Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  FIRST BLOKE: Have you seen Bob lately?

  SECOND BLOKE: No, I heard he has a bad case of VD.

  At the outbreak of the Second World War, many writers in Vivian’s circle joined the army, and correspondingly she made far fewer appearances in print during the first half of the 1940s. Pin, on the other hand, published over fifty critical articles and three books during this decade, including Swastikas and Ray-Guns: Australian Scientifiction and Fascism (1942), a magisterial denunciation of the Cor novels, and “The Clock Will Strike” (1947), an examination of the legend of Sydney Steele’s contract with the devil, of which, sadly, only the abstract survives. By the end of the war Pin was appointed a professor and head of the University of Sydney’s English department. With the conflict over, Vivian expected her life to return to what it had been, but she was disappointed. Now in her late forties, although still handsome, she did not find it as easy as she once had to attract men. To her disgust, some younger poets insisted on seeing her as a mother figure. This perhaps explains her brief fling with the mystery writer Claudia Gunn in 1946, Vivian’s only known same-sex relationship. Though not particularly attracted to women, and even less so to one sixteen years her senior, Vivian nevertheless engineered a brief affair with Gunn, a liaison that produced the novel Death in Full Bloom (1948), in which Gunn obligingly killed off the femme fatale “Vivian Bloom” by eviscerating her with a stalactite.

  In 1948 Pin was offered the post of professor of Australian literature at Cornell University in New York State. The role had been created specifically for him by the dean of the Faculty of Arts, who had been impressed by Pin’s research published throughout the 1940s. The Darkblooms arrived at the university on 9 November 1948, two days before Vladimir Nabokov, who had recently been appointed to teach Russian and English literature at Cornell. The Darkblooms and the Nabokovs met for the first time at a party to welcome new teaching staff. Nabokov took an instant liking to the diffident Pin, who had read and admired Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, published the year before. After a few cocktails, Vivian interrupted the conversation between the two men to whisper that there seemed to be a lot of Jews at the party. She then proceeded to air some of the racial theories she had picked up from Rand Washington. Nabokov did not inform Vivian that his wife, Vera, was Jewish, but from that moment on he treated her with polite disdain whenever they met. After learning that Nabokov was a celebrated writer, Vivian flagrantly pursued him throughout 1949 and 1950, exploiting her husband’s friendship with the Russian to throw herself in his way as much as possible, even using the pretext of her daughter Polly’s crush on Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, to visit the Nabokovs’ home as often as she could. Nabokov, in turns amused, angered and aghast, rebuffed Vivian’s advances, which only ceased when Pin, for the first and last time in their marriage, threatened to leave her.

  Pin and Volodya (as Nabokov was known to his close friends) would meet twice a week to take long walks together. Nabokov, to Pin’s embarrassment, praised Dancing in the Shadows, a copy of which he had found in the university library, and would good-naturedly needle Pin about when he would write another novel. Pin demurred but enjoyed listening to Nabokov’s plans for his next book, The Kingdom by the Sea. Pin’s encouragement and enthusiasm for this work, which eventually became the notorious Lolita (1955), helped to sustain Nabokov during the early stages of the novel’s composition when he was, uncharacteristically, afflicted with self-doubt. Nabokov’s fondness for Pin is clear in his letters to his friend Edmund Wilson, the editor and writer. In a letter dated 17 April 1952, Nabokov describes a conversation with Pin in which the Australian had mechanically enumerated his wife’s many lovers, concluding, “And yet, I still think of her as an angel.” Nabokov had responded, “Yes, an angel dancing on the head of a pin.”

  During their years at Cornell, Vivian’s only appearances in print were three articles in the university newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, whose nineteen-year-old editor she had seduced in March 1950 after a three-month campaign. The first article was an interview with Vivian, which described her as a “famous Australian novelist” and “good friend of the Nabokovs”, while her other appearances were limited to brief mentions in the newspaper’s “Spied around Campus” column. Though Nabokov did his utmost to disguise his loathing for Vivian in deference to his friend’s feelings, he was perversely fascinated by the couple’s relationship, and delighted when Pin pointed out to him that Vivian’s full name was a perfect anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”. The Russian writer was incapable of resisting such a delicious play on words, which explains the brief appearance of the character “Vivian Darkbloom” in Lolita, where she is the lover and biographer of Humbert Humbert’s nemesis, Clare Quilty. Later, the character would resurface as the annotator of Nabokov’s longest novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Vivian remained unaware of her appearances in Nabokov’s books until the 1970s.

  One morning in early June 1954, Pin was on his way to meet Vivian for lunch at a diner in Ithaca when he suffered a massive brain haemorrhage and collapsed in the street, directly outside the funeral parlour where his body would lie, and where his memorial service would take place, four days later. Pin, Nabokov noted in a letter to Edmund Wilson, had died as he had lived, not wishing to put anyone to any trouble. Before the funeral, Nabokov and Vera visited Vivian to pay their respects. The children, Polly and Rainy, were sitting silent and numb in the kitchen. Vera made the girls some soup and tried to comfort them. Nabokov found Vivian weeping in Pin’s study, a room she had never set foot in before. Littered around her, Nabokov noted, were stacks and stacks of her book, Ivy Van Allbine: An Australian Vanity Fair. As Vera helped Vivian to bed, Nabokov replaced the books on the shelves, pondering what had possessed his friend to keep precisely one hundred and nine copies of his wife’s horrendous novel.

  Vivian and Rainy returned to Australia in September 1954, but Polly elected to remain in America, having fallen in love with one of her father’s protégés in the English department. She stayed with the Nabokovs for five months before marrying her sweetheart in February 1955; Vivian chose not to attend the wedding. She used the money from Pin’s life-insurance policy to buy a comfortable home in Sydney’s Double Bay. Rainy stayed with her until the beginning of the academic year, then left to study drama at the University of Western Australia. Three years later she met Will Deverall, a mystery critic, and the two married. Free at last of her daughters, Vivian set about re-establishing her literary gatherings, but she found it much more difficult now to attract any but the most obscure writers and artists. Her one coup was a brief visit in December 1955 from Nobel laureate Matilda Young, who bored Vivian by talking about how much she owed to Peter Darkbloom’s early championing of her work, and resisted Vivian’s suggestion that the best way to honour Pin would be by writing a poem about his widow.

  By 1956 Vivian had grown tired of the inability of the writers she patronised to publish anything. Using most of her savings, she established the Darkbloom Press. Six collections of verse by various undistinguished poets appeared throughout 1956 and 1957, all containing gushing dedications to Vivian and a mandatory poem or two immortalising her beauty. The books did not sell, and the press went bankrupt in the summer of 1957, forcing Vivian to auction her house and move to an apartment in Blacktown. Later that year Nabokov sent her a courteous note, along with a copy of his latest novel, Pnin (1957). This book, arguably Nabokov’s most humorous and poignant, describes the misadventures of the clumsy, balding lecturer Timofey Pnin, a man who retains his essential decency and kindness despite being shabbily treated by the world at large, and by his manipulative ex-wife in particular. Though Nabokov had made Pnin Russian instead of Australian, the resemblance to Vivian’s Pin was clear. The commercial and critical success of Nabokov’s novel enraged Vivian, who could not understand why the Russian had chosen to write about her husband rather than her.

  Without any money to bestow on authors, or hospitality to attract them to her poky apartment, Vivian found herself
alone for the first time in decades. Her old lovers, among them Rand Washington and Claudia Gunn, wanted nothing to do with her. Her spirits were briefly lifted when Dancing in the Shadows, which had been out of print for twenty years, was brought out in a new edition by Berkeley & Hunt in 1961, complete with a rare, admiring quote by Nabokov on the cover. Vivian granted interviews to journalists and academics, who called to talk about Peter Darkbloom but left with shorthand notes and audio tapes full of Vivian’s recollections of herself. The University of Sydney contacted Vivian to purchase her husband’s papers, but she had left them in the basement of their house in Cornell, where they had been burned by a janitor. Undaunted, Vivian offered the university her collection of the novels, poems, stories, paintings and sculptures she had inspired, but they declined. Vivian then turned to the noted biographer Stephen Pennington, asking him if he would be interested in writing her life. Pennington refused Vivian’s persistent requests for a meeting until she told him that she was in possession of Alexander Fernsby’s love letters to her. Pennington had just begun work on Fernsby’s biography and could not resist the bait. He visited Vivian in June 1964, but she refused to show him the letters unless he signed a contract to write her biography. After a futile hour of flattery, which included tactfully deflecting Vivian’s attempts to seduce him, Pennington made his excuses and left, convinced the letters did not exist. Pennington’s brief and uncharacteristically vicious description of Vivian in his Biographical Sketches 1953–2003 read: “Vivian Darkbloom. A lanky oversexed crone, with the faltering, high-pitched voice of an unconvincing female impersonator.”

  A month after Pennington’s visit Vivian was reading the morning newspapers, checking for any mention of herself, as was her lifelong habit, when she came across a review of a recently published science-fiction novel, An Imperfect Vacuum by P.V. Darkbloom. A letter to the publisher confirmed the author as Vivian’s daughter Polly. Vivian borrowed the book from the library, but to her disappointment could find no trace of herself among its spaceships and aliens. She had made no effort to contact her children in years, and so was unaware that Polly had become a cult science-fiction novelist, and Rainy a playwright whose farces had been successfully staged in Sydney and London. Neither was Vivian aware that she had three young grandchildren.

  Vivian sent letters to her daughters asking them to visit her in Sydney. Polly was living in San Francisco, but agreed to meet her mother since it coincided with her returning to Australia to promote her latest novel. Rainy, it transpired, was living only a short bus ride from Vivian’s flat. The reunion took place in a café near Vivian’s home in late November 1965. Polly and Rainy had barely sat down before their mother began berating them for their selfishness in not mentioning her in their work; between them they had dedicated two plays and a short-story collection to their father, but nothing to her. Polly and Rainy listened in silence as Vivian outlined her plans: they should each write a memoir of their childhood, in which she would play a major role. This was too much for her daughters, and as they went to leave Vivian pleaded with them, telling them it would be easy as there was so much to write about; for instance, Pin wasn’t their father. The news appalled the sisters, and an incensed Polly led Rainy, crying, from the café. Polly returned to America six weeks later and never spoke to her mother again. The second volume of Stephen Pennington’s exhaustive biography The Life of Alexander Fernsby made public Rainy’s parentage in 1972. Although Fernsby, her biological father, would attempt to contact Rainy in the 1970s and 1980s, she refused to meet with him.

  In the last years of her life Vivian made repeated efforts to republish her novel Ivy Van Allbine. She would spend each weekday at the offices of a different publisher, clutching her manuscript and demanding to be seen. Sometimes a kindly receptionist would accept the manuscript and promise to give it to an editor, but Vivian would return a week or two later, having forgotten the incident, and the charade was repeated. In January 1975 Vivian fell and broke her hip outside a supermarket in Blacktown. She was hospitalised for nine weeks, and during her stay was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Her eldest daughter, Polly, continued to refuse to have anything to do with her, but Rainy visited her in hospital, though her mother no longer recognised her. After Vivian’s hip replacement, Rainy installed her in a comfortable care home in Liverpool in western Sydney. Vivian appeared happy in her new surroundings, especially after her books and papers were brought from her flat once it had been sold. Rainy and her daughter Rachel would visit one afternoon each month, and Vivian would ask her granddaughter to read her a story. Rachel read to her from Little Viv’s Birthday Party, or Dancing in the Shadows, or one of the many hundreds of poems which featured Vivian Darkbloom, while Vivian listened with her eyes closed. When Rachel finished, Vivian would open her eyes and thank her. “I like stories about Vivian,” she would say. “Vivian is my favourite.”

  Vivian Darkbloom died of heart failure on the evening of 13 June 1976.

  Helen Harkaway, in Robert Bush’s flat, October 1963

  (1940–1993)

  The Bell Jar in the Rye …

  Robert Bush, describing Harkaway’s novel Parade of the Harlequins (1965) in his autobiography

  Bastard Title (2004)

  THE RECLUSIVE NOVELIST HELEN HARKAWAY WAS BORN IN Canberra on 29 June 1940. Her father, Iain, was a federal member of parliament for the seat of Lyne, New South Wales, representing the United Australia Party. Her mother, Diana, was a former model, still occasionally recognised as the “Gunn Girl” who had appeared in advertisements for the mystery novels of Claudia Gunn in the 1930s. The Harkaways were wealthy, owning two houses in Canberra, three in Sydney, and a thousand acres of land in the Barrington Tops. Helen enjoyed a privileged upbringing, but in contrast to her sociable parents she was an introvert. As she grew into an exceptionally beautiful young woman, however, she found attention more and more difficult to escape. Helen preferred to stay in the family’s farmhouse in the Barrington Tops rather than in Canberra, but her parents only went there for a few weeks every year.

  At the private school she attended in the capital she made few friends; girls seemed to take an instinctive dislike to her, and boys were simply an annoyance. Like many lonely children before and since, she found refuge in reading. Among her favourite books were The Magic Pudding (1918) by Norman Lindsay, A Child’s Jane Eyre (1950) by Naomi Plume and Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs (1918). Helen also enjoyed such pulp magazines as Nurse Sheila Romances and Famous Sheilas of Filmland, published by Fountainhead Press. They inspired her to write her own stories in exercise books, but she would allow no one to read them. Helen was a perfectionist; even the simplest homework took hours, and she would often destroy her work if it was returned with any corrections from the teacher. By the time she was fourteen she was taller than her father and was already developing her mother’s figure. Helen hated her height and deliberately cultivated a slight stoop; she refused to wear the fashionable dresses her mother bought for her, preferring dowdy clothes. This did nothing to deter the increasing number of male visitors who came to court her. She was thrilled when her poor eyesight required her to wear thick glasses, and she tried unsuccessfully to develop a squint. Her parents blamed Helen’s continuing eye problems on her constant reading and writing, and forced her to attend parties and balls; Helen would spend these evenings hiding in a bathroom. She received her first marriage proposal before she turned seventeen. She rejected her puzzled suitor with lines borrowed from A Child’s Jane Eyre:

  I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

  Helen’s “inward treasure” was her growing sense of vocation as a writer.

  When she was eighteen she began attending the Australian National University in Canberra to study English literature. Two male undergraduates were expelled for fi
ghting over her, and a sixty-year-old lecturer was forced to resign when Helen reported the love letters and compromising photographs he had sent her. After a few unhappy months she stumbled upon a forgotten corner of the library where she was never disturbed by either students or staff: the Australian literature section. When she realised that her lecturers would never give her a failing mark, no matter how poorly she performed in exams, Helen spent all her time in her secret place in the library, reading. In her years at university she filled in hundreds of call slips requesting books from the stacks, including one that much influenced her, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger, which had been banned in Australia until 1958.

  Harkaway’s idyll was destroyed in December 1961 when she returned from the stacks to her usual desk to find an admirer had placed a note there for her. She only read the first line – “Was this the face that launched a thousand slips?” – and was so upset that she left and never went back. Instead of reading, she took up writing again, this time in earnest. Much as she disliked the experience, she attended lectures and tutorials once more, recording scraps of overheard conversation in her notebooks, as well as ideas for poems and short stories. She even overcame her distaste for parties so that she could meet people and gather more material. During her last semester she began work on at least three novels, only to discard them after a few chapters. In October 1962, shortly before her final exams, Harkaway’s parents perished in a light-plane crash over the Barrington Tops. After the funeral, she left university without completing her degree and put the houses in Canberra and Sydney on the market, where they sold quickly. With this money, and the sum she inherited from her mother and father, Helen Harkaway had become a very rich young woman. She retreated to the family property in the Barrington Tops to concentrate on her writing.