James McNeish: New Zealanders in Exile at the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse Tung

Reviewed by FELICITY BARNES*

Some time before World War II, New Zealand began to specialise in a new type of niche export - of brains and talent, facilitated through the Rhodes Scholarship system. It was spectacularly successful; between 1920 and 1940 more than half the recipients who went to Oxford did not return.

This phenomenon is the starting point for James McNeish's Dance of the Peacocks, a multiple biography that weaves the lives of five remarkable New Zealanders who made their way to Oxford. All were outstanding academics, but this defining aspect of their lives is almost the least of it. From Oxford they went on to lead extraordinary and interconnected lives, all as writers, most as soldiers, in one or another capacity in the front lines of world-changing events of the 1930s and 1940s.

Two of the five, Dan Davin and John Mulgan, might be familiar, largely through their significant roles in the formation of a New Zealand literary tradition. Yet they, along with James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox and Ian Milner (also foundation members of that club) form part of a forgotten generation.

These are lives worth remembering. James Bertram was the first British journalist to interview Mao Tse Tung, smuggled Chou En Lai's wife out of China and worked with Madame Sun Yat Sen.

Geoffrey Cox scooped the world during the Spanish Civil War, went undercover in Nazi Germany, and later became a pioneer in broadcast television news. During the war Cox and Davin headed up the intelligence division for General Freyberg, while Mulgan, after fighting at Alamein, became involved in special operations in Greece.

But McNeish's choice of a broad canvas has another purpose. In bringing their lives together he is exploring the "group phenomenon" of expatriation, and "the great loneliness of being a New Zealander".

As he suggests, this has not been explored in New Zealand at a collective level before, despite the rate of successful exports. I suspect this absence reflects the greater interest in describing "New Zealandness". Expatriates, particularly those who seemed to thrive back home, introduce a confusing element to a national story.

This multiple biography intertwines these stories, reflecting the connections between the individuals. The stories unfold rather like conversations, with some intriguing digressions, but also with some repetition. Making the whole cohere as a narrative is complicated - McNeish describes it as "a handful" - but it holds together largely through his structuring devices. It also helps that the individuals are so interesting. So are the supporting cast: some characters, such as linguist Paddy Costello, and the godfather of the Oxford University Press, Kenneth Sisam, at times threaten to run off with the storyline.

The structure helps to expose McNeish's ideas about expatriation. It is loosely divided into three sections - Escape, Engagement and Exile - and within these broad categories he draws out the common threads of experience to get at the heart of what expatriation is about.

"Escape" evokes a stifling, Depression-era New Zealand, and introduces the shaping force of English, and Empire, ideals, in the form of Frank Milner's Waitaki Boys High School and the Rhodes Trust.

"Engagement", which encapsulates the most compelling parts of their lives, is hugely readable.

With "Exile", the pace, and their lives, winds down. In this section, the group phenomenon recedes against the individual circumstances of their lives. The exception is the chapter examining New Zealand's domination of the Oxford University Press, which picks up on genealogies encountered in the first section. Here, at least, expatriation seems to be working in the New Zealanders' favour.

There is a further, quieter, story in Dance of the Peacocks, which is one of its greatest strengths. These intertwined stories work because of the real friendship that existed among the five men, and others mentioned in the text. Their friendships endured war, distance, the Iron and the Bamboo Curtains.

McNeish's writing is at its best capturing the tone of their relationships, often through anecdotes. He describes a reunion between Ian Milner and Charles Brasch, friends since Waitaki Boys High: "Now, on the Peninsula's mellowing beaches, the two were present in each other's thoughts almost daily for 10 months. Milner was 60, Brasch 62. They 'floated together'." It is bittersweet for the reader, perhaps more so because in the artificial time zone of biography, it was only pages ago that they were boys.

McNeish writes that these are not biographies "in any formal sense". With so many characters, and only 400 pages, that is hardly surprising, and not really an appropriate measure of the book's success. What does matter is that, through these stories, he succeeds in repatriating for us something of what was exported, and thought lost.

* The Going West Books and Writers festival is on this weekend at the Titirangi War Memorial Hall. James McNeish will be speaking about Dance of the Peacocks tomorrow, September 14, 4pm.

Random House, $34.95

* Felicity Barnes is a postgraduate student researching New Zealand's cultural links with London between 1900 and 1940.