Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  I am given to understand that on page 26 of my book ‘Passport to Hell’ I have recounted an incident concerning which I was misled, and which may be understood to reflect unfavourably on the Gladstone School, Invercargill and on Mr Duncan McNeil, its headmaster during Starkie’s period of tuition there. Starkie himself informed me—though in a perfectly humorous way, and I am sure, without intention of injuring either one of his old schools or anyone else concerned—that at the time he was such an incorrigible truant that his father on three days chained him up to the school doorstep. I accepted this and recounted it in good faith, but on Mr McNeil’s statement that the occurrence never took place, had the paragraph removed from the ‘serialized’ version of my book, have written to the publishers to have it deleted from future editions, and finally will be glad if you will give publicity to this correction.29

  The most powerful criticism of the factual background of the book came from one who had served like Starkie in the Otago Infantry Battalion (though he seems to have joined up some eighteen months later) and was a native of Invercargill. His name was John Tait and he wrote two letters to the Southland Times which annoyed Robin Hyde immensely, perhaps because she had followed Stark so closely. Tait begins:

  In the New Zealand Division there were many stories told of J. D. Stark, commonly known as ‘Starkie’. Some of them were true, many of them distorted or exaggerated, some of them purely apocryphal; but all agreed in emphasizing his contempt of danger and discipline alike. Broadly regarded ‘Passport to Hell’ gives a vivid and plausible picture of a strange character. The detail, however, does not bear critical examination. The author opens her prefatory note with this sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The natural presumption is that she offers her work as a record of truth in which case one would have expected her to verify such details at least as she readily could. A few minutes in a reference library would have corrected her ideas (and spelling) of Avenal, Waihopai, the time when Invercargill went ‘dry’ and ‘the battle of the Wasr’. A few inquiries would have revealed to her the fact that two at least of the schoolmasters referred to in chapter one are still living in Invercargill, and would no doubt have been pleased to correct her picture of the boyhood of her hero; that the Magistrate she refers to by name is resident in her own city; that ‘the battle of the Wasr’ was fought before the Fifth Reinforcement (not ‘Regiment’ by the way) left New Zealand; that ‘Y’ Beach was separated from Anzac Cove by nine or ten miles of the Peninsula from which New Zealand and other allied troops were rigidly excluded by the Turks. But why go on? It is sufficient to say that the verity of the story could have easily been checked at many points, and Robin Hyde’s palpable failure to do so has rendered her work worthless as a record of truth. The literary worth of it would in no wise have suffered had the preface run something like this: ‘This book is not the product of my imagination. I have related its incidents and the circumstances under which they happened, as Starkie told them to me. To what extent he has drawn on his imagination I cannot say, but I thought them sufficiently interesting to publish.’ In such case, while one might have criticized her taste in the selection of her material, her talent for vivid writing would have been fully appreciated.30

  When Hyde replied citing J. A. Lee and Downie Stewart in her defence, Tait returned to the attack with pedantic tenacity:

  If you will permit it I should like to point out the fundamental weakness in her position as it appears to me. Let me explain that before writing my private letter I had discussed the book with many of my fellow returned soldiers and had confirmed my own belief that the book cannot be relied on as a truthful record of facts. I took particular care to give full credence only to those who had personal knowledge of the events which they described and I checked their recollections as far as possible by reference to such records as were available to me. I do not doubt that much of the narrative is substantially true but it contains so much intrinsic evidence of the author’s failure to check the facts that the whole story stands suspect. It is in this sense that I maintain that the book is worthless as a record of truth. It is clear of course that considerable portions of the narrative could be verified from independent sources only with difficulty and that in some instances corroboration is impossible. Much of it however could have been checked with comparative ease, and, had Robin Hyde made any attempt to do so, she would not I feel sure, have commenced her preface with the sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The points I mentioned in my first letter were a few of those which should have led the writer to suspect the accuracy of her information. Robin Hyde dismisses them as trivial. Some of them are, perhaps, mere straws indicating the direction of the wind but the march from ‘Y’ Beach to Anzac Cove was a military impossibility and ‘the battle of the Wasr’ as described took place during the Easter of 1915 while ‘Starkie’ with the Fifth Reinforcements was still in camp in New Zealand. Men who were actually there have told me that the description of that event is remarkably accurate but the point is that Starkie was not there.

  The reviews referred to do not, I submit, alter the position. Their laudations can properly be regarded as paying just tribute to Robin Hyde’s literary talent but the writer must have assumed the narrative to be true. This applies to the two distinguished New Zealanders referred to by Robin Hyde. The period mentioned as covered by the Hon. W. D. Stewart’s somewhat cautious authentication affects only some 40 pages of the book (144–183). The Hon. J. A. Lee served—I speak from memory—with the machine gun corps and would have few if any contacts with Starkie on service. He would be the first to agree that realism is a virtue in literature, or any other form of art, only when it conforms strictly with reality. I do not suggest that Robin Hyde added to or varied the facts of her story; those embellishments were there when she received it. She pleads in excuse the youth of her hero but even this will not stand. J. D. Stark was not born on July 4, 1898, as Robin Hyde believes; he was born on July 17, 1894. He was not a boy of 16 when he left this country but a young man of nearly 21.

  In conclusion, I have taken every precaution which has suggested itself to me to verify the facts I have stated but unless those facts are challenged I do not propose to carry on a correspondence which might tend quite wrongly to suggest some animosity towards either Starkie or Robin Hyde. My protest is simply this. Let realism be truth, the whole truth if you will, but above all, nothing but the truth.31

  The only response to such letters is the asking of those unanswerable questions, What is Realism? What is Truth? Robin Hyde’s concern was for the work’s effectiveness, as a portrait of Starkie and as an impression of war. She was outraged at the meanness of the attack, and replied to Tait’s first letter with a long defence of the book’s accuracy and a statement of her purpose as a writer:

  I trust your columns may be open to a reply to Mr John Tait’s attack on my book ‘Passport to Hell’.

  It is perfectly obvious that there may be minor (mostly very minor) inaccuracies of spelling or detail in a book written by an author who has never had opportunities to visit the scenes recorded, and whose material was gathered from a soldier (sixteen years old when he left this country) who never kept a diary. In addition, though Starkie attended several Invercargill schools before at twelve years of age, he was sent on to the Burnham Industrial School, and though I found him very far from unintelligent, his spelling does not seem to have been all it might. However, I don’t think the fact that the soldier’s spelling was here and there substituted for the schoolmaster’s is likely to trouble many people.

  Starkie was unquestionably at what the soldiers called ‘the battle of the Wazza’, Mr John Tait ‘the battle of the Wasr’, and some other authorities ‘the battle of the Wazir’. May I quote what your paper says in an adjoining column, reviewing another book? ‘The detail is so precise, and the narrative concerned with the surrounding country all so exact, that the reader must accept it all.’ If any inexactitude of mine as to date or number of contingent has confused Mr
Tait, I should think that by reading the chapter he might have convinced himself of its essential reality. At all events, the fifty or more English reviews I have had of ‘Passport to Hell’ nowhere seem to question the book’s authenticity as a broad record of war experiences—not a war history—and I suppose their staffs must contain a few men not unacquainted with Egypt, Gallipoli and France in 1914–1918.

  It is curious that if my book is, as Mr Tait says, ‘worthless as a record of fact’, the most favourable reviews and comments should have come from returned soldiers. In addition to personal letters, (some confirming actual incidents), the Imperial War Museum, in writing to thank me for a copy of ‘Passport to Hell’, which was sent on request, refers to the book as one of the most interesting New Zealand war records in its possession. Mr John A. Lee, a returned soldier of distinction, said when interviewed by The Standard that ‘Passport to Hell’ was the most important New Zealand war book yet published, and made special mention of its realism. As Mr Tait has chosen to question my taste (though I did not know that war was ever in good taste), I may quote a sentence of Mr Lee’s: ‘Some people will be shocked because Robin Hyde sends a soldier to a brothel, but will cheer when the troops swing by to their death.’ Writing in the Otago Daily Times, the Hon. Downie Stewart, who for part of the war years was attached to the same battalion as Starkie, says that for this period ‘the authenticity of the book is such that nobody could cavil at it’, and later that ‘it is hard to believe the author was not at the front’. I quote in both cases from memory, but anyone who cares to look up the reviews will find that I have in no way exaggerated. Nor do I wish to advertise my own work, but Mr Tait’s suggestion that because of a few trivial errors Starkie’s record and my book are practically a work of the imagination, is so unfair and untrue that it cannot be left unanswered. Does he imagine that the experienced soldiers mentioned above would be taken in by any plausibility?

  It is true that I could have written to Starkie’s schoolmasters in order to ‘correct’ my view of his character, though this is the first time I have ever heard that an author is supposed to take this course. I could also have written to every policeman, warder, prison superintendent, sergeant-major, military police official, and innocent if officious bystander with whom Starkie came into conflict. But I didn’t, and I would never be likely to do so. My object in writing the book was not to portray the outside world looking at Starkie, but to portray Starkie looking at the outside world. After all, that outside view, especially of any person estranged from society by lawlessness, sickness or poverty, means so little. If I have any ambition as a prose writer, it is to write from the inner centre of what people think, hope and feel, and of that Interpreter’s House, those set in authority over us know curiously little, because they have no humility ….32

  However, she received support over the ‘Battle of the Wazza’ for ‘Tano Fama’ wrote in, explaining that there were two battles of the Wazza, ‘and the second one was in the early days after the arrival of the 5th Reinforcements. This is probably the one to which “Starkie” referred. In defence of Robin Hyde, may I say that far from exaggerating the exploits of this wild member of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, there were many many vivid incidents which could be told, but were omitted by her. Is it not true that Douglas Stark carried in the Rt. Hon. Gordon Coates when he was wounded in the field of battle? I believe it was ….’33 But a glance through the notes to this edition will reveal that Tait’s general observations on Starkie’s inventions, distortions, and slips of memory, are not inaccurate. Hyde followed Stark closely, expanding from time to time from the merest of hints but making very few changes. She darkens the portrait a little by having Starkie steal where her notes indicate he did not, and she insists on his youth throughout, even, in the first version, making him almost absurdly younger than he had claimed to be. But the charge of not checking her sources sufficiently haunted her and we find her defending herself to Eric Ramsden in similar vein over Check to Your King, her account of the life of Charles, Baron de Thierry. She had had neither the opportunity nor the money to travel, she argues, and thus could not consult the archives in Sydney. ‘However, Charles kept copies of most of his more important documents and treasured up hoards of newspaper remarks—kindly and otherwise—and I felt at the end of my work that I understood his own point of view pretty well, which was the only thing pretended for “Check to Your King”. I am not a historian, and don’t want to be one. It is the individual and the mind moving behind queer, unreasonable actions which seem to me to produce a good deal of the fun of this old world; and I think that any writer has the right to interpret this as best he can ….’34 Both John A. Lee and Downie Stewart were well aware that Passport to Hell contained a number of errors, indeed Stewart took trouble to point out some of them and to consider the question of how far Passport was ‘a true record of the events recorded’. He concluded that for the period of his knowledge of the events ‘they are told with such substantial accuracy that any minor corrections of fact would not alter the main tenor of the story’. Stewart was, moreover, conscious of the imaginative resources needed to make a person live in literature: ‘The average normal citizen is in the habit of regarding any strange or unusual individual as what is called a “Character”, and of saying that “some one ought to write him up”. But people who are given to this line of thought often fail to realise what a difficult task it is to make such “characters” live in a book with such vividness that the reader feels that they are real persons and that he must have met them at some time.’35 Robin Hyde he thought had done that most successfully. While Lee wrote to her in 1938 of ‘your “Passport to Hell” which was so amazingly correct psychologically if the graphic side was out of joint occasionally; and, of course, to get the experience true and vital rather than the mere geography was the greater achievement’.36

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about Starkie was that although a seemingly unique figure, he was also in some senses the quintessential colonial soldier. The troops from the Dominions were noted both for their magnificent fighting qualities and their casual attitude toward discipline. The two aspects were not unconnected. As Denis Winter points out the British Old Army endeavoured to turn men into cyphers, breaking them down by endless drill and repetitive burdensome trivial tasks so that they obeyed without question: ‘As long as a soldier could be guaranteed to obey all orders, he could be considered “trained”.’37 The brilliant Australian general Monash knew what was appropriate for his men: ‘very stupid comment has been made on the discipline of the Australian soldier. That was because the very purpose and conception of discipline have been misunderstood. It is after all only a means to an end, and that end is to secure the co-ordinated action among a large number of individuals for achieving a definite purpose. It does not mean obsequious homage to superiors nor servile observance of forms and customs nor a suppression of the individuality.’38 The colonials had proportionately nine times the number of men in military prison than had the British and man for man they ‘fought better, were better adapted to the longueurs of trench fighting and supplied the storm troops of the B.E.F. to the end’.39 This is a point made nicely by Hyde’s editor J. G. McLean in his review of Passport for the New Zealand Observer:

  Stark was a private from beginning to end. Anything which marked him out for promotion or a decoration was as quickly cancelled by some breach of discipline. He was one of the light-hearted roystering crew of Diggers who formed the backbone of the N.Z.E.F., who lent the sharp edge of valour to its attacks, but chafed under restraint when out of the line. There were thousands more like Starkie; not so wild and lawless, perhaps, but sharing with him a rooted distaste for formal authority as represented by brass hats, military police, and other martial phenomena who could stop a soldier’s leave, prevent him from drinking beer when he was thirsty, and march him across the desert in seemingly unnecessary parades.40

  In his article ‘In Parenthesis among the War Books’, William Blissett outl
ines the two poles of war literature—the spare narrative simplicity and symbolic starkness of Henry Williamson’s Patriot’s Progress on one hand and the self-conscious In Parenthesis of David Jones with its extraordinary density of literary and liturgical allusions on the other.41 Hyde’s portrait of the outlaw from New Zealand is much closer to the powerful simplicity of Patriot’s Progress though she is not unaware of that larger context of war, literature, and religion which almost overwhelms Jones. Passport has greater intensity and immediacy than the two other New Zealand books from World War I with which it may be compared: Aitken’s Gallipoli to the Somme (1963) and O. E. Burton’s The Silent Division (1935). Burton’s book (which Hyde admired, terming it ‘one of the greatest testimonies against war that I have read’42) endeavours to ‘place’ the almost unimaginable experience of war by providing epigraphs to each chapter (he follows Frederic Manning in this) from a whole range of war literature from Kingsley’s The Heroes to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But the decision not to give names removes personalities and diminishes the necessary specificity of the work. In Gallipoli to the Somme, the events waited forty-seven years for publication, having been recollected through youthful notes. The result is a beautiful and humane perspective on the horrors of that campaign.