Frank Sargeson

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Frank Sargeson (born March 23, 1903 as Norris Frank Davey in Hamilton , New Zealand , † March 1, 1982 in Auckland ) was a New Zealand writer .

Life

Norris Frank Davey was born on March 23, 1903, the second of four children to Edwin John Davey and Rachel Sargeson in Hamilton . Davey's father was self-employed at first but later worked as a town clerk in Hamilton . His parents were Methodists . His father was considered puritanical and picky.

Davey first attended West School in Hamilton and from 1917 to 1920 Hamilton High School . He is said to have been an excellent cricket and hockey player at the time, and good at English and history. From 1921 he worked in a law firm while studying law . Easter 1921 he visited his uncle Oakley Sargeson on his sheep farm in Okahukura and received from him in the following years until his uncle's death in 1848 spiritual suggestions, orientation in questions of faith and in social matters.

In mid-1925 he moved to Auckland , began studying to become a lawyer and graduated in 1926. He then worked as a lawyer for a year and decided to go to England in February 1927 . This was followed by trips to France , Switzerland and Italy . In England he devoted himself extensively to his interests in art , music and theater , occupied himself with religion , philosophy and science and had his first sexual experiences with homosexuality . In England he wrote his first novella, Journal of a suicide , which he did not publish.

In March 1928 Davey returned to New Zealand and found employment with the Public Trust Office in Wellington . For the next 15 months he worked during the day and wrote in the evening and on the weekends. His sexual contact with homosexuals then earned him a two-year suspended sentence in October 1929 on the condition that he would move to his uncle in Okahukura and live there. During this time he continued to work as a writer, published in 1930 in the New Zealand Herald and a year later the novel Blind Alleys in London .

In May 1931 Davey moved to a family weekend home in Takapuna , a suburb of Auckland , where he lived and wrote until his death in March 1982. Harry Doyle , his life partner and friend for life, lived seriously ill from 1967 until his death 1971 with him and was cared for by him.

Although he had already published something in the Australian Woman's Mirror and occasionally in Auckland's newspapers in 1933 , he described the short story Conversation with my uncle , which he was able to publish in Tomorrow in July 1935 , as his first real beginning. By 1940 he had published around 40 short stories and with his short story The Making of a New Zealander he won his first literary competition in 1940. From this time on he published in Sydney, London and the United States.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Sargeson met the German-Jewish exile poet Karl Wolfskehl and his companion Margot Ruben in Auckland. Sargeson helped the blind Wolfskehl with visits to the authorities and read him English literature, which they discussed. A productive friendship developed between the two, but it ended on an unfortunate note. Wolfskehl, who saw himself as the literary governor Stefan Georges and a member of the Secret Germany even in exile , tried to persuade Sargeson to take up the literary traditions of Europe more and to incorporate them into his works. Sargeson, who was just at the beginning of his specifically New Zealand and post-colonial writing, felt himself misunderstood and oppressed by Wolfskehl, whom he saw as the embodiment of old Europe, and broke off the relationship. After Wolfskehl's death, Sargeson regretted the tough decision and paid tribute to Wolfskehl in a radio essay. Sargeson was also in contact with other German-speaking authors such as Werner Otto Droescher and Peter Dane .

Life as Frank Sargeson

In 1946 Davey had the property in Takapuna transferred from his father and at the same time officially changed his name to Frank Sargeson . His name change was due in part to his disapproval of the commoner in his family and the use of his uncle's last name in recognition of the time he had with him. Sargeson also wanted to get rid of the criminalization of his person in 1929 and, associated with it, of his name. He built a new house and was writing a new novel called I Saw in My Dream , which he was unable to publish in New Zealand at first. It was published in England in 1949 and only in New Zealand in 1974.

In the 1950s, Sargeson sponsored a number of young writers, some of whom he took in and was a friend and mentor to his home in Takapuna. These included Janet Frame , Maurice Duggan , Peter Dawson , Greville Texidor and Renate Prince . Janet Frame, who was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in her later life , was released by Sargeson's short-term resolute intervention from psychiatric treatment that was about to have a lobotomy planned.

From 1980 onwards Sargeson suffered from diabetes, had a minor stroke with increasing dementia and also developed cancer. He died on March 1, 1982 in North Shore Hospital in Auckland . His last book, Conversation in a train , would be published a year later.

Frank Sargeson is one of the most important short story and short story writers in New Zealand alongside Katherine Mansfield .

Frank Sargeson Trust

After Frank Sargeson's death in 1983, Sargeson's heiress and close confidante, Christine Cole Catley , founded an association for young New Zealand authors, the Frank Sargeson Trust . In 1987, the Trust's first grant was awarded to author Janet Frame .

Since 2014, the award associated with the scholarship has been awarded together with Grimshaw & Co as a Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship .

Works

  • 1930 In France, along the road , published in the New Zealand Herald in May 1930
  • 1931 Blind alleys
  • 1935 Conversation with my uncle , in Tomorrow
  • 1936 Conversation with My Uncle, and Other Sketches
  • 1940 A Man and His Wife
  • 1940 The Making of a New Zealander
  • 1943 That Summer , Penguin
  • 1946 That Summer, and other stories
  • 1949 I Saw in My Dream , Lehman, London
  • 1964 Back in the summer, Collected Stories ( Collected Stories ), Biederstein Verlag, Munich, 1968
  • 1965 Wrestling with the Angel and Memoirs of a Peon
  • 1983 Conversation in a train

Awards

In 1973 Frank Sargeson received an honorary doctorate from the University of Auckland .

literature

  • Michael King : Frank Sargeson - A Life . Viking , 1995, ISBN 0-670-83847-0 (English).
  • Lawrence Jones : Frank Sargeson [Norris Frank Davey], 1903-1982 . In: Kōtare - New Zealand Notes & Queries . tape 7 , no. 2 , 2008, ISSN  1174-6955 , p. 157–211 (English, ojs.victoria.ac.nz [PDF; 278 kB ; accessed on January 5, 2016]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael King : Sargeson, Frank . In: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography . Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, January 29, 2014, accessed January 5, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Norman Franke, ' Jewish, Roman, German at the same time ...'? An investigation into the literary self-construction of Karl Wolfskehl with special consideration of his exillyricism. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-8253-5106-8 , pp. 304-350
  3. ^ A b Jones : Frank Sargeson [Norris Frank Davey], 1903-1982 . In: Kōtare . tape  7 , no. 2 , 2008, p. 171 .
  4. ^ Sargeson, Frank . New zealand Book Council , accessed January 5, 2016 .
  5. ^ A b Applications Open for the Newly Named Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship . December 4, 2013, archived from the original on June 6, 2014 ; accessed on January 5, 2016 .
  6. ^ Taonga : A visit to Frank Sargeson . In: Blog - New Zealand 2 Go . Peter Pieruschka, April 13, 2013, accessed on January 5, 2016 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Sargeson, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davey, Norris Frank (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamilton , New Zealand
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1982
Place of death Auckland