Deep South v.3. n.2. (Winter 1997)
Paddy Hogan is the amoral protagonist of Travelling Man,
Jack McClenaghan's novel about the Depression in New Zealand.[1]
Violent, and showing scant regard for the niceties of conventionally
approved behaviour, Hogan resembles the Tough Guys of American
and European crime fiction of the 1930s. He even speaks a New
Zealand version of Hemingway's Tough Guy idiom. Yet Hogan is not
a New Zealand gangster, and McClenaghan is not the James Hadley
Chase of the Antipodes.
At first glance the difference between Hogan and most of the
Men Alone who populate New Zealand's fiction seems an extension
of the difference between the early narratives in which the protagonists
are conventionally rewarded or punished according to their virtue
and the later narratives in which the characters' behaviour is
not explicitly judged. Unlike most of the narratives that have
emerged from New Zealand's Man Alone tradition, McClenaghan's
novel seems to disregard the convention (which the early writers
borrowed from their Victorian models) that society will punish
those who rebel against it, particularly when that rebellion leads
to murder. It also seems to ignore the convention that fellowship
is essential for survival. In the place of these customary assumptions
and the behaviour they entail, Travelling Man appears to
admit Hogan's amoral and violent behaviour.
I suggest that Travelling Man seems to disregard
conventions and appears to accept Hogan's amoral conduct
because McClenaghan's attitude towards his protagonist is hard
to ascertain. Like Hemingway, whose To Have and Have Not
commentators consider to be one of the most influential of the
Tough Guy novels, McClenaghan intentionally distances himself
from his protagonist. Hence, McClenaghan never uses the authorial
voice to assert his point of view, and he never allows the third
person narrator to expound on Hogan's behaviour.[2] The only
source of information about Hogan is Hogan himself. Yet according
to Frank Sargeson, "it is impossible for any serious novelist
to finish his story without letting you know (at any rate, implicitly),
that he has judged his characters".[3] Hemingway, for
instance, judged the characters he created according to a code
based on his perception that, given the nada (or nothingness)
at the centre of existence, conventionally moral behaviour is
meaningless. In an imperfect world, according to Hemingway's code,
his heroes act toughly and do not deceive themselves. McClenaghan,
by contrast, seems to ironically measure his protagonist's tough
behaviour against the powerful conventions governing law and order
which Hogan ignores, thereby hinting that Hogan's toughness will
not save him from society's retribution.
According to Lawrence Jones, writers adjusted the Man Alone's
experience to emphasise the different concerns of different periods.[4]
As in nearly all New Zealand's Man and Woman Alone narratives,
Hogan undertakes a conventional learning journey: as a farm and
road labourer, bootleg whisky deliverer, and swagman, he travels
the length of New Zealand during the Depression, observing conditions
and interpreting what he sees. Traditionally, Hogan's journey
would lead either to his successful reintegration into society,
as it does for Raleigh in George Chamier's Philosopher Dick:
Adventures and Contemplations of a New Zealand Shepherd[5]
or to his death, as it does for Manning, whose unredeemed anti-social
behaviour leads to his suicide, in John O'Shea's 1964 film Runaway.[6]
Bill, in Frank Sargeson's That Summer[7] and Johnson,
in John Mulgan's 1939 novel, Man Alone,[8] are also
Men Alone, yet their experiences emphasise a different concern:
during the Depression the inevitability and persistence of the
economic hardship they endure implicitly debunks the aspects of
the Myth of Progress which are sustained by William Satchell's
novel, The Land of the Lost: A Tale of the New Zealand Gum
Country, published in 1902.[9] Thus, unlike Satchell's
protagonist who becomes part of settler society when he sets himself
on the conventional path towards prosperity by planning to marry
and raise a family, Bill and Johnson cannot join conventional
society and cannot achieve prosperity. Yet they are not completely
separated from New Zealand's Victorian conventions: in an indifferent
universe, they still assume that fellowship makes life bearable.
Travelling Man was written nearly forty years after Man
Alone and has a different emphasis: its protagonist emerged
from the postwar era when the debunking of the Myth of Progress
had widened to a challenging of many more of the moral verities
left over from the previous century. Unlike Bill and Johnson who
often ignored society's rules but still believed in kindness and
fellowship, Hogan is violent and incapable of being anyone's mate.
The emphasis in McClenaghan's novel seems to be on how an individual
survives in an indifferent universe where one cannot depend on
the intervention of a benevolent Creator, where conventions hold
only a doubtful validity, and where people are alienated from
society and from each other.
According to Sheldon Grebstein in his essay "The Tough Hemingway
and His Hard-Boiled Children", the American Tough Guy is
the literary descendant of James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bummpo,
Herman Melville's Ahab, and Jack London's Wolf Larsen. All of
these characters
are physically hard and emotionally tough. All are supremely
adept at their crafts. All espouse objectives which frequently
do not square with conventional moral norms but which are admirable
nonetheless. All are pragmatists who employ questionable means
towards desirable ends. In the Darwinian terminology, they are
superbly equipped in the struggle for existence; in the Nietzschean,
they practise a Master rather than a Slave morality.[10]
Lawrence Jones' earlier comment about the evolution of the Man
Alone helps to explain the difference between Bill, Johnson, and
Hogan. Hogan does not unequivocally espouse any socially admirable
objectives. Yet in his travels throughout New Zealand he resembles
the larger-than-life literary figures described above, these supermen,
more closely than he does the moderate Bill and Johnson and their
forebears. Thus while Bill and Johnson drift from job to job,
careful to avoid trouble, Hogan's manner is always opportunistic
and sometimes aggressive or vengeful. While Bill is philosophical
about the money which his seeming friends steal from him at the
beach, and while Johnson does not want to fight with Stenning
about Rua or to punish her for her involvement in Stenning's accidental
death, Hogan is eager to retaliate against the people he feels
have thwarted or injured him. In That Summer and Man
Alone there is an implicit search for a meaningful moral code
which is fulfilled when Bill steals milk money to support his
friend Terry or when Johnson is able, through fellowship with
other soldiers, to transcend the hopelessness of his position
as an evacuee. In Travelling Man, by contrast, Hogan neither
thinks nor acts on thoughts about fellowship and the moral code
it implies.
The absence of a system of values based on fellowship becomes
obvious when I compare Travelling Man to Guthrie Wilson's
The Feared and the Fearless[11] and Strip Jack Naked.[12]
When Il Brutto in The Feared and the Fearless kills many
of the people who threaten to curtail his freedom Wilson's careful
exposition of his past promotes the idea that, because Il Brutto's
personality has been altered by a severe head injury, he is not
responsible for his psychotic behaviour. Jack in Strip Jack
Naked is also violent. His deprived childhood is the plausible
cause. Yet Wilson's displacement of his characters' personal
responsibility on to their environment does not mitigate their
fate: Il Brutto and Jack will die because, when they killed others,
both overstepped the boundary of socially acceptable behaviour.
When in his essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish" George
Orwell contrasts the ethical values implicit in E. W. Hornung's
Raffles, a Thief in the Night (published in 1900) to those
of No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (published
in 1939), he comes to the conclusion that Hornung's novel is governed
by powerful taboos and that Chase's is not.[13] For example,
although Raffles is a thief, he redeems his honour when he dies
for King and Country in the Boer War. Chase's novel, by contrast,
with its emphasis on perversion and murder, "takes for granted
the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human
behaviour". A similar distinction may be made between The
Feared and the Fearless and Strip Jack Naked and Travelling
Man. Wilson's novels imply moral judgements about Il Brutto
and Jack when both are killed by the police. In McClenaghan's,
however, Hogan's crimes seem to go unpunished.
In the following excerpt Hogan's observations of a small rural
town resemble Johnson's implicit debunking of the myth that those
who are virtuous and hard-working will be rewarded with material
prosperity. Yet the seeming lack of ethical values which distinguishes
McClenaghan's novel from Wilson's will also distinguish it from
Mulgan's Man Alone.
The more [Hogan] saw of it, the more the area depressed him.
There was no open space, only high hills and open valleys, and
although it was young country it had an old, worn out look. The
fences sagged, as if the effort of climbing the hills was too
much; and in the small settlements, timber mills in the main,
box-like houses huddled together, forlorn shelters that needed
attention but never got it.
In the next paragraph Ned, a bootleg whisky distributor who contrary
to the myth prospers even though his activities are distinctly
criminal, describes the same area optimistically. When Turncott,
one of Hogan's work and travel companions, ironically remarks
on the unreality of Ned's hopes, the myth's groundlessness becomes
even more apparent:
`The good thing about this place is the people .... They have
to be real battlers, otherwise they wouldn't take this country
on. They'll never do much more than scratch a living out of it,
but one day it will come right.'
`We'll all be under the sod by then,' said Turncott sourly.[14]
Despite a similar starting point (that is, both novelists intend
to debunk the Myth of Progress), as Johnson and Hogan grow more
aware of social conditions their awareness does not lead them
to similar conclusions or actions. Johnson's involvement in the
Queen Street riots and the civil war in Spain turns him into a
hero, one who stoically endures hardship in the company of fellow
soldiers, the ideal Man Alone "you can't kill".[15]
Although McClenaghan's protagonist is also a survivor, his behaviour
is hardly that of a hero. Early in Travelling Man Hogan
sets alight the scrub which he and Turncott have been employed
to cut: he wants to punish the farmer who has pushed them to work
harder and harder before terminating their employment because
they could not work hard enough. Hogan is pleased at the thought
of the farmer scrambling up the hill to escape the fire and is
unconcerned about his survival. When their next job--the delivery
of bootleg whisky--leads to the death of a pursuing policeman,
Hogan and Turncott go their separate ways. Although they have
travelled and worked together for some time, they part without
regret because individual survival is more important to them than
any sense of mateship. Hogan's lack of concern about others becomes
even more apparent later, in Invercargill, when he plans to start
a romance with a young woman even though he will maintain sexual
relations with the widow who gave him a home and then helped him
find work on the Hollyford Road. When the widow discovers Hogan's
intended infidelity and remonstrates, he beats her and leaves.
The novel's title and dust jacket illustration emphasise Hogan's
penchant for moving on when circumstances do not favour his satisfaction.
Underneath the bold, stencilled lettering of Travelling Man
is a trail of footsteps across the necks and torsos of women which
the subtitle, A New Zealand Novel, identifies with the
New Zealand terrain. As Hogan walks over the women who lie passively
in his path, the illustration identifies him as one of New Zealand's
most misogynistic Men Alone. Unlike Raleigh who will begin Philosopher
Dick as alienated from conventional society but will end by
marrying into it, or Johnson who in Man Alone will remain
alienated from women but will still manage to survive with a
few male friends, even unlike Manning in Runaway whose
lonely death sustains the convention that fellowship is necessary
for survival, Hogan will survive even as he continues to hurt
others with his amoral behaviour.
Like Johnson, Hogan is involved in the Queen Street riots. They
react very differently to them, however. Johnson is caught up
in the riots by chance while attending a street rally about unemployment.
By the end of the novel he has come to the conclusion that any
economic system that forces men to work uselessly for a pittance
will cause them to revolt. Hogan, by contrast, actually starts
the Queen Street riots. Unlike Johnson, he does not see them as
a sign of men "going forward together".[16] Nor does
the looting convey a message to him about the consequences of
exploitation. Instead, the rioting and looting indicate to Hogan
that violence and greed are commonplace. As Hogan remarks to Marie,
his companion at the riot, "everyone out there tonight enjoyed
smashing all those windows and pinching what they could".[17]
As is obvious in this next passage, in Mulgan's version of the
riot Johnson does not take part in the looting but fights for
his friend Scotty who is being beaten by a police officer:
Johnson was angry now. He was angered by the brutal blow he had
seen, in all that evening's brutality, and angered, too, to think
that of the few who would be picked out and punished for all that
night's work, one of them must be Scotty, the small, the stupid,
at heart the inoffensive.[18]
That Hogan is more concerned with self-preservation becomes apparent
when he allows himself to be seconded to the Specials: he does
not want to join this group of civilians in their efforts to control
the rioters, but he will in order to avoid trouble with the police.
During the second night of rioting, however, Marie seriously injures
him for joining the Specials rather than remaining faithful to
the cause of the unemployed. The novel ends with Hogan just out
of the hospital and planning to inform the police that she has
looted a fur coat.
Keeping in mind that Travelling Man is clearly a Man Alone
narrative and that nearly all of New Zealand's Man Alone narratives
judge their protagonists according to a set of conventions which
proceed from the assumption that community is better than anarchy,
it is reasonable to suggest that even though McClenaghan's attitude
towards his protagonist is less apparent than Chamier's is to
Raleigh or Mulgan's is to Johnson, McClenaghan does imply a judgement
of Hogan's behaviour. In this passage, for example, Hogan's attempt
to interpret all that has happened to him outlines the journey
from ignorance to awareness which Johnson travels in Man Alone:
A funny thing, all those adventures he'd had; no one could possibly
have predicted them, the scrub cutting, the dropping, the work
on the Hollyford road, on the swag in Central Otago, looting
one night and fighting the looters the next.
One adventure after the next, but without a pattern. It had
been a sort of jellyfish existence in which he had been content
to be carried along by events and had never tried very hard to
swim against them.
All those experiences, however, did something to a man. They
were changing him. Did that happen to every man? Did they all
have their life and their very being shaped against their will?
Did no one really have the power to say what sort of man he would
be?[19]
If Hogan could ask himself the questions recorded in the excerpt
above, perhaps, like Johnson, he would also learn to take responsibility
for his destiny. But in fact, he does not. Instead the passage
above introduces a subtle and ironic debunking of the notion that
he could be changed by his travels. The narrator does not explicitly
comment on the discrepancy between Hogan's meditations and his
behaviour, but the ironic juxtaposition of his contradictory thoughts
and actions does provide a compelling (if silent) commentary.
For example, Hogan explains to Turncott near the end of the novel
why he has refused an offer of employment with a prosperous businessman:
"`I've learned not to get too involved. As far as I can see
... there is no sense in beating your heart out or your guts out,
for anything'".[20] Ironically, he has just been released
from hospital after his involvement with Marie and the unemployed
have led to his severe wounding. Despite his avowed intention
to avoid involvement, Hogan has decided that he would rather support
unionised labour than the owners who think that they can hire
and fire workers casually. Yet when Hogan says "I might get
mixed up with them", referring to the unions, it is not wholly
because he is interested in improving conditions for the ordinary
worker: in the new order anticipated by Savage, unions will hold
more power than the owners. McClenaghan treats Hogan's vengeful
thoughts just as ironically: after Hogan has decided to work with
the trade unions to better employment conditions, he ponders the
punishment he will impose on Marie who, aside from putting him
in hospital, believes passionately in workers' rights.
In summary, although Travelling Man has emerged from the
Man Alone tradition, Hogan is not a traditional Man Alone because
his travels do not end with his rejoining of society. He is not
a Man Alone like Bill or Johnson, either, because he does not
learn to appreciate the value of even their limited kind of fellowship.
An ironic reading of Hogan as a Tough Guy who is tough yet handicapped
by his limited self-awareness may be possible, yet such a reading
is problematical because it is only near the end of the novel
that McClenaghan hints that Hogan's ethos may restrict his options.
Such a reading also assumes an authorial stance where, in fact,
one may not have been intended.
A more certain conclusion may be reached by comparing Travelling
Man to an earlier novel written by McClenaghan. In Moving
Target Dougherty, the protagonist, runs away from representatives
of the New Zealand government because he has been drafted into
the Army to fight in the Second World War.[21] When the Army
hunts Dougherty as a deserter, he accidentally kills a soldier
in self defence. Finally Dougherty commits suicide because he
knows that inevitably the Army will either imprison or kill him.
From the beginning to the end of Moving Target, the plot
moves inevitably towards Dougherty's suicide. The fictional world
evoked in Travelling Man may approximate the amoral world
of crime fiction deplored by George Orwell, but McClenaghan is
not really a Tough Guy writer. Although Hogan's fate is less obvious
than Dougherty's, it seems inevitable that Hogan will still be
punished for his misdeeds--sometime after the end of the novel.
When Travelling Man suggests the eventual collapse of Hogan's
amoral lifestyle, therefore, McClenaghan may be described as implicitly
challenging his protagonist's way of life as well as implicitly
agreeing with those aspects of the New Zealand Man Alone tradition
which proceed from the assumption that community is better than
anarchy.
[1] Jack McClenaghan, Travelling Man (Auckland: Collings,
1976).
[2] Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1937).
[3] Frank Sargeson,"James Courage: The Fifth Child",
Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing, selected
and edited by Kevin Cunningham (Auckland: Auckland University
Press, 1983), 35.
[4] Lawrence Jones, "The Novel", The Oxford History
of New Zealand Literature in English, edited by Terry Sturm
(Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991), 148.
[5] George Chamier, Philosopher Dick: Adventures and Contemplations
of a New Zealand Shepherd (T. Fisher Unwin, 1891).
[6] John O'Shea, Runaway, 1964.
[7] Frank Sargeson, Collected Stories: 1935-1963 (Auckland:
Longman Paul Limited, 1964).
[8] John Mulgan, Man Alone (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1949;
rpt. 1984).
[9] William Satchell, The Land of the Lost: A Tale of the New
Zealand Gum Country (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
1971).
[10] Sheldon Grebstein, "The Tough Hemingway and His Hard-Boiled
Children", The Tough Guys of the Thirties, ed. David
Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968),
18.
[11] Guthrie Wilson, The Feared and the Fearless (London: Robert
Hale Limited, 1954).
[12] Guthrie Wilson, Strip Jack Naked (London: Robert Hale
Limited, 1957).
[13] George Orwell, "Raffles and Miss Blandish", A Collection
of Essays, Doubleday Anchor Books (New York: Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1954), 139-154.
[14] McClenaghan, Travelling Man, 23.
[15] John Mulgan, Man Alone, 207.
[16] Mulgan, Man Alone, 53.
[17] McClenaghan, Travelling Man, 166.
[18] Mulgan, Man Alone, 58.
[19] McClenaghan, Travelling Man, 181.
[20] McClenaghan, Travelling Man, 185.
[21] Jack McClenaghan, Moving Target (Wellington: A. H. and
A. W. Reed, 1966).
Chamier, George. Philosopher Dick: Adventures and Contemplations
of a New Zealand Shepherd. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891.
Grebstein, Sheldon. "The Tough Hemingway and His Hard-Boiled
Children." In The Tough Guys of the 1930s, ed. David
Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.
Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1937.
Jones, Lawrence. "The Novel." In The Oxford History
of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm, 105-202.
Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991.
McClenaghan, Jack. Moving Target. Wellington: A. H. and
A. W. Reed, 1966.
________. Travelling Man. Auckland: Collins, 1976.
Mulgan, John. Man Alone. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1949;
rpt. 1984.
Orwell, George. "Raffles and Miss Blandish." Chap. in
A Collection of Essays, 139-154. New York: Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1954.
O'Shea, John. Runaway. 1964.
Sargeson, Frank. Collected Stories: 1935-1963. Auckland:
Longman Paul, 1964.
________. "James Courage: The Fifth Child." Chap.
in Conversations in a Train and Other Critical Writing,
selected and edited by Kevin Cunningham. Auckland: Auckland University
Press, 1983.
Satchell, William. The Land of the Lost. 2d ed. Auckland:
Whitcomb and Tombs Limited, 1938.
Wilson, Guthrie. The Feared and the Fearless. London: Robert
Hale Limited, 1954.
________. Strip Jack Naked. London: Robert Hale Limited,
1957.
Copyright (c) 1997 by Dale Benson, all rights
reserved
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