He is playing his persona to the hilt – getting kicked out by bookshops, giving his dogs away, landlady issues – but gives Kevin Ireland credit for turning him into a writer: “Twenty-five times he made me write my first story and then he published it. That was the start.”
And there is a reference to a comment about his success that was apparently quoted often: “The dough’s got into me blood.”
Robin DuddingEditor, gardener, poultry breeder; born Hastings 7 December 1935, died Auckland 21 April 2008.
Watching Robin Dudding examine a new book was like witnessing a master of wine savour the first sip of a rare vintage. It was work – and it was pleasure.
There was a ritual to it. He would put down his 2B pencil and take the book in both hands. The front cover design would slowly be perused, then the back, without comment. He would open it up at random, but properly: wide and flat, seeing whether it stayed open. If the binding resisted, the book wouldn’t be easy to read; if it let out a crack, it would soon fall apart.
His eyes would scan over the double-page spread, checking the typeface, the leading – the spacing between lines – and the white space that surrounded the words. This was crucial: not enough, and he would murmur, “Shame about the mean margins.”
Dudding was a perfectionist, and not just with words, type and paper. He bred champion chooks, pruned fruit trees like a craftsman, fed his family with a bounteous vegetable garden (the peppers came from cuttings given to him by Frank Sargeson), and was a wicked table-tennis player.
For almost 30 years, Robin Dudding was also New Zealand’s most gifted and significant literary editor. He was Charles Brasch’s hand-picked successor at Landfall and went on to found his own literary journal, Islands. This became the leading outlet for creative writing and essays in the 1970s and 80s; at Landfall or Islands Dudding gave many New Zealand writers their first prominent outlet, among them Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Lauris Edmond and Jenny Bornholdt.
The man Brasch chose was 31, a part-time primary teacher and part-time editor of Mate, a small-but-perfectly-formed literary journal. Founded in 1957, the magazine had evolved from sessions at the Queen’s Ferry in Vulcan Lane, Auckland.
Kevin Ireland co-edited the first issue with John Yelash, and for young contenders they punched above their weight. James K Baxter, Frank Sargeson and RAK Mason were in the first issue, which was printed by the fabled Bob Lowry. But Mate’s purpose was to champion new writers: also in that debut was Janet Frame, and the magazine’s most successful discovery was Barry Crump.
By issue three, Dudding was the sole editor; he was 22 and working as a journalist at the Auckland Star. Compulsory military training had brought him north from Hastings, where he had worked on the Herald-Tribune. He “seagulled” on the Auckland wharves before becoming a reporter at the Star. The feisty underdog of Auckland’s two dailies, the Star featured venerated bylines such as Noel Holmes, Robert Gilmore and Pat Booth. Gary Wilson, a young reporter with Dudding, remembers everyone in the same room, “typewriters clacking, phones going, teleprinter chattering ... the big boys holding forth with their mix of important and bullshit discussions, all in a haze of cigarette smoke.” It was a tough environment, recalled Dudding, whose beat varied from rugby league to theatre: the arts editor’s desk was nicknamed “queer’s corner”.
Dudding shifted to Christchurch in 1966 to edit Landfall, accompanied by his wife Lois and their young family. Another of his tasks was to edit the Caxton Press’s general books; after five years there was a parting of the ways, allegedly because of the late delivery of a publication.
This is believable: Dudding was interested more in high standards than hasty mistakes. The family – now with six children – headed back to Auckland, and in 1972 he founded Islands. The name and format suggested a sequel to Landfall, and it’s significant that Brasch himself contributed (as he did to Mate). Brasch’s philanthropic offer to financially underwrite Islands was only prevented by his untimely death.
Islands lasted for 15 years and 38 issues, sustained by Dudding’s gritty determination, occasional relief teaching and copy editing, plus the support and sacrifice of his family. A rundown hut in the back garden of their North Shore home became the nerve centre of New Zealand literature.
“Woodspring Cottage may not qualify for the attentions of an Historic Places Trust,” Dudding once wrote, but its “icy interior” had produced eight issues of Mate and 20 issues of Islands. Moving inside to a warmer spot, the cottage “reverted to its original use as a tool shed.”
Dudding took risks as an editor: Islands’ poetry, short fiction, literary and arts criticism could be edgy and challenging. In 1976 he took the bold step of publishing Ian Wedde’s debut novella Dick Seddon’s Great Dive as a complete issue. Despite the title, Dick Seddon portrayed the hazy 1960s with an almost nostalgic tone and experimental style. It won the 1977 book award for fiction.
When Islands was the Mecca of new writing, Dudding would receive “in a good week” about 10 stories and 300 poems. He would reject 97 percent, but read them all from beginning to end. In 1984 he explained why to Metro’s Robert Mannion: “You’ll get a handwritten manuscript on a piece of torn paper, written on both sides – all of which you say you don’t want – you want material typed and written on one side only. Every second word on the manuscript is misspelt and it is barely legible.
“But then you notice it comes from Wi Tako or a psychiatric hospital or something like that. That’s someone who’s sitting in a cell, who for therapeutic reasons, or whatever reasons, is trying to do something with pen and paper. You’ve got to give it some sort of response. You can’t give it that without reading it right through. It’s most unlikely, in fact it hasn’t happened in 20 years, but there may be a jewel in there.”
At its peak, Islands had a subscriber base of 2000; it suspended publication twice in its 15-year run. If every contributor had also taken out a subscription, the magazine could have sustained itself, but Dudding would never make that a pre-requisite for publication.
Instead, he took on freelance editing tasks for Auckland University Press, where he had a long association and friendship with Dennis McEldowney, the managing-editor. Among the major books he edited for AUP were James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars, and he also contributed the “Bookmarks” column to the Listener with a wry, informed eye.
Although Dudding wrote very little – the pithy “Tailfeather” column that dealt with Islands housekeeping matters was his only written contribution to the journal – such was his standing that he became the University of Auckland’s first literary fellow in 1979. When McEldowney went on a long-delayed OE, Dudding stood in to manage AUP. “The job was all that I hoped it would be,” he said later. “But Dennis wanted it back.”
McEldowney, a gentleman and scholar if ever one existed, wrote in his diary of Dudding, “I suspect he is a more rigorous editor than I am ... [he came in] with the typescript he has been editing, in which he has slaughtered a thousand howevers, moreovers, therefores and thuses.”
Dudding could seem formidable, but not for long. His eyes could be piercing, because he was listening, concentrating. He was a backroom literary legend, but not to himself; he didn’t suffer fools but he loved company of all kinds, especially children. In the 1990s, for post-work Friday sessions at the London Bar he would draw together a wide variety of workers and age-groups, with rarely a writer present. His style of humour was the gentle tease: he liked to encourage people to do their best at whatever they attempted. He subsumed his ego to let others flourish.
New Zealand literature’s gratitude to Dudding was finally acknowledged last month when the University of Auckland conferred an honorary doctorate upon him. Sadly, after a long battle with emphysema, he died on April 21, two days before the ceremony. His family accepted the scarlet doctoral robe on his behalf, and the occasion became a moving celebration of a life lived with generosity and courage.
________
I haven’t seen many Heath Ledger films but he was always the most memorable part of those that I have watched. My first – and I had to look this up – was the tense caper flick Two Hands (1999), in which Ledger played a naive crim in debt to a violent crim (Bryan Brown). He loses a stash of money on Bondi Beach while going for a swim – shirt-off alert – and then has to find it before Brown’s character finds him. Ledger was one of the few of his generation who never looked like he was acting, he didn’t need to brood or emote, he was just there, real.And unlike the Hollywood brats of the same age – and I was surprised to learn he was just 28 – he never seemed desperate to be famous. He just did his job. (The same couldn’t be said of his compatriot Michael Hutchence, who was addicted to fame and sex. Whereas Ledger’s death appears to be a tragic accident, Hutchence’s demise was – he’d hate this – uncool.)
Now, Ledger is destined to be a pinup for those that love handsome heroes who never grow old, although with today’s voracious media I don’t think he’ll be wallpaper for as long as James Dean.
Ledger’s most recent great film role will also stand up longer than any of Dean’s. In Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) he is one of six actors – among them Cate Blanchett and a young black boy – who play variations on a theme based on Bob Dylan. The film is a tour de force, with a risk-taking script that flits between “Dylans” (the character is never called that) at various stages of his career. The exquisite art direction also gets every period detail right, even the colour processing: the verite B&W of Don’t Look Back, or the rich, sun-drenched colour of Woodstock-era Dylan as captured in Elliot Landy’s famous photos.
It is a bio-pic, but not a bio-pic; like Dylan himself, the subject of the film is an invented, mercurial character. I’m Not There captures the chaotic, surreal lyrics of Dylan’s mid-60s heyday and flits sure-footedly between the six incarnations: a young Woody Guthrie, a retired gunslinger (Richard Gere), an amphetamined dandy in Cuban heels (Blanchett), etc.
Ledger plays a movie star, Robbie Clark, the straying, self-absorbed husband of a “Sarah”-like artist (played with compelling intensity by Charlotte Gainsbourg). They fall in love in Freewheelin’-era New York, enjoy a pastoral idyll in Woodstock, and fall apart with the inevitability – and architecture – of a 1970s Cheever short story, accompanied by Blood on the Tracks on the turntable.
The cinematic and Dylan references in I’m Not There are endless, and part of the fun. At one point the dialogue is from Nat Hentoff’s famous Dylan interview in Playboy from 1966; at another the soundtrack re-uses Dylan’s ‘Turkey Chase’ from his soundtrack for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. It’s a game that will be replayed often, like Cluedo.
But it’s not played for laughs; with its fastidious reconstructions and rewriting of a well-worn fable, this is The Rutles for Dylanologists. Whether it is for anyone else is a moot point: certainly the foppish Brit critic Anthony Lane missed the boat in The New Yorker. But Haynes captures the images evoked by the familiar songs; in the Richard Gere/Billy the Kid sequence, it’s like Fellini directing The Basement Tapes. And the music itself – most of it Dylan’s own versions, unlike the released soundtrack – segues and weaves with perfection and sensitivity. By ripping up the rules of the music biopic and throwing them on the ground before reassembly, Haynes has done justice to the sly chameleon who wrote Chronicles and created a classic of his own.
As part of the research for my current project
It has been fascinating. The idea that nothing happened in New Zealand during the 1950s is a myth perpetrated by, I don’t know, Tim Shadbolt. It just happened behind closed doors after 6.00pm.
But Truth was there, looking through the tatty lace curtains for Reds under the bed, sly groggers, teenagers enjoying carnal knowledge (and many not), backstreet abortionists, petty bureaucrats and Cabinet ministers using government vehicles for their own purposes. (I love the one about the Minister of Transport’s young daughter using the Crown-supplied Zephyr to drive to work in Christchurch when there was a perfectly good bus service right outside her door.)
Cars were hard to get in those days, and so were houses. This is where Truth’s usefulness comes into play: bollocking the government for letting people sleep in car-cases, bollocking pub owners for refusing to serve Maori (take another bow, Christchurch). You didn’t get this in the Weekly News.
A recent comment on the NZBC site by poet Kevin Ireland – who made his own fun in the 1950s, much of it in Vulcan Lane's Occidental – seems apposite. He was discussing the current moves by Herald-owner APN to cut back the numbers of sub-editors on its periodicals. (Yes, it’s true. Soon Australians will be checking our spelling. Blame the Labor Party.)
Ireland points out that this has been going on for 40 years since offset printing first threatened the jobs of hot-metal typesetters. He saw it all happen in the 1960s and 70s, when Rupert Murdoch bought The Times, updated the presses and moved everything to Wapping. Ireland’s description of contemporary newspapers could be that of Truth in the 1950s, except there is very little entertainment coverage and most of the celebrities are British, such as the unlucky-in-love glamour-puss Princess Margaret:
“Fleet Street doesn’t exist any longer,” says Ireland. “The papers have gone and the whole bizarre Dickensian set-up with them. The miracle is that they lasted there so long. I got out just in time. What’s happening here with job cuts is what’s been going on just about everywhere else as newspapers have changed from being providers of hard news and political views to daily magazines of colour pictures decorated by shallow texts about murders, abductions, teenage drivers, dogs, fashions, personalities, entertainment, health issues, etc. Getting rid of the people who once maintained editorial standards is just another part of a certain-death process.”
More news as it happens from the files of Truth, a national treasure that never darkened the door of my parents’ house until one day in 1975, when it came wrapped around a cabbage. Meanwhile here is the paper’s editorial from 1953 after Hillary and Tenzing conquered Everest:
The Fitness of Things
A Press Association special message from London reports that when New Zealanders along the Coronation route cheered news of Sir Edmund Hillary’s Everest ascent, the Prime Minister, Mr Holland, “leaned out of the window of his coach, waving and exchanging smiles with New Zealanders who called out to him. He clasped his hands together and held them above his head as a gesture of success.”
It is to be hoped, for the sake of New Zealand’s reputation and sense of the fitness of things, that this report is incorrect.
Clasping the hands above the head as a gesture of success is an American version of shaking hands with oneself. It is much more in place in the professional wrestling ring, where it originated, than in a Coronation procession.
It will also not have escaped notice that it was Sir Edmund Hillary, as a member of a British-sponsored-and-financed expedition, who reached the summit of Everest, and not Mr Holland.
The Acting Prime Minister, Mr Holyoake, also showed some disregard for the fitness of things when, in giving the news of the conquest of Everest to the crowd assembled in Parliament Building grounds for Wellington’s Coronation ceremony, he said, “What a magnificent Coronation present for the Queen! How proud we all are that it is from our loyal little New Zealand!”
Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing would be the first to point out that they were members of an expedition and that their success is shared with their comrades and, to a lesser extent, with those who made their expedition possible. It will have been noted that in cabling their congratulations, both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh congratulated the expedition and not individuals.
The conquest of Everest was not “a present from loyal little New Zealand.” If it was a present from anyone, it was from the members of the whole of Sir John Hunt’s expedition and their backers.
New Zealanders have every right to be proud of Hillary and of the fact that he has been one of the first two men to reach the top of the world. But the limelight belongs to the men who climbed Everest, not to the political announcers of the good news.
Posts
All Comments
