At the age of 30, Joe Bennett arrived in Lyttelton and moved into the cottage where he has lived ever since.
This is the point where the English-born columnist and author concludes his just-published memoir, From There to Here. It might seem unusual to stop an autobiography halfway through a life, but Bennett explains that most of the adventures that make interesting reading happened in his earlier years.
He finally settled down when he chose New Zealand as his home, and he’s happier for it. “Until then, everything I owned you could get in a suitcase and a half,” he says. “My feet had always itched. Then I chose to come here, and it felt like a watershed. I bought a house, got a dog, and then it was all over. It seemed like a break in my life. Everything built up to that age and I’ve been resident in one place ever since.”
For 25 years, Bennett has made a living as a writer, penning 20 non-fiction books, thousands of syndicated newspaper columns and one novel. When we speak, he sits in his Lyttelton home, on the brink of his 66th birthday. He is about to go on a holiday up north and has just finished a column for a newspaper about scientists recreating mammoth meat. The week before he’d had ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot making headlines, in his sights.
I can’t see him to talk about his memoir because he can’t work the Zoom link. He speaks about technology with the same fiery ranting that infiltrates his columns, a view that many of his fellow Boomers may relate to. “Technology makes my head boil. I would rather it wasn’t there. It’s a diminished world that kids come into.”
Mind you, he credits one tool – his computer – with his ability to get published because he describes his writing process as slow: 500 words a day, a lot of editing and cutting and pasting, whether it is a book or a column. His memoir is a good example. It took five years to write. “Yes, I found this memoir hard to write and I hope that doesn’t show.’’
However, writing is his passion and it was what he wanted to do since he was a boy in England. In From There to Here, he shares his journey to taking up the craft, via stints teaching in Europe and obtaining an English degree at the University of Cambridge.
Since 1998, he has been writing columns for newspapers and the Stuff website, often two a week, and he hasn’t missed a single one. Judged New Zealand columnist of the year five times in the national media awards, he describes his work as observational. He also doesn’t shy away from the controversial, sparking anger with columns targeting the use of te reo on RNZ and arguing it was a dying language.
Outrage aside, he relishes the immediate response that columns can provoke, the way he enters people’s lives, which is different from books where any responses from readers take time. “I write anything that gives me a spark of emotional interest. But as a columnist, you’re as good as your last piece of writing. You can be sacked tomorrow, so you’re very much on your toes because there are lots of people who want your spot.’’
Romantic touch
Bennett’s segue into columns happened via the short stories he began writing for women’s magazines. As an adolescent, he had attempted novels, which were never published. At 40, he was teaching English at Christ’s College in Christchurch when he wrote a romantic short story, sent it off to a women’s magazine and managed to syndicate it to other publications here and overseas. “When you study them [romance stories], the formula is quite simple. The audience wants the couple to get together and you put a barrier in their way – usually a smooth rival – and something exposes his flaw. And so the guy that she should have been with, she’s with in the last line.
“I knew when I’d written one which would sell because as I was writing the line, ‘She opens the parcel and discovers the egg timer which he has repaired’, I burst into tears with her, and I thought, ‘Oh, that will sell.’”
The stories were lucrative enough to pay for a new car – but the editors turned him from “Joe” into feminine “Jo” Bennett.
About the same time, he began submitting columns and articles to other magazines and sent one to the Press in Christchurch. A decade after he had arrived in Lyttelton, the newspaper offered him a column, and others approached him, too, so he resigned from teaching. Column writing has earned him a living ever since and he has published collections of them. Over the decades, he has brought his sharp, satirical eye to bear on topics such as dogs, games, language, travel and people’s often-strange beliefs – or as his publisher puts it, “the swamping trivia that shape our lives despite our best intentions”.
But there are many columnists and younger, fresh voices coming through. What’s different about his and why does he have such longevity? “I’d like it to be, and what I honestly think it is, is that I use the language better, tellingly and well,” he says. “I don’t think people read me for the point of view. I hope they read me for the writing and that it’s funny and comic. I try not to take the world too seriously.
“I’d like to be recognised as a technician. I don’t think my opinions are particularly fresh. I’m interested in the craft of putting the language together.’’
Too middle class
Born in 1957, Bennett spent his childhood and adolescent years answering to his birth name of Julian. In his memoir, he outlines his first three decades: he grew up in a middle-class home in Willingdon, Sussex, the youngest of four children, in the post-war boom “when every house seemed to swarm with kids’'. Life was stable, suburban and sunny. Computers weren’t around to “ruin my childhood’'.
He changed his name to Joe when he went to Cambridge. “I had never liked the name Julian,” he writes. “It smacked of the Famous Five. It was nice and white and middle class and earnest. It seems to embody all the qualities I liked least about myself.’’
Although he writes that he was suited to teaching, “to me it smacked of cowardice. Instead of going out into the world and forging something new, to go back to school was to retreat from the unknown to the known, the obverse of adventure. To teach would be the external undeniable expression of my lack of courage.”
The book covers the ups and downs of adolescence and Bennett’s emergence into adulthood. He writes about being molested as a boy, adolescent crushes, travelling to Europe to teach English, and the people he met there. The memoir also touches on the ordinariness of everyday life.
“We drag our life around like a snail shell,” he tells the Listener. “There’s a vanity in writing a memoir. I wanted to try to tell it as truthfully as I can but you’re editing, selecting. Of the thousands of days I’ve lived, most of them don’t get a mention. They’re probably the reality.
“I’m trying to crystallise what happened and, as always, you hope that a reader will chime and say, ‘That’s how it was.’ That’s what I’m always trying to do. Whether I succeed or not is not for me to say.’’
Sexuality & identity
The book’s delight lies in the characters who come alive on the page, such as Sammy Barnes (a pseudonym). Bennett writes: “It was love, of course …'’ On Friday and Saturday nights in Brighton, a teenage Bennett became infatuated. “What he made of me, I don’t like to think. I must have fawned after him like a puppy … I had only the vaguest notions of gay sex and none of it appealed. The Sammy I loved was Sammy clothed … I tried to dress like him and there was no surer way to intensify despair.’’
He describes his crushes in vivid detail so we can almost imagine them, such as Barnes and Tim, a rower he met at Cambridge. Bennett was fearful of being labelled gay and uninterested in what he understood to be gay sex. He writes: “I have dwelt on Sammy and Tim because I dwelt on them at the time. I have found it very hard to find the words to tell the truth of the time. Were they just adolescent crushes? Perhaps. But both mattered to me greatly, then and now.’’
Today, he’s coy about his private life. He has been with his gay partner for 15 years, whom he does not wish to name. His sexuality is not a big deal and he speaks with the same fiery tongue as in his columns. It is as though he doesn’t want his sexuality to be his identity. “I’m not particularly gay. Everyone’s somewhere on the spectrum and I’m not far off to one side. As I write in the book, I’m not queer by much but that ‘by much’ is enough to make all the difference.”
While his memoir is at times nostalgic for a time lost, he is also cynical. New Zealand felt like a backwater when he arrived on a Sunday in 1987 with one suitcase and in debt. “Cathedral Square was hot, empty and shut.’’
Some things remain despite the passing of time. Like other migrants arriving today, Bennett observes the nuances of the New Zealand accent. At Christ’s College, he struggled with the pupils’ vowels. “Ben Wilson, for example, would be Bin Wulson,’’ he writes.
Australia had always been on his bucket list. He visited it and saw enough of it. “Where was there to go after 30? Where was there to go after New Zealand?’’
Back home to the “semi-derelict cottage’' in Lyttelton. Of acquiring it, he writes, “I shoved an elbow through the plasterboard because I could, because for the first time in my life a wall was mine.”
On the road
Bennett’s best-selling book so far is his 2008 travel book, Where Underpants Come From, in which he traces a five-pack pair of underpants back to their source, to factories in China and even a cotton field on the border with Afghanistan. A genius idea, it came to him while he was shopping in Christchurch.
He wrote several travel books for a British publisher that were bestsellers, starting with A Land of Two Halves in 2004, about hitchhiking around New Zealand. The publisher asked him to write another one about doing the same in the UK. But although he had hitched around England as a teenager, he says, “Hitching in the early 2000s was impossible. So I changed it and I drove around the route following HV Morton who wrote a book, In Search of England, in the 1920s. Norton’s book was hugely successful. I followed his route around the country 80 years later.’’
A book about a trip to Dubai, which he described as the world’s weirdest city, followed. Bennett reflects that the market for travel books – along with the publishing industry – has changed in the past decade and it is much more difficult to write them these days, a fact he blames on the internet.
Now, any travel writing he does is domestic. One of his most recent Stuff columns was about that trip north for his 66th birthday holiday, and it bemoaned the fact he wasn’t allowed to spend his Airpoints and had to pay $10 to choose a seat.
He has written one novel. King Rich (2015) was a fictionalised story based on a yarn he was told in a Lyttelton pub. A few months after the Christchurch quakes, he was told a myth about the Grand Chancellor Hotel, which was on a lean and going to be demolished. The story was that someone had been detected living in it. It wasn’t true, but Bennett imagined a hobo squatting in the hotel, drinking his way around the mini-bars and eating everything he could find. The plot is more in-depth, and reviewer David Hill was complimentary about the book in the NZ Herald, describing Bennett as “probably our most eloquent columnist’'.
Bennett explains that writing a novel had also been on his bucket list, but he will stick to the craft of non-fiction. “I don’t think by character I am a novelist. But I am pleased to have knocked one out.’’
From There to Here, by Joe Bennett (Harper Collins), $35.
