MIDDLETON, O(sman) E(dward Gordon)

Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Christchurch, 25 March 1925. Education: New Plymouth Boys High School, 1939-41; Auckland University, 1946, 1948; the Sorbonne, Paris (New Zealand Government bursary), 1955-56. Military Service: Served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, 1944; New Zealand Army, 1945. Family: Married Maida Edith Jones (marriage dissolved 1970); two children. Career: Resident, Karolyi Memorial Foundation, Vence, France, Summer 1983; lectured at several European universities, 1983. Has also worked as a farm worker, clerk, seaman, construction worker, adult tutor, telephonist, and landscape gardener. Lives in Dunedin. Awards: New Zealand award of achievement, 1960; Hubert Church Prose award, 1964; New Zealand scholarship in letters, 1965; University of Otago Robert Burns fellowship, 1970-71; New Zealand Prose Fiction award, 1976; University of Auckland John Cowie Reid award, 1989.

Publications

Short Stories

Short Stories. 1954.

The Stone and Other Stories. 1959.

A Walk on the Beach. 1964.

The Loners. 1972.

Selected Stories. 1975.

Confessions of an Ocelot, Not for a Seagull (novellas). 1978.

Poetry

Six Poems. 1951.

Other

From the River to the Tide (for children). 1964.

*

Critical Studies:

New Zealand Fiction since 1945 by H. Winston Rhodes, 1968; "Middleton: Not Just a Realist" by Jim Williamson, in Islands, Winter 1973; Middleton: The Sympathetic Imagination and the Right Judgements, 1980, "Out from Under My Uncle's Hat: Gaskell, Middleton and the Sargeson Tradition," in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story edited by Cherry Hankin, 1982, and Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose, 1987, all by Lawrence Jones.

* * *

Beginning with his first published story in 1949, O. E. Middleton has written more than 50 published short stories and novellas. While some of these remain uncollected in little magazines, the majority appear in one or more of his six overlapping collections.

From the first, Middleton's stories could be seen to belong to the tradition of critical proletarian social realism initiated by Frank Sargeson, but they are not derivative, for Middleton succeeded for the most part in his stated aim of writing in "a voice [he] strove to make … [his] own." His method resembles Sargeson's—a first-person or third-person limited point of view, a vernacular style in keeping with that perspective, a relatively lightly plotted slice-of-life structure from which the themes often emerge indirectly, although a structure rather richer in sensuous detail, less spare than Sargeson's. The range of character also resembles Sargeson's, with the emphasis on male characters from outside the middle class. Some are children, as in "Down by the River" or "First Adventure." Many are working men, as with the coopers in "Coopers'Christmas" and "A Married Man" or the seaman of "The Doss-House and the Duchess." Some are inmates of prisons, as in "My Thanksgiving" and "The Collector," or of mental hospitals, as in "Cutting Day." Some are Maori, as in "Drift" or "Not for a Seagull," or Islanders, as in "The Loners." This range is extended in the later stories, with the depiction of a German immigrant in "The Man Who Flew Models," or the female German student in France in "For Once in Your Life," or the Spanish artist and the female American tourist in "The Crows."

Middleton's stories are likewise in the Sargeson tradition in their underlying attitude, an attitude that might be broadly identified (in Sargeson's terms) as "a sort of humanism, although a rather special colonial variety," with a strong egalitarian strain. As in Sargeson's work there is a clear dualism involved, a valuing of those who uphold the humanist code and a criticism of those who betray or violate it. The primary quality that furthers the code is sympathetic imagination. Sometimes this is manifested as a sympathetic understanding of one's mates, as in the secular communion among the unemployed seamen in "The Doss-House and the Duchess." Sometimes it is manifested as an imaginative understanding of another culture, as in the boy's reaching out towards Maori culture in "First Adventure," culminating in his intuitively right reburying of the Maori skeleton discovered in the sandhills. In some stories the imagination is revealed in an aesthetic awakening, as in "A Means of Soaring." All of these expressions of the sympathetic imagination are valued in the stories, while those who fail to exercise it are criticized. Sometimes the failure is in relation to the natural world, as with the objectionable middle-class father in "Killers," who intentionally runs down the harrier hawk in the road. This failure of imagination can appear as racial prejudice, as when the police in "Not for a Seagull" persecute Sonny, the Maori protagonist. In some stories, this failure is represented as sexual exploitation, as with the homosexual rapist Karel in "Confessions of an Ocelot." More frequently it has to do with economic exploitation and class privilege, like in "The Doss-House and the Duchess."

The persistent critical problem that these stories present is that of authorial distance. Sometimes Middleton identifies too much with his positive characters and/or stereotypes his negative ones so that the didactic design becomes too obvious and simplistic, as in "One for the Road" or, in its loaded ending, "The Crows." But in his best stories Middleton is able to maintain a double perspective by which the reader can sympathize with the main character and share that point of view while at the same time retaining some outside perspective, not in order to view the main character ironically but rather simply to see and understand more. Thus in "A Married Man" the reader shares the points of view of Tony and Colleen as they anticipate the birth of a first child and then mourn its loss when it is born prematurely and dies. At the end of the story the reader can both share and sympathize with Tony's experience of burying his own child while at the same time seeing more clearly than Tony can that his sympathetic work mate's attempt to cheer him up with drink and a barroom pick-up is inappropriate to Tony's own deeper feelings. In "The Loners" the reader can share the point of view of Luke, the unemployed Islander, and comprehend more clearly than Luke can how inadequate New Zealand society is to his social needs. In the novella "Confessions of an Ocelot," the reader can share the sensuous and emotional immediacy of Peter's long hot summer in Auckland while sensing well before Peter is aware of it that he is going to be faced with the discovery both of his own homosexuality and of the extent of human evil and suffering in the world around him. In stories such as these Middleton's method triumphantly succeeds in presenting his vision with neither partisanship nor irony, and he demonstrates that he has found his own particular way of working within the Sargeson tradition.

—Lawrence Jones