At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  Tony looked around for his publisher, Alister Taylor, who was nowhere to be seen. Taylor had collected the cheque when the announcements were made at lunchtime, and gone back to Wellington.

  Inside the venue, a large pink-faced man with ample jowls and girth, and shrewd eyes, stood leaning against the bar. ‘Albion Wright,’ he introduced himself. ‘Have a gin, dear.’ This was the man with whom I had an assignation of my own. I had rung him the previous week and asked if I might bring him a collection of my poems. I thrust my envelope containing the manuscript for Honey and Bitters into his hands. He sniffed loudly, and looked resigned.

  The following Monday morning, he rang to say Pegasus Press would publish the book the following year.

  I think my poems had a certain vitality that suited the times, and that Albion had seen that. He had chanced his arm with a number of women writers when other publishers were not interested, writers like Janet Frame with Owls Do Cry, Jean Watson with Stand in the Rain. But he didn’t publish much poetry by relatively unknown writers and I was proud that he had taken so easily to my work.

  Lauris and I had been talking about a possible joint publication of our poems for a while, but we had gone off the idea. In my heart, I knew that she understood more than I did about what made a good poem. Her poems, although immediate and personal, were at the same time measured and distinctive in their voice. When she read, her audiences were drawn to her, at a very personal level, as well as to the work itself. My poems were raw, fairly unstructured, and increasingly influenced by American beat and feminist poets, a shift away from Bishop’s and Bogan’s more formal structures, which had attracted me earlier on, and which I struggled over. Critics would describe my poems as ‘confessional’ and I suppose that’s what they were, although I’ve come to question the glibness of that definition. It seems to me that most poems give away something of the poet who writes them. But I hadn’t really grasped the art of drawing experience into the small fictions that move a poem beyond ‘what happened to me’ or ‘how I feel’.

  I had been getting some advice about shaping the work from Alistair Paterson, who mentored several younger poets. From him, I also learned how far I still had to go. It was Lauris who had pulled away from the idea of joint publication and I, too, could see it might not work. We needed to stand on our own feet. I had a niggling feeling that, in the close confines of a single volume, my work would suffer by comparison and that that would be difficult for both of us. With Albion’s acceptance of Honey and Bitters, a reversal of this scenario began to unfold.

  Delighted, I rang to tell Lauris the news. I heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by a pause. When she spoke, she sounded withdrawn. I suppose I was a bit full of myself. I knew she had already submitted the manuscript for In Middle Air, but when pressed on Albion’s response she had brushed the matter off. Some weeks later, she mentioned that Albion had accepted her book. At that point, all difficulties were apparently swept aside. What I didn’t know until years afterwards, was that Denis had intervened and persuaded Albion to publish In Middle Air. Denis was right, of course: Lauris was the true poet. As things turned out, Albion had no cause to regret publishing either book. In Middle Air went on to win the Jessie Mackay Award the following year, and Lauris’s work began to be published internationally. In 1985 her Selected Poems won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

  We decided that we would hold a joint launch party for the two books at the University Club. Nineteen seventy-five would be International Women’s Year and we saw our double celebration as part of this event. In fact, word had flashed around publishers that women’s poetry was the happening thing, and before long nine books of poems had been signed up for publication for that year. They included work by Marilyn Duckworth, Fleur Adcock, Peggy Dunstan, Christine de Beer, Elizabeth Smither, Rachel McAlpine, Jan Kemp, Lauris and me. In the whole previous ten years, there had not been as many. As well, Riemke Ensing set out to collect New Zealand women’s poetry for the first time, in an anthology called Private Gardens.

  All of this was still to come, the day I set off for the Wattie Book Awards. Nineteen seventy-five would be a year crowded with incident.

  I was infinitely happier in the new house. Things were falling into place. I felt as if I was conquering some of the old demons. True, life wasn’t always good for my friends. I had seen Carole through some difficult times. She had a new relationship but it was not what she wanted, so she ended it. The man ended his life.

  But I now had a job, a circle of friends and two books lined up for publication. When Albion accepted Honey and Bitters, I already had another small book in preparation. Publishers A.H. & A. W. Reed had approached me to see if they could include Search for Sister Blue, the radio play about Heta Rakete and his sister Queenie, in their educational series for secondary schools. This little book was produced with a fine Ans Westra cover photograph that exactly matched the mood of the play. We had a party at our house. Ray Richards and David Elworthy from Reed’s and Ian Cross and a crowd from the Listener braved a southerly to send the book on its way. Craig Harrison came down from Palmerston North as well. Concurrently with my book, Reed’s published his play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day.

  From time to time, I made some calls I regretted. One of these was at the children’s school. Ian and I often crossed swords with the principal, Gladwell. We didn’t believe in his disciplinary methods and said so. Nor had I recovered from his offer to serve on the ladies’ auxiliary, which I had never taken up. I spoke to a few women in the neighbourhood who were equally uncomfortable that the school committee was ‘men only’, but they didn’t see what they could do to change the situation. Ian and I decided we would do something.

  This took some planning, but when the triennial elections for the committee took place, we were prepared. Leigh Minnitt shared my views. Although she didn’t have children, as the wife of a local professional she felt entitled to express an opinion. Her friend Sue Edwards agreed to be nominated to the committee. Sue lived within the school’s area, although her children attended another school. She knew she would probably lose, but was willing to put herself on the line for the principle involved. I spent an afternoon ringing around, and whipped up a posse of local supporters, some of them grandparents of children now at the school, all eager for change. Teachers’ training college lecturer Patrick Macaskill, who also served on the Book Council, was among our group.

  As the meeting got under way, we saw that Hataitai’s conservative element was well represented. Nominations were called for, and almost as quickly closed, but not before I had nominated Sue from the floor. There was a stunned silence. Gladwell called for a show of hands. Ian, armed with the regulations, pointed out that if there were more nominations than seats vacant there had to be a ballot.

  ‘We don’t have ballot papers,’ said Gladwell, by now appearing apoplectic.

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Ian. ‘I brought some in case you needed them.’

  Our supporters demanded that the rules be followed, so the ballot took place. When it was completed, Gladwell offered to count the votes. By now his supporters were in a sullen mood. A guest speaker was supposed to address them, and it was nearing eleven o’clock.

  ‘No,’ said Ian, ‘the regulations require that you have an independent scrutineer.’

  Leigh was the only person present who qualified. At some stage during the counting, Gladwell approached her to see if the result could be hurried along. Leigh threatened to call the police. As we expected, Sue was not elected. But at the next election a woman was, and later several women were, and the cycle was broken.

  Did I ever regret this? Of course. People have said that it took courage to do this, that we were before our time. But it didn’t feel like a triumph. Our children had to pay for our principles and they had less power over their lives than we did. School was always difficult after this, until they moved on to high school. This event shaped some of my views about the morality of inflicting personal choices on those who might
be disenfranchised by them. Although I have joined a number of collective movements over the years, I also believe in individual responsibility. I have learnt that the greater good is often a big muddy moral quagmire.

  I was, by then, caught up in the women’s movement in New Zealand, not that I had consciously thought my way into it. I don’t want to seem artlessly naïve about the role of feminism in my life. Over the years I had read the books — Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. I had heard Greer lecture in Wellington some years before, and marched in protest when she was taken to court for saying ‘bullshit’ in public. Of course I knew what it was about. And yet, there was an accidental element to my becoming a feminist. This wasn’t a role I had sought or deliberately planned. What I wanted to be was a writer, always that, but so often I was writing about women’s lives, and about poor and disadvantaged women. I couldn’t help but notice inequality, and more than a few times in my life I had felt disadvantaged by being a woman myself.

  But even if I understood what the women’s movement represented in 1975, nothing had prepared me for the New Zealand United Women’s Convention, where I had been invited to speak about writing. I don’t know what I had been expecting — perhaps a gathering of people in a room, much like one of my evening classes. The convention was to be held in the Wellington Show Buildings in Newtown. On Friday 13 June, the sky burst apart and an immense deluge soaked women as they made their way to the convention. The rain would continue for most of the weekend, the noise on the roof all but drowning out the sound of speakers’ voices, except in the main auditorium area where there were microphones. More than two thousand bedraggled women crushed together, trying to find their way to different workshops. My site was right in the middle of the main hall, and I had an apple box to stand on. At least two hundred women had joined my workshop. With the noise overhead, the steam of bodies, the upturned faces, I suddenly began to understand the magnitude of the movement and my own part in it. Over the previous five years, my name had become well known and, in a time when it was still difficult for women to get their writing published, I was perceived as successful. These women waited anxiously for me to tell them how to unlock the key to their own creativity, how to be published, how to find time to write in the middle of their domestic lives.

  What did I say? Be like me? Be single-minded, driven, often manic in your determination to work? I might have said, be an only, often lonely, child with a mother who lived partly in a fantasy world of soap opera and Maori voices from the past, and a father with a doubtful history, and you’ve got a good brew for the imagination. That wasn’t enough, of course. I tried to tell them about setting targets, making space in their lives, giving themselves ‘permission’ to work. ‘Permission’ was the key word, and it seemed to be useful. Afterwards, I was mobbed by women wanting to tell me their experiences, and some of them were harrowing. I heard from women who had been beaten and abused, who had lost their children because they were lesbians, women who worked liked slaves for pittances or nothing at all. My own life experience seemed limited by comparison.

  Now and then, I have been celebrated for holding feminist views. But over the years I have also been heckled, abused, accused, ostracised, had my family insulted, my sexuality called into question. More often than not, the term ‘feminism’ is used as a pejorative in New Zealand. It’s shorthand for ‘this woman is opinionated’ or ‘who does she think she is?’ or ‘we think she’s difficult’. I have been forced, on occasion, mostly in order to protect my family, to define my brand of feminism, although this goes deeply against the grain. Believing what I do is part of the person I am, and it is troubling to be asked to put belief into boxes. Making utterances about not being ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ seems apologist. But my views have been consistent ever since I became seriously involved in the women’s movement. I believe that women are equally entitled to receive education, adequate health care and recognition in the workplace. I believe, too, that women have the right to choose their sexual partners — that means not being forced or coerced to have sex — and to have control over their fertility. Women are not human chattels.

  That’s all. I don’t think women are ‘better’ than men. I was mentored and supported in the development of my career by several men. I haven’t forgotten. It’s neither here nor there, but I’ve never attended a single encounter group in my life, nor gone to speculum parties to inspect vaginas. I have never slept with or been intimately involved with a woman. Do these things matter? Not really. For some women it was part of understanding themselves. I respect their courage, but there were aspects of the women’s movement that were simply irrelevant to my own personal growth as a woman. I think we were, all of us, passionate and brave and strong. From this distance, I can see that we probably looked faintly ridiculous at times, but that doesn’t make us wrong. Most of us were fired by the genuine belief that we were making the world a better place for women, and that doesn’t seem like something we should have to apologise for.

  When I explain my own basic philosophy of feminism, most people nod their heads and agree that this argument is about human rights, rather than pitting men and women against each other. More than once, I have heard Margaret Atwood offer similar views to mine, when heckled from the floor, and her voice is tinged with a certain note of weariness that I hear in my own responses. How many times do you bang your head against a wall without becoming unconscious?

  Lauris was missing throughout much of this time. Earlier in the year she had spent several weeks with her third daughter Rachel, who was being treated for schizophrenia in Ward 10 at Auckland Hospital. I had only met Rachel once, at the Upper Hutt house during university summer holidays. She was a pale gentle girl, her smile much like that of her brilliant vibrant siblings, but different in some indefinable way. I remember her sitting on the grass, beneath a tree, plaiting flower stems, and talking about how to make japonica jelly. Lauris wrote to me regularly from Auckland. In her first letter she explained that the situation was much more serious than she had suspected and she could only stay with Rachel until she seemed reasonably safe. I walked straight into a nightmare when I came to see her on Sunday morning, Lauris wrote. I was in a car, being driven to the hospital when I saw her — a little pale wraith walking along the footpath. A week or so later, Lauris described her time spent in the ward, staying all day and eating with the patients and family who had joined them, as she had Rachel. One of them was Hone Tuwhare, who was staying there to support a relative. He was, she said, ‘a great genial bear of a man’ who had encouraged people to write their own poetry and read it aloud. When he left, he had handed to Lauris the job of keeping the sessions going.

  Lauris, then, was living a totally different life from mine. After she returned to Wellington, we continued to meet and talk, and plan the launch of our two books later in the year. She seemed optimistic about her daughter’s recovery, but Rachel came back to Wellington and her health continued to deteriorate. When most of the women poets who were being published that year gathered one evening for a reading at the Settlement, word came through that Lauris wouldn’t be there. Rachel was very ill; the family was at her hospital bedside.

  I rang the next morning and learned that Rachel had died. Immediately I went to the Upper Hutt house, where the family was gathered. Lauris seemed pleased to see me but the funeral would just be for family, and I left soon. It was to be some time before I saw Lauris again. I realised that however close to Lauris’s life I had thought myself, I was not part of this. I wrote a poem for Rachel, called ‘Winter Roses’ — ‘I have only some winter roses,/bought from a flower factory,/to lay beside the wounded earth’ — but the truth was, the flowers didn’t get delivered.

  After the launch of our books, Lauris and I began to pick up the threads, or so I thought. In the interval, since Rachel’s death, other appalling tragedies had struck. No fewer than five of my friends’ daughters died suddenly with
in the space of twelve weeks. I felt as if I was becoming a sort of ubiquitous mourner, without a tragedy of my own, thankfully. And yet, as a mother, I was overcome by a numb and helpless horror. At nights, when the children slept, I walked around our new house and touched their sleeping faces, overcome with dread.

  At times Lauris cried; at other moments she appeared overtaken by a wild gaiety. She insisted we go ahead with the launch at the University Club. Denis launched In Middle Air and Sam spoke for my book, Honey and Bitters. It was during his speech that Denis made his infamous comment about ‘the menstrual school of poetry’, confirming the view of many in the packed room that he was an elderly misogynist. He did himself a disservice because his deeds were kinder than his drunken words. About 300 people had turned up, many of them uninvited. The gatecrashers included members of the Press Gallery and a number of Labour politicians. We felt like the centre of our universe. Nobody had mentioned to Lauris and me that publishers usually paid for launch parties. Albion arrived beaming from Christchurch, behaving as if he was the host. Afterwards we counted the cost of our largesse.

  Often I seemed to fail quite simple tests of friendship with Lauris. I’m sure I was inadequate, but the ups and downs of that year, and the volatility of our friendship, were beginning to make me feel isolated and uncertain again. She had decided the Edmonds should move to town, and enlisted my help in looking at houses. I don’t know whether her family was aware of the role I was playing in its future, but at least it felt as if I were doing something useful. We looked at dozens of places together, and then, all of a sudden, Lauris settled on a house I hadn’t seen. I thought it an outlandish choice, a 1950s L-shaped house nestled in a hollow halfway up Grass Street in Oriental Bay. It was within walking distance of where I live, but there were hundreds of steps to be negotiated whichever way you approached it. It was a suntrap though, and she was enchanted by the bush that surrounded the garden, and by the inner harbour view.