Their Brilliant Careers

by Ryan O'Neill

  Exhausted, Young continued to write poetry and began submitting her own work, all of which was met with polite rejection. Then, on the way to one of her lessons, Young caught the wrong tram by mistake and fell asleep, waking miles from her student’s home. Weeping out of frustration she pulled a sheet of music from her bag and wrote “On the Tram”, a free-verse poem that gave vent to her feelings of helplessness and despair. It was the first time she did not show her work to her husband. “On the Tram” would later become the most anthologised poem in Australian literature, yet Northerly initially declined to publish it. The poem was returned with a handwritten note from the editor, Albert Mackintosh, who declared that Young’s “verselets showed some skill, but [were] sadly too feminine for our taste, and that of our subscribers”.

  Young, furious and humiliated, almost destroyed the poem, but instead waited five months before resubmitting it, this time under her husband’s name. Within a week Mackintosh had sent her (or rather “Jack Sargent”) a letter accepting the poem, praising it for “the masculine heft of the rhythm”. “On the Tram” appeared in Northerly in September 1924. Young had only intended its publication to prove a point, but the money from the sale came just in time to prevent their eviction. Sargent was rarely at home now, preferring to spend his time drinking and exchanging gossip with Berryman and other cronies. When he did appear it was to demand money from his wife to pay the debts he had accrued with bars, restaurants and tailors.

  Now eight months pregnant, Young left home at six o’clock most mornings and returned after dark. She would make herself toast for dinner and then spend two hours writing. She knew she would be unable to work for much longer, and there appeared no prospect of her husband ever getting a job. In October 1924 an anxious Young decided to submit more of her poems under Sargent’s name, reasoning that they stood a better chance of being published if “written” by a man. Nine of these poems, including the poignant “Paper Targets”, the technically dazzling “Look at the Whales” and the hilarious “We of the Synchronised Yawns”, were accepted, bringing in enough money for Young and her husband to survive for a few months if they were careful. Unfortunately Sargent became aware of the publication of “On the Tram” in early November, when his friend Berryman congratulated him, declaring it the finest poem he had read in years. Drunk and enraged at what he saw as his wife’s duplicity, Sargent returned to their flat to confront her. In the argument that followed, Sargent struck his heavily pregnant wife hard across the face, and threw her to the floor. Shocked at his own actions, he then made clumsy attempts to comfort her, bringing her a towel to press against her bleeding mouth and stroking her hair as she sobbed. He told her that he loved her, and that he forgave her, but that she must never do anything like that again. Young waited, resignedly listening to his ramblings until the early hours of the morning when he finally fell asleep. Then she left him.

  She had no money for another place to stay, but friends from university put her up for a few days until her mother wired enough cash for a train ticket to Brisbane. Young returned to her mother’s home in Oxley, where she gave birth to a daughter, Irene, on 17 November 1924. Aubrey Montague had died in 1922, and Young’s mother told her she could stay as long as she wanted. In time Sargent learned where his wife had disappeared to, and in December he travelled to Queensland with the intention of bringing her back. Although he was careful to appear sober when he went to the Montague home, Young refused to speak with him. Sargent met the rebuff with dignity, but returned to the house that night and threw rocks at the windows, demanding he be allowed to see his wife and daughter. He was arrested and charged with being drunk and disorderly, and after spending a night in the cells was released. When he saw Young waiting outside the police station he assumed she had had a change of heart, but she returned her wedding and engagement rings to him along with the money for his train fare to Sydney. She was well aware no court would grant her a divorce, but she told him that she was no longer his wife.

  Sargent returned to Sydney and, despite his protestations of love for his daughter, began no legal process to claim her. Instead, in February 1925, he avenged himself on Young by penning a page of obscene doggerel modelled after Dorothea Mackellar’s “My Country” (1908), in which he described in explicit detail the sexual performance and preferences of his estranged wife. The loutish tone of the poem was signalled in Sargent’s adaptation of Mackellar’s title, as he removed the second, sixth and seventh letters of the last word. Sargent, with his friend Berryman’s help and encouragement, sent the poem to the families of his wife’s piano students, and to the editors of every newspaper and literary journal in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. He dimly believed that destroying Young’s reputation and sabotaging her literary ambitions would somehow result in her coming back to him, perhaps because she would have nowhere else to go. Instead he was to find himself an object of ridicule. In May 1925 the anonymously authored “Fancy of the Overflow” was circulated among the Sydney literati. The poem was brought to Sargent’s notice by Vivian Darkbloom when he visited her to request a loan. Sargent listened in growing horror as Darkbloom read the poem aloud in front of the city’s most influential editors and poets.

  The speaker of “Fancy of the Overflow” is a young prostitute, lying down, bored and contemptuous, as the ludicrous Fancy grinds away on top of her for ten verses, of which the fifth reads:

  I couldn’t hardly feel him, why did Mother Nature deal him Such a shrivelled little fellow hanging limp down there below? I wanted him to ram me but instead he cried out “Damn me! ’Tis the first time this’s happened to Fancy of the Overflow!”

  “Fancy of the Overflow” made Sargent the laughing stock of Sydney. He was expelled from the Onomatopoets and dared not show his face in public for months. In that time he became addicted to opium as well as to alcohol, and one drunken night in November 1925 he confided in Berryman his plan to travel to Queensland to kill Matilda Young. Berryman, who blamed Young for his friend’s troubles, made no attempt to dissuade him. It will never be known if Sargent was serious about his scheme. In January 1926 he was drinking in a Glebe bar with Berryman when Jim Taylor, the editor of the Western Star, complimented him on his excellent poem “On the Tram”. Taylor was perfectly sincere; he was unaware that the poem had been written by Young, but Sargent lost his temper. In the ensuing melee Berryman’s left arm was broken and Sargent was stabbed through the neck, dying within the hour.

  Sargent’s widow and baby daughter returned to Sydney for his funeral and stayed on afterwards, renting a small house in Sans Souci. Young found it impossible to resume teaching the piano, and the poems she submitted to newspapers and literary journals received no response. Albert Mackintosh, the editor of Northerly, had become aware of Young’s deception in submitting “On the Tram” and was intent on using his considerable authority to ensure she would never be published again. Moreover, during her absence from the city, Paul Berryman had turned all of her former friends against her; Young was now generally held to be responsible for Sargent’s decline and death, and no poet from the city’s schools, collectives and movements would have anything to do with her. In response, Young formed “The Truants”, a school of poets for those who refused to take part in the petty internecine quarrels of the Sydney literary world, but she was long to remain its only member. On her pension, Young’s mother was unable to support her daughter any longer and so reluctantly Young had to resort to using pseudonyms again in order to have her work appear in print. Throughout 1926 and 1927 she wrote forty-five poems under a number of pen names, including Richard Hunter, Robert Manly and Henry Paterson, all of which were published.

  Albert Mackintosh was quick to embrace this new generation of male Australian poets, dubbing them the “Sans Souci School” after the Sydney suburb where they all lived. Poems from the Sans Souci School garnered a great deal of attention and bountiful praise from reviewers and critics, leading Young to worry that she had gone too far. As long as Mackintosh and other editor
s continued to shun work she submitted under her own name, however, she felt she had no choice. Finally, in February 1928, Max Murray, editor of the Billabong, a new radical literary journal, contacted Young to commission some poems for the second issue, having been informed that “On the Tram”, a work he greatly respected, had been written by Matilda Young and not Jack Sargent. Murray was no admirer of the established literary journals, whether conservative or experimental, and after meeting Young he asked her if he could publish her first collection. Young confessed to him then that she was behind the Sans Souci School. Murray was enchanted by the deception, but Young refused his repeated requests to make it public, until May 1928. It was then that Northerly published a review of three poems that had appeared under Young’s own name in the recent Billabong. Young’s most personal verses to date, “A Lover in Fortuna” and “But Mostly Air”, with their uncompromising imagery and frank investigation of female sexual desire, were variously described as “filth” and “perverted trash”, while “Flick of the Wrist”, which the Nobel Committee would later praise as “one of the great poems of the twentieth century”, was dismissed as “the hysterical ravings of a petty, shrewish mind”. The review was written by Paul Berryman, who had recently been appointed deputy editor of Northerly.

  The Billabong of July 1928 featured a long article by Max Murray, “La Belle Dame Sans Souci”, which exposed both Young’s deception and the gullibility and misogyny of Sydney’s literary journals, with special attention paid to Northerly. Murray ridiculed the editors for being outwitted by a “mere woman” and questioned their credentials as men of letters. It was no surprise that when Young’s collection, simply titled Poems, was published the following month, it was met with savage criticism from the same journals that had originally published and praised the work it contained.

  The modernist poems in Young’s first book were devoid of kangaroos, bushmen and billabongs, instead questioning the casual sexism ingrained in Australian society and the suffocations of suburban middle-class life. Her work was calculated to alienate conservative poets, but experimentalists also disparaged Young for her insistence on accessibility rather than opacity. The most damaging review, a venomous and brutal ten-thousand-word harangue by “PB and AM”, appeared in Northerly, and its juvenile mockery upset Young more than any other. PB and AM concluded their critique:

  In her “book”, would-be poetess Mrs Sargent (notwithstanding that she calls herself Young), does nothing but complain about her dead husband (who was, it must be stated here, a great man unworthy of the slurs cast at his memory), her child (poor tot!), her country, and her life, so that one is tempted to think of her, if the present critics can be forgiven for desecrating the work of an infinitely superior artist, as a kind of Whingeing Matilda.

  She was not to learn of the fact until almost a decade later, but Young’s Poems had, at least, found admirers in England. Sydney Steele bought a copy in London, and was so dazzled by it that he destroyed his own half-finished poetry collection for being moribund and old-fashioned and began writing another, patterning it on Young’s style. Steele gave Young’s book to his friend T.S. Eliot as a Christmas gift in 1929, and the American mentioned it as one of his “Notable Poetry Books of the Year” in a column in the Sunday Times of 28 December, along with collections by W.B. Yeats, Cecil Day-Lewis and D.H. Lawrence. On Eliot’s recommendation, the foreign rights to Young’s collection were subsequently acquired by Faber & Faber, and the book appeared in England in July 1931 and in America a year later.

  In the meantime, Young continued to publish poetry exclusively in the Billabong, including “Whingeing Matilda”, a celebration of the indomitability of Australian womanhood, and “Irene”, which analyses the helpless love Young felt for her daughter. By January 1932 Max Murray and Young had become lovers; Murray proposed to her on eleven separate occasions throughout the year before Young agreed to marry. The couple wed in February 1933 but the poor state of Murray’s lungs, which had been damaged in a gas attack in France during the Great War, necessitated the family leaving Sydney for the clearer air of Katoomba. They purchased a bush property five miles from town, where Murray continued to edit the Billabong and Young wrote and spent hours tramping the property with Irene. All three were overjoyed to be away from the city. During the six years they spent in the bush, Young worked on the long sequence of anti-war poems that would become her masterpiece. “An Ecstasy of Fumbling” was inspired by her recent reading of Wilfred Owen’s work and by her husband’s anguished recollections of the war. This decade also saw Young touch upon two themes that would preoccupy her for the rest of her life: the degradation of the Australian bush and the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians.

  Young’s 1935 collection, Yarramundi, received only a single review in the Australian press, from the Modrenist, which dismissed its exploration of colonial exploitation and the ruin of the natural environment as “The Songs of a Cynical Sheila”. The collapse of the Billabong in late 1939 meant that Young and her family could no longer afford to stay on their Katoomba property, and so, with some reluctance, they returned to the city. Regrettably, the enemies they had made meant that neither Young nor her husband could find employment in the literary world. Undeterred, they moved to Melbourne, where the outbreak of the Second World War found Young writing book reviews for the Melbourne Eon, while her husband worked as a copyeditor for the local office of the oldest publishers in the country, Berkeley & Hunt.

  The 1940s were a wretched time for Young. Max Murray died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in June 1942. Although he had suffered frequent debilitating bouts of depression, and often relied on his wife to nurse him when his lung problems flared up, he had adored his “Tilda”, and theirs had been an unusually happy marriage. Young’s love for her second husband can be seen in the poems she wrote in the weeks after his death but did not publish until twenty years later, including “The Meaning of a Dream”, “The Unsaid” and, perhaps most movingly, the elegiac “Music for Broken Instruments”. Young’s loneliness after Murray’s death was exacerbated by Irene’s decision to move to Sydney to study teaching at the university. Before long, Irene was caught up in the excitement of student politics, and in Janury 1943 she joined the Australian Communist Party. Young thought of herself as a socialist, but she did not trust the communists, considering them traitors for their pact with the Nazis in 1939. Young had once been sounded out by Francis X. McVeigh, the head of the party’s literature section, on whether she might join, but she had refused McVeigh’s offers, both of membership and of taking her to bed. Young was dismayed when Irene dropped out of university in July 1943 to work as a secretary for the party’s publishing arm, Steelman Press. Irene resented her mother’s interference and stopped responding to her letters, in which Young implored her to return to her studies. In late February 1944 Young travelled to Sydney, hoping to bring Irene back with her to Melbourne. The poet waited on the steps outside her daughter’s flat for three hours before the police arrived with news of Irene’s suicide. Earlier that morning Irene had leapt from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She left a brief note apologising to her mother for what she was about to do and expressing her love for her boyfriend, despite his appalling behaviour. An autopsy later revealed that Irene was pregnant. None of her friends had any idea who the mysterious boyfriend was.

  Heartbroken, Young remained in Sydney after her daughter’s funeral. Little is known of her life from 1944 to mid-1947, except that most mornings she could be seen walking up and down on the Harbour Bridge, stopping occasionally to peer into the waters below. At some point Young became convinced that her daughter’s lover had been employed by Steelman Press. In early 1946 she was arrested twice: the first time for breaking and entering the offices of the Australian Communist Party’s literature section, and the second for vandalism and theft, when it was discovered she had ripped out and stolen a page from the 14 December 1917 edition of the long-defunct Clarion held at the National Library of Australia’s vast archives. Young’
s mother scraped together the money to pay her fines, and Young was released back into obscurity.

  By 1947 interest in Young’s poetry had been rekindled with the publication of half a dozen articles by Peter Darkbloom. Some critics believed Young was dead, but the appearance of a new poem, the bleak, cryptic “Prologue to the Death of a Pig: 1 November 1946”, in Lone Hand in July 1947 announced her return to the world of letters. There followed the most successful period of Young’s career. Her greatest enemies, Paul Berryman and Albert Mackintosh, had been humiliated by their part in the Donald Chapman affair and were no longer taken seriously. A new generation of editors was in charge of literary journals and, to Young’s surprise, they were eager to publish her work. From 1948 to 1953 over a hundred new poems by Young appeared in Sydney’s journals, magazines and newspapers, many of which were collected in The Fallacies (1954). This, Young’s third and longest collection, received a handful of positive reviews in Australia but was hailed as a work of genius in England, America, France and Sweden, where it was translated by Tomas Tranströmer. Over the years, Young’s poetry had attracted numerous supporters overseas, including Albert Camus, Dylan Thomas, and Marianne Moore, even as Young was still relatively unknown at home.