by Adam Dudding
He emailed me a few days later: ‘Ask those smart asses from BbC if they can produce 5 fillies and 1 colt, tell em it is harder than looks, especially with a beard.’
It was funny, sure, but I also felt slightly sad about this TV cameo, because ‘man of achievement’ wasn’t how I thought of Dad these days. When I was little I knew he was terribly important in some way, but by my teens I’d noticed this didn’t translate into anyone I met ever having heard of him.
Now, in my 20s, I knew he was remembered and presumably respected in the small world of NZ Lit, and I still got a little frisson when I read the arts pages of a New Zealand publication and spotted a name that I remembered meeting as a kid, or proofreading a story of, or playing ping-pong doubles with, but it all seemed such a long time ago. His magazine Islands had fizzled and died a decade before. Subbing at the Listener was a respectable job, but I suspected he got more satisfaction from the lunchtime table-tennis than the work itself. And now he seemed old and disappointed and worn-out – literally, in the case of the arthritic hip that was finally replaced over the New Zealand summer. I wasn’t even sure he was especially proud of the things he’d achieved back in the days when he had a bit more life in him.
I was wrong, of course. He wasn’t quite finished. And he was proud, though he liked to give the impression that he wasn’t. And he did matter. It’s just that it would be a couple of decades before I bothered finding out enough about him to rediscover that fact.
9. A different star
AS WELL AS friends and family, I interview some of the people Dad worked with – poets and authors, editors and publishers, academics and critics. I’m mostly looking for funny stories, or important events I haven’t already encountered in his correspondence, or adult perspectives on events I half-remember from my childhood. But while the recorder’s running, and after they’ve confirmed Dad had an extraordinary beard and liked talking about chickens and had seemed rather dour in the 1980s, it would be odd not to seek their professional opinion on something else. Namely, what did they make of Robin Dudding the editor? Were those magazines of his really that big a deal? Was he any good? Was he, in short, a Man of Achievement or not?
There are good reasons to treat their answers with caution. Most of them, at one time or another, had their work published by Dad, so it stands to reason that they would endorse his excellent judgement. Most of them were also, to some extent or another, personal friends as well as colleagues or collaborators. They may also have felt bound by politeness, when talking to the son, to refrain from revealing that the father was actually a misguided fool of no account. Also, apart from a small number of well-known feuds and spats (most of them involving the reliably disputatious writer and academic C. K. Stead) it sometimes feels like there’s an omertà within NZ Lit that keeps anyone from bagging anyone else in public – admitting, say, that you find Writer X’s famous book unreadably dull, or that you think Poet Y has built a career on sentimental doggerel, or that the only genuine talent Author Z has demonstrated is in writing applications for the succession of government funding grants they keep getting to write books no one reads. (Naturally, in private and with no recorders running, these conversations proceed merrily.)
Yet for all those caveats, it is striking how everyone I interview reaches for superlatives. Editor Dudding was, I am told, ‘the best editor we’ve ever had’; the ‘father of a generation’ and someone of ‘immense’ influence. He was a ‘lighthouse’, a ‘cult figure’, a ‘guru’ and a ‘cultural hero’.
To recap: what he’s remembered for is his editorship of three literary magazines: Mate in the 1950s and 60s, Landfall in the 60s and 70s, then Islands in the 70s and 80s.
He was the first publisher of many writers who went on to be a big deal, including Barry Crump. Others he spotted first, or at least early, included Maurice Gee, Peter Bland, Kevin Ireland, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Alan Brunton, Sam Hunt, Bob Orr, Yvonne Du Fresne, Albert Wendt, Margaret Sutherland, Fiona Kidman, Greg McGee, Anne Kennedy, Jenny Bornholdt and Elizabeth Nannestad.
He published C. K. Stead and Vincent O’Sullivan and Maurice Shadbolt; Fleur Adcock and Elsie Locke and Marilyn Duckworth. He was always looking for the new thing, but they’d generally share covers with writers who’d already made their name – Frank Sargeson and Kendrick Smithyman, Hone Tuwhare and Janet Frame, James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson, Bill Pearson and Maurice Duggan.
Visual art was always part of the mix. Artists who designed a cover or illustrated a story included Ralph Hotere, Doris Lusk, Michael Smither, Toss Woollaston, Michael Illingworth, Pat Hanly, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Tony Fomison, Don Binney, Garth Tapper, Philip Trusttum, Jeffrey Harris, Brent Wong, Nigel Brown, Peter Siddell, Dick Frizzell, Barry Lett, Gregory O’Brien, Joanna Paul and photographer Marti Friedlander. In Islands 10 he went art-crazy and reproduced works by 19 people, each accompanied by 300 words from the artist explaining why this was their favourite work.
He published 71 magazines in all plus a handful of standalone books: a comic novel by Barry Mitcalfe, several poetry volumes and a collection of autobiographical essays called Beginnings. As a freelance editor for other publishers he had a hand in many dozens more.
That’s a solid CV. But lots of people publish stuff, and people who doggedly write or make art and are good at it will, surely, be published somewhere eventually. Why ‘cult figure’, ‘hero’ and the rest of it?
In the 1950s there weren’t many places to turn if you wanted to get your story or poem published. Charles Brasch’s Landfall was the place to be, but it was very highbrow, Literary with a capital L, and not everything matched Brasch’s rarefied standards. Sometimes, says Maurice Gee when I visit him and his wife Margareta in Nelson, it seemed like there was nowhere to go, especially if you were just starting out. Eventually Gee became the book-award-hogging novelist we know him as now, but back then he was sending his short stories off hopefully, just like everybody else.
There had been other ‘little magazines’ that tried to challenge Landfall’s dominance, says Gee – Noel Hoggard’s Arena; something called Image; Baxter and Louis Johnson started Numbers – but usually they folded pretty fast. So when Dad took over Mate at its second issue, and managed to produce another 12 alongside assistant editor Tony Stones before handing it on to another editor, he was ‘giving us a place to publish’. To say he was ‘keeping writing alive in New Zealand’ might seem corny, Gee says, ‘but that’s not too far off the truth’. Brasch, by founding Landfall back in 1947, had been of huge importance, and ‘Bob Dudding – I wouldn’t say he was a satellite; he was a different star . . . what do you call those things? Twin stars? I’ve used it in a novel somewhere. An astronomical term . . .’
Binary stars?
‘Yes. Binary stars.’
When Dad was being sized up for his honorary doctorate at Auckland University in 2007, Gee wrote one of the letters of commendation.
‘It’s no exaggeration,’ he wrote, ‘to call him the (youthful) father of a generation (my generation) of New Zealand writers.’
Not just Gee’s generation. From the late 1960s, in Landfall and then in Islands, Dad was an enthusiastic backer of baby-boomer poet and author Ian Wedde, seeing him as the vanguard of something new and important.
I meet Ian in a café around the corner from his apartment in Ponsonby. He has a walking stick because of an old hip injury, but he’s just as groovy and fizzing with energy as I remember from when I was a kid. ‘One of the big debts I owe Robin,’ he says, ‘is that he endorsed the belief that you could put writing at the centre of your life and do a bunch of other stuff – be a postie, or give talks or whatever you had to – to make up the difference. Not just me: he gave a lot of people that signal that yes you can, that it wasn’t just a childish whim.’
Underneath the warm encouragement there was discipline. Robin would be reading for the literary business – What is this about? Is it substantial? – but he was also doing the
close reading: looking for crummy sentences, unnecessary words.
‘He was never very intrusive, but he did make some very firm suggestions when it came to the detail of the writing – “too many fucking adjectives”, that kind of thing. He burnt a track through how I wrote.’
Ian visited the Duddings in Auckland in the mid-1970s. At that time Dad was editing Islands out of a draughty, leaky-roofed shed in the garden that was stuffed to overflowing with mountains of submissions and proofs and other hoarded papers.
Between our house and our neighbours’ there was just a straggly hedge, through which Ian and Robin could hear a fractious baby at 2 Sealy Road.
‘I remember Robin running through a gap in the hedge and running back through holding this child – he’d obviously totally kidnapped the child – and beginning to cram fish and yoghurt into it. And then he ran back with it through the hedge, and the child was quiet.
‘That gap in the hedge stood for a lot. The image I have of Robin running through while clutching this child – it feels to me very like what he did with young writers. He kind of bolted through the hedge and brought them back into the shed, and maybe they were quiet for a while.’
He was still dashing through the hedge and helping young writers a decade later and more. After Beth Nannestad sent him some poems in the late 1970s for consideration for Islands he scooped them up and told her she was good. In the early 80s he informed her it was time to publish a collection, and told her who to talk to, where to go, how to do it.
‘I owe him me being a poet,’ Beth tells me. ‘If it hadn’t been for the presence of Islands, and then that feeling of being under his wing like one of his little chickens, and being told quite succinctly what to do – if it wasn’t for that, such poetry as I’ve written wouldn’t have been written.’
Literary magazines, with their miscellanies of poems, stories, reviews, essays and images, can be bitsy, uneven things. Yet I am repeatedly told that Robin Dudding’s were always more than the sum of their parts, that they had a shape and logic that made them much more than a grab-bag of the first 15 printable things through the letterbox slot.
Bill Manhire is in the UK teaching a semester at the University of East Anglia, so we talk on Skype.
‘The great thing about him as an editor,’ says Bill, as I watch his blurry, time-lagged face peering into his laptop from a London hotel room, ‘but also his downfall in some ways, was that he waited patiently until work came in. He’d commission essays and reviews and so on too, but there was some organic growth to each issue of Landfall that he did, and each issue of Islands. He’d decide what fitted and how to order it, without doing one of those heavy-handed thematised issues, which never works. He’d produce an issue that had its own integrity.’
Gregory O’Brien – artist, poet, author, curator and some-one who gets more infectiously excited about art and culture than anyone I’ve ever met – says the Dudding magazines were structured in the same way that a good curator might order an art exhibition: ‘setting up the juxtapositions and transitions and the disruptions and disjunctions’ between different elements.
The point, says Greg, as he paces around his kitchen in the Wellington suburbs and makes too many coffees for both of us on a stovetop espresso maker, is that editing of the kind Robin did was a creative process of its own. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a writer or poet himself.
‘Robin was a cult figure really, and it’s pretty amazing to be that – having a literary reputation apart from being a practitioner.’
That rare status of non-writing editor was something to which Robin was temperamentally suited, reckons Bill. In his publications there was ‘the feeling that Robin was always dashing out of the frame. He wanted to be a presence and take charge, but he always wanted to be an invisible figure’, a bit like the description of Stephen Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as the godlike figure who ‘remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.
The family’s hippyish idyll in Christchurch was part of that, says Bill.
‘One of the things Robin was doing with his editing was building a community of writers of which he was the secret chief, the guru, the leader of the commune.
‘And that community was alongside that utopian family that I met in Christchurch, but also overlapped with it a bit, because a lot of those writers became family friends and were defeated at ping-pong.’
In a 1991 interview with the poet and journalist Iain Sharp, Bill said getting one of his poems into Landfall, not long after Dudding had taken over from Brasch, was a rite of passage, a huge symbolic moment. ‘It meant somehow you really were a writer.’
The kudos was as much about the magazine as its new editor, but after Dad was fired and started Islands he carried that status – and the loyalty of many of the Landfall writers – off with him. The mana was attached to Islands still by the time he published Beth Nannestad for the first time.
‘If you were good, you could be in Islands,’ says Beth. ‘And it meant you were good, this was a poem – it wasn’t just trying to be. It meant a lot.’
Robin was always waiting for the next great thing to arrive in the mail, says Beth, but he was also having an effect on the world, like a lighthouse – he ‘made other people better, because you knew there was someone who was the centre of something, who could tell the difference’.
Mike Beveridge, another baby-boomer writer who was published by Dad in Landfall then Islands and befriended the family in Christchurch, tells me the Dudding mission to publish wasn’t just about supporting or gratifying would-be writers and poets. There was a grander civilising project underway.
Mike, who was once a fairly serious rugby player, has a vivid memory of going to a test match with Dad in the late 60s or early 70s. They were on the embankment at Lancaster Park, east of the city centre, and as usual it was bedlam.
‘There were people pissing on each other and throwing pies into the crowd. And Robin looked at it all, and said, “Imagine parodying this.”
‘Because that was life. That was the kind of crass, brutal, six-o’clock-closing-get-pissed-and-beat-the-wife life we’d grown up with.
‘And he was doing his bit to give us some culture. What a noble thing to have done. What a great thing to have done. You could have done much worse with your life than that.’
Robin Dudding battled the philistines on one front and the snobs on another. Beveridge, who’d grown up in provincial towns around the North Island, found the conservatism, the fake Englishness, the old-boys’-club atmosphere of Christchurch, where he was a PhD student and tutor in the university English department, stultifying. ‘I couldn’t abide that Christ’s College aspect to it – the snobbishness and the twittishness.’
It was wonderful, then, to encounter Robin, someone who would talk seriously about art and language and culture, but didn’t feel the need to give himself airs and graces and a false British accent while doing so, and who also knew the score of the latest All Blacks game. There was loose talk, in the early 1970s, between the Duddings and Beveridges about the prospect of founding a small commune in Nelson, but nothing came of it.
Patrick Evans, who was a friend and colleague of Mike, remembers Robin being ‘very clear about the New Zealand thing. He said be clear that you write your fiction in New Zealand and not a fake version of somewhere else, like Pommy-land or the United States.’
By the late 1960s the world was shifting on its axis: Civil Rights in the US, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, May ’68 in Paris, the hippy movement, feminism and, more locally, the growth of Maori activism. New Zealand often felt a year or two off the pace, but the changing of the guard at Landfall in 1967 felt like another tiny symptom of the changing times.
In 1970 the young Maori writer Witi Ihimaera arrived at Robin’s offices in Christchurch to ask why he hadn’t received a response to stories he’d submitted to Landfall, and
made his point clearer by pulling out a taiaha and performing a warrior’s challenge on the steps of the Caxton Press. Robin waited patiently, then Witi said ‘Kia ora’ and they went inside to talk. A chapter of what would become Witi’s first (and award-winning) novel Tangi appeared in Landfall later that year.
By 1972 Witi was becoming a literary celebrity with the success of his collection Pounamu Pounamu, but his 1973 story ‘Clenched Fist’ which was published in Islands, marked his turn towards darker, more political themes.
When I meet Witi for a coffee in Ponsonby he tells me about his dramatic first meeting with Robin, and how he was always grateful to him for making him visible ‘at the highest level’. Even though Robin was supportive, he didn’t mince words when rejecting weaker material, chiding Witi when he though he was overdoing things, or being melodramatic, or boring, or superficial. They hatched a plan to work together on a book of modern retellings of Maori myths, but it never quite happened.
For poet and author Fiona Kidman, it seemed Robin was a turning point. He was declaring a new kind of literature that was more inclusive of younger people, of Maori and of women.
She’d been ‘knocking on Landfall’s door for years, and I’d been getting these cool little notes from Charles Brasch – “Not quite for us” sort of thing. Then Robin took over and the first story I sent him he published.’
He was a few years ahead of the pack in his support of women. It wasn’t till 1975 that you saw a ‘great blooming’ of women writers here, Kidman says, and that was because canny publishers noticed the UN had declared it International Women’s Year and suddenly started accepting more work by women. There were nine poetry collections by women published that year, more than in the entire previous decade.