by Tessa Duder
Margaret was not without her critics within the School Publications offices, as Jack Lasenby recalls. ‘Pat Earl, the chief editor when I first went there, was an admirer of writing that comes from direct experience. He finally said that you must realise that Margaret’s experience is her imagination itself. There’s a deep truth in that; she has a truth of the imagination that most people would never achieve. I remember one of the editors being suspicious of her witches, though not on any religious grounds. Interestingly, over the years the crank religionists haven’t had a go at Margaret, to my knowledge, and yet a lot of writers have kept off that very topic for years. And what I’ve always thought of as the first women’s movement story from Margaret was that lovely little thing with the long long title, Concerning a Little Woman and how she won herself a house and a servant and lived happily ever after — about a little woman who’s the servant to a slobbish green-backed beetle. She has to rub his back with handfuls of moss each day and he says, “Rub harder, little woman.” He’s a thoroughgoing joker-prick. But at the end of the story she’s got herself a house and he’s had to become her servant. Margaret is far too subtle a person to be given to feminist writing as such, but that had something of it in it to great effect.’
Lasenby remembers Margaret attending a course that School Publications ran for writers in Christchurch. After a full day’s work, they had agreed to write a story that night; Margaret apparently intended to call in at the library and do a couple of hours’ work before driving over the hill to Governors Bay. ‘She turns up first thing the next morning with not one but two stories, and one of them was the most spooky thing about a kid whose brother pretends to be turning into a robot — Margaret had put her own imaginative slip on it, so the younger boy begins to actually be a robot and scares the shit out of his older brother.’ This story, which Lasenby considered chilling and superb, was later published as The Mad Puppet, in a 1982 School Journal.
Later, according to Lasenby, ‘when Margaret signed up with Helen Hoke Watts, it took some hard learning for the authorities [at the Department of Education] to accept that somebody such as Margaret Mahy couldn’t be constrained by having had first publication in the School Journal. Her new offshore publishers generously agreed to send so many copies of the books to the Department. I remember these great parcels arriving, our Journal stories now as individual printed books. We’d go through discussing the illustrations and designs, delighted, of course. But while I’m very fond of those stories in the Journal because they are part of my earliest reading of her, the fullest enjoyment I got from Margaret’s writing was from The Haunting onwards, the great novels. Suddenly she strode off into the older “young adult” stage — from every point of view those novels have got structure, characterisation, development, they’re just perfect of their kind. That image in The Catalogue of the Universe of the mother scything the long grass by moonlight — it’s unforgettable.’
But the novels were still 10 or more years away. Even before Lasenby arrived at School Publications and embarked on his enthusiastic support for Margaret’s work, an event had taken place on the other side of the world. Involving just one very short story of 26 lines published some years earlier in the School Journal, it would set in motion events which would completely transform her life.
Part Three
The Picture Book Writer — 1969 to 1980
A Lion in the Meadow first appeared in the School Journal (Part 1, Number 3) in 1965. Essentially a profound statement about the power of the imagination to alter reality, it was the story that, more than any other, altered the reality of its impecunious but determined writer’s long struggle towards publication and recognition.
The transformation begins in a public library on Long Island, New York, where Sarah Chockla Gross, an editor with a respected New York publisher, Franklin Watts, is browsing one day. Mrs Helen Hoke Watts, the owner’s wife, looks after the children’s list and has an internationally known eye for outstanding picture books, and the artists and writers whose talents make them memorable. Among her protégées are the hugely popular illustrators Brian Wildsmith, Charles Keeping and Jan Pienkowski. In the Long Island library Mrs Gross sees a touring printing exhibition that includes some School Journals from New Zealand’s Department of Education. Perhaps someone has chosen to display the small book in a glass case, open at a particular page; perhaps she is leisurely thumbing through one issue.
The little boy said, ‘Mother, there is a lion in the meadow.’
The mother said, ‘Nonsense, little boy.’
The little boy said, ‘Mother, there is a big yellow lion in the meadow.’
The mother said, ‘Nonsense, little boy.’
The little boy said, ‘Mother, there is a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow!’
The mother said, ‘Little boy, you are making up stories again. There is nothing in the meadow but grass and trees. Go into the meadow and see for yourself.’
The little boy said, ‘Mother, I’m scared to go into the meadow, because of the lion which is there.’
The mother said, ‘Little boy, you are making up stories — so I will make up a story, too …’
It is a moment all editors yearn for, hope to have at least once in their careers. Sarah Gross, elated, seeing the picture book potential of the story, immediately rings Mrs Helen Hoke Watts — long-distance, because she happens to be in London at the time. She has barely finished reading the story before Mrs Watts asks: ‘Who wrote that? Where did you find it? It’s absolutely perfect for a picture book, I wouldn’t want to change a word!’ Most authors wait a few anxious months, some even years, for decisions like that — and may find their carefully polished text ruthlessly cut or altered by an editor — yet Mrs Watts, clearly a woman of action, writes a prompt letter to Margaret Mahy, care of School Publications, Department of Education, Wellington, to say that her story will make an ideal picture book, and has she got any more like that. She sends a cheque for US$1,000 in advance royalties (‘Too much money always works — people can’t resist money — pay plenty!’ she is quoted by Betty Gilderdale as saying, and in 1968 that is serious money) and briskly begins the process of finding English co-publishers like Heinemann, Dent and Dobson and first-rate illustrators like Helen Oxenbury, Charles Mozley and Jenny Williams for no fewer than five Mahy books to be published simultaneously in New York and London, and before the end of 1969.
In publishing terms, this was unusually speedy, heady stuff — and canny, since, only a few months later, Margaret received another, independent inquiry from the United States, which later caused a typical smile: ‘No one likes to think that their success has been totally due to something as random as good luck.’ With the advance, she was able to get water piped into her small house and buy a car, which was an overdue necessity.
She has described reading Helen Hoke Watts’s letter as feeling ‘like Cinderella entering the ballroom and being seen at last in her true beauty’, and that ‘within seconds a heavenly choir had begun to serenade me’.
‘I opened it — read it — and felt I was dissolving. The idea of actually having a book published was overwhelming, though it was one that had been with me for many years. Of course in the first few seconds, I knew I was going to write back and say, “Yes I would love to have the story published as a picture book. Please take it.”’
In fact, she wrote back a letter ‘servile in its enthusiasm, knowing myself to be lucky, but unaware just how lucky I was. I had no idea that at this time picture books in the USA were profitable, for apparently many school libraries in those halcyon days received a federal grant which they were to spend only on books. I had an opportunity which I had done nothing to deserve, and had not sought.’
There was a certain sense of both utter disbelief and a destiny fulfilled, ‘… a transmutation that I had imagined so often that, when it came about, it seemed like the inevitable fulfilment of a prophecy, and yet a fulfilment so frail, so contingent, I could hardly believe it had ever
been achieved.’ From the age of about nine, when she was second in that essay competition, ‘I always had that feeling in the back of my mind and when I had my first book published, part of me remembered that childhood fantasy and said, of course, I always knew this was going to happen! When I was a child and people said, what are you going to do when you grow up, I started out by saying, be a writer, but people kept saying you can’t earn your living as a writer, so after a while I said instead, I want to be a writer but I suppose I’ll be a librarian or a teacher to earn my living. When I went to university, I said to myself, I’ll get a degree even though what I really want to do is write stories. So I didn’t give up on the idea, I just postponed it.’
But this approach from New York was not, astonishingly, just about one story. ‘When she first got in touch, Mrs Watts said rather foolishly, have you got anything else you’d like to show us, and I sent her practically everything I had. She wrote back and said, “Are you aware that you’ve sent us over a hundred stories and poems?” I suppose the interesting thing is that I had just kept on writing, even though I didn’t think there was ever any strong prospect of getting anything published, other than the School Journal.’
In the light of this New York enthusiasm, it may reasonably be asked why no New Zealand publisher other than School Publications had recognised her potential? Margaret had made some efforts on her own behalf, making up a collection from the School Journals and submitting them to various local publishers, such as Blackwood and Janet Paul, A.H. & A.W. Reed and Whitcombe & Tombs, because she felt she would be ‘less lost and anonymous in New Zealand than I would be in either the USA or Britain … They were always returned, sometimes with the usual terse rejection slips, but sometimes with rather fuller comments, so that I formed a picture of a publishing industry catering for a small population and restricted to very small print runs. My stories were not “local”, were set, indeed, in an area where, if published, they would be competing with a similar genre of book coming into the country from overseas, and available much more cheaply than indigenous productions. On the whole I don’t think New Zealand publishers were very cosmopolitan, which isn’t to say they weren’t involved in some very creative publishing at times.’ They ‘made it plain that their only commercial option was to publish books with a New Zealand voice’ but ‘I was a determined and assiduous writer of poetic tales and tall stories. I wrote on and on and on.’
To publishers who wanted a self-consciously New Zealand voice, telling stories of farm life, bush adventures, tui, pohutukawa, Maori pals and Maori artefacts, Margaret’s settings, metaphorical language, archetypal characters and images were too firmly rooted in European traditions, and possibly, in the women’s storytelling tradition for editors in a male-dominated profession to take their own imaginative leap outside a perceived need for only ‘New Zealand’ stories. Unlike Jack Lasenby at School Publications, there were evidently no editors reading unsolicited manuscripts for the trade publishers similarly able to recognise that here was a writer with a unique, universal voice and so demonstrably of world class that she could be profitably published towards an international future. International co-editions, where publishers share costs, were virtually unheard of. Picture book publishing, in full colour, was, and still is, costly, and the New Zealand market notably small. Through the 1960s fewer than 20 children’s books by New Zealand authors were published annually, and many of these were produced by London and New York publishers. In 1969 there were 23, including Margaret’s five: 15 were published overseas. They included books by Anne de Roo and Ruth Dallas, Janet Frame’s only children’s book Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, and The Duck in the Gun, the first major picture book by another future international star of similar age, Joy Cowley.
As Margaret has written, overseas publication still commanded disproportionate respect. Even now, ‘it is hard for a book with a Kiwi idiom to find a place in Britain, which produces 7000 children’s books a year, many of which are probably not as good as the best that New Zealand can offer, but have the advantage of local voices and local reference … While New Zealand needs stories with local content and local idiom to help its children become New Zealanders, local content may disadvantage the story when international sales are explored. New Zealanders are great bridge crossers. They have had to be. The food has often been on the other side of the bridge. Publishers, however, are cautious bridge builders, for, given the choice, many people do not want to cross over. Publishers need the international sales, and so do authors and illustrators, if they are to buy the time it takes to produce the next book.’
With the Franklin Watts contracts signed, the production process under way, and a long-term relationship with the young author in mind, Mrs Watts plans a trip to New Zealand. She is an indefatigable trans-Atlantic traveller, with apartments in New York, London and Rome, but New Zealand is another matter altogether before the jumbo jet era has arrived. It is also highly unusual: even today, publishers do not generally go chasing halfway round the world after authors. But Margaret’s stories have star quality written all over them, so Mrs Watts packs her bags.
In fact, this tall, ‘notably well-dressed’, larger-than-life New York grandmother packs no fewer than 13 of them, and her arrival at Christchurch’s small airport does not pass unnoticed by the press. Two taxis have to be hired to cope with $1,000 worth of excess luggage and follow Margaret’s battered second-hand Mini over the Port Hills. At the modest Governors Bay Ocean View Hotel a second bedroom has hurriedly to be taken for the luggage. (Just what was in those bags? Margaret believes clothes, though it was January, summertime. There were also books and many gifts; ‘she was carrying quite a lot of whisky and gin. She drank a lot, which naturally I enjoyed sharing with her.’)
‘On the one hand I found her intimidating because she was very tall, rich and had the power to publish my books. On the other there was something oddly naïve about her romantic view of herself and her world. She saw herself as being powerful through riches and glamour and talked freely about her lovers and men who had admired her, including D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas.’
Moments of high comedy occur all through the visit. Her first words to Margaret, waiting nervously at the airport, had been ‘My God, this really is the end of the world — they don’t recognise American Express.’ Ice for drinks proved difficult even at the hotel. In Margaret’s two-roomed house in Merlincote Crescent, just below the hotel, she likes the idea of a Scotch on the rocks, but Margaret has no running water, let alone ice: ‘I was carrying water in plastic containers from the library over the hill to my home.’ The house has no electricity and the outside toilet is a little hut housing a can with a lid; a hole is dug and the contents buried about once a week. A septic tank is not allowed because of the house below. What a sophisticated New Yorker who keeps a permanent suite at the Savoy makes of all this can only be guessed at. Inside, there are books everywhere, but as yet no bookshelves; when she returns to the United States Mrs Watts will begin to construct a compelling legend that Margaret Mahy is building her own home herself, conjuring up images of the writer in a builder’s apron hammering in nails. Margaret says this was never quite true: she was having the house built in stages and was simply waiting until she could afford a builder, though she did help to dig the foundations. But there is ample treasure for Helen Hoke Watts to justify her rather surprising week in New Zealand: within the house she finds more Mahy handwritten stories, dozens of them, in suitcases, in files, even (reported the Woman’s Weekly) one stuck to congealed plaster in a bucket. A few months later Margaret tells the local newspaper that Mrs Watts ‘went over a lot of material I had written, did a bit of editing and wanted certain changes, and took more material away with her’.
‘She stayed at the local hotel for a few days, and then shifted to a hotel out by the airport,’ recalls Margaret. ‘The children were sometimes there, and though she was nice to the girls, and bought them presents, she wasn’t really interested in them. She took us all out t
o dinner, which we all regarded as hugely sophisticated, and she took a great deal of pleasure in seeing our pleasure, since she was operating in such a beneficent way. Her purpose was to sign me up, yes, but she was a romantic in many ways, an incessant traveller who loved travelling and being rich and able to do it all first class. She knew a lot of publishers and editors and exercised a certain amount of power.’ Helen Hoke Watts died in 1991.
Margaret has always remembered her extraordinary publishing debut with gratitude. ‘Helen was to launch my books in the USA with a generosity that I did not appreciate at the time, simply I did not understand it … [and] didn’t altogether realise how unusual it was … I remember her enthusiasm vividly … and her strong approval that nobody could tell my books were New Zealand books. I was not upset or insulted. I was too glad to be getting published. However, it did give me a tremble of self-doubt, because, after all, I was a New Zealander and the books were constructed out of what New Zealand had offered me … the idea that though we were good at producing butter and wool, our own artistic ideas had no authority — that it was overseas that Imagination with a capital “I” flourished most richly, and that what we did in Auckland or Christchurch was bound to be inferior in both skill and essence.’
Margaret now looks at those first five books with some incredulity. The number of words on the page and the size of the print would not, she says, be acceptable today.
‘I would describe The Procession as a poetic progress, A Lion in the Meadow and The Dragon of an Ordinary Family as touched with elements of amused fantasy. Pillycock’s Shop as a sort of horror story. Mrs Discombobulous seems to me now the story in which I most closely move towards humour, though it would be unpublishable today, not only because of its length but because of its subject. The nagging woman, a basic character of past folk tales and jokes, is no longer a politically acceptable subject in spite of her presence in folk tale though … in defence of Mrs Discombobulous I would like to make the following points. She is a woman who loves language … and who uses it, dramatically, to rescue the gypsy princess from the Baron. Mrs Discombobulous isn’t witty or epigrammatic but there is a joyous element of release in her flowing abuse … these days I would not write this story in the way I wrote it thirty-five years ago … after all if I did I am sure that Learning Media might hesitate to publish it whereas School Publications, back then, did not … but I quote it because it seems to mark for me a move towards assertive and even flamboyant language and to embody the suggestion that words, juggled and exaggerated, have the power to make us laugh, that laughter not only reinforces our necessary bond with language, but signals release.’