Simply by Sailing in a New Direction: Allen Curnow: A Biography - Hardcover

Sturm, Terry; Cassells, Linda

 
9781869408527: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction: Allen Curnow: A Biography
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1869408527 ISBN 13: 9781869408527
Verlag: Auckland University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Linda Cassells has a doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Bath and over 25 years’ experience in book publishing. Terry Sturm CBE was a professor of literature at the University of Auckland for many years, editor of The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1990, 1998), author of An Unsettled Spirit: The Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton (AUP, 2003), and editor of a selection of Curnow’s verse written under his pseudonym Whim Wham, Whim Wham's New Zealand: The Best of Whim Wham 1937-1988 (Random House, 2005).

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Allen Curnow Simply by Sailing in a New Direction

A Biography

By Terry Sturm, Linda Cassells

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 2017 Linda Cassells on behalf of the Literary Estate of Terry Sturm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-852-7

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements, 
PART I, 
Chapter One: Family Ancestries, 
Chapter Two: Early Childhood, 1911–21, 
Chapter Three: The Lyttelton Years and Adolescence, 1921–30, 
Chapter Four: Student Life in Auckland, 1931–33, 
Chapter Five: Widening Horizons, 1934 to mid-1936, 
Chapter Six: Marriage, Journalism and Enemies, 1936–37, 
Chapter Seven: A Turning Point in History: Not in Narrow Seas, 1937–38, 
Chapter Eight: A Changing Christchurch, Dearth of Poems, and Whim Wham, 1939–40, 
Chapter Nine: 'The Shock of Another War': Island and Time, 1940–41, 
Chapter Ten: Pacific Outreach, the Mid-war Years, 1941–42, 
Chapter Eleven: 'Landfall in Unknown Seas': 1942–43, 
Chapter Twelve: Family Expansion, Sailing or Drowning, and the Caxton Anthology, 1943–44, 
Chapter Thirteen: Restless Years, 1945–46, 
Chapter Fourteen: Last Years in Christchurch, 1947–49, 
PART II, 
Chapter Fifteen: United Kingdom, March 1949–January 1950, 
Chapter Sixteen: United States, February–April 1950, 
Chapter Seventeen: Moving to Auckland, June 1950–November 1954, 
Chapter Eighteen: A New Life and New Poems, 1955–57, 
Chapter Nineteen: Penguin Anthology Delays, 1958–60, 
Chapter Twenty: More Plays, 1958–61, 
Chapter Twenty-one: United States, March–September 1961, 
Chapter Twenty-two: Separation and Remarriage, September 1961–August 1965, 
Chapter Twenty-three: Transitions, 1965–71, 
PART III, 
Chapter Twenty-four: The Making of a Sequence: Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, 1972, 
Chapter Twenty-five: New and Collected Poems, 1973, 
Chapter Twenty-six: Discovering Europe: Leave, 1974, 
Chapter Twenty-seven: Europe revisited, and An Incorrigible Music, 1975–78, 
Chapter Twenty-eight: Return to New Zealand, 'Moro Assassinato', 1978–79, 
Chapter Twenty-nine: A Growing UK Reputation, You Will Know When You Get There, 1980–81, 
Chapter Thirty: Curnow and the Theory of 'Open Form', Apartheid, Brisbane Writers' Week, 1981–82, 
Chapter Thirty-one: Menton, London and Toronto, The Loop in Lone Kauri Road, 1983–86, 
Chapter Thirty-two: International Recognition, Continuum and Selected Poems (Viking), 1986–90, 
Chapter Thirty-three: Expanding Critical Interest in Curnow, 1990–93, 
Chapter Thirty-four: Early Days Yet, 1993–96, 
Chapter Thirty-five: Last Poems, The Bells of Saint Babel's, 1997–2001, 
Editor's Note, 
Endnotes, 
Allen Curnow Bibliography, 
PLATES, 
Index,


CHAPTER 1

Family Ancestries

* * *

We all grow up with all kinds of psychic pressure-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.


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.


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'. 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 whoprovided 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 longstanding 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...

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Verlag
Auckland University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1869408527
ISBN 13 
9781869408527
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
732
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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mail@preigu.de

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