by Ryan O'Neill
Stephen felt little grief when, in August 1948, Robert Pennington drowned after being washed overboard in a storm off Cape Conran. Within the month Stephen and his mother left Eden and moved to the Sydney suburb of Point Piper. Stephen was dispatched to Calvin Grammar, an exclusive boys’ boarding school; it was only then that he grasped the fact that his family was rich, despite his father’s miserly ways. At school, Stephen showed great promise in English and his lifelong love of history was kindled by reading Naomi Plume’s popular abridgements A Child’s Parallel Lives by Plutarch and A Child’s Secret History by Procopius (both 1947). In his second year at the school, and every year thereafter, Stephen won the Addison Tiller Prize, a writing award named after his school’s most famous alumnus, for his essays on Australian history and literature.
Stephen’s grandfather, whom he had never met, died in 1949, leaving a substantial bequest to his only child, Eve Pennington. Not long after, Eve reverted to her maiden name of Forester and soon became a noted figure in Sydney’s social scene, taking up where Vivian Darkbloom had left off on her departure for America the previous year. Eve seldom replied to Stephen’s letters and never visited him during term time, though the school was only a short walk from their home. Unhappy and lonely, Stephen begged his mother to allow him to become a day pupil, but she refused. Stephen spent his sixteenth birthday, which his mother had forgotten, in the school library. It was there that he came across Alexander Fernsby’s The Bloodshot Chameleon (1949). This novel, Fernsby’s fifth, tells the story of Terry Finnegan, a self-educated drifter working on a trawler in the waters off Broome in Western Australia. At the beginning of the novel, Finnegan considers himself to be a chameleon, able to adapt perfectly to his surroundings, whether a working-class pub or a society cocktail party. Ultimately, his experiences in Broome, from falling in love with a married woman to almost killing a man in a bar brawl, change him, and when he returns to Sydney he feels that he can no longer fit in there, or anywhere. He has become an outcast.
Stephen read the short novel in one morning; the character of the fascinating, feckless Finnegan so impressed him that he went to a nearby bookshop to seek out Fernsby’s other novels: Broken Sunlight (1925), The King Died and Then the Queen Died of Grief (1928), Today, Tonight, Tomorrow (1933) and The Square Circle (1934). After reading all four books in one sleepless weekend, Stephen wrote a long letter to Fernsby, care of the novelist’s publisher, pouring out his feelings of isolation and resentment. When months passed and no reply came, Stephen assumed the letter had gone astray, or the writer did not care to answer it. Stephen spent the next term rereading Fernsby’s novels, and much of his free time scouring bookshops for back issues of literary magazines containing Fernsby’s short fiction, which was at that time uncollected. Then, in September 1952 Stephen received a letter with a London postmark. He presumed it was from an English book dealer he had contacted to enquire about the price of a signed first edition of The Bloodshot Chameleon, but found instead that it was from Alexander Fernsby himself. The author apologised for the delay in replying; he had been travelling in Africa and Europe and Stephen’s letter had finally caught up with him in England. He offered sympathy and counsel, encouraging the young man to write, and to get away from his family and school as fast as he could. Echoing one of his novels, Fernsby concluded by telling Stephen, “Like me, you’re a circle. Don’t let them turn you into a square.” Stephen carefully preserved the letter in one of his history books, and years later had it framed and hung over his desk when he commenced his biography of Fernsby.
A month after the delivery of the Fernsby letter, Stephen’s mother was killed in a car accident; Eve Forester had crashed her Auburn 851 Speedster into a lamppost as she raced home drunk from a party. Somewhat to his surprise, Stephen found himself stricken by her loss. Her funeral was attended by the cream of Sydney society. Stephen did not know any of the mourners, and during the service overheard a couple arguing about who the young man in the front row was; Eve had told everyone she was childless. For his last year of school, Stephen became a day pupil and lived in the large house he had inherited, keeping on his mother’s cook and maid to look after the place. Inspired by Fernsby, he had determined to become a writer, and that summer he began scores of short stories and poems but was unable to finish any of them.
In 1953 Pennington began studying history and English literature at the University of Sydney, consistently achieving the top marks in his year. He continued to write poetry and even began a novel, but it became painfully obvious to him that he did not have the imaginative gift for fiction, and he decided instead to become a biographer. He asked his fellow students innumerable questions, amassing information to write brief, biographical outlines. Pennington’s relationship with his first girlfriend was blighted when she happened upon her file, which recorded everything from her father’s nearsightedness, to her mother’s birthplace, to her own bra size. Despite this, Pennington was to continue his practice of writing capsule biographies of the many people he encountered throughout his life; his posthumously published three-volume Biographical Sketches 1953–2003 (2010) contains over a thousand pen portraits of the famous and the unknown, from an encyclopaedia salesman Pennington once sat next to on a brief bus trip in London in 1966, to prominent literary figures including Robert Drewe, Lydia McGinnis, David Malouf and Claudia Gunn.
In his third year at university, during a lecture on the Napoleonic Wars, Pennington suddenly came to the realisation that he knew infinitely more about the life of Napoleon than he did about his own mother and father. He made the decision to resume the unauthorised biographies of his parents he had begun as a child, and to spend the winter break finding out more about their lives. Consequently, in July 1955 he returned to Eden for the first time since he was thirteen; he stayed in the old cottage his mother had never bothered to sell, which was now in a state of disrepair. There Pennington chanced on relics of his father – a spare pair of gloves, an oilskin jacket and sou’wester, his bank book – but of his mother there was little sign. Finally, in an old chest under his parents’ bed, Pennington found a mouldering pile of documents, including an ancient photograph of a smiling debutante whom Pennington eventually recognised as his mother, and a copy of Stephen’s birth certificate, mottled with damp, which listed “Eve Forester” as his mother and his father as “Unknown”.
As Pennington later wrote in his unpublished Autobiography of a Biographer:
Everything became clear to me at that moment; now I understood why my father hated me and the reason for the complete absence of love between my parents. The birth certificate, taken together with my father’s old bankbook, which showed a deposit of a thousand pounds in the month after I was born, could only mean that Robert Pennington had been bought off, paid to marry my mother and to raise another man’s son as his own.
Pennington was more relieved than shocked by his discovery, and also electrified by the thought that his real father might still be alive. After months of investigation, which involved questioning his few surviving relatives, Pennington believed he had identified his father: all evidence pointed to a man called Harry Valentine, who had once worked as a deckhand on Robert Pennington’s ship. But Valentine had vanished without a trace in January 1935.
Upon completing his degree in 1956, Pennington undertook a doctorate in Australian literature, although his initial proposal to study the development of the Oedipus myth in the novels of Alexander Fernsby was rejected. At this time, seven years before the publication of The Sydney Trilogy, Fernsby was still regarded as a minor writer. Instead Pennington chose Sydney Steele as his thesis topic, and it was as a direct result of his painstaking archival research that the only surviving works in Steele’s hand were uncovered: a shopping list from May 1899 and Steele’s signature on the original contract for Charlie Cobb’s Cobbers. Pennington eventually revised and extended his thesis as Sydney Steele: Australia’s Homer (1961), published by Kookaburra Books. His chapter on the so-called “Curse of Sydney S
teele” reportedly challenged the notion that Steele, and those who chose to write about him, were doomed to mishaps and adversity. (Unfortunately, the entire print run of the book perished in a mysterious explosion at the printing works before it could be distributed.) After the completion of his doctorate in 1960, Pennington was offered a lecturing post at the university but turned it down, preferring to devote his time to another biography, this time of the perennially popular short-story writer Addison Tiller.
Pennington spent a month in Coolabah and almost a year in Bath, England, researching Tiller’s life, and the resulting exhaustive 1200-page biography, completed in the remarkably short period of two years, proved hugely controversial, bringing to light Tiller’s real name and nationality, and his often unflattering opinions of his adopted country. Copies of Addison Tiller: Australia’s Chekhov (1963) were burned outside Tiller’s supposed childhood home on the edge of Coolabah during the annual Tiller festival, as the town’s mayor refuted Pennington’s claim that not only had Tiller not been born there, he had never even been to Coolabah until his burial in 1929. Pennington’s biography was credited with sparking a renewed interest in Tiller’s stories, including a television adaptation of On Our Homestead commissioned by the ABC, on which Pennington served as creative consultant.
Although not yet thirty, Stephen Pennington had established himself as the pre-eminent literary biographer in the country. By September 1963 he was considering his next project, tentatively titled Frederick Stratford: Australia’s Laurence Sterne, when he was approached by Berkeley & Hunt to write a biography of Fernsby, whose recently published The Sydney Trilogy, comprising Yellow Blue Vase, A Day Trip and The Kissing of the Cross (1963), had finally brought the writer to national and international attention. Remarkably, Pennington vacillated for almost a month over the commission. Although he still treasured Fernsby’s letter to him, and continued to regard Fernsby’s early novels as masterpieces, Pennington had been disappointed by the stark modernism of The Country of Mirrors (1959) and frankly befuddled by the stylistic and narrative experiments of The Sydney Trilogy. He was also concerned that his idealised image of Fernsby would necessarily be sacrificed in the process of writing a biography. Undoubtedly, too, his hesitation also owed something to the sheer scope of the task. Fernsby had lived an almost absurdly full life across four continents, and Pennington surmised, correctly as it turned out, that a biography of Fernsby would require more research and more time to complete than his biographies of Sydney Steele and Addison Tiller combined. When Pennington expressed his reluctance to commit to the project, he received a letter from Alexander Fernsby himself, who told him how much he had enjoyed his biography of Tiller and begged Pennington to reconsider:
I can tell you how the book will end, if that makes things any easier. According to the medicos, I have a grapefruit-sized tumour growing in my noggin, and it’s only a matter of weeks before it goes off, or whatever it is that tumours do. Alexander Fernsby: 1903 to 1963 (Or 1964 with Any Luck). There’s your title. What do you say?
Pennington could not refuse the dying man’s wish, and at the end of October 1963 he signed a contract with Berkeley & Hunt for “a two-volume biography of Alexander Fernsby, volume one to be delivered on or before 1 July 1965 and volume two on or before 1 July 1967”. The biographer and his subject met for the first time on 29 November at St Luke’s Hospital in Sydney, where Fernsby was spending his last days. Pennington was struck by how youthful Fernsby appeared, and how closely he resembled the author photograph on the first edition of The Bloodshot Chameleon, taken almost fifteen years previously, which Pennington had brought for him to sign. Fernsby greeted his biographer genially, but obviously did not recognise Pennington as the boy who had written to him years before, and Pennington did not remind him. He liked the old man immensely, and for several weeks Pennington spent his days by Fernsby’s bedside, recording on an expensive, unwieldy tape recorder Fernsby’s memories of his childhood in Beijing and his travels across India, Africa, Europe and Australia.
When Fernsby was alone he spent his every waking moment on what he presumed would be his final book, The Blind Sunrise, a collection of short fiction which he was revising for publication. The doctors had told him he would not live to see the new year but he was still alive by the end of January 1964, having completed revisions of The Blind Sunrise and begun an ambitious new novel, The Papercut (1965). Pennington continued to visit Fernsby throughout February, but after a weekend spent organising and transcribing their interviews, he returned to the hospital to be informed the writer had disappeared. Robert Bush, Fernsby’s editor, told the biographer that further tests had revealed Fernsby was perfectly healthy; his X-rays had been mixed up with those of another patient, who had since died. On hearing the news, Fernsby had discharged himself from hospital. News of his whereabouts did not come until September 1964 when Berkeley & Hunt received a postcard and the completed manuscript of The Papercut, sent from Bolivia.
Pennington began his research in earnest after Fernsby’s reprieve, spending all of 1964 and most of 1965 gathering information on the writer’s years in Australia. Fernsby was born in Randwick, Sydney, on 11 April 1903. The Fernsbys were an old and well-respected Sydney family; Alexander’s great-grandfather had been a midshipman on the HMS Sirius, one of the ships in the First Fleet; his grandfather had been a magistrate, and his father was a successful businessman. When Fernsby was two, his family moved to Beijing, where his father opened several factories. Fernsby did not return to Australia until 1921; when he did, he spent twenty-eight years living a rootless life as a farmhand, fencer, fruit picker, fisherman, jackaroo, labourer, bin man, cook and shepherd, among dozens of other jobs, while at the same time writing and publishing five novels. In 1949 Fernsby left Australia once more, living first in Africa and then Europe, returning to his homeland in 1961. Upon his diagnosis of a brain tumour he elected to remain in Australia, expecting to die at any time.
With their hospital conversations as his guide, Pennington attempted to retrace the writer’s travels across Australia in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, interviewing as many of his friends and acquaintances from that period as he could find. Fernsby had crisscrossed the continent dozens if not hundreds of times, and despite his meticulous research Pennington was unable to account for months of Fernsby’s life in 1923, 1927 and 1929. He wrote to Fernsby care of his last known address in Bolivia and received a reply six months later, postmarked from El Salvador. In it, Fernsby attempted to puzzle out from memory his movements during these lost years. In an almost illegible postscript, he told Pennington of his sudden recollection that he had hidden the only copy of his first, unpublished novel, The Huntigowk, in the library of the University of Sydney while working there as a janitor in 1923. Pennington was in Perth when Fernsby’s letter was forwarded to him and he returned to Sydney without delay. He spent the next nine weeks inspecting every inch of the library stacks, hoping the lost manuscript might be recovered. When Robert Bush mentioned Pennington’s assiduous search in his correspondence with the writer, Fernsby telegrammed Pennington. He had written the letter, he explained sheepishly, on April Fool’s Day, and the postscript when he was drunk. “Huntigowk” was the old Scots word for an April Fool. Fernsby had learned it while crofting on the Isle of Skye in 1920. He sent his sincere apologies to Pennington for wasting so much of his time.
Pennington’s abortive search for The Huntigowk meant that he had fallen behind his strict writing schedule. With the submission date for the first volume looming, he spent the second half of 1964 toiling fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, organising his notes, transcribing interviews, sifting archives and working on the first draft. In January 1965, Pennington was finally granted a visa to visit China, where Fernsby had lived between the ages of two and sixteen. Pennington flew to Beijing on 24 January 1965 and, with the help of a translator and government chaperone, was able to track down two of the domestic staff who had worked for the Fernsbys. Although now very old, they could still re
call the frolics of the young Alexander. In a letter to Fernsby dated 14 February 1965 Pennington described, with some satisfaction, the trove of anecdotes about the writer he had amassed during his stay.
Pennington’s repeated requests to visit Fernsby’s childhood home in the Xicheng district were politely but firmly refused by his Chinese guardians. On the day before he was due to depart for Sydney, Pennington slipped away from his hotel room for the afternoon and, with the aid of a map, found Fernsby’s old house for himself. He took a photograph of it, but before he had replaced his camera in its case was accosted by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, who prevented him from leaving. Within the hour police arrived, and Pennington was arrested. The Australian government was not informed of his detention until a week had passed; despite their formal protests, at the end of February Stephen Pennington was charged with espionage and his trial set for July. (Later it was revealed that Fernsby’s childhood home now housed the favourite mistress of Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party.)
The Australian government downplayed the situation, believing that publicity would only make matters worse. In secret negotiations throughout March 1965, the Chinese were finally convinced of Pennington’s innocence and scheduled his release for 6 April. Unluckily, Alexander Fernsby, by then living in Mexico, was already circulating an immoderately worded letter protesting Pennington’s arrest, signed by American, Australian and European writers and intellectuals, including Norman Mailer, Edward Gayle and Susan Sontag. The letter was published in the New York Times on 5 April, prompting a swift response from the Chinese government: a statement was released declaring that Pennington’s trial would be brought forward to the end of the month, and prosecutors would be seeking the death penalty. The matter was raised at the United Nations, with Great Britain, France and Canada taking Australia’s side. Soon after, the espionage charges were dropped, but Pennington was sent to the Shayang Re-Education Through Labour camp in Hubei province, where he spent the next eight months. During one of his daily interrogation sessions, three of Pennington’s fingers and his thumb on his right hand were broken; without adequate medical treatment, they healed badly. The deadline for the first volume of the biography passed while Pennington was in the camp, as did his thirtieth birthday.