Mr John Clarke

In 2010 John was asked by ‘The Listener’ to write about the satirical tradition in New Zealand. His article appears below:

Thinking about humour, I am reminded of an old army story. In 1945 the New Zealand Division fought a costly street-by-street battle against the retreating German army to take the city of Trieste, in northern Italy. Once the city was secured, the Americans decided a victory parade was in order, to be headed by the elite US Marines. It was pointed out that the Americans had arrived after the battle had finished and that the fighting had been done by the New Zealanders. The Italian campaign was nevertheless being run by US Army command and the parade went ahead as planned. In front came the US Marines, with a large banner bearing their emblem and the words ‘US Marines. Second to None.’ Behind them marched the New Zealanders carrying a large sheet upon which was written the word ‘None.’ This squares my shoulders nicely. I’ll have what they’re having.

The New Zealand sense of humour is said to be laconic, understated and self-deprecating. Even if true this is not very helpful, as the same claim is not unreasonably made for the humour of the Scots, the Irish, the English, the Australians, the Russians, the Canadians and the Ancient Greeks among others. North American humour rests on a writing tradition also rich in irony, laconic delivery and litotes. Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, Thurber, Dorothy Parker and Ruth Draper were all people whisperers. Dave Barry and many other writers enrich this tradition today.

In ancient Greece, irony was considered ‘the glory of the slaves’, suggesting that you can’t have irony from above. How the world can consist only of underdogs is an interesting question. It may be that an ironical perspective emerges from the underclass of each society or in each of us, and that these are not national characteristics at all.

When my generation was growing up there was no television and no New Zealand radio comedy. This was not because New Zealanders weren’t funny. A lot of our parents had just returned from the war and if they had a gift for humour it wasn’t much use professionally; it was just part of their personality. They didn’t tell jokes; they just talked very well, often about local things. A man once described a friend from the hill country as having ears a bit further back than the rest of us. ‘It’s the wind’ he said, ‘They get these very big westerlies. He had to go and get his wife from up near Opotiki the other day. She’d gone to hang the washing out. She still had the peg basket.’

The Second World War was the biggest conflict in human history. Seventy million people were killed. An important aspect of dealing with the carnage, the tragedy and waste, was humour. It helped articulate what the Allies were fighting against and it fortified resolution and hope. There was humour in concerts for the troops, in books and magazines and there was radio. Humour that is identifiable as coming from New Zealand emerged at this time.

The most famous cartoonist in Britain was David Low. He reinvented the drawing style and purpose of the newspaper cartoon, removing cross hatching and class-conscious trivia and introducing bold lines and a moral stance on political issues. He spotted Hitler and the Nazis well before they came to power and portrayed them as liars, thugs and murderers. He opposed appeasement and was deadly and relentless in subjecting Hitler and Mussolini to continuous open mockery. His depiction of the Nazi Soviet Pact became one of the most celebrated cartoons of the century. After the war it was discovered that Hitler had prepared a list of the people he would kill when he conquered Britain. David Low, a Presbyterian socialist from Dunedin, was number five.

The most successful wartime radio show was ‘It’s That Man Again’, broadcast by the BBC from 1939 to 1949 and featuring the comedian Tommy Handley. The show, known as ITMA, was the comedy equivalent of Vera Lynn and it sustained the civilian population through its dark night. It also changed the way radio comedy worked, establishing new forms to which the television sitcom owes a significant debt today. ITMA was written by Ted Kavanagh, from Auckland.

Throughout the campaign through Greece, Crete, the Middle East and up into Italy the New Zealand Division experienced a steady procession of successes and setbacks, not always of their own making. One danger would be averted, one cock-up survived, one victory won, when a fresh disaster would arrive and all hope would seem lost. In response to this pattern the Division adopted intelligence officer Paddy Costello’s sardonic and perfectly balanced ‘Hooray fuck.’

A major point of contact between my generation and these men and women was ‘The Goon Show.’ It ran on radio through the 1950s but was essentially a Second World War show in which the madness witnessed by soldiers like Milligan and Secombe and the New Zealand Division was defused by logic disposal experts using surreal language and operating in a landscape of idiots, explosions and death. Only the British class structure held firm, just in case you didn’t get the point that the system was absurd. I didn’t know any of the history. I laughed at the jokes and the funny voices. Even when my father despaired of his children and had developed a rhetorical shaking of his head in disbelief while moaning ‘What have we reared?’ we still laughed at the same bits in The Goon Show. We looked at each other and we smiled and laughed. When nothing else worked, the Goon Show convinced us we were related.

Television and the internet have not changed humour a great deal and we shouldn’t expect them to. In writing about humour, Freud quotes a joke from Sophocles, which dates from as recently as about 400BC. A king is touring his kingdom and as he passes through a town he sees in the crowd a young man who looks very like him. He arranges for the man to be brought to him privately and he asks him ‘Was your mother ever employed at the Palace? Did she ever work at the Royal household at all?’ ‘No Your Majesty’ replies the young man. ‘No she never did’. Then he adds ‘But Dad did.’

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‘Stepping Stones’ (2008) is a book in which Seamus Heaney discusses his work, with Dennis O'Driscoll. John’s review of the book appears below:

‘Stepping Stones’ Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Dennis O'Driscoll, Faber. A Review

When Seamus Heaney came to Melbourne in 1994, he had not yet won the Nobel Prize and could still play an away game. He participated in three memorable events and was responsible for deep enjoyment among those present. As he talked and read from his poetry, its themes opened up and the tone of his voice provided a sense of the weave and heft of his writing.

‘When you write’, Heaney says in ‘Stepping Stones,’ the main thing is to feel you are rising to your own occasion'. Marshalling the strength, memory, belief, shyness, humour and philosophy required to do this, is what ‘Stepping Stones’ is about. A roughly chronological record of Heaney’s life and work, the book takes the form of a series of interviews conducted with fellow poet and friend Dennis O'Driscoll, whose excellent map of the territory gives the book its structure. Most of the questions, responses and exchanges were written rather than spoken and there has been some criticism of this from the Lilliputian cavalry on the basis that Heaney could have been put under more pressure by direct confrontation. Pay no attention. Heaney has long needed to find safe ground for open, relaxed and generous discourse. And incidentally, even when putting the shutters up, Seamus will go very nicely. At a full house session in Melbourne he was asked how he would define religious poetry. He leaned into the microphone as if he were at the House Un-American Activities hearings and explained ‘Religious poetry is that poetry in which the exclamatory particle 'O’ figures considerably'. No trouble.

Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children in a nationalist Catholic Ulster farming family. At the age of eleven he won a scholarship, which took him away to boarding school and by twenty-two he had a first-class honours degree. The farm that had given him his bearings was behind him and the pull of home was moving from his life to his poetry. He writes of this realisation in an early poem,

‘But I’ve no spade to follow men like that.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it’.
‘Digging’ (1966)

Heaney’s beautifully remembered South Derry childhood nevertheless provides the historical nucleus of his life and work. In ‘Digging’ we hear the tribal vernacular he has kept in an inside pocket at all times. The circumference of his life has since widened to embrace other languages, work at Berkeley and Harvard, acclaim at home and abroad. But he still holds a poetry book the way a farmer holds an almanac of cattle prices and crop yields. He is practical, friendly and weather-wise and when amused, as he often is, his eyes close with pleasure. The Heaney nucleus also features an instinct for the resolving chord in things; for finding the balance in words and ideas. In another early poem he sees the military disparity of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, in which the French arrived too late to help and were given an ice-cream by the English and sent home, while the Irish rebels were slaughtered. Still in his twenties, Heaney’s impulse was not to rail against injustice; that would be rhetorical. It was to find in the real story, an image which was as sure as the rhythm of the seasons. The Irish soldiers, ill-equipped and hungry, were given a handful of barley to put in the pockets of their greatcoats

‘No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country’…
…‘Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.'
'Requiem for the Croppies’, (1969)

Heaney’s first Faber book of poems, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966) was an immediate success. He was twenty-seven and working as a teacher. His next books were also successful and he was increasingly sought as a speaker, lecturer and professor. In 1972 Clive James recognised the power in Heaney’s verse and in 1975 Robert Lowell described him as ‘the best Irish poet since W B Yeats’. He was hailed, feted and wreathed in prizes. This led to the usual trouble. It was all happening to him too early, some said. It would fade, they predicted. ‘Famous Seamus’ they joked. He couldn’t keep it up, they agreed. The next book would be a dud, they reasoned. But they were not really talking about Heaney. He did not heap these garlands upon himself. And it wasn’t happening fast; it was just happening. And actually, there was plenty in the tank. His reading was wide and deep and, all through this book, Heaney illustrates with examples, images, metaphors and quotations from other writers. He was also learning to trust his personal experience, to write out of his own places and people and to invest intimacy in the language itself. One thing is very obvious about Heaney; he is patient. He has never forced the pace. The writing that interests him is not a race. It’ll happen or it won’t.

It did happen. The books continued to come; poetry, criticism and translations. In 2000 he published his translation of ‘Beowulf’ from Old English. It was a sensation, enriching the language at its source. In doing this work Heaney used words we use now but only those that come directly from Old English. Old English words are short, strong, stalwart, conveying meaning, not flourish. He gave as an example the section from the Churchill speech, which begins ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ and ends ‘We shall never surrender.’ The only word in it which does not come from old English, is ‘surrender.’

Throughout ‘Stepping Stones’ the reader is surfing in language. Heaney can lilt from a serious point to a softening aside or another thought without losing ‘the whole thing’. His English is assured, exhilarating and colossal, but not complex. He returns often to Robert Lowell’s landfall line ‘Why not say what happened?’ It is never unclear what Heaney is saying and his poetry is able to be read by anyone. When his mother died he wrote a sequence of short poems called ‘Clearances’. Read them when your mother dies. When his father died he wrote a sequence called ‘Crossings.’ When his children were born he wrote about it. When his country was in turmoil he wrote about it. When he and Marie were young marrieds living in a country cottage he wrote the Glanmore Sonnets (1979). When he wanted something new, he journeyed to the bogs of Jutland, digging again but in an older place.

At the heart of this book is an investigation into what Heaney thinks matters and how to say it. In ‘Preoccupations’ (1980) he asked ‘How should a poet properly live and write?’ He found some of his answers in Eastern European writers who were ‘keeping on’, who prevailed through horrors; the Czech Miloslav Holub, the beguiling and deadly Joseph Brodsky and the man Heaney describes as ‘the giant at my shoulder,’ Czeslaw Milosz. Read Heaney on his admiration for Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz. Read him also on his fellow feeling for Ted Hughes or the playwright Brian Friel. Read him on his aunt Mary, on Elizabeth Bishop and on Yeats. When Heaney speaks of the ways in which people have helped him in his poetry, he is not always talking about an insight into where he could tighten a stanza. Often it is a kindness, some support, a wink.

Ulster humour is dark, nutritious stuff. When Heaney showed his friend John McGahern the house he had recently purchased, McGahern pondered upon it. ‘Well’ he announced, ‘You’ve bought the coffin.’ When Heaney had a stroke, from which he has now recovered, Brian Friel visited him in hospital. Friel had had a stroke himself a few years previously and comforted his friend with the insight, ‘Different strokes for different folks.’

If you like poetry or think you might, if you are a writer or might be, if you value place, memory and language, you might enjoy this remarkable book.

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Ten other useful distractions:

1. Getting to Know You, Jack Benny, Giselle MacKenzie 2. Fork Handles, Two Ronnies 3. Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell 4. Cement Mixer, Slim Gaillard (Marvin Gaye’s father-in-law) 5. Sand Dance, Wilson and Keppell 6. Peter Cook summing up in the Jeremy Thorpe trial 7. Foster Brooks roasting Don Rickles 8. Moonlight Bay, Morecombe and Wise and The Beatles 9. Schoolteacher, Rowan Atkinson 10. Paul Whitehouse

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Well-known South Island vintner and promising young actor Sam Neill, has a website twopaddocks.com on which he presents selections of music chosen by people with whom he has been on the turps. Here is John’s list of songs (original Two Paddocks post here), in no particular order

1. She’s Not There. The Zombies

1964. The year I sat School Cert. Beatles up and running. British music going well. Colin Blunstone in fine voice.

2. Why Don’t You Try Me. Ry Cooder

Ryland Peter Cooder is a Latin expression meaning ‘made of rhythm.’

3. Arthur McBride. Paul Brady

Great anti-recruiting song sung by Paul Brady, a key figure in the Irish music revival and in its fusion with other music.

4. We Can Work it Out. Teddy Thompson, Martha Wainwright

Nice version of the song. Good singing together. Maximum musical pedigree permissible in one youtube clip.

5. The Ship Song. Camille O'Sullivan

Great version of the song. If you like this, try Camille doing ‘Look Mummy, No Hands’.

6. Hey Joe. Tim O'Brien and Jerry Douglas (dobro)

What a cracker this is. Top flight musicians going for the doctor. Stand well back.

7. Nowhere Man. Natalie Merchant

Best version of the song I’ve heard. Natalie sings like Clive Lloyd used to hit sixes; slowly, majestically and with ridiculous ease.

8. The Way it Will Be. Gillian Welch, David Rawlings

Great writing and beautiful singing, as always. One of the songwriters of the age. ‘The Harrow and the Harvest’ is the album.

9. Don’t Leave Nobody But the Baby. Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss.

Just three voices. What pleasure.

10. Killing the Blues. Alison Krauss, Robert Plant

Alison Krauss sings on this album? Thank you. No further questions Your Honour.

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