Review: Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde is the second publication in a new kōrero series described as “picture books for grown-ups,” edited by Lloyd Jones and designed to showcase “leading New Zealand writers and artists working together in dynamic new ways.” In this publication, though, leading-dead-writer Robin Hyde (1906-1939) has snuck in between photographer Haru Sameshima and novelist Paula Morris.

The plan was a joint road trip to find “traces of Robin Hyde” and “to sense the past below the mown and overgrown.” However, lockdown, and Haru being in quarantine, intervened and writer and photographer were unable to travel together. Perhaps because of this, the book is not the spacious record of a conversation between artists that the first book in the kōrero series, High Wire, promises - where Lloyd Jones is writing to artist Euan McLeod who is responding in drawings.

Sameshima and Morris are relatively new “storm followers” of the “too wild inside” Robin Hyde. Morris says they have become “zealots” and “investigators” of her stories and her extraordinary representation of them. They feel they have to tell Hyde’s entire life-narrative and encounter all the problems of summary and a sad ending.

Sameshima’s beautiful photographs sometimes seem like illustrations of story rather than his responses to Hyde’s writing or places. To get the power of the images you need to read with a finger in the Notes to the Images where passages of Hyde’s are quoted in full. Sameshima is a publisher and creator of work with other artists but his collaboration with Hyde and Morris would have been more eloquent if his images had been arranged alongside or opposite Hyde’s words.

Some of his photos are in the genre of Ann Shelton’s asylum works, and crumbling factory buildings and abattoirs by Chris Corson-Scott but the landscape images create the soft depth, dreaminess and solace that Hyde found in hills and remote harbours. Morris contrasts Hyde’s reaction with her own; in the city Hyde was frightened by the dark but in the remote Whangaroa Harbour felt safe.

At times, the text is arranged to dramatise Hyde’s life. This a good-fit with the picture book format but means it needs to be read through, not dipped into. Overwhelming events in Hyde’s early and teenage years are encapsulated at page 34 with only one line of text. It is a lot to happen to a girl before she is 20.

This one-line (a remark from Hyde’s oldest friend) is faced with an image of a hospital room and following centre-spreads all of Hanmer (Queen Mary Hospital) where Hyde was a patient in 1927, after a mental and physical collapse following the death of her baby Christopher Robin Hyde the previous year.

The staged juxtaposition is accurate to the times. There were frighteningly judgmental attitudes to young women having sexual experience and getting pregnant if they did not cover up immediately by getting married. Meagre charity combined with contempt for grieving and mental breakdown did lead to incarceration in mental hospitals as punishment - and Hyde feared that. But the image of the Hanmer room, though now grimly aged, is misleading to what was actually Hyde’s lucky escape. Porirua Mental Hospital was the dreaded threat; she calls it The City of Dreadful Night.

It was at Hanmer she recovered, as did many until the hospital was closed in 2003. Hyde’s kindly doctor, Dr Chisholm, and the surroundings of the beautifully designed and appointed women’s hospital - which had only opened that year - especially the trees (pictured on the cover of the book) helped her recover. You can find most of this out if you turn to the quotations in the Notes to Images, but even with those it is hard to follow and a missed opportunity for image and text to speak together.

This staging of events is a staple of fiction writing but the opposite of personal reflective writing which I began to crave more of as I read on. There are moving connections; Paula’s childhood memories of being taken to the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the war casualties in her own family lead her to discover the ubiquity of traumatic war experience in the generations 1910s - 1930s. And a wonderful image of a relief sculpture (albeit not local) sits poignantly in relation to Hyde’s story of Starkie (Passport to Hell) carrying the body of his dead brother.

Part way through, Morris tells us she lives in Grey’s Avenue where Hyde interviewed returned soldier Douglas Stark (Starkie). This is another congruence I wanted to hear more of but re-telling the life story takes so much space that there is little room for reflection on the difference between finding history “under the mown and under the overgrown” or what aspects have remained of the sombre mood of Hyde’s times and what has changed and lightened.

There is always a tikanga to raising ghosts and letting them go - a question of how to do it best and with respect - something Hyde herself fretted over. Literary pilgrimages made by Hyde enthusiasts lend both seriousness and lightness to tracking Hyde. The last time I took students to the Lodge, the old house then voluntary ward now part of Unitec, there was much hilarity (after the fact) when a custodian informed the students that the paint scribbles on the probably-1980s-painted inside door of Hyde’s writing attic were scratched by Hyde trying to get out! (See images here on pages 13 and 56-57.)

Thinking you can find a writer in the places they lived and wrote is naive and amusing, easily satirised, but also powerful and important. Katherine Mansfield, writing in 1910, saw our national character as pragmatic and unimaginative - not believing in ghosts and unseen presences. From that perspective it is wonderful to see so many ghost chasers.

At a Whanganui event to celebrate Poetry Day several years ago, I met Redmer Yska who lives in Northland Rd near Hyde’s family house, poet Glen Colquhoun and other writers - all obsessives about Hyde and her work. Then, in Whanganui, last year I was a participant in another pilgrimage when lovers and scholars of Hyde’s were taken on a mini-van day trip around Hyde’s locales (the following day it was a paddle steamer). We lunched at the “hipster” café in the building where the Wanganui Chronicle was housed, read aloud at the Veitch’s house where she took part in seances, enjoyed pre-dinner drinks at the hotel in one of whose rooms the organiser of the expedition, Pat Sandbrook, conjectured Hyde’s son Derek was conceived, and dined with an invited local spiritualists at the house on Somme Parade overlooking the river, where Hyde boarded.

There are also poets who conjure up Hyde. Michele Leggott before she was a Hyde scholar, for example, and Gregory Kan in whose work you glimpse Hyde’s Wellington and China experiences alongside generations of his own family.

Shining Land is a finely produced, handsome book and it extends this tradition of artists and scholars fascinated by Hyde - even though it is not quite brave enough to leap off from what is known to something more explorative.

Reviewed by Mary Paul