Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  This is not one of Ngaio’s best novels but it has some clever satire and startlingly vivid cameo characters, like the alcohol-addled Major Keith Barrimore, with the smell of whisky on his breath, purple veins in his face, and a tremor in his hand. The young New Zealand-born schoolmistress Jenny Williams is also convincingly evoked. Like Roberta Grey in Surfeit of Lampreys, she is a stand-in for Ngaio, and when asked whether she gets homesick she gives an answer that the writer might have given herself: ‘A bit. Sometimes. I miss the mountains and the way people think.’

  Rehearsals for Macbeth began in early June. Once again they were conducted in the most primitive conditions, but a warm sense of camaraderie among the student players made the cold crudeness less biting. Helen Holmes, who was to become a close personal friend, played an excellent Lady Macbeth, and Ngaio was thrilled with her thane, James Laurenson. ‘The Macbeth himself has made a most impressive beginning & I have high hopes of him,’ she told Doris McIntosh, whom she wanted to come down for the show. Finally, Ngaio had firm dates to send her. ‘We open (now!) on July 27th (Friday) & play a week missing Monday 30th.’ To enhance their barbaric marauding qualities, Ngaio dressed her Scottish thanes in the thonged sheepskins of the Highlands and put them against an unrelentingly metallic-grey set. The play oozed ambition, and the kind of sexual tension between the Macbeths that turned dreams into murder, and reality into a living nightmare.

  Ngaio had called for an adjournment from her work on A Unicorn for Christmas with David Farquhar to produce Macbeth. There were words to write, but she could not concoct the rhymes while she was coming home from play rehearsals at 2am. Ngaio was always catatonic with nerves on opening night. ‘If you were nervous,’ Bob Scott remembers, ‘you never looked at Ngaio. Her hands shook like a leaf.’ As Alleyn says in Dead Water, ‘one has to remember that all the first-night agonies that beset a professional director are also visited upon the most ludicrously inefficient amateur’.

  Even after Macbeth closed, Ngaio was not free of commitments. In mid-September she told Doris McIntosh that she was on a regime of writing ‘if possible 1500 words of “tekery” a day’. She had not been out of the house for about five weeks other than to buy food. ‘I must finish this damned book by March & that’s going to take some doing. How Agatha ever does it in 3 to 4 months I do not know.’

  On 31 October 1962, another event pushed its way into her busy timetable, but this was warmly welcomed. Ngaio was presented with an honorary doctorate of literature by the now fully-fledged and independent University of Canterbury, in recognition of her services to literature and the theatre. Coming on top of the Macmillan Brown Lectures earlier in the year, it made her feel that there had been some acknowledgement of the huge contribution of time and money she had made to student theatre, and of her worldwide reputation for detective fiction writing. Ngaio was the first woman and the first non-academic to receive an honorary doctorate from Canterbury. She was delighted. University capping provided the kind of costuming spectacle that tickled her heart. More importantly, though, she wore her cap and gown with pride, knowing that the academic élite of Christchurch, who had often seemed aloof in the past, had made her their peer.

  Ngaio did not bask long in the glory before she was writing to David Farquhar, arranging to be in Wellington in early December. ‘[I] would very much like to sit in the shadows of the dress-rehearsals, if I may.’

  In late November, Ngaio’s role shifted from the shadows to the limelight. One evening she received an urgent telephone call from the Unicorn’s production director, Donald Munro. Producer John Trevor had arrived at rehearsals drunk and had been reprimanded for his vicious verbal attack on one of the female cast members. Things were falling apart, and if something dramatic did not happen soon they would never open on time. ‘There are unsettled arrangements for all sorts of ongoings.…[I] hold myself in readiness for whatever bombshells may fall.’

  She was rocked by what she found. ‘The acting…so bad,’ she told Jonathan Elsom, ‘that I made no bones about saying so.’ The cast’s improvement under her direction was enormous. They had three excruciatingly long rehearsals. John Hopkins, the conductor, came back after a few days in Sydney ‘and…was amazed with the progress’. According to David Farquhar, ‘Ngaio knew what she was doing and got it out of them.’ Her feat was to transform singers into actors. The opera had been cast with the music rather than the acting in mind. Ngaio’s libretto called for versatility in both acting and singing, and this she achieved with the cast in a production that opened on time and ran from 3 to 8 December 1962.

  The initial reviews were very pleasing. ‘Words trip from Miss Marsh’s pen as notes dance from Farquhar’s imagination,’ wrote long-time Evening Post music critic Owen Jensen. But the same critic, a few weeks later, had acid second thoughts. It was little more than ‘a cross between pantomime and farce,’ he wrote. ‘The story was naïve, the libretto corny…[and] David Farquhar’s most attractive music seemed a squandering of his talent.’ Ngaio shared at least some of his reservations. In a letter to her agents, she wrote: ‘David’s music is essentially sophisticated, adult & rather dry in character: extremely good musically but not of the light catchy sort. In a sense it is much too good for the libretto.’ To some degree it was a mismatch. Ngaio had written light libretto for children, and Farquhar epic score for adults. After all her hard work Ngaio must have been disappointed, but she was remarkably resilient to criticism.

  She returned home for Christmas. ‘This past year has been an extraordinarily busy one for me. Not a let-up anywhere,’ she wrote to Jonathan Elsom on Boxing Day, ‘& I now find myself landed with the whole production for the Royal Performance.’ A second season of the Unicorn at the St James’s Theatre in Auckland was planned for the New Year with a performance in front of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh on 7 February 1963. This was exciting for Ngaio, who was an avid royalist.

  Once again she found the rehearsals, held daily for two weeks, gruelling. Cuts were made to the dialogue of the wyvern and the unicorn, and Ngaio wanted further improvements in the acting. The gains were equivocal, because the final result depended on the cast on the day. ‘One never knows when they will suddenly lose way & go flat. A strange phenomenon in singers but they don’t apply the principles of singing to the techniques of acting.’

  No one could have imagined the impact a royal performance of the Unicorn would have. A hundred thousand people packed the procession route. Hundreds struggled in a milling crush outside the theatre. As the Queen and Duke arrived, the police, in two lines, shouted ‘Keep back! Keep back!’ The barrier broke and the crowd surged around the official cars. For a moment some of the vehicles were separated from the entourage. At the entrance, police four deep could barely resist the push. ‘Fifty people, most of them elderly, who fainted before the Royal couple arrived were treated inside the foyer,’ wrote the reporter for the Daily Telegraph. ‘St John Ambulance men sponged the straining faces of the police cordon.’

  Inside, in the hush of the theatre, the royal visitors were treated to a performance that was very familiar in its symbols and storyline. Act One opened in the hall of Lacey Castle in Victorian times. Two heraldic figures in the family coat of arms, a wyvern and a unicorn, led the audience in a carol. The atmosphere was festive until it became apparent that the House of Lacey had fallen on desperate times. They had lost the Lacey Luck, a jewel with magical powers, and were on the verge of selling the castle. Act Two was a trip back in time to the Lacey family of the Tudor period. Here the lucky stone was lost when Barbara Lacey, betrothed to the horrible Lord Eustace Pinchbeck, tried to avoid her fate. Act Three returned to Victorian times and a dénouement that involved finding the jewel, saving the castle and some mistletoe romance. When the performance ended, the Queen and Prince Philip were ushered onto the stage to meet the cast and present the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council charter to Prime Minister Keith Holyoake.

  New Zealand’s first opera was anything but indigenous. In essence, the Unicorn wa
s a Euro-centric children’s story about family history and inheritance, imbued with class-consciousness. Roger Savage described it as ‘fiercely Colonial…a loving homage to home eleven thousand miles away, more English than the English’. The origin of its storyline was controversial, as were the exorbitant ticket prices. For a month before the opera opened, a battle raged over costs. David Farquhar was paid £25 to compose the musical score, and the cheapest seat was £10 2s and doubles £31 12s. The papers were vitriolic, and late in January prices were adjusted. Although it was contentious, the royal performance raised £7,100 for the new Arts Council and was a watershed in New Zealand’s operatic history.

  With limited resources of money, skill and experience, it was, as Peter Platt wrote in Landfall, ‘a hazardous venture, a gamble which could have failed horrifyingly’ but for the ‘imagination and spirit’ of those involved. The fervour of the crowds outside the St James’s was proof of a continuing adoration for things British. The apron strings were still intact and, in 1963, the Unicorn was less of an odd choice than it would become. If it was not the future of New Zealand opera, it was a beginning that reflected the priorities of many in the present.

  ‘I have a strong hunch which I scarcely dare write down, that it may go quite a long way,’ Ngaio wrote to Jonathan Elsom. She was initially doubtful about the adaptation of a children’s play for opera, but became swept up in the hope that something lasting would come of it. The genteel Farquhar saw it as an opportunity to write music and experiment with audience participation. Sadly, the opera was played on radio only twice, once live at the Royal Performance, and again in 1974 as a studio production in front of a select audience. No commercial recording of the opera was ever made. Added to this disappointment was a warehouse fire, which completely destroyed props and costumes six weeks after the opera finished. The production was lavish and the loss irreplaceable. This was bad luck that certainly had an impact on future staging.

  But for Ngaio the next commitment was already looming. She still had Dead Water to wade through before rehearsals began for Henry IV, Part 1. By January 1963 she had written about half of it, ‘but will no doubt have to revise & re-write pretty drastically’.

  When Dead Water was finished, she moved almost directly onto producing the play. It was a five-week task of working out the set and the costume designs, holding auditions, and then going through the production script. By April she had already had a preliminary meeting, ‘lavishly attended by the usual callow but beguiling brew of freshers’. Through early autumn, Ngaio was laid low with what would become chronic problems: ‘guts, digestion, neuralgia & strange pains’. But her focus was unfailing and she was undeterred by obstacles.

  Three weeks before rehearsals began, there was no rehearsal room and she was having trouble casting the women. ‘Why, I wonder, out of some 2000 undergraduates is there never a better haul? Are they too anxiously involved in adolescent sex?’ She was pleased with her Lady Mortimer, a pretty, delicate, hard-working woman of Welsh parentage with an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland air’. The rehearsals rooms were finalized. A ‘Dog Show at Addington,’ she shuddered, in a letter to Doris McIntosh, ‘an icy, vast, & filthy location’.

  They had five instead of the usual seven weeks’ rehearsal time, and this worried Ngaio because of the difficulties of Shakespearian comedy for students. They liked ‘being funny’ instead of understanding timing, ‘& waiting for the comedy to emerge of its own accord’. But she was quickly enamoured with their natural liveliness and verve. ‘Gerry Lascelles shapes up not badly as Falstaff’, Ian Kirk was a sensitive but not quite resolved Hal, and Huntly Eliott as King was excellent. ‘The more we work, the more we are staggered by the genius of this play.’ It was the language, the depth of understanding of human nature, of motive and impulse, communicated with ‘terrifying economy of expression’, that impressed her.

  In February 1963, Ngaio wrote an extensive article on the arts in New Zealand for The Times Supplement on New Zealand. She talked about the emerging generation of New Zealand painters, writers and musicians who had begun to create ‘with full authority, as New Zealanders’. These were painters like Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Evelyn Page and Olivia Spencer Bower; writers A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R.A.K. Mason, Frank Sargeson, Denis Glover and Katherine Mansfield; and composers Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar. She saw these as the brightest lights in New Zealand’s fine arts firmament, and Janet Frame as ‘our most distinguished living novelist’. What she lamented again was that ‘such talent constantly emerges and the opportunities presented in other countries are often irresistible’. Could New Zealand afford or be convinced to concentrate more of its resources on feeding the arts? ‘Controlling interests are, on the whole, less sympathetic to the arts and to pure scholarship than to industrial expansion.’ Ngaio had negotiated obstacles and slim opportunities by choosing popular fiction with a reader base overseas, but this meant that among her literary peers there was often little respect for what she did.

  During the year she also worked intermittently on a book about New Zealand for American schoolchildren. She found it particularly frustrating because a personnel change in the middle of editing meant new priorities. A draft copy arrived back from the publishers requesting more writing, and the instructions from the copyeditor conflicted with those of the original brief. Outraged, she thought their observations were ‘asinine’. ‘Anything objective or critical was marked “too apologetic”; anything subjective was marked “make objective” ’, while for the plainest of statements they asked her to ‘explain this a bit more’. Ngaio was a professional writer. Because of her need for an income, even at the age of 68 she took almost every serious commission offered to her. ‘Ten weeks vacillation…have set me back,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh in November. ‘I mustn’t miss a single day if I am not to lose a year’s income…I never seem to save & really depend upon my job.’

  Her taxation was exorbitantly high—so high, in fact, that she considered moving permanently to Britain to avoid double taxation. She felt exploited by New Zealand, a ‘country that financially speaking treats me as an Aunt Sally’. In 1964 a new rule in Britain meant that if she stayed longer than six months her tax status altered and she had to pay more. She was hit by a whole lot of official questions: How long was she in Britain the time before last? How many books did she write ‘A) here B) at sea C) in England. Awful lot of bull, but please the gods it gets us all somewhere.’ Her tax was complicated, because she now had books selling in approximately 15 languages in at least that many countries. She was a limited liability company in the United States, where tax laws were different again. Ngaio was a freelancer. Her income was unpredictable and inconsistent, and she was not fit in her senior years to track its helter-skelter rhythms. So it became a vicious cycle. The more she earned, the more she paid in tax; and the more she lost in huge unexpected chunks, the more she had to earn. Tax was an unquantifiable fear that dogged her heels and occasionally bit hard.

  It was Billy Collins who first approached Edmund Cork about Ngaio writing an autobiography. This was a significant commission. The agent broached the subject with his author, and Collins wrote to her in August confirming his interest. ‘To show how keen I am on this book I have suggested an advance,’ he explained. He had spoken to Ned Bradford of Little, Brown in Boston, who was equally keen. Collins was sure there would be ‘no difficulty getting a signed contract from them’.

  Ngaio responded with enthusiasm and warmth: ‘how touched I am that you should think an autobiography worth doing: Believe me I am—never would such a notion have occurred to me of itself!’ She was quietly delighted. It was a mark of her publishers’ respect, and a money-generating project to keep the wolf from the door. She developed reservations, however, as she began to write. By the end of October she had ‘shrinkingly’ sent her agent a draft of the first chapter; he was encouraging. ‘I have now gone into strict purdah & with considerable misgivings, am pressing on with it.’ She allowed herself only one night
off to see Lawrence of Arabia, which she thought superb for the photography alone.

  She was chained to the task of a literary striptease, as Roderick Alleyn called it in Died in the Wool: ‘you are using this room as a sort of confessional’. But this was not what Ngaio had in mind. She liked the idea of writing about her life, but the process of self-revelation was torturous. She felt unable to turn the prurient professional curiosity of the detective on herself. So writing the autobiography became a battle of balance between candidness and caution. What was acceptable as part of her public persona and what not? Which stories and relationships were part of the public domain, and which were private? For a woman who was Edwardian in her sense of propriety, getting it wrong was tantamount to a betrayal of friends and family. Ngaio even struggled with the book’s name. ‘Still undecided about the title,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh nearly two years later. ‘What do you think of “Black Beech & Honeydew”?’

  At the end of 1963, she was already planning the next year’s drama production. She wanted to do a ‘large scale Caesar in Modern dress with a huge crowd spilling into the Auditorium’. She intended to use a stylized setting with action on different levels and ‘pooled lighting’. There was a vague plan to tour it, which would make the extra effort worthwhile. She wondered if this would not be her ‘swan song with the kids’. The next year ‘I shall have to catch up with my writing’, and after that she hoped there would be a new theatre where students could produce their own plays. ‘I am a great believer in leaving off before you begin to flag’, and she intended to make her exit ‘with as little fuss as possible’.

  In the meantime she had a ‘procession of boys’ coming up to the house for auditions. A bout of flu laid her low and she missed four rehearsals. The only one still standing among the cast was Gerald Lascelles, her assistant producer, also cast as Artemidorus, who ‘carried on nobly of course but couldn’t do much more than mark time’. She was worried that they would not peak in time for opening night. ‘Of course all dramatic dialogue must be orchestrated,’ she wrote to John Schroder. Shakespeare’s linguistic music was carried in the subtle inter-play between dialogue, in an ‘overtone that is caught and carried on by another voice’. She found it in Hamlet, but also in ‘Caesar, [in] the quiet little duets between Brutus and the boy Lucius’. She loved the moment of chemistry in a production when players captured the nuance of rhythm in the dialogue and ‘suddenly the voices flow together & mingle & make one thing’. In spite of the flu, Ngaio felt her students achieved just that unified flow. She was thrilled with the production. All in all, she felt that they were the ‘best lot’ of players she had ever had. They worked wonderfully well, the houses were full and they made a large profit of £600.