Dick Frizzell has a kind of breezy, insouciant, ‘I can do anything’ aspect, which animates everything he does from paintings and screen prints to t-shirts and children’s toys and (increasingly in recent years) to books. His latest production, a memoir of growing up in Hastings, is unique in that it doesn’t rely primarily on images, unlike his other books, such as It’s All About The Image (favourite New Zealand paintings), or Me, According to the History of Art (a personal trip through art history) or The Sun is a Star (astronomy for kids). In this case (apart from photographs introducing each chapter) it’s all about the words. Frizzell at the age of 80 has finally emerged as a writer, and, like most that he takes on, he makes a pretty good fist of it.

As a visual artist, Frizzell is hard to pin down because he operates with apparent ease in so many different styles or genres – meticulously realistic landscapes or vases of flowers one day, figure paintings of comic-book heroes (Superman or the Phantom etc) the next; copies of Picasso or McCahon the day after; plus exercises in early Modernist abstraction and all-word or sign paintings (the list could be greatly extended). Both as painter and writer he is acutely attuned to what he calls (in this book) ‘archetypes’. The whole book follows an archetypal pattern – that of the bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story which traces the protagonist’s development from childhood to the point where he or she leaves home for the city and the beginning of adult life. Frizzell’s memoir, having documented his Hastings boyhood from infancy through high school, ends with his heading off to art school in Christchurch.

An element which runs through all of Frizzell’s multiple activities is self-confidence. He is admirably sure of himself, a characteristic that enables him to take on tasks which most of us would shrink from undertaking. You have to be full of self-confidence to write (without apparent irony) of mundane activities such as mowing lawns or trimming hedges! Watching this enviable asset emerge is one of the pleasures of this likeable account of growing up in a provincial New Zealand town through the middle decades oh the twentieth century.

This book will doubtless read differently according to the age (and possibly the gender) of the reader. To younger readers (I hope it gets some) it will no doubt read as ancient history, a quaint world which differs in almost every respect from that which they inhabit. But for readers of Frizzell’s own generation, born during World War II, such as myself, the book is alive with endless reminders of how things used to be – the feeling and smell (to choose a random example) of wet woollen bathing suits with modesty flaps in front, which disappeared maybe sixty or seventy years ago. I was constantly impressed by the author’s vivid recall of the sensory experiences of childhood, from saveloys and iceblocks to Gene Autry and Donald Duck.

In a brief introduction Frizzell writes: ‘..I’m not even sure what my system is, apart from sitting there and remembering stuff and writing it down. A little memory, a little licence and a lot of humour’. The book consists of 30 chapters (plus introduction), each between  six and a dozen pages long, and each with a discrete, designated topic, amounting to a roughly chronological sequence of ‘yarns’, loosely connected by the continuous presence of the narrator and his circumstances. It’s a simple but fairly effective method –  a bit stop-start and episodic, perhaps; an easy book to pick up and put down.

A couple of chapters which stood out to me will illustrate some of the many pleasures of this narrative. In ‘Richard Almost Gets a Brother’, the author describes a family experiment in which the author is temporarily provided with a foster ‘brother’, presumably to give him male company in a family where his siblings are all girls. Dick (‘Richard’ to his parents) immediately hated and resented the interloper with whom he fought constantly until the experiment was abandoned. What lifts the chapter above the ordinary is the author’s honesty about his own negative feelings and bad behaviour and his obvious unease in recalling the circumstances: ‘What a ghastly performance’. ‘Cannery Row’ is a pungent account of holiday jobs at canning factories (Watties) and freezing works (Tomoana); the atmosphere of such places, so fundamental in the experience of many New Zealanders, is casually but expertly conveyed. For example (illustrating typical stylistic traits): ‘The killing floor. The loudest, most dangerous, biggest dick-swinging community in the works…Large, loud, confident men spinning their knives like drum majorettes, shouting loudly to no-one in particular as they sliced through briefly exposed throats before another gun-swinging twirl saw the knife back in its scabbard…These implacable showmen, standing at their raised platforms like Inca priests, revelled in their exalted status…’.

I enjoyed this memoir on many levels, certainly its portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man dimension but also because of its multiple glimpses into aspects of New Zealand provincial life not often presented with such colour, sympathy  and vitality.

Reviewed by Peter Simpson