Robin Maconie: Cooking the Books at Frankfurt

Late May out of the blue it was announced that New Zealand is to be the featured nation at the 2012 Frankfurt International Book Fair. In principle this should be a rare opportunity to showcase what New Zealand writers can do and what they are known and respected for internationally. Since that time, along with the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards, normally a topic of national interest, the issue has sunk without trace.

Panic set in at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. A new post of Project Director was advertised on 24 May. When a decision is reached, which could take months, the new appointee will have less than a year to make the event a success. A hastily assembled “High profile group” of cultural and administrative dignitaries was announced by the Ministry on July 1. It includes representatives of a book trade that for decades has resisted supporting the publication of cultural works of international interest, and who are likely to be deeply embarrassed by the exposure to alternative markets abroad where New Zealand taste may not be so easily comprehended. Why? Because a significant majority of books by New Zealand authors that are of international cultural interest are published abroad and never reviewed at home.

Nelson Wattie, who in addition to his remarkable work for New Zealand literature as a researcher and translator, is fluent in French and German and has published a monograph on Katherine Mansfield in German and English with a German publisher, is not on the Ministerial list. Neil Quigley, Chair of VUW Press, an academic press of mediocre standing which devotes far too much of its funds to lacklustre poetry, is on the list.

Ministry chief executive Lewis Holden describes the event as an exciting opportunity to promote New Zealand culture. “The exposure that our creative industries, culture and people will receive is extraordinary – on a world-wide scale. The Ministry and the Advisory Group are excited about this opportunity which will offer an international audience a fresh view of what New Zealand has to offer”, he said. Exposure will certainly be the case. Excited is hardly the word. All sorts of policy chickens are suddenly coming home to roost.

As an active published writer on musical culture since 1976, and author of several titles of reference on the German contemporary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, I look forward to representing New Zealand at Frankfurt. But it will not be from the New Zealand stand. There is no space among the glut of photograph albums, gardening and cookery titles, children’s readers, ghosted political memoirs, sensationalized crime, and slim first editions of poetry by Victoria University graduates in creative writing, for titles of international interest.

New Zealand publishers are not interested in culture, unless it is art exhibition material that comes amply subsidized by Creative New Zealand. The latter is bound by statute (or so it alleges) to favour the local and ephemeral over the universal, whether or not the policy works. Well, we will soon know. Certainly CNZ are not interested in subject areas of international cultural appeal, either because they do not know, or because they do not care.

We are required to believe that because New Zealand has only the equivalent reading population of a London suburb, the only books worth publishing here are those that will sell in quantity to a local readership, and since the local readership is assumed to be of Decile 3 comprehension skills and interested only in “local” subject matter, that only topics aimed at such a readership are likely to succeed. This is to ignore the fact that New Zealand writing on whatever subject and wherever written has a New Zealand viewpoint and a distinctively New Zealand hard edge realism. The poetry of Fleur Adcock, for example. Who is Fleur Adcock, I hear you cry. Exactly.

In a recent opinion piece I reviewed the launch of Greg O’Brien’s memorial study of the art of expatriate New Zealand artist Graham Percy, who died in 2008. The study is nicely designed and presented, eloquently written, and published by Auckland University Press. I spoke to the publisher’s representative at the launch to ask if there were any plans to co-publish the book in the United Kingdom, where the artist lived most of his professional life and was certainly well respected. She looked at me as if to say, why bother? He is ours now.

From this and similar reponses I have had in the past, as well as contributions to the current blogosphere by writers connected to publishing, I have the impression that New Zealand publishers are not only resigned to being marginalized, to a point where they no longer have the skills or the will to sell NZ titles abroad, but that they have no concept of reading habits and attitudes outside this country and for that reason are unable to perceive the marketing potential of international sales of “cultural” titles that would be unlikely to sell in quantity in this country. In the Chinese market, for example.

From my own perspective, since returning to New Zealand in 2002 I have published four titles on cutting edge music and music education for the New Zealand and international reader. A fifth is in the pipeline. Most of my titles are still in print after up to 21 years. You can find them on Amazon.com. They are not blockbusters, but they are viable, steady earners that cover their costs. They are inexpensive to produce, compared with a Craig Potton photograph album, or even a children’s book of 24 pages.

One title, designed on a desktop in Dannevirke, in March 2006 made the cover and lead review for The Times Literary Supplement. A request to Creative New Zealand for assistance in writing this title was turned down unacknowledged, but I did subsequently receive a modest grant from a German cultural agency arranged without hesitation through the German Embassy in Wellington. I have repeatedly offered titles to New Zealand publishers, including the Government’s own Learning Media imprint. Invariably, if they bother to respond at all, the idea is met with the stock lame excuse that there is no market in New Zealand for such titles. And yet these same titles go on to cover their costs and make a small and steady profit abroad. New Zealand thrives on niche markets, and niches should exist in the publishing world as much as in engineering, fashion, and fine wine.

New Zealand authors labour under the yoke of a lazy and bovine cultural bureaucracy, in government and the universities, that is more concerned with cashing the cheque than promoting our national intellectual life. Not publishing in New Zealand means that my titles sell in the US, UK and Europe at half the equivalent price for a 500 page book produced there, but have to be reimported to New Zealand at extravagant additional cost owing in part to the way the book trade operates in this country. But at least they get published.

My latest book Avant Garde has gone to New York. My most recent published title Musicologia, with a splendid Michael Smither reproduction on the cover, donated by the artist, was refused even a review by The NZ Listener on the ground that “it does not fit our reader demographic”. In a Radio NZ Saturday interview late last year Kim Hill, who to be fair is not a musician, voiced an opinion that Musicologia “might well be a work of genius” – but in a tone to suggest, in A. R. D. Fairburn’s phrase, “we don’t want your sort here”. About the content of the book Ms Hill, a normally intelligent reader, had nothing to say.

I cannot help but wonder that part of the reason for New Zealand’s poor public showing abroad has to do with an incestuous and provincial mindset feeding into a publishing and media culture of militant mediocrity and poor judgment masquerading behind a blank leadership that more and more resembles the chameleon like Zelig in Woody Allen’s movie, adept at inserting himself into international media events, but remembered by nobody.

The comparable 2010 European trip to Vienna by the NZSO could have been an opportunity to showcase New Zealand’s European connections. We have deep historic and cultural links with Austria and Germany, whose representatives laid the foundations of New Zealand science and clean and green conservation image over a century ago. Our first significant composer, Alfred Hill, trained in Leipzig in the early 1890s. Because of his association with Germany, his career took a nosedive after the Great War and despite some amazing work to preserve Maori musical culture he was ostracised as a social pariah. Hill’s place in our cultural history has never been taken seriously by the NZSO, and our national orchestra continues to promote itself as a Scandinavian outpost in the outdated and frankly distasteful image of racial purity associated with the composer Sibelius (a view still rampant, I regret to say, among opinion formers in some of our university music schools).

Except for a subtle reference in a speech by Minister Chris Finlayson, the Vienna concert event of 2010 took no cognizance whatsoever of the historic links New Zealand has with Austria, such as Vienna’s extensive collection of Maori artifacts, and – ironically – of Hochstetter’s efforts to assist Maori to set up their own publishing facility over a century ago. Until our cultural representatives begin to acknowledge our own real cultural and historical antecedents, we can hardly expect them to communicate effectively with cultural readers abroad.

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