Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (8 page)

The theatre provided Ngaio with the perfect place to stage a murder. It was a hermetic, hierarchical world where schedules and patterns of behaviour could be scrutinized and checked, and it was filled with sinister potential. Behind the stage was a labyrinth of backdrops, props and passageways; in front, when the lights went down, was a sea of blackness. Then there were the actors, their emotions heightened by the tensions of putting on a show and playing their parts. Among spectators, too, there was the buzz of excited expectation, and a tempting echo of crime novel readers, who were a parallel audience. It was an ideal backdrop against which to tease out issues. Ngaio was still intrigued by Pirandello’s
Six Characters,
with its metaphysical exploration of illusion and reality: ‘
If you long above everything
to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done.’ She was not yet directing actors, but she could direct characters. What interested her was the melodramatic way actors play themselves in real life.

‘Darling,’ [Stephanie Vaughan] said, taking her time over lighting a cigarette and quite unconsciously adopting the best of her six by-the-mantelpiece poses. ‘Darling, I’m so terribly, terribly upset by all this. I feel I’m to blame. I
am
to blame.’

Surbonadier was silent. Miss Vaughan changed her pose. He knew quite well, through long experience, what her next pose would be, and equally well that it would charm him as though he were watching her for the first time. Her voice would drop. She would purr. She did purr.

Enter a Murderer
had more dramatic pace and change of scene than
A Man Lay Dead,
and the dialogue was more compelling and implicit in moving action along. The characters were convincing and in sharper relief. The theatre was not just a venue for crime, it was the book’s defining energy, creating a cohesive, vivid piece of writing.

Ngaio would write sunk in an armchair, mostly at night, with a favourite fountain pen filled with green ink in an exercise book or on loose-leaf foolscap
paper in a hard cover resting on her knee. Only when the house lights went down did the characters come onto the stage of her imagination. The scenes would run through her mind almost complete, as if she were watching them. After she had written 1,000 words or so, the curtains were drawn and she would go to bed. She was disciplined and methodical, writing fluently with relatively few changes. Those she did make were written in the margins, above the line, or on the back of the facing page. The next day, what she had written would be typed by the woman she paid to handle her correspondence. She needed help and enjoyed her secretary’s regular company.

Ngaio found the recovery from her mother’s death ‘agonising’. Her father became a constant companion. ‘
[When] we built a hut
in the Temple Basin above Arthur’s Pass, he carried weatherboarding with the best of us up steep flanks in a nor’-west gale.’ One of Henry’s great gifts to his daughter was his spring of youthful energy. He gave her the ability to be physically and mentally young, long after youth usually lasted. In the latter part of his life he drew on it himself, tramping vast distances with her into the mountains. He played tennis, gardened, and continued his secretarial work. He was, in Ngaio’s mind at least, a Peter Pan figure who immersed himself in a Neverland of late-night Lexicon games and mild-mannered drinking sessions with the boys. She felt almost parental towards him, but there was a cantankerous side that could suddenly rear up and remind her of their true relationship. At a point when she could have become independent, the tables were turned, and Ngaio the only child began caring for her only parent. It worked because of an arrested development in them both: he was not looking for another wife and she was not searching for a husband—or even a life substantially different from that of her childhood at Marton Cottage.

In many ways Ngaio was an orthodox person, yet her dress was startling for a woman in New Zealand in the mid-1930s. A photograph taken by her friend Olivia Spencer Bower in 1936 shows her seated on the back of a chair surrounded by fellow artists. She is conspicuous in her mannish slacks, tie and beret. Yet she wore her
‘cette monsieur-dame’
dress to shock. Why? Was it to delineate herself as a modern woman? Was it to identify herself as a lesbian? Certainly, she knew it would signal both to some, and so this ambiguity may have been deliberate. But an androgynous persona was also commanding and theatrical, and more accurately perhaps expressed the woman she was. A person of independent means defined not by femininity, marriage or motherhood,
but by her talent and skill as a writer and director. ‘I think I’m one of those solitary creatures that aren’t the marrying kind,’ she would later write in her autobiography.

But this was only partly true, because there was a gregarious side to Ngaio that was satisfied by her women friends. She began picking up the threads of her old life. During the summer of 1933-34, she went on trips to the mountains with her
Canterbury College School of Art
friends. With her father’s help they built a hut at Temple Basin so they could live and paint together. She loved the beauty and solitude of the magnificent ranges. On hot days the mountains became a suffocating crucible of stillness and heat, yet she found it cleansing. Olivia Spencer Bower painted Ngaio at her easel sketching the foothills of the Southern Alps on a dazzling Canterbury day, squinting into the brilliant sun, absorbed in her work, at one with the environment. Concentration on her painting and comfort in the company of old friends eased Ngaio’s grief. Although Spencer Bower made a number of images of Ngaio working in the landscape, it was Phyllis Bethune
(née
Drummond Sharpe) who was her most constant companion, and other friends such as Evelyn Page
(née
Polson), and Rata Lovell-Smith
(née
Bird) travelled with her to paint in places like the Aclands’ station at Peel Forest in South Canterbury, and the Mackenzie Country.

In the years immediately after the First World War, Christchurch had become the country’s leading centre for the visual arts. Canterbury College School of Art was buoyant and had a reputation as one of the best art schools in the country, known for its painters, especially those who painted landscape
en plein air.
The city had an active exhibition culture.
‘The Canterbury Society of Arts [CSA]
was considered the most lively of New Zealand art societies.’

Ngaio and her friends were the cream of the art school. Ngaio had been enrolled there full-time from 1915 to 1919. Also attending had been Page, Lovell-Smith and Haszard; Spencer Bower had begun part-time study in 1920. Collectively, they represented a phenomenal blossoming of post-war female talent. Not only did they share the ambition to become professional painters, but they knew it was an unconventional role. ‘
Life at an Art School
is considered by many to be Bohemian; this, to a great extent is true,’ wrote Rhona Haszard. ‘To people passing along Rolleston Avenue…we may certainly appear eccentric as we wander about in our paint-dabbed smocks, singing tuneful quartets.’ As students, they ate meals together between classes, ‘worked at anatomy, perspective
and composition’, and had parties there after evening session ended at nine o’clock. Leslie Greener remembered Haszard, ‘
a lithe, slim figure
’ among her studio friends, ‘curled up in a chair strumming on a banjo while everyone sat round on the floor and crooned accompaniment’.

But heady student days gave way to the serious task of earning a living. In spite of her dramatic and literary successes, Ngaio had always seen herself making her living from art. ‘
It had never occurred to me
that I would attempt to be anything else in life but a serious painter: there was no question of looking upon art as a sort of obsessive hobby—it was everything.’ Her college years seemed to substantiate this dream. She practically paid her own way through art school with scholarships. She won the Pure Art Scholarship and Medal, worth £25, in 1917 and 1918, and two awards for figure composition in her final year. Art appeared to be her destiny. In order to establish her career, she exhibited with the CSA from 1919 to 1926, and also intermittently with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (NZAFA) in Wellington and art societies in Auckland and Dunedin. However, even though she was mentioned positively in reviews, her receipts were modest.

As students, Evelyn Page and Ngaio had shared a studio, along with Haszard, Edith Wall, Margaret Anderson and Viola Macmillan Brown, and after leaving art school they kept it on. By 1927, it had become an established sanctuary away from the strictures of Victorian upbringings and families. They were delighted, not just to escape there, but also to assert their professionalism as artists. ‘We rented a small room in Hereford Street,’ recalled Evelyn Page many years later.

It was a
tiny
room
…then I think it was Edith Wall who discovered the old
Press
building…right in the middle of Cashel Street, was vacant…and it was a whole top floor…it was brick and you had to go up a fire escape to get into it and…there were great big square windows all round so the lighting wasn’t too bad but it was very cold so we had points put in and heaters, electric heaters. We couldn’t afford too many of those so we had kerosene heaters as well…we thought we’d…have exhibitions…and we did.

They whitewashed the walls, and ‘Ngaio thought instead of having tea and sandwiches’ at the opening, that they should have ‘a hock cup…or a claret
cup’. So they pooled their money and bought a ‘vast basin’ of wine. They invited their friends, then ‘we thought, we’d better invite some possible buyers…so we looked up the telephone book and rooted out all the wealthy old dowagers of Christchurch and invited them too and up they came, up the fire escape and had their hock cup and ran round buying indiscriminately—it was marvellous!’

In fact, this was a point of radical departure for art in New Zealand: the beginning of The Group. The exhibition, with its ‘hock cup’ and dowagers, was its inaugural show. Group members were looking for an opportunity to show their work outside the CSA’s annual Edwardian clutter of pictures. ‘
There [was no] deliberate attitude
towards the Arts of Christchurch,’ said Ngaio of The Group’s genesis. ‘There were no politics. We were not a bunch of rebels, or angries, we were a group of friends.’ They were discerning friends, though, Page remembered: ‘
We invited
…only the newest, the most modern of our contemporaries.’ The Group would become one of New Zealand’s most important outlets for progressive painters.

Ngaio was a relatively pedestrian painter, and her talent glowed dimly in a constellation of stars. Page was beginning to realize her talent as a dazzling colourist who could apply Impressionistic brush strokes of impasto paint with a skill that looked effortless. Equally, Haszard was distinguishing herself, with pictures painted in the British Camden Town style composed of luscious paint-loaded mosaics of bold Post-Impressionist colour. Other talented painters—Spencer Bower, Rata and Colin Lovell-Smith, Rita Angus and Louise Henderson—were also establishing careers. In this context, many of Ngaio’s Impressionistic scenes of New Zealand High Country looked staid and formulaic. They were competent but tepid: she laid down the bones of the landscape but not its heart.

By the time Ngaio joined her women friends (and two men, W.H. Montgomery and William Baverstock), in their new Cashel Street studio in 1927, she realized that art would never be more than an abiding passion. She showed with The Group in 1927 and 1928, then left for England.

Her friend Rhona Haszard had departed two years earlier, and many of their contemporaries followed. It was difficult for artists to establish themselves in New Zealand without the authority of overseas experience, so they were lured away. A few, like painter Frances Hodgkins, remained abroad, but most came back. The news, therefore, of Haszard’s death after a four-storey fall from a tower in Alexandria, in February 1931, sent shockwaves through conservative
Christchurch. Many, already suspicious of her second husband Leslie Greener, believed he had killed her because of an affair she had while staying in London. Rumours abounded. His decision to bring his wife’s paintings back to New Zealand and sell them reignited controversy. Ngaio almost certainly saw Greener’s memorial exhibition, which he toured nationally in 1933, the year after she returned and began exhibiting herself. She showed with the CSA in 1933, and The Group in 1935, and continued to exhibit intermittently with The Group until 1947.

Among the paintings she showed at the CSA in 1933 was
Native Market, Durban,
taken from the photograph and quick sketch she had made on her voyage to England. Ironically, there is more visual interest in the bustling human energies and vibrant marketplace colour than she ever achieved in the remote Canterbury landscapes she loved to paint. The simplified forms of the figures and produce have a sculptural quality reminiscent of Paul Cézanne and his precept that Nature can be structurally reduced to the cone, the cylinder or the cube. She was influenced by work she saw in Europe, but also by Australian Margaret Preston’s magnificent Post-Impressionist distillations of white-on-white: in
Native Market, Durban,
these are in the white folds and twists of turbans, veils and dresses.

Her painting
In the Quarry
was exhibited at the CSA in 1935. The subject is a group of local relief workers building a section of Valley Road close to her home on the Cashmere Hills. She looks down on the scene from above. The summer day is hot, and men work, sit, stand or laze lethargically in wheelbarrows. The work is a vivid communication of an ordinary scene. Forms are simplified and geometric. Captivating contrasts of work and repose, blazing light and deep shadow, and the warm cream of a dusty dirt road cut through lush green grass, activate the canvas. At The Group exhibition that opened in early September 1932, English é
migr
é
and Post-Impressionist Christopher Perkins showed four oils and a group of drawings. His hard-edged naturalism, with its simplified form and colour, pointed to a new direction in New Zealand art. Ngaio had seen the exhibition, and his drawing
Employed,
reproduced in
Art New Zealand
in September 1932. This almost certainly influenced her
In the Quarry.
She called it
Still Life
for the CSA catalogue, a pun as her novel titles often were. After the ‘mistake’ was pointed out by a literal-minded art society official, the painting was retitled and entered in the correct section.