RAK Mason launch (by John Griffin)
One of the stimulating things about the years at the UBS was the lively
humanity of almost all of the working relationships.
Jim McLean and Bill Thompson, the UBS auditors, were interesting and
likeable men whom I admired. I enjoyed working with them. One day in 1963 they
called me into my own office. They had taken it over to do the annual audit.
"What have you got to say about this?" McLean asked me sternly. It
was a sizeable bill from Meenans the liquor merchants, dated some months
earlier. With relief I said "That one’s quite OK. It was for grog we
needed when we launched Ron Mason’s book." "I don’t think you get the
point," said McLean. "Why weren’t Bill and I invited?" It was a
fair question. A hell of a lot of people had come to the Mason launch,
including many less deserving than our auditors. In fact I can’t remember now,
forty-odd years later, whether we invited anyone much. Perhaps
most of them just came.
Ron Mason (right) was the Burns Fellow at Otago University that year. He was 57 years
old, a poet admired by everyone, but his reputation had been earned thirty
years earlier. Then he ran dry. The Fellowship, everyone (especially Mason)
hoped, would stimulate a creative rebirth. Month after month Dunedin people
were like clucky hens waiting for a blessed event that would do honour to the city
and the university. It was in this climate of expectation and anxiety that
Mason’s "Collected Poems" appeared.It struck me that this was a time
when the book shop could do something that was friendly, interesting and
popular - perhaps even profitable. I rang The Pegasus Press. Albion Wright
readily agreed to launch at the UBS. He would come and so, if I paid the fare,
would Denis Glover, an old comrade of Masons who had worked with Albion on the
book. Denis had grown up in Dunedin.
Wright and Glover were not teetotallers and their behaviour was neither
predictable nor controllable, but I knew they would do their best for their
friend Mason and I hoped their efforts would take as conventional a form as
possible. I wasn’t entirely reassured by a letter from Glover in Paekakariki. "My
dear Griffiths," he wrote, then lost control of his runaway pen: "Dunedin,
ah Dunedin, does that spire still swim heavenward, or will it appear
foreshortened? Built, I understand, on the town section generously given by my
great grandparents , who then retired to their Mornington estate. God, if I had
it now there’d be no First Church and no oil company building either. A great
big beer house cum brothel, that’s what Dunedin wants. Down with Chapman’s
monument, away with the peasant boy [Burns]with his bathrobe at the top,
hock the Hocken [Library], up with Princes Street, down with the Rattray
Street wharf" ! Subsequently, when I was trying to persuade him to
board the homebound plane I did wonder if he had seen First Church or anything
else of his old city except the Captain Cook Hotel and the sites of the two
parties.
By some miracle Wright and Glover did arrive in time for the launch - with time
to spare in fact. They spent it at the Captain Cook Hotel and turned up noisily
at the shop, which by that time contained the biggest crowd the UBS had ever
hosted. They greeted Mason with loud and cheerful eloquence. He was beaming. We
had the makings of a pleasing occasion.
Alan Horsman, head of the English Department where Mason was based for the
year, set the ball rolling with some thoughtful and generous remarks,
persisting manfully in spite of some loud and irrelevant asides from Glover.
Then Glover, first addressing himself pompously to "My Lord Mayor"
and other dignitaries present only in his imagination, pulled out a copy of "Squire
Speaks", Mason’s verse play, and read it from end to end. Mason spoke
modestly, his face wreathed in smiles. That was that, apart from another loud
contribution from Glover, warning all light-fingered booklovers present that
certain of the books had been mined to explode if disturbed.
The party went on and on, with mounting exuberance. Half-full glasses were
perched perilously on the bookshelves, in front of the books. Lots of people
became unsteady on their feet. I gathered our principal guests and set off for
home in Maryhill followed by a fair number of others. Bob Stables, with one or
two of the staff, generously stayed behind to clear up the mess and shoo off
the last of the guests. When Bob at last turned up at Maryhill he was as bandy
as anyone I had ever seen, swaying slowly from side to side and smiling in a
simple-minded way. He told me he had finished off a few of the glasses as he
tidied up, including, he said, a tumbler nearly full, which tasted strange and
very strong. It was the glass full of gin that Glover had left behind when I
took him away.
Footnote:
I am most grateful to John's London-based publisher (recently retired) daughter Kate for forwarding this to me.
I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did. It brought back many happy memories for me of John and his huge sense of humour and fun.
John's funeral will be held at St Matthew-in-the-City, cnr of Wellesley St and Hobson St at 1pm this Thursday, 1st November.
Kate will not be at the funeral but she tells me that she will be " having a little wake for his London friends,
including Phil Thwaites and Patrick Wright."
John would approve of that, Thwaites and Wright were both close book-trade friends of his.
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