by Ryan O'Neill
The couple returned to Sydney in July 1985 and were married three months later. Instead of slaving for most of the day on the biography, Pennington now worked only three hours in the morning, spending the rest of his time doing repairs around their dilapidated house or tending to the long-neglected garden. Susannah found employment in the same hospital where Fernsby still languished in a coma. On the days she worked, Pennington would have lunch with her at the hospital canteen, then spend half an hour reading to the comatose writer from one of Addison Tiller’s short-story collections. Pennington was later to recall this as the most carefree time of his life.
Work on the sixth and final volume of the biography progressed slowly throughout the late 1980s, and was interrupted when Pennington and his wife took a five-month luxury cruise. In 1990 Berkeley & Hunt, who had shown commendable patience throughout the long life of the project, began to pressure Pennington to complete it. Finally, in 1991 Pennington informed his publishers that he had only one more chapter to write, which would describe Fernsby’s road accident and tragic fate. Three days later, Pennington sat by Alexander Fernsby’s bedside on what he intended to be his final visit and, as he had done in the past, started to read an Addison Tiller story aloud. On this occasion, Fernsby slowly opened one eye and croaked, “Will you please stop reading that fucking tripe?”
Fernsby’s astonishing recovery, at the age of eighty-eight, from a seven-year coma would become the subject of heated discussion in the Lancet, as well as the subject of Fernsby’s next book, The Comma, in which he described his period of unconsciousness as nothing more than a pause between two clauses in his life. After months of physical therapy, Fernsby, though confined to a wheelchair, was able to leave hospital and return to his home in Randwick, where he continued to live independently. This marked the beginning of Fernsby’s remarkable late period, which saw the publication of The Comma (1992) as well as the novels The Rooms (1993), The Newcastle Fragment (1995), Falling into Space (1996) and The Amputee (1998), his second short-story collection Tapestries of Light (2000), and his first poetry collection, A Crown of Lantana (2001). Fernsby also stood unsuccessfully as the Greens’ candidate for Randwick in the 1993 and 1998 federal elections, an experience which informed his memoir, The Red, Red Dust of Home (2003), published on his hundredth birthday.
Not long after Fernsby’s recovery, Stephen Pennington suffered a nervous breakdown and spent seven months recuperating in a sanatorium. Against the advice of his psychiatrists, he insisted on resuming work on volume six of the biography during his stay. When told he needed to rest, Pennington responded agitatedly, “I can’t. Every time I sit down for five minutes, the bastard writes another book.” Eventually Pennington experienced a psychotic break, coming to believe that Fernsby was immortal. During this period he attacked and injured a doctor whom he mistook for the writer. Pennington’s recovery was slow. In his last two months at the sanatorium, he refused to see his wife, and on his release moved into a motel and began divorce proceedings. Although Susannah attempted to contact Pennington, he ignored her appeals. Finally he sent her a note that simply said, “Stop distracting me.” Susannah agreed to their divorce and returned to Eden, leaving Pennington alone. He went back to his house, and The Life of Alexander Fernsby: Volume Six: 1974–1991 was published in 1994.
To the wonder of many, Pennington did not participate in the elaborate festivities which Berkeley & Hunt and the University of Sydney had organised for Fernsby’s hundredth birthday in 2003. The university presented Fernsby with an honorary doctorate and hosted a three-day conference on his work, which attracted scholars from all over the world. There was also a gala banquet to mark the reprinting of all of Fernsby’s books as part of Berkeley & Hunt’s new Antipodean Classics line. Pennington sent a paper to be presented at the conference but offered his apologies, claiming he was too busy with volume seven of the biography (1992 onwards). Now sixty-eight, frail and suffering from a persistent racking cough, Pennington nevertheless continued to work at an accelerated pace in the hope of finally concluding his great work. Throughout 2004 Fernsby had been uncharacteristically quiet, and Pennington made great progress in catching up to him, but in February 2005 the writer made two announcements: he had almost completed Unfinished Stories, the sequel to The Bloodshot Chameleon; and he had booked a seat on Virgin Galactic’s first commercial space flight, with the launch predicted for 2009.
After reading Fernsby’s statements in the newspaper, Pennington suffered a heart attack and spent a week in the intensive care unit of St Mark’s Hospital in Sydney. While in recovery, routine tests revealed that he had stage-three lung cancer. His prognosis, with chemotherapy, was six months. Pennington had never smoked and suspected the cancer had been caused by the three weeks he had spent in Maralinga, South Australia, in 1974; Fernsby had worked in Maralinga as a labourer in the late 1930s. It was later revealed that the area had been the site of secret British nuclear tests in the 1950s. Upon his release from hospital on 17 March 2005, Pennington took a taxi to a storage unit in Ryde, where he kept his mammoth Fernsby archives in two hundred filing cabinets, spread over eight large units. He asked the driver to wait and returned fifteen minutes later carrying a bulky envelope. He then gave the driver Fernsby’s home address in Randwick.
When he arrived, Pennington found the front door unlocked and let himself in. Fernsby was in his study upstairs, working on the final chapter of Unfinished Stories. The old man was almost deaf and did not hear Pennington as the latter stood a few feet behind him and tore open the envelope he had taken from the archives. Pennington brought out the revolver Hemingway had given Fernsby in London in 1921, then walked up behind Fernsby, placed the barrel against the back of the writer’s head and pulled the trigger. Despite its great age, the gun went off, killing Fernsby instantly. The barrel of the gun also exploded, taking with it the four fingers of Pennington’s good hand, his left. The biographer called the police and waited for ten minutes beside Fernsby’s body until they arrived. Pennington was discovered with his jacket wrapped around his bleeding hand, reading Fernsby’s gore-covered manuscript and jotting down notes on a piece of paper with a pen held between his teeth.
Pennington was arrested and charged with murder, to which he pleaded guilty. Despite submissions to the court testifying to his good character, and his terminal cancer, the judge had no choice but to sentence him to twenty years in prison. He was sent to the minimum-security wing of Long Bay Correctional Centre in Malabar, where he was made a trusty in the prison library and held classes to help inmates improve their reading and writing skills. Although Pennington’s injuries meant he could no longer write longhand or type, a number of inmates volunteered to be his assistants, and once again progress on the biography resumed, albeit slowly. Pennington refused all treatment for his cancer but, rather than expiring within the predicted six months, he survived for four years. He completed the seventh and final volume of his monumental project in December 2008. The Life of Alexander Fernsby: Volume Seven: 1992–2005 was published on 1 February 2009, and Pennington died three weeks later.
Fernsby’s murder, by his own biographer, created an intense interest in the life and work of the novelist. The Bloodshot Chameleon, The Country of Mirrors and The Comma all became bestsellers in 2005. Pennington’s biography would never achieve such sales, in part because the complete seven-volume set cost $349 and Pennington’s contract with Berkeley & Hunt stipulated that his work could not be abridged. Its status as a classic was nonetheless assured, as critics frequently compared Pennington’s biography to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The success of the sumptuous twelve-part ABC adaptation of The Country of Mirrors (2007) and its companion documentary on Fernsby demonstrated the spell the writer continued to exercise over many Australians.
In November 2009 New Dimensions commissioned the author of this book to write a one-volume biography of Fernsby. Alexander Fernsby: The Definitive Biography (2010) necessarily drew a great deal from Pennington’s classic work, while revealing
one fact about Fernsby’s life that Pennington had inexplicably overlooked. Among the papers left by Vivian Darkbloom after her death in 1976 were two dozen letters she had received from Fernsby. Pennington had, of course, already disclosed that Darkbloom and Fernsby’s brief affair in 1935 had resulted in the birth of a daughter, Rainy, yet Pennington was unaware that Fernsby had kept in touch sporadically with Vivian Darkbloom in the years afterwards. In a letter sent from Paris in May 1954, Fernsby told Darkbloom that while he had based the physical characteristics of The Bloodshot Chameleon’s Alicia McDowell on her:
… as for [Alicia’s] passionate, repressed nature, that came from a woman I had a dalliance with over Christmas 1934 in a little town called Eden when I was living under the romantic alias of Harry Valentine. Her surname was Forster? Foster? Forester? I loved her with all my heart (for that single, wonderful week), but now I can’t remember her last name. Isn’t memory a terrible thing? Her father found out about us and I had to make a dash for it. But I will never forget her first name. Eve.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The genesis of this book can be traced back to the night of 5 October 2001, when I attended the Pennington Prize for Nonfiction awards ceremony in Melbourne. My provocative history of Australian short fiction, Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace Settings, was shortlisted, and having garnered enthusiastic reviews and generated robust critical debate was the obvious favourite. As it transpired, the prize was won by Rachel Deverall for her study of Lydia McGinnis’s short stories. I was, I admit, disappointed, but since the judging panel included two writers whose work I had disparaged in my book, I was not entirely surprised. (This experience was to be repeated in 2012, when The Weight of a Human Heart was shortlisted for the Addison Tiller Short Story Collection Award and lost under similarly dubious circumstances, this time to a book belonging to that neither-here-nor-there genre, a “linked short-story collection”.)
At the end of the ceremony, after an unpleasant altercation with Tim Winton, I went to congratulate Deverall. Rachel was then in her early thirties and already had a reputation for her outspokenness as much as for her brilliant research. She said she had enjoyed my book, but did not hesitate to tell me it was skewed too much towards men: eighteen pages on Price Warung and only one on Barbara Baynton was a travesty. I disagreed with Rachel then, as I was to do throughout our relationship, and we spent the next three hours at the bar arguing over the merits of Lydia McGinnis and Henry Lawson. During our lengthy conversation we touched on those Australian writers who had inspired us (Young, Swan) and repulsed us (Washington, Gayle), some of them famous (Tiller), some notorious (Pennington, Gunn), and others almost entirely blotted out by time (McVeigh). Walking to my hotel that night with Rachel, the idea for this book began to crystallise: a series of short biographies that would place these fascinating figures in their historical and literary contexts. Rachel and I saw each other more and more over the next few months, as I exploited her vast knowledge of Australian literature to assist me in selecting the writers to be included in my book; it was Rachel who suggested Vivian Darkbloom, her grandmother, as a possible subject for study. Aware of how much I owed Rachel, I tried, in vain, to persuade her to be my co-author, but she was too caught up in her own research.
Rachel and I were married in 2003 and we were happy, until Rachel’s fascination with Wilhelmina Campbell, an unknown nineteenth-century writer, became a mania. Our belated honeymoon in Paris was simply an excuse for my new wife to continue her research, a circumstance that became clear when Rachel refused to return to Australia with me. During many phone conversations over the next year, I begged her to come home. Finally, in June 2005 I issued her an ultimatum, demanding she choose between her husband and a long-dead writer. She chose the long-dead writer. Although forced to admit that this did not bode well for our marriage, I could not face the prospect of divorcing her.
I did not see Rachel again until after her breakdown in 2009, when she had lost everything. (Sometimes I blame myself for dissuading her from publishing her findings on Campbell earlier, but they were so incredible, I felt she had to leave no shadow of a doubt as to their authenticity.) After Rachel’s release from psychiatric care, I tried to help her, though in her paranoia she was now pitifully suspicious of everyone. In December 2011, hoping to divert her from her melancholy fixation on Campbell, I employed Rachel as an assistant on my seminal volume of literary criticism, Sacred Kangaroos: Fifty Overrated Australian Novels (2013), a book whose sales were equalled only by the number of enemies it made me in the literary world. (Geordie Williamson’s description of me as “a jackass of all trades” in his review is sadly typical of the vitriol it attracted.) Serious research was beyond Rachel by then; she was incapable of writing a paragraph without mentioning Wilhelmina Campbell. When Rachel was diagnosed with cancer, I vowed to save what small part of her I could by including her in this book, and I was deeply moved when, despite her illness, she offered to compile its index. During the long talks we had in her final months I was able to complete her life, even as her life was ending. Rachel, my darling, I owe my brilliant career to you.
I could not have written the life of Robert Bush without the aid of Patrick Cullen, whose reminiscences of Bush proved invaluable to me as I fleshed out a portrait of this singular man. Similarly, my research on Arthur ruhtrA was enriched immeasurably by Lazaros Zigomanis’s generosity. As one of the founding members of Kangaroulipo, and current vice-president of the Frederick Stratford Society in Australia, Zigomanis granted me full access to ruhtrA’s surviving letters and notebooks. Laura Elvery, Annabel Smith and Amanda Betts were the only friends of my late wife who consented to speak to me, and I suppose for this they should be thanked, even if it was only to shower insults upon myself and Anne Zoellner. I owe a great debt to A.S. Patric for his generosity in sharing the rare papers in his Matilda Young archive. Patric’s 2010 poetry collection Music for Broken Instruments is an inventive and insightful reworking of Young’s verse that, I am certain, would have delighted the Nobel laureate. My thanks must also go to Roberto Bolaño, whose Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), a series of biographical sketches of right-wing and fascist writers, provided essential background information for the life of Rand Washington. The Australian was known to have corresponded with many of the writers Bolaño featured in his book, including Harry Sibelius and Thomas R. Murchison. I am especially indebted to Bolaño for his biographical sketch of the pathological plagiarist Max Mirebalais, which served as a model for my own life of Frederick Stratford. Thomas Mallon’s classic study Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (1989) also provided indispensable, if sometimes inaccurate, information about Stratford. (Speaking of plagiarism, critics will no doubt use the life of Stephen Pennington to resurrect accusations that my Alexander Fernsby: The Definitive Biography appropriated large sections of Pennington’s classic work. I have always acknowledged that I owe a great debt to Pennington; if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants such as he. I am not, however, a plagiarist.) Thanks also to my editors, Chris Feik and Denise O’Dea, especially for their forbearance in the matter of the Sydney Steele chapter. A run of bad luck, which included computer viruses, software malfunctions and my research assistant Robert Skinner being struck by lightning, plagued this piece right up to the deadline. It seemed at one point we might lose the life of Steele altogether, something that would, no doubt, have gratified those who subscribe to the legend that the great writer was some sort of Antipodean Faust. I trust that the publication of Steele’s biography here will finally lay to rest the foolish idea of Steele, and by extension those who write about him, being cursed.
I must also extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Australian Federal Police. Six weeks after my wife’s death, just before this book went to press, the police contacted me to say that, acting on a tip from an anonymous source, they had found thirty boxes marked “Property of Rachel Deverall” at a storage unit in a warehouse in Ryde. Renta
l for the unit had been paid for, in cash, for five years in advance, by someone giving the name John Smith. As Rachel’s next of kin, I was invited to claim her property. When I visited the unit I was flabbergasted to find the boxes comprised Rachel’s research into the life and work of Wilhelmina Campbell, including the Degraël trove, and Rachel’s priceless copies of The Summer Journey and The Autumn Journey, which had been believed lost in the mysterious fire that consumed her house in the first week of November 2009.
Finally, Anne Zoellner. I simply don’t have the words to thank you for your generosity and friendship. You were there in the good times when Rachel and I first met. You were there in the dark times after Rachel left me, when I thought my life had ended. You were there when my groundbreaking work was snubbed again and again by the critics and their “literary” awards. In countless letters and articles you defended me from unsubstantiated charges of plagiarism. You remembered, crucially, that we had dinner together on the evening of 7 November 2009, and so prevented a terrible travesty of justice. When Rachel broke apart, you were beside me, and together we tried to pick up the pieces. And you are here, now, as we embark on a new book together, one that will bring about the rewriting of every literary history of France, Great Britain and Australia.