Yesterday’s Papers

1. Sliver of hope

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compares this gloomy era in journalism to the film Sunset Boulevard, rewriting the famous quote of aging actress Norma Desmond: “Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.” She asks Phil Bronstein, editor of the troubled San Francisco Chronicle, to take her on a “justify your existence” tour. Bronstein drives her past the journalists’ bar, now empty, the police headquarters where they uncovered corruption, the SF General Hospital, once teeming with Aids patients. In magazines, when the circulation department receives its returns marked “Subscriber deceased: please cancel,” it’s a stark reminder that one’s readership is aging. But this is now a good thing, reasons Bronstein:

His tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer,” he said. “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

The reference to crusading journalist I.F. Stone (pictured above) was heartening - the Seymour Hersh of his day, for years he ran his own I.F. Stone's Weekly - and intriguing. I don't think he was a relative of Bronstein's short-term wife, Sharon Stone.

2. Cold beer, hot type

There are few books written about New Zealand novelists, but even fewer about its journalists. After the Fireworks is both, a biography of novelist and Auckland Star leader writer David Ballantyne, who died in 1986. It’s an evocative portrait of the loneliness of a writer in a hostile culture, diverted by the hard-drinking, hard-bitten but strongly bonded world of newspapermen in the 1940s and 1950s. Ballantyne’s first novel The Cunninghams was written when he was just 23, in 1947, and published in the US; it would be another 15 years before he published another.

Long sessions at the Occidental in Vulcan Lane were part of the reason, but he managed to get off the bottle in 1973 and produce a late flurry of work. After the Fireworks captures the smoky newsrooms, the pride and wisdom of the long-serving reporters and sub-editors, the daily post-deadline binges, the hidden subcultures such as the rundown flat at 301 Willis Street, Wellington, where journalists, poets, novelists (and even Douglas Lilburn) would come and go, knowing they could get a beer after six o’clock closing. Under the circumstances, the Aucklanders’ productivity is extraordinary:

“… visits to Willis Street were sporadic and impulsive excursions, usually involving drinking in Auckland on a Friday after work, catching the overnight train to Wellington, drinking at various Wellington watering-holes … partying on at 301, then catching the Sunday night train back to Auckland in time for work at the Star on Monday morning.”

The biography was written by Ballantyne’s friend Bryan Reid; the pair started at the Star on the same day in 1943. The book slipped under my radar when it came out in 2004 but – like Ballantyne’s best, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, from 1968 – is recommended.

3. Quality of Mercer

The Dominion Post runs the country’s best obituaries, but didn't quite get the tone right with a recent tribute to the former Dominion editor, Jack Kelleher. Portraying him as a cardigan-wearing conservative – and concentrating on the brief tabloid folly of Rupert Murdoch – doesn’t tell the whole story. A quick glance at Kelleher's journalism suggests he moved in a broad circle. His ghost-writing of forensic pathologist PP Lynch’s memoir No Remedy For Death is mentioned; erudite, stubborn, patrician, Lynch did not suffer fools. Kelleher could work the public bar as well: he was close enough to the “hermit of Hawera,” novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson, to be a key source for Julia Millen’s biography. His history of Upper Hutt reveals a rapport with Wellington’s hippest post-war bandleader, Fred Gore. And his sensitive obituary of Ruru Karaitiana in 1970 – the only one the ‘Blue Smoke’ songwriter received – indicates a newspaperman who never stopped working his beat (in this case, Wellington’s inner-city music precinct of the late 1940s: Mercer, Willis, Manners and Bond streets). Maybe not Clark Kent, but a very effective mild-mannered reporter.

4. A comic sign of health

The same week of Kelleher's death, I found Ballantyne's biography in a small town sale bin. Both reminded me of Julia Millen's biography of Morrieson, from 1996, which also hasn't reached the audience it deserves. The pair had quite a bit in common: their era, their profession, their obscurity, and their alcoholism. Unlike Ballantyne, Morrieson didn't leave a swag of diaries, letters and manuscripts, which made Millen's task more difficult. But by weaving in anecdotes from his fiction, and putting in plenty of leg work, she captured his drive and his demons, in that closed Taranaki world.

“Herbert had told me on the quiet that he reckoned Uncle Athol had got his teeth from Mr Dabney, the undertaker.” (The Scarecrow)

“What is this thing called gothic?” asked Morrieson, after a rare literary review during his lifetime. Just months before Morrieson died - yes, “another one of those buggers” who only became famous afterwards - Robin Dudding published two “appreciations” in Landfall 98 (June, 1971). Morrieson's champions were Frank Sargeson and CK Stead, and the issue had a cover design by Pat Hanly. Sargeson wrote:

We hear sometimes of somebody who intends a march on Parliament in order to emphasise some fact of human nature or human society. It would be a comic sign of health in the community (not to mention an immense compliment to Mr Morrieson, and his skill in revealing to us much about the inner nature of human life in our country), if Parliament were to march upon him and his home town.

Mate

Robin Dudding

Editor, 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.

________
The cover designers are: Ralph Hotere (Landfall 84, Islands 1 and Islands 16: Dick Seddon's Great Dive), Tony Stones (Mate 9), Michael Smither (Landfall 82), Peter Buckley (Islands 26), and Dick Frizzell (Islands 27). This obituary originally appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 11 May 2008.