Robin Hyde

Looking for a home in this world:
Robin Hyde’s ‘placename’ poems 1937-39

Robyn Lendrum

ENGL 739 Research Report (Robin Hyde). University of Auckland, July 2003. Revised October 2004.

Introduction

Robin Hyde left an enormous body of work when she died unexpectedly in August 1939; she also left many unanswered questions about her life and her work, some of which are slowly being resolved as archival and biographical information is co-ordinated.   Due in part to letters Hyde wrote to family and friends, and to memoirs of friends in England at that time, we can establish in broad terms what she was working on by early 1939. These projects included a book about China (Dragon Rampant), a dramatisation of her novel Wednesday’s Children and a collection of poems with a distinctly New Zealand theme.   The centrepiece of the poetry collection was taken by most of her editors, especially Gloria Rawlinson, to be the sequence ‘Houses by the Sea’ which Rawlinson published in 1952 in her edition of Hyde’s later poems of the same title.

Unfortunately, Hyde’s papers were too disordered to uncover the shape of the collection being put together in 1939 or to find more than fragmentary evidence of groups beyond the ‘Houses’ poems.   However, it has been noted by Michele Leggott among others that there is a small group of intriguingly marked poems in the later part of the archive.   Each of these texts, described by Leggott as the ‘placenames’ typings (YK 24), bears a hand-written New Zealand location in a consistent site on the page. The question is, what does this group of poems represent in Hyde’s late poetry, and was it connected with one or more of the projects of 1939?

The textual history of the ‘Houses by the Sea’ sequence 1937-39 indicates that Hyde was working on at least one other group of poems, as described by Leggott in her introduction to Young Knowledge (YK 28).   Gloria Rawlinson further states that Hyde was working ‘on a series of poems to be called New Zealand Beaches’ (Houses 18). The beaches poems date from Hyde’s visit to Northland early in 1937 and some of the placename poems are to be found in the list Rawlinson gives of the projected series. In his biography of Robin Hyde, The Book of Iris, Derek Challis notes that the trip to the north of New Zealand ‘further intensified the sense of identity with her country’ (Challis 2002, 398). Hyde wrote in the autobiographical fragment A Home in This World, of the difficulty she had in finding a home, for both mind and body, and this work too originates in 1937.   It is conceivable that the place-annotated texts represent part of that search and in some way record or name places that provided a sense of security for the journeying self.

But what exactly do the placenames signal on the annotated poems?   Robin Hyde sometimes wrote or typed an address alongside her typed signature at the end of completed texts, but these were usually in the form of a street or postal address, such as ‘92 Northland Road, Wellington’.   The unique and fascinating quality of the placename poems is that the locations are written, in Hyde’s own hand, using the same pen and in the same area of the page – the top left hand corner.   The consistency of the writing is so strong it suggests that the annotations have all been made at the same time.   Because several bear a date (1937, and in one case 1938), we can probably assume that the annotation relates to some experience of the place or to the date of composition.   Some of the texts are unsigned, indicating that Hyde either did not consider them completed or that they are part of a larger sequence. Two of them conclude with a short typed rule, one of Hyde’s common signals for a component part of something larger.   The group is marked out by place, sometimes by date and sometimes by looking as if it is part of a series.

The Placename Poems

Most of the poems in question are held in the Iris Wilkinson Papers at the University of Auckland (AU); the rest are in that part of Hyde’s archive held by Derek Challis (DC).   The poems are listed below numerically according to the Auckland University inventory (which reflects Rawlinson’s 1959 chronological listing of the papers by approximate date of composition).

There are four other texts in the archive that bear a typed placename at the end of the poem and may also be associated with the group.   These texts are:

The two texts on Utility Linen have been typed on Gloria Rawlinson’s machine and the watermark of this paper differs from the kind of Utility Linen used by Hyde. The insertion by Rawlinson of these two typings into the archive complicates the situation of the placename poems; her intention in typing these texts is unknown but presumably they were part of her preparation 1945-47 of Houses by the Sea.   Copies of the four type-annotated placename texts can be found in <Appendix B> and their relation to the hand-annotated poems will be considered as the investigation proceeds.

Findings

A close examination of the texts was undertaken to determine any unique or common features that might distinguish or illuminate Hyde’s intentions for the group.   This involved looking at editorial history, physical characteristics and the content of individual poems along with the history of Hyde’s manuscripts generally.   Initial investigation of the texts confirmed that most are finished versions but there are untitled texts and some still unfinished versions bearing hand-written alterations by Hyde. Whatever the grouping was, it seems that in their hand-annotated state the poems were part of a work in progress; potential rather than finalised components.

Of the ten hand-annotated poems, eight are to be found in Houses by the Sea, either individually or as part of the title sequence. In her introduction to Houses Rawlinson states that Hyde was working on the series to be called New Zealand Beaches (Houses 18) but she gives no date for the duration of this work and has no further information about the proposed sequence.   Interestingly she does place together some of the texts that she believed may have belonged to the beaches series, including four of the placename texts, but she cannot accommodate others such as ‘Husband and Wife’, ‘The White Seat’ or the two poems located at The Lodge in Avondale because they do not fit thematically into the beach series. Rawlinson’s observation that Hyde was working on more than one group of New Zealand-oriented poems is supported by Hyde herself, who stated in a letter to Pat Lawlor in April 1939:   ‘I am polishing up two sequences in verse, both purely of New Zealand origin, though most of one was written six storeys up in Hankow’ (Docherty 299).  

Rawlinson published some but not all of the placename poems as a group. The rest she distributed into other parts of Houses, with sometimes unusual editorial decisions about their titles. For example, she gave the title ‘The Familiar’ to Hyde’s untitled version (‘Firelight, be my cat’) which has the numeral ‘13’ at the top of the text.   She also chose to use the untitled ‘Look upward: see the strange mountains of what-I-know-not’, renaming it ‘Titirangi, 1937’ – the location written on the page at top left.   In yet another curious move, she chose as her copytext the obviously unfinished version of ‘Sand’ which bears the ink annotation ‘Spirits Bay’, rather than a signed fair copy; however she may have been aware that the handwritten placename version is the latest-known typing by Hyde. The paper on which it is typed is Peco Bond and as will be explained later, its use dates the typing to after Hyde left Singapore for London in August 1938.

Typewriters

A vital discovery in the dating of the placename poems was that all the texts were typed using the same machine.   This was the Hermes Baby Portable Hyde is documented as having purchased in January 1937 (YK 23) and which accompanied her to China and England.   This machine can be easily distinguished from her previous one, which had a faulty key (see <Appendix A>).   Typefaces can also be used to discern the insertion of texts by Rawlinson into Hyde’s archive, as the machine Rawlinson used during the preparation of Houses by the Sea also had a characteristically defective key (see <Appendix B>).   Evidence of Rawlinson is found on the typing she titled ‘The Familiar’ and ‘placed’ at Castor Bay (as Hyde has labelled the untitled text), while the version of ‘Whangaroa Harbour’, which has a typed location at the end, is also from Rawlinson’s machine.

Using the typewriters to establish dates is important as some of the placename poems were composed before 1937. For example, ‘Hilltop’ and ‘Lover’, typed on Hyde’s earlier machine, are versions of the untitled ‘If I set my lips to thee, tree’ typed on her 1937 machine.

Paper

Just as important as the typewriter findings was the discovery that some of the placename texts occur on paper not seen anywhere in the New Zealand part of Hyde’s archive.   Two of the texts are typed on paper bearing the watermark ‘Peco Bond Made in USA’, while four others are on unmarked paper which is distinctively hard and smooth to the touch.   Due to their absence from the New Zealand part of the archive it can be assumed that both papers were unavailable locally to Hyde and were purchased after she left New Zealand in January 1938. Lisa Docherty’s research has identified the use of Peco Bond paper on which Hyde wrote letters to family and friends between mid-September and mid-November 1938. The earliest known letter on Peco Bond (to Rosalie and Gloria Rawlinson) is dated 15 September 1938; it was written while Hyde was on board the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, en route from Singapore to England (Challis 2002, 663).   This indicates that the typing of the texts on Peco Bond could not have been done any earlier than during the last part of the journey to England.   The American manufacture would not have been available in New Zealand’s British -dominated market, and it seems likely that Hyde obtained it either on board the ship or during her stopover in American-run Manila.

The second paper is unwatermarked and its use harder to date accurately. It was informally described by Michele Leggott and Patrick Sandbrook as ‘hard ricey’, though subsequent analysis has ruled out an actual rice component. Hyde’s use of the paper postdates her stay in Hankow, April 1938, because parts of ‘Houses by the Sea’ known to have been written there occur in draft form on it. One thing is clear: ‘hard ricey’ was a paper Hyde used for draft rather than fair copy because several ‘hard ricey’ folios in the archive have typewriter indents recto and/or verso, showing that they were used as backing sheets.   From what can be deciphered of the recto indents, it seems that AU 532.1 ‘Section and brick and grass’ was used as a backing sheet for typing AU 521.3 ‘Look upward: see the strange mountains of what-I-know-not’.   The indents thus strengthen the physical evidence linking two of the ‘hard ricey’ placename typings.

History

Though Robin Hyde lacked a permanent home, she appears to have maintained a firm control over her manuscript collection, even while travelling.   The exact location of her works while still in New Zealand is not relevant here, but the fact that she planned to have her recent manuscripts with her in England is documented in several places.   Derek Challis notes in ‘The Fate of the Iris Wilkinson Manuscripts’ that while she sent papers relating to her older, published work to her mother in Wellington for safekeeping, the more recent material, ‘work in preparation, the later poems from 1935 to the end of 1937’ was sent ahead of her to England (Challis 1998). Challis notes that she did take ‘some material, particularly the manuscripts of “Houses by the Sea” and other recent poems’ in her personal luggage, working on them notably in Hankow (April 1938) and Hong Kong (July-August 1938). ‘Faraway’ was composed in China, probably in Hankow as the crossed-out annotation suggests, but this does not necessarily mean that DC 640.1 was typed (or annotated) there.

The whereabouts of Hyde’s manuscripts is significant when linked to information about her use of Peco Bond paper. If we accept that the placename poems were annotated around the same time, the presence of Peco Bond typings in the group means the placenames were inscribed in England and at a time when Hyde had been reunited with all her books and manuscripts. One glimpse of the scenario is evident in the close resemblance of the Peco Bond ‘Husband and Wife’ typing to the version published in 1937 in A Caxton Miscellany. Leggott notes: ‘The [Young Knowledge] copytext, typed on Peco Bond in late 1938, is close but not identical with the 1937 publication of the poem by Denis Glover’ (YK Notes, ‘Husband and Wife’).   Perhaps Hyde retyped the poem in England from a copy (her own?) of the Miscellany, adding the ink annotation at top left, as she factored the poem into her developing plans for the placename group. Also lending weight to the scenario of an English retyping are the ‘hard ricey’ versions of ‘Give way to restlessness’ and ‘If I set my lips to thee, tree’; it seems unlikely that the earlier versions of these, on the old machine, travelled with her through China.   It is plausible to think that they were among the post-1935 papers sent on ahead to London.

Poetics

While all the locations named by Hyde in her ink annotations of the poems are places she visited or lived at for varying periods of time, the only other significant commonality is that they are all New Zealand placenames (with the exception of ‘Hankow, 1938’ which may not be part of the group since it has been crossed out).   The physical appearance of the poems ranges from the two-stanza lyric ‘Give way to restlessness’ to the six-page dialogue of ‘Husband and Wife’.  

One consistent element in Hyde’s poetry and prose was the relationship of each to her own life, and the strongly autobiographical character of her writing often enables us to contextualise her work.   Another feature, evident as early as her first published collection The Desolate Star (1929), is the motif of the search or quest for an elusive something or someone felt to be absent or lacking in the speaker’s life. The same impression of loss or absence is present in the placename poems.   The early work is part of a continuum in which the placename group appears to record, in its diverse locations, a journey of sorts through New Zealand.   A third feature of Hyde’s work is references to other worlds, times or states of existence, whether in spiritual terms such as the afterlife or Nirvana, or the simpler alternative space of another room in a house.   She seems to be constantly seeking a place where life can be more fulfilling than present circumstances allow.   Her autobiographical work A Home in This World epitomises this aspect of her writing with the defining statement that she feels ‘caught in the hinge of a slowly opening door, between one age and another’ (AHome 28).  

The placename poems cover such a wide range of styles that they could almost be seen as a sampler that links Hyde’s writing to actual places in her life. This is an interesting concept because it implies that the physical environment of New Zealand may have influenced her as much as societal and personal factors.   However, two of the poems appear to stand apart from the others and, perhaps not coincidentally, they became part of the sequence ‘Houses by the Sea’.   These are ‘Section and brick and grass’ and ‘Faraway’; the latter was published in CA Marris’s New Zealand Best Poems 1938. The annotation linking ‘Faraway’ to Hankow aside, this poem and ‘Section and brick and grass’ are identifiably about Hyde’s childhood, the major concern of the sequence they now belong to.   In ‘Section and brick and grass’ Hyde describes the boys ‘lingering home from school’ and girls with ‘long hair in plaits’ in the evening setting of her childhood home in Wellington.   ‘Faraway’ centres on a similar childhood memory: ‘In this place, I remember Faraway’ evokes the empty house where Hyde played as a child in Wellington.   But whereas ‘Section and brick and grass’ is firmly anchored in childhood, ‘Faraway’, with the line ‘the child, the stranger dares’, suggests a sense of alienation and intrusion into a world that the speaker does not belong to, and thus could link this text with the placename group.  

Of the remaining eight poems, each embodies Hyde’s general theme of seeking a missing quality or person.   Stylistically and structurally they vary significantly, but all are vivid in their imagery and use archetypal devices.   In ‘The Last Ones’ the shape of ‘the last black horse’ is an apocalyptic image as Hyde portends the possible demise of the Maori people.   The location of Spirits Bay attached to this text, with its reference to the afterlife of Maori tradition, is an apt site for a poem where there is a sense of leaving this life for another through ‘the world’s last door’.   In the poem Hyde blends Maori and European mythologies, creating a uniquely New Zealand voice.   ‘Sand’ is also placed at Spirits Bay (‘beyond the last fall of land’), however with its themes of failed female/male relationships the poem contains ideas that are also found in A Home in This World.  At the end of the first chapter of that work the narrator talks of finding a home in the love of another person and uses the image of sands to depict wasted love and lives. ‘Sand’ depicts the human body as sand, beautiful but empty due to ‘one wave’s anger’ and implying that unless we learn how to love each other properly, there can be ‘no flower, no fruit’ between men and women except a sad dependency and lack of feeling.

The remaining texts can also be linked to their location, and they share a common theme of loss or absence.   This can be the actual loss of love as in ‘Husband and Wife’, the absence of companionship as in ‘Firelight, be my cat’ or the sense of the passing of a race of people as in ‘Look upward: see the strange mountains’.   In a move found throughout her writing Hyde turns to the natural world in an effort to find or depict what she seeks, thus linking humans to their environment.   This seems an important connection considering that it is the writing of physical places onto these texts that unites them in the first instance.   The wife in ‘Husband and Wife’, for example, is described as a ‘vague mirrored dryad’ by her husband who fails to recognise the woman he once loved, while in ‘If I set my lips to thee, tree’ the speaker seems to be seeking her lover in the physical landscape.

If we follow this notion of a search for love, the two poems annotated ‘The Grey Lodge’ become clearer in their association with the others.   Hyde came to depend on and care deeply for her psychiatrist, Dr Gilbert Tothill, and these texts suggest an unfulfilled love for a male figure that has a life-sustaining role for her.   In ‘Give way to restlessness’ the beloved has gone away and may ‘not come this way again’, leaving the speaker in a world narrowed ‘between two pine-folds’ – a direct link to the environs of The Lodge in Avondale with its distinctive pine trees (Leggott, Notes for YK, ‘The Well in the Forest’). Leggott also notes that a manuscript of the poem, untitled, occurs as part of Hyde’s 1935 Journal entry of 30 April. This entry is a direct address to Dr Tothill, and though the poem was subsequently used in Hyde’s unpublished novel, ‘The Unbelievers’ (1935), its original impetus is clearly grounded in her experience of The Lodge.   ‘If I set my lips to thee, tree’ is more cryptic but, as noted above, the speaker is seeking the sustenance of a lover in the natural world, suggesting the image of a man who is as essential to her as the air and earth are to life. Manuscript sources for the poem indicate that it was probably composed 1935-36 (Leggott, Notes for YK, ‘Out of the crowd’, ‘Hilltop’, ‘Lover’).

Of the three remaining poems, ‘Look upward: see the strange mountains’, ‘The White Seat’ and ‘Firelight, be my cat’, the presences being sought seem less unified.   ‘Firelight, be my cat’ expresses the loneliness that Hyde felt when living on her own at Castor Bay and Milford mid to late 1937 where even though she often seemed happy and wrote prolifically, she lacked companionship and the support of her doctors.   The speaker wants a fire or a cat, two symbols of comfort unavailable in her present surroundings. The presence of the cat, traditional symbol of a witch’s familiar, and the poem’s alternative title ‘The Familiar’ connote witches and magic but the text does not otherwise dwell on this association.   Hyde rented briefly at Titirangi at the end of 1937, before leaving on her own nomadic journey and perhaps the thought of her future intersected with ideas about past cultures in ‘Look upward: see the strange mountains’ to create a reflection on the loss of the past and its peoples.   ‘The White Seat’ is also a meditation on personal history, as the seat in question was a trysting place for herself and Harry Sweetman, her first love (Leggott, Notes for YK, ‘The White Seat’).   Like ‘The Last Ones’ this poem has distinctly New Zealand images of the bush and the stars (‘silver keas’) of the Southern Cross, yet Hyde links it to a wider vista; the ‘gleaning bride’ of Boaz is a reference to Ruth in the Old Testament.   The alienation Ruth suffers, away from her family and native land seems to suggest Hyde’s empathy; the home of her youth is now also in ‘fields afar’.

Conclusions

The textual and historical analysis shows that these poems were typed after January 1937 and annotated sometime after Hyde’s retrieval of the manuscripts that awaited her on arrival in England in September 1938.   From this dating of the annotations we can deduce that Hyde was indeed sorting through her poems and making selections that were significant to her and in some way reflective of New Zealand experience.   The post-September 1938 dating strengthens their placement alongside the work she was doing on ‘Houses by the Sea’ in the same period, raising the possibility that the placename group forms a related sequence – perhaps the second of the two she mentions working on in April 1939, if ‘Houses’ is the one written mostly six floors up in Hankow.   The dating of the annotated poems to the later time in England would not be a problem as Hyde didn’t begin sustained work on her poetry until early 1939, due to her concentration on the writing of Dragon Rampant.  

But another and more intriguing possibility is that the placename group was meant to be part of or to complement in some way A Home in This World, as both concern the search for an entity absent or lacking in Hyde’s life.   One significant structural element of the fragmentary A Home is the use of untitled poems to conclude each chapter; however some of the poems are noted as missing from the typescripts of this work. Of interest here is the poem missing from the first chapter which ends on page 12 of the Ariel Bond typescript (Sandbrook 361) while the annotated version of ‘Firelight, be my cat’, also on Ariel Bond, has the numeral ‘13’ at the top of the page. It seems likely that a comparison of this page, now in the University of Auckland archive, with the typescripts of A Home in This World held by Derek Challis, will show that the poem in this form was once part of the prose work.   The firelight of the Castor Bay poem answers the wish for a blazing fire expressed in the opening pages of A Home as the narrator describes her damp and uncomfortable surroundings at Waiatarua in the Waitakere ranges. The boarding house at Waiatarua is where Hyde took refuge in March 1937 after exiting abruptly from The Lodge which had been home since 1933. Perhaps some or all of the placename group with its recollection of places representative of provisional ‘homes’ important to Hyde was intended to join or complement the prose writing in some manner. Whether ‘Firelight, be my cat’ was annotated before or as part of its appearance in A Home is difficult to establish in the absence of more detailed information about Hyde’s writing activities in England. There are no other extant poems on Ariel Bond with page numbers that fit the gaps in the typescript of A Home.

By the time Robin Hyde reached London in 1938, she was exhausted, ill, short of money and facing the depressing English winter alone. However, if homesickness is a contributing factor to the grouping of these texts, it is probably too simplistic an explanation for the annotation of the poems.   There were still many aspects of life in New Zealand Hyde despised, but it is possible that the physical environment was more deeply embedded than she had realised and that like other New Zealand writers perhaps she thought she too could find answers in the loneliness of ‘underpopulated New Zealand’ (DGround 358).   Like the godwit, the migrating bird of her first novel’s title, Robin Hyde never seemed to really find her home in any conventional sense of the word, but she built a series of places on her journey through life that would suffice.   The placename poems are perhaps a record of her continual search, just as the godwit is the eternal migrant, for ‘a home in this world’. As such, they create a valuable link between her poetry and her prose.

As a result of this investigation, it is possible to clarify the progress of Hyde’s placename poems from their individual appearances in her archive towards whatever grouping was intended for them 1938-39.   Because we have established some information about the use of certain kinds of typing paper, the poems can be listed in chronological sub-groups as follows:

The Placename Poems 1937-39:  

A Provisional Regrouping by Papers

 Ariel Bond, used in New Zealand, 1937 - January 1938

Peco Bond Made in USA, used Singapore, London and Kent, September – November 1938

Unwatermarked ‘hard ricey’ paper, used in (China and?) England, (possibly as early as April 1938) until early or mid-1939

Waterton Bond, used in England, December 1938 – April 1939

Unwatermarked, date uncertain

Utility Linen used by Gloria Rawlinson 1945-49 as she mimics Hyde’s typed placename texts.

This arrangement shows clearly the concentration of typings on the smooth (‘hard ricey’) unwatermarked paper Hyde seems to have used for less-than-final versions. Perhaps ‘hard ricey’ is part of the ‘polishing’ mentioned to Lawlor in April 1939 as she sorted out which poems would go into ‘Houses by the Sea’ and which would be part of a sequence that encompassed a wider sense of her homes in the world. That at least some of the second sequence moved nearer to final state shows in the two poems with (RH) typed placenames on better-quality (though unwatermarked) paper.

The potential of the placenames to identify another late sequence seems to have reached its limit, but the exercise has produced a better understanding of the movement Hyde’s texts underwent as she worked towards the final state of ‘Houses by the Sea’ and perhaps A Home in This World. Based on the provisional regrouping above, and noting the number of ‘hard ricey’ typings, it now seems logical to bring forward one more untitled typing on ‘hard ricey’ paper, lacking only an ink placename at top left to make it a bona fide part of the group.   This is ‘Hares on their forms at dusk’ AU 530, which like ‘Section and brick and grass’ and ‘Faraway’, eventually became part of ‘Houses by the Sea’:

This poem too straddles the domains of memory and place, concluding with an address to a mother now as distant as the remembered motherland:

Why didn’t you answer back? Perhaps the wind
Was I ….   you the deep earth, that would not care
(So listening,) for the litter left behind:
Flame pieces out your hair,
Your hands; never the quiet coast, your mind.

 

Appendix A

Robin Hyde’s Typewriters

Examples of typing from Robin Hyde’s first typewriter, which had a defective lower case ‘a’ key. On this machine, used until January 1937, the upper horizontal part of the key was damaged and did not print completely. The machine purchased in January 1937 had an accurate registration of this key and most others.

• AU 361.3  ‘The Well in the Forest’. RH’s old typewriter.
• Detail of AU 361.3 showing damaged lower case ‘a’.
• AU 361.1  ‘Give way to restlessness, to the empty heart’s disquiet’. RH’s 1937 typewriter, undamaged lower case ‘a’.

Appendix B

Gloria Rawlinson’s Typewriters

Examples of typing showing the difference between Robin Hyde’s 1937 machine and Gloria Rawlinson’s. The machine used by Rawlinson in the second half of the 1940s had a defective lower case ‘d’ key. The ‘d’ was damaged on the left hand face of the loop, preventing full registration of the letter.   Hyde’s machine did not have this fault in the respective key.

• Gloria Rawlinson to JHE Schroder, 22 October 1947. MS-Papers-0280-10-01. John Schroder Papers. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
• Detail of Rawlinson letter showing damaged lower case ‘d’.
• AU 503.3  ‘The Familiar’ (GR machine).
• AU 498.3  ‘Whangaroa Harbour’ (GR machine).

The letter to John Schroder, dated 22 October 1947 and now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, is typed on the machine that was used for ‘The Familiar’ AU 503.3 and ‘Whangaroa Harbour’ AU 498.3. There seems little doubt that Rawlinson retyped these poems at some point after Hyde’s death and inserted them into the archive.   The versions she typed of ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Whangaroa Harbour’ have typed placenames at the end of the text that appear to mimic what Hyde has done with ‘The Last Ones’ AU 501.3 and ‘Among Neighbours’ AU 499.2. As noted earlier, Rawlinson’s typings are on a brand of Utility Linen different from that used by Hyde.

The presence of typings from Rawlinson’s machine in Hyde’s archive is of two kinds. There are a number of poems from this machine and the one Rawlinson acquired around September 1949; these have capitalised titles and are clearly marked, usually at bottom right, ‘COPY’. Of more concern are those that mimic Hyde’s formatting and are only distinguishable by means of the defective ‘d’ and/or the paper they are typed on.

Rawlinson’s post-1949 typewriter is more difficult to discern, but its presence in the typescript of The Book of Nadath has been noted (Nadath xxxvii), and points to Rawlinson’s emendation of that text sometime between 1949 and 1959. A list of typings from Rawlinson’s machines in Hyde’s archive will shortly be added to the University of Auckland’s inventory of the collection.

Primary Sources

The Book of Nadath.   Ed. Michele Leggott.   Auckland: Auckland UP, 1999.   (Nadath)

A Home in This World.   Ed. Derek Challis. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984.   (AHome)

Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist.   Ed. Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews.   Wellington: Victoria UP, 1991.   (DGround)

Houses by the Sea and the Later Poems of Robin Hyde.   Ed. Gloria Rawlinson.   Christchurch: Caxton, 1952.   (Houses)

Letter 21 to Pat Lawlor.   26 April 1939.   Transcribed and numbered in Docherty, .’“Do I speak well?”’, 299-301.

Poetry Manuscripts ca 1925-37.   Iris Wilkinson Papers 97/1.   University of Auckland MSS & Archives.   (AU)

Poetry Manuscripts ca 1938-39.   Derek Challis Collection.   (DC)

Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde. Ed. Michele Leggott.   Auckland: Auckland UP, 2003.   (YK)

Secondary Sources

Challis, Derek.   ‘The Fate of the Iris Wilkinson Manuscripts’.   Revised from Journal of New Zealand Literature 16 (1998): 22-32.   URL http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hyde/challis.asp

-------, and Gloria Rawlinson.   The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde. Auckland: Auckland UP, 2002.

Docherty, Lisa. ‘“Do I speak well?” A Selection of Letters by Robin Hyde 1927-1939’.   PhD thesis.   U of Auckland, 2000

Leggott, Michele.   Notes to Young Knowledge.   URL   www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hyde/yk.pdf
(Notes to YK)

-----, and Patrick Sandbrook.   Personal research notes on Iris Wilkinson Papers 97/1.   2001.

Rawlinson, Gloria.   Letter to JHE Schroder.   22 October 1947.   MS-Papers-0280-10-01.   John Schroder Papers,   Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Sandbrook, Patrick.   ‘ Robin Hyde: A Writer at Work.’   PhD thesis.   Massey University, 1985.

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Last updated 12 December, 2004