by Adam Dudding
The literary world could feel ‘very sexist’, especially among the older men, but Kidman saw Robin as ‘being the younger man, who was supporting the emergence of women’s writing’. This wasn’t tokenism – it was about recognising that good stuff could come from anywhere and anyone.
Spotting the good stuff, everyone I speak to agrees, was Robin Dudding’s superpower: he had a semi-mystical knack for sorting the wheat from the chaff.
‘Nobody can pick things like Robin could,’ says Beth Nannestad. ‘Nobody.’
He had ‘terrific insight into what worked and what didn’t’, says Kevin Ireland. That’s why Bob decided so definitively not to be a writer himself, ‘because he could apply that insight to himself as well’. Kevin suspects Dad’s time as a reporter gave him an edge: ‘Bob came in with a shit-detector to start with, but also a ruthless journalist’s ability just to put a pencil through something.’
‘Robin had an eye for good writing,’ says C. K. Stead when I visit him at his Remuera home, where he shows me the framed original of the Peter Siddell drawing Dad commissioned for the cover of Islands 25 then gave to Stead after printing, seeing it was an illustration of Stead’s poem ‘Scoria’. ‘He recognised good from less good, and good from bad.’
There was no pedantic aesthetic manifesto at work, says Bill Manhire. The goal was simply ‘print what’s good’. Which also meant there were no free passes based on reputation or friendship. ‘He turned people down happily if he didn’t think it was good enough. Everybody who was established in New Zealand had the experience of being turned down by Robin Dudding. I did.’
With the total control he exerted over Islands in particular, he could take some editorial risks, such as turning over the entirety of Islands 16 to Wedde’s novel Dick Seddon’s Great Dive (which won the 1977 national book award for fiction), or devoting an entire issue to Frank Sargeson in 1978.
‘That sense of focus, and not knowing what the next issue might do, was pretty exciting for subscribers and readers,’ says Bill.
I’d be lying if I said I’ve made exhaustive efforts to track down someone who can give me a contrary view, but there’s an article that appeared in Auckland’s Metro Magazine in 1984 which did have a stab at playing devil’s advocate.
Islands was just about to relaunch after a three-year hiatus, and Metro writer Robert Mannion headed out to Torbay to meet the man whom someone had pointed out to him as ‘the backbone of the country’s literature for the last 20 years’.
The piece is framed as a spirited discussion about the emperor’s new literature – a jolly joust between the no-bullshit journo and the establishment editor who is complacently presiding over an industry-wide circle-jerk. But reading between the lines you get the impression the editor found some of the journalist’s questions foolish or naïve, and played a dead bat:
Tell Dudding modern short stories are quiet and lack guts and he tells you about the quiet ones that work and the ones that are not quiet.
Tell him there are too many academics in New Zealand writing and he points to the writers who are not academics and the academics who are good.
Tell him about the bad writers, and he will not get drawn at all. He does not talk about good or bad writing, only writing he is fond or not so fond of.
But the article attacks not so much Dudding or his magazines as the entire New Zealand literary scene. Mannion quotes snippets from well-known writers to demonstrate that New Zealand literary writing is incomprehensible, its writers self-satisfied, its supporters snobbish. He is withering about NZ Lit’s cosy circles of mutual congratulation and its unseemly reverence for its heroes, as exemplified by that 1978 Sargeson-themed issue of Islands. ‘No one,’ claims Mannion, ‘should have so much praise heaped upon them.’
Mannion doesn’t explain what’s wrong with lavish praise, beyond a peevish admission that it makes him want to find fault in Sargeson’s work. His specific objections to Sargeson’s writing include his use of the words ‘categorical imperative’ in a story, as if basic vocabulary from Philosophy 101 were the height of pretension.
He concedes that literary magazines ‘exist to nurture new talent rather than sell the work of established names’ and that Islands’ peak circulation of 2000 is more than decent compared with similar magazines abroad, yet he still reckons ‘the marketplace is some sort of judge’, so asks: would Islands’ circulation be less tiny ‘if it was better?’
Even though he sounds like the person who comes out of their first modern art exhibition saying ‘My kid could do that’, Mannion is nibbling at the edges of some serious and legitimate questions: How do you tell what’s good and what’s not? Who is qualified to judge? What Mannion doesn’t seem to realise is that it’s precisely those puzzles that preoccupy the literary insiders he’s scoffing at. Sure, lots of people think Sargeson was terribly important, and he’s one of a few names – Mansfield, Baxter and Frame are some of the others – who have achieved mythic status. But there’s far more disagreement and bitching about worth and status within the literary bubble than there is outside it.
It’s woven through the decades of correspondence I’ve been skimming in the Turnbull Library: Who’s actually good? How do we know? Who am I to say? Have you seen Shadbolt’s godawful new novel?
The most vigorous challenges to Dudding’s supposed editorial discernment came from writers themselves. In August 1962, James K. Baxter wrote to explain why he would no longer be contributing to Mate magazine, which was by that time nine issues old.
He said he was disturbed ‘by what seem to me extraordinary errors in your editorial judgement’. He had discovered that, of late, Mate had rejected a first-rate poem by Erik Schwimmer and a fine poem by Peter Bland. Mate had also returned Baxter’s own ‘Remuera Housewife’ poem, without seeming to realise that it would be a very good complement to the ‘Takapuna Businessman’ poem which had been accepted.
These blunders led Baxter to conclude ‘that you are out of touch with the present development of New Zealand verse, and that your judgement as an editor is deteriorating. I am sorry about this.’ Mate, it would appear, was becoming too ‘established’, and its editor was suffering a ‘hardening of the mental arteries’.
A month later, delayed by ‘sickness and unexpectedly early childbirth’, Dad replied, not quite apologetically. He had no intention, he said, ‘of eating humble pie’, yet the fact was that ‘I am in the position of having less respect for my own judgement than I have for yours [. . .] even if it doesn’t mean that I always do or will agree with you.’
Anyone, he said, is ‘fully entitled to lose faith in an editor if it is thought his or their judgement is consistently wrong [. . .] But still I think the major judgement of luckless editors must be made in the first instance on what is published rather than what is rejected.’
In any case, he wrote, ‘fallibility is not a sign of hardening of arteries – we are not less likely to make a mistake now [than] we were 3 years ago.’
Within the week Baxter replied: ‘I am a cantankerous old bastard. Even before receiving your letter, I had regretted the smart-aleck acrimonious quality of my last one to you: a scoring-of-points rather than a human communication. I apologise for being like that.’
He said he was saving up most of his verse for a new book, but ‘if I have something I want to send to MATE I’ll send it; and if you want it, you’ll take it, and if not, then not; and we will both be at peace, as usual. Your letter has taught me better thinking and better manners. That is one gain.’
He was true to his word. In Dad’s final, bumper, issue of Mate in 1966, the first seven pages were given over to poems by Baxter.
As Bill Manhire recalls it, Robin was very clear in his judgement when something was bad. He was less clear when something was good. His views on prose were more confident when it was realistic than when surrealistic. He wasn’t always sure what the younger poets he encountered from the 1970s onwards were up to, and would sometimes seek a second opinion.
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nbsp; ‘Occasionally,’ says Bill, ‘he would send me something secretively and say, “Here’s something by famous writer X and I want to print it, but there’s something wrong with it. Do you have a sense of that?” And sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.’
It’s something Bill has tried to explain to his creative writing students at Victoria University, that a really good editor has all sorts of responses to a work. They don’t just look at it and say ‘that’s rubbish’ or ‘that’s wonderful’. ‘They approach it from all sides if they’re doing their job properly. So don’t assume that an editor knows better than you. They’re fallible.’
In 2003 Bill enticed Dad out of retirement to edit the annual Best New Zealand Poems online series, selected from works published in collections and literary magazines the previous year.
In a rather lovely introductory essay Dad wrote about the difficulty, the folly, of choosing just 25 poems and calling them the ‘best’. There seemed to be two selection approaches, he wrote: ‘attempt to find worthwhile examples of as wide a range of poetic expression as possible, or plump for the poems that you like best, even if there is the risk of too markedly revealing one’s own taste or lack of taste’.
He took the latter option, and if the fallibility this ensured wasn’t obvious enough, there was always the quote he put at the top of the essay, from someone called Fabricius: ‘Let certainty be tempered with disbelief.’
Another thing keeps coming up in these interviews – Dad’s constant willingness to pay an unreasonable personal cost while pursuing his quixotic goals, or while serving the nation’s literature, or whatever it was he was doing.
He kept making these magazines despite being desperately short of time (especially in the early days when he edited alongside working fulltime and fathering an improbably large family) and desperately short of money (especially in the Islands years when editing became the principal pursuit and our family finances ebbed ever lower) and despite being driven to the brink of panic and despair with every issue.
Mike Beveridge sees it as heroic altruism. ‘He was willing to be supportive of anybody and to sacrifice his own wellbeing to do so. When [poet] Bob Orr and I talk about Robin we always describe him as a hero.’
In Gee’s letter of recommendation for Dad’s doctorate he wrote: ‘Editors don’t become famous. They work quietly, often in difficult circumstances, but the best of them deserve to be recognised as cultural heroes. Robin Dudding is in this class.’
Stead, who also wrote a very nice letter of recomm-endation, tells me that his admiration was often mixed with exasperation. He found it hard to watch as the notorious Dudding slowness morphed into something more pathological, as submissions disappeared into a black hole for months or years and the arrival of the latest Islands slipped ever further out of sync with the date printed on the spine.
‘I was always sympathetic to the fact that he was short of money all the time and struggling along, so in that sense I saw it as heroic. But you can’t go on being heroic in slow motion. Eventually the heroism aspect dies, and what you’re watching is something running out of steam.’
I like the way Patrick Evans puts it during a long phone conversation – me in Auckland, him in Christchurch – partly because Patrick’s version makes me laugh, but also because it most closely matches my own impression that there was a self-defeating urge at the heart of many of Dad’s endeavours.
‘It seemed to me,’ says Patrick, ‘that he was on that borderline between creativity and destructiveness, and all the good things that he did came out of a sea of chaos’. The chaos was evident both at home in Barnes Road, and in the office at the Caxton Press where Landfall was being edited.
When you visited him at Barnes Road, ‘he’d be hacking the weeds down helplessly, and trying to plant the vegetables and get them watered, and there was never enough time to quite do enough watering’. The Caxton office meanwhile was famously messy, filled with box after box after box of correspondence.
‘The boxes were sort of a joke. He’d come in and say, “I’ve been trying to clear the boxes and as a result there are 10 more of the bloody things.”
‘One of the reasons his time and motions were so bad, why he was inefficient, was that so many people would come into his office and he’d never turn them away. You’d go there and there’d be would-be writers and real writers – it was a bit of a salon. But he’d never be looking at his watch and saying, “Oh I’ve only got 10 minutes.” So I don’t think he ever got on top of the job.
‘You’d go in and he’d say, “Oh I’m in the shit. I don’t think I’m going to get this issue out”, and he’d be crashing around looking panicky – and then the issue would come out and it would be terrific. He was a terrific editor.’
‘Robin Dudding is a very important figure in New Zealand writing,’ said Bill Manhire in his 1991 interview with Iain Sharp, ‘and at some stage someone will have to sit down and try to work out just what his presence consists of, apart from the considerable beard.’
Fair enough, but I think it’s important not to underestimate the beard itself. I track down an email address for Richard Herring – half of the comedy duo who took the piss out of Dad for 40 seconds on a BBC TV sketch show a decade and a half ago. What, I ask Herring, was that all about?
Herring remembers the ‘Men of Achievement 1974’ gag fondly. He and his comedy partner Stewart Lee found the book and were amused ‘partly by the 70s fashions, partly because we assumed people had paid to be featured, partly because with the passage of years being a man of achievement in 1974 is a bit of a double-edged sword’. As a recurring gag it didn’t last long, because no one really liked it as much as Herring and Lee did.
To the best of Herring’s recollection, the person they zoomed in on each week was chosen based on an amusing picture or because of their listed hobbies.
‘I would therefore suspect that your father’s beard was the cause of his inclusion.’
10. Lean and hungry
I’M BARELY in the door, still fumbling to get my digital recorder out of my satchel, when the words start tumbling out of Tom McWilliams – a torrent of memories and theories and digressions, interrupted only by his wonderful roaring giggle or by his occasional stammer, which is of the kind that brings you to the balls of your feet, wide-eyed as to where his sentence is going to go next.
Tom is retired, 75ish. I guess he’s been thinking about Robin Dudding, and his intersections with him over 50-odd years, ever since I emailed three days earlier and invited myself to his house in Westmere, Auckland.
I follow Tom into the kitchen, where he’s making tea, or rather, clattering cups and fiddling with the kettle switch and absently swinging a teabag in the air, too caught up in what he’s saying to take the final step of lowering it into a cup.
Tom was at Teachers’ Training College around 1959 when he befriended Tony Stones, who like him was planning to become an art teacher. Tony introduced Tom to his cronies Kevin Ireland and Robin Dudding. Tony, Kevin and Robin were a tight trio – the artist, the poet, the editor. Tony and Kevin were the showmen, the big presences, says Tom. They were the Lennon and McCartney, but Robin was quiet, the one who stood shyly to one side.
Tom notices the teabag dangling from his hand, then looks back up and locks me in his gaze. ‘Robin was George Harrison,’ he says wonderingly, as if slightly surprised by his own analogy.
When the tea’s finally made and we’re sitting at a sunny table in the corner of the sitting room, Tom tries to recall his first impressions of Robin. He didn’t know him terribly well back then; it wasn’t till decades later that they became close while working at the Listener.
‘In the early days with Robin, I thought he might be a bit slow. When I met him with Lois I thought now there’s the brains of the outfit. He talked very little, and when he talked it was very softly. He didn’t try to sell anything.’
Here’s another way of putting it, says Tom, who is not only a Beatles fan but a film buff. Think about
the 50s and 60s. ‘Who were the heroes? Who were the guys you wanted to be like? This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the Western hero – the laconic guy who’s actually going to deliver the goods but he’s not selling anything, and he’s a bit of a mystery man.
‘Isn’t that Robin?’ says Tom. ‘The slightly downcast look’ – he jumps from his chair and adopts a marksman stance – ‘you can almost see him sighting down the barrel. There’s a core in there, but a surface that doesn’t give anything away. Robin was like that.’
I rather like the idea of Dad as The Man with No Name, sweeping into a no-good town, cleaning things up with a few salvos of poems and critical essays, then skipping town without saying goodbye, leaving hearts broken and closed minds prised open. Better, surely, than being George Harrison.
Kevin left Auckland in 1959. The remaining pair, Tony and Robin, were only five years older than Tom, but the gap felt bigger than that to him. They were men. They had wives and mortgages and children. They lived in poverty-stricken bohemia with jam jars for tumblers. They had artistic purpose. They were making a magazine.
All true. But these things were also pretty new to Robin. He’d barely finished being that kid who slept on a park bench and hitch-hiked to Cambridge to visit a girl he fancied.
He was 22 when he married in February 1958. His first magazine, Mate 2, the one he’d co-edited with Dave Walsh and with the cover illustration by Tony, came out in November the same year. My oldest sister Rachel was born the following month (‘definitely a first-night effort’, as Dad over-shared in a letter to his mother announcing the pregnancy). By his 24th birthday he’d trained as a primary school teacher and quit journalism, and a second baby was on the way.
At the end of 1960 the family of four moved into the old two-bedroom house in Torbay they’d bought for £2000, and it wasn’t long before the garden was dug, the first chicken coop was installed and Lois was pregnant again. Books, chooks, tomatoes, kids – apart from the beard, which wouldn’t arrive in earnest until 1973, the defining characteristics of Robin Dudding were all in place. Dad kept the traveller Kevin Ireland encyclopaedically updated on the fate of Mate and the continuing adventures of the Queen’s Ferry crowd, even if the demands of teaching and domestic life, and the remoteness of Torbay, meant his contact with the scene had become intermittent.