by Tessa Duder
‘“I think humour is an innovative thing. It enables us to confront sensitive problems and not be too crushed by them. I try to joke about a lot of things. It’s a way of coping.” But it too, she adds, has its limitations.
‘And what about the 1990s? “They look … all right,” she says very tentatively, then laughs.’
During the productive 1980s Margaret’s successes were celebrated by the growing number of children’s writers and illustrators in New Zealand, who saw her as their guru, mentor, champion and friend.
She may have been published mostly in Britain and the United States, but she has always been very much part of the New Zealand writing community, and arguably one of the main reasons for a sudden expansion of New Zealand children’s publishing from about Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain in 1979 onwards. The establishment of the children’s book awards in 1982, and their growth from a modest sponsorship by Government Print to a handsome corporate funding, by AIM toothpaste in 1990 and New Zealand Post in 1997 (even though Margaret’s books were not, through the 1980s, eligible), undoubtedly owes much to her high public profile and leadership.
Her generosity among writers is legendary, from offering the use of the central Christchurch apartment, to attending book awards armed with a heavy bag of shortlisted copies for their authors to sign, paying her own fares to functions around New Zealand where she knew the organisers were good people on tight budgets, to her famous late-night stamina (she is often the one who insists on paying any bill and among the last to leave) at after-awards and conference parties. (‘Adult’ writers have not been neglected, especially at many a Governors Bay party, whether for the New Zealand Society of Authors or unofficial gatherings.)
Margaret’s assessment of this community has always been typically down-to-earth, and aware of its shared problems, such as finding an authentic New Zealand voice and editing for overseas editions. From her earliest years as a picture book writer, she had plenty of experience of editors wanting to diminish or eliminate the subtleties of her New Zealand voice. ‘This certainly is different to the English voice. Vanessa was a wonderful editor in a lot of ways, but she had a supremely English voice and there were times when I felt that she would try and edit out not exactly slang or idiom, but a certain sort of Kiwi accent which I had and which sometimes I wanted, though I wouldn’t argue about it …’ For books being published in New Zealand, but seeking overseas markets, maintaining the integrity of indigenous storytelling was an ongoing worry.
She said, in a candid assessment to an Australian audience in 1985, that ‘… the New Zealand children’s book community is a small one and not particularly self-critical. In a way it is still at a stage where any one person’s triumph is everyone’s triumph … We all tend to know each other — or of each other and my feeling is that Australia is more diversified, more critical and probably more innovative … It is probably enough to say it is a lively, optimistic, rather insecure, but very alert scene, and making unabashed use of a cliché, is establishing its own identity at last and in doing so, is, at least to the present, not uncritical but supportive of its writers …
‘A writer like myself does not always straddle the voice between “small-local” and “big-international” all that easily. On the one hand I want to be part of my writing community. Though an essentially solitary experience, writing draws reinforcement from many places and passes it on too. At one level, at once superficial and important, a writer does not really want to abandon success and this tends to involve overseas publication. Yet the American market in particular is anxious about idioms that are not immediately familiar and local custom which they say their public will not understand or accept. People in Australia and New Zealand reflect with irony and even indignation that, for years, their children have adapted satisfactorily to books from GB and the USA but of course the situation has been they have had to adapt and this does apply in the USA. It is a huge and desirable market and sets its own rules. In my picture book Jam, mention of pikelets and scones and steam pudding (all useful ways of using up jam) was too idiomatic for the American market … Lynley Dodd had trouble with English editors over the mention of the “possum” at the end of The Apple Tree. They felt British children would not recognise a possum. The American publishers worried about the violence of the language … the possum who eats the apples is described as “a mean old rotten old possum”, which I find quite verbally satisfying from a child’s point of view. For my own part, I compromise. Others seem to me to be dictated by the conservatism implicit in power, by a certain humourless subjection to whatever society is choosing to be didactic about at the time and sometimes by lack of faith in the material and the children it is intended for. Alterations in accordance with the demands of these important markets do tend to eliminate the very local elements that teachers and critics in one’s own immediate surroundings are longing to find. Some of them look very sternly at any compromise. Nevertheless, in any sort of bridge-building, there are two banks and one has to adapt one’s bridge to various configurations.’
And yet —‘Will and good intentions alone do not create an indigenous children’s literature. Though the desirability of writing “New Zealand” children’s books has been discussed for over a hundred years, it took more than simply writing set in New Zealand to produce books that felt like New Zealand books and even as late as twelve years ago, people were submitting manuscripts to Oxford New Zealand in which New Zealand children played in the snow at Christmas, so I am not the only person with the fault line, though I think it is vanishing and certainly New Zealand is now as partisan about its own children’s books as anyone could wish.’
She was also well aware of the increased pressures on authors, especially children’s writers, to perform and, slightly ruefully, of the inevitable consequences of creating her own very singular and powerful public persona.
‘It is increasingly expected of writers to stand up and be seen in New Zealand …“In a way, I’m not sure how fair it is for someone to talk about their own books, although I’ve enjoyed hearing other writers. Of course, we all want to be read, but then you experience the paradox of being commercial.” Mahy wants to escape both the commercial side of publication as well as stereotypes surrounding children’s authors. “It used to be that people didn’t take you seriously if you were a children’s writer. That has changed, but now and again it is a bit disconcerting to find that people remember the wig and find that the most interesting thing about you.”’
Some time in the early 1990s she decided on a change of image, as noted by North & South.
‘Even the fact that the chuckling, largish woman you see inside book jackets, usually sporting a dreadfully comic wig, has been replaced by the comparative wraith on the sofa before me has a prosaic explanation.
‘Mahy had got to the point where she had to decide whether to stay uncomfortable, buy new clothes or lose weight. She chose the latter. “With a long, thin face, losing weight isn’t necessarily the most flattering thing you can do and one or two people did say, oh dear, you do look thin but … they were usually people who were quite a lot heavier than I was. Walking up the hill and getting in and out of cars are easier,” she adds. She has been interested to note people’s reactions to her changed appearance. To a writer, everything is interesting.’
By around 1990 it was fairly common knowledge among children’s book people that Margaret had dissuaded colleagues eager to put her name forward for recognition as, at the very least, a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Apart from her strong (some felt well overdue) claims for a high civil honour, there was something deliciously apt about the notion of the storyteller, the wise and wacky word magician, becoming, at the touch of a silver sword, Dame Margaret.
She was, however, perfectly happy to lend her name to a new prize, the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award, instituted in 1991 by the New Zealand Children’s Literature Foundation (later the Children’s Book Foundation of New Zealand, now the Storylines Children’
s Literature Foundation of New Zealand). With Margaret as the first recipient for ‘a distinguished contribution to New Zealand literature for young people’, the award immediately became the country’s most prestigious honour in the field, in subsequent years annually honouring lifetimes of service and distinction in writing, illustration and publishing.
The inaugural awards dinner, held in Auckland and attended by 200 people, was notable for the display, determinedly mounted by the librarians on the organising committee, of nearly every single one of Margaret’s books. As probably the only time anyone has tried to gather her entire output physically in one place, trade and educational books, this display stunned even those familiar with the scope of her work.
Margaret’s speech, entitled ‘Surprising Moments’, was packed with a typically glittering and, at times, highly comic array of literary, political and scientific allusions, beginning with the incongruity of reading ‘not the most profound statement she’d ever read’ about ‘imagination’ penned by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, on the side of a packet of herb tea (‘an adventurous blend of real strawberries and fruity herbs’).
‘Story and fantasy have many functions in our lives, but one of the functions is to mediate between us and naked existence, to nudge us back into a state of astonishment from which we can also easily retreat, as well as providing places to stand, strong places in an overwhelming world. And when, pushed by no matter what sort of force from outside, we fall into the cracks in the structure, we immediately start to compose stories to bridge the crack or fill it in so we can walk out of it safely. Of course, not all the cracks are profound ones. Some we experience as jokes, which brings me back to the quotation on imagination and the tea packet … It is odd to think that possibly more people have read Baum’s thoughts on imagination on tea packets than in his original essay.
‘What others do with such ripe and fruity incongruities I don’t know, but I do know that I make use of them in inward and outward ways, and the outward way is often a story, and often a fantasy. In New York in late January I saw a painted permanent sign that read, “Ears pierced. With pain or without pain — your choice!” For a fraction of a second, mid stride, I thought the message was not about ears being pierced but something much more metaphysical … the power we have to choose pain or to refuse it, the way some stories often give pain romantic status, and allow it to have power over us while other stories allow us, ultimately, to have some sort of power over pain. With these thoughts I climbed up out of the crack, lived through the ambivalent moment, finished my step, took another and another, went on to a lunch appointment and went on beyond that to write a story built around that sign, though it not a children’s story [The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale]. Statements often suggest their own audience. These moments are real enough, but they are fantastic too, and link one into fantasies so vast so profound they seem to be speculations about our own nature and the nature of the world … seem to be myths, seem to be mysteries, seem to be the source within ourselves, which we feed with stories and out of which stories come, directing us towards astonishment, even as we develop some sort of a technique for coping with the perpetual surprise of living in the everyday world.’
Part Five
The Doctor of Letters — 1993 to 2005
The highest civil honour in New Zealand is the Order of New Zealand, instituted in 1987 and modelled on Britain’s Order of Merit. Ordinary membership is limited to 20 living people: when one dies, a new member is appointed. A handful of additional members may be appointed to mark important royal, state or national occasions.
Two writers, already recipients of the CBE, were made additional members during the country’s 1990 sesquicentenary celebrations: poet Allen Curnow and novelist Janet Frame. Three years later Margaret May Mahy, not previously decorated in any way, became the only New Zealand writer ever to be appointed an Ordinary Member of the Order of New Zealand. Other current members include Sir Edmund Hillary, the Maori Queen, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and two former Prime Ministers, David Lange and James Bolger. Others come from the legal profession, architecture, art, medicine, academia, politics and business. Apart from recognising Margaret’s own life and works, the 1993 honour was a direct acknowledgement that a major contribution to the culture of children — their entertainment, their education, their well-being and their place in society — is as worthy an achievement as any other.
It was a good year, 1993. A second high official honour was bestowed, appropriately by her alma mater, the University of Canterbury. Flying in to the graduation ceremony from one of her overseas commitments, Margaret was presented with a citation conferring on her an honorary Doctor of Letters by the head of the English Department, Professor David Gunby, who said that her ‘underlying optimism about the human condition’ and ‘an innate capacity for growth and love’ were ‘always being affirmed in her work’. Margaret, in typical style, told a reporter afterwards that while she was happy to be affirmed by her former university, she felt she had ‘cheated a little bit’ by receiving a degree for which she had not had to sit examinations.
Nineteen ninety-three was also the first year of the now acclaimed Storylines Festival of New Zealand Children’s Writers and Illustrators in Auckland. In the long Easter weekend of the previous year, Joy Cowley (by now the internationally esteemed writer of many hundreds of school readers and a body of fine novels for both adults and children) had hosted the first ever gathering of children’s writers and illustrators at her beachside home in the Marlborough Sounds, with Margaret and Joy honoured by their peers as the undoubted doyennes of the 32-strong group.
From this weekend came an idea, enthusiastically picked up by the Children’s Book Foundation in Auckland, which materialised as the first Storylines Festival in June 1993. Centred for nearly a decade on the Auckland region, it has since spread to include Wellington, Christchurch and other centres, with Margaret making a loyal and (though this is not a word she would use) regal appearance nearly every year, reading and signing her books for lengthy queues of fascinated and patient children. If a single paid director backed by volunteer organisers have been able, by sheer hard work and passion, to nurture this five-day festival into probably the world’s biggest children’s literary festival — in 1993 it drew about 20,000 and now the free family days, writers’ school tours, workshops, seminars and a national literature quiz attract around 50,000 — then it is due in large part to sponsors’ recognition of Margaret and Joy’s leadership of children’s writers and publishing.
Approaching 60, Margaret was now occasionally given to announcing herself as one of the ‘oldest’ writers in New Zealand, and getting ‘older and tireder’ by the year, although the spate of books, travel commitments and work on ongoing projects continued undiminished. In 1989, along with The Great White Man-Eating Shark, there had been three other publications; in 1990, three, including the lovely Seven Chinese Brothers. The following year saw no fewer than five, among them Dangerous Spaces (her first serious novel since Memory four years earlier) and at last, Bubble Trouble, that memorable patter song and favourite performance piece, enjoyed frequently by audiences and now committed to paper. The American edition featured her own illustrations and the British edition those of the highly esteemed Tony Ross. Another novel, Underrunners, appeared in 1992, and then two shorter novels, the jolly gang stories of the Good Fortunes Quartet in 1993 and the comic knockabout ‘pirates and librarians’ tale of The Greatest Show off Earth in 1994.
Interesting and dramatic novellas Dangerous Spaces and Underrunners arguably suffered from coming after the great surge of award-winning novels. For instance, they rate only passing mention in reference book summaries of her work, such as The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English or The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. No writer, even or especially those as prolific as Margaret, can keep on ‘topping’ their work, and a critical plateau, or even some fatigue on the part of booksellers and readers
(if not the writer), was perhaps inevitable.
After more than 10 years with J.M. Dent, the 1991 ghost story Dangerous Spaces was Margaret’s first book with Hamish Hamilton. The imprint page states that this is ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’: her long-time editor Vanessa Hamilton (no connection to the publisher) had become principally Margaret’s agent, working from her home, a converted stable in West Sussex, where she lived with her husband, the writer Noel Simon. Vanessa edited and ‘packaged’ the picture book manuscripts with a chosen illustrator for chosen publishers, and edited and advised on longer manuscripts.
The reasons for the change to Hamish Hamilton were, as often in publishing, convoluted. As the 1993 North & South profile explained, Dent had been taken over by Weidenfield & Nicolson five years earlier, and Vanessa Hamilton was invited to join the new board. ‘After “one year of intense frustration”, she left to set up as an independent literary agent, presenting Margaret with a dilemma: to stay with Dent, where she almost felt like company property, or go with Vanessa with whom she’d had a happy professional relationship for 15 years. “I had been with Dent for almost 20 years but so many of the original people had gone it was almost as if its identity had dissolved. I chose to go with Vanessa.”
‘It was not the wrong choice. Hamilton takes up the tale: “As soon as it was known that I was representing Margaret, I was approached by most of the major groups in the UK. She and I decided to hold an auction for her first post-Dent novel, Dangerous Spaces, and we invited five publishers to bid, including Dent of course. The Penguin group [of which Hamish Hamilton is part] made an outstanding offer for world English language rights, the first time they had done so for a children’s book.”
‘That “outstanding offer” was £30,000 and with it Hamish Hamilton became Mahy’s mainline publisher in both hardback and paperback. “Suddenly,” says Mahy, “I became rich in authorly terms.”’ As North & South reported, ‘Based on royalties of Mahy titles currently in print, one New Zealand publisher estimates her annual income would be about $300,000. That would be about right, she agrees mildly, though it goes up and down and she doesn’t think it would be as much this year. A far cry from 1976 when, still relatively new to the business, she got landed with an income tax bill for $10,000 and had to sell her car. She has an accountant to monitor these matters now.’
