Rachel Barrowman: MASON: The Life of R.A.K. Mason

Reviewed by GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

Even when he is a child and even when he is smiling, ineradicable lines of anguish haunt photographs of Ron Mason, the poet whose singular voice crept into the New Zealand consciousness during the 1920s and 1930s. These lines were etched by an anger, wrote a friend after his death in 1971, that was "the rage of outraged tenderness".

This excellent biography sustains that perception of someone who simmered throughout his life at what he saw as injustice and inequality. Mason's public reputation now rests on a slender, youthful output of verse. Didacticism brushed everything he wrote, but when he was young his poetry was personal, an intense argument with himself, whereas later it became political and was a shallower argument with society.

This is a genuine literary biography. Barrowman has drenched herself in Mason's poetry, indeed in all his writing - right down to the droning propaganda he wrote over many years for leftist causes. By doing that, she has helped to explain a man who was an enigma for most of us.

Mason's problem with recognition as a young man was that his work was so early, so unexpected, that the country wasn't ready for him. His reaction to the fact that few people here took any notice of him while he was being published with respect in London was a mixture of despair and inertia - or was it perversity?

When he had the chance to expand his British reputation, he didn't even bother to answer his mail.

This was someone who had gained top university marks in New Zealand for Latin III by a margin over the next best that was unprecedented, but didn't get a degree until years later because he had failed terms for History I.

And yet when his Collected Poems were published in 1962, Allen Curnow wrote: "On the strength of these 22 poems, Mason emerges as his country's first wholly original, unmistakably gifted poet". His reputation seems to have slipped since then, but it hasn't gone away and this book may help to restore it.

Contemporary readers may have some difficulty amid the present plethora of poetry and literary prose to understand what Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn, Robin Hyde and Frank Sargeson meant to literate New Zealanders in the decades between 1930 and 1970. They peopled a literary desert, as Sargeson wrote in defence of Mason.

When I first read the poem On the Swag I was moved enough to learn it by heart - although it's now too sentimental for my taste. And yet, when I was reading Mason, I came across the fascinating Footnote to John ii 4 in which Christ repudiates his mother, or doesn't, which impressed me so little then I couldn't recall it:


Don't throw your arms around me in that way:

I know what you tell me is the truth

yes I suppose I loved you in my youth

as boys do love their mothers, so they say,

but all that's gone from me this many a day:

I am a merciless cactus an uncouth

Wild goat a jagged old spear the grim tooth

Of a lone crag Woman I cannot stay.

Each one of us must do his work of doom

and I shall do it even in despite

of her who brought me in pain from her womb,

whose blood made me, who used to bring the light

and sit on the bed up in my little room

and tell me stories and tuck me up at night.

Mason was a child of his time, a member of the generation that grew up through World War I, into the failed promise of the 1920s, lived through the cruel hardships of the Depression and back into the carnage of World War II.

Born in Auckland, one of two sons of a Queen St barber, he went to Auckland Grammar, and on to Auckland University College. He spent time with an aunt in Lichfield, in the Waikato, and all his life he found a measure of contentment as a gardener. He was also a prodigious walker.

Like so many of his contemporaries, he saw the world for the mess it was and embraced the left, although he was never a member of the Communist Party. He became deeply involved in trade union and anti-Cold War causes and used his writing skills as a propagandist, churning out ready-made jargon week after week exhorting anti-Fascist forces "to crush the mad beast" among other things.

When a friend asked him how a writer of his taste and sensitivity could do this, he said it was what the people expected and what he had to do. After the orthodox left dropped him, he became president of the New Zealand-China Friendship Association.

The difference between Mason and so many other writers of his time is that age did not dampen his radical ardour or relieve him of an almost adolescent drive to cure the world's ills.

Late in his life, he was awarded the Burns Fellowship in Dunedin and tried to write seriously again, especially plays, fulfilling a long interest in the theatre. But the small amount of poetry he wrote was a travesty of his early work. His health deteriorated and the manic depression which had dogged him all his life surfaced in a more extravagant way. He died of a heart attack in Auckland in 1971.

This is a scholarly, well crafted and well written book that not only does much to explain a complex personality, but also illuminates his time and the difficulties faced then by writers and artists.

Victoria University Press, $49.95