Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  ‘Like any writer — any communicator — I am not indifferent to my audience. I am certainly not indifferent to my audience out there or the fact of their childhood. Certainly I select and modify my aboriginal fancies to meet them half way. But I am also concerned that my story should do something for them, complete some circuit or exorcise some demon. I have come to see these stories as shadows cast in the conscious world by unconscious actions and journeys, the crests of icebergs shining in the sun while their greater part remains drowned in green water. If it is the hidden part I am talking about today, I hope to justify it by showing that the shining crest, the story the child reads and understands, is made possible by the depth and weight of the hidden experience that produces it. And some children at least are able by a mysterious process or faculty that we roughly call “imagination” to apprehend that part of the story that is hidden and use it to illuminate their own hidden experiences …

  ‘To get a true picture of ourselves we are increasingly required to understand ourselves as points of tension in a field of opposites, to acknowledge and cope emotionally with paradox. I think imagination is the mechanism by which we achieve a position of balance, not a cloudy decoration hanging on the outside of life but a vital part of our structure. Part of its function I think of as a sort of coding which gives you, in moments of need or crisis, rapid access to images and energies which will enable you to interpret and to act. The definition of imagination which I prefer therefore is not simply the power to create in the mind, images of things not present, but that it is the ability to deal creatively with reality, one of the definitions given by a dictionary.

  ‘How can we study this intangible but important faculty? It is so very intangible. I suppose in the same way that we are forced to study so many of the basic constituents of matter by looking, not at the thing itself, but at its shadow or its footprints. Sub atomic particles reveal their nature by the tracks they leave in cloud chambers. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to become dogmatic, to understand that we are dealing with possibilities and probabilities for the most part rather than fact, I believe we can find out a lot by tracking the paths imaginative processes leave in the mind, by looking at shadows, dreams, analogies, symbols, images and actions based on these things.’

  Some characters and images are particularly potent for her. ‘Perhaps we are all born with witches, lions, magicians and heroes in us, who recognise their counterparts in the outside world and invite them in to sleep or dance in the various spare rooms that open off the main corridors of the human mind.’

  Occasionally, a good-humoured defensiveness is evident as she reminds audiences why her stories are so determinedly universal.

  ‘I am a New Zealander by birth and by a sense of tradition, so when people say to me “Why don’t you write New Zealand stories?” my answer is that I do, but I am aware at the same time, that this is almost an evasion, a deliberate twisting of the terms. For what people mean when they ask this, is, why don’t I write in terms of a particular locality, in terms of people, surroundings and experiences that couldn’t be anything else but New Zealand?

  ‘I have wondered at times about this myself and have come to the conclusion that it is in part because the external landscapes with which I identify so closely and which impose themselves in such immense images in my inner landscape (the landscapes of personality and identity), do not do so in terms of their locality …

  ‘At present I am living on an extinct volcano on Banks Peninsula which has been broken into by the sea and has become a harbour. In the heart of this harbour you can still see the little hard core which has become an island. Every morning when I get up and go out to test the day and to guess what sort of a day it’s going to be, I see hills and sky and trees and sun. Far off I see Lyttelton perched in accidental fashion on the flank of the hill. It’s only a few miles away as the crow flies but already it looks like a mirage — it looks as if it is there in a very temporary way, as if at any time these big hills might shrug it off into the sea. As I look out I see this, and I see hills which have been robbed of their bush, except in streaks where the folds of the land run down to the sea. There is a sort of arrested stillness as if the hills have a great deal more mobility than the sea itself, a great deal more fluidity. I have this feeling that if I’d looked out a moment earlier I would have seen these hills moving in some sort of way, moving in a motion as tidal and instinctive as the sea …

  ‘I very often … while looking out the window and catching a glimpse of this landscape, have the feeling that it is growing and evolving around me. In actual fact, perhaps I am seeing my own shadow cast upon the hills, seeing in fact, my own growth, my own evolution, recognised at some partly conscious level and reflected in the exterior landscape. Being small in a big landscape produces the feeling it is mobile and you, the observer, are standing still …

  ‘… Finally we get off and we go along the road … And we climb up till we get to the top where the rocks come through. Here perhaps, one is aware of the rock coming through the soil and one feels the very bones of one’s body move in sympathy with this breaking through, and one feels one’s substance of flesh identified with the rich soil. Then we reach the top of the hill, and there’s the Sign of the Takahe as we follow down the other side towards Christchurch.

  ‘Here something different happens, because although there are trees and rocks, and corners with which we identify, and though we see these trees through the years as slow clocks ticking away the season, and although they are still a continuation of the same scene, I feel we are imposed upon this landscape, not sifted through it.

  ‘On the other side of the hills we are incorporated in our own landscape.

  ‘Many of you will know exactly the sort of experience I am talking about. When you’ve chosen a landscape to live in and you’ve lived in it for a number of years, watching the seasons pass over it, you become part of it in a very special way. Like any other form of love it is a double-edged emotion — it can hurt you as well as reward you. Any violation of this familiar landscape feels like some sort of personal injury, because you identify with this landscape to such an extent. Inevitably it is a distinc-tively New Zealand landscape with which I have formed this sort of relationship.

  ‘In talking about this outside landscape, this exterior landscape, I’ve probably already given intimations about an inner landscape too, because it’s hard to separate them. On the whole the outside landscape is much more predictable than the inner one because although there are places you can go to, and perhaps infallibly recognised, in your inner landscape there are also places you can go to where the landscape changes, where the milestones don’t stay the same for two days running. You go there along the road that you thought was well sealed and laid, and you find it’s already a mosaic of doubt. This is the inner landscape where you find yourself coming face to face with changes; you find yourself coming towards a puritan, or a nymphomaniac, or some shadowy stranger and as you come up to them you recognise that they all wear your own face. This is the place where your surrogates, your other selves, act out your own particular dramas, dreams and devices. The inner landscape is a much more dangerous place and a much more personal place, too.

  ‘I’m still talking about this inner landscape in terms of scenery, because you have to limit it in some way or otherwise you have chaos … And look [sighting an autumn poplar beside the road] there’s the tree burning up from the ground like a flame in all its autumn colouring. It comes into my eye and into my mind through a complex system of nervous reactions which I can’t attempt to describe, and I see, simultaneously almost, an autumn tree, a flame, a shower of bright arrows, somebody standing in a golden robe, a magician, an enchanter and an ancient spirit whirling in a spindle of gold. In a moment the boundaries between outer and inner landscapes are down, and they flood into one another and combine. Then I, myself, dissolve into a swarm of golden whirling cells and am knitted up again between one world and the next, so that, even the most ma
lignant and observant traffic-officer probably couldn’t fault my driving. Yet in a second, I feel I’ve been infinitely enriched and my direction has, in some way, perhaps infinitesimally, been altered.

  ‘This really can happen. Some days may go by and it doesn’t happen; sometimes it can happen several times during the day. One such spell of it extended over a period of about three weeks — I seemed to live with this thing almost continually. Once I went almost without it for three years and looked at the landscape, the outer landscapes around me, and knew they had this ability to transform me, but I knew too, that I was shut off from this magical experience. In the inner landscape the identity of things changes — the tree becomes a spirit, the spirit a flame, the flame a clown and the clown can become the very axis of the world with all the planets dancing around it. There is nothing whimsical in this. In fact it can be frightening, and beautiful, and merciless. Time too, changes in the inner landscape …

  ‘Were I able in the same way to stand outside of time in the outer landscape, I would see my volcano creating itself, seething, building its walls up, falling into silence, and wearing down and down into the hills and the road and the sea that at present exist. At this point several things become obvious, I think. Just any landscape, anywhere in the world, is capable of this sort of interpretation, and this sort of feeling; it’s not a particularly New Zealand thing to do. Although the inner landscape is enriched and developed by the outer landscape it is ultimately defined in terms of language and images and things that are heard, things that are read and things that are said. If a person’s inner landscape has been as closely defined as mine has by reading and listening, then when the moment of union comes … when the inner landscape widens and coalesces with, and interprets the outer landscape, then it does so in words which are the closest approximations to the state it perceives. This isn’t some particularly New Zealand thing. It’s a universal phenomenon.

  ‘The words and images that are at our disposal to use, in order to interpret our landscape, tend to be — at least in my case and I suspect in the case of many people — those that turn back to a European background … But when we have a totara tree, we don’t have any of the build-up of language, we don’t have any of the background, if you like, that gives this word the same quality of meaning on the inner landscape. Many of our local words are still only half real. They’re real on the outer landscape, but haven’t yet attained the associations that we need to make them completely real on the inner landscape …

  ‘So I suppose what a New Zealand writer should hope to do is to build up the associations for the inner landscape with the things that are particularly New Zealand. He should try and strengthen this sort of association so that it becomes part of the inner landscape of our children and when they read for example “totara tree” or rimu (or something like that) instead of feeling this self-conscious, slightly unnatural feeling that we appear to have about it, we come to feel as natural and strongly about it as we do about willow or poplar.

  ‘In actual fact this has been happening in New Zealand … I think it began with the poets and goes on with poets … I think that the process begins here and works its way down ultimately to people who never even read the poems. At present we have novelists, historians and children’s writers, who, again, are doing this sort of thing. So perhaps it’s partly a feeling of guilt because I don’t seem to be doing much in this area myself, that makes me want to stand up and say that, while the development of local associations is one of the good functions a children’s story, or any other sort of writing, can perform in New Zealand at the present, I’d like to speak up also perhaps for some of the things I’m doing when I write. I feel they’re just as “New Zealand” as anything else. I feel that perhaps our tradition of writing is dictated partly by the idea that we must express ourselves as New Zealanders. I’m now over simplifying it perhaps to an unforgivable degree. But I do think there’s more to New Zealand’s outer landscape than the football match or the good keen man. I do think that this rather mystical interpretation of New Zealand landscape has relevance and enriches it. I think that perhaps our whole tradition has been touched upon partly by the fact that we use words, almost entirely to convey information. Very few of us really use words as a celebration — and I personally am very fond of a celebration. Then we have a paternalistic rather than a pantheistic form of religion, so that we don’t expect a religious experience to come to us out of the trees — we still think of it in terms of something “way out there”…

  ‘I think that science with its emphasis on relationships and structures and things like this can add to our feelings, not only about our outer landscapes, but about our inner landscape … How exactly does this lead to the writing of children’s stories? I don’t rightly know, because personally I don’t regard myself as any sort of child — I think I’m a mature adult. I don’t think I write children’s stories out of any sort of whimsicality, only out of necessity. I find that the stories I write can use all the feelings, all the command of language and all the passion I have at my disposal. If I had more they could use it all … I don’t want to be the tree, just one of the voices singing within its branches. The sort of story I write, would, I hope, tend to leave the children who read it, with their options open to choose in a whole lot of different ways. I like to think that they will be able to see the tree as the tree, as the clown, or as a king. I like to feel that they too will be overwhelmed by what I called earlier the shower of golden arrows. I like to think too, that if they’re confronted with something like the structure of the DNA spiral, they will be changed by it, as by a good poem. I like to think also that the children who read these stories are left with a tremendous number of voices and able to use this fantasy as an instrument of accuracy. I hope ultimately for children who come in contact with this sort of story that the poet and the scientist may dance together like lovers each wearing the child’s own face in the child’s own inner landscape.’

  For many admirers, it is the language that sets any Mahy writing apart. Whatever the genre, she uses English as few other writers can do, across a wide range of comic, ironic, poetic and lyrical styles.

  In 1987 University of Auckland MA student Jenni Keestra analysed some of the more straightforward characteristics of Margaret’s language: the repetition, the extravagant use of alliteration, and less frequently assonance, by which playful rhythmic patterns are established and played upon much as a composer might do. Keestra quotes from The Midnight Story on Griffon Hill: ‘His stories were so funny that doctors gave them to people suffering from dejections, doldrums, despondency or even those who were merely down in the dumps. As the patients read his stories they would begin to simper and smile; they would grin and giggle and guffaw, and at last they would laugh loud and long until they were light-hearted again.’ As Mark Williams has commented, Mahy’s patter song Bubble Trouble (included in Bill Manhire’s 100 New Zealand Poems) is amazing ‘if only by showing how many permutations of the letters b and l are possible’. Many audiences have been delighted with a perfect, rapid fire rendition, starting:

  Little Mabel blew a bubble and it caused a lot of trouble …

  Such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobble way,

  For it broke away from Mabel as it bobbed across the table,

  Where it bobbled over Baby, and it wafted him away.

  The baby didn’t quibble. He began to smile and dribble,

  For he liked the wibble-wobble of the bubble in the air.

  But Mabel ran for cover as the bubble bobbed above her,

  And she shouted out for Mother who was putting up her hair.

  At the sudden cry of trouble, Mother took off at the double,

  For the squealing left her reeling … made her terrified

  and tense,

  Saw the bubble for a minute, with the baby bobbing in it,

  As it bibbled by the letter box and bobbed across the fence.

  Her alliterative bent comes out most outrageously in Th
e Birthday Burglar, in which a boy called Bassington has a predilection for things beginning with the letter ‘b’. She says she was slightly disconcerted at how easily alliteration came to her in this story: ‘I increasingly became addicted to using the letter b … when read aloud The Birthday Burglar should have the quality of an extended tongue twister. Part of the fun of the story is working out the ending from the clues that the words beginning with b provide.’ Then there are the words heaped on top of one another —‘Oh, she was a scold, a shrew, a vixen and a virago — and a proper tyrant and tartar to her poor husband’ (Mrs Discombobulous)— and the escalating lists in descriptive passages, as when the little man sees the sea for the first time in The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate. The sea, notes Keestra, is acknowledged as having more than one image, one character:

  He hadn’t dreamed of the BIGNESS of it. He hadn’t dreamed of the blueness of it. He hadn’t thought it would roll like kettledrums, and swish itself onto the beach. He opened his mouth, and the drift and the dream of it, the weave and the wave of it, the fume and the foam of it never left him again. At his feet the sea stroked the sand with soft little paws. Farther out, the great, graceful breakers moved like kings into court, trailing the peacock-patterned sea behind them.

  Or, later, the long, surrealistic dream sequence in The Changeover, in which powerful details are added to lists:

  … she saw dwarfs, lost princes, beautiful girls who had committed themselves to silence in order to save brothers turned into swans or ravens, young men who thrived on sunshine and dwindled with darkness, mutilated maidens who wept over their own silver arms, and then the simple people, three bears, the girl in the red hood, the lost children who found their way home, the lost children who didn’t and were covered with leaves by the robins.