Fairburn: What kind of biography?

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 20

Fairburn: What kind of biography?

Walking On My Feet: A.R.D. Fairburn 1904-1957, By James and Helen McNeish, Collins, 1983, 236 pp., $49.95.

(Reviewed by

Peter Simpson)

Fairbum was a notable example of what has become a characteristic New Zealand type: the male poet with a commanding personality, as famous for his deeds and his persona as for his poems: Fairburn, Glover, Baxter, Sam Hunt. Such writers are natural if perilous subjects for biography. Their genuine ability as artists justifies the attention of biographers; their colourful lives and personalities provide a wealth of material. The danger is in confusing the one with the other.

The greatest problem in literary biography is how the life and the work are related to each other. It is only too tempting to see the work as evidence for the life, in other words to read the poetry not as poetry, but as something else — versified psychology or selfrevelation. This sort of critical biography or biographical criticism is widely practised, sometimes expertly as in W. H. Oliver’s recent “James K. Baxter: A Portrait,” though it flouts the principle embodied in T. S. Eliot’s

still apposite statement of more than half a century ago that criticism should treat poetry as poetry and not as another thing. The flagrant ■ cannibalising of Fairburn’s poetry by both the authors and designer of this pictorial biography will immediately arouse the justified suspicion of anyone primarily interested in Fairbum’s poetry. It shows little sensitivity to the problems of specifically “literary’’ biography. The book has a second sub-title: “A Kind of Biography.”, What kind? The book is made up of roughly equal portions of narrative by the authors, excerpts from recorded interviews with family, friends, and associates of Fairburn (well over 50 people are mentioned in the acknowledgments), and, third, illustrations, including many photographs, reproductions and facsimiles. Some of this material is of considerable interest, especially the interviews and the illustrations.

The linking narrative, however, is badly written and (as biography) often misleading less because of factual inaccuracy than because of fanciful or dubious interpretation placed upon the

facts. The text is studded with portentous banalities, especially in the early pages, which do anything but inspire the trust and confidence of the reader (surely an essential ingredient of biography). For example, “There is a direct line of descent from Bacon the Elizabethan poet to Fairburn the Elizabethan poet”;. “Politically Mason was on the Left and on the Left in New Zealand was a dangerous place to be”; “The answer” (to Fairburn’s early restlessness) “had to do both with the parental household and with New Zealand. Some would say they were one and the same thing.” Fairburn deserves better than such sloppy generalising and glib phrasemaking. The design of the book is opulent but over-fussy, though there are some memorable pages on which blown-up snapshots have been used to great effect. But for the fifty dollars this book costs you could buy all of Fairburn’s “Collected ’ Poems,” “Selected Letters” and “The Woman Problem and other Prose” and still have some change left over — a much greater value for money in my opinion. An adequate biography of Fairburn remains to be written.