by Fiona Kidman
With all these people filling the spaces in my life, my concept of friendship began to change. You could love friends, care about them as you did members of your family. And close friends could be men. This had never occurred to me before. Men were people women thought of as ‘mates’ or boyfriends, potential lovers, husbands — and brothers, though I hadn’t any experience of these. But friends? That was different, and I liked the new dimension it brought to what one could talk about, laugh over, gossip about.
Witi. Keith. Alison. Leigh. Later, Sharon Crosbie. Michael King. Lauris. These were the people I loved then, the people I think of when I recall Wellington in the 1970s. I loved our passionate exchanges, the conversations, the causes we believed in. Several of them have died. There are days when I would like to be able to reach back in time and bring them back, just to carry on where we left off our last conversation. I have only to sit quite still for a moment in this room here in Menton, and I hear one or other of them.
Chapter 15
For a long time I had been drawn to poetry. I kept bumping my shins against it, even though there wasn’t much around in my early years, not even at the library. But, although it’s easy to dismiss my education, here and there, teachers like Terence Buxton and Eileen O’Shea had made a difference. Frank Gee, at Rotorua Boys’ High, and Max Harris from Australia had wanted to talk about poetry. Before I left Rotorua I came across the work of American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Bogan. It was Kit who mentioned Bogan to me, the last summer before I left the town. Still inconsolable about the loss of Len, she had turned to poetry, surprising herself, because she had always preferred fiction. Bogan’s work has never been widely discussed in New Zealand, or not so far as I know, but I liked her spareness, her understanding of form and design, her plangent female voice, which spoke in quite formal ways about the nature of love and the difficulty of being a woman artist. I liked the intensity with which she described coming across the idea of writing poetry herself, in her mother’s hospital room, where a vase of marigolds had offered her an exact image of light and contrast. She believed, too, that women had to help themselves rather than expect to be rescued.
When I arrived in Wellington, I began to meet poets but, before that, in the first months when I had felt so isolated, I began searching the library shelves for a wider range of books. Wellington Public was a satisfying hunting ground, crammed with good collections. I began to discover New Zealand poets, never a good topic with Kit, who thought Baxter ‘a frightful man’, whose books she wouldn’t have in her library. I came across Robin Hyde’s work and instantly fell in love. Her poem ‘Words’ struck a great chiming chord:
But I tell you this, I,
Who have shaped my word while the fools have bungled ten,
Words should be hard old lamps, and white of wick,
And the right flame rises then.
I once went to a Bethune’s rare book auction and spent most of a month’s housekeeping acquiring all the first editions of her poems. Then I met Keith, and he was a poet. His collection, The Firewheel Tree, had just been published and he was full of pleasure at having won for it the Jessie Mackay Prize for the Best Book of Poetry. He quoted whole poems over lunch, and later sent me some new pieces. Suddenly there were poets all around me and I began to dabble with the possibilities of writing poetry too. I sent some to Keith in response to his; he liked them and persuaded me to send them off to Landfall. By the time I met Lauris, I had begun to call myself a poet too.
Irene Adcock, the mother of Fleur Adcock and Marilyn Duckworth, had started a Poetry Society that met at her house, and later at the old Settlement café in Willis Street. There was a gallery upstairs where the meetings were held, and the gatherings just got bigger and bigger, with poets coming from all over the country to read their work. Then there were gatherings at Battle Hill, where Sam Hunt lived with his partner Kristen Wickens. He had had a celebrated sojourn in a boatshed at Pauatahanui, in an inlet he renamed Bottle Creek, for all the obvious reasons to do with his celebrated drinking habits. Now, further round the inlet, he and Kristen lived in a huge creaking old farmhouse. We had first grown close to Sam and Kristen when they lived directly across from us in Rakau Road. Kristen was expecting a baby, and on Sunday evenings the couple often ate at our house with the family. Lauris, Alistair Campbell, Rachel McAlpine, Marilyn Duckworth, a whole host of us, gathered out there, overlooking the water, drinking apple cider and reciting poetry far into moonlit nights. At Sam’s place, I first met Vincent O’Sullivan with whom, over the years, I have fallen into a close and easy friendship. His wit was so quick and rapier sharp that I was a little afraid of him; since then he has lost none of his wit but I have gained confidence. One night, when it got cold, Sam led a procession to light a bonfire of blazing logs in the paddocks. He presided over the proceedings, wearing his drainpipe pants, winkle pickers and colourful jerkins, his strange rasping voice exerting an odd magic over us all.
Later, I did some touring with Sam. He was still publishing books of poems, but performance was taking over his life, and I could see that his love of oratory, his affinity with landscape and the easy way he got on with people who weren’t poets, were leading him away from the ‘established’ forms of poetry — for this, read the ‘establishment’. I shared some of these views.
I also found myself in a disreputable scrape at a house where we stayed in Hawke’s Bay. After the reading, there had been a gathering at a big elegantly appointed residence in the countryside where the poets and some artists were being billeted. As so often happened, it ended up with a few too creatively drunk people. I went off to sleep in the room allocated to me, a children’s nursery decorated with murals and delicate chimes hanging from the ceiling, and containing two beds. Sometime later, I heard Sam’s voice urgently whispering at the door. ‘Fiona, Fiona, d’you mind, I mean, would you actually mind, Fiona, if I slept in the other bed, because I can’t stand that drunk man in the room where I am. He’s throwing up, throwing up, can’t stand it.’
I said it was fine by me, and it was. In the morning, I woke and saw that the room was full of sunlight filtered through an oak tree at the window. Sam was lying in his bed reciting Dylan Thomas, and worked his way from there through several chapters of the Bible, and then some Yeats. It seemed peaceful and harmless, lying there listening to him.
At breakfast, the farmer’s wife slammed down some tea and toast, her face stony. Her special displeasure was directed at me. I understood how offended she felt, and imagined her fumigating the room of evil before her children returned there to sleep. It seemed pointless to try and explain. Unintentionally, I had joined the ranks of badly behaved poets.
Through Lauris I became involved with Denis Glover’s circle at the University Club in Featherston Street, although, as it happened, Denis and I had met earlier. Denis, and Allen Curnow in Auckland, were considered the two most distinguished living poets in New Zealand. In some ways, Glover had a touch of Max Harris in his history, with an early flowering of outrageous talent, strong left-wing views and a literary scandal to his name, plus a burning desire to change what he saw as the bland and pretty poetry of his time. But there the resemblance ended — with his frequent irritating put-downs of women’s writing, it could hardly be said that he shared Harris’s enthusiasm for female emancipation.
As a student at Canterbury University, Glover, along with Ian Milner, who was the editor, had produced the magazine Oriflamme in April 1933 and provoked widespread anger by publishing an essay by Patrick Robertson entitled ‘Sex and the Undergraduate’. Later that year Glover was sacked from his student reporter job at The Press, Christchurch’s daily newspaper, on account of the scandal. But print and poetry, not journalism, were Glover’s passions. He collaborated in early printing press experiments with Bob Lowry, set up the Caxton Press and, after distinguished naval service in the Second World War, established Landfall with the support of a group of friends that included Rex Fairburn and James Bertram. He called on another frie
nd, the high-minded poet Charles Brasch, a man of independent means, to be editor. Glover particularly loathed the poems published in Best New Zealand Poetry, the only major outlet when he began writing. At that time, Curnow was his long-time friend and they encouraged each other in this effort to establish a new literary environment. Glover saw to the publication of much of Curnow’s early work. But once Glover had achieved his goal of providing this alternative forum, he succumbed to his alcohol addiction. At Caxton he had taken on a business partner, Dennis (Dinny) Donovan, the former office boy, who tired of Glover’s drink-fuelled mismanagement and had him removed. Glover moved to Pegasus Press to work with sailing companion Albion Wright. Although the business relationship didn’t last, the friendship did.
By the time I met Denis Glover, he had become a kind of godfather of New Zealand writing. Although much had changed at Landfall since Robin Dudding replaced Brasch as editor, and the scope of what constituted literary value had been more broadly redefined, it’s fair to say that if you wanted to get a foothold in the literary periodicals, it helped to get along with Denis. The work I had already published in Noel Hoggard’s Arena stood me in good stead. Hoggard and Denis were also colleagues.
When I got to know Denis, his friendship with Curnow had long since soured. I think an element of competitiveness had entered the relationship and that Curnow, with his own reputation, admirers and adherents, had overtaken his early mentor. Denis frequently spoke of Curnow with a snarl, as ‘the parson up north’. (Curnow was the son of an Anglican vicar and, in his youth, had trained for the ministry too.) At Auckland University, Curnow had an academic career and respectability, while, in Wellington, Denis led a kind of swashbuckling vodka-fuelled life as writer and man about town. His curling red nose, constantly dribbling with snuff, almost met with the pointed tip of his upturned beard. He had a habit of addressing anyone young as ‘my de-ah girl’ or ‘my de-ah boy’. Even if he was not overly sympathetic to women’s writing, Denis did seek women’s company. Certainly he liked Lauris, whom he chose to edit the letters of his contemporary, and great friend, the poet A.R.D. Fairburn, who had died in 1957. For myself, I often found Denis’s habits disagreeable but I did like his hard, bleakly funny, often passionate work dedicated to the sea, landscape and men alone in the countryside, like the Arawata Bill and Mick Stimpson sequences. I found, on the whole, that I could forgive his worst behaviour, although from the outset I was tested by it.
My earlier encounter with him had been when Michael Frayn, renowned columnist, novelist and playwright, visited as part of my newly established Meet the Author programme at the Book Council. The British Council had agreed to my request to fund Frayn to come to New Zealand en route to a speaking tour of Australia. Ian and I picked him up from Wellington airport in the Mini, after he had flown non-stop from England. He was so tall his knees almost touched his chin in the front seat of the car. The British Council had arranged a dinner in his honour only an hour or so after his arrival. Fortunately, he was young and resilient. We took him to his hotel to drop off his bags, before setting off for the residence in Oriental Terrace where the dinner was being held. I can’t remember all the people who were there that night, perhaps not more than half a dozen local guests, including Denis and his wife Lyn, and about as many again of the British Council contingent. I don’t know why Denis had gone, for he loathed the British and didn’t mind saying so. It was probably just because he could never resist invitations of any kind. He was furiously drunk and made several anti-English jokes throughout dinner, not that he consumed much or any of it. You never really saw Denis eat, just extract his hip flask while others ate.
As we finished the meal, Denis glowered around him. ‘Poms,’ he shouted. ‘Lily-livered Poms.’
Dessert was hurriedly cleared away and our hosts stood up. They nodded to each other, and as one, moved to some seats near a bay window overlooking the harbour. Apparently, there was an important cricket match on, and one of them produced a transistor radio. For the next hour or so they sat with their backs studiously turned towards the New Zealanders. And Michael Frayn. After one or two bewildered glances, Frayn had decided to throw in his lot with our end of the room. He could hardly contain his mirth as Denis ranted on. I’ve sometimes wondered whether he got some ideas for his later more farcical plays from that night. Noises Off, which I first saw in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and again in Wellington, remains one of the funniest plays I have ever seen. Around eleven o’clock, Lyn turned to Ian and me with a pleading look. Denis called her Pixie, and certainly she had the appearance of an elderly otherworldly creature, with big eyes and an urchin haircut. ‘Please could you take us home,’ she implored.
This was fine, except that we had promised Michael that we would return him to his hotel too. When we said we were leaving, our hosts nodded. Nobody budged from the transistor, and it was clear we weren’t going to get any help there.
A long flight of steps leads from Oriental Terrace down to the Parade. There was nothing else for it. Ian and Michael picked Denis up, one on each side, and carried him down. They then poured him into the front seat of the car, and Lyn and I crawled into the back, me more or less sitting on Michael’s knee, while Ian drove the Glovers home. At the other end, there was another flight of steps, so the two younger men carried Denis up those as well.
‘Oh thank you, de-ah boys, thank you,’ Denis managed, before he passed out.
In those days, I didn’t know that some famous touring writers might expect special treatment. And famous Michael Frayn was, even then. He had already won the Somerset Maugham and Hawthornden Prizes. I am glad I didn’t know, because we might have missed out on a wonderful and funny ten days with him. Sometimes when I see writers behaving like prima donnas at festivals, I think what a lot they miss out on. I have never believed in the cult of writer as super celebrity. Instead of being cloistered away, protected from the country he had come to visit, Michael tramped and sailed with Ian and his friends and often joined us in our barely restored house for meals at night. One day, Ian and David, one of Marjorie and John’s extended family, took Michael on a tramp through the Orongorongos, and David played his recorder as they climbed.
During this stay, Michael took a plane trip up to Rotorua and stayed for a couple of days. I had to lend him some money for his fare, as a bank draft he was expecting hadn’t come through, and the Book Council didn’t have the funds to cover it. On the last night in Wellington, Michael gave a talk and then, with various invited guests, left for a party at the home of one of the university’s leading academic lights. He had promised the money he owed me that evening, as I wouldn’t be seeing him again. Assuming I was invited to the party, he allowed himself to be whisked away by his hosts in their car. As it turned out, I wasn’t invited, but I followed him there anyway. The host wasn’t pleased to see me. After some time, he said, ‘I can take Mr Frayn to his hotel.’
‘Stay,’ Michael hissed at me. Comic he might have been, but he was also a gentleman. He wasn’t, as he explained later, going to give me the money in public.
‘I suppose you want another drink, do you?’ the host enquired, in a chilling tone.
I could have left then, but I was worried about the money. ‘I’ll have a glass of water,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
Eventually we left. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.
‘I wasn’t having a good time,’ said Michael. ‘You might have left me there with those dreadful people.’ He was laughing so hard he could hardly stop as he counted out a handful of money. ‘I so enjoyed the look on your face.’
I was buying vegetables at our corner greengrocer late one Friday afternoon, when I ran across Michael Noonan. Since Bill Austin died, Noonan had a role in commissioning scripts. I hadn’t had any television work since Pukemanu, but I knew that Noonan and a producer called Tony Isaacs were commissioning a drama series called Section Seven, based around the probation service. I liked Michael and Tony, but although they both treated me with respect, telev
ision was rapidly being captured by other men I considered ruthless, self-seeking and hungry. I had been disappointed not to get a commission for this particular series because I was sure I could do a good job, and had an idea in mind. However, by this time I had been given to understand that the series was complete and about to be shot, so I had given up on it.
Over the silver beet and peaches, Michael asked me what I was up to. I said I was very busy, which was true. To my surprise, he asked me if I could write a play to fit the Section Seven series.
‘How long have I got?’
‘Till Monday morning,’ he said. He filled me in on a few brief details, and walked off.
So that was that. I had two days to write a thirty-minute drama. I guessed that, somewhere along the way, an episode had fallen over. The idea I had was about a Pacific Island woman who is wrongly accused of a crime, and a female probation officer who becomes emotionally involved with the case. I didn’t sleep over the weekend, but on Monday morning I was able to ring Michael and tell him that I had a play ready. The play was accepted; I was paid handsomely, and flown to Auckland shortly afterwards for the filming of ‘They Called Her Elizabeth’. The lead role in the series was taken by London-based, New Zealand-born Ewen Solon, the Shakespearean actor who had been coached in his youth by the same Terence Buxton who taught me at Northland College.
At the wrap party on the last night, Ewen said, ‘You write terrific drama. Why don’t you take yourself off to England? The BBC would snap you up. You could make a fabulous living.’