Editor note: The stories discussed in this essay can be found in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Pictures by Goya and other Stories and also more recently printed in Selected Stories (VUP, 2019; ed. Stephen Stratford), noted in the opening paragraph. Page numbers refer to this 2019 collection.
Vincent O’Sullivan is a novelist, poet of distinction, librettist, anthologist, and Katherine Mansfield scholar of international renown. He has a wide range of craft and reading experience to call on, as we see in his Selected Stories (VUP, 2019; ed. Stephen Stratford), which includes thirty-five stories published over some forty years. These are stories so deftly crafted and composed that they are something of an astonishment. And I keep pondering how does he make all of this happen? Stories that often read like novellas; in this he is in the company of the internationally acclaimed Canadian writer Alice Munroe. There’s not a single dull or dutiful story in this selection.
The writing is full of grace and insight, compassion and humanity; and wit and wry humour, punctuated with satiric thrusts that are pleasurable in themselves.
O’Sullivan has mastered the art of satire, especially since satire as a poetic form is in very short supply in New Zealand. He is a very funny.
This is a gathering of stories that demonstrates the poetry that is in prose. They are extended prose-poems that sing, never stridently; that strike the ear and the eye with a music that makes meaning in itself. He is a writer never working at a distance; and he brings the ‘far more near’. The poet writer as cinematographer. And a painter-poet. These are stories that show a truth of poetry, that say poetry makes intimate everything that it touches. Again and again in these stories we see and hear that everyone seeks intimacy. Seeking life sustaining intimacy with the Self in relationship with the Other. O’Sullivan has wonderful psychological insight into what it means in this struggle to find ways to survive, even ourselves. He is a writer who goes deep, in the sense that deep equals true, and going deep is how we discover, as his characters do – or fail to do – how is it we are so mysterious to ourselves and the world. This is the universal, archetypal instinct at work.
Stories unfold and we see and hear what is going on in the landscapes of his characters. O’Sullivan is a writer interested in mind-mapping, as a means of discovering the way the imagination works.
In these stories, it is the dynamics of relationships past and present that provide the tensions that animate the sinuous plot lines. The all-important rhythmic narrative line moving through time. These are stories whose truths comprise the ‘journey through the human heart’ as in the Janet Frame story.
And this is what for O’Sullivan matters so deeply. This is as he has acknowledged A felt thing and not intellectual head-banging exercise. In this, he does not shy away from the Romantic Imagination, so mysterious at work in the lives of lost Hope. Rather, O’Sullivan plays a well-tempered clavier; playing on the in what we call the human comedy. It is Dark Hope that is O’Sullivan’s major key. It is not the ‘grandeur of ideas’ that matters. But foremost, the words into images and metaphoric riffs and symbols; into sentences that do the essential work in the search and discovery for meaning.
As storyteller with a radar ear, he is a great talker through the inner speech of his characters. I can think of no more apposite description that illustrates the language play of O’Sullivan: ‘L’écriture de la peinture de la voix’ [Voltaire]. He hears and we see images that are those ‘quick surprises’ that reveal so much more than a glancing apprehension of character in action, or inaction. ‘I didn’t mean to say what I meant to say’ is the note that is so often sounded. O’Sullivan knows his Freud and Jung. “My memory flares so vividly”, says a young boy in ‘Photos, to Begin With’ (p. 374). It is memory as a leitmotif that threads it way through these stories. The time of memory visibly present, and because Memory is always about Time, it shows us how the Imagination works to discover things about ourselves and the world. The young boy is recalling his memories of what it was like to experience post-war life.
Pat Costello’s hands, my mother used to say, Pat’s hands, have you noticed how lovely they are? They could be a woman’s.
What follows is a narrative of snapshots from an album of memory though the story itself is always calling itself back to the present moment. This is what good sentences do, what narrative does, always going forward by reaching back in memory to the personal and collective historical moment.
In this, O’Sullivan is masterful in evoking place and a sense of place. ‘Mrs Bennett and the Bears’ (p. 501) is in effect a prose-poem with a strong narrative drive. Here, the language of quiet, lyric intensity never soars too high into the aether as a distraction from measured emotional colour. This gives the story a kind of otherworld fascination. Edward is a middle-aged foreigner from the West, making a short visit to the strange, exotic East, Japan. He could have hardly ever have imagined such a strange, mysterious place. A very deftly shaped sonatina composed and played with the skill of a keyboard artist. In this story, Edward, a confirmed stay-at-home, where life is clockwork is secure and safe and predictable, suddenly finds himself volunteering for one of those business information jaunts to another world. Where, as a dutiful tourist, he accepts a time-out offer excursion by his Japanese minder, a visit to the famous bears in captivity. And it has been arranged that he is to be accompanied by Mrs Bennett, who immediately insists on a first name, Keiko. As the story unfolds, we take part in what turns out to be a discovery of self-revelation for Edward and Mrs Bennett-Keiko.
“Yes,” Edward said, “Yes”. He did not catch what word she had actually said. But yes to whatever it was, for when he looked down and saw the bears he felt a catch in his breath. They were magnificent and poised and huge …
“I feel like a child, watching these.”
“They would kill you like that”, Keiko said … “They are very beautiful and they would kill you like that.” And they laughed together, although there was no particular reason to.
Unspoken bonds. It is always going to be mysteriously interesting when an unspoken bond develops between the most unlikely. As it does in this story ‘Pieces’ (p. 536) – at one level, a court-trial story, at another level something altogether else. At the very outset of this gem of a story, it is uncanny how O’Sullivan is so able to enter into the thoughts of the two characters. Not only are we given role as witnesses, but as surrogate jurors. Weston is the trial lawyer for Mandy, who is on trial for a serious crime. There is no question of criminal liability; it is a given and acknowledged as such. It is rather something altogether and intriguingly else that is taking place in the minds of Mandy and Weston. This ‘something else’ turns out to be how normative, conventional justice deals with those who are unable to look after their own craziness – and how they end up falling into chaotic criminality. Here, we see O’Sullivan open a story out to thinking about sanity and insanity. How astonishing it is that so little has been written about sanity, whilst insanity is endlessly written and talked about and has been for centuries. Where would novels of fiction be without the ‘reasonably crazy’? Here, some thoughts from Mandy, the defendant:
“So, my defence as you see it, Weston? I didn’t know what I was doing?”
… ‘the defender of my insanity’, Mandy would come to call [Weston].
…Mandy insists, “I was never more lucid.”
O’Sullivan is raising very complex issues about the justice system. And about how in a democratic society we deal with the deranged. What does it mean to be insane when sanity is the moral measure, and madness or craziness is deemed a pathological condition? And those who go ‘mad’ must be punished in one form or another. As a story, ‘Pieces’ – riveting in itself for its dramatic intensity – is very courageous indeed, one that opens up issues of moral measure; and madness or craziness is deemed a pathological condition.
All of this in an O’Sullivan short story. The luminescence of clarity. Thinking about how everyone wants to be clear about something or another in their lives. But not so ‘clear’ that you stop thinking about it. I think I hear something like this going on in the stunning story ‘On a Clear Day’ (p. 482).
‘Odd’ is a word I later kept saying to myself, that I’ve said several times… I meant I had not been so startled by anything in my life as I was by the feeling that I interrupted some deep moment of privacy, that I was the one who needed to excuse myself as I saw the white scoop of my wife’s breast released, the dark uncovered nipple. I in fact had said ‘sorry’ from the half-opened glass door. The memory of that sears more than what I saw. Then Peter was facing me with the eyes that took in nothing, and asking, ‘Pompeii over already, then?’
Introspection is a blessing and a curse. Things happen and you are stunned and then you become part of the problem. This is why I consider this story literally stunning. What can I do and say about what has knocked me off kilter? When doing nothing is something that ties you in knots. And we ‘see’ in this story that blindness is always about clarity: the light in the dark of confusion. What is in question is the ‘inner blindness’ of Claire’s husband Charles. No surprise to O’Sullivan himself who knows a great deal about what is going on in the Unconscious; the Unconscious as ur-author and co-creator.
When reading O’Sullivan, as in ‘On a Clear Day’, it is dividends plus to read the words, to read the images and the sound-sense of the images, to read the sentences. And never to worry about the Big and Profound Ideas. They will look after themselves. Sentences. For example, a sentence taken at random. ‘It was an apprehension taken into himself and returned as poise.‘ If this sentence and many more like it doesn’t stop you in your tracks, what to say? Taking a leaf from Jung’s experience of reading Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake: he recommended reading from the end back to the beginning. And he did that and enjoyed it immensely.
Yet another pleasure in reading O’Sullivan. Charles is speaking about the gusts of winds from off the seafront harbour:
The spray rose and its saltiness was flung above the railings. The gusts lifted the collar of my jacket and whirred it against my cheek. I felt the elation of it as I had when I was a boy and the winds came up and rocked you in a life bigger than your own.
Images of light and dark are threaded and woven throughout this story. This is again O’Sullivan’s painterly eye at work. The brushwork of words composing the canvas of the narrative. It is a fact that O’Sullivan admires Cézanne as Maestro of the early rise of Modernism. And he has acknowledged a number of times that we are as writers and artists obliged to pay attention to those of our literary ancestors of quality, who created pathways and opened doors on the literary and art journey. This what it means to have a ‘roving intelligence’.
I tried to explain that Claire and I, after all, we both knew exactly what it was… It was a woman letting a blind man fumble her tits … What is the point going on about confusion, when clarity is already there.
This is what I would call a Tone Poem. And its signature note: Look, at what’s before your eyes. Then look, again and look through into your heart. This journey through the human heart.
Michael Harlow has published twelve books of poetry including The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (a Finalist in the 2010 National Book Awards). Nothing For It But To Sing winner of the OUP Kathleen Grattan Award (2016). Residences he has held include the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in France and the Robert Burns Fellowship. In 2014 he won Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize, and in 2018 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.