Your Unselfish Kindness by Mary Edmond-Paul

Author:Mary Edmond-Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press

II

1934–1935 Journal Fragments

MSX-8216 Alexander Turnbull Library. Acquired by the Library in 2009. Handwriting at the front and towards the back of a book entitled ‘Whitcombes New Zealand ROUGH DIARY 1934’ (‘Exercise Book 12’ in a sticker on the cover in Gloria Rawlinson’s sequence: Derek Challis uses this name, Michele Leggott uses ‘Rough Diary’).

DESCRIPTION: The Rough Diary is a thick quarto diary with a grey board cover with an illustration map of New Zealand in red. It includes advertisements and calendars for 1934 and 1935, pages of postal regulations, stamp duties, etc., and sections on taxes, labour legislation, local government and social items, as well as lists of banks and bank holidays.

PROVENANCE: The Rough Diary was probably sent with papers to Wellington or left at the Lodge when Hyde departed from New Zealand in 1938, and then sent to Edge and the Rawlinsons in 1945 after the deaths of Hyde’s parents.

The entries are mostly but not entirely on the recto pages, with occasional unrelated notes on the verso pages. The journal entries are not made on the printed dates: the first date is ‘September 24th’ (1934), and the only other date is ‘January 11th 1935’. Also included is the draft beginning of a story, ‘My Countrymen’. It is possible that Hyde bought the Diary cheap in the middle of the year and started writing at the very beginning of the book. It is also possible that the 11 January entry, written at the back of the book, immediately precedes the first entry in the ‘1935 Journal’ (pp. 182–3, 190). The sequence is interrupted by manuscripts of poems, two lines of another story and, in two places, torn-out pages.

As indicated in the following text, the entries include a poem written in pencil, which is illegible, and after that a half page of automatic writing. The Rough Diary was also used as a workbook for handwritten notes and drafts of twenty-five poems written between 1934 and 1935.1

No dates. I usually know when it’s Friday, because then is served for dinner something which in its natural state would have been called fish. Poor fish!

I’ve discovered, after reading through an anthology of the verse of living writers, what abstraction in poetry should and must be, if it’s ever to be at all. It’s the distillation of one’s most inward and secret self. This essence fluid, once released, is the correct colour-basis of poetic landscape, sky-scape, dream-scape. Most of the moderns, in a revulsion of feeling from the late Victorian verse which was simply music & anatomy, don’t know this, and write then abstractions – or attempted abstractions – outwardly. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote with a stethoscope: these moderns with a microscope – as Walter De La Mare, Barrie2 – a telescope, or a gyroscope. The results are startling but not convincing. I wonder if Epstein’s “Rima”3 is the distillation of inward and secret Epstein, applied to the green house of leaves, a fairy wood, and a fairy love? If so, what a splendidly savage thing it must be!

They – the moderns concentrate too much on technique.

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