His writing is gloriously free of the internal censor’s eye. Like David Keenan, Sargeson also lets “them talk”. Characters are allowed to live on the page, speak, wonder, think, confound, breathe, and be.
On my initial reading, I appreciated the work on the immediate linguistic, artistic, and thematic levels. In terms of language, the appeal to me was direct:
It’s always a very great pleasure ro experience sophisticated literary art that represents the speech, character, and communication of another culture; different varieties of the language, and the reservoir of life and meaning that will be conveyed if you simply listen to voices as they speak. James Kelman underlined this unabashed, powerful linguistic verve in Sargeson’s writing during an interview my friend Alan and I conducted with him in 2018:
The ‘fuck them’ is of course the act of allowing the characters to form the narrative, rather than ceding that space and power to the voice of authority. Kelman expresses how radical this act is, especially when considering the times in which Sargeson was writing. The courage and the commitment to focus his art on the hearts and minds of ordinary New Zealanders should not be underestimated. The stories, That Summer in particular, also attracted me on account of the content – the world being presented, the people that inhabit it, the recognizable travails they seem to go through, of work, poverty, fractious relationships, and such like.
However, what I believe makes Frank Sargeson such a remarkable writer is that, while his work was indeed operating (successfully) on these artistic planes, there is another dimension here, a whole other art-form at play, functioning within the psyche of the characters; revealing itself in glimpses and, at times, seemingly ceasing to exist. It can be difficult to discern if Sargeson’s narrators are even cognisant of it, of whether they are in on the ‘deception’ or whether their own senses are in flux, trapped within that particular social and political climate.
Duncan McLean illustrates this in the following terms:
Of course, the country being in that state meant that Sargeson was unable to simply write straightforward tales of non-heterosexual relationships. Yet he managed to become, in the words of Janet Wilson in her excellent introduction to Frank Sargeson’s Stories (Cape Catley, NZ, 2010), “a key writer in registering ‘queer dissent’ and critiquing the heteronormative.” And nowhere else did he manage this as successfully, truthfully, and beautifully as That Summer – a work that the NZ writer Patrick Evans called a “masterpiece of restrained emotion.”
It is a rich, multifaceted work of art, a novella of quite incredible psychological scope, simultaneously bearing resemblance to great European fiction of that period, while diverging drastically, towards the heart and the emotions of living, breathing people. Writing that operates on such different levels merits closer examination.
The impression we get from Bill is the same – he doesn’t seem to be seeking anything specific, nor trying to make contact with much conviction. It’s like he is waiting for life to approach him so he doesn’t need to initiate. He walks around, trying not to ruminate, hoping for experiences to occur:
On this surface level, Bill’s story reads brilliantly. He strolls, he ponders, he makes a ‘cobber’ called Terry, and they struggle to get money and stay afloat. It is writing with all the hallmarks of the European existential – the lack of omniscience, the primacy of voice, the material survival of the character at the forefront of the narrative. Much like Bove’s amis, much like Raskolnikov and Josef K, Bill spends time outdoors, on his own, eking out a living, existing on the margins. I hear echoes of these novels and these characters throughout That Summer, particularly when Bill is in custody, locked in a cell, remembering his childhood, bereft of any hope or understanding of his plight.
The process of his arrest and investigation bear a very direct similarity to Kafka’s The Trial in fact – two plain-clothed officials turn up at the boarding-house, politely and calmly arrest Bill without detailing the charge, and walk on either side of him, refusing to communicate further (I have no idea if Sargeson would have read Kafka in English by 1939 when he began That Summer, but it seems too reminiscent of that sequence to be coincidence).
It is once the arrest has taken place that the parallel with Mersault, the protagonist of l’Etranger by Albert Camus, comes sharply into focus. In the police station, Bill tries to express himself and his position, but this soon dissolves into a strange apathy:
He seems to lack the spirit, or even the interest, to defend himself in the face of a gravely serious prosecution, much like Mersault was to remain indifferent and unmoved by the case against him.
Where That Summer deviates from these timeless European masterworks is that Bill doesn’t only exist in this state of detachment. He moves towards a secret joy, an expression of human emotion and love, that is not normally present in the existential novel. Although I think Camus may have, consciously or unconsciously, veered quite close to this with Mersault. In a section that’s eerily similar to the relations between Sargeson’s Bill and Terry, Mersault befriends his neighbour Raymond:
It is not clear what Mersault is thinking when the blood throbs his ears. Is he wondering why Raymond started addressing him by his first name? Has he paused because he is unsure whether he really wants to depart? Or does the moment have no significance – has he merely drunk too much wine? Camus does not take us any deeper into this introspection, because human relationships are not the focus of such novels. Bill is like Mersault, but Bill is more than Mersault. That Summer is the story of a flâneur, and it is another story too, co-habiting on each page with the surface-narrative. When Bill’s ears throb with blood, he will at least try to think of why.
The mystery of fictive characters’ inner worlds is something that was discussed by Robert Boswell in his seminal book, The Half-Known World:
‘Human slippage’ seems an appropriate phrase to describe much of Bill’s ponderings and his behaviours. Does he know himself and his motivations, or does he only ‘half-know’ them? (Also, does Sargeson?) And does Bill use the narrative to obscure his feelings from us, or is he constantly deluding himself as to his true nature? After seeing Terry in the pub once, he later returns, seemingly incidentally, only remembering and mentioning Terry spontaneously:
The reader cannot know whether Bill genuinely did just remember Terry at that juncture, or if he has concealed his true motive in re-visiting the pub, or if he’s actually unaware that this is what drew him there again. It is a simple event, presented innocuously, given no forethought or significance by the speaker. It is Boswell’s half-known world, and in this case we can’t even be certain over who it is only half-known by – the writer, the character, or only us, the readers.
I believe Duncan is here treading the same line as Boswell, when in his Conversation with Frank Sargeson piece, he exclaims: “To hell with the bourgeois niceties! To hell with … the three-dimensional characters!” Literary discourse and convention have conditioned us to consider the ’three-dimensional’ character as the highest form of fictional creation; the person who has been fully realized in words. Sargeson, and many like him, existed in a society where they could could not live as fully realized people, so it’s entirely logical that Frank’s fictive manifestations are also shrouded in secrecy and uncertainty.
Later in the story, the following exchange occurs with Maggie, a transvestite who is staying in the same boarding-house:
This earnest claim to the reader cannot help but ring false. I do not know if this denial is for the reader to question Bill’s level of awareness, or to convince censors that this really is just a story of two close cobbers. Again, whether the narrative is a deceit or a delusion remains open to question.
Janet Wilson writes perceptively in the aforementioned introduction about the quandary faced by Sargeson and his narrators:
This last sentence is crucial, as That Summer certainly alludes to its own secret or double narrative throughout. A key way in which it does this is through Bill’s guidance of the story.
The first sign we get that this is not being presented as a ‘realistic’ representation of a sequence of events, and is in fact a story being told to us (and manipulated by the speaker) occurs whe Bill remarks: “But it turned out I never shifted from Mrs Clegg’s, not for a long time as I’ll tell you” (p145). He later underlines the presence of an addressee by stating: “…you know the feeling” (p169). Of course, whenever an implied reader exists, so does the likelihood that the narrative character is telling the story with a particular slant to it, or purpose in mind.
What Bill chooses to omit has the effect of narrowing the scope of the story:
By rejecting a narrative of his time in custody (even though he acknowledges there would be ample material for this), Bill is implicitly showing that the subject of his story is not his own life and experiences necessarily. This leaves us with the deduction that That Summer is, to use Wilson’s phrase, “the story that cannot be told openly” – ie, the story of the relationship between he and Terry. This sense is heightened by the fact that the story ends abruptly after Terry’s death. Bill, and Sargeson, can’t simply call or recognize this story what it is. Through the select movements of narrative, it reveals itself.
Bill himself is prey to retreating into silence when others confess their emotional attachment to him. At two junctures in the story, other characters profess their feeling for him; the female proprietor of the first boarding-house he stays at, and the older male cook in the Dally’s restaurant. In both instances, Bill refuses to even engage with their expressions, becoming mute and swiftly moving his narrative on to other matters.
Two facets of Bill’s consciousness that continually come to the fore are what he calls his “empty” feeling, and his desire to soothe his mind and stop it from (over-)thinking, both of which point to issues of articulation and recognition within himself. Often it is this emptiness that drives Bill out to the streets, in search of something (“I began to feel empty so I went down town” – p149, “I was feeling pretty empty inside” p156), but he never arrives at any more detailed definition of this state that appears to haunt his existence.
Whereas thinking is something that he actively tries to avoid:
My belief, linked to the intentionality of Bill’s narrative, is that he is constructing this as a chronicle of the emotions that swirled inside him, and not a reflection upon them (the concrete nature of ‘That Summer’, as it occurred, as opposed to ‘Looking back on That Summer’). Although Bill is narrating from a point in the future, he seems committed to presenting his reactions and emotions as they were during this fateful summer, refusing to retrospectively re-assess, re-formulate, or re-render them. If these sensations were inexplicable to him at the time, they remain so in the text (and, perhaps, to Bill in his future state also).
This quality of the story brings to mind an interesting and memorable exchange about that great American John Updike, which took place on BBC Radio 4 in 2014, involving the presenter Matthew Parris, novelist Justin Cartwright, and comedian & writer David Baddiel:
This, I believe, is what makes That Summer such a singular and powerful work – that Frank Sargeson refuses to superimpose himself onto Bill and ‘better’ (ie: in more conventionally writerly fashion) articulate these emotions for him, in a way that the character either can’t express, or wouldn’t understand. This is really getting at the crux of prose fiction I think; most readers (it seems to me) prefer the overarching ‘Updikean’ voice to tell us what the character really feels or means, whereas others (myself included) are far more intrigued by a genuine representation of the character’s inner struggles and machinations than we are by a writer’s best turn of phrase.
James Wood observed the same flaw in Updike’s method, with specific reference to the novel ‘Terrorist’:
What Baddiel sees as the power of insight being conferred upon a lowly character, Wood considers an enraging intrusion upon that character’s consciousness. I struggle to see the argument from Baddiel’s perspective. Surely we should communicate with the focalizer directly, rather than having a conversation above their head with the erudite narrator? If Bill’s feelings in That Summer trouble him and he struggles to define them, then we must see that struggle take place (as Sargeson allows us to). These are the tribulations, the difficulties of emotion and relation and communication, that each of us lives through.
There are many instances in the text where Bill flags up that he’s suffering some sort of emotional reaction or crisis:
The feelings are vague, transient, barely articulated but present, mentioned and then the narrative rushes onward, leaving no time for rumination or reflection. The language of the story remains his, the thoughts in the story are his alone. Had we a narrator defining and describing these feelings on his behalf, as a “stale peace” or some other such writer’s term, the relationship between the reader and the speaking character would be overthrown – and humanity would be lost from the page.
At the apex of the story’s drama, as Bill finally snaps out of his Mersault-like neutrality in the court, his inner commentary is:
This exclamation surely resonates. We do not need Updike’s “stale peace”, as we are confronted squarely by the consciousness of the character; inarticulate perhaps, but powerful. We hear and we feel his heart and mind through the honesty of his reaction in the moment. Later inarticulation and silence become a solace to Bill when he is the company of Terry. There is such beauty to be found in the simplicity and ‘queer silence’ when he visits Terry in the hospital:
Hello Terry, I said, and he said Hello boy, and for a while we didn’t seem to have anything else to say. I just sat there holding on to his hand, and after giving us a few looks the jokers in the other beds looked away, and I thought it was mighty nice of them.” (p193)
The affection is so clear when he looks and sees ‘old Aussie face’, and there’s such serenity when they are content to just be in close proximity to each other, saying and thinking nothing in particular. That the other ‘jokers’ in the ward have a tacit understanding of their situation, and respect it, is beautiful. This is as ‘out’ as they can ever be in this society. It is silence. It does not require any explication, other than the presence of them both, there in the room.
The relationship can only be expressed implicitly, in this manner. Bill (and Sargeson) are careful not to articulate it too clearly, so the reader must be observant and intuitive, otherwise the matter-of-fact swiftness of Bill’s narrative style will conceal their love too smoothly. A glimpse of their true relationship is given when Bill has gone out during the night in search of money, and Terry is awake when he returns:
It’s such a brief moment, yet worthy of consideration. The sentence structure here suggests that time has passed between Bill getting into bed and Terry making his observation (“and when I was nearly asleep”). Terry is assuming infidelity, and has been stewing on it for a while before eventually choosing to say something. So often, creative writing clichés such as things happening “off the page” or “between the lines”, or the concept of “leaving space for the reader”, etc, are tossed out idly to describe (or defend) writing that is in any way oblique, or often ill-formed or ill-conceived – and in reality, there is nothing of substance for the reader to feasibly be wondering on or contributing to. In That Summer, Frank Sargeson genuinely is allowing different modes and meanings of life to play out within his characters’ distinct utterances, whether the reader chooses to engage with these or not.
It is prose fiction of the highest quality.
To hell with the stale peace!
That Summer is a novella you could write about indefinitely. There is so much more to say about it – about its treatment and concept of love, its relation to silence, how this is represented within the prose, the story’s structure, and so on. I will refrain though, and leave more of this exploration to this new edition’s readers.
Near the end of the piece, Bill is again enjoying the quietness of Terry’s company:
He takes pleasure in not trying to rationalize such matters. He just experiences them. As Katherine Mansfield states in the epigraph, sometimes we just encounter things that “beat words”.
I titled this essay “But I never could” in reference to this short section on the story’s final page:
This is such an important moment in fiction – or at least, in my own readings of fiction. Here we have a character who wants to speak love, but in the story he can’t, and in the real world he isn’t permitted to. But he doesn’t stay mute. He does not implode. He just repeats the name of his partner. He is with Terry. This is all he really needs to know. This is enough. To speak is enough. ●