Apropos of nothing really, except that it's always good to remember these things, Henry Feltham has an insider's story of a hospital visit to Hone Tuwhare. It's made me dig out some poetry, and then some more… hope it does the same for you. Henry:

It has been a long time since I visited the sickly poet in hospital. I remembered the day only because I dug up notes made on a typewriter, that had itself long since vanished. Apparently I was 'striding towards the main block of Wellington Hospital … Roger explaining why Hone would have accepted flowers … indeed could be highly charming … but wouldn’t miss them …'

Memory has made the day white, almost featureless, which it easily could have been in early October, and we were gabbling, Roger really, up the lift, with lost souls coming and going at every floor, until we reach level M and crept down the hall towards Hone's room.

It was predictably hospitalesque, divided by curtains, sleeping patients seemingly lost in the folds of blankets and general whiteness. He was asleep with a towel wrapped around his head, looking like some wizened old Arab found wandering in the desert, brought there for safe-keeping. He was far smaller than the photos I'd seen of him – the ones of him digging holes in China with R.A.K., or expounding to an unseen audience, cigarette pinched between two stubby fingers.

We were whispering in the doorway and although Hone was supposed to be deaf, he heard us, blinked, and grinned. ‘Oh man, some friendly faces,’ a throaty explosion. ‘Fucking great.’ And suddenly I was there, far enough within my notes that the present tense felt more appropriate.

Roger introduces me, but Hone has to ask my name four times. He eventually gets me to write it down: ‘And write 'a good visitor, who came with Roger Steele', and put an arrow to your name … and write your address.’ When Roger shoots off a few minutes later to speak with the doctors, Hone tells me to expect a crate of whiskey in the mail, which I do, for several weeks, half-wonderingly. Then he asks if I am a writer, and I admit it to him, which in my early twenties was a rare thing.

‘Oh that’s great,’ he says, brown eyes shining, ‘that's great,’ shaking my hand, and I can see real pleasure in his eyes, I see hope and thoughts orbiting autumn irises, and I can see that food is on his mind. He wants us to bring him takeaways. No, he wants to get up, wants to walk down to the shops.
‘I’ll buy us all steak and eggs. Just down to the bank and get some of that dirty lucre out,’ to which Roger, freshly returned from conferencing with the authorities, says no. He is not taking any of the $60,000 Hone won on Monday night (as recipient of the inaugral Prime Minister's award). That money will stay where it is until someone can figure out how to safely introduce this windfall into Hone's life.

‘Koha,’ Hone insists, ‘koha.’

‘Hoha,’ replies Roger, without missing a beat.

‘Koha?’ Hone asks, straining to hear what was said.

Roger leans in, ‘Hoha, Hone … ho-ha.’

I'm trying to resist asking what the word means, while Hone gazes at Roger, eyes shining with a semi-feigned ignorance. He has amazing eyes. Roger tips in even closer, slips the words into Hone's ear: ‘You’re being hoha, Hone … boring.’

Hone goes quiet. Five minutes later though, it's: Just let me into my clothes, into a suit, let me out of here, I feel fine, just let me get some money out … and Roger ducks off to enquire once more.
It must be a recurrent request, because the doctor capitulates, says that if Hone can handle it – if he can keep it down – he’s allowed steak and chips, just this once – no matter he's in hospital for severe gastric problems, and looks like he's running a slow leak – he can have the steak and chips.

The look on Hone's face – his expression when we tell him there's food coming, is indescribable. It's the absence of an expression, every muscle going slack in wonder, tears forming at the corner of his eyes, though I can see he’s unsure we’re really coming back. He sits forward to watch us leave, then slumps back on the bed, returned to a state of dismay, suprise at finding himself in hospital.

Roger and I split up, pursuing different missions. When I come back, Hone’s sitting at the window with Roger's son Ben, looking out over Newtown. The day – I remember now – is clear and blue, sultry by the window, silent and high, with only old sleepers behind us. I place a plate of steak, eggs and chips in front of him, plus a small bottle of chianti. Hone stares at the plate, his face not quite recovered from it’s exertion. I tell him it looks good.

‘No bloody salt … Can’t have eggs without salt.’

And he sits there a moment longer, before offering us some of the steak, pushes it towards Ben and me, but touches nothing himself. I think of him offering half his Montana prize, two years before, to the poet who lost, and I wonder what he'll do with the money Helen Clarke gave him, whether all this precaution is really necessary. Maybe Hone will do with it whatever Hone will do.

He looks mournfully at the food in front of him, which may as well be on the other side of the window, getting pecked at by seagulls, for all its saltless waste. Then Roger appears, magically, with a few sachets of salt. Hone duly absolves his egg with it, and tucks into them, after a fashion. In fact, he eats thoughtfully, looking at the turbine spinning silently on the far Brooklyn hill.

‘Does anyone have a schematic for one of those things? … I could do with one at Kaka, man, the wind comes whooshing up outta the sea there,’ smiling, remembering home. He doesn’t touch the other half of the steak. Instead, orders us to eat the rest of it. ‘Come on, my brothers, those nurses’ll think this Maori can’t eat.’

Roger ducks out again, whispers to me as he leaves, ‘No te Reo.’ Later he tells me that Hone has trouble, because he’s deaf, but also that his Maori isn’t too hot. I see how this might be, living in Balclutha he must have forgotten a lot. His lack of faculty embarrasses him, I gather, but despite this I tell Hone about my wahine, and we discuss whakapapa, which involves him ruminating on various acquaintances, accreting them in his mind. Later I call him porangi for not eating the fine meal.
Ben sits there, smiling, chuckling at Hone, who eventually realises who he is, remembers meeting him five years earlier in Rotorua. Both of them are awed by this connection: Hone for remembering, Ben for being remembered.

Roger and I leave them, sitting in the hospital sun, remembering, and drinking chianti.

*

He checked himself out of hospital on Tuesday morning, surprised as anybody to find himself still there. He had been weak on Sunday, very weak when Roger took him out for a meal, had been swooning at the table. And when the oublisher brought oysters to the poet’s bed on Monday, Hone said, ‘Beautiful my brother, beautiful,’ and asked for a lemon. Roger told him he’d tasted them and they didn’t need it.

‘You didn’t eat one of mine did you?’

No, Roger explained, he'd bought his own.

*

My notes say, that by Thursday morning Hone hadn't been seen since Monday night. The situation, though, was unclear, as Roger would only impart vague details. So I was forced to envisage the rest. I pictured search parties of poetasters roaming Newtown, combing the restaurants, flitting through the bars, chanting haiku in the hope of luring him from the shadows. When Hone finally rang, it turned out that he was still in town, hiding out in some nameless motel. He didn't want anybody to know where he was, had ordered two bottles of whiskey and shut the door.

‘You’ve got to take your pills Hone,’ I overheard Roger urging down the phone.

‘I’m a doctor, I know what I need, I’m a doctor.’ He had an honorary doctorate in literature from Victoria University. He asked Roger for his clothes, ‘Can you get them from the hotel?’

‘There’s no hotel, Hone, you’ve been in the hospital.’

‘Have I?’ he rose on the last syllable, like someone running their fingers up a piano.

*

By Friday, I was no closer to finding out where Hone was. I knew it was the same place Sam Hunt stayed, because I hear Roger on the phone to Sam: ‘You know the place you stayed last year? It’s the same room.’ He went round on Thursday night with Rob, Hone's son, who I’d met at a John Walsh opening, smiling and lazy eyed, a chippie from Waiheke who looked like a good natured brawler, shifting from foot to foot on the hardwood floors.

Hone told them to fuck off, wouldn’t let them in the door. The next morning, I had to ask, 'Was he pissed?'

‘Yeah,’ said Roger, ‘Probably … It was hard to tell, actually. I bought him a bottle of wine and a bottle of Glenfiddich.’ The theory, as it went, was that Hone was a grown man, ‘He can’t walk the streets, can’t have women … At least he can drink … Worse things than drinking yourself to death,’ though these last words are reconstructed, too, as Roger had trailed off into a thoughtful silence. Or a tired one, exhausted by balancing the demands of so many concerned people.

Hone did emerge eventually, went to dinner on the Friday with Roger and Rob, who joined them with two drunken women in tow, one who weepily forced tequila on them.

I only know this from notes, I suppose Roger must have told me. Hone returned to his motel, and Roger left early, but then got a midnight call from Rob, who’d thrown a punch in a Courtney Place bar, been ejected, then raced for the nearest alley to hide from the police.

He was collected by my employer from a brothel, where he’d been supping cocktails with an overweight trucker …

*

The story goes on, as it began, erratically, but my notes end here.

Hone Tuwhare – 21 October 1922 – 16 January 2008