Chapter Twelve
L’écrivain
The 300 or so letters from Aldington to dad chronicled the highs and lows of the writing life in 1940s and 1950s France and England.
Aldington was intimate, affectionate, detailed and forthcoming. He was endlessly cheering dad on, congratulating him on any moves forward, confiding literary facts and details that implied a relationship built on mutual trust and deep companionship. The years they spent in Saint Clair were so beautiful that when dad returned to Australia, almost every letter from Aldington contained a reference to something in Saint Clair.
Aldington hadn’t just loved dad’s company as a friend and companion. He’d seen dad’s potential as a writer and a creative. And that’s what transformed dad’s perception of himself.
As I read the letters, I realised that just as dad had unintentionally found a mentor on that first trip to Saint Clair, I had found the same kind of guidance when I first lived in Sydney.
In my twenties and working at a women’s magazine, I wrote an email to a writer whose website I loved. Though her website was technically about astrology, her wild tangents were grounded in a background as a journalist, and she had the ability to pull facts and figures from history and psychology to twist funny tales that somehow related to pop culture and the news. Reading her sometimes made me laugh out loud.
Mystic Medusa wasn’t just an astrologer, she was a poet, an educator, and an entertainer. Her irreverent writing style had the ability to polarise and dismay; it was incredibly unique. She even formed a few new words of her own language, which her fans soon took into their own lexicons. Her blog, I often thought, was one of the best parts of the internet. Openly encouraging the discussion of ideas women once would have been burned at the stake for considering, her online presence was a portal of learning.
Like Alister writing a fan letter to Aldington from La Coupole in Paris, I wrote Mystic an email praising her blog, and she responded with a surprisingly generous commission to contribute a piece, posted me a copy of her newly published book as thanks, and encouraged me in my writing.
But that wasn’t what inspired me the most. Mystic Medusa was the first writer I’d ever known to make an actual living as a freelancer writing on things she wanted to write about — not bound to an office or a company or someone else’s dictates. This was as distant and magical an idea to me, in those early days, as someone having the ability to travel to the moon. The fact that she made a living from her freelance writing, with a house and family, was even more impressive.
Years later, when I was in New York, sending her regular email updates on my antics, she forwarded one of my emails to her then-publisher, pitching my rambling emails as the ‘possible beginnings of a book’. The publisher had written directly to me expressing interest in the idea.
Mystic’s generosity, openness, and finger on the pulse of digital media were the impetus for so many developments in my career. She implored me to come back to Sydney, time and again, connecting me with key people who would go on to influence my life and loves. Without anyone in my family or Melbourne circle from whom I could seek help for my writing dreams, Mystic became my biggest mentor.
I don’t think she realised how much she inspired me. When I first went full-time freelance — after giving it two half-hearted cracks before heading back to pound the floors of restaurants — she gave me an actual, real-life model for a life and lifestyle I wanted.
Editing pays better than waitressing, she wrote. Get your mindset right … send out a pile of story pitches and go Louisa!
Because she so easily invited me into her circle, I assumed I had a place there. Just as Aldington had tuned the piano and invited dad to stay in Saint Clair, then suggested some writing jobs and made introductions (where dad had always been the one in Melbourne making introductions for others).
Though both dad and Aldington had been damaged by war and the diseases of the time, it was Aldington’s crack-hardy attitude of not letting it affect his creative work that dad imitated, instead using it as fuel and fodder for publication.
Mystic, likewise, refused to ever play the victim. When she suddenly lost one of her highest-paid weekly columns, when Australian newspapers haemorrhaged advertising dollars in the switch to digital media, she never whinged. She just looked for a new way, quickly, to continue to do her work — upgrading her website and trying new subscription methods to replace the archaic old newspaper model of payment, where money usually arrived months after submission of an invoice to some anonymous accountant.
Aldington described the hackwork he’d once done in London for a pittance to build up his repertoire, exactly how much he was paid for his first poem, what he was paid for writing and when, who in which country was looking for certain types of translation, and ideas for stories he thought dad could pitch. He advised dad on living costs, as though making the writing life work had to be the first priority — and that’s how you made your choice about where to live.
Mystic had written to me in similarly detailed ways, encouraging me to set myself up in a cheap studio flat rather than share a house that might be too distracting, and even to rent a computer when my own had blown up. It’s a business cost and you can write it off at tax time, she wrote. When I was hired for my first editing job, she told me exactly how to set up an email contract and invoice the publisher.
As I read the Aldington letters, I remembered how I once didn’t know a single other person who even wanted to be a freelance writer. To be able to count someone like Mystic as a confidante and a friend was a privilege and a gift, so I understood how important Aldington was to dad. Yet at important as meaningful connections were, Mystic and Aldington also understood the necessity of ‘critical distance’ from distractions. Much as Aldington preferred the peaceful obscurity of French provincial life to the literary establishment of London, Mystic insisted on remaining anonymous despite the enormous number of subscribers to her blog. The writing had to came first.
Sometimes bossy, always informative, Mystic was the first person who really understood and encouraged the part of me that knew — from childhood, when I was obsessed with letters — that I wanted to be a writer. In that first year I went freelance, I had dozens of confounding experiences where I’d be met with radio silence or bizarre feedback from an editor, and her swift replies with her own stories ‘from the field’ made my frustrations pale in comparison.
She had at least a decade more experience than me. I’d shake my head after receiving one of her emails filled with data and details that helped me make sense of a somewhat bizarre industry. She helped me find new ways to make it work, the way she had, opening herself up to a global model and not constraining herself to an Australian market. (In Australia, where the shift to digital came almost a decade after the British and American newspapers had already switched to user-pays, subscriber-based models, her subscription-led blog was actually revolutionary.)
Aldington, too, was encouraging and kind, with a global viewpoint and knowledge founded in experience. He believed in dad, but he wasn’t unrealistic, and he definitely cracked the whip. The details in these letters were incredibly romantic and intimate, and I loved the two men’s open affection, wondering if it came from living in France, where masculinity didn’t involve that Australian way of men jokingly putting each other down.
In one letter, Aldington echoed advice Mystic had given me, warning him to have a clear commission before he worked for too long on writing a particular story. He shifted, just as Mystic had shifted, from encouragement to detail to diary-like entries on word counts and book sales to ideas for what dad could try to work on next that might interest publishers in different markets. He wrote about life as an artist, how things had changed since he’d lived in a garret in Paris in the twenties and thirties, details of life in rural France in the 1950s, and what was happening in the publishing world in England and the USA and how that might be affecting dad’s story pitches. From Mystic, such expansive information always blew my mind wide open and dusted out the cobwebs of clichéd thinking. I was immensely grateful for her generosity, just as in reading Aldington I saw a similar generosity of knowledge and connection.
In between Aldington’s descriptions of the changing seasons in France, gossip about mutual friends, bizarre health complaints (with what sounded like medieval treatments), and, always, talk of which books to read and why, he would offer news of the latest poetry anthology he was compiling, a quick request for dad to do some paid research or translation work, and sentimental sign-offs begging dad to return or visit.
And Gisèle, Gisèle, so many references to Gisèle.
She had met Aldington, too.
I learned that dad was supposed to drive with Gisèle to Montpellier to spend the Christmas of 1953 with Aldington, but couldn’t come because petrol was too expensive to leave Paris. Aldington implored him to look for a place to live in rural France — that way, he could live, and write, without having to take another soul-sucking job in an office, which he knew dad loathed. Dad had just completed a year’s work as a Special Press Analyst in the Paris office of the US Special Representative while living with Gisèle in the 7th arrondissement; he quit to finish writing a book. He was thirty-two.
Did he ever finish that book? I was thirty-two when my first book came out.
I kept reading the letters.
In 1954, Aldington had started the search for a place for dad and Gisèle to live. He wrote that with a car, and with the cost of good food in rural France a fraction of what it cost in Paris, dad could live as a writer ‘for fifty pounds a year’. How much Aldington had wanted dad to stay. How close they had been.
A community of expat writers in France. How idyllic it all sounded!
I remembered leaving Sydney that awful first time I’d tried to make it work as a writer. In the space of a week, I’d been sacked from my magazine job, my car had blown up on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I’d fallen off my bicycle (on the Bridge, again) and broken my tooth. I was back in Melbourne before the stitches were even out of my chin.
Mystic wrote to me, calling me back, telling me not to give up, calculating different costs, encouraging me to replace waitressing with sub-editing because it paid better — and because there was more work available in magazines in Sydney.
Dad almost stayed in France. But a car accident took the last of his savings. The letters from Aldington, particularly those dated 1954 and 1955, when dad returned to Australia after eight years abroad, showed just how close a call it was. The car cost somewhere between 20,000 and 48,000 francs to fix.
In June 1953, dad had written:
After the car accident in January 1954, they also, it seemed, had to look for a new apartment. It was an awful winter in Paris, and the pipes in their kitchen in the Rue Las Cases froze over. They had to boil all their meals, and Paris had run out of coal to heat the place. Months of rejected job applications for work as a writer or translator soon followed — for a job at UNESCO, French correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, Paris correspondent for the BBC, translator for Australia House in London, translator for Air France … Gisèle had even started to search for translation work, to keep them in Paris. She spoke fluent English, too.
But no dice.
In July 1954, they left Paris for London, marrying in a quiet registry ceremony before their slow journey back to Australia.
Of course: the eternal juggle of money, time, chance, love, and place …
Aldington had done all he could to encourage them to stay in France. He had found a nice town where dad and Gisèle could live nearby — Alès, in his beloved South. With food prices ‘a fraction’ of the prices in Paris, which were already very little, and all dad needed was to get his car fixed to be comfortable. Dad had even asked Aldington to drive around and sign a year-long lease on his and Gisèle’s behalf.
But then — the money ran out and they left. Dad and Gisèle returned to Australia, and Aldington’s hopes of having his protégé close by were dashed. Dad and Gisèle made the long journey back to Melbourne via Ceylon in December 1954. When they arrived back in late January, the liner had lost all their luggage.
Dad went back to finish his history degree at Melbourne University on Saturday mornings, and soon got full-time work as a French teacher in Toorak, planning his first lesson around the word Chez. But he was depressed.
No Aldington, no spirit, no aesthetic, he wrote in his diary back in Australia. Money isn’t a means of exchange, here. It’s an infection.
Aldington’s letters became more and more intimate and affectionate after dad’s return to Australia. He dreamt of dad; he heard locals calling to each other and mistook them for dad. In one letter, he wrote that dad had belonged in Europe and he couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He seemed to be calling dad back.
Aldington, by then in his late sixties, and battling a host of ailments, must have known he’d never live to see dad back in France again.
In January 1955, as dad and Gisèle waited on their lost luggage and started the slow rebuild of life back in Australia, Aldington’s book Lawrence of Arabia was released.
The book that had given dad his first research assignment. The research that led dad to exclaim, in the margins of his notebook, working here and writing is the only time I feel I shouldn’t be anywhere else, doing anything else. The writing that showed him what he was capable of, and what brought him the most joy. Aldington had appreciated his swift transcription and summaries of hundreds of letters over the Channel in London, for they’d helped him build the new ‘story’ of T.E. Lawrence and know it was based on fact.
Lawrence of Arabia sold 30,000 copies in its first week, an instant bestseller on account of the scandalous new view it represented of the Lawrence legend. Aldington revealed Lawrence’s illegitimacy and his homosexuality, but, more importantly, argued that Lawrence had fabricated or exaggerated many of his wartime exploits. The methodical research dad had completed in 1951 at the British Library, examining and copying the correspondence between Lawrence and Charlotte Shaw, wife of George Bernard Shaw, letters that the public had never seen, had enabled Aldington to prove many of the assertions he made in the book.
Aldington became notorious almost overnight, and was called up at and out of the pensione where he now lived in Montpellier to give radio and press interviews across the United Kingdom and Europe. Newspapers and radio went wild for the story, with Aldington counting over 200 newspaper clippings in the first month in one of his letters to dad.
Aldington had lived as a writer for decades, and already published numerous books, including the bestselling novel Death of a Hero. But even as a well-known poet and author, he’d never had notoriety like this. It was one of those peculiar cluster bombs in publishing that can’t be predicted: the political and social attitudes of the time and the attachment the public had to the mythical legend of Lawrence meant that the book was met with furore.
(Eventually, when the film Lawrence of Arabia was made in 1962, some of Aldington’s research and the references to Lawrence’s homosexuality in the book were used in the script. The film was nominated for ten Oscars, and the British Film Institute called it the third-greatest British film of all time.)
And dad’s research in the British Library had been so important to the creation of the book. It burned me up to know dad and Gisèle were back in Australia by the time it came out.
Wanting to share the spoils of publicity and knowing it would have raised dad’s profile in both French and London literary circles, Aldington’s letters show how devastated he was that dad was so far from the action. Three thousand miles away in Australia, living in a time when radio interviews could only take place in a studio, dad was cut off. The few Australian radio stations dad had to choose from paid no attention to his pitches, and he was met with apathy and rejection. Aldington was appalled, exclaiming that dad was the only one in Australia who knew the truth, because he’d been the first member of the public to view the letters from George Bernard Shaw.
Dad wasn’t just physically far from Aldington, but a complete world away in the land of gum trees and wide vacant spaces in the mind, as he described it in his diaries. Dad’s copy of Lawrence of Arabia — which Aldington had generously fought for the publishers to send him, gratis — took three months to arrive, by boat. Bookshops in England and Europe were ordering the book by the hundreds; dad reported to Aldington that Collins Booksellers in Bourke Street, the biggest bookseller in Melbourne at the time, ordered a single copy, and only after he badgered them.
If dad had only stayed in France a bit longer …
Hundreds more reviews came out in England as the scandal was discussed and dissected. Sales continued to grow, and anyone affiliated with Aldington and the book was called up to write and speak on radio. Alister and Jacques Delarue (the ‘well-read police inspector’ who dad had befriended in his time at the Hotel Floridor) performed a number of radio talks. Radio France gave each man a forty-five-minute slot, and Alister was paid for a number of freelance newspaper features, launching his writing career in France.
Aldington continually begged dad to pitch the story to the press in Melbourne — he’d done the research, and could argue its truth in detail. Aldington knew of dad’s financial struggles and search for journalism work, knew how much writing made him happy. But dad might as well have been on another planet. He pitched the story to ABC radio in Melbourne, who rejected it and sent him to write about a sewerage farm in Werribee instead.
Dad must have felt he’d left his career behind in France. Everything he’d learned about the world and himself, all the connections that had taken eight years to create, was now in the past. Australia was so very far from France. He’d returned to a Melbourne that boasted rows of new ‘suburbs’ of identical houses, talked more of money than anything else, and showed little-to-no interest in what was going on in Europe, let alone France.
When Albert Tucker returned a few years later, dad wrote that they shared the same sense of the spiritual poverty of Australia, which was an intellectually and culturally arid wasteland in the 1950s.
The French-Australian Association ran a fete for Bastille Day in Melbourne, and dad and Gisèle went along, hoping for some sort of Gallic reunion with like-minded kin. They served beer and sausages, dad wrote in his diary. We returned home, depressed.
Barry Humphries was one of the first to make light of this sense of Australian complacency and insularity in his comedy sketches. Dad was thrilled when he discovered Humphries’ work, feeling an affinity with Humphries’ entertaining theatrics and digs at Australian inertia: both had played similar surrealist pranks on Melbourne trams.
In 1958, when Humphries brought his comic characters to a wider audience on the Wild Life in Suburbia EP (a collaboration with Arthur Boyd’s cousin, Robin Boyd), dad played the record to all who would listen. Geoff Dutton, returned to Australia by then and editing the literary magazine Australian Letters, listened to the recording with dad and Gisèle over dinner, and commissioned dad to interview Humphries. Dad’s interview with Humphries about Dame Edna was published in 1959, the first article to explore this unique act. Until then, most Australians had seen Humphries as someone who ‘dressed in drag’.
When I took a break from the Dutton and Aldington letters to make my way across from the library to the National Portrait Gallery for lunch, I caught sight of a giant portrait of Humphries in the gallery’s main area. That same portrait, by Clifton Pugh, had run alongside dad’s article.
I already knew about dad’s connection with Barry Humphries. I’d discovered it while travelling around Australia in 2006. I had just seen his show in Perth, and I’d been so awestruck I pitched an interview to Sunday Life magazine, not knowing how or if I could even get to talk to him. But within forty-eight hours I was on the phone to him, and the first thing he asked was if I was any relation to Denison Deasey.
Aware that we had limited phone time, I didn’t want to press him, but the question gave me a surge of emotion. I told him that dad had died when I was very young, so I didn’t know much about him.
‘You must look into it,’ he said, emphatic. ‘It’s your history.’
I was living in Fremantle at the time, far from dad’s boxes in the library, and it was only a year or so after that awful first attempt to read his papers. Humphries talked about dad for another few minutes, about how he’d made some introductions in his life that had proved important, before giving me what I needed for the magazine story in our remaining ten minutes: his impressions of arriving back in Australia after three years in England.
‘My assaults on suburbia were my only defence against the creeping boredom that Melbourne in the fifties seemed to exude,’ he said, echoing reams of dad’s diary entries.
I worked my way through the remainder of the Aldington letters, forming a clearer picture of dad and Gisèle’s return to Australia.
Returning in early 1955, dad and Gisèle moved onto land in the scenic country town of Warburton that dad had bought back in the war years. His sister Kathleen invited them to live in her suburban Armadale house the following year. Kathleen travelled regularly during this time, living in the USA on a Ford Foundation grant and teaching as a fellow at New York University in 1958. After returning to Australia herself, she secured a position at the University of Adelaide, leaving her Armadale house for dad and Gisèle to make their own.
In 1955, dad took thirty-three ‘sixth-forms’ in his first teaching class. On Saturdays, he’d go to his history lectures and work his way through the remainder of his unfinished degree. Gisèle sat a librarian exam at the State Library and then worked as a French correspondent for Radio Australia’s telecasts to Paris. Dad continued his role as black sheep of the family by allowing Gisèle to occasionally work on the sabbath. Neither were deeply religious.
In one letter to Geoff Dutton, dad described a visit from George Bailey, the American journalist he’d befriended through Aldington in Saint Clair, and spent many years visiting in Vienna and Berlin. Dad was devastated that he couldn’t shout him to dinner — his teaching wage unable to stretch that far. The cost of living, particularly the cost of ‘treats of culture’ such as fine wine and theatre, was comparatively high in 1950s Australia. He returned to drinking beer over wine, purchasing Gisèle small bottles of champagne so she could have a glass by the fire when they met with friends.
Meanwhile, Adrian Lawlor, the artist whose book dad had published when he’d been flush with funds, unexpectedly turned on dad, demanding dad return all the unsold copies. Dad had lost thousands publishing the book due to printing costs, mostly because Lawlor had aggressively resisted any edits on the manuscript, which was way too long, over 500 pages. Of a limited print run of 300 hardbacks, dad had managed to sell less than a hundred, and most of those went to a small group of artist friends. Despite taking out a paid advertisement in the literary journal Meanjin, it seemed no one in Australia wanted to read about other Australians, artistic, bohemian, or not. Lawlor’s demand that dad return the books wasn’t just ungrateful, it bordered on the insane.
At the same time Lawlor was demanding his book be returned, dad was searching for a publisher for his own book, a travel book about France, apparently. Where was this travel book? Aldington kept referring to it while he consoled dad over the Lawlor situation.
Dilettante, failure … The words were becoming less significant, for I saw they were factually untrue. Dad was a battler. He didn’t just work hard, he was a generous friend, though not everyone reciprocated or appreciated it. And through it all — the full-time teaching work, the lectures on Saturdays, pitching and writing articles at night, clearing the land and building his Warburton house on weekends — he was also very often sick with sinusitis and painful arthritis. Aged thirty-four, he probably still had remnants of the tuberculosis.
The details in Aldington’s letters helped me to form a picture of dad and Gisèle, their life together. How close to France dad would have still felt, with her by his side. Although Aldington clearly missed dad, he approved of how happy Gisèle made him, affectionately offering to post her the French magazines, while imploring dad to use his newfound sense of calm from their relationship to keep writing consistently.
After settling in back in Australia, things seemed to be looking up for dad. He’d sold a radio play to Melbourne station 3AR’s Armchair Chat show, The Koepenik Affair (after the famous German imposter Hauptmann von Köpenick), and a biography — a translation and study of the nineteenth-century artist Vivant Denon — had some publisher interest.
Every few weeks, there would be another letter from Aldington, detailing how many words dad should write each day to finish the ‘travel’ book, after the Denon biography. But what was this book? I’d found the Australian memoir, which talked of his family background and those early years back in Melbourne, but it had read much like a first draft, and couldn’t have been longer than 40,000 words. Certainly it wasn’t something you’d send to a publisher, which was what Aldington was referring to. It wasn’t a ‘travel’ book, and it wasn’t 90,000 words, which Aldington had written might be too long and need to be cut.
In April 1955, Aldington wrote with pride at dad’s literary career being about to launch: the situation was ‘licked’ because dad’s ‘travel’ book was about to be launched to the world. The Denon book had been rejected, but Aldington said he might have better luck pitching it after his ‘travel’ book came out. (A piece of Aldington’s advice was an exact parallel to something Mystic had written to me: Send a new story out the day you get a rejection … Let them know that’s not your only idea.)
Alister Kershaw and Geoff Dutton were about to have their first books published, so it must have seemed like the Australian contingent of those summers at Saint Clair were all launching their literary careers. Aldington’s tone was that of a proud father.
Another letter appeared dated 1955, giving dad some feedback on the ‘travel’ book, all complimentary. Three more letters were dated April 1955, commiserating over shared money troubles and bolstering him like a father: Work, my boy, work.
But by September 1955, something had happened. The publisher had either pulled out of the deal or rejected the ‘travel’ book; it was hard to understand.
Aldington’s letter was full of consolation and commiseration. Fear not, there will always be France, he wrote, saying he missed dad more than ever. He wrote that if dad had still been in France they would laugh all night like they had years before in Saint Clair.
But where — and what — was this travel book?
The letters from Aldington produced a sort of revolution in how I saw dad.
He wasn’t a failure.
He had completed not just one, but two books in his early thirties, just as he’d promised to do when he quit the job in Paris. The Denon biography and the travel book. Along with all the articles and plays. As well as the two books he had written in the 1970s — that made four complete books.
Dad wasn’t a failure.
He’d also translated an entire book to French as a ‘favour’ to an Englishman, I later discovered. He’d pitched radio scripts and stories — and more. But the tyranny of distance and timing, and the casino wheel of fortune that is the publishing game, had seen him take a few knockbacks. How could he consider that he’d failed?
I thought of my own wheel of fortune. Of pursuing publication with the zeal of a bloodhound in my late twenties. Would I have done that if I’d known dad wasn’t a failure? That he had, in fact, finished things? By thirty I had to have a book published. Like it was a test I needed to pass as single-mindedly as Dec had passed SAS selection. Be ashamed for the rest of your life if you don’t finish this, some cruel part of me whispered, a ghost I thought publication would vanquish.
Not just any book, but a book on travel, on love, on the risks we take in life. How I poured myself into that book — setting myself insane deadlines, like a first draft in six weeks, because I felt I was surfing an uncommon wave of publisher interest after what Mystic had done for me and I needed to make the most of it, to thank her for her generosity by succeeding.
I was obsessed with making the most of it. Of extending all opportunities. I’d fly to Sydney at a moment’s notice just to have a face-to-face coffee with Mystic’s publisher friend. Just as dad had apparently flown to Sydney to meet the publisher from the Richard’s Press who was interested in his travel book.
Then, after I had drafted and redrafted my manuscript and thought it was acceptable enough to submit, I found the publisher had contracted cancer and left the company. The publisher who’d encouraged a whole book out of me — who’d had me thinking I had it made. And now, just as quickly, was gone.
Mum made me dinner that night back in Melbourne. She looked sadly at the minted peas and muttered, not for the faint-hearted, like I was fighting a losing battle from the start. I didn’t realise she was talking more about her own views of life than my pursuit of writing. For some reason, her belief that getting published was impossible made me even more determined to prove her wrong.
So I rewrote the entire book after feedback from a different publisher — one I’d found on my own. I moved into a share house so that I wouldn’t have to get a day job and could live on my few freelance articles a month, marking down the calendar with Xs for every day of redrafting, along with the page and word counts, like I was training for a marathon.
How I wanted to prove mum wrong. Prove that I wasn’t a dilettante, and that maybe what I’d inherited from dad wasn’t inherently failure. I knew, when she looked at me — especially with the way I lived freelance — she saw dad.
The determination seemed to come from outside of me — a family story I hated and needed to change. I had to finish it. I wanted mum to see my success and change her mind about writing, perhaps about dad. I visualised the publishing house announcing my book as an acquisition on their website, and I even saw the dress I would wear at the launch.
By winter, I’d flown to Sydney, subletting a different room in a Surry Hills flat from a friend I’d met on a travel story to Tahiti. Tahiti! Even that trip hadn’t seemed to convince mum that a writing career could be something good.
I had to be in Sydney. I went to dinner at Mystic’s house, and she gave me more advice and loaded me up with books before I left. These opportunities and connections — they don’t come along twice in your life — like a lightning strike. I worked nights in a bar and spent days walking the beaches or writing in libraries, waiting on a response to the redraft I’d sent to a woman at yet another publishing house, also in Sydney, who’d promised to look at it.
Finally, after I prompted her twice (on Mystic’s advice), she sent me an email, and it was so strange, I realised she hadn’t even bothered to read my redrafted manuscript. I cried in the beautiful Sydney light, staring at the golden cliffs of Bondi and wondering what to do. How I would have loved to talk to dad right then. Instead I called Mystic.
On Monday, I called Allen and Unwin, where the original publisher who’d requested my work had been, and explained to whoever answered the phone that the manuscript had once been requested. By Tuesday, they’d offered me a contract.
Mystic served me a goat-cheese salad in her Newtown garden. ‘What book are you going to write next?’ she asked brightly. The complete opposite to mum, Mystic had expected my success all along.
Yet mum’s response was so odd, so completely unexpected, so completely not what I’d thought her response to my contract of publication would be.
‘Thank God. Now you can move on with your life. It’s been so hard for me to watch you live like this,’ she said on the phone when I called. As though I’d been smoking crack or living on the street, not writing a book.
She didn’t seem relieved at all, just tired. It finally twigged that nothing could change the story mum had in her mind. That life was hard and good things weren’t coming. I know she would have been proud if she’d been able to escape the weight of her depression.
My sister consoled me over mum’s response, cheering me on for my perseverance. Dec sent me a handwritten note of congratulations.
Mum chose to leave the world the week my contract arrived.
Dad wasn’t a failure. Dad wasn’t a failure.
To me, a failure was someone who didn’t try, who didn’t finish. Who cared what others thought? Dad had fearlessly pursued his dreams, despite health and money issues, despite lost luggage and missing letters and endless nonsensical rejections, despite living on a continent separated from the publishing powerhouses that ruled the world at the time. He still did it. He wrote. He finished. He sent. Despite teaching full-time and studying part-time and using a manual typewriter that must have made his wrists ache and his arthritic back hurt, he finished two books. Maybe four. Where was this travel book?
I tore through the rest of the material in Canberra quicker than I’d ever worked before. With only a few hours until closing, and seven boxes to finish, I scoured hundreds of Ninette’s letters until I finally saw dad’s name in her cursive script from a letter to Geoff in 1942.
He’s had a pretty lousy time. She wrote of his appearance after six months in the Northern Territory. The conditions and so on … he talks only of the war …
A pretty lousy time. How they underplayed things during the war. Camping in squalid conditions in the middle of the outback for six months with no proper food, and ulcerated legs that would scar him for life, and dengue and malaria … Watching men shoot themselves … A pretty lousy time.
I felt affection for Ninette, just as I had for Aldington, because she had been there for dad at a time he needed a friend. He’d written in his diary that her bright face meeting him at the station was a relief after months with suffering men.
I worked my way through the rest of the boxes, including Geoff Dutton’s enormous collection of letters from Saint Clair. He detailed secret codes they’d use at the inn, dad’s unrequited love for one of Aldington’s American visitors who was already married, and how the three Australian men — dad, Geoff, Al — were as close as the Three Musketeers.
When the library rang the bell for closing, I was the last to leave.
I ordered an expensive glass of French wine in front of the open fire downstairs at my hotel, and posted a photo of one of the beautiful Saint Clair envelopes on Instagram. Clém and Coralie ‘liked’ it from Paris at the exact same time as Ayala in Melbourne.