Curious collection a mixed blessing
David Herkt loses track of time reading CK Stead’s latest collection.
Approaching a new anthology of CK Stead’s short stories is like squaring up before a New Zealand landmark. Since the mid-1960s, Stead has maintained an academic career as well as publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, and criticism. He has received a long list of awards, and become the subject (or instigator) of several well-known controversies.
The Name on the Door is Not Mine is a curious compilation of short stories written over the past 50 years. None are dated, so they are presented as belonging to some eternal moment of Stead-dom. It is impossible, without additional research, to sense development from the context. Many have been revised.
This is a pity not only for a reader’s overview of Stead’s career, but for a glimpse it provides of a nation’s cultural growth.
A Fitting Tribute is a much anthologised story concerning the eccentric Julian Harp, his unpowered flight in the Auckland Domain, and the woman he left behind. It is a glimpse of a gone, more innocent Auckland and it remains as readable as it was when first published in 1965. Its tone of unironic Kiwi pragmatism mingles contradictorily with a kind of Antipodean ‘‘magic realism’’.
Despite Stead’s reputation, it is also the first pointer to something that a reader quickly discovers. Ultimately, Stead is not a particularly adventurous short-story writer. There might be references to cutting-edge philosopher Jacques Derrida and writer Georges Perec on the acknowledgement’s page, but a reader would be better advised to place more value on the book’s uncredited quotation from Don McLean’s sentimental 1971 chart hit, Bye Bye Miss American Pie.
The basis of many of the stories in The Name on the Door is Not Mine is good old-fashioned short-story writing.
Class, Race, Gender: A Post Colonial Yarn is an example. It is more Somerset Maugham than PostModern. The typical Maugham device of a story-in-a-story encloses a rollickingly frank account of a man’s affair and a woman’s revenge which is half as old as time. The added extras of Po-Mo framing take us nowhere in particular, except as a kind of intellectual scene setting.
The collected stories also have another common thread; the majority are set outside New Zealand. A Small Apartment in the Rue Parrot is one of the finest. An Oxford student, Helen, and a New Zealand academic, Max, make a trip to Fontainebleau where Katherine Mansfield died and Gurdjieff, the religious philosopher, flourished. Human boundaries are charted, and frailty and resolution become terrible things.
The collection is a mixed blessing. The ‘‘Academic Abroad’’ common thread becomes slightly wearying. Stead’s sexual writing is frequently frank and interesting. There can be the sense of authorial exercise about some stories as one feels the daily wordcount ticked off. At other times, Stead’s evocative power is a triumph. The suspicion remains, however, that an entirely different selection could be made from Stead’s works, with perhaps better consequences.