by Tessa Duder
The word processor, and later the more upmarket of big-screen computers, entered her life around 1986. It was a long way from her apprentice’s notebooks and pencils, or even her large clunky typewriters, and not entirely the blessing it might seem. ‘Lately,’ she mused to Greg O’Brien, ‘I’ve taken to thinking about the word-processor as being associated with some form of immorality or hellishness — a new form of industrialism.’
Those, like O’Brien and Betty Gilderdale, who visited the Mahy house from this period commented on the thousands of books, spread around every room: the encyclopaedias, dictionaries, atlases, philosophical and scientific texts, adult fiction from around the world and an enormous historical collection of children’s books. On the bedroom shelves sat hundreds of her own books, not only in English editions, both hardback and paperback, but multiple copies of the American editions and many translations: Italian, German, French, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish (Catalan and Mexican), Greek, Thai, Chinese and Japanese.
Then there was the stuffed snake descending a staircase, a rocking-horse and a fine Elizabethan toy house, many dolls and toys; on the walls, blank-eyed masks, children’s paintings, book cover artwork and brooding New Zealand paintings; later visitors might notice a small upstairs room given over entirely to an amusingly eclectic collection of perhaps 500 videos — action and horror movies and old classics alongside Shakespeare and Shaw. Around the bricked patio outside are two-metre storks, wooden garden seats straight from Kate Greenaway, a goldfish/waterlily pond and, not far away, a spa pool; in the garden, many varieties of fruit trees, raspberries and roses climbing over archways. Margaret has always found solace and pleasure in being a gardener, almost single-handedly creating an enchanting physical world while creating her many imaginative worlds.
This was the routine behind the incessant, some might say obsessive creativity, as explained to interviewers a few years later: ‘She writes for long hours (at least 12 a day) and sometimes, in the past, has ended up working through half of the night. Now that she is getting old, she has had to change her routine. Her working day comprises getting up every morning at 4.45 am, having a cup of coffee and working for an hour or two.
‘She then walks her dog (she also has cats and rabbits), returns home and then writes again. Margaret used to type her manuscripts but now uses a word processor. This change has altered the way she writes and edits. Novels like The Tricksters she would end up typing out four times completely, but with a word-processor she says, “I write on screen, print it out, read it — I try to operate between word-processing and reading the page. I used to have a word-processor, a photocopier, a fax machine and laser printer in my bedroom and then I used to have to go outside the house to the loo. It certainly stopped you from getting too conceited about your technology.”’
Not surprisingly, as Margaret moved closer to her 50s, many observed how tired she looked, quite thin and even ‘gaunt’. They marvelled at her workload, and sympathised with the days that inevitably got interrupted, but not many knew that, as well as her writing commitments, international travel, house renovations and garden improvements, for nearly four years another domestic responsibility was being attended to daily. And typically, the experience was to provide Margaret with the knowledge and compassion for a later major work of fiction.
‘If any story I have told has the mark of social realism on it, it is certainly Memory, and in it I have told young readers a lot of the truth I know about the metamorphosis of a rational human being replete with knowledge, memory and the power to make a cup of tea several times a day, into a demented old woman losing command of all the things in which self-respect is traditionally established, and driven to wear a tea cosy instead of a hat.’
Aunt Francie Street, her mother’s sister, who once mailed a wartime birthday cake to the five-year-old living in a caravan in Northland, came into Margaret’s domestic orbit around 1982, as sole resident of the little next-door cottage her niece had been able to buy. For nearly four years, through Francie’s increasing dementia, Margaret cooked her aunt’s meals, dressed and toileted her, did her laundry and rescued her when, increasingly, she went wandering.
In the later stages, some help was available: ‘The support services were good, partly because I was sufficiently well-educated to know where to go and what sort of things to say, and also because I was prepared to cope with quite a lot before I asked for some support. A district nurse and a housekeeper appeared once a week and things were tidied up quite quickly. In between times things went downhill, but neither my aunt nor I bothered too much about a certain amount of squalor.’
From the early days of this arrangement, the writer in Margaret had recognised the potential, one day, for a story. Sophie in Memory is the only character she acknowledges as being based on a real person.
‘There’s very little written for children about adult senility, and I think they could identify with a character who is like a child. My aunt, for instance, hides biscuits and I would like to develop that into a story. When she does bring out the biscuits, she brings out Biscats. You can see how her mind is working, though. A cup of tea for her is now made with a milk token and hot water. It’s sad, because she used to make such a good cup of tea.’
The incidents involving Francie were always poignant, sometimes very funny. ‘When Bridget was working up at the shop, Aunt Francie showed up one day dressed only in her petticoat and Bridget said, “Francie, do you know you’re only in your petticoat?” Francie stiffened and said “Child, I never tell you what to wear”.’
She would laugh uproariously, while slightly shocked, at Benny Hill on television, and mistake her nieces in jeans for young men being familiar with her, or put on three dresses, or retell certain anecdotes endlessly, or constantly wash clothes and check the mailbox and walk right past the lavatory she needed to visit. Once, sent off at bedtime with a torch to negotiate the short bricked connecting pathway to her cottage, she returned with the torch in her mouth, asking ‘what was she supposed to do with this trumpet?’ As she got older, she became fixated on her handbag as the symbol of identity. ‘As long as she had that she had her bankbook, the symbol of having some money and position; she felt in charge of herself … her search became very simple, so every time she looked for her handbag which she used to hide because she was afraid it would be stolen, she was searching for herself too, and she would feel diminished, lessened, if she didn’t have that handbag.’
Francie provided Margaret with one of the most chilling moments of her life (one she was to use to full effect at the climax of Memory), when she ‘turned around and her mouth was “bursting with teeth”. She had tried to wear two sets of false teeth at once. “It was like those scenes in horror films, where someone goes to touch something familiar, and suddenly it becomes a ghastly face.”’
Nev was coming towards Jonny, not fast, but very deliberately indeed … Yet, in the very moment when he might have destroyed Jonny, Nev stepped back, dropped his left hand and revealed a face twisted not only by pain, but by such horror, that Jonny turned involuntarily to see what had horrified him.
The green door was open and coming out of the darkness was Sophie, armed with the hearth brush, and resplendent in her petticoat, suspender belt, crimson hat and one shoe. Over one arm she carried her handbag. She looked like an old, old spirit, her thin silver hair turned into a phosphorescent nest by the street light, her eyes nothing but two black holes under her high forehead, her mouth bursting with more teeth than any natural mouth could hold. Her lips were stretched thin trying to accommodate the impossible number of teeth which extruded over her lower lip, making it seem as if she were beginning to devour herself.
Involuntarily, Jonny flung up his own good arm as if to defend himself. Before he could remind himself it was only Sophie, every nerve in his body told him to put himself out of mortal danger …
Margaret has often acknowledged that some of the happenings and conversations in Memory are directly transpo
sed, but ‘if the story lacks the nastiness, the sheer fatigue of response involved in looking after a demented person, it is partly because, though those elements were present, they were not a commanding part of my life with my aunt. Because I had a background of story to draw on she never lost her imaginative function in my life …’ Occasionally the strain told. ‘I don’t wish to suggest that she didn’t drive me crazy from time to time … the collapse of rationality is wearing to live with. Nevertheless the alteration in the frame of reference which a lifetime of stories enable me to make, made this a rewarding and mysterious relationship as well as an infuriating one. My aunt took on some of the aspects of an oracle. “How beautifully blue the sky is today,” she said, peering at the sky as we drove up the hill. “It doesn’t seem to mind us getting any closer to it.”’
Memory provides a fascinating glimpse into Margaret’s frequently quoted belief that it is the fiction writer’s job to create imaginative originality by finding new and interesting connections, to detect (on getting an idea) ‘the compressed ending, to tease it out, to coax it into public view … or perhaps to goad the beginning out of the end, for sometimes one gets the idea for the ending first’.
She has denied that Memory is a novel ‘tackling the subject of Alzheimer’s disease’; rather, it recognises Alzheimer’s in a story, with its origins firmly in fairy tale, about a troubled young man and a strange, helpless old woman. In essence it is a ‘magical encounter between two unlikely people, both of whom are possessed, in different ways by a dissolving rationality’. She has also acknowledged the novel as yet anther example of her subconscious haunting her stories, this time in the fatal fall of the hero Jonny’s sister. ‘I had an imaginary picture in my mind of the place where she fell and when I was back home in Whakatane recently I saw the place. I couldn’t believe it. I told my sister Patricia and she said somebody had once fallen off those rocks, a girl at her class at school, and you know, even then I still could consciously remember it.’
Yet the actual trigger for Memory was none of these, but an image that stayed with her until she found a place for it. This was a strange and haunting vision, ‘seen when I was driving home through the city in the early hours of the morning. Passing a supermarket car park, empty and strange with its daytime function gone, I saw a very old man coming out of the car park pushing an empty supermarket trolley … when I finished Memory, when I was reading it through afterwards it occurred to me that what I had written was still at heart a fairy story about a young men setting out to search for a girl whom he remembers as very mysterious, beautiful and clever. He encounters, in the empty car park of a supermarket, an old woman who asks him a question, “Are you the one?”— a question my aunt once asked me, having in the course of going to a public lavatory, forgotten just who she was supposed to be with. In the beginning of my story the young man does not know if he is the one or not, but by the end of the story he feels that he does.’
Memory won a third major British award for Margaret: the Observer Teenage Fiction Prize for 1987 from a shortlist of six that included Anne Fine’s Madame Doubtfire (later to become a Hollywood film starring Robin Williams). The book, said judge Elaine Moss, was ‘so close-grained and all-embracing that it defies categorisation … a compassionate and intelligent novel, brilliantly crafted, simultaneously involved with social concerns and with universal themes’. Another eminent judge, Claire Tomalin, wrote that Margaret Mahy ‘strikes me as one of those few writers who has actually retained the strengths of a child’s imagination in her work; she deserves to be read by teenagers — and by more adults than the statutory librarians and schoolteachers’. In the Times Literary Supplement Doug Anderson commented on the novel’s overtly New Zealand (Maori) political allusions. Double Carnegie winner Jan Mark in the Times Educational Supplement admired the elegant writing and good-humoured wit: ‘only a churl, surely, would wonder if [the book] might perhaps, given its subject, have been a little less charming’.
Nineteen eighty-seven was a particularly triumphant year, with Margaret’s literary and television achievements lifting her public standing and recognition internationally to a new level. The five internationally acclaimed novels she had produced in as many years were earning this sort of comment from British authority Julia Eccleshare:
‘More recently, especially in her long novels for older readers, Mahy’s spectacular originality has injected a force or energy into her writing which has the unusual and outstanding quality of charging up the reader. She plays with fantasy, twisting the strands of fantasy and reality together into a continuous thread with no visible joins. She doesn’t divide the world into “real” or “imaginary”. To her, the unseen forces which surround us are every bit as real and powerful as the table top on which she writes … in each of these full-length novels she has shown the full extent of her invention, humour and control, giving to her readers books of exceptional intensity and intelligence.’
Eccleshare felt there was ‘nothing intrinsically New Zealand about any of her books. [Margaret] was brought up on a diet of British literature and her books are, therefore, part of that literary tradition. As she says, it takes a long time for an indigenous literature to develop.’ But ‘landscape and locations can occupy more important, and more precise, places in Mahy’s books than is always recognised … [she uses] indirect and playful ways of locating her story without excluding the non-local reader, as more local allusions are bound to do’.
Her exotic non-British voice could even, for some key people, work in her favour. ‘As a writer, and as a person,’ wrote one commentator in an influential British magazine, reprinted in a major American reference book, ‘Margaret Mahy isn’t easy to categorise. She both loves and resists her New Zealandiness [sic]; she wards off all attempts to turn her into a moralist yet fiercely defends the significance of the craft she practises; she’s a fantasist who claims “I always write about real life”; she has a zest and flair that can bring her a bullseye where many other authors don’t recognise there’s a target … and at the same time she can’t offer any guarantees that a new book of hers won’t misfire completely. In short, she’s a writer who takes risks, who’s always changing, already capable of growth.’
Back in her own country, Margaret was beginning to find extra support from some loyal and well-informed quarters — notably, reviewer and historian Betty Gilderdale’s breezy and useful hardback for young readers, Introducing Margaret Mahy. In 1987 two University of Auckland academics, backed by the esteemed literary journal Landfall, were among the first to mark Margaret’s work out for academic attention: Murray Edmond with a lengthy, entertaining taped interview which he began by announcing that Margaret was an ‘indefatigable and supremely entertaining talker, a genuine intellectual’ and Claudia Marquis with the first New Zealand study of The Haunting, in a paper called ‘Feminism, Freud and the Fairy Tale: Reading Margaret Mahy’s The Haunting’. (Later she produced a 1991 paper on fantasy, notably Mahy’s.) Marquis seems to have been a lone academic voice until work by Kathryn Walls, Rose Lovell-Smith and Diane Hebley began appearing in the mid-1990s.
Today Mahy is taught at Auckland (Marquis and Lovell-Smith), Wellington (Walls) and Christchurch (Anna Smith), and in the Canterbury College of Education’s national children’s literature diploma run by John McKenzie and Doreen Darnell. There is still, however, according to one leading Auckland academic, a strong notion in New Zealand university English departments that children’s literature will never be a proper or worthy area of study and, since it cannot really be classed as ‘literature’, it is better taught and researched in colleges of education — this despite compelling evidence to the contrary in overseas universities and growing interest by students, such as Jenni Keestra’s 1987 MA thesis, and Joan Gibbons’ paper on Mahy’s families and especially when seen in the light of the parallel rise of interest in the academic study of ‘popular’ culture.
By contrast, from about the time of The Changeover, papers on Margaret Mahy have consistent
ly appeared in overseas literary and educational journals and books by British, American and Canadian academics. For example, Elliott Gose, professor of English at the University of British Colombia and author of a book on Irish fairy tales, has written a detailed analysis of Mahy’s connections with myth and folk tale. Massachusetts teacher Adam Berkin’s long 1990 paper draws parallels between The Changeover and the Sleeping Beauty, concluding that novel performs a double service: ‘it appeals to the whims of the adolescent reader by providing humor, suspense, and romance, and it subtly educates. The book ends with optimism. Sorry and Laura do not get married; that would be too traditional and unrealistic, but the book hints that they might get together in the future when Laura has grown up a bit more. This romantic and young adult rewriting stands between Sweet Dreams Novels and rewritten traditional fairy tales. The Changeover is a stepping stone to a feminist literary awareness.’
In 1988 one non-academic New Zealand publication did recognise Margaret as having a place among the country’s 21 leading writers. On his earlier visit to Governors Bay poet and editor Greg O’Brien had clearly enjoyed Margaret’s ‘exceptional intelligence, which underpins her hilarity’. He noted, too, her ready agreement with ‘Nabokov’s notion that writing is a process involving the loss of energy. Starting with the original idea, energy is lost through writing it down, and then another loss occurs as it is revised. “The challenge of writing is to somehow recapture the originality of the idea,” she says.’