The Secret History of Modernism [Paperback]

With the unlikely title, "The Secret History of Modernism", the author who in real life authored an authoritative text on literary modernism, (The New Poetic ),and who is a regular contributer to The London Review of Books, reconstructs the post grad life of his protagonist, a doctoral student from Auckland New Zealand at the University of London , in the 1950s.This is one of the numerous successful novels Stead wrote after retiring from teaching English Lit at The University of Auckland. The eminence grise of the New Zealand Literary scene,the author of 9 volumes of poetry and recipient of many awards,the hollow cheeked curmudgeonly cadaverous author( judging from his portrait on the jacket of the hard back edition ) dazzles his literary audience with displays of erudition which if he himself wasnt the protagonist or if his audience were not themselves doctoral students in literature would have no place in this novel.Rather than writing a conventional novel Stead experiments with a number of modernist and post modernist techniques including an episodic rather than tightly structured plot, reflexivity, with characters acting as sounding boards for the protagonist's ideas,jumping forward and backwards in time,and experiments with word play ranging from vernacular English to French phraseology and idiomatic New Zealand and Australian language. Stead's post modernism is reflected in the semi fictionalization of real historical individuals including the poet T.S Eliot,and his professorial self, ( incongruous in that for the purposes of the novel he is still a student), holding forth on Shakespeare, metaphysical poetry and modernist fiction writers. The protagonist Laszlo Winter grooves on his own felicitous familiarity with literary tropes and conventions and is an autodidact who has little tolerance for permitting divergent expressions of opinion. Clearly it is his verbosity not his glamour that attracts the women he is pursuing and attempting to browbeat.No character in this novel has anything like a moral compass, except for the leading protagonist's opposition to the Korean War, and Laszlo'a feeble efforts to reconstruct the Holocaust experiences of the Jewish character who is being cuckolded.Coming from a virtually homogeneous Anglo-Celtic society Stead's protagonist settles for Friedrich Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor as exotic.
Playing the role most penniless young New Zealanders abroad have played Laszlo does not respect the boundaries of the pre-existing relationships of any of the women he meets, and is patronizing to the Asian character Rajiv who is trespassing on Laszlo's territory by researching Yeats.Stead relies on Peter Sellers and The Goon Show for his version of Rajiv's post colonial Anglo-Indian dialect.The residues of English colonialism linger on even when the perpetrator is from a colony not of it.
Laszlo 's relationships are exclusively immature ones with a woman who already has a lover ,(Friedrich Godstein), who she is cuckolding , and a woman who is probably in an incestuous relationship. While Laszlo does not succeed with these brilliant and literate women he succeeds brilliantly with the neighbourhood whore who finds his critical perorations absurd and ridiculous. To the extent that this may be intended to be part of as huge literary joke,the humour is very subdued or non-existent.
The action in this novel consists of the grappling, groping philandering, cheating and duplicity of most of the characters as experienced and seen strictly from the protagonist's point of view.The suspense, if there is any, is built around the protagonist's efforts to cement his relationship with a literary rival who is writing a thesis on the protagonist's area of expertise , literary modernism.After he is finally rejected he continues to stalk her.She is the source of the riddle of the title of the book.We have to wait more or less for the end of the novel before we find out whether or not the 'secret" turns out to be what everybody already knows about modernism and modernists, and therefore ironically no secret at all.
In describing the intimacy of Laszlo's encounters with the women he pursues Stead engages in a kind of literary voyeurism which pops up in two of his other novels, All Visitors Ashore, and Mansfield.Literary Voyeurism is egregiously to the fore in Mansfield.Stead's juvenile obssession with sex and sexuality persists throughout most of his work.
Eros is not the main thrust of The Secret History of Modernism.Clearly the women are intended by Laszlo to be the muses that inspire his writing and scholarship, and when they stop caring he has a breakdown.Nevertheless this is predominantly a novel of literary ideas with feeble interspersed efforts to profile some characters and sustain the farcical relationships.
Influenced by the satirical writing of Gunter Grass Laszlo continues to stalk his unrequited love interest years later, acting on information from a sinister informant, one Otto Stiltz .Both Stiltz and Goldstein have been lovers of the woman Laszlo pursued but because of indecision and revision,or her revulsion, have lost out to the banal Australian partner she accepts.
Towards the end of the novel Laszlo tracks down Goldstein on the east coast of North Island of New Zealand and Stead attempts to construct the facsimile of an exotic Jewish European refugee committed to Zionism and Israel Samantha's mysterious lover.So far no New Zealand writer has succeeded in creating a convincing portrayal of a Jewish character .Clearly in this novel Goldstein is a non-Jewish Jew. New Zealanders remain obtusely closed to the reality of Jewish culture, Jewish history and Judaism.
If Laszlo Stead's alter ego is am exemplar of the English language literary set. ( and Stead is rumoured to have close ties with the English literary establishment),then the metaphor of "incest' may well be relevant for the scholarly and literary careers of establishment writers, seeking to extricate themselves from the literary cronyism of the antipodes, substituting the the even more incestuous English old boys network for it.
Stead's extraordinary literary intelligence, wit and erudition, and occasional drollery, ( where the student Samantha encounters T.S. Eliot outside the publishing house of Faber and Faber), appealed to most of the establishments critics. The book is worth reading for persuing the question , can a scholarly individual like Stead not only unpack literary modernism for his students but apply the lessons learned in his own fiction?For this reviewer the answer is "yes".He is a creator as well as a student of modernist fiction.For those who like conventional novels Stead's post modernism could prove irritating.We are not moved emotionally by anything that happens in this novel, not even by the scene where Laszlo is recalled to New Zealand to farewell his dying father.This is portrayed as just another event in the life of Laszlo Winter.What most matters to Laszlo Winter, ( and presumably to the author Karl Stead), is the cleverness of word play which trumps all other considerations.There is no cure for the absolute banality for what may have meant to be a primordial encounter.

"You need to read," they told me. "Find out what others are doing. You cant expect to produce a workable manuscript unless you have some idea how good writers go about it."
Read? Finding a name in the phone book is hard enough!

One day I saw this book by Stead.

The literati talk about him a lot, don't they? Professor of English I heard. Poems and novels published, (yeah, published). Renown critic too. Insightful and spirited stuff, they reckon. Not afraid to get up other writers' noses.

`The Secret History...' Wow! Look at all his other stuff listed next to the title page...

Maybe I'll see what he's on about?

Took me two weeks before I could pick it up, steeling myself for the BIG UNDERTAKING. Dyslexics are like that - need space and time to make the effort, so when both were present I added the resolve. "Might get a third of the way through in four hours. By then I'll have the gist of it, enough momentum to complete it."

Friday night, and I got to P.81 in one hit. First page only four sentences, but with such meticulously particular punctuation - precision structuring to essentially doubtful attempts at a beginning. All this kind of broken consciousness stuff, or elements at word impressionism in prose. Might work in poetry. Here seems strangely unconvincing, then brilliant at turns. Finally found a convincing section (chapter 2) that flowed cogently integrating nice blend of social/personal history (accomodation of Rajiv and Lazlo) with literary interest. Then 3 follows with a sense of hard effort (discordant as a cockatoo's call) before finally settling easily into Sammy's meeting with Goldstein. Same with 4 - something tentative and unconvincing about it. Suddenly it comes alive in 5, then sparkles P.60-66 with discussion/anecdote on Sammy and T.S.Eliott

Why does this writing seem so laboured when pastiching backgrounds to personal recollections, but so gripping and immediate when dealing with literature and its personalities? Why is it that even at his age, his youthful relationships and experience still suggest inner resistance to presentation, whereas the prose becomes direct, compelling and full of lively interest once Lazlo is not (even indirectly) part of the picture? Jack and Jill? Well, getting better but still too close to the author for any sense of effortless flow.

And this guy is famous...?
Some kind of awkward distillation of late youthful.... well, life and loves?
Maybe best titled, `Pirouettes in the Mirror' ?

Next day, back at work, beginning with The Goldstein story. That is good! The whole chapter. But P.86-99 especially is powerful writing. In fact all three chapters on Goldstein. How does this guy achieve such compelling interest to what is essentially just details to well known historical fact? Is it the continuation of drama surrounding that family's history, as compared to the episodic nature of the personal material (Heather, Margot) or other events (Suez, Hungry)?

Finished at P.162 that day, then off to bed.

Funny thing. When I awoke the book was still with me. Surprised me how intrigued with it I was now. Couldn't wait to finish breakfast and go off to some quiet place to complete it.

Suddenly all these disparate things: Literary anecdotes and insights, political events, Sam's affair and her lovers family, and even (yes even) Lazlo's oddly distant and awkward experiences of love. Whoops! Not love - rather, Coupling. (coupling as adjunct to literary discussion, coupling to poetry - emotion distilled through literature). Suddenly all integrated. Did it themselves, tied the pieces together while I slept.

Recollections of Lazlo Winter. Biographical episodes, political hard edge of Modernism, wistful recollections of winter caught at the antipodes of spring...

And then the ending. Boy, I wish I could produce endings like that. But even before, see how it all tied up! This is one clever writer. Maybe I will read some more of him? Even look up some of those names to see if they really exist, like Mendel Hand (Michael King?), or Dick Flinders.

Wonder if he will read my Manuscript? Lance its boils over lunch maybe...
Might call him.