Colin Hogg: A Life In Loose Strides

Hodder Moa Beckett

$34.95

Review: by David Hill*

The Barry Crump myth or media construct is fading fast. It's just four years since Crump died, but Colin Hogg's big boys' biography already has the feel of times well past.

It's summed up by one of the evocative, often archival photos.

Here's Crump at the time of Wife No 5. He's 54, but the face like a wedding cake left out in the rain looks 74. In the text, he's grumbling about how the country's falling to pieces.

Yes, Barry Crump was an icon in this country - maybe with an emphasis on the last three letters, as Hogg points out.

His personal life was a junkyard. His writing began with an intriguingly different book; followed it with an excellent book (Hang On a Minute, Mate); then dwindled to repetitive fantasies. He wrote punchy short stories and execrable doggerel verse. He never created a memorable woman character. How much does it all represent?

Of course, it wasn't what Crump did, but what he made many Kiwi males feel they could do that made him significant.

Hogg explores this compassionately. He has no illusions about his man: "foul, cruel ... dreadful to be married to." But he obviously feels for Crump, even if he doesn't always find him.

His insistent, immediate, intermittently irritating present-tense prose skips through the hectic life. There's the appalling father, who never called Barry anything except "Dopey;" the 16 schools; the 23-year-old scrubcutter, deer-culler and horsebreaker reading James Joyce.

There's the drinking and predatory womanising; the huge attractiveness that won him friends of all sorts; the huger, sometimes violent unreliability.

He was a difficult author to deal with: editor Ray Richards had to finish One of Us after Crump shot through to Australia. Yet he wrote carefully, building up notes, getting the voice right. He was a TV charmer on Town and Around, and a Baha'i who found God via a motorbike ride from England to India. He comes out of the Urewera camp where five boys died with his reputation shredded.

Hogg punctuates his own laddish, laidback prose with lots of extracts from Crump's fiction.

He offers some good life-literature links. He occasionally tries to out-Crump Crump, which is not a good move.

His book doesn't try to be scholarly. It's energetic, emphatic, perfunctory about the last years, commendably lucid as it examines the writing and rewriting of A Good Keen Man.

And by two-thirds of the way through, it's a bit boring.

This isn't Hogg's fault. Crump lived a life of fragments, with no big commitments either in relationships or writing. Any story of his life becomes a chronicle of just one damn thing after another.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.