Having followed Grandma into the kitchen, I noticed that Mum was no longer behind me. Poking my head back into the lounge room, I saw her standing behind an old chair. It had wooden armrests that curved from the back around the seat, a faded pattern on the upholstery. There was a green and blue tartan knee rug draped across the back of it. Mum lifted it to her face.
‘Much changed?’ asked Vern, emerging from the bedroom where he had put the cases.
‘Nothing and everything,’ she said, smoothing the rug back onto the chair.
‘There’s one big change,’ Vern announced, squeezing past me in the doorway. ‘What do you think?’ He gestured beyond the kitchen, to the sunlight streaming through the louvres.
Mum gasped.
‘We couldn’t have a big lad like this bunking in with his mum, now could we?’ Vern ruffled my hair and shaped as if to box me.
‘All your uncle’s idea,’ Grandma said, filling the kettle at the sink. ‘‘‘I’ll build him a sleep-out,” he said, ‘‘fill-in that back verandah.” It’s not much, Mick. But it’s yours.’
Mum gave Vern a side-on hug and kissed him hard and loud on the cheek. ‘No wonder you were talking yourself up,’ she said, as he fended her off. ‘Great uncle, indeed!’
‘Only finished painting it yesterday,’ he said, trying not to show that he liked the attention. ‘It still reeks, but it’ll air quickly enough if you leave those louvres open. Oh yeah, and you can blame your grandmother for the curtains. Makes it sissy, I reckon, but apparently you’d die of cold without them. And she thought you’d want some privacy. You’ll have to tie them back when you want to howl at the moon.’
I thanked them both, hugging Grandma and shaking Uncle Vernon’s giant mitt. The room was perfect, long and skinny and more like a cubby than a bedroom. Even the name they gave it – a ‘sleep-out’ – made it sound exciting. Like a hide-out; like I would be permanently camping.
The move to Australia was not the wrench it might have been. Mum and I had moved from Edge into Stroud soon after Gil left us, so that she could be closer to her work at the tearooms. I knew no one in town and found it hard to make friends at the primary school. The chief bully, Simon Cunningham, had somehow discovered my parents were divorced and that was cause enough for me to be spurned by everyone but Samuel Roth, another outcast, on account of him being Jewish. Sam’s parents had read In Daniel’s Den and actively encouraged our friendship.
Once it was clear that the break with Gil was permanent, Mum had become desperate to return to Australia. Saving for the fares, she worked long hours at the tearooms and was always exhausted at home. Of a morning, I would pretend to be the grown-up and, braving the cold and dark, would make her a cup of tea and take it to her in bed. Climbing in beside her to drink my own, I would cuddle her to keep warm, and sometimes we’d fall back to sleep. One morning, hugging me from behind, her breath warm and sour on my neck, she said, ‘I feel I could sleep forever. Lucky I have you to wake me!’ She gave me a squeeze, and with it put a weight in me that has never fully lifted.
In those years, I barely saw my father. The most memorable time was when he borrowed a friend’s racing-green MG and arrived declaring he was taking me for a spin.
Mum was reluctant to let me go. Standing on the front steps of our tiny terrace, Gil leaned in to her and whispered something I didn’t catch. He then bounded towards the car, jangling the keys above his head like a charm.
Once out of town, we rocketed through the Cotswolds, speeding down country lanes, the hedges tunnelling my excitement. We couldn’t talk over the engine noise and the whoosh of the wind, but every now and then we glanced at each other, beaming at the thrill of it.
Skidding to a stop in a gravel parking bay overlooking Stroud valley, Gil turned off the engine and in his best marble-mouthed Scottish brogue said, ‘Shaken, not stirred.’
For years, that day – not even a day, six hours – shone in my memory like a polished stone, giving my father a glow, a light and warmth and humour that years of neglect could not diminish. It ended with him giving me a hardback copy of The Raven’s I, which was to be published the following week to great acclaim. A review in the Times Literary Supplement anointed him ‘one of the most important voices in contemporary fiction’. The inscription on the title page read: To My Mick, More eagle than raven. Best bird in the sky. From your FOF (Famous Old Father), Gil.
I saw him only twice more before Mum and I sailed for Melbourne. The last time was when he made a flying visit to introduce me to Tamara Billings. He was driving an old Morris Major that day, though Tamara belonged in the Bond car. She was the first American I had met and afterwards I wondered if all women in the United States looked like movie stars. She had long blond hair tied into a bun, glittering eyes and a large mouth. Full lips covered white, perfectly straight teeth. She smiled at me a lot, which I didn’t mind at all.
We went to the Pig & Whistle for lunch. I had a cottage pie, while they shared a packet of crisps and Gil enjoyed a pint. Raising his eyebrows at Tamara, he lifted the glass to his mouth. Fiddling with the coaster, he looked at me and said, ‘How would you like to see the Empire State Building, go to New York?’
‘Sure … maybe.’
I thought he was offering to take me on a book tour. He polished off the beer and slapped the glass on the coaster, all the time keeping his gaze on me.
‘Great!’
Not knowing what to say, I stared at the slew of tiny bubbles clinging to the glass, studying the way the sunlight streaming through the window made them glitter and gleam.
Tucking a ribbon of loose hair back into her bun, Tamara again smiled at me.
‘Tam and I are getting married next week,’ Gil abruptly announced. ‘Registry office job. No big deal, no ceremony to worry about. And we’re moving to the States for a while. It won’t be so easy for me to see you then, but if your mother lets you, perhaps you could come stay with us some time. Spend a term in the Big Apple. How about that?’
I was barely listening. I couldn’t. The most I could do was stare at the tide line of fading froth.
Gil beamed. ‘I told you he’s a trouper.’
Two years after Nat and I got together, six months before Noah was born, Mum announced she was moving from Brunswick, semi-retiring to Castlemaine, an old gold mining town in central Victoria. When I was young, she had worked for years sorting mail at the GPO, studying nights and on weekends to finish her teaching degree. Ever since, she had been teaching in high schools and now she wanted a break, a change of scenery. A belated fresh start.
She couldn’t afford to give us the house in Munro Street, the weatherboard cottage she had inherited from Ella, but she wanted to sell it to us for half what it would fetch on the open market. Knowing they had a grandson on the way (the sex of our yet-tobe-born baby having been revealed by the ultrasound), Natalie’s parents reluctantly sold the block of land in Fawkner they had imagined her ideal Italian husband would one day develop, and presented us with the money for the house.
So it was that, aged only thirty-four, without having ever had a full-time job, I found myself owning my mother’s house. My firstborn child, Noah, would be the fourth generation of my maternal line to live in it.
Three years later, when Nat was pregnant with Sunday, we took out a loan and reluctantly undid Uncle Vernon’s handiwork to make way for a modest extension. The design skirted round Grandma’s vegie patch, which she had always called Clem’s, but her pear tree was collateral damage.
Of course none of that matters now, the whole lot having disappeared beneath the concrete, seeds from the past starved of light.
If, as some have suggested, Madigan hoped to utilise Tamara Billings’s family connections to increase his profile in the United States, he must surely have been disappointed. Before they arrived in Manhattan in March 1968, taking up residence in a third-floor apartment on the Lower East Side, Little, Brown had already published and remaindered The Raven’s I. The excitement it had generated in Bri
tain did not survive the Atlantic crossing, with its reception stateside being less than lukewarm. Gore Vidal memorably dismissed it as ‘so much bovine rumination without the health benefits of milk’.
Madigan’s arrival in New York, then, was not so much that of a package full of celebrated possibilities as one of damaged goods, another piece of foreign flotsam washed up on the East River’s banks. Undaunted, in his first eighteen months as a New Yorker he wrote a short story and a novella, Indelibility, which his US publisher promptly rejected.
Back in the UK, The Bodley Head was eager to publish the novella, but the American rebuff caused Madigan to recall the manuscript. Neither it nor the short story, ‘Then Again’ (a ‘playful, time-bending childhood reflection’), has been sighted since.
Tammy’s return home had greater literary impact. In quick succession, she had poems published in Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker. The Manhattan literary set revelled in the emergence of the offspring of one of its own, and for a time the Madigans were a fixture on the literary party circuit, effortlessly traversing dope-fumed basements in the Village and martini-fuelled soirees on the Upper West Side.
This shift in the balance of literary status in the Madigan marriage almost certainly caused the rift that ended it. Not even the birth of their son, Reuben, could paper over the cracks that rapidly expanded into a chasm that came to divide them. So it was that by the time of Reuben’s first birthday, 6 December 1970, Madigan had moved out and was once again dependent on the generosity of friends, accepting a room in Ben and Angie Cartwright’s place on Carmine Street. It was there, and at a particular desk (third on the left) in the reading room of the New York Public Library, that he wrote the manuscript called ‘Free Fall’, which was eventually published as Freedom Falling.
Chronicling the steady decline of Artie Doyle through the usual failed marriages, dead-end jobs and self-medication, the genius of Freedom Falling was to have him do this backwards. In this way, Doyle’s unravelling coils back on itself as the reader learns how the war in the Pacific had unpicked him.
An American posted to Brisbane, Artie falls hard for a local, Amy Mitchell, a secretary assigned to his commanding officer. Many Australians were hostile towards the million or so US servicemen based in and around Brisbane, their attitude best expressed by the popular taunt that the Yanks were ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’. In the face of this, Artie and Amy develop an affection that becomes more than a wartime fling. By the time he is shipped out in August 1942 they know of Amy’s pregnancy and are making plans for the future.
Having survived the bitter fighting of the Battle of Tulagi – depicted in scenes rightfully lauded for the veracity of both the action and the soldiers’ terror – Artie is struck down by malaria and sent to Brisbane to convalesce. Her pregnancy now showing, Amy loses her job and her parents’ respect, and spends her time nursing Artie. That is, until her brother Tom, an Australian soldier recently returned from Milne Bay, is injured in a street fight with a group of US Marines.
Voiced in the first person, it is only now, three-quarters of the way through the book, that Madigan has Artie reveal that he is black. Suddenly the reader must reprocess and reinterpret everything they have read; references and asides that on first reading seemed slightly strange now make perfect sense. Playing brilliantly on our own assumptions and prejudices, this twist feels like honesty rather than deception. It enables us to experience the way Tom’s beating at the hands of African-American soldiers who he had racially abused, and the reactions of Amy and her parents to this attack, collapse Artie’s world, wheeling away his hopes and dreams as if mere scenery on a stage; elaborate props to life’s illusions. Artie thought he was fighting for freedom, but Amy’s defence of her brother’s racism makes him realise that he was only ever fighting fear. The rest of his life – the one we have already read – is lived out in this knowledge, in the falling.
With the Billings’ circle now against him,Madigan dispatched the manuscript to Little, Brown with, as he wrote to Peter Kessler, ‘even littler hope’. His pessimism was quickly proven misplaced, however, as everyone at Little, Brown loved the manuscript, and, despite the failure of The Raven’s I, decided to rush it into print. It would, they hoped, resonate strongly with the young and their resistance to the war in Vietnam, as well as with the civil rights movement.
For once such prognostications proved well-founded. Universally hailed by reviewers – most of them seemingly unaware that it was written by an Australian (the flyleaf’s bio being deliberately short on detail) – it quickly entered The New York Times’ bestseller list, where it remained for seven months. The New York Review of Books celebrated it as ‘a profound meditation on the bitter legacies of war and prejudice, and the limitations of personal freedom’. When asked by a reporter what he thought of Madigan’s book, Norman Mailer growled, ‘Lucky he’s not one of us or the bastard might’ve beaten me to it – you can’t write the Great American Novel if you’re not American, right?’
Predictably, perhaps, the response in Australia was less positive. Madigan had long ago become a tall poppy, and by narrating the story from an American’s perspective, with Freedom Falling he handed the country, its critics and its public, a scythe with which to level him. That the main character was not Australian deemed the book ineligible for the Miles Franklin Award, the country’s most prestigious literary prize. That Doyle was in love with an Australian who in the end rejected him out of misplaced loyalty, and who, like her compatriots, ultimately did not appreciate the Americans’ efforts to protect her country’s freedoms, strengthened the case for literary treason mounted by those taking turns to cut Madigan down.
If The Falling Part had won praise from all points on the Australian political and literary spectrum, the opprobrium directed at its near-namesake, Freedom Falling, was similarly democratic. Addressing a meeting of the Melbourne Realist Writers’ Group, Frank Hardy, the rebel-rousing author of Power Without Glory, overlooked the book’s anti-Vietnam and civil rights subtexts when he condemned it as ‘a grovelling piece of bourgeois, pro-US propaganda’. With similar vigour, yet from the other side of the political fence, the poet and critic Douglas Stewart affirmed the book’s important theme of freedom and acknowledged Australia’s grave debt to the United States, but nonetheless saw it as a work ‘only an expatriate could write; as if penned by a clever but ungrateful child spurning his parents, it is entirely lacking in grace’. He also pointedly noted that it was written by someone who had never served his country.
Combined with the decision of his parents to retire to his father’s recently inherited childhood home in Devon, the storm of criticism discouraged any thoughts Madigan may have entertained of ending his self-imposed exile. Instead, having achieved something no Australian author before him had managed – critical acclaim and bestseller status in the US – Madigan unexpectedly announced he was returning to Britain.
Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, pp. 134–137.
CHAPTER FIVE
The promised trip to America never eventuated. Growing up, the disappointment of this was the only grudge I really held against my father. The rest came later, upon reflection. I had never thought about New York until he suggested I go there. Then it became an obsession. It is hard now, with the internet, Google Maps, YouTube, to remember when places had an aura, a mystique about them. I used to cherish any glimpse I got of New York on television or in movies, imagining my father there, myself – there among the famous people, the singers, the movie stars, the artists. One Christmas Gil sent me a six-inch-high brass replica of the Empire State Building. I placed it on my desk next to his postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge, the cluttered skyline towering behind it. By comparison, Melbourne seemed flat, dull, like a cake that had failed to rise. My imagined Central Park blinded me to the neighbourhood wonders of Royal Park, Princes Park, the botanical gardens. Surely, I thought, these were mere imitations, poor counterfeits of the real thing.
By the time I’d turned nine Gil and Tamara had been in America for six months. Mum, worn down by my harping, suggested I write to them and remind Gil of my proposed visit. Unlike the rest of his letters, I didn’t keep his response. Screwing the aerogram into a ball, I threw it in the bin. The timing wasn’t right, he explained, he was working on a novella. The next month was no good either – he would be delivering a series of lectures in a friend’s writing course at Columbia. He suggested I might come the following Christmas. As that time approached he wrote again, breaking the news that I would soon have a brother or sister; that Tamara was pregnant. The downside to this was that she had terrible morning sickness and wasn’t up to having guests. ‘What about you come after the baby’s born, to meet your sibling? In the meantime, I’ll be in Melbourne in July, to help Nanna and Grandad pack up their house. You could come with me to Sydney. I’m meeting with a publisher. I could show you the sights.’
Either Mum didn’t want him in the house or Grandma had forbidden it. It felt weird, Mum standing with me on the footpath, waiting for his taxi. Neither of us talking. When the cab pulled up, Gil burst from the passenger door. He gave Mum a kiss on the cheek like nothing had changed and she blushed. ‘When did you hit town?’
‘Tuesday,’ he said, all the while pretending not to have seen me. ‘Now, where’s that son of mine?’ Turning to me then, ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen him? About so high?’ Indicating a height I’d long since outgrown, he then grabbed my shoulders and pulled me to him. ‘My God, Mick, what are they feeding you? Giraffe? Look at the size of you!’
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