WITHEFORD, Hubert

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Wellington, 18 March 1921. Education: Victoria University of Wellington, M.A. 1943. Family: Married Noel Brooke Anderson in 1941; one son. Career: Staff member, New Zealand Prime Minister's Office, Wellington, 1939–45, New Zealand War History Branch, Wellington, 1945–53. Staff member, 1954–67, head of Overseas Section, Reference Division, 1968–78, and director of Reference Division, 1978–81.

Publications

Poetry

Shadow of the Flame, Poems, 1942–47. Auckland, Pelorus Press, 1950.

The Falcon Mask. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1951.

The Lightning Makes a Difference. London, Brookside Press, 1962.

A Native, Perhaps Beautiful. Christchurch, Caxton, 1967.

A Possible Order. Harrow, Middlesex, Ravine Press, 1980.

A Blue Monkey for the Tomb. London and Boston, Faber, 1994.

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Hubert Witheford began to publish in Wellington in the 1940s while he was a student in history at the University of Victoria. His early poems were heavy with symbolism and were rhetorical in tone and form, but they had an abstract intellectual quality that marked them out from the more typically romantic poetry of his contemporary James K. Baxter. This can be seen, for example, in "Bright Sunlight":

The flower unfolding and the burning tombs
At the far sun of lonely flame are kindled
Beneath whose power as in earth's final light
The citizens of chaos come to justice.

Witheford quickly assimilated T.S. Eliot's view of literary history, that in the seventeenth century there had been a "dissociation of sensibility," from which modernism was at last rescuing poetry in English. He also was among the first New Zealand poets to appreciate and write intelligently about Pound's Cantos. This led to a gradual shift in his own poetry in the direction of wit, though for some time there was a continuing element of mysteriousness, even mysticism. In the early 1950s Witheford moved to London, where he was employed in the Central Office of Information. For many years he worked almost entirely in isolation, cut off from his potential readers at home and without establishing any significant British reputation.

There was a gap of ten years between Witheford's second and third books, and it is in this period that the full shift into his mature style occurs. The iambic beat is largely gone. The lines are shorter, or at least more varied, the cadences closer to those of speech, and the statements more direct. The wit that was evident in his student prose writings now finds its way into the poems, especially those of his fourth book, A Native, Perhaps Beautiful, still probably his best. It is as much as anything a matter of tone, as shown in excerpts from "The Displacement" and from "Towards a Completely Flat Surface":

I know without opening my eyes
It is ugly,
It is mine.
 
I take a drink from an undeniable
Sportsman in a white polo-neck jersey

"Barbarossa," a recollection of the earthquake that destroyed the town of Napier in his childhood, revives the legend of the great soldier-king Frederick Barbarossa, who "sits in his armour" in a cave, waiting to rise from the dead, as the burghers of Napier sit "squashed in their ancient Fords" under the "half a hill / Spilt on the coast road."

After his retirement from the British civil service in 1981, Witheford went back to live in New Zealand, but his attempt to return to his roots proved a failure, and he was there only long enough to earn a place (his identity thinly disguised) in the intimate memoirs of a noted New Zealand woman poet. The publication of A Blue Monkey for the Tomb (1994) by Faber & Faber, still the most prestigious of British publishing houses, seems to mark Witheford finally as an expatriate writer whose identity, like Fleur Adcock's, has become more British than New Zealand.

Witheford's new poems are stripped, direct, sometimes witty, often gloomy, domestic in subject, and lacking entirely the plush language of his early work, but lacking also its sense of mysteriousness and consequent space for the reader to reach into or beyond the first strike of sense. The effect, as in "Going into Winter," is somewhat bleak, not unlike the poems of the similarly retired and retiring British civil servant C.H. Sisson:

Each morning
I wake earlier
Mourning
The chances
That will never happen again,
 
Welcoming
The deluded sparrows
Who think it is dawn.

—C.K. Stead