Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  I painted bourgeois interiors where the chairs looked twitchy and sick of sitting about in rooms. I painted them romping in paddocks. I painted vigorous messes, plumbing that was tending towards anarchy, shoes, a silver glitter pair of high-heeled platforms belonging to Allegra, which seemed to announce her feet slung, crossed, off a chair above and to the right of them. It seemed to me you could sketch the rest of the picture from this token. You can tell a person by their feet. I took photos of The Brolga’s and Pattie Gospel’s at an opening at the National Gallery, long pointy claws in deluxe brown and short, stubby fatties in blunt-nosed slingback blacks. I had a lot of fun with shoes. There were little pictures taking shape all over the house. But these were just things I painted on the side, inspired by my house and my daily life. More importantly, my ironies of the nude were slowly taking shape and resolving themselves into something poised, something I had never attained before. I kept them in a separate room – nothing else in there but a tape deck and classical guitar music. I painted uninterruptedly over Easter 1983, and each night before I fell asleep, I read Uncle Nicola’s diaries.

  At the beginning of 1928 Uncle Nicola wrote, ‘I do not know what I shall do for money, but I shall live as if I had it and were an ascetic. I could cast myself as a person with a priestly vocation, a variety of missionary whose task it is to establish my faith at the ends of the earth. But how to establish my faith? I picture myself in my frock coat, being cooked in a cauldron. By whom? I don’t have to invent an opposition to myself because all I have is an opposition. On my own, I am ludicrously opposable.

  ‘The Consul-General has tried to intervene to have me removed from the university because I am, according to him, “a Communist whose views are well known in Italy” and I am supposed to have “come here with the sole purpose of spreading propaganda and promoting unrest among the labouring classes”. Would that I could penetrate the labouring classes to spread unrest! But the labouring classes tend to treat me as a joke. As for spreading propaganda among them, the mechanics of doing so all but prevent it being done. There are no secretaries at the university, the professors do their own typing. Duplication is by way of a bed of gelatine yielding, with luck, ten fair copies at a time, and the supply of gelatine, paper and ink is one’s own responsibility.

  ‘There are few people of culture who share my politics and I count myself very lucky indeed to have come across il dottore professore Lonsdale! Without him – mortificazione! I am so poor, I have to wear carpet slippers to save my shoes when at home in my room, and even then, I am in trouble with the landlady (una donnetta molto grassa e molto orribile) for walking about at nights, because the floorboards creak. Today she wanted to know, and in English too, what all the scratching and creaking was about. The other tenants think I pace around all night for the express purpose of getting on their nerves, when it is they getting on my nerves that makes me pace. Well, I tried to tell her, in English, that I was muttering The Inferno to calm myself, as I find there is nothing more calming than to have, stretching and preening in my throat, the verbal cat of The Inferno. Such a creature needs the legs and arms to keep it company. As for the scratching, what can the woman mean, unless it is that even in uncouth surroundings, a dignified and cultured person replies to the many letters he receives and is at times perhaps given to assailing the paper and causing the ill-made furniture in his room to complain of its poor condition. But a man must write, and with elan, to those whose spirits are oppressed and need his expressions of hope and goodwill.

  ‘No news from Milan. I have to throw myself into inventing my work here in Australia to stop dwelling on it. They would write if they could.

  ‘So, I hear from Paris from the Antifascist Concentration just about every day, but only recently have I begun to hear from anyone in Australia. They are very short of money in Paris, and I’ve promised to do what I can to raise money here, but the Catholic Italians, who have most of the wealth, have been ordered to steer clear of me. Their monsignor, who is from Rome, publishes a weekly bulletin called The Angel of the Family in which I am periodically decried.

  ‘Spencer says my support is growing, because my last lecture was packed out. Certainly it was packed out: it was packed out with fascists. I’m more attractive to them than the opera. They come to watch me for my curio value. I am famous for my clothes and my oratory. There are few people to whom antifascism means anything here, and I can’t communicate with these because my English is so poor. The more I worry about it, the worse it becomes. Spencer says that’s because I want to speak sophisticated English without learning ordinary English first. But the level of education of people to whom I really want to talk exceeds the use of ordinary English, and, in any event, I don’t think in ordinary words. When it comes to educated Italian speakers, the icons of their culture are often not the icons of mine, and conversations with them are restricted to a one-way flow of words from me to them.

  ‘I open my mouth and flow over, but what effect does it have? I am a one-man fountain – quite refreshing to paddle in my waters, but knowing why I’m here is irrelevant. This is an island of somnambulists in which there is no temptation to wake.

  ‘Oh well, I have been appointed as an instructor by the university, however much the Consul-General has tried to assassinate my character. He wrote and told them they should have asked him about me first and warned them I was a dangerous communist. The best he can do now is warn the Italian community against enrolling in my course. Quite amusingly, I notice, he has his own troubles. The fascist old guard is saying the party should be more powerful than the consulates, since the Italian state is now deemed in Italy to have reached its self-perfecting phase. Ah, what a paragon is the perfection of Italy – a rambling poetaster who has read Nietzsche, a man who believes, with the help of his friends, that the arrival in the world of himself, Benito Mussolini, has been immanent in all history. Just as the expulsion of Nicola Coretti to the ends of the earth has. I race out, bombard Melbourne with my orotund sorrow, and people come along to the performance. Then they go straight to the Consul-General and tell him what I’ve just done and what I am about to do. I’m a sideshow.

  ‘By now the Consul-General knows of my intention to set up an antifascist club in Melbourne and is trying to convince Australian politicians that I’m dangerous, a political subversive of the worst stripe. It’s a view the Catholic branch of the Labor Party would probably endorse. A strange country, this. You have to pass a spelling test to get into it. Strange to say, though they could have excluded me by giving me a test in any European language but my own, my test was in Italian. I have heard of ‘undesirables’ being tested in Gaelic. All I can think is the Italian Consul-General wanted to flex his muscles by having power over my life. Thank God for the consul-curbing potential of British colonial arrogance!

  ‘There are two Australias, the British and the Irish, and there’s no question but that the British is in the ascendency. The working class and the present government are like different species of being, their interests so thoroughly opposed as to seem irreconcilable. To succeed in this country is to succeed by displacement and exclusion. But, if they belong anywhere, the Italians belong in Irish Australia, with the Catholic church its way of competing for ascendency.

  ‘Clearly, there is something wrong in Milan. It might be that the mail is being intercepted. If I could get up, go there, sort it out! But of course, I cannot. I could do all the mechanical things, step onto a ship, return, find out what is going on, but I would be stepping into my death, and quite possibly that of my brother’s family as well. Thinking about anything else takes enormous effort, and sometimes the meaning I attach to everything I do just falls away.’

  As well as chronicling his life, Uncle Nicola was constantly ruminating over politics. From these ruminations I was able to diagnose myself as safely unamenable to Genghis Khan and to reproach the Troika with an ideological joust of my own: I was against dictatorships and tyrannies and all forms of fanaticism. I was for democracy
and a degree of central control: people ought to be able to see the political debate in progress and choose their side. In response to a thorough mocking on the grounds that it didn’t matter what side you picked, democracy based on capitalism meant prosperity for the first world at the cost of the third and was simply the substitution of one interest group for another, I was able to reply that, while I had no answer to the exploitation of the third world by capitalists, people in a democracy could, at least in theory, participate in the political debate themselves, and this extended to their right to speak out against capitalist exploitation. In a democracy, furthermore, people could lobby, form minor parties or use ballot papers to express a view not put by either major party: such protest votes were being counted in Australia, even as I spoke. The Tasmanian electors, in reaction to proposals by their electricity commission to build a dam in the wilderness for a hydroelectric scheme, chose to invalidate their votes by writing ‘No Dams’ across their ballot papers, while famous people like Reg Sorby chained themselves to the landscape and got covered in leeches. The scrutineers counted the protest vote and it was reported Australia-wide.

  In Fascist Italy what Mussolini said went, even if it was total bunkum like the war in Abyssinia, ostensibly fought to unite the Fascist State in that noblest of all expressions of nationhood: War. In reality it was a ridiculous beat-up in which a great many more Italian soldiers died of malaria than died fighting.

  If Fascism was idiotic I’d always believed Nazism was the scourge of the twentieth century, but to my horror, reading the diaries, I found Hitler to be the great disclaimer, for he was the perfect product of his times: racism was in place before he was, and it was virulent and pretty well universal. Australian ‘socialists’ went as far as condemning the idea, emanating from China, of a pan-Pacific International which would strive to unite the proletariats of China, India, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines and Latin America against the oppressive classes in those countries. Only the white man was worth solidarity in Australia.

  Uncle Nicola did not hear from his family until well into 1928, and then it was through a letter from Rose’s father, Lev Katz. The Corettis had fled to Paris and were now living with the Katzes, but the story was complicated.

  In December 1927, when Uncle Nicola was ripping a branch from a fir tree in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, the house with the trompe l’oeil fitting room was raided and ransacked by blackshirts looking for, and finding, articles Emilio and Allegra had been gathering for Non mollare! Emilio was beaten up and had his leg broken badly in two places.

  Allegra and Dadda had been in the house when the bashing occurred, and both were deeply affected by it. Lev wrote, ‘Allegra barely sleeps, and even now, sometimes seems dazed by the rapidity and cruelty of the attack. They arrived here in January, Allegra bringing with her a case full of smashed possessions. She thought she might raise something with them in Paris but, in truth, there was nothing we could salvage.

  ‘They escaped via the sea route, Emilio doing the best he could with his leg splinted, but he was in agony when he arrived here, and it was pretty soon evident to us that he had gangrene, and there wasn’t much that could be done for him.

  ‘We didn’t know where you were, and, never thinking of Australia, lived in expectation of you arriving any day. We did not locate you until April and by then, I have to say, Emilio had died from overwhelming infection. I’m afraid he died in so much pain, we hesitated to tell you. It has been harrowing for us all.

  ‘We buried him at Montparnasse, in the family vault of my father-in-law, Dan Grafman. I never got on very well with my father-in-law before this happened (he’s Orthodox and wouldn’t let me marry Rivkah unless I consented to a kosher household), but he showed me something. He showed me the value of tradition in times of indescribable anguish. You search for the words and the deeds and it’s a comfort to know people have searched before you and found something you recognised as emotionally appropriate. So, even though old Dan has endless set-tos with my father, Isaac, who’s liberal and doesn’t even believe in God, I was grateful to him on this occasion. I hope you don’t mind your brother being buried Jewish? There’s the custom, in Jewry, of taking in the stranger and treating him as a family member. A tradition was better than no comfort at all. It was a demonstration of love and care, an opportunity to reclaim good memories.

  ‘Old Filippo Turati came to the funeral. He lives near us these days, and he asked me to see him home; he’d collected some money to help Allegra and Henri out and wanted to hand it over. He’s taken a fancy to Henri, who’s impressed us all with the courage he showed looking after his mother, shielding her from Emilio’s pain. Turati asked if he’d like to do some work for him – running messages, that kind of thing. As Henri was keen, I said later he could do it and now, it seems, there’s work for Allegra too, if she’s up to it. She says she is and that the discipline will be good for her. It’s translating work, I believe. Though she has moments of anguish still, Allegra is strong-minded and very practical. I did not know this side of her before.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to communicate this grim news to you, far away as you are, but you can be proud of both Henri and Allegra; neither of them has lost sight of Emilio. It’s strange how weeks of pain can substitute itself in the mind for a full and vigorous life, how hard it is to remember back before the pain, but both Allegra and Henri are determined to remember and keep on reminding us to remember too.

  ‘I try to picture Emilio as the happy inventive person he was, gregarious and thoughtful. He was my best friend.’

  Uncle Nicola wrote, begging Allegra to come to Australia at once. But he did not have citizenship, and Australia was wary of accepting refugees. The Americans had imposed quotas on Southern Europeans, stating a preference for ‘Nordic Types’, and, following suit, Australia began to assert its preference for Britons. The Italians were quite visible in Australia, and because a high proportion of them came to labour for low wages, people thought of them as a threat to living standards. A widow with an eleven-year-old child didn’t stand a chance unless she had money, and, if at all possible, British citizenship.

  When I was in Paris on my way to Milan, I went to the Cemetery of Montparnasse and photographed the aisles of the dead. An idea was growing in my head. Back in Australia I’d seen a suite of photographs documenting the journey of a European Jew to the unknown land of Australia between the years of 1920 and 1950. The suite was not simply a range of photographs taken over those years, it was also a layered journey from a distant past to a futuristic present, and this did not happen from left to right. Each photo was constructed to represent a present of its own; each was a layered history. I thought to do a similar thing in paint and collage and, as I began my journey in search of the Grafman family vault, which contained the ashes of my grandfather, I was thinking of the formal problems such a work would entail. Perhaps I would build up a three-dimensional surface, a sophisticated kind of peep show, making an alley of the Grafman vault and its history. I was about to head down the first pathway, but fifty yards off a face peered out from behind one of the tombs and fixed me with an intense, crooked gaze.

  I had been going, simply, to stand at the place where my father had stood, watching the entombment of his father’s ashes. I was going to savour the wretched irony of Emilio Coretti occupying a space in the Grafmans’ vault, while Rose’s grandfather, Dan Grafman, through whose courtesy he lay there, had been gassed in the Auschwitz ‘shower block’ and thrown onto the heap of bodies which were pillaged for their hair, teeth and jewellery before being carted off for cremation. All this because his daughter was married to a German Jew who was an active socialist. Every now and then, human fat clogged the ovens at Auschwitz, due to insufficient stoking of the bodies.

  I never found the vault; the predator anticipated me at every turn.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Crushing

  I CALLED MY exhibition for the double criticism edition of the Mad Meg Broad Sheet ‘The Crushing’.
Some of it was mildly pornographic and meant to convey the idea that men’s sexuality is a lot more ambivalent than women’s. Men seemed to me to have a decided ability to conduct their sexual activities, not with their eye on their female partner, but on a dominant man whose good opinion they were seeking. They lived in a hierarchical pyramid at the apex of which sat God the Judge of Men and under whose base Women, the Unworthy Ones, were crushed. To this God women didn’t matter, they were without souls; the best they could aspire to was the ‘versatile, comely beast’ of Granpa’s imaginings. Breeding stock.

  I stood around on opening night with Rose and Maggie, guessing tipsily what might be said. The chap would probably say something like an ‘admirable tension is generated by the juxtapositioning of stone and flesh’, or, as had happened to one poor woman before me, ‘my reaction is better left unsaid’. The Broad Sheet’s woman reviewer would probably say something like ‘there are things in life too complex for oral transmission (R. D. Laing, op. cit.)’. Given half an opportunity, I myself would have said, ‘The females in this work are undeniable, and they are crushed females, distorted, flattened and, in one case, pushed up against the front of the picture plane as if into a pane of glass …’

  Maggie’s hair had curled up against the glass like the hair of a dead woman in a locket.

  At one stage I thought of an all-male guest list, since the pictures addressed men more than they did women, but I was glad I decided against it when David, who’d been quite chatty and affable, was suddenly very drunk and began to say what I was doing had been done already a thousand times, no, a million times better, by Lucien Freud. It wasn’t only women who were oppressed in his pictures, men also suffered. Lucien Freud hadn’t exactly crossed my mind in connection with this exhibition. William Blake had, as part of the question of rendition, not to say theme, since Blake was concerned to represent a bearded God and women in attitudes of prostration. Furthermore, rotting furniture played no part in my pictures, as it did in Freud’s, and my women were not yellowish green, their flesh was undeniable.