Beryl Fletcher

Old Books Never Die

 

Blog Number 20: 12 November, 2009

 

For the past seven weeks I have been teaching a course at the Continuing Education Department at the University of Waikato. Teaching creative writing can be a two way street in that the tutor can learn just as much from the students. This group works. A good mixture of men and women, some of them already good writers.

 

I had been wondering why I have begun to go out to Raglan on a regular basis apart from my deep seated almost pathological craving to be near the sea. It came to me during this class. A student said something which for the life of me I cannot remember except for the unspoken elation that followed. Writer’s (and all creative artists) have this experience of a puzzle suddenly falling into place, or of something familiar becoming strange and insightful. This, I believe, is the drug that keeps writers working in the face of adversity and/or indifference.

 

Here is the sequence of events. I had found myself unable to read for a few months after my appointment as the New Zealand judge for the 2009 Commonwealth prize. I read eight fine novels, finalists from around the world. I become satiated. A few weeks ago I began to read again after a long drought. Not newly published work. Old books, that I first read long ago.

 

This can be a sobering experience. A book that you once loved can bore you from the very first page. Conversely, a book that once disturbed you to the point of hurtling it across the room, can become a fascinating read after a long gap.

 

This happened when I began to read Paul Theroux’s book, (Penguin, 1992) The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. He paddled his collapsible kayak around fifty-one islands after a traumatic marriage break down. Theroux is a prolific writer loosely characterised as a travel writer but he is far more than that.

 

I re-read it with the same fascination and rage that I experienced seventeen years ago. I did not finish the book then, but this time, in spite of his sometimes judgmental statements about the people he met, I could not put it down. I kept reading it until I had turned the last page.   

 

I crave this sort of travel. I always wanted to be a wanderer. I am jealous of Theroux and all the other contemporary writers who have turned the experience of the lonely traveller, the adventurer, into a fascinating literary form. It has been said that Theroux and others of his ilk (like Bruce Chatwin) are egocentric, misogynous and opinionated. I suspect that they have to be, to endure the physical and mental hardships of their journeys and the attacks from armchair travellers after publication.

 

I have made peace with the limitations of an aging woman who still craves to travel alone. It’s all over for me, in fact it never got off the ground. For over twenty years I have found it difficult to walk for more than half an hour due to a defective hip joint. Before this problem developed, I had children to care for.

 

In the writing class I had a sudden memory of reading an anthropological treatise on a group of Micronesians who prior to the advent of colonisation made long journeys using a unique method of navigation. They sat in their stationary canoes beneath static stars and watched the islands glide past them. It is far more complicated than this of course, but it was the fact that the islands moved instead of the canoe that intrigued me. (The best book to read about this is by T Gladwin: East is a Big Bird, Harvard University Press, 1970).

 

I saw the answer to this question: why do I return again and again to the same place at Raglan? Room Four at the guest house, the same bed, the same creaking door, the same battered cabbage tree outside the window?

 

I am in the canoe and the social landscape walks past me. There are always different people staying there. I revel in the superfluous chatter but am sometimes surprised. A young French backpacker once asked me if I had read Derrida and Foucault.

 

And outside, the sea and the wind are ever changing. Some days the waves coming over the bar look like a menacing tsunami. Other days there is a tiny flounce of white water breaking across the bar like an abandoned petticoat.

 

I have reversed the need for constant movement by staying resolutely in the same place establishing the same routine each time I visit the coast. I have no desire to change my place of refuge, just as long as those islands keep floating past to help me navigate my way home and back again.