PHONE HOME BERLIN
Collected Non-fiction
Nigel Cox
Victoria University Press, pbk, $35
By Gavin McLean
Nigel Cox's death at 55 in 2006, just before the publication of his new novel The Cowboy Dog, created immense media interest and brought many reappraisals of the life and works of a writer who had recently returned to novel writing after a long silence.
Unlike Fiona Kidman, C.K. Stead, Marilyn Duckworth etc, Cox left no memoir or autobiography. A biographer may appear one day, but in the meantime Phone Home Berlin will have to fill the gap.
Fortunately, the book is much meatier than those posthumous bits and pieces and left-overs albums that record labels rush out whenever a star pops his clogs.
Although it ranges widely across national identity, museology, music and domestic life, Phone Home Berlin contains 18 pieces (including a poem and an interview with Damien Wilkins) that satisfyingly address parts of those perennial standards, the making of an artist, and that peculiarly antipodean one, OE and return.
Cox admits that as a boy he was obsessed by islands. And ruined by them, obsessed by Robinson Crusoe tropical fantasies that sea-girt New Zealand, and the Hutt Valley in particular could not satisfy. So he travelled, and this bookseller and tyro novelist became a concept developer for a museum.
Not just any old museum: Berlin's new Jewish Museum. Cox's stint on the concept team of the Berlin holocaust museum and its aftermath dominates the book.
As a Wellingtonian, I laughed at his descriptions of how he and fellow Wellingtonian Ken Gorby set up this most controversial of museums: Nothing was expected. Germany had nothing to lose. Germany would simply be a nation among nations. Which, after all, is what's it's been seeking to be ever since the end of World War 2.
He has some great descriptions of living in Berlin and of dealing with German bureaucrats. He found them trying sometimes but, even so, he too could be a bit of a pain.
The sight of a middle-aged studio technician in shorts provokes a very stuffed-shirt response: ‘‘The legs have dark marks, bruises maybe, or healing sores of some sort, down around his calves and I find it completely unacceptable that he should display them to us, especially in the studio, which is tiny.''
All good things come to an end, and eventually Cox rejected the offer of permanent directorship. Here, the exile made a heavy landing.
The inner groan when you see that Judy Bailey is still reading the news. We've moved on since then, Nige, but it's hard to disagree with his complaint about the popcorn quality of the TV news and the slick superficiality of the magazines.
Cox saw a nation obsessing itself with material satisfaction: Try to talk politics and you get the reply, ‘‘Come on wanker, get your boat shoes on, get down to the Loaded Hog.''
But it is the chapters on his writing that are the most interesting. I thought ‘‘Waiting for Einstein'' just OK, but ‘‘Dirty Work'' a dutiful trudge. It's interesting to see that he felt it missed the mark too. But he has some great lines about being an aspiring author: ‘‘Writers are the Morris Minors of the careers world, able to run on an oily rag of hope.''
Editor Barrowman concludes the book with a poem, but the penultimate short piece, ‘‘What I Would Have Written'', is the most powerful. Cox talks feelingly about the vapour pieces, the books the cancer denied him writing. It's moving, and a reminder of a promising career cut too short.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
