‘Keri Hulme brought me thumping back to earth': Ross Calman's books confessional
The book I wish I'd written
Gee, what a tricky question, there are so many great books, but each is so individual that it's almost impossible to think about them being written by someone else, let alone by me! Without overthinking this one, I'm going to go for Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I have read this several times and always marvel at its perfection. There is not a word out of place and it builds inevitably to its devastating conclusion. And it blows my mind that English was Conrad's third (or maybe even fourth?) language!
Everyone should read
New Zealand writers because they speak to us about what is important for us in this country now. I believe that focusing on our local communities is very important, especially in this time when there is so much trouble abroad in the political and environmental spheres.
The book I want to be buried with
Maybe not actually buried with, but a book I have a lot of fondness for is Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence. It's a book that meant a lot to me when I was aged 18–21. I haven't read Lawrence for a long time and doubt it would have the same impact on me now as I am at a different stage of life, but it is special because I read it when I had just left home and was finding myself as a person.
The first book I remember reading by myself
It may have been the Berenstains' Bike Lesson, or this may be a memory that I am borrowing from my own children when they were small and could 'read' this book. Either way, it is a brilliant book with wonderful timeless humour – an absolute classic!
Fiction or nonfiction
I am totally on the fence, I love both and the boundary between the two is getting blurrier all the time! I was a judge for this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and had to read 55 non-fiction books towards the end of last year. Since then, I've read nothing but fiction to compensate, all by New Zealand writers, including Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu, The Mires by Tina Makereti and Delirious by Damien Wilkins, all of which I have loved!
The book that haunts me
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. It is a compelling ghost story and mystery, and one of my all-time favourite books. The Moonstone by the same author is not far behind.
Most underrated book
Going West by Maurice Gee. I fricking love everything by Maurice Gee and particularly this book, but you never hear it being mentioned when there are discussions of New Zealand's best novels, or even Maurice Gee's best novels!
Encounter with an author
In 2000 I was in Dunedin for Aukaha Kia Kaha festival, a Ngāi Tahu arts festival. During the festival I was lucky enough to attend a writing workshop that was being run by Keri Hulme. I remember describing my ideal writing situation, how I had this vision of a cottage by the sea where I would be away from all the distractions of modern life and I would be able to write my masterpieces. Keri brought me thumping back to earth, saying that I was really just procrastinating, that as writers we need to find the time and space to write, wherever we happen to be. It was such good advice that I still follow now. Wherever I am now, I try to start my day with an hour of creative writing (or half an hour if I am pushed for time).
Greatest New Zealand book
The Bone People, without a doubt. No other book has stayed with me, as this one has, after first reading it more than thirty years ago. I have read it four times and I am looking forward to reading it again soon to find out what it says to me now, in my current phase of life and with the current state of the world.
Greatest New Zealand writer
I am going to go nonfiction and say James Belich. No other New Zealand writer has brought the past to life with such vibrancy and made it seem so vital. He has had a huge impact on my own career exploring the worlds of my tūpuna.
Best thing about reading
It's a low-tech activity that you can do alone and in many different spaces: on the bus; waiting for a haircut; in a café; lying on the beach; lying on the couch.
Best food memory from a book
Midnight in Sicily by the Australian writer, Peter Robb. It's a mix of mafia, recent and more remote Italian history, and Sicilian culture, with lashings of food and wine. I also recommend his A Death in Brazil, where he does the same thing for Brazilian politics and culture.
Best place to read
I used to love reading in the bath, but now that I wear glasses, this is not so practical, as they fog up. I also love reading while on holiday, at a bach or even in a tent. I walked Te Araroa for two months over the summer of 2023/24 and I used to love the half an hour or so at the end of each day lying in my tent reading. Sometimes I was so tired though, that I could only manage a few pages.
What I'm reading right now
Owen Marshall's short story collection, Return to Harikoa Bay, and I'm absolutely loving it. Each story is a perfectly constructed artefact, a tiny world that it is fun and stimulating to inhabit. They are the perfect length to read at bedtime.
The Treaty of Waitangi by Ross Calman ($30, Oratia Media) is available to purchase through Unity Books.
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Maurice and me, by Geoff Chapple: part 2
George Orwell says in one of his essays that a writer's best years lie between the ages of 30 and 45. Maurice Gee has read those essays – what writer doesn't? – and at 44, in 1975, it's late in the day maybe, but for the first time his inchoate life is aligning. He resigns from his library position. Margareta and Moss sell their Mt Eden house, and by November 1975, have settled in Nelson. The house overhangs the Maitai River and has a dirt-floored basement where Maurice separates off a two-metre square room with one small window onto the outside world. He needs to concentrate like never before, and he and Margareta establish a Foot Stamp Chart – one stamp from the floor above signals a phone call, two a visitor, three a cup of tea, four important mail, five an emergency. In December 1975, there's a final affirming flourish to the decision to relocate. Moss is told confidentially that he's won the Literary Fund grant of $6,000. In mid-February 1976, he descends to the basement room and is now alone with the memory of his grandfather at Peacehaven, in the study where a fat and shiny brass Buddha sits on the desk and the library goes up to the ceiling. He'll wander first of all through to the kitchen of the Peacehaven bungalow on Lincoln Road. Later he'll wander at length over the five-acre Peacehaven on Millbrook Road, to the creek, and the eels, and the shadows within the orchard. He begins to write Plumb. Memory is a Maurice Gee strong suit. He's written about his remembering in Blind Road. His youngest childhood memories, as he describes them, seem almost to resemble paintings by old masters, where the light falls on certain prominent features, but the backgrounds are dulled out. Later, as he grows up, the memories are more self-aware, his positional skills increase and the shadowy backgrounds are usually gone. Everything is sharply defined 'as if the sun strikes down from straight overhead'. Yet occasionally as the eidetic explorer moves through these brighter frames the shadows become important, and yes, he'll see which way they fall, and he'll see that they have sharp edges. Memories make up about two thirds the length of Plumb. Throughout the majority of the novel, the Reverend George Plumb is remembering his past life, and at one point suggests his remembering is a skill: 'Memory with me is an active thing, not an undisciplined dreaming. It can be, and was now, an acceptable substitute for reading and writing. I get a hold on acts, words, gestures, worry them out of the corners they've got themselves lost in, and brush the dust away. And yet, because they come from far away, from lost realms and because their shapes are refined and mysterious, they have visionary force.' That's Moss himself laying out, I'd say, his own professional method. His manner was often mild, his face almost bland, but the inside of his head was a vault with a thousand chambers. The beginning of the novel Plumb is brilliant in every way. The Reverend, deaf to the world but not sufficiently worried about the deafness to deploy his big black bakelite hearing trumpet more than occasionally, is suddenly aware of an excited and gesticulating daughter, Meg. She beckons him through to the Peacehaven kitchen, and once there he's further invited to be amazed at the brand-new Atlas electric stove. Meg opens the oven door and there – look Dad –the polished interior. So to the stove top – look Dad – three elements. Meg holds up three fingers, and in a near-theatrical display of the stove's excellence, shifts a pot of boiling porridge off one of the elements and turns the knob below – just so Dad! – cutting off the electricity. The Reverend sees a further sign of approval is needed and, assuming the thing turns cold once the electricity is gone, places his hand firmly onto the element. Turmoil. Family bursting into the kitchen from all over the house. At a stroke we see an old man's isolation from the modern – that is the 1940s – world. In the rush to the kitchen we also see the main family members who'll be important as the novel unfolds. But better yet – a structural point – that for ease of reader reference, the burned hand, immediately treated with Vaseline then heavily bandaged, can serve as a signal. The book's mainstay is Plumb's remembrance reaching across the decades from the 1880s to the 1940s. Those passages run parallel to a month-long present-day narrative, and at each return to that present, the bandaged hand welcomes the reader back, either by direct sight of the bulky white bandage, or Plumb's own comment upon the healing that's under way, or by a concerned enquiry from someone in the 12-strong Plumb family – How's your hand Dad? By the end of March Maurice has written 40,000 words. Ah, at 40,000 words or thereabouts is the passage I first read when I was flying over China in 1979. Moss had inscribed a copy of Plumb for my mother, and she'd passed it on to me as I left New Zealand, part of a four-man team documenting the life, in China, of the kiwi farmer, Rewi Alley. The old DC3 carrying our documentary film team towards Inner Mongolia seemed to move crabwise in a side wind over the dunes of the Gobi Desert, for hours – a good bland background perhaps to be teleported in an instant back to the most vivid New Zealand scene I've ever read. The Night Limited Express of the late 1940s plunges on across the Central Plateau. In one of the sleeping carriages, the 80 year-old Plumb is on his way to visit his three adult children in Wellington. Blistered hand and all, he lies awake: 'The small hours. A moon-rayed closet full of dead air and burnt coal. A swaying circular motion that set my stomach floating as though on oil. . . . Close at hand Mount Ruapehu was shining in the moonlight.' So quick. So tight. Maybe it's just me. This is set in the late 1940s when steam trains travelled the main trunk line and maybe I'm just sentimental for having known those steam trains as a youth. No. I'd rather see it as writing doing the thing it does best, holding something important back from the void, forever. The atmosphere of the Night Limited Express which was once and never will be again is ageless here. Is Moss Gee magic, is one of the gifts that are given by a terrific writer, and one of the gratitudes you may feel. The Faber original, 1979, of Maurice Gee's classic book By mid-May he's written 70,000 words, by July 90,000, and his projected final total of 110,000 will roughly coincide with his 45th birthday. Amidst the Chapple's family's rich history, and his own extensive research, each day's work has felt like the work he's been born to do. He writes to Robin Dudding that the Plumb stuff flows each day 'like dipping into a barrel.' When he'd first begun seriously shaping up the novel he'd reassured his mother that the more he brooded on it, the more distant the Reverend George Plumb was becoming from the Reverend James Chapple. Later though, the Barrowman biography speculates that Moss has begun emphasizing to his mother that the book is fiction, for the very reason that the further in he got, the more the characters came to resemble the Chapples. In the 'Author's note' that concludes Plumb Moss says his aunts and uncles are not to accuse him of putting them in a novel. Despite that, many within the family could pick precisely who was who. Moss Gee's further note though is correct: that the early part of the novel is based on the facts of James Chapple's life, but from 1918 onwards including details of the relationship between Plumb and his wife Edie, it is not. So we approach the novel's climax – set around the early 1920s when Plumb is in his 60s and has just conducted a Unitarian Service for the Peacehaven wedding of his daughter Esther. Guests promenade about, and 'the bowl of the lawn' – part of the original 5-acre Peacehaven – 'is brimful of sunshine.' One of the guests is John Willis, the lawyer who defended Plumb in the 1917 sedition trial. John meets Plumb's 19 year-old son Alfred, at this wedding, and takes an interest in the youth's poetry. A month or two later, Plumb crests a rise in the Peacehaven orchard, sees Alfred and John Willis in flagrante in the grasses below, and is momentarily overwhelmed by darkness. He's clutching the branch of a tree to stay himself as he comes out of the darkness cursing the two of them with Old Testament bloodiness, watching their faces turn 'white and bestial', hearing the male voices that 'croaked like toads'. He flees to his study, grabs a handful of the gold sovereigns stashed there and is back in time to find the lovers crossing the creek bridge that exits the orchard. He flings sovereigns at their feet: 'You are dead. You are dead to me Alfred. Never come here again. Your name isn't Plumb. There's money to change your name.' In the aftermath, Plumb's wife Edie is calm. Plumb tells her he's banished Alfred. Pressed as to why, he speaks of the sin of Sodom, and she remains calm. He guesses she's known Alfred's nature all along and long ago forgiven. The banishment of Alfred becomes an estrangement in some small degree from his adult children who simply laugh at him, but in no small degree from Edie. In the first hours of the crisis it's Plumb the patriarch who forbids anyone ever again mentioning Alfred's name to him, but in that same hour of crisis it's Edie, with the dignity and soft power of motherhood, who insists that he, Plumb, should never speak of Alfred to her again. And it's she who, despite his command, departs often within the years ahead for what he knows are visits to Alfred. Hat and gloves. Departing Peacehaven, and returning, in silence. Eight years on, as a storm shakes Peacehaven, Edie lies dying, and the Reverend Plumb has a vivid and terrifying glimpse of his wife's immortal soul, sees Light and Love, and backs away, knowing suddenly he's thrown away any right to look upon it. She reaches for his hand – 'George ' and their life together rests in the strength of that grasp, but again 'George' her last word that he knows is also a last wish – to take Alfred as his son again. Still, he cannot. Back now to the novel's present-day narrative, Plumb arrives home by car from the Wellington visit. Peacehaven shines for him with Edie's presence. She's the one who chose that name. Her brush painted the nameplate. She's dead now. Eight years lay between Alfred's banishment and her death. Now a further 12 years have passed. Forgiveness. Love. Why has he not? He rests in the summerhouse and the change comes, finally, easily. That he can love Alfred. That too, he can forgive himself. He is a man. Nothing human is alien to him. The reconciliation is arranged to take place in the house of one of the Plumb children. Alfred arrives, ignores his father and kisses the two sisters who are looking on. Plumb seeks to talk with Alfred alone, and the atmosphere turns spiteful – 'Who is this man?' Alf asks – then begins a verbal assault that's brought finally to a climax as Plumb counters with a suggestion that Robert, Alfred's older brother, has a healing touch, has in fact during the recent visit to Wellington, helped Plumb's burned hand to heal, and could help Alfred too. It's an ambiguous suggestion. To help assuage Alfred's entrenched bitterness perhaps, but Alfred takes it differently. 'To stop me being a homosexual?' he asks. ' I did not say that' replies Plumb, but Alfred has begun to frenzy. The big black bakelite hearing trumpet has been tilted to catch his replies once too often, and he batters it away, picks it up and smashes it against the wall. Reflecting later on the impossibility of this or any other possible reconciliation with his son, Plumb says: 'His hatred of me was so great I did not believe he would survive me long.' The last 56 pages of the original Faber and Faber hardback edition are the pages that hold these stark descriptions of love's flip side – Plumb's black curses, and 20 years on, the bitter harvest. Hatred, cold, hard, and ferocious. Yet even as the novel comes up to its end, love is gathering again in bits and pieces, his other adult children support his needs, and look after each other too during any personal distress. And why not? The whole book is an intermittent soliloquy on love – Edie's intimate attendance and understanding of both the children and of Plumb. And the contrast – Plumb's spiritual yearning for Divine love. The book explores both the tragedy and the humour of those two loves, one to another, a separation that's at its most clear as the Reverend sits in his study, writing the ascent of Man, and requests yet another cup of tea by tinkling his teaspoon within the empty cup, a sound faintly heard and drawing a prompt response from the loyal household beyond. But in the course of the novel he will see also, that Edie's love is complete, and that he has fallen short. The novel ends at the summerhouse. Plumb, alone now, talks to his dead wife, tells her the hearing trumpet is smashed and he can't hear whether her thrush is singing, or not. Raymond the favoured grandson arrives to play draughts, and presently Plumb jumps his grandson's last man, and wins. He's ready to die, or love, or whatever it is. He's glad of the good he's done, sorry about the bad. Daughter Meg comes, takes him by the hand and leads him in to tea. Aside from its memorable characters, Plumb is beloved by New Zealanders for its depiction of what Moss Gee has called New Zealandy things. Its trains, its motorcars, its lawns, its language, its pragmatism, its attitude to Catholics perhaps, its idealism. Yet I'd say it was bigger than that too. Plumb won the 1978 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest British literary awards, for the work of fiction judged the best novel published by a British imprint that year, regardless of the author's nationality. With that one proviso of a British imprint, the Tait Black was open to the whole English-speaking world. To put the award into a longer perspective, the other winners in that same decade included Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell, John Banville, John Le Carré, and William Golding. Portrait of author Maurice Gee, 1990s, photographed by Reg Graham. Ref: PAColl-6458-1-08 Alexander Turnbull Library. The book sold internationally, and when Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005 for her novel Gilead, which detailed the life and family ties of an aging Congregationalist Minister in Iowa USA, Plumb was the novel that various literary critics reached for in their comparisons. I'd suggest also that the novel made an international impact because it gave voice to the hopeful vocabulary humanity has erected to cope with infinity. Plumb is a flawed man, but he's studied religion, the poetry canon, also the literature of enlightenment, and he's unafraid of the big words. Let's hear it for the Salvation Army's blessing upon the newly dead – they're Risen to Glory. Let's proceed further with Heaven on Earth 'where I, the imperfect, can adore my own Perfect', or where 'man comes in sight of Man'. Or, let's catch sight of the eternal in the vivid glimpse of Edie's immortal soul. Or sight some ineffable Light that earthly mortals can glimpse, but cannot, on this earth, live within. On the day of Esther's wedding, after the Unitarian Service, the 60-year-old Plumb is pierced by such a light, and to describe the vision will reach for the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:51: 'Behold I show you a mystery.' Plumb tells us that on this day he beheld just that mystery –'Which was made plain – a great light, a bliss, a splendour, a white radiance streamed through me.' You don't have to believe any of it, but these are words you've heard before, not often, perhaps but nonetheless, embedded, and in Plumb out they spill and on we go – it's terrific. Lastly let me recall a few of the more memorable meetings with Moss Gee over the years. In 1983 the Listener had agreed to a proposal that I write and photograph a regular fortnightly column as, with Miriam and my three children aboard, I manoeuvred a housebus anti-clockwise around the South Island. I knew already that when I reached Timaru one of the episodes would centre on the Reverend James Chapple. Moss was the man to talk that through with, and after we rolled off the inter-island ferry, we drove straight to his Nelson house. Moss brought out the Reverend's Bible, and we leafed through it together, the first time I'd seen the extensively inked monument. I told Moss about a recent visit to the United States to look up my Uncle Aynsley there and a few of my cousins. Aunt Dora, the local poet at Carmel California was the oldest of the Chapple children, and was now dead, but her son, David Hagermeyer still lived in Carmel and David suggested I talk to the last of my living American aunts. He called her up, and soon enough an American voice purred down the line – – Hello, it's your Aunt Mercy here – and who are you again? – Geoff Chapple – – Ah Geoff – Son of Geoffrey? Yes, I remember him well. And what do you do Geoff? – I'm a writer. – Oh that'd be right. That's the Chapples. Teachers, writers, or neurotics. I looked at Moss and refused to pass judgement. Moss looked at me, and, I hope, did the same. Under the Mountain was by now flying off the shelves. Plumb was doing edition after edition and the family trilogy with Meg (Faber and Faber 1981) and Sole Survivor (Faber and Faber 1983) was now complete. A little later those three novels, all inspired by the Chapple / Gee intergenerational line of Reverend James, Lyndahl, and Moss Gee would be gathered together by Penguin, published under the title The Plumb Trilogy, and reviewed by Michael King as 'One of the finest achievements in New Zealand literature.' It would feature on its cover a photo of the Reverend James Chapple – Moss's grandfather and mine. A meeting in Menton April 1992. I'd been the ideas guy for the main film the New Zealand pavilion showed at the Seville Expo 92, in Spain. This is New Zealand had separate images projected on three screens showcasing the country's landscape and culture including perhaps some wacky stuff like chooks pecking away at the country's NZ initials, laid out in wheat. I can't now remember if that one made the final cut, a lot of my ideas went west, but the pay was good, and so Miriam and I set out to catch the opening of the Expo on April 20. That same year Moss had won the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and once we'd landed in Paris, Miriam and I diverted to Nice then took a local train to Menton, walked up to the enormous pastel frontage of the Palais Lutetia, up one floor, and knocked on Moss's door. He hadn't known we were coming. The door opened and Moss stepped back and threw up his arms – 'Geoff! Rachel Barrowman's masterful 2015 biography of Maurice Gee After leaning awhile on the balcony with a glass of wine and contemplating the mighty Mediterranean, the three of us walked down to the nearby Katherine Mansfield writer's room. In 1920 Katherine Mansfield did her actual writing in the Villa Isola Bella which stood above us, locked, and we were down in a basement room that would have been, in 1920, a gardener's hangout, or perhaps a lapinière for raising rabbits. White concrete walls, a bed, a chair, a desk, an exercise book where Moss had been hard at work hand-writing his novel, main text on the right of each opened page, and revisions on the left. Crime Story (1994) was under way. I had something to tell him – I'd known that his research for the Plumb novel, years back, had turned up a former pupil of the Reverend James Chapple who'd said the Reverend had told her that he, Maurice Gee, of all the Reverend's grandchildren, was the one who'd have the most trouble finding himself, but was also the one most likely to carry forward the Reverend Chapple's life's work. Wrong. At the time of the Reverend's death in 1947, the one who'd come closest to doing that was running around somewhere in Mt Roskill as an energetic 7-year-old. He was the son of the 12th Chapple child, Joyce, who'd married Phil Reanney, a trucking contractor. In due course their son, Darryl Reanney, would gain PhD level qualifications in bio-chemistry and molecular biology. He lectured at Canterbury University, then La Trobe University in Melbourne and in 1982 became an Australian media figure as presenter for the ABC-TV's 7-part science programme Genesis. Early in 1992, Darryl had come across from Australia for a conference in Auckland, and I'd sat with him over a beer on his side of the harbour bridge. To cross that span, he told me, he'd need a whisky to settle his fear of heights. It was 36 years since I'd seen him last, and he was keen to talk. He'd recently published a book called The Death of Forever – A New Future for Human Consciousness (Longman Cheshire 1991) and he laid out the book's central thesis – that the insights of science now validated the insights of the sacred tradition. That every atom of the human body was generated first in the heat of a star. That the star-child, humanity, was a conscious entity, self-aware and part then, either a large or small part, of a cosmos awakening to understand what it was, so it could understand what it is, so it could understand what it may be. This tripped off Darryl's tongue with a practised ease, but became speculative with the proposal that as part of that forward momentum consciousness survives death. Not the individual ego, but a joining of some sort with a greater power. After that, Darryl lost me in subtle arguments about wave / particle dualities at the quantum level – except I remember him saying the wave part of the duality was 'very like a thought.' But yup, Moss agreed, as we leaned on the balcony again later and looked out over the Mediterranean, that certainly sounded like something the Reverend James Chapple would approve. Moss must have gone on to research Darryl further, for in the essay, Double Unit, he notes Darryl was 'a brilliant boy' who'd gone on to write two books on human consciousness and the interface between science and mysticism, the second published in 1994. Moss noted 'Of all James Chapple's grandchildren, he would have pleased the old man the most.' In August 1998 I was just coming to the end of route testing Te Araroa's proposed North Island trail, Miriam was walking with me, and we dropped down off the Mt Kaukau walkway straight into the Ngaio suburb and the Gee house in Chelmsford Street. I unslung my pack on the front porch, then knocked and delivered a prepared greeting as the door opened – – Moss, I've walked 1700 kilometres to your door. – Then please, theatrically with a sweeping arm, do come in. We had a good night of reminiscing the various Chapple foibles and scandals. Moss had just won that year's top fiction award, the Deutz medal, for his novel Live Bodies (1998), at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, passed it across, and Miriam and I got to weigh it in our hands. He was by then finishing the young adult novel Hostel Girl (1999) and about to start on another adult novel – Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001). His industry was always, to me, sobering. In the morning as we walked down Chelmsford Street towards Trelissick Park and the Tinakori Hill track into Wellington central, Miriam turned to me – – Did you see that your cuzzie had one of his slippers done up with a plastic clothes peg? We called in again in January 2014, Moss had relocated to Nelson by then, and, with an occasional eye-roll at his own stupidity, recounted how he and Margareta had sold up their Nile Street house there and opted for a cottage in a retirement village. They'd been in the village just two weeks when they knew they'd made a terrible mistake. They contacted the Nile Steet purchaser, who'd bought the house for his daughter – would he consider selling the house back? Luckily the purchaser was having misgivings about his purchase. So yes, he would. Maurice and Margareta then lost their deposit on the retirement cottage, but got back the Nile Street house and its high enclosing hedge. I'd been hosted to Wellington for a panel discussion at the Wellington Art Gallery and Miriam and I then popped across to Nelson, for a chat with Moss. I'd just read his second-to-last book, a junior fiction novel, The Severed Land (Penguin 2017). The land is Galb, and the indigenees have erected an invisible but effective temporal seal between the aristocratic colonisers at one end, and themselves at the other. But the invisible wall, held in place by the Old One's will, is starting to decay. The novel, I said to Moss, seemed set up for as sequel. He agreed, and offered that I wanted to take that on, he'd to pass it over. I re-read the book, but declined, and Moss subsequently gave the sequel rights to Tony Chapelle, son of my Uncle Hollis, but who'd changed the spelling of his name after a dispute with his father. Tony's sequel was endorsed by Moss Gee before publication, Truthmaker (Penguin 2021). In 2018, a Unitarian Group in Canada had discovered an unpublished hand-written manuscript by the Reverend James Chapple that Moss himself had donated to the Turnbull Library. The Canadians wanted to published it online, and after some family discussion, David Chapple, son of Leonard Chapple, the second of the 14 Chapple children, volunteered to type out a soft copy to send to the Canadians. Moss and I discussed copyright and decided that was irrelevant, Moss then withdrew from the project commenting that he was 'all Chappled out', but did think the Reverend's title on this one – The Growing Point of Truth – was a good one. The book was duly published on the aptly named website. In Late November 2023 he came to the door of his Nile Street house and welcomed us in, then returned to the sitting room to settle into his big chair. The sun was coming in through window. We talked and came up to the point – – I've lost the urge to write. I challenged that statement but he replied – It's the words Geoff, I'm losing the words. We noticed also that he was keeping a sharp eye on Margareta as she pottered about in the kitchen. When we got up to leave, he rose too quickly from the big chair, momentarily lost balance and stood swaying. I stepped forward to steady him, but he'd righted himself quickly, saw us to the door, and gave us the usual cheery farewell. We'd felt, though, an obvious change within the Nile Street house. In the course of testing the North Island Te Araroa route in 1998, Geoff Chapple drops in on his cousin Maurice Gee. (Note plastic clothes peg on Gee's slipper.) Photo: Miriam Beatson On February 12 this year I sent an email to Moss asking him to identify one of my Chapple cousins in an old photograph that shows my mother Dawn , his mother Lyndahl, then Florence and the Reverend James all in a line and my sister Bronwen being held by my father. I can date it easily, February or March 1944 because my mother is obviously pregnant, and I'm not yet there. I wrote to Moss that I needed the identity of the unknown cousin because I was thinking of including the photo in a memoir of my own and might need a caption. His answer came three days later – Deorwyn the 10th Chapple had a couple of sons and the cousin in the picture was one of them, Malcolm Fergus. Good luck with the memoir Geoff, he wrote. I'll hang on in the hope of reading it. It wasn't to be. Moss had talked to me more than once about seeing death as the last great experience. When the news came, I didn't know at first it was an end of life choice, but in the following days his family forwarded his final letter, and that made it clear. The family also sent me the note, hand-written on lined notepaper, that listed what should happen when he was found. Each separate item was given its own space upon the page, with the first two words at the top of the list encircled to indicate priority: no service – – family and friends – cremation – river or hill or burial. I learned also that he'd last visited Margareta on June 3, nine days before his own death on 12 June 2025. Margareta was then in a Nelson Hospital ward. She was no longer recognising him, and was about to be shifted to a full-time care unit at Stillwater Gardens, so loyalty to her was no longer a consideration. I thought then – so of course, my beloved cousin, you wanted to experience death and to do it before you were too wrecked to appreciate the last great experience. So how was it? I've seen it written that some perfectly crafted airtight door opens. Death's door, and with the slightest of sounds – tk! – through you go. And maybe this side of the divide, a slight suction at its closing. A thing of minimalist beauty. I hope there's something in there –maybe the tk! – that you might place, thrillingly, in your own minimalist, hard-edged prose. # The timelines and many of the details in this remembrance are taken from Rachel Barrowman's meticulous Maurice Gee: Life and Work (VUP 2015), and Maurice Gee's Memory Pieces (VUP 2018). Peter Beatson, the Associate Professor in Sociology at Massey University, now retired, was helpful in suggesting that the so-called evil in Gee's novels is not theological, and usually pertains to human cruelty of whatever kind. Helpful also in pointing out the structural similarity between Plumb and In My Father's Den. The 'Death's door' description leans on an episode in David James Duncan's Sun House (Little Brown and Company 2023). The opinions on how Maurice's life unfolded and the conclusions reached are my own. Part 1 of Geoff Chapple's memoir of Maurice Gee (August 22, 1931-June 22, 2025) appeared in ReadingRoom on Tuesday.
