The Biographer's Lover
Page 1
RUBY J. MURRAY is a writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Saturday Paper,
The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Lifted Brow, Best Australian Stories, The Asian Literary Review and Meanjin. She was selected as a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for her debut novel, Running Dogs, which was also shortlisted in the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
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Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
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Copyright © Ruby J. Murray 2018
Ruby J. Murray asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
9781863959421 (paperback)
9781743820322 (ebook)
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko
Cover artwork by Tim Maguire
Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro
Ern Malley poems appear by arrangement with the Licensor,
The Ern Malley Estate, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd
Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often, cowled in slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the wind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.
– Ern Malley (June 1944)
‘Most nations practise, beside their formally acknowledged religion, the cult of some ideal manhood or womanhood.’
– C.E.W. Bean
Geelong was bought for a bargain basement price: Fifty Blankets, Fifty Knives, Fifty Tomahawks, Fifty Pairs of Scissors, Fifty Looking Glasses, Twenty Suits of Slops or Clothing and Two Tons of Flour, All Lies.
Geelong was built with the wood of Van Diemen’s Land.
Geelong released the rabbits.
Geelong is flour mills and wool grease and rope works and hangings.
Geelong was cheated by false mapmakers from Melbourne, who warped the shape of the state and pushed us away from the goldfields.
(Melbourne will never be forgiven.)
Geelong is foundries and flames, bird shit and Ford, and you can have it any colour as long as it’s black.
Geelong is a tongue of land.
Geelong can grow concrete like a second skin, can eat up the ground, can tear down the trees, can expand and expand.
Geelong is a sleepy hollow.
Geelong is the murder capital of Australia.
Geelong is the armpit.
Geelong is the best town to bypass.
Geelong is the pivot, the open mouth of the bay.
Geelong is a deep pulse.
Geelong is on the Bellarine, leaning on its elbow, staring out at the sparkling sea.
Contents
Edna: A Life
The Biographer
Edna: A Life
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Edna: A Life
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Epilogue
Acknowledgements
EDNA: A LIFE
Author’s Preface
When this biography was first published in 1994, I titled it The Forgotten War Artist. Back then, few people in Australia remembered Edna Cranmer’s work. Over the two decades that have passed since, the text that you hold in your hands has remained the same. But today Edna is far from forgotten: she is now considered one of Australia’s greatest artists. So what has changed? Not the facts.
Born in Geelong in 1929, Edna was a largely self-taught painter. After a few modest successes exhibiting in the 1960s, she briefly came to the attention of one of Australia’s most powerful artistic tastemakers: in 1967, Sir William Dargie recommended Edna be considered as a potential official war artist worthy of deployment to the Vietnam War on behalf of the Australian War Memorial. This fleeting recognition, however, failed to translate into sales or accolades, and Edna withdrew completely from the Australian art world in the early 1970s. For the last twenty years of her life, Edna dedicated herself to her family, painting in near solitude in her studio in the hills above Port Phillip Bay.
It wasn’t until after the artist’s death in 1991 that Australia began to discover her incredible body of work. Her images of ordinary Australian men and women working, fighting and commemorating the wars that defined the nation’s character during the twentieth century have now become iconic, from the vibrant oils of the Australian Women’s Land Army series to the delicate sketches of her husband Max Cranmer, who was crippled fighting on the Kokoda Track during the Second World War.
In 2006, a year in which only three per cent of works auctioned globally were painted by women, Edna’s soaring Poppies triptych of the Australian war cemeteries in France sold to an anonymous collector for $1.25 million. Edna Cranmer’s work has finally found its audience. We now remember Edna as an unofficial war artist, as an emblem of Australian womanhood and the Anzac spirit of hard work, sisterhood, motherhood and loyalty. We can only speculate how that would make the artist herself feel. I, of course, hope she would be pleased.
As always, I would like to thank Percy and Victoria Cranmer and the extended Cranmer and Whitedale families for their support. Without them, it would have been impossible to tell this story. The family’s insistence that I continue to be Edna’s sole official biographer is a great honour; I know that others will eventually come but, in the meantime, I owe the family – and Edna herself – a great debt that I can never repay.
This re-release of The Forgotten War Ar
tist: Edna, A Life with new colour plates and photos from the family’s collection was supported by the Australian War Memorial and the National Endowment for Memory, a federal initiative for the preservation of Australia’s war histories.
The Biographer
Edna had been dead for seven months on the day I first heard her name, her body in a box in the wet dirt on the peninsula.
It was April 1992, and I was sitting in a Carlton cafe with my agent, Anna-Marie, talking next projects. I was twenty-nine years old, divorced three years, the author of a handful of books, none of which bore my name on the cover. Rose Gardening for Beginners. Atkins on the Menu: Low-Carb Recipes from 10 Great Australian Chefs. Art Now: Unlock Your Inner Painter. 16 Tricks with Scarves. Everyday Angels: How to Find Calm in Your Home. A ghostwriter.
The coffee was burned, the air sharp, and Anna-Marie left plump, tan lipstick marks around the tips of her Benson & Hedges Special Filters. Her fingernails were permanently painted a stubborn rococo pink. The men at the table next to us were eating marinara and picking at the greasy prawn carcasses. One of those end-of-summer storms had just blown through. Huge leaves spiralled down from the plane trees and clogged the Melbourne gutters.
‘I’ve got you a project,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Edna Cranmer. Died last year. Daughter’s grieving, wants to do some sort of biographical monograph. It’s a vanity project, but there’s potential for it to be more if you can get the woman’s son involved too.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s a footy player. Cranno.’
‘Cranno. Geelong Cats?’
‘I didn’t think you were the footy type.’
‘I grew up there.’
‘No? You’re from Geelong?’
‘It’s only an hour away.’
‘Know any Cranmers?’
‘I’ve been gone a long time. Geelong’s bigger than you think.’
Anna-Marie puckered her mouth as if she could taste oil in her latte. ‘Doesn’t matter. Could be a footy memoir. People love a good football origin story. Sounds like you know football.’
‘Not really.’
‘Look, this could go two ways. Option one: you do it arty. Three months, flat fee, short monograph, and daughter self-publishes under her own name. Five people buy it – the rest she gives away as presents. Family’s loaded, and there’s not much to tell. Daughter says her mum stopped exhibiting to dedicate her life to the family, but probably mum just couldn’t make it.’ Anna-Marie stubbed out her cigarette, wrapped her creamy scarf closer around her shoulders and shivered. ‘Dropped out, taught local ladies to paint piers and seagulls. You do have some sort of art degree, right? Victoria said the art degree was important to her.’
‘Victoria?’
‘The daughter.’
‘I have a Masters in art history. On the French surrealists, Anna-Marie. Not the Australian suburbs.’
‘It’s all spiky irons and toilet seats to me. Option one: arty vanity project. Option two: persuade the football player son to talk, weave the art stuff in and then sell it as a footy memoir under your own name.’
‘Wouldn’t that annoy the daughter?’
‘I don’t know. Find out. Most important thing is that the daughter says the family’s tight and they’re all on board. No hang-ups, no delays. You just get in there and see if you can change their minds. Footy memoir. That could start something for you.’
I remember telling myself to be pleased.
I was not. A hunger was starting to grow inside me. I wanted more.
Anna-Marie worked from home, a lacy white terrace house in St Kilda. I thought of her as my ‘agent’, but she rarely took a cut of the projects she threw my way. I think she wanted to be my mentor. I certainly wanted her to be. But we were an odd couple. She was too busy to ever really look out for me; she threw me scraps. I was too proud to ask for what I wanted.
When I arrived for the meeting with the daughter and her lawyer a couple of days later, Anna-Marie was waiting for me on the nature strip. She began talking as soon as I opened the car door.
‘I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to warn you …’
But a slick silver BMW was pulling up behind me, scraping the kerb. The daughter had arrived. She got out of the car in one smooth movement.
Victoria Cranmer was powerful, like a machine, legs in bright white leggings, long business jacket grazing her thighs. Her thick blonde hair was short and winged. Princess Diana was all over the magazines that year, but Princess Diana was wispy, unsure; Victoria was solid, concrete. Chanel and dry-cleaning. Around my own age, she had the beginnings of the weathered Australian skin I have always associated with women who used to be beautiful in their teens.
Behind Victoria, the family’s lawyer, Leslie Clarke, was not so much dressed as draped with nondescript fabric.
Anna-Marie ushered us into her house, where we perched on the fluffy couches, facing each other over a porcelain bowl of potpourri. She opened the meeting by saying how much she liked the idea of me ghostwriting Edna’s monograph, but that she had reservations about how long the project might take.
Ignoring my agent, Victoria leaned over and took my hand.
‘They tell me you grew up in Geelong?’ Her touch was smooth and warm. Her fingernails were very short, perfectly manicured. Hands that were used to holding a horse’s reins, to swinging golf clubs on lush greens. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Matthew Flinders,’ I told her, skin tingling.
‘You won’t believe this. Mum went there. That was her high school. She was in the first class ever, right when it opened.’
Victoria let go of my hand, raised thin eyebrows.
‘But you didn’t go there,’ I said.
Victoria wrinkled her nose in faux embarrassment. ‘Geelong Grammar.’
The most expensive private school in the country. Girls from my school had thrown bottles at girls from her school. Girls from her school had told stories about how we were sluts, and junkies, and whores.
Anna-Marie was already glancing at her watch. ‘There’s a limited market,’ she interjected, trying to reclaim the conversation. ‘A limited audience for women’s lives. Academics, those sorts of people.’
Victoria shook her head. ‘I think you’re wrong. This is the ’90s. It’s time to write real women’s stories. Which is exactly why someone needs to write about Mum. She was in the Land Army, she travelled, she was tough. And then there’s Mum’s art. It’s so good. She could have been famous, but she didn’t care about all that attention. She stopped exhibiting when we were kids so that she could focus on us. She sacrificed her art for her family. She was that sort of woman. And it’s going to be easy to write about her. I’ve already started collecting all the material.’
‘Leslie called me this morning to explain about the embargo on your mother’s written correspondence,’ said Anna-Marie, looking at the lawyer. ‘That’s slightly unusual, so I just want to make sure that you have everything ready before we set a timeline and a cost for the project, Victoria.’
This was what Anna-Marie had wanted to tell me.
‘Exactly.’ Victoria was still bright and smiling. ‘That’s why we’re here. To talk this through.’
Anna-Marie was shaking her head. ‘When you first came to me,’ she said, ‘you told me you had everything together, all the materials and the correspondence, that you’d built out all the timelines, and that everyone in the family was excited to help out. That’s why I suggested three months. It’s starting to sound like a bigger project.’
‘The terms of the will were clear, Victoria,’ said Leslie. ‘You have the sketchbooks. You have all the paintings except for what was left to John. But all Edna’s letters, those are embargoed. You can’t go digging through her papers for this.’
‘This John, he’s another brother, right?’ asked Anna-Marie. ‘And he has some say in the estate too? You wanted a lot of images reproduced. Even with small projects, this can end up in the courts when people disagree. We wouldn’t wan
t that.’
Victoria slammed the flat of her hand on the table. ‘Oh, please,’ she snapped. ‘John’s not a real relative. He doesn’t care – he didn’t even send a card for the funeral. I am the executor of Mum’s estate. I know what Mum would have wanted.’
She turned to me.
‘Please,’ she repeated. Her voice shifted, lowering, as if we were friends, telling secrets under the covers. The woman who had slapped the table a second before was gone. ‘You can use everything I have. Mum’s sketchbooks are better than anything she ever wrote down. The sketchbooks are mine. The paintings are basically all mine. We won’t need any letters. Granny can’t wait to talk to you. My aunts. Percy will talk to you, my dad will talk to you. You’ll have everything you need. I’d write it myself but it would take so long, I’m just not a writer. I need your help. It will be easy, though; I’ll make it easy for you.’
All three of the women turned towards me.
‘I’ll look at the paintings,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise anything.’
Victoria clapped her hands together once. The sound was startling in the soft white room. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Great.’
When Victoria and Leslie were gone, Anna-Marie and I stood on the footpath while she lit a cigarette. The wind swept up the street, racing through the picket fences, making the end of her smoke flare red.
‘You better get Cranno on board and make this a footy memoir,’ she told me. ‘That embargo? The lawyer said this morning that it’s in place until the husband, Max, dies, and the kids too. It doesn’t feel right. If the family gets hostile, you drop it.’
‘Could be interesting though,’ I said.
‘You don’t want interesting. And you don’t want to get caught in the middle of a family fight about a no-one, writing a book that only they’ll read. This isn’t Plath. Put your time into something worthwhile, okay?’
‘Another self-help guide?’
‘I’m telling you: I’m losing my good feelings about this. Make it quick, or just say no.’
‘Anna-Marie, I’m not going to do this if it doesn’t make sense.’
I have seen the lawyer Leslie many times in the two decades that have passed since the biography was first published. At galleries, at writers’ festivals. I have tried to speak to her. But she avoids me.