ROBIN HYDE

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22805, 2 September 1939, Page 18

ROBIN HYDE

What’s in a name? It is, I think, in one of his essays contained in “Remembering Things” that Mr J. H. E. Schroder philosophises upon the efficacy of names. Matthew Arnold, who had something to say on the matter, cited the unfortunate Ragg- For my own part I must confess tiiat it was the name that first attracted me to Robin Hyde, “Thq Desolate Star” bore her name, there was what Kenneth Grahame would have called a woodland .joyaunce about some of the poems ..in that collection which could not fail to attract. Then one acquired further knowledge of this writer, until finally there came personal contact, first through letters, and finally an actual encounter. She had with her at the time of her visit to Dunedin the dust-jacket of "Check to Your King,” and she had in her mind the matter for “The Godwits Fly,” into which she put more of herself than she put into any prose work of hers with which I am acquainted. (I must plead ignorance of the two Starkie books.) "Journalese” came as a revelation, .and also something of a shock. • In “Journalese” we were introduced to a very different being from the Robin Hyde of “The Desolate Star.” One caught the idiom of the news- : paper for which Iris Wilkinson wrote. It was an idiom that depended for its effect on a kind of slick travesty of the solemn and accepted cliche. To take an instance from memory, the author headed the chapter devoted to the deathstruggle between two newspapers, “Sunset and Auckland Star.” i Talent and Trick It may be said of Robin Hyde that in Grub street, or its New Zealand equivalent, she acquired cer- . tain habits which hampered her throughout her literary career. She was constantly tempted into alliterative by-paths or to perverse quota- ' tion, Whenever she yielded to this temptation she usually pulled her ■work awry and marred her effect. She did not put herself to school, ' as did Katherine Mansfield. As a

(specially written for the press.) fßy C. H. ALLEN]

thinker she appears to have been quite independent and quite fearless. She set out to ingratiate nobody. In her portraiture of Baron de Thierry she is almost Carlylean at times, but Carlyle is often attended by an imp, one might almost say a printer’s devil, with a flair for a scandalous caption, and down comes the sage of Chelsea to the level of Lambton quay. Few writers in New Zealand have evinced a greater power of communication with the dead than has Robin Hyde. There is a meditation, one of many, which has the Boulton street cemetery for its local habitation. The essence of it lingers in the mind.

Robin Hyde, like Lucas Malet, was sometimes betrayed into quasi-virile writing. This is sometimes apparent in “The Godwits Fly.” When women turn virile they are apt to dwell upon the obvious, one might almost say the protuberant. One seems to see two spirits at work, and these are not always reconcilable. There is a phrase, beloved of journalists, which one borrows with acknowledgements to the proper quarter in this attempt to diagnose the case of Robin Hyde. Perhaps one should speak of a term rather than a phrase. "The Godwits Fly” is marred by “high lights.” I think we should lay this fact at the door of “Journalese.” . . Labour and Insight

It is difficult to separate the opus from the author, and as one learned a little more of Robin Hyde one learned to respect her for her output. Robin Hyde among the archives almost suggests a contradiction in terms; yet she undertook research in circumstances of great difficulty for the sake of her Baron de Thierry. She rendered a service not only to him but to many readers. There is something approaching the clairvoyance that Kipling seems to manifest in his period portraits—to be found in “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and “Rewards and Fairies”—in the .opening portions of “Check to Your King.’ It is difficult to believe that Robin Hyde was writing of a London she had never seen. True enough, it was a London none of us had seen; but there is enough of old Chelsea left to help the native or the visitor on the backward search. Robin Hyde was neither native nor visitor. Her fellow countryman, Mr Mulgan, had his imagination stirred by actual contact, as we read in “Home.” Robin Hyde had not been Home. Whether or not she mentally refuted the theory advanced by Dr. Beaglehole, Dr. Findlay, and ’others, that “home is a deleterious myth, perhaps we shall never know. “Sorrowful Great Gift” There was one poem written by Robin Hyde which I rather think she thought worthy of a place in two collections. It certainly appeared in “The Desolate Star,” and I think it reappeared in- “The Conquerors.” This was an apostrophe to an English tree, or, to be more exact, to a tree in England. As a writer of verse she transcended “Journalese completely. My knowledge of what she wrote is incomplete; she may have written snappy jingles to keep the pot boiling: I have never come upon any. Robin Hyde was first and foremost a poet, or she was till the appearance of “Dragon Rampant. Possibly this book will place her on a plane with those two other New Zealanders who. .have made their mark in what has been called “inspired reporting.” But her need was to'write poetry, as Chattertpn s, was. One does hot apologise for employing a cliche when one declares that she had the sorrowful great gift. There is a (furious poem to be found in the collection, “Verse Alive, to which she. contributed. An old woman is upbraiding her. cohabitant because She .feels the call of spring while he is in thrall to passivity and convenience, as represented by the radio. There is a bitter-sweetness about this poem, which": Robin Hyde knew well how to induce. The pas-

sion she proffers or implies is hardly coloured by hope. Old age and infirmity presented themselves to her as spectres to be acknowledged. In actual life she could display a reformer’s zeal; but as a poet she is with Francis Thompson when he wrote a not very characteristic poem, “The Anthem of Earth.” She sought among the incidents of death itself for a certain radiance. One associates her muse with autumnal foliage rather than with the bursting of green buds. It was a robin who brought leaves to cover the babes in the wood withal, and we presuppose fallen leaves. One has no means of knowing whether Robin Hyde desired this or that of posterity. She may have desired a niche for heif Baron. She may have looked to that unborn reader to appreciate her Eliza in “The Godwits Fly,” and Eliza was Iris Wilkinson in essence. What I envisage for her is a sure place m the affections of any who love poetry for what it can do by. way of investing words and phrases with the writer’s being, or aura, if you will. Iris Wilkinson was a girl when she chose a Robin as her symbol, , It was no Christmas card Robin. Peace and the satisfaction of the psalmist at the ultimate awakening are not often implied in “The Desolate Star,” if they are implied at all. Nevertheless, Iris Wilkinson never jettisoned Robin Hy.de.