Joseph Furphy, Such Is Life (1903)
Mark Twain claimed to be the first author in history to submit a typewritten manuscript. Technology did little to enhance his prose, but Twain loved gadgets.
The manuscript of Tom Sawyer was, as the word implies, written longhand. Originally, Aunt Polly was introduced as she asked of young Tom, ‘Where is that boy?’ Twain crossed out those words and replaced them with Polly’s now-famous utterance: ‘What’s gone with that boy?’ The reader hears Polly’s voice a page before learning her name. It’s Polly’s voice which creates her character. Twain is renowned for having something to say about everything. But his genius came from his ability to listen. He heard voices and they were real.
Twain shared that capacity with an Australian writer who rivals Twain’s brand of mercurial genius: Joseph Furphy. Furphy is really known for a single book. Such Is Life has frustrated and infuriated readers down the decades with its tangled plot, recondite humour and long-winded digressions on every subject from the practical to the arcane, from mechanics to philosophy. At the same time, the book has won a band of admirers who place it in a class of its own in the history of Australian writing. I am one of the latter, though I have served my time among the former. It is a book worth the struggle. At some point most readers stop scratching their heads and break into laughter. For some reason, that moment for me was when the narrator, Tom Collins, offers his views on the oxide of hydrogen. He means water. In a book about bullockies, a species of worker which no longer exists, set during the drought and depression of the early 1890s, I was able to recognise something of my own pretentiousness.
Tom Collins is a man of such absurd modesty that, in the company of bullockies, he insists on using ‘sanguinary’ for ‘bloody’ and ‘sheol’ for ‘hell’. In one of the best-known passages of the book, he finds himself skulking naked along the banks of the Murray because his clothes are on their way to South Australia, lost in the river. Collins can’t bring himself to mention by name the item of clothing, essential to his dignity, which he spends the next thirty pages trying to secure. But later in the book, he finds himself standing naked in front of Nosey Alf Morris, a stockman whom the reader has long ago realised is a woman in disguise. Collins himself is oblivious to this. Gender identity is one of the recurring themes of Such Is Life. Collins’ horse is called Cleopatra. It is actually a stallion.
Few of the female characters in Such Is Life can be trusted. Collins tries to blacken his own name to avoid marriage; one memorable character, Warrigal Alf, discourses at length on a series of unfaithful wives. Some readers have wondered if such attitudes reflect Furphy’s frosty marriage to Leonie Germain, a union which lasted for over forty years but which brought neither of them much peace. Leonie was sixteen, French and Catholic when they married in 1867. Furphy was twenty-four, Australian and Protestant. Throughout his life, Furphy pursued a number of platonic relationships with younger women, trying to find what was lacking in his marriage. One was with a schoolteacher, Kate Baker. Another was with Miles Franklin. He did not fully appreciate the effect these relationships had on the women concerned, especially on Baker. Needless to say, we never hear much of Leonie’s side of the story. Doubtless, she could have written a counter-piece called C’est la vie.
Such Is Life purports to be a series of random extracts from the diary of a minor bureaucrat moving pointlessly around the Riverina region of New South Wales: ‘Contrary to usage, these memoirs are published, not “in compliance with the entreaties of friends”, but in direct opposition thereto.’ There is little that is random about the architecture of the book. Collins is not Furphy. He is more outgoing and ebullient than his creator, a man whom people invariably came to remember as quiet. Collins’ opinions do sometimes coincide with those of Furphy, but are usually delivered with a kind of throwaway self-deprecation.
Furphy’s views on social justice were firmly held. They derived from his first-hand experience of the hardship endured by working people. They also came in part from his unselfpitying acceptance of the limitations of his own life. Furphy developed a kind of comic stoicism which has become the stock in trade of Australia’s most searching humour. Furphy was the forerunner of Barry Humphries and John Clarke. He pioneered their kind of intellectual anti-intellectualism. They always create the illusion that the joke is on them.
At the beginning of Such Is Life, the narrator indicates that his purpose is to ‘afford to the observant reader a fair picture of Life as that engaging problem has presented itself to me’. Joseph Furphy’s life presented problems of its own. He was the least successful member of a successful family and known to them as ‘poor John’. The fatalism which underlies the humour of Such Is Life owes a lot to this. His parents were among the early settlers of Port Phillip and slowly improved their fortunes, first as part of a Scottish enclave in the Yarra Valley and then at Kyneton. Furphy’s brother, John, ran a successful foundry in Shepparton. It was he who invented and marketed the legendary Furphy Water Cart. During World War I, troops used to gather around these carts to exchange rumours and gossip. Unreliable stories have since been known in Australia as furphies.
The two brothers were rock and water. John was a pillar of the Protestant ascendancy, whereas Joseph thought long and hard about the beliefs of the underclass. The long intellectual agenda of Such Is Life includes Christian socialism: ‘the Light of the world, the God-in-Man, the only God we can ever know, is by His own authority represented for all time by the poorest of the poor,’ muses Collins, speaking on this occasion for Furphy. Quoting A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he says, ‘The kingdom of God is within us; our all-embracing duty is to give it form and effect, a local habitation and a name.’
Elsewhere, Such Is Life deals with the ageless question of free will and determinism, whether our lives are created by our own choices or by circumstances beyond our control. Collins puts forward a theory of ‘the controlling alternative’, an idea that free choices actually create the circumstances which restrict us, and vice versa. Typically, this idea is played out first in the tragic circumstances which attend the death of a swagman and then in the comic circumstances which attend the loss of Collins’ clothes.
Joseph Furphy tried his luck as a selector but lost his land. He then spent four years as a carrier in the Riverina, based in Hay, a disastrous time which nevertheless yielded much of the raw material for both the characters and politics in Such Is Life. Finally, with nowhere to turn, and a wife and three children to support, Joseph took a job as a mechanic in John’s foundry in Shepparton. He stayed there for twenty years, working up to fifty-four hours over a six-day week. His comfort was to retreat to his ‘sanctum’, a corrugated-iron shed against the fence at the back of his cottage in Welsford Street. It was here that he read and wrote. He became a contemplative. That shed was a cave in the desert.
In April 1897, an enormous handwritten manuscript turned up in Sydney at the office of J. F. Archibald, then editor of the Bulletin. It was accompanied by a brief note: ‘I have just finished writing a full-sized novel: title, “Such Is Life”, scene, Riverina and northern Vic; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian.’ The manuscript was twelve hundred pages of copperplate. It took another six years for the work to see the light of day. By that time, Furphy had got a typewriter and rapped the whole thing out again.
Such Is Life delights in language, in the rhythms of thought and speech. Despite the assessment of one early reviewer, Banjo Paterson, that ‘its literary methods are poor and its powers of reproducing dialect phonetically are mediocre,’ it is a book which has listened closely to the people it represents and to their culture. Such Is Life belies the myth that nineteenth-century Australia was intellectually isolated. Collins describes the Australian landscape as the work of an impressionist artist. Furphy himself bridged that painful and unnecessary gap in Australian history between the life of the mind and manual skill, between education and training. He did things by hand.
It’s a pity that neither Furphy’s house, nor his shed, are still standing. On the site is a Wilga tree, which Furphy planted, and a plaque. His memory is kept alive in quiet ways.