C.K. Stead is a literary Everyman- a poet, novelist, critic, and activist. His first memoir South West of Eden covered the first 23 years of his life.
His second called You Have a Lot to Lose spans the years 1956 to 1986 and covers the Springbok Tour, his travels and studies abroad, and his relationships with friends and foes including Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries.
CK Stead Photo: Credit Francesco Guidicini
Stead, 87, who has a serious heart condition, tells Kim Hill that he has finished the third volume of his memoirs.
“I didn’t think I was going to be around, the prognosis was so terrible and then I found I was around and was still able to write and to think and so I carried on and to my surprise I finished that.”
The only treatment for his condition, a heart bypass, is too risky because of his age, he says.
“We’ve been warned, my wife’s been warned, not to be surprised if she wakes one morning and I’m dead in the bed beside her. So, we’re well prepared, if you can be prepared.”
Stead’s public persona has been complex. Sometimes divisive, he has been criticised for expressing illiberal views, particularly from someone with a left-wing background. He was rebuked, for example, after suggesting the Roast Busters saga, and the debate around consent and misogyny of young men, was a moral panic.
“Being committed to the left, and known to be committed to the left, and then baulking at certain parts of the left programme, which seemed extreme,” has caused him problems, he says.
“Then you become a kind of dissenter, so it’s your own party, so to speak, that turns against you, it’s not the rest of the world, it’s the people who are looking to you to be liberal in everything and you have your qualms about the extremes and that turns you into a dissenter.”
Stead’s maintained strong, although sometimes fractious, friendships with his literary peers.
He admits to some jealously over the early success of fellow writer Maurice Shadbolt
“My problem with Maurice Shadbolt was that I was that I could never take his fiction entirely seriously, we were friends in London but there were difficulties and I did admit to Frank (Sargeson) that I was envious of him when he had such early success.”
Julian Harp, the central character in Stead’s short story A Fitting Tribute, is based on Barry Humphries.
“Julian Harp’s behaviour was modelled on the bizarre behaviour of Barry when he and his wife and Kay and I went night-clubbing in Auckland and it was really very extreme.”
This was before Humphries gave up drinking, he says.
“He had very long hair, which was very unfashionable at the time, and strange garish clothes sometimes and he just behaved very, very conspicuously so everybody looked at him. He was a natural performer and so some of that behaviour I put into the behaviour of Julian Harp.
“He continued to be brilliant after he stopped drinking, it was not as though the brilliance depended on the drink at all. He’s gone on being brilliant.”
Stead also maintained a long-standing friendship with the writer Janet Frame.
While they were both in London in the 1960s Stead visited Frame when she was in a psychiatric ward.
“It was not her doing she was she was incarcerated in the way she was, she was mistreated, misdiagnosed and suffered appallingly in psychiatric care as it was called, it was not care at all.
“Her treatment in New Zealand mental hospitals was described to me by her doctor in London as barbaric the number of ECTs she’d had, he was appalled by.”
Photo: AUP
Frame’s book The Triumph of Poetry was less than kind to Stead, although he says they subsequently healed the rift.
“It would be true to say I was hurt, I was hurt and immensely surprised it came out of the blue, something completely unexpected.
“There’s an element in a lot of her writing that is … I’ve described it as child-like envy of the world that she can’t enter for one reason or another. Because although I’ve said consistently that she wasn’t insane, she was socially incompetent. She couldn’t function in society as most people do, especially in her younger years.
“And so, she looked on the world, I think, the world in which people function in inverted commas normally, with envy and resentment and sometimes took revenges on it.”
His memoir describes an affair he had with a student when he was 38 and she 20, the decision to include the affair was difficult, he says.
“The deliberation was fairly difficult, but I thought I wanted it to be there and she was no longer alive so that aspect of it didn’t come into it.”
Stead says the affair was a conscious decision by both parties.
“Well I say we were both adults, and we were both conscious of what we were doing and made our decisions consciously.
“Somewhere in the memoir itself I say it would be as wrong to say that I exploited age and status as it would be to say that she exploited youth and beauty. Neither was the case.”
He says in You Have a Lot to Lose while he was not a faithful husband, he was certainly a loyal and committed one.
“Everybody knows that these things happen in a marriage, it’s not as though there’s anything very rare or unusual about it. People have these disturbances in their relationships and they either break up or they find ways of accommodating.
“This is the sort of grown up world in which people get on with their lives as best they can, isn’t it?”
Although Stead was warned to think very carefully about returning to New Zealand from London by his friend Frank Sargeson, he has no regrets.
“I’ve often felt it was an uncomfortable place to be, but it was on the whole where I wanted to be, and probably anywhere in the world can be an uncomfortable place.”
Poet and critic Iain Sharp said Stead has been under-celebrated at home and admired abroad – not a notion with which the writer himself agrees.
“I think I’ve been celebrated at home and rewarded at home rather a lot actually. I’m very grateful to my country for the way it’s treated me.”
