Margaret Mahy
Page 27
She has written movingly of their births. ‘I saw the oldest child struggle out of her mother and into the outer world. I missed the actual moment of the second girl’s emergence because she was born underwater in a small plastic swimming — sorry, birthing — pool that had dominated her family’s sitting room for several weeks. I was in London to see the third child arrive, but, finally, in spite of his mother’s [Bridget’s] extended heroism, he was delivered by instruments and only his father was allowed to witness his birth … I have also felt helpless agony of behalf of my two daughters. It is so much harder for humans to give birth than it is for cats (part of the price, I understand, of evolving to walk upright, an evolutionary exercise which freed the hands for creative tool-using, but incorporated an inhibiting curve in the birth canal). One longs to intercede … to take on any weariness and anguish for a short while at least, and to give the struggling mother a break. But, no matter how many concerned people may cluster around the bed, the actual birth belongs with inescapable intimacy to two people only — the bearer and the one being born.’
She believes she is being reinterpreted and changed by the experience of being a grandparent, that it is not a one-way traffic. ‘Literature tends to dwell on the imaginative development a good grandparent can bring about in a children’s life, but there may be less emphasis on the possibilities for a reciprocal inner growth and alteration in the life of an attentive grandparent. The axioms of our own childhood become part of the relativity of age.’ In the end, ‘the ‘remarkable thing about connection with grandchildren is living, moment to moment with what they are in themselves … [yet] I am part of a close family, but I am also outside the magical necessities that rule the most intimate circle of that family. There are times when I cannot comfort, no matter how passionately I long to do so … time when only a parent will do, because the parent has power beyond reason or will. I am not complaining about this, because of course there is freedom in being outside that intimate circle, and solitude has its own blessings.’
Despite the extensive time given to her family, Margaret’s generous public life continued on through the 1990s. Asked to preside at the official opening of the first Christchurch Books and Beyond Festival, she sat down and concocted new words for Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I am the very model of a modern major general’ from The Pirates of Penzance, then delivered it flawlessly at breakneck speed to an enchanted audience in the Great Hall of the Christchurch Arts Centre. The only rough surviving manuscript of this spectacular vers d’occasion includes some unfinished fragments of several more verses, indicating that she could have continued in this vein for some time.
For the Opening of Books and Beyond
I have written many poems but I think this is the best of all,
A dithyrambic ditty to extol our city festival;
A dithyramb, for those who lack a vocab academical,
Is a Dionysian choric hymn, poetic not polemical.
And though some philistines may cry ‘No! Bugger all! It’s doggerel,’
All connoisseurs of poetry will gape and be a-goggeral.
Free verse is never quite as free as something with a rhyme to it,
If you’re the sort of poet who’ll devote a lot of time to it.
As form competes with chaos the explosions can be various,
Revealing Art as heavenly, hypnotic or hilarious.
Wake, wake then, Art! Bestow on us your blessings bright and aureate,
According to instructions from the local poet laureate.
As wintertime approaches other cities start to aestivate,
But in the Garden City we wake up and start to festivate.
The season which in other towns breeds angst and deep anxiety,
Fills everyone in Christchurch with a longing for variety.
Ignoring indications of hibernal frigidity,
The city opens up to art with cordial avidity,
Theatres, squares and galleries display our great diversity,
A balcony or bus stop can become a university;
A festival’s explosive — there are some who think it facile,
But it’s frolicking — it’s rollicking, aesthetic razzle-dazzle.
And if there’s any one thing over which the town can glory at
It’s being told to ‘Go it!’ by a local poet laureate.
We go lurching, ever searching for the moment that translates us all,
The word, the note, the image that so strangely recreates us all …
We look for dissolution, the true instant of dumbfoundedness
When art conspires to face us and reveal its true unboundedness.
We flow into the universe and cosmic magic fills us all,
Our petty agitations cease as contemplation stills us all;
Though I’m the sort of laureate who tends to make a joke of it,
We’ve artists who exemplify the glory, pain and yoke of it.
It’s like a wand transfiguring the long, the short and tall of it,
It’s like a firework going off, illuminating all of us,
A truly thrilling flare-up is the underlying quest of all,
Go out! Rise up like rockets! And enjoy the city Festival.
Another occasion, in Whakatane, provided a rare public glimpse into a quicksilver mind, delighting the audience of 200 but greatly discomforting the three people sharing the stage with her. Unwisely agreeing to join Whakatane’s favourite daughter and by turn improvise a story on the spot, author David Hill, illustrator Martin Baynton and the present writer soon had their worst fears confirmed: from Margaret, remembers a trembling David, who was sitting alongside and had to follow her, came a flood of ‘astonishing and baroquely inventive ideas like one of those time-lapse sequences of flowers unfolding’.
We did not know, of course, of the days spent with Belinda Rotman in the Ohariu Valley talking only in rhyming couplets, but after her first two or three turns this is what happened, in spectacular, chuckling style. Not only wicked, off-the-wall twists to the story, but in verse. David was seen to turn white, rise to his feet and, to avoid the follow-on, treacherously move his chair to the other side of her, to the audience’s gratification. The present writer was left with the task of picking up from verse worthy of Pope crossed with Ogden Nash, and by now reduced to nearly mute terror, remembers little of the rest, only vast gratitude when the MC, local librarian Nan Pemberth, stepped in and put us out of our misery. Rarely have three writers, none strangers to public speaking, felt so outgunned, or so convinced (we later consolingly agreed) that not a single stand-up comic in New Zealand, with the possible exception of David Lange in his heyday, could have matched her.
Four books, The Other Side of Silence and three picture books, appeared in 1995. She told one interviewer, ‘I am fifty-nine and I feel I am still looking for my identity. There are areas where I think I’m established, but watching my daughter with her children makes me re-interpret the way I brought up my own children, so even the past is not totally closed off. It’s a lifetime search, trying to establish one’s identity. Even when you’re old and have lost large pieces of memory, you may still be searching for yourself … I think you never give up this search for identity, even when you know yourself, even when you have a definite job and a definite place in the family and feel in charge of your life.’
The acquisition of experience and knowledge, she thought, was not entirely a romantic blessing: ‘It’s certainly true that if you go out looking for a certain form of experience and certain form of information and you find it, then you can’t really go back to what you were before, even if you discover, when you get what you were searching for, that you don’t like it … It’s the same with a lot of things, sexuality, for example. You can’t forget experiences, you have to build up your identity in a way that accepts experience, and make as good a profit as you can out of those experiences … When you get cause and effect, you always get some sort of a message, even in a story just told for fun.’
For all the many picture books in the 37 years since, she had put her faith in her editor/agent Vanessa Hamilton’s judgement on the selection of illustrators and, on the whole, she had been very happy with the results. So it was something quite new to be ‘able to sit down beside the illustrator and to discuss the text of the story I had written as it might or might not relate to the pictures he wanted to draw …
‘Almost all stories begin in a sort of solitude, in that they depend on connections made in the crowded attic of a single head. Many picture books however are the result of co-operation between two imaginations and separate skills, and there is a general assumption, sometimes justified, that author and illustrator must have worked closely together. This is not necessarily true … indeed I know there are publishers who prefer to keep illustrator and author apart except perhaps for lunch after the book has been published. I haven’t time to comment on this beyond saying that no publisher has ever had any difficulty in keeping me apart from my illustrators, for I live in one hemisphere and they live in another, and though phones and faxes theoretically break down that isolation, my first published stories were stories written for the ear, but produced, almost accidentally from my point of view, as picture books and I had nothing to say to the illustrators nor they to me.’
For The Boy Who Was Followed Home, Steven Kellogg and Margaret had some to-ing and fro-ing before they agreed whether pictures or text should have the final say (Margaret did, with the line, ‘Robert was very pleased,’ that met her expressed preference for words that said to the child, ‘That’s it! You may stop listening now’). Then Steven asked Margaret if she would consider changing the title for the next book, the story of a family picnicking on the slopes of a volcano, and escaping from lava flow by using one of Granny’s pizzas to replace a car wheel.
‘The Escape from Volcano Mountain [was] another domestic story, this time concerning the unreliability of old cars, something I know a great deal about. I have pushed more reluctant cars than any other children’s writer in New Zealand and possibly the USA. To this day the sight of people pushing a car sets off a conditioned reflex in me. I stop my own currently blameless car, leap out and offer to help push. One of Steven’s first contributions was a suggestion that the title should be changed, since that first title was a summary of the plot. Any reader would know, before they so much as began reading, what the story was going to be about … I agreed to change both the title and the name of the mountain (to Mount Fogg) though I always liked the idea of the reader feeling he or she knew something the characters in the story did not. However illustrators are treacherous. Almost at once Steven’s pictures let the reader in on the secret the words no longer acknowledge … though Steven and I are working together to tell a story, there is an illustrator’s tale separated yet merging with the writer’s one … I am claiming that the landscape he thinks he has invented is my own, though I had to see it in the outside world to recognise it. For better or for worse we are both story tellers and both live in the landscape of story.’
Shortly before The Rattlebang Picnic, as it became, was to be launched, the publisher contacted Margaret with a new kind of problem. ‘The Booksellers’ Conference at which the book was due to make its debut was to be held in Los Angeles that particular year and Los Angeles had suffered a damaging earthquake in the recent past. Children’s books are always subject to a singularly intent scrutiny by people anxious to detect insensitivity on the part of the author and it was felt that joking about earthquakes might be seen as unduly callous. Would I consider changing my reference to Earthquake Valley to Tornado Valley? The publishers did not demand this. They merely suggested it and left it to me.
‘I agreed to change it, not so much because I was anxious about disadvantaging the book from the point of view of sales (after all, I had insisted in the case of a previous book The Horrendous Hullabaloo that a pirate must drink rum for breakfast not passionfruit juice though I had been warned that this alcoholic reference would automatically reduce sales, no matter how traditionally piratical) but because I was filled with anxiety on behalf of those who had suffered a really terrible earthquake and felt temporarily ashamed of my own levity. I do joke over disasters, my own as well as other people’s, but when my right to do so is questioned I retreat and apologise and I am not sure to this day whether it is because of mere cowardice or belated sensitivity … I hope the latter. Anyhow, the strange thing was that the alteration of a single word — one word — changed the story far more than Steven’s pictures from being a New Zealand story to being a story set once again nowhere. When I tell it or read it aloud, I find I still have to say Earthquake Valley …’
In 1996 Margaret was also given the chance to speak at length to the New Zealand Reading Association conference on a topic dear to her heart, ‘taking humour seriously’.
‘I joke with language,’ she once said, ‘because I think it makes it more entertaining for children and, after all, when things are entertaining they stick in our minds. Entertainment reinforces important events which we would not remember if we had not been entertained … I think laughter is very important … we are relieved by laughter, and when we are confronted with concepts we can’t take in, one of the things we do is to joke about them. This enables us, in some way, to relieve the pressure and to absorb what we need from the experience without trying to rationalise it too much. I think one of the dangers of laughing at things is that we falsely feel we have power over them. We have to be aware and careful of what we laugh at and of how we laugh. But I laugh a lot and I make jokes about things — serious things. I laugh at disasters or semi-disasters in my own life, because it’s a way I learnt to come to terms with them. Laughter helps me absorb and incorporate many contradictions — clashes between ego and objectivity, between desire and altruism.’
The 1996 speech’s opening salvo, for what became an erudite examination of classical philosophers’ support for various theories of humour —‘release and pleasure’ (Freud), ‘superiority’ (Aristotle, Hobbes, Bain and Bergson) and ‘incongruity’ (Kierkegaard, Koestler, Schopenhauer and possibly Kant) — was a vintage Mahy anecdote.
‘On one occasion I found myself at an afternoon party talking to someone I had never met before and this man began telling me a story. It seemed a friend of his, visiting a strange house, was invited to enjoy the facility of the host’s swimming pool. Having climbed into an appropriate swimming costume the man came into the sitting room, looked out over the terrace and saw the swimming pool, shimmeringly replete with its promises of pleasure. Filled with sudden exhilaration he ran at increasing speed across the living room and burst onto the terrace planning to dive into the swimming pool. However, there were none of the defining spiderwebs … the streaks of dog’s blood and mud … the smears of icecream … that usefully modify the clarity of glass in my own home, and the would-be swimmer did not realise that a sheet of plate glass in a sliding door extended between him and the terrace. He exploded through the glass. Badly gashed he fell to the ground while others raced to call an ambulance on his behalf. I listened with interest to this anecdote rather like an antelope watching from a safe distance as disaster falls on another member of the herd, and then, as the story had ended I heard myself say:
‘“It would have been awful if he’d got out there and found there was no water in the pool.”
‘As I said t
his, the image of the lacerated victim spouting blood in all directions, diving out over the pool only to fall with a dull thud onto sloping concrete painted with that bright delusive blue paint that characterises many swimming pools, shot through my mind. It immediately seemed like a metaphor for existence … a tempting symbol of life itself. I had certainly made a joke of someone else’s painful and disfiguring misfortune.
‘“It wasn’t funny,” said the narrator indignantly. I hastened to agree in a small, shamed voice that of course it must have been terrible — tragic — and to apologise for my joke at the expense of the unknown sufferer — probably permanently scarred. My attempt to seem nice was of course too late. At some level, I had been entertained by the image of the accident and later I wondered just why I had had that immediate reaction. And since, like all speakers on occasions like these, I want to present myself in a good light, I suppose that in telling you this story I am acting on the assumption that a significant number of people here today will have had similar experiences and suffered similar confusion at realising they have been caught out, laughing at someone else’s misfortune. If I thought you were all going to be disgusted at my lack of sensitivity I would obviously have kept this story to myself.’ Despite the success in life of many humourless people, she thought humour did ‘add to our prospects of survival as a species … Laughter thrives with practice, but one’s ability to laugh in a totally light-hearted way may mutate. I laugh just as much as I ever did, but my laughter becomes increasingly less carefree as I grow old and I have to cope with the increasing complications imposed by time, age, experience, the accumulation of knowledge while understanding, at the same time, that what I know will never be enough, and the problems of trying to integrate all information — all instinct, all judgement — into some harmonious system.’