Book review: We owe Harry Ricketts. He’s a poet, critic, biographer, even sports historian. He’s been an academic (English at Victoria University of Wellington), and co-editor of the former review journal NZ Books. Now comes this lucid memoir of his first three decades, ending not long before he leaves England for the Antipodes.
He’s born in Malaya, during ‘’the fag-end of Empire’'. His army dad faces Communist insurgents; young Harry faces a bellicose monkey. Soon, it’s back to Worcester, where he becomes a Davy Crockett fan, then encounters that British brutality of boarding school at age 8. “It stunted my capacity for joy.”
Right from the start, you’re into Ricketts’ thoughtful, often engagingly whimsical prose. It’s the voice of a good lecturer, plus a bit more. The puzzles that are people intrigue him; they’re recorded and respected.
You’re instantly into books as well. English poets Swinburne and Robert Graves arrive in the second paragraph; John Dryden and Katherine Mansfield in par three. Wordsworth, AG Macdonell, Philip Larkin press close behind. You get six titles in six lines. They all extend perspectives and viewpoints. They also offer some rewarding juxtapositions: King Lear with Swallows and Amazons; his grandmother’s forbidding gaze and the Eye of Sauron. Ricketts’ own poems punctuate the story, making their own reflective, meditative comments on younger selves.
He suffers and survives at prep school. Cricket starts to obsess him; you’ll forgive – no, enjoy – his summaries of games where H Ricketts stars or slumps. A school production of The Batsman’s Bride, surely a contender for title of the Millennium, helps stir awareness of words and plots.
Then it’s the even more arcane world of public school, “reading all the time, often a book a day”. Cricket stays important; sex becomes insistent. Social pretensions and expectations are recalled with a sort of wondering objectivity.
Next is English at Oxford, where he hopes for “intense late-night arguments about art, love and the meaning of life”, but finds things “rather philistine”. There are photos throughout the book, and you have to see Harry’s 1969 hair. He knocks off firsts: hitchhiking (Ireland); infatuation with a poem (Keats); love affairs (UK and northern France), including first kiss – “a bit slobbery”.
Add music, films, language, “a joint or two”, holiday work in a Ribena factory: the usual subjects, crisply related. Friends die, soon after or much later. It deepens and diversifies the narrative.
And so to Hong Kong and a lecturer’s life, not liking English entitlement. Still more reading and re-reading: John Fowles doesn’t last well. Neither does the colleague who compares Bob Dylan to a Guinness ad. Our man fails to write The Great Hong Kong Novel. By book’s end, in another leap of place and purpose, he’s back in the UK, married and a new father. “Will appeared in a gush of blood, opening like a parachute.”
First Things is indeed replete with episodes and anecdotes, but Ricketts is adept at turning quotidian moments into emblematic ones. He recalls or skewers his people via a meeting, a couple of sentences, a series of phone calls. Or a collision: a child’s toy lands in the windscreen wipers after a road accident; a friend of sorts arrives to warn the author of the Second Coming.
Conventional structure. Nicely varied pace. You learn a bit of lit; even end up with an eclectic book list. Ricketts himself seems to have read just about everything worth trying, and doesn’t boast about it. Any life told well will appeal, will provide a potential template, and it happens here. A second volume, inevitably called Last Things, will follow. Hurry up, please.
First Things by Harry Ricketts (THWUP, $35.00) is out now.
