Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  Apart from art, they wrote about what they were reading, the weather, what my father was writing and so on. (During all this time he and Norman also kept up a separate literary correspondence.) There were frequent requests for my mother to send up tobacco, tubes of oil or watercolour paint, such as Raw Sienna, Purple Madder, Alizarin Crimson, New Blue or Aureolin, and various other painting necessities. Besides fulfilling such requests, Mum was always despatching cakes, biscuits or chocolates to him. (Oddly enough, she also prepared Norman’s income tax returns during the 1930s and 40s, a task which gets quite a few mentions.)

  Rose returned, unhappy, to Springwood in 1941. Most of the paintings from the sixteen crates of Norman’s best work that she had hoarded over the years and taken to America (out of concern about the war) had been destroyed in a fire at Pennsylvania as they were being transported by train to New York. This devastated her. As soon as she arrived home Norman dashed off a letter to my mother saying that Rose wanted to call on her and bring her up to Springwood ‘to sort of ease off her job of having to tell me about it’.31 While one feels this might be a not entirely accurate version of events, it is interesting. (Norman, in fact, reacted to the loss of his works with surprising equilibrium, merely announcing to Rose that he would have to paint her some replacements, which he promptly set about doing.)

  From 1939 on, my father was well and truly on the scene. His letters to her, usually written when he was away fishing, or when she was away at Yass, show how clearly he was smitten. ‘The world does not exist without you,’ he finished up in one.32 In another, having explained the inadequacy he felt buying some watercolour papers at Penfolds to post to her, he continued with the declaration: ‘You are a benevolent, beautiful & brilliant person & you are sadly missed.’33

  My mother’s letters to my father are embellished with a more grown-up flirtatiousness than her ‘Puss Puss’ letters to Norman. In a letter from Mylora, where she had been staying while painting a portrait of Mollie Garry, she begins by remarking that, thank God, she’s finished the face, so now there are only trees and background left to do. Then she tells my father how she has been on a walk along the creek the day before. ‘Coming back through a dark green paddock were enormous white mushrooms, the kind you would see in a dream,’ she writes. ‘I filled my skirt up with them & walked home very rudely with the upper part of my legs showing. I am sure you would have enjoyed the sight.’34

  In a letter of November 1940, after remarking that she hopes there were no blondes on a motor car trip he has taken in Victoria, and that he hasn’t been tempted by any fillies at the Melbourne Cup, she reminds him that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. She ends cheekily, with a touch of her school-day humour: ‘Be kind to accept a kiss behind your hairy knees & one on each ear & your noble brow with all love from Margaret the “Grey Ape of Clarendon”.’35

  My father’s accounts of the days he and Mum stayed together at Springwood, firstly with just Norman and Jane when Rose was away and then later with more of the Lindsays, are filled with a nostalgia for halcyon days. ‘What a twittering and a twinkling and tinkling of laughter and a froufrou of pretty dresses and a glitter of witty, wicked conversation there was,’ he describes in his memoir of Norman.36

  He lists, too, the number of poems he wrote between 1940 and 1955 which owed their inspiration to Springwood and the surrounding bush. The helmet orchid that looked like a little purple ear bent to the ground; a water scorpion in the fishpond; a drowned kookaburra in the swimming pool that he transferred in words to the waterfall in the gully and turned into a Bunyip; snake orchids with blood-red darting heads; a red-breasted robin bathing in a rock pool; Slim Jim, the Springwood cat, chasing a toad across the lawn at night – all became poetry.37

  In Portrait of Pa Jane Lindsay recalls how Norman was forever encouraging everyone to ‘keep at’ their particular creative endeavour. ‘Margaret was kept at her watercolours,’ Jane writes, ‘and would bring bunches of flowers with her on Friday night ready for the weekend painting jag. She worked with quiet industry in the corner of the studio with Pa darting over to inspect her watercolour from time to time and comment encouragingly, dropping an odd hint or two about colour or wash as he flitted by.’38

  Norman’s opinion of Mum’s work was expressed in a letter he wrote replying to one of hers about how moved she was (it reduced her almost to tears, in fact) by the way he had ‘fought the battle for faith in art, & surmounted the depression of the world at war, to produce the most inspiring and beautiful painting’ he had ever done.39 Norman’s reply also unequivocally indicates what Mum meant to him:

  dear Margaret, I’ve had the charm and stimulus of you and your work beside me all the while, and I know without a doubt, that but for you, and all that you did for me in those evil years when I had to fight back to work, I would long ago have been in my coffin. So if this country has gained anything by my work since that time, it is in your debt, not mine. It was the stimulus, quite apart from my affection for you, of seeing you make such a brave fight to conquer the problem of water colour, that bought me back to attack it once again from a new outlook.40

  Lin Bloomfield, in her recently published Norman Lindsay Oil Paintings: 1889–1969, quotes a letter by Norman to his old friend John Tremearne. It was written in the 1940s after he had been staying at 12 Bridge Street:

  Margaret remains the most perfectly balanced, sane, intelligent and generous souled woman which has been my lot to encounter. The only one, in fact. Doug is damned lucky to have her to look after him. She has the rarest of all qualities in a woman, the capacity to become a shock absorbent to male nerves. She carries with her an element of peace … It has been luck to have two friends without a fear in them. Margaret’s one and I write this to the other.41

  My mother and Norman continued letter-writing throughout the 1940s. Mum wrote to Norman twice on her honeymoon; she sent him descriptions of life at the Cross when she and Dad lived at Crick Avenue; she wrote all through her pregnancy, virtually to the minute I was born. (One of these letters, in which she says she feels too embarrassed by her girth to go to dinner at Aaron’s, is decorated with a funny sketch of her with a swollen stomach.) After my birth Norman wrote to Mum saying Rose suggested when she came out of hospital she bring the baby to Springwood to recover in comfort with them. Later on Mum sent Norman accounts of the ‘little puss’, which included a description of how I would pat the ladies on the lacquered screen he’d painted for the studio, and talk to them.

  If all this sounds weird, I should point out that in the twenty odd years (admittedly I was very young in the beginning) I knew Norman and visited Springwood I never noticed the slightest strain, or any overtones of sexual tension, between Norman, my mother and my father. Nor, for that matter, was our interaction with Rose awkward, not that she was there for many of those years. Due to ill-health she departed from Springwood in 1956 and went to live with Jane and her family. Although he and Rose remained in close communication with varying degrees of friendliness, Norman thereafter lived at Springwood with a succession of cats for company.

  My mother and he exchanged letters until his death in 1969. Right at the end, as well as the short note of goodbye to both my parents, he wrote a much longer letter consoling my mother for his ‘eminent departure’.

  ‘I know how you feel about me,’ the letter concludes, ‘because it’s the way I feel about you and I say again, you are the only one on earth I regret parting with, even briefly [obviously an exaggeration but nevertheless a heartfelt avowal]. With all my love, dear Margaret, Norman.’42

  Reading through the letters of Mum, Norman and Dad, what I have found most surprising (apart for their extraordinary capacity for letter-writing on top of everything else they did) and most moving is the depth of affection both men clearly felt for Mum. She was so loved by both of them. It’s overwhelming, really.

  One afternoon in the midst of writing this, two male king parrots with glowing red heads and breasts came right up to the front window
s of the house and stared in at me. The female accompanying them sat unconcernedly a little way off in the magnolia tree. The thought occurred to me that they were Norman and Dad reincarnated, giving me the once over. At least the female didn’t seem to care what I was up to, I consoled myself. King parrots are, of course, often seen around houses. But the fiercely red male pair did have a very intent gaze.

  Why did my mother keep the affair so secret? Possibly first and foremost out of concern for my father, to whom she was profoundly attached. It was, after all, with him she lived so much of the life she reported in her letters to Norman. Perhaps it was also out of respect for, or fear of, Rose. Perhaps Norman insisted on the secrecy. It may have been the most convenient and tactful thing for all concerned (including relatives – Catholic and otherwise). Perhaps over the years, as her friendship with Norman deepened, it did actually slip her mind. It is sometimes easier to forget that you’ve slept with someone than dwell on the sexual indiscretions or passions of youth.

  Perhaps she dealt with it as she did with her age. My mother, in fact, was four years older than my father. But over the years she started giving her birth date as 1913, the same as his.43 By the time my father died he was convinced that she was younger than he was; or so she and I joked. After his death she reverted to her correct years.

  In the end, you come away thinking if my mother succeeded in being close to two such creative men as Norman and my father – and my father did have his difficult moments – and was a muse to them as well as continuing undistracted, for the most part, with her own painting, it’s all the more kudos for her.

  What does it matter, anyway? As Jane Lindsay concluded in her letter to me: ‘It’s all in the past & not really anyone’s business.’ That’s true, except for who they were. To know tells us something more about who that was, about their work and the way the world is as far as love, affection and infidelity are concerned. There is always curiosity, too, about affairs of the heart – consummated or unconsummated – and theirs was very definitely an affair of the heart, as well as of the intellect.

  At which point I might leave that young woman – my mother – who gazes so enigmatically through a mist of gauze at the unknown, in peace.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to particularly thank Lin Bloomfield, not only for sharing her extraordinary Lindsay expertise with me but also for her humour and enthusiasm, both in connection with this book and also a number of other projects over the last ten years. I would also like to thank Helen, Catherine and Andrew Glad for allowing Jane Lindsay (Glad) and Norman Lindsay’s copyright material to be included, and for giving their permission to reproduce Norman Lindsay’s painting The Party.

  As well I would like to gratefully acknowledge the painstaking work of Ruth O’Dwyer in tracing the descendants of Patrick and Margaret Maloney, now published in book form for all of us.

  Thanks must go to Warwick Hirst, acting curator of Manuscripts Original Materials, the State Library of New South Wales; also to Jennifer Broomhead, Intellectual Property and Copyright Librarian, Original Materials; Louise Anemaat, Original Materials; and all the staff of the Mitchell Library; Julie Price in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Sydney; Jane Bloomfield of Odana Editions; Gloria Carlos, assistant archivist at Yass and District Historical Society; Zeny Edwards, Steven Miller and the staff of the Research Library at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Barbara Mobbs; Kieran Shaughnessy at the Galway County Library in Ireland; and Guy Tranter, Document Archives, Australian Broadcasting Commission.

  I should also like to acknowledge the contributions of Janna Bruce, Doreen Hubble and Rita Lee, all now deceased, to the original edition of this book; also Jacqueline Kent, who edited it.

  The photographs used in the original edition are now held in the State Library of New South Wales with the Stewart family collection of photos relating to Douglas Stewart, Margaret Coen and Norman Lindsay: PXD 744, vol. 6. Photos used in this edition are from there and also the private collection of Meg Stewart. The photographs of Margaret Coen and Douglas Stewart with Fang, Margaret Coen as an older woman and Douglas Stewart at work are by Michael Elton. The photograph of Margaret Coen and Meg Stewart in the garden at St Ives is by Lorna Rose. Portrait of Douglas Stewart and Douglas Stewart Reading on Observatory Hill, both by Margaret Coen, are from the State Library of New South Wales. Copyright of all Margaret Coen paintings is held by Meg Stewart.

  My thanks to Catherine Hill of Random House for editing this revised edition; also to Pippa Masson of Curtis Brown, my agent; and most especially to Carol Davidson of Random House for being such a fan of Autobiography of My Mother over the years.

  Finally, finally, thank you to my mother.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Books

  Lin Bloomfield, Norman Lindsay: Impulse to Draw, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1984

  Lin Bloomfield, The Complete Etchings of Norman Lindsay, Odana Editions, Sydney, 1998, and Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 1998

  Lin Bloomfield, Norman Lindsay Oil Paintings: 1889–1969, Odana Editions, Bungendore, 2006

  Lin Bloomfield, Norman Lindsay Watercolours: 1897–1969, Odana Editions, Bungendore, 2003

  Paul Hetherington (ed.), The Diaries of Donald Friend: Volume 2, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2002 Jane Lindsay, Portrait of Pa: Norman Lindsay at Springwood, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1973

  Norman Lindsay, My Mask, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1970

  Norman Lindsay, Redheap, Faber & Faber, London, 1930

  Rose Lindsay (ed. Lin Bloomfield), A Model Wife, Odana Editions, Bungendore, 2001

  Kenneth Mackenzie, The Moonlit Doorway, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1944

  Alan Susan and Emily McCulloch, The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2006

  Joanna Mendelssohn, Letters & Liars: Norman Lindsay and the Lindsay Family, Angus & Robertson, HarperCollins, Sydney, 1996

  Cheryl Mongan and Richard Reid, ‘We have not forgotten’: Yass & Districts War, 1914–1918, Milltown Research & Publications, Yass, 1998

  Ria Murch, Arthur Murch: an Artist’s Life, 1902–1989, Ruskin Rowe Press, Sydney, 1997

  Ruth O’Dwyer, The Descendants of Patrick and Margaret Maloney, Ruth O’Dwyer, Sydney, 2005

  Philip Parsons (ed. with Victoria Chance), Companion to Theatre in Australia, Currency Press, Sydney, 1995

  Rachel Power, Alison Rehfisch, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2002

  Pam Ray (ed.), Monumental Inscriptions: Yass Cemetery and St Clement’s Churchyard, Heraldry & Genealogy Society of Canberra, 1996

  Douglas Stewart, Norman Lindsay: a Personal Memoir, Thomas Nelson, Australia, 1975

  Douglas Stewart, Writers of the Bulletin, 1977 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 2001

  Meg Stewart, Margaret Coen: A Passion for Painting, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1997

  various, Howard Hinton: Patron of Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1951

  Thesis

  Benjamin James Taaffe, Douglas Stewart: Poet, Editor, Man of Letters, Volumes 1 and 2, a thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English, University of Sydney, February, 1995

  Article

  Ross Latham, ‘Fulfilling a Promise’, Memento, Winter 2006, issue 31

  Manuscripts

  Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney:

  Norman Lindsay – Drawings and papers, 1894–1925

  Original MLMSS 742, Microfilm 14 (CY 3573); 22– 23 (CY 3149–50)

  Norman Lindsay Papers, 1910–68, ML MSS 6174/1

  Stewart Family – literary papers of Douglas Stewart, 1929–85 (includes papers of Margaret Coen), MLMSS 5147/19–23; MLMSS 5147/28

  Douglas Stewart – further papers, 1913–15, MLMSS 5147, add-on 2077/1–12

  Margaret Coen – further papers, 1829–49, 1934–85, MLMSS 5147, add-on 2077/13–15

  St
ewart Family – further papers of Margaret Coen, 1852–1993, MLMSS 5147, add-on 2085/9–24

  Stewart Family – papers of the Coen and Trainor families, 1873–1984, MLMSS 5147, add-on 2085/25X–30

  University of Sydney, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, Kenneth Mackenzie Papers, box ½

  Catalogues

  Art Gallery of New South Wales, Research Library and Archive: catalogues for Australian Watercolour Institute; Royal Art Society of New South Wales; Society of Artists

  Online resources

  Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library, database for Art Prizes: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/lib/prizes_database

  Australian National University, Australian Dictionary of Biography online edition: www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/

  National Library of Australia, Australian Performing Arts (PROMPT) Collection: www.nla.gov.au/collect/prompt.html

  NOTES

  1 Joanna Mendelssohn, Letters & Liars, Norman Lindsay and the Lindsay Family, pp. 83, 203–4

  2 Letter by Jane Lindsay (Glad) to Meg Stewart, 4 November 1996

  3 Lin Bloomfield, The Complete Etchings of Norman Lindsay, p. 27

  4 Ibid., p. 145

  5 Ibid., pp. 27, 147

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid., p. 28

  8 Bloomfield, Norman Lindsay Watercolours: 1897–1969, pp. 164, 180

  9 Bloomfield, The Complete Etchings of Norman Lindsay, p. 28

  10 Ibid.

  11 Diary in possession of Meg Stewart

  12 Douglas Stewart, Norman Lindsay: a Personal Memoir, p. 90

  13 Norman Lindsay – Drawings and papers, 1894–1925, MLMSS 742, Microfilm

  14 (CY 3573) 14 Some punctuation has been added to this quote for the purposes of clarity.