Mug Shots (19 page)

The inward sleep

There is, or was, a god and his name was salty, pungent Max Suich, at the time chief editorial executive of Fairfax news­papers. I'd written to him, putting out feelers for work, and now he rings, and asks what I'm looking for. I tell him. He says he'll get back to me. Eighteen days go by (I'm counting), and in a procedure not unlike K's attempts to get through to the authorities in Franz Kafka's
The Castle
, I start ringing, but get no further than his secretary.

Then there's a week's relief from radio and from waiting—a tour of the Richmond/Windsor area with Olga Masters, ­sponsored by the National Book Council. Our job is to read our work before selected groups of victims, and then become victims ourselves. We kick off before a deathly silent class of schoolgirls, then an equally silent group of English teachers. It was as if we were reading out obituaries.

Then came workshops. We ran the first together. Olga's policy—she's a modest, hesitant, good-hearted woman—was to encourage everything. She has an unusual way of starting. It seems to take a few seconds before her mind slips into gear. We listen to a strange remote lady reading a strange remote poem. I've been through this before, and have developed the technique of the inward sleep. On the outside, I seem to attend. On the inside, I sleep quietly. The poem is incomprehensible. I am silent afterwards, Olga (‘Your—yes—poem—I—very good—') warmly encouraging.

A delicately boned English lady reads a story that includes the sentence: ‘Jack jerked himself back to the present.' I dared not look up. The strange, remote woman, having been encouraged by Olga, turns to prose, a story about a man who feels ‘a warmth and hardening in his groin' every time he starts a fire. After starting one in a dress shop, he has trouble escaping through a window ‘because of the condition of arousal he was in'. Eyes down again.

Olga presses on, praising everything. When I say goodbye to her, the workshops thankfully over, she says she has headaches and trouble focusing. Her headaches, and her sometimes awkward progress through her sentences, mark the beginning, I later learn, of a brain tumour that will kill her.

When I get home, Carmel tells me Max Suich has rung—could I ring him Monday? When I do, he says Robert Haupt, the editor of the soon-to-be-launched
National Times on Sunday
, the
National Times
re-invented, wants to have lunch. ‘Theatre reviewing,' says Max, ‘your old trade.'

This is good news—I'll cease being a burden on Drama and Features—and bad: it's a job I need but don't want. Could I go over to the other side again? I'd had an eight-year break from scribbling in the dark. My spirits rose—if this is possible—and sagged at the same time. I was becoming quite good at getting jobs I'd rather not have.

‘Fuck it,' said Robert

There was no one else at the restaurant where Robert Haupt and his deputy editor Valerie Lawson said they'd meet me. A fire was burning. I chose the table carefully—a three-seater. If I chose the right chair, one of them would have to sit beside me—depriving them of the psychological advantage of my having to face both of them. They came in, and pleasantries were exchanged. Robert inspected the wine list, and ordered an expensive white. He tasted, paused, and found it good. We all drank, and it was indeed good.

More pleasantries. The food arrived, and was presented with ceremony. Robert ordered another bottle. I struggled with Tasmanian scallops in a pastry that Leo Schofield would have found too hard. Robert was editing a schnapper, and Valerie excavating half a lobster.

I was counting his drinks. I had a strategy. Get him half-under before money is mentioned. We had each now put away five glasses. Robert's crinkly black hair had freed itself from the top of his head and was hanging over his right temple, like a wig that was about to come off. Valerie remained inscrutable behind tinted glasses. She was beginning to laugh for no reason. I was becoming flushed. The second bottle disappeared.

Robert ordered champagne, at an unthinkable price. Would the gentlemen like cigars? The gentlemen would. A box of Havanas was presented, and two neatly decapitated. Wait. Wait for the champagne. Wait for him to have a glass. We paused, we puffed.

‘Okay,' said Robert, who'd become slightly dishevelled, ‘what are we looking at?'

‘That depends on what you'd like me to do.' There was a feeling that Robert had more or less forgotten what he wanted me to do. He was on to his second champagne. I stayed with my first.

‘Twelve hundred words a week,' said Valerie, who was holding her liquor better than either of us. ‘How much would you want?' Awkward silence. Crackle of fire in the corner. Robert was becoming distracted. Look at him, not at her.
I leaned
forward slightly to catch his eye, which was fixed on a blond at a nearby table. We puffed again. The cigar was ­ambrosial. Don't do the drawback. Don't have a dizzy spell.
I needed
to go to the toilet. Robert needed another drink.

‘Excuse me while I phone my accountant.' It wasn't funny, but they both laughed. While I was relieving my bursting bladder, Robert, I hoped, would be having another champagne. I'd planned to ask for $300 a week, but decided to think big. When I returned, Robert's wig-like coiffure had slipped further down the side of his head. I was a trifle unsteady. Robert's nose, always impressive, was now glowing.

‘I was thinking of $400 a week.' Silence. Absurdly high? Laughably low?

‘We were thinking $350,' said Valerie, who, now that moolah was mentioned, had regained her native cool. Robert was looking away. He seemed not to care. Everything stopped. Who'd weaken first?

‘Fuck it,' said Robert, ‘$400 it is.'

I poured him the last of the champagne, while he made a feeble protesting motion. I liked Robert. A man after my own liver. I puffed, without doing the drawback. He puffed, and deeply inhaled. His eyes were glazed. He was having visions.

‘We're going to build you up as the only national critic. If there's an important play opening in Melbourne or Brisbane or Adelaide, you'll go there.' Pause. I should've asked for more. Too late now. ‘We've just given TAA a big newsprint freight contract. I think they'll come to the party.' When I get up, will I fall over? Robert did, years later, in a New York restaurant, while doing a deal with his publisher over a book on the Soviet Union; with a glass in his hand, his heart would stop, and he'd fall backwards in his seat, dead.

Rat remains on sinking ship

First up, in Melbourne, I got two turkeys, but some high comedy in the street.
Spook House
, at St Martin's South Yarra, was so bad the actors looked embarrassed taking their final bows. Near me, Len Radic and Helen Thomson were scribbling away for the
Age
and the
Australian
. ‘How long have you been a critic?' Helen, surprised, asked afterwards. ‘About two hours,' I said. I'd joined the freemasonry of critical coroners, who hasten away while the corpse is going cold to write their reports. Was it killed, or did it die of natural causes? It was a gloomy business.

Kill Hamlet
, at the Anthill Theatre, a cold hall in South Melbourne, was even worse. The program gave due warning of what was ahead: ‘The spectator should sweat in a theatre without armrests.' Germany was declaring cultural war on me yet again. An actor prowls around the small, freezing and ­terrified ­audience, commenting and confronting. ‘And you, sir, yes you, you will come out here and be a tree?' I sat there and sweated—will he see me, furtively taking notes? True to my inflexible principle—never sit at the front in alternative theatre—I thought I was safe, though he was getting closer and louder.

‘Conventional theatre,' he barked, ‘involves a play-safe contract between actor and audience. Zis contract tonight we break.' Would he spot me? Would it be—‘and you, sir, come out and pretend to be a critic, ja?' I escaped. It wasn't a bad play—simply not one at all.

Late the following afternoon, since I was back in my home city, I decided to revisit Stewart's Hotel, where, since the days of the Pram Factory, the tribe always gathered. Like the Painters and Dockers, the group—writers, actors, publishers, academics—looks after its own and punishes its own. I had left this network, implying that its closeness, its gossip, its affairs were not good enough—and worse, I'd left it for Sydney. Abandoned Melbourne content for Sydney style.

And here, as I got out of the taxi and crossed Elgin Street, was the proof. I was wearing my Gold Coast white pants and hitherto successful pink shirt. It was unseasonably sunny and the drinkers were out on the footpath—and the drinker-in-chief, Dinny O'Hearn, Carlton identity and sub-dean of the Melbourne University Arts Faculty, began jeering at me. A man I'd always got on well with, a praiser of me in the
Age
book pages, now drunk and unshaven, took special exception to my prized shirt—Sydney poof! Paddington parader!

It was a ritual humiliation, during which the others remained silent, and I could only re-establish myself by submitting with good grace. When I was through the gauntlet, a millionaire businessman and writer, in jeans as dirty as Dinny's, brought me out, as a sign of tribal acceptance, the biggest glass of beer I'd ever seen—so big the publican came out after it to make sure it wasn't stolen.

Some weeks later, Billy Marshall, one of my screenwriting students from the Film School, told me that the Aboriginal people of Papunya (he'd spent years teaching there) had institutionalised this kind of mockery into the Teasing Group. The outsider is teased by the group, and this helps bind it together. Their favourite insult, their equivalent to Sydney poof, is directed at ears—because they relate intelligence to hearing.
Pina wima
!
Pina wima
!—Little ears! Little ears! And some say, according to Billy, they tease more when in danger of losing their Dreaming. The Stewart's Hotel tribe were losing some of theirs—the Pram Factory, their sacred site, was now derelict a hundred metres down the road.

My first visit to Brisbane was equally unpromising. The Queensland Theatre Company's adaptation of
Animal Farm
, involving twenty-three actors in animal costumes and a small orchestra, was bad, and their public relations man knew it. He greeted me effusively, took me straight to the bar and kept asking if I'd like another whisky. I kept saying yes. But even five in rapid succession failed to dull my critical sensibilities. The sight of anthropomorphic figures capering to music and doing
Playschool
violence to the original's spare prose was so painful it prevented sleep. The low hum that could be heard between numbers could have been Orwell spinning at turbine speed in his grave.

Because I phoned my copy in, there were typos every week. ‘And the baby was suffocated' became ‘and the baby was sophisticated'. It could have been worse. When Clive Barnes reviewed
A Midsummer Night's Dream
for the
New York Times
, he wrote that he'd found David Wallace's Bottom particularly splendid, but the crucial word came out in lower case.

By November 1986, after only three months, the paper's circulation is declining, and there have been crisis meetings at Fairfax (would I get the sack? Could they afford me—the interstate flights, the hotels?). Worse, Kristin Williamson tells me Robert Haupt might go. Candy Baker, who's taken over as arts editor (is that the third in as many months?) says the
National Times on Sunday
office is like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Later still, as we take the long pathway to the Wharf Theatre to see
Tom and Viv
, Robert Drewe tells us Haupt has just resigned, to be replaced by Valerie Lawson. As we take the same boardwalk after the show, Robert Haupt's in front of us. We have to go slowly so as not to catch up. What could I possibly have said?

There are some theatre experiences that move into the backstage of memory and refuse to leave, and Barry Dickins's
Royboys
, which I was permitted to fly to Melbourne to review, is one of them. It was an elegy to the recently deceased Fitzroy Football Club, and it was staged in the plush depths of the Arts Centre. Amongst the usual crowd there were some very large men—famous footballers, at ease in their native jungle habitat but awkward and uncertain here—such as Jack Dyer, now a little stooped, and the man whose name Dyer, as a radio commentator, was unable to pronounce—Robert Dieperdomenico. (Dyer used to do almost as much damage to the English language as he did to his opponents. A well-known coach, he once noted, had just come back from ‘the French Riverina', and a particularly tall ruckman was once described as extending his arms ‘like a pair of giant testicles'.)

After I found my seat up the back the whole row started to tremble. A giant was heading for the one next to me. It was Ray Gabelich, huge in his Collingwood playing days and even bigger now. He sits, and my seat sinks into his, and I spend much of the evening leaning against him. But what was going on? Ray can't work it out. Why is this white-haired guy taking notes all the time, like some kind of football coach? And why is he pressing up against me?

Fitzroy, the Royboys, eternal losers, get some goals on the scoreboard at last. Beryl and Roy Noble have stuck with them to the end. Roy is sixty and alcoholic, the old Australia personified, the Australia that's going up the street in a removalist's van. He's battling the pink-helicopter entrepreneur who wants to shift Fitzroy to Tokyo. He fails, collapses and dies, his face falling into a plate of rissoles. (‘Don't die yet, love, you haven't done the lawns.')

Roy might lose, but the play's a winner—even Roy's old blue heeler behaves itself. She barks at their quarrels, chases any actor that runs, sniffs the set, and falls through the floor. It's a great night, and Dickins celebrates by kicking a football across the foyer, narrowly missing the Jeffrey Smart murals.

A few weeks earlier, I went over to the other side myself. I'd been commissioned by Angus & Robertson to devise what they called a presentation to celebrate their centenary. It would be at the Opera House, and must be centred around their founder, George Robertson. But—Scottish and thrifty to the end, like Robertson himself—the budget was modest, and costs ‘mustn't get out of hand'.

George Robertson, I soon discovered, was the most underrated figure in Australian literature. A Scot, big, bearded and blunt, he was as unsparing of the talentless (‘Dear Sir, Your stories are quite hopeless and we feel sure that you will never do anything worthwhile. Give it up and take to gardening, or something else that's useful, in your spare time') as he was nurturing of the gifted. He started his publishing career with a whip crack: Banjo Paterson became the most popular English-language poet of his time (apart from Kipling) and he went on to build an unmatched Australian list—C.J. Dennis, May Gibbs, Norman Lindsay, Christopher Brennan and Henry Lawson, who both delighted him and drove him mad. He had a hiding place at the back of his bookshop to which he retreated whenever Lawson came in, begging for booze money. From 1900 until his death in 1933 he dominated Australian publishing.

It wasn't easy to suggest all this with half-a-dozen actors reading from their scripts, but under Nick Enright's direction they moved backwards and forwards in rhythmic patterns to the music of Elgar. But it was intimate theatre, in constant danger of disappearing into the whale-gape of the Opera House.

It was around this time that I saw Valerie Lawson, now the paper's editor, at the Paddington newsagency, rearranging the disturbingly high stack of
Times on Sunday
in the hope more people would notice it. If it's not selling in Paddington, then where? A few days later, a call from the most recent arts editor. ‘This is strictly between you and I. I've just resigned.' (Between you and
I
? That's a sackable offence in itself.)

The paper kept sinking, the deck sloping slightly, but I was allowed to stay on board. I can remember little of the plays reviewed for the rest of 1987. But I still have some of the cuttings, now turning brown. ‘Lights up on Jennifer Clare as Lillian Hellman' began one. No recollection of that whatever. ‘The situations are slow-paced and unsubtle, the language flavourless basic English.' So much so that the play,
The Impostor
by a Chinese playwright called Sha Yexin, has disappeared entirely.

There's an irony here. When scholars write the theatrical history of the time, the only evidence they'll have to go on will be the reviews. The productions will have submerged, all their lights gradually extinguished, leaving on the surface only a thin slick of type. The reviewers' accounts of the plays become the authorised versions. All that vividness and fire collapsing into the ash blackness of print.

There were vividness and fire in the epic production of Manning Clark's
History of Australia
, a perhaps foolhardy attempt to transform Clark's vast six-volume work into dialogue, dance and song, staged in the faded French–Empire finery of Melbourne's Princess Theatre. The proscenium arch disappeared into a wraparound set that brought gum trees and action into the audience. Eighty-eight characters came and went, taking the audience on a boisterous ride through two centuries of history. Something almost as spectacular followed—a tremendous party in the Melbourne Town Hall, at which Bob Hawke, that legendary theatre-lover and patron of the arts, gave a speech.

Sometimes the play took off, and sometimes it was as chaotic as the period it was depicting. Knowing the time, effort and money the producers, writers, composers and performers had put into it, my review focused on the good—the vigour, the energy—but the Melbourne
Sun
was savage, and the
Age
's Len Radic, the Easter Island obelisk, was stony. It closed after thirty-seven performances. Later, the journalist Ben Hills pecked away at it like a crow at roadkill, carefully avoiding the central point: Manning Clark's
History of Australia
was a heroic enterprise that deserved admiration, not cheap journalistic contempt.

A month later, it was another heroic enterprise's turn. I wrote a review of a now-forgotten Melbourne Theatre Company play on the forty-second floor of the Regent Hotel, working until 3 am, and watching the lights of the city shrinking far below me. A few hours later, I rang the
Times on Sunday
to file. ‘Don't bother,' said my contact, Sharon Hill, who was in tears. ‘The paper's folded.' Was it my room service bills that did it?

By May 1988, when I was still luxuriating in the fact that I'd never have to manhandle 800 words out of a brightly lit couple of hours whose meaning eluded language, we began to run out of money. We were still getting free tickets, but—the crucial part of a theatrical experience—couldn't afford interval drinks. ‘Don't worry, dear,' said my mother during one of our regular Sunday night phonecalls. ‘When one door closes, another opens.' If she suspected I might have been hinting about a short-term loan, she was right.

Her venerable apothegm turned out to be right too. In June, I went to a lunch organised by Geoffrey Dutton for what he called key figures, to meet Christopher Pearson, soon to launch a Sydney equivalent of his successful
Adelaide Review
. Pearson, rotund of figure and orotund of speech, took me aside and offered me one hundred dollars a review for his new monthly. Despite our indigence, I declined. The next day he doubled the offer. ‘Please say yes,' he said. Though I was flattered (by the pleading, not the pay) and told him I'd think about it, I knew I'd have to take it on.

But we couldn't live on $200 a month. Carmel keeps us afloat managing a rug shop and writing video scripts for the Education Department. From now on we eke—a verb that sounds better without a predicate. I agree to be strapped once again into ­theatrical harness and drag 1200 words behind me once a month for Pearson's
Sydney Review
. While I was straining at my task, I got a phonecall from Anne Fussell, features editor of the
Australian
. ‘Is it true you're interested in being literary editor of the paper?' (I had my friend Dick Hughes, who worked then at News Limited, to thank for this masterly piece of networking.) Saved! I wanted to shout, but managed a sober affirmative instead.