Mug Shots (15 page)

Lecturer takes off his clothes

A writer-in-residence is someone funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council to stay at a university college or some other institution for a couple of months to help students with their writing and perhaps do some of their own. A writer-in-residence is by definition a poor writer. No one would run workshops by day and retire to a cramped room at night unless in desperate need of the modest funding provided.

The most spartan accommodation I ever retired to was at Mannix College, when I was in residence at Monash University. It consisted of a small bedroom and study, both totally bare. I'm out of town, have no car, and the campus at night is dead. Nine weeks of this, I thought, and I'll go nuts.

The college rector, an urbane Dominican, foolishly entrusted me with a key to the senior common room. Depressed by the austerity of my cells, I'd wait for the staff to retire, tiptoe down the corridor, unlock the door, and decant a schooner of red from a cask.

But I was being watched. A portrait of Daniel Mannix witnessed my nightly siphonings, the piercing blue eyes taking it in with amusement. ‘Now,' the late but legendary Archbishop of Melbourne seemed to be saying, ‘it's my turn. It was you, crouching cravenly over your stolen alcohol, who wrote that play about me for the Pram Factory in 1971, which had me in a bath, in a bed, and in tights in a wrestling ring? Look at you now, your hand shaking over the tap. Straighten your back like a man.'

After a monastic week, Mary Lord, a Monash tutor in English, takes pity on me and allows me into what she calls the literary bedroom of her house, which had earlier accommodated Christina Stead and Dorothy Hewett. I'm saved.

Soon the manuscripts come in. One student, almost blind, feels his way into my office and leaves a playscript. Another offers a short story which has worrying sentences: ‘Simon flung an arm towards a corner of the room.' A third, a Chinese student, leaves a long and laborious allegory in which Australia is subtly called Moronia. The poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the author claims, has likened it to Swift. What to say to these people? How does one encourage and discourage at the same time?
I had
to tell the Chinese satirist that there was one problem with his manuscript. It wasn't funny. But other readers say it hilarious, he insisted. He then read out choice passages, having small convulsions while he did so.

‘Still not funny?'

‘Still not funny.'

‘When I famous,' he said at the door, ‘I not forget you.'

Mary Lord is preoccupied organising the first conference of the newly formed Association for the Study of Australian Literature, for which academics and writers are converging from all over the country. She is nervous, and has to be fortified by gin & tonics, which she's taught me how to mix.

As well as innumerable lectures, there's a program of ­readings at the Alexander Theatre. May they be ambushed?
I ask
Mary. She says they may. I'd written a monologue called
Scanlan
, given by a lecturer who gradually loses his marbles during his address. It was first performed by Tim Robertson at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, where it was advertised as a straight lecture on Henry Kendall, given by a visiting lecturer. For the first few minutes all seemed normal and the students took notes. Then Scanlan becomes erratic, sipping from a hip flask, abusing his audience and taking off his shirt as he heads for a nervous collapse. The most remarkable thing was not so much Scanlan's behaviour as that some of the students scribbled down his ravings almost to the end, including the absurdity ‘Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, a firm of solicitors, crossed the Blue Mountains'.

And now, in the person of Max Gillies, Scanlan was to be let loose again. Many in the audience—Max had performed the play elsewhere—knew it was an imposture, but not its victim, A.D. Hope. During a somnolent reading by the eminent poet, a manic figure scurries onto the stage, thumps his briefcase onto the table and ferrets for his notes. Gillies apologises briskly, hustles the bewildered figure from the platform and launches into his lunatic lecture (it was one he was to give all round the country, playing to packed houses wherever he went). There's enthusiastic applause—from everyone except Frank Moorhouse, who gets far less, and complains that I cheated by bringing in a professional to do what I should have done myself. He sulks for the next two days.

It'll be right on the night

Despite the fact that by becoming a critic I was a theatrical quisling, the Pram Factory politburo agreed to do
The Ship's Whistle
, my play about the inflated English poetaster Richard Orion Horne, who came out to the goldfields to seek his fortune—and as colonial correspondent for Charles Dickens's
Household Words
.

Horne, as keen on physical fitness as he was on pentameters, was made for Max Gillies who, in velvet cloak and top hat, filled the part with the swagger and braggadocio he does so well. The props included an incredibly heavy set of parallel bars, which required six of us to bump up the theatre stairs, and a bust of Shakespeare, which I had to bring down from Sydney on the plane, and which I nursed on my lap.

Flight Attendant: ‘Is that a fossil or what?'

‘It's Shakespeare.'

‘I'll take him up to First Class.'

‘With me too?'

‘Unfortunately not.'

There were many scenes (too many, I later learned) and a bulky traverse (a wheeled platform that had to be trundled up and down the space according to requirements). The cast have trouble moving it. Barry Dickins, one of the performers, complains that it has run over his teeth, and the rehearsals are rough—normal for the Pram Factory. (‘It'll be right on
the night
.')

I had the usual first-night nerves, and at dinner in Carlton beforehand red wine wasn't enough to quell them. I went into the lavatory, took a Valium and sat on the bowl and waited. Was there an earthquake? The black and white tiles on the toilet floor seemed to be moving.

But it all goes well—the traverse doesn't roll off into the audience, Dickins remembers his lines, and Gillies, riding his ship to the colonies and roaring Horne's terrible poetry, is unforgettable. The old world meets the rough-and-ready new one on the Melbourne docks in the person of Alf the carrier, which I only mention because he's played by the great character actor Reg Evans, who rode his motorbike from Kinglake every night and who later died in the bushfires there.

The hard-to-please first-night audience liked it, and so did the
Age
's Len Radic—not enthusiastic (when was he ever?) but positive: ‘uneven but enjoyable' (how many plays are even?) and ‘should keep the Pram Factory audiences happy for weeks
to come
.'

Alas no.
The Ship's Whistle
was too long and unwieldy (a cast of ten, with thirty roles between them). It closed a week early, maybe because a petrol strike crippled attendances (theatre maxim number one: always put the blame on someone else). But it lived again in Adelaide, where the South Australian Theatre Company did a polished and popular production.

Most boring man in Sydney

My agent, the ever-helpful Tim Curnow, tells us he's moving from his Paddington terrace—would we be interested in renting it instead of him? Probably not, he thought, ‘—it's sixty dollars a week, and you wouldn't be able to squeeze in your kids.'

Our kids were down to four and they were squeezed in quite well. And so began nineteen years of inner-suburban life, in what my father, who'd condemned our Richmond house, called ‘a tenement'. There's a back lane, where cricket can be played, and where a grumpy old gutter-pisser named Bully lives in a van. There's damp that rises as inexorably as the rent. Each year, I am soon to discover, the elderly landlord knocks on the door, wishes us a happy new year and raises the rent. I then must shake his hand—not easy, since he has Parkinson's Disease, and his hand moves up and down. I must dart mine out to catch his, and then his trembles do the rest.

Twenty-four Renny Street had quite a literary history. Tim Curnow was the manager of the Curtis Brown literary agency, and its office was here. At various times it was visited by Patrick White, Douglas Stewart, Ruth Park and Xavier Herbert. Curnow recalled his wedding party there in 1974, when White gave them a frying pan. Also present were Frank Hardy and Donald Horne. ‘They had an altercation outside the dunny, each threatening to stuff the other down the bowl.' And when Xavier Herbert won the Miles Franklin Award for
Poor Fellow My Country
, ‘he arrived in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce hired by his publisher, Collins. I heard a car horn and there was Xavier sitting up in the back seat like royalty'.

For a while we had calls from writers who thought Curtis Brown was still there. One morning Bob Brissenden was at the door, suited and briefcased. ‘I've finished it,' he says. I don't know who was more surprised. I was on a grant and he was chairman of the Literature Board. I explained that Curtis Brown had moved, but despite my pyjamas I was hard at work. ‘And I rise at five,' I called after him as he headed for their new address with his crime-fiction manuscript.

For a time, our social life consisted largely of seeing friends who came up from Melbourne, many of whom brought their political intensities with them. Also at this time, I was changing from being an automatic Labor voter to one who could at least entertain the possibility of voting Liberal. I had realised that it wasn't much use having ideas about the redistribution of wealth unless you also have them about generating the wealth in the first place—the engine of capitalism had to be made to work better, investment had to be made more attractive, capital had to be seen as a friend and not an enemy.

At a Darlinghurst restaurant I said these things to an incredulous circle of Melbourne diners: a leading comic actor, a Marxist playwright, and two of our closest friends, a theatrical producer and his then-wife. They attacked me, collectively and individually. It was like a tag wrestle, though I had no one to tag. I remember one of them getting up to go to the lavatory, and tagging his neighbour: ‘Give him a go on trade unions.' Enterprise bargaining was a novelty even to the Liberal Party in those days, but I said it sounded a good idea—centralised wage-fixing discouraged investment in new business, and this made unemployment worse. They couldn't believe it. They had an authentic enemy of the working classes trapped at last. When the evening and the shouting was over, the producer's wife called from the door: ‘No wonder you moved to Sydney.'

‘To get away from Melbourne,' I called back. (Memoirists always have the last word.)

As we got to know people, there were dinner parties—blander Sydney ones. If there were battles, they were personal rather than ideological. At one, the writer Robert Drewe stormed out, saying he'd never speak to me again (he did, although guardedly). At another, one guest thanked me for sitting him next to what he called the most boring man in Sydney (who'd just left). I agreed with him and apologised. Neither of us ­realised that the most boring man in Sydney had returned to collect a coat and heard what we were saying.

At another of our dinner parties, strange things seemed to be happening. The guests, after enjoying the first of Carmel's delectable dishes, began to look embarrassed. Then, when a firm hand was put on my knee under the table, I looked embarrassed too. Was A touching up B, and C doing the same to D? Then it was the forthright E's turn. Furious, she lifted the tablecloth, to reveal Kieran, touching knees and ankles as part of his own private game.

The most abundant hospitality was provided by the Codys. John was a publisher, his wife Margaret an educationalist, and at their North Shore house we sometimes met Important People. We saw Clive James in the flesh (which he had then in abundance) as he sunned himself by the pool. Then, when social intercourse became unavoidable, we sat over a salad and white wine. His long comic poem about Prince Charles was doing famously, he confided, and the great German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger was going to run it in his literary magazine. Once the Germans think you're funny, I attempted, shouldn't one be worried? The sally bounced harmlessly off him. Soon he and his wife rose to go. Was it my fault? I said. Had I ruined the lunch? No, no, said the ever-genial Codys; but I certainly hadn't helped.

On another occasion, at the same house, the Canadian ­novelist Margaret Atwood put me in my place. I was sitting next to her on a couch. Conversation hummed all around, but between us there was silence. The Principle of Celebrity was operating: she was famous, so she was resting. It was up to me.

‘I was one of the judges of the Canada/Australia Literary Award,' I offered. She sat on, pale, freckled and unmoved. I blundered on. ‘We've chosen the novelist Leon Rooke.'

She turned her head in my direction without actually looking at me. ‘A good choice, considering he was born in South Carolina.'

‘But surely he's regarded as Canadian by now.'

‘He is regarded by very few people at all. If being known as Canadian was measured in points out of ten, Leon Rooke would rate about four.' A pause, a sip of her drink, some salted peanuts. ‘And I'd rate ten.'

Now that we've integrated into Sydney literary life, I'm invited, with two of our larger sons, Miles and Eugene, to play in the annual Actors Versus Writers cricket match. It's organised by Alex Buzo, who takes his captaincy of our team extremely seriously. He's in pressed whites, but his team declines to a motley of browns and greys.

Alex loses the toss and places his troops carefully. I'm in slips, but after refusing to put out my cigarette, exiled to the outfield. Bob Ellis has a toothbrush in his shirt pocket which falls to the ground every time he stoops to gather a ball (a slow process, with the actor–batsmen happily running). Bob has an unusual running action. Only his legs move. The top half of his body is reluctant to do so—it's as if it belongs to someone else.

When it's our turn to bat Alex gives us a solid foundation, but the rest, listless from sun and alcohol, fall away. We lose. He's not pleased. ‘You people,' he says, looking at Bob and me, ‘treat it as a joke. You wouldn't do that in the theatre.' We protest that it's a bad analogy, but he won't be placated. He's in a bad mood. One of his plays has had a poor reception in Adelaide—a city he hates—and he blames it on ‘the frigid Adelaide Establishment and the Carlton Marxists'.