Relatively Famous Read online

  RELATIVELY FAMOUS

  ROGER AVERILL

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Roger Averill 2018

  First Published 2018

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private

  study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

  Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover art: ‘White-throated Needletail’ 2006 and ‘Mangrove Robin’ 2006,

  book carving. Courtesy Kylie Stillman and Utopia Art Sydney.

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing- entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-01-9

  For Shelley & Grace & Lily

  And in memory of Frank Mallett

  On April 12, 1964, eight years after they met and two months after the end of his affair with Libby Jarrell, Gilbert Madigan closed the door on his marriage to Marjorie. Not with the slam that their recent rows might have presaged, but with the muffled click of the lock’s tongue sliding gently into the jamb; speaking the silence that had come to punctuate their arguments. Unable to face another round of tears and recriminations, he left a parting note on the kitchen table and snuck from the cottage while Marjorie and young Michael still slept upstairs. He did, however, return two days later, with the poet Peter Kessler and his lorry, to clear out the study, soon to be immortalised as the eponymous den of In Daniel’s Den.

  Over the next year, living first in a room in Kessler’s house, then with Jessica Guy in a flat in Soho, Madigan exorcised the demons of his first, ill-matched marriage by writing a searing, barely fictionalised account of his bleak early years in England, and, in the process, created for himself the international literary fame he had always craved. As The Falling Part had made his name in Australia, In Daniel’s Den was to do the same in Britain, metamorphosing him from an Antipodean goldfish swimming in foreign seas, to a creature much higher up the literary food chain; no leviathan, to be sure, not yet the whale he would one day become, but something agile and predatory, demanding the reader’s attention.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 72.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ever since I can remember, people have asked me if I am going to be a writer like my father. I was, I suspect, a sullen, awkward child and that they were merely trying to engage me, make me feel important. And on occasions I guess they did, though more typically the question embarrassed me, implying the presence of a father I’d never had. In truth, my father, Gilbert Madigan, the acclaimed author, the perennial favourite to receive Australia’s second Nobel Prize in Literature, the great writer of fictions, was, for most of my life, little more than a fiction himself.

  I was four when he walked out on Mum and me. My memories of him from before then are wisps, vapours. There’s a generic one of him in his den, sitting at his desk, smoke curling from the ashtray beside the typewriter, him shushing me out the door, the machine clattering back into action as I left. And another of him showing me off to his friends, having me sing songs and recite rhymes, before banishing me to bed. Lying upstairs in my room, I would strain to hear their conversations but could only ever catch the tumbling waves of their laughter. And before long, despite my resistance, I would slide towards sleep on the ebbing tide of their muffled voices.

  My clearest memory from before the breakup is of him trying to rescue an injured bird. We were walking through Maitlands Wood, close to our village in the Cotswolds, which, curiously, was called Edge. It was just Gilbert and me walking, which was, I think, unusual in itself. Of course our dog Boswell was with us, he being the cause of the bird’s injury. One minute Gil was pointing out a beautiful thrush in the undergrowth, its speckled breast billowing with song, the next he was retrieving its limp body from Boswell’s jaws.

  ‘Drop,’ he commanded, letting his cigarette fall to the moist forest floor, as if in demonstration. ‘Bad dog!’ The confused terrier, half proud, half chastened, deposited its prey at his master’s feet. The knee that would be replaced fifty years later was giving Gil pain even then, and he winced as he knelt to inspect the victim. Cradling it in one hand, he stroked its breast with the other. ‘Are you going to live, little bird?’

  Crouching beside him, holding back the sobs that came with the shock of seeing something so beautiful destroyed, I asked if it was dead. I knew it wasn’t. I could see the faint rise and fall of its chest, the flicker of the lid across its obsidian eye, but I wanted my father’s reassurance.

  ‘No … no. But it’s not looking good. Even if they’re not all that injured, they sometimes die of fright. We’ll take him home and dip his beak in brandy. That might revive him.’

  Still caressing the bird’s chest, he told me to feel the softness of its plumage. Tentatively stretching my finger towards its downy breast, my nervousness made me prod the bird rather than pat it. Jolted, the thrush opened its shuttered eye and squirmed about in my father’s hand. Thrashing its head from side to side, it pecked him on the finger. ‘You bugger!’ he said, loosening his grip, flinging his hand upwards.

  The bird began to fall, then its wings unfurled and fluttered into action and it flew off, shrieking as it went, deeper into the forest. ‘So much for St Francis,’ Gilbert said, sucking at his bleeding finger.

  Looking back, I am struck that the bird was forced to hurt my father in order to gain its freedom, and I wonder now if that is why I remember it. Or if it is even a memory at all.

  It is a paradox that the pasts of the people we most need to understand in order to better understand ourselves – our parents – must remain a mystery. Fragments of rumour and fact, borrowed memories, they are re-imagined and strung together by story to form personal origin myths no more reliable or compelling than the collective ones offered up by religion and science. The creed of a failed marriage, my myth was not so much handed down to me as stolen from unconscious slips and the few family stories not yet committed to the silence of wilful forgetting. These imagined memories begin, not in Edge, nor even in England, but in Melbourne, where my parents met when they were students.

  Gilbert was finishing his honours degree in English and Marjorie was in her first year at the Teachers’ College. Mum had always been a bright, bookish girl, but her parents had expected her to get a job once she turned sixteen, insisting she do the commercial stream at high school. Before marriage, Ella, Marj’s mum, had worked in a knitting mill, and Clem, her dad, was a foreman at Hoffman’s Brickworks. It was only the intervention of Marj’s history teacher, Mr Hansen, that convinced them their daughter should enter the professional stream. His assurances that her high grades guaranteed a scholarship, that she had all the makings of a fine teacher, were what did it. Foreign as it was to them, Clem and Ella recognised their only child’s talent and did not want to stifle it. Embarrassed by their pride when she was accepted into the Teachers’ College, they shared the news only with those who knew to ask.

  To make it easier on her parents, Marj supplemented her stipend by working nights as a barmaid at Stewart’s Hotel. They didn’t want her working in a pub, but the extra money was gratefully received, and Marj liked it because it meant she didn’t feel so guilty when she bought a new dress, another book.

  It was in Stewart’s that Mum first saw Gilbert, observing the way his friends deferred to him in arguments, laughed loudly at his jokes, nodded at his pronouncements. The strange thing was
she’d always hated his type, the popular ones, the men her mother said had tickets on themselves. Beyond taking his order, she had never talked to him, successfully rebuffing his performative charm when delivering his drinks. Then one morning, standing in the University Bookroom, killing time before a lecture, she was browsing Elizabeth Bishop’s new book of poems when someone behind her whispered, ‘Hilda Doolittle’s better, if it’s female poets you’re after.’ The tone was playful in its condescension. Marj was riled. Turning, she saw Gil, the popular one from the pub, standing directly behind her, leafing through the pages of a book by William Carlos Williams. The sweep of his light brown hair was burnished by the sunlight slanting through the window. Looking up from the page, he smiled and Marj saw his eyes for the first time – really saw them, their deep ocean green.

  ‘Only if it’s Imagism you’re after.’

  ‘Touché! An erudite barmaid. You don’t meet them every day.’

  ‘Almost as rare as an interesting bar fly!’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, retreating, fearing he had gone too far. ‘Bishop’s poems are finely crafted. But I do think the Imagists are more interesting. More contemporary.’

  ‘Really?’ Marj said, not offering him an out. ‘I’ll keep that in mind. Does the Bookroom pay you, or is it voluntary, the literary advice service?’

  Mum didn’t often talk about their relationship and only told me this story and how it led to their first date – dinner at Genevieve’s, a Fellini film at the Bughouse – because one day when I was sixteen she found me reading a copy of Williams’s Paterson, which I’d come to by tracing a line back from Patti Smith to Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg through to the good doctor. Telling this tale, she seemed to enjoy the way it showed up Gil’s charms, his arrogance. How she’d held her own. Had his measure.

  Another story pilfered from my parents’ past was smuggled to me by Ella, my grandmother. It comes from a year or so later, after Gil and Marj were married.

  Ella and Clem had never warmed to Gil. He was friendly enough; it wasn’t that. If anything he was too friendly, too informal: always asking Clem questions about his job at the brickworks, trying too hard to draw him out. They hated the way he flattened his vowels when he talked with them, dropped his aitches. It was like someone talking loudly to a foreigner. Did he think they wouldn’t notice? That this helped?

  Gil’s father was a lawyer. He owned the firm. And a mansion in Hawthorn. Clem and Ella hadn’t been there, but Marj had described it to them. The truth is, they would have coped better had Gil been luring their daughter from them to land her in a place like that.

  Instead, having completed his honours year, Gil took on some part-time tutoring in the university’s English department; hardly enough to support a wife. And being married meant Marj couldn’t work as a teacher, forcing her to forgo the scholarship and withdraw from the college. Hotels weren’t so fussy. With Gil’s encouragement, she increased her hours at Stewart’s, freeing him to tutor less and write more.

  The worst of it was when Clem and Ella offered to help transport furniture to the newlyweds’ rented house in Carlton.

  Gil greeted them at the threshold. ‘Not quite a palace,’ he beamed, ushering them in, ‘but you’re royally welcome.’

  They couldn’t believe a university teacher could live in such a dump, a dilapidated worker’s cottage smaller than their own. The house was dark and smelt of mildew. They found Marjorie in the front bedroom, scrubbing the walls with sugar soap. Seeing their stricken faces, she snapped off her rubber gloves and led them through to the kitchen, a lean-to with an ancient two-burner stove. She put on the kettle. The gas hissed, popped into a ragged flame. Searching for the teapot, she offered, ‘It’ll look better once we’ve cleaned it up.’

  Saying nothing, Ella retrieved the pot from under a jumble of newspapers and handed it to her daughter. Clem stared through a dirty louvre window at the tiny backyard. Gilbert stood beside him. Peering at the knee-high weeds covering the path to the outhouse, Gil quipped, ‘Wouldn’t want to be in a hurry, would you?’

  ‘Should’ve brought my machete,’ said Clem, not making it clear whether he meant to use it on the grass or on his son-in-law. The joke, if it was one, was swamped by a sadness born of deep disappointment and incomprehension. Clem had begun his working life as a stoker, sweating his guts out at the kilns, by day’s end smelling like he’d been slow-roasted in his own juices. Yet he and Ella had never lived like this, in squalor. Had he really worked all those years providing for his daughter only to see her end up in a dive like this? What was all Gil’s study for, anyway? Having been sold on the idea of Marjorie becoming a teacher, Clem now found it hard to let it go, to accept that while he had not stood in the way of his daughter’s talents, her husband would.

  Putting her nose to the milk bottle, Marj’s face puckered. ‘We haven’t organised a fridge yet,’ she explained.

  Gilbert patted his pockets for change. ‘I’ll pop over to the milk bar.’

  With Gil gone, the atmosphere in the kitchen became even closer. Refusing to be embarrassed, Marj said, ‘He’s just had a story accepted by Meanjin, the best literary magazine in the country. The editor’s raving about it. Says Gil’s a real talent. His lecturers all say the same.’

  Clem drank his tea black. Sipping at it, he poured some into the saucer and slurped it the way Ella hated. Ella cleared some books from a chair and sat down at the cluttered table.

  ‘I know it’s hard to understand.’ Marj was searching for a change in their faces, some glimmer, a nod. ‘But it’s what we want. What I want. You always said you don’t need much to be happy.’

  Lifting his face from the saucer, taking in the room, Clem said, ‘You must be over the moon.’

  Ella shushed him as Gil returned with the milk, and that was the last they talked of it.

  Last week when I visited Mum I took her a copy of Sinclair Hughes’s biography of Gil. Like me, she had refused to be interviewed for it and I knew she’d never buy a copy.

  It’s impossible for me to be objective about it. My own issues aside, having finished it, I was outraged on Mum’s behalf. ‘You’re dispensed with in twenty-two pages!’

  She didn’t share my indignation. ‘I know you don’t believe me, Michael, but the truth is I don’t care. I just don’t. I dealt with all that decades ago.’

  ‘Annie gets almost as many pages as you! How long was he with her? Eighteen months? You, apparently, were simply unsuited to the role of the famous author’s wife. That’s why your marriage failed. Nothing to do with Gil chasing every passing skirt!’

  ‘They were very different times,’ Mum said, staring at me, her blue eyes the colour of faded denim, paler than they used to be. ‘Anyway, Hughes is right: I was unsuited to that role. Utterly.’

  Ever since I can remember, Mum’s been looking for something to sustain her. Back in the seventies we would have said she was searching for meaning, the idea of which nowadays seems somehow quaint. I used to think of it as her trying on different outfits – a Jungian caftan, a Buddhist robe, a tai chi jumpsuit – now I see each garment as another layer, something added to rather than discarded, all of them offering some kind of comfort and protection. Camouflage, perhaps. She’s still active in the women’s choir and meditates every morning, but lately I’ve felt she has been disrobing rather than trying things on, revealing more of herself.

  As usual, we were talking in the kitchen, she at the sink, washing dirt off the baby carrots she had pulled from her vegie patch. She turned eighty last October and, perhaps more than anything else, now lives for her garden. Recently when I suggested she was working herself into the ground, constantly pruning and weeding, she said, ‘That’s the plan. One day I’ll cark it out there and you can come along and dig me in.’ Pleased with herself, eyes twinkling, she added, ‘I’m trying to become one with the earth. I thought you knew that.’

  As she shook the carrots dry and proceeded to cut them into thirds, I tried again to explain m
y anger over the biography by reading her a passage depicting Gil’s departure from our cottage in the Cotswolds. Adding the carrots to the salad, mixing them in with the lettuce, basil and tomatoes, she said, ‘Well, that’s not quite how it happened. I’d asked him to leave, issued an ultimatum. But, really, what does it matter now, after all this time? He left us. The rest is detail.’ Wiping her hands on a tea towel, gesturing to the book, she added, ‘It’s Gil’s life, not mine.’ She reached for my hand and squeezed my fingers until they hurt. ‘I got the best of him, Mick. The critics, the biographers, they’ve all got it wrong. That’s why I don’t read them. They’re looking in the wrong place. They think the best of Gilbert Madigan is in his books. Truth is, the best of him’s in you.’

  Despite its Lilliputian proportions, the Australian literary circle of 1957 had a far more complex geometry than that tired metaphor of unity suggests, one typified by sharp ideological lines and discrete hemispheres, occupied by realists in one half and mythopoetic types in the other; all of it crosshatched by resentments, petty slights and incestuous liaisons.

  It was into this murky pool that Penguin tentatively dropped The Falling Part, not knowing what, if any, critical or commercial ripples it might make. By some good fortune – some literary miracle that has become only slightly more explicable with the passing of time – Gilbert Madigan’s first novel transcended this small,misshapen world, and, through the splendour of its prose, created a trigonometry that reconciled the Left’s obsession with the Everyman and the formal and ontological concerns of the Modernists.

  Being a foreman in a brickworks, the novel’s main protagonist, Harry Balfour, possessed the working-class credentials demanded by the Leftists. In a review for The Sydney Bulletin, Nettie Palmer praised Madigan’s ‘pitch-perfect rendering of Australian working-class culture as personified in the unforgettable portrait of Harry Balfour, with his mixture of stoic reserve and dry, thin-lipped humour, all lightly masking a deep concern for the plight of his fellow man’. This concern becomes acutely focused on the fate of one man in particular,Archie Taylor,whose fall from a smokestack during a maintenance procedure provides the book’s central drama and its title’s most literal reference. Harry’s belief that he could and should have prevented Archie’s death results in an anguish and existential disassembling that, combined with the ambition of the writing, also made The Falling Part a darling of the Modernists.