Leeward Page 16

  In 1958 James McAuley gave a lunch hour talk to the Newman Society. I was one of the few non-Catholics in the packed lecture room and noticed a girl with natural blonde hair to her shoulders and high cheek bones. She was tall for a girl, and I was later to ask her out. I shall call her ‘S’.

  McAuley was a lean, aesthetic-looking man, with sallow features, and strongly marked lines in his lower cheeks. He was then a lecturer in the Australian School of Pacific Administration. He stated forcefully that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. I had already convinced myself of this. (Two years later he contradicted himself and became a Reader in English at the University of Tasmania.)

  McAuley’s explanation of what scansion in English verse really did, its true function, changed how I wrote poetry. He chalked up a line on the blackboard to illustrate his point. I’ll use a line of iambic pentameter from his poem ‘Because’ (which he was yet to write). I have italicised the five syllables that are stressed if the rules of scansion are applied strictly.

  Why should this matter to me now so much ?

  As spoken naturally, the stresses might fall in the following way:

  Why should this matter to me now so much ?

  You will notice there is a tension in the line – a quarrel between the syllables that are stressed as spoken, and those stressed under a strict application of the rules of scansion. ‘Why’ is given extra emphasis, because the normal scansion has to be reversed to pronounce the line in a natural way. When you come to ‘to me now’, you have to slow down as it becomes unclear where the stresses fall. You speed up again with ‘so much’. What might be a fairly uninteresting line in free verse is given life by the form. Free verse has no rules you can break. Fixed forms allow greater variety than free verse.

  A few weeks later I posted some poems to McAuley for Quadrant, the literary and conservative policy magazine he edited. They were written before his university talk. I placed my telephone number in the top right-hand corner of the covering letter.

  I received a phone call from him a couple of days later. He did not want to use the poems but wanted to meet me.

  I went to the Quadrant office in a tall, narrow building in Albert Street, near Circular Quay. I travelled slowly up several floors in an antiquated lift. It was late afternoon. McAuley was sitting at a desk in a large, almost empty office, which was dimly lit by the fading daylight. For twenty minutes he gave me an exposi-tion of the rules of scansion. It was identical to his Newman Society talk. Our meeting had a surrealistic quality, of time replayed. As he spoke, I could almost predict what he was about to say next.

  I was beginning to realise McAuley’s theory of prosody had a larger context. When I was writing a poem within prescribed rules, I had to think about the form rather than my emotions. Adherence to conventions freed me from solipsism. It can liberate emotions in a way formlessness cannot. Perhaps this is what Yeats meant by ‘the ceremony of innocence’ – if you are intent on the ceremony you regain your innocence.

  I admired McAuley’s first book of poetry Under Aldebaran for its ideas and brilliant language. I sensed he had experienced German Romanticism, as Brennan had. But his way out of the Romantic dilemma – formalising the Romantic impulse in the rituals of an established religion – for me was an evasion, although an improvement on Brennan’s rhetorical mysticism.

  In 1958 I was still writing a couple of poems each week and I studied just enough not to fail my three courses – German, History and English. Now I knew how to scan, I wrote ‘A Dark Sea-view of Cats’ subtitled ‘A Georgic on the Care of Cats’ – more than a thousand lines of blank verse about cats. Faber & Faber rejected it. I was still not ready to write a true Georgic on a pastoral subject.

  I sat in the State Library studying overseas literary magazines, then purchased international reply-paid coupons and mailed out around fifty poems to twenty or so international journals. I sent ‘An Image’, a poem about lions on a beach at dusk, to The London Magazine. I was unaware Charles Osborne was preparing a small selection of Australian poetry. In January 1959 he published my poem alongside poets such as Judith Wright, Douglas Stewart and John Blight. The editorial note said: ‘Geoffrey Lehmann is 18 and is in his second year at Sydney University. He has been writing poems since he was 14 and has had some of them published.’ I received fan mail from Britain and felt my career as a poet had taken off.

  Not all tables in a student canteen are equal. There was one fashionable table in Manning House – where students sat who were involved in the weekly student paper Honi Soit and satirical stage revues. Clive James and Robert Hughes were among the habitués of this table. But not Les or I. Chester (Phillip Graham) presided. Like Hughes, he was an old boy of the Jesuit school, Riverview. He was the author of some remarkable revue scripts and poems. I was dazzled by a Chester skit in which the Oedipus story was parodied to the tune of the nursery rhyme ‘This old man comes rolling home’. When the skit came to its inevitable climax, a curtain opened, showing Jocasta – Libby Sweet – hanging from a rope.

  I had some small roles in this revue. At a post-revue party, standing in a garden, I impulsively kissed a girl. She opened her mouth so that it was almost a kiss with her teeth. I was shocked. I had not realised people kissed like that.

  I was having coffee with Donald Kirby in Manning House. He had been at high school with Ian Boden and was occasionally dating S, the girl with long blonde hair I had noticed at the McAuley lecture. Several other boys were also seeing her. I should feel free to ask her out, he suggested.

  On our first night out, in the back seat of a taxi, she leaned her head on my shoulder. I was surprised. We kissed. I had not tasted lipstick before. I began seeing her regularly. I was grateful for the freedoms she allowed with her body – very big freedoms they seemed to me. But as my hands became bolder she made it clear there were strict boundaries. She still went out with Donald and other boyfriends. Some young men came and went.

  We saw films, ate out and went to the beach. I studied with her and Donald at the State Library, or the ‘lipe-ry’ as she jokingly called it – why I do not know. It was one of her mannerisms. She and I got out of a bus at St Leonards Park one night and went on the swings among the white trunks of lemon-scented gums.

  I did my best to keep her amused. Sometimes before catching the Manly ferry at night we strolled around Circular Quay. The Opera House was then under construction. If we were passing a young couple I used to toss a few copper coins over my shoulder. The young man (thinking the coins were his) would bend down looking for them, while his girlfriend stood by. A freak throw caused a halfpenny to lodge in a young man’s trouser cuff.

  I quickly realised our relationship was unequal. I was in love with an enigma. She was slightly short-sighted and walked along with her head down so she did not have to recognise people. I was in love with that. The lipstick on her cigarette butts, and the way she arched her neck to draw back the smoke (the dizziness was why she smoked, she said) were all irresistibly attractive. I was enthralled by her short love affairs with particular words. As well as ‘lipe-ry’, a favourite word for a while was ‘rich’. I’d tell her a person had said something or done something and she would say, ‘That’s rich’. I had no idea how I could escape from this unequal relationship. When I did escape, I was shocked by how easy it was.

  By 1961 my social circle was widening, I was becoming more confident and I was in my second year of articles with a law firm. Hermes, the university magazine for 1961, had poems by Les Murray, Ron Blair (the future playwright), ‘Tempest Teacup’, Clive James, Chester, Richard Appleton (one of the few literary members of the Sydney Push) and me.

  My own over-long poem in Hermes 1961 was portentous. Murray’s sonnet, ‘Personality’, nominated Sorrow as the Self (out of his collection of Selves) that would determine his fate. Les, the genial wit and raconteur who presided at the less fashionable Manning House coffee table, was already aware of something his friends were unaware of – he would wrestle wi
th life-long depression. ‘Blue Glass’ by Clive James was a series of imagistic poems influenced by Chester.

  The outstanding poem (and a big influence on my own poetry) was Chester’s ‘Provincial Report’. It is a report from a Roman provincial governor (Pontius Pilate) asking Caesar (the Emperor Tiberius) what he is to do with this Jew ( Jesus Christ).

  My life was about to change. I was having coffee in the Union refectory. A couple – a tall blond man older than his tall blonde girlfriend – sat down at a nearby table. Both looked as though they had stepped from a Swedish film set. He was rugged, she was statuesque. A few months later I found out he was Darcy Waters, a wharf labourer and philosophy student, and she was Gill Burnett, both members of the Sydney Push.

  I had been seeing S for about two years when I lost my virginity elsewhere. I took her out one last time, and explained our relationship would have to change if it was to continue. She said, ‘This happens to all my men. I’m surprised it did not happen with you earlier.’ We shook hands outside her mother’s house and said good-bye.

  I was in the backroom of the Royal George Hotel, sitting with the girl who had seduced me, and with Donald Kirby. Darcy Waters entered the room, with his lumbering walk. Turning to Jan Miller, my seductress, Darcy said in a genial voice the whole room was meant to hear: ‘Hi, virgin-fucker’.

  JOHANN

  When she died in 1974, my aunt Agnes Lehmann had lived almost all of her ninety years in a wooden cottage in Walker Street, North Sydney, now the site of an apartment building. The house was elevated and had a sunken garden in front, with bamboo, a spreading poplar, mulberry and fig trees, and wine-grape vines. A small wooden bridge crossed a small stream. As a child, Agnes had picked pink boronia growing wild on the next door land.

  When I was a child it was a magical place, and stayed so, even after the council encased the stream in a concrete pipe. The house was an old Queenslander, on high wooden poles enclosed underneath by wooden latticework. Agnes’s father Johann bought the land in the 1880s and the architecture reflected his year in Queensland.

  Johann used the large basement area as a workshop for his building business and it was later used by his sons Carl, Otto and Leo (my father). Years after Johann’s death, the three boys trained as carpenters. Johann, my father said, reached the second highest of the five rankings in the carpenters’ guild. He was a staircase maker. The highest rank was die-maker. I have a small cabinet with tiny drawers and small metal handles, made by my father when he was sixteen, in which he kept watchmaking tools and hairsprings. The cabinetry of his brothers was as fine. Otto was still working in the 1970s on an intricately carved table top begun by Johann almost a hundred years earlier.

  By the 1960s the Walker Street house was slowly falling down – thanks to my aunt having three brothers who were carpenters. No one else was allowed to work on the house. On many visits I was asked into only one room, a cosy kitchencum-dining room where my aunt listened to the radio of an evening, sitting at a table where guests also sat. Somewhere in the dim interior of the house she had a bedroom, and there were other derelict rooms where her brothers once slept. Late one afternoon in the mid 1960s Agnes, my father and I were sitting outside on a brick-paved area that overlooked her garden. A blue-flowered water hyacinth, a noxious weed she admired, floated on the surface of a glass fish tank. Small goldfish were occasional flashes of orange in green murk. My father walked down the steps into her garden, rummaged in bushes and came up the steps again, clutching a copper kettle. ‘Leo, how did you know that was there?’ Agnes squawked. He had just remembered hiding it there as a child.

  Johann Ernst Lehmann was born in 1854 at Grosswelka, a village in Saxony which is about a half hour walk from Bautzen, later the site of the notorious Stasi political prison. Johann’s father was Peter, a farmer, and his mother Agnes, her surname possibly Dutchsmann.

  In 2004 I drove across a fertile green plain to Bautzen. I wondered why anyone would wish to leave such a beautiful hilltop town with mediaeval towers and a cathedral. Dom St Petri is shared by Lutherans and Catholics, its two halves divided by a knee-high fence. I noticed a Lehmann on an honour roll, killed at the Battle of Sedan in 1870. The story handed down in my family says Johann left Germany because of religious scruples about military conscription.

  Among many Johann Lehmanns who sailed out of Hamburg for New York at about that time, one broadly matches my grandfather. This Johann Lehmann sailed in November 1873. If he is my grandfather, he may have disembarked at Southampton. My grandfather’s surviving draft letters indicate he worked in London before going on to America. He wrote in English, spiced with strange Germanic syntax and spellings (which I have corrected when quoting him).

  Young carpenters of that era roamed the world with their cumbersome toolboxes and often a mate. In the spring of 1877 Johann wrote from the United States to a friend in England. Work prospects were good, but negroes were undercutting carpenters’ wages ‘so it is hard for a good workman to get anything like a fair price for his work. Of course the negroes as a class are very poor and of course have to work for anything rather than starve.’

  The next draft letters are from Australia where he continued to wander, working along the way. He practised his signature, sometimes ‘John Lehmann’ and at other times ‘Johann Lehmann’, in the exercise book where he kept his drafts.

  His letters are not unlike those a young European on a working visa might send from Australia in the twenty-first century. His first Australian port was Sydney. Sydney, he says, has the handsomest bay in the world, and very nice parks and museums like the old (‘alt’ in his spelling) country. Other references to the ‘old country’ in his correspondence make it clear he refers to England not Germany.

  In 1879, he writes from Sydney telling of his travels around Queensland. He spent Christmas eve ‘under a big tree in the wilderness’ with twelve men, two women, children and dogs, one goat, about 100 horses and many mosquitoes and ants. It was very hot and the worst of it was they had no plums (‘blams’ in his spelling) for a pudding, but overall ‘I enjoy myself very much’.

  Another letter, written to a fellow German – but the draft is in English – says he got the gold fever ‘again’ and travelled to Charters Towers with a companion, who got cold feet when Johann decided to walk 275 miles (440 km) further west to the Gilbert River diggings. Johann was alone on the road for thirteen days:

  This long journey through the bush was an interesting one. I was free like a bird in the air, especially in the morning when day was breaking. I travelled sometimes for a few days without seeing a single person, but [saw] plenty of beautiful birds and kangaroos and many other beautiful things. I always was accompanied by a very nice concert all day and night … of beautiful birds and the night from thousands of mosquitoes around my body.

  After three weeks on the diggings, he had panned two and a half pennyweight of gold, worth eight shillings (a day’s wages as a carpenter). He says he lost the gold fever (‘golt fiver’) and instead got a fever from an ‘ague’. Back in Townsville he did some horse breaking, then carpentry.

  In 1882 he married the Welsh daughter of a paper maker, Annie Jones, in St Philip’s Anglican church, York Street, just south of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was yet to be built. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-six.

  There is an absence of letters to family members in Germany – they may not have survived – nor does he mention them. Johann is like a man who has no family, apart from the statement on his marriage certificate that his father was Peter and his mother Agnes, her maiden name undisclosed.

  I am unable to form a clear picture of Annie Jones. Before her marriage she was a ‘general servant’ and described in a reference as ‘honest, sober and steady’ and able to wash, iron and cook. A letter from a sister, Mary, gives Annie a week’s notice of Mary’s wedding in Ipswich in Queensland in 1879 and invites her to attend. A sister in Wales wrote several letters; in February 1886 the sister laments that Mary last wrote back to Wal
es seven years ago, and says of their father: ‘I have seen the tears running down his cheeks when he would be talking about you’. This letter mentions another sister Catherine, married to a goldminer in Charters Towers called Aldridge.

  In the following year the sister in Wales wrote again. She laments that both Mary and Catherine have died. Their parents, she says, ‘do vex a good deal about our two sisters that is gone I hope to the land of Bliss where God will wipe away all our tears’. William Aldridge had a child by Catherine, remarried and continued to write to Annie every few years.

  My aunt Agnes, an enthusiastic talker, rarely spoke about her mother, except to say she nursed her during the last week of her life. My father, when he read aloud, spoke in a singsong voice, with a trace of Welsh. This singsong voice and a letter Annie wrote to Johann when he went to New Guinea are as close as I can get to her.

  Annie and Johann were still living in Phillip Street, Sydney, when their first child Agnes Annie was born in November 1883. My father once pointed out where his father had his Phillip Street workshop, among some yellow-painted corrugated iron buildings which survived until the 1950s.

  It is likely Annie and Johann had moved to his North Sydney house by the time the next children, May, Carl and Otto were born. Johann prospered. No letters to America or England survive in which he asks about possibilities for work. The family story is that he became a spec builder, and built one or two stone houses in Mosman.

  Then one Sunday in 1891, Alfred Yarnold, rector of Christ Church, North Sydney called for volunteers for the first Anglican mission to New Guinea. There was a recession in the building industry and Johann may have had an attack of his old wanderlust. He agreed to be head carpenter. A neighbour wrote advising against going to ‘New Guinea to do manual work in that hot and unhealthy climate’. A letter from Frederick Felton, Sydney’s leading hardware store proprietor, reached Johann in New Guinea. Trade is quiet, Felton says and asks: ‘Whatever possessed you … to go so far … May God in His Great Mercy … bring you back.’