Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  The evening was a great success. Laurent and Rose befriended Gil-Serrano, who had been stranded in Australia by the First World War and led a bizarre and lonely life, being infrequently called upon to translate or to act on behalf of Paraguay. He’d seen all manner of things, from Spanish speakers trapped in a derailed train to a boatload of grandees moored in Westernport, unable to come ashore because Customs wouldn’t clear them. Cedric Barnes, the mathematician, was still living out the war, on the lookout all the time for trip-wires and dead men, and he did not cultivate friends. He used all his energy just keeping his maths safe in a head full of horror. Rose and Grace Lonsdale liked each other, though they were very different women. For Rose, plants were the things that grew behind railings. They adorned the way but didn’t intrude; she was fascinated to learn from Grace that they had a sex life. But Rose wasn’t much attached to the world of things and beings. She preferred to think of life as a mysterious sojourn between states.

  Rose and Laurent spent their first night in Australia in a nearby hotel room Uncle Nicola had reserved for them. Their first accommodation was to be a rented flat in South Melbourne where they stayed a month or so before deciding to buy a boarding house in St Kilda.

  Laurent, in due course, called on his relatives in Melbourne. After all, at a time when it was hard to get into Australia, they had agreed to underwrite his stay for five years, and he was grateful, but he knew in his heart of hearts that Rose would be exasperated by them and they would not approve of the course of action he and Rose had taken.

  True to predicted form, Uncle Julius and Aunt Orpah were offended that they hadn’t been asked to meet Laurent at the ship. Laurent tried to explain about the Corettis in Paris and how important it was that Rose should make contact with Uncle Nicola as soon as she was able. Priding themselves on their rise to solid respectability in Australian society – after all, Australia even had a Jewish Governor-General – the relatives weren’t too moved by the story of refugee Italians and were even less impressed that Laurent had been in Melbourne some time before looking them up. Laurent, ambushed by tea, cakes and Toorak, knew immediately and precisely where he stood in their regard. There could be no question that there was anything wrong with Laurent; it had to be those who surrounded him who were at fault. The task of Laurent’s uncle, his mother’s brother, Dr Julius Lichtblau, would be to see him safely into the medical faculty, and of Laurent’s Aunt Orpah (Australian born and bred) either to bring Rose into line or to get her nephew out of an ill-considered marriage.

  Laurent did not tell them he’d just bought a boarding house in which he and Rose intended not only to let rooms, but also to create a ‘salon’ in the basement. He did, however, leave his address with his aunt, who had then presumed her plump frame up the crumbling steps of the boarding house, encountered Rose in the front room sewing ‘some ghastly article’, declared the house ‘completely unsuitable’ and telephoned an estate agent she knew, making an appointment for Rose and Laurent to go and see him right away and ‘get yourselves out of this mess’.

  That was not the last they saw of Aunt Orpah, for though she considered Laurent and Rose to be in a mess, they made such an exotic pair that she was intrigued in spite of herself. Invitations to Passover were to come every year thereafter and were generally accepted, because Laurent had a deep family feeling and he knew Aunt Orpah would thrive on the legend of his inimitable Rose.

  Each year Rose grumbled at having to go to Passover, and each year Aunt Orpah used the occasion to ask when the children were going to appear, so the questions could be asked of Julius, the Hebrew could be taught and read, the traditions passed on. Aunt Orpah’s grandchildren were all too old to ask the questions now; it was up to Rose. But though Rose often tried, she did not fall pregnant. It was something she would regret at a later time, almost as much as she would regret the horrendous loss of her family.

  When Rose arrived in the bosom of the Australian middle class, people feared her. Her speech was unexpurgated, her clothes were highly eccentric and she didn’t have a proper bathroom in her house. Those who admired her did so in secret until she might have proved herself one way or the other. The more daring among the women she met came knocking timidly at her door with jars of home-made jam, or some peculiarly Australian knick-knack such as a swizzle stick for cocktails she once showed me, which folded away in the shape of a golf club.

  In Australia, women thought they were making perfectly good mayonnaise with a one-to-three mixture of vinegar and condensed milk. Drop by drop, Rose hand-whisked olive oil into egg yolk. People who ate with her weren’t certain whether to take up the practice themselves or to condemn it as ‘something with oil in it’.

  On Rose’s breath the visitor was apt to find garlic. The Aunt Ninas of the time probably would have done her the courtesy of not mentioning it, but the pillars of wisdom who ran the ceaseless campaign to correct Australia’s mores might have told her discreetly that a good Australian breath smelt of toothpaste.

  Rose, now in her eighties, is still feared in some circles in Australia, but, having visited Paris, I now know she would have been feared there, too. For while the sturdy Australian toilet, immaculately clean, bears testimony to generations of Australian women who have seen their role as continually having to guard the home against, or rid it of, invaders with pestilential propensities, the condition of Parisian toilets reveals a nation of women quite above cleaning them, and that is not to say the men do it. There is now a two-franc public loo on the streets of Paris which completely cleans itself. Charming city though it is, Paris, like Melbourne, is thoroughly bourgeois.

  In that charming city, in the winter of 1931 when Dadda was fifteen, the great artistic rebellion against the bourgeoisie was over. Former rebels such as Picasso were now mainstream artists. Robert Delaunay had turned from his colour studies of window forms back to the formality of circular forms in which he explored ‘colour, the fruit of light’. Dadda’s countryman De Chirico had made his mark as a metaphysical painter and was doing sets for the Ballet Russe. There was also Derain, steadfastly treading his own path.

  However, while Dadda’s career was shaped through close acquaintance with the work of Picasso, Delaunay and Derain, and even more acquaintance with De Chirico, whose picture structure, imagery and technique made a deep impression on him, the person who seeped into his soul as no other was Modigliani. Not only did he know Modi’s story well, having grown up with it, but now, in Paris, he was able to see the work.

  He followed up the glowing women, the friends whose portraits Modi had painted, as he became drunker and drunker, exploring the lineaments of their being. Modi would sing to the women in Italian to soothe them when they became frightened of him, so excited by the growth of his portraits that on one occasion, as he worked feverishly on the bottom of a canvas, the top took leave of the easel and fell on his head.

  The Paris in which Rose had spent her childhood was the Paris from which Modigliani wrote to his mother in Livorno saying he would repay the money the family had been sending him just as soon as his fortunes turned the corner, and this should be any day. Though they boasted a deputy in parliament, the Modiglianis were not well off and it must have broken Modi’s heart when the only one-man show of his life was ordered from the walls of a Paris gallery because the nude in its window was judged offensive to the public view.

  Modi loved his family and they loved him, but not without reservations respecting his talent. Indeed, after his death they did not even salvage one painting, though they could have rescued several from the clutches of avaricious dealers.

  How much of Modigliani’s antibourgeois attitude was genuine and how much an affectation dictated by the bohemians of Paris is open to question, but he certainly painted without regard for ‘taste’. His generation wanted to fire the imagination of their audience, to provoke rebellion against middle-class conservatism and conceit. Now, of course, you can buy a Modigliani print in any suburban print and paper shop and it wouldn’t be out
of place in many middle-class homes. We mass-produce Modigliani and sell Jeanne Hébuterne, his tragic lover, as part of our ‘tasteful’ range of stationery.

  If Modigliani were to materialise as a young painter today, I feel certain feminists would despise him. People with alcoholism, schizophrenia or depression in their families would despair of him as incapable of living the way most of us live. Most of us live, however, by doing trivial work. Our empty weekday houses, stuffed to the gunwales with modern accoutrements, are symbols not so much of achievement as of wasted time. What the socialists despaired of for the proletariat has become the lot of the bourgeoisie. This was Dadda’s theme; it was through Modigliani and antibourgeois Paris that he came to it.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Modernity and Obsolescence

  THE BOURGEOIS MENTALITY runs deep in Australia. Ironically, since feminism and Marxism are more often associated than not, it was probably the bourgeois mentality more than anything else which drove young women to react against the revolution in social mores that had its beginning in the sixties. Having themselves acknowledged as human beings rather than pleasure toys and slaves led those who, a few years before, would have been destined for bourgeois housewifery and pedantic toilet-cleaning into the public arena. The former housewife now had an education. If children were to be had from her, they would come at the cost of some effort from men, and it would be effort expended on the very tasks decried by Marxists in the past. If men wanted to remain married, they had now to address the practical problems of running and keeping a house and family and, in Australia, the land where people own their own homes, these were strongly bourgeois concerns.

  By 1983 it was no longer good enough for David Silver to insist on his entitlement to an uninterrupted life as a painter when there was a child to bring up and a wife with a career. Though few offered their sympathy, everyone understood Allegra’s position, while David’s had become completely reprehensible.

  His violence went much deeper than his public outburst against me. Allegra, too proud even to have turned to me for help, eventually admitted to having taken regular beatings from David during their relationship. As is characteristic of bashers, he would hit her where the bruises wouldn’t be obvious – the back of the head, over the ears, the sides of her face that could be hidden by her hairline – that way she, like other victims of this kind of violence, could spare herself the agony of making any admissions to her family or friends. Afterwards, remorse knew no bounds.

  Surely there is no one more generous and flattering than a basher trying to crawl back into his hole. Allegra was plied with oil paintings, cake, long-stemmed roses and cheques, but she was past giving in now. David might be the father of her daughter, but he was a wrecker, and there was no excuse for his behaviour.

  Primitively, deep down, he had destroyed my show because he hadn’t wanted me, a woman, to succeed. Feeling his efforts at justifying himself were falling short, he then tried to condemn my work as bourgeois. He said it was ‘tasteful’ and tastefulness was anathema in real art. To him, leaving the show on the walls was spelling out contempt for the growing tenor of the times; whereas for us it was the exposure of ingrained misogyny, one of the factors contributing to the absence of women practitioners in the history of art.

  The only correctness in David’s point of view was that the world had moved back into money, and the slickness and suavity that went with it. My work was never slick and suave, however, and it was farcical to suggest it was.

  At this time there was widespread graffiti in Melbourne, presumably the work of young feminists, saying, IF HE BEATS YOU, LEAVE. This presupposed there was sympathy for the victims of violence in the outside world, somewhere to go and something to go with, and that leaving would not aggravate already serious problems. The feminist movement consisted largely of bourgeois women, like The Troika, who knew little about poverty, alienation and fear, and unless these things were foisted upon them, did not want to know. To know would have been to expose their own vulnerability, as the world in which they lived was owned and controlled by men. They had been brought up to avoid knowing, and the lives of many of them were lived on bluestone foundations bequeathed to them by mothers who kept poverty, alienation and fear at bay by occupying the tops of the low peaks of Australian society and creating space in which their daughters could at least be independent for a while. They probably did not realise that leaving can be the most dangerous part of a violent relationship. It is the time when desperate men go mad, and it can mean distress and material loss for a woman to the extent that personal gain is ever after under threat.

  David would launch himself like a kamikaze bomber at my house, where Allegra had come to stay, and where, to Eli’s chagrin, we had had the locks changed. Eli thought we were going too far, but David, bearing wine and roses, would burst into restaurants where we were eating or having coffee, or he would follow us along streets, ducking into alcoves, hiding behind bushes, until, overwhelmed by his need, he would rush us, brandishing bank cheques for large sums of money. Whenever Allegra went out without me, she was mobbed, cajoled, entreated and begged. The worst moments were those when he’d throw himself on the bonnet of my car – Allegra no longer had a car – in heavy traffic.

  Eli, who thought we were being hard and suffered to see David suffer, took ear-bashings from him that went on for hours: how Allegra was a fool to toss away everything they’d built together, and how it would spell the end of her friendship with Bart and Miles. Then he’d have a belated rush of love for Nin and then express his remorse for having hit Allegra once or twice when he ought not to have hit his child’s mother.

  When Allegra heard this, she was nearly driven insane. ‘Once or twice!’ she screamed. ‘Once or twice! It was every fucking Friday! Beat her up on Friday, she can go back to work on Monday! Why are you feeling sorry for him, Eli? And why is the only reason he shouldn’t have hit me be that I’m the mother of his child?’

  ‘He’s two people,’ Eli answered.

  ‘Yes, and both of them treat women abominably. One of them grovels while the other slugs.’

  ‘You ought to have told us, Allegra,’ I said. ‘You could have come and stayed with us before now.’

  ‘You knew,’ she said, and I immediately felt smug, guilty and self-righteous, because I had known that the fights could be fierce and physical, but after them Allegra would seem to be bristling with a hostility that said Just leave me alone! Don’t even ask. So I wouldn’t ask, and the one time I tried to comfort her, she pushed me away. It had seemed that my role was to take care of Nin.

  I’d never had to ask Allegra to understand my problems; she’d protected me as a matter of course. She had said nothing because she was incredulous that David would hit her and certain every time that it couldn’t possibly happen again. She tried to describe it, to decipher whatever it was that triggered him, but could only arrive at self-loathing. ‘I let him beat me in my home,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know why he does it. I don’t understand.’

  I could feel her pain in me. I felt degraded by him, but how much worse it was for Allegra. I thought that surely, confronted with it, Eli would feel this pain and never make that sort of mistake himself. But something else was happening to Eli.

  On the threshold of manhood, he was very susceptible to David. He liked the feeling of power the situation conferred on him and, instead of seating himself on our side, he occupied the ground he thought did him credit, the middle. When he came asking Allegra if David could see Nin, she exploded.

  ‘Can’t you see past your nose, Eli?’

  ‘He loves Nin.’

  ‘No! No! He does not love Nin. He disowned her. He found that blasted little cat more interesting. The fucking cat ran away, Eli, and you know what he has the gall to say to me? I killed it! I drove it away! Or I ran over it in secret and put it in the garbage or some such. He doesn’t know what love is. The only two people he cares about in the whole world are Bart and Miles. No, he can’t see Nin. I won’t le
t him lay a finger on Nin. Oh God …’ She began to sob deeply, the tears making her lips glisten in the cave of her hair. ‘Mothers are supposed to keep the wolf from the door, not allow the wolf into their wombs! I’m hopeless, I’m hopeless.’

  Then Eli tried to understand. Back he went to David with the reasons he couldn’t see Nin. That one resulted in a siege, and Eli, trying to keep the peace, became David’s envoy.

  ‘Can’t you see he’s manipulating you?’ Allegra would say, but Eli couldn’t see it. As if David were a wounded soldier out on the slopes at Gallipoli, Eli would not abandon him. He sat with David through his self-recriminations, his spite, his self-pity, and though David brought himself very low in Eli’s presence, Eli didn’t stop respecting him. Rather, he admired him for bringing himself low.

  ‘Oh, Eli!’ Allegra despaired. ‘You think you’ve got him in the palm of your hand, and you like to feel bigger, older and wiser than he is. Your mother’s there watching, and you wish it was your father!’

  Eli didn’t deny it. ‘David’s spelling himself out,’ he said. ‘He needs someone with him when he does that. I’m the only person available.’

  ‘You mean you’re the only person who’ll listen. You encourage him by listening.’

  ‘He needs encouragement. And, yes, I am bigger than he is.’

  ‘But, for God’s sake, he used to call you an oaf!’

  ‘Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he? He probably won’t change much by talking it out, but he may become more conscious that what he does affects people. David is a small man with a soft voice. He doesn’t realise that what he does affects everybody round him; he’s suffering from the delusion that he’s weak. He’s never felt separated off from women, initiated into manhood, if you like.’

  ‘Well, thanks very much, Eli! That’s just what we wanted to hear. He hates us, but he doesn’t hate us in the way he should!’