'He's left an intergenerational legacy' - Tributes for Maurice Gee
Respected Kiwi author Maurice Gee.
Photo:
Supplied/Nelson City Council
The death of Maurice Gee has prompted many New Zealanders to pay tribute to the late novelist.
Considered one of New Zealand's greatest novelists, his work extended over 50 years.
The author,
who died recently aged 93
, wrote about ordinary people and ordinary lives, often with the narrator looking back at events that caused damage and unhappiness.
Publisher and literary commentator Fergus Barrowman said Gee's work hugely influenced his life.
"I read
Plumb
when it came out in paperback in 1979, and I was 18, and it was the first New Zealand book I read that really sort of fired my imagination and gave me a sense of how sort of diverse and interesting and challenging this country was.
"I read everything else, and he's really shaped my view.
"I know that his books have stayed in print and been widely read, and the fact that he was at that point turning to write children's books as well meant that there have always been new generations coming on, so people are still reading him as a contemporary," he said.
Barrowman said he knew Gee for more than 40 years and had worked with him from time to time.
That included Gee's 2015 biography - written by his sister Rachel Barrowman -
Maurice Gee: Life and Work.
"He was dedicated from early on, but he didn't strike gold quickly," said Barrowman.
"He took some time to learn to write and was in dialogue with Charles Brasch, the stern editor of
Landfall
, with his early stories.
"At a certain point when he really felt that he had come of age as a writer, he left secure employment and lived by his writing, his adult novels, his children's books, and writing for TV thereafter, so that dedication has been an inspiration for a lot of writers.
"I think he had an inner core of steel and grasped his own significance, but he was also a very humble and modest man who didn't like being the centre of attention.
"I think it was interesting that when he did publish a memoir, it was three memoirs, three shorter pieces, which had been written about his family, and for his family he wasn't trying to foreground himself.
"It was really his books that he wanted to see recognised and out in the world, and the books are known internationally as well as locally."
"Though I haven't seen a lot of him recently, he does leave a hole in my life," said Barrowman.
The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi said we they were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Gee, describing him as "one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most celebrated novelists, a literary giant, and a quiet revolutionary".
General manager Jessica Palalagi said this was cemented by Gee earning the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 1992 and being among the inaugural Icon Whakamana Hiranga recipients in 2003, among numerous other awards.
"He has left a strong intergenerational legacy for us all through his work," said Palalagi.
"To me, that's what becoming an icon is really. It's that ability to make work and to be an artist that lasts across generations.
"I think his writing for children also meant that a lot of us grew up with his literature and then they were turned into sort of like motion pictures and TV shows.
"It was world building, he created worlds through his words," she said.
Palalagi said The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi had been trying to organise a rare interview with Gee, which unfortunately was not able to materialise.
She said even in his final years, he still shied away from the limelight.
"I had been actually trying to reach out to him since last year. So we've been talking to him via his daughter because we were trying to organise a sort of a profile piece on him.
"He was kind of like, 'oh, why is everyone making a fuss about this work that I did?'. So I think he was just incredibly humble.
"He was actually very generous in saying that he doesn't actually do a lot of interviews, but he was happy to sit down and have a chat so I felt very humbled in that way to be able to have that time, but we just couldn't quite get there.
"It's quite sad in a way to think that we could have had one sort of last conversation," she said.
Gee was born in Whakatāne in 1931 and educated at Auckland's Avondale College in Auckland and at Auckland University where he took a Masters degree in English. He worked as a teacher and librarian, before becoming a full-time writer in 1975.
He spent much of his later life in Nelson, where he became a loved consituent.
Nelson MP Rachel Boyack said the late novelist made a big contribution to the South Island city.
"He was involved in groups like 'Friends of the Maitai', who have done a huge amount of work to protect out river that runs through inner city Nelson.
"In a recent interview he spoke of the important of the Maitai river, in terms of teaching his daughters how to swim and so while he didn't grow up here he spent his later years of his life here.
"It's really sad, wonderful that he was able to live such a full life into his early 90s but it's always so sad when we've lost someone who made such a significant contribution to our nation."
"Nelson people are very proud that he decided to live and retire here in Nelson," said Boyack.
Those sentiments were shared by another politician, Minister for Arts, Culture & Heritage Paul Goldsmith.
"It's a very sad day, Maurice Gee has been a greatly loved writer and novelist for many decades.
"People of my generation grew up on
Under the Mountain
being a great local story, some of his other great novels like
Plumb
have had international acclaim but also being part of our literary cannon as it used to be known as," said the minister.
Goldsmith said
Plumb
was his favourite novel written by Gee.
He said parliament could look to pay tribute in some way to the late writer in the coming days, but said there had been no discussions yet.
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‘Dear Maurice, I miss you': tributes to Maurice Gee, 1931
The great New Zealand writer Maurice Gee has died. The literary community pays tribute. Maurice was one of the most honest and brave men I've known. Honest about his craft – because he saw it as craft, equal to any art; there was absolutely no bullshit about Maurice when he spoke or wrote of his job. Brave because he was unflinching in his presentation of human and social imperfections, and in his commitment to the precarious business of being a full time writer. I remember his casual mention of the fact that the year's PLL payment had been a decent one, so they could afford a decent Christmas. It was said with absolutely no affectation or pretension – just part of his stoicism and modesty. His contribution to our children's writing was astonishing. He took on topics which hardly any other author attempted at the time; respected and even honoured his young readers by showing characters and issues in their ambivalent and often disturbing complexity. The ugliness, the evil was never glossed over, but his books were permeated by such a strong moral sense. And he mythologised the NZ landscape, made it emblematic in ways which have inspired New Zealand writers since. I was lucky enough – hell, privileged enough – to be hosted by Maurice and Margareta at different times. They were warm, natural, interested as well as interesting: all that you could ask of hosts. I want to acknowledge Margareta's commitment, support and love for Maurice; she was his greatest friend and companion. And I want to mention that once when I was talking to him, Maurice thanked me for writing a small booklet for schools about him. 'It was so good of you to take the trouble.' He thanked ME for writing about him? I'd have crawled on all fours to have the chance to do so. / David Hill Dear Maurice, I was one of your very first admirers in print. In 1962, I took up the book review page in the Rotorua Daily Post, and one of the very first books to land on my desk was The Big Season by a writer nobody really knew. But of course it was you, and your book fairly sizzled with colour and vibrancy, and an immediacy about a world I had been immersed in in my teens, rugby clubs and the high dramas on and off the field. I didn't know then that you had lived for some time in Rotorua but it felt as if you did, that we had watched the same games. That book had the total ring of authenticity, a trait that followed through in all your work, even though the subject matter changed, took on an often sombre tone. But anyway, a couple of firsts: your first novel, my first book review, repeated on the back of your next, A Special Flower, a book I really really liked too. Here's what I said: 'The Big Season is a splash of colour on the New Zealand literary scene. Maurice Gee is an obviously brilliant young New Zealander, with an unerring eye for detail and a sharp ear for dialogue….it is completely fresh and natural and does more towards the authenticity of his New Zealand scene than anything else.' Well, I was young and, if it sounded a bit precious, I was trying to convey just how much I admired your work and, perhaps, how much I wanted to write like you. I mean, I wasn't wrong about your brilliance, was I, although it was something you wouldn't admit to, being, as I found you a bit retiring, almost shy. You let me through once or twice and let me see the man who blazed behind that mild exterior, I think I knew where the books came from. There were some I liked more than others and I sighed when I was shortlisted for prizes behind your winning novels yet again. I'm sorry, you would say, in that self-deprecating way, as if you hadn't quite meant to win, but you did anyway. But there was always the sense of us being part of that company of writers who learned our craft together in those early years, and went on our way, following in each other's footsteps as friends and colleagues for a long time. It's a while since we last met in person, not since you left Wellington. But dear Maurice, I miss you. Thank you for the books, thanks for the friendship, thanks for your own big season. / Dame Fiona Kidman One of the joys of placing Maurice Gee's fiction at the centre of my PhD in Creative Writing was reading all 17 of his adult novels in one intense year. Maurice was our master literary archaeologist, scraping away at the patina of Godzone, coming back at it from another angle — and another and another — until its swampy underbelly revealed its petrified secrets. We've lost one of our greatest writers; there'll never be another like him. Go well, Maurice. / Sue Orr The following is an excerpt from Damien Wilkins' 2015 launch speech for Rachel Barrowman's biography of Gee. Reprinted with permission. There's a great photo in Rachel Barrowman's essential Gee biography. It shows Maurice in a white singlet digging a hole for his septic tank. You don't have to think for too long before coming up with its symbolic appeal. Yes, this writer has been excavating our waste systems for decades. What's especially good about the photo is that it captures the process at its dirtiest. I mean Maurice looks buggered, straddling the hole, the sun beating down on his red face and neck, piles of fresh dirt around, broken bits of concrete. It's been awful out there on the slope beneath the house but you're going to feel good once it's done and you know you haven't paid another man to do it for you. It's an image then we can savour not only for its tempting literary meaningfulness but also for its suggestion of graft, labour, commitment and self-reliance. We use the phrase 'a work of art' fairly loosely and unthinkingly, hurrying to the created thing. One of the contributions high quality literary biography can make is to remind us of how an art form such as the novel is work – a matter of showing up each morning, putting in the hours, being dissatisfied, getting it right – as right as it'll come – and signing off on it before moving on to the next job. You might even get paid. Luckily for his readers, though not always easily for Maurice Gee, the job of novelist seems to have been the only thing he was good at. Although I'm sure he did a fine job with the septic tank. Of course everyone is interested in money and writers are interested in what other writers earn. So the question is: How do you go about constructing your income stream if all you really want to do is make up stories? Read in one way this book is a sort of instruction manual for anyone with an interest in following suit or simply following how one writer did it. And I value intensely Rachel's dedication to such details. She's down in that hole with Gee, getting dirt on her shoes and working up a sweat. But of course the story is much more than royalty statements, grant applications, the odd windfall, the many setbacks . . . For a start there are all those books to read and consider in the light of the life being revealed. This biography is thoroughly engaged with Gee's fiction and Rachel's expert delineation of the family tree, the family Gee, which sets out how one book is connected to another, this is tremendously valuable. And it's never done in the niggardly way which aims to shrink everything to a neat template of correspondences – here's the real creek and here's the invented one. When Rachel tests the life against the work she wants to amplify and enrich and suggest. And I especially like one aspect of Rachel's account of the writing – that is, she always leaves in place the author's own avowals of ignorance ('I don't really know what I'm doing'), of uncertainty ('I tried to get close to that experience but who knows'), of fear ('I seem to have come to an end'). These are recurring notes. Partly, of course, they're a form of self-defence. The aw gee-shucks of Gee. But Rachel understands too that these moments communicate something about writing itself; that it always takes in the possibility of not writing, of not turning up for work. Gee may present as an unpretentious carpenter – look at the cover shot, sleeves rolled as if thinking how to tackle the skirting board – but his life story is remarkably chancy and non-compliant, made from unlikely leaps as much as from dogged toil. From the outside we discern steady progress, books written as regularly as eggs laid, but finally we see inside the life and understand something of its costs, its crises, its victories too. A small example: It's amazing to me that Gee struggled so much with Meg, a novel I think of as kind of perfect. It's amazing that Prowlers was originally called Papps. Let me finish by saying one more thing about the scope of this book. Anyone's life becomes on closer inspection a group portrait and although Maurice Gee's career must do without creative writing courses, Rachel convincingly recreates the friendships and relationships that in many ways mimic the kind of support structure available now. There's a lovely evolving set of insights into how people such as Maurice Shadbolt, Kevin Ireland, Robin Dudding, Ray Grover, Nigel Cook and others interacted with our man. Gee's friends are Rachel's friends too and therefore ours, helping us see her subject from different angles. When Gee was doing scriptwriting for television and earning better money, Shadbolt reports back to Ireland that at the Gee house there are 'hints of prosperity' – 'hard booze in the cupboard now instead of home brew.' I think Rachel's feel for the telling remark, the revelatory incident, from what must have been a large archive of letters, interviews, essays, reviews, as well as the fiction itself, lends her text not only its narrative drive but also its tone. The book sounds like Maurice Gee without being his mouthpiece. It's intimate but also pitched at a crucial remove. This poise allows the book to be fundamentally sympathetic to its subject without sacrificing loyalty to facts which emerge that the hagiographer or even simply the fan might baulk at. I mentioned at the start this business of secrets, new things about Gee's life that will alter how he's read. I'm sorry but I'm not telling. Rachel's biography needs to be read to learn these things. Obviously you'll want to read it to know how the Plumb trilogy came to be written. Or Prowlers. Or Going West. That would be enough. But such is Rachel's achievement that gradually you feel something else going on. Through scrupulously attending to this remarkable individual, the biography's single focus starts to do that wonderful thing: it expands, it blossoms, and somehow captures the broad view of a society in motion; it lets us see not just how he lived but how we lived too. That also feels fully in tune with the working art of Maurice Gee. / Damien Wilkins, 2015 I interviewed Maurice in 1976 for the Nelson College literary magazine. I was 16 and we talked in my bedroom (!) next door to Trafalgar Park in Nelson. He was so gracious and patient even though I'm sure my questions were fairly predictable. I remember his advice to young writers was simply to keep doing it. I've read almost all his books and, in them, I always hear his quiet careful voice. And I still dream of being able to write with his elegance and power. / Darryl Carey There are some artists whose work gives you a way to look at your ordinary life and see something deeper, wider, richer than what you might think is there if you're only glancing; work that is mind-altering really. If we're lucky, these artists can do this over a long career. As a child, Maurice Gee's Under the Mountain and Halfmen of O series opened up a space in my imagination that I'm still trying to extend into as an adult, and I thank him for that. / Kirsten McDougall I feel a huge sadness to hear of the death of Maurice. He has always had a very special place in my heart. I loved his books, especially Meg. I recognised bits of us in some of the books!! Maurice came into my life when he met my half-sister Margareta in 1967, and married a few years later. He had a huge influence on my (part-time) writing life, and I write a bit about him in my new memoir My Father's Suitcase. I'll never forget how he and Margareta supported me with my first book The Serpent Rising (published in 1988), when the rest of my family had turned against me, or were disinterested. I've still got the long letter they wrote after they read the draft manuscript. An excerpt: 'Maurice says it must be published because there is so little written about your experiences. He found it gripping, interesting, very moving and beautifully written in parts. That's high praise from him. We both ‒ at separate times ‒ flew from page to page, chapter to chapter.' I had huge doubts about my writing and could have easily burnt my work, but their validation meant everything to me. I'll always appreciate his help and enthusiasm during all the long years I worked on the biography of my father, his father-in-law. In 2007, he wrote a glowing letter to support a grant for a research tour of the South Island, said this book must be written and I needed all the help I could get. Here is an excerpt from the Author's Note of my book Sundowner of the Skies, the story of Oscar Garden, the forgotten aviator (2019). 'When he [Dad] was alive the idea that someone might write a book about him came up in conversations. He seemed quite keen on the idea, although he was adamant that his son-in-law, Maurice Gee, should not write it. Maurice, an acclaimed New Zealand author, is married to Margareta, my father's daughter from his first marriage. My father reckoned there was too much sex in his books. Not that Maurice could write much about the sex in my father's life. According to Mum, they only had sex a few times and after she became pregnant with my younger sister, Anna, that was it.' Also, a snippet of Maurice's long review, part of which ended up as an endorsement in the book 'An important piece of aviation history and a courageous personal story, vividly told. I found it enjoyable in every way. Beautifully told and bravely too, the width of research is astonishing. Sundowner of the Skies should find enthusiastic readers, grateful readers in the aviation world, and thoroughly engaged ones in the wider one. The way the personal story has been woven into the public one works without a hitch and provides a dimension that any other approach would have missed. I read it like a novel – a what-happens-next story, in both the aviation and the family parts. The sad and tortured final years must have been hard to write. Thank God for the bits of humour, 'Where's the ink?' What a great comic line, in its context. Standing further off I can laugh, but Oscar, in a much smaller way, is part of my life too. The little bit I've written about him comes nowhere near the real man that Mary has put down here. Many years ago, I stole one of Garden's flying adventures and gave it to an invented character in a novel I was writing, Emerson in Plumb.' Again, his validation was important as some family members were not happy about me writing about Dad's flaws. Maurice loved that I told it all. Maurice and Margareta represented, for me, a healthier branch of the very dysfunctional Garden tree. I'd visit them when I was in New Zealand and spent time with them in 2022. I've got a box of letters and emails and memories that I will treasure. Thank you Maurice for everything: your extraordinary gift of writing, your kindness and gentleness. / Mary Garden When I was 16 I discovered worn Penguin paperbacks of the Plumb trilogy on my parents' bookshelf and since then have carried them with me like talismans across rentals and oceans. For me, Maurice Gee is Peacehaven – his work a place of nostalgic, pastoral New Zealandness that feels like home and which I'll return to again and again. / Holly Hunter
