KEY POINTS:
Ian Cross' memoir tells some surprising tales. He has been journalist (chief reporter, the Dominion), novelist (The God Boy, The Backward Sex, After Anzac Day, The Family Man) broadcasting chief (chairman, chief executive New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation), editor (NZ Listener), PR man (Justice Department, Army, Feltex) and altar boy.
But who would have thought he would be the subject of a Sunday newspaper story with the headline: Would you pick God Boy man as a gun runner?
The facts behind the shock-horror beat-up may be known, but Cross' retelling of his early days of OE in Panama leave for dead the usual tales of young Kiwi adventurers in Earl's Court.
Two young Dominion newspaper tyros, Cross and his friend Keith Berry, answer Brazil's call for English-language journalists just after World War II (dates are largely absent from Cross' memoir).
Knowing Brazil intimately from pictures of Copacabana beach in library books and Carmen Miranda films, the two hop on the good ship Rangitikei for Cristobal Colon in the Panama Canal. They never get to Brazil.
But they did work for the United Fruit Company, met a revolution in Costa Rica and Cross was armed and under siege at the Panama American newspaper office.
They also became tangled in a web of Central American intrigue at whose centre was New Zealand-born editor and British intelligence agent Ted Scott. These are stories to startle any reader no less than they did 22-year-old Cross.
Cross naively took in the violence around him, obeyed the advice "not to ask questions of expatriates of any nationality" and barely grasped the influence of Scott who, it seems, was a possible model for aspects of Ian Fleming's James Bond.
Central to the politics and paper was Tito Arias, whom Cross encountered again in Wellington as the crippled diplomat husband of ballerina Margot Fonteyn.
In 1949, Cross returns to New Zealand but Berry stays and gets himself jailed (and sprung by Scott).
Like many an unfolding personal narrative, this book warms up as the story cracks along. The syntax becomes less tangled, the passive verbs become active. In a selectively remembered, roughly chronological story, Cross joins the Southern Cross, the Labour Party newspaper, then again the Dominion (1951-56). Success leads to the Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University, 1954-55 (and some creative writing classes). Back again, Cross laments the timid newspapers and "pusillanimous pap" of their editorials. Cue the backroom writing of The God Boy, winning the Burns writer's sojourn in Dunedin (1959), life at Feltex (1961-72) then four years as editor at the Listener (lightly dealt with).
He hints at what he calls "the confused directions of my life" in reporting a conversation with an elderly Frenchwoman who translated The God Boy for French publication and became a regular correspondent. This is reinforced by his quoting more than once Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken - "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both". Cross felt the pull of fiction but knew a parlous writer's existence was not for his family.
There's a poignant insight in 1957 after the New York Times praise for The God Boy made the front page in New Zealand. Cross reports he was hailed as "an author" on the drunks' tram heading out to Island Bay after 6pm closing. As he watched the tram retreat, he was happier about his change of identity "than I was ever to be again".
When Cross received the first Burns fellowship, short story writer Maurice Duggan, an unsuccessful applicant, derided Cross as "riding off the backs of other New Zealand authors". Cross acknowledges the lonely struggle of New Zealand writers and decided to give away fiction at one point; when British arts noble Lord Goodman greeted him as a distinguished novelist, he retorted "I am an extinguished one".
Cross is surprisingly frank about the influence of the nuns, incense and the Catholic world he left behind, about his depression in his early days at the Dominion and how The God Boy after it was published in New Zealand in 1973 became an albatross around his neck because people believed it to be his story. He writes a revealing chapter about the events and people he stitched into the fictional fabric of the book.
Cross stands by many strong opinions from his professional life in his memoir. He says Jock Barnes' demagoguery in the 1951 waterfront industrial troubles damaged the unions for generations, but he is equally critical of the crackdown on the press that was legally unable to report the watersiders' opinions.
He excoriates the pathetic stance of the newspapers in cravenly accepting "such a flagrant violation of the rights of a free press". He notes that he put the boot in with his Column Comment TV programme in 1969 when the nation's newspapers all lined up as a one-party press against Norman Kirk's election campaign. His point was that in a healthy democracy the media should be open to every viewpoint. He believes there is enough diversity today.
As broadcasting chief he defended the need to show the 1981 Springbok tour matches on TV because of the principle of freedom of expression, however worthy the cause of the protesters.
He also writes, "I was one of many who admired [Bill] Sutch", believing him to be a maverick with a genuine sense of nationality despite his poor British and American intelligence security rating.
Cross' 3000-word Listener editorial skewering the SIS after the Ombudsman's 1976 report is echoed in 2007 by his warning that New Zealand should have the necessary scepticism about foreign intelligence, vide Iraq.
Cross is an important person in the cultural landscape, and proud of a successful campaign such as the author's Public Lending Right crusade while he was president of Pen from 1968-72 ($22 million now returned over 33 years).
He actually used the Feltex PR budget then to survey authors' earnings - they were between 72c and $5.40 a week.
Like the absolute beginners he refers to, those post-World War II migrants and refugees learning the trick of standing upright in New Zealand, Cross saw himself as a learner, a novice in this country.
But as a beginner he was a typical, successful get-on-with-it Kiwi pioneer, that word originally from the French for foot-soldier, a man in the front line.
* Published by David Ling Publishing, $29.99
