Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  I recall this mother very exactly because I feel I should have made her understand that the library belonged to her just as much as it did to me. Should I have been silent? More insistent? Whatever I should have done I failed to do and she left me there, monarch of all I surveyed, ‘another kind of people’.

  Between the person who knows exactly what the library is there to do, and the person who is unsure of anything about it except that it is full of hard books, there are many people who are well informed but want to be better informed.

  A considerate parent gives children time to choose books — time to browse around and see what is to be seen. Sometimes of course one has to dash in and out, but children choosing books need a little bit of space. I recall one parent, very impatient with a book-loving child, saying over and over again, ‘Take the first one on the shelf … it doesn’t make any difference.’ In fact, it makes a lot of difference and children should be given the chance to choose whenever possible.

  Her own unique humour — ironic, self-mocking, subversive, some-times sharp but always generous and never cruel — was now at her command. By the mid-1970s she was giving the serious, but occasionally comic and always entertaining speeches that, with new successes as a novelist, would take her all over the world in the 1980s.

  A talk, she told an Australian audience in 1977, is not so dissimilar to a story: characters need to be established boldly, so she proceeded to describe herself:

  ‘I am a solo mother aged forty-two, a really entertaining age. My oldest daughter is seventeen and the youngest is twelve. I am a full-time librarian — children’s librarian at the Canterbury Public Library, Christchurch, New Zealand, and just over a week ago at two in the morning I had, for the first time, the experience of washing a young cat in warm soapy water (because it had fallen in a drain, not purely for personal diversion). I once drove a traction engine and I can go to sleep standing up or, very occasionally, walking. I have written twenty-seven or eight books and have been writing for thirty-five years, but I am still capable of making misjudgements in my own favour. I am capable of behaving in a terrible fashion — for instance once recently at an innocent library party I got drunk and ate the flower in somebody’s buttonhole, not pretty behaviour in a children’s librarian of forty-two. I live merely twenty-five to thirty minutes from the centre of Christchurch … but I am divorced from some of the amenities of civilisation having an outside chemical lavatory and being dependent on rainwater for a water supply. I am the custodian of four cats, four hens, a fat despicable dog, a rooster called Tarquin and a guinea pig. Once I had ten pheasants. I think reality is largely an act of the imagination but I am not very clear about who is doing the imagining. I live in a place which was once a volcano and is now a harbour. Someday it will be something else and so shall I. In fact, I am the usual mixture of fairly conforming public elements and singular personal elements. And yet the most important element of all is missing from that description. If I had to describe myself as one thing above all other I would describe myself as being a reader, meaning not just a person who reads, but a person who has, to some extent at least, been made by reading …

  ‘… It may be worth recording that [my father’s] catholic diet of stories, many of them read to me when I was about seven or eight, meant that I could identify with any mortal of any age or sex whose role in life interested me. I could identify with boys, girls, animals, with great white elephant hunters, pirates, cowboys and space men. It is true that when I was ten I was greatly interested in women like Belle Starr, Calamity Jane, Mary Read and Anne Bonney but for many years it seemed that the people with whom I identified most closely were middle-aged men travelling through underground caves, the pockets of their shooting jackets filled with diamonds. It resulted in a great build-up of energy that had to be used up somehow, and opportunities for travelling through underground caves with or without diamonds were very limited in Whakatane when I was a girl.

  ‘Perhaps therefore the desire to belong in this compelling world of discomfort and adventure became too much for me. At any rate from the age of seven onwards I began writing stories.

  ‘The effect of reading on the choices that people make is the subject of much speculation. There are probably degrees of resistance, some cultural, others, possibly innate … I have never found any account of the possibilities of influence or indifference that satisfied me … I know that many decisions I have made in the past have been made in an effort to match up with the challenges and excitements depicted in books. Some of these decisions, decisions about what to do next, have affected me for years. Others are more ephemeral. We live at one end of a road … a wild road in many ways, always on the look out for blood, throwing down rocks on travellers, or dissolving itself, crumpling its edges in slips. People do go over the side and fall sometimes hundreds of feet. I have a friend who escaped such a fall unscathed but every now and then someone is killed. In the winter when there is a heavy frost and the corners of this road are glassy with ice there is always the question of whether or not to take this treacherous road or to go by the easier, longer, less dramatic, less beautiful road through the tunnel. It sometimes seems we submit all such decisions to Allan Quatermain. High winds, frosts, trees down over the road or mysterious fog that makes strangers of familiar corners — all these journeys touched by these elements are journeys through an internal landscape as well as an outer one.

  ‘As I stagger up the library steps on a frosty morning I say, aloud if need be “Well, another triumph for Allan Quatermain. Keep up the good work, Allan!” and similar encouragements. Rider Haggard’s resourceful hero has become an emblem, a heraldic device, and I am not so much addressing him as some part of my imagination which he has come to symbolise — a sort of imaginative energy which can be released and used by locating and invoking the emblem that is its representative …

  ‘Rather than thinking of imagination as the ability to summon into being the vision of things that have no real existence I think of it as the ability to work creatively with reality. It may sometimes choose to entertain itself, sometimes very meaningfully, by invention by producing the sort of sub creation that Tolkien names and describes (he goes on to say that such fantasy produces in us recovery, escape and consolation) but part of its work is to provide us with symbols and analogies that give us some sort of control over an incredibly complex world. (Incidentally Tolkien, for no doubt very sound scholastic reasons, would disagree with my view, thinking imagination simply the power of summoning creative images.) At any rate I want to express an opinion that imagination is not simply a pretty decoration hung around the neck of humanity but a working part of the intellect. Part of our intellectual process in an essential way, promoting survival rather than hindering it. And I would like to speculate that children’s stories, the myths and legends, tales of adventure and love and laughter with which their society presents them (and today this mostly means children’s books) operate with great power, not only establishing a present relationship but actually determining what the adult imagination is going to find acceptable.’

  In the second half of the 1970s the picture books kept coming: four in 1975, two, including one of her best, The Wind Between the Stars, in 1976, three in 1977, one each in 1978 and 1979, and Horrakapotchin!— none in 1980. This was the only year between 1969 and 2004 when there has not been at least one new Mahy book (and sometimes four or more) on the market. By the eve of the new decade, royalties were coming in from some 21 picture books, in English and a number of translations, also from six collections of stories and three junior novels. School Journal stories and poems (more than 60 had been published in over 20 years) would continue to bring in money, though these always involved only one-off payments, no royalties. In addition, income could be generated from school visits, from speeches and very likely from other areas of writing, such as the burgeoning educational market and children’s television, developing strongly at the time. Full-time writing at last seemed possible.

&nbs
p; In another major Australian speech, given in Melbourne in 1978, Margaret talked about the unresolved problem of being a New Zealand writer in a global market, and of that fault line that still ‘divided my interior landscape from my outside one, from my town, from my home … Some component, some correspondence was missing. “Every writer,” says V.S. Naipaul, himself in an ambivalent position, “is, in the long run on his own, but it helps in the most practical way to have a tradition. The English language was mine but the English tradition was not.” I was not altogether in Naipaul’s situation. The English language was mine, and disconcertingly, so was the powerful and beautiful English tradition. But I was not English, and nor were others like me.

  ‘This then is a circular problem. We cannot exist as total New Zealanders until our imaginative focus, our imaginative reality is established and the fault line that separates inner and outer landscapes is bridged, or until the power of our collective vision applies pressure and makes both landscapes move together. We cannot become New Zealanders in our imagination until someone has already become a New Zealander in his or her imagination and said, “Look. This is what there is to see. Listen. This is what there is to hear. That light between rose and lavender colour that falls on the thin soil and rocky outcrops of the hills around Lyttelton harbour once fell on those hills when they were the walls of a volcano, not of a harbour. Come over these hills in the evening and there are places where there are no houses to be seen and such trees as there are have been absorbed back into the shadows. The lush landscape you so often see promoting New Zealand in tourist brochures is never present here, and now in your imagination the world has become ever starker and leaner and you are back in Gondwanaland, the old continent, with the ancient ocean Tethys sighing at the edge of the land. This is something that perhaps you can see. And listen: even the sounds are ranked, each marking its place in time — the bleating sheep and the distant barking dog, the older sound of the bellbird; wind, oldest of all, and the silence that underlies all sounds underlying these. On these hills our eyes and our ears make time travellers of us, particularly if there is a writer to give us the passwords.”

  ‘Fortunately this circle is not a closed circle. Little by little people make break throughs, catch accents, see details and pass on their discoveries about them. No need to copy — once someone has succeeded, successors have a place to stand, and with language for a lever, they can be Archimedes moving the world in some private direction.’

  In this speech Margaret also gave a shrewd and frank assessment, as librarian and writer, of the problems still facing children’s publishers in New Zealand, where mostly older writers, still capable of submitting manuscripts of children playing in snow in Nelson at Christmas, were caught in the same trap as artists who attempted, unconvincingly, to draw Maori or early builders who built their houses facing south, because, ‘in their building imagination, south-facing houses were strongly established and that was what they built, because the reality inside mattered more than the reality outside’.

  She was unusually blunt about the standard of those books that were published ‘by New Zealanders, featuring New Zealand, many of them dreadful enough to justify the common suspicion among New Zealanders of the recent past that a thing produced within the country was bound to be of poor quality’. Though sympathising with local publishers’ difficulties in a small market, she declared that, in her opinion, ‘our local publishers frequently lack precision and inspiration in their judgement, and books are slow selling because they are books of only moderate quality … and their promotion in the book shops is often very casual’. New Zealand – British co-publication was a possible answer; more professional book production was another, as was more government support, especially in the form of equal recognition for picture books in Authors’ Fund payouts. (This fund compensates authors for the borrowing of their books from public libraries; in 2004, picture book writers and illustrators are still disadvantaged.) More awards and grants would also help; it was, she concluded, an altogether uneasy and anxious scene. She ended this talk on a personal and significant note, signalling the coming change in her focus and, possibly, her own career:

  ‘I find myself in an odd but by no means unique situation where my own writing and publishing life is concerned. The stories that I write are published overseas, they are illustrated overseas. I sometimes don’t see the illustrations until the books turn up in my letterbox, so that in a way I am an expatriate writer, even while I live within New Zealand and don’t ever contemplate living anywhere else. Everything that happens with the production of my stories takes place at some point of removal and I think that this is a very strange state of affairs. I have a friend in Christchurch [Gavin Bishop] who has illustrated and written a story which is in due course, I understand, to be produced by Oxford University Press. He is looking forward to joining in the production of this book throughout the whole process. Now I might not want to do that, but I think that one of the things I would love to do is to work with an illustrator on a book. There is no real reason I suppose why I shouldn’t do this, except the usual lack of time, and the commitments that already exist to people overseas.

  ‘Nevertheless, I do feel that I have come to a point where I would write a story which had a New Zealand setting, but that setting of New Zealand would be inside the character, they wouldn’t be “living in New Zealand”, New Zealand would be inside them. Like myself, the characters would have to incorporate the fault lines, the uneven movement of volcanoes becoming harbours that are part of the landscape … It is an enviable position perhaps to be in, having to make a tradition. If I have any ambitions for myself as a writer for children and for other writers in New Zealand, my ambitions would be that we would make it possible for our children to build houses that don’t have to face south.’

  She would not regret leaving full-time library work, much as she had enjoyed it.

  ‘Back then when I really was a librarian at the front desk,’ she wrote in 2003, ‘there were times when someone would come in and ask, say, for a red-covered book about wild horses remembered from a first reading back in 1946. Not always, but on a significant number of occasions, I was able to recognise from such intangible clues the very book they were searching for. Such successes filled me with an enormous pleasure, as if I had truly become, at last, the witch I had once claimed to be. I had found something I was good at. But the prospect of more money moves librarians away from the confrontations of the front desk to other less rewarding puzzles like staff organisation, writing reports and so on — all excellent and necessary work in the contact between order and chaos, but not front-desk work any more. I had left my particular area of excellence behind me. As an administrator I was never as good a librarian as I had been at the front desk, knowing how and where to find that longed-for book. In due course I left the library and became, at last, a full-time writer.’

  Part Four

  The Full-time Novelist — 1980 to 1993

  The transition, in 1980, from five-day-a-week librarian and part-time writer to full-time writer working from the solitude of home, required faith and courage. With this new, hard-earned ‘gift of time’, Margaret sat down to daily (and often nocturnal) hours at the typewriter, ‘delighted with the new space in my head’.

  No longer would her modest and unreliable cars have to negotiate the steep road up and over the Port Hills to the Christchurch library and back twice a day, its driver frequently doing battle (after only a few hours’ sleep) with rain, gusty winds, cloud, smog, ice and, occasionally, snow. Her house was still tiny, and would have an outside loo for some years yet, but it was homely with toys, cover artwork, small statues, china cats, masks, paintings and photographs gathered up in 10 years of increasingly public life, as well as family clutter and ever more books. Progress was being made in the garden, too. Penny, now 20, had been away from home since she was 17; Bridget agreed to spend a year at boarding school so her mother could spend more time writing. Realising that Governors Bay was no
t a great place for teenagers, Margaret allowed both her daughters to get their driving licences at 15, which she described as ‘a very scary thing for a parent. If they were late home — and they often were — I’d worry.’

  The decision to leave the library was a huge turning point. ‘I was 44 when I finally went full time and I had reached a stage in my life where I felt I would stop writing if I didn’t. I was starting to fall asleep over my stories at night. I’d had one or two things rejected and I’d started things and hadn’t finished them or rushed through stories too quickly because of time pressure. I had a lot of ideas but I didn’t seem to be able to do anything with them, so I decided to have a go at being a full time writer. I’d always wanted to, but I had all the anxieties of making a living and financing the mortgage and I wasn’t sure how I would manage. When I finally took the plunge … I swore I’d do anything that was compatible with self-respect, to make money.’ Though she had written three short children’s novels, Clancy’s Cabin (1974), The Bus Under the Leaves (1975) and The Pirate Uncle (1977), she had no conscious intention of immediately embarking upon further long fiction. But two unfinished stories that had ‘grown too long and somehow too complex to think about’ suddenly presented themselves as possible novels.

  Compared with the earlier novellas, the story that became The Haunting was a ‘rather different kettle of fish’ and she found herself ‘rather thrilled with what I was writing. Both this and The Changeover came quite easily, because I’d been thinking unconsciously about them for some time, carrying them around, you know, while doing ordinary things. After I’d finished the first one, it seemed that Tabitha was quite a self-portrait: the talkative girl who wants to write, quite bossy and commanding, managing to work mention of my stories into conversations in an effort to show other people how interesting I was.’ The key role played by the silent, powerful, mysterious older sister Troy in the dramatic dénouement takes most readers by surprise, but Margaret mildly rebuffs any suggestion of deliberate 1970s feminism. ‘I didn’t then and in many ways still don’t have very strong politically feminist intentions. However, being a female I suppose that means a certain set of experiences at my command, and there are times when I quite like making a strong female character.’