by Meg Stewart
The sad thing about getting older is seeing so many people you love die. It’s heartbreaking. Beryl McCuaig, Ken Slessor, David Campbell, Dora Jarret. Norman died in November 1969. The cicadas shrilled with an intensity I will never forget on the bright blue hot summer’s day Norman was buried in the little gum-treed Springwood cemetery. Unbelievable that our friendship through so many years had come to an end. Too sad to think of. Shortly before he went, he wrote a note to Doug and me: ‘Dearest Margaret and Dear Doug,’ it read. ‘I go ahead of you, that’s all. Love Norman.’
As for the family, the year after Doug and I were married, Dad came up to Sydney and moved back in with Mum. Grandma had died and the business in Yass had been sold up. Dad was lonely and at a loose end, so he and Mum decided they might as well live out their old age together.
Dad could still never really do the right thing by Mum. She found housework increasingly difficult as she grew older. ‘Put the vacuum cleaner [a recent acquisition] over the house, King,’ she said to Dad, who was hovering around wanting to be helpful. Dad did the bedroom first and came back out to Mum.
‘I don’t understand why you women use these stupid things,’ he said. ‘The room looks dirtier than when I started.’ Dad had put the blower on the vacuum, not the sucker. It was hours before the dust settled.
King and Mary were stationed up at Charleville with the bank and Mum went to stay with them for a holiday. Dad took advantage of her absence to treat himself. When I went to clean up for him before Mum’s return, beside his bed was a whole bundle of theatre programs. Dad had been to every theatre in town, I think, while Mum was away. He was irrepressible and remained fun-loving and genial until the day he died.
After Dad died, Mum’s remaining years were spent in a private hospital near me at Pymble. I visited her daily after I had done my painting, and amused myself by sketching some of the other elderly lady patients.
Mum had a great mate in one hospital called Mary Jane. They used to play endless games, although Mary Jane seemed to get rather the rough end of the stick. Mary Jane was the servant, while Mum was the mistress of the house.
‘Mary Jane,’ Mum used to say, ‘you haven’t done this room at all well today. Look at this bed! It’s a mess. Yesterday it was perfect; today it’s a mess.’
They both loved this game. It allowed them to escape from hospital monotony, I suppose.
Mum kept her senses right to the end. Only in the last twenty-four hours did her mind wander in the slightest. Her mind just wore out, the doctor said. Ninety-two years is a long life.
Mollie moved from the Taxation Department to the GPO and became very much involved in the fight for equal opportunities for women in the Public Service. As soon as they were finally introduced, Mollie applied for a new position. Although she had matriculated well, Mollie, by this stage in her late fifties, was told that in order to be eligible for this job, she would have to do the Leaving Certificate again. Undaunted, she set to and went back to school. During the day she worked at the GPO; at night she studied.
The day the results came out, the phone rang. Mollie was on the other end in tears.
‘Oh, Mol, what’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’ve come first in the state,’ Mollie choked out.
Mollie (whom Mum outlived by almost four years) died of cancer in 1966, following a mercifully brief illness. King died in 1982; Jack is still going stronger than ever.
Doug died suddenly aged seventy-one at the beginning of 1985. He had been frail for a long time, but it is still hard to believe it has happened. He was buried at the Frenchs Forest Cemetery which used to be the bushland where we went painting with Johnny Maund and were so happy. I miss him sorely.
We did have similar sensibilities. I remember we were driving home from visiting Norman at Springwood, way back in the days when we were first married, and suddenly Doug said, ‘I think there is something wonderful on the road ahead,’ and stopped the car. A procession of about twenty-five caterpillars linked together making its way across the road off into the bush was what we stopped to watch.
After the romance and passion of youth wear off, being able to enjoy things together and being good companions are what’s most important in a marriage. Doug and I respected each other’s work. When Doug really liked a painting of mine, such as Moon Over Ku-ring-gai, he bought it for himself to make sure it stayed in the house.
I am still painting. The trouble is that as you get older you do feel that time is running out. The young think time will never run out; they feel they have forever to do things, they waste time. It’s only as you get older that you realise if you are going to do anything good you had better get on with it.
It took me years to learn how to work really hard. Now I have so much to do I can’t bear to slow down.
‘Do the neighbours know what you do?’ a young grandniece asked me once. ‘That Uncle Doug writes and you paint?’
‘It has dawned on them, I think, yes,’ I replied, laughing.
But we were a bit of an oddity for the first few years at St Ives. The woman whose son sported the leopard-skin underpants that Doug celebrated in a poem bought a book of Doug’s poetry that included the very poem.
‘He’s a deep one, Mr Stewart, isn’t he?’ she remarked to me afterwards. That was all she ever said.
When I was doing my duty at the school tuckshop, another woman told me that her daughter had reprimanded her for wanting to wear low-heeled shoes to tuckshop instead of high heels. I have to wear flat-heeled, sensible shoes on all occasions; my feet won’t fit into anything else.
‘Why can’t I wear sensible shoes?’ the woman asked her daughter. ‘Mrs Stewart does.’
‘Yes, but that’s different,’ the daughter said. ‘Mrs Stewart’s an artist.’
So be it.
WHAT MY MOTHER DIDN’T TELL ME
My mother outlived my father by eight and a half years. She died early in the morning of 27 August 1993, aged eighty-four. The young tabby cat our household had recently acquired was asleep on the end of her bed; outside the three wild cats she’d tamed were curled in their baskets. I stood by, not knowing what to do or what was happening, as she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage at about 6 am.
The day before was warm and she had her lunch sitting in the front garden, the petals of the magnolia tree she had so often painted falling softly about her. It was the sort of day you long for in winter; the sort of day, with its yield of fragile blooms, that she’d waited for impatiently as a young artist; a fine day to remember her by. Fittingly, too, for one who had found spring flowers such a never-failing delight and source of inspiration, she was buried on 1 September.
Despite the great sadness that beset her when Dad died, and an ever-increasing number of hospital stays, the first – almost six – years she survived without him were good. The publication of Autobiography of My Mother at the end of 1985, the same year he had died, and the warm response it received, were a distraction from grief. Similarly the appearance in print of his last book, Garden of Friends, which she illustrated with charcoal drawings of the garden, brought happiness. His death did not deter her from painting. The reverse was true. Even when she was reliant on a walking frame, she made her way to her painting table in the studio each day. Eyeshade in place and a lolly or two in her apron pocket for good measure, she painted resolutely on, always in watercolours.
In these good years she had a number of sell-out exhibitions. People queued up on the pavement outside the doors of the Wagner Gallery in Paddington before they opened. To look around the gallery and see a red spot beside every painting was an extraordinary thrill for her.
During this time she and I were particularly close. Although she missed Dad so much, she did not lose her sense of humour or practicality. I watched with amusement when, after a decent interval of several months had elapsed, she suddenly pulled out a blue and white printed wool dress from the wardrobe.
‘Doug never liked this dress, but I always did,’ she remarked, and
proceeded to wear it to a party.
Although she almost never went out of the house alone, she was always eager for an outing with me. As soon as it was decided we were going anywhere – be it to the beach to watch the waves breaking, with a rainbow’s span over the ocean if we were lucky; the nursery to buy plants; the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see a Donald Friend retrospective, or some exhibition of Dutch flower paintings with black backgrounds that intrigued her – she would be out to the car in a flash and ready to go.
But then, after the opening of her 1990 Wagner Gallery exhibition, she fell and broke her pelvis. She wasn’t long in hospital but it marked the beginning of a decline. To welcome her home I had put a potted cyclamen at the foot of her bed. Despite her discomfort she was determined to get to work on its white flowers. The paintings that resulted, called Cyclamen in Flight, seemed to encapsulate everything about the movements of flowers she had always sought. They were also the last works she ever completed.
The Parkinson’s disease from which she suffered, perhaps also the medication for this – the latter is purely a supposition on my part – and an associated mental deterioration, began to take over. I moved back to St Ives permanently. No longer painting, she drifted into a world away from the rest of us. Physically it was difficult. Although a hip replacement had given her pain-free mobility for a few years, her other leg now seized up. One day she just stopped walking.
Strangely, I remember very little of the effort of looking after her during this time. I remember mostly the fun of before. Two years went by. She was now shrunken in size and her lack of interest in life became such that every meal had to be fed to her, either by myself or other kind carers. The last year she didn’t talk much. Her days were spent gazing out at the garden’s greenness from the front windows of the house. Otherwise, weather permitting, she was wheeled out into it.
She still knew my name. Her hand reached automatically to pat the new cat. Very occasionally her blue eyes sparked. But the mother I’d known all my life was gone.
In 1996, three years after my mother died, respected art critic and writer Joanna Mendelssohn’s revelations concerning the popularly held myths (which she shows to be mostly untrue) about Norman Lindsay and other artist members of the Lindsay family were published in her book Letters & Liars. And, as is so often the case after death, details of a secret purported love affair came to light.
Mendelssohn had written to me before the book’s publication asking for permission to quote from letters written by my mother, which I had given. I thought no more about it. When the book came out I bought a copy. The same day I went out to lunch – a mushroom risotto at The Wharf Restaurant, which looks out on to sparkling Sydney Harbour. Afterwards, sitting in the car about to drive home, I skimmed through the text. I found myself reading a chapter headed ‘Mistress and Wife’.
The chapter is essentially about Rose Lindsay, herself for many years Norman’s mistress before becoming his legal spouse. This was not new. What threw me was the disclosure that when Rose was his wife, the mistress was my mother.
As a daughter I felt distressed; as the biographer of my mother I felt – well – stricken. Temporarily, at least. I found the word ‘mistress’ disturbing. ‘Mistress’ conjured up images of a kept woman in a black nylon negligee; a femme fatale languishing in an apartment paid for by her married lover. It was an unfamiliar role to imagine my mother in. My mother was never a kept woman; she was never beholden (except perhaps to Beatrice McCaughey for her patronage). All through my childhood she had always had her own money earned from painting. An independence, even from my father, was essential to her.
In Letters & Liars Mendelssohn implied, or so I thought, that my mother’s ‘adventurous past’ had been deliberately kept under wraps to preserve her reputation as the wife of Norman’s close friend, Douglas Stewart.1 That stung too. I hadn’t kept quiet about it to preserve my mother’s image. She simply never mentioned any affair to me, or implied there had ever been one. I didn’t think to question her about being Norman’s lover because it would have been like asking if the world was flat instead of round. All the time I was growing up there were my parents and there was Norman. By the time I was born he was close to seventy and was like a grandfather to me. A tad detached perhaps, but the nicest of grandfathers. That’s the way it was.
I do remember pressing and pressing Mum during one interview for more information about him because I knew people would be interested. ‘Do we have to have so much about Norman?’ she responded plaintively.
So, what did happen back in the 1930s at Springwood and at 12 Bridge Street? Norman’s daughter, Jane Lindsay (later Jane Glad), who was born in 1920 and died in 1999, was close friends with both my parents. Soon after I first read Letters & Liars Jane gave me her account of the affair in an affectionate letter: ‘Your mother was a very beautiful, gentle creature & my father fell in love with her,’ the letter begins. ‘He was in a state of deep depression over his work being banned & newspaper attacks. She helped him get out of the gloom and interested in work again.
‘Certainly Pa [Norman] & Margaret became lovers and many of their contemporaries accepted them as a pair,’ it continues. ‘They never lived together, and Pa never supported her. He had to share his Bulletin salary with Ma [Rose] & buy materials to paint with. He could not have afforded to help Margaret in that way.’
Jane adds a bit further on: ‘We all knew about it & Ma was very bitter.’ Her last words on the affair are that despite all of the above Mum and Norman ‘always pretended there was nothing between them’.2
Mum’s brother Jack didn’t believe it was the case. When I shouted down the phone to him (Jack was deaf by this stage and his hearing aid wasn’t always entirely successful) about Mum and Norman having a love affair he denied it vigorously. There are relatives of Mum alive now who believe that the suggestion of an affair is an example of gossip or rumour, and a misinterpretation of an artistic friendship.
But, of course, she hardly would have announced it to the family. Being the mistress of Norman Lindsay might well have given Grandma Coen and others of Mum’s very Catholic family a great deal more than a lack of corsets to complain about. (Her immediate family were all quite keen on Norman, actually. Nan, my grandmother, made him her special Russian caramel; King, Mum’s other brother, posed – clothed – for Norman at 12 Bridge Street; and Mollie, Mum’s sister, asked his opinion of one or two of her short-story efforts.)
Lin Bloomfield, who has written and published numerous Lindsay art books, charts the progress of the love affair by what is revealed of Norman’s emotions in his art. In her astonishingly detailed The Complete Etchings of Norman Lindsay, published in 1998, Bloomfield states directly that it was Norman’s affair ‘with the beautiful young artist Margaret Coen’ in the early 1930s that ‘revived and revitalised his creative facility’.3 She also writes that, apart from the banning of his novel Redheap, the disintegration of his marriage to Rose and an attraction to my mother were among the factors that prompted Norman and Rose’s trip to America in 1931.
There was definitely enough going wrong in Norman’s life as far as work was concerned at this time to make an escape from Australia desirable, regardless of any infatuation with my mother.
‘Norman had turned fifty in 1929 and the capacity to create had abandoned him,’ Bloomfield expands in the etching book. ‘His distress during this phase (which lasted several years) is portrayed in Self Portrait. It was this etching that brought the criticism of Norman’s work, which had been steadily growing over the years, to a head.’4
Self Portrait, in which Norman, with an etching needle between his manacled hands, cowers under an avalanche of lascivious nudes and other demonic creatures of his own creating, was reproduced in Art in Australia at the end of 1930. Six months later, when several thousand copies of the magazine had been sold, police raided the offices of the publication because of a complaint from a member of the public. All remaining copies, and the printing blocks, were se
ized. Smith’s Weekly then ran a front-page story about Norman’s possible arrest. It must have been a time of huge stress for both Norman and Rose.
Lin Bloomfield cites (as does Mendelssohn) the etching Have Faith, done in 1932 after Norman and Rose returned to Australia, as evidence of Norman’s continuing desire – which he was still attempting to resist – for my mother.5 The foreground of Have Faith shows Norman submissively kissing the hand of a clothed woman, said to be Rose, while a naked young woman with flowers in her hair (long before the days of hippies) – my mother, it would seem – lies temptingly beside them amid what appear to be hollyhocks. Behind these three figures is an assortment of amorous couples and a large black bull. Bloomfield and Mendelssohn both comment on the sexual overtones of this bull, especially its penis horn!
Bloomfield has the affair getting underway with another etching (of which a print was never finished) called Surrender. Surrender, she says, can be dated 1933 and depicts ‘Norman surrendering to Margaret while Rose looks on’.6 Norman, who is not very recognisable since he is lying face down, appears here to have thrown himself at the feet of the flower-wearing young woman and has an arm twined possessively (or perhaps desperately) around her ankles. Mercifully, there is no black bull present this time.
A later unpublished etching, Duality, from around 1938, shows the conflicting emotions Rose and my mother (who looks rather startled in the work) came to represent for Norman. There is a mythical salamander twisted around the feet of both women and, as Bloomfield’s text explains, a wise magician representing Creative Art sits in judgment between them, gripping them by the wrist, with an open book on his lap, which stands for the search for knowledge.7