by Adam Dudding
For some reason it was like that the night I spent with Dad at the London Bar, with the Phil Broadhurst trio crashing its brilliant way through some bebop standard in the corner. I don’t remember much of what we said, but I remember that it was fun, and it was easy, and I didn’t feel my usual need to harangue him.
I remember he asked me, with an intensity which made me feel the answer really mattered to him – that it was perhaps similar to a question he’d once asked himself – whether I was genuinely excited about trying to make a living playing music, or whether it was just something to do for the time being.
I remember we talked about the fact that I’d recently, finally, belatedly, got round to finding a girlfriend, putting to rest his vague fear that the reason I was taking so long was that I was gay, and we talked about whether having a girlfriend was turning out to be a good thing or not.
Then he said something so far outside our usual conversational lines that it stuck in my mind long after the rest of the night faded.
‘I may have fucked up my own,’ he said, ‘but I do still believe in marriage.’
And that’s it – the sum total of what my father ever said to me about the dark cloud that had settled over our family a decade earlier.
Not long after that I went overseas for a few years. Occasionally, much later, I’d try to get him to say more, to tell me about how he’d met Mum, or what it had been like at Landfall, or what went so wrong with his life and marriage and career around the time his father died, or why, really, he’d been like that to Mum, but he’d always let the questions slip away.
I knew I should get him back to a bar, to see if opening a few more bottles of beer would open Bob up again, but somehow I kept putting it off, and 17 years passed, and then one day it was too late.
* Later, Anna and I tried to figure out the etymology of Dad’s rage. Given his disdain for airs and graces, we figured he must have considered the word ‘dessert’ a snobby variant of the more honest, proletarian ‘pudding’, though my recent googling on the subject suggests if that’s the case he had it back to front. In the UK at least, it seems ‘dessert’ is the below-stairs term, and posh people say ‘pudding’.
17. Some tentative theories as to the cause of the midlife decline of Robin Dudding
HE WAS DEPRESSED, of course, and to ask what caused his depression may be pointless, given that the truth probably lies in intractable things like brain chemistry and genetics. That said, here are some speculations on the matter.
Too much gloomy New Zealand literature.
Through the 60s, 70s and 80s, Kevin Ireland tells me, much New Zealand writing was serious and mock-virtuous and gloomy, so joyless and grey you might call it Polish New Zealand Writing. ‘I have a feeling that Bob’s unrestricted diet of these things produced the reaction that you’d expect, which is every now and then he must have felt a kind of despair.’
Too little money.
Though of course, says Kevin, the underlying problem was always financial. Bob would have made Islands forever if he’d had the cash. The Arts Council subsidised the second-rate Landfall yet wouldn’t give him more for his first-class magazine, and there weren’t the big private patrons you get abroad. Bob just needed a dollop of cash and to be left to get on with it.
Too many cigarettes.
And don’t forget, says Kevin, that Bob was slowly and methodically poisoning his entire system with the bloody fags, which all his peers had given up decades earlier. ‘I think he was nicotine-delusional at times.’
The culture had turned to shit, perhaps.
Ian Wedde visited Sealy Road in the 80s and he and Robin had a long walk on Long Bay Beach, and Robin was gloomy and bitter about the culture in which he was trying to keep something going. Value systems had shifted. He saw no hope. He told Ian local writing, publishing and journalism had all gone to shit, and that he felt Islands was no longer esteemed.
The whole country had turned to shit.
It’s worth recalling (this is me, Adam, talking now) that in the early 1980s Robert Muldoon was PM, the Springboks toured and the economy was a shambles. There was optimism when Lange’s Labour won the ’84 election, but then Roger Douglas administered economic chemotherapy and the money-market barbarians and corporate raiders started building their glass towers in the city. What member of the lefty literati wasn’t a bit depressed?
His magazine had become irrelevant.
Magazines have a lifespan, says Ian Wedde, and the literary nationalism that had defined Islands was being overtaken as academia embraced new ways of working – the ‘death of the author’ thing, which said readers made texts, not just the writer, and so on. Robin was mistrustful of the academy and ‘theory’, so as the years passed Islands was starting to miss the boat.
Hang on a minute. Perhaps it hadn’t.
Not so, says C. K. Stead. Wedde’s a terrific poet but he was on the leading edge of all that stuff, so he would say that. Fact is, Islands was relevant and publishing the best writing right to the end. Robin was just too slow and he let it drift away, and watching it happen Stead felt ‘puzzled and exasperated’.
Things just fall apart.
Maybe, says Bill Manhire, there just comes a time when things stop working the way they used to – you get a bit of arthritis in the head as well as the body.
Bulldozers.
The half-wild idylls of Barnes Road and Sealy Road were stands against the spirit-cramping nature of suburbia. So I do wonder, says Bill, what it meant for Robin and Lois to return to Torbay, out on the northern fringe of Auckland, only to watch the bulldozers and motorways reach out and eat the North Shore.
Envy.
And one might get pretty pissed off, says Bill, if you were an editor living a hand-to-mouth existence and you kept noticing there were other people, third-raters who cared about writing and writers far less that you did, who were on comfortable salaries doing hackwork in academia and publishing.
Pain.
His hips hurt a lot. Maybe, as Rachel said at the funeral, that’s why he was cranky. Except the timing’s off: he hit peak nastiness in the mid-80s when his hips weren’t really so bad, and by the time they got so terrible they needed replacing he’d actually cheered up a bit.
Losing his parents.
A few years before he died, Dad told my sister Ruth he’d really tried to get Lois to understand how profoundly upset he was by his father’s death. He’d even broached the subject by asking Lois what the worst thing that had ever happened to her was, and she’d said such-and-such, but to his dismay she hadn’t asked him the same question back. He’d wanted to tell her that the worst thing that had ever happened to him was the death of his father, but she didn’t ask!
When Ruth told me this I felt a flush of familiar teenage anger. This was quintessential Dad – he’d constructed things in such a way that his failure to talk about his darkest thoughts became Mum’s fault. Unbelievable.
He was more direct with other confidants though. He told Greg O’Brien, who was then in his 20s and had recently fallen out badly with his own father, to make peace with him as soon as possible, ‘because if your Dad died you would take this to your grave as a piece of unresolved business’.
When Dad’s mother Winifred died in 1988 he told Jenny Bornholdt he now felt orphaned and terribly depressed, just like he had when Ernest had died. She was impressed at the willingness of a guy of his generation to talk so openly. She asked him if he’d thought about antidepressants.
Feminism.
As I write about Dad’s insane reaction to Mum taking a teaching course I start to wonder if I’ve been underestimating the power of the zeitgeist. Perhaps his treatment of her was less about two individuals and more about a specific, strange moment in the history of sexual politics.
The 1980s was when second-wave feminism became mainstream: you didn’t need to read de Beauvoir or Friedan or Steinem, because there were posters everywhere stating Girls Can Do Anything, featuring cartoons of women holding weld
ing torches and hammers. Middle-aged music teachers were realising they were lesbians and banishing the husband to the garden shed so the lover could move in. One of my favourite high-school teachers had a badge she’d sometimes pin to her jacket, which went:
which I greatly admired because it was righteous and politically bold, but also slightly titillating (it doesn’t take much if you’re a teenage boy).
And yes, Dad was progressive compared to most men of his generation. He published a relatively large number of women, especially in the latter years of Islands.* He truly thought women writers were just as good as the guys. He had quite long hair and his son’s was even longer for a time. He taught his daughters they could be anything they wanted. He was ahead of the wave.
But then the wave broke over his head, and he turned out to be just one of the guys – part of a cohort of confused middle-aged men all over the western world who were freaking out because their wives, who’d committed themselves to housewifery and docility while living in a different era, had come to realise they didn’t have to put up with that sort of shit, especially now the kids had just about left home. Reactions varied, but I’m pretty certain Dad wasn’t the only politically enlightened man who responded to a perceived threat of emasculation by turning into some weird, re-masculinised version of himself – a prick, in other words.
Zeitgeist excuses nothing. You need have no more sympathy for him on this account than you’d have toward a plantation owner inconvenienced by slavery’s abolition. All the same, I think it’s something.
* His final 1972 Landfall had 25% female contributors. Islands 1 of the same year had none, but the figure rose thereafter – Islands 2, 3, 4 and 5 had 4%, 4%, 8% and 19% respectively – and plateaued at around a third of contributors: 27% in Islands 17 (1977); 38% in Islands 26 (1979); 29% in Islands 34 (1984); and 31% in the final edition Islands 38 (1987). In his correspondence he defended his record. To Sue Vaassen in December 1972 he wrote: ‘Why this fiction that I’m an anti-feminist? I love ’em (& try and leave ’em) all, and there’s a lot of Ms in ISLANDS 2&3. Fortunate that you can take that abbreviation in two ways.’ Then again, he told Riemke Ensing in 1974 that he was ‘horrified’ at her plan for an anthology of NZ Women Poets, partly because she’d likely end up with ‘a collection of work of doubtful quality’, and because it would destroy ‘any work by women writers to be accepted as, simply, writers’. In 1977 he wrote to Star columnist Valerie Davis complaining about her inference that male editors ‘consciously or unconsciously have tended to overlook women’s writing’. ‘I’ve been publishing work by people (men & women) for a number of years [. . .] I think without fear or favour’.
18. Return to Damascus
SO, BACK HERE. Me and Dad in his office. Kerosene and tobacco in the air, long skinny galley proofs in front of Dad, which he’s correcting with his red BIC pen, the kind with the yellow top and little red clicker and a clear plastic barrel where you can see the skinny ink-tube inside, and around us papers, books, manuscripts, magazines stacked high like we’re in the archives room in a Terry Gilliam movie.
I’m 15 and I’m gripped by the story we’re proofing, the one Dad will shortly publish, about the 1930s great-grandmother who sells biscuits to save up for a fur coat then loses the coat because her mean husband pawns it and keeps the cash, a story about patriarchy and power and control; and part of the reason I’m gripped is it’s been only a few weeks since Dad went crazy and sabotaged Mum’s attempts to complete a language-teaching course. I can’t believe he can’t see the irony.
That’s how I remember it. It’s vivid. It’s the anecdote I told a friend a couple of years ago, which he reckoned I could almost build a book on. That’s why you’ve already read it in Chapter 2.
It’s not true, though. Since writing the chapter, I’ve checked dates and read letters, and I’ve found the story Dad and I were proofreading and read it again. It’s by Anne Kennedy – ‘Damascus’, the lead story in Islands 37, which was published in 1986, so I’ve got the year right. But Mum didn’t do her ESOL course till 1988, which means Dad’s upending of her study table was years off. If I was even angry with him that day it had to be about something else.
My recollection of the short story itself is mangled too. ‘Damascus’ is set in the 1890s, not the 1930s. The great-grandmother bakes cupcakes not biscuits, and she saves for years not months. Her husband isn’t cruel, just traditional – ‘no wife of mine will work’ – and he doesn’t refuse to buy her a coat; she just realises it’s unaffordable and never asks. There’s not even a pawn shop – I think I must have borrowed that from Roald Dahl’s cheesy adultery-revenge tale ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’ from his kinky short-story collection Kiss Kiss, one of those books I used to read over and over.
In Anne Kennedy’s story, the patriarchal oppression is all internalised – great-grandmother abandons her coat voluntarily after catching sight of her husband in the street and losing her nerve. He never knows there was a coat. It’s a far more clever and nuanced tale than the heavy-handed version I reconstructed over a few decades of retelling a small tale about my wicked father.
Worse: in the Turnbull Library, I find a letter from Dad to Anne where he thanked her again for the story and wrote: ‘I sat the family down this afternoon (rarely do it these days) and read your story to them [. . .] the story was much enjoyed.’
I can’t decide if this improves my own story or ruins it. He liked her story so much he wanted to share it with Mum? And she liked it? And they were getting on well enough that he’d even bother? Is it possible that I actually remember the story because of this cosy family read-through rather than a kerosene-scented proofreading session?
It’s unsettling. If I’ve misremembered this, what else have I got wrong?
Much of what I’ve written so far is supported by documents: by a photo, a birth certificate, a newspaper cutting, a letter, a diary, an email. Where it’s not, I haven’t exactly made stuff up, but I’ve taken a few guesses. I think I remember a tantrum-smashed pudding bowl, but maybe it just bounced on the floor and I’ve Photoshopped in a different memory from a less dramatic crockery incident. In Chapter 16 I had placed Emma the dog’s body under a bed of dahlias, until I discovered a letter where Dad said it was a rose she was fertilising and even specified the cultivar (I’d already corrected that sentence before you read it).
I’m worried too that I might have exaggerated my memories; that I’m trying to squeeze Angela’s Ashes out of a situation that was really more Cider with Rosie. It’s been reassuring, then, to find some things were actually worse than I remember. I was sure the bullying I got because of my long hair had been trivial by the time I reached high school, but I recently bumped into a schoolmate who reminisced about the time some fuckwit in Third-Form drama class grabbed me by the hair and swung me around his head like a Scottish hammer-thrower. I simply don’t remember that.
I had lunch with another school friend, Anton, and told him I was writing a chapter about the 1980s, a time when he was at Sealy Road a lot.
‘Are you going to use the butter thing?’
‘What butter thing?’
‘When I had meals at your place Robin wasn’t talking to Lois, so he’d get other people to. You know – “Anton, could you please ask Lois to pass me the butter?”’
No memory of that either.
So I’ve got some things out of order. I’ve forgotten things. Some stories may be hybrids – this moment at that location with those people, like those picture books where you flick the pages to make a person with dinosaur feet, belly-dancer body and spaceman head. It’s not just me. People I interviewed contradicted each other and themselves, mixed up their years and, just occasionally, may have lied to me.
Yet the constituent parts are still true. The colour of a pen, the smell of a room, the way Dad’s face would turn red when he was angry. And you don’t forget mood either – the sour stomach of a silent, glowering mealtime, the half-defensive embarrassment of bringing a
new friend home, the sober joy of helping your father make books.
After reading the real Anne Kennedy story I consider going back and fixing Chapter 2, but I don’t. I leave it there as a caution to myself, or maybe to my reader, to be wary of a striking irony or tidy symmetry. Anyway, the most important line of Anne’s story is probably the final one, and I remembered that more or less correctly: ‘Greatgrandmother got it all wrong,’ says the narrator. ‘It’s the men who bought the coats.’
You can’t nail things down. Dad was a chauvinist pig and a great supporter of women artists. He truly loved Mum and he really hated her. He was awful. He was wonderful.
My entire teens, I’d have you believe, were overshadowed by the depression or existential crisis or whatever it was that visited my father, which was linked to the demise of his publishing career and a crisis in his marriage. And that’s the truth, just not the whole truth.
In the Turnbull Library, in one small folder of Dad’s 1988–90 correspondence, here is what I found:
– A letter from a poet asking ever so tentatively if Robin would mind terribly if he resubmitted elsewhere the poems Robin has been sitting on for a terribly long time;
– A note from Timaru Public Library, curious about what has happened to the past two years’ issues of Islands;
– A letter from the Literary Fund requesting an audited financial annual report (I can just hear Dad’s sardonic ‘Ha!’);
– An uncashed cheque for $50 from Janet Frame for her Islands subscription, with a note saying keep the change as a donation;
– A letter from Auckland University English lecturer Brian Boyd asking if Robin would think again about allowing the university to support Islands on the condition of ‘your having absolute editorial control as long as you chose to remain editor’.