Leeward Read online

  Iris’s illusions about marriage to Leo – her leisurely life of reading books – had gone by the time I was born. Her frequent complaint when we were young – it became a family joke – was ‘I don’t even have time to go to the lav’. I hated it when my mother asked, ‘Have you been to the lav?’ She did not seem to understand children reach an age when they do not need to be reminded. Although inhibited about certain parts of her body – in the bathroom, she kept the door firmly shut – she had no sense of decorum, filing away the dead skin on her corns in front of the family and pointing to the bunions on her feet when I was a little boy, saying how silly she had been, wearing tight shoes when she was a girl.

  This intimacy faded and I became resistant to ‘Your father’s just a working man’ or ‘He’s not a reader’. I began hinting to my father that I sided with him and made a point of contradicting my mother while he was present. I suspected my father’s sceptical detachment was the accumulation of many small rebuffs. Under the layers of habitual disappointment, he might even have still been in love with her.

  After I reached puberty, my mother would sometimes say with a worried look: ‘There’s something I have to tell you some day’. My standard response was a pretended ignorance. This flustered her even more. I eventually gave up teasing and told her there was nothing she needed to tell me. Once she knew I knew, a flood of intimate confessions began that I could not stop, anaesthetising whatever feelings I still had for her.

  One of her stories was that on their wedding night, my father explained to her ‘he’d done it before’. He was seduced, he said, by his landlady when he was a young man in the country. She used to come to him on the outside veranda where he slept. One night she pointed to a doll: ‘Perhaps we shall have one of those’. My father left the next day.

  Some other confessions were not as harmless. On their wedding night Leo, she said, was surprised at how hard she was to penetrate. (It may have been her peculiar way of letting me know she was a virgin when she married. It was not something I wanted to hear about.) My mother used to tell me: ‘Save yourself for marriage’. What I was saving myself for was unclear, as sex was ‘that dirty business’. After sex with Leo (she said): ‘I had to wash myself out in the bathroom. Late at night. While your father was asleep.’

  I asked my mother why she married, if she found sex so abhorrent – did she ever love him? ‘Your father was comfortable’, was her reply, or ‘safe’. I asked had she ever enjoyed sex, and she once admitted it was ‘close to heaven’.

  As owner of a passenger boat, my father found it easy to strike up a conversation with strangers, but he did not talk about his feelings. I deduced he had been in love with my mother when they married, and, as far as I know, was faithful to her. He was respectful with women. A physically shy woman such as my mother may have appealed to him. By the time he moved out of the marital bedroom though, he knew he was not loved. He revealed little, only comments such as he was too young (at forty-four) when he got married, and ‘Your mother likes the gold braid and brass buttons’ (referring to her boast about General Blamey). I came to believe the unreciprocated feelings between my father and mother were normal: there was always a lover and a loved.

  As my mother grew older, her tendency to talk at rather than with increased. I became the target of her diatribes about ‘the Catholics’ (often ‘the dirty old Catholics’), ‘the Americans’, the starving Africans and Asians, world peace, and nuclear weapons. My father shrugged his shoulders: ‘Why should I worry about the Bomb? I’ll be dead and buried by the time they let it off.’

  Many of her generalisations began ‘They say…’ I asked her, ‘Mother, who is this “they say” you are always quoting?’ One evening I was particularly dismissive of her. After she had gone to bed, my father stood in the doorway of my room. He said, ‘Don’t be too hard on your mother son. She’s…’ He pointed at the side of his head and rotated his forefinger.

  Bella’s ‘Recollections’ end with the sentence ‘And now I am alone’. But she was not alone. She was surrounded by the ghosts of famous people she had caught glimpses of. She wrote a page-long ‘After-thought’ which begins ‘Amongst distinguished people I have seen…’ She lists the King and Queen of Portugal, the King and Queen of Italy, King George V with his wife in Edinburgh when they were the Duke and Duchess of York, and she reports attending the funeral of the Duke of Cambridge, who was uncle to Queen Mary, and so on. Compared with Bella’s fatuities, Iris’s obsessions were generous and humane.

  I was hard on my mother, with the intolerance of youth. In many ways I was her embodiment. When I was a child, she encouraged me to read books and listen to music. She once tried to teach me to sing a Nat King Cole song we both liked. There was an extra note I couldn’t get, which I stumbled over. She sang the tune for me, but this note still eluded me, even when we sang it together. One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.

  My mother read Pepys’s journal. She suffered with Swann in Proust’s Swann’s Way. Gertrude Bell and Mary Wortley Montague were among her heroines. She loved H V Morton’s travel books and Dickens, and above all Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. But she was married to a man who never read a book after he left school. He spent hours studying form guides for race horses and his only reading matter travelling in the train between his houses was old copies of the Reader’s Digest.

  Perhaps I expected too much of a woman of her age. In the mid-1970s, when I was divorced and looking after three small children half of each week, I was vaguely resentful of her lack of interest. But she was eighty years old, frail and slightly forgetful, although she could always retell, in great detail, what had happened in last night’s television show.

  A steady decline in her health had begun in her early fifties. Late in 1949 she had a fall in the David Jones Elizabeth Street store and broke her arm. She took herself along to a nearby public hospital. Badly shaken, she arrived home at seven that night. We had been alarmed, wondering where she was.

  The Sydney Hospital interns had botched the setting of her arm. A few weeks later the fracture was reset and a steel plate inserted in a private hospital. Her hospital stay was prolonged by pleurisy and a thrombosis in her leg, and she was found to have high blood pressure.

  This was the Christmas when Diana and I had no Christmas gifts. With our mother out of the way, my father cooked hearty meals, and invited over to the McMahon’s Point house his friends and relations, the people in his life who were unwelcome when my mother was there. He entertained them with sherry and Christmas cake (already made by our mother with an enormously thick white coating of delicious marzipan). Our father enjoyed the bustle he created, but it was a desolate Christmas for us children.

  Iris came home and we moved to Gordon. She insisted we go by train to look at the house of the surgeon who had reset her arm. As we walked past, my mother salaciously pointed out his mistress’s cottage – in the grounds of the house where he lived with his wife. Iris had heard all about it from her surgeon’s irascible old mother, who had an adjoining hospital room.

  She was nervous about falls. In winter she could sense the steel plate in her arm. In 1968, after my father’s death, she met the parents of my future first wife. Aged seventy-two, Iris was crestfallen when she saw they were in their fifties: ‘I’m the only one who’s old’.

  SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

  In 1956, my final year of high school, I was in the refectory of the Sydney University Union. A row of tall French doors had an outlook onto trees. Murals of romanticised figures from Shakespeare to Dickens looked down on the hundred or so young men and women at the tables below. In summer the young women wore nylon stockings and tried to arrest the ladders in their stockings with a spot of nail polish. In winter they wore knee-high woollen stockings, black or with tartan patterns, and tartan skirts, whose folds were held in place by a prominent safety pin or rabbit’s foot. The young men wore sports coats and ties
– usually wool, cotton or rayon ties, rarely silk. The murmur of young adults coming and going, and the clink of teaspoons stirring sugar in coffee cups, were intoxicating for a sixteen-year-old from a boys’ school.

  A school friend – I’ll call him Robert – who was in first year Architecture, had arranged to meet me there before taking me to a lecture in the Wallace Theatre where the composer Richard Meale was to talk about Webern and Schoenberg – composers I had heard of – and Berio, Boulez, Varèse and Xenakis – four unfamiliar names.

  Robert was two years older, and we had become friends at Shore in 1955 when he was repeating his final school year. We got to know each other in the Honours English class Pat Eldershaw held after school. During school holidays Robert invited me to his parents’ house where we listened to long-playing records, and I heard for the first time the symphonies of Sibelius, and Bartok’s string quartets.

  In 1956 Robert asked me to be his witness on a court application for exemption from compulsory military training, or ‘Nasho’, for males turning eighteen. Robert was not objecting on religious grounds. If he succeeded, this would set a precedent. Vivienne Abraham, the solicitor for a pacifist organisation, was acting for him and briefed a maverick barrister, Peter Clyne, chubby with a goatee and prominent glasses.

  At the time, I was a prefect at Shore and a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps. In my mind neither of these things stood in the way of my being a witness. But I had private qualms. Not understanding I was just a character witness, I naively felt I could not give evidence about another person’s beliefs. As we were walking to the District Court, another problem occurred to me. I was an atheist. I turned to Clyne and told him I could not swear on a bible.

  I made a statutory affirmation and was in the witness box for only a few minutes. In his final address, Clyne argued that the conscientiousness of his client’s belief, not its logic, was what mattered. ‘If my client conscientiously believed he was a poached egg’ said Clyne, ‘that would be his conscientious belief ’. Poached eggs did not make it into Judge Holt’s judgment, but Robert won his exemption.

  Not long before the hearing something happened that exacerbated my squeamishness about giving evidence. On one of our bush walks through Lane Cove National Park, Robert spoke about his horror of war. He looked at me and added, ‘Remember I said this’. I realised our conversation had been rehearsed with his lawyers.

  A few years later, when I was an articled clerk, I used to see Vivienne Abraham around the courts. ‘Robert hasn’t paid Peter Clyne’s fees. The Society had to pay them,’ she told me. I passed this message on. Robert’s reply was the pacifists had wanted a precedent for a non-religious objector. In his view, he had done them a favour.

  In my final year of school, Robert took me to visit Timothy Suttor, then living, as we both did, in Gordon. Tim and I found a common ground with our shared love for the poet Emily Dickinson. Tim was working for a building supplies company and was married, with a baby. His face was painfully thin, dominated by spectacles. He spoke in a light, quizzical voice, in carefully constructed sentences. Tim was a Catholic convert. While training for the priesthood with the Dominicans, he edited volume 11 of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (now the standard edition published by Cambridge University Press). He did not take holy orders.

  My first exposure to intellectual Catholicism was disturbing. I saw Tim as personifying the Jesuitical Naphta of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. I kept thinking of young Hans Castorp witnessing Naphta’s verbal demolition of Settembrini’s liberal humanism – the liberal humanism with which I identified.

  We discussed James McAuley, a formalist poet, whose poems I admired, and who, like Tim, was a Catholic convert. One day Tim, with a laugh of evident enjoyment, read out lines from McAuley’s ‘Celebration of Love’ which referred to koalas as ‘sober citizens of sweet content’ looking down on lovers with ‘grave astonishment’. I was unable to laugh. I thought these lines were ghastly.

  Encouraged by Tim, who seemed to like my poetry, I applied myself with enthusiasm to writing in rhyme and something resembling regular metre. But my understanding of metre was still wayward, until I met McAuley a couple of years later, and he became a friend.

  In 1957 Tim moved with his family to Canberra to undertake a history doctorate at the Australian National University, and I stayed with him from time to time. We called on Alec Hope (an old friend of Tim’s) and his wife Penelope. I had a copy of Hope’s astonishing first book of poems The Wandering Islands, with its red and purple end papers. I was unable to say how much I admired the great man’s poetry. He seemed reserved, and I understood he had no reason to be friendly to a stiff and pimply undergraduate.

  In 1964 Tim and his family stayed briefly in a Wahroonga flat I was renting before they moved to Canada. He became a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario, and stayed at my house on trips back to visit his parents. I still occasionally find pencil notes in my books, written by Tim on his visits back. Some years after his death I found this epigram in my copy of James McAuley’s Under Aldebaran.

  Jim was no pretty man, no petty man

  But was

  A pretty petty poet –

  After the first scandal

  Never quite scandalous enough again?

  The scandal was the 1944 Ern Malley affair, when it was revealed that McAuley and his accomplice Harold Stewart had invented a modernist poet. Like many epigrams, Suttor’s oversimplifies. The balanced paradoxes explain why his mind was attractive to an intellectually raw schoolboy in 1956. Classicism and formalism – ways of writing poetry and thinking that did not depend on subjective emotions – were unfamiliar and compelling. Tim did not resolve the conflicts in himself. There was an unsatisfied energy and restlessness about his embrace of orthodoxy.

  At the beginning of 1957, I was starting an Arts-Law course at Sydney University. Robert introduced me to Ruth Hansman (later Burgess). She was just back from Paris where she had studied musical composition under Darius Milhaud. (Ruth remembers that she and I played piano duets. I cannot understand why she agreed to this. I could only produce meaningless discords. My piano playing in the Gordon house was a torment to my father.)

  Ruth talked nostalgically about Sydney University’s Art Group. She had been a member when she was an undergraduate. Robert and I revived this defunct student society and renamed it. We put up posters. Before a first year English lecture in the Wallace Theatre I announced the first meeting of the Writers, Artists and Composers Group. About a dozen turned up. Two admitted to writing poetry: Libby Sweet (who later married my school friend Alex Jones) and a big raw-boned, moon-faced boy from Taree with scabs on his face. Les Murray was about eighteen months older, and, like me, a first year ‘fresher’. The three of us agreed to meet later that week and exchange poems.

  We met one afternoon on a university college oval. Les and I produced our poems. We asked Libby to show us hers. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘they’re just little things, little things’. That became Libby’s standard reply, when I met her again. One of the poems Les showed us was ‘Refugees’, which described fleeing refugees ‘with their faces dusty-white/ Flowing peristalsis in the dirty gut of night’. I was impressed by the easy mastery of rhyme and metre, and the extraordinary peristalsis image, which I thought verged on genius. I said his poems were terrific.

  I can’t be sure what I’d brought along. One poem may have been about the holidays with my mother and sister. It begins:

  There is always a sense of disappointment

  When you are on holiday,

  The final horizon you were hoping for

  Is still just as far away…

  We published two poems of Les’s in a roneoed publication of the Writers and Artists Group, as we now called ourselves. (We gave up on the composers. Robert was our only member who wanted to become a composer.) One of Les’s poems was ‘The Inquisitor’.

  Les was yet to convert to Catholicism, but this early poetic monolog
ue begins with the inquisitor addressing his victims as ‘Vile termites in a dried-out well’, and ends with the inquisitor saying he is requited if their deaths ‘can save the souls to come’. I can almost hear Les’s cackle of laughter in the last line: ‘Now my brothers, wind the rack’. In this poem, Les’s mix of irony and genuine spirituality was even then apparent.

  He was already a large-framed, heavy young man when he started at university, but not excessively so. He exploited his body shape for humour. It may have been our first year at university. We were standing in a porch looking out at the rain. Les: ‘Well, I think I’ll dodge in and out among the rain drops’. Only in later years did he weigh 20 stone (130 kg) or more, and join ‘the Stone Age aristocracy’ as he calls overweight people in ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’.

  Early in our friendship Les persuaded me to come with him one night and watch two black-and-white German films in the old Lyric, near Central Station, a rundown cinema in a tatty end of town. Sitting next to him, he was exceptionally rancid. He must have been wearing the same pale moleskin trousers for weeks. I guessed what the problem was. I suggested Les start wearing underpants and washing them. Peter Alexander in his biography of Les states Les ‘was enlightened, and grateful’.

  Les later reciprocated my advice on matters of dress and I was equally grateful. I used to wear a tweed sports coat, sometimes with a yellow cotton tie, until Les gave me a friendly warning: ‘I think I should let you know. Up my way – on the north coast – only shirt lifters wear yellow ties. It’s their signal to each other.’

  I admired Les’s sociability. He hated snobbery, believed generously in his friends and liked anyone who liked him. He used to joke: ‘You can buy Murray with a meat pie’. He was welcoming to a wide range of people and not judgmental. Once (probably when we were co-editing the 1961 Faculty of Arts magazine Arna), he handed me some poems, saying ‘These show real promise’.