Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  Discovering your mother’s love life etching by etching definitely adds a whole new dimension to the old line, ‘Would you like to look at my etchings?’

  In Bloomfield’s equally comprehensive Norman Lindsay Watercolours: 1897–1969, published in 2003, she identifies my mother as ‘undoubtedly the model’ for the watercolour Happiness and as the female figure representing Spring in Spring’s Retinue.8 Both works were painted in 1933. The delicate Happiness shows a naked young woman standing in a garden of mauve and blue flowers – more of those hollyhocks, or perhaps delphiniums. White doves perch on her hands, a silvery-mauve peacock leans towards her from a branch and another peacock stands with its tail swirled at her feet. In Spring’s Retinue, she is miraculously blonde and accompanied again by doves and a peacock, as well as a profusion of other animals led by a muscular satyr carrying a koala.

  Happiness was bought by the collector Howard Hinton directly from Norman. According to Bloomfield it was one of his favourite paintings in his bedroom in his Sydney house in Cremorne when he died in 1948. Happiness is a most lyrical Lindsay painting, and if this is what resulted from my mother’s presence in Norman’s life, then it is something to be grateful for and to celebrate.

  The love affair, as described by Bloomfield in the etching book, lasted through Norman’s days of permanent residency at 12 Bridge Street until 1939. In the 1940s the relationship developed into one of friendship, in Bloomfield’s words: ‘with Margaret inheriting from Rose the maternal mantle of caring for Norman’.9 When my parents married in 1945, Bloomfield concludes: ‘Stewart had already become, and was to remain, Norman’s closest friend for the last thirty years of his life’.10

  The romantic imagery of Norman’s art aside, it’s the letters – undated, all of them – between him and my mother that now offer the most opportunity for evidence of their feelings towards each other. I found it by turn tantalising, tacky and addictive reading through them: trying to glean proof of sexual infidelities that took place close to seventy years ago from a smudged postmark; attempting to decipher a chance admission of guilt along with handwriting; searching for a tell-tale indiscriminate word or phrase scattered on the thin, almost transparent, sheets of paper the letters are often written on.

  Although the lack of dates appears daunting at first, there are, in fact, plenty of clues to when the letters were written. For instance, one of my mother’s early letters mentions the recent death of Australian artist Myra Cocks (Cocks died in 1940). References to the war are helpful, as are remarks about what Norman or my mother is painting, and my father’s poetical works in progress. There is often news of what Jane and Rose are doing. In addition, as you read more and more of the letters, an actual correspondence becomes evident and you start to discover a chronological order for them.

  The narrative of my mother’s life described in the preceding chapters of this book is accurate. It’s just that as an older woman recalling her past she chose not to reveal the nitty-gritty of her love life. We know she had been admiring Norman since she was a schoolgirl at Kincoppal. Norman’s photo (a reproduction of Harold Cazneaux’s The Etcher of 1921, cut from a magazine) was pasted in her Great Artists book and there was the family’s admiration for John Richard Flanagan. As Lin Bloomfield said to me recently: ‘Clearly Margaret had stars in her eyes for Norman right from the start.’

  Regarding John Flanagan, it would seem that he too flirted with Mum on his visit to Sydney in 1927 a little more than she disclosed. Several years after her death I found the diary she began when she was twenty-one.11 In the small journal were a couple of letters Flanagan wrote her after he left Australia. As well as keeping the originals, she had decided to copy some of their ‘very dear and personal’ contents into her diary for safe-keeping. The letters make it obvious that physical flirtation went on. Whether or not they were lovers can be left to our imaginations.

  Most poignant in Flanagan’s letters (in one of which he did, indeed, correct her spelling of his name) is his image of Mum saying goodbye to him at number 5 wharf, Circular Quay as he left for Java via Darwin on the Malabar. His last recollection of Sydney, he writes, is of her standing on the end of the dock with her hands fluttering, fluttering, fluttering in farewell like butterflies over a large field of cornflowers.

  ‘They fluttered around my heart too,’ Flanagan, who could sure dish out the romance, finishes up.

  It was two or so years later, when she was twenty, that Mum’s first encounter with Norman took place. Just to be taken to meet Norman and Rose at Springwood would have been a heady enough experience for her. Norman and Rose’s Blue Mountains Olympus – a ‘home-made palace in the wilderness’, as my father once described it – would have been saturated in an unconventional artistic atmosphere.12 That Norman showed any interest in her would have made my mother’s heart flip.

  Perhaps, too, on that first fateful visit, Norman was more struck by my mother’s milk-white skin, blue eyes and black hair than she even knew? Or perhaps he made it abundantly clear. Perhaps he was seduced by her beauty every second he was painting the watercolour of her that she describes. Maybe it was the spill of watercolour on white paper that dazzled her. Norman may have been flattered to have such a beautiful young woman as an admirer. Perhaps they stole away from the others into the garden and sat a shade too close on the stone seat under the magnolia trees, the flowers of which exude such a heavenly lemony perfume.

  Perhaps the mischievous nakedness of the art in the house and grounds inspired a lack of inhibition in my mother on the weekend of the dance they attended in the Springwood hall. Perhaps Norman himself was inspired to a little satyr-like behaviour on her second visit. Perhaps …

  You’re fictionalising, making it up – I can hear my father, the literary editor, interrupting now. He’s right, of course. Tempting though it is to invent such salacious details, fiction is what they are.

  The copy of Redheap Norman gave Mum on her second visit was very properly inscribed: ‘To Margaret Norman Lindsay’. No hint of passion there. The letter in which she described Redheap as ‘absolutely spiffing’ finished up innocently enough too: ‘I feel that owing to my youth & inexperience, spelling, blots & a certain disjointedness of composition in this epistle will be forgiven. Regards to all & best wishes. Margaret C.’ (Joanna Mendelssohn thought the last mark in the letter was an x for a kiss. I feel sure it is a capitol C for Coen. See how hard it is to know what’s what.)13

  The first entry in the diary that my mother began with her birthday fountain pen is dated 7 July 1930. She announces that she intends to write about herself, her friends and ‘be candid into the bargain’. But the diary, soon written in both pencil and ink, also contains what appear to be anecdotes or stories she’s inventing or recalling. Some of these seem to have been inspired by relatives and others perhaps by the behaviour of her workmates at Celebrity Pictures. There are pages torn out and, as her letter to Norman, the diary becomes rather disjointed. Her journal does, however, make it obvious she was corresponding with ‘NL’, as she calls him, (there’s even a portion of letter which might be from him copied into it), and that she had a crush on him.

  Early on, in an entry that could be described as more spontaneous than logical, she exclaims: ‘Heavens, I do wish Rose would hold that Blanky dance [the second dance that was cancelled]. Life is becoming unbearable. Has N. forgotten altogether … Sometimes I think I just about hate N.L.’

  ‘Life has taken another queer twist, I am all confused and at sea again. It appears that that dance is hardly likely to come off,’ she writes in a later entry. ‘I am afraid that my heart is still well alive after my having done my best to stifle it. God – how the days drag. Three months have now gone by. The winter is at least passing.’14

  The remark about her heart is a bit ambiguus. Does it mean she’s been unable to stifle her crush on Norman, or that despite it she has found a new love interest? In another entry she describes how ‘a most divine man’ is seated outside her office at Celebrity Pi
ctures. She keeps looking out to check his ‘sex appeal’ – underlined. So she wasn’t moping too much. This is also the period when she was longing to go to Paris and study art, which means Norman was far from her only focus in life. But he was on her mind.

  We come next to 1932 and 1933. Norman, back from the trip away with Rose, frequently vacated Springwood for days at a time to stay at the Wentworth Hotel in town, and also briefly rented a studio in Bond Street. In his own writings later he made no secret of the fact that by the 1930s he was in the throes of a creative and marital crisis. ‘I was fifty years old and work had gone back on me,’ he puts it in his autobiographical My Mask.15 His marriage to Rose, in his version of events, was troubled by ‘that inevitable disruption which attacks all marriages in middle-age’.16 It was both physiological as well as mental, he said.

  Rose Soady was Norman’s second wife. She first modelled for him in the early 1900s and the two were soon in love. Although still married to his first wife, Katie Parkinson, within a few years Norman was relying heavily on Rose for emotional, practical and artistic support. Not only was Rose the subject of many of his paintings, she was also the one who skilfully printed and marketed his etchings. In 1920, two days before their daughter Jane was born and two weeks before his divorce from Katie became absolute, Norman and Rose finally married. However, by Norman’s own account (and also Rose’s, according to a letter written by her to the poet and novelist Kenneth Mackenzie well after the event), at the end of the 1920s he lost interest in her sexually.17

  Norman was fed up generally. He loathed having to constantly catch the train down to the city because of his Endeavour Press commitments and did not enjoy the ‘ghastly ordeal’ of reading endless manuscripts from aspiring novelists for the press.18 He was tired of living at Springwood and especially tired of the stream of visitors Rose invited there in his absence, whom he then had to put up with when he returned. (Socialising was never Norman’s forte, except for conversing with a chosen few. My father has described Norman’s pleasure when at the end of the day he could at last shut the studio door of 12 Bridge Street and be alone with a book. ‘The peace!’ he would exclaim.)19

  ‘He tried to revitalise his marriage with the trip to America,’ Lin Bloomfield reiterated to me not long ago. But the attempt failed. Now, burdened by his other discontents, he finally decided he had to break from Rose and make a fresh start in life. Thus the affair started, Bloomfield believes.

  And so did the paintings like Happiness, and the beautiful blue-violet watercolours, Guarded and The Dragon Slayer, not directly of or about my mother. For Mum it would have been a dream come true, one imagines, to have such intimate contact with an artist of whom she’d so long been a fan.

  Norman’s watercolour The Party attests that he was far from immune to the attractions of studio life after painting hours. This work depicts the farewell party Alison Rehfisch threw for George Duncan when he was going overseas in 1933. Norman has painted himself to one side of the revelry, wearing a dark jacket and bowtie. He and the rest of the party-goers, mostly in fancy dress, who do appear to be having a good time, are ringed around a dancing, bare-breasted woman in a long blue skirt who looks suspiciously like my mother.20

  However, to say that Norman took the studio at 12 Bridge Street simply to pursue a love affair with her is an over-simplification. As she points out, the studio gave Norman far greater access to models than he’d ever had at Springwood, and a significant number of major oils resulted from this. After a hard day’s painting in oils, Norman himself cheerfully admitted he was ‘good for nothing but to flop into a chair with a detective novel, or any other printed drivel’ until bedtime.21

  My mother kept her own studio on at 38A Pitt Street after Norman moved into 12 Bridge Street, and she continued to live at Botany Street, Randwick, with my grandmother. The pattern of her working days was probably exactly as she described. What is impossible to know is how much of this time, at the top of the forty-four stairs you had to climb to reach the studio, she and Norman were lovers, how much of it was the imagining of others, and when physical lovemaking was replaced by the less arduous frisson of adoring friendship.

  No one can know what went on in the narrow little bed Norman slept in at 12 Bridge Street. By everyone’s account it was no boudoir love nest. Jane Lindsay, in her memoir of Norman, Portrait of Pa, gives the same dimensions as Mum for Norman’s studio divan. My mother was not a small woman and Norman, although slight, was well into his fifties. The thought of them romping on his narrow studio bed is incongruous, to say the least.

  Perhaps my mother’s enigmatic expression in the photo on the cover of this book (taken, coincidentally, at about the time she and Norman first met) best sums up the perennially teasing dilemma of attempting to ascertain the truth between two people.

  Undoubtedly their closeness must have been galling for Rose. (Perhaps that’s why Mum never spoke of it; maybe she was plain embarrassed about it in later years.) Rose, in the letter to Kenneth Mackenzie mentioned before, had a lot to say about the affair. As Rose bluntly puts it, my mother ‘got’ – as in landed – Norman in about 1932.22 She describes Norman as initially having been ‘besotted’ by my mother and proud as a ‘pouter pigeon’ to have been involved with a woman so much younger than him. She also says plainly that he told her before she left for America in 1940 that the affair was over.

  Rose, as you might expect, is not very complimentary about Mum in her letters to Mackenzie of this period (after all, she was letting off steam in a private letter to a sympathetic and attractive male recipient). Another, dated 1942, includes one of her comic drawings mentioned in Letters & Liars; it shows my mother, overly large, and a diminutive Norman waiting together at Springwood station to catch the train.23

  Just to complicate matters, Mackenzie, ‘a silver-tongued, charming Adonis’, as Mum described him, and very much married, claimed in a letter to Rose in October 1941 to have had an affair with my mother that lasted nearly four years.24 However, two months later he confessed to Rose that he had been more or less drunk for the past four weeks and that given this he may not always have been the most reliable of correspondents.25 It should be pointed out here, too, that in the early 1940s Mackenzie was involved with Jane Lindsay, to whom he dedicated his collection of love poems The Moonlit Doorway, published in 1944.

  The letters between Norman and my mother began when Norman left the studio at 12 Bridge Street in 1940 and went back to live at Springwood. There is no written record of when their passion was supposedly at its height. A few of my mother’s early letters to Norman were put in the Mitchell Library by Rose Lindsay, and I placed many more there at a much later date (at the time unread by me).26 Rose attached to the letters she deposited the wry comment: ‘Very amusing examples of the “Puss Puss” period.’27

  What the letters reveal is the undeniable bond between Mum and Norman in the Bridge Street days of the 1930s. Both mad about cats, they refer to each other in the letters as ‘Dearest’ or ‘Darling Puss’. Mind you, it wasn’t just Norman; Mum called all those close to her ‘puss’ for most of her life. In letters to Norman after I was born I am the ‘little puss’. It becomes really confusing when she starts writing about Silver, the cat Dad gave her, as ‘Puss’ or ‘Master Puss’. Oh no, who is she talking about now, you wonder, before realising that this time she is referring to a real cat.

  The early letters, written while Rose was in America, also show how much my mother looked after – fussed over, you might say – Norman. When she returned from seeing him, probably for the first time, settled in his Springwood studio at the back of the main house, she wrote: ‘Dear Puss, I arrived in town safely, last night. I felt very blue leaving puss & had a weep in the train but I had no idea how beautiful & convenient everything is up there. I am getting busy on the studio so when puss comes down he will be surprised how clean it is; it really is terribly fusty, it makes me think I have neglected puss.’28

  Further on in the same letter she mentions
sending him some tobacco, some warm underpants and pyjamas. ‘Make sure puss that they give you a green veg everyday & pears or apples & keep up your food,’ she instructs, a few lines later. ‘I think you will be very comfortable puss & it is very fitting to see the dear cat in beautiful & dignified surroundings.’ Now the letter is signed with six crosses for kisses.

  There is no sex in the letters. About as physical as they get are the mentions of Norman’s frequent lumbago attacks and the various other ailments they suffered from, such as colds and stomach upsets. During the first winter Norman was back at Springwood Mum made him a warm jacket, which did provoke a more overtly romantic response than usual from him:

  The magnificent jacket arrived this morning (Thursday) and I put it on at once and have been warm and snug in it ever since. It is the most comfortable garment I have ever worn and to its warmth is added the warmth in my heart for the dear kind girl who made it, and winter will be for me one constant reminder of my dearest Margaret, though I don’t need anything to remind me of you, for you are always in my thoughts at one point or another.29

  The incriminating ‘Puss Puss period’ of address, except for occasional lapses, soon eased off. Cats, however, maintained an ongoing presence in their letters. Norman nearly always managed to include some anecdote concerning the antics of the Springwoods cats, and often enclosed a drawing of them.

  The letters are also full of painting and the problems they were encountering in their work. ‘I wish I was down with you to discuss harmonies in water colour,’ Norman confesses in one. ‘Don’t forget the invariable rule that there is no brilliancy in water colour without an under wash of yellow, especially if you are using cool colour. Particularly blues.’30 An exchange went on through several letters about the commissioned portrait of the woman in pearls Mum had such a struggle with. There are a few, not very many, swipes at modern art and contemporary Australian artists.