THE GORSE BLOOMS PALE Dan Davin's Southland Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
Otago University Press, hbk, $49.95
Review by Lawrence Jones
In the first 10 years after his death in 1990, Dan Davin was the subject of a biography and a book of reminiscences by his friends.
However, his books have dropped out of print. This fine edition not only brings some of his most memorable writings back into print, but also brings together, with some of the better known stories, some previously uncollected ones and one previously unpublished.
The stories are united by their Southland and Otago settings, but also cover the full chronological range of Davin's writing career, from a story written in 1935 when he was still a University of Otago student to his last story, written in 1989.
The stories are arranged in three groups: stories from the original The Gorse Blooms Pale (1947), stories from Breathing Spaces (1975), and previously uncollected stories.
The first, written between 1939 and 1947, includes eight stories of the Connolly family, Davin's fictional version of his own family, focusing on the growing up of Mick, the Davin persona, as well as two University of Otago stories and two rather melodramatic Southland farm stories.
The second group comes from Breathing Space (1975) and includes three stories from 1948-53 and five from 1967-75, some continuing the Connolly sequence of stories of growing up in Invercargill, others dealing with Davin's return visit to New Zealand in 1948.
The last group of uncollected stories all, with the exception of Prometheus - a Bluff story from 1935, were from 1985-89, retrospective autobiographical stories from his Southland childhood.
The stories are accompanied by full and useful editorial material: a chronology of Davin's life, including a bibliography; a full, documented introduction; explanatory notes with each story; a Davin poem as epigraph to each of the three sections, with a fourth poem to end the collection.
The format of the book is appropriate for such a definitive edition - hard-cover, with an attractive illustrated cover (rather than a dust jacket), a sewn binding with attached ribbon bookmark, and an attractive typeface printed on quality paper.
It appropriately suggests that these stories form a lasting contribution to New Zealand literature.
When Davin himself selected some of his Connolly stories in Selected Stories in 1981, he combined the stories from his first and second volumes and put them in the order of the time of Mick's life with which each dealt.
Janet Wilson has chosen a different sequence for these stories: while within each of the sections the stories are arranged by subject, not by order of composition, the sections themselves are put in chronological order, roughly as early, middle, and late stories.
The sequence the editor has chosen allows us to see more clearly the development of Davin the man and the writer, and she emphasises this in the introduction.
Especially striking is the way we get three different versions of a Southland childhood. The Mick Connolly stories of the first section focus on what Mick knew at the time, with the invisible presence of the author behind him allowing us to sense his implicitly naturalistic vision so that we see the naive young Mick as moving towards a darker view of life that he does not yet consciously know.
The Connolly and other childhood stories in the second section, as the introduction says, ‘‘reinterpret Mick's Southland from the perspectives of the travelled, European-based expatriate''.
In Bluff Retrospect (1967), this contrast between the world as the child saw it and as the adult now sees it becomes explicit, and the first-person narrator of all the stories from the 1980s is equally retrospective in looking back at Southland childhood experiences both with nostalgia and a deepened sense of the meanings of time and of exile.
This fine edition of the stories that are perhaps Davin's best, offers contemporary readers a chance to experience them as a completed set and a suggested way of reading them for maximum understanding.
- Lawrence Jones is emeritus professor of English at the University of Otago.
