Cullen John - In the Memorial Room

Meeting and Invitation

September, 1973

Today I received word that my application for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship had been accepted and that I am to be next years Fellow. The Committee would like me to visit Wellington for the presentation ceremony early in October, and I am to leave for France by a ship of the Paradise Line in early December.

Although I am not quite sure why I applied for the Fellowship Im looking forward to travelling, although indeed I am not a traveller and my first voyage out to New Zealand when I was nine years old, in 1950, gave me enough experience, I felt, to last a lifetime. The money from the Fellowship, however, will give me a chance to write a different kind of novel from my first two which have given me the reputation of being an historical novelist. Wairau Days might just be called an historical novel, but I did feel that New Families, with its emphasis on the private lives of the characters, might not have been dismissed as it was as another historical novel from the pen of a talented young writer.

Id rather like to write a comic novel in the picaresque tradition, a desire which is perhaps strongly proportionate to the lack of picaresque qualities in myself, for I am a dull personality, almost humdrum, a plodder from day to day with only an occasional glimpse of light, literally as well as figuratively for the disease in my eyes has worsened and in another three or five years I might not be fit enough to take up an overseas Fellowship: another reason, I suppose, why I applied for it. So here I am, shy, bespectacled, rather slow on the uptake, a reader and a student since my early childhood and an accidental novelist, for Wairau Days was written to correct or bring to full blossoming the half-truths of the story of Wairau. How surprised I was, that I so much enjoyed my task of telling the truth!

Although it has been a disappointment to my father whose natural desire was that I should qualify in medicine and take over his general practice, it alarms him less, now, that I should be on the way to being a successful writer (described as talented, and promising and not yet too old to panic at the description) than that I should have continued my shilly-shallying of courses at university. The Entomological Course did interest me while I was studying it. And for a while the prospect of Ear-Nose-Throat held me spellbound, and my poor fathers eyes were shining when he talked to his colleagues about me. Then came the blackout and the problem with my sight, and, though that seemed to be only temporary and the family accepted it as such and were cheered when by my accounts and those of the physician it improved (a physician is oblivious to his familys ills), I have not yet told them of the new problems with it. In some strange way I have fastened my hopes on the scholarship and Menton and I am determined to get there, and to enjoy it, and to write my new kind of novel, and then, when I return home, take whatever is waiting for me.

This last remark sounds schoolboyish, and might betray my English birth; it shows a recklessness which I have within me but which none may read in my face or behaviour.

I have a severe headache above my right eye.

October 3rd

The notice of the award appeared in this evenings newspaper:

WATERCRESS-ARMSTRONG FELLOWSHIP
TO YOUNG HISTORICAL NOVELIST

Harry Gill, 33, of Auckland, author of Wairau Days and New Families, has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship for 1974. He will leave at the end of November for Menton where he will live for six months working in one of the rooms of the Villa Florita, occupied during her lifetime by Margaret Rose Hurndell, the internationally known poet whose last three books were written at the Villa Florita before her death there in 1960. The Fellowship has been endowed as a living memorial to Margaret Rose Hurndell whose death at the age of thirty cut short a brilliant career.

So. Each of the five fellows before me has taken time to write a study of Margaret Rose Hurndell or to edit letters and one actually discovered an unpublished poem between the leaves of a book sold casually at the annual bazaar of the local English church. At the presentation ceremony in Wellington (which was held last week), when I was asked if I had any plans for making a study of Rose Hurndell I replied that I did not know, I would see how the land lay at Menton, although inevitably Rose Hurndell would be in my thoughts.

I said I admired some of her poems very much, particularly those of the last book, Rehearsals.

Two ladies at the presentation (there seemed to be mostly ladies and very very tall men, almost with their heads near the roof, in the small group surrounding me), Connie Watercress and Grace Armstrong, the two principal donors of the Fellowship, replied that Rose Hurndells first two books were their favourites, the ones written in New Zealand: The Harbour, and Manuka Night.

Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages, Connie said. And her Letter to Procne is now known all over the world. Just think!

I thought just. There is such intense interest in Rose Hurndells works, more so, naturally, now that she is dead, and her last poems have been compared in their purity and otherworldliness, their vision of death, to the Requiem music which Mozart left unfinished, and although they were written before her death they have the effect of being posthumous, of actually being written after death.

The conversation that evening was mostly about Margaret Rose Hurndell and her life and her family. I was told that her sister and her sisters husband had retired to live in Menton two years ago, and that two friends she had made when she lived in London came each year to spend the winter in Menton and to make a pilgrimage to the Villa Florita. Her work was known in the city. The city was proud that she had lived and died there yes, they were even proud of her death there, although her body was taken to London to be buried.

Towards the close of that presentation evening, when suddenly the talk of Margaret Rose Hurndell had died away, someone asked me I think it was Connie Watercress what I planned to write in Menton. I said vaguely that I did not quite know.

Im afraid I havent read your last book, Connie said. But Ive heard so much about it! The New Family.

I smiled and murmured, Yes, New Families.

Theres a shortage of historical novelists in New Zealand, someone said, as if talking of petrol or transistor batteries or vacuum cleaners.

So were proud to have you.

Will you be writing something historical, something French?

Do you speak French?

Did you know that Peter Cartwright, whos at Oxford now, thinks you are the finest historical novelist weve had? I havent read your Wairau Days myself but he said it cant be faulted. I read an article about it in one of the English papers. I get the Times and Guardian flown over.

The papers too thin, airmail, dont you find? It tears.

Were proud to have you. Perhaps therell be more financial support for the Fellowship when they know youve got it. We have to advertise you a little, you know.

Hes blushing.

So he is!

Well, Harry, well soon get rid of those blushes.

Your fathers a doctor, I hear?

And so the conversation continued until one by one the guests found their fur coats and went home, and I stayed a while by myself in the smoke-laden air, snaffling the last few savouries, for I was hungry, and a little drunk, and I went back to the hotel room where theyd booked me (Id refused to stay with any members of the Committee whod invited me) and I went straight to bed and fell asleep.