New Zealand Writers

WELLS, Peter

Though he is committedly and publicly a gay writer, his range of subject, setting and style is greater than any such definition can suggest.

• From The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature
• Updated Information
• Peter Wells talks about Iridescence
• Links

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

WELLS, Peter (1950– ), won the New Zealand and Reed awards for fiction with his first short story collection, Dangerous Desires (1991). Extraordinary for the lucid and passionate eloquence of the writing as well as their sexual (mostly homosexual) explicitness, the stories combine emotional intensity with psychological insight and a rare wit.

‘One of THEM!’, concerning two young men coming to terms with their sexuality, was described as ‘a small masterpiece’ by the Book Award judges, who also commended ‘Of Memory and Desire’, about a Japanese couple honeymooning in New Zealand, as ‘original, sensitive and finally deeply moving’ in its tragic outcome.

Visually vivid, perhaps reflecting his experience as a film writer and director, the stories have a freshness of image and phrase and a sometimes mannered coruscation of language that work to affirm vitality in the face of the often tragically frank presentation of gay life in the age of AIDS. The last story, ‘Dark and Light’, ends with a movement out of the ‘dark zone of passion’ to realisation ‘that already it was dawn, the night had ended and there was light, trembling like a membrane, all over the world.’

Wells’s second collection, The Duration of a Kiss (1994), is more darkened by the shadow of AIDS, ‘the fateful diaspora’, ‘the chaotic dark agent of a virus’. The writing is again remarkably eloquent and metaphorically rich, though less consciously lyrical than at times in Dangerous Desires. As there, some coherence is provided by two stories continuing the narrative of Eric Westmore, now after the death of his partner Perrin.

The success of many stories in both books lies in part, as Wells suggests in a concluding essay, ‘Confessions of a Provincial Pouf’, in enabling ‘readers simply to experience a world in which their concerns are placed to the side, viewed from a different angle’, as in several stories of relations with parents, for instance. But Wells’s power of sympathetic insight also makes profoundly moving such topics as the seduction of a schoolboy by a middle-aged antique dealer (‘His Eternal Boy’), or obsession throughout the gay community with a charismatic visitor (‘The Duration of a Kiss’).

Though he is committedly and publicly a gay writer, his range of subject, setting and style is greater than any such definition can suggest. Again, some of the best writing deals with non-gay subjects—the tragedy of Bosnia (and the problem of New Zealand’s identity) in ‘Hills Like Green Velvet’, or an international marriage in ‘A Colour Known as White’. Both collections have been published internationally and the stories anthologised in the Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories and elsewhere.

Wells is equally known as a film and television director and scriptwriter, most notably for ‘A Death in the Family’ (1986), which won a major New York award for its drama about the loss of a friend to AIDS; and for the feature film Desperate Remedies (co-written and directed with Stewart Main), selected to screen at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Documentary television work includes The Mighty Civic and The Newest City on the Globe! With director Colin McColl, Wells was responsible for ‘Ricordi!’ (see D.H. Lawrence), an operatic and expressionist dramatisation of Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington stories, commissioned for the 1996 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, where response to its stylised perplexities was mixed.

With Rex Pilgrim, Wells edited Best Mates: Gay Writing in Aotearoa New Zealand (1997). His first novel, Boy Overboard, was published in 1997. RR

Updated Information

One of Them! (Vintage, 1999) is a novella narrated by the same character, Jamie, who narrated the novel Boy Overboard. One of Them! was published to coincide with the screening on TV of the film version in September 1999.

Wells was joint winner (with C.K. Stead) of the 1999 Landfall essay competition. With Stephanie Johnson he is co-founder of the Auckland Writers' Festival.

His memoir, Long Loop Home (2001) won the Biography Award in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Wells was awarded the Randell Cottage residency for 2002.

His second novel, Iridescence (Vintage, 2003) spans three decades of the Victorian age. Remittance men were sent away from Britain to live in a colony on a small and regular sum - a remittance. Usually behind them was some disgrace or scandal, a secret that each man carried, often to the grave. Samuel Barton, a remittance man, is blown into Napier in 1971, after an undisclosed scandal. He carries with him an earring made up of fabulous jewels. With this earring he will buy his freedom.

Iridescence was a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. It was also a finalist in the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize.

In 2006 Peter Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and film.HIs short story 'Little Joker Sings'appears in The Best of New Zealand Fiction. Volume Three (Vintage, 2006).

Peter Wells talks about Iridescence:

Q. In Long Loop Home, Napier clearly has a strong influence on your upbringing and imagination - is that why you set the NZ scenes there in Iridescence?
P.W. I toyed with making up a New Zealand town but in the end I couldn't get past the combination of Napier's geographical setting in Hawke's Bay, which is so superb, and my own predilection for the place. My family was living there in the 1970s (the time the book is set) and I liked roaming, in my imagination, up and down streets which my ancestors walked. It's a form of reclaiming the past through the imagination. As a Pakeha, I feel we need to reclaim a sense of our own past, the way people lived, the way they saw things. I think writing and films can do a lot to help people re-imagine, and thus engage, with the past. But in the end Napier in Iridescence is a town of the imagination. It isn't literal history, and at times I shifted buildings if they didn't suit the purposes of the book's geography. Napier also stands for every small town in colonial New Zealand - a place where people gather from all over the world and try to make a life.

Q. You mention writing the novel during your fellowship at the Randell Cottage in Wellington - how important was the residency to your writing?
P.W. The Randell Cottage Residency in Thorndon, Wellington, was important because it gave me five months to live without having to think about money. This is always a spell in the life of an author. It was also reassuring. Authors always feel like made up people with a purpose in life which isn't entirely real, because you don't go off to work in the morning like other people. A residency makes you feel part of the real world. But it was also important because the cottage is sympathetically placed in a lovely old suburb in Wellington (incidentally Katherine Mansfield live just down the road). The cottage was built about the time I set the book. And it was just down the road from the National Archives, which were an amazing resource for historical research. The book felt blessed by the residency.

Q. As you mention in the historical note, the idea behind Iridescence had been in your mind for many years, but did it take you long to write such an extensive work?
P.W.The idea behind Iridescence has been in my mind for over 30 years, strangely enough. So when I came to write the book, it sort of rocketed off, as it had been waiting there all my life. My only problems were to do with how I would tell the story, what voice, what point of view. But once this was sorted out, the book was written quite quickly, especially for such a large book. It was also quite a joyful book to write, because it is about mischief in a way.

Q. How easy was it to fictionalise fact? Where did you draw the lines between the two (for instance are the Napier scenes mostly fictional, the London ones fact?
P.W. Initially, because I trained in history at university, my desire was to write quite an historical account about the scandal at the heart of the book, which really happened. But in the end I realised point of view is what animates historical accounts. Pepys's eyewitness account of the great fire of London lives in a way historical accounts don't. So I selected characters to carry points of view. One such character is Eliza Clarke, a servant in London. She existed in fact, but I had to reimagine what her life would have been like. What she would be like. And she took off, in quite a determind way. So I bowed before the force of imagination, if you like. It isn't an a historical account, in the end, even though the heart of the novel concerns the important scandal which actually happened. I take history and make a story out of it. But there is a saying that history is 'an argument without end'. Perhaps Iridescence can be seen as a playful part of the argument, full of suggestive conclusions.

Q. Point of View is a crucial device in the novel, did you plot it out like a piece of action to get it right?
P.W. Once I grasped that point of view is what makes any event live then I had understood how to write the novel. The old saying that if you have five people at a road accident you have five different versions, pertains here. I enjoyed giving different poits of view to characters. After all, even as individuals we understand our own lives quite differently at different ages. And the novel is about understanding, or making sense of life.

Q. You show a deep understanding of your characters' world of make-believe and acting parts - is this a feature of being a writer or is it still a necessary refuge for anyone outside the norm?
P.W. The novel is set partly in the world of the theatre in the 19th century. It was well known as an amoral, slightly tawdry, naughty world. But it had its own morality, oddly enough, a morality today we feel is quite contemporary - it was accepting and broad. It allowed all sorts of people to feel at home in it. Theatre people moved about a bit like gypsies. They moved around Britain, and by the 19th century all over the world. In 1870s New Zealand there were competing opera and theatre groups crisscrossing the country, playing before big audiences who were thrilled to have some alternative reality in their hard lives. I entered into the mind of a character who feels most at home on the stage. As a writer you become like an actor, to a certain extent, acting out the different parts of your characters. I had acted on stage as a child (in fact I got my first public notice as an actor, aged nine) and have always loved the way the fantasy world of the stage contrasts with every day life. An actor's world has something to do with magic, even ancient magic. It is making up something which isn't there and getting people to believe in something they know isn't actually true. It becomes quite inflammatory when there is confusion between what is make believe and what is real. This is the nub of the novel - the clash which happens when make-believe meets a judgmental reality head on. I can't say more, or I'll give the plot away. And I hope Iridescence is a good read, partly because you want to find out what the secrets of the plot are. And like any good scandal, there are quite a few secrets, and quite a few turns of the plot.