Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Today a 33-year-old and impecunious solo mother hitting the literary big-time in New York and London — J.K. Rowling, of similar age and circumstances in the mid-1990s, comes to mind — might well be getting extensive media attention. There seems to have been little coverage of Margaret’s achievement and the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly piece was typical of women’s magazines at the time: ‘Mrs’ Mahy was described as a ‘tallish, strongly boned blonde in her early thirties, well-dressed in a tweedy “mod” style. One imagines she would be at home on a tennis court, on the back of a horse … but with a BA and Library Diploma, she has a responsible, full-time job with the Country Library Service in Christchurch.’ The young mother, in a double-breasted trouser suit, was photographed with the ‘two adorable little girls she is bringing up single-handed’.

  In 1970, A Lion in the Meadow won Margaret her first literary award, the Esther Glen Medal given by the New Zealand Library Association for a novel or picture book deemed to be a ‘distinguished contribution to children’s literature’. It had been awarded only five times since its inception in 1945, mostly to books with Maori elements and most recently in 1964 to Lesley Powell for Turi: the story of a little boy. An unprecedented second Esther Glen Medal followed in 1973, with The First Margaret Mahy Story Book, published in London by J.M. Dent & Sons, who would be her principal publisher for more than two decades. By this time Margaret had formed a strong friendship with her editor at Dent’s, Gwen Marsh. A few years later there would be an even more important friendship and professional relationship with Vanessa Hamilton, the forceful, astute Dent editor and, later, literary agent, who from The Great Piratical Rumbustification (1978) on, was to edit most of Margaret’s picture books and, in due course, her major novels.

  By 1973, Dent’s was producing promotional fliers inviting English readers to ‘step into the magical world of Margaret Mahy’, detailing no fewer than 13 books, and in New Zealand she was now being invariably described in journals like Education as ‘New Zealand’s best-known writer of children’s books’.

  It was inevitable that before long her overseas publishers would want to meet their rising young star in person, so in May 1973 Margaret flew to London at the invitation of Helen Hoke Watts, returning by way of Las Vegas to attend the American Library Association annual conference. Unusually for middle-class Kiwi women who, since the 1950s, had spent their early twenties travelling, it was her first adventure outside New Zealand, and a wonderfully rewarding experience. Her childhood reading had given her feelings ‘of great familiarity and affection with a place I had never been in before — quite eerie, but far from unique’.

  Typically she had agreed (as other more precious or more canny, established writers might not) to an exhausting programme: straight into a week of schools and libraries in Bristol and Birmingham, followed by a major speech to the Library Association in London and a visit to the huge Penguin Books complex at Harmondsworth.

  Although Margaret had not yet done a great deal of public speaking, Constance Reed of the Bracknell Children’s Book Group reported in a children’s literature magazine that ‘No summary of Mrs Mahy’s talk can do credit to her gift of interweaving short tales and poems, and of gripping the attention of her audience’. As still primarily a working librarian, her own report on the trip to her Country Library Service managers in Christchurch comments soberly on professional matters such as book stock, remedial literacy advisers in schools and pointed comparisons between ‘the very circumscribed nature’ of New Zealand’s school library service for pre-schoolers, and the English situation where young children were regarded as being ‘of the first importance’. The occasional whimsical note breaks through: she describes the malfunctions of Camden Library’s computer system cutting off the initial letters of author’s surnames, resulting in ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer, now both beginning with the letter “H” becoming unexpected neighbours’.

  The visit had begun in fairy-tale style with a Rolls-Royce at the airport, to take her to Mrs Watts’s Belgravia apartment, and dining with her hostess at the Savoy Hotel Grill and the Hilton. She had some time for sightseeing and stood before Seurat’s ‘The Bathers’ in the British Museum weeping for joy. Bedecked in borrowed coat, gloves and jewellery, she sat in a box with Mrs Watts at Covent Garden Opera House for a sold-out Rudolf Nureyev gala performance. And two valuable and enjoyable days were spent at the home of Margery Fisher, then Britain’s leading critic and author on children’s books, before she flew on to the Las Vegas conference. This was ‘an incredible experience’, where she noted the ‘earnest and rather conservative’ approach of American librarians as opposed to the publishers’ vast displays and their ‘very hard and competitive commercial sell’. She also attended the banquet for the prestigious Newbery and Randolph Caldecott children’s literature awards, with her hosts, the Parents Press. Though the meal was ‘hardly lavish’, the whole occasion, ‘ritualised by repetitions over a number of years, was something a librarian would always recall with interest and even nostalgia’.

  By 1975, as she moved into her eighth year of full-time work with the School Library Service, behind the occasional glamour of being an internationally published author in demand by schools and adult audiences, Margaret’s professional life was becoming very complicated. There was a constant stream of mail from the United States and Britain (for every book, the publisher’s contract to be signed and returned, the proofs at various stages to be checked and endless publicists’ promotional requests to be met). For every appearance outside Christchurch, there were travel arrangements to attend to, titles to supply for as-yet-unwritten speeches, short biographies to write for organisers. By 1976 her books were being published in German, Japanese and Russian, which meant more contracts, and The Wind Between the Stars had been the only picture book in the English language to win an award at the recent international children’s book fair, held annually in Bologna. She told a journalist ‘I’m sure that Brian Froud’s illustrations played a big part, but like to think that the story helped.’ And then there were her readers’ letters, from children, their parents, librarians, teachers, other writers. Like most children’s authors, Margaret regards these personal notes, but above all those from children, as her most important and rewarding mail: every one is essentially a love letter that must be answered.

  As she wrote in a short autobiographical piece for the prestigious American children’s literature magazine Cricket, ‘Every working day I get up and begin to arrange some sort of breakfast for a hungry family of two girls (Penny, 16, and Bridget, 10), two cats (Polly and Punch), one dog (Max), one horse (Blackberry), at least two guinea pigs, and one fish. I have to be careful with breakfast; for instance, it would not do if I gave Bridget the guinea pig grass and the fish an egg.

  ‘When everyone is fed and some of us are dressed, Penny, Bridget, and I set off to school and to work. We travel up a zig-zag road that is very steep in parts with banks on one side and a cliff on the other. In winter when there is frost and sometimes snow on the road, we feel very adventurous as we wind carefully up to the top of the hill. We usually get to the city safely, though every now and then we are late for school and for work.’

  This relentless routine was taking its toll, as she revealed to a Listener journalist:

  ‘I used to think it didn’t matter if I got tired, and in a way, it didn’t. But over recent years the most terrible thing has happened — I not only get tired, I go to sleep … If I get to bed by midnight I am all right. If I’m up till one I’m quite likely to go to sleep at work, very compulsively and embarrassingly. I wouldn’t mind being tired, that’s something I can cope with, but going to sleep is a most terrible thing.’

  Asked about future prospects, Margaret doubted that she could make a living from full-time writing. ‘She likes to think that if she was on her own she would be adventurous enough to try, but with two daughters … such a venture would be “rather risky”. So each weekend the dirty white Mini goes over the Hill to the Country Library S
ervice where, as a “patchy librarian” Margaret Mahy has worked for the last eight years.’ To add to her workload, ‘she does correspondence courses in third-form maths and fifth-form biology — at present, in a rather disjointed fashion; the maths because she doesn’t find it easy (she remembers that she never passed a maths exam in her life) and the biology because when the course says it is time to dissect a worm or a possum, worms don’t seem very interesting and “possums prove difficult to catch”.’

  Significantly, in this Listener piece, Margaret signalled her desire to extend her range, perhaps even to novels. ‘I suppose every writer has the dream that one day he will produce the story that will go beyond entertainment, that will involve people and maybe change them, even if only to an infinitesimal degree. That is what I ultimately hope to achieve. The trouble is, when you get involved in something like this, it is an emotional involvement and you have to be careful not to make what you are doing carry the full burden of your own hang ups …

  ‘The stories about real life I wrote before were not satisfactory to me. They were rather wooden. I didn’t feel the same involvement with them as I did with fantasy stories. Now, perhaps, I have come to the point of saying something I have realised for a long time — that real life is fantastic, too. Perhaps some of the stories I write from now on will be concerned with the sort of experience that could really happen. I would like to have a go at writing something other than short stories. It’s not that I wish to give up writing the sort of story I have been writing — I enjoy that very much indeed — but I suppose there comes a time when you feel you have to move on. I suppose, too, with all the talk of confrontation and self-identification, that the process of writing is a way of growing up, which sounds odd coming from someone my age. Writing has been like going back over familiar ground, reinforcing the symbols and elements that were present in childhood, in a way like a sort of echo of growing up. The books are an outer symbol of an inward progression.’

  Some idea of where she stood as the New Zealand feminist movement gathered force can be gleaned from a short and rather stern essay, ‘Educating the Imagination — Women as Writers,’ which she contributed, along with educator and editor Phoebe Meikle, poet Lauris Edmond and activist Phillida Bunkle, to a feminist magazine in 1975:

  ‘If there is any area in the literary arena where women should feel encouraged to succeed, it is as writers for children. The training and moral direction of children has long been regarded as a proper interest for women, and success in children’s literature can readily be seen as the development of a perfectly legitimate female interest.

  ‘It is true that there are a large number of excellent children’s authors who are also women, their number increasing as one approaches the 70s. Yet, for all the involvement that women have had with children over hundreds of years, the outstanding books for children, those which have changed accepted patterns and which now stand out as landmarks, are almost exclusively by men — Andersen, Carroll, Lear, Kipling, Twain and Stevenson write with a certainty and a freedom that Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary Mapes Dodge, Edith Nesbit and even Louisa May Alcott cannot, for all their mastery and magic, quite achieve.

  ‘The view is of course historical. It is not possible in an article of this length to build up a total picture of why men have proved so successful in a field that seems set up for female dominance. All one can do is to speculate on the social and literary factors involved.

  ‘Perhaps the very closeness of women to children, for all that it offers unique opportunities of observation and involvement, has been a mixed blessing because of the weighty instructive responsibility women have had placed upon them. Women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the subject of some scorn today because of their constant moralising. Men, of course were not free of this fault … it can be seen very clearly in Kingsley, George Macdonald and even such rugged writers as Ballantyne and Marryat. However, men, rather than women, seem capable of breaking free from the instructive function of writing and producing books which, though originally written for a specific audience of children, are primarily personal celebrations.

  ‘Alice in Wonderland, for example, was not only a remarkable innovation in children’s stories when it was written. It was also a sudden manifestation of a new type of humour — one which is very much with us today.

  ‘Girls do seem to show a higher initial responsiveness to language than boys do. However, in the past they could probably not enjoy the verbal latitude which men were allowed. Profanity was out, and even slang, that colourful and idiomatic field of invention and innovation, was generally forbidden to well-educated middle-class women — the very women who would want to write stories for children (and in some cases needed to write them in order to make a reasonable living. Edith Nesbit is a case in point). It is significant perhaps that Jo — the writer of the March family — was adventurous, not only physically but verbally too, and in the first few pages of the book is criticised by two of her sisters for using slang … I am not suggesting that women were brought up to be inarticulate — but they were certainly encouraged to be very careful in their choice of words, and the way that they said them.

  ‘It seems as if women on the whole had to work twice as hard as men to achieve that spontaneity, that unselfconsciousness, which is so much a characteristic of writers like Kipling, Lear and Twain. Women have not felt free to experiment, and their natural joyousness is often tinged with caution. They do not seem to be able to make that curious act of unconscious surrender which is as much to the needs of the story and words as to the needs of an audience …

  ‘My particular interest in education is perhaps the education of the imagination, for I believe a properly functioning imagination to be as much a part of a human being as a good clean liver. It need not function along the whimsical lines so often regarded as evidence of its excellence but it must bridge the gap between the rational intuitive aspects of human thought and feeling and help us avoid the disassociation that so often seems to threaten us today.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me whether or not the books that inform the imagination are written by men or women provided that they are written. Certainly I believe that Twain and Stevenson are ultimately more liberating than any modern morality where the boy plays with dolls and his sister chops the wood. It is not beyond a female capacity to be Tom Sawyer or Jack Hawkins if ever she needs to be. Here is real adventure and style. I am equally glad to read The Iron Man by Ted Hughes or Tales of Arabel’s Raven by Joan Aitken — as long as the combination of action and style is potent, then the sex of the writer is irrelevant.

  ‘Nevertheless, I feel that only now — when it is increasingly recognised that children’s literature is part of the literary spectrum and those who write it best out of their own necessity — are women writers able to be writers and not authoress-instructors. They are free to turn the universe upside down and kick the stars around like autumn leaves if they wish to, or to put a raven in the fridge with the milk bottles.

  ‘Throughout this article I have been considering the strictly literary scene, of course, and overlooking the grannies and nannies and nurses and housemaids who in the past have told both sentimental and horrifying stories to the children in their care, touching them with that combination of delight and fear that is still necessary today. These people too were powerful educators of the imagination.

  ‘That’s another story.

  ‘I have neglected too, the lady writer of our own times who produced literally hundreds of books, bristling with stereotypes, patronising in style, often lacking in compassion, who nevertheless appealed to the imagination of thousands of children. Two generations have responded to Enid Blyton with a wholeheartedness that few writers before and none since have equalled.

  ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN INDEED.

  ‘But that’s another story too.’

  In 1976, Margaret won a New Zealand Literary Fund Grant to enable her to take a welcome year’s leave of absence from the School L
ibrary Service. Apart from the writer in residence fellowship at the University of Canterbury in 1984, it was to be her only acceptance of public money.

  By this time she had published 19 hardback picture books with artwork by some of the best illustrators in Europe, three story book collections illustrated by the acclaimed English artist Shirley Hughes, and two very short (and admittedly very lightweight) junior novels, Clancy’s Cabin (1974) and The Bus Under the Leaves (1975). It might be expected that her regular contributions to the School Journal would diminish, but in fact some 20 stories and poems appeared in there between 1970 and 1975, including the four Tai Taylor books championed by Jack Lasenby. Some of these, like the first group of Mahy stories from 1969, would later appear as international picture books: Sailor Jack and the 20 Orphans (1970), The Railway Engine and the Hairy Brigands, The Boy Who was Followed Home, The Boy with Two Shadows and The Princess and the Clown (all in 1971), The Man whose Mother was a Pirate (1972) and Leaf Magic (1975).

  Meantime Margaret herself was undergoing a gradual transformation from the rather plainly dressed librarian/working mother, often pale and drawn with tiredness, into the flamboyant Margaret Mahy, Storyteller persona now so embedded in the popular New Zealand imagination: the witty, beloved author of wacky picture books who, wearing an equally wacky green or multicoloured fright wig, regularly visits primary schools to captivate the children with readings from her books.

  By the mid-1970s she had embarked on the first of her thousands of visits over nearly three decades to New Zealand school classrooms, mostly under the auspices of the New Zealand Book Council’s highly effective Writers in Schools scheme begun in 1977 after several years’ trialling by its then administrator, Dame Fiona Kidman. The scheme originally envisaged New Zealand authors of adult books visiting high school English classes but was increasingly extended into the primary and intermediate schools as Margaret and an upsurge of talented children’s authors from the early 1980s became more widely known. Some see this initiative as a significant factor in creating the present keen audience for New Zealand books, both adult and children’s.