Photo - James McNeish - © Matt Bialostocki.
It’s not every Monday
evening that I am in lecture where a Dame introduces a Knight. Dame Fiona Kidman introduced Sir James
McNeish at the 2013 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture at the City Gallery Wellington
last night. The auditorium was full and
the audience eager to hear Sir James’s talk entitled Two Cheers for Eccentricity: a non-academic approach to the theme of
creative non-fiction. While the
address is typically a ‘state of the [literary] nation’ address, Sir James
side-stepped this aspect citing that Owen Marshall did it so well in 2007 that
it didn’t need repeating, and Sir James also noted that he has spent a good
deal of his time out of the country.
Being
out of the country was one of the main themes of his address. He believes it is through experience outside
of New Zealand where inspiration can be found, and indeed, interest in global
affairs can enrich writers’ lives and their stories. He spoke of the need for the writer to
embrace their ideological passions. In
her introduction, Dame Fiona Kidman spoke of the bond she and Sir James shared
as both writers and activists. Sir
James spoke about the Nationalist period in New Zealand writing where writers
like Sargeson were concerned with creating a local literature, and although
acknowledging how important this had been, he also lamented the absence of New
Zealand voices during a time of great historical significance, the Spanish
Civil War except for a “few hardy souls” who happened to be there at the time.
Creative non-fiction is the mixing of fact and fiction,
the blurring of boundaries between the two, or the labra-doodle of the literary
world, as Sir James suggested. He mentioned both Lloyd Jones’ ‘Biografi’ and Sarah Quigley’s ‘The Conductor’ as examples
of authors using fiction to illuminate truth. And he made mention of Owen
Marshall’s recent re-imagining of history in ‘The Larnachs’.
It is in the
blurring of the two where imagination and invention met. Sir James elaborated on this theme, telling
us of a text where the writer has a Soviet Block runner winning gold and being
awarded gifts of an apple and bread and butter insisting the writer had no way
of knowing that the runner received these gifts, but their inclusion highlights
the bleakness of life at that time, and the few rewards for a great deal of
effort. Creative non-fiction means a
letting go of the literal truth, a truth that Sir James thinks New Zealanders
are particularly fond of, and embracing small fibs and eccentricity because
they illuminate the humanity of a situation.
Sir James is sponsoring a travel prize, which is due to
be advertised in the near future. This
scholarship is a chance for a New Zealand writer to travel abroad, to let go of
the literal and embrace the eccentricity of experience. This award highlights Sir James’s generosity
and support of writers, and advocacy of his beliefs, which has been a feature
of his career.
Rebecca Styles is a writer and a member of the NZSA
Wellington Branch committee.
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