by Adam Dudding
In May 1961 he told Kevin about one of his rare sorties to town for an exhibition opening, at which ‘anyone who was anyone was there’.
‘As I usually get rotten and disgrace myself at any such formal functions, I was very carefully only slowly sipping the watered-down plonk when down the stairs, much bandaged, slid Abungus [Barry] Crump.’
Crump, it turned out, had crashed a truck loaded with dogs in Taupo and ended up in hospital, from where he had only recently made his escape. On a whim he’d bought himself a new car and driven up to Auckland.
Almost everyone, wrote Robin, was overjoyed at Crump’s arrival. Crump ‘managed in a short time to deposit all likely males down at this brand-new car with a few bottles of 4X, and ducked back to entrap most of the eligible females in the lavatory from where emerged all sorts of interesting sounds’.
Crump’s sex life and finances were a source of constant fascination for the Auckland literary set, who’d taken in this rough-as-guts bloke from the backblocks, given him a few tips for polishing up his pub yarns and getting them on paper, then realised they had a bestselling celebrity in their midst. Sightings of the prodigal bushman were passed along the grapevine, such as this letter from Jack Lasenby to Dad from January 1962: ‘Maurice said he saw Crump in Wellington last week. He has the latest in Landrovers and flashy guitars and seems to be picking up a few prestige fucks.’
In a 1965 letter, Dad told Kevin he’d just ‘devoured’ the first novel by Jean Watson, the writer who’d introduced him to Lois. The book, Stand in the Rain, is a lightly fictionalised first-person account of Jean’s early relationship with Crump, at which time Crump was still married and occasionally returning to his wife. In the book Crump becomes ‘Abungus’ (not such a heavy disguise, given that Abungus was what his friends called him anyway) and Jean becomes the narrator ‘Sarah’.
The novel, Dad told Kevin, was ‘very good’, even if it contained an ‘accurate if unflattering portrait of yours truly’.
Now that’s intriguing. I get Stand in the Rain out of the stack section of the library and skim it in search of a fictionalised Dad. Presumably he’ll have a different name, but I figure I’ll still spot him: maybe he’s there as Abungus’s first publisher, or as a chicken-raising schoolteacher. Perhaps Jean has written about the day she introduced Lois and Robin.
But no luck. I read the whole book and can’t spot him.
Then I come across another letter from Wellington, this time from Maurice Gee, sent to Dad in 1958. Amid the updates about mutual friends, Moss said he’d run into Jean Watson, ‘who said you’d turned her out of your home just for committing adultery. She seemed genuinely puzzled.’
Bingo! That’s just like a scene from Stand in the Rain. Sarah and Abungus are asked by a character called Rex Potter to leave his house after he learns they’ve restarted their affair even though Abungus has supposedly returned to his wife, Dell.
So Rex must be Robin. And he seems something of a puritan:
Rex Potter was not at all pleased to see this reviving of a relationship which he considered based on escapism and fantasy. Abungus was being particularly loving, too, and at everything nice he said to me Rex would frown with disapproval.
After tea Abungus said that he was in love with me not Dell and we were off to Wellington and that we ought to go out and tell her. Rex took me aside and said, ‘I think you better leave. It’d be all right if you were here on your own or with Jerry, but under these circumstances I think you better leave.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s nothing personal. You know we’re always pleased to see you on your own, either of you, but both together . . .’
So we went – ‘It’s nothing personal don’t forget,’ Rex called after us.
Rex was doing the right thing by his standards. I admire him now for saying what he thought and not harbouring people who he considered were doing the wrong thing. He was being loyal to Dell. It is always so much easier to keep thoughts like that to yourself. At the time we were both hurt and indignant. Rex had always been a close friend of mine.
It’s an odd little anecdote. Mum doesn’t remember anything resembling it, but perhaps she wasn’t there, or Dad didn’t tell her at the time why their friends had left in a hurry.
His unwelcome high-mindedness caused no serious rift with Crump. Crump had another story in Mate 4, but after that he was getting too big for literary mags. He responded to Dad’s request for him to give Mate a plug from his pedestal of newfound fame like this:
Why the fucking hell do you presume I should acknowledge your scoury-arsed magazine in my immortal works? Mate, according to a recent letter from someone whose opinion you value, should acknowledge my contribution to it – “Your story in “Mate” is the best thing it has come up with to date, and, in itself, justifies the magazine’s existence!” (unquote)
I’ll swap you a review copy of my book for a couple of free “Mates”. (A profit for you of 10/-)
Sorry I can’t let you have any stuff at present. Have just finished second book (Watch Reed’s 1961 publishing list) and am unable to bring myself to even think about any more writing for a while. I’ve run out of bullshit. [. . .]
Still hard up, hunting and hounded by the Police. In & out of jail like a berserk shuttle. The country’s fucked for the want of more literary magazines.
Regs. to Lois & kid(s)
Forever Yours,
Crump.
‘I have nothing but regard and pity for Barry,’ wrote Dad in a letter to Kevin. ‘Like Schulberg’s character* he is a public figure – N.Z. hasn’t had one before and is forever expected to act the part of the swanee-ed deer stalker – bloody awful for him. But he is pretty resilient I think.’
Editing and publishing was the grand project, but to feed his growing horde, Dad taught. As best as I can tell he clashed with headmasters, alienated school inspectors and was loved by his pupils, especially Standards One and Two at Browns Bay School, who in 1965 spent most of a term building a life-sized papier-mâché cow called Strawberry, who was the star exhibit of the East Coast Bays Art and Music Festival. ‘I’m a terrible teacher,’ he told his mother in a letter.
He used the back of some of his classroom notes to take carbon copies of his outgoing Mate correspondence, which is why I know that in February 1964 a boy called Philip hit a girl on the jungle gym and later ‘cried because didn’t want his T. Bear “poked” at Dolls Show’. Philip’s classmates, meanwhile, are noted as variously ‘chatty’, ‘annoying’, and ‘Sent back from swimming for throwing seaweed’.
Through the 1960s Mate ticked along, albeit at a gradually slowing pace: three issues in 1960, two apiece in 1961 and 62; one a year for the next four years. Tony remained assistant editor even after he got a senior job in the design department at TVNZ; on Friday evenings Dad would come into the city and they’d work through the latest submissions in the TVNZ cafeteria till late.
Mate 4, published in February 1960, contained a section devoted to Maori writers, including Hone Tuwhare and Mason Durie. There was excitement in 1963 when poems by Louis Johnson and Peter Hooper were deemed indecent and pulled at the last minute. In a letter to Johnson, Dad explained that ‘the printer sent these two poems to his solicitor who while he admitted not to getting a hard on and to having no feeling of having been corrupted [. . .] told the printers they were not to print them etc etc’. Mate’s circulation peaked at around 1000 copies and with the help of grants from the Literary Fund almost broke even.
In 1964 Dad dared dream of a career in populist publishing when Mate Books published Barry Mitcalfe’s Salvation Jones, a book of humorous Crump-esque yarns about a hard-living Kiwi hard case. Dad borrowed money from his father to print it, became euphoric when the first print run of 3000 (distributed, like Mate, from Sealy Road’s dining table) sold out, but even after selling another 1500 from a second run of 2000, somehow he made no money. A 1965 poetry collection by Peter Bland, My Side of the Story, was a proper disaster, selling 300 copies and
leaving him £250 in the red (almost $10,000 in today’s money).
In other words, Dad’s lifelong inability to make money was firmly established early on. He wasn’t innumerate. It’s just that whenever he made his financial projections he’d make sure contributors and printers were going to get paid and that readers wouldn’t be asked to spend too much, and if that meant there was going to be nothing (or less than nothing) left over to pay himself, he’d go ahead regardless and make a financial loss, then moan about the miseries of poverty.
Tom McWilliams was giving Crump a ride home from the pub once, and they got talking about Robin and money. Tom said, ‘Well, you know Robin’s really been paying to do Mate’, and Crump said, ‘Well, more fool him.’
Crump had, after all, dedicated A Good Keen Man ‘To LSD’ (pounds, shillings and pence), but such straightforward enthusiasm for wealth was unusual among that crowd. Tom thinks that, like a lot of them, Robin ‘believed that money was evil. He wouldn’t have taken a vow of poverty, but subconsciously I think he did. It’s that socialist thing – people with a lot of money are bent; they’re not honest like us.’
Being a starving artist was a competitive sport in the literary set. ‘My wife is convinced,’ Dad wrote to the novelist Noel Hilliard in 1960, ‘that our wolves, for lean and hungry looks, would knock yours for a row of ashcans.’
In a 1965 letter he bragged to Barry Mitcalfe:
The Duddings live as ever. Sample conversation overhead today to show you how the side is being let down.
Neighbours snotty-nosed brat: Rachel why haven’t youse got any carpets in your place?
Rachel: Dad was saying he might be getting some soon.
NSNB: We have.
No copyright required as a germ for best-selling poem.
He saved his most honest complaints for his long-distance confidant Kevin Ireland. ‘Christ I hate this poverty,’ he wrote just after Christmas 1961. ‘Imagine £10 a week for the last 2 1/2 years as teacher’s salary.’
In a letter to Kevin in April 1964, he unleashed the full force of his self-doubt and existential dread:
Dear Kevin,
I don’t know what the hell to say to you. My neglect depresses me so much that I can’t raise the energy to make excuses. This country is just getting too bloody – too enervating – somehow all one’s energies, hopes, wishes, desires are sucked away – I’ve always felt snail-shells emptied of the meat by God-knows-what soft-mouthed sucker are forlorn objects. I’m one [. . .]
Both Lois and [Tony Stones’ wife] Cushla are to borrow a Crumpism in possession of belly-fulls of arms and legs. Woe is us. The house is falling down with dry rot, wet rot, financial rot and creeping paralysis and so life goes on.
Kevin responded by asking Robin if he’d heard of the pill.
A year and a bit later the Dudding finances were in genuine peril. ‘If you want to really feel miserable for me,’ Dad told Kevin, ‘our house mortgage falls due in December of this year – I have no knowledge of how to refinance and find that I owe £1,750 on a house valued at £1800 five years ago’.
In the end he addressed his mortgage problem just like any bohemian offspring of bourgeois parents would: he wrote a letter to his father.
The letters about money between Robin and Ernest Dudding through the 50s and 60s make me wince. It’s obvious Robin hated to ask for help, especially from the man who had always rubbed him up the wrong way, and his requests are an odd mix of obsequiousness and aggression, as if he was inviting his father to prove he was a bastard by not stumping up.
‘I’m not begging for this,’ he wrote, when asking for help with the original Torbay house deposit. ‘In many ways I’d sooner not be any more beholden to you.’ He still took Ernest’s £500 loan.
It was more complicated when, a couple of years later, Ernest underwrote the publication of Salvation Jones and got closely involved in the sales, marketing and accounting, probably as a condition of risking his money. Over months of correspondence between Hastings and Auckland the two men circled each other, clearly trying to find common ground and to work together, yet unable to overcome their history and their natures – thin-skinned defensiveness on Dad’s part, a streak of subtle cruelty on his father’s.
Ernest suggested Dad go about things in a more ‘business-like manner’ by forming a company alongside him and hiring an accountant. Dad said thanks but no thanks.
When Salvation Jones sales tapered off earlier than hoped, Ernest wrote: ‘If you take my advice you will not spend more money on advertisements. I think you are only thrashing a dead horse. Actually, your advertising has been excellent really, better than the book warrants.’
Dad was offended. ‘You write as if Salvation isn’t a success – it is – we’ve sold over 4000 now – which compares with any other book except Crump published this year. With a little more help from shops we would have sold twice as many. Admittedly I won’t make much if anything – but I didn’t aim to unless sales were terrific – this one was for experience and costed to break even. There’ll be more to come this year.’
In mid-1965 he was back, asking for a large loan to help pay debts from the disastrous Bland poetry collection. ‘You – penniless, retired etc etc are my first avenue of escape. I haven’t worked out my other avenues yet although I have been noticed hanging around the offices of a South American Airline.’
I’m not sure whether Ernest said yes to the printer bill loan, but it was only a couple of months later that Dad wrote again, asking for help with the mortgage that was about to default, and Ernest bailed him out. That’s when he wrote the scolding letter advising Dad not to let children draw on the walls.
Ernest lived another 16 years, but the wariness between them was never resolved.
A couple of months before Grandad died in 1981, Dad and his brother Ian were both in Hastings, and Ian watched in amazement as they re-enacted the sort of argument they might have had when Dad was a teenager – a blazing, pointless, row about a coat.
Ernest had bought a cheap coat by mail order from Hamilton and it didn’t fit, so he asked Robin to take it to Hamilton for him on his way home and exchange it. It was a big detour and Robin was short of time, so he refused, and Ernest hit the roof.
‘If you can’t do that for me,’ he yelled, ‘I’m doing nothing for you. You’re not having that chicken I killed for you! You’re not taking any of the fruit out of the garden!’
If he’d asked Ian to do it, Ian would have followed his own childhood script of bending with the breeze. He’d have agreed to exchange the coat then not bothered, or he’d have binned it and bought a new one once he got home.
Robin’s principles (and lack of cash) made such slippery solutions unthinkable. He stalked out in a fury and drove home with no coat, no chicken, no fruit. It was possibly the last conversation father and son ever had.
* Probably Budd Schulberg’s 1941 book What Makes Sammy Run about a screenwriter who rises from the mean streets to the top of Hollywood, selling his soul along the way.
11. Cold south
AT 7 O’CLOCK on a wet, cold morning in late August 1966, an ancient, ramshackle little car rolled off the brand new Wellington car-ferry onto Lyttelton wharf, packed to the roof with luggage, blankets, linen and its six travellers: a couple in their early 30s and their four young daughters.
To the man waiting for them on the wharf as they drove off the Wahine,* they looked like refugees at journey’s end. They’d come a long way and were very tired, but they were cool and quiet in themselves and with their children – no fuss, no impatience, no indulgence. The oldest girl, Rachel, told the man she would be turning eight in December. The youngest, Natasha, looked no older than two.
The family were, the man wrote in his diary that evening, ‘obviously very poor’. The father’s clothes were ‘cheap, & old & worn’. Yet he had ‘a very quiet natural authority, which he is probably unaware of, coming from his inner certainty’.
The man on the wharf was Charles Brasch. As so
meone with a private income, a beneficiary of the Hallenstein clothing fortune, he probably had high sartorial standards, but no doubt the assessment was spot on. Even when he had money to spare for clothes, Dad never seemed too interested in what he wore.
Halfway through the mile-and-a-bit of road tunnel linking Lyttelton to central Christchurch the refugees’ car broke down, but grinding along at 20 miles an hour, they finally made it.
The Duddings had made their unsteady way to the South Island because Brasch had finally found someone to take over the editorship of Landfall. Brasch had edited the magazine unpaid from his hometown of Dunedin and it was printed at the Caxton Press in Christchurch, but in order to convert the editorship to a salaried role Caxton had agreed to wrap it into a broader job of ‘general editor’, which would include some boring commercial work.
Other names had been in the picture – C. K. Stead, Vincent O’Sullivan, Ken Arvidson, Mac Jackson, Tony Kingsbury – but in the end it was Dudding who was able, available and willing to move to Christchurch. The Mate baton, meanwhile, was passed to a startled Tom McWilliams, who edited it with the continued assistance of Tony Stones for a few more years.
Brasch’s diaries show he’d first sized up Dad for taking over Landfall as early as 1960, when Mate was only a few issues old. Aucklander Frank Sargeson knew Dudding pretty well, so Brasch asked him for an assessment. Young Dudding, Sargeson informed him, ‘is a nice fellow but only just not illiterate’.