were ghosts that haunted my New Zealand childhood’:

I knew the house the moment I saw it. An old yellow photograph of Markshall always hung on the wall of my grandmother’s room – the room of her own that she had in all the New Zealand vicarages where our family lived. It was always part of the landscape of my imaginary England. As a child I could look at it, while I listened to stories of Norwich, and Caistor, and the old mill at Buxton Lammas.¹²

The encounter was especially poignant since the visit to Norfolk occurred in the immediate wake of Curnow’s learning of his father’s death in New Zealand, at the end of October 1949, and details of the trip to Norfolk are included in the powerful poetic tribute he wrote over the next few weeks, ‘Elegy on My Father’. In his radio piece, Curnow sees the trip to Norwich as enabling him to substitute memories for ghosts, to test sentiment against reality. Contemplating the tombs of his ancestors, so surprisingly recent compared with the 700-year history of the Norman church where they are located, let alone compared with the Roman past contained in the name Caistor St Edmund: ‘All I could think to say – and I did say it, aloud, was: “So there you are. You’re real, after all.”’¹³ And that reality included not only their relative recentness, but their ‘distance’ or difference from himself: ‘They seemed to be asking questions: “This is where we belong,” they said. “Where do you belong? Where do you come from?”’¹⁴ What is recorded here is a personal release from a disabling kind of sentimental identification with Englishness.

A similar kind of release is described in Curnow’s moving and beautiful memorial sonnet to his grandmother Rose Gambling (‘In Memoriam, R.L.M.G.’), which he wrote some fifteen years after her death in January 1931 at the age of 76. Shortly before she died the family had shifted from West Lyttelton to the parish of New Brighton in Christchurch, and Curnow was about to embark on his own theological studies at St John’s Theological College in Auckland. However, it was Rose’s wish to be buried in the cemetery in the hills behind Lyttelton, where she had spent nine years in sight of the ships arriving and departing from the harbour below – ships which she had often watched from the window of the upstairs landing at the vicarage, occasionally weeping, as Curnow recalled, and longing to go home.¹⁵ In the poem her sacrificial death, after an exile from England of more than 40 years, establishes a local past – a local ‘ancestry’ – for those who come after her and in so doing ‘dismisses’ them into the ‘broad day’ of the present. She is presented as a figure of courage, who deliberately chooses ‘oblivion’ for herself in order to allow the generations she nurtured to feel at home in a country which was always alien to her:

The oldest of us burst into tears and cried

Let me go home, but she stayed, watching

At her staircase window ship after ship ride

Like birds her grieving sunsets; there sat stitching

Grandchildren’s things. She died by the same sea.

High over it she led us in the steepening heat

To the yellow grave; her clay

Chose that way home: dismissed, our feet

Were seen to have stopped and turned again down hill;

The street fell like an ink-blue river

In the heat of the bay, the basking ships, this Isle

Of her oblivion, our broad day. Heaped over

So lightly, she stretched like time behind us, or

Graven in cloud, our furthest ancestor.

In the companion sonnet to Grandmother Gambling’s sister which Curnow wrote at the same time, ‘To Fanny Rose May’,§ he praised his great-aunt (then living...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Editor’s Note
• Endnotes
• Allen Curnow Bibliography
• Plates
• Index
• Copyright Page
• Footnotes