Who Would a Would-be Be? A Memoir of Literary Encounters

• Published in: Journal of New Zealand literature Vol. 33; no. 33; pp. 128 - 149
• Main Author: Edmond, Murray
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wellington, NZ English Programme, School of Arts, University of Waikato 01.01.2015; Victoria University of Wellington
• Subjects: Appreciation; Books and reading; Characters and characteristics in literature; Churches; Families in literature; Hair; High schools; Literary criticism; Lyric poetry; Memoir; Poetry; Poets; Poets, New Zealand; Smithyman, Kendrick; Theater; Universities; Verbs; Works; Writers; 1949; New Zealand
• ISSN: 0112-1227

The feeling of being a fake cries out for a noun (there must be one in German); it haunts my reality. The idea that you could just make yourself up would have scandalised my mother and been incomprehensible to my father. There must be more to reality than this! So, their outrage and incomprehension, which I inherited, lingers within me in relation to my own roles in life. A poet? I love what the character Kutisar in Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis’s 'The Guru of Chai' says about poets: ‘They have dirty, filthy thoughts and out of their mouths come pomegranates and figs’. And so, it was with a desire to seek out the company of those whose disgusting imaginings could be transformed into gorgeous indulgences that I went looking for those who were real-real poets, real writers, real artists, and not just fabrications of their own fancy. ‘The Fancy’, in Coleridge’s coinage, lacked that transformational capacity to convert those dirty, filthy thoughts, and so remained ‘a mode of Memory’ which ‘must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association’. This exercise I am undertaking here is guilty of being exactly that, and thus a child of ‘The Fancy’, yet I shall try to see if I cannot transform it by the end. This is the story of the beginnings of my literary encounters-which have continued ever since-and which, in those beginnings, felt like a revelatory series of meetings with the wise and the mighty and the blessed.