The God Boy.

Cross, Ian

(A lecture delivered to Stage 1 English students at the University of Otago on 20 September 1962)

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to this in a way, because, for the first time in regard to The Gad Bay, I feel a certain sense of justification, in that it is not a big book. It should not take up too much of your time. But hitherto one of the things I have had against the book was that one very callous reviewer actually described it thus: that it is a little book. Now I have an ambition, which I still cherish, that is, to write a big book, about six or seven pounds in weight. And one of my more aggressive fantasies (and I have quite a few) concerns an incident in which someone hits somebody else with my big book and renders him unconscious, with just one blow. Because it is never a real pleasure to an author to be told that the reader couldn't put the book down, because he really likes to be told, and his real ambition is to be told, that the book is so big that they couldn't pick it up!

If it is any consolation to you, I might as well tell you that in preparing a few notes for this talk, I had to read The Gad Bay myself, But it is true that most people believe that an author carries his book about in his head, that he is more or less an embodiment of his book, especially of course when you use the autobiographical technique. Invariably they want to discuss it with him. When they want to discuss it with him, they have just finished reading it, and it is rather embarrassing to have to admit to such people that one has forgotten this point or that point. But it is true that in the actual process of writing, one is, of course, deeply concerned with the incidents, the events, and the characters of the novel. Not emotionally concerned, believe it or not, because you only write well, or begin to write well, or hopefully write well, if you are extremely cold-blooded about it. But nevertheless at the moment of writing you are completely dedicated. But once the book is done, once it is finished, the writer forgets about it. The book that was once more real to him than the world about him almost vanishes. The forgetfulness can in fact be almost total. Somebody said (I can't remember the name--it was another writer) that he wrote his stories in order to forget about them, and this I suspect is a general truth about a lot of writers. I didn't know this when I wrote The God Boy, being a little unused to the fact of even being considered a writer, and I once made a rather embarrassing mistake. It [concerned] an American who attempted to adapt the book for purposes of a stage play, submitted the script, and I liked it very much; and in writing to him about it I complimented him on his dialogue, because I thought that this was something he had contributed, and I really felt that he had entered into the spirit of The Boy and had really put what that Boy would say and do. He wrote back to me, and he was very nice about it, but he quoted me the page from which the particular passage of dialogue came. And honestly I had [forgotten]. However, I have been very careful in preparing for you, or fairly careful, and I have read The God Boy for the first time in about four years. But before I leave this point, I should add that if you could look into an author's mind, you'd never never find in that mind the books or the stories he has written. You will find there the books and the stories that he may one day write. So, Jimmy Sullivan and I are long since separated, and I view his fate with a complete detachment.

But going back to the book, I thought I should consider first, because it is not without interest, the technical approach I made, and give you some of the personal experience I had in writing the book, or attempting to come to grips with the theme. But first I should make this point, that a writer, when he decides on his story, or decides he is going to tell a story, must have a sense of his relationship to the story he is telling. He is, in fact, the means by which the reader sees the story, sees the characters, observes their action, and so his position in regard to this is very, very important. It is an elementary mechanic, but in exercising it, it can often (this mechanic) determine your success or failure with the story. I am rather preoccupied with this point, especially in regard to The God Bay, because it worked. It was a mechanical contrivance that allowed me to come to grips with my theme.

An author can play God to his characters and the action; that is, he can stand above the whole action and with omniscient power see into the mental processes of the characters, and record what he chooses to record from his omniscient vision for the purposes of his story. You know the stories [where] the author shifts from one mind to another. He can tell you what Anna is thinking one moment, and what Bill is thinking another moment. He can detach himself so far from the scene of an action he seems almost in orbit above it, so far, so panoramic, is his view of the whole scene. Tolstoy, of course, would give you that kind of panorama. This is an omniscient point of view.

The more usual one is the one in which the writer stands beside the characters, stands at a character's shoulder, and more or less sees everything from that point, the point of view of his central character. But he does not wholly identify himself with the character. He leaves himself plenty of elbow room to manoeuvre, to occasionally intrude a fact that would be perhaps beyond that character's observation.

The writer can [also] step inside the character and be that character-and this is the method of The God Boy. He must record the action as that character would record it, and what comments he makes, he must make in the terms and proper action of his character.

Of course, the writer can also be extremely detached and clinical about his characters. He can stand back from them and merely observe the externals of actions, record what he sees and what he hears, and nothing more. He never enters into the mental processes of his characters, or never offers explanations of why his characters did this or did that, or why they said this or said that. It is up to the reader to supply that judgement, to read the lessons between the lines, so to speak.

There is a fifth method, in which the author is present as the author, that is rarely used now. I merely give you a quick skimming over that, because on these basics and their combinations (which can get up to about fifteen to twenty)--these are the points by which an author more or less walks around his story, settles 'I'll take it from this angle', and by remaining constant to that vision he can free his story, he can give the reader a grandstand view of the action.

Now I wrote The God Boy as a short story. I would say a very bad short story. It was a story about a boy who was given a bicycle by his father just as he was about to leave for school. You'll see the nucleus of the novel there. Excited, he called to his mother, and, in the very brief scene that followed--I was externalising, I was only recording what could be seen and what could be heard, nothing more--the mother and father demonstrated a bitter hatred for each other, and the boy got on his bike and made his way to school. That was--and, oh yes! it should have been between the lines, and one hoped that the reader gathered this, that the reader should have been aware that the boy would never, never, never have any regard or any joy in the gift of the bike--this detached point of view, although more or less from the boy's angle, in concerning itself with externals only, made a pretty bare story. It was in fact quite hopeless. It is a big mistake to think that a writer always likes what he does. Sometimes he is very disappointed with his efforts, even more disappointed sometimes than his readers. In this case I can remember very distinctly (I didn't really regard myself as a writer at this time), I jiggled the story around, and it didn't work. There was something wrong. I sensed that there was something there that I wasn't getting.

And then--actually, to the extent that The God Boy is a contribution to New Zealand literature, one could say at least that television has helped--because one night on television (remember I was at Harvard University at this time and living in Boston) I saw a short play based on Sherwood Anderson's story called 'I'm a Fool'. A sixteen or seventeen year old boy looked directly at the camera and began to recount an incident concerning a girl--the recurrent theme was 'I'm a fool'--and he stood before the camera, began to tell his story, and then the camera faded into the actions of the story, and it lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes. The camera returned to this adolescent, and he wound up the story. He told the story in his own language, or introduced the story in his own language, concluded it in his own language from his own point of view. It was extremely well done. As a matter of fact (probably he doesn't belong to your generation any longer), the boy who played that role was James Dean, the American actor, who was later killed. Anyway, I remember thinking, my goodness, this might be a way to fix--I don't think the boy was called Jimmy Sullivan then--this might be a way to fix that short story that just doesn't work.

I rolled some paper into my typewriter (it would be sometime in the next few days), and experimented for about ten minutes. I saw then that it could work, but the story, while it was going to improve a good deal, still wouldn't add up to a great deal. In considering, or coping with the situation of the boy caught between the conflict of his parents, I still sensed a wider situation than was encompassed in the original story. But, somewhat contradictorily, I couldn't tell the story, because the confounded boy was not, could not know all that I knew, and I thought of returning to the God-like point of view. But by doing that I would immediately--even though I had first explored the situation through the boy's mind--I would immediately lose the freshness, and, it seemed to me, the life in that story. And it was then that I decided to have my cake and to eat it too. I would have the boy tell his own story, but in such a way that the reader could take an adult view. In other words I would give the story a double focus. The mechanical difficulty then--and this is really, I am telling you trade union secrets, I think-the mechanical difficulty then was always to have a good reason for the boy dwelling on an incident, the primary purpose of which was to provide the reader with other essential information beyond the boy's comprehension. And I did the sequence--I remember I tried the sequence as an experiment--and it worked; I tried the sequence of the abortionist coming to the house, and it worked. And I knew that I had my novel.

I left it at that point. I think it was packed away when I left Boston and came back to New Zealand, and the story remained in the luggage somewhere, and some months after my return, I dug out the manuscript and resumed work.

I originally had planned that the boy in telling his story should be in an institution, because I thought that he would kill his father. I thought that in this situation the boy would actually make the demonstration, would in fact resort to violence. But as I worked on it, I could see that the boy's guilt would be an assumed burden. And I also saw--it came to me because of what was at first born of a simple blasphemous expression--it came to me that this whole area--I forget what the expression was, something in relation to God, it's just one sentence-that this could be a whole area for exploration in that the boy was in fact a rebellious son of God.

Now I won't discuss the main theme of the book simply because I couldn't do it very effectively this way. You must realise that the writer expresses himself in fictional terms. He's forced to express himself in fictional terms, because it is the only way he can communicate with people. My meaning--if you like to label it in that terrible way: my message--I have expressed in fiction, and I would never, never attempt to express it in any other way. Because I couldn't! Nevertheless, I would like to discuss one or two aspects of the book that interest me as an author.

In the first place, the method. Frankly, on rereading the book, I must confess that I had a feeling that I was very, very lucky indeed to get away with it! And now, four or five years later, and almost prepared to consider myself an experienced writer--and I'm not, anyway I like to think I know a good deal more about writing--I think if I was in the same position now, I wouldn't try it like that. The God Boy was a true first novel in a sense that it was done out of sheer ignorance of the difficulties, and motivated purely by desire to get to a meaning, and to express this meaning. When a writer is in the grip of such a feeling, he takes risks. Well, I finished the book, I can remember, back in New Zealand, and I reworked it a little, and I thought, 'Well, I like it. It pleases me all right, but I don't think it is going to please anyone else.' Still, in ignorance, I wrapped it up, and sent it off to a publisher, and they wrote back and said, 'Yes, we like it! We will publish it! But you have neglected to give us a title.' And I had! However, it was always obvious to me what the title was, and I would like later on to give you my reasons for calling it The God Boy.

I have no doubt you have already spotted the reasons. And this must be a personal statement between us--I'll continue to talk about myself. I think I am a colonial writer; that is, I must find means of expression that are natural to me and the people I want to write about. This inevitably, I am afraid--no, I'm not afraid, I'm pleased--gives me a strong sense of kinship with a group of American writers. Writers are highly individualistic, and yet they belong in groups, and it is impossible for me not to feel a brother to Americans, because I share the same problems and the same experience as a colonial people--to a certain group of Americans, I mean. Perhaps I can help you understand that by picking up Thomas Wolfe and reading this, because here he is talking of himself as a writer, and saying exactly what is true of a young New Zealander who tries to write: 'I don't know when it occurred to me first that I would be a writer. I suppose that, like a great many other children in this country of my generation, I may have thought that it would be a fine thing, because a writer was a man like Lord Byron or Lord Tennyson or Longfellow or Percy Bysshe Shelley--a writer was a man who was far away like these people I have mentioned; and, since I myself, an American, and an American not of the wealthy or the university-going sort of people, it seemed to me that a writer was a man from a kind of remote people that I could never approach'. Now, in that paragraph Thomas Wolfe has really given you, I think, the life story of perhaps two or three hundred other writers, and most of them (except perhaps the prominent provincial Englishmen), most of them would be colonial writers. Because I have always had this sense of a distance, being away, being detached, being lost in a corner; and writers were these people, the Shelleys, the Byrons, Thomas Hardy perhaps. But you'll understand that when I read Thomas Wolfe I say: 'There is my brother'. And I mentioned Sherwood Anderson and the story 'I'm a Fool'. Hearing him talk was just like hearing another brother talk. Here's a passage from 'I'm a Fool' just to give you an idea:

 Then Wilbur and his girl went away up the beach and Lucy and 1 sat
 down in a dark place, where there was some roots of old trees, the
 water had washed up, and after that the time, till we had to go
 back in the launch and they had to catch their trains, wasn't
 nothing at all. It went like winking your eye.

 Here's how it was. The place we were setting in was dark, like I
 said, and there was the roots of the old stump sticking up like
 arms, and there was a watery smell, and the night was like--if you
 could put your hand out and feel it--so warm and soft and dark and
 sweet like an orange.

I am giving you these quotes to allow you to get, I think, The God Boy in context and in reference within contemporary writing. You could think of Ring Lardner, the American of the 1920s, in his short story You Know Me Al:

 I says No I am talking about babys. He says Oh, I thought you was
 talking about ice cream soda or something. I says No I want you to
 come over to the flat tomorrow and take a look at my kid and tell
 me what you think of him. He says I can tell you what I think of
 him without taking no look at him. I think he is out of luck. I
 says What do you mean out of luck. But he just laughed and would
 not say no more.

Of course, it's always consoling to an author, you know, to look over his shoulder for support, and I think really that these little books here are in this context a kind of protection trick. But it was Ernest Hemingway who learned a lot from Sherwood Anderson, as he demonstrates in his short story 'My Old Man', which he simply starts out like this:

 I guess looking at it, now, my old man was cut out for a fat guy,
 one of those regular little roly-poly fat guys you see around, but
 he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and
 then it wasn't his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he
 could afford to carry plenty of weight then.

So there is plenty of precedent there for you if you want to look for precedents and derivations in that group of American writers or colonial writers--perhaps American is a term that we should beware of. Truman Capote, Salinger, oh, there are a dozen of them, or half a dozen of them in this century, that have been particularly good, and they all go back, of course, to Mark Twain. But Mark Twain, of course, in his Huckleberry Finn. I won't quote it to you because it is the same kind of stuff. Mark Twain, of course, had his predecessors, and you would have to go back to England, and perhaps to Daniel Defoe and Moll Flanders. I sometimes wonder whether there is some kind of connection between a journalist in literature and the use of this particular form of writing. Of course, this liberation, this means of finding a formula to express what has perhaps not quite been expressed before, does not merely result in the chronicles of the young, or semiliterate, semi-educated. It is spilled, the influence is spilled over the entire scene, and its use certainly does not permit the writer to be artless or formless. It can make very great demands on whatever skill he has got. Rather interesting, when you consider these American provincial writers and their influence. You can now spot it in the writings of young English writers who are coming up from the lower middle class or middle class. I am thinking of Stan Barstow, John Braine. You can see that they were influenced by Thomas Wolfe, Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and that they too have found it a way out for them to say something that previously there seemed to be no other way of saying.

It is commonly assumed that the colonial--the colonial American, Australian, South African, New Zealander--speaks the English language with a kind of provincial variation, that is significant only as a colloquial phenomenon. This is all very well, but it goes deeper than that. I think it is concerned with our responses to what we have seen and heard since the day we were born, that language is not a fixed order of words imported from the other side of the globe. We must do something with it, and, in doing something with it, we must start with the way people use it here. It was this belief that allows Jimmy Sullivan finally to take some sort of life.

Now [for] some aspects of the book. As I've said, I am not going to cope with the main theme, but I'd like to mention a couple of aspects which interested me--and if I say anything that contradicts your lecturers please assume that I am wrong.

The title of The God Boy. Why I am mentioning this, is that a lot of people who have reviewed this book, or written about it, don't seem to have made this point. On page 41[42], you will find Jimmy Sullivan unconsciously already aware of his role. (1) The very simple form: he was called out by the nun; he has been inattentive, and he says this [with Cross's comments in parentheses]:

 I went out, feeling somehow pleased with what was going to happen.
 I was being looked at by everybody, even Jesus with His bleeding
 heart seemed to be looking, and the windows on the side walls, they
 were not looking out, they were looking in, and at me. (He's not
 that conceited and egocentric, this boy.) I got as much kick out of
 it as Jesus did at the Crucifixion. (You see he's all--I mean--oh
 well, we'll go on.) By holding your hand high, you could cut off a
 lot of the force out of the strap, but I held my hand low. She
 swung the strap over her shoulder and slapped it down hard. My hand
 stung, and felt as though it was scorched. She hit me once more,
 and then dropped her arm, the strap dangling in her grip.

And he says 'Go on, hit me again', or says in his own mind 'Hit me again. I'll keep on holding out my hand'. You will note that Jimmy is willing to accept pain as a kind of atonement for the sins of his little world. He is beginning to fulfil his God boy role when he holds his hand low.

And of course on page 105 [99], he announces it again quite unconsciously:

 'I'm a God boy, Sister,' I said. 'You don't have to worry about me.
 I'm a God boy.' Now where that came from I don't know.

You see, he is a victim of forces operating. And he repeats it, tries to explain it, but doesn't quite. But you'll notice in his long [explanation]--or fairly long for him, for Jimmy doesn't explain too much about himself directly to other persons; he never really wants to communicate his feelings (you'll notice that it is really a paraphrase, not a conscious one at the time)--his own interpretation of why he is called the God boy is pretty well an extension of Saint Paul, who says that whom God loves, God chastens. The point about Jimmy is that he was speaking more truth about himself than he realised, but the Jesus Christ theme is maintained on pages 148 and 149 [135], and it is almost explicit at this point in his dream. He has the dream in which the web sticks to his hands and legs and (here we go):

 Then I was slowly lifted up until my feet were off the ground and
 my arms were stretched wide out. There was a tugging at my wrists.
 I tried to struggle and kick my way out but it was no use. I let
 myself hang and waited.

This crucifixion motif, if you like to call it, is continued on, or reiterated on page 185 [166-7]. And it's the point, it's the constant point about this protection trick of his. And it really worked here! You will notice that after he is conscious of this great evil that has befallen his home, he moves up out of the room, struggles down the passage, 'I had both my hands on the wallpaper on one side and sort of slithered forward. I was moving darn quickly even though I felt I weighed a ton, and my throat was choked and my chest heaved up and down ...'. He gets into the bathroom, he puts his hands underneath the hot water, and here we get this:

 I spouted out 'Hail Mary, full of grace' and so on, because now the
 marble feeling was on top of my head and filling in my ears, and
 propped both my arms out. Funny, I'm sure there was no feeling at
 first, for I was on the 'blessed is the fruit of thy womb' part
 (and of course he is talking of Mary)--when the back of my hands
 and wrists caught fire.

So, again we have the God boy role, the true son of God role fulfilled. Now, of course, these are trade union secrets. There is no need really to have observed this in reading the book. If it was overstated, it would have spoilt the book.

You must remember too--and this is a little less explicit, and some people have complained, or expressed a bit of dismay about that reference of Jimmy to God--the blasphemous references, if you like, were really variations on the theme of Jesus Christ on the Cross: 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' [Matthew xxvii 46]. And, finally, very dimly, Jimmy at the end of the book still accepts his role. Now, I'm inclined to think perhaps I did not put that across too well.

You'll notice that the bike theme continues. It is one of the things that holds the ... that gives the book a coherence, and it is maintained right throughout the novel. This is the burden of guilt that he is willing to carry for everything that has happened to him ... [END OF TAPE ONE; TAPE TWO BEGINS] ... vision of Jesus Christ. At page 156[142] he is walking with his mother, and starts to talk to her. He says 'Mum, is it all right my having the bike?' She doesn't answer, so he asks her again. 'Oh, yes, that', she said. He's worried. On page 186 [167-8], you get his last glimpse of the house. Remember Father Gilligan comes in, picks him up, carries him:

 Even in all the hurting, it came to me as I bounced around on
 Father's shoulder that I was being taken away from home, so I
 opened my eyes and took a quick look back before my hands made me
 cry again. All I saw was that big policeman standing at the back of
 the house holding that bike and staring at me.

And then the real purpose, or the author's purpose, in that final scene with the nun--and you see you can't, when you are handling these things, you can't, you mustn't, you've got to handle it very gently, because once you become over explicit, once you become obvious, once your mechanics show, you are writing badly--the final scene with that nun. He is deliberating. He sits down with Sister Francis. And in just one sentence he finally assumes--not finally assumes-he assumes (the book states), perhaps for ever, his function as Jesus Christ in relation to that little world of his: 'All that green grass, the convent itself looking so big, the animals and trees and all that kind of farm stuff--they were all spread out around us. Sister Francis patted her old face with a handkerchief ...' And she, Sister Francis, had tried to talk about something with him that he refused to. 'I said it was all right by me, and away she went, while I sat there thinking of Mum and Dad, and why on earth I had ever wanted a bike.' And there was Jimmy, to me, maintaining his role to the bitter end.

I don't want to say anything more about the book. I think I'll let you out early tonight. Short books need short talks perhaps. But I merely wanted to give you a sense that there is an author behind the book; that sometimes he is working very, very hard indeed. Now, if he is caught, if he is caught working, I say he is not writing very well at all. But the effects he produces, the manipulations he makes, must not seem contrived, or awkward. They must not seem mechanical. They must be valid not only in terms of fiction. I like to think valid in terms of life and very truth itself. I hope the book said something to you. A writer expresses himself best by his fiction, and I think that if you read the book, even if you don't like it, I will be content with that, and say no more. Thanks very much!

[This text is based on a tape recording made on the occasion of Mr Cross's lecture. The following year a transcript, typed by E. W. Moodie and edited by R. T. Robertson, was deposited in the Hocken Library, Dunedin, together with other related material from the author. (This included a typescript draft of The God Bay with manuscript alterations, marked 'Not to be used without the Librarian's express permission'.) In May 1991 this transcript was re-edited for publication by Keith Maslen, who had attended the original lecture. This involved listening to the two reels of old tape, with the assistance of Mr Ray Bretherton of the University of Otago Higher Education Development Centre--the tapes are held in the Department of English--checking the quotations from The God Boy, and supplying punctuation and paragraph divisions. The quotations from Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and Hemingway have been checked in order to supply punctuation, but are given as Mr Cross spoke them. A very few verbal editorial additions are put in square brackets. The aim has been to retain the informal character of spoken delivery. The author's permission to publish is gratefully acknowledged.]

Notes

(1.) Ian Cross's references are to the 1958 edition, published by Andre Deutsch, but for the reader's convenience the page numbers of the New Zealand Whitcombe and Tombs 1972, edition are supplied in square brackets