Fleur, 1934-2024

Dunedin writer Kay McKenzie Cooke met Fleur Adcock at the Tairoa Albatross Colony. She writes: I couldn’t believe it when I saw the name Fleur Adcock written down as a booking for a tour at Taiaroa Albatross Colony. No-one else at the centre knew who she was from a bar of soap. It would’ve been a real shame if she’d been put on another guide’s tour. I would have been devastated. But, thankfully, travesty was avoided.
She was with a male friend, the only two on the tour. I was far too awkward and shy to reveal I owned about three of her books of poetry but towards the end of the tour I mumbled something like, “I like your poetry.” I’m not sure she picked up what I said in the wind at the top of the observatory. I was terrified of coming across as some kind of demented fan-girl. She was here to see the albatross. This could sometimes be an almost spiritual experience. Poetic, even. And I wasn’t about to spoil that.
I was a tour guide for one season only. In the end I became exhausted from saying the same thing over and over to impassive faces, and didn’t apply to go back for another season. Also the drive out and back—beautiful, so beautiful, but long. The tours were run along fairly strict methods and truth to tell I was a little embarrassed at the spoon-fed method and rote involved. Especially on that day. Fitting for a bus load of Americans, but not fitting for a poet who would (I thought) want only to see the big birds aloft without all the info.
I actually felt sorry for Fleur and her friend having to listen to me drone on. But they were quiet and polite and listened. Even if I hadn’t known who Fleur was, I would have seen both of them as the personification of fine people with a delicate strength, an aura of calm.
We were finally through the obligatory initial stages of the tour (the lifestyle model, the talk, the video) and could stroll up to the observatory where hopefully there would be albatross flying. But if not, at least there was a fat, fluffy chick that never went anywhere and which that year you could see from the window. Oh, and there was a display featuring the stomach contents of an albatross chick. I remember Fleur’s intake of breath when she saw it.
Thankfully, there was indeed an albatross flying—it could have been my favourite one, an adolescent with one wing out of alignment. The sight of an albatross in flight is always, always wondrous. I was happy one flew over and around for them because it doesn’t always happen and the tours are not cheap.
It’s not a fib to say that Fleur’s visit was the highlight of my short time as a tour guide out there at the colony. I made sure to look out for the poem I was hopeful she was thinking about as the three of us watched the albatross soar. She probably wasn’t doing so right at that moment. But just in case, I’d been extra careful to give her space to think and kept at a respectful remove, making sure not to talk too much in the observatory up on the tussocky knoll.
I was thrilled to read the poem Fleur wrote after the tour. The poem, simply titled “Albatross”, encompasses Coleridge and takes the subject of the albatross into realms I never could. But it didn’t refer to an albatross gliding so close you could see its smile. It was the contents of the chick’s stomach that made it into the poem.
Dunedin writer Alan Roddick was Fleur’s companion that day. They first met in the Writers’ Group at Otago in 1957, alongside novelist Graham Billing and, later, authors Ian Cross and Maurice Duggan. Alan writes, “As Fleur Campbell at that time, separated from Alistair and the mother of their two small boys, ‘that princess of quiet fire’ (to quote CK Stead), was writing the poems that later made up her strong first collection, The Eye of the Hurricane, in 1964.” After her death earlier this month he completed a poem about their visit to the albatross colony.
Remembering Fleur Adcock
Still turning heads at eighty-two!
(Wait a minute, wasn’t that…?)

At the Albatross Colony
our guide recognised you

and spoke one of your poems                        
as over us        soaring

that great bird you’d come to see
paused, on a wing-tip.

ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias once met Fleur Adcock for dinner, and exchanged correspondence with her off and on for about eight years. He writes: She didn’t smile much and she ate without gusto while I shovelled food in my mouth over dinner one night about five years ago with CK Stead and his wife Kay. She lived in London and had travelled home to New Zealand for the summer. She was reserved except for one tense moment when she raised a subject that angered her: a poem CK had written about the late Wellington poet Lauris Edmond. It was entitled “Witchy Wellington” and she had read it in The Friday Poem, the 2018 anthology I had edited for undistinguished publishing house Luncheon Sausage Books; two of Fleur’s poems were also included. CK had referred to Edmond as “the Intolerable Lauris”, relishing “the way those two words seemed to belong together”. Fleur found it offensive. Edmond was dead and as such not in an ideal position to respond. CK merrily demurred, saying the musicality of the phrase was irresistible and, moreover, was an accurate assessment of her character. Fleur was having none of it. She held her ground and maintained her stance of admonishment.
That same certainty and resolve was a feature of her emails over the years. We corresponded on and off in the 2010s and I last heard from her during the 2020 lockdown, when I asked her to write a portrait of her plague year in London. “One thing missing from my routine is any inclination to write poetry; that seems like a frivolity, a self-indulgence from the olden days before we all shared the same grim future. I don’t feel as cheated by what lies ahead as a younger person would: I’m 86; I’ve had my good times. I suppose it’s fortunate that I’m a pessimist – a cheerful pessimist, by nature, but one with absolutely no expectation that the world will somehow save itself from a collapse through climate change, overpopulation, mad populist politicians, and now pandemics. This one isn’t going to go away, and even if a vaccine is miraculously developed there will always be another nasty little disease to ride around the world in the bloodstreams of greedy, travel-obsessed human beings. Where is the vaccine for the common cold, another form of coronavirus? Viruses mutate.”
All her literary urges were towards poetry but her prose was so lively and charming and beautifully composed. I commissioned her to review the first volume of Philip Temple’s biography of novelist Maurice Shadbolt. All I knew was that she and Shadbolt were the same generation; I hadn’t realised they were lovers, which was a bit of an oversight. Much of the review read like her own memoir: “It was in November 1975 that Maurice took me to Dublin, on Reader’s Digest expenses. He was thrilled when just after we left the airport a UDA terrorist bomb exploded in the men’s toilet in the arrivals lounge, which he had actually visited a short time before: a gift for the sensationalist in him. This was his first visit to the country of his Kearon ancestors, and here he was, narrowly escaping death, as his self-dramatising imagination would have put it. The event went straight into his myth kitty, to be recycled and embroidered at every opportunity – he found himself remembering a shifty looking individual he had vaguely noticed as he washed his hands….”
I get tired of people describing New Zealand literature as incestuous. Probably my tiredness is because it’s an accurate assessment. Another of Shadbolt’s relationships was with Fleur’s sister, novelist Marilyn Duckworth, “with whom”, she wrote in her review, “he was desperately trying to negotiate a way of living that wouldn’t get her into trouble with her husband’s divorce lawyers. Apart from legal problems, any possible future with Marilyn was doomed from the start by the fact that each of them had four children – not to mention Maurice’s clear assumption that his writing would always take precedence over hers. As the situation hurtled downhill, one bizarre event following after another – including the recruitment of my mother, Irene Adcock, to move into Titirangi as house mother when the divorce laws debarred Marilyn from being there – he gradually reached the conclusion that grand passion was all very well, but what he really needed was a ‘housekeeping partner’. This role fell to Barbara Magner. When Marilyn met him again a year or two later, having herself moved on by then, he complained that Barbara didn’t really understand marriage. Also he hadn’t been able to find any socks that morning.”
God it was a great review. More: “In December 1975, on my first visit to New Zealand for 13 years, he [Shadbolt] picked me up from my mother’s house in Wellington in a car already occupied by his own mother and little Brigid [Shadbolt’s youngest daughter], and drove the four of us up the North Island. This somewhat fraught journey was made no easier by the fact that the said little Brigid threw up in the back of the car just as we arrived at her mother’s house to drop her off. I was wearing casual clothes and jandals, and feeling rather frazzled from the trip (although fortunately I had escaped the vomit); Barbara [Magner], whom I’d never met, was dressed for seduction in a stylish blue outfit with high-heeled sandals and blue nylon stockings. Clearly she wasn’t going to let her standards slip just because her husband was hers no longer. When the handover had at last taken place and Maurice and I were alone in his house at Titirangi we found the fridge full of provisions left for him by Barbara, who although they were separated still had a key. They included several salads featuring soya beans, a favourite of hers. Maurice didn’t like soya beans, but had never had the courage to say so; now here they were, pursuing him beyond the marriage. Right at the beginning of this holiday I felt daunted; how could I compete with yet another of his clinging mother-figures?”
One final passage: a note on her exceedingly brief marriage to Barry Crump. She admonished Temple for saying she typed a novel that Crump had written in longhand, in 1952: “No way! I was far too busy working as a librarian in order to pay our rent and buy groceries (any request for a contribution from Barry would be met by ‘Where’s your independence?’)  His typist was a young woman called Lorraine whom I assumed he paid with sexual favours, although his publishers may have backed this up with actual money.”
Of course I wished she had composed an actual memoir. But she already had, her whole literary life, in exact and witty poetry. One of the two poems I included in The Friday Poem was apropos of her first husband, writer Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and Crump, her Mum and Dad, and mortality.
Six typewriters
To begin with, my father’s reconditioned
German keyboard picked up during the war,
with a spiky Gothic ‘o’.
Then, I suppose,
when I was married, the use of Alistair’s:
details forgotten or repressed.
In Dunedin I answered a small ad
and paid £10 for a museum piece
black and upright as a Model T Ford.
Next, a surprise: Barry Crump’s portable
Empire Corona, an honourable
parting substitute for alimony.
It’s rusting at the back of a cupboard
in case it should become collectable –
after all, he had his face on a stamp.
Then my Adler Gabriele: brand-new,
the machine ‘für moderne Menschen’ –
handsome and much cherished, until
the last one, a gift from my mother:
electronic with adjustable spacing
and a self-correct facility;
so efficient that for years I spurned
computers. Of them I shall say nothing.
Fleur Adcock OBE (February 10, 1934 – October 10, 2024) is most famous for her couplet, “If you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks / what you should give up is not smoking but sex.” She was born Kareen Fleur Adcock in Papakura, attended Wellington Girls’ College and Victoria University, and emigrated to London in 1963. Her collections of poetry include The Eye of the Hurricane (1964), The Inner Harbour (1979) “generally cited as her most artistically successful work”, according to her entry in Britannica, and Te Herenga Waka University Press published her Collected Poems in 2019. At 18, she married poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and the couple had two children. A second marriage to Barry Crump lasted five unmemorable months. She became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006. She received numerous awards in New Zealand including the national book award in 1984 for Selected Poems.Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $60) is available in bookstores nationwide.