by Alex Miller
‘You think mine was a privileged beginning?’ he said incredulously.
‘You’ve had nothing to renounce,’ she explained. ‘Your parents didn’t object to you following your dream. You bring nothing to the struggle for art except your desire for it. There’s a wonderful purity in that. It’s less common than you think. Edith has her grandfather’s example. Most of our friends were born into art in one way or another. Your wish to make art is mysterious to you. Yes, I believe you’ve had a privileged beginning.’ She laughed. ‘We’re alike. You and I. You don’t have a choice. That’s the thing.’
‘I’m not like you,’ he said. ‘I have to feed my family.’
She went very still, then turned to Arthur and said sharply, as if she was accusing him of a serious offence, ‘You didn’t tell me Pat has a family.’
‘He didn’t know,’ Pat said. ‘My wife only told me she was pregnant this morning.’ He reached for a cigarette and lit it. ‘It’s not important. We’re having a kid, that’s all. So what?’
Autumn was silent for a long moment, looking at him levelly across the table. She said with venom, ‘I hate you, Patrick Donlon!’
Arthur said, ‘Now then, darling!’
She knocked her wine glass over with a furious flick of her wrist, sending the red wine cascading across the table towards Pat, and she stood up. The cats scattered around her feet, the ginger one making it through the veranda door with her like an eel slipping upstream through the reeds, the other two swerving aside as the door crashed to in their faces. Arthur and Pat sat looking at the door. A moment later her wail came from the deep night, ‘I hate men!’
Arthur said in a hushed voice, ‘We should give her a minute to herself.’
‘You’re not going after her?’
‘Heavens no.’
Pat said nervously, ‘Should I leave?’ Her cry had sounded weird and lonely to him, as if he had inflicted on her an unbearable pain. He was a little frightened of her. Of what she might be capable of. Of her strange vulnerability and the way she had involved herself in his situation. He wondered if she was entirely sane.
‘No, no, no. There’s no need for that,’ Arthur said. He kept his voice down, nevertheless, as if he feared she might overhear him. ‘Perhaps if you and I clear some of this away.’ He waved his hands over the clutter of dishes. ‘She’ll be walking down to the river. It’s not your fault. It’s what she does.’
Pat stood up and began collecting their plates. He said, ‘The pie was terrific.’
‘Yes, Autumn’s a very good pie maker,’ Arthur said solemnly. He might have been giving the oration in the chapel on the dark day of Autumn’s funeral. My wife’s pastry was a wonder to us all. Let us pray.
They had cleared away the dishes and were sitting at the bare kitchen table in silence smoking cigarettes when they heard Autumn returning. They both stood up as she came through the door, the ginger cat sliding in behind her. The oyster cats had not returned from hiding. Autumn’s hair was shining and her eyes were bright and startled, as if the night had held some power over her. She said absently, ‘Where’s my glass of wine? I was enjoying it.’
Arthur said, ‘I’ll get us all a fresh one.’
She stood looking at Pat. She held his gaze. ‘I hate you the way you hate our friend Roy de Maistre.’
‘I don’t hate him,’ he said.
‘And Wyndham Lewis. That is the way I hate you. The way you hate them.’
‘I don’t hate either of them.’
‘Yes you do. You are lying to yourself and to me to deny it. It is our envy that makes us hate.’ She took the glass of wine from Arthur.
He said, ‘Why don’t we go and sit in the library? I’ve kept the fire going.’
Autumn went ahead of them down the passage. At the library door she paused and indicated the bundle of drawings lying against the wall. ‘Bring them in.’
They spread the drawings out on the table in front of the fire and Autumn began to look at them. She said to Pat, ‘Sit here,’ and pressed her hand on the cushion beside her. Arthur stood in front of the fire and watched. Every now and then he turned and looked at the fire as if he was wondering whether to take to it with the poker. Autumn said nothing until she reached the last drawing, then she read the poem silently to herself, her lips moving. She turned to Pat. ‘To dwell secretly in the solitude of my convictions?’ she quoted. ‘What a state? What an achievement?’
Pat said uneasily, ‘It was how I felt at the time I wrote it.’
‘Are you a poet as well as an artist?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’d better find out, hadn’t you? You can’t be both.’
‘Why can’t I be both?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know you can’t be fully an artist and fully a poet. We can only give ourselves fully to one thing. Art demands everything. Art is a woman, Pat. She is not kind to those who only give her a part of themselves. She wants everything or nothing. She sees everything else as betrayal. The artist and the poet both reinvent reality. They extend it. It takes time for them to learn to do this. A lifetime. That reinvention of reality is their way to their private truth.’
He couldn’t hold her gaze, it was too intense. He didn’t know what she wanted. Or what she meant. He looked down at his drawing of Mr Creedy’s daughter’s buttocks.
Autumn rested back against the couch and closed her eyes. ‘I wanted a family of my own more than anything.’
Arthur and Pat were silent.
She opened her eyes and looked up at Arthur. ‘We both did, didn’t we, darling?’
Arthur reached down and took the hand she held up to him. ‘Yes, darling, we did. More than anything.’
Autumn turned to Pat. ‘But we weren’t given a choice.’
He waited for her to go on.
‘So what are you, Pat? Poet or artist?’
He said, ‘I think you know what I am.’
She surprised him by leaning over and kissing his cheek. ‘Yes, I know what you are.’ There were tears in her eyes.
Arthur said, ‘Bedtime, you two, I think?’
‘You go on in, darling. Pat and I have things to talk about.’
11
November 1991
WE USED TO CALL IT ARMISTICE DAY, TODAY IT IS REMEMBRANCE that is asked of us. But there is too much to remember now. The eleventh hour of the eleventh month and so on … Let us forget. And was I entirely sane? I’m sure he was right to fear for my sanity even then. Am I sane now? How are we to know? In 1938, when he and I first met, the greatest insanity of all was about to break upon a trembling Europe. The great European civilisation we had all known and loved was about to be destroyed.
I have often wondered since if I should have made a job of it that night and thrown the wine glass at Pat’s head while I had the strength to do it, instead of meekly tipping its contents in his direction. There is never any satisfaction to be had from half measures. At that moment I did hate him. And have hated him and loved him many times since, but for other causes than envy of his child. Not deeper causes, but other. There is no deeper motive in us than envy—not even a deeper motive for the insanity that causes men to make war on each other.
The season of storms began early this year and has persisted throughout the spring. The ground is sodden and Arthur’s sacred Algerian oak has developed a dangerous lean—sacred to him and me. It was not the wind. The ground is sodden. The night was still, the freeway strangely silent. I woke to the shuddering of the earth and lay in my bed wondering what had happened. Had the sky fallen in? Was it a message from the gods?—at last! Adeli came into my room with the iron poker clutched in her fat paw, ready to slay the ogre at my throat. The dog next door was howling. Adeli barefoot in her thin nightdress, Sherry attendant, the pair of them standing at my French doors gazing out at the moonlit garden, Adeli’s enormous body in silhouette. I was fascinated.
‘What was it?’ she asked, puzzled by the deep stillness of the night.
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�A tree has fallen somewhere,’ I said. ‘Hopefully it has fallen onto the roof next door and has killed the lycra woman and her ugly infant in their beds.’
She said sorrowfully, ‘That is a cruel thing to wish for, Mrs Laing.’
‘Are you a Christian then?’
‘You know I am.’
I hadn’t known she was a God-fearing woman but I might have guessed it. For I did know that God in his infinite wisdom has not bestowed on Christians a sense of irony. It is as if they receive at birth only one ear with which to hear plainly the straight talk of this world. My biographer, alas, is not a poet either. It is the plain truth only, I’m afraid, that Adeli looks for in her research, and not the poetry of a life. If there were such a thing as a biographer of sympathy for my life, I think I should be quite content if they were to title their book, The Poetry of a Life. But historians, as Goethe famously said, are without imagination. So there’s not much hope of that ever happening.
When Stony told me later it was the red gum, a tree beloved of Arthur and me, I knew the force of this omen in my belly and was shaken by it. Absurd, but there it is. The power of omens is known to us. It’s lucky I was still using Barnaby’s shillelagh for balance—the walking frame of the gods—or I too would have fallen. Stony stood with one foot on the veranda step to address me, knowing the solemnity of the news he brought me. He looked up, his cap in his hands—he is a short, stocky man of a great age and refuses to use machines—and said, ‘The red gum’s come down, Mrs Laing.’ We were ever Arthur and Mrs Laing for Stony. His stout arm raised, cap dangling from his fingers, pointing behind him down the slope of the garden towards the coach house and shaking his head. ‘It’s beyond me to deal with her.’ I had not realised before this that for Stony trees are female. I sucked in air and trembled and I bore down on Barnaby. ‘I’ll have someone see to it,’ I said, my voice weaker than my knees, and I turned and stumbled back into the kitchen. The red gum was probably five hundred years old.
I stood by the stove and wept. It was as if Arthur had returned to tell me he was leaving me for good and I would not hear from him ever again. The spirit of Old Farm had withdrawn in fear of me. This was his last word. What power had taken him? What deathly insight was his? The renewal of his absence was a shock, massive and not deniable, as cavernous and empty as his vastly echoing death had been. I will do nothing about the fallen tree. It can lie where it has fallen until it returns into the earth from which it rose. I think now of Mahler’s line, I come from God and I will return to God. I wonder how long it will take for a five-hundred-year-old red gum to return into the earth? Five hundred years?
When I run my hand along the knobbly shank of Barnaby’s shillelagh—as I am doing now, it is an idle thing to do—it gives me the pleasantest creepy feeling in my bowels, just sufficiently reminiscent of the rush of sex to be bearable. If I am not deluded. The stick has a fine balance to it and would be a deadly weapon swung in the right hands. Not mine. I’m past killing. I didn’t say I am past wanting to kill. I will never be past that, I hope. And a little strength is slowly returning to my legs. Andrew insists it is Adeli’s improvements to my diet that’s doing it, but I believe it is more due to my own improved will to see this to the finish. The two of them confer in low voices in the hall, like junior politicians at their shenanigans in the back passages of power, and have become great mates. Good luck to them. Perhaps he is astonished by the volumes of her flesh. Who can know another’s tastes?
I stood on the veranda the other night looking out over the dark garden, Adeli snoring in her room—she has the grand snore of an Irish navvy on her—the ball of the stick cupped snugly in my palm, and I wondered if I might yet find the strength to get to the river one last time. I will not ask Adeli’s help for that excursion. She knows nothing of my desires, nor shall she. At the river I shall be alone under the moon. Put that in your biography! I am not past dreaming. The more of this I get done the more the nightmares leave me in peace. Why is that?
What did Pat and I talk about that night after Arthur left us and went to bed? I told him his drawings were interesting to me not because they were art, for I didn’t believe they were, but because he had executed them with the intention to make art. It was his desire for art, I said, that interested me. I’m sure I talked a lot and probably bored him with my views on the politics of the art world. I had been excited to find out earlier that he not only lacked the commonplace drawing skills of our Gallery School graduates but that he had refused to sully what he called the purity of his eye with the conventional training. The rest of our little gang of artists had assiduously acquired those skills in abundance, Anne Collins to an almost genius degree—but not quite. It is surprising how many brilliant students excel at drawing but are not artists. Anne became a curator in Melbourne then in Sydney and finally made a career as a curator of colonial art at the Tate in London—from where she called me to tell me of Pat’s last words at the moment of his passing. Most become teachers. Pat would have starved rather than teach art. His response when asked about it was, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing myself so how can I teach someone else what to do?’ Freddy wanted to know from him why, at the beginning, when he was a boy, he had thought himself an artist. ‘For what reason did you think you were an artist, Pat? Did you know anyone else who was an artist?’ But Pat would never discuss such questions. He shrugged and said something evasive like, ‘Why is anyone anything, Freddy? You tell me. You’re the psychiatrist. You should know.’ Freddy realised he would need a more oblique approach if his enquiries were to get him anywhere with Pat. Pat liked to work and remained a workman at heart all his life, even at the height of his international fame. Nothing shifted him from that. He didn’t care why things were as they were. He was not an intellectual but was intuitive and unquestioning in the exercise of his vocation. The source of his inspiration and his desire to paint were a mystery to him and he was happy to leave it at that.
After he located the subject of his own material, he became clearer about what it was that he valued in others. He reserved his mature admiration for a select few of the naive artists and thought of himself as one of them. ‘The untutored eye’ remained his favourite and most often repeated phrase. And when he heard the work of the naive painters criticised for its lack of sophistication he would say, ‘It’s their craft not their vision that’s naive.’ It was one of the few perceptions about art I ever heard him articulate. He gave art no thought. It was there for him. And he didn’t think his opinions should matter to other people, but only his art. The depth of such deceptive simplicities was often missed by more tutored minds. But Pat had no desire to understand, he just wanted to do. When he was working he was happy and was impatient with questions of motive and theory. He and Freddy were wary of each other and never became friends. Freddy treated him, in many ways, as an interesting case study, and naturally Pat was sensitive to the implied condescension of this.
Like Pat, Freddy was born in Australia, but in everything else he was Pat’s opposite. Freddy came from a cultured and very wealthy family. His father, a mining engineer, died in Paraguay when Freddy was seven. His mother, a strikingly beautiful woman, was a fine pianist and became, as Vera Henning, a much-sought-after accompanist on the international concert circuit. She had inherited a fortune of her own from her father, a Geelong wool merchant. Freddy moved with his mother freely around the world in society from the time he was a young boy until he went to school in England. His ideas about art were inseparable from his ideas about politics. Europe was his source for both. He would say in his quietly insistent voice to anyone who disagreed with him, ‘You can’t espouse the conservative in art in our time without espousing fascism.’ He met with no counter-arguments to this from the members of our little group, for whom to be a modernist in art was to be radically left wing in politics. In this we were perfect conformists. Pat was the exception. He didn’t know what Freddy was talking about and couldn’t have cared less. Pat used to say, ‘Freddy talks. I paint.’
For a time Freddy was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Australia. A visit to Moscow in 1957 cured him.
What interested Freddy most deeply and most persistently throughout his life was understanding human motivation and the processes by which that understanding might be acquired. He was analysed in London by Wilhelm Stekel, a pupil of Freud’s who’d had a falling-out with the master. Freddy believed that one day science would acquire the means to prove that the basic theoretical assumptions of psychoanalysis were correct. The highest post he held during his career in Australia was Medical Superintendent of the Sandy Heights Mental Facility, at the time Melbourne’s largest mental hospital. On his appointment to the post he was charged by the state government with bringing about cultural change in the area of mental illness. Freddy quickly discovered that his masters, being politicians with their eyes fixed on the next election, wanted results within months. He told them two generations and a great deal of money would be needed for the kind of cultural change they envisaged. It was a famous public row and dragged on unhappily for a number of years before Freddy tired of it and resigned. After Sandy Heights he worked as a private consultant. He was always living in hope of meeting interesting patients, but was usually disappointed.
And yet for all his frequent boasts that his was a professional and a scientific approach to the understanding of human behaviour, for Freddy, in a deeply private way, our lives remained poetic, the web of our motives a kind of shifting of clouds forming and re-forming, vague shadowy dawns and romantic sunsets, the tragedy of storms and the merciless in our souls. He was in awe of the wonder of it all and strove rigorously to make systematic sense of it. But he could never quite hold his faith in any system and always referred to himself as a failure. Indeed he was in thrall to a morbid fascination with failure and believed himself fated never to escape the traps set for him by this particular demon. Stekel, his analyst, set the pattern and committed suicide in 1940.