Authorgraph No.24: Margaret Mahy
As a writer, and as a person, Margaret Mahy isn’t easy to categorise. She both loves and resists her New Zealandiness; she wards off all attempts to turn her into a moralist yet fiercely defends the significance of the craft she practices; she’s a fantasist who claims ‘I always write about real life’; she has a zest and flair that can bring her a bullseye where many other authors don’t even recognise there’s a target… and at the same time she can’t offer any guarantees that a new book of hers won’t misfire completely. In short, she’s a writer who takes risks, who’s always changing, always capable of growth.
But then, the last person to be impressed by the writing of Margaret Mahy is Margaret Mahy herself. ‘I always start writing a story with a lot of optimism; that this time I have a really good idea. Then towards the end I start to lose confidence. The minute I had posted The Haunting I thought it was dreadful. Then they wrote and said they liked it so I thought it must be good after all.’ Certainly it was good enough for the British Library Association who awarded it the 1983 Carnegie Medal. Yet so inventive and unpredictable is this New-Zealand-based, internationally-known author that at least two other books have a claim to being her best: The Boy Who Was Followed Home, which gave illustrator Steven Kellogg as perfect a picture-book text as he’s ever likely to get; and The Great Piratical Rumbustification – a wonderful spoof that’s a sure-fire winner with all youngsters old enough to get the measure of a babysitter. Not that they’re likely to resist the charms of Mr Orpheus Clinker:
‘He wore a long, green coat and had a polka-dot handkerchief tied around his head. He had one leg, wooden, and one arm, tin. He wore a patch over his left eye. It did seem that there was quite a lot of him missing, but what was left was more than enough. You certainly would not recognise him as a babysitter. Indeed it was plain to the most shortsighted landlubber… that Orpheus Clinker was a pirate.’ In the case of Mr Clinker, to name only one splendid Mahy character, it’s hard to agree with his creator that no matter how well she writes a book it’s never as good as the idea she had in the first place – ‘with the translation of the idea on to a page, it somehow loses energy.’ Really? Then the energy of Margaret Mahy herself must be a sight to behold as she works off any looming writer’s block: ‘I go for a walk around the edge of Lyttleton harbour where I live and I talk aloud because often when I’m writing and certainly when I’m reading, I do hear the story as a voice speaking… and what I try to do then is take the voice out of my head and put it in the outside world and hear what the words sound like. And so I walk around the coast talking to myself, watching carefully ahead to see if anyone’s coming because I don’t wish to seem too bizarre.’ Much the same method was used by William Wordsworth, you may recall, though the nineteenth-century poet of the Lake District cuts a very different figure from this twentieth-century children’s author of Governor’s Bay, near Christchurch. Or does he? For a start, she too admits to being something of a recluse – and her home, with its large garden, umpteen cats and thousands of books doesn’t seem so very unlike Dove Cottage, at least in terms of atmosphere. One big difference, though, is that Margaret Mahy takes herself much less seriously. As a solo parent with daughters Penny (22) and Bridget (18) she has her sharpest critics living on the premises. Bridget especially ‘makes various comments – she feels obliged to be critical having read so many times how honest children are! For instance, of the next book I wrote she said “the beginning’s too much like The Haunting” and in actual fact this is what the editor said too… I’m very influenced by what people say.’ Yet it’s not surprising she was tempted to repeat her successful formula in The Haunting. Naomi Lewis pointed out that ‘a generous humour tempers the eerie thrills of this ingenious (plentifully quotable) story’, while in The Times Literary Supplement, Sarah Hayes commented ‘strange pictures of the mind invade with terrible clarity the ordinary geography of daily life. And the warmth and closeness that underlie the vigorous family dialogues bear no trace of sentimentality.’ Who would’ve expected such a triumph from her first attempt at a full-length novel for older children? Well, any admirer of Margaret Mahy’s possibly. In a couple of dozen books she’d already testified to her conviction that ‘a fairy tale is often the truest way of talking about real life that humour has a more spiritual function than people are prepared to admit.’
She was born in Whakatane, a country town in New Zealand, in 1936, where she lived till she was almost eighteen as one of a family of five. Her father was a specialist in bridge-building. ‘I write the kind of book that reflects the European middle-class family I came from,’ she says. ‘For years I could not conceal that my natural writing landscape was not Whakatane and the Bay of Plenty, which I love dearly, but another mongrel country where the Wild West and forests of wolves and lions melted into each other.’ In fact she’d still recommend The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island as books to grow up with ‘re-reading them over and over again.’ Her own first stories were written ‘from the time I was seven onwards… in a spirit of implacable plagiarism because, reading widely as I did, I rapidly came to feel that everything worthwhile had already been written. I do believe now that the games I acted out, talking aloud as I did so, were the real stories I was inventing.’ Later she went to University in the cities of Auckland and Christchurch, qualified as a librarian and held various appointments, all concerned with children’s library work. She’s still a frequent visitor to schools and libraries when she’s apt to don a green wig, describing herself as ‘a bit of an exhibitionist with nothing to exhibit’.
Echoing her own two daughters’ interests, her first books were written for a very young age-group and were published in the School Journal. Her big break came in 1968 when Helen Hoke Watts, of the New York publishing house Franklin Watts, read A Lion in the Meadow:
‘The little boy said,
“Mother there is a lion in the meadow.”
The Mother said,
“Nonsense little boy.”
The little boy said,
“Mother, there is a big yellow lion in the meadow.”
The Mother said,
“Nonsense, little boy.”
The little boy said,
“Mother, there is a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow…”’
And so on. On the strength of 26 lines in all, Margaret Mahy (pronounced Mah-hee, by the way) was offered a contract covering all the work she had produced in the previous fifteen years, as well as a sizable cheque against royalties. This meant the immediate scheduling of eight picture books, most of them still in print. Mahy texts have been illustrated by Jenny Williams, Helen Oxenbury, Jan Brychta, Brian Froud, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes, Steven Kellogg… though if she were an illustrator she’d like ‘to be Edward Gorey who said that all his books are about real life, and I believe him.’ But then, real life for Margaret Mahy includes ‘more emotional and intuitive components than is commonly acknowledged’ and the relationship between her books and reality has always been negotiable. Take the latest one to be published in Britain, The Pirates’ Mixed-Up Voyage:
‘The pirate captain charged forward and slashed at Mrs Hatchett but she, with tremendous skill and a sword of razor sharpness, parried his lunge, and cut through his thick leather belt so that his trousers fell down. He dropped his sword and seized at them desperately, then stepped on to one half of the banana and shot across the room, winding up in a dusty corner with the classroom wastepaper basket.’
Hardly suggestive of Long John Silver, you may think, or even of Orpheus Clinker. For her model here she went to The Goon Show, Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which she listened to on tape ‘over and over again while I did the dishes. There’s something about the pace that I liked and I suppose what I was trying to do was to make that pace indigenous to myself in some way.’ The result is a riotous and anarchic knockabout comedy which seems guaranteed to grate on the nerves of anyone beguiled by The Haunting… among adults, that is. Children, as Margaret Mahy well knows, tend to be more catholic, and flexible, in their tastes. ‘In books, as with love, we are always astonished at other people’s choices.’
So how – when not pacing the seashore or listening to the radio for inspiration – does she set about the job of being a writer? ‘I think if you’re writing to earn a living you can’t leave it to the chance of a particular frame of mind… you’ve got to keep words and ideas moving.’ Thus she makes an early start each morning in her den which has books and files overflowing on the floor and is dominated by a huge electric typewriter. This has an electronic attachment which allows technology to cut down some of the time used in editing. The first draft of her books, though, is always written in longhand in total isolation – apart from her favourite, a large black cat called Fletcher who lies asleep in a basket on her bed in the corner. One advantage she does have is a very clear idea of what she’s about. Her books don’t, for example, make moral points ‘perhaps because I am not as sure about these as other people. I try to tell an exciting story, something which children enjoy reading. For older children I try to suggest the world is not a rigidly defined place, that they can allow their imaginations to move and have a lot of freedom… children who are most articulate and deal most enthusiastically and capably with language are those exposed to a lot of conversation in the home, or who have had stories read to them. They have an expectation that they will be able to use and enjoy language.’ Hence her deliberate use of complicated words, sometimes for their sound, sometimes because the story makes their meaning clear. How many other writers for young children would call a character Mrs Discombobulous – and let context explain the word’s meaning? Not that this prolific enchanter of children is by any means satisfied with her previous work. ‘Many of my books I don’t like at all now.’ Nor is she satisfied with herself. ‘I am becoming less and less capable of giving a simple answer to anything, and try to justify this by maintaining that there are no simple answers, and there may not even be any real answers, only points where people agree not to argue.’ For all her uncertainties, however, she’s careful to preserve the twinkle in her eye and sums herself up with the declaration that ‘I am forty-six, untidy with things (not people) and entertained all the time. I am slowly disintegrating but I don’t mind, and would quite like to turn into a tree some day, but not immediately.’
Even at her jokiest and most slapstick, as with The Pirates’ Mixed-Up Voyage, Margaret Mahy insists her theme is ‘the infinite retreat of ideal life… that as you catch up with it, it’s turned into something different.’ In one respect for sure she does have a resemblance to the Wordsworth of The Prelude: her constant attempt to ‘negotiate the interface of my current state of being an adult and the state of childhood which everybody shares’. But the instant she says this she laughs.
The Books
(all published by Dent unless otherwise indicated)
The Boy Who Was Followed Home, ill. Steven Kellogg, 0 460 06723 0, £4.95
The Wind Between the Stars, ill. Brian Froud, 0 460 06661 7, £4.95
The Great Piratical Rumbustification and The Librarian and the Robbers, ill. Quentin Blake, 0 460 06871 7, £5.50: Young Puffin, 0 14 03.1261 7, 95p
The Great Millionaire Kidnap, ill. Jan Brychta, 0 460 06693 5, £4.50
A Lion in the Meadow, ill. Jenny Williams, Picture Puffin, 0 14 050.043 X, £1.10
A Lion in the Meadow and Five Other Favourites, 0 460 06722 2, £4.50
The Chewing-Gum Rescue, ill. Jan Ormerod, 0 460 06084 8. £5.50
The First Margaret Mahy Story Book, ill. Shirley Hughes, 0 460 05856 8, £5.95
The Third Margaret Mahy Story Book, ill. Shirley Hughes, 0 460 06625 0, £5.95
Raging Robots and Unruly Uncles, ill. Peter Stevenson, 0 460 06073 2, £4.95
The Pirates’ Mixed-Up Voyage, ill. Margaret Chamberlain, 0 460 06132 I, £5.95
The Haunting, 0 460 06097 X, £5.95; Magnet, 0 416 48420 4, £1.25 approx. (Spring 1984)
The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance, 0 460 06153 4, £5.95 (June 1984)
Leaf Magic and Five Other Favourites, 0 460 06151 8, £4.95 (June 1984)
The Witch in the Cherry Tree, ill. Jenny Williams, 0 460 05884 3, £4.95 (July 1984)
The Birthday Burglar and The Very Wicked Headmistress, 0 460 06158 5, £5.95 approx. (September 1984)
