Too Loud a Solitude

Colloquy with this post.

Robin Hyde at Waiatarua
wished she had her Malory there.
Inside was a specific illustration
of a scene that had stood,
a little earlier,
for something she didn’t want to say.

This she wrote in ‘37.
It was published in ‘84,
one in a series of ‘scripts and fragments.
I had a second-hand copy of that volume.
I think my mother may have found it for me.

By the turn of the century
I was a funded student of Hyde,
all passion but not too many ideas.
Michele Leggott suggested
I pay attention to
some of the things Hyde had read.
I wanted to find that Malory.

Editors and inventors had
come out of the long skirts of Tennyson,
to tell Malory-stories
again and again.
Rackham, Beardsley engraved and illustrated.
The story was compressed
for softer sensibilities.
This was before the Winchester manuscript,
before Vinaver. All adaptations
were out of Caxton.

Hyde had mentioned Rackham
as her illustrator.
I fed my inquiries through interloans.
They found me a copy
in the Invercargill Public Library,
a Great War-era abridgement.

The drawings were by Rackham, but
the illustration to which she clung
wasn’t there.
That whole section of the narrative
wasn’t there.
Hyde always was a beautiful mis-rememberer.

I cast a browsing arc
to proximate editions.
I sat in the narrow aisle
between the library shelves.
I looked through the donated volumes
in the library’s possession.
I found the picture,
found the volume. W. Russell Flint
the illustrator’s name.

There’s not much that’s concrete
in literary academia.
Books buckle under the weight of
the ideas heaped upon them.
Originary objects are viewed under vitrines,
or touched through gloved hands.
Texts are visible through contexts,
which we cannot transfer.

Yet I had this book, and this evidence.
I saw the picture that she remembered.
She mislaid her copy before she went to the bush.
It was borrowed from a friend, who died.

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