INTRODUCTIONA. The social contextB. Maurice Gee, novelist

Part A: Social Context•

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Image 4 – 1956

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INTRODUCTION:

Part 1: • Maurice Gee, the writer – background and unique ‘voice’• In My Father’s Den, our novel

KEY VOCABULARY LIST gentility redemption provincial secular prefigure

morality antipathy oppression synopsis social realism

MAURICE GEENew Zealand writer1931 - Maurice Gee, the writer – background and unique ‘voice’ In My Father’s Den, our novel

- born in Whakatane in 1931. - writes adult fiction, children's fiction and television and movie scripts. - has won a number of literary awards- novels include the Plumb Trilogy, Prowlers, The Burning Boy, Going West, Crime Story, and In My Father’s Den – first published 1972 – his third novel.- has written a number of children's novels- short story collections include A Glorious Morning, Comrade and Collected Stories.- now a fulltime writer living in Nelson with his wife Margareta and his two daughters.

Why is Gee an important New Zealand writer?

Source: adapted,abridged, and simplified from an essay by Peter Beatson, Massey University, New Zealand. www.litencyc.com

Maurice Gee is arguably New Zealand’s most significant living novelist, if “significance” is judged by the size, range, historical scope, thematic depth and consistent literary flair…

In a writing career spanning over half a century, he has currently produced 26 books of fiction for adults and children, as well as a number of TV series.

His lifetime’s achievement was recognised in 2003 when he was selected as Icon Artist by the New Zealand Arts Foundation. Overseas, his novel Plumb was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, other recipients including E M Forster, Robert Graves, Graham Green and Salman Rushdie.

At home, Gee is a household name to generations of children whose imaginations have been enriched by his novels for young people, notably the allegorical science fiction trilogy set on the planet O, which rivals the epic fantasy world of C S Lewis’s Narnia chronicles.

What is Gee’s background?

Maurice was the middle of three brothers, and spent his childhood and school years in the small semi-rural town of Henderson, west of Auckland.

His father, Leonard William Gee, was a carpenter and also a champion amateur boxer, who emerged from working class origins to become a successful building contractor. His mother, Harriet Lyndahl Gee, an aspirant creative writer, was one of the 14 children of James and Florence Chapple. Though the Chapples belonged to a more “cultivated” middle class social stratum than the Gees, with Florence in particular setting great store by “gentility”, James was a crusading religious free thinker, pacifist and socialist.

How did his parents influence his values and ideas?

Maurice grew up in a socially hybrid household, his sensitive mother blending genteel middle class manners with a strong social conscience and a literary sensibility, his macho father combining rough working class vitality with capitalist aspirations.

What is the social setting for our novel?

Small town suburban New Zealand in the 1930s – 1960s.

• Look carefully at the following 7 images of New Zealand from this period.

• List what you ‘read’ in the photos of values, social conventions and lifestyle.

(The images are more or less in chronological order: first women, then men. You can find them on the Te Papa Museum of New Zealand web site)

Leading into our novel …

Draw two columns down your page like this:

Maurice Gee’s Style and Ideas

4 KEY QUESTIONS

In My Father’s Den

1. What shaped Gee’s vision as a writer? In his work we often see facets of his parents’ very different

personalities and the Henderson of his childhood, usually under the name “Loomis”, Its alluringly dangerous, eel-infested creek, the site of canoe adventures but also of random death, left particularly strong memories.. (Wadesville (Henderson) is the setting for our novel.)

After gaining an M.A. in English literature and attending Teachers’ Training College in Auckland (1950-54), Gee taught in the small provincial town Paeroa, but … encouraged by the publication of a short story in the literary journal Landfall in 1955, he abandoned the classroom.

Even so, schoolteachers, ranging from the repressive to the inspirational, play important roles in some of his subsequent fiction. (Paul acts as a mentor to his student Celia in our novel).

2. What do his novels focus upon?

Patterns and themes that would shape later books are already there in his first novel The Big Season.

These themes include the tension between family members, violence as an unavoidable fact of life, social constraint and inner freedom. (Paul/ Andrew; Celia’s murder; The Mother/ the den/ Paul)

Gee's literary breakthrough came with the publication of "the trilogy". Plumb (1978), Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983) provide a broadly conceived image of life in New Zealand over three generations, with Plumb widely considered one of New Zealand's finest novels.

Gee may be considered a ‘social historian’ for the insight his novels give into how New Zealanders have thought and behaved over the last fifty years.

3. What are some of Gee’s recurrent early themes with links to our novel? His short stories were published together in Collected Stories

(1986) …prefigures many of the character types, motifs and themes that were developed more fully in his later novels. These include class antipathies, the destructive tensions of married life, the subterranean psychic pressures that erupt in acts of chilling violence, the permeable membrane between sanity and dementia, and the conflict between repressive social codes and sensual or imaginative vitality. (The motives for Celia’s murder/ Paul and his father’s desire to escape moral oppression, even if only in the world of the imagination/books).

During this decade Gee also wrote his two apprentice novels – The Big Season (1962) and A Special Flower (1965). The former explores the rebellion of the young man Rob Andrews against the claustrophobic middle class morality of small town New Zealand in the 1950s, along with its secular religion of rugby. (Paul and Celia’s relationship; the ‘vigilante’ squad, Andrew and Penelope)

4. What has Gee shown us about ourselves through his writing?

As a social realist, he has mapped New Zealand’s evolving social pattern from the semi-rural, provincial backwater of his childhood years to today’s cosmopolitan consumer society. (Paul’s ‘freer’ sexual morality, Celia’s longing to travel.)

His evocation of the spirit of place is equally grounded in the meticulously observed natural and social realities of the Auckland, Wellington and Nelson regions where most of his fiction is set. (Wadesville, semi-rural Auckland suburb 1930s – 1960s in our novel: the landscape, the small town attitudes, & the growing impact of social change).