by Martin Boyd
MARTIN Á BECKETT BOYD was born in Switzerland in 1893 into a family that was to achieve fame in the Australian arts. His brothers Merric and Penleigh, as well as Merric’s sons Arthur, Guy and David, were all to become renowned artists, while Penleigh’s son Robin became an influential architect, widely known for his book The Australian Ugliness.
After leaving school, Martin Boyd enrolled in a seminary, but he abandoned this vocation and began to train as an architect. With the outbreak of World War I, he sailed for England where he served in the Royal East Kent Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps.
Boyd eventually settled in England after the war. His first novel, Love Gods, was published in 1925, followed by The Montforts three years later.
After the international success of Lucinda Brayford in 1946 Boyd decided to return to Australia, but by 1951 he was back in London. In the coming decade he was to write the Langton Quartet: The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love and When Blackbirds Sing. In 1957 he went to Rome, where he lived and continued to write until his death in 1972.
CHRIS WOMERSLEY lives in Melbourne. He is the author of the acclaimed novels The Low Road, which won a Ned Kelly Award, and Bereft, which won the ABIA Award for literary fiction and the Indie Award for fiction. His third novel, Cairo, will be published in late 2013.
ALSO BY MARTIN BOYD
Fiction
Scandal of Spring
The Lemon Farm
The Picnic
Night of the Party
Nuns in Jeopardy
Lucinda Brayford
Such Pleasure
The Cardboard Crown
A Difficult Young Man
When Blackbirds Sing
The Tea-Time of Love: The Clarification of Miss Stilby
Under the pseudonym ‘Martin Mills’
Love Gods
Brangane: A Memoir
The Montforts
Under the pseudonym ‘Walter Beckett’
Dearest Idol
Non-fiction
Much Else in Italy: A Subjective Travel Book
Why They Walk Out: An Essay in Seven Parts
Autobiography
A Single Flame
Day of My Delight: An Anglo-Australian Memoir
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Copyright © the estate of Martin Boyd 1957
Introduction copyright © Chris Womersley 2013
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in the United Kingdom by John Murray 1957
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781922147073
Ebook ISBN: 9781922148155
Author: Boyd, Martin, 1893–1972.
Title: Outbreak of love / by Martin Boyd; introduced by Chris Womersley.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.2
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Undercover Operations
by Chris Womersley
Outbreak of Love
IN 1913 the first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was published, the Geiger counter was invented and Albert Camus was born in Algeria. Nationalist movements simmered across Eastern Europe, resulting in sporadic outbreaks of violence. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, the complicated saga of the Langtons, and their myriad familial and amorous entanglements, continued to unfold. In Outbreak of Love, the third volume of Martin Boyd’s famed quartet, the Langtons, ever determined to maintain their social status, find it increasingly difficult to set themselves above the concerns of ordinary folk and are dragged into the fast-moving tide of world events.
In the preceding volume, A Difficult Young Man, the narrator Guy Langton observes with laconic precision that ‘the repeated patterns of heredity’ are one of the defining aspects of his life. Indeed, the actions that propel the plot of Outbreak of Love have their antecedents in the adventures of Alice and Austin Langton in the late nineteenth century, recounted in the series’ opening salvo, The Cardboard Crown, and continue with Guy’s brother Dominic (the titular Difficult Young Man of the second volume) running away with another man’s betrothed, ‘the greatest social fiasco Melbourne had ever known’.
The Langton Quartet is an indispensable glimpse of the social and political mores of upper-middle-class Melburnians in the years leading to World War I. The characters are conflicted about their origins, where they belong and against which yardstick they are to measure themselves. And such ambivalence extends to the novel itself. The quartet was published between 1952 and 1962. While the work bears the unmistakeable hallmarks of modernism, Guy Langton is sceptical of the worth of the artistic movement that defined the twentieth century. ‘At the risk of making this party as tiresomely elusive as Kafka’s castle…’ he begins one chapter.
Elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s maxim that houses are machines for living is treated with derision. In yet another scene, a discussion of the painter Brian’s latest work, Cynthia Langton urges the artist to experiment a little more. ‘It was surprising,’ Guy notes sardonically of this exchange, ‘how soon in that remote place she had caught the atmosphere that was to corrode the soul of her generation.’
The place names are familiar (Collins Street, Fitzroy Gardens, Brighton) but the world of the Anglo-Australian upper-middle classes, and the complications that arise from their love affairs and quests for social advancement, today feel remote. Despite this, many of the observations that Martin Boyd gave his characters remain as wise and amusing a century later. And while it is a mistake to assume the words of fictional characters always reflect the thoughts of their creators, some of these seem irresistibly the result of Boyd’s battle for recognition in Australia. (His 1946 novel, Lucinda Brayford, had sold handsomely overseas, but received scant attention at home.) ‘A single success is a mischievous thing,’ Russell Lockwood warns, but ‘without repetition, it’s worse than failure.’
Another of the recurring themes in the Langton novels is Anglo-Australians’ suspicion of their inherent social inferiority to the old world of Great Britain and Europe. As noted in A Difficult Young Man, the Langtons, emblematic of their class, suffer the ‘family disease of always wanting to be somewhere else’ and have inadvertently inflicted upon Guy the dilemma of not knowing where his true home might be.
Guy forgives the behaviours of certain characters by explaining that they had ‘no basic reality. They spent their time trying to fit their lives to a pattern which existed on the other side of the world, the original of which most of them had never seen.’ It is no accident that A. A. Phillips’ essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’, in which he named and explicated this colonial inferiority complex, was published in 1950, two years before the first Langton novel appeared.
Published in 1957—two years after the preceding Langton volume, A Difficult Young Man—Outbreak of Love more or less adheres to the slightly awkward narrative model established by its predecessors. The story is told by Guy Langton, and once again it centres on key members of his large family.
How Guy manages to access and record the intimate moments of his relatives is never explained, but we take the veracity of the account for granted.
Guy is articled to a Melbourne architect and lives with his unmarried Aunt Mildred, rather than with his parents at the ramshackle family estate at Westhill, some distance from the city. Mildred has an unhealthy, possessive relationship with young Guy. ‘Like most unmarried ladies,’ Guy notes with the pomposity of youth, ‘she sought compensation in excessive loyalty to her family as a whole.’
Mildred’s loyalty assumes a vaguely sinister complexion when threatened by Guy’s potential relationships with girls, most notably with his caustic twin cousins, Sylvia and Anthea. ‘Now you’re not to speak to the twins,’ she warns Guy as they set out to a reception given for his Uncle Wolfie to perform his latest preludes, a party which—with its coy subterfuges, extramarital attractions and social anxieties—sounds the opening motifs for all that follows.
Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume epic A Dance to the Music of Time (to which the Langton Quartet has been favourably compared), Guy Langton is content to remain in the shadows, revealing himself only to the extent that his observations of others mark him by default. In many ways he is a perfect guide: observant, droll, wise enough to understand and to forgive. The portrait he paints of his family and their milieu is clear-eyed, witty and always affectionate. ‘We can only satirise those things which part of us admires,’ Aunt Mildred observes with an uncharacteristic bolt of insight.
Although Guy’s romantic interest in his cousin Cynthia Langton is obvious, Outbreak of Love concerns not his own amorous adventures but mainly those of his Aunt Diana who, aged forty and for twenty-three years married to the lazy and boorish German émigré musician Wolfie von Flugel, falls for another man’s charms. Russell Lockwood, also forty, is an Australian recently returned from many years abroad. He is on the lookout for someone ‘of his own appreciations’, and the two begin a hesitant flirtation.
Diana thought about Russell. She talked with him more easily than with anyone she knew, although she had only seen him three times since his return. She found talking to him extremely refreshing to her mind, after a married life deprived almost entirely of mental, if not emotional, contact. She had long given up trying to reach intellectual understanding with Wolfie. In one way she understood him perfectly, as one understands a charming Labrador, which whimpers at the door to go out, or cheerfully sweeps a coffee cup on to the floor with its tail, or complacently eats up all the butter left on a low tea table.
The situation Diana finds herself in—and the decisions she must make as a result—is similar to that in which her mother, Alice, found herself a generation earlier. In this manner the family disease makes itself apparent and articulates precisely the dominant theme of the quartet: where do one’s loyalties really reside? Operating within such social strictures, love—as the title suggests—is akin to an undercover operation behind enemy lines or an illness that must be managed.
Diana and Russell conduct their delicate romance with care. There are discreet assignations and elaborate plans that are invariably frustrated. Love continues to break out in inconvenient places: Diana and Wolfie’s daughter Josie becomes engaged, and the prospective wedding further disrupts the secret lovers’ hopes for the future; Guy’s affection for Cynthia grows, causing friction with Mildred.
Meanwhile, a world away in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated and the Great War—that blood-soaked cataclysm which eradicated any vestigial beliefs in the superiority of European ‘civilisation’—darkens the horizon. By the close of this sharp-witted historical drama Australia is at war with Germany, setting the scene for the quartet’s final instalment, and Diana is forced to declare her romantic allegiances—for better or for worse.
CHAPTER ONE
Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full of unilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go and press the right button, the route is illuminated before us in electric clarity. We may go through life with no light ever shining along the unused tracts of our minds; or something, the influence of our parents or our friends, our environment or our own stupidity may cause us to press the wrong button, so that instead of reaching stations of which the names glow with history and devotion, Sèvres Babylone, Cluny, Strasbourg St Denis, we arrive only at Monge. The right button is more often pressed by some accident than by our own choice, as when a line of poetry or a glimpse through a doorway may show us where we long to go.
Adolescents, whose tracts are most sensitive to illumination, are always pressing buttons, but they do not necessarily take the train. For one thing they can seldom afford the fare. When I was about eighteen I had one of these accidental illuminations. I was walking with my parents through a museum in Rome, when we came upon a sculptured group of a faun, who with a cheerful grin was grabbing a nymph round the waist. The nymph, struggling to free herself, had a handful of the faun’s curls. Although this suggested that she had not lost her head, she had in fact lost it in the passage of the centuries, and remained only a lovely brainless body.
My parents glanced at the group and walked on. When they had turned a corner I hurried back to give it a closer inspection. It was even more candid than I had imagined, and the paganism, the innocent animalism that is in all of us, awoke with joy. The nymph had pressed the right button, and the resulting incandescence in my mind, although it faded, was never entirely extinguished, but would often glimmer, and from time to time shine with intoxicating radiance.
It was a few years later than this, that two or three people, a generation older than myself, experienced a similar illumination of the forgotten tracts of their minds. For them it was not pure joy, but almost painful, the searing light along the unused wires. It happened at a party in Melbourne towards the end of 1913. To understand why this happened we had better glance at the events which led up to this party, before we attend it.
My aunt Diana was now forty years old. She had married at seventeen Wolfie von Flugel, a musician, and she had spent twenty-three of her forty years in his moral and financial support. She did this because she loved him, but she excused herself by saying that he was an unrecognized genius. She had to support him, but she did all kinds of extra things for him, which he could easily have done for himself. On a morning a month or so before the party, she warned him at breakfast that if he ate some very hard toast he would probably break a tooth. He ate it and broke the tooth. He was very upset and said he must have it mended as soon as possible. Diana had to take his plate into the dentist in Collins Street the same afternoon. He could not take it himself as it would be embarrassing if he met a friend while he was without it. She supposed that the friends he was afraid of meeting were his young lady pupils.
Russell Lockwood was walking up Collins Street to the Melbourne Club, as Diana was coming down from the dentist’s. He also was forty years of age. She had known him as a boy, as their parents had been neighbours in St Kilda, but for the last twenty years he had been in Europe, and had only returned to Melbourne a week earlier. He had come back partly out of curiosity, to see how much his imagination had distorted his memory of his native land, and partly because, although his European life had been as successful as he had hoped, at times he felt that it was too floating, and he longed for the comfort of old association. He was not exactly ambitious, but he did like people and things of the best quality, perhaps things rather more than people, and he was a little anxious about the quantity of quality obtainable in Melbourne. He was soon thought to be very smart and all the rich hostesses tried to lure him to their houses, though he would far rather have gone to the simplest cottage if he could have found there someone with his own appreciations. He was on the lookout for people of this kind. He would like them if possible to be in the fashionable world, as that made for greater pleasure and freedom, but it was not his first consideration, as people thought.
When he wa
lked in the streets he glanced at the people he passed, looking for familiar faces, and also to see if the general ethos of the place was likely to be sympathetic to him. He saw Diana coming towards him and his attention was arrested, not so much by her looks, although at times she could look beautiful with her well-cut features and graceful bearing, as by her expression, which was patient and ironical, as she was thinking how absurd, and yet faintly amusing it was that she even had to take Wolfie’s tooth to the dentist. She did not look rich or smart, but her shoes were good, and she had some fine pearls round her neck, and he thought: “That woman is somebody,” by which he did not mean someone who had money and went to the right houses, but someone who from childhood had been accustomed to certain ways of thinking and who knew the different modes of life, and above all, whose awareness was similar to his own. This impression was immediately followed by a vague feeling of familiarity, and as quickly by recognition. When he reached her he stopped, and she glanced at him.
“Diana Langton?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, a little dazed, as she was still thinking of Wolfie. Then she exclaimed: “But it’s Russell Lockwood.”
“You remember me?”
“Of course I do. But I thought you were in Italy or somewhere.”
“I came back a few weeks ago. I’m so glad that you remember me.”
“I’d be very foolish if I didn’t. But I’m not Diana Langton. I’m married—von Flugel. Don’t you remember Wolfie?”
“Yes, I knew you most as Langton. How is Mr von Flugel?”
“He’s very well, but he’s broken a tooth.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Russell, and they laughed. “Look,” he went on after a pause, “are you doing anything now? This very minute I mean.”
“Only going home.”
“Why don’t you come and have tea with me?”
“I will. That would be lovely. Where?”