Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  When he died in 1985, his wife Margaret still retained her allegiance to Catholicism. Although Doug was an agnostic, his funeral was at an Anglican church in St Ives, the suburb where the Stewarts lived. It was a disappointing farewell. Not much was said about Douglas Stewart, the fine poet, and friend and benefactor of so many writers. Instead there was a long evangelical harangue. Doug would have hated it.

  The 1969 edition of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems has an introduction by Sir Herbert Read, the English literary critic, where he includes Webb in the front rank of twentieth century poets, at the level of Rilke, Eliot and Pasternak. This assessment contrasted with Webb’s demeaning personal circumstances, as an inmate of mental hospitals for most of his adult life.

  Lyn Riddett, whom I knew at university through Les Murray’s Newman Society friends, knew two nuns who used to see Webb at Sydney’s Callan Park Mental Hospital. In about 1966 she suggested we visit him. I went with the two nuns and Lyn, and also our mutual friend Robyn Read (who had married John Hamilton, after I introduced her to John at Les Murray’s wedding). As we were ushered into the visitors’ room, we were met by a shambling, disoriented man, who looked twenty years older than he was.

  I could hardly believe this was the well-known poet. I had imagined someone who was neatly dressed, a bit depressed, and sat in a hospital room writing poems – not this wild and disorderly man with a face disfigured by eczema, which he continually rubbed, and carrying a string bag, where he kept his few possessions. Confused and barely able to maintain a coherent conversation, he rambled from anti-communism to Catholic piety, with frequent references to ‘Our Lady’ – perhaps to show respect for the nuns.

  He seemed unsure who we were. After about half an hour he turned to me with a baleful look and asked, ‘Are you Geoffrey Lehmann?’ He then recited a couple of lines of my poetry, which he thought ‘very beautiful’:

  … all through your verse there blows

  A gracious, clean, colonial innocence.

  These were some lines I had written about the poetry of JAR McKellar. After that, I was a fan of Webb’s for life. As we were leaving, the nuns produced some bananas from a bag. They handed them to him. With enormous courtesy – he was always very courteous – Frank said: ‘Thank you kindly, sisters. I much appreciate it. Like the animals at the zoo.’

  This first meeting was followed by other visits in the Kaf-kaesque visitors’ room. At these later meetings Webb’s condition was hardly improved, except that he now recognised us. There was activity among the patients – what Webb described in a poem about Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital as ‘our droll old men … darting constantly’. When there was a scuffle, Webb jumped up and separated the antagonists. Inmates in an adjoining room, locked away from the visitors, hoisted their heads above a high wooden partition, and peered in through the glass divider. Our little group bought a transistor radio for Frank, so he could listen to classical music. He was devoted to Bruckner’s symphonies. The radio did not last long in his string bag, and was stolen.

  Webb wrote some of his best poems in mental hospitals in England. A grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1958 brought him back to Australia and he wrote much less. The conditions in Australian mental institutions were such that there were periods when he was unable to write anything at all.

  The visits with my friends and the nuns ceased. A year or so later I called on Webb by myself. I knocked apprehensively on the door of his ward and asked to see him. Frank appeared. His eczema had disappeared. Even more surprising, he said to the male nurse, ‘I’d like to go for a walk outside with my friend’. For an hour or so we walked in the grounds, talking about poetry. He referred to a recent book of a young Australian poet and asked what I thought about it. ‘He is a much better poet than me’, Frank said with characteristic humility.

  It was an awkward question. The book had a poem about a poet in a mental hospital. The poem presented the poet as a heroic figure. But it had a phrase ‘the defeated poet’ and mentioned the poet’s string bag. I replied to Frank’s question evasively. Realising my embarrassment, Frank quickly said, ‘Of course I have not read all the poems in the book’.

  Standing under some trees, there was a sprinkle of rain. Webb reached out his hand to feel the rain-drops: ‘I’ll record this in my memoir, if I ever write one’.

  A year or so later I heard he was at a mental hospital in Orange. I drove to Orange and called in at the hospital. I found he had transferred to yet another institution in Victoria. This may be when he was befriended by the poet and doctor Kel Semmens. The hospital authorities had been surprised when Semmens proposed a visit. Webb is a hopeless case, they said: he just sits in a rocking chair on the veranda, rocking and talking to himself all day. Frank later told Semmens: ‘The only way I can stay sane in this awful place is in this chair, reciting all the poetry I know’. (My informant: Jamie Grant.)

  Frank died at Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney in 1973, of a coronary occlusion. He was aged forty-eight, four years younger than his pianist father Clarence was, when he died as an inmate of Callan Park in 1945. Frank was then twenty-one.

  In The Gene: An Intimate History Siddhartha Mukherjee has written of the genomic origin of schizophrenia. The immune response region of the genome (the MHC region, ‘a gene mapper’s nightmare’) is involved in coding a protein that clears up cellular debris. This protein also edits and trims synapses in the brain. ‘Good’ editing during adolescence is necessary, but ‘overpruning’ in one’s twenties leads to schizophrenia.

  Francis Webb’s personal history follows Mukherjee’s account exactly. Frank was an outstanding school athlete, came second in English in the state-wide New South Wales Leaving Certificate, was a flight sergeant in the Royal Australian Air Force when he was demobilised at age twenty-one, and became engaged to a young woman in Canada. His delusions and episodes, such as breaking a shop window, then began. The Frank I knew in his lucid intervals was protective (towards other patients), friendly, discreet, loyal and ironic. He had a nobility of character. This was the real Frank.

  A profile of the seventy-two-year-old Robert Graves, with his unruly mane of silver hair, like a Roman emperor on a medallion, appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald in October 1967, on the day of his arrival in Australia. He was in Australia to promote his translation of the Rubaiyat and to read his translation the following night to a large audience at the Sydney Town Hall. A couple of days later there was a short news story about the disappearance of his briefcase at a party after the reading, and its recovery. The disappearing briefcase was also news on the morning radio.

  I had given Graves’s Collected Poems to Les Murray for his twenty-first birthday. I was part of a small group – Geoff Mill, Sally McInerney and Stephen Wilson – sitting near the front at the Town Hall, looking up at Graves, tall and craggy, clothed in black and purple, reading from his translation. Geoff Mill proposed we throw a party for Graves in the Sutherland Street house.

  Geoff was an imposing, handsome man, and after the reading we went backstage and he quickly convinced Graves a party with some poets was a good idea. Within half an hour fifty or more young people were crammed into the small terrace house – we must have made phone calls to round them up – and I had brought in a supply of cheap wine and beer. Not long afterwards the great poet arrived with his Sydney relatives.

  Graves was anxious about his briefcase. It contained drafts of his translations he was planning to sell to academic institutions. The party was crowded, there were people we did not know, and Geoff offered to mind the briefcase. He stowed it in the back of his car. About forty minutes later, he told me he had to leave. It was an hour or so before we realised the briefcase had vanished with Geoff in his car.

  Graves was thunderstruck. I took him up to Paddington police station at about midnight. Graves and I sat before a police desk and I told them this was ‘an international incident’. Before we put the matter in their hands, I asked would they give me Geoff ’s ad
dress. It was in Collaroy and they could find it by telephoning the motor vehicle drivers’ registry. When we had the address, Graves and I drove out in my grey VW beetle and woke Geoff ’s family up at about 2 am. There was no Geoff. His wife Sarah did not know where he was.

  Graves and I drove down to Collaroy beach and found a public phone booth on the main road. I rang the police and told them the matter was now in their hands, and I put Graves on the phone, so he could satisfy himself I was speaking to police. It was now about 3 am. White rollers could be seen in the light of the street lamps, breaking coldly on the beach. Graves asked, ‘How about a swim?’

  Early next morning Geoff discovered his mistake. As he advanced across the living room of the Roseville house where Graves was staying, Graves stood, glowering, and obsessively searched the briefcase when Geoff handed it to him. Geoff had a moment of nervousness. He had not checked the contents.

  A few days later in the rain on the tarmac of the Oodnadatta airport in Central Australia, Geoff again met Graves, by a strange coincidence: ‘He must have thought I was stalking him’.

  After our meeting in the dimly lit Albert Street offices of Quadrant in 1958 I remained in touch with Jim McAuley. He took up a readership with the University of Tasmania in 1960. On one of his sporadic forays to Sydney in the 1960s Jim phoned and we had dinner at the Sutherland Street house. I decorated the table with a bowl of wisteria and azaleas from my parents’ garden. In 1969 he sent me a thank you letter after I reviewed his Surprises of the Sun favourably in the Bulletin. He asked in his letter whether an author should thank a reviewer.

  He was subject to bouts of an almost disabling pessimism. Writing in his poem ‘Explicit’, not long before his death in 1976, Jim said of the twentieth century, ‘No worse age has ever been’, and described it as ‘Murderous, lying and obscene’.

  I last saw McAuley in 1976, a few months before his death. I was aware he had terminal cancer. There was an afternoon reading of his poems to a small group at the NSW State Library. I may not have been invited, or may have been unable to come because I was caring for children. Quite by chance after the reading had finished, I was driving my Kombi Van past the library with my three children in the back. I saw Jim with Alec Hope, Leonie Kramer and Peter Coleman, walking slowly down Macquarie Street. I was unable to stop.

  We did not realise it was the start of the ‘poetry wars’ when Robert Adamson replaced Roland Robinson as president of the Poetry Society of Australia in 1968. (The ‘poetry wars’ were to run intermittently for a couple of decades, with Les Murray leading the poets labelled as ‘conservative’, and opposed by John Tranter leading the ‘generation of ’68’.) I voted for Roland at the angry Poetry Society meeting on the evening when he was stripped of the presidency. Roland and JM Couper had staged a putsch against Grace Perry a year or so earlier, and at the end of the meeting I was indifferent about what had happened.

  As I was walking out into lower George Street, a fair-haired young man on the footpath stepped forward and introduced himself. Robert Gray was in his early twenties. He called me ‘Mr Lehmann’. I was only five years older than Bob. I insisted I was Geoff.

  We began meeting, eating meals together and occasionally going to films. Bob was always well informed about films. We have maintained these habits now for fifty years. When we were younger, walking through the city – on our way to a restaurant or to call in at a bookshop – young women’s eyes fixed themselves on us as we walked past. It was Bob they were looking at. Not only his Nordic looks, but an instinctive reticence attracted their glances. They knew they could look at him and he would take no notice. Bob was unaware of their attention.

  Peter Alexander’s biography of Les Murray says Murray ‘greatly admired’ Gray’s ‘lapidary poems’, ‘but he found Gray the most elusive of men’ with last-minute dinner cancellations and mysterious absences from places where he had promised he would be. After a couple of years I realised this elusiveness was not intended personally – it was a fear of being confined. I started letting Bob initiate arrangements for a meeting. If he phoned and suggested we meet, he was punctual and reliable. Living with Dee, now his partner of forty years, has also changed Bob. For more than half a lifetime he has proved to be the most steadfast of friends.

  When we first met, he regarded himself as still an apprentice poet. He had been attending Poetry Society meetings, where Bill Hart-Smith was inscrutably neutral and Roland Robinson clashed with JM Couper, the poet and academic, who later returned to Scotland.

  Gray’s poetic interests were already strongly formed and changed mine: his insistence on the primacy of the image and his love for the work of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. I had been aware of Hart-Smith’s Williams-influenced poems – Williams with sweeteners. Williams taken straight had been too bare and unadorned. I looked at Williams again and found a classical plainness and freedom to say almost anything. He was a liberating influence on the poems I wrote over forty years called Ross’ Poems and later Spring Forest.

  I became friendly with Robert Adamson (I think) through Bob. Many years later Adamson told me he had found himself on the wrong side in the poetry wars. He was shocked by the bellig-erence of his allies; for example, he was told off for having a Les Murray volume on his desk.

  In about 1971 David Malouf suggested we organise some poetry evenings at the Cell Block theatre at East Sydney Art School (the site of the old Darlinghurst gaol that once held Henry Lawson for drunkenness and not paying child support). We held two readings.

  At the first reading, Bruce Beaver arrived early with his wife Brenda. They hid in two large cardboard boxes set up for them at the back of the theatre. Bruce was suffering from agoraphobia, and could not read. Someone installing sound equipment had cut himself. Roland Robinson’s large Alsatian dog Caesar lapped up the blood on the steps to the podium as the audience was drifting in.

  Our plan at the end of the reading was for the Beavers to climb out after the audience had dispersed. But before they could make their escape, Caesar came bounding up and sniffing at their boxes.

  Leonie Kramer (she was David’s professor) held a post- reading party at her Vaucluse house. She had a slipper orchid on a small table in the middle of her drawing room. Roland (now minus Caesar) was pointing at his feet and bending down to take off a shoe. He was telling a group of younger people he had webbed toes. Leonie was anxiously hovering nearby, out of hearing range. When Roland changed his mind and straightened up, she moved on with a look of relief.

  Michael Dransfield, already famous as a young drug poet, read at the second Cell Block evening. A few months earlier Michael had collared me and said, ‘Man … you’ve got a lot of property’. He explained how as a Tax Office employee he had ordered up my tax return to see what property I owned. Michael had misunderstood the information on the return. I did not try to disabuse him.

  The party after the second reading was at my Lindfield house. I was driving there with John Manifold and Dransfield. Michael may have been excited that John was a Manifold, from one of the great grazing families of Victoria’s Western Districts. That he was also a Communist was probably of little interest. We were at the midpoint point of the Cahill Expressway, halfway between the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. Michael asked John: ‘Where’s your property, man?’ John replied in his posh accent, a mixture of Geelong Grammar and Cambridge, ‘I don’t think poets should have property’. As Michael kept pressing him, John finally surrendered: ‘Well, I’ve got a modest house in Brisbane. At Wynnum. That’s all.’

  Biographies of Dransfield and Manifold were later written by Rodney Hall. Although they were to share a common biographer, I suspect neither had read a word of the other’s poetry.

  ‘The sonnet is a house that’s been destroyed’, David Campbell remarked later that evening as we were talking at the post- reading party. I memorised and used his sentence in a poem. David had just come through a painful divorce and had to sell a grazing property, ‘Palerang’, with a histori
c stone homestead. Michael Dransfield joined us. He immediately asked: ‘Where’s your property, man?’

  David knew and liked Michael’s poetry and was not at all taken aback: ‘Well, I’ve just sold my old property for a large profit and I’ve got a new place, quite small, a few hundred acres with a lemon orchard, and I must say I’m very happy.’

  John Manifold was one of the Cell Block readers who stayed at the Lindfield house. A tall, handsome man, he had been in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps and sprinkled his upper-class English with numerous ‘dinkums’ to remind the listener he was Australian. (I particularly like his sonnet ‘Death of Stalin’, which invokes the vastness of the Soviet Union and imagines Stalin as a fighter pilot, flying a crippled plane to a friendly aerodrome, ‘his petrol spent’, his victories blazing in the air. Wisely, Robert Gray resisted my suggestion to include this poem in Australian Poetry Since 1788. Such a blatantly Sovok piece would have done a dis-service to Manifold.)

  I took Manifold on an inspection tour of my antique roses in the former tennis court. I had also planted a young pine I could not identify. Manifold said, ‘I’ve seen that growing in China’.

  (I later saw forests of it in China. By that time I knew its name: Cunninghamia sinensis.)

  I was aware that John, like many Communist writers, had travelled widely in Eastern Bloc countries. This led to a conversation about the Communist Party. I said, ‘John, what about Hungary?’ (referring to the 1956 Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising). Manifold answered, ‘I was in Hungary six weeks after that. I can tell you they were counter-revolutionaries.’

  Bruce Dawe and John Blight (or ‘Jack’ as he was usually called) were other Cell Block readers who stayed in the Lindfield house. Bruce was an exemplary guest. I later included in Australian Poetry Since 1788 his story of watching students arrive when he was working as a young man on a university building site, and remarking to a fellow worker: ‘What lucky bastards, I wish I was one of them’.