OPINION: New Zealand writer Charlotte Grimshaw spent the eight weeks of the Polkinghorne trial in Menton, France on the Katherine Mansfield fellowship. But that didn’t stop the novelist, whose books often explore the nuances of privileged Auckland society, from following the trial in detail. She reflects on character, drugs, and why we were all so gripped by Philip Polkinghorne and Pauline Hanna.
While I was in France and following reports of Philip Polkinghorne’s murder trial, I happened to watch a classic movie about a man with a hidden life. The film makes one thing very clear: character witnesses are of limited value. They may be superficially persuasive, but they don’t take into account the shape-shifting qualities of the human personality. Anyone can have a hidden side, a different self. Some people are exceptionally simple and open, but many are multilayered. It never gets you very far trying to nail down, in brief black and white terms, what any person is like.
Philip Polkinghorne’s murder charge caught the nation’s attention. Did he strangle his wife, Pauline Hanna, or was her death a tragic suicide? The trial tried to arrive at an answer by meticulously laying out the facts. Who were Philip and Pauline? What happened between them? There were competing narratives and no third-party witnesses to the death. The Crown case was circumstantial, and the verdict could go either way.
So, there was mystery, and there was suspense. But these elements exist in many criminal trials. What was different? The protagonists were affluent, educated Remuera professionals. Sex, infidelity and drugs were involved. Our attention is diverted by novelty, and it sure was novel – it was rivetingly unusual – to see the universes collide: drugs, sex-workers and scandal crashing into educated middle-class affluence, the Northern Club, a prominent surgeon.
Most commentators rose to the challenge by playing it straight. I followed a lot of thorough, intelligent local reporting, along with excellent podcasting.
There was some flamboyant commentary that struggled with tone. It showed flashes of Schadenfreude. It exaggerated themes of money and status. It used tabloid terms. It emphasised, to an indecent degree, how thrilling the trial was. And there was endless resorting to labels. Rich. Elite.
Reading that coverage, I reflected on authenticity. Our common discourse is important. The trial was an enquiry. In the same way, all good writing is an enquiry. It’s a search for accuracy and authenticity. If you begin with labels, you’re lost. If you slap on those clichés and stereotypes – rich, elite, overlords – you aren’t looking beneath them. As Chekhov said, “It is the duty of the artist to ask questions.” And that was the duty of the court too, and of all of us trying to make sense of the case.
Authentic, observed details are found, as the good doctor could tell you, by using your eyes. And ears. And instincts. No two “rich Remuera doctors” are the same, just as no two “gang-members” or “poor people” are the same. It always seemed to me, watching the evidence unfold, that the tragedy had a distinct source. In my view, this was the story of a personality unravelling, and taking another down with it. His gradual collapse of identity that spilled out, caused widening ripples of damage, ultimately ending in disaster.
In my experience, that kind of ruin isn’t to do with money or status. There’s no inherent decadence in affluence, any more than there’s intrinsic depravity in poverty. Affluence is, in many ways, a protection against “going off the rails.” But one force that works its way in, gets through the barrier made by money, is substance abuse. It’s a leveller. It breaks down the walls.
I can think of a family: high-achieving, highly educated parents, whose kids went to expensive private schools. The father was an alcoholic. One night the adult son was high. There was a fight; the father king-hit the son; the son threw the father through a window. Each could have killed the other. They lay there amid the broken glass, with their university degrees and their polished accents, waiting for the ambulance and police. It wasn’t about money or social status. It was about substance abuse, and the resulting, very hidden damage.
There seemed to be minimising by the defence of Polkinghorne’s use of meth. But how else to explain the admitted details? The frantic elderly pursuit of sex workers, the large amount of meth in the house, his recommendation of it to a colleague.
All the social status he had: prominent surgeon, international reputation, Associate Professor at Auckland Medical School, sophisticated technocrat – and he’s Whatsapping Madison about her latest boob job or arse lift. He’s chattering like a moronic teenager, all the while, according to admitted facts, arranging sex hookups and scoring, and smoking hard drugs.
He’s collapsed not just into seediness and squalor, but into sheer inanity. This has always seemed to me the hellish essence of substance abuse: its blending of melodrama and inanity. His life as described in the trial seems like the collapse of Polkinghorne’s intellectual self. Along with the loss of his faculty of self-preservation – both sure outcomes of meth use.
Pauline kept forgiving him, it seems. But she’d lost sight of self-preservation, too. Infidelity is intimidating: it is intimate betrayal.
Polkinghorne has been found not guilty. We will never know exactly what happened. We can only look at photos of Pauline Hanna. A hardworking woman, who may have lacked self-esteem. Who tried to be a good wife. Who worried, but drowned her sorrows. She had a gentle, open face and soft eyes.
She had looked at apartments in Napier, but was fearful of divorce. The house was divided, but she wanted the marriage to stand. She loved her husband. All those character witnesses portrayed him in brief black and white: “Polky”, the good doctor, great guy, lovely man.
Charlotte Grimshaw is a columnist, novelist and memoirist based in Auckland
