Mulgan's Man Alone, fifty or so years since it first appeared, seems to be undergoing a still-turning cycle of criticism. In his foreword to Penguin's well-timed 1990 reprint, Patrick Evans does good service in questioning 'whether the novel is in fact the scrupulous work of realism that its first readers took it to be', and pointing out that it is more accurately viewed as 'a powerful example of male romanticism'. (1) But in accounting for the motivation for such writing he appears to share the negative viewpoints of later critics. Nowadays these seem to constitute the received wisdom as much as the 'Mulgan myth' is claimed to have done for the earlier generation. While his foreword ignores C. K. Stead's allegations of asexuality and Marxism, Evans, both here and in his Penguin History, takes up Stead's view that the novel is proof of Mulgan's great resentment towards his father Alan Mulgan, and in the foreword adds another charge, that of sexism. (2) In the History he also claims the novel shows its author as negative about New Zealand. (3) Evans is not alone in these opinions. Jock Phillips in A Man's Country? refers to the 'appalling chauvinism' of Man Alone, and refers to Mulgan as an 'alienated intellectual, especially bitter for personal reasons against his own society'. (4) Even as eminent a personage as Keri Hulme is on record as saying, '... what I would like to do with that whining little shit Johnson is throw him into the nearest steel trap!' (5) Mulgan's first and only novel, created in the face of the coming destruction, holds a permanent place in the New Zealand literary tradition, for its own sake and for its inextricable link with the 'man-alone myth' or pattern discerned as characteristic of much of our early writing. (6) But perhaps there is still unfinished business concerning our view of it. In a letter to his parents in which Mulgan announced its existence, he described it as 'Hemingwayesque', (7) and in fact Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, besides containing a Johnson, a Johnston, a Harrison, and some speech echoes, may have suggested the alternative title to 'Talking of War'. The one-armed Harry Morgan, as he dies, manages to get out,
