Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  Part of John’s reputation as an eccentric stemmed from his Luddite tendencies. As far as much modern technology was concerned he was a conscientious objector. He would have no truck with computers, and in the library depended on the kindness of librarians to track down books. He didn’t even countenance the typewriter, writing always in neat, understated longhand. As for ATMs, he detested their mechanical impersonality, and would have nothing to do with plastic cards and pin numbers. He had once driven a car, but after an accident—which he (jokingly?) attributed to experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary while at the wheel—gladly gave up on it. And in his pocket of North Melbourne motor vehicles were definitely the enemy. When relieved of his watch in a poofter-bashing attack in a nearby park he did not bother to replace it, finding happily that he could rely on town-hall clocks, church bells and the like. Perhaps his one concession to the technology of communications was his embrace of the telephone—he enjoyed the chat and gossip it facilitated.

  Linked to his aversion to technology was his deep distrust of bureaucracy. This comes through strongly in Take Me to Paris, Johnny in the portrayal of Juan as a stateless person, treated with blank-faced indifference if not suspicion by immigration officials around the world. Mark Baker attributes John’s hatred for bureaucracy to its association with the Holocaust; and technology can so easily be deployed as a means of state control. John resented any process that required the filling in of forms. He went for years without submitting a tax return, indifferent to the refunds that were probably owing to him. At the university he obstinately would not apply for the promotion to which he was surely entitled. And, according to fellow historian Greg Dening, ‘he used not meeting deadlines as a sort of anti-bureaucratic espionage’.

  John’s lifestyle always retained a whiff of the monastic denial of money and possessions. As Jim Brady has observed, ‘he liked to see a degree of extravagance and richness around him but not as part of himself’. John himself confesses in the memoir that money was a subject he found ‘profoundly tedious’. As a tenured lecturer he always seemed to have enough: what he had he spent or gave away, ‘a mildly profligate reaction against the thrift of a middle-class upbringing’. For Juan, struggling to survive at the edge of New York’s underclass, this was, as John wryly observed, irresponsible carelessness.

  This kind of otherworldliness should not be taken to imply a lack of interest in his material surroundings. As a child he had a passion for plants, flowers, gardens. Granted early on his own vegetable and flower patch, he was soon taking much of the responsibility for the family’s garden, stoutly defending it against his father’s tendency to cut down anything showing signs of healthy life. Garden history became an important minor research interest and he gained a particular reputation as an authority on Melbourne’s parks and gardens. In 1989 he published an edited collection of documents, Victorian Picturesque: The Colonial Gardens of William Sangster; as he mentions in the memoir, Juan helped him with some of the research. John was a popular speaker with the Garden History Society, which he supported. And, in the Australian suburban tradition, there was always room in John’s garden for chooks; he even went so far as to join the Essendon Poultry Society.

  He was not, however, an enthusiast for native plants, at least not in the urban environment. Street planting of untidy eucalypts, with their peeling bark and scraggy foliage, caused him great distress, and, indeed, brought out the urban terrorist in him, as he did not shrink from rooting them out under cover of darkness. In the garden, as in other areas of his life, he nursed his prejudices carefully. Describing the flowers brought by a friend to Juan in hospital he applauds the bright colours of gerberas, in spite of their emanating from racist South Africa, while compensating by declaring anathema ‘the whole hideous tribe of the proteas’.

  His engagement with parks and gardens was one aspect of his strong sense of place. He related very much to the local world of North Melbourne—the splendid, noisy profusion of the Queen Victoria Market, the almost country-town atmosphere of Errol Street, the Italian exuberance of the neighbourhood trattoria, and, before it folded, the down-at-heel gay bar with its cheerfully amateur drag show. Melbourne University, within easy walking distance, had been the focus for his working life, and its nooks and crannies were as important to him as the collegial sociability it offered. Although he was occasionally lured to Monash to give a lecture he greeted that car-infested suburban campus with a shudder. The bulk of his estate went to Melbourne University—to buy more books for the library in his chosen fields.

  Melbourne, in the larger sense, was also important to him. He was comfortable with the city’s brand of tribalism, and was a strong supporter of the Collingwood Magpies, once confessing to me that it was the ‘thuggish’ players he was most drawn to. Melbourne, and, at a pinch, Victoria, had meaning for him: on the other hand, he had a profound distaste for nationalism. Sydney was definitely foreign territory and he viewed its culture with suspicion. Looking abroad, he had a British disdain for things Irish, although one of his closest friends had an Irish background; and in North America he could feel entirely at home in New York, while preferring not to see it as part of the United States. He loved Berlin, too, as is evident in Take Me to Paris, Johnny, and was able to detach his affection for the city, and particular parts of it at that, from any thought of German nationalism, which would have instantly conjured up the horrors of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Always it was the immediacy of place and the people contained within it that evoked a response from him.

  He was, then, a man of contradictions—many of which, I am sure, he was conscious. Sometimes one wondered how serious his prejudices were; or at least it could be hard to distinguish those which were deeply felt from those which were adopted more playfully. He relished conversation but there was often an element of polite mischief in his contribution to it: he enjoyed the effect created by saying something slightly outrageous or politically incorrect and yet would profess mild astonishment at the reaction it elicited. But he could also be tactful in accommodating and adjusting to the views of others. Although not initially an enthusiast for the ordination of women he respected its importance for many of his friends and accepted its inevitability.

  One had a feeling that the charm, the playfulness, the eloquence, masked a very private angst or self-doubt, something which he had sought to assuage in the monastic community and which was difficult to communicate to others. Like most of us, he had secrets, the most trivial one being that he smoked. His friends were not supposed to know: if he was caught with a cigarette in hand, the incident would not be referred to, and the fiction that he was a non-smoker maintained. He also reserved to himself the right to go his own way. He had no qualms about leaving a dinner party abruptly if he was tired of it, and more generally his comings and goings could be unpredictable, not helped, perhaps, by his lack of a watch. Eccentricity, one suspected, could be a refuge.

  There was no disguising, however, the central integrity of his life. One reason why writing could be agonising for him was that he had such high expectations of it. I think, in this respect, writing the story of Juan offered him a kind of release. The emotion which underpinned it and the urgency of the project were sufficient to reassure him that the words on the page conveyed a truth that justified the act of writing. There was a sense, then, in which Take Me to Paris, Johnny was not only his tribute to his lover but Juan’s final gift to him.

  The launch of Take Me to Paris, Johnny on 2 September 1993 was a happy occasion. Unlike Michaels and Conigrave, he was fortunate in being able to attend the launch of his own book. At the Meat Market in North Melbourne there was a great crowd of John’s family, friends and colleagues, all of whom sensed, I think, the importance of the moment. Dipesh Chakrabarty, then a member of Melbourne University’s History Department, spoke eloquently in launching the book, concluding by singing a song about love and grief by Tagore, the first song his mother had taught him. John responded with his usual grace and charm. He made a refere
nce to a recent bout of sickness, and said that he had been overwhelmed by the support of friends. He felt he could face the future with confidence. It might have been emotional for many in the audience, but John was adept at striking a note which overcame that danger.

  Three weeks later John was hospitalised with a brain infection, toxoplasmosis. When he emerged from a coma he was for a time disoriented, convinced at first that he was in Israel, then a Paris monastery, though you couldn’t be quite sure that this wasn’t a game he was playing with us. Although he made a partial recovery he was never quite his old self again—yet what, one could not help wondering, was that old self? Certainly aspects of the John we knew were recognisable through the haze of illness, as when, one evening, he arose from his bed in the Royal Melbourne Hospital and quietly walked out, and, somehow negotiating the hectic traffic of Flemington Road in pyjamas and Sandy Stone dressing gown, headed home to Howard Street, where he was greeted with considerable surprise by friends enjoying a pre-dinner drink in the vicarage garden. For John it was as though he was simply making a sociable call and he offered no explanation for his unexpected arrival; he stayed for dinner, and, after an anxious phone call from the hospital to report that he had gone missing, made no objection when it was suggested that it was time for him to return.

  Whereas Juan, the dancer, had, in his dying, seen his body wasting away to a skeleton, for John, the historian, there was the sad irony that his mind bore the brunt of AIDS. Adding to the tragedy, Murray, the vital young friend referred to in the book—it is Murray who brings Juan gerberas—was also hospitalised with AIDS-related illnesses at this time. John attended Murray’s funeral just a month before his own death.

  It all came to an end at St Mary’s which, like the university, had been such an essential part of his life. It was the full requiem mass with all the ritual he would have wanted, though his body was contained in a simple Jewish-style coffin of unadorned pinewood. After the eulogies had been said, the hymns sung and the Eucharist celebrated, his body was borne to Kew Cemetery to join Juan. There, as had happened with Juan’s burial, those gathered joined in filling in the grave. Remembering that earlier occasion Greg Dening remarked that not many of us will turn the soil of their own grave as John did.

  Yet, whatever one’s beliefs, it was not the end. Take Me to Paris, Johnny survives as more than just a superbly crafted memoir—it is also a living expression of the spirit of John Foster.

  It was Greg Dening who offered the beautiful prayer: ‘Thank you, Lord, for John. May the gardens grow, the bantams hatch and the bell toll as John would have liked.’

  SOURCES

  APART FROM BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

  Mark Baker’s comments come from his Introduction to History on the Edge: Essays in Memory of John Foster (1944–1994), History Department, University of Melbourne, 1997, which also contains the funeral eulogies by Jim Brady and myself. Greg Dening is quoted from his speech launching History on the Edge, to be found in a booklet published by St Mary’s Anglican Church in 1997, with the support of the History Department, Melbourne University, entitled Bell and Book: In Memoriam John Harvey Foster. I am also indebted to Ross Foster, John’s brother, for his recollections.

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