Dame Fiona Kidman on one of the great editors in the literary pantheon, Harriet Allan, made redundant by Penguin
The editing process, for any serious writer, is a relationship. You put years of work, your inner life, your personal reputation, your future prospects, into the hands of a person you may barely know until the editing process begins, and you trust them to make things work, to ensure you are your best you. I have little time for the writers who say they don’t allow their work to be edited. You can usually see that that is one big mistake on their part.
There have been editors and publishers for most of my adult life. You could say I’ve been around. There was the genial Australian who accepted my first novel the day the manuscript landed on his desk, and, after 35,000 sales, turned the next one down. Later, an editor with long golden hair who grumbled about the amount of research I included in my fictions and insisted I re-write whole novels. I learned a lot from him and I’m still grateful, but he decided at some point and, after several years, that all my main characters were thinly disguised versions of myself; we argued about this and parted company. There was Albion at Pegasus Press, who drank gin by the tumblerful, and took my first forlorn and too confessional collection of poems, again at first sight. There were script editors too, like Arthur, an old BBC hand, permanently wreathed in grey smoke with a pallor the same colour as his skin, whose kindness I will never forget. Listen to the silences, he would say, as he taught me the finer points of writing radio drama, it’s what goes on beneath the chatter. His offsider, the man who was really in charge, was a shy and handsome alcoholic, who dropped dead on the pavement one fine morning. Other editors wanted to have long lunches and weren’t interested in looking at your work unless they could drink you under the table.
Some of these people became my friends, and some of them make me shudder in hindsight. All men, of course, that’s the way it was.
And then there was Harriet.
I walked into a long light room at Century Hutchinson, a publishing company on the North Shore (it would morph into Random Century, an early iteration of what became today’s Penguin Random House). It was 1990 or thereabouts. My relationship with Heinemann, publishers of my novel The Book of Secrets, had ground to a halt, in spite of some very good years and several books.
A slender woman, still in her twenties, stood up and shook hands with me. She had been working on the manuscript of my latest novel True Stars. This was my first meeting with Harriet Allan, my new editor, and later fiction publisher.
A few years earlier, Harriet had immigrated from Scotland with her husband (a linguist, the late Scott Allan). The daughter of a Canon of the Church of England, her M.A. in English Literature and Languages was from Edinburgh University. She had spent some years living in Birmingham, and during her teens there were frequent drives to Stratford-on-Avon, to see what ever Shakespeare play was being performed. She was slightly younger than my daughter. For the briefest moment I was unsure. I was going to be edited by a young, clearly intellectual woman? Really? (Did I know all of this at the time? Of course not, but I knew that it all felt very different). This was the person with whom I must now place my trust. But I was drawn to her that day; she was quietly spoken and had a gentle presence. She had read some of my earlier work, and had come to our meeting far better prepared than I was. I thought that it would all be all right. This meeting marked the beginning of a new phase in my approach to writing, one that has lasted ever since. Thirty-three years later, my faith has never felt misplaced.
Working with Harriet has never been just about grammar and syntax, she steers each book with utter and unarguable certainty. Behind the air of calm unflappability there is a steel core. When it comes to language, Harriet is unerring, you know that she is certain to be right. Her suggestions on ways to improve a manuscript, to develop characters, to reach clarity in storylines, invariably worked for me. We have rarely disagreed. At times, I have felt challenged to do better and that has been exciting rather than conflicting.
As it happened, the 1990s were a difficult decade from a writing perspective. After a number of successful titles, written at speed, I was brought to a sudden marking of time. My invalid mother came to live in our household and time to write became increasingly limited. While much of this period was joyful, with a grandchild coming after school each day, and picked up by her mother, this multi-generational household meant focus of a different kind. But, in Harriet, I had an editor who played a long game. Soon, her daughter was born, and Imogen, her first baby, arrived in a carry cot in the office when she was a few weeks old. Harriet seemed undeterred in her professional life by the demands of motherhood and carried on through the arrival of Matthew a year or two later.
During this period of intense domestic activity on the part of us both, she encouraged me to produce a collection of short stories, The Foreign Woman, and then commissioned Ricochet Baby, a novel, for which she did have to wait a very long time. These two books were both shortlisted for book awards, keeping my profile alive. The decade ended with the publication of The house within, a collection of stories written over 25 years, centred around the same character, Bethany Dixon and, with Harriet’s guidance, brought together to read like a novel; fronted with a lovely Glenda Randerson painting, it was an instant hit. But I was intensely aware that I needed to break new ground.
As the 2000s began, and circumstances changed, it was make or break time. Sixty-year-old writers don’t have much time left up their sleeves to start over. If my writing had been kept afloat by Harriet over the previous decade, it was now time for a change of pace. What followed would be more than 20 years of highly charged work, and 20 or so books written or edited, produced in close collaboration with Harriet.
The first two books in this new era, a collection of stories, and a novel, got some terrible reviews. It was an awful time and I found myself in litigation in one instance. There were some deeply indrawn breaths at Random Century. Looking back, there may have been other ways of dealing with all of this. But you could say I was back. The next novel, The Captive Wife, was a bestselling prize winner. It’s still in print, most recently in the 50th anniversary Penguin New Zealand classic series. There have been more prize-winning books since I wrote that.
What special magic did Harriet bring to this relationship? I tried to explain it one evening at a Wellington festival. Claire Mabey, Verb festival director, asked a group of people with literary connections to pair up and write ‘love letters’ to each other. She had teamed up Harriet and me. The event was held in the old San Francisco Bathhouse in Cuba Street, affectionately known as the San Fran. It’s up a steep flight of stairs, a space now used as a theatre and bar, opening on to a balcony, the life of the street almost within touching distance. It felt crowded that night, a bit edgy. Lloyd Jones and his partner, the Australian writer Carrie Tiffany, were there reading to each other; Paula Morris and her husband, Tom Moody; and Grant Robertson and Fran Wilde, striking a slightly different note as warriors from homosexual law reform. Everyone ended their letter with a declaration of love, and in mine and Harriet’s case, I thought how much real friendship is based on a variation of love, and how shy we often are of saying this. For Harriet had become someone who meant so much more to me than a person I did business with. She has an inimitable way of keeping professional boundaries when it comes to the work, but beyond that there is a warmth that translates into a close and affectionate intimacy, the sort based on long conversations and shared beliefs. The night of my husband’s sudden death, she was among the first people I turned to. She had endured her widowhood far too early, she has understood my emotional landscape in the years since I became one.
We walked out of San Fran quite late that Sunday evening. She was staying with us in Hataitai, and I’d suggested we have dinner in the city. But the streets of Wellington were deserted by then. I remember dull-blue street lights over Courtney Place’s closed restaurants. Nothing like an omelette and a glass of wine, I said, my Elizabeth David kicking in. By some miracle we found a taxi, and when we got to my place, I made a late dinner. I saw Harriet down the path to the semi-detached bedroom tucked into our lower storey, and left her for the night.
At two minutes past midnight the house began to rock and roll. The Kaikoura earthquake, 7.8 on the Richter scale, lasted a full two minutes. When we were able to stand, Ian and I nearly knocked each other over in the rush down the stairs to see how our guest was faring, worried that the house might pancake (it was fine). Harriet stood, looking nonplussed for once. "Is this normal?" she said. She spent the night upstairs on our living-room couch. I lay awake until morning, wondering what would happen next. And what might have happened in the San Fran if the quake had hit an hour or so earlier.
There were times we would travel together. Like the day we went in search of a witness to the events at Ye Olde Barn Café in Auckland, on a night more than sixty years earlier, when a young Irishman called Albert Black got into a fracas with another youth known as Johnny McBride, and Johnny died. Albert would hang for this death, branded a murderer, although there is much to suggest that the charge should have been manslaughter. Harriet picked me up at Auckland Airport and drove me south to meet Richard Douglas. We spent much of the day deep in conversation with Richard, an elderly seaman who had been sent to New Zealand as a child migrant. On the night of the fight, he had been sitting inches away from the combatants. We admired the beautiful model ships that he made and at his insistence, chatted to Kermit, the frog that lived in his goldfish pond. Later, Richard would give sworn testimony to a lawyer, that seemed to put beyond doubt that the death had been an accident. Harriet and I drove back to the city, stopping for a long time at a roadside café, to mull over what we had heard, to talk about life’s frailties, about our mothers, about justices and injustices.
Harriet was there the night that This Mortal Boy, my novel based on Albert Black’s story, won the Ockham Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, the country’s biggest literary prize. We shared the stage together, and it felt as if the prize was for both of us.
She was there another time when I went in search of Albert’s grave at Waikumete Cemetery. We stood together before a weathered little cross sinking into mud in a desolate corner of the burial place, nameless and seemingly forgotten.
Harriet, it feels, has always been there. But recently she left Penguin Random House. And what I know is this: if I have felt a special connection with her, it is one that is shared by so many New Zealand writers, men and women, Māori, Pasifika, Pākehā, it’s like a roll call of honour. Elsewhere, Stephanie Johnson has listed the names of writers Harriet has brought into the light, the list just goes on. This is where the magic comes in. We all, in some way, believed she belonged to us. The truth is, in the literary sense, we belonged to her. How did she manage us all, all at once?
Among her last acts at Penguin Random House was the celebration of 50 years of Penguin’s presence in New Zealand, compiling a set of 11 ‘classic’ Penguin titles, in their distinctive orange covers. They include works of several authors whose books she has edited. My name is there in the mix, along with Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Lloyd Jones, Alan Duff, Jenny Pattrick, Albert Wendt, Maurice Gee, all Harriet’s writers, and from earlier times, Katherine Mansfield, John Mulgan, Barry Crump.
And, finally, there is a beautiful hardback of short stories, the cover subtly reflecting all the colours that have distinguished Penguin series, The Penguin New Zealand Anthology, 50 stories for 50 years in Aotearoa. In the foreword, Harriet writes: “…this book is about the authors. I have already had the considerable pleasure of publishing almost all of them. Needless to say, the shortlist of writers I wanted to include would have filled several volumes, but as we weren’t celebrating a century I had to make some difficult choices ... In the meantime, I welcome you to enjoy – and celebrate – what is here, and to be transported into 50 different places.”
Harriet Allan may have left the building, but she is very much alive and not far away. She will always be in the hearts of the writers she has nurtured, one of the great editors in the literary pantheon. The Penguin New Zealand Anthology (Penguin Random House, $45) edited by Harriet Allan is available in bookstores nationwide.
