Mulgan was one of the youngest of the writers born between 1900 and 1914 who among them made a new New Zealand literature in the 1930s.
Others in the group included Frank Sargeson (1903-82), A.R.D Fairburn (1904-57), R.A K. Mason (1905-71), Robin Hyde (1906-39), Charles Brasch (1909-73), Allen Curnow (1911-2001) and Denis Glover (1912-80).
But that grouping is historical, after the fact, for Mulgan in his short life (he died by his own hand at 33 in April 1945) had little direct relationship with the new literary movement and its publications and did most of his writing from Oxford and from the places where he served in the British army in World War 2 - Northern Ireland, North Africa and southern Europe.
His Man Alone was undoubtedly the most important novel in the formation of critical realism in New Zealand fiction, but it was written in England and first published there in 1939. It was not published in New Zealand until 1949, and was not written as part of a literary movement but rather as a very individual attempt to express - "rather crudely", he feared - a "point of view" that was "rather deep" in him that the years of his growing up in New Zealand were "a lost wasteland sort of period between two wars with so much folly and so much wasted effort to account for".
He did not consider himself primarily a novelist and thought the book was "honest but dull and unfinished". He would probably have been surprised to know that it would become, for a generation of New Zealand students, the New Zealand novel they were most likely to have read at school, just as he would have been surprised to know that a legend would grow around his short life and tragic, mysterious end.
Both of these books add valuable texts to the short list of Mulgan's published literary works - Man Alone and his brief memoir, Report on Experience - in that they similarly exhibit his clear, vividly realised prose style and what he called, in a letter to his wife, his "beautiful objective mind".
Journey to Oxford is a previously unpublished memoir of his experiences and impressions from the time of his leaving New Zealand in 1933 to his joining the Clarendon Press in 1935, pieced together from several manuscripts by Peter Whiteford. It overlaps in places with Report on Experience, but is more personal in focus and presents fine sketches of people he knew and his experiences at Oxford.
Mulgan's letters do not have very much to say about his writing and are inconclusive about the mystery of his suicide: the volume ends with his suicide note in April 1945, addressed to his commanding officer, in which he makes up a story about a non-existent fatal cancer and asks for cover-up concerning his death, while in letters to his parents and to Gabrielle three months earlier he could be clear about the difficult experiences he was having, dealing with matters of help and compensation for the widows and families of Greek guerrillas who had been killed under his command, a task which he summarised as "fairly heartbreaking work", but he could say he was "glad to be doing it" and that it "compensates for all the troubles" of being in Greece.
In many of the letters of that time, he wrote that he was looking forward to finally getting out of the army and reuniting with his family.
Vincent O'Sullivan in his fine 2003 biography of Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border (a new edition has appeared to mark the centenary) quite rightly leaves the questions of motive open. The letter are perhaps most interesting as immediate historical documents, revealing almost day by day Mulgan's shifting attitudes to England and the English in relation to New Zealand, to the events leading up to World War 2, and to the war itself.
They show that "beautiful objective mind" coming to terms with difficult issues in a rapidly shifting situation.
The twists and turns in his responses to the war give the reader a sense of what it must have been like to live through the hopes and fears of those years as he moved from his early sense of a possible Fascist victory to his later hopes that Germany would admit defeat and the war could be ended in 1944, to his final view that there would be fighting to a bitter and violent end with a painful aftermath (he committed suicide just weeks before VE Day).
A passage from his letter to Gabrielle of November 9, 1942, towards the end of the second battle of El Alamein (in which he took part) perhaps marks the turning point in his feelings about the outcome of the war: "I think I have had, ever since the days when we followed the Spanish war so painfully, a feeling that fascism was with the big battalions & that we belonged to a lost though honourable cause. I never expressed this to myself but I think I had it. And now I feel for the first time that I can lose it."
His shifting feelings about New Zealand and England are equally complex and interesting. One example must suffice, a passage concerning Richard's education from a letter to Gabrielle of July 1944: "I rather hope that somehow he will be educated in New Zealand. I dread the English system, however reformed - it places a class and value on a boy from which he might spend a life-time escaping, or worse still accept complacently for all his life."
The book is full of such insights, worth reading for them alone.
Together the two new books complement both O'Sullivan's biography and Mulgan's previously published works.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
