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The poet Ruth Gilbert provides another example of the experience of women poets during the period this study covers, her first publication appearing in 1941. Gilbert offers a case study for these women poets, as she is at the heart of the controversy regarding the antagonism that some men writers and publishers displayed towards the work of their women counterparts up to the feminist revival of the 1970s.

Evidence of this antipathy can be found in 1957 when the literary magazine numbers 7 published a letter by Willow Macky in which she criticises the critics of the New Zealand literary scene, in particular the editor of the numbers series, poet Louis Johnson, for his unfavourable review of the latest book by Gilbert, The Sunlit Hour. Macky doesn‘t end there. Her letter becomes both a plea to her male colleagues and an indictment against them when it comes to their treatment of their female counterparts. She states:

Most women, if they wish for success, will try to conform, monkey-like, to the masculine pattern; others, by remaining true to their feminine insight, risk opposition and failure in male-dominated fields (Macky in numbers 7, 1957: 26).

The question is: why was this the case? This letter is evidence that women actually felt like this and expressed these frustrations about the way they were treated by male editors and I discuss this later. I have appended the full text of Macky‘s letter and the editor‘s reply.

The 1970 cut-off point for this thesis roughly coincides with the emergence of the so-called ‗second wave‘ feminist movement in New Zealand. However, when lesbian-feminist poet Heather McPherson was asked about her early attempts to get into print before and around 1970 she said she had poems published in Landfall and had approached Leo Bensemann, then Caxton Press and Landfall editor, with a collection of

54 poems, mentioning to him that she had become a feminist. His reply was that Rita Cook (Rita Angus) had become a feminist ‗but it didn‘t do her any good either‘ (McPherson, 2007: 116).

These examples illustrate some of the difficulties and antipathies existing between the men and women literary figures during the period of my study. They illustrate some of the restraints and difficulties women writers worked under. Gilbert‘s experience reflects the hurt and feeling of unfair treatment given to women writers by their male counterparts, editors and publishers during this period. As early as 1943 her poem ‗Shooting Season‘, unpublished until the 1988 collection Early Poems: 1938-1944, describes male writers taking pot-shots at female writers, just two years after her first appearance in print.

When man goes forth At rise of sun

With haversack

And well-greased gun How most unpleasant To be a pheasant; And what abysmal luck To find oneself a duck (Gilbert, 1988: 38).

Nielsen Wright‘s book on her quotes Gilbert stating that ‗Shooting Season‘ was written in 1943. However, when Wright interviewed Gilbert in 1988 she associated ‗Shooting Season‘ with James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson as the shooters. Wright found this impossible since the poem was dated 1943. He continues that he knew Gilbert felt she was under attack from Baxter and Johnson in the 1950‘s and 1960‘s, as had Eileen Duggan at PEN committee meetings (Wright, 2007).

A brief outline profile of Gilbert‘s life and publishing history illustrates her place in both literary and social settings during the period. Born in 1917 at Greytown, Wairarapa, as an adult she could be regarded as typical of many New Zealand women during and after WW2, as she married and had children. During her long literary career Gilbert‘s poems have appeared in newspapers, books and magazines.

55 Her poems were published in C.A. Marris‘s New Zealand’s Best Poems, Art in New Zealand, The Evening Post, Lyric Poems of New Zealand, Johnson‘s New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, and Frank McKay‘s Poetry New Zealand. She has also been published in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, and her work has been broadcast on the BBC and the former NZBC (now Radio New Zealand). Her publishing and writing career [see appendix 6] provides perspective on the literary trends and views of other authors in relation to the gender politics of the period.

Gilbert‘s post-war poems to 1950 show how her career as a published poet began, also how it was undermined by what I argue were the misogynist views prevalent among publishers and anthologists of the time. Brasch included Gilbert in the literary magazine Landfall only once:1 Landfall 11, March 1948. ‗Lazarus‘ sequence: 1 Betrothed to Lazarus; 2 The Sisters of Lazarus; 3 Lazarus speaks, which were subsequently published by Reed in 1949 under the title Lazarus and Other Poems. The author note for the Landfall issue states that her work had also appeared in Art in New Zealand, The Evening Post and New Zealand Best Poems.

For Gilbert, 1948 was a very successful year. Her work ‗Overheard in a garden: Anthem poems‘ was published in Yearbook of the Arts in New Zealand (Gilbert, 1948: 154-155). She was also published by Quill, the magazine of the Society of New Zealand Women Writers and Artists. A note in Quill about ‗Lazarus‘ states the poem won the Society‘s ‗Donovan Cup Competition‘ for unpublished work in October 1947. It also won the Jessie Mackay Memorial prize for verse in June 1948. This prize had been established the year of Jessie Mackay‘s death in 1938 by the New Zealand centre of the writers‘ organisation PEN. Mackay‘s work was included in a number of anthologies of New Zealand poetry which were produced in her lifetime, and in the anthology edited by Robert Chapman and Jonathan Bennett in 1956. But the DNZB entry on her states:

However, her exclusion from the 1960 Penguin book of New Zealand verse, edited by Allen Curnow, limited awareness of her contribution to New Zealand literature among later generations of readers. Mackay‘s place in the history of New Zealand poetry has been considerably under-recognised. (Roberts, DNZB: website).

56 The Spring 1948 issue of the American literary magazine Voices No 133 also features Gilbert‘s work. In the selection of New Zealand poetry Gilbert leads, filling nearly two pages. The Yearbook of the Arts in New Zealand 1949, (5: 134) has Gilbert‘s poem ‗Phobia‘, and her first full collection Lazarus and Other Poems was published by A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, in 1949. Also in 1949 the New Zealand Listener2 recorded that Gilbert won the ‗Jessie Mackay Memorial prize‘ for poetry. She had in fact won the prize twice in successive years, 1948 and 1949, and would again in 1967, when she shared that year‘s prize with Baxter. In 1949 Gilbert began to contribute poems to the New Zealand Listener and did so up until March 1975; that is, she contributed during the years when Monte Holcroft was editor.

Gilbert states that when her book was published in London she had reviews not influenced by New Zealand literary politics, hence different from what she would have received in New Zealand. Gilbert said that she thought being a New Zealand woman writer of her period was a more difficult life than her male counterparts:

Here you might be either over-praised or over-damned … I think most male reviewers approach a piece of writing differently when they see a woman‘s name on it. They unconsciously patronise. A writer wants to be recognised as a writer, not as a man or a woman. But even when a woman writer becomes known, she is not the male writer‘s equal (Gilbert in Wright, 2007: 17-18).

Gilbert stated that she had three books of verse published by that time and her work had appeared in anthologies of New Zealand and Commonwealth verse and in periodicals in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland; her work had also been broadcast by the B.B.C. Gilbert explained:

I am not prolific enough to be sending it out all over the place … I don‘t sit down at a desk to write. With me it‘s a matter of waiting till I have something to say. Then anything may catch my eye and I‘m away (Gilbert in Wright, 2007: 18).

With this outlook it‘s hardly surprising that Gilbert always liked the musical, lyrical and perhaps more traditional verse. She continued that this was her voice, not that she was against the moderns. Gilbert, who wrote verse from

57 the age of about nine, kept black books with ‗the most ghastly verse‘ and contributed to her school magazine (Gilbert, 2007). She was in her early 20s when a friend suggested she should show her verse to C.A. Marris. Marris, then writing in The Evening Post as Percy Flage, told her: ‗You can write, but you mustn‘t send anything out till I tell you‘ (Marris in Wright, 2007: 18-19). He got her work first into the Post, under the initial ‗R‘, and later into Art in New Zealand and New Zealand Best Poems.