Remembering Vincent O’Sullivan: a life of literary clarity and endless conversations

Vincent O’Sullivan was someone who could walk into your life and change it. He had such a zest for life. Tremendous generosity. Thoughtfulness. The self-effacement that comes with enormous reserves of refinement and intelligence
is often read simply as kindness.

I first met him when I was studying English Literature at Victoria University. This was the late 1970s and Frank McKay, who taught seventeenth-century poetry, told the class he had “a treat” for us. And there, instead of Henry Vaughan, George Herbert or John Donne, was the New Zealand poet Vincent O’Sullivan. I remember him wearing all black and I had assumed that he, like McKay, was a Catholic priest. We laughed a lot about that later. But I thought so. He wore black pants and a black turtleneck and looked exactly the same as Frank; they clearly knew each other very well.

Vincent was funny and smart and full of sense of the mystery of life and the joys and wonders of the world – like the poets we had read in class and about whom he seemed to know everything. The conversations were about Cambridge and Oxford. London. Europe. Then Vincent took a stack of papers out of his bag and sat down to read some of his poems.

And the poems! They were wild and sexy and introspective and beautiful, with an idiolect and diction that seemed part sly TS Eliot and part full Wairarapa. They were like nothing I had ever read before. What was going on? I was enchanted.

I had heard of O’Sullivan, of course. Everyone had that. Even then, in the late 1970s, he was quite famous – but now here he was with us, the same Vincent O’Sullivan. It was as if the world had entered that seminar room with him and he had left the door open, as if we could all follow him through to live in a place that was both there and here. I felt everything change that day.

Years later, when my first novel was published, film producer Philippa Campbell asked if I wanted to meet Vincent. He was a good friend of hers and he had invited us all to lunch. Lunch? I was amazed. By then Vincent was a huge presence, even more famous. I would ‘meet’ him again, so to speak, through that big scientific project of his, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, which I had lined up along my bookshelf in Oxford and kept adding to as a new volume came out. My teacher, John Carey, and I had had conversations about those books, about KM and how O’Sullivan, with biographer Antony Alpers, had introduced Mansfield to Britain ‘properly’, as John put it. “It’s terrible that before Vincent O’Sullivan’s letters,” I remember John saying, “we didn’t read her here as we should have.”

And now it was the same Vincent O’Sullivan who invited me to lunch! This all happened during conversations that took place north of the Remutaka Range, after a literary festival in Wellington. I was staying in Martinborough – with my sister Merran and our three babies – in happy chaos, but yes, it was chaos. We did everything we could, Merran and I, to try to make that lunch with Vincent happen, but in the end I had to call him from a phone box in Featherston to say that it was unlikely I would get there anyway. That phone call – which we talked about later – marked the beginning of our friendship. He could hear that “happy chaos,” he said, and also spoke so kindly and generously about my work that he made me feel like I was “home” again. It was another one of those shifts, those changes.

We met again, in London at a Katherine Mansfield conference, and this time he was not the famous writer who I thought was a priest, nor the warm, engaged voice on the phone line. He was there, knowing everyone and everything and making sure everything went smoothly and happily, as co-founder and director of the newly formed international Katherine Mansfield Society, to deliver the keynote paper that would introduce the final part of those letters . . And we sat, and we talked, and we talked. The beginning of what I came to believe was an endless conversation, taking place across the hemispheres, north and south, in a garden in London and a kitchen in Wellington, in restaurants, cafes, at book festivals on stage and off, and during telephone conversations. and letters, cards, emails and, most recently, in March at his beautiful home in Port Chalmers with his beautiful wife Helen, and his grandchildren’s toys scattered at our feet, and later in a nearby pub. Still talking about books. Writers. To live. It went on, and it went on gloriously. Until he and Helen waved me goodbye in the dark from their porch.

I could hardly breathe after the inaugural speech he had given that day in London, all that time ago. It was so finely written that it could describe Mansfield’s final illness and death without a trace of pity, but only by using the full potential of the English language itself, in all its gradations, nuances, tones and rhythm, as Vincent read steadily and gracefully from his own written words about a writer who can no longer speak into the world.

And now that I find myself trying to think of some words about him, this great literary friend of ours who has left the room of this world and all of us here without him, I find, yet, through Vincent O’ Sullivan’s words – all his words – that he is still with us.