Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Her university years seem to have remained rather introverted, with little money, hardly any extra-curricular activities and few she came to call friends. ‘When I went to university I didn’t have much idea about the sort of person I was, and only very general ideas about what I liked and what I thought. I was a slow developing person compared to some.’ Children’s novelist Jack Lasenby, later to be one of her key School Journal editors at School Publications, was a fellow student in English and philosophy lectures. His memory of her is hazy, indicating that the boisterous schoolgirl had been temporarily replaced by another, somewhat lonely and withdrawn, persona. But he recalls a friendly, unusually literate student who ‘even then had the whole story thing going, making up stories on the spot especially about the formidable English lecturer Dr Annie Shepherd and icicles forming as she came towards us’.

  Without close friends or immersing herself much in activities on the lively fringes of university life, Margaret spent time regularly visiting her Auckland aunt, her mother’s sister Dorothy. She was the rebel of the family, the disadvantaged (she claimed) middle one of six girls who had done a degree rather against her family’s wishes, then travelled widely at a time when few young women did — and when intelligence in women was not universally valued. Dorothy’s travels took her to Canada, Spain, France and Austria, where she became companion to a well-to-do Viennese girl and learned to speak German. In a 1982 speech, Margaret was to describe her as the free-thinking, pro-Nazi aunt she was fortunate to have, ‘who suffered terribly during the Second World War, not simply because she was investigated by the secret police who observed a photograph of Hitler on her wall, but because she could not believe the accounts she read in the papers’. She was very intelligent, says Margaret, a natural academic, filled with fascinating ideas, particularly politics and philosophy. Aunt and niece enjoyed lively discussions, frequently disagreeing; philosophy, stated Dorothy, was like a blind man in a dark room looking for a drawer that wasn’t there.

  Two factors influenced Margaret’s decision to move to Christchurch for her final year. One was her struggle with French; at Auckland a foreign language was a compulsory BA requirement. She worked hard, and could translate well enough from French to English, but not, mysteriously, from English to French. After a third failure, she felt she knew the lectures almost word for word. To her great relief, she found by chance that the Canterbury college did not require a language. The other factor was her increasing fascination for philosophical ideas, particularly the philosophy of religion, which was offered at Canterbury.

  Moving to Christchurch in 1955, she found her new city made friendlier than Auckland by her Penlington relations, and stage three philosophy at the attractive stone-built Canterbury campus quickly became enthralling. ‘I absolutely loved it there. There were good lecturers, Professor Prior and Mike Shorter, and five students: one Buddhist, two young men who were going into the ministry, and me.’

  Her enthusiasm for philosophy stems from those years, but Margaret thinks her interest in political and ethical ideas began earlier, at home and in secondary school English and history classes: ‘it was always very primitive there, but the whole huge confusion of ideas started to creep in on me in my last years at school, reinforced when we started studying [the English philosopher John] Locke’. Latin had never interested her as a subject, until the day she found a Latin textbook tossed onto the dump in Whakatane. She did not get very far with her intention of studying it, but along with Locke and Sayers, it had been influential in drawing her towards the world of ideas, of the classics. She believes she may have been a different sort of writer had she not discovered philosophy, with its themes of transformation and links to folk tales, myths and legends, when fairly young. ‘Classical philosophy underlines my work,’ she says, ‘with a lot of powerful philosophical ideas unconsciously expressed even in stories for little children. And as you move into older fiction, you get political ideas, ideas about right and wrong expressed much more intricately. If you’ve done philosophy, that certainly underlines them.’

  There was, however, another layer to Margaret’s life in her university years. Secretly she ‘longed for fantasy and truly amazing things. I was not able to draw that amazement directly out of real life, though it was certainly to be found there if only I had known how to look, and in those days very little fantasy for an adult reader seemed to be available.’ She was, though, reading widely: science fiction by John Wyndham, C.S. Lewis, Walter de la Mare, folk tales, horror stories, ghost stories, Henry James and Arthur Machen — and, increasingly, children’s books. After the limited resources of a small town, she found shops like Auckland’s Minerva Books irresistible, often popping down to Queen Street to spend her free time browsing, ‘searching I suppose, for that magical extremity that had been part of my childhood encounters … it was in children’s books that fantasy had a true and acceptable maturity’. She discovered, among much else, the children’s short story collections of English writers Barbara Leonie Pickard and Eleanor Farjeon; the children’s books purchased around this time are among the most loved in her extensive collection.

  Until this time her own compulsive storytelling had progressed through its various preoccupations with jungle children, swashbuckling heroes and horses, sometimes lasting for anything up to a year and moving in recurring cycles. Later she would assess her earliest attempts harshly. ‘When I look with apprehension at my first stories, pencilled words growing very faint now, I am brought low by the singular lack of talent they display. They are, almost without exception, strongly derivative and I am reminded of Tom Lehrer’s song Plagiarize! Had I the vocabulary or the concept when I was seven I would have called it “writing in a tradition”… And yet when my children who have actually owned horses read my early series Jet the Wonder Horse, Son of Jet and so on, and laugh derisively, I feel defensive of these raggy little stories written with such earnest satisfaction doomed through the permanence of the written word to perpetually display incompetence and fall so far short of the ideal form Plato thinks all aspects of existence must attain to. The fact is something personal was involved even in these plagiarisms, something which I detect with consternation, some permanent commitment was made to the story …’

  Her most truly ‘original’ work had been a consistent output of poetry, and various adolescent attempts at novels, including a prophetic one about a woman who wanted to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. But now aged 18 or 19, while formally studying the world’s great writers and philosophers, removed from family life and with no children of her own, she made a conscious, serious decision to develop her talent as a writer of stories for children.

  ‘At the time I was growing up, literature was overwhelmingly realistic. It may have been partly because World War II made magical games, jokes and speculations seem indulgent … realism was also allowing New Zealanders both to recognise and to invent themselves.’

  Her first encounter with ‘magical realism’ was probably Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘which generated a very different sort of amazement from that engendered by Lord of the Rings’.

  ‘I have previously speculated as to why British and European adult literature discarded fantasy for a while, and think that in New Zealand’s case the necessity of defining a day-to-day New Zealand identity was expressed in defining our relatively new and uncertain identity rather than playing any surrealistic games. It was partly a sort of fidelity to fantasy that made me (I conjecture) a writer for children, since it seemed back in the 1950s and 1960s that fantasy had no place in respected adult writing.’

  Fairy tales, folk tales, myth, legend, fantasy — these were the recognised stuff of stories and novels written for children. ‘I began to imitate this particular genre myself, knowing for the first time just what I was doing and who my models were.’ The 19-year-old’s degree of confidence in this decision is remarkable. ‘I had always known I was part of literature, but at the cost, it now seemed, of some severe displacements. I had chosen fantasy of
some kind without being aware that I was choosing anything, and at that time, writing for children was the area in which fantasy attained the easiest acceptance.’

  Towards the end of her university years, however, there had been a disturbing experience which stopped her writing for a while and caused her to reflect on the whole nature of ideas and the notion of ‘originality’. In September 1987 she described what happened in a celebrated essay, Joining the Network, for the British magazine, Signal.

  ‘I was writing stories at this time that seemed to me more original than they would sound if I were to describe the plots, all making heavy use of fairy and folktale elements, but not always in ways I recognised. One such story involved a group of people who were travelling through a wonderful imaginary land on some quest, the exact nature of which I forget. I think they were going to save the world from evil or something like that. They had to climb a savage mountain, and one by one they were disabled until only one was left — the one who, through great suffering, would reach the top and do whatever it was he had to to save the world. About this time a lecturer in English at university, listening to me talking about Arthur Machen, who was certainly not on the syllabus, suggested that I read “this new book by J.R.R. Tolkien”. I had not read The Hobbit and began The Lord of the Rings with some impatient reactions to Bilbo and Frodo and the rest. I was soon possessed, read all three volumes, reread them immediately and then reread them for the third time, disconcerted to find things I had somehow imagined were more or less my own ideas in a story which, through 1956 and 1957, completely absorbed me. I read it aloud to my brother and sisters in the Christmas holidays, but in a way it stopped my writing for a while, for it seemed to use up every idea I had ever had, or at least it brought me to understand that the ideas were not mine, had never been mine, and were not altogether Mr Tolkien’s either, but existed in the network, never exhausted, always capable of revealing themselves in new ways.’

  Many years later, she would assess Mr Tolkien’s achievement with rather less wonderment. As a student, she had been delighted by The Lord of the Rings, ‘whereas reading it now [1995] I feel weariness at this great, creaking vehicle of a tale, with its polarised characters, its lack of irony, wit and humour. The invention of the entire imaginary world, complete with a history extending before and beyond the tale, is not the wonder I once thought it was, but a relatively commonplace act of imagination. As such fantasies have proliferated’— and Tolkien, she thinks, ‘has a lot to answer for’—‘the predictability of the genre has proliferated too; but part of my weariness is because I have become a more precise reader than I was when I was nineteen.’

  Furnished with what she has described as ‘a very ordinary degree’, Margaret finished her years of formal university study at the end of 1955. There was no serious thought of post-graduate study or overseas travel before marriage. It was understood that she must put her degree to some use, and start earning her living. Nursing had been found unsuitable; she had the wrong skills and no inclination for secretarial work; the very thought of teaching, the most popular avenue for female BA graduates, was unappealing. In what was then an orderly, smug and patriarchal society, young women with basic BAs in the mid-fifties simply did not aspire to climbing career ladders in business, and only rarely to entering word-based professions like law or publishing or political bureaucracies. Most female BAs in arts subjects found themselves teaching, or began travelling to get their obligatory Overseas Experience before the expected wedding, and Margaret now says she simply didn’t see travel as an option.

  ‘The idea of the adventurous life still beckoned me. I thought I might become a police woman, was interviewed, and told at the end of the interview that I was not really suitable. I think I had the idea, a vague amorphous idea, that I might progress rather rapidly through the uniformed ranks to become a detective of a sort … someone rather like Lord Peter Wimsey himself, or Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, or perhaps their more current counterpart P.D. James’s detective Adam Dalgleish — acute, capable of picking up on clues that other people missed, ruthless yet sensitive, and filled with sufficient literary strength not only to recognise quotes from Webster and Ben Jonson but also to complete the quotations. I might have been moderately good at the literary quote side of detective work, but I image the guru who conducted my interview was wise when he closed this particular door for me. The adventurous life retreated yet again.

  ‘In desperation I applied for Library School, was accepted and in due course became a librarian.’ It may have seemed like a desperate and possibly even mundane choice at the time, but she must have been one of the better-read 20-year-olds to apply and though occasionally given to sending it up, she was to grow proud of the noble practice of librarianship, and ascribe to it high ideals and status.

  ‘Only a few days ago I saw a picture in which the prim austerity of a female character was emphasised by the fact that she was a librarian. Over the years librarians have been given a repressive image. Time and time again they are shown as humourless women who, being largely sexless, have never escaped into the halcyon work of housekeeping and hanging out napkins. Of course many people are unaware that Casanova was not only sexually prodigious but also progressed to become librarian for Count von Waldstein in Bohemia for 13 years, though admittedly this was towards the end of his career. We have no evidence that he progressed to be an efficient cataloguer. Casanova to one side, I am here to assert that librarians stand dancing and pivoting on the tenuous ridge that separates chaos from order. That dancing librarian makes so much of the world accessible to others.’

  The idea of working with books and bookish people, though, meant another full year of training, another move to yet another major city. After that, she would be qualified to apply for jobs in any library, large or small, in the country.

  Despite the five years of hard and mainly solitary study for twin qualifications to make herself employable, independent and secure, Margaret’s story was about to enter, as fairy tales do, another and more arduous, testing phase: some 15 long years of often lonely and relentless struggle towards financial security and the hard-earned beginnings of full recognition as a writer.

  Part Two

  The Apprentice Writer — 1959 to 1968

  With her 1958 diploma in librarianship added to her degree, Margaret began work as ‘a dancing librarian’ at the Petone Public Library, in the Hutt Valley north of Wellington. Her year in Wellington at Library School had been a much less lonely experience than her university years in Auckland or Christchurch. Now, she found herself enjoying the companionship of the library environment, continuing with her customary, voluminous reading over a huge range of subjects and experimenting with the children’s story form which so intellectually fascinated her.

  Few of her earliest attempts survive, although there is a large, well-used diary for 1960, in the Christchurch City Libraries Margaret Mahy Archive, that includes not only several of the stories that would later become international picture books (‘17 Kings and 42 Elephants’, ‘Pillycock’s Shop’ and ‘Mrs Discobobulous’— no ‘m’ at this stage), but a large number of others in fascinating draft form, showing scraps of ideas and dialogue being worked and reworked. The handwriting, never tidy but legible, gives the impression that her writing hand cannot keep up with the prodigious flow of ideas.

  Some time in early 1961, to help support herself and the child shortly to be born, Margaret ‘sat down and wrote a group of short stories and sent three of them off to School Publications,’ publishers of that unique New Zealand institution, the School Journal. Since its inception in 1907, the Journal had attracted the finest writers to submit stories for the issues that were regularly provided free to New Zealand schools by the Department of Education. Then, as now, writers regarded acceptance as a considerable achievement, no matter how short the story or the poem. The same was true for illustrators: the School Journal featured work by such eminent artists as Mervyn Taylor, Russell Clark and Jill McDonald. And short
ly after Penny was born and after an anxious, protracted wait for a response, Margaret learned that she was to be published in the School Journal. She felt ‘intensely thrilled and vindicated, especially when I realised that I could actually earn money from writing’.

  ‘I remember that I had sent the stories in to School Publications and I hadn’t heard from them. I happened to be in Wellington and I rang up and asked after my stories and they [School Publications] said ring again that afternoon. I rang back and they said that they were going to print The Procession… I felt, in a small way I suppose, as God might have felt on the first day of creation … and it wasn’t much to do with the fact that I would be getting money (though I needed money). It’s not something that you ever forget.’ She was a little surprised at the story they chose. ‘One I wrote for myself and one I wrote not completely for myself. I had a view of the possible market, that is school publications and the use of the story in the school. The story they accepted was the one I had written completely for myself. They turned down the one I had written “for them”. This was the opposite way I thought it would be … Since then, I continue to do both. People have a special feeling about language, even though it’s been so abused. It’s a bit like being a minister or teacher. They feel you are dealing with something so special you should do it for free. So the idea of commercialism in writing is a very sensitive area.’

  In its understanding of the folk tale genre, its structure, language and metaphors (‘a sharp mountain that bites like a tooth at the sky’), the combination of folk tale archetypes with sly, domestic touches (‘They toasted muffins on the Dragon’), the underlying idea of transformation and the general air of originality, The Procession is strange, poetic, dreamlike, even a touch fey — and unmistakably Mahy.