Passport to Hell is the story of 8/2142 Private J. D. Stark, Fifth Reinforcements, Otago Infantry Battalion N.Z.E.F., his youth in New Zealand and his experiences in the Great War of 1914–18. He returned to New Zealand disabled and without skills and like many soldiers found enormous difficulty in adjusting to civilian life. His drift into marriage, prison, violence, and occasional labour is told in another of Robin Hyde’s books Nor the Years Condemn.1 He survived the outbreak of World War II, married—for the third time—a twenty-three-year-old, Peggy Christina Linton, and suffered the ironic indignity for one of his former daring, of receiving two anonymous white feathers (Otago Daily Times, 10 January 1940). He died in Auckland on 22 February 1942, of bilateral broncho-pneumonia with toxic myocarditis, betrayed finally by his wounded lungs. He was buried in the soldiers’ section of Waikumete Cemetery by his friend the Reverend George Moreton, to whom he had asked Robin Hyde to dedicate Passport to Hell.
Hyde first heard of Stark through her investigative journalism on prisons for the New Zealand Observer. She joined the Observer in 1931 just after it had doubled its size, increased its price and aggressively sought more readers, believing that ‘there is a place in Auckland and the provincial district for an informative, illustrated, topical weekly, presenting not so much the ordinary news of the week as the news behind the news and comments thereon’.2 Or as Hyde put it in a letter to J. H. E. Schroder: ‘We are trying more or less, to steal “Truth’s” thunder without their unpleasantness: that is, to write bold & free as other papers mayn’t, but certainly not to haunt divorce courts & put harassed housemaids in the headlines.’ Following up this policy she ‘interviewed several convicts & wrote a pungent article about Mount Eden Gaol’.3 (N.Z. Observer, 9 March 1931: ‘A Convict’s Life in Mount Eden: Unpalatable Truths about Auckland’s Prison Fortress’.) Details from this article were to find their way into Passport to Hell4 but as far as I know she did not hear about Stark at this point. It is interesting however to find how convincing she was in writing of prison conditions for in the same letter to Schroder she observes, ‘And here was a compliment: the prison chaplain told me that the authorities spent hours hunting through the files for a convict named Robin Hyde!’ When, over a year later, she came to write an article on the chaplain, George Moreton, he drew her attention to a figure immediately recognizable as ‘Starkie’. Moreton had shown her letters from former prisoners requesting help:
There is one from a gentleman whom we will call Sammy—which isn’t his name. During the war, this man saved the Hon. Downie Stewart’s life, pulling him out of a bombed dug-out. He was absolutely fearless, and his chest is literally tattooed with bullet wounds. In Wellington he was once concerned in an assault cause, and got the worst of it. Mr Downie Stewart sent him to a private hospital and paid for a bottle of brandy—but this unfortunately was left beside the patient’s bed. Sammy revived somewhat—and when the doctor came in, he found a distinctly tipsy patient, in a cheerful frame of mind. This man sends occasional telegrams to plenipotentiaries in Wellington. ‘Dear Gordon, About ten wolves at the door, waiting your O.K. for job’, may be regarded as a new one on the Hon. J. G. Coates. Mr Moreton is blithely addressed as ‘Young fellow me lad’, or ‘Dear George’. Yet this man, married now and passionately devoted to his wife and children, keeps his little home spotlessly clean, and hopes one day to pay back the ‘one tin jam, 2 lbs butter, one tin baking powder’ for which he now has to ask the D.P.A. [*]5
It was not until February 1935 that Hyde returned to Starkie, this time to interview him for a book.6 That she may have kept him in mind over those years is indicated in an undated letter to Schroder in which she describes her hopes for the book and continues: ‘It was a queer true terrible story—the story of a living man … that simmered until written.’7 Mid-way through March she was sufficiently confident of completing the work that she made over a half share in the royalties to Stark which he promptly assigned toward a furniture debt: being the proceeds ‘from the sale of a book now being written by Miss Iris Wilkinson concerning episodes of my life as a soldier in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force’.8 On 27 March she notified Schroder of her determination: ‘Am likewise going to complete a very queer sort of writing job which I’ve undertaken and which may be either a book or a nightmare when I’ve finished. It will take me about three months to finish the job I am doing.’9 However, within a month she announced triumphantly to Schroder:
The book that might have been a nightmare is finished. It is a nightmare, but I think it is a book—Harder, barer and more confident—It’s the story of a soldier—he exists and I know him very well. His queer racial heritage—he is half Red Indian, half Spaniard—has taken him into desperate places: prisons, battles, affairs. With it all he’s something of a visionary and —in physical courage—unquestionably heroic—I wrote the book because I had to write it when I heard his story, and because it’s an illustration of Walt Whitman’s line—‘There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in man.’10
As George Moreton remembered it, he had initiated the writing of Passport to Hell sometime in the winter of 1935:
It must have been somewhere about that time that one morning, a slight woman with an interesting face and a lame leg swung into my office on a walking stick. Her name was Iris Wilkinson although, perhaps, she was better known to most people under her pen name ‘Robin Hyde’. She was inconspicuous enough until she began to talk and then you instantly realized that the person sitting before you was not ordinary; the acuminated intelligence behind the sensitive face made you feel like a ponderous galleon awkwardly trying to avoid the lightning shot of a nimble frigate. I forget most of what we talked about that morning but I do know towards the end of our conversation I asked her if she would like a good story: her smile was tolerant. ‘I should very much,’ she replied, ‘I must confess a weakness for good stories.’
I leaned over and drew a package from my desk and handed it to her—it was the diary of James Douglas Stark, bomber in the Fifth Regiment, N.Z.E.F., during the Great War. I can recall the excited pursing of Iris Wilkinson’s lips as she turned the pages of the document and the way she laughingly waved her stick as she left my office. And that was really the genesis of Passport to Hell, a book which a well-known English paper described as ‘… wild and strange as anything any warbook writer has remembered or imagined’.11
It is highly unlikely that Starkie kept a diary. Soldiers were officially forbidden to do so,12 and he certainly did not have the temperament to which diary keeping is natural. But he recognized the sensational nature of his experience and hoped to make something of it. It is also probable that like other men who had performed brave acts and not been officially noticed, he wished to be recognized. As Ernest Atkins complained: ‘I was recommended for a medal five times. The grievance about it all exists in my mind to this day and is the main reason for writing.’13 In any case in 1926 Starkie was writing to Downie Stewart about his ‘book’: ‘Downie let me know about that book of mine soon as you can because if it is jake I will finish it.’14 Eight months later he mentions a book, again in a letter to Downie Stewart, on this occasion writing from prison: ‘I have been on a book and I am just arriving in Armentiers in the Bombers with you.’15 It is impossible to tell if this work was in the package which George Moreton handed to Robin Hyde, but she certainly possessed a very sketchy and overwritten account of a number of Stark’s adventures. It is contained in a black exercise book, part of Derek Challis’s collection of his mother’s papers, and written in a hand quite unlike that of Robin Hyde or of Stark. Inside the left front cover is an inscription in Stark’s writing: ‘C. Murphy, No 1 p.1–89 inclusive 7/9/29’. The writer is clearly a novice, for he notes down ‘Useful Books’: ‘The Commercial Side of Literature’, ‘Journalism for profit’, and ‘How to write a short story’, and there are rough drafts of different material interspersed with vocabulary lists. I assume that Stark met him in prison and hoped that he would ‘ghost-write’ his experiences. Murphy on the other hand, hoped to break into print with Stark’s story, and get out of prison. This emerges from the draft of a letter from Murphy to Stark on folio 30 of the exercise book:
Since writing this book of yours I have decided to continue on in the business. I have always had a flair for writing and wish to utilize the time here in something of use to me when I leave. Now I wish to suggest that you let me remain the author of yours not as to any spirit of greed but that it may give me a chance to have other things published which I intend writing. Again should any money be forthcoming for your book I don’t want any of it except of course at your own desire. My object is to break into print. With your book as a lead I shall undoubtedly have the chance of a lifetime, not only in gaining prominence in print but as a lever to get myself out of this.
I’m absolutely alone with no influence of any description and am striving to do the best I can for myself. With my writings and stories in print I’ve at least a chance. Coupled with this of course I am depending on your influence with J.G. [Coates?] to get something done. Believe me Doug there is no selfish wish in my effort to shine as the author of your book that will remain a secret between you J.G. and myself. You can explain things to him and I’m sure he will understand. Nominally, the authorship and rights remain absolutely as you choose, also any acruing monetary proceeds. It is the lead I want.
When you leave and let me have your address I’ll send from time to time such stories as I can finish. With the first book a success you ought to be able to get them accepted without trouble and incidentally collect a few quid.
On folio 19 verso, Murphy seems to have tried out his title and intended nom de plume: ‘Dawes Bently author of Doug Stark Bomber’.16 The interest in the Murphy manuscript lies in the fact that where the same incidents are described as in Passport to Hell, there are small but significant differences.17 Robin Hyde’s was not the only imagination at work; Starkie changed his story to suit his hearer. Hyde does not seem to have used the Murphy manuscript but gone straight to Stark and made notes while he talked. She also asked him to write down some of his experiences18 but was unsatisfied with the result. When he talked, she was able to see quickly what was happening. As she explained to J. A. Lee later when commenting on Passport to Hell: ‘I think some bits of it are pretty good—The realism is because when people talk about things they have seen and known I can see ’em like little pictures, or think I can—maybe it’s only an unusually clear knack with words taking shape so quickly that it seems like a visual image—Anyhow that is how it worked with Starkie—I tried getting him to make notes—it was hopeless, no marrow in it at all. When he talked, though I havena my shorthand and the book was in no wise dictation, I seemed to get it without difficulty.’19
Hyde’s original title for her work on Stark was ‘Bronze Outlaw’ and having completed it she sent it off to the agents A. and P. Watt in England who recommended it to the firm Denis Archer, who finally accepted it towards the end of 1935: ‘Archers have accepted “Bronze Outlaw”—terms to come. By the way the title, which sounds like that of a Western, and is altogether vile, may be changed.’20 Archers placed it with the publishing firm Hurst and Blackett who seem to have suggested the title Passport to Hell which did not altogether please Hyde as she explained in a letter to Johannes Andersen, the Alexander Turnbull Librarian: ‘Hurst and Blackett are bringing out my first novel, “Passport to Hell” (I did not choose the title, by the way), early in March of this year, and I suppose that means it will be in New Zealand before Authors’ Week. This is a book of New Zealand background except for some wartime sequences.’21 Hurst and Blackett seem to have seen the work more as war memoir than as New Zealand novel since a great deal has been cut from the original version22 (much of it presumably at their urging) including the last two chapters which bring Starkie back to New Zealand and underline the New Zealand moral to his life. Hyde observed to Lee that the two chapters had had to be dropped but for different reasons: ‘I had two post war chapters one about Mt Eden gaol, but had to cut ’em out owing to considerations of space and libel.’23 There is no doubt that all the cuts can be defended aesthetically; they result in a sparer, less diffuse work, with a stronger narrative line. It is also clear that the same process has gone on here as Dr Patrick Sandbrook has discerned in his study of The Godwits Fly,24 namely an effort to eliminate subjective authorial intrusion, but the result is to focus much more vividly on Stark and his wartime experiences.
I noted above that Stark had also used his imagination in relating his life story (after all he had been polishing these accounts of his encounters for some eighteen years prior to meeting Hyde) and nowhere is this more clear than in his account of his father, which Hyde followed carefully, expanding where it seemed to her there was an opportunity to do so.25 The result is an exotic figure: a giant full-blooded Delaware Indian from Great Bear Lake with a beautiful Spanish wife, killer of Higgins the bushranger, publican and breeder of gamecocks and race-horses. Some of this is undoubtedly true, but either Stark knew little about his father or he recreated him for Robin Hyde’s benefit. These inventions were not confined to Hyde; the Murphy MS contains an account of Stark fondly leaving his parents on the way to the War when his father had been dead five years. If we are to believe the obituaries of Wyald Stark, he was a different, rather more impressive figure, a pioneer with his own claim on history.
One of Invercargill’s very earliest settlers, Mr Wyald Stark, passed away at his residence, on Thursday, in his 78th year. Deceased came to these parts in the fifties, when the present Queen’s Park was covered in bush, and Dee street did not exist except as a track through thick scrub. He was born in Florida (United States), his father being an officer of the American Army, and after his death while on active service, young Stark left for England. There he remained but a short time before he was attracted to Australia by the gold fever. He put in some hard work on the diggings and, winning a considerable quantity of the precious metal, decided to try New Zealand, arriving in Southland about the year 1857. Deceased built a store in those early days on the east side of the North Road at Avenal, and … supplied goods to miners as far away as the Mataura district, which he waggoned all that distance. Shortly afterwards he constructed a tramway through Queen’s Park, from the North Road at Avenal to Elles road, for the purpose of supplying firewood to the residents, and at a later date erected an hotel at the west side of the road, which he occupied for some years. It was known as ‘The Governor Grey’, and was then a small wooden building. Afterwards he re-erected a brick hotel near the site of the old one….
Deceased was a man of great physical strength, and his courage was exceptional. While on the Victorian diggings he demonstrated these qualities by capturing an armed bushranger named Higgins, for whom the authorities were in search …. Beneath his dark skin beat a kind heart, and those who knew him when he was in a position to assist others, say he was generosity personified …. Deceased was one of the oldest members of the St. George Lodge of Oddfellows. He leaves a widow, one daughter, and three sons, also nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.26
The problem of fact and fiction is not an easy one; most war books contained elements of both, including the memoirs. John Galsworthy saw this in his preface to R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm where he tried to put his finger on the nature of its ‘new form’: ‘I suppose you would call this a war book, but it is unlike any other war book that I, at least, have met with …. “The Spanish Farm” is not precisely a novel, and it is not altogether a chronicle … quite clearly the author did not mean it to be a novel, and fail; nor did he mean it to be a chronicle and fail. In other words, he was guided by mood and subject-matter into discovery of a new vehicle of expression—going straight ahead with the bold directness which guarantees originality.’27 The finest books from World War I were shaped—like New Zealander Alexander Aitken’s stoically elegiac Gallipoli to the Somme, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Blunden’s Undertones of War, Manning’s Her Privates We. Each is, as William Blissett puts it, ‘both based on experience and thoroughly composed, a “thing made’”.28 Certainly Passport to Hell is ‘composed’; Robin Hyde is concerned to show the making of a man who can both murder a surrendering prisoner and carry a wounded comrade across no-man’s land as ‘gently as a kitten’. But she also wishes to claim the certainty of fact. She had to project a world in which Stark would live convincingly and assert, ‘This book is not a work of fiction.’ She relied too heavily on Stark’s veracity. In one particular incident concerning his schooldays she was forced to remove the account from the ‘new edition’ of 1937 and wrote to the Southland Times with a public apology:
I am given to understand that on page 26 of my book ‘Passport to Hell’ I have recounted an incident concerning which I was misled, and which may be understood to reflect unfavourably on the Gladstone School, Invercargill and on Mr Duncan McNeil, its headmaster during Starkie’s period of tuition there. Starkie himself informed me—though in a perfectly humorous way, and I am sure, without intention of injuring either one of his old schools or anyone else concerned—that at the time he was such an incorrigible truant that his father on three days chained him up to the school doorstep. I accepted this and recounted it in good faith, but on Mr McNeil’s statement that the occurrence never took place, had the paragraph removed from the ‘serialized’ version of my book, have written to the publishers to have it deleted from future editions, and finally will be glad if you will give publicity to this correction.29
The most powerful criticism of the factual background of the book came from one who had served like Starkie in the Otago Infantry Battalion (though he seems to have joined up some eighteen months later) and was a native of Invercargill. His name was John Tait and he wrote two letters to the Southland Times which annoyed Robin Hyde immensely, perhaps because she had followed Stark so closely. Tait begins:
In the New Zealand Division there were many stories told of J. D. Stark, commonly known as ‘Starkie’. Some of them were true, many of them distorted or exaggerated, some of them purely apocryphal; but all agreed in emphasizing his contempt of danger and discipline alike. Broadly regarded ‘Passport to Hell’ gives a vivid and plausible picture of a strange character. The detail, however, does not bear critical examination. The author opens her prefatory note with this sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The natural presumption is that she offers her work as a record of truth in which case one would have expected her to verify such details at least as she readily could. A few minutes in a reference library would have corrected her ideas (and spelling) of Avenal, Waihopai, the time when Invercargill went ‘dry’ and ‘the battle of the Wasr’. A few inquiries would have revealed to her the fact that two at least of the schoolmasters referred to in chapter one are still living in Invercargill, and would no doubt have been pleased to correct her picture of the boyhood of her hero; that the Magistrate she refers to by name is resident in her own city; that ‘the battle of the Wasr’ was fought before the Fifth Reinforcement (not ‘Regiment’ by the way) left New Zealand; that ‘Y’ Beach was separated from Anzac Cove by nine or ten miles of the Peninsula from which New Zealand and other allied troops were rigidly excluded by the Turks. But why go on? It is sufficient to say that the verity of the story could have easily been checked at many points, and Robin Hyde’s palpable failure to do so has rendered her work worthless as a record of truth. The literary worth of it would in no wise have suffered had the preface run something like this: ‘This book is not the product of my imagination. I have related its incidents and the circumstances under which they happened, as Starkie told them to me. To what extent he has drawn on his imagination I cannot say, but I thought them sufficiently interesting to publish.’ In such case, while one might have criticized her taste in the selection of her material, her talent for vivid writing would have been fully appreciated.30
When Hyde replied citing J. A. Lee and Downie Stewart in her defence, Tait returned to the attack with pedantic tenacity:
If you will permit it I should like to point out the fundamental weakness in her position as it appears to me. Let me explain that before writing my private letter I had discussed the book with many of my fellow returned soldiers and had confirmed my own belief that the book cannot be relied on as a truthful record of facts. I took particular care to give full credence only to those who had personal knowledge of the events which they described and I checked their recollections as far as possible by reference to such records as were available to me. I do not doubt that much of the narrative is substantially true but it contains so much intrinsic evidence of the author’s failure to check the facts that the whole story stands suspect. It is in this sense that I maintain that the book is worthless as a record of truth. It is clear of course that considerable portions of the narrative could be verified from independent sources only with difficulty and that in some instances corroboration is impossible. Much of it however could have been checked with comparative ease, and, had Robin Hyde made any attempt to do so, she would not I feel sure, have commenced her preface with the sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The points I mentioned in my first letter were a few of those which should have led the writer to suspect the accuracy of her information. Robin Hyde dismisses them as trivial. Some of them are, perhaps, mere straws indicating the direction of the wind but the march from ‘Y’ Beach to Anzac Cove was a military impossibility and ‘the battle of the Wasr’ as described took place during the Easter of 1915 while ‘Starkie’ with the Fifth Reinforcements was still in camp in New Zealand. Men who were actually there have told me that the description of that event is remarkably accurate but the point is that Starkie was not there.
The reviews referred to do not, I submit, alter the position. Their laudations can properly be regarded as paying just tribute to Robin Hyde’s literary talent but the writer must have assumed the narrative to be true. This applies to the two distinguished New Zealanders referred to by Robin Hyde. The period mentioned as covered by the Hon. W. D. Stewart’s somewhat cautious authentication affects only some 40 pages of the book (144–183). The Hon. J. A. Lee served—I speak from memory—with the machine gun corps and would have few if any contacts with Starkie on service. He would be the first to agree that realism is a virtue in literature, or any other form of art, only when it conforms strictly with reality. I do not suggest that Robin Hyde added to or varied the facts of her story; those embellishments were there when she received it. She pleads in excuse the youth of her hero but even this will not stand. J. D. Stark was not born on July 4, 1898, as Robin Hyde believes; he was born on July 17, 1894. He was not a boy of 16 when he left this country but a young man of nearly 21.
In conclusion, I have taken every precaution which has suggested itself to me to verify the facts I have stated but unless those facts are challenged I do not propose to carry on a correspondence which might tend quite wrongly to suggest some animosity towards either Starkie or Robin Hyde. My protest is simply this. Let realism be truth, the whole truth if you will, but above all, nothing but the truth.31
The only response to such letters is the asking of those unanswerable questions, What is Realism? What is Truth? Robin Hyde’s concern was for the work’s effectiveness, as a portrait of Starkie and as an impression of war. She was outraged at the meanness of the attack, and replied to Tait’s first letter with a long defence of the book’s accuracy and a statement of her purpose as a writer:
I trust your columns may be open to a reply to Mr John Tait’s attack on my book ‘Passport to Hell’.
It is perfectly obvious that there may be minor (mostly very minor) inaccuracies of spelling or detail in a book written by an author who has never had opportunities to visit the scenes recorded, and whose material was gathered from a soldier (sixteen years old when he left this country) who never kept a diary. In addition, though Starkie attended several Invercargill schools before at twelve years of age, he was sent on to the Burnham Industrial School, and though I found him very far from unintelligent, his spelling does not seem to have been all it might. However, I don’t think the fact that the soldier’s spelling was here and there substituted for the schoolmaster’s is likely to trouble many people.
Starkie was unquestionably at what the soldiers called ‘the battle of the Wazza’, Mr John Tait ‘the battle of the Wasr’, and some other authorities ‘the battle of the Wazir’. May I quote what your paper says in an adjoining column, reviewing another book? ‘The detail is so precise, and the narrative concerned with the surrounding country all so exact, that the reader must accept it all.’ If any inexactitude of mine as to date or number of contingent has confused Mr Tait, I should think that by reading the chapter he might have convinced himself of its essential reality. At all events, the fifty or more English reviews I have had of ‘Passport to Hell’ nowhere seem to question the book’s authenticity as a broad record of war experiences—not a war history—and I suppose their staffs must contain a few men not unacquainted with Egypt, Gallipoli and France in 1914–1918.
It is curious that if my book is, as Mr Tait says, ‘worthless as a record of fact’, the most favourable reviews and comments should have come from returned soldiers. In addition to personal letters, (some confirming actual incidents), the Imperial War Museum, in writing to thank me for a copy of ‘Passport to Hell’, which was sent on request, refers to the book as one of the most interesting New Zealand war records in its possession. Mr John A. Lee, a returned soldier of distinction, said when interviewed by The Standard that ‘Passport to Hell’ was the most important New Zealand war book yet published, and made special mention of its realism. As Mr Tait has chosen to question my taste (though I did not know that war was ever in good taste), I may quote a sentence of Mr Lee’s: ‘Some people will be shocked because Robin Hyde sends a soldier to a brothel, but will cheer when the troops swing by to their death.’ Writing in the Otago Daily Times, the Hon. Downie Stewart, who for part of the war years was attached to the same battalion as Starkie, says that for this period ‘the authenticity of the book is such that nobody could cavil at it’, and later that ‘it is hard to believe the author was not at the front’. I quote in both cases from memory, but anyone who cares to look up the reviews will find that I have in no way exaggerated. Nor do I wish to advertise my own work, but Mr Tait’s suggestion that because of a few trivial errors Starkie’s record and my book are practically a work of the imagination, is so unfair and untrue that it cannot be left unanswered. Does he imagine that the experienced soldiers mentioned above would be taken in by any plausibility?
It is true that I could have written to Starkie’s schoolmasters in order to ‘correct’ my view of his character, though this is the first time I have ever heard that an author is supposed to take this course. I could also have written to every policeman, warder, prison superintendent, sergeant-major, military police official, and innocent if officious bystander with whom Starkie came into conflict. But I didn’t, and I would never be likely to do so. My object in writing the book was not to portray the outside world looking at Starkie, but to portray Starkie looking at the outside world. After all, that outside view, especially of any person estranged from society by lawlessness, sickness or poverty, means so little. If I have any ambition as a prose writer, it is to write from the inner centre of what people think, hope and feel, and of that Interpreter’s House, those set in authority over us know curiously little, because they have no humility ….32
However, she received support over the ‘Battle of the Wazza’ for ‘Tano Fama’ wrote in, explaining that there were two battles of the Wazza, ‘and the second one was in the early days after the arrival of the 5th Reinforcements. This is probably the one to which “Starkie” referred. In defence of Robin Hyde, may I say that far from exaggerating the exploits of this wild member of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, there were many many vivid incidents which could be told, but were omitted by her. Is it not true that Douglas Stark carried in the Rt. Hon. Gordon Coates when he was wounded in the field of battle? I believe it was ….’33 But a glance through the notes to this edition will reveal that Tait’s general observations on Starkie’s inventions, distortions, and slips of memory, are not inaccurate. Hyde followed Stark closely, expanding from time to time from the merest of hints but making very few changes. She darkens the portrait a little by having Starkie steal where her notes indicate he did not, and she insists on his youth throughout, even, in the first version, making him almost absurdly younger than he had claimed to be. But the charge of not checking her sources sufficiently haunted her and we find her defending herself to Eric Ramsden in similar vein over Check to Your King, her account of the life of Charles, Baron de Thierry. She had had neither the opportunity nor the money to travel, she argues, and thus could not consult the archives in Sydney. ‘However, Charles kept copies of most of his more important documents and treasured up hoards of newspaper remarks—kindly and otherwise—and I felt at the end of my work that I understood his own point of view pretty well, which was the only thing pretended for “Check to Your King”. I am not a historian, and don’t want to be one. It is the individual and the mind moving behind queer, unreasonable actions which seem to me to produce a good deal of the fun of this old world; and I think that any writer has the right to interpret this as best he can ….’34 Both John A. Lee and Downie Stewart were well aware that Passport to Hell contained a number of errors, indeed Stewart took trouble to point out some of them and to consider the question of how far Passport was ‘a true record of the events recorded’. He concluded that for the period of his knowledge of the events ‘they are told with such substantial accuracy that any minor corrections of fact would not alter the main tenor of the story’. Stewart was, moreover, conscious of the imaginative resources needed to make a person live in literature: ‘The average normal citizen is in the habit of regarding any strange or unusual individual as what is called a “Character”, and of saying that “some one ought to write him up”. But people who are given to this line of thought often fail to realise what a difficult task it is to make such “characters” live in a book with such vividness that the reader feels that they are real persons and that he must have met them at some time.’35 Robin Hyde he thought had done that most successfully. While Lee wrote to her in 1938 of ‘your “Passport to Hell” which was so amazingly correct psychologically if the graphic side was out of joint occasionally; and, of course, to get the experience true and vital rather than the mere geography was the greater achievement’.36
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Starkie was that although a seemingly unique figure, he was also in some senses the quintessential colonial soldier. The troops from the Dominions were noted both for their magnificent fighting qualities and their casual attitude toward discipline. The two aspects were not unconnected. As Denis Winter points out the British Old Army endeavoured to turn men into cyphers, breaking them down by endless drill and repetitive burdensome trivial tasks so that they obeyed without question: ‘As long as a soldier could be guaranteed to obey all orders, he could be considered “trained”.’37 The brilliant Australian general Monash knew what was appropriate for his men: ‘very stupid comment has been made on the discipline of the Australian soldier. That was because the very purpose and conception of discipline have been misunderstood. It is after all only a means to an end, and that end is to secure the co-ordinated action among a large number of individuals for achieving a definite purpose. It does not mean obsequious homage to superiors nor servile observance of forms and customs nor a suppression of the individuality.’38 The colonials had proportionately nine times the number of men in military prison than had the British and man for man they ‘fought better, were better adapted to the longueurs of trench fighting and supplied the storm troops of the B.E.F. to the end’.39 This is a point made nicely by Hyde’s editor J. G. McLean in his review of Passport for the New Zealand Observer:
Stark was a private from beginning to end. Anything which marked him out for promotion or a decoration was as quickly cancelled by some breach of discipline. He was one of the light-hearted roystering crew of Diggers who formed the backbone of the N.Z.E.F., who lent the sharp edge of valour to its attacks, but chafed under restraint when out of the line. There were thousands more like Starkie; not so wild and lawless, perhaps, but sharing with him a rooted distaste for formal authority as represented by brass hats, military police, and other martial phenomena who could stop a soldier’s leave, prevent him from drinking beer when he was thirsty, and march him across the desert in seemingly unnecessary parades.40
In his article ‘In Parenthesis among the War Books’, William Blissett outlines the two poles of war literature—the spare narrative simplicity and symbolic starkness of Henry Williamson’s Patriot’s Progress on one hand and the self-conscious In Parenthesis of David Jones with its extraordinary density of literary and liturgical allusions on the other.41 Hyde’s portrait of the outlaw from New Zealand is much closer to the powerful simplicity of Patriot’s Progress though she is not unaware of that larger context of war, literature, and religion which almost overwhelms Jones. Passport has greater intensity and immediacy than the two other New Zealand books from World War I with which it may be compared: Aitken’s Gallipoli to the Somme (1963) and O. E. Burton’s The Silent Division (1935). Burton’s book (which Hyde admired, terming it ‘one of the greatest testimonies against war that I have read’42) endeavours to ‘place’ the almost unimaginable experience of war by providing epigraphs to each chapter (he follows Frederic Manning in this) from a whole range of war literature from Kingsley’s The Heroes to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But the decision not to give names removes personalities and diminishes the necessary specificity of the work. In Gallipoli to the Somme, the events waited forty-seven years for publication, having been recollected through youthful notes. The result is a beautiful and humane perspective on the horrors of that campaign.
Why did Robin Hyde write Passport to Hell? Initially no doubt from her sense of the need for social justice. Her journalism shows her defending the Maoris at Orakei, returned servicemen, discharged prisoners, prison reform, indeed all those pushed aside, oppressed, wounded, or ignored by Society, and Starkie provides a perfect focus for these interests. In addition, as a child she had been fascinated by the War (her father was a sapper in the N.Z.E.F., 13th Reinforcements and her mother’s brother was killed at Gallipoli) and wrote of having been torn apart by ‘our weekly “war lessons”’ and as one ‘who gave to that grim uniform the unthinking hero worship which may have helped all modern men to despise all modern women’.43 In Starkie she may have perceived her ‘mask’, the polar opposite, both an element of herself and an image of New Zealand. Stephen Scobie gives us an insight on the matter in his study of the documentary poem, the genre that has dominated recent Canadian writing. He notes how the authors are driven by a need for self-definition, and how in that dialectical process, they endeavour to anchor their work in the ‘validity of fact’ and are ‘drawn towards their opposites, the images of alterity, setting between them the distances of era, country, gender, yet always recognizing in the image something of themselves, a territory that awaits discovery’.44 Just such a need seems to have led Robin Hyde to Starkie.
IN PREPARING this edition I have used the manuscript notes (MS Notes) made by Robin Hyde as Starkie related his experiences, the typescript of the finished novel ‘Bronze Outlaw’ in the Auckland University Library (MS B-10), copies of the first edition in various impressions (the novel went through six impressions in 1936), and a copy of the Second Edition—the ‘new edition’ of 1937. I have not consulted the ‘cheap edition’ of 1937, nor the serialization in the Radio Record.45
A collation of the typescript and the published version reveals an enormous number of variants. Approximately seventy pages were cut from the typescript and there are between ten and thirty minor variants (spelling, punctuation, word order, substantive verbal changes) per page. Robin Hyde took considerable care over the final version of this work. The result is a much tighter, more direct, swifter narrative. Punctuation changes from the typescript show a general tendency to change semi-colons to commas and to remove commas or replace them with dashes. The most noticeable feature of the published version is the much greater use of dashes, presumably to increase narrative urgency. Unnecessary adjectives are removed, though not all the changes are simplifications; occasionally the printed version is more circuitous, in order to underline irony. The more stilted language is improved: ‘Starkie elucidated’ becomes ‘Starkie said’ or he ‘effected a permanent escape’ becomes he ‘got away for keeps’. Very occasionally gentility requires an expression to be made less vivid: ‘poor bugger’ becomes ‘poor blighter’. One cannot, I am afraid, tell which of the changes were at the urging of the publishers.
The differences between the first edition and the second edition are few, the most important being the change of the name of the Invercargill magistrate from Cruikshank to Sentry and the rewriting of the passage concerned with the incident at Gladstone School. Otherwise there are some minor corrections and a slightly larger number of fresh errors.
I have chosen the Second Edition as my copy text since it contains the final authorized changes. I have indicated in the notes where cuts in the typescript have occurred, with a brief summary of the material omitted. Finally, I have silently corrected such textual errors as I could readily identify.
1. Republished 1986 by New Women’s Press with an introduction by Phillida Bunkle, Linda Hardy, and Jacqueline Matthews.
2. N.Z. Observer, 19 February 1931.
3. Letter to J. H. E. Schroder, 19 March 1931, MS Papers, 280, Schroder, folder 5, Turnbull Library.
4. See below, note for p.38 on p.220.
5. N.Z. Observer, 13 October 1932, ‘Landlords Lock Their Doors Against the Friend of Down and Outs: The Prisoners’ Aid Society’s Nomadic Life’. Some of the same details appear in Moreton’s account of Starkie in his biography A Parson in Prison by Melville Harcourt (Whitcombe & Tombs 1942), pp.222–7.
6. Notes from a brief interview with Stark in an exercise book held by Gloria Rawlinson have a date of 19 February. See Patrick Sandbrook, ‘Robin Hyde: a Writer at Work’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Massey University, p.99 and note p.404.
7. MS Papers, 280, Schroder, folder 6, no.84, Turnbull Library.
8. Document dated 18 March 1935 held by Mr Derek Challis.
9. MS Papers, 280, Schroder, folder 6, no.79, Turnbull Library.
10. 26 April 1935, MS Papers, 280, Schroder, folder 6, no.80, Turnbull Library. Hyde wrote ‘believe in man’ in this letter, but ‘believe in Men’ appeared on Passport’s title-page. I have been unable to trace the Whitman quotation.
11. Melville Harcourt, A Parson in Prison, pp.222–3.
12. Denis Winter, Death’s Men, Allen Lane 1978, p.170.
13. Winter, p.190.
14. Letter to the Hon. Downie Stewart, from Wairoa Hospital, dated 27/11/26. Copy in the possession of Derek Challis.
15. Letter to the Hon. Downie Stewart from Mt Eden prison dated 4/7/27. Copy in the possession of Derek Challis.
16. The manuscript of ‘Doug Stark—Bomber with Otago on the Western Front’ by ‘Dawes Bently’ (two exercise books written in the same hand as the Murphy/Challis MS) turned up in the Turnbull Library some years ago (see Turnbull Library Record, vol.12, no.2, October 1979, p.121) and was drawn to my attention by Dr Patrick Sandbrook. It had been transferred from the General Assembly Library where it had no doubt been deposited by either Gordon Coates or Downie Stewart, whom Starkie relied on to get it published: ‘Now about that book Downie, can you do anything with it. If so and you think it worth while, can you sell it and help me to furnish my home for the love of Mike’ (letter to Downie Stewart of 3/7/30, copy Derek Challis). And, ‘Now Gordon if that book of mine would only prove a success and you could send me 50£ or 25£ for it …’ (letter to Gordon Coates of 29/7/30, copy Derek Challis).
17. See below, notes for pp.152, 160, 161 on pp.235–6.
18. See below, note for p.142 on p.233.
19. Letter to John A. Lee, 9 June 1936, Auckland Public Library.
20. Letter to Schroder, ‘Nov/Dec 1935’, MS Papers, 280, Schroder, folder 6, no.86, Turnbull Library. See letter no.84 for A. and P. Watt’s response.
21. Letter of 28 February 1936, MS Papers, 148, Andersen, 29, Turnbull Library.
22. See ‘A Note on the Text’, p.xxii.
23. Letter to Lee, 29 May 1936, Auckland Public Library.
24. Sandbrook, ‘Robin Hyde: a Writer at Work’, doctoral thesis, Massey University.
25. See below, notes for p.9 on p.216.
26. Southland Daily News, 5 November 1910.
27. R. H. Mottram, The Spanish Farm with a Preface by John Galsworthy, Penguin 1937, p.viii.
28. William Blissett, ‘In Parenthesis among the War Books’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Spring 1973, p.283.
29. Southland Times, 17 October 1936.
30. Southland Times, 3 October 1936.
31. Southland Times, 17 October 1936.
32. Southland Times, 10 October 1936.
33. Southland Times, 17 October 1936; see also note for pp.75–78 on p.222.
34. Letter of 26 December 1936, MS Papers, 196, 173, Turnbull Library.
35. Otago Daily Times, 4 July 1936.
36. Draft of a letter 2 September 1938 with Hyde’s letters to Lee, Auckland Public Library.
37. Winter, p.40.
38. Cited in Winter, pp.47–48.
39. Winter, p.49.
40. N.Z. Observer, 4 June 1936.
41. University of Toronto Quarterly, Spring 1973.
42. Unsigned review, N.Z. Observer, 18 July 1935.
43. N.Z. MSS 412, Auckland Public Library, ff.5, 13.
44. ‘Amelia or: Who Do You Think You Are? Documentary and Identity in Canadian Literature’, Canadian Literature, no. 100, Spring 1984, p.280.
45. N.Z. Radio Record (Wellington), 30 October 1936–25 March 1937 (22 instalments); also in N.Z. Sporting Life, beginning 31 October 1936.
*Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society.