Joy of the Worm by Frank Sargeson

First published: 1969

Type of work: Tragicomedy

Time of work: Mid-twentieth century

Locale: Rural New Zealand

Principal Characters:

• James Bohun, a Methodist minister
• Jeremy Bohun, the eldest of James’s two sons
• Queenie Quelch, James’s second wife
• Maisie Michie, Jeremy’s first wife

The Novel

After a year of working at odd jobs around New Zealand, Jeremy Bohun returns home to reestablish contact with his parents. Jeremy is feeling at loose ends generally, a state of mind that contrasts with his father’s great self-assurance. His father, James, is a Methodist clergyman who takes it as his professional obligation to direct the lives of those around him. To this end, he reads endlessly from theological and classical tomes and as a result projects himself in what he perceives to be an erudite manner. To others he seems merely eccentric, out of date, and overbearing. The result of his dictatorial and rather archaic manner is that his wife has retreated into a shell while John, his second son, has left home disgusted with his father’s senseless pontification, vowing never to return.

When Jeremy first walks into the kitchen of his parents’ home after his long absence, his father mistakes him for John, his favorite, and greets Jeremy accordingly. This greeting comes as no surprise to Jeremy, knowing his father as well as he does, nor does his father’s request that he return to a long-standing practice and read to him daily from Gibbon’s History. In time, the old man hopes, this will create a bond of mutual intellectual curiosity between them.

Soon Jeremy relocates to a small town nearby, where he secures a position with the local government. Taken under the wing of his predecessor, Mr. Greenlee, in whose home he lodges, Jeremy learns the various aspects of his job and settles comfortably into a routine. Another boarder at the Greenlee home, Maisie Michie, captures his interest, and a love affair ensues. Without the knowledge of the Greenlees, who would never brook such behavior under their roof, Jeremy and Maisie begin sleeping together. Jeremy goes to some trouble to furnish a back room of his office suitably so that they can meet there as well. Jeremy’s meager salary is not very conducive to his romantic interests, and he therefore begins what becomes a rather inglorious habit of stealing from the office petty cash.

As this is occurring, Jeremy’s mother is slowly dying back home. James, feeling the part of the long-sufferer, has had the help of one of his parishioners, a middle-aged woman named Queenie Quelch, in seeing to the care and comfort of his failing wife. Queenie first became known to James when she had asked his help in investing five hundred pounds inherited from her mother. Being suitably flattered and using the best means at his disposal, James invested the money in what became a losing proposition. He later reminisces, to his own comfort and gratification, that on the occasion of entrusting her money to him Queenie may have lost five hundred pounds, but she gained a husband, for after the first Mrs. Bohun’s departure from the world, James begins to woo the nurse for his second bride.

Father and son are married on the same day, and both seem destined for happiness. James goes so far as to question whether his first wife really understood him, while Jeremy’s household becomes filled with robust little children. James proves exceedingly virile and active as an old man, but the treachery of self-absorbed intellectual curiosity returns to the Bohun men, who retreat into a realm of reading and conversation that supersedes what they presume to be the mundane demands of job and family. It is as if the pursuit of women animates both James and Jeremy, but following the pursuit it is the love of books that take over, a need for the rarefied atmosphere of cerebral indulgence. James justifies his study as requisite to his job. Jeremy, being more forthright, merely neglects his office duties.

Jeremy is eventually caught in his theft of petty cash: A government auditor easily discovers his dishonest manipulations. Unknown to Jeremy, Maisie approaches another local official, Joe Lavender, for help. She is prepared to offer anything to save her family the ignominy of her husband’s crime yet finds her task easier than she had ever expected it could be. Upon reaching the Lavender household, she observes Mrs. Lavender dressed as her husband, carrying out his chores, and Joe dressed in his wife’s clothes, doing the ironing. After some flustered embarrassment, Joe admits to Maisie that he and his wife do such a switch on occasion to “keep things fresh.” To avoid the public ridicule and reproach that would follow exposure of this, Joe volunteers to pay back the sum stolen by Jeremy, thereby righting the situation for Maisie and her less resourceful husband.

James, meanwhile, decides that he and Queenie need a break from each other. He writes to apprise Jeremy of his forthcoming visit. Maisie is not happy, but Jeremy, surprised at his own reaction, is actually pleased with the prospect of seeing his father. When James does arrive, the two men sequester themselves for lengthy, esoteric discussions. Their insensitivity to the women is evident, as all household chores devolve on Maisie, who laments being “the family charwoman.”

After a lengthy stay, James returns home on the train. Queenie fails to meet him at the station, and after searching for her without success, James calls on Jeremy to attend him. Jeremy does so and arranges for a temporary nursemaid to watch over his father, but when he returns he finds, to his own surprise, that Maisie has left him. The narrator interjects, “But after all, to what end had he read all those books all those endless speculations about human experience, all those demonstrations of human behavior, all those emotions on paper, if he were not to be better equipped for coping when the testing time came?” He does manage. He manages by muddling through.

Christmas vacation arrives and Jeremy takes advantage of the holiday to visit his father. There he finds the old man under the care of an attractive widow, Mrs. Bonnie. Jeremy finds himself drawn to her but is kept in check by his uncertain marital status. Interestingly, James has similar designs on his nurse. When Maisie’s remains are discovered in some barren country not far away, Jeremy is not sure whether to mourn or rejoice. In short order, he dispenses with the usual funeral arrangements, proposes to Mrs. Bonnie, and is married.

Left to his own devices, James embarks on a quest to find Queenie and his other son, John. After some six months, Jeremy is called to a small town where his father is in the care of the widow of a licensee. There James chooses to remain and there he dies. Jeremy returns home to continue with his latest interest, seminary studies, hoping to become a vicar. As a tag end to the story, Jeremy hears rumors of a man answering the description of John living a rather ordinary life somewhere in Latin America.

The Characters

James Bohun is an older man deceived by his own moderate intellectual gifts and physical virility (which he retains into dotage). As a Methodist minister, he believes that he should be able to keep his own life in order as well as the lives of others looking (or even not looking) to him for guidance. Perhaps to save God the trouble, or perhaps simply to make sure that things are done properly, James assumes a position of authority within his small world and becomes not only self-righteous but arrogant and pushy as well. Presuming on his own generous estimate of his gifts, his godly calling, and a trace of aristocratic blood somewhere in the family line, James strides through life aware of his triumphs but woefully ignorant of his shortcomings or the strengths of others. His character is consistent throughout the novel and similar to the emperor who paraded so proudly in his “new clothes.”

Jeremy is an attractive character when the reader meets him, employed at a laborer’s job, enjoying the company and admiring the philosophy of simple working men; upon returning home, he is put off by his father’s unbecoming blend of arrogance and insensitivity. As time goes on, however, Jeremy loses this wholesome, commonsense perspective and becomes increasingly like his father. Jeremy is more reflective than James, yet, when it becomes apparent to him that he is duplicating his father’s life, he seems unperturbed and willing to continue. Previously he had sought to comfort his mother for being married to such a man. That he is aware of what has transpired is evident in his letter to a friend that concludes the novel: “To you I will confess the chilling thought that sometimes occurs to me when I am in conversation if my brother were to return to us, he might hasten to depart again immediately, under the impression of being misinformed about our father’s being no longer amongst us... perhaps I am much more his son than I ever imagined.”

Maisie is the only female character who is given much of an inner life, and it flickers only briefly before she decides to leave Jeremy. Maisie proves her mettle as a loyal mate in approaching Joe Lavender. Receiving no such consideration from Jeremy, burdened with an ever-increasing family, and having spoken with a woman who warned her about the exploitive nature of men, Maisie considers her lot in life. She observes in what respects her life has been dominated by males, including Jeremy, James, and her sons, and concludes that she and her daughter must escape the sexist-religious-intellectual oppression.

Critical Context

As one of Frank Sargeson’s later novels, Joy of the Worm shows the cumulative effects of many of his previous works. It exhibits Sargeson’s tendency toward picaresque and episodic plots in his longer works. As another in a series of perspectives on New Zealand life offered by way of offbeat or curious characters, it says something about human nature and proffers a powerful, if not altogether succinct, moral. The story continues Sargeson’s exploration of the Puritan mentality that guided the formative spirit of early colonial New Zealand and that has remained to superintend much of New Zealand’s contemporary life.

In these several respects, Joy of the Worm follows naturally the short stories, which garnered several literary awards, and novels such as I Saw in My Dream (1949), Memoirs of a Peon (1965), and The Hangover (1967). The elements present in Joy of the Worm are those same elements mentioned most frequently by observers as constituents of the “Sargeson world,” a world presumably similar to that of Charles Dickens in the author’s re-creation of his milieu with the irregular building blocks of perverse, eccentric, lonely, lost, intriguing people.

One critic has characterized Sargeson’s writing as “imaginative realism,” a phrase which accounts for the author’s unique approach to his culture and the dual nature of his characters as both representative and real. Sargeson has been placed alongside Katherine Mansfield as one of the giants of New Zealand literature. He has been called a “father figure to virtually all modern New Zealand fiction,” and critics have spoken of his “sheer dominance of his fictional scene.” His international reputation is limited, in part as a consequence of his single-minded determination to create a literature of New Zealand without looking over his shoulder toward larger audiences.

Bibliography

Copland, R. A. Frank Sargeson, 1976.

King, Bruce Alvin. “New Zealand: Frank Sargeson and Colloquial Realism,” in The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, 1980.

Rhodes, H. Winston. Frank Sargeson, 1969.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. August 7, 1969, p. 873.