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.

 

A Note on the Text

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.

Notes

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.