C.K. Stead: Kin of Place

By MICHELE HEWITSON

At University in the mid-80s there was a silly fashion, at least among those who "did" women's literature, to regard C.K. Stead as the enemy.

Contrarily, regarding Stead as the enemy mostly involved not reading him - always a ridiculous ploy when it comes to stacking an argument.

I mention this only because I was at the University of Auckland at the time, and because in Kin of Place Stead also refers to those times, and because, although I dismissed such silliness many years ago and have long read Stead with delight, it's amazing what lingers from the propaganda.

Thus, I am (still, slightly) amazed to find that here Stead reproduces, with additional comment, a piece written in 1981 about Sylvia Ashton-Warner.

In the introduction to Kin of Place, Stead notes that his advocacy of Sylvia Ashton-Warner had the effect of "producing no sign of a revival of serious interest in her work - a fact all the more puzzling when considered against the background of 1980s feminism and the determined search in universities for neglected women writers."

(It's not that difficult to work out why: Ashton-Warner was always going to be too hysterical, too needy, to be embraced.)

In a real sense, reading Kin of Place represents a re-reading of Stead, even if you were silly the first time around. Watching the development of the critic, of how the critic says it, is as fascinating as reading what the critic has to say.

You can apply what Stead has to say about the process of re-reading to the process of reading his own work: "Re-reading has been an interesting and in some ways a surprising exercise, reminding me of the fact that criticism never exists in a vacuum, but is a response to what has been said, or is being said. Context is all."

The piece on Kendrick Smithyman, for example, is enriched by the context of the autobiographical.

Smithyman was "bluff, laconic, generous, amusing, picturesque", and his first wife Mary Stanley - "a notable poet, blonde and beautiful" - had been married briefly before, to a serviceman killed in the war. Stead tells us.

This is not just biographical tittle-tattle, but it is interesting because, as Stead notes, a number of Smithyman's early poems feature "the poet-persona, the woman, and a man/ghost who remains unappeased, a force in the lives of the living pair".

As Stead says, personal knowledge is relevant - to not acknowledge it would be ridiculous and misleading - but here is meant to be "critically useful rather than simply of human interest".

"Criticism should be some sense of a conversation, a community of interest," writes the critic.

But "enough of this clubby stuff!" says Stead of Lauris Edmond. "It is time to look hard at the words on the page."

So, a conversation with Stead the critic is not going to be a cosy affair. This is a conversation that demands you listen as vigorously as he writes.

Which means that you enter a conversation to hear compassion (there's Stead the loyal champion and critic of his good friend, Allen Curnow); challenge, wielded like a taiaha (on saint Lauris Edmond's failings as a poet); and defence (of Elizabeth Knox's infuriating Black Oxen).

It is a conversation which, like all the best ones, is elegant, wide-ranging, well-argued and, like Black Oxen, bound to cause vigorous debate.

It is the best conversation I've had with a book in a long time. It talks to you, you talk, or snort, or stutter objections back at it.

And, like the best conversations, Kin of Place begins a dialogue which entices you to return again and again.

Auckland University Press

$39.95

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.