by Adam Dudding
Brasch didn’t take Sargeson’s word for it. He subscribed to Mate, struck up a correspondence with Dad, contributed some poems, paid him a few visits. After one visit in 1961 he wrote in his diary that Dudding was ‘a young man quietly sure of himself, without worldly ambition or any gnawing wish to be a writer’, though it seemed there were ‘difficulties of money & time to contend with’. Well spotted.
It might be overdoing the pop psychology to say that in Brasch, 26 years his senior, Dad finally found the supportive father figure he had missed out on by birth. Yet Brasch was his rock throughout the Landfall years.
More facilitator than mentor, he didn’t tell Robin how to edit – he just made it easier for him to do so. He arranged introductions with literary old hands and young talent. He also lent Dad much of the cost of our house in Christchurch, and later wrote off most of the debt.
Dad, for his part, was hugely grateful for Brasch’s support, even as he set about jazzing up a magazine which under Brasch had gained a reputation for prissiness and perfectionism, and even though he suspected Brasch disapproved of much of what he published. He was the new broom, but he still wanted the older man’s approval. And, unlike Dad’s real father, Brasch seemed able to give it wholeheartedly.
Landing the Landfall job was a thrill, of course.
‘[I] have perhaps,’ Dad wrote to Kevin Ireland in shock, ‘joined the establishment.’
Yet despite the kudos, and a salary far higher than he got for teaching, and a well-resourced office complete with secretary, despite finally being paid to be an editor rather than squeezing it around an irrelevant day job, despite the relative spaciousness of Woodspring Cottage in Barnes Road after the crowded little Torbay home, and despite the feeling of security that you’d think would come from knowing a very wealthy patron had your back, Dad made heavy weather of it. He hated the dreary Caxton chores that kept him away from Landfall, and Christchurch in general weighed him down – the cold, the snobbery of the self-defined gentry, the conservatism, the bitchy, gossipy literary scene.
His patented blend of panicky despair and ironic optimism, and his love of complicatedly punctuated subclauses, is showcased as ever in his confessional letters to Kevin Ireland, like this one from September 1970. (The opening apology is, I think, for being indecisive with some poems Kevin has submitted.)
How apologise? And how attempt to explain how I’m flogged to death with work, kids, mortgages, bad debts, overgrown wilderness of half-an-acre, house powdering to dust, drainage boards, councils demanding this connection, that money – don’t use that septic tank, that well’s polluted; how Lf is thrown together desperately late time after time squeezed between the routines of proof-reading, listening to every bastard under the sun who’s got a complaint, sub-editing putrid, nonsensical ‘histories’ by descendants of deckmen from the ‘Charlotte Jane’ or whatever it was called.* Over the Bridle Path we come again and again; how the book-length manuscripts pile up behind me – all the poets (and others) who want books out and who I’m too soft-hearted to say ‘No’ to until I’ve read them, and sat on them and sat on them hoping for a miraculous new world where everybody who wants work out can achieve this thru Dudding’s fleshless hands.
Impossible to explain, so I shan’t attempt to. Five kids and another knocking and I don’t even have time to sing them ‘Kevin Barry’ [. . .]
Woe, woe and more woe. We’re getting old, but we’ll live I think. Spring again here, but the only signs of libido around is the grass growing.
Such wailing – and yet this was also the era of the backyard golf with hockey sticks and craft nights, of Mum up a tree reading her book, of rambunctious family fun. I don’t think he was miserable all the time. Also, that sixth kid ‘knocking’ is me – the first Dudding son.
The day I was born, Dad planted a weeping gum in my name in the back garden. A month later there was a ‘bottle party’ at Barnes Road, for which he made a hand-printed tri-fold invitation featuring old-fashioned illustrations of a double bed† and a giant stork towing a baby in a chariot.
Once unfolded the invitation reads: ‘AFTER 13 YEARS OF TRYING; AFTER PRODUCING FIVE AMAZONIAN DAUGHTERS (Rachel, Ruth, Melissa, Natasha, Anna) WE’VE FINALLY HAD (ON BLACK FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13) A SON—ADAM (probably).’ A footnote reads: ‘Men, a bottle will help (the Family Benefit is shot): Ladies, a chastity belt, or similar.’
I have a copy of the original invitation, but there’s another in Brasch’s papers at the Hocken Library. On Brasch’s, Dad has scribbled an apologetic note: ‘Tasteless: But just in case you’re in town. Regards, Robin.’
I don’t know if Brasch made it, but I’ve still got two of my gifts from that party, during which I reportedly mainly slept. Mike Beveridge, the rugby-playing literature scholar and Landfall contributor, turned up with a children’s size leather rugby ball, and the artist Ralph Hotere gave an A4 ink sketch of a semi-reclining naked woman – ‘an Eve for Adam’, he said.
Beveridge’s rugby ball is in a box somewhere, squashed flat and wrinkled like a giant dried fig. The Hotere sketch had an even harder life – it spent a couple of decades sellotaped to the walls of Dad’s various offices at the mercy of sunlight and fly-shit, another 10 years rolled in a cardboard tube, and then made a long and expensive visit to the paper conservators at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. They told me they’d repaired a few Hotere sketches of similar vintage, also given as birthday or christening gifts, but none had been as badly mistreated as mine. It’s now in a frame in my sitting room, though it’s so faded you can barely see what Eve’s up to.
The most familiar memento from this part of my life, though, is a black-and-white photo Dad took of Mum breastfeeding me. I’m about four months old and unbelievably fat with heavily dimpled cellulite thighs. Mum and I are both naked, outside in bright sun, though the baby on her lap preserves Mum’s modesty a little. Dad liked the picture so much he got it blown up and mounted on a piece of board two foot high. Ever since I could remember, this giant photo of naked Madonna and child sat on our mantelpiece, occasionally overlain by more conventional school photos and holiday snaps.
Some visitors thought it odd, but I never found it embarrassing, partly because for many years I didn’t realise what it was showing. Like one of those optical illusions where it’s either a candlestick or two faces in profile, I always misread the image. To me the arrangement of shoulders and breasts and baby looked like a slightly deformed rhinoceros roaring into the sky.
Dad’s five-and-a-half-year adventure within the establishment came to an end in April 1972, when Caxton’s managing director, Dennis ‘Dinny’ Donovan, suddenly fired him.
Before I’d even looked at the many letters in the Turnbull collections concerning the matter, I discovered that faint, unreliable rumours about the Caxton Dismissal Mystery were still doing the rounds of NZ Lit more than 40 years on.
‘Apparently . . .’ said someone who was about 10 in 1972 and who must have heard it third-hand at best, Robin had an affair with his boss’s wife.
I wasn’t in the country at the time, said someone else, ‘so all I heard was gossip – the usual things, from a clash of personalities, to sex. I know the gossip but I’m not willing to repeat it. It’s all hearsay.’
‘I heard there were complaints from Caxton that he was slow in delivery,’ said one writer. And wasn’t there something about a Katherine Mansfield story making an edition of Landfall late?
‘I just bought the line everybody was offering,’ said another. ‘That Donovan had behaved like a horrible man and Robin had been forced to walk away from the whole thing.’
By now I was learning that Dad did have an affair (or something resembling one) while he was employed by Caxton – though it certainly wasn’t with Donovan’s wife. Yet the dalliance had ended almost half a decade earlier and I could see little evidence that it had any direct connection to the sudden sacking.
The truth, then?
Donovan was a wealthy businessman, and by virtue of let
ting Caxton subsidise low- or no-profit literary publications, he was a patron of the arts and proud to be. But he was also a loudmouth and a bully, a big drinker who liked to rant and swear at his employees, especially after a session at the pub. Maybe he reminded Robin of his father, only worse because of the drinking.
Robin was a perfectionist, a neurotic. He was too slow, too careful, unrealistic about time and money and deadlines, always busting the page limits and budgets set by Donovan. He was much more interested in Landfall than the tedious work of the general editor. He was unaffected and honest. He had a natural affinity with writers and artists. He was quietly confident of his judgement. He wasn’t a drinker – especially after he developed a stress-related stomach ulcer. He chafed against authority in general and tyrants in particular.
None of these things would have been to Donovan’s liking.
The tension between the drunken bully and the thin-skinned neurotic mounted. There were polite professional disagreements but also flare-ups over far pettier things: the time Donovan threatened to fire Robin if he moved a heater in the office; the time Donovan went berserk after Robin parked in the wrong car park; the time Robin made mention of Donovan’s ex-friend and sworn enemy Denis Glover during an address to the Library Association and Donovan spent the following week abusing him for having done so.
In early 1972 Landfall was once again dangerously close to missing its deadline, in part because space was being held for a particularly exciting piece of work – a complete, unpublished Katherine Mansfield short story from 1915, recently discovered by a Turnbull Library researcher.
Fed up, possibly a bit drunk, Donovan called Robin into his office to yell at him for a bit, but Robin grew tired of the abuse and walked out. The next day Donovan hauled him back in for some more, but this time he was really angry. ‘You set me up,’ he ranted. ‘I’m managing director but you think you’re superior to me, telling me what to do by walking out . . .’ And he fired him.
For the following six weeks the pair wheeled about in a weird half-embrace, half-playground scrap, all conducted through letters.
At first both seemed interested in reversing the impetuous dismissal, but only if the other man would admit it was entirely his fault. Fat chance.
Then they discussed compromises – perhaps Robin could buy the Landfall name off Caxton or edit the magazine off-site on contract – but they couldn’t agree on how to talk about these plans: Donovan wanted to discuss them over a few drinks and Robin didn’t, so they never met.
Letters went back and forth. Donovan accused Robin of stealing Landfall files; Robin said he’d simply removed some personal correspondence because he feared Donovan was such a brute he’d misuse the sensitive material therein (such as a letter from Writer A slagging off his friend, Writer B, behind his back).
Donovan accused Robin of sabotaging Landfall by returning contributors’ submissions after he was fired; Robin said that editing is a personal relationship not a corporate one so it would have been unethical not to give writers the opportunity to decide whether to resubmit once they knew who the new editor was, and anyway the real saboteur was you Mr Donovan when you cruelly fired me with one hour’s notice.
Many of the Caxton staff were loyal to Robin. There were discussions about a possible walkout in his support, and he received regular covert updates about what Donovan was doing and saying.
Dad seemed as mystified as anyone as to the underlying reasons for his dismissal. His preferred theories, as laid out in letters to friends, were that the whisky had finally driven Donovan insane or that Caxton’s continuing financial struggles had reached a point where shedding staff – he wasn’t the only person fired that year – was worth the trouble it would cause.
Eventually the pair stopped communicating altogether. Donovan reneged on a promise to pay out Dad’s superannuation in full. The final Dudding Landfall, edition 101 featuring the never-before-seen Mansfield story, was printed – late, of course, though Dad insisted if it weren’t for his dismissal the issue would have made its deadline.
Caxton employee Leo Bensemann picked up the pieces and produced a rather ragged June issue of Landfall, while Robin worked in an utter frenzy on his next project: launching a bigger, better, properly independent magazine that he would edit and publish alone. Brasch instantly abandoned Landfall (‘it’s nothing – less than a ghost – without you,’ he told Dad) and threw his weight, both moral and financial, behind the new Dudding project.
Dad wrote to all his writer friends and asked them to find something special for the launch issue. All suggestions for a name for his new mag were welcome.
In mid-September Robin spent a pleasant day in Port Chalmers collecting mussels and cockles with Ralph Hotere, and he left with a nice new Hotere painting under his arm. He also visited the printer John McIndoe: he wanted to be sure his new baby was looking good as she came off the press.
Hotere had designed the cover. The central image was a jumble of letters built from repeated impressions of rubber stamps of the words ONE and ISLANDS. The inking was uneven and the stamps overlapped and rotated to form random words and non-words: NO, ONFONF, NEON, ONI, NONE, ONIONI.
Inside there was poetry by Allen Curnow, Vincent O’Sullivan, Russell Haley and Bill Manhire and a prose poem ‘elegy’ by James K. Baxter. There were stories by Ian Wedde and Michael Henderson, essays by Charles Brasch and Denis Glover, reviews by C. K. Stead, James Bertram and Alan Roddick. It was a star-studded contents list, ‘an overwhelming vote of confidence in Robin Dudding’s editorship’, as the Christchurch Press reviewer put it. (As far as I can tell, no reviewer thought to comment on the absence of women contributors.)
After the launch, Ralph sent Dad a letter of congratulations and confession. He thought he’d better let him know ‘before some bright Maori academic bastard’ noticed it first, that there was a dirty joke lurking in the cover’s apparently random typography: ‘ONIONI’ is Maori for the verb to wriggle the hips indecently, to copulate. It was, ‘of course completely unintended!’ wrote Ralph, lying through his teeth.
Brasch was supporting the magazine, but to feed the family Dad once again signed up for relief teaching, as well as labouring in people’s gardens for $1.50 an hour and looking for freelance editing.
He also won occasional cash prizes by showing his chickens at agricultural fairs, though the winnings didn’t stretch terribly far: in 1972 he entered six chooks in the Oamaru Show, spending $2.50 on entry fees, $1.60 to send them by train and 32¢ on Vaseline to get their legs and combs shining. Returns: 15¢ for best Wyandotte cockerel and 9¢ for the second-best Sussex hen. ‘Hooray, hooray,’ as he put it in a letter to his parents.
He was also earning rent from Sealy Road, but that didn’t go terribly well either. One early tenant, a rather strange lawnmower man called Mr Dudley, fell half a year behind with the rent before Dad finally summoned the nerve to evict him from afar. For years afterwards they exchanged letters – Dad would write demanding Mr Dudley pay the $89.40 he owed, and Mr Dudley would reply with an envelope containing a couple of coins and a barely legible cover note: ‘Mr Dudding. $87.40 to go not $89.40. enclosed is $0.40. leaves $87.’ (About 15 years later, Dad and I were driving somewhere in Torbay when he pointed to a hunched figure of a man creeping along a footpath carrying a small petrol lawnmower on his back. ‘That guy owes me $100,’ he said.)
He was racing to get the next Islands out. Life was hectic. And yet, he said in a letter to writer Kevin Cunningham, just being free of the paranoiac, smog-bound atmosphere of Caxton meant he had ‘a little more time to talk, relax, jump with the kids – go to [the hippy musical] Hair, look at sandhills, stroke my geese, wife etc . . .’
He bought a puppy called Emma. He started growing a beard. Even his moaning to Kevin was more upbeat than it had been in years:
I was a fool of course to think I could toss off ISLANDS in between jobs, books, fucks . . . what have you. It’s proving a very big job but I’m very determined to keep it going [
. . .] For the present we stay in Chch with chooks, goose, dog, kids, half-acre and tumble-down Woodspring Cottage but eventually I hope we can move back to warmth and humidity and a place to grow tree tomatoes, oranges, bananas etc & pawpaw & peppers of course . . .
Less than a year later, Brasch died of cancer aged 63. Dad was bereft. He’d been due in Dunedin the following week and had kidded himself that Charles, who’d been ill for many months, was on the mend, that he would see him one last time.
‘I’m faced with a huge loss,’ he wrote to Kevin. ‘It’s not a very good admission but as I work on Islands I have this recurring thought – Charles isn’t here to see it now.’
Islands was humming along, sustained by good reviews, growing circulation, Literary Fund grants and Brasch’s backing, which continued for a while after his death via a bequest. But with Brasch gone, reasons for staying in the South Island were running out. By the end of 1973 the decision was made: we were returning to Auckland.
Dad wound up his gardening and teaching jobs. Sold Barnes Road to the council for development as pensioner flats (the death-knell for my weeping gum, which was now 25 feet high). Dropped the geese off at a farm in Port Chalmers. Bought a near-new baby-blue Ford Transit and took me along to pick it up from the garage where workmen had installed a gas cooker and a fold-down bed. Squeezed in a family of eight and a dog and our worldly goods and started driving north, visiting everywhere on the way.
Brasch’s mortgage on our Christchurch house was written off when he died, and the sale of the Christchurch house in a buoyant property market left enough change that Dad could sink a few thousand dollars into Islands and still have plenty of change for the van and then some. For the first time ever, the family finances were in surplus.
In the face of so few troubles, Dad needed a creative way to make his life difficult again. He packed a typewriter and his files into the Transit and attempted to edit Islands 7 on the road, over the six summery weeks of our migration back to Auckland.