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.