The pale north, p.14
The Pale North, page 14
More importantly, the line he took for his title—‘And I know she’s living there’—also appears towards the end of The City of Lost Things, as Ash, Cortez-like, is cast as a wanderer of an unknown, mythical wild: ‘As I walk I know I’m walking towards her. And I know she’s living there. In the ruin where I left her behind …’ It is not simply the appearance of Young’s line in the novella, but the carefully stage-managed conditions surrounding it which most suggest the handiwork of Gabriel North. For just as it is in the song, the line is a hinge. Suddenly Ash narrates to us from the present tense, and afterwards things are not the same. He has passed beyond a veil from which he never returns. Over the final, brief pages, as everything dissolves, Ash has never seemed so aptly named.
If everything we know about Gabriel North suggests he was the author of everything in that box in Frankfurt, does everything we find in the novella need to be corroborated outside the walls of the fiction? We want literature’s chain of meaning to eradicate chance altogether: we want the pattern of its art to redeem the chaos of the world. What we want to find is that literature works against the law of unconnected things. ‘Only connect … live in fragments no longer.’
I first read The City of Lost Things in October 2012. A year and eight months earlier, in February 2011, a severe earthquake had devastated the city of Christchurch in New Zealand’s South Island. An earlier earthquake in September 2010 had already caused widespread damage but no fatalities. The aftershock five months later struck catastrophically closer to the earth’s surface and the city itself. Countless buildings were torn apart, in turn causing the deaths of one hundred and eighty-five people of seventeen different nationalities. Significant aftershocks continued for months.
Because no catastrophic earthquake hit Wellington in 1998 as the novella describes, I read The City of Lost Things as an allegory for Christchurch. But this doesn’t quite fit either: while the manuscript was dated 2010, the more destructive earthquake struck early the following year.
The idea for the story was probably far older than the Christchurch earthquakes. The first line appears in the diary kept during the winter of 2002, when Gabriel North drove through the South Island, reclaiming a lost inheritance from the landscape he’d been surrounded by as a small boy. In that journal it is a stray thunderbolt, a stroke of twisted inspiration landing in the wide open field of an otherwise empty page: ‘I came back to Wellington in 1998, the year of the earthquake.’ He couldn’t have known that those words, that journal, would later go with him to an ethnographical museum in Europe where he would find the rest of the story they’d been waiting to tell. He could no more have predicted that than he could the earthquakes waiting to hit Christchurch at the same time.
If we want the pattern of art to redeem the chaos of the world, we are asking for art to step in, to take disorder under rein. The desire for writing that makes sense of the world implies the law of cause and effect. But if the order of cause and effect feels back to front, then we feel the chaos of the world speaking back, as if we have released demons into the world.
Who knows why, as he drove through the South Island on a journey of ancestral, spiritual reconnection, he imagined the fury of the end of the world visited upon Wellington. Was it a metaphor of desire, a trace element of his deeper longing to leave the city for good? Or was it an unmotivated daydream, idle and rudderless, but powerfully there having come to mind? Because the city straddles a major fault line, the vaunted earthquake to come has shaped the collective psychology of Wellingtonians for decades. ‘Not if but when’ could be the city’s unofficial slogan.
He might have written the novella after the first earthquake in Christchurch in 2010. Perhaps he heard the news and was reminded of that line he’d written in a diary, in the South Island, in another life. I imagine him in Frankfurt, in a European museum of lost things, seizing upon that scrap of his past and pushing it towards an allegory of some kind—perhaps as an enduring symbol of abandonment and self-imposed exile.
Perhaps it happened like that, perhaps it didn’t.
Either way, after the earthquake of 2011, we can only guess at North’s reaction. His response seems emphatic: having written the novella and observed from afar the slow chain of events eerily playing out along the lines of the fiction he’d written, he disappeared again. He left his diaries and his workbooks, his one novella—perhaps unfinished, perhaps abandoned—in the wardrobe of an upstairs apartment in the museum in Frankfurt. Vanishing without a trace, I can’t help but read his final disappearance as a cruel and unique strain of survivor syndrome. Would he have still written his ghost story, I wonder, if he’d known there was an earthquake waiting to happen?
So The City of Lost Things was written in a quiet room in Germany and then, months later, a massive earthquake struck in New Zealand. The two things were random and unconnected. And yet a chain was made between them by chance. A pattern emerged and meaning was inferred. It was as if someone had seen the earthquakes coming.
The more one looks for coincidences between art and life the more they will appear. Just as Gabriel North wrote, by accident, a novella that now seems disturbingly oracular, the earthquakes of invention were foreseen in The City of Lost Things as well: Colin’s ‘vision of the city abandoned, a portrait of Wellington emptied of all humanity’ later seemed to have predicted the earthquakes for Ash:
It was as if he had followed a prophetic dream, or been among the chosen animals to have felt a holy shiver in the hours before the earthquakes. With a bitter and sickening clarity I saw how his Jericho had been a symphony that had sounded an omen, for the brutal erasure of a city and its people had been foretold in the way it had been so surely composed.
I wonder how bitter and sickening the clarity for Gabriel North, when he saw how his City of Lost Things was another symphony that sounded an omen. Or if he saw it that way at all. Foresight, after all, was one of the qualities he most admired in Christopher Isherwood, who’d written the Berlin novels ‘before the war, and yet made so much of the darkness … [that] would only reveal itself in the years afterwards to be the angel of death’. North’s clairvoyance on the other hand is quieter and more chilling: ‘To read [the Berlin] novels now [is] to behold the portrait of a European city, bristling before history like a dog shivering before an earthquake.’
Other times, in the coincidences between art and life, we find ourselves or our peculiar situations knowingly if uncannily acknowledged. I recognised myself in Ash’s obsessions. We were both writers turned detectives: both of us were on the trail of artists through the works they’d left behind. Ash was, apparently, the better detective—he not only found and met Colin but collaborated with him too. Whereas for me Gabriel North remains on the loose, a spirit at large in the world. And although I can bring his work into the light, his work remains his alone.
More importantly, his reasons for writing? His alone.
We need only attend to ways of reading. Though claims for reading are also claims of ownership. (Ironically enough, for the work of a writer so driven by the desire to disappear.) Mostly those claims will be played out in the ether of future criticism. But there is also the practical, more earthy matter of the manuscripts and diaries themselves to consider.
Where do they rightfully belong? The manuscript is another of the museum’s anonymous objects, speaking to the vast histories of loss which surrounded it and from which it drew air into its lungs. The novella wouldn’t have been the same story if he hadn’t written it there. But where do his journals belong? To the lost cities and landscapes that bore them? Or to Frankfurt, where they were found? Or perhaps to an ancestral library in Wellington, at his old university on the Kelburn hill. It wasn’t for me to decide where his work belonged. In the end I left it with Eva. The custodian.
When I think about where his work should be held—in this collection or that—I am complicit in deciding how his work ought to be read. Yet whether we read him as an accidental allegorist of Christchurch or a prodigal son of Wellington, as a diarist of umpteen lost cities or an essayist of new ethnographies, each of these feels in some way incomplete. Each of these will always demand something else. A writer of brokenness then.
If I could meet Gabriel North I wouldn’t ask him where Charlotte went, only if he knew. I would ask him: if Ash was a ghost, then where had he died? Was it his body that lay in the building where Grace had told him about the girl’s father, and where Ash himself had imagined ‘a medieval king, a knight of Christ lying on his back on a stone table in slants of dust’? Or did he think that Ash was the ghost of Colin? Or that Colin and Charlotte had really been lovers all along? And I would ask him about Grace. Did he think she was the woman in the first photograph Ash had ever bought, and who’d lain there in that photograph with her face turned away from him her whole life, until they’d met in the ruin, in the time after death, in dark arches? Or could she have been the ghost whom Charlotte had seen in the church that day? And who was that little girl anyway.
Perhaps this writer of brokenness, wary of narrative and mindful of the refusal of life to cede to order, had been battered by life’s ‘patternless fury of winds’. But if he no longer believed in the shelter of stories, then perhaps his broken fables were portraits that bore a better resemblance to the world.
If we knew exactly why he wrote it, would that change the way we read his novella? What if I could tell you, for instance, about another diary, one also found in the tattered carton in the wardrobe in Frankfurt, which threw a door open onto a room of more private sunlight. And if this diary contained the photograph of a man who was, perhaps, the author of the diaries himself. Or, if it had been the diarist who had taken the photograph, then perhaps a picture of his best friend. And what if this diary also contained photographs of a woman with olive skin and a bird’s nest of dark blonde hair. The brightest eyes you’ve ever seen. And perhaps too the photographs of a small girl who—you could have sworn—must have been that woman’s daughter.
Simon Petherick
Frankfurt am Main, 4 September 2014
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Creative New Zealand for the provision of a grant towards the writing of this novel; also Buddle Findlay for sponsoring the Frank Sargeson Fellowship, which I was privileged to hold for five months in 2013 and without which this book would not have been completed. Around the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2012 I was honoured to spend four weeks as a guest at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt; my thanks to Sarah Ropata, project manager of the books and literature sector of the Frankfurt Guest of Honour programme, for organising my time in Germany; and Dr Clémentine Deliss, Director of the Weltkulturen, for facilitating my stay and for many fruitful discussions. At the time I couldn’t foresee just how important the Weltkulturen would become to the half-written novel I’d stowed with me. Thank you to all at the museum for the support and friendship extended to me during my time in residence; in particular I owe a debt of special gratitude to Dr Eva Rabbe, Assistant Director and Custodian of the Oceania Collection.
In Wellington, I have very much appreciated the support of Victoria University of Wellington’s English Programme, in particular Mark Williams and Harry Ricketts. At Penguin I’m especially grateful for the patience, belief, and friendship of Jeremy Sherlock; the deep care and attention of Leanne McGregor; and I’m honoured to have had the assistance and support of Jane Parkin as the novel neared completion.
Simon Petherick’s recounting of Percy Fawcett’s last trek owes a great deal to David Grann’s article in The New Yorker, ‘The Lost City of Z: A Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon.’ On page 191 Petherick quotes George Orwell’s description of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, and on page 211 from E. M. Forster’s Howards End.
To the many friends who supported me one way or another through the protracted writing of this short novel, my heartfelt thanks; most especially to Ross Woods and David Coventry for unflagging encouragement; to my trusted first reader, Kirsten Reid, who helped this novel through from its earliest incarnation to its last; and to Catherine Abou-Nemeh, for so faithfully reading and feeling all these words.
WULF
Hamish Clayton
Early nineteenth-century New Zealand—the great chief Te Rauparaha has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from where Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies. Off the coast of Kapiti, English trader John Stewart seeks to trade with Te Rauparaha, setting off a train of events that forever change the course of New Zealand history.
Wulf, Hamish Clayton’s inventive, brilliant first novel, explores a subject little covered in New Zealand fiction, and marks the emergence of a startlingly assured, exciting new voice.
THE BEGINNING
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First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2015
Text copyright © Hamish Clayton, 2015
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Lyrics on pages 209–10 from:
‘Cortez The Killer’
Words and Music by Neil Young
Copyright © 1975 by Silver Fiddle Music
Copyright Renewed
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Cover design by Keely O’Shannessy © Penguin Random House New Zealand
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The assistance of Creative New Zealand towards the production of this book is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-742-53919-5
Hamish Clayton, The Pale North
