by Ryan O'Neill
Every Wednesday at 10 a.m., McGinnis and Bush met in the lobby of the Kennedy Hotel in Petersham. As a joke, they checked themselves in as Norman and Marion Dash (“N. Dash and M. Dash”). They would spend all day in the grubby hotel room, paper scattered everywhere, ordering room service for lunch. Work on the manuscript proceeded speedily, if not smoothly. Although McGinnis had all but surrendered to Bush’s editing style, she would still become livid occasionally or even burst into tears, fearing that her book was being ruined. Bush continually reassured her that he only wanted to help. One day in July 1975, McGinnis saw that she was late for dinner with her husband, crammed a pile of papers into her bag, and rushed home. Later, when she was fishing for a tissue in the bag, she found a crushed-up letter from Bush among the manuscript pages. There was a thick red line through the contents of the letter, suggesting Bush had decided in the end not to give it to her, and she had picked it up by accident. In the letter Bush told McGinnis that he had fallen in love with her, and asked her if there was any chance she felt the same way about him. If she didn’t, he emphasised, it would not affect their working relationship in the slightest. If she did, it would make him a very happy man. McGinnis’s marriage to Brian had been falling apart for months. She barely saw her husband, and when she did they had little to talk about. He wasn’t interested in her writing, and she wasn’t interested in his football team; he wanted children and McGinnis didn’t. By the end of the week, she had made her decision. The next time McGinnis met Bush in their room at the Kennedy Hotel, she returned his letter to him. Beside the thick red line through the text, she had written one word: stet.
The final edits on None of Them Knew the Colour of the Sky, now retitled Basilica, were completed at the beginning of November. Robert Bush and Lydia McGinnis were married the following year on 5 August 1976, after her divorce was granted and on the day Basilica went to press. (McGinnis chose to keep her ex-husband’s name for her nom de plume.) Bush had saved much of his salary since working at Berkeley & Hunt, and the couple spent four months touring France and Italy for their honeymoon. In Turin they received a telegram from Claude Berkeley: “Congratulations, everyone worshipping at Basilica.” McGinnis’s collection of stories about stoic outsiders, told in an exquisite minimalist style, was proclaimed a modern Australian classic by reviewers, including the notoriously acerbic Peter Crawley. Publication rights had already been sold to St. Martin’s Press in the United States and Faber & Faber in England, and French and German publishers were interested in bringing out translations. Basilica was reprinted three times by the year’s end, becoming the biggest selling short-story collection since Addison Tiller’s Return to Our Homestead more than fifty years previously. While Bush felt vindicated by the success of Basilica, McGinnis was left with a nagging feeling that the book was not truly hers. Bush had barely left a line of the collection alone, apart from “The Cockleshell”, and it was this story that was unanimously singled out by critics as the best in the book. Still, McGinnis was understandably thrilled to see herself applauded in the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement.
The couple returned to Australia in December 1976 and over the next four months Basilica made a clean sweep of the nation’s literary awards. McGinnis began a new book, a novel, which she refused to show to her husband before it was finished. Bush was too overwhelmed with work to object; in February 1977 he was appointed publisher at Berkeley & Hunt after Claude Berkeley finally retired. The death of Claudia Gunn had put a large dent in the company’s finances. Although Gunn’s books were bestsellers, they never sold well when reprinted, and Berkeley’s last decision as publisher, to reissue all fifty-nine of Gunn’s books, had been a disaster. Sales were dreadful, and thousands of copies were pulped. The publication of Will Deverall’s sensational The Mystery of Claudia Gunn: An Unauthorised Investigation in September 1977 only made matters worse. Fortunately, a film adaptation of Alexander Fernsby’s The Bloodshot Chameleon, starring Robert Redford and Diane Keaton, was underway in Hollywood, and Bush bet everything on it, confident that it would lead to a renewed interest in Fernsby’s oeuvre. Consequently, when The Bloodshot Chameleon was released in Australian cinemas in July, bookshops were well stocked with the novel, as well as reprints of all Fernsby’s previous books and the first three volumes of his biography, released in a deluxe format.
Fortunately for Bush, The Bloodshot Chameleon was a box-office smash. Berkeley & Hunt sold 30,000 copies of the tie-in edition of the novel, which featured on the cover a photograph of Robert Redford emerging from a swimming pool. Sales of Fernsby’s other novels rocketed, as did those of the three volumes of biography. By the end of 1977, Bush had once again saved Berkeley & Hunt from bankruptcy, but at a considerable price. Bush’s autobiography, Bastard Title, and the letters McGinnis wrote to her friends at this time suggest the beginnings of the breakdown of their relationship. The couple saw little of each other all year. Bush left for the office at 5 a.m. and returned home at midnight. He worked most weekends, and though he had ostensibly given up his role of editor-in-chief, he still took a great deal of interest in all of Berkeley & Hunt’s books, personally proofreading each one before publication. Bush hadn’t smoked for years, but now he was getting through three packets a day and had started to drink heavily, beer at first but then spirits.
McGinnis did not realise the extent of her husband’s problems for some time. Her novel was going well despite, or sometimes she feared because of, Bush’s long absences from home. McGinnis had given up her job when she married Bush, and she was now able to write full-time, something she had dreamed of for most of her life. Although she missed Bush, her novel took up all of her attention. She rarely managed more than four hundred words a day, yet she felt satisfied that they were good words. A Kingly Kind of Trade, which takes its title from a line in Christopher Marlowe’s revenge play The Jew of Malta (1590), tells the story of unassuming librarian Frankie O’Hara and the bizarre relationship that develops between her and a strange man she catches tearing pages from the books in her library. Written in a baroque style utterly distinct from the stories in Basilica, A Kingly Kind of Trade is closer to the gothic nightmares of Barbara Baynton’s short fiction, and has echoes of the masochistic themes of the early novels of Alexander Fernsby.
Throughout most of 1977 and 1978 Bush and McGinnis saw each other only on weekends, which they would spend drinking wine and discussing writing and books, but never speaking of McGinnis’s novel. Bush promised his wife that he would take time off to spend with her, and that he would give up smoking and cut down on alcohol. When he came to bed on weeknights, his breath reeked of mints and he awoke early every morning with a hacking cough. McGinnis worried, but he assured her that he was fine. On 23 January 1979, after sitting at her typewriter for ten hours straight, McGinnis finished A Kingly Kind of Trade. She had completely rewritten the manuscript nine times in the last six months and was now, at long last, satisfied. Still, she hesitated to show it to Bush, telling herself that she did not want to bother him with it. That night she went to bed and did not wake up until nearly one o’clock in the afternoon. In the living room she found Bush, drunk, with her manuscript. When McGinnis snatched it from him, she saw her own words were almost illegible under the annotations, deletions and alterations in his distinctive purple ink. McGinnis swore at him; Bush could not understand her anger and screamed at her in return. McGinnis took the manuscript, rented a hotel room, bought another typewriter and spent the next week retyping her novel before sending it to New Dimensions, who offered to publish without any changes. She did not return home for a month. When she did, she found a contrite Bush. He apologised and accepted with good grace her wish for the novel to be published by someone else.
A Kingly Kind of Trade appeared in September 1979. Sales were respectable and reviews, on the whole, complimentary. Yet there was a feeling that the novel, after Basilica, was something of a disappointment. While beautifully written, A Kingly Kind of Trade was, the reviewers sug
gested, perhaps too long and unfocused. Peter Crawley was blunter, saying, “With some judicious editing, McGinnis’s gothic novel could have escaped its sad fate, which is to be more thick than goth.” McGinnis fell into a severe depression. Her self-esteem, already damaged by Bush’s interference in Basilica, was now all but destroyed. She came to think of herself as a fraud, someone whose writing could only succeed when reshaped by her husband. Although aware that she was being irrational, she blamed Bush for the failure of her novel. The reviews exposed the fissures in their marriage and by November, McGinnis was taking antidepressants while Bush was drinking ever more heavily.
On the night of 28 November 1979, Bush called McGinnis from the Berkeley & Hunt offices and asked her to pick him up. He told her it was because he couldn’t wait to see her, but McGinnis suspected it was because he was too drunk to drive. He refused to get a taxi, so McGinnis, who had been in bed all day, put on a dressing-gown and went to fetch him. It was a rainy night, and Bush soon passed out in the passenger seat. On the highway, McGinnis, falling prey to the drowsiness caused by her antidepressants, also fell asleep. Their car drifted across two lanes before colliding with a truck and then another car. A badly concussed McGinnis regained consciousness in hospital two hours later with a broken left arm. Bush was not so fortunate, having crushed his right leg and suffered severe trauma to his head. He had been put in a medically induced coma, and as his next of kin McGinnis was asked to agree to an operation that would remove her husband’s mangled leg below the knee. Bush emerged from his coma five days later, and McGinnis was by his bedside. When told that she had allowed them to cut off his leg, he was silent for a long time, before muttering, “And they call me the butcher.”
After intensive physical therapy, including the fitting of a prosthesis, Bush was discharged from hospital in February 1980 and returned to work at the end of the month. McGinnis continued to blame herself for the accident, although her husband said he forgave her. Their marriage staggered on, with Bush adding painkillers to his list of addictions and McGinnis hospitalised a number of times for depression. She told her psychiatrist that she had come to realise she no longer loved Bush, but she felt she could not leave him. Finally, despairingly, she went back to the form that had given her her first success: the short story. She began a new collection in July 1980, returning to the themes that had informed Basilica before Bush had got to it. The City of Fireworks was made up of a dozen interlinked stories following six residents of the Sydney suburb of Ultimo. It saw McGinnis finally achieve the mature, original style that had been signalled but not entirely realised in A Kingly Kind of Trade. When the book was finished she presented it, nervously, to Bush. After four hours he looked up from the manuscript and gave his judgment. “It’s a masterpiece,” he told her. “Not a word should be changed.” He asked if Berkeley & Hunt could have the honour of publishing the book, promising that her work would not be edited, and McGinnis agreed.
The months leading to the publication of The City of Fireworks were cheerful ones for McGinnis. She made great progress in her psychotherapy sessions, and as a result her medication was reduced. Bush started to attend Alcoholics Anonymous and was being weaned off his pain medication. For the first time in months, McGinnis could recognise herself and the man she had fallen in love with. They took long walks together to help Bush regain his strength, and talked into the night about the books they were reading. Bush involved McGinnis in every stage of the design of her new collection, and she was excited by how well it was coming together. The City of Fireworks was to be released on 15 September 1981. On the morning of 31 August, Bush left for the office, telling his wife that he would send a courier with the author copies of her collection later that day. Just after eleven, the courier arrived as promised, but the parcel seemed too thin to contain a dozen books. Standing on her doorstep, McGinnis fumbled open the package to find a single copy. At first she thought there had been a mistake. The cover was pink, not blue, and the book was called Ultimo Thule instead of The City of Fireworks. But her name was under the title. Frantically, she opened the book and read.
Four of her stories had been removed. The rest were heavily cut, reordered and rewritten. All the titles of the stories and names of the characters had been changed. On the front endpaper Bush had written, “I’ve had my way with it.” McGinnis let the book fall to the floor. Part of her still hoped that her husband was playing a joke. Feeling nauseous, she ran the two kilometres to the nearest bookshop; displayed in the window were a dozen copies of Ultimo Thule by Lydia McGinnis. Her husband had not forgiven her for the accident after all. She walked home slowly, stepping over the open book that still lay on the doorstep of their flat. She went inside and wrote a note, then went into the kitchen, turned on the gas, and put her head into the oven. Her body was discovered at one o’clock by her husband, who telephoned the police and ambulance. The short note McGinnis had left in her idiosyncratic handwriting was written in purple ink: “I love you, but I’m sorry. I have to cut a long story short.”
No one was aware that Bush’s editing of McGinnis’s last collection had been against the wishes of the author. Bush spoke of her suicide as a tragedy brought on by her depression. Over the next three years, in speeches he gave at the many ceremonies where he collected literary prizes on his late wife’s behalf, Bush began, very gradually, to talk down McGinnis’s role in her own writing. He explained that he was more McGinnis’s collaborator than editor, and that his input had been crucial to the success of Basilica and Ultimo Thule. In newspaper profiles he was called “The Man Behind McGinnis”, though some writers – including Stephen Pennington – spoke out against Bush’s “self-mythologising”. McGinnis’s novel and her two collections of short fiction appeared on the syllabuses of universities around the country, and prominent feminist writers, including Germaine Greer, criticised Bush for his “appropriation” of McGinnis’s life and writing, demanding that he release the original, unedited drafts of her books. Bush at first claimed that these drafts had been lost, and later that they had been destroyed at McGinnis’s request. A number of letters from McGinnis to close friends came to light, showing the writer’s ambivalence, and frequent hostility, towards Bush’s editing. Finally, Bush stopped giving interviews altogether and, as publisher of Berkeley & Hunt and McGinnis’s literary executor, he quietly allowed her work to fall out of print.
In July 1989 Bush agreed to his first interview in four years. The ostensible journalist, Rachel Deverall, was a student from the University of Sydney who had become obsessed with the life and art of Lydia McGinnis. Bush and Deverall met in Bush’s office at Berkeley & Hunt. They had only spoken for a moment or two when Bush was called away to deal with a design issue. He apologised to Deverall, telling her he would not be long. After Bush left, Deverall took a chance and searched his desk. While she knew she was unlikely to find anything concerning McGinnis, she did not want to let the opportunity pass. Miraculously, in a thick folder in the first drawer she opened, Deverall found neatly bundled together McGinnis’s original suicide note and the unedited manuscripts of None of Them Knew the Colour of the Sky and The City of Fireworks. Deverall made good her escape with the documents before Bush returned. She spent the next three days staying at a friend’s house, making forays to copy the manuscripts in print shops and libraries, all the time expecting to be arrested for theft. Bush never contacted the police, nor did he attempt to stop the circulation and eventual publication of McGinnis’s manuscripts by Deverall and her small publisher Xanthippe Press. Deverall gave Lydia McGinnis’s suicide note to the Sydney Review, which published a facsimile in its September issue. In the note, McGinnis wrote at length about what her husband had done to her, concluding that since Bush had edited her out of her own life, there hing left to live for. Upon finding McGinnis’s body, Bush had hidden this note and written a new, much shorter one in McGinnis’s handwriting.
The exposure of Bush’s lies, the suppression and forgery of his wife’s suicide note, and the revelat
ion of the full extent of his cruelty towards her destroyed his reputation. He resigned from Berkeley & Hunt at once and withdrew from public life. His last months were spent alone. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer in June 1989 and died on 23 February 1990, a month after Lydia McGinnis’s books were finally published as she had intended. There were few mourners to see him buried in Pine Grove cemetery, beneath a large marble headstone that read
Robert Bush
1941–1990
“But that was in another country,
and besides, the wench is dead.”
The quotation was taken from The Jew of Malta, the same source as the title of McGinnis’s only novel. In the years after his burial, and despite the best efforts of the groundskeepers in the cemetery, the headstone has been repeatedly vandalised to read:
Robert Bush
1941–1990
“ was a c unt, and he is dead.”
Claudia Gunn at “Mysteriosa”, December 1908
(1885–1975)
“We Esquimaux have one hundred different words for snow,” ejaculated Makittuq Arnaaluk, “but only one for murder!”
From The Death of Vincent Prowse (1924)
CLAUDIA GUNN, THE POPULAR CRIME NOVELIST KNOWN AS “The Antipodean Agatha”, was born Claudia Calthrop on 12 August 1885 in Parramatta, New South Wales. Her father, Alasdair, was a doctor and her mother, Clara, a former governess. Gunn was later to joke in her autobiography A Red Herring (1960) that her knowledge of poisons came from her mother and her writing style from her father, an observation that critics, dubious of her grasp of both English and toxicology, were quick to agree with. After qualifying as a doctor in 1853, Alasdair Calthrop had been swept up by the gold rushes, spending a few exciting if fruitless years fossicking in Echunga and Canoona before returning to take up his practice in Sydney in 1861. His rakish good looks and warm bedside manner found him many patients among the wealthy families of Parramatta, and in 1873 he married Clara Brookes. The couple had all but accepted their childless state by the time Claudia was conceived over a decade later. Claudia’s parents were affectionate and attentive, and her early years were halcyon. She was a bookish child, and she enjoyed spending hours leafing through her father’s bound volumes of Blackwood’s Magazine. It was in one of these dusty tomes that she happened across a story that had a profound effect on her, a reprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). The young girl then read Poe’s other detective stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) and, smitten with their protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, resolved to become a detective. Weeks of nightmares in which a giant orangutan descended the chimney to cut her throat resulted in her mother forbidding her from reading more detective fiction. At school Claudia was considered to be a pleasant, clever child, although privately her teacher commented on her “sneaking manner” and her habit of eavesdropping whenever she had the chance.
