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Bloomsbury South

The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953

Auckland University Press

Ursula Bethell: The Mother of All ...

'I think of one who ... from her high garden / Studied a landscape for years ...' These lines from Section XVIII of Charles Brasch's long poem, 'The Estate', begin his tribute to his friend and fellow poet Ursula Bethell. In the last dozen or so years of her life in Christchurch, she drew around her a remarkable network of artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals, many three or even four decades her junior, who became prominent in the cultural life of New Zealand in the 1930s and 1940s.

The oldest of them were the writers D'Arcy Cresswell and M. H. (Monte) Holcroft, though both were more than 20 years younger than Bethell, in their twenties or early thirties when they became her friends. Many of these relationships were sustained mostly by letter – Bethell was an indefatigable correspondent, especially with those who had either left Christchurch or lived elsewhere. When war broke out in 1939 Brasch wrote to her from England: 'I hope you are not feeling, because of the war, that all your care for the young minds of N.Z. is negatived, was in vain. No; in spite of this, its irremediable tragedy, N.Z., & so the world, is a better place because of your cherishing of them, is richer; & that is & cannot be undone.'

Though born in England in 1874, to New Zealand parents from Canterbury's landed gentry, Bethell spent most of her childhood on a sheep station near Rangiora. She went to Europe in 1889 to complete her education in England and Switzerland, and during the next 30 years travelled back and forth irregularly between Britain and New Zealand. Her vocation as gardener and poet emerged when she finally settled in Christchurch in 1919.

    And later, on a hillside, with one companion,
    She planted different seed, the unaccountable
    Unseasonable word, that in its summer
    And winter too bore richly, proving all weathers
        Salutary to growth ...

In 1924 Bethell bought a property on the Port Hills above the city, which she shared with her companion, Effie Pollen, a New Zealander about five years younger than herself, whom she first met in England in 1904. Bethell's mature verse belongs almost wholly to the decade 1924–34 when she lived in Rise Cottage with Pollen – 'I have a little Raven / who brings me my dinner ...' – and where she created a garden overlooking Christchurch and the Canterbury Plains, with spectacular views of the mountains to the west and north and the Pacific Ocean to the east. She began sending garden poems in letters to friends in England, and eventually gathered them into a collection, From a Garden in the Antipodes, published in England in 1929 under the pseudonym 'Evelyn Hayes'.

This joyful and productive phase of her life ended with Effie Pollen's sudden death in 1934. Bethell was devastated. 'It means a complete shattering of my life; from her I have had love, tenderness, & understanding for 30 years, & close & happy companionship (in spite of the inevitable superficial differences) in this home for 10 years. I shall not want another home on this planet'.

    But finally alone, grieving and ageing,
    All she had cherished lost to her, and troubled
    In that most desolate thing her faith, she practised
    A winter obscurity where every season
        Struck cold into her heart ...

A devout Anglican, she soon sold Rise Cottage and moved to St Faith's House in Webb Street, Merivale, which she had earlier gifted to the church. Apart from annual memorial poems and some uncompleted poems of childhood reminiscence – later published as 'By the River Ashley' – Bethell seldom wrote poetry again. But the Caxton Press published two collections of her poetry – Time and Place (1936) and Day and Night (1939) – during her lifetime, and later the posthumous Collected Poems of 1950, so her work made its impact some time after it was written. In the remaining years of her life her creativity was channelled into her friendships. In the words of Brasch's poem:

    Yet in that winter there came, fluttering towards her
    One by one, hesitant in their uncertainly
    Straining youth, a dispersion, a murmuration
    Of spirits drawn by her wind-flung word and offering
    Homage, asking for strength;
    Who formed a faint galaxy far about her,
    A star-garden sprung in the waste nullity
    To offer her concern a new employment
    With talents needier than she had imagined
    Nature could ever be,
    Strong wilful wildings thirsty for direction ...

Brasch, for one, thought this aspect of her life important in its own right: 'Miss Bethell was a friend – & guide & philosopher – to so many of the young & aspiring in so many fields, & also to others not so young, that any future social historian of this period will be bound to regard her as an important figure whatever his opinion of her as a poet.'

Almost all of these 'strong wilful wildings' were men. Bethell did not lack women friends, but it was younger men in particular whom she cultivated and influenced.

* * *

Bethell's growing engagement with the cultural life of Christchurch stemmed from the publication of From a Garden in the Antipodes and the recognition it brought her. One early admirer was the author Ngaio Marsh, who described the book as 'much the most complete & clear writing that had been done in this country'.

Positive reviews by D'Arcy Cresswell and J. H. E. Schroder sparked connections with the local literary scene. Poet, essayist and playwright Cresswell wrote his review in London, without knowing who 'Evelyn Hayes' was. In his opinion, she was 'a writer of natural and unaffected verse ... It seems that the labour she loves has opened her eyes, in some degree, or taught her at times a modest and fit use of words, the first we have noticed, so far, in New Zealand verse.' Cresswell singled out 'Pause' for special attention. It became for him a kind of talisman of everything hopeful in New Zealand poetry.

In a belated July 1931 review in the Press, of which he was literary editor, Schroder quoted several poems in full, including 'Response', 'Time', and 'Ruth H.T.', commenting on 'the vividness of phrase ... and the exhilarating quickness of mind; and ... a corresponding range and suppleness of feeling'. Schroder and Bethell soon became friends and from November 1931 she began sending him work for publication in the Press, including 'By Burke's Pass' and 'The Long Harbour', two of her most admired poems.

Cresswell returned to New Zealand in January 1932, having made a considerable splash in London with his autobiography, The Poet's Progress, published by Faber in 1930. He was taken up by Lady Ottoline Morrell and Edward Marsh, both associated with Bloomsbury, and other literary luminaries. Back home, Cresswell lived initially in South Canterbury on his family's sheep station, writing satirical essays about New Zealand for the Press. These caused such an outcry that the series was discontinued, but they had a big impact on younger writers such as Monte Holcroft and Allen Curnow. Eventually the essays formed the first part of Cresswell's second autobiography, Present Without Leave (1939). Bethell told her London publisher, Frank Sidgwick: 'And D'Arcy Cresswell "the New Zealand poet" came to tea in the garden & I have taken a great fancy to him. He's better than his (so-far) works – No wonder the London lions received him into their dens ...' Their friendship was no doubt facilitated by their both coming from a similar Canterbury land-owning background.

One of Cresswell's first letters to Bethell was an excited response to 'The Long Harbour', published in the Press five months after their first meeting:

The 'Long Harbour' in Saturday's Press has given me great pleasure. It makes a splendid picture, tranquil, smooth & broad. 'the black, sea-bevelled stones' – New Zealand poetry might well build its foundations with these very stones. Verses four & five I don't think quite brought into focus. I am inclined to think you overtax your powers by dealing with more than the immediate objects ... It is a memorable, a triumphant moment for New Zealand, the day of its appearance in the Press.

One of the stanzas Cresswell criticised read:

    The sons of men, their inexorable wrestling
    with soil and storm here, seems but a beautiful
    gesture, now; craft and travail of women
    beneficent grace, beneath the silver shingle rooves;
    and swift succession of new generations
        the passing of a dance in a dream.

It was replaced in the final published version by:

    White hawthorn hedge from old, remembered
        England,     and orchard white, and whiter bridal clematis     the bush-bequeathed, conspire to strew the valleys     in tender spring, and blackbird, happy colonist,     and blacker, sweeter-fluted tui echo         either the other's song.

The comparison reveals the validity of Cresswell's preference and the sureness of his critical taste.

When Cresswell moved to Auckland in July 1933 he and Bethell corresponded regularly; unfortunately only his letters survive. He made the acquaintance of the printer Bob Lowry, whose Unicorn Press published his sonnet sequence, Lyttelton Harbour, in 1936. By this time Pollen had died and Bethell had begun thinking of a volume dedicated to her memory. In September 1934 Cresswell wrote: 'If you're to publish some of your poems in Ch-Ch why not try Denis Glover at The Caxton Press, 152 Peterborough St. They're a little press like Lowry's up here, & do beautiful work very inexpensively. It would be helping the cause of better printing & a freer press.'

Cresswell advised Bethell about which poems to include and omit and made further suggestions: 'Would "A Colonial Calendar" be a possible title? Then you could subdivide into Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter, devoting a separate page to each of these titles. They make a most distinguished collection, & if this country has any future, they must be a part of it.' Except for the title, which eventually became Time and Place, Bethell followed Cresswell's advice to the letter.

* * *

When the Caxton Press set up as an independent printer and publisher in 1935, most of its first publications were written by Glover and his friends, notably the poets A. R. D. Fairburn, Curnow and R. A. K. Mason, soon to be joined by Cresswell, whose sole Caxton title, Eena Deena Dynamo (1936), was a discursive account of his anti-modernist, anti-rationalist philosophy. With his London reputation, Cresswell brought a certain mana and respectability to Caxton's ranks.

It is unlikely that Caxton would have had the opportunity to publish Bethell without Cresswell's advocacy. She was a senior poet widely respected by younger writers. Furthermore, her presence brought a modicum of gender balance to Caxton's list: she was their first woman writer, and indeed the only woman published (apart from Robin Hyde in anthologies) before Ngaio Marsh's essay, A Play Toward, in 1946.

Publishing Bethell was a coup for Glover and Caxton, but what motives did she have for choosing them? It seems an unlikely partnership: the austere, ageing, devout and somewhat aristocratic woman poet and the youthful, radical, macho, cocky printer. Bethell herself sounded somewhat surprised by her decision when she wrote to Sidgwick:

I am sending you a little present by which you will perceive that you are no longer 'My publisher'! That privilege now belongs to a young N.Z. anti-God communist ... His enterprise 'the Caxton Press' housed in an abandoned stable ... is probably carried on at a loss ... Hitherto he has printed 'modern stuff' in bold and startling type & colours & it must have been rather difficult for him to see it the way I wanted it ... but I think it is quite good all the same, don't you? I have been glad to assist this local industry ...

The last phrase suggests an attitude of noblesse oblige on her part.

In the correspondence between poet and printer, Glover comes across as self-confident, even arrogant: 'Time & Place will not do. You aren't writing a treatise on the Fourth Dimension.' On this matter Bethell stood her ground, drawing strength from the fact that her friends Helen Simpson and Rodney Kennedy liked her title. She proved an exacting author, concerning herself with the minutest production details. Occasionally a note of exasperation creeps into Glover's letters: 'Although your little notes continue to flutter in like snowflakes the job is now out of my hands. I pushed through the cover on receipt of your last note, & enjoined the binder to make a good job of it.'

The title page of Time and Place had discreet touches of green, also used for the seasonal headings, 'Spring', 'Summer', Autumn', 'Winter', given a separate page at the start of each section of four poems. The book was hand-set in Caslon Old Face; 250 copies were printed on antique laid paper, much the largest print run Caxton had done until then; all copies sold.

The book was widely reviewed in New Zealand, giving Bethell a much higher profile than before. The most substantial notice was Cresswell's in Tomorrow. He opened by making somewhat unusual claims for the importance of her poetry for New Zealand: 'I wouldn't call the author of Time and Place our most accomplished poet. But I would call her our most autochthonous poet, with the most direct and impartial vision we have.' Cresswell continued with extended comment on the poem 'Pause' in From a Garden in the Antipodes, which begins:

    When I am very earnestly digging
    I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,
    And muse upon them, muscles relaxing.
    I think how freely the wild grasses flower there,
    How grandly the storm-shaped trees are massed in
        their gorges

    And the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent
        heaps....

    And ends: 'In a very little while ...',

    The Mother of all will take charge again,
    And soon wipe away with her elements
    Our small fond human enclosures.

After asking what was 'so refreshing and hopeful in these verses', Cresswell decided the answer lay 'in the relation to Nature, the point of view. The length of vision that intervenes between human labour, the common lot, and its vast and most characteristic surroundings in Nature, is here perfectly focused ... it's a natural, and for these times remarkable utterance, and it's poetry. It's this naturalness and vitality that make these verses, in places, so exciting to me.'

He went on to argue that the best of the poems in Time and Place had 'the same singular beauty ... At their best they are free of all matter but life and death. Such a singular primitiveness isn't found in English now ... But to find it coupled with a mature and sophisticated use of words, we must go back to the Greeks, though the Greeks have what this author lacks, a perfect form.' To demonstrate these qualities, he quoted the whole of 'Warning of Winter', which ends:

    But one, in dead of winter,
    Divine Agape, kindles
    Morning suns, new moons, lights starry trophies;
    Says to the waste: Rejoice, and bring forth roses;
    To the ice-fields: Let here spring thick bright lilies.

He concluded with another assertion of the importance of Bethell's best work: 'attention to these verses may permit a native poetry to grow. [Bethell], if not the first and most finished of our poets, is the most original, and the most significant of what we are rapidly forgetting, in this country more so than elsewhere, our health, and whence cometh our strength.'

There was also an insightful brief review in the Otago Daily Times, written by another friend of Bethell's, M. T. (Toss) Woollaston, a painter with a passionate interest in poetry. He attempted to define her special qualities:

'Time and Place' stands uniquely apart in New Zealand writing. In so much of the verse written in this country the conscience of the author is allayed too soon either by an easy ecstasy about bush and bellbirds, or by the excitement of banner waving in procession with 'The Modern School' ... In 'Time and Place' one is not asked to follow Modern School' ... In 'Time and Place' one is not asked to follow – one is invited to contemplate. Its peculiar flavour and pattern are of resignation, and all its rhythms are reminiscent.

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Excerpted from Bloomsbury South by Peter Simpson. Copyright © 2016 Peter Simpson. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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