Rachel Barrowman's much anticipated biography of Maurice Gee is released this Thursday (9 July) and ahead of the release we asked her about her experiences working on the book.
How long has the bio
taken you? When did you begin?
I started working on it midway through 2006. It’s
taken me quite a lot longer than I anticipated – which is all to do with life –
mine – getting in the way along the way. Also, Gee has had a long and very productive writing
career – seventeeen adult novels, thirteen children’s novels, a volume of short
stories (and writing for screen). So it was always going to be a big job.
When did you first
approach Maurice Gee about the bio? Had he had other offers?
It wasn’t quite exactly a
matter of me approaching him. One or two people had been gently persuading him
that there should be a biography, and that it would be better that it was by
someone he was comfortable with and had said yes to, that he should take the initiative; if he kept refusing, someone would go ahead and do one anyway. At the same time, I needed a project and I was suggested to him. He
had read my Mason biography and liked it. I think I was unthreatening as a
potential biographer.
So one day in 2006 he contacted me and asked if I
would be interested in recording some interviews with him. He’d decided he
needed to, that it was time to get some stuff down on record – and that if I
wanted to go on from there and do a biography, he was (albeit still hesitantly,
I suspect) happy with that. He would regard me as his ‘authorised’ biographer
to the extent of turning anyone else away. So we went ahead with the interviews
and I applied for and got the Michael King Fellowship.
What was he like to work
with?
He was very open, generous and honest. He said at the
outset that he didn’t like the term ‘authorised biography’, in the sense that
it implied he was maintaining/wanted to exert control. It was to be my book, he
wouldn’t interfere. As far as he was concerned there was no point in doing a
biography if it wasn’t to be ‘warts and all’, and he said that he would be as
honest and open with me as he could.
So he didn’t place any constraints around it (except regarding
a couple of subjects where other members of his family were involved and where he
told me he would need to know they were happy with them being written about –
so that was about their sensitivity, not his. But in the end there were no
issues there). There were, it’s true, one or two things he was
reticent about in those initial conversations and which I came across in my
research, but he was forthcoming when asked.
Five or six months after I got started he and
Margareta moved from Wellington to Nelson, and since then our communication has
mostly been by email: me asking questions as I went along, him remembering or
elaborating on things, and also keeping me up with what he was doing. He was
still writing – four novels published since 2006.
What were some surprising
details you discovered about his life?
I really didn’t know anything much about Gee’s life,
so there was all sorts of stuff that was new and fascinating. Dedicated readers
of Gee’s work will know that his fiction draws heavily on his childhood and
family history, and the few (short) pieces of memoir he’s published have
covered that territory, but there’s a lot else that he has not previously
spoken or written (directly) about publicly.
You’ll have to wait for the book to find out more
though!
One thing I didn’t know was that he’d written quite a
bit for television: Mortimer’s Patch,
notably (early 80s small-town cop show, very successful), and a feature film
(starring Patrick McGoohan of The Prisoner
fame).
The bio is also very much
about his fiction – did you reread all the books? Did you get the sense of themes he would return to/characters
he would reinvent in the novels?
When I first started working on the biography, the
first thing I did – alongside the interviews – was to read them all in order of
publication. I hadn’t read all the novels: not the
pre-Plumb ones, with the exception of
In My Father’s Den which I only read
after the film came out, and I’d read few of the short stories. Nor had I read many
of the children’s novels – only The Fat
Man and Hostel Girl, and none of
the fantasy ones. Now I’ve read them all at least twice and many of them three
times.
Repetition, echoing – of themes, incidents, places,
images and metaphor – is a significant feature of Gee’s work. A fugue-like
quality. (This is also a quality of the novels themselves: Plumb, and the Plumb
trilogy, especially.) Reading the novels (and the short stories) through in
order, what comes through very strongly is not just the sense of Gee’s distinctive
‘territory', but the novels’ own life story, if you like, how they relate to,
speak to one another, either distantly, and through the commonality of language
and metaphor, etc, but sometimes more directly, as in The Fire-raiser providing the basis for Prowlers, and Hostel Girl
for Ellie and the Shadow Man. Often
those connections are smaller and less conscious, and it was fascinating to
recognise them. I enjoyed reading and re-reading the novels (and
stories) very much and I’ve written more about them than I think I anticipated
I would when I started.
Did you have any favourites?
When pressed for a favourite I might say Prowlers, which is Gee’s favourite too. It was the first novel he wrote after the Plumb
trilogy and the enjoyment he had with it is palpable. And I have a special
fondness for A Special Flower, which
is probably his least known novel (it’s the second), and the least Gee-ish
(though in some ways it’s very Gee). A quite strange, creepy novel. It’s also
the one novel he has not wanted to see reissued.
Of the children’s novels: The Fire-raiser, The Fat Man
and Hostel Girl. I’m less a fan of
the fantasy novels but that largely reflects my own reading preferences.
How was the process of
researching and writing different or similar from the Mason bio?
Quite different in a number of respects. Firstly,
Mason died in 1971, so I couldn’t go straight to the source, so to speak, as I
could with Gee; nor to contemporaries.
I started the Mason bio with a
previous, unpublished biography and the research for that biography available
to me as a starting point – though the book quickly became my own and I
supplemented that material with my own research. But you could say I had a
‘head start’. With Gee it was all mine from the outset.
Thirdly, Mason’s literary oeuvre was quite small. Gee
has had a 50-plus-year writing career, which has produced 33 books. So it was
bigger deal, in a number of ways. Certainly it felt like a bigger challenge
(and for all those reasons).
But in terms of my own method, and my approach in
terms of style and form, these were pretty much the same. With the form and style
of the biography – a chronological life narrative, weaving the story of the
literature in with that of the life, wanting to let Gee’s character and the
themes emerge from the narrative and quotation and not be too heavy-handed or
directorial – I was aiming for the same thing.
How does it feel to
complete the book?
A little unreal; a little scary.
What do you think
literary biographies add to a body of fiction or non-fiction work?
I find it hard to answer this. The relationship
between the literature and the life is really the point of ‘literary biography’.
Of course. But of course, the extent to which and the ways in which they relate
will vary hugely from subject to subject. With Maurice, those connections are
pervasive and subtle and, I believe, important.
This is not to say that one needs to know about the
life to appreciate the novels; not at all. But the two do inform each other, in
subtle and not so subtle ways.
Are you nervous about
Maurice's reaction to the book?
No, because he has already read it. I sent it to him
when (and only when) I had a complete draft done, which was in August last
year. Naturally I was nervous. But his response has been very generous.
How he will feel once it’s out there in the world is
another question, of course. (I think we’ll both be feeling a little
terrified.)
Maurice Gee: Life and Work is released on Thursday 9 July. A launch for the book will be held at Unity Books in Wellington. All welcome.
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