Embarrassed writer

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33240, 1 June 1973, Page 5

Embarrassed writer

Banana-boat trips can, it seems, be very disconcerting for novelists.

“I would have given all away to live in a little j wooden hut, but instead I re-J turn to my little wooden rut,”j says Alice Glenday, the! Palmerston North widow i whose novel, “Follow, Fol-| low,” winner the Auckland, City Centennial fiction contest. has just been released by Collins. The hut in the unconscious couplet would have been somewhere in the Pacific Islands, which she has just visited by banana boat; the ru; is her life back in New Zealand, where, upon her return, she discovered that she was not very impressed with the second novel that she had put aside half begun. A CONTRADICTION Although her writing gives her intellectual and emotional satisfaction—ard a living—it fills her life with a contradiction. one seized upon by journalists and interviewers since she reluctantly lost her privacy by winning the Katherine Mansfield short storv award in 1969. She fears that her writing ability will leave her andspends hours avoiding it—! working in the garden, pottering around the house, even.one suspects, banana-boat tripping. Yet, when she finally! faces her work, often late at!

, night after a day of assiduous avoidance, her very ability is isure eventually to destroy the privacy that she cherishes so

I i much. Not that she is shy. Travel- • ling New Zealand with a man ■ from the publishing company ■ —which is why she was in , I Christchurch yesterday — she ’would soon have to dispense with that luxury. But this elegantly dressed, I slender woman exudes a need

tfor privacy, one vhich is ; threatened by the very publicity that allows her to concentrate on her writing. She !is very aware that discussion I of literature is so often preIfentious. “Oh. nlease don’t

print that, I sound so artycrafty. I didn’t mean to sound so icky,” she says quickly aftei a perfectly acceptable comment on her approach to her characters. A review of “Follow, Follow,” in an Auckland paper has described her as an exceptionally gifted user of dialogue, and she seems proud but embarrassed about the fuss. There is also the fear that perhaps she cannot do it again: "Maybe I’m just a oncer.”

Nevertheless, she will not leave that second novel. “I have created the central characters—l can’t just drop them,” she says, slightly aghast as if discussing the abandonment of a bunch of orphans. Do her characters seem so real to her?

"Oh yes. To me they are so real. I enjoy conversation, I’m not the recluse I’m sometimes painted to be, but often 1 long to get back to my characters, to see what they are doing.” Alice Glenday prefers the short story to the novel—and not just for aesthetic reasons. “You c?n’ L make a living off book royalties, and they’re paying quite well—and promptly—these days for short stories.” She has been writing such stories since she came to New Zealand from her native Canada in 1947, man/ of them—typicallywritten under a pen name. The man from the publishing company mentions that

Mice could have written “The Great New Zealand Novel.” She disagrees. Whether she has, or will, really depends on what her characters are doing the next ’ime si gets round to having i look at them.