‘Tell them, then...’
What is the space of mourning? How are we to inhabit it? We walk into the chamber of it, this place of absence—as though into a room where someone was once—and we don’t quite know what to do. The light shifts, time moves through its cycles. Still we stay…. It seems we are unable to leave. An object on a table reminds us of the person who used to be there. We look out the window as though they may be looking back through the glass. At some point, I suppose, someone will call us from that room, someone will need us somewhere else. And then we will walk out of it, leaving the door behind us ajar. In the meantime, the day ticks forward through its hours… And we think about the room. We think about being back in it.
After the death of Vincent O’Sullivan, one of New Zealand’s greatest writers, awarded a Kinghthood for his services to literature and a friend to Imagined Spaces and our activities here as well as past projects and publications that have also informed our thinking, I wrote the following, that I have altered slightly for our website. Time is in it, as is that space of loss and grief, and the impossibility of imagining absence.
I heard the news from Vincent's dear wife Helen who emailed me as I was on a train on Sunday afternoon from Scotland to London, hurtling South through the spring air but not fast enough to catch up with the Autumn dawn in New Zealand, where already the country was waking up to mourn the loss of one of its most important writers—though one who wore his status, his gravitas, and erudition so very modestly you might have missed it. That’s because his thoughts were always—always—for anyone else but himself.
Vincent will be remembered for so many honours, publications and achievements, not least for his distinguished scholarship and service in the realm of Mansfield studies and writing. But probably, most of all, for kindness. How much does kindness and generosity inform study and creativity, I wonder? A lot, I think.
As Emerita Professor Angela Smith of Stirling University puts it, ‘Vincent changed things for people…’ For sure, his work with Margaret Scott, for Oxford University Press on the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield brought a whole generation of us right inside the world and life of the writer and laid the ground for the rich array of Mansfield studies and publications that followed, right through to the great Edinburgh University Press project of the Collected Works which he and Gerri Kimber began with their two volume editions of the Collected Fiction—and beyond. Then there were the poetry collections, the short stories, the novels… All speaking to each other across themes of being in the world… How it felt, what it did to you, to be in relation to time—the nowness of it, the terrible and wonderful responsibility of being made to be a body that exists in time.
Vincent’s beautifully modulated, finely crafted sentences... Constituted a form of prose that was attentive, nuanced and so light on the page that we sometimes forgot he was there. Words that would tell more about that room, with which I started this piece, better than anyone else. Here is the last poem from his last collection of poems, due out next month. You can hear time’s breath inside it…
Tell them, then
When someone says to a writer my age
that straight-out celebratory love poems
seem a touch thin on the ground, few of
those racketing pieces like a bridal car
clattering tins till it turns the corner –
well no, I have to say, not the way rhymes
embossed on mourning cards give your heart that skip.
So I say (the sly evader, you might call him),
‘Gosh, I’m glad you told me,’ and resurrect
as I say it the Wairarapa spring
blossom paused as a choir on the verge
of performance, the moon’s utterly ordinary
arrival, a gift for the occasion.
‘So that’s what you call it, ordinary is it?’
As if that doesn’t say as much as needs to be said:
one day, then the next, by grace the same;
from the curtains first drawn from the Rimutakas,
to their closing, the constant answer: This’ll do.
‘Tell them, then’ is taken from Vincent O’ Sullivan’s new collection, Still Is, forthcoming from Te Herenga Waka University Press.
