Tea at Trianon: The War Novels of Robin Hyde

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 7, 2015

The War Novels of Robin Hyde

From Reid's Reader:

Passport to Hell by Robin Hyde is a book I have been languidly circling for years, always biting my knuckle to read but never quite grasping the nettle and actually reading. Now I have, prompted amongst other things by the hoop-la surrounding a new reprint in June 2015. I acquired my copy about fifteen years ago from a long-vanished second-hand bookshop as a dog-eared 1986 Auckland University Press reprint of the Revised Edition published in 1937. I stuck it on a bookshelf and it gradually disappeared from sight beneath a teetering, avalanche-imminent cairn of other impulse acquisitions.

            The full title of the book is Passport to Hell, the Story of James Douglas Stark, Bomber, Fifth Reinforcement, New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and is about the early life and times of a World War One soldier, and it was first published in Britain in 1936 to considerable acclaim —recognised by reviewers as an exceptional chronicle — so much so that that edition sold out almost immediately, with only a few arriving in New Zealand.

            Actually, the story of James Stark — or 'Starkie' — is told by Robin Hyde in two books. The sequel, Nor the Years Condemn, was published in 1938 and deals with the long aftermath to World War One, the period after Starkie returned to New Zealand, up to and including the Great Depression of the 1930s. I consequently fished out a copy of that book from the waters of Lethe, where it had lain undisturbed these many years, and devoured it whole.

            Starkie is an epic figure by any measure, a man alone, amongst men alone, when that was a dominant trope in New Zealand writing. John Mulgan, Frank Sargeson, John A. Lee were busy producing 'man alone' novels in the Thirties; but arguably Hyde's version was more emblematic than any of them: a mythic New Zealand narrative closely based on a true story. Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson) herself was a kind of honorary 'man alone': a 'woman alone' in a very masculinist, conformist society. Certainly she was a marginalised figure — a disabled, drug-addicted, solo mother of piercing verbal eloquence and stunning literary virtuosity. John A. Lee wrote in his diary at the time, that she was: 'A girl without a sanctified contract to breed. Poor girl, worth a dozen corpulent priests or parsons to New Zealand. Within five years she'll be in a madhouse or dead.' (Read more.)