Bruce Ansley: Down South author on reading Peter Simpson's McCahon

Down South, by Bruce Ansley.

'The man is a phenomenon'

One lovely evening in late spring I was strolling along the waterfront in Sumner, Christchurch, when I saw Peter Simpson talking to a small crowd on a street corner.

I'd met him in a course on New Zealand literature at Canterbury University, where he was teaching poetry. He'd quit the job for politics, become a Labour MP for Lyttelton, served one term and was campaigning for a second.

I stopped to listen. He was giving his bemused listeners a crash course on Ronald Hugh Morrieson. "They weren't all that taken by the election," he told me later, "so I thought I might as well tell them something interesting." Fortunately for us all he lost the seat, for he is a much better writer than he was a politician.

I'm wrestling with Colin McCahon: Is this the Promised Land?, his second volume on the artist. That's a reflection on the book's size, not its content. It pays not to read either volume in bed, lest it fall on you. But these are proper books, so beautifully written and superbly bound and, of course, illustrated by the very best.

My newly published book, Down South, is a southerner's account of his own promised land and I'm rather proud of the fact that it's my 11th volume. But that is not so much over-shadowed as completely dwarfed by Simpson's oeuvre. The man is a phenomenon. He has written on artists and authors, poets and painters, printers and publishers. He is a curator and a critic. He is a human archive of New Zealand art and literature and, I think, the single most valuable writer in the country.

I don't know why I read so much of his work because it makes me feel so ... down table. But I do, and it's always, always worth it.

Down South by Bruce Ansley (HarperCollins, $50) is out now.