New Zealand Writers
O'SULLIVAN, Vincent
O’Sullivan can mock, satirise and laugh, but he also finds dignity in unexpected places.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
O’SULLIVAN, Vincent (1937– ), born in Auckland, is poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic and editor.
A graduate from the universities of Auckland (1959) and Oxford (1962), he lectured in the English departments of Victoria University of Wellington (1963–66) and (after several months in Greece) the University of Waikato (1968–78), before committing himself to full-time writing.
He served as literary editor of the *NZ Listener (1979–80), and then (1981–87) won a series of writer’s residencies and research fellowships in universities in Australia and New Zealand: Victoria (Wellington), Tasmania, Deakin (Geelong), Flinders (South Australia), Western Australia and Queensland. These were interrupted by a year as resident playwright at Downstage Theatre, Wellington (1983). In 1988 he resumed his academic career as professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington.
The winner of many literary prizes, he was the Katherine *Mansfield Memorial Fellow in Menton in 1994. In 1997 he also became director of Victoria’s Stout Research Centre.
O’Sullivan’s first book of verse, Our Burning Time (1965), contained poems that had been published in periodicals in New Zealand, UK and USA. An exceptional facility for image-making was already on display. The first of five ‘Poems of Place’ begins: ‘Skopelos drops its village like a pack of cards / from clumsy-fisted mountain, the white sides over.’ The simile may seem contrived, but it catches well the haphazard sprinkling of chalky Mediterranean houses, is picked up in a later ‘shuffled’, and gestures towards themes of chance, fate, and the quirks of history.
Over three decades O’Sullivan’s talent has developed in response to deepening and broadening experience. His verse is collected in Revenants (1969), Bearings (1973), From the Indian Funeral (1976), Butcher ∓mp; Co. (1977), Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka (1979), The Rose Ballroom and Other Poems (1982), The *Butcher Papers (1982), The Pilate Tapes (1986) and Selected Poems (1992), which draws on all but the first two volumes, and adds new work. Among the strongest of O’Sullivan’s earlier poems are those in which contemporary relationships and states of mind are given a basis in Greek mythology. A traveller, who has visited and lived in diverse parts of the world, O’Sullivan quarries his changing locations for specific reference, while remaining conscious of a contrasting homeland. The sequence of poems From the Indian Funeral, written in reaction to three months spent in Central America in 1975, ends with the poet’s return from the world of the Aztec goddess, with her ‘taloned feet’ and ‘necklace of severed hands’, to ‘green sward and Anchor butter’.
Among O’Sullivan’s most original contributions to New Zealand verse is his creation of ‘Butcher’, affable dealer in flesh and blood and guts, as mouthpiece for a line of racy Kiwi shop-talk that raises perennial poetic concerns. With a cast that includes ‘Sheila’ and ‘Baldy’, the ‘Butcher’ poems exploit a dramatist’s ear for chit-chat, while subsuming the hectoring and reminiscing voices within sheer O’Sullivanese. In Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka, the awesome certainties of eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards and the personal, political and metaphysical anxieties of twentieth-century fabulist Franz Kafka represent twin poles between which the poet’s reflections take place, as a visit to New England focuses his thoughts about love and time. These poems, each of four unrhymed quatrains, include some of O’Sullivan’s emotionally most satisfying. The Pilate Tapes imports the colloquial idiom, the dramatic dialogue, and the demotic vigour of the ‘Butcher’ poems into a miniature Passion Play, rendered in a dazzling variety of tones. A far-flung province of the Roman Empire merges into a postcolonial New Zealand peopled with liberal-minded Mr Pilate, Jesus from Hicksville (alias Jix), sly flunky Rat (who ‘doesn’t like Jix, one bit’), Barabbas & Son (‘doing nicely in second-hand / timber’), and that ‘not-bad piece’ Magdalene. The sequence condenses O’Sullivan’s religious and philosophical preoccupations, while being packed with local realities—political, cultural and geographical.
It was only after he had established a solid reputation as a poet that O’Sullivan turned in the 1970s to the writing of short fiction. His stories have been gathered in The Boy, The Bridge, The River (1978), Dandy Edison for Lunch and Other Stories (1981), Survivals (1985), The Snow in Spain: Short Stories (1990) and Palms and Minarets: Selected Stories (1992). They cover a wide range, but are particularly apt to explore various kinds of deprivation, betrayal, rejection, sadness, deceit, estrangement and loss. Death is a recurring theme. Many central characters are on the fringe of a social group, whether struggling to join in, blithely unaware of their position, preferring to remain outside or simply recognising their difference. In ‘The Boy, The Bridge, The River’, the Polish immigrant to New Zealand, Latty, carrying with him his memories of the war, is an alien among marching girls and Lions’ Day, but builds a friendship with his landlady’s ingenuous brother Len. The dwarf narrator of ‘The Snow in Spain’ finds a niche for himself in the sport of dwarf-tossing. The main character in ‘Terminus’, who is teetering on paranoia, says, ‘Forget that masking is natural and even beautiful and set the way we want things to be against the fact of how they are.’ O’Sullivan strips away masks, exposes pretension and self-deception, reveals all sorts of emptiness and loneliness. ‘Testing, Testing ’ finds the Tarzan and Jane within a pseudo-sophisticated marriage. But O’Sullivan’s stories are not reductive: they exhibit a shrewd understanding that pierces to the heart of what it means to be human. O’Sullivan can mock, satirise and laugh, but he also finds dignity in unexpected places. He is interested in the art of living, and in the borderland where truth and lies meet, both in life and in fiction itself. He can move from old folk to children, from rural poverty to metropolitan glitz, from Hamilton to New York. Characters range from retired sugar-works clerk, to company manager, to trendy academics. Technically, his short stories are remarkable for their unsettling shifts of narrative point of view. Their modes span realism and metafiction. Everywhere they are marked by the poet’s eye for detail.
Miracle (1976) is a witty jeu d’esprit, a comic-grotesque satire on national institutions and attitiudes, laced with fable and fantasy. The novel Let the River Stand (1993), which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for 1994, is O’Sullivan’s major achievement to date. Centred on a Waikato country settlement and covering the period from the end of one World War to the end of the next, it begins, epic-style, in medias res, but only after an italicised page about a woman hospitalised with a head injury, the first of six such passages, one at the conclusion and four serving like entr'acte choruses, as the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time and between groups of characters, whose fates are gradually revealed as interwoven. The everyday life of a typically taciturn rural New Zealand community, with its family feuds and follies, forms the stuff of tragedy and myth. Settings extend to working-class Ponsonby, a Tasmanian apple orchard and Spain during the civil war. There are gestures towards Katherine *Mansfield, John *Mulgan and other predecessors, with the *Depression and the rise of socialism looming in the background. Characters run the gamut from hypochondriac widow to balaclava-disguised prizefighter. The novel has cinematic qualities, both in its visual richness and luminous exactness and in its frequent switches from one centre of consciousness to another. O’Sullivan’s verbal camera lens zooms in and out, tilts and pans; there are cuts and dissolves as the spool unwinds. One section is told through a woman’s diary. A sense of mystery haunts the multifarious elements, until they converge. The climax is an instant, frozen in time. No New Zealand novel has conveyed more completely a sense of history and of those visionary moments that resist its flow.
In the 1980s O’Sullivan the dramatist emerged. He had written radio and television dramas before his first stage play, *Shuriken, was performed at Downstage, Wellington, in July 1983. It examines the bizarre situation that led to the death of fifty Japanese soldiers and one New Zealand guard in a World War 2 prison camp at Featherston in 1943. The title is taken from the Japanese word for a throwing-dagger. Japanese prisoners, theoretically committed to a military code of no surrender, and New Zealand guards lacking both experience in their roles and understanding of their charges, are forced into uneasy association, until cultural difference kindles violence. The presence among the ill-assorted New Zealanders of the Maori corporal Tai, who has as much in common with the proud yet subjugated enemy as with his Päkehä mates, creates a significant third dimension, allowing the play to serve as implicit comment on our interracial history. Though the Kiwi soldiers speak the local patois, in structure Shuriken is stylised and non-naturalistic, exploiting the freedoms of the post-Brechtian theatre. In Jones ∓mp; Jones, about Katherine Mansfield and her close friend Ida Baker, who nicknamed each other ‘Jones’, O’Sullivan again uses such techniques as direct address to the audience, and, taking a hint from Mansfield’s own passion for music hall, punctuates the dialogue with popular songs. The play was commissioned by Downstage for the Katherine Mansfield centenary and first performed in September 1988. It draws on Mansfield’s writings to explore, with considerable wit and verve, an unusual bond, and conjure up the Bloomsbury litterati among whom the two women moved. Animated by Mansfield’s own personality in all its histrionic complexity, it shows, among other things, the emotional tug of the childhood homeland that she had so eagerly escaped. But the relationship between the Joneses is central. Katherine needs her awkward shadow-self in order to scintillate. She bullies, cajoles and mocks Ida —and is fortified by her unconditional love. Specialising in the art of living, she must also learn the art of dying. ‘Jones’, she says, ‘life is nothing if not performance’. Billy, presented at Bats Theatre, Wellington, in August 1989, employs techniques similarly disruptive of naturalism, including tricks with lighting and a litany-like sequence in which characters speak ‘from various points on the stage’. But this is also, in part, a drawing-room drama, with some quite Wildean banter about weighty matters. Set in the New South Wales penal colony of the 1820s, Billy has seven disparate English men and women fret, joke and gossip about their situation, and use the mute Aboriginal servant of the title as a screen on which to project their anxieties and desires. As director Aarne Neeme averred, ‘Boundaries of behaviour are challenged across class distinctions, sexual relations, racial tensions and religious beliefs, as are the notions of authority and civilisation’. Power and its link with violence are among the themes. Here too O’Sullivan returns to his concern with truth and lies. Billy’s dreamlike eruption into speech at the close forms a stunning coup de théâtre. Shuriken (1985), Jones ∓mp; Jones (1989) and Billy (1990) have all been published by *Victoria University Press. Less accessible are ‘Ordinary Nights in Ward 10’ (New Depot, Wellington, March 1984), a dense mix of the farcical, the allegorical and the fantastic, ‘The Lives and Loves of Harry and George’ (Downstage, Wellington, 1994) and ‘Take the Moon Mr Casement’ (Court Theatre, Christchurch, September 1996).
O’Sullivan has, with Margaret Scott, edited five volumes of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984– ), as well as Mansfield’s ‘The Aloe’ with ‘Prelude’ (1982), Poems of Katherine Mansfield (1988), and a Selected Letters (1989). His An Anthology of Twentieth-Century New Zealand Poetry (1970, revised 1976 and 1987) was a standard text for a quarter of a century. He is also editor of (among other volumes) New Zealand Short Stories: Third Series (1975), New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (1983, with MacDonald P. Jackson), Collected Poems: Ursula Bethell (1985), The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories (1992), and Intersecting Lines: The Memoirs of Ian Milner (1993). In his critical study, James K. Baxter (1976), he demonstrates the centrality to Baxter’s verse of the seasonal myth at the core of most mythologies. He edited the Wellington current affairs journal *Comment during the period 1963–66.
When in Jones & Jones D.H. *Lawrence asks Mansfield whether she knows when she is telling the truth, she replies, ‘But I’m an artist Lawrence like yourself. Our vocation is to tell the truth as only the born liar can.’ O’Sullivan’s writing in different genres is unified by his awareness of this paradox.
MPJ
Updated Information
Seeing You Asked (Victoria University Press, 1998) won the Best Book of Poetry Award at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In the same year, O'Sullivan's novel Believers to the Bright Coast (Penguin, 1998) was runner up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction.A collection of poetry, I'll Tell You This Much, was published by Pemmican Press in April 2000.
Lucky Table (2001) was shortlisted in the poetry section of the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
On Longing (2002) is one of twelve titles in the Montana Estates essay series published by Four Winds Press. The press was established by Lloyd Jones to encourage and develop the essay genre in New Zealand.
Vincent O'Sullivan took part in the 2003 WOW (Writers on Wheels) in the City, tour of Auckland.
Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan (2003). Author of the classic New Zealand novel, Man Alone, John Mulgan emerges from this penetrating biography as a man who spoke for the generation that grew up between the wars. He wrote a few days before his death: 'It took me to the age of thirty to stop being frightened, not just of physical things, but fears of what people thought of me and other fairly useless considerations.' Long Journey to the Border was a finalist in the biography category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004.
Nice Morning for it, Adam (VUP, 2004). O'Sullivan's poems reveal a powerful intellect brought to bear on a world of continual change and curiousity. Stepping deftly through a breathtaking range of voices and forms, this book places poems of wry satirical humour against those of remarkable sweetness. What is offered is a poetry of openness and moving humility as well as an insight into the peculiar challenges of being human.
'There is a kind of luminous spirituality about O'Sullivan's poetry, that long after you have read the poems, continues to reside in the objects or situations the poems describe.' - Anna Jackson
Vincent O'Sullivan's acclaimed collection, Nice morning for it, Adam, won the Poetry category in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2005.
Pictures by Goya and other stories (2006) was published by Penguin. His short story 'Mrs Bennett and the Bears' appears in The Best of New Zealand Fiction. Volume Three (Vintage, 2006).
In 2006, Vincent was awarded $60,000 for poetry at the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement. Prime Minister Helen Clark said, 'Vincent O’Sullivan’s poetry, which is what we are honouring him for tonight, goes to the heart of life’s big themes – love, politics, philosophy, literature and history. He is one of the 12 New Zealand writers currently at the French literary festival Les Belles Etrangères and the invitation extended to us this year by that festival illustrates how highly regarded our writers are internationally.'
The annual Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement recognise writers who have made a significant contribution to New Zealand literature.
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