Steve Braunias reviews a fascinating memoir
We think of Rosemary McLeod, rightly, as one of New Zealand's great prose humourists, for her classic weekly column in the Listener in the 1970s, when she wrote so scathingly and hilariously of her generation – the alternative lifestylers, the bohemians, the chattering classes, sending them all up in a bonfire of the vanities. No one could write like her. But the column featured something else, possibly even more scathing and hilarious: her illustrations, all of them drawn in dark, heavy ink, all of them portraits, a gallery of awful, hopeful faces of young and idealistic New Zealanders discovering ways of being in the 1970s. I thought of these kinds of grotesque caricatures that Rosemary drew when I read Raiment, Jan Kemp's small but perfectly charming memoir.
It's a thin book, only 250 pages, and it only covers her life up to the age of 25. It goes from her birth in Claudelands in 1949 to sailing out of Port Vila in 1974. Half of the book is her childhood, the second half after she enrols at the University of Auckland in 1968 and falls in love – with poetry, and with Johannes Maria Caris, who she married when she was 20 and he was more than twice her age.
Kemp writes about what it was like to actually live out those years as a young woman floating through a strange new kind of post-war New Zealand society. As satirist in chief of that age, Rosemary McLeod identified a hypocrisy in her columns and drawings – the way that hippie ideology spoke sonorously of freedom and equality, but imposed a sexist framework where men controlled the culture. Did the young Jan Kemp have what we now call agency? What were her feminist credentials? Or did she have other things on her mind? One of the central concerns of Raiment is the burden of the body. She writes of joining Weight Watchers, and frets about getting fat. And: "As a young woman student without a permanent partner the main thing is not to get pregnant."
Free love was a male prerogative. There is this passage, not long after she marries Johannes: "An old friend from childhood came to stay for the weekend with her husband. She was tiny and blonde, and somehow I knew she loved sex. Johannes suggested we swap partners and sent the husband and me up into the double bed in the new eyrie among the kahikatea. We could hear them down below in the other bed, making love, she quite loudly moaning. Upstairs, we clutched each other, sitting up in bed like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the forest floor and forsaken, wondering what on earth would happen next. It wasn't our thing at all.
"Nor was it my thing that I would sometimes come across Johannes in the new shower above the eyrie bedroom, naked, showering and masturbating."
Good grief. But note the careful descriptions, the tone of amusement, the absence of bitterness. Kemp's book is written inside the experience, as it happened, on its own 1970s terms. She left the marriage (Johannes was the bitter one, demanding she pay half the $300 divorce fee) and got on with things, falling in and out of love, studying with English department eminence grises Mac Jackson and Allen Curnow (and a young Wystan Curnow, the lecturer who held evening classes and "sometimes wore his leather flying helmet with its earflaps"), and joining a new wave of New Zealand poets ("intellectual Ian Wedde and witty Bill Manhire") who gave wildly applauded readings in Auckland, Hamilton, and Wellington. Just as she was in 1979, when she famously toured with Sam Hunt, Hone Tuwhare and Alistair Campbell, she was the only woman among them. ("I saw her on that [1979] tour," Linda Burgess emailed me recently. "They came to the school I was teaching at and were marvellous. Sam Hunt read a poem about a supermarket checkout girl. She read unforgettably a poem called 'Paperboygirl'. She read it in that slightly yowly way that paper boys used to sell papers on the street. God it was fantastic. I remember sort of envying her travelling round with those three.")
Kemp writes of keeping company with intellectual Ian, witty Bill, and the rest of the gang in 1971, "Who was I to try and tell them how to behave? In what I thought was a gentler, more understanding, more loving and female way?" The battle wasn't gender; it was generational: "We were making our own stand against the line-up of older white male poets and writers, Allen Curnow, CK Stead, Kendrick Smithyman, et al, who ruled the roost and set the tone. They were New Zealand Poetry incarnate. We were the young New Zealand poets and wanted to be recognised as such. Students flocked to our readings." Change the names and it reads like it could have been written (probably by someone in Wellington) in 2022.
But how was it that there was only one woman? How was it that it was Jan Kemp? Throughout Raiment, her tone is all very oh-well-you-know – she never seems bothered by wider issues, is more intent on the actual stuff of life, and enjoys or suffers the ride, with its beauty and pleasure, and its mess. On a man she meets in a house at the top of Curran Street in Herne Bay: "He took to me immediately and decided I should become his other woman. The reality was his visiting me at Cowie Street in my little sunroom. I had a new lover, albeit a married one. Oh dear. He even had a friend paint an odalisque portrait of me, lying naked on the couch in the front-room studio in the Curran Street house, that he later took back to Vancouver with him. Later still, a nice woman friend of his said [his wife] Sandra had hidden it in the attic of her house. Oh dear, again."
Oh dear, oh-well-you-know. There's a good line of dialogue in The Walking Stick, an otherwise quite boring 1967 Hampstead novel by Winston Graham. It’s said by a character called Arabella, on her 18th birthday. "I don't care for morals," she says. "Morals are what other people think you ought to do." Kemp's memoir is about what she thought she ought to do, and did do. With its sunny disposition, its bright idealism, and its neatly detailed settings (hippies in the bush in Titirangi, Friday night drinks hosted by Karl Stead at a bar on Constitution Hill), Raiment is a fascinating document of a young life lived in thrall to love and language.
Raiment: A memoir by Jan Kemp (Massey University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the memoir. An excerpt appears tomorrow, a sketch of the Auckland poetry scene of the 1960s is published on Wednesday, and a feminist reading of Raiment will appear on Thursday.
