Leeward Read online

  In 1963 I briefly rented a terrace house in Short Street, Balmain with Ian Fincham and Rod Madgwick. The front door opened onto my bedroom (like the Sutherland Street house I later rented). My bedroom was a horrible bright pink and I stayed there only once or twice. But I was able to put my share of the house to good use. Brian Jenkins and Sue McGrath, a girl I knew from the Newman Society, had a baby together. Sue’s father, a prominent Catholic solicitor, arranged for the police to pursue them. The Short Street house provided them and their baby with a temporary refuge. Eventually Sue, on her parents’ insistence, gave up her child for adoption and went back home to live with them. She became a chronic smoker and died young of emphysema.

  Ian Fincham drove a pale blue Morris Cowley from the 1920s with a loud klaxon, usually driven with the hood down. In 1963 he persuaded me to buy a six-cylinder sedan, which we believed was a 1927 Studebaker ‘World Commander’. I paid £17 for it. I had not learned to drive. Ian used to take me in the car to an uninhabited promontory of Homebush Bay so I could practise driving my heavyweight monster up and down an abandoned strip of road. Friends of Ian’s sometimes came on these expeditions. Everything became a party with the Studebaker. On one side of the road there was an electrified fence outside a disused factory. We piled out of our assembled cars, linked hands, one of us touched the fence, and we fell about laughing as the electric current ran through us. (I say ‘we’, but I think I stood by as an observer.) Unfortunately I was not present when Ian was driving the Studebaker with friends down a steep road in a national park. The wind lifted the roof off like an enormous hat, and deposited it in the valley below. The felt ceiling and interior light were still intact and I had the roof recovered with green canvas.

  I learned to double declutch with my left foot, accelerate with my right foot if I was changing from third to second gear, or let the motor slow if I was changing from second to third. I had to listen and empathise. If my timing was wrong the gears clashed. The brakes were slow at decelerating such a heavy vehicle and I learned to change down to help them. With my left hand pushing the gear stick through its various positions, my right hand on the steering wheel and both feet in motion on the accelerator and clutch, it was like playing a pedal organ. I took care to leave a large expanse of road between me and the car ahead.

  I let the car get bogged in puddles on dirt roads in the bush. I backed into a wooden garage door at Potts Point and drove away without leaving a note. I parked on the edge of a road at the back of my Wahroonga flat, and the car slid sideways into a ditch and had to be winched out. I was stopped by a police car near Crows Nest. It was a Saturday afternoon and a pub crowd emptied out onto the opposite footpath and began booing the policemen.

  There were few cars of that vintage still on the road in 1963. Driving along, we were stared at like royalty. Christopher Koch was intrigued by the blinds on the rear seat windows. When people stared at us, Chris pulled down his blind with a look of pretended petulance.

  On hot days the petrol vaporised inside the long fuel line from the petrol tank to the engine. When an air lock happened in this way, the engine would let out an immense sigh and stop. I would have to wait twenty minutes for the petrol to recondense.

  Once I was driving up a steep Harbour Bridge approach

  (reconfigured since then) on a hot day. My girlfriend Livija was with me. There was an air lock and the engine cut out, and traffic began banking up behind us. I had to hold the enormous weight at a 20 degrees upward tilt with one foot (shaking) on the brake, another on the clutch, my left hand (also shaking) pulling at the handbrake, and my right hand flicking a manual accelerator on the steering wheel every few minutes, trying to restart the car. We were causing a small traffic jam. Livija’s white skin perspired wonderfully in the heat and her cheeks flushed red.

  On cold days I had to make obeisance in front of the radiator and pull at the crank shaft, while hopefully someone was in the driver’s seat, ready to hit the accelerator, if the engine showed signs of life. Hill starts were a way of dealing with this problem. I would park on a hill with the handbrake on and gears in reverse. (The gears and not the handbrake stopped the car from rolling down the hill.)

  The running boards could be a problem. I was driving a girl home through Kings Cross. John Quinlem spotted my car, jumped on the running board and climbed in. I was desperate to get to know this girl and take her somewhere for coffee. John was happily chattering away; it was clear he was now a fixture in the back seat, and I had to let her out where she lived. Over time I began to understand there was a pattern in John’s actions. They were not random.

  I was having the Studebaker serviced and a mechanic pointed to oil pools on top of the cylinder heads. He told me there was a problem with the piston rings, implying this was a fatal defect. I wrote an elegy ‘To My 1927 Studebaker Sedan’ with lines such as ‘Rusting queen of the road, queen of my nightmares too…’ I do not remember if I had the piston rings fixed.

  Months later I was still driving the Studebaker and became concerned I had nowhere to park it under cover. I sold it to Brian Jenkins for the same price I had paid. Many years later he gave it a coat of burgundy duco, a colour which must have pleased the old goddess. Fact-checking, I found on Wikipedia a photograph Brian had posted of her. The caption states:

  1928 GB Studebaker Regal Commander, photographed near Murray Bridge, South Australia in March 1975, en route from Sydney to Perth, a distance of some 4100 km.

  Not only was my poem about the car’s imminent death wrong, I was mistaken about the marque and year of manufacture.

  We often find our friends through long chains of people. Through the person I have called ‘Robert’, I got to know Ruth Hansman. She introduced me to Robin Pratt (daughter of Pixie O’Harris) and Robin introduced me to John Quinlem at the State Library. I habitually studied in the main public reading room that later became the Mitchell Reading Room. John was about twenty-nine and I was about twenty. He was often at the library – he read widely – and sometimes researched material for the handful of articles he wrote for The Observer, a monthly intellectual magazine edited by Donald Horne.

  Hundreds of novel readers and movie goers who have never met him love John Quinlem. He is Billy Kwan in Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously, and the subsequent film. The book is set in Indonesia at the time of the fall of Sukarno in 1965. Anthony Burgess wrote: ‘In Billy Kwan, Mr Koch has produced one of the most memorable characters of recent fiction’.

  When I got to know John in about 1960 he was yet to become Billy Kwan. His father, whose original surname was Chong, acquired his strange Irish/Chinese sounding surname because an Australian customs officer could not quite understand what John’s father was saying and put down this name on a form. John dismissed his Thursday Island childhood as men on a jetty shooting sharks – a typical Quinlem aphorism.

  Billy Kwan, in The Year of Living Dangerously, wanted to become a secondary school teacher but could not because of his ‘appearance’. Early in his life John Quinlem suffered similar discrimination. When he was only seventeen the Brisbane Courier Mail took up his cause to report his claim he had been excluded from an arts teacher fellowship because of his Chinese ethnicity. At age seventeen John was already a provocateur. The Courier Mail reported:

  Quinlem last night removed his slippers to demonstrate he was 5ft. 4in. His speech is typically Australian, even to accent and colloquialisms. He challenged Mr. Edwards to prove that he suffered any speech impediment.

  Billy Kwan was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 m) tall. He was an achondro-plastic dwarf, which John wasn’t.

  John was already inhabiting his past, often talking about his 1951 editorship of the Queensland University student newspaper Semper Floreat when he castigated the establishment (including the Courier Mail which had championed him) and mentored students who later became well-known names: Zell Rabin, Lillian Roxon and David Malouf.

  John and I often met at the NSW State Library. He introduced me to the poetry
of Peter Porter, who later played a fateful role in my life. John was interested in Porter as they were both refugees from Brisbane – John a refugee in many places and Peter in London. Another poet we ordered up from the stacks at John’s suggestion was Constantine Cavafy, who became a particular influence for me.

  One day John came to me with a fistful of printed rejection slips. He had taken these from a desk at Weekend Magazine, which was a girlie, titties and beer weekly edited by Donald Horne (along with The Observer, for which John wrote). The rejection slips had a cheerful red banner with a message to the effect: ‘The editor of Weekend Magazine thanks you for your contribution and regrets it does not suit our current needs’.

  ‘Lehmann,’ Quinlem announced ‘you should write a parody of Vincent Buckley. We’ll post it to him, with one of these rejection slips.’ Vincent Buckley was a Melbourne poet we sometimes discussed. Almost every poem in his first book The World’s Flesh had a reference to either ‘black’, ‘dark’, or ‘wind’, including a poem which had a fortuitous last line: ‘To hold the escaping dark continuous wind’. I wrote a poetic raspberry, stringing together phrases from Buckley’s book. We sent it to Buckley, in an anonymous envelope with the Weekend Magazine rejection slip.

  In late December 1962, in the dead, hot days between Christmas and New Year, Quinlem took me to visit Christopher Koch. Christopher was a workmate of John’s at the Commonwealth Office of Education at North Sydney. I knew of him as the author of a novel, The Boys in the Island, published in 1958. He and his wife Irene, and their baby son, were staying in the Sydenham house of Irene’s Lithuanian parents.

  As Chris ushered us into the Vilnonis household, he turned to John and said, ‘Well, what notable things have happened this year? There is the Robert Hughes affair…’ He stopped in mid-sentence and gazed strangely at me. ‘Well, of course…’

  Chris and Irene were a glamorous couple. If I had not read The Boys in the Island at that stage, I read it soon after. Quinlem suggested the three of us play squash. We first had to find out what the rules were. We began playing inexpertly in the North Sydney squash courts not far from their workplace. John Hamilton later joined our group.

  My friendship with Chris continued until his death more than fifty years later. Like Mr Scrimshaw, we had our ups and downs. Koch, like Quinlem, was obsessed with climate. Cold climates were virtuous and productive. Warm climates such as Sydney were enervating and decadent. All his life Chris longed to get back to Tasmania, when he was away from there. There was one problem. Tasmania was an intellectual backwater and had too few people. As a result, Chris bought and sold six houses, oscillating between Sydney and Tasmania. His seventh house was at Richmond just out of Hobart, more than an acre of English-style garden by a river – his perfect climate, but friends had to fly down to visit. A year or so before he died, aged eighty, he was considering moving back to New South Wales.

  In about 1964 Chris and Irene moved briefly to Melbourne. He had rejoined the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Melbourne was a recurring mirage in Chris’s mind. The climate was cold enough and it was large enough to be his perfect city. But I suspect the bohemian in Koch was not drawn to Melbourne’s earnest flatness, and it depressed him.

  Knowing how conflicted Koch was about climate and Melbourne, Quinlem decided we should send him a telegram. Quinlem was laughing as I wrote it out and handed it across the counter of the General Post Office: ‘COME UP TO SYDNEY TO THE LIGHT OF A MILLION SUNS’.

  Chris and Irene came back to Sydney not long after our telegram and rented an upstairs flat in Challis Avenue, Kings Cross. Chris held a salon every weekend, finished writing Across the Sea Wall and always spoke about this time with nostalgia, notwith-standing the humid frangipani-scented Sydney nights.

  In August 1963 I received a letter from John Quinlem, then living in his mother’s Brisbane house. It begins:

  Dear Geoffrey,

  Nothing will surprise you now. I may have an imbalance of blood corpuscles, and ought to keep out of the cold for a while. Also bronchitis. Sydney doctors are careless!

  The opening captures John: his hypochondria, a dash of medical science followed by the bald generalisation about Sydney doctors. These generalisations were thrilling for young people getting to know him.

  John was sceptical of the medical profession, but he needed doctors to get prescribed pharmaceuticals. He could stand in front of an open medicine cabinet in a friend’s bathroom and recite the names on the bottles and what they were for, with barely a glance at the labels, diagnosing the household’s diseases. He later became, he told me, disastrously addicted to Mogadon (nitraz-epam). As well as chemical compounds, he sought relief from his angst in religion. He collected religions as some collect stamps, with sojourns in Zen Buddhism, Roman Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism and becoming a Jew.

  John was yet to introduce me to Livija when he sent the 1963 letter. It refers to a girlfriend I had then, as ‘beautiful, proud, and terrifying’. He had lent her Kawabata’s novel of wasted love, Snow Country, and his letter asked what she thought about it.

  John romanticised the people he knew; they became ‘proud and terrifying’ – just as Billy Kwan befriended an Indonesian girl, Ibu, referred to in Kwan’s files as:

  Ibu is Durga incarnate: she is life

  As friends of John’s, we became part of an Ibsen or Chekov play. He exercised a spell over us. I became the heir of the Sydney Vitalist tradition. He addressed his male friends at times by their surname, their first name, or often simply as ‘old man’ as Kwan addresses the journalist Hamilton in The Year of Living Dangerously. For a while it was enjoyable for Chris and me to be actors in a play scripted by Quinlem but eventually we both opted out.

  In October 1990 I received an unexpected final letter from John, who was now living in what had been his mother’s Brisbane house. It began:

  Dear Lehmann,

  As you see I’ve returned to my place of origin. Koch is right about climate…

  The letter was written on the back of a photocopy of an interview with an Australian author. The author suggested that in Sydney ‘the sea, sex, physical love, might develop an almost sacramental status … Maybe we are developing a genuine paganism here.’ Quinlem had been this author’s friend and made disparaging comments in the margin:

  You are more likely to be sympathetic to this sort of argument than quasi Christians like Koch and I or Christians like [Les] Murray.

  When Quinlem sent his 1990 letter he assumed that, having no religion, I would be attracted to paganism as a substitute. I had long ago stopped having any resemblance to the person Quinlem imagined me to be. I did not reply.

  In The Year of Living Dangerously Billy Kwan hangs an anti-Sukarno banner from a window in the Hotel Indonesia and is murdered by secret police. Unlike Kwan, Quinlem miraculously survived to old age, despite his pharmaceutical addictions and epiphanies, which were more punishing for him than his friends.

  He was living in Melbourne when he died in 2010, one year short of his eightieth birthday. On the internet I found a late photograph: John is reclining in an easy chair beside a grandchild in a bouncinette. The blog of John’s son Daniel Bowen has an affectionate memoir, ‘Things I discovered when picking up my father’s ashes from the crematorium’. Daniel had doubted his father’s stories that he was Billy Kwan in the novel until he read it and discovered Kwan had all of his father’s idiosyncrasies of speech: starting a conversation in mid-sentence and addressing his friends as ‘old man’ – that was how John often addressed Daniel.

  The family had John’s measure and the death notices in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne newspapers described him as ‘Scourge of the 1950s establishment’.

  After Jan, I had two relationships which were more than casual. I should have learned from them. I did not.

  I can put rough dates around my three-or four-month affair with Livija Strauts (pronounced ‘Livia Strouts’). I had flown into Canberra airport on 23 November 1963. It was a hot Saturday morning. I
was stepping down the metal passenger stairs from the plane. She was waiting at the bottom, straw-gold hair down to her waist, statuesque, with green eyes. Her white linen dress had the simplicity of a Roman toga. Her armpits were sweating and her pulpy, dazzling white skin was radiant in the heat. She told me President Kennedy had just been assassinated.

  I first heard about Livija from John Quinlem when he was living in Canberra. She made it clear, I think, she was interested only in a friendship with him. He decided to introduce us (as Kwan introduced Jillie to Hamilton after she refused to marry Kwan – the model for Hamilton was Chris’s brother Phillip, who was in Indonesia at that time, and also Chris himself ). Livija and I met a few weeks before the Kennedy assassination. I began visiting her in Canberra and stayed with Les and Valerie Murray.

  Livija lived with her parents. She was a female embodiment of her father, a tall, strong, good natured man who worked in the Radiata pine forests around Canberra. We went for chaste walks in Canberra at night, with breezes rustling in the birch trees. English (she said with vexation) had only two or three words to describe the sound of wind in trees. Latvian had twelve. It was an ancient language, with more complex conjugations and tenses than Latin.

  Livija had a spare bicycle and we went bike riding at dusk through the deserted streets of her Canberra suburb. I had never ridden a bicycle and was unsteady sitting on top of just two wheels as I rode down a gentle slope.

  Her family came to Australia on a refugee ship. At Port Said they swapped their woollen pullovers for oranges, haggling with local people on the wharf. They believed Australia would be as hot as Port Said. Sailing into Sydney Harbour, the little girl Livulji (as she was then) burst into tears. She thought the enormous laughing face that was the entrance to Luna Park was laughing at her.