Review of South-West of Eden: A Memoir 1932-56, by C. K. Stead (Auckland: AUP, 2009). Karl Stead's memoir stops at the year he and his wife Kay left Auckland for the University of New England at Armidale and the start of a university career that was to bring a lifetime's rewards in a short period--and which was to be left behind relatively soon, after an early professorship at Auckland University's English Department, for the full-time writing career for which he is much better known. In fact much of this later story has become widely familiar, by one means or another, to those of us who read and write: the influential literary-critical works early on, the poetry and then the fiction, the prizes and awards, his considerable status in parts of Overseas; and the fights, spats and running battles as well, the most recent involving a minor aspect of this book. For decades he has been a lanky, domed presence in our literature, someone who has never held back from saying what he thinks or telling us when we are wrong or even, sometimes, when we are right. His are the most clearly-articulated views of all our living writers, his the greatest ability to identify the crucial issues of the day--of any day: on occasions he has seemed so much omnipresent in our writing that it would be no surprise to spot him in the background of old photographs of Mansfield and her friends, hanging out with Kot and D. H. Lawrence, or to hear that he had parachuted into northern Greece with Major Mulgan and put a little stick about.
