A writer’s published diaries tend to occupy the literary shadowlands. Self-revelation mingles with self-deception; shoals of mundanity give way to depths of introspection. In his radiantly anguished journals, American author John Cheever’s “I wake … mount my wife, eat my eggs, walk my dogs” shares the pages with, “In the little skin of light on the water, I saw a bat hunting.” They’re a topiary genre, the emotional and intellectual life pruned to the sensibility a writer wishes to present. Virginia Woolf wanted hers to be “loose knit”, but certainly not “slovenly”. For Susan Sontag, the journal was for self-expression and self-creation. Whatever the artifice, an author’s diary retains an aura of the authentic, tempting one to read it as the final word on that life. “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,” American journalist Joan Didion instructs herself, and us.
Robert Needham Lord, one of New Zealand’s leading playwrights and the author of more than 20 plays for radio, television and stage, among them Well Hung, Bert & Maisy and Joyful and Triumphant, was also a prolific diarist. His plays reveal him to be at once an astute observer of New Zealand’s suffocating “half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise” and a subversive pioneer who cultivated a queer perspective at a time when sex between men was illegal.
Like other self-documentarians, he pondered the genre as he wrote it, wondering, “Are diaries an act of narcissism or self-torture?” At times, the diaries were a “stab for posterity or something”; at others, “a device for gaining perspective on one’s own behaviour, not a window for strangers”. That he donated his diaries, plus letters, photographs and manuscripts, to the Hocken Collections in Dunedin suggests he may have wanted a stranger or two to read them.
Libertine New York
Lord spent the majority of his writing career in the United States after establishing himself as a playwright in New Zealand. Over 17 years, beginning in August 1974 in East Haddam, Connecticut, the diaries document, sporadically, his journey through the glitter and garbage of libertine 1980s New York, where he sometimes felt “trapped in a ghetto of parties and haunts”, to his visits home to New Zealand, a country, he told an interviewer, “hampered by its smallness”. The diaries end in March 1991, less than a year before his death in Dunedin from an Aids-related illness.
Lord kept eight notebooks, progressing from ink to electric typewriter to word processor. He offers us glimpses of his ceaseless struggle to write (“… will turn my attention to writing for a while. Must. Have to. Must.”) to make money (“Do hope I survive. No money at all. Boring”) and to manage his allegiance to two countries (”I am not now & never will be an American but I have ceased to be a New Zealander).
More broadly speaking, the diaries are a spyglass trained on vanished worlds: New York City, partying on the edge of the Aids abyss before Times Square became a Disney theme park; and “Think Big” New Zealand, before potable coffee was widely available and the passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986.
In New York, Lord ran with a crowd that included David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon acted in his plays. Bob Balaban directed them. His life also had an intriguing supporting cast. The enigmatic Donald Cass, for example, appears once but memorably as “thin and strange” and dwelling “in a hotel on Lexington with blood stains on the walls”.
Roger Hall, perhaps New Zealand’s best-known dramatist, wends his way through the diaries. He enjoyed a long friendship with Lord and to this day keeps a photograph of him in a prominent place on his bookshelf.
Hall says Lord was indirectly responsible for his first stage play. “When he knew I was coming to New York in 1975, Robert insisted I attend the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Playwrights Workshop in Connecticut.” Lord introduced Hall to “everyone” and knew Streep and Christopher Lloyd by their first names. The workshop led to the writing of Glide Time. “That changed my life,” says Hall.
Lord was devoted to New York, despite constant financial difficulties that forced him to take jobs as a realtor and as a typesetter at a porn magazine. He danced at Club 54 and “pigged out on the balcony” at the Saint, a gay megaclub. He was “plunged quite pleasantly” at the St Marks Baths. He dutifully made the summer pilgrimage to Fire Island (or Isle de Flambé, as he calls it), sometimes cleaning summer rentals for cash.
He suffered due to months of unpaid rent and the silence of having his phone cut off. He was acquainted with the quiet thrill of “watching the snow drift down” over Manhattan or smoking hash “and so forth” until 4am, maybe breakfasting later in the day with “Granny Lisz”, (Gary Lisz a costume designer), both of them “feeling like shit and somewhat suicidal”.
Verily, no matter how much abuse Our Lady of the Subways dishes out, you will be grateful to call her home.
But for Lord, home was New Zealand, though when he returns to his birth country the diaries are drenched in dislocation and ambivalence. At Los Angeles airport in 1981, he overhears fellow Kiwis, the men dressed to “deny any sexuality”, their accent giving him “a warm feeling” that also “puts me on edge … Do I sound like this?” Still, he admits he has access to New Zealand in a way he does not have with America, where, “a gut understanding is missing”.
When in New Zealand, with family or taking his American friends on a tiki tour, he sees through the eyes of the recently returned. Being gay in a country that prizes “rude masculinity doesn’t make life simple”. He makes the grave mistake of comparing Christchurch to New York (“Just wish there was more life”). He travels to Raetihi with an American friend to find an abandoned opera house surrounded by fields of carrots. “What was an opera house doing here? Was Tristan ever performed?” This country looks like a “third-world backwater”, he concludes.
And yet, he writes, “I sense I am home.” Most of his work sprouted from New Zealand soil. “Just being here & the flood of feelings makes me want to write a new play.”
Before his time
And write (and re-write) he did. His diaries are filled with projects: a novel; a book recounting his return trips to New Zealand; rewrites of New Zealand plays for an American audience; and turning the diaries themselves into an epistolary Goodbye Book. Hall says, “He always had scripts on the go, whether for television, theatre, radio or film.” A number of his plays appeared off-Broadway or in regional repertory theatres in the United States. A New York theatre journalist labelled him “Broadway’s best-kept secret”.
And yet, as Hall says, financial success eluded him. Plays failed to gain traction. TV shows were cancelled. “He made lasting contributions to the stage and was before his time. But it was hard to sell local writing,” says Hall. “In that era, I used to joke a New Zealand play practically needed a government health warning to be produced. So he never quite had the major break he deserved.”
An abridged version of Lord’s original eight diaries appeared last month from the Otago University Press. Robert Lord Diaries is an exquisite volume of scholarship, edited into a compelling narrative with photographs, a complete index and illuminating footnotes to guide curious readers unfamiliar with his work and those who know it or were fortunate enough to be his friend.
The diaries’ editors are University of Otago professor Chris Brickell, editor and researcher Vanessa Manhire and cultural policy analyst and good friend of Lord, Nonnita Rees. Together, they laboured for the better part of two years, rendering Lord’s 160,000 words down to about 90,000.
“Robert was amazing in terms of sheer output and range,” says Rees. “The diaries reinforce how much work he did. At the same time, they reveal how many of his struggles he kept from the world.”
The diaries had been under embargo since Lord’s death, with access controlled by the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust, of which Rees and Manhire are trustees.
“We had a kind of gatekeeping function,” says Rees. “But we felt the time had come to publish the diaries. Rather than have people quote from them out of context, we wanted Robert to speak for himself.” The timing is appropriate as Playmarket, New Zealand’s script development agency, turns 50 this year. Lord co-founded it with Rees, Judy Russell and Ian Fraser.
As to editing, Brickell says it was labour intensive. “Finding the photographs and identifying people in them was hard.”
Manhire agrees. “There was a lot of repetition and some rabbit holes leading nowhere, lists of what he was reading and detailed notes on his plays that might not interest general readers. We wanted to create a narrative.” She also notes the diaries are fragmented, with gaps in writing lasting as long as a year.
“It was a good bit of sleuth work at times, finding out who people were and then locating them. We felt like detectives hunting down clues,” says Rees.
Even Rees, who had known Lord since his student days at Victoria University, found some surprises. She did not know, for example, that Lord had become an American citizen in 1989. “There were a few Easter eggs, too,” says Manhire. At one point I realised “Marc” was Marc Jacobs [the fashion designer].”
“Gay cancer”
Perhaps the most heartbreaking pages of the diaries are written when Lord knows he has contracted HIV, which he calls “gay cancer”. Lord returned to Dunedin in 1987 on a Burns Fellowship at Otago University and bought the brick cottage on Titan St that would become the Robert Lord Writers Cottage, a place for writers to work. Once again, Lord was ambivalent about home. Dunedin is otherworldly, “melancholic”: “like visiting your grandmother”.
But he liked it. As he embraces domestic life, including a recipe for a salmon dish in his diary, his illness gathers force. Rees says, “He knew he was dying of Aids, but he didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, so he told his diary.” Indeed, in October 1989, he writes, “I find there is no one I can tell my story to. Or maybe I don’t want to tell it.” A month later, “Am screaming inside. Suddenly petrified … ‘I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying’ keeps going through my head.” He worries his mother Bebe will be ashamed of him. In late October 1989, he makes the brutal pronouncement: “… I’ll never know intimacy again.”
Now, more than 30 years after Lord’s death, his status as a “gay playwright” asserts itself. While Lord, in such plays as Bert & Maisy, or his greatest success, Joyful and Triumphant, might seem the satirical bard of the New Zealand domestic scene, with its bright surface hiding subterranean torrents of regret and frustration, contemporary critics see another playwright.
Writing in Australasian Drama Studies last year, critic James Wenley and playwright Nathan Joe said Lord’s work was “overdue a queer re-reading”. Certainly, his early works, such as Meeting Place or Balance of Payments, in which parents pimp out their son to male clients, embrace queerness.
In the Playmarket Annual in 2020, New Zealand actor and director Shane Bosher wrote that Lord’s “articulation of gay experience shows extraordinary courage and defiance”. However, memory of this courage has faded. Bosher notes that the history of queer playwriting in New Zealand is “fractured”.
Even contemporary queer playwrights are largely unaware of a canon of predecessors, such as Lord or Gordon Dryland’s 1971 play, If I Bought her the Wool.
When I arrived in New Zealand from New York in 2020, feeling dislocated and ambivalent, I found sanctuary at the little house on Titan St. Lord describes it almost accurately in his diaries as “the smallest house in the Southern Hemisphere if not the world”. A few strides take you from the front door along a narrow passage hung with posters from his plays, past a study and bedroom, to a sitting room and kitchen with a view of the compact courtyard.
Generosity of spirit
Yet when I sat down at the writing desk with my defiantly empty notebook (“Must. Have to. Must”), an impish Robert smiled down from a photograph on the wall, and the house felt immediately expansive with his generosity as he welcomed me, a fellow “New Yorker”, “home”. This same generosity is laced throughout his diaries, as he launches careers in theatre or secures Broadway tickets for friends.
Other residents of Lord’s cottage sense his generosity, too. Since the cottage – which he left in trust for established writers to use as a retreat in perpetuity – opened in 2003, more than 100 artists have spent time there rent-free. The guest book bulges with offerings of thanks: poems, dried flowers, essays, lovingly rendered drawings of his cottage. Some have left records of internal conversations they had with him.
Diary editor Chris Brickell also grew intimate with Lord through this project. “I came to like him. He comes across in the diaries as complicated and human,” he says. Brickell hopes the diaries will reinvigorate Lord scholarship and put a focus back on New Zealand theatre. “Lord was transgressive and foundational to queer theatre in New Zealand. I hope a new generation discovers Lord.”
Manhire looks to the diaries’ afterlife, too. “I really hope the people we were not able to reach get in touch.”
Donald Cass of the bloodstained hotel room, that means you.
Life on the page
Robert Lord tells all to his journal
Robert Lord in New York
August 31, 1980
Saturday slept late and refused to go to the island [Fire Island]. Jay came round in the afternoon and we played Scrabble … I then played with his body, which was okay, I guess, but he does rather lie there like a dead fish.
October 27, 1981
Had a lousy night’s sleep after exhausting myself packing & writing notes & paying bills … Here I am, 36 & penniless, which is not exactly how I thought I would be in younger & more ambitious days … I do want to write about New Zealand & my life, I want to find out if I ever could live there again & how that country has shaped this 36-year-old penniless writer, typesetter, realtor.
Lord in New Zealand
October 31, 1989
I am surrounded by ghosts and I know no one. I know everything, my past is here, I am here now – but I am invisible.
One last cigarette & I will go upstairs and join the folks for a drink. I have travelled 9 or 10,000 miles this week, already New York is like a dream … Sometimes I wonder why I have been forced to spend my creative life grappling with words & the logic & rationality they demand … I wish I could paint; I wish I could dance; I wish I could go beyond language. I wish I could find a way of reaching directly into another’s heart. Words are my only tool. Sometimes I think perhaps I have not worked hard enough. I am still alive. There is time.
Illness
November 14, 1989
Rich [Lord’s brother] has medication for his gout and is having a blood test today – he went on at length about his pills and his illness, all most amusing. And I’m sitting there not mentioning my own vast armoury of medication.
October 19, 1989
Went to the hospital yesterday to see about getting a renewal of my various medications only to discover it is not the policy of the authorities here to distribute AZT to anyone who isn’t practically already in a coffin. This is most disconcerting. I have contacted my pharmacy in NYC and they are sending another month’s supply over. The doctor here suggested I could cut the dosage in half should I run short, and he thought this wouldn’t have too disastrous a result. By which, I gather he means I won’t wake up dead.
January 2, 1990
My attitude to the illness has been peculiar – I seem to forget about it and then find it nagging at the back of my mind or bouncing round the front of my mind. Am I just going to waste away? Having heard about the months of suffering others have gone through I’m petrified of the same – not so much of dying. And also it is the attitude of family and friends. In the past three months, I haven’t found anyone I can mention my situation to that it wouldn’t be an enormous problem for them to deal with.
Robert Lord Diaries (Otago University Press) is out now.
