Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Q. What did you do after leaving Cambridge?

  A. I lived in London, first in a bed-sitter in Ebury Street, later in a flat opposite, then in one round the corner in Eccleston Street, in a house which belonged to Roy de Maistre the painter. I suppose I was drawn to Ebury Street in the first place because of a youthful admiration for George Moore the novelist. There was also a house farther up the street in which Mozart is said to have composed his first symphony while on a visit to London as a boy. Later on I discovered de Maistre, of whom I’d always known because my godmother’s sister was married to one of his brothers. I owe an awful lot to Roy. He introduced me to painting and music, and through that I think I learned to write. I started writing in Ebury Street – several bad plays, which nobody wanted to produce. I even tried to get into the theatre. I went down to the Westminster where Rupert Doone had begun producing Auden’s Dog Beneath the Skin, and asked him whether he would give me a job. Nothing came of it. He wanted somebody who could ‘do things with his hands’, and I had to confess I was completely useless in that respect. But I was always hanging round theatres. Most of my friends in those days were actors. In Roy’s studio I met Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland on one occasion. I can’t remember what anybody said, and I was certainly far too shy to utter a word. Sometimes I used to see Francis Bacon. In those days he was a young man with a beautiful pansy-shaped face and rather too much lipstick. He lived in a house at the Chelsea end of Ebury Street, not far from the Mozart house, with an old nanny who used to shoplift when they were hard up. Francis designed a magnificent desk for me which I was mad enough to get rid of along with most of my worldly possessions when I burnt my bridges and came back to live in Australia after the War. At that stage Bacon was destroying almost everything he painted. He had an obsession for false teeth. He was always painting those. I can remember him going into a trance over lines scribbled on a hoarding – he was overcome with admiration for the perfection of these random arabesques.

  I also wandered over a lot of Europe during the years between Cambridge and the War. I wrote Happy Valley in the flat in Ebury Street, and revised it at Ciboure, across the river from St Jean de Luz, where Roy de Maistre advised me to go. I went to New York for the first time in the spring of 1939 to try my luck with Happy Valley. I travelled over a lot of the States, but was particularly infatuated with New York. I might have remained there and taken American nationality if war hadn’t broken out. Before that I began The Living and the Dead. I returned to London after the outbreak of war, but during that long Maginot Line period when nothing was happening, I decided to wangle back to the States to finish my book at least. I finished the book, and returned to London for the second time about August 1940. I can remember lying on the pavement at the corner of Ebury and Eccleston Streets the night the first bombs fell, and thinking this surely can’t be happening. Those first nights of the Blitz I spent in the house of my old Italian-Swiss landlady. We used to go down to the cellar at first, but after a bit one couldn’t be bothered, lying on the floor, listening to the other lodgers fart. I stayed in my room with a bottle of Calvados for courage, reading the Journals of Eyre.

  Then I went into the RAF. I was stationed for a bit outside London before being posted to the Middle East.

  Q. And after the War?

  A. On VJ Day I was in Greece. After Christmas I was posted back to England for demobilisation. I just can’t put dates to the next few moves. I know that while in London I lived at that same lodging-house, which no longer functioned as one, but my landlady took me in for the sake of old times. There I wrote the first part of The Aunt’s Story. But London at this period was like a graveyard filled with memories of the Blitz. I also felt terribly hungry as there was so little to eat. To fill my belly may have been the chief and ignoble reason why I decided to re-visit Australia to see whether I could settle there. On the way I stopped off in Alexandria to see my friend Manoly Lascaris, and while there I wrote the second part of The Aunt’s Story. The third part I wrote on the deck of the Strathmore on my way back to Australia, and revised the whole book while staying with my mother in Sydney. This time I only spent a few months in Australia, and decided I might as well settle down somewhere here.

  Q. When did you write The Ham Funeral?

  A. I wrote it in London after this first preliminary visit to Australia, when I met Dobell the painter and he told me the story of the actual funeral with which he had been involved. Again in London I was living in the house of my old landlady Mrs Imhof. The house in the play is more like one of those farther down in Pimlico than Mrs Imhof’s, and there is nothing of Mrs Imhof herself (God rest her soul) in Mrs Lusty. The play was revised only slightly before it was performed in Australia years later.

  Q. You began to write at a very early age?

  A. Oh, I think I was ten when I first wrote a play – in three acts called Love’s Awakening, about a man who went out to ‘buy’ a divorce, had supper with the Other Woman, but eventually decided to stay married. There was another play about this time, in blank verse – I think it was called The Bird of Prey – about a femme fatale in Florence who had a cellarful of lovers in chains. (You see, I started reading very early, the whole of Shakespeare for the plots and the blood, the kind of magazines maids used to love, and particularly the News of the World an English married couple working for some cousins used to have sent out to them.)

  Q. There were also some early novels?

  A. While I was a jackeroo I used to shut myself up at night with a kerosene lamp and write. The first novel was called The Immigrants, about English people who settle in the Monaro and have a hard time. There was another called Finding Heaven (a quotation from the Gilbert Murray translation of I forget which Euripides play) written partly at Mount Wilson, partly at Walgett, about the depression in Sydney. A third was called The Sullen Moon, which was beginning to get somewhere. It had the germ of The Aunt’s Story. After Happy Valley I wrote another novel called Nightside which never got published. It was about a French cabaret dancer, really an Australian, Lily from Mosman who becomes Lys in Paris, and who is murdered by a German kink. It wasn’t as bad as that makes it sound. It might have found a publisher if I had persisted. But I didn’t like it enough. I burnt it in the pit before we left Castle Hill.

  Q. Looking back over your novels, would you be conscious of certain preoccupations recurring, or of particular things you have tried to do?

  A. Life in Australia seems to be for many people pretty deadly dull. I have tried to convey a splendour, a transcendence, which is also there, above human realities. From The Tree of Man onward (that started under the title A Life Sentence on Earth) I wanted to suggest my own faith in these superhuman realities. But of course it is very difficult to try to convey a religious faith through symbols and situations which can be accepted by people today.

  Q. Are you then conscious of changes in yourself as a novelist as you’ve gone on?

  A. Of course. A man changes all the time. If I say I had no religious tendencies between adolescence and The Tree of Man, it’s because I was sufficiently vain and egotistical to feel one can ignore certain realities. (I think the turning-point came during a season of unending rain at Castle Hill when I fell flat on my back one day in the mud and started cursing a God I had convinced myself didn’t exist. My personal scheme of things till then at once seemed too foolish to continue holding.)

  Q. Would you make a dividing line between The Aunt’s Story and The Tree of Man?

  A. Perhaps the conclusion I came to was already developing in my unconscious.

  Q. Could not an idea like 1 Corinthians 1.27 be applicable to The Aunt’s Story: ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty’?

  A. It could be applicable, but it was not in my mind when I wrote.

  Q. What then is the difference between The Aunt’s Story and the later novels?

  A. The Aunt’s Story i
s a work which celebrates the human spirit, but I had not yet begun to accept (except perhaps unconsciously) that I believe in a God.

  Q. When in Riders in the Chariot Miss Hare is offered a Bible to read, she prefers Anthony Hordern’s catalogue. This suggests that you are not interested in institutionalised religion.

  A. I can’t associate my own faith with churches. Nor can Miss Hare. In any case, the Bible would have been a bit difficult for her. She is slightly subnormal. And Hordern’s catalogue was a ‘good read’. I used to find it fascinating myself.

  Q. Then a person living as she does without contact with scriptures or church could be living a religious life?

  A. Oh, yes. She worshipped while crawling on all fours through her jungle of a shrubbery. All four main characters in Riders in the Chariot lead religious lives, Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbold consciously; Alf Dubbo’s attempts at painting are worshipful acts. (I develop this of course through a more sophisticated character in The Vivisector.)

  Q. There’s a tendency in criticism nowadays to be suspicious of the heroic, the visionary, the intuitive: the critic seems to require that such themes be presented ironically, or else be somehow criticised while they’re being presented.

  A. I am myself suspicious of the heroic. I don’t think any of my novels is heroic. All are certainly ironic – the fact that one is alive at all is an irony. Voss was a monomaniac, rather than a hero, and like almost all human beings flawed and fallible.

  Q. But some would say that the visionaries in Riders in the Chariot are being presented ironically. Is that a misreading?

  A. As visionaries they are not treated ironically. But as human beings, in the details of their daily lives, it is impossible to avoid irony.

  Q. What of the presentation of Stan Parker’s experience in the storm in The Tree of Man?

  A. That is not ironical, except on a human level. (When I fell on my back in the rain and mud and started cursing God, there was plenty of irony around, though the event itself was a serious matter.)

  Q. In all your work you show a willingness to ‘chance your arm’ (as the saying is). How important in a novel are principles like plausibility and verisimilitude? For example in the ‘telepathic’ communication of Laura and Voss?

  A. ESP research in recent years has surely proved that telepathic communication does exist. I’m continually receiving evidence of it myself. I’m convinced that life is built on coincidence and strange happenings. But in all this, and in spite of not writing what could be called naturalistic novels, you have to keep in touch with fact, which I feel I do.

  Q. Are the analogies you have made with painting and music part of this?

  A. It is difficult to express what I have to express in a naturalistic medium in the age in which I live. I feel you can do far more with paint and music; I am hobbled by words.

  Q. But words surely can be more expressive. For a moralist …

  A. I am not. I don’t want to be a moralist. I don’t think I have preached sermons in any of my books. I say what I have to say through the juxtaposition of images and situations and the emotional exchanges of human beings. Not everybody seems able to grasp this, but a certain type of mind can – from all social levels, from the most sophisticated to the semi-literate. But of course it sticks in the guts of those who are rigidly rational – what some Australians proudly refer to as ‘a trained mind’.

  Q. In reading your novels I don’t really feel that you are being limited by the novel form. I am not conscious of these constraints.

  A. Oh yes, the constraints are there. I find words frustrating as I sit year in year out reeling out an endless deadly grey. I try to splurge a bit of colour – perhaps to get a sudden impact – as a painter squeezes a tube. But there isn’t the physical relief a painter experiences in the act of painting. I wish I had been a painter or composer. Or I might have been able to solve my problems as a poet … No, I had no acquaintance with Eliot’s Four Quartets until I heard Robert Speaight’s recording of them a few years ago. I realise anybody could be influenced by such magnificence.

  Q. Is the novel, or the medium of prose, perhaps too explicit?

  A. In one sense; in another, I enjoy that explicitness – the accumulation of down-to-earth detail. All my novels are an accumulation of detail. I’m a bit of a bower-bird.

  Q. There is a good deal of treatment in your work of experience that goes beyond the trajectory of what is familiar and traditional in the novel?

  A. I feel that my novels are quite old-fashioned and traditional – almost nineteenth century. I’ve never thought of myself as an innovator.

  Q. Where would you find the tradition?

  A. In the nineteenth-century Russians, certainly; in Stendhal, Flaubert (not the Romantic Flaubert of Salammbo) and Balzac. Sometimes in Dickens.

  Q. I don’t mean the down-to-earthness, but the treatment of areas of experience outside the normal range?

  A. That would be more particularly in the Russians. Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes must have influenced me in my youth. I expect I could think of others, but it’s difficult when asked pointblank.

  Q. It worries me that in valuing intuition, you seem to reject reason.

  A. I don’t reject it but I think intuition is more important, creatively, in the beginning. Perhaps not for everybody. But everything I write has to be dredged up from the unconscious – which is what makes it such an exhausting and perhaps finally, destructive, process. I suppose all my characters are fragments of my own somewhat fragmented character. My first draft of a novel is the work of intuition, and it is a chaos nobody but myself could resolve. Working it up after that – the oxywelding – is more a process of reason. The last version is your last chance – and you hope it won’t be suicide … No. I haven’t read Plotinus or the neo-Platonists on the intuitive powers of the mind.

  Q. Could I ask about symbolism in the novels? Do you begin with a planned system of symbols?

  A. This awful symbol business! I suppose I begin in some cases with a central symbol – the Chariot or the Mandala, for instance. But anything else crops up as I go along, more often than not, unconsciously. (Two examples: in The Eye of the Storm the novel I have just finished, Elizabeth Hunter the central character encounters some black swans while she is reprieved from death by the eye of an actual storm on an island off the Queensland coast; the swans recur again in her mind when she is an old, bed-ridden, partly senile woman, and gather her in the moment before death. It is only since writing the book that I have discovered the swan is a symbol of death. My other example of the unconscious use of symbols is connected with the maiden name of this same Elizabeth Hunter. I called her ‘Salkeed’, because I met someone of this name while I was writing the book, and it had something pleasing and apt about it. Elizabeth Salkeed grows up on a farm, on the edge of a river fringed with willows which play a certain part in her life. (Not long ago I was glancing through a dictionary of surnames and came across the name Salkeld: Old English for ‘sallow-/willowwood’. I am glad to make these two true confessions before some symbol-spotter pounces on my swans and willows.) In their pursuit of symbols many academic critics don’t seem to realise that writers and painters often make use of images and situations from real life because they have appealed to them as being beautiful or comic or bizarre. Hence the bear in Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel: its significance once came up during an intellectual discussion, when the son, answering for the father, explained that Buñuel had been at a party in New York at which a live bear was introduced, and for ever after wanted to use a bear in a party scene in one of his films.

  Q. There are some colours that recur in the novels as though with more than naturalistic significance. Purple, for example, when Stan and Amy are under the mulberry tree, or when Theodora and Pearl Brawne go into the pub in The Aunt’s Story.

  A. Colours, like symbols, are made too much of by those indefatigable unravellers. Can’t we use a colour because it is, or because we happen to like it? If purple crops up
under the mulberry tree, aren’t mulberries purple? And when Pearl and Theodora drink port in the pub, it’s because ladies like Pearl used to order port because it was their tipple (mine’s a port-’n’-splash, love). Though purple in some contexts does have transcendence, as does gold. I don’t know about zinc, which you say recurs in association with inhumanity. The frustrated painter in me is fascinated by zinc-coloured light, particularly off metallic waves. I probably also associate it with bitter mornings over milk pails and separators and wash-tubs.

  Q. Towards the end of The Tree of Man Mrs Fisher talks to Stan about bees: ‘such lovely, dark, living gold’.

  A. A swarm of bees is a lovely sight, a kind of live mesh. Perhaps this was intended to establish something slightly special and sensual between them, but it’s too long ago for me to remember exactly.

  Q. Are the names of characters sometimes symbolically expressive?

  A. Some – Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbold, obviously, and Miss Hare (a sacrificial creature in several mythologies) and Dubbo, the name an Aborigine from those parts might have been given. I’ve already explained how I hit on Elizabeth Hunter’s maiden name (Salkeld) and that it has a symbolic significance by pure accident. No, ‘Laura’ has nothing to do with Petrarch, I chose it as an appropriate name for a woman of the time. ‘Arthur’ in The Solid Mandala seemed to me a simple, blameless name (I hadn’t read The Faerie Queene). ‘Tiarks’ in The Living and the Dead is a clumsy name for a clumsy person. I knew a man called Holstius (The Aunt’s Story) and I suppose I liked the suggestion of Holz (wood) for a sturdy, though non-existent character.