AN HONOUR DESERVED

This story was first published in NZ Author June/July 2011 and is reproduced with permission.

 Photo of Marilyn Duckworth by Marti Friedlander

The NZSA’s new President of Honour, Marilyn Duckworth, talks with FRANCES CHERRY about a varied writing life.

   

 As the award winning author of fifteen novels, short fiction, poetry, memoir and numerous other writings, Marilyn Duckworth well deserves to be the New Zealand Society of Author’s President of Honour for 2011.

 “It means a lot to me to be chosen this year as President of Honour for NZSA/PEN,” she says. “I owe a good deal to PEN NZ from way back in the days fifty years ago when I was nominated for membership by John Pascoe. It helped me over the years to connect with other writers and to believe in myself, something writers can have trouble with. We’re at the mercy of reviewers and indeed publishers, and it can prove a rocky ride.

 “I think Pat Lawlor, who originally founded the New Zealand PEN Centre in the ‘thirties, was on the committee with me when I first attended meetings. I wasn’t aware of his admirable accomplishment at the time. The best memory I have of him is an unkind remark about my first novel A Gap in the Spectrum, which he found a bit shocking. He preferred, he said, another woman writer also published by Hutchinson New Authors – Light Cakes for Tea. I’m afraid I never read it.”

 Some of the other members of that committee, Marilyn remembers, were Stuart Perry, the Wellington city librarian, Denis Glover, Antony Alpers, Ian Cross, A E Curry and poet Ruth Gilbert. “Mainly blokes.”

 “I didn’t say a word,” Marilyn says. “I just sat there listening and being ‘decorative’. That was my job according to Denis Glover. I was really impressed that I was invited to be on this committee. My first involvement in literary circles.”

 She feels she wasn’t a very useful person, apart from editing  the PEN Gazette which became the NZ Author in 1989, though she does remember going with Ian Cross in 1972 (and saying nothing again) to meet ‘somebody in government’ to campaign for the Public Lending Right, which later became the Author’s Fund.

 When she first started editing the PEN Gazette Marilyn used to take the copy in to Bayleys Typing Services. Bayleys were the people who earlier lost some of her chapters of A Gap in the Spectrum. In those days she did everything in longhand. Now she does some longhand first and then continues on the computer. Back and forth.

  “I nearly gave up when they lost it,’ she says. “But I’m glad I didn’t. I tried to remember exactly what I’d written. But of course I couldn’t. It was the later chapters where I made use of my time spent as a psychiatric nurse aid, in Surrey, and I had hospital scenes I was pleased with, but then I had to start all over again. What I did later might have been better, you never know.”

 Marilyn was twenty-two and already a mother of two small girls when A Gap in the Spectrum was accepted for publication by Hutchinson New Authors on the 9^th May, 1958. She had three more novels published in Britain but then there was a gap of fourteen years where she was busy with children and solo parenthood so mostly wrote to earn money – short stories, poems, scripts for radio and television.

 Then there came a time in the 1970s where she was married with three step children, as well as three of her own four daughters and she thought wouldn’t it be nice if  she could get more time to do some writing. So she and Dan, her husband then, decided to set up a writing studio in the attic next door to where they were living in Kelburn.

 She started a novel in this writing studio. It was going to be short and rather amusing but when Dan suddenly died everything went to pieces and a year later she couldn’t even remember writing the last chapter she’d been working on.

 “The Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, in 1980, saved me as a writer, but I couldn’t help writing rather heavy stuff that year.”

 In 1981 Joy Cowley invited Marilyn to her place in Fish Bay in the Sounds to do some writing. “Joy was writing during the day in her study in the old house and I was writing in the main house. In the evening she’d sometimes sit opposite me knitting or sewing while I continued writing. She understood if you’re writing, you’re writing.

 “It was really good to be able to sit and write because it had been building up inside me. It wanted to come out so I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I was really pleased it was happening and I was going to be a writer again.”

 Marilyn says she is honoured to be chosen as President of Honour. She is finding it interesting thinking about what she might say in the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture.  “It’s  putting me back in touch with my writing life, not just mine but of other writing friends, things I’d forgotten but now remember because I’ve been looking for evidence.”