Vincent O’Sullivan was someone who could walk into your life and change it. He had that kind of life spirit. Immense generosity. Thoughtfulness. The self-effacement that comes with enormous reserves of sophistication and intelligence and is often read quite simply as kindness.
I first met him when I was an English literature student at Victoria University. This was in the late 70s and Frank McKay, who was teaching 17th-century poetry, told the class he had “a bit of a treat” for us. And there, instead of Henry Vaughan, George Herbert or John Donne, was the New Zealand poet Vincent O’Sullivan. I remember he was dressed all in black and I’d assumed that, like McKay, he was a Catholic priest. We had many a laugh about that later. But I did think that. He was wearing black trousers and a black polo neck and he looked just the same as Frank – clearly the two of them knew each other very well.
Vincent was funny and clever and full of a sense of the mystery of life and the pleasures and wonders of the world – like the poets we’d been reading in class and about whom he seemed to know everything. Talk ranged over Cambridge and Oxford. London. Europe. Then Vincent pulled out a sheaf of papers from his bag and settled down to read some of his poems.
And the poems! They were wild and sexy and introspective and beautiful, with an idiolect and diction that seemed part cut-glass TS Eliot and part full-Wairarapa. They were like nothing I’d ever read before. What was going on? I was spellbound.
I had heard of O’Sullivan, of course. Everyone had. Even by then, the late 70s, he was pretty famous – but now, here he was with us, the same Vincent O’Sullivan. It was as if the world had come into that seminar room with him and he’d left the door open as though we might all follow him back through it to live in a place that was both there and here. I felt everything shift that day.
Years later, when my first novel was published, the film producer Philippa Campbell asked if I’d like to meet Vincent. He was a dear friend of hers and he’d invited us all to have lunch. Lunch? I was blown away. By then, Vincent was a huge presence, even more famous. I’d “met” him again, so to speak, through that great scholarly project of his, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, that I’d started lining up along my bookshelf at Oxford and was adding to as each new volume came out. My tutor, John Carey, and I had had conversations about those books, about KM and how O’Sullivan, with biographer Antony Alpers, had “properly”, as John put it, introduced Mansfield to the UK. “It’s terrible that before Vincent O’Sullivan’s Letters,” I remember John saying, “we didn’t read her here as we should have.”
And now, here was the same Vincent O’Sullivan inviting me to lunch! This was all happening over conversations taking place north of the Remutaka Range after a literary festival in Wellington. I was staying in Martinborough – with my sister Merran and our three babies – in happy chaos, but yes, chaos it was. We did everything we could, Merran and I, to try to make that lunch with Vincent happen, but in the end, I had to phone him from a call box in Featherston to say that I was unlikely to get there after all. That phone call – we talked about it later – marked the beginning of our friendship. He could hear that “happy chaos”, he said, and spoke as well, so kindly and generously, about my work that he made me feel I was “home” again. It was another of those shifts, those changes.
We met again, in London at a Katherine Mansfield conference, and this time he was not the famous writer who I’d thought was a priest, nor the warm, engaged voice down the telephone line. He was there, knowing everyone and everything, making all run smoothly and happily, as co-founder and director of the newly formed international Katherine Mansfield Society, to give the keynote paper, which was to form the introduction to the last volume of those Letters. And we sat, and we talked and we talked. The beginning of what I came to believe was an endless conversation, played out across hemispheres, north and south, in a garden in London and a kitchen in Wellington, in restaurants, cafes, at book festivals on stage and off, and in phone calls and letters, cards, emails and, most recently, in March in his beautiful Port Chalmers home with his gorgeous wife, Helen, and the toys of his grandchildren scattered at our feet, and then later, at a nearby pub. Talk still of books. Writers. Life. It went on and gloriously on and on. Until he and Helen waved me off from their veranda in the dark.
I could barely breathe after that inaugural address he’d given that day in London, all that time ago. It was so finely written that it could describe Mansfield’s final illness and death without a trace of piteousness but only by employing the full capabilities of the English language itself, in all its gradations, nuances, tones and rhythm, as Vincent read steadily and graciously from his own written words about a writer no longer in the world to speak.
And now that I find myself trying to come up with some words of my own about him, this great literary friend of ours who has left the room of this world and all of us here without him, I find, even so, through Vincent O’Sullivan’s words – all of his words – that he is with us still.
