Jenny Nicholls is a Waiheke-based writer and fortnightly columnist for Stuff.
OPINION: Does New Zealand really have a tall poppy syndrome? Dominion Post editor Anna Fifield thinks so, and explains why in a recent Letter from the Editor.
She writes: “Tall poppy syndrome– the tendency to begrudge, resent or mock successful or talented people – is still endemic [in New Zealand].”
I’m not taking snippers to Fifield’s tall stem when I dissent, by her own definition. Disagreeing with a powerful person in public is not only part of a healthy society, it is something Fifield is very good at.
If New Zealand has a tall poppy syndrome, we share it with the world’s richest countries. Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, Chile and England all use the phrase, or a variant of it, and it doesn’t seem to be holding them back. (The only exception I could find was Israel – my Israeli-born friend could not think of an equivalent.)
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Although The New York Times refers to it as a foreign concept – “what the British call tall-poppy syndrome”, as a journalist wrote in 2017 – to me it has always seemed a by-product of natural egalitarianism, rather than envy. It’s the reason the boss is a hapless moron in comedy from Fawlty Towers to 30Rock, why the killer is always the sneering rich kid in Columbo, and why Jeeves is smarter than Wooster.
Here’s Maureen Dowd in the New York Times in 2017, writing about a new prime minister on the other side of the world to New Zealand. “The tall new Irish prime minister has run afoul of the Irish tall poppy syndrome, the need to cut down all perceived peacocking … ‘If we could export wing-clippers, we could solve the national debt,’ ” an Irish TV host told her. Complaints, she wrote, were mostly about the PM “swanning around”, a mortal sin in Ireland.
A friend from Colombia told me about the country’s tall-poppy-adjacent phrase “caranga resucitada” – in which a bloodsucking louse swollen with success forgets its lowly origins on the anuses of cattle, lording it over the other lice.
Tall poppy syndrome might seem pretty in comparison, but it has an older and even uglier origin story. The Roman historian Livy (59BC-AD17) tells the legend of Tarquin, a horrible tyrant, receiving a messenger from his son, a despot looking for advice. Rather than answering directly, Tarquin took a stick and knocked the heads from the tallest poppies in his garden. The son understood the symbolism of this message, and dutifully executed the most illustrious members of his realm.
In his book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, David Winner quotes an architect who links the Dutch variant of TPS to the flatness of the Dutch landscape. “When your head is above the level of the grass, it will be cut off in the Netherlands. The Dutch like things level, to keep the cultural landscape flat. We don’t like high peaks.”
Although the Dutch might envy the English their cultural peaks, the phrase tall poppy syndrome is known and used in England.
Susannah Clapp, a founding editor of the London Review of Books, wrote in a review of a biography of Tom Stoppard: “It’s true that some complaints about his output are pretty putrid. Lack of heart comes up from time to time, often from a critic who regards the height of his trade as evisceration.
“I don’t think, though, that Stoppard has particularly been the victim of tall poppy syndrome. Vilification may still be considered the quickest way for any reviewer to make a name, but theatre critics, not being in the same line of business as those they are reviewing, don’t suffer from the routine jealousy of those book reviewers inclined to behave as if an author has pinched their own material.”
Putrid. Evisceration. Jealousy. Pinched. Ever read words like this in a New Zealand review – of anything? The latest works by Owen Marshall, Jane Campion or Flight of the Conchords are greeted with wall-to-wall rapture. Nobody knows if vilification gets you a name in Aotearoa reviewing circles, because hardly anyone has tried it.
Far from being a nation of savage critics straining at the leash, most New Zealanders are unused to the concept, as I discovered after getting an acidic misdirected email from an author, accidentally, via his agent. I had loved his book, and said so in a review in my community paper, although one of the sentences might have been slightly less gushy than the rest.
Editors often have good reasons for seeking recommendations rather than analysis. In the August issue of the New Zealand craft beer industry magazine Pursuit of Hoppiness, columnist Michael M (“I am German. If you ask me for an opinion you will get one”) complained: “I do not read beer reviews any more. Why? Because I cannot recall ever reading a bad one … I wonder why New Zealand beer reviews are always positive?”
The editor, Michael Donaldson, replied: “We sample a very small percentage of all that’s available – so if you get a bad one, it can feel incredibly unfair to single out that brewer for a lashing. In the end, we’re not really doing ‘reviews’ – we’re offering unsolicited recommendations and sharing what we love.”
The New Zealand craft beer community is small, and supportive, but this reluctance to criticise is as Kiwi as Buzzy Bees and the Edmonds Cookery Book.
As an eloquent friend told me: “New Zealanders who imagine that tall poppy syndrome is unique to us are actually saying something unflattering about their fellow Kiwis – that other people are envious, bitter and inadequate.
“Surely it’s just that fame and success invites scrutiny. Some of it will be legitimate, and some will be mean-spirited – but that’s a human characteristic not unique to one country, least of all this one.”
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