Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, for the first appointment was made, to Ian Cross, in October 1958, to be taken up in January 1959.
The fellowship was established by an anonymous group (rumoured to have Charles Brasch as its motive force) to be awarded annually to "writers of imaginative literature, including poetry, drama, fiction, autobiography, biography, essays or literary criticism".
It offers the appointee a one-year term (which could be extended by up to one additional year) as writer in residence, drawing a lecturer's salary, with an office supplied in the department of English.
The purpose of the fellowship is "to encourage and promote imaginative New Zealand literature and to associate writers thereof with the university".
To celebrate the fellowship's jubilee, the university has invited back all of the surviving ex-fellows during the Otago Festival of the Arts for a banquet, the unveiling of a celebratory plaque at the statue of Robert Burns and other gatherings, culminating in the Burns Festival weekend on October 11 and 12, a series of public readings and panel discussions, and involving also the launching of a book, Nurse to the Imagination: Fifty Years of the Robert Burns Fellowship.
The anniversary is a good time to ask how the fellowship has promoted and encouraged New Zealand literature, how the writers who have received it have used it.
One use that the founders must have had in mind was that it would give the appointees the opportunity to take on a major project that might otherwise have been difficult in a small country, where by economic necessity most writers cannot be full-time professionals.
Sometimes that has been the case for fellows.
• Owen Marshall (1992), for example, had been focusing exclusively on the short story after several early and inconclusive attempts at novels when he had been in his 20s.
This was partly because the challenge of the short story fascinated him but also because the genre suited a part-time writer whose teaching and family responsibilities precluded many long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
By 1992, he was in his 40s, had published seven collections of stories with an additional one due to appear that year, and was ready to try a novel again.
He used the uninterrupted time to write a full draft of The Many Coated Man, a book different in some ways from anything he had done before and one that on its publication in 1995 was shortlisted for the Montana Book Awards.
But he did not forsake the short story, for his next collection, Coming Home in the Dark, appeared the same year and had at least one Dunedin story - "Flute and Chance", depicting the terrifying encounter of an Otago PhD student with "the misfit" in Northeast Valley.
• Another example would be Michael King (1998-99). He was a much-published author in his 50s, on his way to being a national institution, when he was appointed.
He was at work on his largest project to date, his biography of Janet Frame. He had put in almost three years of research and was ready to write the big book.
The fellowship gave him the time to do that, with access to the Frame papers in the Hocken Library and with Frame herself living nearby for consultation.
It all went according to plan: Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame was completed, to be launched by Helen Clark at the university in 2000, and won the Montana Medal as the finest nonfiction work of the year.
Not according to anyone's plan was his early death in 2004, a fate he shared with a disturbing number of fellows, including James K.
Baxter, Maurice Duggan, Bill Sewell, Robert Lord and Dianne Pettis, none of whom even came close to the traditional three score and ten.
• From the first, the results of the fellowship have often been unexpected. Cross (1959), the first fellow, came in on a wave of success: The God Boy of 1957 had been a striking debut (many years later, it was to become the only New Zealand novel to become a Penguin Classic) and his second novel, The Backward Sex, had been accepted and was due for publication in 1960.
He had ambitious plans for his third novel, After Anzac Day.
In his report at the end of the Burns year, he said that the book "involved work beyond the range of anything I had previously attempted" in dealing with the past and present lives of four very different major characters, and that it had brought him into "a constant struggle with technical problems", but that he was still able in the year to bring it "to its penultimate stage".
Forty-seven years later in his memoir Such Absolute Beginners, he was more sardonic about the project: "In the two-storey wooden building that housed the English Department of the university, in a tiny room saved from being claustrophobic by a sash window, I sat down to write the great New Zealand novel, a project calling for characters whose lives and experience would span the nation's short history. Nothing to it, really."
Cross finished the last draft back home in Wellington in 1960, with some "short cuts" that did not "fulfil the original grand plan for it", and when the novel appeared in 1961 it was not suddenly acclaimed as the Great New Zealand Novel and it never achieved the fame of The God Boy, but it remains a major piece of work.
The fellowship and its novel did not form a stepping stone to a career as a full-time novelist, rather it gave Cross the chance to write his swansong as a novelist.
As he began the book, he wrote in answer to a Landfall questionnaire on the situation of New Zealand writers that even with the remarkable success of The God Boy he could not earn enough from writing fiction to meet his responsibilities as a man in his 30s with a growing family, so "the novel I'm working on now is likely to be my last".
It was, until after his retirement, when he published one more novel, The Family Man, in 1993.
• Cross' successor as fellow, Duggan (1960), also had ambitious plans for his tenure: he would complete a short novel in the mode of Henry James, The Burning Miss Bratby, and begin a panoramic novel of Northland life, The Wits of Willie Graves.
He started in a purposive way, giving a talk to the Literary Society on the Jamesian method and its advantages as he laboured on his short novel and completed a first draft, and he published in Review a fragment of the planned Northland novel. But the ambitious plans did not come to fruition.
The Burning Miss Bratby, which he kept returning to for years, remained stillborn, a much-revised unpublished manuscript accompanied by a sheaf of notes and outlines in the Alexander Turnbull Library; the Northland novel was never completed.
When Duggan finished the draft of The Burning Miss Bratby, he wrote to his mentor, Frank Sargeson, who was hoping that he would produce the Great New Zealand Novel, that it was really only a sketch.
To Keith Sinclair, he admitted he was "bored stiff" with "the cold corpse" of Miss Bratby and said of his draft, "God knows where the draught is coming from but it blows through the holes and gaps in the poor thin story like a blast from the arse end of a vacuum cleaner."
But from the ruins of his schemes, Duggan made much. The "fragment" of the novel that had appeared in Review he revised and made into one of his best short stories, The Wits of Willie Graves, published in Summer in the Gravel Pit in 1965.
Another fragment he revised as For the Love of Rupert for the same volume, while a hypothetical story that he used as an example in his Literary Society talk he decided to make into a real story, and it became one of his best known, Blues for Miss Laverty, published in Landfall and collected in the same 1965 volume.
But the best writing came in the second half of the fellowship when he put Miss Bratby aside and in reaction to it wrote an entirely different kind of short novel, Riley's Handbook.
He had been reading Samuel Beckett and he had for a while boarded at the Captain Cook Hotel, and he put both experiences to good use in this ranting monologue of a rebellious Irish artist living in a hotel.
He wrote to Sargeson that he had written "a dozen `brilliant' but obscure pages as a beginning to something at the moment indescribable, puzzling and strictly non-commercial".
When he had completed a first draft of what he called his "lewd and obsessive phantasy", he sent it to Brasch, expecting it would be turned down for Landfall, but Brasch liked it, and when he accepted the fully revised version in 1961, he wrote: "What a triumph it is for your Burns year, and would be if you had written nothing else then."
But Duggan had also started something else that would turn out to be his greatest story, Along Rideout Road that Summer.
Taking another hypothetical example he had written for an article on the teaching of English for Robin Dudding in the Auckland Training College magazine as a starting point, and using the first-person narration modelled on that of Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita (he had borrowed a copy of the novel, then banned in New Zealand, from Erich Geiringer, who was lecturing at the medical school at the time), he produced an unbuttoned, ironic masterpiece.
• In getting the fellowship, Duggan had just edged out Maurice Shadbolt. Shadbolt, who had written in answer to the Landfall questionnaire in 1960 that "Otago, with the Robert Burns Fellowship, is like a bright island in a bleak sea," had his turn at the fellowship in 1963.
He also had a grand project in mind, his version of the Great New Zealand Novel, Strangers and Journeys - "a worthy project for a Burns Fellow to undertake".
He duly laboured away at it, published a piece of his draft in Review, but finally found the going just too heavy, put it aside (it was finally completed after many fits and starts almost 10 years later) and, being irritated by what he called "the unnatural naturalism" of Cross's The Backward Sex and other New Zealand fictions of adolescence, began to write a "playful pastiche of some New Zealand writing", seeing how far "clich could be used to subvert clich".
He used Cross, Brasch, Denis Glover, Baxter, and Barry Crump as characters at a literary party thrown by someone who sounds very much like C. K. Stead.
But as he wrote his parody, it "grew dismayingly into a novel called Among the Cinders, perhaps proving that I had to have my cake and eat it too".
The novel, his first after two collections of short stories, was published in 1965, a most unexpected result of the Burns year.
• Other fellows had unexpected, sometimes life-changing experiences in their Burns year.
Janet Frame (1965) had come back to visit New Zealand in 1964, having lived in Spain and England since 1956. The "homesickness" (if one can call it that) brought about by the visit to a family with New Zealand connections (fictionalised in Towards Another Summer) had led her to plan a visit in 1964, and the death of her father made it urgent.
She received the Scholarship in Literature in 1964, which required her to stay in New Zealand for the year, but she was planning a return to England when she was unexpectedly invited to take up the Burns for 1965 (she had not applied for it).
She described the experience of returning to Dunedin as "like living personal fiction with all the best set properties of enchantment and nightmare, the classic theme of the return to the crime, the triumph of the little serving maid [I was last in Dunedin as a waitress at the Grand] who was invited to the castle".
She had a most productive year, finishing two novels, writing a draft of a third (The Rainbirds), and writing poems and short stories.
The year was so successful that she applied for an extension, but Baxter had also applied for 1966 and receive the fellowship. But the committee wished to have Frame stay on to complete some of her work, and she was made a special "guest of the university" in 1966.
In that year, she finished the poems of the Pocket Mirror, wrote more stories and began the novel that would finally become Intensive Care in 1970.
Most important, she used some of her grant to make a down payment on a cottage in Opoho and decided definitely to stay in New Zealand.
• Baxter (1966-67) also had a most productive return to Dunedin as fellow.
He was worried when he took up the fellowship that maybe the Muse, "that primitive and prejudiced old Lady, does not smile on Fellowship holders".
She is bored by their "good morals" and instead is likely to "whisper in the ear of a young poet with a raging hangover and three mistresses and no money at all, who inhabits a blanket-shrouded bedroom in a flat above a wineshop in Greater King Street".
As it worked out, the Muse did not desert him but, if anything, harried him and burned him out.
In his two-year term, he did not finish his "worthy" project, an edition of his grandfather John Macmillan Brown's memoirs, but he produced an incredible amount of work, rivalled only by Frame's: more than 100 poems, including some of his best on Otago places, the powerful sequence Words to Lay a Strong Ghost, on a love affair of his student days, and the notorious A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting; a series of talks on literary subjects that became The Man on the Horse; a series of articles for the Tablet that became The Flowering Cross; and a sequence of seven plays for Patric Carey to produce at the Globe.
When he first took up the fellowship, he had taken a year's leave of absence from the post office in Wellington, but he never returned.
He stayed on one more year in Dunedin, working at the Catholic Education Office, and then, possibly burned out, following a call that he heard, he took off for Boyle Crescent, Jerusalem, and his final, prophetic phase, stating in Valediction at the end of 1968, "I will go North / Tomorrow like a slanting rainstorm".
• Witi Ihimaera (1975) was another who heard a call to change his life in his Burns year. He came as fellow having published his first three books within what he calls "the Maori conservation framework" of his writing in the previous three years.
As he focused on his Burns project, the collection of short stories The New Net Goes Fishing, he enjoyed "this opportunity to write, for the first time, on a full-time basis", while also feeling the culture shock of being "the only Maori on Maori Hill", as he wrote in an essay for Review.
The short stories, emphasising Maori experience in the Pakeha-dominated city, were a change from his previous "pastoral" emphasis on traditional Maori rural life, but as the year went on he felt that a greater change was needed.
He worked on the first of what was to be a series of anthologies of recent Maori writing, Into the World of Light, an experience that he said "was pretty significant personally" because it enabled him "to commit to Maori writing in its widest sense".
Looking at his work to date and at the response to it, he decided not to publish new fiction for the next 10 years because he thought that his first books were "a serious mismatch with the reality of the times", the expression of a vision that "was out of date and, tragically, so encompassing and so established that it wasn't leaving room enough for the new reality to punch through".
So he took it as his job to publish no new fiction until he could encompass within it the "new reality", and instead to help bring out recent Maori writing that dealt with "Maori life and race relations between Maori and Pakeha in the current environment".
Thus no new fiction by Ihimaera appeared between the publication of The New Net Goes Fishing in 1977 and The Matriarch in 1986.
• Other Burns Fellows brought to Dunedin by the fellowship stayed, sometimes permanently. Ian Wedde (1972), the youngest Burns Fellow appointee at 25, like Frame, returned to New Zealand from a time in England to take up the fellowship and settled for a while in Otago.
He and his wife and child lived in Port Chalmers from 1972 to 1975, a prolific period for him from which ultimately emerged three of his best books of poetry, Pathway to the Sea, Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos, Spells for Coming Out; the short novel Dick Seddon's Great Dive, which won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1977; some short stories; and a book of translations.
O. E. Middleton (1970) and Hone Tuwhare (1974) stayed on permanently, Middleton in Dunedin, Tuwhare in Dunedin and then at Kaka Point.
Roger Hall (1977-78), who wrote of the Burns period as the movement "from Glide Time to full time", having established himself as a professional playwright with Middle Age Spread in 1978, stayed on at the university as a teaching fellow in drama until 1994.
Robert Lord (1987), returning from New York to take up the fellowship, stayed on until his premature death in 1992 and left his cottage on Titan St to a trust for the use of other writers.
The promotion and encouragement of New Zealand writing by the fellowship, then, has worked in a number of ways, many of them unexpected, in its first 50 years.
There is indeed much to celebrate.
