Table Talk: Opinions, stories and a play
by C.K. Stead

A kingfisher, blue as blue, ‘lit up as if from the inside’, lands on a clothesline in a leafy suburb in Auckland. Of the three old friends chatting on the deck, only Don notices. He tries, and fails, to remember the phrase in a TS Eliot poem (presumably ‘After the kingfisher’s wing / Has answered light to light’). That night, the bird’s sudden flight presages another retreat into silence.

‘The Kingfisher’ is short, poignant, haunting, one of three previously unpublished stories – plus one play, a revised version of Racine’s 1667 play Andromaque – featured in Table Talk, Karl Stead’s latest collection of reviews, poems, stories, speeches and, surprisingly, reader reports.

This is the seventh such collection, following on from Shelf Life in 2016. Here, we are at the table. I imagine a table covered in books, papers, new stories, old poems – rewarding in their conviction, their humour and their personal and critical insight into New Zealand literature.

As in Shelf Life, part of this book is given over to writings on Katherine Mansfield: her correspondence with Lady Ottoline Morrell, her flirtation with Bertrand Russell, a proposal to relocate Mansfield’s remains to Wellington (a ‘ghoulish and parochial proposal’, wrote Stead at the time); Mansfield the poet, Mansfield in Europe, all written with the confidence of an academic in complete control of his subject.

As in Shelf Life, there are blogs from Stead’s three-year tenure as poet laureate, drawing New Zealand poetry into a wider analysis of western poetics. In reviews and papers, he traverses the battles of twentieth-century New Zealand literature, between the Auckland poets and the new cohort of Wellington poets, between the ‘literary nationalism’ of Allen Curnow’s era and younger writers such as Ian Wedde, Murray Edmond, Alan Brunton, Dave Mitchell and Jan Kemp, ‘full of brash confidence, arrogance sometimes’. It was a shift in influence, Stead argues, from mostly British-inspired ‘Modern’ poets to a younger generation of Modernists, ‘whose debt was to Americans Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.’

Time and again, he returns to the tight cohort of Auckland writers, a mainly mid-century period of friendships, dinners and fallings out, poetry and left-wing politics, opinions sought and opinions rejected. Four Aucklanders all a decade his senior – Keith Sinclair, Bob Chapman, Kendrick Smithyman and Maurice Duggan – Stead describes as talented, committed, ambitious, ‘hard-working and successful’, but viewed up close, ‘they could seem in one way or another damaged’. He quotes Curnow’s description of an underlying ‘New Zealand sadness’, but, he writes, ‘we were all in it together.’

In an excellent review of Kevin Ireland’s A Month at the Back of My Brain, he describes Ireland and himself, both Auckland ex-grammar boys, both under the influence of Frank Sargeson, ‘not to write in the Sargeson style… but to take on board while still young what a commitment to “the literary life” meant, the ideals it promoted, the pleasures it offered, the devotion and the cost.’

The cost for Stead has been a reputation for a bullish contrariness. ‘Kevin thinks I have “improved with the years”,’ he wrote in a Newsroom review in 2022, ‘that I have left behind the “occasional needless irritability and prickliness” in favour of the “geniality” [of Stead’s third autobiography]’. Stead rears up. If Ireland had known Stead as well twenty or thirty years ago, ‘he would have found me just as “genial”…. What might have been diminished or been lost is discrimination, the sharp and unforgiving eye. If it is indeed gone, I’m sorry.’

There are more regrets. In his 2016 obituary for poet Mike Doyle, Stead refers to his 1956 review of Doyle’s first book A Splinter of Glass in Landfall. Doyle was offended by Stead’s reference to ‘the pleasant whining of a mandolin’ (another line from Eliot) as a descriptor of his poems. It is an odd line to cause offence – Stead put the phrase in the context of the ‘attractive musical sadness’ of Doyle’s writing; elsewhere in his review he is coruscating, noting Doyle’s ‘tendency to self-dramatization’ and ‘abstract philosophizing’. As he later wrote to Doyle, ‘I was such an idiot, it still embarrasses me to look back on the things I wrote – childish, egotistical, competitive, desperately unsure of myself.’

There is some putting to right. In a paper for the launch of Terry Sturm’s 2017 biography of Allen Curnow he is quick to refute Sturm’s assertion that Curnow’s relationship with Stead was marked by ‘an element of reserve in personal matters … of never being quite sure what confidences might be turned against him.’ It rankled. It hurt. He and Curnow were and remained close friends and allies, Stead describing Curnow’s achievement as ‘quite unequalled by any other New Zealand poet’. The idea that he ‘cruelly satirised’ Janet Frame in All Visitors Ashore, he says in an ANZL interview with Mark Broatch, is ‘total misrepresentation ­– truly extraordinary!’

There is some falling, often at a life-saving angle, on his sword. In a 2019 review, Stead accepts Sargeson’s charge that his negative review of Maurice Shadbolt’s first book of stories was driven by a ‘fair whack of jealousy’. He quotes an earlier letter to his wife Kay: ‘I ought to have been kinder to him [Shadbolt]. I have been a merciless sibling rival’. But then come the brackets: ‘Even if it’s true he’s not much of a writer’. Was that bracketed comment true? he asks. Clearly, he thought so at the time but ‘if I’d believed he was the writer he thought he was, I would have envied his success – yes, for sure; but I would not have pretended to think his work was “no good”.’

Rivalries, hurts, misunderstandings. No one is keeping score now, but their inclusion tells us more about that commitment to the ‘sharp and unforgiving eye’, a critical, at times dramatic lens sweeping across the literary landscape – friends, other writers, even his own reflection – with incisive clarity (‘I am not interested in arcane dialogue,’ he says. ‘I prefer where possible to be understood’).

In conversation with arts writer Guy Somerset, Stead admits he did worry about giving offence, ‘but I grew up in an age (the age of Eliot and F.R. Leavis) when saying honestly and clearly what you thought of a work of art was almost a moral responsibility.’ This directness can be wounding. Of Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, he writes, ‘What is improbable and lyrical in Shakespeare becomes absurd and ugly. The detailed accounts of psychotherapy in James Courage Diaries edited by Chris Brickell ‘are boring, repetitive, self-enclosed, self-pitying.’ But he can also be generous. Greg O’Brien he describes as a poet ‘of rare quality and true originality’; Ian Wedde, right from the start, is ‘manifestly and exceptionally talented’.

Stead’s own poetry shines through. He includes his poem ‘Curno’, written after Curnow’s death in 2001 and set at the poet’s bach in Karekare: ‘Sky-high improbable clouds / float like fleeces, and from the rocks the ghost of a poet fishes / for metaphor and cod. //A big surf / slams its doors, and opens it, / and slams it again’.

His short stories are taut, intrepid. ‘The Philosopher’s Kiss’, first published here, centres on fellow Oxford philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and the narrator Mark Stevens: ‘he famous, I quite unknown’. The story is haunting in its brevity, like a memory crystal-cut in its precision.

‘Ebony’, published in 2022, also touches on that relationship between a successful figure and a less successful colleague. Here, the narrator, a writer of popular thrillers, meets his old friend Benny Feinstein, ‘one of those very good poets who don’t become famous’. With effortless composure, Stead slices through the realism of the story. ‘“Are you well?” Benny asks. Living in London he had not heard the news that I was dead.’

Equally audacious is ‘Vladimir’, another Zelig-type encounter in which the narrator – ‘Christian Karlson’ – finds himself driven by a hand-holding Vladimir Putin to a glitzy function attended by playwright Tom Stoppard whose trilogy of plays looking at pre-revolutionary Russia is due to open in Moscow (which it did, in 2007).

Stead turns 93 later this year; he is currently a finalist in the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for his poetry collection In the Half Light of a Dying Day. Does Table Talk add to his considerable bibliography? It does. Like newly revealed stepping stones across a river, it charts a new way across Stead’s long career, and some excellent new and recent writing.