Sifting facts among the fiction

By MICHELE HEWITSON

It seemed like a good idea: try to con writer C.K. Stead into writing a description of a 69-year-old author living in Parnell to serve as the introduction to this profile of C.K. Stead, a 69-year-old author living in Parnell.

As an idea it had a couple of advantages: I wouldn't have to do it, and I wouldn't have to face the prospect of the writer, who is also a well-respected critic, reading it. Stead is also the master of inserting cunningly disguised slices of his life into his fiction.

"Oh, just knock off around 100 words and deliver it in two hours," I would have said.

That isn't quite the way it happened. Stead, although taken with the idea, thought the notice was a little short. And he has the peculiar effect of making one behave very well, which meant the request was couched rather more diplomatically. Despite his reputation of being a "terrible ogre," he is charming and utterly disarming.

He was outraged when I asked him if he cultivated the terrible ogre image. "No, absolutely not," he spluttered.

I was outraged when he phoned the day after the interview to say he had wondered whether he had been elusive, or whether I had been too polite. Nobody, I spluttered, had ever accused me of being polite.

When I arrive at the front door of his neat white Parnell house he opens it with an outstretched hand and the famous Stead scowl turned upside down into a wide smile, giving the odd, if fleeting, impression that one of us is standing on our head.

He is long and lean, and moves in a way which suggests the contradictory metaphor of an elegant crane. He is craggily handsome, always has been, but his is a face which suits the stories age has etched. He feels that 69 is an awkward age. "I can't get used to being almost 70. It all happened so fast."

There is no doubt that the writer of whom the Spectator has said "it seems incontestable ... that Stead is among the very best contemporary novelists" could have managed a more telling description. Well, maybe.

He has said earlier, on the topic of his public image, that "I'm not very good at analysing these things really".

The reason for coming to see Stead is that his new book, The Secret History of Modernism, which is very good indeed, is to be launched on Wednesday night. (At which point in my story, I imagine the author sitting back over a second cup of coffee on the comfortable couch in his tidy living room with the Louise Henderson and Ralph Hotere paintings on the wall behind him, thinking, "Finally. Thank God.")

The Secret History opens with its narrator, Laszlo Winter, introducing himself thus: "I'm a novelist, and for the purposes of this identification we will begin in Auckland, New Zealand, at the beginning of a new century." Winter is experiencing writer's block, wondering if his writing life is over. And wondering whether that life might be "rounded off with a retrospect ... some sort of autobiography ... " A memoir, or something along the lines of a book of recollection: "A description used, I'd begun to think, as an excuse for invention, inaccuracy, and the settling of old scores."

Or, perhaps, Laszlo Winter muses, he might let himself "off writing altogether, and simply close up for ever the room in the back garden where my work has been done, the structure I refer to mostly as 'the shed' (humbler than it deserves), but also as 'the studio' (pretentious), 'the office' (too businesslike), and 'the Lockwood' (name of its manufacturer)".

The story with which he breaks the writing drought is found in the late 1950s in London, where he was a postgraduate student studying Shakespeare and falling in love. Winter has had his run-ins with critics. His first response to the clever savaging by a young novelist of the old is to "fell him with a single blow when next we met". He fantasises about "the next literary scandal attached to my name" and accompanying headlines: Writer Punches Critic.

T HOSE readers who have enjoyed playing the game of "spot the author" with Stead over the years will enjoy this. Yes, the novelist writing of the novelist writes in the Lockwood in the back garden. Yes, he studied in London in the late 1950s. Yes, he has had the odd literary scandal, or at least the more sprattish spat.

The latest involved a tetchy exchange of letters with biographer Michael King in the Listener. It was resolved, with good grace, applauds Stead, when King dedicated a book to "C.K. Stead who, like an execution, concentrates the mind". Stead has never slugged a critic.

He was once described by a British critic as having "an almost Proustian preoccupation with memory".

Obviously, he says, all writers of fiction make use of memory but "maybe I use it differently because there is sometimes a way of using what at least your home readers will know is material from your own life, and then introducing an element of uncertainty".

Memory, by its nature, is uncertain. It becomes more so with age. Stead says: "I notice it in other people, how they get things wrong. So I assume I do, too. But obviously if you get it wrong you don't know."

For the writer, shaping episodes from life to fit the fiction has its own perils: "I have some sense that this isn't how it actually was but it's become my memory."

Occasionally, fiction based loosely on reality becomes fact. Stead tells a story about addressing a group of students who were keen to hear about Janet Frame's Zen Buddhism. Frame has never been a Zen Buddhist. Stead had made a character a Buddhist, the assumption was that the character was Frame (on whom the character was based), hence Frame had become a Buddhist. In fact, it is Stead who has had a fascination with Zen Buddhism and its enigmatic puzzles- although, before it becomes fact, let's stress that he has never been a Buddhist.

All of which could be nicely muddied further with a memoir. If one is ever published, readers will no doubt refer back to Laszlo's description of it as a vehicle for invention, inaccuracy, and the settling of old scores.

Stead, despite his critics' fascination with his fascination with the workings of memory, is in no hurry to provide that particular sport. Not until he's out of fictional material, he says. "I think it lays out the ground too clearly. You never know what material in your life you're going to want to use. If you've used it in autobiography, I can't see how you could ever use it again. You would have put an embargo on it."

Why bother, anyway, when your novels are read as autobiography? This is irritating and flattering. It means that "the fiction's working awfully well because they're believing it to the point of believing it's not fiction at all".

It's irritating, he says, when "people ascribe automatically opinions to me which they find in my novels. I think that's a mistake".

Tagging him with the terrible-ogre label is a mistake, too, and it's a lazy one. But it's just as much a mistake not to understand that his "I'm just a pussycat" retort to such shallow silliness contains a typically shrouded meaning.