Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (37 page)

But for Ngaio the next commitment was already looming. She still had
Dead Water
to wade through before rehearsals began for
Henry IV, Part 1
. By January 1963 she had written about half of it, ‘
but will no doubt
have to revise & re-write pretty drastically’.

When
Dead Water
was finished, she moved almost directly onto producing the play. It was a five-week task of working out the set and the costume designs, holding auditions, and then going through the production script. By April she had already had a preliminary meeting, ‘
lavishly attended
by the usual callow but beguiling brew of freshers’. Through early autumn, Ngaio was laid low with what would become chronic problems: ‘
guts, digestion
, neuralgia & strange pains’. But her focus was unfailing and she was undeterred by obstacles.

Three weeks before rehearsals began, there was no rehearsal room and she was having trouble casting the women.
‘Why,
I wonder
, out of some 2000 undergraduates is there never a better haul? Are they too anxiously involved in adolescent sex?’ She was pleased with her Lady Mortimer, a pretty, delicate, hard-working woman of Welsh parentage with an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland air’. The rehearsals rooms were finalized. A ‘
Dog Show at Addington
,’ she shuddered, in a letter to Doris McIntosh, ‘an icy, vast, & filthy location’.

They had five instead of the usual seven weeks’ rehearsal time, and this worried Ngaio because of the difficulties of Shakespearian comedy for students. They liked ‘being funny’ instead of understanding timing, ‘& waiting for the comedy to emerge of its own accord’. But she was quickly enamoured with their natural liveliness and verve. ‘Gerry Lascelles shapes up not badly as Falstaff’, Ian Kirk was a sensitive but not quite resolved Hal, and Huntly Eliott as King was excellent. ‘The more we work, the more we are staggered by the genius of this play.’ It was the language, the depth of understanding of human nature, of motive and impulse, communicated with ‘terrifying economy of expression’, that impressed her.

In February 1963, Ngaio wrote an extensive article on the arts in New Zealand for
The Times Supplement on New Zealand.
She talked about the emerging generation of New Zealand painters, writers and musicians who had begun to create ‘
with full authority
, as New Zealanders’. These were painters like Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Evelyn Page and Olivia Spencer Bower; writers A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R.A.K. Mason, Frank Sargeson, Denis Glover and Katherine Mansfield; and composers Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar.
She saw these as the brightest lights in New Zealand’s fine arts firmament, and Janet Frame as ‘our most distinguished living novelist’. What she lamented again was that ‘such talent constantly emerges and the opportunities presented in other countries are often irresistible’. Could New Zealand afford or be convinced to concentrate more of its resources on feeding the arts? ‘Controlling interests are, on the whole, less sympathetic to the arts and to pure scholarship than to industrial expansion.’ Ngaio had negotiated obstacles and slim opportunities by choosing popular fiction with a reader base overseas, but this meant that among her literary peers there was often little respect for what she did.

During the year she also worked intermittently on a book about New Zealand for American schoolchildren. She found it particularly frustrating because a personnel change in the middle of editing meant new priorities. A draft copy arrived back from the publishers requesting more writing, and the instructions from the copyeditor conflicted with those of the original brief. Outraged, she thought their observations were ‘asinine’. ‘
Anything objective or critical
was marked “too apologetic”; anything subjective was marked “make objective” ’, while for the plainest of statements they asked her to ‘explain this a bit more’. Ngaio was a professional writer. Because of her need for an income, even at the age of 68 she took almost every serious commission offered to her. ‘
Ten weeks vacillation
…have set me back,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh in November. ‘I mustn’t miss a single day if I am not to lose a year’s income…I never seem to save & really depend upon my job.’

Her taxation was exorbitantly high—so high, in fact, that she considered moving permanently to Britain to avoid double taxation. She felt exploited by New Zealand, a ‘
country that financially
speaking treats me as an Aunt Sally’. In 1964 a new rule in Britain meant that if she stayed longer than six months her tax status altered and she had to pay more. She was hit by a whole lot of official questions: How long was she in Britain the time before last? How many books did she write ‘
A) here B) at sea
C) in England. Awful lot of bull, but please the gods it gets us all somewhere.’ Her tax was complicated, because she now had books selling in approximately 15 languages in at least that many countries. She was a limited liability company in the United States, where tax laws were different again. Ngaio was a freelancer. Her income was unpredictable and inconsistent, and she was not fit in her senior years to track its helter-skelter rhythms. So it became a vicious cycle. The more she earned, the more she paid in tax; and the more she lost in huge unexpected chunks, the more she had to
earn. Tax was an unquantifiable fear that dogged her heels and occasionally bit hard.

It was Billy Collins who first approached Edmund Cork about Ngaio writing an autobiography. This was a significant commission. The agent broached the subject with his author, and Collins wrote to her in August confirming his interest. ‘
To show how keen
I am on this book I have suggested an advance,’ he explained. He had spoken to Ned Bradford of Little, Brown in Boston, who was equally keen. Collins was sure there would be ‘no difficulty getting a signed contract from them’.

Ngaio responded with enthusiasm and warmth: ‘
how touched I am
that you should think an autobiography worth doing: Believe me I am—never would such a notion have occurred to me of itself!’ She was quietly delighted. It was a mark of her publishers’ respect, and a money-generating project to keep the wolf from the door. She developed reservations, however, as she began to write. By the end of October she had ‘shrinkingly’ sent her agent a draft of the first chapter; he was encouraging. ‘
I have now gone
into strict purdah & with considerable misgivings, am pressing on with it.’ She allowed herself only one night off to see
Lawrence of Arabia,
which she thought superb for the photography alone.

She was chained to the task of a literary striptease, as Roderick Alleyn called it in
Died in the Wool:
‘you are using this room as a sort of confessional’. But this was not what Ngaio had in mind. She liked the idea of writing about her life, but the process of self-revelation was torturous. She felt unable to turn the prurient professional curiosity of the detective on herself. So writing the autobiography became a battle of balance between candidness and caution. What was acceptable as part of her public persona and what not? Which stories and relationships were part of the public domain, and which were private? For a woman who was Edwardian in her sense of propriety, getting it wrong was tantamount to a betrayal of friends and family. Ngaio even struggled with the book’s name. ‘
Still undecided
about the title,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh nearly two years later. ‘What do you think of “Black Beech & Honeydew”?’

At the end of 1963, she was already planning the next year’s drama production. She wanted to do a ‘
large scale Caesar
in Modern dress with a huge crowd spilling into the Auditorium’. She intended to use a stylized setting with action on different levels and ‘pooled lighting’. There was a vague plan to tour it, which would make the extra effort worthwhile. She wondered if this would
not be her ‘swan song with the kids’. The next year ‘
I shall
have
to catch up
with my writing’, and after that she hoped there would be a new theatre where students could produce their own plays. ‘I am a great believer in leaving off
before
you begin to flag’, and she intended to make her exit ‘with as little fuss as possible’.

In the meantime she had a ‘procession of boys’ coming up to the house for auditions. A bout of flu laid her low and she missed four rehearsals. The only one still standing among the cast was Gerald Lascelles, her assistant producer, also cast as Artemidorus, who ‘
carried on nobly
of course but couldn’t do much more than mark time’. She was worried that they would not peak in time for opening night. ‘Of course all dramatic dialogue must be orchestrated,’ she wrote to John Schroder. Shakespeare’s linguistic music was carried in the subtle inter-play between dialogue, in an ‘
overtone that is caught
and carried on by another voice’. She found it in
Hamlet,
but also in ‘Caesar, [in] the quiet little duets between Brutus and the boy Lucius’. She loved the moment of chemistry in a production when players captured the nuance of rhythm in the dialogue and ‘suddenly the voices flow together & mingle & make one thing’. In spite of the flu, Ngaio felt her students achieved just that unified flow. She was thrilled with the production. All in all, she felt that they were the ‘best lot’ of players she had ever had. They worked wonderfully well, the houses were full and they made a large profit of £600.

Eleven years had passed since Ngaio’s first staging of
Julius Caesar.
In 1953, it had been a symbol of her determination to continue in spite of the loss of the Little Theatre; in 1964, it might well be the final curtain on her career as a student producer. One
Julius Caesar
looked forward, the other back, but had there been any appreciable change in between? Theatre commentator Paul Bushnell argues quite rightly that they were very similar productions and there was ‘
little reworking
of the original composition. Ideas might be elaborated, but they went largely unchanged, except for details.’ This, he suggests, was because Ngaio saw her role as curatorial, and Shakespeare’s plays as artefacts. She looked for essential meanings and saw play interpretations as finite. This was true, but it was also the thinking of her era, and on the eve of retirement, if her ideas had not changed, they had certainly matured.

Ngaio returned to her autobiography as soon as the production ended. ‘
80,000 words
,’ she noted early in November, ‘& the end, I hope in view.’ She was cutting everything after 1950 down to a minimum because she had ‘no desire to drool’
on about old age. But she needed earnings from a new book and was ‘going eyes out’ to finish her autobiography so she could take a Christmas break with friends in the Marlborough Sounds. ‘
I’ve been lumbering
up the straight with my blasted book,’ she told Doris McIntosh, and before Christmas she wrote the final sentence. She feared the rewrites would be extensive but was relieved to have it done, and left for Portage, in Kenepuru Sound, on Boxing Day with Anita Muling and her friend Marjorie Chambers. ‘I shall go on tinkering for some time.’ The manuscript was already too long, but if she wanted to add any more something must be cut. ‘
I find myself
quite unable to see it in perspective & have moments when I think it a failure. Pity if I’m right after all the trouble.’

Her stay was an oasis of perfect weather and blissful long days of swimming and reading. ‘
We spent 10 days
of utter, utter laziness—the hotel at Portage had been taken over by an Australian couple with gratifying results on the cuisine, which was excellent,’ wrote Anita Muling to Olivia Spencer Bower. Ngaio had arranged for Val Muling to be buried in the Acland family cemetery at Peel Forest in South Canterbury. She had taken the Mulings there, and a friendship with the Aclands had begun. They had generously offered their cemetery, with its quaint stone chapel, as a final resting place for someone they knew Ngaio had loved. After her husband’s death, Anita Muling shared a house, and what many people believed was a lesbian relationship, with Marjorie Chambers, matron at the Christchurch Public Hospital. The two women were regular guests at Marton Cottage, and Anita Muling still attended most Sundays while Ngaio’s players rehearsed.

In the New Year, Ngaio was delighted to have John Dacres-Mannings staying with her. ‘
He doesn’t change
& is just the same affectionate, gentle, lethally absent-minded old thing.’ In January, Ngaio began preparing for another trip to Britain. She and Crawsie launched themselves ‘upon the hellish bosom of the cleaning-up-for-tenants tidal wave’. They carried things up the path to the whare at the top of the section that had been Ngaio’s bedroom as a child. Blankets and precious objects were all stowed away. Her exact plans for the year were not settled, and she anxiously awaited her publishers’ response to the autobiography: she expected ‘
some constructive observations
’. A first draft had been sent to her American publisher and she hoped Billy Collins would read his copy of the manuscript in March.

In the meantime, Jonathan Elsom was over from London to play the role of Messiah in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays for the Pan Pacific Festival. It was
‘lovely to see him again’, and she proudly told Doris McIntosh that he had not had a week out of work in the past year. She was also delighted to play host to Maureen Balfour, Nelly Rhodes’s second daughter, who was visiting her farm-cadet son. ‘
She & her brothers
& sisters are “my family”, & I couldn’t be more happy to think she’s coming.’ In late February 1965, Ngaio saw the York Cycle, staged at night on the banks of the Avon River. She found the production patchy, especially the directing. Elsom’s acting was ‘
a supremely sensitive
solo in the middle of an insecure &
groping
ensemble’. The setting was superb and the mounting very good, but the co-ordination of crowd scenes incensed her. ‘O! O! O! the lovely opportunities lost,’ she wailed.

Her American publishers got back to her in early March to say they wanted illustrations for
Black Beech.
‘
I am engaged
in a slightly melancholy hunt through old photographs,’ she told Doris McIntosh. Ned Bradford’s response was ‘gratifyingly drooling’, but the photograph safari through a dusty savannah of drawers and albums seemed endless. Billy Collins and his son Pierre visited Ngaio in Christchurch that month. He was ‘very pleased’ with the biography. This was a relief.