A Man’s Life and a Woman’s Death: — Arthur H. Adams’s Female Writer of Genius

Abstract

Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, journalist, and one-time literary editor of Sydney's Bulletin, New Zealander Arthur H. Adams (1872-1936) had a career as writer that earned him some considerable reputation in his time. His enduring monument has been the fine late-Romantic elegiac poemThe Dwellings of our Dead', which has appeared in Oxford and Penguin anthologies and carries a strong emotional charge, mainly by way of its plangent music. It was probably written in a semi-trance while Adams was convalescing in Chefoo (or Chi-fu) in China from an almost fatal bout of enteric fever. He himself considered it his best - if, as I believe, this is the poem that in his novel A Man's Life he refers to as composed in such circumstances. Published in London in 1929, that novel seems almost entirely autobiographical, reflecting many details that we know, or can reasonably conjecture from his other works, about Adams's life. But it begins and ends with its hero's death. A man in his sixties is lying on a London hospital bed, with his skull cracked from a traffic accident. To the nurse he appears dead, but excerpts from his life present themselves to his mind in vivid flashbacks ranging swiftly and erratically over the full span, until death is pronounced. The movement back and forth in time is governed by chance association, and the whole is organized around recurring themes or types of incident expressive of the man, his aspirations and character. He is a romantic and an agnostic, with the sensibility of a 'nineties aesthete, a morbid fancy, an overactive superego, and a hankering for fame. But my present concern is not with Adams or his fictional counterpart but with a young New Zealand woman writer whom he asserts to have beena genius'. As a reluctant Law student at university - obviously Otago - the protagonist of A Man's Life published several satirical skits, including some against theMeds', who bullied him into apologizing. He also formed a Literary Club, the sole members being himself and two others. The first was thedour son of a Scottish professor', who specialized in clever arguments and blank verse on philosophical themes, and himself became a professor, producing `five children, but no poems'. The second was a gaunt, angular, charmless young woman of poor background but endowed witha finer brain than the other two'; she becamethe most brilliant chemical student at the university'