Arundhati Roy (2025) Mother Mary Comes To Me - Not a review to let it be

 Arundhati Roy Mother Mary Comes To Me

Not a review to let it be

 

Around 2010 or so I pitched a publication proposal for a biography of Arundhati Roy. It was declined on the grounds that Roy was only ‘mid-career’, i.e. not yet deserving such a treatment. Now in 2025, Roy published a sort of autobiography with a focus on her mother, thus making any attempts at biography somewhat redundant, although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried anyway in unearthing anything that has not been covered by Roy’s current work. Maybe a grand evaluation of her grand oeuvre would go down well instead. Caveat: I think she is a great writer.

 

Much of the content in Mother Mary Comes To Me is already well known, at least to readers who have followed her career ever since The God Of Small Things (and her life story leading up to her celebrated first novel). Anyone who might read Mother Mary Comes To Me without knowing much about Arundhati Roy is, of course, in for a literary treat second to none – and even for those, like me, who are in the know, precisely because it is not so much about the facts of the matter but how they are communicated to the reader (and to herself). The way she writes is both breathtaking and subtle. 

 

Her literary exploits together with her political activism provide a blueprint for any writer whose aim is to expose and improve the human condition, both in a personal and on a public domain. As the saying goes, she walks the talk. Biographers tend to psychoanalyse a writer’s work, especially if the writer is a conflicted human being. As an example, read Reiner Stach’s monumental biography of Franz Kafka (reviewed on this blog as well) where Kafka’s excruciating self-analysis is met with Stach’s additional analysis. Arundhati Roy does not engage in extensive self-analysis other than giving hints of her inner life that finds expression in her exposéthat at times rivals that of Kafka’s conflicted relationship with his father – here Roy’s conflicted relationship with her mother. Hence, as from Kafka we learn ‘how’ his father is, from Roy we also learn ‘how’ her mother is but neither Kafka nor Roy provide many clues ‘why’ their father/mother is that way. Here a biographer comes in handy, e.g. from Stach we learn how and why Kafka’s father could become such a miserable figure by delving in his early life history (as any good Freudian would). Arundhati Roy does not provide sufficient details about her mother’s upbringing and her early married life to allow for a Freudian analysis of sorts as to why Arundhati Roy’s mother, Mary Roy, became, at times, such a miserable person. We do learn the basic story line: Mary Roy’s father, an eminent entomologist who ‘whipped his children … and split my grandmother’s scalp open with a brass vase’ (p.11). Such a traumatic upbringing – however ‘common’ it may have been at the time in India and Britain – must have left deep psychological scars on Mary Roy. Arundhati’s only significant mention is (p11):

 

To get away from him, our mother told us, that she married the first man who proposed to her.

 

Given that while daughters at that time were part of the father’s household until they got married, above statement sounds like an exaggeration as Mary had left the household a number of years earlier, first to study in Madras (earning a BA in Education) and then getting a job in Calcutta where she met her future husband. More about that in a minute.

 

A biographer would also be interested in the linguistic background of the Isaac clan in Kerala. Did and still do the Syrian Christians all speak English as their first language? After all this is the key inheritance that propelled Arundhati to literary stardom. That high-ranking Indians under the British Raj all spoke English as a second language is well established but less so as a first (native) language. Personally, although having travelled extensively in India (including Kerala) I was not aware of this situation. I was first made aware of it (to my embarrassment) in New Zealand when I assumed that an ethnic Indian colleague of mine at a Polytechnic had (perfect) English as a second language, i.e. he corrected me to say that English was his first language, having grown up in Pune, a well-known cosmopolitan hub in Maharashtra, in an English-speaking Indian family. Hence in retrospect it might not be that unusual for Arundhati Roy having grown up with English as her first language, infused with an Indian idiom that makes it so special. Another aspect that a biographer might explore in more detail is that women in such families are often afforded a higher education, thus setting them free from the subjugation of married life, at least relatively so. An example of such subjugation – within an upper-class family – is witnessed (p.36) by a young Arundhati at a children’s birthday party where the rich, bejewelled mother of the birthday girl is humiliated Infront of everyone by her rich, overbearing husband who throws her an envelope (containing money presumably) which she has to pick up from the floor. Another example of the toxic patriarchal stranglehold, again at an educated level, is described later on when Arundhati separates from Goanese boyfriend, i.e. an acquaintance of the boyfriend, a qualified psychiatrist, tries to make a case for her to stay with her boyfriend but failing to do so confronts her with this outburst (p.112):

 

I know what women like you need. A good tight slap every now and then. You want a man to behave like a man.

 

From this angle it is the more remarkable that Mary Roy turned into a radical feminist who fought for equal rights, upsetting the family apple cart and Indian society (especially in Kerala) in general with her unrelenting legal campaigns to achieve her goal – and have her brother evicted from his house, although one could describe that one as an example of revenge best served cold for having her and her children evicted from the little cottage in Ooty. 

 

It is difficult to understand that Mary Roy, after leaving the toxic family home to study in Madras and then getting a job in Calcutta, working as a secretary for an Indian corporation, Metal Box, that was one of the biggest packaging companies in the world by then, was on the lookout for a suitable husband. I say ‘suitable’ in the sense of the highly restrictive marriage market that must been drilled into her from an early age – deeply embedded that no liberal education could escape, it seems. From a Times of India interview in 2002, it appears that Mary Roy is introduced to her future husband Ranjit Roy by his elder brother Prannoy Roy who in turn had been introduced to her by his father at her workplace. It turns out that the Roys were (and still are) a very prominent family, described as a Bengali Christian ‘aristocratic zamindar family’. Certainly, sounds like a ‘suitable’ match, engineered on her own without input from her own family – another case of sweet revenge?  Ranjit being the manager of a large tea estate in Assam would have guaranteed a very well-to-do lifestyle, albeit in a very remote part of India. In the interview Mary Roy states that she ‘did not love her husband’, giving credence to the idea that it was a marriage of convenience, for the sake of status that she was used to from her own family. She must have been blind to the fact -supposedly discovered only after her marriage – that her husband was a hopeless alcoholic who nevertheless – like many a corporate alcoholic – functions adequately in his managerial position. There is little concrete information about their married life up until Mary and the two children, aged 3 and 5, were evacuated to Calcutta due to the looming war between India and China. This is surprising because when Arundhati and her brother found their father some 20 years later and cared for him to some degree until his death by alcoholism, there are no recorded reminiscences about that time in Assam. Of course, Mary Roy never talked about it. There are however two snippets that are gold for the psychoanalyst in me. First, Mary Roy tells Arundhati that a passage in her The God of Small Things is not based in fiction but on subconscious memory, namely when the fighting parents push the children from one to the other, shouting (p.6):

 

                  You take them, I don’t want them.

 

A shocking episode, if there ever was one. The other one relates to Mary Roy kicking her daughter out of the car on the highway from Trivandrum to Kottayam because she had nothing intelligent say during their visit to Laurie Baker. Years later Arundhati must have told her father that story who laughed, saying that this was a common ‘sport’ when they lived in Assam, kicking her out of the car on the jungle road from Nowgong to Shillong when she was only three years old (p.68). How shocking is this! Were they both Out-of-Africa types who frequented planation-owner parties, getting sozzled while leaving thew children waiting in the car? 

 

It is often said that children (as grown-ups) repeat the crimes of their parents, i.e. inflicting violence and psychological terror on their own children. Violence begets violence. The endless cycle of violence. A cycle that must be broken if we are to advance as a civilised society – although there are hardly any signs today (2026), if anything the opposite, as Arundhati in her activist role only demonstrates too well. Mary Roy as a victim of this cycle is desperate to break out but for some reason repeats it in the many moments that her daughter calls her ‘gangsterism’. An almost schizophrenic condition (she was Arundhati’s ‘shelter and storm’), a Jekyll and Hyde personality. 

 

It seems that Arundhati Roy managed to really break this cycle of violence via the cathartic writing process and political activism. Her brother too seems like having broken the cycle. Are they the noble exception of the rule? It seems like this to me, especially in Arundhati’s erudite reckoning with her mother. 

 

But what about her father, the ‘nothing man’ according to Mary Roy? Why does he remain a peripheral figure? When Arundhati’s by then adult brother LKC locates him in Calcutta, and brings him to Delhi as an alcoholic wreck, one wonders about the illustrious Roy family. Did they disown him? And why would Mary Roy absolutely not countenance meeting her ex-husband again? Sure, according to Arundhati’s descriptions, Mickey Roy (as he was known then) was a fairly hopeless alcoholic but one whose sense of humour seemed to be intact. However, it seems that he too had no wish to see his ex-wife ever again. Given that Arundhati and her brother were ultimately brought up by their mother alone, it is understandable that Arundhati in particular must spend a lifetime wondering what this mother was all about. Still she could have extracted more information from her father about the time they all lived in Assam on that tea estate. Detective work to do for a biographer?

 

In the meantime, let’s just concentrate what Arundhati has to tell us in her version of events. Not all of the 40-odd chapters deal with her mother, especially the seven years after she left her mother for Delhi, not having any communication with her, at least according to Arundhati. Her mother always claimed that even during these years she financed Arundhati’s studies at the School of Architecture – maybe just paying the fees as Arundhati’s descriptions of abject poverty do not seem to indicate much financial support from her distant mother. Be that as it may, it is of course a fascinating story how a 16-year old girl makes in in Delhi to eventually become a Booker Prize winner. From the anarchic beginnings that involve a heavy dose of groovy sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – we are in the late 70s, with one chapter headlined as ‘Joe, Jimmi, Janis and Jesus’ – we move on to the contradictory fate of meeting Pradip Krishen, her future husband. Maybe I should not have used the adjective ‘contradictory’ because it is some sort of the continuation of her ‘cosmopolitan’ upbringing, being surrounded by highly educated Oxford types (e.g. her uncle G. Isaac) who all speak English as their first language, some very literary, quoting Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling at the drop of a hat. Some of their ideological – if not financial - leanings were on the radical left, inline sometimes with the Marxist government of Kerala at the time. Even Mary Roy approved of her daughter’s student speech (at her school) about the US Running Dogs, quoting Ho Chi Minh. There must be some truth in the observation that many a revolutionary mind emerged from the bourgeois upper classes, e.g. Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg all came from relatively well-to-do families. Arundhati Roy in this context seems no exception, nor Pradip Krishen whose well-to-do family (his father a former ambassador) domiciled in a villa in a leafy part of Delhi. True to form Pradip lives upstairs in his artistic anarchic attic with his two children and his wife with whom he has an ‘open’ relationship. He is into off-beat film making. Nice lifestyle if you can afford it – the liberal parents downstairs no doubt pay a few bills and entertain their granddaughters in the tropical gardens surrounding the mansion. Arundhati is a bit conflicted but then again she is used to a bit of grandeur from her relatives in Kerala, and even from her mother as she becomes well-to-do with her private school for the well-to-do children of the liberal well-to-do Syrian Christians of Kerala – always on the lookout for some deserving kids from the somewhat lower classes to demonstrate that a good education will lift you out of conformist poverty, a bit like the schools run by A S Neill and Bertrand Russell. 

 

In any case, love flourishes between the two non-conformists, and before you know it Arundhati commences on her decisive career as a scriptwriter and logistics operator for Pradip’s movie productions commissioned by UK’s Channel 4. While still operating on shoe-string budgets, there is nevertheless a good off-beat critical response for their movies in India, gaining recognition. Arundhati tells this story with aplomb, the ups and downs, the private and the public (and now the private becoming public, somewhat a treacherous process at times). I like her descriptions of the US and UK producers and hangers-on who descend on their film sets in the most inaccessible parts of India, complaining condescendingly about the poor services and amateurish set-ups. It reminds me of my own brush with movie celebrity when I had a job in 1969 with an American film company that made a movie in Hohenschwangau (the mad King Ludwig fairytale castle) with Hal Prince as director and Angela Lansbury and Michael York being the main attractions. I my job as a go-between the German crews and the Americans and Britons (my English at that stage was just good enough for this task) I witnessed many a ‘condescending’ – if not racist – exchange which I mainly translated with good humour so as to please both parties. BTW the teenage sons and daughters of the celebrities introduced me to hard drugs which made it difficult to do my job during daytime. The Germans wanted me dismissed but dared not to complain to the American bosses (whose sons and daughters were my friends in crime) lest my translation thereof put them at a bad light, necessitating their dismissal instead. Obviously, Arundhati’s bohemian film making crews were not on the same wavelength as the often-outrageous US and British movie scenes, for quite different reasons. One interesting corollary of Arundhati’s scriptwriting and film-making experiences is that while her fiction writing (i.e. all her novels) has an extraordinary visual aspect, none of her later novels have been given the film treatment (or maybe yet to materialize). 

 

It must be with great satisfaction to then tell her story of her literary breakthrough, as unexpected as any in recent history of literary achievement. Like winning the jackpot in a lottery – literally in financial terms for her – she has, for the first time in her life, the means to do as she likes, i.e. devote her time exclusively to writing and political activism. 

 

Winning (sic) the Booker Prize was of course big news in Kerala and Kottayam, hence Mary Roy re-entered the life of her daughter. Mary was not surprised at her daughter’s sudden success; she expected no less – a sort of miserable put-down, feigning disinterest. Indeed, Mary Roy did not read the novel for quite some time, and then only the parts that identified her as the character of Ammu. Still Mary Roy organised a book launch at her school, being proud of her daughter’s achievement, especially in the sense that she was the one that instilled in her daughter the art of writing. 

 

Arundhati being in the public eye from then on means that her privacy was gone. She was passed around as public property. I met her in Auckland where, after a reading/discussion at a writers’ festival, she signed for me her 2019 book My Seditious Heart and I presented her in return a copy of my 2006 biography on Noam Chomsky (there is a photograph in it with her and Noam), albeit in a Hebrew translation (I didn’t have any English copies left). In retrospect this may not have been a good idea since Chomsky has recently been found to be implicated with Epstein in some financial dealing, following the release of the Epstein files. Since Arundhati’s My Seditious Heart contains her essay ‘The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky’ as an admirer of Chomsky, one wonders what she makes of the current affair (not that Chomsky is able to defend himself since he suffered a severe stroke a few years ago and is incommunicado). Chomsky as a syndicalist-anarchist, left-wing political activist has of course a history – as for example detailed in my biography – of impeccable standing, one that can hardly be detracted by some regrettable, minor association with a villain of our time. 

 

As Arundhati delves into her anti-dam and Naxalite encounters, we learn from her side the often-vile treatment she was dished out in the neo-fascist Hindu nationalist press, what with various court cases designed to shut her up. That she battles on is a huge achievement when she could simply withdraw and take it easy. All along are the more complicated battles with her self-absorbed mother who is supportive one day and abusive the next. Add to that Mary Roy’s ever deteriorating health. Having had bad asthma all her life, her health problems made worse by obesity necessitated constant medical care, hospital stays, ambulances called, near death experiences – and yet she proved to be a battler reaching the ripe old age of 89 before she died. Throughout these struggles, Arundhati began to understand that her mother loved her even when she abused her. The acceptance of this contradiction engendered a sort of peace that must have propelled Arundhati to contemplate writing a book about it all. And so she did. Another masterpiece. Mother Mary no doubt would have objected to the ‘masterpiece’ label since it is a male derived word. It is not enough to rid the English language of sexism by changing a few pronouns. Arundhati ups the language ante by giving the Beatles song a clever, poetic twist:

 

           Mother Mary Comes To Me

(speaking words of wisdom)

For Mary Roy

Who never said let it be.

 

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/theres-something-about-mary/articleshow/15871684.cms

 

 

 

A POETIC REVIEW OF PETER OLDS’ BIOGRAPHY BY ROGER HICKIN (2025)

 A POETIC REVIEW OF PETER OLDS’ BIOGRAPHY BY ROGER HICKIN (2025)

 

Kafka liked reading biographies. I just reviewed Kafka’s biography (see previous blog entry). Now it’s the turn of Peter Olds’ biography by Roger Hickin. While Olds, a Dunedin poet, is a total unknown in comparison to Kafka, he has quite a lot in common with Kafka, namely this uncanny gift to analyse himself from the outside, self-depreciating like Kafka, and with a healthy dose of humour. Most people who obsessively self-analyse do it from the inside to the degree of pointless mental disintegration. Peter Olds, on the other hand, who struggled with mental illness of one sort or another all his life, looked at himself dispassionately, and wrote poetry of amazing clarity of purpose. 

 

Peter Olds who died aged 79 in 2023, was a consummate street artist, living on and off the streets in Auckland and Dunedin. Roger Hickin who knew and published Olds’ poetry in his later years, charts Peter Olds life intelligently and compassionately – with the telling title of ‘Minding his Own Poetry Composing Business’. Certainly not in the sense of a money making ‘business’, as he was penniless most of his life and didn’t care about any material comforts of life. 

 

I only ever came across Peter Olds once in my life, as a student at Dunedin University in the late 1970s, when Peter was the poetry editor of the student rag Critic and accepted my submission of a few poems – a copy of which will appear in my new poetry and art book to be published by the Michael O’Leary’s Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop next year. Michael was a good friend of Peter Olds and published many of his little poetry books. They also lived for a few years in Seacliff near Dunedin, as is detailed in Roger Hickin’s biography.

 

Now, while I do not want to make any great comparisons between biographies in general, there is one aspect to point out: a purely chronological narrative of a subject’s life and death story is sometimes crammed with unnecessary detail that detracts from the overall impression created by the biographer. What other biographers (including my own attempt at Noam Chomsky’s life and work up to 2006) do to get away from the purely chronological narrative is to insert thematic chapters on important aspects of the subject’s work, e.g. in Kafka’s case, his Jewish identity, his relationship with his father, or in Chomsky’s case, his linguistics, politics and philosophy – all cutting across the chronological time spans. This makes for more interesting reading.

 

However, Hickin is excused from his chronological account as his subject is constantly moving, physically and mentally, ending up in an ‘on the road’ story that matches those of Kerouac and (for NZ) Colin Hogg’s (2018) Sam Hunt ‘Off the Road’ account. As such Hickin does present a fascinating biography that in the narrow New Zealand context – Peter Olds only ever left NZ once for a short time to visit his brother in Brisbane – covers the narrow ground between Dunedin (and environs), Auckland, Omokoroa, Wellington, and iconic stop overs like Jerusalem. The latter is of course in connection with the other iconic poet of New Zealand/Aotearoa, James K. Baxter, who was instrumental in encouraging Peter’s poetic output. One other discernible theme is Peter’s relationship with his father – and his parents in general – which has its ups and downs (but nowhere as bad as that of Kafka’s). 

 

So let us start at the beginning of the long road to poetic immortality – one might intone Werfel’s praise of Kafka here and say:

 

Dear Olds, you are so pure, new, independent, and perfect that one ought to treat you if you were already dead and immortal.

 

One might leave out the ‘new’ as much of Olds’ poetry has its roots in the often-radical beat-and-street poems of the likes of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Wantling, Bukowski, Tuwhare, Baxter and Eggleton. Being widely read, Olds is also linked to the English writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thomas. His lyrical and music tastes (he defines himself as both a song and poetry writer) range from classical (Beethoven) to rock’n’roll (Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cohen, Yardbirds). One of his poetry collections is entitled ‘Music Therapy’.

 

Hickin calls Olds a ‘war baby’, born in 1944, four days before the D-day landing. Born into a staunch Methodist family, his father Mac eventually being an ordained minister of the church by the age of 40. Mac’s earlier life included stints in mechanics, beekeeping, small-holding farming and labouring made him a practical jack-of-all-trades. By the time Peter was five they had moved numerous times, perhaps setting the scene for Peter’s eventual life as a gypsy. A formative event was his being sent to a Health Camp due to having contracted glandular fever. There he received a severe flogging due to a minor infringement.  According to Hickin ‘Peter never forgot’ thus contributing or even triggering his life-long struggles with anxiety and depression. 

 

Perhaps this would have been the place to stop and engage in some Freudian analysis, especially as later in his life he spent a lot of time in psychiatric wards under the care of various psychiatrists whose main treatment consisted of heavy medication. Sadly, psychiatry at the time was ruled (and is ruled to this day) by American-style Behaviourism, correctly denounced by Chomsky as ‘neo-fascist’ (when I studied psychology in the early 1970s at Munich’s LMU this was the reason I abandoned my studies). Had Peter Olds undergone verbal psychotherapy he may well have been saved from endless medication and becoming addicted to it. Hickin gives us a clue for his trauma: at the health camp Peter’s punishment was for staying back in the dormitory with an older boy – not for being with an older boy. What was going on? Later in life when Baxter’s alleged homosexual tendencies were revealed, Peter Olds commented that when thinking back, Baxter may have come on to him at some stage. Nothing more is mentioned - swept under the carpet. A taboo subject. I am not suggesting that any of this is related to Olds’ trauma, just that psychotherapy might have revealed the true cause of it, and thereby contributed to the healing process that under Behaviourism never happened.

 

Olds’ fragile physical state as a child and into adulthood – like that of Kafka – may in turn have exacerbated his trauma in that his father’s exemplary maxim of the wholesome nature of physical labour could not be accommodated by his ‘weak’ son. As such Peter always admired his father for his practical skills but less so for his mental skills. 

 

When in 1953 the family moved to Dunedin – Peter Olds’ eventual holy grail – the underbelly of suburban New Zealand was captured in his poem, quoted by Hickin (p.22):

 

                  Lying (as a child) in bed

tucked tight in wesleyan

quilts listening to the neighbours 

murdering each other with

 

blunt breadknives and

set each other alight

at the clothesline stake

for their sins and slaughtering

 

their children with strangulation

after whipping their bare

backsides with leather straps snatched

from hooks behind bathroom door.

 

Olds calling a spade a spade, straight-out, not taking any prisoners, a bit like Kafka’s In the penal colony. Note the stylistics: a poetic sentence broken up into three stanzas, merging into each other, making a powerful statement. And yet another example of what such a childhood memory might mean in terms of psychotherapy. Hickin does very well in interspersing his text with Olds’ uncompromising poems that are often more convincing than Hickin’s prose. This is of course the conundrum of any biographer whose subject outshines the literary abilities of the biographer to the power of ten. Bad biographers openly show their envy – Hickin being a very good one. 

 

In Chapter 2 we learn of the momentous move in 1959 to Auckland, the big apple of NZ, no less to Ponsonby, the inner-city suburb that in the 1960/70s turned into the coolest hippy location anywhere in NZ (I should know as a dopey resident there in  Margret Street the early 1970s). With cheap and rundown housing, Ponsonby also became home to Polynesian immigrants, thus creating an early example of a kind multiculturalism that straight society viewed with great suspicion and disdain. Being ensconced in the relatively well-to-do parsonage in Herne Bay, Peter was bullied at his high school but one day beat up another boy and thus was spared further agony. He even was invited to join the gangster club of the school. At age 16 he convinced his father to let him leave school and get a job. First as a window dresser – mocked as a job for gays – and then two years later as a worker in a mattress factory. Peter stopped going to church and became a rebel without a cause. He joined the petrol heads. He hung out with older boys who had cars. American V8s. For the uninitiated, let me explain: when I first came to NZ in 1971 or so – and having had a car in Germany but being utterly oblivious about its mechanics or even how to fill it with petrol (this always being done by a petrol station attendant in Germany) - every self-respecting Kiwi hippy had a British motorbike of at least 500cc, take the engine apart and reassemble it in five minutes. I was a fast learner and took my 500cc Triumph apart and reassembled it with a few bits and pieces left over – the bike still worked. Now imagine Peter Olds in 1964, still somewhat pre-Hippy era, as a petrol head, buying his first Ford V8 Coupe, naming it ‘Psycho’ and taking his first steady girlfriend out, like in the famous lyrics by Bob Seger:

 

                  Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy

Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy

Workin' on mysteries without any clues

 

When they broke up. Peter Olds went to Dunedin after a spell of residential detention for car conversion. His mother sold his V8, and he never owned another car in his life, turning into a true-blue vagabond, eschewing all material comforts, hitchhiking and if necessary travelling by rail and bus. Still the V8 cars stayed in his memory and in 1972 published a collection of his poems entitled V8 Poems. 

 

Working at odd jobs in Dunedin he sees the Rolling Stones in the Town Hall and is driven to write his own songs for his guitar he cannot really play. He gets free lodging (for work in the garden) with an elderly landlady who allows her tenants to bring in girls for the night. Mrs Fisher, the landlady, spent her days reading and smoking. Peter showed her his lyrics, and she pronounced it ‘poems’. Peter Olds comments that ‘that’s where it started’. Turned on to reading he devoured Kerouac’s On the Road as well as books on the blues (Leadbetter) and poetry by Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. Peter was on his way to become a writer, a poet. 

 

A chance meeting with Baxter’s daughter Hilary in a Dunedin café led to an exchange where she asked him if he is a writer seeing him scribbling in his notebook. The exchange that changed his life is recorded as follows (p.37):

 

Asked if I was a writer – ‘Sort of’, I said. I’m trying to write songs,’ I added hopefully. ‘Oh,’ she smiled, ‘I write poems.’ She was my first poet. 

 

Well, she was his first poet in the flesh. She suggested to show his songs to her father who had been awarded the 1966 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. They met and became good friends, although in the beginning Peter was in awe of senior Jim (not James) and a bit worried about Jim’s effusive ‘love’ for him, wondering if he might be gay or just mad – deciding on the latter. Nevertheless, it was Jim (James K. Baxter) who encouraged Peter to become a published poet. Jim introduces him to the bohemian artist scene in Dunedin and a young Cilla McQueen wrote years later that she remembered ‘Baxter and Peter playing chess to the bittersweet strains of Dylan’. As a keen chess player myself, I appreciate the brain gymnastics that this game demands – and no doubt is exhibited by Peter Olds in his poems (and of course Baxter’s).

 

As noted, Hickin here misses the opportunity to write a thematic chapter on Peter’s relationship with Baxter, who as one of the most iconic poets of New Zealand deserves, in my mind at least, a critical evaluation – one that could be explored through Peter Olds’ perceptive eyes. For example, Peter early on is a bit perturbed by Baxter’s efforts to convert him to Catholicism, which sounds like the shortcoming it is, namely Baxter’s rather bizarre road to Jerusalem which many other readers and critics have lauded as some sort of enlightened meeting of the minds, i.e. Baxter and company and Māori and Catholicism. I much prefer the pre-catholic Baxter.

 

Meanwhile Hickin goes on to tell us about Olds’ further travels and odd jobs, including meeting a couple of potential publishers. Nothing came of it, so his first published poems appeared in a 1967 Otago University student literary review. Entitled The Road is Getting Empty it is a masterpiece with the first ingenious stanza:

 

                  I feel the blues it hangs in

                  A number –

                  I count the leaves that float

        In the gutter -

 

After some further travails back in Dunedin Peter was encouraged by Baxter to write a play which was staged together with one by Baxter and others. It was reasonably successful, and Baxter praised it beyond reason. A second play written by Peter was not a success. In addition to that a bizarre meeting took place between Peter and a reporter from the right-wing Truth newspaper that produced the headline ‘Dropout Dreamer’s Drift into Drama’ which scandalised not only Peter but the whole Dunedin theatre scene, with the Globe theatre’s director ‘disowning’ Peter Olds. 

 

By 1968 Peter had his first serious attack of anxiety and depression. Baxter found him a doctor who referred him to Cherry Farm, the psychiatric hospital some sixty km north of Dunedin. BTW my wife trained there as a psychiatric nurse in 1979 or so, while I studied at Otago University, and as mentioned before, was published by Peter Olds in the poetry page of the Critic.  Peter was subjected to ECT and Chlorpromazine, writing later in a poem of amazing insight (p.48):

 

                  Each morning we lined up 

                  to watch the Mandrake

                  get ripped from her head

                  by a man named Chlorpromazine …

 

Having started (but never finished) to train as a psychiatric nurse myself at Carrington Hospital in Auckland where I witnessed ECT and then wrote a report for my supervising teacher – having been given access to Carrington’s subterrain archives – that detailed the clearly punitive application of ECT. Of course, my report was dismissed as the work of a misguided student (who BTW had studied psychology in Germany, so what would a Hun know!). 

 

Then we get another Baxter snippet. Olds had become a voluntary patient and was allowed to go and come as he pleased, and Baxter accosted him with an urgent invitation to join him in his newly discovered Jerusalem. Olds in a later poem refers to this as 

                  

                  

        There always was something odd about Baxter

                  And this seemed to confirm it.

 

Although Olds eventually took up the invitation and travelled to Jerusalem, he resisted Baxter’s nonsensical pull to Catholicism while holding on to Baxter, the great pre-catholic poet-writer-activist, of the sort exemplified in a black-and-white photograph (p.44) showing Olds and friends at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Dunedin in 1967, with Baxter a speaker. Fast forward to Baxter’s death which prompts Olds to write one of the most irreverent, hilarious poems about Hemi Baxter. Olds had missed the burial by a day and on arrival went fishing for eels, catching a big one. Hickin comments that the Māori children at the pā thought it was a taniwha, then introducing the poem by saying that ‘someone else had another idea’ (p.73):

 

                  I walked slowly up the brown dry

                  track to your grave & held it 

 

                  High over your head, & someone in red hair

                  & weeping jeans ran from the bushes, screaming –

 

                  ‘He’s caught Hemi’s cock’ You should

                  have seen the size of it, mate …

 

                  We ate well that night, listening

                  to the ducks fly over the flat green water.

                  

Really, Roger Hickin should have devoted a whole chapter on the theme Baxter and Olds.

 

In the meantime, more of his poems were appearing in various poetry magazines, hence his emerging confidence that ‘I’ll always be the poet thing’. Having recovered somewhat from his breakdown, Olds moved back to Auckland. We learn of his adventures there mainly through letters he wrote to his parents. Olds, a bit like Kafka again, was a frequent writer of letters that were preserved by his parents. These often very explicit letters are the more so surprising in that his parents, especially his father, seemed to accept their wayward son’s lifestyle with a certain amount of empathy. For example, he confided in his parents that in Auckland he had shacked up with a married woman ‘I love a married woman and sleep with her. I’ don’t care what the bible says.’ The woman in question, a 20-year-old drug addict who had her four children taken away from her, became Peter’s companion for ‘three torturous years’. Mandrax became their drug of choice (I remember Mandrax being sold in Goa by the fistful for next to nothing). Peter was also busted for Marihuana and sentenced to two years of probation which meant that his probation officer was to direct Peter where to live and work and what medical and psychiatric treatment to undergo. Peter was also ordered not to associate with Baxter for this time. Hard to believe the power of mean-spirited judges and even more so the power of probation officers who wielded God-like oppression over their victims. Olds puts it like this in his poem ‘My probation officer wants …:

 

                                    talks of his experiences in the army-

                  I don’t want to know

                  he wants me to cut my hair

                  he wants me to stop / writing

                  he wants me to cut my cock off

                  and breed flowers …

 

Wow! Couldn’t have said it better myself, if I may so say so (saith Hone). The ‘saith Hone’ to be explained later, if you don’t already know. 

 

Peter Olds’ life from then on followed the pattern of all of the above – minus any further involvement of the police and courts. 

 

A notable period of his life, four years, was spent in Seacliff (ch.13 of Hickin’s biography). While not particularly creative in term of writing poems, he lived there in an outhouse he slowly converted into a liveable mini cottage; he salvaged his building martials from the nearby abandoned Seacliff psychiatric hospital aka lunatic asylum. He kept chooks, one named Janet after Janet Frame, who had spent from 1945 onwards some 8 years on and off at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, culminating in her famous novel Owls do Cry and subsequently enjoying a stellar literary career. Peter Olds on the other hand just lived with the ghosts of the asylum, roaming through the ruins at night, hearing the voices of the tortured ones. He grew his own vegetables, made wine from wild elderberries, and to escape ‘geese, magpies and sheep’ he travelled to Dunedin, some 28 km away, by bus or sometimes walked. Walking back home again to his small artist colony, the conservative locals would not give him a lift, Peter wondering if they ‘might still be afraid of escaped lunatics’. The other main artistic lunatics in residence at Seacliff were Bryan Harold and Michael O’Leary. According to Michael, their friendship deteriorated somewhat during that time due to them teasing Peter for his Methodist roots ‘Methodism in his madness’. Hickin credits Olds during his time in Seacliff with a pastoral idiom, comparing him to the Chinese Taoist poet T’ao Ch’ien whose aim was to ‘nurture simplicity among gardens and fields’. Olds was also into Zen quite a bit, absorbing the spirit of the Zen gardens, if not the Zen koans for his poems. Being a bit of a Zen gardener myself in my old age, I appreciate Peter Olds’ ode to the simple life:

 

                  Rain on the roof drowns out the radio announcer.

                  Geese cackle behind the macrocarpa …

 

                  Yesterday I made wholemeal bread small rolled

                  saint-filled chunks – burnt brown crust, tasty with

                  tomato and cheese eaten (today) with potato soup.

 

                  Rain …

                  Paradise …

 

                  Runner beans on the trellis wall on the side of the hut

                  A new red sleeping bag in the alcove

                  next to the small black stove

 

                  The smell of onions.

 

Kafka’s father would have called such a life ‘abnormal’. Kafka’s reply at the time was that if his vegetarian life was abnormal then it was alright because the other ‘normal’ life outside was WW1. For WWI we can substitute, today, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela and dozens of wars fought in the shadows of the great powers. Kafka, Frame and Olds were the odd ones out, nut cases, lunatics in worlds as normal as ever. 

 

Life after Seacliff followed the ups (writing poems) and downs (not writing poems). Another notable meeting of minds is the one between Peter and Hone Tuwhare, another iconic poet that somewhat eclipsed even the fame of Hemi Baxter. Peter and the elder Hone were good friends and when Hone was going down and out, in his eighties, in a Dunedin rest home, Peter described him thus (p.169):

 

                  When I come into your room you’re lying in bed

                  flat as a flounder with receding groper eyes

        protruding from above the lip of the blanket,

        & the top of your head crowned (royal-like) with

        a woolly balaclava pulled down over your rissoled 

        boilermaker ears.

 

To emphasise his debt to Tuwhare, he often inserted ‘saith Hone’ in his notebooks. The photograph that goes with it (p.166) completes the picture, as it were. 

 

In his last years Olds becomes a bit more settled in a council flat up on a hill, the past catching up with him via various old and new flames, these days conducted online if not face to face. With Covid lockdowns looming, he became frailer, surviving several hospitalisations. Roger Hickin remarks that Olds wrote his best poetry later in life but after a stroke in 2020 he was coming to the end of his writing days. There was a flurry to have him recognised as a true-blue Dunedin poet and a plaque was installed in the Octagon that in part read ‘The Laureate of the Marginalised’. While this may be true enough, it sounds a bit patronising as an inscription in a plaque, like a consolation prize, – evoking a feeling of pity (Mother Theresa-like, one that catholic Baxter would have liked) if not disenfranchisement from the real thing. Peter at that stage was not well enough to critically evaluate the inscriptions, just happy that he got one after all – next to the one for Baxter! Olds’ last poetry collection entitled Sheep Truck was published by Cold Hub Press in 2022. The following year Olds died. The poem that gives the collection the name should have been reproduced in the biography as it is the key to Peter Olds’ razor-sharp perception of what New Zealand is all about: poor old sheep who like any New Zealander don’t know they are going to the slaughterhouse. I reproduce the poem here from the Cold Hub Press website:

 

                  Sheep Truck

 

So this is what it’s like being on an aeroplane 

in a window seat, having a whole window

to myself, jammed in with all the others 

who only have their woolly bums exposed . . .

Here we are up before dawn, loaded, packed 

& on our way.

Is this the last I see of my family?

 

We have no suitcases––

we only have our winter coats . . .

We rip down the runway like a train: 

bells ringing, tires screaming. 

Faces fly by at a distance . . .

Very quickly we are above the clouds. 

The view is spectacular:

First there are rivers,

then, snow-capped mountains. 

How high can a sheep truck fly!

 

I see my lambhood down there

among the crab-apple trees, the apricots.

The banks of the Clutha we loved to play on.

I don’t want this trip to end.

I never thought I’d get the chance to fly in an aeroplane.

I don’t know where we’re going but I know we won’t be back . . .

I’ve got a window seat which is quite rare for a sheep.     

 

They said everything we need for our journey

will be waiting for us when we reach our destination.

We must be getting close, our wheels just touched the runway. 

I see trees, shops, traffic lights flash by––

and a sign on a lamppost that says ‘GREAT KING STREET’.

 

© Peter Olds 2022

 

Surely one of the best of his ‘Poetry Composing Business’.

 

As mentioned before, in reference to Hickin’s title ‘Minding his Own Poetry Composing Business’, Peter Olds’ business was not about making money – far from it. So, what is it really for? The satisfaction to see one’s poems published by some publisher who also is not interested in making money, and therefor asks you to apply for a literary grant to support the printing of a hundred copies? To see your poem in a literary magazine, hopefully a fairly reputable one, so as to gain some fame and glory? To be discovered by a real publisher who will sell your poetry book by the millions, to make millions? But isn’t the publishing industry predicated on the capitalist credo whereby demand must be created before supplying the market? And we know how this demand is created by a few movers and shakers in the mainly academic literature business – securing manuscripts for the lowest common denominator and proclaiming it in aggressive advertising campaigns as the ‘best’ of the ‘best’. To send the ‘best’ (and now famous) author on gruelling reading and signing tours around the world? Reinforce the sales via best-seller lists? Even the liberal Guardian engages in this nonsense: ‘the best recent poetry review roundup’ (some sound OK, others rather pathetic) next to the ten best novels, the ten best kitchen knives, the ten best video games, the ten best TV shows, etc. After consulting the best seller lists do the editors of such pages then let their own biases do the rest? A bit of networking, nudge, nudge? Sure, very occasionally the great publishing houses and sought after literary agents hit the jackpot, discovering the genius of a complete unknown, out of left field, as happened to Arundhati Roy (I have reviewed her two novels and will soon do the same for her latest Mother Mary Comes To Me). Maybe I’m just a jealous guy, having collected too many rejection slips? But then again when Peter Olds was the poetry page editor of the extremely famous (world famous in Dunedin) Critic magazine, he chose my poetry submission for publication. How many others were rejected in my favour? Maybe I was the only one who had bothered to submit at that time? It’s all very confusing, especially when one proclaims to be a socialist, anti-capitalist writer. Peter Olds did not worry one way or the other and did get published one way or the other by small, sort of anti-capitalist publishers like Michael O’Leary’s Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop. Peter even got a few literary grants and awards (and a Burns Fellowship) to help the printing of his poetry books. A true poet of the people who walk the streets because they cannot easily afford the bus fare to the library to read a poem or two. Strangely enough, he also had an academic admirer, an English literature lecturer at Otago University – the best of two worlds. The latter no doubt being a considerable bonus in terms of academic recognition. All in all, one wonders how this all works.

 

Finally, clues may also be in the black-and-white photographs and illustrations that enrich Roger Hickin’s biography. Apart from the iconic cover photograph, I particularly like the Seacliff pics that evoke a precious time gone by. Still, Peter Olds defeated the saying ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ by writing words that painted a thousand pictures. And hopefully, the Guardian will include Peter Olds’ biography in the list of the best of the best for 2026.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup

 

https://www.coldhubpress.co.nz/sheep-truck-peter-olds-cold-hub-press-----.html