Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Even the most prolific authors can become permanently (and sometimes unfairly) associated in the public consciousness with one book, often the first, but sometimes the ‘take-off’ book or novel adapted for the screen. For Janet Frame, it is probably Owls Do Cry that comes to mind; for Maurice Gee, Plumb; for Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck; for Maurice Shadbolt, Strangers and Journeys; for Fiona Kidman, A Breed of Women; for Sherryl Jordan, Rocco; for William Taylor, Agnes the Sheep; for Paula Boock, Out Walked Mel. With Margaret Mahy, the sheer body of notable titles has made it much more difficult. In Britain, where she is equally or better known as a novelist, Margaret is probably most associated with her two Carnegie winners still in print, The Haunting or The Changeover. In New Zealand, of all the picture books, notwithstanding the claims of The Wind Between the Stars, The Great White Man-Eating Shark or The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate, A Lion in the Meadow is still probably the first that springs most readily to mind.

  Considered within the body of Mahy picture books and stories published during the 1970s, it is also a somewhat unusual story. As Betty Gilderdale points out, ‘for the most part [Mahy’s] characters are adult, like their predecessors in myth and fairy tale. Where she does take a child for a central character it is usually alone or in a close, secure relationship with an adult, not with another child. The child alone is more likely to be sensitive to the world of the imagination, to see things at the edge of vision, and perhaps for this reason needs domestic security, such as that enjoyed by the boy who could run to his mother to tell her he had seen a lion in the meadow.’

  The publishing history of the book is also unusual: it has been twice illustrated by the same illustrator, and the second time given a different ending.

  ‘A Lion in the Meadow is a very simple story. It looks as if it would take five minutes to write. However, it took longer than that, because in the beginning it was really two stories.

  ‘I began by working on a story about two people writing letters to each other on behalf of two other people. After working on this tale for about a week I finished it early one evening, and found I had pushed myself into a particularly excited mood. I wanted to go on writing, as after a few restless minutes I immediately began another story — an extremely short story. It needed very little correcting. I got it right almost at once.

  ‘When I read the two stories a week later I found it was the second one, A Lion in the Meadow, which I liked best. Nevertheless I’m sure I could not have written it if I hadn’t written the other story first. Somehow writing these stories had been a bit like pole vaulting. When people are pole vaulting they need to take a long run before hoisting themselves up in the air. The long run is part of the vault, part of the act. I think writing the first story was like taking the long run, and A Lion in the Meadow was like the leap into the air.

  ‘I don’t want to make what is after all a slight playful story bear the burden of too much interpretation but I think I can say that, from my point of view, A Lion in the Meadow was disguised biography and in a way more complex that I could even have imagined at the time I was so impulsively writing it. Writing is a vain profession and writers, particularly writers who are asked to talk about their books, often think intently about what they have written … however, it also seems to me significant that A Lion in the Meadow concerns a struggle between reality and the power of the imagination. The child in the story successfully does what I had never been able to do, pulls an image from imagination into pragmatic everyday life where it achieves an established reality. The boy in the story fulfils the misplaced attempts and longings of my own childhood, succeeding where I failed. The lion materialises and hides in the broom cupboard. It is real … well, real enough. His mother has to recognise it and change her own behaviour to accommodate it.’

  For Margaret, A Lion in the Meadow and her most complex novel, The Tricksters (1986), are ‘basically about the same thing — which is, someone whose imaginative extremity actually produces an alteration in reality’. As to the mystery of where that archetypal lion came from, a children’s literature gathering in Auckland in 1975 provided probably the first published account of the source of her famous ‘great big black-maned Abyssinian lion’. Twenty-one years and many retellings later Margaret told a dinner audience at Harvard University:

  ‘Sometime after I had become used to the idea that I was actually the author of a book, I was suddenly seized with a great curiosity to know what it would be like to read this story for the first time. It is a curiosity impossible for the writer to satisfy. The story he or she has written has probably been revised and written out again and again, and can never return to the state of being totally unknown. Nevertheless I decided to trick myself, as far as was possible, into reading my own story as if I were a casual reader, picking the book off a library shelf, making an accidental contact, and accepting or rejecting it accordingly. After all, this is the moment to which the story has been directed … the moment when it springs out of a book and becomes the reader’s story.

  ‘I knew just where A Lion in the Meadow was on my bookshelf. I walked past the bookshelf, not looking at the books on it, and then, pretending I was really interested in something else, trailed my fingers over the backs of the books until I found the one I knew so well. I pulled it off the shelf, and carried it in to my bedroom, whistling and glancing to left and right, still pretending to think of other things, and deliberately refusing to glance down at the cover in case I was jolted into a state of familiarity too soon. The moment of truth had come. Opening the book at random, I looked down, quickly and ruthlessly, and read the first words I saw. “The little boy said to his mother, ‘Mother, there is a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow’.”

  ‘Then, overwhelmingly, I remembered something I had not thought about for many years … certainly not at the time when I was writing the story. I remembered myself as a small child, three years old, sitting on my father’s knee and listening to a series of stories he invented evening after evening, all unrecallable now, except for the opening line, which was always the same. “Once upon a time, there was a great big black-maned Abyssinian lion.” I stood transfixed, staring down at the page.

  ‘I remember that beginning, only the beginning, repeated night after night, and it suddenly seemed to me that the lion in my story was the same lion my father had given me all those years ago, and my own story, the one I had written, had been packed into a millionth of an inch … inside its own opening line. I had not been inventing at all. I had been pushed by the energy of the moment into a secret remembering and reconstruction. A big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion and the great big, black-maned Abyssinian lion certainly move to the same beat. So, by now, it seems that the first story I remember hearing was in some way the story of the first book I had ever published. In contemplating an ending, the achievement of an ambition I had entertained since I was seven, I had been returned to a beginning.’

  The original 1969 A Lion in the Meadow, in landscape format, featured strongly symbolic, strongly coloured illustrations by the London-trained and well-established British illustrator Jenny Williams. In 1986 a second version appeared, in a square format, with the new illustrations requested after the loss of the original film in an Austrian printing house. The colour palette used by the artist is softer, the landscape and farmhouse clearly English, or at least northern European, the interiors with their pine furniture and children’s felt tips and toys clearly comfortable middle class. And now there is a younger child, a baby sister in pink baby-gro, who quite clearly is seeing (as the mother still does not) the lion too; a very different, cosier ending replaces one Margaret described as ‘a bit of a stark ending, a bit implacable and enigmatic for children, and it also isn’t quite what I meant. What I meant was that the mother never ever tried to use stories dishonestly again. In trying to simplify it I said something I didn’t quite mean, because of course I don’t mean that the mother never ever made up a story again.’

  ‘A story is
seldom published to universal applause,’ Margaret told the Harvard audience. ‘Over the years A Lion in the Meadow has been criticised for various imperfections … for using the word meadow (which is not part of average New Zealand terminology: a New Zealander would almost certainly say paddock), as being sexist because the mother is the one who is at home peeling the potatoes. But the criticisms I have had most occasion to think about concern the ending, which I have thought about every bit as much as I have ever thought about its beginning, though for different more external reasons.

  ‘As it was originally written, it ends in a ruthless way. The mother, who did not take stories seriously, had patronisingly invented a story about a dragon in a matchbox — a story in which she certainly did not believe — to trick her child into less distracting behaviour. Stories suddenly roared into life around her. The lion, in which she had not believed, suddenly becomes actual, rushes into the kitchen crying, “Hide me! A dragon is after me!” and hides in the broom cupboard. The mother, horrified at the turn events have taken, protests, “But there wasn’t a real dragon. It was just a story I made up.” “It turned out to be true after all,” her child explains to her. “You should have looked in the matchbox first.” The child and the lion then go off together, and the tale ends by saying, “The mother never made up a story again.” Or, once upon a time, the story ended like that. Once upon a time the mother learned that stories have power beyond parental condescension.

  ‘“Do you think the mother really saw the lion?” my first editor asked me curiously. I replied that I did. “But that doesn’t make sense,” she said. “A lion doesn’t suddenly materialise out of nothing. The artist will draw the pictures so that the reader can make up his or her own mind.” I was perfectly happy about that. At that stage in my writing life if she had suggested that the lion be replaced by a pink elephant I might have agreed in the most servile fashion. I was so keen to be published I didn’t have as much integrity back then as I can afford now. But I genuinely liked the ambiguity of the idea, and since I don’t want to be a submissive reader, I can’t afford to be a dictatorial writer, either. And yet I was puzzled. After all, the editor was right, and, even in these days of email and the Internet and three-dimensional imaging, lions don’t materialise out of nothing. Anyone who praises rationality as often as I do has to acknowledge that. All the same, at some level I felt certain that the mother had seen the lion, and been overwhelmed by it …seeing the lion?! The mother never made up a story again, because she had seen the lion, and she kept on seeing it.

  ‘As the story began its public life, I was sometimes reproached, usually quite gently, for telling a story with such a negative conclusion, and the people who expressed dismay were people whose opinions I respected … fellow librarians and editors, people on whose judgement the continuance of the story depended. “I love the story,” a librarian acquaintance once said to me, “but I can’t bear to read the ending.” I began to feel rather guilty because of these judgements. Some 16 years after the story had been published, the publisher proposed a new edition with new illustrations by the original artist, and I was asked to come up with a kinder, more positive ending. I agreed to this with a certain relief, feeling I was being given a chance to correct something that I had not got right the first time. In due course the new edition appeared, and immediately I, along with those who expressed pleasure at the older ending, began to hear from people who were indignant at the change, who felt, in some way, betrayed because they had trusted the story the way it had been told the first time. I think they were right to feel like this, for I also found that, though I had so willingly altered the ending, I did not believe my own alteration. Now I consider A Lion in the Meadow very cautiously, feeling the ruthlessness of the first ending still lurking under the second kinder one, and believing it to be the true ending. Don’t patronise the story, the outer sign of the pattern you are destined to fulfil … don’t use it in the wrong way or it will have its revenge. It might pull itself out of your life and you will never make up a story again. Or it might rush into your kitchen and take over the broom cupboard. Every time you go to that cupboard, planning to sweep the floor, it will look out and roar at you. You will never make up a story again, because now you know you are living eye to eye with story every moment of your everyday life.’

  As early as 1975 the lion had become much more than a favourite character for Margaret:

  ‘In moments of exhilaration I still catch glimpses of it, bounding along golden and beneficent, usually silent. I recognise it in other people’s lions — in C.S. Lewis’s Aslan (though my lion has nothing of the moralist about it) or recently and more important in Russell Hoban’s book The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. The lion has two uses — one is that it builds around itself a sort of area of acceptance and association which enriches reading among other day to day experiences. The other use is one of celebration — when the lion, as it were, takes over and roars or dances in those moments of happiness or vision which we all experience, sometimes most deeply in solitude.

  ‘Everyone knows this feeling and all have their way of visualising what is going on in their heads. For me, as I have said, the lion has taken over and I am seeing the world through lion eyes, not the eyes of Elsa the lioness, or any of her African relations, but the eyes of the big black-maned Abyssinian lion, a sort of personal archetype. The lion stories are usually slight, cheerful, fun stories where difficulties are resolved in unexpected ways. It puzzles me at times that something that I feel with great power in my imagination should produce amiable uninvolved poems and stories, but I think perhaps I haven’t finished with the lion and some day he may really roar.’

  The picture book of the first Mahy quintet that did least well in the English and American markets was, perhaps predictably, the 1966 School Journal horror story of Pillycock’s Shop. Asked a few years later whether she was ever concerned about the question of taste, or suitability of subject matter for young children, Margaret replied: ‘I wrote a story, Pillycock’s Shop, which … has been criticised because it is a horror story. In fact it’s a sort of Faust situation: in order to get something that he thought he wanted, a child gave up something — in this case it was a baby he was looking after — that was really more important, and then had to reclaim it before the sun went down. He went back and found the whole environment changed, like a nightmare. But because he was a child of resource, and also of some courage, he finally did find the baby. It’s a play on words: the baby in the story is called Penny, and he sees a new penny on the table that wasn’t there before. When the shop keeper, Pillycock, tries to divert him from it, he sticks to his request for it, and finally makes the statement which now, looking back, I can see as a statement of good, saying “If you don’t give me back the penny now I’ve asked for it, the sun won’t ever go down”. In the context of this particular story he’s making the statement that right must triumph or the laws of nature will be suspended — which is partly a religious statement, I suppose.

  ‘I read a review of the book recently which said it revealed “real malignancy” and indeed it does, and indeed it was meant to. People seem puzzled by this book, and I think they’re justified in that the picture book presentation seems to tie it in with a younger age group than that for which it was written. And the pictures (by Carol Barker) are rather horrific, although suitable to the story. There is, for example, a metamorphosis where in one picture everything is beautiful, a doll, an owl, and a variety of objects, which in the next are shown fallen into decay, with the doll’s face broken, the owl reduced to a skeleton, and everything broken or destroyed. I’m not surprised, in a way, that the book has not been successful, but I’m always pleased when I meet people — and I do meet some — who really like it.’

  Picture book authors, she also discovered, are not always delighted with an illustrator’s realisation of their characters. The image of the clown in The Princess and the Clown was a disappointment, ‘because they changed the quality of the clown
to such an extent. In the original story he was very much a circus clown, a buffoon, the butt of humour. In the illustrations, and by cutting one or two phrases, they transformed him from the knockabout clown to a harlequin type, who is much more of a romantic figure. They had removed the ridiculous contract of a clown marrying a princess, they had somehow or another made the clown a figure of beauty — which he was — but they had entirely cut out the fact that he achieved this beauty by making other people laugh by making a fool of himself. It is an ambiguous figure, the figure of the clown.’

  The impact of these five books, of finding herself almost overnight a world author with American and British publishers (and soon, others, with editions in translation) cannot be underestimated, but the exhausting daily routine of family life, working and writing continued. There might now be a steady stream of books being beautifully published, energetically promoted and brilliantly reviewed overseas, but Margaret was by necessity a solo working mother first, and a writer and reader second, with a house to get built and a garden to develop.