Margaret Mahy Read online

  Dedication

  To Vanessa Hamilton

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One

  The Young Philosopher — 1936 to 1958

  Part Two

  The Apprentice Writer — 1959 to 1968

  Part Three

  The Picture Book Writer — 1969 to 1980

  Part Four

  The Full-time Novelist — 1980 to 1993

  Part Five

  The Doctor of Letters — 1993 to 2005

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Select bibliography and major sources

  Margaret Mahy — chronological bibliography

  Awards and honours

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Introduction

  It seems remarkable now, when new authors can reasonably expect early induction into the heady world of literary festivals, the media and the writers’ community, that I did not meet Margaret Mahy for five years after my debut novel was published. Another two years went by before I heard her give a major speech.

  There were several reasons for this long wait. The early 1980s had yet to see the spread of the literary festivals — Dunedin, Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch, Whakatane, Waitakere, Bay of Islands — now securely established on the New Zealand arts calendar and providing, among other things, invaluable opportunities for writers to meet their colleagues. Then, a writer might be individually invited to a more specialised, professional occasion, say, a library conference, a children’s literature or literacy event, a university seminar or a school’s book week. If shortlisted for an award, you might briefly meet other authors, under less than relaxed conditions, at prize-giving ceremonies.

  Then surely I, and other up-and-coming writers of the 1980s, would have met one of New Zealand’s all-time greatest writers, twice winner (in 1982 and 1984) of Britain’s Carnegie Medal, at these occasions, adding New Zealand awards to those she was collecting overseas? No, because her novels, short story collections and picture books, being published principally in England and America, were not then eligible for most New Zealand awards. With the exception of the Esther Glen Medal, which she won six times from 1970, you do not see most of her great novels of the past 20 years included in New Zealand’s book awards.

  To me, as a parent, a newish writer and an eager reader of every Margaret Mahy novel as it appeared, the author down in Governors Bay on the shores of Lyttelton Harbour was a distant and Olympian figure.

  I finally met her in August 1987, at a screenwriting course being run in Wellington. My novel Alex, due for publication in September, was also being adapted for television, so the five trips to Wellington seemed a worthwhile investment in my role as script consultant and coincidentally the opportunity to meet at long last the author I admired above all others. Margaret, by then also recognised as an innovative and successful writer of children’s television, with Cuckooland and Strangers under her belt, was to conduct the last session.

  ‘Oh, Tessa, I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said in that unmistakeable New Zealand small-town voice, a broad smile under the soft felt Homburg-style hat she often wore in public to cover fine and anxious hair. Holding out mint copies of my first two novels, Night Race to Kawau and Jellybean, she added, to my astonishment, ‘Here, I’d be so pleased if you’d sign your books for me.’

  I later heard that other new writers had similar experiences of this simple, generous gesture of support for the genre and the writers behind the books. In recent years she often lamented that she simply couldn’t keep up with all the children’s books local and otherwise that she wanted to read, never mind the adult ones; for decades Margaret had followed her librarian’s commitment of reading virtually every New Zealand children’s and young adult novel published. She happily bought literally hundreds of them, creating on her living room’s high-reaching bookshelves what must have been one of the best private collections of New Zealand children’s books anywhere in the country.

  I remember her session for one other reason. Until then, a good deal of the discussion had been of a defensive nature: how to prevent or at least deflect nasty producers, directors, financiers, script editors and even uppity actors from generally conspiring to ruin your carefully polished script. In the space of a few minutes, Margaret changed all that. Not for her the inevitability of the beleaguered writer, knowing the risk of being called precious but standing firm against the suits and barbarians. Writing for television, she stated then and continued to say throughout her life, was teamwork with other clever, talented people, and for novelists who normally work in solitude, it was entertaining, surprising, intense, stimulating, full of excitement and thoroughly enjoyable. Her session, an informal talk with 12 or so students in a small room, was positive, wise, often very funny, slyly self-mocking, discursive to the point of seeming to tilt the topic off-balance into a lengthy ramble, but also, given a few minutes of often virtuoso deviation, bringing her point unfailingly, triumphantly home.

  It was Margaret’s brilliance as an essayist and speech-writer, her supreme versatility and completeness as a writer, along with my belief that as a novelist she was (in her own country) shamefully neglected, that largely led me to this book. Even that experience in Wellington was hardly sufficient preparation for the first few occasions I heard her delivering a formal speech to a large and well-informed audience. The first was two years later in New Orleans, where she was a keynote speaker at the American convention of the International Reading Association, which, thanks to an Arts Council grant, I was attending on my way to Rome to research the third book in the Alex quartet.

  In New Orleans, I sat spellbound and proud among a large gathering of equally captivated Americans as, for over an hour, Margaret brought all her wit and eloquence to bear on the subtle, scholarly, subversive nature of her ideas. In 1990, it was Rotorua, a full hall of teachers at the South Pacific Convention of the International Reading Association listening to her talk on censorship in children’s literature, and also in Wellington, at the International Festival of the Arts Readers and Writers Week, where I found myself sharing a platform for a children’s session with Margaret Mahy and the acclaimed British poet Charles Causley. Though comparatively little published as a poet, she was as learned and compelling in the specialist field of children’s poetry as he, and able to quote with ease from his widely known, infinitely sad pieces ‘My Mother Saw a Dancing Bear’ and ‘Timothy Winters’, among much else. Causley was gratified, respectful, even overawed.

  On these and other occasions through the 1990s, the Mahy hallmarks, well honed in more than a decade of constant public speaking, were always there: the rich, magical language; the sheer musicality and rhythmic ease of her prose; the provocative and often contrary ideas; the incursions into philosophy and science, architecture and the arts, history and anthropology; the literary quotes and allusions; and the social commentary and the psychological insight. Few academics could match her knowledge of children’s and adult literature, both historical and contemporary. Along with a lifetime of reading, many years as a professional librarian, and, by her death, 30 years as a full-time professional writer, there was a phenomenal memory which enabled her, in any question time or informal gathering, to offer impromptu musings on practically any children’s or young adult book you care to name. Characters, storyline, issues, the author’s place in the genre under discussion, all were effortlessly, accurately recalled and shared. The same largely applied to ‘adult’ classic and contemporary fiction or works on a range of science topics, philosophy, popular culture, plays, poetry, horror stories, ghost stories.

  In private, she was a creative listener as well as an enthusia
stic talker and participant in lively debate. The extent of her reading often astonished: David Hill, writer and passionate amateur astronomer, once settled down to instruct her on the matter of black holes. Two minutes later, he recalled, the reverse was happening with ‘absolutely no arrogance — she just paid you the tribute of assuming you could participate’. No matter how tired or jet-lagged she was, how currently immersed in work or family affairs, her presentations were invariably delivered with energy, good humour, respect for her audience and skilful timing in a New Zealand accent that she once said sounded more like the sort of voice that should be reading out cake recipes over the radio.

  I came to believe over the years that Margaret as a versatile, complete fiction writer, novelist, essayist and thinker was much under-rated in her own country, where the general literary establishment persisted in seeing writing for children and young adults as outside mainstream literature. Therefore, only serious ‘adult’ writers (no matter how new or undistinguished) were worthy of their serious critical attention. Margaret’s world-acclaimed novels were not, until quite recently, widely read for adult pleasure or academic study because ‘Well, she was only a children’s writer.’ Even the day after her death one well-known commentator opined on national radio that he just wished she’d written more adult stories; her sci-fi drama series for adults had been pretty good and she would have written ‘some masterly stuff’. Her speeches, even those on general aspects of literature or culture, attracted, in my experience, very few of the literati.

  Those of us who work in children’s literature, however, or in the associated fields of children’s librarianship, literacy education and educational publishing, had regular, unforgettable reminders from the late 1980s of Margaret as a speech-writer and public speaker without peer in New Zealand.

  We had read her internationally award-winning books, at least five of which, given different book design and covers, could have been published as adult fiction. We knew of her fairy-tale arrival on the international scene, in 1969, with simultaneous launches of not one but five picture books in New York and London, and the two Carnegie Medals that she won with her first two novels. We had some idea of the offshore reputation that she had built up since by sheer brilliance and hard work.

  Many of us had experienced on more than one occasion the challenge of her intellectual curiosity, the warmth of her generosity and her extraordinary stamina. Some of us knew of literary organisations she quietly supported with cheques arriving out of the blue; of occasions like the Storylines Family Days when she insisted on paying her own air fares; of the writers who’d been offered the use of her book- and video-filled apartment in Cranmer Square in central Christchurch, sadly destroyed in the 2012 quakes. We had seen on websites — those of several publishers, the New Zealand Book Council, Christchurch City Libraries and others set up overseas — the generous, written responses that she supplied to FAQ (frequently asked questions) pages: long paragraphs, which must have taken hours, about how she wrote, her working methods and advice for young writers. Many of us, recipients of occasional emails, notes of congratulations on a new book, long personal Christmas letters or sudden phone calls, counted her as a good friend.

  Yes, the literary establishment said, but surely it was true that in 1993 she became the only writer to receive the country’s highest civil honour, ordinary membership of the Order of New Zealand. (Janet Frame and Allen Curnow were appointed additional members to mark the 1990 sesquicentennial celebrations.) In 1993 wasn’t she also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Canterbury? The New Zealand Literary Fund Lifetime Achievement Award earlier, in 1985? The publishing industry’s first A.W. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999? President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors in 1997? A second honorary doctorate, from the University of Waikato, in 2005? The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Arts Foundation Icon Award, also in 2005? If they knew anything at all about children’s literature, they might add that a medal bearing her name had been awarded annually since 1992 by the Storylines Children’s Literature Trust for a ‘distinguished contribution to children’s literature’ or that in 2006 she travelled to Macau to receive the world’s ‘Little Nobel’ prize for children’s writers, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Wasn’t she known to the general public as a ‘household name’, a beloved national treasure, a taonga — that loveable eccentric from Lyttelton who wrote wacky picture books and was often photographed with primary school kids, wearing a penguin suit or funny multicoloured wig?

  These accomplishments, however, comprised the literary establishment’s soothing, official mantra; in my opinion, they were only half the story, very often expressed with condescension and not matched by the sort of recognition and support that would be accorded to an adult writer of similar international standing.

  Where have been the mainstream academic studies? If Margaret Mahy was one of New Zealand’s three greatest ever writers, why has she not been extensively taught in English literature courses in New Zealand universities, alongside Mansfield, Frame, Mulgan, Hyde, Ihimaera, Hulme, Gee, Duff and Knox?

  Where (besides A Dissolving Ghost, a shortish, tantalising collection of speeches published in 2000) are the several substantial books of essays, compilations or edited versions of the best of her many speeches and reviews? Although she occasionally jumped the barrier and made it as the only children’s writer profiled in selections of contemporary New Zealand authors, why did arguably the country’s best, most versatile and most original writer not appear in short story collections, or critical studies or anthologies of New Zealand writing published since 1980?

  As her career as a novelist flowered internationally during the 1980s and 1990s, where were the publishers’ launches and the nationwide promotion accorded to, say, Maurice Gee or Fiona Kidman or younger writers like Catherine Chidgey? Where, in the book pages of the mainstream media and the literary journals, were the serious, informed reviews and commentaries accorded to writers of ‘adult’ fiction? Why do I search in vain for her inclusion in any book of New Zealand quotations, when so much droll, insightful quotable treasure is to be found in her work? As David Hill said in his review of A Dissolving Ghost, ‘She’s eminently quotable: “Pursuing truth in literature is like pursuing a chimera, a dissolving ghost”; “In books for young adults … [readers] are looking anxiously for something that’s going to make them marvellous”; “It was the year I turned five. I was already a slave to fiction”.’

  So how did it happen that in Britain Margaret Mahy was known primarily for her novels for young adults, was even, according to a 2005 television documentary, Made in New Zealand: Margaret Mahy, ‘a household name’ there — often even claimed as one of their own? Why is still any mention of these same young adult novels in New Zealand intermediate and high school classrooms usually met in my experience with blank, mystified faces? The Changeover? The Tricksters? The Catalogue of the Universe? The Other Side of Silence? No? Surely you’ve at least heard of Maddigan’s Fantasia or Kaitangata Twitch, TV series but first, books? There is admittedly a lamentable general lack of teacher and student awareness of locally written young adult novels in our secondary schools, despite many best efforts in the past decade, but this is getting close to disgraceful. They are probably being taught Mansfield and Duff and lately, Kate De Goldi and Fleur Beale, but I don’t believe they are being taught Mahy.

  Until the last decade, Margaret was mostly published overseas and her major novels were therefore brought into New Zealand from UK as pricey imports, without promotional budgets and through the 1980s, not eligible for awards. But because she has been touched by what Rose Lovell-Smith calls ‘the dead hand of children’s writing’, there is still widespread ignorance of the full range of her work, of the unique intellect behind it and of her true international standing.

  Within the UK, Margaret Mahy has long been seen as one of the all-time greats of children’s literature, studied by academics alongside Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Graham
, C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner, Arthur Ransome and Philip Pullman. Julia Wells, editor at Faber & Faber, which published Margaret’s long-awaited fantasy The Magician of Hoad (in the UK, titled Heriot), says she found it hard to believe that in New Zealand, a country being perceived through its 1990s film successes as a ‘hot-bed of talent’, Mahy was better known for her younger books. ‘[In the UK] she is particularly revered for the quality of her novels for older children … The characters in Margaret’s work engrossed me [as a teenager] to such a deep level that I didn’t at first realise the stories were set in New Zealand. Not until I read an episode in The Tricksters where the family are having Christmas lunch on the beach … The idea of sunbathing on Christmas Day was such an unusual picture that I instantly had to readjust how I was imagining the story. The strength of her work is that it can be enjoyed on many levels. For New Zealand readers, I am sure it is loved for characteristics that are pure “New Zealand”. However, the reason why Margaret has endured in the UK is because her writing transcends cultural and environmental differences.’

  The literary snobbery which confines children’s and young adult literature to an invisible ghetto is, however, now much less fashionable or indeed, inevitable than it has been. Margaret herself has commented on the attitude that sees children’s literature as ‘somehow detached from literature …’, a view totally at odds with her own view that the genre is indisputably ‘part of the literature of a community’. In England, Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon have famously challenged established notions of where ‘children’s literature’ stands by winning ‘adult’ literary awards with complex, sophisticated novels that defy easy and condescending categorisation as mere ‘children’s books’; the seven Harry Potter books have won J.K. Rowling a significant adult audience, as have superb ‘young adult’ novels by Australia’s Sonya Hartnett, Gary Crew and Lian Hearne (aka Gillian Rubinstein). Mahy’s Memory, runner-up for an unprecedented third Carnegie Medal, is regarded by many as a compassionate adult study of Alzheimer’s disease; there’s enough anecdotal evidence to put in cross-over claims for William Taylor’s The Blue Lawn and my own Alex. The judges for the 1986 Goodman Fielder Wattie award were open-minded and progressive enough to include my novella Jellybean in their shortlist of 10, to widespread tut-tutting, I have to say, from the literati. But now, Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and in Australia, novels like Hartnett’s Of a Boy and Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels typify the new enthusiasm for publishing cross-over books aimed equally at young and adult audiences. Though grumbles about the unwarranted lowly status of children’s writers and the lack of review space and critical scrutiny are nothing new, nor by any means confined to New Zealand, the small, close-knit publishing and literary world here does perhaps mean fewer and more muted challenges to entrenched attitudes.