Dennis McEldowney: The World Regained

By MICHAEL KING

In Who's Who in New Zealand, Dennis McEldowney lists one of his recreations as "looking about". While this may seem a good qualification for anybody with who aspires to be a writer, it has a special meaning for McEldowney. For much of his adolescence and early adulthood, "looking about" was all he was able to do. And he did it largely through one window of the bedroom in Christchurch to which he was confined.

McEldowney was born with Fallot's tetralogy, a congenital deformation of arteries leading to the heart. He was a blue baby, suffering from a severe oxygen deficiency. By the time he was 24, an operation had become available to ease the condition. A second operation, performed when he was 36, gave him almost full health and the ability to join the paid workforce for the first time.

The World Regained, originally published in 1957, is the story of how his life was transformed by the first operation - how he went in a matter of weeks from being an invalid to something approaching normal adulthood.

He describes an early life in which his activities and ability to interact with other people progressively diminished. Even lying in bed listening to the radio was an exertion after which he would have to rest.

While this sounds liked grim territory to traverse, it is not, because McEldowney describes his condition with insight and good humour. "Continuous unhappiness in any situation," he writes, "requires a strength of mind which I did not possess."

And there were things he was able to do, albeit in small doses. First among these were reading and writing. As a consequence, once he took up his bed and walked after the first operation, he was able to write extraordinarily well about the experience he had undergone.

Suddenly, in his mid-twenties, he had to learn to do the kinds of things everybody else takes for granted: how to walk among other people, how to talk to them ("Why they should insist on names of their own was a puzzle; you might as well name every sheep on a high-country station"), how to shop, how to operate a bank account. How, even, to cut up cat's meat.

"I took the saucer of meat from the safe and began hacking at it with a tableknife while it was still on the saucer. Every time I stroked it with the knife it merely gave way and then sprang back into place like a fiendish piece of India-rubber.

"I hacked at it until I was soaked in sweat, my wrist was aching, and the cat nearly demented. I tried the carving knife and got on little better. Then suddenly, from some remote part of my mind there popped into consciousness a suspicion that I had seen meat being cut up on a wooden board. I found such a board and the cat was soon appeased."

And, of course, he learned from these kinds of experiences: "[Regaining] the world was not merely a matter of being able to move where once I was still, of being able to go around corners where once I could only see in a straight line.

"I began to feel as the contemporaries of Copernicus and Galileo must have felt when they were told and refused to believe that the earth was not the centre of the universe. I might still believe that I really was still the centre of my world; but I had to recognise it was a moving centre, moving in a complicated orbit among a lot of other bodies which were all convinced they were the centre of the world, and I had to move among them without colliding."

When this book first appeared (from Chapman & Hall in London, Evelyn Waugh's publishers) it won the Hubert Church Award for the best work of prose by a New Zealand author published that year. It's easy to see why. It is unsurpassedly well-written (McEldowney could make a train timetable sound interesting), and it is redolent of a wit and wisdom unusual in one who was (then) so young.

McEldowney went on to write seven more books and edit another two.

They are all outstandingly good. He would have produced even more had not his eventual attainment of near-full health led to his becoming the managing editor of Auckland University Press, which has republished this first volume.

For those not already familiar with his writing, The World Regained provides a perfect and pleasurable introduction. For those who are, it offers a repeat treat.

Publisher: Auckland University Press, $34.95

* Michael King is the author of many books on New Zealand history.