Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  Bob may have had an altruistic motive for bringing me in as his co-editor. After my marriage break-up I had become disen-chanted with the literary world. He would ask what poems I was writing and made a point of introducing me to younger poets. One of these was Jamie Grant, who stayed at the Lindfield house for several weeks when he moved to Sydney, and later worked with Bob in a bookshop.

  Perhaps because Grant is an acerbic critic, his outstanding body of work has been scandalously neglected. Many of his poems use complicated verse forms. His ‘Altercation by Owl-Light’, about rescuing an owl from a swimming pool, employs the extraordinary verse form of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Over Sir John’s hill’. ‘DFC’, another exceptional poem, is about Jamie’s father landing his flying boat in the dark in a crater lake during World War II.

  My interest in poetry revived in the early 2000s. Two things may have helped. My column on tax had become a chore: each week I had to identify a topic and manufacture outrage or enthusiasm. The Australian decided to stop my column.

  In 2002, following an annual prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had a radical prostatectomy. Shortly after the operation I wrote ‘Self Portrait at 62’ recording my ‘altered body map’. I had begun writing poetry again, longer poems made up of small snippets, influenced by Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Unlike Stevens’s poems, these were autobiographical – mosaic poems about myself, my children and grandchildren.

  The experience of cancer was slightly unreal – I had difficulty taking it seriously – as though I was a spectator.

  In July 2008 I retired from my job as tax counsel with the large accounting firm where I had worked since 1988. Bob Gray and I began work on our third poetry anthology. A couple of years later it acquired the title Australian Poetry Since 1788. We agreed our roles would be reversed. I would find new material and Bob would be the critic. We would re-use much of our 1991 anthology where Bob had been the main editor.

  Australian poetry had changed since our 1991 anthology and we had changed. Perhaps to correct my conservative bias – I am a more conservative poet than Bob – I was keen to explore types of poetry we had not considered for our 1991 anthology. Reflecting a generational change among writers, our anthology has a pre-ponderance of women among poets born after the mid-1950s.

  Bob and I met one or two days a week for a couple of years. Our first draft of about 1600 pages had to be cut back. We had a rule that we were collecting poems, not representing poets. The naive poet ‘Bellerive’ was a beneficiary of this. Bellerive has been regarded as an oddity and does not appear in any other ‘serious’ anthology of Australian poetry. A committee of poetry experts would have considered themselves daring to include even two or three Bellerive poems in a collection as long as ours. Because I liked them, I initially chose fifteen Bellerive poems. I expected Bob to be apoplectic (in his own quiet way). Much to my surprise, he was not, and we agreed on fourteen.

  Including poets such as Bellerive and the Dadaist Jas H Duke meant we had to leave out poets with more established reputations. One of these was Kenneth Mackenzie. I vetoed Mackenzie for the 1991 anthology, although Bob had been an admirer. This time I wrote a long biography of Mackenzie and selected half a dozen of his poems. A few months later, during one of our periodic culls, Bob said one day, ‘I think Mackenzie has to go, the way he stands’.

  The voice in Mackenzie’s poems was grey and poetically conventional. Bellerive’s voice was economical and uniquely strange, full of the life around him. Comparing the two voices, we had to choose Bellerive, who had little education and manned his own variety goods stand at Melbourne’s Victoria Markets for many years.

  One of the pleasures of preparing the anthology came towards the end, when I met with Barry Humphries in his Sydney apartment to discuss our selection of his poems. I wanted to delete a verse from some vers d’occasion which referred to the launching of an art exhibition. We sat across a low table, each with a copy of his Neglected Poems. Barry was happy with my suggested changes, and wanted several further small changes in other poems. We recorded these in our copies of Neglected Poems, then had afternoon tea and talked about the divorces of some mutual friends.

  By the time the anthology went to press, it had shrunk to 1086 pages (still twice as long as any previous Australian poetry anthology). Nonetheless, we have been criticised for our ‘omissions’. Some uncritically ‘representative’ Australian anthologies create the impression that Australian poetry is a provincial backwater. Our anthology was cited as one of The Economist ’s books of 2011.

  I have no wish to live in the suburb where I grew up. But I have a recurring dream about ruined houses. I am walking through derelict rooms with collapsed ceilings, bits of plaster scattered on the floor, and torn drapes hanging across windows filmed with dust. Even when there is no resemblance, I sense these places are the McMahons Point houses. In other dreams they have been restored and I am living in ‘Fifty-three’, with its grand staircase and doors with yellow cut-glass handles, the house where we never lived.

  The painter Peter Kingston is a long-term McMahons Point resident. I have known Peter’s partner Jan Corke for almost fifty years. She sometimes reminds me of a blue velvet jacket I bought not long after I married Gail. Jan liked my jacket. Gail did not. Jan’s and my generation of the early 1960s was strangely unpolitical. Vietnam and feminism were yet to happen. Women wore floral dresses and young men acquired a taste for corduroy, which continued with me into the 1980s when I bought my blue velvet coat.

  I wrote a poem for Jan which she seems to like:

  Men always send roses

  To girls with long noses.

  To have freckles on one’s back

  Takes quite a knack.

  Gail came of age as the 1960s were ending, taking part in anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations (but having no sympathy, she tells me, for those who shouted ‘Victory for the NLF’ – the Viet Cong). As a Queensland University student, she was a member of a feminist collective and wrote for the early feminist newspaper Mejane.

  Then in 1972, after backpacking by herself on $3 a day around Indonesia and Malaysia, wearing hotpants, she won a scholarship to Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Although she was the only non-Indian student on the campus, JNU was international in a way that Queensland University was not. Top American academics visited. Gail met Margaret Mead and Gloria Steinem at JNU during her four-and-a-half years in India. Indians were interested in ideas in a way Australians were not.

  In the late 1970s, she was a tutor at the University of New South Wales and completing her PhD. Her mother also died at this time. And one night we met at a party.

  She was serious where I was flippant, ordered where I was haphazard. As part of getting to know her, I read her thesis about women and the early twentieth century nationalist movement in India. Its language reflects the academic discourse of the 1970s, a style I was not sympathetic to. But I was attracted to the toughness and objectivity of her argument and an image at its centre.

  The female nationalists marched with the men in public protests. Because they were women they gave credibility and respectability to the marches. The men needed them. But the women marched together in a group as though they were still in purdah. They were not treated as equals. Nor did they share in the fruits of political recognition when it came.

  When Gail moved into the Lindfield house she brought with her a large library of books about sociology and Indian political history, as well as novels and poetry. I had a bohemian arrangement of bricks and boards along the hallway. Gail ordered in Scandinavian bookshelves, which I secured with an electric drill to the walls of a room we set aside for a library.

  Apart from the new bathroom, the house had an air of decrepitude. I had a cedar dining table bought from the Salvation Army, but only an odd assortment of broken-down chairs to set around it. Gail’s bentwood chairs from her grandmother Pearson’s breakfast room became our d
ining room chairs. Gail resolved to replace the old and shabby blinds and cheap cotton Japanese rugs I had thrown down on top of June Read’s red carpets, which were now threadbare.

  Only one of my ancestors had been to a university. All four of her grandparents had a tertiary education. Both grandfathers had headed the Presbyterian Church in Queensland as Moderators General at different times.

  The Pearson grandparents’ house – a Queenslander on poles

  – on a hill in the Brisbane suburb of Greenslopes, was full of nooks not dusted for years, coats hanging on a hook behind a door, books piled on a floor. Its three hallways, five bedrooms, and numerous rooms and verandas housed four children, a billiard table and an old pedal organ on a single level. The children (Gail’s father and his three sisters) played tennis on the tennis court. Under the house, their father had a collection of tools and blacksmithing equipment for shoeing the two or three horses that grazed on his hillside.

  Breakfast was in the breakfast room. Midday and evening meals were in the dining room at a table always covered with white damask. Despite its many rooms the Greenslopes house had only one bathroom and a spare toilet under the house for emergencies. Six people in the house meant a strict schedule and time limits for morning showers.

  The Pearsons came from the New England plateau, where they had lived for generations, slowly accumulating assets and education. (They were unaware they had seven convicts among their ancestors.) This orderly transmission of discipline and assets from generation to generation was foreign to me, with my motley family history.

  Gail’s maternal grandparents, the Ramsays, were Scottish and equally disciplined. Her grandmother, Joanne Ramsay, was a Scottish Master of Arts, edited the Presbyterian Outlook, and wore stylish clothes. She had ‘presence’. Unlike Grandmother Pearson who had an aloof, speculative mind, Mrs Ramsay was always ordering the children about, and blew bubbles in the bath when Gail and her sisters bathed there.

  Ken, Gail’s father, was a young doctor in his mid-twenties when he married Rowena Ramsay, a special needs teacher, who taught the blind, or deaf and dumb children. The young couple moved to Maryborough for a hospital job. Ken was soon asked to join a Maryborough medical practice and bought a house in John Street, a Queenslander, that had two sets of steps descending at the front in a half ‘V’. Ken and Rowena soon had five children.

  They played in a long paddock of a backyard with banana palms and four varieties of mango trees. The girls became friendly with Jack Blight’s girls, who lived over the back fence. ( Jack’s garden had a red flowering Eucalyptus ficifolia which he told me about on his visits to Sydney.) Gail liked riding Sheba, a good- natured grey, and swam twice a day – before and after school – in the town swimming pool, riding there by bicycle.

  The children were sent off to Sunday school, but Ken and Rowena became infrequent church attenders. On Sunday afternoons the parents and friends played tennis and their children looked on. At the end of the day the children were allowed onto the court. This seemed like ‘an Edwardian summer that would never end’, and Gail imagined the parents would still be there when she grew up and moved away.

  She got on well with other girls at Maryborough Girls’ High School, but felt she was ‘different’. With her accent she was asked if she was English or ‘from Victoria’. Boarding at Somerville House in Brisbane in her last two school years, she formed her first deep friendships: Judith Wright’s daughter Meredith McKinney (Meredith later did the Penguin translation of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book); Judith McKay (later a curator, and author of books, including a monograph on the sculptor Daphne Mayo, who travelled with Lloyd Rees to Italy and later broke off their engagement); and Rosemary Moon and Yvonne Grant, who later moved to Sydney.

  Rowena contracted the autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis. Gail was back in Australia and teaching at the University of New South Wales when Rowena had an unexpected crisis. She was alone and had died by the time Ken came home from work. Within days of her death he abandoned the practice. The family house, then the farm were sold and he became head of emergency at a city hospital. The ordered world of Gail’s childhood fell apart, as though it had never existed.

  In photographs of our wedding at the registry office, we look as though we are in our late twenties: Gail in her red and yellow sari and I in a light-coloured suit with a red tie, both of us cheerful and hopeful, with Paul Delprat and Gail’s sister Deborah as witnesses.

  After Nicholas was born, Gail began a law course. She is now a law professor and author of Financial Services Law and Compliance, published by Cambridge University Press, and co-author of two texts on consumer law. If she had not taken her decade-long detour through Indian history, we would not have met when we did. I regret not knowing Rowena. In her photographs she has a look of vulnerable innocence.

  Gail’s sisters live in Queensland and each week she has long telephone conversations with them. She travels more than I do – she is president of the International Consumer Law Association – and every couple of years returns to India. She likes the music I like – Lutheran church music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and Morton Feldman’s 1979 string quartet – but does not share my taste for Conlon Nancarrow’s frenetic player piano pieces or for Zappa.

  We often read the same books. After a few weeks, a book that is on the floor by one side of the bed changes sides. At night I am usually the last to fall asleep. I take what she is reading, remove her glasses and she briefly stirs as I switch off her bed lamp.

  In a recent dream I am sitting in a cafeteria, hundreds of us at small tables, and Gail is finding her way among the tables, looking around. I stand up and wave. The dream re-enacts the many times we arrange to meet at public functions. There is a press of people, we see each other and our faces light up. This has been happening now for thirty-seven years.

  BROTHER AND SISTER

  In my twenties and sitting in a crowded train, late one afternoon coming home after work, I sneezed. My sister, sitting several rows ahead, recognised my sneeze and turned around. We greeted each other, and later walked home together to the Gordon house.

  Diana used to tell me, ‘I’m the practical one’. This was not a boast. Sometimes there may have been an edge of desperation to the statement. She would have preferred to be a person like her mother, who did not have to make the hard decisions.

  Steven Pinker explained in his 2005 debate with Elizabeth Spelke:

  In the condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, girls in utero are subjected to an increased dose of androgens, which is neutralized postnatally. But when they grow up they have male-typical toy preferences – trucks and guns – compared to other girls, male-typical play patterns, more competitiveness, less cooperativeness, and male-typical occupational preferences.

  As a child my sister did not display male toy preferences. My father took many photographs of her at her solitary girlish tea parties, sitting at the cream-coloured child’s table he made for her, on small cream-coloured chairs which he painted with Minnie Mouse figures. But Pinker’s description of the increased dose of androgens reminds me of my sister when we were children: her aggression and competitiveness.

  I was aware of her growth spurt when she was ten and grew like Alice in Wonderland and towered over her classmates. Without any understanding of her condition – I was told nothing – in my child’s mind she was somehow not a girl.

  After her adrenal glands were removed, she had to take artificial cortisone for the rest of her life. She stopped growing and had a longer than normal trunk and slightly short legs. She looked like a normal woman, although stocky. But my childish image of her as not wholly a woman persisted – it was not something I could erase. Diana and I saw each other once at a bistro. I was meeting friends for lunch. I must have shrunk away from her. She said, ‘You’re avoiding me’. I denied this. But what she said was true.

  I inherited only one of the genes, of which she had two. I came within the spectrum of normality. She did n
ot. A more masculine brother may have been able to cajole the woman in her and make her feel protected. My attitude was reprehensible. But it was imprinted in childhood and reciprocated. For my sister, I was not wholly a man. Diana and my mother tried to get me to wear a back brace when I was a teenager – some strips of leather with metal buckles. They were worried by my tendency to stoop.

  Diana was attracted to manly men, and I think may have fallen in love a few times – at a distance – but it was not something she discussed. She was thirty-two when our father died. She had lost the only man in her life and dedicated herself to caring for our mother. If I had been a brother who made her feel protected, she would have appreciated this. But nothing would have changed. For the fifteen years that they lived together until Iris’s death, she was the man of the house.

  After the split with Gail, she rarely saw the children. I took them once or twice to meet her in Hyde Park. The older children tried phoning her, but she could not sustain a conversation for very long. The androgens in utero may have left her lacking the skills to entertain younger people, remembering birthdays and taking them on jaunts. Perhaps she did not want to. I belonged to the childhood when she was a normal little girl and her body had not been tampered with. She wanted to see me and not my children.

  I continued seeing her once a week, sometimes once a fortnight, for lunch in the city. I let Diana choose the venues for our lunches. They were take-away food shops where we could also sit, and served food that did not make her sick. Diana suffered from food allergies and sudden illnesses, perhaps from the cortisone. She tried Chinese herbal medicines. At one point she was on two diets at once. I said, ‘Diana this is ridiculous. Your two diets may be cancelling each other out.’

  It is hard to remember what we talked about during our many lunches over more than fifteen years. I do remember telling her about searching for a commercial-grade orange juicer, with a revolving stainless steel basket. I tracked one down at a restaurant supplies shop. I was now making orange juice at home instead of buying it on my way to work. It would pay for itself in a year. Diana said, ‘I hope you are drinking the pulp’.