A LITERARY PAGE OR TWO


Lawlor ran his editing and sales operations from Wellington as a form of branch office of New Century Press. Confessions of a Journalist re-plays the different offices he occupied as the chain-smoking hub of what he liked to portray as a mini-Fleet Street in his much-loved city.

Much of Lawlor's literary page or two can be understood, literally at times, as an anecdotal diary of the comings-and-goings around him and amongst those who constituted his stable coterie of helpmates, friends or variously esteemed persons. As observed by the Wellington Public Library Readers Review publication in 1935, a chief characteristic of Lawlor was that he was "ever moving and scheming" to create an interest in the "literary world" (at least as he penned it).

At this stage of my research I am fully engaged on tapping into Lawlor's Shibli Bagarag columns - all 97 of them - to the fullest extent possible. I expect that as I keep sifting and indexing through the 1273 brief items that appeared on those pages, no less than 800 being directly attributable to Lawlor's preferred pen-name, I will keep discovering new diachronic and thematic groupings. The most obvious are the ones set out on this slide: Book notes and chatter,Enzed journalism and what I've called, using a pet phrase of Lawlor, "Austrazealand" tales and trails.

As Patricia Clarke has written I believe there is much to be gleaned from looking for points of identity that have perhaps been ignored or noted only on some periphery. There is a real challenge in finding some people on these pages who never or seldom ever show up in strictly literary surveys, as well as the tempting detective work that could be done to reveal more about Lawlor's gallery of subjects and contributors across a range of collaborative journalism specific and quite unique to "Austrazealand".

If the writings in these columns belong to any sub-genre, it would probably best be called that of the pithy paragraphist, a relatively ordinary journeyman rather than a man of letters. Much seems to be written of, for and by fellow ink-slingers in the Bagarag columns in a somewhat recursive and repetitive loop, and shows how immersed Lawlor was by the milieu of books, and publishing, and newsprint, almost to the point where I wondered if the implied reader was almost solely Lawlor himself and his circle.

By producing some detailed indexes to the Bagarag columns I will be holding up a mirror to the running monthly catalogue of cultural production, transactions and other traces on those pages. The number of "scribblers" lauded by Lawlor doesn't take long to look like a telephone directory, and he is methodical in the way he tracks the rise and demise of both publications and people, including the way in which New Zealanders, particularly a figure such as David Low, fare in the wider world while invariably relating each story back to "Austrazealand" and an embedded circuit of communication.

The turns of phrase used on these pages have a particular resonance for journalism history, from the linguistic oddities to some colloquial gems. For instance on these pages you just don't die, you are "buried somewhere among the printing presses on the other side".