Title: A Paradise Rubric: Introduction to The Bird of Paradise

Author: Sara Berger

In: The Bird of Paradise

Publication details: S. N. Brown and Co., 1896, Dunedin

Part of: Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection

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II. The Life of the Author

The Bird of Paradise was not published as an obvious autobiography. A reviewer of the time seems to have taken it at face value; the Otago Witness remarks drily that it is 'difficult, inasmuch as, like many first novels, it contains characters and incidents sufficient to set up two or three modern novels...'¹ The length is a problem:

The closing paragraph of the book describes the death of Eugene, which the ordinary novel reader would have no doubt welcomed earlier, for these days we are imbued with the idea that life is brief indeed, and that the wit which suits us best is that whose soul is brevity.²

(In life, if not in the novel; the Otago Witness reviewer roundaboutly gets his wish; Dutton died in November of the same year, and one obituary supposes the unfavourable reception of The Bird of Paradise as a cause: 'Owing to disappointments of a private nature – the cool reception his novel, The Bird of Paradise, received, was one–'³).

It is common to say of a novel of the times that it was based on the author's life. Lawrence Jones, writing in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, notes: 'A recurring type of fiction is the clearly autobiographical novel in which the hero's career has been fictionalized and made more dramatically coherent by an admixture of melodramatic romance.'⁴ Check. Clearly this was a style that was easy and profitable to imitate. But this observation has the advantage of hindsight, and therefore the advantage of Dr Dutton. He wrote his 'Romance' less than two years after the divorce with which it is mostly concerned. The simultaneity of his life and literature are illustrated by a curious page of the Otago Witness, on August 16th, 1894, which contains a letter to the editor:

SIR- The Trustees of the Arrow Hospital recently appointed, with a great flourish of trumpets, as surgeon to the hospital, a Dr. W. H. Dutton, of Victoria, a medical genius with a string of letters to his name as long as the tail of a kite...⁵

The writer, a “Nemo”, goes on to criticise the 'degrading' conditions of the hospital and suggest that only a doctor ignorant of its status, or lacking self-respect, could have been induced to take up the position. The very next item on the page is 'A Melbourne Divorce Case: Alleged Cruelty of Dr. Dutton'⁶, which reports the case in detail, probably drawing from the Melbourne Argus. The placement speaks of remarkable editorial comment, however 'silent'. The notoriety of the case appears to have cost Dutton the Arrowtown practice; the Argus's trial notes report that, 'as to the New Zealand appointment, he had received telegrams stating that in consequence of the reports appearing in this case, it had been cancelled.'⁷

This is not the typical colonial writer creating a pleasing, or socially apposite, tale from her experiences, dressed up in the popular melodramatic style of the time. This is a writer whose life story had already been printed when he came to write it. Jones notes that 'most of the Pioneer novels were written by amateurs, with fiction at best an occasional avocation in the midst of lives dedicated primarily to the more material concerns of a pioneer society...'⁸ Dutton turned to that 'occasional avocation' after the other side of his story had damaged his reputation as a respectable man, and thus his career.