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Frank Sargeson

Frank Sargeson, born Norris Frank Davey in 1903, was one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers of the 20th century. Davey left the confines of his puritanical Methodist upbringing at an early age, and in 1927 he bought a return ticket to Europe. In London he began a frenetic round of galleries, museums, concert halls and theatres, and started to develop his writing skills. He also embarked on his first homosexual relationship, with an interior decorator 14 years his senior.

After a year abroad, Davey returned to Wellington, where, in 1929, he was arrested for a series of homosexual encounters. In 1931 he moved into the one-room bach his family owned in Takapuna. This offered sanctuary and somewhere to write. Here Davey wrote most of his fiction, journalism and plays, and also held court to the small Auckland literary community, which included his protégée, Janet Frame.

Frank Sargeson’s major achievement was to introduce the rhythms and idiom of everyday New Zealand speech to literature. While his first stories were about the constricting effects of a puritan and materialistic society, many of his later writings celebrated the freedom of those who had escaped from it. His work also shows a gradual shift from a colloquial and laconic manner to the more elaborate style of his later novels and memoirs. His early style influenced a generation of younger New Zealand writers.

By Michael King; adapted by Matthew Tonks

Read full biography of Frank Sargeson (DNZB)

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Frank Sargeson’s Bach

Frank Sargeson’s Bach, Takapuna (1931)

New Zealand fiction finds its voice

No Historic Places Trust registration form could improve on writer Kevin Ireland’s assessment of this place. ‘That tiny fibrolite dwelling, set in the subsistence garden that Frank cultivated like a small farm,’ he wrote in his memoir Under the bridge and over the moon, ‘became a literary kingdom entirely without guards or frontiers and where the only cards of identity were books’. As the novelist David Ballantyne put it: ‘Here he wrote all his best-known short stories and novels, grew vegetables and entertained friends and fellow writers. Here a truly New Zealand literature was born.’

In 1931 Norris Davey (Frank Sargeson) moved into the family bach (a Kiwi word for a small no-frills beach or holiday house) in Esmonde Road, Takapuna, then a quiet seaside resort on Auckland’s isolated North Shore. Seclusion suited the 28-year-old Sargeson, who was still trying to live down an earlier arrest for having sex with another man, then illegal in New Zealand. Dilapidated and cockroach-infested 14 Esmonde Road, ‘a small one-roomed hut in a quiet street ending in a land of mangrove mud-flats that belonged to the inner harbour’, offered sanctuary and somewhere to write. Here Sargeson wrote most of his work and also held court to the small literary community. Here he grew his vegetables, entertained, cooked fine meals, argued and loved and took in strays, most memorably the novelist Janet Frame, whose sojourn in the garden shed (now demolished) has been featured in books and film.

Sargeson died on 1 March 1982 and his ashes were sprinkled under a loquat tree in the garden. Traffic from the harbour bridge now thunders along Esmonde Road, past the property, which a trust administers as a literary museum. Contact the Takapuna Public Library to make an appointment to see the place. Sargeson’s reputation may have faded a little in literary circles, but behind its stark, no-frills grey fibrolite exterior there awaits an enticing, water-stained brown little world full of books, old armchairs, hats, coats and all the relics of a life of yarns and letters.

View Perfectly Frank - the life of a New Zealand writer (NZ On Screen)

Further information

This site is item number 88 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

Websites

Books

Michael King, Frank Sargeson: a life, Penguin, Auckland, 1995
Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford (eds), An affair of the heart: a celebration of Frank Sargeson’s centenary, Cape Catley, Auckland, 2003

Credit:

Text: Gavin McLean, 2013

Contemporary images: Gavin McLean, 2001

Historic image:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: 1/2-003138-F
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of their images.

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Date established:

1931

Katherine Mansfield

Autographed photograph of Katherine Mansfield in 1914, taken by the Adelphi Studio, The Strand, London.

Katherine Mansfield wrote short stories, poetry, letters, journals and reviews, and is regarded as a central figure in British modernism. Three story collections were published while she was alive and two posthumously. Much has been written about her work and her brief, tumultuous life.

Read biography of Katherine Mansfield

Credit:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: 1/4-017274-F
Photographer: Charlotte Mary Pikthall
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa must be obtained before any reuse of these images.

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Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born and raised in Wellington. Her writing talents were noticed in high school.

As a teenager she spent nearly four years in England. Back in New Zealand she was dissatisfied, longing to return to England’s cultural richness.

She had several short stories published in Australia in 1907 and announced that she wished to be read only ‘as K. Mansfield or KM’. In 1908 her father let her return to England, agreeing to pay her a living allowance.

Mansfield became pregnant to one man, and married another. She miscarried, and her mother deleted her from her will. Her experiences informed the stories she wrote.

In December 1911 Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, editor of the arts journal Rhythm. They began an unconventional but committed relationship. Katherine continued to write, building her reputation. However, the couple had financial worries and frequently changed address. They associated with many literary luminaries, who recognised Mansfield’s brilliance.

In 1915 Mansfield's soldier brother Leslie Beauchamp visited her, and they reminisced, planning a return to New Zealand. When Leslie was killed in battle, Mansfield was devastated. Her grief influenced her work, along with her nostalgia for New Zealand.

Mansfield had tuberculosis. As her health deteriorated, she tried many treatments, and completed some significant stories.

In 1923 she suffered a fatal haemorrhage. She willed her manuscripts, notebooks and letters to Murry, who published many posthumously, and contributed to the growth of her international reputation.

By Gillian Boddy; adapted by Johanna Knox

Read full biography of Katherine Mansfield (DNZB)

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Death of John Mulgan

At the time of his suicide in Cairo in April 1945 (while serving with the British army), many New Zealanders knew little of the Christchurch-born John Mulgan.

This changed following the 1949 reprint of his novel Man alone, which became a classic of New Zealand literature and a staple of the secondary curriculum.

Image: John Mulgan

John Mulgan

Following his graduation from Auckland University in 1933 the Christchurch-born Mulgan took up residence at Merton College, Oxford. In 1935 he began working at the Clarendon Press. A keen observer and commentator on European politics, he also became a New Zealand government observer at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1936. He and his close friend Geoffrey Cox also began contributing regular articles on foreign affairs for the Auckland Star. But it is as the author of Man alone (1939) for which Mulgan is perhaps best known.

The title for Man alone came from a remark in Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Most copies of Man alone had been destroyed during the London blitz. As a result Mulgan’s literary prowess remained largely unknown to many New Zealanders at the time of his death in April 1945.

This changed following the New Zealand reprint of 1949. Man alone spoke ‘for the generation that grew up between the wars’ while at the same time exploring Mulgan’s own sense of 'feeling of being between two worlds'. It became a New Zealand literary classic.

Its central character, Johnson, an English survivor of the First World War, came to Auckland during the Depression. After being caught up in the Depression riots he turned his hand to farming, firstly in the ‘grim northern Waikato’ and then in the central North Island. There, he had an affair with his boss’ Māori wife. Following the accidental killing of his boss, he then survived an epic crossing of the Kaimanawa Ranges as he sought to leave the country and set out for the Spanish Civil War.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War Mulgan enlisted in the British army, serving with distinction. His work with Greek partisans during the German occupation between 1943 and 1944 saw him awarded the Military Cross.

Mulgan became increasingly disillusioned with the chaos resulting from war as demonstrated by the civil war which had erupted in Greece but also from what he saw as the failure of socialism. In late 1944 he had unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate a transfer to the 2nd New Zealand Division, highlighting what some saw as ‘the central tragedy’ of his life – ‘that he never discovered where "home" was.’ Shortly before his death he completed the manuscript of his memoir, Report on experience, which he posted to his wife in New Zealand.

See also: Biography of John Mulgan (DNZB)

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John Mulgan

John Mulgan, author of Man Alone, c1940.

Read more about John Mulgan

Credit:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: 1/1-000652-F

Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

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Portrait of Ngaio Marsh

Standing portrait of artist, playwright, actor, director and crime writer Ngaio Marsh taken c1935.

Read more about Ngaio Marsh

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Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: PAColl-8163-04
Photographer: Henry Herbert Clifford
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image

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Ngaio Marsh

Newsweek described her novels as 'the best whodunits ever written'. Ngaio Marsh was also an artist, playwright, actor and director. The New York Times called her New Zealand's best-known literary figure.

Marsh was regarded as one of ‘Queens of Crime’ in the 1920s and 1930s. Her international acclaim was based on 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982, all of which featured the British detective Roderick Alleyn. All but four were set in England; in the four set in New Zealand, Alleyn was on secondment to the New Zealand police.

In New Zealand Marsh is also remembered for her theatrical work. Her first play was written and performed in 1913 while she was a student at St Margaret's College in Christchurch. Between 1913 and 1919 she studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art before turning to acting during the early 1920s. From 1928 on she divided her time between living in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

In 1942 Marsh produced Hamlet for the Canterbury University College Drama Society and in 1944 her productions of Hamlet and Othello toured New Zealand to great acclaim. During the 1950s she was involved with the New Zealand Players, a short-lived attempt to maintain a national professional touring repertory company.

Ngaio Marsh was knighted as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966. She died in February 1982 at her home in Valley Road, Cashmere, Christchurch - now a Category I Historic Place open to the public.

The boys of Puhawai

In the baby-boom years following the Second World War, the state education system struggled to meet the needs of a rocketing young population. Trained teachers were in desperately short supply, and locally relevant reading material even more so. So the publication in 1960 of a collection of stories about the day-to-day adventures of three young Kiwi boys was a welcome addition to the limited range of quality children's literature.

The stories describe the joys, dangers and discoveries of three friends, Timi and Peter, who are Maori, and John, a Pakeha. They attend the same school in the coastal North Island community of Puhawai, and spend their free time on its beaches, in the bush and in each other's houses. So far, so predictable. But The boys of Puhawai has several features which would make it unusual even today.

The author's name was given only as 'Kim', and the stories presented a clear and unromanticised view of the place of Maori in post-war New Zealand. Timi's father works as a farmhand for the descendants of settlers who acquired his own ancestors' land. A summer visitor to the local holiday camp calls Timi a 'dirty little Maori nigger'.

Yet these unfortunate realities emerge casually and believably in the course of the three boys' rural escapades – discovering valuable flotsam on the beach, encountering some stroppy bulls in a paddock, confronting a runaway criminal trying to steal their horse. The boys are loyal to each other and frequently a menace to the rest of the neighborhood. They argue, speculate and scrounge for food in entertaining and convincing fashion, and in language ('by crikey dick!') that sounds real.

Kim was actually Alastair Airey. He was teaching junior classes at Taupo District High School when he began writing stories to encourage his pupils to read. The 23-year-old immersed himself in the mainly Maori community around the Taupo township and regularly visited its local marae, Nukuhau. He based his central characters on three of his pupils, George Blake, Paki Blake (no relation) and Henry Dixon. Their real-life activities were transplanted to the imaginary community of Puhawai, loosely based on Auckland's west coast beaches, where Airey's family spent holidays, and on coastal areas of the Coromandel, where he now lives.

The pioneering New Zealand publisher Blackwood Paul was a family friend. Paul had developed his father's Hamilton business, Paul's Book Arcade, into one of the country's finest bookshops. From 1945 he and his wife, Janet, began publishing books which, as she explained in 1995, 'could lay the groundwork for a better understanding of New Zealand by the people who lived here'. The Pauls produced The boys of Puhawai in a substantial hardback edition, with superb line drawings by Dennis Turner and, unusually, black-and-white photographs by the author.

Alastair Airey chose to conceal his identity as author because his father, Willis (Bill) Airey, an Auckland University history professor and former Rhodes Scholar, was widely known for his radical views. In the Cold War atmosphere of early-60s New Zealand, such a stigma could sink a first-time author's reputation from the outset. The nom de plume Kim was taken from the character in Rudyard Kipling's novel of that name, because, according to Airey, 'he was white but culturally the same as the Indians he lived among'.

Paki Blake, portrayed in Airey's book as 'Peter Neroy', remembers being a schoolboy in Taupo: 'you weren't proud to be a Maori back then. In those days te reo and tikanga weren't part of the curriculum'. He recalls that his former teacher was 'the only one who pushed us in that direction'. From Taupo, Paki went on to study at St Stephen's Maori boys' boarding school. Today he is a senior teacher at Te Kura Kaupapa o Waitaha in Christchurch: 'Without him [Airey], I wouldn't have got anywhere, I don't think.'

Alastair Airey is still a writer and inspiring educator. Now 75, he works regularly at Coromandel School, teaching remedial reading or, as he prefers to call it, reading partnerships. He has not published a book since The boys of Puhawai, but still writes ‘heaps of stories for the kids'.

By Mark Derby

Further information

Janet Paul, in Landmarks in New Zealand publishing - Blackwood and Janet Paul 1945-1968, National Library Gallery, Wellington, 1995

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