Eleven years had passed since Ngaio’s first staging of Julius Caesar. In 1953, it had been a symbol of her determination to continue in spite of the loss of the Little Theatre; in 1964, it might well be the final curtain on her career as a student producer. One Julius Caesar looked forward, the other back, but had there been any appreciable change in between? Theatre commentator Paul Bushnell argues quite rightly that they were very similar productions and there was ‘little reworking of the original composition. Ideas might be elaborated, but they went largely unchanged, except for details.’ This, he suggests, was because Ngaio saw her role as curatorial, and Shakespeare’s plays as artefacts. She looked for essential meanings and saw play interpretations as finite. This was true, but it was also the thinking of her era, and on the eve of retirement, if her ideas had not changed, they had certainly matured.
Ngaio returned to her autobiography as soon as the production ended. ‘80,000 words,’ she noted early in November, ‘& the end, I hope in view.’ She was cutting everything after 1950 down to a minimum because she had ‘no desire to drool’ on about old age. But she needed earnings from a new book and was ‘going eyes out’ to finish her autobiography so she could take a Christmas break with friends in the Marlborough Sounds. ‘I’ve been lumbering up the straight with my blasted book,’ she told Doris McIntosh, and before Christmas she wrote the final sentence. She feared the rewrites would be extensive but was relieved to have it done, and left for Portage, in Kenepuru Sound, on Boxing Day with Anita Muling and her friend Marjorie Chambers. ‘I shall go on tinkering for some time.’ The manuscript was already too long, but if she wanted to add any more something must be cut. ‘I find myself quite unable to see it in perspective & have moments when I think it a failure. Pity if I’m right after all the trouble.’
Her stay was an oasis of perfect weather and blissful long days of swimming and reading. ‘We spent 10 days of utter, utter laziness—the hotel at Portage had been taken over by an Australian couple with gratifying results on the cuisine, which was excellent,’ wrote Anita Muling to Olivia Spencer Bower. Ngaio had arranged for Val Muling to be buried in the Acland family cemetery at Peel Forest in South Canterbury. She had taken the Mulings there, and a friendship with the Aclands had begun. They had generously offered their cemetery, with its quaint stone chapel, as a final resting place for someone they knew Ngaio had loved. After her husband’s death, Anita Muling shared a house, and what many people believed was a lesbian relationship, with Marjorie Chambers, matron at the Christchurch Public Hospital. The two women were regular guests at Marton Cottage, and Anita Muling still attended most Sundays while Ngaio’s players rehearsed.
In the New Year, Ngaio was delighted to have John Dacres-Mannings staying with her. ‘He doesn’t change & is just the same affectionate, gentle, lethally absent-minded old thing.’ In January, Ngaio began preparing for another trip to Britain. She and Crawsie launched themselves ‘upon the hellish bosom of the cleaning-up-for-tenants tidal wave’. They carried things up the path to the whare at the top of the section that had been Ngaio’s bedroom as a child. Blankets and precious objects were all stowed away. Her exact plans for the year were not settled, and she anxiously awaited her publishers’ response to the autobiography: she expected ‘some constructive observations’. A first draft had been sent to her American publisher and she hoped Billy Collins would read his copy of the manuscript in March.
In the meantime, Jonathan Elsom was over from London to play the role of Messiah in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays for the Pan Pacific Festival. It was ‘lovely to see him again’, and she proudly told Doris McIntosh that he had not had a week out of work in the past year. She was also delighted to play host to Maureen Balfour, Nelly Rhodes’s second daughter, who was visiting her farm-cadet son. ‘She & her brothers & sisters are “my family”, & I couldn’t be more happy to think she’s coming.’ In late February 1965, Ngaio saw the York Cycle, staged at night on the banks of the Avon River. She found the production patchy, especially the directing. Elsom’s acting was ‘a supremely sensitive solo in the middle of an insecure & groping ensemble’. The setting was superb and the mounting very good, but the co-ordination of crowd scenes incensed her. ‘O! O! O! the lovely opportunities lost,’ she wailed.
Her American publishers got back to her in early March to say they wanted illustrations for Black Beech. ‘I am engaged in a slightly melancholy hunt through old photographs,’ she told Doris McIntosh. Ned Bradford’s response was ‘gratifyingly drooling’, but the photograph safari through a dusty savannah of drawers and albums seemed endless. Billy Collins and his son Pierre visited Ngaio in Christchurch that month. He was ‘very pleased’ with the biography. This was a relief.
Unchained from her ‘gnawing misgivings’, in April Ngaio became involved in another production. Jonathan Elsom and Brian Bell, production supervisor of local channel CHTV3, decided to put on a two-man show. Ngaio liked the material they were doing, and when they asked her to produce Two’s Company, ‘dived in boots & all & I must say with great satisfaction’. It was a medley of part-plays from Noël Coward, Anton Chekhov, John Mortimer, Luigi Pirandello and Marcel Achard, innovatively performed. ‘The changes of make-up are effected at two side tables in view of the audience, & the whole thing runs like cream from the bottle.’
In April, Ngaio sent a desperate letter to Billy Collins. The new law, applied retrospectively to her last two visits to England, had left her with a tax demand of £1,700. ‘This just about cleans out my savings & is a horrid blow.’ She appealed to both her agent and her publisher for help, but double taxation seemed unavoidable and all she could hope for was a partial rebate when everything was settled in New Zealand. Collins was deeply concerned about the tax; he also discussed the autobiography. Jonathan Elsom’s mother, Vy had been commissioned to draw a portrait of Ngaio for the back cover. He told Ngaio this, had been sent on from New York to Boston, where Black Beech would be published first. Collins in Auckland wanted a few changes, and Billy Collins himself asked for some additions, which he regarded as minor; for Ngaio, they were excruciating. The project soured in her hands, and by September she wrote to John Schroder: ‘I’ve been having a gruelling time with my autobiography, unwillingly ventured upon (& I think perhaps unwisely, too).’ Collins had been persistent. The autobiography was finished, but it was ‘not the book I hoped it would be. I have been defeated by my own reticence.’ She sent off the final manuscript with ‘profoundest misgivings’.
Ngaio did not plan to produce a student play that year, but she still became involved in annual rehearsals. They were in the dog show shed in Addington: ‘One wonders if billions of fleas are coming up for the fur orgy.’ She turned down an opportunity to produce a play for the Wellington Repertory Company because she was at work on Death at the Dolphin, a new detective novel that once again drew on her passion for the theatre.
Somehow, though, in the latter part of the year she became caught up in the concept of a touring Hamlet or Macbeth with the New Zealand Theatre Centre, a ‘pretty generously subsidised’ organization intended to assist regional professional theatre. Ngaio was on the board and Dan O’Connor was tour manager, with Richard Campion assisting him. Ngaio was invited to direct their first major production. She delayed her departure from New Zealand, began organizing, spent all day with Raymond Boyce on set design, and talked to Douglas Lilburn about music, but by November the venture had fallen through. She was deeply disappointed, and seriously out of pocket, as she had to pay an additional £200 to travel on a large passenger liner ‘which I dislike instead of a ship I know & love’. She had turned down an opportunity to launch Black Beech in the United States, and because of the tour had delayed the Collins launch in London until after Easter ‘at great inconvenience to all concerned’. It was an upheaval and a waste of time. It was nobody’s fault, she admitted: ‘Just theatre where that sort of thing happens continuously. What a life.’
In the meantime, she stayed with Stella Mannings in Wellington in Oc
tober. ‘Our relationship is more like that of sisters than cousins.’ She was looking forward to introducing Stella to Doris McIntosh. ‘[Stella’s] a great dear but rather agonisingly shy…[with a] very good cranky sense of humour which pops up at surprising moments. I dote on the old tart.’ While in Wellington, Ngaio presented the Katherine Mansfield Award. The event was not without incident. ‘I had just been told I had to be televised canoodling with Frank Sargeson,’ Ngaio explained to John Schroder. The problem was they lost Sargeson, so she had to lie on the lawn ‘& be photographed until he could be found’. The organizers neglected to tell Ngaio that he had won the award, which ‘botched up my speech’, and forgot to ask Sargeson ‘to come & get his hundred smackers’.
Around speeches and public engagements, Ngaio packed and prepared to leave. There were permits, injections, tenants and cats to organize. She bought a new sewing machine for Crawsie, who was desolate after her ‘old warrior’ broke down. Ngaio rationalized the gift: ‘instead of waiting till I pop off she might as well have something’. The parcel was duly delivered, accompanied by a note that said, ‘with love from His Holiness the Pope’.
At the beginning of 1966, Ngaio was still ‘packing & stowing’, while an avalanche of Black Beech promotion rumbled in the background and began to pick up momentum. ‘I’ve got T.V. chaps from Wellington tomorrow & Friday, all day, doing a programme in the house.’ She also agreed to a ‘whirlwind’ of promotional events in Auckland. Ngaio departed Wellington aboard the Arcadia on 7 March, but on arrival in Auckland found that she had lost her luggage. ‘I’m going pretty crazy as you can imagine.’ A painting of Anita Muling’s she was taking to Sotheby’s, and a mink coat and precious camera, were all packed in her lost luggage. Her relief was palpable when, after a frantic telephone call, Gerald Lascelles managed to trace the luggage.
In Sydney and Melbourne she faced further ‘book-shop-crawls’ plus press, radio and television interviews. ‘The Sydney T.V. gentleman would keep asking me why I had never married,’ she wrote in her thank-you letter to Lascelles, ‘& how, in my surprise & exasperation, I answered him I tremble to conjecture.’ Ngaio caught up with Elizabeth and John Dacres-Mannings and their young family, which included a toddler and a baby, Nicholas and Sarah. She was delighted to see them in their new house, still under renovation. Dacres-Mannings had visited her in the New Year. ‘There we were: just as usual,’ she explained to John Schroder. ‘I couldn’t like him better if he were my son & yet have no cluck-clucking desire to attach him to myself.’ Perhaps that was the answer she could have given the Sydney ‘T.V. gentleman’—that she cherished intimacy, but above all valued her freedom.
The journey was something of a Marie Celeste passage. The missing luggage was followed by disappearing galley proofs for her ‘new tec’, sent registered mail to Fremantle by her American publishers, and to be corrected and returned urgently. She was anxious that this would mean a delay in publication. In the end, a second set reached her in Gibraltar and she spent two ‘hectic days & nights in the Bay of Biscay O, correcting them’ and returned them by airmail from London, which cost a small fortune. Ngaio was ‘dreading the hullabaloo’ of the London launch of her autobiography. ‘I quite like the earlier bits, now,’ she confessed to John Schroder, ‘but shall never be reconciled to the thing as a whole.’
To her great delight, ‘Jonathan and Elric were both down at the docks at the crack of dawn’ to meet her. As soon as she arrived, she found her engagement book a ‘thorny thicket’ of events ‘& time’s winged chariot, with a return ticket to N.Z. is hard on my heels’. Leisurely London stays were a thing of the past and she must make the most of her time.
The first three weeks vanished in a blur of press, television and radio interviews, followed by semi-business luncheons with publishers, Crime Club representatives, and her agent. A luncheon with Lady Freyberg made a pleasant interlude. She stayed at the Hyde Park Hotel until she found a flat at 5/51 Pont Street, Kensington. It was here that a ‘bombshell’ fell in the form of a commission from Alexander Cohen, ‘the Eminence Grey of Broadway’, to dramatize Singing in the Shrouds. Ngaio was staggered by this unique opportunity, but if she accepted ‘I shall have my nose to the grindstone as usual’. It was a risk and she was not sure she could ‘make a job of it’. In mid-May, Ngaio enjoyed a weekend stay with Billy Collins. She was stunned by the beauty of his 14th-century house, with its massively proportioned comfortable rooms ‘smelling of applewood fires’, and furnished with ‘lovely’ antiques. His library was in a huge silo separate from the house.
Work soon resumed. By the end of May, Ngaio had seen only five shows, and far less of her favourite family than she liked. This stay was shaping up to be another working holiday, with an emphasis on work. What theatre Ngaio did see, though, she enjoyed. ‘YOU NEVER CAN TELL gets superb treatment at the Haymarket and the KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE, a terrifyingly funny play about lesbian ladies, is wonderful,’ she told Gerald Lascelles. She also saw ‘THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN…[which was] superbly mounted and acted…TRELAWNY OF THE WELLS…an enchanting revival but the VOYSEY INHERITANCE’ was not well done. Ngaio could not get in to see Sir Laurence Olivier’s Othello and hesitated to write a private letter requesting a seat. She was always reluctant to push herself forward, even when it was justified.
In the midst of all this came responses to Black Beech, both personal and published, from readers and reviewers. The initial reaction was positive, but as the flurry of enthusiasm died down more critical voices emerged. One of those belonged to writer and publisher Dennis McEldowney, reviewing the book for Landfall in September 1966. In part his reaction was a statement of the obvious. There was not much about Ngaio Marsh ‘except indirectly, in the latter part of her autobiography,’ he stated in his opening sentence. ‘Most of her adult life remains undisclosed.’ He also observed that there was almost no discussion of her detective fiction. ‘Followers of her criminal career may be disappointed to find so little of it.’ There were none of the colourful Detection Club descriptions she had read out over the radio, and little revealing analysis of her theatrical work. What glowed brightly from an otherwise subdued fire were the coals of her youth. ‘She recalls as convincingly as anyone I have read the unstable and extravagant emotions children are subject to, before they have grown wary of emotion.’ Ngaio was less reticent about her early life and could recall it without embarrassment, McEldowney postulated, because time had elapsed.
These were reasonable comments, but there was a cruel barb to the review that must have stung Ngaio. McEldowney claimed she had only ever written about New Zealand ‘as though she were a visitor, while believing she was a native’. He made cutting remarks about the way she handled the New Zealand accent in fiction as opposed to the cockney, implying that she was an Anglo-centric snob. And he ended with a diatribe against detective fiction. ‘It is doubtful whether any New Zealand writer as ambitious as she was could now bring himself to write detective novels, even as a means of making a living.’ He acknowledged that things were different when she began, and that detective fiction was ‘then recreation of some respectable talent’. However:
It has never seemed to me…that Ngaio Marsh was a potential novelist wasting herself on detective stories. She has not been either passionate enough or detached enough. This doubt is strengthened by her autobiography, pleasant to read as it is. The reader can trace fascinating patterns but wonders if she knows they are there.
On the one hand, McEldowney admonished Ngaio for not offering more about her detective fiction; on the other he demonstrated the intellectual snobbery that had silenced her. Ngaio’s reticence over her detective fiction writing had proved well founded. She had carried the weight of academic condescension for years. It was an intense disappointment to her that what she sometimes slaved over was given so little respect in her own country.
Her discretion about her private life was probably equally well placed. She revealed her childhood because the people in it were mostly long dead, and a
mong her more contemporary friends and associates, she easily mentioned those whose careers were already in public view: Dan O’Connor, Jack Henderson, Paul Molineaux, Elric Hooper and Jonathan Elsom. But she was more hesitant about the Rhodes family, whom she called the Lampreys in Black Beech, about her cousins, the Mulings, Doris and Alister McIntosh, and was almost completely silent about one of her closest friends, Sylvia Sibbald Fox. Although he was a major character in her novels, Ngaio never explained how Detective Inspector Edward Walter Fox got his name. His surname was that of her best and most faithful friend, Sylvia, and his middle name came from her father, Walter Sibbald Fox.
Their association began at Miss Ross’s dame school. In Black Beech, Ngaio mentioned the boys who helped her adjust to the trials of her early school life, but never Sylvia. She was born on 5 December 1898, the eldest of three children, and the only girl. Her father, Walter Fox, was a surgeon and superintendent of Christchurch Public Hospital from 1914 to 1935. The family mixed in well-to-do circles and knew people of prominence in Canterbury, including the Aclands.
Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Page 30
