The Butcher Shop Read online

  NEW ZEALAND FICTION

  General Editor Bill Pearson

  THE BUTCHER SHOP

  THE BUTCHER SHOP

  Jean Devanny

  Edited and Introduced by

  HEATHER ROBERTS

  © Estate of Patricia Hurd 1926

  Introduction and Notes © Heather Roberts 1981

  Note on the banning of The Butcher Shop © Bill Pearson 1981

  First published by Duckworth 1926

  This edition 1981

  Reprinted 1983

  Reprinted 1988

  This ebook edition 2013

  Auckland University Press

  University of Auckland,

  Private Bag 92019

  Auckland 1142

  www.press.auckland.ac.nz

  eISBN 978 1 86940 650 9

  CONTENTS

  Introduction Heather Roberts

  The Butcher Shop

  The Banning of The Butcher Shop Bill Pearson

  Notes

  Jean Devanny’s Published Work

  INTRODUCTION

  Jean Devanny has for too long been an aside to the history of New Zealand literature, notable only for having had her first published novel The Butcher Shop banned in her own country. Devanny’s seventeen published works of fiction have long been out of print.

  What can be said to justify reprinting The Butcher Shop, which after publication by the English firm of Duckworth in 1926 went through six printings but has not been reprinted since 1931? There are two reasons why Devanny’s work deserves to be rescued from the oblivion into which it has been cast, and they are reasons which to some extent explain the neglect of her novels.

  The first reason has to do with the place that Devanny’s work occupies in the development of an indigenous New Zealand literature; the second reason lies in her examination of certain social and political ideas which she saw as relevant to the 1920s and which are still pertinent now.

  Joan Stevens wrote of the 1920s as a period of ‘revival and growth’1 in New Zealand fiction. For many decades much of the material that was published during that time has not been available. Gradually we are beginning to rediscover our literary heritage, and Jean Devanny’s work is part of that heritage. It is important to our literary history because unlike the work of her contemporaries she gives the reader of The Butcher Shop (and succeeding novels set in New Zealand) a contemporary interpretation of the decade of the 1920s.

  More importantly Jean Devanny belongs to a strong literary tradition in this country. Her use of the novel as social criticism is common in New Zealand writing. Her contemporary Jane Mander had so used the novel, and later writers like Frank Sargeson, John A. Lee, and John Mulgan were to be highly critical of aspects of New Zealand life. The tradition continues in more recent fiction, by Janet Frame, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Michael Henderson, and others.

  In particular Jean Devanny’s criticism of the puritan morality of New Zealand society is one that is commonly expressed by other novelists. Frank Sargeson in Memoirs of a Peon, The Hangover, and I Saw in My Dream, and Michael Henderson in The Log of a Superfluous Son are examples of other writers who objected to New Zealand’s puritan morality. She shares her advocacy of female equality with other women novelists, including Edith Searle Grossman in In Revolt and A Knight of the Holy Ghost, Jane Mander in The Story of a New Zealand River and The Strange Attraction, and Robin Hyde in The Godwits Fly and Wednesday’s Children.

  The violence which lies at the heart of Devanny’s novel is common to other New Zealand novelists. Puritan morality denies the release of so many natural desires that the inevitable result seems to be violence. We see this in Frank Sargeson’s The Hangover where sexual repression leads directly to the deaths of several characters. It occurs also in the domestic violence of the two novels by Edith Searle Grossman, in one of which a drunken husband beats his wife and murders his son, and yet can still claim that his wife is his property. A more sophisticated version of the same violence occurs in Janet Frame’s novels—here the perpetrator of the violence is not so much the puritan society per se, as it is a society which undervalues experience that lies outside certain narrow limits. Different interpretations of life from those considered ‘normal’ are not tolerated and people holding them are placed in violent institutions such as the mental asylums which dominate Owls Do Cry and Faces in the Water, or they are eliminated altogether by a rational and violent government machine, as happens in Intensive Care.2

  Jean Devanny’s novel then belongs to a particular and a strong literary tradition in New Zealand. Like all serious fiction it gives its own interpretation of life in this country, and provides us with another way of seeing ourselves. We may not like what we see in the novel—and the banning of the novel suggests that her contemporaries did not—but we cannot deny the power of her interpretation.

  The two theories central to the novel are feminism and socialism. Devanny advocates that women should be equal in both mind and body with men, and she sees that equality being achieved through a socialist form of government and society. The idea of a socialist government was one that appalled most New Zealanders in the 1920s: ‘During the 1920s and early 1930s … the vitality of industrial militance and the strength of the Labour Party seemed threatening to suburban, small-town, and rural New Zealand. Labour symbolised the forces of disorder and anarchy.’3 Devanny’s ideas about women would have been threatening also. The 1920s were a decade during which people desired stability. At the heart of that stability was the home tended by a wife and mother whose role it was not only to provide for the physical welfare of the family but also to transmit society’s moral code to her husband and to her children. The woman in the home was the bastion of the moral order. Devanny’s ideas fly right in the face of all that the majority of New Zealanders in the 1920s seemed to want. Devanny does not so much interpret the atmosphere of the society in which she was living as comment on its fears and prejudices and show how irrational they were.

  Devanny’s ideas about socialism no longer seem very frightening in a country which has experienced three Labour governments. Her ideas about female equality and the causes of women’s inferior position are ones which are now more likely to find a sympathetic audience. Her Marxist analysis of women’s position—as stemming from women’s lack of economic independence which makes them the equivalent both of the working class which sells its labour to the highest bidder and of animals which are considered as property—is a comparatively common one in the current phase of the women’s movement. Her hope that a socialist form of society will allow women to be free is one that history has, unfortunately, proven to be largely erroneous, but it still has support within the women’s movement.

  The importance of Devanny’s novel to us is as a document that is at once part of our literary and social history and also a reflection on a particular period in our history. The novel and its subject matter arose however as much from Devanny’s personal experiences and background as it did from any wish to write about the time in which she was living.

  Jean Devanny was born Jane Crook on 7 January 1894 at Ferntown, a small mining town near Collingwood in the South Island of New Zealand. Her father, William, was a miner; her mother, Jane, was the daughter of a colonel in the British army who had been stationed in India. According to Devanny her mother was ‘married off’4 to William Crook when she was seventeen. The Crook marriage was unusual in class terms, because a gentlewoman had married a member of the working class. The disparity of her parents’ marriage may explain Devanny’s preoccupation with class, and also her own intellectual (and bourgeois) pursuits of reading, writing, and playing the piano. There were ten children in the Crook family, of whom Jane was the eighth. She left school when she was thirteen because her moth
er, who was delicate in health and ‘general appearance’, needed her at home, the older daughters having left to get married. In between her onerous domestic tasks, Jane found time to read Alfred Wallace, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, all exponents of the theory of evolution.

  In 1911 when Jane was seventeen she met Hal Devanny at a dance in the mining town of Puponga (about twelve miles north of Ferntown) to which the Crook family had moved. The attraction was mutual, and they were soon married. It was a marriage rather like that between Margaret and Barry Messenger—Hal Devanny was quiet and rather introverted, Jane Crook was extroverted and possessed of exceptional physical strength. By the time the Devannys had been married six years they were the parents of three children—Karl, Patricia, and Erin.

  Hal Devanny was a miner and involved deeply in union affairs. The Miners’ Union at this time was one of the most radical unions in the country. The first branch of the Socialist Party in New Zealand was set up by men working in the Blackball mine.5 In many mining towns there were small Marxist study groups which were active during the war years, and helped to kindle the revolutionary spirit.6 The Devannys belonged to such a group in Puponga; in her autobiography Devanny writes of meeting such notable socialists as Paddy Webb (who was elected to parliament in 1913 as a candidate of the Social Democratic Party), Pat Hickey, and Bob Semple. All three men worked on West Coast coal mines and were active in forming the Socialist Party in Blackball; Semple and Hickey were also office-holders in the New Zealand Federation of Miners.

  In the early 1920s the Devannys lived near Dunedin in the mining town of Fairfield. In 1921 their third child Erin died there. In her grief Jean Devanny gave up playing the piano which her mother had taught her when she was six, and from which she had gained much solace during the frustrating years of caring for three small children. Soon after this, probably in 1922, the Devannys moved to Wellington so that Hal Devanny could join Bob Semple’s tunnelling party which had contracted to drive a tunnel through the Orongorongos. Hal Devanny was extremely well-paid for this work (£20-£25 a week) and the Devannys bought a boarding house in Wellington. The circumstances of this period of Devanny’s life provide the background of her second novel Lenore Divine.

  The Devannys also became closely involved with both the Labour Party and a group of mostly ex-Communists, which included F. P. Walsh and Fred Freeman. The Devannys were not permitted to join the Communist Party because the Party thought the tunnelling venture was a ‘boss’s outfit’.

  There is little mention of Devanny’s fiction writing during this period. She must have been writing for much of the time because by the time The Butcher Shop was published in 1926 she had already written at least two novels, one of which was never published. Devanny herself says of the 1920s that ‘chronologically apart from my efforts at writing I am confused about the events of the middle 20s’.

  While she was still living in Wellington Devanny received notification from the London publishing firm of Duckworth that they had accepted The Butcher Shop. On publication it won her instant notoriety, being banned in New Zealand, Boston, Australia, and eventually in Nazi Germany (where it had been translated under the title Die Herrin). It also sold 15,000 copies, a number which would be impressive even today for a New Zealand novel. The novel was believed to have been banned in New Zealand because ‘its frank portrayal of farm conditions was considered detrimental to the Dominion’s immigration policy.’7 (In particular the episode where the men castrate the lambs with their teeth was considered unsuitable.8) The reason for its banning in Germany is described by Devanny thus: ‘With Hitler’s policy of women belonging to kitchen, church and child, to Doll’s Houses etc., there was no question of a woman owning her own body either within or outside marriage.’ Devanny’s analysis is interesting in that it reveals what she considered to be one of the important themes of the novel.

  Four more novels by Jean Devanny were published before the family left New Zealand for Australia in 1929. The Devannys went to Sydney because they thought the climate there might be better for Karl whose health was poor. They could not have chosen a worse time to move. The Depression had just begun and all four Devannys were without employment for some time. Both children—Karl and Patricia—joined the youth branch of the Communist Party, and their parents joined the Party soon after.

  In 1931 Jean Devanny travelled through Russia to Berlin to attend a conference for Workers’ International Relief. M. B. Soljak, a close friend of Devanny, describes the trip: ‘A visit to Soviet Russia … included a journey through the republics in Eastern Turkestan where the women had just been freed from the restrictions imposed by Mohammedanism. Here Mrs Devanny was granted special facilities to talk freely with these unveiled women “comrades”, who told her with great enthusiasm of the joys of their new-found liberty. This was followed by a stay in Berlin, where she met many of the ardent proletarian revolutionaries who have since fallen victims of the Nazi Terror’.9

  The 1930s were for Devanny a decade during which she devoted her life to the cause of the Communist Party. For the Communist Party in Australia, unlike its New Zealand counterpart, the 1930s with its crusade against war and against fascism was the high point of the Party’s history. Devanny was often to be seen on Sydney Domain speaking against war, against fascism, for the socialist government in Russia, and for the International Brigade in Spain. As well, she appealed always to the women in her audience, exhorting them to oppose war for the sake of their children and the children of women in other countries. Jean Devanny’s personal life changed dramatically during the 1930s. In 1934 Karl, her son, for the sake of whose health the family had moved from New Zealand to Australia, died of an incurable heart condition. On Devanny’s return from her European trip, according to her autobiography, she and Hal Devanny absolved each other from their marital obligations. They continued to share a house for some time. When she attempted a reconciliation during the war, he was appalled because she had been expelled from the Communist Party, and refused to be reunited with her.

  Jean Devanny also spent some time in North Queensland visiting existing Communist branches and recruiting for new ones. It was in 1940 while she was on one of these tours that she was expelled from the Communist Party for no given reason. According to Jean Devanny’s daughter, Patricia Hurd, Devanny had her suspicions about why she had been expelled, but did not write down these suspicions, even in her autobiography. By this time the Party had become centralized and access to party leaders was increasingly difficult. In the same year the Party was banned by the Australian Government, so that even if Devanny had been permitted by the Party to approach its leaders to question her expulsion the banning made that impossible. Devanny was readmitted in 1944 and then resigned from the Party in 1950. Despite her harsh treatment by the Party she remained loyal to its beliefs all her life.

  There is no doubt that Devanny’s involvement in the Communist Party affected her writing in many ways. Obviously it curtailed her output. Between 1926 and 1930 six novels by Devanny were published, in the next six years a further six, but thereafter the pace slowed down dramatically so that only four novels were published between 1938 and 1949 when her last novel Cindie appeared. More importantly however it affected the quality of her writing. She no longer had the time or energy necessary to devise new plots or new characters. All her novels, even those written while she was still in New Zealand and had more time for writing, are repetitious in their plots and in range of characters.

  ‘Commitment to Marxist ideas’, writes Ian Beid, ‘had a blighting effect on Jean Devanny’s literary development’. He notes the drain on her ‘time and energy’ by her political activities.10 Ever honest in her assessment of what she did, Devanny wrote in her autobiography that ‘I myself might have been a good writer if I had put writing first’. Her later novels, particularly those published in the 1940s, are little more than fictional tracts for the Communist Party. And the novels written in the 1930s, with the exception of Sugar Heaven (1936) are potboilers which
show little of the liveliness that characterized the novels written in the 1920s.

  In the early 1950s Jean Devanny moved permanently to Townsville, Queensland, and with her daughter and son-in-law bought a house there. She lived there until she died of leukaemia in 1962. In Townsville she continued to write—there are four unpublished novels among her collected papers11—and to seek republication of the novels already published. Despite severe illnesses she remained active in political, social, and cultural affairs in Townsville. Even when she was bedridden the room at the front of her house was a focal point for any visitor wanting a provocative and lively discussion. Her friend and fellow novelist, Miles Franklin, described her as ‘vivid, valiant and temerarious’;12 another colleague recalled her as ‘most remarkable and courageous’ if ‘like us all, sometimes misguided’.13

  Jean Devanny described The Butcher Shop as ‘a terribly confused and foolish book, its meagre merit sincerity, frankness and a certain power of phrasing’. Most other critics have been no kinder. Joan Stevens answers her own question ‘What, then, is wrong with The Butcher Shop?’ by attributing Jean Devanny’s weakness to ‘lack of technical skill’. The Butcher Shop, she writes, has ‘an undisciplined crudity, poster-coloured sensationalism, careless language, and over-emphatic character drawing’. Yet like its author Stevens is prepared to credit the novel with some merit when she writes, ‘Yet it has some life.’14 E. H. McCormick mentioned Devanny only in passing for the ‘more lurid way’ (than Jane Mander) she broke taboos.15 Even Robin Hyde, who was sympathetic to Devanny’s political and social ideas, gives the novel only qualified praise when she writes that ‘ “The Butcher Shop”, written with great if undisciplined power, is a work of crude ore’.16

  The attention of both author and reader in The Butcher Shop is focused more on the ideas than on the plot and characterization. Central to the novel are Devanny’s ideas on the history and development of the family, and particularly the effect that development has had on the wife and mother. Many of Devanny’s ideas about the family as an institution came from Friedrich Engels’s book Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in 1884, but not available in English translation till 1902. Engels’s book, along with other texts by himself and Karl Marx, would have been required reading for the Marxist study groups to which the Devannys belonged. The Origin of the Family obviously made a special appeal to Jean Devanny. In most of her novels she repeats the ideas about the family which she derived from Engels, and she also wrote a 300-page manuscript on the subject, which is unpublished.