The perils of Japanese rope bondage ...

In which John recounts some chastening encounters with academia ...

When the professor who axed the Masters of Creative Writing I established at an Auckland University was sacked for regaling his colleagues with his Japanese sexual bondage methods, I caught a glimpse of the inscrutable workings of fate.

An Englishman and Professor of Hotel Studies, he had a disarmingly upbeat manner as he told me that my job and the centre I had established were to be extinguished. 

Hotel studies at AUT University

'We're reconfiguring the faculty,' he told me in a conspiratorial whisper. 'Sadly, there's no room for you at the inn.'  

Was this a specifically hotel studies kind of dismissal patter, I wondered?

I had known I was in trouble when another professor, who had been my staunchest ally and sponsor at the university, an Anglican vicar with a penchant for astronomy, abandoned his wife to elope with my Dean to the mountain tops of Chile to gaze amorously at stars for a year. It didn't seem to matter that he liked astronomy. This seemed to me to be a grave dereliction of duty.

The heavens, I had begun to realise, were not aligned for my embryonic writing programme. It seemed fitting, somehow, that the only rooms they could find for my centre were next to the Serious Fraud Office in a faceless downtown office block.

Unpropitious neighbour

Several years earlier, I had approached the English Department at the other Auckland university (the really big one) with a group of writers, and proposed they start a Masters of Creative Writing. My group included some of New Zealand's best-known authors, so I figured I would at least get a sympathetic hearing. 

The Head of Department ushered me into his office. He wore a tweed jacket, with leather elbow patches, and had thick spectacles. He directed me to a chair, and then put both his feet up on his aircraft carrier of a desk, with the soles facing me. 

'Good of you to come in,' he said. He sighed heavily. He seemed perplexed by the sheer obdurate nature of the Universe. 'Did you know that there is already a Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand?' he asked.

I did know that. 

I had been Chair of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors for four years, and helped restructure this body after a spectacular public altercation between one of his colleagues, Professor C.K. Stead, and other writers had brought ridicule and near-collapse to the Society. The London Flat Affair, as it came to be known, was something of a notorious watershed in the history of New Zealand writing politics. (See my previous blog item, 'Autumn of the Patriarchs'.) 

Stead - baffling perversity

If nothing else, the incident demonstrated the baffling perversity of professors in the Auckland University English Department.

Also, I had talked to Bill Manhire, the architect of Wellington's renowned Masters of Creative Writing Programme. In fact the success of his programme was a prime stimulant for trying to establish something similar in Auckland. 

'You know there's really no room for another Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand,' he went on sorrowfully. 'I can't see the authorities permitting it'. 

I pointed out that Masters of Creative Writing were proliferating all over the world, that Manhire - reputedly - had a waiting list of over a hundred applicants for the twelve places on his programme each year, and that many of those applicants would be from Auckland, a much larger city than Wellington.

He sighed again and looked at his fingernails. I gazed at the soles of his shoes. I noticed that one had a large hole in it. This seemed incongruous in a man on a six-figure salary.

'Look,' I said. 'There is a tremendous renaissance going on in New Zealand writing. Our authors are key to forming our emerging identity. We're a young nation finding its feet.' He languorously crossed his legs. 'A fascinating cross-fertilisation is occurring between Maori, Pasifika and pakeha writers right now,' I went on, trying not to focus on the hole, which had moved to the other side. 'I can't think of a more exciting time in New Zealand literature. And Auckland, with its big Pacific and Maori population is key to that. Manhire's programme at Victoria University has created a whole new generation of writers in Wellington. Surely we can do the same in Auckland.'

Some years earlier, I had spent several years living in the headquarters of Nga Tama Toa, the Maori brown panther movement, and had had my eyes opened to the oncoming Maori renaissance by the writers and film-makers I had met there - Merata Mita, Rowley Habib, Brian Potiki ... (See my blog item 'Two Years Living With Maori Activists').

'I'm sorry. That's just the way it is,' he said, taking his feet off his aircraft carrier desk. He ushered me from his office with a sweep of his leather-bound arms. 

I never heard from him again.

The next year, the Head of Department established a Masters of Creative Writing, and recruited an obscure poet from the USA to run it. A likeable, warm woman, she subsequently told me that her speciality area was 'the digital analysis of the silences between words in poetry'.

After leaving my job as editor of the country's largest circulation magazine, where I had employed many writers to do precisely what I had explained to the Head of Department - to write on issues of New Zealand culture and identity, I took up a job in the journalism programme at the Auckland University of Technology.

There I got a much more sympathetic hearing. Ironically, it probably didn't hurt that Auckland University had just established a Masters of Creative Writing ... it spurred the AUT high command to a competitive response. The Dean of my Faculty and the Pro-Vice Chancellor were supportive, and I spent a year designing the programme, approaching a variety of writers to help out as guest tutors and mentors. 

A sympathetic journalist at the national paper the Sunday Star Times profiled the embryonic programme ('Get a decent haircut and move to Auckland'), and the fact that it was being run by a group of prominent local authors, with a specific goal of celebrating our local literature, rather than the more modest goal of the digital analysis of the gaps between words in American poetry.

We got off to a great start. We had many applicants, and I was able to employ most of the writers who had been behind me when I approached Aircraft Carrier Desk Man. A number of graduates from that first year went on to publishing success, some internationally, including Fiona Sussman, who regularly wins national awards for her writing. Other graduates, perhaps infected by the spirit of entrepreneurial energy that characterised the establishment of the centre, eventually formed their own publishing collective, Eunoia Books, where they not only published several of their own novels, but went on to publish many other authors' books as well. 

The Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean were behind me, and the masters degree was almost immediately, and to my astonishment, voted by students the best-taught post-graduate programme at the University.  

This seemed to me a vindication of the collective group-based approach I had taken, employing a variety of NZ authors to come in to teach, rather than a specifically personal accolade. It was also a vindication, I felt, of bringing in successful working authors, rather than career academics, to teach on the programme.

The other thing I was keen to do was to establish an atmosphere of equality and empowerment amongst my students, all of whom were adults, with an average age in their 40s. Many had lead rich, varied and tumultuous lives in a variety of occupations: somewhat different from the circumscribed lives of many of my academic colleagues, most of whom had been cloistered in the academy for decades. I was often bemused by the devotion of these folk to the tortured wisdom of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and the other doyens of French post-structuralism.

It seemed like a fashionable gambit to confer mandarin status on a marginal elite, and had little to do with the raw and vigorous stories of an emerging Aotearoa. I was put in mind of the person who loses his keys on a long darkened street, and spends his time searching under the tiny area illuminated by the one working street-lamp on the road, because that's the only place where there's light. 

So all was not entirely well in the state of Denmark. I had noticed at both Auckland University, and AUT University a number of academics had family members employed alongside them, something that in the corporate world would be considered dubious. After all, universities are publically funded organisations that consume hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payers money. 

When the career academic who had helped me establish the programme proposed to personally employ his father on the Masters of Creative Writing I said I thought that would be poorly received by the literary community. 'Look,' I said. 'Writers are badly underpaid in this country. They're really sensitive to any hint of nepotism or unfairness in the dispensing of opportunities. They won't like this, it'll damage the reputation of the programme, and I don't think you should do it.' 

What I didn't realise was that I had made a bitter enemy, which would come back to haunt me. And then my two principle supporters, the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Dean, eloped together to their Chilean mountain top, and I was all alone, with the 2010 global financial crisis bearing down on us all like a runaway juggernaut. 

For some reason I had never been able to divine, but probably had to do with the fact that I was keen to establish an independent centre, outside the AUT English department, I was required by the Faculty, and by my budget, to raise $80,000 a year in corporate sponsorship for the programme to continue. Bill Manhire, who had recently returned from a tour of North American writing programmes, told me the message there was clear - stay out of English Departments. 

When Victoria University had proposed his centre be absorbed into the English Department, he resigned in protest. Rather than lose one of the stars in their crown, they had relented and reversed their plans. It probably didn't hurt his case that Bill had an eccentric Las Vegas billionaire by the name of Glen Schaeffer bankrolling his programme.

Now, with the Global Financial Crisis, the corporate sponsorship doors slammed shut to me. Loudly. I was all alone. 

The Acting Dean called me into her office. To my surprise, she looked at me with undisguised rage. Perhaps SHE had wanted to elope to a Chilean mountain top. I knew I quite liked the idea myself. 

'You're getting the chop,' she said. 'Chop, chop, chop, chop,' she chortled. 'You'll just have to take your bunch of grubby so-called real-world writers somewhere else and annoy some other reputable, protocol-observing academics who have a keener sense than you do of the intricacies of post-modern thought.' Actually, she didn't say any of that, but it did seem to me that that was what she was thinking. 

'Look,' I said. 'This programme has been many years in the gestation. It's only been running two years, and just been voted the best post-graduate programme in the university by students. Surely that counts for something?' Her look turned to one of glee. She had a PhD. I didn't even have a Masters degree, and here I was, running a Masters programme. This was a perturbation of the academic universe that was almost certainly contrary to the divine order of things. 

'Sorry,' she said, with the smile of a wildebeest. 

'I'd like to talk to your superior, please.' And this is where the Professor of Hotel Studies, and exponent of shibari, or Japanese sexual rope bondage stepped in.

'You've been a naughty boy, John,' he said. 'You don't fit into our robust, rope-loving, pristine culture here. And I'm afraid you need to be punished.' Actually, he didn't say that at all, but I felt that that was what he was thinking. 

So the programme was closed down, and the Masters of Creative Writing absorbed into the English department, where it has been presided over for the last ten years by the career academic who employed his father. To my knowledge, this person has not published any contemporary New Zealand fiction. 

I took my band of merry writers, and founded the Creative Hub, a small independent writing centre, with a fraction of the resources of the universities, based on the same principles I had established on the Masters programme. 

The Creative Hub is poetically located on Princes St, a few hundred metres from both universities. We now have many hundreds of graduates, and they have many successful published novels to their names. I have a growing stack of them in my office.

I had gone to both Auckland universities with passion and an excitement at the possibilities of helping them spawn a new generation of kiwi writers. I was particularly keen to harvest the wisdom and generativity of the previous generation of authors, to help the tyro upstarts on their way. 

I came away with a sense of disillusionment with the structure and practices of these places. Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps the English departments of these two universities are now hot-beds of joyous experimentation. But I came to the reluctant conclusion that in the literary realm at least, there was something about universities that was fundamentally hostile to creativity. 

My grandfather Darcie: thwarted murderer ...

My grandfather was a man inclined to direct speech. So when he issued instructions for the murder of his wife, he didn't beat around the bush. 

Some men might have said: 'Son, I've been reflecting for some time on the state of my marriage, the conjugal and other responsibilities I feel my wife is disinclined to discharge, and on reflection, after due consideration and some consultation with other interested parties, I've decided to do away with her.'

But that wasn't my grandfather's style.

Darcie Cranna. War hero. Thwarted murderer.

'Son,' he said, to my father, who was fifteen at the time, 'Get out to the woodshed and bring me that axe. I'm going to kill Jamesina right now.'

My father didn't go to the wood shed, but leaving Darcie in an alcoholic stupor on the floor, walked instead to the police station in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire and dobbed him in.

Darcie was brought before the courts, where the decorated WW1 veteran listened to his fifteen year old son give evidence of his murderous intent. Darcie was summarily dealt with, and my father became family breadwinner as a clerk in a local law firm.

He never forgave Darcie for any of this, and spoke of the humiliation of having to give evidence against his own father in a public court of law. 

Twenty years earlier, in August 1915, at the age of 23 and part of the Scottish Horse, the handsome Darcie had landed at Gallipoli, where the Scots received heavy casualties at Suvla Bay. Much has been written of the botched Dardenelles Campaign, presided over by Winston Churchill. Many young New Zealanders were also killed or wounded on that beach. 

Darcie's unit was so badly decimated it was disbanded and reabsorbed into a larger force. Three year's later, Darcie's beloved younger brother, William George, a member of a machine gun unit know as 'the suicide squad' was killed on the front line in northern France. In his memory, my own father was named William George.

My father, a passionate musician, who escaped the torment of his family through retreat into the arts, and as a teenager was organist for the churches of Peterhead, was playing Chopin's Funeral March one night on the family piano. Darcie entered the room and punched my father so hard that he was pitched backwards off the piano stool onto the floor.

'Never play that again in my house,' said the war hero.

Its hard to escape the conclusion that Darcie was traumatised by war, by the death of so many of his comrades and his beloved brother. At the time, shocked and traumatised soldiers who ran from the battlefield were put before a firing squad and summarily executed by their seniors in the British Army. 'Pour encourager les autres'.

Darcie - handsome devil

Jamesina came to live with our family here in New Zealand. She was so affected by the continual diet of violence visited upon her by Darcie that she had entered a state of helpless dependency. I watched her as a teenager, puzzled by the rarity with which she left the house. She went out once a week to play bowls. Everything had to be done for her. Her only companion was my younger brother Andrew, who as a result acquired a broad Scottish accent at the age of five.

Eventually, she took a substantial overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to hospital, and was rescued again from premature death by my father.

Arguably the largest influence on gender relations, and in fact on 20th century culture in New Zealand more generally, were the two world wars - particularly WW1, where New Zealand lost a larger proportion of its men-folk than any other British dominion. The cenotaph in every small New Zealand town, with its marble gold-lettered roll of honour, speaks of the trauma of countless families.

Only in recent years have psychologists begun to reveal the intergenerational impact of this kind of trauma. The legacy of violence, depression, anxiety that emerge in the wake of these major conflicts. In his magisterial study of returned soldier trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, tells of the incomprehension that greeted traumatised soldiers (in this case Vietnam veterans) as recently as the 1980s.

These vets were medicated to the eyeballs, ostracised, or otherwise relegated to the back wards of mental hospitals. No one knew how to treat them. Van der Kolk writes of the uncontrollable emotions these veterans suffer, and their retreat into a myriad of substance abuses. Van der Kolk writes: 'They ... alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down."

Had my father been able to understand this, he might have been able to forgive Darcie. William Cranna served in the Royal Navy in World War II but was spared engagement in battle. His subsequent life was defined by his hostility to his father: emigration to another country; utter commitment to the role of reliable family bread-winner; distaste for the use of corporal punishment against his children. 

But his fulminating rage at Darcie persisted to the end; and in an ironic mirror of his father's eventual demise, also drank himself to death, perhaps driven by the demons of his childhood. 

And thus is trauma, undiagnosed, and untreated, visited upon the future generations, and the vicious cycle continues.

As for my own more nuanced experience of all this; at the age of 23, after leaving Wellington with a degree in sociology, I went to live for the 1980s in London's most violent red-light district. Hillview estate, Kings Cross, was a centre of immigration; political refugees and other foreigners, many of whom had fled war zones in the developing world. 

My job was to evict a bunch of violent drug dealers and pimps who ran the Kings Cross heroin trade, one of the most active in London. Big Jo stalked the estate clad only in luminescent green shorts, a machete tucked into the waistband. His wingman, Sparky, aka Mr William Patterson (a lavish brass name plate on his door) had acquired his moniker from his Molotov cocktail attacks on fellow pimps.

For several years I lived with a rope ladder under my bed and a steel box bolted to my front door letter-slot to repel Sparky's special cocktails. One morning, from my first floor window, I observed Sparky attacking an underling who he had cornered in his ground floor flat. On this occasion, Sparky's instrument of correction was a carving knife. The man punched out windows in his desperation to escape the onslaught.

At the end of this impromptu execution attempt, Mr William Patterson, himself a Scot, looked up and into my eyes.  His own eyes seemed flat and reptilian, devoid of emotion. I called the police, packed an overnight bag, then walked smartly to the station, took the tube to Heathrow, and caught a flight - any flight - out of the country. Hunkered down in Palermo, Sicily, I lay low for a couple of weeks until the dust had settled. 

The sound of that smashing glass is still rivetingly present, forty years on.  

After ten years, I returned to New Zealand with case of what Van der Kolk calls hypervigilance -  evidenced for many years by a tendency to walk down the middle of Auckland roads at night (the safest place to walk in Kings Cross). I had also become a heavy drinker. 

My dependence on alcohol was a chilling echo of the habit that had killed both my father and grandfather, so eventually I sought out an expert in the field.

My therapist listened with patience to my stories of  mayhem on the streets of Kings Cross, including two attacks I had experienced myself. Once I was dragged backwards out of my office chair by a self-described 'servant of Lucifer', and kicked with a fair amount of satanic energy to the floor. When I put up my hands up to protect myself he shattered my fingers. He was eventually dragged off me by other office workers. On another occasion I was attacked in an estate stairwell by a man with a welding hammer. As I looked at him through a veil of blood, I had the distinct impression he would have been quite happy to kill me. A glancing blow, another trip to University College Hospital, and seven stitches in the head. 

My therapist had trained in the 1960s, prior to the recognition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which as Van der Kolk points out only became truly understood in the 1980s. After some time listening to these tales, my psychotherapist, in despair of a solution, prescribed anti-depressants ... which I declined, convinced that I wasn't really depressed. 

That there was something else wrong.

Recently, I came upon the body - stiff with rigor mortis - of a friend who had died of a heart attack, one of his feet was lifted strangely in the air, like a mast. Richard lived on his own and had failed to answer his phone. I rang him several times, sensing something was amiss. When I got into his flat, I discovered he had been dead for 18 hours. Slipping into my Kings Cross pattern, I managed the situation with efficiency, searching his desk for contact numbers, talked to the ambulance man and police for hours, rang his shocked relatives, informed the neighbours. 

I was pleased at how well I had managed the situation. 

Three days later, my car and some possessions were stolen from outside my workplace in central Auckland. The car was found shortly afterwards, written off; my belongings suitably pillaged – in Dargaville. On going to survey the vehicle, I observed with detached surprise the mess the thieves had left. The loss of the vehicle was an echo of Kings Cross, where my car had been stolen five times. On one occasion I had caught the thief, and over the course of an hour, had dragged him bodily and resisting to the local police station. 

That weekend, my girlfriend didn't answer her phone, when I knew she had walked home alone at night from her office.

I watched myself with detachment as I fell to the floor, unable to stand. I began to let out the most abject groans. Lying on the rug, my body was wracked with convulsions. My heart went into extreme palpitations. This went on for half an hour or so until I shakily got to my feet - a sense of having been projected sideways into a parallel universe of uncontrollable fear. 

My girlfriend had been talking to a flat-mate in another room, and a de facto arrangement to talk had slipped her mind. But the body keeps the score, and years of proximity to violence and death in Kings Cross and the recent discovery of Richard's cold, blue body, had left their mark ...

What this taught me, and what is so eloquently laid out in Van der Kolk's book, is that violence is deeply encoded in the body, and that triggers can release the traumatic pattern involuntarily, even if that trauma has been laid down decades before. 

Since then, reliably and painfully, I have been doing trauma therapy every two weeks, aware that I have a unique opportunity denied my father and grandfather. My new therapist gets me to recall the events from the past, and to tune in through a 'felt sense' to the visceral signals in my body when I do so. Like many writers, and in fact many New Zealand men who grew up in the latter 20th century, I have a tendency to work from the head - to analyse my experience through the higher brain.

But emotional shock is encoded in the limbic system, and only through a more sensory attunement and adjustment can this 'ancient brain' be eased out of its stage of frozen trauma. After eight sessions or so I observe some progress. My girlfriend reports a more likeable person. I no longer walk down the middle of Auckland streets at night. The palpitations are less severe if she misses a late evening call. But I sense the beast is still lurking there in the undergrowth.

Whether I will ever be free of the demons of Kings Cross remains to be seen. 

I recall sitting in the Kings Cross police station and talking to Inspector Bill Nelson about one of my neighbours who had been murdered. Patsy Malone was a lesbian prostitute who boasted of never having had normal sex with a man in her life. Her body was found in three plastic bags in the Epping Forest. A few months later it was revealed she had been killed by a policeman during a violent sex session. Constable Swindell was a member of the diplomatic corps and had once guarded No 10 Downing Street. He was acquitted of manslaughter but sentenced for disposing of her body. 

Patsy's killing has stayed with me ever since. 

Sometimes, Kings Cross prostitutes would sleep in my stairwell. A refuge if their pimp (Sparky, Big Jo) became too violent. I had a deep compassion for these women who, like my own father, were often in flight from violent families. Many had been been sexually abused by their fathers. Most of them were substance abusers, usually heroin, who used the drug as a brief and delusional respite from their emotional pain.

Van der Kolk, with his remarkable book, has done a great service to trauma sufferers. These are truly the benighted of the earth. Ostracized and imprisoned for their actions. Unable to live - or love - civilly, tormented by their past, prone to visiting their inexplicable rage upon those they care for most. Truly cursed and deeply misunderstood. When I think of the young Darcie, getting back on his troop ship as a callow 23 year old, leaving behind the tortured shapes of the bodies of his friends in the Turkish sand, I think of a whole generation who were changed in ways that were inexplicable to both themselves and to their loved ones. 

In the final scene of All Quiet on the Western Front, the great anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the hero of the novel reaches out to touch a butterfly in the mud and degradation of the trenches. The German soldier Paul is traumatized by the acts he has had to commit and by the death of so many of his friends. At the precise moment of reaching for the butterfly he is shot dead, his hand stretched before him. “His face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come ..." 

What great healers like Van der Kolk and his colleagues have offered is a respite before death for the most severely afflicted by trauma ... a butterfly that can truly be touched, gently, and taken into the heart for healing.