I for One… by Frank Sargeson

First published: 1952

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Mid-twentieth century

Locale: New Zealand

Principal Characters:

• Katherine, a schoolteacher who is single and living with her mother
• Dr. Hubert Nock, an American psychologist
• Katherine’s Mother, who is recently widowed
• Hilda James, Katherine’s half sister by her father
• Helen, Hilda’s daughter

The Novel

I for One… is written as a series of diary entries kept by Katherine, a schoolteacher, over the course of the five months following her father’s death. Katherine seems to be in her thirties and lives at home with her mother. The death of Katherine’s father has left both women curiously unaffected, except that it has caused Katherine to take up her diary again after a ten-year hiatus. Katherine is disturbed by her mother’s apparent stoicism and believes it to be the product of a denial of the terrible loss. She is shocked, then, to discover that her mother is, in fact, relieved at the man’s parting, that she had loathed him for years. This is the first of many occasions on which Katherine displays a naivete which both disturbs her and remains her great comfort.

On a rare social outing, Katherine is introduced to Dr. Hubert Nock, an American psychologist who captivates her with his fine manners and interesting conversation. Katherine finds one of his stories particularly moving, a story about a boy who was extremely nearsighted. Not until the boy grew older did people recognize the true nature of his problem, which was easily corrected. Previously, they had thought him simply dull-witted. With his sight corrected, for the first time in his life the boy was able to gaze out into the world, “lost in the wonder of it all.” The clear implication is that Katherine herself suffers from a kind of myopia, a failure to see reality clearly.

A relationship seems to develop between Katherine and Hubert. He, however, is often away for reasons of work, if the reader is to believe what he has told Katherine. On one occasion during his absence, Katherine reminisces about her first love, a boy she had befriended as he convalesced in the local hospital. She had been introduced to him by a nursing friend and felt an immediate pity which she mistook for love. When the boy recovered and departed without any declaration of affection, she was heartbroken. The memory causes her to question once again the nature of her innocence.

Katherine travels to visit her nursing friend, Else, during another of Hubert’s absences. Else shares a house with two old ladies, sisters one a spinster (Miss Drake), the other separated from her husband (Mrs. Ellis-Thomas). Else is away, so Katherine visits with Miss Drake, who, in the course of the conversation, describes how her sister pitifully awaits the unlikely return of her wicked husband. Inviting Katherine to a window to view a man across the way who is obviously shiftless and unkind, she explains how her sister insists that clean linen be kept out in case her husband, a man not unlike the one in view, should return. The wizened old woman makes light of this, expressing the opinion that her sister should be grateful to be rid of “bad rubbish.”

Disconcerted, Katherine leaves in a rush, convinced that the old woman is crazy. Her emotional response is the same as what she had experienced when her mother had offered similar sentiments. For the moment, she wants to believe in love, and although she no longer lacks for examples of love gone wrong, she excuses Hubert when he fails to call for a long while, asking for no explanation.

Something more of Katherine’s character is revealed when she invites one of her students, a girl named Katie Willis, home for tea. Katie is a painfully shy girl, very like what one might imagine Katherine to have been when she was younger. Katie has failed her exams at school, and her mother is sorely disappointed. Katherine explains that although Katie has failed one set of exams, she remains an attractive girl with a wonderful talent for art. She is able to draw highly emotive pictures. When one of these pictures is shown to Katherine’s mother, she is noticeably unimpressed. The similarity to Katherine with her journal is unmistakable. In both instances, self-expression is more private than public and goes unappreciated. Katherine has sympathy for the younger girl but cannot recognize the parallels with her own situation.

One day while walking, Katherine encounters two strange girls who give her an envelope. Inside, she finds a lewd message addressed to her. Not so shocked by the content of the message itself, Katherine is more disturbed that such a foul thing should be addressed to her. Selected as a target for some of the nastiness of the world, Katherine finds her vulnerability disquieting.

Hubert continues to make only rare appearances, begging off frequently because of a mysterious illness. Not wishing to doubt him, Katherine accepts his word; in fact, her admiration for him grows. She writes in her diary, “. . . he is so fully adult and reliable that I can’t help being reminded of father.” The nature of her attachment is thus revealed. In a later entry, Katherine writes, “If only one could have a home of one’s own and stay there forever, content always to attend to all the little tasks that have to be done without ever wanting to put one’s foot on the street outside. Nothing could go wrong then.” Katherine continues, however, “It is only when we meet people, and because we meet them, that things go awry.” Katherine then meets Hilda James, her half sister.

In meeting her half sister, Katherine is forced to confront the conflict between her image of her father as a near-saint and the reality of his irresponsible life. In a parallel discovery, she soon learns that Hilda is the wife of her beloved Hubert, the reason for his frequent and prolonged absences. Katherine crumbles.

Only after a week of recovery under the care of Hilda’s daughter, Helen, does Katherine come to accept that the world in which she has believed was in fact a sham. Her mother, long a protector and guardian, reveals a bit of the truth when, touched by her daughter’s sad confession, she feels compelled to share some of her own past. She tells of how she met Katherine’s father (who, at the time of their meeting, was a married man) and risked everything to run away with him; she recounts tales of cross-country trips and motels. Later she attempted to put off the inevitable divorce. All this comes as a revelation to Katherine, and her reaction is one of instant relief, as if a great burden had been lifted. She sheds her misconceptions like an outgrown skin and, like the nearsighted boy of Hubert’s story, looks out into the world with a new sense of exhilaration and wonderment.

The Characters

I for One… is told through Katherine’s diary entries and thus is restricted to her outlook. Katherine’s character is for this reason not so eccentric as might at first appear. She calls herself to rather harsh judgment throughout the novel, doubtful of her perceptions, skeptical of her assessments, and leery of her ability to survive change. Such is not extraordinary. Stated simply, Katherine has a well-developed intellect, but by virtue of being overprotected, only now is she coming of age emotionally. Katherine’s parents lived unconventional and turbulent lives. Clearly, they wanted something more stable for their daughter. In creating a secure environment, however, they fostered in Katherine a false sense of life and love as they normally occur, leaving their daughter naive to the ways of the world.

The strength of Katherine’s character shows in her instinct to write. Writing is her method for consolidating a sense of her developing self and beginning the struggle to emerge as a healthy individual. A diary gives her freedom to reflect, to speculate, to study, or to debate without challenge. It allows her to maintain, even in the looming shadow of her parents, an independent identity free from constraint.

Still, Katherine must get beyond writing. She ponders the ultimate worth of writing herself at one point, asking, “Can it be that when we feel we live, really and truly live, we become impatient with what is merely on paper?” Yet, she also understands that, in the early stages of her growth, such questions come to light only in the process of writing. The answers, as well, are clearly defined only when she can work them out on paper. In the end Katherine’s developed self does emerge. She rids herself of unnecessary shame, dumps the surplus from her vast stores of humility, and, unlike T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, enters the world triumphantly.

There is some temptation to classify Katherine’s mother and Hubert as villains in the story, but that would be both inaccurate and unfair. Katherine’s mother, after all, does what comes naturally to most parents, and the implication of Hubert’s occupation as a psychologist is that he may have been trying to assist Katherine. He offers romance. His deception, although ungentlemanly, passes in this world, and as Katherine admits, he was the first to ask her to defy convention and live for herself.

Critical Context

Frank Sargeson has been credited with giving New Zealand literature new life. The path he cleared was for the return home of many expatriates who, as he did, had fled the vast separateness of life which they had perceived in New Zealand for what was hoped to be the rich intellectual life of England and Europe. What Sargeson discovered and encouraged others to recognize was that, as New Zealanders, they could not deny the unique nature of life in their island nation, nor could they write of it in borrowed forms and language. Sargeson wanted to set himself and his countrymen to writing about New Zealand life in a more familiar idiom.

The early years of Sargeson’s career were marked by his success as a writer of short stories. An avid reader of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Sargeson observed how effectively one might approach the heart of a culture or region by way of its curious rather than respectable characters. What emerged was a fiction that seemed to peer at New Zealand life from the dark corners and lonely hearts of the nation. There was no self-conscious posing, nor was an accommodation made for overseas readers. In short, what Sargeson began was the self-examination of the psyche of a small nation, with little regard for what a larger audience might think.

Sargeson’s earliest stories are like parables. He wrote about his waiflike protagonists with insight and concern, often using them to deliver some thinly disguised message. Later stories obtain the oblique perspectives and rich characterization while becoming less didactic.

When Sargeson began writing novellas and novels, he brought his short-story skills with him. His longer works are almost invariably episodic or picaresque. Some of the novels suffer for this. I for One…, however, does not. As a story told through a series of diary entries, an episodic narrative is not only inevitable but preferable. The narrative device works especially well because Sargeson is able to maintain his fictional female’s point of view credibly throughout.

After I for One… Sargeson began to experiment in drama, with limited success. He continued writing fiction as well, and his themes remained essentially the same. Although he produced a satire of some note in Memoirs of a Peon (1965) and a disturbing examination of human nature in The Hangover (1967), few among his longer works rival the masterly craftsmanship and intuitive understanding of I for One….

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.