The Dark Dad
by Mary Kisler

It used to be sometimes said of someone that they had had ‘a good war’. This meant that when their mettle was tested in World War II they had acquitted themselves with resourcefulness and valour. I say ‘they’, but it was, of course, always ‘he’. I say ‘valour’, but, well . . .  you know. These were things a certain kind of man measured and valued. Sometimes someone had had ‘a bad war’, because when their mettle was tested they had gone to pieces or made a catastrophically poor decision. These evaluations could shape a man’s reputation long after the war ended. They could make or ruin him.

We now understand enough about war and its traumas to know that even a ‘good war’ could turn out to have been a bad war after all, leading to a bad peace. No peace at all. It could all catch up with you in the end. When you went to war, sooner or later your family might have to go with you. Not for nothing was Marriage Guidance established in 1949 in the wake of World War II. Or, some would argue, not for nothing was the violent protagonist of the 1947 Dorothy B Hughes novel In a Lonely Place – and its 1950 Humphrey Bogart-starring film noir adaptation by director Nicholas Ray – a war veteran. The post-war world could be a truly lonely place for some men.

As Mary Kisler records in her memoir The Dark Dad: War and trauma – a daughter’s tale, a former prisoner of war was regarded by some as having had no war at all. Those thinking this included some POWs themselves, their sense of failure and shame unabated by the likes of Major General Sir Howard Kippenberger encouraging them to ‘have pride in what they had endured and overcome’, and boosted by such incidents as a POW writing to thank the woman who had donated a balaclava, scarf and pair of gloves he received, only for her to write back that she had meant them ‘for a live fighting hero, not for a coward who gave himself up’.

Some New Zealand POWs were not welcome at their local Returned Servicemen’s Association branch because they were regarded as cowards, so joined the Ex-POWs Association the Army set up to counter such attitudes. Kisler’s father, Jack Arnott, was a gunner in the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, 33rd Battery, 6th Brigade, New Zealand Artillery, part of Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg’s Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Arnott trained at Maadi Camp near Cairo in Egypt, before he was dispatched to fight in Greece and then, in late November 1941, wounded by shrapnel and caputured by Germans at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in Libya. The Germans handed Arnott over to the Italians and he spent the rest of the war in a succession of POW camps, of varying degrees of awfulness, run by one or other of them. Kisler remembers being told as a child, by a boy whose father was a fellow soldier, ‘that my father was a coward and for years I quietly worried that it might have been true’.

Not, however, after he told her more of his wartime experiences, and after her extensive research into what he and other POWs endured in the camps where they were held. This was the main source of the darkness that infected Arnott in the years to come.

Despite the terrifying opening chapter of the memoir, in which she recounts in novelistic fashion some of the post-war rage and violence Arnott unleashed on his wife (including a lighted cigarette pushed into the corner of one of her eyes), with accompanying trauma for their children (Mary and brothers John and Michael), Kisler does not depict him as a monster, but rather as a damaged man with plenty to redeem him. The ‘dark dad’ had other shades too. As any man would.

The damage Arnott suffered during World War II was compounded by earlier damage inflicted on him as a child by a psychologically abusive ‘father’ he would later discover (as he shipped out to war, informed by a malicious relative) wasn’t his father at all but his cuckolded uncle, whose brother had in fact fathered Arnott. Arnott was doubly cursed and so therefore were his wife and children. Trauma is nothing if not intergenerational.

Kisler will be familiar to many for her regular conversations about art on Kim Hill’s Saturday morning show on RNZ National. She was for many years a curator at Auckland Art Gallery and is the author of such books as Finding Frances Hodgkins (2019) and Angels & Aristocrats: Early European Art in New Zealand Public Collections (2010). Those who have read Kisler will know how she can look at a painting and, supported by assiduous research, guide you methodically around it, with pellucid prose deciphering it into an accessible world of story and meaning. Here she does the same with her father and the locations in which he found himself in World War II. These skills of an art writer serve a memoirist well. I can’t help but think of UK critic Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands: My Mother and other missing persons (2019).

Kisler never matches the immediacy and intensity of her first chapter, and never tries to. She only returns to Arnott’s post-war life in the memoir’s brief last two chapters, ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Final struggle’, and in a short postscript. When she writes about his ‘demons’ in these sections, she does so at a greater remove, and her focus shifts to a more general account of the family, including her parents’ marriage and her own after a late-teenage pregnancy.

An earlier teenage incident touches on the frustration a reader may feel about this change of approach.

In spite of his rages, my father had never hit us. Then one day when I was a recalcitrant teenager who demanded to be allowed out with my brothers, he knocked me across the kitchen into the fridge door. I was too stunned to be aware of pain, and he was appalled at what he had done. Instead of leaving the house, I sat with him at the kitchen table while he talked about his childhood and the war, trying to explain why he was driven to such lengths.

But that’s all we get of this conversation. Kisler doesn’t take us any closer. We hear more about Arnott’s comic compulsion for making things from the volcanic rock scoria than we do about this insight into his volcanic temper.

Earlier in the memoir, Kisler refers almost in passing to the only person that Arnott seems to have killed during the war being an old woman he struck with his motorbike, and then she moves on without so much as a glance in her rear-view mirror, despite writing that ‘the accident continued to haunt him long after the war was over’. How? What did this look like? What did he say?

Thanks to New Zealand writers such as Noelle McCarthy, Charlotte Grimshaw and Megan Dunn, we have become accustomed to parental-focused memoirs that dig farther than this, where writers put more of themselves on the line. Kisler seems happier on the surface of a scene than probing potential psychological depths below. In another example, she doesn’t reflect on her decision to study Italian at university given her father’s antipathy toward Italians because of his experiences at their hands. He could never understand why, she writes, ‘and must have found it hard to reconcile himself to my growing love for the country and its art history’. Indeed he must. Paging Dr Freud!

Most of the memoir is about life in the POW camps, but not necessarily Arnott’s life. Kisler doesn’t have much to work with in terms of his life there, with scant writings by him or pictures of him, and, as mentioned already, less made than the reader might like of any conversations she had with him about it.

As in her art writing, Kisler conducts extensive research and uses the material she does have well. Even if Arnott feels in these parts of the memoir like a bit player in his own story, popping up for an occasional cameo, Kisler writes affectingly about the conditions in the POW camps he was in and the sort of life he would have led there, based on other POWs’ writings and sometimes pictures, as well as war histories and her own visits to locations (where she describes the scene as she might a landscape painting). Without enough Arnott, however, it feels impersonal and generic.

It is to be expected that Kisler would alight on war artists in the camps, but she sometimes mistakes the memoir for an art book, writing of the ‘highly sophisticated’ bird’s-eye perspective in an Arthur Douglas sketch: ‘This technique has been used since the Renaissance, when it is thought that the Flemish painter Giusto Utens used it in his lunette paintings of the 17 Medici palazzi in Florence and Tuscany.’

Her own perspective is a bit off here. When she keeps her eye on the story she is supposed to be telling, Kisler conveys the brutality and desperation of the POW camps, the absurdities along with the abominations, the instances of esprit de corps and black humour.

There are better places to get a sense of the camps (for example, director Bryan Forbes’s 1965 film King Rat, based on James Clavell’s 1962 novel of the same name) – and of what came after (Peter Wells’s similarly themed 2010 novel Lucky Bastard). But The Dark Dad does add something to our understanding and for that we should be grateful. For all his shortcomings, and those of this memoir, Jack Arnott was a man worth getting to know.