Derek Challis and Gloria Rawlinson: The Book of Life: A life of Robin Hyde

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

In the 1960s, I visited the Wanganui Chronicle for a meeting with the then managing-director of the company. I knew that Iris Wilkinson, much better known then as Robin Hyde, had worked there in the 1920s on the women's and children's pages - the only journalistic work women were considered fit for then.

Coming from a family of journalists, I'd been captivated by the underground mythology that shrouded Wilkinson's heroically rebellious life - or was it her contemptuous disregard for social conventions? That depended on your point of view. Being young and it being the 60s, I plumped for heroic rebellion.

During a break in our meeting, I wandered into the Chronicle's print shop and asked if anyone remembered her. No one did. The place was typical of the time: cavernous, an unrelieved grey, grubby from unwashed years of lead and ink. Then a linotype operator pointed to a dozen or so trays of type stacked on an elevated shelf. He told me it was something Wilkinson had written while on the staff.

I put the matter of the type to the back of my mind until I could find time to urge someone to take proofs of the galleys, in case it was something special.

Well, I never did. So imagine my feelings of embarrassed negligence and regret when I read in The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde, published yesterday, that during her stint on the Chronicle she was seized with a spasm and started a novel to be called The Windy House. No trace of such a work survives.

Wilkinson's life loomed larger than her work for more than half a century. Her behaviour was talked about behind the back of the hand which made her all the more an alluring figure. We knew she was a feminist when it wasn't only unfashionable, but positively dangerous, that she flouted social conventions. We also knew about some mental illness.

Everything was overlaid by gossip. The facts of her life - in her letters and other documents - were in the care of a watchful gatekeeper, long-time family friend and former child poet Gloria Rawlinson, who was said to be working on the biography. Driblets of sanitised information were released, mainly as forewords to new releases of her work - as in 1952 when Houses by the Sea, a collection of her later poetry, was released by the Caxton Press. I still have my copy (bought for 15 shillings) and its very proper introduction by GR.

So the mystery that created the myth prevailed. During the 50s and 60s, I discussed Wilkinson's life with a number of journalists and politicians. She had had powerful friends, and I was struck by how kindly they were in their recollections but how guarded they were in their talk. I came to understand that they carried a stain of guilt in their memories.

For example, when I was in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, Jack Young, a member for 40 years, showed me where Wilkinson had had to sit in a corner of the visitors' gallery when she was covering politics. When I expressed astonishment that she wasn't admitted to the press gallery, he shuffled and said it had been difficult.

By the 70s, Rawlinson had quietly abandoned the biography, so it wasn't until 1991, with Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde Journalist, we got an expanded look at the writer. Now The Book of Iris has dispelled the mystery with a layer-upon-layer, letter-by-letter account of her troubled life which represented a neurotic but heroic contempt for the claustrophobic New Zealand of the time; although she put her problems down to sex, too receptive a mind and a lack of concentration on essentials. Well, any woman who would publicly flaunt a relationship with a married man in Wanganui in the 1920s possessed a rare kind of defiant courage.

The Book of Iris, a work of 300,000-plus words, is attributed to Gloria Rawlinson (who died in 1995), and Derek Challis, a son from the Wanganui liaison who did the major job and who seems to have the courage and desire for openness of his mother.

The story sometimes treads with heavy feet, but it leaves none of the minutiae of Wilkinson's extraordinary life unturned and held me to the end. And it portrays not only her life but her times. Imagine now an Auckland in which a debate between an American and a local clergyman on the doctrine of conditional immortality could draw crowds to the Opera House for six nights.

Wilkinson's prolificacy as a writer was amazing. From her teens until she died at 33, she wrote almost continuously.

Novels, autobiography, poetry, letters and journalism spewed from her typewriter. One wonders what she would have been capable of had she been freed from the need always to earn her way with journalism often of the most menial sort.

The letters excerpts give The Book of Iris the tone of autobiography for long passages of her life. They provide an evocative account of how she faced the world and remind that because people don't write letters or keep journals the way they did, we will probably never again get so intimate a look at how they felt at various times in their lives.

I think Wilkinson was a figure of importance in literary history as one of the first generation of writers who felt and wrote like New Zealanders. Her mother was born in Australia, her father in India. They married in South Africa where Iris was born. They came to Wellington when she was an infant, and she and her sisters were brought up in a philosophical rift between a radical left father and a conservative mother who thought of an England she had never been to as the yearned-for colonists' Havaiiki.

The autobiographical novel The Godwits Fly was inspired by her mother's sense of longing for Home, which also prompted the writer's long, lonely and courageous journey through China to London, where her last attempt at suicide was successful. She knew by then she was essentially a New Zealander in exile.

I have always been touched by the remarks of the New Zealand High Commissioner to London, Bill Jordan, to a small group of expatriate Kiwis at Kensington New Cemetery at the end of August 1939, a week before war was declared: "In the midst of the important affairs of state we must make time to bury our young poet."

Then he bustled off to No 10 Downing St. If he kept them waiting he had his priorities right.

Auckland University Press

$69.95

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist.