by Tessa Duder
‘Schooling is a complicated process. I have the memory of one teacher who had a ruinous effect on me, due to no real fault of either of us. But Ian McLean, through what I like to think was true insight and determination, along with genuine idealism, transformed my school life in ways too varied to detail here. He was the magician who gave me something to live up to. I will never forget the fairy-tale feeling of being recognised at last for what I felt I was — a writer and reader — and I will never forget the magician who, in transforming my circumstances, gave me, perhaps, the energy to further transform myself.’
This, written in her early 60s, was not the first generous public tribute Margaret had made to the young teacher who for three years taught her English and introduced her to, among other things, the worlds of classical music and the Savoy operettas. According to journalist Celia Dunlop, in an important 1991 feature in the Listener, seeing some of her poems had prompted McLean to take a special interest in Margaret’s standard third form English test. Having succeeded in having her placed in the top class, he astutely arranged his lesson sequence so that Margaret could excel and find her social feet in the classroom. It was a ‘tremendous boost’ to the confidence of the physically clumsy girl who had struggled through her early schooling.
Now Margaret found herself being introduced ‘to people like T S Eliot, Steinbeck and writers of the classics’. Dickens she had discovered at primary school (her mother was so horrified by finding her reading a comic version of Oliver Twist that she rushed out and bought her daughter the proper book) but McLean introduced her to Shakespeare and Edith Sitwell, among many others, and to the encouraging notion that there were poets and writers, notably Frank Sargeson, making a living in New Zealand.
Fiction for early teenagers about her own country, however, was scarce. In 1949, when she was 13, Brian Sutton-Smith’s stories began to appear in the School Journal and were published in 1950 as Our Street. These short novels, by an academic who was a world expert on children’s play, were something quite new, and disturbing, with tough, young male characters who ‘treated their parents as enemies’ and were ‘both deceitful and cruel’. According to Betty Gilderdale they created something of a furore. Although they were too didactic in intent to stand as credible fiction, Margaret read them with interest. ‘For the first time perhaps, I had it suggested to me that my own surroundings and classmates were possible subjects for a story. Some people find this a revelation. There are many people who have recorded their excitement at achieving this sort of identification possible. However, I was not one of them. If anything I was bewildered at recognising my own surroundings and companions and felt rather cheated, for as a reader I was committed to “otherness”. I knew all about my life. I didn’t need, I thought, to read about it too.’
But Margaret was sufficiently affected by Sutton-Smith’s work, and suggestions in English classes that New Zealand needed a great New Zealand novel, to begin deliberately to write stories with New Zealand settings. ‘I remember going down to the river and describing exactly what I saw in front of me and working it into a story. All in vain! The description, though no doubt correct enough, brought no conviction. I had a fault line running through me. My inside world did not match the outside one and my imaginative convictions were in terms of a country that existed only in print and images of astonishment …’
For three years, McLean encouraged her writing — he lived almost directly opposite, so she often called in with stories, poems and set assignments for comment — and was often astonished by what he read.
By the fourth form, as a result of McLean’s urging to sing in the chorus of his annual Gilbert and Sullivan productions, she was producing deadly accurate, authentic parodies and satires of W. S. Gilbert’s uniquely rhythmic, comic style. She was fascinated by his ‘verbal jazz … by his tremendous verbal capacity and his ability to put something into rhyme that sounded inevitable, as though that was the way you’d have said it in real life’. (Much the same could be said of her own work, both the prose and poetry.) These school performances activated a lifelong love affair with patter songs and verse of sophisticated technical dexterity demonstrated three decades later with pieces like her famous performance pieces Bubble Trouble and Down the Back of the Chair. Many years later, somebody protested when Margaret claimed that she knew Gilbert’s songs by heart; and yes, she admits, it is not quite true, ‘because I don’t know The Grand Duke or Princess Ida well, but I do most of them extremely well. This is not an exaggerated claim; they always came quite easily to me. I used to irritate my mother, with my ear clapped to the radio series they did of the story of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great partnership.’ In her enthusiasm, she pursued the programme from station to station, ‘a Bay of Plenty listener chasing after such bits and pieces as I could hear in between bursts of static when the series was being broadcast (on 4YA) to listeners in Dunedin’. She badly wanted to learn all those songs by heart, and worked at them very hard. ‘Of course, my more profoundly musical friends laugh at me, unable to keep a touch of patronage out of their laughter, when I confess to such populist musical preconceptions, but in the beginning I felt that, through my power over Gilbert and Sullivan, I had become truly cultured.’
Classical music was another area in which she has acknowledged a debt to McLean. She was thrilled by hearing in class composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams for the first time and deciding, as she wrote many years later, ‘only partly consciously, to improve myself … to become artistic, sensitive and cultured. At the time I had at my disposal a wind-up gramophone and a pile of 78 records … including works by Beethoven, as well as selections of well-known operas, Rigoletto, La Traviata and so on. Winding the handle steadily I listened to these cultural fragments over and over again and certainly grew to enjoy them … Round about this time “long playing” records began to appear and everyone, including members of my family, hastened to acquire “radiograms”— record players capable of coping with this astonishingly new technology. Influenced by Lord Peter’s musical preference [Lord Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy Sayers’ detective novels] I bought records of Bach to which I listened with the self-conscious sense that I was doing the right intellectual thing. However, the day came when I was overwhelmed by a different sort of musical experience. Listening to that music I underwent what I can only describe as transformation. The initial self-consciousness became irrelevant … disappeared. The room faded around me. There was nothing beyond my listening ear and that sound. Something was being stated that could be stated in no other way. My whole feeling about music changed forever … on my own now I work to the music of Albinoni, Purcell, Vivaldi and Hildegard of Bingen … sometimes music is a companion to me — barely heard yet working its way through me and altering me as it does so …’
Her growing confidence in her third, fourth and fifth form years resulted in other kinds of progress. She became a competent tennis player, though this gave her a lasting dislike of competitive and aggressive games, and a better than average swimmer, even winning a school championship. She gained further social acceptance, albeit of an eccentric kind, by not only regularly topping English but also starting a club she remembers now being known as ‘The Apolloni Quarto Decimatineo Psycho Phrenologist Junior Society of Genii whose members would study Tautology, Idiosyncrasy, Hugger Mugger and Procrastination’.
To the suggestion that by the end of her secondary schooling she had acquired an exceptionally wide vocabulary and command of language, naturally rich in metaphor, myth and irony, she laughs and says, ‘Yes, I was rather self-consciously pleased with myself because of that … I suppose it was a talent in the way that another child has for sports or a craft.’ The extraordinary freshness of, especially, simile and metaphor noted by so many critics she puts down to her individual response to the world, and her intention to make every story as good as possible, using ‘what’s going to be the most fertile and interesting ideas that you can’.
Ian McLean remembered Margaret as an ‘unusual girl w
ith a zany sense of humour’, not so much eccentric, or odd, or peculiar, as ‘an individualist who would laugh uproariously at things that no one else would think the slightest bit funny. She didn’t go down altogether well with the establishment. Our high school was a very traditional sort of place. And Margaret was certainly not that.’ He recalled the talkative fourth former setting the staff room abuzz after an important school rugby game during which ‘that Margaret Mahy’ on the sidelines had hurled some unprintable lines at the opposition. ‘I thought it was vastly funny,’ he said, ‘but nobody else did!’
And there was the occasion she capered across the road to announce excitedly that she had been reading Christopher Fry’s play A Phoenix Too Frequent, apparently as a result of studying his better-known The Lady’s Not for Burning in class. ‘That she’d even heard of it amazed me.’ She had, he said, cottoned on pretty early to the notion that literature can be interpreted at different levels, ‘that if you looked beyond the basic level of the storyline, you would find a level with a meaning about some aspect of life which could be relevant today’. Serious books on ideas, on philosophy and science, were yet to be discovered, ‘but of course in a lot of good fiction philosophical notions are implicit’.
Nearing the end of her school days, passing first School Certificate and then University Entrance comfortably, the boisterous student became, in McLean’s words, ‘quieter and a little more conforming … she showed a growth in maturity in what she wrote and did’.
But he has been reluctant in interviews to take any credit for his famous student’s later success. ‘I think she would have done what she’s done whoever had been here,’ though according to Dunlop, he admits that Margaret’s English class enjoyed a memorable and special rapport between teacher and students.
She continued to astonish him, with poems like The Burnt Library, written after a school fire in 1952. With ‘an extraordinary breadth and depth of reading for a 16-year-old’, she catches the style of Alexander Pope, ‘cadences and all … The poem could have been written by Pope except that it mentions certain authors that came after him. There are 19 of these, and she obviously knows a lot from the comments she’s made. She even refers to [E.M.] Forster’s Celestial Omnibus … even more astonishing … she found these things herself.’
The Burnt Library
Here as they came and all too swiftly went,
The hours of happy solitude I spent;
But for a space I left, and now, returned,
I find my place of silent worship burned.
Here Eliot, Auden, Steinbeck, Lewis, James
Have moved the world, but could not move the flames;
And with them Pope whose shrilly-cutting ire
Has met its master — all-devouring fire.
Mark! Dickens crumbled ’neath the flaming thrust,
And Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ is in the dust.
Here Shakespeare held his once imperial sway;
Where is his golden thunder then today?
Where are Othello, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth?
They lie with Shaw in silent ashen death.
And Dante with Defoe and Dekker fell;
No Virgil came to guide him through the Hell;
See how he mingles ashes on the floor
With Homer, Hardy and Sir Thomas More.
And Forster’s here; now I shall never know
Where his Celestial Omnibuses go.
See — Shelley’s brilliant passion is today
All dull and cold and spent in ashes grey …
So shall we be. Wise, foolish, mean and just
Shall sleep together in tomorrow’s dust;
The prince and peasant shall appear as one,
As motes of dust seen in a ray of sun.
In her last year at school, two Mahy poems were published in the school’s magazine. Magic is notable for its prediction of the themes, imagery and freshly minted word play that would later reappear in hundreds of picture books; Ghosts impressively anticipates the philosopher.
Magic
Is there no magic in the world?
Is sun just sunshine, raindrops rain?
Are they not fairy gold and pearls?
Is not the wind a fairy train?
Is all the world of magic gone?
Are there no roadways through the grass,
Which mice draw match-box coaches on,
Along which fairy workmen pass?
Is all the world of magic gone?
Are not the roses fairy homes?
Is not the earth beneath our feet
Alive with goblins, elves and gnomes?
If all the world of magic’s gone,
And witches do not sail the sea
In eggshells halved, with broomstick oars —
This world is not the place for me.
Ghosts
Two ghosts are walking out today,
And one I cannot see;
The ghost of what I was before,
And what I am to be.
The ghost of what I was before
Is still a friend to me:
The other ghost — the one I fear —
Is what I am to be.
If I could draw the veil aside,
Perhaps I then could see
The face of this, the stranger ghost,
The one I am to be.
Yet I am blessed in this, I feel:
The future’s hid from me,
And I must wait and meet the ghost
Of what I am to be.
There are two ghosts abroad today —
And one I cannot see:
The first, a wraith of what I was,
The other is to be.
Freed from school, officially armed with University Entrance in four subjects (English, history, geography and French), Margaret contemplated her future. She hardly bothered telling her parents that she wanted to be a writer: in the early 1950s, middle-class New Zealand girls became teachers, nurses or secretaries before the expected marriage by the national average age of 23. University meant committing money and by now the Mahys, with four younger children to support, were understandably stern about her need to get a job. Margaret was not ready to leave Whakatane but she reacted against the family inevitability of teaching and chose, as something different, nursing.
It proved a short career of less than a year, and ‘forced alarming truths’ on her. Too young, at 16, to be a proper nurse, the nurse aid soon came to recognise that though she enjoyed talking to the patients (‘I saw compassion as quite a desirable thing, and I knew I’d be good at that’), she was also physically slow and clumsy to the point of routinely exasperating the other nurses anxious to get through their routines. ‘Other nurses and nurse-aids would rally round me to help me finish my duties, partly out of kindness and partly out of self-interest, for no one on the morning’s team would leave until everyone was finished.’ Girls who had been behind her at school were much more deft and successful in ward work; her younger sister Patricia later did nursing and ‘was miles better at it than me’. When she finally went to the matron to say that perhaps she’d be better suited to other work, ‘never before or since have I encountered such spontaneous relief in an employer’.
Sometime during this experimental but decisive year, Margaret came across the detective novel Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, set in Oxford. The idealised portrayal of university life affected her profoundly: ‘the whole question of academic honesty and ideals starts to come out, the question of truth, the extent to which the university is a sort of fountain and defender of truth. The ideas discussed in that book were ideas that thrilled me a great deal. I thought I wanted to be associated with all this.’
Some hard talking with her parents followed. There were plenty of teachers but few graduates among the wider family: they regarded university as ‘a bit of a self-indulgence,’ but ultimately agreed to support their bookish eldest daughter during the expected three to four years of study for a BA degree. In February 1953, no
t quite 17, she left the family home in Haig Street, the river and the Pacific coastline to travel north alone, by bus, to New Zealand’s biggest city, to enrol at what was then the Auckland College of the University of New Zealand.
After the neighbourly, supportive friendliness of a small, remote township, Auckland was forbidding and lonely, landladies unpredictable, and the boredom of part-time work in a small coffee factory, putting tops on bottles alongside workmates who never read books, mind-numbing.
Margaret enrolled in English, history, education, French and philosophy. This last was not a particularly well-regarded subject: ‘Auckland wasn’t then a great place to do Philosophy … it was the thing you tended to take when you didn’t know quite what you wanted to do’. Her mind already awash with an extraordinary range of literature, ideas, questions, ideas for stories, even an ongoing novel, she found herself increasingly interested in the subject. The lecturers seemed rather old and not very articulate, and the Aristotelian syllogisms not particularly interesting, but she managed well enough in her first two years. English meant an introduction to Chaucer, Spenser, more Shakespeare, poetry with Allen Curnow, tutorials with eminent author Professor Michael Joseph; she studied Katherine Mansfield, but not very deeply, and does not remember particularly opting for New Zealand writers. Frank Sargeson, however, came to give a talk she remembers vividly, about living as a writer.
She noted ‘a general feeling that when poets and lecturers read their poems aloud a certain degree of drunkenness lent authenticity to the performance. A panel of sober readers somehow felt clerical rather than artistic. There was a certain relish in references to the dissipation of Burns, and rather later the accounts of Dylan Thomas’s excesses carried a curious quality of fulfilment about them. James K. Baxter’s drunkenness was sometimes quoted as if it proved New Zealand poets belonged to the true literary world. But everyone knows by now that there is more to art than being drunk, and drunkenness is no longer the mandatory feature of artistic utterance in the way it used to be.’
