by Ryan O'Neill
After months of sensitive negotiations between the Chinese and Australian governments, Pennington was released and deported to Australia at the beginning of December 1965. He spent a month in hospital, where he was treated for malnutrition and scurvy, and began the frustrating process of learning to write with his left hand. When he was discharged he wasted no time getting back to work, determined to complete the first volume of the biography before the year was out. Pennington spent only three months recuperating in Australia before setting off for Bombay, where Fernsby had lived for a year after being thrown out by his father at the age of sixteen. Despite contracting amoebic dysentery, Pennington was elated to find that the model for the unforgettable Father O’Malley in Fernsby’s first novel, Broken Sunlight, was still alive and running an orphanage in Calcutta. The old priest proved eager to share his memories of the young, idealistic Fernsby.
In June 1966 Pennington left India for Great Britain, where Fernsby had lived briefly in 1920–1921 and then again from 1951 through to 1960. Pennington was based in London for the rest of 1966, interviewing Fernsby’s surviving friends and associates and gradually nearing the end of his second draft of the first volume. To Fernsby’s amusement, Pennington even succeeded in recovering the US Army revolver Ernest Hemingway had given Fernsby in November 1921, when the pair of ambitious writers had met at a bar in Cheapside as Hemingway was en route to Paris. Fernsby had wrapped the gun in oilskin and buried it in a private park in Hampstead, intending to go back for it later. But when he did return to England three decades later, he had been unable to find the weapon. Pennington, after Fernsby’s reassurances that the gun was not another “Huntigowk”, had crept into the park every night for a week, digging and then filling dozens of holes before finally unearthing the firearm.
Despite Fernsby’s gratitude for the find, by the beginning of 1967 Pennington was trying his subject’s patience. In his haste to complete the first volume, Pennington had sent over a hundred letters to the writer in November 1966 alone, requesting further information and clarification about his youthful exploits in China, India and London. Fernsby’s replies from Ecuador were at first swift and jocose, gradually becoming more abrupt and fewer and farther between, until finally, in January 1967, the writer, who was editing an early draft of his most linguistically dense and psychologically complex novel, Donkey Hotel (1969), sent Pennington a page torn from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) with two sentences underlined in red ink: “Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Fernsby later apologised, even going so far as to dedicate Donkey Hotel to Pennington, but after the biographer’s many ordeals the exchange proved a serious strain on their relationship, which was arguably never the same afterwards.
Pennington arrived back in Australia in March 1967 and delivered the finished first volume to Berkeley & Hunt in June. Thanks to the heroic efforts of its editor, Robert Bush, The Life of Alexander Fernsby: Volume One: 1903–1925 was published just four months later. Adulatory reviews and brisk sales went some way towards assuaging Pennington’s fury that his preferred title for the book, Alexander Fernsby: Australia’s Graham Greene: Volume One 1903–1925, had been changed by Bush without his consent. Fernsby, in a letter from Argentina congratulating Pennington on his winning the Laurence Steed Prize for Biography in December, commiserated, recalling that his publisher had made him discard the original title of The Bloodshot Chameleon, which he could now not even recall.
As Pennington embarked on the second volume of the biography, it became clear that one book would not be enough to cover the remaining thirty-two years of Fernsby’s life, including as they did his travels across Australia, Africa and South America and the writing of his most important novels. Pennington was therefore contracted to write an additional third volume, which was expected to be finished in time for Fernsby’s seventieth birthday in April 1973. On hearing the news, Fernsby, who had narrowly escaped being executed with Che Guevara in Bolivia in October 1967, wrote to Pennington expressing his hope that he would live long enough to see the third volume published. Fernsby had long held a suspicion he would die before the age of sixty-nine.
Having earlier been sidetracked from Fernsby’s wanderings across Australia by the abortive search for The Huntigowk, Pennington spent the next three years retracing Fernsby’s travels, from Alice Springs to Perth, Brisbane to Launceston, Darwin to Melbourne, Canberra to Cairns, Townsville to Coober Pedy, Broome to Mackay. During his lengthy nomadic period, between 1926 and 1949, Fernsby had written some of his best work, including The King Died and Then the Queen Died of Grief (1928) and The Bloodshot Chameleon (1949). While his writing had brought him admiring reviews, and a few hundred pounds in royalties and advances, Fernsby supported himself by doing a range of jobs across the country; in one month he could go from being a political speechwriter in Canberra to being a pimp in Adelaide. Fernsby’s diverse experiences in these years informed his novels, allowing him to create dozens of memorable characters, from the doomed self-loathing bisexual policeman Sergeant Hobby in The Square Circle to the saintly elderly Methodist Mrs Farrell in Today, Tonight, Tomorrow.
Pennington, despite never again enjoying good health after his experiences in India and China, continued to work long hours for months at a time without a break. He crisscrossed the continent by car, train, bus, helicopter, boat and aeroplane, travelling an estimated 55,000 miles between 1967 and 1971. His perseverance was amply rewarded: he found a lost poem Fernsby had inscribed with a diamond on the window of a Newcastle boarding house in 1932, six forgotten short stories that had appeared in a Catholic church newsletter in Kalgoorlie in 1929, and even the medical records detailing Fernsby’s treatment for gonorrhoea in February 1935 at a medical clinic in Boydtown, New South Wales, a small town not far from Pennington’s birthplace. Pennington’s chief discovery was that Fernsby’s brief dalliance with Vivian Darkbloom that same year had produced a daughter, Rainy, whom Darkbloom’s husband had raised as his own. Fernsby had no idea he had fathered a child, but his intermittent attempts to contact Rainy on learning of her existence were rebuffed.
The Life of Alexander Fernsby: Volume Two: 1926–1935 appeared on 11 April 1972, Fernsby’s sixty-ninth birthday. The writer cabled his congratulations to Pennington from Tijuana, Mexico, expressing his great pleasure that he was still alive to read it. Neither Fernsby nor his publisher, Berkeley & Hunt, spoke any longer of the delays that plagued the biography, or its excessive length; the first two volumes alone amounted to nearly nineteen hundred pages of closely printed text. To their credit, Berkeley & Hunt never considered abandoning the project, even when the company’s fortunes were at their lowest in the mid-1970s after the death of Claudia Gunn. It helped that Pennington’s work continued to win various literary prizes, and that both volumes had sold in respectable numbers, enough even to generate a small profit.
From 1973 to 1977 Pennington remained in Sydney, working steadily on the third and projected last volume of the biography, which would follow Fernsby through the writing and publication of The Bloodshot Chameleon to the present day. Although he was now reluctant to bother Fernsby with questions, Pennington found the writer eager to discuss the composition of his most famous novel. The film rights to The Bloodshot Chameleon had been purchased by Paramount in 1972, and Fernsby hired to write the screenplay. Fernsby arrived in Hollywood in July 1973 and was put up in a palatial house in Bel Air. Yet after months of effort he had made little progress. When he mentioned a structural issue he was struggling with in a letter to Pennington, the biographer’s reply gave him the direction he needed to solve the problem. Over the next four months Fernsby continued to seek Pennington’s assistance on matters of dialogue, pacing and characterisation, telling his biographer, “You know the damn thing better than I do.”
Although initially flattered to be of use, Pennington came to resent Fernsby’s constant queries by letter, telephone and telegram, as he was anxious to finish off volume three of the biography before he turn
ed forty in 1975. Rather than answering any more of Fernsby’s queries, Pennington wrote a complete screenplay for The Bloodshot Chameleon in five days in May 1974 and sent it to Fernsby with a curt note requesting that he now be allowed to concentrate on the biography. Fernsby submitted Pennington’s script under his own name, and the studio expressed its satisfaction by giving the writer a $10,000 bonus. By December 1975 the film was in production, with Robert Redford as Terry Finnegan and Diane Keaton as Alicia McDowell. The Bloodshot Chameleon was released in America to critical acclaim and respectable box office returns in April 1977, the same month The Life of Alexander Fernsby: Volume Three: 1936–1949 was published in Sydney. After tense discussions with Pennington, his publishers had bowed to the inevitable and authorised a further two volumes. Pennington was too busy either to attend the launch of the third volume or to see The Bloodshot Chameleon when it was released in Australian cinemas in July 1977. By the time Fernsby won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay in April 1978, Pennington was in Malawi, visiting the small primary school in Blantyre where Fernsby had taught English from 1949 to 1951, and which had provided the setting for The Country of Mirrors (1959). Pennington learned of Fernsby’s Oscar triumph in June, from an old copy of the Washington Post that he came across while having dinner with the Australian consul in Lilongwe. In Fernsby’s self-deprecating acceptance speech, the writer had thanked his agent, his editor and even his cleaning lady, but there was no mention of Pennington.
After six months in Africa, Pennington travelled by boat to South America, arriving in Rio de Janeiro in August 1978. The next year and a half was spent in the various backwaters that Fernsby had frequented during his travels on the continent from 1964 to 1972. Though Fernsby had lived a charmed life in South America, Pennington was not so fortunate. He was kidnapped and held to ransom twice, once in Paraguay and once in Chile, with his publisher paying the ransom on both occasions. As well as contracting, at different times, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, cholera and typhoid, Pennington lost three toes on his left foot to piranhas while fording the Bermejo River in Argentina, and was hospitalised with suspected rabies after being savaged by a dog in Bogotá. Pennington continued to work during his stays in hospitals and clinics, and despite his hardships made great progress with the fourth volume of the biography, completing it shortly before returning to Australia in May 1980. Having spent long periods travelling far from civilisation, Pennington had not received any of Fernsby’s increasingly querulous letters from Hollywood during this time. After the success of The Bloodshot Chameleon, in 1979 Fernsby had been commissioned to adapt William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) for Twentieth Century Fox, but he was lost without Pennington’s advice and unable to submit a finished screenplay. Fernsby’s acrimonious disputes with Fox and the studio’s threat of legal action to recover the $200,000 advance it had paid him were behind the novelist’s returning to Australia in May 1980. It was the first time he had been in the country since his cancer scare sixteen years earlier.
Fernsby and Pennington met in Robert Bush’s office in the Berkeley & Hunt building on 31 July 1980. Much had changed since their last meeting in 1964. Fernsby was now seventy-seven and Pennington forty-four. In Bush’s autobiography, Bastard Title (2004), he gives a short description of the encounter. Pennington was late and limped into the room, scowling. Fernsby clasped his biographer’s hand, causing Pennington to yelp in pain from the arthritis that had resulted from his injuries in China. Pennington said little, save to finish Fernsby’s sentences, a habit that annoyed and discomfited the writer. Pennington’s ability to predict what Fernsby was going to say was uncanny. Bush was puzzled by Pennington’s moroseness; Pennington had earlier told the editor how much he was looking forward to seeing Fernsby again after so long. Pennington’s attitude can be explained by his chancing on a note in Berkeley & Hunt’s archives only an hour earlier, which he copied into his diary. The note, which Fernsby had written to publisher Claude Berkeley in 1963, revealed Pennington had not been the first choice to write Fernsby’s biography:
It’s a crying shame that Richard Ellmann isn’t available. Still, can’t be helped. Anyway, have you read the new biography of Addison Tiller? My God, it’s tedious. The writer makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that Tiller was a good writer, rather than a hack. Still, Pannington [sic] can just about put a readable sentence together, when it comes down to it, and we may as well get him as anyone else. The doctor says I won’t be around to read it anyway. For the love of Christ, though, make sure you put in the contract that he can’t call it Alexander Fernsby: Australia’s Graham Greene.
All three men were visibly relieved when a journalist from the Daily Trumpet arrived to interview Fernsby, ending their meeting.
Remarkably, volume four (1950–1964) of Fernsby’s biography, which dealt with his years in Africa, return to Europe, and the famous brain tumour misdiagnosis, and volume five (1965–1973), which focused on his travels in South America and the writing of Donkey Hotel, were published within six months of each other, in January and July 1982. Pennington had no doubt that the sixth volume, covering Fernsby’s years in California and his return to Australia, would be the last. The biographer set off for Hollywood in November 1982, the same month that Fernsby was invited to take part in an expedition retracing the route of the explorers Burke and Wills from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Fernsby jumped at the chance, and despite his age easily passed a rigorous medical examination for insurance purposes. The journey, by camel, foot and four-wheel drive, took over ten months; Fernsby wrote about his experiences in his first work of nonfiction, Footsteps in the Sand (1984). He completed this book while staying at Australia’s Mawson Antarctic Research Station in Mac.Robertson Land, where he had been offered the post of writer in residence for six months from January to June 1984.
Pennington spent most of 1983 in the Paramount Studio archives. If he had not known before, he must have realised then that the screenplay that had won Fernsby his Oscar in 1978 was the one Pennington had written for him. Whatever his feelings, Pennington never commented on the matter. Through Fernsby’s Hollywood agent, Pennington was granted interviews with the stars of The Bloodshot Chameleon. Redford and Keaton spoke to Pennington at length about their experiences of working with Alexander Fernsby, and it must have been somewhat gratifying to Pennington when Redford told him, “To be perfectly frank, I couldn’t get through the novel. But the script … The man who wrote the script for The Bloodshot Chameleon … He’s a genius. No other word.”
Pennington had to cut short his stay in Hollywood in October 1983 so that he could join a second expedition that intended to follow in the footsteps of Burke and Wills. Poorly planned and funded, this caravan ran into trouble after travelling only fifteen hundred kilometres, and Pennington almost died from dehydration before they were rescued. After recovering for four months in Sydney, Pennington resumed his usual working habits. The biography was now only a few months behind the actual life of Alexander Fernsby, a fact of which Fernsby himself was becoming uncomfortably aware. Writing in his journal in the third month of his stay in Antarctica, Fernsby confessed a recurring nightmare of looking through the thick glass of his hut and seeing Stephen Pennington, with his sinister limp and twisted right hand, approaching inexorably through the blizzard. Always superstitious, Fernsby came to believe that the day his biography caught up with him would mark the day of his death.
Fernsby returned to Sydney in late June 1984, having completed the final draft of Footsteps in the Sand and the initial draft of its companion volume Footsteps in the Snow (1986, edited by Pennington), a nonfiction account of his stay in Antarctica. That same month Pennington applied for and was denied permission to visit the Antarctic research station that had hosted Fernsby, delaying the progress of the biography. Only by chance, much later, was Pennington to learn that Fernsby, whom he had listed as a referee in his application, had written that Pennington was a violent alcoholic and on no account should be allowed i
nto the station. Pennington pressed forward with the application, and after his publisher interceded was eventually allowed to stay at the research station for a month, under strict supervision, in December 1984.
Pennington had been in Antarctica for three weeks when he was informed of Fernsby’s accident. The writer had been crossing Pitt Street in Sydney when he was clipped by a van. The impact threw Fernsby three metres across the road; he suffered numerous compound fractures and serious head injuries. At the hospital Fernsby slipped into a coma from which he was not expected to awaken. Pennington returned to Australia in January 1985 and went straight to the hospital. He stayed by the old man’s side throughout the night, mentally revising the opening of volume six of the biography. The doctors assured him that due to the nature of Fernsby’s injuries and his advanced age, he would almost certainly pass away in the next few weeks. Pennington visited Fernsby every day for the following three months, but the old man refused to die.
Pennington took a month off from the biography: his first holiday in over two decades. He returned to Eden, where he found that his old family home had collapsed from termite damage, so he had to stay in a local hotel. From habit, he awoke at half past five each morning, but instead of commencing work on the biography, as he had done almost every morning for twenty-two years, he went for long walks on the beach. On his third morning he nodded hello to a woman strolling in the opposite direction. On the fifth morning, they had a short conversation about the weather. Later that day, Pennington realised this marked the first time in years he had talked to someone for more than two minutes without mentioning Alexander Fernsby. By the seventh morning Pennington and the woman on the beach had exchanged names. Hers was Susannah Pope; she was forty-two, and a nurse. On the tenth morning, Susannah asked Pennington what he did, and he told her he was writing a biography of Alexander Fernsby. “I’ve never heard of him,” she replied, and not long afterwards Pennington asked her to marry him.