He won everything and he earned a knighthood and he was a senior literary figure to the point that he was a living monument to himself until his death in the weekend at 86, but there was something about Vincent O’Sullivan that flew under the radar, that was independent and separate and free, too, of the routine blather of New Zealand literary life. Okay so maybe you can say this about most authors who live in distant polar wastes ie Otago and further south. Vincent’s final address was in Port Chalmers. He lived a very private life and yet was an informed and entertaining gossip. He has already been eulogised for his generosity to other writers but his sharp wit whipped fools gladly. The best of him – his fluency, his depth of mind – was in his books, that amazing range of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and reviews, and he also produced important work as an editor and anthologist; his only contemporary equal and rival was CK Stead, likewise a brilliant academic who wrote across genres, but Vincent went further, as a biographer and playwright. Throughout, he never took a fixed or easy position, was too fleet of foot to pin down. He went his own way, not just as invariably the smartest person in the room and inevitably the funniest, but as the spirit moved him. He was a creature of temperament and wickedness.
He was born in Auckland. He attended college at Sacred Heart in Glendowie. He taught for eight years in the English Department at the University of Waikato. Last year, when he judged the Sargeson Prize for short stories, he remarked, “During my own early years on the Waikato campus, when the cafeteria was a done-up milking shed, I wrote my first stories.” He was the author of eight collections of short fiction. Naturally, I sought him out during last year’s election, when I commissioned four writers to compose stories about fictional campaigning politicians; Vincent contributed a satire on a Labour goose. His witless character declares, “A politician is a citizen who believes he has the skills or the right to tell other citizens what to do, whether that is replacing the national flag with a golf shirt logo, to tell another culture their destiny is to behave like yours, or advising the poor in South Auckland to just toughen up, eat more Big Macs, and leave the subtleties of nutrition to the gym-trim waistbands of Epsom.”
He hated the stupid rich. He earned most of his income in academia, and was professor of English at Victoria from 1988-2004. He was literary editor at the Listener magazine for two years, and writer in residence for a year at Downstage Theatre, writing the play Shuriken, set in Featherston’s POW camp during World War II, when 48 Japanese prisoners were shot dead. A photo from the camp was published last year in the excellent illustrated book Our Land in Colour: A History of Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960. I alerted Vincent to the photo of a Māori guard laughing with a Japanese prisoner, and asked him to comment on it. He emailed, “When I was getting background stuff for Shuriken it was still in time to meet several of the guards, as well as some of the Japanese prisoners who were on a kind of ‘old boys’ tour to Featherston. Some great stories from both sides. It seems the Māori guards and the Japanese got on particularly well. One story I liked was one February day, very hot, a few guards and a consignment of prisoners were down at the river, detailed to pack sandbags. One guard said too hot for this caper, the soldiers propped their rifles on the bank, and then all of them swam in the river together for a break. I love it that it could even happen, with clearly a sense of trust on both sides.”
Internationally, he was best known as editor of the letters of Katherine Mansfield, published by Oxford University Press; she was probably his mastermind subject, his consuming interest. He regarded Allen Curnow as our finest poet. I commissioned him to review Curnow’s collected poems, and he came up with this strange insight, this admiration of violence: “There’s not a flicker of sentimentality in Curnow. One poem after another hones its point of unexpected death, inescapable violence….There’s a kind of unsettling glamour in the way Curnow writes about such things, an even more disturbing aesthetic kick to it when, so to speak, the knife goes in. A defining aspect of his poetry is precisely that exuberant ruthlessness. There are not many poets (are there any?) who carry such responses so far. One can easily enough think of those who call it a day before getting to that.”
The contemporary writer he most admired was Kirsty Gunn. I commissioned him to review her 2018 novel Caroline’s Bikini. His piece began, “A few years ago Witi Ihimaera gave the New Zealand Book Council Lecture, which he called ‘Where is New Zealand Literature Heading?’ He ticked us off, in his engagingly vague way, for writing fiction that seemed, by his standards, short on ambition, and too modestly achieved. Where, he asked, is the challenging work that he hoped to find? The kind that takes risks? The answer was not as hard to come by as he thought. It was in the library, actually, shelved under ‘G’.” Vincent, the generous critic; in the same review, he was Vincent, merciless and ruthless: “There’s a wry diversion, of sorts, in turning from Gunn’s third book from Fabers in six years, to check with my favourite Jumbo book of serio-comic academic prose. In The Cambridge History of New Zealand Literature, edited three years ago by Mark Williams, Kirsty Gunn fails to make the text or the index so much as once. The sections that might have touched on her bristle with inadequate reading and parochial verve.” He hated the stupid of any stripe.
When his great book on Ralph Hotere, The Dark is Light Enough, won the nonfiction prize at the 2021 Ockhams, he became the first New Zealand writer to win national book awards for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – or so I thought, and rushed into print to declare this apparent fact, but was quickly pulled up by Pamela Gordon, niece and literary executor of Janet Frame, who pointed out her aunt had won first, for her novels, her memoirs, and for a posthumously published book of poems. I asked Vincent to respond. He emailed, “How do I feel? Suitably Framed. And perhaps to sneak in while living, does have the edge on posthumously.” He wasn’t giving up on the claim to be the only New Zealand writer to win for all three categories while still alive: indeed I only discovered it at the Ockham after-party in 2021, when I was informed by…Vincent O’Sullivan. He was well chuffed with himself.
We exchanged numerous emails these past seven or eight years. He was always funny and erudite, polite, patient, never got in a snit, and was quick to pass on a compliment. I only met him a few times. At a literary event in Fairlie, where he was travelling with old mate Brian Turner; at the Wellington international festival of the arts, where he was interviewed for an hour and gave the most dazzling, hilariously epigrammatic performance I have ever seen at a books event, coming up with one beautifully formed fresh zinger after another; and at a talk he gave at Eastbourne Library, probably at the behest of librarian Helen Mulgan, widow of Man Alone author John Mulgan, the subject of what I think might be Vincent’s best book, Long Journey to the Border, in part an examination of that unsolvable mystery as to why Mulgan killed himself.
We sometimes write about ourselves when we review the work of others, and even when we write their obituaries; we see qualities we wish we possessed, and strive to attain. I asked Vincent to farewell his friend of 40 years, editor Stephen Stratford. He wrote, “In this awful business of a vivid living man becoming a sequence of memories, fragments stand in for so much more. For me, these run from Stephen’s casual erudition, his professional standards, his courtesy, through to his sense of fairness, his contempt for posturing, his warmth, his wit. He attended, to the point of it becoming a vocation, to how language worked, to why writing mattered, and his interests in the other arts were wide.”
A more succinct example of covert autobiography is from the obituary I asked him to write of his friend, novelist Philip Mann. Vincent wrote, “So much crammed into the life of a good man.”
When the time comes it is going to be very hard to find someone to do justice to Steve in he way he has so perceptively revered our literary greats.
I completely agree with you Bruce. Steve is without peer in his insightful observations of people. A lovely and fitting tribute to Vincent O’Sullivan too.