Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  After more than a decade of lobbying by the Children’s Literature Foundation (now the Storylines Children’s Literature Trust), the AIM and then New Zealand Post Children’s Awards, the New Zealand Book Council and a few influential individuals like Greg O’Brien and Professor Terry Sturm, the situation is only marginally improved. Some literary festivals still pay scant attention to children’s literature as a genre like any other, or confine it to schools’ events; review space in the print media has, if anything, got worse. In a small country, one festival director, one publisher, one academic, one buyer for one bookseller, one editor and/or reviewer in one magazine can, and very often does, by their enthusiasm, indifference or hostility to any given genre or book or author, exert disproportionate influence and power — unlike even, say, Australia, where the five-times-greater population gives rise to a much broader range of compensating views and positions.

  Added to this has been a ‘powerful hierarchy of genres’ dominating critical discourse about New Zealand literature, ‘with poetry and “serious” adult fiction (the novel and the short story) enjoying largely undisputed possession of the field, the genres of non-fiction and drama on the margins, and children’s literature and forms of popular writing largely invisible’. Terry Sturm’s introduction to The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English cited the 1990 Penguin History of New Zealand Literature as therefore capable of relegating ‘one of New Zealand’s major writers, the children’s author Margaret Mahy, to a footnote’. Worse than that, I would add, the footnote includes Mahy not in her own right but only in the context of a book of author interviews by Sue Kedgley.

  And Sturm is not alone here, nor can I be accused of a bit of nationalistic flag-waving for a local favourite. Margaret Mahy is acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s very greatest fantasy writers and an acknowledged international leader in the field of writing on family relationships; many another country would be proud to call her their own. Australia, for instance, currently has no real equivalent to Mahy on the world stage. Diane Hebley, whose Power of Place — Landscape in New Zealand Children’s Fiction 1970–1989 was the only academic trade publication on the genre for more than two decades, concluded after a detailed survey that ‘the amount of useful and extensive critical commentary reserved for New Zealand children’s literature is woefully small for a literature that has international standing and excites critical interest in journals overseas’. More specifically, Greg O’Brien asserted in Moments of Invention, Portraits of 21 New Zealand Writers that Margaret Mahy is ‘… in every way, a serious writer, but the fact she writes children’s books means she seldom gets the degree of recognition she would receive if she were writing for adults’.

  In my research for this book, those comparatively rare occasions where Margaret Mahy was properly considered within the literary mainstream and not as a paddler up some distant creek stood out because of their rarity. Leading academic Mark Williams, in reviewing Bill Manhire’s anthology 100 New Zealand Poems in the literary review journal New Zealand Books, noted Manhire’s comment that ‘Frame is a poet in all of her work’ and adds, ‘The same might be said of Margaret Mahy whose books, more than those of any other New Zealand writer, with the possible exception of Janet Frame, derive from the conviction that literature is language that causes us to regard the world with amazement.’

  An earlier tribute was a major interview by Murray Edmond which appeared in the literary quarterly Landfall in 1987. His introduction states (and what a pity about that coy qualification, ‘Although she is a children’s writer …’, which Edmond disowns but still, alas, feels obliged to make):

  … a great deal [of this taped interview] has been lost in cutting and shaping because Margaret Mahy is an indefatigable and supremely entertaining talker, a genuine intellectual with a mind full of ideas and information as well as a relentless curiosity. What is not lost in this interview is her ability to speak in superbly honed sentences and with great clarity and precision … Not until she won prizes in America for The Haunting and The Changeover did she begin to be acknowledged fully here in New Zealand … Although she is a children’s writer (and such a qualification should really be unnecessary), Margaret Mahy, along with Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame and, much more recently, Keri Hulme, is one of our few internationally acclaimed writers. On any level she is a fine stylist, and, as a children’s writer, she bears comparison with Kipling for her command over genre and her verbal dexterity.

  Yet in 2004, searching through books of literary criticism published in the previous 20 years, I found, besides Sturm, O’Brien, Hebley or Williams, very few references to Margaret Mahy or the country’s now well-established literature for children. Ironically, though, there have been signs through the last decade that she was being accepted in the mainstream, if not as a novelist, then belatedly as an essayist. O’Brien’s generous New Zealand Books review of her only book of essays, A Dissolving Ghost, suggested that this rather slim and modestly promoted title should have been bigger, that she should be encouraged, indeed commissioned, to write more major essays on serious topics, not for spoken presentation where the audience is ‘sitting so expectantly in front of her’ but for the published page where ‘she could stretch out more’. Mahy, he concluded, was ‘one of a line of New Zealand geniuses that also includes Janet Frame, Rita Angus, Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgkins’.

  Genius is, or should be, a word used with caution. In a major feature in the Listener in 1991, Ian McLean, her high school English teacher, stated that, after 50 years of observing his former student’s career, ‘I wouldn’t be backward in claiming the word genius for Margaret.’ Now, it is a given. Margaret undoubtedly shied from the thought; she acknowledged sharing with Frame the same enthusiasm for myth ‘but she’s an exquisite writer, and I’m a more plastic, clownish writer. I remember reading her autobiography and feeling it was a story that was true for so many New Zealanders. You get an extraordinary feeling when you suddenly recognise your own story in someone else’s; it’s a moment of fulfilment.’

  Greg O’Brien chose Mahy and Frame to open and close his book Moments of Invention:

  … I imagined these two figures as being like bookends — pillars of both the craft and the imagination; both of them fitting and substantial enough presences to hold in place the nineteen writers who filled the space between them … As well as being comparably substantial artists [my italics], these two bipolar (in our book plan) figures were remarkably different as writers yet also, as became increasingly apparent, interestingly similar.

  If Mary was the writer of light, of buoyancy and liberation, Frame struck a dark, more restrained note. If Mahy wrote for the child in all of us, then Frame wrote for the adult that exists inside every child. Or so it might appear at first, but — of course — once you dug a little deeper, vistas of redemptive space opened up in Frame. And something darker and more foreboding emerged in the most clearly, brightly voiced of Mahy’s tales. In both of them a constant interplay of gravity and levity, light and shade, brilliance and something which is at times heartbreakingly ordinary. This paradoxical quality, I suspect, is at the heart of creative genius.

  If Frame tends to present life as a juggernaut we must handle with stealth in order to survive, Mahy sees the world more as a great machine that we can and should tamper with. And while the results might occasionally be disastrous for the individual, such an approach contains the possibility of success and elation. For Frame, language is healing; for Mahy it is more a preventative medicine or, more exactly, a vitamin supplement ensuring, at least, the possibility of health.

  While Frame is commonly thought of as a doyen of the inner life, Margaret Mahy is the public speaker, a performer in person as well as on the page. During the 1980s Mahy was often photographed — and existed in the public imagination — wearing a multicoloured wig which she would don, to the delight of all assembled, at readings in libraries and elsewhere (you could almost think of this get-up as a fluorescent revision of t
he Frame hairdo). This ‘persona’ drew attention to some of the qualities you find in Mahy’s writing; the sense of adventure and risk, and the need for unabashed brilliance up front, a dash of imaginative magic to jump-start commonplace reality.

  Further contrasts strike me. If Frame’s output, her autobiographies notwithstanding, was almost entirely fiction and poetry, with rare interviews and even fewer public appearances, Mahy’s body of work included, besides her fiction and poetry, an astonishing output of reviews, commentaries, journalism, non-fiction, screenwriting, essays for publication and many as yet unpublished speeches.

  Frame bore no children and lived much of her adult life in Europe, America and only intermittently and in the final years in New Zealand, alone and increasingly reclusive; Mahy travelled widely on the literary and library circuit and lived all her life in New Zealand, single-handedly creating a home for herself, her family and frequent visitors. She was a caregiver for most of her adult life, raising two daughters, and for nearly five years, even as her professional literary career took off, she looked after an aunt suffering from Alzheimer’s. She devoted substantial daily chunks of time to her seven grandchildren, those living nearby and the two others of her younger daughter living in Auckland.

  With Frame, there is the apparent curiosity of this most private of writers producing, in her mid-fifties and at what proved to be the peak of her powers, a three-volume autobiography, followed by her agreement to an acclaimed screen version. Some years later, there was Michael King’s large, authorised biography.

  For Mahy, the idea of an autobiography, even one volume, even the less challenging form of the memoir, held no appeal whatsoever. Neither, she told me with unusual sternness, did she want a conventional biography within her lifetime. The reasons were unsurprising. She was genuinely sceptical that anyone should find her life — so focused on study, librarianship, providing for her children, travel, visiting schools, always reading and constantly writing — in any way ‘interesting’. Equally, family sensibilities were an important consideration; the quest for happiness, honesty, harmony, kindness and love within the dynamics of extended family life was a dominating theme throughout her fiction and emphatically was no less so for her in real life. One of a large family herself, with her own daughters and a new generation of grandchildren, nieces and nephews growing up, she was anxious, she told me, not to have herself cast as any sort of hero in any detailed or intimate history involving the wider family. A writer’s statements about self, she believed, were secretly contained in what he or she wrote.

  My original idea had been to follow A Dissolving Ghost with a bigger compilation of further unpublished essays, some of which I’d remembered from specific occasions and hoped I might gently extricate from the book-filled office that was also her bedroom. However, it seemed that she could be better served by placing selections from available writing both by and about her within the broad context of her life and career. Much of the material has come from the many lengthy, carefully prepared one-off and so far unpublished speeches she gave all over the world from 1973, and from 10 hours of interviews recorded in Governors Bay in 2004. Other material has come from various libraries and private collections noted in the acknowledgements.

  Margaret also allowed me access to some of her files. Despite her librarian training, she was typically somewhat dismissive of the importance of her own archives —‘Who wants all that old stuff?’ she said more than once, and maybe she was only teasing when she gleefully announced that she later burned the ‘old stuff’ I had returned to her. (Fortunately, I had taken photocopies.) Admittedly, the papers in the filing cabinet were somewhat haphazardly arranged. Some of the speeches, probably from the 1970s, we found on flimsy foolscap paper in boxes not opened for decades, and several could only be tentatively identified by the topic or references to her age or audience. In the absence of a diary or record —‘I’d always assumed I’d remember it all!’— one thing had tended to run into another. Throughout her career, she had no assistant and only infrequent secretarial help to deal with correspondence, filing and other business aspects of a demanding literary life. Much more than writers for adults, successful children’s writers are frequently called on to speak and write about themselves, their childhoods, where they get their ideas, their writing processes, and none was more generous in this respect than Margaret. As she pointed out, over the years she ‘had talked a lot and inevitably I have often said the same things in different ways’.

  One day there will be a proper Margaret Mahy archive in Christchurch, and it is to be hoped that in time her essays, poems, letters and reviews will be published, as Mansfield and Frame have been. For now, though, this ‘literary history’ first published in 2005 and now updated with her death must suffice; the main text (Parts One to Five) remains from the original 2005 edition, but an Epilogue covers the years from 2004 to 2012. It is neither a biography nor a critical literary study, but in providing an overview of her career together with extracts from interviews and essays as yet unpublished, I hope that it goes some way to acknowledge with gratitude Margaret’s unique contribution to her country’s cultural life and to literature for younger readers around the world.

  Part One

  The Young Philosopher — 1936 to 1958

  Any narrative about Margaret Mahy, as lifelong and passionate advocate for the power of stories to influence, shape and structure human experience, should surely begin in the traditional way.

  Once upon a time

  … a first child was born to a couple living in a small, remote township on the coast of a distant country surrounded by ocean. The mother and father of this daughter had some standing in the town: she was a primary school teacher, he (somewhat older, approaching 40) was a bridge builder, with his own respected contracting company.

  The child, eventually to be the eldest of five, grew into a solid, fair and articulate girl who showed an unusually early love for reading, and, as soon as she was able to hold a pencil and shape the letters, for writing down her own stories …

  Or, we could skip the mostly happy middle-class childhood, the adolescent years of schooling and university study, and move on to …

  Once upon a time

  … there was a young mother who had two daughters, but very little money. During the day she worked hard as a librarian to support her young family, but by night, after they were in bed, she secretly wrote stories that she sent away to get published in a School Journal and earn her much-needed extra money.

  Gradually, over many years, she became quite well known, but only in her own country, until one day, a rich and famous publisher in America happened to read one of her stories. Immediately she sent a letter offering to be her publisher and made plans at great cost to fly to that far-off country especially to meet this writer of unique and unusual talent …

  Or, we could fast forward to the subsequent simultaneous launch in the United States and Britain and the growing world reputation as a writer of marvellously quirky, funny picture books and start with …

  Once upon a time

  … there was a librarian who was also an author. All her life she had written stories for children and many of them had been published as handsome picture books in many countries. To earn extra money, she also took work writing for television, but secretly she yearned to write longer works, serious novels for children and perhaps also for young adults.

  One day, when she was in her early 40s and bone-weary after years of working all day and writing many hours into the night, she decided that the time had come; she must try to support herself and her daughters by her writing. Resigning from her job in the library, she began intense work on her first serious novel for children. Imagine her astonishment and pleasure when her book won one of the world’s most important prizes for children’s writers, and even greater astonishment when her second novel, her first for young adults, won the very same medal two years later …

  Margaret Mahy’s life story always seems to have had somet
hing of a fairy-tale air about it, with herself cast in the persona of the benign, slightly mischievous witch, the weaver of magical or funny or ghostly or powerfully dramatic stories, as it pleases her, or us, her readers.

  She lives alone — with her cats and, usually, a dog, and sometimes rabbits and other animals — on the rim of ‘a collapsed caldera type of crater, similar to some on the moon, where the sea has come and turned it into a harbour’. In her house of many levels and staircases are the old books, antique toys, masks, pictures, puzzles and countless accumulated treasures a magician might have, while the fruitful garden is a touch tangled and mysterious, with arches and pathways and no clear boundaries. Frequently her house sings with the happy chatter of grandchildren. And though most of her shorter stories and some of her longer ones are set in the land of Anywhere or Somewhere or Elsewhere, and in England (the country where most of her books have been first published) she is often thought to be an English writer and actually claimed there, 20,000 kilometres away, as ‘one of ours’, Margaret Mahy has never thought of herself as anything other than a New Zealander by birth and by choice, in soul and in spirit.