Hastings: A Boy’s Own Adventure
by Dick Frizzell

Dick Frizzell is a major public figure, one of our best known painters. Over his long career he has produced works in many genres including so-called pop art, landscape, abstract, portraiture and natural realism. His most famous work, perhaps, is Mickey to Tiki, in which an image of Mickey Mouse slowly morphs into the face of a tiki. Back in 1995, this landed him in hot soup for cultural appropriation but seems now to be fondly regarded as an important part of Kiwiana.

Frizzell is also the author of four published books: the earliest is Dick Frizzell: The Painter (Random House, 2009) and the most recent a work on the sun and the near universe, The Sun Is A Star (Massey University Press, 2021). The latter professes to be for all ages but is to all intents and purposes a children’s book. Massey also published Frizzell’s 2020 book Me, According to the History of Art and now, this year, his memoir.

Or is it a memoir? In his introduction, Frizzell reminds us that he has remarked before, ‘jokingly’, that ‘it takes a lot of fiction to write non-fiction’. He adds, with no irony and as if it is a new discovery, ‘I lay out the frame of the story, which is without doubt inspired by actual events, and then my febrile imagination just flows into the gaps and creates the whole.’ It seems the author does not want his readers to waste time wondering what is true, and what is not, or even what is near the truth or what is completely removed from it. It is perhaps a painter’s prerogative, to present a narrative that approximates the truth but includes an inconsistent image.

Hastings is concerned with Frizzell’s boyhood, from his earliest memories until he leaves Hawke’s Bay for Christchurch, to study at Ilam. Frizzell calls the pieces in the new book ‘stories’, as opposed to say, ‘essays’ or ‘pieces’, which may have implied veracity. He is not insistent that they represent real characters or events. They read as if they are true, however, without the sprinkling of magic of true fiction.

A lot of ink has been spent in the past few decades debating the difference between autobiography and memoir. The writer of an autobiography is expected to attempt an objective truth; a memoirist can take liberties. Most readers will believe Frizzell’s stories because of their plain, chatty style. In order to preserve a sense of the author’s voice, editing is a little haphazard. Recalling a brief spell in hospital to have his appendix removed, he writes: ‘I remember lying on a rolling bed thing in a corridor somewhere and a nurse giving me something to calm me down.’ Here we have ‘thing’ repeated in the sentence and no effort made to call the ‘rolling bed thing’ a gurney or trolley. Elsewhere, the word ‘Ozarkian’ is used twice as an adjective and in both contexts is nonsensical.

Now in his eighties, Frizzell recalls with affection various boyhood adventures and scrapes. He includes a particularly loving portrait of his no-nonsense hardworking mum, for whom Dick was her first born. She went on to have five more children; the last was her only other son. Dick’s father was a heavy drinker and keen on giving his errant oldest son a walloping with the dog collar, should he believe it necessary. Refreshingly, Dick does not hold this against his father. This was typical child-rearing practice for parents in the 1940s and 1950s, as were the many jobs children did around the house and garden, without any expectation of reward. There are two occasions in Dick’s youth which could have resulted in hours on the therapist’s couch but both are taken in stride as being unfortunate events and neither given any examination by the parents. This is almost heresy in the twenty-first century.

Hastings contains many asides on Frizzell’s cultural influences, the beloved comics and Saturday matinees, the still-prevalent Scottish dancing, marching bands and caber-tossing of the era, and his mother’s near mania for crafting, which in some way she passed on to her talented son. The location itself, the freezing works and canneries, the schools, Te Mata Peak, the local beaches and parks, are all lovingly evoked.

The book is a hardback, a relatively expensive production, handsome in red and black. Perhaps Massey is aiming for a readership that appreciates the book as an artefact, rather than as a work of literature. The intended readership is in fact a little murky. Were Frizzell not so famous, this would be a volume intended for his children and grandchildren, a record of a past way of life, printed out for his descendants. Instead, we have the beautifully published record with the author’s voice faithfully reproduced and a sprinkling of carefully selected images on the chapter title pages. It is likely that the painter’s many friends and admirers will want a copy on their bookshelves.