by Adam Dudding
3. Letters
NOT LONG after I tell my mother and sisters I’ve decided to write a book about Dad, my sister Melissa drops off a tea-chest-sized cardboard box full of chokingly musty papers (and, mystifyingly, three even mustier cushions).
The papers are two-thirds junk – crap collected over the decades by Dad’s mother Winifred at the family home in Hastings, then passed on after her death and once again after Dad’s.
Junk, but intriguing all the same: recipes and shopping lists jotted on scraps of notepaper, brown paper bags and smoothed-out sheets of used Christmas paper, cardboard cereal boxes cut into pieces to reuse as jotting paper, unsent sympathy cards, parish newsletters, a handwritten list of Latin names for trees, a brochure for the European tour she and Grandad took in 1967, award certificates for Grandad’s prizewinning fowls, an exercise book full of handwritten tips for the thrifty housewife, including how to sew old stockings inside the seat of pants to extend their life. There are newspaper cuttings too, including the hilarious ‘Beautifying society disbands – apathy is blamed’, possibly from the Hawke’s Bay Herald-Tribune, as well as lots of Ian Gordon’s ‘Language’ columns from the Listener, in which he explains the etymology of ‘enormity’, or ‘shortbread’.
This stuff isn’t terribly useful to me, but I like the little indicators of class and economic circumstance and the reminders of Grandma’s love of language. I’m struck by the evidence, in the increasing spideriness of the shopping lists, of her ageing and decline.
And amid the dross, gold: a large bundle of Grandma’s mail, including letters from Dad from the late 1950s on, and another smaller bundle of Dad’s papers, including hire-purchase receipts, newspaper clippings about himself, and some letters.
It’s ridiculous that these receipts have been kept so long, but I’m still glad to learn that on the 24th of November 1961 my parents bought a second-hand piano for £65 plus £7/4/– interest and 14/– insurance and stamp duty, and paid it off at £3/16/– a month. That’s our piano, my piano, the piano with a sticky high E which I practised on for 15 years – though, by the time I got to it, it was a semitone flat and couldn’t be tuned back up because the frame was cracked.
Dad’s notebook of cash outgoings for a few months in 1983 triggers memory of things I’ve not thought about for decades: the advent of plastic hexagonal (or were they pentagonal?) milk tokens that you could leave at the gate with the empty bottles instead of the coins that sometimes proved too tempting to passing schoolkids; the time Dad took Anna and me to see Casablanca and told us he’d always thought Mum looked like Ingrid Bergman (but he’d kill us if we told her); my new school shoes bought on layby – frumpy Charlie Browns rather than the cooler but pricier Nomads. There’s a tiny time-travelling thrill just looking at the prices: New Zealand Herald 20¢, loaf of bread 78¢, butter 96¢.
My favourite find, though, is one of the few letters to Dad from his father Ernest. It’s written in November 1965, five years before I was born, and reveals something I didn’t know but which hardly surprises me: my parents came close to defaulting on the mortgage on our house in Torbay.
Grandad sounds pretty angry that his idiot son, 30 years old and with a wife, four young children (so far), a fulltime teaching job and a promising sideline as a publisher, is asking for a loan Grandad can’t really spare, and yet . . .
I do not want to see you lose your house thus the cheque. I have had to get an overdraft as I never had that amount available.
It’s the next sentence, though, that reveals the real distance between father and son, between the hard-working National-voting provincial baker and the long-haired left-leaning literature-loving Bohemian who sprang cuckoo-like from his nest.
I feel that if you had looked after the interior of the house in the way of wallpaper and paint on walls and kept the garage in repair you would have no trouble in raising a loan. It is not much sense me rubbing it in but the idea of letting children do what they like in the way of scribbling on walls and tearing wallpaper does not pay dividends.
Grandad obviously makes a sound financial point, but just as obviously he’s never considered how much fun it might be to be a child and to be allowed to draw on the walls. His son, however, has.
The rest of the bundle looks promising too – chatty letters from Dad to his folks about the garden and chooks and children, documents that pin a fragmentary memory to a particular time and place, some intriguingly intimate letters from a woman who appears to be a family friend. I scribble some notes and put the most interesting stuff in a folder. Before I start writing this thing in earnest, though, there’s somewhere else I need to look.
In 1983, the year I turned 13, Dad’s quarterly Islands hadn’t seen a new issue in two-and-a-half years. He was desperate to get it up and running again but the journal, and by extension our family, had completely run out of money. He wanted to send letters of apology to all the subscribers waiting for their magazine, but reckoned he couldn’t afford the postage.
Eggs, chickens and vegetables from our garden, supple-mented by Dad’s occasional wages from relief teaching and freelance editing, kept us from going hungry, but he couldn’t pay printers with eggs and silverbeet (though he may well have considered it – I remember him defraying a dentist’s bill by taking in a tray of eggs fresh from the fowl-run).
Then someone came to his rescue. Jim Traue, chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, wrote to Dad to say he’d heard of his financial troubles, and to repeat an offer he’d made years earlier to buy the Islands archive – manuscripts, proofs, incoming mail and carbon copies of the letters Dad wrote back – for the Turnbull’s collection of unpublished papers.
After some hand-wringing – he’d always wanted to gift everything to the library rather than sell it – Dad agreed, and by the end of the year the library had paid a first instalment of $2000. With that in the bank, plus some funds rustled up from other sources, Islands could rise again.
As it happened, Dad didn’t hold up his end of the transaction until 14 years later, when a library staffer drove up to Auckland and fetched a fraction of the literary detritus that filled a room and a half of his house, and took it back to the Turnbull to be filed. Later still, in November 2014, I would take a couple of weeks off work and fly to the capital to take a look.
I don’t know quite what I’m expecting, but if flicking through the 100 or so letters Melissa dropped off was dipping my toe into archival research, entering the Turnbull is like being thrown overboard. I’m drowning.
Dad’s papers were stored for years in teetering stacks of cardboard boxes but for some reason, presumably ease of filing, the library has split them into 350-odd foolscap folders, each containing a sheaf of papers up to 5cm thick. According to the library index, bits of Dad’s correspondence also appear in the Turnbull archives of 42 other people.
Each folder must be ordered with a computer booking system before it can be delivered, still chilly from its temperature- and humidity-controlled vault (the librarians wear Swanndris down there), to the front desk of the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room. After surviving decades of silverfish and mould spores and Auckland humidity, after dodging the fate of Dad’s two-metre-high stack of old Listener magazines which one summer were eaten by a colony of wasps and converted into a fearsome hive, Dad’s old papers are enjoying a surprisingly safe and comfortable retirement.
I leaf through each folder as fast as I can without distressing the watchful librarians, one of whom tells me off for licking my page-flipping finger. I photograph anything that looks interesting for closer reading later, and Jocelyn, the wonderful librarian who’s digging out most of the files, invents an extra identity for me so I can order files twice as fast. Even so I get through just 16 folders on the first day, and take about 200 photos. At this rate I’ll never get through it all.
Some files are alphabetical, some are chronological, and others are a bit of both. The upshot is that I’m trying to skim-read four decades of Dad’s
professional life involving complex, long-running relationships with dozens, maybe hundreds, of people – in near-random order. I’m leaping from the late 1950s to the early 1990s then back to the 60s, then to the 80s. People are alive then dead then dying, then alive once more; Dad is a father of six, of none, of four; he’s despairing and inert, he’s dynamic and optimistic; he’s ready to give things one last shot, he’s just getting started. He’s doddering, he’s young, he’s having a midlife crisis.
I’m interested to see what’s here, but part of me is hoping I can get away with skimming the lot and jotting down the famous names Dad corresponded with, then be done with it. I want to write an intimate, impressionistic book, not something academic and exhaustive. There must be an English Literature PhD student somewhere who has the time and patience to index this ocean and write a handsomely footnoted history of post-colonialism in mid-century New Zealand literary journals or something.
There are indeed plenty of boring, glanceable documents – discussions with printers about pagination and so on – but many others are too seductive to skim. They’re not simply the professional exchanges of an editor with his galaxy of writers, would-be writers, artists, illustrators, academics, subscribers and critics, but also lovely things, consciously well made by people who have a way with words.
Letters frequently start with a grovelling apology for delay (‘it is quite disgraceful that I have taken so long . . .’) or for the inadequacy of what’s to follow (‘I wonder if you’ll excuse just a short note’) followed by a critique of the preceding correspondence (‘it was a very pleasant surprise to receive your good letter’), before moving on to business.
There’s fond scatological banter (‘Dear shithead,’ writes James K. Baxter on 22 March 1967, ‘With affectionate regards I enclose this pile of crap . . .’). There’s literary backbiting (‘Have you read Shadbolt’s godawful new novel?’ a young poet asks); and great sentences: ‘I am also writing hard,’ says the same poet in 1974, ‘& am not sure if it’s out of anger with myself or with the lumpy world.’
For Dad, the boundary between professional and personal was vanishingly thin, so family updates and intimate revelations share the page with a discussion of grammatical nuance and inadequate character development, or the commissioning of an essay. The carbons of his letters to the novelist Maurice Gee sit alongside an impassioned letter to the Wildlife Branch of the Internal Affairs Department, in which he begs for the return of one of our two tame Canada Geese, which had wandered from our Christchurch property and been relocated by officials to a wildlife park where it was now ‘being bullied by a wide selection of geese ducks and swan’. Meanwhile, Dad writes, ‘the bird we still have at home is [. . .] obviously pining’.
There are also things in these folders that shouldn’t be here at all: my Form Two school report, a poster for a sister’s school play, shopping lists on the backs of envelopes, and what look suspiciously like love letters to Dad from two more women who aren’t Mum, at points in history when they should have been. Like it or not, I’m going to have to take at look at everything in these files.
The library offers up an appetiser within half an hour of my arrival. It’s in the archives of Frank Sargeson, the capsicum-growing elder statesmen of New Zealand letters. In March 1978, the month of Sargeson’s 75th birthday, Dad turned over an entire edition of Islands to a celebration of him: Sargeson stories and novel extracts sat alongside dozens of tributes from fellow writers including C. K. Stead, Bill Manhire and Kevin Ireland. I also find letters between Dad and Janet Frame where she declines to contribute to the issue, despite having ‘so many illuminating, de-light-ful, moving memories of knowing Frank’.
There must have been some sort of knees-up to launch the special edition. I don’t remember it, but a letter from Dad to Frank a few days later shows I was there.
Ah, well . . . thank you Frank for putting up with Thursday’s hoo-har so graciously. I think it all went very well.
I’ve just told Karl--& I’m sure you’d appreciate it too--that while Karl was singing the praises of ISLANDS, seven-year-old Adam whispered to Anna, ‘Yes, but he’s not a very good father’! . . . and laughed like drain this morning when I faced him with this treasonable utterance.
As I read this, 36 years on, I laugh out loud once again (though it’s more a stifled ‘ha!’ – I’m wary of the librarians). I’m well aware that by the time I was 12 or 13 I was taking righteous pleasure in explaining Dad’s flaws to him, but I had no idea I was such a traitorous little shit quite so young. I decide, forgivingly, that seven-year-old me was probably just trying to make his sister laugh. I email a cellphone snapshot of the letter to Anna.
Recently I’ve been trying to remember how Dad’s voice sounded and finding it difficult, but ‘laughed like [a] drain’ has spun a tiny neural cog and for just a moment I almost hear him. This was one of his stock lines, along with describing tired or mascaraed eyes as ‘pissholes in the snow’ or saying his daughters’ nail polish made their fingers look like they’d been ‘dipped in blood’. If you asked him where he was going, he was always going to ‘build a wigwam for a goose’s bridle’ or ‘to see a man about a dog’. Ask why, and you’d learn that ‘Y’s a crooked letter, and your nose is not much better’.
Seeing Sargeson’s name reminds me of the day Frank spent at our house in Torbay, when I was about 12. He was dying of cancer and mostly sat quietly in a chair with his stick next to him and our cat Haydn on his knee, but at some point his catheter bottle needed emptying and Dad ceremonially conveyed it outside to empty onto the lemon tree.
In almost every folder that I open, something sparks. In Sargeson’s inbound mail is a note from my mother, written in 1980, thanking Frank for the gift of $43 that paid for her new pair of spectacles. I don’t remember her getting new specs – why would I? – and what strikes me about this note isn’t the words but the handwriting. Since her stroke Mum has been able to write only with her left hand, painstakingly printing each shaky letter, but this is her old right-handed pre-stroke script, an elegant looping cursive which I’ve always found beautiful but difficult to read. And CLICK – I’m three years old, perhaps four, and I’m trying to read a page of a letter that Mum is halfway through writing, but all I can see is coils of black ink looping across the page like broken springs, and I hear myself saying, ‘This is silly – it doesn’t say anything at all’, and I find a pen of my own to demonstrate that I can write the same meaningless coils. One of the adults in the room is laughing indulgently at me, and I feel indignant.
If I pause the memory I can look around and see the whole moment. The oval kauri dining table is behind me, and I’m standing in front of the high divan next to the white-framed casement windows that you have to jolt with your palm to open because of the swollen wood, and through them you can see the branches of the tree growing in the little cracked-concrete courtyard outside.
I find letters about Dad’s brief stint as acting editor at Auckland University Press, during which time he spruced himself up into an approximation of a conventional pen-pusher – and I can see him at the bathroom sink with a pair of scissors, cutting his own crooked fringe and trimming his beard down from enormous to simply large, leaving hairs all over the bench which will really annoy Mum, and early in the morning, before Anna and I have even had breakfast, he’s heading out the door, still Dad, but somehow all wrong, too posh in his grey polyester walk shorts and calf-high socks and a shirt with a collar, looking so thoroughly scrubbed he’s rubbed some of himself off.
There’s a burnt matchstick hiding between two 1985 letters – and I can see the ash-tipped cigarette in his hand, the red soft-pack of 10 Pall Mall Plain in his shirt pocket, the yellow nicotine staining his calloused hands. I remember the sweet, comforting tobacco smell that permeated his office and clothes and hair and skin, and the exciting moment one day when he put a spent match back into the matchbox without checking it was fully out, and the box exploded into flame in his hands.
The
re’s no bin near my table in the reading room, so I hand the matchstick to a librarian, Paul, when I return the folder at day’s end. When I return to the same folder the next morning, the matchstick has been carefully re-filed with the letters.
I sit and flick and snap and scribble and stand and fetch and sit and flick and snap, hour after hour. At times the skim-reading becomes hypnotic and the meanings of words drift away, leaving me to notice the shapes and colours: flimsy blue aerogrammes, blurry carbon copies, chirpy postcards with writing that overshoots the last line and runs across the bottom and up the side, shouty yellow telegrams with their messages about a printing delay or an urgent correction printed in anxious capitals on strips of white tickertape glued to the page.
I decode the angular red letters of Dad’s occasional handwritten letters, and note the sudden switch in his outgoing carbon copies from a classic seriffed typewriter face to an anaemic sans serif in mid-1975, when a writer friend gave him her old Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe, replacing the near-dead machine Dad had bought 20-odd years earlier with his pay from a holiday job washing sheepskins at the Tomoana Freezing Works. And in 1980 the Galaxie too was replaced, by an IBM Selectric with crisply uniform letters and super-modern interchangeable font golfballs. At night, as I fell asleep, I would hear the loud electric clunk of each letter through the wall between his office and my bedroom. He used the Selectric till the 1990s, by which time he and everyone else was switching to word processors, with their reckless profusion of typefaces and Zapf Dingbat pointy fingers.
As the days pass and my camera memory fills up, the thrill of finding yet another funny or useful or evocative document is replaced with a low-grade panic that I’ll never get through all this material before my fortnight’s up – and even if I do I’ll never be able to filter it down into something readable.