This morning I called into Frank’s place, to visit him. Frank Sargeson’s place, at 14 Esmonde Road, Takapuna. I hadn’t been there for ages, mainly because for the last two years Esmonde Road has resembled a war zone. The street that 28-year-old Frank Sargeson moved onto in 1931 has been widened to better cope with the thousands of vehicles that streak ceaselessly past the Sargeson house every day, on their way to the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The road works seem to have been going on forever, with sections being sliced from the frontages of all the Esmonde Road properties to make the road a four-lane one, with a median strip, so creating what is called in Britain a ‘dual carriageway’ and allowing even more vehicles to travel even faster along it, day and night.

As I knocked on Frank’s back door and walked in, I gave him the usual greeting.

‘G’day Frank. How are you?’

As he greeted me Frank put his hand to his brow in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Oh that bloody road’s still not finished. It’s making writing almost impossible. The noise, the dust, and all the rest of it.’ Then as he led me into the main room, he chuckled. ‘I had a couple of the road workers in for a cuppa this morning. Poor buggers, they looked the way I felt. I was going to give them some Lemora wine, but then I looked at the machinery they were using on the road and thought better of it.’ He went behind the kitchen bench. ‘They wandered about in here with their cuppas, and one of them – a Samoan bloke I think – said, “Hey, Mr Sargeson, you got heaps of books in your place, eh?”’ Frank laughed delightedly. ‘“Heaps of books”.  Well, I filled up my bookshelves years ago, that’s why there are heaps.’ He reached for the flagon on the bench. ‘You’ll have a Lemora, won’t you Graeme?’

‘I will, thanks Frank.’

He poured me one in a Marmite jar, then dropped an ice cube into it. After he’d poured his own Lemora, we went to the other end of the room. Frank sat in his usual chair on one side of the fireplace and I sat on the bed on the other side, on the quilt Janet Frame had sewn for him, in 1956.

‘Well,’ said Frank, ‘I see that young Karl Stead and young Kevin Ireland have both got new books of poetry out. Going for it neck and neck, as usual. Have you read them?’

‘I have,’ I said. ‘They’re both terrific.’

Frank nodded. ‘Well, that’s good. I haven’t got copies from them yet. Karl’s in England and Kevin’s floundering up north – or some sort of fishing – so they’ll probably send me copies when they get back.’ He pushed back his black beret and scratched his scalp.

‘Who’s this year’s Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow? Over at the Sargeson Centre in town?’

‘James George.’

‘Ah yes, James. I admire his novels.’ He paused. ‘And what about you, Graeme? What are you working on?’

‘I’m writing a blog, Frank.’

He looked mystified. ‘A blog? What the hell’s that? Some sort of thriller?’

‘Not really.’ I took a sip of Lemora. It burned a fiery track down my gullet. Then I told him.

When Frank first moved to 14 Esmonde Road, it was a cul-de-sac, little more than a track running off Lake Road in Takapuna and down to a mangrove swamp. The property had been in the Davey family – Frank had been born ‘Norris Frank Davey’ – since the early 1900s. On the large section was a hut which the Davey family, who were from Hamilton, used as a holiday house. After deciding to become a writer and changing his name, Frank moved into the hut in 1931 and stayed on the property for the next fifty years, writing short stories, novels, plays and memoirs. Its then-serenity was ideal for a writer. Over the next decades 14 Esmonde Road also became a social centre for writers and artists, a place where most of New Zealand’s major writers and a good many minor ones, visited Frank to catch up with literary news and gossip. There too Frank mentored many younger writers, including Robin Hyde, Maurice Duggan, David Ballantyne, Janet Frame, Karl Stead and Kevin Ireland. He helped me, too, when I was a struggling writer in the late 1970s. My very first novel, The Mentor, featured a character strongly based on Frank.

The Sargeson Trust, led by the indomitable Christine Cole Catley, Frank’s literary executor and beneficiary, has fought long and hard to preserve the house at 14 Esmonde Road, the one built in 1948 after the original hut disintegrated. With the strong support of North Shore Mayor George Wood and his council, the house is now a listed Heritage Building, protected and preserved as a literary museum. Visitors can see over the property by arrangement with the Takapuna Library. A sign at the front of the house states:

‘Frank Sargeson (1903-1982) lived at this address from 1931 until his death. Here he wrote all his best-known short stories and novels, grew vegetables and entertained friends and fellow-writers. Here a truly New Zealand literature had its beginnings’.

Frank ushered me to the back door. From the rear of the house we could hardly hear the rush of the traffic from the road at the front.

‘Thanks for the Lemora, Frank,’ I said. ‘And I’ll see you again, soon I hope.’

‘Any time Graeme, any time. But ring me first, won’t you? In case I’m writing.’

‘I will.’

He chuckled. ‘The road works might be finished by early next year. In time for my one hundred and fifth birthday.’ He stroked his white goatee. ‘Give my love to Christine. And good luck with your plog.’

‘Blog, Frank.’

‘Blog, yes. I must look that word up in my Greater Oxford.’

Going to the front of the house I looked up. There he was at the window, a gnome-like figure, grinning mischievously. He waved and I waved back. Then, at the gate, by the rubble from the road works, I turned again. Frank had vanished.

Two literary projects have been absorbing me over the last few months. Firstly, the compiling of The New Zealand Book of the Beach, an anthology of writing by New Zealanders which has in common a beachside setting. As I grew up close to two inspiring beaches – Oakura and Opunake, in Taranaki – this was a project close to my heart. I went right through my bookshelves, re-reading the story collections of writers such as Owen Marshall, Lloyd Jones, Sarah Quigley and Witi Ihimaera, gleaning every New Zealand short story, novel or non-fiction passage which had a beach setting.

I didn’t have to cast my net very wide to find suitable material. Befitting a country with a 6000km-long coastline, where no place is more than a two-hour drive from the sea, the beach is a strong presence in the lives of most New Zealanders, and hence in New Zealand writing. I rediscovered the delights of such stories as Katherine Mansfield’s At the Bay, Frank Sargeson’s A Great Day and Victoria McHalick’s The Picnic Virgin. Excerpts from Shonagh Koea’s novel The Lonely Margins of the Sea and Kevin Ireland’s memoir Under the Bridge and Over the Moon fitted naturally into the anthology, as did the preface to Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather. There are twenty contributors in all, a mixture of the living and the dead, young and veteran writers. The New Zealand Book of the Beach (David Ling) will be published in October 2007.

My second work in progress is a compilation of the work of the European writers and artists who came to the South Pacific from the late eighteenth century onwards. This was a fascinating historical period, full of mutual wonderment and confusion as two vastly different cultures came together for the first time. The period also produced some great art and literature, such as the novels of Herman Melville and Samuel Butler and the paintings of William Hodges and Augustus Earle. An indispensable reference for my research has been Anne Salmond’s enthralling account of James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (Penguin, 2004). And as my new travel book, Inside the Cannibal Pot (pictured, publishing in May) also has a man-eating component, the Salmond book is resonating twice-over with me. As is Kevin Ireland’s new book of poems, Airports and Other Wasted Days (Hazard Press, 2007) which appeals to the travel writer side of me for its poetic evocation of the ghastliness of contemporary airports.