Joe Bennett's true confessions

Saturday, 13 May 2023

Joe Bennett was doing the maths the other day. How many columns has he written since he first started writing for The Press? More than 2500, he worked out. In fact, he would soon be approaching 3000.

That is two newspaper columns every week and a monthly one for New Zealand Gardener magazine. He never writes anything about gardening and expects to be sacked every single month.

So he must often be asked – “Where do I get my ideas from?” he says, anticipating the question. Not quite but close. How does he never run out of ideas?

“And I say has nothing interesting occurred to you this week? Have you seen nothing that has tickled your fancy, that has amused you? Nothing at all? Are you that dead?”

On the morning The Press visited Bennett in Lyttelton, where he lives at the top of a street so steep he is almost in the clouds, the paper had published his column about the coronation.

“Princess Anne was dressed like the Duke of Wellington,” he wrote. “But there was also a Duke of Wellington. It was that sort of a do: both a pantomime and an event that purported to belong to the real world.”

Press readers hardly need to be told that Bennett writes very funny columns and that his columns contain elegant sentences. But it is surprising to learn that he is what he calls a chronic rewriter. His drafts, which he numbers in Russian for reasons that seem unclear, might go through at least five versions.

“If anyone saw my first drafts I would simply have to shoot them. If they ever got out.”

A recent column about Donald Trump memorably described Trump as entirely egocentric, a man who consists only of his appetites.

“I’ve never hated a man more,” he says. “I’m not much given to hatred. He makes my gut shrivel.”

But we are not really here to talk about the columns, or even Trump, although we do for about six minutes. We are here because Bennett has just published an entertaining and often very tender memoir called From There to Here, which covers his first three decades.

It goes from childhood in the south of England to university in Cambridge to his itinerant twenties, when he taught in schools in Spain, France, the north of England, Canada, England again and finally, New Zealand. The cover photo that makes Bennett look like a scowling punk was taken on the beach at San Sebastian in Spain when he was 22.

He wasn’t a punk, but he used a brutal-sounding device for cutting his own hair, which “produced this pulled-through-a-hedge look. I quite like the look. Any hair I’d like the look of, really.”

There are many amusing and intimate stories, but any memoir risks a level of exposure. Is there anything in the book that might make him feel vulnerable?

“You’re talking about sex, really, aren’t you?” he says. “Every friend knows I’m gay, but only just gay, to be honest. Not by much but by enough to make all the difference.”

Vulnerable is not the right word for it, he says.

“Honesty is a very strong armour. People will do what people do.”

But has he ever written about sexuality in his columns?

“No. I don’t think I ever have. I’ve spoken openly doing speaking gigs and so on. But I haven’t put it explicitly in a column which I suppose is surprising.”

Rather than the vulnerability question, he is more interested in the responsibility question. What does he owe to the people he writes about? He says he has tried to be as fair as he can be without lying. Some names had to be changed “because it’s not their fault”.

One of the moving chapters from his childhood concerns the death of his brother, which is published below as an extract. And here is something that may be a revelation for some readers. Joe was not originally Joe, but Julian. It is a name he knew he had to ditch.

“I was so obviously a Famous Five Julian,” he says. “Now my mother has died, no-one calls me Julian.”

You might have the sense he has longed to write a memoir, but he says he hasn’t really. And yet here we are.

“Who doesn’t lug their life story around with them?” he says. “And you’re the only person who knows it. Even your nearest and dearest haven’t got a clue about the complexities of your life story up until then. It accretes like a shell on a snail and you drag it around with you. So it’s a common urge to put it down. A lot of people want to sit in bars and tell it to people and they are to be avoided.

“It’s an act of vanity. It’s also a fight against the coming dark. If you don’t put it down, no-one ever will. It’s a resistance against oblivion. A futile one, obviously.

“Evelyn Waugh, who’s an idol of mine, said the only time to write an autobiography is when you’ve lost all curiosity about the future. I don’t think I’m quite there but I can see it from here.”

He recently turned 66 and he suspects there is nothing much left to surprise him “apart from what are you going to die of?”

Here is a trite question that is always asked about memoirs: did he learn anything about himself?

“I don’t think so. You create the narrative as you go, you build it during your life. Only a tiny fraction of the events of your life form the story of your life. The notion of what is true – once you’ve put things in words, you’ve distorted and selected, then you do it again, and eventually you remember the story you tell.”

The book stops before the start of his career. Not his teaching career, which he fell into almost accidentally and proved to be good at, but his writing career. As soon as he realised he wasn’t going to be a professional cricketer, writing was the only ambition left.

In his twenties he still had aspirations to write fiction and poetry. He saved up money from the teaching job in Canada and took time off to write his great novel. The result was that he “wrote two crappy little poems in a year and nine months, and drank all the money”.

As he approached 40, he thought about how he always wanted to write professionally, and how he was tired of teaching, and “40 is that age that when you double it, you get an alarming number”.

He realised he had to write commercially and remove himself from his writing. Which he did by writing short romantic stories for women’s magazines. After a year, that had made him enough money to buy an $8000 second-hand car.

He wrote the romantic stories under his own name, which seems surprising, but the magazine editors always crossed the E off Joe. He still has most of them somewhere.

Maybe he could publish the collected romances of Joe Bennett.

“For God’s sake! But they did me proud at the time.”

Professionalism was one thing. The other thing is that he taught himself to write by analysing writers he admired, such as Clive James, and working out how they achieved the effects they did.

“Those two things are what turned me from a self-indulgent wet wanker of a failed novelist to someone who could put prose together that people liked to read.

“I would never make any apologies for column writing. I think it’s writing at its peak almost because you’ve got an audience every week, you’re as good as your last piece, you can be sacked tomorrow, people are very frank about what they say about your writing, and you’re not just writing for the literati. I’m an essayist and very proud to be so.”

Without giving anything away, at the end of the book Bennett faced a choice between a teaching job in Christchurch and a teaching job in Peru. Obviously he chose Christchurch. But does he ever wonder if Peru might have been better?

“Better? It would have been different. Living in your language is important. My Spanish is good, my French is good, but you’re always slightly outside. You live through your language. You address the world through your language.

“Also, it would have been hard to be a columnist in Peru.”

An extract from Joe Bennett’s memoir, From There to Here.

Breakfast some time in 1964. There was always a cooked breakfast – sometimes bacon and fried bread, gleaming with fat and snappable, but more often beans on toast. The beans were Crosse & Blackwell, all other brands being deemed common.

We ate at the dining room table: my mother at the kitchen end so she could fetch and serve, my father at the window end and children on the sides. It was like one of those line drawings of the time, advertising middle-class contentment: mother in a dress and apron, father in collar and tie, children scrubbed and uniformed for school, a paradigm of post-war prosperity and orthodoxy, even to the light, sleek, insubstantial furniture. Pan out and the picture became even more of its time, with the brand-new estate, detached brick houses each with a garage and an indoor bathroom, and an extra toilet downstairs and a fenced back garden. It was the epitome of the post-war boom, of ‘you never had it so good’.

But Nigel had not come down for breakfast. He was seventeen by now. He had grown his hair into a bouffant ginger mess. And his body had struck out suddenly to over six foot of height, and he had a bedroom to himself with a record player, the standard box on legs that played The Animals and The Kinks. All of the above, every molecule of it, antagonised my father, because he couldn’t understand it – not the hair, not the music, not the private bedroom, not even the extraordinary height of his son, he being only five foot seven. He did not understand what he had spawned. His own adolescence had been during the Depression, when teenageship was a luxury the world could not yet afford.

Nigel and my father had skirmished many times and were clearly heading for the main event. All it needed was a spark. And failing to get up in the morning was exactly that, for it enshrined the whole of my father’s case, that my brother was spoilt, ungrateful, selfish, rude, an unclean thing. I doubt he had ever said any of those words, or even gone so far as to form them in his mind, but he didn’t need to. He knew action was needed, and he was not one to back down from conflict.

My mother, sniffing the wind, anxious to placate, had called upstairs. And now she sent me, aged seven. I was always the one sent, the other redhead, and the only member of the family who had any influence on Nigel. But I dreaded the mission. Friction was brewing and friction made me feel sick, unable to swallow food, to think of other things, to smile.

My brother’s room smelt of socks and sweat and excretions. He lay foetally, face to the wall, the sheets and blankets a twisted mess. He had demons. He didn’t sleep in a bed so much as wrestle with it. His left shoulder was exposed above the bedclothes, the skin garlic white.

I laid a hand on it. It was clammy. ‘Bloggs,’ I said. It was what we called each other when fishing. I don’t know why. ‘Bloggs.’

He struggled all his life with the world’s official rhythm. He rarely slept before three in the morning. If left alone he’d sleep till three in the afternoon.

‘Bloggs,’ I said again, and with visible effort he managed to mutter that he was coming. But you could sense sleep like a set of hands pulling him back under. I urged him again, and he promised he was on his way.

‘He’s on his way,’ I said back at the breakfast table and the tension rose a notch and the meal went on in silence.

When he appeared at the dining room door some minutes later he had pulled on trousers and a shirt. No socks and the shirt hung loose about his waist. His hair was a haystack, his face still folded with sleep.

My father was not an angry man or a violent one, but he had a temper born of a sense of propriety and when it blew, it blew. It blew now. He pushed his chair back and stood and my brother saw what was coming and turned away and my father swung a kick at his backside and another and another, kicks for being a canker and a threat of chaos in a right and proper home. And my brother whimpered and hunched and fled from the room pursued by my father, still swinging his righteous kicks.

Not long after that, Nigel left school and then home. I suspect my mother of engineering the move because my father and he just couldn’t share a house. Nigel went to some college to study town planning. Why town planning I have no idea. It would be hard to think of a course of study to which he was less suited.

There was a television programme called ‘Out of Town’ in which Jack Hargreaves demonstrated rural skills: how to make an eel trap, skin a rabbit, fish for carp, all of which was pleasing stuff. But better even than the content was the manner. He smoked a pipe that he would lay aside as the programme began and then he would speak in a gentle unhurried voice, as one who harboured no ambition, who was content with the way of the world and his place within it. No doubt there was an element of performance to it all but the man seemed as relaxed as the landscape, as languid as the rivers we fished. Jack Hargreaves presented a world in which my brother could live.

Nigel should have been a water bailiff, someone who managed a stretch of river for a fishing club. He often spoke of it but he did nothing to bring it about. He had demons, but they fell silent in the countryside. When he was fishing or stalking the frozen fields with a shotgun, he was at ease with himself, absorbed and fully alive. He was not, and never would be, a town planner.

To complete the qualification he had to write a dissertation on some planning matter. For years my mother would speak of the dissertation as the final hurdle that stood between her troubled son and a better life. It was a hurdle he never jumped. Though he did eventually go to work for Brighton Borough Council, he was always in the wrong business.

A couple of years after he left home he came to the house late one night when everyone was asleep and woke me and led me downstairs to meet his girlfriend. Mary sat beside me on the sofa and I showed her a bird book I’d been given for my birthday. As far as I know Mary was the only girlfriend he ever had. They married 10 years later, in a registry office. I was best man. There were plastic flowers on the filing cabinet and a reception at a pub in Ditchling.

But Nigel was already sliding into drink. He bought the trappings of a Jack Hargreaves world – a battered Land Rover, a black lab called Sam, guns, rods, a hen coop, even a ferret from Lewes market where there were still shepherds in smocks – but the reality of his work in the planning department depressed him. To pay for his drinking he took backhanders from cowboy builders. He found me summer jobs with them when I was at university. In the end he was suspended from work, pending an investigation into corruption. He borrowed money wherever he could, stole from my mother, drank to oblivion, and then Mary left him, taking their two daughters.

In his forties he fetched up on an oil rig in the North Sea, where he suffered an embolism of the brain and was airlifted to a hospital in Norwich. My mother went to see him, despite their estrangement, and found her eldest son writhing on the bed, oblivious and shouting a torrent of obscenities. He died within days.

I flew back from New Zealand for the burial, in the graveyard of a country church overlooking the Weald. From the wicket gate you could see a little river shining silver. There was no service, no vicar, just six gloomy men hired by the undertaker to carry the coffin from the hearse to the grave. The mourners were his mother, his estranged wife, his three siblings and a representative from the oil company who had never met him.

We stood around as the coffin was lowered. Nothing was said. My mother threw in a handful of soil. And we left.

From There to Here is published by HarperCollins New Zealand, $35.